Nourishing the Roots: An Interview with Walker Wright

When working through faith crises, many people eventually start asking: How do I even know what I think I know? What may have started as a difficult question can become an epistemological inquiry that sometimes even leads to an existential crisis. 

We sat down with Walker Wright, author of the recently published book “Nourishing the Roots: Seeking the Foundations of Latter-day Testimony,” to discuss this pattern and how someone might work through it. Wright’s book lays out an intellectual case for the plausibility of the “roots” of a testimony: belief in the Godhead, belief in the Atonement of Jesus Christ, and belief in the Restoration. In our interview spanning metaphysics, science, history, and epistemology, we explore questions ranging from what the nature and orderliness of the universe might tell us about the plausibility of God to what we should make of the experiences of the Book of Mormon witnesses.

Wright serves as the director of programs for a Yale-based institute and has previously held academic program management roles at public policy organizations in Washington, D.C. His writing spans economics, politics, and religion and has appeared in academic journals and public outlets alike. He holds an MA in government from Johns Hopkins University, as well as an MBA and BBA from the University of North Texas.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length, clarity, and style, and Mr. Wright has approved the edits. 

Anna: Good morning, Walker. Thank you for joining Amanda and me today to talk about your new book, “Nourishing the Roots.” Amanda and I both read it and really enjoyed it. We’re excited to jump into some questions about it today.

Walker: Thanks for having me. Appreciate the invitation.

Amanda: Latter-day Saints, especially those who are experiencing a trial of faith, often hear this domino logic: If the Book of Mormon is true, then Joseph Smith is a prophet, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints really is Christ’s restored church, Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and then God is our Heavenly Father. So all we really need to know is if the Book of Mormon is true. But you started from a much simpler and almost opposite route: why anything at all? Why did you think that was the right place to start?

Walker: Great question. I don’t disagree with the logic that having a spiritual witness of the Book of Mormon is the major paradigm shift and the way to truly anchor you in the truths of the Restoration. That’s why I make it the last chapter. I think that is the most fundamental and best way to come to know the truth of it. For most Latter-day Saints, that’s usually how they get their testimony and where they begin. 

But if you’re beginning to struggle with your faith, you’re often questioning those experiences. You’re questioning whether they were actually genuine, if it was self-delusion, or high emotion, something like that. You’re usually unsettled. You’re going through an epistemological crisis once you start questioning your testimony and those experiences. 

My approach is to go all the way back to what we can really know about anything, which goes back to the basic fundamentals of reality. When you start to question these experiences, start questioning all experiences. Go all the way back and start to build again. The hope is that once you get through chapters one through seven—starting with reality, the Resurrection, and the Book of Mormon itself—someone questioning those experiences can say, “Maybe that wasn’t self-delusion. Maybe that was genuine. Maybe I should continue to take that seriously.” 

Or if you’ve never had that experience yourself—maybe you’ve always been a non-believer of some sort—maybe you can get over some of these hurdles that might be blocking you from even trying to have a spiritual experience. Eventually, once you’ve thought through it, you might say, “Maybe I should try this. Maybe I should take it a little bit seriously,” and you might be in a place where you could genuinely attempt to have a spiritual experience. I decided to start at the root because the hope is to help people overcome a number of hurdles and create the context for a genuine spiritual experience.

Anna: I was really interested in your discussion of the intelligibility of reality. That chapter blew my mind because we take so much of it for granted. Math works with physics, but it doesn’t have to. Why that chapter? How does that help form a basis to develop some of the most basic and fundamental beliefs?

Walker: I start there because it is one of the most knowable things: existence. We all exist. It’s one of the most familiar experiences that we have: existing and seeing that things around us exist. As you pointed out, we often take that for granted. Understandably so, because it’s natural. We form these beliefs through sensory experience. 

But if you actually stop to think about existence or being, you realize that it’s pretty weird. You start to ask, “Did things have to exist?” And even if they did, they could have existed in a chaotic form where nothing made sense to us, with no meaning, purpose, or pattern that we could derive from anything. Yet, that’s not the kind of reality that we live in. There is an orderliness and a rationale behind these things. There are laws of physics that we discover. We don’t just project those laws onto a nonsensical reality, but they’re actually woven into the fabric of reality. That’s very lucky, and in some sense, somewhat unexpected. 

It could be a happy accident that we exist. It could also be a happy accident that it’s orderly and rational to some degree. But I don’t know if we really should expect that. Once you start to think about that, it puts a crack in the naturalist worldview—the idea that nature is a closed system that is sufficient to account for itself and that you can explain it all from within that system. This worldview generally sees reality as nothing more than physical processes and mechanisms. There’s no ultimate purpose to these processes. It’s just the machinery of the universe.

But I don’t know if that’s tenable anymore once you start talking about things making sense and that there’s actual sense to be made, because that entails meaning in the way things operate. That indicates a logic to the whole structure. And logic isn’t inherent in any mere mechanism. Describing physical laws assumes lawfulness and order. It smuggles in meaning. And I don’t know that meaning has any place in a strictly naturalist view of the universe. It’s not so much that “why is there something rather than nothing” or “why is the world intelligible” automatically means God, the Restoration, or anything like that. But I think it puts a crack in naturalism. Once you start moving away from that worldview, you start asking, “What are the alternatives? What kind of reality do we exist in?” Eventually, hopefully, you get to the point of asking whether it’s the kind of reality that makes more sense with or without God. This is the first step moving towards a reality that contains the divine.

Anna: That’s really interesting. You also talked about consciousness. I had to read that chapter a few times just to wrap my head around it: the fact that we are conscious and can comprehend that we are. Yet as much as we can describe the neurons firing and the chemicals flowing, we cannot actually understand the subjective experience of consciousness merely through its scientific process. How does that connect to a person’s consciousness or mind in seeking truth and developing a testimony of the roots?

Walker: I see the first three chapters as laying the groundwork for moving beyond a naturalist worldview. You have the strangeness of existence and the intelligibility of reality in the first chapter. You have the fine-tuning of the universe that reinforces this intelligibility of reality. 

Then you get to consciousness, where now we’re talking about mind, intention, desires, beliefs, and meaning-making that goes on in our heads. That’s a very strange phenomenon. It’s something that we don’t understand; we don’t even really know what it is. Some people will try to say that it’s just the brain chemistry or the neurons firing in your brain, and that the brain and mind are one and the same. 

What makes that difficult for me to agree with is that once you start to go through the machinery of the brain and think through it, if it is all just physical stimuli and physical processes, then we can easily imagine a world in which those physical processes are still going on, but there’s no subjective experience. In the book, I talk about what philosophers of mind call “zombies,” which basically look like us, act like us, and are in every way, shape, and form the same as us, except there’s no light on upstairs. Or maybe the only conscious experience is white noise. It could have been that way if mind were just machinery, but it didn’t end up being that way. 

One of my favorite thought experiments is the “Chinese nation” by the philosopher Ned Block: let’s say you gave everyone in China very specific instructions about when and what to signal to others, along with a cell phone to carry out those signals. The entire nation ends up functioning like neurons in a brain, flipping certain switches at certain times by use of these signals. Now let’s say that you hook the whole system up to a robot. The people of China collectively function as the robot’s “brain,” and the robot begins to act like a conscious human being because of all these switches. Now, ask yourself, “Is that robot conscious? Does that robot have a subjective first-person experience?” Most people would say no. But if we say that the mind is nothing more than this kind of machinery, then we haven’t really explained why we have conscious first-person experience. We all could have ended up like this robot. But we’re not.

There seems to be a qualitative difference and gap between the physical nature of the brain and the experience of consciousness. Mind is more than machine. I sum it up by borrowing from a philosopher who says it’s a construction error to think mindless particles suddenly become mind: Just like white marble tiles do not suddenly add up to a black, non-marble floor, mindless, impersonal matter does not suddenly add up to a personal, subjective mind. The implication seems to be that the mind must be in the ingredients from the get-go, that it must have always been there. It’s not a latecomer to the universe. It seems to be at the foundation of existence, the ultimate foundation of all things. So now you not only have the strangeness of existence, the intelligibility of reality, and the fine-tuning of the universe, but a mind-like reality where mind is eternal, has always been around, and was there from the get-go. That fits very well with the Latter-day Saint perspective that intelligence is not created or made, and that mind was in the beginning with God, premortality, all that type of stuff. Now you have this strange mind-like reality. Is it the kind of reality that makes more sense with God or without? That’s the groundwork that leads up to God, Christ, and the Restoration.

Amanda: I want to take us back to the Book of Mormon now. You make an interesting comparison between the historical evidence for the Resurrection and for the Book of Mormon witnesses. What do you think a Christian who accepts the Resurrection but quickly dismisses the evidence for the Book of Mormon witnesses actually has to grapple with when it comes to the witnesses? 

Walker: What I’ve noticed a lot of the time in people who have rejected the Book of Mormon witnesses but accept the Resurrection—especially if they’re leaning hard on the eyewitnesses of the Resurrection or the New Testament witnesses—is that I don’t think they’re familiar with the documented evidence. I don’t think they’re familiar with how much we have from these witnesses, how consistent they are, and how early they are in terms of proximity to the actual event. Some are much later, but we have plenty from within a month or so where you have actual signed statements and so forth. 

Many Christians who reject it make elementary mistakes. I’ve heard people in some debates say, “Joseph was the only one who saw them.” That seems to be completely ignorant of the witnesses themselves. Or they’ll say, “It was just a fraud.” What’s your evidence that it’s fraud? That’s the question, isn’t it? Or they’ll say something like, “The witnesses went back on their testimonies,” which they never did. 

What they’re missing is how closely they parallel the ancient witnesses of the Resurrection, meaning that they had plenty of incentives to deny their testimony. They had reputational damage. It cost money in the case of Martin Harris. The witnesses faced persecution, they faced death threats, some were beaten, and some were actually killed. Some left the Church. Some came back, but some didn’t. That is really interesting, because the claim was not, “Joseph was never a prophet,” but for those who left, they said he became a fallen prophet. That is a very important distinction, because ultimately it’s saying, “Angels, God, the Restoration—that happened. I just think it may have gone off the rails later on down the line.” The Book of Mormon witnesses are something a lot of Christians are missing. They’re between a rock and a hard place: they’ll rely heavily on the eyewitnesses of the Resurrection, but then if they take that eyewitness argument seriously, they either have to deal with these Book of Mormon witnesses and take them seriously as well, or they have to undermine their own argument in favor of the Resurrection. 

These critics are missing many of the same incentives the early Christians faced, and they’re overlooking the fact that we have far more documentation from these particular witnesses describing their experiences, and that it wasn’t just one kind of experience. You had the Eight with a very tangible, physical, natural experience, and the Three with the angel. The two of those together, reinforcing each other, make it pretty hard to come up with an overarching explanation to dismiss them.

Amanda: At the beginning of our discussion, you mentioned how people going through a faith crisis are reevaluating their previous experiences and looking for things like how much of this was confirmation bias, how much was emotional manipulation, or a draw from culture. Book of Mormon antiquity is always a big question for people who are struggling. How do you distinguish a good case for Book of Mormon antiquity from confirmation bias, where you’re counting all of the hits while you sort of dismiss what doesn’t work?

Walker: Great question. The biggest thing—and I say this in a footnote, not in the main body of the book—is that critics will ask, “Is there any non-Latter-day Saint archaeologist, Mesoamericanist, or anthropologist who takes the Book of Mormon seriously?” The answer is pretty clearly no. Nobody looks at it who isn’t a Latter-day Saint. I point out that if they did take it seriously, they would probably become a Latter-day Saint, and then they would remove themselves from the critics’ preferred category that was created. 

Second, it’s not just being an expert in a particular geography or field; you also have to be an expert in the text itself. What does the text itself actually claim? That was something that John Sorenson was doing when he created the limited geography model: piecing together what the text itself says about its own geography. That’s just one example. To me, the bad arguments for supposed antiquity usually rest on a whole bunch of assumptions about the ancient world or about the text itself, and sometimes both, instead of what the actual text says and what we actually know about the ancient world. When those two things converge, that’s when it becomes—not a knockdown argument by any means—but definitely one that should raise eyebrows where you say, “That’s interesting.” 

The best ones for me are the most subtle, where the text itself actually makes more sense when you take that ancient evidence into consideration. If you read the Bible straight through, KJV style, you can get a lot out of it, but you can also be confused. Using a commentary that has cultural context can make the text come alive so that you understand why they acted that way and what was going on, because it doesn’t always give you that information. It assumes the audience already knows. Same thing with the Book of Mormon. Anytime I’ve incorporated ancient evidence to give cultural context to the text, it starts to make more sense, come alive, and I understand the text better. It has no business doing that if it’s strictly a 19th-century text, because it should have no coherence with the ancient world. That’s a personal thing for me, where the text begins to actually make more sense when you take into consideration this evidence for antiquity. That’s one of the biggest flags for me.

Amanda: People who are struggling through a crisis of faith often describe feeling dismissed when people offer advice focused on getting back to the basics: read your scriptures, say your prayers, go to church, take the sacrament, fast. When we are supporting those who are struggling, how do we keep this roots-and-branches framework from becoming a way to dismiss real, heartfelt, good-faith questions about issues that may be branch issues?

Walker: Great question. I’ve already seen some responses to my book where I’ve been accused of being dismissive just by promoting the idea that there are roots (primary, fundamental beliefs) and branches (secondary beliefs that are outgrowths of the roots)—just the sheer model of it is offensive in some way. Most of the time, the answer’s not going to be, “You have a concern about Church history. That doesn’t matter. Here’s a book by Walker Wright, go read that.” That’s not the best way to do it. 

In my experience, when dealing with people struggling with the branches, what those issues are doing is unsettling trust in foundational claims. Sometimes it’s not clear how they’re connected to the foundational claims, but trust has been disrupted, and that’s the problem. In my experience with helping and talking with people, one-on-one is often best, where it’s not for show or performative. Generally, asking questions of the individuals who might be struggling helps, because part of where this whole roots and branches idea comes from is that there are tons of assumptions five layers deep that never get talked about. People are talking past each other because they have a totally different set of assumptions. When you sit there and talk with someone, when they say “X bothers me,” you ask, “Why does it bother you?” “Because I don’t think a prophet would do X.” “Why do you think that?” You start asking questions. One, it helps you understand what the person is actually struggling with, but it also helps them better understand what they’re struggling with. 

A lot of the time, I’ve found that you’ll reach a certain assumption that might not be necessary or justified, or it’s a paradigm about prophets. It’s a gangly branch that could be cut off; it’s not something you have to preserve. You don’t have to believe or think that; you can think about it another way, and that fits just fine in the Church’s teachings. By asking questions and being genuinely interested, you go through these and figure out where they’re coming from. That helps people feel heard, and it helps you both understand where the issue is. It may not resolve it right then and there, but it helps you better connect on where you both are coming from. I have had experiences where I’ve pointed out that they don’t have to hold a certain assumption, and that helped them move on from there. My experience with people has been to always try to figure out how what they’re struggling with connects to these roots and whether there actually is a through line between what they’re struggling with and the major claims of the gospel.

Amanda: That connects a lot with my own personal experience, where I thought the issue was polygamy, and the more I questioned it, the more I got down to: maybe the reason why polygamy led to me thinking I might be an atheist is because I’m struggling with the nature of God, what God might think, and how my assumptions about the world might be different than the way God views the world.

Walker: Absolutely.

Amanda: After spending most of the book constructing an intellectual case, you ultimately end with personal revelation. Does that suggest that apologetics don’t actually produce faith, or perhaps they can clear intellectual obstacles so that people become more willing to encounter God?

Walker: I think it can be both. Elder (Neal A.) Maxwell (of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles), quoting Anglican philosopher Austin Farrer, said that arguments and reasons don’t produce faith, but they create a context in which faith can thrive. It’s few and far between, but I think there are some people out there where the sheer intellectual argument can do something for them. That really does it for them. But that’s not most people. Most people take reason and their own experience into account. 

I see the book as casting a wide net to those people who might be 95% intellectual, hoping to offer good arguments, reflection, and reasons to take it seriously. None of it is absolute proof; none of these are knockdown arguments that you can’t explain in other ways, but I think someone can walk away saying, “I may not believe it, but it’s not unreasonable.” That’s a move in the right direction as far as I’m concerned. 

For most people, apologetics helps clear hurdles. I hope my book causes people to reflect on how they know things, how their experiences are wrapped up in how they know things, and gets them to think about the world around them, how they make sense of the world, why they should make sense of the world, and if there is sense to be made. To really drill down deep into these existential questions. I jokingly say that if you’re going to have a faith crisis, have an existential one, because an existential crisis makes you ask deep questions about what anything means, what your life means, whether there is anything after death, or if it all just ends there. Those types of questions are the kinds of cracks that God can get into and reach you in different ways. 

Spiritual experiences aren’t just an emotional high. Sometimes it can be enlightenment, where an idea clicks, a worldview makes sense, or you feel pulled toward meaning. There are a variety of experiences that people have. I hope apologetics can reach those few who are intellectually minded, while clearing hurdles and creating a context for others to feel it’s reasonable to rely on these spiritual experiences and safe to attempt to have them.

Amanda: From the book, it appears that your own return to faith was not primarily the result of a philosophical argument. It involved a very personal experience connected to your sister, who passed away when you were young. Did the intellectual work create your faith, or did it come afterward as a way of understanding and testing something you had already experienced spiritually?

Walker: For me, it was definitely an afterward thing. I had a spiritual experience in the MTC related to the plan of salvation and the death of my sister from years earlier, but soon after, I was introduced to the work of Truman G. Madsen, to whom the book is dedicated, who taught me that the intellectual pursuit of the spiritual was something that could be done. He made me want to learn and know more. He provided a model of asking questions, seeking answers, learning more, and growing in my faith. Through that, I would come into contact with things that were more difficult than expected: weird history, policies, or people behaving badly. But because I had been anchored by the spiritual experience, I still felt strongly that this was right. 

I would ask how I could make sense of a particular issue and if there was an answer to be found. Some people say, “I put it on the shelf.” Well, at some point you have to take it off the shelf and read it. Work through it, but don’t be so hasty in your judgments and conclusions. That doesn’t mean you can’t come up with a framework that works, but a lot of times people are too quick to pull the trigger: “I Googled over the weekend, and my faith fell apart.” Would you do that with any other academic or intellectual pursuit? If someone Googled a different subject over the weekend and changed their mind overnight, would you take that seriously? Probably not. Then why do that with ultimate questions that people have been wrestling with for thousands of years in philosophy and theology? Take a breath and take time to think through it. 

When it came to the intellectual stuff, especially when I got home from my mission, I found myself struggling with constructing a coherent theological worldview and working through classic arguments about God and religion that didn’t always overlap neatly onto Latter-day Saint theology. Trying to think through these philosophical questions was an intellectual and spiritual struggle, but it anchored me in these big questions. That’s what an intellectual pursuit can do. Some people say that you can or should come to a spiritual conclusion only after you understand everything. I don’t think that’s the case. You can have a spiritual experience, recognize that it seems genuine, and then want to better understand it. That’s what we do with lots of things: we have an experience or observe something, recognize that it happened even if we don’t fully understand it, and then try to better understand it through thought, study, or experimentation. That’s how we learn things. The fact that an experience can give you a reason to believe something doesn’t mean you have finished thinking about it. But it also means that you don’t have to act like that experience didn’t give you legitimate knowledge that you can act on.

Anna: Thank you. I’m excited to share this with our readers.