Why can’t you just be content to have your journey and let Church members be?

This is one of a series social media posts that I wrote in 2021 during the height of my Faith Transition. Because I was publicly deconstructing in front of an entirely faithful network of friends and followers, I received a lot reactions, questions, and backlash from people I loved regarding my journey. Many of them were dismissive or hostile towards me because they had been trained to me as a “defector.”

Since an overly long response in a comment or personal message would have been seen as aggressive, I took quotes from these reactions to write these public posts in response. I never attributed the person who asked the question since I didn’t want anyone to feel specifically blamed or called out for having the response. The questions are also not unique. They are part of the scripted response we were taught to have as members of the “in-group.” Still, each post begins with a quotation because it is a question I personally received during my Transition.

---

“Why can’t you just be content to have your journey and let Church members be?”

🌞To me, agency is sacred.🌞

It’s something I think a lot of Church members agree with me on (at least in theory).

📥 But, since our abilities to choose wisely rest heavily on the information that we have and the way we talk about or calibrate our logical processes and sense of reality with other people, that means I see the Church’s long-term deception, obfuscation, smear campaigns, and blame-reversals on the members as not just inconvenient, but morally outrageous. For generations, the Church (as an organization supported by the smaller decisions of thousands of different people) has been tampering with and assuming primacy over members’ most sacred and fundamental human right–their abilities to choose.

💭 The apologetic brain will respond reflexively to this characterization by saying,

🏹 “Members don’t have to do anything–they’re not forced at gunpoint to do anything,” Or

🛼 “You can leave any time you want, my sibling/friend/coworker left as a teenager and no one threatened them or forced them to come back. Everyone was fine with it,” Or
🥊 “The Church is a volunteer organization! Everyone has their agency! Are you forgetting the war in heaven??”
🤷‍♀️Arguing about the overall transparency metrics of the Church is not my goal. It’s being
done in other places and the evidence of Church-based manipulation, coercion, and disempowerment is abundant.
Still, I’m glad some people have had easy, painless transitions. Good for them.

All I know is that my own experience has not been easy.
❌ I was not given all the information.
❌ I was not encouraged or facilitated in finding the pertinent information.
❌ I was encouraged to make huge decisions that compromised my health and well-being repeatedly, based on that altered information.
❌ I was blamed as the problem, when I did end up finding the hidden information, 

❌ And, I was told that being upset or objecting to being systematically lied to by an organization I trusted with my whole heart actually means…that I’m defective/unfaithful/uncaring/lazy.
😕 That kind of sucks.
Even so, I have come through with relatively few scrapes, compared to many.
❣️Murphy and I are still happily married,
❣️our kids are young and don’t have to unpack years of their own indoctrination, 

❣️we have time to reorient and make room for some other life goals to sprout, and

❣️despite the difficulties in communicating with our close circles, the tone and conduct of our loved ones has been extraordinarily friendly and understanding, when compared with the aggressive shunning or spiteful treatment that others have received in their transitions.

🌼 Because of this, I feel like I am in a prime position to do service to my fellow members,

whether they still associate with the Church or not.

🌸I have abundant tools from studying this history for years and from working with story analysis to talk about Mormon history with critical thinking, empathy, and an open mind as to the spiritual experiences members report having.

💫 In the future, I will be posting a lot more about the interesting factoids, patterns, and individual stories that I have found in my journey–not because I have any particular outcome in mind for your or anyone’s life, but because I believe every person creates a unique, complex and beautiful tapestry with their choices and the more information we all have, the more capable we all are of creating a life-tapestry that we feel 100% proud of.

⏰Not everyone has the time to read first-hand accounts of polygamists in the 1800s or to compare multiple biographies of Joseph Smith.

Not everyone has the desire or patience to to thoroughly investigate questions like, “why would the 3 witnesses have lied??” Or

“Why would Helen Mar Kimball defend polygamy later in life, if it weren’t consensual?”

✅ I have.

✅I am.

✳️ And, I plan on sharing lots of those things with you.

👣 This is our shared, glorious, outrageous, disturbing heritage.

I love it, I’m saddened by it, I’m interested in it, I know a lot about it, and most mysteriously of all,

😉I still enjoy talking about it.

💫 My choices, my stress levels, my spirituality

have all changed based on the amount of information I have about it.

It’s all important.

It’s important for all of us to know this now.

🚧 The Church seems to be at a cross-roads. Nelson has introduced a slew of new jargon to the Church that is changing the way members think about their association with the Church, the way members view those who leave, the way members define words (like

“translation, “conversion,” “revelation,” and “history,”) and the way members make everyday choices.

🚧 As a global community, we are also at a crossroads.
👉 What do we do about climate change?
👉 How do we preserve peace between nations?
👉 How do we secure justice for the victimized?
👉 Who deserves to feel safe?
👉 How do we preserve a cultural diversity?
👉 What do we do about the wealth gap?
👉 Are women really people or still male-controlled capital?
👉 Will there be any semblance of a world left for our grandchildren, at this rate?
🌍We have a lot to do.
🌎We have a lot of information to consider.

🌏We have to process a lot of problems, all at

🌍We have a lot to do.

🌎 We have a lot of information to consider.

🌏We have to process a lot of problems, all at once.

🤷‍♀️ I don’t know how we’ll do it all, but I feel pretty confident that if we learn to talk about the hard things of Mormonism, maybe we will all be a little more able and a little more willing to address the hard questions everywhere else, too.

✨And besides, working together can make even the very hardest puzzles a lot of fun. ✨

Quote: “Tell me, what will you do with your one wild and precious life?” –Mary Oliver