The YouTube documentary series “An Inconvenient Faith” is a collection of videos that is more or less in the “why I stay” genre of discourse that is commonly found in progressive-leaning venues like Sunstone and Dialogue. And as is typical of the “why I stay” genre, the videos contain some very valuable insights, mixed with narratives of self-imposed religious ordeals that remain perpetually unresolved.

The series seems to have several objectives:

• Show how different people have responded to faith challenges in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
• Offer a discussion format with diverse voices, ranging from hostile apostates to devout believers
• Let people know that amid faith challenges, to stay in the church is a viable personal decision
• Address the most common causes of doctrinal and historical frustration among church members, with a variety of perspectives

-note: after I wrote this post, I saw their stated goals to (1) foster better understanding and empathy for those who struggle with these challenges and (2) present honest and ethical approaches to remaining faithful and active while staying fully informed.

The series has nine episodes:

1. Introduction
2. The Book of Mormon
3. LGBTQ Part 1
4. LGBTQ Part 2
5. Race
6. Women and authority
7. Polygamy
8. High demand religion
9. Personal revelation

I’ll reiterate here that this series contains numerous valuable insights. With the exception of the Introduction episode (which is a mess), most of the episodes offer things of value. But the project as a whole is undermined by two fatal choices. The first of these fatal choices is to avoid difficult-but-essential questions. The second fatal choice is related, and it is an insistence upon relativism. As we proceed, we will see how these choices undermine the project.

The basic format of the series is to present difficult aspects of church history, doctrine, and lived experience, and those difficult things are assumed to be the source of “inconvenience” in the faith of Latter-day Saints. The participants in the videos then offer their responses to the issues. If a church member has never had any exposure to difficult issues, they are likely to feel challenged and disoriented by information in this series. But the message in each video is that there are some church members who find ways to reconcile these difficult things, or just maintain faith in spite of them. Let’s explore each section of the series.

Episode 1: Introduction

Bluntly stated, the introduction video is the worst video in the series. However, it is useful for revealing the producers’ choices, which go on to permeate the rest of the series. It offers a problem statement, in a series of narratives of disaffection and departure from the church. But it also shows that some people have experienced disaffection and confusion, and found reasons to keep their church membership. The basic revelation in the introduction might best be expressed in the contribution of Latter-day Saint philosopher Adam Miller, who says early in the video that “we are perpetually in the midst of the crisis of needing to, with every generation, figure out again, how to be Mormon.”

Miller’s statement offers an unintended insight into essential questions that this series strenuously avoids. In this instance, we might simply ask, what is the objective of our church membership and participation, as understood by prophets and ordinary church members since the beginning of the restoration? It is definitely not “being Mormon.” Believing Latter-day Saints understand that the objective of our church membership and participation is eternal life, the development of the kinds of understandings of and responses to reality that allow us to participate in the life that God lives. By contrast, as the Hulu series The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives has demonstrated, to “be Mormon” is merely to adopt a heritage-based identity marker that may have nothing to do with God or the church in any way. In pointing this out, I should also clarify that I believe Adam Miller to be an exemplary Latter-day Saint and I personally consider his writings on theology to be a great resource for church members. This review is my attempt to invite viewers of An Inconvenient Faith to try different kinds of intellectual work than what was presented in the series.

The introduction video also features nonbelievers who identify as “Mormons” and who bring to the series their own form of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, an egocentric belief system of personal fulfillment that resists specificity in theology (preferring abstract vagaries like “the divine”) and rejects institutional authority of any kind. Each of these contributions to the introduction reveals a pattern that repeats itself at several points in the series:

1. Church member adopts an external paradigm (MTD, relativism, positivism, academic critical theory, etc.)
2. Church member is confronted with teachings or policies that violate their new external paradigm
3. External paradigm goes unexamined
4. Tension between external paradigm and church experience is presented as inevitable, and sometimes manageable

In these videos, people tend to use the term “Mormonism” instead of “the restored gospel of Jesus Christ.” This is by design. Again, since the term “Mormon” does not imply any particular belief system, “Mormonism” can similarly be whatever a person imagines it to be. It can be the sprinkling of some scripture and some heritage-appreciation onto whatever external belief system one has adopted as their primary paradigm. While the term “Mormonism” certainly held descriptive value in the past, it is now used to claim the benefits of affiliation with the institutional Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, while simultaneously rejecting the doctrines and other aspects of the church that give it strength. “Mormonism” as a term is still appropriate for academic discussions of religion, but as a practical descriptor of anyone’s actual religious beliefs, “Mormonism” has become utterly useless.

The introduction video reveals another pattern in disaffection that is common among both progressive and conservative dissidents: it is the tendency to homogenize. Questions of race, LGBT issues, and scriptural historicity are very different. They require different modes of analysis, and different epistemological choices. Yet they are all offered in this series as more or less the same kind of thing, requiring the same kinds of responses. To examine each of these issues on its own terms is part of the harder intellectual and spiritual work that is avoided in this series.

Episode 2: The Book of Mormon

This is perhaps the strongest video in the series. It presents narratives from detractors John Dehlin and Jeremy Runnels, and how they lost their confidence in the Book of Mormon. They represent themselves as honest seekers that found critical information that they found insurmountable, though in recent years this narrative has been demonstrated to be erroneous in the Interpreter and in a report on the CES Letter. Regardless, though, their simple narrative is useful for understanding:

1. Devout, believing church member finds critical information
2. Church authorities are unable to answer the critical information
3. Church member leaves the church in order to maintain intellectual integrity

An obvious thing to note about this sequence is that it is self-serving, portraying the disaffected former member as a heroic exemplar of intellectual integrity. There are powerful emotional incentives to adopt and then maintain this validating narrative.

In contrast with Dehlin and Runnels, Jim Bennett and Terryl Givens present their stories of overcoming doubts that arose from critical arguments about the Book of Mormon. Givens in particular offers an example of paradigm-adjustment, explaining how terms are sometimes used in loose relation to concepts across cultures. His process might be described as follows:

1. Devout, believing church member finds critical information
2. Church member examines assumptions, learns more about how the world actually works
3. Church member integrates better assumptions, and makes adjustments to paradigm
4. Church member continues faithful participation in the church

This process is certainly the better choice, but it is difficult. Paradigm adjustments are the most challenging intellectual work that any of us face. It is no wonder that we tend to flee to easier paths of doubt or agnosticism rather than do the difficult work of adjusting our paradigms. In addition to paradigm adjustment, there is an even better choice, one that went mostly unexplored in this video series. It is to understand why some of us do the work of adjusting their paradigms, while others resist it. That is a process that usually takes place subconsciously, but unearthing the intuitive processes that motivate our decisions around faith is immensely valuable. Adam Miller exemplifies this in his acknowledgement that for him, questions of Book of Mormon historicity are secondary to questions about what the book reveals of Christ. That decision to focus on verifiable spiritual reality over unresolvable abstractions is an expression of what he values, and what he loves. As a viewer of the series, I wish they had done an entire episode on this question alone.

Episodes 2 and 3: LBGTQ

With the shift from the episode on the Book of Mormon to the episodes on LGBTQ issues, we go from the strongest to the weakest of the discussions. LGBTQ issues are among the most challenging in the series, requiring the most thorough and honest exploration of viewpoints. And yet, these episodes are abysmal. They present a glimpse of how LGBTQ issues are understood among church members who have not mentally moved beyond the late 1990s.

These episodes present examples of clumsy and sometimes sad and regrettable responses to the experience of sexual minorities in the church, and then use those to paint a picture that the church cannot possibly be correct in its teachings on family, gender, and sexuality. The videos offer examples of personal narratives from people like Kendall Wilcox and John Gustav-Wrathall, illustrating the profound challenges faced by people trying to reconcile their faith and their experience of sexual orientation.

As I explained in a recent article, the LGBTQ ally movement is very good at using the power of personal narrative to activate people’s empathic responses. But when narratives become the sole basis for our attempts to understand phenomena, we end up in a situation of low knowledge and high empathy, which places us in direct conflict with church leaders who are seeking to operate from a position of high knowledge and high empathy.

The series avoids the difficult work of honestly asking the question of whether the church’s teachings on family, gender, and sexuality are true. If they had not avoided that question, their viewers might have seen just a sample of the voluminous amount of studies that have been done in recent years affirming the church’s teachings (some of which are referenced here). Instead, viewers are told without any irony by Greg Prince and Robert Rees that most church members just have an outdated understanding of “the science.” Prince’s contribution ventures into the egregious as he creates a narrative that church leadership are somehow divided over the merits of the Family Proclamation, which happens to be the most resoundingly-vindicated prophetic statement of our generation. Neither Prince nor Rees manifest any awareness of developments in LGBTQ-related research or observable social trends in the past two decades.

Viewing these two videos on LGBTQ issues, we are left wondering how could people so intellectually gifted be so resistant to new information? To make zero attempt to explore the validity of the church’s teachings on such a contentious issue, is absolutely mystifying.

Episode 5: Race

The episode on race has some excellent material. It offers an unflinching examination of extremely poor choices around race among church leaders and members since the early days of the restoration, and we see the difficult consequences in the lived experiences of racial minorities. We are also given a glimpse of how activism in this area can run amok and cause a deepening of people’s pain. This video reinforces the fact that we still have work to do as a people in the area of race, and fortunately the video does not offer any current flavors of neo-Marxist activism as a recommended approach.

In this discussion of race, Darius Gray shines as a witness. He offers his account of hearing the voice of God prompting him to join the pre-1978 church, and this gives viewers a glimpse of why so many people have sacrificed so much for their membership, amid adversity they have experienced in the church.

The placement of this video after the awful videos on LGBTQ issues was a very unfortunate choice, one that seems to convey here is another example of the church being wrong about something, and taking a long time to come around. But again, these are very different issues that need to be examined on their own terms. To conflate them — especially by totally ignoring evidences for the validity of the church’s teachings on family, gender, and sexuality — is a common coping tactic among disaffected progressives, and it is not honest.

Episode 6: Women and Authority

This episode is emblematic of the series’ refusal to engage in the work of examining assumptions. In the video, women express their commitments to feminism and how those commitments have resulted in difficult tensions in their lived experiences in the church. To understand challenges in people’s lived experiences is extremely important, as it allows the church to do the important work of removing stumbling blocks to faith. But in this video, there is very little effort to examine how often, stumbling blocks are self-imposed.

Feminism is assumed to be a good thing, the product of academic research that is also assumed to be good. There is no attempt to explore modern critiques of feminism and the sexual revolution, such as the work of Louise Perry or Mary Harrington. There is no attempt to explore the best case for gender complementarity or male priesthood administration. There is no attempt to examine the impact of postmodernist thinkers like Michel Foucault and how their anti-Christian conceptualizations of power have become the basis for much of feminist analysis. As with the videos on LGBTQ issues, the basic pattern is to observe tensions and conclude that they arise from deficiencies in the institutional church.

This video continues a common thread that goes back to the introduction video: we are left asking the most basic question of what these people are trying to do. Are these feminists seeking authentic knowledge of God, from the standpoint of a personal conviction that the church is invested with the authority of Christ? Or, are they “finding their personal way of being both feminist and ‘Mormon’?” If the former, the church offers the context for the deepest and most powerful understandings of eternal feminine identity available to us. If the latter, then it does not matter what the church or its members do, because someone can be “Mormon” without any actual affiliation with the church.

This video has a strong point in the story of Maxine Hanks, whose journey outside of the church led her to see in depth how female administration of church governance happens in other institutions. Often, as in her case, that can be an illuminating exercise that enables people to see the value in our current gendered framework in the church. I was also glad to see in this video the inclusion of the testimony of President Camille Johnson, of how women’s voices are integrated in the governing committees of the church.

Episode 7: Polygamy

The discussion of polygamy is difficult, as expected. Polygamy is presented as a mistake, although other options were possible. At minimum, there could have been a discussion of Kathleen Flake’s groundbreaking talk The Emotional and Priestly Logic of Plural Marriage. The polygamy discussion turns toward Joseph Smith’s character and fallibility, and whether it is possible to maintain confidence in him as a prophet in light of his actions in the practice of polygamy.

There is not a lot that I can recommend that people do differently in exploring this subject.

Episode 8: High-Demand Religion

“High-demand religion” is a common criticism leveled at the church by detractors like John Dehlin, and this episode gave glimpses of the different ways our intensive church commitments can affect us. This video might have benefited from a broader religious studies discussion of attendance and other trends among churches that are high-demand versus low-demand.

There was some good discussion of the value of high-demand religion, that deep personal transformation is the point of Christianity, and it doesn’t happen in contexts that are comfortable and low-commitment.

Episode 9: Personal Revelation

This video offers some good insights, though incomplete. It explores the tension between institutional revelation and personal conscience. Especially valuable was the choice to include a serious discussion of the council system, and how it increases the reliability of institutional revelation. More could have been said on this, but the quotes they did include – particularly the explanation from Elder Bednar – are strong. The question is asked “what if my personal revelation differs from theirs?”, and this ought to have been followed by a discussion of discernment, again with references to the council system.

An example is given of Elder Boyd K. Packer going off script in general conference, then having his remarks adjusted later for the Ensign. Ironically, if the producers had even a basic knowledge of current research on sexual orientation, they might not have chosen this as an example of fallibility. The Boyd K. Packer was right jar keeps getting heavier by the day.

In the video there are good explorations of what it means to sustain, but it would have been ideal to acknowledge that how strongly or how weakly we define this term has very real consequences for our experience of faith.

This is a video that could have benefited from personal stories of revelation received in church contexts, as personal revelation is the most common reason why people choose to remain committed church members amid difficult experiences and questions.

Summary Thoughts

This series has some things of value to offer viewers, and it also reflects some very unfortunate choices to avoid the work of digging deeper. We wonder when the scripts for these videos were written, as in the past 5 years there has been such a great movement in the church toward exploring “meta” questions of worldview and assumptions (see Jeffrey Thayne’s FAIR presentations, for example). In An Inconvenient Faith,, the church is often portrayed as being behind the times, trying to catch up to where ordinary people are – holding the right point of view, of course! – on a number of issues. But particularly with the discussions of LGBTQ issues and feminism, it is clear that the church and its orthodox members are far ahead of the views offered in these videos. Many of the participants in An Inconvenient Faith seem frozen in time, as if they settled into a critical stance decades ago, and have never done any work to seriously examine that perspective. As I often tell disaffected members and former members- until you learn to deconstruct your own tools of deconstruction, you have not learned real critical thinking. Many of the claims in these videos are presented as if from the finish line of truth-seeking, when in fact they have not even made it to the second leg of the race.

As mentioned earlier, there is a clear embrace of relativism in the project. It is as if every point of view is equally valid. This is an emotional impulse toward inclusion at the expense of truth, and it does a disservice to viewers. If the church is actually what believing and sustaining Latter-day Saints claim it to be, then viewers of a series like this deserve to hear the reasons for our convictions, which enable us to weather inconveniences of faith that are sometimes extremely severe.

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