Ever since the new essays dealing with more complex bits of Mormon history appeared on lds.org, almost daily I encounter facebook statuses and posts in private groups of people reeling, overwhelmed and disoriented, unsure of what to do. These are good people, people who have devoted their lives and their talents and their faith to the Church, many of them deeply orthodox. Their statuses are, for me, an unsettling echo of the statuses of many of my more liberal and progressive Mormon friends last summer when Kate Kelly and John Dehlin were facing Church discipline. It seems it’s been a hard year for Mormons of most stripes.
For a while I didn’t look too closely at the statuses. They reminded me of the numbness and shock I felt, over a decade ago before social media existed, when I pored over books in the Harold B. Lee library shortly after taking out my endowments as a younger, pre-mission-age single woman at BYU. I didn’t know then where to turn, whom to talk to. When I did bring up the information I found in those books to close friends and family – secret “spiritual wivery” and polyandry, blood atonement, racist pronouncements said over the pulpit in the name of the Lord – even the least dogmatic immediately told me not to worry about it or not to read it. My protestations that I wasn’t reading anti-Mormon materials but historical documents and books written by LDS scholars fell on deaf ears, and, even more unnerved, I realized that this was not something I could talk about with any of my LDS friends. It was many, many years before I did. My faith transition was achingly alone.
And so, when John Dehlin issues a request, as he frequently does, for people to offer their advice and stories for how they handle their own faith transitions, I find myself wondering what advice I or any one of us can give.
It took me a long time to reorient my relationship to Mormonism, a relationship that continues to evolve. As I’ve contemplated what Mormonism is to me, and as I’ve observed the frequent pain and anger that accompanies many of us who experience the sense of loss and disillusionment that comes from transitioning away from orthodoxy, I’ve noticed something: So many lose their beliefs in Mormon doctrines, their faith in the singularity of Mormonism’s capacity for salvation, and their sense of safety and connectedness in community. So many have similar responses to this loss – feelings not just of anger and betrayal, but of hopelessness, of fear that this lifetime of accumulated experiences, of missions and marriage and motherhood and service, has somehow just lost its meaning and value. Feelings of purpose snuffed out.
I can’t help but feel that such existential pain is itself rooted in Mormonism’s teachings. For some reason certain binary constructions linger on even after faith has disappeared. Maybe on some level it is easier to move away intellectually and emotionally from Mormon orthodoxy than it is to reject one of its most fundamental binary premises: “Either it’s all true or it’s the biggest lie ever perpetrated upon humankind!”
My one thought for those enduring a faith transition is this: reject that binary. I think that it’s likely that we must put it down and move away from it as we discover and shape our new paths, whether in or out of the Church. Even if the Church is not “true” – whatever your take on truth – your life and your experiences – your truth – is your own and cannot be dissolved away. Your spirituality, your relationship with divinity whatever it may be, your lifetime of memories of songs and scriptures and family time – these things have shaped you and will always have place in your life. You have the right to claim their meaning; to imbue them with meaning, or to discover their meaning and value for you. No one person or organization, especially not the Church, has the right to take that away from you. Even if, as the maxim states, it is “the biggest lie,” still your own truth, your own life narrative, stands. You don’t have to accept a premise that appears to have the ability to strip your life’s story of its meaning. That binary – that it is all true or all false – stands outside the truth of you. You have the right to claim your own narrative, including your past in the Church, and especially your future, wherever it may lead.
This is so good, Galdralag! I particularly appreciate your concluding point, about how giving up belief in the Church being “true” in whatever sense doesn’t require that we give up our right to interpret or draw strength from experiences associated with it. Wonderful post!
I definitely often find myself on the other end of a binary. It’s hard to get rid of that black-and-white thinking! I was recently thinking about the whole “by their fruits ye shall know them” and Alma’s “good seed” ideas and feeling confused. I know a lot of people who are really good Mormons, but these same people sometimes can be really adamant about things that are hurtful. So which fruit/seed are we supposed to go by? Even though I can step back logically and say, “Every human has flaws,” I sometimes get stuck wanting the clarity that comes with that old black-and-white thinking. You’re right that being able to find and focus on the positives is a great power to have.
Great post! For me, the reason that letting go of the binary true/false paradigm was so hard was because it had become the support of my “shelf” for so many years.
As more and more challenging topics confronted me, it was really the idea that it had to all be true or false that allowed me to continue placing items on the shelf. If I’d prayed and received a witness about something, then EVERYTHING else HAD TO eventually fall into place… I just needed patience.
Dismantling the binary approach to the Church meant having ALL of those things coming crashing back down, and having nowhere to put them while trying to sort through them in a calm and reasoned manner.
I imagine I’m not the only one that not only believed that principle, but used it as my primary support in the early stages of my faith crisis. One of the things I most hope to do for my kids is to help them avoid that crash by helping them reject the “binary paradigm” from the start. I think that all of the issues I have and still have with the Church would have been so much simpler to deal with from that perspective.
I have nothing to add, but just wanted to say thanks for writing this. To put it into Mormonese, “I needed this today.” 🙂