Hold Onto Your Faith
Sustaining Belief, Navigating Doubt, and the Ongoing Restoration
Guiding Text
Teaching Section
Sustaining Faith Through Dialectical Tension
Lesson Plan
The paradox: hold faith while acknowledging harm. Dialectical tension, not cognitive dissonance. 'I love my faith AND my faith has wounded me.'
'He will yet reveal many great and important things.' The Restoration is not complete. The Church was wrong about race for over a century. The Ninth Article of Faith makes future corrections possible.
Pargament (2011): positive and negative coping coexist. Riess (2019): generational shifts toward LGBTQ+ inclusion.
DBT: both things are true. The Restoration is real AND the institution has caused harm. The tension is a space to inhabit, not a problem to solve.
Name one thing you believe and one thing you question. Hold them both.
Detailed Lesson Content
Can I stay? I cannot answer that. What I offer is a framework for the space between belief and betrayal. The Ninth Article of Faith: the Restoration is not complete. The Church was wrong about race for over a century—taught as doctrine, defended as revelation, and wrong. The 1978 revelation acknowledged previous prophets taught false doctrine. The Ninth Article of Faith made that correction possible. It makes future corrections possible too. Pargament distinguishes positive from negative religious coping. For LGBTQ+ Saints, both often coexist: connected to God in prayer, alienated from His institution. DBT's dialectical stance: two contradictory truths can both be true. Testimony and questions are companions on the same road.
Recommended Videos
Jana Riess, ‘The Next Mormons’ (author talks, 30–45 min)
Drawing on a large-scale national study and dozens of interviews, Jana Riess explores how Millennial and Gen-Z Latter-day Saints are navigating faith, identity, and belonging.
Listen to Interview →Terryl Givens, ‘The Crucible of Doubt’ (author talks)
Terryl and Fiona Givens discuss how faith and doubt can coexist, offering new paradigms for approaching uncertainty within a life of faith.
Watch on YouTube →Thomas McConkie, ‘Navigating Mormon Faith Crisis’ (A Thoughtful Faith Podcast)
Mindfulness teacher and author Thomas McConkie explores how faith crises are part of a natural cycle of spiritual growth—a breaking open to make room for new life and deeper faith.
Watch on YouTube →Additional Reading
- Pargament, K. I., et al. (2011). The Brief RCOPE. Religions, 2(1), 51–76.
- Riess, J. (2019). The Next Mormons. Oxford University Press.
- Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT Skills Training Manual. Guilford Press.
- Ninth Article of Faith; Official Declaration 2; D&C 1:30.
Academic Framework
Research on religious coping distinguishes between positive religious coping (seeking spiritual support, finding meaning through faith, collaborative partnership with God) and negative religious coping (feeling punished by God, questioning God's love, experiencing spiritual discontent) (Pargament et al., 2011). LGBTQ+ individuals from non-affirming religious backgrounds often experience both simultaneously—drawing strength from core beliefs while being wounded by institutional application of those beliefs. The therapeutic task is not to eliminate religious coping but to help individuals shift from negative to positive forms.
Riess's research in The Next Mormons (2019) documents that the most common reasons for faith transition among millennial Latter-day Saints include concerns about the church's stance on LGBTQ+ issues, historical transparency, and institutional accountability. Critically, many who leave the institutional church do not leave their faith—they leave a specific expression of it. This session supports participants in articulating what they believe, what they choose to hold, and what they release.
Theological Reflection
The Ninth Article of Faith: 'We believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God.' This is the most radical and under-appreciated article of faith. It commits Latter-day Saints to theological humility—to the admission that the Restoration is not complete, that God has more to say, and that current policies and practices may be revised by future revelation. To hold this belief sincerely is to hold all current institutional positions with an open hand.
The Dear Forrest letter articulates this beautifully: 'If the church could be wrong about Black people for over a century—and it was—then it can be wrong about gay people now. That is not faithlessness. That is the very faith in continuing revelation that the Restoration demands. Hold your testimony and hold your questions at the same time. They are not enemies. They are companions on the same road.'
Discussion Prompts
- What parts of the Restoration do you still believe in? Which ones sustain you? Which ones have been made difficult by institutional treatment?
- Can you distinguish between your testimony of the gospel and your relationship with the institutional church? Are they the same? Where do they diverge?
- What are you holding with an open hand—beliefs or policies you are willing to let future revelation revise?
Integration Exercise
Testimony inventory: Participants write a personal testimony—not the rote testimony of fast Sunday, but an honest accounting of what they believe, what they hope, what they are uncertain about, and what they have chosen to release. The exercise honors both conviction and doubt as legitimate expressions of faith.
Therapeutic Methodology
Primary Modality: Existential Therapy (Yalom, 1980; van Deurzen, 2012). This session engages directly with the existential givens that religious trauma often forces into awareness: freedom (the terrifying reality that one must choose one's own beliefs), isolation (the aloneness of holding a faith that one's community may not validate), meaninglessness (the collapse of a meaning system that once organized all of life), and mortality (the eternal stakes that Latter-day Saint theology places on these decisions). Clinicians should create space for participants to sit with these existential realities without rushing toward resolution. The therapeutic goal is not to eliminate existential anxiety but to help participants develop the courage to live authentically within it.
Secondary Modality: Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) — Distress Tolerance. Participants who are navigating active faith transition while maintaining family and community relationships are in a state of chronic dialectical tension: 'I love my faith AND my faith has wounded me.' 'I believe in the Restoration AND I reject the institution's position on my identity.' DBT's radical acceptance skill is essential here—accepting reality as it is without approval or resignation. Clinicians should teach the dialectical stance explicitly: both things are true at the same time. You do not have to choose. You can hold your testimony and your questions simultaneously, and the tension between them is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be inhabited.
Assessment Note: Clinicians should re-administer the Internalized Homophobia Scale and the Self-Compassion Scale at this session to track therapeutic progress. Comparison with Session 1 and Session 5 baselines will indicate whether the program is achieving its clinical objectives.