One good reason to read about other people’s lives is to learn about their experiences that are different from our own. But another good reason is to learn about their experiences that are the same, because it makes us feel less alone. It is for this second reason that I most enjoyed Katie Langston’s memoir Sealed: An Unexpected Journey into the Heart of Grace.
I’ve blogged before about how I grew up a neurotic Mormon. I worried about being able to keep track of all my many sins so I could properly repent of them all. I worried about impending nuclear war that some people seemed to so gleefully anticipate. But where I was neurotic, Katie (sorry I’m going to be all uncouth and call her by her first name because I know her through the Mormon feminist groups) suffered from full-on scrupulosity, although it wasn’t until she was an adult that she was able to put a name to it. She was so worried as a child that she was sinning and not remembering that she began confessing to her parents about things she was quite sure she hadn’t done, but couldn’t be 100% certain, so it seemed safer to confess and accept punishment than risk letting a sin be forgotten. She writes about how, when she turned eight and the time came to be baptized, she hoped to put it off a little, figuring that if she only got one chance to wipe her slate clean, she shouldn’t be too hasty to rush in and use it up. Unfortunately, by bringing the scheduling question up with her father, she found that she had inadvertently accelerated the process. Although I never thought of this strategy as a kid, I had so much the same line of thinking about sin.
Similarly relating her experience back to mine, where I grew up with parents who were pretty strict about church teachings, hers leaned toward fundamentalism. She was homeschooled for years, to keep her mind safe from the wickedness of secular ideas. Her parents fell into the orbit of anti-government preppers, but fortunately, when some of the most radical among them asked her parents to go with them to Mexico and become polygamists, they declined, and the experience may have pushed them toward finally sending Katie to public school.
Over and over, I so much identified with her stress about her sins. She continued to struggle with scrupulosity while on her mission in Bulgaria. Here’s a passage that I think captures her dilemma perfectly:
The Questions showed no mercy. Every day, they threatened to overtake me with despair; every night, I lay in bed, weeping silently so as to prevent my companion from hearing. I read Book of Mormon passages where characters had profound born-again experiences and felt the Spirit was their guilt away. I wanted desperately to sense something similar. What was wrong with me, that God wouldn’t grant me an experience like that? I had never, for as long as I could remember, felt whole. I’d had moments—an hour or two here, a day or two there—but always The Questions returned, driving me to the brink of what was bearable, urging me to succumb to darkness.
Still dogged by these questions about her worthiness after her mission, and into adulthood and marriage and schooling and parenthood, she explains how she moved year by year away from the center of Mormonism and began considering different ideas about God. She eventually had what she calls an encounter with God’s grace, and this led her to turn her previous thinking about God on its head. She writes:
I say I turned myself over to God, but that’s not entirely accurate. It’s more correct to say that I was turned; that is, for all those years, I’d gotten it precisely backward. I had believed that I must choose God in order to be loved, but the reality was that God’s love chose me.
It was years more still until she came around to the idea that she was called to the ministry, and she began seminary to train to become a Lutheran pastor. Again, I enjoyed reading her experience to match it up to my own. After rejecting the idea of the harsh authoritarian God that so many Mormons believe in, I’ve drifted in a less deliberate way toward agnosticism, where Katie moved in a more deliberate way toward a mainstream conception of God. So of course I couldn’t identify so much with her journey, but I still found it inspiring to read. Even as a mostly non-believer, I still find so much hope and beauty in the expressions of faith in a loving God that I hear from believers around me.
I also want to mention how much, particularly as a man trying to learn feminism, I appreciated Katie’s articulation of some of the central dilemmas of being a woman in the LDS Church. For example, she writes at one point,
Someone else could fill these roles as well as I could, perhaps better, and that was precisely the point: my life’s purpose was to be Woman—not a woman, but the very concept itself; a vessel, an archetype, a projection of pedestalized femininity.
Sorry to say so much about myself in what is ostensibly a review of a memoir. I guess I’m just saying that I enjoyed this book most for how it connected with my own experience. I hope that for anyone whose experience has been even a little like mine, at least you’ll have a sense of what you might enjoy about Katie’s memoir. If you’re outside of the mainstream of the Church, whether fringe-Mo or post-Mo, I think you’ll particularly appreciate her discussion of the aspects of the Church that were most difficult for her. She does get into many other topics like her family of origin, her coming of age experiences, dating, marriage, and so forth, but as the title suggests, her faith journey is really the core of it. I’m really glad that, as she reveals near the end, she was convinced by friends to write her story up as a book rather than a series of essays, because I really enjoyed reading it.
This is an excellent opinion piece, and I applaud Ziff for writing it. Ms. Langston has done something that far too few young people are doing—thinking, studying, and pondering spiritual things.
People might come to different conclusions by asking the questions Ms. Langston did, but they will come to no conclusions if they never ask the questions in the first place.
God is not pleased with those who mindlessly follow Church leaders without ever asking for themselves whether things are true. Neither is He pleased with those who mindlessly leave the Church for lives of debauchery that would make even the most demented stoats blush with shame. He is only pleased with those who honestly ask, study, and reason things out to their best ability.
Whether or not people agree with the ultimate conclusions of Ms. Langston, the world will be a better place if they follow her example of becoming a thinking, feeling, reasoning person.
This was me. I would pray and beg for forgiveness. At one point (as an adult) I figured I might as well kill myself. If I was going to hell anyway, why not put an end to all my sinning? Once I was treated (with medication) for anxiety, it all changed. I was in Testimony meeting one time and a little 11-12 year old girl got up and sobbed about her sins. I was broken hearted. She is falling into the same trap. It makes me extremely angry at the leaders that the continue to preach this judgment, harsh god, that is just out to punish you.
Oh, wow, Lily, that’s so sad, both your experience and this other little girl’s. It really is unfortunate that so many GAs, not to mention local leaders, are so devoted to the idea of an angry bookkeeping God who can’t wait to punish us for every little thing he can think of.
Look at the language used by JCS above: “god is not pleased” when we do this, ONLY when we do that. That’s not God. He knows how hard it is down here. He’s not chronically pissed off at us.
Amen, Lily. JCS definitely believes in the version of God that hastened Katie’s exit from Mormonism.
I was a Mormon overachiever all the way into my 30s. A psychologist eventually said my zeal for following rules was a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder. I don’t have enough symptoms to be diagnosed with OCD, but the trait is there. I finally broke out of that guilt/shame mindset for good, but it cost me my faith. Looking back, I’m angry that I wasted so much time feeling guilty and ashamed. The Church’s focus on even keeping your thoughts pure was too much for me. Imagine my relief when, in my mid-30s, a therapist told me that my mental obsession with sex was common for child abuse survivors! I’d thought it meant I was sinful and evil. I am so angry that I had Church piling the guilt on an already devastating experience. The reason I couldn’t keep my thoughts morally clean was because of someone else’s sins and not my own. I was coping, not sinning.
[JCS and his obsession with debauchery if someone leaves Church is completely bizarre. It was leaving the church that gave me emotional space to heal from the abuse, balance my sexual issues, and eventually realize that I’m asexual. I’ve left church and want to have nothing to do with sex either. I even divorced my temple-married husband so I could avoid sex forever. So thbbbpt on JCS’s weird idea that people who leave the Church want to have orgies.]
The book sounds good, but I won’t be able to read it. I don’t want to revisit that scrupulous time in my life, even through someone else’s experience. There’s still too much baggage there. But thanks for reviewing it. This was a good post. I’m glad to see a dialogue beginning about scrupulosity and the pain of being a religious perfectionist. I saw a review of another memoir recently that was also focused on recovering from religious scrupulosity. It’s a good trend to bring attention to that topic.
This is why I think worthiness interviews are so misplaced. I believe a significant number of youth confessions are false. Especially if they are made to a popular or authoritarian figure.
When I first started teaching high school, a theft occurred in my classroom. As a naive teacher, I decided the next day to increase the pressure on the mysterious perpetrator with an idealistic lecture on integrity. Shame the guilty student into confession, right?
I went on a rant in each period that day. Then three of my students, each from a different period, privately confessed to that single incident! That’s when I learned about false confessions. I still have no idea who the thief actually was. Vulnerable teens confess for attention, prestige, connection, as the result of guilt for an unrelated incident or even misplaced guilt. Add in the sexual morality aspect of Bishop’s interviews and we have a recipe for coercive, confusing and harmful events for many teens. Some poor Bishops never realize that a portion of the confessions they hear are false or misleading, or that some individuals may be harmed.
Wow, Janey, I’m sorry. That sounds miserable. I’m glad to hear that you’ve moved on to a better place, but that sounds awful that you got such a painful dose of guilt and shame while in the Church.
Great point, Old Man. That’s a fascinating example, where pushing the students just ended up getting some of them to confess to something they hadn’t done!
This is a great post, Ziff. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks, Freckles!
Egads! What an experience!
Thanks for bringing this book to my attention, I want to read and explore her story. I believe that connecting through stories is an essential part of our spiritual growth, but it’s a minefield of erroneous wrong turns when these stories serve to manipulate rather than nourish our growth. And here’s an honest account of how she managed to find a way through it— it’s much more useful to me as a straight up story than essays.
My story would make a page turner. (Cue loud laughter.) Reading these comments has churned up old memories of confessing to bishops, and every time they were thoroughly misunderstood by both of us. Often there was grace centered in the bishops’ efforts, but the encounters were fatally flawed in service to a system hell-bent on achieving a hacked version of balance to appease an illusion of a vengeful, picky, and very male god. And the worst part of these memories is how I participated in manipulating my life into turns that I now wish had been different. It’s a constant struggle, this seeking healing, but it’s still worthwhile now that I believe in — and give to myself — the grace I have found. I just can’t get that healing grace at church, so I have made another manipulation to turn away from that system. And I have received a measure of peace and healing, and no debauched orgies.
Wayne: I know, right?
MDearest, I’m glad to hear that you’ve found some grace. I love your description of the “vengeful, picky, and very male god” that you encountered before in the Church. Spot on to my experience too!