Marriage on a Tightrope: 053: Listener Q&A

RE: the alcohol consumption issue, etc.

A 2nd-generation TBM’s plug for the transformative power of the church and a rant against alcoholism from the perspective of someone w/ a family history of alcoholism… While it sounds like Allan has taken up drinking responsibly, I would caution about setting a precedent for future generations who may ignore restraint and feel they can, in the absence of church teachings, imbibe freely along with the consequences that come with it – this from someone whose family tree on both sides seems to have a genetic predisposition toward alcoholism and who has seen first-hand the scars from the journey down the long, painful road to shed that legacy.
Like the therapist in the previous episode said, there are many positive things about the church and its transformative power in my family’s lives over a few short generations is undeniable. I am second-generation LDS and so my family’s journey has been an opposite trajectory (literally and figuratively)from Allan’s and many of those disaffected Mormons’ more often than not from pioneer stock that I hear about on podcasts like this one – I say “literally” because my paternal grandfather, a lifelong alcoholic who came home drunk and beat his kids including my dad, spent his remaining years on oxygen after he got drunk and nearly killed himself when he drove into oncoming traffic on an exit ramp (and could have very easily have killed another motorist like Allan’s father) while my maternal great-grandfather lost his home because of his alcoholism and finally discovered Alcoholics Anonymous and made his peace with God before he died in a house borrowed from a relative. I’m not as immersed in “rabbit hole” research as Allan and some others but am not altogether oblivious either. While I’m likely only aware of a smidgeon of the substantive issues enumerated in Allan’s 110-page letter to his wife, I have attended one of John DeLin’s retreats with my faith-transitioning wife and listened along with her to several episodes of Lindsey Hansen Park’s “Year of Polygamy” Podcast, while on my own, I sporadically read the Journal of Discourses to fall asleep, have read some of “Rough stone rolling” and have reluctantly started reading B.H. Roberts’ “Studies of the Book of Mormon”. While JD and HC have been in my “queue” to read for years, w/ 6 kids, I just haven’t had the mental bandwidth or time to do any thorough study. While I used to smile and shrug my shoulders and not pay much attention to the endless back-and-forth between the apologists and the critics (“No man knows my history”- Fawn Brodie: “No ma’am, that’s not history” – Hugh Nibley), I now find myself invariably starting to develop nuanced views about the church as my wife’s faith transition has forced me to take a hard second look at some of the inconsistencies between the church’s neatly-packaged narrative that every missionary learns and shares and its actual history which is a lot more messy and which, up ’til now, I just put on the back burner. That said, please, please, please think long and hard about just walking away from the church in these perilous times as it’s an increasingly dangerous world out there outside the ever-shrinking Mormon bubble and, now more than ever, families need all the help they can get to weather the storm.