Frankly, I don’t
even know what “faith crisis” means. I understand that people stop believing
certain things. I understand that they get disillusioned. I understand that they
choose to leave the Church for a variety of reasons. But I don’t understand faith
crisis. I keep wondering where the emergency is.
Let me start by
saying that I am a very impatient person. If you’ve ever driven slowly in front
of me, you’d know what I mean. I’m an insufferable perfectionist as a sports
fan. I interrupt people when they’re talking. I don’t like walking slow. At
almost 67 years young, I still run up stairs. I’m an editor, so inconsistencies
grind on my nerves. And on and on. But for some reason, I have an enviable level
of patience with the foibles and flaws of Mormonism. Yes, I find lots of things
that I’m not happy about or that don’t make sense or that disappoint me (such
as the Church’s recent fiasco over hiding its finances). But I am in no hurry
to pack my bags and leave the Church. Let me try to explain why.
First, not much
surprises me. I’ve been around the block a few times and have seen a lot of
reality. And that reality includes both divine intervention and human imperfection.
There’s not much about the Church’s history that is new to me. As editorial
director at BYU Studies for almost 17 years, I have seen a lot. We don’t get to
publish much of it, but I read a great deal—books, scholarly journals, blogs, news stories, whatever.
I have no illusions about how humans can mess up God’s work, and how he can
still bring about his own purposes, which sometimes are not at all what we
think they are. But finding out something unsavory that happened over a hundred
years ago does not provoke a crisis. Hopefully we can learn from our imperfect
history and try to do better.
I worked in the
bowels of the holy bureaucracy in Salt Lake City for seven and a half years and
have now worked for almost 17 additional years on the periphery in Provo. I do
Mormonism all day long, five days a week. Sometimes it’s aggravating. Long ago
I wrote an essay for Dialogue titled “Why the True Church Cannot Be
Perfect.” The primary point of the essay was that the Church isn’t perfect. The
rest was to explain why it has to be so. That doesn’t mean the Church gets a
free pass. It often damages people. But it’s what we have. It’s not just Jesus’s
church. It’s also ours (you know, that “of Latter-day Saints” part), so I
figure it’s up to us to try to make it work better. There’s no crisis about it.
It’s imperfect. So what? Get over it and do what you can on the inside to improve
it.
If you’ve been
reading this blog for a while, you know that I find LDS theology quite lacking.
There are gaping holes, inconsistencies, really bad assumptions, and folk beliefs
that make no sense at all. But as I put it in my mission memoir, Bruder: The
Perplexingly Spiritual Life and Not Entirely Unexpected Death of a Mormon
Missionary, “We Mormons like to think we have THE
TRUTH, as if it were some rare diamond that only one church can possess, and if
you have it, you have all of it. But truth is much more amorphous than we
Mormons imagine. It is multifaceted, and nobody has all of it. The LDS Church
grasps pieces of the truth, but some doctrines have shifted over time, some
aren’t consistent with others, and some don’t hold up well under careful
scrutiny. Still, all things considered, I think Joseph Smith tapped into a very
productive vein of religious truth.” But he obviously didn’t have everything
figured out, and we have made precious little progress (if any) over the past 193
years. We Latter-day Saints are a proud lot. We smugly assume that other
churches know nothing about the hereafter, but if we are honest, we will admit
that we know next to nothing. But does that constitute a crisis? No. We just
need to acquire some humility and prepare ourselves for many surprises when we graduate
from this mortal grade school and start the next phase of our long education.
Above
all else, the Church is not an organizational chart. It is people. And people
are imperfect. Members, leaders, everybody. The Church has done a great
disservice to itself and to its members by creating the illusion that leaders
are infallible, that they’re always inspired. All this does is create unrealistic
expectations. And I would guess that unrealistic expectations lie behind most
of what people call faith crises. They have these expectations of perfection,
so of course they are going to be disappointed. The solution if to ratchet down
our expectations so that we don’t get blown out of the water by reality. But we
need to recognize the difference between expectations and hopes. It is always
good to hope for miracles, for blessings, for pleasant surprises. But we should
be careful about what we expect. There is a very fine line between faith and
expectation, especially when our expectations are based on the performance of
fallible humans.
As
I mentioned earlier, I have seen not just the imperfections of the Church and
its leaders and members; I have also seen divine intervention, sometimes in
strange and wonderful ways. And quite often that intervention doesn’t fit
within the staid corporate structure of the Church. In fact, quite often the organization
impedes divine intervention. When I was young and impressionable, God opened
the heavens briefly to me two or three times in ways that were both breathtaking
and perplexing. In later years, I have had a few quiet assurances that God is
there, that he wants me to do certain things, and that he doesn’t want me to
forsake my religious roots. “Be patient” is the message. Things will work out.
So
I don’t understand Latter-day Saints who are in a great hurry to give up on
something they could help improve and that just might improve them. I don’t
understand people in self-constructed crisis. So what if our history is messy?
So what if our leaders are human? So what if our theology is full of holes? So
what if the organization is aggravating? So what if the Church is full of
people who watch Fox News and think vaccines will kill you? Yes, there’s a lot
to not like about Mormonism. But there’s a lot to like too. Am I a better
person because of my membership in the Church? I would like to think so. Does
the Church give me opportunities to improve myself? Of course. Are there good people
in the Church who need my meager service? Sure. So where’s the crisis?
