Kirby article should be included with "How to stay…"

Looks like R. Kirby has read the “How to Stay in the Church after a Crisis of your Faith” article.

Kirby: Soul searching needn’t always end in strict adherence

By Robert Kirby

The Salt Lake Tribune

First published Jan 19 2012 05:13PM

Updated Jan 20, 2012 05:19PM

According to America’s top churches, religious freedoms are at stake if gay people are allowed to get married. Rice-throwing gays could spell the end of our constitutional rights to worship as we see fit.

Personally, I’ve always believed that marriage in general restricted religious freedoms. If you don’t think so, tell your spouse that you’re not going to church anymore because you want to practice voodoo. See what happens.

Still, I can’t dismiss the idea that married gay people constitute a horrible threat to the plan of salvation. After all, church leaders say so.

There was a time in my life when I let other people be in charge of my religious freedom. Back then, any ideas I had of my own about what God expected were secondary to embracing what I was told by church leaders.

For example, a church leader once told me birth control was devised by Satan to thwart the plan of God. Another told me emptying my savings account to catch up on my tithing instead of paying tuition was what the Lord wanted.

Both of those ended up being the wrong thing for me to do. I did them anyway because — well, church leaders said so.

I was assured this wasn’t mindless belief. After all, didn’t they also encourage me to test the truthfulness of their counsel by praying about it?

Yes, they did. But the general assumption was that any answer I got other than what I was already told couldn’t possibly be right. Ergo something had to be wrong with the way I was praying. Or living.

Maybe I wasn’t obedient enough, humble enough, steadfast enough, fasting enough or even just plain serious enough to get the “right” answer.

It couldn’t just be that what I’d been told was either not intended for me in particular, or just plain wrong in general. How could I tell when I should agree or disagree?

For a time, I thought this was a problem everyone had. It wasn’t. I brought it up in priesthood meeting one Sunday. The room went so quiet that I could actually hear the surprised blinking.

When Satan didn’t actually appear, one of the guys recovered his wits enough to announce, “I have never disagreed with a church leader.”

It was my turn to blink. Never disagreeing with a church leader is a pretty neat trick considering they don’t always agree with one another.

Also, what’s the point of praying about the advice of church leaders if there’s no possibility they could be wrong?

Incidentally, this isn’t just a Mormon thing. It’s also true of people who believe the Bible, the Quran, the pope, Microsoft, etc., are infallible to the point where they don’t have to figure things out for themselves.

Eventually, I got comfortable with my own view of things rather than the correlated one. It’s not always an easy place to be, but it is where I feel at home.

Today, I’m OK with church leaders running the church. That’s their job. But I’m in charge of me. If I’m wrong in what I’m thinking, I’d rather it was my fault than because I let someone else do it for me.