Why questioning feels so dangerous
I had not been back to church for almost two months when a man cornered me one Sunday and started swinging. I had finally made it back through the door and when the service was over I was trying to slip out before anyone could ask me anything I did not want to answer. He found me anyway. He had me pinned in the corner with the precision of a prized fighter. He threw a left jab of “are you doing okay?” Then a right jab of “I have been worried about you.” A left uppercut of “have you been attending church somewhere else?” A blow to the body of “are you meeting with any of the guys?” And then a final windup roundhouse knockout attempt of “I was worried you had gone under. Are you staying afloat? I do not want you to get taken out.”
I stood there absorbing the punches and looking for an exit while he genuinely thought he was helping. I didn’t blame him for that. What I did not understand at the time was that every question he asked me was the same question dressed up in different words, the question of whether I was still one of them. The urgency in his voice, the worry, the catalog of escalating concerns, all of it was the sound a tribe makes when one of its members starts drifting toward the edge of the herd.
I gave him the kind of polite answers that bought me time. I am fine. I have been busy. Life is great. He left feeling like he had done his job, and I left feeling like I had survived something. It was three days before I realized that the something I had survived was the first round of being called back. There would be many more.
What I want to look at this week is something the surface of that exchange could not have shown either of us. When a person starts to question the beliefs that have been holding their identity in place, the people around them often experience that questioning not as personal change but as a moral threat. They love the person, they want to help, they want to understand, and underneath all of that they are also operating on a much older instinct that has nothing to do with love. The instinct is herd protection. When one member starts looking like they might leave, the rest of the herd closes ranks. The closing happens reliably, often without anyone consciously deciding to do it, and usually with the best of intentions. The man in the corner was the herd doing what herds do.
Erich Fromm wrote about this years ago in Escape from Freedom. His argument is that real freedom is psychologically terrifying, because it requires you to face your own aloneness and to author your own life from the inside. Fromm said most people cannot stand the weight of that aloneness for long, so they flee from it by submerging their identity into something larger than themselves. The submerging can happen inside almost any kind of larger system, whether that is a religion, a political movement, a cause, a family system, or any sort of tribe. Once submerged, the individual no longer has to carry the unbearable weight of being a self, because the group carries it for them. The group’s beliefs become their beliefs and the group’s values become their values and the group’s certainty becomes their certainty, and they are no longer alone.
The Israelites in Exodus are a perfect example of this long before Fromm wrote about it. They were finally freed from Pharaoh after generations of slavery, and almost immediately they began grumbling. They said they wished they had died in Egypt, where at least they sat by pots of meat and ate bread until they were full. The wilderness they escaped into was too uncertain. There was no predictable schedule, no clear chain of command, no daily routine that told them what to do and when to do it. Slavery was terrible, but slavery was at least known.
Freedom is unknown. And the human nervous system, then and now, is wired to prefer known suffering over unknown freedom because known suffering is predictable. Our brains are built to anticipate our environment, to conserve energy by reducing surprise, to keep us alive by keeping the world predictable. An unpredictable environment costs the nervous system more than the familiar suffering does, even when the unpredictable environment is objectively safer.
Fromm called this preference for the known the escape from freedom, and he saw it operating in his own time in obvious ways, through fascism and authoritarianism and the willingness of populations to hand themselves over to leaders who promised certainty. Fromm also named a version of this that most of us are doing without realizing it. He called it automaton conformity. We become whatever the people around us expect us to be. We adopt the politics of our friends, the religious certainty of our family, the professional identity our credentials give us, the values our particular subculture rewards. We perform the role so consistently that eventually we lose the ability to tell the difference between ourselves and the performance. The role becomes the self. And once the role has become the self, any threat to the role registers as a threat to the self, because there is no longer anything underneath the role to fall back on.
The cost of this arrangement is invisible at first, because the trade feels like a gain. You exchange the burden of being an individual self for the comfort of belonging. What you do not see until much later is that you have also exchanged your capacity to question for the safety of certainty. The two go together. You cannot keep your questions and also keep your full membership in a tribe whose identity is moralized, because the tribe needs your certainty to maintain its own. Without even realizing what is happening, your questions are slowly chipped away and replaced with the certainty the tribe had already decided before you came along.
Eric Hoffer named the same dynamic from a slightly different angle. In The True Believer, he wrote that faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves. People who do not trust themselves anymore reach for a cause that will trust on their behalf. The cause becomes the ground they stand on. And once you are standing on a cause that way, anyone who does not stand on it with you starts to look like a threat to your own footing. The middle becomes dangerous. The questioner becomes dangerous. The person leaving the herd becomes the most dangerous of all, because their leaving raises the possibility that the ground was never as solid as you needed it to be.
This is what it means for an identity to become moralized. Your beliefs and your goodness get fused together until they cannot be separated, and questioning the beliefs feels like questioning whether you are still a good person. The tribe enforces this fusion in subtle ways, by treating doubt as a moral failing rather than an intellectual move, by framing leavers as people who have fallen rather than people who have grown, by reading questions as symptoms of pride or rebellion or worldliness rather than as evidence that someone is paying attention. The man in the corner was performing a moral inventory disguised as concern. “Are you doing okay” was code for “are you still good.” And I knew it, even if neither of us could have said so out loud at the time.
This is why questioning feels dangerous from the inside, even when nothing about the person’s external life is actually under threat. Questioning shakes the floor. The defensiveness that rises up inside your nervous system when someone challenges your beliefs is your body protecting the foundation rather than the rational mind weighing the argument. Your unconscious has been treating the belief system as the ground, and any pressure on the ground registers as a pressure on you. This is what happens to the people you love when you start asking questions they do not want you to be asking. The questioning may not be aimed at them, but their bodies don’t know that.
The deeper problem, and the one the last six weeks of this series has been trying to name, is that the culture around all of us is set up to encourage exactly this trade. It rewards the person who picks a tribe and stays put, and it makes belonging easy while making questioning expensive. When a person is wrestling with their own life and looking for some certainty to lean on, the culture is right there with ready-made certainties pointing in every direction. Pick this politics, join this church, adopt this lifestyle, believe these things, and we will tell you who you are and what you are for. The trade looks generous from the outside, but the cost is your questions and the part of yourself that knows how to ask them.
When I made the decision to walk away from attending weekly church services, my nervous system went haywire for a long time. It didn’t matter that I was reading religious scriptures every day, writing in my journal consistently, praying on the regular. Because I was intentionally going on a journey to discover my own heart and my own beliefs (ones I had not been handed before I knew what to do with them), my body objected to being in the wilderness and sunk me into a depression that lasted several years while I pursued my own truth.
Anne Lamott has written for years about what it looks like to live with faith without falling for that trade. In a chapter called “Sam’s Brother” in her book Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, she shares something her priest Father Tom once told her:
“The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.”
That line reverses almost everything most of us were taught about belief. We were told that doubt was the enemy and certainty was the goal. Father Tom is saying the opposite. Certainty is where faith goes to die. Real faith is the living thing that can hold the mess and the discomfort without needing to resolve them, and that can stay in relationship with what is actually there even when what is there is foreign to you. By his definition, the person doing the most faithful work in any spiritual tradition is often the one the tradition itself has the hardest time tolerating, because the tradition has organized itself around answers and the faithful person is still trying to live inside the questions.
When I left the herd, I did not stop believing in something larger than myself. What I stopped believing was that my belonging to a particular group was the same as my relationship with whatever that larger thing might be. The two had been fused for so long inside me that I could not tell where one ended and the other began. Pulling them apart was its own kind of grief. I had to lose the certainty in order to find anything that was actually mine.
The author Vinita Hampton Wright has a line that names this experience as well as anything I have read:
“Giving up beliefs is not the same as giving up God or spirituality. A true belief holds on to you, not vice versa. And our questions, even the scary ones, lead us to more knowledge and more growth than do our certainties.”
That is the truth I needed someone to tell me back when the man in the corner was still throwing punches. The beliefs I was loosening my grip on had never actually been mine. They had been handed to me long before I had any way to question them, and I had spent years clinging to them while everyone around me mistook that clinging for faith. Letting them go was how I finally started to find out what part of the sacred had actually been mine all along. And, letting them go was when I finally understood deep in my body what genuine faith feels like.
If you are reading this and you recognize yourself somewhere in it, the fear you are feeling makes complete sense. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was built to do when the ground starts moving underneath you. The activation in your chest, the tightness in your throat, the dread you feel at the thought of saying any of this out loud to the people you love, all of it is the appropriate response of a body that has been treating a particular set of beliefs as the floor for a very long time. Being scared is appropriate. Questioning is honest. Paying attention to what is moving inside you is the work itself. What you are doing is the slow, terrifying work of sorting out which parts of what you were given are actually yours, and which parts have only been wearing your name. Your body will object. The objection is the natural response of a system that has been trained to keep you safely inside the herd, and it is also the signal that something real is happening underneath all of that training.
Just know that if you are questioning something the people around you have built their identities on, you are going to feel the corners closing in. Some of the people who love you will not be able to stay with you through this part. Their bodies will not let them. The questions you are asking are landing as threats to ground they have been standing on for decades, and they will fight to protect that ground, even when their fight looks like concern. Some of the relationships will hold and even deepen. Others will end, or cool, or become formal. That loss is real. It is also what it takes to become someone whose identity is no longer for sale to whichever tribe got there first.
Leaving the herd turns out to be the beginning of belonging to something less crowded and more honest. There is a different kind of community on the other side of moralized identity, and it is made up of people who have all done some version of this same work. They will find you. The questions you are afraid to ask out loud are the questions they are still asking too. The ground you may be losing is only one ground among many.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: Speed, Productivity, and the Loss of Sensing
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
