Sabbath Devotional :: Belonging and Believing

Something I catch myself thinking a lot is, “How can anyone believe _____??!!” And especially, “How can any of my family, my friends believe ______??!!” I see the inverse on social media sometimes: “If you believe ___, unfriend/unfollow me because I don’t want to know you.”

It is so satisfying and so tempting to think there is a set of righteous beliefs and we should only associate with others who have them. Unfortunately, I do not believe Christians or Latter-day Saints can afford to indulge in this kind of ideological purity testing for the people to whom we are willing to extend love.

It’s true that there are abhorrent beliefs, and even that people who hold those beliefs behave in abhorrent ways. Nevertheless, if I read the scriptures correctly, we are really not allowed to shun people for what they believe.

Most of the time, I think this commandment is too hard for us. It’s too hard for me, anyway. I WANT to loathe people who believe loathsome things. And I want to feel that my loathing is righteous. I’m not good enough to love my enemies just because Jesus said I must.

And so I have been thinking about a more practical reason to refrain from shunning people whose beliefs I find abhorrent. It is this: if I refuse to associate with my enemies, I have to give up on the possibility that they might change. People change when they are loved, not when they are shunned.

Maybe the reason God told Joseph Smith that all of the churches’ creeds were an abomination was not that the content of the creeds was incorrect, but that requiring particular beliefs as a condition of belonging makes it impossible for human beings in a group to grow and change as they learn new truths. We are supposed to be wrong, try out erroneous beliefs, because that is the only way human beings are able to arrive at more correct ones. Feeling strong and secure in our identity, knowing we are safe and loved, is a precondition for the kind of dialogue that can lead us to reassess our own ideas.

A quick glance at the history of political parties In the U.S. makes the primacy of identification over intellectual coherence pretty clear — both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have changed policy positions and even fundamental ideological elements of their platforms over the years, but it often takes a dramatic change and a few decades before people are willing to switch their affiliation to the party that most closely aligns with their own opinions, or even their economic self-interest.

This has all kinds of depressing results in the political sphere, but I think it also contains a tiny seed of hope. It tells us that if people feel like they belong, they can be open to new ideas — belonging is more important than belief.

And this, dear readers, brings us to the German studies portion of the devotional: “Belief” is etymologically related to the German word “belieben,” from which we also have “beloved.” We believe the things and people we give our hearts to. Ideas become true, in the way that mechanics speak of a wheel or a fitting as being “true” — straight, aligned, and functional — and people become the truest versions of themselves when they are beloved.

There’s a book I love, by the philosopher Philip Hallie, called “In the Eye of the Hurricane,” in which the author studies the subtle features of character that seem to distinguish people who help others in heroic ways. One of his principal areas of study was Le Chambon, a little village in France that sheltered and saved hundreds of Jewish children during World War II, at great risk to the whole town. In describing the woman who had organized and energized the complicated and dangerous project, he concluded that she helped simply because she had a deep sense of belonging in her village and was in the habit of welcoming others. She loved and welcomed people, even when it was risky, because she knew what it meant to belong:

For Magda and for many of the other villagers, helping was automatic. They weren’t conscious of it, let alone proud of it. Helping and receiving help were like breathing out and breathing in to Magda. She expected the women of the village to help her as matter-of-factly as she expected herself to open a door and invite a refugee into the middle of her busy, dangerous life.

Habit is by definition not inborn. It takes upbringing to create it and to make it firm enough to resist the temptations of fear and greed and cynicism. Magda raised her four children…in such a way that danger-provoking, food-consuming foreigners were accepted affectionately into the very center of their lives. She bade them enter the lucid mystery when she opened the heavy presbytery door to dangerous strangers with an “Of course. Come in, come in.”

I know some Magdas, and I suspect you do, too — someone who lets you know you are safe with a word, a look, a smile that breathes “come in, come in.” One of the things I love about the Church is the way it pushes me to open the door, or at least to get in the habit of leaving it ajar. Throughout my life, I have been taught and fed and listened to and loved by people who thought a good many of my ideas were outlandish or ridiculous, but who also would have thought it absurd to treat me as an enemy because of our disagreements. They let me know I was beloved regardless of my beliefs.

In the end, our enemies are not mostly collections of ideas, but, like us, creatures who need to be fed and sheltered and occasionally have their worst ideas ignored. Loving our enemies is, perhaps, what happens when we finally understand what it means to belong — what it will mean if our enemies also belong to us.