I was rounding up the girls to go home from church when I was approached by the Elders Quorum President to help him give a blessing. My heart sunk. I hated giving blessings even when I believed in Mormonism, but now I didn’t believe in God let alone modern prophets of God. Those doubts were still private, and I wanted to keep them that way for a while longer. I was trying to regain my testimony for my wife’s sake. Part of trying to gain a testimony was doing my priesthood duty.

So I followed the President toward the cultural hall. Two women and several children were waiting on the stairs leading to the stage. One woman I knew from church. The other I had never seen before in my life. This other was the woman whom I was being asked to prophesy over.

Giving a blessing always followed a pattern for me. Whenever someone asked for me to give them a blessing, my mind started racing. What would I say? Would God speak through me? Had there been anything that I did that I should have repented of? What would they think of me? What did God think of me? Would God support me in trying to do my duty?

I had been taught that if I opened my mouth in faith, God would fill it. It never happened that way for me: I never felt any special inspiration. I concluded that I must not have enough faith. I begged and pleaded with God to inspire me. I begged him to make me his worthy servant. All to no avail. It was always the same: I was left to my own devices.

I had never felt a special inspiration to say anything in particular while giving blessings. It was always a shot in the dark, a guess. For all I could tell, God didn’t care whether I promised a person that they would be healed completely or whether I told them to prepare for death. I never felt a special guidance.

So I always walked a tightrope. On the one hand, I could decline to pronounce a blessing and feel like a faithless, heartless schmuck, enduring their scorn. On the other, I could speak as if I knew the mind of God with a confidence that I didn’t feel, promising the moon only to look like a fool when my promises came to nothing. I was too afraid to do either one, so I split the difference and promised only safe things. Rarely would I promise someone complete healing. Only if the person was asking to be blessed for some minor illness that was unlikely to prove fatal would I promise them that they would recover. I always counseled them to listen to their doctors.

The same went for naming my babies. Naming babies was the mental anguish of giving a blessing magnified. The public ritual of naming a newborn and giving them a blessing in front of the congregation only made things worse. I would brainstorm good things that I wanted my children to have and that I presumed Heavenly Father would like them to have too (since we both loved our children). I would pray about my ideas beforehand to see if God approved. I wouldn’t feel anything special either way, as if God were saying “Sure, whatever. Sounds good to me.” I agonized, fasted, and prayed over what I would say, and the most I got was a shrug of the divine shoulders?

We all walked up to the stage, the woman seeking a blessing sat in a chair, and we gathered around her. I asked the woman to give me her full name. I repeated it back to her to avoid any embarrassing mistakes. I put my hands on her head, the President covered my hands with his own, and everyone else folded their arms and closed their eyes.

Those Sisters (it was always Sisters) sat there expecting me to speak for God like it was the easiest thing in the world. I secretly resented when women would ask me for blessings, for putting me through this torture. I tried to forgive them by telling myself that if they really knew what it was like, they probably wouldn’t ask. I think many Mormon men don’t ask for blessings because they know what it’s like for the person giving the blessing (and deep down they know how uninspired most blessings are).

With few exceptions, blessings never seemed to do much of anything. People would get better (except for when they didn’t) in due time, just like any Gentile would. I never witnessed any miraculous cures or extraordinary instances of prophesy. I never saw the blind given sight, the deaf made to hear, a lost limb restored, or the dead raised to life. As far as I could tell, the world went on spinning regardless of whether or not someone received a blessing. Subconsciously, this made my resentment for being asked to give a blessing even greater because I felt like we could skip the pointless exercise and spare me the mental anguish.

I sent one more silent, urgent prayer that God would guide my words, and I began. “Sister X, in the name of Jesus Christ and through the authority of the Melchizedek Priesthood, we lay our hands on your head to give you a blessing of comfort and peace.”

With the easy part over, I took a deep breath. Feeling no special inspiration, I told her safe, comforting things. “Your Heavenly Father loves you.” “Your family life will improve as you attend church.” “Be diligent in your scripture study and prayer.” “Listen to your priesthood leaders.” I said whatever I thought she wanted to hear.

In this way, this blessing was different than all the previous blessings that I had given in my life. I was consciously lying to her. All the other times, I had some hope that God would come through for me and fill my mind with his divine will. This time I had lost that hope.

If I had been honest, I would have declined to go through this ritual which had become empty for me. But doing so would be to admit that I lacked faith or that I was somehow unworthy of God’s communication. And they wanted to hear comforting words. How could I refuse to give them comfort? I just wanted to do the right thing and make everyone happy.

So I did the best I could with what I had. When asked, I showed up and begged for divine guidance. Lacking that as I always did, I said what I could without overcommitting myself.

From various talks given in church by other men, I don’t think I was the only one. One man during my missionary years openly admitted in a fireside that he usually just said safe, comforting things. One stake president taught in stake priesthood meeting that we should feel no pressure to prophesy when called upon to give a blessing. It was a nice idea, but impossible for me in practice. People expected to hear some prophesy, and I couldn’t bring myself to disappoint them by admitting that I wasn’t capable of it.

I left church that day knowing that I couldn’t lie anymore. I dropped a letter in the mail to my Stake President the very next Tuesday. I am so grateful that I never have to give another blessing.

Half a century ago, a young social psychologist named Leon Festinger and two associates infiltrated a group of people who believed the world would end on December 21. They wanted to know what would happen to the group when (they hoped!) the prophecy failed. The group’s leader, whom the researchers called Marian Keech, promised that the faithful would be picked up by a flying saucer and elevated to safety at midnight on December 20. Many of her followers quit their jobs, gave away their homes, and dispersed their savings, waiting for the end. Who needs money in outer space? Others waited in fear or resignation in their homes. (Mrs. Keech’s own husband, a nonbeliever, went to bed early and slept soundly through the night as his wife and her followers prayed in the living room.) Festinger made his own prediction: The believers who had not made a strong commitment to the prophecy—who awaited the end of the world by themselves at home, hoping they weren’t going to die at midnight—would quietly lose their faith in Mrs. Keech. But those who had given away their possessions and were waiting with the others for the spaceship would increase their belief in her mystical abilities. In fact, they would now do everything they could to get others to join them.

At midnight, with no sign of a spaceship in the yard, the group felt a little nervous. By 2 a.m., they were getting seriously worried. At 4:45 a.m., Mrs. Keech had a new vision: The world had been spared, she said, because of the impressive faith of her little band. “And mighty is the word of God,” she told her followers, “and by his word have ye been saved—for from the mouth of death have ye been delivered and at no time has there been such a force loosed upon the Earth. Not since the beginning of time upon this Earth has there been such a force of Good and light as now floods this room.”

The group’s mood shifted from despair to exhilaration. Many of the group’s members, who had not felt the need to proselytize before December 21, began calling the press to report the miracle, and soon they were out on the streets, buttonholing passersby, trying to convert them. Mrs. Keech’s prediction had failed, but not Leon Festinger’s.

(Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), via The Situationist)

Quite a few prophecies have failed, yet people still believe. We’ve expected Jesus to come again for two thousand years, for example. It seems like people have been saying “any day now” forever, at least since the day he died.

Why don’t we collectively say “You know what, we were wrong. Christ really isn’t coming.”? Even if Christ really is coming (the big tease), disbelief would be a reasonable reaction after two millennia of disappointment. Why does the biggest failed (so far?) prophecy in history fail to cause widespread disbelief?

One reason is cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort we feel when there are two conflicting beliefs fighting it out in our minds. For example, if I believe myself to be an honest person, but I cheat on my taxes, this conflicting information will cause cognitive dissonance. I will probably do one of two things: I could either stop cheating on my taxes, or I could rationalize my dishonesty, perhaps by saying that I worked hard for my money and I deserve it.

The engine that drives self-justification, the energy that produces the need to justify our actions and decisions — especially the wrong ones — is an unpleasant feeling that Festinger called “cognitive dissonance.” Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent, such as “Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day.” Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don’t rest easy until they find a way to reduce it. In this example, the most direct way for a smoker to reduce dissonance is by quitting. But if she has tried to quit and failed, now she must reduce dissonance by convincing herself that smoking isn’t really so harmful, or that smoking is worth the risk because it helps her relax or prevents her from gaining weight (and after all, obesity is a health risk, too), and so on. Most smokers manage to reduce dissonance in many such ingenious, if self-deluding, ways. (Ibid.)

In the case of the Second Coming, we don’t want to believe that we could be duped. “I’m not the kind of person who could fall for silly stuff like horoscopes, crystals, doomsday cults, and the like. But Christianity is different. Christianity is real. If it weren’t, I would see right through it because I’m not easily fooled.”

Personally, I have spent a lot of time in my life telling people that I knew that Joseph Smith is a prophet of God, that Jesus loves us, and God has a plan for our lives. I spent two years doing this full time. I spent countless hours saying this and hearing it repeated in church services. Much of my life has been spent inside the walls of a church. I estimate that I’ve spent at least one full year of my life in church meetings. The church received 10% of my earnings before taxes, my whole life, every last penny. After committing so much time and energy to my beliefs, it was uncomfortable to think that I’d sacrificed all that for a lie.

I’m no fool, or so I like to tell myself. If my beliefs were false, then I’d have realized it a long time ago. False prophecies? You’re reading them wrong. Polygamy? It was God’s will. Racism? Talk to God ’cause I didn’t make the rules. Christianity borrowed from previous mythologies? No, the mythologies borrowed from Christianity. Contradictions in Holy Scripture? Errors in translation. Unanswered prayers? Maybe the answer was “No” or “Wait”, or maybe you weren’t faithful enough for God to speak to you.

I rationalized from morning till night. Evidence against my beliefs surrounded me. I constantly battled to preserve my self image as an intelligent, independent thinker. The truth was that I spent my intelligence in rationalization and followed like a sheep because I was too proud to admit that I didn’t see the Emperor’s clothes. I was the very thing I pretended not to be. I held on to my beliefs kicking and screaming until I was forced to see their absurdity.