Finding a Faith That Fits You
A former Mormon on church-shopping, the God you can return for in-store credit, and the one pearl that was never on sale.
The most reasonable-sounding, diplomatic statement in modern religious culture. It is also the precise opposite of what Jesus said.
Imagine the pitch.
“Tired of religions that just don’t get you? Sick of rigid rules, judgmental communities, and a God with strong opinions about how you spend your Friday night? Introducing Faith™ — the first belief system engineered around the most important person, the ultimate God of the universe: YOU. Take our thirty-second quiz. Tell us your values, your vibe, your hard no’s. Our algorithm matches you with a spirituality that fits your sensibilities and your lifestyle. Flexible plans. No long-term commitment. Cancel anytime. The first eternity is free.”
If that made you wince — good. Keep wincing. You’re going to need it.
Because a softer, kinder, holier-sounding version of that exact ad is the single most common thing I hear from sincere, intelligent, genuinely Christ-loving people. It came up recently. A dear and beloved friend, in the middle of a good and decent argument about how Christians shouldn’t be criticizing each other, but instead uniting against a common enemy, put it like this (I’m paraphrasing):
We should each find the religion that fits us. Who has the truth? We’ll all find out later.
And honestly? I get it. I want to be careful here, because there is something real and good buried under that sentence, and if I steamroll it, I’ll have missed the point.1
What’s good is the instinct against contempt. My friend was reacting, rightly, against the spectacle of believers knifing each other over differences while the house burns down around them. Don’t tear each other down. That instinct is valuable and correct. Mormons - the most attacked religious group in the Western world - know this all too well and are hypersensitive to it. This impulse is, in fact, deeply Christian. “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” So I want to honor the heart of it before I take a scalpel to its logic.
But the logic has to come out. Because the cure my friend reached for- find what fits you- is not a peace treaty; it’s poison. And it’s poison precisely because it sounds so humble, so generous, so live-and-let-live. Let me show you what it’s actually smuggling in right under your nose.
“Fits You” Is Fitting-Room Language
Listen to the verb. Fits.
That is not a religious word. It’s a retail word. It belongs in a fitting room, next to the mirror, the little bench, the sign that says "maximum 6 items,” and the warning about the penalties for shoplifting. You try things on. You check the fit. If it pinches you put it back on the rack and reach for a different size. The customer is always right.
It seems to me that we are the first civilization in our history who shop for Gods the way we shop for jeans. And we don’t even notice we’re doing it because the market isn’t a place we go anymore. It’s the air we breathe.
Everything is a product now. Your education is a product. Your relationships are a product (swipe, match, return). Your attention is a product being sold to someone else while you sleep. So, of course, faith became a product too. Of course, we started asking the living God the one question we ask of everything else in our lives: Does it suit me?
Here is the trap, and it’s airtight. If the customer is always right, then the customer isn’t God; it’s us, and God is just inventory. The moment you make “fit” the test, you have quietly crowned yourself the thing that does not move, the fixed point, the judge before whom all the religions of the earth must audition. They line up. They do a shark-tank pitch. You select. You have not found a faith. You have held a casting call, and the role was a god who agrees with me.
How American.2
I mean that precisely, not as an insult. The free-market church, the one you choose for how it suits you and how it makes you feel, is one of the most distinctly Western, consumer-centric, distinctly modern inventions in the whole history of Christianity. The early Christians would not have understood the question. You did not “find a church that fit you” in second-century Antioch. The Church was there. It had been handed something. And the only question on the table was whether you would conform to it. The direction of the verb ran the other way.
Ego is the Western mind’s true God. And “finding a faith that fits you” is its liturgy.
The Sleight of Hand in “We’ll All Find Out Later”
Now to the second half of my friend’s sentence, which is even sneakier than the first.
Everybody thinks they have the truth, so who really knows? We’ll find out later.
This feels like humility. It wears humility’s clothes. But watch the hands, because two completely different claims are being palmed as one:
People disagree about religious truth. Obviously. Wildly. This is just true.
Therefore, (the subtle implication is that) the truth can’t be known with certainty — or isn’t really there at all. (It seems to me to be back-door agnosticism.)
Claim one is a fact about us. Claim two is a conclusion about reality. And claim two does not follow from claim one. Not even a little.
Try it with anything else. Hand three strangers the address of where you’re trying to go, and watch them give you three different routes. Do you conclude that the city doesn’t exist? Are all roads equally good? Should you just drive in whatever direction fits you? Of course not. You conclude that at most one of them is right, possibly none of them, and your job is to figure out which. Disagreement is not a verdict that the destination is unreachable. It’s an invitation to do the navigation.
We already know this, by the way. We acknowledge this the moment we admit that each different “church” tradition teaches incompatible things. A thing cannot be both true and not-true in the same way at the same time. That’s the oldest rule in the universe; it’s a fundamental principle of Logic, and no amount of polite shrugging repeals it.
Also known as “the law of non-contradiction.” Aristotle states it in Metaphysics Book IV, but he didn’t invent it any more than Newton invented gravity; he just wrote it down. A claim cannot be both true and false in the same respect at the same time. Accepting such contradictions to both be true, by the very rules of formal logic, means that you can sneak ANY kind of absurdity or lie in the back door.
Note the self-detonating quality of the relativist proposition here. The sentence “there is no truth” is itself advanced as a truth.
Rationally, it follows that if that statement is true, then the very proposition it advances is false. It eats its own tail (it’s a self-refuting proposition, or self-referential inconsistency)
The 40 thousand different Christian denominations, springing from hundreds of different, contradictory theologies, can’t all be right. Some of them, likely most of them, are wrong about enormously important things. That’s not me being unkind. That’s just probability and math.
And then there’s the quiet little phrase doing the most damage of all: “we’ll find out later.”
It sounds patient. It sounds humble. In fact, it’s a permission slip, a doctor’s note excusing you from the hardest and most important homework of your life, because the answer key won’t be released until you’re dead. It sounds nice, but rationally considering your very eternal salvation (because that’s what’s at stake), it’s massively dangerous. It’s probably the most dangerous thought you can ever think.
AND it is not what Jesus said. He did not say ye shall know the truth eventually, in the fog, after the funeral. He said, present tense, on this side of the grave: “ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” And Jude tells us the faith was “once delivered unto the saints” — once. Past tense. Finished. Handed over. A deposit with a return address. Not an ongoing slow rollout of “continuing revelation” that updates itself with every change of ecclesiastical leadership.
You don’t wait for the truth to be revealed in the afterlife like exam results. It already happened. It has an address, a date, and a location. Your job is to trace it back to where it was delivered. That can be done, BUT it’s not easy. It costs you time, comfort, and a fair number of your assumptions. But it can be done. I know because I did it, and there is absolutely nothing about me that is special.
Where “Fits You” Goes to Die
Here’s the thing nobody points out. Jesus told a thirty-word story that detonates the entire fits-you framework, and it’s so short you’ve probably read right past it your whole life. Or were taught to misunderstand it.
Let’s examine it like the little sleuths we are.
“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.” — Matthew 13:45–46
This parable contains three details. Watch them carefully, because each one matters.
The merchant was seeking. “Seeking goodly pearls.” Active voice. He didn’t stumble onto it on a walk. Nobody handed it to him on a velvet cushion. He didn’t take a quiz and get matched by an algorithm. He went hunting. The truth, in this parable, is something you go and look for, on purpose, with effort, the way Vincent of Lérins did sixteen centuries ago when he set out to find a fixed rule for telling real faith from the counterfeits.3 Seekers find. Shoppers browse.
The pearl’s worth is intrinsic. “One pearl of great price.“ Its value is not set by whether it flatters the merchant, suits his taste, or works with his existing wardrobe. Its worth is intrinsic. It is worth what it is worth, full stop, whether he likes it or not, whether it’s convenient or not, whether it “resonates” or not, whether it matches his “vibe” or not. The truth God gives is not graded on a curve of how well it fits your life. It’s graded on whether it’s true.
The direction of fit runs completely backwards. The merchant does not ask whether the pearl fits his budget or will go with his wife’s earrings. He liquidates his entire life to fit the pearl. “Sold all that he had.” Everything. The man conforms to the pearl and is willing to sacrifice everything for it. The pearl never once, not for a single verse, conforms to the man.
That is the exact, perfect, surgical inversion of find a faith that fits you. The consumer sentence asks: Does this fit me? The pearl asks: Are you willing to be re-cut, re-set, rebuilt around this?
And now go back and notice what the scriptures somehow never say. They never say: " Find a worship service you enjoy. Find a congregation where the people are nice to you, and you’ve got friends. Find a gospel that’s close enough to the truth that you stay comfortable. None of those are in the Bible. It is not in the mouth of Christ. What is in His mouth is a strait gate and a narrow way that “few there be that find it,” and the flat command: “let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” Mormons generally understand that “straight is the gate and narrow is the way” means that not only do few find it, but also that fewer people who find and enter into it stick with it.
A faith that fits you costs you little. And costing you little (I’m not talking about $$) is the single most reliable sign that it is not the pearl. (For my LDS readers — you know that the truth is in the business of celestializing you. Nobody, in the entire history of the cosmos, ever got celestialized by staying comfortable or by tithing being the epitome of their sacrifice.)4
But didn’t YOU just pick the Church That Fit You?”
Fair hit. The fairest one available, actually, and if you didn’t think of it, I’d be disappointed. You say the truth can be found — great. By what measure? Aren’t you just doing the same consumer move I am? Picking the tradition that suits you and slapping the word “apostolic” on it to feel authentic and objective about it? Ok, fair point.
So let me hand you the measure. And the whole point is that it isn’t mine.
Around the year 434, a monk in southern Gaul, a man whom Rome and the Orthodox East both honor as a saint to this very day, which is exactly why I’m using him5, went looking for precisely the thing my friend implies we can’t know: a fixed, reliable rule for telling the apostolic faith apart from its knockoffs (and there were always several - we know them today as heresies.) His name was Vincent of Lérins. And the answer he arrived at is the oldest there is. Hold fast to what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all. Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus. Everywhere. Always. By all Christians.
Sit with how completely that demolishes the fitting room approach. It’s not a preference test; it’s actually the anti-preference test. It asks nothing about your vibe. Nothing about your comfort. Nothing about your friend group, your favorite worship music, if you “felt the spirit”, or how the sermon made you feel on the drive home. It asks one cold, public, checkable question: is this what the whole Church, in every place, from the very beginning, received and handed down?
That is a test you can actually run. It’s historical. It’s documentable. The sources are sitting right there in the open, mostly hosted by people who have no Orthodox axe to grind. You do not need my permission, and you do not need my conclusions. You need a library card and some nerve, because…….
The Pearl Doesn’t Fit in Your Pocket
Here’s the part that settles it, on principle (at least I’m inclined to think so)
When I went looking, really looking, with the ubique-semper-ab-omnibus test in one hand and a stack of the patristic Fathers in the other. (OK, not literally, I had Fr. Trenham’s Patristic Nectar app on my phone with access to a few critical series that made an impact.)
The faith I found did not Fit me. Sure, there was a certain appeal; I did like the Byzantine music. I fell in love with the liturgy. I loved that it was ancient.
It did not fit my life or my sensibilities at the time. It is often inconvenient in ways I’m still adjusting to. In addition, I had to give up quite a lot and admit that many things in my life were for naught.
I had to give up a community I was relatively comfortable with and a story about how reality and the afterlife worked that I’d believed my entire life.
I had to accept that what I had lived and defended most of my life was not true.
That suffering I had endured for my LDS faith was all for naught. I had been picked on enough as a young person for being odd, for being sickly, and a lot more for being Mormon. I was the only one in my family to serve a mission, and in preparing for it, I developed an illness that ended up requiring open-heart surgery. It necessitated my coming home early, and because I came home early to have heart surgery, the girls who had written me my entire mission wouldn’t even talk to me in the hallways of my ward building; they assumed that God didn’t protect me on my mission because I was unworthy (a common LDS mindset) I very nearly died from that illness and I almost didn’t make it through the surgery - the Dr’s couldn’t get my heart started again.
Ramifications from this will last the rest of my life: being on blood thinners, constant INR (blood thinner) monitoring via bi-weekly blood tests, further restrictions on what I can eat, large restrictions on activities like martial arts, all contact or extreme sports, or anything where there is a risk of bruising or suffering force to the head or chest. This rules out or adds great risk to a lot of things that I’d/or do love to do. A small sampling includes: Horseback riding, riding a motorcycle (which I have always wanted since I was a young teenager), Contact martial arts, boxing, Kendo, HEMA, skydiving, hang gliding, skiiing/snowboarding, etc. I have at times ridden a horse and a motorcycle, but I had to approach each with an abundance of caution and limit my amount of engagement with those activities; they could never be regular activities.
I spent decades researching “anti-Mormon” issues and challenges to Mormonism, historical and doctrinal. Much time was spent sorting the illegitimate ones from the legitimate ones, and for those, finding the apologetic.6
Sometimes there was no existing apologetic, or it was weak, and I needed to go looking for information that supported it. Often, this required intense amounts of reading and study that usually required constructing new narratives or new understandings of church teachings or history that met the challenges.
In the end, I had to admit that my suffering might have all been for nothing. That I had to throw away almost 30 years of dedicated research and study, trying to defend Mormonism or prove that it could be true7. Ultimately, I had to admit to myself that it was all a waste of time. That I, with all my smarts, had been deceived into dedicating most of my life to something that was so clearly (to everyone outside the LDS church) a lie. That I had been manipulated into paying over a hundred thousand dollars in “tithing” to a group of con artists pretending to be prophets. That the church I had built up and taught my children to defend and be resilient in - was a lie. Worse still, that the probability that the LDS church could lead them to salvation or theosis, given the extreme depths of its heresies, was likely very low; a thought freaked me out more than anything else and ultimately sparked the major impetus behind this publication.
My new faith asks me to fast (twice a week) when I’d rather eat. To fast from foods (meat, fish, oil) that, if I avoid, make it very hard to eat anything at all (given my long list of food allergies and required food avoidances (most of which are vegetables).) The result being that I usually just don’t eat at all and go hungry. To stand for two hours when I’d rather sit due to lower back pain and pain from flat feet. To confess my actual sins out loud to another human being, which is as comfortable as it sounds. My first experience with confession, while miles better than my LDS experiences with “repentance,” still had the ring of sitting in the Mormon bishop’s office. I knew that orthodoxy would make me an outsider in my own family, and my current circle of friends would be likely to abandon me. I also knew that there was a very high risk that I would be kicking out the last leg of a very weathered stool that supported my already precarious marriage (it did, and I paid the price). I knew that the moral standards of conduct in orthodoxy were just as high, if not higher than in Mormonism, something I always kicked against. I had maintained, for decades, that if I were ever to get divorced, I’d never remarry. When LDS friends gasped and asked about forgoing sex, I scoffed and said that I’d just have sex with anyone I wanted to, marriage or no marriage, cause I didn’t think it mattered. I didn’t believe in what I considered to be these made-up “white people” rules. However, now I find myself divorced, dating, but holding women (who want to have sex) at bay with a position of “no sex before marriage,” one of the very rules I rejected when I was Mormon.8
If I had been shopping — if “fit” had been my test, I had already found it in Buddhism and would have stayed exactly where I was. Comfortable, not sacrificing anything, or built myself something cozier and called it “close enough.”
I did not choose Orthodoxy because it fit me. I submitted to it because, when I ran the test, I determined that it was what was handed down from Christ to the Apostles. And the fact that it cost me pretty much everything (my truck, my house, my woman - my life is a bloody country song) is not a bug in the story. It is the reason I trust it and the very reason I know I’m not being a hypocrite by writing this article.
Because a God who fits you is a God you made in your own image. He’s a mirror with a halo on it, your own preferences, your own ego, your own face, reflected with the volume turned up and a little incense or smoke machines added for atmosphere.9 The God who is actually there is the one who does not poll your opinion before He confronts you, does not soften His commandments to clear your filters, and does not audition for the role of your God. The pearl does not fit in your pocket.
You rebuild your pocket — your whole house, your whole life — around the pearl.
Here Is My Plea
And it is a plea, not a pitch.
Stop shopping. Start seeking. Put down the quiz and pick up the cross. The faith once delivered to the saints is not lost. It is not hiding in the fog of "we’ll find out later.” It is not relative, not unknowable, not gone. The Church that Christ founded is still standing. The truth the Apostles taught is still here, intact, traceable, and stubbornly refusing to conform to anybody’s lifestyle. It can be found by you, this year, with the two hands you already have. But! Only if you want it more than you want to be comfortable, and only if you’re willing, like the merchant, to sell everything you have to obtain it.
Don’t take my word for any of it. I would be insulting the pearl if I asked you to. I am nothing but a sinner, just like everyone else.
Go seek and verify it yourself — ubique, semper, ab omnibus, the Fathers are in the original, the sources linked below. Run the test on the tradition you’re in right now. Run it on mine. Run it on all of them you can, but do it prayerfully and let the Lord know you are willing to submit to whatever he tells you.
And then when you find it, and you will find it, if you actually look, do the one thing the merchant did that nobody talks about.
Don’t admire it. Don’t bookmark it. Don’t add it to your cart and tell yourself you’ll come back.
Sell everything.
And obtain it.
Primary Sources
I encourage you genuinely, not rhetorically, to verify everything below for yourself.
St. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium (c. 434 AD). The source of the “Vincentian Canon” — quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus (”what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all”). The famous rule is laid out in the early chapters; the opening chapters also record Vincent’s own diligent search for a reliable criterion. Venerated in both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. Read the full text at New Advent here (Heurtley’s translation, from the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 11).
Scripture (King James Version, via the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ scripture portal, for readers coming from an LDS background):
Matthew 13:45–46 — the merchant and the pearl of great price.
Matthew 7:13–14 — the strait gate and the narrow way.
Matthew 16:24 — deny yourself, take up your cross.
John 8:32 — “ye shall know the truth” (present tense, note).
Jude 1:3 — the faith “once delivered unto the saints.”
A general resource for the curious: New Advent’s Fathers of the Church library hosts the complete Ante-Nicene (pre-nicene) and Nicene/Post-Nicene Fathers in English. It is not an Orthodox site. It hosts the sources I’m citing here, and it’s a fine place to start running the ubique, semper, ab omnibus test on your own.
The conversation that prompted this started somewhere else entirely — it was about whether Christians should unite against external pressures rather than fight among themselves. I’m setting that part aside on purpose, because the assumption I’m interested in here — find the faith that fits you, we’ll all know the truth… eventually — is bigger than the argument it happened to show up in. It outlives its occasion. The ramifications of it are also far larger. The ramifications are eternal. You’ll hear it from a co-worker, a cousin, a podcast, a stranger at a wedding. It deserves an answer on its own terms.
I have my anthropologist hat on here. I’m not trying to be a flag-waver. I’m originally Canadian, so I’m poking at this from an outsider’s perspective. The free-market approach to religion, the “church-growth” and “seeker-sensitive” movements that literally focus-grouped worship services by demographic, the whole assumption that a congregation is something you select like a gym membership; these are recent, local, and weird when you zoom out to the full two thousand years. Most Christians who have ever lived would find the question “which church fits you?” roughly as coherent as “which set of parents fits you?”
More on Vincent below — but I want you to catch the parallel now. Vincent’s whole project in the Commonitorium opens with him describing how he searched diligently and for a long time, asking the holiest and most learned people he could find for a reliable rule to distinguish true faith from false heresy. He was the merchant seeking goodly pearls. The criterion was itself a pearl he had to go hunting for.
For my LDS readers: yes, you recognized the phrase. The Pearl of Great Price is one of your standard works, and this parable, Matthew 13:46, “one pearl of great price” in the King James you grew up reading, is exactly where that title comes from. Sit with the image that your own scriptures are named after. The pearl was something a man sold everything to obtain. It was never the thing that fit conveniently into the life he already had. Take the example of the early Mormon pioneers, especially those who came from overseas. They literally sold everything they had.
St. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium (c. 434 AD), feast day 24 May. I’m citing him deliberately and strategically: he is venerated as a saint in both the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox Churches, which means no one gets to wave him away as “just an Orthodox source” or “just a Catholic source.” His test, the Vincentian Canon, predates the Great Schism by six hundred years. It belongs to the undivided Church, which is the whole point.
Why? As part of my religious studies coursework, I took a course on Mormonism that exposed us to many of the standard anti-Mormon challenges that were still prevalent at the time. This caused a great amount of cognitive dissonance. At that point in my life, you could say that I was largely a material realist (philosophically speaking), so many of those challenges bothered me quite a lot. Here is a quote from C.S. Lewis that sums up the remaining part of how I felt about it.
To be ignorant and simple now—not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground—would be to throw down our weapons and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.
Well, maybe not prove it to be true, but to prove to myself at least that it had the possibility of being true. I liken that effort and my thinking around it to this quote from Austin Farrer, often attributed to C.S. Lewis.
“Though argument does not create conviction, the lack [it] of destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced, but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned.”
Light on C. S. Lewis, Harcourt, and Brace: New York, 1965, p. 26.
I don’t want to derail this article, but strangely, my life is almost more Mormon than it ever was when I was actually Mormon. That’s not an endorsement to stay Mormon. Do not equate this with the “well, Mormonism is close enough to orthodoxy, I might as well just stay Mormon” fallacy. Because in truth, while the moral life might be close. The spiritual life and theology are vastly different, and in a way that impacts your very salvation and exaltation.
This is, almost word for word, the atheist Ludwig Feuerbach’s nineteenth-century argument against religion: that “God” is just humanity’s own image projected onto the sky, our wishes with a crown on. Here is the uncomfortable thing: for the person who builds a faith out of what fits them, Feuerbach is exactly right. The fitting-room God really is a projection; they really did make him. The only escape from Feuerbach’s trap is a God you did not select for fit; one who was handed to you, who predates your preferences, and who has the nerve to tell you no.