Part III: Freedom Is Not Permission
Chapter 9: Family Wasn't The Lie
I do not believe in eternal families the way I was taught. I do not believe priesthood keys make a family real, or that temple sealing is the cosmic technology by which love survives death. I do not believe God arranged the universe around the domestic ideal promoted by the modern LDS Church. But I still think Mormonism was right to make family central. Here, more than almost anywhere, I resist ex-Mormon inversion.
It is easy, after leaving, to become suspicious of family language. The church uses it constantly, sometimes beautifully and sometimes coercively. It can make single people feel incomplete, childless people invisible, queer people wounded, divorced people failed, and married people trapped inside roles they did not choose. But oversold is not the same as fake. A pitch can be manipulative and the product real — and family is the realest product the church ever oversold. A culture embarrassed by family can leave people underprepared for one of the few human goods strong enough to stand up to loneliness, aging, selfishness, and drift.
Family is not good because Mormonism said so. Family is good because human beings arrive dependent, remain vulnerable, and need forms of love that survive inconvenience. For most people, marriage and children are not accessories to a finished self. They are how the self gets finished. We assign counselors for college and mentors for careers. For choosing the person you will build a life with, we offer an app and a shrug. Young people are told to take school, work, travel, identity, politics, pleasure, and self-discovery seriously. Many of those deserve seriousness. Dating deserves the same seriousness. So does the possibility of children — before it becomes an emergency.
Children make abstraction difficult. They are not arguments, proof of righteousness, or accessories to adult fulfillment. They arrive helpless and slowly become themselves in front of you. To know someone from the beginning is one of the sweetest experiences I know. Mormonism did not invent that sweetness. It did teach me to notice it.
The church was not wrong that family deserves unusual reverence. It was wrong to fuse that reverence with a brittle script. It was wrong to make one life pattern the authorized form of righteousness, to pressure young people toward enormous commitments before they had enough self-knowledge, and to treat family idealism as a substitute for skill, as if revering a house taught anyone to fix its plumbing. But the modern counter-pressure can be wrong too. It can treat marriage as a lifestyle upgrade to consider once everything else is settled, and children as one possible enrichment among many. I have never met anyone whose life actually worked that way.
If not for the church, I probably would have delayed marrying and having children. I would have wanted more self-knowledge, more experience, more freedom, more time to become someone before binding myself to other people. Some of that would have been reasonable. And I am glad I did not wait too long. I got years of sweetness I would not trade away. I had children early enough that, with luck, I will have a long time to know them as adults. I got meaning that does not always feel like happiness but runs deeper than many happier things.
I inherited a script. I followed a path made morally obvious before I could compare it to much else. I entered serious commitments sincerely, but with an underdeveloped sense of alternatives. Mormonism gave me a picture of the good life before I was fully able to evaluate it. You can be grateful for a life and uneasy about the way you were steered into it. You can also admit that being steered sometimes brings you to goods you might not have been wise enough to choose.
One task after Mormonism is defending family without superstition. That means valuing marriage without pretending every marriage should last, wanting children without mounting them on the wall, and honoring domestic life without granting it a secret police. It also means refusing the era's favorite reassurance — that you do not owe anyone anything. You do. The owing is the point. When my children are old enough, I expect to tell them to take dating seriously, not because marriage will save them, but because love, sex, fertility, family, and time are not casual materials.
There is a kind of adulthood that keeps every door open and slowly becomes weightless. It has options, mobility, taste, self-expression, and a pleasing lack of constraint. Some of that is freedom. Some of it is just low gravity — nothing heavy enough to hold a person in orbit. Family is one of the places where people stop floating. The church saw that. It responded with too much certainty, but it saw something real.
I no longer believe my family is eternal because an ordinance made it so. I do not know what death does to love. But family relationships are worth investing in as if they matter enormously, because they do. If eternity exists, good. If not, the stakes may be higher. We have these people now, and the chance to become safety and delight to the lives most exposed to us. That is sacred enough to be getting on with.