Faith is the belief in something in the absence of communicable evidence. It is not necessarily limited to religions: we all display faith in our day-to-day actions. A philosopher who doubts everything but carries on getting up every morning has faith. A couple that knows the divorce statistics and marries anyway has faith. A man who reads the climate reports and says we’ll find a technological solution for the crisis the way we always have had faith.

Faith isn’t a good or bad thing in itself–faith in one’s partner is necessary, faith in technology like jumping off a cliff and holding one’s crucifix. But faith can be a choice and often a useful one. To choose faith cuts short worries about justification when those worries are recurring.

For instance, say you work in radical politics. Every week you meet your chapter, hear about the evils of the world, and think of ways of moving beyond it. You fail most of the time and even what small successes are achieved seem like they’re immediately wiped out by systemic changes so big they make your work irrelevant. You might spend a lot of time second-guessing yourself, in turn wasting time by discussing with your peers about whether what you’re doing is useful rather than just doing it. Choosing faith can escape this cycle. It presents a complete answer to the question of why you’re doing something and whether it is useful.

Faith can also be a way to hold onto something that seems implausible in the current world. It lets you reach out to something beyond the rational reality around you even if that thing is hard to justify or explain. If you can only barely imagine something–a different way of living, a better neighborhood community, a happy partnership–an act of faith can let you move past the worries.

Lastly, faith is what’s needed for anything that can’t be planned for, only prepared for. The standard example is death, the more interesting politics. You may have no reason to believe that something will happen, much less around when, and yet you will have to be prepared when the moment comes or risk losing it immediately. In these situations only faith can drive you.

Capitalist realism relegates faith to the purely religious. It only allows those ways of relating to the world that necessitate its own continuation – any belief in the possibility of something better without an immediate path to it is made out to be delusional. Consciously choosing to have faith in particular people or ideas can be a way of breaking out of these restrictions.

References

The examples of everyday faith draw mostly on Kierkegaard’s preface in “Fear and Trembling” (http://www.religion-online.org/book-chapter/preface-42/). The discussion of faith in a revolutionary context comes from Enzo Traverso’s “Left-Wing Melancholia”. For a thorough defence and rehabilitation of secular faith in the context of politics see Martin Hägglund This Life: why mortality makes us free.