Faith as Trust: Why Religious Frameworks Matter Right Now (Even If You're Not Religious)

You might have noticed I haven’t been Ezra Klein’s biggest fan lately (see my post about his conversation of the Buddhist understanding of doubt, and this one about his controversial conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates). But his recent conversation with James Talarico was terrific. I found it really helpful for some questions I’ve been circling around for weeks.

Talarico’s a Texas state representative running for the US Senate. He is also a Presbyterian seminary student who is very vocal about the way Christianity shapes his progressive politics. And there’s this moment in their conversation where he talks about learning ancient Greek in seminary. The word we translate as “faith” can also mean “trust,” he explains. Not belief in some abstract doctrine. Trust.

He tells this story about learning to swim at his neighborhood pool. His instructor told him: Don’t fight the water. Let the water carry you.

“That’s what my faith feels like,” Talarico says. “Trusting that love is going to get you through the hour, through the day, through your life. That love will ultimately prevail, even when it’s temporarily defeated.”

Before I go further: This Substack is called Religion Reimagined, and people constantly push me to define “religion.” I don’t give straightforward answers because that’s the point—exploring what religion is and could be means the definition isn’t fixed. It shifts depending on what form of lived religious experience I’m looking at. This post plays with an idea from Talarico’s conversation: that religion isn’t just about unwavering belief. It’s trust.

When Talarico pivoted from that poetic swimming pool image to something more concrete, my ears perked up. We all put our trust in something, he argued. Donald Trump has faith too. Absolute faith. In money, in power, in status. When Klein pushed back slightly—Trump’s not exactly pious—Talarico doubled down: “He’s very faithful to that religion.”

And suddenly we’re not talking about swimming pools or Sunday services anymore.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about since I listened: If faith is trust, if religion is really about what you trust enough to organize your entire life around, then what are those of us who call ourselves “nones” supposed to do with that?

Because I don’t 100% trust religion. But in this particular moment of instability and violence and fear and anxiety, I keep wondering: what lessons are religious leaders offering that might matter to those of us outside their communities? Not that we should do what they do, exactly. But how can they function as conversation partners—helping us ask better questions even if they can’t give us answers?

This week, as I chewed on what constructive role trust could have in this particular political moment, I found some religious conversation partners. And if they’re not helping me come to certain conclusions they are at least helping me ask myself some really hard questions.

When Trust Gets Physical

On January 13th, Bishop Rob Hirschfeld stood at a vigil in New Hampshire for Renee Macklin Good, a woman shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. And Hirschfeld said something that’s been ricocheting across the internet ever since.

He told his clergy to get their affairs in order. Write your wills, he said. “Because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.”

Bodies. Not thoughts and prayers, not eloquent statements, not well-wishes. Bodies.

The responses split immediately. Some clergy felt relief—finally, someone naming what they’d been feeling as they showed up to pray outside ICE facilities and got pepper-sprayed, roughed up, arrested. Others pushed back. “I didn’t sign up to be a martyr,” one California priest said.

But here’s what author of the forthcoming book Antifascist Dad Matthew Remski caught in that speech: This is Christianity becoming “profoundly material, no longer choked in idealism.” Hirschfeld’s standing there in his vestments talking about death and wills and inheritance. And Remski argues there’s something deeper happening. “Once you set your affairs in order,” he writes, “wouldn’t they always be that way?”

“Once you set your affairs in order,” Remski writes, “wouldn’t they always be that way?”

You can’t un-prepare for that level of commitment. Can’t go back to comfort once you’ve acknowledged what might be required of you.

Hirschfeld invoked Jonathan Daniels in that speech—a seminary student from New Hampshire who went to Alabama in 1965 to help integrate public spaces, who took a bullet protecting a Black teenager. Not everyone can be a Jonathan Daniels, Hirschfeld said. But we’re increasingly being called into dangerous places.

Is this what Talarico’s trust looks like when it costs you something? Not fighting the water, but letting that trust carry you somewhere you might get hurt?

The Monks, the Crowds, and What Comes After

There are 18 Buddhist monks walking across America right now. They’re walking to DC, arriving sometime in mid-February, to ask Congress to recognize Vesak (the Buddha’s birthday and enlightenment) as a federal holiday.

And people are losing it over them.

Millions of followers online. Thousands showing up every day just to see them walk, to stand near them. The AP reported crowds gathering from morning to evening, often in tears. On one Saturday in Columbia, South Carolina, thousands thronged the State House steps to watch them chant.

The monk leading the walk, Bhikkhu Pannakara, walks barefoot—his feet are now heavily bandaged from stepping on rocks and nails and glass. He teaches about mindfulness and forgiveness at every stop. People describe feeling calmer in their presence, unexpectedly emotional, like their faith in humanity is being restored.

Brooke Schedneck, a religion professor at Rhodes College, points out that this tradition of peace walks in Theravada Buddhism goes back to the 1990s, when a Cambodian monk led marches across areas riddled with landmines to foster healing after genocide. “These walks really inspire people and inspire faith,” she says. “The core intention is to have others watch and be inspired, not so much through words, but through how they are willing to make this sacrifice by walking and being visible.”

I want to be moved by this. I am moved by this.

But I’m also sitting here wondering: Then what?

Buddhist teacher Lama Rod Owens—who represents what’s often called engaged Buddhism, the tradition that explicitly connects spiritual practice to social justice work—posted a video on January 16th asking spiritual teachers to speak out. Keeping politics and practice separate, he argued, “actually makes us a tool of fascism and oppression.” If we’re not telling the truth about this moment, he said, “then we’re bypassing the moment... and that’s just another act of violence.” Spiritual bypassing as violence. That’s the frame.

He offers a middle path for spiritual leaders who aren’t ready to write their wills: Hold space. Ask people how they’re doing. Just be present with their anxiety. Let them know they’re not alone.

So back to the monks. What do those thousands of people gathering in tears do with that feeling? Where does the inspiration go?

The monks’ stated goal is symbolic: a federal holiday. Their main emphasis is helping people “achieve peace in their lives.” And look, after one of them lost his leg and they kept walking, I’m not about to critique their sacrifice or their sincerity. That’s real commitment. Real witness.

But are we—those of us watching, following online, showing up to see them—are we consuming their witness as spiritual comfort? Or are we being called by it?

Because here’s what Lama Rod is saying: inspiration without action is complicity. And here’s what Hirschfeld is saying: the time for statements is over. And here’s what Talarico is arguing: faith/trust should lead to politics, not the other way around. “I really do feel like this is a way that I can love my neighbor at scale,” he says about his legislative work. “Through good public policy, reducing the cost of prescription drugs, reducing the cost of child care.”

So what would it look like if those crowds in South Carolina went home and organized? If that feeling of connection mobilized people to call their representatives, to show up at town halls, to work on immigration legal defense, to build coalitions?

There are levels here, obviously. Not everyone can write their will and prepare for martyrdom. But there’s got to be something between spiritual tourism and taking a bullet.

The Politics of Love (Which Sounds Gooeier Than It Is)

Talarico’s got this vision he keeps coming back to in the Klein interview. “I think people are ready for a politics of love,” he says. “A radical love. Especially for our neighbors who are the most different from us.”

I know. “Politics of love” sounds gooey, right? Toothless. Emotional and sentimental and a little saccharine. Especially for those of us outside the Christian tradition who don’t really understand how the word “love” operates there.

For me, spiritual love isn’t an interpersonal emotional feeling. It’s the acknowledgment of connection and interdependence. Recognition of our fundamental entanglement with each other and the world.

That’s closer to what Talarico means. He talks about love as “a force as real as gravity. The force that drew elements together in the Big Bang, the force that drew life from those primordial oceans.” Love as logos. As the fundamental organizing principle of reality.

“If we actually treated all of our neighbors as bearers of the image of the divine,” he asks, “how would our discourse look? How would our public policies look?”

That’s the question trust as practice has to answer. Not just what we believe, but what we’re willing to do. What we’re willing to risk.

What This Means for the Rest of Us (Who Are Also Scared)

Here’s where I have to be honest with you: I don’t have this figured out. And I’m scared too.

My own home of Boston—a sanctuary city—is preparing for a coming surge in ICE activity. My daughter asked me not to go to protests after what happened to Renee Good. I’m trying to figure out how I’ll show up, when I’ll show up. What level of risk I’m willing to take.

And here’s where it gets tricky for those of us who are religiously unaffiliated. Many of us are drawn to these frameworks—the language of radical love, the bodhisattva vow, the prophetic tradition of bodies on the line. But we can’t quite commit. Can’t quite trust the institutions or the leaders or maybe even the communities.

Maybe that’s because most religious institutions/leaders/communities don’t actually follow this logic all the way through. They stop at thoughts and prayers. At inspiring witness. At individual transformation. The ones worth engaging might be the ones willing to go all the way—to liberation theology, to “get your affairs in order,” to spiritual practice as political resistance.

Hirschfeld clarified later that he wasn’t asking people to seek out violence. “I’m just asking you to live your life without fear of death,” he told NPR. “Be prepared... I’m not asking you to go look for that bullet. I’m simply saying be ready, have your affairs in order, have your soul ready, in case you find yourself in trouble.”

Be ready.

And maybe that’s what those of us outside traditional religion need to figure out. Not conversion. But what it would mean to be ready. To have our affairs in order—not just our wills, but our lives organized around protecting the vulnerable. To let trust in something—love as connectivity? human dignity? our fundamental interdependence?—carry us into places that feel dangerous.

In a political moment when opposition politicians won’t even name the stakes, religious language might be the only language that’s radical enough. Not because it’s comfortable or comforting. But because these traditions have been thinking about costly commitment for millennia. They’ve got frameworks for what it means to trust something absolutely.

The monks are walking. Hirschfeld is asking his clergy to prepare. Lama Rod is calling out bypassing as violence. Talarico is arguing for politics that grows out of absolute trust in love.

The question for the rest of us, and the question I’m asking myself while my daughter worries about me going to protests, while I wonder what “getting my affairs in order” would actually mean in practice: What comes after we’re inspired?

If you found this post helpful, please like, comment, or share it. Doing so helps others find the newsletter. And I've opened up comments to everyone, so let's continue exploring these themes together there—I’m especially interested in hearing about any religious/spiritual leaders who you are finding helpful, inspiring, radical, or wise right now.