Dan Riley - Generation Atheist

In high school, I was very involved in the debate team. Debate instilled in me the idea that evidence for one’s beliefs is important. I had to compete against people in debate, and I found that if my beliefs and arguments weren’t warranted by evidence, then they would fail in competition. I thought that I ought to turn that same spirit of inquiry toward my religious beliefs. I did so in the hopes of affirming my faith. I was incredibly self-righteous, and I was hoping that I could use the tools of reason and logic in the service of my Mormonism.

At first, I didn’t actively search out anti-Mormon sources. I read a book written in the late 1950s called Mormon Doctrine . It’s by Apostle Bruce McConkie. Most of the book was faith-affirming. I was trying to learn more about my faith and its precepts. Then, I found a chapter entitled “Negros.” It said that the Negro is inferior to the white race in the area of spiritual blessings. To give some background, in the book of Genesis, Cain is cursed by God for killing Abel and his curse of blood is called the mark of Cain. Historically, Mormons have interpreted that mark, the mark of Cain, to be dark skin. In the early Church, that assessment seemed rather fair to a lot of people. As I discovered through Mormon Doctrine , the early Church taught that blacks were born into Cain’s cursed lineage because of the preexistence, the life that predates mortal existence.

In the preexistence, there was a war in heaven. Mormonism teaches, controversially to many religious people, that Jesus and Satan are brothers. In the war, in the preexistence, Jesus and Satan vie for power, and they propose two differing plans for salvation and present them before God. Jesus’s plan was to give people free will and let them inherit bodies. Satan’s plan was to take people to Earth, give them bodies but not endow them with free will in order to ensure that they all come back to God. It was decided that everyone, all the spirits of heaven, would be granted the ability to choose which plan they wanted, Satan’s plan or Jesus’s plan. Those who chose Satan’s plan were cast into hell immediately: that was one-third of all spirits. The other two-thirds wound up here on Earth; those people voted for Jesus’s plan. The way that the Church explained why blacks were born into Cain’s cursed lineage is that while the blacks in the preexistence supported Jesus’s plan, they were “less valiant” in their support. So whites, who became Mormons like myself and my family, were on the forefront in the war in heaven. We were campaigning for Jesus’s plan vigorously, whereas the blacks were lazy. This played into the common racial stereotype of blacks possessing that characteristic. That’s how the Mormon Church historically explained how blacks are burdened with, according to Mormonism, their unattractive skin color.

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.