"I know the church is true:" discovering vocabularies that work

A couple of days ago, an LDS graduate student list that I belong to sent a link to a question and answer session in The Washington Post with Helen Whitney, producer and director of "The Mormons." One curious reader intent on listening to Ms. Whitney asked the producer what she learned from her time studying Mormon culture. She replied:

I was struck by the emphasis on certainty in your religion. I come from a tradition which encourages doubt and questioning. My own faith is inflected with doubt which I feel is intimately connected to my faith. However, I sense from many conversations with Mormon believers that doubt can be seen as undermining of the faith, even dangerous to it. When I went to my first testimonial meeting, and heard men, women and children describe their faith using the words "I know" I was truly surprised. They didn't use words like: I hope, I believe, I intuit, but the ubiquitous phrase I know. For some Mormons, this can be inspirational, and yet for others it can be intimidating and discourage them from voicing their own questions. Nonetheless, as I spent time in the Mormon culture I came to learn that their certainty is a complex many layered encounter with the divine.

The content of Ms. Whitney's respectful response did not surprise me. Having asked myself for many years what Mormons mean when they claim that they "know the church is true" and what it might mean for me to voice those words through which we self-identify as members of a church, I could fully sympathize with Ms. Whitney's remark that the phrase is complex. Sometimes the phrase "I know" expresses firm conviction; at other moments, it is the rote phrase we use to close a testimony; on occassion, it stands as a poor substitute for the other terms Ms. Whitney mentions - hope, belief, in short, faith.

But although the phrase "I know the church is true" can appear complex to individuals who, like Ms. Whitney, listen well enough to discern the multiple meanings it conveys, I suspect that the strident, certain, and imprecise note that this rhetoric strikes often leads to misunderstandings amongst those within and outside of the LDS church.

To claim that "x" is "y" is to trade in essentials, to shift the debate to what something IS rather than what something DOES. When we claim that the church is true, we speak of the essence of what the church means to us. But, in staking this claim - a claim that is too cliche to confer much meaning to people who don't share the culture associations it carries to us - we also invite resistance to it and fail to give other people a point of reference through which they can engage with our ideas. We define our position and invite others to define theirs, a dead-end move that shuts down conversations that might help us better understand each other's experiences.

Rather than professing the church is true, perhaps it would be more useful if we as church members used a more precise vocabulary and began to describe what the church does for us in our lives that lead us to be members. I suspect that if we were to shift our vocabulary away from essentials and towards what our faith does, then we would more actively understand and take responsibility for the deeds that motivate our belief.

Certainly, there have been moments in my experience of the LDS church when I have known both people who felt threatened by other members' desires to question and those who felt unwelcome in a culture that appeared rather too rigid and prescritive of conservative values. I, for one, have often both these people at once. But I suspect that if we as members were to pay more attention to the language through which we expressed our belief, focusing always on what belief does, that we would discover more intersections and exciting potentials in our faith with people both within and outside of the LDS church. So many times, I am astonished at how I talk past someone until a slight change of diction brings us onto the same page. If in our relationships to other people we cannot agree on what something is, then we need to search for a vocabulary that does work.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/04/27/DI2007042701597.html?hpid=sec-religion?hpid=sec-religion