September/October 2005

One woman's painful journey out of Mormonism and into faith.

An interview with Martha Beck
by Ravi Dykema

"The ability to question and to believe whatever you believe is fundamental to psychological health..."

Martha Beck - a life coach and columnist for O Magazine - was raised as Mormon "royalty," in a devoutly religious family with exceptionally deep roots in the church, surrounded by some of the Mormon's highest-ranking officials. Her early years were defined by an adherence to the church's strict code of conduct. But when she and her husband John, both Ph.D. candidates at Harvard, learned during her pregnancy that their unborn son had Down syndrome, she took the first faltering but determined steps on what was to become a trying and often exquisitely painful path that would lead her far from the church.

After her son, Adam, was born with Down syndrome, Beck chronicled the surreal and seemingly miraculous events surrounding her pregancy and Adam's birth in her memoir, Expecting Adam, detailing how her pregnancy and Adam's birth awakened in her a deep spiritual longing and a quest for her own truth. Adam's birth ultimately drove her and John back to Utah, where they eagerly anticipated the comfort of familiar surroundings and the support of family and friends. But with Beck's return to Utah came a growing awareness of the church's secrecy, contradictions and often-troubling practices. Most disturbing of all, she was forced to confront her memories of childhood sexual abuse by her father, a Mormon scholar and one of the church's most prominent authorities.

Beck's journey culminated in her brave and often chilling book, Leaving The Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith, a chronicle of her quest to develop an authentic spirituality and satisfy her deep spiritual longing, coupled with rare and compelling glimpses into one of history's most secretive religions and accounts of her personal attempts to deal with childhood trauma. Here, Nexus publisher Ravi Dykema talks to Beck about surviving sexual abuse, coming to terms with the Mormon church and the transfomative power of personal truth.

RD: Much of your story centers around your father and his influence—I understand he was a leader in the Mormon church.

MB: Actually, not in the formal leadership structure. My father was more a cultural legend than an actual leader. He was a very odd person—he was brilliant, but he didn't have great social skills; he was sort of odd with people. If not for his lack of social graces, I think he would have been in the leadership structure, since it's a lay leadership. He was mainly an intellectual figure, and was probably the best known apologist of Mormonism in the church's history.

RD: An apologist is like a scholar who editorializes?

"It's not a problem to tell someone who's illiterate that there's no such thing as evolution.  But it's another thing to send people to Harvard to become teachers, and then convince them that they have to teach creationism."

MB: Yes; it's a person whose specific scholarly purpose is to support a faith. So Thomas Aquinas was an apologist, C.S. Lewis was an apologist for Christianity.

RD: So even though your father wasn't involved in the formal leadership, he was important to the church. I'm assuming the church's politics were part of your daily lives.

MB: In a sense. But we were really raised in a different kind of Mormonism. It was one where the primary figure of veneration was my father, and after him probably Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. My father actually looked down on some of the leaders, and was known for his acerbic commentaries. We weren't raised to revere the church's leaders; we were raised in the cult of my father, with his brand of Mormonism.
My father was willing to lend his amazing mind to the church, and they needed someone to give a scholarly feel to some of the doctrines—which were, to put it mildly, difficult for most Americans to believe. Because he was willing to do that, he got away with quite a bit; he had a reputation for saying scandalous things, like mildly critical comments about certain aspects of the modern leadership. In any non-Mormon context, it would seem very tame, but he was considered oh-so-daring.

RD: You went to Harvard, so I'm assuming you were in the top of your class. Were you a nerd in high school, completely into your studies?

MB: I pretended to be, I was very into school, especially speech and drama. And I went to a high school where the standards of performance were very high. Mormonism has a very high standard of performance in general. A lot of Mormon children play musical instruments or do presentations or performances, and I ended up doing a lot of that too. My high school was very focused on national contests; I was entered in many national level contests, in whatever I showed the slightest aptitude for, so I ended up getting a lot of little kudos.

But I never really had peers; the kids I did hang around with were the bookish ones and the debate team. I remember once I was in a play where I dressed as a grown woman, and a rather stern one at that. I wore a gray wool suit in the performance, and everybody mistook me for an adult; they thought I was a teacher. So I began dressing that way to go to high school and a lot of kids thought I was a teacher.

When I was a sophomore, the student body president of the school got into Harvard. I didn't even know that he knew who I was, but he challenged me to apply when I was a junior; I hadn't thought about it until then, but as soon as he said it, I thought, "Cool!"

RD: Harvard must have been a culture shock after Provo, Utah.

MB: It was a total culture shock. At Harvard, it was as though I walked into another form of fundamentalism, only this time the religion was rationalism. I had trouble with any absolutist philosophy. What was most confusing to me was that I felt strangely confined at Harvard in a mental and emotional way that felt similar to the religious environment I had come from. But this time, the religion was more confusing because it was of an atheistic sort. There were a lot of people at Harvard who had all sorts of different philosophies and beliefs, but coming from a deeply religious culture, it was odd to me that the absence of religion almost seemed to be a requirement for blending in socially, for appearing hip and with it.

RD: You must have felt un-hip.

"The ability to question and to believe whatever you believe is fundamental to psychological health."

MB: Completely. I was also really ashamed about certain aspects of my religion. It was the first time I had interacted closely with any African-Americans; there were none in Provo when I was growing up. And I felt enormous amounts of shame and guilt because of Mormonism's stance on race. The Mormon church allowed all men to hold the priesthood except those of African descent, until 1978. The belief I was raised with was that in the pre-existence before this life, certain people had sided with Jesus in Jesus' war against Satan, others had sided with Satan, and a certain group had chosen not to choose sides—they had stayed on the fence and hadn't chosen to follow Christ, and those people were born negro, of African descent. Not just with dark skin, but specifically African. That doctrine was so upsetting to me all my life, and was particularly upsetting when I was at Harvard. I was afraid people would find out I was Mormon.

But my African-American friends ended up being so relaxed. They were like, "Girl, you would not believe what people have told us about ourselves." They were so large-hearted and tolerant, but I was ashamed of having my name on the rolls. I deeply believed that the racist standpoint I'd been raised with was wrong. Oddly enough, that, as much as anything else, created conflict for me when I was just starting at Harvard.

RD: Let's fast forward a little. You dated a man at Harvard, John Beck, who later became your husband, and he had gone to your high school as well. Did you date in high school?

MB: No. We knew each other, but there's a big difference between a 14-year-old and a 17-year-old. When you're 20 and 23, the difference doesn't seem so drastic. When I first went to Harvard, he was actually on his Mormon mission in Japan. I took a year off because I was crazy and really depressed and not knowing what to do with my life, and he went back to Harvard; I went back the next year, and that's when we started dating. We got married when I was 20 and he was 23. At Harvard, I was in a doctoral program, writing a Ph.D. dissertation. Then we had a son with Down syndrome, and I was trying to grapple with the various emotional and existential issues that came up pursuant to that. Eventually, we ended up coming back to Salt Lake City.

RD: You said in your book that you wanted the support of your family and the church; the people there who you knew would be compassionate about your choice to have your baby.

MB: That's right. So John and I went back to Utah, and I got a job at Brigham Young University (BYU), which is a bastion of Mormonism. The bastion of Mormonism. At first it was very relaxing, and I kicked myself for having been so critical of the culture as a child and an adolescent. Everybody was so kind, and it was obviously a tight-knit, highly functional community in its ability to keep everyone up and running all the time. I had also come to consider my rejection of faith to be hubris, and I was much more open to anybody's definition of the universe. So it was lovely at first; but then I started to notice some things that were odd and troubling, and they started to just pile up. Most of it had to do with the control of information, which seems like a simple thing.
But I had done my undergraduate work on China. I did a thesis on the role of women in pre-communist China, which I studied by going to China and collecting folk tales, the oral tradition of what life had been like. When the control of information becomes an ideological tool for keeping people in line for their own "best interests," bad things tend to follow.

RD: What were the bad things in China?

MB: The cultural revolution. The whole rule of Mao Tse-tung and the communists and the death of 30 million people, either by starvation or imprisonment or torture or outright murder. When you start to say that you've got the absolute truth, and that the end of creating this glorious Utopia based on your doctrine justifies any means necessary, it can go to demonic levels. I'd never thought Mormonism was going to end up getting people killed, although early on in its history, the Mormons got pretty warlike about killing non-Mormons. But, of course, I had not known that as I was growing up because that information is controlled. It was the control of the information that began to scare me. On a subliminal level, I was thinking, "This reminds me of something, and it's not good."

RD: Was there a moment when that really struck you, when you really realized, "Oh my God, this is what's happening here"?

MB: There were thousands; they started small and became more frequent and larger. It was a period during which I think the church had run into an interesting set of dilemmas. A generation of Mormon children had been educated in a non-Mormon system and were starting to become the educators, and I was one of those. We were all educated in things like, say, evolution. It's not a problem to tell someone who's illiterate that there's no such thing as evolution. But it's another thing to send people to Harvard to become teachers, and then convince them that they have to teach creationism. During that time, the church started cracking down. In fact, they piped in church leaders' addresses to the offices of faculty members at BYU. You'd be sitting in your office and there's a little speaker on the ceiling, and you'd start to hear these speeches, and you couldn't turn them off. The leaders would say things like "There were ravening wolves among the flock," and the ravening wolves were clearly feminist intellectuals.

RD: They used the words "feminist intellectual?"

MB: That was in an address that was meant only for people who were in the leadership structure; one of the 12 apostles of God came out and flatly said that intellectuals and feminists were enemies to the gospel, and that those forms of thinking had to be suppressed. It was leaked to the media because it was so shockingly propagandistic. But you have to understand: these men are considered to be under direct inspiration from God. They literally speak for God, and that is not taken metaphorically in Mormonism. It is literal.

There are 12 of these leaders, just like Jesus' original 12 apostles; in fact, they're said to be chosen by Jesus and by revelation. There's a phrase in Mormonism—this is word for word—that says, "When our leaders speak, the thinking has been done." That's it. It's God's word, no ifs, ands or buts. It's basically a theocracy.
Every six months, we professors at BYU would be interviewed, and one of the things we were asked was "Do you support the 12 apostles and the other general authorities of Mormonism as God's literal leaders of the one true church?" And if we didn't say "yes," we would be fired. It was very explicit. It's a religious school, and absolute adherence to the belief system is required.

RD: So you found yourself once again as a deviant?

MB: The weird thing is, I didn't think that originally. I was going to be open to any faith, and I was willing to suspend my disbeliefs. I considered it hubris to say that I knew that they weren't God's apostles—how do I have any absolute knowledge? But what I began to see was that the things that they were saying felt very wrong to me, and had everything to do with control and secrecy. My experience of control and secrecy, both intellectually and personally, is that control and secrecy are devastating to human life and development. The ability to question, and to believe whatever you believe, is fundamental to psychological health.
I was also told that I wasn't to share certain pieces of information, like the fact that most Mormon women work outside the home. That was considered a dangerous piece of information, and I was told, "You can't write about this. You can't publish that or you'll be considered unworthy to teach here." I was supposed to keep that a secret because the official position is that mothers should never work outside the home, so the fact that most Mormon mothers do work outside the home is considered classified, even though it's a census statistic.

Another thing that happens when there's this kind of control of information is that people start to pretend—perhaps professors at BYU pretended that they believe in the apostles and the beliefs of the church. Perhaps they even begin to try to convince themselves that they're not really feeling or thinking the things that they're feeling and thinking. In other words, we start getting into denial.

It became clearer and clearer to me that a lot of the Mormons around me were going through this. And people would talk about it constantly, the psychological stress and the cognitive dissonance of pretending to believe in a system they didn't believe in, and trying to convince themselves that it was okay to save their jobs by claiming to believe. And then there are the odd twists that the psyche takes once you have entered into that realm of denial and suppression and all that.

RD: It leaks out, doesn't it?

"if you take away anything that is in people's nature - their secuality, their desire to learn, whatever it is - you begin to create huge amounts of neuroses, suffering, pathologies of allkinds."

MB: Yes. In my first memoir, Expecting Adam, I used that phrase—that the problem with denial is that it leaks. If you could just absolutely pack something away, it would be fine. If you could pack it away long enough, you think it will go away. But it doesn't. It's like holding a beach ball under water.

Freud's whole psychology is based on psycho-sexual development and all these repressions and stuff, and I think it's overly focused on sexuality. But I think it's because he grew up in an environment where sexuality was tightly controlled. If you take away anything that is in people's nature—their sexuality, their desire to learn, whatever it is—you begin to create huge amounts of neurosis, suffering, pathologies of all kinds. If you take away people's freedom to wonder, to think of different philosophical and religious positions, it becomes a bit like the inquisition or the Crusades or Galileo having to risk his life to say that the earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa. It makes us all weird.

RD: In your book, you disclosed that you discovered that your father had sexually abused you; you had lost or repressed that memory, and then it came back to you.

MB: Yes, although I had friends who told me that I told them about the whole thing in high school. To this day, I don't remember telling anyone about what happened. I am the last person to jump on some sort of pop-psych bandwagon and say, "Oh, I'm recovering memories." It wasn't like that at all. I had intrusive and cataclysmic memories that had left tracks my whole life. I had been having nightmares and dysfunctions from this source for my whole life. It's not like you just remember something out of nowhere. It's more like a wound under the skin that finally breaks the skin. But it always hurts.

RD: I know there's some controversy about whether the abuse really occurred, or whether these "memories" might have been implanted by a psychotherapist.

MB: I was not in therapy when I had my first flashbacks. After I started having memories, then I went to a therapist—not to talk about how to "recover" memories, but to figure out how the hell to deal with my life. I was raising three children, one with Downs syndrome, and I was working at BYU. I needed support. But part of the process of remembering meant a catastrophic break from my family of origin. So I went to a therapist for support. We almost never talked about any kind of abuse and very rarely discussed any memories, much less retrieved them.

RD: So you weren't recovering these memories in psychotherapy sessions or under hypnotherapy?

MB: Not in a therapist's office. I had a typical response to abuse, what's called dissociative amnesia [see sidebar]. It happens all the time with police officers; I've talked to people from the 9/11 terrorist attack who had it. Dissociative amnesia includes a partial blocking of more horrific aspects of an experience that later intrudes dramatically as an actual memory when you feel like you've got enough safety or distance from it. I also have extensive physical scarring.

RD: Where's your scarring?

MB: Well...where would you expect? I have so much scar tissue vaginally that I've had one gynecologist offer to just "clean it up" for me surgically because it was so severe. I ultimately ended up having three surgeries to correct problems because the scar tissue had healed so badly. It created abscesses and all kinds of gross things that are embarrassing to talk about.
But my family's so cynical that they actually wrote on a website that I was hospitalized three times for issues related to my "false memory syndrome." Actually, they were surgeries to correct scar tissue. The scars were there, but I never knew what caused them until I had these memories. The weird thing was, I never wondered. Physicians assumed I'd had an unassisted childbirth and had torn during the birth. They'd say, "Wow, why didn't the attending physician sew you up?" I had had children, but I had the scar tissue before they were born, and none of the births caused these scars.

RD: It sounds so horribly painful, I'm really sorry.

MB: One of the surgeries was an emergency surgery, done without anesthesia. It was a nightmare. Once you've been through that, it's very convincing when you remember how it happened.

RD: When you were recovering these memories, what did you make of what happened to you as a child? Did you conclude that your father was presenting a false public persona?

MB: I don't know. I thought maybe he, himself, had repressed memories because he had witnessed a lot of atrocities in World War II, and I think maybe even participated in some of them based on things he told my husband. For example, he told my brother that his unit took a church in France where a wedding was going on, and every member of the company raped the bride. Then we'd ask him to re-tell some of his war stories, and he'd look at us blankly and say, "I never talk about the war. What are you talking about? I don't even remember it." My mother also believed he'd been sexually abused by his mother; this had always been the stuff of family gossip.

The weird thing about the memories I had, and it's so difficult because people will say, "Well how did you connect it?" But I didn't connect it. I was five; I didn't know what the hell was happening. I have very vivid memories of the first occurrence. I think things happened after that, but I feel very vague and dissociated about them. The reason is that if you dissociate immediately when a trauma begins, you never really record it that well. I've done so much reading on the function of memory and how it works, trying to figure out what was happening to me. I don't have the luxury of saying, "Oh, I just made it all up." I know I didn't.
I know that whatever these memories are, they were not implanted by a therapist. They felt exactly like memory. When I began dealing with them as memories, the dysfunctions I had suffered for years, like nightmares and depression, totally went away. Anyway, I didn't know anything about what was going on in my father's work at the time, but I did remember strong religious overtones and the things that he said and did, and specifically the phrase, "an Abrahamic sacrifice"—that he had to make an Abrahamic sacrifice and that I was the Isaac figure, the sacrificial object.

"western systems are based on the idea that thinking is the paramount determiner of truth.  My experience us that thinking can be monstrous if it's directed toward an ideal or a value system that causes suffering. "

But I remembered hearing that sex could be substituted for death. My father explained this to me when I was five. After that, I prayed every night of my life that I would never, ever have to make an Abrahamic sacrifice again. I never wondered why I had that little prayer, but it was the most desperate prayer of my childhood. I had a whole ritual around it. I had to arrange the heater in my room a certain way, and I had to get the covers just so, and I had to be out of my bed and on my knees praying. All of this was to keep me from having to make an Abrahamic sacrifice.

RD: Did you understand what "Abrahamic sacrifice" meant?

MB: I didn't have a clue. When I heard the story of Abraham and Isaac in church, it didn't ring any bells. It bothered me, but it didn't sound like an Abrahamic sacrifice to me. That was something very different in my mind, something absolutely horrifying beyond belief, but different.

RD: I know your siblings vehemently deny your allegations, and yet it sounds as if you're really sure of the veracity of what you've discovered.

MB: Yes, I really am. Something happened. Because of the scarring, I know it was some form of rape. It could have been object rape, I suppose. But I'm absolutely sure it happened—as sure as I would be if you asked me what I had for breakfast this morning.

RD: Do you think there's a higher rate of incest or pedophilia among Mormons?

MB: I actually do think it's much worse in Mormonism than outside of Mormonism. I've noticed that many people who have backgrounds in the old polygamist families have totally unrepressed, absolutely clear memories of incest. I haven't seen the incidence of incest to that extent outside the Mormon church. I work as a Life Coach, so I've had literally thousands of people as clients; of the non-Mormons, I've had only two or three talk about histories of incest. I've also had a handful of Mormon clients, maybe 10, and of those, seven were sexually abused.

RD: So it seems pretty clear as I listen to your story why you would have left the Mormon church; it sounds like it betrayed your trust and your faith.

MB: Yes, but I hesitate to use the word "betrayed." It's a blaming term, and it sounds like I'm being a victim. I would rather say it just didn't work for me, but I do believe that Mormonism is a very useful and helpful path for some people. I'm never going to say that other people can't have their faith because it didn't work for me. That's putting it in gentle terms. To put it in harsher terms, it was like marrying somebody I thought was a nice guy and then finding out he was an ax murderer. The vows I took at the marriage altar suddenly gave way to the new information I was getting.

RD: And where did you go? What faith have you found?

MB: I consider myself a Taoist. I have a religion based on two tenets. These are the only things I believe absolutely. The first thing is that no matter what I believe, I may be wrong, because I think the obsession with being right is part of what's driving fundamentalism all over the world, whether it's religious or political, and it's terrifying. The second thing I know is I can tell the difference between what causes suffering for me and what does not. People would say to me, "Do this, support the prophets, believe in Joseph Smith and you'll be happy," so I'd give it the old college try, and it didn't work. It caused suffering. So I choose not to believe it.

I love Taoism and certain aspects of Buddhism. I find Asian religions more sensible and more resonant with my own experience, particularly the focus on dropping everything that is conceptual in preference for what is experienced with the part of the self that recognizes the self-evident truths—beauty, love, that kind of stuff. Just be present with actual experience, whether you're looking at physical evidence or whether you're looking at emotional reaction, just be present with your own experience and allow yourself to be guided by compassion. I like that. It's kind of a new-agey conglomerate of Asian religions, but I claim special new-age privilege because I actually studied it before it was like hip. I studied it when I was at Harvard and when I was in China; the language was a bitch to learn because it required a different way of thinking.

But that different way of thinking saved my life. I believe that we understand and experience the world largely in terms of our ability to speak about it to ourselves. Asian languages require that you think differently in order to speak differently.

RD: How did that save your life?

MB: Because it made it seem laughable that Westerners believe Descartes' phrase, "I think, therefore I am." The Western systems are based on the idea that thinking is the paramount determiner of truth. My experience is that thinking can be monstrous if it's directed toward an ideal or a value system that causes suffering, like Nazism. The Germans are so rational, so logical. But in Asia they favor a different approach, more like, "The mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master." In Western systems, the mind is the master.

It's like Aladdin's genie. Whoever holds the lamp, whatever he believes in, he can defend. My father's life's work was to take logic and create rhetorical snarls that would either entrap people's minds so completely or turn their real experience upside down so thoroughly that they would believe that black was white and white was black. It was all sort of a trick of reason and language. In Asian systems, the mind just doesn't have that kind of prominence in the language and the belief system. There's more of a focus on the awareness that is without mind. We don't even have a word for not-mind. In Asia, it's the empty mind that is considered most wise.

It's a very different, upside-down way of looking at the world. When I got back to Harvard after living in Asia, I would go from class to class thinking, "What is wrong with you people?" Then when I went back to Utah, it was times a million, "What is wrong with you people?" As I said, they were both fundamentalist systems based on the idea that, "Look, we can take all this odd logic based on these bizarre premises, and once you've gotten the bizarre premises taken for granted, you can prove anything with logic." I mean Mormonism makes complete sense within its own logical system. It's just really bizarre when you stand outside that logical system.

So that's how it saved my life. It gave me a place to go that was my own experience, and not what I'd been told I had to believe. If I hadn't been able to lay a claim to my own experience, I would have committed suicide; it's that painful. I have a friend who is mentioned in the book. She was my closest friend for a while at Harvard. She was Mormon, and she was the first person I called when I started really struggling with flashbacks, because she was a therapist. And she said, "If it were anybody else, I'd say go to a therapist, but given your situation, you can never tell anyone, ever."

I remember feeling like she had just slammed the dungeon door; I was so devastated. Right before I finished writing this book, she killed herself in her apartment in Manhattan. I pulled up her obituary onto my computer screen, because I could not believe she was gone. I had the manuscript on one side, and her obituary on the other side. And I looked at them, and I thought, you know what? From the time I was five years old, I was going to be one or the other. I was either going to tell the whole damn story or kill myself. But that's not the only reason I wrote it. I wrote it for the people who don't know how to tell their story. And I've had over 2,000 letters and e-mails now from people who have said "I'm stuck in a similar situation."

Also read:

A true or false question:
False memory syndrome and recovered memories