What happened?

Today, I wish to make clear the beginnings of my doubts about the LDS Church.

A long time ago, before my college years, that is, from the seventies up to the early nineties, I was a properly involved church member. I had doubts as a matter of course. It is normal to doubt. I just thought that the Holy Spirit hadn't yet spoken to me and told me that everything about the Church was true.



In the eighties, I began reading my Book of Mormon on my own. On my first reading I was very confused. A few years later, at the age of eighteen, I began to read and enjoy it. And as years went by I could swear it was a true book. I still think it is a book containing truths I have yet to learn about, ponder, and live.



But there is much more to the LDS Church than the Book of Mormon.



Sometime in the nineties I started avoiding going to church meetings. I was a college student at BYU and felt guilty because BYU is a religious university and you are supposed to attend as many of your church meetings as possible. I would often strive to do better and attend a little more often. I would say that at that time the spiritual content of the meetings benefited me. I often felt a good spirit rest upon the meetings.



But problems began to appear which very subtly questioned my loyalty to LDS doctrine.

As young adults, LDS young people are advised to take time off from their social, occupational, and educational pursuits to serve an LDS mission. Basically, the young people who took this suggestion would put in a set of papers to the authorities and then wait to be assigned a location--France, Ohio, California, Scotland. You could be sent anywhere.



I was wondering myself if I shouldn't go. But there are a few experiences I had that caused me to doubt if I should go at all.



During one church meeting I attended a missionary prep class, a class instructing potential future missionaries. During the class the young instructor taught us that we were supposed to share our personal testimonies about basic church teachings in a certain format, "I know that the Book of Mormon is true." "I know that the Church is true." Stuff like this. You couldn't use the words, "I believe.." You had to say that you knew. To me, this smacked of dishonesty and bureaucracy. Wasn't I supposed to tell these people in a sincere way what I thought of the LDS Church. Wouldn't this inspire them to investigate? But no, you had to always state that your knowledge was perfect. I disagreed vehemently with the teacher on this point and he looked at me like he suddenly knew I had more problems than he ever thought I had before.



And then there were other problems. At one point, I told one of my church leaders that I indeed was planning on going on a mission and wouldn't return to college in the fall. After I made this announcement, I was paralyzed with fear, uncertainty, and disgust. I couldn't bring myself to tell my bishop or even get a job. I thought I had just chickened out. But when I renounced plans to serve a mission, I suddenly felt a lot better. After all, I was looking forward to school at the university in the fall.



I now know that that incredible paralysis preserved my integrity. I didn't want to go out and preach something I wasn't always sure about. I didn't want to have to pretend to be perfect and dress like a missionary everyday. I didn't want to have to finance something that would be hard enough to just show up for. I didn't want to do it and I couldn't admit it. All I could really do that summer was stall.



The final blow to any plans to serve a mission for the LDS Church came when I was attending sacrament meeting about ten years ago. A leader in the ward was speaking. He told us that if you have the truth you have a desire to share it with others. I felt like I must be lazy or evil because I realized I didn't desire to share it with others. I thought it was scary. Secretly, beneath my love of believing that I knew more of the truth than persons not worshipping as I was, was a fear of dragging more people into a church with strict rules. I knew that not everyone liked to abstain from coffee and R-Rated movies and pay tithing. I knew that many people felt violated if you pushed them too hard to investigate your religion. I knew that my own best friendships didn't smack of the coercion that the LDS Church advised I exercise so that we could have membership growth.



And (this is really interesting) I never thought of these people from traditions not my own as going to hell. Some of them I considered saved already because they were faithful to God in their own traditions. I considered them good, maybe even better than I and my fellow Mormons.



It was only a few years later, when I reflected on where people of other faiths and persuasions were going, that I relied on LDS doctrine to work out in my mind where they really must be going and became horrified and fearful. Reading the doctrine made me believe that if you did not accept the LDS religion in this life or the next that you would not inherit as many good things in heaven as those who did. I believed that if you weren't accepting of the LDS faith that you would be separate from all the good people who did. And for a while, I became sorrowful when someone had died without being baptized into the LDS Church. Basically, I couldn't handle the deaths of the majority of the people on the earth.



But after a while, my mind started to flip back to my former belief. As I refused to attend more and more church meetings, my mind started to open to the idea that there were a lot of people I knew nothing about, simply because they were not LDS and had not gone to my church. I started to believe that I didn't know most of the good people on the earth. As the LDS Church gathered more and more shame on it in my mind, I began to realize that maybe there were people of other faiths who could inherit more than I will in heaven. And I now realize that there are many who will inherit the same things I will inherit. And these people will be from different faiths, have different personalities, etc. Heaven is getting more cozy. Heaven is starting to look like the real world.

And what shocks me most as this idea came back to me, is that I was so brainwashed that I couldn't be too upset because I really thought I was better because I was in the better religion. I really liked the idea that everyone else was under my feet. Because inferiority complexes respond very favorably to people thinking they are better, either on earth, or in heaven.

And I now realize that it is not hard at all to give up a belief I am better than others if it means that heaven will be interesting again.

And I think that in the next few years, life will become much more interesting, too.

There are many other things that made me discount the LDS Church. But there are plenty of other blog entries.