How can I not judge people, when that's exactly what I've been taught to do?

We've had elite training in spotting people who violate Latter-day Saint culture.

I got on the elevator at work the other day, with a Starbucks cup in my hand.

I don’t drink coffee, but when we lived in Seattle for a number of years I became entrenched in the coffee shop culture that exists among professionals there. It was very common to meet someone “for coffee,” even if neither of you had any intention of drinking coffee; the point was that you’d meet at one of the million Starbucks locations and conduct your business there. The only time this didn’t work for me was when someone said, “Let’s meet at the Starbucks by your building,” and he and I ended up at two different locations a block apart because the designation “by my building” didn’t actually narrow it down to one.

When we moved to Utah, I found exactly no traces of this coffee shop culture, and since we moved here a handful of years ago I haven’t met anyone “for coffee” even once. It just doesn’t happen here, or at least in the circles I run in. But in those years of coffee shop meetings, I developed a taste for Starbucks hot chocolate, despite it being neither good for you nor particularly good hot chocolate. And occasionally I still stop in to get some.

Which is why it was funny to run into a Latter-day Saint friend on the elevator, while holding my Starbucks cup.

I know he probably didn’t care one iota what I was drinking (mediocre, slighty-gritty hot chocolate or not). I have active Latter-day Saint friends who do drink coffee, and I literally do not care at all. But I was immediately self-conscious about being spotted with the incriminating cup. I didn’t explain myself—we were only on the elevator together for a couple of floors—but I wondered if I should send him a message later so that he could know that I wasn’t actually drinking coffee. I finally convinced myself that I don’t owe anyone anything regardless of what kind of cup they see me holding. But clearly I’m still thinking about it, and clearly I’m still self-conscious about it.

Maybe that’s because I know that I notice. I wish I didn’t, but I’m programmed deep down to notice if a Latter-day Saint friend is drinking coffee. Do you know what I’m talking about? I can’t be the only one. Maybe it’s because I’m nosy and judgmental, or maybe it’s because I’ve been taught this. For decades.

It’s the same with checking to see if someone is wearing garments. There are zero reasons that we should ever be checking to see if someone is wearing garments or not. But even knowing that, it can be obvious when someone is wearing an outfit that would normally show their garments and it’s clear they’re not wearing them. I can’t think of anything dumber than taking such a vested interest in other peoples’ underwear. And yet, here we are; I’ve done it, you’ve done it, we’ve all done it.

The name of the game here is implicit bias or unconscious bias. These terms refer to any negative bias—and we all have them—that we’re not totally aware of.¹ Sometimes we have explicit biases, which are the opposite; maybe you’re openly, vocally biased against fans of your rival college football team, or against people in a different political party, or people who watch certain news outlets on TV. But implicit biases live below the surface; we don’t know they’re there, and we may even deny them if confronted with them.

As Latter-day Saints, we often have implicit biases against people doing things that don’t fit with the most conservative parts of our Church culture.

To be clear, I have these biases. This isn’t me telling a story about how I overcame these prejudices, and came out the other side a better person. These biases are so baked into who I am—and who we are, all of us—that having them is not a choice. The nature of implicit bias is that it is the automatic judgment we have. But the good news is that as human beings we are more than just our built-in, instinctual reactions.

Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, in his landmark book “Thinking Fast and Slow,” describes this in terms of “System 1” and “System 2.” They operate like this:

System 1 is fast, automatic, and intuitive, operating with little to no effort. This mode of thinking allows us to make quick decisions and judgments based on patterns and experiences.

In contrast, System 2 is slow, deliberate, and conscious, requiring intentional effort. This type of thinking is used for complex problem-solving and analytical tasks where more thought and consideration are necessary.

This concept shows up in anti-racism and other anti-prejudice education. The idea is that sometimes we’ve been taught things, or even internalized ideas generationally, that are no longer satisfactory to us; System 1 reactions often manifest as stereotyping others. Maybe we were taught as children that White people shouldn’t associate with Black people, or that straight people should avoid LGBTQ+ people, or—let’s just say—that people who drink coffee are Bad. Our unconscious, implicit bias is to react that way, the way we were taught implicitly or explicitly when we were younger, when we’re suddently confronted with people who fit those bills.

But System 1 is followed by System 2—the deliberate, conscious version of ourselves. And that’s where we get to choose. Will our second thought—from System 2—feed into the stereotypes that our System 1 is propagating? Or is it going to refute ugly prejudices? We’ll always have a first thought, whatever it is, but what matters is what we do with the second thought.

There’s grace for us in this idea. If you see someone of another race and have a knee-jerk reaction, we get to allow our System 2 to weigh in and change the balance. It doesn’t mean we’re bad, it just means we have baggage; the measured, thoughtful System 2 represents everything that we’ve learned more recently, which often represents a better version of ourselves. Your first reaction may reflect where you came from, but your second reaction reflects who you are now.

So, how did we get here? Why do we have implicit biases as Latter-day Saints?

Well, again, everybody has biases. But the specific biases that we have, the ones that are pervasive in our Latter-day Saint culture, do have sources we can trace back to. Our stories are all probably a little bit different, but I can tell you mine.

For one, I can tell you for sure that I was taught to be judgmental as a youth. When President Hinckley gave his “6 B’s” talk in 2000, when he suggested that young women looked better with only one set of earrings (I wrote more about that here), it became a thing. I sat in Young Men lessons where I was taught that if a girl had more than one set of earrings, then she was not someone I should date, let alone marry—I was taught that she was unwilling to follow the prophet and was unworthy. I now know many wonderful, faithful Latter-day Saint women who have multiple sets of earrings, but there’s still a touch of that implicit bias left in me. How do I know? Because my System 1 notices the earrings, even if my System 2 doesn’t care about them.

Same thing with modesty, as a youth. I was explicitly taught as a teenager that if a girl wore something that was deemed immodest, by whatever arbitrary bar was held at that time and by that person, then not only was she sinful but would probably also cause me to sin. Yeah, I was taught to judge a woman’s righteousness by what she wears. And if you’re sensing a theme here, of judging women and controlling their bodies, then you’re right on. Yikes.

There will be those who get pedantic about “judging”; surely, they’ll say, we need to judge between right and wrong. What is judging, they’ll also say, but making choices?

All right, I’ll play. This is not just a hypothetical contradiction; this is a literal scriptural contradiction. The same book of scripture that says “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged”² also says we should “judge righteous judgment.”

But that’s okay, words in the English language can have more than one definition. To “judge” can absolutely mean “to form an opinion about through careful weighing of evidence and testing of premises”; it can also just as easily mean, from the same dictionary, “to form a negative opinion about.” The former is what the scriptures refer to as potentially “righteous judgment”—you might substitute a word like “discernment” here.³ But the latter, when used to be judgmental of other people, is what we’re told to simply not do.

I’m just not interested in trying to justify ourselves in judging others. There’s simply no “righteous judgment” when our judging causes ourselves to lift ourselves over other people (or put other people below ourselves).

Or, how about this as a rule of thumb: If you’re judging a situation, or a decision to be made, fine. If you’re judging a person, you’re doing it wrong.

Do you see what this means? It means that if you understood President Hinckley’s earrings thing as a commandment (and many people did not), then you had the opportunity to choose whether to follow it or not. But nothing gave you permission to judge other people for what they chose to do.

We all have the agency to choose to dress to our own particular standards of modesty. But it’s not a righteous judgment if we judge others for how they dress.⁴

We get to choose whether we follow the Word of Wisdom, how we keep the Sabbath Day holy, how often to read the scriptures or pray or even attend church meetings, but nothing in the gospel of Jesus Christ gives room for us to judge others on when, how, or why other people do those things.

As BYU professor Dr. Catherine Corman Parry put it, “Our own sins, no matter how few or seemingly insignificant, disqualify us as judges of other people’s sins.” Or as Dr. Julie Hanks put it so concisely, “If I’m judging you and your commitment, the sin is on me for judging.”

And Elder Uchtdorf brings it all home:

This topic of judging others could actually be taught in a two-word sermon…

Stop it!

That’s easier said than done. Our unconscious biases, embedded in our System 1, are always going to go crazy. But our System 2 is also always there, to justify us, to break generational cycles, and to represent who we really are—not just where we’ve come from.

If we were capable of having Christ-like love for everyone around us naturally and instinctually, this mortal life would be a lot easier. But we’re not wired that way (or I’m not, anyway, maybe you are). My System 1 doesn’t have automatic love for everyone in my neighborhood, my ward, or my work. This could be what King Benjamin describes as the natural man.

But the good news of the gospel accounts for that. We can learn kindness and empathy, and it’s up to us to grow into those Christ-like characteristics as much as we can. They can be part of our System 2, the part we can control a little more. But the unmerited, unearned grace of Jesus Christ—the only love that does not fail, that Charity with a capital C—is given to all of us. That love is automatic. Nothing can change that or take it away.

When we’re taught to be Christ-like, that may mean a change in our behavior, a change in how our System 2 responds. But much longer-term, it also means a fundamental change in who we are. Changing our System 1, to be filled with automatic love for all our fellow children of God, isn’t something we can do on our own. And probably not even something we can do in this life. But it’s something we can do with divine help.

As Elder Uchtdorf also said, in the same talk as referenced above:

The pure love of Christ can remove the scales of resentment and wrath from our eyes, allowing us to see others the way our Heavenly Father sees us: as flawed and imperfect mortals who have potential and worth far beyond our capacity to imagine.

It’s pretty dumb that the Starbucks cup thing bugged me so much. I clearly had to come write this to clear my conscience. But it strikes right to the core of something I believe in very deeply: that the great commandment to love our neighbor is one of the few things we’ll take with us—that we’ll be judged on, even—after this life. And that its partner, the commandment to love God, is best fulfilled in how we treat other people. If our love of God makes us judge other people, then we’re doing it wrong.⁵

There’s no question in my mind that we’ve been taught, culturally, to judge other people. Let’s stop teaching that. And the best way to start is to just stop judging each other.

1. More, and more complete, definitions here, here, here, and here.

2. All right, I’ll play on this one too. Where the equivalent verse shows up in the beginning of Matthew 7, the JST updates “Judge not, that ye be not judged” to instead say “Judge not unrighteously, that ye be not judged; but judge righteous judgment” (here). This chalks up a point in favor of judging. But the verse I’ve cited in the text here, Luke 6:37, doesn’t get that same update in the JST (here).

3. I’ve heard an example about choosing a babysitter. Clearly you should use some discernment/judgment; say it came down to two candidates, and one had a history of child abuse—hopefully you would choose the other. But hopefully, also, you can see that this sort of thing isn’t what I’m talking about here.

4. Most standards of modesty are somewhat arbitrary, and attached to a time and place; there was a time when it was scandalous for a woman to wear slacks. But let this be the takeaway: even if there is a clear standard for what modesty means in a given moment, that still doesn’t give us license to judge anyone for the way they dress.

5. From Richard Rohr:

One would think that people who insist they believe in one God would understand that everyone on Earth is equally a child of that one God. Christians ought to be first in line to cross artificial boundaries created by nation states, class systems, cultures, and even religions. Often, we’re the last! It makes one wonder if we believe what we say we believe. Religion too often becomes the way to defend the self instead of the way to “let go of the self” as Jesus forthrightly taught (see Luke 9:23).