Understanding Faith

This past month marked the 20th anniversary of the release of “The Shawshank Redemption.” If you’re anything like me, your first interaction with the film came through a web search of the “greatest movies ever.” This search leads to IMDB’s Top 250 list, a thoroughly unscientific run-through (even for something as subjective as film rankings). Sure enough, a small film from 1994 that almost failed to break even takes the top spot.

The film’s message of hope allows it to resonate so deeply, even today. You know a movie is universally beloved when people put it in their top five lists even if they’re afraid of sounding trite.

The film’s twist ending underscores this point. Even though Andy keeps his mission secret, the way that he conducts his life is jarring to those around him. It is a beautiful example of a life guided by a seemingly incomprehensible hope.

This hope is what makes him help a prison guard with his tax papers. This hope is what drives him to help a convicted murderer pass his G.E.D. And this hope is what causes him to challenge Red–a jaded convict–to look at his life in a completely different way, and say “I hope” at the very end of the film.

Hope takes many different forms. As a matter of fact, for those who are “religious,” hope springs directly from faith. Faith is a loaded term—but, as a general rule, we seem to be fine with letting people believe what they want to believe, as long as it makes them better persons and, perhaps most importantly, doesn’t interfere with how other people conduct their lives.

I wish that faith was simple. I wish that it was purely insular—something that you could keep to yourself and use as self-motivation when you’re going through a rough day. But real faith is something much more powerful than that.

I do not bemoan the decline of religious affiliation in the United States. My concern is that, with this loss of faith, we have come to misunderstand why faith exists in the first place.

To be fair, many harmful things have come as a result of “faith.” Real faith does not drive believers to suppress and condemn others. Real faith does not push forward a specific social agenda. The reason why “Christians” pass harsh anti-gay legislation around the world is not because of faith. It’s because they do not understand the love that makes their hope possible in the first place.

For many believers, the tendency is to view faith as a nothing more than a tradition, albeit a crucially important one. Unfortunately, this is the general culture among many of the people in some of the most repressive, intolerant parts of the country. This makes faith nothing more than a cultural phenomenon—and a reprehensible one at that.

On the other hand, the attitude among "the enlightened" is to dismiss faith as nothing more than a nice personal trinket that people carry around to convince themselves to be good. The focus is on the fact that, as Voltaire put it, “faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.” In this narrative, faith is cast aside in the name of trying to find meaning and identity within ourselves.

As a Christian, I advocate for a society where people are loved regardless of who they are. But, because of that same faith, I do hope to challenge people to change their way of life. This doesn’t spring out of hate or misunderstanding. This comes from my own personal experience in having to daily cast aside who I believe myself to be. Faith tells me that, in the midst of a society obsessed with finding an “identity,” my identity is to be found in something greater.

And that’s often the biggest leap of faith—embracing that you’re not simply what you think you are. For me, it means that who I am is not an accumulation of the things I do or the things I like or the people with whom I spend my time. My identity rests in knowing that my hope is found in something beyond myself—specifically, how God views me through the redeeming work of Christ.

This is not a call for people to embrace my faith. As countless philosophers have pointed out, faith and hope don’t make sense to those who don’t have it. But what I do want people to understand is that, for those who have faith, the greatest demonstration of it is to lovingly encourage others to find hope in something beyond themselves.

That’s my hope, anyway.

Al Fernández ’17 lives in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.