Lynn recently commented on a post arguing that doubt, despite becoming fashionable in some Christian circles, is still not a good thing. Marvin made a similar point about a month ago, leading to a debate and a post from a commenter defending doubt.
There’s a lot going on here — more than I can cover in one post. But one thing I always notice in these discussions is how they’re always haunted by certain American conservative Protestant ways of understanding doubt and faith. And that can lead to some miscommunication with the rest of us.
For one thing, as Telford pointed out to me years ago, doubt is taboo among many evangelicals. And there’s a crucial difference between a community regarding something as wrong, and actually treating it as taboo. Consider the way Alcoholics Anonymous looks at alcoholism, for instance. Alcohol abuse is clearly a bad thing to them, since they are devoted to eradicating it. But it is not taboo in AA culture, and quite deliberately so. Whereas taboos are defined largely by what people don’t talk about, AA is all about talking about alcoholism. And where taboos create shock waves when they are broken, AA expects backsliding from its members and deals with it through established systems.
I think that treating doubt as taboo, rather than simply bad, can sometimes make evangelicals insufferable, as Lynn points out. But even for those who have rejected the taboo, the fear of shame can remain the dominant association with doubt. I think that’s why many people react so defensively to criticisms of doubt: it sounds like an endorsement of the taboo. For that reason, I feel it’s incumbent on critics to not only explain what’s wrong with doubt, but to discuss methods of dealing with it.
This relates to the phenomenon that Marvin objects to, where ministers think that their main task, when confronting doubters, is to assure them that doubt is OK. That may need saying if the person’s main problem with doubt is fear of social opprobrium, but that may not be the case. Where I come from, if anything, the social pressure runs the other way: the desire for certitude is seen as a somewhat primitive emotion that needs to be overcome on the way to a more sophisticated, mature comfort with uncertainty. I think that is what Shane is objecting to: where communities of like-minded doubters gather, they can act like other like-minded groups and start thinking themselves superior to others. This is quite different from the lone, tormented doubter that many former evangelicals seem to have been at some point. So the appropriate attitude towards a doubter depends a lot on the situation.
The other odd thing I’ve noticed about how conservative Protestants view doubt is how it relates to works. David, commenting on Marvin’s blog, says doubt “shakes religion out of the realm of belief and into action.” A number of people at my former church told a similar story: they were raised with rigid beliefs, came to doubt them, and then, by some mysterious process, settled into a life of following Jesus through good works.
I call this “mysterious” because this relationship between doubt and action doesn’t seem to apply in any other realm. Take politics, for instance. Is a feminist who’s fervent in her beliefs more or less likely to be an activist than one who isn’t sure about it all? Would you think someone who left a comfortable job and family to sign up for the military is a firm believer in the war on terror, or a skeptic? Only in religion, it seems, are faith and action somehow embroiled in a zero-sum game.
I’m not sure what’s going on here, but this seems to reflect the old Reformation divide between faith and works, and perhaps also the idea of “once saved, always saved.” In other words, it is not so much the fervency of belief as the content of belief that inhibits action. And it seems that evangelicals, in particular, have a very specific idea of what constitutes “belief” in the religious sense: a set of propositions to which a person, at some point, chooses to assent, which then assures his salvation. Another kind of belief — one that is more intuitive, or emotional, or unchosen — isn’t considered a “belief” because it does not fit that template.
Again, though, this is a subcultural peculiarity. In my neighborhood, changing your career, giving away possessions, and getting arrested for Jesus (all of which PMCers I’ve known have done) are signs of strong belief. Whatever you call it, it sure as heck ain’t doubt. Yet I think that because it’s not “belief,” in the evangelical sense, it gets lumped in with doubt, thereby giving doubt unwarranted credit for inspiring good works.
I am saying this all as an outside observer, of course, so I could be getting things wrong. But if we’re going to talk about faith and doubt, we need to talk about what we’re talking about.
Not being from American evangelical culture either, I’d like to throw in a couple different notes.
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.”
Comment by Beth — December 3, 2008 @ 8:28 pm
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.
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.
Comment by Camassia — December 4, 2008 @ 11:49 am
Thanks for the response. Re: your first paragraph. Yes, facts are foundational, but what I’m talking about is more like the difference between treating making the affirmation about someone “She was born in Washington” as the same thing as having a relationship with her, versus taking the risk of beginning the dialogue with that person, “So, you were born in Washington? Wait, so that actually means the hospital was in DC but your family home was in Vienna? Huh. Well, I’m from rural Iowa and I can’t help wondering if you can understand that kind of upbringing….”
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.
Comment by Beth — December 4, 2008 @ 1:54 pm
I think, for me, the reason I may react “strongly” to criticism of doubt is not because it evokes a former taboo, but because it denies that my experience of God and of “faith” is bad or wrong. It limits God. I think framing it as good or bad, though, might be the wrong question. Doubt is important for faith.
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.
Comment by David — December 4, 2008 @ 8:26 pm
Beth, I do see how doubt can be helpful in a relationship to the extent that it gets people to talk about subjects that might otherwise be tacitly assumed. I don’t think that’s the only way or even the best way to do it, though. I remember, actually, that last year my sister asked my father something about somewhere he used to work, which led to a long story about his early medical career and why we moved three times in the first four years of my life. It was one of those things that I’d never thought to ask, because when you’re a child your parents’ movements are pretty much like the motions of the planets — they just happen. So it was part of the process of seeing my parents in a more personal way, but it didn’t come up because we doubted that it happened. I guess there are some Christians who assume that curiosity=doubt, or that there’s something sacrilegious about being unsatisfied with the amount of knowledge you have of God (as opposed to the accuracy of that knowledge). I suppose if you were brought up to think that then you’d have to doubt in order to learn anything, but again, that seems like more a critique of the content of belief than the act of believing.
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.
Comment by Camassia — December 4, 2008 @ 11:41 pm
[...] Camassia and Hugo both have thoughtful posts on doubt. [...]
Pingback by Noli Irritare Leones » Blog Archive » More on Doubt — December 5, 2008 @ 12:22 pm
[...] –Camassia and Hugo on faith and doubt [...]
Pingback by Assorted links with no particular unifying theme « A Thinking Reed — December 5, 2008 @ 8:35 pm
In Catholic circles we talk, I think, in a similar way about the dicotomy between “vertical” and “horizontal” religious emphasis (i.e. “focussing on God” vs “focussing on other people”), and there’s a similar idea that thinking about God too much will prevent you from getting involved in service work. Maybe the idea is that if you’re not too sure about Christianity per se, but you are quite sure about the Golden Rule, then of course you’ll spend your energies on the poor. But if you’re also very involved with the specifically Catholic Church idea of God, then maybe your energies will get diverted into meditation, embroidering altar cloths, or teaching Natural Family Planning to middle class married couples.
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.
Comment by Anne — December 6, 2008 @ 7:55 pm
one thought:
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).
Comment by myles — December 7, 2008 @ 10:25 am