Doubt. It’s the great heresy, the existential villain of every Sunday school lesson, and the silent assassin of countless heartfelt beliefs. We’re taught to see it as faith’s enemy, that insidious whisper on our shoulder in a world that desperately wants us to just sit down, shut up, and believe. But this is a profound and dangerous lie. A faith that can’t withstand a little healthy skepticism isn’t really faith at all; it’s a house of cards built on the illusion of certainty. And when a hard wind blows—when a loved one dies, when a tragedy strikes, or when a quiet, inconvenient question arises—that house of cards collapses, leaving us with nothing but rubble and a profound feeling of betrayal.
The truth is, doubt isn’t the enemy. It’s probably the most useful tool we have. It’s the crucible, the refining fire that burns away the superficial, the inherited, and the frankly ridiculous parts of what we believe, leaving behind only what is truly resilient. A faith that has been tested by doubt is not a brittle, fragile thing. It’s something living, breathing, and strong enough to withstand the inevitable storms of life. It’s the difference between a child’s understanding of the world and a hard-won, adult conviction.
We live in a time of endless blue pills. We’re given the option to take the blue pill: to accept a comfortable, beautiful illusion and believe whatever we’re told, to stay blissfully ignorant of the cracks in the system. Or we can take the red pill: to face the ugly, uncomfortable truth and embark on a lonely, difficult journey of honest inquiry.
This tension isn’t confined to ancient parables. We live in a time of endless blue pills. We’re given the option to take the blue pill: to accept a comfortable, beautiful illusion and believe whatever we’re told, to stay blissfully ignorant of the cracks in the system. Or we can take the red pill: to face the ugly, uncomfortable truth and embark on a lonely, difficult journey of honest inquiry. The true act of faith, in this context, is to choose the red pill, to look at the mess of the world, and to begin the excruciating, necessary work of building a foundation for ourselves. The great force of history, as James Baldwin so profoundly put it, “comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.” To take the red pill is to reckon with that history and to confront the contradictions within our own beliefs.
Consider the story of Thomas, a man whose honesty earned him a permanent moniker as “Doubting Thomas.” When his friends, breathless with a miracle, told him of the risen Jesus, his response was not to kneel in immediate, unquestioning faith. It was to say, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” We’ve been taught to see this as a moment of profound weakness. But what if it was an act of profound courage? What if his request for proof was not a lack of faith, but a fierce, honest refusal to believe in a secondhand miracle? Thomas’s faith, once he saw the wounds, was more profound and earned than the faith of the others because he chose the difficult path of intellectual and spiritual honesty. He chose to look at the wound and believe anyway. His was a faith forged in the crucible of doubt.
As the great thinker Rainer Maria Rilke so gently instructed, “Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves.” This is the spiritual practice of the modern age. It’s the hard work of living in the tension of not knowing, of loving the very questions that keep us up at night, because it is in that liminal space that we grow. A faith that has been honestly questioned is a faith that has been earned. It becomes compassionate and humble because it remembers the questions. It is robust and resilient because it has endured its own pain. As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks once said, “Optimism is the belief that the world is changing for the better; pessimism, that it is changing for the worse. The Jewish faith is the conviction that we can collectively make the world better.” Our doubt, when channeled into this kind of honest reckoning, is the very tool that allows us to find and strengthen that conviction, allowing us to build a faith that is not just personal, but one that actively contributes to a more just and compassionate world.
In your own life, what is one belief you hold, whether religious, spiritual, or ethical, that has been profoundly changed by a moment of doubt?
Justin Lockridge 
Leave a comment