Part III: Freedom Is Not Permission
Chapter 8: 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 suspicion can become its own blindness. 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 lifestyle accessories. They are central ways a life becomes thick with meaning. The wider culture is often too casual about that. It tells young people to take school, work, travel, identity, politics, pleasure, and self-discovery seriously. Many of those deserve seriousness. Dating deserves seriousness too. Choosing whom to build a life with deserves seriousness. The possibility of children deserves seriousness 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 emotional maturity, sexual honesty, relationship skill, and psychological reality. 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 do not think that is how life works for most people.
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 deeply 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. It means wanting children without treating them as trophies. It means honoring domestic life without making it totalitarian. It also means refusing the modern temptation to treat obligation as suspect. 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. A life with no deep obligations can also become thin. 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.