She could be any one of the students roaming the halls of the Utrecht university library.
Some students are clustered together in their friend groups, standing in little circles as they talk in hushed voices. Others are lucky enough to have found an empty seat on the grey benches pressed up against the corridor walls.
I wonder if she’s among them.
Getting up from her seat on the right side of the entrance hall, she finally makes herself known. In her flowery top and skinny jeans, she looks like any another student. Her weighty backpack makes it obvious she had either come from a class or was on her way to one.
What’s not obvious from looking at her, however, is that behind her introverted aura hides a brave and resolute young woman.
As she brushes a strand of her short auburn hair out of her face, she introduces herself.
“I’m Christina” she states.
Walking through the halls of the library we find a quiet spot and sit down. She fidgets slightly with her hands. But when she starts talking that nervousness melts away, bringing to light the part of her that’s excited to share, to connect.
Finding truth has always been an important aspect of Christina van Beek’s life. Her podcast “Latter-day Ramblings” serves as an audio journal, documenting Christina’s search for honesty as she moves away from the church she was raised in.
“In the first episode I was very confused. I hadn’t figured it out yet. It was only during the episode on polygamy that I knew ‘I’m leaving the church.’”
Growing up as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the LDS church), Christina van Beek’s future had been decided for her since birth. She was expected to become a religious missionary, find a faithful husband, have children with him and raise them in the church. Things, however, worked out differently for Christina.
The LDS Church or the Mormon Church, was founded by Joseph Smith in the United States in the 1820’s and 30’s. In the Netherlands, where Christina grew up, there are only about 9000 members, making it one of the smaller Christian denominations in the country.
Often described as a high demand religion, the church requires from members that they hold to certain rigid standards. This is supposedly necessary to enter into the sacred temples and ultimately, into the highest degree of the celestial kingdom, or heaven.
Modesty being one of those conditions, especially for women.
“Young women should wear clothing that covers the shoulder and avoid clothing that is low-cut in the front or the back or revealing in any other manner”, one pamphlet states.
As a natural skeptic, Christina had a habit of asking questions. A habit that according to her could get you into trouble.
“You’re stimulated to ask questions, but if you ask certain kinds of questions, you’re ostracized,” Christina explains.
While the other kids her age were being tumultuous teenagers, she was grappling with her uncertainty about Mormon doctrines.
She says how, when she was an inquisitive 14-year-old taking part in a Q&A session, the youth of the church gathered in a circle to listen to the bishop answer some basic questions about the scriptures. Christina however felt there was a more important topic that was being ignored in the conversation.
For her, the matter of modesty for women was much more pressing than scriptural technicalities. So she decided to ask her bishop about it.
In front of all the other youth members of the church she asked:
“Why do women have to cover their shoulders?”
His answer?
Apart from having to be modest not to be a temptation for young men, the shoulder, according to him, is technically speaking the beginning of the breast.
“It’s just ridiculous to think back to. That an adult man would say something like that!” Christina exclaims, laughing as the words leave her mouth.
Despite her disbelief at the bishops’ answer, at that time Christina still believed in the core tenants of the faith. Those being that women have to dress modestly, alcohol and caffeine are prohibited and sex before marriage is the sin next to murder.
The dichotomy between Christina’s curiosity about discrepancies in the faith and her willingness to continue believing in the Mormon religion, eventually caused her to experience some severe self-judgement around her critical thinking.
She slowly but surely internalized the criticism she received from church elders and her parents.
“They kept telling me to trust in the Lord, and that I shouldn’t worry, because everything would turn out okay in the end,” she states.
Adults were not the only people finding fault with Christina’s analytical character. Church peers were hesitant to associate with a more nuanced believer like her.
During a church camp, a room full of the underage members of the church are asked what statement most applies to them. “I know the church is true,” “I believe the church is true,” or “I hope the church is true.”
The first sentence was called and about half of the youth stood up. Then the second phrase, again about half of the people got up from their seats. As the last statement was called, only Christina stood up. The speaker tries, unsuccessfully, to make Christina feel better about her being the only one to stand up, but feeling the other teens eyes on her made her very aware of the fact that her behavior wasn’t accepted.
“It was a very embarrassing and shameful experience. I couldn’t participate in the activity that went next because I didn’t feel well from that experience,” Christina remembers.
Although her church peers would avoid the skeptical Christina, her school friends had no such problem. In fact, it’s at her first high school that Christina met her best friend, Annemarie Christinaanse, and by coincidence, they’ll both be at Utrecht train station at the same time this afternoon, after university.
At the station an excited Christina sees her best friend coming up the escalator. They get closer and start to giggle and squeal with joy at the chance encounter. They haven’t seen each other in person for a long time.
But best friends don’t have to see each other every day to stay close.
No matter how close they are, religion still formed a point of friction in the early days of their relationship. Annemarie felt some of the teachings were “culty” and tried to get her friend to leave, without success.
On top of that, Annemarie had come out as bisexual to Christina. For most Dutch teens this wouldn’t have been too big of a deal. For Christina, however, it came as a huge shock.
The LDS church does not look favorably on the LGBTQIA+ community.
One church leader’s talk at the church’s main university in Utah, the church’s main religious base, even goes as far as to say he would “like to hear a little more musket fire from the temple of learning” with regard to “defending marriage as the union of a man and a woman’.
Christina had this type of rhetoric instilled in her from such a young age that, when she was confronted with her friend’s bisexuality, she simply recited what she had always been taught. Annemarie must be too young to know for sure and it was likely just a phase.
But the love she felt for her friend made her realize something.
“I didn’t think that anything she was feeling was wrong because I didn’t think she was hurting anyone. So why would God think it was bad?” Christina says thoughtfully, trying to find the right words to describe how conflicted she had felt.
As the two girls start to catch up on their daily lives, the time comes for me to leave. Walking away to catch my train, I look back to see the two girls entangled in a long hug before they’re too far away for me to see.
Annemarie’s coming out was the first time Christina had been honest with herself about her disagreement with some of the church’s policies. Although she stayed in the church, her perspective had shifted. She came to the conclusion that she was allowed to have a different opinion on some topics.
Over the next couple of years, Christina would find out that holding unpopular opinions in such a homogenous church was very difficult. It lead to her going through phases of being extremely committed to the faith, before becoming more moderate again.
When at 15 her family had to move to the south of the Netherlands, Christina found herself alone at a new high school struggling to fit in. A naturally introspective person, she struggled to find a new group of friends.
“The church was the only thing I had, because I didn’t have friends or a social life,” she says.
One particularly helpful narrative that the church offered was that of Jesus as an older brother. If you pray and are faithful, he will watch over you and take care of you. Christina prayed more than ever in this lonely period of her life, yet she never had her prayers answered.
After a year, when school life had started to become unbearable, Christina was finally allowed to switch schools once again. It improved her mental state and gave her the peace of mind to start researching some of the more controversial parts of her faith she hadn’t dared to look at before.
“I started to think more about if it was true in general, not only if it worked for me. If it was a force for good in the world,” she explains.
At only 16 years old, motivated by her own experiences with harmful church teachings, Christina started to research the church’s history of polygamy, racism and homophobia.
Slowly but surely, she realized not everything she had been taught was true. After years of grappling with the split between her faith and her skeptical side, she left the church in March of 2021.
Part of what makes it so difficult to leave the church, is way ex-members are chastised from the community. This can take many different forms, but for Christina this meant that her parents would continue to push their beliefs on her.
“They tell me there still a place for me, while I made it clear that I don’t want to make that a part of my life anymore, that I don’t believe in it anymore. To me that is a sign that they don’t respect my decision,” she says.
To deal with the difficult emotions that were overwhelming her during her “faith crisis,” as it is often called by members of the ex-Mormon community, Christina started the podcast that helped her let everything out.
“I felt cheated at first. I felt sad, I didn’t know what to do, where to go. I felt alone at the time. In the course of time that got better,” she explains.
Although this transition was a painful experience, Christina could finally embrace the skeptical part of herself that she had been criticized for her entire life.
“I feel more free now. I’m allowed to have my own opinions. That’s very important. That was difficult for me, because for a long time I felt that that wasn’t allowed. Going to university helped me with understanding that,” she calmly explains.
