HT sent link to Deseret News article: How to respond

[SunbeltRed]

My HT sent me an email and a link to the Deseret News article from last week. I think it was done out of friendship/concern but it is exactly what many of us fear: that these terrible articles and ideas will be used as bludgeons.

I plan on responding but I need to cool down.

Edited by SBRed [redacted email from HT for privacy concerns]


I'm not sure what to say yet. I want to walk through some of the key points of the article and why I disagree. I think I might also let him know that I'm not a doubter, im a non-believer.

Anyone have any thoughts?

Here the article if you haven't read it, but beware, it's awful.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/8656 ... tml?pg=all

Update below: HT responded to my email (it was a very nice email)

[Spicy McHaggis]

You could send him the op-ed in from the SL Trib. It addresses the same issues but with a more sensible approach.

http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/4660975-1 ... ch-deserve

[No Tof]

I think Spicys advice is the best and thanks to him for sharing the link to that article.

[wtfluff]

You could send him the op-ed in from the SL Trib. It addresses the same issues but with a more sensible approach.

http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/4660975-1 ... ch-deserve

+1

[document]

I don't have any advice but wanted to voice my concern that the article is affecting real people who are still in the church and struggling. This stinks, I'm sorry this is happening to you.

[achilles]

I would tell your HT to read the comments to the article. They're very revealing...

[Deepthinker]

You could send him the op-ed in from the SL Trib. It addresses the same issues but with a more sensible approach.

http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/4660975-1 ... ch-deserve

Yep, that's my vote too. I love that article. I've been thinking of asking DW to read it.

[SunbeltRed]

I will probably send Kristy's OP, it is very good and much kinder that what I would like to say.

Here is how I would like to respond, but probably won't for the sake of keeping the peace and DW doesn't want things to be awkward:

--------

Hey Brother xxxxxx,

I saw this article last week. Though I’m sure you sent this in the spirit of kindness, may I point out how others may have misinterpreted your email and your acceptance and even belief in some of the ideas presented in this article?

Let’s start with this:

1) "What I have been able to understand is why people stay," she said. She boiled it down to character. Those who stayed active in the church exhibited patience, faith and trust in Jesus Christ, hope, knowledge and wisdom, obedience, diligence and persistence, humility, repentance and forgiveness, charity and virtue.

Is this how you view your siblings who have left the church? They lack character? They lack any good qualities like wisdom, knowledge, humility, persistence, forgiveness, charity, and virtue? If you do view your siblings this way, how do you view someone like me, someone unrelated to you and how will you view me if I eventually leave the church? If you don’t view your siblings or others this way, why would you send a “decently written article” with this type of ignorant drivel?

2) "Most people who decide to leave the church really end up leaving a cartoon of the church," said Williams, a psychologist and director of BYU's Wheatley Institution, which hosted "Reason for Hope: Responding to a Secular World" at the Hinckley Alumni and Visitors Center.

Williams spoke from experience.

"I didn't deliberately make this cartoon and assume it was the church," he said. "Nobody purposefully offered me only a cartoon of the church. The cartoon was what my subculture made available and what I had ears to hear."

Elder Hafen described the phenomenon in a different way.

"Most of us do run into some uncertainty and ambiguity," he said. Most children grow up and recognize that there is a gap between the ideal they perceived when young and what was actually real. For example, they learned that their parents, or they themselves, weren't perfect.

Perhaps you can help me understand the above paragraphs a bit better? So if someone has been taught certain narratives their whole life, made it through church, seminary, mission, years of service and then they find out that the narratives told in sacrament, Sunday school, or at home are different, it is somehow their fault because they invented or created some cartoon of the church? None of the responsibility lies on the church or its members for perpetuating narratives and stories that it turns out are not entirely accurate? The church’s essay Blacks and the Priesthood had to DISAVOW previous theories…why would they have to do that if those ideas still didn’t exist? Maybe you can’t see it, maybe you don’t want to see it, but these leaders are blaming the victim for somehow creating a caricature of a church that doesn’t exist, when the caricature they created was the caricature the church persisted and claimed it was.

“Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in a premortal life; that mixed-race marriages are a sin; or that blacks or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else. Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form.”

3) "Mind the gap

Each person must learn to navigate that gap, and Elder Hafen described three levels of doing so. On the first level, some don't ever see that gap and never leave that black-and-white thinking, like his friend. At the second level, people see things as they really are, but often erase the ideal and therefore the gap between the two, and they suffer from "a terminal skepticism," Elder Hafen said. "Our cultural paradigm can seem permanently stuck in level-two realism."

Level three is the goal, he said, a space where people live not only with eyes wide open but hearts wide open.

"At level 3, we're neither optimists nor pessimists, we're open-minded believers who know that history and life are not always clear-cut and tidy, but our desire is to keep learning and growing. We want to improve the status quo, not just criticize it."

His friend's happy bubble didn't materialize "because the church consciously imposed some mindset to keep him in the dark. His bubble was nothing more complicated than the innocent perspective and habits of gliding along at level one, not realizing that we can grow out of that simplistic world."

Do you find it ironic that for someone who claims that others are stuck in black and white thinking, their final stage of getting beyond black and white thinking requires belief that the church is True? That doesn’t come across as strange to you? So to not be a black and white thinker, the conclusion you have to come to is to still believe the church is True, that’s how you really become a well-rounded and nuanced thinker. It really is Stage 3 thinking (see Fowler’s stages of faith). For such a “decently written article”, this seems rather biased, and for a conference focused on faith and intellect, this appears completely intellectually lazy. Perhaps you can offer a different interpretation as I seem to be missing something.

4) "Do not have someone else's faith crisis," Williams added. "Don't have a non-LDS faith crisis. If you think you are having a faith crisis, make sure to find out what faith really is in the context of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. … Assume that most of your cultural understandings are wrong or at least distorted. Then give the restored gospel a chance at your mind and especially at your soul."

Giving faith an equal chance includes persistent and sometimes difficult effort, each speaker said.

"Press forward by giving the Lord and his church the benefit of our doubts and uncertainties," Elder Hafen said.

Why? This makes a lot of assumptions….that the LDS church is the Lord’s church, that the LDS church is where someone should be, that to choose otherwise means that you have not chosen God or Jesus. Or that again, it is someone’s fault that they had an incorrect understanding or distorted view of the church culture, it could not have possibly been the leadership or the church’s fault, it must be the person’s fault. Again, I’m not sure why you think this type of advice would be helpful or useful to someone.

5) "For me," Millet said, "to doubt our doubts is to be courageous rather than cavalier when it comes to eternal things. We cannot be casual in doubting our doubts and thus succumb to spiritual and intellectual laziness. In other words, no one of us should ever allow a doubt to reign, when in fact it has not won that lofty perch through proving itself beyond all doubt.

So if someone concludes they don’t believe in the church any longer, they have succumbed to intellectual and spiritual laziness? Is that really how you view people? This type of rhetoric is not only disturbing and unhelpful, it’s cowardly. To me Millet is the coward. He’s willing to suppress his issues and concerns, put things on the shelf so to speak, and then talk down and disregard others who have crossed the bridge into the dark night of the soul, examined the facts and concluded differently. Somehow in the Mormon church we have come to praise those who doubt, but remain faithful, but only in the context of our church. We send out thousands of missionaries to do quite the opposite, to leverage the wedges of doubt others might have of their own faith journey or church or philosophy. When “investigators” insist that they may doubt their current faith but want to stick with it, we call them lazy, and prideful, and deceived, So which is it? Persistence in the face of evidence to the contrary is applauded in one way, and disregarded in the other? How is that consistent?

Again, is this how you view people? And if you don’t, why would you send this to someone with your endorsement of the ideas and narratives expressed in the article?

[Silver Girl]

The article the HT sent is infuriating, belittling and insulting.

I didn't leave a cartoon of the church - I left a mockery and blasphemy of Christianity.

[2bizE]

Thus guy is ripe for leaving the church. Rather than respond to the article, I would ask him about the essays. For example say, "thank you for your support. I, too have struggled with church historical claims. I just do not see how a prophet of God could coerce young girls to marry him, and claim an angel with a flaming sword would kill him if they would not marry him. I also struggle with understanding why JS, convinced of being a con artist, or glass looker as they called it then, used the same stone that did not work to find hurried treasure, used it by placing it in a hat to translate the BoM. Do you have any thoughts as to why JS would need to be sealed to other married women?"

[vankimber]

I would be very interested to find out what specifically your HT found to be decent about that article. What, exactly, does he expect you to get from reading it? I have a feeling that he would be quite surprised to discover that the water he thought he was throwing on your smouldering indignation about the church turned out to be gasoline instead.

[SunbeltRed]

The article the HT sent is infuriating, belittling and insulting.

I didn't leave a cartoon of the church - I left a mockery and blasphemy of Christianity.

It is infuriating, and Mormonism has become the Pharisees and Saducees talked about in the NT.

[SunbeltRed]

I would be very interested to find out what specifically your HT found to be decent about that article. What, exactly, does he expect you to get from reading it?

Agreed, I'm a bit perplexed as to how anyone could find the article helpful or useful.

[Deepthinker]

I would be very interested to find out what specifically your HT found to be decent about that article. What, exactly, does he expect you to get from reading it?

Agreed, I'm a bit perplexed as to how anyone could find the article helpful or useful.

I read through the response you typed up. It did have anger in the tone of it, which I completely get. I’m there with you. However, this person when they read that kind of response might sense that same anger and be turned off to what you’re saying.

Here is what my response would be:

Thank you for sending the article my way. It was nice of you to be thinking of me.

To be honest, I didn’t find the article to be helpful because it is not an accurate reflection of my experience. It broad-brushed those who leave the church as lacking in character, patience, diligence, wisdom, obedience, etc. It goes on further to describe these people as intellectually and spiritually lazy. This is completely the opposite of my experience. The article actually paints a cartoon caricature of those who leave, yet says it is those who leave that leave a cartoon version of church. To the author, those how leave seem to be nothing more than a cartoon themselves.

If the purpose of the article you sent to me was to push those who leave further away from the church, then mission accomplished.

I don’t believe this article is in line with what Christ taught and how Christ would react to those who leave. Instead, I would recommend this article: http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/4660975-1 ... ch-deserve

Showing unconditional love to those who leave is the Christian thing to do and might eventually lead to some of them coming back.

[Deepthinker]

The article the HT sent is infuriating, belittling and insulting.

I didn't leave a cartoon of the church - I left a mockery and blasphemy of Christianity.

I’m wondering if there was a Freudian slip in the cartoon of the church part of the article. Maybe the author subconsciously thinks of the church as a cartoon.

I think the article does paint a cartoon version of those who leave.

[SunbeltRed]

I would be very interested to find out what specifically your HT found to be decent about that article. What, exactly, does he expect you to get from reading it?

Agreed, I'm a bit perplexed as to how anyone could find the article helpful or useful.

I read through the response you typed up. It did have anger in the tone of it, which I completely get. I’m there with you. However, this person when they read that kind of response might sense that same anger and be turned off to what you’re saying.

Here is what my response would be:

Thank you for sending the article my way. It was nice of you to be thinking of me.

To be honest, I didn’t find the article to be helpful because it is not an accurate reflection of my experience. It broad-brushed those who leave the church as lacking in character, patience, diligence, wisdom, obedience, etc. It goes on further to describe these people as intellectually and spiritually lazy. This is completely the opposite of my experience. The article actually paints a cartoon caricature of those who leave, yet says it is those who leave that leave a cartoon version of church. To the author, those how leave seem to be nothing more than a cartoon themselves.

If the purpose of the article you sent to me was to push those who leave further away from the church, then mission accomplished.

I don’t believe this article is in line with what Christ taught and how Christ would react to those who leave. Instead, I would recommend this article: http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/4660975-1 ... ch-deserve

Showing unconditional love to those who leave is the Christian thing to do and might eventually lead to some of them coming back.

DT - this response is excellent! Do you mind if I borrow it? I think my anger got the better of me.

[Deepthinker]

Agreed, I'm a bit perplexed as to how anyone could find the article helpful or useful.

I read through the response you typed up. It did have anger in the tone of it, which I completely get. I’m there with you. However, this person when they read that kind of response might sense that same anger and be turned off to what you’re saying.

Here is what my response would be:

Thank you for sending the article my way. It was nice of you to be thinking of me.

To be honest, I didn’t find the article to be helpful because it is not an accurate reflection of my experience. It broad-brushed those who leave the church as lacking in character, patience, diligence, wisdom, obedience, etc. It goes on further to describe these people as intellectually and spiritually lazy. This is completely the opposite of my experience. The article actually paints a cartoon caricature of those who leave, yet says it is those who leave that leave a cartoon version of church. To the author, those how leave seem to be nothing more than a cartoon themselves.

If the purpose of the article you sent to me was to push those who leave further away from the church, then mission accomplished.

I don’t believe this article is in line with what Christ taught and how Christ would react to those who leave. Instead, I would recommend this article: http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/4660975-1 ... ch-deserve

Showing unconditional love to those who leave is the Christian thing to do and might eventually lead to some of them coming back.

DT - this response is excellent! Do you mind if I borrow it? I think my anger got the better of me.

I don't mind at all. Please post an update with how it goes.

[Linked]

Sunbelt, I read through your response and I liked it. It touches on many of the reasons this thinking is so damaging and immoral and lazy. Similar to Deepthinker's suggestion I would try to make it less off-putting for the person you are sending it to. Specifically, remove any reference to how crazy they must be to like this article and just focus on what you thought. You bring the sanity. You bring the proper way to have a real discussion. Because TBMs don't know how.

For example, I would change your first point from:

1) "What I have been able to understand is why people stay," she said. She boiled it down to character. Those who stayed active in the church exhibited patience, faith and trust in Jesus Christ, hope, knowledge and wisdom, obedience, diligence and persistence, humility, repentance and forgiveness, charity and virtue.

Is this how you view your siblings who have left the church? They lack character? They lack any good qualities like wisdom, knowledge, humility, persistence, forgiveness, charity, and virtue? If you do view your siblings this way, how do you view someone like me, someone unrelated to you and how will you view me if I eventually leave the church? If you don’t view your siblings or others this way, why would you send a “decently written article” with this type of ignorant drivel?

To:

The implied corollary to this is that those who leave the church did NOT exhibit "patience, faith and trust in Jesus Christ, hope, knowledge and wisdom, obedience, diligence and persistence, humility, repentance and forgiveness, charity and virtue." That is a broad and very negative brush. I don't think that is a good way to view those who have left. It damages our relationships with the people we know, respect, and love, and creates a boogeyman of all those that leave that we don't know.

This is a great thread BTW, thanks for starting it.

P.S. Last weekend I was at a Christmas party BYU throws for employees and their families (my mom retired from BYU so we can still go) and saw posters for the "Faith and Intellect" symposium. It got me all hot and bothered, but had to keep it inside, no need to ruin a nice time with the wife and kids...

[SunbeltRed]

Version I sent to my HT. Thank Deepthinker and Linked. I used a blended version of your comments, much appreciated. You got the tone just right.

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Thank you for sending the article my way, I did read it last week. It was nice of you to be thinking of me.

To be honest, I didn’t find the article to be helpful because it is not an accurate reflection of my experience. It broad-brushed those who leave the church as lacking in character, patience, diligence, wisdom, obedience, etc. It goes on further to describe these people as intellectually and spiritually lazy. This is completely the opposite of my experience. The article actually paints a cartoon caricature of those who leave, yet says it is those who leave that leave a cartoon version of church. To the author, those who leave seem to be nothing more than a cartoon themselves.

Take for example this paragraph:

1) "What I have been able to understand is why people stay," she said. She boiled it down to character. Those who stayed active in the church exhibited patience, faith and trust in Jesus Christ, hope, knowledge and wisdom, obedience, diligence and persistence, humility, repentance and forgiveness, charity and virtue.

The implied corollary to this is that those who leave the church did NOT exhibit "patience, faith and trust in Jesus Christ, hope, knowledge and wisdom, obedience, diligence and persistence, humility, repentance and forgiveness, charity and virtue." That is a pretty broad and negative brush. Personally I don't think it’s a good way to view those who have left. It damages our relationships with the people we know, respect, and love. Is that how you view your siblings? If I leave the church is that how you will view me?

If the purpose of the article you sent to me was to push those on the borderlands, or those who have left, further away from the church, then mission accomplished.

Furthermore I don’t believe this article is in line with what Christ taught and how Christ would react to those who leave. Instead, I would recommend this article: http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/4660975-1 ... ch-deserve.

Showing unconditional love to those who leave is the Christian thing to do and might eventually lead to some of them coming back. IMHO, the ideas in the article you sent only further reinforce, to many, that there isn’t actually space for them at church. If you would like to discuss further feel free to reach out.

[SunbeltRed]

My HT responded to my email:

It was a very nice email. He did concede that some part of the article were problematic, and he could see why I felt the way I did. He talked about his siblings in a very kind and loving manner and said that if i ever left he may not agree but that doesn't mean we can't continue to be friends, talk, etc..

He was concerned, and kind, and introspective. I believe he responded as we all hope that someone would, understanding as best he is able, validating many points I made, while also in a very personal and non-judgmental way, affirming that his own faith has been valuable and hard won.

Thanks again for the help! I think we may have been able to open up some dialogue that may otherwise not have happened.