Perhaps because of my own journey with doubt, I wince when I hear one mere mortal call another one an unbeliever.

Contrary to popular opinion, doubt doesn’t always mean we want to avoid the responsibility of belief, or that we don’t want to face the implications of God’s existence. Sometimes doubt is legitimate. As it says in the obscure epistle of Jude, “Be merciful to those who doubt.”

Here is a major reason I resist lobbing out the name unbeliever, especially in a cavalier way: it is dishonest. If we call someone else an unbeliever, does that mean we do believe, at all times and everything Christians ought to believe? Who of us can purport to say that?

At the very least, we ought to pray the line from the Gospel of Mark, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.” The Psalms, also, are chock full of the prayers of pilgrims who were doubting, yes doubting even the most basic reality–that of God’s existence. And the Psalms are pretty much our prayer prototype.

Richard Rohr says the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is forced belief, doubling down on a set of statements about the world. Trying to freeze our beliefs leads to stagnation, which is antithetical to faith. Abraham went out not knowing whither he went. If we allow life to come at us as it wants to, it always pull us from stagnation to risk, always invites us to abandon current beliefs so that we can embrace new ones. As Christian Wiman says, “If you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived–or have denied the reality of your life.”

We are all a mixture of doubt and belief. No one is always a believer. And that brings me to the corollary point: how likely is it that anyone is an unbeliever in God at all times? Maybe they aren’t comfortable using the word God, but does that mean they always deny God, always disdain all aspects of God?

Calling someone an unbeliever implicitly puts blame on the person, which is a lot like blaming a sick person for being sick. Imagine a doctor who says, “What? You aren’t getting better? You are such a loser.” To call someone an unbeliever can be like saying, “What! you don’t believe in God? Man up, put on your believing hat.”

Of course, a doctor of any merit would probe and experiment until they find something the patient responds to. Recently I have been trying to let one of Jesus’s statements chisel its way into my psyche: “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). One New Testament scholar says it is more faithful to the Greek to say “drag all to myself.” If unbelievers aren’t being dragged to Jesus, could it be that we failed to lift him up? Sometimes the blame, if indeed we want to use such a profane word with such a sacred topic, lies with those purporting to be believers.

Maybe we have failed to provide on-ramps to faith for our unbelieving neighbors, all of whom are infinitely complex. Quite understandably, they will not embrace a faith that can be reduced to a simplistic formula.

Perhaps we have failed to show love, which is after all the distinguishing way, the only way, people will know we are his disciples (John 13:35).

Perhaps like a lunatic doctor, we have insisted that healing must come through a certain tablet taken at a certain place and time, administered by a certain person wearing certain clothes.

Perhaps our message is stripped of its potency because it has devolved into a series of “pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities” (MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail).

Whatever the case, Jesus’s words remain: If I am really lifted up, people will be dragged to me. How would our belief system change if we made that a cornerstone?