Many Churches, One Church

Q: “The Church you describe sounds nothing like the Church I am experiencing.”

🎭One of the weird things about the the LDS (and maybe all religions? Idk) is that there are simultaneously thousands–maybe millions of versions of it being lived or believed in around the globe. 

🧠This creates kind of a fractured experience, in which we (as members) shoulder a good deal of cognitive dissonance all the time, as we attempt to mediate the gap between the Church/Gospel we believe in, with the Church that the “fringe” members of our wards talk about (usually this group includes: the peppers, the feminists, the semi-actives, the end-times activists, etc), the Church that the General Authorities are making, the Church non-members talk about, and the Church that post-members critique.  

🎪It would be overwhelming to regularly recognize how many systems are butting heads and even more so, if we tried to recognize why each of those versions is  justifiable, based on our doctrine and history. 

So, instead of grappling with that mess, our brains prioritize our version as correct and dismiss aspects of others’ versions, so that we feel validated and reinforced by everything that agrees with us, yet untroubled by contradiction from ideas that don’t. 

🧩 In this mindset, we also tend to ignore parts of our own life or experience that don’t fit within our mental model of how things “should” work, and we get fantastically creative in explaining to ourselves “why” unexpected things (good or bad) have happened in the way they have. This is called motivated reasoning. As in: motivated to explain things in a way that lead to a certain result.

(Not to brag, but Murphy and I were amazing at this. We could justify  a n y t h i n g  to fit our version of the Church/Gospel. Also, I’m so so sorry for anyone who had to listen to that.😖) 

🏚Anyway, to have a belief system fractured in so many different directions is to have a system that is not integrated, consistent, or honest with itself. And the lay-people of that system will bear the brunt of the fallout from those different systems colliding. 

“No man (or might we say, organization?) can serve two masters…” 

 ⛪️ I’ve probably listened to a thousand stories, by now, of people’s versions of the Church and it’s always interesting to me how differently we have all internalized this system. 

For example: 

I grew up being kind of envious of First Nations descendants who got to claim “ancestry” to the Book of Mormon peoples. I had no clue the kind of racism they were experiencing, the kind of cultural eradication and exploitation that had been committed against them, the kinds of objectification those members were experiencing on a regular basis. I had never meant to show interest in ways that were offensive. I had never meant to oversimplify their vast and fascinating cultural heritage. 

I had only tried to celebrate them and attempt to make my interpretation of the Book of Mormon prophecies come true.  

Does that make my version of the Church “right” and theirs “wrong?” 

🍊Hopefully, you barfed into your orange juice at that question. 

Clearly, 

💥I was the under-educated one in these interactions. 

💥I was the one who had to expand my understanding of the what “the Church” is, to see where and why experiences like those were still happening. 

💥I was the one with a narrow, privileged view of what it meant to be a member of the Church. 

And this applies to a dozen other subjects, too, all of which, I am mortified (now) to have offered apologetics on. 

The point is this: 

🧶The Church is a mangled up, tangled up knot of contradictory doctrines, policies, and anecdotes. This means that all of us are living in different Churches, in some respects. For those whom it works, it REALLY works well. But, for the vast majority of members, their gender, their race, their sexuality, their family background, their income level, their disability, their education, or some combination of things, has made it an unpleasant, and often a traumatic and deeply invalidating experience. 

✊I have a lot of faith in the lay-membership of the Church as a good, honest, hard-working people. If enough lay-members were to see the fractures of this system, I’m confident that they could make the Church into a better place. 

👉The biggest hindrance, to this, though, is that members have been well-trained to dismiss experiences that aren’t “faith-promoting” and place inordinate weight on those that are. This creates a feedback loop of cognitive bias in which someone only ever sees what they want to see. 👀

🗣If you want to know what the Church really is, you have to stop trying to make it one thing: it is everything that everyone is experiencing. Good, bad, ugly, traumatic, inspiring, life-saving, life-ending. 

👍Your version of the Church is as real as you are. I’m glad it’s served you well. It served me well, too, for a good while. 

👉But, at what cost? 

🛶How many people has the Church stripped of dignity and cultural heritage in order to serve the white American demographic?  

🌈How many people have ended their lives, because of the same doctrines that made us puff out our chests in “defense of the family?” 

💊How many women have been shuttled towards addictions because their hollowed-out lives as caretakers for everyone else have left them empty and passionless? 

💀How many wrongs have gone unaddressed based on excuses that it will all be made right after the person has died? 

⛓ How many people are suffering in your ward, your family, your friend-group right now, because they feel guilty all the time, because they feel like they will never measure up to “God’s standards,” because they have never felt at home in Church pews?  

What do we do about that?