Episode 201: What About Certainty? | What About Conscience?

David French wrote, “We live in an age of misplaced certainty, when even the smallest expressions of doubt or the slightest of disagreements break institutions and fracture families." In Episode 201, Cynthia and Susan take on certainty as it contributes to the development of a Church monoculture. Is there room for existential or intellectual humility in a True church? And as members of an organization built around checklists and worthiness assessments, can Latter-day Saints allow individual conscience to function as a holy disruptor?

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Notes & Quotes:

I Don’t Want to Live in a Nonoculture, and Neither Do You, by David French, New York Times, 10/20/2024
Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence, by Diana Butler Bass
Pope Francis is Turning Certainty on its Head, by David French, New York Times, 9/19/2024
Pope in multi-faith Singapore says ‘all religions are a path to God’, Crux: Taking the Catholic Pulse, by Elise Ann Allen, 9/13/2024
The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our "Correct" Beliefs, by Peter Enns

“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.” —David French

“In my experience, the more ideologically or theologically ‘pure’ an institution becomes, the more wrong it is likely to be, especially if it takes on a difficult or complex task. Ideological monocultures aren’t just bad for the minority that’s silenced, harassed or canceled whenever its members raise their voices in dissent. It’s terrible for the confident majority — and for the confident majority’s cause.” —David French

“…the point was that she [the professor lecturing] complicated my view of faith and history. Complications challenge certainty. You do not have to go to graduate school to know that. We live in a complex world where, at any given moment, a sound bite or tweet from the other side of the planet can make you stop in your tracks and reconsider what you believe.” —Diana Butler Bass

“…..I learned that faith must be cloaked in humility and open to honest criticism about where the church had gone wrong. (That’s the existential humility!) As a historian, I experienced a kind of graciousness that arises from knowing that, in a century or two, we too will probably be shown to have contributed to some great injustice or really stupid idea that is invisible to us now.” —Diana Butler Bass

“Pope Francis wasn’t watering down the Christian faith; he was expressing existential humility. He was unwilling to state, definitively, the mind of God and to pass judgment on the souls of others. His words were surprising not because they were heretical in any way, but rather because existential humility contradicts the fundamentalist spirit of much of contemporary American Christianity. His words were less a declaration of truth than an invitation to introspection, a call to examine your conscience.” —David French

“We live in an age of misplaced certainty, when even the smallest expressions of doubt or the slightest of disagreements break institutions and fracture families.” —David French

 “The fundamentalist mind is largely free of doubt. It presumes to know the mind of God not just on the core elements of the faith — the life, death and resurrection of Jesus — but on virtually all matters that touch on Christian faith. Fundamentalists believe they know exactly how God wants you to vote, to raise your kids, and even which movies and television programs he wants you to watch.” —David French

“When trusting God is central–even just the simple act of trying to trust him when we might not feel like it–we are walking a holy path.  When we learn that it is okay to let go of the need to be right–that God is not going to pounce on us from behind the corner and give us a whipping but actually welcomes this step of faith–only then will the debilitating stress of holding on to correct thinking begin to fade. Then we are giving control over to God, which is a more secure place for faith to rest than on the whims and moods of our own thinking.” —Peter Enns

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