02.05.08
Leaving the Church by Noell Hyman
Leaving the Church
The hardest thing I’ve ever done was to leave the church I loved and accept an existence with no god and no eternity.For my entire life, until I was a mother, I had no doubts that I was a member of the one and only true
church of Jesus Christ – the Mormon Church.
It’s not that I just accepted my religion because my parents handed it to me. I did the hard work of seeking out multiple spiritual convictions that it was true. I created a life that revolved around my religion, served a mission for the Church in the Philippines, and held many leadership positions.When my oldest child was a baby I experienced doubt for the first time. Doubt! This was all new to me. I mean, there had always been points of doctrine and verses in the scriptures that didn’t make sense. But that didn’t bother me since I figured God would explain it someday. For the first time, though, I was having moments of actual skepticism. It scared me.
It is so hard to fathom an existence that contradicts everything you thought you knew for your entire life. More than that, I felt ashamed, so I shut those things out of my mind and refused to think about them. Life continued as usual.
But then, a couple years after my two most serious cases of doubt, I got a phone call from my husband, who was on his way home from work. He prepared me for a few minutes to receive al-most the worst possible news – he told me that he did not believe the Church was true.He promised to spend two weeks reading scriptures and praying before making a final decision. I “knew” that as long as someone tried to get an answer by praying, they would get it. That belief is the heart and soul of Mormonism, so I wasn’t worried. Things were going to return to normal.
For two weeks I watched my husband read scriptures and search for an answer. Yet after those two weeks were over, he was more sure than ever that he didn’t believe. I never imagined he would not get the answer he was supposed to. God had promised to answer prayers about the truthfulness of his church. It didn’t happen this time.
Meanwhile, my doubts from years earlier began creeping out of their hiding places. The more I read the scriptures, the more contradictions I saw. It’s not that the contradictions were new to me. It’s just that I had compartmentalized each of them into their own individual places in my brain, all to come rushing out at the same time. My husband’s leaving gave me the emotional permission I needed to finally face my own questions.I began a serious effort to receive an answer from God that the Church was true.
I didn’t realize then that it was too late. For the first time I had already peeked through door number two, the door marked “It’s Not True.” Once you’ve poked your head through that door, going back is like trying to pretend Santa Claus is real after you’ve caught your father putting the shiny new bicy-cle next to the tree.
It would be a year before I was willing to give up, though. I wasn’t about to throw everything away because I had some doubts. I continued to go to church every Sunday and be a full partici-pant. I maintained all the standards of the Mormon religion. I prayed and read scripture daily for answers to my questions.
The more I read, the more problematic it became. Why were the contradictions so overwhelming in number?Why did God seem so racist? And mean?Why were the various people in the Book of Mormon beginning to feel more like flat characters of a poorly written story rather than real, complicated people?So many questions! Each reading cut deeper into that wedge in my faith.
Six months into this process, as I was losing hope, I went to the temple, the most holy place where you were more likely to get an answer from God than anywhere else. I told God I was staying until he gave it to me. I begged him to give me just the slightest seed of hope; I just needed a positive feeling in my heart to keep me going.I stayed until the temple closed. After three hours of praying I felt nothing.
I returned home in shock. I told my husband, “The Church isn’t true.” We sat on the bed. He was dumbfounded. And I cried.But I went back to church the following Sunday. I didn’t want it to not be true, although I was sure after my hours-long quest in the temple that it was false, I had not actually been expecting that conclusion. It was a surprise I wasn’t ready for.
I began another six months of continued church involvement with a small amount of hope for the slightest reason to think I was wrong, along with the question of where the truth was, if not in the Mormon Church. I wondered which Christian religion was closest to truth. Would I find one I could be comfortable in?
Then the New Year came around and the adult Sunday-school class began studying the Old Tes-tament. It was the talking donkey that blew it for me. I was getting tired of crazy supernatural beliefs and the idea of a god.
Over the previous months, since that last temple visit, I watched my relationship with what I thought was a Heavenly Father slip away. I had grown far distant from that god who had before seemed always at my side.This wasn’t tragic or lonely. It was empowering. All the strength that I had derived from this imaginary god-partner throughout my whole life had really come from within myself.
When God disappeared, I realized I was still the same person. I came to know and appreciate myself more than ever before in my life, in contrast with the guilt and self-criticism I observed in many of the women at church. They never felt they were good enough. They could never meet the demands and expectations of religion.It got to the point where I left every church meeting angry about something someone taught. At this point I was going, not out of belief, but out of a desire for spiritual sustenance.
Instead, church was becoming a spiritual vacuum.I finished my year-long search with a two-week, two-hour-a-day scripture study and prayer obsession. That’s right. I read and prayed for two hours. Every day. In the process, I lost any remaining hope that it might be true. I couldn’t believe it when later my mother told me that I didn’t show enough faith to get an answer from God. Two hours a day for two weeks isn’t enough? How about a year of desperate searching?
I was finally ready to add the “ex” to Mormon. Telling my parents I was an atheist was as diffi-cult as I imagine telling your parents that you’re gay. You almost can’t do it. They impose so much shame on you. For the next couple years, my relationship with my parents was an emotional battle of accusations, veiled threats, and begging for a return.
But other than that, life was exhilarating. There was suddenly so much to learn! Every part of the world was open and undecided, free for exploration. I had so many new questions to ask. Everything about my life became better. My husband and I are stronger friends, closer than we’ve ever been.And now, I can say that my parents and I are close again.
They’ve had five years to see that I love who I am and that I’m passionate about my new world-view. I don’t criticize or challenge their beliefs, but when they try to challenge mine, I am honest and clear about what how I see things. This has been the key to regaining their respect and a healthy relationship.
I was once a happy Mormon, who thought she knew all the important answers. I am even happier now, knowing that I don’t.
Noell Hyman is a stay-at-home mother of three children, living in Mesa, Arizona. She blogs and podcasts, mainly on her favorite subject, which is the visual art of story-telling through scrap-booking.
This story was originally published in International Humanist News - IHN 2007.3 November |
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August 25, 2008 at 8:14 pm
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MPJ said,
August 26, 2008 at 5:01 am
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