Stages of faith: Latter-day Saint edition

Faith is different for different people. Understanding that lets us have more grace for those around us.

If you spend much time on social media in Latter-day Saint circles, then you saw the frenzy that happened a couple months ago. In conjunction with a worldwide Relief Society devotional, the Church’s main social media accounts posted a quote from Sister J. Anette Dennis, the First Counselor in the Relief Society General Presidency. The quote famously asserted, “There is no other religious organization in the world, that I know of, that has so broadly given power and authority to women.”

Art by Kathleen Peterson. Buy art from living artists.

Much has been said about the quote, including in more than 20,000 comments across Instagram and Facebook. We won’t rehash that here. But amid those comments, I was interested in the different types of comments that rolled in, largely from women.

Many landed within the emotional range of upset, confused, and in disbelief; these were women who did not see the quote reflecting reality, and instead detailed ways that women lack power and authority in the Church. Others tried to make sense of the quote, explaining and justifying ways that the quote could be true. Still others, often in response to those women who questioned the quote, suggested that their concerns would be allayed if they would pray more and follow the prophet.

There was a lot of talking past each other. Clearly some people’s comments didn’t resonate at all with others. I can feel the frustration, of thinking, “This is so obvious, how can you not understand what I’m saying?”

There is a lot to unpack. But I think we can shed a little bit of light on this, by talking about stages of faith.

I first became familiar with the concept of stages of faith through the work of James W. Fowler, a Methodist pastor. Since then, I’ve come to prefer a similar model from Brian McLaren, outlined in his book “Faith After Doubt,” as its terminology is simpler and clearer. The model suggests that there are four stages of faith: 1) Simplicity, which values being right, 2) Complexity, which focuses on learning, 3) Perplexity, which anchors on authenticity, and 4) Harmony, which is all about humility and love.

None of these stages is better than another; the terms are descriptive, not prescriptive. This isn’t a game where you try to get to the “top” stage. Many people spend their entire life in Stage 1, Simplicity, and they live fulfilling and complete spiritual lives. Same with the other three stages.

That’s because the stages of faith describe behaviors, not people. They’re not a personality test. You might be in one stage about one topic and a different stage about another, and then tomorrow you might have flip-flopped. You might find that you are largely in one stage, or you might move around a lot. McLaren was careful not to represent these stages as a ladder you climb; he instead recommends seeing them as concentric circles, like a target, where each subsequent layer also encompasses everything inside it.

Let’s look at the stages.¹

Stage 1 - Simplicity

The first stage, Simplicity, sees things in black and white, right and wrong. There are Good Guys and Bad Guys, and our job is to be on the right side. People in this stage are defenders of the faith.

I spent much of my life in this stage, either partially or fully. I think that’s true for most of us. This is the stage we start in, as kids (and many adults are in this stage—remember, that’s neither good nor bad). It’s the “Primary answers” stage; everything boils down to reading the scriptures, prayer, and going to church. If you’re doing those things, you’re doing it right.

This stage also has the most deference to authority, and in our Latter-day Saint circles we recognize this as putting the most emphasis on following prophets (past and present) as a way to keep ourselves safe from the world. As McLaren describes it:

Stage One is built on trust… If you distrust the authorities, you'll ignore their warnings and venture too far into the woods, where the wild things will eat you. You'll run out in the street, where the cars will hit you. You'll get too friendly with the other tribe, and they'll kidnap or corrupt you. If you don't trust, you won't obey, and if you don't obey, you won't survive. So you'd better not blur any edges or allow any shades of gray: life is a war, and your survival depends on you becoming a good, obedient, trusting soldier who follows orders as an absolute necessity.

Simple trust; simple obedience; simple, unquestioning loyalty... that's what matters in Stage One.²

I am sometimes jealous of those who are in this stage. My faith has not been this simple or clear for some time, and sometimes I wish I could go back to it.

There’s a negative side to this too, as there is in every stage. The emphasis on dividing everything into good and bad, right and wrong, creates exclusionary tendencies. Going to McLaren’s description again:

…If we trust our authorities enough to believe and do what they tell us, we can have the same absolute certainty that they have ... the certainty that we are the good people, and all who are not part of our in-group are the bad people, the certainty that we will have a happy ending and those other people will not. So for the rest of our lives, it will be our job to avoid the bad people, to exclude them, eliminate them, control them, or convert them, because in the end, it's either us or them.³

Stage 2 - Complexity

The second stage, Complexity, is pragmatic. People in this stage are willing to acknowledge tough topics or complicated bits of Church history, to the extent that they can provide answers for them.

McLaren recognizes this as a stage of gospel learning:

…Here in Stage Two, everything is learnable and doable, if only we can find the right models, mentors, and coaches and master the right techniques, skills, and know-how.⁴

There is an emphasis here on learning from “coaches,” from people other than our Simplicity/Stage 1 authority figures (which may be our parents, for example, or the prophet again). I see this in the popularity of LDS-centric podcasts or social media accounts. The people behind them, these models and mentors, provide new voices that help us understand this gospel on a level we can use and apply. Everything becomes accessible and doable. We can do this gospel thing.

To me, this is also the “apologist” stage. Part of winning at this game is having practical, reasonable answers for just about everything. Faced with the question of polygamy, for example, people in this stage may assert—tell me if you’ve heard this one—that God wanted early Church members to practice polygamy so that they would have a lot of children and grow the Church more quickly. Right or wrong, it’s an answer—it’s plausible, and it moves you on to the next thing. The aim is to have an answer for any tough question. And each answer will start with, “God wanted it to be this way because…”.

This is the stage I was in, somewhat deeply, as a 19- to 21-year-old missionary. Every concern someone raised could be overcome. I took some pride in my ability to answer every question. Looking back, I’m not sure how many of those answers were correct, but I taught them with complete certainty at the time.

Stage 3 - Perplexity

I’d like to spend a few minutes on this third stage, Perplexity. This is where I find myself most of the time. And it’s where I find my people.

These are those who are willing to sit with questions even when they don’t have answers, and acknowledge the mess. There’s doubt, and there are questions. If these things scare you, you may be viewing it through a Stage 1 (Simplicity) lens, where asking hard questions looks like disloyalty and apostasy. But in Perplexity, asking questions is a major part of your toolkit toward living your faith authentically and honestly. This is the stage where we can humbly say, “I don’t know.”

My experience is that this stage isn’t all fun and games. Some things that you gained and earned in the first two stages—certainty, confidence, and stability—can be gone in an instant. Richard Rohr describes this as a death, and a loss that we may need to mourn. Brian McLaren gives us fair warning:

…Stage Three, even though it brings new gains, feels like the loss of all that we worked so hard to attain, descent from the heights we worked so hard to surmount. Stage Two built so naturally on Stage One, and even the portal of doubt between the two was a relatively easy passage compared to Stage Three. Stage Three feels different, disruptive. Everything we constructed, we now deconstruct. The summits we climbed, we now leave behind. We cut our losses but secretly fear: will anything be left, or will we end up in a state of spiritual bankruptcy?…

We find ourselves in a free fall from doubt into deeper doubt into doubt that feels utterly bottomless.⁵

Let’s be clear: For some people, asking hard questions in Stage 3 leads them to be critical of the Church, and sometimes to leave it. Being more open-minded in this stage means being more willing to accept nuance in the Church and its history, but it also means being open to messages and truth from outside the Church. Perplexity can be an off-ramp for leaving the Church.

But it’s not that way for me. Viewing the Church with this authenticity and raw honesty makes my faith stronger. Acknowledging that prophets are fallible and have made mistakes is a crushing blow, but it also liberates us from holding them up to standards of perfection, which they cannot meet. Seeing the Church (and even our limited understanding of the gospel) as a good-faith construct built and maintained by human beings, with no greater claim to perfection than you or me, changes the way we think about the Kingdom of God on this earth.

There’s a reason for the doubt and, well, the perplexity in this stage. These struggles tend to orient us toward understanding not only ourselves but others, and most notably the “least of these” around us. We start to get a glimpse of our Heavenly Parents’ love for the marginalized. The outcome is increased grace for ourselves, for church leaders, and for those we see all around us.

So Perplexity, even though it is deconstructive, is not destructive. Even though it questions and challenges conventional moral thinking, it is not immoral. It is a constructive stage of dissent on its way toward love. ⁶

I feel like there are people in my ward in this stage, and who understand me being in it, but I feel like they’re a stark minority. Or it’s possible that there are many more, but that we are all masquerading as Stage 1 individuals at Church, so as to keep up appearances.

Stage 4 - Harmony

The fourth stage, Harmony, is more elusive to me. I don’t know that I know anybody who is consistently in Harmony. I think we may reach this stage in relation to certain topics, at certain times, and then slip back into other stages at other times.

In Harmony, a person is able to transcend everything we’ve talked about so far. They hold truth in tension and accept paradoxes. It’s all about love, both for God and their neighbor. There is a deep humility here; Harmony is what you learn from having weathered the doubt and struggles of Perplexity. From McLaren:

Our quest for certainty was confident in Simplicity, determined in Complexity, and despairing in Perplexity. …But in the hot crucible of doubt we experienced in late Perplexity, we began to become cynical about our own cynicism, skeptical of our own skepticism, critical of our own critical thinking, doubting of our own doubtfulness…

We finally descended to a point so low that instead of looking down on everything, we had to look up at it from a humbled position of under-standing, you might say, and in so doing, we became capable of encountering something without needing to control it. Rather, we were able simply to see it, perhaps even to see it with love.⁷

Let’s put it together

With this context, let’s look again at the comments in response to Sister Dennis’s quote.

In these thousands of comments, we see examples of women (and men) at different stages of faith. They are each living their truth, even when they seem to be at complete loggerheads with each other.

The controversy over this quote starts with those who had the courage to share their authentic belief and experience in response to Sister Dennis’s well-intended message. Sometimes this was factually-based, sometimes it reflected deep hurt, and other times it included criticism of the Church and its leadership. This courage, this deep honesty, and this willingness to speak up are core tenets of Stage 3, Perplexity. We can assume that those posting this type of comment are spending at least some of their time in this stage.

So what of those who rationalized and explained what Sister Dennis must have meant? This is for sure Stage 2, Complexity territory. This is the willingness to acknowledge the questioning, to the extent there is an answer. There must be an answer. I don’t think those who found this post challenging were lacking for what Sister Dennis was trying to say. But finding an answer that makes everything okay is a Stage 2 thing—and I’m glad those individuals were able to find answers that worked for them.

And finally⁸, there are those who commented things like, “Have you tried praying more?” or “We are equal with men, our responsibilities are just different!” This is Stage 1, Simplicity. To those in this stage, the Stage 3 comments must look like they were posted by aliens; and the Stage 3 folks might see these people as deeply out of touch. But this group legitimately wants to stay on the straight and narrow path—and want us to stay there, too!

None of this apologizes for the original post, or undoes any of the consternation it caused. Men’s and women’s roles are not equal in the Church, and we have a long way to go to get there.

In my experience in the Church, there is a cultural expectation that we are all at Simplicity, the first stage of faith. Most talks and lessons present topics in a Simplicity way—we treat questions as settled, and the gospel as completely restored. When someone gives a talk they often talk about how they’ve mastered that topic in their own life; if they had an issue or a struggle with it, that’s certainly all in the past.

Even in General Conference, topics are often presented in a right-or-wrong, Simplicity-focused way. Everything can be solved with scripture study and prayer. Many difficult topics just aren’t brought up.

Understanding these stages of faith helps me understand the people around me at Church. When a lesson is taught from a purely Stage 1 perspective, that doesn’t make it a bad lesson—it means it was taught with full sincerity and good intent by someone at a different stage than me.

In reality, they feel the same passionate way about their faith that I do about mine; it’s just different. Their faith is in a different place than mine, a different stage, and they have different priorities. I want vulnerability in meetings, I want to hear from people who are struggling in their faith because I find it relatable and reassuring. Others may see that as too slippery of a slope; they want to hear from people with rock-solid, simple testimonies who make them feel strong.

Next time you find yourself completely flabbergasted by something someone says at Church, see if you can see what stage of faith they are coming from. In doing so, you might find you can have a little more grace for them, too.

1. The irony of writing about faith stages is that I am inevitably going to describe them through the lens of the stage I am currently in. I genuinely believe that all the stages are valid and productive, even if I’m unable to disguise my biases.

2. Brian D. McLaren, Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do About It (New York City: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2021), 46.

3. McLaren, 47.

4. McLaren, 49.

5. McLaren, 75.

6. McLaren, 86.

7. McLaren, 98-99.

8. I’m leaving Harmony-stage individuals off of this part of the discussion. I’m just going to assume they weren’t engaging in a messy Instagram situation that day.