Many reasons for religious doubt: Links with doubt struggles, mental health, and an open, humble, questing orientation.

Abstract

Many people experience doubts around religious beliefs. Drawing from prior work on meaning-making and religious doubt, we examined reasons for doubt and doubt struggles among undergraduates: What are the most common reasons for doubt? Do students with more religious doubt show more doubt struggles and poorer mental health—especially if they are religious? In terms of potential benefits, might doubt also be associated with an open, inquisitive, humble stance? We surveyed 3,953 undergraduates from three U.S. universities. The top-ranked reasons for doubt involved behaviors of religious people (intolerance toward gay and lesbian individuals, intolerance toward other religions, hypocrisy, and proselytizing) and the problem of evil and unfair suffering. Both religious doubt and doubt struggles predicted unique variance in indicators of poor mental health. Religious doubt was most closely linked to doubt struggles and mental health challenges among religiously engaged students. Yet students reporting more doubt also scored higher on quest-related variables: quest orientation, belief complexity and universality, search for meaning, intellectual humility, and openness. Students identifying as spiritual and/or had disengaged from religion also had elevated scores on some quest-oriented variables, though patterns were complex. Our results suggest that students facing many religious doubts report poorer mental health—especially if they are religiously engaged. But our results also highlight a more hopeful side of religious doubt and disengagement: For some individuals, religious doubts and decisions to disengage from organized religion may be part of an ongoing search for truth and meaning, one that involves an open, inquisitive, humble stance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)