The First Honest Question

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There is a kind of question that is really a compliment. I asked hundreds of those. You raise your hand in a Sunday class, you pose the difficulty, the teacher gives the received answer, and everyone leaves reassured that the faith is strong enough to have been asked. Nothing is at risk. The question was chosen precisely because its answer was already in the manual. I was good at those questions. I could have gone on asking them for the rest of my life.

An honest question is a different animal. It is a question whose answer you have not pre–approved. You do not know, when you open your mouth, which way the room will be standing when you close it. That is the only test I know for honesty in a question — not its tone, not its humility, not how gently it is phrased, but whether you have left the answer free.

Mine, when it finally came, was not clever. I had given the church of my fathers thirty years of belief. I asked one thing back: that the history be true. That what we taught the children had actually happened. I was not asking anyone to give up God. I was asking that they stop requiring me to give up reason as the price of belonging.

I want to be precise about where I learned to ask it, because that is the part that still astonishes me. I learned it there. The tradition that could not survive my question is the same tradition that taught me a question is holy — that if any of us lack wisdom we should ask; that we should study it out in our minds and then bring it before God and expect an answer. The founding gesture of that faith is a boy alone with a question he could not settle out of books. I did exactly what I had been raised to do. I simply did it about a claim that was not on the approved list.

That is when the machinery turns. Not against your conduct — no one could fault my conduct — but against your mind. And it is done gently, which is what no one believes afterward. The invitations to teach grow fewer. A lesson is reassigned. A younger man, more certain and less curious, is called to the seat you held for years, and you are thanked, warmly, for your faithful service. Gratitude, I learned, is the sound a door makes as it closes. They did not call it exile. They called it counsel. They said they were protecting the flock, and I had become the thing the flock needed protecting from.

I have thought for a long time about why an honest question frightens an institution more than open sin does. Sin is legible. There is a procedure for it, and running the procedure confirms that the system works. A question does something worse: it applies a load. And every structure tells the truth about itself under load. The healthy response to a load test is to reinforce the beam. The other response — the cheaper one, the one nearly every human institution reaches for first — is to forbid the load and to call the man who applied it dangerous.

But I will not let myself off here, because I failed my own question next, and it took me years to see it. When they would not answer, I stopped asking. I swung to the far shore and fortified it — installed science as the sole giver of all information and became precisely as defensive of that ground as I had ever been of the pews. I had not become a man who asks honest questions. I had become a man with a new set of pre–approved answers. The uniform changed. The war did not.

An honest question does not respect shores. Put to the faithful it asks whether the history holds. Put to the certain materialist it asks what consciousness is, and why observation should have anything to do with what a particle turns out to be, and what he proposes to do with a universe that behaves at every scale like something rendered. I have watched colleagues go as quiet at the second question as any elder ever went at the first. Reflex is reflex. The robe is a detail.

This is why the church I am building has the shape it has. Faith and Reason are not two sides of a debate we intend to referee. They are two instruments, and here a claim gets both or it gets neither. Faith affirms science; reason rights the soul. A question in this house is not a contagion — it is the work. If a doctrine of ours cannot bear the load, I would rather learn it from a sixteen–year–old with her hand up, and I want her still in the room afterward, still trusted, still ours.

I lost a community to one question asked in good faith. I would ask it again tomorrow. The only thing I would change is that I would have kept asking it — of everyone, and of myself — instead of trading one certainty for another and calling that freedom.

Teach your children to ask the question whose answer they cannot control. Then stay in the room for the answer.

— Clayton Hess

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