Religiosity

Lately I have been thinking a lot about religion. I think the reason for that is my attempt to learn more about Les's family. A few weeks ago I made the mistake of questioning one of their family traditions, I was honestly trying to understand. The responses to my questions and the subsequent conversations led to me just completely giving up on trying to communicate with them in the least. Les has been explaining the dynamics of his family to me and I have spent quite a bit of time reading up on Mormonism and ex-Mormonism.

This has lead me to compare how I grew up  with how he grew up. And made me realize how much my perceptions have changed, since being with Les, about religion in general and about religious people. 

I grew up in a completely nonreligious household. As a child I was completely unaware of the idea of god. My father, while he has no formal education, has always had a very keen interest in science. We would occasionally go to church as a way to pass time, or with friends, but it was never presented as fact. As a child in that situation, I always assumed it was something like story-time for grownups. It seemed very similar to the story-time hours I spent at the library. 

When I was around 10 I began attending a Mormon church with a friend, I now realize it was because that was the only way her parents would allow us to be friends. My friend was the oldest child of seven at the time and attending church with her and her family was somewhat of an ordeal. There were always children running everywhere and more often than not the two of us would wander the halls rather than attend the three-hour-long meetings. Her parents were always talking about me being baptized but I brushed them off. They always wanted my dad and brother to come with us to church, but I always made up an excuse because church was my time to have fun with my friend. 

I sort of knew my friend's family was weird, but I couldn't really put my finger on it. For example, I thought it was odd that they had a special bag hanging from the ceiling in their laundry room for their dirty underwear. My friend told me the underwear was too special to be mixed in with the other clothes and was never supposed to touch the ground. I assumed she was joking and didn't realize she wasn't until several years later. I finally stopped hanging out with that friend when her parents gave me a poster to hang in my room that listed a bunch of rules I was supposed to follow. It had things like not wearing clothes or listening to music that would "offend the lord." I never got a satisfactory answer to my question of why these things were offensive to the lord. When my friend's parents continued to ask if I had put the poster up in my room and if I had made the commitment to follow the rules, I decided they were too weird to hang around any longer.

My entire experience with the Mormon church, the only church I had any long term exposure to, was more like a childhood friendship gone bad, as childhood friendships tend to do. It wasn't until I was older that I realized the role Mormonism had in my relationship with my friend. When I first realized it a few years later, I only saw it as the reason the friendship ended. It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized we never would have been friends at all if I hadn't gone to church with her. Her parents set out to convert me and my family, there was no other reason we were friends, no real relationship. 

My only other experience with religion came in middle school. I became extremely interested in mythology. Greek, Egyptian, Celtic, Norse and any others I could get my hands on. I spent hours at the library studying different myths and legends and ancient cultures. I decided at this point I wanted to be an archaeologist or anthropologist when I grew up (I actually started college as an anthropology major). By this time I had become more aware of Christianity but didn't fully understand the impact it had. I remember sitting at the library reading about the time-spans different deities were worshiped in Greece and having the realization that the old myths and legends were once serious religions, the same way Christianity was a serious religion in the modern day. That set me on a track of thinking of religion the same way I thought of the mythology I had been studying. But I never really studied Christianity because I found polytheism much more interesting.

Being a teenager in Utah and not a Mormon is an interesting experience. Especially when you look like I do. I am white, with long blonde hair and tend to be rather shy. Mormons assumed I was Mormon, nonMormons assumed I was Mormon, it sucked. So I started wearing a cross. I didn't mean anything to me, but it was an instant way of setting myself apart. I actually started telling people I was Catholic, I had never heard the terms atheist or agnostic and since I was wearing the cross and religion always seemed to be a topic of conversation, it was just easier. I played that role on and off all through high school.


I even played it at the beginning of college, but soon realized Carbon County was different. I wasn't always assumed to be a Mormon even when I wasn't wearing the cross. And when I said I was Catholic, people were actually interested, they didn't immediately shut down the conversation. So I started really thinking about belief. I also started reading books and the internet and discovered that I had always been an atheist, I just never put it into words before.


Part of the reason I was doing so much reading was my boyfriend. When we started going out, he was an inactive Mormon (I never saw myself dating a Mormon, but I suppose it shouldn't surprise me, I spent most of my childhood in Jackson County, Missouri and Northern Utah and now I'm living 30 minutes from Palmyra, New York, did I really stand a chance of avoiding Mormon influence in my life?). But he was becoming more and more jaded with the church he was raised in. We would sit up late into the night and talk about how drastically it was going to affect his family to find out he was dating me, and then later to find out he was leaving the church. This was an emotionally draining, several-year-long experience. In that time Les did leave the Mormon church, going so far as to have his name removed from the records. And as I found out more about his childhood, I found out more and more about Christianity and Mormonism.


The more studying I did and the more I talked to current and former believers, the more I realized I never really understood religion, in fact I never understood belief, I still don't think I do. In all of the studying I had done it literally never occurred to me that religious people took their beliefs seriously. That may sound a little odd but it is the only way I can think to describe it.


Obviously I knew there were religious nutjobs out there who protest everything and think the earth is only 6,000 years old, but I always assumed those were just the crazies. It wasn't until I met and sort of got to know Les's family that I realized the regular, everyday people out there think the stuff from the Bible or the Book of Mormon is real. I sort of understand spiritualism to a certain extent, the idea that there is something out there bigger than you that you don't quite comprehend. But the idea of a magical man living in the sky who created you and loves you but only if you follow certain rules, who is interested in the intimate details of the lives every person on earth, I never truly understood that people actually thought that was real. It goes back to that idea of church as story-time, I enjoyed story-time at the library as a child, but I never thought the stories were real, they were just stories.

So there it is, my entire history with religion. In a way I'm glad I've married into such an uber-Mormon family, it has opened my eyes to the way people around me see the world.