Challenging issues and keeping the faith: Part 9

Why are some intelligent and rational members negatively affected by critical claims, while others are not? Some testimonies, quite frankly, are built on sandy foundations such as folklore, tradition, the admiration of a church leader, the enjoyment of the LDS social organizations, or memberships based on family pressure. When there is no true conversion of the spirit, it's often more difficult to accept those things that must be known by faith alone.

As already noted, however, even members who have experienced real spiritual experiences can be counted among those who have left the faith. There are numerous — and oftentimes complex — factors that contribute to each person's reasons for belief or disbelief. I pointed out in Part 6 that those members who take fundamentalist approaches to religious issues may be more vulnerable to testimony damage. Often they transition from fundamentalist Mormons to fundamentalist ex-Mormons.

Many former-Mormons who once had testimonies, for instance, share pre-apostate ideologies about scripture and the nature of prophets with many active Mormons — ideologies that contributed to their deconversion when faced with intellectual challenges.

All of us embrace concepts, beliefs, or positions that we unquestioningly accept primarily because we've never thought of questioning the belief, position, or concept. Unfortunately, we occasionally confuse beliefs on peripheral teachings — such as rumors, traditions, or personal opinions — with LDS doctrines.

We often go through our lives naïvely unaware of the intricacies and complexities of some gospel and historical issues until we are confronted with those intricacies and complexities as challenges presented by some detractor. Suddenly we become very concerned about issues that we previously accepted with naïve ratification. These issues emerge as stumbling blocks to our testimony. Ironically, many stumbling blocks are based on non-doctrinal misunderstandings.

Some of the most perplexing and dissonance-generating LDS dilemmas, for example, seem to come from discoveries in church history. One informal poll of several ex-Mormons, for example, found that two thirds claimed to have left the church over disturbing historical discoveries.

We may encounter, for example, a theory that seems to explain away miraculous core LDS events, such as the First Vision. Or we might discover details of a historical event that seems to conflict, or at least differs in radical ways, to what we've been taught about the event.