Part II: What Broke
Chapter 7: The Dog Comes On Every Walk
Mormonism had a name for the part of me that liked praise, victory, appetite, attention, and the small thrill of being right: the natural man. He was an enemy to God, something to be subdued, starved, put off. There is a part of me that wants the treat more than the good. But I do not believe that part is an enemy. I think it is a dog.
The dog likes applause. He likes sex, food, music, sleep, novelty, comfort, revenge, status, the notification bell, the sentence that lands in a group chat, the feeling of having seen through something before someone else. He is not evil for liking any of this. He came with the animal, and the animal is good. A religion that teaches people to hate the animal will make them dishonest about themselves. A culture that teaches people to obey the animal will make them ridiculous, then weak, then dangerous.
Leaving Mormonism did not make the dog vanish. In some ways it gave him more room to run. For a while after I announced my disbelief publicly, I was addicted to the notification bell. Every chime meant I existed a little harder: someone shaken, someone grateful, someone furious, and all of it attention, all of it evidence that I had registered in the world. I like dunking on the church as much as anybody, even if I mostly did it in group chats and let the public posts stay respectable. The dunking voice, I eventually noticed, is testimony voice with the polarity reversed: same cadence, same confidence, same pause before the line you already know will land, same little reward waiting at the end. The church trained the performer. The performer survived the faith.
This is one of the facts ex-Mormon simplicity can miss. Leaving Mormonism does not free a person from the appetite for certainty, applause, and authority. The same animal comes with you. It may stop wanting a temple recommend and start wanting ideological purity, sexual validation, political belonging, or the quick sugar of being applauded for saying what the room already believes. The costume changes. The appetite remains.
Mormonism's mistake was not that it noticed the dog. Its mistake was turning the dog into an enemy and then giving institutional obedience too much credit for holiness. The natural man was treated as a monster until the church needed him harnessed for church purposes: ambition for callings, hunger for certainty, loyalty to the group, pride in being peculiar, pleasure in bearing testimony, righteous anger at enemies. The dog was not banished. He was baptized.
Outside the church, the same trick is available. We can condemn Mormon certainty while enjoying our own. We can mock purity culture while creating new purity tests. We can reject priesthood authority and still crave someone impressive to bless our conclusions. We can call ourselves free while obeying the nearest crowd with better lighting. None of this makes leaving worthless. It only means the work is deeper than changing teams.
The ethical task is not to kill the animal or pretend he is gone. It is to keep him from becoming your religion. Appetite belongs in a good life. So does pleasure. So does ambition. So does the wish to be admired, to persuade, to be beautiful, to be chosen, to be heard. These are not sins in themselves. They are powers. They become corrupt when they stop taking direction from anything higher than themselves.
This is where I still think Mormonism saw something important. A person should not be merely a bundle of wants. The divine part of us, if I can still use that word, is the part that can choose which wants deserve authority. It can tell the dog yes. It can also tell the dog not now, not that, not at that cost, not if it requires lying, not if it makes you cruel, not if it turns another person into scenery for your appetite.
That is not repression. It is government. It is the difference between despising the dog and letting him drive. I can act for noble reasons even when the dog gets a treat on the same errand. Mixed motives do not ruin goodness. They only require honesty.
When I wrote publicly about leaving Mormonism, I was trying to stop lying by omission. That was true. I was also listening for the bell. That was true too. Some part of me wanted to be useful, and some part wanted to be impressive, and some part wanted the old structure to feel the force of my refusal. None of those motives arrived alone. They came braided together, like motives usually do. The question was not whether I could make the dog disappear before speaking. The question was whether the better reason was still holding the leash.
Music is the gentler example, but not a purer one. I can play because beauty deserves a body in the room, because a hymn or a tune or an improvised line can make strangers less strange to one another. I can also play because I like being heard. I like the little hush when a room turns toward the sound. I like knowing I can help make it happen. The vanity does not cancel the beauty. It only becomes ugly when it chooses the song.
There are better ways to live than Mormon, but none of them will be found by pretending the natural man was a Mormon invention. He is older than the church, older than Christianity, older than language. He comes along after disbelief. He sits under the table during reconstruction. He hopes for scraps while we talk about truth. I do not want to hate him. I do not want to obey him. The dog comes on every walk. The work is learning who holds the leash.