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[00:00:00] Morgan Jones Pearson: In his new book, When Church is Hard, Tyler Johnson writes, Faith is the combination of grace, personal tenacity, and commitment that allows us to continue living as though the gospel is true, even when we remain unsure. It does not always allow us to make the right decision, but it allows us to keep trying, even when we falter.
This sentiment captures what, in many ways, I feel like I've learned about what it means to be all in the gospel of Jesus Christ. It made me think that maybe the definition of being all in is simply acting in faith. But fortunately, we get to continue asking this question and on today's episode, Tyler Johnson shares his thoughts on how to approach faith related struggles.
Both our own and those of people we love Tyler Johnson is an oncologist and clinical assistant professor at Stanford University through serving as the bishop of a young single adult ward. He became familiar with the struggles and earnest questions that many young church members grapple with.
This is All In an LDS. living podcast where we ask the question, what does it really mean to be all in the gospel of Jesus Christ? I'm Morgan Pearson, and I am so excited to have Tyler Johnson on the line with me today. Tyler, welcome.
[00:01:21] Tyler Johnson: Thanks so much, Morgan. I'm glad to be here.
[00:01:24] Morgan Jones Pearson: Well, I wanted to start out, you start your book in a way that I thought was really compelling Honestly, for me as a reader, it was kind of gripping, which Obviously, any author is kind of looking to, to grip the reader, but you describe what it's like as an oncologist to share difficult news of a devastating diagnosis with patients.
And then you compare that to sitting with people as a bishop or an institute teacher, uh, in a private church setting that, that. confide in you that their faith is faltering. I wondered, how did you choose to start the book in this way? And for those that haven't had a chance to read yet, what is the comparison or the parallel that you draw there?
[00:02:10] Tyler Johnson: Yeah, so Thanks for that question. I, uh, so as you said, I work as a medical oncologist. So that means I'm the doctor who gives chemotherapy to people with cancer. And I'm not usually the person who breaks the diagnosis of cancer per se, because usually that's done by the doctor who performs the biopsy or maybe the primary care doctor or whoever refers the doctor to my office or the patient to my office.
What I do. Sometimes do is I will sometimes have to deliver news, for example, telling a person that their cancer has come back after they thought it was in remission, or perhaps having to tell them that they're no longer able to receive chemotherapy because we don't have any more effective chemotherapy options to offer them.
Or sometimes I have to inform people that I'm afraid they don't have very long to live. Now, on the one hand, those are medical issues, right? And, and there are biological and physiological aspects to talking about those things, but the truth is that the biology is a necessary precursor in the sense that I have to.
Understand that in order to know when to have the conversation and what the contours of the conversation should look like, but the content of the conversation itself is actually often largely, uh, what we might call spiritual or what people in another context might call existential. It is, that's to say that.
The content of the conversation often deals with things like what is the purpose of life? What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to die and what happens after you die? Uh, what does it mean to have a meaningful life and what does it mean to end your life in a way that is as meaningful as possible?
And so that actually the kind of the spirit of those conversations, if you will, or the kind of the emotional and intellectual and spiritual attitude that I often need to adopt in those conversations resembles in many ways. the conversations that I have when I'm in a religious setting with students or ward members or what have you.
And the reason that I say that is because, you know, I, just because of the, the things that I've been doing over the last 10 or 15 years, I've worked a lot with young people in the church. And so I, I will speak most directly to that just because that's mostly my experience. But I think that what I'm going to say about those people really applies to everyone.
A young person may. approach a bishop or a parent or a teacher or, or whomever, with a question about Joseph Smith and polygamy or the racially based restriction on priesthood and temple blessings or, you know, whatever the, the specific kind of the tip of the spear, if you will, whatever the specific the question is, in my experience.
Behind that, if you kind of, you know, dig a little and a little more and a little more, almost always at the base of those questions lie much deeper questions about what is the purpose of my life? What It is the reason that I'm here, who is God, what does God want from me? How do I learn about God? How do I develop knowledge of the divine?
How do I have confidence that my life is taking the appropriate course, right? It's really those sorts of questions. And so, Even though on the surface, it might seem like being a medical oncologist and being an institute teacher or what have you would be completely different endeavors, often the sort of the heart of the matter of the conversations that come up in both roles is surprisingly similar.
[00:06:07] Morgan Jones Pearson: That makes complete sense. And, and it's, I completely agree with you. I think there's often so much more there than what is initially expressed. You mentioned that you've worked a lot with young people and part of that was as a young single adult ward bishop, right? And you've also been an institute teacher.
You, you talk a lot in the book and I thought this was a really important point and you've reiterated multiple times. The importance of integrity to this younger generation, and you talk about how it might seem like, or I think the assumption at times is all people just want to be able to do what they want to do, or they want to be able to throw out morals.
And you're like, actually, in this instance, many times it's because they want to be people of high integrity. Why was this important for you to, to write and why is it important for people to understand and how does that, that desire to have high integrity affect faith, especially as it relates to members of our church?
[00:07:19] Tyler Johnson: Yeah, so, you know, I think I have found that, uh. And people could disagree with me on this and maybe they would be right, but at least in my life, most of the time, in most circumstances, I have found it to be a good rule of thumb to begin with the assumption that another person's motives are good and that they're Bye Intentions are noble and to sort of work backwards from there.
Now, occasionally you work backwards and maybe find out that actually they are not so good or they're not so noble. But in most cases, I have found that once you really work to understand someone, they largely merit that confidence. They merit that benefit of the doubt and. So in doing that with young people, of course it is the case that there are times when young people just want to sow their wild oats, or they just want to, you know, they're just tired of being told what to do or whatever, right?
Of course that happens, and I'm not questioning the reality of that circumstance. But. My experience is that most of the people, especially those who are really grappling and wrestling with deep questions about the church, virtually always that wrestle comes from a place of love. It comes from a place of love and integrity.
In other words, they are Trying to square what they see at church with what they understand to be the most important, fundamental principles of righteousness and justice and mercy and other ideals that I think all of us God bless you. Would agree are noble and important, and the wrestle comes not just because they want an excuse to walk away and do whatever they want, rather because they see something at church that just doesn't feel right to them, and, and that they, that tension is very difficult to hold.
That apparent contradiction is very it. Ways on them, not because they are bad, but precisely because they're trying to do what's right. So I'll give you an example. There has been a lot of treatment in the media over the past, I don't know, three, four or five years about the amount of money that the church has in particular in one investment firm and ensign peak investments, but also more broadly, just the amount of money that the church has.
Right. And so. Many young people and older people, but again, I spent a lot of time talking with young people, many young people look at that and they say, well, good grief. If there's this much money in the church's coffers and there are all of these people in the world who are manifestly suffering in an endless number of ways, right?
Whether from starvation or lack of medications or because they don't have running water or because they can't get access to an education or whatever. Young people will look at the admittedly noble humanitarian efforts of the church and say, well, sure, that's great that they're doing, you know, ABC, XYZ, but that is a sliver of a sliver that entails a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the church's overall wealth.
Then how can I in good conscience, for example, pay a very large percentage Of my money, 10 percent of my income to an organization that is going to put it into these coffers, where at least as best I can understand as an outsider and et cetera, et cetera, it seems like it's going to be there sitting idle when I could instead take the money.
And give it to a, uh, vetted organization that will use virtually all of it in a short timeframe to actually benefit other people. That feels to some young people like a violation of their integrity because they're, because in effect they end up saying, if I have, let's say it's 10, 000. If I have 10, 000 in charitable money that I'm going to give somewhere, How can I, in good conscience, give it to a place where it will sit in an investment fund for an undefined amount of time, versus giving it to a place that will use it essentially immediately to better other people.
And so, the point of this is not that specific example, so much as that example is emblematic of a broader set of principles, which is that if a young person feels that, um, that their membership or activity or what have you in the church has become a question of their integrity. If we respond with accusations rather than a recognition of the integrity behind their question, the conversation cannot go anywhere.
except in a destructive direction, because here they are trying to bring the best of themselves to understand the universe and their place in it. And now we're accusing them of being, you know, whatever, of just wanting to go and sin or what, you know, whatever line you want to use.
[00:12:50] Morgan Jones Pearson: So I'm curious, Tyler, for those listening, how would you approach a question like that as, as a bishop or as an institute teacher, allowing People to express those feelings, acknowledging that they're coming from a place of integrity.
How, how do you approach a question like that?
[00:13:13] Tyler Johnson: Yeah. So, The, I mean, this is a little bit of a, uh, sort of a, well, it may seem initially like a little bit of a side note, but I would argue it's a really important side note for the, for the following reason. My experience is that most of us fundamentally misunderstand.
So I was talking a moment ago about. Uh, the, these encounters that I have, right, whether it's in the bishops or institute teachers, whatever's office, or whether it's as a medical oncologist, I would argue that 95 percent of the encounters that go on in one of those places. Maybe that number is high, but a high number anyway, a high percentage, are actually one kind of thing.
And we almost always want to assume that they are a different kind of thing. And here's what I mean. Most of us assume that when a person comes to us with a question like that, what they are essentially, what they are fundamentally. Looking for is an infusion of knowledge. In other words, they're coming.
What we think is happening is that they're coming to us with a cognitive gap and they're saying, hey, will you fill in this cognitive gap? And so then our instinctive answer is to say, oh, here's some facts. Here's a thing that you haven't thought about or you didn't know about. And now you know the thing and forevermore.
That's what we think is going to work. But almost always, that's not actually what's going on. Almost always what's really happening is that the person is coming because of an emotion and not because of a cognitive gap. Now don't misunderstand me. I'm not trying to say that there. That the cognitive questions that they're asking are not substantive.
That's not it at all, because they usually are substantive. But what I'm saying is that the substantive question has given risen to a deep and often powerful and even painful emotion. And if we attend to the cognitive question before the emotion behind the question, then the encounter is almost certain to go wrong.
So I'll give you a quick example. If someone comes and says. Gosh, I, you know, I grew up in a church where I was told endlessly as a young man or young woman, that young woman, that I needed to abide by a standard of strict chastity, right? No sex before marriage and then only sex with my spouse when, when I was married.
And yet now I'm reading all of these things about Joseph Smith and polygamy that what's up with that. Now, it may be that the person who's listening to that question happens to have a deep well of knowledge about Joseph Smith's polygamy. And in that case, they're they're first impulse, maybe to rush in and say, well, no, no, no, no.
But what you don't understand about Joseph Smith and polygamy is that this and that about the old Testament and this and that about the sealing system. And anyway, all these things, and that's all fine and good. And it may even be true. And in some case, it may even be helpful, but I would argue that what first needs to happen is just a recognition of the integrity behind the question, which can be as simple as saying something like.
I am so glad that your sense of integrity makes this matter to you, that you care about what initially appears like a contradiction between what you were taught growing up and what you see at least on the surface in this part of the life of Joseph Smith. There is something deeply affirming About having someone see the integrity that lies behind a painful question like that.
And that initial affirmation and that initial sort of responding to the question with empathy rather than with certainty or with Trying to fill the cognitive gap can be hugely important. And then I think once you have established, and the other thing is it requires zero knowledge about the subject matter, right?
You don't have to be a historian. You don't have to know anything about Joe Smith and polygamy or the church's investment arm or anything else. It would look, whatever the question is about, you don't need to know anything about anything except. to know that you are, that you have the trust to express confidence in the integrity and the goodness of the asker.
And then if you do have some knowledge that can help to fill cognitive gaps, that can come afterwards. And if you don't, then you can in effect say to the person, you know, this is such a good question. And it resonates with me so deeply that even though I don't know, so to speak, the answer to this question, As Elder Ballard once counseled Institute teachers to do, why don't you and I seek out an expert who could help us to get an answer to this question so that the sort of phrase that I sometimes encourage people to remember to describe that approach is when asked if you are a teacher or a parent or a leader or what have you, and you're asked a difficult question.
Always let empathy come before certainty. That's almost always going to be a more effective way to respond.
[00:18:38] Morgan Jones Pearson: I think that's really well said, Tyler, you raised some interesting questions in the book that I think could be. Debated at length. Um, but one is whether doubt is a good or bad thing. And you kind of set the stage by sharing quotes that suggest that doubt is bad and some that suggest that doubt can be a positive thing.
What do you hope that readers come away understanding about doubt?
[00:19:07] Tyler Johnson: Yeah. So I think that one of the sort of the messages of especially the first two sections of the book that I think is a really important principle that I hope readers will take away is that there is a difference between a word and the thing that the word represents.
Right? And the reason that I say this is important is because you can imagine the kind of miscommunication and sometimes the kind of heartache that can ensue if we have a group of people, let's say church members, who are all using a certain set of words with the assumption that everybody understands those words to mean the same thing when in fact people have wildly different definitions.
Right? Of those words, because if you, if I have, if I think a word means one thing and you think it means a different thing, and then we sit here and have a debate about whether whatever it is that we're talking about is a good thing or a bad thing, but we have different understandings of what the word even means in the first place, then it's going to be almost impossible.
For us to come to any sort of understanding about the subject, because we're starting from completely different premises, but without acknowledging that our premises are completely different. And I think that in few places in the church is this more true than about the word, doubt. So in the book, I actually go in and outline, I think it's six different definitions of doubt that I think if you look, and it could actually be even more than that, but I think if you look at the places in, uh, in church where we talk about the word doubt, I think there are at least six distinct definitions that we use.
But then when we talk to each other about it, we We often talk about it as if it just means one thing, and we should all understand that it means that one thing. And so then, as a consequence, you have some people, good, faithful church members, who are over here saying things like, you know, that, Anytime anyone gives any space in their heart and mind for doubt that they are sort of sowing their own destruction in effect.
And then you have people on the other side who are saying that a form of genuine doubt is a necessary precursor to building abiding faith, right? I mean, those two things, if the word only means one thing, those two definite, or those two approaches to doubt cannot be. Simultaneously true. If doubt only means one thing, right.
But I think that the issue is that doubt actually means a lot of things. I guess the I'm not going to get into all the details that I get into in the book because we don't have time to do that. But what I will say for the purposes of this discussion are two things. The first thing is that I think we have to recognize and again, this is a I'm not A concept that I go into in great depth in the book, but I think we often have a misconception in the church that what we often call a testimony, that is a sort of a knowledge of spiritual things is like a thing that you gain when maybe you're like an older teenager.
And then it's kind of like a trophy that you can like put on a shelf and just sort of have there. for the rest of your life. And you just kind of every once in a while, you go by and sort of polish it and make sure that it's nice and shiny, but it just stays there and is stable. But I think in fact, that knowledge of any spiritual thing is a lot more like the mythical Phoenix, right?
So the whole thing about the Phoenix is that it keeps dying and having to be reborn. Like that is its life cycle is it's is a continuous process of death and rebirth and death and rebirth. And so I think that it's important that we recognize that those deaths and rebirths of our confidence in any spiritual idea or practice or system or what have you are natural and to be expected, they are, that's not to say that, you know, there's a certain kind of person that might go.
Sort of pretend to be having one of those because it feels, I don't know, sort of edgy or cool, and I'm not talking about that. But I'm saying that when those dark nights of the soul come to you, I think we have to recognize that that's just a natural part of the process of being human. And because that's the case, the quote, doubt unquote, that is involved in that, in that normal regenerative process of death and rebirth and death and rebirth, Is is normal and it's not a thing that we have to pretend is not there.
So that's thing number one. And then thing number two, I would say about doubt is that in my mind, the thing that matters the most when we're talking about whether what doubt adds up to, or whether it's quote good or bad, comes to one of my favorite verses in the Book of Mormon, which is as he's kind of.
Finishing or close to finishing his overview of the people of the brother of Jared, Mormon sort of interjects as he does from time to time and is sort of giving a summary of kind of like what he has learned from appending their record. And then at the end, he says, and now I would commend you to seek this Jesus.
And in my mind, if that forms the center of the journey of discipleship, in other words, if seeking Jesus is the, is the stabilizing force of our spiritual attitude, then whether we feel doubtful or not. I think that to paraphrase the line from the Doctrine and Covenants, even our doubt can be made to work for our ultimate spiritual good, as long as the center of our spiritual gravity is that we are seeking Jesus.
[00:25:23] Morgan Jones Pearson: I wanted to touch on, because I think it's especially relevant to this podcast, given, given its name, but you share a story from a man in your stake and how he wrote to his parents on his mission that he needed to come home early because he didn't know with certainty that the gospel was true. His mom wrote him back.
And she told him to stop praying with his knees and to start praying with his feet. He said that since receiving that letter, he has instead devoted his life to wagering everything he has on a belief that the gospel is true. I thought that this idea of of wagering everything you have was fascinating because since starting this podcast and realizing that going all in is technically like a poker term, which seems odd for a church related podcast.
Um, I've read up on like, what does that mean? And tried to think through like parallels of that. We hear that those words all in all the time in our culture, but what does that really mean? So I wondered from your personal experience, why would you say Tyler for you that the gospel is worth that wager?
[00:26:37] Tyler Johnson: So I think there's sort of, uh, two answers here or, well, I'll get to the direct answer in a second, but the, I think there's a sort of a precursor that has to come before that answer.
My experience, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but from, you know, a lifetime spent in the church is that most church folks. I think would feel a little squirmy with that language, right? Like it feels a little uncomfortable to talk about living a life of gospel living as a quote unquote wager. And I think that the reason for that is because we have developed this mental framework in our culture and in our religious tradition where we talk about, we act as if.
The only reasonable way to proceed is to have spiritual certainty first, and then to live life based on that spiritual certainty. Now, I don't doubt that there are people for whom it works just like that. I'm sure that there are people who develop that certainty, and then they sort of are sort of buoyed and driven by that certainty for the rest of their lives and, and, you know, more power to them.
That's great. But I also think that if you look at the scriptures and the words of modern prophets and just reality and your own interior life, for most people, that is just not how it works. For most people, a wager is the best we've got in a sense. Now, I want to be careful there because I'm not. I, I don't want to suggest that a person should just, you know, sort of randomly make the wager like they just, you know, are picking a bet to put down somewhere.
So might as well put it here as anywhere else. That's not what I'm saying. And I'll get to that more in a second. But the point that I am trying to make is that if you spend your entire life waiting, For certainty, and then once you're certain, then you're going to be all in, then you will never be all in on anything, save for these people who, you know, maybe have a spiritual certainty that they grasp early, and then they just have it for the rest of their lives.
And again, to those people, more power to them. But I think they are the exception, not the rule. In this sense, I love Uh, there was a Jewish thinker who came to speak at BYU probably two or three years ago now, who was then, uh, had a, um, so BYU, or I'm sorry, the Deseret News now has this thing called Deseret Magazine, I think is what it's called, and they had a special.
Uh, issue that was devoted to why a religious based higher education is a good idea writ large, and they invited thinkers from a bunch of different religious traditions to basically say, Why do you think at your religious college that having a religious education is a good idea? And what some of those thinkers did was that they contributed what they understood to be kind of their faith's great idea to contribute to the public discourse, or at least one of the great ideas.
And this Jewish thinker wrote an essay mirroring what he had said at the BYU devotional or forum or whatever, where he said, one of the great ideas from Jewish thinking to contribute to the modern world is the idea of living in a covenant culture, rather than what I think he called a consumerist culture.
And basically what he said is that in the covenant culture, you commit first. And gather information after, whereas in a consumerist culture, you gather information first and commit later now, you know, and I don't know how he comes down on the nuances of this. I want to be careful because, of course, you know, that could idea could be twisted, for example, to try to force a woman to stay in an abusive relationship or whatever.
Right? So I want to I'm not endorsing the extremes of the idea necessarily. But what I am saying is I do think that there is truth to the idea to some degree, we have to choose to commit and then make the thing to which we commit beautiful and true by virtue of the way we are committed to it. Right? And, and I think that there is great beauty and truth in doing that.
In a church context, in a marriage context, right? If you think that you're going to gather information about all potential spouses until you find the perfect one, and then that's when you're going to commit, you are never going to commit, right? Because the more information you get about someone, the more you find out that they're just a flawed human like you are, right?
And so anyway, so, but that gets to the heart of the question, which is, okay, so then why is it worth making a commitment to the church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints? Like, is there anything there to justify the wager, so to speak? And I go into this in great depth in the book and I, there's not time to do that here, but the two overarching arguments that I make are that within the church, we find a beautiful, soaring, revolutionary, And I would argue ultimately nourishing theology, that is the beliefs that we have, the way that we think about God and the universe and our place in the universe and in relationship to God, and we find a beautiful way.
Nourishing, substantive, meaningful form of lived religion. In other words, set the beliefs aside for a moment, but just the way that we show up for each other and show up on Sundays and show up in the world and et cetera means something. Now, I want to be clear. None of this is to paint any of this as perfect, right?
But I still think that it is true, like I, I'm fond of Melissa anyway, who, uh, passed away recently and who we all miss, uh, was fond of saying that. So she was a scholar of other religions, religion writ large, and she was fond of saying something like. Grand visions, theophanies, and grand ideas for how to run a society or a church or whatever in the world of religion, like of the history of religion.
Those are a dime a dozen, like you can find those all over the place. But what is rare is establishing people who show up and who like the culture and the group endure. And I think that there is a genuine, imperfect, real, but beautiful, meaning to the culture and community that we have created and sustained within the church.
And so I think those two things, the theology and the lived religion, give a rational thinking person a satisfactory basis for saying this is a place that it's worth putting down my wager or going all in to use your words.
[00:33:38] Morgan Jones Pearson: Uh, completely agree with everything that you said, and I love this idea of covenants.
I just taught Sunday school yesterday, and we talked a lot about the power of covenants and the power of making them in the book. You reference the, the idea that you referenced earlier in this interview of the dark night of the soul. Say you write this, and I wanna give people a little taste of how great your writing is.
You said first, when we find ourselves wandering through a dark night of the soul, we can rest assured that it is not new and that we are not alone. Some of Christianity's most diligent disciples have faced similar situations. In fact, the perception of divine absence may be a necessary trial for many, if not most, who ardently Follow Jesus.
Second. Our response in these moments of aloneness may define who we. who we become. I don't know if you feel this way, Tyler, but one thing that I observed and have observed in my life, but specifically with friends, I was, I was in the YSA, uh, stage of life for a good long time. And one thing that I felt like I saw over and over again is that when these questions related to faith because faith is so important to people when the questions of faith kind of start to pile up a little bit, there can be like a sense of panic.
And I think that that feeling of panic, like I need to figure this out right now comes from the adversary. And instead, I think God gives us place to. To learn and to grow and to seek answers to our questions. So I wonder for you, how do you think that approaching doubt, knowing that doubt can be a normal part of maturation can help those struggling, but also those who are seeking to help those who are, who have these questions?
[00:35:40] Tyler Johnson: Yeah. So I think I have learned so a few things. The first one is. I think there is a really tempting, but potentially problematic and even painful, even hurtful rhetoric and, and idea in the church that we should score people's lives as either successes or failures. So I'll give you a kind of a stark, uncomfortable example.
I have heard people. Say things like, well, this couple are clearly wonderful parents because they have five kids and all of them have stayed strong in the church. That short sentence has about 117 bad ideas in it and is like So much of a problem for so many reasons, just to cite two of the really problematic ones.
One is the idea that it suggests, even if it doesn't quite say it explicitly, that a person who grows up and stays actively engaged in the church is, quote, a success, unquote, and that a person who doesn't is, quote, a failure, unquote. Again, it doesn't say it explicitly, but it's. pretty, I mean, it is all but explicit in that statement.
And then, of course, the second idea is that you can measure any parents by what their kids do, which, you know, is a great idea unless you've read anything in any of the scriptures at all, in which case it totally falls apart, right? But, uh, I mean, like literally from Adam and Eve and Lehi and Sarai on, like, choose your starting point.
It's always wrong. But, but the issue is, if, if people who have serious questions about the church believe that our starting point is to look at them and think, you are on the precipice of deciding whether you will be a success or a failure, and my job is to push you into the success category, i. e.
Continuing to be an actively engaged church member in that moment, they recognize that they have ceased to be a person to us and they have become a statistic or a conquest. They have been instrumentalized, objectified, and nothing is more offensive to our sense of being human than to sense that a person who is interacting with us has objectified us.
And so at that moment, the conversation is now over. So, I mean, they may continue to talk to us, but in terms of their, you know, harder mind being open to anything, they're done. And so I think that we need to change that underlying paradigm so that instead of thinking about pushing people out of the failure box and into the success box, we are instead saying the gospel has beautiful things to offer.
Would you like me to help? You to understand some of what I understand to be those beautiful and powerful principles and ideas and, and what have you. And, but it only works if the second part is just as sincere. Can you teach me what I don't understand about what is beautiful and holy, or for that matter, What it is that deeply concerns you about the church.
And then of course that goes back to the empathy piece that I was talking about earlier. Once the conversation is approached from that direction, then it becomes intuitive to understand that what I said earlier needs to be seen to be the case, which is the life of belief is like a Phoenix. A Phoenix's life cycle is to die, And resurrect and die again and resurrect again.
And I think that for most people, that is what a life of belief is going to be. Like C. S. Lewis has a part in one of his books where he says that I think it's in the screw tape letters where the elder devil tells the lesser devil that, uh, While we may, while the lesser devil may think that because his quarry is not going to church anymore, that that means that he's closer to being in the devil's grasp, if the reason that the person has distanced the subject of the devil's conquest has If the reason that they have distant, that he has distanced himself from the church is because he's looking with integrity and deep thought and conviction at his beliefs about the world, that is the worst of all outcomes for the devil, because what that means is that the person is now caring about drilling down to the truth about finding what is real.
And so in effect. We have to have the confidence that truth and deep reality and genuine enduring beauty are reflected in our church and our beliefs in such a way that we don't need to fear, we don't need to imagine that the The truth that we hold is somehow harmed because someone doubts it or does not understand it, or even thinks that it is silly or, or wrong because truth is not changed by our attitudes toward it.
Truth is truth. And I think that when we are filled with both that confidence and most importantly with love, then it changes the entire way that we approach that kind of conversation.
[00:41:50] Morgan Jones Pearson: I loved your chapter, Tyler, that discusses Mary Magdalene at length. In short, you write that Mary's lesson to us is that sometimes believing is hard, but to go into greater detail, you say the dawning lesson she offers comes in the period between Jesus's death and his resurrection, even when she could no longer reasonably hope, even though she had no mental category within which to place the idea that Jesus might live again.
Still, she sought Jesus, which goes back to that idea of seeking Jesus that you mentioned earlier. And then you said she kept about the business of following him even into his grave. I wondered partially because I find Mary Magdalene to be a fascinating character in the scriptures, but can you tell listeners why you chose to talk so much about about Mary Magdalene and why you feel that she's a compelling example of faith?
[00:42:47] Tyler Johnson: Yeah, so, you know, I had this, uh, long series of conversations with a friend who read a very early version of the book many iterations ago, uh, and at that time I had this sort of long list of people who had been sort of quote unquote famous people who had been through a dark night of the soul, right? So that included people like C.
S. Lewis. Mother Teresa, Joseph Smith, and then Mary Magdalene. And what, what my friend helped me to understand over the series of multiple conversations was that Mary is, even though all of those people, yes, faced very deep questions, and you can read more into this if you want to read up on any of the individual ones, but like if, so for example, if you think of Doctrine and Covenants 121, right?
The beginning of that is Joseph Smith saying, Oh God, we're out there. Where art thou? And where is the pavilion that covereth thy hiding place? In other words, why aren't you helping? Where are you? You know, in effect, do you even exist? He never says that explicitly, but that's sort of the implied bigger question.
C. S. Lewis, Mother Teresa went through long periods of anguished divine silence as best they could perceive. But what my friend helped me to understand Is that although those, all of those examples are compelling in their own way, Mary's experience was different for multiple reasons. The first one is that Jesus was a daily living, palpable presence in her life, right?
He wasn't like a, I mean, I don't, you know, I guess I can't speak for whatever C. S. Lewis or Mother Teresa or for Joseph Smith, but even Joseph Smith, who had many divine manifestations, it was like he would live most of his life and then boom, he would get a revelation or boom, he would have a, you know, a, uh, uh, angelic visitation or whatever.
But the point is that those were like punctuation marks in the book of his life. But for Mary, at least for the last three years or whatever, of Jesus's life. We, I guess I don't know per se if they were in daily contact, but they were in frequent contact, right? She was part of the party of disciples that sort of followed him and lived with him.
And anybody who's watched the chosen, I think you get a sort of a, you know, cinematic idea of what that might've been like. So then, so So her knowledge of Jesus, her familiarity with Jesus was just different in a way that I think is hard really for us to imagine. That's number one. And then number two is that at least those three other people that I mentioned, C. S. Lewis, Joseph Smith, and Mother Teresa, all of them, the very basis or one basis of their faith was the idea of resurrection, right? It was this, this unimaginable idea that a corpse could live again. But for Mary There was no such idea granted there was Lazarus, but even Lazarus, right? That, but that was the whole point is that Jesus was there to do the raising, right?
And now the person who had always been there to heal the other people had died. And it wasn't like he had, you know, slipped away to a different country and she heard a rumor that he had died. Like she had watched in the most extended, anguished, agonizing way had watched him take his last breaths and then had helped to prepare the body for burial and to lay it in its death tomb.
And I go into this in the book, but I can tell you that as a doctor who takes care of a lot of very sick patients, it is hard to overemphasize, you know, most people now have no first person exposure to death because We have largely quarantined death off from polite society, right? Like you may maybe have had a parent or someone who you watched die, but even that is relatively rare.
But for me, it's not, I've seen a lot of people die because of the work that I do. And I can tell you that the qualitative difference between a living person and a dead corpse is something that is hard to really grasp. Until you have done what we call certifying the death, which is that I literally, when a person has died, if it's my turn to, to pronounce, as we say the death, I have to go to the bedside and like, feel for the pulse and instead feel the cold absence of a pulse, listen for the heartbeat and instead hear silence in the chest, watch for the chest wall rising and falling with breathing and instead see it sitting there still.
It's, it's hard to. Convey the depth of the change that happens when a person dies and Mary watched this happen to Jesus and then presumably, like, even felt the weight of the dead body in her hands as they prepared it for burial or what have you. And so, All of that is to say, it is different to have had this daily palpable presence of Jesus in your vicinity and then watch as that presence dies and have no As I say in the quote you read, there's no mental category.
There's nowhere for her to even place the conception that, I mean, come back to, like, come back to life. What would that even mean? Like, who would be there to do it? Right? Because the only time that she had seen something a little sort of parallel was Lazarus, but that was the whole point is that Jesus was the one doing the raising and now he's not even there.
And so I don't even want, I don't even think the scriptures necessarily justify us in going so far as to claim to know what Mary's motivations were as she approached this, as she continued to seek Jesus, like I'm not even, I mean, the scriptures do seem to make clear that she was shocked. When she finally saw him again, so I don't, it's not like I'm, I'm not trying to suggest that she was sort of hanging around the tomb waiting for him to wake back up.
That's not it. But she seems to have been compelled by some still barely burning ember of whatever you want to call it, faith or belief or devotion or something to stay as close to Jesus as she could. even after Jesus had died. And I think the power of the metaphor for many modern people is that we may well arrive at a place where it feels like so, uh, sister or president Rosemary Wixom gave this beautiful talk in conference called returning to faith.
And in it, she tells the story of this woman who had watched in effect, her testimony burned down. And this woman, the president Wixom quotes the woman as having said that, uh, once Once this sort of process had fully happened, everything had gone to ashes, except for Jesus. And this is just to say that I think we may experience that moment where either everything except for, maybe even everything including Jesus, everything, all of our beliefs, all of our, But are thereto for what we thought to be knowledge burns to the ground.
But the question then is, what spiritual attitude will we adopt in the moment when it feels as though the very object of our belief has died?
[00:50:19] Morgan Jones Pearson: I love that point that you make that holding all things in consideration, recognizing that regardless of what's going on for Mary in that moment. where she is is so significant.
Um, and she's found there outside the tomb. And that is where Jesus meets her. I want to, before we get to our very last question, I want to read one more part from your book. You talk about the complexity of belief and you say, believing is complex. belief and doubt battle for ascendancy in societies and in each of us.
We may believe for a time and later find that that belief receding. We may find the life of faith initially intuitive only to find it later taxes us greatly. It seems that for many of us anyway, confidence in any spiritual thing will be defined by dynamic. Dynamism. Dynamism. Okay. Thank you. Um, I can't read, uh, not constancy by change, not consistency.
There will be days when we believe despite it all days when we don't and days when the best we can do is hope that belief will one day reawaken. You obviously have written this book, Tyler, and I know how much work goes into writing a book, and you've written this book with deep hope that it will help.
someone, I'm sure. Um, that's why you've devoted the time to it. What do you hope people come away from the book understanding about the complexities and the non linear nature of belief in the gospel of Jesus Christ?
[00:52:03] Tyler Johnson: Yeah, so You know, sort of to the point that I made earlier, so that, you know, you mentioned this, a friend of mine in our stake here who wrote this, uh, essay or has given a talk called on praying with your feet.
Right? And the point of that, if I were going to distill down the point of that essay, it would be to question this idea that we often have. Um,
And, you know, I think we probably wouldn't affirm that idea if we were asked it explicitly, but we often affirm it implicitly, or we seem to suggest that this spiritual certainty is a, if not an absolute prerequisite for living a life of faith, it is. It's such an important, uh, it is so important that we sort of can't, it's like, I guess I would say it this way.
We often act as if certainty about certain spiritual truth claims is the point of the gospel. as if certainty is the goal. And to the degree that we explicitly or implicitly believe that, I think that's a deeply problematic notion for a lot of reasons. One of them is because it's not scriptural. Both Alma 32, and I always get it mixed up, it's either Doctrine and Covenants the one that talks about spiritual gifts, The, the section of Doctrine and Covenants that talks about spiritual gifts says explicitly that it, to some, it is given to know by the power of the Holy Ghost, and then the next part of the verse says, and to some, it is given to believe on the words of those who know, especially offered in contradistinction to the first part of that verse.
What that tells me is that it is a spiritual gift not to know. And my experience is that I learn deep abiding, important truths from my friends who do not know, or from friends who are in a season or period of not knowing. And I believe that we are meant, at least many of us, are meant not to know, and that's okay.
Like, we don't need to pretend to know when we don't, we don't need to enter into the, you know, high stakes testimony drag race where everyone's trying to proclaim more certainty than the person before them. We don't need to. act like we have a confidence that we don't have. I, I would, I think it would be aspirational for us as a church to have testimony meetings where it would feel entirely comfortable for a person to stand up and say, I don't know if this is true or I thought it was true, but now I'm not sure.
Or I have really deep questions, and here's why. The reason that I say this is because my experience is that that's most all of us, at least some of the time, and some of us most of the time. And I don't think that any of those things calls into question the depth of our discipleship or the ability to that we have to contribute meaningfully to the body of Christ.
And in fact, you know, nobody, nobody shows up at church and says, well, I was told in my patriarchal blessing that I had the gift of healing, but I progressed beyond that. I don't really do that anymore. Right. Like that would just be weird if somebody talks like that. Right. And so maybe it's the case that for some people, the gift is not to know.
And the question, and if, and when the knowledge comes, that's the other thing is that the doctrine of covenants says, I mean, it's metaphorical. But to the degree that a metaphor can be explicit, it seems to explicitly suggest in Doctrine and Covenants 121 that the doctrines of the priesthood, it doesn't say that they will fall on you like an anvil from the sky.
It says that they will distill upon you as the dews from heaven. And one of the things that I understand that to mean is that when spiritual confidence or knowledge or certainty or whatever comes, most often it will come subtly. As a famous Christian poem says, it will come unasked, unforced, unearned. It will just, you'll get up one morning.
And it's there just like the dew is bejeweling the grass when you wake up in the morning, because it just appears. And so I guess what I hope that people will come away with is first off that they will give themselves more space. To progress honestly on the pathway of discipleship and, and to be unthreatened when they go through a period of deep doubting.
And that by the same token, as they become more comfortable with that in their own interior lives, that we can all give greater space to people around us who are feeling those same things.
[00:57:41] Morgan Jones Pearson: My last question for you is what does it mean to you to be all in the gospel of Jesus Christ?
[00:57:49] Tyler Johnson: In a spiritual sense, I think we would all do much better if we understood that in a, in a framework of ownership or in terms of thinking of what we own, none of us owns anything.
We are all penniless, right? As King Benjamin emphasizes, even the air you breathe is a gift, right? You can't add one. Inch to your own stature. So, you know, what are you so proud of in effect? Right. And yes, that's true with money, but it's also true with a college degree or a home or, you know, whatever your gifts are, spiritual, physical, emotional, or otherwise, all of those things are gifts.
None of them is earned. So if you understand that you're penniless, and then if you understand that everything that you have been given is a gift, then the question switches from, you know, many people think that the. Question of life is trying to quote unquote, find yourself. But of course, Jesus explicitly excluded that as the reigning paradigm of our lives.
And instead it becomes in my mind, there are two operative questions in life. Question number one is what are my gifts? And again, this includes spiritual, emotional, physical, financial, educational, all of it. What are my gifts? And then the second thing is, what can I do with those gifts to most bless the world?
When it comes to that second question, I think of life as a series of concentric circles. So the tightest concentric circle around me is, uh, my immediate family. Those are the ones who are in the tightest circle. Then my extended family. Then my ward family, then my immediate community. And then there may be some people who had such a, you know, a reach or influence or whatever, that their influence actually goes beyond that to their, you know, city or state or nation or whatever.
If you happen, you know, if one of your gifts is. Political acumen, maybe you're a Senator or whatever, but of course, that's not going to be most of us, right? But the point is that then the question becomes, I, I give up the idea of ownership, I give up the idea of having earned stuff and the question instead becomes, how can I use these gifts to bless people around me?
And I think that in my mind. That idea of consecration, that idea of being all in is simply a way of saying, how do we use the gifts we have been given to worship God by loving and blessing the people around us? And of course, none of us is going to be perfect at those things, but when we make mistakes, we can.
Repent and keep trying to do better and make our life a question of how to do that a little bit better every day.
[01:00:45] Morgan Jones Pearson: I think you're spot on. And I love that you, you touched on this idea of, you know, finding yourself and that being kind of eliminated or replaced by these other two questions. I think that idea is so pervasive in our society today.
This like, what's in it for me? Yeah. You do you be your true, authentic self. And in reality, if we could recognize that we're children of God with God given gifts to bless the world, it would make the world so much better. Um, Tyler, I appreciate your work on this book. I, I learned a lot. And, and like I said, It's been really, uh, good for me to reflect, um, my personal faith and, and also how hopefully I can be more empathetic toward others.
So thank you so much for the effort that you've put into it. And, uh, hopefully. Others can can benefit from it as well. I'm sure that they will.
[01:01:48] Tyler Johnson: Thank you so much It was a pleasure to be here.
[01:01:54] Morgan Jones Pearson: We are so grateful to Tyler Johnson for joining us on today's episode. You can find Tyler's new book When Church is Hard in Deseret bookstores now a big thanks to Derek Campbell of Mix at Six Studios for his help with this episode and thank you for listening. We'll look forward to being with you again next week