Hope is an unsexy word, but it might be what we need.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: The last several years have been, arguably, the most depressing years in recent record for those unsettled by extremist currents in American public and religious life, and, yes, it was especially painful for those of us with ties, however frayed, to the Evangelical church. We’d been betrayed, yet again, by those who claimed to speak for God. It’s an old story, but no less painful for being old.

Still, something about the way we’ve handled all of this has bothered me deeply. It’s a discomfort that I haven’t quite been able to name, a resistance to the the way our collective discourse has gone: the biting sarcasm, the streams of comments and retweeted toxicity, the doom and gloom and casting of blame. About halfway through 2020, I turned off Twitter, unable to deal with the collective indignation. It all seemed profoundly unhealthy in a way that I wasn’t quite able to parse out. We’ve been mishandling something.

Last week, I picked up Hope in the Dark and Rebecca Solnit helped me out. In her chapter about the American election of 2004, “When We Lost,” she writes:

Sometime before the election was over, I vowed to keep away from what I thought of as “the Conversation,” the tailspin of mutual wailing about how bad everything was, a recitation of the evidence against us—one exciting opportunity the left offers is of being your own prosecutor—that just buried any hope and imagination down into a dank little foxhole of curled-up despair. Now I watch people having it, wondering what it is we get from it. The certainty of despair—is that kind of certainty so worth pursuing?

There it is! This has been the era of the Conversation, of accusation and self-flagellation, of wallowing in the 24 news cycle of unceasingly dire news, of endless social reposts and mounting anger, of mourning things we knew and things we did not know, of the endless projection and refraction of anger until we stood in a house of mirrors, our anger infinitely morphing and reflecting and thwarting itself into new forms until finally settling into despair—unfocused, ruthless, self-destructive despair.

This has been the era of the Conversation, of accusation and self-flagellation, of wallowing in the 24 news cycle of unceasingly dire news, of endless social reposts and mounting anger.

Throughout all of this, we—yes, yes…I—forgot one thing which Solnit points out with laser-like specificity: None of us actually know what is going to happen next. That story has not been told. But by wallowing in the Conversation, I was robbing myself of the opportunity (and, frankly, energy) to help tell it.

Solnit is ardently anti-wallowing. She writes,

“[H]earing people have the Conversation is hearing them tell themselves a story they believe is being told to them. What other stories can be told? How do people recognize that they have the power to be storytellers, not just listeners?”

How, indeed?

The tricky part for those like me (that is, who grew up in fundamentalist-leaning faiths) is acknowledging that we’ve yet again succumbed to the temptation of certainty. For—as Solnit points out—however well ensconced in correct language and well-intentioned outrage, that’s what our collective fatalism ultimately is: A certainty that things will turn out badly.

And, as former Evangelicals know all too well, certainty how the world’s story ends leads directly to inaction, a paralysis so well-rationalized that it feels like righteousness.

Certainty how the world’s story ends leads directly to inaction, a paralysis so well-rationalized that it feels like righteousness.

So maybe we could take a page from Solnit and reframe all of this. Maybe this isn’t American culture’s long and inevitable slide into decay, but an upheaval which enables the rebuilding, the wrecking ball that makes way for something new. Maybe what we’re looking at is not a culture on the edge of the abyss, but a bunch of humans confronting a profound disruption of narrative, a sea-change of thought in American culture and a mass exodus from the old ways of perceiving and talking. Maybe. It could be.

The point: I don’t know and neither do you. But I don’t think it’s beyond us to leave the Conversation and, instead, tell a new story about faith and its place in the world.

To do that, though, we have to have a story, to be for something. We can’t simply reject the old narrative, be the “ex,” the against, the ones who say no. We can’t just rage against the inevitable on social media. We’d have to decide what we’re for, declare what kind of world we want to live in and live in that world as boldly as we can. We’d have to eke out the courage to, as Heaney puts it, “Believe that further shore / Is reachable from here.”

We have to have a story, to be for something.

And there’s the rub: those of us who grew up righteous had a story and it let us down. For many of us, the dissolution of our old narrative was deeply traumatic. Our communities, self-worth, families, and identities hemorrhaged. And for those of us who walked away wounded, committing to a new story—with the fervor necessary to join in the telling—is a step of such bravery and vulnerability that it feels, frankly, impossible. Believing in something again would be an act of self-donation, profoundly religious. It is exposing our neck, once again, to the axe.

And, when we come right down to it, is it even possible to tell a story, collectively, without certainty? What do narratives about the future, faith, belief, and religion look like when you remove the platitudes, the systems of control, the neat sorting algorithms used to sort one another into cleanly edged groups marked In and Out? In the vacuum left by old orthodoxies, can we build a new orthopraxy strong enough to hold us together?

Again, I don’t know and neither do you. But since the Conversation no longer seems an option, I’m game for trying hope instead.