I was asked by some non-member friends to describe the impact of being raised in the mormon church, as well as a few of the events - physical and internal - which led me to leave. I thought you might enjoy this as well. It was first presented on my blog in 2006, in a series of 7 parts.
Growing Up LDS
by Ren
Reading Big Daddy's (a fellow poster on www.reverb1.com) blogs about Catholicism has caused me to reflect upon my own religious upbringing - not just in how my family raised me, but in how the mormon church played a large part in defining my morals for me.
Now, I'll say right up front that some of this may be somewhat critical of the mormon church, BUT these are my opinions. For those here either raised by mormons (why does that sound like being raised by wolves?) or currently in the mormon church, my intention here is not to challenge your beliefs or present a condemnation of the philosophies therein. This is just my experience, and I accept that everyone has different ones.
Just wanted to get that out there up front.
We first met the mormon missionaries when I was 4 years old. My mom's brother (my Uncle Roger) had died recently, and a neighbor had suggested we meet the "Elders" who had a message that might help us deal with our loss.
I have very vague memories of these men showing up in dark suits and playing with us kids and talking to us about Jesus and baptism and life after death, and how a family could be together forever, which seemed like a mighty long time, but I'm here to tell you - there's something else: The afterworld. Oh, wait, that's Prince. Sorry, wrong song.
Anyway, the missionaries were nice, the message was something my mom REALLY needed to hear, and the assurance that she would be able to see her brother again helped my mom stop being so sad. So my family (not me, I was too young) got baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. By the way, if you didn't already know, that's the full name of the 'mormon' church.
The name 'mormon' comes from a book they believe was found and translated by a modern prophet named Joseph Smith in the early 1800's through the power of God. This book recounts the history of people who left Jerusalem some 600 years B.C. and found their way through a series of madcap adventures onto this, the north and south american continents. (it also mentions briefly a group of people who arrived here even earlier from the tower of Babel, but that's another story altogether)
It also speaks of Jesus himself appearing to the people of this world following his death and resurrection - fulfilling the cryptic verse in the new testament "other sheep I have which are not of this fold..." - as well as mentioning many of the principles and philosophies described to one degree or another in the Bible.
It also talks about the people's eventual downfall and degeneration into the savage and barbarian people that the 1800's believed the native americans to be.
The self-defined purpose of the book of mormon (named after one of the main contributors to the book, one of the last writers and the one who compiled the majority of the history and philososphy into the book) was to exist as not just a record of the beliefs of a people who were a 'branch of the house of Israel' (an interesting footnote here is to look at the blessings of the house of israel, specifically those given to Joseph and his sons Ephraim and Manasseh, way back in the OT book of Genesis), but to exist as further evidence of the divinity of Jesus. After all, the ability to appear on the other side of the world to people who didn't have access to the internet or cell phones would make for a pretty significant miracle, wouldn't you say?
So for the mormon church, it all starts with that book. If you believe the book, then you have to believe it was brought about through the power of God. And if you believe it was brought about through the power of God, then you have to believe that the person who brought it about was chosen by God. And if he (Joseph Smith) was chosen by God to be that messenger, then that makes him a prophet. And if he's a prophet... well, you get the idea.
So suddenly, I found myself in a religion that believed itself led by a man who spoke directly to god.
And it kind of set itself - as most churches are wont to do – as the only church of its type in that regard. And if that wasn’t enough, God apparently wasn’t done talking to Joseph Smith, either. Smith compiled a series of additional revelations, one after another. These were later printed in a book called “the Doctrine and Covenants”, with an additional series of translations from Egyptian papyrus called “The Pearl of Great Price”. All in all, it was kind of fantastic. I felt like we were inside the velvet rope, you know? Like we were clued in on some Big Secret, and had some primer for the universe that a lot of people didn’t know about.
It was very cool.
But with that cool came a lot of other promises. Tithing (10% of all money earned goes back to the church), the ‘Word of Wisdom’ (originally states that strong drink and tobacco are not to be ingested and that one should be thankful to God for all things on earth given to man for consumption; later interpreted to mean that you shouldn’t drink coffee or Pepsi...), baptism for the dead (oh yeah, I’ll explain that, don’t you worry), plural marriage (polygamy), the aaronic and melchizedek priesthoods and all manner of pretty unusual things.
A couple of philosophies worked their way into my young mind as I grew up
For example, the idea that ‘as man is, God once was; and as God is, man may become’ was a well-known principle. The concept translates into the idea that God was, once upon a time, a person who just lived his life and did in the way you’d imagine a God-in-embryo living his life, and who became, through an unexplained series of madcap adventures, God. And, because every parent wants their children to have the same opportunities they were given – and more – God turned around, had children of his own and sent them to earth to have the same little exercise in spiritual evolution. And, if we do it all the way we should… the cycle continues. Make sense?
Another principle taught via Mormonism is the eternal aspect of families. Since it’s all explained as an eternal plan to evolve, the idea that emotions, familial connections, etc would just be ‘til death do us part’ is kind of sad and fatalistic. So one of the things taught is that families can be married in the temple in a special ceremony that promises that the marriage will last forever.
This is just a sample - - most of the concepts taught in the mormon church deal with eternal repercussions for all our actions. So, there I was, 5, 6, 7 years old, thinking that anything I did – anything I thought – could determine the course of my soul FOREVER.
That’s pretty heavy stuff for a child.
When I was about 5 years old, my family traveled to the mormon temple in Oakland, California, and did a ritual referred to as “temple sealing” - - this is done to effectively bond the family as a unit for eternity. At the time, again, it sounded really nice. We can be a family forever. Big word, forever, and that’s a mighty long time… er… ah, already done that joke, huh?Now, the mormons also teach that a child can’t be held responsible for his actions, and is thus innocent – until they reach the ‘age of accountability’, defined as the age of eight.
So when I reached eight years, and amid growing concerns about my parent’s ability to reconcile, got baptized – more out of a desire to do what my parents believed was right than any degree of personal conviction – and effectively set myself on the path of the Mormon way.
In retrospect, I wish I’d waited a few more years. But there’s this sense of “if you don’t do it, you could die and that’d be horrible!” which kind of urges you to make a lot of choices.
The really interesting thing is that about a year after I was baptized, my parents got divorced. Now, there are varying interpretations a person is going to get about how this affects the bonds of a temple marriage, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s not as significant as what it does to an unsuspecting 9 year old who’s been getting told for half his life that families are forever.
Yeah, go ahead and think about that one for a moment. I’ve had that paradox in my head for 25 years.
Now, when young men in the mormon church reach age 12, they (assuming they pass all the tests – mostly philosophical and faith-oriented) are given an introductory level of the Aaronic Priesthood and are given the title of Deacon.
What’s the Aaronic Priesthood? Good question. Mormonism defines Priesthood as “the authority to act in the name of God, bestowed upon a worthy male by the laying on of hands by one in authority to administer the office.” It’s a calling, a power, a right, a responsibility. Within the Aaronic (named for the brother of Moses, who administered the rituals in the Tabernacle while the house of Israel wandered in the desert for 40 years) Priesthood contains the offices of Deacon, Teacher and Priest, and holds the keys to (among other things) prepare, bless and administer the sacrament (the mormon version of the Holy Communion), and assist the other officers of the church in various functions.
So now, I’m 12 years old, a deacon, living with my mom – who has by this point remarried a guy I didn’t really get along with – and now having responsibility thrust into my hands for a church I was desperate to believe in.
By this point, I pretty much had convinced myself I believed. I’d read, I’d studied, I’d prayed, and while no heavenly messengers had appeared to tell me yea or nay, I assumed it was on account of my many doubts. In time, I was certain, I would KNOW it was true, and all I had to do until that time was keep doing what I was supposed to do.
When I was 14, I was old enough to go to the social functions – dances and such. I loved the dances. I was a pretty good dancer in my youth, and the 80s were really made for kids like me. I was starting to get comfortable in high school around this time, figuring out what I wanted to be in life, and even had a girlfriend or two. In spite of the “dysfunctional family”, I was doing well. I’d get invites to the cool parties because they knew I wouldn’t drink or smoke or do drugs, and, in spite of not yet being 16, I at least wasn’t too drunk to drive. So that, strangely enough, gave me a degree of popularity I hadn’t expected. I remember a game of spin the bottle where a few of the girls wanted to spin and get me, since I was sober and still had full control of my lips. Good times.
Then came the call to Missouri.
Another interesting tidbit not really advertised by contemporary Mormonism is the belief that when Jesus comes back, something is going to happen to the state of Missouri. I don’t know if Joseph Smith didn’t like Missouri or whatever (and chances are, he didn’t, since they tarred and feathered him a few times there), but it is stated that it would be “wiped clean” and be made into a garden, like unto Eden (author’s note: Mormon records indicate as well their belief that the Garden of Eden was actually located in Jackson County, Missouri in a place now called ‘Far West.’ The name for this place is called Adam-ondi-aman, or ‘the place where Adam dwelled’). It is also suggested that one of the signs of the second coming would be when the members of the mormon church would feel the call to “return to eden”.
So in the summer of my 16th year, my mom decided she had received the call. We packed up and moved into a farm near the town of Whitewater, Missouri. The next two years really sucked.
But I’ll talk more about that next.
Growing up LDS, pt 2
I’ve been told it’s different to grow up outside of Utah than in Utah, if you’re a mormon. For that matter, I know it’s different to grow up in Utah if you’re NOT mormon – my wife spent a few years in Utah as a child and HATED it. The other kids weren’t allowed to play with her, since she was a ‘non member.’ Pretty lame.
Living outside Utah as a young mormon was just kind of weird. People didn’t know much about the religion – not that they do now, but it used to REALLY be weird. But some of the alienation was their own fault.
In 1976, the leader of the church at that time – Spencer W Kimball – announced that they were going to allow every worthy male in the church to hold the priesthood. This struck me as odd at the time. I asked my parents if this meant that there had been worthy men who hadn’t been able to have the priesthood before, to which they explained that black men couldn’t, up til that moment. This was profoundly odd. I didn’t have any thought that there was any distinction between people, other than skin color - - but then that it had been mentioned to me like that, I realized that there weren’t very many African Americans in the church. Sure, back then, (remember, 1976), we just called them black people, but I never thought there was anything different about them other than skin color. Little did I know but I was later to discover the twofold explanation for why they didn’t have the priesthood in the first place.
In the mid to late 1800s, there was this thing in America called the civil war, and, as the bulk of the mormons were still living around Missouri and such, there was a lot of issue taken with the idea of whether Missouri was going to be able to remain neutral in the war. And, how were those mormons gonna side? They’re freakish folk, maybe we should just kick them out? So the mormons made a lot of concessions during the last half of the 1800’s, like stopping plural marriage, starting tithing, and making sure their bylaws were all completely legal.
It was strange, because at the same time we were growing up with the knowledge that our faith would make us seem pretty weird to people, the church was doing all it could to NOT seem so weird. It was another one of those paradoxes that stuck with me for a while.
But I grew up trying to obey the commandments. I really did. I was a good kid. I really tried to help out when I could, too. I remember once where a few friends of mine and I got in trouble at a church dance because we were “dancing suggestively” and “dressed inappropriately.” I think it was really the song “When Doves Cry” that did it, too. I remember I was dancing with a girl who’d obviously been taught in several latin dance styles and we were kind of grindy. But the chaperones knew me and my friends and didn’t really like us much, so it was kind of a matter of time anyway. The next day at church, we were called into the Bishop’s office, and, while the rest of my friends got mad and stormed out, I stayed behind and smoothed things over, explained to the Bishop how things really were and how they were intended versus how they were perceived, and he ended up seeing my side of it. I was 15.
Later that year, we moved to Missouri.
So if I wasn’t already used to standing up to the man, and standing up to public scrutiny, I would have learned it almost immediately in the Show Me state.
I won’t really go into my school here, cos honestly, that’s a whole different series of issues for my therapist and me. But one point of note is that this is where I got my name.
No, my name isn’t really “Ren.” But if you’ve ever seen the Kevin Bacon movie “Footloose”, you’ll figure it out. That was me. Funky kid, David Bowie fan, shows up in rural butt***k and changes the whole town, and they have a big dance.
Okay, the changes the whole town bit? Didn’t really happen. But everything else is pretty much nailing my time there. Some friends of mine made the Footloose connection, started calling me Ren, and it stuck.
I made one really significant friendship during this time, a girl named Xio, while visiting my brother who was serving a mission for the mormon church up in Chicago. She and I hit it off and kept in touch from that point forward - - we still check in on each other from time to time today. She plays a big part coming up later in the story, but I wanted to mention her now where she and I met. That meeting alone is kind of a cool story, but that’s a tangent, and I’m a man with a mission. Well, not yet. That came later.
One of the high points (read that last phrase with as much bitterness and scathing sarcasm as you can muster) during this time was dealing with my new Bishop in Missouri. Moving to Missouri made me a bit bitter. I hadn’t wanted to go, I didn’t really have a choice, and so it helped me explore my as yet untapped rebellious potential. One of the first things I did was stop cutting my hair.
This really ticked off my Bishop, who began calling me into his office about once a month to ask me to cut it. “You’re a bad influence on the younger members in the ward,” he’d say.
I’d ask him what sorts of sins my long hair was secretly whispering into the hearts and mind of the impressionable younger folks, and he could only answer that long hair was associated with bad people and evil deeds, and that it was simply the only interpretation associated with long hair.
I told him I thought people with long hair could be good, decent and worthy of our attention. He challenged me to name one.
I, of course, said, “Jesus?”
One time I explained that my long hair was simply a fashion choice and that there was no other political, social or psychological significance behind it. He countered by describing a leisure suit he rather enjoyed and how, while quite fetching, was wholly inappropriate to be worn by a religious leader.
I responded by telling him that there was a difference between whether or not I felt like having short hair and his decision to not wear grotesquely antiquated clothes, BUT that was his choice, not mine, to make – just as my choice is mine, and not his, to make.
Realizing he couldn’t convince me, he began calling my mom into his office. He’d tell her what a bad mother she was to have raised so stubborn and rebellious a son, and that she needed to redouble her efforts if she didn’t want to be faced with spiritual condemnation as a result of my actions.
She’d leave his office in tears and my step dad and I would take turns convincing each other not to go back and kick his ass.
One week at school, I found that a friend of mine was contemplating suicide. This lasted the better part of the week, the Friday of which resulted in the vice principal pulling me out of class so we could go find him after he ran from his therapy session. We found him, and got him sorted – I was able to talk him calm so that they could get him to go with the doctors and get him someplace calm while he recovered.
That Sunday, my family and a few friends stood and talked about how their own conviction had been lifted by seeing what God had been able to accomplish through me, a young person who really didn’t look like the sort of person God worked through - - - and how grateful they were for the other people in the church who were able to refrain from judging me by my black clothes and long hair. The Bishop called me into his office afterwards and told me to cut my hair. I told him to kiss my ass first and then I’d consider it.
When I graduated from high school several months later, I jumped at the chance to get as far away from Missouri as I could - - the most obvious choice was BYU, a primarily mormon college located in Provo, Utah. So I went in for my preliminary interview that I needed in order to ensure I was “worthy”, and the Bishop said: “While none of your actions are bad enough that I could keep you from going, if you will cut your hair, I will sign the papers.”
I remember that interview pretty well. I stood up and pointed my finger in his chest. “You know what? I’m so totally sick of you. I’m sick of your attitude, your ignorance, your complete lack of regard for the world around you. I’m tired of your abuse of power and all the many horrible things you have tried to do to me and my family. But you know what? I’ll cut my hair - - and I’ll do it for two reasons: That it will let me get far from you and it will make you leave my family the hell alone.”
He nodded and signed the paper.
Growing up LDS, part 3
Brigham Young University is really just a weird place. I don’t know if words can put it in perspective. It’s almost like Disneyland without the rides. Everyone has that vacant smile as they go from class to class, secure in the knowledge that they are the chosen youth of God, and comfortable in the certainty that God will smile upon their GPA as they graduate and embark into the world.
It’s also pretty full of a lot of people who don’t want to let their opinions be challenged, and who refuse to even consider that they could be wrong about the world.
I read a really interesting book a few years back, “Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith: Psychobiography and the Book of Mormon” – its author was a student of psychology at BYU several years ago, and they were discussing the concept of Psychobiography – which, in layman’s terms, means that people who write fiction really are just drawing the concepts from their own lives, and you can learn a lot about an author from the fiction they write. Cos the truth is, they’re not writing FICTION per se, they’re just describing their own lives with other elements tossed in for decoration. So his professor challenged them to find ANY book which didn’t support this theory. He took this as an opportunity to prove that the Book of Mormon was true – cos, if it was fiction, it would simply show its places and events as being borrowed from Joseph Smith’s own life.
He felt that it would be the ultimate test to prove a book he totally believed in. What he didn’t expect was that it would actually prove just the opposite. He took his findings, shocked, to his BYU professor, who failed him.
Professors are fired from BYU pretty regularly for teaching things which are not supported directly by the mormon doctrine. Movies shown in the campus theater must be “edited” (a famous edit when I went there was the ‘blue scene’ from Top Gun, because it showed Tom Cruise moving in a suggestively thrusting manner), and no Pepsi or Coke products are available in any campus vending machines.
A girl on the “Real World: New Orleans” a few seasons back was dismissed from school because she lived in a house with boys during the filming of the show. So they got to have their degree of moral intolerance exposed to the MTV crowd. Yay BYU.
Just around the end of my high school senior year, I started having this recurring dream, which only picked up steam after I went to BYU. In this dream, I was in a large, elegant and formal ball room, swathed in red velvets and mahogany, tapestries, candelabras, etc. All were present in their silken finest - - black tie and tails for the men, evening gowns for the women. All were coiffed and bejeweled.
I’d wander around the party, though, and realize I didn’t know anyone there. There was no one to talk to, it just wasn’t my crowd. I felt alone in a crowd of people I knew I despised. And yet, I couldn’t find the door out. I didn’t know why this dream bothered me so much, or why I kept having it, but I’d have it an average of at least every 1 or 2 months.
Back in the real real world, my friend Xio had opted for Kenyon college, going for the liberal arts, to which I felt conflict. Something seemed so completely perfect about that - - - and yet, I worried she was ‘falling away.’
A story of note in the Book of Mormon called the “Tree of Life” describes the path to finding the Tree of Life, interpreted as the love of God, the fruits of which will give those who partake of it eternal life. The path, though, wanders near dark waters and through obscuring fields of darkness. Along the path, though, is an iron rod – analogous of the word of God - - whosoever takes hold of the word and follows the path along it will find themselves at the tree. Others might be ashamed by the proud who laugh at them, some might find themselves lost in darkness, but the big fear transmitted by this tale is “hold on tight, don’t fall away”.
The idea, of course, being that we were told from a young age that if you didn’t stick firmly to the laws of God, that that would be it for you. Lost. Gone. Finito. See ya, see ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya.
So from the beginning of our educations in the church, we’re taught not to leave. Because if you do, you’re gone.
The irony of this, of course, is that one of the founding and inspirational scriptures that Joseph Smith credited with leading him to ask God for guidance is James 1:5, which tells a person to ask God and God will give you the answers you need.
Blind obedience doesn’t seem to have been a requirement for quite some time.
So while there at BYU, I finally got sick of all the silliness of Church and stopped going. See, here’s something fun. Once a month, they pretty much open the floor to the general membership of the church in a special meeting called “Testimony meeting”, where for an hour, people just get up and share their belief in the church. Now, having a mind for math, I started to notice a specific trend.
Aside from the criers – you know what I’m talking about – people would start kind of one-upping each other. Each testimony was a bit more dramatic than the one before. And the endings would always try to top the ones before them. One person would close telling the congregation that they knew Joseph Smith was a prophet of the Lord, the next person would close by saying they knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was a prophet of the Lord and that the Book of Mormon was the word of God. The next person would add that in addition to knowing being a shadow of a doubt that he was the prophet and that the book of mormon was true, that the modern prophet was chosen by God to lead us… and on and on. It was like that game where you sit with the other kids and list everything they’ve said on their turns and add “…and I’ll bring a stack of pancakes to the picnic”, only with the word “Amen” on the end for good measure.
I started to really hate testimony meetings. It would have been more honest if people had just gotten up there and said they were really happy with their new dress because it really brought out the blue in their eyes, and didn’t everyone else wish they had a nice dress like that? Or maybe “I believe more than you and anyone who says otherwise, I’ll beat you up after church in the basketball gym.”
I just got sick of it, so I started sleeping in late on Sundays. My friends in the dorm came by to get me for the first few weeks, then gradually began distancing themselves from me. By the end of the year, I had only a few friends left in the dorm.
By the end of the school year, I was pretty convinced I had no interest in returning to BYU. I got back to Missouri in time to help my family pack up and move to Wisconsin. In my absence, the Bishop in Missouri had gotten a promotion to Stake President (meaning the organizational leaders over a smaller region, usually a half dozen wards or more) and we honestly didn’t want to be anywhere near him anyway. And I can’t even imagine how lame he was, to be in charge of a whole area.
Wisconsin was nice. I immediately met the local “goth girl” in the church, and she was awfully cute - - think Beetlejuice-era Winona Ryder - - and we hit it off instantly. I was okay with being in the church again. Geri (my gf) took a week in june to go to an art camp thing and, on the very same day she left, my friend Xio arrived in town (it’s only 3 hours from Chicago to where we lived then in Wisconsin) to wish me a happy 19th birthday.
We stayed up talking all night (I mentioned we were friends, right? Nothing ever happened between us), and happened upon the topic of the Mission.
When all mormon boys reach the age of 19, they’re invited to serve a two year mission. This means they dedicate themselves to a live of preaching, teaching, serving, God. They’re sent from their homes to a region of the world, where they’re no longer watching TV, dating, playing video games or doing any of the other hundreds of things 19 year olds will otherwise do.
They eat, sleep, breathe the gospel of Jesus Christ. For two years, 24 hours a day, 6.5 days a week (a half day for laundry and shopping), they give up everything to teach people about the mormon church.
Needless to say, I’d pretty much written that off from ever happening.
But something in the conversation Xio and I had - - and bear in mind, she actually had agreed with my decision not to go - - told me to rethink my position. I’d spent so many years having not really resolved my feelings about the church, and maybe – just maybe – I needed to face it head on. Maybe I needed to stop putting it off and do it. Maybe it was time. Maybe…
“Holy crap. I have to go, don’t I?” I said.
She nodded, just as surprised, “I think so.”
I walked in to church the next Sunday and told the local Bishop, “I’m going on a mission.”
Growing up LDS, part 4
I was kind of a young mormon success story for a while, there: Rebellious Mormon Youth Cuts Hair and Serves Mission – oh, did I mention, I grew my hair back while I was at BYU? Heh heh. Yeah, I did. Bleached it, too.
Anyway, I did all the interviews, got the passport, and was sent to Mexico City for my two years. Now, let’s be very clear about one thing here: I didn’t know ANY Spanish. I could count to eight, knew the words Taco and Burrito and Cinco de Mayo, but THAT WAS IT.
But before they send missionaries out into the world, they send you to Provo, Utah. Ugh. The memories. Anyway, they spent two months teaching me the language and culture and the actual lessons we’d be teaching as missionaries. We read the scriptures (I’m kind of proud of the fact that I was able to read the entire bible cover to cover more than once, and read the book of mormon about 30 times, half of it in Spanish), and studied what we were going to be teaching.
I didn’t get along with a few of the other missionaries there, though. I asked a lot of questions, and treated things with the skepticism I felt matters of such importance merited. And I found every opportunity to play the piano I could get my hands on. For me, music has been better than prayer - - it feels more like unfiltered communion with the divine than anything else I’ve ever encountered. To some missionaries, though, it seemed like I was wasting time.
But another nice thing about being a missionary is that you get bumped up to the Melchizedek priesthood, to the office of “Elder.” This also means you do laying on of hands for healing the sick, can participate in other temple rites, etc. It also means you go through the temple to do a series of rites on your own behalf, which I will not speak of here. They’re not mystical or creepy or anything, I just don’t think this is an appropriate forum to talk about them, no offense intended. It’s also a REALLY complex thing, which would take dozens of pages just to do it all justice. But if you were wondering at what point mormons start wearing the mormon underwear, this is that point.
During this two month period, I struggled with faith as I never had to that point - - I begged to know the truth. I promised anything to just be told. I wanted to know. I didn’t get any answer. Nothing firm, anyway. I felt good about being there, I felt like it was where I needed to be, and I interpreted that to mean that I was supposed to be there, preaching the word of God. *shrug* Hey, I was young. Whatcha gonna do?
After two months, they packed us up and shipped us out. I was Mexico City bound.
Again, I’m gonna gloss over a lot of the minutiae here, cos a lot of it warrants its own blog. But a few important things to note are that I kept music around me whenever possible. I wrote about 200 songs over those two years, including my first fully instrumental song, “Between the Mountains and the Sea”, based upon sitting upon the shores of Acapulco and wondering what path my life would take – into a stable and assured future or out into the unknown. It was pretty much the main question my life had ever had throughout my youth.
Now, a very nice thing about being a missionary is that they tend to pretty much open the vault for you – I had access to pretty much any mormon writing every put to page, a lot of things the general membership doesn’t even know exists. And being that I was in mexico, I had not only ACCESS, but very little supervision. And so I studied. After I’d finished studying all the main books of scripture several times, I went into the fringes. Old texts. Old versions of the current books. Old non-canon apocrypha. Books about the Wife of Jesus (you think Dan Brown was the first one to talk about that? Some of this pre-dates Holy Grail, Royal Blood, folks – one book I read about that, for example, was written back in the late 1800’s. (From the mormon philosophy, Jesus HAD to get married, because he was required to comply with all of God’s laws, including the law that says ‘neither is the woman without the man, nor the man without the woman, in the eyes of God’) Mormon teachings also strongly support the idea that God is actually a title comprised of a Heavenly Father AND Mother. Now, this, I actually liked.
I also discovered that many old church teachings (left in darkness because they were impossible to govern now) that spoke of why men were given the priesthood at all, whereas women were not. I found teachings stating that men needed to be GIVEN the priesthood because woman had it by their birthright. (case in point: baptism is called the second birth, and both births are necessary in order to resurrect in the presence of God; men perform the rite of the second birth because they are GIVEN the authority to do so - - but who performs the FIRST rite? And who gives THEM the authority to do so?) I found out that tithing was instituted because the church was going bankrupt and they needed money to keep the church going – and miraculously, they had it revealed that all members should give 10%, because suddenly it was a law of God.
I started to see that the church I was following wasn’t the same church I thought it was.
But still, I pressed on.
When my “stats” dropped as a missionary, my mission president asked me what sins I was committing to have God abandon me like that.
When I had concerns, it was of course because I had lost faith and needed to fast and pray to have my faith restored.
When I questioned policy, it was because I was listening to music and thus couldn’t have the spirit of God in me to show me the way.
But I was a good soldier. I did the time. I worked. I dedicated myself to the job.
I came back, happy in my newfound faith. I believed. The church was true. I knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Growing up LDS, part 5
I can’t tell you how eager – in spite of my renewed faith – I was to resume my life. I’d missed it so much. I got in touch with my old friends, and the first one I reached out to was Xio.
Imagine my shock - - when I discovered she’d left the church. I didn’t know what to do. What to say…
I put it all down in a letter – a heartfelt plea to “come back to the church, come home to God”…
She sent back a small letter in return, but it pretty much said, “you can’t understand, I hope someday you will.” I was crushed. She’d been one of my best friends, I’d looked forward to sharing my faith with her more than with anyone else, as she was indirectly responsible for my finding it.
I spent that winter in Wisconsin in a daze. I struggled to re-learn English, and figure out my place. A friend of mine from the mission was moving back to his home in New York City and invited me along. He was in Utah for the summer, and why didn’t I come out there, we’d hang, make some cash from summer jobs and then fly out to the big apple?
Sounded great. I packed up my little Toyota tercel and made the journey.
Within one month, he’d gotten engaged and moved to LA with his fiancée. Bastard.
So now I was in Utah again. I almost got engaged once myself, but that didn’t take. I started a couple of bands, but they never stuck together. I didn’t know what to do.
A friend of mine mentioned a friend of hers who was trying to start an independent movie about vampires and such, and was looking for actors and musicians. I went to the first meeting, and hung out - - - turned out they were all also part of a roleplaying game club who focused on LARPing (Live Action Role Playing). It sounded like fun, so I started hanging out, made some friends, and thus started my journey into darkness.
No, just kidding.
What really happened is that, amid the many friends I knew at that time, few had been from outside the mormon church. And let me just say that I’ve rarely lost an argument in the mormon church. I knew more about the actual teachings of the church than most members themselves knew, and understood the organization of those philosophies, their origins, etc. But suddenly, I was hanging around with people who actually challenged my theories. It had been so long since that had happened.
I loved it.
One friend of mine introduced me to tarot. Another introduced me to native American sweat lodges and shamanism. Suddenly, my world began to expand exponentially. Taoism, animism, Buddhism, paganism, Gnosticism, you name it, I dug in.
What I didn’t realize was that what had happened before was that I had, within the confines that the mormon church had created for me philosophically, learned to master the small degree of knowledge I had been raised with, all its precepts and principles – but out in the real world, those masteries simply weren’t enough.
Imagine you have an old Nintendo 64 race car game. You play it long enough to completely dominate it. Now hop in a real car. Are you an expert race car driver?
I thought about this predicament for a long time, finally deciding the only solution was to tear it all down, and start from scratch.
I disposed of the remnants of my mormon upbringing – discarded of the mormon undergarments which play so integral a part in reminding one of the covenants one makes within the solemn walls of the temple – and burned them. (It sounds dramatic, but that’s actually what you’re told to do when you get rid of them.)
I started drinking, smoking, engaging in all manner of grownup activities (yeah, I was in my 20s when I lost my virginity), and essentially tossing out all my old convictions in an effort to figure out what I really believed in.
About this time, I had that dream again. The party dream.
In the dream, I was miserable, hanging out near the wall, wondering what the hell I was doing there in the first place, when I heard laughter behind me - - - beyond the wall.
I reached around, pushed aside one of the large tapestries, and saw an entire room beyond. The first face that looked to me was Xio. She smiled, and said “it’s about time, Ren. I was hoping you’d find us.”
I called her the next day. “I was just thinking about you,” she told me. I apologized for the letter I’d sent her a few years before, and we talked about everything that had happened.
And it turned out we came to have so much in common with our journeys from the mormon church. At one point, I asked her “why didn’t you tell me about this wonderful world out here beyond the LDS Curtain??”
She just shook her head. “Would you have listened?”
I agreed. “No, I wouldn’t have.”
I remember very specifically - - it was December, about a week before Christmas. And I sat there at the hotel I ran, looking out the window into the snow, listening to carols on the radio, when it hit me:
Do I believe in God??It struck me in that moment that I didn’t even know. I remember crying openly at that. It was the most basic, fundamental, elemental pillar of religious conviction – and if I’d ever had any, it hadn’t been my own.
And somewhere, in that moment where I was surrounded by a veritable chasm of despair, that I heard a single phrase in the chaos of my mind – with a clarity that shut out everything else:
“Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, Ren.”It was so…. unusual. It’s not a phrase I’d ever really thought, never really applied to my life. In fact, I don’t think I ever even understood it before that moment.
But in that moment, I did. I not only understood the phrase, and knew how it applied to that moment of emptiness - - - I knew it wasn’t my thought.
It wasn’t much… but in that moment where it was all gone - - - I found a grain of faith. Only in the eye of the needle, basically.
Familiar with that analogy? You know the one, that says a camel can no sooner fit through the eye of a needle than a rich man could get into the kingdom of heaven? Well, it’s apparently referring to a series of pedestrian doors leading through the walls into Jerusalem in the time of Rome - - basically, for people to get in, they have to take all the various bags and stuff off their camels, due to the size of the doors. These doors were referred to as the “eyes of the needle” – thus the analogy being that you needed to strip away all your baggage in order to be able to spiritually evolve.
And I have to tell you, that’s exactly how it happened for me.
But living without faith in a religion is not easy - - not when that religion is the mormon church. It becomes everything for you - - men have their fellow priesthood holders; women have the Relief Society; children have Primary; teenagers have various young Adult programs. Basically, it becomes integrated into every aspect of your life. How can you go on without it?
I found a way – somehow. I found new aspects to fill those empty spaces in my life, and life became richer, more than I’d ever thought possible.
I was happy. I was taught from an early age that you can’t be happy unless you were in the church. I was breaking every rule I thought was undeniable.
And around that time, I crossed paths with one of my mormon friends, a photographer and artist named Cherise. We’d always had really good, solid talks about philosophy, art, etc. So I thought, who better to tell that I’ve finally found my faith?
So I told her. And she began to cry. “Ren,” she told me, “I’m so sad for you. I just want you to come back to the church. Come home to God.”
I went to church two last times, by the way. Significant in that I made two tests. Two last chances to see what it was that I’d dedicated my life to.
The second to last meeting was a testimony meeting. I got up. I stood in front of everyone there and told them I believed. I told them I knew the church was true. I told them I knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt. I told them I knew that Joseph Smith was a prophet of god. I told them I knew the Book of Mormon was true. I stood up there and told them the whole thing – the perfect testimony.
And I didn’t believe a single word of it. I silently begged them to come to me, to tell me they knew I didn’t believe, to ask me at what point I had begun to doubt.
Instead, they came to me to tell me how moved they were. How they were stirred by my conviction, by my solemn expression of my sincere beliefs.
No, I thought. You were fooled by my ability to act.
The last Sunday I went, I sat in the center of the back row, people on both sides of me. I think they knew I was ready to bolt. The last talk that day was about the dangers of intellectualism. The guy stood there and said that the biggest threat to faith was in the mind’s ability to think and to question. I waited, wondering why no one yanked him from the pulpit. At last he ended and the Bishop stood, and reiterated: “one of the biggest dangers we face is when we question the word of God, whether it be from the scriptures, the prophet, or any of the church leaders. We are required as a test of our faith to believe and to follow.”
I stood up, looked him square in the eyes and walked out. Not a single person in the room didn’t turn and watch me leave.
Growing up LDS, part 6
Leaving the church isn’t really a simple task. The hardest part, I found, was realizing that you suddenly have very few friends. I mean, it’s not like I was one of those flaming anti-mormons - - one friend of mine in particular came out of the closet and was screaming gay for a while til the rest of his ward got wind of it and asked him to stop being gay. So then he ran around screaming about how the mormon church was oppressing his right to be gay. He came by my hotel (it was kind of a gathering place for my friends, since I spent so much of my time there anyway) and complained to me, so I felt the need to point out that the church was officially against homosexuality, and why would he want to be involved in a church that he didn’t philosophically agree with?
That led him to DEMAND that they remove his name and he kind of made that his rally cry for a while. The whole time I watched that, I kept thinking “jeez, man. Just don’t go. They’ll eventually just let you fade into obscurity, you don’t need to make a huge drama about it.”
Me, I just didn’t go. That seemed simple enough. I didn’t wear the jammies, I didn’t pay tithing, I didn’t attend meetings, I didn’t tell them when I moved where I moved to… it was kind of a nice thing – I had been going to a ward (have I mentioned what a Ward is? It’s a congregation – about 200-300 members in a single geographical area, led by a Bishop) that was developed just for single people at the University of Utah - -to help with dating and such, naturally – and they were used to people just moving on, so if you didn’t show up for a few months, they’d just send your records back to the church office building in Salt Lake City and wait for you to pop back up on the map.
It works really well unless your mom is like mine.
After a few months, she got a call from the church asking if she knew where I was, cos they wanted to “update their records”. So she tells them.
Next thing I know, I’ve got members of the church on my doorstep, inviting me back. I smile, “no thanks, guys. Have a nice day,” and close the door.
Let me reiterate – I didn’t hate the mormon church – I just didn’t believe in it, and really pretty much put in the same category with my library membership. I didn’t go, and didn’t really care that I didn’t go.
I changed apartments a few times over the next couple years, and struggled to get my faith to a manageable place. I wanted to know what I *DID* believe in. It wasn’t enough to know what I didn’t believe. But every time I’d get settled in, my mom would let them know where I was living and, sure enough, they’d come calling.
About this time, I decided I was pagan, and just let myself be identified as pantheistic – basically, the notion that truth is everywhere, and that’s all that matters. You see, this is a philosophy I really believed in. Truth exists everywhere – either literal or metaphorical. Sometimes, maybe even rhetorical – you know what I mean? (come on, that was kind of funny, you have to admit)
My mom and I had a few conversations about this – I finally asked her to stop telling the mormons where I was, and explained that I didn’t go anymore and didn’t believe in the church anymore. She didn’t talk to me for about six months.
This was about the time Lizz and I got engaged. We found a nice Unitarian church in Salt Lake City, cos, basically, those guys are about as open minded as you can get and still be an official religion.
About a month after our engagement, my dad and stepmom came out to visit, and I got to tell them face to face that I no longer went to church. I almost felt like I was coming out, in a way. I guess I was kind of coming out of the broom closet, since I was kind of a pagan at the time. I went on this long and self-conscious monologue, and looked up to see them both smiling at me.
“Whoa- - - - what?”
They both explained that they agreed with me and were happy that I was finally searching for my own faith, and not willing to just accept someone else’s dogma.
Just take a moment. Let that sink in with me. I sat there and felt a deep and abiding happiness, the like of which I can’t really compare with anything.
The week of the wedding was interesting. Both my parents showed up, Lizz’s family was there, and they were all hanging out and helping us get ready. Except for my mom. She spent most of the week at the mormon genealogical library, doing family research.
I mentioned temple work for the dead - - - let me explain that here. See, not only do the mormons believe in PHYSICAL life after death, but they do most seriously believe that birth and baptism are absolute requirements for eternal life. And baptism, they further believe, is a rite which must be performed by a person possessing the authority to do so.
Now, do the math on that – they don’t believe the authority was put on the earth again until the 1800’s - - - meaning that millions of people had already died without the opportunity to be baptized. Furthermore, millions of people would continue to live and die without learning about it. Now, is that fair?
Well, they also believe that people have a chance to learn about their principles and make the choice for themselves AFTER this life. That sounds fair - - - - but they still don’t have a baptism done for them, so they’re still screwed, right? Not so.
The mormons practice a form of vicarious ordinances which allow deceased people to receive (or decline) a baptism – or temple marriage, or anything – in their name, performed by someone who stands in their stead. Thus, they have Baptisms for the dead.
And to help them figure out who still needs one, they encourage all members of the church to do their genealogy, and submit all names of deceased relatives to the temples for the work to be done for them.
My mom takes this very seriously.
But on Thursday before the wedding, everyone was asking me why my mom was in town but not hanging out with the inlaws.
So I pulled her aside when she got back to the hotel and laid it out for her. I told her that the lives of the living were more important than the lives of the dead and no amount of working in that manner was going to make up for the alienation she was creating in the lives of the woman I was going to marry.
But, see, that’s what that place does. It puts so much emphasis on the possibility of an eternal reward, that, at the end of your life, how much of your own life has any significance any more?
I was at the studio about 7 years before that, well immersed in my LDS-ness, and one of the girls asked me why I was mormon. “Won’t you feel stupid if you die and find out you were wrong? Won’t you feel like you missed out on life?”
Turns out the question is a pretty valid one.
Growing up LDS, part 7
Only a few months after we were married, one of our best friends, Mark, died. It was the first time someone that close to me had died, and it floored me. I retreated back into my desperate quest for faith, and came back up with the same weak philosophy – that there was probably a God, but as to the rest, who knows?
I remember standing by his casket, and looking at the empty shell of a human that lay there. It definitely looked like he was GONE.
But it still messed with me. What DID I believe? What was I gonna do about it?
Due to job issues and other sundry things, we moved up to Seattle, leaving Utah behind. The city here felt better, everything just had a better energy about it.
But within two or three months of living here, the missionaries showed up again. I sent them away and called my mom. And in spite of my requests, she’d told them where I was AGAIN. I realized I’d have to face them.
So I started organizing my thoughts - - it wasn’t going to be simple. But when they came around again (they have to make contact every three to four months to verify you live in their geographical area, that way the local Bishop can maintain their statistical verity as a Ward – which helps them receive funding, etc.), I did the unthinkable. I invited them in.
The two missionaries sat right here in my house, I gave them juice, and we talked. Was I ever that young? Within minutes, I wondered what all the stress had been about. Their hand gestures, their delivery style – one elder speaks, the other silently prays, they trade off, they take turns confirming their testimonies - - - I knew all the tricks and watched them play them out for me. It was like watching old Flash Gordon shows and seeing the wires.
Honestly, it was kind of sad.
In the end, I told them my own faith and thanked them for coming. I wished them luck on their missions and told them as a former missionary, I knew their time was difficult, but assured them that if they would simply trust God and do the work they’d agreed to do, in the end, they would know the truth, also. I added, “just pray your mind is open for the truth when it comes to you, for it may not come in the way you expect it.” I concluded, “the truth rarely does.”
They kept asking me how it was possible that I didn’t go to church. I told them that faith is where you find it. That many people want the ritual, want the place of worship, need the safety of a congregation to empower them. But, (and I quoted the mormon’s eleventh article of their faith) “I claim the privilege of worshipping almighty God according to the dictates of my own conscience – and allow all mankind the same privilege – let them worship how, where and what they may.”
One month later, I wrote out my official request to be removed from the official membership rolls of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. They sent a few members by to make sure I was serious, I confirmed that I was, and two months later, I received confirmation in the mail that my membership was terminated.
That was about six months ago.
What’s changed since then? Well, for starters, I can finally write this. It’s taken months – no, years – to get to the point where I understand the effect that being raised in the mormon church had on me. And now I have a daughter who I want to give the opportunity to find her own path. I want her to know that she has the power to believe – that her soul can find a level of faith that will ring true within her.
That she will find herself whispering calmly in the quiet of the night, “yes, it is true. I believe.”
Or maybe not. But whatever the case, she will find a path that is comfortable beneath her feet.
Or, as the phrase says – one which I carried with me during my mission and still keep in mind since –