- This topic has 38 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated 2 days, 7 hours ago by
.
-
Posts
-
Minyan Man wrote:
As I’ve mentioned before, we have recently moved into a new ward. This is a new experience for us.We were members of our old ward for almost 50 years. This week a member of our new ward took me
out for lunch. It was a very good experience. We asked questions about each of our lives, our families
and experiences inside & outside of church. The conclusion for both of us was, that even though we haven’t
lived a perfect life (problems & challenges) we can still apply the basic principles of the gospel as best
we can. We don’t have to be perfect. It was an interesting experience.
I wish I could have more experiences like that in the church & outside.
One of the conclusions I’m coming up with in this life is: living a superficial life is a waste of time. I believe
that God wants us to be close, emotionally & spiritually within the limits of the time we have on this earth.
And within the limits that we are comfortable with.
Everything I read in the scriptures about Jesus Christ is that’s what he tried to do in the personal relationships
he had in his short life. Or, am I reading too much into the scriptures?
I agree MM. There is very little of the gospel I’m pretty sure about. Loving one another is one of the things I’m pretty God wants us to do.
I am comfortable with my own interpretations of things, and I genuinely love the large majority of the people with whom I worship directly. (I live outside central Mormondom, so that is easier for me right now.) This is the recurring problem of the God of the lost car keys, a quieter cousin of the prosperity gospel. At its core is a deeply human craving for certainty. We are uncomfortable with ambiguity, and so we build cognitive systems that give us the illusion of control—systems where outcomes can be explained, predicted, and morally justified.
When people say, “God protected me,” the phrase sounds humble and faithful, but it often carries an unexamined assumption: that God intervened selectively on their behalf. Usually—though rarely stated outright—it implies that something about obedience, worthiness, or spiritual alignment unlocked divine protection that day. Taken seriously, that belief collapses almost immediately under even modest moral scrutiny.
Your question exposes the fault line. If God protected these teenagers, what are we to say about the children killed in the Texas floods? Was God absent? Indifferent? Selectively attentive? Were those lives less worthy of protection? No thoughtful person can sit with those questions for long without recognizing that this framework produces a God who is arbitrary at best and morally incoherent at worst.
Even more troubling is the implicit lesson that can be absorbed without anyone intending it: risk is acceptable if God is on your side. Speeding becomes survivable. Poor judgment becomes spiritually insulated. The narrative subtly shifts from gratitude to presumption.
The only interpretation that makes sense to me is not triumphalist faith, but humility. Gratitude, yes—but gratitude stripped of entitlement. Something good happened that easily could not have. Not because it was earned, deserved, or spiritually engineered, but because existence is fragile and outcomes are uneven. If we use the word “grace” here, it must mean what grace actually means: unmerited favor. And sometimes, if we are honest, it may simply mean luck.
What troubles me most is not that people feel thankful—gratitude is natural and human—but that leadership so rarely reframes these moments. When testimonies unintentionally teach a transactional or selective God, silence functions as endorsement. A gentle correction could preserve faith and moral coherence: emphasizing compassion over causality, humility over certainty, and shared grief over implied spiritual hierarchy.
Faith does not require us to explain why some are spared and others are not. In fact, the insistence that we must explain it may be one of the ways we miss the deeper call—to mourn with those who mourn, to resist simplistic answers, and to trust without pretending we understand the machinery of God.
Even more troubling is the implicit lesson that can be absorbed without anyone intending it: risk is acceptable if God is on your side.
I believe this is also how scrupulosity starts, going something like this:
God protected them, god didn’t protect me, what imperfection is baring me from earning god’s protection.
At its core is a deeply human craving for certainty.
The prosperity gospel and god of the lost car keys is what led to my faith crisis. I had felt that I could buy a spiritual insurance policy by my covenant keeping that would protect my family. When crisis struck, I was left examining the small print to find out what went wrong. I was shocked to discover that the policy had huge escape clauses in it. It only protects when it is the will of God and sometimes it doesn’t protect because of the fallen world we live in or to maintain the principle of free agency.
My bishop at the time was very compassionate and freely admitted that sometimes members will say things in class or over the pulpit that may not be doctrinally sound or may even put words and promises into God’s mouth that He never has said. When I showed him in a recent church publication where it said that God would bless us both spiritually and temporally for our diligent tithing compliance, he backpedaled, saying that of course God CAN bless us temporally if it is his will to do so.
The challenge is how do you gently correct someone when they preach the prosperity gospel?
If someone just got through sharing a heartfelt personal experience during a lesson about how their obedience to a doctrine led to them being blessed to get out of a terrible situation you don’t want to say anything invalidating. The experience is real and personal to them.
I suppose the best we can do is chime in with something similar to Bednar’s “but if not” or something that the book of Job tried to teach (but failed because it still teaches the prosperity gospel IMO). In other words, give a comment that adds another alternative experience instead of a comment that tries to tear down an experience someone has shared. It’s a delicate situation.
Another challenge is that the prosperity gospel fully permeates nearly every aspect of church culture. Any time someone says obedience brings blessings? Prosperity gospel. Fasting? Someone could be fasting in a way that’s implementing the prosperity gospel. I hear infusions of the prosperity gospel in just about everything at church.
Yes, that is a challenge. I don’t think I’ve had very good luck in my attempts. I think that people tend to view my “but if not” as a lack of faith.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.