Learning to Trust My Inner Authority

When I was Mormon, I looked around at people who had no religion and thought how difficult it would be to figure out their own ethics. How would anyone know what was right or wrong without religion (or God) to tell you what it was? I think I genuinely believed that without a system of rules to tell me what I was allowed and not allowed to do, along with a series of punishments (from social disapprobation to the threat of God’s eternal condemnation) to keep me on the straight and narrow, I would likely become all sorts of bad things.

A drug addict.

A prostitute.

A serial killer.

A pedophile.

A thief.

A liar and con artist.

In a world without religion and its commandments, why would anyone be prevented from doing what was solely in their own benefit rather than doing what was good for the larger group? In addition, how would anyone be able to gather enough information from millennia of human experience to see what actions were likely to lead to bad outcomes for children or anyone else? It seemed an impossible task to me, then.

Fast forward twenty years, and this lack of a foundation for my own ethics was one of the major reasons that my disintegrating faith in Mormonism was so distressing to me on every level. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I didn’t know which way was up. I didn’t understand anything the way that I had before. The whole world had changed and it seemed a dark place now that I wasn’t clear which way was true.

One of my ex-Mormon friends told me that his mother said when he left the church, “Then what’s even the point of being alive?” It can be painful to hear things like this. It sounds like judgment that you don’t deserve to be alive if you step away from fundamentalist religion. But what my friend’s mother was saying is that she didn’t know what the purpose of her life would be if she wasn’t Mormon, because she hadn’t done the work of figuring that out all on her own. She’d leaned on other people’s truths and others’ moral value systems.

The idea that I could now figure out my own value system, as some of my post-Mormon friends began to suggest to me was a bonus of my faith crisis, seemed like an even greater burden to put upon me. It certainly didn’t feel like a prize that my trauma had won me. I didn’t want to figure all those things out. But nonetheless, I was forced to. I admit, I find myself extremely suspicious about constructions of “good person” even in a post-religious context. Partly this is because I don’t like the idea of now being a “bad person.” But it isn’t the only reason.

This is where the “freedom” of the faith crisis comes in. Because I no longer believe that other people have the moral authority to tell me what right and wrong is, I’m free to dismiss other people’s ideas of goodness, particularly in relation to myself. But yes, this also means that I have a great deal of work to do. So much work that I can’t do it in a single day. Or a year. Or possibly even the rest of my lifetime. Every day, I find myself asking myself what my values are, and if those really are my values, looking at what I’m doing with my life. Sometimes I adjust my idea of my values; sometimes I adjust my habits.

When you’ve spent your entire life looking outside of yourself to find the answers, it takes a lot of time to make it a reflex to start looking inside instead, and to accept that there isn’t really one answer about what is good or bad that’s true for everyone. Instead, we’re mostly stumbling around in the dark, trying to do our best at figuring out what is best for us. And it changes all the time, so we’re constantly flat-footed. But religion never actually protected me from the truth of that. It just pretended to.