Believing vs. performing

Religion is offended by the literal approach. Believers aren’t supposed to ask about the texture or whereabouts of god and heaven, and if they do, the response is most often a patronizing smile and a metaphor. Thus the believer might be forgiven for intuiting religion to be not something you believe, or take to be materially and physically true, but something you do: that is, a performance.

This is not a very dire insult. Practically the entire project of social interaction is to perform. The “self,” as we conceptualize it, is as much something to be observed as something to be experienced. We’re rarely satisfied to be; we want to be seen as. We are social creatures to a ridiculous extent. Even when alone, we constantly perform for an observer-self that sits in audience of our acting-self. To drop the performance risks disrupting of our sense of self-continuity—which isn’t to say we never break character, but that when we do, we must expend energy to either assimilate or repress the memory.

I was born into religion. I remained internally devout for over 20 years and nominally devout for a few more. I was happiest in my religion when I treated it as a performance in interaction with others, and most troubled when I treated it as a set of literal statements about the universe.

Once, while in training to be a missionary, I asked one of my instructors about the literalness of his belief in god: “Are you actually, constantly aware of a physical being who watches your every act? Is that in the back of your mind at all times?”

^{Mormons believe god has a physical, human body—not as Jesus, but as a separate person. They also believe this matters a lot.}

It wasn’t an obvious question to him, nor one he’d ever thought about before. His response was halting and uncertain. The gist was that, while he believed in god, he didn’t consider him the same way he considered the physical world he could see and touch. It wasn’t that one was greater or lesser than the other, but that it was infeasible to hold those concepts in the same locus of awareness.

I think he was being honest with me. I appreciated that, and still do.

But my question had layers to it. I was responding to the instructor’s performance of religion: the way he dressed, the way he spent his time, the way he spoke. I wanted to know whether he was performing for god as much as he was performing for us. I could tell he felt our eyes on him when he taught a lesson or told a joke. I could see him responding to us responding to him. Did he feel god’s eyes on him the same way? Was he trying to make god laugh, too?

I also wanted to understand the feedback loop between performance and belief. Was his performance simply an enactment of his belief, as you might assume? Or was his belief an enactment of his performance, something that materialized out of his observation of himself? Did he think, “I should do this because I believe in it,” or did he think, “I must believe this, since I’m always doing it?” Was it a combination of both?

^{Mormonism explicitly teaches that belief arises from performance, though not necessarily in those words. Mormons are instructed to engage in daily religious rituals in order to build and maintain their faith, rather than proportionally to the faith they already have. “Fake it till you make it” is unironically preached over the pulpit—again, not necessarily in those words.}

If we put aside politeness and tolerance and social mores, it’s plain to see that for the religious, some amount of their belief is always, necessarily metaphorical. Not all of them deny this or are even bothered by it. Particularly in the largest and oldest religions, the “legacy” religions, there seems to be a great appreciation for religion as metaphor—as a thing that holds value the way a poem does, rather than the way a scientific discipline does. There would be more fellowship between the theist and the atheist if this were a basic understanding between them. So often their arguments take the form of one person singing a hymn while the other searches the sheet music for peer-reviewed citations. One insists that the hymn is true, the other that the hymn holds no value unless it is true. Each has set impossible terms for the other’s defense. Both have implicitly agreed to these terms, which they should not have done.

When I believed, I constantly framed my belief in metaphors. One of my favorites, beloved of religious writers for millennia, was the metaphor of romantic love. “How do you know there’s a god?” someone might ask. “How do I know my wife loves me?” I would respond. What I was saying was that, while the evidentiary basis for such knowledge appeared slim, the emotional-experiential basis was compelling. But I was unwittingly expressing a different idea: that love, like religion, is more a performance than a physical fact.

Neither my wife nor I believe in soulmates. She isn’t shy about the fact that there are many people she could have been happy with. This detracts nothing from our relationship; on the contrary, it’s romantic, even flattering, to know she’s with me by choice and intent, not due to lack of options. Our relationship doesn’t subsist on a proposition about fate or true love or the sanctity of marriage. It thrives because of a continuous, authentic performance of mutual kindness and affection.

I say “authentic” not to mean “based on immutable qualities of the soul,” but rather to free the word “performance” from connotations of pretense or leading on. Neither of us is putting on an act. At the same time, we are acting. We are spontaneously and intentionally doing things to build our relationship. Sometimes those things are premeditated and rote. Other times they’re motivated by deep emotion. One feeds into the other. But ultimately, our belief in our relationship is after-the-fact: it arises from a series of performances we’ve made to impress and endear each other. And why did we start doing those things in the first place? Because we foresaw, or at least hoped for, the effects they would have. We did certain things to make ourselves and each other feel a certain way, and it worked.

If this description is uncomfortably cold and surgical, then maybe love is also offended by the literal approach. But like religion, it aspires to it anyway. People talk about finding “the one” and “knowing” if you’re in love. These are terms of precision and certainty, neither of which is arrived at suddenly. In other words, they’re endings, not beginnings. And even as endings, they’re crude tools for the task. Will math and epistemology tell us how we feel? Maybe they could circle the answer for us, just to be sure?

An essential but oft-ignored element of love, religion, and the self is the will to be. We speak of all three as though they already exist and are only waiting to be discovered. But in fact, they don’t pre-exist. They’re uncovered by our willingness to perform towards a belief. That’s not to say there are no base ingredients. No one is a blank slate. Our genes, upbringing, experiences, ideas about the world, and inscrutable preferences all play a role. But they are co-creators with our personal will. The best predictor of whether you will love a particular person, worship at a particular altar, embody a particular archetype, is whether you want to. Our performances reflect our intent to arrive at something that would motivate them.

What remains problematic about these performances is their insecurity. Because people assume we’re performing our beliefs, we feel pressured to perform the beliefs we want people to assume we have. The self experiencing the self is not enough, nor is the self discovering the self. We want the self to be named and validated by others. As I said earlier, this is the project of social interaction: to be named as the object of one’s intent.

This takes a relatively straightforward task and makes it exhausting. We perform toward a role, then hope other people will properly recognize it, like a game of charades. But even when people understand our intent, they’re obliged to perform roles of their own: instead of validating our performances, they may accuse them of insufficiency or insincerity. These accusations are toothless if we understand our performances to be toward-something instead of from-something; what is there to be insincere about? But it would be rare to think this way. When someone casts our beliefs into question, the natural response is to perform them louder and with more grimacing. Unfortunately, intensifying our own performance rarely alters theirs, so the cycle continues.

The ultimate end of this process is violence, in a variety of literal and figurative forms. Violence is the evidence people are least willing to refute. It proves to the perpetrator, the victim (often the same person), and any observers that one’s performance is genuine and unlimited. This is ironic because violence is cheap. It takes no discipline, no great effort of will to cause harm. The only necessary ingredient is disregard for the victim. A dramatic act of cruelty or self-flagellation shouldn’t lead us to affirm how committed the actor is, but to ask what insecurity could drive them to that extreme. What are they so desperate to prove? And to what audience?

Much of desire is constructed, and much of interpretation is scripted, so the dialogue between insecurity and violence is usually invisible. Even the actor is likely unaware. But awareness would only inflame their insecurity. In the end, they must be persuaded to some other theory of themself, or their audience must tell them their performance is unnecessary, or if all else fails, we must limit the harm they can do.

Within ourselves, the options are similar. We can lay down beliefs that were chosen for us, or chosen too hastily, and refuse to perform for them any longer. We can distance ourselves from audiences that demand too much. We can learn to keep ourselves and others safe.

This is hard, lonely, terrifying work. But it gives us back to ourselves. And that is the most valuable thing in the entire world.