Episode 250 (Transcript): What About Sin?
Episode Transcript
Many thanks to listener Ginger Hyde for her work in transcribing this episode!
This episode can be found on any podcast app or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:
Episode 250 (Transcript): What About Sin?
CW: But what Peter said about learning and growth made him a kinder person. I think that brings us back to, if that’s the whole purpose–for us to be more like Jesus, for us to become kinder–then isn’t it ultimately okay when we mess up?
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 Sin? Let’s talk about sin, Cynthia. That sounds fun!
CW: Yay. Yay.
SH: Yay. Waa, waa, waa.
CW: Exactly. I know. I was trying to think of a more clever title. I noticed you didn’t think of a more clever title either, so we’re just saying what it is. It is what it is, and we’re talking about sin today.
SH: Yes, exactly.
CW: So, sorry about that, listeners. We’re just jumping right in with how icky the topic could be. But I do think in a season where our theme is Big Ideas, I’m glad that we’re tackling this topic, actually. I really can’t think of a topic that’s bigger for Latter-day Saints.
SH: I mean, in Christianity generally
CW: Okay.
SH: I mean, sin is pretty big, right?
CW: Sin is pretty big. You’re right. And we are no different. Because we interview children; we interview youth and adults to assess our worthiness all throughout our lives. ALL throughout our lives. And if you’re in one of those interviews and it happens to dredge up some sins, we have consequences for those sins–all the way from not allowing someone to take the sacrament to holding a meeting where that “sinner’s” membership can be revoked.
SH: Right
CW: And I don’t care if we call it membership withdrawal now, instead of calling it excommunication. Both are very spiritually violent.
SH: Right
CW: So, this is big. This is a really big topic for sin. But I think in order to take it from a really small idea, which, spoiler, I think we make sin to be. I think the way we tackle sin is so small minded. I think you and I wanted to really dig deep on even the definition of sin so that we could make it a bigger idea.
SH: It’s interesting. As you say that, I’m thinking in my own life–it’s kind of worked the opposite. Like sin was a really big thing for so much of my life. And now the older I get, it’s like it’s not a capital S word anymore. It’s a small S word. So I guess we’re going to get to that as we talk about it today.
CW: Well, let’s get to it then.
SH: All right. We put out a call for voicemails a while ago and asked listeners to talk to us about sin because we wanted to know how the idea of it was changing for people on their own journeys. Because I had this hunch that if this concept has changed a lot for me–I’m not that special–it’s probably changing for a lot of people. So, just as a reminder, some of the things that we put out to get people thinking: How has the concept of sin played into your spiritual life? Where did your ideas about it come from and how have those ideas impacted you and your faith? Has your thinking around sin changed? Have you reframed it entirely? Because I kind of have, actually. And so I’m going to talk about a few of those points for myself to start.
CW: Go for it.
SH: The concept of sin figured really prominently in my whole LDS life. And it started for me–it really rose to the fore–with being racked as a teen over a few minor missteps in my early dating relationships.
I mean–young. I was a young teen when these things happened and it’s like the morality lessons that I had been hearing in Young Women’s really did their dirty work, Cynthia. I think they worked on me exactly the way that they were supposed to because I was completely obsessed with my own sinfulness. I really was. You know those scriptures where it talks about, “I was so wracked and harrowed up in my soul”? That was me! Really. It really was. And I didn’t think there was any possible way that I could ever be clean from those sins. I just really thought, “Oh, great, I’ve ruined my entire life and I can’t even drive a car yet!”
So it makes me really sad to think about now, but I can also laugh about it a little bit because teenage girls are really dramatic. But this is one of the ways that my drama manifested: I really thought I was the worst sinner in the history of sins, and my infractions weren’t even that [00:05:00] big!
We’re talking about pretty silly things here. But anyway, here’s where the rubber hit the road for me: Because I was so convinced of my own sinfulness, it’s not an exaggeration to say that my inability to forgive myself for those things drove a lot of the major life decisions that I started making at 18.
CW: Yeah
SH: So even though those decisions resulted in great choices–it brought me a happy life, right? I love the life I’ve built! It’s pretty sobering to me when I think that I was there constructing a whole life of penance for myself while I was still a teenager. I mean, that’s wild when I think about it.
CW: Okay, so we’ve already entered the big ideas part of this episode because that’s huge, Susan. That’s huge. And I’m so sorry, and I wish I could go back and give your little whatever you were, 13, 14, 15-year-old self, a hug and of course give her the motherly talk. “You are fine and whole and worthy and amazing right now!”
SH: I’ve tried to do that for myself. I’ve tried to go back and give that little girl those hugs and I really feel like I do see it so much more clearly now, even understanding why I made the decisions I made and all those things. Even though it’s sobering to look back at, there’s a lot of power in understanding it, right?
And so I feel like a lot of those things have been healed. I’ve healed myself on a lot of those things, but that’s taken a lot of work. I’m 62 years old, Cynthia. It took a long time for me to get to that place.
You and I heard Richard Rohr talk recently about this. It was about the larger church’s obsession with “body-centered sins” is how he described it. And I really did internalize those kinds of sins as being the worst possible failures. And he’s not just talking about sex. I think he’s talking about anything that really centers on the body. When I think about it, I think, well, this is why the Word of Wisdom gets way too much attention from Mormons–because it’s a body-centered sin, right?
Richard Rohr says in his book, Dancing Standing Still, which you and I have just both finished reading, he says this: “People can’t go to communion if they are in a second marriage or openly gay, but they can go to communion all they want if they are multimillionaires in a world of poor people. You begin to see that we are cafeteria Christians picking and choosing what we are ready to hear. If you look closely, you will see that the things we emphasize as truly sinful are usually body-based, and the things we pick as absolutely essential are those that tie us to dependence upon the clergy. Notice how different this selective morality is from the radical morality of Jesus.”
CW: I remember when you read that, Susan. You started texting me and I’m like, “I’m not there yet in the book. Hold on!” So you and I were like, “Okay, well we’re going to have a talk about this on the microphones for sure.”
SH: Yeah
CW: Wow
SH: Well, I mean, can I just say worthiness interviews, right? I mean, that’s exactly what that’s talking about. These essential things that tie us to dependence upon the clergy. Hello, temple recommend interview. I’m looking at you.
But even after many years, decades, Cynthia, of getting all the body sins right, I found myself still obsessing over little things like missing a month of visiting teaching. I was racked with it. Or not prioritizing scripture reading. I’d go to stake conference and hear a talk about it and suddenly I’m just racked with guilt because I don’t read the scriptures. Well, sure, I’ve got three little kids and, you know, all the things. It wasn’t a time in my life, maybe, to be immersing myself in scriptures.
There are different times and seasons, but I realized that guilt was the emotion that I most often experienced as a member of the church. That’s specific to me. I remember at the time having a conversation with a friend after that stake conference. This is a real stake conference I’m talking about where I said, “I’m so tired of being made to feel guilty about everything at church.”
And she said to me, “I never feel guilty at church.” That’s interesting because we had been on very different life paths in our younger years and she had, in her history, some of what people would consider the biggest sins.
CW: That is really fascinating.
SH: Yeah. She never felt guilty. And I always felt guilty. And so this is a very individual thing, but I think that it really goes to our mindset about sin.
CW: Yeah, it does.
SH: And this tells a lot about how I internalized those teachings and how they worked in my life–not in a good way. And if you kind of zoom out from it, the macro effect was something I’ve talked about a lot on this mic, which is my assumption that my inability to fit was because I was somehow defective, right? I was fundamentally less [00:10:00] worthy than everyone else in the room. And that’s really tragic because the effect of all of the guilt that I experienced around church was that I basically missed the entire point of all of it. No wonder my religion failed to give me peace. Because I didn’t realize that being perfect wasn’t what I was here to do: learning was.
And I think this also goes back to the growth mindset versus fixed mindset thing we’ve talked about. I’m a person with a tendency to be fixed mindset. I don’t know how to value making mistakes. But then along comes a teacher like Richard Rohr and explains it to me, and it begins to change everything.
Richard Rohr says “Darkness, failure, relapse, woundedness, backtracking are the primary teachers in the spiritual life. Not doing it right seems to teach us much more than doing it perfectly.”
CW: Ding, ding, ding.
SH: Did you ever hear that message at church?
CW: Never, never, never. And it’s interesting because even as you’ve been talking for the last few minutes, I’ve been thinking about, as someone who’s 52 years old, thinking about the arc of how we talk about perfection in the church. And I feel like we’ve moved to softer perfection now, which is, you’re not going to be perfect in this life. That’ll happen later, but . . . duh duh duh duh duh.
So I feel like before, we used to focus a lot more on perfection. I feel like we then saw the fruits of that, which are kind of what you’ve just been talking about the last few minutes, like this incredible self-flagellation about this. And so now we’ve moved to a softer perfection . . . That’s for later! That’s for later. But we just can’t quite let go of it. And so I feel like that quote you just read by Richard Rohr, he’s trampling any idea of perfection. And so no, I have never heard anything like that in church and I don’t know that I ever will.
SH: I agree that it’s getting better. I think the softer perfection idea is real. I’m thinking specifically of a talk by Elder Holland
CW: Yes, yes
SH: That I taught a Relief Society lesson on, right? And so I think they are maybe trying to tweak this messaging a little bit. But I mean, the damage is done for people of my generation. It’s already all in there. The programming’s in there and it can be really hard to move on from that.
Richard Rohr in Dancing Standing Still also writes this, “You know, this church is harder and harder for me to understand. You claim to have the perfect medicine: the healing power to restore and renew hearts and souls. But you also seem to be saying, make sure you don’t really need it, because if you really need it, you are less than an ideal member. Forgiveness, reconciliation, compassion and healing are mere concessions to the unfortunate instead of the very path of salvation itself. But in fact, they are the very nature of God.”
So figuring out for me that being human is the work of earth life–like remodeling my most basic ideas about sin and about myself in relationship to God, and understanding that God actually loves me–changed my ideas and cleared the way for me to finally experience a relationship with God. But I mean, that was decades and decades into my life as a church member, right? And I think that that’s why, because I really did internalize that. Make sure you don’t really need the atonement! Because if you really need it, then you’re sunk.
CW: It’s always better if you don’t need it.
SH: It’s better if you don’t need it.
CW: Whether we literally use those words or not, I think it is riddled throughout our lessons and talks and sermons, and I don’t know how anybody could argue otherwise, because like you said I’ve never heard anyone in church say not doing it right seems to teach us more than doing it perfectly. Never.
SH: Right. No, never. And they’re never going to, I don’t think. I don’t think that’s ever going to change, even if we soften our ideas around perfection.
CW: I want to argue with you right now and say, “Well, the arc of perfection . . Maybe we will.” But I don’t know that I have any strength to argue that because I agree with you, and that makes me sad to say.
SH: Yeah. It makes me sad too, because it’s not really the idea that I would want to raise my children with.
CW: Right
SH: Right. I’m wondering, how would my life be different if I’d come at it with the perspective of thinking “You’re here to make mistakes and learn things.” But I didn’t.
Anyway, I just have one more thought about it and that is that Brian McLaren describes how sin separates us. He says we’re not the imperfect self or the separated self. And that makes the healing of sin, not just about forgiving a list of wrongs, but about inviting us back into relationship.
The purpose of forgiveness, he says, is to restore relationship. And maybe this is why the idea of relationship is so resonant for me. You’ll notice I harp on it all the time. It’s a soapbox word for me. Because his description really represents the [00:15:00] truth of my own experience as a Latter-day Saint.
For me, reframing sin didn’t have anything to do with my behaviors. I didn’t change my thinking about sin because I wanted to start drinking coffee, right? That’s not what has happened for me. What this reframing has done is it erased the barriers that I had constructed that kept me separate from God for so long.
CW: Yeah. Yeah. I have so much to say about the relationship angle, but I’ll save some of those thoughts for a minute because I’m 100% with you–about that separation from self, that relationship that maybe gets damaged through sin.
SH: I want to hear all of your thoughts. Where do you land on some of these questions? Has sin changed for you? And if so, how has it changed?
CW: Well, I think it has changed for me, and that’s the whole reason we’re having this episode. Because like we said, we’re not that special. So my beliefs around sin have changed dramatically as well.
And I just need to echo what you were saying above about body sins, because most of what our church labels as sin has to do with anything surrounding sex–which is sad because that is a healthy and normal part of development. And so we take these cute little teenagers who are just developing and they’re just beginning to realize that they have a sexual part of their being. And then we throw at them all of the lessons on purity culture. And I just think that does so much more harm than good.
I’m going to put a pin in this, okay? Because we’re actually going to have an episode later this season with CA Larson. It’s going to come soon, hopefully in a few weeks, where we’re going to talk more about purity culture.
So, put a pin in that. What I want to focus on now for a minute are the two great commandments: loving God and loving other humans. And I want to know why aren’t we policing that sin in our church? Right now we’re seeing such brutality here in the US from our government on a government level, right? It’s a sanctioned government level. The cruelty. And yet our new president of the church, Dallin Oaks, when he was just interviewed, said this, “By all means, people should not be depressed because we are surrounded with challenges, whether they are economic or political or social. That is part of what we were put here to experience. We are optimistic because we trust the Lord and know that he loves us and he set us up to succeed, not to fail.”
I have so many feelings about this moment in time when our religious leaders are not talking about the sin of breaking those two great commandments. Like, tell the mom to be happy because that’s President Oaks’ advice. Just be happy.
Tell that to the mom in my son’s ward, whose husband, who is a stake leader, was taken by ICE and she had no way to support her large family. Tell her to be happy.
Tell that to the mom in Salt Lake City whose daughter was really sick and she was being treated by my friend who’s a nurse at a low-cost clinic. And the mom said to my friend that she can’t pay her bills because her husband was now in ICE detention in Texas. So my friend calls me up along with all of her other privileged friends and says, “Who can donate some money to this mom to keep her electricity from being turned off?” And she said, “I really hope in the end that this woman’s ward will give her some church welfare.”
So do we have a problem with sin right now? All around us with the destruction of families being separated, while other LDS families are totally fine with this cruelty? It seems that we do. And our leadership is silent about this, about the breaking of those two great commandments. I mean, I never heard Jesus talk about this body part touching this body part. But if it’s this body part touching above the belt, it’s not as bad. It’s a lesser punishment. But if it’s the body parts below your belt, well then that’s a bigger sin. I never heard him talk about that.
SH: Right
CW: But Jesus, who was this homeless preacher who said, I don’t even have a place to lay my head, who was once a refugee, he never mentioned those things, but he could not shut up about helping the poor, the hungry, the widow, the least in society. So my views on sin have changed, but I don’t think they have changed in the way the church hopes they would have changed for me. And if you can tell, I’m angry about this. I’m so angry about this. I’m so angry that we are not acting like a bunch of Jesus people right now.
SH: Amen
CW: Sorry, Susan, sorry to take it down that way, but just before you and I hit record, we were asking each other [00:20:00] how are we doing?
SH: Right. And it’s not good. The answer was “not good.”
CW: No, it’s not good. Like, all of your daughters live in Minneapolis.
SH: Yeah, they do. My whole family is there.
CW: They’re not okay.
SH: Yep
CW: They’re not okay. Things are not okay. So yeah, if we’re going to have a conversation about sin, part of me is like, I dare someone to bring this up in a lesson at church. I dare them!
SH: I can tell you it’s never happening in my ward. Never.
CW: Never. But that’s what I would do. You want to have a conversation about sin? Well, then we’re going to talk about the two great commandments because we don’t police that, but we sure police our body parts and liquids that we drink.
Well, how about we jump in and hear what our listeners, how their ideas around sin have changed?
SH: Okay. We got such great voicemails for this episode. I’m really excited about it.
CW: Well, let’s hear from Rian.
Voicemail 1: Hi Susan and Cynthia. My name is Ryan and I just wanted to share a few thoughts on sin with you.
My most recent epiphany related to sin came because of Meggan Watterson’s thoughts in her book, Mary Magdalene Revealed. She shares the idea that sin is actually a forgetting or a denial of the two core parts of ourselves, which are the divine self and the human or earthly self. And both these parts of the self are essential and sacred and are essentially the whole purpose of our coming and living a life here on earth.
We’re spiritual beings meant to have an embodied human experience. So what happens when we “sin” or when we separate or deny either of these two parts of the self in either ourselves or others? It can disrupt our relationships–our relationship with ourselves, our relationship with others, and our relationship with God.
I don’t think this is because God just can’t abide us when we forget who we are or when we don’t act as a whole divine human being or treat others as such, but because it actually prevents us from showing up in an authentic and complete way that reflects real love, which is essential for connection.
I think this understanding of sin aligns particularly well with who Jesus was, if we really believe that he was the perfect example of what it meant to be both fully God and fully human. I feel like he certainly honored both those sides of himself and the very word atonement or at-one-ment suggests a bringing together or a healing of the rift between these maybe seemingly incompatible parts into a whole, which again, is what I think heals our connection and relationships with ourselves, God and others.
SH: Preach, Rian.
CW: Wow!
SH: Why are people so much smarter than I am?
CW: I know. I was thinking that, too. I was like, “Why isn’t Rian on this episode instead of us?!” Well, I mean, she is, but you know, I want to hear more from her. But this is where Rian agrees with what you and I were just saying a few minutes ago about sin disrupting relationships. Because she said that exact phrase.
SH: Right
CW: And another book you and I both loved, we both read Francis Spufford’s book, Unapologetic, where he defines sin as, and we’ve talked about this before, the human propensity to eff things up.
SH: Right. Right.
CW: Which is just so great. Because I just think that’s exactly what Rian’s talking about and what Mary Magdalene Revealed in that book–Meggan Watterson is talking about–this disruption in relationship is because humans really do have a propensity to mess up a whole lot of things and that just all seems to align together really well with what she’s talking about.
SH: And the thing that I think about when she says that– Okay. Yes. Those early experiences with sin that I had as a kid, they didn’t really eff anything up in my life necessarily. They effed ME up. Like my relationship to myself and to God. Like really huge impacts on those things with far reaching effects–that really had very little to do with the actual sin.
CW: Yes
SH: But instead they were like, what I did with it, you know? And also like going to the bishop’s office, all of the things surrounding that time in my life, it’s like it couldn’t have gone worse. It couldn’t have been like a worse approach
CW: The perfect storm
SH: to my own sin than the approach that I took or the path that I was put on, I guess, for dealing with that. And so yeah, we eff things up in all kinds of ways. And I think sometimes the sin itself isn’t even the important part of that.
CW: Exactly
SH: Let’s hear from Mechelle.
Voicemail 2: Hi, my name is Mechelle. At age 23, my daughter got pregnant and had a baby out of wedlock. A member of my bishopric came up to me, and was kind of very straightforward and belligerent almost about it, and asked me if I had encouraged her to come talk to the bishop about what she had done.[00:25:00]
I looked at him in a very cranky way, and said no, and I left it at that and wouldn’t speak to him anymore. Well, as I sat there and fumed, I was like, I’m not sure what sin she even committed that she needs to really come talk to him about. She hasn’t been to the temple. She did not commit adultery. She hasn’t attended church since she was 16. She’s non-believing. So where did that idea come from? I’m just not sure what I’m missing. And on the other hand, our bishop, the only thing that he has said is to make sure that she’s okay and that she doesn’t need financial support from the church. Thanks for all you do.
SH: Okay. That message is so interesting to me. That totally reveals the way that different church members think about sin in the response of those two bishopric members
CW: Right
SH: And about what needs to be done about it, using air quotes there and about the primacy of those body sins that we’re talking about.
CW: Uh-huh
SH: In our ward, we had a really similar situation some years ago where the Relief Society wanted to give a shower for the girl who was expecting the baby. And the family said, absolutely not. We’re not going to reward the sin. And to me that was such a backwards way to think about it. It was like the total opposite of Jesus, because what they were doing was reinforcing the separation, rather than inviting the person back into the ward community and healing the relationship. The girl having the experience is already learning from it, right? There was no need for a well-meaning church to teach her lessons from it or to not reward her sin.
CW: Yeah
SH: But that’s the way it went in that situation.
CW: I’m really embarrassed to say that I would’ve been one of those people–and I was one of those people years ago–that was like, you don’t give somebody a party when they’ve sinned. And I’ve repented of that.
SH: I don’t think you have to be embarrassed for that. I think a lot of
CW: Well I am,
SH: Members would respond that way.
CW: I am, because I mean, come on. A mother needs new things for her baby. She needs blankets and diapers and all of those things, and so really we need to punish the baby? Anyway, I’m embarrassed by it and I see it completely differently now. And a while ago, I realized I had shifted from the idea of “God punishes us when we sin” to kind of like what you were saying, “we have consequences for our choices.” But even then, does a young man feel the same consequence to sex as a young woman?
SH: It probably depends on who his leaders are and who his family is.
CW: Well, I just mean like she’s the one who’s going to have to give birth. She’s the one who’s going to carry this baby for nine months.
SH: Right. Yeah. The bottom line consequence.
CW: Yeah, exactly. The bottom line consequence. So I feel like I still haven’t figured out a nice and tidy statement about consequences, and maybe that’s for the best because even consequences are unfairly doled out.
SH: Yeah. I don’t think there is such a thing as a nice and tidy statement about consequences. I don’t think you can draw lines around those very cleanly. And that’s part of what complicates all of it.
CW: Right. It’s just interesting for me to see, like, this is my evolution of how I’m thinking about sin: I went from God punishes us, to we have consequences for our choices to do we, though? And those consequences are surely unfairly handed out. So anyway, I don’t know where I’m landing.
SH: The other thing about consequences is you can’t always connect those dots in real time, if you see what I mean. Like sometimes consequences might come 30 years later for something that happens and so it seemed like someone was getting away with something at the time or whatever or not learning their lesson when in reality that lesson might have been working inside them all the time. It’s not for us really to know or to assess the punishment, I guess, that people deserve.
CW: Well, let’s hear from Heidi.
Voicemail 3: There is so much that infuriates me about the doctrine and the cultural attitude about sin. Hi, Cynthia and Susan. This is Heidi, and I have a lot of thoughts about sin, but there’s one point in particular–Christianity as a whole, and our church for sure–puts so much emphasis on accountability and repentance for personal sin, that there’s no energy spent on societal sins.
Our world is on fire. There’s so much poverty, violence, oppression, large-scale suffering. As followers of Christ, we’re called to liberate the oppressed, but we’re too distracted by our shame and fixation on personal failings. When the monster truck cuts me off in traffic [00:30:00] and I’m staring at his bumper stickers of assault rifles, confederate flags, female bodies pictured in violent, objectified ways, slurs against the L-G-B-T-Q community, political opponents, an entire population of non-Christians. I am filled with uncharitable assumptions about that person. And yes, I should repent for feelings of animosity and judgment toward another human being based on bumper stickers.
But if I focus solely on my shame for the sin of being judgmental, then I’m not expending any energy on fighting the societal sins of racism, misogyny, gun violence, homophobia, or xenophobia. Yes, God calls us to repent, but I think we are supposed to be repenting for all the ways that we aren’t loving each other better and creating a more just world.
CW: The two great commandments.
SH: Exactly. Her comment for me is exhibit A for what I meant about personally missing the whole point in my own life. And you know, one of the things that I get sadder and sadder about our church, and maybe this is religion in general, is the amount of self focus that it causes when I’m totally fixated on my own purity and my personal exaltation and all of those things, right?
When I’m trying to earn my way to heaven, who am I focusing on? I’m focusing on me! And it’s like you miss the whole point. When you’re doing that, you’re completely neglecting your part in the bigger picture as one of God’s children.
CW: Yes. Yes.
SH: Right? And so I’m really sad that I missed that for most of my life.
My apologies to God and to my fellow human beings for being so focused on my own purity, right? I think I mischaracterized what God cares about. I think God cares a lot less about my purity than about all of us being siblings together and working for the good of the whole family. I’m never going to forget the first time that I heard Richard Rohr talk about what I think he called institutional sins on a podcast.
And it was like, as a Mormon, I had never been asked to think about sin in that context before. That the church might have sins, that society might have sins, that I might be complicit in all of those things. My mind was blown. I know exactly where I was walking when that came through my earbuds, because I thought, “Why have I never thought about it?”
And I think in part it’s because our church is as self-obsessed as the members are. I don’t think our church is ever going to want to be anything other than pure. It’s never going to admit, it’s never going to say, I’m sorry, it’s never going to admit mistakes. It’s never going to do any of those things. I think that this self-focus and this desire for personal perfection totally manifests in the institution. They’re like shadows of each other. Same thing.
CW: I have so many things I want to say just based on what you said, but I’ll try to focus here on what Heidi said just for time purposes. But I think she captured it perfectly because she’s talking about macro sins, whereas in this church we focus on micro sins.
SH: Right
CW: And our obsession with that piety. So I guess I am talking now about what you were talking about, like, our obsession with that piety is we’re straining at gnats. You know, the scripture from Jesus, we strain at a gnat while swallowing a camel.
SH: Right
CW: Or camels, as Heidi said, because there are a lot of camels: racism, misogyny, ignoring the poor, all of those things.
And Heidi’s message reminds me of, we made a social media post while we were on break and we called it From the Archives. Well, you know, almost every day we had a post called From the Archives where we just highlighted some old things and we highlighted an old Chieko Okazaki quote that we had posted about.
And so this post was from early December, and the quote from Chieko is, “Much is expected of LDS women, but guilt is a burden they need not pick up.”
And we had the most heartbreaking comment from a woman who said, “Being told repeatedly I needed daily repentance was one of the reasons why I left. Yes, I may have snapped at my kids or cut someone off in traffic or burned my dinner, but I am a good person. And those talks and reminders to repent daily made me feel like a horrible sinner who needed to beg for forgiveness for just being human. I would spend every night on my knees crying as I tried to remember all the horrible things I had done that day I needed to repent of. I was never good enough.”
So yeah, micro sins detract us. They make us focus on, like you were just saying, ourselves.
SH: Yep
Voicemail 4: Hi, this is Miriam. Oh my goodness. Sin was a three letter word for most of my life. I got my belief from the Bible and church that God is [00:35:00] vengeful and doesn’t tolerate sin. You’ll be punished and cut off. I believed that sinners were bad and the righteous people were good, and this really caused a lot of problems in my life and became a twisted part of my judgmental perfectionism.
Coaching changed my life and my perspective on this. I don’t believe in sin or a vengeful God anymore. We’re here to learn and grow, and mistakes are part of our life and they’re normal and to be expected. There aren’t good or bad people, only people doing our best.
SH: Okay. How do you think our church culture would be different if the focus had always been, we are all just people doing our best?
CW: Oh gosh.
SH: Like, I feel like that would be an entirely different church.
CW: Yeah, it would.
SH: I don’t know. My current bishop tries really hard to strike this note in everything that he does in our ward. Like every email, every time he bears his testimony, every welcome to a meeting, anything. He always is reminding us that we’re all just people doing our best. He has a lot of different ways of saying that, but that’s the message. And I have to admit, it gets my attention every single time because I love it, but I also immediately distrust it.
CW: Ooh
SH: Every time it comes out of his mouth, I’m thinking like, really? What are you up to?
I’m working really hard on that, Cynthia. Like, I need to be willing to allow change and growth in the institution and in the culture and in the members, you know?
CW: Yeah
SH: But just because I think the church installed faulty sin software in me as a kid, doesn’t mean that I should keep resisting the updates as they occur.
But it’s hard for me because that programming runs so, so deep in me.
CW: Yeah
SH: So it’s like, I hear these expansive messages. Do I trust them?
CW: Yeah
SH: It’s hard. That’s a work in progress for me.
CW: I think that binary that Miriam was talking about of there’s good people and there’s bad people, right?
I think that does us so much harm. I mean, I’ve talked plenty on this microphone before about, I have shifted to saying, “Would this be a healthy choice for me? Or would this be an unhealthy choice for me?” Because what might be healthy for me may not be healthy for you. And so I don’t want to label that necessarily good and bad anymore if that makes sense. So, yeah. Thank you, Miriam.
SH: Let’s hear a message from Erica.
Voicemail 5: Hello, my name is Erica. There’s a right way to live and be happy. It is choosing the right every day. Wear your garments, read the scriptures, sustain the prophets, serve a mission, attend and love the temple, go to BYU, get married. Have a family. Don’t have a career, but if you do, make sure it’s family friendly. The list goes on and on.
When I looked at my life, I realized just how bone-achingly narrow the path is that I was taught to walk. If everything outside of this incredibly narrow path is sin, that doesn’t leave room for anything besides an incredibly narrow God.
And I just don’t have time for that. I want an expansive God who can love me outside of the narrow confines of that path, which makes a whole lot fewer things sin. I personally now believe that anything that harms others is sin. And anything that harms ourself is sin. And other than that, honestly, I think it all just comes out in the wash.
SH: Love that way of thinking about it. I was definitely taught to think of a narrow God who demanded a really specific set of things from us. And I think rhetoric like covenant path and iron rod and exact obedience and the least degree of allowance, all of these phrases that we have around this stuff, they continue to reinforce that kind of idea that this is a very narrow thing that we’re talking about. But that makes it really hard to focus on a big picture of love, and love for everyone! Like how can you get your arms around everyone when you’re coming at it from this extremely narrow place?
It’s impossible to approach a huge concept like love with the kind of rigidity that I internalized around sin. I think that made it literally impossible for me
CW: Yeah
SH: to look at my brothers and sisters in the world from a place of love because I learned to draw lines. That’s what I learned from church. And I think Jesus was actually trying to teach me to erase lines. I had to learn that myself. Like I had to go back into the scriptures myself and see what Jesus was doing. It’s not the representation of Jesus that I internalized from church.
CW: How hard has that been for you, Susan, to erase those lines?
SH: Really, really hard.
CW: Right?!
SH: Uhhuh. Like I said, this stuff runs so deep. It’s really hard to get that out of me. So I’m getting better at love, I feel like, but I’m not anywhere near where I want to be.
CW: The glacial pace
SH: Right?
CW: I [00:40:00] feel like I’m at a glacial pace in some of these things, because my instinct is still to draw those lines and be like, “Oh, well you messed up. You deserve this.” Oh, I hate admitting that out loud.
SH: Yeah. It’s hard, painful stuff. It really is.
CW: Yeah
SH: It really is. And honestly, I’m going to die before I make that much more progress on this, I think. Like I’m to the place in my life where I can see, oh, I don’t have that much runway left.
And I still have a lot of things to undo in my own thinking and my own approaches. Love is just something you’re going to spend a lifetime learning to do. But, I feel like I didn’t start learning to do it until I was, you know, pretty late in my life. Definitely in the second half.
CW: Same, same, same. Everything you said. So, yeah. I really like how Erica put that–that there’s this huge checklist that’s a sin or of okays and then everything outside of that is a sin. And like she said, that’s just so narrow. That is so narrow. So yeah, that’s been the work of my discipleship as well, is erasing those lines. It’s so hard.
SH: Let’s hear from Amber.
Voicemail 6: This is Amber. About a year ago I left the LDS church and my view on sins has shifted significantly. I view sins more so as choices now. Obviously there are very wrong choices–things like abuse and betrayal that absolutely need to be addressed. Instead of minor missteps being sins, I see them more as opportunities to learn.
So if I am impatient with somebody and I say something that I shouldn’t say to that person, instead of being angry at myself and punishing myself by a rules-based system that is often given to me by a religion, I take a step back. I reevaluate what it was that caused me to do that thing that wasn’t so good, and I use it as an opportunity for my own growth and for my own learning. Instead of approaching it from a rigid system that tells me what a terrible person I am because I did that thing, instead I try to approach it from a system of my own personal morality and what I can do and learn from that thing. It helps me to feel my humanity and to be more empathetic to myself and to other people.
CW: Sounds like Amber just said that Richard Rohr quote, kind of in a different way, about our mistakes being an opportunity to learn, you know?
SH: Right
CW: Sounds like she traded the rigidity that we were just talking about about those lines. It sounds like she traded it for something much healthier–that opportunity to learn. I also think as I was listening to Amber’s message, I was thinking, okay, there are two aspects of recognizing sin. I think the first is very easy for me. It’s when others sin. I see that very clearly, but I have zero control of deciding what that other person will or should do with their mistakes.
And so really, seeing my own missteps, my own sins, my own opportunities, however we wanna label that, my own propensity to eff things up is where, and I think that’s what Amber is saying, like where we have the opportunity to learn. And I’m not exactly sure how, in a healthy way, I see the missteps of others.
I probably need to let go of that. There’s still more lines to erase there, but I feel pretty confident now in dealing with my own mess ups. As it sounds like Amber is. And maybe that just comes with maturity and age and wisdom. I don’t know. What do you think?
SH: Well, and she also starts by saying that she left the church a year ago. And it sounds to me like the way that she phrased that, this is insight that has come to her, maybe came to her more easily outside the framework of
CW: Oh yeah
SH: Church activity. I don’t know. All I know is it’s been hard for me to get to, within the framework of church activity. Right? That’s been difficult because I continue to hear these other messages, but I don’t know. Her message made me think of, I had this experience where someone I was really close to really messed their life up and what was shocking to me at the time was how it knocked the ground out from under me.
But at the time, I was still decades away from being able to draw insight from that. I had to put the whole thing on the shelf for a long time. Well, I had to go to therapy first and then put the whole thing on the shelf for a long time, right? Trying to figure out why is this having this effect on me?
But after sitting with it for so many years I realized that it rocked me to my foundations because it showed me that this is the stuff that humans do. All humans, like, I’m not that special. The people I love are not that special, which meant that even I could [00:45:00] be capable of screwing up really royally, but also capable of learning and growing from huge mistakes in huge ways, right?
It helped me stop thinking of sins as stains that need to come out and think of them more like stretch marks. I have really some magnificent stretch marks on my body from bearing children, Cynthia. They’re always there. But they tell the story of growth and so I’ve come to this place where everything belongs and in order to really internalize that and believe it in my life, that has had to include mistakes.
Like we don’t become our whole selves only from the good things we do. It’d be really great if we did, but it just doesn’t work that way. I think we’re in fact more likely to become ourselves as a result of the more questionable choices that we were forced to do some growing
CW: Yeah
SH: from. But it was really hard for me to reckon with the idea that I’m not special and I can screw things up as much as anybody else on this planet. Like, I really thought I should have started somewhere ahead. Like, Mormons should be starting on third base, right? There are all these things they’re just never going to do. And I put myself in that category, but no, I’m afraid we’re all subject to these mortal problems.
CW: That is the most Mormony thing I think anybody could ever say–”I thought I would be further ahead of this because of my Mormonism!”
SH: Right
CW: Sorry for laughing at you. But I’m really also laughing at myself because I’m like, “Me, too.”
SH: Uhhuh
CW: Me, too
SH: Yeah
CW: Let’s hear from Gabby.
Voicemail 7: Hi Cynthia and Susan. My name is Gabby. I just wanted to share a little analogy that was taught when I was young. For context, I’m about to turn 28. I’m still pretty young, but this was definitely used when I was a youth, even Primary age. Anyway, it was the dog poop brownies analogy.
I cannot imagine I will be the first entry talking about the dog poop brownies lesson. But essentially, the analogy was if someone baked you some brownies and said they put the tiniest bit of dog poop in it, would you eat it? And the obvious answer is no, that’s disgusting. And so the analogy was, even a little bit of sin is bad and disgusting in the sight of God. And I know this was used in the context of rated R movies or music with anything suggestive or even a bad word or just saying the occasional bad word is still sin.
And looking back, this really put an emphasis on toxic perfectionism. I don’t think all sin is equal in the sight of God. I think that’s really silly. I feel like that’s something we get mixed signals, mixed teachings about in the church, but I just wanted to share that. Thank you guys so much for what you do. Bye.
CW: Well, congratulations Gabby, because you are the first person to bring up the dog poop analogy. But when she was about to say her age, I remember thinking, oh, she’s going to say 52 because that’s my age. And surely we aren’t still teaching that, decades later. And so waa waa . . .
SH: Sorry, Cynthia.
CW: I guess we still are. That whole phrase, toxic perfectionism. I feel like it’s kind of redundant, don’t you think? Because isn’t all perfectionism toxic?
Anyway, here’s an example–our recent social media post about paying tithing. “Oh, you can be perfect at paying tithing” and you know, should that really matter?
Anyway, we were just trying to pose the question like, does it really matter that we have this one commandment that we always like to brag about? Wow! We can be perfect at this! But how giddy it makes Latter-day Saints. Thankfully there’s one commandment that we get to be perfect at! We can have one commandment that we never need to be sullied by dog poop!
SH: Because it’s so specific, Cynthia! We put an actual number percentage on tithing. So it’s beautiful. Mormons love this kind of stuff. I don’t know, I think our church’s focus on purity can really screw up our relationship to our own sins like that.
You know, it’s the experience that I described for myself. But we’re meant to have the dog poop experience. That is the full, you know, both/and human experience.
Like being a human does not happen without a little dog poop in your brownies. You and I have probably eaten so many gross things that we don’t know about in our lifetime.
So I think the dog poop analogy is a really [00:50:00] funny one. And in my experience it is mostly used to cause shame for the movie that you went to over the weekend. That’s really the point of that.
CW: Yeah. We have really got to get rid of that dog poop analogy and so I’m really sad that
SH: Still happening.
CW: Still happening.
Let’s hear from Kirsten.
Voicemail 8: When I saw you were asking for thoughts on sin, my first reaction was–it was always a way of keeping me feeling guilty. I was always a super good girl, like a super good Mormon girl and Mormon woman. But in my early twenties, young mom, when a friend told me she’d been trying to get me into a Young Women’s calling with her, but I’d been turned down more than once by the bishop, I thought, well, that’s on me.
Like, I know I don’t have any big sins, but the bishop must know that I do. Or must know that I’m not doing enough right. And with Mormonism, there’s always more that you could do. It’s impossible to do it all.
When I admitted to myself I didn’t love going to the temple, it took a long time to admit that it had to be my fault, because that’s what the toxin lessons say. There must be some unresolved sin, or you’re not doing enough right, which is, I guess, still a sin. It couldn’t be that I’m neurodiverse or my learning style is different. And this just doesn’t work for me. This isn’t how I learn. This isn’t helpful for me. It has to be I’m doing something wrong.
So I guess my point is they made me feel like I was sinning when I wasn’t. And they made me feel bad about myself and my efforts when I was doing just fine. I no longer believe in sin.
CW: Okay. I just want to say that Kirsten actually sent us two voicemails, but for time purposes we can only play one.
But in the other one, she used the analogy to sin of a metal detector or airport security. You know how now they’re like, do you have anything in your pockets? And you’re like, no. But I’m like, wait, do I?
SH: Wait, do I? And then you always feel your pockets. At least I do.
CW: Exactly. Always.
SH: Yeah.
CW: And I think that’s what Kirsten’s getting at is like we always kind of doubt ourself.
SH: Right?
CW: Like she said, it’s impossible to do it all, so therefore she could never be worthy for a calling. Again, Susan, it’s the piety.
SH: Ouch, ouch
CW: The piety, whether it’s explicitly taught or we absorb it differently–and there’s probably a spectrum of what all of us hear and actually absorb–focusing on our piety is the focus.
I don’t know that there’s any way to say that isn’t the focus. It really is a focus on our personal worthiness. If there’s always a chance that you might have sinned, then how could you ever really be worthy? Now whether I have sinned or not, the real problem in my opinion is with the obsession over our own personal piety.
SH: I mean, I agree with you and now I also just want to say, you’re just talking crazy talk. Because can you imagine Latter-day Saints without an obsession over their personal piety? Like it’s really hard for me to even imagine what that would be. I don’t know, Cynthia, if you don’t know whether or not you sinned, then I’m going to posit that you didn’t, because how can you grow from a thing that you don’t even understand
CW: Ooh
SH: Or grasp, right? Like spinning in guilt or shame doesn’t do anything to move us forward. But it does keep us afraid of sin and it does keep us in line, right? But does it lead to relationship with God? I don’t think so. I had a social media post this week about that line from the sacrament hymn “How I my worthiness may prove.”
CW: Yeah
SH: Right? Guilty until proven innocent, right? But what kind of relationship is that? It’s not one. It’s a relationship with yourself, basically. And your own piety. That’s the relationship that you’re developing, not a healthy one.
CW: Oh, I love that we just keep talking about relationship when we’re talking about sin because that’s what’s become most obvious to me in recent years.
SH: Same, same, same
CW: Let’s hear from Peter.
Voicemail 9: This is Peter. I have had a complicated relationship with the idea of sin for years. About 15 years ago, I started to think about sin as the means of learning and growth. If the atonement of Jesus is supposed to correct sin, am I wrong for not hating sin as much as I was taught to? I spent years living in fear of sin because I didn’t actually believe the atonement applies to me because somehow I knew better.
I also had a complicated relationship with the idea of confession of sins to a bishop. That created a weird power dynamic for me, and it influenced my belief in God. He was willing to weaponize shame, and he liked that I felt insignificant and inferior because it meant I would feel broken and willing to submit. Pure obedience meant stripping myself of all parts of me that could sin.
I attribute [00:55:00] this in part to why I was in the closet to myself for so many years. It didn’t matter what means were necessary to make obedience happen, whether abuse or neglect, it only mattered that I didn’t sin. Here’s the thing though–sin was how I grew and learned, and the subsequent repentance was when I became a more kind and gracious person and could accept that I’m no better than anyone else.
So I wanted to become better as a person, but I feared the means of making it happen. Mormon God wanted me to grow, but not too much and outgrow him.
CW: Ooh
SH: Okay. I love this idea of outgrowing the God of our youth. I feel like that’s so important to me personally. It’s such an important part of my story and I mean, it makes sense.
As a parent, the thing that I wanted most was to raise daughters who outgrew me. They outgrew the relationship that we had where I was in authority over them because they needed someone to be in authority over them until they were old enough for their personal authority to take over. But I have to believe that heavenly parents are hoping the same thing happens for their children, that eventually we outgrow that authoritarian kind of relationship.
CW: I think that’s what’s so hard in our church, which is a very much first half of life church–because there really isn’t much in the institution that kind of supports the second half of life, which is like you were just talking about your whole job as a parent, Susan, was to outgrow
SH: Right
CW: that type of relationship that you had with your children into a more mature one. And I don’t think we really have that kind of structure in place in the church where we outgrow certain things. But what Peter said about learning and growth made him a kinder person. I think that brings us back to, well, if that’s the whole purpose is for us to be more like Jesus, for us to become kinder, then isn’t it ultimately okay when we mess up?
I’ve had a lot of conversations with my brother Mike, my older brother, and we’ve been talking to each other about, I know I have blind spots. And sometimes it’s other people that point out those blind spots or we just realize them on our own. And then he and I have been saying to each other, we’re working on removing our blind spots.
And my brother said to me, “I pray every day that God will show me my blind spots.” And I was like, “That’s a dangerous prayer!” It’s like Richard Rohr says, “I pray every day to God for one humiliation.” And I was like,
SH: Right, exactly.
CW: I don’t know if I wanna pray for something like that! But then, you know, when I hear Peter talk about. I mean, he didn’t use the phrase blind spots, but you know his mistakes
SH: Right, right
CW: Leading him to learning and growth and kindness. I’m like, okay, maybe I do want to because I really do want to become a kinder person, so maybe I should start praying daily, “Dear God, show me my blind spots.” I don’t know, Susan, I’ll get back with you. That’s a hard one . . .
SH: Well, please don’t show me mine, Cynthia.
CW: No. Oh gosh. I love that message. Thank you so much, Peter.
SH: It’s so good. Yeah.
CW: Yeah. Pretty deep. Loved it. Let’s hear from anonymous.
Voicemail 10: Hi, Cynthia and Susan. I returned to activity in the church as a 29-year-old, just pre-COVID. I came flying through the doors with a brand new mental illness and straight out of a whirlwind, abusive relationship. Because the sin and abuse were both sexual, I ate myself alive trying to untangle the braids of what was my own sin within this relationship and what was abuse. I was confused about what parts needed to be repented of and what parts needed to be healed from, and was trying to sort this out in between bouts of psychosis. I sat in the bishop’s office with two men I very much respect, who told me I would find hope in the temple, and then when I asked them if I could go now, sharply replied, no, in unison, that I was not ready. I took this so much to heart that I only ever went once to perform baptisms. I never found myself worthy enough for my endowments in five years of being able to answer the temple recommend questions correctly and honestly. Looking back on the last six years and all I’ve learned about worthiness, I now believe I was never more worthy than I was the moment I returned. In John 8, Christ asked the woman taken in adultery, “Hath no man condemned thee?” And she says, “No man, Lord.” And Jesus says to her, “Neither do I condemn thee. Go, and sin no more.” She was forgiven that fast, immediately, on the very same day. I did not understand that I was always worthy until I put space between me and the church.
And now that I know that I was always worthy in the sight of the Lord, I am so disenchanted with my experiences within the church that I no longer have a desire to attend or go to the temple. Some days I pray for the strength to go back, and some days I pray that I will never have to.
SH: We’ve reached the lie-down part of the episode for me.
CW: Yeah, we have
SH: That message is so hard for me. Cynthia, if we were to reframe worthiness as [01:00:00] desire or willingness, and reframe sin as setting us up to learn and grow, then I think there would be very few members who would not be in the temple. And I think the temple would then be a place of growth and healing that it isn’t really allowed to be now.
I don’t know. Her message makes me so sad. It makes me mourn for what I feel could be. And when our leaders . . . we’re in a time in church history right now where there’s so much focus and emphasis placed on the temple.
CW: Yeah
SH: And yet the way that we determine who gets to be in the temple really makes it so that it maybe isn’t reaching the people who need that
CW: Right
SH: kind of spiritual experience that the leaders want us to have most of all.
CW: I’m really glad we prepare so well for these episodes because I had to listen to that voicemail several times just to weep, before I could record this episode. And that line where she said, because the sin and abuse were both sexual.
SH: Right
CW: Oh my gosh. But I absolutely love it when she said, (and I want to put this in skywriting!): I was never more worthy than when I returned to church. Like, just the willingness, my favorite word.
SH: Exactly
CW: Yes. Her willingness to be in the temple made her worthy.
SH: Right. I wonder if this will ever change. I don’t anticipate that it will.
CW: I don’t know.
SH: But, you know, I would maybe welcome a conversation
CW: Uhhuh
SH: with a leader who could give me some insight into really what their thinking is. I mean, I guess the thinking is that God cannot abide any unclean thing. But God created a whole lot of unclean things. So, as a parent, that’s really hard for me to accept or understand, or dare I say, believe. That’s hard for me to believe.
CW: Yeah. I have a problem with that whole scripture in Doctrine and Covenants–unclean thing. People aren’t things.
SH: Right
CW: So . . .
SH: Right
CW: Anyway, let’s have an anonymous message.
Voicemail 11: The concept of sin really messed me up. So as a teenager, I had premarital sex, and according to the church, that’s a sin. And I was definitely disciplined for it.
And I am a married woman in my forties. I’ve had so much therapy, and I’m really sad to say that I still see intimacy as bad because it was first drilled into me, labeled a sin. So the question I have now that I’m working through in therapy is, who said it’s a sin? And that’s my problem with sin in general because it’s somebody else deciding for me what makes me bad. That’s hard to process.
SH: Wow. Someone else deciding what makes you bad. Isn’t in Jana Riess’s book The Next Mormons, the thing that most younger women reported as driving them out of the church, the fact that they felt judged?
CW: Yes
SH: Right?
CW: Yes
SH: Her message made me think of another Richard Rohr quote and he was talking about the role of church leaders or others in recognizing our sins.
And he says, “Ephesians says, anything exposed to the light will become light. It’s not a matter of kicking people out or saying you are not worthy. It’s just leading people on journeys of illumination. Then they see their own mistakes for themselves.”
Judging–and we call bishops, judges–bishops are judges in Zion, right? Judging sets up a completely different dynamic to me from leading people on journeys toward greater light. And that would just be a whole different approach to it, in my opinion. And I think you see that difference in the voicemail we had where the woman’s bishop said, “I just want to know, Is she okay? Does she need support from the church?” That’s leading someone on a journey to me. They’re just different approaches and different styles and different understandings. And I clearly think one is better than the other.
CW: Well, clearly, and I’m with you, but I just think this is where our system needs an overhaul because I don’t think you can have our poor bishops be pastoral [01:05:00] leaders AND judges.
SH: Exactly
CW: I don’t think that’s possible to do that at the same time, maybe within the same meeting. Right? To mete out some type of judgment on someone who has a sin, and then turn around and put your arm around them
SH: Right
CW: and extend compassion. Read a scripture to them. Pray with them. I don’t know. I think we do a big disservice when we make our bishops be judges and pastoral leaders. They’re administrators and ministers and that’s really too much.
SH: Impossible. Yeah. Impossible.
All right. Last message. And it comes from Seth.
Voicemail 12: Hi, my name is Seth. I hope it’s okay if I leave a quick message here.
You asked the question, has your thinking around sin changed? We, in the church, used to have this really strong idea of here is the righteousness checklist, and here is the sin checklist. You check all the righteous boxes and you avoid all the sin boxes. I think one way in which we’ve matured some as a church over the last few decades is I think we have approached the righteous side of this checklist differently, where it’s more about intent. It’s more about growth and learning.
The new For the Strength Youth books are much more open-ended and kind of self-created. Something I think would be really beneficial would be for us to take some of the things we’ve learned from that maturing and apply them to how we see sin. Just as we lose something when we talk about righteousness without talking about intent, we really lose something in sin when we talk about sin without talking about intent. I think about the word intent a lot more when I think about sin these days. I think it is really important what’s in our heart, even more so than the boxes that we check.
SH: Yeah
CW: Yeah
SH: That’s good stuff.
I think it’s a great place to end this conversation. I’m going to look for more evidence of it, because is the church changing or are the members changing, or both? I don’t know. But I was thinking about when he brought up For the Strength of Youth, like I do believe there are members who would’ve told you that wearing two pairs of earrings was a sin.
CW: Right?
SH: Some years ago. Right? But in light of the updated guidelines, you know, now they would concede that maybe it’s not a sin.
CW: Temporary commandments, Susan!
SH: Right. Temporary commandments! Because I think there are also members who would say, no, it’s still a sin. There’s still a higher law.
Right. There’s a higher law. And then this is where obedience comes into it too, because is the main goal obedience or just not transgressing any specific lines. I don’t know. So I love his focus on intention, but I think it’s hard to focus on intention when you’ve been focused on your own purity.
I think it’s hard to get to the thing behind the thing or the thing that’s supposed to be behind what drives our behaviors. Right? That pure intent–it’s hard to get to that. It’s hard to get your heart transformed when you’re worried about obeying so you can be perfect. That’s pretty hard.
CW: I think it’s really hard for church leaders to measure intent and so I don’t have a whole lot of hope that what Seth is talking about can happen because we need things that are measurable.
SH: Right. Well, no, leaders need things that are measurable!
CW: There you go.
SH: But the Lord looketh on the heart, Cynthia. So, I mean, it’s got to be about intent, doesn’t it?
CW: Ding, ding, ding. Yeah. He just nailed it. I kept thinking about that arc of perfectionism that we talked about earlier as I was listening to Seth, because I do think he’s right. I do think that we can apply what we’ve learned about perfectionism in that righteousness column, as he called it and apply that to the sin column.
So I’m totally with him. Let’s do that. And also, I know we’re going to have an episode this season on rules versus principles . . .
SH: Yes, we are.
CW: We may just save Seth’s message and play that again. Because I think he gets right at the heart of it when he talks about intent.
SH: Right
CW: So there’s a teaser, friends, for an episode this season about that. Because that’s a big idea.
SH: That’s a big idea.
CW: Yeah. Rules versus principles. Big, big, big!
SH: We hope that everyone will stay with us for that one. I’m excited. I’m excited for all the big ideas that we’re going to talk about this season.
CW: Yeah, me too. Thank you, Susan, for showing up and talking about this icky topic and shedding new light on it, I think . . . or our listeners shed new light on it.
SH: I was just going to say thanks to our listeners who brought all of their [01:10:00] great insights to this topic. We can’t thank you enough.
Voicemail 13: There’s a new apostle, and again, they were called outside of general conference. None of the members were able to sustain them before they were given that calling. I don’t like that this has happened again. It happened with Elder Kearon most recently. And I also remembered, I was reading articles about Elder Kearon being called, and he talked about how he went in for his routine meeting with the 12 to talk about, you know, whatever he had done.
They asked him to be an apostle and then basically ordained him really quickly, like before the end of the day. They didn’t even give him a chance to call his wife or really even think about it for very long. It was such a huge life-changing question and calling, and I hate that. I hate that. It’s so disrespectful of the church to not give someone the time and space to decide if that’s what they want to do with the rest of their life. And I hate that they didn’t give him a chance to call his wife. I hope that Sister Causse was given a phone call before they ordained her husband.
I was just reading that a new apostle was called and he has been a touchpoint with the church’s finances. He’s been heavily involved in that over the last few years. And in the Salt Lake Tribune’s coverage of this, they mentioned that the church, I think it was at the end of last year, was worth about $200 billion and they’re projected to be worth $1 trillion by 2040. Also at the same time the United States government is shut down. SNAP payments have stopped and my brother’s family isn’t getting any SNAP for this month. And it just really brought home that I’m so disappointed and disgusted, honestly, that our church has so much money and they could be helping so many other people, or at least letting people keep their money by not paying tithing. And instead they’ve amassed all these riches and it’s disgusting. It really is.
SH: Don’t forget our website. Go to atlastshesaidit.org to find all our Substack content. While there, you can contact our team, leave us a voicemail, register for events, subscribe or make a tax deductible donation. Paid subscribers get extra stuff, including ongoing community chats and live chats with us.
Remember, your support keeps the podcast ad-free. Thanks for listening!