Episode 201 (Transcript): What About Certainty? | What About Conscience?

Episode Transcript

Many thanks to listener, Sarah Thomas, for her work in transcribing this episode!

This episode can be found on any podcast app, or can be listened to here on Substack. All the notes and resources we cited are found at this link as well:

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SH: Hello, I'm Susan Hinckley.

CW: And I am Cynthia Winward.

SH: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things. And the title of today's episode is What About Certainty? What About Conscience? We're going to talk about both today, Cynthia. We couldn't choose one. We're going to weave those two things together and have a conversation about it.

CW: Well, and people might be thinking, how are they even tied together? So stay tuned. We're going to dive in.

SH: Now let's just think for a minute. Why would a Latter-day Saint podcast feel like they needed to talk about certainty?

CW: I don't know. I don't know. (Total sarcasm people!)

SH: I'm pretty sure when they hear your evil laugh, they know our sarcasm.

CW: What's interesting is this episode–which I think was your idea–but I was like, “Oh, no, I'm sure we've had lots of episodes called this”. Because I feel like we talk about certainty all the time here and there, but we actually never have had it be the title and the main subject. So, I'm excited.

SH: High time that we did.

CW: Yeah. So go for it, Susan.

SH: Well, how this conversation came about is that you and I were having a conversation one day–as we are wont to do–of something that David French had written in the New York Times. We both have come to really enjoy his opinion pieces that happen regularly there.

And so, we had both read the same piece, and then that one had a link to another piece. We read that piece as we talked through those two pieces and let them talk to each other. The interplay between the ideas in them exposed what we felt was a podcast conversation waiting to be recorded. So this is that conversation.

And the first piece that we were looking at was one in which David French describes being attacked from both sides. And he is a political columnist—wouldn't you say mostly political columnist for them? He writes about all kinds of things.

CW: But religion is where, I've loved his columns because he came from a high-demand religion too. But yeah, it all ties together.

SH: He was talking about politics being attacked from both sides. Neither side likes him, and I think it's because he's been on a journey, right? So he's kind of switched from one side to another. So he gets attacked from both sides and he was talking about how that actually has been really helpful for him in changing his perspective for the better.

He feels like he's better. He's a better thinker. He's a better writer. Everything is a result of the criticism that he gets from both sides.

And you and I sometimes say that we know we're getting it right with this podcast when we get hate mail from both sides. And we're not talking about politics. We're talking about church when we say that, but I mean, it's probably the same thing. It's kind of a good place to be - being in the middle is a good place to be when you're talking about ideas and trying to get some distance on them, right? Zooming out.

In this piece, he explains the problems with what he calls a monoculture. Of course, we will link to these articles in our show notes, so I would encourage our listeners to read them for themselves.

The place I want to start is with this quote. He said, “It's a fact of human nature that when like-minded people gather, they tend to become more extreme. This concept, called the Law of Group Polarization, applies across ideological and institutional lines.”

In other words, as I have described it about a hundred times on this podcast, the boundary shrinks toward the middle. And this really could be, as I think about it, how certainty has kind of become the hallmark of Latter-day Saints.

Right? It's that I know the church is true. I know that Joseph Smith was a prophet. I know that we're [00:05:00] led by a prophet on the other side—all of the “I knows” of being a Latter-day Saint. And pretty much everything exists in that category. Don't you think? Because when you're in a church that you would characterize as the True, capital T, church, then everything becomes I know. You're dealing in absolutes.

CW: I'm really glad that we are tackling this topic of certainty in this season where we are talking about zooming out. Because obviously, David French is not writing from a Latter-day Saint perspective, but I love his perspective, and it sounds so much like both of our own experiences in Mormonism, that I just think, this is what humans do.

And as soon as you read that quote “As soon as like-minded people gather together, we become more extreme”, it reminded me of that phrase, mob mentality. That's exactly what I feel like he's describing. That's just human nature.

If you get enough people together and everyone is chanting the same thing, pretty soon, literally everyone in the group will be chanting the same thing and saying, “Let's do something about it!” And it just goes nutso. So yeah, I'm glad we're zooming out on this because it's definitely a human problem, but I love that we are going to discuss it in the context of our own Latter-day Saint monoculture.

SH: Right. Well, I love at any time that we can sort of zoom out and connect those dots to something we're discussing as actually being a human problem. Because I feel like a lot of times as Latter-day Saints we feel like we're really special and unique in every way, right? And sometimes I like to see that actually, we're really just humans, and we're all pretty much struggling with the same thing.

So being a member of one church or another does not save you from yourself when it comes to being human. We all have the same frailties, and this is one of them. But what I feel has happened as a result of this in our church monoculture is that hope and faith and belief have coalesced into something much more extreme.