How Mormonism is Half True

It was fast Sunday on a brisk fall day and somewhere down the hallway outside my bedroom door I could hear my roommates getting ready for our singles ward sacrament meeting. Three guys, who in any other place in the world would probably still be hungover from the previous night, were faithfully going about their Sunday morning pre-church ritual; ironing shirts, tying ties and shoelaces, and discussing whether they should sit next to the cute new girl who’d recently become the object of desire for half the ward.

Just another Sunday morning in the life of a BYU student living in Provo.

But this isn’t about my roommates or even BYU. It’s about how on this particular fast Sunday I came to a realization, an understanding so profound for me that a new paradigm of religion was born.

This is the day that led me to discover that Mormonism is only half true.

Some background, perhaps. For a little while up to this realization I had been increasingly curious about some of the more unusual things I’d learned as a practicing Mormon, and if they could really be true. For example:

• Despite having less than fifteen million members worldwide only Mormonism has the fullness of truth and has the necessary revelations, rituals, and authority for salvation
• Despite no conclusive archeological or anthropological evidence, The Book of Mormon is a literal history of a group of Jews who travelled to the Americas and established their own civilization, culture, and language (Reformed Egyptian — though nobody has been able to find any evidence of it yet)
• God expected some early Mormons to practice polygamy, threatening damnation if they didn’t obey, including commanding Joseph Smith to marry Helen Mar Kimball, a fourteen year old
• God condoned Joseph Smith openly lying to his wife, Emma, and the members of The Church about practicing polygamy for seven years
• There’s a good chance that we may be expected to practice polygamous relationships in heaven
• God created black skin first in Cain, then later in the Lamanites to signify a curse upon the wicked and to make it obvious who the wicked are (spoiler, it’s the black/brown people)
• While the truthfulness of Mormonism rests largely on the existence or non-existence of the Gold Plates, they were (inconveniently) taken back to heaven and can’t be examined
• Despite many reports proving certain health-benefits of tea and coffee, the Mormon God is fiercely against their consumption
• God expressed severe distain at other religions in early Mormonism history, calling other Christian churches abominations
• Joseph Smith and Brigham Young intended Mormonism to overtake all earthly political structures with Mormon leaders ruling as theocrats, building a literal latter-day kingdom on Earth
• God has an unusual (and sometimes unhealthy) fixation on the importance of traditional forms of female modesty, virginity, and gender roles
• Any textual analyses by Egyptian scholars of Joseph Smith’s translation of the Egyptian papyri (Pearl of Great Price) reveals he mistranslated 100% of the available text. 100%.
• There are multiple accounts of Joseph Smith’s ‘first vision,’ which compete in vital details such as whether Joseph saw only an angel, God the Father, or God the Father and Jesus
• God holds to ancient, pre-scientific, pre-civil rights views on homosexuality and gender-identity issues
• Among other things, God requires 10% of an individual’s money before they are able to receive the required ordinances of salvation. 10% of all one’s money is thereafter required for life to be in good standing with The Church
• In order to enter heaven special handshakes (which Joseph Smith learned as a Freemason and incorporated into the Mormon Temple endowment) are required
• The Garden of Eden is in Missouri

During weekdays at university lectures I was being taught to think critically, analytically, and broadly, to question assumptions and check my preconceived notions. But on Sundays while I was attending church meetings in the exact same buildings on BYU campus I was being taught the opposite: to accept claims to truth on faith, and that questions were permissible only within the narrow confine of seeking to understand doctrine, not to question it.

These two ways of approaching information, the one inquiring and critical, the other submissive and deferential to authority, began to take its intellectual toll on me. Many of Mormonism’s core claims were beginning to feel more and more challenging to believe in, but obedience to The Church, whether what The Church taught seemed reasonable or not, was tantamount to nothing.

As a teenager and into my early 20’s I had accepted faith-based beliefs with barely a second thought. So many of my friends and family members didn’t seem to have a problem with building their worldview on faith, so why should I? But by the time I was in college I was studying comparative theology and reading the writings of great Christian theologians such as St Augustine and other philosophers like Spinoza, Nietzsche, William James, Bertrand Russell, and Carl Jung, who, in part, made me aware of my cognitive biases and illustrated the ease with which humans misinterpret emotions and accept religious dogma.

Predictably, many will say that education and exposure to philosophy robbed me of faith, but I say I was endowed with understanding because of it.

I arrived at church a little after my roommates that day and renewed my baptismal covenants through taking the sacrament, a weekly practice in which I would spiritually chastise myself for some minor sexual indiscretion that I would ernestly promise God never to repeat, though I always did.

It then came time for unassigned individuals in the congregation to stand and bear their public testimony. Young men and women took their turn approaching the pulpit to declare with a level of conviction experienced rarely about anything else in life that Mormonism was the true church, Joseph Smith God’s true prophet, that Jesus Christ is our savior, and that the living prophet was the only person authorized to speak to the entire Church on behalf of God himself.

An unusual but very real sensation of embarrassment arose within me at just how certain we all were that Mormonism — with all its quirky views on race, sexuality, and American history — was utterly indisputable when the majority us — as of yet — didn’t have college degrees and had never travelled outside of the U.S., let alone experienced any other religion besides Mormonism. It was like we’d been locked in a box all our lives and been taught to believe that only the content within this box is true. For the first time I wondered: wait, are Mormons just as indoctrinated as Catholics, scientologists, and JW’s?

Surely not. We’d been told we weren’t.

But hang on … isn’t that what they’re told, too?

It was during this hour-long confessional that the horizon of a new understanding began to glisten in my young mind, and I began to see Mormonism in a new and dynamic light.

Like many churches, Mormonism relies heavily upon interpreting the good feelings you experience while reading or praying about the Book of Mormon, attending church, or while living Mormon principles, as evidence that God is communicating directly to you through the Holy Spirit that the institution of Mormonism is true. I know this because I taught it to people as a missionary.

The first and most obvious problem with this method of legitimizing the religious claims of Mormonism is that it is the same method the majority of other churches, sects, and cults use use to prove their message. The key was to convince people to focus heavily on their emotions and how they felt and spend as little time as possible on providing any actual data or evidence for the claims The Church made.

When an individual experiences a new religion or belief system it is common for them to also experience new, sometimes completely novel sets of emotions that require definition and interpretation. It is in this crucial moment that Mormonism seizes upon these feelings and promptly attributes them as evidence that the LDS Church is true. But these feelings could just as easily be used to authenticate Catholicism if those same feelings are experienced in a Catholic context or Scientology if experienced in The Church of Scientology.

My realization on that fall morning in that sacrament hall was promptly followed by a question: what if good feelings and spiritual sensations have nothing to do with the truthfulness of the institution of Mormonism per se, but instead occur due to the truthfulness of some of the principles embedded within Mormonism?

This got me thinking.

If people who belong to different religions are having similar emotional experiences, which in turn their institution is telling them to interpret as evidence of its authenticity, then maybe that’s also what’s happening to Mormons, too.

When a person is prescribed a set of theological notions and the use of certain in-group language to understand something as speculative and conceptual as God, they will naturally find themselves identifying and tethering their emotions with those ideas and use-of-language from that particular tradition, whether that’s the power of praying the rosary in catholicism, undergoing audits in Scientology, or attending the temple in Mormonism. Once a feeling is fused to a theological idea separating that association is sometimes impossible. Perhaps that’s why it is so hard to view your own religion objectively, I thought.

I suddenly realized that throughout my entire life I’ve been viewing religion from one limited perspective, from one cultural position, bracketed by a set of approved words that I can and cannot use, with limitations to what I’m supposed to think about everything from coffee to LGBTQ issues.

My reaction to this idea was guilt. Was I sinning by doubting Mormonism? Was I going to displease God and forfeit eternal salvation because I was attempting to reconcile my doubts and concerns logically? Did faith mean that I was supposed to ignore that unsettling feeling that things didn’t add up?

What if Mormonism was merely a vehicle, a potentially disposable, socially constructed theological housing for truths more universal and non-sectarian than it would or ever could admit? I’d been taught to have faith that only Mormonism had the ultimate authority and spiritually correct rituals for salvation, and I had covenanted at the highest level of ritual in the Mormon temple to devote my time, resources, and talents to The Church. Did that mean I really shouldn’t doubt or question it even if things didn’t make sense?

Religions frame the principles they espouse in their own unique theology. Take the effects of a faithful Muslim memorizing the Koran, for example. This can take years of patience, diligence, and studying. When an individual has finally completed this enormous task they often feel closer to Allah and express greater certainty that the Koran is God’s word. The spiritual dividend they receive, however, is not because of the Koran itself, but because of the diligence and hard work that they invested into the Koran.

The same can be said for a Latter-Day Saint who reads the Book of Mormon everyday. Many Mormons say daily scripture study makes them a better person, and indeed I believe it does in many fundamental ways, but the credit shouldn’t necessarily go to the book; the book is merely a catalyst, one of many springboards that can help us produce our own spiritual dividends as we align ourselves with purer, more refined ideals of human living: organization, diligence, devotion, patience, effort, commitment and so on. This is why Mormons and Muslims can generate similar spiritual feelings and a commitment to the divine while having no holy book and only baseline theology in common.

In the end my weekday mind won out, and I decided that if I was going to believe in The Church then it had to be logical to me — even faith had to be grounded in enough logic to sustain itself. I shouldn’t stop myself from working through ideas, however contrary they seemed to the teachings of my religion. Valuing the free inquiry of truth without fear of consequence had to be paramount to obedience. Any religion or God who didn’t agree was not one I could respect.

So I continued this train of thought.

If true principles of human well-being are the root cause of spiritual sensation, not institutional correctness, then this would certainly explain why people all across the world and throughout different ages have had similar experiences to me when living their faith and practicing their institution’s ethical and moral norms.

I began to wonder as I sat in church listening to people offer up radical certainties about Mormonism if we were all in fact victims of delusion. Maybe we were all so in over our heads that we couldn’t reason clearly anymore. We were so occupied with Mormonism, so saturated with its ideas and language that we were incapable of considering anything else, blind to other possibilities.

What if we were all mistaken? What if principles are true, but churches aren’t? What if the churches, whether Mormon or Methodist, use true principles and the good feelings that true principles naturally produce to convince us their institutions are special? What could the churches have to lose if they admitted this fact? Power? Money? Control? Influence? Perhaps even church authorities hadn’t themselves considered this possibility. Maybe they, too, have been deluded?

By this point I really did start to feel bad. But I also felt like Neo from the Matrix, slowly awakening to the realization that not everything was as it seemed; that there are complex layers of reality we don’t discuss, that aren’t approved, that could spell the unwinding of our entire belief structure and the institution’s grasp on our devotion.

As I sat pondering these possibilities I also mulled over the principles that I love about Mormonism; an emphasis on strong families, compassion, forgiveness, love, kindness, charity, patience, friendship, happiness, service, honesty, and many more. I began to realize that these aren’t exclusively Mormon principles, they’re in fact quite universal. They even exist in the secular world where religion is shunned. This explains how people without religion can be completely happy and can even appear religious when they live by these principles.

Mormons have an answer for this, they call it The Light of Christ. But it began to seem more likely that that’s a concept invented by early Church leaders to explain how our species is inclined towards morality even in absence of Mormonism. A post-hoc formula, you could say.

When we begin to understand that the real value in organized religion are the embedded values and principles they can teach us, we can extract and separate those moral truths from the institution’s sectarian theological grasp and ignore the myths, stories, and man-made theological fantasies in which they’re housed.

The beauty of this understanding is that you can enjoy so many more religions in a way that you never before could, even ones that Mormonism considers untrue. Believe it or not, some religions do things better than Mormonism. Thousands of years of Buddhist tradition, for example, teaches us that meditation — separating oneself from the incessant voice in our heads and realizing that the self is not that voice — wields profound psychological and spiritual benefits. Mormonism doesn’t have a science of meditation, but it should certainly adopt this practice into its teachings and theology.

I discovered that Mormonism, with its shadow side of polygamy, racially dubious history, and condescension towards homosexuals, feminists, sexual “self-abusers,” and intellectuals, isn’t true in the way its members think it is; however, the surrounding theology of Mormonism doesn’t need to be true for the core ethical teachings to work and improve people’s lives; the ethical furniture, so to speak.

In many cases, if people follow the teachings of the LDS Church they will lead happy and fulfilling lives, never realizing that the overarching theological reasons for why they behave in certain ways are based on a complex overlap of true principles and mythology. If one was to take a blade and scrape off the crusty shell of rigid theology, dogmatism, certainty, corporatism, biblical mythology, leadership ambition, and peculiar LDS cultural norms, one would find a trove of valuable principles related to human well-being acting as a supporting framework — principles discovered and adopted, not created by Mormonism or any other world religion. Principles true to human nature.

In short, while Mormons may be wrong about where the Garden of Eden is located (or that it exists at all), if Joseph Smith actually had ancient golden plates, and whether there’s a God who denounces tea, coffee, and homosexuality, they’re right about love, charity, and compassion being some of the highest of human virtues.

And that is how I know Mormonism is half true.