Choosing not to choose

Choosing to be a disciple of Jesus Christ is liberating. But oddly, many of us in the Church have never really chosen one way or the other.

In elders quorum a few weeks ago, in the course of the lesson, the teacher made a reference to Pascal’s wager. That caught my attention, as that sort of philosophical concept doesn’t show up in our church meetings too often.

I’m nothing more than a hobbyist when it comes to philosophy, so I’ll let others represent the idea’s complexity and detail¹, but the simplified, pop culture definition (and the way this elder’s quorum instructor used it) of Pascals’s wager goes something like this:

• If you believe in God, and He exists, then you win. Eternal glory is the reward.

• If you believe in God, and He doesn’t exist, then hey! At least you were a good person and tried to treat other people well.

This sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? As Latter-day Saints it gives us something to fall back on, should doubt creep in. Even if the worst-case scenario came true, if the bottom fell out and the gospel was somehow not true, at least we’d have loved our neighbor, by taking so many opportunities to serve others. At least we’d have learned to be generous, because we donated tithing and fast offerings. At least we’d have been healthy, from living the Word of Wisdom. It’s a safety net. It’s a “just in case.”

Initially, the idea gives the same energy as the talk “But If Not…” by Dennis E. Simmons in April 2004. Elder Simmons talks about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego in the Old Testament, and how they refused to worship a golden image. When threatened by King Nebuchadnezzar with death by fire, they asserted their faith that the Lord would deliver them. But their faith extended beyond that, into recognizing that even if delivering them wasn’t the Lord’s will, they still wouldn’t worship the golden statue. They said this (emphasis added):

[O]ur God whom we serve… will deliver us out of thine hand, O king.

But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.

This “but if not”-style faith is admirable; it trusts both in God’s ability to work miracles, and also in His righteous judgment of when to do so (and when to not). The faith of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego wasn’t just a belief in God, it was a trust in His ways—which are higher than our ways—and in His greater plan for each of us.

That’s not what Pascal’s wager is, though. Instead, I’ve always gotten the impression that Pascal’s wager is intellectually lazy. One criticism is that it emphasizes faith only for the outcome, for the personal benefit you get from it. It’s not about the strength of your faith, or the depth of your relationship with divinity. It’s not about choosing faith, it’s about betting—wagering—on faith based on what prize you might get at the end.

But the biggest problem I have with this reading of Pascal’s wager is that it gives us an excuse to not choose.

For those of us who were raised in the Church, there can be a strong “default state,” of being and staying in the Church. We show up every Sunday because we always have. We might feel an external pull from family, friends, and people in our ward to show up and be present. Or we might feel an internal push, because we believe that being at Church every week is the Right Thing To Do, and that we’ll be a Good Person if we do.

This is all fine. This “default state” doesn’t mean not having a testimony; rather, I think the two go hand-in-hand. When I was a child, I went to church every week because that’s just what we did. It was my default, it’s how I was raised. Through my teenage years I developed my own testimony, small and juvenile as it was, and my serving a mission at age 19 was undoubtedly a combination of 1) cultural expectations, deeply ingrained in me, that serving a mission was the right thing to do, and 2) a blossoming testimony in the gospel of Jesus Christ. It was both things.

It wasn’t until adulthood—and farther into adulthood than I’d like to claim, really just in the past handful of years—that I think I was able to largely shed the cultural piece and really choose to be a disciple of Christ.

Before that, a certain amount of my Church participation was going with the flow. Even in getting married and raising children, I maintained the momentum I gained growing up in the Church.

Falling back on our cultural or societal expectations isn’t choosing, it’s letting other people choose for us. Pascal’s wager creates the ultimate hedge—it tells you that you don’t need to choose, that you can sit safely on the fence and benefit either way. Too many of us end up going to church on auto-pilot. We’ve chosen to not choose.

Tim Chaves, on an episode of the Faith Matters podcast, echoed this same sentiment:

One of the metaphors… is this idea that we're in a hallway, walking through. Our decisions are the rooms off the hallway and what we want to do is enter into a freely chosen room.

We don't want to be in a locked room, and we don't want to be in the hallway. We want to be in a freely chosen room. And if I can get a little bit concrete with this, I think people of faith, people that were born into religious institutions, sometimes struggle with this. As a lifelong member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there have been times in my life when I have asked myself: Am I in a freely chosen room? Or am I in a locked room? Have I actually made this decision? Or am I here just because I was born here, and it's the air I'm breathing, and I'm not taking an objective look at what I'm associating with, and I don't know if it was a decision that I actually made.

I think if you had asked me when I was younger, I would have said absolutely, I have chosen the gospel of Jesus Christ. But it was later, with hindsight, that I was able to see the currents of the water I was swimming in (and I may be deceiving myself now by seeing myself as freer from those cultural effects). This message seems to come through most clearly somewhat later in life; not as a teenager, not as a young missionary, and maybe not even through early adulthood.

Moving past those stages of life, it seems to be a somewhat common refrain. I also appreciate Susan Hinckley’s description of the same realization, on At Last She Said It:

…[M]any of us who have been lifelong members never actually said yes. I mean, as an eight-year-old, you “made the choice” to be baptized. But really, how much choice is an eight-year-old really making?… Now when I say yes to church engagement, it's because I want to say yes. And that is an entirely different thing from just doing it and going along because that's what good LDS women [and men] do. I'm going to be honest and say that's the space I was in most of my life.

Inevitably, when faced with the sudden fork in the road, when forced to choose, some of us will choose to leave the Church. That’s not what I’ve chosen, but I have respect for the choice. If that’s what you need to do to be true to yourself, and if you’re making a choice based on what’s best for you, then make that choice. Choosing yes or no, regardless of which one you choose, puts you far ahead of those who have never chosen either one.

It was hard for me to learn that attending church is not the same as committing to be a disciple of Jesus Christ and building a strong relationship with Divinity. Intuitively I used church attendance as a yardstick of righteousness; being “active” meant you were coming out of this earthly transaction with a positive balance, having left the Church or being “inactive” meant you were left owing. But I’ve since learned that it’s completely possible, and potentially common, to sit in the pews each week without having committed to something.

It depends what our goal is. Is our goal to hedge, to find a middle ground where we don’t actually commit to the gospel, but don’t commit to being outside it either? Or as Patrick Mason put it on the That’s Church podcast:

Do I actually want to live my religion? Or do I just want to stay here with all the right answers on the multiple-choice test?

Do I actually want to apply this in terms of what Jesus calls us to do?

There’s one other thing that’s true here, and it’s important. It’s this: You don’t have to choose it all right now.

If all you can choose is to come to sacrament meeting and sit in the back, choose that. If you can’t choose certain people in your ward or even certain Church leaders, choose those that lift you up. If you don’t feel like you can choose everything in the Church, everything in its history and everything it seems to represent, choose the parts that you can right now. Maybe you’ll be able to choose more later, and maybe you won’t, and both are okay. Be a “backbencher in a blue shirt and no tie,” to use a male-specific analogy, if that’s what you can do right now.²

Now, I’ll acknowledge straight up that this is not what is typically taught in the Church. We’re taught that we are engaged in a spiritual war of the greatest magnitude, and that we must choose a side. This is what President Russell M. Nelson, then Elder Nelson, said in 2011 about teaching our children:

Warn them that they will encounter people who pick which commandments they will keep and ignore others that they choose to break. I call this the cafeteria approach to obedience. This practice of picking and choosing will not work. It will lead to misery. To prepare to meet God, one keeps all of His commandments. It takes faith to obey them, and keeping His commandments will strengthen that faith.

The scriptures are similarly full of reminders that we can choose either fully good or fully evil, light or darkness, with inevitable consequences coming from each. Joshua, in the Old Testament, instructed us to “choose you this day whom ye will serve,” choosing between the Lord and false gods. Jacob, in the Book of Mormon, detailed that we are “…free to choose liberty and eternal life… or to choose captivity and death,” without any gray area in between. We can choose good, or we can choose evil.

But that's not always a helpful binary. Choosing between black and white can fail as a useful analogy because the world isn’t black and white. Even activity and participation in the Church isn’t black and white. Being partway in and partway out isn’t a failure of faith, it’s choosing to be in as much as you can. If that’s what you can do, do it.

Because choosing is at the heart of agency, and agency is at the heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I was interested to see this definition of agency come from a book that was not religious, and instead was about mental health and healing trauma. It still feels very much at home with how we think about agency in the context of the plan of salvation:

"Agency" is the technical term for the feeling of being in charge of your life: knowing where you stand, knowing that you have a say in what happens to you, knowing that you have some ability to shape your circumstances…

Agency starts with what scientists call interoception, our awareness of our subtle sensory, body-based feelings: the greater that awareness, the greater our potential to control our lives. Knowing what we feel is the first step to knowing why we feel that way. ³

In other words, in the gospel we choose based on the way we feel—including the promptings of the Holy Ghost—even when we don’t entirely know why we feel that way or the mechanics of how God speaks to us. But we always have a say, we always have that ability to choose and shape our circumstances. We were given that before the foundation of the world.

To bring it back into Latter-day Saint circles, Elder D. Todd Christofferson reminds us that the act of choosing is what sets us up to become like God:

Using our agency to choose God’s will, and not slackening even when the going gets hard, will not make us God’s puppet; it will make us like Him. God gave us agency, and Jesus showed us how to use it so that we could eventually learn what They know, do what They do, and become what They are.

So, choose something. No matter how small it is, choose something, and choose it because it’s in your soul. Choose it because it brings you joy. Choose it because your life depends on it; not because you might die from not choosing, but because you might not live without it.

Choose it for you. And don’t let others choose it for you.

1. Pascal’s wager is actually a set of multiple philosophical arguments, centered around 1) whether or not God exists, and 2) whether or not you believe in Him. In this essay I’m just talking about the part that people are most familiar with.

2. Christian Kimball, Living on the Inside of the Edge: A Survival Guide (Draper, UT: By Common Consent Press, 2023), 40.

3. Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York City: Viking Press, 2014), 97-98.