So What Are You Now? A Godless Commie?
Making sense of who I am after leaving the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
No one:
Me (in my best Elyse Myers voice): What am I now, you ask? Great question, I would love to tell you.
After my shelf broke, meaning after I acknowledged all the things I couldn’t make sense of in Mormonism and everything fell apart, I wasn’t sure what I believed in.
You may not have experienced a so-called "faith crisis" but put yourself in my shoes for a minute. I know this is difficult for my critics, but imagine you’re in a situation where you’ve somehow come to know with certainty that your childhood religion isn’t true. If it’s easier, imagine you grew up in a completely different religion like Scientology or Islam. What would you do once you learned it wasn’t what you thought?
I had a friend in high school who was inactive in the LDS church. At the time, I felt it was important to "bear my testimony" to him about how great the church was. I told him that I knew it was true because I had felt the spirit. But even if it wasn’t and there ended up being nothing after this life, living the gospel would lead to a happy and fulfilling life.
I assumed that if I were ever to leave the church, I would immediately become a sex worker strung out on drugs who neglected her many children from multiple partners. I would worship Satan and live a short and miserable life.
When it was my turn to actually grapple with the truth claims of the church, I thought back on my previous words to my friend. Did it really matter if the Book of Mormon was a literal historic account or not? Was the organization of the church still more good than bad?
These questions were especially gripping because I was teaching psychology at Brigham Young University (BYU) at the time. I cherished that job. I could have easily continued on, simply focusing on what I considered the "good parts" of Mormonism. I could have pretended to believe in the sticky parts for the sake of keeping a job I loved.
I essentially did that already, minus the pretending. In my class, I talked about showing love and compassion to the LGBTQ community. I talked about how human behavior is so dang complicated, and how I believed Christ needed to intimately feel all of our pain, anguish, and experiences, to truly be able to judge us.
But things kept getting harder to justify. It made sense to me to keep the parts of the gospel that advocated for service and love. But if it wasn’t capital T True, how could I excuse the church’s stance on LGBTQ members, the role of women, or the church’s history of racism?
My platitudes that "God works in mysterious ways" and "It’ll all make sense in the end," were only comforting when I believed the church was ultimately run by God.
In November 2019, I got an email stating my BYU classes for January had been dropped due to low enrollment. I was working at the Salt Lake Center at the time, so this wasn’t unusual. I was pregnant with my third child, so I knew I’d be taking a semester or two off to be with him.
Once I read the email, it hit me that I was never going back to BYU.
The next time BYU reached out to create my teaching schedule I responded,
It has been difficult for me to plan semesters going forward since I’ve recently decided to take a step back from the LDS church. While I’ve enjoyed my time at BYU, it’s my understanding that I can no longer work here with this decision. Thank you for the support you’ve given me throughout my tenure.
She replied, "Thank you for letting me know. You have been a marvelous instructor for us and I wish you all the best."
I cried. And that was that.
No longer holding onto Mormonism by my very fingertips for the sake of my job, I was lost. I was free. I was confused. I was relieved.
Was I Christian? Should I explore non-Christian faiths? Was there even an all-powerful creator? Or afterlife?
My husband and I attended other church services here and there with our kids. We dug into the bible, reading and watching YouTube videos from biblical scholars. I read memoirs of other people leaving their childhood religions and searched for how they made sense of their life afterward.
I learned about cults and how we humans justify our beliefs. I learned about how we make decisions — about how susceptible we are to biases, fallacies, and overconfidence.
I dove into evolutionary psychology to understand human nature from a broader perspective, learning how group behaviors, snap judgments, and intuition can be both adaptive and maladaptive.
The more I contemplated, the weaker my belief in Christianity became. I thought back to how I clung to the idea of Jesus being the perfect judge because he understood all we had gone through. Yet, how could He (and God the Father) still put us in a tiered system in the afterlife after perfectly knowing every single thing we had experienced?
At this point, my belief in free will itself was starting to crumble. Especially after learning more about neuroscience. I couldn’t understand a God who can condemn someone for something like drug addiction when scientists know that addiction is a result of genes and environment.
Human behavior is so much more than choice and willpower. It stems from our evolution — it’s influenced by what our parents ate while pregnant with us and whether they smoked or not. It’s influenced by the genes we didn’t choose and the zip codes we were born into. It’s affected by hormones, neurotransmitters, pollution, toxins, trauma, and an endless list of other factors.
Once I immersed myself in the complexities of the brain, studied the origin of behavior, and read the history of how mental illness has been treated, I saw how little conscious control we really have over our behaviors.
I let go of claiming, as many religious people had in the past, that my feelings confer ultimate truth. I let go of certainty. I made no claim to know if there was an afterlife or a supreme being.
What I do know is I’ve felt pain and I don’t like it. I don’t believe suffering is a lesson from God to help us grow. Sometimes bad things just happen, and there is no supernatural explanation. People experience injustice and needless suffering.
Leaving the church created a greater urgency in me to learn about injustice, social policy, and community action. If God isn’t here to end world hunger, slow climate change, or welcome asylum seekers at the border, who is?
We, humans, evolved with the capacity for empathy. Communities that were cooperative were more likely to survive and reproduce. We have mirror neurons that allow us to feel what we perceive another person to be experiencing.
I don’t know what the meaning of life is. But I know despair and loneliness. I know shared pain. I don’t want anyone to go through needless suffering.
I heard many justifications growing up as to why our lives were cushy compared to others in the past and throughout the world. Those feel icky now. I am no more worthy of a comfortable life than anyone else.
Maybe this life is all there is. What do I know? Consciousness is too complicated for me to fully understand. But I can comprehend love enough to know that every human deserves it. I can hope for my children, grandchildren, and all of humanity to have a blip of conscious experience filled with connection, joy, and peace.
So what am I now? A Jaded exmo? A Godless commie? You could probably say atheist or agnostic. But those have a lot of negative connotations here in Utah. The label I’m most comfortable with is Secular Humanist (or just Humanist).
Humanists believe we can be moral and find fulfillment without a belief in God. I wholeheartedly endorse their 10 commitments which they use as an alternative to the ten commandments.
Instead of trying to find the good within Mormonism, I’ve decided to seek out just the good. For now, I find that in humanism.
Am I married to humanism? No. But the beauty of letting go of dogmatic and unquestionable beliefs is that I can be flexible and simply follow the evidence. I can practice intellectual humility. If humanists begin to use their beliefs to justify cruelty, I can walk away.
Will I ever return to Mormonism? I doubt it. The more I learn, the less the Mormon pieces fit. But then again, we humans are notoriously bad at predicting our future behavior. I never thought I would leave the church, yet I did.
Who knows what the future holds?
