Suspending the Need for Truth
The most unexpected discovery of my post-church, deconstructed faith life is my indifference to the need to know what is true—this is a liberation from the ridiculous certainties of ‘testimony’.
This is the fourth in a series of critical reflections on LDS theology as I navigate my shifting faith.
I offer my thoughts not as an act of retaliation, rebellion or disparagement, but as contributions to the growing community of Mormon thinkers who want the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be the best version of itself.
Previous: No, I’m Not Going Through a ‘Phrase’
Ten months ago, I wrote about my decision to ‘disengage’ from Mormonism because of the irreconcilable conflict between my faith and my gay identity.
Ten whole months ago, I stood giddily on the ledge of exhilarating possibilities. I’d stuck my toes over the precipice, but was still reaching backwards for support. The momentum of my decisions, however, was a forcing me over.
In that essay, I articulated how I was then conceptualizing my feelings in this way:
At the moment, I’m in a process of disengagement from active Church membership. I can’t just leave it at once, both because I still believe something in it and because instant departure would destroy me. So, I’m slowly detaching. … My future feels, I think, bright, open, liberating. Faith-having if not faithful.
Publishing that piece was cathartic balm. I was touched by messages of support, love and acceptance. I was particularly moved by the awkward comments I received from Latter-day Saints. Many of them slogged through that 6000-word piece and responded with variations of ‘I hear you but I don’t get it’. And I got why they couldn’t get it but I honoured their charity. Still others have greeted me more heartily than ever before; they never mention what they read, but—bless them—they don’t have a clue what to say, though I can sense their care.
Once all that hype had died down and my congregation stopped eyeing me like I was about to spark a pride rally down the chapel pews, I was left alone to contemplate the profundity of the steps I had now broadcasted to the world.
I had never anticipated the force of the momentum. It only took a few weeks before I sensed a shift in my spirit. I had expected that my ‘disengagement’ from Mormonism would be a migration from one whole set of doctrines, beliefs and worldviews to another complete set. A faith transplant. My ‘testimony’, as Mormons would call it, no longer told me that the LDS Church held the fulness of truth as I now saw it, so logically I would find it elsewhere.
Deconstructing faith was terrifying, exhilarating and surprisingly automatic.
Once the first doubts disrupted my pristine faith (boy, it was stable), those first little thoughts metastasized. Doubt one thing, and another pops up. Before long, the whole edifice was splintering, then shattering. And I had to pick up each piece to evaluate its provenance and its future utility.
That rapidity was destabilizing, so I kept attending church to provide at least some consistency. I needed to feel tethered while my soul was tumbling over the cliff.
I started imagining and the petrifying possibilities of post-faith. I looked into other churches and even other religions to see if anything resonated. But that wasn’t possible when my faith life was dying.
In the Mormon tradition, truth is a foundational and preeminent concept. The Mormon psyche (collectively and individually) operates on the first principle that there is literal objective reality. Enshrined in Mormon scripture is this notion:
And truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come; and whatsoever is amore or less than this is the spirit of that wicked one who was a liar from the beginning. The Spirit of truth is of God. (D&C 93:24–26)
Right from the very first lesson missionaries teach interested students, the initial goal—the missionary’s raison d’être—is to get people to develop a personal witness of the ‘truth’ of the Book of Mormon, the Church, Joseph Smith, etc.
Receiving your testimony is a seminal spiritual experience. It can happen instantaneously or gradually, but all good Mormons know the key moments of their testimony development.
The term testimony has even taken on a life of its own in the Mormon lexicon. Traditionally, it might refer to one’s witness or personal experience of divinity. For Mormons, in a way more reminiscent of sworn court testimonies, a testimony is a speech, a recitation of what they ‘know’ and, usually, how they ‘know’ it.
And Mormons bear those testimonies often. They’re ingrained in the liturgy.
Almost every lesson ends with one. Ministering visits do too. And every talk and sermon. Missionaries pepper their lessons with more testimony than content sometimes. The first Sunday of every month contains nearly an hour of open-mic, eye-wateringly repetitious testifying.
So truth—and our certainty of it—is always on display. It is infused into every part of our culture.
Mormons’ relationship with truth is meant to remain deep and faithful—and crescendo throughout life. Doubt has no place here. In fact, some church leaders have recently referred to members who experience doubt as spiritually sick or obsessed with technicalities (see recent addresses by Elder Renlund). Truth is healthy. Truth is clear-sightedness. We are ‘in the truth’, walk by the ‘light of truth’, seek truth, speak truth, live truth. Truth is happiness. Doubt is dangerous. Doubt destroys. Doubt got the world into the Great Apostasy. Truth got us out.
There’s a sense, though, an undercurrent through all of this reciting of testimony, of fear. Why do we need to keep reminding ourselves of our own knowledge and certainty of truth? Why must we confirm and affirm it to each other all the time? Odd phrases like ‘strengthen your testimony’ recur in Mormon lexicon. It’s as if testimonies are inherently fragile and liable to decay either from spiritual withdrawal or from exposure to scurrilous external sources (like this essay, to get meta). Mormons are terrified that they’ll lose their testimony and go astray. As if they can’t keep the faith without one.
This fear is evident in the Church’s obsession with truth claims. Mormon theology posits that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the literal restored church of Christ, that He Himself has established an institution, governs it through priesthood, appoints prophets and apostles as in days of old and that it is the only true church on the face of the earth. If that isn’t true, the theology suggests that the church is pointless. Its exclusive claim to divine authority is an all-or-nothing proposition.
So, a Mormon’s spiritual formation path in the Church is grounded in developing and safeguarding this testimony of the ‘truth’. To lose it is a genuine fear and satanic mission. It would lead to darkness and apostasy. Indeed, ‘apostasy’ is defined by Saints as isolation from divine revelation of truth.
In a sense, Mormonism propounds a gospel that is self-evidently too hard to follow without the leverage of truth or insufficient without that profession.
What room is there in all this for a life built solely on faith—on the unknowing but trusting? Faith is the first principle of Mormonism so it should be immanent, but the narrative Church culture constructs around truth leads to the belief that faith is merely the incipient stage of discipleship: once traversed, it is supposed to mature into knowledge and certainty and testimony. If lost, the whole thing is moot.
When my disengagement and faith crisis hit, I was operating within the framework I’ve just described. I was doubting the Church’s truth claims, so that was it for Mormonism. I discarded much of my Mormon roots: prayer, scripture study, temple worship, tithing, other commandments. They were useless if the Church wasn’t true.
I fumbled in the darkness of faithlessness. It was scary. I felt like the ground beneath my feet had vanished and I was in freefall. Nothing else resonated.
Then, I slowly felt a new sense of direction. Truth wasn’t the problem. I didn’t need to know what was true. Even if I did know, how could I be certain of objective reality anyway?
It was an astonishing revelation. I suspended the need for truth.
And with that I was released. I hadn’t even realized how imprisoning all that truth talk had been. Faith, doubt, testimony, seeking divine will, checking for validity, paranoia that I was interpreting revelation wrong, terror that I’d lose certainty—all of that was absorbed by the immeasurable, imponderable depths of unknowing.
I didn’t need to know if there was a God, if He (assuming masculine gender) cared about sexuality, if there was a Church or what His will even was. I could bathe in the uncertainties.
Some of my LDS friends thought I’d lost it. What I told them made no sense to them. How could not I not care if there was a hell? I had to believe something now. What was the point of not knowing anything?
Maybe I’ve just experienced a reflexive pendulum swing back from the narrowness of my old faith framework. Whatever the impetus, I’m here. And with that comes a liberation from external control.
It’s difficult to recognize, in the thick of an orthodox faith tradition, that we outsource our spiritual authority to the church. Other people (prophets, apostles, local leaders, scriptures, publications) become authorities against which we judge our faith and fine-tune our perceptions of reality. Doing what we’re told is intuitive. We don’t necessarily develop the mature autonomy to regulate and choose our own faith lives.
So, as I found my faith expanding into this suspension of the need for truth, for the first time I had to govern my spirituality and make decisions. I, and only I, had to decide what practices and rituals I wanted. I had to choose which principles I would honour. I was accountable to myself.
No one had ever given me permission to do that. Oh, we’d paid lip service to it. I’d heard sermons on being ‘spiritually self-reliant’ and knew that my testimony was my responsibility, etc., but I had genuinely never been able to sit down and just choose what I wanted to do. Did I want prayer in my life? Was it useful? Tithing? Word of Wisdom? Church attendance?
Yes, the deconstruction of one’s faith is terrifying, exhilarating and self-propelled. It can end up in a weird unknowingness. And it’s thrilling!
