In Praise of "Letters to a Young Mormon"

The enduring influence of Adam Miller's epistolary primer on discipleship

Illustration courtesy of author

It has been just over eleven years since Adam Miller’s Letters to a Young Mormon first appeared on the proverbial shelf of the modern Latter-day Saint. Of interest to scholars and laypeople alike, these terse but profound letters built a summer cottage at the intersection of theology and home-grown discipleship. Miller’s meditation on the “real beauty and real costs of trying to live a Mormon life” shaped me as a young believer. For what felt like the first time, an adult crouched down, paid attention to my mustard-seed-sized faith, and said that it was good.

Miller’s letters respond with gentleness to some of the most potent matters pressing on the minds and hearts of cerebral covenant keepers. Many words have been written about what and how to believe. Accustomed to hearing generic words preached from large and distant pulpits, and to sitting through timeworn object lessons that (perhaps) miss something vital about discipleship, Latter-day Saint youth can feel unnoticed and condescended to. Against this backdrop, and with familiar diction and comfortable syntax, Miller emerges as a generative interlocutor articulating what belief looks like on a regular Tuesday afternoon. This book does more than supply generative ideas relating to how I interact with my religion. More broadly, Letters acts as a witness to my trek along the covenant path, declaring with each entry that my faith, however green and undeveloped, is real, living, and breathing. Miller as scholar, father, and grown-up believer wondered, just like me. He worried, just like me. He struggled to do and be right, just like me. 

What is transformative about this epistolary treatise on a life in Christ is the careful treatment of the doctrine. Rather than approaching redeeming truths as sterile scalpels that cut through the natural man to get to the latent divinity within, Miller illustrates the restored gospel as a well-worn pair of working gloves. We are meant to put them on, shove them in the dirt of daily life, pick up the splintered wood of our testimonies, and handle the hot coals of our trials. They protect us, empower us, enable us. Rather than a tool to use or an object to employ, the gospel is meant to be interwoven in our being in the world. Miller tells of how our beliefs can become ways of being and seeing and engaging. When used properly, the gloves of our convictions touch everything we touch. Our kids, to-do lists, insecurities, histories. These letters are not a gospel how-to guide—they are a call. A call to pay more attention, to slow down, to lean in more. Take for example, Miller’s unique explication of faith: 

Practice faithfully attending to the difficult, disturbing, and resistant truths God sets knocking at your door. Faith is a willingness, story or no, to care for what’s right in front of you. Faith doesn’t wish these difficult things away. It invites them in, breaks with them, and washes their feet. Faith is what you need to persist in truth as your sweet story, regardless of its content, gets overwritten by the real.

Miller’s prose becomes poetic as it makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar. The letters are deceptively simple and perhaps even unremarkable to a devout believer. The table of contents contains one word chapter titles like Prayer, Faith, Temples, Agency, Work, History. In his writing, Miller effortlessly does what the Savior repeatedly asks of us, “Become as a little child.” Prayer, for example, is a “practice of remembering God.” He splits the act of prayer into two parts, talking and listening. Asking God for help with a particular challenge or for advice at crossroads is “important” and “good,” but listening is “imperative” and “harder” (33). You can’t help but want to taste his flavour of prayer: 

Sometimes when we pray and wait in silence, a messenger will come, you’ll hear the voice of the Lord and be empowered to do as God directs. But sometimes when you pray and wait in silence, there will only be silence, and you will wonder where God has gone. When this happens, you will have to make a choice. You’ll have to decide whether to get up and leave or whether to continue in silence. If you choose the first, then you’ll return to the bustle of the world. But if you persist in the second, you may discover something more powerful and more primal than the voice of the Lord. You may discover that God’s silence is not a rebuke but an invitation. The Heavens aren’t empty, they’re quiet. And God, rather than turning you away may be inviting you to share this silence. This is what part of the atonement looks like: sitting in shared silences with God.

While the structure, content, and lens of Letters to A Young Mormon all stand out, the star of the show might be its original language. George Handley, a professor at BYU and a friend and colleague of Miller’s, marvels at “how adept Miller is at using new vocabulary to avoid old and sometimes worn out cliches about the various topics he writes about.” Miller does more than just feed us fish of fresh ideas and approaches; through a renovated glossary of terms, he teaches us how to fish. Instead of talking about the limits and lines of the law of chastity, Miller broaches sexuality by describing it as a hunger, a framing which Handley calls “both a stroke of literary and theological genius.”

Instead of defining sin as misstepping, misbehaving, or missing the mark all together, Letters describes sin as “not just your actions but . . . the story you use those actions to tell.” Miller’s conception of sin as a sort of flawed personal narrative is simultaneously implicating and illuminating:

Like everyone, you have a story you want your life to tell. You have your own way of doing things and your own way of thinking about things. But “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9). As the heavens are higher than the earth, God’s work in your life is bigger than the story you’d like that life to tell. His life is bigger than your plans, goals, or fears. To save your life, you’ll have to lay down your stories and, minute by minute, day by day, give your life back to him. Preferring your stories to his life is sin. 

To understand sin in this way is to decenter “doing the right thing” or the performance of “good deeds.” Instead, living in a proper, true, honest way takes center stage. The concern with sin shifts from the merits and demerits, dark stains on our hearts and hands, to distance or separation from truth, from reality, and most importantly, God. 

Obedience is transformed too as it is no longer an adherence to this capital-L Law that provides metrics for existential success but rather a relationship to the law: A dynamic, vibrant, and flowing exchange that occurs between us and the law. A Miller enthusiast and friend of mine, Charlie Finlayson, described his experience with Miller’s refreshed language of hunger as “help[ing him] realize that the gospel of Jesus Christ is to help us learn how to live, rather than just survive.” It is not only informative language but like all good art, it’s transformative. 

Among the myriad of ways this seemingly small book packs such a mighty punch is that though it was written for Miller’s then-teenage daughter and aimed at her particular demographic, it did as much, arguably more, for the previous generation. Spencer Fluhman, the former director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, which published the first edition of Letters, put it this way:

The language of faith that Adam and I were raised with formed us, conspicuously, but it has proven insufficient as a religious lexicon for many of our children. Adam's Letters translated our generational inheritance for them. For me, his work functions as a bridge between one church-world and another forming in the lives of my kids. He condescended in that book to take their lives seriously, but without being condescending. It was, and is, a resonant masterstroke that has potentially meant more than he intended or anticipated to those of us desperate to pass the gift down the line.

And at least in my case, that gift has been received, unwrapped, and cherished. Because of Letters to a Young Mormon, I felt as a youth that the world was to be embraced rather than feared, healed rather than condemned, and that my faith—forged in Seminary classrooms, overwrought youth conference testimony meetings, and sacred encounters with God’s love—was sufficient to the task.