From All-In to Pretty Much Done

When I talk to current members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there is often an uncomfortable moment in which they have to piece together the fact that I am no longer adherent to the Church. It’s awkward for both of us. I’m not trying to trick anyone. I also don’t want members to feel uncomfortable with me.

The other effect of this awkwardness is that the member will start to make assumptions about why I am no longer involved. Often, this means that they assume…

a) I never believed in the Church or the truth claims

b) I didn’t try hard enough to be faithful or was too lazy to Endure to the End

c) I was offended by someone I interacted with at Church and gave up on the whole thing.

None of these answers are true, but for most members these assumptions are important for maintaining worldview coherence. I get it. No one wants to get a huge messy life story when chatting at the gym, but it feels like a bummer to me that these assumptions prevent both members and post-members from having real friendships. I wish that I could know more member as full humans and I believe many members would benefit from friendships with post-members too.

I offer this small summary for two reasons: to give some background on my story for clients wondering about where I’m coming from and to offer some perspective for active believing members who want to be friends with Post-mormons but can’t imagine how someone in their circles could have made such a seemingly self-destructive choice.

Faith Transitions are like flowers–they all bloom in their own way. This is one way it can happen: it can grow directly from our commitment to the ideas (agency, integrity, love, and even faith) that we learned from our religious community in the first place.

All-in

Growing up in many different places, I felt like Mormonism (the mainstream LDS tradition) was my real “hometown.” Carpet-walled Church buildings, Linger Longers, and correlated lessons felt like home. When I graduated from High School, I bee-lined for BYU, where I graduated with Honors, a BFA, and then an MFA degree from LDS Church-owned Brigham Young University.

At BYU, I met an awesome guy and we got married in the Salt Lake Temple after our missions. We were both very TBM (truly believing Mormon/Members). We raised our kids in Utah for more than a decade before our faith deconstruction.

As our lives developed, I started to feel and see more of the systemic sexism in the Church. I felt overwhelmed and isolated trying to be a Family-Proclamation-style mother. And, I was increasingly frustrated by how empty and repetitive Church Meetings felt. I felt like I left Relief Society with more cognitive dissonance than charity.

I found some relief by supplementing my Church experience with other Christian apologists, but the relief was short-lived. General Conference reminded me every six months that we were not as fiscally generous or as Christlike as some of our religious cousins in Christianity, no matter how many times we used the name of Jesus.

Hanging out with Leah Young of Balanced Living with Leah

Deconstruction

At the end of 2019, I had a spiritual experience that led me into researching my family history of polygamy. That research was a huge relief. I was grateful to finally have answers for the unsettled feeling inside. It was also the beginning of a much bigger Faith Crisis. I had felt alone and disgusted with the background of Church polygamy for years, but I had always bullied myself into just “showing more faith” and “doubting my doubts.” But in the company of my ancestors, I came face to face with the ways that my upbringing and service in the Church had compromised my values, mental health, and self-worth.

Because I had many good memories of growing up Mormon though, I believed the Church could change. So, I began posting on Facebook and working with other Mormons who were working for change. I also hired my first coach, Leah Young, who had been through her own trauma with the Church.¹ As I worked through my challenges, I saw more and more evidence that my desires for the Church’s future were not welcome and people like me were being excommunicated.² In 2021, I spoke out on TikTok for a while but when it started to become a full-time job I opted to delete and withdraw.

As time went on, the Church doubled down on harmful practices and policies. I watched them justify not changing with tired non-logic. My believing friends and family continued to feel hurt or angry at me for pointing out problems. I watched LGBTQ+ members like David Archuleta open up about their experiences of passive or active suicidality. And others began to expose the Church’s huge underground sexual abuse scandals.

By the end of 2022, my husband and I had gotten the message loud and clear: the Church didn’t want change. It doesn’t like activists. It would rather protect the fantasy of its “good name” rather than create a healthy institution.

Nemo the Mormon hosted me for this special on C.S. Lewis in 2022.

Recovery

The long road of recovery sometimes felt like a nonconsensual roller coaster. I had trusted Church authorities more than my own grandparents. And I am still hugely disappointed in the flabby ethics of Church Leaders. I didn’t expect perfection. But, I had expected respect, decency, and honesty towards us as members.

But even though breaking up with Church leadership was painful, the nastiest surprise was watching my network of believing friends and family refuse to engage. I had thought that the cult dynamics described in books didn’t apply to my network of educated, spiritual, community-centered members. I thought we could solve any or all of these problems if we could just talk about it. But as more of my people adopted scripts of antagonism, name-calling, and dismissal, I had to face the fact that they were behaving in predictable ways, just like members of other cults. That was a reality check. It was also a clue. I added cult de-programming to my recovery regimen and felt an instant boost.

Now, 6 years after that initial “shelf-break,” I still feel weird sometimes in this new life. I am different on this side of things: I’m a softer parent, a more affectionate partner, a more adventurous artist, a more avid learner. I am more aware of history, more genuinely curious about others, less judgmental, and relived that I don’t have to worry about squishing all of science and humanity into a narrative that validates Kolob, Adam-ondi-Ahman, and 19th century American kinks.

At Home in the Wilderness

There are many women like me out there. Some of them are also LDS, like I was. They care about their families, their values, their communities and they sense that the Covenant Path is not working. But where will they go? How do we make new friends? What does life outside the Truman Show look like?

It took me years of experimentation to figure this out for me, and now that I am well on my way through healing, I realize I still care about helping others navigate that wilderness too.

Whether you’re fresh out of a “shelf breakage” or many years inactive or somewhere in between, there is a map through this for you and it is unique to you.

I don’t know where you’ll go after you leave, but I am confident that it can be better than what you are leaving behind.

Leah was dragged into the Church’s faux-legal court for “Excommunication,” an archaic practice of social rejection that the Church uses to punish and discredit Members who speak out. Leah’s Family’s Mormon Story was very moving to me. Listen to that here. ↩︎
Such as the articulate Peter Bleakley of Mormon Civil War Podcast. ↩︎