by Ardell Broadbent. It has been 5 years since I left the LDS church. I didn’t want to post my experience immediately, knowing it would have come from a place of resentment at that time. I don’t believe that’s a helpful mood to write from, and as I still have LDS friends and family members, I want to show respect for their choice and beliefs. Beside that, earlier I’d probably have been much too long-winded. I’ll start by acknowledging what I believe I gained from church membership during the nearly 40 years as a member. I practiced discipline; I was a 33-year-old virgin when I married. In addition, I was of a temperament prone to existential angst, and as no other philosophically suitable alternative had then been presented to me, the LDS doctrine gave me a somewhat logical system from which to develop a sense of permanence and a personal ethic. Since leaving the church, I have not floundered in an abyss of relativism. Rather, I have had a rich spiritual life. I found myself having a familiar teary-eyed heartfelt response to reading from cover to cover the Tao te Ching (trans. By Ellen M. Chen). On a daily basis I read snippets of three authors who help me maintain a spiritual perspective: Diane Mariechild, Eckhart Tolle, and two interpretive texts on the Tao te Ching by William Martin. On a note of what constitutes a spiritual perspective, to paraphrase a young yogi John (who was in possession of my entire CD collection when he suddenly left town never to be heard from again), a spiritual perspective is simply a broader and more comprehensive view of what we consider truth.
By the way, I have not, as Joseph Smith predicted of those leaving the church, fought the church, nor have I become bitter toward it and its founder. Notwithstanding the historical facts that have recently been formally acknowledged by the church leaders, I view Joseph Smith as a well-intentioned visionary leader who, from an ideological perspective, elevated Christianity above what it collectively was at the time. Having listened many times to lectures by Truman Madsen, I had a grasp of aspects of his character that impressed me. Beside that—lest I be thought reliant on second-hand understanding—as a BYU student I had been a paid research assistant for Hall Miller in a project for which I read 200 autobiographies, biographies, and journals of the early saints who had been at least 18 at the time of leaving Nauvoo. I had found a way at the time to “bracket,” as they say of qualitative research methods, some of the information I read that was less than faith-enhancing. We humans have, as I learned in studying psychology, a capacity for cognitive dissonance, double-think if you will, by which we can hold two contradictory views in mind at the same time. It is a valuable skill, because it allows for the eventual merging of new perspectives that incorporate truths that appear at first contradictory. (On that note, Joseph Smith himself stated that in paradox, truth is made manifest.)
But on with my story… As a student, I saw friend after friend leave, and I maintained the friendships. Although I had through much study found a way to conceptualize Mormonism without a pervading guilt, I believed those friends had possibly needed to leave in order to break free from soul-destroying guilt. In the last year of membership, I remember listening to general conference talks and thinking, “who could doubt the sincerity of these leaders and their intention to promote a better world?” I believe the world might be currently better off with Mormonism than without. Yet I found myself even at that time realizing—with a twinge of guilt but with acceptance—that I preferred the gatherings of my outside friends instead of the church social gatherings. For me, the final break came when a dear friend of mine had described how as a black man he had been so rudely treated in a nearby small-town LDS community. As I sat writing, trying to formulate a perspective that church members could benefit from as a doctrinally-supported culturally more accepting attitude, the words of Jesus came to my mind, “by their fruits ye shall know them.” I felt I could no longer defend church members and the attitudes that membership seemed to either attract or cultivate. Stunned, it took no more than 48 hours for that schema to dissolve, until the parallel schema that had long existed had no cohesive alternative.
As for my formal leaving, as a returned missionary I had been trusted, in the branch I last served in, with teaching Sunday school to teenagers and then with serving as the primary president for 2 years. Being in a small congregation, in a small town, I thought it fitting to bow out without causing scandal and awkward questions from children to their parents. I simply announced that I was transferring to the local Spanish branch. This surprised no one, as I’d partly served my proselytizing mission in the Spanish-speaking program. Eventually my past Branch President asked for a word with him after hearing that I had not been attending. I stated I no longer believed. He said, “ya gotta wanna.” I suppose that is a recognition that in the end there is not enough logically compelling evidence, chiasmus and tree of life archeology aside.
I still believe all life is connected in an esoteric way. My study of near-death experiences--that began at least a decade before leaving the church--led me later to see religion as the natural outgrowth of the descriptions by NDE experiencers who came back and either described an immensely peaceful and joyful state or described a horrible fearful experience. As stories must have spread about these two after-death options, just as knowledge is always co-opted for political use, religion was born. The truth in this paradox may be as was described in Rubin's Jacob's Ladder, “If you're frightened of dying and holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.”



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/16/2014 08:46PM by ardell.