Last Saturday, my husband Adam and I flew to Utah to watch our nephew be baptized. In Mormonism we consider age 8 to be a hard and fast age of accountability. Before that, you are pure and innocent and afterwards, you are ready enough to choose between right and wrong. So that is when you are old enough to really acknowledge your belief in the church and become a baptized member.
I tried to think back to my baptism, but I actually don't remember it very well. I did not really know how to question my beliefs or my testimony at the time. After all, if I challenged them and I came to the conclusion that the church was not true, it would just add unnecessary conflict to my life. As a very young child (I think I was three or four), I had an experience with prayer and comfort that built up my belief in God. Alongside this strong belief, I like the atmosphere at church. I feel good after going and experience a great deal of comfort while I am there. Those two aspects of church were enough for me to be comfortable getting baptized.
In junior high and high school I started to believe more in the other principles of the church, especially Jesus Christ and Joseph Smith, while ignoring the hardest questions to ask. Now I am 24 years-old and I have finally started asking the hard questions and tentatively getting answers. All in all, I have been able to become a stronger believer and worse member of the church. By that I mean, I am more comfortable and firm in what I believe while also disregarding a lot of non religious aspects of Mormonism I don't like. For example, I had a lot of blanket teachers that thought it better to say things like "if a guy has tattoos, you should not be dating him." Okay, so the teacher was trying to say that you should be careful with who you are dating and that most good Mormon boys don't have tattoos (young Mormon girls should always marry Mormon boys and they should be sealed for eternity in the Temple). At the time, all I could think was how Jesus Christ talked about forgiveness and acceptance. I had been taught to accept everyone. Except, it always felt like my own salvation was at stake and by accepting and associating with people who had lived different lives I was risking my future. I hated those blanket statements that gave no exception. What if the guy was great? What if he regretted the tattoos? What if??? So, I am a worse member of the church because I refuse to see the world like that. Now I know those statements are wrong. I know they provoke mindless following and that is not who I am.
Up until now I have only been looking over the edge to see if perhaps an answer or two is available to my hard questions. But now, I'm jumping into the abyss.
I wish I could say it was courage that got me here, but in fact, it was a couple of books. I have read and heard plenty of stories about people who have struggled with their lives as Mormons. But two weeks ago I read Mormon Diaries by Sophia L. Stone. She started as a girl not like me. She grew up in a very strict household that took Mormonism at its word (as I've said before, my parents were not orthodox). She was forced throughout her life on a path that unfortunately led her to leave the Mormon church. I say unfortunately not because I think she should have stayed but rather because she had to experience Mormonism that way. In and of itself, this book did not really disturb me much. I acknowledge that women's roles in the church are undervalued and stereotyped. But then I read a book called Stolen Innocence by Elissa Wall. Stolen Innocence is about an FLDS polygamous woman who was married to her first cousin at age 14 and eventually left the FLDS. These two books together sort of rocked my relatively frail balance I've created within myself.
The second book is about the FLDS. I've read plenty of books about the FLDS before, I actually find them fascinating. There are a lot of common root beliefs so its amazing to see where the FLDS have taken them. Also, their life style and some of their beliefs feel crazy to me. But when I read it this time, I was able to see Mormonism from regular people's perspectives and how they must think we're crazy. I by no means want to imply that the FLDS and LDS religions are the same at all because in practice they are not. But I thought a lot about their garments and the clothes they wear, their long hair. These things are quite cultural. Mormons use to have longer garments like the FLDS and used to wear clothes like them (back when everyone wore clothes like that) but Mormonism is evolving with modern culture, just always staying a little behind. That bothered me. First it bothered me that Mormonism that to change and conform to cultural change. When I was in young women's they came out with the one piercing, no flip flops thing for teenagers and that was a reaction to American culture. Should religious rules change because of culture? As grateful as I am for birth control, I understand why the Catholic Church has tried to hold onto the belief that it is wrong (although lots of Mormons still have like 6 or 7 kids despite using birth control, so that was Mormonism's answer) to not 'multiply and replenish the earth.' But it also bothered me that Mormonism can't just stick with culture if its going to be reactionary. Why not just say, okay spaghetti strap shirts are fine as long as your not showing your breasts (which is actually what modesty is trying to avoid). Like being conservative and holding back helps contain sex, promiscuity and wrong doing. Maybe it does, I don't know. But I just wish that I could be Mormon and have a testimony without having people know it by what I'm wearing or drinking.
Into the abyss for me means asking about the fuzzy stuff, the cultural stuff. The unnecessary stuff. Like, it's not that women can't give the prayers at conference, they just don't. No one ever thought to ask a woman. Really? Or even the resolved issues of the past. Blacks were given the priesthood in Joseph Smith's time but then Brigham Young put a stop to it (by the way, this whole issue just seems to be another reaction to American culture but in the direction of acceptance instead of rejection) and then in 1978 Prophet Spencer W. Kimball reversed the policy. I don't hold this against Brigham Young because I think the Prophets and General Authorities are human and sometimes in trying to get revelation from God, they are as affected by the environment they live in as any other person. But before I let myself really think about it, those kind of issues just festered inside of me and hindered my beliefs. Now I'm just trying to sort through them.
p.s. the same fuzzy issues exist in science, the difference is in the culture. Scientists have realized that any 'fact' can be overturned with the right evidence. We are taught to never fall in love with an idea or theory because its probably not the whole picture or it might be wrong all together. If you love your theory too much you'll never be able to accept its short comings and you'll hinder the progression of your own research.
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