MysteriousFaith

Understanding Doubt

If you are at all like me, when you connect very deeply with a particular individual – especially if that person functions in your life as something of a mentor or teacher – the fascination with their personal story begins to become as important as the lessons they are teaching you. In my own recent intellectual journey I have fallen under the influence of Ken Wilber; but, without a book like Grace and Grit, a story of his wife’s death from very aggressive breast cancer, I would be unable to fully appreciate how his intellect was connected to, and built upon, his most intimate of trials and his own encounters with that ultimate of taboos - death. Within the travails, joys, mistakes and successes of our mentors’ lives we see how we also may live, and if we have the courage to build on what they may share with us, how we might very well become something even better than they. Few mentors will impact us as heavily as those that walk with us during the dark days when our beliefs are being tested, when what we held as remnants of beliefs from our parents are tested, purified, but potentially altered, before they become our own. For some this process of doubt is withering, causing a deep anger to boil up inside at the thought of time spent invested in ideas now found antiquated. Such anger is never helpful and must be discarded if we are to pursue real truth. For others doubt manifests itself not in denial of what they were raised to believe, but in lack of belief in anything specific enough to be worthy of saying “I believe.”

My own journey has been marked by five distinct phases, with more no doubt to come: familial belief, unformed rebellion against familial belief, familial belief out of necessity coupled with convenience, a decision to take ownership of what I say “I believe” concerning and last, learning critical thinking. These phases are by no means totally inclusive, but they do follow my own path and the path of many others I know and whose spiritual memoirs I have read.

It is the most natural thing in the world to adopt the language, orthodoxy and perspective of those who raise us. Unless you are raised in a home that values learning critical thinking before belief, believing that the search for truth is dependent not on revelation but on reason, you no doubt were raised in a family with a particular belief system. Whether that belief system was agnostic, secular or religious these beliefs colored your world from the very beginning consciousness developed. Some of the healthiest skeptics of religion have made this realization key, none more so than the late 19th century agnostic Robert Green Ingersoll who said in his speech “Why I Am Agnostic”:

“For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned by our surroundings. Environment is a sculptor – a painter. As a rule, children love their parents, believe what they teach, and take great pride in saying that the religion of mother is good for them. Most people love peace. They do not like to differ with their neighbors. They like company. They are social. They enjoy traveling on the highway with the multitude. They hate to walk alone.”

As we have no other means of learning as children, this initial framing of reality serves the same purpose for us all – it is the elemental lens through which we view the world and how we individually come to find truth. A child seeking approval from his family in a healthy environment will come to hold such truths tightly but in a manner that is usually non-dogmatic and is not threatened by competing truth claims. On the other hand, a child desperately seeking approval within a toxic environment will take the beliefs on in an emotionally charged attempt to make his grasp of the creedal statements evidence for worthiness of his family’s love, and the steadfastness with which he holds to them a substitute for the unflinching love he so desperately desires from his own family. This child will struggle with any statements of competing truths because they not only potentially damage his worldview, but they also put at risk those fragile ideas upon which his family’s supposed love was built. Regardless of background, it is inevitable that children from either environment must mature and encounter the challenges and complexities of teenage and young adult years.

For those of us who were raised in highly religious environments it is not uncommon to reach our later teenage years and seek our own way of doing things that manifests itself outwardly as rebellion. The younger this takes place, the more likely it is that we will rebel against a number of outward things, but leave the inner dimensions of belief untouched. Outward rebellion occurs for any number of reasons and has been detailed ad-nausea by childhood therapists; why children do not rebel is as interesting a question, but a question that often goes unaddressed. Children who do not rebel do so in some part because they have found no reason to need to define themselves outside of the world they are being raised in. A healthy, nurturing environment that allows a child to be him or herself without running into reason-less rules becomes quite well adjusted and accepting of whatever external constraints remain. I believe the presence or lack thereof of doubt in the life of an adult has as much to do with this – whether or not their environment forced them to doubt in order to have a semi-healthy worldview of any hope of survival. My suspicion is that a child raised in a healthy home either rarely experiences doubt, or experiences it and chooses to accept it but in the same breath conform to certain external familial expectations that make doubt secondary to going along to get along. The security in being able to do this is predicated on a childhood that reinforced the lesson you were loved regardless; on the other hand, many pervasive doubters always struggle with the idea that unless they get all the lessons just right you can have no security and you will not be loved. If you have followed my logic, it becomes obvious that safety, security and stability make doubt less likely and less caustic if it is encountered; versus insecurity, instability and anger making a love that could never be counted on manifest itself as a trust that can never be placed.

If rebellion finds itself later on in actual adulthood it is more likely the act of rebellion will be deeper, a choice to walk away from the faith of our childhood because it represents a life or familial ethos we now find antiquated and unhelpful. This is simply put, adopting another perspective to define “us” against “them”. This is equally unhelpful as it again is not rooted in a deep desire to think rationally and to know truth, it is still rooted in the very adolescent emotion of rebellion. Families who watch their adult children walk away from the life of faith often get empty answers to their questions, leaving the parents wondering how their child could walk away from something they hold so dear. With time, it often becomes the case that the children will encounter difficulties and find their heritage necessary for answers, hope and clarity. My own experience, as I have discussed in the first chapter of Bumper Sticker Spirituality, is that I was forced to ask the “big questions” of life after a brush with what I thought was a serious illness. At the time this encounter took place I was hopelessly maladjusted personally, professionally, in my marriage, and in my priorities. When this encounter took place, my criticisms of the traditions I was raised in were still juvenile; I had expended very little (if any) intellectual effort at wrestling with what I believed. It was enough for me to not believe what I had been raised to believe simply because my emotional construct was anger, frustration and a desire to lash out at those that had hurt me.

At this moment, the really hard thing to do would have been to quiet myself and wrestle with belief. The intellect I have been given was still taken with other topics of business and history, and felt questions of theology and philosophy could go unattended. For me, the next step was obvious: I returned to the beliefs of convenience, those I had been raised in. Thoughtful enough and wounded enough not to go back to precisely the same perspective I had been raised in, I still stayed fairly close to my evangelical Christian roots. There is an old saying that “the child is the father of the man.” If, up to this point in our personal journey, we have not taken the time to reflect on why we believe what we believe, what constitutes rational thinking, and what beliefs are those we choose to center our lives on, we will fall back on those general things we were raised on as a child. For some the motivation to go back to their family’s beliefs is not based on anything more serious than having a child and succumbing to the pressures of the neighborhood Vacation Bible School. Within many such decisions is the rusty logic “what harm can it do?”, and in truth, from that perspective very little has been lost. The cycle repeats itself, taking different variations based on personal experience and personality.

I regret none of my own changes. My marriage is the better for having walked this path, and is the stronger for having walked the last two phases honorably. A path marked by changing beliefs that stress familial relations is not easy as an individual, and is certainly less so as a couple. Doing so correctly will draw two people together, truly knit their souls together as long as both share a desire to know truth and to expend the effort required to find that truth together. I am also thankful for the teachers who became friends, and authors who shaped me during these times of doubt and change. I still heartily recommend authors like Brian McLaren to those within the church who are struggling with some of the positions of the contemporary evangelical church, even if McLaren’s positions now are not helpful to me. I would welcome more people leaving fundamentalist evangelical churches and going to moderate evangelical churches, even if for me such a transition is penultimate to greater truths that lie outside of the construct of church altogether. One of the real joys I take from having walked this path on my own is that I can see where others stand and can reach out to them at their point on the path, using tools and techniques that help them where they are at without attempting to get them where I am now.

My own life has been marked by two final phases thus far: taking ownership in my own beliefs, and learning critical thinking. The first was when I began to ask myself what I meant when I said “I believe”. Never being given to statements of slight grandiosity, the more vocally I projected my beliefs, the more I began to wonder if I really knew what they meant! What did I mean when I said the Bible was “God’s Word”? Did I really believe Jesus was born of a virgin or was a member of the Divine Trinity? If I did, why did I believe these things? Upon what foundations were these built? It should be said clearly at this point that simply asking these questions is by no means guaranteed to take you in a particular direction. It did for me, but it will not for everyone. I can afford to care less about the destination (within or outside of my own beliefs today), because I seek truth on its own, for its own sake above all else.

Healthy doubt is built on a real search for truth, not a simple new cultural surrounding or statements of belief that exist only because they help you feel you are not a part of the world you were raised in. It seems inevitable to me that electing to own your beliefs as your very own and to understand them, means you must test them. It is at this point that I have found the greatest separation from almost all others who walk this path with me. It is here that some of my closest friends disagree with me, but it is a point I feel is absolutely essential: it is not possible to say your beliefs are your own until you have adopted the fundamental component to critical thinking - testing your beliefs against those who disagree. Nothing is more alarming to a theist than reading an atheist who is not vitriolic or angry, but who simply disagrees and can respond on point to the greatest minds put up to present theistic claims; the opposite holds true equally well (lest I be accused of not encouraging critical thinking in my own writing!). In my own searching, I gravitate towards books and events where people who disagree but who do so civilly present their beliefs and then debate the reasonableness of either claim. It is in these environments that I believe healthy doubt can be nurtured, and where truth can be most easily illuminated.

Understanding why people doubt may be helpful to some who see children walking away from their beliefs, or who can not understand why some people feel the need to ask questions. In my next essay, we will ask whether or not doubt itself is healthy, and if it is, what forms healthy doubt should take and why.

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next post: Is Doubt Healthy?

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• August 4, 2005

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