Tradition

Most believers more inhabit their religion than reflectively assent to it, at least in the way that one might ascent to a simple proposition. In some very real and not at all dishonorable sense, their belief rests upon the experience of belief only, and that of the most generously imprecise kind. It does not need to justify itself, because it is a home rather than an ideology. Thus, in a way that would be all together scandalous to the average traditionalist or integralist fascist or religious scold, such believers are largely indifferent to a great many of the dogmatic appurtenances of their faith. Most doctrines are not things they believe discreetly, but are instead things they accept only as nebulously included within the totality of the faith as a whole. Few, for instance, truly believe anything so degrading,obscene, cruel, psychotic and (in fact) unscriptural as the notion of the reality of a hell of eternal torment, at least not with any immediacy of conscious awareness, much less within any imaginative consideration of what so foul a belief would entail about reality; to do so would be to invite psychosis, or to accomplish the total destruction of one’s own moral intelligence. Most, however, vaguely accept the idea in an indistinct, unreflective, almost symbolic form, as little more than something remote and shadowy on the far horizon, hazily and hyperbolically defining the outer edges of their spiritual Sitz im Leben. For the large majority of believers, the larger inventory of doctrines is little more than the background stage-scenery that allows them to play out the drama of religious life in some kind of coherent setting, rather than as set off starkly and vertiginously against an existential void. And this suffices for a life of faith, so long as one does not get bored and begin inspecting the stage too closely. If one does that, all the scenery — the trees, the distant hills, the quaint village nestled in the fold of the valley, the white steeple on its humble church, and so forth — will be revealed as just so much purely functional, crudely daubed pasteboard. At that point, one will no longer be able to proceed with perfect innocence, and it will become necessary to make an explicit decision among three possible options: to commit oneself to forcing each feature of the background — tree, hill, village, steeple, and so forth — into the foreground, hoping to prove that all of it is in fact really what it purports to be; to resign oneself to a faith purged of the comforting illusion of cozily close horizons and familiar landmarks; or forsake belief altogether.
David Bentley Hart, Tradition and Apocalypse