Sample Literacy Narrative

Note to reader: This draft is re-printed here with the author's permission. These student drafts are provided for a couple of reasons: first, to give you a taste of the variety of topics and approaches students have taken, and second, to provide instructors with readings that might be used in class discussions and activities. These samples are not perfect and represent final grades from across the grade scale (A through F), so please be forgiving, understanding, and respectful if you find errors or problems.

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Alex Anderson

Mike Petersen

English 1010

6 September 2016

Religious Literacy

“I was raised LDS,” I say, hoping they’ll understand what I’m trying to communicate by using the words “raised” and “was”. I’ve been trained extensively in the art of passive aggression, and it would be against my nature to be up front. Of course, that strategy is my backup plan; Plan A is my haircut and my style of dress and my frequent usage of expletives. But it rarely works. Maybe I should get a tattoo, or take up smoking. Anything to scour off—or even just paint over—my Mormon aura.

Less than four years ago, I would have had a much different response to the question “are you Mormon?” Back then, I was somewhat of a rockstar within my LDS community. I had positions of leadership, I connected with people well, and I had influence on the girls my age. I also grew up around scholarly Mormons, and I learned early how to dig deeper into doctrine and theology. In fact, I was a little competitive about it. In my classes in church I would listen quietly to the contributions to the discussion and gauge what kind of response I would have to produce to outshine everyone in the class. And I always did. My leaders loved my philosophical approach to gospel topics and always looked forward to having me in class, since I had a way of making their lessons much more interesting than they would have been otherwise. But to this day I’m unsure if I did all of that because I actively believed what we were talking about, or if it was just a game. Even if I did believe it, I wasn’t very invested, because my faith was later obliterated with surprising ease.

I mostly attribute my loss of faith to the fact that I was harboring the dangerous truth of my homosexuality in the LDS institution. To be LGBTQ in this culture is to be perpetually at odds with one’s self, and very few in this position find reconciliation.

Most give up on what they can live without, which is usually the church. It’s an establishment, an organization. You can walk away from it. That is not the case with identity. It will always be with you, no matter how many lies you tell yourself. The problem is that this organization in particular has convinced most of its members that you can walk away from your identity, and that leaving the organization is not an option. And this lie has driven people to their deaths because they thought they had no other choice. I was almost one of those people. But I escaped because I was shown that I didn’t have to listen to my religion if I didn’t want to.

My uncle Jon—who had gone through the same things that I had as a gay Mormon—gave me bits of information on my church’s history that I had never heard before. It was information that I clearly wasn’t supposed to hear, so of course, it was intriguing, terrifying, and intoxicating. After testing the waters of apostasy a few times over, Jon gave me the demo version of everything that is wrong with my family’s religion. And rather than upsetting me, it comforted me. It gave me a way to resent my church for reasons founded in fact, rather than emotion. I had grown to hate the Mormon religion because of how I felt within it, and I had no defense against it when it told me that I was the problem. This was deeply confusing, because I knew they weren’t lying when they said they didn’t hate me. The people themselves always treated me well, and I have no malice towards them. But that, in a way, made everything worse. Everything they taught was strictly against who I was, but they treated me with wonderful kindness. It was rejection coated in thick confection. And that is very much the Mormon way. Knowing that there were cracks in the foundation of my religion was an enormous relief, but it was often hard to remember in times of inner conflict. I would get caught up in the impossibility of my situation, and as I was always taught to value the position of my church far above my own, I was consistently losing these battles over whether or not I was allowed to be who I was. So when I remembered the relief that came from deconstructing the integrity of the religion, I would immediately go to my uncle for help. After a handful of these incidences, he gave me my own way to access the information that totally disarmed my religion against me—he gave me the “Letter to A CES Director.” This letter was a document of about 85 pages containing enormous amounts of evidence that conflicted with LDS doctrine. And it took out my faith in one fell swoop.

When I got the letter, I dove into it face first. Every paragraph rocked my world. I felt like a rag doll in the hands of a gorilla. I spent hours poring over it, reading each line over and over, forcing my brain to comprehend words that I was strictly taught not to believe. And I found, in navigating the limits of my mind, that my culture had installed in me a state-of-the-art security system, hell-bent on deflecting thoughts of doubt. It was impressive. Even after spending months training myself to think in my own terms, trying to detach myself from the beliefs of my childhood, I found that all of the filters through which I saw the world were undeniably Mormon. Defense mechanisms that I hadn’t used in years sprang to life again to protect me from cognitive dissonance. And in observing those defenses, I saw that my head was still totally full of Mormonism. The way I saw everything—spiritual or otherwise—was through an LDS context. I was sorely mistaken to think that I could change that with a few conversations about Joseph Smith. Mormonism ran far too deep in my brain to be eradicated completely. I may have destroyed my faith with a few blows, but the smaller, quieter Mormonism shards embedded in the deepest trenches of my mind would require deeper excavation.

The final blow to my faith was a video about personal revelation. It explained how people had felt that they had received divine revelation concerning things that were clearly not divine. People who were involved in dangerous cults felt the same way about their leaders as my family did about ours. They felt called by god to follow people who led them into horrific things. Seeing that it was possible to have a spiritual experience with just about anything was what really knocked down the last pillar of my belief. The entire system that I was taught to use to discover truth had just been completely eviscerated. I had nothing left after that. So I just sat and stared into nothing, trembling violently. Everything I had ever known was annihilated right in front of me, and in total silence.

Following my recovery from that momentous occasion, I went through a phase of obsessive research. I listened to copious amounts of podcasts on the topic of Mormonism, and never stopped thinking about it. I was totally obsessed with the fact that though Mormonism was dead to me forever, it continued to thrive outside of me. I was consumed by sharp hatred for the religion, and I took any opportunity to talk about it with people who wouldn’t be bothered by what I had to say (I wouldn’t dare bring my opinions to any believing members). It took me a while to come out of that, and in some ways I’m still in it. But I’m in a place now where I have found a respect for what religion means to people. I know what it’s like to be part of a culture that you wouldn’t necessarily choose if it were up to you, and I know what it’s like to still be attached to it even if it isn’t right for you. I think that’s what most religion is like, really—people just growing into whatever life they were given from the start, and finding fulfillment in it. There’s beauty on whatever path you take, so most people don’t venture very far beyond what they started with. And there is nothing wrong with that— it’s just the way that life seems to work best. Understanding that has helped me to stop blaming people for being part of something that’s wrong for me. As long as they aren’t hurting me or anyone else, there is no reason to try to change the life they have found.