Driven out of the church

"If you can bring me one student whose faith I have injured in Mormonism, I will bring you five that you, through your narrowness, have driven out of the church."

-Ralph Chamberlain, responding to accusations that his teachings on evolution were undermining the faith of students at the fledgling Brigham Young University. February, 1911. From Bergera, Gary James. "The 1911 Evolution Controversy at Brigham Young University"

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When I was in seventh or eighth grade, I picked up my father's copy of The Origin of Species and started to read. Darwin's carefully described theory and evidences were good nourishment for a young mind having aspirations to science. To this day, I have not read another book being primarily directed to advancing a scientific subject which I also consider to be passably good literature. A year or so after reading Darwin, I moved on to Dostoevsky.

Because of the religious influences to which I had been subjected growing up in a conservative (and frequently poorly educated) community in semi-rural Utah, reading The Origin of Species carried with it a lingering feeling in my mind that somehow I was dabbling in things of questionable spiritual fidelity. In one of my few clear memories of that time in my life, I remember bringing up my concerns with my father, a man who combined scientific discipline, great spirituality, and Mormon church ministerial bona fides (he had served as our congregation's bishop and later as counselor to the larger community's "stake presidency"). Myself, I had already held some positions appropriate for my age in our ward, serving as a leader in the deacon's and teacher's quorums, primarily overseeing the preparation and distribution of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper at our weekly Sunday services. I don't know how I would have reacted had my father condemned evolution.

He didn't. Instead, my father simply explained to me his belief that nothing in The Origin of Species or our modern understanding of evolution need conflict with any teaching of the gospel. As well as I knew my father, I confess I was still relieved to hear him calmly lay out how Darwin posed no threat to his faith, nor should evolution pose any threat to mine.

As I began my subsequent studies in Dante and Cervantes and other subjects appropriate for a high school freshman, the more conservative side of Mormonism also confronted me. At my father's urging, and to conform to the social mores at the time, I enrolled in daily "Released Time," or, more informally known, Seminary. Seminary is the Mormon attempt to inculcate religious teachings into young minds attending public schools and therefore potentially vulnerable to unchecked secularism. In reality, Seminary is a class where paid Mormon ministers act outside the church's regular priesthood authority to add onto what local lay leaders teach on Sundays and at once a week Mutual Improvement Association evening activities. My freshman year Seminary text was the Old Testament, and early on the subject of evolution came up. In all piety and seriousness, the teacher warned us against evolution, pointing dutifully to scriptures whose only true interpretation, they claimed, taught that the earth was less than seven thousand years old, that man was literally created by the hand of God out of the dust of the earth, and that the evolution of life on the earth was a heresy and in conflict with the revealed word of the Almighty.

I didn't believe it.

In the years that followed, I learned to put up with the conservative nonsense I heard in Seminary and, occasionally, during Sunday church meetings. I would shake my head at the latest news of professors fired from BYU and intellectuals disfellowshipped and excommunicated from the church, but I would continue to attend the church in which I was raised, confident in my own faith and the faith of my father. Local leaders would then reward my faithfulness with assignments to teach Sunday School and minister to the youth and to the larger congregations. At one point, the president of the branch I attended during law school recommended that I serve as the president of the quorum of elders in our branch, a position whose time demands distracted me from my studies but, like past callings of leadership and trust, also brought me a sense of spiritual and social fulfillment. After all, rather than having to put up with conservative interpretations of scripture with which I didn't agree, I could advance my own interpretations, or simply lead open discussions where different viewpoints were accepted without charges of blasphemy or other ludicrous epithets.

I'm thirty one years old now, almost thirty two. I can't say how many of my friends have stopped attending the Mormon church in which we were raised, but the number isn't small. The most recent exodus occurred in connection with the narrow bigotry advanced by the church's professional ministers in the Quorum of the Twelve and First Presidency during the California Proposition 8 campaign. For the better part of the year leading up to that campaign, I had been attending church sporadically. Shortly after viewing a recording online in which David Bednar warned against the rising intolerance against "us" should we allow ourselves to vote for expanded rights for others, I stopped attending church services altogether and largely withdrew from "the fellowship of the Saints." It's been four months now since I have attended any formal church service, and over five since I have partaken with any congregation in the body and blood of Jesus.

The suggestion that I have withdrawn because of the intolerance of some in the church toward evolution would offend me. Likewise, I have taken great offense at the suggestion from my own father, no less, that I have withdrawn as a result of my studies (and the associated stonewalling from the LDS Church Archives) into my family history (which has revealed, among other things, the forced polygamous marriage and rape at age thirteen of one of my ancestors by her bishop). The church's history of bigotry toward black men and women, dominance and misogyny toward women generally, and our role in the historical and current demeaning and persecution of our gay brothers and sisters dismay and pain me, but never before caused me to "leave the church" as they say in the bishop's and stake councils that meet to discus the welfare of the souls they believe to be entrusted to them. Even the persecution of sexuality in the ranks of the otherwise faithful, the sentences of formal and informal probation and disfellowshipment laid down against young people who, carried away in the normal throws of healthy hormonal imperatives, dare to take steps toward the simulated or actual performance of reproductive action, never before now caused me to leave. No, none of those things alone, by themselves, pushed me out of the church in thirty years of adherence.

It is rather the cumulative affect of narrowness in the church that has finally driven me out. In the zeal of protecting the faith of the vulnerable, in guarding the good name of the church, and in the cause of saving souls, it is the narrowness of the fallible, closed minds of those who style themselves prophets, bishops, and high priests of the Most High, that drives out me and people like me, in masses that exceed five-fold and more those who stay within the fold of the ignorant and the obtuse.

My father continues in his loyalty to the church in which he raised me, serving now, as he has for years, as a member of the high council in our stake. My mother attends the meetings of our local congregation, usually alone, though, increasingly, she comes home early, frustrated with the same nescience and bold witlessness which keeps me from even making a show of attendance anymore. Without legitimizing that which I believe to be in error, it is nevertheless a difficult situation.

My mother speaks of how my father, at about my age, had largely stopped attending church. He didn't go to meetings, choosing to advance his career and personal interests and to enjoy the company of his family of "non-members" in preference to the religious tradition with which he had affiliated himself as a young man. Then came the invitation and pleading of an old farmer who didn't know any better than to simply love goodness, and dad started to attend meetings again. In short order, he found acceptance, won respect (and a few distractors), and has never left. Perhaps I'll walk that path, too.

Until, however, I feel that free, open love of goodness, rather than the fanatical zeal of narrowness, is the dominant force in the church, I cannot be a part of it. I'll eat my bread and drink my wine with the publicans, preferring the company of sinners to the hypocrisy of the synagogue.