Many religious people—certainly Christians—will attest that one of the immediate rewards of faith is the reassuring conviction that one is doing what God wills. This could mean anything from sandlot moral decisions we make daily (should I pay a little extra for fair-trade coffee?) to big-league questions like in which direction we should steer our lives and vocations. For the truly faithful, the feeling of being in sync with God’s will can be as comforting as the assurance we have enough material resources to thrive. It’s a sense that things are right with the world—our little corner of it, at least.
The problem is that this sense of “doing God’s will” is easy to counterfeit, even to ourselves. Every “pro-life” Christian who has terrorized an abortion clinic, every Islamic suicide bomber, and every Israeli settler who has brought physical harm and dislocation to the lives of innocent Palestinians has surely believed that they were acting, at least in part, on God’s orders.
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