Posted by:
Anziano Young
(
)
Date: January 13, 2022 09:43AM
My candidate for Most Overused Mormon Cliché of All Time, as excerpted from my (unfinished) memoir: "I know."
"There is a script for bearing one's testimony from which Mormons seldom if ever deviate. 'I know the Church is true.' Spoken with quiet authority, and sometimes just the hint of tears forthcoming, for greater emotional weight. 'I know Joseph Smith was a prophet.' The founder of the feast, indeed. 'I know the Book of Mormon is true.' The keystone of our religion, Ezra Taft Benson called it. 'I know __________ is a prophet.' Fill in the blank with the name of the current Church president. Rinse and repeat.
"Sometimes 'know' will be replaced with a statement of belief, but the standard from is an assertion of certainty and not faith. It is trained into us from a very young age. Attend any fast and testimony meeting and you will be guaranteed to see at least one preschool-age child escorted to the pulpit by its parent and prompted to bear their testimony in the accepted manner: 'I know the Church is true. I know Joseph Smith was a prophet. I know the Book of Mormon is true. I know __________ is a prophet.' Even though I cannot remember it, this was my first experience bearing my testimony, as it was for all my siblings and now is for those of my nieces and nephews being raised in the Church.
"Like vines covering a brick wall that will dig their way through the masonry if left unchecked, Mormonism has reached its tendrils into my life. It wasn't just through bearing my testimony, either. All the songs we sang and learned by heart in Primary, the Church's Sunday School program for children, were designed to cement our faith, to shape it into an unbreakable monolith. The lessons we were taught, drawn from stories in the Book of Mormon, gave us black-and-white answers to simplified moral conundrums. My father would recount the same stories to us every night before bed: of Nephi obtaining the brass plates by beheading the evil Laban at the command of God ('Better that one man should perish than a nation dwindle in unbelief,' the justification went); of Abinadi rebuking the decadent and evil King Noah and then burning alive in the fiery furnace; of the Stripling Warriors who had not taken the vow of pacifism their parents had going to war in their place; of Samuel the Lamanite preaching repentance on the city wall of Zarahemla while arrows flew around him. The obligatory prayer before every meal reminded us that we were never far away from church. The hours of church every Sunday and Church activities during the week kept us dependent on the cultural grip of Mormonism, as much a social outlet as a religious organization. All this was designed, expressly or not, to make us consider faith in Mormonism a given, indeed to replace 'faith' with 'knowledge.' Lacking the ability to question, to express doubt at all, we could state with the confidence of 5-year-olds, 'I *know* the Church is true,' when no such knowledge is possible. Even as an adult, finally learning to question the truth of it all, the thought of leaving the Church gave me a sinking feeling in my stomach. How can I *know* it isn't true? If this is all I've ever known, or more accurately *thought* I've known, how could I possibly leave it?
"The answer turned out to be, only with great difficulty. Three years after coming back from the MTC, I was having dinner in my college's cafeteria with a friend and another student I did not know when the subject turned, somehow, to the Book of Mormon. Mormonism, this person claimed, is a cult, and I found myself arguing otherwise--quite heatedly, in fact, to the point that I apologized to my friend as we left. 'I don't know what came over me,' I said, and I didn't. I had no reason to defend Mormonism like that. No reason, that is, other than years of conditioning to unquestioningly accept that the Church is true, Joseph Smith was a prophet, the Book of Mormon is true, and __________ is a prophet."