On Mormons
by Steve Howard
(written in 1997)

One part of being Mormon I can’t escape is how much of my identity still remains with it. . . .While I don’t really like organized religion I would rather go to a Mormon Church.  I’m more comfortable with it.  I’m  not sure about Mormon theology, but it’s what I grew up with, just as a person born into communism thinks it’s better, so I feel about Mormons.  There’s the roots of my family.  My parents met while they were both on missions in Argentina.  They wouldn’t have met otherwise.  Yet there they met, because they were Mormon.  Can’t complain about that. 

Then too, my mother’s family goes back in the church almost to its beginnings in 1830.  Doesn’t mean I don’t believe Joseph Smith was a con man.   It’s just if  Charles W. Penrose, my great-great-grandfather was a polygamist, and one of the top men in the Church, how can I hide from it?  I can’t.

Ironically it’s because of all this that I knew I couldn’t believe in God.  Whatever last bits there had been were gone, completely erased.  Doesn’t live in this building anymore.  It’s strange, but I can’t remember my reasoning.  I have a sense it was something along the lines of “this is too much bulls--t.”  

Let me add this to the mix.  With God dead I had lost a fundamental part of my core value system.  Just as great a loss as my immortality.  While I had been an inactive Mormon, I had been trying to get myself to go back.  Been trying for a couple of years.  While I didn’t believe in God, I did believe in being a Mormon (and that I still do.)

I think most Mormons are Pod People, right out of old Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which was filmed in Sierra Madre, where I was born.  They have a certain smile.  A Pod People smile.  A frightening tendency to leave their thinking to old men who weren’t born in this century, and who have no great intellect themselves.  Because it’s American, it has many American traits.  Anti-intellectualism is very strong.  A recent church leader said the enemy was feminists, gays and historians. 

I don’t know if a man can be a feminist, but I do believe in the ideas, have nothing against gays, and I have a history degree.  Not good.  Historian are an enemy because they tell the truth.  The good ones do.  They’re the ones who can take about fifteen seconds to show that the Book of Mormon is a bunch of horses--t concocted by Joseph Smith.  Yet the Church has people who are Book of Mormon scholars.  Sort of a flat earth society.  Or like the philosophers who tried to figure out how many angels could sit on the head of a pin.  Insane.

[Between his brain tumor and seizures, Steve had several close calls with death, which he talks about here.] 

 Of Salt Lake City and Utah in general.  Of a bunch of pod people going around.  Of not allowing any kind of intellectual thought while believing in education.  Of exclusion when the goal is to get everyone converted.  . . . I want to be able to stay a Mormon, but I’ve been pushed away.  I just can’t go to church.  They’re too crazy for me and I’m too crazy for them. We’re oil and water.  Yet, there it is, I’m Mormon.  Can’t run away from it anymore than I can grow six inches or stop being left-handed.  To reject a part of it is to reject myself.  To reject myself—you can see where this goes.

So what do I do now to anchor myself?  I’m Mormon.  Mormon or nothing.  So how does the need for the answer, for the comfort, where does that come from, the soothing?

If I knew that I would switch my allegiance from the Dodgers to the Giants—for a few weeks.  (I’m not getting rid of everything I have.  For Chr--t’s sake there’s a baseball strike and the Sharks are in a slump!)  It doesn’t really come from anywhere, not the deeper healing that I need.