Latter Day Struggles

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Author, Evangelical theologian, and recently deceased Christian reformer Rachel Held Evans poignantly stated, 

"A lot of people think the hardest part about religious doubt is feeling isolated from God. It's not. At least in my experience, the hardest part about doubt is feeling isolated from your community."

In this episode Valerie and Nathan share their thoughts and personal experiences about how faith expansion can be both a deeply sacred experience of personal enlightenment but also profoundly isolating, lonely, and relationally painful as we try to relate to our former circles of family and friends. Why is this so hard? Val and Nathan offer some ideas:

Our Former Inner Circle LDS tribe (both friends and family):

1. Sometimes build their relational lives around the church, which makes relating to those different from themselves challenging; especially in relationships where both parties were accustomed to relating to one another only through church-related common beliefs
2. Sometimes seem to struggle being genuinely interested, curious, and open to the experiences of their friends and loved ones now differing from themselves and relate to us from a place of "concern, heal, reconvert, or fix"
3. Are conditioned by teachings at church that those of us in faith expansion are "falling away" or "led by Satan" in our experiences, thereby making it challenging to want to explain, justify, self defend (as we have heard this rhetoric ourselves all of our lives)
4. Judge those of us no longer fully aligned with them. This judgment might be cloaked in 'concern', but its essence (possibly unconscious but still felt by us) is "without the church you are lost.  As a faithful  church member, my testimony insulates me in certainly, thereby also preventing me from curiosity, openness, and a true desire to learn from you."

These divides create an added layer of grief on top of the grieve of faith and trust crisis. These divides prevent us from drawing upon our core family and friends when we’re need them most.

This episode was is offered with the hope to help you feel seen, understood, and not alone as we struggle relationally in our faith expansion.

Book referenced in this episode:

• Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church, by Rachel Held Evans

Podcast mentioned in this episode 

• Fireside with Blair Hodges: Voices, with Jeff Chu

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Join Val as she breaks down a thought provoking idea about the pull of cynicism as a natural emotional component of Christian faith evolution. 

She explores a beautiful and thought provoking quote by the late Rachel Held Evans from her book Searching for Sundays. Highlights of this episode:

• Cynicism is a protective emotion often experienced to manage legitimate emotions such as betrayed trust, grief, anger, and disorientation. 
• Grief and disorientation in LDS (and other Christian) faith crisis/expansion experiences are often directly correlated to one’s former “all in” status and [over] commitment to the promises made by the institution
• Recovering from cynicism and moving into a psychological space of faith expansion and spiritual peace cannot be forced
• Psychological and spiritual growth embodies an eventual paradigm shift in relationship to the institution, complete with a realization that no institution could (nor should) do for us what it claimed it could (and should) do to bring us truly into contact with our most whole selves and our creators.

As we grieve the former paradigm (and any harm done by it) and embrace our life’s experiences as platforms for deepening discernment, wrestle, and the opportunity to seize personal authority for ourselves, we can see these institutions as paradoxically instrumental in our processes of truly growing up and deciding what to accept, reject, and reconcile for ourselves.

Book referenced in this episode: 

• Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church, by Rachel Held Evans

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Series Title: Healing our Ideas about God's Nature [Part II of II]

In this episode, Valerie again is a guest on "The Brannon Patrick Show" and they continue in their conversation about the ways that our inherited constructs about God get in the way of our personal growth and our relationship growth to our higher powers

Specific ideas that hurt: 

• God is male.  

They discuss how this is a human construct and a natural outgrowth of patriarchy and that a centuries-old male governing church culture has created religious systems that carry energies consumed in power and control issues.  

They discuss the parallels between our institutions struggles with women (heavenly and earthly) and how this shows up in ways that men have contrived to limit power, authority, participation, and voice of both the feminine divine and of her daughters; and that this extends into an attempt to curtail interaction between the feminine side of God and all of her children. 

They discuss how our male construction of God insidiously impacts marriages, parenting, family systems, and church systems.  

• God is white.  

In this section Val and Brannon layer racism on top of our centuries-old struggles with sexism in our ideas about God and go through the various ways this has impacted not only our own tradition, but countless others as well. 

They end the episode by exploring why it is so scary to let go of our false and sometimes even harmful constructs about God but also why it is so important to do so in an effort to become psychologically healthy and autonomous human beings “worshiping how, where, and what” we may. 

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Series Title: Healing our Ideas about God's Nature [Part I of II]

Today's episode is the first half of a fascinating conversation between Valerie and fellow therapist/podcaster Brannon Patrick where Val is guest on Brannon's  new podcast "The Brannon Patrick Show”

In this two-part conversation they dive into how some of our received ideas about God may hurt us here in and around the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. These harmful [though possibly unintended] ideas includes the following:

1. God is unapproachable until we are worthy enough and we need an intermediary to protect us from him
2. We increase in lovability according to our righteousness
3. Fear of God’s anger or disappointment is an effective motivator for obedience
4. Pressure to “follow the covenant path” creates a high anxiety relationship with self, others, and God as well as a low sense of personal confidence,  autonomy, struggles with perfectionism, and struggles with shame.

In response to these fraught ideas about God, Val and Brannon talk about how a new understanding of God can heal us both psychologically and spiritual.  They discuss the following:

1. The only motivation that is transformative in our growth and development is love
2. Mistakes do not estrange us from God, they draw us towards God, provide experiential learning, embodied growth, and compassion for others’ struggles
3. Our natural disposition is towards goodness
4. When we experience ourselves as lovable, we simply become more of who we always were and therefore fear and shame have no healthy part in our life’s experiences
5. God blesses every part of our personal journey
6. Spiritual maturity creates resilience and decreasing need for validation

Next episode in this 2-part series:  The White Man's Creation of the White Male God 

To check out Brannon’s new podcast: 

• The Brannon Patrick Show

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Series Title: Real Talk about the Book of Mormon [Part IV of IV]

Join Valerie and special guest Paul Toscano in this part four (last in this series) focused on untangling some of the complexities of The Book of Mormon.

In this episode Val questions Paul on a variety of topics involving The Book of Mormon, including its connection with Joseph Smith Jr., her own wrestles with the fraught relationship between leadership & followership;  the roles, expectations, and hopes of a spiritual leader, and so much more.

Here are a few teasers to get you excited to listen in to this conversation:

• All mystical texts, trancelike experiences, and visionary accounts are strange, uncomfortable, and often implausible—including the very birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
• God has shown humans mysteries through a variety of “weird” manifestations with large numbers of eye witnesses throughout time. 
• One of the greatest tests of true discipleship is to learn to forgive God…for the pain of our suffering…for Their not preventing harm to those we love at the hands of those in power
• This kind of discipleship forces us to learn how to hold the tension of opposites and demands that (if willing) we be stretched beyond our known capabilities. This process makes us holy.

Finally, Paul shares these views: Salvation is not a community experience.  Salvation is an individual experience and it happens in the act of saving wounded things.  The individual saves the church, not the other way around. The individual saves the family, not the other way around.  

You won't want to miss this conversation with one of Mormonism's great scholars.  These conversations with Paul are breathtaking.  

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Series Title: Real Talk about the Book of Mormon [Part III of IV]

Join Valerie and special guest Paul Toscano in this part three on a series focusing on untangling some of the complexities of the Book of Mormon.  Paul had a lot of fascinating ideas about this topic including 3 ways to look at the Book of Mormon:

• As a historical record (the most immature, irrelevant, and unhelpful approach)
• For its literary value (perhaps interesting but often not transformative)
• As a mystical/visionary text (as a living, supernatural text intended to be interpreted by the reader with the objective to transform in ways only possible by suspending one’s demand for proof, evidence, certainty.)

According to Paul there are several reasons why very few people are able to approach the Book of Mormon as a mystical/visionary text:

• We currently live in a world steeped in scientific materialism. Our minds are socialized in understanding and valuing only the rational and literal; often struggling to interpret the spiritual, supernatural, or mystical. 
• The LDS church itself has proven to be a huge stumbling block through its decades-long efforts to “prove” that the Book of Mormon is a historical text, hoping that by proving its historical truth, it might thereby “prove” to be the “only” true church. 
• The LDS church leadership have provided additional stumbling blocks through their heavily correlated efforts to prescribe dogmatic meaning to the text rather than allow readers to find meaning for themselves in this and other mystical texts.

Toscano contends that The Book of Mormon was never intended to “prove” that the LDS church is true, but rather has one—and only one—prominent purpose.  

Book References in this Episode:

• The Sanctity of Dissent, by Paul Toscano
• Mormonism in Crisis: A Critique and a Defense, by Paul Toscano
• Latter-Day Dissent, by Paul Toscano
• Strangers in Paradox: Explorations in Mormon Theology, by Margaret and Paul Toscano

Podcasts Referenced in this Episode: 

• Mormon Stories Episode
• Gospel Tangents Episode
• The Toscano Dialogues

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Series Title: Real Talk about the Book of Mormon [Part II of IV]

In this second of a four part series tackling various aspects of the Book of Mormon with a couple of prominent Mormon theologians, Valerie continues to talk to Taylor Petrey about the negative impact that many current members are experiencing around the overly simplistic narrative regarding the translation of the Book of Mormon, its origin, meaning, and literalness.

Valerie contends that this complicates one’s ability to read this book and find its potential gems of truth from a place of candid openness when it brings up other complicated feelings related to historical transparency and a long culture within the church that is "faith promoting" at the expense of complex reality.

Too much to say in the show notes about this vibrant and loaded topic!! Listen to these episodes and discern for yourself if/how the Book of Mormon can lead you closer to Jesus Christ.

Links for the lit review referenced in this podcast series:

• The Dialogue Journal: Dialogue Topic Pages #7: Book of Mormon Topics, Part 1⁠
• ⁠The Dialogue Journal: Dialogue Topic Pages #8: Book of Mormon Topics, Part 

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Series Title: Real Talk about the Book of Mormon [Part I of IV]

It's time to take a deep dive into what may be a psychologically and spiritually confusing topic for many expanding members in and around the LDS church—THE BOOK OF MORMON. 

In this FIRST of a four part series tackling many complex aspects of the Book of Mormon with prominent Mormon scholars, Valerie begins the conversation with friend and colleague Taylor Petrey (editor in chief of the Dialogue Journal of Mormon Thought) where together they review a myriad of topics that have been addressed over the years in the Dialogue Journal related to the ongoing skirmish between the “naturalist” and the “apologist” camps regarding authorship, authenticity, and historicity (just to name a few!).

They talk about the Isaiah controversy, chiasmus, contemporary doctrines of the early 19th century woven into this text, DNA issues, and the rise and fall of FARMS (Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Study) among other important topics. 

They also address thoughts from religious scholars (LDS and non-LDS) who maintain that regardless of the above complexities, the Book might be (and has been) valuable for many, once it’s genre is better understood and if it were read as scripture rather than history.  

In the second segment of this series, Valerie engages Taylor in a dialogue about the challenging relationship that many people in and around the LDS church have about The Book of Mormon due to their early learnings that were overly simplistic or inaccurate regarding the translation of the Book of Mormon, its origin, meaning, and literalness. 

Links for the lit review referenced in this podcast series: 

• The Dialogue Journal: Dialogue Topic Pages #7: Book of Mormon Topics, Part 1
• The Dialogue Journal: Dialogue Topic Pages #8: Book of Mormon Topics, Part 2

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While *generally* trying to avoid “taking pages out of Satan’s playbook” [which sounds both a little terrifying and very intriguing at the same time], Val and Nathan recently found themselves at odds in their respective interpretations and experiences listening to P. Nelson’s April 2023 General Conference address titled “Peacemakers Needed”. 

Listen in and see how healthy it is to have different thoughts, feelings, and interpretations regarding religious experience.  The ability to tolerate and even celebrate the otherness of others is what creates true connection.  

Link to the address:

• Peacemakers Needed, by President Russell M. Nelson

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This episode introduces the concept of “non-hierarchical revelation” as key to the spiritual health of any Christ centered organization.

This episode dives into ideas about how revelation going in both directions:

1] creates a synergistic partnership between leadership and lay membership where both parties are increasingly growing in their abilities to not only communicate with God, but also where all parties learn to work together as spiritual equals

2] insulates the church from the misplaced idea that God limits revelation to those with certain positions of formal power

3] protects leaders from a burden of perfection in receiving revelation that no one cannot be expected to maintain 

4] takes the pressure off of leaders [and their predecessors]  from fruitlessly defending their own stances when their directions prove afterwards not to have been revelatory.

In sum, the model of non-hierarchal revelation invites our entire spiritual community to become more mature, seeking, and collaborative as it spreads out the burden of responsibility amongst the entire body of the church! 

Book and chapter referenced heavily in this episode:  

• Women and Authority: Re-Emerging Mormon Feminism, edited by Maxine Hanks.  Chapter title:  “Non-Hierarchical  Revelation” by Todd Compton

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