Leaving the church of my birth and family heritage—descendant of Mormon pioneers that I am—was a momentous decision for me—25 years ago. I just got around to formally resigning my membership recently. It wasn't as tough as I'd been led to believe on various sites like Post-Mormon and Ex-Mormon. Maybe everyone's experience is different, or maybe, in the wake of the furor over the church's involvement in California's infamous Proposition 8, they've had to streamline the procedures.
(See 8: The Mormon Proposition, for a critical (inflammatory?) view of the church's role in this debacle, which had the effect of prompting me to finally resign. I hear the church leaders have mellowed a bit on the issue of homosexuality once they learned how upset California Mormons and other members were with the church's role in orchestrating opposition and funding in support of Prop 8. Joanna Brooks at Religious Dispatches says the film mostly gets it right. A second RD review chronicles Mormons who worked against Prop 8's passage.)
The actual procedures I'll save for another post. First, I am very clear that I am very happy with my decision to formally resign, and only wish I'd done it sooner. I wish I'd left a lot sooner than I did in my late 20s. But at least I did.
I can't help noticing since my resignation that actually getting my name removed from the membership rolls has had a profound effect on me. Coincidentally or not, I've been gearing my podcast choices more and more to skeptical and science-related topics. Someone on a skeptical email list I'm on, when I mentioned having just left the Mormon church, turned me on to the Irreligiosophy podcasts, a highly irreverent look at religion, skeptical thinking, and all things Mormon. It's true that the two hosts indulge their sophomoric senses of humor frequently, but they also share quite sophisticated knowledge of theology, ancient Egypt, Greece, etc., and they have good guest interviews. And it's a bit liberating to laugh at things I no longer hold sacred, a bit of a guilty pleasure.
The upshot of all this skeptical thinking is I have really been feeling keenly the deficits in my own reasoning through the years and in my education, which sorely lacked a thorough grounding in science, logic, skeptical thinking, or anything that might have inoculated me against the magical thinking and unreal worldview I absorbed from Mormonism. I have been taking stock of just how damaging that magical thinking I absorbed has been to my intellectual and even emotional development. That realization, and the skeptical and scientific blogs I've been reading (I'll make a blogroll soon) and podcasts I've been listening to, are what prompted me to start a second blog.
I imagine my mom probably thinks I'm just angry at God because of some shitty things that have happened in my life. What she may not remember is that I left the church (in the sense of stopped going and stopped identifying as a practicing Mormon) before any of the really bad stuff happened. And I'm not angry with God, I just don't believe in him/her/it. And what I'm certain she doesn't know is that I blame Mormon indoctrination for ill-equipping me for life. I could say my parents ill-equipped me for life, but maybe they just didn't realize how thoroughly indoctrinated I was. Ironically, at the time, I'd been secretly critical of them for not being sufficiently valiant in the faith, or so I though. And Mom at least has become much more religious, it seems, as I've moved the other way. Or maybe my view is still skewed!
"Blame" is a tricky thing, we mustn't indulge in "the blame game" after all, right? I know that sounds like a lame excuse or something, but I don't think I can set things right, if indeed I can at all, if I don't come to grips with my stupid thinking and misdirected faith. I hope to make myself clearer on this point as I go along. Perhaps not all in one post! The point is, simply leaving the church didn't leave the bad thinking behind, it didn't automatically cure me of faith-based magical thinking. More on that later.
But I have come to see my life much more clearly recently, it seems, and one conclusion is just how much I have been hampered by the magical thinking of the deeply religious mindset. This manifest in my life as thinking that the important thing for me to do, as I was growing up and heading to college, figuring out career, exploring relationships, etc., was to figure out God's will for me and follow that. I absorbed so much propaganda about how I had to pray over every decision, seek the Lord's will in my life and follow that, that a rational mindset didn't have a prayer of a chance, excuse the pun. If you don't get that burning in the bosom, you must be headed in the wrong direction! Consequently, I was usually very confused, indecisive, and all too easily swayed by emotion.
No one ever suggest to me, instead, that I should figure out what *I* wanted to do with *my* life, figure out what gave me joy, even figure out how to serve my fellow humans (or animal welfare, or the environment, or some other worthy cause—I was terribly idealist, after all) so that I could spend my life doing something that would give me joy, fulfillment, and a steady paycheck. I didn't comprehend that it was a great privilege to have the freedom to decide my college major and my career—or some other course perhaps—and that I shouldn't waste the chance in my youth to prepare myself for adult life by looking outside myself for direction. Specifically, by looking heavenward to my invisible friend with magical powers to decide what I *should* do. All that coaching to ask God's will teaches you not to develop your own opinion or sense of direction.
It may be hard for someone not raised as religiously as I was, as devout as I was, as utterly sincere in my belief in God as I was, to understand the grip that this mindset had on me. "Indoctrination" is definitely not too strong a term. More and more I feel like I'm at last waking up out of a deluded daydream, only to find out that I've screwed up my life and made many poor life choices because I as basing those choices, in many cases, on faulty thinking and goals that simply could never come true (e.g., that I could know "God's will" and that it would make me happy to follow it).
It may seem churlish of me to complain of anything about my upbringing, given my relatively blessed state growing up a middle-class American girl in the latter half of the 20th century, with all the advantages that implies. I did, after all, have the opportunity to get a college education, and that's not available to everyone. It wasn't that long ago that girls weren't even expected or allowed to go to college at all, as Mom reminded me countless times growing up by telling me she was one of only a handful of girls in her (admittedly tiny) high school graduating class that went on to college. She did indeed get her MRS degree, marrying my dad not long after graduation, but she did graduate and later got her masters degree, just before she divorced my dad and moved us to California.
Ah, hindsight! One thing I can say in my favor is that I have always tried to pursue the truth wherever it led, regardless of the consequences to me.
