“Help Thou Mine Unbelief”

In the course of his interactions with Brigham Young, Parley P. Pratt was once said to have proclaimed that after the practice of polygamy was made public, he had assumed that the “cat” had finally been let out of the proverbial “bag.” Brigham Young, however, let him know that he had another thing coming: “Allow me to tell you, Elders of Israel, and delegates to Congress, you may expect an eternity of cats, that have not yet escaped from the bag.”¹

Lately, widespread access to information, vastly accelerated by the Internet, seems to have caused the number of cats and bags to multiply inordinately, much to the consternation of Brigham Young’s successors. The arcane and sometimes disturbing details of a tight-knit provincial faith community on the western frontier and its uncomfortable transition out of obscurity have been documented in excruciating detail, and this information is now widely available to lay audiences. While Mormon history enthusiasts and apologists sometimes complain to those who are surprised by this information that it has been available all along, few dispute that its accessibility has increased dramatically, and that this accessibility has presented new challenges. It has made it difficult for the LDS Church to control its narrative as tightly as it used to be able to.

During prior eras, such as the one in which LDS general authority LeGrand Richards published his well-known A Marvelous Work and a Wonder, Mormon modernism ruled the day, convinced of its ability to circumscribe all truth neatly into one great whole, and that all the answers and proofs necessary to overwhelm the faith’s opponents would shortly be forthcoming, if they hadn’t arrived already.

But as theologian Richard Holloway has observed, though the truths that undergird our worldview may be fixed, static, and immovable, we are not. The goalposts of our post-secular culture seem to be changing around these Mormon modernists, and they begin to find themselves in a difficult position. Unlike prior generations of Mormon missionaries, who could draw from a common religious narrative when interacting with potential converts, the missionaries of today have an especially difficult pitch. Now, they must first convince potential converts that they have a problem, and then they must convince them that they have the solution to that problem.

Prior generations tended not to dispute missionaries’ emphasis on the importance of priesthood authority and the necessity of salvific sacraments, though they may have disputed the Mormons’ particular claims. But claiming that anything is important merely because ‘God said so,’ is becoming more difficult, especially when one’s audience is not certain of God’s existence! Even those who do believe in God seem increasingly to think that requiring particular sacraments for salvation is arbitrary and capricious.

The dichotomies of true or false, historical or fictitious, are the catch-phrases of the modernist generation.

One can observe a number of different reactions or approaches to this growing disaffection and difficulty in proselytizing from inside and outside the faith.

One approach can be broadly characterized as an appeal to apologetics and academic research.

While apologetics sometimes help, they have limitations. Paul Tillich explains that apologetics can provide temporary relief from perceived flaws in one’s religious narratives and symbols if one’s concerns are not too difficult to answer and if one’s conviction of the faith’s truth claims remains essentially intact.²

Another challenge of apologetics is that apologists often distance themselves somewhat from more mystical or superstitious aspects of the faith in an effort to justify their position rationally, but in so doing they weaken their ties to the symbols of the faith that are necessary to maintain its vitality. As Tillich describes:

It often happens that in opposition to literalism, myth and cult are attacked as such and almost removed from a community of faith. The myth is replaced by a philosophy of religion, the cult is replaced by a code of moral demands. It is possible for such a state to last for a while because the original faith is still effective in it. Even the negation of the expressions of faith does not negate the faith itself⁠⁠—at least not in the beginning. This is the reason one can point to a nonreligious morality of a high order and can attempt to deny the interdependence of faith and morals. But there is a limit to this possibility. Without an ultimate concern as its basis every system of morals degenerates into a method of adjustment to social demands, whether they are ultimately justified or not. And the infinite passion which characterizes a genuine faith evaporates and is replaced by a clever calculation which is unable to withstand the passionate attacks of an idolatrous faith.³

Another approach to lagging faith is an appeal to institutional authority.

What Tillich means by “an idolatrous faith” is not necessarily religion in the traditional sense. It may be that, but it may also be any movement or community that is centered around an “ultimate concern”. For Tillich, nationalism, obsession with worldly success, political ideologies and atheism, to name a few, can be, and have often been, ultimate concerns in which many individuals and communities have exercised faith. Whenever a religion mistakenly places a finite human construct as its ultimate concern, it engages in idolatry, expecting of its ultimate concern something that it is incapable of delivering.

One example of an idolatrous faith is an appeal to fundamentalism. Disillusioned by an apparent lack of consistency or commitment to principle in present leaders, or by challenges to the orthodox narrative, some seek refuge in a more distant past where doctrinal purity and consistency can be more easily imagined, and where increased isolation makes inconsistencies and paradigm mismatches less apparent. Ironically, those who embrace fundamentalism and literalism are able to do so because of the scientific precision that they have inherited from secularism.

Another common approach is an appeal to secularism. This also qualifies as what Tillich calls “nonreligious morality,” which ultimately fails to provide the communal rigor and motivation necessary to resist more virulent forms of idolatry.

Each of these approaches is a different way of avoiding what Tillich calls “breaking the myth,” or recognizing religious symbols as such rather than as literal reifications of the divine, while still retaining (rather than discarding) them.

Christianity denies by its very nature any unbroken myth, because its presupposition is the first commandment: the affirmation of the ultimate as ultimate and the rejection of any kind of idolatry. All mythological elements in the Bible, and doctrine and liturgy should be recognized as mythological, but they should be maintained in their symbolic form and not be replaced by scientific substitutes. For there is no substitute for the use of symbols and myths: they are the language of faith.⁴

It’s important to clarify that “myth” is being used to refer to a deeply-valued narrative or overarching moral truth, not a fable. Breaking a myth isn’t to discard it as wholly flawed or irrelevant, but to recognize and retain those aspects of it that are of greatest value, namely its ability to transcend the circumstances of its emergence, and inspire and help us in our present challenges.

A friend, Holly Huff, recently shared such a paradigm-shattering period in her life.

Recognizing my faith crisis as the smashing of an idolatrous God-figure gave powerful meaning to that painful process. These idols fall because they confront a true reality that extends beyond them. God can’t be contained. The living God is impervious to our attempts to wholly rationalize the Divine.

I had so many idolatrous beliefs about God. (God rewards obedience and punishes disobedience; God is a respecter of persons who treats some groups of people differently than others; God is indifferent or distantly dispassionate about suffering because it is the just result of wickedness, and many more.) All of those false and limiting ideas were baked in to my concept of God, and I had to start over in some pretty fundamental ways. I was an atheist for a while and I slowly came back to believing in God in an entirely different manner. It’s the best worst thing that ever happened to me.

Here is one possible reading of the empty tomb. Something goes wrong in our religious life, it seems. We are confronted with harsh realities, and God gets killed. The figure we revered as master dies a harsh death, and we are at a loss. What now? Our sense of purpose is devastated. Did we really get it so wrong? Were we just fooling ourselves the whole time? In this moment, it seems like perhaps we were.

We go about our lives anguished, empty, and mourning. We make preparations to bury our dead, and then we stumble, still grieving, onto the miracle. The God we thought we’d seen murdered lives. We hadn’t understood who he was in the first place. We looked for him in the wrong places. God’s power to redeem is revealed in what seems like the utter disaster of his death.

Easter promises that this pain so many of us feel or have felt in doubting can be redemptive, and that a faith crisis doesn’t have the final say. It in fact may point to the greater truth of a living God.

“Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, for he is risen.”⁵

In the July 1906 Improvement Era, B. H. Roberts wrote presciently of the need for disciples who are capable of managing such tensions.

Disciples and partisans, in the world of religious and of philosophical opinion, are of two sorts. There are, first, the disciples pure and simple,⁠⁠—people who fall under the spell of a person or of a doctrine, and whose whole intellectual life thenceforth consists in their partisanship. They expound, and defend, and ward off foes, and live and die faithful to the one formula. Such disciples may be indispensable at first in helping a new teaching to get a popular hearing, but in the long run they rather hinder than help the wholesome growth of the very ideas that they defend: for great ideas live by growing, and a doctrine that has merely to be preached, over and over, in the same terms, cannot possibly be the whole truth. No [one] ought to be merely a faithful disciple of [anyone else]. Yes, no [one] ought to be a mere disciple even of oneself. We live spiritually by outliving our formulas, and by thus enriching our sense of their deeper meaning. Now the disciples of the first sort do not live in this larger and more spiritual sense. They repeat. And true life is never mere repetition.

On the other hand, there are disciples of a second sort. They are [people] who have been attracted to a new doctrine by the fact that it gave expression, in a novel way, to some large and deep interest which had already grown up in themselves, and which had already come, more or less independently, to their own consciousness. They thus bring to the new teaching, from the first, their own personal contribution. The truth that they gain is changed as it enters their souls. The seed that the sower strews upon their fields springs up in their soil, and bears fruit,⁠⁠—thirty, sixty, an hundred fold. They return to their master his own with usury. Such [individuals] are the disciples that it is worthwhile for a master to have. Disciples of the first sort often become, as Schopenhauer said, mere magnifying mirrors wherein one sees enlarged, all the defects of a doctrine. Disciples of the second sort co-operate in the works of the Spirit; and even if they always remain rather disciples than originators, they help to lead the thought that they accept to a truer expression. They force it beyond its earlier and cruder stages of development.

Roberts comments on this passage:

I believe “Mormonism” affords opportunity for disciples of the second sort; nay, that its crying need is for such disciples. It calls for thoughtful disciples who will not be content with merely repeating some of its truths, but will develop its truths; and enlarge it by that development. Not half⁠⁠—not one-hundredth part⁠⁠—not a thousandth part of that which Joseph Smith revealed to the Church has yet been unfolded, either to the Church or to the world. The work of the expounder has scarcely begun. The Prophet planted by teaching the germ-truths of the great dispensation of the fulness of times. The watering and the weeding is going on, and God is giving the increase, and will give it more abundantly in the future as more intelligent discipleship shall obtain. The disciples of “Mormonism,” growing discontented with the necessarily primitive methods which have hitherto prevailed in sustaining the doctrine, will yet take profounder and broader views of the great doctrines committed to the Church; and, departing from mere repetition, will cast them in new formulas; co-operating in the works of the Spirit, until they help to give to the truths received a more forceful expression, and carry it beyond the earlier and cruder stages of its development.⁶

The Mormon Transhumanist Association seeks to cultivate disciples of the second sort.