Here I go: I am not Mormon. I don't even believe in God, at least not in the traditional sense. Atheist, right here. Hi. I've been an Atheist for more than three years now. So you don't get to stop loving me because of this proclamation--because if you've loved me for the past three years, guess what? You loved atheist me. I am still the same person. 

 

I grew up Mormon. Not just mormon, but incredibly, devastatingly, irrefutably, faithfully, devotedly Mormon. As in--you know. I followed all the rules. I believed in Heavenly Father and Jesus and the Holy Ghost and I believed Joseph Smith was a prophet of God and I wanted my life to be a testament to those indisputable facts, and I wanted to live a good life and make God proud of me. I never wore tank tops. I did not drink or do drugs. I did my best to stay clean in mind and spirit, and I read my scriptures every day. I went to seminary, I went to church, I even held callings in the young womens program. The first time I kissed a boy, I cried because I felt so guilty. I realize that's taking things a little too extreme, but I'm just telling you...I was hardcore.

 

Most of all, though, I just KNEW it was true. I loved it. I KNEW it. I KNEW it was the ONLY way to be happy and have a good life. I KNEW that without my religion, my life would be empty and meaningless.

 

Can you imagine that?  Try.

 

I was hopelessly committed. I believed it with every fiber of my being. The sky was blue, the grass was green, and mormonism was pure, unadulterated, unquestionable, without a doubt, TRUTH.

 

And then one day I found out something that changed my life forever. I had a beloved Uncle who died from the tragic affects of alcoholism when I was young. He was a wonderful man with a beautiful soul. I was devastated by that loss, even though I was young. And I miss him. And I was very angry for a very long time....I knew alcohol was bad, because I was Mormon. And Mormons don't do alcohol. And I was so angry that he would do that. But I found out that not only was my beloved Uncle an Alcoholic, he was also a homosexual.

 

My whole life, the world had been so black and white. Right and wrong. And not just right and wrong...right and wrong as proclaimed by GOD. Can you imagine the power of that? Well, and homosexuality..it's just one of those WRONG things, according to Mormonism and God. And I had never questioned that. And I had never had a reason too.

 

But if my beloved uncle had been gay, and I hadn't even known it, and he was such a beautiful person...well how could he be BAD AND WRONG AND EVIL...when he was wonderful and kind and good?

 

This was the start of my cognitive dissonance. I read everything I could from the church about Homosexuality. It was a sin. It was evil. It was deeply, darkly BAD.

 

More questions came. I relied only on Mormon sources for my answers, still afraid to venture out of the safe bubble I grew up in. But I had so many questions. I went to old trusted seminary teachers. I went to institute teachers. Mostly, I went to God. I can't tell you how many nights I spent in tears on my knees, pleading with God to just take the questions away. I wanted Mormonism to be true. What would I do without it? I wanted the questions to have magical feel good answers.

 

But questions are dangerous things indeed, and once you ask them...you cannot un-ask them. They remain. You can ignore them, you can pretend you don't have them...but they stay. At the back of your mind. Nagging.

 

I wanted to know why Joseph Smith had 33 wives. Why some of them were married to other men in good standing with the church at the time of their sealing to the Prophet. And most of all, I wanted to know why I never learned about Joseph's polygamy in church...and why I found out from an LDS genealogy website. It made that movie about Joseph and Emma that they showed at the visitor center in SLC look like such a blatant lie! I wanted to know more about the book of Abraham, which just cannot be explained in reasonable and acceptable terms if you want to keep believing Joseph was a Prophet, Seer, and Revelator. I wanted to know why Gordon B Hinckley referred to wives as their husband's greatest "possessions" in an LDS general Conference. I wondered where God was after September 11, 2001, when the greatest revelation in General Conference that October was for girls to stop wearing flip flops to church and to only have one earring per ear. Really? That's all, God? We live in a world of so much hate, in so much need of healing, and the prophet, who apparently has a direct line of communication with you...talks about flip flops and earrings? How can I use my brain and still believe that?! And...I wanted desperately to understand how Polygamy could ever, possibly, even remotely be OK? And what about Mark Hoffman...those letters? How did he trick a Prophet of God? And why does Nephi kill Laban, even though God said thou shalt not kill...and God is allegedly unchanging--the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. That's kind of a rule change, God. What is it?  'You can kill people when I say it's ok, but only then.'?

Yeah. 

That works. 

No. It doesn't, actually. 

And why did the LDS church stop ERA, and why did the LDS church lie about their involvement in Proposition 8? And why did the LDS church build a gazillion $$$ mall in SLC, and condos to boot? Shouldn't churches be building....hospitals....in Africa? Or something a little more humanitarian, not commercial? 

 

And I went to people I loved and trusted with these questions. I went to God, always. Do you love me, God? Give me answers, please. How could you love me and think that it would be ok for me to live as someone's polygamous wife in the Celestial Kingdom someday? How is that heaven? Is the church true? How could Joseph be a prophet, God, when he lied about things? How could he say that polygamy was only ok if your first wife approved, then take wives in secret so Emma didn't know? How could he do that? How could you be a God of love and yet we live with so much hate? How could you let blacks not hold the priesthood, God? I expect that of men...men limited by their worldviews, their prejudices...but how could your prejudices match theirs? And why was it ok for women in the early church to give blessings, but not anymore? Why couldn't women pray in sacrament meeting during the 60s or 70s? How can obedience be the first principle of heaven? How is obedience a virtue, really, when you think about it? "Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion." ~ Oscar Wilde. 

 

Even deeper and more complex was the longing that I had, that I could not explain, and that I think basically most women feel on some level but may or may not realize it, was a connection with the divine. I knew that mormons allegedly believed in a heavenly mother...and it seemed so wrong and horrible to me to not have any knowledge or chance at connecting with the divine in a feminine way. I was told that God loved her so much that he didn't want us to take her name in vain or dishonor her in any way...but that's so convenient, isn't it? Essentially-- 'We don't know anything so just forget about her'. Or was it because there wasn't just one Her? And what kind of Goddess would need the protection of God? A subservient one, which is deeply troubling, and wholly unsatisfactory. I'm not trying to sound weird and hippie like..I am being for real. God is supposedly a man...and Jesus died for my sins and felt every pain imaginable. But how could he? There are painful experiences unique to female physiology. (Labor, anyone?) Jesus was a man, with a man's body...and the limitations that presents. If God had only ever been a man, how could he understand women like he understood men? It seemed wrong, and limiting, and at the root, deeply patriarchal in a very disenfranchising way for God to be limited by something as unoriginal as gender.

 

I wanted so badly to forget it all. I just wanted to go back to the comfort zone of my belief. Because the more I learned and studied, the more I realized I could never go back. And can you possibly grasp the ramifications of that fact?! I couldn't. I was terrified. It was all I knew, and it had kept me safe and happy for a long time. Except when it didn't keep me happy...because that happened, too--there were times I was paralyzed by the doubt, by the guilt of having these questions...there were moments when allegedly inspired words made me sick to my stomach...but mostly, truly and deeply, I wanted it to be True for me again. I wanted to have that unquestionable faith. I wanted to be able to be happy with the religion of my youth like everyone else I knew in Utah. I wanted to know the answers...it had been so simple. Follow the prophet. Marry a returned missionary in the temple. Endure to the end. Voila! I wanted it. I wanted it to be true, I wanted to remember what it was like to KNOW...

 

Because leaving...leaving was bad.

and hard.

and so, so scary. 

and social suicide.

and exile. Truly.

 

And.......how do you choose that? What logical, rational, normal person chooses that?

 

Well, me.

 

I did. Because in the end, if I had stayed...I would have lost all the self-respect I possessed. I wouldn't be able to look at my own reflection in the mirror. I wouldn't be happy or feel good about the person I was.

 

I cannot tell you how deeply, truly, unfathomably hard it was to leave the LDS Church. Not only because it was the only thing I knew, but also because of all the truly, deeply AMAZING people that are still a part of it. The amazing people that I loved, and who loved me, and who would not understand even for a second the thing I was doing. And because of the things I would lose. I couldn't know it then, but I would lose everything.

 

{Sometimes that's the trick to life. You have to be willing, at any given time, to give up that which you are for that which you can become}.

 

So I did it. I resigned. I wrote a letter. I delineated my reasons. I listened to the bishop plead with me to just be "inactive". And despite the overwhelming devastation....when I handed over that letter....I was flooded with peace. The same feeling I had been taught all my life was the "spirit" testifying the truthfulness of something to me. How did I feel the spirit when I was undoing everything? Leaving the church?

 

I went through a dark and sad time. I was a wreck, and I didn't know how to fix it. I lost everything--my entire worldview--and was left standing in the rubble, knowing that I had created the whole mess in the first place. I was a project for well-meaning friends, friends who abandoned me when they saw how serious I was about the whole heathen apostate thing. I can't even tell you how many people avoided me--even though I'd had these doubts, these questions, for a loooong time, and they didn't seem to mind me back then. I stopped sharing my journey with people I loved, because I hated losing people. I hated seeing old friends turn to walk in a different direction when they ran in to me simply because...why? Because I didn't believe in a book that was translated by a man with a seer stone in a hat? Really? 

 

I didn't go off the deep end...you know, they tell you that at church. That if you leave, it's because you've been offended, or you're lazy and you want to sin. But I was only offended by the lies the church had passed off as truth, the deceit I now saw was inherent to the history of the LDS church, and the mistreatment of all those silently deemed "second class citizens". Women, black people, homosexuals. I was offended, but not by people, by the doctrine.  And I didn't want to sin. There was no sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll in my postmormon lifestyle. I didn't want to sin. I just wanted what I had always wanted--truth, happiness, love, peace. Eventually I would cross some of the boundaries my religion raised around me, but it was on my terms, in moderate amounts, when I felt right about it. Mostly. I made mistakes, too, but I don't regret them entirely. I am who I am. The things I've done have made me who I am. I love me. I wouldn't be the same me without those experiences. And I was always doing my best. I've forgiven myself for my mistakes...what else can I do?

 

I remember one poignant night, sitting on my friend Jared's couch. I had no place else to be that night, and was deep in the midst of my wreck-phase. He was trying to convince me to go to church with him the next day, and I was trying to explain that it was too soon; the wounds were too fresh. I couldn't handle it. "Well, what do you believe?" He asked, certain I still had some faith left.

 

I didn't, though. I didn't have faith...not in the bible, not in God the Father, not in Jesus, not in salvivical bliss....I told Jared that I believed in love, and in humanity, and that I thought faith in anything else was rather futile. If it did good things for one, that was one thing. But it didn't do good things for me, and I was through with it.

 

"You don't even believe in Jesus?" He asked, utterly astonished. It was completely unfathomable to him. 

 

I shook my head. 

 

In a show of tenderness and sorrow, he took my hand. "Oh, Jo." He said softly, looking into the distance. "That must be so lonely." 

 

And it was. It was so lonely that even that one small act of understanding meant the world to me.  There was a void. I didn't believe that God would help me find my keys if I lost them and needed them and frantically asked him; I didn't believe anymore in my sinful nature and my desperate need to be saved. It was lonely, leaving all these things behind. Disconcerting. Scary.

 

But slowly, I made my way out of the loneliness and the rubble. I'm still doing it. I'm still on the journey, exploring, discovering, finding a way to make a beautiful life without the mandates of the religion I left behind. And when I look around me, I'm pretty damn pleased with myself. 

 

One of the worst things the bishop told me when I left, and that was repeated to me as a warning and admonition in the aftermath, was that I would never be truly happy without this one true gospel of Jesus Christ. And 99% of me knew that was bullshit. But there is that 1%, that little tiny 1% that is still a brainwashed little 19 year old girl, who still thinks God might actually talk to the LDS Prophet and would be incredibly displeased with me. And that 1% sneaks in and doubts me, sometimes.  But that peace, that overwhelming, reassuring, wonderful, deep down in my bones peace always reminds me that  I was doing my best, that I did only what I absolutely had to, and that it was right for me.

 

But I can say this for sure. The LDS Church may very well give some people true happiness. I haven't really seen it, but anything is possible. If that was true happiness, then I will take a pass any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Part of me believed that I would never be truly happy...but I didn't have another option. I couldn't go back to belief. I had to move forward. 

 

But really? Who can say that to someone? How would you even know? It's fear-mongering of the worst degree. 

 

A year ago, I stood in a sleeveless (gasp!) dress on a mountainside in my favorite place on earth (not the temple! double gasp!) and married the man I love more than anything else in this whole universe. If you try and tell me that day wasn't true happiness, you're a moron. Many months later, I held that same man's hand as I stared at an ultrasound screen and saw our baby stretching it's sweet little arms and legs around inside of me. If you try to tell me the tears on my cheeks were not tears of sheer amazement and joy at this miracle of new life, you are an even bigger moron. I have an amazing husband, a healthy baby growing inside of me, a fulfilling career, a beautiful home in a beautiful place. I did all of this without faith, without prayer, without a traditional belief in God. And I look around me and I can't imagine anything better. My life is amazing, and blessed, and perfect, and beautiful. I have an amazing family that I love and adore, many of whom didn't abandon me when I announced my apostasy. I have it all, truly. When I do good things, it's not because I want to make God happy. It's because I want to be good. I want to make this world beautiful. I want to make others lives more meaningful and beautiful. That comes from me. God may be out there, or God may not...I don't know the answers. I am content with not knowing.

 

I knew I was going to be ok one day after I had done a favor for an LDS girl I'd just met. She needed a ride to a friends apartment after a training meeting we'd both attended. I wasn't in a hurry, so I offered her a ride. On the drive to the friends apartment, she asked me something about mormonism, I think what ward I was in or something, and I informed her that I wasn't LDS. "What?!" She said, totally shocked. "You aren't?! But you are SO nice, and SO happy!!!" Her expression was one of bewilderment.  I told her that Mormons didn't have the corner on happiness or kindness, and hoped she would remember that.

 

The end. Out of the closet. That feels good. 

 

And I hope if you have taken the time to read this through, and you are LDS, you think more deeply the next time someone teaches a lesson at church about how damaging doubt is, and how weak those are who leave. Because if you take anything from this, I hope it's that following your own path takes guts, and it's hard, and nothing about leaving the Mormon church is ever easy. And I also hope you realize that true happiness is enjoyed by many people all over the world, LDS or not.