A Crisis of Faith? Or a Crisis of Love?
If you’re a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, you or someone you love has experienced or will experience what has been called a crisis of faith. I believe a better name for it is a crisis of love. Thinking of it this way may help us correctly focus on the most important issue.
Crisis of Faith Is the Wrong Paradigm
A crisis of faith is defined as a person moving from a place of belief and faith to a place of doubt. It’s often assumed that the root cause is sin, rebellion, laziness, or lack of character. The perceived solution is to focus on getting the person back to traditional belief.
Someone who has been deeply committed to their faith doesn’t come to doubt lightly. Treating them like a sinner who needs to repent is the wrong response. Warning them from a place of ignorance about their concerns only fuels the fear that their doubts are well-founded.
Visualizing a Crisis of Faith
Here’s how you might visualize a crisis of faith. It may start with one “hot” issue like the church’s teachings about LGBTQ people. When a person doesn’t find satisfactory support and answers in the church, they look elsewhere where they discover a host of other hard issues.
Faith Crisis: The Wrong Questions
Consider the questions a believer might be asking in the context of someone’s faith crisis:
- How can I help Bob believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet?
- How can I help Sarah know that the Book of Mormon is historical and true?
- How can I help Melissa believe in God’s true priesthood and respect its patriarchal nature?
- How can I help George and Holly know that acting on being gay is a serious sin and that they need to encourage their son to repent?
Do you see the common thread? The believer’s energies are focused on convincing the doubter to return to traditional belief. The believer is forgetting Who has the job of carrying truth to hearts and souls, which may not always align with culture and tradition.
Trying to do the job of the Holy Ghost will almost always fail. A hyper-focus on convincing someone to reclaim lost beliefs usually just creates a naggy atmosphere of anxiety, conflict, pressure, isolation, and fear.
It turns into high-pressure sales. Well-intentioned believers start promising doubters that if they will do A, B, and C, they’ll come to know for themselves again that X, Y, and Z are true. The doubter may try to pretend they believe to relieve the pressure or satisfy someone who seems certain.
I remember a time someone gave me a challenge like this. I followed the instructions with great excitement, hoping for renewed faith. When it didn’t help, my doubts were further solidified… for years.
From the doubter’s perspective, seeing yourself as having a faith crisis leads you to do the wrong things too!
Just as believers focus on convincing you of their truths, you start to feel an irresistible urge to defend yourself by doing the same thing. You want to feed them information and convince them of your views.
Driven by Fear
The paradigm of a faith crisis is fraught with fear.
Fear drives people apart. It turns us all into courtroom lawyers, proving our cases. Adversaries. It makes interactions tense and awkward. It causes us to stereotype and demonize each other. It could all turn out so much differently if we could remember our most important shared value.
Love.
A Crisis of Love
The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
Thomas Merton
A crisis of love is the fear and reality that your most important relationships will be damaged or lost if you stop sharing religious beliefs.
The foundation for this paradigm is a commitment to loving each other, no matter what. It means believing that love is more powerful than fear.
When you or someone you love starts having religious doubts, recognizing this as a crisis of love leads us to calm those fears through an outpouring of loving reassurance that they are safe with you and that you will love them no matter where their search for truth takes them.
From the crisis of faith perspective, we see the doubter as a flawed person who needs to be fixed.
From the crisis of love perspective, we (as a faith community) must confront our own fears and the limits of our capacity to love. We must strive for what many of us would see as a gift from God to love beyond our own ability.
Visualizing a Crisis of Love
When you perceive a situation as a crisis of love, instead of seeing a wall full of doctrinal, historical, and political issues a person might be facing, we instead focus on the much bigger issue.
Do you have a friend who can’t go to church because of the 2015 policy toward LGBTQ people? And the subsequent reversal that was communicated as another, contradicting revelation? If you see this as a faith crisis, you may be tempted to go convince her that prophets aren’t wrong That if she is struggling with it, she needs to pray more and maybe repent. You will most likely fail!
When you see it as a crisis of love, your priority is to be with her. To mourn with her. To listen to and understand her. To affirm that your friendship will continue, no matter what she feels she needs to do to honor her conscience.
You will be influenced by her. What you were sure was right may be affected. This is always the result of love. We influence each other. We cause each other to think more deeply. To act and speak with more sensitivity. This isn’t a danger to your faith. It’s an opportunity for you to practice your faith. Love is at the center of your faith!
Love Crisis: The Right Questions
Consider the questions a believer might be asking in the context of an identified love crisis:
- How can I help Bob feel confident that we are friends, no matter what?
- How can I help Sarah know that I love her and value our marriage, no matter what happens in her faith journey?
- How can I help Melissa feel understood, loved, and valued? Does she have some good points that we could act on in our ward?
- How can I help George and Holly and their gay son Jeff feel 100% safe in our ward? Despite our church’s doctrines, how can I, as a bishop, set the tone for helping our ward be a loving place, no matter what lifestyle Jeff chooses, now or later?
Do you see the pattern here? The goal is to affirm love and help people feel safe, first and foremost. It’s a recognition that people may need to go on journeys of faith that span years or decades or their entire lifetime. When we put love first, those relationships don’t have to end.
Instead of being a source of judgment and pain for people, causing our relationships to become distant, we have an opportunity to increase trust and affection through love.
Possible Believer Thoughts
“Won’t that just make doubters feel like it’s OK to leave the church? Like we’re supporting them in their bad decision? Is it really loving if I’m coddling them in the short run while helping them lose eternal life?”
If you think this, try it your way. Boldly testify. Warn. See yourself as a righteous guide practicing tough love. Like Father Lehi, preach to Laman and Lemuel.
If it works out, great. Go write a book about how right you are. My experience and my money are on you accomplishing nothing but alienating this person out of your life and causing them to believe that you are a self-righteous !@#$!.
The good news is, even if we’ve made this mistake, we can change.
Consider the path of loving and respecting people, even if they choose to leave the church! What do you have now? A continued marriage. A continued friendship. Years of loving interactions. Influence that goes, not just one way, but both ways.
If you really believe that this person needs to return to the church to be happy, whether in this life or in eternity, won’t you have a better chance of influencing someone who knows you love them no matter what?
If you really believe that the Holy Ghost converts people rather than you, won’t a person be more inclined to perceive this in a context of love and safety rather than judgment and hypocrisy?
Possible Doubter Thoughts
“I hate the idea that, in the back of their minds, believers are just being nice to me in hopes that I’ll come back someday.”
Fair. If they really believe, what else would you expect them to want for you? Can it be enough for them to choose to love and respect you, even if they maintain this hope?
Do you secretly maintain a hope that they will lose their belief and join you? Is this any different?
If you’re doubting or have left, you can probably look back to moments where you failed to love in a relationship. Where you tried to push ideas onto people who weren’t ready to hear them. Then felt anger or frustration when they weren’t open to your ideas.
You know full well that the saints aren’t always saintly. That they, like you, can be hijacked by their emotions, doing and saying hurtful things.
What can you do when you recognize yourself as having a crisis of love? When you’re petrified to come out of the closet? When you realize you can’t respect Joseph Smith, much less believe that he was a prophet?
When this crisis of love hits, you’ll know it because you’ll feel scared about how your changing views might damage important relationships you have with believers. When you see this happening, go to those people you love most and affirm your love for them.
Instead of attacking their faith to validate your loss of faith in the church, open your heart to them. Tell them that you love them and don’t want your relationship to be damaged by your sincere and honest changes.
At some point, you will have to tell people that you don’t believe and it is going to hurt them. People who aren’t prepared will probably react badly for a while. But make the commitment to repeatedly affirm your love and your commitment to those relationships.
Have faith that these relationships can be good again. Don’t believe the narrative that leaving the church means you aren’t a person of faith. Leaving, despite the difficult consequences, is a huge leap of faith. You have faith.
Have love. You are still full of it. You may not need a scripture to justify it as your goal, but you intuitively know that love is what brings happiness and meaning to your life. You have love.
If you find yourself itching to expose believing loved ones to your newly found truths in hopes of helping them “see the light”, recognize that you’re doing exactly what you don’t want them to do. See this red flag and move toward love instead.
Inspiration Anyone Can Receive
Whether you call it revelation or inspiration, it doesn’t matter. Whether you think the source is God or your brain, it doesn’t matter.
How Can I Love Today?
Ask this question and give yourself at least two minutes of undistracted time to think about it. Ideas will flow into your mind of both how you can love and who you can love.
It may be someone in your home. It may be a friend you haven’t talked to in years. The ideas will come. Write them on your phone or your hand or on a sticky note. Act on them as soon as you are practically able. Then keep asking the question.
How can I love today?
When you feel isolated and small, ask this question and act on it. It will expand you and make you feel peace and connection.
The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
Thomas Merton
To the extent we haven’t learned to love each other for who we are and who we choose to be, it’s a crisis. But when we can recognize the right crisis, we can address it without fear. We can address it without feeling compelled to twist others into our own image.
We can all have faith in love.
