Earlier this week, the Salt Lake Tribune published a column entitled “If You’re Faking Your Latter-day Saint Faith … Why?” The basic gist is, the columnist is puzzled why people who don’t believe in the church still participate, rather than living authentically. He writes about these fakers (and, if he were a Salinger fan, I supposed he would have used “phonies“):
They go to church, they fulfill congregational callings, they pay tithing, they socialize with believers and participate with family members in every aspect of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, except for one.
They do not actually believe it to be the truth.
Call me naive, but this whole concept is tough to fit into my brain.
Why the heck would anyone pretend to believe in a religion that is as demanding, and often outright inconvenient, as the LDS Church is?
The column really got under my skin. In the first instance, it’s because I have no patience for people (inside and outside the church) who insist that, if you don’t buy into their conception of religion, you should leave. (I similarly have no patience for people who insist you have no choice but to stay—I’m equal opportunity impatient!)
And to be fair, I don’t think the columnist was insisting that people leave. But I still want to contend with the reasoning underlying his “[m]ind-blowing” (his words) revelation that non-believers would participate in church.
The first, and principal, issue I have is that belief and faith aren’t binaries. Most people don’t believe or disbelieve in the church. We’re more nuanced than that. Moreover, belief isn’t static. Some days—and even some years—people believe more, and some they believe less. That’s true of the church. That’s true of their commitment to their employer. That’s true of their faith in the government. The idea that you have to be fully committed or fully uncommitted is just unfathomable.
But it’s not just that he misses the idea of spectrum—it’s that he assumes that the church only provides value at some level of belief. And I certainly hope that’s not true.
Look, belief is a compelling reason to attend church. But lack of belief—whether complete or partial—doesn’t mean you can’t find value in it. Church also offers community. It offers moral instruction. It offers professional and personal connections. It offers an hour of free babysitting a week. It offers weekday basketball and babysitting gigs[fn1] and music and self-directed worship and a way to meet people and moving services and opportunities to serve and be served.
And those are all valuable things! They’re all good things! And I hope the church continues to offer reasons to come, even if you don’t fall on the high end of belief. In fact, I hope we start to offer more reason—I hope we can make our tent big enough to invite the LGBTQ community and people with tattoos and people who don’t follow the Word of Wisdom and people who aren’t rich successful businessmen. I don’t see any advantage to limiting membership and participation to those people would fit comfortably into the first couple episodes of WandaVision.
And look, it sucks for people who feel like they don’t want to participate but, because of familial or neighborhood or work or whatever pressure go anyway. I don’t for a second want to say that people have to participate. The church isn’t for everybody.[fn2]
But there’s no benefit in pushing people out. And there’s even less benefit in framing church participation as only having value for people who believe certain things at a certain level. There’s room enough for everybody. Or, if there’s not, we need to make room.
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[fn1] In fact, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that teenage babysitters are making up to $30/hour in the post-heights-of-Covid world.
[fn2] Like my good friend who came to church when our downtown Chicago building was dedicated. He and his family have come to the baptisms of all of my kids and we’ve gone to several Christmas Eve masses with them. But when, in the dedicatory prayer, the person praying started asking that the HVAC system be blessed and the wiring be blessed and, like, the parking spaces be blessed, well, he managed to keep a straight face and I managed to keep a straight face but it was not easy.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash