one of the many reasons, historically, Christianity gets caught in the “zero-sum” game between faith and action is the long history of co-option of Christianity for various social programs and political ideologies. Social Gospel, divine right of kings, Holy Roman Empire, Crusades….any time Christianity becomes strictly identifiable with one particular NON-ECCLESIAL structure (and this is the key distinction), Christianity–within a generation–finds itself dissolved within that structure, be it ’social progress’ or an empire; Xn becomes one more way by which the program or the empire can be propagated.

Thus, for Xns, doubt is healthy insofar as doubt calls all concerns relative. All good concerns can become unhealthy when they turn: concern for the poor and for justice is great so long as it doesn’t lead to killing the landowners (Zimbabwe).

In other words, people with different amounts of faith define what counts as a work differently. The more faith you have, the more “impractical” a work is allowed to be.

I also think there’s a political stereotype componant to this, where religion is seen as a “right wing” thing and service to the poor is a “left wing” thing, and so we culturally expect them to be incompatible, even if there’s no logical reason why they should be.

David, to address your last point first, I agree that humble activists are a lot more agreeable than arrogant ones (and probably more effective too). My point, though, was that doubt is not the engine that fuels action, certainty is. I have known several people who have gotten involved in the Israel/Palestine issue, for instance, and they have definite opinions about the right and wrong of the situation. Me, I don’t know wtf to make of it all, so I do nothing.

It’s also worth mentioning that some people have a definite belief in seeing things from other people’s point of view. Miroslav Volf, for instance, devoted a chapter of Exclusion and Embrace to explaining why Christians have a duty to practice “double vision,” i.e. seeing the world through others’ eyes without losing one’s own identity. So again, the content of belief matters. How much you can see things from another point of view without seriously doubting your own, I don’t know. (Volf is too abstract a writer to be terribly clear on that point.)

I do agree that framing doubt, in some general way, as good or bad isn’t very useful. I agree with Lynn that it’s entirely appropriate to doubt things that are doubtworthy. The hard part is figuring out what those things are, which is a subject that could fill up another post. Frankly, I think a modern American Christian who never, ever doubts his religious beliefs is either unusually gifted or unusually obtuse. I think that where I agree with Marvin and Shane, though, is that doubt in itself is not particularly fruitful; it can yield ancillary effects that are, but that is by no means an automatic process. My own experience of doubt is much more like Hugo described, mostly frustration and paralysis, so I’ll admit to getting a little annoyed when people who are not, in my view, actually experiencing that much doubt tell me I should learn to like it.

I do not think the demonization of doubt (tabooing, if you prefer) is simply a Conservative Protestant thing, either. I’ve been in Mainline churches for a decade and find similar resistance to doubt and/or questioning.

I think any activist should harbor doubt. I think it makes them a stronger, more effective activist because it is easier to empathize with different points of view. Without doubt, there is narrow-mindedness.

Being vulnerable enough to have a dialogue like that is highly conducive to real intimacy, I would think. I agree with you that the *doubts* themselves there aren’t what makes for intimacy; the open conversastion about them is. In the same way, the truth of the *proposition* that say, my father wasn’t legally married to my mother wouldn’t be what harmed our relationship – having been relationally lied to by him about that would be.

I’ve heard this theory before, and I understand what you’re getting at, but I think I’d give facts a little more credit. Knowing facts about someone is not sufficient for an intimate relationship, but it’s part of the foundation. I mean, as you go from childhood to adulthood your relationship with your parents changes, hopefully in the direction of seeing your parents less as archetypes and more as persons. But if I said to my father, well I don’t know if I really believe you were born in Washington, or actually graduated from medical school, or were legally married to my mother, I don’t see how those doubts would be conducive to intimacy, unless there were actual basis for them. Every once in a while someone comes out with a memoir about a parent who has a secret past, as a spy or a criminal or something, and invariably the discovery of these facts changes the child’s view of the parent — even if, in the end, the child decides something like, “no matter what, you’re still my father.” So knowing the facts about a person is inherent in really knowing and trusting that person, I would think.

I have heard of James Fowler’s theory of stages of faith. I’m not that familiar with it, but apparently it’s based on the life-stages theories of Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg and Erik Erikson, which I am more familiar with. There has been some controversy in the psych world about these stage-based models, and I recall that one criticism of Erikson’s was that he conceives of every stage as having a “crisis” — it was he who started the idea that all teens go through (or should go through) an “identity crisis.” This angsty view of development owes much to Freud, and so some non-Freudians have questioned whether we really need that many crises in order to grow. It probably depends partly on your environment — modern society expects people to have more independent identities from their families that most past ones did, so perhaps we really do need identity crises. But whether this is a universal truth of human nature, I don’t know.

I have little patience for the “we’re all about doubt! come doubt with us!” attitude, but I do think that for clergy to articulate that doubt has a role within even a fairly classical construction of Christianity can be important beyond assuring someone they won’t experience social opprobrium. But as you say, it depends on what you mean by doubt.

Defining doubt as simply entertaining the opinion that certain propositions articulated by Christians may be false, as over against a desirable goal of having unshakeable confidence in the accuracy of those propositions, seems to me to depend on a less-than-adequate presentation of what Christianity itself is. “Even the demons believe” the propositions, but they have no life in Christ. If that’s so, then someone’s beginning to question at the level of proposition may be an invitation from God to move out of viewing life in Christ as assenting to concepts, and into a way of relating to God that engages more of their personhood and jibes better with what it means to relate to a Person. I mean, we don’t know someone well by being able to list correct facts about them. It’s good to get the facts as right as we can, but that’s not what makes intimacy. (This shift may be analagous to the “some mysterious process” in the examples you give above.)

There are a few different books putting forth “stages of faith” research about how relatedness to God develops, and both the ones I know posit a very clear positive role for a crisis of faith in most spiritual lives. There’s also some parallel to this in writings about the progress of prayer, where usually what “used to work” stops working and in order to go any further you have to find a new way — one over which you can claim less neat intellectual mastery.

Finally, sort of related. Absolutely axiomatic for me is this statement of Simone Weil about her process of conversion: “It seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.”