Acid Test: LSD vs. LDS by Christopher Kimball Bigelow. Provo, Utah: Zarahemla Books, 2020. https://www.amazon.com/Acid-Test-LSD-vs-LDS/dp/0999347233/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=Acid+Test%3A+LSD+vs.+LDS&qid=1577942846&s=books&sr=1-2
When I was offered a review copy of this memoir/autobiography, I gathered from the time period mentioned in the publisher’s description that the author, Christopher Bigelow, is probably about 20 years younger than I am, and that the popular culture of his adolescence, a thing which is so influential in a person’s life as he or she is coming into young adulthood and which serves as a counterweight to the pressures of his or her elders, was already also a rebellion against the popular culture that influenced me at the same age in my life. I was a hippie. He was a punk. Punks hated hippies. Furthermore, I was an atheist from a mainstream Protestant background; he, one from a Mormon background. But we both took LSD and found it to be an undeniably excellent and profound experience. As an unexpected result, we both returned to the religious traditions of our respective sets of ancestors with a fresh perspective that we hoped and continue to hope is true to the original inspiration which gave rise to them.
The title, subtitle, and the brief description on the back cover were enough to convey some inkling of this. What I worried most about, when I was offered a copy to review, was that it would be amateurish and poorly written. Far from it! Christopher Bigelow is an artist. This is a very detailed autobiographical description of a roughly three-year period, 1984-1987, when he was a young adult, and as it ends, there are only hints of what lies ahead. He wrote this from a vantage point of many years later, but the appeal of the book is not nostalgia for the joy of being young. What we have here is an honest, entertaining, and moving expression of what it is like to be a human being, through the lens of a particular period in the life of a particular man. The narrative flows easily and is well thought out. He mentions a friend’s name, and what is at first just a name is linked, over the course of the book, with accounts of interactions that become a portrait of yet another real person in all his or her individuality. Not once while reading it did I feel burdened with irrelevant information. Reading it made me feel more appreciative of the richness of detail in my life and in the lives of my family and friends, as we are living now. I felt happy while I was reading it.
As the subtitle indicates, two big themes are the role LSD played in the author’s spiritual development and the Mormon tradition in which he was steeped, against which he was rebelling, and which he re-embraced after a spiritual crisis. I applaud his honesty about both. I learned some interesting things about Mormonism, some of which I find attractive, for example, the belief in a pre-mortal as well as post-mortal personal existence. This is something of which I had already become convinced independently, based on my inability to imagine my own nonexistence. I also agree with Mormonism’s teaching that revelations are still ongoing, even though this raises the thorny issue of which ones are true. However, the book also makes clear something I find unattractive about Mormonism. And there are many things Bigelow himself found unattractive, which is why he rebelled in the first place, and some of which he still expresses doubts about even after he has returned to it. The one thing that seems most wrong to me is a contradiction that Bigelow confronts but doesn’t resolve. The contradiction is between Mormonism’s all-or-nothing, uncompromising demand on one’s life, and its teaching that in this world everything, including Mormonism, is a mixture of light and darkness. True, Jesus said to be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect, and we Christians believe that the church is the body of Christ, but Jesus also asked, “Why do you call me good? Only God is good.” That is why I don’t think a church should try to lay down the law about every aspect of its members’ lives. The LDS Church seems to do this to an objectionable degree, giving rise to the all-or-nothing choice between the outwardly corporate blandness of a highly controlled lifestyle and a nihilistic, rebellious chaos that led to sad ends for some of Bigelow’s friends. Bigelow attempts to resolve the contradiction, between the church’s demands and its recognition that everything in this world is a mixture, by paying attention to the wilder, imaginative vividness of Mormonism, but he still seems to be struggling with this contradiction at the end of the book.
A note on the back of the title page indicates there are two more volumes to come: Mission Test and Zion Test. I look forward to reading them to find out whether and how he deals with this problem, as well as to enjoy his exceptional writing skills once again.