The Tribute of Faith: Theistic Commitment as Moral Gesture

In this paper I explore and defend the idea that those who struggle intellectually in theistic religious practice can be given a good reason to persist in it by treating their continuing practice as a way of paying tribute to people and projects and personal relationships and indeed to the whole moral dimension of human life, expressing how important and profoundly significant these things are to them. This ‘tribute of faith’ is a gesture that one makes with one’s life—a moral gesture. The key thought is that the sayings and other doings of a religious life allow one to treat the world as one in which the things, such as projects and people, that are, for one, most deeply imbued with moral value will achieve fulfilment—a fulfillment that without the truth of religious claims they would often be denied.