Green Oasis

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past
I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

(Frank Herbert, Dune)

In the beginning of my spiritual quest, I really wanted to reach God. I wanted to bridge the gap that I perceived between us. Now in a state of openness, I began to listen with open ears to what my heart was saying was the truth. My search for truth began to lead me to atheist authors. I wouldn’t have given them the time of day before my newly open heart. Now I listened for the first time without holding up the sheild of dogmatic faith, laying my breast bare before the sword of truth.

I had held many stereotypes about those who hold no belief in God. I imagined atheists to be unhappy, blind, immoral, purposeless, lost, angry, scheming, passionless, nihilistic, empty, dishonest, and untrustworthy. This is what I had been taught to believe. I had always dismissed atheists as shortsighted since they refused to take the eternal view. I laid this prejudice aside long enough to hear them.

Lightning flashed leaving behind a violent upheaval and rumbling thunder to reëcho and rebound within the halls of my opened mind. As I let the truth of the atheists’ words sink into my soul, it rang resoundingly true. I could not deny it. My walls of fear, shame, and self-deceit fell away. I found myself more truly awake to the truth than ever before. Dazed, it took me time to reorient myself and survey the wreckage of my self.

I could not recall one experience that I could say with conviction was the Holy Spirit witnessing to me of the Father and the Son. I had never felt the love of a Heavenly Father despite years of searching. Nothing in my memories led me to a belief in God.

I started to examine the doubts that I had carried with me through all these years. “Could it be true? Could God be just another imaginary friend?” I turned the idea over in my mind, examining it, testing it, tasting it.

I feared being perceived as unworthy, unreliable, and defective. The faithful perceive those who change their mind on such fundamental issues as unstable and untrustworthy. I was afraid of admitting that I had led people astray by teaching them the gospel. I feared being ostracized from the community to which I had belonged all of my life. I had never before been strong enough to take a stand against this social pressure. In previous moments of doubt, I had looked out despairingly at the unfriendly world and fearfully returned to the community, unable to bear the thought of going it alone.

That had changed. I was now prepared to stand alone, playing the fool, if need be, for the truth’s sake.

I feared losing all the sources of my happiness. I was taught that everyone outside of Mormonism lacked true, lasting peace and happiness. The teachings of my childhood equated leaving the church with leaving behind hope and happiness. Life without the gift of the Holy Spirit was a lone and dreary wilderness, devoid of joy I was told. Those who leave the church would taste the bitterness of life unaided by God choicest blessings.

Contrary to those teachings, as I accepted the unreality of God, I became more happy than I could remember being. A broad feeling of peace enveloped me as what I believed came into alignment with what I had experienced in life. I became true to my real beliefs. I set down the burden of ignoring my doubts and perpetrating a faithful façade. The small twinge of guilt that I felt when I professed an absolute belief in things that I didn’t know to be true slipped away. As I lived true to my real beliefs, whatever they may be, I found real peace.

I didn’t need God to be happy.

I feared being wrong. The slimmest doubt that God might actually exist kept me in line for fear of eternal punishment. Then my eyes were opened to the problem with this line of thought. I had as much reason to believe in the God of Abraham as to believe in Zeus, Odin, Krishna, or any of the other gods. Should I embrace all religions past and present just in case one of the many was true? Would any of those gods accept such calculating faith? (Revelation 3:16)

I had always thought it was silly for people to believe in those other gods. Their faith was patently superstition from what I could see. I now turned that same skepticism on the God of Abraham. I had been an atheist all my life regarding all those other gods. I simply took it one step further in disbelieving in the God of my childhood. I decided that, if I were wrong in letting go of my belief, a loving, forgiving God would understand my predicament, especially since He gave me a rational, discerning mind and then hid himself so well from me. How could He expect me to believe in Him. I had tried very hard to suspend the workings of my discernment in God’s favor, but was never completely convinced. In giving up that effort, my view of the world suddenly coincided with my perceptions for the first time in my life.

I no longer feared being wrong.

I feared uncertainty. The experience of being completely sure is pleasing. Uncertainty is uncomfortable. I sought to maximize my pleasure by ignoring evidences which threatened my certainty. The Mormon promise of certain knowledge drew me in and kept me in line. I wanted to believe with absolute confidence, to dispel the uncomfortable feelings of doubt.

I began instead to accept uncertainty as part of the human condition. Absolute certainty seems impossible, out of the reach of the finite, human mind. Even simple logical and mathematical assertions rely on the assumptions of fallible human minds. I saw that I lived in a world of unresolvable uncertainty. Being without doubt is not the same as being correct. The siren call of absolute certainty had curtailed my search for truth. My own convictions imprisoned me, walling me off from honest inquiry. I saw how it threatened to make people unjustifiably zealous and willing to commit atrocities. I saw behind the attractive veneer of certainty to the burning, wasting disease of pride which gives me a false hope of losing all doubt.

Even though uncertainty was uncomfortable, I made my peace with it. I savored being openly aware of my limitations and doubts and owning them. I realized the wisdom of humbly seeing those limitations.

I no longer sought certainty from God.

I feared that I would fall into immorality without God to guide me. Without an absolute guideline, how could I decide what was right and wrong? I had always decried moral relativism as a weak-willed justification for amorality. Surely if I was left to my own devices I would become an unrepentant, self-interested pleasure-seeker.

As I observed the workings of my conscience, I instead found that the moral compass that I had been following was largely internal and always had been. The people around me had shaped how my conscience worked, but it had been largely inborn. As I looked over human history, our gods’ purportedly absolute morality has always changed to suit the tastes of the people. The God of the Old Testament condoned slavery, stoned willful children, accepted human sacrifice, commanded genocide, and drowned the entire human race including innocent children, babies, and the unborn. The Old Testament patriarchs got drunk, slept with prostitutes, had incestuous relationships with their daughters, and offered their virginal daughters to satisfy the lusts of mobs. Prophets killed people who believed differently and children who insulted them. Jesus though normally thought of as peaceful was also a fiery personality at times, not only famously casting the money-changers out of the Temple, but advocating family abandonment for his followers.

Human moral judgments have changed since the days of the Bible. I think for the better. In a flash of insight, I realized that we are not made in God’s image. God is instead made in our image.

As man is
So is his God;
And thus is God,
Oft strangely odd.
(Goethe)

We craft our gods to meet our needs, to embody our ideals. God was not a constant upon which I could rely. Teachings about God have evolved over time to match our evolving internal sense of morality. We read the scriptures selectively, picking and choosing which passages to follow based on our own moral intuitions. My sense of morality had never really come from God or the Mormon scriptures, but rather from an innate sensibility tutored by human society. I had sought justification from the scriptures for moral judgments that I had already made.

I hadn’t refrained from cheating on my taxes, tripping old ladies in the street, or killing babies because God told me not to. I wasn’t good because I feared eternal damnation. If anything, the idea of God had strewn my life with myriad forbidden fruit trees, all of them tempting because I was commanded to not eat their fruit. I chose to do good because I empathized with the victims of my actions, felt an innate sensibility about right and wrong, and did not like the consequences of wrongdoing.

Mormons would call this moral compass the Light of Christ, a close synonym for conscience, a gift of God to help His children discern between right and wrong. I found it more plausible that this was an organic product of how our minds have evolved to function in social groupings, not a mystical, omnipresent, divine influence.

I found myself without a divine moral crutch. I could no longer claim absolute authority over right and wrong. I saw that moral relativism wasn’t a prescription for human behavior, but a description of our true situation, impotent to find absolutes. We cannot know for sure what is absolutely moral, if such a thing even exists. Moral absolutism is what leads sane, well educated men to crash planes into occupied buildings. I was left to make up my own mind about right and wrong guided by my empathy for others.

I had never needed God to be good.

I feared being responsible for my actions; it seemed easier to blame it on the temptation of demons or on my fallen nature, or to seek forgiveness through divine intercession rather than accept that what I had done was irrevocable and a true reflection of my desires. As a believer, I had been able to sin while planning my future repentance. God would forgive, I thought, even the sin of planned repentance.

Releasing this fear of responsibility allowed me to accept and embrace my actions. I didn’t need sacraments to make me holy because I was not fallen. I became more aware of my actions, more intent on doing the right thing, since I couldn’t take my actions back—there was no intercessor to expunge my misdeeds.

I didn’t need God to take responsibility away from me.

I feared leading a meaningless, purposeless life. The thought of living and dying without purpose was intolerable. I could only bear human suffering if it served a greater purpose. God had given me a purpose and a direction. He had helped me to imbue my life with a meaning greater than mere survival. He helped me to look on human suffering as good, noble, and necessary. I could stomach the suffering of my brothers and sisters because they needed to experience opposition in all things. Everything was according to God’s plan.

The western religion in which I had believed seeks to divide the world into dualities—good and evil, heaven and earth, clean and unclean, sacred and profane—and use these distinctions to escape this tawdry world of dirt, death, and decay to a pristine heaven where there is no sorrow, no illness, no dishes to wash, and no inconvenient starving children. Transcendence is the watchword. Up and away from this life of pain and misery.

This mindset allowed me to avert my eyes from the unpleasant realities of life on earth. I gratefully ate my lotus and forgot my cares in heavenly visions of life beyond death. I was satisfied that all would be made right in eternity.

I now began to find purpose from a different source. I, as a human being in a universe without a benign supreme being, was free to choose my own purpose in life. I no longer desired to have meaning bestowed upon me from above. My life and agency were mine to dispose of as I chose.

Leaving behind God allowed me to escape false dualities. For me, all things became sacred. This change rooted me in the wonder of the mundane, and in the concerns of this life. I no longer sought to transcend this world, but instead to make earth into a garden of delights where the human family could enjoy the perpetual rhythm of birth, life, and death. I sought my nourishment here, now.

I found hope in the future of humanity. I found hope in our curiosity, ingenuity, and will to survive. Our altruism and love inspired me.

I didn’t need God to find meaning or hope.

I feared losing my family. Mormons believe that the fullest blessings for families can only be obtained within their temples with the approval of the church hierarchy. Only there behind closed doors can eternal families be created. Leaving the body of the church in light of this doctrine is seen as an abandonment of family. Heretics are qualitatively the same as those who shirk their family responsibilities.

Because of my change in heart, I saw myself become a more capable, loving, devoted husband and father. I felt a greater responsibility to feed and nurture my children. I became more enamored of my wife and more willing to do whatever I could to help her find her own happiness. I could not believe that a loving, devoted unbeliever would be separated from his family by a loving God while a man who performed certain rituals and was a mediocre husband and father would be forgiven and rewarded simply because he didn’t doubt the existence of an invisible being. A just God wouldn’t allow it.

I didn’t need God to be a good father.

I feared destruction. The thought of annihilation had provoked dread in my heart. Religion offered the promise that I need not fear destruction at death. As a believing member, I was secretly, smugly fond of thinking that non-believers were filled with fear of death while my belief spared me such pain. I took a secret satisfaction in the peace that I felt about death because of my beliefs about the afterlife.

I grew less afraid of death as I let go of my former ideas. Buddhism teaches of our impermanence. I perceived myself as a process which would some day end. Fearing that end would only cause me pain. Hoping for more was a distraction. I found peace and began to enjoy life in the face of death.

Before, as a believer I was the one who was afraid of death, who needed the assurance that death was not the end. I began to face my own death and destruction more squarely. I didn’t need consolation that death is only a reverse euphemism for change.

Instead, I treasured this meteoric experience of consciousness as a miracle. I was fortunate to have had the chance to experience life. Earth was my only heaven. If it didn’t live up to that name, it was in my hands to change it. I wished to improve others’ lives because they wouldn’t get a second chance at life, nor would they receive a divine compensation after death for wrongs they experienced. I looked to the time when my consciousness would cease to exist with equanimity. It motivated me to make the most of the gift of life, and to prepare for the welfare of my family after I could no longer look after them myself.

I didn’t need God to find peace in death.

As a believer, I abhorred the idea of being ultimately alone. When I considered a world without God, I felt like a motherless child left at the mercy of the brutal world. I wanted to be loved unconditionally, to be protected from harm, swept under a protective wing and told that everything would be fine. The world around me didn’t offer any assurance that this need would be fulfilled. Many of us may die without tasting the milk of human kindness. Some children are born into lives without love, leading a mean, dirty life that is sometimes mercifully short. We may suffer injustice at each other’s cruel hands or through acts of nature, without recompense in this life or any other. Monsters like Stalin die and will never receive justice for their crimes. We may suffer and die alone, deprived in our last fearful moments of the companionship of family and friends.

I hadn’t wanted to believe that these things were true, that we had no guarantee of love and justice. The concept of an unconditionally loving God assuaged my deep fear of being alone. It promised that all would be loved, that all suffering would be balanced by a joyous afterlife. None needed feel alone even when it seemed to be true for God was there by our side.

This fear may have been the most difficult for me to face. When I accepted that I wasn’t loved by an omnipotent ruler of the universe, I began to see the true importance of taking an active part in decreasing human suffering. There was no loving God to pick up my slack. Children who die in poverty would not be rewarded with heavenly riches. I must share my riches with them now, before it is too late. The victims of unspeakable crimes would not receive justice at the hands of a vengeful Father. Justice is in our hands. Those of us who die alone, unloved, and unmourned will not be received home with open arms. The only arms who can give them comfort are here, in this life.

I didn’t need God to love and be loved.

These fears were powerful even when they were only on the periphery of my awareness. By relying on God to allay my fears, I made giving up God too frightening to contemplate. My religious devotion was primarily a product of fear and self-deception. My fear held me to God. If I loved God, it was because he took away my fear.

As I mulled over the concept of a world without God, I was able to let go of every fear and doubt that kept me tied to God and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Through fearless honesty and the willingness to accept personal responsibility, I had gained freedom. I didn’t need God to conquer fear and doubt nor did I need Him to be at peace. I could find happiness without Him.

Santa Claus illustrates my change of focus very well.

As young children, our parents may have taught us to believe in Santa Claus. For the believing young child, Santa Claus is real and colors how they experience Christmas. They look forward to receiving gifts from a benevolent man whom they may never be lucky enough to see, who lives in a far off, magical place. They may think twice about being bad because they know that he is watching, judging whether they should get good presents on Christmas morning.

For adults, this is no longer how we see Christmas. We inevitably learn from some schoolyard skeptic that this is just a fairy tale. We’ve gone through the process of shedding our beliefs in Santa Claus, and painful though it may have been, it allowed us to more effectively deal with reality. We more selflessly give Christmas gifts to others rather than selfishly waiting to see what Santa has brought us. We no longer live in fear of being bad in case Santa won’t deem us worthy of a gift. If we are good, it has nothing to do with the ever-watchful Santa Claus and his list. We rely on the generosity of our friends and family to bestow gifts regardless of how good or bad we’ve been, simply because we are important to them. Our non-belief in Santa brings us closer, through gratitude and love, to the true flesh-and-blood givers and receivers of our gifts. Our thoughts no longer center on an imaginary man in a far off place. Our thoughts turn to each other.

Christmas may seem less magical without Santa Claus, but it becomes much more meaningful in his absence.

That is how I feel about my lack of belief in God. This is why my thoughts and hopes have turned to you, my friends and family.

All alone, or in two’s,
The ones who really love you
Walk up and down outside the wall.
Some hand in hand
And some gathered together in bands.
The bleeding hearts and artists
Make their stand.

And when they’ve given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all it’s not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wall.

(Pink Floyd, Outside the Wall)

I look around myself and see my self-deceit laying in ruins. My internal audience is gone. Only I remained.

They left. They had all utterly disappeared. Surely it couldn’t be that simple. Surely I hadn’t been imagining these things all of my life. Yet with the flip of a switch, the darkness they had cast over my life was banished.

At the time that I was searching for new a understanding of Mormonism, I read The Now Habit by Dr. Neil Fiore. The book offers a cure for procrastination. It discusses how guilt and fear have a negative effect on our motivation. We may avoid a task that we feel guilty about or one that causes us some conscious or unconscious fear. By putting it off however, we don’t resolve our fear and we feel even more guilty about the task. This vicious cycle paralyzes us into inaction.

Like the yoga class before, this book deepened my understanding of myself and why I chose to act the way I did. I began to apply its truth to my life and my eyes were opened. While some of the motivation that the Christian gospel uses is positive, it draws on fear and guilt extensively.

For example, I had thought that the Mormon teachings were pretty even-keeled regarding sexuality. As I dug beneath the surface appearances of my attitudes toward sexuality, I found that I had a deeply embedded, counterproductive shame about my sexuality. It caused me to put undue focus on what should have been a smaller part of my life.

From what I could tell from rumors, confessions in Elders Quorum, and the topics of General Conference addresses, there was an epidemic of sexual addiction in the church fed by the increased availability of pornography via the internet. Church leaders spoke more and more frequently and openly on the subject. I got the feeling that desperation to curb the problem had driven them to such frankness. Young men were delayed on their departure into the mission field, and stake presidents and bishops were disgraced for their involvement in pornography. I began to see why this was such a problem in the Church as I reflected on the role of guilt.

Moral teachings throughout the history of the Mormon church seemed to have followed the trend of mainstream, conservative thought, only lagging behind it by a few decades. Teachings about race, styles of dress, family size, birth control, and sexual behavior had all followed this pattern. Leaders of the Church sometimes parroted the popular, false opinions of the time. For example, in 1871 Daniel H. Wells, Second Counselor to Brigham Young, repeated the common, fallacious belief that masturbation would cause insanity and a premature death. (D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power)

It became apparent to me that leaders of the Church had been preaching their personal beliefs mixed in with God’s divine inspiration. This led to dangerous, uninspired ideas being preached and accepted as God’s infallible word. These ideas created a fertile breeding ground for sexual addiction by mingling fear, guilt, and sexual pleasure in the minds of their followers.

I began to reëxamine my own feelings of guilt, whether they arose naturally because I truly regretted what I had done, or whether false teachings were their source. More and more, I saw that Mormonism and Christianity had inflicted my wounds (or enlarged them) in order to offer a cure. The Christian gospel relied on my guilt to motivate me to apply the balm of Christ to the wound. “The whole have no need of the physician” (Mark 2:17) so I must be sick so that I will need Christ. If I wasn’t truly sick, I would be made ill to convince me of the necessity of Christ’s atonement.

At about this time, I learned about the history of the idea of Satan as an evil entity working against God and his children. I found that much of the Mormon concept of Satan is a pretty modern one, borrowed from contemporary Christianity. The ancient Israelites, on the other hand, believed that Satan was one of God’s angels, sent to test men in God’s behalf; Satan was God’s angelic agent to determine who was worthy. That the Israelites believed Satan worked for God is apparent in the story of Book of Job.

It was hard to square Isaiah’s words with the Mormon concept of Satan: “I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me: That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the LORD, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.” (Isaiah 45:5–7) Isaiah says that Jehovah is sovereign over the universe; that He alone creates good and evil. Beside Him there is “none else”.

The Israelites didn’t believe in an evil, fallen angel who reigns over a demonic host trying to counter God’s work. That concept was added to the Judeo-Christian tradition later. The concept of Satan evolved over time and was adopted by the Mormon church.

At this point, I began to let go of my belief in Satan as yet another human element in the Mormon faith. I began to take full responsibility for my actions into my own hands. I no longer perceived my negative thoughts as originating from a powerful, supernatural entity bent on my destruction. Temptations weren’t evidence of a world beyond sight, but motivations arising from within my own mind and appetites. Suddenly, the demonic influence in my life was silenced—completely, utterly silenced. I was alone with my own thoughts, both good and bad. I could only conclude that Satan and his demons were a figment of my imagination.

In retrospect, I see that I worshiped my demons. I gave power to the things I feared and hated. I was never free of demonic temptations until I accepted and embraced the demon within human nature. The demon is in me. It is me.

I know that some will see this as the point where my seduction was complete, that Satan took control of me when I let down my guard by ceasing to believe in him. “And behold, others he flattereth away, and telleth them there is no hell; and he saith unto them: I am no devil, for there is none—and thus he whispereth in their ears, until he grasps them with his awful chains, from whence there is no deliverance.” (2 Nephi 28:22) Life is largely a matter of interpretation. How we perceive our world says perhaps more about us than it does about the world.

From my experience, this change of belief made me more motivated and empowered to do good. Rather than wasting energy fighting against enemies I couldn’t see, I began to take a good, hard look at myself. I had more confidence that I could be good than before when I was plagued by demons of my own construction. It was a tremendous relief to let go of that burden. I will not take it back up. I had finally kicked the devils out of my internal audience. Now, it was just me and God.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.
(1 Thessalonians 5:21)

Joseph Smith was a mystic by every worthwhile definition of mysticism, and Mormonism is a mystic tradition. Mormons seek to receive personal revelation of the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the divine prophetic calling of Joseph Smith. This revelation comes not through intellectual means or empirical evidence, but by the experience of the Holy Spirit. Mormons seek to be made one with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is why Christ came into the world, to bring the faithful back into the presence of the Father through His Atonement. Every good Mormon is a mystic whether they know it or not.

Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.
(John 17:20–23)

When I joined Mormon+Mystic, I hoped that I could apply wisdom from the mystic tradition to the Mormon framework. I got that, and a lot more. There were mystics of all stripes, not just Mormons. I found a marketplace of ideas and stepped into a larger world of thought and discourse. I met people of great intelligence, study, and experience. I never realized how narrow my view of Mormonism had been. The Mormon history and doctrine that I had learned from attending Sunday meetings and from official Church materials was only a small part of the rich spiritual heritage that Mormonism has to offer. It seems that in our rush to gain acceptance by our neighbors, we have jettisoned a lot of peculiar doctrines. In order to let them go, we have intentionally hidden and forgotten our history. In order to bolster our claims to divine authority, we have turned a blind eye to the humanity in our history. We have portrayed ourselves as being of one faith by hiding the diversity of doctrine in our past in order that the institution of the Church would survive the challenges of modernity.

In my mind, this is a tragedy. Mormonism was once alive with a hunger and thirst for the truth. We were once a heterodox people willing to dash to pieces any icon which contradicted the truth. Perhaps I am nostalgic for a time and people that never were, but the early Mormon church was much more like my description than the present Church.

Members of Mormon+Mystic introduced me to three books on Mormon history which opened my eyes: Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling by Richard L. Bushman, Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890-1930 by Thomas G. Alexander, and David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism by Gregory A. Prince and Wm. Robert Wright. These books are not anti-Mormon, nor are they faith promoting history. The authors are faithful members of the Church (Bushman is a Stake Patriarch, for example), but the books are impartial history based on the available evidence. They do not draw conclusions about the Mormon church’s claims to divine sanction, but rather present the facts allowing the readers to make their own judgements.

I learned at least two important things from these books. The first truth that I learned was that Mormon church leaders are human. They each have their own leadership style and make human mistakes. They are not infallible, even when acting in their offices. This reminds me of a joke.

Catholics are taught that the Pope is infallible and don’t believe it. Mormons on the other hand are taught that the Prophet is only human, but they don’t really believe it.

This is consonant with my experience in the Church. In my experience in positions of leadership and with other Church leaders, a position in leadership does nothing to help insure that the person will not make mistakes, sometimes dangerous ones. While Mormon leaders (except the Prophet) make no claim of infallibility, I was taught that I should not murmur against my leaders and their perceived failings, that the Lord would bless me for following their leadership regardless of what I thought about their counsel or how bad the counsel was. Murmuring is the first step to apostasy, I was told.

So for years I did all kinds of mental acrobatics to avoid the glaringly obvious: that my leader’s counsel was a mixed bag with some pearls of true wisdom mixed in with the ideas of men. I blamed myself for not following their counsel exactly enough. I explained it away by saying that God was testing me using my leader’s humanity. I assumed that what appeared to be a failure to me was in fact exactly what God wanted. I ignored scriptures like Matthew 7:15–20; D&C 64:37–40; D&C 52:14–19; D&C 121:39–40; and D&C 129 which cautioned me to be discerning about those who would seek to lead me.

Learning this reminded me that I was ultimately responsible for my own salvation. I should exercise caution and discernment before following any counsel, no matter what position of authority my counselor occupied.

The second truth that I learned was that Church doctrine had changed over time. Even as a child, I could see that the Church had evolved throughout its history. It had been one source of doubt at the time. Surely, I figured, God couldn’t be the author of confusion. (1 Corinthians 14:33) A church directed by Him should hold to eternal truths, untossed by the winds of human doctrine. (Ephesians 4:13–15) I sought a church that could give me a foundation to rely on. (Matthew 7:24–27 and James 1:17)

I discovered in these books that my childhood doubts were well founded. The teachings of the Church had changed over time. Each successive generation changed the teachings to suit their tastes and needs. The modern Church has become very different from what I discovered in the historical Church. Central doctrines and practices such as Plural Marriage, the Law of Adoption, women washing and anointing for the healing of the sick, and the Adam-God Theory (no, it was not just a misquotation of a single sermon) have come and gone becoming only obscure historical footnotes to the modern membership. This doctrinal evolution continues to this day.

I rationalized this evolution by believing that what God really wanted most was for me to strictly follow the current leadership of the Church and be willing to relinquish any teaching that became out of favor, no matter how heartfelt my belief in that teaching may have been and no matter how much my powers of reason urged me in other directions. God wanted willing, trusting followers of His representatives on earth, I surmised. I was to do this as a sign of submission to God’s will. Changing doctrines were only a test of faith and loyalty to God and his chosen mouthpieces.

I also believed that God needed to change the emphasis of His teachings to adapt it to the circumstances of His followers. God couldn’t give one wise set of rules to hold for all times and circumstances, so I needed to follow His Spirit and His servants even if it meant changing directions from time-to-time.

I also tried to deny that the doctrines had substantially changed. I sought to harmonize all of the teachings of the Church throughout its history. I wanted to believe that the Mormon gospel was one eternally true whole which grew line upon line. (2 Nephi 28:30)

These histories showed that the teachings of the church do not represent the culmination of a progressive understanding of a single, unified doctrine. Some abandoned doctrines contradict current doctrine or are simply an embarrassment which the Church would rather forget. It became impossible for me to look at the history of Mormon doctrine and find a unity of faith.

To my surprise, this willingness to be unorthodox had been one of the Church’s greatest strengths. It allowed it to innovate and adapt to new challenges as times changed. Nevertheless, I still secretly hoped for a God who could avoid contradicting Himself.

I also saw many valuable truths which had been lost in the Church’s evolution. The loss of the gifts of the Spirit troubled me. Where had speaking in tongues, prophecy, and healings gone? Mormonism used to be much more charismatic than today. I had consoled myself that we didn’t need those outward signs anymore, that the faith of the saints was strong enough that we had outgrown such displays.

I learned instead that, around the turn of the 20^th century, the Church underwent a change of culture overseen by Church leaders who were uncomfortable with the wild nature of gifts of the Spirit and the power that they gave to the women in the Church. Relief Society meetings were once havens for spiritual gifts. Some claimed that the sisters of the Church were better healers than the men. The Relief Society didn’t answer to the Church leadership. They were an independent group which was parallel to the Church. The Church leadership slowly discouraged the charismatic culture of the Church and replaced it with exhortations to frequent temple attendance, and subordinated the queens and priestesses of the Relief Society under the leadership of the male priesthood.

This convinced me that the current Church had lost something essential. We had become too worried about following the human leadership of the Church, forgetting to follow the Spirit wherever it may lead. Would I have the courage to leave the Church if the Spirit told me to, like Joseph Smith left the traditional Christian churches of his time?

Hearing children sing the repetitive refrain “Follow the prophet, follow the prophet, follow the prophet…” began to make me wince. (Follow the Prophet, Children’s Songbook, pp. 110–11) If Joseph Smith had sung a similar song as a child, I doubted he would have been independent enough to found the Mormon church. It felt like indoctrination. Rather than creating mature, independent individuals who thought about important matters, held their own convictions based on their own experience and judgment, and chose without coercion to belong to the Church and follow its leadership, this ethic sought to create blind faith. You can’t go wrong following God’s prophet, the thinking goes. The encouragement to repeatedly confess belief at an age before children can form a well reasoned opinion of their own began to disturb me. It made use of the saying-is-believing principle, and the principle of insufficient justification to induce the children’s belief and overcome any cognitive dissonance between what the leadership of the Church said was good and what the individual judged was good as influenced by the Spirit.

Joseph Smith detested religious creeds and confining orthodoxies.

It looks too much like the Methodists, and not like the Latter-day Saints. Methodists have a creed which a man must believe or be asked out of their church. I want the liberty of thinking and believing as I please. It feels so good not to be trammeled.
(Joseph Smith, Documentary History of the Church, Vol. VI, pp. 273–74)

Joseph Smith didn’t leave behind a conscise definition of Mormonism. He never pegged it down enough to create a creed, the Articles of Faith notwithstanding. If personal revelation from God is to be taken seriously, the recipient must be willing follow it where it leads with caution and discernment, even if that means leaving the comfort of a familiar organization which contradicts personal experience of the divine. The Mormon church wouldn’t exist if Joseph had been unwilling to follow his experiences which contradicted the religious leaders of Palmyra, New York.

The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that the Mormon church had become narrow and creed-bound over the course of its history. We had abandoned our dynamic visionary heritage, given up the guidance of revelation in favor of the comfort of the administration of good men. My quest became to find something authentic which had become hidden to me which would help me build a true relationship with God. At this point, I was prepared to follow God wherever He led, inside or outside the Church. If only He would make Himself known.