It gets better: Navigating a mixed-faith Mormon marriage

I gave the following talk at a Mormon Stories conference yesterday here in Houston. Since I haven't posted anything detailed on how I left Mormonism, I thought that some of you might appreciate reading this. The talk was recorded, and the live version is available here.

I’d like to begin with two disclaimers.

First, while I’m the one standing up here and telling the story — and while I’m certainly telling it from my perspective — this is our story. It's a story of how I left Mormonism, how Amanda has remained an active member, and how our relationship has survived in spite of our differences. It’s a story about both of us, in other words. It’s too bad that there isn’t time for both of us to tell our sides of it, and I find it a bit anti-feminist — especially for Mormon Stories! — that I’m the one up here. But here we are. The consolation prize is that we get to break the usual Sacrament Meeting convention: Here it’s the husband who has to introduce the family to the new ward, not the wife!

Second, I don’t want anyone to think we have marriage advice to give out. We know we got off easy: we’re young, we have no kids, and our situation is much less complex than many others'. All I can do is to tell what we’ve been through and to share a few insights that we’ve gleaned along the way. The predictive value of our experiences, or the applicability of our insights to individual circumstances, I’m simply not willing to claim.

With those out of the way, let me lay out my thesis: Stable, healthy marriages between active Mormons and ex-Mormons are possible. New apostates often feel like the only way to save their marriage is to deconvert their spouse. I believe this to be a largely false and harmful idea. I also believe that the shift in worldview that often accompanies a faith crisis gives the apostate two insights that can help stabilize a mixed-faith marriage. One, belief doesn’t have much to do with intelligence. Two, belief doesn’t have much to do with morality.

By Mormon standards, my upbringing was pretty ordinary. I was born in Tacoma, Washington, to parents of pioneer ancestry. Dad worked in business while Mom stayed home with the five kids. We were loyal Republicans. I hit all the usual milestones. I was baptized at 8, ordained to the Aaronic priesthood at 12, and at 18 I graduated from high school and was shipped off to BYU, where I picked a safe, marketable major. After my freshman year, I put in my papers and was called to the Australia Perth Mission.

I had always believed in Mormonism, and I felt like it held together logically. But I also subscribed to the Mormon epistemology that I could know — through unmistakeable spiritual witness — that it was True. And I’d never had such a witness. So while I left for my mission not “knowing” if the Church was true, I had every expectation of receiving a witness while teaching the gospel. I was not disappointed. In the early months of my mission, during a small handful of our very rare opportunities to teach, I experienced a profound, naked human connection as we testified of the gospel and as our testimonies were received. Even now, as an unbeliever and a thoroughgoing materialist, I consider these experiences meaningful and even transcendental. As an idealistic young missionary hungry for spiritual validation, I considered them an indisputable manifestation of the Holy Spirit. I completed my mission and returned to BYU confident that I knew, not merely believed, and that my faith would endure for the rest of my life.

I was wrong. In fact, my faith endured for only a few years. My faith started its transition as I worked on my master’s degree. I was still at BYU, and I wasn’t studying anything that would challenge a testimony, but the transition from undergraduate study to graduate work has a way of forcing self-skepticism on a person. And that’s because research is difficult and unstructured. Suddenly, instead of being the guy who can master difficult concepts and solve problems on exams, I was the guy suggesting wrong-headed solutions to research problems. I went from being very rarely wrong in my area of expertise to being wrong every single day. And I came to learn that this was perfectly normal. Being wrong was part of the program. The first of my two insights began to set in: When the questions are hard, even smart people are wrong all the time. Belief has little to do with intelligence.

Around this time I met Amanda. Her upbringing was less stereotypically Mormon than mine. She grew up in Dallas. Her parents had converted to Mormonism in the mid 70s. By Mormon standards they were politically left-of-center. In their household, belief in evolution did not contradict belief in Mormonism. Gays and lesbians were regarded as good, decent people, and although you might share an honest difference of opinion with them there was no reason to condemn or avoid them. It was still an orthodox Mormon home, both in terms of belief and practice, but it was less rigid than that of many of her peers.

When Amanda and I met, she had just finished her degree at BYU in anthropology. Our first meeting, a chance encounter by the apartment complex pool, got off to an auspicious start. I made some jokes, she laughed at those jokes, and we discussed our academic aspirations. I got her phone number, asked her out, and for the next two years we dated off and on. Around the time I was finishing my master’s degree we began to talk seriously about marriage.

In the meantime, my self-skepticism had put down deep roots. As I realized I could be wrong on technical matters, I also realized I could be wrong about almost anything, and my entire worldview was up for reexamination. I consciously admitted to myself doubts that before I had kept sequestered in the subconscious. I doubted that my missionary experiences were necessarily divine manifestations. I doubted that a few million Mormons, out of the billions of humans on the earth, have any credible claim to exclusive truth. I doubted that there is a life after this one. I doubted that there exists any God at all.

It turns out you can rationalize anything when the stakes are high enough. As we talked more seriously about marriage, I confided in Amanda my doubts — she knew what I was when she picked me up, you might say. But we examined the problem from a very Mormon perspective. We talked about how I was “struggling” with my testimony, and we were optimistic that I would “overcome” my doubts. In other words, we assumed that the right answer — from a purely moral perspective — was for me to find a way to continue believing. And, for a while, I did. Of course I did. I was in love, I wanted to get married, and “overcoming” my doubts was a precondition for getting married. We got engaged a few weeks later, got married a few months after that, and immediately afterwards we left for Houston so I could pursue my Ph.D. at Rice.

It was another six months before my doubts resurfaced, and they did so with a vengeance. Somewhere in those six months the second insight had set in: belief has little to do with morality. I’m not sure exactly what caused it — maybe I just needed to get out of Provo, or maybe it was interacting with a bunch of smart, decent people of diverse backgrounds at Rice. Whatever the stimulus, I no longer believed there was a morally right answer to my doubts. I gave myself moral permission to disbelieve. I began a more serious, and I think more honest, study of my beliefs. I read Amanda’s textbooks on biblical archaeology. I confronted issues with Mormonism that are probably familiar to many in this audience. After a few months, I came to a conclusion: I no longer believed in the truth claims of Mormonism, and I no longer wanted to affiliate myself with the church.

Breaking the news to Amanda was difficult. Of course she had seen it coming. Of course it was something she didn’t want to hear. But she also knew that she couldn’t in good conscience pressure me into continued activity. So I left, and to her credit she came to terms with it. She was too tolerant a person to buy into the rhetoric that apostates are morally degenerate. So once it became clear that I was the same person as an ex-Mormon — once it became clear that I’m an even nicer guy after a few drinks! — she accepted the fact that I had left, and that I probably wasn’t coming back.

But things were still rough, and it was mostly my fault. I was decent enough not to try actively to deconvert Amanda, but I did hold out hope that she would eventually leave. This hope led to a few nasty disagreements. I particularly remember one evening. We were at Arby’s, having a particularly classy night out, and somehow we got to talking about Warren Jeffs and the FLDS church. And I couldn’t resist the urge to stick it to her. I pointed out that FLDS members bear a testimony of Warren Jeffs that isn’t all that different from the one Mormons bear of Thomas S. Monson. How could Amanda have any confidence that her convictions were any more justified than those of an FLDS member?

No amount of beef ‘n’ cheddar could salvage our evening. Arguments like these happened often enough, and were severe enough, to create a sense that our differences were fundamental, that they prevented us from having an emotionally intimate relationship. It was a bleak several months, and we both worried that our marriage was in jeopardy.

The turning point came in October 2010. We were sitting in our living room. Amanda was listening to conference while I wasted time on the internet. And Boyd K. Packer got up to speak. Probably you remember the talk. For all the harm it caused, Packer’s crotchety intolerance may have saved our marriage, and for that I could kiss him on his gruff old mouth. Amanda was outraged. She was too tolerant, and had known too many gay Mormons, to listen to someone she regarded as an apostle of Jesus Christ indulge in hurtful rhetoric she knew to be false.

Now, this wasn’t a turning point because Amanda’s beliefs began to change. Because really her beliefs didn’t change at this point. This was a turning point because it gave us common ground. Here was something about Mormonism we could discuss productively. We were both upset by the damage being done to gay and lesbian Mormons. And we talked about it. Through our discussions I came to a long-overdue realization: Both intellectually and morally, I had seriously underestimated Amanda’s relationship with Mormonism.

I took the two principles that led to my apostasy, and I applied them to believing Mormons in a way I just couldn’t do when I first left. Even though I think the evidence weighs heavily against Mormonism’s truth claims, there still are intelligent, thoughtful reasons to believe. Belief has little to do with intelligence. Even though Mormonism can do a lot of harm, there still remains tremendous good to be found in it and to be done through it. Belief has little to do with morality. I came to respect Amanda’s belief, and I came to accept that, just as I might never return to Mormonism, she might never leave. From then on, Mormonism ceased to be a wedge between us.

Since then, Amanda has begun to deal with her own faith crisis. She has become increasingly unorthodox in her beliefs. She interprets the Church’s truth claims figuratively. She’s gotten involved in activism for the Mormon LGBT community. She participates in Mormon Stories. But this doesn't cause me to breathe a sigh of relief. It’s nice — it gives us even more common ground, and more to the point it’s made Amanda happier — but her faith transition is not essential to our relationship. If tomorrow she returns to orthodox belief, if she decides never again to listen to a Mormon Stories podcast, it wouldn’t have much impact on our relationship.

We don’t know where our faith journeys will lead us. Amanda especially has an unpredictable road ahead, and who knows what the future holds for me. But we’ve stopped worrying how that might impact our relationship. Our marriage is no longer predicated on shared religious belief. Respect for each other’s intelligence and goodness is what’s essential to our relationship. And our particular beliefs don’t say very much about our intelligence or our goodness.