The radio crackled a mechanical dying breath then went silent. A loud sigh, heavy with blame, broke the silence and filled the darkness like invisible fog.

The words that followed the sigh shot out like poison darts at their unseen target. “You’re an idiot.”

“You’re an idiot,”came the weak, echoed reply.

Several minutes of silence followed until the frustration erupted again.

“Shut up!” the first girl spat into the silence at nothing in particular.

“You shut up!” was the flimsy retort. This elaborate exchange continued for some time, the two young ladies who sat together in the pitch black darkness each becoming more and more entrenched in their view that the other should “shut up.” Suddenly, a dim gray light lit up the edge of the door, light only inasmuch as it was not the utter darkness that filled the rest of the room. The inane fighting halted momentarily.

“Is it morning?” piped up the second voice, high pitched, tense, and with a practiced puritanism that underpinned every syllable and belied its youthfulness.

“There are no windows in the hall. Someone must have tripped the motion sensor light.” This voice had a sternness borne of frustration, was tight-lipped but clear, like the voice of a librarian scolding a noisy youngster. It was the conscientious mother to its counterpart’s naïve child. Another brief pause reified the silence as the two girls listened intently for whomever had brought the gray light to their dark little hole. The thick wood of the door yielded no sound or clue, no matter how they strained their ears. The schoolmarm-sounding one chided the other.

“It’s probably some idiot freshman boy going to the bathroom,” she said, sounding thoroughly unconvinced by her reasoning. Unseen, her lips untightened as she lapsed into thought. She and Fiona had been trapped in this blasted janitorial closet for two days now. On Friday, their lazy and generally good for very little student supervisor Kit had sent them to change the room’s fluorescent light so he wouldn’t have to do it himself and interrupt his reading. “Useless layabout,” she thought. Somehow, Fiona, her impish little child of a maintenance partner, had managed to lock the door from the outside before it shut, leaving both the keys and their work radio just outside the door. Along with the new light bulb. She boiled with rage just thinking about it.

At five o’clock on a Friday night in the freshman dorms the day finals had ended, their pounding and pleas for help echoed through empty hallways. Everyone had gone home already or was out for the night. By the time anyone got home, it was so late they hadn’t dared say anything for fear they’d be fired for being in a men’s dorm so late. “Stupid BYU,” went her angry thoughts. “Stupid everything!”

They’d spent a miserable night huddled on the cold linoleum floor in the dark. The next day, they began to call out again, but to no avail. Everyone must have already left and she was certain she was going to die in that room. Luckily, there was a dump sink which had doubled as a source of water and the second most bitterly humiliating bathroom experience of her 23 years of existence. At least Fiona had had to suffer the same ignominy. Now she was ravenously hungry and beginning to consider whether or not beating Fiona to death with the pipe wrench in their tool bucket would solve all her problems.

The worst part about this whole affair was that she had missed church. Church. Where she was finally going to sit next to Cameron, the beautiful half-Korean boy who had recently begun to occupy the vast majority of her thoughts. She could feel her skin turn red, first with embarrassment at her infatuation, then with more anger. Fiona! That underdeveloped little twerp had ruined everything. She felt around in the darkness for the tool bucket as the heat spread through her body.

Finally, her fingers felt the cold, round, steel haft of the heavy pipe wrench and she pulled it from its slot with a metallic rattle.

“Evelyn, what are you doing?” Fiona asked timidly.

“Just…don’t move, Fifi,” Evelyn replied with a terrifying firmness. In the darkness, Fiona couldn’t see the Raskolnikov-esque glint in Evelyn’s yes as she raised the massive wrench above her head. It was something she never would have believed she was capable of, but the last two days had pushed her to her breaking point.

The breath caught in Fiona’s throat as the wrench swooped down in a vicious arc. A sharp crack rang out in the darkness, then a gasp, then a lifeless thud. Then, silence.

A soft light shone through the round hole where the door handle had been.

“Evelyn, what did you do!?” Fiona squeaked. “We’re going to get in so much trouble!”

“Oh, shut up!” came the exasperated reply. “No one saw us, so they won’t know whom to blame. I can’t stay in this dank little cave one second longer.”

She hooked her finger through the hole in the door and pulled it open.

“I am not peeing in front of you again,” she said, and stepped out into the dim hall. She had no way of knowing what time it was. Evelyn had forgotten her crummy little cellphone back at the shop, while Fiona always insisted on leaving hers there out of some kind of misguided principle. She didn’t want to get distracted while they were supposed to be working. The little killjoy.

They looked around the hallway. The coast seemed clear. They could sneak out without anyone noticing. But Evelyn’s bladder was about to burst and there was no time for subterfuge. She bolted toward the floor’s communal bathroom like a woman possessed, pipe wrench in hand, simultaneously sprinting and clenching to avoid wetting herself.

She finally reached the door and pulled down the handle in gleeful triumph. With a rush of wind, it flew open, striking her in the forehead and knocking her to the floor. Her wire-framed glasses had fallen and she could feel fresh, warm blood running down her face and into her mouth from a gash on her head. Someone stepped out of the bathroom and past her prostrate body. Someone large, blurry, and unmistakably naked.

“Maintenance, woman on the floor!” she heard from what seemed to be a million miles away in a voice filled with the kind of panic that can only be aroused in a 19 year old prude seeing a naked man for the first time. As Evelyn felt for her glasses, the naked man rushed past her and toward Fiona down the hall. A rush of cold, naked air filled Evelyn’s nostrils. Suddenly, Fiona screamed a strange, childlike scream that awakened something maternal in her.

She found her glasses and placed them on her slightly crooked nose. They were smeared with blood. Standing up, a rush of adrenaline coursed through her veins and her transparently pale skin grew hot and feverish. Now she bolted the other way after the naked man who was charging down a now shrieking Fiona. Her screams ended in a sickening thud and a painful choking sound as the naked man crashed into her like a rampaging bull. She flew through the air like a ragdoll before hitting the thinly carpeted floor with a limp crunch. Evelyn felt a surge of panic shoot up her spine.

“Hey, stop! I’ll…I’ll call campus police!”

The nude freshman turned his attention to this new distraction. Through the red mist that covered her lenses, Evelyn could see something like black ink covering the boy’s mouth and chest. She didn’t dare look further down.

“Stop! I mean it!” she yelled in a voice filled with the kind of panic that can only be aroused in a 23 year old prude seeing a naked man for the first time. He didn’t stop. He careened toward her like a fleshy rocket, arms outstretched and mouth agape, black teeth bared. Fear like she had never known welled up in her heart.

This was it. She was going to die. She was going to be violated, then brutally murdered, all because that idiot Fiona had gotten her locked in a janitorial closet.

He was a step away when instincts she didn’t realize she had kicked in. While the rest of her body remained paralyzed, her right arm swung upwards in a perfect arc at the end of which was five pounds of pipe wrench-shaped steel.

The head of the wrench connected with the assailant’s jaw in an explosion of blood, teeth, splintered bones, and Evelyn’s screams. The naked freshman fell to the ground briefly, his ragged jaw hanging piecemeal from its hinges and oily black blood pouring from the gaping hole of his mouth.

Before she had time to realize what had happened, he was back on his feet and lunging again. This time, Evelyn didn’t hesitate, and the heavy steel came down on the naked man’s skull like some kind of medieval instrument of death. The back of his head burst like a rotten cantaloupe, brain, skull, and blood exploding outward like a firework of carnage.

Heart palpitating, breath short, Evelyn looked down at the horrific scene she had wrought and vomited the meager contents of her empty stomach. Then, without even the slightest hint of dignity, she fainted.

A few years ago, I read an article about a book (which is clearly better than reading a book, right?) called “All Joy, No Fun.” The book was about parenting, specifically about how people without kids rated every indicator for happiness (going out to eat, sex life, hobbies, etc.) higher than people with kids, as you’d maybe expect. The only thing was that on the final indicator, which was actual life satisfaction level, people with kids rated themselves significantly higher than people without them, which of course came as a huge, counterintuitive surprise. Fast forwarding, the researchers came to the conclusion that in the end, for people with children, despite having lost so many of the things we think of as making us happy, they experienced a joy through their children that was so much more than the sum of its parts.

Look, this isn’t a screed about how everyone needs to have kids RIGHT NOW, don’t worry. Life is too complicated for anyone to make the choice for anyone else when or if they should have kids (or at least, it should be, but that doesn’t stop people). But what I realized just recently, all these years later, is that the same principle that leads bored, sleep-deprived, sexless parents to feel joy from their children leads us to find joy in Christ despite the fact that, well, being a Christian is not always fun. In fact, it’s often the opposite

To be clear, if it’s not already obvious, when I say “joy,” I don’t mean the kind of almost material sensation of happiness that comes from so many of the activities to which we devote ourselves in the modern world. I don’t mean the dopamine hits that we get every time someone RTs something we Tweeted (I say, pointing a finger directly at myself). I mean “joy” in a sense similar to what C.S. Lewis refers to in the book “Surprised by Joy,” a kind of spiritual hope, longing, peace, and Godly comfort in the face of an absurd and often brutal world. The joy that comes from Christ isn’t dependent on our “happiness” because it comes from a connection to God that cannot be severed in the same way that we can never cast off God’s love, no matter what efforts we make to that end. It’s a feeling and a concept that’s difficult to define, but that you absolutely understand if you have felt it or even sought to feel it. It’s a feeling accompanied as often by tears and pleading as it is by laughter or praise. 

There’s a misconception that exists sometimes in the church and which I think is largely an osmosis-received taint from the all-conquering American Gospel of Wealth that following Christ will make you happy. If you follow Christ, things will go your way. Sin leads directly to material downfall, righteousness has a one-to-one correlation with every kind of success. This material interpretation of the Gospel is often stretched to practically Satanic lengths where one’s goodness becomes measured purely in terms of temporal blessings despite plenty of scriptural evidence to the contrary. We are promised blessings for following Christ, but none of those blessings are designated specifically as material. The sun shineth on the wicked and good, and if the modern world isn’t absolute evidence of that, then I suppose nothing can be. We have created Mormon-specific ways to interpret the Gospel of Wealth, too: pay your tithing and you’ll never want for anything, for example.

I mean, it’s not that God does want us to be that kind of happy. It’s not that He doesn’t care about our temporal well-being. If God didn’t care about physical suffering He wouldn’t have commanded us to serving others to relieve that suffering. And yeah, there are plenty of scriptural examples of people living righteously reaping material rewards and of sinners finding out the hard way that “wickedness never was happiness.” But there’s a big giant neon sign blinking “BUT IF NOT” above that entire storyline because there are no guarantees that ticking every box won’t result in a Job situation (the bad part) and that people who seem like they have completely abandoned any semblance of trying to do good won’t be swimming through vaults filled with money in a Scrooge McDuck style glut of facsimilistic “happiness.”

But the story of the Gospel is, over the course of world history starting with Adam and Eve, reaching its apex with Christ himself, and being reiterated in no uncertain terms in 1844, one of violence, oppression, persecution, and hardship. And it’s likely that at some point, it will be again. Was Peter, as he died an excruciating death on an upside down cross, suffering the material consequences of his spiritual failings? Seems unlikely. Did Peter feel a joy in Christ as he died, a longing for home, a hope in his Savior and the Atonement. I have no doubt whatsoever.

And here’s the truly, absolutely magnificent thing about joy through Christ: no one can regulate it, no one can take it from you, no one can excommunicate you from it, no one can define you out of it, it is not dependent on your sexuality, your status in the institutional church, your “activity” rate, your appearance. It’s a joy that comes from our direct relationship with Christ and from our desire to follow Him. Alma felt that joy so deeply it caused him pain and that was when he was in the absolute throes of evil in a way that most of us simply can’t imagine. If Alma can feel that joy as he begins his journey from the depths of sin to the heights of goodness, then that joy is certainly accessible to all of us in whatever state we find ourselves. 

God willing, none of us will die on an upside down cross now or in the future. For some, the hardest cross they’ll ever have to bear is three-hour church (and some of us bore that cross so, so badly). But living the Gospel isn’t always fun, even when life is generally going well. It’s not all munches and mingles (this is the correct pluralization) and it’s not all beautiful, perfect spiritual experiences with our perfect spouses, perfect children, perfect lives. Sometimes it’s just work and rules, or at least it feels that way. Even (especially? I mean, the life of even a modern day apostle sounds like hell on earth to me) for the most righteous, life can be a slog. But Christ died so that that joy could always be in reach, because no trial, no mishap, no tragedy can take away our hope in Him, our longing for home, and our faith that as miserable as things are right now, Christ has provided a path to eternal joy.

When I was in grad school in Indiana, the 19 year old inactive son of an inactive family started coming to church out of the blue. He’d come on Sunday morning with his girlfriend both of them dressed like they had come straight to church from a Linkin Park concert and invariably sipping on 64 ounce Super Big Gulps of Mountain Dew as they sat on the front row. We were all so, so happy to have them there. Nobody cared how they were dressed, nobody cared about the Big Gulps (well, I was jealous, but that’s it), nobody cared about piercings or tattoos. They needed to be there and we needed them to be there. That was all that mattered.

There’s no way around the hard truth that church culture has become incredibly aesthetic and that we often use a combination of white upper-middle class and specifically Mormon tropes to gatekeep our communities. We want people to come to church in their “Sunday best,” smelling like essential-oil-laced soap, clean cut (no beards or mustaches for leaders!), smiling, and contributing to the ward. This seems to be particularly true in large swathes of Utah but it’s not just a Utah thing, it’s a problem all over the US, particularly in white, upper-middle class wards. 

That gatekeeping, which I think is largely unconscious rather than deliberate, is holding back not just the spiritual potential of active members, but perhaps more importantly, it creates a perception of “us and them,” of “faithful sons and prodigal sons” rather than reminding us of the truth of that parable: that we are all prodigal sons, no one more or less than the other because we have all fallen short of perfection and that is something that is absolute, not relative. When we gatekeep, when we create these artificial cultural standards that prevent all of God’s sheep from being a part of the flock, we are all poorer for it.

I have a dumb thing I do on Twitter where I jokingly/not jokingly invite my followers to come back to church and inevitably get responses either by reply or by DM saying that people simply don’t feel wanted. They feel rejected because of their appearance, their sexuality, their inactivity, their lack of conviction, or a myriad of other reasons. It is absolutely abhorrent to me that we have created a culture where anyone could feel rejected by people who claim to be Christ’s representative organization on earth and there is no doubt in my mind that that culture exists. 

I’ve experienced it myself during my freshman year at BYU and I’ve seen a number of friends go through it as well. Whether for internal (spiritual) or external (aesthetic) reasons, people felt they could not go to church because they did not fit into the norms and faced rejection by their fellow members. This is something that has to change or we will never reach the goals we have set for ourselves as a community. That change will be incredibly hard because it has been embedded so deeply into our structure, but we are shackling ourselves spiritually with chains made from white collared shirts and maxi skirts. 

Seeing that Monster Energy-branded couple come to church every Sunday not caring for two seconds what anyone thought of how they were dressed because they wanted to be there changed a lot of people’s hearts in our little ward in Indiana. The responsibility to change active members’ hearts to accept people who aren’t at the aesthetic and spiritual mean does not lie with those who are on the margins of the church. But at the same time, simply by taking the step to come to church, you will change people. You will be a part of the progress that we as a culture and a community need to make. 

Come to church with your tattoos, smelling of cigarette smoke, hung over from the night before. Bring your coffee if you need to. If you’re a gay member of the church, bring your boyfriend or girlfriend, because we want them there, too. We need you there and you need to be there. The truth of the Gospel and the love of Christ are completely independent of my sins (perceived or real) or yours or anyone else’s, and we all bring them to church with us. Come to church if all you have is hope or you just want to believe.

I hate the analogy that the church is a hospital because then it naturally puts the burden on some people to be doctors and some people to be patients. A better analogy would be that the church is the family in  Lost in Space, we’re adrift from our home, every single one of us is lost. No one is less lost than anyone else and we all need each other to get home and we absolutely refuse to get home without bringing every single member of the family with us and nothing matters except we are a family and we are in this together.

Please come to church. It’s not about the institution, it’s about the true love of Christ. We need you there, every single one of you. And together, we’ll make it home.

The yellowed plastic tray arrives and the process begins like so many times before as his clear blue eyes scan the week’s offerings with urgent anticipation. I hold it perfectly still as he considers his many options. With robotic precision, he examines each little cup and its contents, more discerning than the haughtiest of connoisseurs. The very slightest difference in water level is known to him, each transparent milliliter matters. His baby fat hand hovers, but first he must think, he must analyze.

He has decided, and his hand moves toward the one perfect cup. His soft finger pads, sticky with stolen treats and wiped away tears, the congenital grime of childhood, grip the rim of the little cup. But no, he has sensed something, some imperceptible flaw. This is not the one. He leaves a filmy signature of bacteria and dirt for some unknowing future drinker to touch to his lips and moves on.

This. This is the one. He picks it up and moves it tortuously toward his lips with all the care of a miner moving nitroglycerin; a single spilled drop is a disaster. It does not spill and observers whisper a silent thanks to a watching God. The cup is at his lips, now.

He slurps. Like a Frenchman sucking loosened snail meat from a greasy brown shell, he slurps and the purposefully quiet room is filled with the sound of his slurping. He pulls the cup away to examine his work and sees that a couple of tiny droplets have escaped the wet vacuum of his slack mouth. This is not acceptable. This cannot be.

The cup is back at his lips and with the efficiency of a desert animal he flicks a soft pink tongue into the recesses of the cup and gathers the liquid. It is done, and now it is time to cast away the leavings, a bandit racoon tossing empty clam shells into a riverside pile. In the tray there are three openings for the used cups and each has its merits. Each is considered in turn.

The mechanical claw of his little hand hangs over the middle opening for several seconds as an audience of two holds its breath. But this is not where his cup goes. The first choice is, by rule, never the correct one. One little last drop, somehow missed, more saliva than water, surely, drips from the inverted cup to land in an untouched compatriot.

Finally, it is decided and with Caligula logic the cup is dropped with a quiet clatter onto the bone pile pit with its dead fellows. Now, it is done and the tray moves on until next Sunday, when he will take the Sacrament again and the ritual will be repeated.

Today on the radio while listening to an interview with a guy who recently wrote a book about flags (guess which station I was listening to), I heard something that struck me. The author, discussing the power of flags as symbols and the rising tide of nationalism around the world, made an important distinction between nationalism and patriotism. “Patriotism,” he said, “is loving one’s own and having respect for others. Nationalism, on the other hand, is loving one’s own but having contempt for others.” This isn’t the first time I’ve considered the differences between the two concepts, but I really liked the way he put it, and in the context of the country’s political climate and that of the world at large, it seemed particularly apt. America, like pretty much every country ever, has always had a nationalist streak running through it that has been expressed in various distasteful ways, usually disguised as the more virtuous patriotism.

But, rather than spending much time railing on nationalism, the dangers of which are well-known, I’d like to suggest a third route, a kind of patriotism that I think truly embodies who we are as both Americans and Christians. In my first post, I talked about my agnosticism (agnostic theism, to be clear), but despite my mind being Schrodinger’s cat box when it comes to my belief in god, my commitment to basic principles of Christianity remains unfazed. More on that, eventually, but that’s simply to preface my suggestion. Patriotism is certainly vastly preferable to nationalism, which to my mind is tied for first place as the most devastatingly evil and anti-Christian ideology of the modern world. However, patriotism in the sense of loving one’s own while respecting others does not meet the standard set by Christ himself. Simply respecting people from other countries and faiths and ethnic groups and whatever boundaries separate us from the “other” is not enough. Christ commanded us to love them.

To love the “other” is one of the most difficult parts of being human, perfectly and pointedly illustrated in my favorite parable, the story of the Good Samaritan. Among the many remarkable aspects of that story is the feature of otherness. The Samaritan, of course, is the most obvious outsider, from a sect reviled and cast out by the Jews. But to the Samaritan, it was the Jewish man dying by the roadside who was the outsider, from a group that despised his own, a man to whom he owed nothing, not even ethno-religious solidarity. But, demonstrating true Christlike love, the Samaritan looked beyond the artificial (from a spiritual viewpoint) barriers of genealogy and history and religion and did everything in his power to help a man that for all he knew considered his kind the scum of the earth. That’s part of the power of the parable.

Patriotism is laudable. Americans, Canadians, Europeans, and anyone who lives in a democracy with basic freedoms is living in a historical anomaly and should be incredibly grateful. But nationality isn’t merit based, and it certainly confers no preference in the eyes of God, despite what we might tell ourselves. There are no borders among children of God, and Christlike charity may begin at home, but it certainly doesn’t end at foreign shores. Overcoming the biological and psychological barriers that prevent us from conferring the love we have for those familiar to us to those who are utterly foreign to us, perhaps even hateful toward us, is one of the most difficult things about being a Christian. It goes against human nature in a very visceral way (there’s a reason it’s sometimes called the Monkeysphere). But it’s what Christ asks of each of us. It is a goal that we are commanded to strive for, to have a love of God and of all men. To love those we’ve never met, to clothe our enemies, to do good to those who spitefully use us. There are no exceptions. Enemies of the state, though they may be, Christ has commanded us to love them.

The Church has emphasized this in recent years, to its enormous credit and political risk, and my experience is that we as a people do a pretty solid job here. There’s still a sizeable minority within the Church, though, that has bought deeply into the growing Know Nothing fanaticism of America First, the thirst for war with other countries, the toxic political culture that is creating virtual ideological ethnic groups among people in America and across the Western world.*

It can be frustrating to see politics and faith constantly conflated, with one often substituting for the other. Nationalism, including nationalism under a facade of patriotism, has no place in a Christian church or a nominally Christian country. Furthermore, common patriotism is not enough, either. We as Christians have to take it one step further in this Westphalian patchwork world we live in. Love of country is laudable, but we should be working toward more than respect for other nations, but toward a perfect Christlike love to every single one of God’s children on Earth (including nationalists in and outside of the Church, I’d add). I do a terrible job at this myself, but I am really trying. How this plays out in the real world of international politics is tricky, but how it should play out in our hearts is clear.

I feel incredibly blessed to be American. Without trying to come off as pretentious, I’ve seen a lot of the world. I know how good we have it. I believe deeply in America as a city on a hill, and I think that many times in our short history we have, as a nation, given selflessly of ourselves and our people to better the world around us. American Exceptionalism, to me, means more than being exempt from the rules that govern international politics or the ability to buck the norms of the rest of the world (though, I don’t think that’s always or even usually a bad thing). It also means being a beacon of a different kind of patriotism, a Christian patriotism that says “we don’t just respect you, we love you and we want to help you better yourselves even as we strive every day to better ourselves.”

I’m a patriot, I’m a Christian, and I’m doing my best to be both despite sometimes trying conditions. Happy Fourth of July to everybody out there. Let’s remember today as the day that America declared not just independence from Great Britain, but also declared that a country and a people can be more than the sum of its borders and interests, a day when we launched the most ambitious national project for the betterment of mankind in all of human history. We’re not perfect yet, but we’re trying, and I hope we’ll never give up.

* This is not meant as a statement of my politics on one or the other side of the aisle, and certainly not as a spiritual condemnation of one side. If you want to see me rant about those from either of the major political groupings in the Church, I can, and probably will. This merely happens to relevant to the post at hand.

(This is part 2 of a two-part post. You can find part 1 here. – Ed.)

I’m going to say flat out that I think the culture of “knowing” is damaging to a lot of members of the Church and almost certainly contributes to the all-or-nothing attitude that pushes people on the fringes away. The Church very often feels like a club for “women [and men] who know,” and going to Church without that certainty can feel like showing up to a Michelin starred restaurant in sweatpants. The thing is, knowledge leaves no room to manoeuvre, it is restrictive, a line that once crossed changes one’s reality. You know or you don’t know, and if you don’t know then it’s either because there is something wrong with you (see above), or because it’s simply not true. If you fulfilled all the pre-conditions necessary for an answer and still didn’t get one, those are the only reasonable conclusions (we tell people to keep asking until they get the right answer, all the while acknowledging in our own scripture that that’s not really how God works).

A good illustration of how we use “know” in the Church versus how we use “believe” can be found with a quick search of both words over on LDS.org. When you search “believe,” most of the references you see are either scriptural or general use of the word to describe the tenets of the Church (e.g., “what we believe,” “we believe in Christ,” “what do Mormons believe?”). On the other hand, searching for the word “know” reveals talks with titles like, “No Greater Joy Than to Know That They Know,” “I Know These Things of Myself,” “I Know It. I Live It. I Love It.,” “Ye May Know,” and “You, Too, Must Know,” to select just a few of the many. I get that this a) isn’t exactly scientific research, and b) you’d expect the language in Conference to be a little bit more on the side of absolute knowledge. On the other hand, the language we use in daily Mormon parlance filters down to us through church leaders, especially through conference talks, and those talks set the tone for how our very centralized religion expresses its faith. Besides that, I can really only speak to my life growing up in the Church and as an adult and what I’ve observed, and I accept that much of what I’m saying here is colored by my own perceptions and my anecdotal experience. However, I’d venture to say that both those perceptions and those experiences are shared fairly widely by members of the Church. If you think I’m exaggerating, listen at your next fast and testimony meeting to see how many small children use any other word but “know,” often directed by well-meaning parents.

There’s nothing wrong with knowing the Church is true, or thinking you know the Church is true. The problem is that if you don’t know, it feels deeply uncomfortable to say so because it’s almost like admitting you don’t have a testimony at all. I would hazard that many, if not most, Mormons, when bearing testimony in class or at the pulpit or anywhere else, say “know” when what they really mean is “believe” or even “hope.” Many people say “know” hoping that if they say it enough times it will be true. But to not say “know” is to admit either personal failure or to cast doubt on the truth of Church. At least, that’s how it has struck me since I switched camps.

The real question, of course, is “Does it matter? Aren’t you being a little pedantic arguing about which words people use to describe their feeling of faith in the Gospel?” Maybe I am, and maybe it’s all semantics, but I’m one of those people who continues, somewhat futilely, to believe that words have inherent meaning and power, and the word “know” has deeply affected the LDS community’s sense of belief and faith. It is understandable, of course, that a people who are making as bold (and some would say extreme) a claim as we do, to be the only true church, the vessel for Christian salvation, should be pretty damn sure that they are hitching themselves to the right wagon. Besides that, a major theme of the Book of Mormon, especially the dog-eared pages of Alma 32, is the transition from that first seed of faith to the outright knowledge of the truth of the Gospel. Our culture is steeped in the importance of knowledge, and knowledge as the end goal of our faith journey. We took it from the Book of Mormon and we made it the key word in our common church lexicon, a universally accepted touchstone concept. And it matters.

It matters because of, as I mentioned above, the impact it has on people who can’t use the word “know” without feeling hollow or hypocritical. It matters because people are pushed to “know” so hard that we often miss the steps that it takes to actually get there and we miss opportunities to better understand the Gospel because of it. It matters because when everyone “knows” but you, you feel out of place and lesser, and that lack of knowledge becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the echo of that word fills your ears until it’s all you can hear. If you’re someone who “knows” the Church is true, this might seem overblown and melodramatic, but for those of us who have had to go to church feeling like the only person in the room who hadn’t had a member of the Godhood personally confirm that they’re in the right place, I can promise you that it’s not. I can remember very clearly how hard it was to bear testimony at the end of a Sunday School or Priesthood lesson for a couple of years, because it felt so awkward to say anything but “I know these things are true,” but it also felt hypocritical to say that I did when my insides were crawling with doubts.

Emphasis on knowledge shortchanges the process of getting there, or at least it has the potential to do so. You don’t have to “know” the Church is true when you’re four years old and your parents are whispering that word into your ear, when you’re eight years old and getting baptized, when you’re walking into the MTC, when you’re kneeling at the altar in the temple, when you’re baptizing your own kids or, hell, even when you’re called to be bishop. It’s okay to still be nurturing that seed of faith and hope and trying to see what you can get it to blossom into. It’s okay to pray daily for a better knowledge, a stronger faith, and a more perfect brightness of hope and to accept that it may take you your entire life to get there. Maybe you never will. True “knowledge” of the veracity of the Gospel may be an unachievable goal in this life for many of us, maybe the vast majority of us, and that’s part of the point of being here in the first place. To hear a twenty-something year old (or much younger) announce with unfeigned confidence that they know with every fiber of their being that the Church is true makes the whole idea of “knowledge” of the Gospel seem almost cheap, once that statement is placed under real examination. In our church, it never will be. Maybe they do know, and I’m simply being cynical and dismissive. I don’t mean to be. People do know, and believing you know is, for all intents and purposes, probably the same as actually knowing. In any case, belief stated as knowledge doesn’t diminish the belief, or invalidate it in any way, and I don’t mean to do either of those things to those who express their sincere testimony in words that hypercritical cranks like me insist on dissecting and parsing to satisfy our own constant self-inquisition.

For the vast majority of us that merely hope and believe, including the many who use “know” when they really mean “believe,” it should be a relief that we are not burdened with the overwhelming responsibility of a perfect knowledge or testimony. Knowledge can be fragile, a ship that breaks its bow on the first iceberg of doubt or self-awareness. Knowledge, real or perceived, has not, in my experience, kept a lot of people from leaving the Church the first time that knowledge was contradicted by some new piece of Church history or unconsidered misgiving (more on the former in another post). Going back to the Book of Mormon, no one could possibly have “known” that God was real and exactly what he wanted of them than Laman and Lemuel, to cite just two of many examples from that book. The knowledge they had, stripped as it was of hope, of faith, of charity, of understanding sincerely sought, was a tool they never knew how to use.

Hope gives us room to fall, room to doubt, room to fail. Hope allows someone like me, who can stare up into the godless blackness at one moment and then fall on his knees in prayer the next, to continue to strive toward a better understanding of Christ and the Atonement. Losing what I thought was my knowledge of the truth of the Church nearly destroyed me because I had been living in a black and white world where knowledge was the only option. It took a great deal of soul-searching and struggle, and the personal decision to keep trying, to come to the conclusion that it was okay not to know and that one verse in Moroni was not the only acceptable way to have a testimony of the Book of Mormon or the truthfulness of the Gospel.

I don’t think that we as an LDS culture are going to be moving on from the emphasis on knowledge anytime soon. I think it’s too deeply embedded in the way we think of our faith and in the average LDS person’s concept of self. But having seen so many friends leave the Church because of their doubts rather than fighting through them to find the kernels of truth beyond some of the frustrations and confusions of being Mormon, I think it would be immensely helpful to make sure that those people know that doubting is not a personal failure. It’s not a negation of their faith. The alternative to the Church being big “t” TRUE is not the Church being big “f” FALSE. Christ did not recruit his apostles from among the already converted, but instead he found men who were willing to go through the process of confronting their doubts until they understood the nature of their Savior. Considering how long it took Peter and company to get there, despite learning at the feet of Christ himself and witnessing countless miracles, it seems only fair that the rest of us should give ourselves more time, too.

(This is part one of a two-part post. You can find part 2 here.- Ed.)

One of the scary things about testing the waters of agnosticism as a Mormon is that we are, quite simply, a religion that culturally and institutionally is antithetical to the notion of agnosticism in the first place, and we are socialized accordingly. From the very beginning of our spiritual lives, the emphasis is placed on surety, on certainty, on making that leap from “faith” to “knowledge.” And that’s understandable. For one thing, our foundational text ends with a promise that if you ask with faith, you’ll receive a certain knowledge of the veracity of said text and all the accompanying implications. “And if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.   And by the power of the Holy Ghost, ye may know the truth of all things.” Nice. All you have to do is sincerely ask. Real intent. Faith in Christ. Like, it seems pretty straightforward. But, there’s a problem there.

The problem is that if you happened to be one of those people, especially someone who was, say, already baptized into the Church at an age where they had trouble grasping the plot of a Boxcar Children novel, who didn’t come away from that prayer (or those many, many prayers) with a firm answer, well…that’s not great is it? Which thing were you lacking, then? Faith? That’s bad. Sincerity? That’s really bad. You didn’t even mean it when you asked. That’s enormous amount of pressure to know. Not to hope. Not to believe. To know (preferably with every fiber of your being/soul). Some of us, though, had one or several soul fibers that just didn’t quite get fully saturated with knowledge, and I can tell you, as one of them, that every time it comes up over the course of your religious life, it is a little bit jarring. Over time, it wears on you.

When I entered the MTC as a smooth-faced, ill-fitted suit wearing neo-ascetic in the fall of 2004, I had never read the Book of Mormon cover to cover. I don’t know if I had ever read a full chapter of the Book of Mormon on my own. I had memorized seminary scriptures just long enough to repeat and forget them. I had slept, physically or mentally, through basically every seminary lesson I had ever gone to and only given the most cursory attention to nightly family scripture reading. Now, a real full-time Mormon for the first time in my adult life, I was committed to the basics of actually believing in the religion it was now my job to propagate to the atheist hell holes of Western Europe. I started reading the Book of Mormon and tried to avoid any discussion that required a detailed knowledge of Gospel doctrine or the scriptures (I remember with acute embarrassment being the only person who wasn’t sure who Teancum was and asking “wasn’t he…a king?”, a question that was met with an MTC version of rather hostile derision).

In the MTC, I faced a constant barrage of “pure” testimony, and while I felt that I was there for the right reasons, I wanted to be able to be just as sure as everyone else that the Book of Mormon was true. I wanted my heart to burn with the spiritual fire that I was convinced drove the engines of every other missionary but me (at the time I didn’t quite realize the irony of already “knowing” the Church was true and just asking God to confirm the fact). My time at the MTC never really got me there. I had spiritual experiences and I was an enthusiastic young elder, but that nagging lack of fire that I knew was unique only to me and that one missionary whose main post-mission goal was to become a Mason was something I carried with me throughout those two years.

The most dramatic example of my inability to have a lightning bolt of faith strike my heart came when, recalling my MTC companion’s story of how he knelt in the Sacred Grove and prayed for a testimony and felt an overwhelming knowledge of the truth of the Gospel, I tried a poor man’s version of the same thing. On a p-day hike, I sneaked briefly away from my trainer, just long enough to find a secluded spot in the woods and pray out loud for my own First Vision Experience. Maybe it was the fact that I’d broken a mission rule in my quest for perfect knowledge, or maybe it’s the fact that God seems to have no jurisdiction in France, but I trudged back to my trainer and the other missionaries feeling entirely underwhelmed and vastly inferior to my MTC companion, who was so spiritual that even thinking about the Gospel seemed to drive him to tears.

Again, I had spiritual experiences as a missionary, and I’ve had them since. I sincerely loved reading the Book of Mormon. It brought me comfort during miserable days of missionary drudgery, which is what most of a mission in Western Europe consists of. But that defining answer to a prayer daily proffered never came, and I spent those two years in the shadow of an inferiority complex for it. To even speak of the fact would have been anathema, but I always felt like it was somehow evident to those with whom I spoke about the Church, and that every time I bore testimony to a rapidly retreating Frenchman or a bored African refugee, they could feel that I didn’t really believe it. It really wasn’t for lack of trying, though.

There’s a point to this long-winded narration of my missionary past, and it’s the fact that, well, I did have a testimony all along, in its own form. I had never received that punch-in-face Moroni’s Promise Moment, but in my own way I believed, or even “knew,” the Church was true. Ironically, it took me so long to know I knew because of Moroni’s promise. In my mind, testimony came not from a love of the Church and Gospel principles, from the happiness they brought you when you lived them, or even a deep-set hope in the Atonement and moral principles taught by Christ, all of which I possessed. I thought a testimony needed to also be accompanied by an incontrovertible spiritual experience, a kind of badge of authority that I could flash to wandering faith seekers I encountered. I was fairly certain that my middling testimony, without any kind of endorsement from the Holy Ghost, was the reason my message so rarely penetrated the hearts and minds of those I was supposed to be teaching. I would later realize that a) I was simply not a very good teacher, b) no one else’s testimonies seemed to be doing anything either, and c) penetrating a French heart with a spiritual message from an obscure American sect of Christianity is a akin to trying to pierce military grade body armor with wet corn starch.
I did have a testimony, and eventually I realized it, but by the time I did it was already too late. Coming to terms with not receiving a clear “Moroni’s Promise/First Vision” took a lot of time and thought and sometimes struggle, but gaining that understanding was an important step in my spiritual growth. It helped keep me invested and active in the Church when it would have been really easy to check out after I got home, accepting my failure to get the real answer I was seeking. Certainly when, years later, I started doubting the very existence of God, it provided me with a little bit of flexibility in how I coped with those doubts intellectually. After all, I had had a testimony for years without really knowing the way most Mormons seem to (or claim to).