Breaking free of the flock

Outsiders know the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by its clean-cut image: young missionaries in white shirts riding bicycles in the neighborhood; television commercials extolling family life; a thrifty wholesomeness straight out of “The Andy Griffith Show.”

Some former insiders, however, have other tales to tell. And few have such fascinating tales -- or the literary chops and emotional range with which to tell them -- as Martha Beck, an author (“Expecting Adam”), magazine columnist and life coach.

In her memoir, “Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith,” Beck draws us into a world of secret temple rituals, demon-resistant underwear and Stepford-like denial.

Beck, her husband, John, and their two small children return to Utah in 1988 from Harvard, where the couple were graduate students. Forsaking friends who urged her to abort a fetus with Down syndrome, Beck was determined to raise her infant son among the unconditional love of God-fearing people. By going back, Beck also resolved to set aside her skepticism and embrace the “hefty caboodle of beliefs and traditions I inherited from my Mormon culture.”

She recalls her wedding, explaining how she was given special undergarments in a temple rite that included the oath to “let ourselves be killed” if certain details were ever divulged. The ceremony included a pantomime of the “various modes of death that would be inflicted.”

“I found it so surreal it was truly marvelous, like watching an episode of ‘Leave It to Beaver’ in which June and Ward take just a moment out of their busy day to agree that if they ever leak the family secrets, they’ll hack off each other’s limbs.”

All this seems to be mere amusement until Beck joins the faculty at church-controlled Brigham Young University.

A feminist and critical thinker, Beck runs smack into the cultural conservatism of a society in which women are secondary, even in the afterlife, and where academic inquiry must adhere to church teachings.

As it happens, a battle is raging. Stung by scholarly attacks on the religion, church authorities are closing ranks and have embarked on a McCarthyesque campaign against naysayers. Faculty members are told which research sources to use, while publications deemed “alternative voices” mysteriously disappear from the library. The defiant are excommunicated, the kiss of social and financial death in this American church-state.

Beck provides ample reason for the paranoia. Her recitation of evidence undermining the prophetic credentials of church founder Joseph Smith, who was assassinated in 1844, is one of the best primers I’ve read about Mormonism’s Byzantine belief structure. She is particularly brutal at debunking the claim that Smith translated an account of the patriarch Abraham from Egyptian papyri.

But it gets much more personal.

The man on whom the church has relied to repel attacks against the translation, now part of the Mormon canon, is none other than Beck’s father. A brooding figure, he is a leading church apologist who has spent years countering criticisms that the papyri were not new scripture but unremarkable ancient funeral documents.

Living so close to her father again triggers a reaction in Beck. Nightmares grow into screaming fits, then into flashbacks of a secret buried in her unconscious: When she was a little girl, Beck claims, her father molested her.

Beck alternates chapters and styles, juxtaposing scenes from her confrontation with her father against a more chatty exposition of Mormon life. At first this construction seems clumsy, but as the tension ratchets up, the counterpoint begins to work well.

Unfortunately, there’s so much going on that we lose the element of a nascent spirituality brewing in Beck. She describes brushes with a higher power yet fails to develop this, leaving us to wonder how she filled the void created by her eventual break from the church.

Still, breaking away from such a pervasive religious system is major work, and Beck brings us inside what she calls a “powerful form of bondage.” It is a system in which God sanctions secrets and silence, and church authorities trump personal choice.

With fundamentalism on the rise throughout the world, her words take on a larger meaning about what it is to live in a society controlled by true believers.

Beck breaks from her spiritual and psychological bondage in dramatic fashion. We share the feeling of exhilarating release. Yet the book makes plain that there is often a depressing price to pay. Neither her father nor his religious system will acknowledge the harm they have done to believing hearts. That Beck can write so eloquently about it without bitterness is a gift worth its weight in gold plates.

Ralph Frammolino is a writer with The Times’ Metro staff.