In President Obama’s first State of the Union Address, he spoke of a loss of faith in our nation’s biggest institutions. He is correct.  Faith is a fragile thing.  It is intangible.  We cannot measure it, or weight it, or know what color it is or how it smells or tastes.  We cannot tell by touch the texture of it.  Faith never stands alone.  It walks hand in hand with doubt.  “I believe, help my unbelief.” (Mark 9:24).  When faith is broken, it is very very difficult to repair.  Faith, like love, requires courage because we expose our vulnerabilities when we believe.

Faith in the transcendent, in God, however we understand the concept, comes over time.  It comes with experience.  Our childhood faith grows into a mature faith when we have done our best, acted in accordance with what we thought a loving and just God would require and have nevertheless been disappointed, nonplussed, undone, hurt.  Time passes and we come to see how the thing that hurt us so deeply was the thing that made us stronger and taught us an important lesson.  The disappointment was a tool that hollowed out a space that was later filled with more accomplishment, more love, more joy.  The disappointment became a blessing for which we thank a merciful and loving God.  And our faith in God grows.

In contrast, when human beings and institutions disappoint us and our faith is broken, our trust is never quite the same.  Even if we are able to restore our faith, it is a cracked vessel and the evidence of the fissure remains.  Our faith in many of our public institutions was broken a long time ago.  The credibility gap during the Vietnam War, Watergate, the savings and loan scandals, corrupt politicians, abusive clergy, Enron, World Com, big pharmaceutical companies selling bad drugs, the media cooperation in selling the Iraq war to the public, the financial crisis of 2008 are a few of the events that have broken public faith in our biggest institutions.

Now, we have to live in relationship to our institutions –government, business, media, even faith institutions – with a moral logic that does not require faith.  That logic is the logic of enlightened self interest.  The people who run these institutions make decisions according to their own self interests and according to the interests of the institutions within which they work.  In a democratic republic, citizens need not have faith in the people who work within the structures of government.  We give and withdraw our support of our elected officials according to how effective they are in advancing our wellbeing and the wellbeing of our nation.

This is how the founders structured our government.  They lived in a theological moment in history that taught that humanity was a fallen creation, that there was no intrinsic good upon which we could rely.  They had no faith in humanity’s ability to act purely from the common good.  This is the reason there are checks and balances built into our system of government.  They did, however, believe that human beings would act in their own self interest.  We see this at work in our politics today.  Republican obstructionists clearly think that it is in their own self-interest to block legislative progress.  It seems as if the logic is that if Democrats cannot get anything done, then the voters will turn to Republicans in the next election.  We will see in November whether or not this strategy will work.

When citizens get enough of hyper-partisan obstructionism, we ought to vote the people out of office who are not cooperating to get our business done.  We ought to relieve them of the responsibility we have given them.  This is true with other institutions as well.  When banks misuse our money, we ought to move it.  When the media gives us half-baked, echo-chamber, sound-bite journalism, we ought to write, complain, and/or choose a different news outlet.  When businesses are dishonest, we ought to do business with a different company.  We ought not to invest our money in them.

The important thing about faith, because it is at once powerful and irreparably fragile, is that we ought not to put our faith in everything or everyone.  We ought to choose the people in which we have faith very carefully.  We ought to put our faith in that which is ultimate, in Radical Love.  The rest is a negotiation.