Can You Doubt and Still Be a Christian?
Yes — and Here's Why the Question Itself is an Act of Faith
Can you doubt and still be a Christian? It's one of the most searched questions in faith spaces and often one of the least honestly answered. Most responses go one of two directions: either "doubt is dangerous, get back to certainty" or "doubt everything until nothing is left." Neither of those is actually helpful.
In this episode of Hey Tabi, Tabitha Westbrook sits down with Elizabeth Woodson — author of Habits of Resistance, podcaster, and one of the sharpest Bible teachers around — to talk about what it actually means to hold doubt and faith at the same time, what faithful questioning looks like, why the wrestle is often the point, and how to find your way back to God when the people who were supposed to represent Him caused the wound.
This post isn't a recap of that conversation, though. It's actually an invitation to go deeper — to press on the ideas, sit with the questions, and find what might shift for you.
Can You Doubt & Still Be a Christian? The Church Sometimes Gets This Wrong.
Many of us grew up in faith communities where uncertainty was treated like a character flaw or equated to whether or not you were even born again or saved. You either had strong faith or you had weak faith(and weak faith was equated to no faith), and asking hard questions was evidence of the latter. The implicit message? Get to certainty fast, and stay there.
But if you're asking whether you can doubt and still be a Christian, the answer is not just yes — it's that doubt has always been part of the story. The Psalms are full of lament and raw anger at God or at horrible circumstances. Job doesn't get tidied up. Thomas doubts. Peter denies. The disciples on the road to Emmaus are walking away from Jerusalem in grief and confusion — and Jesus walks with them anyway. And He also takes the time to lean in and open up the Scriptures for them. They even say afterward, “Didn’t our hearts burn within us as He spoke?!”
Elizabeth Woodson, as she often does, puts it plainly: God is big enough for the tension. He is not threatened by our hard questions. He is not waiting for us to arrive at certainty before He will engage with us.
"The journey and the wrestle is the point. It shows us so much about who God is and helps us adjust our expectations." — Elizabeth Woodson
Something to Sit With
Think about a question you've been afraid to bring to God. What's the actual fear underneath it — that He won't answer, that the answer will be devastating, that asking the question means your faith is broken, or even that God doesn’t actually care?
Here's what's true: you can doubt and still be a Christian. You can wrestle and still be held. The question itself might be the most honest thing you've brought to God in a long time. And we can’t seek Him if we aren’t being honest with Him.
When the Wound Came From Inside the Church — and You Still Want to Believe
This is one of the hardest kinds of spiritual injury: when the harm comes at the hands of someone who claimed to speak for God. A pastor. A spouse who weaponized scripture. An entire community that used theology as a tool of control.
Tabitha names it plainly in the episode: it will rattle your faith. And of course it will! If someone who was supposed to represent Jesus was actually a source of harm, it makes complete sense that your image of God got tangled up in the wreckage.
However, what was done to you in God's name is not the same thing as who God is. And you can reorient yourself to God, the real, Living God who looks nothing like those who harmed you.
Elizabeth points people back to the Gospels for this — specifically, the Gospel of Luke — because Jesus repeatedly shows up for the people society had written off. He stops in the middle of a crowd to make time for a woman who'd been bleeding for twelve years. Can you imagine? Twelve years of being cast out and ostracized, believing she was broken and could never be whole.
He talks to her. He honors her. He doesn't rush past her to get to the more important thing.
"Hang out with Jesus for a little bit and see if he changes your opinion of what it means to draw near to God." — Elizabeth Woodson
Something to Try
Read Luke 8:40-48 — the story of the woman with the issue of blood. If you’ve read it before, try to read it like you’ve never even seen it before. Sit with the detail that Jesus didn't have to stop. He was on his way somewhere. He stopped anyway.
Ask yourself honestly: Does this feel true to the God you've been told about? Or does it show you something you haven't been shown before?
There's More Room in the Faith Than You May Realize
One of the most freeing ideas in this conversation: Christianity is a house with many rooms. You may have grown up in one — charismatic, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Episcopal, non-denominational — and come to believe that the room was the whole house.
It's not.
If you're asking whether you can doubt and still be a Christian, part of the answer might be that you've been trying to stay Christian inside a room that was too small for you. You don't have to leave the house to find more space. Seek out teachers you've never heard. Ways of engaging scripture that crack open something locked for years. Traditions that have held faithful believers who asked hard questions for centuries.
Tabitha adds her own thread here: she's been reading the Bible cover to cover every year for 26 years, and she keeps reading in different translations — because familiar text can go flat, and a fresh rendering can make it land differently. De-familiarize. Get curious again.
Questions Worth Asking
What theological assumptions did I absorb without choosing them?
Have I ever read the Bible in a translation that felt alive to me, rather than just familiar?
Is there a theological tradition I've written off that I've never actually investigated?
God in the Old Testament: Not Who You Were Told
Here's a common wound in people who've been hurt by religion: they love the Jesus of the Gospels but are terrified of the God of the Old Testament because He’s been cast as angry, punishing and unpredictable.
Tabitha challenges this gently but directly and invites us all to go back and read it again. Look at Genesis 3 — not chapter three as the moment everything fell apart, but as the moment God started showing up for people in the middle of the mess.
“Where are you?” God's question to Adam and Eve isn't the tone of an angry dad about to ground someone. It's longing. It's tender. It's the sound of someone searching for people they love. And then, before they're sent out of the garden, God makes them clothes. He tenderly provides for people who just betrayed Him.
Elizabeth takes it further: by chapter four, God is still talking to Cain. Still trying to guide him. Still present with people who keep choosing against Him. That's not the portrait of an angry, distant God. That's a God who keeps showing up and invites to know Him.
"He just keeps showing up for people who are consistent in not being faithful to him, and that speaks loudly of how he's going to show up in our lives." — Elizabeth Woodson
The Busy Work of Not Healing
This one's for anyone who's been in survival mode, filling every hour with activity because being still means being with the pain.
Elizabeth wrote her book Habits of Resistance out of her own experience of grief after losing someone she cared deeply for. She found herself overscheduling, overachieving, running toward busyness because it felt like a more survivable path than sitting in it. She discovered it’s not.
Tabitha names what she sees in her clients, particularly those coming out of abusive relationships: the moment they finally get their autonomy back, they can exhaust themselves trying to heal. Pulling in every resource. Taking every path at once. And paradoxically, crushing themselves under the weight of it.
Healing requires presence. It requires actually being with yourself. And for a lot of people, especially those who've been harmed in faith spaces, that includes the question: Do I even believe God wants to be with me?
A Slow Question
What is busyness protecting you from right now? Name it, even just to yourself.
And then ask: What would it feel like to bring that thing to God, not polished, not resolved, just as it is?
How to Treat Yourself the Way God Treats You
One of the most quietly devastating moments in the episode is when Tabitha shares what her own therapist asked her years ago: How would you treat you if you were married to you?
Oof. That question landed hard. Because most people who have internalized harm — from abusive relationships, from controlling faith communities, from years of being told they weren't enough — would never treat another living person the way they speak to themselves.
Elizabeth connects this directly to theology: if we love God's creation, we ought to love the way God loves, and that includes ourselves. The command to “love your neighbor as yourself” has always implied that you will, in fact, love yourself. It's not a bonus step; it's the baseline.
This matters for the healing process because how you treat yourself is, in many ways, a window into how you believe God sees you. If you're convinced you don't deserve gentleness, you're probably not convinced God would offer it either.
One Practice
This week, catch yourself in a moment of harsh self-talk.
Then ask: Would I say this to someone I love? And if not, what's the kinder, truer thing?
The Problem with Charisma Without Character
Tabitha and Elizabeth don't shy away from the hard conversation about institutional church — specifically, the damage done when charisma is confused with calling, and when skill fills seats faster than character can be verified.
Tabitha's work in abuse and coercive control spaces puts her face-to-face with the aftermath: families scarred by leaders who could say all the right things but whose moral character was a different story. Elizabeth names the structural problem: prestige culture, celebrity pastors, megachurch economics — these create conditions where the right decision (such as removing a harmful leader) is the costly one, and institutions often choose the costly thing less.
Both women are clear: this is not a condemnation of the church. It's a call for the church to take discipleship seriously. Real discipleship, not just information transfer, but formation. The question isn't how many baptisms a church does; it's who are these people, and do they look like Jesus?
"The way you live your life tells a story about what you believe." — Elizabeth Woodson
Worth Asking in Your Own Community
How does our church vet and disciple leaders before placing them in authority?
Is there genuine accountability for those in power, or is accountability applied selectively?
What mechanisms exist for the people in the pews to raise concerns safely?
Jonah and the Unanswered Question
If you've been in the church for any length of time, you probably think you know the story of Jonah. A man runs from God. A fish. Three days. Nineveh. The end.
Elizabeth has been teaching through it slowly, and what she found will recalibrate the story for you. Jonah isn't primarily a story about obedience. It's a story about the limits of a person's compassion — and the limitlessness of God's.
The book ends with a question. God asks Jonah whether he has any right to be angry that Nineveh was spared. And then... the book just ends. No answer. No resolution. The question hangs there on purpose.
Elizabeth sees it as an invitation: God doesn't find another prophet. He keeps trying to reach Jonah. The question is an open door, not a verdict. For anyone who's ever run from God, or been so angry at grace being extended to people who don't deserve it (maybe in your own estimation), or found yourself sitting outside a city waiting for it to burn that unanswered question might be meant for you too.
Read Jonah Fresh
If you have twenty minutes, read all four chapters of Jonah in a translation you've never used. Read it as literature, not as a children's story or like something you’ve never heard before. Notice whose side you're on. Notice what bothers you about it. Those reactions are worth sitting with.
So — Can You Doubt and Still Be a Christian?
Yes. Completely. Without asterisks.
This episode isn't offering you a formula for getting your faith back. It's offering you permission to be honest about where you actually are.
You can doubt and still be a Christian. You can love Jesus and still have hard questions. You can be done with a particular version of church and still be held by God. You can be angry, confused, grieving, or cautious. God can handle all of that. He has been doing it since Genesis 3.
The wrestle is not the opposite of faith. For a lot of people, the wrestle is the most faithful thing they've done in years.
You can doubt and still be a Christian. The question isn't whether you're allowed to ask. It's whether you're willing to let the asking take you somewhere.
READY TO STOP WRESTLING ALONE?
Doubt and trauma don't have to be carried in isolation. If you're in the middle of your own wrestle — healing from church hurt, spiritual abuse, or a traumatic experience that's shaken your faith and your footing — The Journey and The Process exists for you.
We offer counseling and coaching for men and women working through the hard, necessary work of trauma recovery. Not a quick fix. Not cheap comfort. Real, grounded support for the road you're actually on.
Learn more at thejourneyandtheprocess.com
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE
Hear the full conversation with Elizabeth Woodson on the Hey Tabi podcast, available on all major podcast platforms and on The Journey and The Process YouTube channel.
Find Hey Tabi at: tabithawestbrook.com/heytabi
ABOUT ELIZABETH WOODSON
Elizabeth Woodson is an author, speaker, and Bible teacher. Her book Habits of Resistance: Seven Ways You're Being Formed by Culture and Gospel Practices to Help You Push Back is available in print and audiobook. She is passionate about discipleship, women in ministry, and helping people understand the whole story of Scripture.
ABOUT TABITHA WESTBROOK
Tabitha Westbrook is a licensed trauma professional specializing in trauma, domestic abuse, coercive control, and complex trauma. She hosts the Hey Tabi podcast and creates content for people navigating harm in faith communities. Her work bridges clinical expertise and pastoral care. She’s also the author of Body & Soul, Healed & Whole: An Invitational Guide to Healthy Sexuality After Trauma, Abuse, and Coercive Control, available wherever books are sold.
By the way—I’m not AI.
AI can be a useful tool; however, I am an actual human. I do love a good m dash, ellipses, and semicolon. I will never give up the Oxford comma. I just want you to know I’m an actual person here writing and sharing. I know the amount of AI-generated stuff out there can be mind numbing, so I want you to know I’m actual flesh and blood sharing my expertise and wisdom.
