A Mormon Mother's View On Gay Marriage

          My mother is a very quiet woman but also very true to her religious convictions.  She is always there in the background, doing what is expected of her.  My mother also possesses a very unusual blend of convictions; she is both a Mormon and a Democrat.  Once, she even hinted to possessing pro-choice leanings; she believes people should be given the freedom to make their own choices.  She dislikes Romney and always agreed with me when I grumbled about the authorities being a bunch of old white men that were out of touch with reality.  

          Now that I have left the Church, religion is a topic we rarely discuss; my mother clings to the belief that I left because church members offended me.  I don’t want to break her heart any more than I already have, so I try to keep quiet about the real reasons I left.  

          Last winter, during a trip home, my mother and I engaged in a rare conversation about the Mormon church.  Specifically, I mentioned the Church’s support of Proposition 8 and how hurt I was by their involvement in the matter.  My mother didn’t know what I was talking about, so I explained that Prop 8 was an initiative to ban gay marriage, which at the time had been legal in California.  The Mormon church had invested a lot of money and time into getting Prop 8 passed, to the heartbreak of many.  After I explained about Prop 8, my mother was quiet for a moment.

          And then, very gently, I decided to push just a little bit further.  I mentioned how upset I was when I discovered Joseph Smith had 33 wives.  I was in my mid-twenties when I found this out, in spite of a lifetime of learning about Joseph Smith.  I asked my mother if she had heard about Joseph’s other wives.  My mother admitted she had heard a little bit about the matter.  

          “But they were just spiritual wives.” my mother said.  “They weren’t real wives.”

          “Actually, no.”  I said.  “The evidence strongly supports the idea that they were actual wives.  And the thing is, about a third of his wives already had living husbands.”

          My mother was quiet for a moment, then smiled and looked at me.  “Well.” she said.  “I guess Joseph Smith’s unconventional marriages means that one day the Mormon Church will just have to support gay marriage.”  

The Peculiar Heart-Break Of A Mormon Wedding

          As a Mormon girl, I was raised to believe that the pinnacle of my life would be when I entered the temple to marry a worthy Mormon man.  My very salvation depended upon getting married in the temple --- a temple ceremony seals a husband and wife together for eternity.  The highest level of Mormon heaven is reserved for members that have married in the temple and born children.  The doors of heaven are closed to those who are childless, single, or un-worthy to enter the temple.

          To enter the temple, a member must hold a temple recommend.  To get a temple recommend, a member must be of a certain age and have been active for at least a year.  A member must also pass an interview, during which he/she must demonstrate that their belief in the Church.  A member is asked if he/she believes in the Church; supports the authorities; abstains from mind-altering substances such as coffee, tea, and alcohol; obeys the law of chastity, including abstaining from premarital sex, masturbation, and porn; and have paid a full tithe.  If a person can’t fulfill all of these requirements, then they are denied a temple recommend.  

          One of the most heart-breaking consequences of leaving the Mormon church meant that I was banned from attending my siblings’ weddings.  One of my brothers got married around the time I was starting to leave the Church.  My parents didn’t even bother to bring me along for the wedding --- I stayed at home while they made the trip to D.C. for his wedding.  Three days of wandering an empty house, wondering what was wrong with me.  

          A year later, another of my brothers got married.  By that time, I was fully out of the Church.  His fiance was a convert --- her family was Catholic.  His fiance’s mother was upset about the idea of a temple wedding and insisted on organizing a church wedding.  She wouldn’t take no for an answer --- she had spent years dreaming of organizing her daughter’s wedding.  

          This is when the matter became very delicate.  If members choose to have a civil ceremony, they are barred from getting sealed in the temple for a full year.  If they do choose to have a civil ceremony instead of a temple ceremony, church members begin to doubt their worthiness and faithfulness.  Church authorities also warn them about the dire spiritual consequences of waiting.  There is an intense amount of pressure --- both social and doctrinal --- to have the wedding be in the temple.  My sister-in-law was forced to choose between her family and her religion.  

          So my brother and his fiance evaded the situation.  They down-played the importance of the temple ceremony to the in-laws.  The wedding was in Pennsylvania, so my brother and his wife woke up at 3 the morning of the wedding, drove to D.C., had the temple ceremony, and then came back for the church wedding.  To circumvent the issue of a civil ceremony, they hired a Mormon minister who was very careful about his wordings.  Instead of saying --- “I now pronounce you husband and wife”, at the end of the ceremony he turned my brother and his wife around and said “I now present to you Mr. and Mrs. G-----”, thus avoiding saying the words that would have made the ceremony real.  And no one in my sister-in-law’s family was any the wiser.  They danced, drank, and partied, never knowing that the ceremony they had just seen was a sham.    

          My sister got married last year.  Once again, the issue of my break with the Church was brought to the forefront.  My sister’s fiance came from a long tradition of Mormons.  My husband and I were the lone non-Mormons within the two families.  And so we were relegated to baby-sitting the children during the ceremony.  My mother asked me --- after the ceremony was finished and the photography had begun --- if I was upset about being left out of the wedding.  I longed to tell her my true feelings --- that being banned from the wedding felt like a knife to the chest --- but I also knew that making an issue of the matter accomplishes nothing.  My family performs their weddings this way because they place their faith in a church that demands the exclusion of non-members.   

Correction: The sentence "Members are required to show their W2’s to prove that they have paid a full tithe of 10%, was removed", as this is not church-wide policy.  

A Moral System Free Of Religion

          What frightened me the most about leaving the Mormon church --- and losing my belief in a higher power altogether --- was the perception that religion is required for morality.  I was afraid that leaving religion would turn me into a person devoid of values.  I thought I would lose the love I had for people. I was afraid I would lose my inner compass that told me how to differentiate between right and wrong.  And Mormon culture supports the idea that leaving causes a person to become lost.  The authorities taught me to fear the world outside the rigid confines of the Mormon Church.   

          When I first started questioning the Mormon Church, I was not doing so out of toughness or bravado.  I was scared and confused, with no idea of what the future held for me.  I thought my doubts made me a bad person.  I held on to the Church in desperation, praying that I could somehow resolve my issues.  I prayed and read my scriptures.  I attended church every Sunday.  I went to seminary every morning.  I participated in my youth activities.  I followed the admonition that bearing your testimony will strengthen it.  And nothing worked --- I was as full of doubts as before.  I had been promised answers if I was faithful enough but the answers never came.  

          Then one day I said to myself --- “What if there is no God?  What if it’s OK not to know?”  And with that question, all of my issues melted away.  The world made sense again.  But a part of me was still frightened of what being an agnostic meant.  I didn’t know what life would be like without religion to provide structure.  

          Ten years after leaving, I have learned many lessons, the most important of which is that losing faith in God doesn’t mean losing faith in humanity.  Who I am --- the very core of what makes me a person --- is unaltered.  My love for people is still intact.  My sense of what is right and wrong still exists.  The joy I find in life is still there.  And I have found that the stripping away of a rigid belief system has opened my eyes to the inherent goodness of humanity.  I have discovered that good people are found in all walks of life.  Goodness is not reserved for a single group of people but exists in the diversity of the world around us.  

Testimony Meeting: Fake It 'Til You Make It

“We gain or strengthen a testimony by bearing it.”¹  

Dallin H. Oaks, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.  

          In the Mormon church, every first Sunday of the month is fast and testimony meeting.  Members are expected to abstain from food and drink.  During sacrament meeting, in lieu of prepared talks, the service is devoted to members standing up and professing their faith in the Church.  

          As a kid, I always dreaded fast and testimony meetings.  Sacrament meeting seemed even longer than normal, as the majority of the hour was marred by uncomfortable silences, punctuated by the occasional member that would feel pressured into standing up to break the monotony.  Later, during Sunday School, all I could think about was the grumbling in my stomach.  We usually had another, smaller testimony meeting among our peers, so that we could practice saying them in front of others.  

          We were taught that the best way to strengthen our testimony was by bearing it.  I did my best to follow that advice, in spite of my reticence about public demonstrations of faith.  The dissident in me always thought of Matthews 6:5 --- “And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street, that they may be seen by others.”  But the admonition to bear your testimony often was a directive from the General Authorities, so I tried my best to be a good Mormon girl.  

          Testimonies usually fell into a pattern --- the member would talk about some trial in their life and then say how the Lord had answered their prayers.  Then the member would finish by saying --- “I know this Church is the one true Church.  I know that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God and that Jesus died for our sins.”  Or something along those lines.  But the testimonies were more exceptional for what they didn’t say.  In all the testimonies I heard over the years --- and there were thousands of them --- I can count on one hand the number of times I heard members admitting to having unresolved doubts about the truth of the Church.   Having doubts and questioning the gospel was acceptable, as long as you arrived at the correct conclusion of “The Church is true.”  

          I always felt very uncomfortable bearing my testimony.  I thought that the Mormon church was true.  I believed that the Mormon Church was true.  But there was an intense pressure within the Church to say that you knew the Mormon Church was true.  You knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the Mormon church was true.  And the rational part of my mind knew that the fact of knowing was impossible.  But I had been raised to place complete faith in the authorities and so I too stood up and said “I know this Church is true.”  And in so doing, I contributed to an environment in which members felt alone in their doubts.  

¹http://www.lds.org/general-conference/2008/04/testimony?lang=eng

"The Church Is Perfect. People Aren’t." And Why The Idea of Doctrinal Infallibility Is So Harmful To Members.

          As a Mormon girl, my fellow Mormons and I had a saying that we would repeat every-time that someone or something within the church frustrated us.  The saying was --- “The church is perfect.  People aren’t.”  By that, we meant that whereas people might be frail and corruptible, the church was the one institution that we could rely on to always lead us in the right direction.  People might make mistakes but the Church did not.  We viewed the President of the Mormon Church --- whom we considered to be a prophet inspired of God --- to be our spiritual leader.  The Book of Mormon was considered to be “the most correct of any book on earth and the keystone of our religion.”  The Church would never lead us astray.  Any offense caused by another member was the result of human imperfection.  Any issue that we had with doctrine or the teachings of authorities was the result of our own human failings.  

          This idea of doctrinal infallibility places an enormous burden on church members.  As a faithful Mormon, I had some serious mis-givings about some of the Church’s teachings.  I felt very uncomfortable with the Church’s stance on gay people.  My heart told me that two people in love --- no matter their gender --- was something to celebrate.  My church told me otherwise.  And since “the Church is perfect”, the implication was that my heart was leading me astray.  The burden was on me to change myself in order to fit the dictates of Church doctrine.  

          I also had no avenue in which to try and change the Church.  I was taught not to contact authorities about my concerns.  Criticism of the authorities is a very serious matter within the Mormon church and can lead to excommunication.  As a member, I was powerless to effect change.  My voice was silenced.  Since the Church was perfect --- and the only true church --- the implication was that I had to conform my convictions to match that of the Church.  My eternal salvation depended upon my ability to internalize the doctrinal teachings and make them my own.  This led to quite a few mental gymnastics on my behalf as I struggled to conform my heart and my mind to the ideals that the Church demanded of me.    

          All of this leaves members in a very vulnerable position.  Church members are expected to give over complete control to authorities.  There is no space for dissension.   In situations where the Church’s actions are less than perfect --- such as the priesthood ban on blacks or the support of Proposition 8 --- members have no room to voice their concerns.  Authorities expect complete obedience, no matter how heart-breaking obedience may be to the individual.