In the marshmallow test, you sit a preschooler in front of a marshmallow. You tell the preschooler that if she can wait 15 minutes, she will get two marshmallows instead of just the one in front of her. Some preschoolers can wait, some can’t. Children who wait for two marshmallows get better grades as teenagers. The popular conclusion is that the ability to delay gratification is a sign of good character that makes your life better later on.
Elder Cook referred to the Marshmallow Test in his October 2015 General Conference addressShipshape and Bristol Fashion: Be Temple Worthy In Good Times and Bad [fn1].
The adversary has been successful in planting a great myth in the minds of many people. He and his emissaries declare that the real choice we have is between happiness and pleasure now in this life and happiness in a life to come (which the adversary asserts may not exist). This myth is a false choice, but it is very seductive.
…
I recognize that, despite the overwhelming happiness embodied in God’s divine plan, sometimes it can feel far away and disconnected from our current circumstances. It may feel beyond our reach as struggling disciples. From our limited perspective, current temptations and distractions can seem attractive. The rewards for resisting those temptations, on the other hand, can feel distant and unattainable. But a true understanding of the Father’s plan reveals that the rewards of righteousness are available right now.
…
Last year the professor who conducted the original [Marshmallow Test], Dr. Walter Mischel, wrote a book in which he said the study grew in part out of his concerns about self-control and his own addiction to smoking. … After years of study, one of [Dr. Mischel’s] professional colleagues reported that “self-control is like a muscle: the more you use it, the stronger it gets. Avoiding something tempting once will help you develop the ability to resist other temptations in the future.”
A principle of eternal progression is that exercising self-control and living righteously strengthen our ability to resist temptation. This is true both in the spiritual realm and in temporal matters.
Essentially, happy Church members get a marshmallow now, and a marshmallow in the next life. But even if you’re not getting a marshmallow now, if you can remain faithful, you’ll get two marshmallows in the next life. The no-marshmallow-in-mortality people are being tested on their ability to delay gratification until the next life.
The Marshmallow Test that Elder Cook talked about has been updated. (Even the people who conducted the test back in 1960 knew that they were using a small sample size and hadn’t controlled for all variables.)
In 2013, researchers added a wrinkle to the Marshmallow Test. They had the kids do an art project first, giving them old and broken crayons. The children were divided into two groups. The researchers told both groups that they would bring them new crayons in a minute. The researcher brought new crayons to one group. In the other group, the researcher returned empty-handed. The researchers did this again with promises to bring stickers. One group of kids got the stickers; the other group didn’t. Then they gave the kids the Marshmallow Test. Guess which group of kids ate the marshmallow?
The conclusion was that the child’s ability to wait for a second marshmallow was influenced by whether or not the child trusted the researcher to give them the promised reward. The test didn’t just measure the child’s impulse control; it also measured the researcher’s trustworthiness. [Note that this would have been an unidentified variable in the original test – the researchers did not find out whether any of the children already distrusted adults who made promises about later rewards.]
When Church leaders emphasize mortal obedience and eternal rewards, is the test measuring the members’ obedience? Or the Church leaders’ trustworthiness?
Let’s talk about faith and trust separately. Faith is an abstract belief that’s centered in the believer. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. That definition is confusing enough to sound profound and yet make it clear that it’s the believer’s choice of whether or not to believe something. You hope for something that you don’t see any evidence of.
Trust is different from faith. Trust is based on actual experiences. You have evidence of why you trust someone, or don’t trust someone. Something happened; you can tell a story about why you do or don’t trust someone.
Some people evaluate the Brethren’s promises of eternal happiness from a place of faith; others evaluate the Brethren from the perspective of broken trust. The difference is in our identity and experiences.
Let’s look at a couple of hypothetical people to help illustrate this.
When Henry was a teenager, he prayed about whether the prophets and apostles are Heavenly Father’s chosen leaders for his Church and felt the assurance of the Spirit that they are.
- Henry is a cis, white, heterosexual male who got married in the temple.
- Both of his parents are happily married as well.
- He’s always been blessed for paying tithing and believes the Church’s huge financial reserves are wise stewardship.
- He and his wife have several children and enjoy their Church callings.
- Henry has had so many experiences in which his faith has blessed him that he really doesn’t understand why other people seem so cynical. After all, he doesn’t believe he’s anything special, so his blessings must come from Heavenly Father. Therefore, anyone else could be just as blessed as he is if they would exercise faith like he does.
- Henry frequently testifies of this to Edward, because Edward is losing his testimony.
As a teen, Edward said the same prayer and had the same peaceful assurance that Heavenly Father chose the prophet and apostles to lead the Church, just like Henry.
- Edward is Black and has always been uncomfortable about the Church’s refusal to apologize for the priesthood and temple ban.
- Edward’s parents divorced when he was three years old. His father has had no contact with Edward since the divorce. His mother married again; his stepfather is a good father to Edward. His mother can’t get the sealing canceled because she can’t marry her nonmember husband in the temple. His younger sisters from his mother’s second marriage are also sealed to Edward’s birth father, according to Church doctrine. His birth father got married in the temple again, which upset his mother because now she’s trapped in eternal polygamy. This hurts Edward because he loves his mother, stepfather and sisters so much.
- Edward is bisexual. He’s dating a woman, and since he passes for straight, he hears what members say about LGBTQ individuals. His best friend is gay and has long since left the Church. He’s got a boyfriend now, and seems happy with his decision to quit Church. Another friend just confided in him that she’s a lesbian and she’s suicidal because she believes the Church is true and hopes God can make her straight after she dies.
- Edward has to work two jobs to make ends meet, despite paying tithing. He dislikes his calling as building cleaning coordinator and wishes the Church would just hire a janitor.
- Edward is thoroughly sick of listening to Henry testify about how he’s been blessed for his faithfulness.
Henry and Edward are taking the Church’s version of the Marshmallow Test. Who is really being tested here? Are Henry and Edward being tested on their faith? Or is The Test-Giver being tested on his trustworthiness? And is Heavenly Father the Test-Giver, or is it the Church leaders?
Henry seems humble and faithful. “I know I’m nothing special,” Henry testifies. “I didn’t earn these blessings. Heavenly Father, in his mercy, gave me these blessings. I know that anyone can be blessed as I have been blessed.”
At first glance, Henry is humble and faithful. At second glance, Henry is ignoring his privilege. Sure, Henry is never going to be a General Authority – but Henry’s life experiences and priorities are never going to clash with the General Authorities because they’re all cis, white, heterosexual married men with good educations, rewarding careers, and influential callings too. In contrast, a lot of Edward’s experiences and questions are foreign to the General Authorities. [fn2]
Perhaps Henry is too self-conscious about his privilege to acknowledge that his faith is in a different context than Edward’s, solely because of advantages that neither of them control. It’s simply easier for Henry to believe that everything will work out in the next life according to your faith in this life. Henry will never feel disrespected because of his skin color; never feel like a lesser person because of his sexual feelings; never feel pain and confusion about who he’s going to spend eternity with; never feel like the Church is exploiting him through a calling. And he lacks the empathy to see that Edward is in a different situation – not because of his faith, but because of his life circumstances.
When we encounter trust-breaking experiences, Church leaders encourage us to doubt our doubts; don’t focus on the problems but have faith that all questions will be answered in the next life. Most people do this. You start piling questions and experiences on the shelf, trying to hang on to faith even as your trust takes another hit [fn3].
The shelf breaks when we realize we can’t continue to have faith in people that we can’t trust. It’s a trust crisis, not a faith crisis. It’s caused by things people have said and done. Having Henry bear his testimony doesn’t help because the broken trust is about our experiences, not about things we believe without evidence. We have evidence that we can’t trust the men who are making the promises. Many of us separate the Brethren from God and conclude that the Brethren don’t speak for God. In this way, we can continue to trust God.
Is it possible to have faith in the divine calling of someone you don’t trust? From the Brethren’s point of view, lazy learners just need to have more faith that the Brethren are called of God. You don’t need evidence of that; you just hope for things that you can’t see. But experiences happen. If you go to Church and try to be obedient, you’re going to have experiences with Church leaders, experiences with prayer; experiences with obedience. Being part of the Church is a relationship with a community, and relationships either strengthen or damage trust.
The Brethren do not take actions that would restore trust. Restoring broken trust requires acknowledging your actions, listening to the person you hurt, taking full responsibility, apologizing sincerely, and then agreeing to be accountable for your actions in the future [fn4].
Exhorting Edward to greater faith doesn’t heal broken trust. And that’s why Henry and Edward are always talking past each other.
- If someone you don’t trust promises you two marshmallows later, but in return you have to avoid all marshmallows in mortality, is this a question of faith? Or is it one of those fool-me-once-shame-on-you-but-fool-me-twice-then-shame-on-me situations?
- Does saying “trust crisis” instead of “faith crisis” change anything for you?
- Can you have faith in the General Authorities and NOT trust them?
- Do you even like marshmallows?
[fn1] Elder Cook cited Elder Uchtdorf, who also used the Marshmallow Test in his April 2020 General Conference address Continue in Patience when he encouraged listeners to be patient and accept that good things take time to achieve.
[fn2] Yes, the Brethren eventually listen to someone who has a different life experience than they do, but it takes years of emotionally exhausting work to get it through to the Brethren that the status quo is hurting people who are NOT cis, white, heterosexual married men.
[fn3] It’s not really about giving a second chance after one violation of trust. Most of us don’t feel our trust crater until many, many things have happened. We’re not struggling to give someone a second chance; we’re struggling to give someone a 490th chance when they haven’t repented. Compare Matthew 18:21-22 when Jesus tells Peter to forgive seventy times seven with Luke 17:4 when Christ says that you should forgive seven times a day if the offender says “I repent.” See also Matthew 18:15-17 in which Christ teaches that if your brother trespasses against you, try to talk it out. If your brother “shall hear thee” then the relationship heals but “if he neglect to hear” then throw him out of your life. You can quote Christ to say you have to forgive no matter what, and you can also quote Christ to say that the wrongdoer has to repent or you don’t have to have a relationship with them at all.
[fn4] The best book I’ve ever read about how to rebuild broken trust is How Can I Forgive you?: The Courage to Forgive, the Freedom Not to by Dr. Janis Spring. She talks about how to find peace and forgive someone even if there is no chance for reconciliation, and gives good examples of just what it takes to reconcile. She makes it clear the burden is on the wrongdoer to rebuild trust, rather than suggesting that the victim’s forgiveness needs to come first.
Wheat & Tares 
I don’t think that comparing mortal probation to the marshmallow test is appropriate. Choosing the right isn’t a delay of gratification, it’s alternate choices. You are supposed to always choose the right. Not choose the right, now, in order to not have to choose the right later.
My 22 year old son has suffered for 10 years with a number of medical problems that made it so he couldn’t sleep (sleep studies showed he was waking up 55 times an hour). Of course this gave him depression and made him feel awful constantly. We didn’t know the causes and it took years to find out over time and to attempt treatment. During that time we had many expectations of him that were completely unfair if we had understood his situation. This has been the central fact of his life.
Nothing church leaders say helps, other than to make him feel unaccepted and criticized. He has a trust issue not only with them but with God, for giving him a life like this.
As you explained, his situation really cannot be understood by leaders. Certainly the majority of leaders live quite healthy lives which gives them resources to serve others. Unfortunately, it often doesn’t give them resources to truly understand the situations more unhealthy people face. Their talks on these subjects can come across as shallow, trite, unhelpful, or even hurtful when they start talking about a transactional gospel where you reap what you sow.
From the top, it would be helpful if leaders would be more humble about their point of view and what they understand. What they see and know is only a slice of what there is to see and know. It’s hard for God to inspire on subjects we haven’t had experiences and exposure to.
I just wish leaders and members in general had more humility about what they know
For much of its history, institutional Christianity has engaged in its own versions of the marshmallow test: Just focus on personal piety and if you’re considered good enough you might qualify for a heavenly existence after mortal life, which typically was filled with heartache, despair, suffering, and a myriad of other terrible stuff. This, first of all, perverts if not ignores the whole concept of divine grace. But in addition, this approach to religious life completely sets aside the basic teachings of Jesus to seek “the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.” Skip over Matthew chapter 25 as well as a good many other of Jesus’ parables. Those are all nice stories but all that really matters is that Jesus died on the cross to give you a chance to enter heaven. And so, in the meantime, don’t trouble yourself with matters of injustice, inequality, inequity, discrimination, racial or caste privilege, or for that matter anything to do with THIS world because all that matters is your position in the next one.
Many of us took the exit because our trust in the Church degraded as we investigated Church history. What I say to people who ask me about my attitude towards the Church is this: I don’t know what is true and what isn’t true but I do know that historically speaking you can’t trust the Brethren to tell the truth. To me this defines a trust crisis not a faith crisis.
Even if I find out some day that Joseph Smith DID restore the true Gospel, DID restore the Priesthood, DID restore the saving ordinances, etc. I’m still going to have the same question: Why did you guys lie to us so much?
This is a fascinating update to the marshmallow test. I was of course very familiar with the test and even some critiques of it, but didn’t read this update to it. I think the update from faith test to trust test is spot on. Well said.
There are some other interesting addendums to Marshmallow Test theory, one I already knew about:
Kids in different cultures have different approaches: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/07/03/534743719/want-to-teach-your-kids-self-control-ask-a-cameroonian-farmer
And one that’s new to me:
Recent kids did better than past kids at the test, not worse: https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/the-marshmallow-test-todays-kids-show-more-self-control-305353
As humans, we are all evolutionarily primed to find and see patterns in a world governed by not only by material things, but also social constructs- Like rules, cultural norms, institutions.
Success within social environments furthermore requires people detect agents and agency amidst these patterns, as well determine their social significance.
Henry has few incentives to problematize his model, nor distrust the authority-figures that promote it. He hasn’t faced that many direct, negative consequences for following said model relative to its advantages, as this model also just so happens to place Henry in an extremely advantageous position within its cosmology.
But Edward’s trust as you say is broken, because his position in life encourages him to more attentive to phenomena that cannot be easily accounted for by Henry’s model.
Henry could, of course, become much better incentivized to understand his model and its weaknesses, but amidst the process of Edward communicating these inconvenient points, Henry comes eventually to associate such inconvenience with Edward himself.
It is Edward’s voice and presence, rather than the Mormon model’s incoherence, that becomes the ‘real’ and primary existential threat to Henry.
~
Apologists may argue “But couldn’t the argument be just as true in reverse when describing ‘critical theories’ of gender, race, or sexuality.”
To which the answer of course is: “yes – But only if these theories attempt to explain the same breadth and depth of phenomena; relative to the same quality and degree of arguments/evidences used to support said explanations; with an equivalent expectation of societal hegemony relative to their arguments’ substantiveness.
Simply put: both natural and social scientific explanations for how the world works are, on-the-whole, much more reliable and valid than religious truth claims – and (relatively) much more falsifiable and modest.
Religious nationalists however in particular try to muddy the water by falsely claiming these secular and scholastic arguments as being necessarily equivalent to their own religious truth claims in their scope/substance.
It is easier, after all, to legitimate the establishment of a politically-advantaged religious movement, if the secular absence of such is construed as impossible, being also a religion of sorts.
Constructivism and postmodernism without the self-awareness.
I really like your framing, Janey. I definitely lack trust in the GAs. They have a difficult problem in that, as you note, the big marshmallow they’re promising is to come in the afterlife, so nobody can test and report whether it really works out that way or not. However, when they routinely botch things in the here and now, it makes it far less likely that I’ll trust them about the afterlife.
Here’s a concrete example of botching I was talking about with one of my sisters recently. Since the 1960s when birth control became reliable and available, GAs railed against its existence and use and told women especially that they needed to step up and make the sacrifice to have as many kids as possible. Finally, by the 1990s or so, it became clear that Church members just weren’t listening, so with the occasional exception (e.g., Elder Andersen), they backed off on it. Now it’s fine to have two or three kids and nobody will look at you funny. But did the GAs ever go back and apologize to the women who sacrificed their physical and mental health to have a ton of kids? No! The GAs told them at the time that it was absolutely critical and that they would be inviting damnation if they didn’t do it, and then they changed their minds and pretended that it had all never happened. Now they wave their hands at the Handbook, which vaguely says it’s up to a couple and God, and the woman’s health should be taken into account.
So you can probably understand now why, when men like Dallin H. Oaks and Jeffrey R. Holland are adamant that excluding LGBT people from full Church participation and from having their marriages recognized or their genders accepted, I’m skeptical. I figure in a few decades, the GAs of the moment will give up on these ideas and pretend like they never happened. Oaks and Holland want me to sacrifice my humanity to make LGBT people’s lives more miserable because that’s what God wants. Except God wanted people to have a ton of kids too, right? Until he didn’t? It turned out that the sacrifice was never meaningful, or even acknowledged.
I’m going to trust my own conscience over whatever policy or doctrine of the moment that the GAs are pushing. I may be wrong sometimes, but at least I’ll own my own experience.
As you introduced the marshmallow test, I thought the tester doesn’t know my #2 daughter. Oh, she liked marshmallows, but never more than one. She would have trusted the tester to give the second marshmallow, but she wouldn’t have *wanted* a second marshmallow. And she was never one to bribe into finishing her vegetables in order to get desert. If she didn’t want vegetables, she most certainly didn’t want sweet stuff for desert. Until she discovered sugared caffein she just didn’t care for sugar. Then she got addicted to Mountain Dew.
I really liked your whole post. Best blog post ever.
I had never heard about the trust component added in with the marshmallow experiment. It gives a whole different perspective on the view of “the ability to postpone gratification”. Often, it has nothing to do with postponing gratification. I really love it when something I was taught by “experts” that I felt was wrong, proves to be a badly planned experiment.
So, kids who don’t trust adults have “poor ability to delay gratification” at least in the badly planned experiment. And of course, those kids who don’t trust adults are going to do worse in school. Doing well in school is for most students is all about adults making promises to do your homework and you’ll get a good job when you grow up. If they have seen that getting a good job depends more on things like who your parents are, or the color of your skin, they just won’t believe in those promises. I know that I didn’t try in school because as a kid growing up poor, I had already seen too much of life and how what mattered was not really things you had control over. At three I knew that being a boy meant you got lots more out of life than being a girl. In my ward as an 8 year old, I had already learned that what mattered most was who my parents were, not who I was. At school, I learned quickly that what mattered most was how expensive your clothing was, or at least that your clothing didn’t scream poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks. I learned in Junior high school that getting good grades didn’t matter at all if you were a girl and “not going to use your math for anything but doubling recipes.” (I was the best student in the school in math, and my teacher said that, along with a sarcastic, “you’re pretty smart, for a girl.”) I got good grades, because I disliked so many of the other kids, that I wanted to beat them the only way I could. I resented the “rich kids.” It had nothing to do with how my own life might turn out. I already knew my life was screwed no matter what I did. And at least I was white. How much more do inner city poor colored kids feel like their life is screwed no matter what they do. So, yeah, they will flunk the marshmallow test and then prove to “experts” that it is lack of ability to postpone gratification that causes them to do poorly in life.
Oh, people might be relieved to know that I did “unlearn” much of my childhood cynicism, once I got out of my childhood poverty.
And yes, I was taught in my social work classes that this inability to postpone gratification had racial components and was probably “inherited from parents”. There was one study that compared the kids to their parents, so this “personality trait” was genetic. And I remember being angry cause it felt wrong and felt like “blame the poor for being poor.” And maybe the kids learn it from their parents, which does sound like it is more about trusting the world than a genetic personality trait.
I didn’t leave the church because of lack of faith in God, but because I lost trust in “priesthood leadership” on all levels. There was just no inspiration there. There could be love and kindness, but there was never inspiration about what was best for me. If I accepted what they promised me was inspiration, if it went against my own feelings, it was always a disaster. And so many times, what I felt the church was doing wrong, was confirmed when the church finally changed. The only thing it ever gave me confidence in was that the rest of the things that I think the church is wrong about will also change given enough time and pressure from people like me who also feel the church is wrong. Wow, talk about confidence that I get better inspiration than 15 old white men. But that is where my trust in them is after 70 years of watching them cave to pressure, and always too little too late, given with no apology.
As humans, we are all evolutionarily primed to find and see patterns in a world governed by not only by material things, but also social constructs- Like rules, cultural norms, institutions.
Success within social environments furthermore requires people detect agents and agency amidst these patterns, as well determine their social significance.
Henry has few incentives to problematize his model, nor distrust the authority-figures that promote it. He hasn’t faced that many direct, negative consequences for following said model relative to its advantages, as this model also just so happens to place Henry in an extremely advantageous position within its cosmology.
But Edward’s trust as you say is broken, because his position in life encourages him to more attentive to phenomena that cannot be easily accounted for by Henry’s model.
Henry could, of course, become much better incentivized to understand his model and its weaknesses, but amidst the process of Edward communicating these inconvenient points, Henry comes eventually to associate such inconvenience with Edward himself.
It is Edward’s voice and presence, rather than the Mormon model’s incoherence, that becomes the ‘real’ and primary existential threat to Henry.
~
Apologists may argue “But couldn’t the argument be just as true in reverse when describing ‘critical theories’ of gender, race, or sexuality.”
To which the answer of course is: “yes – But only if these theories attempt to explain the same breadth and depth of phenomena; relative to the same quality and degree of arguments/evidences used to support said explanations; with an equivalent expectation of societal hegemony relative to their arguments’ substantiveness.
Simply put: both natural and social scientific explanations for how the world works are, on-the-whole, much more reliable and valid than religious truth claims – and (relatively) much more falsifiable and modest.
Religious nationalists however in particular try to muddy the water by falsely claiming these secular and scholastic arguments as being necessarily equivalent to their own religious truth claims in their scope/substance.
It is easier, after all, to legitimate the establishment of a politically-advantaged religious movement, if the secular absence of such is construed as impossible, being also a religion of sorts.
Constructivism and postmodernism without the self-awareness.
The Marshmallow Follow-up Experiment is a strong analogy. The Milgram Experiment is another.
I never had the expectation that the managers of the institution were anything but managers. Religious leaders are self-evident: goodness, purity, love, exude from men like Eyring, Ballard, Uctdorf, Nelson, Holland, and others. I suppose there may be a possibility that the manager-mentality creeps in to pollute leadership, but I think enough of the Brethren are devoted to the Lord to protect us from some of the tendencies we might find in Bednar (who really focuses on managing people, not leading people). So trust in the Brethren is still a good bet.
However, the institution—the administrators and managers, the outside donors—particularly the lawyers—are clearly corrupt. Stuff like Prop 8 advocacy came from lawyers—same with the temporary baptism prohibition a few years back. They influence the Church disproportionately. I don’t trust any of them. So many beta-males hungry for power get promoted up: in the secular world they are weak and undesirable, but within the ranks of the institution, they transform into powerful and important figures—they work for a Brand, not for God.
Trust crisis and Belief crisis are fitting descriptions for what most folks experience when they have a so-called “faith” crisis. The managers of the institution rely on belief systems as psychological constructs, which are engineered to control behavior. People go through life following dictates which have nothing to do with the Gospel. When belief systems contradict or collapse, crisis ensues, people fall away. Yet if belief systems weren’t used to control behavior, the institution would have no arbitrary power over the congregation. Belief systems function as psychological tares planted in the field, folks eat it and get sick, and decide to avoid laboring in the field. It’s an adversarial system, it sets the institution against the congregation, it would supplant conscience with “moral agency,” and it would have us trade the Spirit of Truth for obedience to authority.
I was unaware of the details of this study. Details sure do matter!
@Ziff: “I may be wrong sometimes, but at least I’ll own my own experience.”
This! Assuming when I day there will be a judgment, I plan to hold my head high, eyes locked on God and Jesus, and say this very thing. That I did my best based on my life experiences. That I didn’t outsource decision making to anyone. That mistakes were made, but I did the best I could. And I will gladly accept the consequences.
One of the things I mentioned in my mission memoir was a story in which I had temporarily decided to *really* follow all the rules with exactness, mostly because my trainee said she felt guilty about any rule violations. For the first time ever, I cracked open my “white bible” and really read it. It was utterly miserable, by far the worst week of my mission. I talked to a fellow missionary about how I just couldn’t be happy doing things that made no sense whatsoever and had no bearing on our success anyway, and while I cared about my companion’s feelings, I also thought it wasn’t being a good trainer to give her the false idea that these ticky-tack rules were anywhere on par with actually following the spirit or loving & listening to the people. I became resentful and ineffective. The advice the other missionary gave me was that we were supposed to both obey & find a way to be happy while doing it.
Sorry, but that is just not me. I do not find any pleasure in obeying dumb things like beating myself up over how much my luggage weighed or whether I read a book of poetry in the morning instead of scriptures or if I stopped at the store on a day that wasn’t p-day or what order we taught the discussions. It was just a distraction from actually paying attention to real life, listening to the people we were there to love, and making & owning my own choices given the context of the moment. Even my comp agreed after a few days that we were just losing our minds for absolutely no benefit whatsoever. There was no second marshmallow. There were no marshmallows down this path.
Janey, thank you for this. The marshmallow experiment didn’t sit right with me, but I couldn’t put my finger on why.
I so agree about trust being the issue. And the necessity of having to stop trusting leaders in order to maintain trust in God. Something I had to do for my own sanity. It’s made me very sensitive to the constant conflation of church with God/Jesus that we see.
Was it last year or early this year a number of fireside were streamed in this country of a visiting church history dept representative, question and answer sessions. Very poorly publicised. Anyway I viewed the session aimed at adults. It was underwhelming. Afterwards I contacted our very excellent Sunday school teacher and asked if he’d viewed either that session or the one specifically aimed at teachers. He said not, as he really hadn’t expected there would be anything to be gained, confirmed by my report. I said I hadn’t attended because I had a problematic history question I wanted answered, but because I wanted to see how questions were handled. I wanted to see whether we can trust them to be honest with us now. And my answer, was no, no we can’t. It was still all dissembling and obfuscation.
Thank you for this. Though, in my personal life’s experience and in my experience as a parent, I read the book about and saw value in the conclusions of the Marshmallow Study, I had never thought of the trust variable. The clarification from the further studies you tell about and your analogy here is so helpful to me. Thank you for sharing this!
KA – while researching for this post, I saw that update about how kids today do better at delayed gratification than kids 50 years ago and I had to smile. All those doom-sayers who think “kids these days” are worse than kids in their days are so wrong, aren’t they? Every generation gripes about “kids these days” so it’s nice to see that they’re objectively wrong. I thought it was interesting that researchers attribute the increase in delayed gratification to an increased ability to think abstractly due to video gaming and other digital interaction.
Ruminating Randy – that’s a fascinating idea! Henry could start to identify Edward as the problem, rather than acknowledging the real differences between their situations. Maybe he would start to blame Edward for his own difficulties, i.e., Edward is a lazy learner and lax disciple who wants to sin. Hmmm, I think I’ve heard that before.
Ziff – Great example! The one I remember personally is when the Brethren were preaching that women shouldn’t get married at all if they couldn’t marry in the temple. Women turned down proposals from non-members. Then decades later the Brethren quietly changed their minds, and all those women who turned down proposals were pretty upset. Also the counsel to women to not have careers but stay at home. Now the Brethren are calling successful career women into high positions, though they’re still preaching gender roles.
And I really like the line ” I may be wrong sometimes, but at least I’ll own my own experience.”
Anna – yes, exactly! It isn’t the ability to delay gratification; it’s the ability to trust adults that determines success in school. And a second thumbs up to everything else you said.
Travis – I’m not ready to exonerate the Brethren and blame everything on the lawyers. The Brethren lead the Church, not the lawyers. Lawyers do what their clients tell them to do. Poor ol’ RMN not being able to control the lawyers just doesn’t ring true to me.
hawkgrrl – I would define “don’t eat the first marshmallow” as “follow all the rules even if they don’t make sense” because you’ll be rewarded for your obedience later. Some rules make sense; other rules make you miserable. Thanks for sharing your experience.
Calling it a trust crisis instead of a faith crisis doesn’t change much- although in a very real way it’s a trust crisis for me and how much I trust myself. To some extent I colluded with the church in how I interacted and allowed it to shape virtually every aspect of my life. Now I have to continually ask myself is my reaction due to some real danger or is it a product of my former belief system.
Janey, thank you for sharing this reframe that it’s not a crisis of faith but of trust. That rings deeply true to me. It also gives me a better vocabulary to use in describing the topic.
“Henry and Edward are taking the Church’s version of the Marshmallow Test. Who is really being tested here? Are Henry and Edward being tested on their faith? Or is The Test-Giver being tested on his trustworthiness?”
This is where the post really came home for me. I really liked the idea of rethinking whom the test is really testing. That said, strictly for my own purposes, I find myself resisting the idea of treating faith and trust as separate things. I’m thinking of faith as belief, which is itself an act or attitude of trusting something to be true. Maybe I’m getting hung up on semantics. And I don’t say that to undercut the post. I’m just finding myself resisting the idea of separating trust and faith, especially when it comes to high-demand religions. In a sense, isn’t faith just blind trust? (perhaps necessarily/unavoidably blind)
This also got me thinking about the idea of negative trust–something I see in the world and in myself for better and worse. Negative trust would be saying I trust this *leader/institution* is going to continue to disappoint me. I trust their promise of a second marshmallow will prove to be a broken promise. On the positive, this attitude may give me the courage to leave a destructive situation. On the negative, this may result in me writing off a leader/institution which may be capable of change and improvement. Just throwing that out there. Could be a healthy or destructive attitude. Or maybe just me overthinking.
Jake, I think most of are separating trust in church leaders from faith in God when we say we did not have a faith crisis, but a trust crisis. The church tries to conflate the two into the same thing by claiming that they speak for God. But I agree with you that faith is kind of like blind trust, or seeing through a glass darkly trust. And there are people w ho lose trust in God, over things like unanswered prayers, and then lose faith in God. But many of us lost trust in church leaders and then had to ask ourselves if they really speak for God or *ever* speak for God. So we separate the church leaders from God in order to maintain faith in God. Those who lose trust in God, usually leave religion altogether. While those of us who lose trust in church leaders, often hang around discussion boards with other heretics trying to figure out what parts of Mormonism to keep, what parts of Christianity to keep, and where we go from here.
I really like this post. Applying this twist on the Marshmallow Experiment to our experiences with the Church institution and leaders is very enlightening.
“We have evidence that we can’t trust the men who are making the promises. Many of us separate the Brethren from God and conclude that the Brethren don’t speak for God. In this way, we can continue to trust God.” This describes me perfectly. My study of Church history shows that Church leaders have been wrong over and over again. Ziff mentioned birth control, and Hedgehog mentioned honesty about problematic Church history. Those are just 2 examples–there are so many more. Since the Church is so unreliable, I have decided that when it comes to figuring out what is the right thing for me to do, it’s really just between me and God–I don’t really care what Church leaders say.
Ziff also mentioned that she can’t trust the Church’s stance on LGBTQ issues due to its failures on previous issues (birth control and others). I actually suspect (with zero evidence) that there may be members of the Q15 that could support more equitable treatment of LGBTQ individuals, but they are concerned that if they make the change now that too many members who do fully trust Church leadership will have a trust crisis. It was only 14 years ago that Proposition 8 passed in California. A lot of Church members, both in and out of California were recruited to give a lot of time and money to support Proposition 8. The Church’s efforts against LGBTQ rights obviously weren’t limited to Proposition 8–it was not long ago that the Church repeatedly preached against LGBTQ people from the pulpit. Many members have lost friends and alienated family members defending the Church’s position on LGBTQ people. If the Church were to immediately change course today, many Henrys in the Church who have always trusted Church leaders might experience a trust crisis overnight. They’d start asking themselves, “Why did the Church ask me to donate to the Proposition 8 effort just a decade ago when it is now letting married gay couples have callings in my ward? Why did I shun my gay nephew and his partner a few years ago because that’s what the Church said to do, when the Church now allows gay couples to be married in my local chapel?” I think there may be some members of the Q15 that know that the Church did the wrong thing by supporting Proposition 8 and other negative actions and statements against LGBTQ individuals in the recent past. However, they are fearful that if the Church makes changes too soon in its LGBTQ stance that many Henrys in the membership will lose their trust in leadership. In the last few years, it seems like the Church is no longer attacking LGBTQ people in its statements (very often, anyway). Instead, it’s just saying “be nice to everyone even LGBTQ people” while still holding to its hurtful practices. Some of the Q15 may just be hoping that this new “be nice” approach will be enough to satisfy the Edwards that have been hurt by the Church’s LGBTQ policies until the Henrys that couldn’t handle a change of the LGBTQ policies are old enough that they don’t really matter to the Church any longer. Perhaps only when enough time passes so that the Church doesn’t trigger trust crises in too many of its Henrys will it be able to change its treatment of LGTBQ people. If this is really what is happening in the Q15, that’s sad. I’d much rather see Church members lose some trust in their leaders than keep discriminating against their LGBTQ members. Losing some amount of trust in our leaders/prophets now would also set the Church up to be better able to adapt to needed changes in the future as well.
I can’t help but suspect, as you do, that the Q15 know some things have to change for our church to better follow Christ. I guess I don’t have any basis for this except for my own conviction of what is Christ like and my clear understanding that the membership of the church truly isn’t ready for the kinds of changes that I see as necessary. I think if the church did step forward on these issues in a transparent and direct way, offering accountability, this would offer the membership an opportunity for growth. We need to mature our understanding of the fallibility of leaders, the necessity of ongoing revelation, the necessity of personal revelation, and the need to accept nonconformity in the church and to be inclusive rather than exclusive.
my post gets 51 thumbs up and yet the author (Janey) can’t seem to find a reason to acknowledge my post but acknowledges 6 others :). Oh well life isn’t a popularity contest
@Josh h – I liked your comment – which is easy to do when I agree with it! 🙂
josh h – I gave you one of those thumbs up. It was a good comment, but I didn’t have anything to add to it or anything specific to say in reply. My first post here, I tried to respond to every comment, but that gets overwhelming.
To be fair, if you remove references to LDS-specific issues (such as history and LGBTIQ), it could read exactly the same for any Christian denomination. And it’s not like other institutions haven’t had their own fair share of problems. Could it be that the proximity to GAs and the Church™ brings these problems into our lives in a way that some other denominations don’t have to deal with? They have their churches which don’t claim the same direct connection to a distant deity, and so aren’t the same target when things go wrong.
Thanks for the analysis, Janey. One of the key findings of various iterations of the Marshmallow Test, that often gets overlooked in retellings, is that delayed gratification and impulse control are malleable and teachable behaviors, rather than a “either you have it or you don’t” proposition. I also appreciate the mentions of how important individual context and circumstances are; that a child growing up in poverty, displacement or other instability will likely do poorly on the test because their life experience is surrounded by scarcity and distrust (of people and institutions). The same child in a different context may fare much better.
I agree with the framing of a faith crisis as also a trust crisis, with trust (or lack of it) as a crucial element. The cover-up is usually worse than the crime, and the exposure of a lie is usually far more damaging than the lie itself. I was very much like Henry in the OP example, until I reached my thirties and my lived experience diverged away from a comfortable privileged Mormon one, and I began to question and deconstruct. Since then, the Church leaders (local and general) have made no apparent effort to win back my trust; no apologies, no admission of wrongdoing, no meaningful attempt on their part to repair the relationship. In fact, they have made it harder, which is evident in every recent General Conference and every press release responding to an embarrassing news story.
It’s worth noting that for many faithful Church members, RMN’s public endorsement of COVID vaccination, with the accompanying photo of him receiving one, was a trigger for individual distrust of the Church and its leaders. The Q15 is caught in a dilemma of risking loss of credibility with members on both sides of the belief spectrum.
As has been pointed out, our church leaders find themselves between a rock and a hard place because of the many course corrections and lack of actual acknowledgment of harm that Ziff described so well. I think the LGBTQ issues are the biggest crisis for the church in our day. The position is just flat out wrong and ungodly. One only has to check in on some of the wonderful postings in places like liftandloveorg and encircle etc. So many people, young and old, see these policies for what they are and walk away.
Polygamy and racism past and present – more broken trust.
Contraception, abortion etc. I birthed 2 more children than I would have had I not been so conflicted by messages received at church. I didn’t feel cut out to be a mother to a large brood. Thank goodness I don’t think I ruined lives in the process.
I feel that the emphasis on the eternities is misguided because we just don’t know what it will look like, feel like or if it even really exists? Wouldn’t it be far more worthwhile to be living for the here and now? Helping to make life better for those who are unable to help themselves and also for the future generations that follow us? All the emphasis on temples and draining time commitments to perform copious temple ordinances for the dead no longer make sense to me – for the dead or ourselves ( and I’m a ward FH consultant 🥴). I often think of a conversation I had with a person who was doing some repair work in our house. He was LDS, divorced and probably in his 50s. He was in the process of dating and actively looking for a new wife. Friends had introduced him to a widow who he found lovely in every way but he told me he’d decided not to pursue the relationship because he couldn’t be sealed to her. My reaction – huge 🙄 . Crap like that and eternal polygamy makes me mental.
Great post and I’m late to the comment party but three thoughts:
(1) yes, I think it’s useful to think of things in terms of a trust crisis, not a faith crisis. I still have faith in God. I don’t trust Church leaders. They don’t deserve it. Trust is earned.
(3) there are so many other factors for the marshmallow test! One of my kids has a total scarcity mindset. I truly don’t know why. But anyway, someone with a scarcity mindset (maybe because they’ve frequently gone without food) is going to respond so differently to that situation than someone who has always been taken care of. So using someone’s response to that scenario as some kind of judgment about their moral uprightness is so wrong because people bring all sorts of baggage to the test.
(3) Come to think of it, I *don’t* like the Church marshmallows! The idea of a heaven when I’m a (potentially) plural wife having billions of babies has literally zero appeal to me. So yeah, the Church had better offer me something better now (chocolate?) or I’m headed to another table.
I should have added – I’ll take the marshmallow now thank you very much – though sickly sweet stuff just isn’t my thing. I’m with Elisa on chocolate but it needs to be dark and high quality 🙂