Elaine is a mostly-recovered Mormon who retains a great interest in belief systems of all kinds. She has a BA in Intercultural Studies (that’s what her university calls cultural anthropology), with a concentration in the anthropology of religion. In real life she takes care of her mother, writes for some websites in the UK, works on her own writing projects (mostly very late at night), moderates on a science fiction and fantasy forum, and reads a lot. 

[Editor’s note: Elaine is a longtime MoF community member.  She has contributed a guest post (a detailed examination of the Lafferty murders and a review of Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith).  I can only hope that I am as cute and spirited as her mother when I reach her age.  You can find more of her insights into religion, science fiction and life at littlemissattitude.blogspot.com. ]

Namaqualand Wild Flowers, originally uploaded by Martin_Heigan. This photo is shared under a Creative Commons license.

The specific triggering mechanism that led me to leave the Mormon church was the revelation I had one Sunday as I was teaching a Relief Society lesson, right in the middle of class, that I didn’t believe a word that was coming out of my mouth. The lesson was a particularly pernicious one: it had to do with how the church is a good thing because keeps its members in line (well, their take on it was that it keeps members honestly striving and on the straight and narrow) by having lines of authority which makes everyone responsible to someone else and for someone else. Aside from the fact, uncomfortable for me, that it was another lesson for women that celebrated the power men hold in the priesthood, it occurred to me that what I was teaching presented Big Brother as a good thing. I carried on with the lesson despite my revelation, and apparently nothing of what was going on in my mind was visible on my face as I finished teaching. If it did, anyway, no one said anything. Then again, no one ever really got the chance to do so. I headed for my car directly after class and never went back.

It wasn’t so much an end, that final exit from the church, however, but more the continuation of, or perhaps the return to, a process I had begun as a fairly young girl. I can remember being in fourth or fifth grade and attending First Baptist Sunday school. After class I would go home and pore over lesson manuals and the Bible, trying to make some sense of it all. I rediscovered that quest many years later, in school at a small Christian university where I was able to take some Biblical studies and theology courses and was also lucky enough to be able to study the anthropology, sociology and psychology of religion. In the process of taking those classes, which had a distinct presumption toward Christianity but also allowed a lot of room for asking questions, I started to really think about what I believed, not what other people kept telling me I should believe. Unlike my experience in the Mormon church, I was encouraged to explore those issues and ask those questions.

Part of that process, strange as it now seems, was my return to the Mormon church for a short time, an effort to give the church one more chance. That lasted about four months, maybe five, and ended as I was teaching that Sunday afternoon. Finally leaving the Mormon church and its ways of thought…or ways of discouraging thought…opened the door to thinking about my beliefs without the blinders of a particular theology or set of dogmas. It was like stepping from a dark, overgrown, highly regimented, walled-in garden out into a bright, sunny, meadow dotted with trees of every kind and covered with flowers and plants in hundreds, thousands of species, each one representing a different possibility, a different potential.

In the time since then…roughly four years or so…I have claimed the label “agnostic”. Does that mean I don’t believe that God…or gods…exist? No. Does that mean that I think he/she/it/they do exist? No. What it does mean is that I don’t have to know for sure, that I’m fairly certain it is impossible to know for sure. It means that I have claimed the right to find the belief system that fits me and have rejected trying to contort myself to fit a truth that someone else has defined for me. Most important, perhaps, is that I’ve learned that spirituality is not a “one size fits all” proposition that depends on any one specific system of thought or belief for its validity.