Enough! I'm Leaving.
I grew up in Northern Utah in the 1960s and 70s. My family and I were active in the Mormon Church for as long as I can remember. Although I wasn’t born in the covenant, my parents and siblings were sealed to each other in the temple when I was about 14 years old. That was the first time I’d seen my father cry. It was a very emotional moment for me. Although I was kind of freaked out by the temple clothes, it did feel warm and secure to think about eternity with my family. I don't, however, remember interpreting that warm feeling as the spirit testifying to me that the Mormon Church was true.
Out in the real world, I did pretty much what I was supposed to do. I got good grades, served in the seminary presidency, and graduated from high school. Being a little rebellious by nature, I never felt comfortable with the “good” Mormon kids, but I felt too guilty to have much fun with the partiers. I always just skirted the edges of “acceptability” as defined by the Mormon Church. I didn’t quite go all out with the kids who drank and partied, but I thought the “good” kids were incredibly boring. Only once in a while did I experiment with alcohol. I often would go to parties and be one of the only ones not drinking or drugging.
I had a long-term girl friend during my high school years. We were together for almost three years from the time I was 16 until I left on my mission. Although there was no actual sex, I’m sure the bishop would’ve been interested in some of the things we regularly did. I felt guilty about it. And sometimes wished I could stop being sexually “impure,” but it was becoming increasingly obvious to me as a 17 or 18 year old that I couldn’t live up to the Mormon’s conception of righteousness. I listened well enough in seminary and my church meetings to know that God does not look upon sin with the least degree of allowance. I knew God was not pleased with me. By the time I was 19 years old, my biggest sins were drinking once in a while and having a little fun with my girl friend.
I heard other people say that they knew that church was true, that the Spirit had witnessed to them that the Book of Mormon was the word of God; that Joseph Smith was a prophet; that the Mormon Church was the only one with all the truth, and so on, but that kind of testimony never happened for me. I decided it must have been my depraved wickedness that kept God from sending the Spirit to testify of the truth to me. God would not give anyone as unrighteousness as me a testimony. This is how I have come to understand how Mormonism taught me to be ashamed of and hate myself. The church made those years lonely and frightening for me. I could never get back to the Celestial Kingdom and be with my family like this, but I just couldn’t change. I hated myself for it.
To get a testimony, I was going to have to repent of my sins and be in a place where I wouldn’t sin for an extended period of time. I’d heard many returned missionaries bear their testimonies that they had received a testimony of the church on their missions. So I thought that by serving the Lord for two years on a mission, I could once and for all get the will power to not sin, and maybe then be worthy to get a testimony. I spent a year after high school at the university partying harder than I ever had (which wasn’t really that much in retrospect), getting it all out of my system, knowing that I was going to put down the beer, give up sex, repent of my sins, go on a mission, and finally get that testimony.
I was called on a mission to a European country in the early 1980s. Instead of a place where I could finally be righteous and not sin, I found my mission to be a place where it seemed like almost everything I did or thought was a sin. In pre-mission life, there were certain things I knew were sinful from the Mormon perspective, such as drinking alcohol, fooling around with my girlfriend, masturbating, shopping on Sundays, etc., etc, etc. Of course I know now that these are completely normal things for a young male to do once in a while (or more than once in a while). But the mission was a different story. My life was completely controlled down to minute details. (See Steve Hassan’s web site on destructive mind-control cults www.freedomofmind.org). Suppose I was tired and wanted to sleep past 6:30 in the morning; that was a sin. Taking an afternoon off from contacting people about the church. Spending too long at a friendly member’s house socializing was a sin. Going out of the apartment in preparation-day (civilian) clothes was a sin. Going out of the apartment without my companion was a sin. If you have been on a mission, you know what I’m talking about. General mission rules were outlined in the “White Bible,” the name we gave the mission handbook. The “White Bible” in fact was printed in the form of a small booklet that would fit in a suit coat pocket. That way if you wanted to do something, but weren’t sure if it was allowed, you would have it handy for reference. Rules specific to the mission are also dictated and piled on top of the general rules.
Although I tried, I couldn't keep all those silly mission rules (who could?). So for roughly two years it seemed like the living the processes of everyday life became a sin. With any breech of the mission rules being sinful, and because God does not look upon sin with the least degree of allowance, I was constantly in a state of unrighteousness. I came to think of it this way: with the Spirit withdrawn from me because of my sinfulness, I could, of course, not get the testimony I sought. And according to my twisted thinking (although logical from the perspective of my Mormon upbringing), my inability to get a spiritual witness of the truthfulness of the gospel must be my fault for being weak and unrighteous.
But it is even worse. I was taught that there were people who the Lord had prepared to hear the message of the Mormon Church, waiting specifically for me to contact them. If I had been sinful by not keeping the mission rules, then the Spirit would not guide me to them, and their sins would be on my head. So now, not only did I hate myself for not being able remain without sin, but I felt guilty and hated myself because I wasn’t doing all I could to find others, and punishment for all the sins they committed would be visited on me as well. Of course I didn't know who these people were, or how many of them I had missed, but there must’ve been people that I didn’t find, because I only baptized one person while I was there. Like my high school years, these were also anxious and scary times contemplating the eternal damnation that surely awaited me because of my wickedness, and the wickedness of others that I didn't find on my mission.
As an aside, one may ask, "where was Jesus and the atonement in all this focus on perfectionism and being without sin?" The Mormon conception of repentance, grace, and forgiveness is like the carrot dangling in front of the old mule. It dangles there in front of him, but is never quite in reach. Here's the problem, let's say someone commits a grievous transgression such as masturbation, a sin that Mormons especially love to hate. To get full forgiveness, one would, of course, have to go discuss the issue with the bishop. (Picture that one. A 13 year-old boy talking in a closed office with Frank the mechanic from down the street in great detail about private sexual matters. Tell me that isn't a law suit waiting to happen). After humble prayer and confession, one could theoretically be forgiven. But according to Mormonism, if it happens again (and it will happen again with a 13 year-old boy by the way), the former forgiveness would be withdrawn. So the Mormon God dangles forgiveness in front of you, but it is seldom available unless one becomes completely "perfect," something that is largely unattainable. So Jesus, grace, and forgiveness are out and anxiety, fear, and self-loathing are in.
It’s really no wonder, then, that I came home from my mission an emotional wreck, a neurotic mess. I came home two months early when they shortened missions throughout the church because of the difficult economic times. I couldn't get home soon enough. I still had no testimony, although I lied about it during my welcome home sacrament meeting speech. I felt guilty that I hadn’t kept the mission rules, that I hadn’t baptized very many people, that I still didn’t have a testimony, and that I hated my mission. I had a terrible time on my mission, and I wanted to talk about it to someone. But there was nowhere to go. It seemed like everyone else had a wonderful time. "Maybe it was just me" is what I thought at the time.
It turns out that my girl friend wasn’t waiting patiently for her returned missionary, so shortly after I got home she dumped me. That sucked, but in retrospect it was a good thing. We really didn’t have that much in common. But I immediately got into a relationship that ended in a temple marriage about six months later. We had only dated for three months or so before the engagement. The problem was that we felt compelled to get married quickly because we were already finding it really difficult not to have sex, which of course would be a grievous sin, nigh unto the shedding of innocent blood (Again check out The Miracle of Forgiveness by Spencer W. Kimball if you don't believe me). It turns out that three months isn’t long enough to determine compatibility for a marriage partner. Neither of us was very happy with the marriage, so we split up. By the time we had split up, however, we had daughter in tow.
It was during the rocky marriage that I became a jack-Mormon. Remember I still didn’t have a testimony, and I couldn’t get anyone to talk to me about the psychological torment and misery I’d experienced on my mission. And now this temple marriage that was supposed to be for time and all eternity was imploding. Nothing was working out according to plan. The pillars of my LDS faith and practice had crumbled. The mission was a bust, the temple marriage a joke, and I had no testimony. So one day I decided that I was done with it. I was going to take off my garments and stop going to church. My soon to be ex-wife was fine with it and followed suit.
I became inactive because the church wasn’t working for me, not because of a careful study of church history and whether the historical evidence backed up the truth claims of the church. At this stage, I called myself an agnostic. I didn’t know if God existed, and didn’t think it was knowable. There certainly had been no manifestation from the Mormon God that he existed or had a church. Because the Mormon lifestyle had not been working out for me, I abandoned it. I ignored the Word of Wisdom. Being newly divorced, I began dating non-Mormons and doing what typical people do while they are dating. I essentially began living my life as if I were not a Mormon.
I had the first experience of the church reeling me back in after finishing graduate school and moving out of town for my first job. The discomfort of moving with a five year-old daughter and starting a new career caused me to seek the comfort of the church. I found a ready-made community and made some friends. I was still, however, ignoring the Word of Wisdom and dating both Mormon and non-Mormon women. I eventually met and married a non-Mormon. She was atheist and I was still agnostic. Although I still took my daughter to church for a period of time, she was never baptized. I remember joking during this time that I took my daughter to church because I wanted her to have the same neurotic tendencies that I had. So at this stage, I was married to a non-Mormon, I called myself agnostic, and I had no testimony, but I still felt compelled to attend church and take my daughter.
Eventually, however, as my daughter approached her teen years, she began resisting, and I wasn’t really getting much out of it anyway, so we quit going altogether. By that time my wife and I had a son and my jack Mormon life was proceeding along relatively smoothly. For several years I didn’t go to church or even think about it too much.
The next instance of the church reeling me back in was when the second marriage ended. The end was sudden and traumatic. By this time my daughter was away at university and my son was 12 years old. My first reaction in my desperation and despair was to get my community back. Within a month of the separation I was back in church. I began to interpret all the problems in my life as being related to my inability to keep the commandments. I felt guilty about not raising my kids in the church. I concluded that my life was not going well because I was not living a Mormon lifestyle. I know better now, but that is how I felt back then.
As a divorced single father, I had my son 12-year old every other week-end. As a youngster, I had a pretty good time in the scouting and Young Men’s (YM) programs, so I decided to start taking him to church every other weekend and YM’s during the week. In fact, by that time I had a calling in the YM’s program. He hated both YM’s and the Sunday meetings. He didn’t like the kids or the leaders (except for me, of course). He wouldn’t even consider putting on a scout uniform. He must’ve attended every other week for about a year, but then he got to the point where he just refused. Church meetings were just stupid and boring to him, and having not been indoctrinated from a young age, he saw no point.
So here I am back in church now with a calling in the YM’s program. I’m teaching the Priest’s quorum lessons on things that I myself don’t practice or believe. My son sees the church as stupid and boring and my daughter has no interest. I still have no testimony, and yet I feel compelled to keep up my activity in the church. I have some vague feeling that my only shot at happiness is through the church, but I’m still not quite sure how this will work.
The beginning of the end came when the missionaries knocked on my door one day and started teaching my daughter about the church. She was in her early twenties by then and going through a rough patch emotionally with all the family instability. To her and to me, the church seemed like a way to stabilize her unstable world. For me it was like a dream come true. She was assuaging my guilt by making up for all my years of sinfulness and neglect through investigating the church and deciding to get baptized. We were also getting a lot of support from my extended family, who were ecstatic that she and I were coming back to the fold.
The missionaries taught her several lessons over a two-week period. They testified, sang hymns (that was weird), and got her to commit to reading the Book of Mormon. During one interesting session, the missionaries were committing her to baptism (I was shocked that they would try to get her to commit so soon), but as part of the process, they tried to get me to bear my testimony. I could not do it. I still didn’t have a testimony, and was not going to lie to my daughter. However, having grown up in the church, I of course knew a lot about some of eccentric and bizarre doctrines, and I consciously did not discuss these things with her, thinking that it would cause her to lose interest and decide not to be baptized. (I know this now as the cult practice of “milk before meat.”) I do feel bad about having participated in the conspiracy to rush her to baptism before she could be fully informed, and I have apologized to her for that.
After her baptism and confirmation, which I performed, she was welcomed as the newest member by the family. She made a few friends at the singles ward, which she attended for a few months, but she didn’t really fit in. As she started to hear some strange things at her meetings that the missionaries or I hadn’t told her, she did what any bright techno-savvy young adult would do – she started looking stuff up on the web. She found exmormon.org and postmormon.org, as well as other sites. She checked out and read Grant Palmer’s An Insiders View of Mormon Origins and Fawn Brody’s No Man Knows my History from the library. She also read parts of Richard Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling. Based on these readings, along with some bizarre experiences at the singles ward, she abruptly stop going to church.
When she stopped going I was a bit angry, thinking that she should stick with it a little longer (after all that’s what I had done). To explain the decision to end her activity, she showed me some of the material she had been reading and the web sites she had been visiting. I started with Palmer, I was stunned. I’d never heard about any of this stuff. I then read Rough Stone Rolling. It was very generous towards Joseph Smith, but I still could not see how a prophet of God could behave that way. Then I moved to Brody. I also read Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven. I began to consistently lurk, and post once in a while, on exmormon.org and postmormon.org. I visited many other web sites. I saw that there were a lot of people that were very much like me. This is what I had needed 25 years ago!
The dam had burst. My daughter, who I was so proud of baptizing into the church just a few months earlier, had finally led me to the material I needed to help me finally break away from the church. I love the irony: by leading my daughter to the church, I paved the way out for myself. The combination of reading objective unapologetic church history and seeing that there were people out there who were having the same questions that I had, caused things to fall into place. I was finally able to make sense of my lack of a testimony, and to understand, at least to some extent, the origin of my self esteem issues and the extent of the psychological damage the church had inflicted on me. I now understood that I didn’t have a testimony because the process of acquiring knowledge based on emotional responses is bogus at worst and unreliable at best. My innate bulls*** detector wouldn’t allow me to interpret an emotional response to something as the Spirit testifying about the truthfulness of that thing. It wouldn't allow me to interpret an emotional response as God telling me that the Mormon Church was true or that Joseph Smith was a prophet. Far from being a weakness or a sign of sinfulness, I now count that as a sign of strength and inherent honesty that I can begin to build on as a post-Mormon. Besides, even if there was a Spirit to testify about truthfulness, it could never testify in the affirmative about the Mormon Church, because it is built on a foundation of lies. There is mountain of valid historical evidence pointing in that direction.
Perhaps one of the most rewarding recent events in my journey out of the Mormon Church is when my daughter thanked me for not raising her in the church. That was such a relief to hear her say that. It still chokes me up when I think about it. We had a close call with her baptism and brief attendance at the singles ward, but she’s safely out now, and will not have to deal with the particularly onerous mind-f*** that Mormonism inflicts upon women.
When I write of exit from the church, I want to be clear that I have yet to officially resign. I’m pretty sure that it will happen some day. My exit so far has been an emotional and psychological exit. I can say with as much certainty as a rational human being can muster that the evidence does not support the truth claims of the Mormon Church. This is tremendously liberating for me because, I feel the self-loathing, guilt, and shame beginning to evaporate. I feel like I'm starting to heal from the deep psychological and spiritual wounds that Mormonism has inflicted on me.
I have a ways yet to travel out of Mormonism. During my time of questioning, I met and married a lovely woman with several children who also grew up in Mormonism and went through a number of psychologically damaging experiences with the church herself. I have been honest with her every step of the way through my exit process. We still have some terrain to cover with respect to how the Mormon Church will figure into our everyday lives. But if I didn’t think we could work these things out, I wouldn’t have married her.
The Most Problematic Elements of Mormonism
I've so far outlined the main events, with some commentary, surrounding my exit from the Mormon Church. In this section I discuss some of the things I’ve discovered about the Mormon Church that are particularly problematic. There are certainly issues than I've written here, but I just want to provide a sampling of what I've discovered. These are certain historical facts about Joseph Smith and the early church that make it, in my view, extremely unlikely that he was a prophet of God, as he claimed, and that the church is what it claims to be. Among the most damning pieces of evidence:
- Multiple, contradictory stories of the first vision
One of the most compelling stories of Mormon history is that as a 14 year-old boy, Joseph went to the Sacred Grove, prayed to find out what church was true, and received a visitation by God the Father and Jesus Christ. In this vision Jesus told Joseph that he was to join none of the churches, because they were not his true church, and that more would be revealed. The historical evidence does not support this version of events. There are multiple stories about the first vision. The first one does not even mention God and Jesus. How can one receive a visitation from God the Father and his son Jesus Christ and then not recognize it until 20 years later? It is more plausible that a common spiritual epiphany was embellished by Joseph Smith later to suit his political needs. Then how can the Mormon Church be what it claims Joseph Smith was not visited by God the Father and Jesus Christ?
- Deceit surrounding how the Book of Mormon was produced
One of the pillars of any testimony is belief that the Book of Mormon is the word of God; that it literally describes events and people as described in the Book. It turns out that there is absolutely no evidence that anything that happened in the Book of Mormon is actually true. In fact, there are many reasons, such as inconsistencies and anachronisms, to believe that the Book of Mormon does not describe real events and real people. There was no steel in the Americas. There were no chariots or wheels or horses, and of course there are many others. That all this is cited in the Book of Mormon, and that there is no evidence that any of it existed points suggests that it was probably just made up. Joseph Smith had access to Ethan Smith's Views of the Hebrews and Solomon Spaulding's manuscript for the basic plot. Some of the stories are similar to those in the Bible, and some passages are copied wholesale from the Bible. It is also not a stretch that Joseph could have conceived much of it from his own imagination.
The Church is aware of the tenuous claims regarding the BOM and tries to maintain its credibility by deceiving us about how the book came about. They still circulate pictures with Joseph Smith sitting in front of a stack of plates translating. No one with any knowledge of history believes that is how the process worked. Yet the church perpetuates the myth to prevent members from questioning the origins of the Book of Mormon.
The deception suggests that the leaders of the Church have something to hide, and or something to gain by keeping people in the dark.
- The Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price
The Book of Abraham was supposed to be translated from papyri that fell into Joseph's hands. Joseph paid a huge sum of money to a dealer of antiquities. Then he supposedly translated them. Any credible analysis shows that papyri were funerary documents from a period well after Abraham would have been alive. There was no religious or spiritual significance at all to the funerary documents. Yet the church still maintains that the Book of Abraham is the word of God.
- Polygamy:
Joseph Smith married between 30 and 40 women, some of whom were young, probably prepubescent, teenagers, and some of whom were married to other men. The historical evidence strongly suggests that he had sex with many of them. He was doing this largely without the knowledge or consent of Emma, his wife. Joseph Smith also used his authority to threaten and cajole men into giving up their wives to him for plural marriage. He would send men out on missions, then marry and have sex with their wives. He intimidated parents with threats of spiritual harm if they failed to allow him to marry their young daughters, and promised passage into the Celestial Kingdom to the families of young girls who would agree to marry him.
I cannot believe that a prophet of God would conduct himself this way. It is more plausible that he was not a prophet, and that he was just using his position, power, and authority to gratify his sexual desires. Now maybe I'm wrong. Maybe God did command Joseph Smith to perpetrate what appears to be evil. But it is more likely that God did no such thing, that Joseph was not a prophet, and that the church he started is not what it claims to be. The bottom line is that I'm disgusted with polygamy and how it wreaked havoc in the lives of so many good women, men, and children.
But perhaps more directly applicable to my everyday life than historical facts is what I see as ecclesiastical abuse that I do not believe would occur in God's church. It has been my observation that the church plays on peoples' deepest sentiments and worst fears to keep them under control. For example, a child's biggest fear is being separated from his or her parents. The worst fear of a parent of young children is losing a child to death. The Mormon Church plays on these fears to keep people attending meetings and paying tithing. We are promised that we can be with our parents or children for eternity in the Celestial Kingdom if we stay worthy. But there is the rub. What does it mean to stay worthy? You have to attend meetings, keep the Word of Wisdom, remain sexually pure, pay your tithing, etc.
The problem is the expectations are so high that no one can reasonably expect to meet them all. Such a combination of requirements and expectations ignites a crushing perfectionism in too many people. Of course that is where the atonement of Christ applies. Supposedly, through Christ we can be forgiven of our sins. But the problem is, as I mentioned earlier, that if one repents then commits some other sin or the same sin again, it is as if you had never repented. So according to the Mormons another sin means that Christ withholds the earlier forgiveness and you are worse off than before. And we also know that the Mormon God does not look upon sin with the least degree of allowance. If you take this idea seriously, then the notion of the atonement is nothing more than a cruel joke.
Now back to the sentiments. One can never realistically expect long-term forgiveness, which means that the promise of eternity with loved ones is also a cruel joke. It's hanging there in front of you, but never really attainable. For believers, such a situation creates anxiety and emotional distress, and in some cases becomes completely debilitating. I think this in part explains the higher incidences of depression among Mormons and higher incidence of suicide among the youth of Utah. In my view it is ecclesiastical abuse to subject people to these pressures. Abuse that would not exist in God's church.
Another aspect of this is how natural urges become demonized. Natural and ubiquitous behavior, such as masturbation, has become included within the class of sins next to murder in seriousness. If you don't believe my characterization, just go read The Miracle of Forgiveness by Spencer W. Kimball. Church leaders told us as a young people that our natural urges were evil and acting on them would make us unworthy to spend eternity with our families. So young Mormon boys and girls who masturbate are taught that the consequences of their actions are separation from their parents and siblings for eternity and residence in the telestial kingdom with rapists and murderers. We were also taught that our sinful behavior would be broadcast on judgment day for the whole world to see, as if there would be a giant movie screen showing our most personal moments. For a child already shamed about natural behavior, such a threat is traumatic and abusive.
In addition, as Mormons we are interrogated about our personal sexual behavior and terrorized about having to experience the humiliation of divulging our personal sexual behavior to a middle-aged man (the Bishop), likely the neighbor down the street, who would stand in judgment over us. In my view, all this preoccupation with sex and so-called sexual purity has cruelly and needlessly created long-term psychological damage to countless Mormons. It is no wonder that there seems to be an epidemic of compulsive pornography viewing among Mormon men and depression in Mormon women. It makes no sense to me that a church like this could be God's true church restored to the earth.
There were certain aspects of my experience as a Mormon that were positive. The youth activities were memorable and fun. I loved the camping, fishing, hiking, and boating that went along with being a Mormon teen-ager. Although the mission experience was mostly miserable, I did learn a second language and developed respect and admiration for another culture. And finally the community did give me a place to feel comfortable during periods of instability in my personal life. Still, the benefits of Mormonism in no way out-weigh the costs.