I know this is long, but my story of leaving the church is very wrapped up in my story of leaving my first husband, so it's all here:
I am the third of five kids in my family, born to converts of the LDS church. Our family moved to Utah when I was five. My parents were true believers, and really lived the gospel of Jesus Christ. They were genuinely kind, open, honest people who never pushed their religion on anyone else, and who never judged another by LDS standards. Obviously my grandparents on both sides and many of the extended family were not members, so it was easy for us to see that being Mormon didn’t equate with being a good person. I like to tell my mother that it’s her fault I was liberal enough to leave the church.
I had the usual Utah upbringing. My neighborhood was full of kids my age and most went to church. At the very least they came to camp and weeknight activities. We all played church ball, we all went to Seminary activities. Thanks to some amazing teachers and my parent’s strong beliefs, I like to think I was pretty well educated in my religion. I’d read the Book of Mormon and Bible, as well as the other books taught in Seminary and Institute. I had attended Missionary Prep classes and Temple Prep classes in the hopes that I might serve a mission when I was 21. Despite everything I knew about the church, I had never had that burning of the bosom that was supposed to verify truth, but I was certain that it would come if I just gave it time.
Instead of a mission I got married in 1992 and a little over a year later, I was pregnant with twins. My husband was slightly younger than I, so we were not exactly mature by any standard. But we had been high school sweethearts and stupidly thought that love could solve everything. And I was making it my life’s work to gain perfection. I wanted to be the perfect wife and the perfect mother and the perfect LDS woman. I’d see all the other perfect women at church and I’d come home and find myself lacking. I figured I’d just make everyone think we were perfect until we really were and could take our place among the chosen of Heavenly Father. However, we also had some problems. We had “sinned” with each other before we were married and I had always assumed that it was because we were so much in love. I didn’t realize it had much more to do with my husband’s long term addiction to pornography, phone sex and ‘modem sex’. I’d found this out from a phone bill about six weeks after we got married. My problem was an inability to deal with his addiction in any helpful kind of way and my overwhelming desire to hide the shame of this situation from everyone except the Bishop. I think the secretiveness and internalized guilt in my life was probably caused by my chronic, undiagnosed bi-polar disorder.
So mostly our world went like this: Schmuck (husband) would find a new online girlfriend and they’d carry on for a few weeks, then he would come confessing. I’d yell and scream and threaten and cry, I’d forbid him to speak to the woman again and then I’d make him go see the bishop, he’d improve for a little while and I’d go back to trying to make myself a better wife, only to feel like a failure when the cycle would repeat itself.
Then something amazing happened. Schmuck was hit by a drunk driver. He was ejected from his car and landed on his head twenty feet away. He spent 7 days in a coma, and 1 month in rehab. He should have died or, short of that, he should have had brain damage. But when it was all over he was completely ok. And even better than that, he was a changed man! Suddenly he was excited about religion, he believed he’d been given a second chance and vowed that he was going to make some big changes and, for almost 3 years, things were so much better. It was the happiest time in our marriage. It lasted just long enough for me to have our third child.
Six months after our son was born, the terrible cycle began again. But this time things were really falling apart. I’d start yelling and he would yell back. I began to realize that he was using me as an excuse to break up with a girl online, so that he could start over with someone new. I finally insisted that we get rid of the internet at home. After that he just started finding reasons to stay later and later at work. He finally moved a couch into his office so he could sleep there. He always claimed it was work and I’m sure it often was, but I felt hurt and took it out on him, and I started to bully him into coming home to spend time with the kids. The arguments escalated into him throwing things, and punching holes in the walls. He no longer made any pretence of wanting to be involved at church. I was on my own with three tiny kids, and I was miserable.
Throughout this period, I was leaning heavily on my friends and family for support. But they didn’t know the details of my situation because I was still trying to hide all of our imperfection. I was too embarrassed to explain how unhappy I was in my marriage. So as things got worse, I began to isolate myself more and more. I also talked to the bishops of the two different wards we lived in during this time but they were less than helpful. I don’t mean that I fault them for their lack of knowledge regarding the situation, but I blame the church generally for putting Bishops in situations for which they are not trained. It’s not their fault. But they get called to these positions and told to pray and rely on the lord for guidance. Really, they need to be taught to say, “This is out of my experience, you ought to see a licensed therapist and get some real help.” But that never happened.
Instead the poor Bishops had to come up with something on their own and I was told to be patient and longsuffering. To have a more Christ-like attitude. I was supposed to be an example to Schmuck, and I was the person the lord was counting on to help him live a righteous life. I was supposed to throw myself into my church calling and focus on my children and in doing good works I would somehow find happiness.
Oh, and there were these gems from Schmuck’s dad, who was in the Bishopric in his own ward. “If you’d just sleep with him more often, he wouldn’t have to go looking elsewhere.” And, “He’s just young, he’ll outgrow it. You don’t see men in their 60’s having problems with pornography, do you?” I was beginning to realize where Schmuck got it from.
Maybe it was, in part, my frustration with the church’s lack of useful support, or perhaps my unhappiness in general, that made me begin to question the truth of the Mormon church. Or maybe it was just that I had begun to see the little flaws in the management of it. But I found that as I sat in my meetings, I was beginning to disagree with things that were being said. We were studying Brigham Young that year and I remember sitting in the back of the room thinking, “That’s not right…that can’t be right.” And one afternoon I was driving around Salt Lake and saw the flower beds in the parking lot of the Genealogy Library being replanted for the third time that year, and I thought, “What a waste of tithing money. It’s a parking lot!” It began as a bunch of little things. Polygamy was so abhorrent to me because I knew the hurt it could cause. The idea of gaining perfection made my depression spiral into thoughts of suicide. Praying more didn’t help. Reading the scriptures didn’t bring peace. People said “Go to the temple when you feel down.” But, frankly, the temple had always sort of creeped me out. I was a hundred little doubts, but it added up to the realization that maybe I wasn’t where I belonged.
By the beginning of 1999, I had started to make a few preparations for the future, knowing that I couldn’t put up with this forever. I funneled a little money into a checking account of my own. I convinced Schmuck to move to a house closer to his work, and much closer to my parents, and I made plans to go back to college to finish a degree. One of the best things I did was get the internet at home again. We hadn’t had it because of Schmuck, but I was going to need it for school. Once I got online and realized that the web had resources for any kind of question, I was hooked. I started studying everything I could find about the church, its doctrine, its leadership and its history. To say I was shocked and amazed at what the church manages to hide with regard to its past would be an understatement. How could I not have known any of this? And if the church were true, why was it hiding so much?
Within a couple of weeks of starting my search, I knew that my little niggling doubts were only the tip of the iceberg. I had been absolutely right in questioning the leadership and the teachings of the church. I felt so let down. All the truth I had believed for 28 years of my life was wrong. I didn’t know whether to cry or feel grateful that I knew the truth. The rug had been pulled out from under me. But what now? How could I give up everything I had ever known? How could I disappoint my family and my friends? How would this impact my already failing marriage?
I made the final decision to leave after I found the Ex-mormon.org website and started reading other people’s exit stories. I stayed up all night reading and thinking and praying. I suppose I just needed to know that I wasn’t alone; that I was following in the footsteps of a lot of other intelligent individuals who just couldn’t put up with the secrets in the church anymore. And my prayers always made me feel like I needed to be confident in myself and my choice to leave. This WAS the right decision.
That was the easy part. Letting other people know was hard. When I told Schmuck, I asked if that was going to be a problem for him. I was expecting him not to care since he didn’t go to church anyway, and I would quit dragging him in to the bishop. It was quite surprising when he said, “But if you leave the church, how can we have a celestial marriage?” *BLINK* It just boggles the mind!!!
My parents were really nice about it. I told them that I had decided there were too many secrets in my life and that what I wanted more than anything was to just be honest; live my life with nothing hidden, ever! So I told them about all the hurt and arguing and abuse in my marriage. I told them about the holes in the walls and the things thrown at me. I told them that I was going to get some real counseling and give it one more shot, but that was it. And I told them that I wasn’t ever going back to church. I no longer believed Joseph Smith was a prophet, and once you lose that, everything else crumbles away. I explained that the only teachings of the church I could still embrace were the ones that are not unique to the Mormon church. The idea of the golden rule and the importance of family are taught by most religions and are practiced by people who aren’t religious at all. They said they felt sad that I would give up the church, but that they loved me, and always would. They felt terrible that they hadn’t seen what was happening in my life. But I told them no one had. I never let anyone. So it certainly wasn’t their fault. They offered all kinds of help so that I could go back to school and find some peace in my life.
The next Sunday morning, I drove over to the church to give the Bishop the ward bulletin (my calling at the time) and told him he would need to find someone else to do my calling because I wouldn’t be returning. He immediately invited me into his office and we sat and talked for about half an hour. I explained my feelings, and he suggested that I give it some time to think it over. I said that was fine, because it is a HUGE decision, and I agreed to meet with him again in a month.
For a year after that, I met with the bishop every month, and every month my firmness in the decision to leave the church grew stronger. I have to give the man credit for actually caring. The talks at first were very kind. Then he cajoled, and lectured. Finally he began threatening. He told me he was going to hold a disciplinary counsel. I said that he could do what he liked but I wouldn’t attend because I no longer recognized his authority over me. He told me that I was “going merrily down to hell.” To which I replied, “I’ll wave to you from the bottom.” His final words to me were a quote from the Book of Mormon. I felt a little bad when I pointed out the fact that I no longer believed in the B of M so his words meant nothing to me. A look of amused acquiescence came over his face and he replied, “Well, you’ve got me there.”
In the end, he never did hold a disciplinary counsel. I’m sure he was hoping I would change my mind and come back. And, as I’m sure you realize, Schmuck and I never did work it out. We spent that summer in marriage counseling. He finally quit coming and I went alone. It was on my birthday, in July, that I discovered Schmuck had an actual girlfriend in Colorado who he had been seeing on layovers while on his monthly business trips. He had left on one that morning, in fact. Happy Birthday! That was the line I couldn’t cross, so I called him and told him to move to his office when he got home. I offered him a couple more chances to reconcile and he did want to talk about working things out about 6 months later, but when I asked him to come around for dinner to discuss it, he said that he already had a date for that night and didn’t think he should cancel on her because that would be rude. Our divorce was final in the spring of 2000.
Thankfully, once I’d stopped hiding my life from the world, I made some pretty good friends in my neighborhood. I lost a few too, when I told them I wouldn’t be coming back to church. The Schmuck’s parents cut me off without a backward glance and have only minimal involvement with my kids. But my two best friends to this day are both very actively LDS. We have a lot of respect for each other. If nothing else, leaving the church will show you who your real friends are.
I spent almost a year in counseling, working out my own issues. I made a LOT of mistakes in my first marriage. By the end I was doing things to punish Dean and make him hurt too. It took me a while to realize I was only hurting myself and I needed to rethink my own attitudes or I would fail to ever find happiness. I also made it back to college. My mom watched my kids full time, taking the twins to Kindergarten for me, while I was in school. And I’d have dinner with my folks every night so that I could do homework instead of worrying about meals. The chance to be around other adults and make friends was more valuable to me than the education I was getting. I finally liked myself, and I could see that other people liked me for exactly who I was.
A couple of years after my divorce, I married a man who had grown up in Salt Lake but had never been a member. He’s one of the kindest men I’ve ever met. He’s agnostic and over time I’ve found myself following that line of thinking. It just makes sense to me. We can’t KNOW that God is what we’ve defined him as. We CAN make allowances for miraculous events without trying to explain them. And when we pass on from this life, we’ll find out what happens next, so why worry about it now? At this point I’m just trying to make this life as good as it can be. I find great enjoyment in my family and friends. I’ve taught my children to do what’s right because it’s right, not because someone told them to do it. I’ve found that kindness and generosity are almost always returned in kind. And more than any other guiding principal of my life, I believe that if I’m doing something I need to hide, I probably shouldn’t be doing it.
So, there’s my tale. I’ve had ten years to ponder all that happened and I have absolutely no doubts that I did the right thing leaving both the church and my first marriage. I recently decided I really ought to do the final paperwork for the church and I resigned my membership April 8, 2008. Incidentally, two of my brothers left the church about the same time I did. And my Mom, Dad and my sister’s family left the church about 2 years ago. I had never tried to talk my parents into seeing the church the way I saw it. I certainly didn’t want to be responsible for someone else going through the difficult process of leaving the church. But one day my mother said, “Kathy, I’d like to apologize for making you go to church all your life.” She had just been released as the RS president so needless to say, I was floored! But we’ve been able to be so honest with each other about everything in the past now. It has brought us much closer together. All of us feel like we’ve never been happier.
If you’re interested in any more details of this process, the following links are things I’ve posted to my live journal:
About dealing with parents who don’t understand: http://katphyre.livejournal.com/80472.html
About my parents leaving the church as well: http://katphyre.livejournal.com/80768.html
My letter requesting name removal: http://katphyre.livejournal.com/80999.html
Photos of letters from the Bishop and from Membership services: Click the link through LJ to my gallery and then click the letter you want to see. Use the size change option on the upper right side of the screen to blow each picture up for easier viewing. http://katphyre.livejournal.com/81275.html