“‘Substantive doubt’ is part of the life of faith.”

I have always wrestled with my faith and when my husband suddenly left our fundamental religion six years ago, stumbling from Mormon to Christian to agnostic to atheist over the course of a year, we both found ourselves in the depths of doubt and uncertainty.

In the beginning, with stories of divorce and infidelity, I kept hearing and reading the phrase “faith crisis.” The word “crisis” made me think of eminent peril or some life-threatening condition that we were not equipped to “fix,” something that would trick us into betrayal and affairs and make us not ourselves.

In time, however, I was led to the book Stages of Faith by James Fowler. I cannot express how this book healed, changed, and empowered me. It helped me re-image faith and realize that faith is ever-changing and evolving just like our emotional, relational, and sexual development. It helped me realize that faith is a human phenomenon; it is the search for profound and ultimate meaning and how we choose to express that meaning. Just as we transform through human development, our faith transforms and evolves through faith development. In the book, Fowler uses the human development models of Erikson, Piaget, and Kohlberg to better understand and identify faith by stages. I realized that Steve and I weren’t having a “faith crisis,” but a natural faith maturation.

Fowler’s research demonstrates that “when our deeply invested henotheistic ‘god’ fails us or collapses, it results in dislocation, pain, and despair. Only with the death of our previous image can a new and more adequate one arise. Thus, ‘substantive doubt’ is part of the life of faith” (31). In other words, when our childhood faith fails, when the ‘god’ we were given by our family and tribe dies, we grieve and then build something new, something that makes sense to us with the doubt that collapsed our faith. Therefore, doubt is not only normal, it is vital in development. This book was clarifying and validating and gave me language that had been missing from my lexicon.

Doubt, as a word, transformed into something new and beautiful. And not just a beautiful and necessary part of moving from one stage of faith to another, but the means of movement. This perspective helped me realize that my husband and I were not going to unknowingly divorce because of our doubt, doubt doesn’t take our choices from us, it illuminates the possibilities and opportunities that we have. With our faith transitions, our relationship changed; our doubt moved us into a place with more choices and more freedom. Divorce was definitely an option but not one we wanted to make. This faith transition gave us the opportunity to choose each other again and again; certainty had trapped us with one option but doubt gave us infinity.

Not only were we re-imaging faith, but we started re-imaging our relationship and ourselves. There was “dislocation, pain, and despair” as we let go of our past, and embraced creativity, healing, and freedom as we moved forward. Surprisingly, doubt brings deep meaning to me personally. It allows me to be creative in where and how I find meaning; it encourages me to be active and learning; it invites me to explore myself and my world and the people I love. I’m not afraid of doubt anymore: doubt is our inner self searching for truth, questioning what we’ve been given, and trusting our soul to follow a path that is our own. Doubt has taught my husband and me to listen to and love ourselves, and by extension, each other. I am no longer afraid of my doubt or anyone else’s.

Contrastingly, nihilism is the thought that life is void of meaning. Fowler argues that nihilism, and not doubt, is the opposite of faith. When I heard “faith crisis,” I thought there were only two endings: going back to where we had been (impossible option), or the death of faith: nihilism (tragic option), but I was wrong. Steve and I both created something meaningful and different in the debris of “our previous image” of faith because “only with the death of our previous image can a new and more adequate one arise.” We didn’t absolve all meaning because we explored our doubt, we found more.

Steve and I are different in so many more ways than just faith. The phrase “faith crisis” made us fear our differences and how we find meaning in different ways, but through our doubt, we have learned to celebrate them: I believe in the human magic of language, nature as a teacher, and the power of women; Steve finds meaning in laughter, sex, and the immense power of his body. We are learning to love and explore our differences and allowing each other to find meaning in our own ways: I can choose to attend church and Steve can choose to have his name removed from the records.

The phrase “faith crisis” made us believe that our doubt would create a cavernous gorge in our marriage, but it didn’t. It made a slight avalanche, maybe an earthquake that changed the landscape of our relationship and our faith, and it also allowed us to acknowledge our differences and choose each other, know each other, and listen to each other for reals.