During his teenage years, his concern over his spiritual state resulted in his being praised for being so pious. Bishops, fellow ward members, and even members of his family mistook his scrupulosity for righteous concern. When he confessed things to his bishop like feeling that he had kissed his girlfriend for too long (his standard was one second), the feedback he kept getting was “Eric, you’re doing well…you’re going to be a right, pure missionary, and you’re on the right track.” His thoughts and actions were reinforced by those around him for years.

It wasn’t until he began confessing sins he’d never committed that people started realizing that Eric had a problem. On his mission, Eric confessed to sins that his mission president knew he hadn’t committed. He had a compulsion to confess and feel clean, and he became convinced of that, for example, if a part of him had merely brushed against a person or even an animal, he’d had some kind of sexual encounter with them. At one point, his elbow barely touched his mission president’s wife, and he became convinced that he had touched her inappropriately and confessed this to his mission president, out of concern that he wouldn’t make it to heaven if he didn’t.

A striking part of this podcast for me was the fact that because Eric’s behavior fit the picture that many people in his religious context had of someone who was living righteously, his thoughts and actions were reinforced by those around him for years. They say that one of the worst worst things people can do for someone with scrupulosity is reinforce his or her obsessive-compulsive worldview, but because his behavior fit a kind of cultural ideal, those around him remained unaware of its source.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this podcast over the past few weeks, because I’ve been thinking about how easy it is to be praised within evangelical culture if you know the right lingo and appear to be the evangelical cultural ideal. I used part of Eric’s story only as a jumping-off point; I wanted to give an (admittedly, extreme) example of what it can look like for a person to meet a cultural ideal while operating from a very unhealthy place. I’ve grown increasingly concerned both about our ideals within evangelicalism and about our lack of discernment–and our lack of value for discernment. Eric’s story is as good as any to show why discernment is so vital to the health of the church. His being LDS is inconsequential; his story could happen within any religious context. I believe someone with scrupulosity could flourish quite easily and be praised up one side and down the other within evangelicalism, and it would be both to their detriment and ours.

But people need not suffer from scrupulosity for similar situations to occur in the church. I’ve been involved in enough churches in my 28 years to have watched quite a few people show that their character cannot sustain the responsibility that was given to them because of their reputations. And it is both to their detriment and ours that we have so readily promoted them.

When people express opinions that we feel passionately about or behave in ways we approve of, we have a tendency to assume that it could only be because they are godly; and we think this because we believe that it is because we ourselves are godly that we have these opinions and behave this way. Our cultural conditioning can blind us to what’s beneath the surface of people’s culturally-affirming lifestyles. We fail to understand that evangelical culture is a culture, and that there are benefits, within the culture, of living according to the cultural mores.

I spent some time with the Westboro Baptist Church this summer, and because of that, I’ve had several conversations with fellow evangelicals about the WBC. One thing that consistently surprises me (but rarely fails to be the case) is that evangelicals talk about them as if they are a part of “us,” because they consider their beliefs to be Christian–even though they always denounce what they perceive to be Westboro’s downfall: they don’t feel that they’re loving. Because they consider the WBC’s doctrine to be orthodox, however, evangelicals tend not to question the church’s Christianity. I find it shocking that evangelicals can value love so little and doctrine so much that if they believe a church has the latter but not the former (but not vice versa), they consider it to be a Christian fellowship.

We seem to have forgotten Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13: If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

I don’t know how we’ve gotten so far away from this.

Ever since Harold Camping and company gained national exposure, most evangelicals have been eager to distance ourselves from him and our faith from his. We use words like “embarrassment” to show that we recognize his wrongness and take no part in it. We speak of being concerned that Camping and his listeners will make Christianity look foolish, that he will give people one more reason to reject the faith that has, in recent years, not done so well in the American media.

But we can learn something much deeper from Harold Camping than to not be taken in, to shelter ourselves from the embarrassment of being wrong. Deeper than accepting at face value Jesus’ words that no one knows the day or the hour of his return. We can learn to flee the pride that threatens to destroy us in all our being right about Camping’s being wrong. We can learn to accept Harold Camping as one of our own without qualification, as a person who loves Jesus and who frankly just has a flawed approach to the Bible. We can learn that God is not interested in our saving face.

Christianity will not be destroyed by Christians looking foolish. Some will always find a crucified Christ foolish. But Christians will be destroyed by foolishly failing to name and reject the pride that keeps us in bondage to maintaining our public image. We are in far greater danger of failing to love one another—the love by which Jesus said we would be recognized—than we are of failing to appear wise and rational.

Image-wise, we have nothing to lose from embracing Harold Camping, because nothing–image-wise–is at stake that’s worth holding onto. To the extent that Christians value being accepted more than we value being holy, we are submitting ourselves to the bondage that will always, without fail, accompany the pride we are cradling in our scramble to create distance between us and those we fear will drag us down with them.

I feel that evangelical culture is driven, in many ways, by a fear of hell–hell being a future state of complete separation from God. Much of our evangelism is centered around hell and trying to keep people from going there. “You have to tell people the bad news before the good news sounds good” is something I heard growing up. Translation, for non-evangelicals: “You have to tell people what their problem is (that they’re sinners and on their way to hell) before the good news, the solution (that Jesus can save them from sin and hell), will sound good to them.”

Sharing the gospel has become synonymous with telling people that without Jesus, they are hell-bound. If we didn’t have a hell to appeal to–if the stakes were not eternal damnation–we wouldn’t know how to talk to people about Jesus. Do we know Jesus as the good news who transcends where we will be after we die? Rob Bell’s alleged universalism strikes not just at the doctrine of hell and who we think will be there. It strikes, for many of us, at the gospel itself. At our fear-driven, hell-focused, afterlife-centered gospel.

Squelching rears its ugly head in all sorts of situations, and the people doing the squelching seem to be oblivious to their squelching ways, likely because their admonishments really sound like wisdom. Squelching often takes the form of warnings–warnings against perceived danger, against foolish choices, against heresy, or against any number of things. For example, if someone expressed her newfound appreciation for meditation to me, and I responded, “Well, you have to be careful about meditation–there’s a real spiritual world out there, and you’re opening yourself up to it by meditating,” I would be squelching. I believe there are healthy forms of meditation, just as there are unhealthy forms of it, but if my tendency is to jump immediately to warning about the possible negative effects, I’m killing her momentum and shutting her down. This is something that’s common to squelching–the person doing it may very well agree with what someone has just said, on some level; s/he just also feels that another perspective is needed, and it’s nearly always a negative one. But why do we think this? Why do we jump to the warning, rather than embracing what we can and allowing people their excitement? I haven’t been able to put my finger on exactly what the issue is, but I think it lies somewhere between fear and control.

When people squelch, it is common for others to join in with something like, “Oh, yes, that’s a good point too–you shouldn’t go overboard with that/you have to consider both sides of the issue.” Squelching is contagious, and it knocks the breath out of excitement and crushes the vulnerable. Squelching is the drug of the cynical and of people who operate out of fear.

My working hypothesis is that squelching resides as a nearly-unexamined (because it skates by nearly unnoticed) habit in the lives of those who practice it. The more we observe squelching, or the more we have been squelched ourselves, the more likely we are to pick up the practice. Squelching can be as culturally embedded as anything else, and it can quickly become one’s default way of interacting with the world. It is easy (it takes no thought), safe (for the squelcher), and almost always elicits a positive response from conversants besides the squelchee.

I’ve thought a lot about this passage of Colossians 2 with regard to squelching:

Since you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world, why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its rules: “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? These rules, which have to do with things that are all destined to perish with use, are based on merely human commands and teachings. Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.

“Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!” have “an appearance of wisdom,” but it is false wisdom, and squelching is just a variation on those themes. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom, and squelching’s goal is to shut that freedom down, to squeeze the breath of life out of every good thing that enters a person’s life. Squelching would like nothing more than to see people stagnate, so afraid of being thought foolish that we cease venturing into uncharted waters. Earlier in Colossians 2, Paul says, “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.” Amen, Paul.

Can be explained in five points

Exposited in a statement of faith

And posted on the church website

For others to taste and see that the Lord is good.

It is the glory of God to conceal a matter

And the glory of kings to search it out

But you are not a king, so just sit tight

I’ll be right back with the catechism or Josh McDowell

For his yoke is easy and his burden is light.

My sister moved to Pasadena a week ago and already has a good job–which is very exciting–but I feel that I need to turn the attention of all of our mutual friends back to me regarding our journeys to Pasadena. So this post is serving the dual function of reminding anyone who needs reminding that this move of ours to Pasadena is really more about me–though of course Anna’s a pretty good sidekick, so it’s alright for her to have a few days in the sun, but a week is feeling like overkill to all of us, I’m sure–and giving me a chance to begin processing the upcoming move.

I think the only thing more startling than moving into Utah may be moving out of Utah. I forget sometimes that I haven’t always lived here. It seems normal to me that women wear shorts to their knees and that people believe in three heavens and don’t drink coffee. I’m surprised when I hear anyone swear, and I sometimes catch myself gazing for an inappropriate amount of time at people with tattoos. I’ve nearly forgotten my mother tongue, Christianese; I now speak Mormon almost fluently. I think in terms of having testimonies of things, and I feel befuddled at evangelicals’ attachment to Enlightenment rationalism.

Theologically, Utah gave me space to breathe. Evangelicals tend to police orthodoxy with McCarthy-esque diligence, and the sheer lack of expectations Mormons had for my theology was freeing. Leaving that behind for a seminary environment, of all places, will be difficult.

But I’m also excited about the change. I enjoy learning most of all, and learning new things about Mormonism isn’t happening nearly as much as it used to these days, and I’m ready for a new something to immerse myself in. It’s not that I find Mormonism uninteresting; it will forever hold fascination for me as well as a soft spot in my heart. And it’s not that I think I’ve exhausted Mormonism. It’s just that as much as I’ll miss being surrounded by Mormon culture–and I will miss it–I’m ready for something else. I have the religious equivalent of wanderlust.

It seems like an appropriate thing to do would be to write about things I’m looking forward to about being at Fuller, but I’m a lot better at reflecting on the past than I am at thinking ahead, so I haven’t spent much time yet anticipating life in California. There are a few things, though…

I’m looking forward to being among people whose interests are similar to mine. I majored in philosophy at BYU, and I’m glad I did; I really enjoyed the classes, and I found community and camaraderie with philosophy students that I don’t feel I would have found in other majors. But philosophy isn’t where my heart lies. The intersection of religion and culture is a lot closer to it, and that’s what I’ll be studying at Fuller. I’m also looking forward to living somewhere as starkly different from both Minnesota and Utah as Southern California is. Its foreignness is a draw for me right now. And I just feel like Fuller is where I’m supposed to be, so going there feels a little like taking a drink when I’m thirsty, even though I have no idea how it will taste. Three more weeks!

I didn’t need to try scaring people with the threat of hell to feel that I was being effective. Though hell was sometimes on my mind, I was more discreet than that. I would try to change people by withholding my approval of their offending beliefs, hoping that my disdain would cause doubt. This may sounds innocent enough. It’s not as though I should affirm an opinion with which I disagree, and it’s not as though my disapproval was keeping anyone awake at night. But regardless of the ineffectiveness of my strategy, I used my approval or lack thereof as a tool for manipulating people into believing what I wanted them to believe, and I shouldn’t have.

I wasn’t spreading the good news; I was doing the work of the accuser. I was spreading fear (or attempting to spread fear, anyway). There are people who have found God because they were afraid of hell, to be sure, but fear of hell isn’t a relationship. Fear of hell doesn’t save. Fear can be a catalyst (as can anything), but I see now that it is a barrier to be overcome, not a step on the road to salvation. Fear of hell gets one absolutely no closer to knowing God (which John says is eternal life).

Part of problem, I can see now, is lack of faith. When I act out of fear and play on people’s fears, I am believing that the result depends on me and not on God. If I believe that I have to scare people into a relationship, then I am not trusting that people will be drawn by God’s kindness to repentance. I am not trusting the Holy Spirit to move hearts. I’m not believing that God, who is love, is really all that compelling.

The only thing that could really be trusted was the Bible. God’s voice could be misheard, but the Bible was God’s way of providing us with truth to which everything else could be compared. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy states, “We are persuaded that to deny it [inerrancy] is to set aside the witness of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit and to refuse that submission to the claims of God’s own Word which marks true Christian faith.” In other words, Jesus and the Holy Spirit affirm that the Bible is inerrant, and true Christian faith is marked by submitting to the teachings of the inerrant Bible. That’s pretty much how I saw things.

Then, along came Mormons in my life, who as a group generally trust scriptures because they have gained a testimony of them (which means that they have received confirmation directly from God that testifies to the truth of the scriptures). The end of the Book of Mormon offers a promise to anyone who wants to know whether or not the Book of Mormon is true: ask God, and he’ll tell you. A good (LDS) friend of mine told me last year that he doesn’t believe in God because he believes in the Bible; he believes in the Bible because he believes in God. The Bible had the same trace of the divine that he experienced when interacting with God, so he accepted it as inspired. This statement struck me as much more compelling than everything I’d been spouting off to my friend about the necessity of appealing to an objective standard for determining whether or not the Bible was legitimate (namely, historical evidence). I had read numerous books and parts of books and watched several documentaries about why the Bible was reliable, but I couldn’t honestly say that the reasons presented in any of them had anything at all to do with my acceptance of the Bible as scripture. On a heart level, it was suddenly obvious to me that any trust I had in the Bible came from somewhere that was completely untouched by historical evidence or lack thereof.

On the heels of this discovery came the thought that God should be the ultimate authority in my life, above the Bible. To Mormons, this seems obvious. To evangelicals, the dichotomy doesn’t make sense. God authored the Bible, so this is like saying that I trust God more than I trust what God says, and it may imply that I have some reason to distrust at least some part of the Bible, since I feel the need to define the hierarchy in the first place.

I believe it’s important to place God above the Bible for two reasons. One, the Bible is not God, so placing it on the level of God is idolatry. Our faith should be rooted firmly in God, who we can get to know partially through the Bible, but who is not contained by the Bible. This passage from Floyd Filson’s book Which Books Belong in the Bible? captures my feelings on the subject:

It is possible…to stress the Bible so much and give it so central a place that the sensitive Christian conscience must rebel. We may illustrate such overstress on the Bible by the often-used (and perhaps misused) quotation from Chillingworth: “The Bible alone is the religion of Protestantism.” Or we may recall how often it has been said that the Bible is the final authority for the Christian.

If it will not seem too facetious, I would like to put in a good word for God. It is God and not the Bible who is the central fact for the Christian. When we speak of “the Word of God” we use a phrase which, properly used, may apply to the Bible, but it has a deeper primary meaning. It is God who speaks to man. But he does not do so only through the Bible. He speaks through prophets and apostles. He speaks through specific events. And while his unique message to the Church finds its central record and written expression in the Bible, this very reference to the Bible reminds us that Christ is the Word of God in a living, personal way which surpasses what we have even in this unique book. Even the Bible proves to be the Word of God only when the Holy Spirit working within us attests the truth and divine authority of what the Scripture says. Faith must not give to the aids that God provides the reverence and attention that belong only to God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Our hope is in God; our life is in Christ; our power is in the Spirit. The Bible speaks to us of the divine center of all life and help and power, but it is not the center. The Christian teaching about the canon must not deify the Scripture.

The second reason, which is much less important than the first but which I believe still has broad implications for Christian living, is that believers who place the Bible in the position of final authority are likely to feel that their faith in God is threatened every time their vision of the Bible receives a blow. This is exhausting. I believe that even Christians who rarely think about the historicity of the Bible feel the stress of needing the Bible to be something it never claims to be (perfect, the ultimate authority, whatever). People who build their houses on sand (and anything that’s not God is sand) spend all their time trying to keep their houses from collapsing. This, I believe, is one of the main sources of the defensive posture of contemporary evangelical culture; we have to pour a lot of our energy into assuring ourselves and others that our foundation is secure.

I should clarify that my thoughts on this subject are directed toward non-missionary Latter-day Saints. While I feel strongly about what follows and believe it has broad implications, I realize that missionaries have different roles within Latter-day Saint culture than most members do, and that’s another post for another day.

I can only think of two things that really bother me about the evangelism practices of some Latter-day Saints and three things I think are really effective. Maybe I’ll think of more later and write another post. I’m really interested in LDS reactions to this, especially the first two…

Things that are not effective for me:

1. Bearing your testimony. I am reluctant to write about this topic, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I dislike it when Latter-day Saints bear their testimonies to me, and I have yet to speak to a non-Mormon about this who feels differently (I’m sure there are some out there, but I don’t think my experience is rare). Testimony-bearing is a conversation-ender. There’s just nowhere to go from there. And to be honest, it often feels to me like it’s used as a trump card, as a last word in a debate I didn’t even know I was having. I usually walk away from conversations in which that has taken place feeling manipulated, bulldozed, and disheartened. Of the many times people have borne me their testimonies, only one experience was not completely negative, and that was when a professor of mine asked (a courtesy for which I was very appreciative) if she could bear me her testimony, and I said yes. Usually when people bear their testimonies to me, it feels like they and I are suddenly standing on uneven ground. I feel forced into the position of being told what’s true. The testimony-bearer becomes the teacher and I become the student. They do so knowing that I believe differently, and I imagine that their desire is that I will feel the Spirit while they’re speaking and have an experience like they have had. But when that doesn’t happen, where are we supposed to go from there? Can we have conversations without this element being introduced, without our roles being so rigidly defined by only one member of a two-person relationship?
2. Telling me that I wouldn’t lose anything I believed if I joined the LDS Church; I would just get more truth in addition to what I already have. Many a well-meaning Latter-day Saint has expressed this to me. As best as I can tell, it is a distortion of a (great) quote from Joseph Smith (which I am going to distort myself, because I can’t find it): “Bring what truth you have and let us add unto it.” [Correction: the quote is from Gordon B. Hinckley; see aquinas's comment below for context.] Being on the receiving end of the comment “You wouldn’t lose anything…” is frustrating, as it takes but a moment of real reflection to realize that I would lose some beliefs that are very precious to me if I were to join the LDS Church. That’s not necessarily a valid reason not to join; it just makes the statement untrue. I cannot be Mormon and believe that God is a Trinity, I cannot be Mormon and believe that the one true church is the invisible body of all the redeemed regardless of official church affiliation or lack thereof, I cannot be Mormon and believe that God has faithfully sustained all the truth his Church needed throughout the centuries, and I cannot be Mormon and believe that God created from nothing everything in existence outside Himself. I would lose some things that are close to the core of what makes God so beautiful to me, beliefs that it would be almost physically painful for me to part ways with. To imply that my transition to Mormonism would be either easy or loss-less is to reveal an understanding of my faith that is a very weak caricature of its reality. Also, presenting Mormonism in this light is counter to the way Jesus presents the cost of accepting the gospel. If Mormonism is the Way, and it costs me everything to join the church, then so be it. Though I believe salvation is free, it cannot be said of Christianity that it costs us nothing; it costs us everything. If the Latter-day Saint gospel is the pearl of great price, I’ll sell everything I have to get it. A Jesus-following people should expect no less.

Things I think are very effective:

I’ve thought about this for years now, but it wasn’t until recently that I connected people’s sharing the beauty God put inside them with their being cities on a hill, not hiding their lights under bushels, being salt and light, and so forth. I’ve had a Sunday school picture in my mind of what Jesus meant when he said those things, and while my Sunday school picture was not necessarily inaccurate, it wasn’t even close to being the whole picture. Lacy was salt and light to me over and over again just by telling me about her day.

When I first moved to Utah, I often heard people ask my pastor and his wife, David and Melissa, how they felt about living in Utah, and their response was always, “We love it here. We just love it.” And they really meant it. They do love it. In a state where a fair percentage of the non-Mormon population is somewhat wary and elitist, David and Melissa embraced the place and the people unabashedly, and in a way that I don’t fully understand yet, they gave me permission to do the same. It doesn’t usually even occur to me to act or think in a way I have never seen modeled. I’m surprised whenever I see people doing something I wouldn’t think to do, and once I see it, it ruminates in my mind, creating a pathway to that action. David and Melissa believed that it was a blessing to live here, and because I believed them, I felt the same way. When people forge a trail in my thoughts, it’s a lot easier to follow it the next time. David and Melissa were salt and light to me by expressing their love for Utah.

It seems like this is how the Church is supposed to work, how sanctification happens in the body of believers and why the Church should be attractive to people outside it. I am made more holy by being around holy people. I am changed by watching them and being in relationship with them. These beautiful things God puts in people are meant to be shared; they change the world.