I Couldn’t Resist Happiness

I’ve often seen the inoculation model proposed as a way to equip people to deal with challenging aspects of the LDS church. The basic idea is that if you initially encounter the difficult things about Mormonism in a context that’s friendly to the church, you’re much less likely to get freaked out when you run across them elsewhere. I don’t know how well that works for everyone, but for much of my life I felt that to some extent that dynamic had been true for me. Maybe not always the friendly context part, but definitely the finding out earlier rather than later part. At the very least, by the time I hit midlife, I felt that I was in some sense inoculated. I never had the experience described by many people I know of stumbling across major things as an adult about which they had previously been unaware, and that shook them to the core.

That’s not to say, of course, that there weren’t things that shook me to the core. It’s just that it all started so early for me. And it didn’t get started because I stumbled across something critical of the church. Rather, my questions and angst got sparked simply by my lived experience of attending church every week and observing the extent to which women were secondary. I was the girl in Primary who demanded to know why women didn’t get the priesthood, and the motherhood answer didn’t work for me at all. I was having the beginnings of a feminist crisis by the age of 12. As the years went by, other issues also started to deeply bother me—the extreme authoritarianism and what felt like flat-out prophet worship, the anti-intellectualism, the insistence on faith-promoting history. I was a freshling at BYU when the September Six happened, and that was a very bad time for me.

But this is the thing. Because the religious turbulence began so early for me, I think there’s a way in which it eventually started to feel normal. Expected, even. Every so often church issues would throw me back into crisis, and the crises were painful and difficult, but they weren’t particularly surprising. That’s maybe not quite what the usual inoculation narrative is getting at, but I think it’s something similar. And for all the angst I felt, there were some advantages to beginning early with a rejection of any idea that the church was perfect, or didn’t have blind spots, or would never hurt anyone. In addition, I was exposed to the progressive Mormon world fairly early on—I went to Sunstone for the first time when I was in high school, and as a teen I obsessively read current and back issues of both Sunstone and Dialogue. I also read every book about Mormonism that I could find in my parents’ basement, which was an extremely eclectic collection, ranging from Rodney Turner to Hugh Nibley to Eugene England to random books by GA’s. I even read the entire anti-Mormon literature collection of the Orem Public Library when I was about sixteen (to be honest, I was somewhat underwhelmed; it tended to come from an evangelical perspective that just didn’t resonate with me). And for all the issues that I couldn’t manage to make any kind of peace with, I was at least aware that there were believers who knew about the hard stuff and who had stayed anyway.

And honestly, I got pretty confident over the years, just because I felt like I’d been through so much. As I said, the September Six was brutal, but it didn’t do me in. Going to BYU, admittedly, almost did—I had a rich academic experience there, and a disastrous spiritual one, and I went inactive for a good 18 months after I graduated. But then I came back. And though I went inactive again many times after that, I always came back. Prop 8 was a particularly low point. And of course the November 5 Policy hit me hard. But by then I’d developed some resilience, and an attitude of, hey it’s my church too, and they can’t drive me away. And because nothing had ever been enough to finally push me out, I’d started to think that it was unlikely that anything ever would. I read the CES letter after someone hearing someone dramatically announce that it was impossible to read it and stay in the church, and my reaction was pretty much to shrug my shoulders. There wasn’t much in it that I hadn’t heard before, and something about its entire orientation to religion didn’t resonate for me anyway. It’s not that I didn’t care about all the difficult issues, both historical and theological—but somehow they never quite felt like enough of a reason to leave. I thought about it, of course, but it was kind of like thinking about finding a way to spend the rest of my life in a cabin in the mountains with a library; an entertaining idea to play with rather than something that felt like a real possibility in my life.

I don’t think it ever once occurred to me that in the end, what would get to me might not be anything that the LDS church did, or that I might be lured away by what I found elsewhere. Maybe because religion is something that’s always been so deeply a part of who I am, I think I had to experience a real alternative before I could be serious about leaving. This isn’t to say that my problems with the church weren’t relevant to my decision—of course they were. But I’m not sure that on their own, they ever would have been enough to send me out the door.

Over the years, I’d developed strong defenses to cope with things like polygamy and general sexism and and anti-gay sentiments and dubious historical claims and so on and so forth. But I didn’t have any kind of defense against the experience of finding happiness somewhere else. That was completely and utterly unexpected. I started going to Episcopal church last spring on a whim—I was in a period of inactivity, but as I said, I’d been through so many periods of inactivity in my life that I was sure it was just a phase and eventually I’d be back. And this wasn’t even close to my first time going to Episcopal church (I actually lived in an Episcopal dorm for five years when I was in grad school). But it clicked in a way that it never had, and somehow going to church turned into a highlight of my week, which was so completely weird that I could hardly wrap my mind around it. At the beginning, though, I was in a slightly manic phase, and I didn’t trust how much I loved it—I still just thought of it as something I was doing for fun. It wasn’t until I’d been going for quite a few months, and I wasn’t manic anymore, that I started to realize wow, this might be serious. It was the end of last February that this all started, and in the fifteen months between then and now, I have been to an Episcopal service every single Sunday. Not out of duty or obligation or a desire to be righteous, but simply because I would hate to miss it. It feeds me. My parish is not any sort of utopia; it’s full of complicated and sometimes difficult human beings who are struggling to figure out this community thing. My own experience in starting to be part of that community has not been entirely stress-free. And yet going to church still makes me really, really happy, sometimes to the point where I almost want to pinch myself to see if it’s real.

And of course if you read this blog, you know where the story has gone. I ended up getting baptized in January, right after Epiphany, and that was an amazing experience that I will never forget. I’m getting confirmed on Sunday, and I could not be happier about this decision. In the end, conversion was kind of a no-brainer for me; when you find something that speaks to you that deeply and powerfully, why wouldn’t you embrace it? I still stumble a little when people ask me what my religion is; I’m not used to answering anything other than Mormon. I never ever thought anything like this would happen to me. And yet here I am. Because while in the end I could endure all kinds of angst and questions and doubts, I couldn’t resist the pull of happiness.