Choosing to Stick With Your Faith

This is very boring, but the biggest religious choice I’ve had to make is simply that of staying put. I was very fortunate in the tradition that I grew up in. While I am far from incurious, I found that my own tradition, with its demands and expectations of belief and behavior, held up pretty well under scrutiny. So I stayed.

Doing so has reinforced to me the value of rootedness and the flimsiness of whim, volition, and passing fancy. Doubts come and go, but I seem to inhabit a different zone from most modern Americans—not of certainty, but of inevitability. It’s true whether or not I believe it.

A religious choice I suppose I’m still in the process of making is the one to stay in my religion rather than leave it. And while that’s not an unusual decision for many religious people to encounter at least once in their journeys in faith, I'm struggling with it a lot.

I’m 17 and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and for a few years I was dead-set on leaving the church as soon as I left my home, even if it meant cutting off my family and community entirely. That started changing a few months ago, when I decided I would try to find faith again.

That decision didn’t immediately transform my experience, as I hoped it would. Even though I had decided I wanted to stay, and wanted to believe in this huge and grand and intangible thing that made people I knew so happy, it wasn't as easy as one choice. Faith is elusive, and I learned that even when one devotes their lives to it, belief can be hard to cultivate.

At first my big issue with the Church, and staying involved in it, was its culture—the sometimes judgmental and exclusive and downright mean behavior of some of its members. After a while I realized that the culture I hated so much was something created by its members, who are all fallible humans, rather than doctrine or a divine being. I thought that epiphany would make my faith flourish, that it would no longer be so difficult to believe in the gospel in which I so desperately wanted to believe.

But it didn’t, and my journey got harder. Reconciling personal beliefs with religious ones is hard. Overcoming the effects un-Christlike Christians can have on one’s testimony is hard.

But what is so painfully and exhaustingly tough is aching to find belief when that belief just won’t come; when all your prayer and scripture study and church attendance and commandment-following doesn’t translate into faith, like you were always taught it would; when persevering only leads to more persevering, with no easily observable effects but frustration and an increasing feeling of hopelessness.

It takes up such a huge part of my life now, all the trying and worrying and crying and discussing and begging. It affects my mental and emotional health as well as my personal relationships.

Why do I keep trying? I ask myself this every day. I guess I see something in my religion, something bigger and further away than the promised blessings righteousness is supposed to bring—I guess I see some bright and immeasurable joy, somewhere off in the horizon. And so, every day, I make the choice to keep trying.

You could say I’m writing this in defense of organized religion, since I'm sharing the story of how I re-found my faith. I think your reader series is really perfectly timed, since the world’s focus on religion is so negative at the moment.

I’m 25. I’m a single Mormon girl living in Salt Lake City. I grew up Mormon, but finding my current faith has been a long process. I realize that my opinion may be extremely unpopular, and it’s kind of the opposite of a lot of the pieces you’ve published. But I feel really strongly about my faith, and want to champion it.

I want to share with you part of a talk I wrote last February. The Mormon church doesn’t have just one preacher or pastor; members of the congregation are invited to prepare talks and speak in the general meeting every Sunday instead. I’ve updated it a bit, but essentially, this is what I wrote:

A few months ago, one of the Humans of New York posts caught my eye. It said: “Going through life without God is like being an astronaut tumbling out of control in outer space....you've got to stay close. You can't cut your umbilical cord.” I just love that. For me, at least life without God really is like that, directionless and terrifying.

2013, the year I left the church, was the worst year of my life. I don't say that lightly, either—I mean it. I was in a manipulative and emotionally abusive relationship for most of that year, and it, along with some leftover teenage rebellion, caused me to walk away from the church. I turned my back on all of it, including my family, for a year.

I grew up in the church, and was baptized at 8, went to church every week with my parents and younger sisters, attended all the youth meetings, etc., but it was much too easy for me to turn away. Even though I was going to church and doing all the right things, I was not applying the principles and doctrines I was learning to my life. I was just there.

One of the biggest influences on my returning to church was a book I read in 2013, called Dakota: A Spiritual Biography, by Kathleen Norris. It was her definition of sin that caught my eye: sin as “any impulse that leads us away from paying full attention to who [we are] and what we’re doing; any thought or act that interferes with our ability to love God and neighbor.” I remember reading that and thinking, wow, that’s a much better definition of sin than “doing arbitrary wrong things” or “breaking the rules.”

It was this definition that got under my skin and eventually helped me go back to church. I realized that all the principles and doctrines I’d learned growing up were still rattling around in my brain, and I realized that the very restrictions I was straining against would help me, if I followed them, to lead the kind of life I wanted to live—cleanly, soberly, and with a clear conscience. I realized I desperately wanted to stop lying to my family about, well, everything. I realized I needed something to believe in, because believing in nothing and making my own rules was such a hopeless endeavor—without the guidance of a loving God, the world did not make sense to me. I needed to believe that everything will work out in the end, even if everything looks hopeless right now, because God is in charge and He loves us, no matter what.

I’ve attached the whole talk [PDF], as it was when I gave it, if you’re at all interested in reading the whole thing. I believe that religion is an intensely personal thing, and I’m so glad for all the perspectives shared already. The fight regarding religious freedom is going to get worse before it gets better, I think.