The Erosion of My Belief: Mission

When I entered the MTC, I didn't have any more of a testimony than I possessed in high school, but I really, truly believed. Although I would deny it to myself, a significant part of my belief rested on the conviction that there were many competent scholars like Hugh Nibley who had worked out the big historical and theological problems in Mormonism. I had heard over and over about things in the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham that confirmed that they were ancient documents, and I was convinced that they could only have come about in the way Joseph claimed. I read claims about hallmarks of antiquity in these books that Joseph could not have known about, but that have since been confirmed by modern scholarship. This goes on very frequently in the church; not too long ago in Sunday School we had a lesson on the account of Enoch in the Book of Moses. At the end the instructor held up a volume of Hugh Nibley's writings on Enoch, and claimed that Nibley has shown that there are similarities between our Enoch account and other books of Enoch that have been found in the Near East since then. With statements like that, we can be comfortable talking about our spiritual testimonies based on faith. Never mind that we don't bother to actually look for ourselves at the evidence people like Nibley present. I am convinced that we would think harder about what we know from spiritual experiences if we didn't have such claims of corroborating evidence. If instead we heard in Sunday School that textual errors unique to the King James Version of the Bible are found in the Book of Mormon, or that details in the Book of Abraham are hopelessly inconsistent with what we know about ancient Egypt, many of us would seriously question our testimonies. My point is that while we may claim otherwise, for many of us our testimonies are really contingent in large part on the assurance that competent Mormon scholars have at least partially confirmed that our scripture is indeed ancient and refuted all of the nasty arguments made by anti-Mormons who bring up obscure and often disturbing parts of church history. I have lost that assurance; I no longer trust the scholarship of Hugh Nibley or other BYU apologists for reasons I will discuss later in this essay.

The MTC was a mental boot camp. We were constantly barraged with testimony and feel-good church videos. Very little time was spent discussing deeper issues of doctrine. I learned the language, memorized the discussions and learned in a very basic, Sunday School way the doctrine that the discussions are based on. In the MTC you don't think about consistency either, things like how Nephi could put on Laban's bloody clothes and impersonate Laban well enough to fool Zoram, or how Laban had an Egyptian translation of the most up-to-date Jewish scriptures, long before the Septuagint (the first Greek translation) was produced, and certainly before the Old Testament was compiled in a form resembling what we have now. Questioning the Book of Mormon in that way just doesn't happen - we are asked to ponder very basic principles, but not examine our own beliefs critically. And I didn't think critically; instead, every night in the MTC I would plead for a greater witness than what I had.

After a brief time in the MTC I thought I had my witness. President Hunter was coming to visit and I was in the choir that would sing during the meeting. This would be my first time ever seeing the president of the church in person. I remember that September day well; thousands of missionaries were seated in the MTC gym anticipating his entrance. Other apostles were in the room on the stand. I saw a door open and in shuffled President Hunter on his walker. We all arose and sang "We Thank Thee O God for a Prophet," and I was overwhelmed. I felt this seemingly external presence descend on me, literally from above, and I felt a great adrenaline rush. Tears came to my eyes and I could hardly sing. It was the most powerful spiritual experience I had ever had. It was nothing like I had ever felt before, and it really seemed to come from outside of me - an invisible presence had entered the room with this man. I knew without doubt that he was a prophet. Armed with this witness, I was ready to go to Poland and convince people of the truth. Alternate explanations for this experience never occurred to me then, but have since destroyed my belief that this experience was a witness that the LDS church is the only true and living church on the face of the earth with which God is well pleased (see D&C 1:30).

A mission really brings out the quirkiness in some people. Many missionaries become extremely fanatical and rigid, which is understandable because one of the most important things they are taught is obedience to the mission rules. Missionaries are often told that the presence of the Spirit in their work is contingent on their conformity to the specific instructions in the little white missionary handbook. You must go to bed on time, only write letters on P-day, never leave your zone boundaries, etc. Companions must sleep in the same room, even if it means one sleeps on the floor when there is a perfectly good bed in the next room. And you work hard all day. We had few appointments, so we would scour the frozen streets for people to harass. We were supposed to target solid-looking men with families and jobs. Mostly what we got were the only people who were home during the day - the unemployed, the mentally unstable, the ill, and many teenage girls. I baptized one crazy woman and the nine year-old son of a member on my mission. I did not like contacting people on the street, and going without discussions for a week or more was the most difficult part of my mission. When I was called to work in the office I was thrilled. For eight months I worked with some really remarkable people, learned some valuable organizational skills and learned much about how the church operates above the ward or branch level. I was able to see how our mission president worked with the branch presidents to keep the struggling church running. I even sent a few faxes to the First Presidency. Most importantly, I did no proselytizing during this time, which is partly why I consider it the most enjoyable part of my mission. I learned much from my mission president and his wife; they are truly great people. I developed close friendships with the people I worked with. I loved being in Poland, with its rich, Slavic heritage. I had a marvelous time, but unseen cracks in my testimony were beginning.

I also was able to continue to pursue my interest in church history in an informal way. In one of the church's Warsaw offices there was a complete set of The History of the Church. My mother, knowing my love of reading, had always told me that she wanted to get me this set someday. Whenever I had the opportunity, I would borrow a volume (working in the mission administration has its privileges!) and read it from cover to cover. I worked through the first four volumes before I left Warsaw, and I was determined to finish the series when I got home.

At zone conferences on my mission, everyone was expected to get up and bear testimony. It was almost a competition to see who could bear the most powerful or interesting testimony. I would state mine in the strongest terms I could, and every night I would plead in prayer for a testimony to match my words. Not much came though - I had some peaceful feelings, some rushes of adrenaline, and a few emotional experiences with investigators, but nothing really came close to what I had experienced in the MTC. I relied on that experience to keep me going.

About midway through my mission in the town of Wroclaw, we taught a very interesting and thoughtful man. He was sincerely looking for the truth about God, and he frequently invited people over to talk religion. We met a few times and bore testimony, but he politely refused to be baptized and asked me some questions that stuck with me for the rest of my mission. The first was about the Bible - how could we accept the current Bible and claim that an apostasy occurred? The individual books of the Bible were compiled as the New Testament by what we consider an apostate authority. Did these people just happen to luck out and include only books that we could accept as scripture? Sure, we qualify our belief in the Bible by saying we believe only correct translations, but what about the correctness of the compilation? Weren't there any books, particularly in the New Testament, included by this apostate council that were wrong, especially in light of the evidence that not all of the books of the New Testament were written by the authors they are ascribed to? (I am well aware that Joseph said the Song of Solomon is not scripture, but this guy meant doctrinally important books that were not already an established part of the Jewish scriptures.) We just accept the Protestant version of the Bible, and don't include the apocrypha accepted by Catholics. There were so many writings out there that could have been included but weren't, many of which didn't differ at all in quality from the often pseudonymous books in our current New Testament (although not by one or two authors, see Pagels 1979, p. 173 for a list of the planned volumes; Pagels 2003). I couldn't really answer his question well. I suggested that maybe the Spirit worked through early Christian leaders to make sure the Bible came out in good shape. This answer wasn't satisfying to him or me - it makes the apostasy really arbitrary; it sounds like God could have given revelation to these people whenever he wanted to but chose not to during the apostasy. If there were people who could receive enough revelation to put together the Christian Bible, why couldn't they lead God's church? To this day I have not seen any Mormon scholar deal with this question in a satisfactory way, although my research on the subject has been limited.

This man also asked another question that has haunted me ever since. He asked why he should believe our testimony, when he had heard the same thing from many others, including the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Baptists. All of them claimed to have had a powerful conversion experience that sounded much like mine. How were we any different? At the time I believed it impossible for members of any other church to have the same affirming witness I had. Although this is never discussed in Sunday School, an important element of our testimony is uniqueness - if our testimonies are spiritual witnesses that this is the one true church on earth, then these experiences must not occur to people of other religions (unless they are praying about the truth of our church). Something has to be different about at least some of the experiences Mormons have. If all spiritual experiences are the same no matter what church you belong to, how can we then say that we have a witness that our church is true? Since my mission I have had Evangelicals bear testimony to me, and claim the same type of spiritual witness I have had. They take that experience to mean that God has told them that they are saved, and thus they don't need Mormon ordinances to return to God in the next life. I don't see how you can claim that you know our church is the one or even the most true church based on typical testimony experiences. Some Catholics in Poland even had bigger experiences than mine, such as visions (of Mary, of course) and healings. Some Poles make pilgrimages to a revered monastery in the middle of the country, Poland's holiest site, and are cured of all sorts of diseases. These stories are no less powerful than the ones you read about in Mormonism, and they reinforce for these people the notion that God approves of the Catholic church and the Pope. This is an extremely important point - sure, we believe that the Spirit can act on anyone in any church, but if we are going to claim that God fulfills Moroni's promise (Moroni 10:3-5), there has to be something unique in the answer we get if God is telling us to prefer this church over others, unless he only wants some of his children to prefer the LDS church over others.

So I went home from my mission with these questions on my mind, and a little disappointed that I did not know the church was true any better than I did when I arrived in Poland. Of course in my homecoming talk I tried to make my testimony sound as powerful as possible, but always in the back of my mind was the nagging thought that I didn't know as much as I implied I did. This type of thing though is encouraged in the church. Elder Packer, in his talk entitled "Candle of the Lord" says a testimony comes by bearing it. In other words, if you say you know it's true over and over enough, you eventually will know it's true. If that's not brainwashing, I don't know what is.

Many of us follow the example of some of the General Authorities and imply that our knowledge is more sure than it is. It is interesting that Elder Packer encourages members not to ask the apostles if they have seen Christ, and he never gives a direct answer when asked, but he really likes to imply a witness that is orders of magnitude apart from what most members experience. This is very different from the public testimonies of visions from early apostles in the Church. Oliver Cowdery charged the early Apostles to "never cease striving until you have seen God face to face" (Smith 1976, 2:195). According to accounts by 20th century Apostles, this charge has since been changed, and in the late 20th century some of the apostles and prophets have confessed that they have never seen Christ (Quinn 1998b, p. 2-6). For example, Joseph Fielding Smith said: "Every member of the Council of the Twelve Apostles should have, and I feel sure have [sic] had, the knowledge of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This does not have to come by direct visitation of the Savior, but it does come from the testimony of the Holy Ghost... The testimony of the Holy Ghost is the strongest testimony that can be given. It is better than a personal visit" (Smith 1954-1956, 3:153).

Bruce McConkie in his famous final conference talk hit on the same theme, that through the feelings of the Holy Ghost you can have the same strength of witness as a personal visitation. Others though always like to drop strong hints and to imply a vision, such as Elder Packer, who also claims that now such experiences are too sacred to talk about even though they weren't 100 years ago. My opinion is that this is so that Apostles don't feel bad, or seem weaker than their predecessors when they can't testify to a personal visitation. The church has now downplayed the importance of such visions, since it would be difficult to sustain these charismatic experiences on a large scale in a world-wide church. Strong feelings now are just as valid a basis for saying "I know" as other more direct experiences. Unfortunately for someone like me, the realization of this shift served to undermine my confidence in the church, since I still relied to some degree on the testimony of others. If the Apostles, as special witnesses of Christ, have a more nebulous basis for their testimony than I had originally thought, who really does know for sure whether these things are true?