Random Thoughts on Interreligious Dialogues with Latter-day Saints
Apologies upfront. It's basically a stream of consciousness.
This essay is fairly random but interlaced with content from my forthcoming 40 Questions About Mormonism.
I love interreligious dialogue, especially with Latter-day Saints. This month I marked my eighth trip to Utah, in partnership with Standing Together, to lead and participate in dialogues between evangelical and Latter-day Saint college students. While most students long to spend their spring break sunbathing on Florida beaches, a precious few trek to Utah’s cold, wet mountains to talk to Mormons.
There’s often a thrill to these dialogues, of hearing and being heard, learning new things, anticipating the awkward while striving for understanding, all with the hope of honoring the Lord Jesus. Not all evangelicals like dialogue. Some prefer more monological approaches, harboring a suspicion that dialogue is merely universalist ecumenism masquerading as evangelism. I’m sure there are Latter-day Saints who feel the same. But I’ve found these misgivings to be misplaced, at least in my experience. Jesus monologued in the temple at Jerusalem, and he also dialogued about true worship with a woman in Samaria. She was the subject, but He was the object of their conversation. I really enjoy that kind of interaction.
Dialogue is less learning about what someone believes than it is learning about someone. “Who are you?” I wonder, “and what do you want?” I don’t ask these questions directly, but they guide my conversations, and I prefer them over the ones you’d expect: “What do you believe? How do you behave?” Those questions are answered naturally when you understand that humans aren’t the sum of the doctrines they hold, mere automatons programmed by beliefs to perform certain behaviors. I agree with Dietrich Bonhoeffer when he said, “We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or don’t do, and more in light of what they suffer.” If you really want to get at the core of a person’s beliefs, you have to start with their heart, which, in a fallen world, is often weighed down by suffering.
Anxiety. Doubt. Apathy. Depression. Abuse. I’ve heard all these things in dialogue and been overwhelmed by the privilege I’ve had to console strangers with the everlasting gospel of hope. “What does it say about my worth in God’s eyes that I’m not married yet?” a woman my age once asked. “If God values families, why does He allow them to fall apart?” another man asked. “Does God love me even if I doubt him?” a student wondered. These are the deep questions I yearn for in dialogue.
Granted, sometimes dialogue can be a bit like theological fencing. I dig into my opponent only to look down a moment later at their sabre blade bent in my thigh. “Nothing that we despise in other men is inherently absent from ourselves,” Bonhoeffer reminds me. In every instance, though, my goal never changes: to honor Jesus Christ by stewarding encounters with men and women He loves (which, I hope, is a shared goal across the table).
And we’re supposed to love those people, too. It’s not an option. If we’re serious about letting the “Lord direct your hearts into the love of God” (2 Thess 3:5), then we must yield to His greatest commandment: to love Him holistically and to love “thy neighbour as thyself” (Luke 10:27).
Question: How can you love someone “as thyself” if you know little to nothing about them? Or, worse, you believe caricatures about them and refuse to consider that maybe what you learned about Mormonism from your great uncle isn’t entirely accurate? Is it really the person you love or is it a fun-house-mirrored version of them?
The Dating Analogy
An analogy may be helpful. Imagine a doting young couple head over heels for one another. You see it; I see it. It’s inevitable… they’ll get married. But first, the courting ritual. They need to go on dates, to hear and be heard by one another, and to build trust, which is, after all, the foundation of all meaningful relationships. So, off they go to dinner and coffee again and again. They’re not simply learning about each other’s beliefs; they’re learning about each other.
Suppose they treated their dates the way we sometimes treat dialogues. On the one hand, there’s extreme ecumenism, which fosters those fluffy, thin interactions that prize niceness over all. Extreme ecumenists are absolutely allergic to discussing any differences at all, or if they do, they only discuss disagreements of little value. That way, everything remains nice and tranquil.
Imagine the dating couple only ever talked about what they agree on: common life goals, shared hobbies, locations to live, etc. They don’t want any tension between them or risk being disappointed, so they avoid their disagreements altogether. But what kind of relationship is that? How can they truly love one another if they don’t truly know each other? If I’m unaware of how I disagree with my neighbor, do I really know them?
On the other hand, though, is the temptation only to discuss the differences, and any potential agreements are interrogated until they’re resorted into the disagreement category. This street goes two ways. I’ve watched evangelicals transit it toward Latter-day Saints (with whom they deny having any semblance of agreement), and I’ve been on the receiving end from veteran LDS missionaries zealous to convert a pastor.
Back to the young couple. Could their relationship survive if they only discussed their disagreements? Obviously not. What courtship (let alone marriage) can grow if the only thing ever talked about is how the other is wrong?
Avoiding these extremes isn’t easy, but well worth it. We fail to remain atop the horse, as it were, as we slump over to the left or right, being intoxicated with fear of the other. I’d say the force that pulls us down into the dialogue ditch is found somewhere in the difference between saying “I have the truth” and “the Truth has me” (John 14:6). In other words, whom do you imagine is the object of conversation, you or Christ? And to whom do you and the others at the table belong?
A proper understanding of Christ’s lordship over both parties goes a long way, even if you deny the other belongs to Jesus in the first place. That doesn’t change His status one bit, nor His ever-present command to love. Again, Jesus called us to love our neighbor as ourself. It’s not optional.
The Great Reason? The Greatest Commandment
But evangelicals and Latter-day Saints are missionaries by nature, which is one reason why people assume it’s so hard for us to love one another. We’re constantly trying to persuade the other to join us, and our competing impulses have long generated anxiety, mistrust, and animosity.
I understand why evangelicals and Latter-day Saints are drawn to either the rut of our past or to superficiality in the present. Maximizing our differences at the expense of our similarities is comfortable because it reinforces personal conviction. “You’re not really Christians,” Latter-day Saints are told, who reply that the evangelical faith is lacking, like a piano without all its keys, so “have fun playing ‘Chopsticks’ the rest of your life.” So I also understand the impulse to be content with superficial relationships. I’ve lost count of the times when disagreement arises that Latter-day Saints try to relieve the tension by telling me, “Well, in the end, we’re all on the same team,” or evangelicals privately ask me, “Is that difference really such a big deal?”
Yes, it is, because (again) how can we truly love one another as we love ourselves if we refuse to know one another truly, to understand what makes us the same and different?
This is why I prioritize the Greatest Commandment within the Great Commission. Strong words, I know, but hear me out. It’s impossible to obey the Great Commission while forsaking the Greatest Commandment. After all, before Jesus mandated his Great Commission (Matt 28:18–20), he issued the Greatest Commandment, to love God holistically and to love one’s neighbor as oneself (Matt 22:37–40).
This is not to pit one against the other. Love that lacks a gospel witness has no home in the kingdom of God, but a gospel witness that lacks love is equally foreign. You cannot bear witness to the Lord Jesus while harboring apathy or fear or hate against those for whom He died and rose again. If evangelicals are called to love their Latter-day Saint neighbors as themselves, how can we possibly do so without knowing anything about them, their wants, or their suffering?
With a love of neighbor as our core motivation, our approach to Latter-day Saints takes on a virtuous form. We break from the tired pattern of distrust and deception that has marred our relationship for generations. We’ll have no appetite for digesting poor resources, the kinds that introduce us to mere caricatures, Latter-day Saints that exist only in a hostile or naive imagination. We’ll fact-check what we hear and read, but we’ll also latch onto genuine and significant differences, submitting them to the authority of Christ through scripture.
So why do I love to dialogue? Because we are commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves, and it’s hard to love someone without taking the time to get to know them.
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