I have been a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints all of my life (although, technically, I only became a "member" when my father baptized me shortly after my eighth birthday in 1967). I am a fifth-generation member on both sides of my family and thus have a rich pioneer heritage. On my father's side, my third-great grandfather Jefferson Hunt was a high-ranking officer in the Mormon Battalion, and his son, my great-great grandfather John Hunt, accompanied him, with the rest of his family, on the Battalion's famous overland trek from Iowa to California during the Mexican-American War. (John later served for 31 years as bishop of the S______, Arizona Ward -- and shortly after his death, my father was born and raised in S_______.) Another of my paternal great-great grandfathers, William Decatur Kartchner, left a vivid account of meeting Joseph Smith shortly after joining the church, just prior to the latter's assassination in 1844. It is reported that William developed the rheumatoid arthritis that plagued his entire adult life as a result of standing guard over the Nauvoo Temple during many a cold winter night. (He was later part of the advance party settling a number of Mormon colonies, ultimately ending up in S_______ along with John Hunt. When the church authorities called him to make this last move, he could barely rise from his sickbed, but do so he did, declaring that he might die on the journey, but that he would fall facing Arizona.) On my mother's side, my third-great grandfather Welcome Chapman Sr. and my great-great grandfather Welcome Chapman Jr. were stonecutters who, between them, were involved in the construction of the Nauvoo, Salt Lake, and Manti LDS temples. (Welcome Jr. later helped to settle S_______, Arizona, the town where my mother was born and raised.) Life on the frontier in budding Mormon settlements was hard, and all of my forbears suffered great privations for the church to which they had pledged their all, which in turn makes me feel very humbled.Next, Mormon church doctrine has always had a certain intellectual and intuitive appeal for me, historical oddities notwithstanding (such as polygamy, "blood atonement," and the pre-1978 policy of barring blacks from the priesthood and temple blessings). In short, the Plan of Salvation, with its ultimate end of making gods of the children of God -- thus making them, literally, heirs of all that God has -- seems logical and desirable to me.
Finally, the LDS church is the tie that binds my marriage and family together. My wife is as faithful a Mormon as there is, and the influence of the church, with its high standards of personal comportment, has ultimately made all of my children much-better people than they otherwise might have been. Moreover, all of my closest friends, such as they are, are members of the church, and it is the church that I have most in common with them.
So, given all of the foregoing, why do I continually dwell on the margins of church membership, and why do I view the church as the number-one oppressor in a life that is woefully short of fulfillment and self-actualization? These are questions that do not bear easy answers, but I'll start by making a comparison to my short-lived career as a lawyer in 1989-92. As an intellectual pursuit, the law fascinated me (even though, socially speaking, I fit in not at all at the University of New Mexico School of Law, a hotbed of radical -- and radically boneheaded -- legal philosophy). However, I found that there were profound differences between studying law and practicing it. Whereas I always felt like I had the necessary mental faculties to be a successful lawyer (I graduated in the top 20% of my class and scored at the 93rd percentile on the Multistate Bar Exam, despite inexplicably scoring low in Criminal Law, which had been the area in which I'd consistently scored the highest on all my practice exams), I simply did not have the requisite ego and combative temperament. Some people who know me (but not well) might not credit this notion, but I simply didn't have it in me to be a big-enough jerk to be a lawyer, and thus I got off the lawyering highway at the first exit I came to, which landed me on the administrative side of the house at Sandia National Laboratories. (In many ways, Sandia is now my second-biggest oppressor, but that's a topic for another day.)
Similarly, I've persistently found that being Mormon in theory is significantly different from being Mormon in practice -- and ironically enough, I think this phenomenon has its roots in basic Mormon doctrine. Unlike other Christian faiths (and don't get me going about Mormons not being Christians -- only the most blinkered of fools can believe that), the LDS church believes that men must, to a point, work out their own salvation with good works, and that the grace inherent in Christ's Atonement will, in effect, make up the difference only "after all we can do." (Cf. 2 Nephi 25:23.) I've had numerous conversations with church members about this point of doctrine, and they seem to agree uniformly (a) that it is not meant to be taken literally (or, at least, that continual repentance is itself an integral part of "all we can do"), and (b) that, sadly, we as a church tend strongly to under-emphasize the importance of grace in the scheme of things.
However, I gave a lesson in priesthood meeting a few years ago that left me a little disillusioned: Harold B. Lee, a president of the church in the 1970s, closely analogized our mortal probation here on Earth to the abortive Apollo 13 moon mission, in which the three American astronauts had to follow each instruction from Mission Control in Houston implicitly in order to find their way home. I remember thinking, "Man, if the margin between spiritual life and death is that thin, what chance do I have?" (Now, President Lee appears to have been a rather doctrinaire fellow -- I don't think it's any coincidence that he was the last president of the church to whom it didn't seem to occur that the church would become an absolute pariah in the coming years if it didn't change its policies regarding people of black African descent -- but his teachings, together with the fact that the church republished pertinent portions of that particular address in a recent priesthood lesson manual, do shed some light on what we're supposed to surmise from this "after all we can do" business.) This view not only makes the standard impossible to ascertain -- who has ever done all the righteous works he possibly could, and how would he know when he had done that? -- but naturally makes it a moving goal line.
Compounding my self-doubt is the fact that Mormons don't believe either in the Protestant notion of being "saved" (and being assured of going to heaven) simply by accepting Christ as one's personal savior, or in the Catholic doctrine of absolution via confession and penance, under which a sin, once absolved, is forever removed. Rather, Mormons believe that even if one repents of a sin (and is thereby granted forgiveness through the Atonement of Christ), if he commits that sin again, the full weight of all prior instances of it falls back on his head. In a very real sense, then, Mormons believe only in a sort of conditional repentance, which is dependent on permanent change. It almost goes without saying that I have minor personal flaws that make it seem pointless even to think about repenting of same: why waste all that effort if I'm simply going to fall back in the same rut with nothing to show for it?
One effect of all this emphasis on perfecting oneself is to cause members of the church constantly, if subconsciously, to gauge their own standing before God by drawing comparisons between themselves and other members. To the extent I've engaged in this odious exercise, not only have I viewed myself as lacking in the balance, as it were, but I've found myself not wanting to be like other church members; in fact, I've wished a thousand times that I didn't have to associate with many of them. (The odd thing is that whereas I have few problems with individual members of the church -- would that the reciprocal were true -- I've concluded that, taken as a group, Mormons are extremely judgmental, self-seeking, and uncharitable.) Consequently, I'm not the good, quick-to-be-of-service person in practice that I am at heart, and I have tremendous difficulty making more than a desultory effort to fulfill church assignments and callings (although I do take some small comfort, even living on the periphery, in the fact that I care more about most other church members than they care about me).
The term "social Mormon" is one that gets tossed around a lot; it refers to a person who has concluded that the church isn't true, but who remains an active member for the fellowship and social aspects of membership. In that light, I guess you could call me an "anti-social" Mormon: I'm far from having concluded that the church isn't true (although I'm constantly reminded of Christ's admonition that "by their fruits ye shall know them"), but I remain active in spite of the social aspects of membership, which, to put it mildly, I find less-than-rewarding. My contributions are so meager that I sometimes feel like the widow casting in her two mites (even if it isn't obvious to others that it's all I have to give); however, that which I do, I do for the sake of my wife, my children, and my mother.
In all my life, the church as an institution has rarely made me feel anything but bad about myself; most members would say that reflects more on me than on the church, but I'm far from being alone in that regard. What makes me somewhat unique is the fact that I attend church despite it all, still trying to find outside sources of personal fulfillment in order to compensate for the psychic harm that church membership does to me, and still with increasingly dismal results.
