Part 1: A Child’s Religion
My family moved out of the only house I had ever known just before I turned seven years old. Up to that time, my parents had become disillusioned with their Baptist faith and avoided church wherever possible. Speaking with my father as an adult, he had determined that all churches were corrupt, and wanted absolutely nothing to do with them. Both he and my mother had made a conscious decision to not speak about religion in my presence, all in an attempt to spare me the trauma they had experienced from a fundamentalist upbringing. All of that changed though, just months before leaving. They were tracted out by two LDS missionaries, convinced they had found the truth, and were soon baptized as newly minted Mormons. I didn’t know it at the time, but my entire world was about to changed because of that decision, and it wasn’t even mine to make. As far as church is concerned, I went from zero to sixty over night, but it would be a mistake to think that just because I wasn’t given a set of beliefs before Mormonism, that I didn’t have any.
