My Road to Atheism, Part 1: What took me so long

My road to atheism was long and difficult. I’ve only actively identified myself as an unbeliever for less than a year, but the questioning started long before that. I’d like to explore, for my own benefit, and hopefully the benefit of anyone under similar circumstances, what took me so long.

I come from a family of 7^th-generation Mormons. On my mother’s side, the first convert was a man named James Lake, Jr., who was taught and baptized by Brigham Young himself in the late 1830s, shortly after the foundation of the church. On my father’s side it wasn’t much later, as one of my ancestors was taught and baptized over in Europe by one of the early missionaries. People on both sides of my family came across the plains in the wagon train with the pioneers, and much of my family tree around that time is gnarled with polygamy. Today, the vast majority of my extended family is Mormon, and the vast majority of my friends, throughout most of this story, were Mormons.

Growing up, I was extremely devout. I did my best to avoid sex, drugs, and booze, and for the most part didn't even swear. I participated in the church youth activities, including the Boy Scouts, and generally did what I was expected to do. My freshman year of college I argued openly with my biology professor about evolution. I wrote a letter to the editor of my local paper in which I mourned the approval of RU-486 (the “abortion pill”), calling it a “triumph for unchaste women.” I was also the Sunday School president of the local congregation during that time.

Then, I embarked on a 2-year mission for the church when I was 19, traveling thousands of miles from home and preaching the gospel to those poor souls who hadn’t yet heard it. I rose through the ranks of trainer, district leader and zone leader to the highest available position for a missionary, that of Assistant to the President, a highly coveted position of great authority. I was known as a pillar of faith, and one of the most knowledgeable “scriptorians” in the mission. I read the entire Bible, front to back, without even noticing the times when God commanded genocide and rape. My faith-filter was highly tuned. Although I did become aware of several important contradictions in the Bible, Mormons believe that the Bible is only true insofar as it is translated correctly, so it didn't pose a challenge. I had scripture verses memorized that I could wield in almost any situation and to answer almost any question.

I attended Brigham Young University, as did my wife, who had also served a full-time mission. We were married in the temple shortly after we graduated on the same day, and were promised that we would be together not just in this life, but for "time and all eternity" in a secret ceremony only open to those Mormons who meet the rigorous standards of temple attendance. There I covenanted with God and my wife to remain ever-faithful, upon pain of hellfire.

As you have probably noticed, my reasons for staying faithful were legion (to borrow the Biblical usage of the word). It was a storybook Mormon life, had I not been so dissatisfied. I was destined for high positions of leadership; indeed, my patriarchal blessing (a special prophetic blessing that Mormon teens receive; basically a glorified fortune-telling) foresaw that I would “preside over the quorums of the church.”

On the inside, however, things were much different. I remember sending letters to my Mission President in the early months of my mission asking unanswerable questions and being told that I just needed to have faith, which I took to heart. I remember telling some other missionaries that if I wasn't a Mormon I would probably be an atheist. I remember noticing contradictions between the supposedly perfect Book of Mormon and the supposedly perfect Joseph Smith translation of the Bible. I remember writing an in-depth paper at BYU about the Mormon persecution in Missouri and discovering that the evidence suggested that the reasons they were driven out of town had nothing to do with their religion, and everything to do with their arrogance, pugnacity, unwillingness to associate with the other townsfolk, and the huge voting bloc that they represented, giving them near absolute power over local political matters. This information was not welcomed by my devout professor, and was certainly not to be found in any of the (what I even then considered to be) white-washed church histories.

I began studying evolution and discovered it to be a supremely elegant explanation for the things that the church used fairy tales to explain. I actually discovered that the church authorities had softened their stance on evolution several decades before, and that it is taught as truth in BYU biology classes, but that it just hadn't caught on among the general membership of the church. This was a relief for me, but I still struggled to understand how to reconcile evolution with the church’s great emphasis on Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. If Adam and Eve are only metaphorical, then the entire doctrine of the church crumbles, and yet here was evolution being taught at BYU.

It was during this time that I basically went numb. For several years I stopped thinking deeply about religion, fearing the outcome of doing so. My church attendance went downhill, and when I did show up it was mostly for social reasons. It was during this time that I married my wife, a very devout Mormon. My unwillingness to address the issue extended even to her, as I avoided religious discussion with her on anything more than a superficial level. I finally began to think about things a few months after our wedding, which led me to cautiously express some of my doubts. Despite my care, the mere mention of doubt was shocking enough to my wife that I decided to go back to not thinking about it for another year or so.

When I did begin thinking about religion again, it was not Mormon doctrine that dominated my thoughts, but the existence of God at all. I had come to be a logical, reasonable person except when it came to religion, and I wondered if I wasn't compromising my personal integrity in order to believe in it. I began thinking about the odds that any religion was true, let alone the one that I happened to be born into. I began exploring the origins of religion, and came to the conclusion that they were all most likely fiction. Still, I resisted. It was not enough to allow me to liberate myself. I felt like I had too much at stake and risked throwing nearly everything away. It did cause me to reopen a bit of dialogue with my wife, however, albeit to mixed results. The consequences of "coming out" loomed large, and I went back into my numb little shell, refusing to think about it.

A few months later, I happened upon a speech given by Richard Dawkins. I can't be sure, but I think it was his reading and subsequent Q&A session at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in October of last year. It resonated with me, and I sought out more. I ended up watching and reading everything I could find on the internet by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. It was during this time (I think October or November of last year), that I announced to my wife that I no longer believed in God, although I had really stopped believing some several months before, and had lived a virtually faith-free life for even longer than that.

While the arguments of Dawkins and Harris were certainly useful in battling my seemingly never-ending stream of internal religious justification, their effect on me was not necessarily one of convincing, but one of encouragement. I later read The God Delusion, Letter to a Christian Nation, and the End of Faith, further solidifying my desire to be an out-of-the-closet rationalist.

The experience of finally acknowledging my lack of belief, of finally accepting the feelings that had been welling up for so long, of finally putting religious belief behind me for good, is one I’ll never forget. The feelings that accompanied my deconversion are strikingly similar to the feelings described by many of those people who I personally converted to Mormonism. It was a great relief; a giant weight lifted; a rush of excitement. The flood of intellectual nourishment that followed as I sought out knowledge and explored evidence without fear of where it might lead was, and is, constantly exciting.

You see, it wasn’t the rules and restrictions of Mormonism that most bothered me. For the most part I didn’t really mind them. It was the intellectual bondage and the requisite distrust of science that was, to a scientific mind, unbearable.

Next time: The aftermath