10: Doubtless
Disconnection: “The hell stuff—I never made peace with it. Human beings were capable of forgiving those who’d done them terrible wrongs, and we all agreed that human beings were maggots compared with God, so what was his trouble again?”
—John
Reconnection: “Being here, with people I like, doing something despite my unbelief is better than not doing anything.”
—Helen
Faith and doubt can creep into the strangest places—even into the pages of GQ.
This research project has been years in the making, starting with Barna Group’s 2003 study, which identified a generational shift with real implications for the future of the church. Yet it took on new energy after I read an article in GQ.
A long feature from the February 2004 issue describes the culture and fans of Christian rock music and satirizes the fusion of spirituality and rock ’n’ roll. The subtitle gets the party started: “Rock music used to be a safe haven for degenerates and rebels. Until it found Jesus . . .” An illustration of Jesus as a rock star completes the setup. He wears a sly smile and, of course, shoulder-length hair. He is ripped and muscular, clad in jeans and a white shirt—and his right arm is inked with a heart-and-cross tattoo.
This is how the editors of GQ envision the Christian-rock version of the Savior of the world.
What captured my attention most, though, is the backstory of the article’s author, John Jeremiah Sullivan. Sullivan is in a good position to provide an insider-turned-outsider viewpoint because he lived it—Christianity was a key aspect of his personal faith journey. As the feature unfolds, he describes his teen years, a period during which he considered himself a committed, born-again Christian. He recounts active involvement in Bible studies, as well as discipleship and mentoring throughout his teenage “Jesus phase.”
Here’s the kicker: Sullivan’s crisis of faith, as he terms it, came years ago at a Christian rock concert, where he had been recruited by his church to provide spiritual counseling to concertgoers. Anyone who made a new commitment to Christ would receive one-on-one counseling so they could better understand the ramifications of their decision. While trying to help a group of neophyte believers understand what it means to become a Christian, Sullivan’s answers began to sound hollow—to himself. Perhaps it is mere journalistic flair, but Sullivan indicates that he walked out of the concert that night as less Christian. He was a changed person and, evidently, on the path to walking away from faith.
Because of his doubts, the church lost him.
SHADES OF DOUBT
It may seem redundant to say that doubt causes people to struggle with faith, but it is important to remember that doubt is not always faith’s opposite. Theologian and Pulitzer-nominated novelist Frederick Buechner once said, “Doubt is the ants in the pants of faith.” Often doubt acts as a powerful motivator toward a more complete and genuine spiritual life, and our research confirms that not everyone who doubts walks away from faith. Still, our study also shows that doubt is a significant reason young adults disengage from church.
We have learned too that doubt comes in more than one flavor. This is a good time to reemphasize one of the most important themes of our findings: every spiritual journey is unique. We must pay attention not just to macro trends but also to individual stories. If we want to capture the big picture of the next generation’s relationship to the church and to Christianity, a paint roller will only help us prep the canvas. We need a fine-tipped artist’s brush to render the details.
Every story matters.
In our modern evidence-based, logic-oriented culture, we may have a certain picture in our head of what it means to be a doubter. Many Christians believe that people who experience doubts simply lack the proper evidence or depth of conviction. But doubt is a far more nuanced and slippery experience that involves personality, lack of fulfillment, notions about certainty, relational alienation, and even mental health.
Is the Christian community capable of holding doubt and faithfulness in tension, welcoming hard questions even as we press together toward answers? Or will the church continue to be seen as a place where doubters don’t belong because certainty is the same as faith? Will we push doubters to the margins in order to be people with no doubts?
Let’s look at some common avenues of doubt, and then explore how we might better respond when someone’s spiritual journey takes him or her down one of these roads.
Intellectual Doubt
Let’s begin with the doubters we expect: those who struggle with evidentiary forms of doubt, who are not satisfied with rational proofs that God exists or that Jesus was resurrected. Most Christian teenagers and young adults are not racking their brains (or their souls) in an effort to bring logical consistency to their faith claims. However, these types of concerns do affect millions of younger (and older) Americans and should not be minimized. We learned in our interviews with eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds who have a Christian background that one-quarter (23 percent) have “significant intellectual doubts about their faith.” This is not a majority, but remember, individual stories matter. About one out of every nine young Christians (11 percent) said that college experiences caused them to doubt their faith. Again, this is not a large percentage, but it represents tens of thousands of people.
What are the implications? There is still an important part to be played by traditional apologetics in dealing with intellectual questions that stand in the way of faith commitment—though the form apologetics takes must be adapted for the next generation. We might consider shifting away from a focus on “experts” toward a more relational approach. One faith community in Oregon hosts a weekly worship service that invites anyone to ask any question they have about faith. To fit with the uber-connected world of young people, the church accepts questions submitted via text and Twitter. My guess is that this can be nerve-racking for the pastoral staff, who willingly put themselves on the spot to wrestle with people’s most pressing questions—but I imagine it’s worth it, and not just to those who get the answers they seek. The entire community gets to witness, on a weekly basis, what it looks like to wrestle with doubt, to confess our questions without abandoning faith.
For those of us who have strong faith convictions, it can be difficult to imagine how people struggle with unbelief. One of the qualitative interviews we did with a young man named Matt helped me understand the potency of intellectual questions. He said, “Sometimes I wish I could just push the belief button. I really do wish I could say yes to Christianity. But it doesn’t work. I can’t get past some of these big questions about faith, about God, and about Christianity.”
John Sullivan, the GQ writer whom we met earlier, explains in his article that he could not understand God’s damnation of sinners, among other intellectual and theological questions. His words summarize the feelings of thousands:
The hell stuff—I never made peace with it. Human beings were capable of forgiving those who’d done them terrible wrongs, and we all agreed that human beings were maggots compared with God, so what was his trouble again? I looked around and saw people who’d never have a chance to come to Jesus; they were too badly crippled. Didn’t they deserve—more than the rest of us, even—to find his succor, after this life?[64]
Some of the doubts we encountered in our research echo similar struggles, which comes as no surprise; these are questions people have wrestled with since the dawn of the faith. We found that those who experience intellectual doubt are most commonly prodigals—those who decide not to be Christian any longer. Prodigals are the most likely of all dropouts to say they have one or more “big questions” that they cannot get around, such as:
Of course, most people—not just prodigals—ask themselves these questions at some point along their faith journey. Yet questioning does little to stop most people in their spiritual tracks. The research shows that, as students enter their junior and senior years of high school and then college, these types of doubts increase in significance and impact. But even at their peak, it is not typically intellectual doubts that drive a wedge between most young Christians and their beliefs. Nomads and exiles, for example, are likely to consider intellectual questions, but often find other kinds of doubt more undermining to their faith commitment.
Institutional Doubt
A particular type of doubt experienced by the next generation is a form of institutional skepticism directed at present-day Christianity. Singer-songwriter David Bazan, whom we met in chapter 3, exemplifies this perspective. These young adults may be frustrated by the classic philosophical questions much like intellectual doubters, but they are also deeply at odds with expressions of modern-day Christianity, which many would categorize as distortions or abuses of Christ’s teachings. In other words, some young adults doubt God—but for others, “doubt” might best be described as a deep, visceral sense that the church today is not what it could or ought to be.
I think this helps to explain one of the surprise findings I wrote about in unChristian. Many young Christians, just like millions of young non-Christians, have a negative perception of the church, particularly of evangelicalism in America. In that research project, I was shocked to find so many young believers who harbor negative views of the church. The surveys we did for this project helped to clarify and define those earlier findings.
Doubtless | In Their Own Words
Percentage of 18- to 29-year-olds who have a Christian background
completely true of me
completely or mostly true of me
I don’t feel that I can ask my most pressing life questions in church.
14%
36%
I have significant intellectual doubts about faith.
12%
23%
My faith does not help with depression or other emotional problems.
10%
20%
I have or had a crisis in life that has made me doubt faith.
9%
18%
The death of a loved one has caused me to doubt.
5%
12%
College experiences cause me to question my faith.
5%
11%
I am not allowed to talk about my doubts in church.
5%
10%
Barna Group | 2011 | N=1,296
As we described in the chapters on nomads, prodigals, and exiles, one out of five young people (21 percent) with a Christian background said, “I am a Christian, but the institutional church is a difficult place for me to live out my faith.” Exposure to some of the darkest parts of religious life can also sow seeds of doubt. Among the young adults with a Catholic background, one-fifth reported “the priest-abuse scandals have made me question my faith.” Another doubt breaks my heart and has dire implications for the leadership of tomorrow’s church. Nearly one out of every eight young Christians (13 percent) said they “used to work at a church and became disillusioned.” Our research did not probe whether they were church staff or church volunteers, but either way, there are tens of thousands of twentysomethings disconnected because of firsthand negative experiences serving in a congregation. How can we do a better job of monitoring the experiences young people are having in leadership?
The arena of institutional doubt is one of the places where we see the rise of the exiles, young Christians who are seeking ways of following Jesus outside typical footpaths. Recall that in chapter 4 we said more than one-third of young Christians (38 percent) “want to find a way of following Jesus that connects with the world I live in.” One-fifth (22 percent) want to “do more than get together once a week for worship.”
Sometimes exiles make an effort to stay connected to the institutional church to speak prophetically to the broader Christian community, challenging us to reform and renew. Shane Claiborne and his friends at The Simple Way, a new monastic community in Philadelphia, are a notable example of this posture. They are committed to living out a decidedly countercultural vision of Christianity, yet Shane shares their vision at mainstream church conferences and events, exhorting believers of many traditions to examine and reevaluate our ways of being Christ’s followers.
Not all of us may agree with everything these young exiles say and do. I believe, though, that we ignore the institutional doubts of the next generation at our peril. God always seems to work at the margins and speak through prophetic voices. Frequently young leaders are bold and catalytic, and God will use young women and men to start new enterprises that serve the church. Billy Graham was a young man when his evangelistic ministry took off. Mother Teresa arrived in India when she was just nineteen. Many young leaders can envision the future in ways that are not perceptible to established leaders.
Some may be too quick to act on their institutional doubts and define themselves by their leaving, yet some of their criticisms hit close to the mark and can help us identify the shallowness of our worship and practices. While I am convinced that every Christian needs to be part of a community of fellow believers—and many young dropouts need more true community in their lives—we must be willing to listen and respond to the heartfelt institutional doubts of the next generation.
Unexpressed Doubt
Sitting over breakfast several months ago at one of my favorite local spots, Kevin and I talked about the choices that had led him away from church. He grew up Catholic, and it was his parents’ breakup that had begun to undermine his confidence in the faith. “At first it was hard for me to accept that my parents were getting kicked out of the church as a result of their divorce,” Kevin said between sips of coffee. “But probably just as important was how the church handled my doubt . . . or didn’t handle it.” He hesitated before admitting, “I kept my doubts to myself, because I didn’t think my leaders would want to know that I really didn’t believe. Maybe they could have helped me more, but I never believed they would be able to.”
I suspect that, if Kevin had talked about his doubts, he would have found more help than he expected. Sadly, we’ll never know.
I believe unexpressed doubt is one of the most powerful destroyers of faith. Our research reveals that many young people feel the church is too small a container in which to carry their doubts. Fully one-third of young Christians (36 percent) agree that “I don’t feel that I can ask my most pressing life questions in church.” One out of ten (10 percent) put it more bluntly: “I am not allowed to talk about my doubts in church.”
This statistic signals one of the challenges that the next generation of Christians brings to the church. They are used to “having a say” in everything related to their lives. As we noted earlier, communication, fueled by technology, is moving from passive to interactive. Yet the structure of young adult development in most churches and parishes is classroom-style instruction. It is passive, one-sided communication—or at least that’s the perception most young people have of their religious education. They find little appetite within their faith communities for dialogue and interaction.
There is an isolating element to unexpressed doubt as well. When a person feels as though church is not a safe place to be honest, he or she feels compelled to pretend, to put on a show, which all too often results in a faith that is no more than skin deep. When young believers hang back, holding their doubts, concerns, and disillusionments in private, they cut themselves off from leaders and peers who might help them deal with their doubts in a constructive, faith-building way.
People remain silent about their doubts for all sorts of reasons. And let’s be honest, it’s not always the church’s fault. Many youth leaders and pastors are ready, willing, and able to listen to young people, to encourage them in their quest for answers to their biggest questions, and to walk beside them in honesty and authenticity.
There are too many instances, however, when faith communities create a toxic environment where doubts are allowed to fester. Or they never create space for questions to be raised, where pressing life issues can be openly discussed. In these places, young adults don’t feel accepted, safe, or secure. Perhaps their church does not invite transparency but is instead a place where the “expert” makes those who express doubt feel stupid or out of sync with “true” belief. Some perceive they will be judged for being honest, while others want to believe more deeply and articulating doubt feels traitorous.
We cannot solve doubt like a puzzle but we can create communities that hold doubt and faith in proper balance. God is not afraid of human doubts. “Doubting Thomas” is remembered for his unbelief, yet in his mercy, Christ allowed Thomas to renew his faith when the risen Lord displayed the evidence of his crucifixion and resurrection. King David is called a man after God’s heart, even though many of his psalms questioned God’s intentions toward and provision for him—many times in raw, angry language that leaves very little emotion unexpressed. Job too voiced his doubts and disillusionment in very strong terms.
We need communities where it is safe for people to talk about their deepest, darkest concerns, where expressing uncertainty is not seen as abnormal or apostate. Radical transparency, for better and worse, is the norm in young adult culture; just check out the magazines and gossip websites so popular with the younger generation. Better yet, notice how most young people are willing to live totally “in public” on Facebook and other social networking sites. As pastor and technology sage Shane Hipps describes, this is “a generation of exhibitionists.” Most of them do not shy away from asking honest questions (at least within their circle of friends), though they sometimes do not have the patience or determination to pursue good answers.
Still, after studying the role of faith communities and families in spiritual formation, I believe that the problem is not only the next generation’s short attention span, exhibitionism, or lack of intellectual rigor. Rather, I think faith communities have not done a good job creating environments and experiences where students can process their doubts. Our posture toward students and young adults should be more Socratic, more process-oriented, more willing to live with their questions and seek answers together. We need guides who know how to strike a better balance between talking and listening.
Dealing with doubt is a fully relational task. German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was concerned for the spiritual development of young people, especially young men, and became a partner-mentor to many of them. One of his students, Ferenc Lehel, recalls Bonhoeffer’s response to his doubts:
In my intellectual difficulties he stood by me, as a pastor, brotherly and friendly. When he recommended Karl Heim’s Glaube und Denken to me he pointed out how Heim was able to feel at one with the doubter; how he did not indulge in cheap apologetics which from their lofty base fire upon the battlements of natural science. We must think with the doubter, he said, even doubt with him.[65]
As we shape communities where young people can express and process their doubts in secure, accepting relationships, we must also avoid making doubt a way of life. In our firm’s research and in my interactions with young pastors, I have encountered “faith” communities where doubt is so entrenched that it has taken over completely, choking off Christian hope with cynicism and passion for the church’s mission with apathy. Asking great questions can become an excuse for doing nothing. In The Myth of Certainty, Bethel University professor Daniel Taylor writes about his refusal to allow doubt to paralyze him when it arises: “I have learned to live with the rise and fall of the thoughts and feelings of faith, to co-exist with honest doubt, to accept tension and paradox without clinging to it as an excuse for inaction.”[66]
The idea that action—doing faith—can disarm doubt’s most crippling effects is a theme we’ll return to in this chapter.
Transitional Doubt
Two out of every five young people (38 percent) say they have experienced a time when they “significantly doubted their faith.” We offered an array of options in our survey for why doubt arises, and a substantial number of respondents indicated that their doubts were rooted in personal, rather than intellectual, reasons.
We might classify these types of doubt as transitional, arising out of a deeply affecting personal experience. Most believers experience transitional doubt at some point in their lives, yet not all receive the kind of support and encouragement from fellow believers that can catalyze it into a sustaining faith. Let me offer an example that may surprise you.
I met Helen at a Christian conference. After the first day of presentations, I was talking with the conference organizer, Jim Henderson.
“Did you meet Helen, the atheist?” Jim asked.
“You mean short Helen?” I remembered a vertically challenged woman with whom I’d had a brief conversation over lunch.
“Yeah, that Helen. She’s not a believer. You should talk with her more tomorrow.”
The next day when the training event for Christians resumed, I did just that. Helen confided that she had been a very committed, born-again Christian for many years. Yet she had entered a season of serious mental health problems. “I’d had an active prayer life, but I began hearing voices—it was not normal or healthy. Sometimes I thought it was the voice of God, but at times it was other personalities I was developing for myself. It finally reached a point that I was literally going crazy and on the verge of a breakdown.”
Helen paused and then said, “I had to act on my doubt and become an atheist, to save my mental health.”
About one in four adults in the United States suffers from a diagnosable mental disorder.[67] Clinical depression is especially widespread, even among Christian leaders. My own father, a lifelong pastor in Phoenix, Arizona, has dealt with depression most of his adult life. He has spoken on the challenge of being in ministry while struggling with the disorder and has even written a critically acclaimed book on the subject, Understanding Depression and Finding Hope.
Of those Americans with a diagnosable mental illness, 6 percent are, like Helen, seriously ill.[68] It goes without saying that poor mental health can cause debilitating family, work, and personal problems—but it can also plant the seeds of soul-bending doubt. As common as these issues are, however, the Christian community does not always know how to respond. Helen experienced this: “When I went to talk about all of this with my pastor—a very good man who meant well and had been very important to my faith—he said I was silly to become an atheist. He understood I was struggling but said I should not abandon my faith in God. His capacity to really understand and relate to the conflict inside me was very superficial.”
With all she had been through, I couldn’t wrap my brain around Helen’s presence at that Christian conference. I just had to ask, “What are you doing here?”
Her answer underscores the importance of faith in action as a corrective to unbelief: “I am here to help. I respect Christians. I love Jim and this conference. I don’t know where my life will take me but I am definitely an atheist. I just can’t bring myself to believe that there is a God who speaks because I am always on the edge. And I have a husband and kids to take care of. Being here, with people I like, doing something despite my unbelief is better than not doing anything.”
DOUBTING TURNS TO DOING
Creating faith communities where doubts of all kinds can be honestly, openly, and relationally explored is one way to make the turn with the next generation. Another is giving young adults an opportunity to put feet to their faith. Many of the deepest truths of Christianity become clear when we put our faith into action; in the doing, believing makes sense. Sometimes the best thing we can do with our unbelief is to stop fixating on it and get busy for the sake of others. We need to help young adults do something with their faith in order to contextualize their doubts within the church’s mission.
Recently my father, who led a large church for many years, reminded me that his congregation encouraged anyone to participate in mission trips and service activities, regardless of where the person was spiritually. Even non-Christians could participate. Of course, they had committed Christians leading and teaching on these trips and activities but they did not require a person to be a Christian to serve.
“This caused a lot of challenges,” he said, “because some church insiders thought people should know what they believe before being associated with the church. No one knew how to handle it when a young woman came up to one of our team leaders on an outreach to Guatemala and said, ‘You know, I didn’t really believe in God before this trip. But now I see what you are doing—what we are doing for these people. Now I want to follow Christ.’ ”
There is a place for winsome apologetics, yet to capture the heart of the next generation, we also need to help them become doers of faith—a phrase that comes from Scripture itself. James encouraged his fellow Christ-followers to be not merely hearers of the word, but doers (see James 1:22). How can we help young people turn their intellectual, institutional, unexpressed, and transitional doubts into something more than questions?
We cannot argue anyone—young or old—out of doubt. Only the Holy Spirit can do that. But we can try to appreciate how doubts affect real individuals and walk with them as they face vexing questions about life, God, and themselves—real individuals like John Sullivan. His confession—smack in the middle of GQ, mind you—still grabs me: “Once you’ve known [Jesus] as God, it’s hard to find comfort in the man. The sheer sensation of life that comes with a total, all-pervading notion of being . . . the pull of that won’t slacken. And one has doubts about one’s doubts.”[69]
Like Sullivan, there are millions of young adults rethinking church and faith—and they have doubts about their doubts. How can we help them act in faith, allowing their doubts to be “ants in the pants” of their quest for God?