It is with some surprise that I find myself in an area of general agreement with Mr. Smoot.
His fable may be two-dimensional, but arguing that as if it were a refutation is to miss the point of fables in general: to illustrate a moral that is rooted in general experience, not a description of particular circumstances. If the personalities and psychological and social particulars of Sue and Jim are sublimated beneath Smoot's fable, it doesn't deny the general validity of the fable or the moral lesson it seeks to impart.
Smoot is attacking a narrative, and to deny that, indeed, there is a narrative that "ex-Mormons" begin to tell each other about themselves—the so-called "faith crisis"—is to deny what is stiflingly evident. I have seen, heard, or read this same tiring narrative played out, rehearsed, recited, written up, and performed on podcasts and blogs and message boards and reddit and in discussions with family members hundreds of times for nearly a decade and with little variation. It does follow some general patterns—or rather, it is articulated and described in ways that follow a general pattern—though obviously a general pattern is not a general law of nature. Dehlin couldn't have kept his shtick going as long as has if there really were such a wide range of narrative articulations among online ex-Mormons (note the qualifier). That the term "faith crisis" exists as a shorthand for it is one indication of just how readily understandable and communicable it is. It is a kind of shibboleth. It's become a tired cliché consisting of allusive lists that are casually recited and that you can hear on practically any of Dehlin's interviews over the past few years: "So I had my faith crisis; Book of Abraham, polygamy; CES letter—all that stuff." To anyone not familiar with the narrative, the phrases in quotations are meaningless, as is the syntax of the sentence, but if you understand them and can follow the chain of reasoning in that sentence, then you can congratulate yourself on being a part of community bounded by a kind of myth (in the sociological sense).
The "faith crisis" myth exists and persists partly because, like all genuine myths, it is a very convenient way of orienting oneself in a confusing world because it is universal, not particular, and thereby makes it possible to relate with and communicate with other people. That is why it lends itself so well to a fable. It helps you process experience by offering ready-made answers. It is the mirror-image of the "testimony" myth—"I prayed and the Spirit witnessed to me that this Church is true"—and in fact arises out of it, since every "testimony" (all of which are similarly stereotyped, complete with public performance and ritualized language) is predicated on a faith crisis—what else is praying to know that "these words are true" if not a crisis of faith? The only difference on this level is that ex-Mormons eventually get a different answer.
As a myth, it is perfectly natural and, to that extent, justifiable—and that is one area where Smoot reveals his own partisanship, because he doesn't see that he, too, is following some pretty typical patterns and thinking in terms of a myth. For Jim's father (who is obviously by extension Mr. Smoot) in the fable is also part of a myth: the mentoring sage who has weathered the "faith crisis" and who has come out whole on the other side. He may own a lot of books and may even have read some of them, but that too is a role that people play in this myth. I'm perfectly willing to accept that such people sincerely have investigated things that were problems to them and answered them to their satisfaction, but there is always some guy (always a male) like that in every ward. And their answers, like their reading lists, are always predictable, which is not exactly an indication of original thought. These guys are all cliché. They are so cliché that you can just go to a website to see their collection of ready-made answers for whatever question you might have. The thinking has been done!
Smoot is not wrong, I think, in attacking this ex-Mormon cliché because to my mind and to my experience (I never had anything like a "faith crisis") it has had the effect of obscuring the reality of what's really happening in the Church: most ex-Mormons don't know or care that they are ex-Mormons, have never had a "faith crisis," and simply got bored with an institution that doesn't serve their needs, so they quit going. But internet Mormons and those who give their testimony also find it boring. For them, the Book of Abraham and polygamy only matter as issues because allegiance to the Church hangs on the imagined charisma of an infallible clergy and the magical aura surrounding Joseph Smith the Prophet. When the infallibility is gone, the charisma vanishes; when the magic dissipates, only a farmer from nineteenth-century Vermont is left. That is not much to hang your allegiance on, so they become online ex-Mormons who go to reddit and other places.
Now, as I have argued here countless times, I think the "faith crisis" narrative doesn't fit most ex-Mormons. Most never found the leaders infallible or charismatic, and while they may have accepted Joseph Smith's status in the Church, it didn't mean much to them. Apologists struggle to attack these people because they do not form a self-conscious group, and the most that can be said is that they never really had a testimony in the traditional sense—and that is probably true and many would feel no shame in saying so. I freely admit that I never had a testimony and I also never had a faith crisis. From my earliest years I saw testimony-bearing as a performance, but the problem was that the performers didn't see it that way: they used words like "I know," and that in turn invited me to wonder whether I knew that angels talk to farmers and tell them where golden books are buried in the woods. I didn't even have to wonder very long, because of course that sort of thing doesn't happen. Like just about everyone else who quit the Church ("left the Church" would imply too much for too many), I could not discover any charisma in the old sleepy men, and I believe magic is an entertaining illusion. Only a very small core of Mormons have ever been able to think otherwise (some with PhDs, of course) and it is from this small core that online ex-Mormons descend. Neither of my siblings, despite being raised in the Church, even knows who Russell Nelson is, whereas everyone on the ex-Mormon reddit undoubtedly does.
But of course this distinction is not why Smoot is attacking this myth because he doesn't know or care about the mass of the un-testimonied. He is attacking the myth because he really doesn't believe its adherents have really had a genuine faith crisis—he might be right—and he wants them to.
And yet, the response seems mostly to be one of self-justification. Perhaps I shouldn't expect anything else, but it seems to me not altogether the best response. I can understand why some of online ex-Mormons see themselves as victims, and there are instances in general where I think that word applies (e.g. the MTC is the one area where the Church allows itself to behave quite openly like a religious cult), while obviously there are some pretty egregious individual cases. But from my arrogant perch, I think many online ex-Mormons were and still are the victims of their own delusions, even if they were victims of the Church in some sense.
Come on, now—did you ever once in your life see an angel? Did you ever trust the sanity of someone who claimed to? People stop trusting their parents when they enter their teens, and certainly by 19 years old you are responsible for your own beliefs, certainly for acting on them. But that is all in the past for anyone reading this—how about now? Perhaps your "faith crisis" wasn't really a crisis. That is ultimately what Smoot is saying here, and I am inclined to agree with him. Not only do most ex-Mormons never have a "faith crisis" because they were never the testimony-type, but anyone who can shake off a whole religious tradition a few months after reading something as amateurish as the CES letter cannot have been in a very severe crisis. I don't mean to diminish the CES letter, but it's not Spinoza or Hume, for god's sake. My own view is that "faith crisis" is something that caught on largely because of podcasts and Facebook groups in the first decade and half of this century, media which exploit the fact that human beings absorb ideas faster than they can think about them (a meme in Dawkins's sense), and the advantage that "faith crisis" had is that it was already narratively embedded in the minds of believers as the "testimony." But even devout believers have been giving up Mormonism without much of a mental crisis since about 1830.
The proper response to Smoot, then, is not to accuse him of "gaslighting" and "victim-blaming," because that is to fight it out on the ground he wants you to fight it out on: the field of the Testimony. His claim is: "you really haven't given this enough thought." You can only be a victim of that accusation if you accept its premises.
So what's wrong with agreeing with that you haven't given it all more thought? It seems to me the best response must contain the point that any religious group that needs contorted reasoning about historical evidence just to remain as a nominal member is really not worth it. No one would travel on a road trip in a car with a wooden wheel, no doors, a smoking engine, and a broken windshield with bits of ragged glass threatening to blow in your face, and if your friend, the driver, were to answer your second-thoughts by telling you that you need to read several books about the history of cars, or that people with PhDs ride in his car just fine, or that you really need to just think more about the destination because all these problems you see are just apparent and not real—well, you'd be even more suspicious, wouldn't you? The response should be: "This is not really worth thinking about."
(as a footnote: I emphasize "historical" evidence because Mormon apologetics is really all about history, not reason. That is why I hesitate even to call them "apologists" in the classical Christian sense, because fidens quaerens intellectum has to do with the application of human reason to the Christian faith. It has not generally been about the interpretation of historical evidence but instead about philosophical problems that really aren't solvable through empirical evidence. By contrast, Mormons apologistics [my preferred term] is highly suspicious of applying human reason to the Mormon faith—that is the practical difference between the new and the old Maxwell Institutes—and instead is an endless and pointless argument about bits of historical data: NHM, Book of Mormon geography, scroll length, etc. These really have nothing to do with faith in the traditionally Christian sense, or at least they should not.)
The proper response should also clarify for Mr. Smoot that the real crisis is a social crisis—relationships with family and friends and especially spouses and children—and for that the Church really does have a share of blame to accept. If Jim's father is going to be an asshole, then that is his failing, and no matter of book-reading by Jim and Sue is going to correct the father's flaws.
That crisis is the only one that matters. It seems to me that too often the "faith crisis" is simply a metonym for the real problem, and it is telling as I review some of the comments how quickly some go from mentioning a "faith crisis" to problems with the family. For the Church, this has led them to waste time and effort on silly essays rather than looking for ways to make itself less a corporation with a religious ethos and more a network of communities that I hear it once was—or at any rate something that provides discernible benefits to people who don't have time or interest to read shelves of 19th century history books and learned treatises on Egyptian ink.
I am told that one should always fight an enemy on the territory of one's choosing, not the territory that one's enemy wants, and setting up favorable territory for his argument is what Smoot, intentionally or not, appears to be doing here. The apologists want this to be about faith crises because that is understandable to them—it's just a testimony that didn't get the right answer—and relatively easy to attack. It may not win them any friends but they're not trying to win friends; they're trying to defeat enemies.
I wonder whether the Church also benefits from the "faith crisis" narrative for reasons that are not unrelated: making it a crisis of your faith means that it's a problem that you are facing and that you need to resolve, and thus any social problems that arise from your new opinion about, say, "enish-go-on-dosh" and "kli-flos-is-es" are your fault in some ways. The problem of what the Church teaches about social relations and how those teachings are institutionalized is the only problem that counts. I suspect that most Mormons would go on being as indifferent as they ever were about "enish-go-on-dosh" if the Church were an institution that had means of helping its members become better people in more stable families other than social intimidation. Perhaps they'd rather write essays because, in fact, how you deal with "enish-go-on-dosh" and the rest of the Book of Abraham is really a test of how committed you are. In short, it is meant to induce a crisis, social relations be damned. "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple."
From that angle, the only sensible response to Smoot and to the anyone trying to foist a crisis on you is simply not to accept it, and to say: "It's true: I didn't read enough books. Explain why I should have to. Why is this Church worth that sort of time?"
_________________ "As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."
—B. Redd McConkie
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