Generation Atheist

by Dan Riley

  I had been hoping to learn more about my faith in order to sincerely strengthen it. I’m not sure if reading that passage in that book convinced me that Church was false, but it made me not want to believe the Church, regardless of whether or not Mormonism was actually true. I couldn’t worship a God who was the author of such racism.

  To be honest, I’m a bit racist. It’s not malicious racism, but being born and raised in a state like Utah, where roughly 94% of the population is Caucasian, I just didn’t grow up interacting with other races. Historically, I have been naturally uncomfortable around people of different ethnic backgrounds. That’s just a fact that I wish weren’t true. The reason Mormon Doctrine shook my faith was not because I was some huge civil rights advocate or had all these black friends. I understand that my racism is wrong. I understand that my prejudices are human and the result of my ignorance and my follies. God has no excuse. The Mormon Church’s historical racism doesn’t bother a lot of people. I know a lot of Mormons who say, “The Church leaders were just the products of their time,” but that answer has never really flown with me. I demand more of men of God, and I demand more of God himself.

  I remember highlighting those verses in Mormon Doctrine. I would take them to my parents. I’d take them everywhere where my friends were hanging out. I’d strike up conversation about them. At first, I did this as an exercise in trying to help people come up with apologetic responses. Eventually, though, I lashed out at my friends and asked them, “How can you believe this?” I never received a sufficient answer.

  In addition to learning the Church history, my bisexuality also contributed to my apostasy. The fact that I am bisexual didn’t really undermine my faith per se. It made the Mormon experience for me somewhat more painful, but it didn’t necessarily make the Church any less true.

  The homophobia in Utah is internalized homophobia, and I think that’s what brings many gay people to suicide. People are not overtly mean; they are not actively discriminating. There’s just a common notion that there’s something wrong with you if you’re gay. That’s powerful enough. Gay Mormons are taught homophobia by their religious leaders, the authorities they trust the most. They’re taught that it is within their power to change their nature.

  Over the course of two or three years when I was a teenager, I would routinely meet with my bishop and discuss homosexuality. He would tell me, “The answer is prayer, Jon. The answer is prayer. You have to humble yourself before the Lord and ask Him for help. You will overcome it.” That just didn’t happen for me.

  Mormons are taught that homosexuality is not an orientation but rather an occasional feeling that would challenge otherwise normal heterosexuality. That’s still how I often mistakenly identify, as a straight man who just happens to like guys. The last Mormon prophet, Gordon B. Hinkley, always talked about the so-called homosexual movement or the so-called gays in our Church. A homosexual man is treated as a straight guy who has unresolved problems. As a result of being raised in this environment, I’m rather immature when it comes to the issue. I’m underdeveloped where sexual matters are concerned, I think in large part because my sexual growth was stunted by my wrestling with my homosexuality, my bisexuality, in Mormonism. Struggling with who I am for so many years was exhausting, emotionally and spiritually.

  There’s a common belief in Mormonism that, and I think this may hold true for Christian religions in general, masturbation leads to homosexuality. Once, when I was still an incredibly faithful Mormon, I approached my bishop out of complete sincerity, and I confessed to him that I had been masturbating and viewing pornography. He told me that one of the reasons that I needed to stop is because I would develop homosexual tendencies. That was already the case, but I was in such utter denial that I never would have thought of myself as bisexual. The cognitive dissonance I needed was such that I would be watching gay porn and not have that faze me as to my real sexual orientation. In fact, there was never any coming out moment to my family because I was pretty sloppy with hiding my porn trails on the computer. My parents were waiting for me to figure it out. It wasn’t until my sophomore or junior year of high school that it dawned on me that I might be gay.

  The forefront of my apostasy is my politics. Before I identified as gay or ex-Mormon, I identified as a very ardent Democrat. I was an unabashedly liberal Mormon, so I was already an outsider in that regard. I always found that my liberalism was buoyed by my faith. I hoped that Christ’s message, like his Sermon on the Mount and his concern for the poor, would prevail in the Church. In fact, Joseph Smith was a fairly forward-thinking character for his time. Looking back, one can view him as a conservative and a racist, but for his time, he was quite progressive. In 1844, when Joseph Smith ran for President, he ran on a platform of abolition. In fact, that’s why the Mormons were driven out of Missouri: it was suspected that Mormons were abolitionists who wanted to free slaves and convert them. He also wanted to release all criminals from jail because he believed the penal system was corrupt. I found that there were a lot of liberal traditions within Mormonism that I could co-opt as a Democrat.

  For many years I was able to reconcile my Democratic politics with my faith, but that became increasingly difficult over time. In 2004, my junior year of high school, the LDS Church came out with an official statement in which the Church supported the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. My seminary teacher read aloud that statement. This really concerned me. Primarily, I was offended as a liberal. The Church became increasingly strident against homosexuality. Political statements that the Church made hurt me deeply.

  Additionally, I was also quite concerned about the war in Iraq. I’m a military brat. My dad’s a military man, so I’ve always taken particular interest in foreign policy matters. I was vehemently against the war. I thought it was a travesty, always have. The Church never explicitly or officially endorsed the war, but its silence on the matter was deafening. The Church claims to be non-political in the sense that it won’t take political stances, it will only take moral stances. I thought, “If war isn’t a moral issue, then I don’t know what is.” I was upset that the Church broke its political neutrality to condemn gay marriage but not, from my view, an illegal, unjust war.

  Finally, I decided to leave Mormonism. When I left, I had a brief flirtation with other religions. On any given Sunday, I would drive to a different church. I went to several non-denominational services, and I went to a Catholic mass. I was looking into other religions because when I initially left Mormonism, there was something that left me. My life revolved around the Mormon community and its culture and its beliefs. After I left the faith, I thought, “I’ve got to find something because I have nothing otherwise.” But, after coming out of a faith tradition like Mormonism, I found that other religions paled in comparison, that they were small and quaint, just unsatisfying. Because they weren’t all-consuming, they didn’t seem to fill the void that I felt after leaving the Church.

  I considered myself an agnostic for a period of time. I think that just stemmed from a misunderstanding of what atheism is. I thought atheism had to involve the absolute denial of the possibility of any supernatural being, when it really needn’t. I realized that atheism and agnosticism are not actually mutually exclusive. That’s when I began to call myself an atheist. It was liberating because my entire experience with Mormonism was one of staving off cognitive dissonance. It was liberating because I began to be able to accept myself for who I really am. In that sense, atheism was a godsend. Politically, it was also liberating for me because while I was never ashamed of my liberal politics in the Church, I no longer had to reconcile them. I’ve always prided myself in being someone who could go against the grain and be comfortable as the black sheep. Losing the Mormon community was hard for me because I lost a number of friends, but I’ve always been willing to make those kinds of sacrifices for my beliefs.

  Not everything about leaving my religion was easy, though. My parents cried, and there were a lot of tears. I would like to t
hink that they were concerned because in Mormonism, if you have a family member who falls away from the straight and narrow, then that jeopardizes the family’s ability to live with that person in the next life. Mormons put a lot of stock into that idea that families are forever, that you go to the celestial kingdom in heaven as a family, which is somewhat different from some Christian religions. With traditional Christianity, marriage isn’t necessarily deemed to be eternal. Marriage is often seen as for this world only. Mormons extend such concepts to the next life; they’re very sacred. Initially, I thought, “My parents must be crying because they’re concerned that they’re not going to see me in the next life.” But I think I’ve come to find — and I don’t mean this to reflect poorly on my parents — that my parents were concerned about how my leaving would reflect upon their parenting.

  Their concerns, as I learned, were justified. In the LDS community, Mormons are taught that if a family is worthy and if a family has good parents, they’ll rear a good, healthy Mormon family. The family will remain faithful all their lives; if they don’t, it will have been because the parents messed up somewhere along the line. The majority of the pain that I felt leaving the Church wasn’t for myself. I’m a fairly independent creature. I was able to deal with whatever little persecution came my way. I was offended and hurt on behalf of my family because I could tell my family was hurting. They got looks at church once the congregation heard the news that I had left the faith. My bishop explicitly told my parents in a private meeting that the reason that I left the Church and the reason that I’m bisexual is because my family hadn’t hosted family home evenings when I was a little kid. I think the main source of their pain and, by extension, my pain, was the fact that they blamed themselves for my leaving Mormonism. They aren’t angry that I left. I think they’re just sad because they feel like bad parents.

  There have been other tough times as well. A few years ago, at Christmas, I was home, and I’d gone on the computer and downloaded the movie Religulous. I was watching it on the computer, and my mother walked by and caught onto what I was viewing. We got into a big fight, and she said, “How dare you disrespect me by watching this film on the night before Christmas, Jesus’s birthday!” I have come to find that her issue wasn’t really with my watching Religulous on Christmas Eve, but rather that sometimes she doesn’t enjoy having me around the house because my presence reminds her that she’s a failed parent, that she didn’t do her job. That really hurt me. It hurt because I don’t consider myself a failure of a son by any measure. If I’m bitter about one thing about Mormonism, it’s what my leaving the religion has done to my mom and dad, not to me. I can’t quite get over what it’s done to them and how it’s made them feel. That said, for the most part, I still get along quite well with my family. Given their upbringing and beliefs, I really couldn’t ask for more tolerant or understanding parents.

  The basis of a lot of Mormons’ beliefs and the faith of a lot of religious people is they’re convinced that without their religious notions, without their philosophies, that they’re just dirt, that they lack importance. Religion often preys on self-confidence. People are told by their religious leaders that they can’t live without God. The extent to which people need religion has been manufactured from childhood; kids are often told that without God, they’re nothing.

  In reality, people don’t need God. Atheism, in this sense, can’t help but be liberating. It can be life-affirming in ways that religion never can be. Religions often devalue this life as a trial to be endured in order to receive another, better life. Atheism does not do this; it places emphasis on this life.

  Most people are taught misguided — and often religiously-driven — ideas about positive human characteristics. There is, for example, really no mystery about morality. It is innate in us, not because God inscribed it upon our hearts, but because we humans are, by our nature, social creatures. We either get along or we die. Atheists are no less moral than any other group. In fact, atheists are underrepresented in America’s prison population. The most atheistic countries, like Sweden and Denmark, enjoy exceptionally low crime rates and boast high levels of social equality. A recent study even named Denmark “the happiest place on Earth.” So people can — and millions do — lead moral, meaningful lives as atheists.

  I think atheists need to be evangelical about their atheism. I am not looking to tear something down. I don’t want to rob people of the happiness and comfort that they derive from religion. Rather, I want them to know that they can find meaning in their lives by turning inward and making that meaning for themselves, as opposed to believing that they have to follow the dictates of some kind of celestial overlord to micromanage their life. People need to harness the power that is within them. This idea is so empowering and so exciting. When I was Mormon, for example, I was very liberal, and I was a Democrat, but I wasn’t the most active Democrat. I wouldn’t go out and protest. I wouldn’t write letters to the editor. But I’ve done that more now that I’m an atheist. I think that there’s something about atheism that makes activism possible.

  It’s odd that people think that without another life, this one would be would be worthless. We measure value by its finitude, like money. I don’t see why that same principle doesn’t apply to life. Life is important because there is so little of it. It should be cherished in a way that I really don’t think it is in Mormonism or other religions. While there may be no cosmic meaning to life without God, there is certainly meaning in life. My friends, my family, and my future all imbue my life with meaning. For me, atheism has been really beautiful.

  II.

  ______________

  Jessica Ahlquist: Courage in Cranston

  “And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain —

  For the freedom of labor and thought —

  To those who fell on the fierce fields of war —

  To those who died in dungeons bound in chains —

  To those who proudly mounted scaffold’s stairs —

  To those whose bones were crushed, whose flesh was scarred and torn —

  To those by fire consumed —

  To all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of men.

  And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still.”

  — Robert Ingersoll

  Jessica Ahlquist has always been a sensitive person. She cried in class when learning about slavery in the antebellum South. She cried in class when she learned about how the Third Reich massacred Jews. One might think that with what she’s experienced in the past two years, a river of tears would now stretch from Cranston to Providence. But that’s not the case; she says she feels more confident than ever.

  An atheist since age 10, she is currently a student at the public secondary school Cranston High School West in Cranston, Rhode Island. She came across a prayer banner in the auditorium of her school her freshman year. She learned that the prayer, addressed to a God in heaven, was already an issue: the ACLU had been contacted by a parent within the school system, and a subcommittee had been formed to decide what to do about it. At its final meeting, the subcommittee, which included the school’s superintendent, voted 4-3 to keep the prayer.

  Despite threats and harassment, Jessica partnered with the ACLU and filed a lawsuit against the school. She found support online during her activism. According to her, her involvement in the secular movement showed that “there are so many people who care — and that’s the best part of all of it.”

  I’m the oldest of four children. I have a sister and two younger brothers. My father has been an atheist since he was a teenager. He didn’t raise my family and me that way, though. I was always allowed to do my own thing and believe what I wanted to believe. My family identified as Catholics, but I don’t think we were traditional. I would
go to mass for members of my family that had passed away, but that’s about it. My mom has taken part in a religious group called Science Of Mind; they believe that they can control or manipulate the universe through their own minds and that the act of thinking positively will automatically have a positive impact on things that happen in life.

  When I was young, I believed in God, mostly because I believed everything that I was taught. I thought that there was a God up in the sky looking at all of us, taking care of us, and watching over us. As I got older, I started to question things. I was becoming more interested in big questions, becoming less of a kid. My dad’s brothers are atheists, and a lot of my dad’s side of the family is secular, so I heard them talking about religious issues. It sparked a curiosity that caused a chain reaction. I started doing more research and asking my dad questions. Eventually I just decided I didn’t believe any of it.