You’re not crazy

Brian McLaren

Since my February 13 blogpost in which I looked forward to Brian McLaren’s latest book Faith After Doubt (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2021), I have spent many happy hours thinking over the 238 pages he devotes to this intriguing topic.

I also became deeply engaged in a Porter Books Zoom conversation shared by McLaren and the humanist chaplain at Harvard and MIT, Greg Epstein, during which they called for readers’ involvement on many levels in what turned out to be a spirited debate.

The Zoomers left us in no doubt that Christianity is going through a meat-grinder, but that devoted Christians should recognize the danger of too vigorously shutting out doubts that are natural to many of us. What we need, they said, is constructive help in getting back to the shared high goal of a unified version of faith.

Too many Christians, they suggested, are obsessed with too high a loyalty to beliefs that cause others to view them as “useful idiots” who are easy to manipulate.

Such Christians, they said, need to associate themselves with a God who is less patriarchal and more flexible, and can help them become the most loving version of themselves possible.

“Right now,” says McLaren in his preface to Faith After Doubt, “let’s grant one another permission to doubt. And let’s see the doubt in ourselves and each other not as a fact or a failure to be ashamed of, but as an inescapable dimension of having faith and being human, and more: as an opportunity for honesty, courage, virtue, and growth, including faith itself.”

If you thought life before doubt was good, McLaren concludes, wait until you see where doubt can lead you and what doubt can teach you.

His new book is personal and gently convincing, mainly because McLaren has just the right credentials to handle the challenges Christians of all ages and in many countries are facing in these restless times.

Twenty-four years leading a non-denominational, innovative community church, took him to the edge of the pastoral trenches, and we know he speaks from intimate experience when he shares the lessons to be learned from others’ frustrations and triumphs.

His accounts match the observation of a preacher McLaren respects, Dr. Jacqui Lewis, who suggests that the stories people gravitate to are the ones that make sense to them, stories that fit, stories that feel they have continuity, connection to the past, where they’ve been. 

Lewis says people are looking for the story that doesn’t necessarily change their minds; they’re looking for stories that clarify what’s in their minds.

And that’s precisely how McLaren goes to work. He is an understanding friend from Page One, and perfectly sums things up in a chapter titled You’re Not Crazy and You’re Not Alone: 

“Doubt need not be the death of faith,” he writes. “It can be, instead, the birth of a new kind of faith, a faith beyond beliefs, a faith that expresses itself in love, a deepening and expanding faith that can save your life and save the world.”

Clearly, we have work to do!