I typed this up for a good friend of mine, and though I would share. I'm kind of nervous because it shares some personal things about my choosing theism. Please be nice, realize it is my story. However, I'm very excited that for once, I can click submit and it won't tell my post is too long....
I was born in the church. My pioneer stock came from Canada, the US, England and Scotland to join Joseph Smith back east and then Brigham Young here in Utah. I grew up going to all the activities, my dad in the bishopric, my mom in various presidencies, the whole works. We wrote in journals, had FHE, scripture reading and prayer, all that stuff.
When I was 12 or so, I started realizing things didn’t make sense. First thing that bugged me was the idea of being here on earth for testing. With our minds wiped. Didn’t add up. So I started studying the scriptures, comparing them, especially the idea of who God was in each of the standard works. I prayed all the time about it, and I felt what could be described as the "burning the bosom" but also realized I received the same burning whenever I was deeply emotional, from movies, music, talking with people, all sorts of things. I also paid attention in seminary and underlined/wrote down things that didn’t make sense or add up or that cast doubt on Mormonism. Like the JS “prophecies.” Took me about 5 years. During this time, I was still a straight A seminary student, never cut class, attended all my church functions/callings….Sometimes I thought if I could just try harder it would become true to me. I prayed all the time and I was so depressed. I thought it was me. I didn’t know ANYONE who had left the mormon church. Just a few jack mormons who all eventually got their lives together and testified about how they had slipped because they fell into the traps of Satan and wanted to be like the world.
For awhile, I was convinced that I was evil. That Satan had a hold of my mind and my heart and that’s why I couldn’t believe Mormonism. It wasn’t that it wasn’t true, it’s that my mind warped everything. Even after I decided it wasn’t true, I had moments like that. I mean, take a teenage girl’s hormones and add to it finding out the religion she believed with all her heart was false and that everyone around her believed in it, lied about it, well, let’s just say it wasn’t a good time. So at 17, I don’t know what was the final straw, more of a growing awareness, I became convinced that the LDS church wasn’t true. I still went to institute (by then I was in college) and went to everything when I was at home, just sacrament meeting when I was living at college, still a good little mormon girl. I didn’t tell anyone that I didn’t believe in it. Kept acting like I was.
I was very angry at people around me for not knowing the truth. I felt betrayed and alone by God, so I denied his existence for awhile. Then I decided that I couldn’t explain creation without God, so I admitted that he was real, but that didn’t have anything to do with the world after creation. Set the laws in motion and left. I had no life in college, since it was at Weber State in Utah, and you had your molly mormons (of which I didn’t like to hang out with) and your party mormons (and one non-mormon) who were into partying hard during the weekend and attending church on Sunday. (They actually didn’t drink or have sex or any of that stuff, just stayed out all night hanging with the frat boys and pushing the envelope without actually sinning.) I didn’t care for them because I’m not a party girl and because they’re hypocrisy sickened me. So I had plenty of time on my hands and discovered the internet, where I learned all about and adapted eclectic paganism, where I basically took whatever made sense to me and made it my own religion. I believed in reincarnation, god/goddess (only one of each), a sort of eternal progression/enlightenment attitude, spirit in nature, hippy type stuff…..and my family and friends thought I was a mormon, though my best friends thought of me as inactive. I attended wholeheartedly around my family, but my dad was bishop and I’m sure he checked my records at college.
So enter my husband. He and I met while I was up at Utah State University. It seemed like fate. I had been in the Navy, but was medically discharged and entered school in January. I bought a random girls contract, moved into an apartment with perfect strangers and lo and behold, there he was visiting from out of state one of the girls at the apartment. I admit I thought him a total nerd at the time because he’s shy and barely spoke 3 words to me, even when I tried to strike up a conversation. We both used ICQ (chat program) regularly and I tried to talk to him about hey, maybe we could add each other, you know, chat and stuff, but didn’t get any farther then “hey” with barely a response. So I just ignored him. (As a side note, he has a different version of the story then I do.) I used my roommates computer for my ICQ, and one time he caught me before I switched over to my own ICQ and talked me into adding him. So I did, we started chatting, and now we’re married. But before we were married, we dated pretty serious, me in Utah, he in Oklahoma. The phone bills were astronomical, the plane bills were worse, and I barely passed my classes because I was spending so much time chatting/talking with him.
He’s a Christian, but raised very legalistic. Finally on his own (his parents didn’t let him move out or attend university for a long time, and then reneged on the permission), he was reacting big time to his independence and fairly back slidden. Hence the reason why he’s dating me, a pagan. So he calls me one day and tells him that God is convicting him of being unequally yoked (we were talking of marriage) and that he can’t go further in our relationship without me being Christian.
To me, the mormon church was the fullness of the Christian gospel. So if Mormonism wasn’t true, nothing else could be, either. (Which is why I was a pagan.) I didn’t have a clue what he believed and how it was different from Mormonism. In fact, I didn’t know anything about the real history of the mormon church and actually defended Joseph Smith to my husband, saying that he was just misguided and maybe crazy, seeing visions and stuff, but not a bad person. I told him that I didn’t know anything about his religion, and asked if he would teach me.
The debates began with Christianity. He bought me a NIV bible for my birthday (in August) and we would have hours long debates every evening over different things. We started with the New Testament. I kept reading the Bible and amazingly enough, it was totally different then I remember it being when I read the KJV bible as a mormon. Things that I had never seen before seemed to pop out at me. I had an undeniable (to me) experience in December or January and finally accepted the Jesus of the Bible, which I had found was entirely different then the God of Mormonism. It took me another year before I would consent to be baptized (which I don’t believe necessary for salvation, just an outward sign).
Before he bought me the bible, actually, on my 21st birthday, my parents called me into their room and said, basically, we thought you’d always wanted to be married in the temple (I already had been given a temple apron for my seminary graduation present) but here I was dating a non-member. They had high hopes of baptizing the man I was dating, but all that my family ever did was took him to church one day, and after high priests my dad read the Mosiah verse and gave him a BOM. Anyway, I was seriously on the defense talking to my parents, told them that for awhile I didn’t believe in God, so they should be grateful I still did that, yelled at each other for a few minutes and stormed out. First time I admitted out loud I wasn’t LDS anymore. Felt good. (But I still went to church every Sunday I was home until I was married, even taught Sunbeams and was primary chorister and pianist for awhile.)
They didn’t fully understand what I was telling them, probably because I didn’t really explain it well, so they completely and totally blamed my future husband for my leaving the LDS church and still hold it against him. My mother and I had one more discussion about the LDS church, when I told her I was going to marry my boyfriend, and she asked, very hurt, why I didn’t want to marry in the temple. I told her I didn’t believe in it. By this time I was Christian, so she asked if I thought she was going to heaven, and I told her no, not according to what I believe the Bible teaches. Of course, this totally offended her, the conversation didn’t end well, and she goes around telling people I told her she’s going to hell.
So anyway, that’s the story. For a year or two after I became Christian, I felt God didn’t speak to me using emotions and feeling. It was all intellectual and making sense of things. Then my husband and I started attending a church that was made specifically for people recovering from legalism (we both fit) in OKC that was what I call a spirit filled church. (Not in the Pentecostal sense of the word, just, you know, expressive.) I had a lot of emotional experiences there. My family and I hardly ever talk about my faith, other then an occasional question about what we learned in church or something like that. They don’t really understand how religion can be a relationship. I’m struggling with some issues that I never fully resolved coming out of Mormonism that related to the bible, but I’m working through them. I have issues with creation and the flood and with all the killing…basically, most of the OT. I also struggle with submission because to me, submission has always been…not me. My entire self is covered up when I’ve been in positions of submission. I realize now that it’s an unhealthy submission when that happens, but I’m still working through all that.
I've lost a lot of my relationship with God, if not all of it. I struggle with submission because I feel like I'm loosing what defines me by submitting. And I hate that idea. I haven't had good examples of submission, and neither has my hsuband, so he tends to put a certain role of submission on me (as a wife) that I connect with God, and neither of them are right. I struggle with pride because I think of myself as intelligent and want to work through all my doubts before I commit myself. I struggle with trust because I've already been betrayed by religion once, and I refuse to have that happen again. I also struggle with commitment. I've been 5 declared religions in my life, and I'm only 28. Seems like every 5 years or so, I make a religious change because the doubts creep up.
I haven't given up on Christianity yet. Like I said, I've had experiences I can't deny were anything but God. People tell me I just need to keep reading my Bible and praying, but that sounds a lot like mormonism and I balk. It's amazing how much stuff lingers from that......