Sometimes you find religion in the most unusual places — like the sports section of the Winnipeg Free Press. That’s where ESPN college football analyst Bill Curry was quoted as saying: “A good offense is like a good religion. It should have an answer for everything.” 

It’s a great quote. It’s pithy. It’s ­humorous. It’s wrong. 

Not about football. Maybe good football offenses really do have answers for everything the opposing team throws at them.

But it’s wrong about good religion. Good religion has as many questions as answers. It makes us think, and it gives us room to admit when we just don’t know. 

Where did Curry get the idea that religion provides answers for everything?

From religious people, of course.

Christians, in well-meaning efforts to reach out to nonbelievers, sometimes dumb down faith. They pass out booklets with simple formulas for finding God. They write books about prayers that promise to grant our heart’s desires. They preach sermons that say all problems will be solved if people get right with God.

Or they promote the idea that people can be happy, healthy and wealthy if they only believe hard enough — the infamous “name it and claim it” school of Christianity. 

The result? Instead of attracting thinking nonbelievers, they repel them. They make religion sound like something suitable only for children. In so doing, they unwittingly suggest Sigmund Freud was right when he likened religion to a “childhood neurosis” that has to be outgrown, since “men cannot remain children forever.” 

That’s not how author and social critic Christopher Lasch sees religion. In a speech at New York City’s Jewish Theological Seminary in 1991, he said: “What has to be questioned here is the assumption that religion ever provided a set of comprehensive and unambiguous answers to ethical questions, answers completely resistant to skepticism, or that it forestalled speculation about the meaning and purpose of life, or that religious people were unacquainted with existential despair.”

In other words, religion isn’t for the intellectually timid. It has room for questions and doubt.

Says author Frederick Buechner: “Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don’t have any doubts, you are either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.” 

In fact, choosing to believe in God today is a more radical and challenging act than deciding not to believe.

It’s easy to write off belief in God because there is so much suffering in the world, or for any other reason, and then never trouble yourself to think about the subject again. Keeping the faith takes a lot more energy and thoughtfulness.

Philosopher Jonathan Rees notes that being an atheist was hard in the past. It required courage to think independently and go against the norm of religious belief.

Today, however, with participation in organized religion waning, atheism is the default position for many. It is often “nothing more than a ‘do not disturb sign’ hung out by the intellectually inert,” Rees says in Index on Censorship magazine.

Meanwhile, thoughtful believers are now the ones leading the way to find “appropriate ways of attending to the rough and arbitrary finitude of our existence.” 

Good religion reminds people that God’s plans may be different from how we think things should work out.

Says Lasch: “It is just this comfortable belief — that the purposes of the Almighty coincide with our purely human purposes — that religious faith requires us to renounce. Religion reminds us of the inescapable limits on human power and freedom.

“Far from endorsing comfortable superstitions, it undermines the most important superstition of all — that the human race controls its own destiny. . . .

“We have no special claim on the universe, and our prayers are only answered when we surrender that claim: Such is the true meaning of religious faith.” 

So, is your faith like Bill Curry’s good football offense? Does it have an answer for everything? If your answer is yes, then maybe it’s time to start asking some hard questions.

John Longhurst of Winnipeg, Man., is a longtime journalist and frequent contributor to Anabaptist World. This article is adapted from his new book, Can Robots Love God and Be Saved? A Journalist Reports on Faith, published by Canadian Mennonite University Press. It can be purchased at commonword.ca.