The Things We Feel

Sit through almost any testimony meeting and you’ll hear some version of the same sentence: “I know this church is true because of how I felt.” A warmth in the chest. Tears that came out of nowhere. A peace that settled over the room.

I’ve felt it too, many times. I remember how I felt when I prayed to know if the Book of Mormon was true. I won’t pretend that feeling wasn’t real.

But I no longer believe it proves anything. In this essay I want to explain why without taking the feeling away from anyone. By the end, I hope you’ll see the feeling for what it is: real, but not a witness. And I hope you’ll see why that’s not the loss it sounds like.

The believer’s case, at its best

Let’s start where the church starts. In the Doctrine and Covenants the Lord tells Oliver Cowdery, “you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right” (D&C 9:8). Missionaries teach that the Spirit often comes as feelings of peace, warmth or happiness.

That’s a coherent idea. If God is real and wants to reach his children, why not through the heart? And the people who bear those testimonies aren’t lying, and they aren’t foolish. They’re describing something that really happened to them.

So here’s the question I’ll come back to at the end: if the feeling is real, why isn’t it enough?

The same feeling at every pulpit

I’ve watched videos of believers from nearly every Christian denomination, and from Islam, Buddhism and Judaism, and even from a group whose leader claims to be Jesus himself. They stand before their congregations, or sit across from an interviewer, with the same fervent, tearful, heartfelt devotion as any Mormon. They describe the same experience. And that experience tells each of them that their faith is the one true faith.

They can’t all be right. But they can all be sincere. Mormons don’t have a corner on the market when it comes to the Holy Ghost.

Then there’s what I think of as the movie test. I felt that same “something deeper,” that light shining inside me, the first time I watched Frozen and Moana. Those films carried powerful messages that moved me to do good and to rise above whatever I was up against at the time. Nobody would conclude that Disney had been confirmed as the true church.

Psychologists have a name for this feeling. Jonathan Haidt calls it elevation: a warm, open feeling in the chest that comes when we witness moral beauty, and that makes us want to help others and become better people ourselves. In one study, students who watched a short film about Mother Teresa reported warmth or tingling in their chests.

Put that next to the missionary description of the Spirit and the overlap is hard to miss. As far as I can tell, what we call the Spirit and what Haidt calls elevation are the same experience. It’s something we all have by virtue of our shared humanity. The religion we were raised in simply provides the framework through which we interpret it.

Feelings are undeniably real. But this does not mean that they reliably indicate truth.

What the label does to an idea

Here’s the part that took me longest to see. The feeling itself isn’t the problem. The label is.

The way we feel about an idea really is part of how we sort truth from error. When an idea fits what we already understand, extends it, and makes sense, we feel good about it. In Mormon language we say we “feel the Spirit.” We could just as fairly say, “This makes sense to me and it makes me feel good, so I’m going to consider it true.”

The trouble is that once we’ve decided “the Spirit told me,” the thought becomes irrevocable. Tomorrow we might come across new evidence that should adjust our understanding. But you can’t argue with God, so we become less teachable and less correctable.

These days, when I hear “I feel the Spirit” or “the Spirit told me,” I hear “this is what I think, and I’m unwilling to consider anything else.” That’s not always what the speaker means. But it’s very often how the phrase works in a conversation.

That’s why I’m cautious about emotion-based reasoning: using a feeling as evidence that something otherwise unknowable, untestable and unverifiable is true. Mormon orthodoxy asks the feeling to do exactly that. That’s where I part ways.

So what are feelings for?

None of this means feelings are worthless. Quite the opposite.

Emotions are part of the human experience, and we share them in common. They don’t carry a message from outside us. But they can tell us a great deal about what’s inside us: what moves us, what we love, what we fear, what we hope for. I think they should be explored for information. They deserve a space to be felt, observed and honored, not hidden or avoided.

Sometimes we also have to act on them. We don’t always have time to analyze things, and reasoning is a skill we’re all still developing. I believe in a healthy balance between thinking and feeling. What I don’t believe is that a strong feeling settles questions of history, doctrine or the existence of God.

Here’s how I put it to my family: I do not believe that my strong emotions establish truth. But I continue to enjoy spiritual experiences today, just as I have throughout my life. I just understand them from a different frame of reference.

In fact, as improbable as it may seem to my believing family, I still feel the constant companionship of what I’ve always known as the Holy Ghost. I guess I haven’t offended him enough for him to leave me yet!

Back to the pulpit

So, if the feeling is real, why isn’t it enough? Because it’s real everywhere. It shows up in the Catholic pew, the mosque, the Buddhist temple and the movie theater. A witness that testifies for every side can’t settle which side is right.

The person at the pulpit really did feel something, and I believe them. Their tears tell me something true about them: what they love, what moves them, what they hope for. That’s worth honoring. It just doesn’t tell me anything about gold plates.

If you want to see what happens when we take this feeling and use it to steer our biggest life decisions, read Revelation Gone Wrong. And if you want to know where all this leaves me with my own family, start with the letter to my Mormon family and friends.