Mormon Stories and John Dehlin’s Mystery Cycle

Over the past five years or so, I’ve tried every so often to track down a particular conversation here at MSP about one of John Dehlin’s failures to tamp down a crisis he created for himself. Something about it nagged at me, and I wanted to review it. I was pretty sure the conversation happened during Obama’s second term, but I could never come up with a search that would let me find it—until yesterday, and it took me hours of poking around in the archives. (More about that in subsequent posts, because some of the conversations here are fascinating and deserve to be revisited.)

I was motivated to find it yesterday because yesterday was Sunday, and it seemed about time to spend part of my Sunday reexamining how a commitment to Mormonism messes up people’s lives, something I rarely do these days. Also, I learned that there was yet another kerfuffle over one of the stages of JD’s personal mystery cycle happening again: Some exmos in general and some exmo women in particular are upset that John demonstrates more loyalty to the COJCOLDS than he does to the people who pay his salary. In a recent podcast, he said that

• his goals are to strengthen the church, not weaken it
• he doesn’t want anyone to leave the COJCOLDS if doing so is in any way unhealthy for them
• he thinks the reasons the church refused to be transparent before the internet were “very good reasons”
• he didn’t fault the church for lying to people, adding that he probably would have done the same thing if he’d been in the church’s position (which I can totally believe, because I’ve seen him do it)
• he’s reading Joseph Smith’s biography and “has gained so much respect” for JS
• he has more empathy for both early and current church leaders because he knows how hard it is to be a prophet, er, uh, leader of a small group of people, much less a big one
• he doesn’t think secularism is “the way” or that “secular people have figured out a way to create not just community but morality, spirituality, a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose, a sense of identity, in any sustainable, coherent, lasting, profoundly affecting way”
• he cares “about society maybe even more than [he does] the individual and [he thinks] in some ways, religion is the best we’ve ever come up with for helping people live happy, healthy, meaningful lives so far, and [he’s] just not necessarily happy with the practical results of secularism in the lived lives of people”
• he’s reached out to his bishop and said, “Hey, bishop, if I came to sacrament meeting, would you be okay with that?” and hasn’t heard back from the bishop
• if the church were to say, “We take away your excommunication and you’re still a member,” he “would at least occasionally attend”

I really find it shocking and gross that anyone who claims to care about the groups that John says he cares about could look at the way religion has infected US politics and say that the US and the world are better off now than when secularism meant we tried to treat everyone equally and believed in science.

When I first left the church, I still felt a lot of allegiance to it in a number of ways. I still had home teachers, and I let them in when they came to see me. My Institute ward got a new bishop within a year after I quit attending, and he called me in for an interview, and for whatever stupid reason, I went. Gordon B. Hinckley came to talk to the Institute, and I went to that too, just for the hell of it. (It was 1990, so Hinckley was running the church then but wasn’t prophet because Benson was still alive but incapacitated.) I don’t remember if it was Hinckley or the new bishop who went on and on about how terrible it was when men wore earrings, but neither man made me question in the slightest my decision to go inactive.

But by six or seven years later, when missionaries showed up at my door, I did not let them in. I wasn’t mean to them, because I remembered how that felt, but there was no way they were coming in my house. When I had to go to a Mormon funeral, I would get up and walk around the building during any really churchy sermons. I didn’t have my name removed, because my mother asked me to promise her I wouldn’t, but when the church sent me a letter commanding me to inform them whether I was the Holly Welker who was blessed on such-and-such a date and baptized on my eighth birthday, or one of the other Holly Welkers in the world, I didn’t.

I still had plenty of trauma to work through, and I had years when I had almost nothing to do with the church and years when I participated in various Mormon-adjacent forums (MSP being one of them) to help me work through that trauma and also because I found Mormonism interesting and enjoyed hanging out with a lot of the people who also found Mormonism interesting.

I’ve said a few times that I feel a tad sorry for people who understand major problems in the church but earn a lot of their income through activities requiring their continued engagement with Mormonism. I have made a very little bit of money from writing about Mormonism, though it doesn’t come close to what I paid the church in tithing, and if I’d earned it all in one year, I doubt I would have to pay income tax on it. In other words, it was never so lucrative that I felt obligated to keep doing it. When I got bored or frustrated by it, I could stop, so I did. I really enjoyed the years I spent living in Salt Lake City (which honestly surprised me a bit), and I wasn’t entirely thrilled to leave it when circumstances made it appropriate. But one thing that made it a lot easier was how nice it felt to be able to ignore the church when I no longer lived less than a mile from the Church Office Building.

John’s excommunication was in 2015, so he’s had a decade to process it. But he’s had to do it while still talking about the church all the time because that’s his primary income. His view of everything is still tainted by Mormonism—including secularism, as the MSP conversation I was looking for shows. Imagine someone who worked with their ex-spouse every single day and never pursued a relationship with another person saying that they couldn’t imagine anyone every being a better spouse than their ex. JD patterns his organizations on the church, so yeah, it’s not surprising that his attempts at secularism fail when the model they’re imitating is religious.

When the whole Ordain Women thing happened, someone who knew I didn’t think very highly of the Mormon priesthood asked me why I was participating. I said it was because if it succeeded, which I considered unlikely, that could be progress, but if it failed, which I fully expected it to do, more people would see how full of crap the church was and would leave. It was a win either way.

Also, I understood the cycle: People discover a problem in the church. People think that they have some power to change the church in meaningful ways. People try to change the church in meaningful ways. People fail. People feel bad. People confront the reality that the church is unlikely to change. People realize they can’t change back into someone who didn’t know about the problem. People leave the church. The church implements a few minor changes after the crisis that make being Mormon less awkward and inconvenient, but the changes aren’t enough to get most people to go back, because when it comes right down to it, the men leading the church do not want to change it–at least not the way members want it to. (See: Nicknames are a victory for Satan.) John Dehlin doesn’t want to change either, which is why, as people have been noting for years, he does the same thing over and over.

Unlike John, I readily admit that I am happy to help people leave the church. I’ve done it many times. I have no particular qualifications for it except that I had to manage my own departure all by myself before I even knew the internet existed and before I knew one single person like me, who had gone on a mission but just couldn’t stay in the church because it was so inhospitable to truth. But unlike John, after I help someone leave, I don’t talk at length about how awesome it would be if we could go back to church.

Instead, we talk about how secular weddings are a million times more joyful and fun than temple weddings. If you really want to celebrate your marriage, it’s way better to do it by exchanging vows in front of the people who love you best, even if they’re little kids or atheists, and then throwing a great party for them and having dancing and champagne. It’s totally superior to putting on white clothes and going into a cramped little room with a few adults who wear the same underwear you and having a ceremony you’re not allowed to photograph, and then serving hors d’oeuvres, cake, and booze-free punch at a sedate reception. We talk about how the world is a nicer place when you’re not judging it through the lens of Mormonism.

Also, just for the record: John doesn’t have to get permission to go to church. It’s not like they have bouncers at sacrament meeting who would physically eject him. Sure, some people might look at him askance, and he might be asked not to come back, but he has to be used to that by now, since he makes it happen over and over.

Plus the church claims that it wants its excommunicated members to go to church. Look at the September 6, six people disciplined by the COJCOLDS in September 1993 for publishing work critical of the church: Avraham Gileadi was rebaptized in 1996; Maxine Hanks was rebaptized in 2012; and Lavina Fielding Anderson, a wonderful human any congregation would be lucky to have, just kept going to church and participating in her ward for the rest of her life as if her excommunication had never happened. A couple of my friends who are no longer members (I don’t remember if they were excommunicated or resigned) are nonetheless very active and welcome in their blue state New England ward.

Finally, having invoked mystery cycles, I figure I should include a link explaining what they are, which is sort of like the temple ceremony but without as much audience participation. And having invoked medieval and Renaissance Catholicism, I can’t resist an opportunity to mention my favorite emissary of those times.