The Best Advice for Dealing with Doubt Is Not to Ignore It

Where Is This Doubt Coming From?

It’s easy for followers of Jesus to think that the best thing we can do with a doubt is to try and get it out of our minds. I think that often results in doubts hovering in our peripheral vision. The best advice that I could give to somebody is if there are doubts that are popping up—which is a perfectly normal thing as part of Christian experience—rather than just letting them linger in your peripheral vision, why not actually bring them to front and center and take a look at where that doubt is coming from and how you might actually be able to address it head-on?

I think sometimes our doubts arise because we are not necessarily connecting with the actual Scriptures, as they reference our culture. So we’ll sometimes find ourselves struggling with, for example, the history of the sinful behavior that we’ve seen in the church.

And it can be easy to think, Okay, well, the best response to that is for me to try and suppress that thought and to deny that reality. But if I open my New Testament, I should be expecting that my church, whether it’s the local community that I’m part of, or the denomination that I’m part of, or the Western church writ large (if that’s your cultural context), we should probably be expecting that we’re seeing a lot of sin in that history. And it can be hard for us to acknowledge that, but it’s not unfaithful to acknowledge that, and it also shouldn’t throw us completely.

If you read through the Gospels, you’ll see Jesus warning of the reality that sinful behavior is going to continue, that there are going to be some who aren’t actually authentically his followers who are claiming to be his followers. So, we’ll expect to see that.

We’ll see, as we read through the New Testament Epistles, that these letters are written to early church communities, which are often, quite frankly, a hot mess. And you might think the vision of the original church and the early church communities are somehow pristine, and today we struggle with doubt because the communities we see around us aren’t like that.

In actual fact, when we look back at the Scriptures themselves, we’ll find that from the first, churches have been congregations of sinners who are struggling with sin, who are wrestling with doubt, who are offending one another, having challenges of living in unity. You name it and we see it in the New Testament. So, that would be one example of where maybe taking that source of doubt out of our peripheral vision, looking at it front-on in the light of the Scriptures—keeping our Bibles open as we look at that—can be a really helpful practice.

Rebecca McLaughlin is the author of Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion.

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