Todd Maxwell Preston

For most of Todd Preston’s life, he was a Mormon. His family were Mormon, his friends were Mormon, and finally his wife was too. And then he left the church, losing at a stroke everything that he had built up around himself. ‘Religious Rehab’ is the story of his departure from one of the world’s more bizarre religious networks, and how Preston managed to recraft his life into one he felt more comfortable living.

The difference between life within Mormonism and life without is dichotomous; in a paragraph reminiscent of Dickens in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ Preston explains the divergence between the walled-garden of the devout and the painful freedom of the apostate. “I have encountered a world of beauty and color, contrasting with the black and white morality of Mormonism. I have discovered a depth of individuality and creativity, where Mormonism preaches structure and obedience. I have found friendship and love that are gifts given without expectation: so different from Mormon love which depends on faith and obedience to a white god.”

This is only the preface to his adventure; what follows is a detailed account of Preston’s transition. He begins by roughly tracing the path which led his family to join the church at the tail end of the 1970s, and this intertwines with a sketched history of the religion itself. Though it is not the focus of the book – that would be Preston himself – it is a shame that more attention is not devoted to the genesis of the church. It would have been fascinating to see an ex-Mormon detail its idiosyncratic beginnings; there are few apostates from Mormonism and therefore the number of people ready to document the religion from the inside out is minuscule.

Preston’s tone is varied; from clinical studies of the way in which the church operates he moves to the deeply, passionately personal. We turn from a sentence like: “With the Mormons discussion of their history is avoided because of a myriad of conflicting evidence with their whitewashed historical version they learned in primary school” to: “Church on Sundays lasted a ghastly three hours and the speakers were always the same fat, boring faces, regurgitating the same boring shit as the week before.” I sympathise with the author’s sense of boredom in having to sit through such interminable sessions – I went to a slightly religious school myself and had to suffer no end of similar sermons – but here, as elsewhere, the opportunity is missed to show and not tell; or put another way, what was the ‘boring shit’ that the speakers – ahem – ‘regurgitated’?

This odd choice of words is symptomatic of the greatest problem with Preston’s book: it could have used a professional editor. The world of self-publishing is enormous because the barriers to entry have been removed, but so too have the safety nets. I like to think that ‘Religious Rehab’ might have found its way into the market along the traditional path, but much changed from what I have read myself. Sentences like: “Pulling out my Blackberry, I journaled my thoughts for the day” made me wince, and wince I would do terribly often. When did ‘journal’ become a verb? Elsewhere he speaks of ‘the perspective of hindsight’, where hindsight is already a perspective; what should have been a moving sentiment is undermined by poor wording: “I had just left the country I used to call home but could no longer refer to Utah as my home”; and then there are passages that leave the reader scratching his head, trying to determine the meaning of it all: “From New York all the way to New Zealand, my life was a train wreck, with my belongings and memories stretched into a clumsy triangle: Utah – New York – New Zealand.” These examples all come within a page or two of each other, and there were more I could have chosen too.

It is a dreadful pity that reading the book becomes so much of a battle, because Preston has important lessons to teach us. Occasionally we catch sight of a thought expressed with the utmost clarity, and when this happens we pause, not to wonder but to sigh at the weird things we do to each other and ourselves in the name of righteousness and religion. I nodded in deep agreement with this passage: “I observed a redtailed hawk. In the span of sixty seconds, the hawk rose around three hundred feet without a single stroke from its large wings. Its effortless grace reminded me of our lives, the lesson being that you can elevate yourself to new heights with no effort. All that is needed is the freedom to let go and allow the universe to sweep you along a path of effortless living.” Yes, I thought: yes, that’s what it’s like.

But the sense diminished as I was still recovering from this clunker: “Nature helped connect me to the Earth, anchoring my soul.” This is truly awful writing; first of all, how can Nature connect anyone to the Earth when the Earth is Nature to begin with? And secondly, why suggest an anchoring of the soul when no watery metaphors have been called into play? Expressed differently, the sentence could have been transcendent; instead it suggests somebody rushing to publish a book that needed more workmanship than was evidently bestowed upon it.

Chapter Three soon arrived, and what I was reading began to resemble more a piece of travel fiction than a book about religion. Preston described some of the places he saw, most of which he could vaguely recall from his childhood, and he speaks again – and again – about how all of this contrasted so remarkably with where he had been the other side of summer. I began to think he would spend the whole book circling his point and never diving towards it.

After scraping through this particular few lines: “I needed to call Scott’s mate before the day was over. When I phoned, Blair (better known to friends as BK) took control by telling me I would be staying with him and his partner Rebecca (Becs)” I began to question why I was continuing with the book. Everything I’d learned of value thus far had been presented in the preface; what I was faced with now seemed more like somebody’s unexpurgated diary.

I drifted through several chapters of meeting friends, flying from one city to another, wondering about where the next wad of cash would come from. And then this: “Blood Atonement means that apostasy from the Mormon Church is so heinous that the perpetrator must have his own blood shed. The sacrificial death of Jesus is not sufficient to bring salvation: only the apostate’s blood will suffice.” I had no idea that the Mormons had previously had such a tradition. Once again, Preston had my attention.
But then he lost it, irretrievably this time, with yet more travel diary-writing void of all incidence, and the awkward formulations I had come already to expect: “The day wore on with a cigarette in my mouth, and my left foot dangling out the window. For a sliver of a second I could imagine that I didn’t have a care in the world.” Preston often found himself without a care in the world, it appeared.

I decided that the only way to tackle the remaining two hundred pages of this book would be by skim reading. I am not proud of this fact, but I felt forced into a corner by the author. On the one hand, I wanted to know more about his escape from, as he labelled it, the Mormon cult; but on the other, I wondered if perhaps the book I should have been reading was his other work, ‘Sacred Road’, about which he would often pause to mention. Maybe that was the problem: everything I wanted to read about had in fact been described, only not here. ‘Religious Rehab’ reads at times like a behind-the-scenes documentary, and only in rare cases have these been as fascinating as the real thing. This was no ‘Hearts of Darkness’ to Preston’s ‘Apocalypse Now’, but rather a long set of DVD extras, soon to be forgotten or overlooked entirely by the Netflix generation.

I continued, the more glaring faults launching out towards me. I felt my job shifting, from that of a reader-reviewer, to a collector of oddities. Here I present a short selection of the more bizarre:

“I hesitated to continue, almost exiting myself, wishing I had those snow tires I offloaded in Utah.” (How do you exit yourself? Is this a reference to shamanism or mysticism?)

“Our discussion spun circles around the room with the added snap and crackle from the fire.”

“Decatur never made it to Kansas, but his name was used as a national war hero.” (So who was the hero?)

After only a few pages I had to bring my search to a halt, for fear of my review becoming a hatchet job. I raced onwards, hoping soon to reach the end, or at least to come across some other useful nuggets; the preface now felt distant, as if it had been copied from a review of another book.

Looking back, I am reasonably glad that I persevered. Preston’s experiences with his family post-apostasy are heart-rending, and the emotional and financial cost associated with leaving the church is made clearest in the long middle chapters. When he writes: “My parents had hurt me; the dagger plunged deep. I felt like scrap metal being recycled for a few dollars. But I knew none of it was personal. It was the same song and dance for anyone leaving a cult and giving it the middle finger” you can simultaneously feel the pain and anger of a man cast out, and appreciate the forgiveness he has been able more recently to direct towards those who caused him this enormous trauma.

The title turned out to be a fitting one. The book documents the two years that followed Preston’s departure from the church, and how he swung from elation to darkest depression and back again, before, eventually, settling somewhere in the middle; that, I believe, is how rehab works. But, sadly, I find myself unable to recommend his book. It is over-written, under-involved, and feels like a cheap straight-to-TV spin-off. A shame, because I wanted desperately to like this book, to become involved in Preston’s struggle, and to learn about the Mormon church; none of those things were possible in the end.… (plus d'informations)

The author has had a difficult time through his life, finding and discarding spiritual practices (particularly Mormonism) after an abusive childhood. This book was undoubtedly therapeutic for him to write, and may well be helpful to others who have endured similar problems - he describes in detail how he thought, felt, and acted in each scenario. My one concern is that I do not sense very much about how the people around him felt about his behaviors and why they acted the way they did toward him - it would have been a stronger book with more of that included.… (plus d'informations)