A new survey to understand Latter-day Saint faith has sparked discussion in recent weeks. Former BYU faculty member Jeff Strong partnered with different researchers in attempting to understand the perspectives of many current and former members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Strong calls the questions and insights arising from the survey “pastoral,” reflecting his hope they will spark further introspection about how to improve as a faith community and better minister to those with significant questions.
In recent weeks, the Deseret News has featured two commentaries from other researchers raising questions about some of Strong’s methodology and conclusions, featured in his book, “Torn: Understanding why those we love leave the Church.”
Strong, a former Latter-day Saint mission president, says his intent is to “stimulate an honest and open dialogue. Anybody that sees it as a way to weaponize and create division, I think, is missing the point that I’m trying to make.”
The Deseret News reached out to Strong to better understand his work and conclusions. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Deseret News: You acknowledge the wide scope of factors that can impact disaffiliation, but you’ve chosen to focus your main attention on the role “church culture” may play. Why is that?
Jeff Strong: There are so many factors that influence disaffiliation in any faith community. Things going on in general society can be very disruptive. Individual choices also factor in. All of those are incredibly important influences in people’s choices to disaffiliate.
The reason I’m choosing to focus on culture is that all of those other factors are really outside our control as the church community, for the most part. If we want to be the kind of church community where more people can feel at home and experience the blessings of the gospel, we have to work on the things that are within our control.
That means having the humility to recognize that while our culture has great strengths, it has some human weaknesses. It’s powerful to step back and say, “Hey, what could we learn? How could we be better?”
DN: What do you mean by “church culture?” Where do you draw the line in what gets included in that, compared with what’s more institutional and doctrinal?
JS: There aren’t always clean distinctions between doctrine, policy, practice and culture. Prophets have compared the essentials of the gospel with things that are more tangential. Regardless of how people answer what’s doctrine, practice, policy or culture, culture shapes how we think and talk about everything, and ultimately how we experience all those things.
This quote from 17th-century German Lutheran theologian Rupertus Meldenius really helps me personally: “In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, in all things charity.”
Our eternal doctrines are essentials, and in them, we should always have unity. Beyond that, we have policies and practices, and there should be a degree of liberty in those things. And then in all things, charity, right? At the end of the day, if you and I were to disagree on any of this, hopefully we would treat one another with charity.
DN: How do you see Latter-day Saint church culture as a whole?
JS: I think overall, our church culture is a massive strength. And it’s a reason people believe and stay in the community. Our research confirms that.
But if you think about the story of Achilles, he was an incredibly powerful being who had a little weakness, and ultimately, that was his undoing. So even if proportionately we have far more strengths than weaknesses, we have to be really careful not to use that as rationalization to not address our weaknesses.
DN: How can we think carefully about church culture without undermining faith in institutions — like, for instance, setting personal preferences at odds with prophetic authority?
JS: My covenants and the teachings of prophets have been massively formative in my life. The institutional guidance of the church matters because it offers stability and protection that creates directions and boundaries for us.
In making decisions, we have to trust ourselves, the Holy Ghost and the wise guidance we get from church leaders. I’m trying to help people consider how we balance these inputs and reflect on what that means.
The balance should bring together all three influences, in my mind — so there is a risk in becoming imbalanced in one direction. For instance, when asked, “How do you know if something’s true?” quite a few people said, “It’s whatever feels right to you. It’s your truth.” That’s where you might say, “Yeah, that’s a place where secular culture may be having a pretty big impact on Latter-day Saints.”
DN: You’re calling for more love and belonging but making clear that doesn’t mean watering down standards, right?
JS: In the past, I was a little bit of a hard-liner in some ways. My mission president sometimes had to pull me back a little and say, “Hey, Elder Strong, I think you’re just being a little too hard on people.” And my general disposition was to get the job done, live the standards, no compromise, don’t make excuses.
But when I watched my son and other formerly faithful members of the church disaffiliate and saw how the community responded, it changed my perspective. If standards and church membership become tools to sort and sift people instead of to love and lift people, I don’t think that comes from God.
We don’t need to lower our standards, because they’re supposed to lift us to higher ground. What we do is we increase our love, and then standards can actually do what they’re supposed to do.
DN: Do you worry that some take your critical focus on church culture as somehow validating someone’s decision to step away and taking attention away from their own changes?
JS: Yeah, I absolutely worry about that — “Look, he’s outlined 97 reasons why I made the right choice.”
I do hope that former members would see in the book validation where it’s warranted — where their motives, hearts and decisions have been mischaracterized. I hope they appreciate how I’ve sought to listen more to their own explanations of why they’ve stepped away.
But the majority of the book is not a critique of church culture. It is a deep and heartfelt expression of the power and beauty of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Among those who read the book in advance, including inactive and former members, many of them said, “This actually increased my faith in the power of the gospel.” It reminded them of the reasons they loved being a member of the church at one time.
If I have an agenda, it would probably be to make the church community the kind of place that fewer would leave. My focus isn’t on people who left. My focus is on people who are here.
DN: With a survey with so many thousands of people answering, it’s understandable that some would see this as offering definitive answers on disaffiliation. But you’ve been open about the limitations of the methodology. How do you want people to relate to these results?
JS: Every research method has strengths and limitations. And we can learn from different types of research. Representative probability studies are best for estimating precise population characteristics. Large-scale, mixed-method research like ours is especially useful for understanding lived experience, patterns, motivation and complexity. Both types of research are valuable.
It is important to be realistic about the limitations and ask: Can we learn something valuable here? Is there something meaningful I can learn from this that will help me make a positive difference in our community?
DN: Because of the limitations of your methodology — it was an opt-in, non-representative sample — doesn’t that choice significantly influence the data patterns and ultimate conclusions reached in the study?
JS: Yes, it does. As a non-probability sample, this cannot be generalized to the total Latter-day Saint population in the U.S. People should view the findings as descriptive and insight-oriented rather than as precise population estimates.
Large-scale mixed-method studies like this are common in the social sciences. And like other research of this kind, the study is subject to self-selection bias, which can influence the results. But selection bias doesn’t automatically mean the data isn’t useful in offering meaningful insights into what’s happening with Latter-day Saint faith and disaffiliation experiences.
DN: You write about the value of peacemaking among current and former members. What does it look like? How does it happen?
JS: Peacemaking between the communities starts with seeing each other more accurately — that includes recognizing that people who leave are still God’s children.
At the end of the day, we’re gonna draw different conclusions. But it doesn’t mean there can’t be respect, mutual understanding and genuine kindness.
I think we as Latter-day Saints need to try very hard to have a better understanding of those who step away — listening to what their motives are, where their hearts were, and how sincere and deeply vested they were in their decisions. And there has to be a degree of respect for that.
I also think former members can do the same. What we often hear are things like, “Well, if they knew what I know about our history, they couldn’t possibly stay if they have any integrity.” Or “If they were truly Christlike people, they wouldn’t accept some of the doctrines and social positions of the church.”
While I understand those views, I think they are reducing us to a caricature of what we really are — just as we sometimes do to them. Both communities need to be careful not to mischaracterize one another.