Changing Leaves, Changing Callings, Changing Feelings

This image is from a page of my journal earlier this year. It's a graphical representation of how I "outgrew" Mormonism, if you will. I recently shared it with the Mormon Expression folks as part of an episode on which my husband and I appear:

So, one Sunday about a month and a half ago, my husband and I were playing a video game in our living room when there was a knock at the door. It was the 2nd counselor in the Bishopric, stopping by for a surprise visit. It made me nervous instantly. My pulse went up; my muscles tensed. What was he doing stopping by our house for a surprise visit?

It turns out he wanted to give us a new calling to serve as Primary Teachers to the 6-7 year olds. They've been having lots of problems staffing the Primary and so we had been substitute teaching quite a bit the last year. I guess they decided to make us official members of the Primary staff. We asked the 2nd counselor if we could step into our bedroom and discuss whether we should take the calling or not.

The discussion was a vigorous one. I had previously made a promise to myself that I would not accept another calling so that we could gradually transition out of the church. But then when push came to shove, I chickened out. I didn't want to deal with the consequences of "coming out" about being non-believers at that exact moment. The timing felt too sudden. At that immediate moment, I just wanted the 2nd counselor to go away and saying yes seemed like the easiest and most direct way to make that happen. Besides, I kind of liked the 6-7 year olds, so it couldn't be that bad.

Now that a month has gone by, I feel that working in the Primary has been a mixed bag. On the one hand, it's a lot more work to prepare a lesson every week. (I'm a perfectionist, so I can't just phone it in---which makes this calling sometimes very time-consuming and occasionally stressful.) But on the other hand, it's actually been easier to just go back to the basics. I feel like I can teach general humanistic principles in Mormon terms without compromising my integrity too much. And it's been really nice not to attend Sunday School or Relief Society---where the lessons range from being mind-numbingly boring (at best) to offensive (at worst).

As a result of being in Primary, there have been times when I've started to feel somewhat complacent about being at church---and sometimes even comfortable. But just when I start to feel that way, something always seems to come along to take me out of that state, to remind me that I don't really belong here because I'm not a believer.

For example, last Sunday we were assigned a new home teacher who I'll refer to as "Brother W." Brother W. is an uber-Mormon. Very much the TBM, seminary-teacher type. He's probably the only guy in the ward who actually does his home teaching. So, why was he suddenly assigned to us? It could be just a benign decision, but part of me feels paranoid that I've said too much, that I've made it onto somebody's radar, that we're being "watched over." It's irrational and silly, but I can't quite shake the feeling I'm being scrutinized by the people around me. I was really paranoid at church this last week, watching what everyone said to me, how they looked at me, etc. I was frustrated with my own heightened sense of self-consciousness, honestly. It felt like being a teenager again.

Anyhow, since I no longer teach Relief Society, I think I'm going to delve into the archives of the Gospel Principles lessons I taught in the past and continue working through those in my blog. I'll try to shoot for one lesson a month as my free time permits. So, stay tuned!

Coping with Bad Relief Society Lessons

My experiences attending church are often very bipolar, meaning that they go from one extreme to another. For example, I'm usually really bored in sacrament meeting (or too distracted trying to wrangle kids). But a few weeks ago, my favorite professor at BYU happened to be our high council speaker and it was simply awesome to hear him speak again. Best sacrament meeting I've been to in a long time.

I find that fluctuations in my mood swings are most commonly caused by Relief Society. Typically I'm most positive about the church just after teaching my own Relief Society lessons---perhaps because I am largely in control of the discussion. And a few weeks later my mood crashes after a particularly bad lesson. I've had two "zingers" in the last two months that have been difficult to cope with.

The first one was a 4th Sunday lesson a few weeks ago when we discussed Elder Packer's very infamous Conference Talk "Cleansing the Inner Vessel." If you read the edited Ensign version of the talk, it really says very little about homosexuality at all. It says perhaps a little bit about pornography and mostly talks about the importance of being chaste. As a teacher, you wouldn't have to talk about homosexuality at all. Not my teacher! She jumped right in and talked about homosexuality from the get-go. About half the lesson was spent doing some heavy media-bashing (a big pet peeve of mine since I am a film scholar) and the other half of the lesson was spent gay-bashing. Some of the worst anti-gay comments were things like: "We cannot tolerate that which kills us," and "The idea that homosexuality is a born trait is the biggest lie of our time." Ummm... no, it's been pretty well proven to be caused by biological factors. The lesson was just horrible, frankly. There was no civility. No compassion. No tolerance for nuance. No room for thoughtful dialogue.

Later that night, I tried to engage in a dialogue with a sister whom I have a fairly good relationship with. (She made some of the more flagrant comments during the lesson.) I put out the feelers to see if there would be any way to have a thoughtful conversation about some of the points she brought up. Although the conversation was very respectful, it became quickly apparent to me that I was on a fool's errand because she was incapable of changing her mind about this issue. It depressed me greatly.

It's been about two months since that episode and I was really starting to recover. I was starting to feel good about being in the church for a while. And then---WHAM!---I got hit by another awful Relief Society lesson last Sunday.

It was a lesson about modesty based on General Relief Society 1st counselor Silvia Allred's Ensign article entitled "Modesty: A Timeless Principle for All." Here's a few highlights:

• My favorite quote from the teacher was: "When you dress immodestly, you become walking pornography." First of all, I think a more accurate term would be erotica, not pornography. In my mind, there's a big difference between the two and it bothers me when they become conflated.
• Another great comment was: "We need to make sure our little baby and toddler girls don't wear those little strappy sun dresses, because at what age are you going to tell them they can't any more?" Seriously, there was a Sugar Beet article parodying that mindset once and so it really made me laugh to hear that kind of comment.
• And there were several comments that were just generally catty and judgmental. Comments about being "shocked and dismayed" at what people wear to the temple ("I can see her garments through the slit in the back of her dress!"), comments about men taking off their garment tops to mow the lawn and setting a bad example for boys, comments about how teenage boys say girls with expensive jeans are "high maintenance."

There were a number of things that bothered me about the lesson. One is how lessons about modesty are purely targeted at women. Incidentally, the teacher said that this talk was chosen by special request of the Bishop as a follow-up to the Stake Youth Chastity Fireside a few weeks ago. But my husband informed me that the Priesthood had a talk about achieving balance in their lives instead. (The Elder's Quorum counselor rode his unicycle as an object lesson!) When I heard that, I became truly upset. The stark double-standard is all but too apparent. I agree that a woman who dresses provocatively can have a Pavlovian physiological effect on men that is partially beyond their control. But it's still a two-way street at the end of the day. Taken to an extreme, it turns into that "Well, she asked for it" mentality that bothers me to no end. Having seen the devastating effects that rape has had on two women in my class this semester, I can guarantee you that no woman asks for it. Men bear a responsibility to exercise their sexual impulses in healthy and considerate ways and these lessons do not promote that mentality.

Well, the point of all of this is to say that I have good days and bad days at church. It's all an emotional roller-coaster. An ex-Mormon friend of mine theorized that leaving the church is like going through a divorce. Everyone will go through at least one of the stages of grief during the process. If it isn't obvious from my chart above, I'm in the bargaining stage. I try to find ways emotionally to make it work, but then they all implode on me eventually. I'm not sure how much longer this will be emotionally sustainable.

The Double Consciousness of the Non-Believing Mormon

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

             ---W.E.B. Dubois, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" from The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

I want to borrow W.E.B. Dubois's term double consciousness in my essay today. My intention in using this term is not to imperialistically appropriate black identity or to diminish the very real conditions that this term was originally coined to describe. Rather, I want to describe a peculiar sensation that I feel as a non-believing Mormon: a strange sensation of simultaneously being both inside and outside Mormonism, of belonging to both worlds and belonging to neither. I use Dubois's term because I just can't seem to find a better term to describe this condition. So, I use it as an homage to Dubois's keen insight in describing a condition that I can empathize with---even though I am not black myself.

As I've stated before, I no longer believe in Mormonism. It might seem odd, but this last year as I've made my intellectual journey out of Mormonism, I've found that I express my testimony in terms of percentages---meaning the percentage of myself which sincerely believes in the possibility that Mormonism is the true church of God. For example, prior to the October 2010 General Conference, I remember distinctly feeling that my belief was hovering at 30%, meaning that 30% of me still believed there was a chance that the LDS church was the true church. Today I would place that number at a mere 2-3%. In other words, I feel fairly confident that the church's truth claims are improbable.

And yet I still attend church and outwardly appear to be the exact same person I was a year ago. This duality of orthopraxy vs. orthodoxy (conformity in practice but not belief) leads me to feel a great deal of inner conflict. It has also caused the strange sensation of "double consciousness" that I want to describe in this blog.

Most of the time I consciously self-identify as a non-believer. But there are occasionally times when I talk about Mormonism with believing members in which I must perform Mormonism in order to maintain the appearance of being a believer. That is to say, I adopt the codes and conventions of speech that Mormons use to describe and perceive the world.

On some level I am consciously aware that I am only performing Mormonism as I am speaking with these individuals, that there is a dissonance between who I seem to be and who I really am. But sometimes as I'm talking, there is suddenly a strange transition in which this dissonance fades away and I start to feel like I really do believe, like I'm the old me---that I'm just putting on a familiar, comfortable old coat I haven't worn in long time. Here's some specific examples:

• My husband's family came to visit us a few months ago. As we were sitting around watching the kids play with toys in our basement, we started to discuss what my brother-in-law (who is a member of the high council in his stake) might say the next day in his talk about teaching children the gospel. At one point, the conversation turned to a discussion about the Atonement, and I began to argue very strongly that we should remember we are ultimately saved by grace and not by works alone. And I really meant it at the time---even though I had ceased believing in Christ's Atonement several months prior to that conversation.
• I most frequently experience this sensation of double-consciousness when I teach Relief Society. Two Sundays ago when I was teaching my lesson about the Word of Wisdom, I got to the section of the lesson in which I asked them to list some words or phrases that would describe the temple. Then I read the line from the manual that says "our bodies are temples" and asked them if they ever use those words to describe their own bodies. The discussion we had was phenomenal. We discussed how women's perceptions of their bodies evolve as they grow from childhood into adolescence. There were some really good discussions about how we can counteract the negative messages about women's bodies in the media or at school. We talked about how parents can teach their children to find the balance between caring about their appearance but not obsessing over their physical imperfections. Everyone was weeping when it was over. I got hugs and pats on the shoulder when the lesson was over. I got phone calls later thanking me for the lesson. And it's hard for me to say that I didn't feel sincere when I helped guide that discussion and talked about the difference between the message of "the world" vs. the Lord (a binary construct I have long rejected). Despite not fully believing in what I was saying, my eyes got moist during that discussion too---and moistened eyes tend to be a signal of sincerity.

At any rate, it's a very odd sensation. And I don't think it will ever go away necessarily, even when I leave the church. I've known other ex-Mormons who have described this sensation too. I remember reading a comment by a man on the Exponent blog that said something to the effect about how he was a gay, Marxist, feminist atheist who hadn't attended church in a decade. And yet he said that part of him will always feel Mormon. I could see myself experiencing that too. When you've been raised in a certain religious culture and you've sincerely believed it at one point, it's probably largely impossible to fully leave it behind, to fully extract it from your identity. (Nor am I sure that I would want to.)

Although up to this point I have been describing a different kind of double-consciousness than the one that W.E.B. Dubois used, I also experience some of what W.E.B. Dubois was talking about when he coined the term "double consciousness." He meant it to refer to the sensation of being despised (and internalizing that contempt so that you begin to despise yourself on some level) while at the same time knowing that you are not a despicable being.

As discussed in an interesting article entitled The Believer and the Apostate, most religions treat apostates as contemptible. By necessity, apostates must be marginalized by the institution in order to minimize the threat of apostasy to the members who still believe. One of the strategies religions use is to argue that the apostate couldn't possibly have fallen away through any kind of rational process:

This strategy seeks to reduce the believer’s dissonance by assuming that the apostate fell away due to some unacknowledged sin, or some other flaw on the part of the former adherent. It is extremely important, for the believer’s state of mind, that the blame for the apostasy must fall squarely on the shoulders of the apostate himself. It is quite literally unthinkable that the fault could lie with the system itself. This line of reasoning must be avoided at all costs.

Our church is no different. We are told by our leaders that the only reasons people leave the church is because they are sinful, prideful, or easily offended. This is most certainly not true of all cases, as those of us who have come to doubt the church's claims through academic means are fully aware. And yet we non-believers cannot help but see ourselves through that lens of apostasy that other members of the church would apply to us. This has lead me to have a heightened consciousness of my public actions. I find that I look at what I do "twice," if you will. I look at my actions from my new, non-believing perspective and simultaneously look at it from a true-believing Mormon's perspective. ("If I say X or do Y, they will think Z about me.") And that does influence how I behave. It's strange because, on a strictly logical level, I realize how futile it is to try to control other people's perceptions of me. But, on an emotional level, I still care about what believing Mormons think about me.

My dad once sent me a quote by John W. Gardner that said something about how one of the lessons you learn in maturity is that a) most people are neither for you nor against you, they are just thinking about themselves and b) no matter how hard you try, some people will not like you---a fact that feels overwhelming at first, but eventually can become empowering. I think this sensation of double consciousness---the internal conflict of my inner duality---will hopefully lead me to internalize these truisms of maturity that Gardner spoke about. So, at least some good might come out of the resolution of this inner conflict.