Anxiety Predicts Increases in Struggles with Religious/Spiritual Doubt Over Two Weeks, One Month, and One Year

Abstract

Struggles with religious/spiritual (r/s) doubt occur when uncertainty, questions, and hesitancy about aspects of r/s beliefs and experiences become a source of conflict. Cross-sectional research suggests that doubt-related struggles correlate with anxiety, yet no studies have investigated the temporal patterning of the associations between these constructs. We employed three large samples (Ns = 268, 527, 292) to examine concurrent and prospective associations between struggles with r/s doubt and anxiety over three time frames: 2 weeks, 1 month, and 1 year. Analyses revealed that (a) each construct exhibited high cross-temporal stability; (b) there were moderate, positive concurrent associations between anxiety and doubt-related struggles; (c) anxiety predicted increases in doubt-related struggles over each time frame; and (d) there was mixed evidence regarding whether doubt-related struggles predicted changes in anxiety over time. The discussion focuses on how anxiety may begin to undermine confidence in one’s r/s worldview, thus destabilizing one’s r/s beliefs.

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