Prayer for Faith & Doubt

Requests from people whose faith has gone quiet, or who are asking questions they were told not to ask. Doubt is welcome on this page.

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Doubt is welcome on this page. Not tolerated, not treated as a phase to be prayed out of — welcome. A large number of people carrying serious questions about what they believe have nowhere to say so, because the places built for faith are often the places where admitting to its absence costs the most.

The requests here take a few recognisable shapes. Someone whose prayers have felt like talking to an empty room for two years. Someone who was hurt by a church and cannot separate that from God. Someone who still turns up every Sunday and has not believed any of it since a particular week in March. Someone who never had faith and finds themselves wanting it.

None of that is a disqualification from praying. A prayer that begins I am not sure you are there is still a prayer, and it is a more honest one than most.

How people pray when faith has gone quiet

The most common prayer here is addressed tentatively — to whoever might be listening, or into the silence, with the question of who is on the other end left open. There is a long tradition of exactly this. Some of the most-quoted lines in scripture are complaints about God's absence, said directly to God.

People also pray about their anger, particularly the ones who were badly treated by a church. Separating what was done by people from the thing they claimed to represent is slow and painful work, and it does not happen by being told to. Praying through it is one of the few places it can be done without someone defending the institution.

And some pray simply to keep the habit alive through a stretch where it means nothing. Turning up without feeling anything is not hypocrisy. It is what most people who came out the other side of a long dry period actually did.

When it feels like nobody is listening

God, if you are there. I have been saying this into the quiet for a long time now and I have stopped expecting an answer. I am not asking for a sign. I am asking not to give up on the asking yet. Amen.

When the church has been the problem

Lord, I cannot separate you from what was done to me in your name. I do not know how to walk into a building like that again. If there is something on the other side of that anger, let me get to it in my own time, and do not let anyone rush me. Amen.

For someone who wants to believe

Father, I do not have this and I would like to. I have read the arguments and they do not settle it. If there is a way in that is not an argument, show it to me. I am not going to pretend to be further along than I am. Amen.

What helps besides praying

Find one person who will not panic. Doubt spoken aloud to somebody who immediately tries to fix it goes back underground and gets worse. What most people need is somebody who can hear it without flinching.
Read the doubters. The Psalms and Job are full of people asking exactly these questions, at length, without being corrected. It matters that the tradition kept them in.
Separate the questions. Being angry at a church, finding a doctrine implausible, and feeling nothing when you pray are three different problems that get mistaken for one, and they have different answers.
If the dryness came with exhaustion, low mood, or something that happened, treat that as a real possibility. Faith often goes quiet for reasons that are not about faith.

Questions people ask

Is doubt a sin?: No. Doubt is a normal part of a long faith and it appears throughout the text without being condemned. What is described as dangerous is pretending — maintaining a performance while the inside of it is hollow, which is exactly what people do when doubt is treated as a failure.
Can I ask for prayer if I am not sure I believe?: Yes. Nobody here is checking, and a request that says I do not know whether this does anything is welcome. Plenty of people on this wall are in the same position and have not said so.
I feel nothing when I pray. Am I doing it wrong?: Almost certainly not. Prayer that produces a feeling is pleasant and is not the measure of anything; long stretches of nothing are so common in the writing of people known for their faith that they have their own name. Keep going or stop for a while — neither is a betrayal.
What if I am angry at God?: Then say so, in the prayer, in those words. The alternative is a polite version that neither of you believes. There is a great deal of anger in the Psalms and none of it was edited out.