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More than half a century ago, sociologist Thomas O’Dea said the following about the university student who is a Latter-day Saint: “He has been taught by the Mormon faith to seek knowledge and to value it; yet it is precisely this course, so acceptable to and so honored by his religion, that is bound to bring religious crisis to him and profound danger to his religious belief. The college undergraduate curriculum becomes the first line of danger to Mormonism in its encounter with modern learning.” 

My goal here is twofold. First, I want to demonstrate that current notions about dissent in the Church—whether it is good or bad—are inadequate because the language available for talking about dissent is insufficient. Both dissenters and their critics oversimplify and improperly conflate categories, which leads to a great deal of suspicion and mistrust on all sides because we can’t communicate effectively with each other. This deficiency is not particularly anyone’s fault; rather, it indicates that we need a better concept of what dissent is, so that we can talk about it in more subtle ways. 

I remember those verses striking a powerful chord within me when I read them on a bright autumn day in 1980. I was then in the first few months of my LDS mission in central Virginia. But reading those words took my mind and emotions back to the desert mountains of western Utah earlier that year. A friend and I had taken a quick camping trip to collect fossils in that remote area; and something in the desert sun, the bare exposure of earth, and the surrounding evidence of unimaginably ancient life produced a feeling so strong that I recognized it immediately when I later stumbled on that passage of scripture. I couldn’t then put my finger on the exact meaning of the emotion—something about the smallness of our place in the universe and our inability to understand it all. It was as powerful as any religious feeling I had ever had, and its duplication at reading the opening of Ecclesiastes nearly brought me to tears. I read the remainder of the book eagerly, naively hoping to find its resolution.