Book Review: Navigating Mormon Faith Crisis
I picked up Navigating Mormon Faith Crisis: A Simple Developmental Map after listening to this very interesting interview with the author by Gina Colvin. Unfortunately, the interview was the high point of my experience with this book.
Navigating spends most of its energy explaining what McConkie calls the stages of human development: Diplomat, Expert, Achiever, Individualist, and Strategist. It is implied but not stated that these are universal stages, broadly applicable to adult life and development. But it turns out that these are stages created in the 1980s to describe professional managers and consultants. That does not mean they are irrelevant to a faith transition, and McConkie does a good job of applying them to his subject, but I’m left wondering why he prefers this set of tools to others, like Fowler’s stages of faith, that may be more appropriate. Is it because this is McConkie’s field, and “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail?” Or is there solid theoretical foundation for this application that he omitted?
But my main problem with Navigating is that it is so abstract. I am an inductive reasoner; I learn best when a new subject is illustrated with many examples. McConkie is apparently deductive; we are given the principles, but no application. After explaining the stages, the book wraps up with a brief call for more diversity in the Church.
McConkie says that “[i]n writing this book, I am living out the same struggle that nettles so many of us in modern Mormon culture. Namely, I’m trying to reconcile a desire to share my faith and perspective more sincerely while fearing that my perspective is not mainstream enough to constitute appropriate sharing.” I am sensitive that McConkie is walking a tightrope of trying to open orthodox (“diplomat”) minds while remaining circumspect enough to not get excommunicated, but I was hoping for at least a little practical advice. How does the development framework help you tell your spouse about your transition? Your parents? How can you help children cope with Dad or Mom not taking the truth claims seriously, and everything else that entails?
I think that same lack of specifics also makes it less useful for what (I assume) was a secondary goal of the book, namely to help the orthodox empathize with the unorthodox, and vice versa, without taking the intellectually lazy route of othering them. It is a very gentle book. You could safely give it to your orthodox friends without offending them. But I don’t think there is much chance of it helping them understand, either.
What Navigating does do for you and your hypothetical orthodox friend is give you a shared vocabulary for discussing the map of faith. But there are even more resources using Fowler’s stages, and you are probably better served by those.
Further Reading
- For a more positive take, see Rachael’s review of Navigating Mormon Faith Crisis at Patheos. “This book has changed my life.”
- A summary of Fowler’s Stages of Faith.
- Parts one, two, and three in a series discussing how well the Church serves the different stages described by Fowler. McConkie would agree that we serve the early, black-and-white stages well and stumble with the later stages.
- Matt Connelly, Painful but Necessary: Six Mormon Intellectuals Share their Crisis of Faith Stories [pdf]. The discussion is again based on Fowler.
