In recent decades, an alphabet soup of terminology has arisen to describe the smorgasbord of trends that include faith and doubt, growing secularism, people leaving faith and the church, eclectic spirituality, growing indifference or hostility to religion, the rise of agnosticism and atheism, and so on. The labels have proliferated: nones, dones, nonverts, New Atheists, unaffiliated, unchurched, dechurched, exvangelicals, and the like. I would like to add one more: yearners.
Yearners show up in several of the above categories, but they are a demographic unto themselves. Yearners are not hardcore skeptics. They live in the borderlands between fully committed faith and full disbelief—just inside the border or just outside, only God knows which. One of their defining qualities is restlessness. Another is psychological and spiritual pain. As Blaise Pascal, a patron saint of yearners, put it, “Seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied.”
Yearners are attracted to faith, but they are also wary of it. They want more belief, more of God than they have, but obstacles stand in the way—some external, some internal. Some people call these people “doubters” and suggest they should simply get over their issues and accept what the Bible says. It’s not unlike an adult standing behind a frightened child at the end of a high diving board who says, “It won’t hurt, kid. Quit stalling. Just jump.” Easy to say, but not so easy to accomplish for the jumper. Yearners deserve better. God calls to them and the church needs them.
I want to distinguish between struggling to believe and disbelief, which is why I believe a fairer and more accurate term for those contesting within themselves for faith is yearners. I derived the term from an observation made by author Leonard Kriegel in an interview with journalist Dan Wakefield: “I wouldn’t call myself a believer but a man yearning for belief—which is why I also wouldn’t call myself a nonbeliever.”
This is a position for which I have great respect and sympathy. In fact, I’ve been something of a yearner myself. As a young man, I made my search for God not a matter of faith but a misguided search for certainty, a matter of abstract, intellectual inquiry. Momentum kept me in the faith, but doubt kept me near the edges.
Simply put, yearners are earnestly searching for a meaningful relationship with transcendence—most often with the God of the Bible. The desired fruits of that relationship with God include peace, belonging, meaning, significance, stability, confidence about the future, and more—all wrapped up in the concept of love given and received.
But this yearning is often associated with some level of anxiety or impeded hopefulness. Yearners’ desire for God, sometimes as diffuse as simply a desire for “something more,” is sincere but is also frustrated because it is left unfulfilled. Something always seems to be in the way, blocking yearners from what—or who—they desire.
These roadblocks might include intellectual objections, familial or other biographical wounds, church wounds, societal pressures (like negative stereotypes of religion in general and Christians in particular), one’s psychological makeup (such as fear of change, risk aversion, or indecisiveness), and so on. Uncommitted yearners, especially, are held back by the haunting question “What if it isn’t true?” Ultimately, choosing God and faith in God involves the will, and human wills are notoriously vacillating (James 1:8).
I believe that yearners fall into two general categories: the committed and the uncommitted. Committed yearners can still affirm faith in God even though they struggle significantly with doubts, and uncommitted yearners cannot commit to faith even though they may believe in God’s existence (as a great percentage of nonreligious Americans do) and wish for a relationship with God, often intensely.
The key distinction is not in the questioning, which is common to both groups and to all expressions of faith, but rather in the commitment. Doubts about God’s existence, God’s goodness, God’s presence, and God’s caring are the common stuff of faithful lives throughout the Bible and church history. Troubled relationships with God—from David to Peter, Paul to Pascal, Søren Kierkegaard to Mother Teresa—are as common as weeds in a garden. They are part of being human.
Doubting, by definition, is having misgivings about truth claims. It is a morally and philosophically neutral term, and its usefulness depends on what is being doubted, for what reasons, in what spirit, and with what results. Such doubt is often depicted heroically (sometimes foolishly so) in both Christian and secular circles.
But I learned one thing early in my childhood about doubting: Don’t do it in church. In my experience, doubting—or even just asking too many questions—was equated with disbelief, and, well, we all knew the consequences of disbelief. For many believers, faith is the melody and doubt the counterpoint—sometimes harmonious and sometimes dissonant. Genuine faith is compatible with doubt and hard questions, yet it is not compatible with a lasting unwillingness to commit.
Both committed and uncommitted yearners have questions besides the purely philosophical ones. They ask moral and practical questions such as “What about the failures of Christians—in history and now?” “What about hypocrites and charlatans and scoundrels within the church?” “What about how I was treated—by family, friends, or church people?” “Why doesn’t God make himself plain?”
The Bible has stories about both committed and uncommitted yearners. The most famous of the first is found in Mark 9. A man begs Jesus to heal his son, preceding the request with a caveat—“if you can” (v. 22, NLT throughout). Jesus does not ignore the doubt, answering with a mild reprimand, “Anything is possible if a person believes” (v. 23). The father gives a yearner’s reply: “I do believe, but help me overcome my unbelief!” (v. 24).
This father’s response was at the same time honest, desperate, hopeful, and committed. He knew intellectually that it was possible that Jesus might not or could not do what he so desperately wished. He was honest enough to admit his mix of belief and skepticism, even to the one who could reject him for it, but was committed enough both to accept Jesus’ assertion that all is possible with belief and to ask Jesus to strengthen his own belief. He struggles with faith but commits to it anyway. (Did he become a follower of Jesus? We don’t know.)
A Poet for ‘Bruised Evangelicals’
The Bible also has examples of uncommitted yearners. One is found in the story of the rich young ruler in the very next chapter of the Gospel of Mark. The ruler asks Jesus, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (10:17). But when Jesus answers his question in a way he doesn’t expect or like, he turns away, presumably because he prizes his rule-keeping and his wealth above the call to follow Christ.
For modern examples of yearners, consider poets. Poets have a unique ability to explore with powerful yet precise language the hinterlands and boundaries of faith. Consider the story of yearner-poet Anne Sexton—a flamboyant and controversial poet of the mid-20th century. She was a nonideological feminist, a taboo breaker, and a woman who was fiercely honest (including about her own failures) and reckless with her own life. She desperately wanted to both believe in God (which she did) and commit to a life of faith (which she often couldn’t).
God is a familiar figure in her poems, sometimes in passing but often as the main focus. One of her many published collections is titled The Awful Rowing Toward God. Each word of the title is revelatory. God is the goal, but rowing is not easy.
In the first poem in that collection, “Rowing,” she says,
God was there like an island I had not rowed to,
still ignorant of Him, my arms and my legs worked …
I am rowing, I am rowingthough the oarlocks stick and are rusty …
but I am rowing, I am rowing.
As her title indicates, this venture is “awful” in all the senses of the word. It is full of awe and also of awfulness, the self-perceived awfulness of her life—full of addictions, mental breakdowns, promiscuity, divorce, abortion, self-promotion, and self-hatred—contrasted with the awesomeness of God and of the attempt to find him.
And then that ambivalent word toward—a rowing toward God, yearning for God, and for the embrace and restoration of God, but only “toward,” for the poem ends this way:
This is my tale which I have told,
If it be sweet, if it be not sweet …
This story ends with me still rowing.
Sexton had not arrived at the island by the end of the poem, written late in her life. Yet the last poem in the Rowing collection, “The Rowing Endeth,” shows her finally arriving and playing a game of poker with God. She believes she has won because she holds “a royal straight flush,” but God “wins because He holds five aces.” An impossible hand, of course. God has cheated, which is then accompanied by his laughter in which all nature and then the speaker herself join.
Is Sexton suggesting that God’s cheating by doing the impossible—playing an unannounced “wild card”—is actually for her benefit? If God wins, does he win her soul, the prize for which the game is played? Or if she wins, does she seemingly defeat God and thereby lose everything for which she has yearned? And what does that “wild card” fifth ace signify?
The last stanza of this final poem in the Rowing collection suggests that the wild card is God’s love:
Dearest dealer,
I with my royal straight flush,
love you so for your wild card,that untamable, eternal,
gut-driven ha-ha
and lucky love.
If this is truly Sexton’s last word on the matter—and if such a revelation was sustained by some level of enduring commitment—then perhaps she was a committed yearner after all. I hope this is so. But in other poems and statements, Sexton so often expresses a desperate faith and then takes it back that only God knows (and only God needs to know) where she finally stood in the end.
After many suicide attempts throughout her life, Anne Sexton finally succeeded at the age of 45—not long after writing these poems. I do not say she killed herself because she did not commit to God. I only say that she yearned intensely for God, which is not the same thing as having faith in God.
A few years before her death, she said, “There is a hard-core part of me that believes, and there’s this little critic in me that believes nothing.” Which part of her won in the end?
In an earlier poem, “With Mercy for the Greedy,” she contemplates
a crucifix:
True. There is
a beautiful Jesus.
He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef.
How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in!
How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes!
But I can’t. Need is not quite belief.
“Need is not quite belief” is a heartbreaking description of the uncommitted yearner. Before you think disparagingly of anyone called a doubter, think of Anne Sexton.
For every yearner-poet such as Anne Sexton whose final landing place is ambiguous, there are examples of committed yearners. Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, R. S. Thomas, and Christian Wiman are among them.
Traditionally, the church has not done well by yearners, at least not my churches. My childhood Christian subculture called people with too many questions “doubters” and mistakenly equated doubting with disbelief. The more progressive wing of the church, on the other hand, is often happy to welcome doubts but at its extremes fails to defend even the central tenets of biblical faith.
All yearners need to be shown understanding and compassion as well as encouragement to accept the risks and rewards of commitment to the God of the Bible.
Sexton once met a priest who offered an example of exactly that. In an interview with Gregory Fitz Gerald, Sexton recounted her conversation with the elderly priest about her struggle to believe in God:
I said to Father Dunn, “Look, I’m not sure I believe in God, anyway.” And he was sitting there just reading my poems to me, and he said, “Your typewriter is your altar.” I said, “I can’t go to church. I can’t pray.” He said, “Your poems are your prayers.” He was not a particularly intellectual person, but he was wise enough merely to read my poems back to me, to fill me with hope. As he left me he said “… Come on back to the typewriter!” And I said, “Pray for me.” He said, “No, you pray for me.”
I don’t believe the priest was saying, “Writing poems will save you.” I think he was saying, “Your poems are the vehicle by which you are honestly searching for God. God is using them in your life. Keep writing. Keep searching.” Note her response to the priest’s words: “hope.”
AlamyDuring my own long season of yearning as a young man, mine was an attenuated, theoretical faith at best. Providentially, I discovered writers like Pascal, Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, Solzhenitsyn, and Flannery O’Connor. They helped me with my intellectual questions, but more importantly they modeled lives of commitment, combining the mind, heart, and will. As did important friends and mentors, including my wife, Jayne.
The Christian church can do better by its yearners. It needs more people like Anne Sexton’s priest, someone who combined wisdom, compassion, and humility.
Here are a few brief, unelaborated suggestions.
Change the vocabulary. Using the doubter label suggests a disease that can be “cured” through proper “treatment.” It sounds like an accusation or a legal charge rather than an invitation to dialogue.
Listen to yearners sympathetically before you preach to or argue with them apologetically. Before you “solve” their problems, respect their stories. Ethical storytelling demands that we must listen to others’ stories if we expect them to listen to ours. If we listen to them with understanding and compassion, uncommitted yearners may be more likely to commit.
Treat a yearner as a Thomas, not a Judas. Thomas stayed committed despite his understandable doubts. Thomas chose to stay within the community. And the community chose to keep him with them. In fact, it was within the community that Thomas had his questions answered. A yearner seeks to be a committed Thomas—so offer help (Jude 1:22).
Finally, live out the Bible that you say you believe. Consider that the way you live could be the evidence of faith a yearner is seeking. Live out your faith, individually and collectively, in such a winsome, servant-hearted, truthful, and grace-filled manner that the yearner will find the gospel attractive and convincing.
Whenever you doubt or listen to the doubts of others, think not of doubting Thomas but of courageous Thomas, who tradition says spread the gospel as far as India where he was martyred. Think of Pascal, think of Mother Teresa, think of Anne Sexton, think of me—yearners all.
Daniel Taylor is the author of The Myth of Certainty, The Skeptical Believer, and four novels. His next book is Believing Again: Stories of Leaving and Returning to Faith (2025, Wipf and Stock).
This article appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Not None, Not Done".
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