I think stories like this one demonstrate why honestly trying to have a accurate understanding of the world is one of our most important moral obligations. There's an enormous amount of pressure in society to adopt beliefs for social reasons- not just in religion, but in politics and everyday status competitions. We're often made to feel that thinking honestly about whether these beliefs are accurate is a deep betrayal and the act of a bad person. But an inaccurate model of the world produces inaccurate predictions, and so by giving up on accuracy, we also give up our ability to predict the effects our actions will have on other people, including those we love.
If this case, your people inaccurately believed that homosexuality was an unnatural, externally imposed desire that would lead to eternal torment. So, out of love, they taught you to hate it, not realizing that they were teaching you to hate yourself. In other cases, neglecting truth leads to wars and atrocities. The followers of Stalin chose to believe they were building a communist paradise, despite evidence to the contrary, because they lived in a culture that told them you had to believe that in order to be a good person. Likewise, the modern MAGA movement genuinely believes they're improving the lives of Americans; in that subculture, a good-faith effort to find out if that's true or not is a kind of betrayal. Many on the American left arrive at beliefs similarly.
When we arrive at a belief in bad faith, I think we're morally culpable when that belief causes harm. The most extreme mandate of that principle- that people should abandon religion and political identity entirely- is most likely morally supererogatory. However, I think the more modest charge of holding our beliefs lightly enough that we notice when they would cause harm should they turn out to be false is actually a moral obligation.
For that reason, I don't think your congregation should be entirely absolved of responsibility for the pain they've caused. Taking on that responsibility yourself by pointing out their love and your own self-recrimination is a respectable act of kindness, but I think sometimes an element of moral condemnation is also needed to incentivize change.
Well-argued, and I broadly agree with your point here. I think, sticking with this specific topic, that members of traditional religions do have a moral responsibility to understand that their religions are wrong about queer people, or at least to avoid contributing to the harm. The primary fault is in the structures themselves, but people are responsible for their actions within those structures. But people are often very fast to condemn, and the more I condemn others, the more fingers I would have to point at myself, because I was as emphatic as anyone in opposition to homosexuality and I remember vividly what it felt like to be on the other side. Responsibility matters, but so does remembering that people really did mean well and really did act in loving, self-sacrificial ways for my benefit.
As a gay survivor of a Korean Christian cult, so much of this article resonated with me. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I’ve been reading your writing for several years now and have been a big fan and happy to see you back. The Velvet Rage also touches upon a lot of this and I personally found it very helpful.
fuck dude i'm so glad you're here. i hope you find more love in your life that doesnt hurt. and i love that you're trying to honour a love that raised you, but did.
Thank you for this really beautiful piece. I suppose it should not be surprising that someone with your pseudonym should write something that insightful and resonant about being a young boy with a devotion to Card's works, but I appreciate it nonetheless. I'm grateful we both have found a way out of that and into a happier life.
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*.[1]
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[2]. 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.
[1] maybe even I needed a good reason to think before I would think. But I had sexuality too, and my "self-abuse" provided ample reason to think.
[2] on second thought... hard to tell. 10 was the age where this boy, who still didn't know what sex was, noticed something weird in himself.
I felt like it was a place where I could openly express my doubts. I was ruthlessly, constantly, painfully honest about every doubt I had, every uncertainty and question and lack of spiritual witness. My pre-mission testimony saw me stand in front of my home ward and tell them I did not know the church was true, but I believed it and hoped. And the story I told myself and others about leaving, consistently, was that my departure was purely intellectual. I believed this, it reflected my conscious experience, and it was wrong. I left, like you, because eventually I understood it was false, and that distance allowed me to re-evaluate other things about it.
The bone that you're picking is the same bone I would have picked. My assertion is that it's wrong. I never once, consciously, during my entire time in the church, wanted to hold a man in my arms or kiss a man or lie naked next to a man or make love to a man. I thought homosexuality was gross and evil (loving the sinners while hating the sin) and thought of myself as asexual. I confidently described the difference between love and lust, confidently explained that love and sexual desire were different things and could be separated, and ... well, I did, in fact, successfully and subconsciously cleave love apart from sexual desire. All the boys I loved throughout my adolescence, I loved by wanting to be near them and wanting to be like them and wanting to be them. Completely unrelated to that, I had a libido that I systematically and unsuccessfully tried to crush and never, ever, ever allowed myself to direct towards another human.
I told myself I was asexual and that sexuality was a trivial part of my life. That was incorrect: it was shaping my interests, my aesthetics, my relationships with other people, my understanding of my own desires, my emotions, and most of the things that were most important to me. And it is specifically and directly because I treated sexual desire as evil and refused to examine it that I could never look at or understand why I was doing everything I was doing. My model was wrong, and it was wrong because eros cannot be severed from life without losing a great deal else alongside it.
So what causes the difference? Why freely express your doubts about every aspect of the church--except for the sexual aspects, where you instead suppress your feelings so deeply that you can scarcely notice them?
Well, my doubts were careful truth-seeking, and sexuality was my quiet evidence that I was a monster unworthy of love. The more I introspected about and talked about my faults and my questions and my emotions and my uncertainty, the more I demonstrated to myself that I understood myself, wasn't hiding anything, and was taking my duties towards my faith and the truth seriously.
And my libido? That was just an addiction unrelated to anything else that I needed to crush, just like To Young Men Only taught me every time I read it (which I did, repeatedly, with it tucked away in my scripture case). I didn't have any doubts to explore about sexuality. I was asexual, I never noticed attraction to another person, homosexuality was wrong, that's all there was to it. I talked openly about being asexual, and every couple of years (or months, during my mission) I went to confess again that I still had a libido and was still sinful and miserable, and got more advice about how to double down and try harder.
Anything more than confession was packed into a tiny, radioactive box in the corner of my mind labeled "Do Not Open," and I left it there.
Oddly, you've not answered the question. Masturbating while saying that you're asexual is a contradiction calling out for an explanation. And you didn't see anything wrong with the church's story or preachings about sexuality? I guess taboos do funny things to people...
It wasn't a contradiction in my head. I didn't notice attraction to anyone, I hated the idea of sex and didn't care for romance, so I was asexual. Masturbation was just something my body did, not really directed at anything meaningful. The church's teachings on sexuality restrained a powerful and dangerous force that people obsessed over and that made them do stupid things – hedonism was wrong and people had a responsibility to focus on meaning instead.
That's the thing. I built an entire, cohesive philosophy and framework around this. I hated consumerism, hated hedonism and pleasure-seeking in general, was disgusted by how much people focused on sex and how much they sexualized the world, thought it was stupid and reflective of a lack of real problems that people focused so much on gay marriage as an issue, saw the 2015 policy against kids of gay people getting baptized as a sensible way to avoid pitting kids against parents... to me, all of these things existed in the realm of policy and moral theorizing and framework-building around abstract questions of right and wrong, and I was a detached observer just trying to build and live up to a comprehensive frame of Mormon righteousness as I pursued truth.
My body wasn't data to consider, it was a problem to contain. Probably I'd notice women and want to date eventually, anyway, when it was the right time. In the meantime, rationality, skepticism, and rigorous argumentation were what mattered. That was my mindset, and I was exceptionally good at performing introspection and rigor within it while leaving the load-bearing void unexamined.
Well...a powerful and dangerous force created by whom, and for what? We could have lived in a world where storks brought us babies, as I was told as a kid. We could have lived in a world where true love turns our hands sticky to enable reproduction like in that Voyager episode I'm misremembering. I think you're saying either that you thought so little about it that you couldn't notice the essential weirdness of the situation, or more likely, that you created a mental structure that protected you from noticing. I wonder how that worked. Like, okay, you have a cohesive anti-Hedonist philosophy, but why be anti-Hedonist? And in particular, why be hedonist about good music and ice cream, and playing games with friends, but anti-hedonist about a doohickey God put in the middle of your body?
One of the many things that confused me as a Mormon was that a lot of people talked about aphrodisiacs, but no one talked about anaphrodisiacs, even though anyone who preached about sex was preaching against. Why wasn't the Church the world's foremost promoter or producer of anaphrodisiacs? If libido could be increased, could it not be reduced? Erectile dysfunction was a real condition--couldn't we get it in pill form? To me, being Mormon involved a heck of a lot of being confused all the time. I wouldn't say I had a cohesive philosophy, because God's teachings didn't feel cohesive to me. "Oh you're just *children* of God," They would tell us. "God can't explain it to us, just as we cannot explain things to toddlers." But if this were true, the explanations we do get should be on par with, like, Quantum physics: precise formulas that seem to us too complex to properly understand because that's what they are, rather than looking the same as somebody of average intelligence bullshitting us. (My thinking wasn't this developed at the time, but at least I had the sense that something was wrong.)
I saw the body as a problem to contain, too. But it was also data, also a question, also evidence, and I for one could never stop thinking about it, even though I could never see the answer.
I think it’s probably healthy for me that I left, or left in all but name, at an earlier age. I noticed all of these contradictions, I’ve always been curious about anti-apologetics, how could you not want the full picture and the entirety of the story if you have a rational mind and you want to seek the truth? We have always been taught that seeking the truth is the best and highest of glories.
I read the CES letter, all of the anti threads on r/Mormon and r/exmormon, read deeply personal essays like this one from Tracing Woodgrains, and avidly (if not eagerly) consumed the writing of Sam Harris, Hitch, Dawkins.
I know exactly what you mean about your brother saying he was tired of feeling guilty. There is a guilt in having doubts, or knowing that you could be having doubts, and repressing them or refusing to interrogate them in favor of — as you have said — a sort of ignorant and unreflective inertia. It’s easier that way. It felt good to resolve that tension openly and honestly rather than keep it bottled up.
So I have been extremely surprised by the fervor and deep commitment and peace I have felt in returning to the fold. I am surprised at how truly hollow it felt to abandon my covenants for a rationally-considered life, for a life of agnosticism. I was surprised at how silly and pointless and ultimately unhelpful it was to try and come up with some sort of replacement framework. I would never have expected how good it felt to submit myself to the repentance process. Ultimately, I feel incredibly confident about the structure and superstructure I have re-committed myself to, to an extent I would not have expected.
I have seen people leave the Church permanently and suffer. I have seen those who have left the Church permanently and seemingly thrive. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone leave the Church permanently and feel whole; for they show signs of it whether they recognize it in themselves or not. I’m certain most of those individuals will claim internalized damage of some sort from having been indoctrinated at an early age (as so many have very prominently claimed), but I don’t really think it’s that. The hollowness is so much more fundamental than that.
Anyway, thank you for your well-written comment. I’ve been reading quite a bit of deeply personal writing recently from those who have left, or who have stayed but lost their testimonies, or from those in between. The common thread is a deep experience of pain or frustration, which I understand deeply.
I left the Church permanently and feel whole. I have a clarity of mind now that was impossible then; everything just...makes sense. Everything fits together.
Of course, I have become mortal, which sucks very much. But as the saying goes, people can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
I wish you the absolute best of luck; it sounds like it’s been a long journey for you, intellectually and spiritually. I can only plainly say (and you’ll have to forgive me for it’s meant in complete earnestness) that I know your Heavenly Father loves you. I know He loves each of us. I left and I had forgotten that. It’s a comfort to know that, but more than a comforting thought, I also believe it to be true. Although you do not, I hope the thought still helps somehow.
Sigh. Let's see, how to summarize this odd conversation?
Me: I feel you: after 30 years I learned the church was false, and we both know it, I needn't explain in detail. But I do think it's important to act on the basis of what's true, not on how we feel. For example, my brother left not because the church is untrue, but because he felt guilty. I felt guilty and stayed, because all the matters is what's true. In the end, though, I was convinced it wasn't true and therefore left. And in that vein I don't like that love and eros were conflated, because it's also not true that they are the same thing.
Third person interjects: sure, I have no arguments against any of that, and I even followed and liked the people who said it was false, and their arguments too. But figuring things out as a nonbeliever was silly and pointless... so I didn't. Instead I returned with fervor and deep commitment and peace. So I'm really confident about the church's structure and superstructure! And you know, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone leave the Church permanently and feel whole...
Me: [um, wat the heck was that?] well I left the church permanently, I feel whole, I am whole. and everything makes complete sense now.
Third person: Oh, but Heavenly Father loves you.
Me: um, well no.
What you've said, without actually saying it, is that you reject my premise that the truth is what matters. You identified with my brother's story of feeling guilty, not with my own story. You spoke of a guilt in having doubts, which I never did (my sins were what made me feel guilty). You spoke of "repressing them or refusing to interrogate them", which I never did. Nothing in what you wrote resembles an evidence-based or logic-based journey like mine. Did I have pain and guilt in the church? Yes, plenty of that. And for the most part, I admit, they were caused by church doctrines and practices. But again, that's not why I left. Those emotions served only as a reason to keep thinking, never as reason to repress anything, and never as a reason to leave.
I'm the sort of person who loved the Non-Libertarian FAQ and Consequentialism FAQs much that when they disappeared from the internet (apparently Scott Alexander thought them not worth keeping?! Incredible!), I dug them out of the internet archive and reposted them. They teach a different sort of morality than the Church does, but it's cohesive and beautiful, both in its simplicity, and in the infinite complexity of its implications. It's not quite the foundation I landed on, but it makes a great entrance hall for my mansion. Trust me, I have a rock more solid than God ever was.
I'm also the sort of person who spent a year, unemployed, arguing with climate science dismissives in an effort to find out how much evidence it takes to change someone's mind. The answer is ∞, and people told me that, but I didn't believe them, couldn't believe them, because I couldn't believe that evidence was irrelevant to some people. I had to learn the hard way, but now that I have, I can look at you and simply shrug "well, I guess he's one of those, or whatever". I can't know what makes you tick. You sound like you're from another planet--and this isn't new; I felt like *I* was from another planet when I was still in the church. If I had the time, I would like to go study that planet again someday, not to adopt its customs, which surely I will never do, but just to understand better. Alas, I don't have time.
I feel like we have very similar intellectual interests (I, too, loved and was strongly affected by the Non-Libertarian FAQ and Consequentialism FAQ, as well as the Neoreaction FAQ), but I would pretty strongly dispute how you're characterizing me here. I don't think it's charitable to insinuate that I said "figuring things out as a nonbeliever is silly and pointless."
I'm also pretty confused at how you interpreted what I have said about my own path -- I was absolutely drawn to evidence against the church, probably from a similar perspective. That interest was deeply shaped by my early interest in rationalism. I would vehemently disagree with the idea that I don't believe the truth matters. I'm not sure why you say it's so difficult to understand what makes me tick; my suspicion is that we run on very similar wavelengths, have had very similar intellectual journeys (albeit mine may have overlapped with your brother's), and share very similar terminal values. Mine happened to land me back in the LDS Church with a stronger testimony than I had before, and I think that is the part you're struggling to comprehend -- from your perspective, it is literally impossible to love the truth as a terminal value, to take in and understand the extant logical arguments against the Church, and to weigh the balance of evidence only to end up where I did rather than where you did.
I do think it was uncharitable of me to mention that I have never seen someone leave the Church and end up in a place where they feel whole, because the obvious insinuation is that I don't believe you feel whole. That is not my place nor my station, and it was rude of me to essentially assume your internal experience and to cast it in a negative light. I definitely did not want to come across as impolite or arrogant, and I regret that.
Perhaps it is the earnestness with which I stated that I am, in a literal sense, certain that you are loved by a Heavenly Father that feels like a sentiment from an alien world. I would just say that I fully believe, a la Scott Alexander, that arguments should not be toy soldiers and that you should say what you mean and express what you believe.
Since I have offended you it may be pointless to continue, but in my defense, as I said, the response I wrote is based on the response you wrote. Your message did not indicate that you really cared about epistemics, did not indicate that it was the motivation to leave the church (to the contrary), let alone that it motivated you to come back, nor did I see any indication that you comprehended that this is what motivated me. Your message was focused primarily on emotion and devotion, in a way that seemed clearly misaligned with my worldview.
> from your perspective, it is literally impossible to love the truth as a terminal value, to take in and understand the extant logical arguments against the Church, and to weigh the balance of evidence only to end up where I did rather than where you did.
I would adjust this. My first instinct is to change "a terminal value" to "THE terminal value". But that's not quite right. It's like what Lawrence Lessig said about his quest to fix the corrupting influence of money in politics. He said something like "It's not the most important issue, but it's the FIRST issue--the one we have to solve before we can solve the issues we really care about." Likewise... while I place extremely strong emphasis on truth, and value truth, and find it to be the foundation of all analysis and decision-making... is it a terminal value? That feels right emotionally, but it doesn't sound right logically. More like, it's the most fundamental value, the one that determines what all other values should be including terminal values. I could even call it an instrumental value, but this is a determination I make only in hindsight; it's as dear to me as any terminal value. Maybe it's best not to think of it as a value at all, but just a reflection of my brain structure. Because it has been the most important value for decades (whether terminal or not), it produced an intricate brain structure which runs automatically, regardless of what my values should now be; finding the truth is still a goal, but it's largely a goal in the same way an engine's goal is to turn a crankshaft.
But yeah. If you had recognized me as a fellow traveler from the same planet, it is very confusing that you engaged me the way you did. The way you spoke just isn't how my kind speaks.
"I was surprised at how silly and pointless and ultimately unhelpful it was to try and come up with some sort of replacement framework."
If this is so completely different than "figuring things out as a nonbeliever was silly and pointless", I find it strange that you didn't take the opportunity to clarify what is so different about it. I assure you that they do not sound substantively different to me. The second version is shorter only because it's part of a summary.
This resonates with me. I also left, though for different reasons.
In particular the parts about how they hurt you with their good intentions. I have received nothing but love from my faithful Mormon relatives. I know how happy their beliefs make them, and I cannot bring myself to directly tell them I have left. This is not out of a desire to decieve but rather to avoid very painful conversations for which I see no likely useful outcomes.
My family knows I stopped going to church years ago but they've never asked me why. If they asked I would tell them, but their failure to do so makes me think they do not want to know.
My reasons were simple epistemic ones and honestly they feel trite relative to the conflict and self-hatred people such as you endured.
I had nothing intrinsic preventing me from basking in the bliss of religious certainty forever, except that troublesome realization that the entire edifice rests exclusively on personal revelation aka spiritual emotions.
From there it was a simple question of whether I should be weighing a question of such importance solely on emotional evidence.
I miss being in a tight-knit community with a third space I could share with them regularly. I have yet to find anything secular that fills the same function as well. The closest has been various conventions for online communities, but those are only once a year. If you have any advice on that front please let me know.
The funny thing is that I would have described my reasons as simple epistemic ones as well. It's just that in my case those simple epistemic ones were sitting on a decade of unexamined, or rather wrongly examined, misery.
I've stopped expecting people to ask. Most people would rather not know and wouldn't know what to do with the answers they got.
As for the community aspect, I feel the same way and I think the best we can do is keep building out from our online spaces into more and more of a shared social/cultural world. "Atheist church" doesn't work because atheism is not a particularly meaningful thing to organize a social/cultural group around. I see the task as a slow process of planting flags, finding people on similar wavelengths, and organizing more and more communitarian efforts around the resulting clusters.
I was so all-in that I couldn't leave for one reason. I had to think the history was bad and untrue, the doctrines were harmful, and feel hurt personally. Having said that, if there was one foundation that crumbled making the differences, it was thinking that feeling certain feelings probably wasn't a good epistemology (after I learned that word).
Funnily enough, a guy I listen to now who does counter-apologetics (Emerson Green) actually does think spiritual experiences are decent evidence. I think it's largely based on the work of Michael Humer.
Happy to hear you have resolved some of your inner contradictions at least in so far as you see them as such!
I was always slightly bemused by how you would censor swear words - something that fell out of fashion in our circles in the 2000s. I took this to be an artifact of your Mormon upbringing that you clung on to for aesthetic or nostalgic reasons. Now that you've re-examined you relationship with the Mormons this artifact has reached its sell by date and the about heel on that is noted!
I was curious how many people would pick up on it. This is the first time I've cursed in a public post. What looked like an aesthetic or nostalgic artifact (and what I treated as being that) was in fact load-bearing in me not re-examining my relationship with the faith and my upbringing. "Do not swear" was the earliest moral prohibition I became serious about and the one I clung to most firmly as a teenager when I needed one way to think of myself as not-terrible. Keeping it around was, in large part, my way of speaking to and honoring that kid.
But it turns out that some words are the most effective ways to access some concepts, and I had walled my own body off in the same domain I had walled profanity off back when I was making those profane/sacred classifications. Swearing was both a necessary step and close to the final one in realizing how deeply I'd internalized the sense that I was profane.
This is all well and good for male homosexuality, where the behavior is not very socially destructive. But what about people who have the same pent-up angst against whatever social taboos hold their naturally-inclined behavior back? Beyond the obvious examples, there are a lot of people with compulsions to cheat - and sexuality is nothing particularly sacred - you also see it in kids who seem compelled to fight, and those compelled to use drugs. They all hate themselves in the same way, they all struggle. The testimony in this particular case is quite defensible, but the implication is that it's just plain wrong to tell someone to live against their inclinations and force them into shame. For many behaviors, we just have to fight our desires and learn that we can't always master them. We have to go beyond the self-doubt and shame, even though it is socially reinforced. The generalizable point here seems that you would have all such barriers in society removed, but sooner or later you get to the Freudian tradeoff "neurosis is the price we pay for society". It would be awesome if we did live in a world where everyone could just jam out to their identity and follow our inclinations, but a sad fact of the world is that we would do a lot of harm if we made that the generalizable principle. Peace, I love the honesty in your writing.
It's not at all clear to me that the analogy holds for your examples. I think this sort of deep, constitutive impact is quite limited, probably to sexuality and a few other things. Someone elsewhere raised pedophilia as a potential example. If it is true of that instance, people inclined towards it may experience what I experienced for a lifetime, an extraordinarily heavy but necessary cost absent some way of living in conformance with their nature that does not involve acting on attraction to children.
Is there that sort of deep, constitutive draw towards fighting in a way that can't be happily channeled into sports, politics, corporate warfare, what-have-you? That's not clear to me. Towards cheating such that someone is compelled to make promises of fidelity to someone that they experience as erasure of their capacity to feel? Maybe in arranged marriages and much stricter cultures than our own; not typically in the modern United States unless something more fundamental (eg a mixed-orientation marriage) comes into play.
But let's take a strong example and assume that it applies to e.g. pedophilia. Sometimes, it is appropriate to ask people to pay that cost, bleak as it is to say. But if we are to do so, we should give people the correct concept handles, understand what cost it is we are actually asking them to pay, and give them at least the capacity to understand themselves. Mormonism handed me a broken concept map that caused me to misunderstand and damage myself while attacking others like me. It was wrong on the facts, wrong on their application, and wrong that it is evil for a man to love another man.
Keep in mind, in other words, that I was not knowingly restraining a naturally-inclined behavior (and here your reference to Freud is well-chosen). I wasn't consciously attracted to men and actively choosing not to pursue men romantically, which is no more than anyone not in a position to date does. I was unconsciously attracted to men in a way that was impacting enormous parts of my interests, tastes, philosophy, self-concept, and happiness, while consciously thinking of myself as asexual and lacking interest in anyone. That I had a libido, full stop, was sufficient to make me miserable during that time, and I actively avoided thinking about it.
My generalizable point, inasmuch as I have one, is not "all barriers in society ought to be removed." It's something more like "A trait I treated as trivial and insignificant was in fact so constitutive for me that it led to a decade of misery and aggressive attacks on people like me, without me ever so much as understanding why. When I upended my entire framework and allowed myself to see it as a possibility, that misery cleared up and I built a productive, happy life. I think the latter is better than the former." If neurosis is the price we pay for society, then it should at least make people more productive and pro-social in the day even if their compulsive behaviors damage themselves and others in the night.
By their fruits ye shall know them. The fruits of Mormonism are poisoned for queer people.
> It's not at all clear to me that the analogy holds for your examples.
You can say that again. As soon as he said that being gay was "not very socially destructive," I knew that he was about to draw a bunch of very shaky equivalences.
Being gay is not socially destructive, period. Not "not very," - not. That "very" says everything.
I think you’re an awesome writer. It makes me sad for this kid who has a massive crush on my son. My son has been his friend for a few years. My son is obsessed with any female between 13-70 who wears leggings and makeup. They are 15. My kid -i didn’t advise him bc i don’t know all about his friendships-has been really impressive in his texts. “Bro, no, but i’m still your friend”
but they are BOYS. And boys think a lot about being intimate. This kid will do stuff like take his things and ask for a hug to get them back. That’s not cool. But I get it. The kid wants to have a boyfriend. Who doesn’t? my son wants a girlfriend. Who wouldn’t? Regardless i want to help navigate this. Boys can push the envelope. I’ve been proud of my son. I think part of him is afraid girls will see this infatuation and think he’s not interested in them. But still he values the kid and his friendship.
Any advice? the boy has a middle eastern/north african family that is very traditional and i’m thinking he will have a tough time of it.
That's rough. Inasmuch as I have advice, it's that now is the time for the friend to learn boundaries. He'll be happier and better-off pursuing people who can reciprocate. It sounds like your son is acting admirably; he should be firm and unambiguous about the envelope-pushing. The friend has a duty not to put him in this position, and 15 is old enough to be serious about that. At the same time – yeah, the friend is likely to be going through something tough, and it's great that your son is his friend and cares about him.
There's a balancing act, but the more important part of the balance in my estimation is holding the boundary, because the infatuation towards a target who won't reciprocate will cause the kid and others grief until he can get past it.
Right-the lack of reciprocation and being firm will be key. They are both so young that they don’t really even have a blueprint on how to act about this stuff. But any young kid needs to learn that. I will have my kid keep the focus on that.
Thanks for this. I'm glad you found a way through, but some of your words make me wonder if I'm actually through as well. Am I only pretending that I've successfully overcome the pain? Is the truth that I've just learned to contort myself - distort myself, even betray myself - so as to not be pricked by the thorns?
Over the years I’ve become a lot more appreciative of religion and the role it plays in society, and also the religious ancestry of a lot of my own values. That said, as a gay man in particular I have never and will never respect those sorts of fundamentally destructive and stupid doctrines that cause so much unnecessary unhappiness and angst.
Straight people are also destroyed by religion. All through my childhood, all thru college, I was taught that lust was evil, flirting was evil, dating someone you didn't plan to marry was evil, caring whether someone was good-looking was evil, caring whether you looked good yourself was evil. I never saw a man kiss a woman outside of the movies before I went to college. I didn't know how to ask a girl out. I didn't know how to initiate sex, even when women crawled into my bed with me uninvited and pushed me down beneath them, or led me into a closet and shut the door, or came into my room and stripped naked, or tried to seduce me in equally blatant ways. I was taught to trust God instead of trying to fix things, to search for wisdom in ignorance, stupidity, and arrogance. I was taught how to think around reality, to mock truth, to let my sense of morality atrophy as I instead submitted all questions to a book written by ignorant goat-herders and fishermen thousands of years go.
When I found I could make up for my social ineptness with physical beauty, my family was horrified if they saw me shirtless and realized I was trying to look better than average, or if I let slip that I was trying not to gain weight. There was such condemnation in their voices when they told me I was being vain, unspiritual, was obsessed with bodily things, had anorexia, would attract the wrong sort of women.
I was taught to fail. My mother dreaded any of her children succeeding in life; success, she thought, led one away from God. All my life she wanted me to take humble jobs as a physical laborer, even after I got my PhD. I was taught to turn the other cheek, which I did almost all my life, which destroyed my career and left me impoverished.
I can't talk to my family about anything important. Every important conversation ends up at the same point: Jesus. I love my family, but they are madder than a man who thinks he's Napoleon. At least the man who thinks he's Napoleon doesn't tell you success is evil, lust is evil, thinking for yourself is evil.
This post incredibly moved me, a lesbian woman from a very devout Muslim background. There are pains that only those of us who go through stuff like this can understand. When I was growing up, I didn't know about gayness. I thought I was the only one with my sinful desires in the entire world. It was a very lonely and sad experience. Funnily enough my first real encounter with gayness was when I read an article in English about how Jesus loves his homosexual children. Things have changed so much over the years and I'm glad that many younger people don't have to go through the same struggle.
Thank you for this beautifully written piece. It hurt to read, but it was deeply touching…
I didn’t grow up with religion so I can’t relate fully, but imagining having a part of your being shunned as being evil and wrong even as you are surrounded by people who are kind and loving sounds incredibly difficult. Maybe more difficult than if you just have a straight up abusive upbringing where you can outright reject your entire family and environment and start anew.
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.
Hmm. I'm not sure if the piece was meant to have a moral. "listen to pain and disregard inhibition" sounds plausible and I'm not sure if it's a good lesson or not.
But I do think the pain itself is tragedy. In general, pain needn't be necessary (even if it sometimes is for humans), and in this case it had no benefits. What else would the tragedy be?
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.”
I'm saying that while I was growing up, I loved my home and family and culture and spent a decade feeling diffusely miserable with no idea of why, and I stayed that way until I couldn't take it any more, dropped out of BYU and joined the Air Force, and eventually left Mormonism. I had a highly functional upbringing, I knew I did, I constantly and accurately reaffirmed that I did, and it made me embarrassed and ashamed that I was miserable anyway. And I spent eight years after leaving, before writing this article, repeatedly telling everyone who would listen how much I loved and appreciated about Mormonism and how much the rest of the world had to learn from it. I still like the things about it that I like. But I refused to look head-on at the shape of the damage it caused, such that I built an elaborate cathedral around a conviction that there was no damage at all.
I'm moving to live nearer my family, and yes, it is my strong preference that we live near each other. Would I prefer to still be a practicing Mormon? No; my misery eventually pushed me to examine the truth claims and realize the ways I'd been systematically distorting my own thoughts, and the genie doesn't go back into the bottle. But I would prefer practicing Mormons not create the conditions that made my adolescence miserable.
Churches would do well to handle homosexuality in the same way they do heterosexuality, ie: "sexual attraction should be channeled towards a constructive, healthy family and life; trying to eliminate it won't work and will make you miserable; love is good and core to life's purpose." Mainstream Protestant denominations don't need pride flags or politics, they need to stop teaching kids to annihilate themselves. Religion isn't dumb and beneath me, it is specifically and tragically wrong about and cruel towards queer people, and that is wrong.
It kind of hurts my heart when I see mainstream protestant denominations going all in on “acceptance” and putting up pride flags. They don’t seem to understand that the reason their congregants’ children didn’t stick around never had anything to do with any political topic, they just think religion is dumb and beneath them.
Thank you for your testimony, brother.
I think stories like this one demonstrate why honestly trying to have a accurate understanding of the world is one of our most important moral obligations. There's an enormous amount of pressure in society to adopt beliefs for social reasons- not just in religion, but in politics and everyday status competitions. We're often made to feel that thinking honestly about whether these beliefs are accurate is a deep betrayal and the act of a bad person. But an inaccurate model of the world produces inaccurate predictions, and so by giving up on accuracy, we also give up our ability to predict the effects our actions will have on other people, including those we love.
If this case, your people inaccurately believed that homosexuality was an unnatural, externally imposed desire that would lead to eternal torment. So, out of love, they taught you to hate it, not realizing that they were teaching you to hate yourself. In other cases, neglecting truth leads to wars and atrocities. The followers of Stalin chose to believe they were building a communist paradise, despite evidence to the contrary, because they lived in a culture that told them you had to believe that in order to be a good person. Likewise, the modern MAGA movement genuinely believes they're improving the lives of Americans; in that subculture, a good-faith effort to find out if that's true or not is a kind of betrayal. Many on the American left arrive at beliefs similarly.
When we arrive at a belief in bad faith, I think we're morally culpable when that belief causes harm. The most extreme mandate of that principle- that people should abandon religion and political identity entirely- is most likely morally supererogatory. However, I think the more modest charge of holding our beliefs lightly enough that we notice when they would cause harm should they turn out to be false is actually a moral obligation.
For that reason, I don't think your congregation should be entirely absolved of responsibility for the pain they've caused. Taking on that responsibility yourself by pointing out their love and your own self-recrimination is a respectable act of kindness, but I think sometimes an element of moral condemnation is also needed to incentivize change.
Well-argued, and I broadly agree with your point here. I think, sticking with this specific topic, that members of traditional religions do have a moral responsibility to understand that their religions are wrong about queer people, or at least to avoid contributing to the harm. The primary fault is in the structures themselves, but people are responsible for their actions within those structures. But people are often very fast to condemn, and the more I condemn others, the more fingers I would have to point at myself, because I was as emphatic as anyone in opposition to homosexuality and I remember vividly what it felt like to be on the other side. Responsibility matters, but so does remembering that people really did mean well and really did act in loving, self-sacrificial ways for my benefit.
As a gay survivor of a Korean Christian cult, so much of this article resonated with me. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I’ve been reading your writing for several years now and have been a big fan and happy to see you back. The Velvet Rage also touches upon a lot of this and I personally found it very helpful.
I'm very glad it landed well, and glad you got out. It's good to be back.
fuck dude i'm so glad you're here. i hope you find more love in your life that doesnt hurt. and i love that you're trying to honour a love that raised you, but did.
Thank you for this really beautiful piece. I suppose it should not be surprising that someone with your pseudonym should write something that insightful and resonant about being a young boy with a devotion to Card's works, but I appreciate it nonetheless. I'm grateful we both have found a way out of that and into a happier life.
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*.[1]
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[2]. 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.
[1] maybe even I needed a good reason to think before I would think. But I had sexuality too, and my "self-abuse" provided ample reason to think.
[2] on second thought... hard to tell. 10 was the age where this boy, who still didn't know what sex was, noticed something weird in himself.
I felt like it was a place where I could openly express my doubts. I was ruthlessly, constantly, painfully honest about every doubt I had, every uncertainty and question and lack of spiritual witness. My pre-mission testimony saw me stand in front of my home ward and tell them I did not know the church was true, but I believed it and hoped. And the story I told myself and others about leaving, consistently, was that my departure was purely intellectual. I believed this, it reflected my conscious experience, and it was wrong. I left, like you, because eventually I understood it was false, and that distance allowed me to re-evaluate other things about it.
The bone that you're picking is the same bone I would have picked. My assertion is that it's wrong. I never once, consciously, during my entire time in the church, wanted to hold a man in my arms or kiss a man or lie naked next to a man or make love to a man. I thought homosexuality was gross and evil (loving the sinners while hating the sin) and thought of myself as asexual. I confidently described the difference between love and lust, confidently explained that love and sexual desire were different things and could be separated, and ... well, I did, in fact, successfully and subconsciously cleave love apart from sexual desire. All the boys I loved throughout my adolescence, I loved by wanting to be near them and wanting to be like them and wanting to be them. Completely unrelated to that, I had a libido that I systematically and unsuccessfully tried to crush and never, ever, ever allowed myself to direct towards another human.
I told myself I was asexual and that sexuality was a trivial part of my life. That was incorrect: it was shaping my interests, my aesthetics, my relationships with other people, my understanding of my own desires, my emotions, and most of the things that were most important to me. And it is specifically and directly because I treated sexual desire as evil and refused to examine it that I could never look at or understand why I was doing everything I was doing. My model was wrong, and it was wrong because eros cannot be severed from life without losing a great deal else alongside it.
So what causes the difference? Why freely express your doubts about every aspect of the church--except for the sexual aspects, where you instead suppress your feelings so deeply that you can scarcely notice them?
Well, my doubts were careful truth-seeking, and sexuality was my quiet evidence that I was a monster unworthy of love. The more I introspected about and talked about my faults and my questions and my emotions and my uncertainty, the more I demonstrated to myself that I understood myself, wasn't hiding anything, and was taking my duties towards my faith and the truth seriously.
And my libido? That was just an addiction unrelated to anything else that I needed to crush, just like To Young Men Only taught me every time I read it (which I did, repeatedly, with it tucked away in my scripture case). I didn't have any doubts to explore about sexuality. I was asexual, I never noticed attraction to another person, homosexuality was wrong, that's all there was to it. I talked openly about being asexual, and every couple of years (or months, during my mission) I went to confess again that I still had a libido and was still sinful and miserable, and got more advice about how to double down and try harder.
Anything more than confession was packed into a tiny, radioactive box in the corner of my mind labeled "Do Not Open," and I left it there.
Oddly, you've not answered the question. Masturbating while saying that you're asexual is a contradiction calling out for an explanation. And you didn't see anything wrong with the church's story or preachings about sexuality? I guess taboos do funny things to people...
It wasn't a contradiction in my head. I didn't notice attraction to anyone, I hated the idea of sex and didn't care for romance, so I was asexual. Masturbation was just something my body did, not really directed at anything meaningful. The church's teachings on sexuality restrained a powerful and dangerous force that people obsessed over and that made them do stupid things – hedonism was wrong and people had a responsibility to focus on meaning instead.
That's the thing. I built an entire, cohesive philosophy and framework around this. I hated consumerism, hated hedonism and pleasure-seeking in general, was disgusted by how much people focused on sex and how much they sexualized the world, thought it was stupid and reflective of a lack of real problems that people focused so much on gay marriage as an issue, saw the 2015 policy against kids of gay people getting baptized as a sensible way to avoid pitting kids against parents... to me, all of these things existed in the realm of policy and moral theorizing and framework-building around abstract questions of right and wrong, and I was a detached observer just trying to build and live up to a comprehensive frame of Mormon righteousness as I pursued truth.
My body wasn't data to consider, it was a problem to contain. Probably I'd notice women and want to date eventually, anyway, when it was the right time. In the meantime, rationality, skepticism, and rigorous argumentation were what mattered. That was my mindset, and I was exceptionally good at performing introspection and rigor within it while leaving the load-bearing void unexamined.
Well...a powerful and dangerous force created by whom, and for what? We could have lived in a world where storks brought us babies, as I was told as a kid. We could have lived in a world where true love turns our hands sticky to enable reproduction like in that Voyager episode I'm misremembering. I think you're saying either that you thought so little about it that you couldn't notice the essential weirdness of the situation, or more likely, that you created a mental structure that protected you from noticing. I wonder how that worked. Like, okay, you have a cohesive anti-Hedonist philosophy, but why be anti-Hedonist? And in particular, why be hedonist about good music and ice cream, and playing games with friends, but anti-hedonist about a doohickey God put in the middle of your body?
One of the many things that confused me as a Mormon was that a lot of people talked about aphrodisiacs, but no one talked about anaphrodisiacs, even though anyone who preached about sex was preaching against. Why wasn't the Church the world's foremost promoter or producer of anaphrodisiacs? If libido could be increased, could it not be reduced? Erectile dysfunction was a real condition--couldn't we get it in pill form? To me, being Mormon involved a heck of a lot of being confused all the time. I wouldn't say I had a cohesive philosophy, because God's teachings didn't feel cohesive to me. "Oh you're just *children* of God," They would tell us. "God can't explain it to us, just as we cannot explain things to toddlers." But if this were true, the explanations we do get should be on par with, like, Quantum physics: precise formulas that seem to us too complex to properly understand because that's what they are, rather than looking the same as somebody of average intelligence bullshitting us. (My thinking wasn't this developed at the time, but at least I had the sense that something was wrong.)
I saw the body as a problem to contain, too. But it was also data, also a question, also evidence, and I for one could never stop thinking about it, even though I could never see the answer.
I think it’s probably healthy for me that I left, or left in all but name, at an earlier age. I noticed all of these contradictions, I’ve always been curious about anti-apologetics, how could you not want the full picture and the entirety of the story if you have a rational mind and you want to seek the truth? We have always been taught that seeking the truth is the best and highest of glories.
I read the CES letter, all of the anti threads on r/Mormon and r/exmormon, read deeply personal essays like this one from Tracing Woodgrains, and avidly (if not eagerly) consumed the writing of Sam Harris, Hitch, Dawkins.
I know exactly what you mean about your brother saying he was tired of feeling guilty. There is a guilt in having doubts, or knowing that you could be having doubts, and repressing them or refusing to interrogate them in favor of — as you have said — a sort of ignorant and unreflective inertia. It’s easier that way. It felt good to resolve that tension openly and honestly rather than keep it bottled up.
So I have been extremely surprised by the fervor and deep commitment and peace I have felt in returning to the fold. I am surprised at how truly hollow it felt to abandon my covenants for a rationally-considered life, for a life of agnosticism. I was surprised at how silly and pointless and ultimately unhelpful it was to try and come up with some sort of replacement framework. I would never have expected how good it felt to submit myself to the repentance process. Ultimately, I feel incredibly confident about the structure and superstructure I have re-committed myself to, to an extent I would not have expected.
I have seen people leave the Church permanently and suffer. I have seen those who have left the Church permanently and seemingly thrive. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone leave the Church permanently and feel whole; for they show signs of it whether they recognize it in themselves or not. I’m certain most of those individuals will claim internalized damage of some sort from having been indoctrinated at an early age (as so many have very prominently claimed), but I don’t really think it’s that. The hollowness is so much more fundamental than that.
Anyway, thank you for your well-written comment. I’ve been reading quite a bit of deeply personal writing recently from those who have left, or who have stayed but lost their testimonies, or from those in between. The common thread is a deep experience of pain or frustration, which I understand deeply.
I left the Church permanently and feel whole. I have a clarity of mind now that was impossible then; everything just...makes sense. Everything fits together.
Of course, I have become mortal, which sucks very much. But as the saying goes, people can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
I wish you the absolute best of luck; it sounds like it’s been a long journey for you, intellectually and spiritually. I can only plainly say (and you’ll have to forgive me for it’s meant in complete earnestness) that I know your Heavenly Father loves you. I know He loves each of us. I left and I had forgotten that. It’s a comfort to know that, but more than a comforting thought, I also believe it to be true. Although you do not, I hope the thought still helps somehow.
Sigh. Let's see, how to summarize this odd conversation?
Me: I feel you: after 30 years I learned the church was false, and we both know it, I needn't explain in detail. But I do think it's important to act on the basis of what's true, not on how we feel. For example, my brother left not because the church is untrue, but because he felt guilty. I felt guilty and stayed, because all the matters is what's true. In the end, though, I was convinced it wasn't true and therefore left. And in that vein I don't like that love and eros were conflated, because it's also not true that they are the same thing.
Third person interjects: sure, I have no arguments against any of that, and I even followed and liked the people who said it was false, and their arguments too. But figuring things out as a nonbeliever was silly and pointless... so I didn't. Instead I returned with fervor and deep commitment and peace. So I'm really confident about the church's structure and superstructure! And you know, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone leave the Church permanently and feel whole...
Me: [um, wat the heck was that?] well I left the church permanently, I feel whole, I am whole. and everything makes complete sense now.
Third person: Oh, but Heavenly Father loves you.
Me: um, well no.
What you've said, without actually saying it, is that you reject my premise that the truth is what matters. You identified with my brother's story of feeling guilty, not with my own story. You spoke of a guilt in having doubts, which I never did (my sins were what made me feel guilty). You spoke of "repressing them or refusing to interrogate them", which I never did. Nothing in what you wrote resembles an evidence-based or logic-based journey like mine. Did I have pain and guilt in the church? Yes, plenty of that. And for the most part, I admit, they were caused by church doctrines and practices. But again, that's not why I left. Those emotions served only as a reason to keep thinking, never as reason to repress anything, and never as a reason to leave.
I'm the sort of person who loved the Non-Libertarian FAQ and Consequentialism FAQs much that when they disappeared from the internet (apparently Scott Alexander thought them not worth keeping?! Incredible!), I dug them out of the internet archive and reposted them. They teach a different sort of morality than the Church does, but it's cohesive and beautiful, both in its simplicity, and in the infinite complexity of its implications. It's not quite the foundation I landed on, but it makes a great entrance hall for my mansion. Trust me, I have a rock more solid than God ever was.
I'm also the sort of person who spent a year, unemployed, arguing with climate science dismissives in an effort to find out how much evidence it takes to change someone's mind. The answer is ∞, and people told me that, but I didn't believe them, couldn't believe them, because I couldn't believe that evidence was irrelevant to some people. I had to learn the hard way, but now that I have, I can look at you and simply shrug "well, I guess he's one of those, or whatever". I can't know what makes you tick. You sound like you're from another planet--and this isn't new; I felt like *I* was from another planet when I was still in the church. If I had the time, I would like to go study that planet again someday, not to adopt its customs, which surely I will never do, but just to understand better. Alas, I don't have time.
I feel like we have very similar intellectual interests (I, too, loved and was strongly affected by the Non-Libertarian FAQ and Consequentialism FAQ, as well as the Neoreaction FAQ), but I would pretty strongly dispute how you're characterizing me here. I don't think it's charitable to insinuate that I said "figuring things out as a nonbeliever is silly and pointless."
I'm also pretty confused at how you interpreted what I have said about my own path -- I was absolutely drawn to evidence against the church, probably from a similar perspective. That interest was deeply shaped by my early interest in rationalism. I would vehemently disagree with the idea that I don't believe the truth matters. I'm not sure why you say it's so difficult to understand what makes me tick; my suspicion is that we run on very similar wavelengths, have had very similar intellectual journeys (albeit mine may have overlapped with your brother's), and share very similar terminal values. Mine happened to land me back in the LDS Church with a stronger testimony than I had before, and I think that is the part you're struggling to comprehend -- from your perspective, it is literally impossible to love the truth as a terminal value, to take in and understand the extant logical arguments against the Church, and to weigh the balance of evidence only to end up where I did rather than where you did.
I do think it was uncharitable of me to mention that I have never seen someone leave the Church and end up in a place where they feel whole, because the obvious insinuation is that I don't believe you feel whole. That is not my place nor my station, and it was rude of me to essentially assume your internal experience and to cast it in a negative light. I definitely did not want to come across as impolite or arrogant, and I regret that.
Perhaps it is the earnestness with which I stated that I am, in a literal sense, certain that you are loved by a Heavenly Father that feels like a sentiment from an alien world. I would just say that I fully believe, a la Scott Alexander, that arguments should not be toy soldiers and that you should say what you mean and express what you believe.
Since I have offended you it may be pointless to continue, but in my defense, as I said, the response I wrote is based on the response you wrote. Your message did not indicate that you really cared about epistemics, did not indicate that it was the motivation to leave the church (to the contrary), let alone that it motivated you to come back, nor did I see any indication that you comprehended that this is what motivated me. Your message was focused primarily on emotion and devotion, in a way that seemed clearly misaligned with my worldview.
> from your perspective, it is literally impossible to love the truth as a terminal value, to take in and understand the extant logical arguments against the Church, and to weigh the balance of evidence only to end up where I did rather than where you did.
I would adjust this. My first instinct is to change "a terminal value" to "THE terminal value". But that's not quite right. It's like what Lawrence Lessig said about his quest to fix the corrupting influence of money in politics. He said something like "It's not the most important issue, but it's the FIRST issue--the one we have to solve before we can solve the issues we really care about." Likewise... while I place extremely strong emphasis on truth, and value truth, and find it to be the foundation of all analysis and decision-making... is it a terminal value? That feels right emotionally, but it doesn't sound right logically. More like, it's the most fundamental value, the one that determines what all other values should be including terminal values. I could even call it an instrumental value, but this is a determination I make only in hindsight; it's as dear to me as any terminal value. Maybe it's best not to think of it as a value at all, but just a reflection of my brain structure. Because it has been the most important value for decades (whether terminal or not), it produced an intricate brain structure which runs automatically, regardless of what my values should now be; finding the truth is still a goal, but it's largely a goal in the same way an engine's goal is to turn a crankshaft.
But yeah. If you had recognized me as a fellow traveler from the same planet, it is very confusing that you engaged me the way you did. The way you spoke just isn't how my kind speaks.
"I was surprised at how silly and pointless and ultimately unhelpful it was to try and come up with some sort of replacement framework."
If this is so completely different than "figuring things out as a nonbeliever was silly and pointless", I find it strange that you didn't take the opportunity to clarify what is so different about it. I assure you that they do not sound substantively different to me. The second version is shorter only because it's part of a summary.
This resonates with me. I also left, though for different reasons.
In particular the parts about how they hurt you with their good intentions. I have received nothing but love from my faithful Mormon relatives. I know how happy their beliefs make them, and I cannot bring myself to directly tell them I have left. This is not out of a desire to decieve but rather to avoid very painful conversations for which I see no likely useful outcomes.
My family knows I stopped going to church years ago but they've never asked me why. If they asked I would tell them, but their failure to do so makes me think they do not want to know.
My reasons were simple epistemic ones and honestly they feel trite relative to the conflict and self-hatred people such as you endured.
I had nothing intrinsic preventing me from basking in the bliss of religious certainty forever, except that troublesome realization that the entire edifice rests exclusively on personal revelation aka spiritual emotions.
From there it was a simple question of whether I should be weighing a question of such importance solely on emotional evidence.
I miss being in a tight-knit community with a third space I could share with them regularly. I have yet to find anything secular that fills the same function as well. The closest has been various conventions for online communities, but those are only once a year. If you have any advice on that front please let me know.
The funny thing is that I would have described my reasons as simple epistemic ones as well. It's just that in my case those simple epistemic ones were sitting on a decade of unexamined, or rather wrongly examined, misery.
I've stopped expecting people to ask. Most people would rather not know and wouldn't know what to do with the answers they got.
As for the community aspect, I feel the same way and I think the best we can do is keep building out from our online spaces into more and more of a shared social/cultural world. "Atheist church" doesn't work because atheism is not a particularly meaningful thing to organize a social/cultural group around. I see the task as a slow process of planting flags, finding people on similar wavelengths, and organizing more and more communitarian efforts around the resulting clusters.
I was so all-in that I couldn't leave for one reason. I had to think the history was bad and untrue, the doctrines were harmful, and feel hurt personally. Having said that, if there was one foundation that crumbled making the differences, it was thinking that feeling certain feelings probably wasn't a good epistemology (after I learned that word).
Funnily enough, a guy I listen to now who does counter-apologetics (Emerson Green) actually does think spiritual experiences are decent evidence. I think it's largely based on the work of Michael Humer.
I've also not found a great replacement.
Happy to hear you have resolved some of your inner contradictions at least in so far as you see them as such!
I was always slightly bemused by how you would censor swear words - something that fell out of fashion in our circles in the 2000s. I took this to be an artifact of your Mormon upbringing that you clung on to for aesthetic or nostalgic reasons. Now that you've re-examined you relationship with the Mormons this artifact has reached its sell by date and the about heel on that is noted!
I was curious how many people would pick up on it. This is the first time I've cursed in a public post. What looked like an aesthetic or nostalgic artifact (and what I treated as being that) was in fact load-bearing in me not re-examining my relationship with the faith and my upbringing. "Do not swear" was the earliest moral prohibition I became serious about and the one I clung to most firmly as a teenager when I needed one way to think of myself as not-terrible. Keeping it around was, in large part, my way of speaking to and honoring that kid.
But it turns out that some words are the most effective ways to access some concepts, and I had walled my own body off in the same domain I had walled profanity off back when I was making those profane/sacred classifications. Swearing was both a necessary step and close to the final one in realizing how deeply I'd internalized the sense that I was profane.
This is all well and good for male homosexuality, where the behavior is not very socially destructive. But what about people who have the same pent-up angst against whatever social taboos hold their naturally-inclined behavior back? Beyond the obvious examples, there are a lot of people with compulsions to cheat - and sexuality is nothing particularly sacred - you also see it in kids who seem compelled to fight, and those compelled to use drugs. They all hate themselves in the same way, they all struggle. The testimony in this particular case is quite defensible, but the implication is that it's just plain wrong to tell someone to live against their inclinations and force them into shame. For many behaviors, we just have to fight our desires and learn that we can't always master them. We have to go beyond the self-doubt and shame, even though it is socially reinforced. The generalizable point here seems that you would have all such barriers in society removed, but sooner or later you get to the Freudian tradeoff "neurosis is the price we pay for society". It would be awesome if we did live in a world where everyone could just jam out to their identity and follow our inclinations, but a sad fact of the world is that we would do a lot of harm if we made that the generalizable principle. Peace, I love the honesty in your writing.
It's not at all clear to me that the analogy holds for your examples. I think this sort of deep, constitutive impact is quite limited, probably to sexuality and a few other things. Someone elsewhere raised pedophilia as a potential example. If it is true of that instance, people inclined towards it may experience what I experienced for a lifetime, an extraordinarily heavy but necessary cost absent some way of living in conformance with their nature that does not involve acting on attraction to children.
Is there that sort of deep, constitutive draw towards fighting in a way that can't be happily channeled into sports, politics, corporate warfare, what-have-you? That's not clear to me. Towards cheating such that someone is compelled to make promises of fidelity to someone that they experience as erasure of their capacity to feel? Maybe in arranged marriages and much stricter cultures than our own; not typically in the modern United States unless something more fundamental (eg a mixed-orientation marriage) comes into play.
But let's take a strong example and assume that it applies to e.g. pedophilia. Sometimes, it is appropriate to ask people to pay that cost, bleak as it is to say. But if we are to do so, we should give people the correct concept handles, understand what cost it is we are actually asking them to pay, and give them at least the capacity to understand themselves. Mormonism handed me a broken concept map that caused me to misunderstand and damage myself while attacking others like me. It was wrong on the facts, wrong on their application, and wrong that it is evil for a man to love another man.
Keep in mind, in other words, that I was not knowingly restraining a naturally-inclined behavior (and here your reference to Freud is well-chosen). I wasn't consciously attracted to men and actively choosing not to pursue men romantically, which is no more than anyone not in a position to date does. I was unconsciously attracted to men in a way that was impacting enormous parts of my interests, tastes, philosophy, self-concept, and happiness, while consciously thinking of myself as asexual and lacking interest in anyone. That I had a libido, full stop, was sufficient to make me miserable during that time, and I actively avoided thinking about it.
My generalizable point, inasmuch as I have one, is not "all barriers in society ought to be removed." It's something more like "A trait I treated as trivial and insignificant was in fact so constitutive for me that it led to a decade of misery and aggressive attacks on people like me, without me ever so much as understanding why. When I upended my entire framework and allowed myself to see it as a possibility, that misery cleared up and I built a productive, happy life. I think the latter is better than the former." If neurosis is the price we pay for society, then it should at least make people more productive and pro-social in the day even if their compulsive behaviors damage themselves and others in the night.
By their fruits ye shall know them. The fruits of Mormonism are poisoned for queer people.
> It's not at all clear to me that the analogy holds for your examples.
You can say that again. As soon as he said that being gay was "not very socially destructive," I knew that he was about to draw a bunch of very shaky equivalences.
Being gay is not socially destructive, period. Not "not very," - not. That "very" says everything.
I think you’re an awesome writer. It makes me sad for this kid who has a massive crush on my son. My son has been his friend for a few years. My son is obsessed with any female between 13-70 who wears leggings and makeup. They are 15. My kid -i didn’t advise him bc i don’t know all about his friendships-has been really impressive in his texts. “Bro, no, but i’m still your friend”
but they are BOYS. And boys think a lot about being intimate. This kid will do stuff like take his things and ask for a hug to get them back. That’s not cool. But I get it. The kid wants to have a boyfriend. Who doesn’t? my son wants a girlfriend. Who wouldn’t? Regardless i want to help navigate this. Boys can push the envelope. I’ve been proud of my son. I think part of him is afraid girls will see this infatuation and think he’s not interested in them. But still he values the kid and his friendship.
Any advice? the boy has a middle eastern/north african family that is very traditional and i’m thinking he will have a tough time of it.
That's rough. Inasmuch as I have advice, it's that now is the time for the friend to learn boundaries. He'll be happier and better-off pursuing people who can reciprocate. It sounds like your son is acting admirably; he should be firm and unambiguous about the envelope-pushing. The friend has a duty not to put him in this position, and 15 is old enough to be serious about that. At the same time – yeah, the friend is likely to be going through something tough, and it's great that your son is his friend and cares about him.
There's a balancing act, but the more important part of the balance in my estimation is holding the boundary, because the infatuation towards a target who won't reciprocate will cause the kid and others grief until he can get past it.
Right-the lack of reciprocation and being firm will be key. They are both so young that they don’t really even have a blueprint on how to act about this stuff. But any young kid needs to learn that. I will have my kid keep the focus on that.
Thanks for this. I'm glad you found a way through, but some of your words make me wonder if I'm actually through as well. Am I only pretending that I've successfully overcome the pain? Is the truth that I've just learned to contort myself - distort myself, even betray myself - so as to not be pricked by the thorns?
Over the years I’ve become a lot more appreciative of religion and the role it plays in society, and also the religious ancestry of a lot of my own values. That said, as a gay man in particular I have never and will never respect those sorts of fundamentally destructive and stupid doctrines that cause so much unnecessary unhappiness and angst.
Straight people are also destroyed by religion. All through my childhood, all thru college, I was taught that lust was evil, flirting was evil, dating someone you didn't plan to marry was evil, caring whether someone was good-looking was evil, caring whether you looked good yourself was evil. I never saw a man kiss a woman outside of the movies before I went to college. I didn't know how to ask a girl out. I didn't know how to initiate sex, even when women crawled into my bed with me uninvited and pushed me down beneath them, or led me into a closet and shut the door, or came into my room and stripped naked, or tried to seduce me in equally blatant ways. I was taught to trust God instead of trying to fix things, to search for wisdom in ignorance, stupidity, and arrogance. I was taught how to think around reality, to mock truth, to let my sense of morality atrophy as I instead submitted all questions to a book written by ignorant goat-herders and fishermen thousands of years go.
When I found I could make up for my social ineptness with physical beauty, my family was horrified if they saw me shirtless and realized I was trying to look better than average, or if I let slip that I was trying not to gain weight. There was such condemnation in their voices when they told me I was being vain, unspiritual, was obsessed with bodily things, had anorexia, would attract the wrong sort of women.
I was taught to fail. My mother dreaded any of her children succeeding in life; success, she thought, led one away from God. All my life she wanted me to take humble jobs as a physical laborer, even after I got my PhD. I was taught to turn the other cheek, which I did almost all my life, which destroyed my career and left me impoverished.
I can't talk to my family about anything important. Every important conversation ends up at the same point: Jesus. I love my family, but they are madder than a man who thinks he's Napoleon. At least the man who thinks he's Napoleon doesn't tell you success is evil, lust is evil, thinking for yourself is evil.
This post incredibly moved me, a lesbian woman from a very devout Muslim background. There are pains that only those of us who go through stuff like this can understand. When I was growing up, I didn't know about gayness. I thought I was the only one with my sinful desires in the entire world. It was a very lonely and sad experience. Funnily enough my first real encounter with gayness was when I read an article in English about how Jesus loves his homosexual children. Things have changed so much over the years and I'm glad that many younger people don't have to go through the same struggle.
Thank you for this beautifully written piece. It hurt to read, but it was deeply touching…
I didn’t grow up with religion so I can’t relate fully, but imagining having a part of your being shunned as being evil and wrong even as you are surrounded by people who are kind and loving sounds incredibly difficult. Maybe more difficult than if you just have a straight up abusive upbringing where you can outright reject your entire family and environment and start anew.
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.
Hmm. I'm not sure if the piece was meant to have a moral. "listen to pain and disregard inhibition" sounds plausible and I'm not sure if it's a good lesson or not.
But I do think the pain itself is tragedy. In general, pain needn't be necessary (even if it sometimes is for humans), and in this case it had no benefits. What else would the tragedy be?
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.”
I'm saying that while I was growing up, I loved my home and family and culture and spent a decade feeling diffusely miserable with no idea of why, and I stayed that way until I couldn't take it any more, dropped out of BYU and joined the Air Force, and eventually left Mormonism. I had a highly functional upbringing, I knew I did, I constantly and accurately reaffirmed that I did, and it made me embarrassed and ashamed that I was miserable anyway. And I spent eight years after leaving, before writing this article, repeatedly telling everyone who would listen how much I loved and appreciated about Mormonism and how much the rest of the world had to learn from it. I still like the things about it that I like. But I refused to look head-on at the shape of the damage it caused, such that I built an elaborate cathedral around a conviction that there was no damage at all.
I'm moving to live nearer my family, and yes, it is my strong preference that we live near each other. Would I prefer to still be a practicing Mormon? No; my misery eventually pushed me to examine the truth claims and realize the ways I'd been systematically distorting my own thoughts, and the genie doesn't go back into the bottle. But I would prefer practicing Mormons not create the conditions that made my adolescence miserable.
Churches would do well to handle homosexuality in the same way they do heterosexuality, ie: "sexual attraction should be channeled towards a constructive, healthy family and life; trying to eliminate it won't work and will make you miserable; love is good and core to life's purpose." Mainstream Protestant denominations don't need pride flags or politics, they need to stop teaching kids to annihilate themselves. Religion isn't dumb and beneath me, it is specifically and tragically wrong about and cruel towards queer people, and that is wrong.
It kind of hurts my heart when I see mainstream protestant denominations going all in on “acceptance” and putting up pride flags. They don’t seem to understand that the reason their congregants’ children didn’t stick around never had anything to do with any political topic, they just think religion is dumb and beneath them.