Doubt

This book is my heartfelt appeal to the world: let us all keep living in love and wonder. To do that, we have to allow ourselves to be wrong, to heal, and to stop hurting others. We also have to be honest with ourselves.

Doubt is a personal book. It begins in a small Quaker church in rural Oregon and follows one life through the Jesus Movement of the 1970s, the pulpit, the religious right's political rise, a near-fatal car accident, and the long, lonely road out of certainty. Along the way I became something I didn't expect: a believing agnostic. I can't prove God exists. I believe anyway.

Reason and faith each have their own work. Agnosticism concerns what we know; faith concerns what we don't. When faith tries to do reason's job, or reason tries to do faith's, we get into trouble. When either one becomes certain, we get into danger. Theism and atheism are both conclusions of faith, and the arrogance of the zealot and the scoffer comes from the same place: being sure.

As a historian, I also look at how American Christianity fused faith with political power, and what that certainty has cost us. Then I turn to the harder question of how we should live: with kindness, restorative justice, and the humility to admit we might be wrong.

The book is framed by Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov, the doubter and the believer who part as brothers without either one winning the argument. That is my hope for us. I am not trying to convert anyone. To my atheist friends and my believing ones: I am here as your brother, not your enemy.