Porch Steps: Essays On Mormonism

Porch Steps:

Essays on Mormonism

by: Mette Ivie Harrison

New essays are found first. Older essays are behind those.

Why It Hurts

The emails and blog comments I get from non-Mormons never hurt as much as the ones from Mormons. I suppose that’s to be expected. Evangelicals loudly proclaiming that Mormons aren’t *really* Christians and that they used to be Mormon before they accepted Jesus as their savior, or atheists telling me that I’m an apologist for a cult and that I’m as guilty as any Mormon is for whatever terrible ills the church has done, from political maneuverings to make the church more powerful and wealthier to sexual abuse by leadership that has been swept under the rug to the misuse of tithing funds. These are critiques I take in stride.

I spent my early years (until age ten) in New Jersey. I knew what people thought of Mormons. I’d heard the only half-joking remarks about horns. I also knew that most people thought my father had a half dozen wives who’d produced the eleven children in our family. I’d heard snide remarks about birth control before I even knew about the mechanics of sex. I grew up with enough defensiveness about my Mormonism that when I went back to graduate school at Princeton (after getting a B.A. and M.A. from BYU), I was careful about who knew I was Mormon. I remember one professor who made a comment about religion being the number one oppressor of women and I just sat back and kept my mouth shut about my being Mormon. It was obvious that in graduate school, the assumption was that anyone intelligent enough to get in had already given up the ridiculous idea of any god, let alone organized religion.

I moved back to Utah and taught at BYU for a few years after committing the unpardonable sin of getting pregnant while in graduate school—on purpose, no less. But when I published my first novel, The Monster In Me, which was set in Utah, I made very sure that I never used the word Mormon to describe the foster family in the book and that the prayers they spoke aloud were only vaguely Christian, not specifically Mormon. I didn’t want to be labeled as the Mormon writer by New York publishing, and I was very proud of the fact that I hadn’t let go of my dream to be published nationally rather than being published by a local, Mormon press.

After The Monster In Me, I wrote six fantasy novels, precisely because they allowed me to disguise any messages in fantasy word terms, and any talk of belief or faith became magical and therefore couldn’t be used against me as a religious person. I was during this time period an extremely active, orthodox Mormon who served as a member of the Primary Presidency twice, visit taught every month, and had strict rules for my kids about modesty, language, and performance at school. It was only when I went through a long suicidal depression following the death of my sixth child that I began to think about my own relationship with God and my Mormonism differently.

In 2012, I did the very scary thing of writing a book directly about Mormonism. My national agent at the time, very much not religious, told me not to write it because no one would ever want to read about Mormons. This somehow gave me the cover I needed to write the book I wanted to read, about a woman whose Mormonism wasn’t orthodox, but who had a firm belief in God and in herself—a woman I wished I could someday be. The book ended up being published by a national press (Soho) and received great national reviews, became a national bestseller—and remains largely unread by the Mormon public, in part because Deseret Book chose not to carry it in stores.

This early rejection of my book by the typical Mormon bookstore should have been a warning to me about how I personally would be received by Mormons ever afterward. I worried over it, but pushed aside the worries and told myself I was strong enough to get through it. I also believed strongly that my family and friends knew me well enough that they would never turn their backs on me. In hindsight, these assumptions seem rather Pollyanna-ish. I know that many Mormons feel that I’ve turned traitor (at least by the strict terms of loyalty that are often set inside the church) and that therefore I deserve the worst sort of rejection and even excommunication that I may receive. And yet I am surprised and hurt every time I get an email from a Mormon that attacks me on a personal level, telling me that I’m going to hell, that God hates me, that I’m a demon or any other such overblown rhetoric.

I’ve used various methods to deal with the criticism, including creating a list of four kinds of nasty letters that come from Mormons, because the themes are repeated constantly (#1 you hate men #2 you think you’re too smart for the church #3 you never had real faith #4 you’ve rejected your covenants and deserve to be shunned). But the problem is that I’ve begun to hear these emails in the voices of friends and family members who have rejected me on various levels.

Yes, I know that the best thing about Mormonism is the community and that I’m seen now as one who exposes the problems in the community and therefore no longer deserve to be protected by the community itself. But I still attend church weekly. I still teach the Sunbeam class. I am trying to remain Mormon in ways that I feel are authentic and which adhere to my own moral principles—ironically an edict that I learned from Mormonism itself. There are many ways in which I feel like I’ve become the woman that my girlhood version of myself was taught to be. I do what is right, let the consequence follow. I have prayed to God and asked what I should do, and that is to stand up for those who are marginalized and treated badly as Jesus showed us the example of. I give of my time and money to worthy causes and I also do service in my own community.

But none of this excuses me for speaking about Mormonism in a way that is deemed disloyal and inappropriate from a woman. I cannot apologize for who I am, though there is some serious irony here. I probably won’t stop writing about Mormonism, but I find myself moving away from it more and more in my heart largely because of the responses of other Mormons. And I suppose this is what they want, and maybe I shouldn’t give it to them purely out of spite. But really, how can I continue to be Mormon when I’m told over and over again that I’m not allowed in the community anymore unless I conform to rules that make no sense to me or feel wrong? I thought I cared little enough about what other people thought of me, but my relationship with God is not suffering, only my relationship with Mormons. They don’t want me anymore.

What is God to Me?

A friend recently told me that as long as I believed in Christ, I was welcome in Mormonism. When I said I wasn’t sure I believed in Christ the way that she meant (a literal Christ who was the son of God whose atonement and death mean that we will be freed from sin and resurrected), she said that as long as I believed in God, then, I was fine. I also wasn’t sure I believed in the God she believes in, who can and will alter the plan of the universe because of our prayers, who performs miracles for the righteous, who demands our worship and requires us to perform certain tasks in order to get rewards. So what kind of a God do I believe in?

Quite simply, a god of love.

I don’t know that I believe that God is a man—or a woman. Though I do find it useful sometimes to picture God as a woman, who puts her hands on mine as we both turn clay into pottery and she whispers in my ear that the reason we’re making this vessel is because it needs to be filled with something very valuable, something spiritual, that only I can pour into it. Other times, I find God appearing in my prayer as two parents, male and female. Rarely, God appears to me as a gay man or a black woman or an indigenous person. Sometimes God speaks to me in the form of a tree, a river, a bridge, or a beautiful piece of art.

Growing up Mormon, I was taught that the Catholic idea of God as an unformed spirit was just wrong and even ridiculous. How could we be children of God if God wasn’t even human? But there are just so many problems with the Mormon conception of God for me now. Why is God always depicted as white? Why do we never talk about or pray to Heavenly Mother, if one exists? Do we still believe in a heaven filled with multiple polygamous mothers of spiritual children? And what about the idea that we will also have our own planets to one day rule? I love the way in which Mormonism taught me as a child to look for the divine within myself. As an adult, I’m less comfortable with the Mormon insistence that God is male and heterosexual, and that the celestial kingdom will be a place much like the temple here on earth. Call me a heretic, but the temple, with its reiterated rituals and focus on genealogical records, is not my idea of a great way to spend eternity.

And I rejected the idea of God for a number of years, only coming back when I accepted the idea that I could choose the kind of God I worshipped, and I could live with the possibility that I had invented this God purely to make myself happier and a better person in the future. God is goodness. God is all-encompassing love. God is growth and change. God is the future. God is within me.

Faith Transition vs. Faith Crisis

Within Mormonism, the term faith crisis is very common. Depending on who’s experiencing it, a faith crisis might be a kind of sowing of wild oats, after which one returns to the community more committed than ever, or it might be a series of questions about Mormon history and about the institution itself that are never reconciled and lead to a separation from the church or a very different relationship to it than before. Within the church, it’s common to hear people being told to put doubts on the shelf, or to remember past spiritual experiences and hold tight to them, or to be frankly warned about the likely losses that often come along with a re-evaluation of your church affiliation: loss of family relationships, divorce, even drug use and alcohol addiction.

My faith transition had nothing to do with the typical things I hear many ex- and questioning Mormons talk about, from Joseph Smith’s polygamy and polyandry to Brigham Young’s racism to gender inequality and LGBT issues. These are things that I care about now, but if I’m honest with myself, my experience was a sense of abandonment by God. Within the church, it’s very common for people to suggest that any spiritual problems you have are caused by your own spiritual deficits. I saw this happen to my youngest daughter when she was struggling with suicidal depression as a teen. Over and over again, there would be casual mention of needing to repent. But she had done nothing wrong and repentance wasn’t what she needed. I felt like I could never get her leaders to understand how they were triggering her suicidal thoughts. But I had the same problem in my own transition. The first impulse was always to say that I had sinned and needed to repent in order to feel God in my life again.

It will sound arrogant when I say that I didn’t do anything wrong, because of course, no one is free from sins of one kind or another. But at the time and even looking back, I cannot see any specific sin that caused my faith crisis. I followed the Word of Wisdom carefully. I prayed and read my scriptures close to daily. I wore my garments and if I didn’t attend the temple every month, I tried to go regularly. I was a stay-at-home mother and baked bread and made my kids lunches. I kept an excellent food storage that we practiced living on for a month every year. I served in my ward as a teacher and in presidencies. I did my visiting teaching nearly every month. I checked off boxes and considered myself worthy in every way.

But this didn’t save me from losing my belief in God and in the church. When my daughter died in 2005, it felt like my spirituality died with her. It would be a simplification to say that depression made it difficult to connect with God. There was something deeper at work here. I also spent some difficult time in a cycle of self-blame, because if God had a lesson to teach me that I could only learn from my daughter’s death, that had to mean I was a pretty terrible mother, and what was the point of living? Why would I want to believe that my daughter was waiting for me in heaven? Even once I was past this and had found a place of forgiveness for whatever minor mistakes I’d made (not going to the hospital when I wondered if something was wrong toward the end of my pregnancy and going running a couple of times in the third trimester), my faith crisis continued. I would go to church and feel like the old pat answers were not only insufficient, but unmoored from any reality that it felt like I now had a firm footing on.

In the place where I am now, I see that I had to let go of all the old beliefs I had in order to find my way to new ones. Specifically, one of the things I had to jettison was the idea that other people had authority or knowledge to give me answers of God. One of the things I hold most strongly to now is that I don’t need to listen to General Conference talks, to lessons in church or even to the scriptures to come to an understanding of God. I simply close my eyes and reach and listen. I hear God’s voice regularly now, though it’s a different God than I believed in before. This isn’t a god who needs me to perform certain actions to be worthy of love or of redemption. I’m never afraid of angering the real god I’ve come to know. I’m simply loved and told I’m valued every single day, regardless of how the day has gone. God is far more forgiving of me than I am of myself, but more than that, God has messages to offer me and insights into my life that are very personal and have nothing to do with the lists of things to do that seem to be the constant of church lessons.

There are still some dark times when I wish I could go back to the time before I transitioned. I felt safer there, ticking off boxes and feeling superior to everyone else when I seemed to be getting a better grade at mortality than other people did. This is a scarier world now, though it’s the real one, and I don’t have any control over it. I can’t just pray away sin or sadness. I don’t believe that my prayers will help my friend recover from her cancer or that my fasting will save the life of a three year old who nearly drowned. And yet—I do pray and I do sometimes fast. It just means something completely different to me now. And most of the time, I really value the faith transition I went through, even if I had to die to be reborn into this new spirituality that makes a lot of Mormons uncomfortable with me.

Making Myself Small

I realized recently when a friend told me about her decision to stop making herself small to try to make the people around her more comfortable, that this is exactly what I keep doing. Even though I write authentically on-line and take a lot of hits from strangers on the internet, I haven’t done the same in my personal life. I find myself being careful around family members, skipping certain subjects even if they matter passionately to me, because I don’t want to make other people uncomfortable, and then being angry that these same family members don’t support me. I also keep absolutely silent at church, focusing on my knitting or crocheting, and choose not to comment when I disagree. Sometimes I walk out, but I rarely speak up. I refuse to sing certain songs, or I sometimes change the words out loud or in my head, but I’ve never spoken to a chorister about what songs are being chosen and why some are offensive to me.

I don’t know what this will do, and I think it’s something I’m going to have to take slowly, feeling out what situations are worthwhile for me to challenge the accepted opinions of others and what are not. One small step began this weekend, after I’d been to Sunstone. In previous years of attendance, I would refuse to name the conference I was going to at home, calling it a business conference, which it absolutely is, but it was also a way of disguising the truth. Instead, this year I talked openly with family members about classes I’d been to. I didn’t do anything that was offensive, but I also didn’t hide the truth. It felt so much better afterward than the usual silence. I felt like at least I was validating my own experience, telling my soul that what I’d been doing was valuable, that my thoughts and feelings matter enough for me to speak aloud.

I’ve also started criticizing other people more openly. With compassion and love, as much as possible, and with caveats about what they intend. I don’t mean on line in an essay, which is far easier, but to people’s faces. It hasn’t always gone well, let me tell you. People are defensive about their flaws and they don’t like to be asked to change. But well, at least there’s something authentic at the core of our relationship, rather than the resentment and falseness that was there before. And for those who I don’t dare do this with, I’ve started to think more carefully about if the relationship is worth keeping at all.

I’m going to admit something else. On Facebook over the last couple of years, I’ve been cautious about liking public posts for fear they would show up in the feeds of family members who would be offended or even worse—make comments on a total stranger’s thread because they feel obliged to defend the faith. I’ve just started to unfriend people in this situation, yes, even close family members. I want to be able to be friends in real life, and I can’t if I stay friends with them on Facebook. And in general, I’m just unfriending more and more people if they post something I find offensive. I have no social obligation to be nice to people if they’re offensive, especially if they’re not someone I’ve ever met in person before.

I already feel better, stronger, and yes, bigger. I’m a small person physically, but I’m like a Tardis, bigger on the inside.

Trying to Destroy the Church

I was accused recently by someone close to me of trying to destroy the church with my writing about Mormonism. I’m trying to sit with this fairly and see what this person means. Do I think that my writing will destroy Mormonism? Certainly not. I am neither so proud nor so angry that I think anything I do will change the world substantially (except with my fiction, which I have hopes for in the future). Occasionally, my essay writing makes a connection with another struggling Mormon and both of us have friends. That is the extent of the power I wish for myself and my essay writing about Mormonism.

For so many years, I felt like my only options were to stay silent about my existential problems with belief in God and Mormonism or—simply explode. I did not see any other choices. Talking about what I’d been through led only to judgment, encouragement to pray harder, fast more often, read the scriptures more, and go to the temple. I tried all of these things, to the point that I became suicidal at the kind of fasting I was doing while also training for an Ironman. None of them worked at the level I needed. I was desperate for an answer about why my daughter had died and what lesson I was supposed to learn from this that could possibly matter more than her actual life. I could not see any way in which I as a mother should not have taken her place if someone had to die. I desperately wanted to take her place and be dead.

And then it occurred to me that I could write about what had happened. At first, I had no intention of sharing what I was going through. It was purely for myself. And it was therapeutic on some level. However, it still felt like I was pretending in Mormonism, going through the motions because it was a habit, because other people expected it of me, and honestly because explaining again why the Sunday School answers weren’t working for me required more energy than I possessed. I was tired, so tired of talking about what had happened when people would not listen—of so it felt to me.

When I was given the opportunity by a friend (Jana Riess at RNS) to write something publicly, I was terrified at first of what people would think of me. But Jana convinced me that other people would find value in my story, so I went forward with it. I had no idea then the cost it would wreak on all the parts of my life that I’d been protecting with my silence. Maybe I would have gone forward anyway. I think sometimes you can’t understand the future until you’ve lived it. But in some ways, it feels to me like this choice was rather like the choice Adam and Eve were asked to make about taking the fruit of