Leaving the Saints - Escape from intellectual captivity?

Margaret Beck's memoir, "Leaving the Saints" is very much a personal account of difficult life that is still unfolding. In my opinion, it was written in the midst of a healing process that had not completely taken hold. Margaret Beck is the daughter of the late Hugh Nibley, the highly respected chief apologist of the Church of the Latter Day Saints. As the book opens, Margaret is confronting her father in a carefully staged drama. He is, at the time, in his nineties and has recently been released from the hospital. He is clearly physically frail. Mentally, he is a wall. She has raised once again her allegations that he sexually abused her as a child. He completely rejects this – he denies that any such thing could have occurred. She has asked a friend to hide and listen in (in the next room) because she wants this conversation to be her evidence. The lack of trust goes back a long time, it would appear. Still, one of them must be wrong, but neither one will give an inch.

How can this be? Shouldn't we expect more, from two clearly intelligent adults who supposedly had a firm moral upbringing? I suppose that this is one reason that I continued to be interested in the story. I wanted to know more about these two individuals – who they were, how they got to this point, and how the tension would be resolved.

What we find out is this: Margaret was raised, and later married, in the Mormon church. She speaks as someone who is now outside the church, because she is – in the course of her memoir she describes what it was like to breath the intellectual air of Harvard University, where she and her husband have gone to pursue graduate studies. While at Harvard, she begins to examine her beliefs and those of her church with a new lens of rational thinking – it is her own personal enlightenment. Her husband and good friend is with her and they are both seriously questioning parts, at least, of their former faith and its doctrinal basis. Which is to say, they have serious doubts about the basis of their entire lives.

The trouble arises when Margaret becomes pregnant and it is clear that the child will have Downs' Syndrome. At this point, the couple decides to leave Harvard, where abortion would be expected, to head back to Utah where the kind of support they will need is assured. While there, Margaret eventually ends up teaching at Brigham Young University. And this, it seems, is where the troubling signs that she has noted along the way with LDS leadership and control are shown to be true indicators of serious trouble. I won't include the details here – but after several incidents where it appears that doctrinal conformity is valued above actual scholarship, the damage is done – both to Margaret and to the reader. I say damage because the implication is clear and damaging. Margaret presents herself as one who is seeking the truth. She continues to try to piece things together, to make allowances, and to assess what is really going on here. But in reality, the only facts she presents are her own reports of what happened. And this is the nature of a memoir – people get to tell their own story. Period.

But I was disappointed. I felt set up and let down, because I thought that someone as scholarly – both from an upbringing among the intellectual elite of a major denomination, and from her own academic credentials - as Marget Beck would enrich her personal story with witnesses, references from verifiable sources, and corroborating accounts. But as she tells it, it is all inside, hidden from public view - so there is none of that.

Ultimately, I was disappointed in Margaret because I wanted her to be a heroine, or at least to solve the mystery for me - but instead she was a real person with many doubts and weaknesses, learning to speak the best version truth that she can access. And there are wounds to heal. She is sure that the abuse really happened. Her father never gives an inch in denying that. It is remarkable to me that there is so little movement towards a point of reconciliation about this, as if forgiveness, compassion, and love for one another were not even in the picture. But these are very difficult, they take time, and they require honesty and bold love (see Dan Allendar's book for more on that!). So we, as readers, are left with doubt, and with more questions than we had at the beginning.


I must say that I have not read many “leaving the faith” stories – usually I identify more with those trying to find a sensible way in...so I am grateful for Margaret's account of losing her early convictions and continued seeking, all the more so because there is no apparent tidy resolution at the end. Just more questions....One of them being, can you really trust someone who would treat her own father like that, in his old age – regardless of the past???