A Thoughtful Faith For the Twenty-First Century

Preface by Philip Barlow

A cherished friend of mine experienced in his thirties a “dark night of the soul”—at least in the phrase’s modern sense of a personal crisis. This bleak season lasted several years, during which the things he had most trusted in life no longer seemed dependable. Like me, he had studied religion formally in graduate school, which raised all manner of questions about his personal religion. This brought strain, but his trial entailed additional dimensions as well: occupational, financial, marital, and existential ones. It included a sense of betrayal and abandonment in both professional and personal spheres. Suddenly he was broke, jobless, wifeless, and navigating a fractured faith. His life seemed caught, he said, “in the vortex of an abyss.” How to survive and move forward? Among other things, he needed to decide what his fundamental disposition would be toward The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He eventually resigned his membership.

I have known a darkness not unlike my friend’s—an exquisitely lonely and imperiled time. I empathize with him, respect him, and love him. In my case, however, prayer, thought, study, grace, patience, and discussion with wise souls at length persuaded me of the depth and permanence of my faith and my commitment to the institutional church as I came to understand them. This, despite their necessarily human entanglements. I emerged from my own season of anguish and learning a more humble, more rooted, less naïve, and slightly scarred disciple. I am grateful for the path I have walked.

Seeing, decades ago, that the sorts of difficulties that assaulted my friend’s faith were not rare among my people, I decided publicly to articulate “the reasons for the hope that was in me.” I recruited a cluster of allies I admired to similarly convey the grounds for their enduring life in the church. The published result was A Thoughtful Faith: Essays on Belief by Mormon Scholars (1986), which included the ruminations of a sampling of Latter-day Saints versed in history, psychology, literature, law, philosophy, science, and political science. In other words, people who understood at a professional level, from different angles of vision, the sorts of questions with which many struggled. These were informed Saints, unwilling to forfeit either their intellect or their heart.

Feedback over the course of the generation that followed suggests readers found nourishment in these voices. One early reviewer said the collection disabused her of the notion that “the ways of God spell ruin for the aspiring artist or intellectual.” She had previously been led to suppose that in striving to obey God’s laws, one’s individuality must be “lopped off little by little, that she or he might conform to more universal standards of godliness.” “’Losing your life to gain it’ meant trading individuality for eternity in the company of your duplicates.” The Thoughtful Faith authors allowed her more space. There is “nothing depersonalized or duplicate about these twenty-two seasoned saints or their essays.” In their variety, in their humanity, in their quest for goodness and a faith sturdy enough for the rigor of thought and experience, they give us a glimpse of the rich variety of God’s wisdom.

The world has turned some since the essays were published and the volume has long been out of print. Strands of some essays may seem dated, hence the need for the present volume, A Thoughtful Faith for the Twenty-first Century, a collective of fresh perspectives from a new generation. Yet the original collection retains worth. Older and younger generations have things to learn from one another: the hearts and minds of the fathers and mothers must be turned to their children, and vice versa.

We have addressed this need in two ways. First, we have made the original volume, A Thoughtful Faith: Essays on Belief by Mormon Scholars, available online, courtesy of the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University, through the Scholar’s Archive: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/books/33/. Second, we have incorporated a half-dozen samples of the earlier essays into the present tangible volume. The faithful wisdom of such disciple-scholars as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Leonard Arrington, and Richard Bushman should make the intergenerational value immediately apparent to younger readers. Complementing these classic authors, the present collection speaks immediately to our time, includes more women, more scientists, more perspectives from outside the United States, and additional attention to social issues contested among us in the twenty-first century. In several instances, by request, a newer author is directly paired with one of the classic authors whose essays are reprinted in this volume: Spencer Fluhman comments on Richard Bushman’s adjacent chapter; Melissa Inouye comments on Laurel Ulrich; Terryl Givens comments on Eugene England. In another instance, Joseph Spencer comments here on Richard L. Anderson, whose essay is available in the original Thoughtful Faith collection, available online through the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU, as noted above.

Scholar Saints are sometimes called upon to defend the faith. The contributors to this book have naturally done so in their own ways, both in their writing and by their lives. It is rather a different matter, however, when some construe a metaphorical call to arms as license to become fundamentally defensive in orientation. Sometimes such defensiveness becomes aggressive, which often backfires, inciting rather than disarming critics and embarrassing the church. Indeed, it is not unheard of for us as a people to show signs of an autoimmune disease (call it Rheumatoid religion) in which, with excess zeal, we stir contention, attacking fellow believers. We sometimes fail to recognize our real friends, perhaps because they have been honest enough to acknowledge historical, conceptual, or social challenges in the course of their faithful scholarship. When church members turn on fellow Saints whose efforts are trying to inoculate less experienced compatriots against real historical or social difficulties, we may detect in our collective selves such an autoimmune response. As with Job’s friends, it is possible to offend God by a flawed, presumptuous, or disingenuous attempt to defend God.

The people assembled between these covers incline to candor rather than to a public relations blitz while expressing their faith and loyalty to the church. Such informed honesty may raise occasional eyebrows among those unaccustomed to working through rather than avoiding difficulties, but they will relieve many others who sense they can trust the process of authentic dialogue. The contributors gathered here defend the faith not by skirting tough issues, but by acknowledging them while emphasizing and unpacking the richness and redeeming glories of the gospel, often in original, highly personal ways. I cannot speak for all of them, but some would agree with an assertion taken from the Preface to the original Thoughtful Faith: the phenomenon of revelation is real, yet the church is made up entirely of human beings, who in their imperfect ways are trying to respond to the divine with which they have been touched. Both things can be true at once. This leaves room for—this demands—a great expanse of charity as together, and by covenant, we pursue the noble aims of the kingdom.

And they are noble, these aims of Zion and Eternal Life. So too is their divine author, whom Jesus counseled us to love with all that we are: “with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind” (Matt. 22:37). To attempt to submerge any of these parts of ourselves does not render devotion more pure, but only more partial and vulnerable.

—Philip Barlow