But Seriously…

On leaving the (Mormon) Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

It’s been a long time since I’ve just written right on the template, no document or spellcheck or revisions, but I think that’s okay because I’ve felt a burning in my right bosom, so I’m heading to the doctor at 11 a.m.. After that, though, I fully believe I’ll continue to feel inspired to write this.

Today I want to talk to my brothers and sisters in Outer Darkness: you know who you are. You’ve left the Church for a myriad of reasons, but you “can’t leave it alone.”

Please, allow me to reassure you — that’s only because it won’t leave you alone. Yes, I know. There’s a reason for that and we’ll get to it, but first, I’m going to run down a list of the reasons people leave the Mormon Church (from experience). This isn’t all-inclusive nor are the reasons in any particular order.

Please feel free to add your own in the comments if I miss one. I doubt I’ll miss one. If you think I did, re-read. You might have accidentally skipped it *wink*

1. Mistreatment by/from the Church or its leaders
2. Someone overheard you praying to Mom
3. Inconsistencies in the doctrine
4. You ran out of MLM options in your ward and then the indictments started which is so totally unfair because your bishop’s the dude who sold you the magic tonic juice in the first place. Jerk…
5. The oppressive patriarchy and treatment of women, minorities, the LGBTQ community
6. Church policy regarding any/all of the above
7. Lack of transparency w/r/t Church history
8. Mark Hoffman was a prophet!
9. You were tired of living in a bubble, so you took a trip to Amsterdam and never came home
10. Research leading to logical fallacies in Church dogma that got you to thinkin’
11. You read about the September Six and realized that you, too, were an intellectual
12. Doing your genealogy and the distasteful discovery of just how deep (and young and married) the deceptions about polygamy go/went
13. Someone offended you
14. You were exposed to some interesting ideas while in college (post-mission) that forced you out of your belief bubble
15. THE PRESSURE! THE PRESSURE!!! Kiss my “Be ye therefore perfect!”
16. You were exposed to some interesting things while in college, like how some “sins” felt EXACTLY like how everyone describes gaining a testimony feels like (and the feelings last just as long while sinning as when you gain your testimony, btw)
17. You lost your faith gradually, over time, and with exposure to the broader world
18. Your Mormon friends stopped thinking, stopped questioning, stopped thinking and questioning. In other words, they became Mormon Fragile
19. The political whiplash from “family values” to “What in the actual TRUMP are you talking about, Grandpa?” and that whole nasty business (i.e.: you developed a social conscience)
20. You did a deep-dive into early Mormon history after walking into the Abraham O. Smoot building at BYU and all that unsavory, unpleasant, nasty, nasty (oh, so unbelievably nasty)business
21. You were never much of a believer anyway, but being a cultural Mormon was okay until the Church went all fundamental
22. You changed or came into who you really are as a human being and the Church forbids you to be who you are
23. Didn’t look like the continuing revelation re: polygamy was coming anytime soon, so…
24. You fell in love with the sinner AND the sin
25. Tragedy befell you or your family and the Church’s pie-in-the-sky promises fell by the wayside as your family tumbled up, up, up, from the rabbit hole and into the cold, cruel world. Eventually, the casseroles stop coming for all of us, don’t they?
26. You’re female. ‘Nuff said
27. You’re a female with an informed opinion…so, that happened
28. You got curious about Church finances and wondered what in the actual eff they need your measly 10% for when you’re barely scraping by
29. You were “formally disciplined” and saw your chance to escape, revisit your faith, or you simply are too uninterested in coming back just yet
30. You wanted to sin, dammit, SIN! Go and sin more, and more, and more, you luscious, slutty pleasure receptacle! Rrrrwoowwwrrrr!
31. You offended someone and now no one will give you a calling or let you play on the ward softball team
32. You ruined the funeral potatoes again. Seriously, how hard is it? They gave you ONE job…
33. You read the Book of Mormon enough times to know it’s not a cure for boredom ( but it’s great for insomnia), and you didn’t get one tingly feel-good, not once, when you took the Book of Mormon Challenge
34. You found another religion that was less EIN, ZWEI, EIN ZWEI, meaning less “Hold. to-the Rod. The. I-i-ron. Rod!” and “Follow the Prophet, Follow the Prophet” (it helps if you sing these in triple-time, like you’re the lead singer of punk band, Black Flag) and found a religion or belief system that was more, 1–2–3 , 1–2–3, 1–2–3, twirl and dip, yes! 1–2–3… meaning more…“My Sweet Lord…(Krishna, Krishna)” and “Imagine all the people… living life in peace, youooouuhoooohoo-oohhhohho ooh, you can sayyyy I’m a dreamer…”

Sorry. But MAN I get so lost in those songs. They feel so darn good, don’t they?

Non-Consensual Cranial Intercourse

“No” Means You’re Doing It Wrong

There’s a reason former members of the LDS Church have so much vitriol and anger when they either leave or are forced to leave — a much rarer occurrence. I belong to an ex-Mormon Reddit group and it’s interesting to watch people go through their various stages of grief. Yes, grief.

When your faith dies, no matter if it was intentional or thrust upon you, it feels like a death, and you go through the stages, over and over, because there’s no burying the many ways the Church has its hooks deeply entrenched in your psyche.

I’m going address some of the reasons why it’s so wrenching, leaving this particular church, and my hope is, in doing so, you’ll find a semblance of peace.

Ever since I was a child, I was taught that my life would fall apart if I left the Church. It did. Yes, my life fell apart when I left the Church. It turns out, when you have a community of support that’s based around religion, guess where that support goes when you leave the religion? Not to you.

I faced struggles every single mother faced, along with communal shaming, shunning, and even my own family, some members anyway, continued to “consort” with the enemy (i.e.: my ex-in-laws) to show how “above it all” they were. What they showed me was their standing in the Mormon community was more important to them than their sister’s life and the lives of her two little girls.

So, if you note #31 up there on the list, you’ll see it takes you to a Wikipedia page called “Social Proof.” In short, social proof is cause-and-effect social conditioning that comes from a community. It explains the shift to a political red state and community that’s in direct conflict with the Church’s dogmatic “family forever” values.

Tell me, in what universe does a candidate pay off a porn star and still get the Mormon vote?

This universe, baby. This one.

Now, moving right along with social proof, when people are asked to take the Book of Mormon Challenge, it’s after they’ve already gone to church. No one takes it cold. They’ve been welcomed, open-armed, into the bosom of the Mormon community. Disenfranchised no longer, they suddenly have brothers and sisters, meaning and purpose.

“So, still reading the Book of Mormon, are we? Good. Now, pray and if it is true, you will feel a burning in the bosom, which is the Holy Spirit bearing witness that these things are true.”

Tell me, why do we need to get baptized if the Holy Spirit can “burn” in just any old bosom? That’s right. Because the physical body must be immersed in water by a male muttering the prayer, all sins forgiven, to complete the ordinance of the physical body. Which will be irrelevant after the second coming of Christ.

The body that won’t need to take showers in Heaven or Paradise — hey, how can you call someplace ‘Paradise’ without the cool, chlorinated waters of an in-ground pool, huh?

So, the presumptive close is: “IF you are worthy, IF you love the clubhouse and the dental plan and vision plan and ooh, group discounts and can pay the monthly dues, then you WILL feel the feel-goods to be welcomed into our communal bosom. When would you like to be baptized?”

See what they do, there?

As for business, Mormons go BOOM. In Utah and Arizona, specifically, you want the best referral services ever, go to a Mormon ward house. When I was Mormon, business cards were — I shit you not — tacked up on the bulletin board. The networking is fantastic. Everyone has a guy in the ward, don’t they. Just… watch out for the MLMs. Or…don’t. Hey, you do you.

The point? Leaving Mormonism is not leaving God, or a Heavenly Father or Savior, Jesus Christ, it’s leaving a community-centric organization that has shoots growing in and through your entire world. Your personhood is judged by your active or non-active status, and that’s as far as it goes.

I’ve heard people call Mormonism a cult and it doesn’t rise to the level of cult because it’s not a personality-based or single-leader based organization.

If you want the most accurate description of what the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is, I’ll tell you, right now:

The LDS Church is the most successful long-running pyramid scheme in history.

Unlike an MLM, there is really no tangible product the LDS Church sells. They sell what everyone sells: hope.

Hope, meaning, purpose, and as an added bonus, they relieve you of having to do any thinking for yourself while simultaneously making you feel as though you’re of “infinite worth” because no, tithing reprieves aren’t okay… have faith.

Plus, to follow the Savior’s “call” to serve your fellow human beings, that would require you to actually…well. Do that. Charity work is harrrrrd.

Thank goodness your “service” in the temple, the YW presidency, the mission field, the Tabernacle Choir, whatever it is, checks all those boxes, doesn’t it? Not to mention alllll that tithing money you’ve given over the years to help the poor, needy, those people the Savior would have helped had he been here, paying attention, instead of up in Heaven, planning his (awesome!!!) comeback tour. (And I bet you paid for a gold toilet in someone’s private temple quarters, amIright?)

Whew, guilt-free living! Thought-free living!

Wrong. Make no mistake, the LDS Church is a billion dollar enterprise with a dominant revenue stream via — ready for this? Love.

It’s all about love, my friends. Or rather, the love believers have for their families. If you love your parents, grandparents, wife, children, and so on, then surely you’ll pay your tithing, hand over your will, and do unto the Church so that when you shuffle this mortal coil, you’ll be reunited with your Heavenly Father and Jesus, who surely knows you by name, he’s such a cool big brother.

But you have to pay to play. You have to play and pay, or you lose all of it in eternity. Them’s the rules.

And that, folks, is why it’s so hard to leave.

They teach you from the beginning to be a communal thinker. But something happens, or you’re just born this way (like me) and things just don’t feel right, ever.

Bow my head and say — what the fuck did you just say? I think NOT.

Talk about a mind fuck.

By-bye kids, bye grandma, bye child who died when she was 3-years old, bye-bye family, friends, community, support, the freaking Elder’s Quorum and their mad moving-yard-care-and-blessing-the-sick skills and hello Outer Darkness.

Hello “no more ‘feel-goods’” ever. Hello isolation and alone-ness, trust me, there is no alone like the alone of “I thought sinning would be funner” (and yes, it’s officially a word because I made it so. Do you see a red line under it? No, you do not.)

The real kick in the teeth? Members and your family feel okay about you feeling not okay because YOU are a direct threat to their own trembling place in the pyramid of bricks. “Natural consequences” never feel oh, so right as when someone leaves the Church and their lives fall apart, like mine did, does, over and over and over.

But I can say, head high, that I did my best, I did it without the crutch of imaginary friends and beliefs and I did it based on something way cooler than “community guidelines.”

There isn’t an illusion more comforting that freedom within the group. You are never free, you always give in to something. And it begins with milk.

The meat serving comes later, when there’s no getting free without chunks of your flesh and blood left behind.

In Closing

I’m not here to promise you anything. Your life will not be better now that coffee and red wine occupy space in your cupboards. Getting a tattoo is not a celebration of your freedom, it’s yet another capitulation to another social group.

Being anti- isn’t proof you’re no longer a believer and congregating to stoke the fires of anger and betrayal only end up binding you to its harmful messages like the tar and feathers of old, proof their hooks are still in you.

So recognize your grief and loss. Own it. Find or build communities that don’t have the word “ex” and/or “Mormon” in them and prepare for the storms life will bring.

Understand that your still-Mormon family loves you, but they are terrified of you. Terrified that whatever happened to you could happen to them and then? The goodbyes start, all over again, but for them.

Holding your salvation, your family, the people you love most hostage is one of, if not the cruelest forms of social engineering I’ve ever had the displeasure of noting. But the pyramid scheme works thanks to all the young, useful idiots willing to donate 18 months of their lives to assure their place in the community of their tiny little worlds.

I have no hope to sell you. I have no guarantees. Here is what I know: at the end of that final road, you will be able to say that you were the captain of your own ship. You were the one making the calls, for better or worse, and if anything, you can look back and say, “I lived a life unlike anyone else.”

Maybe that isn’t your goal. Maybe it isn’t socially acceptable. I know for a fact the Jesus of dubious historical reputation would be appalled at the opulence of the upper echelons of the pyramid. And what I wouldn’t give to see Jesus pull a mass defenestration in downtown Salt Lake City.

Don’t let them tell you that you can only do good works through a Church. Save a life, every day by getting out of yourself, every day. It isn’t eternal glory or salvation, is it?

But it sounds better to me than a boilerplate Mormon funeral-cum-Church service, upgraded to a Relief Society-catered luncheon, complete with potato rolls, ham, and 18 varieties of funeral potatoes instead of stale Wonder bread.

I look at the many ways The Church shackles the human spirit through shame, guilt, social pressure, and in the end, this quote comes to my mind, time and again:

Listen — Are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? While the soul, after all, is only a window, and the opening of the window no more difficult than the wakening from a little sleep.

Mary Oliver, she knew. Your soul, you, contain “multitudes” and your potential to create meaning is here, now, waiting for you.

I don’t believe there is a supreme being who cares if you wear special underwear or cares about what you eat, drink, or think about. If I was the creator of a world, all I’d want — like any good parent — is for my creations to have joy, take care of each other, and enjoy all that was at their disposal.

I’d want them to breathe in, breathe out, and live a life so ordinary or extraordinary, that at the end of it, the smile of release comes — not with the promise of eternal life — but the sweet understanding that behind them is a life, well-lived, and ahead, at last, the promise of a blessed and restful peace.

Take care of yourselves and each other, brothers and sisters. It’s what we’re supposed to be doing here.