When Friends Ask Me Why I Left Mormonism

Today I received an email from a distant friend who had just learned from my family members that I have left the church. Her letter was warm and expressed empathy, but her primary purpose in writing was to "get me back on the straight and narrow path," as she put it. This was my reply:

Thank you for your concern. I am of course unhappy to hear that my life choices have caused my family members to experience pain and grief. However, I must live a life that is true to my own beliefs and convictions. Simply put, I have realized for myself that the church is not true and it is not what it claims to be. This realization came from several years of intense study and deep introspection. I will not go into detail to describe to you how I reached that conclusion because I don't want to be accused of trying to hurt you or "lead you astray." But let me be clear that I am quite certain for myself that the church is not true. [1]

Again, it upsets me to hear that my life decisions make other people upset. I do not like to cause other people to suffer. But I cannot live a false life just to make other people happy. I need to live a life that is consistent with my personal beliefs for my own well-being---even if others do not approve of my decisions. I tried to live the Mormon life for many years despite not believing in it. That was a mistake. It caused me to experience intense depression and severe anxiety to pretend to be a believer when I was not. I needed to leave Mormonism in order to have peace of mind. It was not easy to leave, but I feel a lot happier outside of the church than I did when I was inside.

I will continue to be your friend if you would like me to. I will continue to treat you with respect and warmth. I would hope that you would extend me the same courtesy. Thank you.

Generally in these kinds of conversations with friends, my goal is to be clear and honest about my reasons for leaving without going into a lot of detail (because I don't want to cause the other person to get too defensive). Since these kinds of conversations can be a game-changer for some relationships, I usually try to make it clear how I will continue to act in the relationship in the future, i.e. with continued respect and kindness. I tell them that I would hope to be treated the same way in return. If necessary, I sometimes add a "boundary" (like a clear behavior request).

Family members are a little different. In the first place, it's fairly rare for a family member to want to discuss my relationship with the church directly and openly. But when they do approach me, I tend to be less direct in those kinds of conversations. For example, when my sibling who is on a mission bears testimony to me in an email, I usually don't respond to it directly and I tend to change the subject. Since sibling relationships have much higher stakes, I would prefer to have those conversations in private and face-to-face where I can communicate with love and respect. In other words, my goal with those kinds of conversations tends to be to forestall discussion until the conditions for a conversation are more ideal. Honestly, I'm also fine with avoiding the topic and just letting it be the proverbial elephant in the room.

I'm not sure about the ideal way to handle these conversations. I don't really think there is an ideal way when both parties disagree so fundamentally about the key issues. Especially when it would take several days/months/years of library research to get to the point where a meaningful exchange of ideas about the church could occur.

Most people haven't done the scholarly groundwork to really have an in-depth conversation with me about polyandry, the theodicy, Biblical history/archaeology, church history, Book of Mormon/Doctrine and Covenants/Pearl of Great Price textual criticism, freemasonry, etc. etc. etc. I'm not saying that to be elitist; I'm just saying that until people have done their homework to make sure we're all having a conversation on equal terms with equal access to the same sources of knowledge, then we're not very likely to have a productive conversation. So, usually my goal is to try to communicate that I still love and respect the people in my life, while at the same time remaining true to my own sense of self. If someone does decide to take me up on the library challenge, then we can have a dialogue. But I'm also content to let the status quo remain.

Footnotes

[1] Sometimes people from other faith traditions read my blog. As an FYI for those individuals, Mormons frequently repeat the phrase "I know the church is true" when bearing testimony of their belief in Mormonism. This binary phrasing often strikes outsiders as being oddly absolutist, but it is basically shorthand for the set of beliefs that comprise the theology of Mormonism (and whatever that means to the individual expressing it).

Things I've Said About Mormon Topics Recently

Used with permission from xkcd.com

This is just smorgasbord of comments that I've made in a few other forums (fora?) recently.

My Relationship to the Church

In response to an inquiry about my situations, thoughts and feelings about the church:

For me personally, the most difficult thing about the LDS church is that I feel like it wants to have a parent-child relationship with me. (The institution is the parent and I am the child.) In essence, it's an infantilizing force. Now that I'm a 30-something, I'm ready to graduate beyond "gospel principles" and wrestle with the more problematic aspects of the church as a mature adult. As an academic, I place a high value on 1) independent thought, 2) developing empathy for people who are different from you or who may disagree with you, and 3) the ability to recognize that no issue is purely black and white, that nearly every issue is more complex than you initially thought it was before you began to examine it in more depth. I believe that thoughtful, well-researched dialogue (argumentation) is usually the best means to this end. It's a messy, uncontrollable process, but, at the end of the day, it is one which produces better people and institutions once they have gone through that crucible. Unfortunately, the correlated, authoritarian structure of the church is not conducive to producing an environment in which thoughtful dialogue can occur (or even a type of person who is capable of that kind of mindset). As such, Mormons like me and my husband are going elsewhere for our spiritual and intellectual stimulation.

On McNaughton's Art

In discussion with a friend on Facebook about Jon McNaughton's claim he is being censored by BYU:

Oftentimes I find that Mormon culture is an extension or exaggeration of American's conservative culture at large. I am intrigued by the conservative impulse to read an "attack on conservative values" into what seems like a fairly a benign administrative decision. (It reminds me of the attack on Christmas that you hear about on Fox News every December.)

I think that framing the issue as an "attack" is meant to function as proof that one's particular religious and political beliefs are ordained by God. The logic is that if something is from God, then Satan must obviously want to destroy it. Therefore, the existence of strong opposition to your cherished beliefs is further proof that your beliefs are of divine origin.

Unfortunately, what these kind of "attack" paradigms really do is just create a red herring to distract us from any kind of meaningful, critical dialogue about the real issues at hand (e.g. does selling McNaughton's art mean that BYU endorses his political values and does it therefore constitute a breach of the church's politically neutral position, should BYU try to be considerate of a diverse range of political beliefs on its campus, analysis of the aesthetic value of McNaughton's artwork, etc.)

For me personally, I remember going to the basement of the BYU Bookstore to buy my husband some lab goggles and seeing McNaughton's painting so prominently displayed. I distinctly remember feeling a profound sense of alienation when I looked at it, a deep sense of how much I didn't belong in a culture that celebrated a painting like that. I never complained to anyone about it, but maybe someone else who had a similar experience did say something.

Perspectives on Inactive Single Women

This next one was in a comment on a blog entry I wrote nearly three years ago about why 20-something single women go inactive. It's in response to a recent comment from a reader who said she left the church because she was tired of the strict family culture of her parents, which was fueled largely by their Mormon beliefs:

A whole lot has changed in terms of my relationship to the church since I first wrote this blog entry three years ago. I'm going through a phase of transitional Mormonism where I am painfully aware of the church's "warts" that were completely invisible to me up until now. Some of those warts have been too big to ignore and have caused me to wrestle quite a bit over what I want my relationship with the church to be in the future.

As part of this transition, I've been hanging out with a lot of liberal Mormons, New Order Mormons, Liahona Mormons, inactive Mormons, ex-Mormons, etc. And I've discovered that the Mormon community is far more diverse than I could have EVER imagined. I used to think of ex-Mormons as angry, bitter folks who just want to rebel or sin, who are so prideful that they are easily offended by something a church member or leader did. I used to define the world in terms of Mormon, ex-Mormon, and non-Mormon. I used to think that a Mormon was someone who subscribed to a particular orthodoxy and orthopraxy (strictness in belief and practice).

I could not have been more wrong. Mormons, ex-Mormons---and all the many other shades of gray in between---are an incredibly diverse group of people. And they all have genuine reasons for believing and acting the way they do. Every single one of them. They're not being prideful. They're not ignorant. They're not sinful. Far from it. In reality, they're all decent human beings who are taking the course of action that makes sense to them in light of their life experiences and all the information that is available to them.

The experiences you shared in your comment make a lot of sense to me in terms of explaining why 20-somethings are leaving the church (and despite my previous comments, I think that the 80% statistic might not be that far off from the truth).

A few semesters ago, I received an email from the parent of one of my college students that was completely inappropriate. The parent told me he was convinced his 20-something daughter had been lying to him about attending my class. He demanded that I tell him whether or not his daughter was attending my class regularly and wanted to know what her current grade was. I emailed him and said that it would be a breach of the student's privacy to share that information with him, but I would be willing to meet with both him and his daughter if she gave her consent. (Incidentally, the student had not been attending my class for some time---and I never heard from either him or the student again.)

The problem with this kind of parenting is the locus of both morality and control is in the parent. In a my-way-or-the-highway model of parenting (a strict, authoritarian, father-knows-best model of parenting), then, as Jane Nelson says, "it becomes the adult's responsibility to be constantly in charge of children's behavior." She writes: "The most popular form of excessive control used by parents and teachers is a system of rewards and punishment. With this system, adults must catch children being good so that they can give rewards and catch them being bad so they can dole out punishment. Who is being responsible? Obviously it is the adult; so what happens when the adult is not around? Children do not learn to be responsible for their own behavior."

It makes sense that a lot of Mormon parents would try to be controlling parents because that is essentially the relationship the church currently has with its members: a parent-child relationship in which the church is the father-figure who tells us what to do and provides for our needs in return for our obedience (social needs being chief among them). The problem is that the church becomes the locus for control and morality---in other words it fosters a dependent relationship in which its members are not free to think for themselves, to act for themselves, and to define morality for themselves through their own experience and insights. This, to me, is one of the most disturbing aspects of the contemporary correlated church. And I don't begrudge anyone who chooses to leave that kind of an institution or that kind of a family.