Why It’s Time for Me to Stop Attending Church
A year after declaring my disengagement from full activity in Mormonism, I know it’s time to stop attending completely. This is why.
Last January, I publicly proclaimed that I was disengaging from full activity in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, because I could no longer reconcile my Mormon faith with my gay identity. I wasn’t coming out as gay (I had been out for a while); I was coming out as an apostate, a doubter, a non-conformist — I was quite literally coming out… of the church.
What I was doing was dangerous. I wasn’t towing the church’s official line and I divulged my views in a public forum. I was openly rejecting settled doctrine and claiming truth that contradicted revelatory authority as the church sees it. I criticized church leaders’ stances and actions. I was stradling the fine line between faithful disagreement and excommunicable apostasy:
…apostasy — the repeated, clear and open public opposition to the Church, its leaders and its doctrine. If someone seeks to teach as doctrine something that is contrary to the Church’s beliefs, attempts to persuade other Church members to their point of view or publicly insists the Church change its doctrine to align with their personal views, they would be counselled by a local Church leader and asked to cease that practice. If they fail to do so, Church discipline may follow. (Church Newsroom)
I knew the moment that essay met the world that my life would never be the same again. I knew I had friends in the church who were with me and who supported me, but I also knew some wouldn’t handle the dissonance. I knew local church leaders were bound by policies from church headquarters to ‘discipline’ me if my writings became ‘problematic’ or if I got together with a man. I knew my formal relationship to the church would blur and possibly fray.
I also knew that I would never, ever be the same gung-ho, ridiculously pious, relentlessly fastidious Mormon zealot. I could never again view the church with willful naivety and consciously blind trust. I had seen theological and ecclesiastical fault lines I could never unsee. I could never again live such a conforming faith life when there were beliefs and practices that cankered my soul and induced me to believe that I was other, lesser, deprived of full blessings, unexplained, veritably unheard. I could not do Mormonism like that again.
I thought at the time that I would remain associated with the church forever. Despite all the poison, it was still my spiritual home. I had been a member for 15 years. I couldn’t just leave instantly. It would destroy me. I needed a support structure as I tried to find my feet in a world without certainties or authorities.
So, I kept attending church. It felt right and it felt safe. There were the predicted awkward conversations with some leaders and warnings not to ‘rock the boat’ with more critical writing, but many more people embraced me and empathized and (though they had to word it with caveats about testimonies and theretofore unrevealed truths) tried to show some kind of allegiance. (For which, let it be said, I was and still am deeply grateful.)
And that made me think that Mormonism very well could remain part of my life. After all, I could tolerate the theological nastiness so long as my community was there for me.
But quickly — far more quickly than I had anticipated — I found my faith shifting to very perilous places, as I described in a recent essay. Sunday School lessons, quorum meetings and sermons were becoming tedious. I was hearing things that just didn’t compute anymore. I wasn’t even sure what I believed, if there was a God, if it even mattered to me that I knew the answer to that question. The practices of Mormonism that had been the scaffold on which my secular life had always been constructed no longer held their sacred significance. They had become drills devoid of divinity. I wasn’t atheist, but certainly heading in an agnostic direction. It was terrifying yet liberating, disconcerting yet enlivening.
So, about two months after that original declaratory essay was published, I decided I would attend church just to continue as organist. I even asked if I could play for another congregation, giving me two sacrament meetings to service each Sunday.
I loved it. It was the perfect act of devotion for my increasingly irreligious conceptions. It gave me spiritual nourishment to wallow in the music that felt transcendent and to serve my community to help them have a more spiritual experience.
That was what my soul needed.
Of course, faith is never static. This arrangement I had — as right as it had been — become untenable. What I was hearing at church in between the hymns went from ignorable to irritating to insufferable. I was listening to people expound the very doctrines that had wounded me and limited me.
I realized that I was allowing myself to attend services in a church that had hurt me.
Not the people themselves, heavens no — or at least, not intentionally. But I had been told by church manuals and general conference addresses and lessons and testimonies and commentaries the most vile things about myself: that I was mistaken about who I was, that it was the result of sin, that I had to be celibate all my life if I wanted a chance at eternal life, that I could never have romantic love or family, that no one knew the answers to why I was so spiritually inferior to straight members, that I just had to bear my cross. This was a church that had lessened me. And I had believed it. I had internalized it.
The ordinances, the talks, the culture and even the vernacular were ever-present reminders of that.
Now the joy of playing the organ no longer outweighs the drag I feel when I’m at church.
So, it’s time to move on. I will no longer attend the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. My soul has already moved far, far beyond Mormonism. It’s time I honoured that shift.
Those who know me (and probably those who have read anything I’ve written this year) will know I harbour considerable bitterness towards the church. And that is true (it’s evident in this very piece). It will abate to an extent in time, as I heal and evolve into my new life. But I also need to be clear that Mormonism isn’t just a regret or just a site of injury for me:
I am grateful for my formation in that glorious tradition. It taught me to see love, mercy and healing in divinity. It taught me that faith can uplift and expand people. It taught me that the divine is in the spiritual and the physical. It taught me how to seek inspiration and how to recognize the movements of intuition and grace in my life. It taught me to seek truth wherever I can find it and to reverence expressions of divinity beyond canon. It showed me that both ritual and improvisation are worthy approaches to worship. It revealed that teaching is about ministry to people, not conveying content. It demonstrated to me what a community can be. It introduced me to the wondrous, the holy, the loving in humanity’s experience of life. It is a tradition of beauty, power and fulfilment. Mormonism at its best is inimitably grounding and profoundly empowering.
I will always be a product of Mormonism. I am severing my connection to its meetings and theology, but not to its people. Most of my closest friends remain in the faith — and I will support them fully in that so long as they feel it serves them best in their spiritual paths. I’m not ditching them nor they me.
I also need to concede that I know there will be some members who will dismiss this essay and my actions as the tragic consequences of doubt or a surrender to sin and Satan’s machinations. They can believe that if they want — I can’t stop them — but I need to say that my decisions have not been made on a whim. It took years and years of agonizing prayer and brutal wrestling with and within myself to reconcile all that I was experiencing. My deliberations have been heavy and lengthy, and they have led me here. What I have chosen is right for me. I feel it in the core of my soul.
My faith is now ambiguous and indifferent to literal mythologies and traditions, but it is gloriously free. I feel free. I encounter edification all around me and I’m constructing a new life that honours those elements of my Mormon development but embraces the awe, the light, the depth and the invigoration of other expressions of goodness.
My eyes are wide open. This is what I need to do.
