In Philip Larkin’s poem “Churchgoing,” a bicyclist who has moved beyond the religion of his upbringing stumbles upon an empty church one weekday. Something about the old building makes him stop, step inside, and wonder—in the most reverent sense of the word—what will become of this building once, as he presumes, religious belief becomes widely obsolete.
I like the thought experiment, but I like even more how Larkin twists it. Rather than asking what happens when belief slips away, he says:
Superstition, like belief, must die.
And what remains when disbelief
has gone?
That question pierces me more than any other part of the poem because it encapsulates the main question I have been asking for the past decade or so. Though I have moved somewhat away from the religious framework of my childhood, I find myself remaining in the LDS Church, and I wonder what stage of faith will follow disbelief.
It’s one thing to talk about a faith that one has “outgrown,” but the question of what happens when those who have outgrown their faith outgrow their doubts is even more tantalizing to me.
The fruit of knowledge
While at BYU, I took a biology class taught by a professor who insisted we call him by his first name, Rick. The class was the first time I learned about evolution in a serious way. Up until that point, I would have said that I already accepted evolution. I knew that humans and apes shared a common ancestor, but I didn’t fully appreciate what that means.
That means, I would soon find out, that my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s ( . . . ) mother’s mother was not a human being. And that makes me and the chimps and the orangutans distant cousins. Cousins in the same way I am cousins with the people I spend Christmas with.
It gets even more amazing. I’m not only related by birth to other apes and chimps, but everything that is alive. Zebras, butterflies, turtles.
And then, one day, it clicked.
“What about plants?” I asked Rick. “I don’t have a common ancestor with plants, do I?”
He smiled widely, since his specific field is botany. “Yep! I have a T-shirt that says ‘99% chimp, 75% banana,’” he said.
That was one of the most simultaneously soul-filling and terrifying moments of my entire life. My whole being thrilled at this new knowledge. Suddenly, life became a broader, more sacred word for me. Humans lost their luster—no, they didn’t lose it; rather, they shared their luster with everything else.
Later that semester, the abstract concepts of evolutionary genealogy were made concrete during a visit to the Bean Life Science Museum on campus. Walking around the taxidermy exhibits, I suddenly saw echoes of my own features on the animals: this one has ears like mine, that one has a nose. I had always believed I was created in the image of God, but here were a thousand more images like mine! The fact that I’m actually related to fish and grass and sequoias changed my concept of the nature of God, bending what had been an exclamation point into a question mark.
Widening the scope of “children of God” to my non-human relatives didn’t diminish my impulse toward reverence; in fact, it fueled my wonder and awe. It didn’t cut off my access to God; it multiplied my points of access to Him. But the shift wasn’t only in the positive; I lost some access points as well. It was a process of conversion something like a “mighty change” talked about in Alma 5:7–14. I cast old mental frameworks aside to make room for new ones.
But Rick wasn’t through with me yet. Though I had accepted the idea of my siblinghood with every being on earth, I admit that I still thought of humans as the golden child of the family. It’s true, Rick admitted, that humans have qualities like big brains, opposable thumbs, and the tendency toward bipedal long-distance running, but those qualities aren’t necessarily better than non-human qualities like flight or night vision (two powers we love to give our superheroes). No species is “the best.” Instead, we all carry an accumulation of helpful, inconvenient, and benign traits.
The same is true of religions. The species I was born into and the religion my family bequeathed me are uniquely equipped with both useful tools and stumbling blocks. They both arose from forces of natural selection—environment, risk, and reproduction—which is an imperfect system, a complicated arithmetic: sometimes neutral or maladaptive traits manage to squeeze by unnoticed, permeating species and religions because they do not interfere with reproduction (cancer on the biological end, and a debilitating sense of superiority on the religious end, for a couple uncontroversial examples).
The only thing threatened by the grandeur of evolution is dogma—the husk that truth so quickly outgrows. My data had expanded; I had no choice but to expand my image of God as well. Which means that my previous certainty that the creator of the universe must be a humanoid has been upended. I am full of awe but with no place to direct it. It’s like I’ve ended a long-term relationship with one god, and must now enter that awkward phase where I date new ones, while still living in the same ward as the others.
Prayers have become complicated. Sometimes I feel like the fourth-century monk Serapion, who, upon being presented with evidence that God is not an embodied man, is said to have cried, “Woe is me! They have taken my God away from me, and I have none to grasp, and I know not whom to adore or to address.”
Mourning this paradigm, I think, is natural, and the solution to the pain is not to go back to my previous belief but to embrace the new evidence and actively seek after more new truth. If God is not this, then what is God? The question may be daunting, but it’s undeniably exciting.
The proof is in the metaphor
In church, I constantly hear people testify, “I know the Book of Mormon is literally a historical document.” And when that happens, I brace myself.
Let me explain what I mean. For millennia, humans knew that the sun orbited the earth. They did not have the tools that could have shown them otherwise, and, yes, from the surface of the earth, it does look like the sun orbits the earth. So when the tools did arrive, and when the observations that could be made through them became known, a lot of people had a rude awakening. Whether the sun orbits the earth can be verified. Similarly, whether the Book of Mormon documents an actual group of ancient American inhabitants is up for verification, whether through current or future tools.
What this means is that the “knowledge” of all those testimony bearers could be knocked over at any moment by new evidence. Suddenly the sun would no longer be orbiting their earth. So I am unwilling to base any part of my belief on the Book of Mormon being a historical document. Even the question of “Does God exist?” seems unworthy of investment because it, too, is verifiable—not with any tool we have now, sure, but who knows when that tool might arrive?
So, yes, my unwillingness to invest in these points is partially born of simple self-defense—a somewhat paranoid and possibly limiting hunkering down with my spiritual food storage, awaiting the theological apocalypse. I don’t want to look like a sucker if some historical fact is revealed that blows apart my literal truth claims. But it’s not just self-defense. What I’m also doing is following the scriptures. “Don’t trust in the arm of flesh.” “Upon the rock of Christ build your foundation.” “Build your house upon rock, not sand.”
To me, if there ever was a sandy foundation to build faith on, it is the claim that the Book of Mormon is a historical document of ancient America. Not that it necessarily is not. But a faith based on that claim can fall apart with a little gust of historical wind.
This may have been what Dieter F. Uchtdorf, second counselor in the First Presidency, was talking about when he said:
Brothers and sisters, as good as our previous experience may be, if we stop asking questions, stop thinking, stop pondering, we can thwart the revelations of the Spirit. Remember, it was the questions young Joseph asked that opened the door for the restoration of all things. We can block the growth and knowledge our Heavenly Father intends for us. How often has the Holy Spirit tried to tell us something we needed to know but couldn’t get past the massive iron gate of what we thought we already knew?
Insisting on the Book of Mormon’s historicity seems to be the kind of “massive iron gate” Uchtdorf was talking about. It may stop us from questioning in more productive directions and finding the true value the Book of Mormon has to offer. And, for me, that value is in the spiritual principles it teaches. Of course, spiritual principles are verifiable, too. You study the principles, you live them, and if the results push you to inwardly repent and outwardly exercise charity and come to greater truth, you’ve verified them. For you, anyway.
This idea, that it was better to base my faith on principles rather than verifiable facts, came to me all at once one Sunday morning. As much as I love stories (especially “true” stories), and as much as I believe them to be beautiful tools that can point us to other people and ideas, I no longer saw them as the point.
Noah did not need to historically be among the few human survivors of a literal flood covering the earth for his story to point me to God. Nephi did not need to literally travel from the Old World to the New World to populate the Americas with Hebrew descendants in order for the words attributed to him to point me to faith, repentance, and charity.
And—it surprised me to go this far, but it felt right—Jesus did not need to bleed and die for my sins in order for his gospel to redeem me. His story does not need to be historical for a divine, atoning power to be a real force in the universe.
I remember a midterm I took in a BYU religion class featuring this question: “What are the essential truths the First Vision teaches us?” One of the correct answers was “God has a tangible, physical body.” I look back on that now and it sounds like people debating whether Batman or Iron Man would win in a fight. Really? The pinchableness of God’s body is an essential truth? That seems like an iron gate, something that can stop us from exploring and drawing more important principles from that scriptural account.
I’ve had many spiritual experiences while reading the Book of Mormon, but one night, I had a spiritual experience while reading the newly published script of The Book of Mormon musical. (I’m an indiscriminate spiritual truth seeker.) In the story, one “investigator,” Nabulungi, is filled with hope after being taught by the missionaries about the paradise of “Salt Lake City.” She thinks the missionaries want to physically move her from her war-torn village to that utopia. When she finds out that they’re not, she’s devastated.
Nabulungi: Stop it, all of you! I told you, our prophet is gone! There is no promised land. There is no salvation.
Sadaka: No! You must not talk like that Nabulungi. Remember the teachings of the first Mormons. When Joseph Smit died they did not give up on their hope.
Nabulungi: But it’s not true. We aren’t going to Sal Tlay Ka Siti.
Kimbay: Nabulungi, Sal Tlay Ka Siti isn’t an actual place . . . It’s an idea. A metaphor.
Mafala: You need to remember that prophets always speak in metaphors.
It’s a brilliant scene because it shows how excruciating it can be to have your literal paradigm shattered. And, yes, prophets do speak in metaphors. But the most compelling layer of the narrative is that Sal Tlay Ka Siti is a real, literal place, too! Sometimes the metaphors prophets speak are literally true. So, yes, Joseph may have actually had a vision in the grove; the Book of Mormon people may have actually existed; Jesus may have actually risen from his tomb.
Maybe they all literally happened. Maybe some of them did.
Maybe none of them did.
Maybe they all happened, but not exactly in the way scriptures say they did.
The freeing thing about my realization that morning, even if it did feel a little scary, was that whether or not the stories are true, my personal religion was safe from getting knocked down by something as simple as a new historical fact. And my religion was now emancipated to do what it does best: inspire me; challenge me; help me become better.
So I am not sure anymore that God is a humanoid, but I do believe that God is real. I believe in Jesus—I know the power to heal and atone and repent is real—but I am no longer sure that that power derives from a single event of suffering and resurrection, or even from a single being. I believe Joseph Smith was a true prophet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he turned out to be imagining some things. I believe Joseph Smith could have “translated” a comic book and produced something of spiritual—and possibly historical—truth. God can speak through anything: raunchy musicals, life science museums, ancient scripture verses, verses of scripture that might not be as ancient as they claim, personal feelings, even something as frustrating and human as an LDS General Conference, on occasion. The problem isn’t God’s silence; it’s whether or not we can listen.
Right now, church teachings help me perform essential reflection and self-critique; they make listening to God easier. The LDS Church is not the only source of truth in my life, but it’s one for which I am profoundly grateful, though I must admit in the same breath that the Church is not always a source of truth in my life, which can be profoundly difficult to accept or forgive. But there’s a lot of wonder out there, and a lot of truth, and a lot of new paradigm-breaking ideas, and I’m not going to throw out any of the sources that let me glimpse them—even if it means continuing to live in this spiritual in-between.This place where disbelief has gone.