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Four years ago, when I stopped writing my blog posts, I was preparing to follow the Come, Follow Me curriculum’s focus on the History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For some, church history is a stumbling block, raising questions and doubts that lead some away from the Church and even from faith in God. Sometimes I feel guilty for not continuing the posts back then, but I feel the past four years have somehow prepared me to maybe do a better job this year to hopefully help strengthen someone’s faith, maybe rebuild or at least give renewed energy to those to keep going. Mostly, I felt compelled to write for my children. So they know the foundations of my faith and the value of finding their own path to Jesus Christ.

So, with that preamble this is a fairly lengthy post, that was a joint effort with one of my friends, that I believe sets the foundation for really exploring the miraculous and the transformative early days of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

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Faith and Doubt: Essential Tensions

For many doubt feels like the antithesis of faith something to be overcome or eradicated. This perspective often leads to spiritual practices centered on avoiding doubt as the sole way to strengthen faith. This could sometimes include avoiding questions or valid concerns, disassociating from certain friends and family members when they leave the church, or maybe blindly following the cultural norms of the church community. Searching for any intentional effort that creates a bubble of safety around our lives that blunts doubt from our lives.

While this approach may work for some, I believe its very risky for generational faith and there is a deeper, more powerful way to understand the interaction between faith and doubt: as complementary forces that work together through the principle of agency. The power that comes from engaging in this process creates an even safer environment for faith and spiritual growth because it is deep rooted to withstand the tests that can breakthrough any bubble of safety.

A quick logical examination of Faith exposes a critical fact – faith is not defined as the absence of doubt, rather it is defined by the presence of doubt which invites us to act, to choose, and to grow in the face of uncertainty, thereby exercising faith.

Agency—the power to choose—is at the heart of this process. It was central to Christ’s atoning mission and remains central to the plan of salvation. The conditions for agency to exist are critical to understanding faith and doubt:

• A choice between at least two conflicting choices.
• An understanding of the consequences of each choice.
• The freedom to act on the decision.

These conditions highlight the interplay between faith and doubt. If we have two ideas, and they both are convincing what do we do? or one is very convincing but it might make other held beliefs seem less believable? what if neither option seems right or there isn’t enough information to decide? or worse, there is no possible way to know for certain? This creates dissonance in our minds, it introduces doubt and it creates something that almost no human mind enjoys – uncertainty.

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The Role of Uncertainty in Religious Faith

Confronting uncertainty is good for faith building – it forces us to seek, learn, clarify and explain. The only thing I am 100% certain of, is that there is some portion of uncertainty tied to every person’s spiritual life at some level. How we deal with that uncertainty, especially in relation to God, deeply affects our overall well-being and happiness. I can’t emphasize enough that our response to uncertainty is one of the keys to happiness and faith.

B.H. Roberts, in Defense of the Faith and the Saints, wrote:

“As to the matter of attaining certainty in human affairs, that is not to be expected. Is it indeed desirable? ‘Know ye not that we walk by faith and not by sight?’ … Is not this very doubt of ours concerning the finality of things—finality which ever seems to elude our grasp—the means of our education? What mere automatons would we become if we found truth machine-made and limited, that is to say, finite, instead of being as we now find it, infinite and elusive, and attainable only as we beat it out on the anvil of our own experiences?”

Our first inclination, when faced with uncertainty, is to try and remove uncertainty from the equation. There are two primary tools at our disposal — a scientific approach which focuses on objective observable evidence, logical reasoning, interpretation of records and data to examine history; and religious frameworks and systems like studying scriptures, praying, meditating, attending church services, following teachings and serving others with the goal of providing individual spiritual evidences.

Both approaches have real value and limitations.

• Scientific Approach:
  • Benefits
    • Feels familiar to how we learn other things
    • Gives more information and data to back up ideas
    • Allows for a less emotionally biased approach
    • There are many experts to learn from, thousands of years of data, records, and thoughts to pull from
    • If proven fully it can remove uncertainty completely
  • Limitations
    • Requires a lot of work
    • Requires critically examining sources and experts
    • History is mostly “he said, she said” and it is difficult to find consensus even within experts
    • Religion is tied to living life and life is messy, uniquely different for each person and therefore hard to quantify and scientifically study
• Religious Framework
  • Benefits
    • Fits better with the life is messy standpoint because it is experienced individually and can be custom fit to each person and their life
    • The source is your own experiences which likely mean so much more
    • Testing within a religious framework is oriented toward doing good and so the effects are good regardless of the removal of uncertainty
    • There many experts to learn from with thousands of years of records, thoughts, experiences to pull from when engaging with the framework.
  • Limitations
    • Requires even more work than the scientific approach
    • It is difficult to quantify, observe or demonstrate results across everyone who engages in the framework to outsiders
    • It is difficult to find consensus among experts
    • Even when proven successful it is sometimes only for one individual and it likely will only lessens uncertainty temporarily.

It can feel frustrating that neither approach is perfect or that both approaches combined still have limitations. My primary point, however, is this should not be seen as unexpected when viewed in the context of faith as a continuous lifetime of choices and learning. Uncertainty needs to be a component in our spiritual journey, it drives questions, thoughts, and choices and so it will be forever our constant companion, although potentially lessened as we have more spiritual experiences.

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Restored Gospel Framework

I believe the best Religious Framework available for building faith is the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ. I think it does the best job of anything I’ve ever encountered in turning the struggle with uncertainty into personal growth. Most of the happiness and well-being, or joy, I feel in life comes from principles that do not come naturally to me and were specifically introduced to me by the Restored Gospel, so it’s very valuable to me. It has made me a better person, as Christ promised that it would help us become like Him. When I compare my experience to most of the frameworks around me I see trends of dealing with the conflicts of life that are disturbing – increased depression, loneliness, hopelessness, stagnation and overall angst – it is very simple for me to conclude that the Restored Gospel’s framework for dealing with uncertainty is so much more beneficial to my life and the life of those I know.

So, before we can discuss some of the difficulties faced when studying Church History or engaging with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it is important to define the Restored Gospel’s Framework. It seems like it would be easy to do this, but it isn’t easy at all primarily because of one of the most important features of the Restored Gospel is an open and changing theology.

Understanding and engaging with theology (a set of defined beliefs and practices) has been difficult for thousands of years for many reasons, but I like to simplify it down to two options in distributing theology to human beings to illustrate the dilemma:

• Option 1: You can have a very rigid and defined set of beliefs and rules which would theoretically be easier and more successful for people to follow – but people and society evolve and those rules either become impractical and irrelevant leading to the need to change them…
• Option 2: You can have an open and changing set of beliefs and rules that can be molded over time to fit society and benefit them more fully – but without structure and order people evolve into chaos and frustration leading to the need to have more defined rules…..

One of Joseph Smith’s greatest strengths was that he recognized this dilemma and with the help of God he helped bring an Option 3. The Restored Gospel is an open theology with ongoing changes, but it is founded on a set of principles (frameworks) that are defined so there is enough structure and organization to keep it all together. However, this does not make it a perfect system because with millions of people there will be varying personalities which prefer defined rules, or evolving changes which makes deploying theology universally difficult.

As an illustration and a declaration of my testimony I am going to define the Restored Gospel framework that I have built my testimony and faith upon:

• Everyone on this Earth is a Child of Heavenly Parents
  • If we are here then God loves us and wants us to come home. Every. Single. Person. That is the goal.
• We are Here to Learn How to be like God
  • Agency was so important to God that Christ’s plan and infinite sacrifice was for the express purpose of maintaining our ability to choose and learn so we can inherit all God has.
• Jesus Christ is Our Pattern and Redeemer
  • Christ is one of the few “experts” we can follow with full certainty and his atonement for sin, his resurrection from the dead, and his power to change us gives us something to build the foundation of our faith upon.
• Covenants and Ordinances are Necessary for Us
  • Human beings need commitment and structure to succeed. Since part of God’s plan is for us to help each other in this world of conflict, Covenants and Ordinances that create a structure and a commitment are not only important that are necessary.
• Our Relationships are Eternal
  • Without this component of the framework the rest of it would be meaningless. This is the value proposition of the Restored Gospel – to experience joy with our relationships forever.
• God Has and Will Help and Guide Us
  • Prophets – Scriptures, Journals, General Conference, and sermons give us expert guides
  • Personal Revelation – God will send the Holy Ghost to guide us personally
  • Angels – We have friends, families, mentors and even heavenly angels who us and we help each other in this life – inspired by God to help.

These principles are each key revelations of the Restored Gospel, and even if our understanding of them continues to evolve, their fixtures as the pillars of our framework gives us something to build our faith upon. You or others may define them differently, but I think they will resonate with you as familiar. The reason I describe them the way I do is because I believe this helps center us in our relationship with others (loving God and our neighbor) in a way that changes us and allows us to live a more focused and fulfilling life. There is something powerful that is introduced to our souls when we are aligned with this framework, it is more than just learning a new skill, it is truly a reformation of ourselves into something better.

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The Shortcut to Certainty – A Warning!

In basic philosophy the main methods people use to discover the truths of our reality are: reason, sensory experience, intuition, authority/perceived experts, and trial and error (scientific method). I will add the Holy Ghost to the list as the scriptures tell us the Holy Ghost was sent to us to help guide us to all truth. I think He does that by amplifying the effectiveness of every method on the list rather than His influence being a separate sense. It is also important to note that the scientific approach and the religious framework both use those methods listed above. 

What you’ll notice is that authority/perceived experts is the only non-individual item of the methods. The other methods are arguably first-person which would probably cause most people to rank them as generally more reliable depending on their level of cynicism and confidence in their own abilities. However, if you can find the right expert, there’s almost no faster way to find truth.

We do this all the time in the name of “Science” when we take expert studies and consensus to define our knowledge of a given subject or answer to a question. While theories and answers do evolve over time, generally it is easier and more reliable to rely upon those experts for information. Of course, experts can be wrong, or we can rely on the wrong experts and so it is still not a full-proof way of even knowing scientific fact.

Likewise, it would be amazingly quick for some perfect expert about God or religion to just give us all the answers. And with perfect faith in that expert, we would have amazing confidence to know exactly what we should be doing every moment in order to accomplish our purposes in life. This idea leads to a very tempting and yet completely false idea: that Prophets and Leaders of the Church are the shortcut to certainty.

I am confident that if I asked 1,000 people if the leaders of the church, including President Nelson, were right 100% of the time I would get 1,000 of the same response that they are not always right. We all know leaders of the church are not perfect, yet we need experts, guides and mentors to help us and to preserve the theology for generations. God likely knows that many people are by nature a little lazy and so having authority figures also gets more people moving the right direction in hopes they catch their own personal fire as well. Additionally, because our greatest spiritual growth comes from struggling with uncertainty and turning to God for our own experiences, having imperfect authorities actually makes a ton of sense.  

Just take the scriptures and Church History for instance. The prophets and saints of old have experiences that are all incredibly different, their actions different, their responses different, sometimes it seems God’s responses are different. Why not just one consistent pattern? one consistent cure-all or lists of things to do? We are all here to learn from within the life circumstances in which we face, which vary wildly from person to person and so we need many different experts, stories, teachings, and experiences to pull from to find guidance that can help us.

While I believe that it is likely safer than most options to use the complete reliance on church leaders as a shortcut to certainty, which could produce good results most of the time, religious practice becomes very dogmatic when we are only relying on authority with no confirming effort. Blindly relying on what any authority, especially including Church leaders, says without engaging in the effortful struggle to confirm and practically apply that information doesn’t lead to growth. It leads to the accumulation of perceived facts, which may be true and may be false. This is the definition of building your foundation on sand. The rock in that parable isn’t an inspired leader, the rock is revelation. A person can’t live on borrowed light, faith gets weak and eventually that person is just a shell of other people’s thoughts and opinions. When those ideas are challenged with no personal foundation, they are easily swept aside and crumble which can be seen as a pattern for thousands of years.

We have always been counseled to find our own personal revelation that confirms authoritative guidance from Church Leaders. Utilizing both pathways of communication (an organized and exclusive priesthood authority together with personal experience-driven revelation) is necessary to diversify, confirm, and fill gaps in our understanding. Either channel, on its own, has a tendency to become distorted due to our imperfections and the imperfections of others which are an inescapable part of mortality. 

The effort to deal with the conflict between personal revelation and Church theology is extremely difficult as it introduces a lot of uncertainty. However, it is my strong belief that going through that conflict with patience will produce the best outcome. It requires grace, forgiveness, and patience for others and ourselves which are foundational concepts in Christ’s ministry and gospel. Intellectual pride is the antithesis to Jesus’s gospel and the only real way to remove it in a religious setting is to create a need and a void of certainty so we maintain faith and humility in our actions. If we get too certain, like some Mormons, and the Pharisees, then we can become lost to the need for faith, repentance, and humility. This is why uncertainty is so necessary in religious life and particularly in the engagement between Church authority and personal revelation and why we have to avoid the shortcuts to certainty.

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There is Real Value in Having an Organized Church

Here is a confession, I do not have time to vet everything Church Leaders have to say through the personal revelation process. I honestly don’t know who does, as getting personal revelation is hard work and our time devoted to spiritual discovery is limited. It is also basically impossible if there is no initial framework to build our faith upon. There is very real need for a reliable repository of information and principles like I set forth earlier in the Restored Gospel framework. Without help, practically no one would find the pathway to God’s character on their own. 

God’s work would be haphazard at best and impossible at worst without an organization. Organizational theory is easily observed in business. A thousand sole proprietors will never compete with a thousand-person well-run organization in terms of fulfilling demand for goods and services. If the sole proprietor model worked better, it would be used everywhere. But if you study any economic theory, there are principles of scale and specialization that are immutable when applying imperfect, heterogeneous actors to a specific problem. At its most fundamental level, the Church is simply an organization to serve the human race by helping as many as possible learn how to approach God. 

On a more detailed level the organization is primarily responsible for gathering, verifying, warehousing, exchanging and spreading ideas. Secondarily, the Church also provides it’s members with opportunities for practical experience. Specialization and order require a hierarchy of decision making simply for efficiency. How is new info discovered, how is it verified, how is it retained, how is it used, how is it disseminated, are all important problems the organization has to deal with. All of these problems require a large administrative effort outside of the direct effort to actually accomplish these objectives.

Taken from this light the organization of the church provides a framework to provide information, experiences, reliable mentorship, religious practice and a community to support and be supported by in an effort to help us build faith. All of these are proven to bring joy and happiness, but in addition they provide the best environment to grow and progress faith.

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Joseph Smith and Early Church History Demonstrate an Important Pattern

From my study of Joseph Smith and how things were revealed through him, I personally gravitate to what’s known as the Catalyst Theory. This basically says that he would be inspired by things he encountered in his life and would then reach out to God, to pray, to ask questions and his revelations were the result. I believe the Holy Ghost inspired him to squeeze out God’s voice from these relatively ordinary encounters with everyday things. I don’t think this approach to creativity is strange at all. If I was going to create a new temple ceremony, for example, I would likely think about all the ceremonies I was familiar with already and use those as my base and seek inspiration to reorganize or add things to accomplish whatever purpose God whispered to me. His revelations were even more effective because the people related to them and it also provides a way for revelations to evolve to fit the audience’s needs. The revelations are for the people and that is why the pattern of evolving theology is very valuable to us.

For my soul delighteth in plainness; for after this manner doth the Lord God work among the children of men. For the Lord God giveth light unto the understanding; for he speaketh unto men according to their language, unto their understanding. – 2 Nephi 31:3

One of the most faith building parts of studying Church history is to see how Joseph received these amazing revelations and had no idea what they meant at the time he received them. He didn’t know how to use them but they ended up being so valuable and applicable over time. Despite receiving the entire Book of Mormon text through his own mouth, he was hearing and reading it for the first time just like you and I once did. He journaled constant surprise, and a huge number of his subsequent revelations are simply the responses he got praying about things that he was learning by studying the Book of Mormon directly or conflicts in doctrine in the Book of Mormon presented to other books of scripture.

Joseph knew direct and personal interaction with God was the only path to resolving the uncertainties these revelations were creating. Imagine the disruption this was creating in his world and those around him. Because of this disruption, I am sure people back then were super clingy to him for a nice warm blanket of certainty. Yet he was completely fixated on helping other people learn how to have personal interactions with God (which is really the main role of a prophet if you break it down to it’s simplest form) to take himself out of the middle.

These people were experiencing the contradictions first hand, with most beginning their path with a fairly profound spiritual confirmation that caused them to go to wherever the saints were congregating at the moment. Many were quickly challenged by real world problems which obscured and confused things and some chose faith, some left, and some hated Joseph. Some repented, some didn’t. None that I’ve studied, even the disaffected people, denied their spiritual experiences, their direct interactions with God. Instead they struggled with the contradiction of Joseph’s system helping to confirm their faith, but being disenfranchised with Joseph personally.

You can see them start interpreting the meaning of their interactions with God differently later when they had falling out with the church. Martin Harris is a good example, if you look at his actions or any of the disaffected witnesses to the Book of Mormon, none of them denied their own revelations, but most thought Joseph lost his way. In my opinion, these actions clearly line up with people receiving a powerful witness and mistaking it for certainty, then struggling when life exposed their uncertainty. They were then left to reconcile their amazing revelatory experiences in the face of contradicting information and emotional circumstances of real life or Joseph’s glaring imperfections. We all have experiences like this.

Critics and Emotions

This is why emotions, not uncertainty, are at the core of critical attacks on any faith system. Particularly feelings of betrayal. Uncertainty only creates a choice for us to study and evaluate. Betrayal and other emotions, on the other hand, create a distrust of people and institutions. This distrust is just a disguised way of seeking the comfort of certainty. Certainty that the person is a fraud, certainty that the institution has lied to us, certainty that our spiritual experiences weren’t real. Critics who are certain of their attacks are often operating under the same blindness to the value of uncertainty as members of the church who ignore uncertainty in their lives of fidelity to the Church. When people ask me how I decide to trust a source the simple rule I have is if it’s goal is to manipulate an emotion in me then I view it with skepticism. If it is giving me honest feelings, a choice to learn, grow and act then I believe it is worth investigating. This is true for friends, politicians, church leaders, journalists, experts, or anyone.

I have studied a lot of information and material that is critical of faith, particularly anti-Mormon material, and I estimate that close to 80% of it is either blatant falsehoods, or it is designed to make us feel emotions of betrayal and to make us feel stupid for believing anything “that is crazy.” This leaves the remaining 20% of information that raise legitimate questions and require extensive research and even then experts can still disagree.

You can tear someone down in two sentences, but to to build a defense takes a hundred pages. This is why social media with short snippets of information and emotion create such motivated and devout followers. This happens in politics, religion, societal debates, friend groups, and even food choices! This underpins a very critical thing to understand: critics of faith use emotion because it is effective to make someone feel stupid or betrayed. It is so easy to accept the expectation underlying their arguments that you should be able to resolve all major faith questions in some definitive way to create certainty and do it in a moments notice. This need for certainty is a drug, we want to be told something quickly, accept it, and move on to something else. There is nothing, and I repeat, nothing more comforting than certainty and our desire for comfort can make us susceptible to the emotions at the heart of attacks on faith.

The reality is that if we allow for uncertainty as a feature in our faith we are able to deal with the contradictions, confusions, and conflicts that are found in all faith journeys. This allows room in our hearts and minds for the patience, grace, forgiveness, and mercy Christ encouraged us to have as we live our lives in faith. This openness allows for inspiration from the Holy Ghost to help us overcome the fears and worries and give us the motivation to act in faith.

Personal Experience with Uncertainty and Spiritual Experiences

This is an excerpt from some of my writings :

One thing that I was very nervous about early on in my mission was the fact that I had never prayed to know the Book of Mormon was true, nor that Joseph Smith was really a prophet and received an answer. The Sunday after I arrived in the field, I fasted to know the truth, and even though I believed it was true, I didn’t feel I had ever had a spiritual experience to confirm it. A few days passed, and I still had not received an answer. One evening, Elder Boone and I had a teaching appointment with a family he had been working with for a while, the Woodward’s, for the third discussion, which was about the restoration of the true church. The Woodward’s were a family who had friends in the local church, and Mr. Woodward was an atheist, while Mrs. Woodward was Protestant. The couple was investigating the church, and it was the first time that Mr. Woodward was considering God at all. That night, we arrived at their house for our last appointment of the day. We had already done a full day’s work and were tired, but we were also excited because Cory had been so receptive to the gospel message so far. We knew that tonight’s discussion would be a turning point, and that we would face some tough questions and probably have a very interesting discussion.

During my teaching of the discussion, I was explaining the experience Joseph Smith had in deciding on which church to join, and how he was told to join none. Paula interrupted me and abruptly asked, “How do you know Joseph Smith was a prophet?” I was sort of stunned, and I paused. I thought in my head that I needed an answer, and I began to speak. I spoke about Jesus Christ, and how some people thought he was a heretic and persecuted him, too. I said a lot of things, but I don’t remember many of them. What I do remember was that I had never before, and have never since, felt the spirit as I was feeling it while I was teaching. Cory was crying very hard, and I too was very emotional. It was a feeling of joy, an overwhelming feeling of heat and energy pulsing through my body. Almost like I could feel my heartbeat while the energy in my body was spreading through the room. I knew it was an answer to my prayers.

Because almost all spiritual experiences seem to fade quickly in spiritual memory, I am glad I wrote about it in my journal, and when I read it today, I am completely taken back to how striking that confirmation was.
But what’s interesting, as I think about what keeps me grounded when confronted with the particular uncertainty surrounding Joseph Smith, is I don’t often rely heavily on that experience. As powerful as it was at that time to remove my hesitancy in teaching as a missionary, it isn’t something I reflect frequently upon. It also wasn’t enough to keep me always faithful and believing in the years that followed.

What does keep me going is that outside of that experience, when I choose to have faith and act in line with the Restored Gospel Framework I notice hundreds, if not thousands of seemingly small instances of divine help, intuition, inspirations, and insights that have come in the process of testing my faith through action. My initial experience together with this long history of faithful practice leave me to wrestle with uncertainty like anyone else, but with overwhelming personal evidence, I’m puzzling it out from the faithful side of presumption. I endeavor to figure out how difficult information I churn through lines up with the subjective spiritual conclusions I’ve already received which has allowed dozens of breakthroughs for my own personal revelations regarding very difficult topics and uncertainties.

Conclusion

Finally, as we dig into the study of Church History for 2025 it is important to remember that most questions aren’t intended to be knowable in mortality. If definitive answers were attainable, anyone presented with this evidence who chose not to believe would be condemned and people would be placed under a system of “force” created by that environment. God doesn’t force us to believe. My strongest conviction is that every ounce of energy pushing us toward God needs to come from within us, completely driven by our own will and choices. This push is what moves us to action in our journey, an leads us to definitive spiritual truths, the real fruits of laboring in a faithful way and those blessings are found during the journey, often in unexpected moments, but when we receive them we should cherish them and continue forward on our journeys.

I am thankful to God for being merciful to me in my moments of weakness, coming to me when I never deserved it, and redeeming me despite my constant wandering. I am devoted to God and to Jesus Christ and I have made my choice to believe and to follow and to act. I know those choices have led to the best and happiest parts of my life and I am confident that is true for all who choose to follow Jesus Christ, even if it doesn’t include the comfort of certainty.

Sources

Talk by J Reuben Clark – https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V12N02_70.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjsiaGtw_fqAhVWYs0KHRWXCFwQFjAAegQIARAB&usg=AOvVaw1PeJmCXqjp9vQH0ZSqg8fY&cshid=1596200294331

Truman Madsen Talk – https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/truman-g-madsen/know/

Jared Halverson Podcast – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jared-halverson-giving-people-the-benefit-of-their-doubts/id1439975046?i=1000489822361

Sources for 2025 Study

• Making Sense of the Doctrine and Covenants – Harper
• Religion of a Different Color – Reeve
• Rough Stone Rolling – Bushman
• Opening the Heavens – BYU Studies
• The Doctrine and Covenants Made Harder – Faulconer
• At the Pulpit: 185 years of Discourses from Latter-day Saint Women

• Church History Publications
• Chronology of Texts in the Modern Edition of the Doctrine and Covenants
• Joseph Smith’s Revelations: A Doctrine and Covenants Study Companion from the Joseph Smith Papers
• Doctrine and Covenants, Historical Resources
• Revelations in Context