Guilt and Shame

I was introduced to the concept of church discipline vicariously, through my father. When I was twelve years old, my father gathered me, my mother, and my siblings around the kitchen table for a family meeting. He explained to us that he was going to be “excommunicated” for a grave sin that he had committed. I did not know what that word meant. My immediate thought was that is was somehow related to being executed, and I imagined my dad hanging from a gallows.

Excommunication is now called “Withdrawal of Membership” in the most recent version of the church’s General Handbook. This is a softening term (most likely settled upon by committee) because in practice, excommunication is like dying. You are cut off from full participation in the church. In a culture of appearances, that is akin to a death sentence. At the very least, your faith community views you with conspicuous suspicion. The excommunicant is not obliged to wear a scarlet letter on their clothing, but he is restricted from participation in the sacrament, can’t offer public prayers, can’t hold callings or lead activities, can’t exercise the priesthood, can’t wear the temple garment, and is banned from giving tithing or offerings (apparently, giving money to the church is a high privilege). Simply put, excommunication is a traumatizing exercise in public humiliation.

Excommunication comes after the church member is put on trial by his local church leadership in what is now called a “Membership Council“. If the sinner is a priesthood-holding male, at least 15 men are involved in the process, including the stake president, the bishopric, and the stake high council. (Women apparently don’t need to have so many men involved and can be disciplined by their bishopric alone). This council convenes in one of the church meeting rooms and literally places the sinner on trial, complete with testimony and witnesses.

It is reasonable to assume that the most common cause for a church disciplinary hearing is a sexual sin such as adultery. The more high-profile cases are for apostasy, or speaking out against the church in a public manner. These hearings are confidential, with the church forbidding any participants from making audio or video recordings. (Nevertheless, prominent church critic and author of the CES Letter, Jeremy Runnells, secretly recorded his disciplinary hearing and it is available on YouTube.)

The church gaslights its members by claiming that church discipline “reflect[s] the love and hope offered by the Savior to those who repent.” Allegedly, the formal repentance process provides a path for the sinner to engage in “godly sorrow” and thus bring themselves closer to God through the healing power of Christ’s atonement. Church leaders have always described church discipline as a demonstration of the balance of God’s justice and mercy, and a manifestation of infinite love of the Redeemer. Ex-Mormons pejoratively call these meetings “courts of love” as a coping mechanism for what is actually psychological violence. It is difficult to explain to outsiders, but to a believing Mormon, the shame of a disciplinary council is a harrowing experience. It certainly was for my dad, and by extension, for our entire family.

I remember my father having to refuse the sacrament each week. As a family, we felt like we were all being punished. This had a profound impact on me. It felt like my family was highly exceptional, and not in a good way. Many of our ward members treated us with kindness, but there were others who kept their distance and treated us like pariahs. After more than 30 years, I can still feel the gazing eyes.

But before you start feeling sorry for my father, let me stop you and point out that my father deserved every ounce of the shame that he felt. He had engaged in a sexual relationship with a teenage girl that had been under the care of our family. I may, at some point in this blog, get into some of the details of my mother’s devastation and the subsequent divorce. But for now, let me just say that although the excommunication was horrendous for us all, my adolescent Mormon mind considered it necessary. I don’t know every detail of my father’s past transgressions, but it is my understanding that the only reason he did not find himself in jail is because the girl’s mother did not want to take our father away from us. Charges were never filed.

This is the childhood backdrop of my relationship with Mormon guilt and shame. Not long before my father’s excommunication, my youth leader had given me a pamphlet entitled To Young Men Only, without explanation. The pamphlet was adapted from the infamous sermon delivered by Boyd K. Packer in 1976 wherein he compares the male reproductive system to a “little factory” that produces sperm. Packer stressed the point that masturbation is a grievous sin. In a similar vein to the teachings of Spencer W. Kimball in The Miracle of Forgiveness, Packer condemns homosexual activity. He even goes so far as to justify violence in the interest of resisting homosexual advances. I remember keeping the pamphlet in one of my dresser drawers and reading it over and over in my bedroom.

I masturbated for the first time at the age of fourteen. I did not consider it normal. In my mind, it was always a grievous sin, and I suffered great psychological harm in my attempts to stop myself from doing what my body wanted to do. So much so, that at age sixteen, I slipped a hand-written note under my bishop’s office door to inform him of my sin. He immediately called me in for a “worthiness interview.” A few days later, after school and on a weeknight, I drove my car to the church to meet him for my confession appointment.

I felt nothing but trepidation. Once I had confessed, the bishop proceeded to ask me a series of intrusive questions. I answered them as honestly as I could. After the interrogation, he asked me a final question:

Do you think we should excommunicate you?

Words cannot describe how I felt in that moment. The memories of my father’s excommunication came flooding back into my mind. I began to cry. I sobbed for what felt like an eternity. In a pitiful act of mercy, the bishop then proceeded to tell me that he wasn’t going to excommunicate me, but that his question was “just a test” to see how serious I was about repentance!

I would love to believe that I have fully recovered from that experience, but truthfully, I probably wouldn’t have written this blog post if that were the case. In the years following that experience, I found myself in a bishop or stake president’s office on many occasions, and it was always related to sexual sins. Whether it was masturbation, the viewing of pornography, or premarital sex, the crushing weight of guilt was ever-present, well into the college years and even into my first marriage. My father even told me once that such things “ran in the family,” jokingly referring to his own foibles. I did not appreciate the comparison.

You see, some Mormons actually take sexual sins as seriously as the church leadership wants us to. I was the type who believed the prophets when they described sexual sin as the “sin next to murder” in severity. Each time that I would confess my sins to a church authority, the emotional relief of feeling “clean” would only last as long as I could resist touching my penis. The guilt infected me daily, and was compounded by participating in religious ordinances such as the partaking of the sacrament, the giving of a priesthood blessing, or attending the temple. When I did things that I knew I was not “worthy” to do, the guilt was compounded. Participation in church rituals was a guilt multiplier, if you will.

Feelings of shame were mired with my guilt, and that crept into my romantic life. At times, I felt tempted to “come clean” with my romantic interests so that they would “know what they were getting into.” Prior to my mission, I pressured my freshman-year college girlfriend to join the church so that it would somehow absolve me of having had sex with her before marriage (which, incidentally, delayed for one year my ability to serve a two-year mission). She ended up reading the Book of Mormon, listening to the missionary discussions, and deciding to join the church. But I was demeaned when the missionaries asked me to perform her baptism. I had to awkwardly inform them that I was unworthy to do so.

Another college girlfriend, one I dated after my mission, broke up with me because she felt like the “Spirit was telling her that I was not going to be her future husband.” The timing of this breakup was suspicious to me because it happened very quickly after I refused to take the sacrament during worship services because of my “struggle” with masturbation. I will never know the true reason she decided to break up with me, but my perception (paranoia?) at the time that it had something to do with “unworthiness” added to the shame.

My first wife claimed that she had received a personal revelation that the marriage companion described in her patriarchal blessing was not me. She said this after I confessed to her that I had engaged in masturbation while we were married.

I have told these stories to trusted friends and family members over the years. In many cases, the reaction is to gently mock me for having taken things to such extremes. I can’t blame anyone for that reaction. The silliness of the cult mentality always reveals itself eventually.