A Review of Brian D. McLaren’s “Faith After Doubt”
A Weighty Tome
In my time as a practicing Christian, I’ve had some doubts about my faith and what I believe in. Sometimes, I have a hard time believing in the concept of God — especially since other religions have other gods (so which one is the true god?) and because God is someone or something you cannot see. At the same time, I have trouble with the theory of evolution. How was it that humans were created from a single cell mutating over time? That seems problematic to me. Still, if there is a God, who created God before God was created?
It is questions like these that make my head hurt from time to time. So you might say that a book such as Brian D. McLaren’s Faith After Doubt was made for me. I’m not so sure, though. The author is a (former?) evangelical Christian who works for the Center for Action and Contemplation, so the book appears to be — at least on the surface — targeted at evangelicals who are doubting their faith and want to leave thorny issues such as gay marriage behind them. That said, there’s stuff here that will appeal to Christians of all stripes but be prepared for a difficult read.
Faith After Doubt can be read over a few days, as it is short enough, but this is the sort of book that you might want to put down after a couple of chapters to think over the implications of what it’s trying to say. You might need to spend a good month with the book to suss out its nooks and crannies, and I feel that I might have to re-read the volume again later to get a handle on where it was going. Basically, the book introduces a schema of four stages that a maturing Christian will go through on the way to expressing their faith in their community. However, as McLaren notes, each stage in and of itself isn’t wholly bad or good in equal measure (which might, at first blush, be a way of saying that the book undermines itself at times).
I might not do the best job of this, but here’s what Faith After Doubt is trying to say. Essentially, most evangelical Christians are at Stage One, or Simplicity, where concepts are understood to be binary and are taught down to the Christian from an authority figure. Thus, you’re either good or evil, faithful or unfaithful and so on — so it goes around issues such as straight versus gay marriage. One is “good”, the other “sinful.” Stage Two, Complexity, is a kind of adolescence that the Christian moves into by looking for new leaders who will help augment their faith. They will start to think for themselves at the stage. Stage Three, called Perplexity, is kind of a fallow season for the Christian who goes out on their own to wrestle with their faith, leading to Step Four, or Harmony, where the Christian will view things through the prism of unconditional love and come to see that concepts such as God existing or not existing are the same.
That might be an oversimplified explanation of the main thrust of the book, and the book spends a lot of time in Stage Four and arguing for the need of a faith community to spring up and sustain Christians moving into this stage to, well, make the world a better place, it turns out. I found the book to be fascinating. I can see myself as being in Stage Two with a toe or two in Stage Three, but McLaren offers no quick fixes or How To’s in getting to Stage Four. All he says is that this is work that the individual will have to do by themselves. Fair enough, but I did feel that the book would have been strengthened by showing us what real love looks like in Stage Four for those of us who were raised in rather dysfunctional families.
Sure, McLaren throws around Bible and other quotes to illustrate what Stage Four is like, but it felt rather abstract to me. If this is something I need to work toward on my own, it might be good to have a few examples of what it is that I’m supposed to be working towards! (This is a criticism I have for the Center for Action and Contemplation at large: I’ve joined their e-mail list on the advice of my Stage Four pastor looking for spiritually nourishing content to read first thing in the morning, but I find much of the essays on the list to be rather obtuse and hard to parse for those of us without Divinity degrees.)
All in all, I’m not sure what to think about this book. For the most part, though with a few exceptions, my questions were answered. (And any questions left unanswered might have arisen from the explanations McLaren gave to the original questions I had.) I also thought that the author’s rationale was sound — though I don’t think it is concrete. After all, are there only four stages of spiritual growth? What about the Donald Trumps and Hitlers of the world? If they were moved to doubt by Christianity, why is it that they would become who they are and not progress from a Stage One to a Stage Two and so on? Thus, the book is probably not perfect and doesn’t offer the one size fits all solution to toxic Christianity that it promises to be.
However, all of that said, this is an intriguing book and one worth reading and thinking about on a deep level. As this book seemingly points out, I don’t deny the fact that Christians need to practice the teachings of Jesus more than they probably are in their day-to-day lives by perusing social justice goals in their communities, for instance. I know I’m one of them. Whether or not, though, Faith After Doubt will resonate with you probably hinges on the fact that you have any doubts at all as a Christian. For all its seemingly imperfection, Faith After Doubt is a book that is probably best experienced in a group setting where you can talk about it. It got me using my gray matter, at least — a refreshing concept for a book about Christianity. Finally, a book that doesn’t talk down to you, but a book that talks with you. For that, Faith After Doubt is a relief.
Brian D. McLaren’s Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do About It will be published by St. Martin’s Press on January 5, 2021.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
