‘Motorhome Prophecies’ Highlights Some Of The World’s Most Pressing Social Challenges
(REVIEW) Americans like to peer over fences into the lives of people who do not live like them. So, the memoirs, podcasts, social media channels and reality TV shows of those who have clambered over those cultural, social and (sometimes) literal fences often attract significant audiences.
J.D. Vance’s bestselling 2016 book “Hillbilly Elegy” allowed readers to peer into his poverty-stricken childhood in Appalachia and propelled him to household notoriety and a successful run for a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio. Tara Westover’s 2016 “Educated: A Memoir” recounts her journey from childhood in an LDS family untrusting of public education to a Cambridge Ph.D. graduate.
Yeonmi Park’s story of escape from North Korea has been met with both fascination and suspicion, and scores of “ex-vangelicals,” former Haredi Jews and refugees from fundamentalist religious groups have laid bare the details inside of their former communities that are likely unfamiliar and shocking to outsiders.
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The latest of the genre is Carrie Sheffield’s “Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness,” released in March (you can read an excerpt of her book here). Sheffield is an accomplished Harvard-trained journalist and political commentator, but even though she’s written elsewhere about being raised by an abusive self-proclaimed Mormon prophet, I doubt that most of her fans and followers are aware of just how brutal her story really is. This remarkable memoir illuminates some of our most pressing social challenges — spiritual abuse, sexual abuse, and our present mental health crisis among them — with forthrightness, grace, and hope that can be missing in other memoirs often fueled by resentment and anger.
Sheffield tells her story in a way that provides hopeful and encouraging reading for anyone at any stage of recognizing, confronting, or addressing debilitating trauma in their own lives. There are three primary ways she does so.
Respect for the past
Sheffield was raised in a large LDS family, spent several years as an agnostic, but very publicly converted to orthodox Christianity when she was baptized into The Episcopal Church at St. Thomas Church in New York.
As a Christian myself, I cannot affirm many aspects of LDS theology. This is something that can often drive a wedge between Christians and the LDS community. In fact, both the LDS and broader Christian communities expend considerable energy seeking to evangelize the other and developing resources to assist in the enterprise.
Sheffield, however, has the burden and the benefit of coming to this tension as a convert from a large and influential LDS extended family. She experienced warmth and kindness at her low points from Latter-Day Saints believers, and she once fervently believed the things that the LDS church teaches. A memoir like requires extreme sensitivity and can easily stray into the polemical. But she avoids that.
Sheffield writes with empathy, love, and gratitude for the LDS, her time at Brigham Young University, and even her abusive father. She admits to periods of deep resentment and anger, and this memoir would have been much different had she written it during different periods of her life. But the posture that she models in telling her story is one that everyone would do well to emulate, religious or not. An empathetic approach to our neighbors could heal a lot of our divides.
Honest vulnerability
Many of the problems that Carrie has had to overcome on her way to a successful career and stable life are accompanied by unfortunate stigmas. How could someone be so stupid as to remain in a cult or spiritually abusive situation for so long? Could the victim of sexual assault really have done nothing to avoid it? Why are those suffering from mental illness not able to resolve themselves to “push through” depression or bouts with suicidal temptations? It is not just the mental illness or struggles of her father, her family, or others that Sheffield confronts, but her own.
She shares with readers stories of sexual assaults at the hands of her mentally-ill brothers, the awkwardness she felt when she finally left her closed and dysfunctional family and her own struggles with depression and suicidal ideation as she navigated a her life in the shadows of her trauma that often drove her to unhealthy relationships.
She is also honest about that fact that there is no single solution to the problems that such trauma can cause. She pursued counseling inside and outside of religious communities as well as professional help and even hospitalization. For those tragically coping with the long term effects of dysfunctional family life, narcissistic parents and spiritual abuse, she models openness and the determined courage to seek the help that can orient a person’s life toward a healthy and productive future.
Hopeful present
Far too many stories like this one — even those of her siblings — end in hopelessness. Sheffield is careful to tell her story and avoid personal details of the lives of her siblings, who have led their own lives and have their own stories to tell. But she does make clear that two of her brothers are still gripped by the ravages of schizophrenia (at least one brother is still committed to their father’s false-prophetic mission in the world) and at least one other has rejected religion entirely. The others make appearances in her story, but she doesn’t share details of their lives up to the present.
It is understandable that so many victims of spiritual abuse wash their hands of religion altogether. The unchallengeable authority of a lone spiritual leader whose prophecies so often align with their personal preferences or work to their own advantage can leave deep scars. False prophets manipulate the language of mainstream religion to inflict fear, pain, or guilt and those who have experienced that have a difficult time transcending that trauma.
But Sheffield, thankfully, has. And her embrace of Christianity has informed her ability to forgive her father even to the point of inspiring gratitude for both the mainstream LDS and unconventional cultic worlds from which she’s come.
Too many book reviews criticize authors for books they didn’t write. Are there ways this memoir could be improved? I’m sure a different editor or publisher would have shaped the final product in different ways. Different details or other emphases would have created a different book, but as it stands this is clearly her story told on her own terms and for her own ends. And as that, it is authentic and inspiring, and hopefully a book that does much good for many readers.
Trey Dimsdale is the Executive Director of the Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy. He earned both his law degree and undergraduate degree from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He also holds masters degrees in theology and ethics. Follow him on X @TreyDimsdale.