Questioning the Spirituality of Others

It’s interesting to me how often we Mormons respond to religious questions by impugning the questioner’s spiritual commitment, testimony, or faith instead of, or in addition to, addressing the question itself. Unfortunately, we tend to assume that people who don’t have questions, issues, or doubts are somehow more spiritually committed than those who do. There are at least two reasons I think this assumption is problematic.

First, life has a way of breaking down the dichotomies between believers and questioners, between the faithful and the doubters. As surely as every human being suffers physical and emotional pain, every Mormon, every Christian, every believer faces religious adversity. It’s highly unlikely that anyone could long endure as a member of this church without encountering some personal challenge, whether in Mormon history, in the tensions between religion and science, in doctrine, in church policy, in the unkindness or unscrupulous behavior of other members, in the pain of unfulfilled priesthood blessings, or in the loneliness that accompanies various borderline statuses: singleness, homosexuality, infertility, divorce, physical or mental illness, race or class marginality.

Maybe another way to put this is that one of the purposes of life is to learn face our trials, including our religious and our intellectual trials, with courage, integrity, and faith. When we impugn questioners’ motives, we make that vital work we all have to do harder. We drive people into circumspection about whatever their religious adversity is, and we contribute to the resulting fissure that then separates adversity from the very personal and community religious strength that questioners and sufferers—which is to say, all of us—most need.

The more fundamental problem with maligning others’ spirituality, though, is the very basic fact that we never know their hearts. We do not know, we cannot know, it is not for us to know, what hours they have spent on their knees, what years-long wrestles they have had with God, what of their lives they have given up to seeking. But we cannot assume that they haven’t. I’m persuaded from my reading of the New Testament that how we treat each other is far more important to God than the positions we come to on even the issues that matter a great deal to me personally, such as feminism. After nearly half a life of church membership (thirty-four years and counting), I’m a little weary of the lack of charity we grant each other, on both sides of all manner of political and doctrinal divides. I’m tired of the rush to impute evil motives. Everything about our doctrine and scriptures and everything about our own mortal experience teaches us, over and over, that we live in a world of ambiguity, that our knowledge even of the most profound religious truths is partial, that even our most cherished spiritual gifts will one day pass away in the knowledge to come. If there is anything this life seems at pains to teach us, it is how little we know. All of us see through a glass darkly, and perhaps our glasses are never so dark as when we gaze at the spiritual lives of our brothers and sisters. Given this, how can we assume that others who have not had exactly the spiritual experiences we have, or who have not come to the conclusions we have based on their own spiritual experiences, are therefore spiritually deficient?

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A Physics Parable

In physics, one speaks of two kinds of balance, or equilibrium. Unstable equilibrium describes a system that is in balance, but that will become unbalanced at the slightest outside influence. Think of trying to balance a pencil on its point: it’s possible to do in theory, but in practice it will fall over every time you try. Stable equilibrium describes a system that is in balance and that will seek the same equilibrium, even if outside influences temporarily unbalance it. Think of a marble resting in the bottom of a bowl: you can nudge it, flick it or bump it to make it leave that position, but it will eventually roll back to the bottom of the bowl.

In my experience, Mormons (and perhaps especially Mormon women) have a habit of reducing the Gospel to an infinitely long to-do list. Pray, read your scriptures, fast, go to church, do your visiting/home teaching, magnify your calling, go to the temple, do your genealogy, pay your tithing, pay your fast offering, bear your testimony, hold Family Home Evening, etc., etc. No one could possibly do all of these things, so success at one is always mitigated by imperfection in others. (Worse, success in any one area may be trumped by the unrealized possibility of a higher degree of success. Sure, you packed home lunches for your kids, but did you bake the bread? Hmm?)

So I was sitting one day in Relief Society, apparently thinking about physics instead of paying attention to the lesson, when I had a thought: “Be a marble.” In other words, don’t let all the little things I’m “supposed” to be doing pull me off balance; rather, see each of them as tending towards the same center of peace and stability, and seek that center by any path.

I had seen each of the little rules of the Gospel pulling me in a separate direction, throwing me off balance unless I happened to do them all perfectly at once. I realized, instead, that they were all pointing towards the greatest commandments of loving God and loving my neighbor. If I did my visiting teaching, but didn’t go on the last temple trip, I didn’t need to beat myself up for it because I had still found a way to offer service. If I went to church on Sunday but I didn’t read my scriptures all week, I had still tried to become closer to God. Each facet of the Gospel wasn’t in competition with every other one. Instead, all the commandments were working together to bring about the same end, and trying faithfully to keep any one of them would help me to follow all of them.

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