Christian: A Modern Prodigal Son–A Story of Redemption and Reconversion
Christian shares his remarkable story about leaving the Gospel at a young age and what prompted his return to the Church years later. He speaks openly about what led him away from the Church and then shares the incredible story of what led him to return to his family and to the Church and to then choose a life of complete spiritual devotion.
Further Reading in Faith Is Not Blind:
“The Lord really can’t save us without our freely chosen initiative, energy, desires, and wholehearted participation. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink it. . . The Savior offers the grace of His saving blessings only as we willingly participate in our own deliverance by choosing to believe Him, then by exerting all our strength to follow Him.”
(Faith Is Not Blind, Chapter 10 “Choosing to Believe,” p. 87)
Faith Is Not Blind: Welcome to the Faith Is Not Blind Podcast. I’m Eric d’Evegnee and today we’re here with Christian Mawlam. Christian, welcome. Christian Mawlam is a communications professor at BYU-Idaho. Christian, could you give us a little bit of background about yourself?
Christian: I’m from northeast of England, so County Durham. The town is Billingham in the top-right of England. And I grew up there until I was about eleven and then moved to the Midlands–that’s around the Birmingham area–for about almost another 10 years, and then found myself back in the north east of England.
Faith Is Not Blind: You lived there until you moved to Idaho?
Christian: We’ve been in the States now, myself, my wife and our kids–four then and five now. My wife and I, we moved here about 5 years ago, give or take. So in September it will be five years
Faith Is Not Blind: And enjoying it so far?
Christian: Yeah. It’s not bad. We like it a lot. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there’s lots of things that you miss about the place where you are from. I usually say to people who want to tie me down that say, “Tell us what’s better, tell us what’s worse.” I just say, “It’s different.” I don’t see that as a cop out. It’s just really good for where we’re at now as kind of a young family at the beginning of middle age, I like to think. But that’s kind of where we’re at. It’s good. We really love it here. Fantastic people. We do miss the people back home, but this is lovely, too.
Faith Is Not Blind: So tell us a little bit about the foundation of your testimony growing up in England. Your parents were members of the Church. Tell us a little bit about the formation of your testimony.
Christian: So my parents were both converts to the church. My dad joined the church when he was a young boy. On his side of the family they had aunts and uncles who were members of the Church, or at least aunts. And there was even a portion of the family who had joined the Church and actually moved over to the western states down in Utah and are still there. His dad had died when he was young, when he was a little boy. And then his mother married again. When she married again, she married a member of the Church who was actually a second-generation member of the Church. His name was Joseph Nephi. He was a fantastic guy, the only grandfather I knew. So that was my dad’s side. Then, on my mom’s side, she joined the Church when she was street contacted in Stockton Town Center, I think when she was about 17. And so she and a few of her friends joined around that time in that kind “young single adult environment.” As they grew up, they got to know each other and hit it off.
And I’m one of 6 kids. I’ve got a younger brother and four older sisters, and it was a very happy growing up in the northeast of England in a Latter-day Saint home. We always knew that Church was a big part of what we did–you know, Home Evenings and that kind of that kind of thing. It wasn’t necessarily that I was remembering what we talked about–it was always a “what’s for the treat” kind of thing. You know, what’s the incentive? We’d sing songs and I can remember it was lots of fun though. It was a fun home. Just the way that my parents were, I knew this was something that meant a lot to them and so that was that. That was kind of my formative foundation. But notwithstanding that, when I was a teenager I was quite a willful boy, as all of my siblings are as well. I think that we’ve all got kind of big opinions about ourselves. I don’t know whether that was because we were fighting for our respective corners as children in a big family, or it was just the nature of our personalities. I think it was a bit of a mixed bag of those kinds of contributing factors. But throughout my early teen years I started really not to be that into Church. I’d go because it kept my parents sweet. I thought, “Well, it’s better not to kick up a fuss. It’s better to get out of bed and show up.” And I did have friends there. I was socially inclined to plenty of aspects of the Church. So that was that.
It was the early 90’s and the “rave scene” was what it was, so parties and good times were very much a pull and a draw for me. I was just more into that. And so notwithstanding this kind of nice spiritual grounding that I can see in hindsight–this foundation–the Church wasn’t something that played a big part in my life. I really wasn’t switched on to things very much spiritually.
Faith Is Not Blind: What’s interesting as we’ve done a few of these podcasts is that one of the themes that’s been present is for a lot of Mormons, especially people that were born into Mormon families or even part-member families, the Church is there. It’s there sometimes in the background, sometimes in the foreground, but it’s there. A lot of the children know that it means something to their parents, but there’s always this kind of movement, I think, in the spiritual maturation process, where a testimony needs to be one’s own at some point. There needs to be this moment where I think a disciple chooses to follow.
For you, you’ve got this really nice foundation with wonderful parents and siblings, and you’ve got this nice ward in England. But there’s a draw to this other scene that goes on–the draw towards other things. So tell us a little bit about what it was that drew you outside to some of those other things– the rave scene etc. And then how does that play a role in the formation of your testimony? How did you move on from that–and we all know a lot of teenagers, or have even been those teenagers that get involved in different things–and what was it that brought you back to that testimony?
Christian: What attracted me to those alternative offers was that I’m quite the social creature. So I like being with my friends. I like having fun. I like to laugh. I like to joke. As dumb as it sounds, I like music a lot. I like the dance music scene. I have a creative background–my vocation is creative. I’m involved in teaching video production to other people. And I used to like the narratives that would kind of fly in my head when I would listen to this music, as daft as that sounds now. But I still think that’s one of the reasons I enjoy music and listen to it now. I am as much about the lyrics and the stories that are told as I am about the music. But mainly it was the social aspects of the rave scene and that kind of engagement. But after a good solid five years of that kind of carrying-on, everything just started to lose its luster a little bit. I just wasn’t getting what I had been getting out of going out with friends and popping to parties and pub crawls. In fact, it just kind of wasn’t floating my boat anymore. And I kind of was like, “Is this what growing up is all about?” It was a bit of a downer for me. I remember thinking as a little boy, “There will never be a time when I will don’t play with toys.” I thought, “Adults have all of this disposable income, why don’t they just buy toys?”
But I kind of got to this state where I thought, “I’m just not that into this anymore.” I liked my friends, but I didn’t necessarily like who I was becoming. I was pretty self-centered by that time and quite sarcastic. I would do things to make my friends laugh and often it was at the expense of other people. There was a time when I was in high school when I was called out of the classroom to report to the Head of Year. That’s a big deal. It was even more of a big deal when I opened the door and my parents were sitting there. My dad has been called out of work and my mom is there and they are fuming. And it was the type of situation where the Head of Year is just going to let my parents speak and I’m going to be a witness to it. And my dad says, “It’s your mouth again, isn’t it?” And I was like, “Oh.” And that kind of summarizes the kind of trouble I used to get into. I was a smart mouth. Always with a comeback. Often with a put-down and it really wasn’t that clever. And you know me personally. I haven’t fully weeded that garden, but it needed to get squared away.
Faith Is Not Blind: That’s why I’m smiling.
Christian: I wasn’t happy with who I was and where I was, so I went up from the Midlands where I was living with my parents and I thought I’d just have one last kind of big shindig in the northeast of England. I had lots of friends there that I had grown up with that I was still really tight with. They were actually members of the Church. The crowd that I hung around down south with were not. So I went up for this last hurrah and it was really sort of a damp squib. It really didn’t push the buttons that I wanted it to. And I just found myself kind of adrift, really lacking purpose. So I thought, “What can I do?”
This is where an incidental but quite purposeful caveat needs to be made. It should be mentioned that years prior to my move–after I’d moved from the Northeast in 1989–a short while later, Elder Neal A. Maxwell came and visited the Stake and spoke to the members, especially to the parents. And he blessed them. He gave them an Apostolic Blessing and he said, “Your children who are all doing their own thing will come back. Too many of these parents might have felt like their children had “gone the journey.” And it’s so interesting to read the actual verbiage because he said, ”The things of the world that they find attractive will no longer be sweet to them anymore.” It’s interesting that I was kind of wafted up North and then I find myself back in that environment, within the catchment area of that particular particular blessing. And I found myself fulfilling that portion of the blessing, even if it was just kind of a bit-part in my own life. It was incredible. I was kind of like, “I don’t want to do this stuff anymore. I actually want to be somebody else.” And I hark all the way back to what my parents had. I can remember thinking, “What my parents have got and what they had when I was a little person is just lovely.” And I thought, “That’s what I’d like to have.”
And so having never prayed–oh, I may have knelt by the bed with my parents, blessed the food, given the public prayer at Church, but as a young adult I had never given a proper prayer. And I can remember where it was. I remember it was in this little house where my friends were living. I was sleeping under the stairs–not like Harry Potter; it was open. People are going to think that that’s some kind of British thing. But I was because it was just a convenient spot. But I was on this little mattress and I pray all night. I can’t remember stopping praying. But in the morning I woke up and the windows were open, the sunlight was open. Figuratively speaking someone had pulled back the curtains and I thought, “So this is what it’s like. This is what the Holy Ghost is like that everyone’s been banging about for all of these years.” It was stark. And for someone who is aesthetically switched on, who likes the look of things, the whole world seemed different. The way that I viewed other people was different. It was a bit of a jubilee for quite a few weeks. And naturally I’m like, “I am going back to Church. This is me. This is who I am.”
Faith Is Not Blind: But it must have been difficult. You describe how one of the things that got you into that scene was your love of music and being around those people and hanging out with them. You had that early rush of the Spirit and that confirmation, You’re on that path. But it must have had its difficulties as you were trying to pull yourself away from that.
Christian: Yeah. I literally kind of walked out my friends down there in the Midlands. I’ve subsequently gotten back in touch through social media connections. But after 20 years I haven’t had a proper sit down with them. I plan on doing that. But we’re into each other’s lives. They’re citizens now as well. They’re tax-paying people who aren’t living the dream anymore. They’ve got kids of their own. They’ve got families and stuff like that. I love seeing that. But at the time I sort of walked out on them and there was this sort of divorce from these friends and that hurt quite a bit. Even with my friends up north end it was different because they just thought, “Oh, Christian’s doing Church now.” And for the most part, they kept on doing their own thing, but I would still hang around them. And I remember kind of slipping back into a few old ways after a few weeks of being really profoundly upset with myself. Because erroneously, I had thought this was me, that I’d been given this kind of superpower and that I was saved essentially. And I was kind of distraught. I think I had smoked a cigarette or two or something and I felt terrible about it. And one of my friends who is still not back on the wagon (he must have had more Seminary than me), he said, “Oh, Christian. I don’t think you’re meant to sort it out in one day.” He starts to explain the process rather than the event. Notwithstanding, this was a milestone. This was a red letter day. Even in an Alma the Younger or a Paul kind of thing, they still have this journey to go on.
Faith Is Not Blind: Can I say this, though? That’s what I was thinking of with Alma the Younger and even with Paul when we get these moments in the scriptural narrative. But you know, they’re writing on these brass plates. They don’t have time to detail the process. So sometimes the way that the narrative unfolds can give us the sense that once the light turns on, “I’m all good. There aren’t any more challenges or growth with your testimony. And that’s what’s so interesting about your story. You have this moment, but that moment is almost like a carrot in front of you. Kind of like, “Okay. This is what it’s like. Now I need to work towards this as it guides me through the process.”
Christian: Absolutely. When I look back at it now I realize that that assurance is more of a projection of possibility rather than a moment where we can say, “I’ve arrived.” That’s what I do even now. Sometimes I think erroneously, “I have arrived.” And it simply isn’t the case. I’m still on the journey. Sometimes we pass through our experiences and we can say, “This is conclusive now. I can park that car. ” But no. The moment that we actually “park the car” and we say “this is how things are now” is when I’ve found that I run into trouble.
And this actually leads quite neatly, it segways. Because the natural thing for this “man of fire” is to go on a mission. So I put in my mission papers and at the same time the Lord is doing a number of my mates–quite a good handful of us in that Stake. That Maxwellian blessing is actually starting to bear some tangible fruit. I think it was always there working in the background. And notwithstanding the blessing from Elder Maxwell, this is Christ working in our lives. And so I go on a mission to Ireland. And then I received this letter from my mom and dad saying, “Robin and Chris, your mates, they’re coming to Ireland on a mission as well.” It was amazing.
But I had become quite the zealot. Before my mission, I was in a fantastic ward, the BIllingham Ward. I love it. The people there were so nurturing and so helpful. but I just wanted to know everything there was to know about the Church on a “head” level. I blazed through the missionary library–Jesus the Christ. Articles of Faith, Doctrines of Salvation. These were thick books really. I hadn’t read books before, I was more of a comics guy. But I loved it. I had a job before I went on a mission, and as I was working I’d be reading these book. I just devoured them. And one of the things about a lot of those books–Mormon Doctrine and the like–they do engender certitude. I mean think about the titles of them. Mormon Doctrine. Doctrines of Salvation. Gospel Doctrine. I suppose I started to soak up some of that kind of bias in a way. And it did make my viewpoint quite binary to an extent. So I went to Ireland on a mission. Not so much in the South where it is predominantly Catholic, albeit culturally to a large extent, but in the South it was “fight night” on the religious debate front because you had a lot of Protestants who really knew their scriptures inside out and they were really fixed in their position.
Faith Is Not Blind: And so did you feel all prepared and ready to go?
Christan: Yes. “Let’s get ready to rumble.” That’s what this was. Which is massively the wrong attitude. It’s like, “I’m here to represent Jesus Christ. So the first thing I’m going to do is tell you why and how you are wrong.” And that’s simply not the case, is it? I can even remember in my scripture study, if someone had said something in the street that was rattling my cage, I needed an answer for that. And so I’d come back and figure out an answer. And then it was like, “The next Evangelical I see tomorrow is going to get it.”
Faith Is Not Blind: So how did that change?
Christian: There were a couple of seeds that were planted actually on my mission. Christopher, one of my best mates in all the world, he and another friend started to call me–and they could get away with it because we were really good mates–and he told other people, “Call Elder Mawlam ‘Revered No Fun.’” Which kind of cuts deep because the real Christian is pretty happy-go-lucky. And yet I’d started to become this kind of hardcore binary, “in it to win it” kind of character. And we’ve discussed subsequently and Christopher even said, “Yeah. I think we became the paper we needed to get by on a mission.” Because it is such an extraordinary situation. I know you served in France for your mission and France and Ireland are quite similar by way of zero success. It was really hard. So a really successful day would be talking to someone for fifteen minutes in the street. And we’d probably just accosted them and they were kind. Don’t get me wrong. There were some successes. I mean, I didn’t baptize anyone on my mission. There were people I taught who went on to get baptized. But it was massively formative to me.
So, I come home from a mission and I’ve still kind of got this quite binary attitude. And I can remember that desire to know everything about the Church had continued. I was getting my hands into books. But then I come home and the internet is more of a thing. So onto the internet I do. And I’m looking up all of the juicy bits of Church History–polygamy, blood atonement–I felt like I needed to have a proper opinion on all of that. Anything sort of out there. I felt like I needed to be able to defend that sort of position. And I can remember one thing as being really quite formative for my understanding of Joseph Smith was that I got myself switched on by a couple of really good missionaries here in the ward in the northeast of England to Truman Madsen’s talks “The Prophet Joseph Smith.” I listen to it now and I appreciate that the target audience is college students. I was listening to it just the other day and as a Communications Professor who teaches propaganda, it sounds quite propagandist in the sense that it is this glowing report of the Prophet Joseph. At the same time, though, he’s not pile on all of the difficulties or concerns about Joseph Smith. He’s not going to do what Elder Maxwell calls, “plucking up daisies to see how the roots are doing.” Or say, “Here are some concerns for you, college kids.” But those talks had been quite formative for me. And one of the things that I’d remembered that Truman Madsen had acknowledged when comparing the characters of Joseph and Hyrum. He said that Joseph was actually more flexible when it came to his being malleable to different situations, whereas Hiram was a bit more fixed. Hyrum was a bit more orthodox. He was a bit most stayed and grounded and more kind of conservative. And I can remember thinking, “I need to be a bit more like Joseph in that regard.” And that is by no means a way to malign Hyrum. But that was a consideration. And I was all over the internet looking at all of these things. However, you didn’t have social media back then. The whole YouTube thing was not really a big thing. And so all of these things that young people come across now–like these huge, aggregated lists–that wasn’t something that I came across. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I was on some anti-Mormon sites. I soaked all of that up. But the funny thing is because I’d kind of engaged in that, when I come across those types of things now, it’s like, “These are just the same old cookies just kind of rolled up and packaged ever so slightly differently.”
But what stopped me being uber binary and to just calm down a little bit was my dad. He was the one that first said something to me. had a bit of bash at my sisters for something. Reverend No Fun had emerged again. I had said something and it was obviously some weird reproof. I felt like I was the morality police and I needed to make an arrest or whatever. And my dad took me aside and said, “Son, this has got to stop. This got to stop.” And that was really tough because he’s “up here” for me. This is like one of the people in my life who I think has made it.” But then it caused me to reflect. Yeah, I’d seen my dad lose it before and make mistakes. He’s a really good guy. And it made me realize that life is a little bit more nuanced. And maybe there was a way to get back to something that felt a little more like the real Christian, something more sustainable, genuinely sustainable.
Faith Is Not Blind: One of the things I love about your story–there lots of things–but one of the things I love is that kind of moving away from the Gospel that you were raised in and then coming back to it. And oftentimes that’s where the stories end. And it’s like, “Oh look. Chris is back.” And it’s almost like the prodigal son ends that way. The prodigal son comes back and the other son is outside the party and then the father comes to see him and then the story ends. With your story, what’s really fascinating is that there is that coming back, but then there is an adjustment period. You get to see the process that we don’t get to see with Alma the Younger or in some of these other scriptural stories.
So my last question would be what advice would you give as a Dad yourself, just looking back at your life? What advice would you give to parents and then maybe even to young people about your whole process and about helping the people that you love and guiding them through or helping them with the process that you went through?
Christian: I think just be yourself. I mean, there’s a lot of things that we learn from one another, from role models and the like. And we can often think that we kind of need to copy what other people are doing in order to be accepted. Terryl Givens sometimes calls Latter-day Saints almost an ethnic or cultural group. And I think sometimes as a group or a tribe we can sometimes find ourselves thinking, in order to be accepted and to demonstrate competency, we need to tick off all of these boxes and that maybe we need to get the forms down. Even in how people pray. I remember being corrected in how I prayed when I first came back to Church. I was praying and it wasn’t with the pronouns that they were expecting. It was, “Thank you very much.” And he said to me afterwards this chap, and he laid it on quite thick: “You’re praying wrong.” And it didn’t feel like I was praying wrong. So that was a little tension between what’s expected socially and culturally and what was in my heart. And so that didn’t jive with me. Even after my dad had spoken with me, it took time. But again it’s a process and not an event. But I found myself becoming a little bit intolerant of a kind of orthodoxy in the Church. And it made me try to be a little bit more free-form, a little more flexible.
But then I realized, “Hey. When you went through being who you were as a teenager and when you went back to Church, you kind of went guns blazing into this hyper-orthodoxy. Try not to become this raving person who has just swung to the other end of the spectrum.” It’s this kind of central middle ground. Because life, the universe, and everything is nothing but a shared space. Even just developing the capacity to get along with each other and to be understanding and empathetic, even with your kids. My parents were really good at being hands off as much as they could be. Don’t get me wrong, there were “sitting downs” and “tellings off,” which is massively appropriate. But it was always “without compulsory means.” One thing my parents have taught me is that “we don’t go to heaven in a headlock.” And so that’s one of those things that if you get there, it’s because you want to be there. So I know it’s difficult for parents, I know it’s tricky, but let people do what they want. Or help them to understand what they want and to identify really what it is that they want. I think as they do that, they’ll be more comfortable with themselves and the relationships that they’ll have will be richer, better, fuller. And there will be less form and more power in our lives.
Faith Is Not Blind: That’s wonderful. Thank you so much. That’s a wonderful quote hearkening back to the First Vision–less form, more power. And that focus on what’s authentic and real about us. But not only just about us, but I think the most important thing that you said, the focus on the people that we love–what’s real about them and loving them. Thank you so much, Chris.
Christian: You’re very welcome. Cheers,mate.
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