I’d be lying if I tried to continuously assert that faith issues and spiritual experience issues were the only things holding me back from committed belief in anything. There are major parts of me that are reluctant to decide for God or for Christ because I don’t want to decide for God or for Christ. Simply put, I have a religious/spiritual fear of commitment.
I’m not talking about the stereotype of the unbeliever who is unwilling to change his life, so he chooses atheism in order to live a life of immoral license. For me, the hard thing about being a Mormon was never the commandments. I’m not saying I never sinned, but I generally wanted to do the right thing, and I was generally successful in repenting of major wrongdoings and staying on the right track. The hard thing was never all of the rules. It was always intellectual.
What I’m trying to say is that Mormonism was so intellectually complete that it was stifling to me. There was no room for the unconventional, or the speculative. That may sound strange in light of rampant “Mormon folklore” and elders’ quorum-style speculation about Kolob, but I assert that it was/is nevertheless so. Sure, there was “room for speculation” in one sense, but it was always limited to certain narrowly defined directions, and even then you’re encouraged to focus on the essentials and warned of the consequences of straying too far out of bounds (just ask the September Six!).
I don’t really feel like I’m articulating this very well, and I’m sure that be failing to articulate it well, I’m inviting well-meaning Mormons to completely disassemble what I’m trying to say.
I like the idea that anything can be true. I like being able to read science fiction and wonder if that kind of thing will really happen someday (whereas the Second Coming of Christ sort of puts a damper on the voyages of the Starship Enterprise). I like entertaining possibilities. As much as religion appeals to me, uncertainty also appeals to me. Freedom to be as heretical as I please is a precious freedom.
I want to be able to wonder if – or even wish that – maybe some crazy thing is true without worrying that it is somehow beyond the walls of my religious/belief system and I need to repent. I want to be able to entertain any idea without feeling like I have to dismiss it for being unbiblical or unbookofmormonical. Or whatever.
I don’t like the idea of saying “I believe x is true” because it shuts down the possibility of a through w and y and z. To me, that is almost suffocating. I know I want spirituality, a spiritual path even, replete with practices and a way of life, but I don’t know if I am even really interested in a worldview. I don’t want to have to interpret everything I see through the lens of Mormonism, Christianity, or anything else for that matter. Maybe it’s the postmodernist in me that wants to be able to hit the buffet instead of ordering just one thing off the menu. I don’t know. Maybe this kind of thinking is intellectually dishonest of me, but if I am to be personally honest, I have to admit that it might be the biggest thing holding me back from belief of any kind.
Thinking about this, is sounds to me like I’m begging to be a Unitarian Universalist, but I have to admit that I’m not interested in the UU at all. I actually like traditional liturgical Christianity, and even Christian theology. And besides, like I said, I’m not reluctant about a spiritual path or well-defined spiritual practices, or even scriptures or many aspects of theology (by which I mean the philosophy of religion). It’s a stifling worldview that I’m spiritually claustrophobic about. I know it has a lot to do with gorwing up Mormon, but I also know it’s not an unjustified fear, because I see it in other belief systems, even more so than in Mormonism.
So one facet of my spiritual fear of commitment is this panicky spiritual claustrophobia that I don’t know how to deal with, or indeed if I even want to deal with it, and certainly I don’t want to have to deal with it.
Sailing to Byzantium 
I think I sympathize. Prepackaged, all-encompassing answers feel like an end. When I was a believer, I would imagine my life when I had it all together gospel-wise: I would have a strong testimony, struggle with no significant sins, etc. When I imagined this, I always felt like I was suffocating. I didn’t want to be like that. In some ways, I liked the exertion of struggling to find answers and become virtuous. I liked the journey but wasn’t looking forward to the destination.
A wise friend once told me that “Answers are death; questions are life.” This also reminds me of a Madonna song (Easy Ride):
I want the good life
But I don’t want an easy ride
What I want is to work for it
Feel the blood and sweat on my fingertips
That’s what I want for me
Spiritual Claustrophobia – good phrasing! I’m gonna use that sometime if you don’t mind.
It’s an inevitable thought. Dealing with belief systems that are inherently exclusive and inescapably dogmatic is stifling to a human soul that is inherently inquisitive and inescapably imaginative.
Don’t think I just came up with that. It’s actually a line from my own story. I went through a “sailing” stage (not to pressume that your’s is a generic “stage”), perhaps not as prolonged nor as thoughtful as yours, but just as personal.
I never doubted the existence of a God. What I doubted was that the God to whom I was introduced was, in reality, God.
What helped me with my spiritual claustrophobia, as you so adequately put it, was realizing what I wanted more than anything. It’s easy enough to figure out what you don’t want. More often than not, those things find you. But, I found myself making the mistake of defining what I wanted by avoiding what I didn’t want. In essence I began trying to define reality by own desires rather than simply searching for reality.
What I wanted more than anything was reality. I wanted truth. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life suspended in a coloration of reality, whether I was the one doing the coloring or not. If I did simply look for the particular explaination of reality that made me most comfortable and gave me the most creative freedom, at the end of the day, it still would have been short of reality.
I got sidetracked yesterday responding to your post. I said that I had one more piece of advice and then didn’t give it. Assuming that I’m understanding today’s post, I think it might be helpful.
My advice is that in your searching, search for truth. When you have a question that you want answered, you don’t look for the answer you want, you look for the answer that’s right. If you only look for the answer you want and reject the reality of others, you don’t find an answer, you find convenience.
I only hope I could be of some help.
t.j.s.
acts 20:24
Interesting. I’ve always thought there was plenty of room for uncertainty in LDS theology. Some people like to try to explain it all, but I find it to be a perfect balance of absolute truth and the as-yet unknown. I happen to be a strong believer in absolute truth. So it has never bothered me too much that by believing in one thing, I am ruling out the veracity of another.
I guess I don’t quite understand what you’re looking for. What you describe seems like universalism to me, or perhaps a uniquely personal belief system that simply follows the contours of what you chose to accept. But neither of those options seem to be what you’re looking for. I don’t think it’s really possible to take a postmodernist approach and still maintain the existence of absolute truth. It sort of seems like having your cake and eating it too. There wouldn’t be much comfort in a belief system for me if I was free to abandon it at any time. I think that spiritual or intellectual “freedom” you describe is one of the things believers sacrifice when they believe.
Yes, there’s room for uncertainty about “the stuff we don’t know,” but only uncertainty within the framework of Mormonism. You still have to look at everything through Mormon eyes, and try to fit everything- everything– into the Plan of Salvation.
My inaugural address at the Great White Throne Judgment of the Dead, after I have raptured out billions! The Secret Rapture soon, by my hand!
Read My Inaugural Address
Hmm. I’m not gonna delete that, because it’s good old-fashioned crazy. Even if it is bogglingly off-topic.
Wow! That was entertaining. Even though I must confess I didn’t read all of it. Did you scroll all the way to the bottom?
Why does the 2nd coming of Christ preclude space travel and other speculative notions that are imagined to be in our future? I know a lot of Christians think/hope that the 2nd coming is “imminent”, but given that Jesus stated that “of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only” in Matthew 24, might this not be wishful thinking? I mean, if God chose to delay His coming for another millennium, it would certainly throw off a lot of the pop eschatology that has been thrown around, but it certainly wouldn’t contradict Jesus.
In any case, I can understand why your “spiritual fear of commitment” would be troubling because it is pretty clear that Jesus demands nothing if not commitment. Yet I’m sure you can think of things that are worth committing to, and it comforts me to know that Christ does not require a blind commitment that disallows questions or denies the intellect. Rather, it is a commitment that is wholly based on newly-discovered and continually-growing love such as the wordless commitment I made to my son the first time I saw his face. I wasn’t worried about the fact that my worldview might be changed or more firmly established in certain areas, and I didn’t delude myself into thinking that I didn’t have a worldview or interpretive lens before he came along.
Anyway, thanks for the blog. I just discovered it and I’ve been enjoying peeking around. In case it is not obvious, I’m an evangelical Christian who understands the need to be vigilant against human authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism, so I appreciate your point of view very much.
Peter,
I believe in absolute truth, but I also believe that we, as finite beings, don’t have access to it. For example, I ate a dinner on my twelfth birthday. What exactly it was that I ate is an absolute truth, but I don’t remember what it was. I don’t think we could recover that information even if every man, woman, and child on planet Earth spent every waking moment on the problem for the next hundred years. That truth is lost to humanity. That is unless there’s a deus ex machina to bring us the truth. Personally, I’m not holding my breath.
Though my example is trivial, I think it represents the human situation quite well.
I know I want spirituality, a spiritual path even, replete with practices and a way of life, but I don’t know if I am even really interested in a worldview. I don’t want to have to interpret everything I see through the lens of Mormonism, Christianity, or anything else for that matter.
I have similar feelings at times. I would love to practice a religion without feeling like I had to believe in it. Whether it be Christianity or Buddhism, or whatever. There are too many people in every religious group who want to clamp down on people thinking outside the box. You need to be able to point to people who take things too seriously in whatever group you belong to and distance yourself from them. Religion often doesn’t allow for that.
Congratulations, Kullervo, you may have yourself an official troll. Funny stuff.
Jonathan Blake: I guess I believe in an accessible absolute truth. I believe that humans can perceive and understand at least parts of what is True, and that we will eventually be able to understand all of it, though not in this life.
Everyday Atheist: Interesting thoughts. I wonder if there isn’t an area in between that allows you to still believe a religious tradition and yet allows you to distance yourself from people who take themselves too seriously? Obviously you’re right in that organized religious usually require some sort of homogeneity of belief, but I think that comes with the territory. I’ve always thought that if you don’t believe or accept what they teach, then you leave. I guess that’s part of the inconvenience of believing. There’s a price for everything, even belief.
I don’t know that he was a real full-blown troll. I’ve been spared their ilk so far, although I’ve blocked a couple of commentors who came irritatingly close.
Peter, may I suggest that your hope for access to absolute truth is wishful thinking? 🙂
You may. 🙂 And yet, I shall persist in hoping. I’m stubborn like that.