Doubt & Belief

A lot of people who land here have been told — or have absorbed — that doubt is the opposite of faith. The actual Christian tradition does not teach this. The Bible writes doubt down rather than censoring it, and the people in it who doubt most openly tend to be the ones God ends up commending.

If you are unsure, deconstructing, mid-crisis, or quietly carrying questions you have not said out loud, you are inside a chapter the tradition has names for. None of these pages assume you have it figured out.

A few things that may help up front

• Doubt is not unbelief. The two are not the same. The most-quoted prayer of doubt in the New Testament is "I do believe; help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24). Jesus' response is to heal the man's son anyway. Mixed faith is faith the Bible takes seriously.
• John the Baptist doubted. From inside Herod's prison, he sent disciples to ask Jesus, "Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?" (Matthew 11:2–3). Jesus did not rebuke him. He answered the question and then went on to call John the greatest of those born among women. Doubt does not disqualify you from being among the people Jesus respects most.
• Thomas got a name for doubting and is in the canon for it. John's gospel writes the story down — the demand for evidence, the touch of the wounds, the resolution (John 20:24–29). The tradition has remembered him as "Doubting Thomas." It could have edited that out. It chose to keep him.

What these pages try not to do

• They do not pretend you should be further along than you are.
• They do not assume you came from a particular religious background.
• They do not try to argue you into belief. The Bible does not work that way, and we do not either.

The questions below are the most-searched versions of "I am not sure, and I do not know what to do with that." None of them require an answer before you can ask the next one.