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Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith
by Martha Beck
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Crown (2005)
ISBN: 0739451464
EAN: 9780739451465
Hardcover: 607 pages
SKU: 07080098
Condition: Like New Like New
Comments: Hardcover. Like new cover and text. Like new dust jacket with very minor shelfwear. Near Fine condition. Beautiful book.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Large Print Edition of this inspirational memoir.
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Customer Reviews
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Frustratingly inconsistent
Rating  (2)
Date: 2008-02-01
4 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
For an ex-Mormon living in Utah, parts of this book will ring so true it's eerie, and this will provide a nice insight into Mormon culture for interested outsiders. Other parts, however, the author is clearly making up, though it's unclear whether she is simply lying or if she actually believes some of the things she says and is simply deluded--or delusional (for instance, her completely credulous account of her "near-death experience").
This creates a certain problem of trust for the reader regarding the parts that are not obviously true or false: one is not sure what to believe, and cannot simply take the author's word for it. This applies, unfortunately, to the central claim of the book: that Beck was sexually abused by her father, a prominent Mormon apologist. While sexual abuse certainly occurs in the Mormon church, and its officials undoubtedly downplay or even help to cover it up, it's impossible to know whether her specific claim is true.
For one thing, her "memory" of what happened is so bizarre that one ought to be skeptical. Secondly, though she tries to dismiss it, there is such a phenomenon as unscrupulous therapists implanting suggestions in the minds of already disturbed patients, and it is as plausible to think this was the case for Beck (her mantra prayers of "please...please...please..." eventually answered--really--by a talking ball of light are one example of how disturbed she is) as that her memories are genuine. For one thing, it is odd that these memories would "surface" after decades when she begins seeing a therapist--although the phenomenon of repression is also very real, especially when coupled with post-traumatic stress. And while she claims that there is actual physical evidence of abuse in the form of supposedly otherwise inexplicable scarring, the reader is simply told this repeatedly with no evidence given.
Her portrait of her father as alternately befuddled and obstinate is amusing, though, but again no evidence is given for his abuse, in turn, at the hands of his mother. His war-time experiences certainly could have messed him up, though.
I hate to belittle Beck's story, but she really gives us very little reason to believe her, and some reason to doubt her; and besides, she occasionally seems to belittle it herself, as when she inexplicably drops inappropriate jokes in the middle of the most serious moments of her narrative, one example of how obnoxious her style can be.
On the whole, her conversion from Mormonism to a New Age brand of Buddhism is almost a step backward. The search for a rational critique of Mormonism continues.
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