nontheism in one of Steven Peck's short stories

I recently reread Steven Peck’s Wandering Realities, a collection of short stories on Mormonism. One of the more moving stories in the collection is “Two Dog Dose,” which features two old friends, one of whom is still a practicing Latter-day Saint while the other is not. That second character is one of those characters who is more interesting than the brief format has room for: We never learn exactly what led to his loss of faith, but we do learn that he had served as a bishop at some point before that happened. There are tantalizing hints of a rich character that can’t be contained in a short story but who is all the more interesting because that’s all we get of him.

During this reread, one passage from this story stood out to me in particular for the way that it captured some of the non-theism that I’ve written about in the past. The story is good enough that I won’t spoil it by sharing the context of this passage, but I think it’s compelling enough nonetheless:

In the low, late afternoon sun he looked around him. While he no longer believed in the white bearded god he had grown up with, there was something powerful in the landscape that lay all around him. A presence that made itself felt. An ancient attendance that cared very little about him, but that he could acknowledge and feel. An old god. This was something he could worship. So while the rituals that had shaped the people of this landscape had been born elsewhere, they had entered this land and made themselves part of the high desert, the wind- and water-carved variegated Canyonlands. He was a part of the landscape and the people that called it home. He knew what to do.

The character goes on to do something very Mormon—something that he doesn’t really believe has any particular power in itself but something that he accepts in that moment and in that context as a worthy representation of something deeper and more powerful. I love this passage as both the representation of the deeper power that a non-theist might accept as god and also as a lifting up of religion as something that should not be mistaken for that deeper power but might be accepted as an adequate substitute.

• Steven Peck
• non-theism
• Wandering Realities: The Mormonish Short Fiction of Steven L. Peck