I will probably send Kristy's OP, it is very good and much kinder that what I would like to say.
Here is how I would like to respond, but probably won't for the sake of keeping the peace and DW doesn't want things to be awkward:
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Hey Brother xxxxxx,
I saw this article last week. Though I’m sure you sent this in the spirit of kindness, may I point out how others may have misinterpreted your email and your acceptance and even belief in some of the ideas presented in this article?
Let’s start with this:
1) "What I have been able to understand is why people stay," she said. She boiled it down to character. Those who stayed active in the church exhibited patience, faith and trust in Jesus Christ, hope, knowledge and wisdom, obedience, diligence and persistence, humility, repentance and forgiveness, charity and virtue.
Is this how you view your siblings who have left the church? They lack character? They lack any good qualities like wisdom, knowledge, humility, persistence, forgiveness, charity, and virtue? If you do view your siblings this way, how do you view someone like me, someone unrelated to you and how will you view me if I eventually leave the church? If you don’t view your siblings or others this way, why would you send a “decently written article” with this type of ignorant drivel?
2) "Most people who decide to leave the church really end up leaving a cartoon of the church," said Williams, a psychologist and director of BYU's Wheatley Institution, which hosted "Reason for Hope: Responding to a Secular World" at the Hinckley Alumni and Visitors Center.
Williams spoke from experience.
"I didn't deliberately make this cartoon and assume it was the church," he said. "Nobody purposefully offered me only a cartoon of the church. The cartoon was what my subculture made available and what I had ears to hear."
Elder Hafen described the phenomenon in a different way.
"Most of us do run into some uncertainty and ambiguity," he said. Most children grow up and recognize that there is a gap between the ideal they perceived when young and what was actually real. For example, they learned that their parents, or they themselves, weren't perfect.
Perhaps you can help me understand the above paragraphs a bit better? So if someone has been taught certain narratives their whole life, made it through church, seminary, mission, years of service and then they find out that the narratives told in sacrament, Sunday school, or at home are different, it is somehow their fault because they invented or created some cartoon of the church? None of the responsibility lies on the church or its members for perpetuating narratives and stories that it turns out are not entirely accurate? The church’s essay Blacks and the Priesthood had to DISAVOW previous theories…why would they have to do that if those ideas still didn’t exist? Maybe you can’t see it, maybe you don’t want to see it, but these leaders are blaming the victim for somehow creating a caricature of a church that doesn’t exist, when the caricature they created was the caricature the church persisted and claimed it was.
“Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in a premortal life; that mixed-race marriages are a sin; or that blacks or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else. Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form.”
3) "Mind the gap
Each person must learn to navigate that gap, and Elder Hafen described three levels of doing so. On the first level, some don't ever see that gap and never leave that black-and-white thinking, like his friend. At the second level, people see things as they really are, but often erase the ideal and therefore the gap between the two, and they suffer from "a terminal skepticism," Elder Hafen said. "Our cultural paradigm can seem permanently stuck in level-two realism."
Level three is the goal, he said, a space where people live not only with eyes wide open but hearts wide open.
"At level 3, we're neither optimists nor pessimists, we're open-minded believers who know that history and life are not always clear-cut and tidy, but our desire is to keep learning and growing. We want to improve the status quo, not just criticize it."
His friend's happy bubble didn't materialize "because the church consciously imposed some mindset to keep him in the dark. His bubble was nothing more complicated than the innocent perspective and habits of gliding along at level one, not realizing that we can grow out of that simplistic world."
Do you find it ironic that for someone who claims that others are stuck in black and white thinking, their final stage of getting beyond black and white thinking requires belief that the church is True? That doesn’t come across as strange to you? So to not be a black and white thinker, the conclusion you have to come to is to still believe the church is True, that’s how you really become a well-rounded and nuanced thinker. It really is Stage 3 thinking (see Fowler’s stages of faith). For such a “decently written article”, this seems rather biased, and for a conference focused on faith and intellect, this appears completely intellectually lazy. Perhaps you can offer a different interpretation as I seem to be missing something.
4) "Do not have someone else's faith crisis," Williams added. "Don't have a non-LDS faith crisis. If you think you are having a faith crisis, make sure to find out what faith really is in the context of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. … Assume that most of your cultural understandings are wrong or at least distorted. Then give the restored gospel a chance at your mind and especially at your soul."
Giving faith an equal chance includes persistent and sometimes difficult effort, each speaker said.
"Press forward by giving the Lord and his church the benefit of our doubts and uncertainties," Elder Hafen said.
Why? This makes a lot of assumptions….that the LDS church is the Lord’s church, that the LDS church is where someone should be, that to choose otherwise means that you have not chosen God or Jesus. Or that again, it is someone’s fault that they had an incorrect understanding or distorted view of the church culture, it could not have possibly been the leadership or the church’s fault, it must be the person’s fault. Again, I’m not sure why you think this type of advice would be helpful or useful to someone.
5) "For me," Millet said, "to doubt our doubts is to be courageous rather than cavalier when it comes to eternal things. We cannot be casual in doubting our doubts and thus succumb to spiritual and intellectual laziness. In other words, no one of us should ever allow a doubt to reign, when in fact it has not won that lofty perch through proving itself beyond all doubt.
So if someone concludes they don’t believe in the church any longer, they have succumbed to intellectual and spiritual laziness? Is that really how you view people? This type of rhetoric is not only disturbing and unhelpful, it’s cowardly. To me Millet is the coward. He’s willing to suppress his issues and concerns, put things on the shelf so to speak, and then talk down and disregard others who have crossed the bridge into the dark night of the soul, examined the facts and concluded differently. Somehow in the Mormon church we have come to praise those who doubt, but remain faithful, but only in the context of our church. We send out thousands of missionaries to do quite the opposite, to leverage the wedges of doubt others might have of their own faith journey or church or philosophy. When “investigators” insist that they may doubt their current faith but want to stick with it, we call them lazy, and prideful, and deceived, So which is it? Persistence in the face of evidence to the contrary is applauded in one way, and disregarded in the other? How is that consistent?
Again, is this how you view people? And if you don’t, why would you send this to someone with your endorsement of the ideas and narratives expressed in the article?
