I officially resigned my membership from the Utah-based Mormon church around 2004 and as of this writing in 2023 I have not rejoined the LDS Church. Since resigning around 2004, I have been on a philosophical and theological journey. Most of the time, from 2005 until now I have been a skeptic or an agnostic or atheist/nontheist. Yet, at one point I became existentially unfulfilled in my atheism and began attempting to re-establish my Christian faith-stance. I remember one key pivotal point in my rethinking my atheism, came after reading the book An Atheist Defends Religion. I then read through Progressive Christian authors like John Shelby Spong, Marcus Borg, Brian McLaren, and Rob Bell, and Phyllis Tickle, among many others.
I realized that even as a analytical and skeptical person I was existentially and emotionally drawn to these Emergent and Progressive Christian authors and speakers. Over time, I then started to realize that the more scholarly enlightened Christianity of Rob Bell and Marcus Borg others, was simply doing "catch up" to to what Joseph Smith had the courage to say and do way back in the 1830s and 1840s. For example, Joseph Smith had already expressed his own version of Rob Bell's "love wins" by dealing with the cruel and inhumane dogma of eternal conscious torment in Doctrine and Covenants section 19: 13-20, section 76, and 137. Joseph had already clarified that it's okay to become wealthy in order to do good; and he emphasized what people today call the Social Gospel with his egalitarian vision of building Zion.
I also started to realize that many LDS authors and speakers were doing something similar to Brian McLaren's' A New Kind of Christianity. For example, Terryl and Fiona Givens' book The Christ Who Heals and All Things New strikes me as A New Kind of LDS Christianity, which I find very appealing.
I then discovered Jordan Peterson who offered the same insights I had learned earlier from Joseph Campbell (on the monomyth and the power of myth). I then read Dominion by the nontheist author Tom Holland (and listened to everything I could find of him on the subject of Christianity on YouTube); and learned that despite his personal skepticism/atheism, his defense and support of Christianity convinced me that Christianity was largely responsible for a moral revolution in ethics in the West, and Christianity is largely responsible for our belief in inalienable Rights and our cosmopolitan consciousness, that we all experience and enjoy today as ideally civilized citizens.
I then began to notice that others were experiencing the same or similar transition from atheism to Christian pragmatism, to then holding many beliefs and philosophical positions that match closest with Restored Christianity (Mormonism). One such example is Shawn McCraney, who after criticizing Mormonism for seven years then turned his critical thinking skills toward Orthodox/Traditional Christianity and pointed out many of its problems; and ended holding views that are similar to the LDS, like rejecting the Augustinian/Calvinist dogma of eternal conscious torment for thoughtcrimes; and he has called out those like Sandra Tanner who come from the Calvinist tradition and have a double standard when it comes to criticizing LDS Christianity (in that she fails to use the same critical thinking skills and historical analysis, that she uses on Mormonism, on the Catholic and Protestant Christian tradition).
During my journey I was a Buddhist for a time, but did not believe in reincarnation, but was a kind of secular Buddhist for a while. After reading a book on Stoicism as a life philosophy, that worked for me for a while. Then there were times I did not think or talk about religion or philosophy at all and tried to just live in the "present moment." I basically became a Epicurean for a time. Then I tried reconstructing my belief in Christianity which I document on my blog practical-fruition.blogspot.com. Over the years I learned from many different Christian philosophers and theologians, from the Eastern Orthodox Christian theologians who emphasize deification (theosis), to Rob Bell's Everything is Spiritual and his "love wins" to reading books by Marcus Borg, etc. All of this made me feel good about being Christian again.
Then, after feeling good about being a Christian again, I began to study early Christian martyrdom through the scholarship of Paul Middleton. I then studied biblical scholarship on the subject of the family, masculinity, and celibacy in the New Testament. I began to find it problematic that the New Testament really did not focus on one's retirement and family planning, but was by-and-large, emphasizing the ideal of celibacy and martyrdom with a mostly apocalyptic ("End-Times") mindset.
Then I sat down and read everything Nietzsche wrote and everything changed for me drastically after that. I realized that during my atheist phase that my secular humanism was grounded in shallow assertions that could not be justified. I have also realized since then that most agnostics and atheists have not really dealt with Nietzsche's arguments and his deconstruction of Truth, free will, and "atheist moralities" like secular humanism. I realized that a truly honest atheist who really takes atheism to its inevitable conclusions and wades through Nietzsche honestly will have to admit that secular humanism's assertions are an illusion and is actually based on Christian foundations.
Once I realized that according to atheism, belief in the soul or the very idea of us having a "self" (or personhood) and free will is an illusion, and the concept of Right and Wrong (or Good and Evil) is grounded in Christianity, I began to more fully appreciate the Bible; and so I began to reconstruct a Christian life stance after better realizing that I did believe in objective Right and Wrong and that we are a person, or a Self, and personhood is real to me.
As I visited many churches in my hometown and continued to investigate all the different options for practicing Christianity, theologically, philosophically and socially, and I began to realize after reading Nietzsche that there were for me many problems with most versions of Christianity; after reading books on early Christian martyrdom and books trying to help Christian men embrace their biological masculinity, I realized that the New Testament actually did not have a lot to say for modern Men in a competitive capitalist world. I began to realize that the message of the New Testament, while valuable and important, was largely presenting many ideas within a first century context of pacifism, asceticism, apocalypticism and martyrdom, due to being under Roman oppression. This was before ideas from the the Scientific Enlightenment and American democracy had emerged; and so there were limits to treating the New Testament as a fully practical Life Philosophy in the twenty first century.
I then began to explore early Mormonism when it first originated through Joseph Smith, apart from what Brigham Young and other Utah-based church leaders turned it into after Brigham Young. When I investigated the original sources and for example re-read The Lectures on Faith, which were the original doctrine of the LDS church and bound in Scripture in 1835, I realized the original LDS church was not as much "Leadership" focused but instead focused on empowering each individual to experience deification (theosis): producing a countenance of joy through a true inner Light-infused, refining transformation, and thus organically producing Zion from inside-out character formation like good soil producing ripe plant life; rather than through top-down leadership controls.
In the original church it was not so controlling, for example the Word of Wisdom was "not by commandment nor constraint." Tithing was less "controlled." Meanwhile, many (not all) of the Utah-based Mormon Leadership today focuses and emphasizes Protestant-like puritanical ideas and body shaming and "worthiness interviews" and labeling members either Worthy or Unworthy based on their loyalty and obedience to the Leaders of the Brighamite Corporate Institution; while Parley P. Pratt rejected this kind of puritanism in his pamphlet An appeal to the inhabitants of the state of New York, and his book Keys to the Science of Theology. Unlike many modern LDS Leaders today, Smith and Pratt rejected Protestant-like puritanical ideas that despised the body and degenegrated organic bodily life; they instead affirmed bodily affections and our sensuality as godly, and focused more on a bodily theosis that empowered the LDS Christian. Some LDS General Authorities are trying to get back to this.
As mentioned above, the New Testament does not cover wealth building for the future, family planning and retirement planning, due its apocalyptic ideology. Smith and Pratt in turn rejected celibacy and Tolstoy's wilful poverty, and instead embraced healthy consensual sexuality and family planning and retirement planning and building wealth in order to do good for your family and your Christian community.
I realized that Joseph Smith and Parley P. Pratt had formed scripturally and theologically a much more body-affirming, this-life-affirming, and muscular version of Christianity; which balanced out the more feminine energy of the New Testament. For more details, see my larger document on this subject: The Secret Doctrine of God: Moving Toward A Theology of the Body.
At one point I then had a light bulb moment and realized that LDS Scripture solves a lot of the problems with the first century version of Christianity in the New Testament, and makes Christianity coherent and cohesive for today; and so I put together my theory in my website I titled: The Phases & Strategies of God: From Rome to America -- The Restoration of God's Warrior Spirit and the Hebrew Doctrine of the Sensual Body as God's Good Creation.
So what I have done is I have reconstructed a Christian life stance through LDS Scripture: which I utilize as an art form and midrash, which I call American Apocrypha. What I mean is that just as Catholics have in their Bible the Apocrypha which Protestants do not recognize as scripture, I simply see myself as a Smith-Pratt Restoration Believer in that my worldview-Christianity is very similar to every other Christian; except I add the LDS Scriptures (Lectures on Faith, Joseph's Bible Translation, Book of Mormon, etc.) as additional "apocryphal" texts like Catholics have in their Bibles that Protestants do not.
To put it another way, the word gospel means glad tidings or the joyful proclamation or news that brings joy. The apostle Paul borrowed the word gospel from the Romans. In fact, the Romans had their own gospel, the gospel of Caesar. So Emergent Mormonism is an emergent extension of the biblical gospels. So that you have the Gospel of Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John, but also the glad tidings that brings joy in the gospels of Dale Carnegie, Paul Tillich, Marcus Borg, and Paul Dobransky M.D.; combined with the gospels of Joseph Smith, Parley P. Pratt, J. Golden Kimball, and Elton Trueblood (author of The Humor of Christ), etc.
So based on my theory of the phases and strategies of God, you have the emergence toward a gospel of heroic becoming, of joyful festivity, laughter, dancing, sensuality and fleshly affirmation; of orderly intimacy through monogamy; of the pursuit of happiness, the Great Health; higher status, wealth, and luminos power through the will to glory manifested in healthy boundary expansionism.
If one reads the original doctrine of The Lectures on Faith they will begin to realize that LDS Scripture and theology was actually originally more empowering and enlightening than one finds in the current Brighamite Church manuals and correlation system. If one then purchases or downloads a free copy of The Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible, one will find that in many passages that are difficult or problematic to modern ears, like passages that seem to promote celibacy, Joseph Smith presents a more body-affirming interpretation of those passages. In short, I began to see that there are a lot of versions of Christianity that are body-despising, but the Smith-Pratt Paradigm is what I call a "Body Affirming Christianity" (see below for more details).
So I do not begin with allegiance to the Utah-based Brighamite Leaders and do not believe in blindly "following the prophet," nor do I consider any church manual "official doctrine" to follow. I instead begin with a very simple belief in the fluid energy (pneuma, pronounced "nooma") of God being an empowering Force of Plenty; and so if anything I read or think about is not empowering and body-affirming, then it becomes suspect to me and I will tend to reject it as the "philosophies of men, mingled with scripture."
From "Faith Crisis" to Deconstruction to Faith Reconstruction & New Models of Faith
What I began to realize by 2015 is that there was a spectrum between those who were constantly deconstructing and criticizing in a state of permanent anti-Mormonism; and then there were those who were seeking to reconstruct their Mormon identity in a more positive direction. Even if that meant never attending a Mormon chapel again but appreciating their Mormon heritage and identity from the outside. I noticed reading his books that LDS scholar Terryl Givens did a form of deconstruction with his book Wrestling the Angel but then attempted a reconstruction with his wife Fiona and their books The Christ Who Heals and All Things New: Rethinking Sin, Salvation, and Everything in Between. So I began to notice in Mormon scholarly circles this new paradigm that departed from the old paradigm of Joseph Fielding Smith, Boyd K. Parker and Bruce R. McConkie. I wrote an essay about this titled, A New Kind of LDS-Christianity: The pre-2005 Church vs. The post-2005 Church. I then produced a document summarizing the changes in the two Mormon paradigms, using images and the key scholars, titled: My Dream First Presidency in Images & The LDS Thinkers that I Align with Most. In that document I did not mention David Bokovoy who is worth mentioning, for he had a multiple part interview and in the Mormon Stories #1016 (at the 50-55 minute mark) he points out that he had reconstructed his Mormon faith and reconciled "faith and scholarship" in a way that he was completely satisfied intellectually as a Mormon; and it was only the Brighamite Church's socio-political policies around 2015 (it has since reversed) that caused him to become inactive. In the entirety of the Mormon Stories interview he lays out his sophisticated Mormon paradigm that aligns with biblical scholarship in Mormon Stories podcast episodes 1013-1016 and episodes 1019-1022.
As mentioned above, during this time in the 2010s I even began to see a change in a popular anti-Mormonism Christian speaker named Shawn McCraney, as he changed his attitude and put out a Revised Assessment of Mormonism. This came after his own paradigm shift and being attacked for it by others in his own Christian community for holding beliefs contrary to their dogma; like his rejection of the traditional dogma of the trinity which led to him being treated to a theological "inquisition." After promoting and defending Utah Lighthouse Ministry (an anti-Mormonism bookstore), ran by Sandra Tanner, he suddenly realized he was being attacked by her because he stepped outside of the "Calvinist club" so to speak; and so he had these words to say to Sandra Tanner. Sandra's store has since been closed down (as of 2023), ironically due to crime in the area making Sandra feel unsafe, which one might argue was due to a lack of religious faith and ethical structure in that community. One of the first anti-Mormon books I read was Sandra's Mormonism: Shadow or Reality. Afterward, I began to realize her intellectual double standard of being so critical of Mormonism but not applying the same critical lens to her own particular theological bias and agenda.
So I began to see that some former anti-Mormon Evangelicals were beginning to reassess Mormonism and remodel it as something overall positive for families and community. As Shawn McCraney acted as host in the debate between RFM and the Midnight Mormons and at one point he says (to paraphrase him) that it's scorched earth out there for those who leave the Mormon Church and fall into atheistic nihilism or the Evangelical churches that manipulate them.
By 2015 I began to see many LDS-turned-atheists reconvert to a new Mormon paradigm as well. I began to notice several others who, like me, had become agnostic or nontheist and then had reconstructed a new Mormon paradigm. There was Don Bradley's journey from atheism to Mormonism that was similar to my own journey. Then there was the former atheist Leo Winegar who has reconstructed his faith with a model for believing in the Book of Mormon as non-literal history. Even the Mormon historian Patrick Mason presented his nuanced Mormon paradigm on Mormon Stories #1657 where he openly discussed the translation of The Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith as a combination of inspiration and a Nineteenth Century production, as a midrash; and how it functions as history and he is comfortable with seeing it through the lens of mythos (or a religious-metaphorical "lens") beyond the scientific enlightenment "lens," at the time-mark 2:10:00-2:33:00; while rejecting scriptural fundamentalism at the 2:36:00 time mark. This view, or something similar to it, had been taught by LDS scholar Blake Ostler for over a decade.
So I began to see the common trend of reconstructing faith through a new model of belief. The author of churchistrue.com has the sacramental paradigm. Even more traditional orthodox believers like LDS apologist Jacob Hansen have the Collective Witness Model. In Hansen's discussions with exmormons he readily admits to a lot of the problems in Mormonism but has simply formulated a model for being Mormon that works for him.
So I began to see a trend that "thinking Mormons" go through some kind of process of deconstruction and then reconstruction, and while Hansen is definitely more Orthodox than I am, a lot of the source material and scholars (like Tom Holland and Jordan Peterson) that he references is the same material I have read through toward my own reconstruction.
So who has the last word on what is true Mormonism? Was Brigham Young's Adam-as-god the true Mormon theology or was Orson Pratt correct to oppose his view in the 1800s? Is James Talmage the last say in "systemized Mormon theology," or are the views in Strangers in Paradox equally worthy of exploring? What about a more nuanced view of the Godhead that incorporates the theology of Joseph Smith and Parley P. Pratt and the fifth Lecture on Faith, which I found in the following slideplayer presentation (at slideplayer.com/slide/11649484); which does an excellent job providing a synthesis of the early LDS Godhead:
So the way I see it, nobody owns Mormonism; and so why should I let the extreme Brighamite/LDS Orthodox position of those still stuck in the McConkie Era tell me what it means to be Mormon? Why let them have all the fun in producing an identity and belonging for themselves? Why should Joseph Fielding Smith and James Talmadge and Bruce R. McConkey get to tell me what it means to be Mormon and believe in Mormonism? They are not the last word on constructing a faith-stance or model of Mormonism!
So what I realized is that we are all constructing our own version of Mormonism, from Bruce R. McConkey to Terryl Givens, from Sandra Tanner's "Mormonism" to Shawn McCraney's revised reassessment of "Mormonism." So I realized that I have a right to essentially construct my own version of Mormonism that works for me, that gives me a sense of connection to my Mormon ancestors, a sense of belonging to my heritage and an identity. I did not need to be either "anti-Mormonism" or a McConkie Mormon. I found a way to make it work for me and empower me while inspiring me to be a better person by utilizing the unifying Christian symbols and stories of the Zion Ideal.
So if you have gone through a "faith crisis," and deconstructed the traditional LDS paradigm, so that it no longer works for you, but are interested in moving beyond atheistic nihilism, then I'm simply offering the Emergent Mormon Perspective as an option for reconstruction to anyone who's interested; who may benefit from my points of view and interpretations after their own "faith crisis." All I know is that for me personally, when I began this process of reconstruction it improved my sense of well-being. In fact, I did not even begin with reconstructing a Mormon model of belief but first began reconstructing my faith in Christianity around 2015 on my blog practical-fruition.blogspot.com and my site google site practical-fruition.
All I know is that as I moved away from nihilistic atheism and toward reconstructing something to believe in again, even within a more nuanced paradigm, I began to feel better about life. I was less pessimistic and negative and I could even feel my self-esteem (well-being and confidence) improve as I felt more existentially vital (more alive) again being part of something larger than myself. I felt buoyed up by the mere "possibility of the Divine Realm" and felt connected to a rich chain of being through connection to my Mormon ancestors that strengthened me; as their collective faith and belief in a soul and Heavenly Parents and three degrees of glory (rather than eternal conscious torment in hell as taught by others), began to be for me just as important as a cultural identity and connection to a People, as a Jew feels connected to his Jewish ancestors and the faith and belief they passed on to him (even if that Jewish individual does not believe in all of it literally). I realized that just as somebody could be a Reformed Jew, I could be a "Reformed Mormon" of sorts.
I began to realize that the belief in the inherent worth of a person as a soul and not merely a collection of atoms, had really never left me. I realized that I appreciated my Mormon heritage and felt connected to my ancestors and the stories and symbols they passed onto me. Once I was able to separate those stories and symbols from the puritanical interpretations of Spencer W. Kimball, Boyd K. Packer and Bruce R. McConkey, the Mormon symbols and heroic stories opened up to me in new ways providing more potent and powerful psychological energy for personal growth and social unity. I began to realize that just as Dr. Paul Dobransky realized the importance of Greek mythology for providing a "tool belt" for exercising positive masculine instincts, I benefited from the Mormon "tool belt" and it's emphasis on healthy masculine power through Book of Mormon heroes, and the ideal of Zion in Moses 7; and the theme of what I call Positive Generational Contagion in the Book of Mormon (which is all similar to MindOS and Daniel Goleman's positive emotional contagion).
