On Defecting

My doorbell rang one evening recently. I looked out and saw two rosy-cheeked young men on my welcome mat. I tried to keep an open mind about what their intentions were, but I knew their spanking white shirts, new haircuts, and rectangular black name tags could mean only one thing. My heart fell.

"May I help you?" I asked, without opening the door.

"We're here to speak to Karen Armstead," one of the young men said. "Does she live here?"

I sure wasn't interested in what they were selling, but the boys were so sweet-faced and harmless, I sighed, and opened the door a crack.

"I'm Karen Armstead," I said.

"Miss Armstead, I'm Elder Thomas. This is Elder Wong. We have it in church records that you've been baptized and confirmed." Elder Thomas didn't say which church that would be. He didn't need to.

It seemed a devout family member had given the local Mormon congregation my address without my permission. The officials dispatched the young missionaries to my door to find out personally why I had not been to church in twenty years. It was the first I'd had my lapsed Mormon status openly challenged, practically since I quit attending.

I wanted to be polite to my visitors. I also wanted to be clear and firm, and not waste my time, or theirs. I leaned on the doorframe a moment, formulating a response that did not betray a hint of personal uncertainty they could seize on and exploit.

"I appreciate your concern for me," I said. "But the person who put you in contact with me did not understand I have no spiritual connection whatsoever to Mormonism or its teachings. For your sake and mine, please tell me what I have to do to have my name removed from your records, so that I'm not contacted again."

Later that evening, I wrote a brief a letter to that church official the boys had told me to contact to have my name stricken from church rolls. I had stopped participating years before, now I was actively renouncing the faith.

The move felt bold, but also sad. Sad, because I knew my differences with the church, up to and including my defection, could only be misunderstood.

In Mormon lore, there seems to exist a cosmic faith divide, on the one side of which are believers and potential believers, and on the other side of which are non-believers. The believer tithes, goes to church, and asks few questions of leaders. But the non-believer, the guy the missionaries can't win over, is invariably a tattooed, beer-guzzling, chain-smoking, whoring, child-abusing, wife-beating, utterly godforsaken churl who opens the door for Mormons in his sleeveless undershirt and threadbare pajama bottoms. Or else, she is his female counterpart, with too-red hair, who comes to the door in a too-short skirt.

In leaving the church, I was troubled to realize I'd have my point of view distorted to fit one side of this faith divide, while as a churchgoer, years before, I'd had to pretend I neatly fit the other side of it.

I was an ex-Mormon, but hardly an ingrate, I thought. I still respected my Mormon pioneer forbears, a gritty people who traveled far from home in the name of God, and raised a vibrant civilization in the bleak Utah desert. I still appreciated the Mormon teaching, soft-pedaled in recent times, of a feminine embodiment of the divine.

I had drunk in L.D.S. culture and doctrine, literally, with mother's milk. I had once loved the church uncritically, in the way that a very young child inevitably finds its mother beautiful. Unless a growing offspring senses, for whatever reason, that continuing to adore mother is inimical to his or her own survival, the offspring's love of the mother continues, an elemental force that can transcend differences.

I left the Mormon Church because I found its embrace more suffocating than nurturing. I left, because I could not remain Mormon, in a climate of religious orthodoxy, and take my own questions seriously. Why was the Mormon Church "the one true religion," while all other faith traditions were "false"? In the Mormon scheme of things, did individual conscience really count for so little that church leaders had to dictate proper sexual expression, and even proper use of personal daily time, to believers?

I have been watching the recent sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church unfold with considerable interest. My heart goes out to the victims of sex abuse by priests, for the enormous human cost exacted by the crime and its cover-up. But, as I listen to churchgoing Catholics demand accountability on the part of their clergy for the sex crimes, I start to think, disturbingly, in Mormon terms. I wonder, given the breaking public awareness of similar atrocities by Mormon leaders, and official L.D.S. disavowal of those atrocities, would there be a major revolt by Mormon churchgoers? I doubt it. I fear typical Mormons in that hypothetical scenario would continue to "follow the brethren," rather than stand up to criminal behavior by those brethren.

The Catholic religion brought us the Spanish inquisition; it sheltered Nazis and it fomented the sex abuse scandal. But the Catholics have also brought us Liberation Theology, and a spate of other democratic movements for human dignity. Despite the Pope's claim that he speaks for God, a Catholic tradition of heterodoxy has undeniably made it feasible for numbers of Catholics to question church policy and church leaders, yet remain Catholic. I credit a stream of Catholic heretics and dissidents over the ages, whom the church has finally tired of routing out, with liberalizing that faith enough to allow for vigorous dissent from within.

Relative to Catholicism, Mormonism is a young religion, less than 200 years old. Perhaps its youth, as much as any other factor, has kept the church monolithic in character. Those Mormons who have openly questioned the church have done so, not as part of an established Mormon liberal tradition, but as lone voices in the wilderness. Their way has been hard. Mormons and former Mormons who have openly challenged the church position on women, or its official interpretations of L.D.S. history, have described being summoned for intrusive interviews by Mormon officials, who rescinded their church privileges or excommunicated them.

To leave the church, quietly and with a sense of loss, as I have done, is one thing. But to remain a Mormon, and attempt to reform the church, invariably at great personal cost, is to refuse to renounce either one's love for the church, or one's own moral faculties. Perhaps it is a braver course.

A grassroots Mormon culture of reform isn't going to make things hot for church leaders anytime soon. But I like to think that 500 or 1000 years hence, if widespread misdoing by Mormon officials comes to light, it will be Mormon churchgoers who rise up in arms to demand accountability on the part of their leaders. Credit for the uprising will be due, not to people like me, but to those Mormons of conscience who stayed to question a church they did not agree with, who took heat for their views.

It will have been the sacrifices of these men and women, down through the centuries, that will make belonging in the broader, liberalized Mormon Church of the future possible for someone like me.