The opposite of faith isn't doubt; it's fear
Returning to a poem by Lia Purpura
Any believer who says they never wrestle with doubt is either lying or lives in an enclave, cocooned from the cross-pressures of modernity. More likely, both are true: the buffered security of some mono-epistemic bubble provides an artificial illusion that everyone agrees—that everyone believes what “we” believe. What’s the problem?
I say “believer,” generically, because such untroubled “belief” is not always “religious” in our usual sense. You might picture the religious fundamentalist—fair enough—but one could equally imagine the “believer” in “science” ensconced in zones of academia and elite zip codes where no one entertains superstitions embraced by the benighted masses in the middle of the country.
The United States is a massive country with a gargantuan economy, both of which make it possible to sustain subcultures that dwarf entire societies elsewhere. This country contains worlds within worlds and it’s easy enough to imagine the “world” one knows is synonymous with reality. So the Christian fundamentalist, for example, can order her life with rhythms that never really encounter differing beliefs except as filtered by the chattering class within her enclave/subculture. She can immerse herself in a week full of programming at her megachurch, stream curated media from evangelical sources, carve out “safe” echo chambers on social media, and socialize only with people who believe as she does. Such a life is a massive endeavor to shield oneself from the existential cross-pressures of modernity—to live in a world where one’s faith is axiomatic, the “default” shared by everyone (where “everyone” = everyone in one’s enclave). There will be awareness of other forms of belief and unbelief, but they are not “live” options. Indeed, awareness only trickles in because cultural arbiters within one’s enclave have issued warnings and crucified the straw men of rival faiths. (The entire industry of “apologetics” within evangelicalism exists only to serve this function.)
Within such enclaves, what “we believe” is so obvious and unrivaled that any instance of doubt is perceived as a threat and a failure. This is when the lying begins. Because, though these enclaved endeavors can be remarkably successful at guarding believers from epistemic vulnerability to rival “faiths,” they cannot be perfect. In the pluralism of modernity, doubt haunts everyone.1 So the security system—the ADT of epistemic enclaves, so to speak—blares alarms at any suggestion of doubt within the community or within the believer. Doubt is demonized. The particularly insidious way this plays out is when doubt is construed as a moral failure. O ye of little faith, the guardians trot out; we thought you loved Jesus? Doubt thus becomes an occasion for shame, and this is when the self-deception starts. When I say that someone never doubts is either lying or living in some enclave, what I mean is that they are likely lying to themselves, and they’ve effectively been taught to do so in order to belong to the community of believers. They experience overwhelming pressure to pretend they don’t doubt. If you keep pretending long enough, you can almost believe it.
What I find philosophically problematic and pastorally heartbreaking about this is the way it all rests on a false dichotomy—as if doubt was faith’s opposite and not, as Kierkegaard once mused, faith’s companion. As if faith could be confused with certitude. As if faith needed to be inoculated from doubt like some scary virus. As if doubt, especially in modernity, isn’t as natural as every other breath. As if doubt was betrayal.
Doubt is not a sign of moral failure. It is not even a sign of epistemic failure. Doubt, in fact, can be a faithful response to what presses in upon us. Doubt can be a form of faithful attention. Doubt can be its own form of confession. Indeed, it takes a lot of faith to admit one’s doubts: it takes trust in the community surrounding you and a fearlessness before the God you believe (most of the time) loves you.
I guess that’s my point: the opposite of faith isn’t doubt, it is fear. Ironically, the fundamentalist who demonizes doubt as the antithesis of faith often lives out a faith that both feeds and foments fear. The fundamentalist’s “faith” is fixated on security but acts out of some deeper insecurity. It is a faith that almost seems to need enemies. As good diagnostic question to ask oneself, no matter one’s “faith persuasion,” is simply this: What is my faith afraid of?
Imagining faith + doubt as correlated “poles” is the problem. If faith has a “polar” opposite, I suggest it is fear, not doubt. Maybe I can’t just generically speak of “faith” here. Maybe I should put my cards on the table and say, more specifically, that the polar opposite of Christian faith is fear.2 I’m thinking of that frequent exhortation from Jesus and his angels in the Gospels: “Be not afraid.” Faith, in Scripture and a long Christian tradition, is bound up with peace, not certainty. In faith one entrusts oneself. Faith is casting one’s cares and anxieties upon God and finding rest. This is what St. Teresa of Àvila pictures so beautifully at the end of The Interior Castle. The “poor little butterfly” who “was always so frightened [by] every little thing,” finds a peace that is fearlessness. “Who knows why this has changed?,” she wonders. “Maybe it’s because in this dwelling she has found a place to rest at last. Maybe it’s because, after all she has experienced, nothing can scare her anymore.”3 Not even her own doubt.
This, pastorally, is what I hope for those who’ve been malformed by enclaves that demonize doubt: I hope they can learn to not be afraid of their own doubt because God’s self-emptying love embraces that, too.
I got thinking about all of this after reading Phil Christman’s review of Paul Elie’s new book, The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. (If you missed the 80s, it was a wild ride.) The review is smart and raises good questions. But Christman’s last lines give voice to something important:
Even as I mentally argued with it, wondering how Elie separates “conventional” belief from other kinds, asking myself whether all of his subjects merit the attention he gives them, I finished the book with a renewed appreciation for the way belief itself is a complicated thing, enfolded upon itself. We are sometimes most pious in the ways we doubt our beliefs, and most blasphemous in the ways we defend them.
Yes, yes: the piety of doubt. The faithfulness of lament. The fearlessness of entrusting oneself to Love Incarnate.
This stirred memory of an evocative poem by Lia Purpura, with which I’ll close. This comes from her wonderful collection, It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful.
Belief
by Lia Purpura
Light being
wavy and particulate
at once
is instructive –
why wouldn’t
other things or states
present as
both/and?
For instance
I both
believe and can’t.
Holding these
together produces
a wobble, I think
it’s time
to take seriously
as a stance.
I deal with this in a lot more detail in my book on Charles Taylor, How (Not) To Be Secular.
I realize that this might entail that the fundamentalist’s faith that foments and feeds on fear isn’t actually “Christian.” I think I’m OK with that. Let’s at least let the inference hang out there for a little bit.
The Interior Castle, trans. Mirabel Starr, p. 282.