Once I decided that I no longer desired to be affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I made an effort to separate myself from the Church. The closest connection I had to the Church was playing for the church basketball team during the winter months.
I wanted others to see me as being “outside” the Church. For whatever reason (likely a narcissistic desire for attention) I have always enjoyed feeling like the minority. Perhaps this is why I have enjoyed living abroad. In a very non-diverse, nearly 100% Mormon community, being the kid who didn’t go to Church and wasn’t afraid to admit it made me different.
Ironically, despite my public separation from Mormonism, it was during this period away from the Church that I sincerely began to really ponder religion in my own life; not simply Mormonism in particular, but the big questions about life. Who am I? Who are we? Why are we here? What does it mean?
Most of my religious knowledge was based in Mormonism, though I began to develop beliefs that such specific dogmas, particularly those based on extraordinary stories recounted in scripture, were largely fantasy, if not altogether ridiculous. Other religions were no different than Mormonism in this regard. I didn’t believe that Joseph Smith had experienced all that he claimed, but I accepted that no less than say, the stories of Noah, Adam and Eve, or the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
But thoughts like these didn’t dominate my mental exercises. I spent a lot more time trying to discern and understand the behaviors of others. With my peers beginning to discover their own faith around me, some more so than others, I was faced with the idea of explaining to myself why some believed so fervently, others so latently, and others who went out of their way to counter-act the dominant faith.
I was asked by others on many occasions to come to church. Though I hated confronting the awkwardness of telling them no, I relished the fact that it gave me an opportunity to show how I was different in some way. Beyond just telling them no, I would give them a reason why I chose not to go to church. They weren’t based on sophisticated anti-religious arguments, and they were never blatantly negative or anti-Mormon, but they were enough to kill any assumptions my peers might have had about the way all others ought to view religion, and they would seldom invite me to church again.
Other thoughts concerning religion would frequently cross my mind. While I wasn’t sure I believed in the existence of God, I thought that certainly there had to be something beyond this life. How could a person die and have that energy, which constitutes their life, suddenly cease to exist? I wasn’t sure what I thought, but I believed that something of who we are would continue to exist forever.
Another frequent topic of thought involved making plans for what I thought could eventually be my own “religion” when I got older. In my mind, it consisted of a group of friends getting together once a week or so, and discussing the needs of others in the world or the community, something akin to the philosophical societies we often read about from the youths of great thinkers, such as Ben Franklin and his Junto.
According to imagined rules of my future religion, the group would gather, discuss, and plan in an organized fashion. The plans would be flawless, and implementation would go perfectly. It would not be necessary to add God in the picture, though a belief in a supreme being would be something left to the members of the society to decide. There would be very little theology, even minimal philosophy, but more social interaction, problem solving, and positive personal change to the individual, the group, and the surrounding community. To me, this is what I thought "organized religion" should be.
In subsequent years I have actually had the privilege to attend groups which are similar to what I had imagined in my youth. Unfortunately, I have been largely unimpressed. Most of what I have seen in such groups involve young people who gather, complain about what they see wrong with their society, and then congratulate one another on being smarter than the rest in their community, while never actually getting around to doing anything substantial.
Very little real structure accompanied these imaginations, but they did exist. It was an ongoing battle between idealism and realism with the meaning of life thrown into the mix. Perhaps those very thoughts were some of the first seeds that eventually led to my choice of a career in international development, hoping to work together with others to solve the problems of the world by implementing working solutions. Though I failed to realize even a fraction of the magnitude of what the world really held at the time, all the same, it felt right. To me, it felt “righteous.”
All in all, this was a time in my life where I was left with a complete lack of desire to participate in any existing organized religion. In fact, I honestly believed that the time was coming when organized religion, in the traditional sense, would wholly cease to exist on the earth, and that we would be completely content to rely on our own selves and strengths to answer the questions before us.
I rarely discussed these ideas with others, and when I did, it was very cautiously, more speculative than authoritative. I didn’t realize at the time that there were many out there who also held these same types of views. While subsequent life experiences have obviously altered these views, I feel I understand quite well how many are led to believe that God does not exist and how organized religion should be seen as a negative byproduct of humanity. The arguments are quite convincing, and on the surface, seem completely logical.
Nevertheless, I believe going through this line of thinking eventually helped me approach religion in a much more honest and straightforward way as I went through the experiences which I cumulatively view as my conversion to Mormonism.
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