Conclusions: Now What?

Conclusions: Now What?

“Don’t walk away” or “Don’t look back”

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So this has been my saga – some segments real and others traveled only in proxy as analogous journeys in my head. What a mind-altering experience this has been! And I do mean that quite literally: Over the last few years, I feel like the synapses in my brain have been physically rewired into a whole new lump of grey matter.

People ask what sent me down this path. Well, I mean non-Mormon people ask what sent me down this path…as if any single thing could have caused this paradigm shift! As far as LDS friends and family, not a soul has even asked, so they’re left making assumptions about my motives, much as I did with those who preceded me in this journey. So back to the question of what led me down this path, I’d need to go through a timeline of the small chinks in the armor that were ultimately needed to bust a seam in it and help me realize the suit of armor was never protecting me in the first place. My reasons for leaving are like the uncountable straws on the camel’s back that I managed to carry for a while; but if I had to pick out the heaviest, back-breaking straws from among them, here are my thirteen reasons why in chronological order:

1989: My BYU anthropology professor, Dr. Ray Matheny, could not and would not defend the Book of Mormon. “That’s odd,” I thought, then turned it off.
1990: I took “the Truth about Mormonism” when handed to me at a pageant and learned of many of the allegations about Joseph Smith that have since been confirmed. “That’s interesting,” I thought, then compiled enough apologetic material to defend my case.
1991: As a missionary, a Karl Marx University philosophy professor laid out for me all the reasons why Old Testament stories can’t possibly be literal. My mind was blown, but I reset it, knowing that insights on truth can’t possibly spring from a Godless communist.
1992: I was sent to “rescue” a missionary who had learned the truth about Joseph Smith’s still-under-wraps affairs. God intervened with a strategic injury for the guilty party who had mailed the literature, so I took that as a sign to whistle while I worked.
2003: After vehemently opposing the invasion of Iraq until evidence of UN violations could be confirmed, I dropped my own letter-writing campaigns when President Hinckley claimed in general conference that we just need to trust that those in authority “have access to more information than the people generally,” and that God would hold those protesters responsible “who try to impede or hedge up the way” of the so-called coalition of the coerced. And when Utah helped re-elect the prematurely invasive regime after it became clear that there was no such evidence after all, it convinced me that those in authority, including the seers at the helm of the Church couldn’t see any further than the rest of us. Hearing priesthood leaders testify of the divinity of the Republican Party solidified my distaste for the co-mingling of politics and religion.
2010: When we covered the Old Testament in Sunday School, I started re-reading it for the first time since I was a missionary, trying to prepare myself to teach the lessons. I started from the beginning, looking for something I could see as divine or even inspirational. Sure, I found some of the stories fascinating, but in the same manner as a Stephen King novel or a Hobbit’s journey includes interesting plot twists and life lessons along the way. As far as finding something I could attribute to God, I finally gave up eight books or so in without a clue. “Not my God,” I said probably a hundred times, not fully realizing at the time that an orthodox belief in LDS scripture requires a literal interpretation of many of the Old Testament characters that I had long since dismissed as composite amalgamations.
2013: As I read the Church’s essay on racism, the refusal to throw the ban under the same condemnation as the explanations for the ban seemed absurdly wrong and conniving.
2014: When I heard that one of the youth from my former stake had opened fire on his classmates in yet another U.S. school shooting, my complicity in the teaching environment that had fueled his mental illness rather than help heal it became painfully apparent. Subsequent comments from the gun rights activists within the church convinced me further that these are not my people.
2014: By the time I read the Church’s Gospel Topics Essay on polygamy, I was already aware of the actual history, so there weren’t many surprises except the disconcertion involved in recognizing my own previous denials of things that were now openly admitted. Even so, reading the spin doctors’ twists on the language was disturbing, such as the official admission that Joseph Smith married one of his teen brides “several months before her 15^th birthday.” I already knew how old Helen Kimball was at the time, but are we really that naïve and does it really make us feel better that being 14.75 years old maybe gave her a few extra months to get through puberty? Just say it like it is! She was 14! Saying instead that she was almost 15 is manipulative at best.
2014: In order to prepare myself to teach lessons on the topic, I stumbled across the Church’s Book of Abraham essay and hoped it might lead to some material that would confirm the supposed evidence that I had learned about in seminary and BYU religion class lectures. Instead, I was directed to the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language, which is an absurd concoction to say the least. Recognizing temple language within the nonsense of the GAEL instantly annihilated any case for historicity and the validity of temple rites in my book. Outright lies in defense of historicity by Muhlestein and other BYU-sanctioned sources solidified my newfound stance.
2015: A series of suicides among the teenage children of my Mormon friends prompted me to look into the reasons why the LDS suicide rate is so high, and the statistics were truly horrifying. Watching the PR machine spin into action to refute any culpability in response to calls for action from affected members of the public was truly disappointing when so much more could be done to combat the trend.
2015: The November Policy. Refer back to #11. Enough said.
2016: Going Clear and similar exposés exposed my hypocritical finger-pointing at the folly and sheer lunacy of Scientology’s origin story, which forced me to the same realization about my own church’s claims. As the year closed out, even the pseudo-scientific E-meters could have picked up a disturbance in the force as Mormons helped propel a madman into office.

So that’s the state I found myself in while pounding away on the piano keys at Temple View, weighing the questions associated with these events out against the miracles I had witnessed along the way. I was an active, practicing Mormon through each of these steps, serving in bishoprics, teaching classes, and driving my kids to seminary. Despite each of these realizations, I still clung to the hope that there was truth in the overall message, and I justified my continued participation, pushing my own kids through Mormonism’s rites of passage. But I also came to an overarching realization that by keeping my mouth shut about my concerns I was being inherently dishonest in my dealings with my fellow men (and women), if I can frame it in the context of a temple recommend interview question.

As I cautiously began to express my unorthodox beliefs to other practicing Mormons in private, I found former mission companions, BYU roommates, teachers, youth leaders, bishops, stake presidents, friends, and family members who had likewise lost their faith in the exclusivity of Mormonism and the literal truth of Mormon scripture – but many of whom just walked through the motions as apparently active Mormons because of the cultural pressures. Frankly, many of them still enjoyed the culture and simply weren’t willing to turn their back on it by speaking up about their own beliefs and accompanying doubts. Maybe that lifestyle works for others, but as I hit my mid-life hump, I realized that approach wasn’t going to work for the second act of my own life. I couldn’t believe my fellow meta-Mormons were willing to live with that hypocrisy, but then I realized that it was much easier to point fingers at them and see clarity in their situations than it was for myself. So I began to dissect my own beliefs by making up stories that bore some resemblance to my own. After each one, I asked myself what the next step should be, taking a step back to look at the direction of the signs on the subway walls and tenement halls that I had never bothered to read before.

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Do or die

I was deeply embedded and heavily invested in Mormonism – so much so, that I couldn’t actually formulate my next steps without these out-of-body narratives to escape my own indoctrination. The ten parables were for my own extrasensory benefit. I don’t know if anyone else will find relevance to their own journeys, but as fully ingrained as I was in my faith, I simply could not allow what I held dear to slip through my fingers without first stepping back and asking myself what I would advise anyone else to do in a range of similar situations.

That dichotomy takes me back to the dilemma I was facing when I started my ramblings in the first place. In essence, each of the roundabout stories culminates with a single, two-pronged fork in the road. Looking back on the previous chapters, it’s a bit embarrassing that it took me over 300 pages – with ten analogous journeys to Kenya, Cleveland, Cairo, Gallipoli, Troutdale, Stuttgart, Brentwood, New York, Cougar Stadium, and the open sea – just to answer a single question:

If I read each story objectively before inserting parallels to Mormonism, I’m left to decide what the main character should do without introducing any bias. Then, when I apply the parallels, the answer should be just as clear. But it’s not that simple…after the first one I’d find myself saying, “OK, how about two out of three?” and so on until I had repeated the process 10 times and made the chance for a comeback damn near impossible. So in the ten analogies I’ve shared here, how should the characters act? What should they do next? And who am I in the story? Each one effectively comes down to a yes-no question of whether to make a change or stay with the same. Should the characters stay on target or abort the mission? To flee or not to flee…

Movies typically favor individuality over systemic conformity, so if we saw any of these scenarios played out on screen, the outcome may be predictably obvious: Splitsville! I can guarantee, however, that in my case, the answers were not obvious. Like the voice in Luke’s comlink telling him to “Stay on Target,” I legitimately considered the continued push toward Mormonism’s target as a valid choice at every step of the way as I worked my way through these ten hypothetical exercises:

What should the Shamanite messenger say after ringing the doorbell?

Stay on target: “Hello, my name is Elder Price, and I would like to share with you the most amazing book…”
Or abort: “Hello, my name is Elder Price, and Meister Bäcker is not Nebuchadnezzar, so I shouldn’t even be at your doorstep until we get that sorted out. Sorry!”

Should Breslen’s dad sign her baptismal form?

Stay on target: Sign the form, dress in white, and start filling the font.
Or abort: Put away the pen and ask her to consider waiting until she’s 18 so she can decide for herself.

Should Tony Morgan make the phone call or toss Gina’s number in the trash?

Stay on target: Listen to Elder Brown and trash it!
Or abort: Call her from the first airport payphone he can find.

Should Commander Crowe fall back in line and order his son over the top?

Stay on target: Blow the literal whistle and send his sons into battle.
Or abort: Blow the figurative whistle on the doomed operation.

Should Yarid’s imam keep teaching lessons the same way?

Stay on target: Keep to the status quo by sharing God’s deadly retribution for sinners.
Or abort: Apologize to the victims and denounce scriptural violence.

Should Wolfgang Gaslinger include the Nazi history and Dieselgate in VW’s company history?

Stay on target: Listen to Ferry and redact the story.
Or abort: Tell it like it is.

Should Travis Cooper keep his mouth shut about Buffy’s body paint?

Stay on target: Listen to Kaelin, throw away the zoom lens, and keep his distance.
Or abort: Publish his photographs.

Should Katie Pilchek threaten to leave Mateo if he won’t remove the prostitute’s picture?

Stay on target: Trust her husband’s espionage stories.
Or abort: File for divorce.

Should the snare drummer listen to Coach Tommy and get back in line?

Stay on target: Plow through the field no matter who is in the way.
Or abort: Try other instruments and have fun playing them.

Should the man overboard hold onto the lifeline being thrown from the Ship?

Stay on target: Listen to the Captain’s orders and climb back aboard!
Or abort: Cut the line, build a life raft, and drift away.

With any bias removed, I’m guessing most people would advise these characters to abort the mission, drop the charade, take a stand, and tell the truth. But once we introduce religion into the mix, the advice that came to me from fellow members and from up the ranks in the Church was consistently to stay on target, take their word for it, keep my mouth shut, and fall in line.

Nathan ends up pointing his finger at David as the justifiably culpable suspect who recognizes his own guilt after hearing the parable of the little lamb; the stories I’ve shared here are not intended to point fingers at anyone other than myself, and in case after case, I likewise ended up recognizing my own culpability in a charade that I couldn’t back up. I now find myself in that hot seat awaiting my sentence for a criminal charge to which I have pled guilty. Nathan’s parable of the ewe really leaves no question as to how the rich man should actually have treated the poor man; the correct answer is a foregone conclusion. But how should he have been judged for his abuse? That answer perhaps involves a more elusive balance between justice and mercy. What is the appropriate sentence? Having recognized himself in the story, what should David do? Whether or not he was remorseful, he was still cursed for his actions, and the Bible claims his penance included having his own favorite – albeit rebellious – lamb taken from him. Having recognized myself in each of these ten stories, what should I do about it now?

I hate to be binary about things, but if the message in the bottle boiled down to the simple yes-or-no question: “Would you use our services again?” what would the answer be? For those still in it, I guess there’s an in-between option, which is to change the way things are done. But as for myself? Ten out of ten mind trips told me to get the hell out of the situation. There isn’t a single case where I would tell the character to take the path of Conformonism. So what’s it going to be for me? I’m ten for ten on the survey cards: I’m ticking the No box; my answer is Mormonschism.

In documenting and trying to justify my own journey, I realize that I haven’t presented any new discoveries at all. I haven’t unearthed any previously unknown sources; I haven’t had angelic visions proclaiming the correctness of my path; and I haven’t discovered any elusive, smoking gun that would convince the masses to head for the exit signs. The guns I’ve pointed to have been smoking for years, some since the very inception of Mormonism. Of themselves, they aren’t elusive at all; they’re simply ignored by believers who are immune to smoke, or they are explained away with preposterously intricate back stories.

Now I’m under no delusion that reciting these discrepancies would ever be likely to make a noticeable difference within the ranks of Mormonism. So why bother writing this at all if it’s not going to make any substantial difference? I guess for myself, I needed the analogies that I’ve written here to transport myself into new realms. As for everyone else, other authors and movie makers have provided plenty of well-known examples that probably make better analogies than the ones I’ve come up with here. But no matter how it is formulated, the end effect of uncovering a smoke-and-mirrors illusion is the same: once you’ve seen the apparatus, gone down the rabbit hole, looked behind the curtain, run Truman’s sailboat into the wall, or exited the Matrix, unseeing and uncomprehending the truth simply isn’t an option anymore!

Everything I’ve relied on to reach my own decisions is freely accessible to anyone else in this interconnected, online world; in fact, much of that information is available in published comments that fall within the current generation’s 160-character attention span, making something as long-winded as this write-up completely redundant. For those who do end up digging through these words, some will nod their heads in agreement; others will shake their heads in disgust; and perhaps a few might see enough similarities to their own circumstances to embark on an uncharted journey of discovery.

But if history does indeed repeat itself, most will simply continue to travel whatever path their parents set them on. And that’s just fine. I’m not promoting a mass exit, after all; I’m promoting mass tolerance. And not just tolerance of those differing opinions but the genuine acceptance that those opinions may be valid and that they might represent just as much actual truth and knowledge from their own adherents’ perspective as one’s own. I spent over forty years of my life thinking that the world that Joseph Smith had envisioned – this plan of salvation that he imagined up – was the overarching framework itself, and that the rest of the world unwittingly resided inside of that rigged structure. But when I found out that the whole world that Joseph Smith envisioned was concocted within his own mind rather than placed there by some external force, initially I felt confined within that space. Only gradually did I allow myself to see that the universe has room for billions of other equally creative worlds formed within the heads, hearts, and souls of people like Joseph Smith. And when I realized – perhaps obviously now in hindsight – that I don’t, in fact, live in any of those worlds, the shrinking bubble simply burst. As I escaped its pull, I could see life from a new vantage point that opened my eyes to billions upon billions of other bubbles. I don’t know how else to describe it, but it has been quite a trip so far!

For years I accepted the notion that you’d be a lost soul – that you would only amount to half a person – without your testimony of the gospel according to Joseph Smith. Apostasy or “losing” one’s testimony is presumed to leave you with a missing hole in your soul. To wake up and realise that there is simply no gaping void – that you’re actually the same person with or without Mormonism – is strangely relieving and now blatantly obvious from an outsider’s perspective. When you realize that God hasn’t gone and clouded your mind with ignorance or a permanent stupor of thought, but that you’ve actually been blessed with insights and empathy and perspective and other important gifts to replace the former dogma – and that you are just as spiritually alive and awake and stupidly ignorant as you were with your conviction of Mormonism – it leaves you unable to return to the solitary confinement shared by the small, elite club you used to isolate your thoughts with.

Hitting the water is scary. And it seems like darkness at first; but fear of the unknown is often perceived as something pernicious, when in fact, it is the path to liberation. I guess the whole point of this message is to say that the water’s fine out here. It’s not as scary as they said it would be; in fact, it isn’t scary at all. For those who have spent their days inside the belly of the Ship, try jumping off the edge and see if you agree. As for me, the amount of happiness that’s tied into Joseph Smith was surprisingly less than I had assumed. I, for one, am much more comfortable walking down the street today knowing that the person passing me has an equally valid view of life than I ever was with my previously exclusive view of the world.

Within Mormon circles, you’re bound to hear statements like this time and again: “I don’t know what I would be, where I would be, or who I would be without the Restoration.” Well, I’ll tell you what you would be. You’d be just fine. If you love your family and friends and you care about people and the planet, you know what? When Joseph Smith drops out of your life’s philosophy, you’ll still find that you love your family and friends and that you care about people and the planet. You think everything’s going to change and go downhill; but then you wake up, and you realize it only changed for the better. I imagine it’s like the cliché superhero who thinks there was power in the costume…but then realizes that the uniform had nothing to do with anything. You don’t need the outfit to do great things. In fact, if my own experience is any indication, the costume can actually serve a detrimental purpose, allowing its wearer to get away with things they shouldn’t have done.

Well I’d better quit with the analogies before I start into another chapter here. I could go on and on and on and on. And I already have. And now it’s time to let it go. I’ll throw this out into the ether in case it can help someone else along their journey. This journey has consumed a lot of my time and effort over the last few months. But now I have no further interest in occupying my time with the mundane details that overshadowed the first half of my life’s perspective. There are enough others out there who will spend the rest of their days debating why one should or shouldn’t follow these made-up rules. I choose to let it go. I’ll never have the power to change the mind of someone who believes God has spoken to them. So go ahead. Keep your own faith. I’ll find my new course. Let’s just try to get along on this journey.

A couple of song lines come to mind as I look back at my empty chair from the uncharted road ahead: One from Joy Division in the 80s and another from Oasis in the 90s. I’ll try my best to follow both points of advice:

“Don’t walk away in silence…Don’t look back in anger”

The End(ish)

[GoFundKevin: 2023 Epilogue on the SEC ruling against the LDS church]

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