Bored With Mormonism

I have been thinking about Mormonism, participating on message boards, listening to fringe Mormon podcasts, and blogging about Mormonism off and on ever since I stopped believing in Mormon claims about 15 years ago. Much of this activity was therapeutic. It is traumatic to lose faith in something that requires such a huge sacrifice of time and money. It is especially difficult to have those I once called friends think I have lost my way and that I am being led around by Satan, when from my perspective I am the only sane and reasonable one when I am among true believers. I have already paid a high price for my intellectual integrity. My true-believing ex-wife divorced me and succeeded in alienating at least one of my children from me. My true-believing oldest sister mourns the loss of my soul while my return-missionary son, perhaps the only true believer among my five children, holds out hope that I may yet return to the fold.

So now, after all this, I am getting quite bored with Mormonism. This is much to the relief of my current wife, who is also a former Mormon who was traumatized by events surrounding her departure. My interest has waned previously, but I was always sucked back in by prominent events such as the release of the Gospel Topic essays, news conferences about LGBT issues, and the recent rash of excommunications. I was especially interested in watching whether the church would come clean about the deception they have practiced for so long and stop demonizing those who ask honest questions. I suppose that I was looking for some type of vindication. I have felt vindicated by others who share my views, but any admission of wrongdoing on the part of the church will likely never come. Dallin H. Oaks made it very clear in a recent press conference that the church will never apologize.

During the Swedish rescue, then assistant historian, Marlin K. Jensen, and apostle Jeffrey R. Holland told the Swedes who had questions and doubts that the church was launching a new initiative that would take care of them all. It turns out that this was the first hint about the essays the church was about to release on its website addressing problematic areas of history and doctrine. This new transparency was welcomed at first by the fringe Mormon community. It seemed to be a harbinger of new things to come. Many thought the final result would be a broader-tent version of Mormonism where honest doubters would be welcome. However, recent excommunications reveal that this was never their intent. Rather, they only wanted to leave doubters without excuses and deflect criticisms of non-transparency.

Well, guess what?  You can no longer count me among the doubters. I am now more certain than ever that many of the Mormon church's core claims are absolutely false. I am also now convinced that the Mormon church does not truly care about its people, but only about their strict conformity to outdated and increasingly irrelevant values, chief among which are blind obedience to authority and bigotry towards those who are different.

So the church has chosen to stay weird. They have chosen to keep themselves out of sync with evolving societal values of greater compassion towards and greater inclusion of those who are different. I admire the heroes who have fought a good fight from within trying to encourage the church to change. The church has chosen to retrench rather than evolve, no doubt a reflection of the ultra-conservative attitudes and over-sized egos of its gerontocracy. If they hold this course, they will continue to decline into ever-increasing irrelevancy, while my unplayed queue of Mormon-themed podcasts grows ever longer until I finally unsubscribe.

This is likely to be my last post about Mormonism, unless something interesting happens. I have heard it said that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. The church is quite adept at dealing with persecution, even seeing it where none is intended. How will they deal with indifference?  I just don't care enough to keep watching and wondering. I have too many audiobooks to listen to on topics totally unrelated to Mormonism. So finally I might do the unthinkable, at least for a while: leave the church AND leave it alone.