Faith is Better than Doubt

There was considerable interest in and comments/questions about my March 8 blog post titled “Doubt is Better than Certainty.” This post is also about doubt, but it is mainly about faith in God rather than certainty or doubt about beliefs. 

“The Shock of Faith” is the title of David Brooks’s opinion column published by the New York Times last December 19. It is a long, thoughtful, heartfelt article that is well worth reading and contemplating. (You can access it here [with a different title]).

Brooks (b. 1961) is a nationally known newspaper journalist and author as well as a regular on PBS NewsHour every Friday evening. He was raised Jewish, but he attended an Episcopal grade school as a boy. He says in his Dec. 19 post, he grew up “religious but not spiritual.”

When I first began to hear about Brooks, I thought he was too politically conservative and paid little attention to him. But his new book, The Road to Character, was the subject of a study meeting at Central Baptist Seminary in Kansas City in September 2015. It was led by then-president Molly Marshall.

Attending that discussion gave me new appreciation for Brooks, and his political views, which continued to move toward a center-left position. The point of this article, though, is about Brooks’s ideas about faith, not politics.

Faith is “like falling in love.” This is one of Brooks’s thought-provoking statements. While there are problems with the widespread claim that people fall in love, that expression implies that romantic love is usually far more a matter of the heart (emotional) rather than of the head (cerebral).

Brooks’s article begins with his acknowledgement that he long “thought faith was primarily about belief.” But when faith finally “tiptoed into” his life, as he put it, it was “through numinous “experiences,” that is, through “scattered moments of awe and wonder” which hit him “with the force of joy.”

That’s what caused him to fall in faith. Even though he had been religious without being spiritual, Brooks says that position “felt empty” to him. On the other hand, he also found that being spiritual without being religious didn’t work for him. Religions, he says, “enmesh your life in a sacred story.”*¹

In that regard, Brooks cites important, instructive words of Rabbi David Wolpe: “Spirituality is an emotion. Religion is an obligation. Spirituality soothes. Religion mobilizes. Spirituality is satisfied with itself. Religion is dissatisfied with the world.”*²

“Have mercy on those who doubt” (CEB) are words in the New Testament book of Jude, verse 22. The issue there is not about doubt rather than certainty regarding beliefs, but doubt about one’s foundational faith.

If people who have fallen in love begin to have serious doubts about that love being “real” and reciprocal, the relationship has become precarious. That is what causes couples to “break up” or spouses to divorce. Just as doubt about love is a serious matter, so is doubt about faith.

Doubt is better than certainty concerning ideas or beliefs, for that doubt nudges the doubter to seek to learn more and to examine his/her beliefs. But faith in God (by whatever name is used for the Ultimate) is not basically about ideas or beliefs. It is about a relationship that can be destroyed by doubt.

Rachel Held Evans, the widely respected Christian author whose untimely death is still mourned by many, once said, “I recognize that faith is always a risk. No matter what we believe, there is always a chance we might be wrong. But the story of Jesus is just the story I’m willing to risk being wrong about.”*³

Evans’s faith was not primarily in the veracity of Christian beliefs. Rather, her faith was heartfelt commitment to Jesus Christ. She had doubts about many traditional Christian doctrines, but her faith/trust in Christ was stronger, and better, than her doubts about the certainty of those stated beliefs.

Since robust Christian faith is commitment to Christ, that faith becomes apparent not by what we say or give intellectual assent to. Rather, faith is expressed by how we live and what we do.

As Bill Tammeus says on the last page of his book on doubt, faith keeps “us focused on the goal of demonstrating what a world of peace, harmony, mercy, justice, and love might look like.”

Doubt can’t do that, so clearly (undoubtedly?), faith is better than doubt.

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*¹ Two of the short “chapters” in Bill Tammeus’s book The Value of Doubt (2016) are about whether one can be spiritual but not religious or religious but not spiritual. In the Comment section of my 3/8 blog post, Bill (who is on my Thinking Friends mailing list) referred to his book, and I had to admit that I knew about it but had not yet read it. Since then, I have been able to check out a copy of it from the local (MCPL) library, and I have been profiting from reading that delightful book. I highly recommend it.

*² David J. Wolpe (b. 1958) is a Conservative Jewish rabbi and now Emeritus Rabbi of the prestigious Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. In 2012, Newsweek magazine named him the most influential rabbi in America.

*³ Rachel Held Evans was born in 1981 and died a few weeks before her 39^th birthday. My June 5, 2021, blog article was about her (see here). The words cited above were part of her discussion about faith with a pastor in 2014. It can be found on YouTube (here); that video has had more than 17,000 views. 

Not All Laws are Good Laws

Perhaps you don’t know (or remember) anything about the Butler Act, a new Tennessee law signed in 1925, but you are likely aware of the well-known trial that resulted from that law.

John Washington Butler (1925)

The Butler Act was signed one hundred years ago on March 21, 1925 (which happened to be my father’s tenth birthday), by Tennessee Governor Austin Peay.

John Washington Butler (1875~1952) was a corn and tobacco farmer northeast of Nashville, Tennessee, and a member of that state’s House of Representatives from 1923 to 1927. The bill that bears his name was passed by a lopsided vote of 71-5 without hearings or debate, and then also passed by the state Senate.

In May 1925, John Scopes (1900~70), a high school football coach and part-time teacher, was arrested for teaching evolution in violation of the Butler Act. His trial was held in Dayton, Tennessee, from July 10 to 21, and he was supported by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Dubbed at the time “the trial of the century,” the Scopes trial pitted the iconic Clarence Darrow as the defense lawyer and prominent politician William Jennings Bryan as the prosecuting attorney.*¹ As depicted superbly in the movie Inherit the Wind (1960), Scopes was judged guilty and fined $100.*²

In the trial’s aftermath, Tennessee disallowed the teaching of evolution in the classroom until the Butler Act was repealed in 1967. It was then determined that, after all, the 1925 law was a bad law, as it conflicted with modern science and also increasingly had lost the support of many (progressive) Christians.*³

Many “bad laws” have been opposed by civil disobedience. As stated in an online dictionary, civil disobedience means “the refusal to comply with certain laws … as a peaceful form of political protest.” That refusal is because of the perception that some laws are bad and should not be obeyed.

Here are just a few notable historical examples of such “disobedience”:

* Mohandas Gandhi’s protest against the salt tax in India. This month marks the 95^th anniversary of Gandhi’s historic “salt march” that began on March 12, 1930. It was in opposition to the salt tax levied by colonial Britain, which he saw as an oppressive, unjust law.

* Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s protest against the Nazi government in Germany. The Lutheran pastor was one of the best-known opponents of Adolph Hitler, who was democratically elected but soon gained totalitarian control over Germany in 1933 by means of his laws and the use of the Gestapo.

* Martin Luther King Jr.’s protest against the racial injustices in the U.S. According to Copilot (Microsoft’s AI “companion”) King “believed that moral principles were more important than unfair laws, so he “used civil disobedience not just to make a political statement but to really change society.” This included the march to Selma and “Bloody Sunday” 60 years ago in March 1965.

Civil disobedience to bad laws is often costly for the protesters.

* Gandhi was arrested on May 5, 1930, while on his salt march and sent to jail without trial where he remained until near the end of January 1931.

*Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943 and was imprisoned until his execution by hanging 80 years ago next month, on April 9, 1945.

* King was arrested 29 times and jailed, usually for rather short times, on many of those occasions. His most well-known incarceration was in April 1963 when he wrote Letter from a Birmingham Jail, during the week he was there.

Now, by contrast, the U.S. President seems to be a “scofflaw.” While the term originally meant disregard for minor laws, scofflaw now sometimes is used for a person who disregards court orders, thus directly challenging judicial authority.

This is the opposite of disregarding bad laws. It is harmful opposition to good laws, such as protecting people’s civil rights. Since his inauguration on Jan. 20, the 47^th POTUS seems to have made many executive actions harmful to women as well as to LGBTQ and non-White people.

For example, during the past few days, the Trump administration has deported three planeloads of Guatemalan immigrants to El Salvador in spite of a federal judge’s temporary restraining order questioning the legality of that action.

That conflict may be fomenting a constitutional crisis according to the news media, such as this detailed March 17 article on the website of Reuters.com.

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*¹ In 2023, Gregg Jarrett, a Fox News legal analyst and commentator, published The Trial of the Century, which, “calls upon our past to unite Americans in the defense of the free exchange of ideas, especially in this divided time.” The author describes it on YouTube here.

*² In recent years, it is often implied that $100 was just a token fine for John Scopes breaking the Butler Act in Tennessee. According to Wikipedia, however, his fine was equivalent to $1,793 in 2024.

*³ As I point out in my book Fed Up with Fundamentalism (2007, 2020), the Scopes Trial led to the weakening of Christian fundamentalism (2020, pp. 34~37).

Doubt is Better than Certainty

Last Sunday, the 97^th Academy Awards presentations were made at Dolby Theater in Hollywood. I didn’t watch the award ceremony, but early Monday morning, I read the results with interest. I was especially eager to know the results for Conclave, the only one of the Best Picture nominees I had seen. 

Conclave did not win the Best Picture Oscar, and Ralph Fiennes (pictured above) was not awarded the Best Actor Oscar for which he was nominated.*¹ Still, please think with me about the striking words of Cardinal Lawrence, who was in charge of the conclave to elect a new pope.

Lawrence, the Dean of the College of Cardinals so admirably played by Fiennes, speaks these striking words near the beginning of the film:

… over the course of many years, in the service of our mother the Church, let me tell you, there is one sin which I have come to fear above all others. Certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance.

He goes on to say,

Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery. And therefore no need for faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a pope who doubts.

These were perplexing words to most of the Cardinals gathered for the conclave—and they are likely perplexing to many of you also, especially those of you who have grown up as (and still are) “traditional” Christians.

“The Appeal of Certainty” is a short subsection in my book Fed Up with Fundamentalism (2007, 2020). In the first paragraph, I write that “the claim to certainty is one of fundamentalism’s primary attractions.” That same claim is true for many, if not most, conservative evangelicals today.

Nearly 100 years ago, Reinhold Niebuhr, the eminent neo-orthodox theologian, declared, “Frantic orthodoxy [=fundamentalism] is a method for obscuring doubt.” The foundation of that method was an emphasis upon belief in the Bible, believed to be God’s infallible or inerrant Word.

In 1969, W.A. Criswell, the prominent pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, stressed that the Bible is the literal, infallible Word of God, and then averred, ”If the Bible is the Word of God we have an absolutely trustworthy guide for all the answers our souls desire to know.”

That position is appealing to so many who desire the comforting presence of certainty.

God After Deconstruction by Thomas Jay Oord and Tripp Fuller is a new (2024) book, and one that I highly recommend. The second of the twelve chapters is titled “Certainty Crumbles.” At the end of a sub-section called “The Benefit of Doubt,” the authors write,

Rather than being an enemy of belief, we think doubt is essential. Believers aren’t ‘certainers,’ to coin a word. To believe means to be uncertain. The wise ones among us learn to resist the impulse to seek certain foundations of knowledge (31).*²

Then, in “Bible Conundrums,” their fifth chapter, Oord and Fuller deal directly with how many people leave Christianity when they realize that there are many problems related to belief in an infallible Bible as a sure foundation. They give much good advice on how to take the Bible seriously but not literally.

Throughout their insightful book, the authors insist that doubt is more conducive to a life of faith than certainty.

This is similar to what Anne Lamott (whom I plan to highlight in a blog article next month) wrote in her book Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (2005). One of her religious mentors is a Jesuit priest, whom she refers to as Father Tom. Near the end of her book, she writes,

I remembered something Father Tom had told me—that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. (p. 256).

Retired pastor Martin Thielen recently wrote about the benefit of doubt. He said, “Religious doubt can lead to a more authentic and mature faith, including the embrace of divine mystery ….”*³

Yes, when carefully considered, doubt is better than certainty.

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*¹ This was in contrast to the British Academy of Film and Television Arts presentation ceremony held on February 16. Conclave and Fiennes both won the BAFTA awards. 

*² While they didn’t cite him, perhaps the authors had read the eminent agnostic Bertrand Russell, who in 1935 wrote, “The fundamental cause of the trouble in the modern world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

*³ In April 2014, I posted a blog article (see here) in which I introduced Thielen, who at that time was a Methodist pastor in Tennessee. After making that post, I found out that he had graduated with an M.Div. degree from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1982 but left the Southern Baptists Convention in 1994. He now publishes articles regularly on his website that he calls “Doubter’s Parish.” The words cited above are from his March 1 post, “Faith, Doubt, and ‘Conclave’,” which I encourage you to read (here).