My brother and I had been baptized Catholic, but there’s where our involvement with religion ended.  I had friends of several different faiths who attended Sunday School, and it seemed they did a lot of fun, cute, crafty things there.  I asked my parents why we didn’t go to church, and my mom’s reply was, “Are we teaching you to be a good person?”  Of course they were.  “So why do we need to go to church?”  My dad said something to the effect that none of them were Christ’s true church and all they want is money.  Christmas and Easter brought the usual brief discussion of the Christian origins of the holidays.  I’m not sure what age I was, but I remember being given a Catholic version of the Bible for kids that was actually more liturgy than scripture.  Dad took me to Mass once, which in those days was still all in Latin.  I had no idea what was going on there and was bored out of my skull, so the subject of attending church was finally closed.  

Yet even then I remember thinking, “Really?  Reeeeeally?” I had nice  friends from decent families who suddenly were in the wrong religions. Nevertheless, I rationalized. My parents are intelligent people and they believe this stuff. The people in the ward are nice and seem to be doing the best they can with what they have. I’ll just trust the adults in my life because that’s what kids do, especially one as insecure as myself. This is making my parents happy and they’re not giving me a choice anyway, so I may as well go along with this and hope to believe eventually. My dad’s former students were both shocked and smug at the news of his baptism.

Overcompensating for my lack of genuine belief, I cast myself in the role of Uber-Molly.  Hounded by my parents about setting a good example for all those non-Mormon family members and classmates, and hounded by my own guilt and shame at failing to stop my brother from jumping off the high diving board, I tried my best to be as perfect as possible.  I wasn’t preachy, but if a question came up, I defended the church, no matter how illogical, sexist, racist or downright loony it was.  On the withholding of priesthood from blacks:  God was waiting for the white members to be ready to accept a black bishop. On the Word of Wisdom:  It’s a question of faith and obedience.  Polygamy?  There were more worthy LDS women than men, and in the 19th century women had little chance of respectability unless they were married. When bad things happen to good people:  They’re being tested.  When bad things happen to me:  I’m unworthy of good things happening to me.

As a teen, I remember my LDS acquaintances saying how grateful they were to be members of the church because it kept them from succumbing to the temptation of all the interesting sins of adolescence.  I was already laboring under the burden of being a disappointment to my parents; the last thing I needed was more guilt, but that was the first thing the church, my parents, and my peers supplied.

I faithfully attended early-morning Seminary and went to all the Young Women activities.  The president of my MIA Maid class was the daughter of a bishop who was very open about ward members’ private struggles, sharing them with his family at the dinner table.  These violations of privacy were promptly shared with our MIA Maid class. I couldn’t help myself; as the daughter of a man who had been in at least two bishoprics by this time, I was quick to point out to her that she and her family were violating ward members’ privacy. I found out this same bishop took liberties with his temple-recommend interview questions, going beyond the scope of “do you consider yourself morally clean and worthy to enter the temple?” to asking married ward members about their private sexual practices.  It was the first time I was faced with the possibility that not all callings to leadership positions were inspired. Why would God allow such a man to remain in such an important position of trust? Just as important, why were the members such sheep that they didn’t call bullshit on him? More people were hurt than helped during this man’s tenure as bishop.

At about that same time, there was a scandal over a 3-year-old girl, the daughter of a couple investigating the church, no less--being sexually assaulted in one of the Sunday School classrooms.  It was all over school and all over town.  It was the Mormon girls that got pregnant out of wedlock at my school because they and their parents were in denial. “So-and-so does such-and-such (drinking, smoking, drugs, sex) and he/she’s a Mormon,” my schoolmates would say. I saw the hypocrisy, but judiciously chalked it up to people being human. I couldn’t answer for somebody else’s foibles; all I could do was increase the pressure on myself to set a good example.  As a result, my teen years were boring as hell and completely uneventful; I had few friends and no truly close ones.

I was often confronted by classmates regarding the church’s history of racism.  I was too young to remember the news stories about certain universities’ boycotting sports on the Brigham Young University campus in the 1960’s. My dad followed the NCAA in those days, but I don’t remember him mentioning it.  He was upset when Martin Luther King was killed, but he also agreed with Malcolm X that the races shouldn’t mix. I had not read any of the more inflammatory remarks by general authorities about blacks’ being the seed of Cain, about their having been “less valiant” in the pre-existence, nor about their only inheriting the Celestial Kingdom as servants. We were shushed when we asked about it in Sunday School. I didn’t know about Elijah Abel. For many people, the “revelation” of 1978 made “the Negro question” obsolete, but for me it was never settled.  Yet I stayed in the corner, hands over my ears, singing “lalalala I can’t hear you.” Anything to drown out the cognitive dissonance that was beginning to crack the veneer.

Afraid to be any further challenged by hanging out with a wide variety of people at a state college or university, I enrolled at BYU (alternately known as YBU, for obvious reasons). Being in the minority and always having to somehow prove myself had gotten tedious, and I was ready to swim with the current and be anonymous for awhile. It was refreshing to find out that non-Biblical geology and biology were being taught in the science department. The Humanities department was often reprimanded, the honors going more frequently to the English department than either the theatre or art departments, something we English majors were proud of.  No Yorgasons or on our shelves! When there was a complaint, it usually came from some student who had enrolled at the school hoping to avoid a secular education. The discussing of phallic symbolism in Shakespeare and Chaucer brought more snickers than outrage; in general, my fellow Humanities majors were a more liberal and open-minded lot for whom “Mormon literature” was an oxymoron, who mocked the religious studies majors who were planning to teach Seminary.  

This was BYU before the September Six, before helicopter parents, before Rush Limbaugh.  One of the saddest things I encountered on my return to YBU to finish my degree, 16 years after my first entry as an 18-year-old freshman, was finding out there was now a Dittoheads club on campus.  Students were complaining to professors about having to read “bad books” like Steinbeck’s The Pearl or, for YA lit class, Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War.

The first I ever heard that Mormons aren’t always honest about their history, not counting the apologetics fed to us in seminary, was in a BYU English class before my mission. A professor mentioned that none of the artifacts that supposedly give archaeological and historical support for the Book of Mormon actually date to the time of 600 BCE to 400 CE.  This was a lightning-bolt moment, one that should have sent me, screaming, for the exit. But fear and a desire to measure up to my family’s expectations were stronger. Ironically, many of the straws in my apostate basket were gathered while I was a student at BYU. Still, I would dismiss my doubts and chastize myself for not having a strong enough faith.

I was unaware of the harassment of homosexuals at YBU in those days.  I didn’t know about the “aversion therapy” (read: torture), nor did I know that students were encouraged to rat out anyone they suspected “suffered” from same-sex attraction.  I didn’t know homosexuals were summarily excommunicated whether they’d “acted on their urges” or not. I think knowing how the church treated gay members would have appalled me. If anyone in my home ward was gay, they remained deeply in the closet. In the early 1990’s I remember seeing a story on television about homosexual Mormons. A couple from Provo who had left the church over the church’s dealings with their own two homosexual children were interviewed.  The father was adamant that the church needed to allow its gay members to marry. Our eldest two children were quite young at the time. As one who had watched her parents bury a child, I had decided, long before becoming a parent, that as long as my children were alive, happy, and living decent, productive lives, I didn’t care whom they fell in love with. Watching that interview with those broken-hearted parents added several straws to my basket.

At the age of 21, what do I do when my doubts about the world, the church, and my place in either have overwhelmed me?  Put in papers to go on a mission, of course, and completely immerse myself in the lies and the spreading thereof.  In my defense, I was hoping to put myself and my testimony to the test. I was certain to emerge triumphant.

I knew what to expect from the temple ceremony because I had been “sealed” to my parents when I was eight years old, but mostly because I had a cool bishop who explained everything to me except what you absolutely cannot share outside the temple, such as the signs and tokens and the symbolism of the garments.  I dismissed the whispers about the Masonic connection because it was explained in seminary class that the ceremony Joseph Smith “restored” to the earth was the pure and uncorrupted version.

I cannot imagine how people who’d had no idea what to expect must have reacted on their first visit to the inner sanctum. Strangely enough, for someone who hates being touched by strangers, I didn’t find the initiatory nearly as creepy as I’d expected to.  I’d been advised to pay attention to the words of the blessings, and those who advised me had a point. What I found laughable was the chanting and the putting on the the robes during the endowment ceremony itself. The film was laughable too.  I’ve never been to a live session, so I had nothing to compare it with, but my parents, who had done sessions in Manti before the switch to film, talked of the old farts flubbing their lines and cracking up during their recitations, so that might have been mildly amusing. For the second time in my life, I got a look at that fugly outfit and was appalled that I would be expected to be buried in it.

The only notable thing that happened the day I received my endowment was that women--yes, women--laid their hands on my head and ordained me to be a queen and a priestess. Haha, haters!  I do have the priesthood, I just. . . can’t use it. It dawned on me that I had a right to question why, but I didn’t.  If I had faith and lived worthily, I would someday understand it.  I knew that women who officiated at temple rites in Nauvoo were openly called priestesses.  As usual, there was a logical explanation why the women who'd ordained me weren't so designated publicly.  19th-century America was not ready for the idea of women who had priesthood power, so the church had to hide this fact from outsiders. These explanations were becoming tedious and too convenient, but I hung on anyway.

The MTC was a nightmare, and this was during the time when missionaries were still allowed out of the buildings on P-day. I couldn’t imagine stewing in that pressure cooker for eight weeks or more, unable to go anywhere outside but the temple. After my first few days I began to envy the missionaries going on stateside and English-speaking missions as they didn’t have to spend eight weeks in the gulag. I had lived on my own for three years and had conducted myself quite well, but now I had to ask a pimply 19-year-old boy for permission to go to the toilet. Phone messages regarding the death of a friend were never delivered to me. I happened to hear about it from a former classmate on a P-day visit to campus.  I phoned the lady that left me the message that night. “I hate to say it, but it’s. . . well, it’s almost as if you were in prison,” she said.  I had to agree with her. I was already sick of being treated with mistrust.  I was there of my own free will and at my own expense yet there was no respect whatsoever for what any of us were sacrificing to be there--jobs, school, money, freedom, young adulthood, boyfriends, girlfriends, travel. I encountered suck-ups, phonies, people who were there because they’d been promised a new car or a job at their dad’s bank. Of course there were some decent, sincere people as well. Decent, sincere, brainwashed people.  

In the “field” things were better.  Unless you had Nazi district and zone leaders, your every move wasn’t as scrutinized as it was in the MTC. Our president, however, was a man of simple faith who had pets. Naturally, I wasn’t one of them. The numbers game nearly drove me mad. There didn’t seem to be any difference in our success at finding people to teach and leading them to the baptismal font whether we were strict about the rules or lax about them. I quickly put myself into “survival” mode and decided to finish, but with no expectations of any great revelations nor of saving my faith.  Aside from learning greater tolerance and acceptance of myself and others, my exercise in superspirituality was a complete bust.

A pamphlet was left in our car one day while we were tracting a street.  Entitled “Letter to a Mormon,” the pamphlet contained the usual stuff, but there was one bit of new information:  No credible linguist on the planet acknowledges that any language such as “reformed Egyptian” ever existed. Another light went on, and I had more straws for my apostate basket. The mission ironically turned out to be the beginning of the end for my testimony. One of the zone leaders was hanging out at the university dorms, sleeping and showering with coeds. One of my fellow missionaries had lived with his girlfriend while serving as first assistant in his priest’s quorum.  His father, a bishop, had sent this missionary’s 16-year-old pregnant sister out of the state to have an abortion.  So many stories.  So many hypocrites. Again, I’m faced with the question of where the hell is God while people like this serve in leadership positions.  Again, I rationalize that these people didn’t take the opportunity of their calling to shape themselves up.

There were several returned missionaries in my home stake in Colorado who went completely inactive after their experiences.  I didn’t hang out with the gossips, and I was never close enough friends with any of the individuals in question to be able to talk to them about their reasons, so I never knew why they didn’t attend church anymore.  On my connecting flight to my hometown, whom should I bump into but Bishop T from my home ward.  He tells me that members count on returned missionaries to help strengthen the church and names a couple of RM’s who were now inactive and a complete disappointment to everybody.  He converted to Mormonism after marrying a Mormon, so he couldn’t possibly understand the effects that bad food, shabby apartments, constant rejection, sometimes-dangerous environments, and Machiavellian leaders could have on a young person’s psyche.  I neither defended the two people he mentioned nor did I vilify them. I said something to the effect of, “Some people have bad experiences out there and never really come to terms with that.” Besides, I had broken some rules, so I certainly lived in the proverbial glass house, and my cognitive dissonance was stronger than ever.

Near the end of my mission, I finally met the famous Elder H, who’d notoriously gone back home to Paris for a month because his mother had gone into the hospital with heart problems.  What the hell kind of mom is that, I wondered.  She must be extremely selfish, and he must be a mama’s boy.  Ick. I knew missionaries whose parents died while they were “in the field” and most of them, acting on faith, stayed on their mission. He returned after discovering what was a near-brush with death was actually a simple heart arrythmia.  His mother had exaggerated her condition to get him to come home.  Despite the disillusionment with the church and his mission experience, staying at home was a much worse prospect, so Elder H returned to the field.  The last few months of his mission, he and I were in the same district in Montreal and, to make a long story short, we fell in love.  We never spoke of our feelings nor acted upon them, and oddly enough, for someone who felt guilty for everything bad that had ever happened to anyone--ever--I was strangely peaceful about it  When I returned home, people were cool.  “He’s from France, you’re from Colorado; how else could you have met?”  Hooray for fatalists.

Of course we were married in the temple, and of course, I had to explain to non-Mormon friends and family as gently as I could why they couldn’t attend my wedding.  I hated the elitism of this, but I knew that if we had a civil ceremony there would certainly be wagging tongues, and I wasn’t ready to face even people who were wrong. I chose to be loyal to the special secret clubhouse where only special people who are either good at obeying or good at lying can get in.  I still cannot think about this without feeling angry and resentful.  We should have had a celebration with as many people as wanted to be there to wish us well as we started a new journey. We were broke, so our reception was held in the “cultural hall” (read:  gymnasium) at the ward building. No money for a band or even a DJ to liven up the party a bit, and certainly no bar for those thus inclined.

We attended sacrament meeting that first year, but often ditched auxiliary meetings. Questions about the church continued to surface, and I finally had someone to discuss them with, someone who didn’t judge and who was questioning too.  

My husband had grown up in Europe.  The Roman Empire flourished during the years the Nephites were supposedly making a great civilization in the Americas.  Before “limited-geography” theory, we were taught in seminary that the Nephites’ mighty civilization included enormous cities and that they inhabited the entire North American continent, blessing it with their Christianity and their amazing technology.  So why, my husband reasoned, is there not a single ruin? There are Roman aqueducts, amphitheatres, ruins, and artifacts all over Europe, England, and North Africa. When he visited his aunt in northern France, he would occasionally find Roman coins in the dirt.  Add to this the fact that European schoolchildren are much better versed in world history, which might also explain the church’s historically slow growth and recent fast decline in those areas. So, on top of the questions about Reformed Egyptian, there were serious questions about the lack of any physical evidence whatsoever to support Smith’s claims to revelation, such as how the hell does a steel mill disappear into thin air.  I found it difficult to justify all this but doggedly continued to attend church and bear testimony that I knew Joseph Smith was a true prophet who restored Christ’s true church.

Not long after we were married, a friend asked me about the “White Salamander Letter.” That story had just broken, before Mark Hoffmann had been exposed as a fraud and began mailing bombs to the people who’d threatened to expose him. I told her Martin Harris was something of a loony toon, so maybe we needed to wait till the final verdict on the letter’s authenticity.  “Would you leave the church over it?”  she asked.  “I don’t know,” was my honest reply.  “I’ve taken things on faith all my life, but I’d definitely want to do some research first.” I was able to admit to her that the Joseph Smith story and the temple and all that must seem very weird to an outsider, so I wouldn’t be offended if she ever had any questions.  I figured it would be better she got the information from me than from some “Antis.” [insert comment about irony or whatever here.]

It was a relief to find out the “Salamander” letter was a forgery, but disappointing to find out the leaders of the church had been duped into buying several of Mark Hoffman’s forged documents that made the early leaders of the church look like madmen on psychotropics. If these men really receive revelation, why doesn’t God whisper in the prophet’s ear, “These are fake.  Save the money for the poor.”  Aside from the famous 1967 turning over of the “Joseph Smith papyri” to scholars who declared them, not for the first time, to be Egyptian funerary documents having nothing to do with Abraham at all, this was the most blatant example in my lifetime of attempts by church leaders to cover up their history, and another reason to question whether these men actually are called of God. As new converts, my parents were clueless about the B of A studies at the time they occurred.

Why I continued rationalizing is a complicated question.  I knew leaving the church would devastate my family.  My sisters were in their teens and I felt I still had to be an example to them.  I hoped I had a brother waiting for me in the Celestial Kingdom. I wasn’t ready to be the wedge in the wall. A person could do some research and find out this was all ballocks; nevertheless I avoided anything that would make my confusion and inner turmoil worse.

In the final analysis, for me, the credibility of the church hung on one slender thread--whether or not Joseph Smith saw God.  If I were to satisfy myself he was a fraud, that would be the end of me and the Mormon church.  I also knew it would be the end for me and religion, for if the Mormons didn’t have Christ’s true church, nobody else did either, and I could go back to simply being a good person for the sake of being a good person. Had I had the courage to find out Smith’s business dealings, his philandering, and his blatant falsification of all Mormon scripture, I may have left much earlier. [Insert platitudes about hindsight being 20/20 and so forth.]

The first two children came in rapid succession.  I was pregnant by our first anniversary and pregnant a second time by our second.  Our son and daughter were blessed in the church and baptized.  We attended church, but both kids complained about it being “boring.”  My astute and precocious daughter, at the ripe age of five, notified me that she need never go to church again because she’d been hearing the same things for two years in Primary now and didn’t expect it to change.  There was much more inducement for my son to remain semi-active in the church because of his involvement in the Boy Scouts. The boys went river rafting and snow caving while the girls cooked and scrapbooked and had it hammered into their heads that having a man in their life validated them as a person and that no other accomplishment in their lives mattered as much as landing a man and popping out puppies every year.  

Somewhere in between my daughter’s eighth birthday and the eighth birthday of our third child, I was finally evolving into my own person. Our third and fourth children were blessed but never baptized. Living far enough away from my family so as not to be cowed by their expectations was one factor.  Having an intelligent partner who was unafraid to question helped tremendously. I had enough fuel for my doubts that I could justify skipping meetings and declining callings.  With young children and a husband who worked most Sundays, staying home from church became easier and easier.  We were peaceful and happy and the kids were turning out all right. Once again, as on my mission, I saw that scripture reading and prayer and blind obedience did not open the floodgates of heaven, and our luck was the same whether we followed the letter of the law or not. On Sundays we went to the park, watched NFL football, cleaned the house.  Sundays in Utah are a great day to go to the cinema or shop at what few stores are open.

I used to sneer at people who left the church over something the bishop or Relief Society president did or said (or didn’t say or didn’t do). But I watched as a friend was devastated by gossip in the ward to the point where the family felt they had to move away.  Joseph Smith wrote that “by their fruits ye shall know them.” It seemed to me the tree was bearing an inordinate amount of rotten fruit, and it was easy to see how someone could be driven away by another person’s actions. Leaving the church over a disagreement during church basketball was one thing; leaving because you’d been abused by family members or leaders was something entirely different.

As I grew older, the more I found my own voice and became more my own person, the little inner mechanism I like to call my shitometer broke down. It seemed somehow wrong to emerge from the chapel after three hours of Sunday meetings dripping with despair and self-loathing.  So I stopped going for good--my husband had come to his senses long before I had--and we informed the children they could choose whether to attend or not.  The boys continued to participate in Scouts and our daughter would occasionally show up at Young Women’s, but if something more interesting was going on at home or if they had homework, they would skip. For her part, my daughter had no intention of chasing boys nor of marrying at 19, so she never really felt she fit in.  None of my children was ever ordained to the priesthood and I never had to face down a bishop over holding a locked-door, one-on-one interview with any of my children.

Living in Utah, my eyes were opened to the dangers of theocracy.  At one place where I worked, a coworker bragged that his uncle was making six figures as a lobbyist for the church.  “My tithing money is paying for that?” I blurted, “With 95% of the legislature belonging to the Mormon church, they need to pay a lobbyist?”  I remember the scary scenarios the church published in pamphlets against the Equal Rights Amendment back in the late 1970’s:  “Women pay alimony, men qualify for maternity benefits.” When the church once again went into action to stop Hawaii from making same-sex marriage legal in 1997, I was furious.  “it was mainly the Catholic church,” I heard members say, “members of our church only got involved as private citizens.”  I didn’t believe them, and when Proposition 8 passed in California, it was obvious who had been pulling the strings, and that they had become involved in Hawaii as a sort of practice run for California, where similar scare tactics were used.  “Your children will be forced to attend ‘gay acceptance’ classes,” was one of the most idiotic of the claims the church-backed organization’s literature was making.    

We were completely “inactive” by 1998, when our fifth child was born.  We dodged questions about having him blessed, just as we dodged questions about the two middle children being baptized a couple of years later.  So one day when they were visiting, the subject was raised again by my mother. I had to explain that we had no intention of providing any “saving ordinances” for our three younger children, and it was in this manner that I finally broke it to her that we were done with church.  I knew it was going to be uncomfortable and that she was going to be hurt, but I was no longer a scared 15-year-old living under my parents’ roof; and I’d long since given up trying to conform my life to their expectations.  

“What about your children?”

“I’d stack my kids against any in the ward, Mom.” At this point I wasn’t ready to turn her own words about raising good kids outside of religion back on her.

“But what about your forever family?  You and [husband] are breaking your temple vows.”

“I’m not breaking anything if I don’t believe in it.”

So there it was.  Crescendo, slam-bang, and my mom looking like I’d kicked her in the gut.

“Mom, if God is any kind of God, he would have to recognize a person who does their best to live a decent life and works hard.” I judiciously  excluded a snarky remark about magic underwear.

“But you won’t be in the Celestial Kingdom with the rest of us!” Wow, I didn’t know her calling and election had been made sure, but I restrained myself yet again from saying anything.

“So come visit me in the Telestial.  Bring a cake with a seer stone in it.”  Couldn’t completely control the snark, could I?

Later, when she had calmed down a bit, we did discuss the afterlife, and I told her I thought Joseph Smith’s notion of same was ridiculous.  “Are there cops and gatekeepers between the kingdoms?” I would ask. “Will we be forced to wear uniforms so they’ll know if I’d crashed a gate into the Celestial to come see you guys? So, is Heaven a police state?” All she could do at that time was admit she didn’t know how that was going to work but that she knew the church was true. Her turn to cover her ears and say “lalalalala I can’t hear you!”

One of my sisters was inactive throughout her 20’s, but when she went to visit my parents, she attended church with them, to keep the peace and make them happy.  One Christmas, before my official declaration of independence, they tried to get the kids to go to church with them.  Mom had been looking forward to filling two pews with her happy churchy family and was chagrined to discover we hadn’t brought church clothes. My eldest son, then 13 and a gentleman at heart, said yes to accompanying them, agreeing to let Grandpa lend him a dress shirt and tie.  Mom had grudgingly said okay to his wearing jeans, since Grandpa’s dress trousers wouldn’t fit.

None of my parents’ nor my siblings’ church clothes would have worked for any of the rest of us, but getting my eldest son to go was at least a small victory. My husband took the boy aside and asked, “Do you really want to go, or are you feeling browbeaten into going?”  Son admitted he felt  pushed, but he was trying to be nice.  “Then go back and tell them you don’t want to go, that your parents have allowed you to choose, and you’re choosing not to go.”  Of course Mom confronted us both, and I told her that we didn’t talk him out of anything, that he simply hadn’t known how to say no. Everybody else in the family could cave in to her emotional blackmail, but I was done with that. Bless my husband for showing my children how to establish boundaries.

I was “inactive” for years because I came out of my Sunday meetings feeling miserable; I was fed up with the hypocrisy of the members; and I was having enough doubts about the church’s scripture, origins, and history that I would respond, “I used to be” when asked if I was LDS, even though I had not officially resigned my membership.

People ask what my “last-straw” moment was.  My slide into apostasy took so long and happened so gradually that it’s nearly impossible to pinpoint the exact moment, but it would probably be something about Joseph Smith. I had known about Joseph Smith’s plural marriages; what I didn’t know was that at least eleven of his wives were already married to other men.  I didn’t know that he had threatened these women with eternal damnation, or promised their families Celestial glory, or threatened to denounce them publicly as a “common whore” if they didn’t submit to him and keep the liaison a secret.  In short, he was a sexual predator who suffered from what we today would probably call narcissistic personality disorder.  Megalomaniac he had vigilantes on his payroll, ran a banking institution into the ground and kited off on the debt, and destroyed a printing press.  Whenever he and his followers would move into a new place, they immediately set about threatening their neighbors with eternal damnation and speak of “building Zion” on land that was legally owned by people who had been there for three generations. Mormons were, and are, bullies. Fueled by arrogance and their complete and unswerving sense that they’re right about everything, it’s no wonder they were constantly being driven from place to place.  

I was taught in Seminary that the tarring and feathering of Joseph Smith was by an anti-Mormon mob, but I found out that it was in fact spearheaded by church members who accused Smith of stalking their niece. Of course the story is disputed, but knowing what I knew about Fanny Alger and Helen Marr Kimball, I was finally thoroughly disgusted and could easily believe that Nancy Marinda Johnson’s denial that Smith ever made advances to her might qualify as a sort of Stockholm syndrome.  After all, I myself had tuned out some extremely loud cognitive dissonance for years. When I finally had enough evidence that Smith was a fraud and a charlatan, it was easy to conclude that the cult he founded was a sham.  

Incidentally, at the time of my resignation I still didn’t know about the multiple versions of the “first vision” or the seer stone in a hat method of translating the Book of Mormon or the Kinderhook Plates or even the archaeological community’s unanimous declaration that the “Book of Abraham” could not possibly have been translated from the papyri Joseph Smith had in his possession. I would like to believe that if I had Google in 1982, I would have freed myself then, but it’s hard to say. At that time I was still a scared little goody-two-shoes who didn’t want to hurt her parents nor show a bad example to her younger sisters. I shouldn’t have bothered.  I should have done whatever it took to extricate myself and make myself happy. [Insert another platitude about hindsight and whatever.]

Because our two middle children were “children of record,” we received an occasional visit from missionaries.  One was an older gentleman, a stake missionary who listened with a surprising amount of respect when I outlined my reasons for not attending church and for allowing my children to choose whether they wanted to be active or not. The young missionaries who usually showed up wanted to argue, so this man was a breath of fresh air.  At the end of the visit, he hugged me and said, “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders.  You and your family are going to be all right.” So, here I was, being validated by a total stranger while being vilified by neighbors, colleagues, and members of my own family.

In late 2005, my husband, my two eldest children and I decided that, aside from being convinced the entire cult was a fraud, we no longer wanted our names associated with an organization that actively campaigned against equality and civil rights.  I know that their “authority” means nothing.  But as long as they had our membership records, they could call us to tithing settlement, continue sending the missionaries to our unbaptized children, and even find us again if we moved to a new city. So we acknowledged their authority one last time in order to be free of it forever.

The local bishop came to see us, of course.  He was a nice guy but his concern for the church’s image seemed to worry him more than our disaffection with history or doctrine.  The first thing he asked was, do you want out because somebody in the ward offended you?  Considering the schoolyard behavior of most members of that ward, I wasn’t surprised he asked such a question. I laughed and assured him that if we still believed it wouldn’t matter what people in the ward thought of us.  I told him our letters were so strongly worded because I’d heard horror stories from other people who’d been harassed and called to church courts for asking that their names be removed. “We’re not asking you to let us leave, we’re telling you we’re leaving.  We’ve done nothing to merit a church court,” I said. He informed me that bishops are instructed not to hassle members over leaving, so if that was happening somewhere, those guys were overstepping.  Big surprise.  

Our letters arrived in early March of 2006.  It was a strange feeling, one of relief, certainly, but also one of loss.  All that time and energy and money and shame and guilt, wasted on a fraud. I knew things would never be the same with my family, neighbors and colleagues.  Most of the hurdles with the family had been cleared and an uneasy peace established, but things will probably never be comfortable nor easy between us again. My husband’s colleagues have been far more tolerant than mine.  To this day, several people in my workplace won’t speak to me.  Encountering members of our former ward at the supermarket was a trip.  Some of them would see me coming, turn around and go the other way.  It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.   

Living in denial all those years, making a slow exit from the church may not have been the most ideal course of action.  Of course I wish I’d come to my senses sooner.  Of course I wish I’d believed enough in myself to trust my own instincts and intellect.  However, there was no real “aha!” moment, just many small ones, and I kept shifting to accommodate the weight of the myriad facts and ideas that had troubled me for so long. It is what it is.  Time to move on.