Faith and doubt — Changes or differences in spouses' beliefs put heavy strain on marriage

Tom Kimball's long and winding path from faith to doubt began shortly before he got married. But he was young then, and he assumed that what he now calls his "low-level" doubts would just go away. Meanwhile, Page Kimball assumed she was marrying not only an Eagle Scout and a returned missionary but a man whose faith was unshakable. It's not like a person wakes up one morning and decides, "Today I'll start doubting," Tom says. But there it was: Things just didn't make sense anymore. And once he started questioning one thing it seemed like it opened the door to yet another uncertainty.

What he wanted to do was talk about his doubts with Page. But those questions at first annoyed her, then angered her, and then frightened her. She didn't understand, she explains now, "why he didn't love me enough to just believe."

If a couple marries, knowing that one person is a believer and one isn't, that's one thing, says Salt Lake therapist Marybeth Raynes. At least there's forewarning, even if deep down the believer hopes that the non-believer will change. But when the spiritual ground starts to shift in a marriage right under a couple's feet, that's a lot more wrenching, she says.

Sometimes one spouse will become less religious. Or more religious. Sometimes there will be differences about specific dogma, or sometime one spouse will begin to doubt the existence of God. The most lethal mix, says Raynes, is when one spouse is still a believer and the other becomes bitter about religion. Sometimes the sense of betrayal, the sense that a religion isn't true after all, becomes the lens through which the person views everything else in life, "the focal point of other disappointments," Raynes says.

Often, says Grace Baptist Church's Rev. Pat Edwards, it's a "crisis scenario" that causes one spouse (or sometimes both) to falter in faith. "Oftentimes it's the loss of a child or a sibling. People say, if there was really a God, he wouldn't allow this suffering to take place." In a crisis like that, the Rev. Edwards says, "what happens is that very few people stay where they're at. They either go closer to God or question God or deny God."

When one spouse begins to doubt, "the other spouse feels a tremendous loss," he says. "Suddenly not only has there been this crisis, but now there's no longer this shared resource they can go to."

But it's not always a crisis that pushes someone toward doubt or inactivity. One of the Rev. Edwards' parishioners recalls a time a decade ago when she began "veering" — started putting God on hold, she says. "It wasn't so much a mental process of 'does God exist?' but a compartmentalizing. ... There was a Sunday me and a Monday me."