The Problem with the Perception of Perfection
Recently, one of my friends who left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a number of years ago began feeling more comfortable sharing publicly about their experience. Leaving the LDS church is no small life adjustment because being in the church is no small portion of one’s life. Membership, and in turn ending membership, in the LDS church influence everything from how one thinks, eats, dresses, views the world, relates to others, and everything in between.
This friend is doing the hard personal work to strive to be a healthy human, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t experience pain in the church or in the process of leaving. How and what they choose to share is unique to them and their experience. Sometimes it is serious and sometimes it is lighthearted in a way that might make some members uncomfortable.
After a particular post poking fun at an element of the Church, a mutual friend of ours reached out to me and essentially said “How can you handle this? It drives me nuts. Why can’t they just leave it alone?”
I think we all have heard or felt this kind of response in some way or another. I’ve written in past about the unhealthy expectation that people completely drop that thing they have been taught their entire life to make the center of their world so I’m not going to dive into that angle at this time.
In response to a new feature on IG that led to a lot of people answering questions about their church activity or the lack thereof, someone shared a post that went what I called “local Mormon mini viral.” The post was initially positioned to be about why the author chose to stay. I have zero critiques of anyone’s reasons to stay and honor anyone’s choice to vocalize them. For a few reasons, I’m choosing not to share the specific post, but it is important to note the overall message clearly resonated with a lot of people. From my perspective, the main sentiment, whether intended or not, was “I’m bothered by how many posts I’m seeing from people talking about choosing to leave the church and negative aspects of the church. They are choosing to focus on the negative when there is so much positive. Why don’t people post more about the positive?”
There are a lot of things that we could dissect here and lots of good things have already been said by others. I want to talk to any of you who have ever felt those feelings of defensiveness creep up inside you when you see something less than positive about the church. I know there are so many who want to maintain good relationships with loved ones who leave the church but struggle to know how to manage their own feelings in response to what those who leave say about the church. Since we can’t and shouldn’t try to control others, the best thing we can do is to look inward.
I write this as someone who has felt deeply defensive of the church at times and has also been the person sharing things that make people uncomfortable. As an owner of an LDS company and social media influencer discussing LDS topics, I’ve spent the better part of the last decade talking to people across the spectrum of Mormonism about their experiences.
This is how I’ve processed those feelings and what I’ve learned from them.
The first step, as cliché as it may sound, is noticing when something is triggering, activating, or bothersome. The natural inclination is to channel those emotions toward the other person and their words and label them as the problem. Instead, I try to take a moment and recognize that the reaction is happening inside of me. What specifically about me is triggered by what I’m seeing?
Why would hearing something less than positive about the church make me so uncomfortable? In truth, this is a relatively unique experience. Sure, I’m used to the Mormon jokes or “negative” takes in media, but within the Church, there is very little talk that could be perceived as even slightly negative about the Church. There is always a divine reason or explanation for anything that might be potentially negative. These reasons sometimes come from official sources and sometimes from fellow members’ well-intentioned imaginations.
I believe that it is important to know that this “everything has a divine reason” approach has not always been the case. In the past, leaders used to openly disagree with each other in lively and sometimes public debates. In the 1950s and 60s with the establishment of Church correlation, specific church leadership made a conscious choice to always appear to have one unified message.
While this is helpful in the sense of organization, it isn’t without its costs. In effect, the message became, that we are led by God therefore what we do is always divine and spot on. The problem with this is it isn’t reality, so it doesn’t always work when applied in the real world and in real people’s lives.
In the LDS Church, we take pride in our scripture study. While there are many important and helpful stories, principles, and themes, one overarching and reoccurring story is: the people and the Church trying their best but getting things wrong and messing things up. We like to call it the Pride Cycle. I don’t love that name because it’s super shamey which makes us less comfortable applying it to ourselves. The pride cycle is something other people experience. I like to just see it as the human cycle or human experience. Somehow, in today’s Church, we have come to believe that the pride or human cycle doesn’t apply to us. Sure, the original 12 apostles who walked with Christ, heard His words from His literal mouth, and witnessed His literal miracles got things wrong all the time, but not us in 2022. Sure, the Bible and the Book of Mormon are full of stories of prophets, leaders, and people making mistakes and experiencing the human cycle, but the church today is perfect and our leaders would never get things wrong. Right?
We spend lots of time talking about how people persecuted the early members, but we don’t spend any time talking about the things the early members did that made their surrounding communities uncomfortable. Not that anything justifies violence, but we simply aren’t sharing the complete truth when we paint early members and leaders as innocent flawless humans without any role in the matter.
We spend a good amount of time talking about how we feel persecuted by the media and others, but we don’t spend any time talking about how modern Church policy, present doctrine, and leadership have harmed Black members, Native American families, and LGBTQ people. We also don’t spend a lot of time looking at how our own members persecute others through racism and bigotry.
Sure, we may say we believe the Church or leaders are imperfect but what do we actually believe when we repeat phrases like “the Church/prophet would never lead us astray.”
By choosing to present everything as essentially perfect and/or divine we have reached a place where members find it difficult to critically think about church issues or topics. It leads to black and white thinking and unrealistic all-or-nothing expectations. It leads to passive following rather than personal accountability. It leads to perfect outward presentations while people quietly suffer inwardly with feelings of shame and inadequacy.
We aren’t in a healthy place if the cumulative response to actual historian-documented history is “that’s anti-Mormon.” We aren’t in a healthy place if the cumulative response to hearing that the Church (present doctrine, policies, or culture) has hurt someone is “that’s anti-Mormon.” We aren’t in a healthy place if we can’t accept constructive criticism or demand that you’re either with us or against us. We aren’t in a healthy place if we immediately distrust or discredit anyone who isn’t “one of us.”
The reality is that the same Church, and all it entails, has been massively beneficial in some people’s lives, while also being completely destructive to others. For a lot of us, it’s been a mixed bag. Faulting those who the Church has harmed and wanting them to speak more positively about it both perpetuates that harm and is abusive.
When we embrace that the Church today, just like the Church of the past, is subject to the human experience we see that it always has room for improvement. This embrace of reality frees up all the energy we previously spent trying to preserve a fictional facade and enables us to invest it in ways that will improve the Church for everyone, but especially those who have been and may be harmed.
For example, if the Church were to honestly address the Priesthood and Temple ban for Black members complete with “we don’t know”, “that was wrong and racist”, “we’re so sorry”, and “this is what we’re going to do to make reparations and improve move moving forward” all of the energy spent ignoring and dancing around real and continuing pain would be freed to invest in actual healing and progress. This is living the Doctrine of Christ.
When we take this more honest and realistic approach, we are better able to honor our baptismal covenant to mourn with those who mourn and comfort those who stand in need of comfort. How? When we hear someone’s experience of pain in relation to the Church we are able to actually hear and believe them rather than needing to figure out a way to mentally protect the perception of perfection of an institution and blame the person.
So where does that leave us in relation to our defensive feelings and our loved ones? I hope the above has helped you better understand why your first response might be a little defensive. Accepting that my defensive response is a learned response has helped me embrace that I can learn a different healthier and hopefully more productive way to respond.
When I hear or read a loved one’s “negative” critique or experience I strive to choose to listen to them and believe them. I try my best to not make it about me. My goal is to not take it personally. I just listen and if necessary and appropriate I ask questions to better understand them. If I’m thinking about anything other than just listening, it’s what can I do within my own power to make this experience less common? Am I perfect at it? No. Are there times when I could have done much better? Absolutely. But this is my goal.
I believe that our Heavenly Parents and Savior are perfect and divine. Everything below that top level is imperfect. I personally believe that Children of God are more important than any institution. I believe the Church is a tool to help us return to Them. If that tool has some dull or weak parts that are harming Children of God, I believe we can and should do all we can to care for those wounds and improve the tool. I believe that some children of God are safer finding other tools to help them in their process and that we should respect that choice. I believe that listening to the experiences of those who are harmed is beneficial in knowing what areas we need to improve so that the tool can better fulfill its purpose in the lives of others moving forward. I believe that our commitment to protecting and serving Children of God says more about the success and benefits of the tool than simply singing praises of the tool itself, but that’s a whole different blog post.