Fallen Away, and Other Words We Should Retire

Listen to how a ward talks about someone who has stopped coming to church. The voice drops, almost to a whisper, as if the children shouldn’t hear. Did you hear about Brother So-and-so? He’s struggling. He’s fallen away. We should pray for him.

Nobody in that conversation means any harm. Most of them are worried, and many of them love him. But every one of those words carries a verdict, and he isn’t in the room to answer it.

In this essay I want to look at the words we use about faith: about people who leave, about our feelings, and about history and God. By the end, I hope you’ll have a few better words to reach for. I think that’s where dignified dissent begins: not with a policy, but with how we talk.

Fallen, lost, struggling

Here’s the vocabulary we usually reach for when someone leaves. They have fallen. They are lost. They are struggling. They have succumbed. They have been tempted. They lost their faith.

Notice what each word assumes. You can only fall from something higher. You can only be lost if you were once found. “Struggling” assumes the struggle is against sin or the adversary. In nearly every version, leaving is the bad guy winning.

The person who left usually tells a different story.

We say they “lost their faith,” while they say they let go of false, unhealthy beliefs. We say they fell away, while they say they found a better way.

Take “struggling.” If someone wants to apply that word to me, I’ll accept it on my own terms. I struggle to fit. I struggle to find resonance. I do not struggle with my beliefs or my faith. I do not struggle against the devil.

I want to be fair to the believers in that whispered conversation. They’re using the only words their culture gave them, and they often use them out of real concern. But the effect is still shame. When someone hears they’ve “fallen,” they hear that they’ve become something less. The truth is that most people going through a faith crisis are just trying to do the right thing, and we’re far more responsible for pushing them away than we realize.

“The Spirit told me”

The second set of words is the language we use for our feelings.

When we say “I feel the Spirit,” what we usually mean is that we’re feeling warmth, comfort, peace or motivation. When we say “the Spirit told me,” we usually mean we feel strongly about something. Those are honest experiences. But the words do something extra: they make the feeling unquestionable.

That’s why, these days, when I hear “the Spirit told me,” I hear “this is what I think, and I’m unwilling to consider anything else.” Try swapping in the plainer phrase, “I feel strongly about this,” and watch how the conversation changes. It becomes possible to disagree without disagreeing with God. (More on that in The Things We Feel.)

Careful words for history and God

The third set of words is about what happened in the past, and who’s up there.

Words like real, true and literal do a lot of damage in conversations about scripture. They force every story into the same two doors: it happened exactly as written, or it’s a lie. Neither is usually right.

I find these words more helpful: historically accurate, historical actuality, ahistorical, credible historical figure. They let us separate two questions that usually get mashed together. Did this person exist? And is what’s written about them accurate?

Achilles was probably a great warrior, but his mother was not a goddess. Just because I don’t believe everything written about a figure doesn’t mean I think they never existed, or that they didn’t change the world. That’s a much more honest conversation than “Is it true?”

The same goes for the supernatural. I deliberately use the word “magic” for claims that God intervened in the natural world. It’s a practical, sensible word that suggests mystery and the unknown, without the coercive sacredness that religious language carries. It isn’t meant as an insult. It’s meant to let us talk about the claim without bowing to it first. (I explain more in God Magic.)

What to say instead

So what should we say about the brother who stopped coming?

Instead of “he used to be so strong,” we could admit without reservation, “It sounds like he’s happy where he’s at.” Or, “He looks like he landed on his feet.”

Instead of quietly placing all the shame on him, we could own our share: “He’s been met with a lot of judgment from members and from his family.” “He doesn’t feel safe or welcome here anymore.”

And when someone tells us directly about their doubts, we could try validating them without trying to fix them:

• “Yeah, I can see why you’re tired of praying and fasting. The situation doesn’t seem to be getting any better.”
• “Yeah, you’re right, that stake president was offensive. I can understand why you don’t want to be part of the church anymore.”
• “I understand you don’t feel accepted here.”

Sentences like these fly in the face of much of what we’ve been taught. But when people don’t find that kind of validation in their own congregation, they go looking for it among strangers on the internet, because the strangers are kinder.

When others leave the church, we need to let them do so with their dignity intact. That’s what dignified dissent means. And it starts with something as small as a word.

Say it out loud

Go back to that whispered conversation in the hall. Imagine the same people saying the same thing in a normal voice: “Brother So-and-so doesn’t come anymore. He seems happy. I miss him.” Nothing about that sentence is shameful, so there’s nothing to whisper.

For where I stand on all of this with my own family, read my letter to my Mormon family and friends. For the feelings behind “the Spirit told me,” read The Things We Feel.