Thirty years ago, long before the CES letter (heck, long before Facebook), I sat beside my brainy boyfriend* as he asked probing questions of two earnest nineteen-year-olds from Utah. He’d been reading the Book of Mormon but not feeling its spirit. How could there be elephants in America, he wanted to know. What about the chariots? The horses? The King James anachronisms?
Neither the missionaries nor I had satisfactory answers, but I had a back-up plan. An LDS classics professor hosted informal scripture study with the very few LDS college students in our branch, assigning sections of the D&C alongside passages of Plato. I arranged for him to hold a sort of office hours for the two us at a local coffee shop. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt we could have hot chocolate and gain solid answers to sincere questions.
We got something else entirely. The Book of Mormon was an inspired book, the professor told us, but not something actually translated from golden plates. The Gospel was not literal truth, but a practical tool for becoming a better person. Simple facts—like the existence of reformed Egyptian–were simply irrelevant. What mattered was whether something was true in spirit.
I listened in shock, wondering if God was testing me to see whether I’d speak against heresy. But my boyfriend Dan was nodding like every word out of the professor’s mouth made sense. The professor was a Church member in good standing, so if he could hold those beliefs and a temple recommend, then that ought to be good enough for Dan too. Because unless he got baptized and could marry me in the temple, I’d have to break up with him as my duty to God, something I’d begun to believe no loving God would require of me. To keep both my faith and my boyfriend, I would gladly stomach any amount of intellectual discomfort. And, yes, it was considerable. I spent my last years of college despising myself both for believing in invisible friends like Jesus and the Holy Ghost, and for doubting their existence.
This all came back to me reading a New Yorker article by Manvir Singh about the persistence of misinformation. Singh explains how some philosophers classify beliefs as “factual” or “symbolic.” The latter are not for understanding the world but for fitting into communities. They are about keeping friends, not understanding reality. It’s less what you believe and more why.
Singh argues that misinformation appeals to people who feel marginalized and powerless. Symbolic beliefs are fed not by logic and analysis but a need for belonging and identity, he explains. “Perhaps people who traffic in outlandish conspiracies don’t so much believe them,” he writes, “as believe in them.”
As soon as I finished the article, I Googled “symbolic beliefs” and “Mormon.” The first result was from John Dehlin of Mormon Stories, pieced together in 2006, back when he was still trying his damnedest to stay in the Church. (He was excommunicated in 2015.) He’d made a table with three columns: a testimony component, its literal interpretation, and a symbolic one. For example, the testimony component, “Jesus is the son of God,” literally meant a physical body derived from God the Father and Mary. Symbolically, it meant a wise historical figure who was as much a child of God as the rest of us.
In the musical The Book of Mormon, symbolic beliefs are presented as a sort of escape hatch. A young elder converts a bunch of villagers with a story about how Joseph Smith cured AIDS via unspeakable relations with a frog. Problems dissipate when it’s revealed the converts never actually believed the story. “It’s a metaphor!” one explains in exasperation to the single villager who feels disillusioned. Prep the happy ending. Singh, similarly, thinks that “symbolic beliefs” allow an easy out when reality refuses to cooperate with your creed. It’s not so simple.
Dehlin’s 2006 post drew pages of comments. Many doubted symbolic beliefs were “acceptable” and could really be worthy of a temple recommend. One came across as pleading for acceptance: if people can agree on the “concepts,” it asked, is agreement on the “particulars” really necessary? Another comment noted “confusion” and “pain” navigating between literal and symbolic.
In contrast, exploring within literal beliefs can be great fun. For example, the First Vision states that Heavenly Father and Christ look exactly alike, so as a budding biology major I speculated that genetic inheritance might have a “divine dominant” component that superseded classic Mendelian dominant traits and explained why Mary’s DNA was rendered invisible even though she was truly the mother of Christ. I also entertained elaborate ideas about how Jonah could breathe inside a whale and saw no reason why a Biblical day couldn’t extend into geologic eons. But that was trivial amusement. Playing out those puzzles of factual beliefs kept me skating happily on the surface. Symbolic beliefs cut to the core.
I think, for many Mormons trying to tape up their shelf, resorting to symbolic beliefs means swallowing down the awareness that you’re not sure what you believe any more, which means the realization that you’re not sure where you belong anymore. It’s like having the rug ripped out from under you, rolling yourself up in it, and assuring yourself it sure is a nice warm blanket. It may have a lot of mud stamped in, but surely without it, you’ll freeze to death.
Singh does not explore the loneliness of being a symbolic believer among literalists, what it’s like to say the same words as everyone else, painfully aware your thoughts are different. In the end, I left the Church for the same pragmatic reason the classics professor stayed. I chose the path that let me be a better person. It was still one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
I have long marveled at the brave generosity of the classics professor—had I passed on his thoughts to our bishop he might not have had his temple recommend renewed, or worse. For decades I thought that he was giving Dan an intellectual stratagem as a gift, a rationalization to let the two of us stay together. But now I think perhaps his motives in the café were simpler: he finally had someone to talk to.
Image credit: Book of Mormon stories
*We’ve now been married over thirty years
Excellent post. Have you any idea what your classics professor is up to now? I wonder how long he was able to hang onto his temple recommend, not to mention his testimony, given how the LDS “thought police” have dominated in the years since his conversation with you and Dan. And yes! I’m sure he appreciated the opportunity to talk to somebody.
Beautiful and insightful.
Really good insights — particularly the parallel with why people are attracted to conspiracy theories.
In the years I’ve been discussing Mormonism on the Internet, I’ve encountered a lot of well-meaning liberal Mormons who have taken a similar stance to that of your professor. My problem with that stance is that not only is Mormonism not true (in the literal, factual sense), it’s also not good. So, no, it’s not “a practical tool for becoming a better person” — quite the opposite!
That’s my humble opinion anyway…
Thanks for reading! I’ve been reading a lot about misinformation lately, and the notion of cognitive dissonance never comes up. I am thinking that the internet is a double edged sword on the one hand, people can find each other (how many doubters were on those anonymous BBS at BYU?) On the other hand, you can find confirmation for anything you want. Maybe my next post will talk about seeking out the uncomfortable!
Thanks for writing this.
Well written. When my husband and I were questioning the historicity of the church in 2005, a good-intending ward member sat on our couch telling us that we did not have to believe literally. He said that it did not matter if it was true because the stories still had good messages, just stay for your kids, the BofM still teaches good principles even if you don’t believe in it literally. Jaw-dropping to hear him speak those words. I had never imagined that kind of belief. I knew I couldn’t fake it for my kids. Symbolic belief didn’t work for my brain. My husband refused to lie to our daughter that if she would SAY she knew the church was true she would eventually believe it.
Mormonism’s fruits are so problematic, I doubt, it is worth saving by retreating from literalism to symbolism. The problem with Mormonism is not a lack of veracity but its ethical deficiencies. I am afraid that we are dealing with a morally inferior and malignant theology.
For individual members who need to sustain their social relationships and their worldview, symbolism might be a sustainable path forward.