Navigating a “Faith/Trust Crisis”: Empathy, Communication, and Finding Your Pace
We dive deep into the complexities of faith journeys, exploring how to better communicate with loved ones and how to navigate church activity on your own terms. What advice do you have in a faith/trust crisis conversation?
Reframing the “Faith Crisis”
Drawing from Jeff Strong’s new book, Torn, I think we should reframe the common “faith crisis” as a “trust crisis.” Why do members leave the Church? While Jana Riess’s statistically reliable research indicates that most people leave simply because they lose interest or marry a non-member, Strong’s study suggests that church history is actually the primary driver for those who intentionally disaffect. Regardless of the reasons, this wave of disaffiliation—which Elder Marlin K. Jensen once likened to the highest period of apostasy since Kirtland—requires navigating complex mixed-faith dynamics.
Strategies for Conflict Resolution
To help families and couples navigate a trust crisis, here are some powerful conflict resolution techniques designed to foster empathy and minimize defensiveness:
- Share emotions over intellect: Fostering true empathy requires sharing specific emotions and physical sensations (e.g., “I feel pressure in my chest”) rather than over-intellectualizing, which often leads to disconnection.
- True empathy does not require agreement: You can fully understand how someone arrived at their feelings based on their unique background without agreeing with their position.
- Use “and” instead of “but”: Using the word “but” can be invalidating to the other person, whereas “and” leaves room for both perspectives.
- The “One Partner, One Complaint, One Day” Rule: To prevent blame-shifting, only one person gets to bring up an issue per day. The talking partner must use non-critical language, and the listening partner is only allowed to use phrases like, “I hear you. I understand. And I’m listening.”
- Take an immediate timeout: After the complaint is made, the listening partner should take a timeout (up to 24 hours) to calm their nervous system and avoid a defensive trauma response.
- The Empathy Flip: When formulating a response, write it down and ask: Is it kind? Is it loving? Is it respectful? Imagine how you would feel receiving that exact response, and revise it if it sounds triggering.
Ultimately, the goal is to consistently fight to understand your partner rather than fighting to be understood. Even if a loved one ultimately chooses to step away from the Church, it is important to trust the Atonement and recognize that they will remember your ability to keep loving them.
Returning to Church on Your Own Terms
A question from a 49-year-old listener with autism, “I Love Christ,” said he wants to return to Church but finds the two-hour block completely draining. What advice would you give?
I offered advice for anyone feeling overwhelmed by church activity:
- Take breaks and ease into it: If church is stressing you out, it’s perfectly fine to step out or make your own personal study out of the time.
- Do what you enjoy: Bring a book to read during class, or hang out in the hallway to socialize about something else if that makes the experience more enjoyable.
- Don’t take everything literally: When faced with difficult scriptural or historical narratives, remember that not everything needs to be viewed through a strictly literal lens.
- Give and expect grace: It can be frustrating to sit through lessons that feel overly simplistic or lack nuance, but it is vital to offer grace to those at different levels of spiritual maturity, and to help teach them to give you grace in return.
Is faith crisis still a problem? What advice do you have?
Wheat & Tares 
What I wish I knew then was that “gospel truth aka [literal] gospel truth” to an Autistic is the “[aspirational] gospel truth” in class and in the community (even if the community and/or leadership is more blatantly black & white about it terms of thinking).
I think the faith crisis is something that happens within your mind as a first step towards changing directions on church activity and in your own personal beliefs about it. You need to have lots of conversations with yourself at first. Try to arrive at a position or set of positions that you feel confident in. For me, I eventually arrived at a position that god and gods as described in most religions don’t exist. At most God is synonymous with nature and to be at one with God is to be at one with nature and the people around you. This could be in a variety of ways.
Next, understand that much as the journey away from belief in the church’s traditional propositions was probably stressful and mentally painful for you individually, it will be the same for others who are still believing. To try to spring information on them could lead them to strong aversions to what you say and create a rift and an avoidance of you. The information is always there if they do desire to see, and they may someday arrive at where you are on their own, or they may continue on in their traditional ways and beliefs for life. After all, there is comfort and order in clinging to tradition. It is harder to live in a world of uncertainty that rejects the idea that hope-inspiring miracles actually exist and occur. Deriving hope from raw reality is trickier.
Lastly, seek to understand what the church teaches about individual freedom, divorce, and a number of other topics. Seek to find commonality between tradition and your new way of understanding. In here you can explain your position to the believing loved one if needed in a way that they are more likely to accept. If you can convince the believer not that Joseph Smith was a fraud, but that the church is voluntary and shouldn’t be forced on others or that the foundations of marriage shouldn’t be broken simply because of a difference in religious belief, that is what you aim for. And use the church’s teachings to help convince the family member of this. Here you are much more likely to find common ground and their acceptance of you as someone who changed in belief.
A full believer will never go to you and ask, “what about Joseph Smith, polygamy, Book of Mormon historicity, etc.” They don’t ask anything. They won’t ask anything. Why? Because they know that that conversation won’t go over well. It will be awkward and uncomfortable. And they have their minds made up anyway. They don’t want to experience any cognitive dissonance that such a conversation may give rise to. Anyone who does ask, “what about Joseph Smith, etc.” is likely experiencing a faith crisis and are looking for a way out. If asked, express empathy that you were there once and that a raw and hard reality of fakery simply became clearer and clearer over time.