Part 1: Borrowed Words: When Children Say ‘I Know’
A Philosophical Inquiry into Religious Education, Faith Development, and the Epistemology of Testimony
Asking questions isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s a precursor of growth.”
– Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf
Acting President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles
December 27, 2025 (de facto)
The Question That Haunts Sunday Morning
Have you ever watched a three-year-old approach a microphone in a hushed chapel, prompted by a parent who whispers sacred phrases into a tiny ear, and wondered what exactly is happening in that moment? Is this the tender nurturing of faith in young hearts, or something more complicated—perhaps the subtle manufacturing of certainty before genuine belief has had a chance to form?
This question transcends any single religious tradition. Whether Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, or Latter-day Saint, all faith communities face the delicate challenge of transmitting belief to the next generation. Yet the Latter-day Saint practice of fast and testimony meeting—where members of all ages publicly declare their spiritual convictions—offers a particularly vivid case study for examining broader questions about religious knowledge, child development, and the nature of faith itself.
Let me be clear from the outset: this reflection is not an attack. The Latter-day Saint community’s commitment to family, its remarkable service ethic, and its genuine desire to raise faithful children are admirable. Many thoughtful Latter-day Saint parents wrestle with these very questions themselves, as evidenced by internal discussions within their own community. One thoughtful Latter-day Saint blogger observed that a testimony meeting is ‘great precisely because of the strange stuff people say,’ while acknowledging that ‘the brethren have addressed the topic of children getting up and reciting rote lines’ (By Common Consent, 2004). This essay invites all parents—regardless of tradition—to think more deeply about what it means to nurture genuine faith rather than to manufacture scripted certainty.
First Question: What Does It Mean to ‘Know’ Something About God?
When an LDS member declares ‘I know the Church is true’ or ‘I know that Joseph Smith was a prophet,’ what epistemological claim is being made? This question lies at the heart of religious epistemology—the study of how we come to have knowledge about religious matters.
Traditional philosophy distinguishes between different types of knowledge claims. Alvin Plantinga, one of the most influential philosophers of religion in the twentieth century, developed what has come to be known as ‘reformed epistemology’—the view that belief in God can be ‘properly basic,’ requiring no inferential support from other beliefs. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes: ‘The central proposition of Reformed epistemology is that beliefs can be justified by more than evidence alone… belief in God may be properly basic and not need to be inferred from other truths to be rationally warranted.’
Plantinga draws on the Reformed theological tradition, particularly John Calvin’s concept of the sensus divinitatis—an innate awareness of God that Calvin believed was implanted in human beings. On this view, belief in God is not something we reason our way toward through arguments, but something we can know immediately, the way we know that other minds exist or that the world did not spring into existence five minutes ago with the appearance of age.
But here is the philosophical question that deserves our attention: Can a belief that has been externally implanted through coaching function the same way as a belief that arises from what Plantinga calls ‘properly functioning cognitive faculties operating in an appropriate environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth’?
The distinction matters enormously. Plantinga’s reformed epistemology makes room for non-inferential religious belief—but it does so because such belief arises naturally from cognitive faculties working as designed. A three-year-old who repeats phrases whispered by a parent is not exercising properly functioning cognitive faculties aimed at truth; the child is performing a social ritual whose meaning cannot yet be grasped. The belief does not arise from the child’s own spiritual faculties but from external verbal programming.
The testimony is to be couched typically in the words “I know.” One apostle who is still living even has gone as far to say you should bear your testimony even if you don’t have one because that is how you can get one. For a Latter-day Saint this testimony is penultimate to their church experience. It is the ultimate trump card in a debate. I recall LDS leaders of my youth teaching us that whenever someone argued or tried to dispute our truth claims just bear your testimony because nobody can argue with that.
This testimony is so important in the LDS experience that we devote 12 meetings a year in every congregation and open it up as well as encourage member to publicly proclaim their testimony. We have youth conferences that almost always include a testimony meeting a the end (I won;t comments about how really improper I think it is to take kids away from a normal setting for a couple days, inundate them with activities designed to reinforce the organizations message then end with a group session that strongly encourages them to make a public profession of their testimony).
You rarely if ever hear anyone who bears testimony in these settings say anything other than “I know.” Nobody defines what this means. So one is left to interpret it to mean what the words “I know” mean. Nobody says “I am really strongly certain that for me these things are truth and the best way for me to live and be happy.” Nobody says “I really have strong faith and active belief that these things we teach are the truth.” Nobody says “I really think these are wonderful ideas and doctrines and I really hope they are true.”
Almost everyone says “I know.” Oh sure once in a while you will hear someone say “I believe” or I don’t know at this point but I have “faith.” But that is rare.
Second Question: What Is the Difference Between Faith and Certainty?
Christian theology has long distinguished between two aspects of faith using Latin terminology: fides qua creditur (the faith by which one believes—the subjective act of trusting) and fides quae creditur (the faith which is believed—the objective content of belief). As Augustine noted in De Trinitate: ‘The faith which is etched in the heart of everyone who believes proceeds from a single doctrine, but it is one thing what we believe (ea quae creduntur), and another thing the faith with which we believe (fides qua creditur).’
This distinction illuminates something crucial: authentic faith involves both knowing what to believe and personally engaging in the act of believing. A child can be taught the content of belief (fides quae) long before developing the personal capacity for genuine faith (fides qua). The danger emerges when we conflate these two aspects—when we mistake a child’s ability to recite doctrinal content for the presence of genuine spiritual conviction.
Even more concerning is the confusion between faith and certainty. The writer of Hebrews famously defined faith as ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’ (Hebrews 11:1). Note the careful language: faith involves hope and deals with what is unseen. Yet in certain religious cultures, the language of faith has been replaced by the language of certainty. As one observer noted in Dialogue Journal: ‘Everyone knows everything. Worse, many know everything “beyond a shadow of a doubt” or with “every fiber of [their] being”! Even three-year-olds are coached by parents to say that they know that “this is the only true church.”‘
The Dialogue author goes on to contrast this with the biblical exemplars of faith: ‘These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed themselves strangers and pilgrims in the earth’ (Hebrews 11:13). Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob walked by faith, not by absolute certainty. They hoped; they trusted; they persevered through doubt. How is it, the author wonders, that modern religious practitioners claim to ‘know’ with certainty what the patriarchs could only embrace by faith?
At FairLatterDaySaints.org, a Mormon speaks:
Summary: “Having” a Testimony?
In this 2011 FAIR blog post, Louis Midgley challenges the common LDS practice of speaking about “getting” and “having” a testimony—language he argues is absent from scripture. He contends that Latter-day Saints have inadvertently substituted “testimony” for the more biblically-grounded concept of faith, creating a problematic framework.
The Core Difficulty for Mormons
The main problem Midgley identifies is that treating testimony as something you “get” and then “have” makes it:
- Emotion-dependent — It becomes tied to how one feels at any given moment, similar to the evangelical “born again” experience. This creates a fragile foundation where someone can say they “had a testimony” but now “don’t have one”—even while still believing in God and keeping commandments.
- Easily “lost” — Because testimony is framed as a possession that can grow, weaken, or disappear, members who experience doubt or spiritual dryness may feel they’ve lost something essential, leaving them feeling “out on the ocean without a rudder or sail.”
- Focused on subjective experience — Rather than being grounded in objective reasons for faith (an apologia), testimony becomes primarily about describing a personal experience of “how we came to know.”
Midgley’s Alternative
He argues Mormons should return to the scriptural concept of testifying—actively giving reasons for one’s faith and hope—rather than passively “having” something. Faith as trust in God can sustain believers through difficult circumstances regardless of fluctuating emotions, while a “testimony” that must be constantly felt leaves people vulnerable when feelings inevitably ebb.
Third Question: Are We Nurturing Faith or Manufacturing Certainty?
This leads us to perhaps the most important question: What are we actually doing when we coach children to publicly declare religious certainty? The psychologist James Fowler, whose work Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning (1981) remains foundational for understanding religious development, identified distinct stages through which faith develops across the human lifespan.
According to Fowler’s research, children aged three to seven are in what he called Stage 1—‘Intuitive-Projective’ faith. At this stage, as summarized by the Institute for Learning: ‘Children… don’t develop formalized religious beliefs, but are instead affected by the psyche’s exposure to the Unconscious, and by a relatively fluidity of thought patterns.’ The child at this stage cannot yet distinguish between fantasy and reality in a sophisticated way; religious imagery is absorbed impressionistically rather than propositionally.
By ages six through twelve, children typically enter Stage 2—‘Mythic-Literal’ faith—where ‘information is organized into stories and together with moral rules are concretely understood by the child. There is still little ability to distance yourself from a story and formulate an overarching meaning.’ Only in adolescence do most individuals develop the capacity for what Fowler called ‘Synthetic-Conventional’ faith (Stage 3), where they can begin to take ownership of beliefs previously held merely because of family or community influence.
The developmental implications are significant. When we teach a three-year-old to declare ‘I know the Church is true,’ we are asking the child to make an epistemological claim (knowledge) about a proposition (the Church is true) that the child is developmentally incapable of evaluating. The child cannot yet think abstractly, cannot weigh competing truth claims, and cannot distinguish between social conformity and genuine conviction. What the child can do is repeat phrases that please parents and community members.
This is not faith formation; it is social conditioning. And it may actually impede genuine faith development by creating the illusion that the hard work of faith has already been accomplished, when in fact it has not yet begun.
Fourth Question: What Happens When Scripted Certainty Meets Real Doubt?
William James, in his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), distinguished between religion as personal experience and religion as institutional conformity. James was interested in what he called ‘first-hand’ religious experience—the direct, personal encounter with the divine that transforms individuals. He was more skeptical of ‘second-hand’ religion: ‘Religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit.’
The scripted testimony of childhood represents second-hand religion in its purest form. The words are not the child’s own; the conviction is borrowed; the certainty is performed rather than possessed. James would predict—and experience seems to confirm—that such second-hand religion often proves fragile when confronted with genuine doubt, intellectual challenge, or personal crisis.
The Dialogue Journal article raises precisely this concern: ‘As this behavior is repeated over time, members of a community will come to believe that in order to maintain standing in the community, they must always speak in terms of absolute surety. Gradually, those who express doubt will be viewed as heterodox and pushed to the edges (if not over the edge). Members are forced to confront their doubts, their disappointments, their fears, and their struggles where nobody can see.’
This creates what might be called an ‘epistemological bubble’—a community where the language of certainty has become mandatory, and expressions of doubt have become socially dangerous. The author continues: ‘The act of doubting or struggling in itself becomes a token of weakness or evil. This pattern is begun at a young age in Mormondom as young children, who could not distinguish Moroni from, say, the latest television action figure, are taught to proclaim that they “know that the Book of Mormon is true.”‘
We might call this the certainty trap: having been trained from earliest childhood to speak the language of absolute knowledge, individuals find themselves without a vocabulary for legitimate doubt, without a community that can receive their questions, and without the spiritual resources that come from wrestling honestly with uncertainty.
Fifth Question: Does This Practice Confuse the Source of Religious Knowledge?
Here we encounter a subtle but important logical consideration. Latter-day Saint theology teaches that genuine testimony comes through the witness of the Holy Spirit. As the official Church resource explains: ‘Young children should be encouraged to bear testimony in sacrament meeting only when they feel the Holy Ghost prompts them to do so, and when they can do so on their own’ (Ensign, December 2002).
Note the two criteria: prompting by the Holy Ghost, and the ability to bear testimony ‘on their own’ without assistance. The Church’s own Handbook 2 reinforces this: children should share testimonies only when they are old enough to do so without assistance from a parent, sibling, or other person.
Yet the common practice of parent-whispered testimonies directly contradicts both criteria. The child is not bearing testimony independently, and there is no way to distinguish between a genuine spiritual impression and the social desire to please a parent and community. We face what logicians call a category error: the activity being performed (social mimicry) is fundamentally different from the activity being claimed (Spirit-prompted testimony).
Moreover, this practice may inadvertently teach children that the source of religious knowledge is external authority (what parents and leaders say) rather than internal spiritual witness (what the Spirit reveals). The child learns that religious truth is determined by conformity to community expectations, not by personal encounter with the divine. This is precisely the opposite of what both orthodox Christianity and Latter-day Saint theology teach about the nature of spiritual knowledge.
Here’s a summary of an article by Corey Miller from the Christian Research Institute:
Main Thesis: The Mormon “testimony” (the emotional declaration that Joseph Smith is a prophet, the Book of Mormon is true, and the LDS Church is the one true church) is the primary obstacle Christians face when evangelizing Mormons. Rather than attacking it directly, Christians should use a “stealth strategy” employing Socratic questioning to undermine confidence in it.
Key Points:
- Affirm testimony’s legitimate value — Scripture supports testimony as a valid form of knowledge (Rom. 8:16; 1 John 5:9-13). Start by commending the Mormon’s sincerity rather than dismissing their experience.
- The problem with Mormon testimony — LDS leaders like Boyd K. Packer teach that testimony is discovered by bearing it and involves stating things “you hope are true, as an act of faith.” This creates circular reasoning where the more expressively told, the truer it seems to become.
- The “Police Lineup” Illustration — Use this to expose the subjective nature of Mormon testimony: There are dozens of competing Mormon splinter groups (FLDS, Community of Christ, etc.), each with their own prophets claiming exclusive truth and all bearing sincere testimonies that contradict each other. Ask: “How would you determine which is true if you stood before representatives from each bearing testimony?”
- Challenge the Apostasy assumption — Use imagination: “If I claimed to have seen God and said all churches—including yours—were apostate, would you believe me?” This highlights the steep burden of proof required to accept one man’s claim over nearly two millennia of Christian witness.
- Create doubt, then present the gospel — Once confidence in the subjective testimony is undermined, share your own testimony backed by 1 John 5:9-13, which explicitly links eternal life to faith in Christ alone and offers the assurance of salvation that Mormonism cannot provide.
The Author: Corey Miller is a sixth-generation former Mormon with ties to Joseph Smith’s family, now president of Ratio Christi and co-author of Leaving Mormonism: Why Four Scholars Changed Their Minds.
A Word of Appreciation
Before proceeding further, I want to acknowledge what is genuinely beautiful in the impulse behind these practices. Latter-day Saint parents who bring their children to the microphone are not trying to manipulate or deceive. They are trying to include their children in the community of faith. They are trying to plant seeds of belief that will blossom into mature conviction. They are modeling for their children what it looks like to make a public commitment to one’s faith.
These are worthy goals. The question is not whether to transmit faith to the next generation—of course, we should—but how to do so in ways that are developmentally appropriate, epistemologically honest, and spiritually formative rather than performative.
Can faith be nurtured in children? Absolutely. But it cannot be installed in children through verbal programming. It must be modeled, invited, and allowed to develop organically as children mature cognitively and spiritually.
Toward Better Practice: Questions for Reflection
Rather than prescribing answers, I offer questions that parents across all faith traditions might consider:
On language: What would it look like to teach children the language of faith and hope (‘I believe,’ ‘I trust,’ ‘I hope’) before teaching them the language of certainty (‘I know’)? How might this more honest vocabulary serve them better when they encounter genuine doubt?
On development: How can we honor children’s developmental stages rather than asking them to perform cognitive and spiritual tasks beyond their capacity? What does age-appropriate faith formation look like at each stage of Fowler’s model?
On community: How can faith communities create space for honest questioning alongside confident proclamation? What would it take to make doubt safe within our congregations?
On authenticity: If we believe the Spirit works in human hearts, do we trust that process enough to wait for children to develop their own genuine convictions? Or do we feel compelled to manufacture certainty because we fear what might happen if we don’t?
On modeling: What would it mean to model honest faith for our children—faith that acknowledges mystery, sits with uncertainty, and chooses trust anyway? How might our children’s faith be strengthened by seeing adults who wrestle rather than merely recite?
Conclusion: Permission to Wonder
The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once wrote that faith is not a matter of certainty but of passionate commitment in the face of objective uncertainty. If everything could be proven with mathematical certainty, there would be no room for faith—and no virtue in believing.
Perhaps the greatest gift we can give our children is not scripted certainty but permission to wonder. Permission to ask questions. Permission to doubt. Permission to develop faith that is genuinely their own, worked out in fear and trembling, tested by experience, and refined by struggle.
The Dialogue author’s lament deserves our attention: ‘Let me suggest that our faith would be strengthened and our spiritual experiences deepened if we simply dropped the artifice of proclaiming in our meetings that we “know” everything and if we ceased to prod our children to do the same.’
This is not a call to abandon faith or religious education. It is a call to honor faith by refusing to cheapen it with premature certainty. It is a recognition that the work of the Spirit in human hearts cannot be rushed, programmed, or performed on cue. It is an invitation to trust God’s own timetable for bringing children—and adults—to genuine conviction.
After all, if our faith is true, it can withstand questions. If our children’s faith is to be their own, they must be allowed to develop it. And if the Spirit is real, we can trust that divine witness will come—in its own time, in its own way—without our need to manufacture it on a Sunday morning.
This article was generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools. While efforts have been made to ensure accuracy and relevance, the content reflects AI-generated insights, but it has been carefully edited by this author.