I’ve been viewing the YouTube videos from the Exmormon Foundation. Worth a look. There are some clips from a film called “Line Upon Line”, featuring (mostly) non-angry, pleasant former saints telling their deconversion stories.
One of the stories in Part 2 tapped into something unexpected for me. A young woman says:
Leaving the Church is hard because you are so afraid of what’s going to happen to you. And you don’t have any examples of that because people leave the Church and they scurry away, you know? Like, you don’t know — When you’re in the Church, you do not know any ex-Mormons. You don’t know ’em! And so I was really afraid of leaving the Church because I was like, no way, this can’t be real. What will I do with my life if I leave the Church? Who am I going to be, right? And so, I think that that fear keeps a lot of people, either consciously or subconsciously, in the Church.
Well, that’s about right. In testimony meetings, Latter-day Saints seem to tell each other constantly how they don’t know where they’d be without the Church. They’d probably all be dead. Or in jail. Like everyone else who isn’t in the Church. And Latter-day Saints are routinely warned that if they don’t keep the promises they make in LDS temples, they’ll be in Satan’s power. Have to keep ’em scared of ghosts, you see.
But this quote touched on another part of the scariness that I think I must have harboured without realising. I have known a few people that stopped coming to church. They deleted themselves from the sample, you could say. And, what do you know, they did disappear, and I never saw them again. So the unspoken impression I think I got was: If you leave the Church, you will disappear. How frightening!
It’s nobody’s fault. Just an artifact of participation (or lack thereof) in social groups. But for me it seems a powerful cognitive illusion that I hadn’t noticed before.
So it’s a good thing that I show up every once in a while at church. I drop the boys off to be with their Mom, wearing nice but non-churchy clothes. No, I haven’t disappeared, I tell my old friends. I’m still here, and I’m very happy without religion.
13 October 2008 at 3:44 am
Great post Daniel. Speaks to the main fear most of my friends had back in those halcyon days when I was still a faithful and compliant JDub. We’d say so-and-so ‘left Jehovah’ as if they ran away and joined the circus…’where’d they go?’, when all along they lived just as close, but couldn’t be further away. Who’d strike out on their own (or Disassociate with a capital D, which is the worst thing you can do because it a conscious and, dare I say rational, move…), leaving the community they were sheltered in, knowing the only people you’ve ever known will not see things your way, even more insidiously they will treat you as if you don’t even exist if they run in to you. Not just be uncomfortable when they see you, but act out an organizationally directed program of shunning you. You really DON’T exist then, you have disappeared and according to them, its a expression of love for you, as if you’re just a pitcher with a no-hitter going into the 7th and everybody starts scooching down the bench and ignoring you so they don’t screw your mojo up.
Whats worse, and I think they’re kind of suggesting it in the sectioned you quoted, that when you leave the church you may have an irrational fear or lack of trust for the ‘Nons’ or the ‘Never-Weres’ on the outside which can screw up your ability to have a normal relationship with new friends. I haven’t had this problem so far but I have also left without any one knowing, cold turkey. I am benefiting from: distance, a move to a new congregation territory (which helps the ‘fade’) and my in-laws being 3 hours away. So, I am heading for a confrontation soon when all of this gets around. I smell an intervention in my future…
Maybe I should start a diversionary heroine habit?