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After the scorn and mockery of Jesus’ persecution and trial, this was the newborn Christianity’s first internal encounter with skepticism, and typically, it was brushed aside with shame and stigma. By his failure, Thomas became the odd one out. As Jesus put it, throwing some of his trademark shade: “Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

Once Thomas has been invented, he is not so easy to get rid of: he lingers on, like the shadow of a guilty memory

“Doubting Thomas seems to have been devised by John (in his Gospel, the only one that tells this story) largely in order to invoke, exaggerate and then resolve doubt, and thereby to lay doubt to rest once and for all,” wrote Glen W. Most, professor of social thought at the University of Chicago, and of Greek philology at Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, in his book on Thomas. “Yet once Thomas has been invented, he is not so easy to get rid of: he lingers on, like the shadow of a guilty memory.”

The traditional moral is that Thomas had the wrong reaction. He should not have needed proof. Faith is a virtue precisely for this reason.

Over the centuries, this view has softened, and Christianity has made a kind of peace with its doubters. Skepticism has repeatedly shown its value as an intellectual tool, even for believers. Rather than an obstacle, doubt has been recast as, if not exactly a virtue, at least a stepping stone to faith. The stigma of doubt is weakening and as it does, Thomas is slowly redeemed.

Doubt is a key part of the modern Canadian experience of faith, according to a joint polling project of the Angus Reid Institute and Faith in Canada 150. Even on the basic question of whether they believed in God, a majority of people who identified as “privately faithful” answered “yes, I think so,” which was almost exactly the same proportion as those who identified as “spiritually uncertain.” Even some of the self-professed non-believers fudged it, with more than a third declining to give the firm atheist response and instead saying, “no, I don’t think so.”