There are certain questions religious people learn to ask quietly. Sometimes so quietly that they’re afraid to even entertain them in their heads.
What if I don’t believe all of this?
What if the Church is wrong about something?
What if I’m wrong?
What if God isn’t real?
And perhaps the most frightening one:
What if asking these questions means I’m losing my faith?
For many people raised in religious communities, questioning can feel dangerous because faith is often described in terms of certainty:
- Believe
- Trust
- Don’t doubt
So when certainty gets shaky and uncertainty starts to creep in, it can feel as though faith is disappearing.
But Scripture tells a MUCH messier story.
Some of the people closest to God questioned Him, argued with Him, doubted what they were told, demanded answers, and occasionally admitted that they weren’t sure what they believed.
- Jacob wrestled.
- Job demanded answers.
- The Psalms repeatedly ask God where He is.
- Thomas wanted evidence.
- And on the cross, Jesus himself prayed the opening words of Psalm 22:
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
These examples are not very ‘tidy’ expressions of faith.
Which raises a different possibility:
What if questioning your faith isn’t necessarily the moment you lose it? What if sometimes it’s the moment you finally begin examining what you actually believe?
These questions may be a better examination of our beliefs than relying primarily on fear. If we never question our faith or examine what we believe, we can keep God at a distance without even realizing it. We aren’t robots. We have emotions, experiences, disappointments, and doubts. There will always be moments when life leaves us questioning God’s will. Or moments when the behavior of a religious institution leaves us questioning whether it deserves our trust.
Those are not necessarily the same questions.
- Inherited faith says, “This is what I was taught.”
- Examined faith asks, “Is this what I believe?”
Examining your faith means giving yourself permission to explore it: to learn more, ask uncomfortable questions, challenge assumptions, and discover that some of the things you thought were God were actually ideas about God handed to you by other people.
And examination doesn’t guarantee that you’ll end up exactly where you started.
You may change your mind about something. You may discover that a belief you inherited no longer makes sense to you. You may wrestle with certain teachings for years. You may find yourself more certain about some things and considerably less certain about others.
That’s the risk of asking honest questions. But there’s a risk in refusing to ask them, too.
A faith that can only survive by remaining unexamined isn’t necessarily safe and sound. If we’re afraid that one difficult question might shatter everything we believe, then it’s possible that the question isn’t the greatest threat.
What if fear is?
Let’s compare faith to a muscle (bear with me, there’s something useful in this analogy). A muscle doesn’t become stronger because we protect it from resistance. It becomes stronger because it encounters resistance and learns to adapt.
Can faith work that way too? Maybe.
Not every question will have a satisfying answer, or an answer at all. Doubt doesn’t automatically make faith stronger, and everyone who begins questioning certainly won’t end up believing exactly what they believed before.
However, asking what we actually believe is different from simply repeating what we’ve been taught to believe.
There is another distinction worth making here, particularly for people raised within the walls of organized religion:
Questioning the Church is not necessarily the same thing as questioning God.
Religious institutions are made up of human beings. Human beings can misunderstand, misinterpret, mishandle, and sometimes misuse authority (we’ve seen it throughout history). Asking whether an institution has acted honestly, or whether a particular teaching, practice, or interpretation deserves examination, is not automatically a declaration that God doesn’t exist.
Examination is giving yourself permission to explore your faith. Permission to learn more, ask harder questions, and reconsider the boxes we’ve built around God.
If a question is enough to shatter our faith, perhaps the question isn’t the problem. Perhaps the fear of asking it is.
Sometimes we’re wrestling with God and sometimes we’re wrestling with what human beings have told us about God. Knowing the difference matters.