My exit entrance exit entrance exit story starts at 5 years old, arguing with my Sunday School teacher about the nature of God. “He can’t be so Big that He fills the universe and so Tiny He fits in my heart. Get real!” So I learned to read the Bible to prove my point. At 12, getting ready for Presbyterian catechism class, the 2 cute guys standing at the door who asked to see my mother looked really shaken when she said “I’ve been waiting for 13 years to hear from you! How soon can I get baptized?” The answer to that was as soon as my dad picked up the BOM that she laid on every table he sat down in front of for the next 6 weeks. He finally picked it up one night, read it cover to cover in a day, and announced we would be getting baptized as soon as the paperwork could be done. He quit smoking cold turkey, started choking on coffee (my mother claims the prayer that started that!) and threw out the alcohol in the house. For my part, I remember thinking “This makes so much more sense about God than what my Pastor says,” and feeling absolutely right about getting baptized.
Our lives totally pivoted around the Church. When you have to drive 45 minutes to the nearest chapel, twice on Sundays, and Tuesday for RS, Wed for MIA, Thursday for Primary, and weekend dances, it makes me glad gas was $.37/gallon. I went to 4 years of early morning Seminary on top of that. Since there were only 2 other LDS kids in my school, moving closer to the Chapel when I was in high school seemed natural. Our ward covered a city of nearly a million. Then there were 3 LDS families in my High School (graduating class of 800). Being well indoctrinated by then about marrying in the faith, the only college I even applied to was BYU. However, I also clearly remember thinking when I was 11, before the Church, that if the ‘world’s oldest profession’ was talked about in the Bible so much, it should be a good profession to get into. My blond proclivities surfaced early in my life.
Yesterday I found the journal I started at BYU. 1970’s. BYU was an island in the storm that was sweeping the nation. Today I would call it isolationism, but then - then I thought I was escaping the world. I enjoyed the openness of the Hippie movement, but was safe from the drugs on my LDS island. I had forgotten how devout I was then – and how boy crazy. I was sure at least 10 times in that period that I had found the ‘right’ RM – only to find out I didn’t qualify. Too good a friend, too liberal, too conservative, too ‘out there’, and my all time favorite – a convert. My first major was Sociology, then Psychology, then into the dreaded CDFR. I worked fulltime at the BYU Law School for 3 years (that means being employed by the Church) and took full advantage of the religion classes and lectures. Dallin Oaks had just been made President of BYU. C. Terry Warner, Cleon Skousen, Hugh Nibley, Stephen Covey, and other venerated ‘scholars’ fascinated me, and yet put me to sleep. I remember being offended that the E.R.A. was being pushed down the BYU administration throats (or the US Govt would withdraw funding for the vets on campus), and yet feeling the discrimination against women nationally was an issue that had to be addressed. Then there was the increasing pressure from the NAACP to have black football players on our teams, or get kicked out of the WAC. The Church was never going to give into that kind of pressure! I thought that maybe if I just learned all about Church History, I could catch up with all those guys who had long Church pedigrees. Not for decades did I learn that most members had never heard of the things I studied. I thought I was the only one who had to dig so deeply to catch up with what everyone else surely had grown up knowing.
. The guy I had dated for 3 years at BYU broke up with me so he could get a temple recommend again to go through with his brother when he went on his mission. My friends who were gay told me about their excommunications (BYU, 1974-76). I turned to theatre and singing for solace, and ended up in the summer run of “Saturday’s Warrior.” I got acquainted with a number of people who were LDS and gay and hanging out with them taught me a lot about suicidal depression and deep conflict between LDS appearances and reality, including marriages to keep up those appearances for parents with ‘positions.’ I even got ‘assigned’ to my vocal coach’s cast for summer stock the next year by his LDS Social Services counselor (blatant manipulation – no audition) so he could ‘look normal’ and I was supposed to keep him straight. I had the opportunity to not attend Church services for the first time in my life because of work conflicts, but I felt so guilty that I started studying again. Not great studying, but disturbing. When the guy I was with got ‘fired’ when he was caught kissing the other male lead after a performance, I got fired too, by association. Two days later, I groveled and begged my way back into the cast because I loved it so much, and finally tried standing up for my own dreams instead of making someone else’s come true. (Decades later, when my daughter and I were conversing with a total stranger, he said she looked like a good girl, and he was sure she understood that going to college wasn’t important - her life was all about getting a good man into heaven – shivers!) That didn’t last long, because of an odd aberration in my story that occurs about now.
Not having yet realized I was a blonde, I decided that if the Church of today had gone astray, perhaps I should try the one Joseph Smith started. I read the racist stuff and the Adam-God stuff and written teachings of the early Church. And I met a man who took me to the Historical Documents Section at the U of U library, and gave me books that showed all the deceptions of the modern Church, and who helped me conclude that it was either all or nothing, and Joseph Smith only lied to get God’s programs rolling on earth again. SOOO, instead of leaving the Church in the regular way, I became a fundamentalist (read that “a second wife” … “polygamist”… “stupid blond” ..etc.)
When I told my parents I had become a plural wife and was pregnant with my first child, I was 26 years old. I was tricked into going with them to visit a man set apart by the First Presidency to ‘deal with deluded members who have lured into cults.’ He asked me what my issues with the Church were and I told him they were too numerous to go over, and that I had morning sickness and had to eat, since my parents had told me they were taking me out for dinner. He said to just make a list and he would know where to go with it, so I made a list of about 30 things that I knew the Church was keeping quiet (in 1978). The first thing on the list was the Adam-God Doctrine, so he jumped on that and quoted from an unpublished (at the time) manuscript written by someone at BYU. My father started going off about what a ridiculous thing to believe and how could I seriously think Joseph Smith would have ever said that, when the gentleman (whose name I have forgotten) said, “But Brother, Joseph did teach that, as well as the other early leaders. We just don’t bandy it about today.” About the third time he told my father that about several subjects, like plural wives and blood atonement, my father stopped interrupting. I really was faint by then and although I would dearly love to have had it out with this man, I had to leave, and never returned. But it did break my parent’s hearts. They served 3 missions as atonement for me. My sister and brother promptly went to the Bishop and Stake President, respectively, to make sure I was promptly excommunicated.
Notwithstanding, I was determined to live a life worthy of the sacrifices of the early Saints. My husband was a Nam vet, and a survivalist and a lover of conspiracy theories, so I listened and studied some more, and we agreed to disagree about his ‘proof’ that the Holocaust was a hoax, and that man never landed on the moon, and that all of the Presidents of the Church up to and including David O. McKay had taken plural wives. I was never in the FLDS sect, but a break-off that had ‘held sacred the choices of women’ and other BS that took me several years of experience to see only a few of the converts, not the blue bloods, believed in. Because we were progressive, our plural family was even part of a 10 year study done by Dr. Joseph Ginot, from Haifa University, about sociological implications of the Biblical practice of taking plural wives. I was surprised to find myself cast as the ‘alpha’ female and my hubby was outraged! He would never let a female rule over him! In another place, I may be brave enough to talk about all the good things I learned from being the second of 3 wives, but I’m timid about that in light of the publicity around the FLDS disaster at the moment. I raised 6 children, and sometimes was fully responsible for 6 of the other children in the family as well.
In the end, I left the group, not because I ‘saw the light” (blond, remember?) but because my husband had PTSD from combat in Vietnam. He was simply too crazy to deal with, and I had to realize I was accepting abuse that normal women wouldn’t put up with. With the encouragement of a long time Church friend, I finally made the break as my youngest child was a senior in High school. When I was actually out of his house, it was as if a cloud lifted, and I began to actually think again. I explored tentatively at first, then aggressively, the things I had been encouraged to ‘put on the shelf’, ‘take on faith’ ‘wait for the enlightenment given the righteous.’ I had, of course, found out about JS’s wives and had studied their dairies for clues to the attitudes and behavior that would make living ‘the Principle’ easier and a growth experience. I know from studying that the first 5 years of any marriage, monog or polyg, is a period of adjustment that in this day and age, often is the first benchmark for divorce. I know from experience that if you can overcome the jealousy issues in the first 5 years, they just don’t surface again, but heaven help you if you can’t, because divorce is the only way to sanity. However depraved I may find the issue of taking young girls or married women to wife by Joseph Smith, there were plenty of explanations in current vogue with practicing polygs to explain the reasons. Just like the apologetics of LDSInc, LDSPolyg has explanations that feel rational if you are trying to bend cold facts into warm human behavior. Lots of benefit of the doubt, or maybe ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ like in literature.
For every practice that LDSInc has given up, LDSPolyg has picked up, and with a vengeance. Take garments, for instance. I haven’t seen any comments on the site about the changes in the garments. Perhaps you have to be over 70 to remember that you used to have to have 2 sets of garments, the ‘temple’ garments and the ‘street’ garments. If you think what you were wearing is something that stands out, try understanding that until the 1930’s all Mormons wore garments that came to their ankles and wrists and were one-piece. The women of the day were rolling them up to wear clothes that were fashionable, so Heber J. Grant issued a statement that a new garment for ‘street wear’ would be designed, but he hoped the faithful would continue to wear the garments placed on them in the Temple. I remember hearing at a General Conference in the 1970’s that Members would now be allowed to wear street garments in the temples for attending weddings. I asked my folks if that meant you could wear colorful clothing now instead of white. They just looked embarrassed and muttered “No, it means something else. You’ll understand when you get your endowments.” One of the reasons Fundamentalists stand out is because their outerwear is frumpy because it has to be long-sleeved and full-length. After leaving, it took me awhile to be comfortable in what the rest of you are feeling confined in – short sleeves and long shorts! The issues of blacks and the Priesthood, divination by Joseph Smith, the ‘old’ temple signs, tokens, and penalties, changes in the BoM, these things were part of my reasons for leaving LDSInc. My reasons for leaving LDSPolyg had to do with being lied about by my husband, treated like a non-entity because I was just a female, having to be ‘in unity’ with my husband to participate in ordinance work (when he had just been released form a mental hospital) and finding out about the tremendous number of children and women who were being abused, but keeping it secret to ‘protect’ the reputation of their Priesthood head. My only excuse for the irrational behavior I ignored became the mantra “I’m just discovering that I’m blond!” Stupid reasoning, but it salved my wounded pride because admitting how blind I had been for 50 years of my life feels devastating. Being blond gives me hope!
Many fundamentalists who leave ‘The Work’ go back into the Church. You probably don’t know that it requires a year of groveling, renouncing any association with family who are still part of LDSPolyg, and a grueling interview by the First Presidency for anyone who had been raised in LDSPolyg to get permission to be baptized. My sister was also in this group, and 4 of my nieces and nephews have actually gone through this process. None of my children have, although one started it and the BS was too much for him. I don’t have much problem with missionaries who tract my neighborhood – just saying I was a polyg is enough to send them stammering off to their next victim. I do know what it’s like to be ex-ed – can’t even play the piano for Primary in my case, although a friend of mine who was also a 2nd wife who left not only played the piano in her ward, but also led the choir (she was a professional). It depends entirely on the Bishop. It also makes it damned hard to get a job in any large organization in Utah, like Jordan School District, where I taught before I was ex-ed, but couldn’t even get an application after the court.
So I was Protestant for 12 years, and converted to Mormon for another 14 years, and converted to Fundamentalist Mormon for 28 years, and now am pretty sure I will not define myself as a religion again. I had to face the fact starting at age 12 that my friends were only friends if they believed with me. Otherwise, they didn’t want to stay in touch. I am nervous about how someone with my background will be accepted by this site. It has been nice to lurk on the PostMormon and find out if this was a conditional group first. Y’all seem pretty open, so I’ll try to be open with you. I may seem kind of ‘far out’, but I promise my IQ is well above room temperature. Can’t say the same for my CSQ (common sense quotient)!