Something for Sundays: Culture vs Doctrine
and why we need to stop pitting one against the other
Something for Sundays is a series of posts about my experiences with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, featured in my Kimber Was Here newsletter. My posts reflect my personal journey wrestling with Mormon faith and tradition and may challenge some beliefs. If you're not in the right space to read this, I understand, I do not fault you, and I am so grateful you subscribe anyway. :)
The Church is true, but the people aren’t.
We need to separate the culture of the Church from the doctrine of the Church.
You/they just don’t understand.
How many times have I heard these phrases within the Church?
As I’ve been on this faith disentanglement journey, when I have shared hard things I have come across or experienced with people, there have been times where people respond with something a long the lines of, “Ah, you know, the Church is run by imperfect people, but they are just doing their best!”
I sympathize with that, and I understand that. Having worked for the Church myself when I was an MTC teacher, I definitely agree that humans are all just doing their best, especially working for an organization that feels immensely important because it offers the keys to salvation!
But blaming real issues on “imperfect people” or “church culture” can’t be where the conversation ends.
Culture Didn’t Just Happen
I recently talked to a girl who found out when she was an adult that her dad had an affair, and had children with another woman. She was so hurt and confused and shocked, but she could only bring herself to be mad at the other woman; it was too hard to be mad at her dad. She ignored the woman, spoke poorly of her, and mistreated her. To get mad at her dad would be too painful, even though, really, he was the one who hurt her. I think sometimes we blame issues of the Church institution on individual members when really, we are missing the root of the issues. We chalk it up to “culture” or “misunderstanding” and not looking to the source of the culture or the source of the misunderstanding.
When I saw people in my life I knew and trusted leave the church, I blamed them for not understanding, for not trying hard enough, or just wanting the easy way out. I blamed them for confusing the culture with the doctrine. I didn’t want to turn my frustration to the institution itself, to the doctrine itself, to the prophet, to God… because that would be too painful. Subconsciously, I knew if I started to take a hard look at the institution itself, I would be opening a can of worms.
Now, I have opened the can of worms, and now, I see it differently. Now, I see that the culture of the Church didn’t just happen.
YES, humans are messy.
YES, humans are imperfect.
YES, institutions are made up of humans that are messy and imperfect.
But why are we okay with chopping off each others’ heads instead of wondering how we got the swords in our hands in the first place?
In the words of a dear friend via DM on Instagram: “The culture of the church didn’t just appear. Our verbiage, focus, doctrines, actions, rules, etc. that originate from the church all contribute to our “culture” and how we as members act. You can’t totally separate the church and the culture, they influence each other.”
I recently listened to a podcast where some girls were explaining to a Non-Member host, “Oooh yeah, the bad things you have heard about is the Church culture, not the doctrine! The doctrine is actually all about love, but the judgmental culture is not tied to the actual teachings of the church!”
Just five years ago, those could have been my exact words.
Later on in that podcast conversation, the girls were discussing whether or not they were “worthy” to go in the temple. “Worthy?” The podcast host asked, “That wording seems a bit judge-y.”
It does, doesn’t it?
Might we have systems, doctrines, practices, policies, and histories that reinforce ideas of Us VS Them, of playing the victim of religious persecution, of self righteousness, of elite members within a group of Saints?
Latter-day Saints in early history have been subjected to really hard things, including losing their homes and lives. I mean, there was a literal law that made it okay to kill a Mormon up until the 1970s in Missouri! I wonder, though, if we have been holding onto that Mormon Story as a part of our collective identity. We don’t want to look critically at leadership out of a fear that is deep rooted in our history of needing to protect our leadership. For an early Latter-day Saint, protecting leadership felt synonymous with protecting their faith.
Manuals, Handbooks, and Study Guides… oh my!
When I first started reading the New Testament more in depth, I was surprised at how many of the themes of Jesus’ ministry and the ministry of his apostles I had never heard of before. I had gone to Church my whole life, I served a mission, I was the girl who took extra religion classes for FUN in college!
Why was it that I had never, at least in my memory, been taught of Jesus’ upheaval of the legalistic practices? Why hadn’t important themes of his ministry been emphasized in my religion classes, like trusting in Jesus’ righteousness, not your own righteousness?
One of the most impactful scriptures I came across in my study was Matthew 15:15-20, where Jesus was questioned on why he was breaking the traditions of the elders,
“Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen and understand. What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them…
Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.”
What Jesus is saying here is a theme that is repeated throughout his ministry — it’s not about what you do, it’s not about what you eat, it’s not about any saving works… it’s about your heart. When I first understood this passage, I was truly shocked, since so much of the way I worshipped God was tied to what I ate and what I did and what I wore. How had I never been taught this before? Curious, I wanted to know what the Seminary Manual taught about Matthew 15. (Seminary is the name for a class high schoolers take that goes through the Bible, Book of Mormon, and Doctrine and Covenants).
Buckle up, people. This is the descriptor of Matthew 15 in the seminary manual:
“When scribes and Pharisees asked why Jesus’s disciples did not follow their traditions, the Savior responded by rebuking those who use tradition as an excuse to break the commandments of God. This lesson can help you determine which of your traditions are helping you become more like Jesus Christ and which may be separating you from Him.”
Here are some examples of the traditions listed, which students were supposed to evaluate together and determine if these traditions would help them become more like God or separate them from God:
For generations, a young man’s family has made it a priority to pray every morning and every night.
A large social event to which many girls wear immodest attire is coming up. A young woman must decide how she will dress for the occasion.
For years, many of the youth in a particular ward have not sincerely participated in their Sunday School classes. This includes being late, not paying attention, and texting or playing games on their phones during class.
It is a tradition at one school for the older students to pick on the younger students.
People ask me all the time what propelled me to begin investigating my faith more critically. If I had to pinpoint a moment, this, honestly, is when it all cracked open for me.
Looking at how Matthew 15 was instructed to be taught in this manual made it clear to me why I didn’t fully understand Jesus’ ministry: because I was never taught it.
This manual teaches the OPPOSITE of what the theme of that chapter is. They only chose to teach Matthew 15:1-9, instead of the rest of the verses, which included the whole point of Jesus’ teaching in that chapter! And, what more, the students were instructed to judge these “traditions” to determine if they were righteous and unrighteous… and one of those traditions was ABOUT WHAT A GIRL WAS WEARING. *face palm* whyyyyyyyy
If you have worked for the Church, you know that everything produced or stated or created by the Church goes through MANY ROUNDS of authorization processes. Did not anyone up at the Church headquarters think to include the main point of Matthew 15? I haven’t gone through the other chapters (yet… could be a fun project? lol), but this was truly shocking to me.
Sure, an “imperfect human” created this manual. But this manual is what is being used to teach millions of teenagers throughout the world about Jesus Christ’s ministry.
The truth is, teachers in the Church, the bishops, the majority of high leadership, the laymembers who give talks during Sacrament Meeting… really nobody has formal training in the historical complexities of the New and Old Testament. We rely on the manuals to help us know what is important and what to include in our teaching.
Sure, teachers can do their own study and bring what they want to in their lessons, but the Church made it clear just in this one lesson what they are choosing to emphasize to our youth and our membership: tradition, self righteousness, and judgement.
I’m not a scriptorian, but I do know how to detect a theme in literature, and it is mind boggling to me that in this specific chapter, the Church has completely ignored the main theme of Jesus’ message. My only explanation for this is that it could be because it puts into question the necessity of the Word of Wisdom and saving ordinances.
The LDS culture has not just magically appeared. As you can see in the “immodest attire” example above, this culture of essentially earning our own salvation is emphasized and explicitly taught in our classes and our meetings. I think it’s important to hold the Church leadership responsible for authorizing and distributing these materials that lay members trust to teach them about God.
How We View God is Important
So much of how we view the world, view others, and view ourselves comes down to how we view God. If we view God as legalistic, demanding, nit-picky, and secretive, then that will absolutely change the way we relate to God in our personal lives and with others.
How we talk about Jesus is important. What we teach about his character and his ministry is crucial to our understanding of the character of God.
When our understanding of God as a loving, inclusive, pursuing, enveloping, fair, radical, truthful, merciful, just being crystalizes, it can help us measure what we are taught in Church settings against that understanding. When we can recognize that something needs to change, and we recognize the root of the problem, we can avoid talking in circles blaming each other for “misunderstanding” these core teachings, and instead we can begin working on healing generational wounds (AKA repentance AKA rebirth AKA the whole point!).
The members of the Body of Christ each have different things to bring to the table. We all have our filters and our inconsistencies and our fears and our joys and our passions and our biases and our experiences that cling to us like dust. But at the head of the table is God, and she invites us to take a seat, and to bring all that we have and all that we are, and be born again. And again, and again, and again. If God can do that to a person, he can do it to an institution, she can do it to a country, to a world. It starts with us.
Thanks for reading,
Kimber was here… and you’re here, too.
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Absolutely love this one for so many reasons. I’ve noticed lately that when a church doctrine – as in something taught by a person in authority and even repeated by others in authority – is found to be problematic, the response is often to somehow rebrand that teaching as “culture”. Today’s culture was yesterday’s doctrine, and a lot of the time is really still today’s doctrine as well 🤦♀️
I love the reminder here that Jesus was all about your heart, grace, inclusion, and love above all else, including tradition and institutions. How I wish those were the themes we focused on.
Your words brought to mind the church’s statement that wearing garments is an outward expression of an inward commitment. Each time I hear that statement 1 Sam 16:7 comes to mind “for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.”