Two Very Polite Mormons Shook My Faith
Not with their teachings, but with how they reminded me of me.
I wrote recently about how a podcast episode shook loose some of my religious certainties and began a life-change for me. But the shaking actually started years before, in some conversations with Mormon missionaries.
Tuesdays with Mormons
In the early 1990s, two young Mormon missionaries knocked on our door — eighteen or nineteen years old, dress-pants, white shirt, tie, and that name tag identifying each of these kids as ‘Elder’. Most people turn them away. But my wife and I were eager to share our faith, so we welcomed these guys who would fit anyone’s description of ‘fine young man’. Thus began 8–10 weeks of exceedingly polite conversations about our faiths.
I had been warned against talking to Mormon missionaries. People said they were well-trained, manipulative, and extremely knowledgeable. Such a warning betrays how much of my early church instruction was based on fear of outsiders. It also shows an inferiority complex about one’s own ability to engage with people who think differently.
But such warnings were unnecessary. These young Elders were not especially knowledgeable about their faith, and had only a basic outsiders’ grasp of mine. Rather than being manipulative, they were unfailingly genial, polite, decent and just plain ordinary. Their messages lacked the threats of eternal torment often associated with missionary zeal.
They had obviously received some training. They had a solid, if rudimentary, knowledge of their sacred texts. They also knew some basic sales techniques, such as how to make a pitch on the front doorstep, how to move the conversation along, and how to attempt to ‘close a sale’.
These are the tools they brought with them into the mission field of our town, pushed forward by a firmly-held belief that this mission was, without doubt, a good thing to do. They were part of a culture back home of parents, grandparents, coaches, and church members, all of whom built into these youngsters the conviction that spending two years in small-town Southern America (at their own expense) knocking on doors, having these conversations…all of this was work that pleased God.
None of their Mormon theology or history was even slightly convincing to me.
In spite of their sincerity and decency, there was just no chance that their strange doctrines or unbelievable history of the Americas would ‘warm my heart’ (a phrase they often used). From the beginning of our association to the end, it was apparent to me that these young men of intelligence and good judgment had accepted fiction as fact because the most important people around them did the same.
Plausibility structures
Years after these discussions, I learned the sociological term “plausibility structure”. Coined by Peter L. Berger, the term refers to all those parents, etc. I mentioned earlier, along with friends at school, and even characters in stories who share our understanding of reality. Our plausibility structures reaffirm the predominant beliefs of our culture. They make plausible those beliefs that seem strange and unfounded to outsiders. If you are born to Muslim parents in a Muslim country, chances are that you will be Muslim — not just outwardly, but in your attitudes and values. The same is true if you are born in a racist white town, or into a free-thinking family of intellectuals. Certainly it was true for these young men from Utah. And it was true for me too.
I grew up on a farm in Ohio. There were lots of Christians around me, including the people most important to me. That made it not only possible for me to believe, but somewhat inevitable. Had I been a skeptic at age 11, or a Buddhist at 13, that would have been remarkable. But because of my plausibility structure, it never occurred to me to be a skeptic or a Buddhist — only to wonder why others couldn’t see what was so obvious to me. And like most Christians — most people of every type, for that matter — I attributed their lack of perception of the truth as I saw it to their own moral and spiritual flaws. This is perhaps the most human thing that we do.
In a free and open society, we aren’t limited to our early plausibility structures. We read, travel, watch movies from around the world, go off to college, get stationed overseas, and meet international workers at home. We hear new ideas and sometimes accept them. It’s easier than ever to move beyond the viewpoint of your parents. Easier…but still, not easy.
Had I grown up in Provo or Salt Lake City, and my parents were Mormons, and so was my basketball coach and my best friend, why wouldn’t I be a Mormon too? And if ever I doubted the historical underpinnings of the faith, I could just look around and see that people smarter and better than me believe it. That’s enough for many people.
Much of what I describe here I learned over decades. During our Mormon conversations, I’d never heard of a ‘plausibility structure’. But I was starting to understand that, whatever the merits of my own faith, I didn’t accept it on the merits. Not at first, anyway. I accepted it because that’s what my ‘tribe’ accepted. What else can you do when you are seven? Or, to borrow Seth Godin’s wonderfully simple words about marketing and culture, I accepted my faith because “People like us believe things like this”.
What about “making it my own?” Did I ever move past the faith inherited from my parents and claim it for myself? I did. I read the Bible, I talked to my preacher (a wonderful man and a great friend). I read some books, and I took it “seriously”, at least in my own estimation. Heck, I even decided to enter the ministry, which meant leaving home for Bible college in Tennessee.
But in making my faith “my own”, I never looked (or not for long) outside of my plausibility structure. I didn’t study other faiths, or read what skeptics had to say. I didn’t read Nietzsche or Thomas Paine or Robert Ingersoll. I mostly studied what other Christians had written.
Some of these Christians made a decent case for the faith, but always it was a case made from the inside, by believers for believers. One of the blurbs on a popular series of paperbacks by apologist C. S. Lewis says that “Lewis is the ideal persuader for the half-convinced, for the good man who would like to be a Christian but finds his intellect getting in the way”. Exactly.
I came to Lewis and others much more than half-convinced. My intellect, such as it is, wasn’t really getting in the way, but I wanted to give it new tools. But I wasn’t looking to be convinced, only to have my conviction strengthened. I wasn’t asking “Is it true?” but rather “HOW is it true?” I looked at evidence that supported what I already believed, and mostly labeled anything else as ignorance, foolishness, even deception.
There is a name for this practice of mine, this sifting of the evidence and keeping only what suits my preferences. More on that here (I want(ed) to believe).
