Americans are fond of unity talk: we see ourselves as “one nation, indivisible,” and in pursuit of “a more perfect union.” But much of our actual existence is characterized more by difference and disagreement than by unity. We lack agreement about the purpose of our country, the nature of the common good, and the meaning of human flourishing.
These differences are evident in our religious and legal practices. Religion asks the fundamental questions of human existence: why are we here, is there a God, what is good and what is evil, what happens when we die? We do not get to hedge our bets in answering these questions. Whatever we conclude, whatever we choose to believe, we all live into one and only one set of beliefs. As New Testament scholar Kavin Rowe asserts, “the human condition is such that you have to choose how to live from among options that rule one another out.” And we make that choice trusting in things unseen: “we wager our lives, one way or the other,” because “we cannot know ahead of the lives we live that the truth to which we devote ourselves is the truth worth devoting ourselves to.”
Law, like religion, raises fundamental questions of our existence. Law is the means through which we impose our beliefs on our fellow citizens. We do so not through gentle persuasion but through coercion rooted in the threat of violence. In the haunting words of legal scholar Robert Cover, “legal interpretation takes place on a field of pain and death.” All of our laws, even mundane laws like property taxes and speed limits, are given power by the credible threat of state violence that underlies them.
Most legal and religious understandings are sustained by texts. The communities in which these understandings unfold are constantly and contingently arguing about the meaning and coherence of the words in those texts. In other words, the lived practices of law and religion—their quests for meaning and coherence—depend on interpretation. That interpretation typically stands somewhere between a rigid formalism that brooks no ambiguity and an open-ended pragmatism that admits no foundations. Most of us fall somewhere in between these poles of certain absolutes and absolute uncertainty. We have another name for this uncomfortable middle ground: we call it trust, or perhaps even faith.