Faith Transitions – Changing to a Survivor’s Narrative

I also agree with this premise.

My faith crisis coincided with mourning the stillbirth of my daughter.

I feel that there were two models that helped me to understand what I was experiencing.

1) The five stages of grief. I remember watching a video talking about making positive choices while going through the stages. There are choices that we can make (like talking with others and not shutting out those that care about us) but we cannot decide to skip stages or rush stages etc. The stages must be lived through. (different people may experience the stages differently but they don’t get to DECIDE how they experience the stages)

2) The assumptive world collapse. My assumptive world had a big fall and I felt like I was rebooting. I remember the sensation that the rebooting was happening at a level below my conscious mind and that was disorienting. I also feel like I made choices during this period. For example, I feel that the material that I read and the ideas that I allowed myself exposure to provided the building blocks for my new assumptive world. I remember not wanting to feel vulnerable to another assumptive world collapse and not wanting to build my world on untested “promises” and faith. In retrospect I feel that I healed in the only way that I felt was possible and authentic for me.

Yes, I did survive and I was changed by the experience.

Right now I am at peace with my feelings about the church. I rarely attend because I just can’t deal with the dogma and I really do feel that the Mormon church was built on a very sandy foundation after Joseph Smith died. I’ve been a member all my life and very active until COVID happened.

On some things, I am also “at peace” with the church. My main concern is that my daughter turns 7 this year (so 8 next summer) – and I don’t want her to have a stronger commitment to the church at her age. I am not interested in driving the conversations that would end up in “baptize the child and overpromise/lie we will actually become active”. The other complication is that my 6 year old will decide that baptism/church attendance is a “one-size-fits-all” best idea and intellectually bludgeon her older sister with that (when for her older sister, church attendance is not the best idea by a long shot).

For me, post-transition, the church was always “built on a sandy foundation” – I’m just not entirely sure whether that is a “feature” (as stated by the church itself) or a massive “bug” (as common sense dictates). I grew up in the church, and did my best to make a space for myself and be a blessing to others wherever I went (church unit wise). COVID made it easier to stop attending, and easier to assess the consequences of attending church (or not) to my way of living.

..I finally started feeling happy and excited about letting go of all the things that made me feel like I would never be good enough. Even though I still try to be Christ like in all I do, I now do it because I want to, not because I’ll have to answer to my bishop, my ministering coordinator, or my Stake President. I don’t feel a need to go to the Temple ever again, I don’t feel the need to pay tithing to a church that has billions, and I wish that I could tell Emma Smith how sorry I am for believing things about her that are just not true.

The “I do what I do because it is valuable to me” instead of “I do what I do because someone told me God valued it (and I believed them for rational reasons)” is very liberating.

I didn’t leave the church so I could “do things and not feel guilty” or any of those other things that “strong members” think of people who leave the church when they decide that it no longer fits their needs (I used to think the same way, unfortunately.) But I am happier, more confident, more a peace with who I am now than I have ever been and i feel so free!

One more thing: it’s such a relief to know, and I feel like I really KNOW that polygamy was never supposed to be part of the true gospel. AND i seriously do NOT believe that JS ever practiced it.

I did make a series of decisions to engage with the church “on my own terms” before COVID hit and provided me with the opportunity to see that “on my own terms” means “select community activities” and “with select people from the community”. But that specific level of engagement looks a lot like “inactive” and borders on “Do not Contact” in church terms.

I think that “Polygamy” is used as an umbrella term to attempt to define different variations of relationship types – and sanction them. We don’t necessarily have a solid theological grasp of what “sealing” meant. With Joseph Smith, it was *probably* more like a “club membership” rite of passage or a “connection power” connecting individuals in a more universal web. With Brigham Young, it was more of a “literal” connection that was in part about pedigree and power in a specific order. I think that “connecting to people” is part of the “true gospel” – but the specific way that partnerships are defined (male-female in a 1 to 1 ratio recognized by both civil and religious authorities with specific rights/responsibilities) is very, very exclusive and can be divisive.

I think a HUGE blind spot for partnership theology is that women were not included. I don’t think that the sealing system as it was set up and declared “divine” would have looked like it has if women had been part of the central conversation(s) about it. After all, Emma Smith is credited with sparking the creation of the Word of Wisdom revelation and the Relief Society. Brigham Young’s family ran the Relief Society, Primary, and Youth Programs as a way to deal with health and education concerns involving women, children, and youth (mostly after the fact). These women sparked revolutions in community and religious theology that are still around today. What would it have looked like if they had been able to spark religious theology in the sealing processes?