Journalist and author Lesley Hazleton has spent much of her career at the crossroads of religion, politics, and history: she reported for TIME and other publications from Jerusalem for many years and more recently has explored the monotheistic traditions in such books as Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother (Bloomsbury, 2004) and The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (Riverhead, 2013). Her delight in asking big questions about, as she puts it, “faith-belief-meaning-mystery-existence”—and her wariness of those who don’t question their own convictions have led Hazleton to write Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto (Riverhead, April 5).
How does being agnostic help you write about religion?
I’ve been writing about religion and politics actually all my life, but intensively the last 15 years or so with [my books] and also on my blog, The Accidental Theologist. Many of my readers were saying, we don’t get it, how can you possibly be agnostic and write about religion? Which is rather like saying how can you be a criminologist and not be a criminal? In fact, being agnostic is a huge advantage because the perspective of the agnostic stance is so much larger and so much freer. You’re not closed in and bound by doctrine, by what you should believe or not believe. To be limited by the idea that you have to be right, you have to adhere to some kind of party line, seems to me just to reduce everything to a very, very small size. And I don’t want my mind to be reduced to a small size.
Agnostic explores the differences between belief and faith. Can you talk a little about this?
Faith, real faith, has nothing to do with belief; belief contains within itself the possibility of disbelief. When we say we believe something, we’re conflating belief with fact, and if something is fact, you don’t need to believe it, it’s a given, right? But [when] we have faith in something or in someone, it’s an expression of hope and of trust. It takes courage to trust, and it takes a certain courage to even hope and act accordingly. The more you say that something is impossible, the more impossible it becomes. So you just give up. That’s a terrible way to live. [For example:] I have faith in Middle East peace. I reported from the Middle East for a number of years, and if you ask me rationally in the light of everything I know, whether I believe that Middle East peace is possible, I’d have to say no. [But] I refuse to accept this; therefore I have faith that Middle East peace is possible. If I am living with an illusion about the Middle East, which rationally I have to say I am when I say that peace is possible, that is the way I want to be. That allows me to stay human. It allows me to work towards what I hope might be one day.
What is the most important idea that readers can learn from your book?
That there is both great integrity, and if you’re open to it, great joy, in doubt and uncertainty— in exploring instead of searching, in seeing what’s there, just being open to the world without this restless need for answers and for pinning things down. This is a wonderful perspective because we are all now living very large and very small at the same time in a way we never have before. Now we know what is happening half way around the world at the same time as we know what’s happening next door, right? We know what happened at 13.8 billion years ago, with the big bang and the creation of this universe, and yet at the same time we are as involved in our everyday lives as ever. It feels like we’re living in three dimensions instead of in one flat dimension, which is where this whole theist/atheist debate takes place. It’s a straight line from belief to unbelief. Let’s just leave this ridiculous, simplistic argument behind, let’s leave binary thinking behind, and rise above it and dance with ideas.
