Letter One
Seek to Integrate
Disciple Scholars
Discuss
Do you worry your faith will be a liability in graduate school?
Talk with a neighbor for a minute.
You are an immigrant
- Your faith is your heritage culture.
- Psychology is your host culture.
- You’ll live in two languages, and they will sometimes clash.
Berry’s four strategies
- Assimilation: take on the host culture; let the heritage go.
- Separation: hold the heritage; keep the host culture at arm’s length.
- Integration: keep the heritage while engaging the host culture deeply.
- Marginalization: lose touch with both.
Wei Chen, in each corner
- Assimilate: “Wayne,” English only at work, Chinese ways left behind.
- Separate: business in Mandarin, a circle of fellow immigrants.
- Integrate: both languages, Lunar New Year and Thanksgiving dumplings.
- Marginalized: at home in neither.
Where are you on the map today?
Scan the code, or go to the address, and place your dot. Nobody sees who you are.
disciplescholars.org/join
Waiting for the first dot…
“Some of you will face pressures to seclude yourself in the forest of isolation. Others will engage wonderfully with the world, but will be tempted to apologize, and back away from the very faith that helped define who you are.”
Elder Clark G. Gilbert (2025)
Apologizers, isolators, lights
- Apologizers engage the world but soften their faith (assimilation).
- Isolators keep their faith but withdraw (separation).
- Lights do both: full engagement, visible faith.
“He always sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites.”
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
“Professional assimilation is tempting because it can bring you more credibility in your chosen field.”
Letter One
“You can’t really be shining light if you’re really just a mirror reflecting back whatever image is cast your way.”
Letter One
Assimilation’s quiet forms
- Compartmentalization: faith on Sunday, the discipline’s norms the rest of the week.
- Naïve syncretism: the gospel retold entirely in secular terms (“Americanized Chinese food”).
- Undercover conversion: professional norms quietly become your real values.
Separation’s forms
- Culture-war mindset: scholarship and faith both subordinated to the fight.
- Spiritually-affirming pseudoscience: spiritual fads, “far less likely to be corrected.”
- Fundamentalism (Letter Five): rejecting scholarship for rigid certainty.
Integration’s counterfeits
- Cultural eclecticism: mixed customs, with the heritage’s deeper loyalties quietly traded away.
- Self-serving integration: faith against psychology when that’s fashionable, psychology against the Church when that wins acclaim.
“Your double heritage and dual concerns with the secular and the spiritual require you to be ‘bilingual.’”
President Spencer W. Kimball (1976)
“The [Latter-day Saint] scholar has his citizenship in the kingdom, but carries his passport into the professional world—not the other way around.”
Elder Neal A. Maxwell (1976)
“Direct engagement with the discipline can protect you from engaging in sloppy scholarship.”
Letter One
Discuss
“Maslow is just eternal progression.”
Integration, naïve syncretism, or something else? How would you tell?
Principles and actions
- Principles and actions
- Resist assimilating into the discipline’s secular defaults. If you uncritically adopt the profession’s assumptions, your work may become indistinguishable from that of your secular peers—and you may lose the distinctive insight your faith gives you. Do not forget your mother tongue of faith.
- Resist isolating from the discipline’s intellectual life. Withdrawal from the discipline prevents you from contributing to the field. Engage with rigor, humility, charity, and intellectual hospitality—but above all, engage. Seek to learn from every theory and perspective, and do not let your faith become an excuse for intellectual slothfulness.
Write back
Where do you feel the pull to assimilate, or to separate? Next time: Letter Two, “Acknowledge Your Assumptions.”