Kishkumen wrote:And, I guess that I have finally been around long enough to grow somewhat jaded about the "victim of Mormonism" narrative. Notoriety is a tricky thing. A little too tricky for me, so I hang out in the shadows. On the one hand, people look to imitate others in order to understand how they should behave in any situation. That is why the Church stigmatizes apostates. If you can see the apostate, you can imitate the apostate. That is also one reason why we transitioners spend some time studying the exit narratives of others as we are considering an exit. How do you exit? Read the literature.
But, once you have read the literature so many times, and heard so many stories, further repetition begins to taste bad in your mouth. "Ah, yes, I've heard that one many times." It is hard to retain the same kind of unfailing sympathy when you have both heard it a thousand times and also started to see a pattern of people cultivating their celebrity apostate status. It may be a difference of personality, but I can say that my personality does not resonate well with the phenomenon of the celebrity apostate. It is probably better for me not to comment when I see it, but I am feeling uninterested in the latest editions of podcasts of exit stories. No doubt I am not the target audience.
This encapsulates well my own view. I think one of the things that John Dehlin has promoted most (besides himself, I can almost hear Rosebud interject) is the idea of a "faith crisis." Obviously, many people experience an intellectual crisis of sorts when they find out X, Y, or Z about Mormon history and its implications for the present-day Church, but more people don't have crises. I would wager in fact that crises are quite rare and confined to the most devout members who 1) served a mission or married a returned missionary, 2) married in the temple, 3) attended both Church and the temple regularly, 4) held callings, 5) watched conference religiously, 6) followed in general the explicit rules and implicit norms of the Church, 7) studied the Church's teachings and read scriptures with some frequency, and 8) paid tithing. A lot of these have corollaries, too; for example, paying tithing implies the ability to pay tithing, which means a certain income threshold. A lot of these people seem to have been life-long Mormons whose family connections to Mormonism extend across generations. Judging from the podcasts I've heard over the years, most of these people seem also to be comfortably middle class and college-educated. They are invariably white-collar professionals or married to white-collar professionals. In other words, Dehlin focuses on people who are most like himself. It fits paradigm Mormons.
Now, that doesn't fit most Mormons at all. I doubt it even fits most "active" Mormons (which the Church defines rather loosely, if I remember, as something like "attends church twice a month" or "attends sacrament meeting twice a month" (I could be wrong on that definition...it's been a long time). Most Mormons aren't paradigm Mormons.
I have yet to hear the faith crisis podcast of the military serviceman/woman or truck driver with only a high school education or some college who drank coffee and alcohol every now and then, wasn't too strict about Sunday activities, derived some income from government welfare, was sealed but not married in the temple, rarely went to the temple after that, held really low-level callings, never really read the Book of Mormon, maybe caught a little conference on TV or on the radio, etc. etc. etc. etc.
I hear the Dehlin "faith crisis" stories and I hear people whose experience in life is so different from my own. I've had some really lucky breaks that have taken me to places I never could have imagined as a kid, and it's only because I got into academia that I was secondarily connected to the types of Mormons who have "faith crises" at BYU, but most of my family and Mormon acquaintances outside of BYU fit the second description of a Mormon, not the first. And their origins are in Utah (most of them are still there). Even outside of Utah, most Mormons I went to school with fit the second description, not the first. And I have only known one person who would actually describe their exit from Mormonism as crisis-inducing. Most just drift away. My parents are active believers and they have never heard of John Dehlin. None of my siblings is a believer or has been. None went on missions. None married Mormons. None have been to Church in years. All drink coffee and alcohol. None of them have ever heard of John Dehlin either and couldn't give one good god damn about Mormon transitions. My younger brother doesn't even know or care who Thomas Monson is.
I would bet that we are more typical of the ex-Mormon experience than anyone on John Dehlin's podcast. Yet, the narrative pushed by Dehlin in his less-than-scientific surveys has made the "faith crisis" the dominant one.
The problem with this is
1) it puts all the emphasis on belief and on the hierarchy, which I think most Mormons who leave don't care that much about. Most of them were Mormons because they grew up that way and it provided a good community, something the Church institution has systematically destroyed since the 1970s. John Dehlin's community of post/transitioning Mormons is never going to be able to serve the needs of most Mormons who leave. I think most would rather have people they can talk to about their families than bitch about how offensive some apostle is; they would rather have dinners and activities and camp-outs than group therapy to recover from the debilitating delusion that Joseph Smith knew how to read Egyptian papyri.
2) it turns the "faith crisis" narrative into a series of shorthands, even a replicated meme that is true for people not because of any identification between their common experiences that each articulate independently but largely because it is a ready-made product into which they can pour whatever their experience might be.
"Confused about the Book of Abraham? Well, then you must have a faith crisis! Let me tell you now what its stages are, fill you in on how other stories you learned at Church are BS, and help you transition to your new existence on a higher plane, where you will develop the following opinions and attitudes."
Back to you regularly scheduled Rosebud now...
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."
—B. Redd McConkie
