"It's not about the sex", my ass: confessions of an ex-Mormon, ex-polygamist, ex-wife
"It's not about the sex", my ass: confessions of an ex-Mormon, ex-polygamist, ex-wife by Joanne Hanks, as told to Steve Cuno. I do so admire people who can not only correct their mistakes, but laugh about them afterwards. I cannot make either claim for myself.
Taking a frank, and admirably fair-minded, look back at her life, Hanks explains how she, raised a mainstream and decided non-polygamist Mormon, managed to persuade herself to join a fundamentalist Mormon splinter group that not only embraced polygamy but insisted on it:
"If that sounds a little weird to you, well, I agree. But we had grown up Mormon, which meant growing up with a tolerance for cognitive dissonance, that is, for living peacefully with things that don't quite add up. Polygamy was just one of them. To us, it was a short leap from approved Mormon teachings to unapproved ones. Nutty ideas felt familiar, even exciting."
She, her husband and three small children moved to the small Utah town that the group had chosen for its base of operations and tossed themselves into the mix whole-heartedly. She became a dutiful helpmeet and handmaid, her husband became the groups PR manager (leading to the two of them appearing in a number of news articles and on TV talk shows) and their kids went to church approved schools.
They also shopped around for, and found, a second wife and eventually a third, tho she didn't last too long. The second wife, who stayed with them for 7 yrs was a teenager with enormous boobs but the third wife was a middle-aged woman whose only claim to desirability was having a lot of money. Even that didn't help for long and wife #3 was eventually transferred to another husband (this odd and convenient process is explained in some detail) and even more eventually left the cult entirely and sued them to get her money back. She lost, that being a precedent no judge in Utah, not even a mainstream one, wanted to set.
Slowly, doubts began to creep into Hanks' mind -- doubts she kept to herself, urging Satan to get behind her, until it just became pointless:
"A prophet, he [the group's leader] once explained to me, was a prophet only 10 percent of the time. The other 90 percent of the time, he was no more than an ordinary guy with opinions. How to tell the 10 from the 90 percent? Short of discerning the Spirit, you had to await outcomes. When an outcome confirmed something that Harmston said, it was evidence that he was a prophet. When an outcome contradicted something Harmston said, it proved nothing at all. A prophet isn't of much use if you never know when to count on what he says, came a thought from nowhere. Get thee behind me, Satan, I replied.
For fun I tallied my success rate in obtaining answers to prayers. I found that when I asked God yes-or-no questions, the answers I received panned out about half the time. Fifty percent? That much was to be expected from random chance. Even so, my 50 percent beat Harmston's 10 percent by 40. Why did I need a prophet when my own success rate was better? And why did I need to ask God for help with decisions when I could do as well flipping a coin? Uh oh. Get thee behind me."
"This is bullshit, came that voice from deep inside. Get thee . . . oh never mind."
Unknown to Hanks, because he was also keeping it to himself, her husband was beginning to have doubts too. First his second wife had been taken away due to his failure to have his vasectomy reversed, setting him up for a loss of power since he was now back down to only one wife, but then came their leader's pronouncement of the End of Days (March 25 2000, in case you're interested) which everyone excitedly prepared for and then, apparently, fell flat on its face. I write apparently because leader guy explained that Christ had returned to Earth, killed all the non-believers and elevated the believers (i.e., only the members of their cult) and then folded time backwards to undo it for mysterious reasons of His own.
That was as much as the husband could take, and he opened up to his wife who initially panicked despite all her own doubts, but:
"We strolled and talked. Panic gave way to reason. It helped not to face the truth -- not The Truth Harmston-style, but the truth reality-style -- alone."
And that, I think, is a huge distinction. I've noticed a tendency among the more fanatically religious to capitalize "truth", as if it were singular or absolute or above and beyond the ordinary, a supernatural thing that we, with all our limits, would have any chance of recognizing or distinguishing apart from our wishes and dreams, from what we hope is true or would comfort us if it were true. Truth without the capital may not be as warm and fuzzy, but it does have the great benefit of being real.
Anyway, they left the cult with pretty much nothing, having given most of what they had to the cult, struggled to re-establish themselves financially and in their careers and succeeded, struggled to keep their marriage together and failed, but it seems without rancor or finger-pointing and I congratulate them for that. I very much enjoyed this book and recommend it, both for its humor and its look into a bizarre world. One last quote, a serious one, and the bolding is the author's:
"Cults are horrible things. They rob you of perspective. Worse, they make you afraid to trust your common sense. Here is the best protection from charlatans, manipulators, controllers, and opportunists I can offer: Whenever you find your emotions pulling you toward believing the opposite of what the evidence says, overrule your emotions and trust the evidence."
Taking a frank, and admirably fair-minded, look back at her life, Hanks explains how she, raised a mainstream and decided non-polygamist Mormon, managed to persuade herself to join a fundamentalist Mormon splinter group that not only embraced polygamy but insisted on it:
"If that sounds a little weird to you, well, I agree. But we had grown up Mormon, which meant growing up with a tolerance for cognitive dissonance, that is, for living peacefully with things that don't quite add up. Polygamy was just one of them. To us, it was a short leap from approved Mormon teachings to unapproved ones. Nutty ideas felt familiar, even exciting."
She, her husband and three small children moved to the small Utah town that the group had chosen for its base of operations and tossed themselves into the mix whole-heartedly. She became a dutiful helpmeet and handmaid, her husband became the groups PR manager (leading to the two of them appearing in a number of news articles and on TV talk shows) and their kids went to church approved schools.
They also shopped around for, and found, a second wife and eventually a third, tho she didn't last too long. The second wife, who stayed with them for 7 yrs was a teenager with enormous boobs but the third wife was a middle-aged woman whose only claim to desirability was having a lot of money. Even that didn't help for long and wife #3 was eventually transferred to another husband (this odd and convenient process is explained in some detail) and even more eventually left the cult entirely and sued them to get her money back. She lost, that being a precedent no judge in Utah, not even a mainstream one, wanted to set.
Slowly, doubts began to creep into Hanks' mind -- doubts she kept to herself, urging Satan to get behind her, until it just became pointless:
"A prophet, he [the group's leader] once explained to me, was a prophet only 10 percent of the time. The other 90 percent of the time, he was no more than an ordinary guy with opinions. How to tell the 10 from the 90 percent? Short of discerning the Spirit, you had to await outcomes. When an outcome confirmed something that Harmston said, it was evidence that he was a prophet. When an outcome contradicted something Harmston said, it proved nothing at all. A prophet isn't of much use if you never know when to count on what he says, came a thought from nowhere. Get thee behind me, Satan, I replied.
For fun I tallied my success rate in obtaining answers to prayers. I found that when I asked God yes-or-no questions, the answers I received panned out about half the time. Fifty percent? That much was to be expected from random chance. Even so, my 50 percent beat Harmston's 10 percent by 40. Why did I need a prophet when my own success rate was better? And why did I need to ask God for help with decisions when I could do as well flipping a coin? Uh oh. Get thee behind me."
"This is bullshit, came that voice from deep inside. Get thee . . . oh never mind."
Unknown to Hanks, because he was also keeping it to himself, her husband was beginning to have doubts too. First his second wife had been taken away due to his failure to have his vasectomy reversed, setting him up for a loss of power since he was now back down to only one wife, but then came their leader's pronouncement of the End of Days (March 25 2000, in case you're interested) which everyone excitedly prepared for and then, apparently, fell flat on its face. I write apparently because leader guy explained that Christ had returned to Earth, killed all the non-believers and elevated the believers (i.e., only the members of their cult) and then folded time backwards to undo it for mysterious reasons of His own.
That was as much as the husband could take, and he opened up to his wife who initially panicked despite all her own doubts, but:
"We strolled and talked. Panic gave way to reason. It helped not to face the truth -- not The Truth Harmston-style, but the truth reality-style -- alone."
And that, I think, is a huge distinction. I've noticed a tendency among the more fanatically religious to capitalize "truth", as if it were singular or absolute or above and beyond the ordinary, a supernatural thing that we, with all our limits, would have any chance of recognizing or distinguishing apart from our wishes and dreams, from what we hope is true or would comfort us if it were true. Truth without the capital may not be as warm and fuzzy, but it does have the great benefit of being real.
Anyway, they left the cult with pretty much nothing, having given most of what they had to the cult, struggled to re-establish themselves financially and in their careers and succeeded, struggled to keep their marriage together and failed, but it seems without rancor or finger-pointing and I congratulate them for that. I very much enjoyed this book and recommend it, both for its humor and its look into a bizarre world. One last quote, a serious one, and the bolding is the author's:
"Cults are horrible things. They rob you of perspective. Worse, they make you afraid to trust your common sense. Here is the best protection from charlatans, manipulators, controllers, and opportunists I can offer: Whenever you find your emotions pulling you toward believing the opposite of what the evidence says, overrule your emotions and trust the evidence."