Branch On a Living Tree
As the message of the Church has progressed onto increasingly global rostrums, teachings that once seemed clear-cut now find themselves ground down into rubble along convergent tectonic boundaries. A straightforward story about the arc of human existence stands pretty easily when it has little to rub up against. But when ideologies and doctrines from around the world and throughout time begin to converge, destruction accompanies creation. Before the era of rapid contemporary globalization, a conception of “humanity” was limited more or less to one’s own visible community plus what one could vaguely imagine about distant but ultimately unknowable peoples. This humanity was not bound by the realities of colliding cultures. In other words, an isolated view of humanity may admit its vastness without having to deal with the consequences. Such a viewpoint is likely to foster easy-to-swallow universal claims about the destiny of mankind. It is also likely that these views foster claims about universal and absolute truth; that is, “What’s true for us is true for everyone else too.” When those universal claims get ecclesiastical, they might sound something like this: “I know that this is the only true and living church on the earth.” Let me put all of this quite simply: what are we to do with the teaching of the “only true and living church” in an increasingly pluralistic world?
In the early-to-mid 19th century, people were desperate for this kind of teaching. Christians had spent two to three centuries aching under the burden of uncertainty about Christian authority. It had been so simple for so long: The Catholic Church was God’s Kingdom on earth, and all people were to accept it or live in delusion. With a worldview constrained more or less to Europe, the Catholic Church seemed large enough for this claim to be plausible. But when that claim devolved into a Protestant-Catholic divide, Christians around the world were forced to sit with some level of dissonance. The religious landscape during the Second Great Awakening in America and 19th century Europe was so rife with divergent religious teachings that it was almost unbearable for people searching for truth. Didn’t someone need to be right?
When Joseph Smith came around, he offered some escape from the burden of choosing. Believers no longer had to submit themselves to the grueling process of sorting through doctrines and picking one that sounded the best. Instead, they were given the solution from On High. As LDS cosmology goes, God had once again intervened into human existence, just as he had in the time of Christ or Moses, to give an unequivocal answer. When the voice of God is as straightforward as Joseph Smith described it, the painful wrestle with relative truths goes away. When Joseph taught his early followers that his new church was the only true church on the earth, it was liberating for them. They were free from the dissonance that naturally accompanied an overwhelmingly plural Christian world.
When the nascent Church moved itself into total isolation in the American West, it became easier to accept the claim that the LDS Church was the only true church on the earth. With no other moral authority to look towards, it was not difficult to associate the LDS Church with goodness itself. Everyone who was upstanding, stable, and moral in the community was attached to the Church. What else can the Church be but the only truth in the world when the whole world is the Church? This teaching persisted without any serious issues for decades because it had little to challenge it. Any challenge to the Church came across as little more than fringe heresy. There was rarely a clash of multiple worldviews, each of them on equally strong footing and all convincingly and visibly good.
But in the 21st century, we have re-entered the world of dissonance, and this time on an unprecedented scale. People have the religious, moral, soteriological, and cosmological claims of every tradition on the planet since the beginning of recorded history at their fingertips. Any serious student of any world religion will find rich and convincing claims about their own nature and the nature of God, many of which blatantly contradict one another. What’s more, all of these religious truths are threatened by the onslaught of modern positivism and materialism. For young LDS believers who have been taught all of their lives that, amongst all of this, their single tradition which makes up far less than 1% of the world’s population is the one and only truth to which everything else is inferior is increasingly difficult (or even undesirable) to swallow. Many young members of the church:
1. Increasingly do not live in LDS-dominated parts of the world
2. Are constantly engaged with friends and colleagues of other faiths or worldviews from around the world
3. Are oftentimes exposed to new and profound thoughts that they have never heard in an LDS Church.
It’s no wonder that the Missionary Department scrambles to find ways to connect with Millennials and Gen-Z members of the Church. For many young Mormons, the pressing question is not “how missionary work?” but “why missionary work?”. We are uncomfortable with the idea of LDS teachings totally superseding or even replacing the cultural traditions and doctrines of the world. It is either quite difficult or somewhat pompous to listen to a lecture on Mother Teresa, or Gandhi, or MLK and think, “ S/he’s a fascinating person, but if only they had been Mormon!”. It is either quite difficult or somewhat pompous to walk into a room of astute colleagues or dear friends from around the globe and think, “all of these people are great, but it’s too bad none of them can get into the Celestial Kingdom as I can.” How many of us as 19-year-old missionaries experienced an encounter with a devout person of another faith and felt that it was wrong to sit them down and tell them their worldview was categorically incorrect, or perhaps even worse, “well, you’re close!”.
As more people have grappled with these grandiose claims on the exclusivity of truth and its location in the LDS Church, we have reemphasized different sentiments. For one, “all religions have a part of the truth, but only we have the fullness of the gospel.” Even this, however, feels a bit condescending. What do we do about all of the teachings we encounter outside of the Church that feel just as true and wise (or even more so) as anything we’ve heard from our pulpits? We may cite the 13th Article of Faith, “If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.” This is certainly a worthy sentiment and one that we should not abandon. But does it necessarily mean that our search for these things puts us in a position of dominance over them, as we sometimes behave? Must our doctrines supersede all others?
My purpose is not to descend so deeply into post-modernism as to advocate that all religious groups abandon any kind of truth claims and accept total relativity. Rather than religious plurality, this would merely become the slow dilution and then eventual collapse of all religious groups. If you claim nothing at all, then people will start asking what the purpose of any kind of sacrifice or devotion is. Without sacrifice or devotion, a religion has no power to take root in the heart of the believer and eventually connect them to the divine.
Instead, I am advocating that we open the door to a new conception of the “only true and living church” in our doctrinal understanding. If we hold too stubbornly to a limited interpretation of this phrase, then within a few generations a minority religion as small as ours may be left at the wayside as collateral damage in a rapidly modernizing (and alarmingly secularizing) world. Perhaps, if we shift our emphasis from the word “only” to the word “living” we may see room for growth. The latter half of the phrase is often downplayed to the extent that we bear our testimonies like so: “I know that this is the only true church” or, more commonly, “I know that this is the true church.” When we hear these phrases, we understand them to mean that no other church is true or could be as true as ours. What about this kind of claim instead: “I know that this is a living, true church” or, “I know that the church is living.”
A simple reconstruction of the way we understand our truth claims could open the doors for a religious worldview that allows us to engage with the peoples of the world without competing with them. I imagine a faith in which we are devoted and loyal to our own community without assuming that necessitates downplaying or degrading those of others. We help one another along the path towards a larger and actual eternal truth, without assuming it is a race that we have already won. We let go of the assumption that someone has to be right in order for truth to have meaning. Rather than run from paradox, mystery, and uncertainty, we embrace them and learn to love these essential elements of human life and the divine. When we open our ears to humanity’s many questions and let go of the assumption that we have every answer, we give ourselves space to sit with and value the questioner. We also open ourselves to a world full of diverse answers, most of which are the products of millennia of sincere human thought and inspiration. We can see ourselves as woven into a diverse fabric of human experience, contributing our own uniquely colored threads while remembering that there remains an entire spectrum for others to contribute and teach us.
Our gospel is the truth just as a branch is also the tree. When we take a step back, it is easy for us to see how the branch is simultaneously a part of the tree and the tree itself. The branch lives because it grows on the tree. By intentionally severing the branch from its trunk, we isolate it until it can no longer give fruit. We would do well to resist the urge to conceptually sever ourselves from the tree, realizing that, ultimately, we are merely a part of a single, cohesive entity. In this sense, we may finally truly internalize the meaning of one of our greatest liturgical maxims: “that all truth may be circumscribed into one great whole.”