The 'Unshaken': What to Do When Your Faith is Shaken (with Jared Halverson)

The seven-year-old sat down on Christmas day with a brand new journal and made his first entry, a list of everything he had received that morning. One gift stood out. Next to the Bible on his list, the boy wrote that it was his favorite present. He spent the rest of the day hunting for verses about the birth of Jesus and marking every one he found with a red pencil.

That boy was Jared Halverson, and he never outgrew the red pencil. Today he teaches ancient scripture at Brigham Young University, chairs the Book of Mormon Academy, and runs Unshaken, a YouTube ministry that crossed one million views within six months of launching and now reaches people wrestling with their faith all over the world.

In a recent episode of Why We Believe, host Nathan Gwilliam sits down with Jared to trace the road between that Christmas morning and that ministry. It runs through a low-baptizing mission, a divinity school filled with arguments against belief, and a marriage tested by illness.

Wired for Scripture

Jared grew up in a part of Los Angeles he describes as very diverse but very devout. His closest friends included Catholics who went to Notre Dame for the same reason he went to BYU, several Jewish friends, a Hindu friend, and born-again Christians, one of whom now teaches theology at an evangelical school while Jared teaches religion at BYU. He spoke at a Catholic church in high school, and he credits those friendships with giving him patience and gratitude for the goodness in other religious lives.

His direct line runs back to Waldensian converts in Italy, a family he calls the first in that country to join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He says nearly every branch of his family tree was filled with seekers of truth, an inheritance that, as he sees it, wired him for spirituality and a deep love of scripture. He began daily scripture study as a ninth grader and says he can probably count the days he has missed on a hand or two.

His mission call sent him to Puerto Rico, one of the lowest baptizing missions in Latin America at the time by his account, where people were open to a first conversation and rarely open to more. Leadership callings pushed the natural introvert to teach missionaries instead of investigators, and somewhere in that pivot the self-contained scripture scholar was turned inside out and became a minister. Lose yourself in service to others, he learned, and you find a better version of yourself.

Inside the War of Words

Jared did his doctoral work at Vanderbilt in American religious history, in a city he says claims the title of Protestant Vatican. The deeper he went, the narrower his focus became, until he landed on the fight over scripture in American history and, beneath it, the rhetoric used to pull people away from belief altogether. His dissertation examined Thomas Paine's attacks on Christianity.

What he found underneath centuries of anti-religious writing was persuasion. Religious faith cannot be proven, he points out, and it cannot be disproven either, so the battle is fought with words. He compares it to the great and spacious building in Lehi's dream. Nobody wades across the river to drag believers away. The mocking only works if you decide to drop the fruit yourself.

The study left him with more admiration for people who hold on to faith without much societal support, including Joseph and Emma Smith, and it left his own testimony stronger than when he arrived. He entered grad school asking God to make him more useful. He came out equipped for a ministry he could not yet see.

The Gym Membership, Not the Day Spa

Jared has a nickname for his father-in-law: Job 2.0. By Jared's account, the man lost his wife when Jared's future bride was eight years old, lost a son a few years later, and along the way lost both his business and his home. So when Jared put the question to him directly, had he ever been angry at God for any of it, the answer carried the weight of experience. Of all the attributes of God, his father-in-law told him, the one he is most impressed with is divine restraint.

The way Jared unpacks it, we signed up for the gym membership, not the day spa membership. When we feel crushed beneath the bar and the Lord's hands hover right there without lifting it, Jared reads that as a vote of confidence. God takes our growth seriously enough to let the weight do its work. Adversity, he says, is the gravity of life, and he is grateful for the spiritual muscle it builds.

This Is Exactly What I Signed Up For

Jared's wife has carried hard things her whole life. A hereditary blood condition made every one of her pregnancies high risk, a fact the couple only learned during the fifth, when a doctor told her that five children with no miscarriages should have been impossible. There have been thyroid problems and stretches with four blood clots at once. Jared once told her their life felt like living in the shadow of Vesuvius. Enjoy every day, because you never know.

During one hard season she apologized to him. She was sorry for what she was going through, sorry the family felt like six people in a handcart he was pushing alone, sorry this was not what he signed up for. Jared stopped her. If a Hollywood wedding signs up for better and for worse, for sickness and for health, he told her, then an eternal temple marriage is built of stronger stuff. She was not slowing him down. She was sanctifying him.

Her faith is what sees her through, he says. She stepped away from the Church at 15 and came back at 20, and her conversion reshaped who she is. Through every physical, mental, and financial strain since, the one setback their family has never faced is a spiritual one.

Unshaken

At the University of Utah Institute, Jared built a course that took the hardest questions in Church history head on. Word spread that nothing was off the table. Thirty students became sixty, then a hundred, until four or five hundred people were filling a chapel class that spilled into the gym. His office became an open door classroom with a teacher to student ratio of one to one.

Then, as he puts it, a worldwide pandemic pushed him off the cliff. In March 2020 he launched a YouTube channel called Unshaken, and within six months it had crossed one million views. Between the channel and the Unshaken Saints podcast, his verse by verse scripture study now reaches people in faith crisis around the world.

Ask him why he pours so much of his life into other people's faith and his answer is simple. It is the one thing that has gotten him through his own. The seas and the storms and the winds and the waves are all around us, Jared says, but Jesus is on the back of the boat. As long as he keeps the Savior awake beside him, there is nothing to fear.

Key Takeaways

Jared Halverson's story is not really a story about scholarship. It is a story about an anchor. A testimony anchored in Jesus Christ bends under trial but never breaks. Hardship is not God abandoning us; it is His confidence in who we can become. A spouse's faith can sanctify a marriage in ways ease and comfort never could. Studying the attacks against faith can deepen conviction when Christ stays at the center. And the Savior does not remove the storm; He stays in the boat through it.

Thank you for reading this week's blog post inspired by the Why We Believe show. If you are interested in more stories like this, you can check out our other blog posts and episodes at WhyWeBelieve.com.

Follow the Why We Believe Show: Website: WhyWeBelieve.com | YouTube: @WhyWeBelieveShow | LinkedIn: @Why-We-Believe-Show | Instagram: @WhyWeBelievePodcast

Follow Nathan Gwilliam: LinkedIn: @NathanGwilliam

Follow Jared Halverson: Website: Unshaken.org | YouTube: @Unshaken | Instagram: @UnshakenSaints