Written for my "World Sacred Literature" class in October 2015. I kicked myself so hard when I realized I'd forgotten to come up with a decent title. But in any case, it should be only a matter of time before my professor converts because of me, right?
Spiritual Autobiography
By C. Randall Nicholson
As many would assume from the fact that I’m a white guy living in Utah, I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or a “Mormon”. I was born in Utah and I live in Utah now and I’ve been a Mormon my entire life, but I spent most of the intervening time on a small farm in upstate New York, which is a different world altogether. This was crucial to my spiritual development, yet that development continued at an increased speed and in different ways after moving from there.
My home county was sparsely populated and dotted with little towns, and the Mormon percentage of those was nothing impressive. Hence the branch I attended growing up drew members from several towns, and my church peers were from several school districts. Because church and school were such separate communities, there was always a disconnect in my mind between what I learned at each of them. I never heard about Joseph Smith or the pioneers or any of those things when I learned history at school, so I didn’t believe that they were even real people. I was biased against church in this perceived contradiction because, while I hadn’t yet grown to hate school, I thought that church was boring and therefore treated it with disdain. I didn’t listen to or believe what it was teaching, I deliberately sang the wrong words to Primary songs, and just in general was disruptive at worst and closed off at best.
My parents would say, “It wouldn’t be as boring if you paid attention,” and I would retort, “I am paying attention. That’s why it’s boring.” As they were surely aware, that wasn’t actually true – I didn’t even pay enough attention to know anything about Jesus other than the vague notion that he was a person who had something to do with something. I don’t remember having much of an opinion one way or the other about God’s existence, though; I was usually what some people call an “apatheist”. I prayed every night when we gathered around as a family and took turns, but I was mainly going through the motions.
I must have had occasional moments of faith, though, because my father tells a story that I vaguely remember about when one of our lambs caught pneumonia or something and we brought it into the house. That night my sister and I both prayed for its recovery. After we had gone to bed, my father thought to himself, “Those poor kids. They’ll just have to learn that sometimes these things happen and nothing can be done about it.” As he thought this, the lamb stood up, looked at him and said, “Baa.” It was fine from then on. He told that story to explain how our simple childlike faith had taught him a humbling lesson. I don’t know why I had faith sometimes when in general I was hostile toward that sort of thing. My memory isn’t that clear.
When I announced shortly before my eighth birthday that I wasn’t getting baptized, I had hoped to start an argument with my parents, but to my disappointment they just shrugged and said that was all right because it was my decision to make. With nothing to rebel against, my rebelliousness sputtered out and I ended up doing it anyway. I don’t know why, exactly, since I didn’t really believe and hated water, but somehow I just couldn’t bring myself not to. The ceremony was decent but nothing spectacular, though I remember thinking afterward that since I had fulfilled this obligation I would have a spot waiting for me in heaven now.
My behavior in church was improving as I grew older and more mature, even though it still wasn’t my favorite thing ever. I don’t know how old I was – somewhere between ten and twelve – when I had my spiritual epiphany. It was nothing spectacular. There was no vision, no feeling of transcendence or enlightenment or anything like that. I was just standing in an empty classroom at church one day when I had a sudden moment of clarity. For no apparent reason I realized at that moment that God was definitely real and that I needed to get my act together. Now I mellowed out altogether and even started paying attention, and I began to actually understand the teachings that had gone in one ear and out the other for so many years.
I started taking initiatives to explore and deepen this “new” faith. Instead of saying my nightly prayer out loud as part of the family, I asked to start praying on my own after the others. My parents agreed and these prayers were longer and more thoughtful than my old ones. I also started reading the scriptures on my own after our nightly reading of verses as a family. When I was about twelve, I read the Bible from cover to cover with the exception of two or three chapters in Leviticus that were just too boring for me to endure. I’ve since tried to do it again but found that I couldn’t even get through Exodus. Anyway, that was a particularly eye-opening experience, as I read many things that hadn’t been mentioned in Sunday school, like Lot’s daughters having sex with him while he was drunk. More than once I went downstairs, showed the eyebrow-raising verse or verses to my parents, and inquired “Um, guys… what the heck?”
Since there were so few opportunities to hold church activities with any appreciable number of Mormon youths in the area, we usually made the four hour drive down to Albany for dances and youth conferences and the like. I never got to attend an Especially for Youth (a week-long “retreat” full of activities and devotionals) until summer 2010, when my sister and I attended one on the campus of BYU-Idaho while we were visiting family nearby. Virtually the entire week was the most uplifting and spiritual experience I’d had up to that point. Usually shy and awkward, I was able to socialize with little difficulty, and after its conclusion the depression problems I had dealt with for most of my life vanished for nearly a year. Without this experience, I doubt I could have dealt with what happened about a month later.
I was subscribed to “Mental Floss” magazine, and one issue contained excerpts from a forthcoming book about influential people. One of the chosen excerpts was about Joseph Smith, and in addition to a handful of small factual errors, it asserted that he was a polygamist. I thought that must have been an error as well. I knew that Brigham Young was a polygamist and that the church had practiced polygamy for several decades, of course, but I’d never heard that Joseph Smith was a part of that as well. I mentioned that to my parents and they just said, “Oh yeah, he was a polygamist,” like it was common knowledge and no big deal. I felt a twinge of betrayal and annoyance that they’d known it all along and never bothered to mention it to me.
Still, I decided to write to the company and correct the parts that actually were errors, but before doing so I wanted to make absolutely certain that my own facts were straight so I didn’t make a fool of myself. I typed “joseph smith” into Google, but paused for a moment. One of the suggestions was “joseph smith false prophet”, and when I saw it I was curious. I wondered what the critics of the church were saying, and imagined it would be silly things along the lines of “The Bible says you’re not supposed to add to it” (things like that had already been brought up and addressed in Sunday School and elsewhere, and I was unintimidated by them). So I clicked on the suggestion and went to one of the websites that came up. To my dismay, the reasons and evidences it listed for why my religion was false were far more compelling than I had anticipated.
I experienced an unpleasant feeling that I later learned is called cognitive dissonance. I couldn’t, with any integrity, simply dismiss what I’d felt during EFY only a month earlier. It was powerful and it was real and I knew it. Yet at the same time, I couldn’t with any integrity just dismiss these facts that, if true, seemed to rule out any possibility whatsoever that my religion was true. In addition to this confusion I felt somewhat betrayed and disillusioned that I had been blindsided by this and never made aware either of these facts or that such critics were out there.
As always, I turned to my parents. They discussed a few of the points with me but weren’t interested in going through all of them. They were clearly unconcerned, and I’m sure they were trying to demonstrate that it was nothing to be concerned about, but at the time it just made me feel that they were indifferent to my struggle and sticking their heads in the sand instead of addressing the issues. They gave me a couple of books to read and a General Conference clip to watch, and they helped a little bit, but I wasn’t satisfied. For the sake of my own integrity I needed to figure out if these things were true, and figure out the other side of the story, if there was one. In the meantime I opted to put them on a shelf and continue with my church participation.
To make a long story short, I did eventually find a website that had responses to these claims. Because the claims had shaken me up so badly, I was surprised to learn that they weren’t new and that other people had been aware of them and responding to them for decades in most cases. This knowledge validated me and made me prideful, and instead of gaining a more nuanced and thoughtful understanding as I should have after this experience, I retrenched and became more fundamentalist instead. The church was true, and its critics were dishonest and stupid, and people who had doubts or took the criticisms seriously were stupid. The end. This attitude was unsustainable, of course, and the further cognitive dissonance that simmered beneath it was like constantly building pressure of waves against a dam that no one maintains.
It served me well for a while, though. I went off to college with it, and one of the pastimes that I engaged in during my freshman year rather than socializing with real people was to argue with critics on the internet. It became an obsession, even an addiction, fueled more than anything by my anger and frustration at these people slandering my faith and repeating the same things as if no one had ever answered them. Eventually I broke free and managed to achieve a healthier balance in my life, not paying so much attention to them or letting them get me riled up. This status quo more or less remained in place for three more years until fall of 2014 when I took an Introduction to Religious Studies course, and began experiencing an entirely different variety of cognitive dissonance and faith crisis.
For years, of course, I had already believed that every religion had some degree of truth and goodness in it. Joseph Smith taught, for example, “We should gather all the good and true principles in the world and treasure them up, or we shall not come out true ‘Mormons’.” I was always taught to respect all people as equals regardless of their beliefs. Yet sentiments like these were always preceded, followed, and/or overshadowed by the caveat that ours was the “only true and living church”. This had always made sense to me, because there could only be one entirely true religion, and ours offered the opportunity for salvation to everyone regardless of which they chose in mortality, as any loving God would do.
I was very enthusiastic about this opportunity to learn about other religions, and the professor did an excellent job of presenting them all in a fair and balanced manner. However, after a while I became confused. All of these religions had similarities to my religion that I could label as their portion of the truth. However, they also differed significantly not only from my religion but from each other, and yet it felt to me as though they were all true. The notion of God as an anthropomorphic, corporeal being seemed as true as the notion of God as a formless, shapeless “essence”, which in turn seemed as true as the notion of God manifesting himself through various avatars, and so on. The same held true for other doctrines that varied and contradicted each other from religion to religion. They all resonated with me, not with the same sort of burning conviction that I had felt about my own faith, but enough to cause more cognitive dissonance.
At first, the issue was not so much about my own faith being “false” as about the impossibility of them all being true. I began to wonder if God was just unknowable, and somehow every faith tradition had some degree of inspiration but still failed to hit the nail on the head, and not one of them was right altogether and not one of them ever would be. I never doubted that God existed, because I communicated with Him very personally and directly through prayer and I had felt His presence as clearly as anyone else’s. I was never in any danger of becoming an atheist. Yet I thought that maybe I didn’t understand him as well as I thought I did, and never would. The class itself wasn’t that destabilizing, but once I started off on this train of thought I got deeper and deeper into it and there was no way out. It lasted for months.
I decided, eventually, that they were all resonating with me not because they were all equally true – I couldn’t bring myself to believe that all truth is subjective – but because they were all used by God in one way or another to fulfill His purposes. They didn’t just spring up by themselves and they weren’t just somebody’s invention, but to some degree they were inspired and raised up because one religion, even the “only true and living” one, couldn’t do everything or fill every niche on its own. This way of seeing things was actually compatible with, if not required by Mormon doctrine in the first place, but I had never made that logical connection all the way because I had been more focused on what made us distinctive than what we had in common.
I don’t know where things will go from here, now that I’m quite settled in my faith and can’t imagine what else could come along to change that after having dealt with these intellectual and philosophical issues. I still try to study and learn everything I can from all kinds of different sources, whether I agree with them or not, but have yet to find anything else earth-shattering. I’m grateful for the experiences I had, even though they weren’t pleasant at the time, because they shaped my faith into the deeper and more thoughtful entity that it is today.
Read more of my essays here.
My home county was sparsely populated and dotted with little towns, and the Mormon percentage of those was nothing impressive. Hence the branch I attended growing up drew members from several towns, and my church peers were from several school districts. Because church and school were such separate communities, there was always a disconnect in my mind between what I learned at each of them. I never heard about Joseph Smith or the pioneers or any of those things when I learned history at school, so I didn’t believe that they were even real people. I was biased against church in this perceived contradiction because, while I hadn’t yet grown to hate school, I thought that church was boring and therefore treated it with disdain. I didn’t listen to or believe what it was teaching, I deliberately sang the wrong words to Primary songs, and just in general was disruptive at worst and closed off at best.
My parents would say, “It wouldn’t be as boring if you paid attention,” and I would retort, “I am paying attention. That’s why it’s boring.” As they were surely aware, that wasn’t actually true – I didn’t even pay enough attention to know anything about Jesus other than the vague notion that he was a person who had something to do with something. I don’t remember having much of an opinion one way or the other about God’s existence, though; I was usually what some people call an “apatheist”. I prayed every night when we gathered around as a family and took turns, but I was mainly going through the motions.
I must have had occasional moments of faith, though, because my father tells a story that I vaguely remember about when one of our lambs caught pneumonia or something and we brought it into the house. That night my sister and I both prayed for its recovery. After we had gone to bed, my father thought to himself, “Those poor kids. They’ll just have to learn that sometimes these things happen and nothing can be done about it.” As he thought this, the lamb stood up, looked at him and said, “Baa.” It was fine from then on. He told that story to explain how our simple childlike faith had taught him a humbling lesson. I don’t know why I had faith sometimes when in general I was hostile toward that sort of thing. My memory isn’t that clear.
When I announced shortly before my eighth birthday that I wasn’t getting baptized, I had hoped to start an argument with my parents, but to my disappointment they just shrugged and said that was all right because it was my decision to make. With nothing to rebel against, my rebelliousness sputtered out and I ended up doing it anyway. I don’t know why, exactly, since I didn’t really believe and hated water, but somehow I just couldn’t bring myself not to. The ceremony was decent but nothing spectacular, though I remember thinking afterward that since I had fulfilled this obligation I would have a spot waiting for me in heaven now.
My behavior in church was improving as I grew older and more mature, even though it still wasn’t my favorite thing ever. I don’t know how old I was – somewhere between ten and twelve – when I had my spiritual epiphany. It was nothing spectacular. There was no vision, no feeling of transcendence or enlightenment or anything like that. I was just standing in an empty classroom at church one day when I had a sudden moment of clarity. For no apparent reason I realized at that moment that God was definitely real and that I needed to get my act together. Now I mellowed out altogether and even started paying attention, and I began to actually understand the teachings that had gone in one ear and out the other for so many years.
I started taking initiatives to explore and deepen this “new” faith. Instead of saying my nightly prayer out loud as part of the family, I asked to start praying on my own after the others. My parents agreed and these prayers were longer and more thoughtful than my old ones. I also started reading the scriptures on my own after our nightly reading of verses as a family. When I was about twelve, I read the Bible from cover to cover with the exception of two or three chapters in Leviticus that were just too boring for me to endure. I’ve since tried to do it again but found that I couldn’t even get through Exodus. Anyway, that was a particularly eye-opening experience, as I read many things that hadn’t been mentioned in Sunday school, like Lot’s daughters having sex with him while he was drunk. More than once I went downstairs, showed the eyebrow-raising verse or verses to my parents, and inquired “Um, guys… what the heck?”
Since there were so few opportunities to hold church activities with any appreciable number of Mormon youths in the area, we usually made the four hour drive down to Albany for dances and youth conferences and the like. I never got to attend an Especially for Youth (a week-long “retreat” full of activities and devotionals) until summer 2010, when my sister and I attended one on the campus of BYU-Idaho while we were visiting family nearby. Virtually the entire week was the most uplifting and spiritual experience I’d had up to that point. Usually shy and awkward, I was able to socialize with little difficulty, and after its conclusion the depression problems I had dealt with for most of my life vanished for nearly a year. Without this experience, I doubt I could have dealt with what happened about a month later.
I was subscribed to “Mental Floss” magazine, and one issue contained excerpts from a forthcoming book about influential people. One of the chosen excerpts was about Joseph Smith, and in addition to a handful of small factual errors, it asserted that he was a polygamist. I thought that must have been an error as well. I knew that Brigham Young was a polygamist and that the church had practiced polygamy for several decades, of course, but I’d never heard that Joseph Smith was a part of that as well. I mentioned that to my parents and they just said, “Oh yeah, he was a polygamist,” like it was common knowledge and no big deal. I felt a twinge of betrayal and annoyance that they’d known it all along and never bothered to mention it to me.
Still, I decided to write to the company and correct the parts that actually were errors, but before doing so I wanted to make absolutely certain that my own facts were straight so I didn’t make a fool of myself. I typed “joseph smith” into Google, but paused for a moment. One of the suggestions was “joseph smith false prophet”, and when I saw it I was curious. I wondered what the critics of the church were saying, and imagined it would be silly things along the lines of “The Bible says you’re not supposed to add to it” (things like that had already been brought up and addressed in Sunday School and elsewhere, and I was unintimidated by them). So I clicked on the suggestion and went to one of the websites that came up. To my dismay, the reasons and evidences it listed for why my religion was false were far more compelling than I had anticipated.
I experienced an unpleasant feeling that I later learned is called cognitive dissonance. I couldn’t, with any integrity, simply dismiss what I’d felt during EFY only a month earlier. It was powerful and it was real and I knew it. Yet at the same time, I couldn’t with any integrity just dismiss these facts that, if true, seemed to rule out any possibility whatsoever that my religion was true. In addition to this confusion I felt somewhat betrayed and disillusioned that I had been blindsided by this and never made aware either of these facts or that such critics were out there.
As always, I turned to my parents. They discussed a few of the points with me but weren’t interested in going through all of them. They were clearly unconcerned, and I’m sure they were trying to demonstrate that it was nothing to be concerned about, but at the time it just made me feel that they were indifferent to my struggle and sticking their heads in the sand instead of addressing the issues. They gave me a couple of books to read and a General Conference clip to watch, and they helped a little bit, but I wasn’t satisfied. For the sake of my own integrity I needed to figure out if these things were true, and figure out the other side of the story, if there was one. In the meantime I opted to put them on a shelf and continue with my church participation.
To make a long story short, I did eventually find a website that had responses to these claims. Because the claims had shaken me up so badly, I was surprised to learn that they weren’t new and that other people had been aware of them and responding to them for decades in most cases. This knowledge validated me and made me prideful, and instead of gaining a more nuanced and thoughtful understanding as I should have after this experience, I retrenched and became more fundamentalist instead. The church was true, and its critics were dishonest and stupid, and people who had doubts or took the criticisms seriously were stupid. The end. This attitude was unsustainable, of course, and the further cognitive dissonance that simmered beneath it was like constantly building pressure of waves against a dam that no one maintains.
It served me well for a while, though. I went off to college with it, and one of the pastimes that I engaged in during my freshman year rather than socializing with real people was to argue with critics on the internet. It became an obsession, even an addiction, fueled more than anything by my anger and frustration at these people slandering my faith and repeating the same things as if no one had ever answered them. Eventually I broke free and managed to achieve a healthier balance in my life, not paying so much attention to them or letting them get me riled up. This status quo more or less remained in place for three more years until fall of 2014 when I took an Introduction to Religious Studies course, and began experiencing an entirely different variety of cognitive dissonance and faith crisis.
For years, of course, I had already believed that every religion had some degree of truth and goodness in it. Joseph Smith taught, for example, “We should gather all the good and true principles in the world and treasure them up, or we shall not come out true ‘Mormons’.” I was always taught to respect all people as equals regardless of their beliefs. Yet sentiments like these were always preceded, followed, and/or overshadowed by the caveat that ours was the “only true and living church”. This had always made sense to me, because there could only be one entirely true religion, and ours offered the opportunity for salvation to everyone regardless of which they chose in mortality, as any loving God would do.
I was very enthusiastic about this opportunity to learn about other religions, and the professor did an excellent job of presenting them all in a fair and balanced manner. However, after a while I became confused. All of these religions had similarities to my religion that I could label as their portion of the truth. However, they also differed significantly not only from my religion but from each other, and yet it felt to me as though they were all true. The notion of God as an anthropomorphic, corporeal being seemed as true as the notion of God as a formless, shapeless “essence”, which in turn seemed as true as the notion of God manifesting himself through various avatars, and so on. The same held true for other doctrines that varied and contradicted each other from religion to religion. They all resonated with me, not with the same sort of burning conviction that I had felt about my own faith, but enough to cause more cognitive dissonance.
At first, the issue was not so much about my own faith being “false” as about the impossibility of them all being true. I began to wonder if God was just unknowable, and somehow every faith tradition had some degree of inspiration but still failed to hit the nail on the head, and not one of them was right altogether and not one of them ever would be. I never doubted that God existed, because I communicated with Him very personally and directly through prayer and I had felt His presence as clearly as anyone else’s. I was never in any danger of becoming an atheist. Yet I thought that maybe I didn’t understand him as well as I thought I did, and never would. The class itself wasn’t that destabilizing, but once I started off on this train of thought I got deeper and deeper into it and there was no way out. It lasted for months.
I decided, eventually, that they were all resonating with me not because they were all equally true – I couldn’t bring myself to believe that all truth is subjective – but because they were all used by God in one way or another to fulfill His purposes. They didn’t just spring up by themselves and they weren’t just somebody’s invention, but to some degree they were inspired and raised up because one religion, even the “only true and living” one, couldn’t do everything or fill every niche on its own. This way of seeing things was actually compatible with, if not required by Mormon doctrine in the first place, but I had never made that logical connection all the way because I had been more focused on what made us distinctive than what we had in common.
I don’t know where things will go from here, now that I’m quite settled in my faith and can’t imagine what else could come along to change that after having dealt with these intellectual and philosophical issues. I still try to study and learn everything I can from all kinds of different sources, whether I agree with them or not, but have yet to find anything else earth-shattering. I’m grateful for the experiences I had, even though they weren’t pleasant at the time, because they shaped my faith into the deeper and more thoughtful entity that it is today.
Read more of my essays here.
