When trust has been lost, it’s easy to fall into skepticism. Many former Latter-day Saints take on an attitude that rejects outright any group’s claims. Skepticism posits that nothing and no one can ultimately be trusted to represent the truth. Instead, the Bible calls us to discernment. Discernment assumes that some things are true, and some things (and some people) can be trusted.
Spend Your Trust Wisely.
Realistically, many voices cannot be trusted. But developing the faculty of discernment helps us know who we can trust and who we can’t, to what extent, and why. Yet a person leaving Mormonism may question their own discernment. Since they readily accepted what they now consider to be lies, they often wonder if they might be fooled again. Yet it is possible to rebuild trust in your own ability to make good decisions.
[Related: Dealing With Loss of Trust]
Who Is Worthy of Being Trusted – B-R-A-V-I-N-G.
Professor and author Brené Brown offers a helpful framework for building trust, based on the acronym BRAVING. Her goal is to help people become more trustworthy in their relationships, but her seven elements of trust can also help us discern who is worthy of being trusted.
- Boundaries. You can trust someone if they respect your boundaries, and they accept it when you say no.
- Reliability. You can trust a person who repeatedly does what they say they will do.
- Accountability. Trust grows as a person (or institution) owns their mistakes, apologizes, and makes amends.
- Vault. This means your confidences are kept. Trustworthy people are not sharing sensitive information about you with others.
- Integrity. You can trust someone when you see that they choose what is right over what benefits them. They practice their values instead of merely professing them.
- Non-judgement. Trust is built as you can talk about what you need and how you feel, without being condemned.
- Generosity. Trust the person or institution that extends the most generous interpretation possible to the intentions, words, and actions of others.
[Related: Regaining Trust After Mormonism]
Wisdom from the Bible About Developing Discernment.
Let’s also consider what the Bible says about how you can learn who to trust.
1 Thessalonians 5:21 “…but test them all; hold on to what is good.”
1 John 4:1 “Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.”
In these passages, we are encouraged to put every claim to the test. This assumes that we can actually make an evaluation without being fooled. But how do we test? Discernment requires applying some external standard of truth or goodness to every claim made about belief or practice. As you find that standard, it is possible to become confident about what you believe and the decisions you make. At Faith After Mormonism, we hold that the standard for whether something is good, or comes from God, is the Bible. (See the videos below to learn why we believe the Bible qualifies to be that standard.)
[Related: The Historical Reliability of the Bible]
[Related: Why I Trust the Bible After Mormonism]
[Related: Archaeological Evidence for the Bible]
The point is: people and institutions need to prove trustworthy before you give them your trust. Trust is earned. That takes time. The Bible never tells us to trust anyone blindly. In fact, it cautions us about trusting human beings (John 2:24). But as people prove they can be trusted, it is fitting to put your trust in them at an appropriate level.
[Related: Transition Step 1: Decide Who to Trust]
Can We Trust Our Feelings?
How do feelings come into play? As Latter-day Saints, we were taught that feelings were a reliable guide to truth. A warm, peaceful feeling was evidence that some authority or some course of action was valid. But the Bible warns that feelings are an unreliable guide to important decisions.
Jeremiah 17:9 “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”
Our thoughts, feelings, and desires are important. But we should be careful about placing too much weight on subjective ways to determine truth – in light of the Bible’s counsel to evaluate everything.
Can We Trust Our Beliefs?
What about beliefs? Some people think they can trust their beliefs simply because they have strong convictions about them. Yet in the Bible, the people most strongly convinced of their beliefs were the Pharisees, who could not even recognize their own Messiah when Jesus came.
Can We Trust Our Experiences?
And what role do experiences play? When a belief is backed up by a real experience, isn’t it more likely to be true? Not necessarily. No experience is self-interpreting. We all make sense of our experiences based on the presuppositions we bring to the experience. In other words, the way we think about reality before we have an experience colors what we think the experience means. So an experience can be real, but we can be wrong in the conclusions we draw about it.
Here’s one final idea to consider: In the biblical framework, we never trust another human being (or a human institution) in an ultimate way. That level of trust belongs to God alone. But once your trust in God is secure, then you can exercise appropriate (earned) trust toward a church, its pastor, or its people – because you’re trusting God above all.
[Related: Can We Trust Our Feelings to Know What Is True?]
