July 2020 Ensign

I may, may not go through all of these. It’s usually the same talking points from a specific perspective.

Church History: A Source of Strength and Inspiration

There is an undercurrent in all of these articles that the person with doubts has lost their way, or deviated from the covenant path, or distanced themselves from God and Jesus … but never loose hope that they can repent and come back.

From the article (emphasis retained from the article):

In learning credible history of the Church, …

The word credible is italicized. Maybe the implication is that people that reach a different conclusion weren’t going off credible history? Yes, not everything out there is credible, but just because someone reaches a different conclusion doesn’t automatically mean that they were misled. I think people on both sides of the debate are doing the best they can with information that they believe is credible. It would be unfair to characterize either side as misled.

This article was mostly a repeat of the Worldwide Devotional For Young Adults: A Face to Face Event with Elder Quentin L. Cook in Nauvoo on September 9, 2018. At times the article quotes the face to face event directly. You’ll see in the Q&A portion of the article that it quotes Kate Holbrook and Matt Grow, the historians present at the face to face.

Here’s a thread on that YSA event. It mirrors the article.

It would be nice if a parent could say, “My kid is walking his own path outside of the LDS church right now but he/she seems to be following the promptings of the spirit to him/her as an individual. I may not understand it fully and it might not look exactly like my own religious path but I do respect the journey and my child’s earnest walk of faith.”

My mom does this actually [though technically I am not physically out of the church]. It is disconcerting because she sees me having “the Spirit” with me and being guided – when I don’t. She sees some of my actions as “Christ-like” when I see them as “humane” or “morally acceptable” and i don’t see myself as a Christian. i am learning that thankfully it is just a mater of semantics and not battle lines.

There is an undercurrent in all of these articles that the person with doubts has lost their way, or deviated from the covenant path, or distanced themselves from God and Jesus … but never loose hope that they can repent and come back. That to me seems patronizing – like I am currently going through a phase or a temporary loss of judgement from which I can be rescued. It is a refusal to see my perspective, path, and lived experience as valid.

I felt like this a lot with my husband. I thought about it and completed some ethical calculations and decided that it was worth my husband’s piece of mind to think it was temporary and just live my life to the best of my ability. It still feels like patronage – but to a degree I can give up a little pride/self-righteousness to provide a degree of security for my husband while I show him that I can be an ethical person without using the church or Jesus Christ as a compass point. And it shifts – sometimes I cannot give him the degree of security he would like and be true to where I am in my journey. But, 2 Christmases ago he gave me a key chain with the saying, “Not All Who Wander Are Lost” – which has meaning to us that the the best of his ability, he recognizes I have a divergent path and I am not lost – even though technically I am not a Christian.

How can we reach a place where we give people the benefit of the doubt? Where we ask people different from us to tell us about their own stories, journeys, and lives and then we believe them?

I am not sure yet – but there are a 1,000 different ways this is applicable in society.