Thesis 4: The Right Truth
A core part of the Mormon church is the story of Joseph Smith reading the bible, feeling like there was more truth to be found, and then asking of God which church he should join.
Building upon that foundational story, missionaries of the church use this inquisitive process as a core recipe for getting people to join the church. In essence they tell investigators of the church, “don’t take our word for it — read the scriptures, come to church, and then pray to know if the church is true or not.”
The only problem is that whenever people investigating the church follow those steps and then don’t feel like the church is true, they always get the same response back from the missionaries: “you’re doing it wrong.”
They ask, did you actually read the scriptures? Did you pray intently? Perhaps you’re sinning and not telling us about something and therefore you don’t have the spirit to tell you the truth? Perhaps you just need to go back and try it again with a different passage of scripture?
I’m well-aware of this process, since for 2 years I was a missionary prescribing this formula. Whenever someone came back and hadn’t found the right answer, I’d send them back to their knees again and again until they did. Unquestionably, the answer as well as the method to find that answer, were both correct.
This attitude of “seek and ye shall find the truth…but only if it’s the right truth” permeates the whole church.
Over the last 11 years I’ve continually tried to find what the actual truth is. Is the Mormon church true? Christianity? God? And whenever I would come to an opposing conclusion, the church and the people inside it would essentially tell me, “Well, yes, you searched…but you must have searched wrong…because you didn’t get the correct answer.”
And the focus isn’t only on the answer — it’s on the process. The church says that to find the truth you must leave facts and reason out of it (perhaps since both will inevitably lead the searcher to the answer that the church is false). Instead, they say, the only way to find truth is through the spirit, prayer, and your feelings. Focusing on facts is what the devil would have you do.
It’s as if the church says that the only way of finding the answer to 2+2 is to feel in your heart that the answer is 5. And then when you actually do the tiniest bit of thinking and add everything together and find out the answer is 4, the church looks at you with a sad smile and says, “you’re doing it wrong. Try it again, but make sure you do it our way.”
