One of the most vexing problems for any religious tradition which asserts exclusivity claims is the problem of sincere believers in other faiths. Evangelicals are confronted by Mormons with firm convictions that the Book of Mormon is authentic scripture. Mormons must grapple with situations in which people report a witness that the Catholic church is the true one. Christians who hold that Christ is the only way to know God are posed with the problem of people who report encountering God in Islam. And so forth.
It seems rather harsh for God to punish people for not having the good fortune to end up with the right beliefs, especially given the ambiguity of mortality. I see this as a problem with any evangelical soteriology that condemns people to hell if they don’t have the right beliefs about Christ. If God is not capricious, the only way this practice could theologically make sense, it seems to me, is if those who hold the wrong beliefs on some level know that they’re wrong, and nonetheless choose to cling to them. And I have occasionally heard theories proposed in an LDS context that rest on the assumption that deep down, everyone knows the truth (i.e., that the church is true). For example, I’ve encountered the assertion that Catholics are jealous of our real priesthood (because of course they know it’s real), and that’s why they place obstacles to our practice of baptisms for the dead. Or it might be assumed that those who have doubts only do so because they’re denying what on some level they really know. But one of the things I appreciate in LDS theology is that you don’t get condemned for not having the right beliefs, and that this life isn’t the only place to encounter truth and have the option of accepting it.
So I don’t think the assumption that people are holding their beliefs in bad faith is fair—not as a tactic used against Mormons, or by Mormons. I’m a Star Wars fanatic, but I do think it’s rather convenient that in that world, the bad guys self-identify as such. Darth Vader chooses the Dark Side of the Force; he doesn’t understand himself as following the good path. In our world, however, things are much messier. In the lessons on persecution in the Joseph Smith manual, I was somewhat taken aback by the assumption that the only reason people would fight against the church was because the wicked always fight against the righteous. I’m not sure it’s all that helpful to frame things in that way. We might disagree drastically with the beliefs of other people, but I think we can do better than to jump to the conclusion that they’re deliberately choosing the wrong.
I think this equally applies to pluralism within the church. Why would everyone have the same kinds of spiritual experiences? But when dealing with difference, it seems all too tempting to fall into an argument along these lines: I’ve never had an experience like that, so I don’t believe that you could have, either. You need to try harder, until your experience matches mine. I’m certainly guilty of engaging in this line of reasoning myself, especially when confronted with experiences and ways of seeing the world that are utterly foreign to me. But this attitude contradicts the scriptural teaching that different people have different gifts. If God interacts with us individually and personally, it makes sense that our experiences would be unique, rather than conforming to some general template which we can use to evaluate everyone’s spiritual progress.
I don’t think this tactic is confined to one group of people within the Church. Those who lose or struggle with their faith all too often get accused of sin—overlooking the extent to which such experiences can happen to those who are sincerely seeking. Such experiences can be wrenching and painful, and I believe they call for us to mourn with those that mourn, not add to people’s burdens with our own conclusions about why it happened. But in the other direction, I’m also uncomfortable with the assertion sometimes made by more liberal-leaning Mormons that statements of knowledge about the truth of the church can’t possibly be true. I’m in that camp; I can’t personally say that I know the church is true, because that language doesn’t really get at my connection to and belief in the church. But I’m not sure that I can definitively conclude that that’s the case for everyone.
I’m not proposing some relativistic extreme in which we renounce any ability to make judgments about beliefs. I don’t think we need to automatically shy away from disagreement. But in the general context of our day-to-day interaction, I think there is much to be said for giving people the benefit of the doubt, assuming that their beliefs are sincere, that their experiences really happened—and not immediately discounting them if they don’t match our presuppositions. Whether people are describing happenings in their life which built their faith or which sharpened their doubts, perhaps our challenge is to listen, to do our best to understand, rather than exhorting them to seek an experience which more closely aligns with our way of seeing the world.
Is there a theological reason for all of this ambiguity? One possibility is that it makes us regularly deal with people who are convinced that they are right, and who completely disagree with us—and we are posed with the question of whether we can respond with charity. It’s hard to believe that someone could be really, genuinely different. At least, it’s hard for me—I find myself too easily thinking that if they just saw what I saw, they would agree with me. But one of the great challenges of charity, I think, is accepting others in all their otherness; we are called to love the other as other, not to morph them into some pale reflection of ourselves.
What I see happen time and again in LDS blogs is that someone with an alternate experience, whatever that might be, extrapolates from it universal conclusions about how TBM members or the church or Utahns or conservatives “truly” are. I have more than once been accused of doing what you write about, denying the reality of someone else’s experiences, when I join a conversation with my own lived experience to the contrary. I don’t do that to deny the other’s reality, I do it to call into question the universal claims the other person has made based on their experiences.
I have found myself more and more recently doing something that may fit under this post. In discussions with people who believe in God, I will present my own lack of belief as something like, “God does not seem interested in communicating with me.” Linguistically though, this is at least open to the possibility that God is out there, but just not discernible to me. I’ve pondered at how this sort of construction can tolerate theism (theism is for those who do perceive God) and atheism (atheism is for those who don’t).
I think one reason why I often want to challenge alternative views is not just because I think I’m right (so alternate experiences calls that into question), but because I think that I’m *typical*. In other words, I’d like to think that if most people can see x, then I should be able to do the same things that they do and also see x. But that isn’t always the case. I don’t like thinking of myself as a “special snowflake,” but the differences in experiences suggests that we are sometimes more different than I’d like to admit.
(P.S., is there a way to subscribe to discussions here?)
Preach.
Charity is the only way. There’s a reason why 1 Cor. 13 lands in the middle of a discourse about spiritual gifts: the diversity of genuine spiritual experience is very difficult to get our heads around. Thank God for hearts.
Thanks, this is really important.
One of the most sobering experiences I’ve had recently was reading “Unbroken,” the incredible story of Louie Zamperini. Near the end of the book, after all the horrible experiences he’s had and after his postwar life has pretty well fallen apart, he goes very reluctantly to a Billy Graham revival and finds Jesus. He is so totally “born again” that he becomes a happy, delightful, forgiving person for the rest of his very long life (he died last year at age 97). How can I argue with this? Especially since in all my years as a Mormon and all the times I’ve asked to be born again, I’ve experienced zilch, no feelings of renewal or rebirth at all. None of the people I baptized as a missionary had an experience anywhere close to Zamperini’s. By their fruits ye shall know them, we are told. If so, then maybe we’re way too judgmental and too certain of our superiority as Mormons.
Thanks Lynnette. Your post has embodied feelings that I have been having as of late. One thing that I have to be careful of is when I have a faith building experience that is “atypical” that I don’t go looking for “atypical” faith building experiences all the time. I don’t know if others feel this way but I find myself seeking these atypical experiences sometimes so that I can share them to show that I am some how more special than others and that Heavenly Father has a special relationship with me. These are insecurities that I should probably work out! I agree with you that we are all spiritually unique and receive personal revelation that is “customized” to our spiritual uniqueness. However I do feel like there has to be some standard to measure up to so that I can have some kind of idea that I am progressing spiritually and not just on some wondering path of unique and atypical spiritual experiences. I think that there is value in having a “general template” (to a certain point) because we can say with each other that we have experienced the same things and can be more unified.
I had a great deal of trouble with the LDS use of the word “true” because the language seemed insufficiently precise (autistic thinking at its best, I suppose). If I read you right, Lynnette, it may not be the same reasoning as yours – I’ve had a very powerful and personal spiritual experience that, I think, equates to the classic Mormon “I know the Church is true, for the Holy Ghost has borne witness to me.” I simply don’t like the way that language describes that experience. It is, however, useful shorthand.
The most loving and merciful things about Heavenly Father I’ve learned as a member of the Church (or, more secularly, “the best things about the Mormon theological framework”) are the notions of the Three Degrees, the lack of a literal Hell, and the idea of continued progress and learning in eternity. So my “saved” evangelical friends who are confident that they’ll spend eternity with the Savior – well, they probably will in my system, too. (They may realize later what they miss by being excluded from the presence of the Father, but that’s a different issue.) It defuses, or should defuse, the whole “You’re going to hell” “No, YOU’RE going to hell” nyah-nyah contest that so often characterizes sectarian “discussion.”
One of the beauties of Mormonism is, or should be, that although Heavenly Father has a Plan of Salvation for all of His children, the path by which we negotiate the plan is not only not the same for everyone, it is absolutely unique for each of us, and tailored to our own gifts, talents, needs, and situation. The closer we come to understanding this, the more we are able to love others and tend to our own spiritual knitting while they tend to theirs. 🙂
About 15 years ago I was really struggling trying to understand how so many people I knew of different faiths, myself included, could receive strong spiritual confirmations about the truth of their beliefs that were at odds with strong spiritual confirmations of others. As I was reading in Isaiah 29, I read a verse that spoke truth to me. It said that “those who erred in spirit would come to understanding.” I felt a moment of immense trust in the Lord and put my concerns into His hands. I pledged to try to be true to the spiritual witnesses I received and to allow all men the same privilege, knowing that He will guide us to understanding as only He can.
Thanks for all the thoughtful comments. (And Andrew S., I’ve added a way to subscribe to comments.)
This is beautiful. I am coming from a different perspective, but it has been a hard journey for me to come to see the experiences of others as legitimate, even when they contradict my own. I served an LDS mission among very sincere religious people, and it opened my eyes to the validity of their experiences.