How I Lost My Faith While Serving as a Mormon Bishop

how does a bishop start to question uh i was reading uh a tribute article about a new essay on race and the priesthood that the church had released and um so 213 2014 something yeah yeah end of 2013 maybe december or so um and i went to the church's website navigated my way and found found the essay and read it and um and there's a part in there that just um just really hit me um in the essay they they disavow that dark skin is a sign of this divine disfavor or curse and um and i agree that that is the case except i remember as a missionary sitting in my chair doing my personal study reading the book of mormon and in second nephi i think it's chapter five when the nephites and the lamanites split off into two groups and the lord curses the lamanites with dark skin and it's very clear that that's what he does and it says it's i think it's nephi speaking in first person for the lord and he he says he cursed with the skin of blackness and so that they would be not appealing to the nephites and i remember reading that as a missionary in new zealand with with them lots of polynesian people you know where i'm serving and thinking ah that's horrible but it was from god like i i completely accepted that this was from god and i and my feeling wasn't that that it was horrible like i did this my feeling was how would it feel to be a person of color and read this and i was terrified that someone may ask me about this in new zealand but it never came up and i and i i just remember feeling that way and and when i read that essay and i read that paragraph um that memory came back to me immediately and i thought well this these two things contradict each other um here's the church saying we disavow that dark skin is a sign of a curse and here is either jesus or nephi or mormon or joseph smith although the only four people that could have written that that verse and they're saying in first person it's it's a curse and um it just shook something loose in me because i trusted my church leaders and prophets i i just had faith in prophets that i that that if you follow the teachings of the prophets your life will work out well and and um all of a sudden i it just shook my confidence in in the scriptures a little bit like well it never had occurred to me that prophets can be wrong and not just like a little wrong but in ways that can affect people's lives and um for a little while that it just shook me it just bothered me and then um then i found the other essays that they had released about i can't remember at this time which ones came out when um there's about 13 or 14 of them and i think over the next eight months they released them kind of gradually and um i read all of them as they came out and um some of them bothered me a lot um i read that i i i tried to be as fair as i could i read i read the footnotes i read everything i could read about about the essays to try and make sense of what's going on about what does it mean if a prophet if if someone in this ancient scripture that i have that i believe is from god gives me bad advice what what does that mean how can i how can i know which ones are which what's good and what's not and because i never felt like i was a super spiritual person um i had to rely on these prophets or leaders because i i didn't feel like i never i never received revelation or answers in a direct enough way to know this is how something should be or or something like that so that um that caused me some problems but again you know i i went back to my tried and true well that's an issue i'm going to sort that out and i'm and i i think about things a lot and i don't do anything fast i i think about things i i like to i'd like to hear both sides of arguments i like to give people the benefit of doubt um so that bothered me and i just kind of left it there and then you know i'm so busy as a bishop i didn't i got stuff to do and i just kind of went back to my calling and and um tried to do bishop stuff did you find out about the essays from the church sort of like hey bishops these essays are coming out here's where you find them here's what they're for here's why you need to learn about them nope nope so you're serving as bishop when the essays come out yes and you know nothing about them zero how do you explain that i think it's shocking um that you're learning from the trib yeah about these resources that are supposed to be and i assume that and i and i um you know looking back a little bit of hindsight now kudos to the church for for putting out this essay and and saying hey this is a maybe a problem area in our past and something and we want to make it a little better but um i don't know why it was just on a page and it wasn't on the front page of the website you know it was i think there was a link in the article that got me to it or because it wasn't church rolls out essays or anything like that it was the enzyme no no nothing the bishops didn't know um i i don't have a good explanation i don't know why they they didn't roll that out but it and maybe it's because it was shocking to people because it was shocking to me well we we know that um that because because you know elder snow and others have have admitted it that the church wanted to put these out sort of so that they couldn't be accused of lying or or withholding information from the members uh but that they intentionally did want did not want them broadly read or known about because it would cause it could cause people to doubt a question right so they wanted him to be there only as a last resort emergency or only as evidence of against them being accused of of hiding or deceiving people yeah but my guess is they didn't want you reading them right and it sounds like there was good reason for that right yeah yeah and this this kind of there were a couple series of events that that kind of eroded my um belief in profits um so this the essays happened and i can't remember if this was before after the stake president that had called me had served 10 years and time to get released and so i get a letter and the letter has on it um questions about me my occupation my previous church callings and then it has a spot for me to fill out the names of three people who i think would be good stake presidents and i come to the meeting with with this and um and that kind of bothered me because um i i'm a practical guy i get it that you know these guys are coming here and they don't know me they don't know anybody in the stake and they they're they're tasked with choosing a steak present that's gonna run the steak for ten years and it's a big big deal um but i was a little disappointed like what what about revelation like um if our callings come from god it shouldn't shouldn't he tell you who it would be you know at some point i figured higher up in the church there would be someone who's getting revelation in a different way than i do or a different way than normal people where you just pray about something and feel okay about it and that's revelation right but i i i hoped that there was somewhere who was actually getting i don't know how it's supposed to work but um where they would clearly know this gentleman is supposed to be the state president right i just started to worry what if what if everyone is like me what if these men like the previous bishop was doing the best he could and just decided something and we supported it and we thought it was revelation but he just was doing the best he could and what if these guys are doing the same thing and what if it's like that all the way up and that thought just kind of stuck in me in my brain which of the other essays um did you know impacted you besides the race in the priesthood um the book of abraham essay what about it um the so the fact that the the scrolls that joseph translated to become the book of abraham um were not it had didn't have anything to do with abraham they were just normal funerary texts um that had been translated aft so those were translated the book of abraham before the rosetta had been discovered and people know how to read egyptian and then later we learned how to read egyptian and and found those scrolls and they did not contain anything to do with book of abraham um and their you know their the essay gives suggestions on other ways to look at it right that joseph thought they were or it doesn't matter that they didn't match he's still receiving revelation and gave us this wonderful book of abraham that has all these great truths in it and so it doesn't really matter but but it did matter to me because it was another another spot where maybe this revelation from god isn't as straightforward as i thought it was maybe it's maybe it's not um clear and and so how much of this is being influenced by joseph the man rather than by god or by it just was another weight of my revelation may not be what i think it is bucket and so what you're saying is you were starting to question the the inspiration process yes yep as you understood it yes yes and i wonder if it was just ordinary people just making it up yes versus really being led by god yes and and that in conjunction with that essay and then reading the other essays um just made it worse that um i just if if if nephi could be wrong about something and if reading the other essays there are issues with joel smith with the book of abraham and polygamy and all sorts of things and i thought if if he's wrong about things too how are we supposed to know when they're right and when they're wrong and and is it not a reliable process is it not a straightforward way and maybe i viewed revelation too simply when i was younger and maybe i'm naive about how it works but i from all those stories i read in all the scriptures it's pretty straightforward god talks to the prophet and he tells us what god wants and um that started that was shaken for me severely um in hindsight now it turns out they weren't right the church now disavows those theories and doctrines and so if they weren't right how can we trust them that that's my issue is how can i know that if if the prophet is telling me something that i don't think is right and i'm not getting direct communication from god what are my options my options are to look into the scriptures on my own read everything i can and decide for myself and if i don't trust that the prophet is telling me something if i can't trust it that they're right i got to just go off what i think and that and that's it and so that's what i do now right so though that that issue for me just just kept kind of eating at me that um i lost confidence in my leaders that they really knew the will of god and that's it you

Channel: Understanding Mormonism with Dr. John Dehlin

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Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021