The Addiction to Certainty

After Deconstructing Fundamentalism

This is week 2 of a new series on what do we do after deconstruction. This won’t be an exhaustive list or a formula for what to do. This is based on my own life and observations of others I’ve walked with. I hope you find this helpful.

Why “I don’t know” still feels dangerous.

Last week I told the story about sitting in a coffee shop with my friend Steve. At the time I was deep into deconstruction. Every week seemed to bring another belief into question, and every book I read opened up five more questions than it answered. The things that had once felt settled didn’t feel settled anymore. I was exhausted, frustrated, and more than a little scared.

What I didn’t say last week is that certainty had gotten into me a lot deeper than I realized. It wasn’t just an idea, it was how I related to the world, and I don’t think I understood that until Steve named it. When he told me I was still doing the same thing I had always done, just pointing it at different targets, he wasn’t pointing out a bad habit. He was putting his finger on something that had been driving me for most of my life. I was still looking for the “right” answer. I genuinely believed that if I could just find it, everything would finally settle down, the anxiety would finally ease up and the uncertainty would disappear. I truly believed the problem was that I’d been given the wrong answers. What Steve helped me see was that I had never really questioned my need to have them in the first place. I had left fundamentalism, but I hadn’t left certainty.

Looking back now, I think those are two very different things. Leaving fundamentalism meant questioning what I believed. Leaving certainty has meant questioning why I needed those beliefs to be so rock solid in the first place. One happened pretty fast. The other has taken years, and if I’m honest, it’s still happening.

The truth is I still feel the pull of certainty all the time. I still want things to fit neatly together, clear categories, simple explanations, a clean sense of who’s right and who’s wrong. There’s a part of me that’s still convinced if I can just find the right framework, the right theology, the right way of understanding things, I’ll finally feel at peace. The problem is certainty has never actually delivered what it promised.

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The World Certainty Built

One of the things I’ve come to realize is that fundamentalism didn’t just teach me what to believe. It taught me how to relate to uncertainty.

When I look back at the environment I grew up in, uncertainty wasn’t treated as a normal part of being human, it was treated as something dangerous. Questions were fine as long as they led back to the approved answer, and doubt was something you were supposed to overcome as quickly as possible. Nobody said it out loud, but the message was there. Good Christians were certain Christians.

Over time, certainty became more than a theological posture. It became a source of emotional safety. I don’t think I understood that for a long time. I thought I was defending doctrine, or protecting truth, but what I was often protecting was the feeling that the world made complete sense and that I knew where I stood.

What I’ve learned since then is that our brains crave certainty because certainty feels safe. People who study ambiguity intolerance have found that uncertainty creates real distress, and that makes sense to me. We’re wired to predict what comes next. We like maps and explanations and the feeling that we understand the world we’re standing in. None of that is bad. It’s just part of being human. The problem comes when our need for certainty gets stronger than our willingness to learn, when we’d rather take almost any answer than sit with not knowing.

I think that’s what Steve was helping me see in that coffee shop. I wasn’t just searching for truth. I was searching for relief. Maybe you can relate but I needed to feel like there was some solid ground back underneath my feet.

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Jesus and the Limits of Knowing

One of the passages that’s become more and more important to me over the years shows up near the end of John’s Gospel, where Jesus is talking to his disciples and says something that would have made the younger version of me deeply uncomfortable. “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” (John 16:12-13). I’ve read that verse countless times, but it lands differently today than it used to.

Think about what he’s saying there. These are guys who’ve spent years with him, who’ve listened to his teaching and watched the miracles and asked their questions and gotten answers. If anyone should have arrived at certainty by that point, it should have been them. Instead Jesus tells them there’s more, more than they currently understand, more than they’re ready to carry. What strikes me is how comfortable he seems with their incomplete understanding. He doesn’t rush to eliminate the uncertainty or hand them some finished theological system. Instead he tells them the Spirit will keep guiding them into truth.

That word guide implies movement, growth, the sense that understanding unfolds over time instead of arriving all at once. The image he gives them isn’t one of arrival. It’s one of journey.

For much of my life I treated faith like arrival. I assumed the goal was to reach a place where all the major questions had been settled and that spiritual maturity looked like knowing all the things.

The older I get, the more I wonder if Jesus was inviting his disciples into something entirely different than what we invite people into. What if faith was never about arriving but about staying open? What if maturity has less do with how certain we become and more to do with our willingness to keep learning?

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Maybe Knowing Was Never the Goal

The more I reflect on my own journey, the more I wonder whether knowing was ever really the right thing to be striving for. For most of my life I assumed faith and certainty were basically the same thing, that the stronger your faith got, the more certain you became and the fewer questions you had. Now I don’t think so.

Some of the people I admire most hold deep convictions, but they hold them with humility. They’re curious, ask really good questions, are open to being wrong, and they’re not afraid to admit when they don’t know something. They don’t seem to be threatened by mystery, which is probably why they appear far more grounded than the people who are absolutely certain about everything.

Maybe that’s because faith and certainty were never the same thing. Maybe faith was always supposed to be about trust: trust that we can keep moving forward without having all the answers, that uncertainty isn’t evidence of failure, that God is still present in the questions even when we can’t resolve them. The older I get, the more I think faith isn’t the absence of uncertainty. It’s the willingness to stay present in uncertainty without letting it run the show.

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An Invitation, Mostly to Myself

I wish I could tell you I’ve fully embraced all of this. I haven’t. I still feel the pull of certainty almost every day. I want the clean answer, the definitive conclusion, and I catch myself believing that one more insight or one more book will finally eliminate the tension.

Then I hear Steve’s voice again: you’re doing the same thing you’ve always done, just with different targets. These days I hear those words differently than I used to. They don’t feel like criticism anymore. Instead, I experience them more like an invitation to loosen my grip some and trust that mystery isn’t my enemy.

As time goes on, the less interested I am in certainty and the more interested I am in a wisdom that’s comfortable with complexity, that’s willing to live with unanswered questions, that cares less about possessing the truth and more about staying open to it.

In fact, maybe that’s what it looks like to grow up spiritually… learning to live faithfully without needing certainty to hold everything together. Being able to say "I don't know" without feeling threatened by it, and trusting God while you're still standing in the uncertainty.

For someone raised the way I was, that’s been far harder than learning new theology. At least theology came with footnotes.

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