Posted on: Sunday, April 24, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
Breakaway exhilarating in memoir
| "Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith," by Martha Beck; Crown, hardback, $24.95 |
By Ralph Frammolino
Los Angeles Times
Outsiders know the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by its clean-cut image. Some former insiders, however, have other tales to tell. And few have such fascinating tales — or the literary chops and emotional range with which to tell them — as Martha Beck, an author ("Expecting Adam"), magazine columnist and life coach.
Beck, her husband and their two small children return to Utah in 1988 from Harvard, where the couple were graduate students. Forsaking friends who urged her to abort a fetus with Down syndrome, Beck was determined to raise her infant son among the unconditional love of God-fearing people. She resolved to set aside her skepticism and embrace the "hefty caboodle of beliefs and traditions I inherited from my Mormon culture."
She recalls her wedding, explaining how she was given special undergarments in a temple rite that included the oath to "let ourselves be killed" if certain details were ever divulged. The ceremony was "so surreal," she writes, it was "like watching an episode of 'Leave It to Beaver' in which June and Ward take just a moment out of their busy day to agree that if they ever leak the family secrets, they'll hack off each other's limbs."
All this seems to be mere amusement until Beck joins the faculty at Brigham Young University. She runs smack into a society in which women are secondary, even in the afterlife, and where academic inquiry must adhere to church teachings.
Church authorities are closing ranks and have embarked on a McCarthyesque campaign against naysayers. Faculty are told which research sources to use. Publications deemed "alternative voices" mysteriously disappear from the library. The defiant are excommunicated.
Beck debunks the claim that church founder Joseph Smith translated an account of the patriarch Abraham from Egyptian papyri. The man on whom the church has relied to repel attacks against the translation, now part of the Mormon canon, is none other than Beck's father. Living so close to him again triggers a reaction in Beck. Nightmares grow into screaming fits, then into flashbacks of a secret buried in her unconscious.
Beck breaks from her spiritual and psychological bondage in dramatic fashion. We share the feeling of exhilarating release. That Beck can write so eloquently about her experience without bitterness is a gift worth its weight in gold plates.
In this memoir, Beck draws us into a world of secret temple rituals, demon-resistant underwear and Stepford-like denial.
