Don't trust this article

I'm told that reading stuff on the internet is a sure way to lose your testimony.

Another cycle of General Conference just wrapped up, and included in it was a warning about discussing the gospel online. It came from Elder Jack N. Gerard, of the Seventy, who said this:

The oppositional pull of this world is an essential part of God’s plan of salvation…

The worldly pull can be as… subtle as posting anonymous comments critical of Church doctrine or culture.

We’ve been warned by Church leaders about the dangers of the Internet, real or perceived, for years. This is a newer flavor, though, and a specific one, focused on what we are saying and what voices we are listening to. It’s along the lines of this article from the Liahona in October 2022, which asked us to re-examine, “Who Are You Following?” (spoiler alert: it turns out you should be following Jesus Christ, more than influencers).

The warning is prudent; there are absolutely accounts on Instagram, etc. who try to tear down people’s faith. On the other end of the spectrum, there are people whose accounts look like they could be run by the Church—scriptures, General Conference quotes, and devotional content.

But in between the two is the interesting liminal space: there is a wide swath of conversations happening online that doesn’t fit in either camp, and a lot of it is about things that are difficult in the Church. It might be topics about women’s issues, race, LGBTQ+, garments, temple worship, Church policies, issues with local leaders—really, anything at all.

And in my experience, so many of these conversations are beautiful. I see people making space for Latter-day Saints of all shapes and sizes. I see people finding online the community they’re not finding in elders quorum or Relief Society on Sundays. I see people earnestly trying to learn, to comprehend this crazy gospel that we understand so little of.

The reality is that the Church is full of people at different stages of faith. You may be familiar with Brian McLaren’s stages of faith; they include 1) Simplicity, where everything is a clear right or wrong, 2) Complexity, which acknowledges doubts but believes they can be overcome, 3) Perplexity, which emphasizes being true to yourself, and 4) Harmony, which transcends and sees these experiences as part of a larger whole. The stages aren’t better or worse than each other, but they are helpfully descriptive of each of us, at different times in our lives.

Content produced by the Church generally seems intended for those in Stage 1 (or possibly Stage 2). It will either avoid difficult topics or redirect them back to core, battle-tested tenets of the faith. But the Church doesn’t have a lot for those of us whose faith doesn’t fit into that mold.

Instead, this is work that is being done largely in the hallways of the internet; these topics are discussed on Substacks and Medium and in social media. Sometimes people research difficult topics online and end up leaving the Church. But the opposite is true, too—sometimes people, maybe in the Perplexity stage, need to sit with those questions, and finding like-minded community online is what keeps them in the Church.

I get asked occasionally why I write. Why I choose to engage online, when there’s so much that can drag a person’s testimony down. There are two parts to my answer:

1. I write for one person, and exactly one person. That person is me.

2. But that said, I’m also posting these thoughts online, for a specific reason: hopefully I can drop keys along the way for those who take this same path.

I’ll explain.

I write for me

Writing helps me to crystallize my thinking. It’s how I process things.

I learned this originally in a business context. I worked at Amazon for seven years, and Amazon has a culture of writing things. At other companies I might make Powerpoint slides to present an idea and get my point across quickly; at Amazon, I would write a PR/FAQ document (sometimes as short as half a page, or as long as six pages plus appendices). Writing out my ideas, in sentences and paragraphs, forced me to think things through in order to be coherent.

It also helped me sort through my ideas—I threw away many of these documents, because the ideas turned out to be dumb. Only the good ones survived.

On my personal faith journey, I am exploring ideas by writing. To do the writing I often have to do significant research, which helps too. Some ideas turn out to be dead ends; those never get posted online. But some ideas turn out to be the entry point to rich insights into Latter-day Saint theology and culture; rich for me, anyway. YMMV.

There’s something very personal about this, for me. It’s like writing in a journal. It reminds of these words by Anna Nalick, who felt this way about writing songs:

If I get it all down on paper, it's no longer inside of me
Threatening the life it belongs to
And I feel like I'm naked in front of the crowd
'Cause these words are my diary screaming out loud
And I know that you'll use them however you want to

The opposite of this is to do it all for the clicks, and there’s certainly a temptation to do that. The surest way to get clicks, views, and follows is to say something edgy; and when that works, the follow-up is create content that is more edgy, as well as controversial, and even angry. The end result doesn’t uplift anybody. I’ve seen these influencers leave the Church. You probably have too.

My most-read articles have been about women’s issues in the Church (specifically this one about Heavenly Mother and this one about complementarianism). If I fell back on my marketing training, I’d just keep pushing these buttons over and over again. And I could do that, and be successful in reaching that audience.

Except—I’m writing for me. I’m writing the topics that I need to dig into, at any given time. I research and write the things that are building my faith and helping me make sense of the eternities. I don’t write to be critical of the Church; however, I do highlight our Church culture when it gets in the way of things that are more important.

Maybe you need to hear these things I’m writing about, too; if so, great. If not, I’ve still accomplished what I need to accomplish. I’ve worked through the ideas. I’ve been able to process them.

This article is a good example of this… so far, it’s all about me. So, let’s talk about you now.

I write for… you?

Sarah Bessey recently shared a thought that has stuck with me, and explains my thoughts on this more beautifully than I ever could. It centers around this poem, by the 14th-century Persian poet Hafiz:

The small man
builds cages for everyone
he knows.
While the sage,
who has to duck his head
when the moon is low,
keeps dropping keys all night long
for the
beautiful
rowdy
prisoners.

Sarah uses this poem to illustrate the journey of her own faith, and how she found keys that had been dropped for her, knowingly or not, by people who went before. For her, it was a variety of authors who wrote about the gospel in new and compelling ways. They not only helped her see, but helped her see that she was not alone.

If you’ll oblige me a lengthy quotation, this is how she describes it:

I had thought that because I had questions, doubts, critiques, longing for social justice, a litany of little-t traumas, and a chip on my shoulder that I had to leave Christianity behind altogether. I thought there wasn’t room for me any more…

I still have the battered books on my bookshelf that I bought… I read them secretly, underlining and marking them up, wondering and being challenged. This is absolutely one of the reasons why I began blogging in 2004. It was the reason why I began to slowly find community online with other folks who were ‘emerging’ (lol) and questioning. I cannot even express to you how much relief this brought to me in that back row of the auditorium…

I haven’t thought of those moments in such a long time, probably more than a decade. But I remembered them this week.

I remembered how it felt to be so lonely, scared, disoriented, angry, and desperate.

I remembered how I felt like I had come to the end of the path within my religion.

I remembered how terrifying it was to be so angry.

I remembered how desperate I was for hope that this was not the end for me…

So I also remembered how it felt to not feel alone anymore. How it felt to know that there might be room for me still. How it felt to have someone bless my questions and my anger and my doubts and my longings. How it felt to be validated in that quest.

It was hope. Good, true, capable hope.

It was the first bit of light on that lonely path in the wilderness.

I love this description, and I relate to it—with the qualifier that Sarah is one of those people who has left keys along the way for me:

Sarah Bessey helped me feel like my journey into the wilderness was not only okay, but the only possible path forward (read her new book, Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith. Amazing, amazing, amazing).

Richard Rohr helped me understand that moving your faith forward means the death of your old faith. And that mourning it is okay.

Patrick Mason helped me see that the Restoration is still happening, and that as much as we believe we have a “fulness of truth,” we have to imagine that we have only a small fraction of it so far.

Nadia Bolz-Weber helped me see that the grace of Jesus Christ is stronger than any stupid thing I can do.

Susan Hinckley and Cynthia Winward helped me realize that it’s okay to talk about things that are hard, and doing so doesn’t mean losing your testimony.

And many others have helped me understand my faith better, helped me gain badly-needed gospel perspective, and helped me see that I’m not alone—even if these conversations are happening online instead of during the Sunday block. These people dropped keys, not knowing me or what I would need to hear, like breadcrumbs marking the trail they had trodden.

One more little bit from Sarah (this is the point):

At forty five now, I feel an urgency to not hold onto the keys I have in my own hands. I want to throw every single key someone dropped to me right up in the sky like confetti, hoping they land in someone else’s outstretched hands.

I think that’s a beautiful legacy. We don’t always know where the keys we’re dropping land, do we? I could name a dozen more right this second. And the funny thing is that many of them will have no idea how their faithful work and witness put a key in my own hand. We don’t always understand fully how just living our lives, stumbling forward faithfully, watching for the low moon, unlocks cages.

And so the Spirit sets us all free, not one key is wasted, not one lock is forgotten.

I hope I have spiritual insights that are meaningful enough for someone else to pick up. All I can share is my own broken self, my own pieced-together journey. All I have is my single, deeply unexceptional voice. But the idea that I could leave even a single key behind for others—like others left for me—is enough to convince me to live my journey out loud.

If I can make space for someone who needs it, space to explore ideas and strengthen their faith, space to feel like their questions aren’t sinful and terrible—I want to do that.

You might have found your way to this article because you, too, are looking for keys. Or you might be reading it because you’re my mom (hi, Mom). Either way, and wherever you’re looking, I hope you find what you’re looking for.

I hope you find meaning.

I hope you find peace.

And I hope you find a space where you know you are loved just the way you are, no matter what questions you are working through. If I can’t provide that for you, let’s find someone who can.

We’re in this one together.