Coming back to church after working through history questions

When a relative stopped attending church, Latter-day Saint Alba Lucia Letelier asked her husband about his own faith, “What’s going on with you?”

That’s when he admitted the extent of his own spiritual doubts, following years of immersion in the words of several online skeptics. Alba had not been aware of any of this and at first resisted his entreaties to spend time listening to these same people.

But her husband pressed her to be “open-minded,” and Alba eventually acquiesced, dedicating substantial time over the following weeks to skeptical podcasts.

Looking back on the experience, Alba now recognizes implicit messaging in these forums guiding listeners in a specific direction. “Immediately,” she recalled, this binge of cynical content was “crushing and devastating” — leading her within weeks to conclude everything about her faith was “dark” and “awful.”

“I went from A to B really quickly,” Alba said. “I was completely done.” She soon announced to her family that not only was she done attending church, she no longer believed in God.

In an interview about her return to faith, Alba remembers how she used to tell people that religion was something “people made up so that maybe life isn’t so sad when someone dies, or maybe people have more of a sense of belonging … so that life is a little bit easier to handle.”

Alba’s journey of restoring a relationship with God and membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is one of a growing collection of stories where people describe regaining their faith. A number of these stories involve people who heard and believed critical arguments about church history or faith generally.

The shift to suspicion

When Landon Hedin was introduced to a list of “questions” assailing his beliefs, he remembers starting to feel nauseous. Since this came by way of a trusted friend, he said it felt like “punching me in the gut.”

Wade Brown similarly encountered “what were said to be some facts” about his faith’s history. He took an analytic approach at the time: “It was strictly an intellectual pursuit.”

“I was 99% sure that everything was bogus … everything religious I’d been taught,” Wade remembers soon deciding.

New openness

German scholars Heinz Streib and Barbara Keller describe rapid conversion or deconversion as reflecting a “crisis paradigm” of shifting beliefs that lead to a “new self and new behavior,” in what’s often taken for granted to be a “one-time and supposedly permanent event.” This can lead to a new kind of certitude and firm conviction.

Despite his first reaction, Landon similarly came to believe what his friend’s questions were suggesting. “How do they not see this?” he recalls asking himself. “It’s so blatantly obvious, you know?”

When other friends and family would encourage Landon to be open to other ideas from scripture or faith leaders, he would push back, “You can’t just read that” — redirecting people back to some negative vignette in church history, and “demanding people explain what the church would say about that.”

After several years, Landon started to get “bored” with this routine, which he said “consumed my life” and “would make me more angry.”

Even after his own rapid change in perspective, Wade still trusted and admired his believing father and remembers posing questions from time to time. “But I wasn’t really looking for answers. I was looking to knock down anything that could tell me I was on the wrong path.”

One day, Wade came across his dusty old set of scriptures, untouched in years. On a “whim,” he said, “Why not?”

He plopped them open and read 14 words: “You have not applied your hearts to understanding, therefore you have not been wise.”

The words hit hard. “I just let that kind of work itself through me. I think that opened the door, just a half-inch of daylight.”

Still, Wade remembers telling his father, “Dad, there’s just too much contradictory evidence. There’s just a mountain of evidence between me ever believing again. It’s impossible.”

“Not in a billion years would I think I’d ever go back to the temple again,” he recalls thinking. “I just said, ‘It’s impossible,’ since there’s a mountain of garbage that I can’t get through.”

Shortly after, Wade came across Jesus’ teaching in Matthew, “If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you shall say unto this mountain remove hence to yonder place and it shall remove, and nothing shall be impossible unto you.”

What if I’m wrong?

Although people return to faith regularly, this is often not the perception of those who have left. In their review of reconversion stories, BYU-Idaho researchers Sarah and Eric d’Evegnée describe this common sense of impossibility, and how it can be disrupted by various new experiences.

Alba described a turning point when she reflected more on her family’s future, and realized, “I have just definitively decided something that people that have lived much longer with much more knowledge and wisdom have been debating” throughout human history — namely, “the existence of God.”

“How could I possibly know with such certainty with the very limited amount of knowledge that I have?” This was a question that, she reasoned, was ultimately not just for her, but on some level, for “everybody after me, my children, my grandchildren. I’m making a decision for them right now.”

At about this same time, Alba remembers hearing about a new archaeological discovery that contradicted one of the common attack lines against the veracity of her prior beliefs. “If this one thing is wrong, what else could I be wrong about?”

Even while still doubting she’d “ever actually be capable” of “truly believing” the way she had before, Alba resolved to attempt something that felt doable: “OK, I’m going to live my life as if I believe in God.”

She began to spend more time seeking answers and deepening her spiritual connection. Yet each time she interacted with her husband, Alba said, “it would take five minutes of him being like, ‘Yeah, but what about this, this, this … and that’s ridiculous,” before she’d respond, “You’re right. Oh my, I’m a crazy person. And everybody in this church is a crazy person, and I just need to get out of here.”

“I would have to start over,” Alba said, describing how she would have to again remember “what she had been feeling and thinking the prior week” in her time alone with God and his words.

Not limiting yourself

Alba spoke of an older mentor who patiently spent a lot of time with her, and pointed her toward other faithful writing about these challenging questions, which led her to feel “a flood of spiritual reassurance and power that I hadn’t felt in a long time.”

“I knew I was onto something,” she said. “Maybe God is real.”

“Don’t ever get to a place where you’re so confident that you don’t need to know more,” Wade shared from his experience. “Don’t cap yourself. Don’t put a lid on your knowledge because it can totally turn things around. It really did for me.”

But early on, Wade also recalls thinking he had to have many of his spiritual concerns settled before he approached God. “That’s just wrong,” he said. “I should have known that’s wrong. Nobody told me that. That’s just how I interpreted it.”

Who and what to believe

Scholar Terryl Givens cautions those who expect historical information alone to resolve significant spiritual matters. “Because the past is a distant world, and because all narratives are based on perspectives and questions not our own, most history can’t even answer historical questions. It certainly can’t answer the most important religious ones.”

In the introduction to their book, “The God Who Weeps,” Terryl and Fiona Givens write that humans are confronted with “appealing arguments for a Divinity that is a childish projection … and for scriptures as so much fabulous fiction.” And in the same moment, “there is also compelling evidence that a glorious Divinity presides over the cosmos,” with our ultimate conclusion dependent “not on the evidence, but on what we choose, deliberately and consciously, to conclude from that evidence.”

Streib and Keller likewise describe people grappling over questions of faith not as passive receptacles of information, but rather as “active subject(s)” who are continually “making meaning” in a “gradual and rational process of acquiring and testing new behaviors” that influence what they eventually come to believe and feel toward their faith.

Scholar John Barbour of St. Olaf’s College similarly writes how “reconversion narratives” often “demonstrate the process of reflection and reinterpretation by which faith can be recovered in good conscience.”

Arguments against emotion

One of the “big things that people talk about when you leave the church,” the young mother Alba said, “is that you can’t rely on your feelings.”

“You can really brainwash yourself into feeling anything,” and you can “will yourself to believe anything,” she would often hear.

Any mention of feeling spiritual peace, Alba said, some “discredit completely” as “made-up feelings,” urging, “don’t rely on that.” Consequently, each time she would have a new positive experience, Alba would revert to skepticism, saying, “Well, I can’t rely on emotions, because those are fake.”

This kind of “separation between thinking and feeling,” says researcher Sam Hardy, is “not aligned” with “decades of psychological science.”

“The brain isn’t built that way,” he adds. “Emotions have a cognitive component and thought has an affective component.”

Hardy points to the work of pioneering neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who studied people with damage to emotional centers of the brain and observed how much healthy decision-making was compromised.

Terryl Givens adds, “We trust our emotions for the most important transactions in life: how to treat other people, our sense of right and wrong, what is beautiful or virtuous or worthy of emulation.”

“Reason, unfettered from human feeling,” by contrast, he says, “has led to as many horrors as any crusader’s zeal.”

Gradual learning

As Alba kept seeking, she began to recognize a spiritual peace she ultimately decided she could trust. “I wanted more of that.”

“It was really, really slow,” Alba said. “I just needed to kind of do it a little bit at a time.”

“If I want to know if God existed, maybe I should try praying to him. If I want to learn about Christ, maybe I should read about him — read what he taught and said.”

She decided to focus on one question at a time, “like, first, Heavenly Father. Is he real?”

“And then, Jesus Christ? Was he a real person? And then, was he a savior? What does that mean, to be a savior?”

Like a new convert, she describes feeling like she was “learning these truths for the first time.” She tried to be patient with herself, while “facing some of the bigger things a little bit at a time.”

Wade, who had spoken of the mountain of issues he needed to confront, said, “For me, it didn’t change overnight.”

“Being in motion, not sitting still, not closing doors, is the key to everything in life,” he added. “That’s the way anything works, not just God reaching into your life, but any happy experiences.”

Although Alba wasn’t sure she was ready for a church calling, she accepted a chance to teach children and had some comforting spiritual experiences helping children with disabilities.

“That was a perfect thing for me, and my fragile little testimony that was slowly growing.”

‘Much, much more’

“I studied and prayed. A lot,” Alba said, describing how she eventually received “strong witnesses of the truths that I was slowly relearning.” She said it took two years to “gain the conviction I had lost and much, much more.”

Wade now compares his earlier analytical approach to a Mozart expert who knows everything about the musician’s “personal history, about him as a human being, about his intellect, about his musical style, everything about his music, how it came to him, how he composed it, how he expressed it on paper.”

But when asked, “OK, what’s your favorite Mozart symphony?” you come to find out he’s not in the habit of listening to much of his music.

So, he asks, “does he really know Mozart?”

‘Everything came flooding back.’

When his child wanted to prepare for baptism, Landon had grown tired of feeling angry and separated from people he loved. He decided to ask for an impromptu meeting with the bishop after her interview. Although they didn’t explore all his questions, this man was clear about what he did and didn’t know. What Landon remembers most was “the feeling.”

“The feeling I had when I walked out of that meeting with my bishop. It wasn’t just like, maybe I’ll go back. … No, it was like … I was in.”

Landon’s daughter noticed he was crying after the visit and asked, “Daddy, what’s wrong?”

Nothing was wrong, he said. As he began attending church again, Landon said that “the coolest thing is everything that I had learned on my mission and more, just everything came flooding back,” including “scriptures I used to know.”

“There is an obvious peace.”

Recently, Landon was able to baptize his daughter and stepdaughter. Now, his sons and both daughters have asked him for what they call “Daddy’s blessing.”

“My daughter will send scriptures to me like, ‘Dad, I read this scripture.’”

“It’s sad that she felt like she couldn’t do that before,” he said. “But, it’s so cool that she does it now.”

‘Don’t be so easily convinced there’s malice.’

In his own story of returning to faith, historian Don Bradley highlighted the unbalanced intellectual consequences of focusing on “exclusively negative sorts of questions.”

“I’m not saying that we shouldn’t give those things consideration,” he added, only cautioning against allowing them to exclusively “guide our focus.”

“Don’t just stop there,” Wade also tells others now. “There’s so much more to know … There’s always more context. There’s always more to the story.”

“Just like in a marriage, whatever you focus on, is amplified,” he said. “So, it’s so important where we place our focus.”

“Don’t be so easily convinced that there’s malice,” Wade added. “So often there’s not,” and “there’s a mountain of good stuff.”

Dan Ellsworth, who leads an online support group helping people on their faith journeys, cautions that online spaces which “actively work to create a cynical and angry emotional baseline” aren’t neutral spaces, and instead often encourage people to interpret information through a lens of “grievance.”

He adds, “If our emotional baseline is healthy and happy,” humans are more likely to see the world in a way that is “generous and charitable.”

A faith reborn

In the book “Faith is Not Blind,” Bruce and Mary Hafen write of how faith can grow stronger after encountering complexity. “The ability to acknowledge ambiguity, an important step in our spiritual development, is not a final form of enlightenment — it is only the beginning,” they write.

“Resolving a faith crisis can be an authentic source of great spiritual growth,” they continue, citing the poet T.S. Eliot: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and to know the place for the first time.”

Alba said her faith became “100 times deeper and better and more real … something that I fought for, and that I valued a lot more.”

One of the most common themes across stories of reconversion, according to the BYU-Idaho researchers, was “something about refinding God, rekindling their relationship with God.”

Relationships are rekindled with other believers too. “I had feared there would be something punitive in the process of coming back,” Bradley says. “Couldn’t have been further from the reality. … It’s been a marvelous, beautiful, experience.”

Open to being surprised

“I always thought to myself, like there’s no way” to come back. Now, Wade added, “I hope to be someone who can tell those people, hey, there is a way.”

When it comes to complex faith journeys, he said, “I intimately understand the heartache and the trauma and the struggle. … I don’t dismiss anybody questioning and feeling hurt. I get it, I absolutely get it.”

“My encouragement is just to leave a little crack open — never say never.”

This is the second in a series exploring stories of people who come back to faith.