The perennial refrain of the faithful LDS when confronted
with criticism from those disenfranchised from the Church:
You
can leave the Church, but you can’t leave it alone.
We see it at least a few times a week on social media.
It is typically shared in a tone of dismissal, intended to demonstrate to the
apostate that their arguments are simply “more of the same” and “typical
anti-mormon lies.” It is also intended to convey an understanding that the
Church is the victim of persecution, and the criticism is just another instance
of the sort of persecution that the Lord’s one and only has always had to
endure.
I don’t know for certain how long this phrase has been
employed by the faithful as a means to elude the criticisms of former believers,
but after an admittedly cursory search, the earliest reference that I found to
the phrase is an April 1989 General Conference address by a member of the
Presiding Bishopric, Glenn A. Pace.[i][ii]
I have a few things to say about the concern that the
faithful have over whether those disenfranchised from the LDS fold should, in
fact, leave it alone.
Bishop Pace, as is typical in LDS rhetoric,[iii] fails to acknowledge the
possibility that there can be legitimate criticism of the Church. He instead
allows for what can only be described as spurious criticisms from non-members
and current members, and what he deems “vicious and vile attacks” by former
members who “lack character.” He quotes D&C 121: 16-17 to assert that critics
of the Church “are the servants of sin, and are the children of
disobedience themselves.”
Not satisfied to simply call former believers “servants of
sin” and “children of disobedience,” Pace doubles down on the ad hominem by apparently alluding[iv]
to a statement attributed[v]
to the Prophet Joseph, intended to explain why “[y]ou can leave the Church, but
you can’t leave it alone.”
The basic reason is simple.
Once someone has received a witness of the Spirit and accepted it, he leaves
neutral ground. One loses his testimony only by listening to the promptings of
the evil one, and Satan’s goal is not complete when a person leaves the Church,
but when he comes out in open rebellion against it.
The actual passage to which I think Pace alludes is
worded slightly more strongly.
When you joined this
Church you enlisted to serve God. When you did that you left the neutral
ground, and you never can get back on to it. Should you forsake the Master you
enlisted to serve, it will be by the instigation of the evil one, and you will
follow his dictation and be his servant.
Let’s call a spade a spade here. Pace is positing, in
his official capacity as a member of the Presiding Bishopric of the Church and from
the General Conference pulpit, that the reason that ex-members are critical of
the Church is that they are servants of Satan, listening to his promptings,
following his dictation, and accomplishing his goals.
Let that sink in, brothers and sisters. “You can leave
the Church, but you can’t leave it alone” is a thinly veiled equivalent of
saying “you are under the control of Satan.”
Although the Church has been known to disavow practices
of shunning “apostates,” I would humbly submit that accusing former members of
being in league with Satan ought to be considered quite firmly and
unambiguously in the realm of shunning.
Thus, employing the phrase “you can leave the Church,
but you can’t leave it alone” effectively accomplishes a number of objectives.
-
It is an effective diversionary tactic. As
soon as a faithful member hears a criticism from a former believer, the
believer can be certain that it is the work of Satan.
-
It spares the faithful member the need to listen
to, evaluate, and respond to the criticism.
-
It ensures that the faithful are insulated
from unvarnished, unfiltered facts about Church history and doctrine that are
faith demoting.
-
It reinforces the notion that the Church
is subject to persecution, and is the target of Satan.
-
It shuts down the critic, implying that
the believer can see through the façade of the “so called” critic.
-
It stops criticism from being about the
Church. To the ears of the faithful, criticism reflects only on the critic.
-
It acts as a form of shunning without
explicitly shunning.
As so many have done before and since, as a younger
man I volunteered for a two year mission
for the Church, and labored with vim and vigor. But why? What is the point of
doing the mission? Why is it so important to the Church? I have observed elsewhere
that missionary service increases the probability of future activity in and
commitment to the Church by being akin to a form of hazing. But to the young
person considering missionary service, there is a more simple and pressing
reason.
I chose to serve a proselytizing mission because extra Ecclesiam nulla salus: “[t]here is no
salvation outside The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”[vi]
Because the LDS Church “…is not a church. This is the
Church of Jesus Christ.”[vii]
It “…is not just another Church. This is not just one of a family of Christian churches. This is the
Church and kingdom of God, the only true Church upon the face of the
earth…”[viii]
so “[e]very baptism of the Catholic
Church, and of the Episcopal Church, and of the Baptist Church, or any other church, if God Almighty did
not ordain and authorize the man who performed the ordinance even though he
performed it in the right way and used the right words, is null and void…;”[ix]
“Presumptuous and blasphemous are they who purport to baptize, bless,
marry, or perform other sacraments in the name of the Lord while in fact
lacking the specific authorization.”[x]
And in the words of the good Lord himself, the other Christian religions are “all
wrong; and … an abomination in
his sight; that those professors were all corrupt…,”[xi]
while the LDS Church is “the only true and living church upon the
face of the whole earth, with which I, the Lord, am well pleased.”[xii]
(italics and bold face added for emphasis).
In sum, the reason that I volunteered is that there is
an idea, relatively (but not completely) unique to Mormonism, that salvation is
dependent upon membership in the right Church. You don’t get into proper heaven
unless you are a faithful member of the LDS Church.
The Church sent me on a mission to convince others
that their Church is wrong, abominable, blasphemous, corrupt, and utterly
misguided in their offer to provide salvation. Were it not the case, if (contra
McConkie, Kimball, Benson, Penrose, and the good Lord, above) any Christian (or
other) Church can offer salvation, then why the need to proselytize (poach?)
believers away from their home faiths into the LDS rolls. If other Churches can
offer salvation, why did I sacrifice two prime years of my life to convince
folks that they could not do without Mormonism?
No. Missions exist because the very raison d'être, the sine qua non for the LDS Church is that all other Churches are
illegitimate.
The faithful may well refer to not leaving the Church alone as persecution, but for the
ex-believer, it is exactly the same thing that the Church does in regards to
all other religions—a sincere attempt to point out that a faith is misguided.
So one face of the Church deploys a volunteer force
currently in excess of 65,000[xiii] missionaries to
convince devotees of other faiths to join the LDS ranks because their Churches
are all wrong, abominations, etc., while another face of the Church asserts
that those who criticize the LDS faith are in the employ of Satan. Perhaps I’m
stating the all too obvious here, but this seems deeply hypocritical to me.
Furthermore, the LDS faithful, more than members of most
religious denominations, are convinced that membership in the correct Church is
requisite for salvation; the corollary of this is that membership in the
incorrect Church will cause one to lose salvation. Anybody who sincerely
believes that membership in the wrong Church will cost them their salvation
ought to be pointedly appreciative of those who are concerned that they might
in fact be in the wrong Church, and there is precedent in the Church for such
an attitude:
I will tell you who the real fanatics are: they
are they who adopt false principles and ideas as facts, and try to establish a
superstructure upon a false foundation...If our religion is of this character
we want to know it; we would like to find a philosopher who can prove it to us.
–Brigham Young[xiv]
Convince us of our errors of Doctrine, if we
have any, by reason, by logical arguments, or by the Word of God and we will
ever be grateful for the information and you will ever have the pleasing
reflections that you have been instruments in the hands of God of redeeming
your fellow beings. –Orson Pratt[xv]
The LDS belief that membership in the correct
organization is a necessary condition of salvation means that attitude of the
believer toward the critic should be one of empathy and appreciation, and most
assuredly not one of
shunning.
Such empathy and appreciation is unquestionably not
the norm in Mormonism, and this raises the salient question of why there is
such an adamant aversion to even admitting the possibility of legitimate
criticism.
Hugh B.
Brown[xvi]
offers a possible answer: “Only
error fears freedom of expression… Neither fear of consequence nor any kind
of coercion should ever be used to secure uniformity of thought in the Church.”
The sentiment is articulated by James E. Talmage:[xvii]
The man who cannot listen to an argument which opposes his
views either has a weak position or is a weak defender of it. No opinion that cannot stand discussion or
criticism is worth holding. And it has been wisely said that the man who
knows only half of any question is worse off than the man who knows nothing of
it. He is not only one-sided but his partisanship soon turns him into an
intolerant and a fanatic. In general it is true that nothing which cannot stand up under discussion or criticism is worth defending.
I put it to
you that the insights of Brown and Talmage are correct, and although the use of
the phrase “you can leave the Church, but you can’t leave it alone,” may be
intended to convey a brave stance against persecution, it instead betrays a
lack of confidence in (i) the defensibility of the claims of the Church, (ii)
the users’ ability to defend those claims, (iii) the unshakability of the faith
of the user, or some combination of the above.
In fact, it
appears to this author that employing the phrase “you can leave the Church, but
you can’t leave it alone” actually reveals a lot more about the person using it
than it does about the critic to whom it is directed.
A favored
tactic of defenders of the LDS faith, in order to divert attention away from
legitimate criticism, is to try to convince the faithful that there can be no
valid reasons for leaving the fold. As mentioned above, Joseph Smith probably
said that if you leave the Church “it will be by the instigation of the evil
one, and you will follow his dictation and be his servant.”
In Lesson
27 of the manual Teachings of the Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith,[xviii]
we learn that there is ostensibly a relatively short list of reasons for
apostatizing from the Church.
1.
Not recognizing the prophet as a source of
revelation for the church.
2.
Pride (as an example, the manual offers
the already discounted story of a petty squabble over milk)
3.
Being critical of leaders imperfections
(the example offered is again petty, a misspelled name on a mission call)
4.
Being offended.
5.
Rationalizing Disobedience
6.
Accepting false teachings of the world.
The manual “Teachings of the Presidents of the Church:
Brigham Young” has an equivalent explicit message. Chapter
12 “Preventing Personal Apostasy”[xix]
has President Young warning us that “…no person ever apostatized, without
actual transgression.”
Certainly we all know one or two people who left for
some variant of one of the above reasons, but if I were to give a ballpark
estimate, >90% of those who I know who have left have done so for much more
substantial reasons than the moral weakness or laziness that Church would have
you believe causes every instance of apostasy.
Consider the role that a hypothetical occupying force
plays in an occupied nation. The occupying nation operates a governing structure,
governors and parliament, a legal system, a military, and a police force. It
may be responsible for education, developing and running grade schools, trade
schools, and universities. It may be responsible for developing and, maintaining
infrastructure like hospitals, water and sanitation, roads and bridges, and
housing. Now what happens if that occupying force either withdraws or is ejected?
It is quite likely to take with it the entire infrastructure that made the
occupied region functional. In effect, it rips the metaphorical spine out of
the country, leaving it crippled, potentially for decades as it tries to
rebuild and replace lost infrastructure. Would it be safe to say that it might
be easier to try to maintain the occupying force and its attendant
infrastructure than to try to rebuild it from the ground up?
The Church is very much like that occupying force.
Growing up in the faith provides a functional infrastructure with regards to multiple
aspects of one’s life, but it is an infrastructure that would have developed
very differently had the individual not grown up immersed in the Church.
The Church provides an epistemology—a theory of what
constitutes knowledge and what constitutes truth—that provides an absolute
certainty only available to the faithful. It “blesses” us with a “knowledge” of
the ultimate nature of reality. It reveals to us the true nature of ourselves,
our ultimate purpose in life, locating us on our eternal journeys, and providing
a means of interpreting and dealing with the death of loved ones and ourselves.
It provides us a network of support via our extended congregational families,
and more formally through a system of employment, welfare, and social services.
Growing up in the Church provides us with a moral scaffolding[xx] that guides us in
political and social matters, and covers everything from big picture moral
issues like charity and compassion, right down to the minutiae of our lives
like private sexual habits and thoughts, dress codes, facial hair, and dietary
restrictions.
For the faithful, the Church is at the core of
personal identity, providing an infrastructure that allows individuals to
interpret reality, experience meaning, and feel confidence at ones place in the
universe, evaluate propositions, interact with the social environment, and be
confident that one is living a virtuous life.
If/when the Church withdraws or is ejected from one’s
life, with it goes the only infrastructure with which one has always navigated
their moral, social, and metaphysical reality. In effect, it rips the
metaphorical spine out of the individual, leaving them crippled, potentially
for decades, as they try to rebuild and replace lost infrastructure.
I want no ambiguity on this next point. For me, leaving
the Church was not down to moral weakness, desire to sin, laziness, hiding
secret transgression, or interpersonal offense. It was not, under any
description, the easy way out. It was fucking devastating. The loss of my
social, emotional, cognitive, epistemological, and moral infrastructure was
like having my spine ripped out.
One of my old students astutely observed that “divorcing
the Church was more traumatic than divorcing my wife.”
I concur.
On the mission, as über-righteous as
we were, we tended to be quite harsh in our judgments of members who we thought
did not take the Church seriously enough, the wishy washy members, who couldn’t
be bothered to learn Church history and didn’t care about correct doctrines,
cafeteria Mormons, foyer Mormons who simply showed up on Sundays out of habit
or for social reasons. We felt justified in our righteous indignation because
the Bible (Revelations 3:16) condemns such believers: “So then because thou art
lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew/spit/vomit thee out of my
mouth.”
We had a name for members of the Church that fit the
above description. Happy Lifers.
When a faithful member dismisses a former believer
with the accusatory “you can leave the Church, but you can’t leave it alone,”
they are suggesting that upon concluding that the Church is not what it claims
to be, and upon concluding that the Church is not for them, the ex-believer
ought to be able to walk away, without so much as a second thought.
Can any reasonable person, after a lifetime steeped in
the Church, seriously contend that upon losing the infrastructure described
above, the former believer can just forget about the whole thing; that after
having one’s spine ripped out, a person should just continue on as if nothing
has happened?
To make such an assertion implies that the person
making the claim judges that were they to leave the faith, they could simply
walk away. Could they really? Could a person whose personal identity developed
while immersed in the culture, theology, traditions, and rituals of Mormonism
really just turn it off like a light switch? Any person who can simply switch
it off was, in my estimation, most likely never a truly faithful believer. The Church was
never at the core of their identity and never provided any sort of
infrastructure to them.
The members use of the phrase “you can leave the
Church, but you can’t leave it alone,” far from its intended purpose of standing strong in the face of opposition and bravely dismissing the persecutor, actually reveals the member to be a Happy Lifer, neither
hot nor cold, and the kind of believer that the Lord in whom they profess to
believe intends to spew out of His mouth.
For those of us who grew up loving the Church, taking
seriously its doctrines, traditions, practices, and rituals, the trauma of
leaving leaves us crippled in many ways. After walking away almost two decades
ago, this author is still reconstructing, still rebuilding, still processing
what it means to leave behind the LDS faith. What the believer refers to as not leaving the Church alone or
persecution, I refer to as rebuilding or processing.
The essays contained in my blog are part of that
ongoing project of rebuilding and processing. More than 50% of the names on the records of the LDS Church no longer practice the faith[xxi], and the numbers leaving
the fold are snowballing; if my essays in some small way help others process
the trauma experienced in divorcing the Church, that’s a risk I’m willing to
take.
The Church may disabuse itself of shunning tactics,
but in fact, the frequent use of “you can leave the Church, but you can’t leave
it alone, by virtue of it being synonymous with “you are under the control of
Satan” is itself a form of shunning.
For many disenfranchised, failure to “leave the Church
alone” amounts to exactly the same thing that the Church tries to do with its
own missionary efforts, while for others it is part of the process of
rebuilding and processing the loss of infrastructure that occurred upon
discovering that the foundational claims of the LDS Church are less than
justifiable.
It is a phrase that, although intended to valiantly
dismiss the former believer and their devilish persecution of the Church,
actually reveals far more about the user. It shows the alleged believer to be
willing to participate in shunning, lacking confidence in the Church’s claims and/or
their ability to defend them, and a “happy lifer” with little commitment to the
Church.
And such a person thinks that they can tell me what I
can say and think, that I have to stop processing the trauma of leaving, to
“leave the Church alone?”
No.
Just no.
[ii] The notion has
been around since the early days of the Church, but the specific phrase seems
to find its origin here.
[iii] A lighthearted
reference to Church rhetoric here: https://unexaminedfaith.blogspot.com/2016/09/church-handbook-of-instructions.html,
particularly principle 2.
[iv] Paraphrasing, but
unattributed.
[v] I use the
considered term “attributed” because the earliest reference to it is apparently
1892:
Daniel
Tyler, in “Recollections of the Prophet Joseph Smith,” Juvenile Instructor,
Aug. 15, 1892, pp.491–92.
Also
found in current lesson manual Teachings
of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Chapter 27,
“Beware the Bitter Fruits of Apostasy.”
[xiii] https://www.mormonnewsroom.org/facts-and-statistics
[xvi] …shortly before
becoming a member of the council of the 12 Apostles (Brown was later to be a
member of the 1st Presidency as well).
Brown, H. B. (1988) The Abundant
Life: The Memoirs of Hugh B. Brown, ed. Edwin B. Firmage (Salt Lake City:
Signature Books). Pp. 137-139
[xvii] Apostle,
considered one of the great, if not the greatest, theologians of the LDS
tradition.
Improvement Era, Jan 1920, p. 204
[xx] A moral
scaffolding that I think is profoundly flawed. Please see https://unexaminedfaith.blogspot.com/2018/08/zeuss-thunderbolt-euthyphros-dilemma.html
and https://unexaminedfaith.blogspot.com/2017/07/ctr-rings-embodiment-of-misguided.html
[xxi]This fairly Church
friendly source https://www.churchistrue.com/blog/lds-membership-statistics-2019/
estimates that approximately 30% of those on the books are actually practicing
members.
Elder Maxwell used similar phrases as early as October 1980 General Conference:
ReplyDelete"Newcomers, you may even see a few leave the church who cannot then leave the church alone."
Good catch. It is repeated by Faust in 1983 as follows: "Among the assaults on families are the attacks on our faith, for which parents should prepare their children. Some of it is coming from apostates who had testimonies and now seem unable to leave the Church alone"
Delete