Something for Sundays: Disentangling Jesus

replacing the keystone

Something for Sundays is a series of faith-related posts about my experience as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They are a part of my Kimber Was Here newsletter, which offers weekly(ish) poems, life insights, and doodled-on pictures. Thank you for being here and for following along!

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A friend once asked me, “How can you question and doubt the church and still feel close to Christ?”

I want to focus today’s Something for Sundays post on trying to answer that question. 

A long, but important disclaimer: if you do not want to read something somewhat critical of the LDS Church, this post is not for you. Sorting through your faith questions can be heavy! It’s emotionally and mentally taxing. If you are in a place right now mentally/emotionally where you do not want to read about something that may challenge your beliefs, I totally get it. What I will write today is a small part of my experiences and interpretations of growing up Mormon, and it might not be yours. I am so more than happy to talk about these things and am open to having conversations about anything church-related. But just know this is where I am coming from right now and if you do not feel like you’re in a place to read my post right now, I do not fault you and I am so grateful you subscribe to my newsletter anyway. I love you :) 

Okay, that being said, 

It’s hard to pinpoint when my “faith crisis” actually started. In reality, it’s all I’ve thought about for years, and can talk about it for hours at the drop of a hat. However, I write about it less. Theology and religion is a touuucchyyy subject for many, and I don’t want to write pretending like I have all the answers. My teacher side of me comes out easily, and when I don’t know how to perfectly explain something, it’s hard for me to even try. But this whole subject has been on my heart for so long and I feel hopeful that what I write could be of use to you in some way. 

Because being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints dictates much of member’s lives, discussion of theology, policy, and practices quickly become personal. What we eat, how we dress, how we spend our time, how we view the world, the stories we tell… it all stems from the Church. 

I’ve always been absolutely fascinated by religion and absolutely in love with the Church throughout my life – I adopted the mindset of being “all-in”. I come from a lineage of people who gave their entire lives to the Church. I wore shorts to my knees, never tasted a drop of coffee or alcohol, and accepted callings with ease. I tsk-tsked at people not living the gospel correctly. I preached boldly throughout my life because I believed what the Church teaches: that we have the complete, full, Truth with a capital-T. And who doesn’t want that?

Over time, my crystal clear “knowledge” and shiny testimony has matured with me. We have aged together, and as the world expands around me, my view of the church and it’s place in the world has shifted, too. 

This hasn’t been easy. There are days when I feel fine and other days when I cry for hours. Questioning the Church, for me, has felt like questioning my very identity. In a lot of ways — it is just that! My blood, my family, my tradition, my time, my life — it has all been Mormonism. To question my faith tradition has felt incredibly scary and devastating at times. But here I am, feeling a little bit more “on the other side” and wouldn’t ya know, I am still alive!

If you ask me “where I’m at” in my faith journey, one sentence I wrote in my journal a while ago comes to mind: 

I am caught between faithfully serving each Sunday, and obsessively watching cult documentaries, trying to figure out if I am in one. 

Basically — I am in the middle of it all! The idea of a “faith deconstruction” has almost become a buzzword in online circles. While I do resonate with the idea of deconstructing faith – slowly evaluating each piece and seeing where it comes from – I find that the words “faith disentanglement” ring truer for my experience. 

When I say I am disentangling my faith – I recognize that there is some love, some justice, some goodness there – but a lot of it is tangled up in all the other… stuff.

In Mormonism, we are taught that the center of our Church, the KEYSTONE of our religion, is the Book of Mormon. What happens if the Book of Mormon goes? Everything else goes tumbling down with it. Most people I see online who have left the Church do not claim to have a belief in God, and if they do, I rarely hear people say they still believe in Jesus. It’s absolutely easy to see why. 

Just like the metaphor of the keystone: when one thing goes, it all goes.  

If you start to question the validity of the Book of Mormon, you essentially are questioning Joseph Smith’s prophetic calling, and he was called by Jesus to produce the Book of Mormon, which testifies of Jesus, so are you questioning Jesus too? And suddenly you are questioning the Restored Gospel and the Restored Gospel is based on the teachings of Jesus Christ, and the Restored Gospel has temples and eternal families, and if that’s not real or true, what is the purpose of families, and is God even real at all?

Growing up, I often heard the quote from D&C that “Joseph Smith, the Prophet and Seer of the Lord, has done more, save Jesus only, for the salvation of men in this world.” When everything lies in the hands of Joseph Smith and his production of the Book of Mormon, it’s a shaky foundation to stand on, for obvious reasons. Besides his controversial life and story, besides his scrappy beginnings and 40 wives that most members of the Church didn’t know about until ~10 years ago, besides all that – Joseph Smith is just a man. He is. Whether he was an inspired man, or not, I will leave that up to you to decide, but when we put him on a pedestal next to the Savior of the World, that can feel a little… tangled.

If we want Jesus to be the center of our Church, we need to start treating Him like it. This is tricky because what the Church SAYS and what the Church DOES are sometimes incongruent. 

The Church SAYS over and over and over that Christ is the center of the Church. But in practice, we believe we obtain salvation not through belief in Jesus Christ alone, as the scriptures say, but through a covenant path that requires belief in Joseph Smith as a prophet to participate in. 

To be fair, in recent years, I have seen a push from President Nelson to try to put Jesus back into Church. He encourages members to ditch the word “Mormon” and opt for “Member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” He encouraged members to read the New Testament and study the ministry of Jesus. He encouraged members to not treat the Atonement as a single event but instead recognize that we can achieve Atonement through Jesus Christ. He changed the church logo to showcase the Christus. 

I see these efforts; I applaud them, appreciate them, and participate in them, but ultimately, I believe that the Church still has a way to go with making Christ and His teachings the center of our theology and tradition.

The problem is, culturally, that we give “the Church” way too much credit. 

When kids go up in testimony meeting, what do they say? “I know the Church is true.” 

When excusing faulty teachings or troubling statements, you might hear a church member say, “Well, the Church is true, but the people aren’t.” 

These statements don’t actually make sense. Why? Because The Church is not an abstract idea or organism. THE CHURCH IS THE PEOPLE. The “Church” is only as “true” as the people are – because they are the same thing. Yes, there is the Institution of the Church coming top-down from Salt Lake City, but still, those are just people, too.  It gets very messy and very entangled when we treat Jesus and the Church like they are the same thing. 

It’s been extremely helpful for me to process my faith disentanglement with a dear friend of mine who is not Mormon and didn’t even know too much about Mormonism (but does now after being my friend, haha).

I cried to her one day: “But the Church brought me so many good things, and the Church did this, and the Church did that…” She stopped me. “Wait, didn’t GOD do all that?” She asked. Her comment made me pause. She continued, “I find it interesting that you say, ‘The church is true’, wouldn’t you say, ‘God is true?’”

I was giving The Church, not God, the credit.

Later on, when trying to decide if I’d continue wearing my garments or not, I cried to this same friend (GOD BLESS HER. TRULY!) about how afraid I was that people back home would look at me and assume I no longer believed in or loved God. She responded, “Then they’ll talk to you for 5 seconds and find out that you do.” 

Her comments changed something inside of me. 

I realized that I’d been substituting “the Church” for God. I’d been worried about my outward appearance rather than the condition of my heart. I’d lose sleep over my relationship with a man-made institution (that I’m sure was created with great intentions) because I thought my commitment to that institution would determine my relationship with God. 

If you are or have been an active member, you understand that you do not have to look far to find the checklist of how to gain salvation. The Church becomes the god, clearly laying out the path and checkpoints that you need to reach to get back home to Heavenly Father. Are we not missing the point here, of a Redeemer?

I watched a talk that an apostle gave addressing university students. He pleaded with the students to not let their ‘Faith Crisis’ cause them to lose faith in God. Here’s the thing: most people who question the church begin with Church History, and current Church practices, but because the Church has drilled the “all or nothing” standpoint into our brains for so long, it feels like all or nothing. And if it’s nothing, God goes with it too.

When we start blaming God for issues created and maintained by the Church, we put people at risk of abandoning God altogether. 

For example, when considering the Priesthood Ban on black members of the church, I have heard the sentiment: “I hope someday we will understand why God did that.” 

Or when asking questions about polygamy: “We don’t know why God restored that practice, but we need to have faith that God knows better than we do.”

Or about Heavenly Mother, “We don’t understand why God hasn’t revealed more about Heavenly Mother, but for now, it’s best not to speculate.” 

Or about women’s place in the church: “Maybe you should pray and ask God why He designed the church to not have women in high leadership positions.”

When we chalk up any issue we have to “God wants it that way” – it’s no wonder that people leaving the Church are leaving God, too. 

When I began seriously deconstructing and disentangling the teachings of the Church, I went slowly and deliberately. I went slowly because I purposefully wanted to keep my faith in God. The disentanglement is dizzying. I try to break a strand free, nourish it, love it, and get to work on another. I have disentangled and disentangled and disentangled, and in the end, I found Jesus. I found Grace. 

When we become so dogmatic in our traditions and our doctrines, the belief is brittle. In the words of Jared Halverson, “I’d take flexible faith over brittle belief any day.”

I had never, before attempting this past year (still working on it!), read the New Testament all the way through. Personally, the focus of scripture study my whole life was the Book of Mormon. When I committed to reading the New Testament like a child just last year, I started to see the gospel of Jesus Christ in a whole new light. I learned to be flexible in my beliefs. In some ways gaining that flexibility was painful.

It has been painful because I see myself in the Pharisees and other Jewish people clinging tightly to their Laws and Traditions. I see myself more in those religious people than I see myself in the disciples willing to leave their nets. I never thought a fixed belief in the One True Church was my net I’d have to leave behind to follow my Savior. 

When I say “leave”, I am still figuring out what that means for me. As of right now, I am a fully active member of my ward. I love my ward. The people are kind, generous, inclusive, loving, gracious, and true. My bishop sees me struggle and thanks me for showing up anyway.

For me, I stay in this church community because it is the way I was raised to worship Jesus. I worship Jesus through gathering with believers and offering my service to others. I love certain aspects of the functions of our church meetings and aspects of our community that are not found elsewhere. This is my experience and my choice right now, and if yours is different, I am cheering you on. Sadly, so many people in our faith community feel (me included!) that they have to physically leave the church if they don’t agree. The price we pay for honoring conformity over authenticity in our faith tradition is steep. It results in a hollow membership rather than a strong, diverse, nuanced community.

Although right now I choose to physically be a part of this faith tradition, what I am leaving are the obligations and beliefs that I once saw as a part of the requirement to follow Christ and the ticket to my salvation. I am gently placing Jesus as the keystone of my faith. I am learning more about His ministry, seeing my body as a temple, and learning the language of God’s love. I have felt God with me on this journey.

If you are worried about losing God when you leave the Church, I understand. It takes time to disentangle it all; I’m still in the trenches myself. I hope we can embrace the pain and grief and disappointment together and turn, turn, turn, again and again, back to Jesus.

Jesus isn’t going anywhere! Relationship with Him is possible without being entangled in everything else — in fact, that’s what His ministry was all about. Remember! His yoke is easy! His burden is light!

Happy Sunday!