Skip to content
Main Street Plaza

A Community for Anyone Interested in Mormonism.

Main Street Plaza

A Community for Anyone Interested in Mormonism.

Growing Up Mormon: Religious Addiction

CV Rick, June 10, 2007

building.gif When I was very young my parents drank, smoked and rarely went to any church. My father had been raised Mormon, but had left the religion to sow wild oats or something. My mother was a Norwegian Lutheran from North Dakota. She was the responsible one, never doing anything to the extreme. My father, from stories I’ve gathered, had quite the alcohol problem – carousing and going on three-day binges. He struggled with excess, characteristic of addictive personalities.

After his last Vietnam duty tour, he came home with a new addiction. While over there he traded all the others in on religion. Specifically Mormonism. It superseded alcohol, tobacco, and sex (I’m speculating on that one, based on clues I’ve heard during family gatherings).

As with all addicts, it’s only good if everyone around you approves, participates, aids and abets. He came back from the war with demands. My mother was required to receive the missionary discussions. She was polite, as Norwegians are. She sat through them with the missionaries, read the Book of Mormon, and said, “No, thank you.” I’d just turned six. I really didn’t understand all this stuff, but I knew that I was now going to church a lot. I mean A LOT.

Despite her refusal, my father required my mother to attend all the services, socialize and participate completely.

Meanwhile, he immersed himself. He accepted callings and requested more. He went to every ward function, he helped every member move, he worked at the building, printed the weekly bulletin, volunteered to drive elderly members on errands. Everything he volunteered for included his family. Even when he’d be working in the office of the ward building and no one would be around, we’d have to sit in the foyer and wait for him to get done. With every assignment, he’d be sure to tell everyone around us how I’d been eager to volunteer, regardless the threats or whippings it’d taken to get me to come. It was important for him to have a good, righteous son.

What I really remember was that we were always in a hurry, rushing from one activity to another. He’d get home from work and we’d have to be standing in the living room, ready to go wherever it might be. Every day and all weekend. One memory dominates my childhood – I’m in a suit and tie watching all the neighbor kids play in their yards from the rear window of our station wagon as we drive away.

In all scheduling conflicts, church won out. We never went to school activities, my parents weren’t part of the PTA or anything else, we never attended neighborhood gatherings as a family – and there were a lot of them on military bases. We were the family that never participated.

In this religious addiction, my father didn’t notice that he lost something – his family. He believes that the church is the source of all things that strengthen families, but the truth is that unhealthy addictions, no matter what the object of the addictive fervor, are destructive.

I’ll bring this up again in later posts, but I was really into sports. I was good at them. I played baseball, basketball, football. I wrestled and I ran track. In track I went to state two years in a row. We went to state in basketball and I was all conference. In baseball I was twice named to the American Legion all-star teams.

Anyone with kids knows what kind of time commitments and expenditures sports require of families. My father was an addict however, so he made his choice and his choice was his religion. He never went to a single game in any sport that I played. He never saw me wrestle. He never attended an awards banquet. He never asked me about my scholarship offers – he didn’t care because it wasn’t about the church. I was the kid who had to beg rides with other families to out of town tournaments. I was the boy without any money for the stop at McDonald’s or for the hotel at the state tournament.

But I digress. My mother underwent the missionary discussions three times over a two year period, and after hundreds of arguments, after hour-long prayer after hour-long prayer, after begging, pleading, cajoling and bullying, she relented. We were baptized together on my eighth birthday and she’s been trying to get out of going to meetings ever since, but like the rest of us they dominated her life. Sometimes I see a simpler desire in her eyes, a life without the pressure of expectations and without the punishment of eternal purgatory for the unrighteous.

It wasn’t until twenty-eight years later, when her last child left the house that my mother got to join a bowling league – the one pre-LDS activity that she really enjoyed, that she really missed. Now she bowls on Monday nights and I’m sure it’s more enjoyable than any family home evening we ever had.

Hi, I’m Rick and my father is an addict.

This and other stories from my life are over on my blog.

ex-Mormon Family Parenting

Post navigation

Previous post
Next post

Related Posts

Forever family freak-show (conclusion of TW)

October 13, 2008

On Sunday morning, Rex and I went out to brunch with those people who weren’t going to church. Mom and Richard had been planning to visit the various local Christian churches that had LDS outreach ministries, but at the last minute the adorable baby motivated them to change their plans…

Read More

Are you a Mormon?

October 26, 2009January 15, 2011

We recently discussed the various names we use to refer to ourselves (liberal Mormon, NOM, post-Mormon, ex-Mormon, etc.) depending on how we each perceive our relationship with Mormonism. I’m interested in much more direct question, which I’m never quite sure how to answer. Are you a Mormon? It seems like…

Read More

Mother’s Day Mormon

May 12, 2008May 12, 2008

My brother-in-law is now an ex-mo, but his mother (my mother-in-law) won’t stop pestering him about returning to Mormonism (he’s only been openly out for about 6 months now; he was in the closet for about 6 months before that). He called her yesterday for Mother’s Day and asked her…

Read More

Comments (5)

  1. SML says:
    June 10, 2007 at 10:24 pm

    From one child-of-an-addict to another, this post is awesome in pinpointing the hazards of addiction to religion that can be so prevalent within the LDS church.

    Very well done.

  2. exmoron says:
    June 11, 2007 at 6:10 am

    Wow! That’s horrible and amazing at the same time. It’s also enlightening. I had never really thought to consider looking at religion as an addiction. That’s an intriguing insight that I’ll have to pay attention to in the future.

    Also, I can empathize with the missed games and such; I, too, was very active (in academic groups and sports) and my father wasn’t always able to make it – though he did try. The reasons were mixed – both work and church, but I’m sure that if church wasn’t in the mix he would have made it to a lot more of them.

    Thanks for sharing…

  3. Hellmut says:
    June 11, 2007 at 3:43 pm

    Thanks for sharing that, Rick. My father was an alcoholic. He had a pretty hard life and made life hard for us. And yet I think that Mormonism messed more with me than my dad.

    Anyways, it’s important to keep in mind that one can never know if another person really has a choice. I am pretty sure that my father did not have much choice. May be, your father did not have that much choice either.

  4. CV Rick says:
    June 11, 2007 at 5:31 pm

    For all his talk about Free Agency, it’s interesting to think that my father didn’t have a choice. No, he claimed to have choice in everything, so his choices were his own.

    exmoron, it’s nice that your dad at least tried . . . mine would volunteer for church stuff intentionally to busy himself on nights he could’ve attended my non-church activities.

    SML . . . Our dads might have been twins separated by fate.

  5. zy327529 says:
    February 26, 2008 at 6:12 pm

    zojos hysexava gukma
    kela http://zy327529.yp2zkuu.net/sitemap18.html [url=http://zy327529.yp2zkuu.net/sitemap18.html ]dohi[/url] gelag

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Mormon Alumni Association Books

Latest Comments:

  1. termal kamerayla su kaçak tespiti on LDS vs LGBTQ:  Nathan Kitchen sheds false binariesJune 21, 2025

    termal kamerayla su kaçak tespiti Ekip çok organize, kaça?? an?nda bulup çözdüler. https://bence.net/read-blog/25188

  2. Cara B. Klein on My conspiracy theory #2April 26, 2025

    Wow, I had never thought about it in that way before You have really opened my eyes to a new…

  3. chanson on LDS vs LGBTQ:  Nathan Kitchen sheds false binariesApril 16, 2025

    The haiku at the end is lovely. Sounds like a great book!

  4. Donna Banta on LDS vs LGBTQ:  Nathan Kitchen sheds false binariesApril 14, 2025

    I imagine anyone who has tried to change the church from within will identify with Kitchen's story. I especially like…

  5. Johnny Townsend on LDS vs LGBTQ:  Nathan Kitchen sheds false binariesApril 14, 2025

    This was a painful review to read. For many years, I held the same hope, that the LDS church would…

8: The Mormon Proposition Acceptance of Gays Add new tag Affirmation angry exmormon awards Book Reviews BYU comments Conformity Dallin H. Oaks DAMU disaffected mormon underground Dustin Lance Black Ex-Mormon Exclusion policy Excommunicated exmormon faith Family feminism Gay Gay Love Gay Marriage Gay Relationships General Conference Happiness Homosexual Homosexuality LDS LGBT LGBTQ Link Bomb missionaries Modesty Mormon Mormon Alumni Association Mormonism motherhood peace politics Polygamy priesthood ban Sunstone temple

Awards

William Law X-Mormon of the Year:

  • 2023: Adam Steed
  • 2022: David Archuleta
  • 2021: Jeff T. Green
  • 2020: Jacinda Ardern
  • 2019: David Nielsen
  • 2018: Sam Young
  • 2017: Savannah
  • 2016: Jeremy Runnells
  • 2015: John Dehlin
  • 2014: Kate Kelly
  • 2013: J. Seth Anderson and Michael Ferguson
  • 2012: David Tweede
  • 2011: Joanna Brooks
  • 2010: Monica Bielanko
  • 2009: Walter Kirn

Other Cool Sites!

WasMormon.org
©2025 Main Street Plaza | WordPress Theme by SuperbThemes