Tamra Woolsey, center, and her children, James, left, and Kessa, right look items that can be donated in a #LightTheWorld Giving Machine in the lobby of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building in Salt Lake City on Monday, Nov. 25, 2019. The machines can be found in 10 cities across the United States. | Scott G Winterton, Deseret News
The annual red Giving Machines are returning this year, and in new locations, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced Monday in a news release.
The vending-type Giving Machines, which allow a person to make a charitable donation instead of a purchase, will open this month in 10 locations across the United States.
The annual initiative, organized by the church, encourages all people to follow the Savior’s admonition to “love one another; as I have loved you” (John 13:34). The theme for this year is “Light the World With Love,” and provides opportunities for people to donate to a variety of local and global charity organizations during the Christmas season.
The red machines will open at various times in November and run until Jan. 1 in the following locations:
Las Vegas, Nevada — the Downtown Summerlin Mall, Nov. 3.
Salt Lake City, Utah — City Creek Center, Nov. 24.
Oakland, California — Temple Hill, Nov. 27.
Gilbert, Arizona — Water Tower Plaza, Nov. 29.
Denver, Colorado — Writer Square, Nov. 30.
Kansas City, Missouri — Crown Center, Nov. 30.
New York City, New York — Manhattan New York Temple, Nov. 30.
This is the first year that Giving Machines will be in Nashville, Oakland and Kansas City.
As in the past, a person can purchase items such as food, clean water, health-care services, shelter, bedding, skills training and educational supplies, with prices ranging from $2 to $500 (depending on location). Chickens, goats, pigs and beehives are also available.
Since 2017, Giving Machines have raised more than $9 million for humanitarian organizations in local communities and across the world.
Scott G Winterton, Deseret News
Kessa Woolsey and her brother, James Woolsey, look at items that can be donated in a #LightTheWorld Giving Machine in the lobby of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building in Salt Lake City on Monday, Nov. 25, 2019.
All donations will go directly to each participating charitable organization. The church will cover all expenses, including credit card transaction fees.
CARE, Church World Service, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNICEF and WaterAid are among the global charities participating this year, as well as more than 40 local charity partners.
More information about the Giving Machines and the Light the World initiative will be available at LightTheWorld.org on Nov. 18.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Giving Machines provide necessary care to millions of people in need, and through the #LightTheWorldWithLove initiative.
The church first made the charity vending machines available in 2017.
The Conference Center is pictured during the 191st Annual General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City on Sunday, April 4, 2021. | Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret News
English professors gather, analyze narratives of people who have returned to faith to find patterns, lessons of hope
Last week, a Brigham Young University student stood on the floor of the Marriott Center and, while asking a question of a visiting professor after a forum assembly, briefly noted his own journey as a Latter-day Saint through deconversion and reconversion.
Deconversion stories are common in this age of the rise of the Nones — those who say “none” when pollsters ask them to what church they belong. The BYU student said he actively worked against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after he left because of disagreements he felt he had with church leaders and documents, but that he has returned to his faith and now wants to support it publicly.
Reconversion stories like the one shared by the BYU student aren’t published and promoted as often as deconversion stories, but a married pair of English professors at BYU-Idaho are trying to change that by collecting narratives from people who return to faith and applying narrative and rhetorical analysis to discover patterns and themes.
Eric and Sarah Hafen d’Evegnée said what they’re finding can provide new hope and direction for those who are or have been members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They said reconversion is a relatively new term.
“The common narrative out there on the World Wide Web is that there’s only deconversion, and then people fall off a spiritual cliff,” Sarah d’Evegnée said, “but there are reconversions. We want to celebrate that and then also use the research to help people avoid the cliff or bring them back.”
Their effort began after publication of the book “Faith Is Not Blind,” by Sarah d’Evegnée’s parents, Marie Hafen and Elder Bruce C. Hafen, an emeritus general authority of the Church of Jesus Christ. The book was designed to help Latter-day Saints navigate questions about church history, uncertainty and doubt and develop authentic, well-tested spiritual maturity.
To continue the conversation, the Hafens, d’Evegnées and others subsequently launched a podcast as part of a larger Faith Is Not Blind Project. Reconversion stories organically surfaced and the d’Evegnées began to apply their expertise in teaching students how to interpret stories. They listened and looked for thematic and rhetorical patterns in both deconversion and reconversion stories and discovered uses of language that both surprised them and led to hope.
The language
For example, Sarah d’Evegnée found that deconversion stories and the deconversion parts of Latter-day Saint reconversion stories frequently use language that showed the tellers had limited their choices of how they could believe.
“A lot of the stories start off with superlative language, like ‘I was the perfect missionary,’ or ‘I was the perfect mom’ or ‘We had family home evening every week.’ I started to see a pattern, a connection between this language and why they perceived that they had to leave if they weren’t living up to that expectation.”
It isn’t just perfectionism, she said. It’s framing the story as binary — stay or leave. “It’s the need to label it as being an ideal, an expectation. The expectation of the ideal is written within the language itself,” she said.
Changing language can help people find more of a middle ground, something d’Evegnée finds lacking in the mindsets of many of her BYU-Idaho students, who often feel like they can be only completely in the church or completely out of the church.
“It’s this black-and-white thinking, and it breaks my heart,” she said. “I want them to know that they have options. They can deal with the uncertainty of a gray area, and they can do it with hope and with faith but also with an open dialogue about what their questions are.”
Eric d’Evegnée found another lesson contained in a different language quirk of deconversion stories. People often substituted the word “church” instead of actually naming the people or actions or problems they actually meant. That is called metonymy.
“In the narratives, people said things like, ‘the church expected me to do this,’ or ‘the church believed this,’” Sarah d’Evegnée said. “They collapse everything about the church into that word. So the church then became the expectations they felt, not only the belief or theology of the church, but the expectations of church members and the larger culture. All that gets collapsed into the church, but they use it synonymously. So they said, ‘the church made me feel like I didn’t belong,’ as if the church somehow could be personified into an active entity like that.”
The couple has used computer programs to catalogue the language in more than 50 reconversion stories. That data and their analysis of it has led them to some additional preliminary findings. The d’Evegnées specialize in literary criticism and literary analysis and are preparing research papers to be published in two academic journals, the quarterly BYU Studies and The Religious Educator.
People who leave faith often feel alienated
Leo Winegar wrote that when he was “a full-blown doubter, a closet atheist” who felt like other Latter-day Saints didn’t understand him. A year after his faith collapsed, he reconnected with one of his former religion professors and found genuine love, humility and honesty. He challenged his cynical assumptions, balanced his research, resumed praying and felt spiritual fulfillment return along with good answers.
However, he still sometimes feels alone at church, like others wouldn’t understand him as post-faith crisis survivor.
A sense of profound alienation and banishment is common among Latter-day Saints as they go through deconversion and before they return to the faith, the d’Evegnées found.
“We need to offer greater compassion and sympathy to those who are going through a faith transition,” Sarah d’Evegnée said.
The decision to return to faith
What mattered most in virtually all reconversion stories is a personal relationship to God and Jesus Christ, the research found.
One woman withdrew her name from church records as a teenager and was rebaptized as a college freshman. Receiving general conference talks from family and friends didn’t help. Neither did the scriptures. In her case, she heard missionaries teaching her roommate in another room. She started to sit with them.
Finally, she recalled, “They invited me to pray. As soon as I said the words, ‘Heavenly Father,’ I could feel his presence, and I knew I had to come back.”
This finding is good news, said Burge, the author of the book about Nones.
His research shows that while nearly 1 in 4 Americans no longer affiliates with a church or religion, about 90% of Americans still say they believe in God at least sometimes. That’s remained consistent over the past decade, he said.
The first thing that goes is church-affiliating behavior, such as attending church meetings. But a total loss of belief in God is rare.
“The share of Americans who are none-none-nones — they don’t believe, they don’t behave and they don’t belong — is only about 6%,” he said. “So, the vast majority of Americans — 95% of Americans — are religious in some way, shape or form. We’re still a very spiritual people if we’re not a very religious people.”
The d’Evegnées were thunderstruck by this one common thread through nearly all of the stories.
“In almost every case, those who reconverted said something about re-finding God, rekindling their relationship with God. My husband and I kept saying to each other, ‘We need to make sure that people know that this is the most important part of anyone’s faith journey, their relationship with God.” I mean, it was astounding and just so sweet.”
For example, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles said, “The first great truth in the universe is that God loves us exactly that way — wholeheartedly, without reservation or compromise, with all of his heart, might, mind and strength.”
A welcoming gesture
Burge preached caution about looking for too much commonality in deconversion stories.
“There are 60 million nones in America. They have 60 million stories of why they left,” he said. “It’s not ever the same thing.”
For most, though, there is no epiphany that ends their religiosity.
“It’s more often just, ‘I moved and I couldn’t find a new church’ or ‘I went to college and I just stopped going to church,’ or ‘I married someone of a different faith and we couldn’t figure it out, so we just stopped going to church at all.’ Those are kind of the things that lead people away from church,” Burge said.
“It’s rare for people to have some sort of theological reason or cultural reason. It’s more often just, it was easier to not be part of church than it was to be part of church.”
Some who leave say they were hurt by another person’s words or actions. The reconversion stories showed that some were grateful for another person’s kind words or actions.
“I would argue that it’s never that one thing that brought them (out of the church) or back, but it’s that one thing that kept them coming back or not coming back,” Burge said. “It’s a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back situation. If I’m still very committed to my faith, and someone says something mean to me, I’m not going to leave the church. But if I’m already looking for reasons to leave, and you just give me one more, that one more might be enough to walk away.
“That goes the other direction, too, right? So if I was away from the LDS church for a long time for all these reasons, and I come back one time to dip my toe in and someone’s kind to me and welcomes me back, that’s all I need. But really the bigger step was coming back to the church. That’s where the work happened. It was just when you got there, you got the affirmation you needed to stay there.”
That affirmation was another common theme found by the d’Evegnées.
For example, Tina Phillips left activity as a Latter-day Saint as a young girl. As an adult, she was curious about returning to church but intimidated by a sense that it was a place for “perfect people,” until she and her husband were invited to a Halloween trunk-or-treat activity. Everyone treated them kindly.
“That gave us the comfort and courage we needed to go on Sunday, where we experienced nothing but welcoming and kindness,” she posted on Facebook post and then shared with the d’Evegnées. “That was a good start. From that point on it was a long road of testimony-building experiences, learning and studying and coming to an understanding of the gospel. One thing I realized was we had to put in the work.
Returning to church activity usually comes after a someone makes a conscious effort to go back, said Burge, who on Friday consulted with pastors trying to understand how to help those who have left their flocks.
“You’ve got to get up, you’ve got to get dressed, you’ve got to drive, you’ve got to get there, you’ve got to sit in the right spot, all those things, so when people come back, they’re really wanting to be welcomed, they’re looking for times they are welcomed and that’s enough affirmation for them,” he said. “Those are kind of the people that to me are the easiest ones to win back. You can tell they miss that thing.”
We’re inundated with loss-of-faith narratives, but what about the ones where people find their faith again?
Many of us are familiar with stories about the loss of faith, but we’re less familiar with stories about faith-based reconciliation and renewal: A young man who stays on his knees all night because he can’t stop thinking about the love he felt in his childhood home. The woman whose cancer diagnosis helps her take shaky steps to the back of the chapel. The online troll heckling those in his former faith community for 20 years until he received a blessing from two missionaries who knocked on his door. The returned missionary who took a break from the faith she felt had betrayed her, but then rekindled her personal relationship with deity. The agnostic who writes an email to his former religion professor to understand his perspective on difficult church history.
These are the stories of Christian, Letitia, Dusty, Allyson and Leo. They are the real stories from real people who have gone through a reawakening of faith. We’ve been collecting and analyzing reconversion stories like these and we want to share what we’ve learned with you.
As a married couple, we tend to see the world through surprisingly similar lenses even though our childhoods were drastically different. One of us was raised in a mixed-faith home on the East Coast, and the other one was raised in a home in Utah with a childhood packed full of siblings, Family Home Evenings and Jell-O (placed with care on a lettuce leaf for Sunday dinner).
Despite our contrasting backgrounds, both of us have experienced the emotion that comes when another family member or close friend chooses to leave a shared faith tradition. And as English professors, both of us have wondered how we can use our teaching experience and love for stories in constructive ways that might benefit both those who have left and those who have chosen to stay.
As people who teach how to interpret stories for a living, we’ve listened to and analyzed many popular deconversion narratives online and we have felt like there is something missing. They often imply that anyone who has questions or is intellectually engaged has no option other than to leave and never return. In these stories, departure is often framed as an inevitable, foregone conclusion rather than a choice.
These stories of departure have received enormous attention over the years, with details parsed and analyzed publicly. Comparable attention has not gone to stories of reconversion. We started our project to help fill in some of the gaps in the complex spectrum of religious experiences and stories of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In a recent interview for our Faith Is Not Blind Podcast, our friend JaNae shared a moment of panic when she felt like her religious doubts and uncertainty had led her to the plank of the “Ship Zion” and her only choice was to jump off. She said, “The pattern that I had seen was that you believe, then you have doubts, then you leave the church.”
She simply wasn’t aware of stories about people who had grappled with doubts and who had chosen to stay in the church, and she definitely wasn’t aware of stories about people who had experienced reconversion. Shedding greater light on the rich, complex stories that exist within our faith community can allow us to see beyond such stark, black-and-white choices and to cope in heathy ways with the type of uncertainty JaNae described.
Deep in the throes of her own faith journey, another woman described to us how she scoured the internet looking for just one story about someone who had returned to faith after a deconversion. She couldn’t find any. Hoping she would discover a single fellow traveler on the road back to religion, she actually googled the term “Ex-Mormon returns to church.” But she couldn’t find any published reconversion narratives. “It would just pull up more anti-Mormon literature,” she said. Happily, this woman’s story eventually became the reconversion story she was looking for. And there are more stories like hers that we’ve been gathering.
We’ve not only found a heartening collection of reconversion portraits, but we’ve also analyzed them to discover how much they can teach us. We’ve felt like gatherers of an underreported brand of hope as we’ve collected these inspiring stories.
While there is emerging research on deconversion narratives, especially with the rise of the “nones” over the past 10 years in America, there’s next to nothing about reconversion. Yet these narratives of returning to faith offer compelling and unique insights into the fluid mobility of religious experience in 21st-century America.
Our analysis of this growing collection of reconversion narratives has taught us about both the difficulties and the joys of the winding path that returns to faith. In addition, because our narrators have lived on both sides of this difficult and widening divide, they offer unique insights about deconversion as well as reconversion. The more we listen to these stories, the more we want to amplify the voices of the people who have felt the grief of deconversion and departure, but we also want to celebrate the hope and renewal that comes with the rediscovery of faith.
In his seminal work “Versions of Deconversion,” David Barbour references what we’re calling “reconversion narratives” and includes the stories of Dorothy Day and C.S. Lewis, arguing that these stories “reenact ... the insights and experiences that led to the repudiation of Christianity and demonstrate the process of reflection and reinterpretation by which faith can be recovered in good conscience.” In other words, these voices teach us not only about rediscovering faith, but also about how introspection and analysis can nurture belief and help it evolve.
In addition to providing helpful insights for those who sit all along the spectrum of belief, we hope there might be some helpful lessons for those completely estranged from faith but who may be open to the possibility of reconversion. Here are a few of the insights we’ve gleaned from our preliminary analysis of these narratives (see links to longer articles about each topic).
1. Thelanguage we useto describe our religious experiences influences our perceived choices. In many of these reconversion narratives there is a fascinating correlation between people’s use of language and their perception about the church, their faith and themselves. Often the language the narrators use to describe their experience seems to determine their perceived possibilities and choices, especially those choices they are able to see about their faith and their current and future religious activity.
The language they use frames not only their experience, but their ability to understand their experience. Analyzing this language helps us to understand at a deeper level why significant shifts in perspective may happen during both deconversion and later reconversion.
In addition, the language used by the narrators indicates that overwhelming doubts are frequently connected to a larger certainty crisis. That is, when someone experiences a shift in belief, it isn’t always only their faith that is transforming — their whole worldview might be changing.
2. People acknowledge a sense ofalienation and banishmentin their time away from the church. A sense of profound distance shows up in many of these narratives — with descriptions of time apart from faith often emphasizing how acute the separation felt when they were “distanced” from their former faith. One woman describes how she “wandered lost in the dark.” The emotional impact of stepping away from formerly valued connections and convictions, along with a lingering anxiety about the possibility of ever returning, is a major theme of these return narratives.
Overcoming this anxiety and narrowing this distance were central experiences in the unfolding of accounts. As one woman remembers, “You have no idea how terrifying it is to come back to church. I almost threw up the first time. I’m not kidding. I had such sweaty palms that I was grateful for a hug rather than a handshake.”
Being aware of the full scope of people’s experiences in returning to the church can potentially help us provide better support to those still grappling over whether to come back.
By appreciating some of what influences the decision to step away, those who are within the fold can hopefully better support and possibly prevent someone from reaching a crisis point and experiencing the pain of a departure from a faith community. We anticipate that a deeper understanding of these kinds of narratives will also generate more empathy among members who have never felt the grief associated with stepping away from faith or community, also revealing specific, practical ways to reach out to and welcome back those who are struggling.
3.Others play a critical rolein both the loss and return to faith. Family members, loved ones, friends and church leaders play a significant role in helping people come back to faith, but these same people also sometimes play a role in contributing to people’s choices to leave. Without suggesting another person was the only cause of someone’s leaving or returning, it was clear that others’ actions or comments often acted as tipping points for significant decisions about their faith.
On one hand, insensitive words at an inopportune moment appear to push someone further away, like pushing an already teetering person off an edge. On the other hand, other accounts clearly demonstrate how the right word or action at a timely moment provided just enough support for someone to take steps to return to faith in God and participation in their congregation. In these narratives, the personal impact we each have on those around us in their journey of faith is abundantly clear. Our analysis might offer some guidance to parents and teachers, encouraging open conversations about challenging questions and listening with greater compassion.
4. Those who return to faith often experience a moment that disrupts the previous narrative they held when estranged from the church. In different and often surprising ways, these stories describe a variety of momentum-shifting moments that disrupt previous assumptions and that puncture strongly held views. These narrative-disrupting moments are diverse, including significant tragedies, miracles, fresh insights and transformative examples, along with a sense of growing hunger for deeper spiritual connection and love from others.
While widely different, these experiences appear to similarly open up new possibilities about a return to faith not openly considered before. Although there are many other important moments that follow in their stories, these disruptive moments hold special significance for our narrators.
5. There is a remarkably consistentawareness and increase of divine influencethroughout virtually every account of return. It’s striking to see how consistently our narrators express a growing awareness of their own relationship with God. While there are a wide variety of influences on the unfolding reconversion, this is one overarching similarity in virtually every story of reconversion: an increasing recognition of God and their relationship to him. Almost without exception, connecting with God in a deeper way is a vital and driving part of the reconversion process in these stories.
It has been heartening for us to study this preliminary collection of narratives from a remarkable group of people. As one newly returned woman summarized, “changes of heart, miraculous changes of heart, are still possible in this day and age. Your past does not define your here, your now, or your future.”
Analyzing these narratives has inspired us in our own efforts to become more compassionate to those struggling and to see faith as a work in progress. Our analysis has also confirmed to us how unique and diverse faith journeys often are, and we’ve learned to appreciate and celebrate the nuance and the complexity of stories about faith. They are each different, and they shouldn’t be confined to stereotypes or easy formulas because they represent unique personal journeys and individual relationships with God.
Studying these genuine narratives and discovering new ones has also left us with the sense that there are many more people out there with such stories to share. We encourage you to share your story with us on our Faith Is Not Blind website and to join us in learning from the intricacies of faith stories and the way that we tell them.
Sarah Hafen d’Evegnée teaches at BYU-Idaho and specializes in Women’s Studies and 20th-century American literature.
Eric d’Evegnée has been a professor in BYU-Idaho’s English Department for 18 years. He teaches advanced composition, literary criticism and 20th-century American literature.
We’re inundated with loss-of-faith narratives, but what about the ones where people find their faith again?
Many of us are familiar with stories about the loss of faith, but we’re less familiar with stories about faith-based reconciliation and renewal: A young man who stays on his knees all night because he can’t stop thinking about the love he felt in his childhood home. The woman whose cancer diagnosis helps her take shaky steps to the back of the chapel. The online troll heckling those in his former faith community for 20 years until he received a blessing from two missionaries who knocked on his door. The returned missionary who took a break from the faith she felt had betrayed her, but then rekindled her personal relationship with deity. The agnostic who writes an email to his former religion professor to understand his perspective on difficult church history.
These are the stories of Christian, Letitia, Dusty, Allyson and Leo. They are the real stories from real people who have gone through a reawakening of faith. We’ve been collecting and analyzing reconversion stories like these and we want to share what we’ve learned with you.
As a married couple, we tend to see the world through surprisingly similar lenses even though our childhoods were drastically different. One of us was raised in a mixed-faith home on the East Coast, and the other one was raised in a home in Utah with a childhood packed full of siblings, Family Home Evenings and Jell-O (placed with care on a lettuce leaf for Sunday dinner).
Despite our contrasting backgrounds, both of us have experienced the emotion that comes when another family member or close friend chooses to leave a shared faith tradition. And as English professors, both of us have wondered how we can use our teaching experience and love for stories in constructive ways that might benefit both those who have left and those who have chosen to stay.
As people who teach how to interpret stories for a living, we’ve listened to and analyzed many popular deconversion narratives online and we have felt like there is something missing. They often imply that anyone who has questions or is intellectually engaged has no option other than to leave and never return. In these stories, departure is often framed as an inevitable, foregone conclusion rather than a choice.
These stories of departure have received enormous attention over the years, with details parsed and analyzed publicly. Comparable attention has not gone to stories of reconversion. We started our project to help fill in some of the gaps in the complex spectrum of religious experiences and stories of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In a recent interview for our Faith Is Not Blind Podcast, our friend JaNae shared a moment of panic when she felt like her religious doubts and uncertainty had led her to the plank of the “Ship Zion” and her only choice was to jump off. She said, “The pattern that I had seen was that you believe, then you have doubts, then you leave the church.”
She simply wasn’t aware of stories about people who had grappled with doubts and who had chosen to stay in the church, and she definitely wasn’t aware of stories about people who had experienced reconversion. Shedding greater light on the rich, complex stories that exist within our faith community can allow us to see beyond such stark, black-and-white choices and to cope in heathy ways with the type of uncertainty JaNae described.
Deep in the throes of her own faith journey, another woman described to us how she scoured the internet looking for just one story about someone who had returned to faith after a deconversion. She couldn’t find any. Hoping she would discover a single fellow traveler on the road back to religion, she actually googled the term “Ex-Mormon returns to church.” But she couldn’t find any published reconversion narratives. “It would just pull up more anti-Mormon literature,” she said. Happily, this woman’s story eventually became the reconversion story she was looking for. And there are more stories like hers that we’ve been gathering.
We’ve not only found a heartening collection of reconversion portraits, but we’ve also analyzed them to discover how much they can teach us. We’ve felt like gatherers of an underreported brand of hope as we’ve collected these inspiring stories.
While there is emerging research on deconversion narratives, especially with the rise of the “nones” over the past 10 years in America, there’s next to nothing about reconversion. Yet these narratives of returning to faith offer compelling and unique insights into the fluid mobility of religious experience in 21st-century America.
Our analysis of this growing collection of reconversion narratives has taught us about both the difficulties and the joys of the winding path that returns to faith. In addition, because our narrators have lived on both sides of this difficult and widening divide, they offer unique insights about deconversion as well as reconversion. The more we listen to these stories, the more we want to amplify the voices of the people who have felt the grief of deconversion and departure, but we also want to celebrate the hope and renewal that comes with the rediscovery of faith.
In his seminal work “Versions of Deconversion,” David Barbour references what we’re calling “reconversion narratives” and includes the stories of Dorothy Day and C.S. Lewis, arguing that these stories “reenact ... the insights and experiences that led to the repudiation of Christianity and demonstrate the process of reflection and reinterpretation by which faith can be recovered in good conscience.” In other words, these voices teach us not only about rediscovering faith, but also about how introspection and analysis can nurture belief and help it evolve.
In addition to providing helpful insights for those who sit all along the spectrum of belief, we hope there might be some helpful lessons for those completely estranged from faith but who may be open to the possibility of reconversion. Here are a few of the insights we’ve gleaned from our preliminary analysis of these narratives (see links to longer articles about each topic).
1. Thelanguage we useto describe our religious experiences influences our perceived choices. In many of these reconversion narratives there is a fascinating correlation between people’s use of language and their perception about the church, their faith and themselves. Often the language the narrators use to describe their experience seems to determine their perceived possibilities and choices, especially those choices they are able to see about their faith and their current and future religious activity.
The language they use frames not only their experience, but their ability to understand their experience. Analyzing this language helps us to understand at a deeper level why significant shifts in perspective may happen during both deconversion and later reconversion.
In addition, the language used by the narrators indicates that overwhelming doubts are frequently connected to a larger certainty crisis. That is, when someone experiences a shift in belief, it isn’t always only their faith that is transforming — their whole worldview might be changing.
2. People acknowledge a sense ofalienation and banishmentin their time away from the church. A sense of profound distance shows up in many of these narratives — with descriptions of time apart from faith often emphasizing how acute the separation felt when they were “distanced” from their former faith. One woman describes how she “wandered lost in the dark.” The emotional impact of stepping away from formerly valued connections and convictions, along with a lingering anxiety about the possibility of ever returning, is a major theme of these return narratives.
Overcoming this anxiety and narrowing this distance were central experiences in the unfolding of accounts. As one woman remembers, “You have no idea how terrifying it is to come back to church. I almost threw up the first time. I’m not kidding. I had such sweaty palms that I was grateful for a hug rather than a handshake.”
Being aware of the full scope of people’s experiences in returning to the church can potentially help us provide better support to those still grappling over whether to come back.
By appreciating some of what influences the decision to step away, those who are within the fold can hopefully better support and possibly prevent someone from reaching a crisis point and experiencing the pain of a departure from a faith community. We anticipate that a deeper understanding of these kinds of narratives will also generate more empathy among members who have never felt the grief associated with stepping away from faith or community, also revealing specific, practical ways to reach out to and welcome back those who are struggling.
3.Others play a critical rolein both the loss and return to faith. Family members, loved ones, friends and church leaders play a significant role in helping people come back to faith, but these same people also sometimes play a role in contributing to people’s choices to leave. Without suggesting another person was the only cause of someone’s leaving or returning, it was clear that others’ actions or comments often acted as tipping points for significant decisions about their faith.
On one hand, insensitive words at an inopportune moment appear to push someone further away, like pushing an already teetering person off an edge. On the other hand, other accounts clearly demonstrate how the right word or action at a timely moment provided just enough support for someone to take steps to return to faith in God and participation in their congregation. In these narratives, the personal impact we each have on those around us in their journey of faith is abundantly clear. Our analysis might offer some guidance to parents and teachers, encouraging open conversations about challenging questions and listening with greater compassion.
4. Those who return to faith often experience a moment that disrupts the previous narrative they held when estranged from the church. In different and often surprising ways, these stories describe a variety of momentum-shifting moments that disrupt previous assumptions and that puncture strongly held views. These narrative-disrupting moments are diverse, including significant tragedies, miracles, fresh insights and transformative examples, along with a sense of growing hunger for deeper spiritual connection and love from others.
While widely different, these experiences appear to similarly open up new possibilities about a return to faith not openly considered before. Although there are many other important moments that follow in their stories, these disruptive moments hold special significance for our narrators.
5. There is a remarkably consistentawareness and increase of divine influencethroughout virtually every account of return. It’s striking to see how consistently our narrators express a growing awareness of their own relationship with God. While there are a wide variety of influences on the unfolding reconversion, this is one overarching similarity in virtually every story of reconversion: an increasing recognition of God and their relationship to him. Almost without exception, connecting with God in a deeper way is a vital and driving part of the reconversion process in these stories.
It has been heartening for us to study this preliminary collection of narratives from a remarkable group of people. As one newly returned woman summarized, “changes of heart, miraculous changes of heart, are still possible in this day and age. Your past does not define your here, your now, or your future.”
Analyzing these narratives has inspired us in our own efforts to become more compassionate to those struggling and to see faith as a work in progress. Our analysis has also confirmed to us how unique and diverse faith journeys often are, and we’ve learned to appreciate and celebrate the nuance and the complexity of stories about faith. They are each different, and they shouldn’t be confined to stereotypes or easy formulas because they represent unique personal journeys and individual relationships with God.
Studying these genuine narratives and discovering new ones has also left us with the sense that there are many more people out there with such stories to share. We encourage you to share your story with us on our Faith Is Not Blind website and to join us in learning from the intricacies of faith stories and the way that we tell them.
Sarah Hafen d’Evegnée teaches at BYU-Idaho and specializes in Women’s Studies and 20th-century American literature.
Eric d’Evegnée has been a professor in BYU-Idaho’s English Department for 18 years. He teaches advanced composition, literary criticism and 20th-century American literature.
A new term is gaining traction in Christian circles and churches in America: biblical citizenship. What does it mean and how do adherents want to reshape the country?
I first encountered the phrase “biblical citizenship” last year, when I heard about the Biblical Citizenship Barnstorming Tour sweeping through Georgia ahead of the Senate run-offs. I attended one of the affiliated rallies, which was held at a Baptist church.
As I listened to the speakers, including former Texas state legislator Rick Green and former U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, I puzzled over the words emblazoned on a red banner on the stage. What, exactly, is “biblical citizenship”? And what are the steps that conservative activists are asking Americans to take in order to live it out?
In hopes of finding out, I recently enrolled in Green’s free, eight-week course on biblical citizenship, which explores the relationship between biblical values and constitutional rights — emphasizing Americans’ duty to uphold both.
Thousands of people, including scores of pastors, have participated in the class or been exposed to its ideas, either individually or through congregational events. Green has also taken the concept directly to churches with in-person lectures.
According to Green and his supporters, growing interest in biblical citizenship is good for the whole country. They believe the U.S. will be at its best when Christians and non-Christians alike understand and respect the wisdom of the Bible and Constitution.
“A constitutional republic works best when citizens follow the biblical commands on everything from obeying just laws, proper taxation, work ethic, loving your neighbor, freedom of choice, free market principles and so many other issues that affect our daily lives,” Green told the Deseret News in an email.
Awaken Church
Former Texas state legislator Rick Green speaks in a YouTube video posted by the Awaken Church Oct. 20, 2020. The concept of biblical citizenship, which explores the relationship between biblical values and constitutional rights, has attracted attention.
But critics, including some religion scholars, say these claims are exclusionary and toxic enough to undermine the country’s democratic institutions. The teachings behind biblical citizenship and other forms of Christian nationalism helped fuel the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, they said.
During the introductory session of Green’s course, the Rev. Jack Hibbs of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills describes biblical citizenship as a form of stewardship, a way for Christians to ensure their country is healthy.
“God has given us this republic to be stewards over,” he says.
The course emphasizes the idea that the Founding Fathers, as well as the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, were divinely inspired and that religious liberty is an important value to protect. It seeks to increase Christian engagement in the public square, in general, and the political process, in particular.
For too long, American Christians have kept quiet about their values, Green and other speakers claim. Now, it’s critical to bring a biblical worldview out of the four walls of the church.
The first step in this process is to educate people. Then, Green explains, the newly educated should become “force multipliers” who go out and share their knowledge with those around them.
“After you apply it to your own life, start educating those around you,” Green says during the course, which is formally titled “Biblical Citizenship in Modern America.”
Religious liberty is the linchpin of all of this, Green says in the seventh class.
“For us to be able to live out biblical citizenship we need religious liberty,” says Green. Some of the freedoms included in the Bill of Rights, Green and others argue, come from God and, therefore, can’t be altered.
“Government has forgotten that there is a power higher than itself,” says David Barton, an amateur historian, in the seventh class.
“Freedom of religion is not freedom from religion,” is a tagline repeated by numerous speakers. During a deep dive into the Bill of Rights, Green also makes the argument that separation of church and state is not actually part of the First Amendment but was an idea that Thomas Jefferson articulated later in one of his letters.
With the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers “were trying to prevent a single national denomination,” Green says. He argues that they weren’t trying to shut religion out of our institutions altogether.
In “Being Salt and Light” — the eighth and final session — Green offers the faithful tips for stepping into the public square. The advice goes beyond obvious and already common methods like registering people of faith to vote and distributing voting guides. Green and others are promoting a deeper engagement.
“Get inside the mixing bowl of our (political) process,” says Green. The first step, he says, is, “knowledge.” Next, he says, Americans of faith should attempt to “influence (the) pool of candidates.”
“Maybe you in this room — running (for office). Maybe asking some people you know that have been good leaders in business or education or in church ... if they’ve shown leadership skills, ask them to run for school board or the legislature or Congress,” says Green, echoing what numerous speakers said — that it’s important to get Christians who are not afraid to bring their faith to conversations about policy running for all levels of office.
Next, the faithful should rally on behalf of candidates whose values reflect their own by “knocking on the doors, making the phone calls, contributing to the candidates, giving of our time,” says Green.
“It’s easy to agree what the good policy is, the hard part is getting into the system,” Green acknowledges. He draws a parallel to the story of Joshua and Caleb spying the land of Israel, full of fearsome giants but not backing away from the task.
“It’s going to be hard but we can take the land little by little,” Green says.
Bringing the course to churches
Green is trying to help Christians take the land by taking this political message out to churches — which is a return to the country’s roots, he claims.
Speaking at Awaken Church during a lecture on Biblical Citizenship in Modern America — an image of an American flag resting on a Holy Bible on the screen behind him — Green remarked to congregants that they have “great pastors” for bringing him. He added that those pastors “understand the importance of ... influencing government with the word of God.”
“There are not enough churches in America doing that anymore,” he continued, explaining that he believes pastors’ attempts to infuse government with religion constituted a return to the country’s historical roots. “It used to be the role of the church; we used to even call pastors in the Revolutionary War the ‘Black-Robed Regiment’ — the British hated them because they were actually so engaged in the culture.”
Historians argue, however, that Christian nationalists have misappropriated the idea of the Black-Robed Regiment. They say the phrase was actually rejected by America’s revolutionary era pastors since it was coined by the British and used to discredit the colonists as “religious fanatics whipped into a seditious frenzy by a conspiracy of militant, politicized religious leaders,” write Thomas Lecaque and JL Tomlin in The Washington Post.
Lecaque and Tomlin go on to explain that while the term presents America’s early pastors as a monolith, there was much disagreement around the topic of whether or not to separate from the British. Those who did support the revolution were generally politically liberal.
“It is profoundly ironic, then, that modern conservative Christians in the United States have claimed the mantle of this imagined, reactionary label for themselves,” write Lecaque and Tomlin. “Eighteenth-century patriot religious leaders would have found this crass, opportunistic and at least marginally blasphemous.”
Nonetheless, Green and other speakers argue that, today, America’s pastors shouldn’t shy away from political issues but, rather, should address them from the pulpit, as they claim the country’s earliest religious leaders did.
Green and others also urge Americans to become so-called “Constitution Coaches” — an option that is available on the website and that is free — who share this content widely, including in their churches. Not only does Green offer materials to lead biblical citizenship courses, he also offers materials so Christians can take a deep, faith-based dive into the Constitution, as well. And in the Constitutional Defense of Your Family and Freedom course, participants also “learn how to shoot handguns,” Green told conservative Christian author and blogger Connie Albers during an April interview.
Sitting on stage alongside Green during the final session of his biblical citizenship course, one Constitution coach — Ken Davis — offered a story of how, in 2012, he decided to start a class on the Constitution at his church. Shortly thereafter, he came across Green’s “Constitution Alive!” materials and led his first class — which had only three participants and took place in a closet, he joked.
But as the ideas and the terminology have caught on, his classes have grown. Now he offers three 10-week classes a year; his last course had 60 enrollees and took place in his church’s auditorium.
Scarlett Lani, who has also led Green’s courses, sought to dispel viewers’ fears that they need to be fluent in the ideas and history in order to conduct a biblical citizenship class. All coaches really need to do is set up the equipment and press play, she said, so students can view Green’s materials.
However, not all Americans are so enthusiastic about the new term and the popularity of Green’s course. Though the phrase “biblical citizenship” suggests, perhaps, that the term comes from antiquity, Gershon Shafir, a sociology professor at University of California, San Diego, explained it as a “neologism” that is completely contemporary.
The term is “misleading since citizenship is an inclusionary term whereas biblical citizenship isn’t,” he said.
A firing squad chair in the execution chamber at Utah State Prison is pictured, as seen through the rifle port, on May 5, 2004. | Jeremy Harmon, Deseret News
One of the state’s most conservative counties backs repealing, replacing state’s death penalty
A very slight majority of Utahns — 51% — oppose eliminating Utah’s death penalty as a sentencing option in future cases compared to 40% who support doing away with it, according to a new Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll. About 8% said they didn’t know what to think.
The survey released Wednesday is the latest poll to gauge Utahns’ temperature on the death penalty as an effort to repeal and replace it is gaining steam, but is expected to draw heated debate on Utah’s Capitol Hill during the Utah Legislature’s 2022 general session slated for January.
Dan Jones & Associates conducted the poll of 746 registered Utah voters from Oct. 14-21. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.54 percentage points.
The poll shows Utahns nowadays have developed increasingly mixed views about capital punishment than they have in the past.
That 2010 poll showed Utahn’s support of the death penalty had not waned at all from a previous survey in 2003, which asked Utahns the same question. The results were strikingly similar even though seven years separated the two. In the 2003 poll, 78% percent favored the death penalty and 17% opposed it.
The new poll figures also came the same day the Utah County Commission — the legislative body of one of Utah’s most conservative counties — voted 2-1 to support a resolution calling on Utah lawmakers to support a bill to repeal and replace the death penalty with a new sentencing option of 45 years to life in prison.
What does this mean for efforts to repeal and replace Utah’s death penalty?
Told of the poll results Wednesday, Connor Boyack, president of the Libertas Institute, a Utah-based libertarian think tank that’s helping drive the 2022 bill to repeal and replace Utah’s death penalty, said it’s “significant” that the latest poll shows Utahns over the years have become increasingly opposed to capital punishment.
“The decreasing public support for the death penalty shows what we’ve seen with elected officials in recent years, and that is this: The more people learn about the death penalty, the less they support it,” Boyack said.
For years, Boyack said his organization and others have been trying to “educate the public about the problems with capital punishment, and there are many.”
“As that education has happened, public support has waned, and predictably so,” Boyack said. “Because the death penalty is a law that creates many other problems. The public doesn’t want to tolerate the risks to innocent people, the increased cost to taxpayers, the re-traumatization of victims’ family members through constant appeals. So as people learn about this they increasingly drop their support. The same thing is happening with legislators.”
Boyack said if he was able to “speak directly to every Utah voter” for 15 minutes to outline the issues with the death penalty, “I’m convinced the poll numbers would be in our favor.”
“We’ve been out there talking to the public, and it’s incredible the number of people who would say, ‘Oh my gosh, I didn’t think about that before,’” Boyack said. “In the past decade, there’s clearly been a huge shift. Do we need to wait another decade to continue educating the public? I don’t think so. I think the trend is indicative of the fact that truth is on our side.”
Boyack thinks if the question were phrased differently, it’s likely even more Utahns would support the legislation set to be considered by lawmakers next year.
“I feel like the question doesn’t accurately represent what’s being done in this legislation,” Boyack said. “Rep. (Lowry) Snow is not simply doing away with the death penalty and leaving nothing in its place. His is an effort to replace it with something that will allow for aggravated murders to have a harsher penalty, give prosecutors another tool they can use to pressure defendants into a plea deal of some sort.”
If the poll’s question were phrased to indicate the death penalty would be replaced with a new sentence of 45 years to life — in addition to life in prison without parole, which is already on Utah’s books as a sentencing tool — Boyack said he thinks even more Utahns would be supportive.
“We’ve seen that with legislators themselves, legislators who were a little uncomfortable with a straight repeal bill,” he said. “I personally know of legislators I’ve had conversations with who when we explain that this is a repeal and replace bill, that there is a solution in the bill in addition to just taking the death penalty away, their support increases or they move from being a fence-sitter to supporting the bill.”
Why Utah County Commission supports abolishing Utah’s death penalty
The three-member elected commission that represents the heavily Republican-leaning Utah County voted on Wednesday to throw its support behind the effort to repeal and replace Utah’s death penalty.
“We call on the Utah Legislature to remove this option from state law, as nearly two dozen other states have, and replace it with alternative measures that can still help ensure justice is served,” the resolution approved by the Utah County Commission on Wednesday states.
Utah County Commissioner Amelia Powers Gardner said she brought the resolution forward for consideration for several reasons. One is because as a fiscal conservative, she’s struck by the fact that the average death penalty case costs $4 million.
Plus, Gardner pointed out throughout Utah County’s history, prosecutors have only successfully tried two murder cases to the point of death row. Out of those two cases, one of them was executed, and the other died of natural causes in prison.
“While I’m not necessarily opposed to having somebody brought to justice through the process of an execution, what I’m keenly aware of is that due to the restraints on the death penalty that are placed on us by the Supreme Court, it causes appeal after appeal after appeal,” she said. “And that creates a celebrity status for those on death row that costs the taxpayers millions of dollars, that re-victimizes families over and over again.”
Gardner said she’s not necessarily opposed to the death penalty, but “the fact that we’ve had almost 200 cases of people on death row exonerated in this country is very frightening to me.”
“It is very frightening to me that any government gets to decide who lives and who dies,” she said.
Gardner said there are two issues in politics that “I will not waver on.” One of those issues is “parental rights, and the other is I am pro life. Period.”
“And that includes even an egregious crime,” she said, “because I can guarantee you that the 18 so odd cases (nationally) that were exonerated on death row, it was an egregious crime and the people prosecuting it were sure that they had the right person. But apparently they didn’t. And that frightens me.”
Commissioner Bill Lee voted in favor of the resolution along with Gardner. Only Commissioner Tom Sakievich voted against.
Sakievich said he was concerned the resolution would send a “mixed signal that we’re completely opposed to all death penalties, thus taking away from the county attorney the option to prosecute for death penalty or not to prosecute for death penalty.”
“If we avoid the resolution, we allow him that latitude to continue to decide which way he wants to go with that while working with our state representatives,” Sakievich said.
The commissioner said neither the resolution nor the repeal and replace legislation address the “underlying issue” of decadeslong “back and forth, lifelong” appeals for every murder.
“You mentioned that you are pro life,” Sakievich said to Gardner. “I am definitely pro life. And that’s all the more reason why I say the punishment should always match the crime.”
Seth and Bethany Mandel celebrate the eighth birthday of their eldest daughter, far right, in Silver Spring, Md., on Sunday, Oct. 17, 2021. The power couple call themselves the parents of the Irishest Jewish kids on Earth. | Cheryl Diaz Meyer, for the Deseret News
With five kids and nearly 200K followers on Twitter, the couple uses social media to promote their brand of family values
SILVER SPRING, Md. — Utah may have the largest families in the nation, but on the East Coast, the beating heart of Big Family Inc. resides in the gloriously messy family room of Bethany and Seth Mandel.
It’s there, surrounded by toys, books and kids, that Bethany writes and tweets on a gray sectional couch, in between nursing her 3-month-old baby, shuttling two preschoolers to activities and homeschooling her two oldest children. Has she mentioned the dog? Truman is the springer spaniel-poodle mix always in search of a lap. But they’re usually taken.
Bethany’s husband, Seth, executive editor of the Washington Examiner Magazine, toggles between his Washington, D.C., office and their home, where he works on a laptop on the kitchen table, or wherever a space opens up. The couple have no home office; the bedrooms are all occupied by children. Their home is the domestic expression of chaos theory, the idea that astounding disorder can exist within an ordered structure of patterns and laws.
Married for 10 years, the Mandels are comfortable with mess. People who’ve delivered a baby in a car know that life can emerge and thrive in circumstances that aren’t sterile. The couple have more important things to worry about than whether the baby’s nasal aspirator is on the front steps, and whether there’s room to fit a drinking glass on the coffee table.
They have five children to raise, tens of thousands of Twitter followers to educate and entertain, and a nation to convince to have more children.
Bethany, a Deseret contributor, wrote about the pleasures of large families for Deseret Magazine earlier this year. “I look at my (then) four kids, and by golly, I like them. It makes me want more,” she wrote. After reading the piece, some people wrote her to say they’d decided to have another child.
Advocating for families — large families, in particular — has become a sort of mission for the couple, faithful Jews who traveled markedly different paths to arrive at this stage of life. “I joke that I see myself as PR for Big Family, like Big Tech or Big Oil,” Bethany said.
Cheryl Diaz Meyer, for the Deseret News
Bethany Mandel, center, nurses her 3-month-old son while visiting with friends during a birthday celebration for her eldest daughter in Silver Spring, Md., on Sunday, Oct. 17, 2021. Bethany and husband Seth call themselves the parents of the Irishest Jewish kids on Earth.
‘I have white privilege?’
Bethany, 35, grew up in New York, the only child of parents who separated when she was 3. She was a latchkey kid who was often alone, and she lost her mother to complications of lupus at 16 and her father to suicide at age 19. “This,” she says, swirling her hands in the air as one child plays the piano and another runs through the room in a Halloween costume, “is very different from how I grew up.”
The couple’s current life is more familiar to Seth, 39, who grew up with two sisters in a middle-class neighborhood in New Jersey, the sort of place where children were sent outside early in the day with instructions to be home by dinner. At one point, both sets of grandparents and four sets of aunts and uncles also lived nearby. “I was surrounded by family,” he said. His parents are still together and just recently sold Seth’s childhood home.
Seth grew up reading Commentary magazine in a conservative-leaning family that helped to inform his views as an adult (despite voting for Democrat Al Gore for president when he was 18). Bethany, who had initially adopted her mother’s liberal views, found conservatism in college, where she said professors lectured her about her “white privilege.”
“I had a social-worker mom who became disabled when I was a teen. We lived in a single-wide trailer park. We had nothing. We were extremely poor, and then my mom died when I was 16, and I’m the one who removed her from life support because my dad wasn’t around anymore. And then I bounced around; I was on my own. Nobody in my family helped me. And I have white privilege?,” she recalled. “I would sit there seething.”
She worked full time throughout college — one year at City College in New York, the rest at Rutgers University in New Jersey. It was at Rutgers where she became friends with conservatives for the first time, and by the time she graduated with a history degree, she had come to realize that her beliefs were more in line with theirs than with liberal Democrats. She decided that she’d one day like to work in politics.
After leaving college, she worked for a year as a development assistant at a synagogue and then moved to Cambodia to teach fifth grade. In Cambodia, she became a denizen of Twitter, then just three years old. She used the social media platform both for entertainment and career advancement. “I followed everyone on Twitter that I thought I might want to work for.”
This included conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, and the strategy paid off when she landed a job at Heritage that she saw mentioned on Twitter.
Mandel’s Twitter presence also led to her subsequent job, after Commentary editor John Podhoretz reached out and said, “I don’t know what I want you to do, but I want you to come work for me.”
A few months later, he offered jobs to both of them; Seth became an editor and Bethany handled the magazine’s social media. “Commentary is very cerebral and very intellectual, and that’s not who I am, but that’s what Seth is,” she said. “They came for me, but Seth was the better fit.”
That’s why Bethany was happy to step away when she got pregnant with her first child, a daughter, now 8. Though she hasn’t had a full-time salaried position since then, there’s been no shortage of work: freelance writing and editing (to include a children’s book series called “Heroes of Liberty” that features people such as former President Ronald Reagan and economist Thomas Sowell) and editing for the conservative website Ricochet. A podcast and a book are forthcoming.
Seth, too, left Commentary and went on to become op-ed editor for the New York Post before joining The Washington Examiner to edit its magazine. Like Bethany, he’s a graduate of Rutgers, although they weren’t there at the same time.
Cheryl Diaz Meyer, for the Deseret News
Seth and Bethany Mandel watch the preparations for their eldest daughter’s birthday in Silver Spring, Md., on Sunday, Oct. 17, 2021.
Attack of the ‘Grandma killer’
On social media, Bethany is witty and blunt, and, in her words, snarky. She had no problem, for example, embracing the moniker “Grandma killer” when she trended on Twitter in May 2020 for arguing against lockdowns. Her tweet even made the news in Israel and the U.K. She has 86,000 followers on Twitter; her husband, nearly 100,000.
You can call me a Grandma killer. I’m not sacrificing my home, food on the table, all of our docs and dentists, every form of pleasure (museums, zoos, restaurants), all my kids’ teachers in order to make other people comfortable. If you want to stay locked down, do. I’m not.
— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) May 6, 2020
She’s also been upfront on social media about the challenges of married life, at one point writing a Twitter thread about a time when she was considering divorce. The couple got help from a counselor who helped them improve their communication and identify where the problem began. Eight years later, Bethany described the couple as “disgustingly in love.”
“Our marriage took work,” she said. “I’m glad we did it.”
Seth, like his wife, tweets a mixture of news, commentary, jokes and snippets of family life. Other than describing himself as the father of the “five Irishest Jewish kids on Earth” (Bethany’s mom was Irish), he doesn’t reveal much about his children in public. Because their work is sometimes controversial and brings out the haters, and because the internet is forever, the couple doesn’t identify their children publicly or allow their faces to be shown in photographs that are published. When the children are mentioned on social media; they have code names; for example, the son born in the car goes by “Altima,” the model of the car where he took his first breaths.
may have a point but WH shouldn't pick this up. "Lower Your Expectations" isn't the slogan they should want to march into midterms with https://t.co/UjKFeHftmu
They are determined that their children have childhoods; no screens are allowed, except for special occasions.
“Because we are a homeschooling family, there is meaning in everything we do,” Seth says. “We realize that our days together are a chance for all sorts of learning opportunities.”
Dinner (a no-phone zone) is at 6 sharp each evening; bedtime at 7:30. The older children help with their younger siblings, even collecting the baby from his morning nap. “My kids are very well-behaved and that’s by training,” Bethany says. “It’s an expectation that we have.”
When they have dinner parties, which they do frequently, the children are present at the table. “People have told us, ‘Your house is very real. And everything in this town is very fake.’ We are not fake. We don’t try to be something that we’re not. Our house is a mess, welcome to it.”
True to form, many of their friendships have originated on Twitter. For example, the Mandels became friends through Twitter with Matt Whitlock, a communications professional who once worked for Utah GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch, and invited Whitlock and his wife for dinner before having met them in person. “They’re really good friends now,” Bethany said, despite being served challah that had been “decorated” with glitter by a child.
— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) June 18, 2021
The couple, who were introduced by a friend, jokes that they only have children in off-election years. Does that mean another is forthcoming?
“Well, you do the math,” Bethany says. For all their interest in politics, neither Mandel plans to run for public office, believing that they can have the most influence through media.
For now, they are content with what they have, what they do and where they live, a leafy neighborhood close to what Bethany calls a “really cool city.” Not that Seth doesn’t occasionally think about how great it was in the Orthodox Jewish community where he grew up, where his family members lived for more than a century. “There are aspects of that life they are doing right and everybody else is getting wrong,” he said.
For her part, Bethany sees the shrinking American family as something many people are getting wrong. The CDC announced earlier this year that the U.S. hit a record low fertility rate — 1.64 babies per woman — which is under the so-called “replacement rate” of 2.1 births, the number necessary to maintain the current population. Family policy experts say that the declining fertility rate could cause economic problems for the country, both in terms of worker shortages and fewer people paying into Social Security. But there’s also a personal cost, not only in the potential for loneliness and poverty in old age but, according to Bethany, what children miss while they’re growing up.
“It’s heartbreaking that this has become so counterculture, this family that we have. I know the difference. It was just me and my mom until I was 16. And I see the difference in our upbringings, the difference between my kids’ upbringing and my own. I don’t want to demean my childhood; my mother did the best she could. But it wasn’t good. It wasn’t what a childhood should be,” she said.
“I feel very strongly, because I know the difference, that this is a better way to live.”
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Scott G Winterton, Deseret News
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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
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Awaken Church
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Cheryl Diaz Meyer, for the Deseret News
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Cheryl Diaz Meyer, for the Deseret News
