I hope this essay will be helpful for dealing with honest questions and for helping others who are dealing with honest questions related to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Many of the things I write will apply equally or almost equally to faith journeys within other religions as well.

When people leave the Church, I would suspect that their questions about doctrine and history are not usually the main issue, but in many and probably most cases, they are one of the issues. And I think such questions can be more productively dealt with in a Church culture where there is, perhaps appropriately, certain pressures to express certainty and to stand united behind all the teachings of the prophets, and where our manuals and lesson plans tend—again, perhaps appropriately—to focus on reaffirming core doctrine rather than exploring the limits of what we know.

My first point is that we need to individually and culturally work on acknowledging our need for greater light and truth. We need to strike a better balance between rejoicing in and preaching the light we have already received, and acknowledging that what we have already received, both individually and as a Church, is inadequate–we will need to obtain more before we can fulfill our individual and collective destinies. I think this is part of what Paul meant when he said, “every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry.”

C.S. Lewis is one of my favorite thinkers, and he wrote this:

“The proper motto is not Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever, but Be good sweet maid, and don’t forget that this involves being as clever as you can. God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than any other slackers.”

We are part of a Church that, in doctrine at least, if not always in practice, is bracingly open to new truth—in which we are taught “unto him that receiveth I will give more; and from them that shall say, We have enough, from them shall be taken away even that which they have.” One of the revelations related to the establishment of the school of the prophets in Kirtland encourages us to study and teach diligently, and the Lord’s grace shall attend us, “Of things both in heaven and in the earth, and under the earth.” – I take that to mean we are to study absolutely everything that we can. Things in heaven, in the earth, and under the earth covers all of space. We should be eager, open, and curious about all of it.

Brigham Young taught:

“It is our duty and calling, as ministers of the same salvation and Gospel, to gather every item of truth and reject every error. Whether a truth be found with professed infidels, or with the Universalists, or the Church of Rome, or the Methodists, the Church of England, the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Quakers, the Shakers, or any other of the various and numerous different sects and parties, all of whom have more or less truth, it is the business of the Elders of this Church (Jesus, their Elder Brother, being at their head) to gather up all the truths in the world pertaining to life and salvation, to the Gospel we preach, … to the sciences, and to philosophy, wherever it may be found in every nation, kindred, tongue, and people and bring it to Zion.”

I love that quote. It expands the meaning of “the gathering” to include the gathering of all truth, as well as of God’s children, to Zion. I love it also because this is Brigham Young himself, the “lion of the Lord,” urging us to gather truths that we need but do not yet possess from the Catholics and the Anglicans, the scientists and the philosophers.

The gospel is not meant to chain the mind with dogma, but to liberate it from pettiness and self-obsession so that it may range far and wide in search of truth, not just for its own gratification, of course, but also for the blessing of God’s children. And it is an article of faith with us that God will yet reveal many great and important truths. The obvious implication is that we are still missing great and important truths. Many of them.

The followers of Christ and his restored gospel have nothing to fear and everything to gain from the search for truth–and everything to lose should we ever say, “We have enough.” If we are not progressing, then we are regressing.

So let’s find ways to acknowledge our need for greater light and truth and to resist any tendencies in our culture towards complacency and dogmatism. As part of that, we should be more excited about the light and truth yet to be revealed. Like the birds before dawn. They’re all chattering about how exciting it is, and I’m lying there awake but wishing I wasn’t, grumping that it’s still two hours before dawn, mentally yelling, “Couldn’t you all just shut up and let me sleep in the darkness, preferably forever?” Let’s be more like the birds and less like me.

Counterintuitively, acknowledging our relative ignorance and our need for more light helps to diminish the power of doubt, while the pretension to a complete understanding of things is like a house of cards that is threatened by the smallest wobble between perceived doctrine and perceived reality.

So how can we better inculcate a culture and atmosphere in which questions and searching are welcomed, as well as answers and certainty, and in which there is greater enthusiasm for the search for truth? I believe that will be a culture in which doubt loses much of its negative power and indeed gains positive power as an additional motivator in the search for truth, but I’m not sure how best to move towards this culture. I would love to see more serious engagement with the treasures of our cultural heritage—“all good books,” as it says in the D&C, but I’m not sure what we can do to promote that. I’d love to see more acknowledgement of the frequent ambiguity of scripture and the corresponding responsibility of wrestling with God and seeking personal revelation. I’d love it if we could see the scriptures as a source for good questions, perhaps just as much as they are a source for true answers.

We should cultivate this truth seeking, ignorance recognizing atmosphere in our counseling and ministering relationships as well. When we counsel with people who have honest doubts, I would think that we should try, to the extent honesty permits, to frame the situation, and to help the person experiencing doubts to frame the situation, as an exciting search for greater light and truth that can benefit more than just the person, a search that has been launched by a legitimate question, and a search that should involve turning to the ultimate source of light and truth as they study, ponder, pray, and stay faithful to whatever light they have already received.

My first counterintuitive suggestion was that confessing our relative ignorance and our need for greater light and truth diminishes the negative power of doubt. My second is related. It is that while it is good to doubt our doubts, it is not good to attempt to repress them.

When something in Church history or in Church teachings feels wrong or seems unreasonable, we do not need to pretend otherwise. We also don’t need to tell everybody who will listen how we perceive it–but with doubts, as with sin, the journey towards wholeness is the journey towards the light, where we can see clearly and be seen and known, not just by an omniscient God who would see and know us in any event, but by each other. God does not lie and he does not ask us to lie. If we have reason to believe that the Church is God’s, then we have reason to question whether our perceptions of something bad or false in the Church are correct, but we also have reason to wrestle with God. The solution is always to humbly and patiently seek greater light and truth while striving to live in accordance with the light and truth we have already received. But that search for greater light often begins with squarely and honestly facing the darkness within us, including our doubts.

So to review, admitting our relative ignorance makes doubt less, not more, powerful, and we should doubt our doubts but not attempt to repress them. My next suggestion I hope will not be counterintuitive. It is that we need to be determined to follow truth, even if that means rejecting some of our former beliefs. I’m altogether convinced that following the God of truth leads deeper and deeper into this Church, but it is proper and necessary for the person experiencing doubts to say, “I will follow the truth wherever it leads, even should it lead me out of the Church.”

Many people nowadays are familiar with the concept of intrusive thoughts. These are anxiety-inducing thoughts that often run counter to the values of the person experiencing them. I had great trouble with intrusive thoughts at the beginning of my mission, and a social worker at the Mission Training Center was able to teach me that people with intrusive thoughts need to give those thoughts permission to exist. They need to stop fighting them, stop panicking about having them, stop judging themselves for having them, and stop putting more credence in them than they deserve. Something very similar, if not identical, can be true of doubts. Whatever Freud may say, I’m not entirely convinced that repression is even possible, at least in this type of context. Counterintuitively, the best weapon against anxiety inducing thoughts is often a cheerful “hello, and what do you have to say? I doubt it will be valid, but I am ready to listen.” Mentally screaming a command to “get out of my head!” does not work and then, precisely because it didn’t work, the anxiety increases and the intrusive thought or doubt looms larger. When I have had doubts, I have expressed in prayer that I just want to follow what is good and true, wherever that leads. And I have felt comfort and confidence from God in response to those prayers, as if confirming that this is the right approach. And that comfort and confidence along with the clarity of that determination to follow truth has decreased my anxiety and allowed my doubts to loom less large. And with the doubts shrunk down to size, there was more space in my field of mental vision to look back through the years at my past spiritual experiences.

We value that courage to follow the truth and let the chips fall where they may when we see it in a Baptist who is investigating the Church with an open mind and heart, and we should value it equally in our own members when they investigate the Church in that same truth-seeking spirit. Our highest loyalty is to God, not to his Church–and if our loyalty to the Church is not founded on our loyalty to God and our belief, based on spiritual witnesses, that the Church is His, then we are building on sand. Better to be a humble follower of truth in any religion than to be a member of the Church who says “we have enough” or who stays out of mere tribal loyalty or social fear and contrary to his/her convictions. The one is on a trajectory that leads into God’s kingdom, while the other is on a trajectory that leads out of it, for the house will not stand when the floods come. My conviction is that encouraging this determination to pursue truth wherever it leads, without qualification, is more likely to result in people with doubts staying in the Church than any alternative.

So we want to follow the truth, wherever it leads. How do we proceed? For one thing, we proceed with humility and faithfulness to what we have already received. Part of the intellectual side of humility is recognizing that our knowledge of truth is partial and imperfect, that we bring our biases and human limitations to the search for truth, that we forget the vast majority of what we see, hear, and experience almost immediately, and that what little we retain is determined by various factors that may be more related to what is going on in our heads than to the significance of the experience. Also, that our incessant tendency is to tell ourselves self-justifying stories. We need to attempt to correct for these limitations and tendencies. This is the implicit background for the frequent scriptural injunction to remember. We will almost certainly forget a thing unless we make a special effort to remember it, and we will almost certainly distort a thing unless we make a special effort to hold it faithfully. This is why the Lord commanded Israel in Deuteronomy 6, the most quoted chapter within Judaism:

6 And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart:

7 And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

8 And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes.

9 And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.

. . .

12 . . . lest thou forget the Lord, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.

So we need to proceed with humility, guarding against the tendency to forget or distort the light we have already received. We need to hold in faithful remembrance the spiritual witnesses that we have been given. And beyond that, I believe that Alma 32 may be, in all the world, the very best description of the truth-finding procedure. I am in awe of that chapter. Most readers are doubtless familiar with the chapter, but I will quote a few verses, and then, with the rest of this essay, I want to clarify exactly what they say.

26 Now, as I said concerning faith—that it was not a perfect knowledge—even so it is with my words. Ye cannot know of their surety at first, unto perfection, any more than faith is a perfect knowledge.

27 But behold, if ye will awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith, yea, even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words.

28 Now, we will compare the word unto a seed. Now, if ye give place, that a seed may be planted in your heart, behold, if it be a true seed, or a good seed, if ye do not cast it out by your unbelief, that ye will resist the Spirit of the Lord, behold, it will begin to swell within your breasts; and when you feel these swelling motions, ye will begin to say within yourselves—It must needs be that this is a good seed, or that the word is good, for it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me.

29 Now behold, would not this increase your faith? I say unto you, Yea; nevertheless it hath not grown up to a perfect knowledge.

This passage refers to a “desire to believe.” It does not say, “just choose to believe.” That is not how this works. Belief involves a choice, but the choice is simply whether or not to do the experiment and whether or not to remember the results. The desire to believe is what impels us to make that choice and do the experiment. Thereafter, it is simply the results of the experiment that bring increasing conviction if we remember them.

We are told that God is our Father and that he sent his Son to share all of His glory, his goodness, his light, and his very life with us. This means an end to sin and death and all that separates us from joy for those who follow the Son. Of course, unless we are in a deep spiritual sleep, we would devoutly wish for this to be true and desire to believe–but an honest mind may well be put on guard by a wish that something be true. The experiment is a whole-souled test that draws on all the resources of an entire life–our minds and hearts, our bodies and our time, our whole souls, to determine whether this pearl of great price is real or fake and, if it is real, to lay hold on it line upon line and precept upon precept.

Alma 32 does not contrast faith with knowledge, but only with “perfect knowledge.” In order to grow up to a perfect knowledge, as the scripture expressly contemplates as the eventual outcome of the experiment, faith must already be a kind of knowledge. We do not yet know perfectly, but we have begun to know. We see through a glass, darkly, but the image is growing clearer day by day. This passage does not pretend that a spiritual experience or two amounts to perfect knowledge, but it does amount to some knowledge. It is enough to justify and motivate the continuation of the experiment.

As a new rock climber increases in confidence that the rope will hold until all fear is gone, as a fiance grows in confidence that the relationship can succeed, as an adopted child grows in security and belonging, so we increase in our trust and confidence towards God.

I will not claim that I have completed the experiment, but I can testify that, as Alma predicted, the Gospel has enlarged my soul; enlightened my understanding; and become delicious to me. I am becoming acquainted with the God of truth and love and glory, and as I do, my own truth and love and glory increase.

“He that receiveth light and continueth in God shall receive more light. And that light groweth brighter and brighter until the perfect day.”