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There is a trend in Latter-day Saint rhetoric to argue that having questions or researching answers about the church are dangerous and misguided ventures. These arguments have good intentions—they are meant to help people avoid discomfort or cognitive dissonance by encouraging them to wear blinders or to place difficult questions on “shelves” to be ignored until all is revealed after death (this analogy is not quite as useful in the age of Marie Kondo, however!). I sympathize with the intentions behind these arguments, although I disagree with them. It’s true: questions can be painful. Questions can inspire disobedience to authority. Questions disrupt what is normal and familiar.

However, questions are also necessary tools for strengthening faith. God teaches us through questions, inspires us with questions, expects and even demands that we continue coming up with questions in order to have reasons to keep praying and researching and exploring and wondering. Questions keep us awake and curious. Questions are requisite for growth.

Socrates was sentenced to death by hemlock for inspiring the youth to ask questions. In Will Durant’s words, “he went about prying into the human soul, uncovering assumptions and questioning certainties.” Although we may admire the Socratic method in many classrooms today, Socrates was seen by authority figures in ancient Athens as a threat and a corruptor of tradition and culture.

Christ, too, was chastised for questioning authority and rejecting church dogma. In John 5, Christ breaks the Sabbath day by healing a man who had been sick for 38 years. When the man stands miraculously whole, he picks up his bedding to leave Bethesda; to “carry thy bed” on the Sabbath was against the rules, however, and a “multitude” of people were quick to persecute both the healed and the healer for their disobedience—disobedience that was required in this instance to live higher laws of charity, empathy, and kindness.

Joseph Smith was persecuted for asking questions, too. He writes of his youth, “My mind at times was greatly excited, the cry and tumult were so great and incessant . . . . In the midst of this war of words and tumult of opinions, I often said to myself: What is to be done? Who of all these parties are right; or, are they all wrong together? If any one of them be right, which is it, and how shall I know it?” We know how this story ends. Joseph reads James 1:5: “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.”

We value questions and changes in history, but it is harder to make allowances for them in the present. Questions lead to growth and strength, but they can also inspire members of the church to leave their congregations and their faiths. We cannot keep people from leaving by making them afraid of questions, however. The stopping of questions and research will not make us stronger as a community—it will merely make members dependent on blind, unquestioning faith. (By the way, if you haven’t read Stapley’s take earlier this week on researching answers to questions about the church, you should, especially as his excellent argument about this is a bit different from mine.)

I don’t think the Renlunds meant harm when they accused questioning Latter-day Saints as being petty complainers on the boat, focused on “the small dents and peeling paint.” Anyone who has experienced the crushing, frightening, emotional weight of the kind of questions that could lead to leaving the church altogether can agree (regardless of whether they stayed or left) that this experience is nothing at all like “Church history whack-a-mole.” Faith crises and transitions do not feel like pettiness and games. These experiences loom with the heaviness of not just life vs. death but annihilation vs. eternity. Asking questions is an act of courage, not weakness. For the Latter-day Saint who went from a rock-solid testimony to a wavering one, it can feel like everything is at stake. Such feelings are not something to be teased about and certainly not something to be judged for.

But I do agree with Sister Renlund when she said, “Faith is a choice a person must make. . . . Faith is also a principle of action.” I would also add that asking questions is an essential action and choice, too. When I teach critical thinking to my composition students, I start by drawing a spectrum between “cynics” who are “afraid to believe” on one end and “blind faith-ers” who are “afraid to question” on the other. (This works in a religious context, but other contexts also. For example, a person of blind faith might ignore all criticism against the presidential candidate they vote for, refusing to accept that the candidate is anything but perfect. A cynic might refuse to vote altogether, because no candidate gives them any hope for something better.)

I then introduce the uncomfortable yet richly fertile middle ground: the skeptics. The skeptics are not afraid of asking questions and they aren’t afraid of having faith. They are critical of their sources, but they are also capable of coming to conclusions based on the available evidence. They are constantly seeking new evidence and are willing to change their former conclusions when confronted with new credible information. They anticipate that their world views will change and adapt over time. Church member skeptics aren’t afraid to question their faith, because they know that, in Lowell Bennion‘s words, “a faith that cannot withstand and transcend the light of reason, is not a faith worth keeping.” Additionally, even after seeing the imperfections in their religion, their nation, their family, their vocation, etc., skeptics are also not afraid to keep their trust in these same fallible people and institutions they choose to stay with, maintaining their beliefs in progress, goodness, and a better future. Bennion told BYU students:

“When faith and reason meet in the life of a college student, something must give; some type of working relationship must be established. . . . One position a student can take is to hold fast to his faith and let no knowledge or experience gained in study disturb it. . . . There is a simplicity about this approach. One is spared much mental effort and anguish by wearing blinders which shut out peripheral vision and even set boundaries to view straight ahead. . . . But those of us who go to the University, who read books, who learn to view life from many angles of vision, thoughtfully and critically, cannot with integrity don blinders to reason in order to protect a child-like faith. To be sincere, to have integrity, faith must be examined and cherished in the context of one’s total life experience.”

I love Bennion’s optimism about questions. I love how he says that in order to “cherish” your faith, you must also “examine” it, and that donning blinders only exhibits fear that you will stop believing if you allow yourself to see the full picture. Making people afraid of asking questions or researching answers only suggests that there is something to hide. A fear of questions comes from a lack of faith—a secret worry that your faith could be easily shaken.

When Elder Lawrence Corbridge spoke to BYU students in January, he said that many members “mistakenly try to learn the truth by process of elimination, by attempting to eliminate every doubt.” This is reminiscent of the “whack-a-mole” theory, that people with questions are trying to snuff all of the pesky questions out in order to confirm that their initial conclusions were the right ones after all. But I’m not interested in this process of “elimination.” Rather than snuffing out the questions I have, I want to use them to illuminate new ideas, people, history, and knowledge that I have yet to encounter. Maybe by conflating “doubt” with “questions” I’m misconstruing what Corbridge was after. But I also think that a lot of times when we question something concerning the church, we immediately categorize these questions at “doubts.” I don’t think this is accurate. We should encourage questions, and we shouldn’t be focused on “eliminating” questions so much as pursuing them—researching them, pondering them, praying about them, and talking about them.

I miss the rhetoric of President Hugh B. Brown, member of the First Presidency back in the ’60s:

“You young people live in an age when freedom of the mind is suppressed over much of the world. We must preserve it in the Church and in America and resist all efforts of earnest men to suppress it. “Preserve, then, the freedom of your mind in education and religion, and be unafraid to express your thoughts and to insist upon your right to examine every proposition. We are not so much concerned with whether your thoughts are orthodox or heterodox as we are that you shall have thoughts. . . . “Dissatisfaction with what is around us is not a bad thing if it prompts us to seek betterment.”

I want to hear more talks like this in my faith community. I want to feel free to ask questions, even when my conclusions result in “dissatisfaction” with aspects of my faith community. Dissatisfaction is not solely the realm of the cynic, who would have no faith in possible “betterment.” What we need are more skeptics in our congregations who love the church and believe in the church while at the same time acknowledge that we’ve made mistakes and can do a better job regarding inclusivity, transparency, and equality. We need LDS versions of Leslie Knope, who loves and believes in Pawnee even while being well aware of its questionable historical moments and cultural problems. Her dissatisfaction drives her work to better her community. Leslie Knope is not a cynic, but she also isn’t a person of blind faith. She’s a skeptic, and she’s a productive and optimistic one.

My point is, we should just quit it with the scare tactics. Telling our young people that they can question everything except for the church is fear-based rhetoric that reveals either (a) a lack of confidence in the church itself or (b) a lack of confidence in church members as they seek answers to their questions. I propose that we try a new tactic: Let’s exercise faith in our church and in our people. Let’s show that faith by encouraging wonder in our congregations and by welcoming questions and new perspectives. Let’s model skepticism by exhibiting faith in our people and our gospel while also questioning and challenging our problematic ways of thinking, making space for further revelation and inclusivity. Let’s go forth with faith and questions and ditch fear by the wayside.