Step 1: Admit that you are powerless to stop yourself from thinking and saying incendiary things. The demon seed throws out out a tiny rootlet the evening you ask your stepfather if the Law of Consecration is the same thing as Communism. He stares like you’ve grown horns. Later you hear him talking to your mother about how short your hair is.
Step 2: Believe that pop culture can restore your sanity. The Adversary will try to tempt you with something–R-rated movies, or heavy metal music. Indulge. Repent. Indulge. Repent. Be extremely moved by something Bad (The Godfather Part II, probably, or “Memento Mori” performed live), to the point where you begin to feel that perhaps this isn’t Bad after all. Repent ye, tearfully and at length. Give up trying to avoid that Bad (?) Thing, because it is beautiful and important and powerful and you want it in your life.
Step 3: Turn your will over to the caffeine idols. Arnold Palmers are Satan’s brew. This drink will lead you down the primrose path of sin.
Step 4: Make a searching inventory of your vocabulary. The first time you say “fuck” aloud, the friend you’re talking with busts a gut. “You’re blushing!” she cries, pointing at your face. It’s true, but you like the way the word feels, spat out. Like you could be tough; like you could maybe not care.
Step 5: Admit to another human the nature of your so-wrong-it’s-rightness. What’s this, a person of the gender you are interested in is interested in you? And has conversations with you? And listens to your opinions? And is generous and kind and smart and super hot? And wants to kiss you? You are only human. You kiss.
Step 6: Become entirely ready to have the defects of your education rectifed. There’s a reason Florida public schools left evolutionary theory out of the 9th grade bio book: they knew it would blow your mind. You feel like someone has cracked your big ol’ sapiens skull open and poured in a cocktail of fossils, baby bonobos, and sweet, sweet scientific method. You’re pretty sure your biology professor is a mouthpiece for the Holy Spirit.
Step 7: Humble yourself with meltdown. Look, it’s you, crying in the courtyard outside the campus Subway! Tears add much-needed savor to a six-inch Black Forest ham on whole wheat.
Step 8: Make a list of people to avoid. Radio silence isn’t the greatest policy for break-ups of any kind, but the thought of discussing your doubts and fears with anyone close to you is unthinkable. You don’t even admit to your LiveJournal what you’re considering. You let your work schedule you on Sundays and you just…stop showing up to church. You ignore phone calls from your visiting teachers, home teachers, bishop, and assorted missionaries. You sidestep questions from your mother about how your Sunday school calling is going. You walk the long way across campus to avoid seeing students from your YSA ward. You try to come up with some ethical way of getting rid of your scriptures.
Step 9: Make amends to yourself. During a class discussion of The Awakening your eleventh-grade English teacher told you to stop being such a feminist; at the time you were aghast, but now the Doc Marten fits comfortably. The flip side is that you begin to sense that you left the Church for the wrong reasons, for petty reasons–love, science, Al Pacino. Those are peanuts compared to what you went through as a woman in that establishment. The burgeoning stridency in you knows this, and the girl raised to smooth quarrels pushes it aside.
Step 10: Continue research and knowledge inventory. Oh look, what’s this? Websites and blogs devoted to leaving the Church? Where were your Google skills last year? You do a little reading–ok, a lot–and realize that your experience wasn’t so terrible. Your parents didn’t disown you; you didn’t have a mental breakdown (mostly). You type up an official resignation letter and send it in. You serenely ignore the fall-out from that action, pitch all “you need to stay and here’s why” literature into the recycling bin, and shamelessly recycle your copy of Mormon Doctrine.
Step 11: Seek understanding of your true feelings and inclinations. You read Under the Banner of Heaven and think, Hmmm but he missed all the really juicy bits. You overhear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir playing on someone’s laptop at the airport around Christmas and have to duck into a bathroom to cry. You long to be able to regard the church as a curio in a cabinet, not a black dog on your shoulder.
Step 12: Apply your new principles to daily life. Six years later, your mother is relating, with many heavy sighs, how they’re doing everything wrong in her ward this month, and you are chuckling. Chuckling: not uncomfortably silent, not crying, not hanging up the phone. Congratulations! The Church has left you, too.
Tags: church, diana hurlburt, feminism, mormonism, religion, the awakening
Yeeeeep. This is great!
“Stop being such a feminist.”
Oh how my heart hurts.
I laughed, because The Awakening, but yes.
Wonderful wonderful wonderful. Thank you for writing and sharing.
I really appreciate this, this is a perspective very far outside my own. “The flip side is that you begin to sense that you left the Church for the wrong reasons, for petty reasons–love, science, Al Pacino.” I was never raised in a religion. Or around people who were religious (Oregon has the highest percentage of religiously unaffiliated adults). However, elsewhere in the world I am sort of perpetually the first kid who knows there is no Santa. Bumbling along speaking before thinking.
DIANA!!!!!!!!
that last line, oh my word.
Relating so hard to this. Oh look, what’s this? Websites and blogs devoted to leaving the Church? Where were your Google skills last year? Ha! Right?! I raise my cup of Satan’s brew to you!
<3
Oh, Bravo, Diana. This is really good!
Oh, this is fantastic. That ending, especially!
I left the church four years ago and the last line has me tearing up on the bus. Thank you for this.
s’wonderful.
truly. I love your writing, lady.
I read the first step and nodded with recognition, except I said that to my seminary teacher, not my stepdad. And then I read the rest of the steps and my eyes got very big and watery because this was all stuff I went through too. Nine Inch Nails, drinking coffee, the feminism that popped up during class discussions of The Awakening, realizing how fun it is to say “fuck”…all of it.
Basically I loved this so much and related so hard that I registered just to tell you this. Thank you for writing this.
the bit that really got me was listening to one’s mom complaining/joking about the ward. this is every conversation I have with my mom, and I am not yet at the chuckling stage. Good to know it’s out there!
It took a lot longer than I expected. It’s normal, I think, to have a view of apostates as freewheeling sinners who take the church off like an old t-shirt, and to figure that that’s what will happen when you leave, but that really sells the institution short. Why would anyone say that “they leave the church but they can’t leave the church alone”? Do they really think it’s necessarily easy to get out? For many people it’s a lifelong influence that can’t just be shrugged away.
Let me know when you get to the chuckling stage! We can swap mom stories. Mine goes to a ward that is really small and rural and apparently has never heard of correlation.
Love love love!
Wait, what juicy bits did he miss?
Well–probably Krakauer didn’t actually leave out juicy bits, but I recall reading the book and feeling like he pulled his punches, maybe. Like he wasn’t as damning as he could’ve been (still pretty damning). Not that I really blame him, since the church (man it took me so long to break myself of the habit of automatically capitalizing that “c”) wrote up a rebuttal before the book even went to stores.
I’m so glad that you are no longer just the girl raised to smooth quarrels. Bravo on seeking new understanding!
START the fucking quarrels!
Hide in a closet with one of your friends from Young Women’s and spy on a Young Men’s meeting so that you may learn the wondrous secrets of the Aaronic priesthood that are being kept from you. Discover that this meeting mainly consists of discussion about an upcoming basketball tournament. Do it again. and again. Come to learn that the Aaronic Priesthood does not have awesome secrets at all. And all this time, you thought they were learning to read minds or levitate stuff.
and maybe start dabbling in historically contextual biblical scholarship and try to bring up what you think are really interesting tidbits in Sunday School only to be shut. down. by the poor teachers who just didn’t know what to do with a student, let alone a girl, raising points that were most definitely not in those asinine manuals.
I was the confirmation sponser for a friend who asked for some discussion of the history of the cathollic church’s teaching on abortion.
The teacher tried to punt by saying “well, it’s not in the bible because they didn’t have it back then…:
My friend is an anthropologist. She said “no one doesn’t have abortion or infanticide. Societies have had that forever.”
And teacher person said the thing they say to shut you up, which is “why don’t you research that for us?”
And so we did. Called up a Jewish history scholar friend, looked up Rome and Egypt’s rules on the practice, made a tidy collection of notes.
.. … teacher person really didn’t want to discuss it the next week in class. Wonder why not.
(Answer: at least partially cause it turns out they did indeed have it back then, and sometimes it was considered to be acceptable.)
Grow increasingly irritated with having Self Worth equated to ‘don’t tempt the boys’ and dehumanizing object lessons in which you are compared to chewed gum, cupcakes with the frosting licked off, ad nauseum. Realize that if it’s all going to work out the way it’s been promised, you still get the shit end of the stick for all eternity and that doesn’t seem very nice, now does it? Start engaging in activities that are completely forbidden in the For the Strength of the Youth handbook and realize that you actually feel that tingly weird feeling you thought was restricted to the holy ghost testifying to you. But it feels good, so keep doing these forbidden activities. Feminism. Social Justice. Environmentalism. Civil Rights. Feel genuinely baffled that secular groups could be far and ahead of The One True Church. And that coffee tastes so good….
“I’ll lick the frosting off YOUR cupcake.” – adding to list of pickup lines for ex-evangelicals
During a class discussion of The Awakening your eleventh-grade English teacher told you to stop being such a feminist;
my mouth just made, i don’t know, this sound, like i’d just gotten a fish bone stuck in my throat. it might be transcripted as such: huuuuuuuunnnnnnngghh!!!!!
Right? During The Awakening??
I knew a girl (who was not even religious, nor was her family) who wouldn’t curse for the longest time, to the extent where instead of saying the name of the show “Jackass” she would say “Jackbutt” (as if that’s better? idk). And she would blush while saying it.
That girl now has more piercings and tattoos than any other person I know. Connection?
I left an eastern orthodox church some eleven years ago and this is probably the closest description I’ve seen to my process. Punk rock and evolutionary biology corrupted me thoroughly.
The link finally works for me! This is great and gorgeous.
Any way of teaching of The Awakening that doesn't encourage feminism would be appalling.
This is great. But I just want to say, for the record, that I love evolution and sex and saying fuck and I go to a church where many other people do all the same things (or some of these things or none of these things) and we think it’s okay and God loves us anyway and we all love each other and accept each other, except we’re human so that is sometimes hard but we try anyway.
yes, it’s true that there are really great religious homes for people who hold those values. But the mormon church is…. not.
This is great. But I just want to say, for the record, that I love evolution and sex and saying fuck and I go to a church where many other people do all the same things (or some of these things or none of these things) and we think it's okay and God loves us anyway and we all love each other and accept each other, except we're human so that is sometimes hard but we try anyway.
I recall discussion in my high school English class of The Awakening revolving around how she was such a bad mother.
Oh my god, me too! My 11th grade English teacher was the worst.
Sometimes I wonder how I can be a scientist and feminist and get mad at the stupid things leaders sometimes stay yet it never makes me reject it all? I even gave a talk a few weeks ago that said (among other things) that we should love homosexuals. And I got compliments on it! I have declared I am prochoice, have discussed abortion imagery in John Donne poetry, and taken evolution all on BYU campus.
I mean, I totally see why some would get fed up with all the human silliness and the imitation of evangelicals, and I don’t blame them and will never disown them, but I am staying put. Maybe not being in Utah helps. 🙂 (Provo was stifling.) It may also have helped that I was willing to argue with all my youth leaders and they took my ideas seriously.
In any case, open conversations and being less judgmental would help us all.