Source: My Faith Crisis And A Message To Those Who Struggle Channel: Thoughtful Faith Published: January 29, 2025 | Archived: May 30, 2026

Video: My Faith Crisis And A Message To Those Who Struggle
Channel: Thoughtful Faith
Published: January 29, 2025
Duration: 34:32
Views: 59,657
Category: People & Blogs
Video ID: coi2zBlUe1Q

Description

So who is Jacob Hansen and what inspired him to start this channel? Jacob explains how his own faith remodeling needed to happen and how it led him to an entirely new paradigm around faith.

A Message from Jacob: I suggest finding the books/videos/podcasts by or about the ideas of the following individuals or organizations. This is by no means a comprehensive list but rather a list of some of the people who I believe have the most compelling things to say (even if I don’t agree with all they have to say).

Level 1 conversation: The Nature of Reality Jordan Peterson William Lane Craig John Lennox Carl Jung Thomas Aquinas Blaise Pascal Alvin Plantinga Steven Meyer William Dembski Jonathan Pageau Frank Turek Greg Bahnsen

Level 2 Conversation: The Nature of God CS Lewis GK Chesterton George Macdonald NT Wright Bishop Robert Barron Tom Holland (Historian)

Level 3 Conversation: The Nature of Christ.
Hugh Nibley Blake Ostler Tyrrell Givens Robert Boylan Brant Gardner FAIR LDS Evidence Central (AKA Book of Mormon Central) “LDS Truth Claims” Youtube channel (36 Lectures) by Brett Mcdonald

For more about me and my story see the link below. https://www.thoughtful-faith.com/about

Our Links Website: http://thoughtfulfaith.org Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thoughtful.faith TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thoughtful.faith Podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1478749

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this video are entirely the opinion of the creator and do not necessarily reflect any officially endorsed positions of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints or channel sponsors.

Tags

jacob hansen jacobhansen thoughtful faith thougtfulfaith mormon exmormon antimormon fairmormon ldsapologetics scripturecentral wardradio ldsconf Faith Faith Crisis My Story

Transcript — YouTube panel (human-authored)

0:00 hey are you watching this video without being subscribed we recently looked over the channel analytics and apparently a lot of people who watch the channel have not yet subscribed so if you enjoy this Channel Please Subscribe not only will this ensure new episodes pop up in your feed it also helps this content reach more people so hit that subscribe button if you haven’t already \[Music\] so about three years ago when my channel was very new I made three videos that told my story I figured since so many people have subscribed since that time I would combine these videos into one and re-release them here for people who might not know my story or why I do this anyway I hope you enjoy so a lot of people wonder why I am so active online in discussions about social philosophical and religious issues the reality is that I have come to realize throughout my own life and experiences that ideas and narratives that we hold shape our Behavior both individually and as a society on my website I have the

1:10 following quote from the German poet Gerta quote man is made by his belief as he believes so is he ideas and narratives are like viruses and they spread throughout society and individual lives with profound implications for good or bad being an active participant in the public public exchange of ideas that shape me and the world around me is something I’ve always found profoundly interesting and meaningful however I think that my passion for this was exacerbated the most when the fundamental ideas that I hold in my life were challenged now I don’t tell people that I had a faith crisis but I certainly will say that for about 10 years starting in 2008 when I got home from my mission I went through a significant Faith renovation where I had to go down and explore and re-explore the very foundations of my belief system so I grew up in an LDS home as one of eight children I was also part of one of those huge extended

2:08 families that everyone in the community knows and who also were essentially all active members of the church I had a great childhood and while our family had its share of normal problems the gospel was always this common theme that United us all however over the course of a decade following my return from my mission in 2008 I have watched as all All My Siblings left the church one by one for a variety of reasons I am now the only one left I also watched as about half of my very large extended family left the church as well of the three family members who most influenced me to go on my mission two of the three had left by the time that I got home now I just want to say that I still have a great relationship with my family though navigating Faith differences has presented some new and big challenges I only mention this so that people know that I too personally have experienced close up the various reasons that people leave the faith and this is an important

3:09 context to my story my older brother has always been someone that I really look up to and I still do you see many people end up coming across something like polygamy or Book of Mormon anachronisms and end up abandoning the church for those sorts of reasons but that was not the case with my older brother as we talked about his relationship with the church he told me that his issues were far more fundamental it was that he had lost his belief in God I asked him more about this and I was introduced to the arguments from atheists like Richard Dawkins Sam Harris and the others in the new atheist movement along with more classical arguments like those found in Thomas Payne’s the Age of Reason so from the very beginning my situation was different than a lot of people and unlike others I started by going to the very foundations of my belief my belie Bel in God and from there began a process of re-evaluation from the ground

4:04 up and that may have made all the difference as you will see in subsequent videos I Came to realize that our testimonies as members of the church are ultimately built on three distinct propositions with each proposition depending on the truth of the one before it the first is that God exists the second is that the Jesus Christ of the New Testament embodied that God and lastly that Joseph Smith was authorized by Jesus Christ to restore his church but then I noticed something strange people who were having trouble accepting the Book of Mormon or things like polygamy were not just abandoning Joseph Smith they were abandoning Jesus Christ and their belief in God often times I was confused by this because even if Joseph Smith was a fraud that would not negate my belief in God or even Jesus Christ my belief in God was not dependent on the claims of Joseph Smith however it dawned on me that many people believed in God and Jesus Christ because of the Joseph Smith story but I believed

5:09 in Joseph Smith’s story because of my belief in Jesus Christ and I believed Jesus Christ because of my belief in the existence of a higher power I began to notice that many people’s testimonies were totally inverted I could not relate to this as long as I held the belief that a personal God interacted with the world the Jesus story became totally plausible and as long as I held that the New Testament accounts of Jesus were fundamentally true the story of Joseph Smith became totally plausible on the other hand of course the Joseph Smith story is absolute nonsense if you no longer believe in the Jesus of the New Testament and of course the Jesus of the New Testament is a total absurdity when you abandon the idea of a God who interacts with the world it’s kind of like how calculus would seem like nonsense until you understand the arithmetic and algebra that it’s based on this framing of the anatomy of my

6:04 beliefs was a GameChanger for me I now could see the fundamental structure of my belief system I came to see my beliefs as three levels of conversation I sometimes summarize my testimony as follows I once had a conversation about reality and among the possible explanations the best was that God existed I once had a conversation about God and among the possible explanations the best was that Jesus was who the New Testament claims he was I once had a conversation about this Jesus of the New Testament and among the possible explanations the best was that his church had been restored through a prophet do you see how these are different conversations as I explored my own faith I realized how much Society influences our worldview this is the lens that we bring to these conversations in our Mormon bubbles we often don’t realize the broader social trends and the reality is that Christianity in Western Society is falling off a cliff

7:09 and has been for well over 40 years and perhaps even longer in Europe for nearly the entire life of the church we have been having conversation 3 with a world that already had conversation 1 and two but that’s not the case anymore due to ideological shifts that really gain Traction in the 20th century Western Society now brings a secular lens to the first and second conversation and as a result fewer and fewer people take the New Testament Jesus seriously and thus many describe themselves as spiritual but not religious as they cling to whatever vague Notions of God they can so their life is not rendered totally meaningless so why didn’t I go down the route that my siblings and so many others in society are going I’ll cover that in my next video part two so in my last video I discussed how I came to see my belief system as built on three conversations this was critical for me because it gave me the framework and blueprint for a full-blown faith reexamination and renovation this was to be a journey where I would walk up from

8:15 the deepest foundations of my belief system to see if it all was still in working order or if certain parts need to be updated or strengthened because as any Builder knows a crack in the foundation will affect everything else I often think of the imagery of the renovations of the Salt Lake Temple those Renovations have had to go down to the literal Bedrock upon which the building stood in order to ensure that it could withstand the earthquakes we predict will come so what is this bedrock in the context of testimony it’s what I call level one conversations these are conversations and questions about the very nature of reality itself including the nature of belief itself as part of this renovation I went went down far deeper than the typical Rabbit Hole of anti-mormon literature I began to explore the nature of human belief itself I began to explore the question for why a person should believe in a higher power at all I began to explore if the natural world held any evidence of intelligent design

9:18 I began to explore the best arguments available on these topics and these extended far beyond the materials of the church I could not possibly go through all the people that I read and listened to when I was exploring this kind of first level of conversation but some of the most influential were the atheist versus Christian debates from people like William Lane Craig John Lennox and Frank Turk Christian philosophers like Alvin PLA and Greg bonson scientists like Steven Meyer and William demsky historical luminaries who pondered level one questions people like Blaze Pascal Thomas aquinus Socrates Plato and Aristotle and more recently a renowned psychologist and philosopher named Jordan Peterson who atheists are calling the gateway drug to religion if you are unfamiliar with the Jordan Peterson phenomena you need to look into it he is the most powerful current voice in the level one conversation he is showing

10:16 that belief in a higher power is all but unavoidable when carefully thought about Jordan Peterson using the language of secular society is Reviving The level one conversation in fascinating ways as he explores the nature of fundamental reality and how the idea of God relates to it religious is what you act out anything you act out everything you act out is is predicated on your implicit axioms and the system of implicit axioms that you hold as primary is your religious belief system it doesn’t matter whether you’re an atheist or not that’s just surface that’s just surface noise so it has nothing to do with divinity or superal beings or it doesn’t necessarily have to do with those no it probably necessarily has to do with it too but it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with your voluntarily articulated statements about whether or not you believe in something like a Transcendent deity so I

11:19 mean what you act out is much more what you are than what you say about yourself and what the hell do you know about what you believe anyways you’re complicated man question well seriously people are complicated you know like we’re we don’t we’re not transparent to ourselves at all that’s why we have that’s why we have to go to university and study psychology it’s like you know we’re we’re we’re not exactly black boxes but we are the most complicated things there are right and we can’t even program our VCR clocks so it’s like how the hell can we propose to understand ourselves and you know I’m existentially oriented which is to say that I think think that what you hold to be true is best determined as an an as a consequence of an analysis of your actions rather than as a consequence of an analysis of what you purport to believe now I could go on and on with the people that have profoundly influenced my view as I went through

12:18 this first level of my faith Renovations however I don’t have time for that so I’ll provide a more complete list in a later video or blog needless to say my exploration at this level has been one of the most fulfilling and fascinating experiences of my life and has led me to believe that among the possible explanations for reality a personal God is the best explanation and therefore it is perfectly rational to believe in some notion of God so what next who or what is this God this is the level two conversation as I pondered that question I came to realize that a God who does not interact with the universe in any meaningful way may as well not exist a God who makes no demands is the functional equivalent of a God who does not exist a world without God the Living God who establishes moral laws to govern and perfect his children is also a world without ultimate truth or justice so I realized I should look for a God who interacts with the world a god whose existence actually matters people

13:29 throughout all of human history have claimed to have interacted with God I realized that perhaps it was worthwhile to explore the different explanations of God given by mankind throughout history however in examining Islam Hinduism various Pagan sects vague spirituality etc etc it was hard for any of those to hold a candle to the story of Jesus no matter how you cut the story of Jesus whether that’s historical sociological philosophical Psych ological that story the story of Jesus is stunning it’s a story that transformed the world interestingly it was an atheist who helped me to realize this Tom Holland no not that Tom Holland but the historian recently wrote a book called Dominion about the impact of Jesus and how his ideas have shaped the world for the better cis’s great contemporary Caesar is by some accounts slaughtering a million Ghouls and enslaving another million in the cause of of boosting his political career and far from feeling in any way embarrassed about this he’s kind

14:35 of promoting it and so when he holds his Triumph people are going through the streets of Rome carrying Billboards boasting about how many people he’s killed and this is this is a really terrifyingly alien world and the more you look at it the more you realize that it is built on systematic exploitation um so the entire economy is founded on slave labor right the the sexual economy is founded on the absolute right of free Roman males to have sex with anyone that they want any way that they like and in almost every way this is a world that is unspeakably cruel to our way of thinking and I began to realize that actually in in almost every way I am Christian and I began to realize that actually Paul although in in in many ways he seems a much less familiar figure than Cicero the kind of you know obeying man with his property problems you know Paul never had any property just made made tense um that that that in almost every you know the what is it SE seven that is the

15:42 seven letters that are conventionally people absolutely accept you know and and as as Tom Wright was saying you know this is not a very lengthy amount of writing but compacted into this very very small amount of writing was almost everything that explains the modern world well the Western world as we take for granted yeah yes but also the way that the West has then moved on to shape you know Concepts like international law for instance so the the fact the B you know concepts of Human Rights all these kind of things ultimately they don’t go back to Greek philosophers they don’t go back to Roman imperialism they re they go back to Paul really is his letters his letters I think are along with the the the the four gospels the most influential the most impactful the most revolutionary writings that have emerged from the ancient world when when I came to understand more deeply the Jesus story and asked if God was in this I could not

16:47 help but conclude that if there is a God this Jesus from the New Testament must have had something to do with him so I began to read the great Christian writers who explain in depth who this Jesus was and what his ideas were independent of any particular denomination writers like CS Lewis GK Chesterton and George McDonald blew me away I will always remember one particular quote from CS Lewis as I explored the level two conversation he said I am trying to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher but I don’t accept his claim to be God that is one thing we must not say a man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher he would either be a lunatic on the level of a man who says he is a poached egg or else he would be the devil of hell you must make your choice either this man was and is the

17:52 Son of God or else a Madman or something worse you can shut him up for a fool you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher he has not left that open to us he did not intend to and so now I found myself independent of any claims by Joseph Smith a Believer not only in some vague notion of God but a believer in Jesus Christ as the Manifest station of that God in the world so now even if Joseph was a fraud I would still have faith in the Christ of the New Testament I can’t stress enough how important this was I can’t stress enough the need to come to know God and Jesus Christ as the foundation of your faith this Foundation makes the whole story of the restoration shine and so now it was time for the third conversation the final level of my renovation the level that most people never go

18:59 this is the conversation the church has been having since 1830 it’s about what happens if indeed Jesus Christ is the savior of the New Testament and the New Testament is fundamentally true do you see how the Joseph Smith story suddenly becomes plausible do you see how now the issues like the Book of Mormon anachronisms which are still bothersome seem like small cracks in the paint of a solid building do you see how belief in God and Jesus Christ acts as the core of of the shelf that so many people say are breaking but here is the great thing there is a great conversation to be had at level three that provides real substantial evidence and reasons to believe have you read all the works of hbii have you read the deathbed testimonies of the three witnesses to the Book of Mormon are you aware of the 14 other witnesses to the plates are you familiar with the discovery of the land Bountiful and nahome in the near East

19:59 are you familiar with the intense complexity of the Book of Mormon are you familiar with the remarkable Theology and answers to Christian questions that came from Joseph Smith are you familiar with the broad social science literature that shows that the more faithful a saint is the more they thrive in almost every aspect of human flourishing education relationships Health volunteering finances Etc look Joseph was either a fraud or he was fundamentally telling the truth but do you see how the answer to that question becomes totally different when you are at level three on the foundation of level 1 and two with this foundation in place you are seeking the church and priesthood Keys promised by the Jesus of the New Testament rather than approaching Joseph’s story as a skeptical atheist the problem is that we have forgotten that the story of Joseph Smith is built on the foundation of the conclusion iions reached in conversation 1 and two in my own journey I came to realize

21:05 that for the past 60 years secularism has been pouring acid on the foundations of belief in Western Society Saints who live in the west need to go back to the foundations and reexamine them for damage especially if they find themselves struggling we have to ask oursel if we have adopted a secular lens through which we view the world what is the proper lens through which we should see the world these are the fundamental issues and it is at these fundamental levels that problems usually arise from throwing paint over and over on a wall that is built on a cracked foundation does not fix the problem and we should not assume that cracks in the walls of people’s testimonies just need some paint when someone says they can’t accept the Book of Mormon you will likely find that they don’t accept the Bible either or even have meaningful reasons for their belief in God so why didn’t I have a faith Christ because by a twist of fate I was

22:01 directed to go deeper to go to the foundations first and when I got there the Lord guided me to seek what I could believe in he guided me through a process of renovation which did require me to tear out some of the old ideas but where ultimately I was building and making something stronger in my next video I would like to speak to those who are facing doubts and who are struggling part three to start off here I just want to say to all those who struggle with their faith that they should know that they’re not alone and that every rational believer at some point must go through the process of transitioning from the simple world of our childhood faith into a mature faith that requires periods where we wrestle with God but I also personally want to say that if approached the right way these experiences have led me to a new level of peace and knowledge that makes the gospel even more real than before as part of approaching this right we need to examine our own

23:05 motivations are we resentful right now are we in a good heads space to even begin an unbiased exploration there is a saying out there that people will believe what they want to believe if someone is angry and just wants to justify that anger I can’t help here my hope is that the people watching want to believe but are struggling at times to justify that belief with their righteous commitment to intellectual honesty I have found that people have a wide variety of reasons for struggling in their faith so the first thing to do if we are struggling is to be honest about why is our struggle primarily due to moral disagreements with the positions of the church or intellectual issues it’s probably both to some extent but one is probably bigger than the other we must be honest with ourselves about this this video is not going to help if your issue is primarily a moral disagreement with the church on an ISS issue like you know gay marriage or something like that

24:01 it also won’t help if your primary issue is that you’re upset with church leaders or policy or church culture those are not primarily intellectual issues this video is for those who do not have serious moral issues with the church but who struggle intellectually to justify saying that they believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the one true church of Our Savior Jesus Christ so to get started did you notice the presupposition Ians in the statement that the church is the one true church of Our Savior Jesus Christ that statement is full of assumptions that statement assumes that God exists and that the Jesus of the New Testament is who the New Testament claims that he was do you and I believe any of those claims independent of Joseph Smith would we retain our belief in God and Jesus Christ if Joseph Smith turned out to be a fraud if not then do we really believe in God and Jesus Christ or do we only believe in them because of Joseph but

25:01 wait we are talking about beliefs on what grounds can we say that we know anything is everything mere belief if there is a possibility that we could be wrong about something how could we ever say that we know it is there anything that we can actually be 100% sure about cannot our very eyes deceive us these may seem like silly questions that philosophers ask but they’re not they are the Bedrock that we build on they are the very first questions we must ask ourselves if we are engaging in the pursuit of knowledge and truth and if we want to reexamine our faith we have to go to the very beginning the very foundations because if those are off everything changes if nothing else we need to understand the real roots of our struggles and they often are far deeper than we realize we have to start by examining our own epistemology now epist mology is just a fancy word for your explanation for how a person says that they can know something and that is a widely disputed

26:06 topic of conversation the first task of intellectual honesty is to examine the lens and criteria that we are using to say if something is true or not now I could not possibly in this video lay out my personal epistemology but I will link in the description of the video one of my posts on that subject all I’m trying to do here is to say that before you even engage Eng in seeking the truth you have to examine how you are going about detecting what is true or false and what tools you think you have to Aid in actually discovering truth only then will you even be equipped with the right tools to begin the renovation of your beliefs and that should begin with this exploration at level one the question of the existence of some sort of a higher power the existence of God can you make a compelling rational case for Why God exists can you deal with with the arguments made by atheists or do you just avoid confronting these arguments

27:02 do you even understand the nature of the debate between the best atheists and the best theists even among the intellectually engaged members of the church I have found very few have seriously engaged with the more foundational questions and issues related to why it’s even rational in the first place to believe or not believe in God we need to be honest about the fact that our deepest foundations are often assumed and that is why a re examination and fortification of our belief in God needs to be the first place that we go then from there we can move on to understanding why we believe that Jesus Christ was the manifestation of that God in the world and then and only then with that Firm Foundation of belief in the Jesus of the New Testament are we ready to approach the restoration we need to stop obsessing with Joseph’s Smith story if we have not fully fleshed out level one and level two of our belief systems

27:58 because ultimately Joseph is irrelevant if there is no God or if Jesus was not the Christ but if there is a God and if the Jesus of the New Testament was who the New Testament claims that he was the Joseph Smith story comes into a whole new light another critical thing to remember is that renovation requires caution tearing down walls can bring the whole thing down and I mean everything not just the church there is a dark ho hole of nihilistic hell awaiting us at all moments so how we go about this exploration and renovation matters remember that ultimately we are trying to build something we are exploring reality for what we can believe in I have realized that I am less interested in hearing what people don’t believe in than I am in hearing what they do believe in and why what you find among critics is that all they’re up to is tearing things down but building is how we avoid the mean meaninglessness and nihilism that is spreading like a cancer throughout our society so When approaching this issue we should start

29:05 with the Positive case start by looking for things that you can believe in start with God seek out all the best minds and Arguments for why it’s rational to believe in God you will find astonishing things do you know the arguments of Thomas aquinus blae Pascal George McDonald William demsky Steven Meyer Alvin plantinga William Lane Craig Jordan Peterson CS Lewis GK Chesterton could you summarize the top arguments from each of these people if you were to have read and fully understand the primary arguments made by all the people I just mentioned and still you found Jeremy rynell CES letters strong enough to pull down your belief in God and Jesus I would be shocked there are Brilliant Minds out there that can give you a solid and strong reason to believe at the very minimum in the rationality of belief in a higher power you have to know where you are are you at level one are you at level two are you at level

30:09 three also when you’re engaging with anyone else ask yourself are they at level one are they at level two are they at level three and then have the appropriate conversation based on where they’re at when you consider all the things in the positive case suddenly the challenges to faith become much smaller yes they’re still there and yes they’re still problematic but they are put into proper perspective they become like puzzles that you’ve not quite sorted out rather than intellectual deal breakers so am I saying we should just ignore the critics no of course not absolutely not once we have really put in the leg work and understand the best arguments on the positive side we can go ahead and examine what the critics have to say we can test our structures of belief and we should we need to see what can hold and what can’t if we’re really after the truth but when we start with a positive case we approach from a position of strength strength against nihilism and a position which for me has shown that

31:11 while the problems and challenges brought up by the critics can be very real they pale in comparison to the reasons for belief especially when we place our spiritual experiences on the scale it’s like we are all faced with a scale and we can fill each side of the scale with reasons to doubt doubt or reasons to believe there are reasons to doubt but if we don’t seek deeply the best reasons to believe and truly take the time to deeply understand the best Arguments for belief then we will not be ready to handle the doubts and if we are intellectually honest we must eventually take into account the critic’s position eventually our building must be exposed to an earthquake but it would be crazy to do that without a fully developed Foundation the adventure of life is figuring out what we can believe in nihilism is not the answer agnosticism is not the answer we have to act in the world and implicit in our actions is what we value a rational person is a person who can explain why they hold the

32:13 values they hold and why those values are not arbitrary this process of Faith renovation is an ongoing one for all of us but it was most intense for me for the 10 years from 2008 until 2018 it was a Journey that changed my life it took me from the piece of my childhood Faith through a fascinating and sometimes challenging renovation process that has brought me to the other side to find peace again and a realness and an authenticity to my faith that is like living water to a thirsty soul in the desert of our increasingly depressed and Confused secular world so start the process don’t seek to Simply deconstruct this is a renovation not a demolition even if that means some old outdated plumbing needs to be replaced ask if our human reason alone is ultimately sufficient to grant us the full knowledge and understanding of reality seek out the best Minds on these questions and keep building I’ll go

33:18 ahead and lay out some of my favorite sources that really were part of a mountain of evidence for my belief in God my belief that Jesus was the manifestation of that God and that Joseph Smith was fundamentally telling the truth though argument does not create conviction a l of it destroys belief what seems to be proved may not be embraced but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned rational argument does not create belief but it maintains a climate in which belief May flourish hey guys if you enjoy this video be sure to hit that subscribe button so my future videos show up on your feed also if you or someone that you know has benefited from the content here on thoughtful Faith please consider becoming a channel donor or volunteer by visiting my new website thoughtful faith.org and clicking on the get involved page