Over the past few years I've seen a lot of public declarations from people who've left the LDS church. I wanted to make my own public declaration.
Somewhere around April 6, 2002 I had an experience that changed my life. It only lasted a few moments, though I wish it could have lasted longer. And there was a message that came with it.
Let me back up a bit. I was raised in a devout LDS/Mormon home, the fifth child of nine. My father owns a local health food grocery store in coastal southern California. Right there is a clash of cultures that was the norm for me, yet I never felt any tension that's not felt by just about anyone growing up in any faith-oriented home. I was expected and encouraged to go to a church-owned school and a church mission. I can't say I felt any undue pressure from those expectations. Those were things I wanted as well. My parents and community did a great job selling me on how wonderful those things would be. And they were right! I was a Deacon's quorum counselor and president, a Teachers quorum counselor and president, and an assistant in the Priest's quorum. My dad was a Bishop of our congregation while I was a teenager. While those sound like admirable traits and callings, I can't say there was anything overtly extra spiritual about holding those positions of responsibility. Maybe it put pressure on me to set a good example for my peers, but having influence over other males my age is not something I was ever good at, then or now. What I probably was, from my foggy memory, was self-righteous. Maybe, maybe not. The other guys will have to tell me.
Our family vacations had campfires loaded with religious campfire stories and even mini-services on Sundays when appropriate where we took the time to keep the Sabbath day as best we could in the woods and mountains of the high sierras of California. Some of these I still remember as extremely "spiritual" and notably emotional. We had Family Home Evening most weeks, and we had family prayers and "Scripture Time" most mornings.
My paternal grandparents were converts to the church and modern day pioneer immigrants to the USA from Denmark. My maternal grandparents have pioneer family lines associated with Joseph Smith and handcart treks across the plains to the Salt Lake Valley. The stories about how admirable and brave and courageous my descendants were are plentiful.
I attended an EFY camp at BYU and had a number of "spiritual/emotional" experiences there. I remember telling my mom as a kid that I could feel the "spirit" during some of our church hymns. I remember praying to know if the Book of Mormon was true and having "good feelings" while doing so. These are the kinds of things I leaned on for my "testimony" as a kid and teenager and young adult. They were how I "knew" that how I was living my life was good.
As a missionary in British Columbia, Canada I was exposed to more sex, nudity, drugs, infidelity, substance abuse, sex-addiction, and prositution in two years than I'd ever been exposed to in my previous life put together. I had never been offered drugs by anyone at school as a kid or teenager. Everyone around me knew I wouldn't take it. I often joked that I had never been offered drugs or sex until I became a missionary.
One assignment we got from a local Public Relations missionary for the local area, was to scout out the local library for any books about our church, whether they were favorable or not, make sure fictional books were listed in the fiction sections, and make sure that books published by our church were included in the library's collection. I ended up reading things I wished I'd never read, overtly sexual things written by someone who had found themselves in a terrible relationship and blamed the church for it, others who'd found intellectual reasons to leave the church, and still others with attacks on our temples and ceremonies that I couldn't refute since I didn't have access to a temple as a missionary and had only attended a few times before I left.
Yet, I tried not to let those things get to me, so I didn't, mostly. I didn't have a whole story so I didn't have to make up my mind at the time anyway. I'd been exposed to plenty of anti-Mormon stuff as a teenager anyway and most of it had no substance, or was unfounded, or was laced with half-truths (did you know that Joseph Smith renounced the Book of Mormon on his death bed? It took me an hour to realize and remember that Joseph Smith didn't die on a death bed. I'm not the fastest thinker in the world). I was exposed to this all the more as a missionary by well-meaning but mis-informed Born Again Christians and Jehovah's Witnesses, or self-proclaimed Intellectuals. Interestingly, it was the Wiccans and self-proclaimed "Pagans" of British Columbia that could carry on the best conversations and heartfelt discussions about spirituality and the peaceful feelings our church associates with the Holy Ghost.
I once took an article given to me by a Jehovah's Witness as he challenged me to make any corrections to the article and return so we could discuss it with him and inform him of how his religion's publication was wrong. I highlighted every statement that was untrue or partially untrue and by the time I finished the article, between a third and half of the article was highlighted bright yellow. There were just too many things to even address a part of them, and all intermingled with things that were true. A single sentence could switch from true, to false, to true again. I don't mean to attack any other faiths, there is goodness and value to almost all of them and most of the people in them are trying their best to live what they know of God's laws and teachings from their understanding. I was and am the same. But it taught me that trying to pull untruths and truths apart from each other is like trying to pull ingredients back out of soup. Sometimes it's best just to throw it away and start with fresh ingredients, though most people don't want you throwing away their soup. They like their soup because it is theirs and it tastes better than uncooked raw fresh vegetables.
Fast forward a few years. I was going through a divorce that was partly caused by my own mistakes and misdeeds and transgressions. I had spent my entire life and made every choice I could possibly make trying to build an "Eternal Family" the way I was taught, and almost overnight the whole thing came crashing to the ground incredibly fast, unexpectedly, and completely beyond anything I could do. I found myself leaning on a Savior who wasn't physically there, but who I could "feel" in my moments of greatest sadness and loneliness. I came to feel closer to Him than I'd ever known before or than I'd ever felt possible. It *almost* made the whole experience worth going through just to feel the comfort of a forgiving and endlessly loving Savior.
Then a few years later, a bolus of controversy starts surrounding the church regarding it's policies about women, homosexuals, and it's history. I wasn't too emotionally involved in these battles but would engage with others online when I felt the church was being unfairly attacked. There was a lot that was brought up that wasn't new to me (or to the church) and there was some that was new, but had the same flavor as the article given to me by the JW. Many friends and family members left the church over these things and more still leave and are quick and eager to try out those experiences that the church discourages. But the great most of my friends and family in the church have stayed.
It's easy to see the negative and put all of our attention on it, even if it doesn't constitute a majority by any means. When a pond is still and silent and a leaf falls onto the surface and spreads ripples that spread across the water, overall, the pond is still and calm, in fact it's the stillness and calm that makes such small ripples so noticeable. I'm not saying "all is well in Zion," ask any Bishop or Stake President and they will know numerous families and individuals in their congregations struggling, severely, in multitudinous ways, who try to look put-together in public. And they could tell you of the countless more who stop coming to church because of other personal storms.
And our leaders are just regular people, too, with their own problems and shortcomings. I used to think that quitting church because of a leader was so dumb, until I felt the same way. I've been remarried for several years now and we have two wonderful girls. We live not far from my older children and I'm keeping a relationship with them as best as possible despite the very difficult career circumstances it places on me and the severe limit it places on earning and prospering in my professional career. When my new wife and I got engaged, my ex-wife (who'd openly left the church and was preventing our children from becoming members of it) had told my Bishop and Stake President a number of angry half-truths about me that made both of them uncomfortable with approving our application for a temple sealing despite numerous meetings to assuage and even prove my worthiness. We were told we would have to wait for the Sealing Ceremony until things calmed down between my ex-wife and me, while being assured that a former spouse cannot hold-up the process of being sealed to a new spouse.
When we moved to another state, the pattern followed and rather than getting to meet my new Bishop and Stake President as strangers, a primacy-effect had already beat me and I was being called into their offices to defend myself from false accusations as a first introduction. Six months later we moved again because of a change in jobs, this time to Utah to be near my kids, jobless, homeless, my wife pregnant, we were broke, and had only a few extended family members in the region (who were extremely helpful and generous). We managed to get to our bishop first this time and he was ready to approve of our Sealing application but the congregation got divided and re-organized because of rapid growth in the neighborhoods before he could complete the process. The new bishop and stake president were approached by ex-in-laws before we met them. After months of meetings, we managed to convince our new bishop of our worthiness to be sealed and then the ward was divided again and a new bishop assigned. We had to start over, again. Even after we won this bishop to our side, the Stake President refused. For whatever reason he seemed to give more weight to my ex-wife's story over our own far longer than I felt he should, despite proof of our story's validity. We followed every bit of his counsel and advice and direction he gave and still each time our requests send in our application were denied. He gave us reasons and justification for doing so but none of them felt real. In the end, he just "wasn't comfortable" with it. All of our years of prayers and fasting for a righteous desire were not working.
My anger at the situation boiled. I wanted to vent and yell at our Stake President. I wanted to quote his own Handbook to him to convince him that he was doing his job wrong. Here we were doing our absolute best to live the gospel and it's commandments, to have an extremely simple but very important ceremony performed for us. A ceremony that is usually a default for most LDS couples in the U.S.A. getting married, who hardly have to give it a second thought. And here we couldn't have it no matter how hard we tried, for years. I felt my faith end. Completely. My faith in my church leaders was gone. I was free to choose my own way. To live the kind of life I wanted to live. No pressure now. It was scary and exhilarating. I could do what I wanted with no guilt. My life was mine to choose without restraint. I was Free.
So what was I going to do? I was going to think about it, and decide. Were social pressures enough to keep me going? Nope. Were family pressures? No. What about all those other spiritual experiences and good memories associated with church activity? Not important enough anymore. But there was that one memory....
It was that early April morning in 2002 that I mentioned at the beginning. While reading the Book of Mormon as a missionary, marking and underlining any and all references to a Savior in the same way I'd been doing during my prescribed morning study for the past several months, a feeling engulfed me that I'd never felt before. Separate from my body, I felt my soul become engulfed in a blue fire (I don't know why blue, but that's what it felt like) and my soul lit up in what I can only describe as PURE JOY. A taste of a Celestial Heaven. Visibly and audibly, nothing was happening to me, I was just sitting at a desk in a dim apartment near the water's edge in Campbell River, BC, reading a comparatively boring book of scripture that I didn't even understand all that well, but something inside me was ablaze like an Angel of Glory. Not like the other spiritual experiences I'd ever had, and not like any other rush of endorphins or dopamine I'd ever felt from other exhilarating or emotional experiences. Not even like the niacin flushes I'd had from taking vitamin supplements. This was something completely different. It was more REAL to me than anything has ever felt real before. It became my new standard for reality. As if everything I've ever seen, felt, and experienced before in this life on Earth was really more like a fuzzy, hazy, dream compared to what I "seeing" and "feeling" then. And there was a message that came with the feeling. No words were spoken, but they were seared on me somewhere inside; indelible and every bit as REAL as the joy I was already feeling: 1. Jesus Christ is the Savior of the World, and 2. the Book of Mormon is True. Unmistakably, this was the message of the experience. Like my soul had just been branded in the same way cattle are branded with the mark of their owner. Unavoidably, I KNOW these two truths and all I have to do is look inside myself and see those two facts there, permanently.
I've read a lot of psychology, I've studied physiology and anatomy and neuroscience. These are the kinds of things I do when I'm bored. I understand the power and effects of hormones, substances, and neurology. What I felt and experienced does not mesh with any other known occurrence or effect I've ever come across, except for similar experiences shared by other religious peoples, and it's not even very common there. And more often, when people have a spiritual experience, there's no message attached to it except for a general feeling that what they are doing is "good" or "right".
Since then, I have also been branded with the truth that what I know to be the Priesthood -used by our church as an authorized form of the power of God to act in His name- is a real power and force of the universe similar to Gravity, similar to the Nuclear forces and Electromagnetic force. I don't have much control over it but I am an instrument for it's application and use in this world.
When I felt my faith in everything end and I had come to that fork in the road, to act in any way that I felt was right for me, I had to address this experience and how it would apply to my life. Was I going to live in a cognitive dissonance for a while, fighting off and pushing down that burning memory, or was I going to embrace it for what it was and live up to what I'd preached to so many people before? The Gospel and the Church are true, I could not deny it. The people who run it are still just people, at all levels. There is no doctrine of infallibility in the LDS church, but there is a promise that God will not let the head Prophet and President of the church lead the church astray. That is a subtle but important distinction. Countless authors, apologists, and academics spend their time and energy trying to prove and convince others of the falsity or veracity of the LDS church. While I don't enjoy contention and fighting and debate, we need to stand up for right when we can, or, when it's appropriate. So, while some are out there attacking the church, others will contend with them in it's defense. That these debates exist is not proof of anything except that there are passionate and educated people on both sides. As my Molecular Biology professor would repeat often, "Show me the Data!" Don't trust commentary from anyone that has to fill in gaps. Look at the original sources in an accurate context, acknowledge the gaps in the data and draw your own conclusion. (and there are a LOT of gaps, holy cow. Just because I find a long-missing lego piece doesn't mean I know what the original model looked like, or just because I can't find any of the unique lego pieces for a specific model among jumbled tubs of legos doesn't mean it wasn't ever there)
Some will claim that some large mistake or poor policy disqualifies a person for being a prophet or the church from being God's. To that I'll ask: What does qualify a person for being prophet or a church from being God's and who are you to decide it was a mistake? The qualifications are this: Nothing other than being assigned the task by an all-knowing and all-powerful, and all-loving God. I've heard a lot of people claim that God's prophet or God's church would never do such-and-such thing. How do you know what God's prophet or church should or should not do? Are you God and why is your standard the one that God's church/prophet should meet?
I watched a lecture on psychology recently and the speaker promoted the idea that to keep an open mind and find truth, one MUST look at opposing views and consider them equally. I will have to disagree with the "consider them equally" part. If I give equal weight to a lie as I do to a truth, I will end up uncertain and have just as much chance of making a poor choice as a good one. Often, when there are two opposing views about facts of the universe, they are either both partially right AND partially wrong, or one of them is right and the other is wrong. We must consider that possibility, that there can be a right and a wrong, that a voice of opposition might be false, perhaps by accident or ignorance, or perhaps by malicious intent. If I'm presented a story from a stranger about my best friend's guilt, who should I believe? Years of personal experience, or some new guy? If I let someone taint my white paint with a bit of black, it might turn grey, but not because my white wasn't originally white. I get to be the guardian of my own "paint," my own beliefs and knowledge. I can decide for myself if I will accept a proposition or new fact as believable and whether I will include it into my palette as an acceptable addition. If I'm not careful, I'll end up with a muddy brown mess that doesn't hold any of the colors I originally wanted.
What about crazy miracle stories with all sorts of weird cultural oddities? Does every story in our scriptures make sense with all we know? Of course not. These were stories and histories and experiences written by people who only had the perspective and culture they were stuck with, and often written and re-written in such brief detail and description that MOST of what we imagine these stories to convey is really our own imagination filling in the gaps. Or they were told in such a way that we, from our perspective, cannot fully understand them. If there is a God who can influence the elements of the universe into creation, can he not perform feats we cannot understand?
It's only been three hundred years since we learned what electricity is, though it's been there all along. Only a hundred since we understood the structure of the atom and those bits of knowledge have changed the world in the very recent past and are still changing it drastically. Let's not let our current knowledge convince us that we've learned it all or discovered it all. We are not even close. We just barely and finally saw what the surface of Pluto looks like though we've known it was there for 80 years! We have to take into account the perspective, knowledge, and education of the authors of the scriptures and just understand that we weren't there witnessing it. Much like Joshua turning the sun back -instead of, more likely, the earth turning back, or, some other phenomenon that was convincing enough to the people of the time- perspective is *almost* everything.
The power of God is the ultimate source of the Universe, he can do what he wants when it suits his purpose without disrupting the system, or he can disrupt it as he needs to to accomplish his purpose. Stories representing God's love and involvement with his children make the most sense to the people they happened to. They then become symbolic of our own relationship with God through the telling of the story, whatever the details we have. And just like my College Folklore professor often said, "Just because it's folklore doesn't mean it's not true, or wasn't true when it was first told."
Most often we make choices and choose our beliefs based on the emotions and hormones that are influencing our physiology, rather than intellectually, more often than we really want to admit. It's been studied EXTENSIVELY. Some of us have a really hard time understanding that or admitting that. So we find intellectual reasons to back up our choices. We tell ourselves a convincing story and decide to believe it, and it can happen within milliseconds in an unconscious corner of our mind. Our brain wants an explanation for what we are feeling, and when it finds something acceptable it latches onto it. This helps us feel like we are above our emotions, like we are in control of ourselves, when we are not. I haven't ever met a person who was fully in control of their emotions and knowing what I've learned about Emotional Intelligence and human nature, I am worried for anyone that claims they are.
Emotional experiences keep people in their faith just as much as they keep people out of it. We look for confirmation for what we already believe or what we want to believe. I have to accept this as a possibility when I reflect back on that singular moment as a missionary. The moment that my life has hinged on over and over and over. And yet, when I do, there is that indelible mark left on my spirit that stands out miles beyond every other emotional, spiritual, or religious experience I have ever felt. It doesn't fit in, it doesn't match up. I can't do anything with it because it I didn't put it there and I have no power to move it anywhere else. I have to live with it, but between you and me, I'm really glad it's there because it's been a bigger help in my life than just about everything else, and everything good and enjoyable in my life can be traced to that experience. And my strategy for how I've handled every crisis can be traced back to that moment.
There is not much difference between a person who leaves our church just because they don't like -or are uncomfortable- going compared to another person who finds a cleverly worded narrative about our history from someone they trust. Both are leaving for emotional reasons and an emotional dislike of the organization or lifestyle. The difference is what they build their confidence on: physical, emotional, or intellectual comfort. We will all do well to admit the enormous impact that our emotions and impressions play in our lives, even and especially, when false or misled by our senses and environment, both in and out of the church. Academic evidences that seem to either promote or put down my own faith are fun and interesting and worth noting, but in the end, my own personal experience gets to trump everything else. And I get to grant the same privilege to everyone else. Don't be offended if I share my perspective while you share yours.
You can probably guess which fork in the road I took regarding my life, and hopefully you can understand why. I stay with the church not because of any mortal reasoning, not even because of faith anymore (though I depended on faith for a long time), but instead because of a burning memory and a gift of knowledge that I can't claim I deserved, but feel blessed to have received. I do not feel coerced, or guilted into staying. I had a set of facts and perspectives unique to my life to use in making my decision and I am making it to the best of my ability. I do not feel like my freedom and agency and individuality has been trounced or impeded. Quite the opposite. My freedom has never been greater, nor my individuality more pronounced. I still struggle through the muck of life like everyone else. Like a flag in the storm, I am still pounded and lashed at by wind and rain, but I have a fixture, set and immovable that keeps me displayed whichever way I feel pulled. A foundation that keeps me grounded and upright, no matter how much the earth shakes. As long as my memory and brain remains intact, I will keep acting according to what is in it.
About my church leaders and my feelings toward them: In the Leadership Handbook which the church distributes to certain positions of authority in the church, there are policies and guidelines to be followed as much as possible, but there is always an important caveat that in some situations, the leader is allowed to "follow the spirit" (the Spirit of God, or the Holy Ghost) in making decisions. While this is a hard thing to accept, especially when it goes against what we want, it is a vital doctrine, and crucially important to the belief of an actively involved God that we can go to for answers and help for our unique problems. I knew of this doctrine and policy even before I got angry, but in my anger I wanted to ignore it and put heavier weight on written, concrete policies because they would be in my favor. I didn't want to believe that the leader was following the Spirit, because I felt that the Spirit would want us sealed. Whether or not this leader was following the spirit is not my decision or place to say. How could I know? But what I did know as I made my decision, was that God knew what I was dealing with, and this was still God's church. And my greatest chance for long-term happiness in this life, and a sure and certain chance for happiness in the next, was to stay with it.
In the end, my ex-wife eventually stopped wanting to be involved in our sealing application and it was sent through and approved very quickly. We were sealed earlier this year and it was an AMAZING experience for me and my wife, and for our family, and all who got to attend.
We are here on Earth to learn by experience, by trial and error, by faith and uncertainty, in and out of God's church, Christian or not, religious or not. God has simply designated one organization to hold his Priesthood authority and a sprinkling of people here on this Earth to do specific jobs he wants done, even if we don't understand what our job is, entirely. You all are a part of it, whether you want to be or not. And I am part of it, of my own choosing. Happily.
