Losing My Religion

by Lobdell, William

  Jesus said a person’s faith could be judged by the fruit it bears:

  Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.

  —MATTHEW 7:15–20

  Judged by its fruits, Mormonism compares favorably with other Christian denominations, even as many Protestants dismiss the Latter-day Saints as a non-Christian cult. So why do many Mormons practice so many of Christ’s teachings better than “real” Christians? As a mainstream Christian and budding Catholic, I often was amazed at how devoted and unquestioning Mormons could be to a faith that seemed so preposterous—not to mention racist—on its surface. I knew doctors and lawyers and other professionals at the top of their field who were practicing Mormons. How, I wondered, did they suspend their disbelief long enough to get around the many common-sense obstacles put in their path by the Book of Mormon and the life of Joseph Smith? Around the world, the church was (and still is) recruiting new members at an explosive pace, approaching 500,000 per year, according to church figures (numbers that critics say are inflated). Do they all believe the tenets of the faith? Do they look the other way theologically in order to join a lifestyle they admire? No one seemed bothered in the least by the speed bumps I encountered through a simple reading of their holy scriptures and the tiniest bit of research. For them, there was no need to debate their faith, just as there was no reason to bicker about whether the Earth was round.

  Many non-Mormon Christians share my reaction to Mormon doctrine. Yet what’s so strange about Mormonism compared to traditional Christianity? At the time, I didn’t see any parallel between the Mormons’ fidelity to the claims in the Book of Mormon and my allegiance to the New Testament, which included stories of a virgin birth, water turning into wine, two people rising from the dead, a coin to pay a temple tax being found in a fish’s mouth, Jesus walking on water, five loaves of bread and two fish feeding 5,000 families, and Jesus and his apostles curing people of crippling and fatal illnesses. And that’s just the New Testament. The Hebrew Scriptures talk about a global flood, people living well into their hundreds, a parted sea, a vast exodus not yet found in the archeological record, bread falling from heaven daily for 40 years and a man living three days inside a whale before being spit out. The details of Mormonism are fresher, but not much more strange and mythical. I just happened to have grown up with the stories of the Bible. I was more used to them.

  I was drawn to Mormons because they seemed to be in a spot similar to mine: they were people who believed deeply in their faith despite its challenges to rationality. At this point, after a decade of the Christian life, I wasn’t worried about specific details of my faith not making sense. I just assumed man’s hand in writing the Bible had injected some harmless contradictions into the Holy Book, and many of the wilder stories were simple allegories. But I did ponder deeper theological problems—the why-do-bad-things-happen-to-good-people kind of thoughts. Why are some prayers answered directly while others appear to be ignored? When a little girl gets raped and killed, where is God? Why might a busload of Christian high school athletes crash on the highway? Why does God play a hide-and-seek game with us, making it difficult to figure how He wants us to act?

  I often felt silly just having these kinds of doubts because the questions seemed so elementary. By this point, I thought my faith should have been more advanced. I saw it as a defeat, in a way, as if I had lasted long into a marathon and now was forced to go back to the starting line. I fought back with heavy doses of Christian reading, church services, prayer and long talks with my friend Hugh. On our weekly run around the Back Bay, I’d bring up the suffering of innocent children, and Hugh admitted that there wasn’t an easy answer to the pain they suffered, and that it broke his heart—and the Lord’s—to see it happen. But, he would always tell me, “Compared to eternity, we’re on this Earth for less than a blink of an eye. With that perspective, any suffering here is so minimal, and we won’t know why we even have that until we see the Lord. It will all be made clear, Billy, in less than a blink of an eye. I can wait. Heaven will be a wonderful place.”

  In retrospect, the Mormons were also part of my therapy. In them, I could see people living a faithful life while relying on a doctrine that to me seemed wildly flawed. Perhaps what mattered wasn’t theology, but the quality of life it created. I admired them because they lived a healthy and holy life. They were more admirable than I was. Yet I also thought my Scriptures, though they contained some contradictions, made far more sense. Was I thinking too much? At some point, didn’t I need to take a leap of faith? That’s why it’s called “faith” and “belief.” Science couldn’t prove or disprove the existence of God. Perhaps I could learn from the Mormons and conclude that intellectuals far wiser than myself had explored the tenets of Christianity and found them solid. I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. Still, I wondered, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, atheists and others each had their own scholars, who tackled great questions and confidently reached conflicting answers. These arguments would ricochet in my head until I just didn’t want to think about them anymore.

  I longed to be Mormon-like, accepting my faith and moving on to more productive matters—such as living it. I wrote often about Mormons, covering everything from their paradoxically hip teenage dances, which attracted 700 students from across Southern California, to the success of Mormon temple weddings, which boast a low divorce rate of 6 percent (the born-again Christian divorce rate is about 27 percent). I reported on a trio of moms who talked a Nordstrom department store into holding a fashion show that featured dresses that Mormon (and Orthodox Jewish and Muslim) teenagers could wear at their proms to retain their modesty.

  I even spent a day and night as part of a wagon train that journeyed 800 miles across the deserts of the Southwest, from Salt Lake City, Utah, to San Bernardino, California. The trek commemorated the Mormons’ first settlement in Southern California in 1851. I marveled at the commitment by the 60 or so Latter-day Saints who volunteered for the 50-day journey. Dressed in pioneer garb, they rode in seven covered wagons, which included a two-seater “potty wagon,” over the dirt trails, dried creek beds and some paved roads that roughly paralleled Interstate 15. They braved 100-degree-plus desert heat and fierce sand storms. They washed their clothes in tubs or over rocks. They settled squabbles in group meetings before each day’s ride.

  During my short time on the trail, I began to appreciate what the Mormon pioneers had gone through. The combination of the wooden-plank seats and rocky trail pounded relentlessly at my kidneys. The novelty wore off quickly, replaced by boredom. The desert landscape passed at less than five miles per hour. I especially felt for the young mothers on the trip. I have enough trouble entertaining my kids on car trips, even with an array of electronic devices at my disposal. These modern mothers had nothing, but somehow kept their young sons and daughters entertained for nearly two months, trapped in a tiny wagon.

  I had come to expect this kind of devotion to faith and family from Mormons. I could often spot a Mormon among other strangers in any given setting. They tended to be clean-cut, bright-eyed, conservatively dressed and surrounded by young children. And they just gave off a Mormon vibe, a Boy or Girl Scout goodness that made you feel at ease in their presence. That’s how I longed to live my faith—with so much integrity that everyone would instantly recognize me as a religious man.

  My story of the Mormon wagon train sparked an e-mail invitation to the inaugural Ex-Mormon General Conference in Salt Lake City the following month to see a different side of the Latter-day Saints. The conference was designed to run parallel to the Mormon General Conference, a semiannual meeting that dr
aws more than 30,000 Latter-day Saints to Utah from around the world.

  Before heading to the hotel headquarters of the ex-Mormons, I walked through historic Temple Square, the Vatican of the Mormon faith. The General Conference attendees swamped the ten-acre parcel that is home to Salt Lake Temple (built under the watch of Brigham Young) and the Tabernacle (home to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir). I also passed by the church’s conference center, a granite fortress of a facility with a capacity of 21,000.

  A block away, I found about 60 ex-Mormons gathered in a small, dingy meeting room at a second-rate hotel. These people lived mostly in the Mormon “Jell-O belt”—Utah, Idaho and Arizona—so-named because of the plates of Jell-O that inevitably appear at Mormon gatherings. They would spend the next three days trying to answer one question: How can a former Latter-day Saint carve out an acceptable life within the immense shadow of the clannish Mormon church, which claims roughly 70 percent of Utah residents as members?

  “In Utah, the church has created an almost impossible box to climb out of,” said Sue Emmett, then 60, a great-great-granddaughter of Brigham Young who left the church in 1999.

  Over the next few days, I saw something familiar at that hotel room: the tremendous pain that had been inflicted on people’s souls by men and women of faith. This time, the victims hadn’t been raped by priests and kicked around by church leaders; they had simply admitted that they didn’t believe in their faith anymore. Their punishment came from the laypeople: rejection by Mormon spouses, children and relatives; the disappearance of Mormon friends; the end of a social life; and sidetracked careers.

  Mormons who openly abandon their faith are relatively few. Most Mormons who fall out of belief don’t admit it. Called “Jack Mormons,” these people are believed, by some estimates, to represent about 25 percent of Mormon rolls, but they don’t dare come out of the closet because of the anticipated backlash. It took 16 months for Suzy Colver—another attendee at the ex-Mormon conference—and her husband to work up the courage to quit the Mormon church officially. They worried about what would befall them once word of their defection spread through their Mormon-dominated town of Ogden, Utah.

  They didn’t have to wait long. Colver told me that her family instantly became the neighborhood pariahs. She lost every one of her Mormon friends, even though she’d been a leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ local Relief Society. She wasn’t asked to volunteer at her kids’ elementary school anymore. Her decision was so unspeakable, she said, that when her brother-in-law visited he was afraid to even acknowledge it, despite the visual taboos: the coffeemaker on the counter and the bottle of chardonnay in the refrigerator.

  “If Mormons associate with you, they think they will somehow become contaminated and lose their faith too,” Colver said. “It’s almost as if people who leave the church don’t exist.”

  The people at the ex-Mormon conference were an eclectic bunch: novelists and stay-at-home moms, entrepreneurs and cartoonists, sex addicts and alcoholics. Some were depressed, others angry, and only a few had successfully moved on. But they shared a common thread: They wanted to be honest about their lack of faith and yet continue to be loved by family and friends. In most pockets of Mormon culture, that wasn’t going to happen.

  The ex-Mormons warmly welcomed me, as had the victims of clergy sexual abuse. They were thankful that someone—even a stranger, even a journalist—would listen to them. They didn’t have many friendly ears to bend on most days. Over the three days, we talked. And talked. We had a few drinks and talked some more. They wanted me to know the hardships they had experienced simply because their faith had evaporated.

  One expressed relief after moving out of state to a non-Mormon neighborhood: “It was so nice to go to the grocery store and know no one’s going to look down on you.”

  Another told of the pain she felt from the response of her grown children, who believe she’s been influenced by the devil: “They see me as an enemy, as a heretic and as a threat to their children.”

  A third—someone who was having problems in her marriage—told me that she quit going to bed with her husband because he refused to stop wearing his sacred Mormon undergarments, worn day and night by the devout. She wanted a respite from symbolism.

  “That church was right there in the bed with us,” she complained. Eventually, he quit wearing the underwear to bed, and she stopped wearing her “Have You Hugged an Apostate Today?” T-shirt.

  Though it was often covered by laughter and gallows humor, a deep sadness filled the conference. Part of what drew me to Christianity were the radical teachings of Jesus—to love your enemy, to protect the vulnerable and to go to any length to lovingly bring lost sheep back into the fold. As I reported the story from Salt Lake City, I wondered how faithful Mormons could embrace so many of Christ’s teachings but miss so badly on one of His primary lessons: to love your neighbor—even an ex-Mormon—as yourself. The lost faces of former Mormons and the callous treatment they suffered stuck with me. Their tormenters were not conspirators; the church did not need to order anyone to freeze them out. Surely the remarkably harsh and widespread reaction against them was a sign of insecurity: declaring Mormon belief a house of cards was a serious threat that evoked defensive hostility.

  At the time, I didn’t analyze it; I just instinctively felt for the victims. I did the only thing I thought I could do at the time: I prayed for the former Mormons and I prayed for Mormons who caused them such pain. I prayed for understanding and reconciliation. I asked for God’s intervention to bring love, understanding and healing to the people involved.

  When translated into English, the shortest sentence in the Bible is “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). He cried in front of the tomb of his friend Lazarus, whom he would soon raise from the dead. Evangelicals love the brevity of the sentence because it underscores the tenderness and human empathy of Jesus. After my trip to Utah, I imagined Jesus weeping over the treatment of the former Mormons I had met. And I was right there crying with Him.

  TEN

  Millstones Around Their Necks

  “But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

  —MATTHEW 18:6

  FORMER MORMONS LET down by their church, family and peers was one thing. Catholics let down by a church that covered up sexual abuse was much worse, and it involved criminal acts on a national scale. Little more than a month after my ex-Mormon story, on January 6, 2002, the Boston Globe published the first of a two-part series that described in devastating detail the extent of the clergy sexual abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston. This would permanently change the arc of my religion-writing career—and my spiritual journey. I was just a few months away from converting to Catholicism. Those weeks would raise a deep question: If an institution is corrupt, does that have any bearing on God? At the time, I thought the answer was obviously negative. But now I think I was wrong.

  Globe reporters, who would win a Pulitzer for their body of work, highlighted the case of Father John Geoghan, a priest who had been accused of molesting at least 130 boys, most of them in grammar school. The youngest was four years old. What made the story even more appalling was that Cardinal Bernard Law had known that Geoghan was a sexual predator in 1984, his first year as archbishop of Boston, but did nothing to stop him. (Geoghan had begun molesting boys in his first assignment after his 1962 ordination.) In fact, Law moved him to new parishes where the priest sexually assaulted new crops of boys, their parents unaware of the serial child rapist in their midst. It took the cardinal 14 years and an untold number of victims before he sought to remove Geoghan from the priesthood.

  Law hadn’t acted differently than other Catholic bishops. He had done as he was trained to do: deal with scandals in-house and keep them, at any cost, out of the public eye. What he didn’t realize was that by 2002, modernity had caught up to the Catholic Church. No
longer could the civil authorities be influenced into inaction and the media bullied or ignored. For once, the story wasn’t going to flare up for a moment and then go quietly away. When the Globe attempted to get a comment from Law for the Geoghan story, his spokeswoman not only declined comment but said the archdiocese “had no interest in knowing what the Globe’s questions would be.” They thought the controversy would blow over, as it had done many times before.

  The newspaper’s initial series in January 2002 was a remarkable piece of reporting in part because it cracked open the wall of secrecy that church officials had hid behind for decades. Globe reporters combed the 84 civil lawsuits still pending against Geoghan for any facts they could use to construct the story, though they couldn’t gain access to the evidence gathered in those suits because church attorneys got a judge to seal it. (After a motion by the Globe, a judge finally ordered the records unsealed on January 26, 2002.) Still, the bare facts of the cases, supplemented by moving interviews with Geoghan’s now-grown victims, allowed the journalists to put together a chilling tale.