Mormonism Cured My Anxiety

For some folks, religion quiets their fears and relieves their pain. For others, it just makes it worse. In my case, religion has done both. When I was a teenager, my anxiety centered around spiritual worthiness. Turning my heart and my will over to the God of Mormonism gave me the assurance that no matter how much I had distanced myself from God during 15 years of disobedience, I was finally okay. So for the following 10 years, Mormonism gave me the answer whenever I felt anxious- about anything. Praying and asking questions about what I should do next frequently made me feel confident about my choices. This was especially true when in reality I was simply following the recipe presented every Sunday and Monday through Friday during religion classes.  This pattern worked marvelously throughout some of the most challenging experiences of my life: falling in love for the first time, getting good grades in college, serving a two-year mission for the church and choosing who I would marry. As an elder in the Mormon priesthood, you pretty much have it made once you get married in the temple. Besides being fruitful and multiplying and replenishing the earth, all you have to do is continue to pay, pray, obey and endure to the end in faith and you’re set for life. Strangely enough, the Mormon recipe became less and less useful after I got married at the ripe old age of 21. After successfully completing the four course meal that guarantees Mormon men their godhood, my life became more self-directed since they don’t specifically tell you what to serve for dessert. Finding employment after leaving the Mormon bubble of my hometown was the first time in the ten years since my conversion that I truly felt incapacitated by anxiety. Continuing my education as a graduate has exacerbated my anxiety just as severely if not more than when I moved away from home. I think I subconsciously knew I suffered from anxiety long before I lost my faith in Mormonism. The last two years of anxiety without faith have shown me I had no idea how bad my anxiety really was. I still struggle to cope in healthy ways and sometimes the most I can do is to acknowledge what I’m feeling and press forward in spite of it. I miss how I used to have overwhelming confidence in prayerfully made decisions. I miss the confidence I used to have in the counsel I received every week from church leaders. And I miss the feeling of endless revelation while studying scripture. Part of the challenge is the reality of adulthood. Nothing is simple anymore. I hope that I will learn to cope more effectively as time passes. Maybe it will get better once I finish graduate school. I still experience those moments when I know exactly what to do and have no problem carrying out my plans. But sometimes I am debilitated by self-doubt and I just don’t know where to turn. More and more I am realizing that no matter what you believe, there are good people everywhere that are willing to help and encourage. Although they can’t and shouldn’t be taken for granted, it’s just as great a sin to abuse another human being’s help as it is to never seek it out. So perhaps if I repent of my stubborn self-sufficiency then I won’t have to be so anxious anymore about handling everything myself. Nonetheless, I feel to quote my favorite space cowboy: “I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff, but I’ve never seen *anything* to make me believe that there’s one all-powerful Force controlling everything. ‘Cause no mystical energy field controls *my* destiny. It’s all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.”

Loyalty

Many extol it as one of the greatest of virtues while overlooking the dangers of misplaced loyalty, branding whistleblowers as modern Judas Iscariots without considering what it’s like when self integrity and loyalty to the truth challenge immutable allegiance. Loyalty is alive and well in Mormonism. It doesn’t hurt that every card-carrying Mormon has to covenant and promise to not say bad things about church leaders. As Dallin Oaks loves to remind us with his self-righteous smirk “It is wrong to criticize leaders of the church, even if the criticism is true.” If you ask FairMormon, what that means is that you can ignore the wrong things that church leaders say and do, you just can’t talk about it. But since I’m an unfairmormon I will do as I please.

Loyalty can be dangerous. I can think of more than one country in Asia that suffers from this problem where the world’s finest yes-men support oppressive governments that impede social and economic progress for millions of human beings who deserve better. Just as the people of North Korea and Russia suffer from the power of undying loyalty to corrupt regimes, Mormonism suffers from the members’ fierce loyalty to every word which cometh out of the mouth of a priesthood holder. Instead of thinking critically and rejecting senseless policies, Mormons frequently defend them because of their origin, rather than judging based on raw merit. I want a world where I can disagree and exchange ideas without any fear of the shunning and “fixing” that inevitably follows being branded with a big scarlet ‘A’ for a crime even worse than adultery: apostasy, sometimes called spiritual adultery.

And yet, I’m not in a place where I can abandon Mormonism entirely. So instead of letting the church define me based on my world view, I get to define and present myself to the world. I used to know exactly who I was so presenting myself was easy. Answers like “I’m a Mormon” and “We believe…” just don’t capture anything close to who I am today. What is difficult is that in Mormonism, generally, everyone assumes a certain level of belief and commitment of everyone who attends church. So you have to go out of your way to explain to people that you don’t actually feel the same way as everybody else. I am proud of the fact that I recently presented myself openly as an unbeliever to my younger brother who is a church missionary. Fortunately, he accepted me without judgment and without getting preachy. I probably need to accept that not everyone I talk to will respond well to the truth about my convictions. But living behind a façade of presumed belief has left me feeling empty and marginalized. I would rather feel empty and marginalized because someone rejected me for who I really am than to feel that way because of a fearful, nostalgic loyalty to my old self. I hope to be pleasantly surprised when those around me respond genuinely and personally rather than falling back on the standard Mormon programming.

Religion works for a lot of people because it offers a program for solving your problems and provides a framework for peace and happiness. In reality, it’s a program, just like enrolling to get a master’s degree, to become physically fit or running a business. In fact, every year the children’s organization of the church puts on a “primary program” where the kids showcase a year’s worth of indoctrination. The magical part is that for lots of Mormons, the program really works. I know because it worked for me for ten years! For every problem, Mormonism has a solution. Can’t sleep? Pray. Need dating advice? Listen to a speech from a church leader. Do you feel guilty about something you did years ago? Talk to your bishop. Do you have money problems? Pay a more generous fast offering. Having a crisis of faith? Make sure you are obeying everything the church has to say and then read the wonderful essays the church published on difficult topics. So what happens when the program doesn’t get you the results like it used to? “You must be forgetting something. You just need more faith. Try again.” So just as I’ve painted Mormonism as a program, not unlike a computer program with a finite collection of methods and parameters, I guess you could say that I, as a black hat Mormon am hacking the program by supplementing my runtime arguments with coffee, critical thinking and regular expressions of disappointment with Mormonism version 5.19.2016.

So am I a loyal Mormon? Not really. It’s a good thing there are some swell people who are Mormons otherwise there wouldn’t be much worth being loyal to.