Redeeming Pain and Normalizing Uncertainty: A Better Way to Talk About Christian Doubt

We need to normalize doubt, uncertainty, and fear in the evangelical conversation about our relationships with God. That is the theme of research my colleagues and I have been working on, but it’s a lesson I learned from Phillip Yancey long before I conducted scientific studies on the topic.

Yancey, evangelical author of best-selling books such as “Where is God When it Hurts?” and “Disappointment with God,” recently announced that he has Parkinson’s disease. Writing for Christianity Today, he penned “I have written many words on suffering and now am being called to put them into practice.”

I am deeply indebted to Yancey. I read many of his books during bouts of deconstruction in and after college, and his formula was surprisingly simple: speak the truth about our human experience.

My introduction to Yancey came one winter day, as I wandered across my undergraduate evangelical college’s frozen campus. I was dazed after a professor argued in a theology lecture that God predestined people to hell. Seeking physical – and I suppose, spiritual – refuge after being confronted with such a claim, I stumbled into the campus store. Books up and down the aisles radiated strong messages about faith: God is in control! Glorify his name! Experience God!

Then I saw a shelf with Yancey’s books. 

“What’s So Amazing About Grace?”

“Reaching for the Invisible God.”

“Church: Why Bother?”

“Soul Survivor: How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church.”

Those books offered me another way to be Christian. Ultimately, Yancey unburdened me from an impossible life in which “faithfulness” was defined as having an answer to every question and a shiny spin for every doubt. As one reviewer at the time put it, “Yancey succeeds brilliantly in telling the truth about the Christian life without overselling it.” 

That was exactly it. I wanted a Christian life but didn’t want to oversell it by ignoring what seemed to me nagging problems – like preoccupation with predestination and God’s wrath. A good evangelical teen of the ‘90s, I had a lot of apologetics and evangelism training, but when I shared the good news, I often felt like a used car salesman trying to offload a 5-speed Renault without a backup gear.

What I hungered for was a brutally honest faith. My Gen X evangelical upbringing was encumbered, though, by spiritual platitudes that worked a lot better embroidered on tea towels than in answering agonizing questions. Yancey was one of the few writers who gave me permission to doubt God’s goodness, the loveliness of the Church, and – heaven help me – the “plans God has for me” (you know, to prosper me and not to harm me).

In my latest academic work, however, I formulated hypotheses about suffering and religious and spiritual struggles that contrasted with the viewpoint Yancey helped me develop. I hypothesized that people who are more committed and involved in their faith should struggle less with doubt and feelings of abandonment by God when they suffer. The hypothesis was built on the well-documented proposition that religion (most often measured by service attendance) frequently protects people from a host of negative outcomes.

But in fact, the opposite was true in our study of chronically ill American adults. As suffering increased, religious and spiritual struggles – including doubt, fear of abandonment, and loss of confidence in God’s power – also increased, and even more so for those who were highly religious. And that included respondents high in spiritual fortitude, a measure scoring people on their intent to redeem hardship.

As a reader, what I treasured most about Yancey was that he avoided platitudes and legitimated doubt, uncertainty, and fear. But as a researcher, I wondered if I had done the opposite, unconsciously relying on old truisms like “Let go and let God” and “God is good all the time, and all the time God is good.”

According to research by the Barna Group, doubt is normal. Fear is normal. Being uncertain about God’s power is normal. This is what people need to hear, and not just those who are suffering. My research confirms that some 40% of evangelicals experience attachment insecurities in their relationship with God, meaning they aren’t totally confident God is as warm, present, and loving as evangelical preachers make him out to be. This makes everything from Bible reading to prayer to attending worship fraught with uncertainty.

And that includes me. I experience attachment insecurities, in addition to having high-masking autism spectrum disorder. These facts about my existence help explain why social relationships are often so challenging, including my relationship with God. What am I do to with a theological system prizing “personal relationship with God” above all else – especially one that says feelings are not reliable, doubt is weakness, and I must have faith over fear?  

Perhaps that is why I have instinctually rejected evangelical platitudes (despite having clearly internalized them). They are part of an unpleasant soup which, when spooned to those abed with a spiritual fever, can feel more like gaslighting than a healing remedy: This doesn’t make you feel better? Then there must be something wrong with you. 

I’m used to documenting spiritual challenges in my research when accounting for something like attachment insecurity, but frankly, in our latest study, I thought the story would be different for a more general population. I was wrong. It turns out that doubt and struggle are common to us all, and that those who are most committed to God are also the most likely to be hurt by him.

With renewed attention on Yancey after his Parkinson’s announcement, it’s time evangelicals took another page from his work, for despite his success as an evangelical writer (to the tune of 15 million books sold), the old bromides stubbornly persist. And they persist not because of any real comfort they provide, but rather because fear and uncertainty are themselves so persistent. As Frederick Buechner, a hero to both me and Yancey has written, “There is doubt hard on the heels of every belief.”

But doubt is not devoid of meaning. Research on post-traumatic growth suggests there are ways through it. Ultimately, I was wrong as a researcher to label religious struggles like doubt and insecurity as “negative” experiences to be avoided at all costs. And despite contemporary platitudes, the historical Christian tradition contains a good deal of wisdom about walking through suffering.

As Yancey wrote when disclosing his diagnosis, “Those who live with pain and failure tend to be better stewards of their life circumstances than those who live with success and pleasure. Pain redeemed impresses me much more than pain removed.”

Belief invites doubt, fear, and insecurity – for all of us. So let’s move past the platitudes. Instead, let’s acknowledge doubt as normal. When we do, we’ll be allowed to deal with it – in brutal honesty.