Why Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints Find It So Hard to Talk About Faith

Introduction of Jennifer Roach Lees

Jennifer Roach Lees has been the senior researcher with FAIR. She’s one who’s given talks before, and we’ve all appreciated her talks at FAIR conferences. We’re very appreciative to have her here again with us. She has her master’s in theology as well as in counseling, and she’s going to give us some insights on speaking with evangelical Christians. So with that, I’m going to turn the time over to Jennifer Roach.

Background and Podcast Experience

Thank you. Very good to be with you. Last year, we were doing Come, Follow Me in the New Testament, and I got the opportunity to host a podcast for FAIR. If you haven’t seen it, you can look either on the FAIR website or on the YouTube channel. It had a really, really specific, narrow focus, which was the differences that come up between people in our faith and evangelicals, based on all kinds of various issues as they were coming up with the New Testament readings. I loved doing it. I learned a lot. I did not grow up in our church; I grew up as an evangelical, so I kind of know both sides of the fence.

Understanding Differences Without Rehashing Doctrine

I was aware of many of the differences already, but it was really fun for me to dive into how some of those specific differences functioned. I’ve had a lot of thoughts about it since then. If you’re interested in the specifics on the differences in our beliefs—why do they say “Trinity” and we say “Godhead,” and what does that mean?—go back and look at those episodes. I don’t have enough time to cover all of that today. Today, we’re going to talk about how those particular conversations between you, a Latter-day Saint, and an evangelical—whether a friend, family member, neighbor, or someone you care about—function, and how we can make them better.

Cultural Language and Conversational Dynamics

Some of the things that come up in those conversations are just these little quirks of our individual cultures and how we talk about things. For example, we tend to say Jesus’s full title, “Jesus Christ,” while they will just tend to say “Jesus.” There are reasons for that, and some of it is just cultural. The actual mechanics of how these conversations happen are really interesting, and we’re actually not going to talk about them in terms of being wrong. They’re not here. I’m not talking to them. I talk about us—in ways we can maybe make those conversations a little better.

A Brief Historical Backdrop

But first, we need a little bit—am I going to be able to do this right? Haha.—tiny little dive back into history. Anti-Mormon rhetoric has obviously existed for quite a long time. It takes many forms. The forms it took in earlier eras is quite a bit different than it is today. It used to be death threats and persecution and open mockery. In my generation—growing up in the 70s and 80s—it was sort of this, like, pseudo-intellectual—Kingdom of the Cults. We watched The God Makers in church, and in my Baptist church every year.

Modern Anti-Mormon Narratives

These days, the anti-Mormon thoughts are done sometimes more subtly, but it’s always a version of two things. It’s either: we want you, member of the church, to know the real truth so that you can leave religion and be unencumbered and happy or we want you to know the real truth so that you can come and know the real Jesus. It’s couched as we’re trying to be so helpful to you. But it’s the same recycled arguments, packaged over and over. I highly recommend you pay attention to Sarah’s talk this afternoon on lots of those themes.

The Background We Carry Into Conversations

The history here, though—the anti-Mormon rhetoric history—whether we realize it or not, and whether we like it or not, is in the background of even really simple conversations that you might have with an evangelical who you care about. I’m not talking about, like, big screaming conversations in front of the conference center. I’m talking about, like, your adult child who left the church and now they’re attending their neighborhood evangelical church—somebody who you actually care about.

Pew Research and Public Perception

I want to say a little bit about some of the current research that is being done on our religious groups. I’m going to point out our two groups—this is from the Pew Research Center. Generally, their research is very good. You should know, in this study, there’s a plus or minus ten percent, which is not super precise, but we’re going to look at what we’re given. Basically here, you’re looking at a chart that says outsiders don’t particularly like—the more religious your group is, the less outsiders like your group. And so evangelicals and Latter-day Saints—we kind of end up on the bottom of this barrel.

Warmth, Coolness, and Intuition

It does not change if the person actually knows a Latter-day Saint or not. The numbers mostly stay the same. Interestingly enough, you can see here—I blocked out the other numbers just so you can focus on the line that has to do with us. Pew Research has all of this on their website. I do recommend you actually look at it. It’s pretty interesting. This is a chart that shows how warmly we as a group feel about other expressions of Christian faith. The more orange, the murkier—the warmer our feelings. We kind of like everybody.

The Reality Beneath the Data

And what is not said in this research, but what I would add, is we really, really, really want them to like us. And mostly they don’t. The darker blue—the cooler their feelings are towards us. And whether you can articulate that with the research or not, many, many people in our church kind of know this intuitively—that there are groups out there that have some pretty cool feelings towards us.

Why This Matters in Everyday Conversations

I’m telling you all of this to make the point that a lot is going on in the background when you are having a conversation with your neighbor, who happens to attend their evangelical church down the street, and you just happen to be talking about church or faith stuff. All of this is playing—whether you or they can articulate the research.

Identity Management and Identity Negotiation

If I had enough time today, we could look at the history of how Latter-day Saints have responded to this at different points in history. Today, I want to talk to you about how we’re responding to it right now, and I’m going to talk about two different but related concepts from social science to kind of illustrate a little bit of where we’re at. It’s a concept called identity management and identity negotiation. Please do not get distracted by the word identity here. That’s a politically loaded word in some conversations. All I mean by identity is—we all play a number of roles in our lives, right? You’re a husband and a father and a son.

What Identity Management Actually Means

We’ll start with identity management. The idea here is that all of us have some very good and healthy identities that are quite different from each other. You might be a husband and a son and a neighbor and a boss. Identity management is just a simple idea that says—you’ve got, consciously or not, to decide what role you’re in at any particular time. If you’re both a father and a son and you get this confused and you start telling your dad what to do and you start asking your child for advice—like, life is going to go really weird for you, right? So we’re all managing this all the time, and the same thing happens in conversations when it comes to religion.

Managing Faith and Relationships at the Same Time

So we have to manage our identity as somebody who’s a strong, believing Latter-day Saint—and maybe the sibling of a sister or a brother who’s left our church and maybe they’re an evangelical now, right? So you have to manage your sibling relationship and your “I’m-a member-of-the-Church” relationship. And it isn’t always as easy as it should be. If you were only in your identity as a colleague at work and never, ever, ever willing to be in your identity as a Latter-day Saint, you might be great at your job. But you might fail to extend a warm invitation to your coworker, who you get along with, that they might want to come to your child’s baptism. Right? Because you have those so separated in your mind.

Navigating Multiple Identities in Real Relationships

So we’re constantly navigating how to mix them. And the other person—the person you’re relating to—they’re doing this as well. And there’s kind of three stages that any relationship goes through in managing this, whether it’s your coworker or your neighbor or your child or your spouse or whoever.

Stage One: Is This Relationship Stable Enough?

Stage one: Both of you are trying to figure out—is this relationship solid enough, stable enough, important enough—that I can bring, like, who I really actually am into the conversation? So it’s your neighbor who you’re perfectly aware does not care for the Church or for your faith. Does that relationship matter enough to you that you really want to show up in your identity as a Latter-day Saint? Or are you just going to be, like, the nice neighbor who keeps their lawn mowed and shovels his snow sometimes, right? Nothing wrong with that.

Stage Two: The “Impeachment” Stage

Stage two: If you have decided this is an important enough relationship to me, I really actually want to show up here—they call this the impeachment stage. It’s kind of where everybody is walking on tiptoes around each other. Like, can I actually say something about my faith that I know the other person isn’t going to like? And most relationships need to go through a stage where you’re sort of conscious. However, a lot of relationships stay stuck there. We never move past it. We just stay in kind of tiptoe land.

Stage Three: Renegotiation

The last stage, if you can get there, is the stage where we call it renegotiation. The individuals start to be able to bring up their differences with respect—but also with honesty—with I see and I understand and I respect why you feel that way. Let me tell you what my faith is about and why it means something different to me, or whatever the conversation would be.

Faith Conversations Are Not Anti-Relationship

Bringing up faith issues in a relationship is not anti-relationship—it’s not even contention. And I think that’s the thing that we fear the most. That if we have a sentence in our head that starts with, “Oh, but I feel differently,” that somehow we’re veering too close to contention. Bringing your real, actual self—whatever identity it is that you are in, in that moment—into the relationship—that’s relationship enhancing. You’re actually showing up for who you are and for what you believe.

Why We Get Stuck in the Middle Stage

So I have an observation—and maybe you have had this one too—that in general, Latter-day Saints tend towards staying in the middle stage. We want to keep things nice. We do not want to offend everybody. We are perfectly aware how cool their feelings are towards us—and we don’t like it. Like, I don’t like it. We want them to enjoy us. We want them to see our goodness. We want them to feel warm towards us. So we keep things nice. We stay out of conversations that maybe we should actually be trying to figure out how to stay in.

The Cost of Staying Quiet

Sometimes this is conflict avoidance. Sometimes it’s just being passive. And to be perfectly fair—sometimes it’s the right choice. You would know better than I would about the individual situations in your life if trying to press a point makes sense or not. The problem is—it comes at a cost. If all you can do is smile and demure and hope that they think you’re nice, the cost is that the actual you—who has beliefs and feelings that matter to you, that are different—has to hide. And when one person in a relationship hides, there’s not really much of a relationship. You’re sort of pretending, in a way.

Wanting to Be Liked—and Showing Up Anyway

Why do Latter-day Saints do this? Well, it kind of goes back to some of the history we touched on briefly—to current-day feelings. Even if you’re unable to cite the statistics about how others feel about our Church, you might know them intuitively. And you really, really want to show people that you are likable. It is not bad to want to be liked—but it’s a terrible strategy to become liked by hiding. They might like that you’re being quiet, but they aren’t going to actually like you.

Showing Up with Kindness and Honesty

If it’s a relationship that’s important enough for you to show up in—it’s kind of your job. So, kindly—not with contention, but with kindness—figure out how to say things that might be very much disagreeing with what their faith or lack of faith is about.

Identity Negotiation Theory

The second related concept, also from social science, is called identity negotiation theory. And it’s this idea that most people, when we’re trying to stay in a relationship with someone, when we’re trying to be friendly with them, we don’t really mind all that much supporting their preferences. You have your neighbors over for a barbecue. You like cheese on your cheeseburger, and they like theirs without cheese. You may even feel almost happy to be like, “Oh, I made some without cheese for you!” You’re showing them: I see you. I value your differences. Like, it’s totally cool. You’re a weirdo, don’t like cheese, but I’m going to accommodate you. Identity negotiation is this human tendency to support the desired self-image of others. And it’s a normal, good desire. It’s part of how we connect with other people. There’s nothing wrong with it.

The Tension Between Supporting Them and Expressing You

However, when it comes to two people in any kind of relationship, there’s a tension between supporting someone else’s identity and expressing our own when they come into conflict. Now, some issues are not a big deal. Cheeseburgers? Who cares! You’re probably happy to help them out. Other issues we care passionately about—like sports teams. You like such and such, and they like such and such. And you might even playfully rib each other over it. It’s not that you have such low care about it, like cheese. I care about cheese quite a bit. You really, really care about the sports team, but you’re able to kind of poke them a little bit. I don’t know many people who go around poking their friends like, You believe in the Trinity! Like, it’s too taboo, right? We’re crashing into feelings that are too tender.

Capitulating and Losing Your Own Voice

Psychologically, what’s going on here is you often feel the pull towards supporting your friend or your loved one who maybe is an evangelical. But you also experience a little loss or a little sacrifice of your own identity, not being able to be expressed in that moment. You just kind of capitulate into theirs. And it is good to support your friend or your loved one in relationships. But it also is good to risk showing yourself, even when your beliefs are very different.

Cultural “Niceness” and In-Group Pressure

Culturally, Latter-day Saints tend towards wanting to be nice, making people think we’re nice, not saying anything that could be seen as contentious. Not only do we fear outsiders would judge us, but there’s in-group judging around that as well. We smile and demure. We know people have this negative opinion of us. We do not like it. We want to change it. Maybe you bear your small testimony at the end, but you don’t really want much conversation about it. I’m not saying that’s wrong in every context. In fact, that’s exactly the right thing to do, probably in many contexts. But it has to be held in tension with being willing to actually show up in the relationship by talking kindly. Kindly talking about your own faith and beliefs without demanding too much.

Elder Holland, Building and Defending

In 2021, Elder Holland gave a speech at BYU. You’ve probably heard about this. The context was quite a bit different. He’s talking about academic scholars defending Church doctrine, specifically around gender issues. And here today, we’re talking about normal Latter-day Saints in relationship with their friends and family. But the idea is still the same. Elder Holland quotes Elder Maxwell when he talks about people building the Nauvoo Temple—trowel in one hand, musket in the other—and he’s giving the metaphor of both building the kingdom and defending it. I certainly do not speak for Elder Holland or Elder Maxwell, but I don’t think they would stand here and tell you to do that with contention, to do that with bitterness, to do that with driving the Spirit away, to do that with something that isn’t going to bring peace. But you can discuss differences without contention. That is a possibility that, just culturally, we don’t talk a lot about.

Sisters, This Part Is for You

Sisters– brothers, you can listen. But this part is for you, sisters. Let me talk specifically to you for a moment. Apologetics is kind of a boys’ game. You might notice that—not as much this year—but maybe from some past conferences. Or if you looked through an apologetic section of books, lots and lots of men showing up. And there’s reasons for that, historically. And that’s true not only in our faith—that’s true in apologetics in every single religious discipline across the board. You will find, today, some brilliant women. You’ll see some of them at this conference. But there is a gaping hole.

Mama Bear Courage Applied to Faith

Women, by our very nature, can easily bring a strong and protective identity to the things we love. The term mama bear is real for a reason. I dare you to threaten the children of a good Latter-day Saint woman, right? She will mop the floor with you, right? There’s absolutely no question about that. But somehow, sisters, when it comes to issues of our faith, our cultural set point seems to be just to smile and play nice while people step all over our faith and beliefs. I’m not trying to add more to your to-do list. I’m not trying to add more to what it means to be a good Latter-day Saint woman. I’m suggesting that you might have more to say than, culturally, you have allowed yourself to say. Sometimes there are other alternatives than just smiling and bearing your testimony. You can defend your own faith with kindness, but also with courage, in the same way you would go mama bear on your kids or grandkids if somebody was trying to hurt them.

Moving Beyond “Casseroles Only”

Sometimes we sisters have really only thought of ourselves as kind of the practical arm of the Church. We provide relief and kind help. I’ve told this story—I think I’ve told it at FAIR before—of a young missionary sister who said: Oh, I’m not very good at scripture. That’s kind of a priesthood thing, right? And she means by that, “That’s a male thing, right?” And sisters, we’ve often thought of ourselves as like, We’ll bring you a casserole—that is going to be amazing. But call the brothers when it’s time to defend the faith. And it does not necessarily have to be so. There is room for you—in the relationships you care about, as well as possibly in the wider apologetic world—to do some work to defend our faith, to have a little musket fire of your own.

Everybody Started Somewhere

And frankly, there’s room for you to learn from the scholarship that has already been done. Like, what apologetics even is—and how do you do that? And how do you start to learn to think through these things critically? Everybody presenting at this conference started somewhere in learning all of that.

Why Conversations With Evangelicals Can Be So Difficult

Back to evangelicals for a minute. The last thing I want to communicate to you is more specific to why conversations between our two groups can be so hard. And we’re going to give them the absolute best motives here. They greatly value and want to protect the importance and place of Jesus Christ. They are very fearful that we Latter-day Saints are being sneaky—that we’re trying to discredit Christ by obscuring some things with our language, by not telling exactly the whole truth. We are not doing this. That’s their fear. I grew up in that fear. They really do not trust us, no matter how we say it. And that is the heart of the problem.

Trust and Relational Identity

From a relational identity perspective, it seems to me that our collective tendency to just be nice—and to really, really want them to think that we’re nice—adds to this problem. Part of why we are still facing some of the same things over and over that we have been facing for generations is because of our tendency as a collective group to sort of demure and not say the things that we’re thinking. They know that we’re doing that. They can feel it, even if they can’t articulate it.

When Silence Fuels Fear

Instead, we smile and we let it go. And that fuels their fear a little bit—that we’re not saying something. And the conversation continues to be difficult, and they continue not to trust us.

A Final Encouragement

So my encouragement to you—both men and women—is to see where and when you might be able to defend our faith in bolder ways. Not contentious ways. Not relationship-destroying ways. But relationship-building ways. Thank you.