The Dance of Faith and Doubt
Sunday, September 6, 2026
Father Richard Rohr reflects on the place of doubt in a mature life of faith:
Basic religious faith is a vote for some coherence, purpose, benevolence, and direction in the universe. Unfortunately, the notion of faith that emerged in the West was much more a rational assent to the truth of certain mental beliefs rather than a calm and hopeful trust that God is inherent in all things, and that this whole thing is going somewhere good.
I worry about “true believers” who cannot carry any doubt or anxiety at all. People who are so certain always seem, like Hamlet’s queen, to “protest too much” and try too hard. To hold the full mystery of life is always to endure its other half, which is the equal mystery of death and doubt. To know anything fully is always to hold that part of it which is still mysterious and unknowable. [1]
Doubt and faith are actually correlative terms. People of great faith often suffer bouts of great doubt because they continue to grow. Mother Teresa experienced decades of this kind of doubt, as was revealed after her death. In a letter to a trusted spiritual director she wrote, “Darkness is such that I really do not see—neither with my mind nor with my reason.—The place of God in my soul is blank.—There is no God in me.” [2] The very fact that people were scandalized by this demonstrates how limited is our understanding of the nature of biblical faith.
It seems a movement from certitude to doubt and through doubt to acceptance of life’s mystery is necessary in all encounters, intellectual breakthroughs, and relationships, not just with the Divine. Human faith and religious faith are much the same except in their object or goal. What set us on the wrong path was making the object of religious faith “ideas” or doctrines instead of a person. Our faith is not a faith that dogmas or moral opinions are true, but a faith that Ultimate Reality/God/Christ is accessible to us—and even on our side. [3]
Our youthful demand for certainty eliminates most anxiety on the conscious level, so I can see why many are tempted to remain in such a control tower. We do not have enough experience of wholeness to include all its parts yet. First-half-of-life naïveté includes a kind of excitement and happiness that is hard to let go of unless we know there is an even deeper and tested kind of happiness out ahead of us. But we do not know that yet in the early years, which is why those in the second half of life must tell us about it. Without elders, a society perishes socially and spiritually.
It is probably necessary to eliminate most doubt when we are young; doing so is a good survival technique. But such worldviews are not true—and they are not wisdom. Wisdom happily lives with mystery, doubt, and unknowing and, in such living, ironically resolves that very mystery to some degree. [4]
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Before and After Doubt
Monday, September 7, 2026
Labor Day (U.S.)
When grounded in an experience of Love, doubt does not represent a step backwards but is a necessary condition for any movement forward.
—Richard Rohr
CAC core faculty member Brian McLaren speaks of doubt as an essential part of his growth in faith, from a focus on “orthodoxy” or right belief to “orthopraxy” or right living.
Before doubt, I thought that faith was a matter of correct beliefs. My religious teachers taught me so: that if I didn’t hold the right beliefs, or at least say that I held them, I would be excommunicated from my community, and perhaps, after death, from God’s presence. They taught me this not to be cruel but because they themselves had been taught the same thing, and they were working hard, sometimes desperately, to be faithful to the rules as they understood them. I tried to do the same, and I would still be doing so today if not for doubt.
Doubt chipped away at those beliefs, one agonizing blow at a time, revealing that what actually mattered wasn’t the point of beliefs but the clear window of faith, faith as a life orientation, faith as a framework of values and spirituality, faith as a commitment to live into a deep vision of what life can be, faith as a way of life, faith expressing itself in love.
For all those years, when I said, “I believe,” I thought I understood what I was doing. But more was going on, so much more….
Looking back, I now see that underneath arguments about what I believed to be true factually, something deeper and truer was happening actually.
For example, whether or not the creation story happened factually as described in Genesis, I was committing myself to live in the world as if it actually were a precious, beautiful, meaningful creation, and as if I were too….
What mattered most was not that I believed the stories in a factual sense, but that I believed in the meaning they carried so I could act upon that meaning and embody it in my life, to let that meaning breathe in me, animate me, fill me…. Whether I considered the stories factually accurate was never the point; what actually mattered all along was whether I lived a life pregnant with the meaning those stories contained. To my surprise, when I was given permission to doubt the factuality of my beliefs, I discovered their actual life-giving purpose….
Doubt need not be the death of faith. It can be, instead, the birth of a new kind of faith, a faith beyond beliefs, a faith that expresses itself in love, a deepening and expanding faith that can save your life and save the world.
