As a former LDS myself I am, of course, sympathetic to this piece. Even though I lived in it for thirty years, I still find the culture of the church difficult to understand in a way--the same way I find climate science denial and anti-vaxxism and flat-eartherism hard to understand. And of course, anti-evolution-science, which some Church leaders directly advocated without, I suppose, knowing much of anything about evolutionary science.
I'm speaking here of the leadership: the kind of people who interview thousands of other people who bring their concerns to them, and despite this never reflect in a reasonable way. So they go on "adoring the truth", *their* truth, while quite carelessly discarding all the evidence against their truth.
The more common approach, the approach of the chapel Mormon, relies on two things: stacked luck and not thinking. First, stacked luck: they typically don't encounter the evidence that the church isn't true. This is done accidently by going to church every Sunday and not going to those places where the facts they heard would be questioned. It's also done intentionally on advice from church leaders who wrongly suggest you shouldn't put yourself in situations that would put your faith in doubt. Yet it was easy to mistakenly think that church was a place where we could openly express our doubts--not perhaps for you, Jack, but that's what I assumed, until the day came when I understood the church wasn't true, and I noticed that I had no desire to tell everyone about that. It would have been *unpleasant* to bring others the truth, so I didn't. Apostates, we were told, try to lead others astray. But the truth is, you have to be brave to confront others with unpleasant facts, and most people aren't.
Second, not thinking: this was the thing I couldn't do. Over so many years--even with no contact with people seriously arguing against the church--it was impossible for me not to notice how *strange* God was, and how *suspicious* the things I learned in the Old Testament were. Ultimately the conclusion was inescapable: God, if he existed, just seemed evil! It was incredibly cathartic when I discovered the videos of NonStampCollector. And when I left the church, I was disappointed to discover that my even best friend, who only joined the church because of me, didn't want to know why I left, preferred to stay ignorant, so ignorant he remains. I realize now that this is the normal state of man: unreflective, unthinking, preferring ignorance, for it is easier to speak confidently than to learn. The only intelligent species on Earth prefers not to use its intelligence very much.
The story you told here reminds me a bit of what my brother said when he left the church: he was tired of feeling guilty. When my brother said that, I was baffled. It seemed crazy, because the church is true. If God is real, he will not be impressed with you leaving the true church because you feel guilty about breaking the commandments. I felt guilty too, so what? I stayed for about ten more years, till I understood it was false. But I still think the way I handled it was right and the way he handled it was wrong. My epistemic technique wasn't great, but long before learning about rationalism, I understood that I couldn't change the territory by changing the map, and in general, the extent to which other people seem not to understand this is *ridiculous*.
But I have a bone to pick with this piece. I'm sure church leaders told you many times about the distinction between love and lust and infatuation. You know the problem wasn't that you loved the talented piano boy. I'm sure piano boy was great, we all love piano boy, but we don't all dream of holding their naked body in our arms. This should be reframed: it's totally fine to want to hold piano boy in your arms. It's totally fine to wish to make love to piano boy. I never really had a problem with it, honestly. I mean, I was like "fudge packing? Eww." I wasn't enamored with the idea, but it wasn't any of my business, and I certainly wasn't going to *hate* anyone for having desires that God gave them. After all, people without bodies don't have sexual desires, and I myself didn't have any sexual desires until I was ten years old. Rather, God created the bodies and put people in them, that's the story, and then the body makes hormones. Sometimes I hear people imply Mormons hate gays, and I wonder which church they're talking about because it wasn't mine. I mean the Church is clear about this, right? Satan didn't create sexual desire; God did. There was simply no good explanation for why God created it or why God disliked people either for having that desire he created, or acting on it. So I certainly wasn't going to jump on that bizarre Christian bandwagon of hating people for things that God did or caused.
Still, love and sexual desire are two different things, and I think any sharp-minded Mormon or non-Mormon would pick up on the conflation in this article.
Damn bro, that's rough. Have you ever considered just like... taking over? Like if Trump could capture and reshape the entire Republican party, I don't see why an ambitious demagogue couldn't take over a religion and reshape it in their image. Politics and religion are practically the same thing nowadays anyway.
i'm not religious nor gay hating, but i feel the thematic arc of the piece is akin to that of a bad ending... even the most garish queer demonstration feels less tragic than this one
I elected to focus this article specifically on pain because that is the shape of the experience I was dodging around, and the words I used are the ones that convey that shape. I'm fortunate enough that my life as a whole is exactly where I want it to be right now, but having reached that point, I realized that it's important that I become able to articulate directly what my adolescence was like and why. Never know who is sitting, right now, in the silently miserable valley I spent a decade in.
The tragedy – and there is one – is not that I found words to match the experience of being gay in a culture you love that teaches homosexuality as damnation. The tragedy is the experience itself.
That definition of the pain as the tragedy is what I find tragic. Even if it is morally wrong to suppress one's sexual preferences, I don't think the generalized lesson that you should listen to pain and disregard inhibition is a good one
I didn't understand myself as suppressing sexual preferences. I understood myself as not having sexual preferences at all, and struggling with addictive behavior I could not suppress. Meanwhile, the orientation I did not understand or claim shaped every aspect of my adolescence, from my interests to my emotional condition.
The generalized lesson, inasmuch as there is one, is that some things about people – and, contrary to my prior beliefs, this includes sexual orientation – are so sweeping in their effects and so constitutive of who the people are that the result of trying to cut them out or segment them off is a much more comprehensive suppression of the capacity to feel.
Restraint has an important place. Self-annihilation does not.
Is it important? Is it actually important for every western individual who grew up in one of the remaining corners of western civilization that have a value set that still put some sexual behaviors outside of the realm of the strictly moral to pen a think piece about how their life is a tragedy (despite the fact that they are doing quite well by any realistic measure)? I feel like we need a term to cover this sense that so many have that, strictly in hindsight, their childhood was ruined by any structure or values imposed on them that they don’t adhere to any longer (even as they benefited from those structures in a million ways they don’t recognize) and now they need to liberate younger people from religion, or whatever. Perhaps “retrospective fragility”, but that doesn’t totally capture it.
My life is not a tragedy, and it is specifically not a tragedy because I uprooted my entire world, left my home and my faith and my culture, and slowly, cautiously, figured out how to build something that worked.
There's no "retrospective fragility" here. My whole online history is filled with me commenting about the million ways in which I benefited from my religion's structure. Is it actually important for me to be able to articulate the internal experience of knowing something was wrong with me, not knowing what, spending a decade in a state of diffuse misery, and discovering twenty years later that "some sexual behaviors" I never recognized in myself, never claimed, and fought passionately against for my entire adolescence were in fact shaping every aspect of my experience – that there was not a discrete "homosexuality module" that could be turned on or off, but that I had gone to war with my capacity to feel and won?
Yes, it is, in fact, important. Mormons are wrong about queer people, so are you, and that hurts people in ways you can't disclaim with polite words about morality and restraint. My life is not a tragedy at all; that I had to leave my world to find it is.
So are you saying that you would prefer to be living near your family and still be a practicing mormon but you can’t because of your sexuality? I’ve been subjected to lots of laments from gay friends or just friends with excessively liberal perspectives over the years about how going to church caused them so much supposed emotional pain. But in all of these instances, my sense is that we’re just talking about upper middle class urbanites with highly functional upbringings who need something to complain about and none of them would be living back home but for there sexuality (or feminism or whatever). After all, with all the acceptance in the world their small to medium sized hometowns would still be committing the cardinal sin of not having walkable coffee shops. Fwiw, I generally think churches would do well to handle homosexuality in the same way they do divorce, ie “we don’t love it, its technically a sin, but we’re not going to spend all eternity arguing with you about it.”
Thank you for your testimony, brother.
As a former LDS myself I am, of course, sympathetic to this piece. Even though I lived in it for thirty years, I still find the culture of the church difficult to understand in a way--the same way I find climate science denial and anti-vaxxism and flat-eartherism hard to understand. And of course, anti-evolution-science, which some Church leaders directly advocated without, I suppose, knowing much of anything about evolutionary science.
I'm speaking here of the leadership: the kind of people who interview thousands of other people who bring their concerns to them, and despite this never reflect in a reasonable way. So they go on "adoring the truth", *their* truth, while quite carelessly discarding all the evidence against their truth.
The more common approach, the approach of the chapel Mormon, relies on two things: stacked luck and not thinking. First, stacked luck: they typically don't encounter the evidence that the church isn't true. This is done accidently by going to church every Sunday and not going to those places where the facts they heard would be questioned. It's also done intentionally on advice from church leaders who wrongly suggest you shouldn't put yourself in situations that would put your faith in doubt. Yet it was easy to mistakenly think that church was a place where we could openly express our doubts--not perhaps for you, Jack, but that's what I assumed, until the day came when I understood the church wasn't true, and I noticed that I had no desire to tell everyone about that. It would have been *unpleasant* to bring others the truth, so I didn't. Apostates, we were told, try to lead others astray. But the truth is, you have to be brave to confront others with unpleasant facts, and most people aren't.
Second, not thinking: this was the thing I couldn't do. Over so many years--even with no contact with people seriously arguing against the church--it was impossible for me not to notice how *strange* God was, and how *suspicious* the things I learned in the Old Testament were. Ultimately the conclusion was inescapable: God, if he existed, just seemed evil! It was incredibly cathartic when I discovered the videos of NonStampCollector. And when I left the church, I was disappointed to discover that my even best friend, who only joined the church because of me, didn't want to know why I left, preferred to stay ignorant, so ignorant he remains. I realize now that this is the normal state of man: unreflective, unthinking, preferring ignorance, for it is easier to speak confidently than to learn. The only intelligent species on Earth prefers not to use its intelligence very much.
The story you told here reminds me a bit of what my brother said when he left the church: he was tired of feeling guilty. When my brother said that, I was baffled. It seemed crazy, because the church is true. If God is real, he will not be impressed with you leaving the true church because you feel guilty about breaking the commandments. I felt guilty too, so what? I stayed for about ten more years, till I understood it was false. But I still think the way I handled it was right and the way he handled it was wrong. My epistemic technique wasn't great, but long before learning about rationalism, I understood that I couldn't change the territory by changing the map, and in general, the extent to which other people seem not to understand this is *ridiculous*.
But I have a bone to pick with this piece. I'm sure church leaders told you many times about the distinction between love and lust and infatuation. You know the problem wasn't that you loved the talented piano boy. I'm sure piano boy was great, we all love piano boy, but we don't all dream of holding their naked body in our arms. This should be reframed: it's totally fine to want to hold piano boy in your arms. It's totally fine to wish to make love to piano boy. I never really had a problem with it, honestly. I mean, I was like "fudge packing? Eww." I wasn't enamored with the idea, but it wasn't any of my business, and I certainly wasn't going to *hate* anyone for having desires that God gave them. After all, people without bodies don't have sexual desires, and I myself didn't have any sexual desires until I was ten years old. Rather, God created the bodies and put people in them, that's the story, and then the body makes hormones. Sometimes I hear people imply Mormons hate gays, and I wonder which church they're talking about because it wasn't mine. I mean the Church is clear about this, right? Satan didn't create sexual desire; God did. There was simply no good explanation for why God created it or why God disliked people either for having that desire he created, or acting on it. So I certainly wasn't going to jump on that bizarre Christian bandwagon of hating people for things that God did or caused.
Still, love and sexual desire are two different things, and I think any sharp-minded Mormon or non-Mormon would pick up on the conflation in this article.
Welcome back sir.
It's great to be back.
Damn bro, that's rough. Have you ever considered just like... taking over? Like if Trump could capture and reshape the entire Republican party, I don't see why an ambitious demagogue couldn't take over a religion and reshape it in their image. Politics and religion are practically the same thing nowadays anyway.
i'm not religious nor gay hating, but i feel the thematic arc of the piece is akin to that of a bad ending... even the most garish queer demonstration feels less tragic than this one
I elected to focus this article specifically on pain because that is the shape of the experience I was dodging around, and the words I used are the ones that convey that shape. I'm fortunate enough that my life as a whole is exactly where I want it to be right now, but having reached that point, I realized that it's important that I become able to articulate directly what my adolescence was like and why. Never know who is sitting, right now, in the silently miserable valley I spent a decade in.
The tragedy – and there is one – is not that I found words to match the experience of being gay in a culture you love that teaches homosexuality as damnation. The tragedy is the experience itself.
That definition of the pain as the tragedy is what I find tragic. Even if it is morally wrong to suppress one's sexual preferences, I don't think the generalized lesson that you should listen to pain and disregard inhibition is a good one
I didn't understand myself as suppressing sexual preferences. I understood myself as not having sexual preferences at all, and struggling with addictive behavior I could not suppress. Meanwhile, the orientation I did not understand or claim shaped every aspect of my adolescence, from my interests to my emotional condition.
The generalized lesson, inasmuch as there is one, is that some things about people – and, contrary to my prior beliefs, this includes sexual orientation – are so sweeping in their effects and so constitutive of who the people are that the result of trying to cut them out or segment them off is a much more comprehensive suppression of the capacity to feel.
Restraint has an important place. Self-annihilation does not.
Is it important? Is it actually important for every western individual who grew up in one of the remaining corners of western civilization that have a value set that still put some sexual behaviors outside of the realm of the strictly moral to pen a think piece about how their life is a tragedy (despite the fact that they are doing quite well by any realistic measure)? I feel like we need a term to cover this sense that so many have that, strictly in hindsight, their childhood was ruined by any structure or values imposed on them that they don’t adhere to any longer (even as they benefited from those structures in a million ways they don’t recognize) and now they need to liberate younger people from religion, or whatever. Perhaps “retrospective fragility”, but that doesn’t totally capture it.
My life is not a tragedy, and it is specifically not a tragedy because I uprooted my entire world, left my home and my faith and my culture, and slowly, cautiously, figured out how to build something that worked.
There's no "retrospective fragility" here. My whole online history is filled with me commenting about the million ways in which I benefited from my religion's structure. Is it actually important for me to be able to articulate the internal experience of knowing something was wrong with me, not knowing what, spending a decade in a state of diffuse misery, and discovering twenty years later that "some sexual behaviors" I never recognized in myself, never claimed, and fought passionately against for my entire adolescence were in fact shaping every aspect of my experience – that there was not a discrete "homosexuality module" that could be turned on or off, but that I had gone to war with my capacity to feel and won?
Yes, it is, in fact, important. Mormons are wrong about queer people, so are you, and that hurts people in ways you can't disclaim with polite words about morality and restraint. My life is not a tragedy at all; that I had to leave my world to find it is.
So are you saying that you would prefer to be living near your family and still be a practicing mormon but you can’t because of your sexuality? I’ve been subjected to lots of laments from gay friends or just friends with excessively liberal perspectives over the years about how going to church caused them so much supposed emotional pain. But in all of these instances, my sense is that we’re just talking about upper middle class urbanites with highly functional upbringings who need something to complain about and none of them would be living back home but for there sexuality (or feminism or whatever). After all, with all the acceptance in the world their small to medium sized hometowns would still be committing the cardinal sin of not having walkable coffee shops. Fwiw, I generally think churches would do well to handle homosexuality in the same way they do divorce, ie “we don’t love it, its technically a sin, but we’re not going to spend all eternity arguing with you about it.”