I like talking with people who have changed religions. Here is one of them. Previously: Emily Stewart.
Lindsay Eagar lives in the mountains of Utah Valley with her husband and daughter. Her debut novel, Hour Of The Bees, is being released by Candlewick Press in 2016.
Hi, Lindsay! Can you tell me a little bit about yourself before we get started.
I grew up in Utah County, Utah, where the population is 75% Mormon. My family was staunchly LDS and I was a good, card-carrying LDS girl until I was 22, and then I formally left the church (submitted a letter in writing to have my name removed from the records, although I am certain they just moved my name to a black folder in a filing cabinet that’s on fire). Being raised in the church has been a huge part of my life, and leaving has also been an experience that brings to mind the following words: traumatic, whiplash, laughable, freeing, jolting. My family is still Mormon, and I still live in Utah.
The standard atheist narrative is – at least the one I see most frequently – something along the lines of “free-thinking person is raised in various flavors of unsatisfying religion, begins to question their beliefs, rejects said religion, and moves out of it.” And it’s not a bad narrative! But I find it doesn’t always cover the whole story. Atheism is presented as a reaction to a religious upbringing rather than a worldview that can, you know, stand on its own. It’s often judged by what it isn’t, rather than what it can be.
So! Before we get into your background, I’d love to know what being an atheist means to you now. What aspects of atheism bring you joy and delight? What have you constructed for yourself that’s meaningful? Dish!
So my trajectory through Religious, to Questioning, to Lost, to Gleeful Atheist Asshole, to Actually Decent Human was pretty trackable. Atheism, to me, is a reactionary term. It exists because to most of the world, faithful is the standard human condition. You lose your faith like you lose your car keys, or your favorite pen, or yourself. Atheism is a stance that, to me, is still out there on the field, playing the game by refusing to play the game. Which is why I don’t like to use it anymore, and when I do use the term, it’s only because there isn’t really anything else. Agnostic suggests a wishy-washiness that I find others don’t respect, but it’s much closer to how I feel: I don’t know. Perhaps the closest term that I relate to is apatheist: I don’t care. God or no, religion or no, I don’t care. Doesn’t affect my daily life. Not anymore.
Well, not until it does—since religion was part of my upbringing, it’ll always be a part of my life. (Remind me to talk about Mormon magical realism at some point.) And it’s impossible to log onto Twitter, read the news, read a fucking book, even, without religion being part of the equation. I recognize a lot of the beauty in religion, but I am determined to look at people first, their religions second.
When I first decided, “yes, I’m leaving, I’m officially resigning from the church,” I read a lot of asshole atheist narratives. I gobbled them up: Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris. I discovered Bill Maher on Youtube and he was my patron saint of atheism for a long time. I lovingly call them all assholes because to me, that was their function—they gave me permission to find my inner asshole, to rail against the homogeny of what I knew and what was being taught to me. I craved extremists like these assholes because I had no idea where to start building my own belief system from the ground up.
I think you see this happen a lot when people leave religions. They kind of turn into little unbearable jerks for a while, and they gather on forums and in coffee shops and sort of have anti-Sunday school, where they can angrily rant to each other about the damage done by whatever religion they left. I did this for a while. Maybe six months. I joined online support groups and my daily sacrament wasn’t prayer or scripture study, it was typing out detailed atrocities done by the LDS church for others to pile onto and affirm, “yes, we see you, you are validated by your hurt.” Eventually I decided to try to heal as best I could, because being part of a counter-culture wasn’t my vision for my life. Today, when I hear about someone leaving the Mormon church, I try to reach out gently and offer myself as an ally, and as proof that you can make it out alive and find happiness.
Leaving a religion is a gigantic rebellion, especially when you live in Utah County, Utah. I felt like a teenager and people around me were happy to point out how angsty and overdramatic I was acting. Keep the peace, they were pleading. But how could I? Leaving Mormonism felt like being alone in a dark bedroom, and seeing a monster in your closet…You turn on the light, and realize the monster was just a sweater sleeve draped on a chair, and no matter how you try to squint in the shadows, you’ll never see the imaginary monster again, because the lights have shown it for what it really is.
After I left, the dust settled, and I was able to put down the asshole atheists when I disagreed with them. A lot of them are pretty terrible, you know? As terrible as some of the religious texts. But they served a purpose, like I said–they were the extreme opposite of what I had learned, so they were the jolt I needed. I learned how to separate vague moral declarations of “I believe in…” which derive from dogmas from the actual actions in my life. Did I really believe in love? Why? Did I believe in family? Why? What did those words mean? Did I really believe that coffee was sinful? I sure hoped not; I was practically bathing in the stuff every day. And that’s what ultimately made me leave—there was too big a dissonance between the life I quote-unquote “believed” in living and the life I was actually living. I am much less of a hypocrite now. I live a life of insane integrity now, and no one knows it but me.
This is the part of atheism that brings me the most delight. I am my own keeper. I answer only to my own moral compass. What worked yesterday may not work today, and I have no one else’s grand eternal plan to formulate or conform to but my own. I’m the biggest cafeteria-style religious person in the world, and yet I’m not religious at all, and this is where I get that sheer joy that comes from smug integrity–I can admit that I pick and choose, and there’s nothing hypocritical about it, because there’s no higher power I answer to. I decide my own prophets and scriptures. My holy canon is the hundreds of books on my shelf—mostly fiction, and mostly kid-lit because there’s something special about children’s literature—and Dead Poet’s Society and some parts of every Tori Amos song.
At first I had a hard time reconciling the good things religion has brought into this world with the bad things. There are books written, deeds done, civilizations created, all inspired by someone’s belief in God, and I never want to dismiss those or dismiss the reasons they were created. But something I do as an atheist is strip those inspirations down to the bare universal values—the core principles of religion, at least the ones I can relate to, are love, and family, and moral courage, and trust. Those aren’t religious values, they are human values. Rather than seeing religious people around me as different, I try hard to do a Venn diagram in my head and focus on the places where we converge.
This is in direct opposition to how I was taught to think as a Mormon. An example which is both hilarious and sad—when I was first dating my now-fiancé, we had a pretty blunt conversation about parenthood. I was the single mother of a five-year-old daughter, so I knew it was futile to date anyone who didn’t want to be a dad. But he responded with such enthusiasm, and told me he’d always wanted to be a dad, that I was suspicious. “Why would you want to be a dad?” I actually asked him. “You’re not Mormon anymore.” What’s wrong with him? I wondered. And then we both had to laugh at this moment. Raised Mormon, it was regularly drilled into my head that Mormons had the corner market on family; the rest of the world was too busy partying and living selfish, single, child-less lives to understand true family. Hogwash, of course—but I was 27 and this was still my knee-jerk reaction. Undoing a lifetime of imposed values and strange narratives takes a long time, but I’m working on it.
My family is still utterly Mormon. In fact, my mother is in the Relief Society presidency (the organization for women in the church) in her ward (Mormon parish). My brother gets home on Friday after a two-year mission (no contact with family except through weekly e-mail and biannual hour-long phone calls). We are closer than ever, and my mom has even said that my de-conversion has been good for her eternal perspective, because it’s so easy to get caught up in the nitty-gritty details and checklists of religious life (especially in the LDS church, because the checklists are very important to them). I can do my Venn diagram with my family, and see that they are motivated in their faith by love and family, and the desire to do good, and I can align myself with that mission and say, “Hey, me too. And actually, mostly everyone, too.”
So my constructs are mostly around love (love of others and love of self), hard work, family, and good. I’m a big fan of good. And I get to decide what good is.
Hopefully that gives you an idea of where I’m at now, and where I came from.
It sounds like you’ve been exceptionally thoughtful about your de-conversion, and like your family has been remarkably supportive of it, all things considered.
I’d like to back up a little bit. Do you remember when you first encountered the idea of atheism? What did you think of it?
I do remember. I was eight or nine, stalling at bedtime, watching the news behind my dad’s armchair. The human interest story was about an elementary-aged boy who was bullied at school because he was an atheist. The other students on camera called him “Satanist” and even a few of the teachers admitted they were uneasy knowing he was “godless.” The father was interviewed, and he (rightfully) said it was ridiculous that they should be so cruel to his son. That was my first image and concept of people who lived completely outside of religious boundaries.
Of course, in Utah we have “Jack Mormons,” people who are technically baptized members but follow little or none of the religious tenants (the LDS version of the “cafeteria Catholic”). But this boy in the news was using that word, atheist, and it was a scary-sounding word. I thought of all I had heard about black holes, and thought this was probably the human theological equivalent.
When did you first start to think, “Oh, this might describe me“?
There were three major cracks that happened in my faith. The first was when I was 16. A bishop who I’d felt particularly close to was excommunicated for adultery. This really made me distrust authority figures in my ward. The second crack was when I was 19. A friend cracked a joke about Joseph Smith’s many wives, and naively I said, “Oh, you mean Brigham Young, right?” He looked me in the eye and said, No, definitely Joseph Smith; google it. I did, and found information buried on the church’s own website about Joseph’s polygamous marriages–something I had never, ever heard of despite spending 20+ hours a week on church meetings/seminary/personal scripture study. This really made me feel betrayed and sheltered by my own church, and sent me down the research rabbit hole.
The third crack was the big one, and it came in a pretty significant but simultaneously small moment–the birth of my daughter. I’d been reading online forums of ex-Mormons, reading Richard Dawkins, reading Christopher Hitchens, and wondered, if there truly was no god, then what was there instead? What was the source of all beauty, all love, all good? Or was it all just human construct, and the truth was that everything was meaningless?
Well, when I held my daughter, whatever notion of god that had been clinging for life in my conscious was quickly pushed off the cliff, Mufasa-style. Here was beauty, love, and goodness in my arms, and the source didn’t matter. I could be without god and still have access to all the good things that I thought I’d forfeit if I left religion altogether. Atheist was the term that all the assholes I was reading and watching used, and so that’s the term I used for a long time.
You told me to remind you of Mormon magical realism at some point, and I’d love to hear more about that.
Mormon magical realism…oh, man. I could also call it Mormon folk tales, or Mormon urban legends. I’ll give you a few examples. All of these were stories or “facts” I heard from adult teachers and leaders in either Sunday school or seminary. All of these were presented to me as doctrine. I don’t know how much these vary from state to state, and there is a very clear delineation between Utah Mormons and everyone else.
1) Garments (the so-called “magic underwear” that worthy, temple-endowed adult members of the LDS church wear) not only provide spiritual protection, but also physical protection. Stories I heard in Sunday school told of a friend of a friend (who knew a guy) who was wearing his garments during a house fire, and was burned everywhere except where the garments touched his skin. Another story was about another friend of a friend (who knew a guy) who wore his special-issue camouflage garments while serving in a war zone, and was shot only in places where the garments didn’t cover his skin.
2) Several Mormon folk tales are about the early pioneer settlers in Salt Lake City. One story tells of a severe locust infestation that devoured the pioneers’ crops…until God sent a massive flock of seagulls to eat all the locusts. Another story tells of how the saints were unsure about Joseph Smith’s successor, Brigham Young…until Brigham Young spoke to the congregation, and the Holy Ghost changed his face and voice to look and sound like Joseph Smith, as an assurance to the members that God approved of this new prophet. Another Mormon myth is that Brigham Young foresaw modern electricity and elevators, and thus the plans for the Salt Lake Temple included spaces for wiring and shafts. (False, false, false, but pretty freaking cool when you’re young and Mormon.)
3) The phrase “the Holy Ghost goes to bed at midnight” is frequently uttered, especially by parents to their teens who are going out on weekend nights. But this was also the cornerstone of a chastity and virtue lesson taught by my seminary teacher during sophomore year. He taught us, with the most fervent, burning testimony I’d seen, that the best way to keep from having sex before marriage was to simply be in bed before midnight. He also told us that we’d be safe from temptation if we only kissed standing or sitting up, and never “went horizontal.” As a teen, this gave me a real fear of any time past 11:59 PM. (Also, had that guy never heard of sex standing up?)
4) Some real kooky shit shows up in many lessons, like the doctrine that the Garden of Eden is in Missouri, and that heaven is located on a planet in our universe called Kolob, which is also God the Father’s current address. These are both details that are occasionally mentioned in church and seminary, but are considered more obscure (re: debatable) doctrinal points that members tend to get extremely defensive about.
5) There are four humans that doctrine says must wander the earth until Christ’s second coming. The first three are the Three Nephites. The Book of Mormon is mostly about Christ’s visit to North America, which apparently happened after his resurrection and before he returned to heaven for good, he blessed three men to “never taste of death; but ye shall live to behold all the doings of the Father unto the children of men, even until all things shall be fulfilled” (from 3 Nephi, a section of the Book of Mormon). These three men supposedly wander the earth and act as good Samaritans here and there, popping up to help a mother change a flat tire, vanishing into thin air sometimes. There’s at least one guy in every ward who swears he was helped by the Three Nephites once. Some BYU folklorist had collected over 1500 stories from Utahns alone who believe they had seen the Three Nephites.
And the fourth guy wandering around the earth? Cain, who in Mormon doctrine had his skin darkened after killing his brother Abel (“And I the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him” says the section Moses in the Book of Mormon). This is the root of Mormon racism, by the way—the idea that dark-skinned people were “marked” by God as less worthy, while the “white and delightsome” Nephites were God’s chosen people. Black men were not allowed to hold the priesthood in the LDS church until 1978. Cain wanders the earth, dark-skinned, taller than other men, and hairy…and many Mormons believe this explains Bigfoot. Yes, Bigfoot sightings, when I was in Sunday school, were chalked up to sightings of Cain, lonely and evil, wandering the countryside.
So these are more than just threads of Mormon culture; they were actually pretty important in my de-conversion. Each new generation of Mormonism has “pet” urban legends which are taught as actual doctrine. Example: my younger brother had never heard any of the garments-in-the-fire stories, and was pretty skeptical that they were ever taught.
It was frustrating to come to the realization that stories which had been taught to me in my crucial teenage years, stories that I had come to rely on as faith-building, were now touted as mere “folklore” or “not doctrinally proven.” When I was young, I believed them whole-heartedly, and I believed the leaders who were teaching them to me were speaking from doctrinally sound sources. The discord was jarring when I realized the LDS doctrine is a living, breathing, shifting thing. Things that are taught as gospel truth now will not necessarily be preached with as much support in ten years.
Even the LDS church’s PR campaign has shifted since I was a teen. When I was young, the tagline was “a peculiar people,” and we were told to promote our weirdness. Now the commercials for the church show normal people doing normal things: “I’m a mom, a mayor, an artist….And I’m a Mormon.” It’s all about blending in, being as utterly regular as you can be.
Now, I do want to point out why I use the term magical realism instead of just Mormon folklore, or Mormon weirdo doctrinal stories… As you probably know, magical realism was originally coined as a term by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, after the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and he gave magical realism three major qualifications. First, that magic be woven into the tapestry of everyday life as if it were reality. Second, that the clash between established religion and whatever pagan or native cultural religions be highlighted (traditionally, in Latin American magical realism, that’s Catholicism vs. the native cultures). Third, that the tension primarily come from the day-to-day realities of oppression, which makes sense considering the political atmosphere of Columbia when Marquez was alive and writing. We’ve seen a shift in the term magical realism—lots of people are using it to describe books and movies that are merely fantasy “lite,” or even urban fantasy, rather than following the clear definitions laid out by the master Marquez himself.
But I think Mormon folktales fit into all three definitions easily. Absolutely magical things are touted as reality—if you just wear your magic underwear, you could be protected from gunshots and house fires! If the established religion is Protestantism, and the clash between this traditional Christianity and the newer (albeit weirder) Mormonism creates such doctrinal stories as Joseph Smith’s first vision, where God the Father tells him none of the current Christian churches are true, then the second definition fits as well. And the third definition fits extremely well, considering Mormonism’s history with the flights across America, extermination orders in Missouri and Illinois, and despite their best efforts with current PR campaigns to show otherwise, their peculiar practices in a modern society. Even in Utah County, where some 75% of the population are baptized members, there is a constant attitude of victimization and oppression, even after all these years of being established and a majority in the Salt Lake Valley.
Are there any final thoughts or things you’d like to say about your atheism you didn’t get the chance to?
Yes! I didn’t speak much to my heritage as a Mormon, and that’s been the most recent shift I’ve felt: pride in this heritage, rather than disgust.
To be a Mormon (and a Utah Mormon, in particular) is to be badgered with pioneer stories at church meetings. We learn every handcart company’s name and roster; we learn about every leg of the pioneers’ journey from Illinois and Missouri to the state of Utah, where Brigham Young saw the valley and said grandly, “This is the place.” Family ancestry and genealogy is also huge in the LDS church (so we can track down all the non-members of our families and make sure we perform proxy baptisms for them in a temple ceremony called “baptisms for the dead”; Anne Frank and other Holocaust Jews were baptized until there was an obvious outcry). So we also trace back our lineage and figure out if we have pioneer bloodI myself am related to the fourth prophet of the LDS church, Wilford Woodruff, through one of his many wives.
So the whole identity of Persecuted Pioneer Stock was something I was anxious to give up when I left the church. I was grateful to see it go, in fact. But a few years, a few family crises, a daughter, and some time to mature and reprocess my de-conversion, and I find myself cycling back around to pride. Perhaps it’s because I no longer belong to the church, and so I no longer have to wave my rebel flag. Perhaps it’s because I’ve learned that I’m lucky to know my family history when so many others don’t have records like this. This is who I am. I have pioneer blood. I have polygamist blood. I have Mormon blood. Leaving the church helped shape the person who I am, yes, absolutely–but so did being raised in it. I no longer roll my eyes at genealogy charts, or tales of handcart companies crossing frozen rivers just to get to a place where they could live their weird polygamist lives in peace. I embrace it. That is where I came from. I choose, however, where I am going.
I live a life of insane integrity now, and no one knows it but me.
I had never found the right words to explain why I was so much happier after leaving the Mormon church, but this is it.
things you don’t know until you know
I love your description of the Venn diagrams of values you can find with people who outwardly don’t appear to share your values or social trappings. As I’ve exited my own ‘asshole atheist’ stage that’s more and more how I see the world, too. Great interview! And GOSH all the Mormon magical realism stuff is fascinating from an outsider’s perspective. If anyone has any further reading recommendations along those lines I’d be super interested!
The best I can do is point you toward the likes of Boyd Petersen, a Mormon scholar who does a lot with Mormon folklore and stuff like that. He has a collection of essays called Dead Wood and Rushing Water, which I haven’t read but I’m told is interesting.
Sorry for the vague reply. I’d be interested to hear more too, if people have more suggestions.
Early Mormonism was heavily influenced by the Freemasons and some of the mystical Christian sects. The books I know of that deal with the magical realism:
Early Mormonism and the Magic World View by D. Michael Quinn
In Heaven as it is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death by Samuel Morris Brown
The Refiner’s Fire: the Making of the Mormon Cosmology by John L Brooke
You had me at apatheist. Brilliant!
I related to so much of this. I’m also getting past my smug phase and hopefully forming a more compassionate approach to religion. I didn’t like the fact that when I was speaking to someone and the topic of their faith came up, I would shut down completely and form a negative opinion of them as a person. It doesn’t need to be that way. But DANG do I enjoy deciding for myself what good is, and choosing my own path! It feels amazing.
(Thanks for introducing Lindsay’s writing here. I’ll definitely pick up her book when it comes out!)
I want to second this, as well! I’m also trying to get to a place where for me religion doesn’t equal immediate dismissal. I really admire Lindsay and I think she spoke very eloquently about deconversion and relating to other people.
Although I have to admit that I will probably be forever smug about living a life of insane integrity. Sorry everyone!
I’m here for this too! Getting to assemble my own moral centre that can grow and change based on experience has turned me into a person of insane integrity too, and I am proud of it and a little afraid of it.
I want to say that having Toast-faiths around has been a big help towards eliminating my own anti-religion knee-jerk reactions. Y’all are lovely and compassionate and a pile of badasses, and while I don’t believe in your gods, I do believe in you. It helps immensely.
I am finding it really hard to get over my negative feelings about faith and religion, and I feel horrible about it; so many people of faith are great, intelligent, compassionate people, and I should not be a dick about something which doesn’t affect me! But religion and faith make me feel really uncomfortable, and I do feel weirdly distressed by the thought of people I like holding irrational beliefs (even though loads of my beliefs are probably irrational! It is human nature) and/or aligning themselves with institutions that they don’t fully agree with and which have caused large amounts of pain. But I feel like this is shitty of me.
“Apatheist” is the best term yet to describe me. I will be using it from now on. Thank you, Lindsay, for that and everything else in this article!
I like apatheist as much as “ambivalist”, which is my friend Honest Lewis’ definition of the same thing. I really do. And I really enjoyed this piece.
I’ve heard it described as “soft atheism.”
My boyfriend is of the “I don’t know and I don’t care” school, which is pretty close, I think.
I looooove the discussion of Magical Realism. This is a delightful piece overall, thank you so much for sharing with us.
There is so much here that is so familiar to me, but stated more beautifully than I would say it. I was in my 30s when I left Mormonism, but still got the “rebellious teen just going through a phase” treatment by other Mormons about my lack of belief.
Unlike a lot of ex-Mormons, though, I never went through any period of shock over hushed-up aspects of the church, because I just never CARED about church history. I think my apatheism phase started long before I realized I was agnostic.
Regardless, letting go of the cognitive dissonance of trying to believe in Mormonism is the best thing I have ever done for my mental health. If anything, I am a far more moral and righteous person now that I’m making decisions more thoughtfully and deliberately rather than following church rules, and my lifestyle hasn’t even changed at all aside from not doing church.
To be fair, Mormonism only sounds crazy because it’s so new. If it were 2000 years old, everybody would eat that stuff up. Plenty of crazy shit in the Bible.
/disclaimer: I ain’t seen no god, and so don’t believe in no god.
It’s not really the age of Christianity that makes so many people into biblical literalists – after all, the Greco-Roman gods are a lot older than Jesus, and yet there are very few Greco-Roman mythos literalists.
It’s the prominent place that Christianity holds in western culture, combined with many people’s fear that, if they reject one part of the traditional Christian package (like, some of the crazy stuff in the Bible), they will have to reject everything else that is bundled in with that package: God, their community, ethics, purpose, love.
It’s the same principle at work in Utah: it’s not that they’re crazier in Utah than anywhere else, it’s that Mormonism occupies a central role in the social fabric there, and not anywhere else. If everybody lived in Utah, almost everybody would eat that stuff up.
/disclaimer: I believe in a god.
Very well said. There’s a message that to be a “real” Christian means being a literalist – all or nothing. I had that feeling, or rather, worry, and I’ve never been Christian! It’s a very narrow view, one that strikes me (possibly completely wrongly) as particularly American, what with the fundamentalsim there and the way so many US atheists are reacting to that. The thing that cleared that idea for me was reading Karen Armstrong’s A History of God. Not in any conversion sense, just learning a bit about how limited my ideas had been. 🙂
This is so great. I am absolutely fascinated by the LDS church and some of the things described here that, as you said, are just kooky. I know some really smart, analytical Mormons, and I just don’t understand how they can do their very analytically-focused jobs on the one hand, and on the other hand hold the genuine belief that Jesus went on a North America tour. That’s the beauty of faith, I guess.
I was raised Catholic and have also recently come out of my asshole atheist phase. I still like the label ‘agnostic’ for myself. I don’t believe in an anthropomorphized God, but I’m open to the idea that there is some higher power. I have accepted that I just don’t know, and I’m fine with that, and at this point I don’t feel the need to explore it more. So maybe I am an apatheist–thanks for the new term!
>I know some really smart, analytical Mormons, and I just don’t understand how they can do their very analytically-focused jobs on the one hand, and on the other hand hold the genuine belief that Jesus went on a North America tour.
Well why wouldn’t he have? How is it kookier than the idea that God came to Earth to redeem ALL of mankind but didn’t bother telling anybody but a couple hundred Levantines?
Oh, I think there are plenty of crazy, unbelievable things in the Bible that one has to accept on faith in order for them to make sense. However, most historians agree that Jesus of Nazareth was probably an actual human who lived in or around modern-day Israel. The historical basis for Jesus existing makes it easier for my non-Mormon Christian friends to make the leap of faith (har har) from their logical sides. That same historical basis for Jesus being in Missouri does not exist. I also don’t mean to imply that all Mormons believe the Missouri-Garden-of-Eden thing to be true; it’s just my anecdotal experience that the Mormons I know tend to be more literalist in their interpretation of LDS doctrine than, say, the Catholics I know are about Catholic church doctrine.
Why shouldn’t the garden of Eden have been in Missouri. Missouri has great soil.
Dear Madams at the dash toast dot net:
I would like to read more about the Mormon magical realism, please.
Much love,
S. Pebbletush
I would like to talk with Lindsay and other Formons about LDS magical realism! It is so…trenchant.
Oh, I so appreciated this and can identify with so much of what the author talks about.
And I heard the guy-in-a-fire-not-getting-burned-where-his-garments-covered-him story in Sunday School too! Along with the story of the woman who didn’t have enough money to pay her bills that month, but she paid her tithing before spending any other money, and JUST IN THE NICK OF TIME when she was about to get evicted, she some miraculous windfall of cash, as though sent from Heaven above, saved her.
There were an awful lot of these stories where people who faithfully paid their tithing got that money back PLUS MORE. Oddly, it never happened to me or anyone I knew directly…
I heard all those stories, too! And so many stories about missionaries. They were accosted by guerrillas, but they bore testimony of the gospel and were let go! They walked through Carnaval scenes of decadence, drugs, and nekkidness, but did not even see any naked people! Because the Spirit covered their eyes! Plus stories of people who were mugged, but the mugger saw their temple recommend in their wallet and gave everything back.
The paying tithing–>greater riches stories always aggravated me the most. I never saw it work out for anyone who was really in need, but I’ve heard firsthand stories from fairly privileged people who chose paying tithing over buying some frivolous thing, and then miraculously acquired more money to buy said frivolous thing! And doesn’t that prove that God looks out for us? Meanwhile there are people paying their tithing and starving or going without vital medical care while they wait for the miracle.
For a moment I pictured that as accosted by gorillas. Then I read it properly and had a sad.
Don’t forget the pioneer woman who found a pie in the road after praying to tell HF how hungry her children were. That’s one I’ve been able to laugh about recently.
According to some of my grandmother’s journals (the woman knew everyone’s business in the ward) everyone knew everything about people’s financial situations and often came together to provide windfalls of cash as needed (not without judgement or detailed examination of how that funding was used.) That story of “pay your tithing, get riches” was definitely reiterated time and time again.
What a great post – thank you for writing it.
I’ve been raised, and as an adult stayed in, the kind of Protestant leftism where you can be out as a lesbian and an atheist at church (as I am!) and that’s considered perfectly wonderful. Come downstairs for free trade coffee hour!
I find that my experience provokes equal amounts of ruffled bafflement from unexamined secular people, angry ex-religious atheists, smug atheists, AND the doctrinally faithful. (Coming out as a churchgoer to people is often trickier than coming out as gay…)
Except for ex-Mormons! They seem to be the only ones who don’t startle or nervously change the subject when I bring up that I go to church. They seem to get that the liturgical culture, the community, the core of shared social values, etc., have a lot of inherent value that isn’t instantly vacated by the flipping a single toggle labeled “DO YOU BUY ALL OF THIS AT FACE VALUE, Y/N.”
I hope that a faith/community movement evolves to create a place for ex-Mormons who can no longer live inside the church, or in contact with their families, but who still want those elements in their lives.
I get you.
I’m an ex-Catholic slouching toward secular humanism, but my daughter and I go to a very hippie UCC church because the community is wonderful, because I like having an hour every week where I can re-articulate my core values and get in some meditation, where my daughter can see examples of people living out values I’m trying to teach like “We are grateful for what we have” and “We who have privilege check it, because we believe everyone is innately equal” and “Help those who need it.”
I am a big believer in the power of local communities that exist to help you define and affirm the better impulses in your nature. Churches are great for that, even if you end up mouthing along to the Our Father or whatever.
I have relatives who live close to the Mormon holy site in Missouri and it’s a nice place, in a sort of pastoral Midwestern sense. For a long time that was the only thing I knew about Mormonism, but at least I came by that honestly.
One thing I have wondered, and maybe this isn’t the place to ask, is how does your typical layperson approach the alternate history in the Book of Mormon? I mean is there a literal belief that there were Israelite tribes living in the pre-Columbian Americas? Do people get worked up about history the way some evangelicals get about evolution? Is it an important teaching at all?
That alternate history about the Israelite tribes living in pre-Columbian Americas is a totally literal belief for I would say most orthodox Mormons. Some (albeit extreme, far past orthodox IMO) Mormons even give tours in Central/South America called Book of Mormon tours.
Anyone feel free to chime in here, but this was the case when I was raised as a Mormon. And FYI, a lot of Mormons feel the same way about evolution as evangelicals do.
That alternate history is absolutely a literal belief in Mormonism. There are even people who study archeology and whatnot who look for evidence which “proves” this history.
I had never heard of Mormons sharing the evangelical approach to evolution, though. I was always taught that evolution did happen (although in a God-directed sense, for whatever godly purposes) and that the creation story of things happening “in a day” was intended to mean “over a period of time” or “a day relatively in God’s sense of time”, where day was not meant literally in the sense of one spin of the earth on the axis.
That’s fascinating. To me, that sounds so easily falsifiable– is it something people get disillusioned about/ lose faith over? I make the evolution comparison because I’ve heard plenty of stories where someone raised in a creationist denomination starts learning about science and their whole faith is shaken. Surely your average Mormon feels some tension knowing that historians don’t support their narrative at all?
That’s where I lived for a long time, too (I might even know your relatives, Mormons are a weirdly tight-knit bunch). It is pretty in a pastoral way. It’s also kind of like a magnet for the weirdest bits of Mormonism, which can be either entertaining or deeply uncomfortable. Like, it being the Garden of Eden is just the beginning of the weirdness.
My relatives aren’t Mormons, they’re just in northern MO. But speaking of Mormon weirdness in that area, I vaguely remember a rumor that the reason the big temple in Independence has a curly spire is that when Jesus returns, he’s going to walk down it like a spiral staircase from the sky.
Oh, got it. So I’m sure they have at least a couple crazy Mormon stories (the craziest ones tend to gather there). And the spiral temple in Independence is actually the Community of Christ, which is a Mormon spinoff, but I sure hope that’s the case!!!
Yeah I don’t even know if that one is in-group folklore or just people who live in Independence ascribing wacky motives to Mormon-adjacent people
When people used to ask me if Mormons were Christians, I used to say, “Mormons are Christians+.” Because they believe in the Christ of the Bible, PLUS that Christ made a stop over on his way back to heaven to reconcile native peoples in the Americas. It’s definitely a literal belief.
What a wonderful interview! Lindsey did a spectacular job talking about atheism and her journey through it. Very enlightening. (And I too love reading about semi-secret Mormon beliefs.)
Oh man, I have so many feelings about this. It is so good. As a former Mormon, not from Utah but raised in a super devout, “pioneer stock” on both sides all the way back to Joseph Smith era family, this is so close to my story. The only reason I haven’t resigned officially is because I heard they contact your family and tell them, and I am a non-confrontational coward. Apatheist is spot on. And yeah, the magical realism. I never heard the Cain one but I heard the garment ones all the time, and the “pay tithing instead of bills and you’ll get mysterious windfalls,” and so many more. (I got some especially weird ones since I lived for a long time really close to the Mormon history sites in Missouri, too. Yeah, there was the standard “this was the Garden of Eden and will be where Jesus comes back,” but also “all the Mormons will walk here right before Jesus comes back,” stuff like that, too. Yeeep.)
The one thing I don’t relate to and desperately wish I did was the family being closer than ever. My family is all still incredibly devout, and religion is a touchy topic at best, causes outright fights and tears more often. I never bring it up, but my mom is incredible at turning any conversation to the church/why I left/how I must hate her personally since I left/why I must think she’s stupid and why don’t I love her because if I loved her I’d take her faith and believe. The rest of my family studiously avoids the topic, thank goodness, but one of my brothers has essentially stopped talking to me (unless he’s attacking my politics on Facebook). So did it take time for your family to accept your decision, or is my family going to be this way forever?
This is very interesting, but as an atheist I have to admit I’m torn between wanting to see atheist/agnostic voices represented on The Toast and not really wanting to see them show up as part of the Convert series, because that implies that atheism is something you can convert to. We get a lot of people telling us, “oh, you just think you don’t have faith, but really atheism is a belief just like X Religion is,” and it’s so hard to convey that atheism is not a belief, it’s the absence of belief, which is something quite different. I realize that The Convert Series is just the name of the series, and it’s really about people reevaluating/changing their approach to religion, and that in that sense losing or shedding your faith qualifies. But I still can’t help getting a little twitchy when I see the Convert series pop up and realize it’s a piece about someone “converting” to atheism. Does anyone else have this reaction, or is it just me?
me too!
Nope, me too. I really hate the idea that atheism is “just like religion” and I kind of hate that this series perpetuates that.
I knew a Lindsay Eager as a teen/young adult who was (and probably still is) the same age as my younger sister. Her mom was my youth leader for part of that time. We lived only a few houses away, in a neighborhood where there were, like, ten dogs all named Sadie. This Lindsay had a daughter, too, and I remember our bishop–a short, muscly guy–getting exed. So, if this is the same Lindsay, my greetings and congrats on doing a book! I’ve left Mormonism too, thought it took me lots longer than it did you or my sister. So cool to see someone (I strongly suspect) I know on one of my favorite internet places, The Toast.
I found this exchange very interesting:
The standard atheist narrative is – at least the one I see most frequently – something along the lines of “free-thinking person is raised in various flavors of unsatisfying religion, begins to question their beliefs, rejects said religion, and moves out of it.” And it’s not a bad narrative! But I find it doesn’t always cover the whole story. Atheism is presented as a reaction to a religious upbringing rather than a worldview that can, you know, stand on its own.
Atheism, to me, is a reactionary term. It exists because to most of the world, faithful is the standard human condition.
– just because, as someone who has always been an atheist (atheist parents, very little exposure to much in the way of faith while growing up, still not really knowing many people who practice a religion), atheism is very much just a default state to me rather than a reaction against anything. I hadn’t really considered what Mallory describes as the standard atheist standard to be the standard, because I feel like most people I know who are atheists are in much the same situation as me: religion was never really a factor in their lives. Are there many other people who are just lifelong, non-reactionary atheists, or is my experience the odd one?
(To be fair, I do have a profound discomfort with religion and faith, so my atheism is not quite a disinterested, neutral condition – but it’s a thing that’s always been there, rather than the result of a lifelong path away from religion.)
I dug out my Intense Debate password just to answer you!
I am also a life-long, non-reactionary atheist from an atheist family. I do understand the appeal of a standard atheist narrative in which a free-thinking person rejects the religion they were raised in, but I feel like I know plenty of atheists leading cheerfully unexamined lives! I don’t think that faith is a default state at all – rather it simply seems to me that a person’s cultural norms are their default, whatever those norms might be.
(I do live in the UK though, and I often get the impression that maybe religion plays a much bigger role in the cultural life of the US.)
I am flattered!
I’m in the UK as well, which I think probably does play a part.
I think it might be a UK-US thing.
I, for one, am always…really surprised when I meet a religious person? And I would assume that they had, you know, had a revelation and found God. (No offence at all meant to any religious people! I just always sort of assume lazy atheism as the baseline, because it was mine.)
I definitely don’t recognise this “standard atheist narrative” either. I grew up with friends from very diverse religious backgrounds (judaism, islam, buddhism, hinduism, several branches of christianity) and other atheist families at very very vaguely CoE schools, and my parents always presented it to us as “some people believe this, we don’t, you can make your mind up later”. There was this attitude of “well, that’s one way of looking at things”, and honestly I think my understanding of ancient polytheism is what helped me recognise that everyone looks for explanations in different places and that’s fine, within reason.
My dad’s rejection of Catholicism does fit Mallory’s narrative, sort of. Most of his family have shuffled around into what’s basically a religious shrug – “we’re Catholic, because it can’t hurt to try, right?”
I don’t feel a hole in my life, and I don’t define myself against anyone else, and I think that’s a much more common experience of atheism. But perhaps that doesn’t make for a good enough interview?
My dad’s does too, a bit – his Catholic upbringing was really damaging (certainly not laying all the blame on Catholicism! His parents are terrible and possibly abusive. But the Catholic framework really didn’t help). For me and my siblings, though, it was always just a neutral background thing – no defining ourselves against or reacting against something else, just “I am not religious and that’s fine”.
My mother followed Mallory’s standard narrative: grew up deeply Catholic in an isolated, rural place and then had a major break of faith and deep anger when she got exposure to the outside world.
My sister and I were raised without any concept of religion whatsoever. Churches were places that the school bake fair might be held or maybe a contra dance. My mother would warn us not to express frustration by yelling either “god damn” or “jesus christ” in front of my grandfather, but never even really explained why. I genuinely did not realize that most people had a religious association until high school. To me, religion sounded like something out of the crusades, as antique and bizarre as witch burnings or Zeus and Athena.
My husband however was raised with faith, and I had to learn to reconcile that with my views of religion as Other. He is rational, liberal, open-minded, feminist… and believes in god. I still don’t believe, because it’s just not me, but I had to realize that religion is an active part of modern life and not something to be universally discarded once people “wise up” or something.
Hello! I am a second generation non reactionary athiest (at least on mums side, my dad is a vaguely agnostic/atheist from a family of seriously lapsed english baptists)
I was a little bit belligerent about it when I was a kid because me and my also atheist friend were mildly bullied for it, but other than that its just been plain old default non belief. I does annoy me every time i read one of these and people do the whole ‘I was an atheist dick for a bit but then I calmed down and now i dont like the word atheist’ because yes there are dicks, but the vast vast majority of us are just calmly chilling out, not believing in stuff, rather than meeting in cafes and denouncing religion. And we are still atheist. Its not a community its just what the word means.
Well, when I held my daughter, whatever notion of god that had been clinging for life in my conscious was quickly pushed off the cliff, Mufasa-style. Here was beauty, love, and goodness in my arms, and the source didn’t matter. I could be without god and still have access to all the good things that I thought I’d forfeit if I left religion altogether.
This is really lovely. I hate the idea that there not being a god makes love and goodness impossible or meaningless – yes, I don’t think there’s a “meaning” to it, in the sense that I don’t think there’s some higher power inspiring us to behave well or some huge eternal pattern that our acts are part of, but love and goodness still clearly exist, and while they might not matter in the very greatest scheme of things, they matter in the here and now, and that’s what’s important. We have the capacity for love and we should exercise it, whether there’s a spiritual dimension to the world or not. God doesn’t need to come into it.
I didn’t know that the gull story was told as a folk tale. I don’t know if it happened in the 1800s, but it certainly has been documented in other places. (Non-religious nature nerd here.)
Seagulls (and other interested birds) will come inland after large migratory grasshopper swarms. For example, grasshoppers numbers exploded in Nevada in 1949, and gulls swarmed from surrounding areas. However, those gulls were apparently lake gulls. It’s happened in Australia as well.
Grasshopper swarms are often pushed with weather fronts, so if there is a “plague” of them, fun things happen since they also move to find food as they graze out areas.
Weathermen can see insects being pushed with storm fronts with their equipment (radar?). This is the only thing I remember from a field trip in junior high. The world is full of bugs. So many bugs.
Love this. I skipped over the angry atheist phase (I’m still not sure why) in my journey out of Mormonism and pretty quickly settled on Agnostic with Atheist leanings. But Atheists are never satisfied with this answer. When I tell them that as someone who believes in science and data that I can’t state anything with certainty when I don’t have evidence to back it up, they will not accept this as an answer. It’s a weird thing.
I have found so much about morality and bad stuff in my life to be better and easier. There is no more question of why something happened or why my behavior matters. Now I have to find within myself the need to care about other people and be good to them. And now I can see the randomness of the universe and not feel like I brought some bad thing upon myself. It’s been incredibly liberating.
I’ve seen two major concerns for that negative response to “uncertainty.” The one I’ve encountered the most is angry atheists upset that someone is saying a god might exist. For them the concern is driven by politics. They are more interested in wiping out belief in any god than talking about what is true. Sometimes they even make rather ironic arguments. I’ve seen some of them, for example, put forward Russell’s teapot (the unobserved might exist but that doesn’t mean we accept it true, due to lack of evidence) while also demanding that a god certainly doesn’t exist (as if it were shown gods did not exist).
The second, and philosophically sound, reason is that certainty is measured against each specify claim of god. When we ask whether a a god exist, we are checking a claim about our world against what happened in it. In this context, we have certainty. We can say, for sure, that a god did not appear in our world and perform miraculous acts of healing at our local hospital yesterday. Since most gods people follow include some version of claimed act in the world, which been falsified, we can be sure that particular god doesn’t exist. Gods are, in fact, entirely possible. All it takes is the relevant existing entity. The evidence just falsifies most of the ones people profess belief in, which is what (correct) argument for the certainty of an absence of (many) gods amounts to.
Yup. This is the sort of thing that gets terms like fundamentalist atheist or evangelical atheist coined. The sheer intolerance of anyone not being a hardline atheist ain’t attractive.
I can relate hard to this: “Atheism is presented as a reaction to a religious upbringing rather than a worldview that can, you know, stand on its own.”
I come from a Midwestern family where religion is an assumed thing–nobody is particularly bible-thumpy, but it is WEIRD to declare yourself not-Christian. I don’t bring my atheism up with my family much because it seems to upset them a lot, and I always get the “you’re just doubting God because you’re going through/have gone through a hard time” reaction, which infuriates me. I don’t know if I will ever quite come out of my “angry atheist” phase. I became an atheist around the same time I began to assert myself as a feminist, and the two ideologies have become very linked for me (although I certainly don’t believe that being an atheist is the only way to be feminist, oh no).
I’m not sure where I am going with this anymore. Basically, I think I am an angry-asshole-atheist-feminist, but I try really hard to respect the beliefs of others/just be a nice person (anybody want to form a club?).
I’ve been waiting for the Mormon deconversion piece! As someone raised Mormon who left (but eventually found her way back to Christianity) I can completely empathize with the un-learning of Mormon fact. Unwrapping the ties and responsibility of “the ONE TRUE religion” and forgiving myself for not believing that took a long time.
I visited Utah recently and was itching to run into someone who would try to convert me- so that I could explain away all of the reasons I left. That didn’t happen (until I sat next to a missionary on the plane out of SLC) and I’m glad- I would’ve been combative and angry and so shaky in my newfound non-Mormon faith that I wouldn’t have made much sense.
It took me a long time to separate nostalgia for being raised in the religion (and the life/family circumstances that surrounded it) and my beliefs / my own articles of faith. I still fold my arms to pray but I am no longer guilty about who I am praying to or what I am praying for.
Thank you for your words!
Really interesting interview, thank you. I moved the other way, from agnostic-bordering-on-atheist to, well, spiritualist, I guess, but definitely not part of any organised group or following any dogma. Functionally I could still be atheist, because my wonderings about deity have been answered to my satisfaction and play no part in my life now.
It was a relief to read about someone moving past the AssholeAtheist™ stage. The lefty websites I read are full of AAs (men, mostly, quelle surprise). So many of ’em seem to think not being atheist means you’re giving comfort to USian Dominionists. Or you’re a silly wimminz who can’t rational gud like teh menz. /rant
Really interesting interview, thank you. I moved the other way, from agnostic-bordering-on-atheist to, well, spiritualist, I guess, but definitely not part of any organised group or following any dogma. Functionally I could still be atheist, because my wonderings about deity have been answered to my satisfaction and play no part in my life now.
It was a relief to read about someone moving past the AssholeAtheist™ stage. The lefty websites I read are full of AAs (men, mostly, quelle surprise). So many of 'em seem to think not being atheist means you're giving comfort to USian Dominionists. Or you're a silly wimminz who can't rational gud like teh menz. /rant
Very well said. There's a message that to be a "real" Christian means being a literalist – all or nothing. I had that feeling, or rather, worry, and I've never been Christian! It's a very narrow view, one that strikes me (possibly completely wrongly) as particularly American, what with the fundamentalsim there and the way so many US atheists are reacting to that. The thing that cleared that idea for me was reading Karen Armstrong's A History of God. Not in any conversion sense, just learning a bit about how limited my ideas had been. 🙂
For a moment I pictured that as accosted by gorillas. Then I read it properly and had a sad.
A devert? (Sounds like a conflation of deviated preverts of course …)
Yup. This is the sort of thing that gets terms like fundamentalist atheist or evangelical atheist coined. The sheer intolerance of anyone not being a hardline atheist ain't attractive.