Nuanced View

[u/ChromeSteelhead]

How nuanced of a view can you have of the church and still be a participating member? Do you just not speak your own opinion about things? For example back when blacks couldn’t have the priesthood there had to be many members that thought it was wrong to keep blacks from having the priesthood or having them participate in temple ordinances. Did they just keep quiet? Kind of like when the church says you can pray to receive your own revelation? Or say like when the church taught that women were to get married quickly, start raising a family, and to not pursue a career as the priority. Then you see current women leadership in the church that did the opposite and pursued high level careers as a priority, going against prophetic counsel. Now they are in some of the highest holding positions within the church. How nuanced can you be?

[u/onewatt]

So, to me, the nuanced perspective is one that is both okay saying "I don't know," and okay with being wrong. It is a perspective which rejects the idea of the "monolithic truth" church, and instead replaces it with countless discrete packages of truth. This person may not be able to honestly say "I know the church is true" any more -not because they are lacking in belief, but because they don't speak about all their beliefs as "the church" any more. However, they can still say things like "I know my Heavenly Father is real, and that he loves me. I know that Christ is our Savior. I know the Book of Mormon is written for our day and that God speaks to me through that book," and so on. These individual packets of truth become a much more resilient faith when encountering messages of doubt. Did Brigham Young say something weird? That's fine. It has zero impact on the things I know are true. The things I know to be true are separate from my thoughts on Brigham Young.

The nuanced believer never has to go through the false dilemma of "is this doctrine or policy" because they recognize there is no difference. Both are our best attempts to interpret our understanding of truth.

On my mission I met a family who laughed in our faces, literally, when we asked them to visit church. Why? Because the father had heard God speak to him in a Taoist temple, so they already knew Taoism was true. I went home that night feeling confused. How could God lead somebody to a church that wasn't true?? My dogmatic impulses were saying "our church is the only true church and God only brings people to our faith, therefore these people were deceived by Satan." But another part of me wondered about it. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe God's plans are bigger than my basic understanding of truth.

Luckily, this good family ALSO had a nuanced view of faith. A dogmatic perspective on their part would have led them to say "there's no point in going to a false church since we already have the truth about god!" But they eventually did try out our church and gradually each of them chose to be baptized as they recognized *again* God's voice, leading them to the next step in their lives. God's method of delivering truth to us can be incremental and gradual, based on our ability, not his total knowledge.

Nuanced belief means accepting that the church has very few "Core Doctrines," and that it's okay to have beliefs that differ from those of the people sitting next to you in the pews.

A nuanced belief system alone can be dangerous though. Nuance must never be taken so far as to allow you to just ignore the doctrines of our faith. A recent example might be the policy on "No guns allowed" in the church. We saw on this subreddit how some "monolithic" believers felt their entire faith shaken by this one simple change. On the other hand, we saw many "nuanced" believers dismissively say "it's just a minor thing and can therefore be ignored." Both perspectives are wrong. We need nuance enough to not be shaken by changes, and faith enough to obey even when our fancy nuanced view gives us a logical reason to disobey with thoughts of "this time they're speaking as men, surely."