Guest Post: Anatomy of Belief
On belief and uncertainty in recent Oscar winner 'Anatomy of a Fall'
We’re doing something a little different for this special edition of Do You Like Apples today. , who runs The Embassy newsletter (and its companion podcast On Culture), is here for a guest post! Mike (who, full disclosure, also happens to be my father-in-law) writes and talks about “understanding ourselves and our world and living wisely.” His newsletter and podcast runs the gamut of “culture, faith, meaning, trends, theology, philosophy, and leadership.”
Mike’s post today is about recent Oscar winner Anatomy of a Fall, so we figured it was the perfect time for a guest spot. The piece thoughtfully delves into (without spoilers) how one of the film’s characters approaches the facts and his own beliefs, and, in turn, Mike links this to our own relationship to faith, doubt, and how the two interact.
If you find this piece interesting, I’d recommend subscribing to The Embassy for more. Also, I was recently a guest on his podcast to talk about a different Oscar winner from this year, The Zone of Interest. Listen to that conversation here or on your podcast app.
OK, Mike, take it away.
“Sometimes you just have to decide.”
Anatomy of a Fall
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Regular readers know that I often (or semi-often) use a movie as a jumping off place toward wherever it is I am going. A picture may not always be worth a thousand words, but it usually is worth a thousand of my words. So I will go there again. The most recent edition of The Embassy engaged the 2023 award winning movie The Zone of Interest - this one will engage another 2023 award winning movie - Anatomy of a Fall. That opening sentence - “sometimes you just have to decide” - is a pivot of sorts in this story. I will engage this movie in a way that reveals a few things, but I don’t think I will spoil it for you if you haven’t watched it yet - and you should.
Anatomy of a Fall is set in France, the house that is the principle setting is high up in the snowy mountains. There is (as you might guess) a “fall” in this movie - a physical fall causing the death of someone - but it isn’t the story of a person who fell. Anatomy of a Fall is the story of a family. And the story of belief. The father death is the opening move of the story, leaving a mother and son (and dog) to deal with what comes after. Was this fall a suicide? an accident? or a murder? We don’t know. Nobody, except perhaps the mother, Sandra, played brilliantly by Sandra Huller (her performance was nominated for an Academy Award), knows - and she may not. If it is a murder, she is the only one who could have committed it. But we don’t know. Their son, Daniel, has a vision impairment and struggles to interpret these events - and that serves as a picture for us, the viewer. We see, but not clearly - we know, but only in part. The family dog also plays a key role, highlighted by his brilliant blue eyes - perhaps he is the only character who sees everything.
This dynamic is fully at work during the trial that follows - and heightened by the language barriers that exist in this French courtroom. Sandra, who has German as her native tongue and who speaks English well and French less well, sometimes has to resort to English because her French doesn’t allow her to tell her story (or conceal it) as clearly as she needs to. As you might expect, unexpected things are revealed - intimate details of a conflicted home - all while Daniel listens, trying to understand, trying to piece it together. Daniel doesn’t understand. He doesn’t have all the facts he needs - they aren’t really all available - but he comes to the conclusion that “sometimes you have to decide”. He has to decide what he thinks happened, and that decision will then impact his interpretation of all he has learned and all he will learn. It is more than deciding what happened, it is deciding what he believes, and therefore will likely believe in the future.
Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
Hebrews 11:1
This is what we have to do - we have to decide what we believe without all the facts. And that belief will form an interpretative grid for the facts and events that follow in our lives. It doesn’t mean we will then have all the facts, or even more facts - it just means belief - without any more facts than we may have started with.
Recent trends in religious belief can be described, in part, by how we interact with this reality - that we don’t have all the facts. This trend has sometimes been described* as a potential progression (that often stops before the end or reverses once it gets there) -
Doubt: we just don’t know what we believe, exactly - or have doubts about some part of what we have believed.
Disaffiliation: a denominational tie or association no longer serves as good description of belief or religious identity.
Deconstruction: we no longer believe what we used to - the often inherited and unexamined beliefs we had no longer seem to account for the facts we are now encountering (or the facts we think we are now encountering).
Deconversion: we don’t believe.
And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.
Hebrews 11:6
Faith is a conviction, not without facts, but without enough of them to make faith unnecessary. The opposite of faith isn’t doubt, it is certainty. I have what you might call a functional certainty about a relatively small handful of things - or perhaps we should call that a belief about a relatively small handful of things. But this belief informs how what comes after is interpreted. I think everyone does this, consciously or not, though the set of functional certainties may be much larger for some people. So doubt is not an enemy, but a reality of belief - without the possibility of doubt, should we really call it belief? I don’t want to celebrate doubt, just recognize it. If I must have certainty - if I must at all cost banish the possibility of doubt - is that belief? I don’t think so. Without faith it is impossible to please God - because you cannot empirically prove the proposition (a proposition about which I have a functional certainty - or about which I have faith). The movement to disaffiliation is also not necessarily an impediment to belief, it may be a necessary condition of it. If the beliefs of a denomination no longer reflect how I believe the world is, then moving away may be the path toward belief.
It is the movement to deconstruction and deconversion that has received much of our cultural attention. Deconstruction, at least in the way I am using it here, is not a dismantling of belief, but a remodeling of belief. This part of the house must go, while I add another room over here. On the other hand, one can find all over the internet deconversion stories that sound exactly like conversion stories. And just like conversion stories, the emphasis is on the transition from one belief state to another - and less on what comes after. Often, we pay attention to what belief is rejected, not what belief is embraced - what is left behind, not what replaces it. It is often, “I am the person who used to believe X,” not “Now I am the person who has become convinced of Y.” I know a lot of people who have deconstructed and reconstructed, who are deconstructing, and who no longer believe in God. These are pretty different states of belief.
There is an old saying in the church - God doesn’t have grandchildren. Meaning you can’t really inherit belief, not forever. At some point, it becomes your belief, or it fades and becomes a shadow or a rigid set of rules, or it is rejected. I think a lot of well-meaning Christian parents of my generation tried to download a thousand functional certainties to their children - and that just wasn’t ever going to work. Instead of a vital core of belief, we often had a strange set of often contradictory sounding “facts” that must be clung to. But clinging to facts, as we have said, isn’t belief. That leaves us with the conclusion that some level of doubt - deconstruction - reconstruction is not only ‘acceptable’ it is vital to true, personal belief. I have changed my mind on lots of things over the years. Of course. That has not, for me, undermined a vital core of belief - it has displayed it in sharper relief.**
Daniel, in a short space of time during a trial, went through a period of deconstruction. What is the truth about my family? He had the choice to reconstruct his belief about his family or to reject his family altogether. I know lots of people who have done the latter from a strangely similar place. But he couldn’t reject all beliefs about his family outright. That isn’t even possible, rejected beliefs are replaced by other beliefs, like it or not. He had to decide. Everybody does.
Link
* Thanks to Dr. Mark Ryan - Executive Director of Sage Christianity
** A decent description of my core of theological beliefs.
Anatomy of a Fall - Les Films Pelléa - Les Films de Pierre - 2023
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