Some Kinda Mormon

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When I started going to high school in Spokane, Washington, half my class was Mormon. I almost expected the kids to have horns. In fact, they were just like me: good kids who studied hard, didn't drink or do drugs or have sex; kids who had something to believe in that kept them out of trouble. There was a group of Mormon boys who buddied up to me and my Christian girlfriends. We went to the prom together, and sometimes we even kissed--the slightest, most platonic of kisses.

As a Christian, I felt it was my duty to share what I knew was truth with those who didn't. I started wars at the lunch table. When the Mormons said they were children of God, they meant it literally: God the Father slept with God the Mother and created baby spirits, which entered human bodies at conception. 'Don't you understand?' we would scream, 'We're not literal children of God; we're adopted children of God. Haven't you ever read Romans 8?' Sometimes we wouldn't talk for days after a particularly bad fight, and we'd grow afraid that the Mormon boys we had crushes on would go to dances with Mormon girls and eventually marry them and forget about us.

Which is exactly what happened. I ended up going to college at the University of Idaho, and my Mormon peers were shipped off to do mission work in places they couldn't or wouldn't or didn't send postcards from. But while I never heard from any of my high school Mormon friends again, I met plenty of new ones in Idaho. A whole new breed, in fact: Jack-Mormons. Not to put too fine a point on it, Jack-Mormons are Mormon fuck-ups. At 18, after a good Mormon upbringing, they opt out for state school, where they stop going to church, take up drinking, and aggressively make up for lost sexual conquests.

I identified with them because some time during my second year of college, I became a Jack-Christian. My deconversion involved drinking, sex, and a full immersion in Faulkner, Plath, and the Catholic fantasies of Dante. The world became too big for my childhood belief system. What about people who lived on islands in the South Pacific who were clueless about Christ? What about matriarchal societies that couldn't comprehend the sacrifice of God sending his only son to Earth to die? What if I only have one beer? A glass of wine with dinner? How far is too far? Is it OK if we're in love? Suddenly, I couldn't remember how I'd ever expressed myself without the word fuck.

For most, the initial free-for-all wore off. We voted for Nader. We became English majors. We drank a lot of good, dark beer. We listened to Democracy Now! and NPR. We studied the Bible as literature. We understood the Book of Mormon as modern-day myth. We realized that it was more fun to have only questions--questions that no one had answers for. We sat on porches drinking and talking, or we went on late-night walks through the university arboretum, or we had guiltless sex for the first time. God had never seemed so real or so happy for us.

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