In recent years, more Christians are facing doubt than ever before. But their communities and leaders still haven’t learned how to respond to it. They’re still largely using the same toolbox they had in decades past. Let’s explore that toolbox—and see where it fails to fit into real-world doubters’ experiences.
(This post went live on Patreon on 7/11/2025. It was originally published in Ex-Communications on September 24, 2015; I’ve cleaned it up and adapted it for modern readers.)
The acceptable forms of doubt
In all too many Christian communities, doubt is only acceptable if:
- The person experiencing the doubt has perfectly pure motivations and is clearly only experiencing doubt as a direct result of incredibly strong religious convictions
- The doubt revolves around approved topics such as troublesome Bible verses or a specific doctrinal stances rather than the existence of the Christian god in the first place
- Everything’s resolved in a fairly short period of time and with very minimal fuss and disruption
- And the process ends with the doubter coming to the correct conclusions
If any one of those conditions isn’t met, especially that last one, Christians accuse doubters of dishonesty, impurity, rebelliousness, or worse. They may even end up getting kicked out of their group.
Doubt interferes with sales and retention
When Christians express deep doubt, the reactions of the people around them are predictable. Christian leaders take doubt very seriously. If they do not stamp it out quickly, the doubter can infect others. So when you see one Christian openly express feelings of doubt, before long another Christian will wander into the discussion to try to clear things up.
For all too many Christian leaders, self-interest guides their thinking. As Christian author Philip Yancey has written, they “tend to be propagandists.” These leaders’ job is selling their product to others and retaining existing customers. Doubt makes those tasks far more difficult.
Adding to the problem of doubt, Christians have long valued feelings of certainty over correctness. They rely heavily on trusting authority figures. They rarely if ever investigate miracle claims or wild testimonies.
To eliminate doubt, all Christians can offer at best is reassurance and solidarity. At worst, they offer emotional manipulation and shaming—with a dollop of “just do this” suggestions the doubter has likely already done without finding relief.
Curing doubt by going through the motions
By far the most common advice Christians offer doubters is to keep using the product no matter how they feel. They tell doubters that they’ll get back in the swing of things if they just keep Jesusing.
It’s hard to imagine advice more condescending: “Do more of the stuff that obviously didn’t work to keep you believing in the first place, and that’ll get you believing again!” And yet this is probably one of the most common suggestions that doubters will hear.
Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work.
When I deconverted, my then-husband Biff went into overdrive. To get me reconverted, he constantly invited me to church or to pray with him. He assumed that an emotional high would return me to faith. But my objections had absolutely nothing to do with feelings. They had to do with the Bible’s promises not lining up with reality. So even if I’d agreed to do those things, I wouldn’t have begun to believe again.
Incidentally, being told to “just pray more” backfired bigtime for me. When someone has noticed that prayer feels exactly like just talking to the ceiling, saying more prayers only reinforces that impression. And being told to read the Bible more often may lead the doubter to notice just how much of the Bible is nonsensical, barbaric, and decidedly non-divine.
Apologetics doesn’t cure doubt either
When a Christian starts to doubt, then apologetics books and videos seem to sprout from everywhere!
In January, an evangelical over at Stand to Reason, Tim Barnett, insisted that apologetics could have totally prevented one young man from deconverting. The young man had watched an atheist video on YouTube, and Barnett felt he would have known how to respond to the criticisms in the video if he’d only learned more apologetics. Unsurprisingly, Barnett just so happens to contribute apologetics videos to that site! He’s also contributed to a recently-published apologetics book!
Thanks to the huge number of their leaders selling apologetics products, Christians learn to tell doubters: “You should just read this book/watch this video/talk to this pastor or apologist.” They learn that this suggestion will cure even the most nagging questions.
It’s perfectly safe for apologetics sellers to teach them this. Existing Christians are the ones paying their bills, after all, not the heretics laughing at the idea of reading yet another book.
Unfortunately for these self-certain Christians, doubts often spring from a critical analysis of apologetics. (In the past couple of days, I’ve heard three deconversion stories that kicked off that way!) Often, doubts leap off into areas that apologetics simply can’t address without resorting to pseudoscience, logical fallacies, and junk history. So these suggestions can do more harm than good. Indeed, one often sees Christians lament that their deconverted spouses and children already know those arguments and therefore cannot be swayed by hearing them again. But little else remains in their toolbox.
To see these strategies in action, William Lane Craig wrote a post in 2013 containing almost all of them. In “Garbage In, Garbage Out,” he condemns the letter-writer (LW) feeling doubts for exposing him/herself to real science. Then, he praises his own brand of apologetics to the skies as the answer to doubt. After that, he lays out a 4-point strategy for how to deal with the doubt:
- Somehow manage “a recommitment of your heart to Christ”
- “Quit reading and watching the infidel material you’ve been absorbing”
- Double down on the apologetics
- Attend apologetics seminars and conferences
A lot of people rightly got upset with Craig for that post, but two years later he was still drilling down on all of it.
Naturally, when the doubter declines to keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results, that leads us to the next strategy: Blame.
If all else fails, Christians blame the doubter
When apologetics doesn’t work and doubters refuse to go through the motions anymore, Christians pivot to blaming them for incorrect beliefs or fervor. A quote by apologist and self-styled “Christian philosopher” Dallas Willard sums up the attitude here:
The issue is, what do we want? The Bible says that if you seek God with all your heart, then you will surely find him. Surely find him. It’s the person who wants to know God that God reveals himself to. And if a person doesn’t want to know God–well, God has created the world and the human mind in such a way that he doesn’t have to.
Most ex-Christians can easily say that yes, they did everything correctly. Yes, they had pure motivations. Yes, they really wanted to “seek God” with all their hearts. They truly did every single thing anybody could ever expect to find some good reason to believe. And they still didn’t “find God.” And when they say all of that, Christians will still accuse them of having done something terribly wrong.
The ex-Christians will be found at fault. What they did, their accusers cannot say. But obviously they did something wrong because the book they idolize says that anyone who truly “seeks God” will “find God.” If doubters did not “find God,” then obviously they weren’t looking very hard.
The message itself cannot be at fault, ever. It is always perfect and cannot be wrong. So if doubters fail to make the message work, then obviously they did something wrong. The only accepted failure in that equation is on the user side. Indeed, I found Willard’s quote used by numerous Christians online to blame doubters for Jesusing all wrong. On the site linked, its writer ends his post like this:
What do you want – evidence that God is who he says he is? Or are you holding out for reassurance that God probably isn’t there and will never bother you again?
Speaking of my own deconversion, I did not do anything like that. I completely earnestly tried my best and did everything my religious leaders advised for anyone facing a crisis of faith. It just didn’t work, that’s all. And yet I have been accused for decades of having Jesused wrong somehow because of apologists like Willard and Craig.
To be sure, though, Yahweh doesn’t actually “bother” anybody. He can’t. He’s as real as unicorn jelly. It’s his followers who do that.
The last-ditch tactic for doubt: Threats
One thing that has changed markedly in Christianity in the past ten years is the end-run game for doubt. When I initially began writing about religion, doubt itself was the problem. Going through motions was definitely still suggested, sure. But if the rest of the flock learned that was what the doubter was doing, they reacted poorly. Christians considered doubt itself a loss of faith, as one 2017 writer, Jesus Without Baggage, has noted.
Now, with Christianity facing marked decline in both numbers and cultural power, I see far more leeway extended to going through the motions of faith while having none. I’m not surprised in the least, either.
If doubters refuse to keep using the product, though, then there’s only one penalty for that sin: Hell. Going through the motions is fine. In fact, it’s completely laudable! Yahweh won’t mind at all. But he gets really mad when someone responds to doubt by withdrawing from the motions that meant nothing anyway.
That’s a ghastly threat to hold over Christians’ heads, isn’t it? If you can’t make your doubt go away somehow, then you will go to Hell.
Of course, along with the existential threat come other, more earthly ones: ostracism, loss of livelihood or family support, loss of one’s community, and more. These are less effective now than they were ten years ago, but still, at the very least many ex-Christians report losing friends and straining family relationships in the wake of deconversions.
For many doubters, this game of emotional chicken will work. It’ll bring them back into at least nominal compliance. They’ll stop talking about their doubts. But for many others, the tactic backfires by making them aware—as I became aware long ago—that their religion can’t possibly have any real evidence for itself if this is how Christians deal with doubt.
It’s little wonder so many Christians avoid engaging too much with doubt. Churches are the very last place for anyone to talk safely about having serious doubts. It’s always been that way. Church leaders may sometimes sound sad about that, but they sure haven’t changed their culture to handle doubters with more grace.
There’s a reason for that.
A given system’s purpose is what it actually does
We need to ask what reward Christians get by mistreating doubters and handling doubt so dishonestly. Their threats and accusations reveal something important about Christianity itself. How Christians handle doubt has a purpose—and that purpose involves control.
Christian culture teaches adherents exactly how to engage with doubt and with doubters. If their teachings didn’t result in something that feeds and rewards Christians somehow, they wouldn’t be doing it. If Christian leaders really wanted their religion to work in some other way, then they would have set it up to work that other way. To be sure, only leaders have the power to put big changes into motion.
Their leaders long ago set up these rules because in the past, these rules worked to keep doubters in the fold. If doubters can be kept spinning in circles trying to accomplish the impossible, then dissent can sometimes be averted entirely. And if it cannot be averted, then the rest of the tribe can be counted upon to shame and criticize the doubter. These tactics may work to keep doubters silent, at least. Other Christians will see this charade play out and may be prevented from questioning their indoctrination because they sure don’t want to experience that treatment!
But more and more often nowadays, these tactics don’t work to keep doubters busy and terrified. More and more often, the doubt doesn’t resolve in the acceptable way. And sometimes—not often but sometimes at least—the tribe doesn’t cooperate in shaming and blaming their doubting friends and loved ones.
The social costs of leaving the fold aren’t nearly as high as they used to be. They lessen with every single person who declares disbelief. And ex-Christians are getting more and more brave about challenging Christians’ assumptions that anyone who fails to resolve doubt simply Jesused all wrong.
It’s ironic in a way that Christians’ dishonesty around doubt is, itself, causing such a big part of their problem with fading dominance and eroded privilege.
They can’t engage with doubt honestly because doing that would open them to discoveries they can’t handle. But engaging with it dishonestly is causing more and more Christians to leave and more and more potential recruits to shy away from signing up.
It’s quite a bitter irony, isn’t it? A religion that places so much emphasis on certainty and answers ends up being the worst at providing either one.
NEXT UP: Speaking of serious doubts, we’ll explore a new TikTok trend that has right-wing Christians claiming that speaking in tongues is real. Stay tuned and we’ll see you soon! <3
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