Mormonism isn’t like a string of Christmas lights

My childhood memories of decorating the family Christmas tree include a growing appreciation of the fine line between delight and disillusion.

Each year, we took the strands of colored lights out of their boxes, wound them around the tree, and held our breath as we plugged them in. Would the lights spring to life, or would a single broken light condemn the whole string to sullen darkness?

Some people feel the same way about faith.

A recent article on Salon.com titled “But I’m a good Mormon wife” gives a poignant account of the unraveling of a Mormon woman’s faith as she confronted various details of her church’s history for the first time. “If Joseph Smith was a fraud-then what did that make the Church?” she asks. A chorus of comments following the article congratulated her for reasoning her way out of religion.

I don’t criticize her decision to leave Mormonism, but I have to disagree with the article’s implicit conclusion that leaving Mormonism-or indeed any religious tradition-is the only logical choice for a rational, educated person.

The logic behind this loss of faith — Joseph Smith was a fraud, therefore the religion that he founded is bogus, and one’s entire experience as a Mormon is bogus — is actually just the reverse of how many Mormons approach their faith. If the Book of Mormon is true, the thinking goes, then everything Joseph Smith did or said was divinely inspired. And if Joseph Smith was divinely inspired in everything, then everything about the church is just how God wants it.

I am an active Mormon and I love my church. At the same time, I can empathize with the disillusionment felt by those who investigate Mormon history for the first time after having been exposed only to sanitized versions of church history.

If a person looks at faith like a string of Christmas lights, they demand that “light” leap from one point to another along a single string of connections. If one junction along the string is flawed, then the whole string is dysfunctional. Or, if the whole string is functional, then every single junction must be perfect.

Here’s the problem with the Christmas-light view of religion: it’s too easily manufactured and too easily broken. As a young girl in Sunday School, just hearing tear-jerking stories about hardy Mormon pioneer women pushing handcarts across the Great Plains filled me with religious certitude. Surely, I thought, the pioneers would not have suffered for something that wasn’t true.

The other side of the the Christmas-light perspective also makes it easy to discredit an entire faith tradition. All you have to do is knock out a single light, and kaplooey-the whole tradition is dysfunctional, bogus, and unworthy of the loyalty of intelligent people.

Human flaws are painfully apparent throughout the history of every major religious tradition — including Mormonism — but that doesn’t negate the experience, motives, or morals of all Catholics, Anglicans, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims — or Mormons.

I have encountered both the humanness and the divinity of religious traditions in my own life. I have studied Mormon history and I am just as certain that early leaders such as Joseph Smith were imperfect individuals who on occasion made serious and damaging missteps as I am certain that Joseph Smith was indeed inspired in founding The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with its rich doctrines and bold avenues of sacred experience.