~ In some of her final writings, the late Church historian Kate Holbrook explores the question of what makes the Church true. . . .
Just before leaving for her first year at Cornell University, a young friend of mine approached me with a question on her mind. She had been a member of the Church for a little over two years and she wondered about the teaching that the Church is true. It’s a claim so familiar that many of us take it for granted: ours is the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth” (Doctrine and Covenants 1:30). When she was baptized, my friend had accepted membership into the Church and entered a covenant relationship with God and her fellow members. But she still wasn’t sure how to explain to classmates what it meant to say that the church is “the only true church.” She wasn’t even sure why the concept of an “only true church” was necessary.
Her question got me thinking. It’s an excellent question, and she’s far from alone in asking it. What does it mean to say that this is the only “true church,” if other religious groups also influence their members to lead good lives and help them feel close to God? What does it mean to say that this is the “true church,” if our historical records reveal a sometimes-messy process of God working with fallible humans? I’m not going to do justice to that question in this short article. Let’s just be clear about that. But I do hope to share some ways of thinking about the truth that is in our Church—and the truth that we can make in and of our Church.
The discomfort that prompted my friend’s question arose, I believe, because the “only true church” claim at times does not feel loving. It can feel exclusive as if we’re discounting the value of other faith traditions, or arrogantly boasting in ourselves. While some of us find the security of belonging to the one true Church appealing, for others of us it creates a substantial psychological dissonance between our devotion to our own faith and our appreciation of other churches and other sources of truth. We see and celebrate the fact that other religious groups provide benefits to their own members, consistent with God’s universal mercy. We don’t want to discount those benefits. We don’t want to be arrogant. We don’t want to blind ourselves to the goodness of other people, and we don’t want them to feel that we don’t see their goodness. So what does it mean to say that the Church is true? ~Kate Holbrook, A Harvest of Truth (Salt Lake City: ‘LDS Living’ magazine, July/August 2023), 20-23 (Continued; see “A Harvest of Truth ll”)
