A Doubt About It

A few years back, a friend and I co-taught a class at our church about religious doubt. Throughout the class, I carried the sense that I was speaking to the wrong audience.  There were a few in the room who could identify with the conversation, fellow strugglers who couldn’t synchronize their life experiences or intellectual journeys with the stock answers and theodicies to which they had been exposed.  However, most of the people in the class seemingly had moved to a place where they had found a way to get comfortable with a perspective of life and God that really provided many more answers than questions. (Either that, or they’d been carefully trained to never speak of their doubts in the company of believers.)  I think the doubters or doubt-strugglers in the room probably felt a little alienated and out of place.  I know I did.

The significant proportion of people with whom I work are from what sociologists and demographers would call the Millennial Generation and Generation Z. A lot of sweeping generalizations are made about these folks and those kinds of statements are often dangerous oversimplifications and even misrepresentations of how people really think and behave.  However, with that caveat, I’d venture to say that a bunch of the people from these generations are dealing with the kinds of religious doubts and questions that we were trying to discuss in that church class. They’re not alone.

One man I know was dealing with some tragedy in his life. In particular, the death of his father got him pondering his own identity and the sad state of things in the world. In the face of those reflections, he finally just got to a place where he couldn’t square up the idea of an all-powerful, all-good, and all-loving God with all of the bad things that happen in the world and in his life. It’s a very old philosophical problem. However, for him, it’s not just a philosophical problem. It’s very personal.

To be more specific, the personal issue for this man is that he can’t quite reconcile the notion of a loving God with the idea that his late father is going to burn forever in hell because he was such a screwed-up mess that he never got around to the whole church and Jesus thing. It was about all his dad could do to get his drinking and drugging problem under control, stop abusing his wife and kids, and hold a job. By the time he got all of that stuff worked out, he died. My doubting friend would say that this departed one probably did the best he could with his life, considering the chance he had and the issues he had to overcome. So for that effort, there is a God who will torture him in eternity.  At least, that’s what he’s learned in church. It’s the same God who also allows atrocities to happen to innocent people every day. That notion is just more than my friend can intellectually and emotionally work through. So, he’s gotten to a place where he doubts there is a God – or at least a God who resembles the one he’s learned about in church.

My friend and many others like him feel disconnected and alienated from religious communities because of these feelings and doubts. Even the best-intentioned churches often don’t deal with folks like that very well. Other Christians are often frightened of them and angry with them. Doubters make people nervous. They tend to trample on our own carefully tended yards and flower-beds of belief.

I want to share some thoughts and perspectives about the issues doubters face and how we can perhaps become more genuine religious communities – for both the doubting and the certain.  More to come…