Choice
This is one of a series social media posts that I wrote in 2021 during the height of my Faith Transition. Because I was publicly deconstructing in front of an entirely faithful network of friends and followers, I received a lot reactions, questions, and backlash from people I loved regarding my journey. Many of them were dismissive or hostile towards me because they had been trained to me as a “defector.”
Since an overly long response in a comment or personal message would have been seen as aggressive, I took quotes from these reactions to write these public posts in response. I never attributed the person who asked the question since I didn’t want anyone to feel specifically blamed or called out for having the response. The questions are also not unique. They are part of the scripted response we were taught to have as members of the “in-group.” Still, each post begins with a quotation because it is a question I personally received during my Transition.
Q: “…you chose to have a faith crisis.”
You know what’s weird?
This idea: members calling our faith crisis as our “choice.”
Every time that phrase comes up, I want to say,
“Wait, you think we just woke up and ‘chose’ to have a faith crisis?”
As if faith crises are akin to choosing whether or not to
wear a turtleneck,
eat an orange,
own a plant,
get another throw pillow,
turn up the thermostat,
etc.
Allow me to clarify:
—I didn’t choose to hide the Church’s history for over 100 years from myself.
—I didn’t choose to set up a secret combination in Nauvoo and use it to protect my coercive polygamous underground.
—I didn’t use Jesus to lure thousands of third world peoples into a Church and then use that as leverage to press them into paying tithing, which would go to pay my hundreds of thousadns of dollars of living stipend and my hundreds of billions of dollars of real estate and stock options.
—I didn’t lie to millions of people about spiral-diving on a burning plane or about a fictional temple meeting in which I saw the Almighty God descend upon the aging Prophet to tell us that what God really wants for people in this modern time is to exclude children of LGBT+ folx from Baptism.
—I didn’t issue a legal brief as a theological proclamation to enforce gender roles without consulting the other gender.
Here were my choices in this equation:
—I chose to trust LDS Church Leaders and local authorities (with exclamation points) for 32 years
—I chose to do everything the LDS plan set out for me: Young Women’s, Seminary, BYU, mission, temple marriage, kids in the covenant, constant, active engagement.
—I chose to take the claim seriously that this Church was true, because if it’s true, then Truth can speak for itself.
—I chose to acknowledge that having regular breakdowns about the horror of polygamy and the weight of never be good enough were probably not normal.
—I chose to be honest about the evidence I found, as I investigated the history and truth claims of the Church
—I chose to nuance everything with reminders of a shared humanity as much as possible.
—I chose to be completely transparent about our journey with Church leaders, family members, and friends, to promote health and wholeness in our Church post-Church community.
People will think what they think. People will say what they say.
But, here’s a gentle PSA, especially for members under the impression that this is some kind of domestic-level choice we’re making:
–> people don’t choose to have existential, reality-melting faith crises with the paradigms under which they were raised.
They choose to allow authenticity or honesty or health or relationships or people to be more important than preserving appearances.
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