Some tidbits from the article:When Christian Kimball was a young man, he checked every Mormon box: mission, temple marriage, leadership callings, a successful career. As a grandson of LDS prophet Spencer W. Kimball, he had a family legacy that was fully intertwined with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But in the 1990s, when Christian was serving as a bishop in Massachusetts, his faith started to fall apart.
Not his faith in God — his faith in the system. As a bishop, he did several hundred temple recommend interviews, and came to feel that the questions he was supposed to ask church members to ascertain their “worthiness” didn’t measure the most important things. And although the church had taught him that as bishop, he would have special access to the Spirit and be able to answer members’ most challenging questions and problems, he found he seldom had inspired answers, so he felt like he was participating in a fraudulent system.
Q: One of the main pieces of advice in your survival guide is to get rid of magical thinking. What do you mean by that?
A: In essence it’s a matter of certainty: My prayer will be answered, the miracle will occur. Certainty is the key. At age 5 I got glasses and I hated them. A few years after that, when I was about 8, I had an opportunity to be in Salt Lake City during General Conference. My grandfather was an apostle at that time. He told me he could arrange for me to meet President David O. McKay after Conference. I remember very clearly thinking about the woman in the Gospels who touched the hem of Jesus’ cloak and was healed. I believed that if I shook President McKay’s hand, my eyesight would be better. I did shake his hand but my eyesight did not change. I had believed so much that it would work. That’s an 8-year-old’s thought, and a theme of the book is that we have to get out of childish thinking and have a more adult attitude.
- A fairly substantial percentage of those people just leave, some will turn back and say, “This is awful, but I still have family, or I still have a testimony, or this is still my community.”
- One option to stay in the church is refuse to get a temple recommend. Simply take worthiness interviews off the table and never have to do them again.
- Another option is to deal with the bishop like an adult. We have a culture in which the bishop sits on a pedestal and is accorded the wisdom of the ages — a father figure who is thought to have God whispering in his ear the whole time. You can deal with the bishop as an adult, asking him what you need to ask him, but not giving him the status of the oracle who knows more about your life than you do.
- My audience is people who have had some kind of break or faith crisis, which can happen dozens of ways. It could be the way the church has excluded gay people, or that it has $100 billion sitting in an account, or that the Book of Abraham doesn’t work.
https://religionnews.com/2023/01/18/how ... -you-want/