Religious Transition

I wrote this a year and a quarter ago, and have been sitting on it since. This has turned out to be substantially harder than I anticipated, and I always thought it would be really, really hard.

Friends, Family, Acquaintances,

In brief: I'm joining Unitarian Universalism, and so necessarily leaving the LDS Church.

Details below, for those interested.

Mormonism has always been a core part of my identity. I'm an 8th generation Mormon. I served a full-time, 2-year mission away from home for the LDS Church, and have served in many church callings throughout my life.

The LDS Church has added immeasurable value to my life. 

As a child, my ward (congregation) was there for me when my parents divorced. They mentored me. They provided me with a core group of friends, and with a framework to find meaning in the chaos. 

My mission taught me lessons that prepared me for the rest of my life, and leadership opportunities that stretched this shy introvert. 

As my mother's health deteriorated during and after my mission, our ward stepped up, turning her attic of rafters and cobwebs into a fully finished area of the house with bedrooms and a full bath. This allowed my mom to rent out her basement, giving her income when her health prevented her from working.

My wife and I married in an LDS temple, and as a young couple still in college, found joy and belonging in a married student ward. In that ward I was again given leadership callings. I'm not a natural born leader. I never would have sought leadership positions, but the structure of the LDS Church pushed me into them. These positions called on me to develop and grow in new and meaningful ways.

When my mom died, that same student ward as well as my mom's ward (which I still thought of as my home ward) were a rock of support. They were a community for me to mourn with, and with whom I could be vulnerable. Once again, ward members, this time from my student ward, were in my mom's house, pulling down old wallpaper, painting, hanging sheet rock, getting the house ready to sell.

Weeks later it was ward members who showed up to my and my wife's apartment to help us pack up and head off to graduate school. My home teacher (assigned lay individual minister) didn't go the extra mile. He went the extra fifteen hundred miles, driving with me and all of my little family's earthly possessions from Northern Utah to Houston, Texas.

I could go on about how the LDS Church has blessed me substantively over the subsequent years, but I think you get the idea.

I didn't only find community and material blessings in the LDS Church. I found meaning in Mormon ways of looking at the world and my place in it. I found my preconceptions and biases challenged. I found inspiration in scripture and the words of leaders. I found peace in the rituals, from the simple daily ones, to the rites of passage, to (most meaningfully of all) my wedding to my wife.

I've deliberately focused on the good in my above description. I'm not trying to skew the true picture toward the positive to give a lopsided view of reality. Rather, I'm trying to reflect the fact that my view of Mormonism, and my life in Mormonism is overwhelmingly positive. That's my own experience, and even people close to me will have had very different ones. In any case, I'm not interested in airing grievances here.

Given all of that, why would I leave the LDS Church? I don't want to go into specifics. If you'd like to talk more with me personally about it, I'm open to that. But let me say that I don't have a clean bullet-point list of logical reasons for leaving. One thing you might do to understand the mindset is pick up Joanna Brooks' "The Book of Mormon Girl." When I first read that I thought "this is the type of Mormon I've always been." Then pick up a book on Unitarian Universalism, such as "100 Questions That Non-Members Ask About Unitarian Universalism," and try to climb into the skin of someone who has been looking for the answers you see there for a long time.

Suffice it to say that I have a deep and heartfelt need for a new religious community, and a bright hope that I've found a church that can fulfill that need. This has been a very long time in coming, and I've taken a deliberately slow and thoughtful approach to making the transition. 

Frankly, it absolutely breaks my heart to be leaving the church I grew up in.

I've found a new community that I hope will continue to add value and meaning to my life, and call on me to stretch and grow in new ways. Below I list some of the things I hope to find in my new faith.

-A church that my family can feel comfortable attending together.

-A religion whose avowed values are consonant with my own, and that accepts my beliefs, and disbeliefs.

-A moral community from which to draw the strength to engage in those ethical struggles of our world that hold meaning for me.

I hope that Unitarian Universalism will be as positive a force in my life as Mormonism has been. I realize that's a very tall demand for me to make.

Finally, I hope that I've added to the Mormon community even a modicum of the value that it has added to me. I hope I can do similarly for the Unitarian Universalist community.

With love,

Jamie