Miles Kimball: Leaving Mormonism

I am a Unitarian-Universalist lay preacher. I gave 12 sermons—annually from 2005 to 2016—to the Community Unitarian Universalists in Brighton. (In 2016 I moved to Colorado.) This post was the first of those, which in turn reprised the same account of what I believed at that point that I spoke in Fall 2000 to the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor. (Actually, it was “Church” rather than “Congregation” back then.) That talk in Fall 2000 came after I had taken Ken Phifer’s course “Building Your Own Theology” and three weeks after I officially joined the First Unitarian Universality Congregation of Ann Arbor by “signing the book.” I date my change in self-identification as a Mormon to self-identification as a Unitarian-Universalist to that moment. What you see below is very lightly edited from what I said in Fall 2000.

This now completes on my blog the full set of 12 Unitarian Universalist sermons that I have given. Here are the links in chronological order of when I gave each sermon:

I also have three of Ken Phifer’s sermons on my blog:

At the bottom of this post are links to some of my other posts on religion.

Hi, my name is Miles Kimball. I wish you could have heard all of the credos that I heard in the latest Building Your Own Theology course, but I may be the only one foolhardy enough to get up here at the pulpit to give mine. In any case, my credo is not in any way representative of the wonderful variety of different things people had to say. But here it is. 

I grew up in the Mormon Church. All of my ancestors for many generations have belonged to the Mormon Church and my grandfather was the President of the entire Mormon Church until he died in 1985. So why am I a Unitarian-Universalist now?

When I was young, Mormonism seemed true to me just like science is true and I reveled in the intellectual playground of Mormon doctrine. In addition to some standard Christian doctrines about Jesus, Mormonism has a set of doctrines that sound a lot like modern science fiction, despite being developed in the first half of the 19th century. It is no accident that Utah is now a kind of Mecca for science fiction writers. It is a common speculation among Mormons that God the Father is only one of a long line of gods, each of whom went off to create a new planet, had billions of literal spirit children and sent those spirit children down into physical bodies to gain experience and prove their worthiness to themselves become gods. What is official doctrine is that we can go on to become gods who create new worlds if we are totally faithful and valiant in adhering to the tenets of Mormonism.   

When I went off to college at Harvard, I vigorously defended Mormonism to my curious classmates. I soon realized that in the East, Mormonism to my classmates was whatever I told them it was. So in defending my religion, I started bit by bit to smooth off the sharp edges and modifying things to make Mormonism more consistent with what I knew of science and social justice. One of the most embarrassing things about Mormonism was its refusal to let African Americans be priests, when it made all faithful men of other races priests (including me). Even though my grandfather changed that racist policy in 1978, it still took a lot of explaining to rationalize why it had been there in the first place. 

On the side of science, the biggest issue was evolution, but without ever having studied evolution I was able to convince myself that the sequence of fossils in the fossil record would make plenty of sense as the way God would have done things. 

When I was 19, I took time off from college and spent two years as a Mormon missionary in Japan and had a positive experience with that, except for the constant pressure to work harder. I saw that Mormonism had a positive effect on the lives of those who chose to join it because they saw something valuable in it for them. 

I got married a year after I had started a Ph.D. program in Economics. Encouraged by the Mormon teachings about the importance of children, we immediately dived into childbearing. Of our five children, two died in infancy. The priesthood powers I held that were supposed to allow me, I thought, to heal by the power of God did not work in my case. Those losses drove me to a deeper searching for spiritual truth---or maybe it was psychological truth. I had four arenas to explore my religion in depth. I had many talks with my wife who was on her own religious journey; I talked on a regular basis to a group of Mormon men who had an uncompromising commitment to the truth; I led an adult Sunday School class that become more and more emotionally honest as time went on; and I taught a course on evolution at the University of Michigan, using Daniel Dennett’s hard-hitting book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea as the main text. I worked hard to spell out each new emotional and intellectual insight as a part of Mormonism. At first I felt I could successfully encompass my new insights within Mormonism, using texts from the large array of Mormon scriptures and quasi-scriptures. But I began to get an inkling that the leaders of the Mormon Church did not share my view of the doctrine when they began to excommunicate leading historians, intellectuals and feminists in the Mormon Church and fire others from their jobs at Brigham Young University (BYU).  Amazingly, I did not fully believe my ears and eyes about the thinking of the Church leaders until I had occasion to interview for a job at BYU and had a long talk with one of the Church’s apostles, my father’s cousin, who was himself the son of an eminent chemist. One of the main threads I heard in that conversation was the thought-control the apostle used on himself in order to not think too deeply about his own disagreements with his more senior colleagues. Along the way, they effectively made a decision that I was not orthodox enough for a job at BYU, though there was still some hope for my reformation. My growing knowledge of evolution and a greater awareness of the limitations of physics combined with this final loss of faith in the institution of the Mormon Church to erode my belief in miracles and in the afterlife. A year and a half ago, I was disturbed to realize I was no longer a Christian when I started to wonder at what terrible force could have created the necessity for him to suffer and die for our sins.

I wanted to have someplace where I could wrestle with thorny questions about God, Christ, the afterlife etc., without being scolded for raising such issues. I started attending the First Unitarian Universality Church of Ann Arbor at the beginning of 2000.  Not long after, my local bishop officially decided that I was unfit to teach or speak in the Mormon Church any more.  That made the transition much easier.  I feel very lucky to have had my whole family make the same transition, though as part of their own, very different, individual religious journeys.  For me, signing the book three weeks ago represented the start of a new life. 

I still can’t help the Mormon influences on my thinking about the Universe. I find myself trying to give a theological meaning to the science I read. For example, I wonder if the creative powers of evolution, cosmic inflation and quantum mechanics in its many worlds interpretation can be considered Creator Gods. I ponder the subjective spiritual experiences I read and hear about and that I have had myself and ask myself whether they point to a God within us, even if it that God within can ultimately be explained as the result of the laws of physics. I marvel at the emotional and intellectual depth of groups of human beings sharing the thoughts and feelings of their hearts and think I see the shape of a God arising from free human beings interacting that is as much greater than those individual free human beings as our brains are more intelligent than an individual neuron. 

These are now my Gods of the past, present and future. 

No one knows the future, but I know the kind of future that I would like to take part in building. I want to stand for all people being joined together in discovery and wonder. 

I want to stand for humanity going beyond just solving its problems. I hope to see humanity reach for the stars, not only in the science fiction sense that I have loved so well but in every dimension of the human heart and soul. 

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