When I was maybe thirteen or fourteen, I learned in Sunday School that 1 in 5 youth end up leaving the church. My sevenish classmates and I were all silent and still as statues but I know every single one of us was internally side-eying each other and placing bets on who would be the one(s) to leave.
The point of the lesson was to encourage us all to stay, of course. I figure in some roundabout way, the teacher thought that hearing the statistic would be motivating. For me, I guess it was - I have a competitive streak that reacts to concepts like “sticking it out” and “beating the odds” - but at that point in my life, I didn’t need any extra motivation to stay in the church. Also, no one would have bet on my being the one to leave.
I’m a very internally motivated person, which made me a successful student, both secularly and religiously. I had an answer to every question and knew the details of every Book of Mormon story. I could recite all the articles of faith (without having to sing the stupid songs), spell Amalickiah and Teancum off the top of my head, and had verses upon verses of scripture memorized. I could play every hymn in the hymnal on the piano, a lot of them on the organ, and could sing them like an angel.
Aside from my motivation to be the best at everything, I was very focused on being ahead of the curve, being the first to do everything. So I got my patriarchal blessing when I was twelve years old, younger than anyone I knew had received theirs.
For years, it was deeply satisfying and validating to me to know “the gospel” so intimately, and to be so good at living it. My sense of self-worth was completely performance-based and so I felt the best I felt anywhere when I was either at church or engaged in things the church encouraged (e.g. anything from sewing lessons and practicing my piano scales to writing talks and saying my daily prayers).
Underneath all this, I was incredibly anxious, and increasingly depressed.
There’s this thing that happens when you become really high achieving. Very quickly the normal standards stop applying to you. Once you score “Exceeds Expectations” enough times, it becomes your baseline. The pressure to continue to perform well mounts with every A, with every right answer, with every “thoughtful comment” at church. Maintaining this new baseline is stressful. You know that any toe out of line could bring it all down. Then you become unable to exceed expectations because people’s expectations - your own expectations - are suddenly much higher. Too high. You can never impress people anymore because they are already expecting it.
In the context of religion, this meant that the more perfect I was at obeying God’s word, the more perfect I felt I had to be, the more humble I felt I had to be, and the more self-loathing I became. I read my scriptures every day, but that wasn’t enough. I would read two times a day, and I would listen to conference talks while I got ready in the morning, or while riding the bus or walking to school. I never actually went so far as to cut secular music and media out of my life, but I had more than idle thoughts about doing so. At some point I stopped having “non-member” friends, and I helped organize scripture study groups and temple trips with “member” friends. Basically, if there was a Mormon equivalent to a nunnery, and if it was accessible to eighteen year olds, I would’ve camped out on their lawn the night before my eighteenth birthday and knocked on their door at 12:00:00 midnight to be let in and given a wimple.
I didn't so much as hear the term “religious scrupulosity” until my late teens, but as soon as I did, I knew it was what I had. The primary motivation for religious scrupulosity is anxiety or fear, and I was terrified of what God could do to me and my life, whether as punishment for my sins or to humble my pride, or because, as I outlined above, I had exceeded his expectations too many times and he needed me to prove myself even further. God gives his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers and all that. Part of me believed I could earn God’s love and protection through perfect obedience, but part of me believed he would give me awful trials (here my imagination ran wild about what sorts of trials) regardless of what I did or didn’t do for him. In any case, I believed I needed perfect obedience and perfect faith in order to be saved and taken to heaven, earthly life be damned. So I kept doing everything and prayed to God it would be enough to at least lift the fog of depression and anxiety that I was living under.
In lieu of a nunnery, and since it didn’t open at midnight, I went to the temple at 5:00:00 on the evening of my eighteenth birthday, got my endowment, and donned knee length jorts for the rest of the summer - which, to be honest, I had been wearing for as long as I’d been dressing myself anyway. The next step on my hallowed to-do list was find myself a husband and have about six to ten children.
So I went where all good Mormon girls go - BYU. And since I was not just a good Mormon girl but a smart and lucky one, I got into BYU-Provo, college of the forefathers, college of my own goodly parents.
And then everything fell apart. Covid-19 ripped away my junior and then senior year, and all the hopes and dreams that had been associated with them. My parents uprooted the family and moved us to small-town Idaho, two months shy of my high school graduation. My boyfriend left on a mission and broke up with me. I moved to Provo and muddled through the usual freshman-in-college challenges while also laboring under the continuously growing weight of mental health struggles.
To make a long story shorter, about two years after I was first dropped off at BYU, I dropped out and moved to live with my parents. At this point I had long been uncomfortable at church but I hadn’t fully unpacked what was going on beneath the surface. As a college dropout, since I had nothing more urgent to do, my principal occupation became deconstruction. And like school and church and every job up until that point, I attended to it with fervor.
My deconstruction is so multi-faceted it would be a disco ball if you hung it in the light, but the crucial thing to understand is that it wasn’t just about God, or just about the church. It was two fold, like a rope that was gradually unwinding; as I lost faith in one, I lost faith in the other.
My whole life I was taught to choose to believe, and that if I so much as wanted to have faith in God, that meant I did, in fact, have faith. But in reality, I don’t think it’s possible to choose our beliefs. I tried and tried to make myself believe the God of my childhood was still there, and I just couldn't - not with all the new evidence to the contrary. And on the other hand, I had no reason to want to believe that there wasn’t a God, and yet that’s where I ended up. It wasn’t a choice, it was a logical conclusion, a culmination of all the thoughts and experiences I had over a lifetime, and over the last few years in particular.
It was exhausting to say the least, and pointless, to try to convince myself I knew things I didn’t, believed things I didn’t. So I don’t force it anymore. I don’t feel like I have to cling to old beliefs when I outgrow them. I have space to change my mind, and to let new evidence, new experiences teach me. I’m more open to learning from other people and I’m less afraid of the world. I’m more curious about other religions outside of Christianity. I find the questions of why we’re here, where we’re going, and where we came from much more interesting because I don’t consider the answers to be obvious or concrete. I feel so much more kinship with other people, and with nature, now that I don’t consider myself to be part of a chosen people, on God’s errand.
I know deep in my bones that the church - and more broadly, religion - is not the right place for me.
And yet - I’m still processing how something that wounded my inner child can also have provided a good community to grow up in. Something that taught me that I am a child of God can also have stunted my individuality. Something that crushed my self-esteem can also have bolstered it, for years. Something that cut me off from some peers also gave me some of my deepest friendships with others. There’s a two-edged, flaming sword in all of it, and as much as I want to believe the church is all bad (it would be so much simpler and easier to process if it was) I just can’t. I don’t. I don’t believe the church is all bad.
Again and again, I think back to that class of thirteen- or fourteen-year-olds trying not to look at each other, wondering who will be “the one” to leave, and I don’t know how to feel, because no one has left like I have. Among those seven or so now-twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds, four have served missions, and one has already been married in the temple. But after the life I’ve had so far, at this point I know not to assume what their inner experiences are like. In what ways were their spiritual lives similar to mine? Dissimilar? Are there topics they wished they could discuss honestly, in depth? What would it have been like if we had felt free to talk about everything? I know I still needed to end up where I am, but I will never claim that my destination is everyone’s tree of life. Lydia and I have so many thoughts and hopes about what this blog could be, but I think she’d agree with me that our broadest goal is for people from all journeys, all destinations, to feel comfortable here. Please, feel free to join us. This isn’t Sunday School.
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