Conversion stories

The centerpiece of my reading for this week was the conversion of Alma the Younger. The Sunday School study guide encourages me to use this reading as an occasion to reflect on my own conversion, and that's what I feel moved to do. I'm going to tell a couple different conversion stories, though . . . and there are more I could tell besides these. Because conversion—or as Alma puts it, becoming a new creature (Mosiah 27:26), becoming a new person—isn't something that happens only once in our lives. It happens again and again as we grow from grace to grace in our eternal progress.

By the way, these conversion stories double as Easter testimonies. The typological connection between the Easter story and Alma the Younger's conversion is apparent from the fact that Alma spends two days and nights in a death-like trance and on the third day rises again. Paul equates spiritual transformation with our being raised with Christ into new life—i.e., spiritual transformation is part of how we participate in Christ's resurrection. I believe that.

Conversion story 1: Early in my mission, I underwent a faith crisis. I'm glossing over a lot of backstory here, but the simple way to tell it is that I came to a point where I realized that I simply didn't have the kind of indubitable proof of LDS faith claims that I believed I needed to have. I'd had "burning in the bosom" kinds of experiences in the past, but I didn't regard those as indubitable because they were too subjective—I could see the possibility that they were the result of emotional manipulation or my own fervent will to believe.

That probably sounds cerebral the way I just described it, but it was intensely distressing and depressing. Wrapped in all this were feelings of homesickness, and culture shock, and inadequacy, and fear of proselyting, and unresolved family issues, plus the incipient discomfort of being a strong-willed intellectual in a church institution that prizes obedience and conformity and has deeply rooted anti-intellectual strains. Sorry—getting cerebral again. The point is: I was miserable. I stayed up at night stewing. I cried in front of a sympathetic sister missionary. I shut down during discussions with investigators. And one morning, at 4 A.M., my companion and I got up and boarded a bus into the capital so that I could confess to the mission president that I didn't believe in God and needed to be sent home. At the end of that long, emotionally exhausting day, I was still a missionary, but largely because when it came time to bite the bullet, I was too chicken to phone my stake president and tell him I was done. My companion and I took the two-hour bus ride back to our proselyting area . . . where the first thing I did was conduct a baptismal service for my sympathetic sister missionary friend, who was frantic because the ward mission leader had dropped the ball.

For two more weeks I vacillated and stewed, trying to find any grounds for believing in the gospel, or anything else for that matter, that couldn't be relativized . . . and not finding any. I was still depressed. And then one day, sitting at my desk for scripture study, I had an epiphany. I would later learn to call this epiphany "postmodern," but I didn't know what that word meant at the time. A little voice in my head said something like: "Wait a minute. Why is it that every time you conclude everything can be relativized, you land on atheistic nihilism? Don't you realize that atheistic nihilism is just one more worldview among all the rest? And you don't have indubitable proof of that worldview anymore than you do for any other."

Again, this is probably all sounding really cerebral. But when I realized this, a huge weight was lifted. (I know, it's a cliché. But that's what it felt like.) I felt freed. The fact that I couldn't prove the truth of any belief the way I'd thought I was supposed to be able to meant that I was free to believe what I wanted. I had to believe something, after all. And there was no question that belief in Mormonism made me happy—or certain aspects of Mormonism, anyway. (I really disliked Bruce R. McConkie, for example.) So I chose happiness by choosing belief. Later, studying Alma 32, I would come to understand that choice as the essence of faith. At the moment I had this epiphany—March 24, 1992—I got on my knees and told God I was committing myself to believe in him and in the gospel teachings that had brought me happiness in my life. And that prayer felt powerfully, amazingly good.

Conversion story 2: I returned from my mission in October 1993. I had loved the mission: I told everyone it had been the most grueling but also the most spiritually satisfying experience of my life. I had seen God at work in my own life and the lives of others, and those experiences had strengthened my testimony. I wasn't necessarily an orthodox Mormon—I wavered on matters like Book of Mormon historicity, though I had no doubt the Book of Mormon was the word of God—but I felt more integrated to the church, as an institution, then I ever had before or ever have since.

And then I walked right from the mission field into the aftermath of the September Six and the beginnings of BYU's academic freedom controversy. The excommunications of people like Michael Quinn, Paul Toscano, Lavina Fielding Anderson, Maxine Hanks, later Janice Allred felt deeply wrong to me. I didn't always agree with those writers, but I admired them and I simply could not accept that their writings made them excommunicable. Particularly troubling were indications that Boyd K. Packer had directed stake presidents to take action and that Dallin H. Oaks (who interviewed with the national media about the excommunications) had known this and had helped cover it up. That suspicion made it hard to trust church leaders, and it made it simply impossible to trust them to the extent necessary to believe something like "the Lord will never allow the General Authorities to lead the church astray." And then the firestorms around David Knowlton and Brian Evenson—both of whom, again, I admired—shook me up that much more.

My first two years at BYU, before my mission, had been mind-opening and horizon-widening. My experience had been that this was a place where I could explore possible relationships between the subject matter of my college studies and LDS faith. I loved that. But during my last two years at BYU, after my mission, the atmosphere felt very different to me. I sensed more conflict, more guardedness on the part of professors, a greater sense that lots of people at BYU felt like they were under siege for different reasons. The message I was getting was that people like me—people who identified as intellectuals, who were interested in postmodern trends (when I began to study deconstruction as an English major, I recognized the same postmodern epistemological principles that had saved my faith), who were willing to put long-standing church teachings up for question, and who thought that church leaders and university administrators were making some very bad decisions—people like me were not welcome, either at BYU or in the church . . . even though we were acting, or trying to act, in the context of our Mormon faith.

At one point I attended a Marriott Center devotional where Gordon B. Hinckley dismissed the September Six controversy, this event that had thrown my life off-kilter, with a joke. He said that in the same month as those five excommunications, there had been 500 convert baptisms in Utah alone—5 to 500 sounded like pretty good odds to him, he said. I felt like I was the only person in the Marriott Center who didn't find that funny. (So the five sheep in the wilderness don't matter as long as there are 500 more in the fold?)

By the end of my time at BYU, church had become a miserable experience. Church meetings were simply to be endured. I don't remember how, exactly, I distracted myself during Sunday School and priesthood; but during sacrament meeting, I would sit alone, sort of folded up in my chair, with my eyes shut. I felt constantly under attack—not that people intended that, of course; but the orthodox tone that everyone took for granted in these meetings, especially in the militant atmosphere of BYU in the early 1990s, sent the constant message that I didn't fit here. Church attendance did nothing for me spiritually. My spiritual nourishment came from things like weekly temple attendance or finding an empty room on campus on a Friday night where I could play hymns on the piano. After I graduated and moved to Salt Lake to go to graduate school at the University of Utah, I attended sacrament meeting once. I was pleasantly surprised to see someone with facial hair give a talk (how progressive!), but when the meeting was over, I thought, "There's nothing here for me." And except for events like baby blessings, I never attended LDS church meetings again.

Why do I call that a conversion story? There are other ways to characterize it. I could call it an un-conversion story. Or a story about going into exile. But I think of it as a conversion story because like the first conversion story I told, and like the conversion of Alma the Younger, the story of how I became inactive is a story about being set free from misery and a kind of captivity, about entering a new life where I'm able to live with joy and freedom, about overcoming forces that hold me back me from being the person I feel that God is impelling me to be. Of course, life wasn't smooth sailing after either of these conversion experiences, just as it wasn't for Alma the Younger, who faced opposition from people who regarded his new course as a betrayal.

Figuring out how to make the two conversion stories I've told here work together in the narrative of my life has been a challenge, one that has involved yet further conversion stories. Had I chosen the route of being an "ex-Mormon," and if I were posting these stories to someplace like "Recovery from Mormonism," I would have treated the first conversion story as an error and the second as my coming to see the light. But that's not the way I see these stories working together. The second conversion story isn't a repudiation of the first. Rather, it takes the first in a different direction. And I trust God to show me where to go next. "God has delivered me . . . and I do put my trust in him" (Alma 36:27).