The Cost of Doubt
Wednesday, September 9, 2026
Brian McLaren normalizes painful experiences of doubt:
The origin of the word doubt helps name the pain. Doubt derives from the same roots as duo and double, suggesting that to doubt is to be in two minds, one that believes and one that doesn’t. The two minds wrestle and writhe in tension, pulling you in two directions, leaving you in di-stress. You can see with eyes of faith and you can see with eyes of skepticism, leaving you with double vision or internal di-vision.
Before doubt, you simply believed. You were in one innocent and undivided mind, seeing with one vision, feeling a comfortable confidence rather than distress. But that innocence, that simplicity, that peaceful unity of mind and clarity of vision now slip away, the first casualties of doubt….
For many of us, faith is our map of reality, our map of the universe. It tells us where we are, where we’ve been, where we’re going, where to turn. But as soon as our trusted map stops matching reality, we feel disoriented. We have no idea where to turn, what to do, how to survive….
People experience the failure of a mental map, paradigm, or worldview as personally traumatizing. Even scientists, when their conceptual maps fail them and they must challenge some of their fundamental scientific assumptions, use emotionally charged language to describe the experience….
Albert Einstein … described the experience of coping with data that took him off the edges of his scientific map: “It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built.” [1]
If the loss of a scientific map or model creates anxiety, how much more does the loss of a religious worldview? This loss threatens us with another even greater loss: the very loss of God or of God’s favor, love, and protection. What could be more terrifying for a sincere believer?
This terror is especially real for people … who were taught that God is an almighty supreme being who demands absolute perfection and submission, a strict and demanding father, and a tough and exacting judge. Yes, we were also taught God is loving, gracious, and forgiving, but the one requirement God demands above all others is precisely the thing that doubters struggle with most: God demands firm, unwavering faith, which we understood to mean correct beliefs. To question those beliefs throws open the terrifying possibility that God might at any moment turn against us, punish us, reject us, maybe even send us to hell if we don’t get our beliefs straight and hold them tight, without doubt….
Doubt can breach the psychological fortress in which we’ve felt safe, tear up the internal map by which we’ve navigated the world, and threaten to separate us from God’s favor and love.
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If the apocalypse comes for us all
Life in the face of death
| DREW BROWN SEP 9 |
I woke up this morning to news that an AI researcher quit yesterday over ethical concerns. He said that if we don’t take the threat of AI seriously, we are headed in a bad bad bad direction.
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I just finished reading a double feature of Wild Dark Shore and The Dog Stars.¹ These are books existing inches away from a near future apocalypse. Wild Dark Shore focuses on the threat of global warming. The Dog Stars is set after a global pandemic wipes out most of the earth’s population.
Grim stuff.
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Last night, we hosted our welcome picnic for the Western Theological Seminary community. Faculty, staff, students, and families all came to the seminary for food trucks (tacos! bbq! ice cream!), mini golf, and a bounce house.²
It was supposed to end by 7, and Lex and I told ourselves before we went that we wouldn’t stay the entire time, that we would be responsible adults with busy weeks, that we would go home early to clean and watch New Girl and be in by by 8:30.
Reader, we did the opposite: we stayed until after 8.
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Let’s face it: I would not be well suited for a post-apocalyptic world. I’m doing my doctoral work in creative writing, for crying out loud.
What am I supposed to do to prove my worth? When food rationing causes us to build our own societies of hunters and gatherers, how am I going to convince some small survivalist collective to feed me and let me live? Write them a play? Write them a fun poem that rhymes “dysentery” with “Joseph and Mary”? Write them marketing copy for the three artisans still living?
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The researcher who quit posted a note on the-site-formerly-known-as-Twitter explaining his rationale and the threat. It—just like Wild Dark Shore and The Dog Stars—was grim.
Curious, I read a few comments underneath the researcher’s tweet. One of the commenters said she wasn’t afraid; she said God was in control.
It’s true, God is in control, but I don’t see anything in the Bible that guarantees that all of this this—waves hands at all of America—is going to end well.
Ta-Nehisi Coates concludes his book We Were Eight Years in Power on this note: “I don’t ever want to forget, even with whatever personal victories I achieve, even in the victories we achieve as a people or a nation, that the larger story of America and the world probably does not end well. Our story is a tragedy.”³
I too believe God is in control, but I also think Coates is onto something. This is—by and large—a country and world of death. Those of us living in extreme levels of comparative wealth and comfort—cloistered, as Switchfoot once sang, inside our “convenient Lexus cages”—are the ones blinded to the realities of destruction, malnourishment, war, abuse, etc, etc. that have always existed around us.⁴
God has given no guarantee America will make it to the New Jerusalem intact.
We are living in a land of death.
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I sponsored a junior high church camp outside Joplin, MO the summer after my freshman year. I was almost twenty and felt very sophisticated with my one year of theology classes.
On the fourth night of camp, I stood in the back and watched the junior highers standing and swaying and holding their hands in the air. I looked out at a sea of fourteen-year-olds and felt—as a nineteen-year-old—so superior to them.
What did they truly know about life? Had they experienced any suffering? Had they truly understood the depths of sin or sadness?
What had they done to deserve God’s presence or attention?
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That whole living-in-a-land-of-death thing isn’t actually an original thought. It comes from—if you’ve read my stuff long enough you can probably guess it blind folded—Eugene Peterson. He wrote in Practice Resurrection,
“The Holy Spirit formed [the Church] to be a colony of heaven in the country of death.”⁵
America, try as it might to listen to its better angels, is a country of death. This started way before AI, way before global warming, way before the first pandemic, way before the current president, way before war, way before systemic privilege and systemic prejudice, way before America itself. This is true for every country and every government built with human hands. All of them Towers of Babel; all of them lands of death; no one is immune; no, not one.
And that’s kind of depressing.
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I looked out at the seminary community last night, saw the laughter and the conversations. Saw faculty sitting with students and staff meeting each others’ families. Kids in the bounce house. New students playing mini golf, making the first tentative steps towards friendship and community. My friend Kate—who helped plan the whole night—told me it was the most RSVPs we’ve ever had. Something seems to be really clicking at Western right now, and I’m just grateful to be a part of it.
As we left, I told Lex how good it felt to see the community all come together. As the Director of Admissions, I spend so much time tilling the ground and hoping for a crop. To see it come to fruition last night meant a lot to me.
So much laughter. So much life.
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Eugene didn’t only say we lived in a country of death. No, he said we—all of us who make up the Church—are a “colony of heaven.” He continues this thought, telling us that we are participating in the “resurrection life, life out of death, life that trumps death, life that is the last word, Jesus life.”⁶
The Bible tells us that this world—this aching world of AI, this aching world of global warming, this aching world of pandemics—will be redeemed and made new someday. Theologians call it the eschaton. Guns will become plowshares, we will run and not grow weary, and we will eternally journey—as C.S. Lewis famously said—further up and further into God’s goodness.
Amen and amen and amen.
But until then, the Bible also says, God and Christ and the Holy Spirit are with us. In the midst of all this death, God is collecting our tears in bottles, intimate with us in our suffering. And God is asking us to be this colony of heaven, this post-apocalyptic colony of life and beauty, standing in stark contrast to the bleak fatalism of a world focused on its own entropy.
Life and life and life quietly living amidst death and death and death.
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As I watched—smug and embittered—that sea of fourteen-year-olds holding their hands in the air, I was swiftly convicted by a song. A few months earlier, Gungor’s Ghosts Upon the Earth had been released. I bought it for $10 on iTunes, and it felt like the greatest worship album I had ever heard.⁷ As I stood in the back of that chapel looking out at all that presumed ignorance, one song from that album—“Church Bells”—came into my head:⁸
Let church bells ring
Let children sing
Even if they don’t know why let them sing
Why drown their joy
Stifle their voice
Just because you’ve lost yours’May our jaded hearts be healed
AmenLet old men dance
Lift up their hands
Even if they are naïve, let them dance
You’ve seen it all
You watch them fall
Wash off your face and danceMay our weary hearts be filled with hope
Amen
Those fourteen-year-olds in that chapel outside Joplin were doing the exact right thing. God was pleased with those hands in the air, and I was the one who was wrong.
Who was I to look down at them—naïve though they might be—and tell them not to dance, to tell them not to sing?
I am not an an AI ethicist; I am not a global warming scientist; I am not an epidemiologist. To be honest, it is often too much for me. I do not read the books published or the articles written by the prognosticators and experts. If I did, I think I’d be too wrapped in fear.
In this way, I am just like those fourteen-year-olds in that chapel: I am ignorant to what lies ahead, oblivious to the pain that could be around the corner, whether at the hands of AI, global warming, pandemics, or a combination of all three.
But does that mean I should lower my hands? Is God that nineteen-year-old in the back, smugly looking at me and not counting my praise because of my ignorance?
Obviously not! God wants that praise, naïve as that may be.
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I think of that time when a woman poured the perfume on Jesus’s feet, when some of those with him rebuked her, telling her she shouldn’t be doing that. She should give it to the poor or do something better with it. It was so wasteful, so naïve. What was Jesus’s response?
“Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish, but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”⁹
What she did for him was worship. Ignorant and naïve, perhaps. But Jesus honored it, promising her that this beautiful act would be an example for the rest of the world, for the rest of all time.
A colony of heaven…
Do you know what happened immediately after Jesus praised this woman with her wasteful and naïve worship?
Judas left and went to the chief priests in order to betray Jesus.
…in a land of death.
This death-dealing and life-giving have existed way longer than everything threatening us now.
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All those students last night are preparing to go into a world of death to share God’s life. They are naïve just like I am. None of us know how this whole thing will play out. We believe God is in control, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be suffering, that doesn’t mean there won’t be AI disasters, global warming catastrophes, or pandemic casualties. We are—all of us—venturing through a land of death.
BUT.
BUT.
BUT.
Each of those students is about to do what they do best: worship God by creating life. They will preach sermons and baptize parishioners and sit in hospital rooms. They will walk with counseling patients and fund non-profits and serve immigrants and the marginalized.
They will naïvely raise their hands like children and dance like old men and pour their perfume on the feet of Jesus, believing that small acts of extravagant love—of faithful living—make a difference.
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Someday Jesus will come back and turn all this death into life. Until then, I want to innocently and boldly lift my hands and dance, doing things that model this future world redeemed. I will kiss Lex and recruit future pastors and therapists and receive communion and clap as people are baptized. I will call my mom and hug my friends and go a little too hard at game night.
Maybe it is all a waste in the obliterating gaze of the apocalypse, but I believe it is worth it.
“Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”
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Two questions
1. If faith no longer means having all the answers, what does it mean for you to “stand” in faith when you are uncertain?
2. In the “land of death” we live in, where are you being invited to create or participate in life—even if part of you wonders whether it will make any difference?
