Now that she had seen the world, now that she had been in it–she could not go back. She tried to imagine it, for a minute, being like Brita or Nels, accepting life where you had babies and had babies, where she would have to marry some carpenter from Minnesota. Never, she thought, and she thought of Will, his apartment with exposed brick walls–small, yes, but his, and the place quiet and clean. The two futures were so dissimilar she was sure they did not exist on the same continent.
—Hanna Pylväinen, We Sinners
A friend of mine from my old Laestadian Lutheran church told me the
other day that he once went back so he could drink and get stoned with
the guys there. It seems that their parents had forbidden them from
hanging out with him once he attained unbeliever status, and he didn’t
care for the hard-core attitude of the party crowd at his school. The
school kids he did like didn’t party as much as the Laestadian guys.
So he “repented” and was allowed back into the company of his lifelong
friends, free to live it up with them on Saturday nights and sit
through sermons alongside them on Sunday mornings. Their well-meaning
parents only witnessed the second part of that social interaction, of
course. That was a while ago; his partying days are over and he has
left the church for good now.
There are a lot of people who go back for a while on their way out,
for a variety of reasons that are seldom so amusing as I found his to
be. Fundamentalist religion exerts a powerful social and psychological
pull that forces them into a return trip or two before–if they can
achieve escape velocity–their final trajectory to the universe
beyond. They might spend years or even lifetimes stuck in unsettled
orbits around Planet Faith, well within sight of everyone down there
but at a tolerable distance from whatever absurd rules and doctrines
made them take off in the first place.
———
Another person provided me with a fascinating little story about how
this worked in his own life for over 20 years. He “encountered
something that seriously strained” his faith and “started running up
against all kinds of” conflicts between science, the Bible, and
faith. “I didn’t know how to deal with this stuff and eventually I
even began to doubt God,” he said. There was a lot of guilt,
even though I was living a life that would seem very moral and
praiseworthy by most peoples’ standards. Unable to reconcile my
conflicts, I simply unplugged and became religiously inactive. I did
my best to simply switch off religion from my life and I found a lot
of joy and richness in my new way of being but, having never really
dealt with my faith issues, I still carried a lot of my old worldview
under the hood. Also, coming from a very conservative and
faith-oriented family, I had to keep up appearances for my parents’ sake.
He became close with a woman in the church he “had loved from afar for
years,” and
eventually it became obvious that we were headed for marriage. But
she was committed to marrying someone who was strong in the
faith. And to me, a faithful life together with her sounded like a
wonderful future. I committed to her and to myself that I would
recommit myself. And boy did I try. From the beginning I had no
intention of just going along to get her to marry me. I was going to
be that man of faith that I thought I should be.
But his issues with the faith remained, as did his feelings of being
inadequate and unacceptable. He diligently studied the church’s
publications that attempted to address those issues, but they just
weren’t cutting it anymore. Indeed, he said, they were
introducing me to more problems than I had been aware of
originally. More and more it seemed like the apologetic answers were
falling flat. After more than 20 years I finally realized the
problem. This method of answering questions, which appeared to be
scientific, was actually the exact opposite of science. If you start
with your conclusion and cherry pick your evidence you can “prove”
anything you want. It was anti-science.
Finally one day, he came across a passage of scripture that he just
couldn’t reconcile. “My brain hurt from trying,” he said. “Finally I
thought, ‘Hey, maybe I don’t have to believe all of it!’ Then, a few
seconds later, ‘Maybe I don’t have to believe any of it!’” And then
his “entire world changed. It was like the parallax shift when you
close one eye and open the other, but the view from the other eye was
of a completely new world.”
His wife remains in the church but is supportive of her husband, he
said, and a “huge weight has been lifted. My greatest joy now is to be
able to say ‘I don’t know’ and to ponder the possibilities. The need
for certainty was so much more of a burden than I realized at the time.”
It’s a powerful story, isn’t it? Does it make any difference when you
learn that my correspondent wasn’t a Laestadian or even a Protestant
Christian? He’d never heard of Laestadianism before running into
me. That last deal-breaker passage of scripture he encountered was
in the Book of Mormon, and the sign out in front of the building he
still visits with his wife reads, “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints.”
There are certainly differences between the church buildings and some
of their troublesome scriptural passages. But they build upon the same
shifting sands of the Bible–with all its contradictions, ancient
outrages, and indisputable errors. And the stories–the hundreds of
stories from people disillusioned with all their varied
religions–sound much the same.
The author of I’m (No Longer) a Mormon: A Confessional writes
eloquently about her own orbit around the LDS Church. “I felt like Eve
in the Garden of Eden: My eyes had been opened. I had been lied
to. Worse, I had spent decades living my life for those lies, trying
to fashion myself into a being that conformed to the standard of those lies.”
Yet she stays, as do many others, and asks her readers to understand
“our absolute desperation to believe what we’ve been taught, even if
it makes absolutely no sense at all. Please pity us. This is no way to
live, and coming out of it is pure and absolute agony.”
She does a frank assessment of the costs and benefits. “If I walk away
from this church, everything I have ever known evaporates instantly.”
She would forsake her faith along with her “understanding of the way
the universe operates.” She would be largely ostracized or at least
“publicly lambasted” by her entire social network, and lose the
support of most of her and her husband’s family.
And if she leaves? What does she get from that? “The rug pulled out
from under me. Live a lie, or live with the consequences. And I’m not
abandoning all and following after Truth. I’m not leaving everything
for something better. I’m just leaving.”
———
One ex-Laestadian correspondent “wanted to cave many times” but “knew
I’d be back to square one.” That pull has lessened over the years,
though it certainly can be a strong one. My own process of leaving is
a testament to that, requiring a year of full-time effort to research
and write a hefty doorstop of a book about the church: “Examining this
pearl of Conservative Laestadianism was in some sense to cherish and
value it. But I also had a very personal need to confront it, to stare
down its threats and dismantle–to my own satisfaction at least–its
most outrageous claims.” There is, another correspondent notes,
“such a huge codependency on everything church.”
Others leave and never look back. My favorite story in that regard was
one I heard secondhand about a guy who announced to his family, “Not
believing. Don’t want to talk about it.” And for him, that was
that. An ex-Laestadian friend of mine has much the same mindset: “No
interest in returning to the dark abyss.” Another says, “Knowing how
hard it was to leave the first time was part of what kept me from
caving in to pressure to come back. I didn’t want to go through it
again, and once I was out, I knew I wasn’t going back to stay.”
Some ex-LLCers frame the matter in terms of personal integrity:
-
“The pressure is real, although I don’t know how I would look at
myself in the mirror if I went back.”
-
“I have never considered going back. Even if I did in the future for
who knows what reason, I would never be a ‘real’ believer again
because I don’t agree with the church, so I would just be
pretending.”
“Feeling very vulnerable, awkward and emotional,” another person
“cracked and repented. Two hours later I started feeling the same old
anxiety creeping in.” There was the old “doubt and disbelief,” which
had started going away the further this person got from the LLC. “So I
knew it wasn’t a real thing, I just had put myself in a very
vulnerable spot. And when I went to church, people I didn’t know very
well were more happy about it than I ever was. I knew nothing had
changed inside, I had to decide–did I want to be truthful to myself
or did I want to conform to the group?”
It’s not an easy path, still difficult in fact, “but I think it is the
right way for me to go.”
The difficulty of the path is beautifully described–again with
reference to Mormonism–in Libbie Hawker’s lyrical book Baptism for
the Dead. The first-person protagonist reflects on an emotionally
difficult departure from her childhood faith. She’d been having a
passionate affair with “X,” a traveling photographer and painter right
out of The Bridges of Madison County. He’s a shadowy outsider who
fit his key into the lock of her latent doubts, revealing the broader
perspective of a world outside the small-town Mormonism that had so
frustrated her.
They flee Rexburg, Idaho for a photography road trip, taking in the
natural beauty of the American West by day and each other in motel
room beds by night. But the church follows her.
She appreciates a certain irony about that, one that contributes to
the return-trip phenomenon: Only after leaving Rexburg had she “come
to doubt my doubt.” Everyone she’d “ever known was in that town. I
could not picture a life that didn’t revolve around my community,
assuming I could still call it my community at all. Yet what else did
I have? An artist I had met only days before, the interior of his car,
and the shifting crowds at scenic overlooks and highway rest stops.”
As she and X drive through the Grand Tetons and she reflects on her
poor gay husband back home who’d tried to fit into the Mormon mold
just like she had, unsuccessfully, she muses about “this ember inside
of me, an animal red, an awful crimson. No matter how I try to smother
it, it continues to glow.”
She feels crippled, silently wondering to herself and to X “how even a
God I don’t believe in still has the power to rub the scales from my
wings, how even when I am with you I can still feel that miserable
brand inside me, smoking, and how sometimes I wish I did believe, just
for the simplicity of it, for the ease of knowing that to want you and
to have you is wrong, absolutely, unmistakably, simply–even though it
feels as right as breathing.”
But she experienced all this with no belief in and thus no “fear of a
vengeful God.” So why, she asks,
even after I left, did that wretched guilt consume me? It smoldered
inside me; it obscured the world with its sickening smoke. And how
could I feel so splendidly alive, so awakened to the world, with the
bird in the pine trees scolding inside my head, with the pines moving
in the breeze of my pulse, with the sunrise coloring my skin and my
skin coloring the sunrise, and yet feel so ashamed of you, X, of my
love for you, which was the very thing that had finally made me live?
———
Our other Mormon author, Regina Samuelson, concludes her book still in
the closet, still uncertain about what to do, moving “forward one step
at a time, hurt but hopeful, and desperately seeking Truth, no matter
how difficult that truth may be for me to cope with or accept.”
“Please help me,” she asks from behind the veil of her pen name:
Please help us. While you cannot exactly understand our position
unless you, too, have experienced it, I pray fervently that this book
has helped in some small way for you to relate to those of us who are
searching for answers, for understanding, and for love.
We are alone.
It does seem that way at times. But she is not alone, and neither are
you. Viewed as a whole, there are thousands of people leaving
Mormonism and
Laestadianism and many other
high-control religious groups. There are online forums and websites
for apostates from the
Jehovah’s Witnesses, the
Exclusive Brethren,
Iglesia ni Cristo, the
“Truth”, and
even Islam–often at significant personal
risk in that last case.
You can leave, for good, if that’s what you want to do. If you’re
not ready–now or ever, for your own set of entirely understandable
reasons–that’s perfectly fine. Lots of people manage to have happy,
fulfilled lives inside of restrictive religions. For some of them, I’d
wish nothing better. And it’s not like there’s any sort of hell
awaiting you after you die because you decided not to become an
unbeliever.
The reality, even from the vast majority of the Bible’s indications on
the subject, is that there’s no hell at all. There is just this single
brief lifetime, and the grains of its remaining days are dropping
through that little passage in your hourglass one by one. So, if you are ready to leave, then do it already! Enjoy those remaining days
free of that “dark abyss,” making your own choices about your life and
with a set of your own beliefs–whatever they are–that you can openly
and honestly call your own.
———
See also my essay “
Getting Out.” Click on (most) individual images to enlarge, or check out their photo pages in my
Flickr photostream. All except for the cover of Libbie Hawker’s fine book are Copyright © 2014-15 Edwin A. Suominen. You may freely use them for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, under the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Notes
