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The art of healing family relationships ruptured by a loved one leaving the LDS Church

UVU play, titled “In Good Faith,” aims to “short-circuit” the defensiveness both sides feel when someone exits the fold.

Can talking help heal family bonds that have been strained or ruptured when a husband, wife, son or daughter leaves The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?

Utah Valley University professor Kim Abunuwara wanted to know — and not just for academic purposes.

Besides meeting with a “parade of students, broken and in tears” over the faith differences in their own families, Abunuwara has been navigating her own relationships since leaving Utah’s predominant faith about six years ago.

(Screenshot) UVU Professor Kim Abunuwara discusses the idea behind the play in the documentary "In Good Faith."

So the director of the school’s humanities program crafted an experiment, inviting 10 of her students to interview impacted families and to perform selected responses as part of a staged performance. In the end, they conducted 41 hours of interviews with 37 volunteers. Of those, 17 were active Latter-day Saints and 15 were former members. The remaining five fell somewhere on the spectrum of nonpracticing to practicing with reservations.

“Something magical happens,” Abunuwara explained in a new documentary about the project, when audience members hear a point of view from a performer rather than the person who holds it. “It short-circuits the typical knee-jerk, defensive reaction that they might have if they’re hearing an opinion they might not agree with.”

(Courtesy) Students practice their monologues in preparation for the big show.

The play, titled “In Good Faith,” capitalized on this distance by engaging the audience in dialogue immediately after the performance.

The result — directness coupled with a general “disarming” among participants — is one Abunuwara hopes to re-create over and over through the screening of the documentary of the same name.

Read some of the quotes pulled from interviews that the play featured:

“I tried to talk with my mom about some of the things I believe, and she just said to me, ‘Hey I don’t want to hear about it anymore.’”

“When Rachel was kind of in this phase shortly after she had her name removed [from church rolls], she was being disruptive during prayers, like literally eating her food loudly while we’re praying. She was making a statement: ‘I’m not doing this.’ I did talk to her and said, ‘I’m trying to be respectful and understand where you’re at with not wanting to be in the church. I think I’ve explained why I am, so you get to respect that. And part of that is it’s my home. You don’t have to say the prayer. You don’t have to say ‘amen.’ But you do get to be quiet and respectful.’”

“Telling [my parents] that I don’t want to be a part of the church anymore is like telling them that I don’t want to be with them after I die. So I avoid it.”

Division among the cast

For Abunuwara and her students, the process of giving words to this often unspoken divide in families was deeply fraught.

Disagreements quickly arose over whose voices to include and what to give voice to. At one point, Abunuwara tried to strike negative portrayals of Latter-day Saints as a group from the play out of fear of alienating members of the faith.

This did not go over well with everyone.

“The cast came to me, and they said they felt like I wasn’t being fair,” the UVU professor said, “and that some of those behaviors needed to be shown because they had” experienced some themselves. She pondered it and concluded they were right.

(Screenshot) Student Brielle Szendre performs a monologue during a live performance of the play "In Good Faith."

That decision didn’t go over well with everyone either.

At the end of the project, a Latter-day Saint student accused her and the final product of being too far weighted on the side of those who had left the faith.

“He really just let me have it,” Abunuwara said, “saying that it was not even handed that I had an anti-church agenda and was asking more of Latter-day Saints than I was of non-Latter-day Saints in asking them to accommodate their nonbelieving family members.”

Some students, meanwhile, simply declined to perform certain subjects or viewpoints.

In other words, Utah’s religious divide was just as alive in their classroom as it was in the lives of the individuals they were trying to portray.

Measuring the impact

That’s not to say that the experiment failed. All along the way, and even now, Abunuwara has seen evidence that the process, however messy, has helped those involved give greater grace to those on the other side of the divide.

In the documentary, a cast member, former Latter-day Saint Savannah Arnold, said that after her believing family members came to the play, a new line of communication was established between her and her parents.

“That door,” Arnold said, “opened.”

As for student Michaella “Mitch” Hales, the biggest change happened in her mixed-faith marriage.

(Screenshot) Student Michaella "Mitch" Hales reflects in the documentary "In Good Faith" about the project's impact on her own life.

“There was so much fear there that we would realize our beliefs were so different that we weren’t compatible,” she said in the documentary. “And so any conversations we had, although we were really good about talking about it, were so scary and so emotional.”

After the second to last show, Hales went home and together she and her husband talked until the early hours.

“There was no fear,” she recalled. “Only curiosity. It was amazing how much we had misunderstood about each other’s beliefs.”

Hales tearfully added: “The relief to just not be scared anymore — I can’t express what that means.”

Going forward with the project

Motivated by these outcomes, Abunuwara has become an evangelist for the project.

A truncated version aired in a special live edition of The Salt Lake Tribune’s “Mormon Land” podcast in April, and the documentary recently wrapped up a stint at the InterFaith Film and Music Festival in New York City. A screening is also scheduled for Feb. 12 at Brigham Young University-Idaho.

“There really seems to be a need for us to talk about this [divide] as a community,” she said. “And when I say us, I want to encompass Mormons as well as former Mormons. We’re all still part of a community, and we need these relationships to work.”

How to view the documentary

To access a digital copy of the documentary, contact Abunuwara directly at Kimberly.Abunuwara@uvu.edu.

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