Faith Deficit Disorder

Recently, I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, and I started taking medication for it. I had never realized just how much this condition had prevented me from functioning fully. I simply hadn’t know what normal was like. After a month on the Adderall, I am doing really well.

One visible benefit from the medication is that I’m a lot more organized, and my desk at work, which has always been obscured by piles of papers and CDs, is organized and clean. One of my coworkers mentioned that he had thought I had been laid off because my desk looked like it had been cleared. When I explained about the Adderall, he said he was taking it, too, and for him, like me, it has been life-changing. Another coworker mentioned that he too is on Adderall. Coincidentally, both of these guys are closeted apostates in that both of them have lost all belief in Mormonism but stay active and participating for social and familial reasons. One of my apostate coworkers said that it was funny that all three of us unbelievers suffer from ADD. He wondered if there were a connection between our loss of faith and the ADD.

He isn’t the first person I know who has attempted to make a connection between psychological disorders and apostasy. My old friend, amateur apologist and armchair psychotherapist Wade Englund, has long asserted that loss of faith in Mormonism is a result of distorted cognitive processes. Thus, he advocates cognitive behavioral therapy for us apostates. I’d never given much credence to that, but then my cousin, who is a psychiatric nurse practitioner, mentioned in passing that she had “trouble feeling the Spirit” before she started taking ADD medication.

Could there be a link between ADD and apostasy?

In talking to my co-medicated friends, I discovered that what we had in common was a real hunger to learn and discover and propensity to become bored when we’re not learning. In me, this hunger for learning led to a passion to read as much as I could about my religion, its history and its doctrines. At one point when I was commuting by bus from Orem to work at the Church Office Building in Salt Lake City, I was reading my scriptures for 90 minutes in the morning and then reading the teachings of the modern prophets (LDS church leaders) an equal amount of time on the way home. On my lunch hours I would go down to the Church Historical Library and read whatever I could get my hands on.

Oddly enough, I never read anything that could be considered “anti-Mormon.” I avoided “The Godmakers” and Fawn Brodie, preferring to read pioneer journals, scripture commentaries, and old conference addresses. Inevitably, as the people and events of my religion’s history became more real to me, my perceptions of my religion changed. Now, I’m not saying that exposure to church history necessarily leads to loss of faith, but certainly the jarring disconnect between the sanitized Mormonism of Sunday School and seminary and the messier but real history changes the way one understands Mormonism. Certainly many people find their faith strengthened by their study of church history and doctrine, but I would argue that their perception has been changed forever.

My interaction with apologists and ex-Mormons bears this out. Those who have been exposed to church history outside of official Mormon publications view Mormonism much differently than do those whose study is limited to correlated church materials. The difference is exemplified in the reaction of some to new information. As an example, quite often we hear of people discovering troubling information about Joseph Smith’s practice of polygyny and polyandry. One could grow up in the LDS church, attend meetings, read lesson manuals and scriptures, and yet be totally unaware that Joseph Smith had at least 33 wives, 11 of whom were concurrently married to someone else at the time. I knew growing up that Joseph Smith had taught and practiced polygamy, but I had always been told that these were sealings, not really marriages, and they were mostly to support widows. I know, it sounds naive, but that’s what I was taught. I suspect I’m not unique in having been taught that. But when someone goes to FAIR or MAD with their concerns about these issues, they are uniformly ridiculed, first because they are said to have been “lazy” for not learning about these things earlier, but second because they are clearly not sophisticated or nuanced enough to understand the godliness of Joseph Smith’s actions.

It seems clear to me that, even in their defense of Mormonism, apologists have radically changed their perspective on troubling issues from polygamy to the very problematic Book of Abraham. What separates the apologists from the apostates is the conclusions they allow themselves to reach. An apostate looks at the Book of Abraham, for example, and understands that the papyrus that Joseph Smith claimed to have translated bears no relationship to any story of Abraham, much less to the anachronistic story canonized in the Pearl of Great Price. Apologists, on the other hand, are reduced to sputtering about missing scrolls and redefining the word “translation.” My favorite apologist response has to be the one suggesting that, although Joseph Smith believed he was translating the papyrus, he really wasn’t, but the text is still the revealed word of God.

But in the end, the new information has forced a transformation of heretofore “orthodox” belief. Lamanites thus stop being Native Americans, and the Book of Mormon takes place in an ever-shrinking geographical location. And the apologists got to this transformation the same way we did: they too hungered for knowledge and found it.

That to me is the common ground between apologists and apostates: we all have a natural curiosity, a desire to learn and understand more. Despite the ulterior motivations believers ascribe to apostates, almost without exception it has been the drive to learn, to know, that characterizes the ex-Mormons I know. The same is also true for most of the apologists I know. The difference, I suspect, is in a person’s willingness to consider that the church might not be what it claims to be. One prominent apologist once said that he believed, a la Thomas Kuhn, that it was healthy and necessary to shift one’s paradigm with new information, as long as the center of the paradigm never shifted. That center of course was that the LDS church is true.

In the end, the Adderall hasn’t dampened my natural curiosity, but rather it has helped me to be more focused in learning new skills and new information. But who knows? Maybe a few doses of Ritalin might have kept me on the straight and narrow.

Red-Letter Day

Yesterday was just an all-around good day for me. As I mentioned, I finally got to a good place regarding my participation on certain message boards, and that feels very liberating. But I also reached my goal weight after 5 months of diet and exercise. I’ve worked really hard to lose the weight and get into shape, and I really feel good. I’ve lost a total of 38 lbs., which given my height and bone structure (I’m 5′8″ and rather small of frame) is a huge amount of weight. I never want to get that fat again. I’m at the same weight I was in the Missionary Training Center when I was 19 years old. Anyway, it feels good, and I suppose I needed to share that.

Also, my wife scored 100 on her Biomedicine exam, which is wonderful. I’ve watched her take her studies so seriously, and it’s great to see it’s paying off. I would have said that her grades are amazing, but then I knew what she was capable of, and she is proving me right. I could not be more proud of her.

And my son, who is a sophomore, placed tenth in the pre-region cross-country meet yesterday. And that really is amazing. A sophomore is not supposed to do that well running against juniors and seniors. But more than that, my son is just a great kid. He works hard, he does what we ask of him, and he is just generally a pleasant person to be around. I am very proud of him, too.

Maybe it’s the adderall, but I feel good these days and genuinely hopeful for the future. Of course, having said that, I’m sure something is bound to go wrong. But I feel like I can handle it.

They Just Look Happy …

When I was a small boy, we lived about half a block from a rather large park in Southern California. My mom would take us over there almost every afternoon in the summers after my youngest brother had his nap. But we never went on Sundays. Returning from church each Sabbath, we would see other kids playing happily on the playground equipment and wonder why we couldn’t play with them.

“We keep the Sabbath day holy,” my mom would say. “It’s a commandment from Heavenly Father.”

“But those kids are having so much fun. Why wouldn’t Heavenly Father want us to have fun, too?” we protested.

“Well, they’re not really having fun. They just look like they’re having fun,” she would say.

As I grew older, I heard variations of this thought: People outside the church may think they’re happy, but they aren’t really happy. Only church members can truly experience real joy. Everyone else just looks happy “on the outside.”

“Happiness is the object and design of our existence,” Joseph Smith wrote in a letter proposing plural marriage to Nancy Rigdon. And we spent an awful lot of time reminding ourselves of how much joy and happiness the gospel had brought us. Numberless testimonies were given of how the gospel had blessed people, and conversely, of how they would have wandered in dark paths had they not known the truth.

I thought I was happy. I had everything a Mormon boy is supposed to aspire to: a loving wife, lots of kids, a postgraduate education, a professional career, and leadership positions in the church.

But then my faith in Mormonism collapsed, and I saw it for the manmade organization it is. But that realization wasn’t nearly as devastating as the realization that I wasn’t really happy and hadn’t been for a very long time. I had accepted the church’s definition of happiness without ever considering whether that kind of life really meant happiness for me.

I had held suspicions that I was dealing with depression during my church years, but it wasn’t until I got out of the church that I began to deal with the problem. I remember filling out a questionnaire to determine the level of depression, and one of the questions was, “How long have you felt this way?” I could only check the answer, “I can’t remember when I didn’t feel this way.”

Of course, I’ve had some church members tell me the depression is a direct consequence of my apostasy, but that’s what I would expect them to say.

The church provides a framework for interpreting experience, and in many ways that rigid framework is comforting in giving us a consistent approach to life. However, I had to break out of that framework to figure out how to be happy. At 40 years old, I had for so long lived by what others had told me that I didn’t know what I wanted out of life. I didn’t know who I was.

And in the end, that’s the only way to be happy: to know who you are and know what you want out of life. I’m sure some people can find true happiness in Mormonism. I didn’t, but then I didn’t really understand what happiness was.

So, yes, I may look happy on the outside, and that’s probably because I am happy.

Roses

Today was the first Saturday in a long time when the weather was nice enough to work outside, and it was nice not to be sick.

We moved into this house about a month ago, and the one thing that has been bugging me is the strip of overgrown rose bushes along the driveway. They had to have been at least 9 feet tall, and they were all twisted and snarled, with smaller shoots woven into the larger, mostly dead ones.

Not only were the rose bushes ugly (it’s winter, after all), but you could not get in and out of the car without snagging your clothes on a thorn.

So, armed with a new pair of hand clippers and leather gloves, I started on the bush closest to the house. Before I started, I read up on rose pruning (thanks, Google), so I knew that you had to cut just above a new bud on each branch.

It was slow going, and even with the gloves, my wrists and forearms were soon scratched and poked. The first bush took almost 45 minutes to prune. There were so many small shoots that were tightly wrapped around the larger branches and each other, but I wanted to get it right. So I looked carefully for new buds, the small red bumps standing out from the green stems. But for a lot of time, I just cut at will on the dead brown branches, the dried leaves and shriveled orange-brown rose hips drooping sadly toward the ground.

A neighbor had told me he makes rose hip jelly, but I thought these were way too far gone. As I was finishing up the first bush, an elderly woman walked by, pulling a wagon with two small boys. She stood in the driveway for a good 15 minutes telling me about her daughter, who had herniated a disk in her spine, which explained why she was caring for the two boys.

“It’s going to take a couple of days for you to get these bushes cut,” she said, and at that point I thought she was probably right. But when she left, I started back in on the roses. A few of the branches on the driveway side had little tufts of polyester batting and small shards of fabric, evidence of kids who hadn’t made a clean exit from the car.

Three hours later, I was done, and my green-waste can was filled to overflowing. The roses now stand a more-or-less uniform 18 inches or so, and they no longer look like the final scene of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (parents like me will know what I’m talking about).

I was pretty pleased with myself, and when my sister called from California, she said I sounded happier than the last time we had spoken. She brought up religion, and she said that I seem to have gotten to a good place regarding Mormonism. “It’s OK to be angry or hurt about the church when those feelings are warranted,” she said, “but you don’t want to be angry and hurt all the time. It doesn’t sound like you are anymore.”

No, I’m really not. A friend sent me a rather scathing letter the other day about my religious beliefs, and I think I would have reacted rather badly had I received that letter a couple of years ago. As it was, I just politely responded that I did not wish to discuss religious issues with that friend anymore.

Imagine that: just saying and thinking, “I don’t want to talk about that anymore.” Maybe the thorns in my life, many of them of my own making, are clearing away. It will take more than an afternoon, and definitely more than a pair of hand clippers, but I can see the roses amid the thorns. That’s a good start.

Therapy

I’ve decided to see my therapist again. I’m not very good at conflict resolution, and I certainly have self-esteem issues. But I’m surviving.

When I went to see her before, she stressed that I needed to express myself openly and confidently, or I would end up depressed and miserable. I haven’t really learned to talk about troubling issues with people who are important to me, so I’ve too often just gone along to get along. I think that attitude was slowly crushing the life out of me.

This blog has been kind of an escape hatch where I could express what I was feeling and thinking. I could be as blunt as I wanted, and it was OK. What I’m learning is that the rest of my life needs to be like that, too. I need to stop worrying about what people think of me and just do and say what I think is right. I don’t think that’s too much to ask from someone.

I’ve been more open in my personal relationships recently, and it feels good, even though it has led to some heated moments and some other moments of despair. Somewhere inside of me are opinions and feelings that need to be expressed. So far, so good.

Starbright

Sometimes I send my posts to be linked from the Carnival of the Vanities, a conglomeration of posts from Outer Blogness. One poster was Jason, who went by “Starbright” on RfM and elsewhere. I linked to his blog early on when I still had my old blog, and he linked to mine, and we exchanged comments and emails. I knew he had been dealing with mental illness, and I was shocked and saddened to learn that this terrible disease had finally claimed him.

I am so sorry for his family for their loss. I cannot imagine how it feels to lose a spouse and parent that way. It’s a sobering reminder for me that I nearly did the same thing last year. I’m really not sure what it is that stopped me before it was too late, but I’m grateful I didn’t go through with it.

It’s easy to blame Mormonism for the kinds of problems that led to this tragedy, but that would be simplistic and really unhelpful. It probably goes without saying that I think that Mormonism’s culture of guilt doesn’t really help people who are predisposed to mental illness, but that’s not the whole picture. And it would be just as easy for Mormons to point to Jason as showing the results of unbelief and apostasy. But that would be equally as wrong. I do think that becoming detached from lifelong moorings can certainly add to existing mental illness, but again, it’s not the cause.

I wish I had some words of comfort, but none come. In grieving for Jason, maybe we should remind ourselves that there are others out there suffering just as he was. If we see someone struggling, I hope that Jason’s memory will motivate us to do something to help.

Why You Should Always Take Your Meds

As GBSmith has helpfully pointed out, I’ve been a bit irritable lately. I haven’t made a conscious decision to be snippy, but I did do something stupid earlier this week: I neglected to take my medication for three days. That’s never a good idea when you’re on antidepressants, and I always respond the same way: part depressed, part crabby. Sorry to have put my readers through that, especially ditchu, who has been the target of much of the snippiness. I am truly sorry. I’m back on the meds and feeling a little better today.

I caught a little of LDS General Conference today, though I really didn’t have time to pay much attention. We had carpet cleaners in all day, and I was taking a load of junk to the dump and DI. I heard a little of Dallin Oaks talking about appropriate sacrament meeting content and Dieter Uchtdorf speaking about faith. Between sessions there was a little bio piece on Thomas S. Monson. I had forgotten just how young he was when he was ordained an apostle (37, I believe). But a few minutes into the documentary, I had to move some more furniture for the cleaner. I felt a little bad for the kid, who is a BYU student. I’m sure he would rather have been watching conference than cleaning my carpets, but at least he got paid.

The last time I really watched a session of conference was a year and a half ago when my home teacher invited us over for the Saturday afternoon session and dinner. I had hurt my back, and I could not get comfortable on his couch. The home teacher fell asleep about five minutes into the session, which kind of defeated the point of inviting us. But he’s a good man, and I enjoy his company (well, when he’s awake).

Tonight I’m home with my two younger sons. I think we’re going to get some dinner and then watch the USC-Oregon game. Maybe I’ll sit through a little of conference tomorrow.

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

I spent a lot of my weekend working on my book, in between mowing the lawn and doing some work around the house. I feel pretty good about the book. I wanted to tell my mission story without too much commentary because I hoped the story would speak for itself. I really just wanted to write down what happened, and I think I’ve succeeded. The book tells the good and the bad, the spiritual and the mundane, without any editorializing. Now, whether it’s any good is another story. But we’ll see.

Sunday morning my wife asked me to go to church with her, so I got dressed and we managed to slip into the church in time for Gospel Doctrine class. The class is reading in Alma, which is probably the best-written narrative in the Book of Mormon, though that’s not really saying much. Anyway, I was less interested in the lesson content than I was in the class members.

During the lesson, my wife watched a couple with a newborn baby, who was resisting their attempts to get her to take a pacifier. Once the baby spit it out with such force that it rolled about ten feet to my feet. I remembered those days (none of my kids would ever accept a pacifier) fondly, when it felt like your adult life was just beginning, and you were destined for good things.

A couple of rows ahead of us sat an older couple, the husband a retired BYU professors (you know, the kind of guy who wears a bow tie). The wife had long, detailed answers to every question the teacher asked, and my wife remarked afterward that every Gospel Doctrine class has that kind of monopolizer. At one point, the instructor read George Albert Smith’s little parable about how the more righteous you are, the more “devils” you have surrounding you to tempt you. This sister raised her hand and said, “That’s not a parable. It’s literal. We really do have little demons following us around and whispering in our ears.” I really can’t relate to that approach to life, as I’m not much of a mystical person. I’m with my mission president’s wife on this one: We don’t do wrong because someone tempted us into doing so; we do it because we like it.

At one point, a young woman raised her hand and said that the scriptures’ teaching that we should never be the aggressors in a war is something we should take to heart today. My wife leaned over and said, “Watch out.” Sure enough, the class was soon having a spirited debate about Iraq and whether the Bush Administration lied to get us to support a war. The man in the bow tie, who said he was “a little to the right of Attila the Hun,” said he looked forward to “educating” the young woman who had started the fracas.

After church (I skipped priesthood) we drove up Hobble Creek Canyon for a picnic. The leaves are turning, and that canyon is spectacular. My son said that it looked like the trees had been dipped in blood, and he wasn’t that far off. We stopped at a park where the canyon forks and had some tuna sandwiches and chips and some plums from our tree. We all got on the swings, and my wife told me how amazing it was to lean your head back and look at the world upside down while you’re swinging. I leaned back, and she shouted, “No! Lean back until you can see the grass!”  I thought it might be a little scary to see the world swinging back and forth over my head, but it was just a new and strange perspective on the familiar.

When I began slowing down, my wife said I must have been scared, so I just said, “I have to pee.” She laughed and said she had just seen in vision me at five or six years old getting off the swings to go pee. “Yeah, but I might not have made it,” I laughed.

The clouds were darkening and some large drops of rain coming down when we left. The wind blew our bag of chips off the table (I’m sure some squirrels ate well last night), and we packed into the van. On the way home, we drove past our old house in Elk Ridge. The people who bought it from us have not kept it up at all. The backyard is overgrown with weeds, and the paint I put on the trim ten years ago has not been redone, so everything is faded, the exposed wood graying and warped.

My wife became pretty emotional as we stood there looking at the house, and I’m pretty sure I know why. Ten years ago when we lived in that house, everything was going well for us. My job was going well, our finances were solid, I had just been ordained a high priest, and we were expecting our sixth child. Since that time, we’ve moved to Texas, and I’ve left the LDS church. Our marriage has had its ups and downs, I’ve been laid off twice, and our kids haven’t always done what we hoped they would.

But I wouldn’t change it. The struggles we have had have only strengthened our marriage, and leaving the church has helped me gain a perspective on life that I never would have imagined from within the confines of Mormonism. In short, I’m doing OK. No regrets. I don’t think I could ask for more.

Joy (from JLO)

Every Latter-day Saint is familiar with the Book of Mormon scripture, “Adam fell that man might be; and men are that they might have joy.”

I was going to write this morning about why it’s OK to be angry, but I realized that there’s a bigger issue than not having the right to be angry; it’s that we were not really allowed to feel much of anything at all. Yes, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but our emotions and feelings were always to be held in check.

Some gems from the Ensign illustrate these teachings:

“A young mother once turned to a wise old man for advice. ‘What should I teach my son?’ she asked. The man replied, ‘Teach him to deny himself’” (Bruce and Marie Hafen, “Bridle All Your Passions,” Ensign, Feb. 1994, 14).

“There are absolutely two ways you can control a horse. (We learned a little bit about horses last night.) One is to kill it; one is to bridle it. …

“A horse is stronger than a man, so the man bridles it, thus controlling its power and using that power for good. Passions are stronger than we are, so we bridle them, thus controlling their power and using that power to strengthen a marriage and forge it into eternity. One has to know how to bridle a horse or a passion” (Paul Dunn, “Teach ‘the Why,’ ” Ensign, Nov. 1981, 71).

“One of the last, subtle strongholds of selfishness is the natural feeling that we “own” ourselves. Of course we are free to choose and are personally accountable. Yes, we have individuality. But those who have chosen to “come unto Christ” soon realize that they do not “own” themselves. Instead, they belong to Him. We are to become consecrated along with our gifts, our appointed days, and our very selves. Hence, there is a stark difference between stubbornly “owning” oneself and submissively belonging to God. Clinging to the old self is not a mark of independence, but of indulgence!” (Neal Maxwell, “Put Off the Natural Man, and Come Off Conqueror,” Ensign, Nov. 1990, 14).

And of course many of us are familiar with the symbolism “that desires, appetites, and passions are to be kept within the bounds the Lord has set.”

But this kind of hemmed in experience is not what Joseph Smith taught. He said, “Happiness is the object and design of our existence, and will be the end thereof if we pursue the path that leads to it; and this path is virtue, uprightness, faithfulness, holiness, and keeping all the commandments of God.” The irony of this quote is its context: a letter proposing sexual union with Nancy Rigdon. The commandment in this case that he’s telling her to be faithful to is becoming his “wife” in secret, even from his first wife Emma (and presumably all his other wives).

Joseph seems to have understood happiness in terms of sexual gratification, but I very much doubt that any of the brethren would see it in those terms today. No, there’s a strange effort to contain the range of human emotions in Mormonism. It’s OK, for example, to weepily tell stories of the miraculous in testimony meeting; it’s not OK, though, to have any strong emotional response to a bad decision by church leadership. It’s fine to have companionship with your spouse; it’s not fine to have passion and even lust within that relationship (Spencer Kimball described it as ‘animal’ passion).

From my own experience, I was often at war with myself. My natural man (the enemy of God, natch) was curious about the way other people lived their lives. That part of me liked looking at beautiful bodies, enjoyed “impure” music (Nine Inch Nails was a guilty pleasure), and told bawdy jokes. But the Mormon in me battered my soul because of these failures, decried my weakness, loathed my passions.

One consequence of learning the fraudulent nature of the church is that people get angry, not only at being lied to, but also at being denied the feelings, the passions they always had. And at being made to feel guilty for having them. But the brighter result is that most of us lose that overwrought asceticism and find joy in living a passionate life. This is not to say that we’re living debauched lives of depravity; nope, we’re just admitting who we are and finding joy happiness in that.

Isn’t it wonderful?

Good Weekend

I drove down to the Sanpete Valley early on Sunday afternoon, heading south on a relatively empty Interstate 15. The sunset was pretty spectacular with the sun streaming through huge cumulus clouds over Utah Lake. Crossing into Juab County, I was struck, as always, with the beauty of Mt. Nebo. Earlier this summer, a large wildfire had spread from Santaquin Canyon southeast up the slopes, charring the scrub oaks and stripping the mountainside bare of grasses. There was a vague, postapocalyptic feeling that continued into Nephi Canyon, which my daughter says is the ugliest canyon in the world.

But even Nephi Canyon has its charms. Perhaps the driest canyon in Central Utah, Nephi Canyon looks closer to the edge of the Mojave in California, where sandy slopes rise into pine-covered peaks. At one spot, you can look up a side canyon, and the barren sandy hills of Nephi Canyon frame majestic peaks of red sandstone, bordered by aspens and pines. My daughter says the cliffs near the top make the mountain look like a sandcastle.

Over the low pass into Sanpete County, the valley spreads out ahead, the lower peaks of the Manti-LaSal mountains hemming in green expanse of wheat fields and shiny aluminum turkey sheds. One abandoned shed is now used for paintballing, with a sign outside broadcasting that it is also available for wedding receptions and banquets. Ewwww.

As we passed the sheds, thousands of turkeys milled about just inside the fence, with a handful standing bewildered outside the fence, pecking and prodding at the wire. If turkeys weren’t so stupid, I’d imagine that they had been yearning to get outside the fence, to experience just a few moments of freedom, but once outside, they realized that food and shelter and comfort were back inside. It always takes a little courage to break free of the comfortable; it’s more dangerous outside the fence, but it’s usually more rewarding.

At my daughter’s apartment, she rolled her eyes at her roommate’s leftover bowl of ramen noodles and can of Coke sitting on the living room carpet in front of the TV. I noticed that my daughters get along much better now that the oldest has moved on to college. Having just one difficult roommate has helped to see that her sister isn’t all that bad, after all. They sat together at the BYU football game on Saturday and seemed to have a great time together. Just like the turkeys, she had to get outside the fence to appreciate what was inside. But she can’t go back, and I hope she never wants to.

I drove home in silence, my only company being Karl Pilkington, who wondered how on earth they had cloned a man and a moth. I passed the turkey sheds again. It looked like they were all safely inside again. A while back I might have envied them. Not anymore.