Note: This is the latest installment of “Leaving the Garden,” a weekly series in which we ask someone to reflect on their journey from religious conviction to uncertainty, from dogmatism to doubt. Religion is filled with stories of faith; here we collect narratives of unbelief. Some are lifelong atheists who have flirted with religion; others are still deeply embedded in their faith, but are learning to challenge authority and embrace uncertainty. Today’s post comes from Lessie, a brilliant and thoughtful woman who cares about many of the same things that concern me and whose virtual path I have been fortunate to cross.
Bio: I live in south eastern Idaho, I’m on the downhill side of my twenties, I’ve been married for almost six years, have two boys, am recovering Mormon, feminist, humanist, wannabe philosophy professor, generally interested in unmarketable skills like dead languages, philosophy, literature, etc. I have a bachelor’s degree in English/Creative Writing (another mostly unmarketable skill), but am currently working out issues so that my agenda don’t poison my stories (hence blogging).
While I certainly wasn’t aware of this at the time, I’ve been a philosopher from a very early age . . . and a doubter (in repressed form) since high school. I remember asking the metaphysical question of “what if life is a dream” at the ripe old age of four and later wondering how God could be omni-everything and still not meddle with my ability to choose. I had questions like these all through high school, but questioning on such a level was unfit for a good Mormon girl (and indeed, I rarely acknowledged these questions—the implications of the answers scared me). Religion had been a world view that I had accepted without question, so it was beyond frightening to explore other ways of looking at the universe. With these repressed thoughts at the back of my mind, I went to an LDS university for my undergraduate work.
The May after my sophomore year, I got married in the temple to an apparently worthy young man. Relatively quickly, I realized that neither of us really reached the standards of worthiness that were expected of righteous young couples. I sucked at domestication, and he sucked at priesthood leadership in the home. I was embarrassed by my own short comings and angered by his. After the birth of our first son, the details of which can be found here, our marriage began a slide into pain, anger, disillusionment, and apathy. We decided to go ahead and try counseling before calling it quits.
The counseling (while working wonders on our relationship) taught me to question key ideas about authority, priesthood, and leadership in the church. I was also taking philosophy classes that taught me to carefully examine the basis for my beliefs. I was so excited by those different schools of thought. It was so liberating to finally be able to ask all those questions in the back of my mind (and also somewhat irritating to see the resistance that these questions garnered from the more devout).
A year later, there was a museum exhibit in a near by town about the history of literacy and the Bible. I was overcome by the excitement of seeing things like fragments from the Dead Sea scrolls, twelfth century Hebrew manuscripts, early Christian writings in Greek, and early editions of the Bible in English, Spanish, and German. I was simultaneously inspired by the dedication of the men who had kept the Bible safe and dismayed by the bloodshed inflicted by differing factions of Christianity. The pain others suffered as a result of extremism and dogmatism began to bother me on a much deeper level.
Eventually, I stopped going to church. I felt that the church espoused harmful ideas of exclusivity. Ironically, the integrity that the church had taught me was what made me decide to leave. I could no longer be honest with myself by going. I found that I had fallen out of love with religion and in love with humanity. Right now, I consider myself agnostic. However, if salvation means separating myself from others rather than engaging with them, then I decline to participate.
