Why Ex-Mormonism Isn't "True"

(And Mormonism Isn't Either)

I guess I was corrupted in graduate school, just like they said would happen. I stopped believing in “truth.” I don’t believe in “science” (read Thomas Kuehn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolution too long ago). My “faith crisis” was more of a drop off a cliff into the final relativism: disbelief in God. But unlike many ex-Mormons or post-Mormons, I haven’t found myself believing in any new “truth system.” I don’t make many friends when I say that I have the same problems with science as I do with Mormonism and other religions. No, I didn’t decovert from Mormonism to convert to science.

Let me explain. Science has all the same structural problems that I see in Mormonism: sexism, racism, etc. There’s a long history of women and minorities having their work stolen by those in power. Science as an institution is about power and retaining power structures. You may think it’s about the “scientific method,” but the problem with that method is that no one can see what the results of the scientific method actually are until hundreds of years later when other people look at them and are no longer blinded by their need to adhere to the power structure. And even then, I have my doubts.

I didn’t leave Mormonism because I “saw the truth,” which is that Joseph Smith was a pedophile and Brigham Young was a racist and the entire institution rests on a bed of lies. All of those things may be true, but they are also true of many other institutions, like science. Like America itself as a country.

I didn’t leave Mormonism because I suddenly saw that I had been lied to all my life. Oh, I had been lied to all my life. But not necessarily intentionally. Some people may have lied intentionally, but mostly people taught me what they believed, just like they did in school. The problem is that no one can see any such thing as “the truth” because there isn’t any such thing for humans. It’s impossible for us, with our many blinders and prejudices, to see “facts” as things in themselves.

In my experience people who insist that they know THE TRUTH and that they can tell you what it is, that they can filter it for you, are either not very sophisticated in their understanding of what TRUTH is (this applies to many, many Mormons, even those in leadership) or they are trying to sell you something. Often both of these things. TRUTH doesn’t exist in that way. It’s not a commodity you can sell or trade. It isn’t something a human can possess.

Even if we could see “reality,” I’m not sure that would matter. It would be a bit like the descriptions of seeing God in scriptures, like you have to be transformed into something other than human in order to endure a brush with such things as “real facts.” And by the time you come back to yourself, to your humanness, with your human language, anything you actually saw, will be turned back into falseness. It’s like a dream, where sure, in a dream, you see images. But they make no sense until you wake and start making them into a story.

Humans make everything into stories. That’s how we interpret the world. It’s impossible for us to not do that. So, did I leave Mormonism because I found out “the truth.? No, I left because I saw it was harmful and I didn’t want to take part in that harm anymore. Unfortunately, nothing else I’ve been involved in seems that much better. I wish it did. But again, we’re humans. We fuck up everything. We are incapable of not messing things up because that’s how we are.

I feel like my art is my best attempt to do something good in the world, but I’m also not blinded by the reality that the institution of art (and especially the sausage-making of “classics” and “genius” and “masterpieces”) is highly suspect and as racist and sexist as anything else. Does anyone really think the reason that all the “classics” taught in school and sold at great value mean that only cis, white men can produce art for some reason? Or even that only they had the time and training to do so? Because I don’t.

I’m doing my best, but I don’t necessarily think I’m doing better than your average Mormon. I just moved from one framework to another. I don’t particularly wish for other Mormons to “know the truth.” It makes me sad that most of them think I’m evil and dangerous and won’t talk to me anymore, but on the other hand, it’s hard for me to talk to them. It’s worse than a language barrier because they use the same words I use, but they can’t hear what I mean when I say those words in a different way. It’s impossible to translate across that kind of chasm.