If I'd never been a member of the LDS Church

One of the questions accompanying lesson 9 in the D&C/Church history Sunday School curriculum is: "How might your life be different if the Church had not been restored or if you were not a member of the Church?" Of course, the question's cuing people to say things like, "I wouldn't have the direction of a living prophet," or "I wouldn't enjoy the blessings of the Atonement," or "I couldn't be with my family forever." My first reflex upon seeing the question was to grimace and roll my eyes, and then I thought for a while about how much it annoys me when people who find out I still identify as Mormon ask me, usually with surprise, "So you still attend church?"—as if participation in the official institutions of the LDS Church were the be-all and end-all of Mormonism. (I find that question particularly annoying when it comes from people in religious studies, who ought to know better. When someone tells you they're Jewish, do you assume they keep kosher? Or if they're Catholic, do you assume they go to Mass every week? No. You inquire about the construction of their religious identity as something they might have negotiated in various ways. So what's so hard about conceiving that I, as a Mormon, might have the creativity and initiative to similarly renegotiate my religious identity?)

Anyway, after I'd indulged in that little mental rant for a while, I decided to think through the question in a (relatively) more humble frame of thought. How might my life be different if I hadn't been raised in the LDS Church?

Well, strictly speaking, I wouldn't exist, since my parents met as a result of attending BYU after their respective conversions to the LDS Church. If my parents had never joined the LDS Church—and if we loosen up the thought exercise enough to assume that a person we can call "me" would still have sprung forth from either my mother's womb or my father's loins, even without the other's genetic material (can you tell I'm teaching philosophy of religion this summer?)—then given my parents' prior religious histories, I might have been raised some kind of conservative evangelical or, alternatively, a tepid Lutheran, or possibly with no particular religious identity at all. Which means I might have grown up in a more permissive household—or not. I might have been raised in a religious community less preoccupied with orthodoxy and boundary maintenance—or not. I might have experienced less guilt about discovering that I'm gay—or not. I might have attended some kind of conservative religious college and—given my arrogant, stand-out-from-the-herd temperament—rebelled by becoming a liberal; or I might have attended a liberal or secular college and, given the same temperament, rebelled by becoming a conservative. Who's to say?

I think it's safe to say I wouldn't have spent two years as a young adult living in the Dominican Republic. Which means that Third World poverty might not linger in my mind the way it does, and I might find it easier to feel entitled or oblivious to the luxuries of American culture. I wouldn't have ever met . . . here plug in a long list of people whose lives I feel very grateful for having entered or intersected with, however briefly as a missionary.

It's safe to say I wouldn't have attended BYU, which means that I might have realized years before I actually did that I could pursue something called "religious studies," in which case I might actually be a professor in this field somewhere already instead of still working toward it at age 36.

I wouldn't have experienced the endowment. As I write it, I wonder if that will seem like a trivial thing to readers. But the temple ceremony has been very important to me in shaping how I understand who I am, and where I'm going in a cosmic or existential sense, and what God wants me to do with my life. I would consider it a loss not to have experienced that.

What else? Similar to the observation I just made about the endowment, I probably would never have engaged with the distinctive LDS scriptures and therefore wouldn't have the spiritual vocabulary they provide. I doubt I would have been moved to join the LDS Church had I not been raised in it. I doubt I would be moved to take the LDS scriptures seriously if I hadn't grown up studying them in a receptive frame of mind that allowed me to experience the Spirit speaking to me through them.

Obviously I haven't engaged here in the kind of reflection the Sunday School manual wants. I'm not gushing gratefully about the unique, indispensible blessings available only in and through the LDS Church. I happen to have been raised in the LDS Church. That fact shaped my life in ways that I appreciate—in some cases, that I appreciate deeply—but it's also shaped my life in ways that I'm not so thrilled about, though who's to say a different life would necessarily have been better? The point is: God found me where I was. He reached out to me in the context, and in the language, of the LDS Church. And even after I stepped away from that church's institutions, I found that communicating with God still came most naturally in the language I'd learned there, and so that's how we've kept talking.

There's nothing special, really, about that arrangement in the big scheme of things, though it's vitally important to me personally. God speaks every language. If I hadn't started out in the LDS Church, he would have found me wherever I was and spoken to me in whatever language was spoken there—and then waited for me, hopefully, to respond. That's how he works. And once I'd responded, he would have led me wherever he wanted me to be, or wherever he knew would best let me live out the desires of my heart. Maybe that would have been the LDS Church, maybe not. All I can know is what actually has been and is. And I trust him to keep leading me along.