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After having moved to Spokane in December to help resolve a family issue and having become acquainted and comfortable in my wife’s first urban LDS ward, things are sufficiently settled to return to many online activities I’ve been neglecting. An online friend who knows of my background in having requested and received removal of my name from the Church Records in 1999 and subsequent re-baptism into the Church now almost two years ago, asked me the following question.
“Are you glad you left,” he asked me. After thinking it through, I wrote the following:
When I decided to leave back in 1991 I was working my way through what I now consider burnout after twenty five years of intensely trying to live up to that perceptual patriarchal ideal that originated in my heart at the end of my mission in 1967.
In retrospect, it feels like I went through twenty five years of that quiet desperation that Thoreau talked about as I attempted to live up to and live out the life of a genuinely righteous Mormon family patriarch. Having been the first Ruger to serve a mission, to marry in the temple, I had been attempting the kind of faithful LDS lifestyle, the understanding of which I had very little. Without realizing it, I had set for myself an unrealistically impossible task.
Eventually, when something snapped inside, it was not a snap triggered by my being offended or angered by anyone in the Church locally or up the chain of authority. In some ways, the “snapping sound” was in reality a mental forehead slap as I began asking myself repeatedly why I acted the way I acted religiously, what my religious/spiritual goals really were, and the self-annoying manner in which I reacted to organizational exhortations to performance and conformity – primarily at the local and stake levels.
“If the prophet of our stake says so and so … then that’s the will of God,” seemed to snap me right to attention.
In the late 1980’s, as a HPGL, I more frequently asked myself why I was investing so much emotional energy into what amounted a need to perform for, please or actually satisfy church leaders who held positions above me in the chain of authority.
Ultimately my faith crisis became my literal mid-life crisis. It was based entirely on how I felt about myself as a member of the Church in good standing who performed the performances and carried out the will of an assortment of authority figures above me.
Emotional triggers began feeding my new found curiosity about the hidden “truths” in the LDS reality and history that led me from one fact to the next. My outrage at having been hoodwinked and having felt gullible caused the self-ignited flaming to grow hotter and hotter. That “heat” eventually became intolerable for me and I was so angry I just felt that the only way I could punish the Church and “make” it sorry for having hoodwinked me was to repudiate it publicly.
I requested name-removal from the membership records in 1991 but had to do so several times before a good bishop took care of it in 1999.
By then, although no longer white-hot angry at the Church, I was still sufficiently full of contempt for the Church that I kept requesting removal until I got my wish. At that time my non-member wife I had been married 3-4 years.
So no, I’m not glad I left. Were I to get a do-over I wouldn’t have done so. It was a mistake on my part because even after all that time, I was still acting rashly out of anger. I would have been better off simply walking away, going totally inactive and ignoring the Church rather than requesting membership termination.
My wife (who was baptized the day I was re-baptized) and I have discussed this recently. She told me that had she been a member back in 1999 – knowing and aware of all that she knows and of which she is aware today – she would have asked/counseled me not to sever the tie with the Church formally as I had done.
Back then I had no inkling of what I was doing to my own sense of identity. In severing myself from the Church, I emotionally tried to sever myself from my culture – to deny who I really am in terms of cultural and spiritual identity.
As I have said elsewhere, for me personally leaving the Church meant a willful leaving of the culture; in a sense, tearing off my own skin.
I did not return to Church membership out of belief in the proselyting presentation and truth claims of the Church.
I wanted to reclaim the identity I unwittingly gave up.
I have done that.
Thanks for such a thoughtful post, Arthur. There is a lot to ponder in it. Thank you Arthur for such an introspective post. Arthur Ruger wrote:Back then I had no inkling of what I was doing to my own sense of identity. In severing myself from the Church, I emotionally tried to sever myself from my culture – to deny who I really am in terms of cultural and spiritual identity.
As I have said elsewhere, for me personally leaving the Church meant a willful leaving of the culture; in a sense, tearing off my own skin.
I did not return to Church membership out of belief in the proselyting presentation and truth claims of the Church.
I wanted to reclaim the identity I unwittingly gave up.
I have done that.
I too am a Mormon Boy through and through. The church influenced that part of me but does not own that part of me. I feel that God accepts my “Mormon-ness” even if He is not the author of it.
Wow! Thanks for the thought-provoking post! I feel like I am exactly where you were during your faith crisis/mid-life crisis. Your post has given me pause to think over my anger and burnout issues…. Stay. IMO. Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2
Great story Arthur. I was in a similar position back in the late 90’s. I was inactive and living with a woman (which devastated my parents). I wasn’t sure about the church, but I defended it to people when they started to bash it. It was at this point that I had the thought “I should remove my name”. This thought came about after the 10th time the HT’s in the ward had tried to get ahold of me (My mother kept giving the wards where we moved our address). At this point in my life, I’m glad I didn’t, but sometimes wish that I had. When I first came back to the church, I felt very unworthy, damaged, out of place. I wished that I had been re-baptised so that I could start all over again nice and “clean”. Who I am today is a combination of the person I was before I left the church, and the person I was when I was inactive. This sometime leads to interesting situations in church (questions, answers not quite what the teacher expected).
I hope that helps. I hope that you decide who you are going to be going forward.
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