Continuing from a previous post, Bruce & Marie K. Hafen taught: There are some natural tensions between faith and reason, which offer an instructive variation on the theme of tensions between early simplicity and complexity. As we search for the right relationship between faith and reason, that process prepares us to reach for a yet higher form of resolution between faith in yonder simplicity.
Just after my mission I enrolled in that “Religious Problems” class in which Marie and I met. As each of us chose a topic to study and prepare and share, many issues were similar to questions LDS young people wonder about today. For instance, one of our close friends from that class was faithful Dillon Inouye. His question was, “Has the gospel of Jesus Christ really been restored?” Marie chose to discuss “How can I bring the influence of the Holy Ghost more into my life?” My question was whether I should be an LDS liberal or an LDS conservative. I honestly wondered how much we should develop our own minds and think for ourselves, compared with how much should we rely on Church authority and spiritual guidance.
BYU history professor Richard Poll wrote an article during those years called “What the Church Means to People Like Me.” He said that most Church members fell into one of two distinct camps: they were either rigid, “iron-rod” LDS, who unquestioningly wanted the Church or the Spirit to tell them exactly how to live, or “Liahona” LDS, for whom the gospel pointed a desired general direction but who tended to rely mostly on their own wits in deciding how to live.37 Speaking of Poll’s two categories, our friend Dillon said he would prefer to see an article called, “What the Church means to people like . . . God.”
Dillon, Marie, and I and our classmates were experiencing what the Catholic socialist Tomas O’Dea had called “Mormonism’s (Lds) most significant problem.” In his book, “The Mormons”, he said the Church’s “great emphasis on higher education” created a serious and unavoidable conflict for LDS college students, because the Church’s literalistic and authoritarian approach to religion collided with the skepticism and independence fostered by university-level studies—just like the “ideal” confronting the “real”. For O’Dea, that issue was a big one: “The encounter of Mormanism and modern secular learning is still taking place. Upon [the outcome of this source of strain and conflict] will depend the future of Mormonism.”38
Fifty years later, reliable research showed that—unlike with most other religious groups—the more education a religious group has, the more likely he or she is to have a strong religious commitment. For example, some 84 percent of LDS college graduate students have high religious commitments, compared with 50% among LDS who have only a high school education. 39
I could see from BYU’s growing academic stature how committed the Church is to higher education. And I had returned from my mission with enlarged perspectives that fueled my hunger, even my passion, for learning. I was close to some LDS university teachers whose examples motivated me toward learning. One of them told me that J.Golden Kimball said we can’t expect the Holy Ghost to do the thinking for us. Another favorite teacher had a great love for literature and the arts, and he emphasized that students needed mostly their own discipline and their own personal creativity to develop God-given gifts. ~~~Bruce C. and Marie K. Hafen “Faith is Not Blind” Deseret Book, Salt Lake City, p. 46-47
