Let’s stipulate some definitions:
Beliefs are the propositions that you hold as true.
Your convictions are the extent to which you live in accordance with your beliefs.
My primary point is that we have a problem in the second definition department right now, but I don’t want to give short shrift to the first.
Beliefs are profoundly important. In my own sphere of education, John Hattie (the Godfather of evidence-based practice in education) says that his latest book has taught him that what teachers believe is more important than what teachers do. If a teacher believes the right things, then their behavior will follow.
Richard Williams is a philosophy professor at BYU and first taught me a similar principle: if you teach children who you happen to think are bags of biological soup, you’ll teach them very differently than if you believe them to be splinters of the divine, endowed with infinite potential. (Given that I’m hinting at it, I may as well say here that I believe the gospel of Jesus Christ as taught by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is both true in a historical sense, but also truest in a philosophical sense: because it is the best working theory that provides the most desirable results—it is the set of beliefs that will produce the highest possible quality people.)
My simple model is this: if I can get you to have the right mindsets, you will naturally do what follows.
Let me give three other examples:
If you believe that depression is primarily an issue of chemical imbalance, you will naturally believe that those diagnosed with it primarily need a diagnosis, a therapist, and a good amount of pharmacology.
If you believe that politics is broken beyond repair, you will not attempt to make things any better.
If you believe that you are small cog in a very large machine, you will feel depressed as a matter of course, and you will not attempt to better your life or your circumstances.
You could list a million of these, and they’re all important. In my faith, beliefs are literally salvific: you must believe the right things to be saved. When I speak with my protestant friends, they agree, it seems, that beliefs are literally salvific—but believe that I have the wrong ones! We are saved independent of our personal behavior, as Jesus’ grace is the only thing we need in order to be saved. I believe, meanwhile, that I must do all in my power to be saved—not as a matter of earning grace or salvation, but as a matter of covenant. I do not earn my wife’s love by doing all I can for our marriage. I do all I can for our marriage as a token of my love for her.
I do not equivocate here: right thinking is crucial. If we think wrong, we will act wrong, and the whole house of cards will collapse around us. If I could upload a set of beliefs into my children at a young age, I would consider it rather carefully—not religious beliefs, but beliefs about locus of control, about their capacity to do good in this world, about how to take on challenges (with delight!) and a host of others. (Religion is one way of transmitting such beliefs and values, but it is too holy to not be earned for ones’ self.)
And what is conviction? It’s getting into the cosplay. It’s really enjoying it. It’s living up to what you believe to be true.
With that as preamble, I hope it is clear that what I am about to say next is in no way a diminishing of the importance of right belief.
The problem we have is both one of right-beliefs, but also of conviction when we have those right beliefs.
It’s little wonder, of course. The eugenicists, the communists, the nazis—they were all zealots, and they had conviction and to spare. There is good reason to be wary of actually acting out your private beliefs.
But we’ve now arrived in a terrible place where the fashionable way to go is to politely claim some non-controversial beliefs, but not actually stand for many of them. This is dangerous in a religious sense because I don’t think God is pleased by how much we have received, and comparatively how little we have lived up to. More practically, however, ho-hum non-controversialism doesn’t deflect the next despot, it lays out the red carpet for him. (And it will almost certainly be a him.)
One of the more compelling theories that I’ve heard is that we always want the opposite of the last guy. George W. Bush was dumb, but he was easy to get along with—so Obama naturally had to be cold, aloof, and brilliant. Obama was Harvard’s president, so Trump had to be the everyman’s. I’m not sure that it’s quite that neat, but there is a certain appeal here—and if I’m right, then a generation of equivocators and nuance bros will be replaced by a generation of zealous, self-assured demagogues.
There is a better word, by the way, than conviction, and the word is “faith.” I’ve always had a hard time with the belief that faith had to do with forcing yourself to believe the right things despite evidence; rather, it always seemed to me to be about living up to what you know to be true. Brent Schmidt’s recent book on faith seems to agree with me: it is a social faith, even a communal, covenant faith that is about living up to what we know that is salvific.
It isn’t that we have all the right ideas—we don’t. Rather, my fear is that the ones that we do have that are true? Those are the ones we are either soft-peddling, or turning our backs on completely.
We need right ideas, but we need to be willing to stand up for them when they come, too.