| by Steve Benson
Personal Breaking
Points in Leaving the Mormon Church
I would note that, based on both my own individual experience
and my general observation of others, that many individuals
end up leaving Mormonism for a combination of reasons: personal,
emotional and intellectual—but that it is often the negative
personal experiences that tend to crystallize, focus and
propel them to take the final step of actually disassociating
from the LDS Church.
These personal experiences can take many forms, including:
--marital stress with a TBM spouse or with other family
members;
--the discovery of acts of hypocrisy or other inappropriate
conduct by formerly trusted and respected Church members
and/or leaders;
--a sense of personal betrayal or abusisve treatment at
the hands of Church authorities; and
--conflicts with Church leaders who misuse their authority
in heavy-handed efforts to control one’s individual life
and decisions.
My Intellectual Path Toward Jettisoning Mormonism
For years leading up to my ultimate decision to resign from
Church membership, I had been actively investigating several
basic issues of Mormon doctrine, history and practice, including:
--the historicity of the Books of Mormon and Abraham;
--the “translation” of the fraudulent Kinderhook Plates;
--the Masonic origins of the Mormon temple ceremony;
--the rewriting and altering of Church history;
--the question of consistency within Mormon doctrines;
--the racist and sexist teachings of Mormon scripture; and
--the reversal and denial of official Mormon teachings
The more I studied in these areas (reading many sources
from both “pro” and “con” perspectives), the more I developed
an intellectual resistance to, and eventual disbelief in,
bedrock Mormon claims. In fact, I had reached the point
of intellectual rejection of most of the above areas some
time before I formally withdrew from the Church.
Breaking from Activity
Even in the final stages of my growing intellectual disenchantment
with Mormonism, I nonetheless remained active, as I struggled
up to the last moment attempting to reconcile my growing
doubts with my continued, but declining, activity.
Ultimately, however, the rift between the two became so
wide that I found it necessary to put my Church participation
on hold, without actually yet resigning my membership.
For instance, when I concluded that there was no other reasonable
explanation to account for the obvious connection between
the LDS temple rituals and the rites of Freemasonry, I stopped
paying tithing and discontinued temple attendance.
When I reached the point where I could no longer accept
the Book of Mormon as an authentic historical document,
I notified my bishop that I could not, in good conscience,
continue teaching my Aaronic Priesthood class that it was
a genuine ancient artifact. I did, however, offer to continue
instructing the young men under my charge, on the condition
that I be allowed to focus on issues of human character
development and general moral behavior—but not on the Book
of Mormon. My bishop found this offer unacceptable and released
me.
I eventually discontinued my hometeaching duties and requested
that the hometeachers assigned to our family stop making
their monthly visits.
I turned down a calling from the stake president to be ward
mission leader.
In short, I needed time and space to deal with the steadily
growing gap between what I had been taught was true about
Mormonism and what I was discovering was, in reality, false
about Mormonism.
My Own Personal Experiences: The Basis for My Ultimate
Break from Mormonism
As important as my intellectual awakening to the falsity
of Mormon claims was to my eventual decision to leave the
Church, the most powerful influence in that ultimate decision
took the form of personal experiences, from youth to adulthood,
which served to raise growing doubts in my mind about the
Church’s claims to divine and singular authority over my
life.
What made these personal experiences even more powerful
to me than the intellectual arguments was their direct and
obvious effect on my individual life, as brought on by people
I knew and had contact with in the Church--from family,
to teachers, to Church leaders.
The cumulative effect of these personal experiences led
me to make the final decision to leave the Mormon Church.
The intellectual reasons served to reinforce and validate
that decision.
What follows is a list of the personal experiences, in cumulative
order, that formed the underpinnings for my decision to
resign my membership in the Church. These included:
--the failure of a priesthood “healing” blessing, given
to me as a young boy while hospitalized for pneumonia, to
have any discernable effect on my recovery;
--the false promise made to me in my patriarchal blessing
that I would return from my full-time mission to find things
just about the way I left them. Contrary to the blessings
assurances, my girlfriend, whom I wanted to marry, died
barely six weeks into my mission. Within a year, several
members of my Seminary class, along with their instructor,
were killed or injured in a tornado while returning from
a Church trip to Nauvoo;
--the failure of “the Spirit” to register positively when
I heard a flamboyant youth fireside speaker reveal to us
the Masonic origins of the Mormon temple ceremony (including
garment wearing), even though many of my peers in attendance
were moved to Holy Ghost-inspired tears;
--my family’s discouragement of me from making any public
reference to struggles I had experienced on my mission with
my own testimony, insisting to me that I, in fact, possessed
a testimony of the truthfulness of the Gospel and that it
was my duty to set an example for others in the Church to
follow;
--unjustified perks and privileges provided family members
of high-ranking Church leaders, including free passes to
General Conference that were expressly off-limits to non-family
members; reserved seating in the Tabernacle for relatives
of Church leaders; and access to special lunches for the
kin of General Authorities during Conference proceedings;
--the effort of my grandfather, Ezra Taft Benson (after
being solicited to intervene by my parents), to stop my
planned marriage to Mary Ann. He did so by abusively invoking
his authority as President of the Council of the Twelve
Apostles in order to exact my compliance—commanding me that
I should defer to parental “inspiration” and seek family
peace, rather than make my own decision on whom I should
marry;
--the refusal of a trusted BYU professor to answer my growing
doubts about Book of Mormon historicity, saying that I needed
to put them on the shelf and accept LDS scriptures on faith;
--the on-the-spot demand of another BYU instructor (in a
private interview into which he called me) that I bear him
my testimony of the atoning sacrifice of the Savior (I felt
intruded upon and left the encounter in tears);
--the efforts by my grandfather and other family members
to stop me from completing an undergraduate BYU research
paper on the Church’s official position on the theory of
organic evolution, fearing that it would be critical of
Mormon leadership and undermine faith and testimony in the
Brethren;
--the refusal of Church leaders (including President Spencer
Kimball, Apostles Bruce R. McConkie and Mark E. Peterson,
Correlation Committee Director Roy Doxey, Kimball’s personal
secretary Arthur Haycock and my grandfather) to give me
direct and straightforward answers to my questions on the
subject of organic evolution; combined with the Church’s
refusal to honestly acknowledge to its members the actual
history of the official LDS position on organic evolution
on the grounds that to do so would be too controversial;
--the extremist political views personally conveyed in our
home by my grandfather and other family members, including
that the U.S. civil rights movement was Communist-inspired;
that President Eisenhower himself may have been a Communist;
that political liberals (such as apostles Hugh B. Brown
and Neal A. Maxwell) could not be good Church members; that
the John Birch Society was the most effective organization
(outside the Mormon Church) in fighting Communism; and that
the Beatles were Kremlin understudies groomed to sow revolution
in America;
--the attitude in certain quarters of the Benson family,
conveyed to me as a 4th-grader on the day he was assassinated,
that President John F. Kennedy deserved to be killed;
--the preaching of racist religious and political doctrines
in my home and/or in the Church—including opposition to
school integration; support of segregationist George Wallace’s
presidential platform as being more in line with those of
the Founders than that of either the Republican or Democratic
parties; spiritual discrimination against those of African
and Native American descent, on the basis of their skin
color supposedly indicating a sinful legacy; opposition
to my participation in demonstration marches urging the
passage of a Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday in Arizona;
and the refusal of the Mormon Church to officially endorse
passage of a King holiday in Arizona;
--efforts by an anonymous Mormon Apostle, local Arizona
Church leaders and Mormon political authorities to silence
my Mormon-related public cartoon criticism of LDS governor
Evan Mecham--including direct contact from the state regional
representative of the Church with me, a phone call to my
stake president from H. Burke Peterson of the Presiding
Bishopric and complaints from a Mormon state senator—all
which led to my eventual removal from the stake high council;
this combined with efforts by local Mormon Mecham supporters
to have me excommunicated for my opposition to Mecham, whom
they claimed had been elected by God’s will;
--a warning from my hometeacher that if I did not stop asking
critical questions about the Book of Abraham, I would be
excommunicated;
--personal meetings with my stake president about my growing
disillusionment with Mormon Church doctrines and practices,
followed by his personal letters to me, in which he accused
me of being consumed with pride and in the grip of Satan,
and in which he also warned me to cease my public cartoon
criticism of unequal treatment of LDS women by the Mormon
Church;
--criticism by a local Mormon male stake youth leader of
Mary Ann’s Sunday School lesson to a joint young men’s and
young women’s class, in which she taught that during the
last days of Jesus’ life, his female friends were more faithful
and brave than were his own apostles (a criticism that was,
in typical Mormon sexist fashion, relayed to me by the stake
leader, rather than directly to Mary Ann);
--efforts by Mormon Church General Authorities and members
of my own family to discourage me from speaking the truth
about the Church’s deliberate misrepresentations of my grandfather’s
actual physical and mental health, combined with the threat
from my own family that if I continued to speak out publicly
about his health, I would be barred from seeing my grandfather;
this last warning was issued to me in the name of protecting
God’s prophet from enemies in the press (of which I happened
to be a member); and, finally,
--admissions by Apostles Neal Maxwell and Dallin Oaks in
private conversations with Mary Ann and myself in their
Church offices just prior to us leaving Mormonism, which
included discussion of what they themselves regarded as
problems with Book of Mormon historicity; failed prophecies
of Mormon Church presidents; contradictory accounts of the
First Vision; Joseph Smith’s inconsistent behavior in the
wake of receiving the First Vision; difficulties with Smiths’
alleged Book of Abraham translation; the role of F.A.R.M.S.
in protecting the Quorum of the Twelve from criticism; the
actual means by which revelation is received by Mormon prophets;
public lies made by Oaks about Apostle Boyd K. Packer’s
inappropriate involvement in a Salt Lake City excommunication
case; the nature of Maxwell’s and Oaks’ own testimonies
of the Gospel; their obsessive concern for secrecy concerning
our conversations with them; and their compulsion to pry
into our personal lives regarding our individual worthiness
to ask them questions in the first place.
Conclusion: Leaving the Church Because of Negative Personal
Experiences, Not Intellectual Arguments
Many questioning Mormons harbor serious intellectual doubts
about the claims of the Church. These concerns are real,
valid and substantial.
But it is often the grinding effect of jarring, personal,
negative experiences in their own lives with Mormon Church
authority, family pressure, leader and member hypocrisy,
individual betrayal and a feeling of suffocating control
that leads many of them to finally make their escape from
the captivity of the Mormon gospel gulag.
That certainly was the case for me--and, judging from the
wrenching personal stories many others have shared with
me--also the case for many others.
|
