I don’t have much faith. Not the religious kind, I mean. But I’ve watched and respected people who do. Forget the fanatics, but the ones who kept going when there was no reason to keep going except that something deeper told them to.
Perseverance with a backbone.
Black churches in the US weren't just meeting places. They carried the idea of justice, that tomorrow could be different if enough people believed it hard enough and worked long enough. Same in Poland with Solidarność. Same in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile under Pinochet. The Catholic Church, for all its horrors, provided sanctuary and organization when dictatorships ruled.
Faith was not about heaven. It was about not giving up.
So if faith can do that, what happens when a society loses it?
La Défaite de l'Occident (The Defeat of the West) gives the answer right in the title. Emmanuel Todd argues that Protestantism was not just about God. It was a moral operating system. Demanding. Disciplined. It told people: work hard, delay gratification, serve the community, don’t be a greedy bastard. That’s not a prayer. That’s a social contract. The values soaked into the culture, creating a social glue.
Without this glue, with no shared values, society is gone, defeated.
Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.
Greed is right, greed works
- Gordon Gekko, Michael Douglas character in the 1987 film “Wall Street”
The logic is simple: if nothing is sacred, why not take everything?
That’s what faith—or something like it—can prevent. It says some things are not for sale. Some things are worth protecting even when they’re not profitable.
In indigenous traditions, nature is not a resource. It’s a relative. It is sacred.
A mountain is not a mineral deposit. It’s an ancestor.
A river is not water volume measured in cubic meters. It's a living entity. With this kind of sacred vision, there's no environmental collapse.
Treating a river as disposable would have been unthinkable.
The moral framework would have prevented the damage before it started.
Some things matter because we together believe they do.
In that sense, I’m a believer.
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