On Expectations & Doctrines

Every month our ward holds a ward find activity. We identify individuals whose records are in our ward but whom we do not know, and we send people out to knock on doors and find them. It's a good and important thing to do, and we've had some really positive experiences with it.

This Sunday I went out with the full-time missionaries to find some of our members, one of whom was at home. She was surprised to see us, and I was surprised by her explanation of why she is not active: "serious theological differences with the Church." Rarely do you get that kind of candor; often it's feeling unwelcoming or being offended or being uninterested in worshiping.

This got me thinking about why people leave the Church. Here are some thoughts, beginning with an interesting entry I read at By Common Consent on how the cultural expectations we have as members of the Church can be problematic. The author discusses how she felt underprepared for some of the big life events that define one as LDS, and many of the comments mirror that sense of pressure that many young members feel at the prospect of the milestones, especially those associated with the temple.

In many ways this sentiment is very different than my experience. I was immensely excited to go to the temple. (When, during the first week of my freshman year, I was called as the president of the Elders quorum in my student ward, I sort of hoped that it would require that I be endowed.) Leaving on a mission and getting married in the temple were equally exciting for me.

But I do know something of feeling alien within the culture. This was most evident in the post-9/11-pre-Iraq-War period when we had just moved to ABQ. (I've blogged about this before, so I'll spare you the details here.) I felt like I did not share the same values or priorities as those with whom I worshiped.

I think about this in the context of another piece from BCC, this one from earlier this month. Here the idea of cognitive dissonance is used to explore faith. I like the argument that we develop faith when that faith is tested, when we are not ready for or comfortable with what we see or do.

And I think this becomes a useful and valuable way to look at faith. It is not believing when it is easy, or practicing your religion in ways that are familiar. Our spiritual growth--like any sort of growth, really--comes only when we are pushed. Only when we come to the questions we cannot answer do we find what we truly believe.

I suppose this is what struck me about that conversation. We tend to think of Mormon doctrine as being pretty homogeneous and top-down: the Prophet receives revelation and we fall in line. But there's a lot more diversity of views than that image would imply. As the Church continues to grow and define itself more articulately, it is important that we be aware of this fact; a 13-million member body with temples in Manhattan and Accra is radically different than one with the majority of its population in small farming communities in the Rocky Mountains.