The Sanctuary of Belonging

We belong to many things.

We belong to the family of God, to the world, to a country, to a city, to a church, to a family. We belong to an employer, to a team, to a PTA, to a book club. We belong to organizations with structure and hierarchy, and to loose groups of friends. Belonging to something means little more than membership; this may be nothing more than being a name or a number on a roster. We belong to many of these things without trying, or any sustained effort.

But actually belonging, beyond just membership, is a different topic entirely. The feeling of belonging is a deeply personal, deeply human experience. It’s being part of something bigger, being accepted and valued and understood. Belonging implies a sense of connection with the people around us.

We often view belonging in this sense as something that is done to us: people and systems and experiences make us feel welcome or unwelcome. These cues of belonging may be outwardly expressed, as in things people say or in how they exclude us from social circles. Or these cues may be implied in what we see, in the skin color or the clothes of the people around us, or even the art hanging on the walls. But the feeling, the sense of belonging, is something that lives inside us.

Recent scholarship suggests that the core of belonging is being able to be our full selves, while still being welcomed by others. It’s knowing that showing more of ourselves, that leaning into who we deeply are, isn’t going to alienate or separate us from the group. This implies a shared burden of belonging, between ourselves and those around us in a given situation. Brené Brown describes it this way:

True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.

Dr. Brown contrasts “belonging,” loosely defined as being accepted for who you are, with “fitting in,” which is being accepted for being like everyone else. Each of us can think of a time—or many times—when we have adjusted who we are in order to fit into a new group. This can have positive, fake-it-till-you-make it ramifications, as when someone adopts a more professional manner when meeting with company executives for the first time. But far too often the desire to fit in leads us to be someone other than who we really are, which makes a fool of both ourselves and those we are trying to fit in with, when we eventually and inevitably revert to being our authentic selves again.

The feeling of doubting whether we belong is often called “belonging uncertainty.” While it may have evolutionary origins as a safety tactic, it can lurk behind impostor syndrome, anxiety, and self-doubt. As our collective societal mental health crumbles, we need belonging that is real and not pockmarked with uncertainty.

But group dynamics are not static. If our groups and social circles inevitably evolve over time, then belonging is a moving target; a place where we couldn’t bring our whole selves before may now welcome us with open arms, and places we previously belonged may not feel the same.

Nor do we stay the same as individuals. We are not one thing—we contain, as Walt Whitman said, multitudes—and we certainly don’t stay the same thing over time. That’s not to say that we outgrow belonging; it continues when both parties change together, as partners in good marriages often do. It does mean that if we find that we no longer belong someplace—because we’ve changed, or because others have—then we are positioned to evaluate if the group is still a place we want to belong, or if we are who we want to be.

But for sure, we cannot overestimate the importance of belonging as a basic human requirement. 

Many are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which organizes human needs into five levels—basic physiological needs like food, water, and shelter are at the bottom; in the successive layers above are safety, love and belonging, self-esteem, and finally self-actualization. We generally understand the theory to suggest that lower-level needs must be satisfied before higher-level needs can motivate behavior. But while belonging is represented as roughly the middle of the pyramid, criticism of the model suggests that is incorrect. There is reason to believe that belonging is foundational: we need it as much as we need food to eat and water to drink.

In the words of Brian Stout, “We have a deep human need to belong: it is both the antidote to and the primary driver of our current crises.”

Belonging uncertainty can exist along a number of different vectors. In society generally, we have centuries of people not feeling like they belong because of differences in gender, race, age, disability, sexual orientation and identity, and other recognized and protected classes. Add others that are unique to Latter-day Saints: where you attended college, if you served a mission or not, if you’re active in the Church, if you’re married, if you have children, if you have enough children.

The fact that anybody feels unwelcome in our pews is a failure of Christianity on our part. Our church buildings bear the name of Him who dined with sinners and touched lepers. We acknowledge, at least academically, that we are all children of the same Heavenly Parents, no matter our earthly differences. As Patrick Mason said, God is not only the Creator and Organizer of all the world’s diversity, but also “the Chief Delighter in it.” Or as Neal A. Maxwell said, “So often what people need so much is to be sheltered from the storms of life in the sanctuary of belonging.”

But even among those that best fit the mold, that are the most built to fit in—such as straight white men, like myself, with bonus points for attending BYU and serving a mission—there’s one more vector worth considering.

Brian McLaren (as well as Fowler, Peck, et al.) demonstrated that faith is not a binary, a switch that is turned on or off, but that our faith develops through stages. McLaren’s model is four stages: 1) Simplicity, where we see things in black and white, and the world is divided into right and wrong; 2) Complexity, which is pragmatic and emphasizes finding answers to questions; 3) Perplexity, which focuses on honesty and authenticity, and can sit with questions that don’t have simple answers; and 4) Harmony, which accepts paradoxes and difficult truths, and finds strength in the simple directives to love God and love each other.

People in different stages of faith come to church for different reasons. For a stage 1, Simplicity person, they may sit in sacrament meeting for affirmation, to be strengthened by the constancy and the community of fellow believers. For someone in stage 2—Complexity—they may come looking for answers. But if you’re in stage 3, and stumbling through Perplexity, you may not find that camaraderie or those answers on any given Sunday. Seeing others finding strength and validation while you find neither makes things worse, frankly. Your faith is not lesser; it’s different. You can have faith and still have a hard time attending church.

My faith journey has taken me to a place that is certainly somewhere other than the Simplicity stage. In some ways, this is liberating, as my faith is not broken by imperfect people in the Church or unanswered questions from the Church’s past; I can sit with some of these questions and understand that neat and clean answers may not exist. In other ways, I mourn the loss of the innocent, unquestioning faith that took me through my time as a youth, a full-time missionary, a young husband and father, and up through my thirties before it could no longer sustain me.

This development of my ever-evolving faith changed the way I related to those around me at church. Suddenly every sacrament meeting talk seemed to describe how someone had gained a perfect, unwavering testimony of a gospel principle. Sunday school lessons might address struggles or difficulties, but always in the past tense; people might have had challenges to their testimony in an earlier time, but certainly not now. And the comments in those lessons were invariably made to assert how strong someone’s faith was, what good parents they were, and how others might go about becoming similarly righteous. I saw Simplicity everywhere. But I didn’t feel it.

And that’s what made me feel like I didn’t belong. Belonging uncertainty results when your faith looks different from others’.

This has been a challenge to me, but being able to see other people through the lens of different stages of faith has been helpful. When I can understand that someone is committed to their current stage, it helps me to not see them as simply wrong—even if I’m at a very different stage.

My wife, Anne, had an experience that gives me hope.

Anne has the gift of fortitude to speak up for herself, and for others. For me, being uncomfortable at church makes me want to retract, to be a turtle that can pull my arms and legs and head into an impenetrable shell. But Anne approaches these situations with courage. And when she speaks up, she makes space for other people whose stage of faith isn’t generally recognized at church, other people who came to the meeting equipped with their turtle shell, just in case. 

In this instance, Anne sat in a Relief Society lesson in our ward that centered on a talk from a recent general conference. This talk had spoken differently to people in different faith stages. For those in stages 1 and 2, it was a rallying cry, a validation of things they already believed. The lesson started with women expressing how much they had appreciated it.

But it was different for those in later faith stages. Anne, leveraging that fortitude, raised her hand and said what she thought. She said that the talk had not entirely resonated with her. And that it had caused her pain.

Her comment hung in the air for a moment. And then another. And maybe another. But just before the teacher could divert attention to something else, another woman raised her hand and said that, yes, this talk had been tricky for her too. A third woman then raised her hand and agreed again. These weren’t women Anne would have expected to be willing to be vulnerable, and to be at that sort of faith stage. The lesson did not start with space for women in the room to have questions and challenges and complicated faith. But when multiple women spoke up, they made that space for others.

We may not be able to tell what stage of faith other people are in. We may feel that uncertainty of belonging when we walk into the church building, even if we’ve been coming our entire lives.

Of all the things we belong to, the Church is a tricky one when we don’t feel like we belong. We can leave a job or a bowling league, and many people do leave the Church when they don’t feel welcome. But for those of us who feel both things strongly—the need to stay in the Church, and also the uncertainty of whether we belong—the dissonance can be tough to handle.

You probably won’t have Anne’s experience the first time you share your full self in church. You may not automatically, immediately belong in your ward, like some people seem to. There are going to be people at church who don’t think like you do. There are always going to be people at different stages of faith. But carving out space for yourself happens like a river carves out space in rock, through years of trying and never pulling back.

The reality is that you don’t build community for yourself or others by not participating in community. That’s hard news, especially if you’re an introvert like I am. It may not be at all comfortable to raise your hand like Anne did, especially if you’re going to say something that might not land with everyone. But when we speak up, sometimes we find out that we’re not alone. And in carving out belonging for ourselves, we are making space where other people can belong. 

In other words, if you don’t feel like there’s space for you, you can take up space anyway. That might mean raising your hand and using your voice, or doing something different. There’s not one way to do it. Your contribution in community, the way you take up space, the way you bring your whole self, might show up in how you volunteer and serve. It might be through art, or organizing activities, or playing the piano, or taking pictures. It might be through giving yourself a calling, filling a need you see that needs to be filled. Or it might be through how you magnify a calling you already have.

My mom and dad are the temple and family history leaders in their ward. They know plenty about family history, but that’s just the beginning. They have ward members over for brunch, and they bring their full selves when they make food and entertain, teaching them about family history over scones and bacon. That’s the space they have carved out for themselves. That’s how they belong.

The big scary part, and sometimes the reason we don’t bring ourselves, is our fear that it might not work. If we bring more of ourselves and people respond negatively—if they don’t make that space—then we feel we won’t belong. Bringing more of yourself can end up with you feeling more pushed out, not more welcome. If we’re seeing the world through a Stage 3 lens, the stage of perplexity, then we may be convinced even before we begin that those in other stages won’t make space for us.

One thing is certain—not everybody in your ward will automatically agree with you on everything. Everyone still needs to work through the stages of faith on their own timetable, and on their own terms. It can’t—and won’t—be rushed. No matter where your faith is or whether it exactly matches those around you, bringing your full self is how you can make space for yourself and for others.

That’s making church the sanctuary it should be. That’s how we can all belong.

Roger Pimentel is VP at Boncom, husband, father, Latter-day Saint, writer, and TIME Magazine 2006 Person of the Year.

Art by Carol Johnson.