When I first reembraced my Faith, I had about a two or three week period when I went to the church nearest my apartment to pray for about thirty minutes each morning in the daily services. I did this because I did not know how to pray (I still do not, really, but now I at least would say that I know how not to pray). Eventually, I began to find a way to focus and perform a morning routine at home. Nevertheless, this was not the only period when going to church took up much of my time. Each year, for a few weeks around Christmas and the weeks leading up to Easter, I am in church several times a week. As well, and perhaps nowadays this must be said for cannot be assumed, I do take my Christian identity to be my central identity (even if I frequently act very much unlike Our Lord). At least in the form of a proposition, I will say that I have no higher identity or relationship than that which I attempt to maintain with God. I am many other things, but those things only matter in a secondary sense by comparison with the Divine; only my roles as husband and father(-to-be) come close, but those also have something of a Divine sanction and obligation, so they fit closely with my identity as a Christian.
Now, why does all this matter? When I went through that early stint of going to the local church each morning to pray, I had mentioned this practice to my mother when we were chatting on the phone one day. My mother and I do not share the Faith, and so my beliefs and practices tend to be opaque to her in certain ways – which is fair, as Byzantine Catholicism is not necessarily an easy thing to grasp from without. Nevertheless, upon hearing of my daily morning ventures, my mother paused and said, “Why don’t you go to the gym instead some mornings?” At the time, I was deeply confused. In my head, these two alternatives – going to church or to the gym – could not have been further apart in terms of what their purposes aim toward. I do not remember exactly what I said in response. I may have just brushed it off by saying, “That’s different.” We evidently moved on to discuss something else.
This one exchange has evidently stuck with me. It demonstrates to me that the relationship between identity and particular actions is intimately bound up but often ill understood. Without a recognition of an identity, two alternative options can seem radically equivalent; with the recognition of an identity, however, those same two options can become radically dissimilar and a choice between the two might emerge as nearly self-evident. Herein, I can only briefly begin to outline how I think identity and specific actions interlock, though I hope it will at least stir some (even argumentative) thought in my reader. I will outline my thoughts here in four steps: 1) constitutive identities must be attached to specific actions; 2) not every activity must be directly related to one’s constitutive identity, but it cannot be disjunct from it without causing severe tensions; 3) constitutive identities can be recognized by paying attention to the patterns of the particular actions someone else undertakes; and 4) we must all recognize that we have constitutive identities, self-consciously recognized or not – and this is, in my view, a near definition of what every person treats as his or her religion.
Human beings are fundamentally active creatures that, in some sense, are and become what they do. Of course, there is intention and phantasy that can precede actions and help manifest a future goal, like in a young boy dreaming of playing in the NHL, but we would also consider someone who has never tried to skate to be delusional if he claimed to already be a hockey player. This goes for literally every identity we can imagine – it is wrapped up in the performance of a certain kind of activity. We may feel more or less attached to the various identities we inhabit, but none of them are utterly detached from our actions undertaken as active creatures. This is why major philosophical figures such as Aristotle or Nietzsche believe that it is easier to know a man by his actions than his words; language can be used to deceive much more easily than activity that has been informed by practice and habit. For someone to think himself a religious man (especially in a more traditional sense) would be odd if he did not regularly pray, attempt to discern the will of God, and attend some form of communal religious practice.
Now, some people may not like this definition because there could be parameters that cause conflicts. For example, I have a friend who is in no way practicing a religion, yet he refers to himself as ‘intellectually Catholic.’ I think what he means by this is something like that he finds the intellectual force of Catholic thinkers most enticing and that, if he were to be a religious man, he would be a Catholic. I passively grant him his self-identity as an ‘intellectual Catholic’ on two grounds: first, he does seem genuinely convinced by the abstract arguments for Catholicism (he has read an incredible amount), and, two, I could not be bothered to argue about a triviality. If pushed, however, I would have point out to him that ‘Catholic,’ even etymologically, really does not suggest a principally intellectual phenomenon and instead a lived, religious practice. Thus, a Catholic is someone who has been baptized and chrismated (confirmed) within the community of the Church and who, ideally, has some regular liturgical life. Thus, in the practical realities of daily life, the details of identity would need to be fleshed out and negotiated; but my theoretical point here is that it must be connected with an array of specific actions because everything that can constitute a human being’s identity must, at some point, be a particular and specific act.
Every action does not, however, necessarily give one a window into someone’s constitutive identity. For example, I enjoy playing squash now and then, though this has no intrinsic relationship to my identity as a Christian. I have certainly played squash against non-Christians who were quite adept at the sport, and I know many Christians who have never held a squash racket. There are a myriad of activities that can be considered in this light, and this explains how a group of adherents to the same religion can have a wide variety of extraneous interests and hobbies that in no way cause religious conflict. It would be impossible guess what a young boy of a Baptist family in Canada as such would prefer to play between soccer, hockey, or baseball.
If, however, we switched to a sport like Mixed Martial Arts, especially as performed in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, there might be more of a hang-up. Though this is certainly not dogma, a Christian may have a problem with the UFC tilting toward being a kind of blood-sport (I will leave that to individual Christians to decide for themselves). The point is that specific acts can be somewhat detached from a core identity but might also clash with it; in such cases, the person will either begin to feel a sense of tension in the contradiction between the identities they maintain through their different habits (going to church some days while entering into violent combat on others), or they will have to give up one of the identities and its concomitant particular actions. Typically, the identity which an individual sees as central to his or her person will be the one that wins out.
Importantly, this is often how you can begin to discern someone else’s identity: you see what habits, which particular activities, come up most commonly in their lives and which ones tend to be the pillars that other chosen actions revolve around. You also begin to discern how the plethora of actions they undertake fit together into an integrated (more or less) whole. Thus, we cannot necessarily know a person by any one action he or she undertakes (though we could have a lucky guess); rather, what we mean when we say we are getting to know someone is that we see the sort of identity he is trying to enact over a time through the myriad of specific actions he undertakes every day. Indeed, especially with people in their late teens to early twenties, you can often watch the core elements of someone’s identity being actively formulated and self-consciously pursued. I remember, during my undergraduate degree, I had a professor in his late seventies who said he loved teaching students pursuing their bachelor’s degrees: there is no shortage to the drama of substantial identities being sought wherever you look – for better or for worse.
This last clause I take to be particularly important – for better or for worse. We all recognize that there are certain habits that people have that become part of their identities which we would not necessarily consider a virtue. This can be overtly negative, in the form of something like a drinking problem or a proclivity to use violence to solve problems. Others, however, have certain habits that our culture might even celebrate but which I would suggest are rather problematic: a common example this is the workaholic, overly productive mindset that can be commonly found today – though there is a further question of considering why this occurs, which is often (though not necessarily) for problematic goals like wealth or status for its own sake. What is important to consider in these cases is what a given person is attempting to enact across time, as this is the definition of his identity. What identity do I need to ascribe to someone to understand why he does the many, disparate actions he undertakes?
Why does this matter? In my view, this is the beginning of a definition of religion. The etymological root of religion is the Latin term religio, meaning an obligation or a bond, which comes from a further root: religare, a verb meaning ‘to bind’ (or, perhaps, ‘to bind together’). This is akin to what I have been describing as a ‘constitutive identity’; it is that which binds together the innumerable actions that one undertakes throughout his daily life. To subscribe to a religion, then, is to recognize that life must be held together by certain principles and to seek out the highest principles one can muster and order one’s life around them. For those people who think that they have no religion, I would want to press them: Do you not have an identity? What does that identity consist in? Does it not bind together the variety of your actions in a manner that you take to be more or less coherent? If so, what are the forces, the principles, the beliefs that sit at the heart of your identity to make sense of everything you do? I would suggest that if someone can answer this, he will begin to understand what or whom he truly worships – and there may be some reconsideration (and, to be clear, this is true even of self-consciously religious folks).
What I have briefly outlined here is, no doubt, incomplete. A critical problem herein is that I have written with a one-sided focus on the individual. I do not think this is a problem per se but it does come off as insufficient. Further questions of familial, communal, and societal coherence and identity must encroach on this conversation and may be cause for additional reconsiderations of one’s identity. The point that I hope to have made clear here is twofold: first, I believe that we cannot understand specific actions without an understanding of the identity of the person performing those actions; and, second, I believe that our identities can only be understood in relationship to the many particular actions we undertake. These are mutually informative halves of a single whole. Finally, to be open for a moment, I will give you a brief look into my own reflections on this matter to ensure the wrong idea is not had, especially from that second-last paragraph. I call myself a Christian and seek a life after Christ – but I am terrible at this. I do not give to the poor or serve the needy as a I could; I bemoan the Crosses that befall me; I frequent look upon others with self-righteous judgement; I frequently am slothful and self-serving; I often pray with a prideful idea that I am better than others because I pray (literally a disposition of heart unto my own condemnation). I could go on. I give you this because it reveals how I am not even certain that I am serving the God I claim to be seeking despite my explicit self-identification. This process is horribly difficult and requires deep striving; I have no right to be condemning anyone for their lack of struggle with their own particularities. All I hope is that these reflections might give some insight into how all of us are struggling – perhaps to know this will be equal part a call to the higher and equal part a call to compassion.
Hoping for Clarity 