Are You Experiencing Ex-Mormon Stereotype Threat?

Recently the concept of stereotype threat has made it onto my radar.  I think this particular concept might possibly explain some of the source of the anxieties I've been experiencing in relation to the church lately (e.g. I've been having panic attacks every time I have to interact with a ward member or discuss church-related issues with family members). Read on if you think you might relate...

 

What is Stereotype Threat?

Stereotype threat is the anxiety or concern caused when a person is in a situation that has the potential to confirm a negative stereotype about their social group.

The concept of stereotype threat made it onto my radar last week when NPR did a really fascinating story about how stereotypes can drive women to quit science. The NPR story reported about the recent findings of a group of researchers (Mehl and Schmader) from the University of Arizona about the gender gap in math and science. To study this phenomena, the researchers attached something called electronically-adapted recorders (EARs) to both male and female scientists. The EARs recorded 70 soundbites of conversation a day for 30-second intervals every 12 minutes. This provided the researchers with a good random sampling of the way male and female scientists talked with other male or female colleagues.

Follow-up interviews with the test subjects found that female scientists often reporting feeling disengaged about their work after having a a conversation with a male peer. Disengagement is a key predictor of the possibility that someone might leave a career, so the scientists dug into their recordings to find out what was causing this phenomena. Listening to the recordings, the researchers found:

When female scientists talked to other female scientists, they sounded perfectly competent. But when they talked to male colleagues, Mehl and Schmader found that they sounded less competent.

One obvious explanation was that the men were being nasty to their female colleagues and throwing them off their game. Mehl and Schmader checked the tapes.

"We don't have any evidence that there is anything that men are saying to make this happen," Schmader said.

But the audiotapes did provide a clue about what was going on. When the male and female scientists weren't talking about work, the women reported feeling more engaged.

For Mehl and Schmader, this was the smoking gun that an insidious psychological phenomenon called "stereotype threat" was at work. It could potentially explain the disparity between men and women pursuing science and math careers. ...

When there's a stereotype in the air and people are worried they might confirm the stereotype by performing poorly, their fears can inadvertently make the stereotype become self-fulfilling. ...

"For a female scientist, particularly talking to a male colleague, if she thinks it's possible he might hold this stereotype, a piece of her mind is spent monitoring the conversation and monitoring what it is she is saying, and wondering whether or not she is saying the right thing, and wondering whether or not she is sounding competent, and wondering whether or not she is confirming the stereotype," Schmader said.

All this worrying is distracting. It uses up brainpower. The worst part?

"By merely worrying about that more, one ends up sounding more incompetent," Schmader said.

Mehl and Schmader think that when female scientists talk to male colleagues about research, it brings the stereotype about men, women and science to the surface.

You don't have to be a woman or an ethnic minority to experience the anxiety caused by stereotype threat. Everyone is a member of some social group for which a negative stereotype exists. Which leads me to the next section of this essay...

Negative Stereotypes about Ex-Mormons

Ask any current or former member of the church and they will confirm for you that Mormons have very clearly defined cultural stereotypes about ex-Mormons. There's the standard "Sunday School" answers for why anyone could leave the church: they left because they were offended or they left because they wanted to sin.

Here's a few more:

• They left because they never had a deeply rooted testimony in the truthfulness of the gospel. They didn't receive a spiritual confirmation of the truth. They were converted to the church and not the gospel.
• They became too focused on things that were not essential to their salvation.
• They stopped doing the things that would invite the Spirit into their lives (reading the scriptures, praying, going to the temple, etc.).
• They were deceived by Satan's lies (anti-Mormon literature, the philosophies of men).

And on and on.

And, of course, you also have the stereotypes about how people behave after leaving the church. There's the stereotype about those who "leave the church but can't leave it alone," the angry, bitter apostates whose only desire is to fight against the church and attack faithful believers. Or there's also the idea that people leave the church and descend into utter depravity and misery.

My purpose here is not to refute these stereotypes, although I do find them inaccurate and offensive. My point is just to mention that these stereotypes exist---and, like all stereotypes, they have the effect of reducing a complex group of people and their individual experiences to a biased, flattened caricature of reality.

So, Do Ex-Mormons Experience Stereotype Threat?

As I've mentioned earlier and in previous blog entries, I've been experiencing anxiety when I'm around my ward members or when I have to talk about the church with family members. I experience problems like increased heart rate, dizziness, and stress hormones flushing through my body. I've also developed a fairly mild case of social anxiety disorder---a chronic fear of being judged by others or being hyper-aware of my actions when with a group of people. It's causing me to avoid social situations. (Like I can't even go for a walk outside with my husband without feeling anxious about encountering a neighbor approaching from a distance.)

I'm starting to wonder if stereotype threat could possibly explain this phenomenon. I realized this during a Facebook conversation I had today. I was talking with someone about how to manage visiting teachers and she gave me the advice to just be real about who I was. She talked about how having visiting teachers has actually been a good way for her to help believers deconstruct misconceptions about ex-Mormons. I responded:

I really, really want to be like you and show Mormons that you can still be an ethical, pleasant person with genuine reasons for believing in the things you believe or acting the way you act. You know---a human being.

I think you're absolutely right that the best approach is to just be respectful and authentic at the same time. I think the real challenge for me is that I'm suffering from "stereotype threat," which is the anxiety that gets produced by imagining that other people will view you in a negative way because of your social group (in this case ex-Mormonism). What I mean is that while I am comfortable with the new life path I've chosen for myself, I anticipate that everyone else will be highly critical and judgmental about it (which has definitely been the case with some people). So, I basically have come to expect the worst possible reaction from everyone about my decision to leave the church. And that makes me feel extremely emotionally vulnerable and unsure about being my honest, authentic self around them---for fear of disapproval. Unlike a person's gender or race, you can "hide" your religious beliefs and I've been passing as a believing Mormon to avoid displeasing people for so long that it's been difficult adjusting to just being out and real about it all, you know?

One thing that helped me to manage my anxieties in my first few months away from the church was to repeat a mantra to myself: "I will not take personally the reactions that other people may have about my decision to leave the church." You can't control how other people respond to you and it is futile to try to please everybody, but it can be hard to let go of the desire to make everyone happy sometimes. You can't let other people to cause you to abandon your sense of self.

I'll get there eventually!

An Analogy About the Correlation Program

One of my many academic degrees (too many) is in Film Studies. A few weeks ago, a friend of mine (who happens to be an ex-Mormon) had seen an indie film that she absolutely loved, but which wasn't in wide theatrical release and wasn't making very much money. She messaged me on Facebook to ask me whether my film studies classes discussed why mediocre or awful movies make a ton of money while truly good films often fail to turn a profit. The other day, I happened to re-read my reply to her because I was sending a message to her on Facebook. I was somewhat amused by it and since it was relevant to the content of this blog, I thought I'd re-post it here.

***

What really is to blame for the fact that truly good movies (the ones that challenge our thinking and broaden our perceptions of the world) consistently fail to rise to the top of the box office while the Shrek 2s and Transformer 2s of the world take their place as all-time box office record-setters? We do explore questions related to this in film classes. It's a complicated question to answer because it takes a certain level of knowledge about film history and the mechanics of the current film industry.

My personal theory is that capitalism is to blame. For example, let's take your average big-budget, A-list Hollywood movies---the ones with all the expensive marketing designed to get butts into seats on opening night. These movies are calculated to appeal to large numbers of people (the mainstream movie-goer), which means they must appeal to the lowest common denominator of audiences who buy movie tickets. (Typically, the lowest common denominator is the pre-pubescent teen male. If the low brow, young male audience likes it, producers are willing to take a gamble that it will be broadly accessible to other audiences too.)

What that means that nearly every film goes through the "sausage machine" of Hollywood before it makes it to the theater. Producers usually reject original properties for tried-and-true standards with built-in audiences. ("Yay! Another Twilight or comic book movie!") Screenplays get all their originality edited out. ("We musn't offend!") And films get screened before test audiences and edited like crazy until they barely resemble the original screenplay. Then, they market the hell out of them. Because they know that even films that pretty much suck will still turn a decent profit after making the full rounds in international theaters and DVD sales (Tron 2, anyone?)---as long as they get enough butts into seats on opening weekend, since that's the only real benchmark of success. They don't care if you brought your mind into the theater with you or not. All that matters is whether you brought your wallet.

The best analogy I can make about this process is to compare it to the church's Correlation program. Anything weird or quirky about church history or doctrine gets edited out over time to appeal to the lowest common denominator: the new convert or investigator. Anything that goes through the sausage machine of Correlation comes out looking clean, orderly, and entirely unoffensive---but ultimately empty. But that doesn't matter as long as your butt's in the pews on Sundays. (Oh, and that you brought your tithing slip with you. Downtown malls don't build themselves, you know!)

Both Hollywood and the church think that we're happy to have a diet of popcorn and soda (because that's what test audiences have told them they prefer). But everybody knows this diet is neither sustaining nor satisfying. And those audiences/church members that are smart enough to realize it are finding other ways to fill the void. The real threat to Hollywood isn't pirated DVDs. And the real threat to Mormonism isn't "anti-Mormon literature." (Notice that both of these threats share the Internet in common.) The real threat is the system itself---and the empty sense of dissatisfaction created by its own hollow lack of substance.

***

In all seriousness, the correlation program is pretty close to being at the top of my list of deeply felt concerns about the church. I literally wept while listening to Part 2 of Daymon Smith's Mormon Stories interview in which he described his dissertation about the Correlation program. It's hard to describe why it made me so emotional, but it bothered me on a very personal, gut level. It felt like the Correlation program was almost intentionally designed to make the church a place that was inhospitable to intellectuals like me. It made me feel profoundly alienated and alone.

And it furthermore made me realize that the church wasn't the way it is today as the result of any kind of calculated conspiracy by the individuals at the top. (Not that I ever really believed it was anyhow.) Rather, the fault lies in the institutional system itself. I recognize that nearly every institution is deliberately created by human beings to serve some noble purpose or meet a need of some kind (Correlation included). But after a point, most institutional systems begin to take on a life of their own, transcending and defying the conscious intentions of any individuals that belong to the institution. That's what the Correlation program has become. To state it bluntly, I feel that it is an anti-intellectual, patriarchal force designed to keep church members under control by shutting down any productive, evidence-based dialogues that could effect change (and thereby potentially threaten the organization in its current form). It is the institutional system itself that is reprobate.

Up to that point (this was around the summer of 2010), I had believed I could find a way to remain in the church even though I no longer accepted its truth claims. I felt that perhaps I could be a catalyst for positive cultural change in my own small way. But the more I learned about the Correlation program and its incredibly far reach, the more I began to realize that trying to be a change agent in the church was like being Don Quixote. I do admit there is a certain beauty in the quixotic pursuit of noble, foolishly impossible dreams. And in that same vein, I actually have a lot of admiration for people who preach the gospel of Middle Way Mormonism. But at the end of the day, I think it's absurd to try to fight a windmill. And my level of tolerance for the absurd is fairly low these days.

Strategies for Handling Church-Induced Anxiety

In my previous post, I wrote about how I was experiencing anxiety attacks whenever I had to discuss church-related topics with my family or ward members. I went to a therapist yesterday to get some advice about how to handle an attack when it occurs and also some long-term solutions for dealing with family members. The session was helpful, so I thought I'd pass on some of the guidance here.

How to Handle Anxiety Attacks

The first key is to recognize when an anxiety attack is occurring. As you pay better attention to your body, you'll start to see patterns in the situations that cause the anxiety to occur. You'll also begin to notice which symptoms you first experience when the anxiety attack is setting in. For me, it's a rapid heartbeat and I start to feel the first sensations of stress hormones.

When you start to feel the anxiety attack beginning, you need to take steps to resolve it as soon as possible. The longer an anxiety attack keeps going, the more it will spiral further downward into negativity---kind of like the snowball effect.

The first thing you need to do to resolve the anxiety attack is to consciously breathe in and out and slow your breathing down. You need to remind your body what relaxation feels like. Breathing is a cue to your body to cool down and not get upset. It helps your body's rhythms slow down and not get caught up in an intense rhythm. (It's harder for adrenaline to spread through your body when your heartbeat is down, for example.) Closing your eyes could also help.

The second thing is to get your mind focused on the present by noticing your environment. Anxiety attacks are basically caused by fears about the future that gradually crescendo and build until they become more and more extreme. So, by distracting yourself and thinking about the present, you don't allow your mind to develop fears that are centered in the future. So, look around your environment and pay attention to the tiny details of the room. Focus on the colors of the leaves of your houseplant or the patterns on the fabric of the chair you're sitting in or things like that. Live in the present. Another thing you can do is squeeze your fingers. Hold your thumb with your opposite hand and count to 5 or 10 and do that with all your other fingers until you feel better. (This works great for kids who have woken up from a nightmare too.) Take as much time as you need to be in this state.

After you've calmed down, take some time to reflect on the root cause of the anxiety. You don't have to do this right away. You can wait a few days. But when you are ready, ask yourself: what are you really afraid of? Is it based on a rational fear or an irrational fear? Think about it in terms of probabilities. For example, is it fairly probable that my father is going to disown me and never speak to me again. (No.) Is it fairly probable that he won't love me any more? (No.) And just keep talking yourself down from there until you find the border between your rational fears and your irrational ones. We spent a lot of the session talking about my irrational vs. rational fears.

Long-Term Solutions for Dealing With Family Members

I felt kind of proud of myself for realizing I needed to set boundaries before coming to the therapy session, but it was helpful to talk with the therapist about how to actually do it anyway.

The basic principle to keep in mind is to set a firm boundary but to show kindness and love at the same time. Decide what that boundary is and express it without any equivocation. Then follow it up with an expression of love. She also recommended writing this down in a letter since that is an easier way to communicate bad news to family members.

So, for example, my panic attack earlier this week was prompted by a phone call from my dad setting up a lunch appointment, which almost always means he wants to lecture me about the church. This has happened somewhat frequently since I announced to him I was having problems with the church. I need these anxiety-inducing discussions to stop.

The basic idea I need to communicate to him is: I am inactive from the church and that is non-negotiable; I don't want to discuss it. But I still love you and I want a relationship with you. (That way I have set a clear, firm boundary but am expressing kindness and empathy at the same time.)

That being said, you need to be cautious about over-empathizing with your parents. My therapist said that you shouldn't let their anxieties cause you to surrender your boundaries. You need to still protect your own sense of self.

She said that I need to be aware that when people hear bad news like this, they will likely go through 2 or more of the Kubler-Ross Stages of Grief. You may not always see them experiencing these stages, but it is likely to happen. (On the bright side, I can totally empathize with them since I experienced a lot of the stages of grief when I was going through my faith crisis.)

It's painful to know that you will disappoint someone, to know that you will cause them grief. But is it more important to make your parents happy or to do what you need to do in order to be happy? Obviously, you need to do what is best for your own mental health and well-being. You can't remain in a state of stress and anxiety just to please other people. And that might mean that you will cause some pain for the people you care about. But eventually, both you and they will reach a state of acceptance.

Redrawing Boundaries

My journey out of Mormonism has sometimes been a mixed bag, bringing both positive and negative changes to my life. One of the unfortunate negative changes is that I occasionally experience anxiety attacks whenever I have to talk to someone in my ward or when someone in my family tries to talk to me about the church. It's especially worse when someone stops by my house unannounced from my ward to talk with me.

I recognize on an intellectual level that the anxiety I experience is somewhat irrational. Nearly all of the time, these meetings turn out to be no big deal and are fairly harmless. The people I interact with usually have a genuine concern for my well-being and are not out to attack me. Nevertheless, I still experience sensations like a rapid heartbeat, dry mouth, mild sweatiness, and my body flushes with stress/attack hormones every time I have one of these encounters. My thoughts become intensely negative when someone from the ward sets up an appointment with me. My mind immediately jumps to the worst possible conclusions about their purpose for meeting with me and how the meeting will go. I always anticipate the worst. For this reason, I make an effort to avoid my ward members as much as I can and I try to dodge any inquiries my family makes about the church.

Obviously this stuff isn't good for my mental or physical health and it's not possible to avoid all of these encounters. For that reason, I'd like to learn how to better manage these anxiety attacks. One thing I've been doing is engaging in some self-reflection in order to understand what is at the root of this anxiety. I'm sure there's lots of different reasons why I experience anxiety: my propensity for pessimism, perhaps some mild social anxiety, and a fear of not being in full control of the situation (since I have a strong need to feel in control). But I recently had an epiphany that a big part of it comes from the concept of boundaries.

Most healthy people recognize the value of creating reasonable boundaries for themselves. They set boundaries for what they will and will not share about themselves with other people until there is a certain level of trust and intimacy in the relationship. They recognize that there are some things which are public and some things which are private. They set boundaries for what they will and will not do in certain social situations. Healthy people learn how to communicate to other people about those boundaries in ways that will hopefully not make other people defensive. It's a balancing act between being honest and showing respect. It's about being assertive and having a good sense of one's self in relation to other people. Lastly, healthy people also show respect for other people's boundaries. When someone tells them what their boundary is, they try not to cross it. They know that no means no.

I've realized that when I was a Mormon, I had no sense of how to create healthy boundaries for myself. That's partly because there's potentially a thin line between keeping some things private and lying. I definitely think that it's wrong to deliberately deceive or mislead people, particularly when withholding the truth will do harm to others. But I've also learned that there are times when it is fully appropriate not to disclose information about yourself unless you feel comfortable doing so. There are just some things that are really nobody's business until they've earned your trust---especially things like your private religious beliefs and practices. My experience in Mormonism might be different from others, but I internalized that it was dishonest and immoral to keep things about myself private, especially my beliefs. That's partly because Mormonism strongly emphasizes the public declaration of your private beliefs in church settings such as testimony meetings. Missionaries boldly knock on doors declaring their testimonies to anyone who will listen. You're also expected to fully disclose private beliefs or practices in counsels with bishops and other religious leaders with whom you may or may not have a personal relationship. To refuse to be fully candid with a religious leader would be looked upon as a sign of guilt, of having something to hide.

There might be an element of gender training at work here too, but I also internalized that it was wrong to say no if someone asked you to do something. In Mormonism, you are strongly encouraged to say yes to every calling that is extended to you. You are expected to help out whenever you are asked to serve and to do so without any complaint. You covenant in LDS temples to consecrate anything and everything that the church asks from you with no exceptions. If you are a woman, you are taught regularly that it's your job to sacrifice and give service to your children and your husband, putting their needs ahead of your own. In other words, there's not very many times when it's appropriate to say no in church culture. It's seen as rude, rebellious, or selfish to set boundaries for what you will or will not do. When people ask, you give. No boundaries. No exceptions. No personal customization. No negotiations.

I'm sure there are some fully active, believing Mormons out there who have figured out how to set healthy boundaries for themselves in spite of church culture. But somehow I wasn't one of them. Only now do I understand that it is healthy and reasonable to know your limitations and communicate them to others. Only now do I realize that it is healthy and normal to keep some things private. But I only understand it on an intellectual level; my emotions haven't quite caught up yet. I still feel anxiety, stress, guilt and shame when I set and enforce my personal boundaries. It still feels wrong to me on a gut level. It's probably going to take a while to de-program myself. But hopefully I will get there eventually.

What Happens If There Are Any Opposed?

I was fascinated to read this post on the Ex-Mormon Subbreddit by a user named JohnBrownsBody yesterday. I have no reason to suspect it's a fabrication, but I suppose it's possible. Either way, it makes for an interesting story.

Here's What Happened

The basic gist of the story is that this 17-year-old boy is an atheist whose parents still strongly believe in Mormonism. The boy's family traveled to Utah for Spring Break to see General Conference last week and brought the 17-year-old along for the Saturday afternoon session at the Conference Center.

Of course, during the Saturday afternoon session, the officers of the church are sustained by the congregation. When Uchtdorf read the names of the prophet and apostles and asked if there were any opposed, this 17-year-old raised his hand. After the sustaining votes were completed, two security guards motioned to the boy that he needed to come speak with them.

He followed them into a private room where they asked him for his name, his full address, the name of his ward, and the name of his bishop. They wrote all of this information down on a notepad. They interviewed the 17-year-old and asked him why he raised his hand to oppose the sustaining votes. He replied that he did not think that Thomas S. Monson and the apostles were prophets, seers, and revelators and so he raised his hand to indicate such. They asked him whether he came to the Conference for the purpose of voting in opposition. He explained that he came because his parents brought him.

The two security guards bore their testimony that they thought Thomas S. Monson was a great man and that they sustain him fully. They also had a discussion about what his parents must feel about him at this moment. According to the boy, the security guards listened to his response and then said: "Well, it looks like you're going through some hard times, I hope you get over it. We aren't trying to intimidate you or force you to believe something, but I hope you change your mind." The 17-year-old basically told them that probably wasn't going to happen.

The security guards frowned and then one of them silently took him out of the room. As they were leaving, the other guard stated: "We'll be in touch."

My Response

I'll give the security guards the benefit of doubt to say they were just doing their job, enforcing a policy that has been laid out for them by the organization they work for. To be fair, the security guards mentioned that this doesn't happen to them very often, so they were probably surprised and inadequately trained about how they were supposed to respond. And, oddly enough, on one level it's even nice to have all those rumors validated: if you raise your hand to oppose a leader, someone will actually take a moment to listen to you in confidence (which is undoubtedly supposed to be the intention behind that policy).

That being said, it's really difficult not to see the power dynamics underlying this entire exchange. Although the security guards emphasized that they were not trying to intimidate the boy, the entire context of the exchange suggests exactly the opposite. When a 17-old-boy is being ushered into a private room (with no parental consent or supervision, mind you) by a pair of older, male security guards---complete with suits and earpieces, how can that situation be interpreted as anything but intimidating? It evokes the imagery of a terrorist or suspected criminal being interrogated by the authorities. This is no heart-to-heart discussion with a personable ecclesiastical authority about genuine doubts and concerns that a young teenage boy is experiencing. This is a power play made by people in positions of authority against someone who has very little power in comparison. The fact that they took down his name, address, and ward information and said, "We'll be in touch" sends that message very clearly. I applaud the boy for his youthful chutzpah, but most other ordinary individuals would have felt fairly shamed and demoralized after such an experience. (Which is the whole point, right?)

The whole situation just speaks to what I've said earlier on this blog about the church failing to provide a healthy environment for independent thought. The fact that the church asks the question "Are there any opposed?" when officers are sustained superficially suggests that there is room to disagree with the sustaining out of good conscience. But we’ve all been in a meeting where a forgetful counselor neglects to ask if there are any opposed---for the very reason that no one really expects anyone to oppose it. Church members are habituated and socially pressured into voting unanimously in favor of what the leaders have proposed---which means that the possibility for dissent is ultimately only an illusion. [1] Then, when a 17-year-old calls them on their bluff, the fact that he is treated with suspicion and intimidation (as opposed to mutual respect and the open exchange of ideas) is rather telling, in my opinion.

The last thing I want to say about this is that if I worked for Kirton and McConkie (the Church's law firm), I would immediately advise the church to change their policy about how to treat dissenting votes in General Conference. I recognize that after the Cody Judy incident, the church needs a security team on hand to ensure the safety of the General Authorities. That being said, these issues need to be handled without violating the civil rights of suspects. Although I doubt this boy's parents will press charges, these security guards should have been accompanied by a lawyer who was getting this boy's parents to sign a ton of waivers for privacy, detainment, and future silence in order to avoid a lawsuit. That's because this is not only a clear example of how the church has little tolerance for criticism and dissent, but a potential violation of the boy's civil rights.

Footnotes

[1] If I'm not mistaken, from a strictly legal perspective, church members are not actually official members of the church anyway. Although the church retains membership records, the members don't actually have any voting rights in the organization/corporation like they do in other organized religions. (At least that's what I remember from the Mormon Stories interview conducted with Daymon Smith.) So, the whole voting thing is fairly farcical to begin with.

On Maltheism from Wondermark

I really enjoyed this series about maltheism from the comic strip Wondermark, so I thought I would re-post them here. (This re-post is done with permission, by the way.) It's an interesting thought experiment, especially after my previous post about God. (Incidentally, I've been emailing back and forth with a friend about that post for the last three months. It's been an interesting discussion.)

Anyhow, I hope you enjoy the strip!

You've Been Charged With Hypocrisy: How Do You Plead?

As a New Order Mormon (a Mormon who does not believe in the church but still attends), I get a lot of ex-Mormons and other Mormons who don't really understand why my husband and I are still attending church. Sometimes they argue that we're being hypocritical by continuing to attend church and support an organization that we no longer intellectually affiliate with.

That's a fair charge. And you know what? I plead guilty. I do often feel like a hypocrite and I experience a great deal of stress and cognitive dissonance every time I interact with the church in any kind of official capacity or whenever I interact with TBMs (which is fairly regularly).

So, you might be asking things like how can I sleep with myself at night? Well, the reason is that right now I prioritize other things over my personal integrity and the consistency of my public appearance. Right now, I'm placing a higher priority on my relationship with my family, friends, and neighbors than my personal integrity. Personal integrity is of course important to me, but right now it's being placed on the back burner next to weightier matters such as my relationships with other people.

Let me state up front that we intend to ask for releases from our callings and gradually slide into inactivity between the months of April to July. It's all part of the plan, so don't get too worried.

Allow me to explain our past and current reasons for continuing to attend church as they've evolved over time:

1. We wanted to give our family members time to get acclimated to the idea that we would eventually leave the church. The whole time we were struggling with our faith crisis, we kept it strictly between ourselves. We didn't tell our bishop or our family members because we wanted to work through the whole thing on our own. If we ended up continuing to believe the church was true, then no harm would have been done. If we ended up losing our faith, then we wouldn't hurt anyone else in the process. (Going through a faith crisis is incredibly painful and I don't feel that I have the right to foist that upon anyone else. If someone is already in a faith crisis, I'll be happy to help them work through it---and I have no personal commitment to whatever the outcome of their faith crisis is. Everyone has to decide whether their life is better inside or outside of the church for themselves---and I'm not going to judge them either way.)

After we had concluded that we had officially lost our faith in Mormonism and were going to leave the church, we didn't want to scare our family by just suddenly leaving the church. Our faith crisis had happened over the course of a year and had involved long, intense moments of deep introspection. But to an outsider, it would appear as though we had made a very sudden and rash decision. We knew that would confuse and hurt our family members. And since they are very important to us, we wanted to gradually get them used to the idea that we might leave the church. We hoped this would subtly communicate that we had not made this decision in haste and that we had given the church a fair chance (notwithstanding the 30+ years of giving the church a fair chance prior to our faith crisis). Now that more than a year has passed since we first clued our parents into the situation, the time is ripening for our departure.

2. We wanted to build a social network outside of the church. One time when I was in the middle of my faith crisis, I took a look at the statistics of my social network using Facebook. At the time, 82% of my social network was LDS. And of the 50 or so individuals who comprised the other 18%, only 1 or 2 of those were very intimate, close relationships. (I plan to do a longer blog entry discussing the unique social network of Mormonism, so stay tuned!) This was a bit of a problem for me because that meant that if I were to suddenly leave the church, I would be jumping into a new world with almost no social support. I'm an introvert so I suppose it wouldn't have been that bad; nevertheless, it didn't seem very healthy to me. We wanted to make sure we had some good friends outside of the church before we left it completely. Nowadays, I'm happy to report that we have established some very good relationships with ex-Mormons and never-Mormons that are richer and more meaningful than our relationships with people inside the church. Again, the atmosphere for our departure is getting better.

3. We want our departure from our ward to be a quiet one. I must admit, I do see the appeal of this particular approach to leaving the church:

But setting aside the sheer coolness factor behind leaving the church in a noisy (and speedy) way, the "live out loud" approach advocated by John Larsen (and others) is just too costly for me.

We like our house and we don't want to move. Nearly all of our neighbors are members of the church and we don't want to burn any bridges with any of them. If we are seen as being full-blown apostates to our neighbors, we will begin to be treated differently by them because we'll be viewed as a threat. We won't be able to maintain our relationships of respect and trust with them. Our kids might not be allowed to form friendships with the other kids in our neighborhood. And worst of all: we'll lose all of our baby-sitters.

We think it's better to be viewed by our neighbors and ward members as inactive. If they want to conjecture that we stopped attending church because we were lazy or something, I'll be fine with that. I'll know in my heart that it isn't the truth and that's enough for me. I'm happy to sacrifice my control over my public reputation in order to maintain peace and good will with my neighbors. (Besides, I think it's silly to imagine that I ever had full control over the way I am perceived by others to begin with.)

4. I prefer to keep my religious beliefs private so that I don't hurt the people I love and so that I can keep myself from being hurt. I've come to find profound meaning in Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall." The poem is about a pair of farmers who go about repairing the wall that marks the boundary between their property. The narrator of the poem says, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." On one level, he thinks it is silly to build and maintain the walls that separate their farms---especially in places where the wall is unnecessary, such as in their orchards. I agree with the narrator's perspective. I think honesty (the removal of walls) is preferable. I wish we could all just be real with each other, that we could all live without facades. Then we could realize that we are all pretty normal human beings and that we're not so different from one another. We could work through our issues together and reach a mutually agreeable understanding about our differences.

Last weekend, I was talking with a non-traditional Mormon who had just discovered earlier that week that her younger brother hadn't believed in the church for nearly 4 years, but had kept it to himself the whole time. That's the cost of building walls: you can't help each other in moments of pain and dissonance because you're too busy hiding from one another.

But, at the same time, I see the wisdom behind the narrator's neighbor too. The narrator's neighbor simply states: "Good fences make good neighbors." He has a good point. I've been burned quite a bit by being honest with my parents about my faith crisis. We've had some intense exchanges that have resulted in tears and have caused week-long spells of deep depression for me. I've realized that I can't be fully honest with TBMs because it hurts both them and me in really painful, almost unbearable ways. I would love it if only they could understand me, but I think there is some futility in trying to force that understanding prematurely. I think that some day, when we're ready and our relationship is in the right place, I'll be able to be honest. I'll continue to hope and have patience for that day---and if it never comes, I'm resigned to that possibility. But for now, I'm building a few walls to keep both my family, friends and myself safe from pain. I've set some boundaries about what I will and will not share about my personal life. And that's because I want to minimize the collateral damage associated with my departure.

Right now I just focus on expressing myself in forums like this blog or on Mormon Expression or private Facebook groups. And that's good enough for me. I don't think it's unreasonable to keep some aspects of your life private from some of the people around you. That's how all healthy human relationships usually work: you wait to reveal intensely personal things about yourself until you have developed a certain level of intimacy and trust in your relationships. You can still maintain a healthy, casual relationship with people without telling your neighbors, or your co-workers, or your former college roommates everything about your personal religious beliefs.

5. It's hard to reset your life to zero all at once. It should be noted that up until 2 years ago, I had fully bought into Mormonism for most of my life. I sincerely believed in it. I kept all of its rules. I was heavily active in the church because I loved it. It was a very big part of my life.

When something is an integral part of your life, you can't just press the "erase" button and expect it all to go away without a hitch. It has taken quite a while to de-program Mormonism out of our lives. For example, we kept praying over our food long after we stopped believing in prayer because it was a life-long habit. Eventually, the only way we could get ourselves out of that habit was to replace it with a new habit: the Japanese ritual of saying "Itadakimasu" before eating. And that was something as silly as what to do before eating---let alone bigger issues like drinking and what not.

We started by dipping our toes in the waters of ex-Mormonism, and now we're taking gradually wading into the deep end as opposed to jumping head-first into the water all at once. We're getting experienced enough now to where we can probably get rid of the flotation device and start swimming on our own now.

6. I don't want to burn any bridges permanently. One thing that's important to keep in mind about my faith crisis is that it has resulted in being pretty comfortable with uncertainty. I've realized in a very profound way that it's possible for me to be wrong---dead wrong---about really important things. It's a very humbling experience. But I've come to feel okay with it because I've realized that I'm making the best decisions and reaching the most reasonable conclusions with all of the imperfect information that I currently have available to me. I believe it's important that I never keep myself from feeling too certain my current position is right because I've learned that my sense of certainty is almost always misplaced. I want to make sure that I'm always questioning myself and that I never stop searching for truth and more information. I'm comfortable with remaining flexible, with a willingness to update my perspectives in the future as more evidence becomes available. As the famous economist John Maynard Keynes once said when he was accused of hypocrisy: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

Maybe things will change in the future as more information becomes available to me or as my life circumstances change. Maybe I'll move on to a Fowler Stage 5 and become one of those Mormon Stories/Mormon Matters people. Or maybe I won't. Either way, I want to be humble enough to give myself room to change my mind in the future. So, I don't want to burn my bridges with the church in the process.

***

At the end of the day, I've reached a place where I love myself and I love everyone else---no matter where they're at in their own personal faith journey or where they stand on the spectrum of Mormonism. I believe that everyone is making the right choices for themselves based on their own personal circumstances. I respect their right to decide the path for themselves in their own way and on their own timetable. I just hope that other people will extend me the same courtesy.