The first and probably most important question to answer is, “How do I explain the spiritual experiences I had while in the church?”. I did have strong emotional experiences that I would happily characterize as spiritual. My answer is that all the spiritual feelings I labeled as evidence for the church’s authenticity were the natural consequences of connecting with other human beings and learning uplifting ideas.

The church does provide many opportunities to experience great love and to learn deep truths of life. But I also believe that in those moments of natural joy and spirituality the church asserts its proprietary association with those personal feelings and claims that the only reason they happened is because the church is the one and only true church on Earth. Each time I felt strong feelings of love or learning while doing anything related to the church, I was then immediately directed to log it as evidence that the church is true.

The fallacy of composition is a logical fallacy where one assumes something is true of the whole because it is true of a part. For example, a tire may be made of rubber but you’ll get very different results hitting a tire vs a car with a sledgehammer. The church uses this logical fallacy to convince people that their beautiful spiritual experiences while in or around the church are evidence of the truthfulness of the church as a whole, of its divine origins, and its authority to act on God’s behalf. When the more intellectually honest conclusion is that some of the activities the church promotes will occasionally produce a strong emotional / spiritual reaction. The evidence regarding the church as a whole is a correlation at best. A correlation it shares with innumerable other experiences and organizations.

While I was a member, I chose to accept those claims of truth via association. I was taught and chose to frame all my positive experiences as evidence in the church’s favor. And I did, because that’s what my people said I should do. I wanted to belong. 

If, as a child, everyone you loved, respected, and revered worshipped the color yellow, would you not likely color all your pictures yellow?

Now I see that there are many beautiful colors in the spectrum. And coloring exclusively with yellow all your life, though it is my favorite color, eventually came to feel not just monotonous but unbearable.

I now believe that those moments of love and learning have nothing inherently to do with the church or its claims of God’s authority and divine ordination, and everything to do with the inherent beauty of love and learning. Love and learning bring light into life, period. I’ve experienced just as potent and frequent spiritual feelings outside the church as I did inside. And I haven’t been keeping the commandments I was taught to. It just depends on how often I’m connecting with those I love and how often I’m taking the time to learn and share new things.

Fear of separation through death or abandonment are indeed as old as time. But I think it’s time for humanity to evolve above this base motivation, especially as a means to enforce obedience in children. The church teaches children and adults alike to fear things that are unhealthy, manipulative, and untrue. They do so because fear is one of the quickest ways to cultivate obedience, at least in the short term. 

In his book “Combatting Cult Mind Control”, Stephen Hassan refers to this behavior as “instilling phobias”, a process by which leaders repeatedly and emphatically teach members to fear separation from the group above all else, and promise catastrophic consequences for dissension. 

Here is a quotation from Brad Wilcox, a well-known leader in the LDS church, that exemplifies the attempts at scaring members into staying.

I felt so much fear as a teenager that I would be rejected by my family and neighbors. That no worthy woman would want to marry me. That any children I had, I would then lose after this life because I wasn’t going to be good enough. And that fear only grew as I got married and had a child.

Church members taught me throughout my life with incredible confidence “Families can be together forever” but the implicit message is, “Only worthy members of families in this church can be together forever.” 

For me, the fear of losing my loved ones or being separated from them eternally is as visceral as it gets. It wasn’t until I left the church that I could see the irony of a church using one hand to pat its back for the idea of “eternal families” and with the other hand introduce and uphold the doctrine of separating families for eternity. It’s not a giant mental leap, once a person knows how rare it is to be Mormon, to see that the church is actually introducing kids to the belief that most families won’t be together forever. As a kid, I just thought, “I am really lucky I was born into the church that lets me be with my family forever.”

Paradoxically, as I was being taught to fear losing my family, I was taught to be prepared to sacrifice them for the church. 

A quote from the church’s founder Joseph Smith conveys the general sentiment well…

I can unquestionably say, no God nor person is going to ever put me anywhere close to purposefully harming my child, much worse killing them. And excuse my expletive but any God asking someone to kill their kid deserves an unequivocal, “fuck you”. 

And what a sad figure to follow, the parent who would be willing to obey it. I found that I was holding myself to much higher standards than I was holding God to, much less any prophet.

It is a common doctrine in Christianity to forsake one’s family if they are not faithful. Even Christ himself teaches it in the New Testament.

I feel embarrassed to ever have espoused even an interpretation of scriptures like this that so blatantly threaten damnation, abandonment, separation, and violence to individuals and their families. At the same time as being taught to fear I will not be worthy to be with my family after this life, I am being taught to fear having to deny and fight my family if they are not worthy. Divisive, starts to look like an appropriate adjective for the doctrines of Christianity. Fending off damnation with one hand and abandonment with the other.

A similarly disturbing Mormon scripture story is that of Emma Smith, Joseph Smith’s first wife, being coerced into accepting polygamy. Joseph Smith delivered the following verses to Emma Smith and the church amidst his active practice of poligamy, including marriage to a local 14 year old girl. Joseph introduced the following revelation from God shortly after telling Emma about having begun the practice of polygamy without her knowledge.

God speaking through Joseph Smith to his wife Emma…

I can’t imagine being put in the position where you’re told by your spouse and your children’s father that God has commanded them to marry other people, including children as young as 14, and they are telling you that God is commanding you to accept it on threat of destruction. I’m sure this woman and mother was put to the ultimate test of God vs her own morality. If she doesn’t accept her husband’s numerous brides, including child brides, God will not only separate her from her husband, but from her children, and will destroy her completely. That’s the God taught in the most recent scriptures of the LDS church, one of polygamy, pedophilia, separation, and destruction.

Sadly, I learned what it was like to be separated from my child. After my divorce, I was given 50/50 custody of my son. It was and often still is excruciating to spend every other week away from my son. And I can confidently tell you, I’m not interested in being part of any organization that has the balls to tell me whether or not I can be with my son after death. It’s cruel and divisive to use a person’s love of their family to garner devotion to any type of organization.

To spiritually and emotionally hold hostage a child’s family, demanding a lifetime of devotion as the due ransom, is psychologically abusive. To hijack a child or parent’s most delicate and vulnerable feelings of love for their family, will often do irreparable harm to that child’s ability to form healthy attachments.

In the temple I recall feeling real fear regarding remembering the temple name, signs, and tokens of the priesthood (the secret associated gestures for the promises I'd made). Similarly, I was very scared of sharing that information outside the temple.

The endowment is described this way, “Your Endowment is to prepare you to receive all those ordinances in the House if the Lord, which are necessary for you to enable you to walk back to the presence of the Father, passing the angels who stand as sentinels, being able to give them the key words, the signs and tokens, pertaining to the Holy Priesthood, and gain your eternal exaltation.”

The understanding I had was that those “sentinels” will destroy me if I don’t have the words, signs, and tokens. Not long before I went through the temple, those signs and tokens had associated penalties: gestures which represented “different ways in which life may be taken” including the cutting of the throat and body. In addition, the pledge of secrecy that comes with these signs and tokens used to include the pledge that, “Rather than [reveal these tokens, signs, and penalties], I would suffer my life to be taken”.

Like I said, many of the threats of danger and violence have been removed, obscured, or softened, but some remnants are still there and the sentiment of secrecy and fear is absolutely still present. All of this takes an even worse color under the historical context of the endowment’s introduction, about which there is disagreement and controversy.

Nonetheless, I always felt pretty uncomfortable in the temple and now I can better understand why. I’m not interested in an organization that would implement these violent and manipulative threats no matter how implicit they might be.

I’ll end this section with a short but perfectly representative quote from one of the church’s apostles. He gives a very smarmy assurance he doesn’t want to scare the audience, before the following comment…

In the later days of my membership I spent a lot of time learning about various cults and the patterns they follow. I learned that this pattern of irrational fear is in every cult. As mentioned previously, cult expert, Steven Hassan, calls this practice "Instilling Phobias", a hallmark strategy of unhealthy organizations.

Cult leaders convince members that they’ve accumulated all these blessings and guarantees by their obedience. Cult leaders convince their followers that they are illogically protected by their obedience and that by questioning their teachings or worse by questioning the leaders, they will expose themselves to evil, danger, and even death.

I think this practice is manipulative and dangerous, and as always, especially horrible to teach developing children and teens.

This practice is best encapsulated by a quote from a past prophet from the church.

I always wanted to be a “man of God”. I knew that’s what people thought of my dad as he served as the leader in our local congregation. I knew that if I kept all the commandments, stayed pure, and let my life be “swallowed up in the will of the Father” I could consider myself a man of God too. My self worth was almost completely wrapped up in my worthiness according to the church’s standards, and you can imagine why. It’s not a far jump to have conflated my worthiness with my worth.

So, as I went through life, I felt acute shame for the ways that I wasn’t worthy in the eyes of God and my friends and family, all of whom were members. The church makes it a very public affair whether you are worthy, especially for males. Every week the members are expected to take a sacrament of bread and water in a meeting with the whole congregation sitting in silence and watching. 

The sacrament is sacred in LDS teachings and should not be taken by those who have committed serious sins. Serious sins included any sexual expression outside of marriage. That itself was enough to create some soul wrenching anxiety as a sexually-developing teenager. 

To add insult to injury, young men from age twelve up are expected to organize, prepare, pass, and bless the sacrament; all of which is performed in front of their family, friends, and neighbors sitting quietly with nothing to do but watch them. Those who administer the sacrament are expected to be even more worthy than those taking it.

I recall suicidal ideation occurring regularly and directly related to the guilt and shame of sacrament meeting. On a weekly basis I was torn in two between what my family and friends think of me and what God thought of me. 

“Am I worthy enough this week? What will my family and friends think if I don't participate? Will I be damned if I take this sacrament when I’m not worthy?”

 It was excruciating. And It started at 12 years old. 

Public scrutiny in sacrament meetings is only the beginning. Other opportunities to loathe myself came all too often, and only increased in their level of intensity and public scrutiny. All of which require you to be worthy to participate. I was expected to attend the temple regularly, to be baptized, confirmed, or participate in other lengthy rituals on behalf of the dead. I was asked to give blessings to the sick or troubled members around me. I was expected to bless my child when they were born. I was expected to perform ordinance rituals of baptism and confirmation. Every one of those activities have either an implicit expectation of worthiness or require explicit declarations of worthiness in interviews with a designated local leader.

Regularly, I was expected to declare privately my worthiness and devotion to the church to the local leader by way of a “worthiness interview”. I sat in a room with countless old men, some of which I knew well, some of which I had never met before, and was asked to declare my devotion to Jesus Christ, the church, the global and local church leadership, my obedience to the law of sexual purity, the law of dietary restrictions including drugs, alcohol, and coffee, the law of tithing (a mandatory 10% donation of one’s income), and a various other commandments including Sabbath day behavior restriction and day and night wearing of the temple underwear garments. 

The shame of one’s worthiness is brutal in these one on one interviews. Despite most of these men being genuine and kind individuals, it always felt like I was not enough. My worth was completely tied up in my obedience. Even when I was declared “worthy” by a church authority, it only served to sait a religiously dependent ego.

I recall vividly the shame and terror I felt knowing I needed to go confess sins to the bishop, but not wanting my family to find out. My dad was the bishop for most of my teenage years and so I suffered in silence all those years, knowing I was unworthy but too ashamed to confess my unworthiness to my dad. I wanted him and everyone around me to think I was a good member and a worthy priesthood holder. And to be proud of me.

One of the events that triggered my deconstruction centers around this practice of confessing sins as a means of becoming worthy.

The church has a process for members who have been sealed in the temple, divorced, then wish to remarry. It involves some interviews and approvals from local leaders and submitting some online forms. One of the forms had a question that shook me. I wish I had taken a screenshot of it, but this was the gist of the question.

That was the first time in my church experience where I felt genuinely that the church had done something wrong. I know that members will likely also feel this was wrong to ask and just a procedural misstep of the church but to me, it was a misstep that unveiled a foundational misalignment. I realized slowly over the following years that not only did I believe that it was wrong for me to be asked to regurgitate all my sins, it is wrong to make people believe they are sinful.

I responded, “I will not be listing out all my sins nor those I have resolved with church authorities and I believe it is wrong for you to ask me to do so.”

It was around this time that I recognized how this idea of sin and worthiness might just be a sham. A farce used to instill obedience in me.

Obedience is a core theme in Mormon and Christian doctrine. The scripture “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” (John 14:15) comes to mind. And now having left the church, that frankly sounds to me exactly like a manipulative threat from a codependent partner. In essence what I hear now is, “Prove you care about me by doing exactly what I ask.” I wouldn’t tolerate that from a partner, but I embraced it from my church because I assumed it was all sourced from a perfect and loving God. I hoped that my obedience would make me worthy of God’s blessings. Just like a codependent lover hopes their subservience will earn affection.

It feels reminiscent of every cult documentary I’ve watched. Charismatic leaders making impossible claims of eternal and spiritual blessings attained by giving up everything you have and are to the cult. I learned that I was only really "safe" by trying my best to be everything the church required. I wanted to be worthy, so that I could be happy. So I could belong. So I could be loved. 

The prophet of the church taught it clearly as an apostle, previous to his ordination,

It’s pretty clear, the love of God in the Mormon gospel is not offered to those who don’t keep his commandments. It was clear from the start, I needed to give all of myself to the church if I wanted to be loved.

The temple covenant is the penultimate example of how members are expected to treat themselves.

Now, I know there’s a lot of variation to people’s experience with these rules. And I’ve completely left out the female rules. But just looking at that, it freaks me out how homogenous it makes a group of wonderfully unique and individual people feel. It is a trope of cults to make its members feel like they are no longer individuals but swallowed up in a larger purpose. There is a very tempting half-truth in the thought I remember having, “By letting the church decide these things for me, I am free from those decisions and have more capacity to serve.”

While these expectations and rules seem minor as individual issues, when taken as a whole, start to look a lot like erasing a person’s ability to express themselves and more importantly suppressing a person’s ability to dissent. The mission experience feels like a boot camp for disconnection, from self, from friends, from family, from reality. The dress code was just the surface-level manifestation of the deeply rooted psychological training underway for these young adults.

I remember some visceral experiences of shame from my teenage years around appearance. I’ve always really loved playing with my appearance. I wore all sorts of experimental and loud clothing. I had many hairstyles. It was and is still fun for me to step into different personas through changing up my appearance.

One Sunday, when I was probably 14, I decided to do something edgy. I wore a purple dress shirt to church. During the Sunday school lesson with all the young men (my friends and neighbors) present, a visiting local authority figure singled me out and remarked how I was not fit to do priesthood duties like pass the sacrament in my choice of apparel. My heart sunk. And over what, a purple shirt? I never wore a colored shirt like that again to church. I wasn’t going to get shame bombed like that again. Though I did continue to play with my hairstyles, there was a recurring sentiment from my parents and leaders that my hair was inappropriate for a priesthood holder and I would not be allowed to do so on a church mission.

The issue of personal appearance alone doesn’t hold a crazy amount of weight for me, but in the context of cult mind control, it’s a bad look. When a place doesn’t feel safe enough to express yourself in physical appearance, how likely is it for a person to feel safe enough to present their most delicate thoughts and feelings?

Another element around which I learned to feel shame in the church was prioritizing myself. A recurring theme of the doctrines I most treasured was that “sacrifice brings forth the blessings of heaven”. That I should be sacrificing myself at every opportunity for the building of God’s kingdom. I recall feeling a lot of relief in the idea that I could just surrender my life to God.

The church’s doctrine is rife with teachings about the folly of self-confidence and self-esteem. I really struggled to develop self-esteem, especially regarding sexuality, so these teachings felt like a relief for me. I could just give myself to God instead of developing confidence in myself.

The following teachings resonated deeply for me during those developmental years:

What that scripture meant to me…

I am right to be miserable because I struggle with sins. If this prophet speaking, arguably one of the more righteous men ever, calls himself “wretched” and grieves when he desires to rejoice, then I couldn’t be more correct in my suffering and depression over my failure to meet church standards.

What that scripture meant to me…

I am nothing to be proud of. I am less than the dust of the earth. I am and always will be eternally indebted to God, regardless of how well I keep his commandments. The only way to get anything good is doing what he asks. Do not prioritize yourself. Prioritize God if you want to eek out any sense of joy or meaning.

What that Apostle’s message meant to me…

I need to give God my will. Only by surrendering myself and all of my decisions to him can I be saved and rejoin God in heaven. Joy will come from me choosing God and his church over myself and my interests.

These lessons and countless others of self-deprecation and self-sacrifice contributed significantly to some of the most difficult parts of my life. Namely, getting married really young to someone who was a good choice by the church’s standard but a terrible match for me personally.

When I was age 16 I received a Patriarchal blessing (a fortune telling from an old local male authority). That was my first time being pressured to marry quickly, “After you have returned from your mission, …first and foremost, it will be your responsibility to search out your eternal companion and to marry her in the house of the Lord.” It was always the expectation to get married in my early 20s and only to a worthy church member.

So, at 16 I was primed to make getting married my primary goal after serving a 2 year mission for the church. Similar lessons were taught to me throughout the next 5 years. Then, on the last day of my mission, my mission president made the same exact type of commission to me that “when you get home, getting married to a worthy woman is much more important than any other pursuit.” When I got home, I attended one of many exclusive congregations specifically targeted at getting young adults in the church married to one another. I could only attend while between the ages 18-30. Temple marriage was the doctrine taught on repeat. Along with it, the message that “as long as two people are righteous members, they can make their marriage work”. I adopted that ideology wholesale. I thought, if anyone can make a marriage work it’s God and me. An absurd thought in retrospect.

So in dating, my main priority was finding someone interested in marrying me, “the wretched man that I [was]” and finding someone who was likewise committed to the church. And as long as I got along with this person decently and felt love for them, I should marry them. So I did. And it was a trainwreck. She and I were so different in so many ways when it came to living actual life. And all those differences just stacked on top of the issues around sexuality. Frankly, now I am just grateful that she had the gumption to initiate a divorce because I was so committed to God that I would make my marriage work, I think I would’ve literally died trying, maybe at my own hand. I distinctly remember getting married and I thought, “this is going to be hard, but the suffering will just refine me.” I had learned to in essence become a masochist. And it only makes sense, I had been taught to worship a man for being crucified. I worshiped him for his suffering. I sang all of my childhood, “I’m trying to be like Jesus.”

I want to insert here a very emphatic statement that I could not be more grateful for my son who came from that marriage and I would absolutely suffer it all again to have him in my life. But I would not have him suffer the same things I did if I can help it. Things I’d want him to know: first of all, marriage is optional. And secondly, marriage is an enormous and life-altering decision. The church doesn’t have to live with your spouse, you do. Every day of the rest of your life. So to my kids I’d say, be unrelentingly selfish and prioritize yourself more than you’re inclined to when you choose who to marry, not that you even need to get married to be happy. But for the love of God, please make it somebody cool.

What that scripture understandably meant to me…

You should become perfect like Jesus Christ and God.

What that scripture meant to me…

The goal of existence is to become perfect in everything we can. Through constant evaluation and unyielding effort to do your best, you can please the almighty God and he will bless you with the things you want.

What that scripture meant to me…

You ought to be anxiously looking for the right things to do. God will give you commandments, but if all you’re doing is following those commandments then you’re a slothful and unwise servant. It is not enough to do as God asks. We must be in a state of anxiety to preemptively anticipate what God would want us to do. Only through constant vigilance and fearful anticipation of God’s will can we avoid being damned.

It goes without saying that I was pretty much the archetypal boy scout. And I was actually in boy scouts and reached the eagle rank.

It didn’t really ever occur to me until I was leaving the church that this striving for perfection was bad. It was overwhelming and brought me a lot of shame, but I thought it was good motivation. I was raised to pursue excellence. In school, recreation, and especially in church my parents had high expectations for my performance. And largely, I’m very grateful to have been pushed to be ambitious and hard working. There’s a lot of value in hard work and ambition. Much about it was stretching in good ways. But when it comes to the spirituality of a person, I think it is a dramatic misstep to pursue anything so lofty and ambiguous as perfection.

Like life generally, I believe the soul of a person is a work of art. And you can no more perfect a person than you can perfect a song or piece of art. The value is in the enjoyment of it, whether that’s creating it or experiencing it. I feel like it’s best visualized in how unique and cool I find my siblings to all be. But we’ve all got some pretty crazy perfectionistic tendencies.

I believe that rest and relaxation are just as valuable and important as work and productivity. But it is extremely difficult for me to feel peaceful when I relax or rest. I learned to feel “anxious” about finding the “right” things to do. I don’t think that’s healthy. The benefits of work and productivity are obvious, we don’t need to add some unachievable weight of eternal damnation to them. I don’t believe human’s need to be taught that working hard and doing good things for others will win them invisible spiritual favor and reward from deity. I think we have a built in desire to create things and to care for each other.

Being shamed into working hard or caring for others only poisons the well of motivation. I have felt that very viscerally as I’ve left the church and many people have randomly dropped off treats at our home in attempts to reactivate us. Whatever genuine care there is, which I’m sure there is some, it is soured by knowing that the church tells them that their salvation depends to some degree on their attempts to fulfill their callings and reactivate us through missionary work. It really sucks to feel you have to be kind or work hard for any other reason than that we care about ourselves and we care about others.

This doctrine of never questioning church leaders, even when your feelings are at odds with the leaders, is the perfect example of teaching people to ignore and subvert their natural sense of right and wrong. And in turn, their self-confidence and self-trust. Thereby, you are distanced / isolated from your authentic feelings and thoughts.

The church’s general stance toward a person’s conscience is that it should be followed, except when it is in conflict with the church. The unspoken doctrine is that the church should never be in conflict with one’s conscience. But if it is, a person should follow the church. The token follow-up offered to members with divergent thinking is, “Do not worry, …

I didn’t think of it this way for the longest time but letting the church tell me to not listen to ex mormon’s negative experiences and critique is the same as a company telling me not to read their negative reviews. Would you be willing to hide the 1 and 2 star reviews from Amazon? Doubtful. Healthy organizations welcome critique and invite open discourse. Discouraging an open forum and dialogue between opposing viewpoints is a quick and dirty way to cultivate echo chambers, ignorance, fear, intolerance, and most of all, isolation.

Voltaire is attributed with writing, “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize”. Critique of the church and especially its leadership is not tolerated in the church.

The doctrine of specialness and being favored by God created a distance in my mind between me and all non-believing people. Having been taught that I was other people’s best chance at being saved for eternity, I struggled to have hope and love and kindness for those people who weren’t living in accordance with Mormon doctrine. I couldn’t actually be happy for other people who got tattoos, lived a homosexual lifestyle, or moved in with an unmarried significant other etc. Even if those things were incredibly happy and uplifting experiences for them. My humanity was constantly stunted by my discipleship.

Sadly that stunted humanity even manifested at times as apathy. When you believe the world’s gonna burn anyways, why bother worrying about global warming, ya know?

The most surprising moment of all my experiences in leaving the church was just minutes after my wife and I had finally decided that we were really going to leave. I remember feeling a myriad of emotions but one caught me off guard. I felt a swell of love and appreciation for humanity. All the diverse people and their ways of pursuing happiness went from tainted by their lack of the gospel, to inherently beautiful and worthy of love. It has been a journey to maintain that sense of love sometimes, but I can confidently say that I feel so grateful for the freedom to admire people genuinely for who they are, without the siren song of my specialness and their lostness playing in the background.

Ironically, another way in which I was isolated by the church was from my own family.

The church encourages members to teach their doctrines at home but the vast majority of my doctrinal learning was done in classes with kids of a similar age isolated from my family.

The most dramatic example of isolated indoctrination I experienced as a minor was at a summer camp called EFY e.g. Especially for Youth. I spent 5 consecutive days during the summer for most of my tween years at this doctrinal bootcamp. The curriculum is a mixture of playful socializing with other youths and intensive doctrinal workshops and lectures. I was surrounded by young adults paid to be counselors and promote testimony building. Hundreds of youths were all around me with the primary objective of obtaining a spiritual witness that the church is true. Families paid a good amount to have their child there. And the expectation of a testimony building experience is completely upfront.

The culmination of the weeklong experience is a testimony night. Each day leading up had been full of exhausting, spiritual, and socially intensive experiences, such that I felt extremely bonded with my peers and counselor. On the final night, we were gathered in a small room and exhorted to each share our testimony of the gospel. I recall feeling overcome by emotion in those meetings. I thought it was the spirit. But that’s what I was told by all of the people I loved and trusted most. Now, I think it was a combination of cult mind control tactics used to produce strong emotional reactions and interpersonal bonding.

We were young, uninformed, exhausted, desperate to be seen as holy, desperate to belong to our tribe, and surrounded by cool camp counselors being paid to generate testimonies. One by one we went in front of the group and proclaimed our love of the gospel and our knowledge that the church was true. I genuinely felt it was a highlight for me of my teenage years to bond with other kids my age and feel so accepted. The love between us and the environment of friendship was quite genuine. That acceptance, love, friendship combined with exhaustion, social anxiety, and peer pressure was the perfect cocktail for an intense socio-emotional reaction in a hormonal 13-15 year old. And this intense emotional week was inextricably presented as evidence that the church is true and devotion to it will yield continued comparable experiences.

I returned home fully convinced that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was God’s only true church on the Earth and that I would never leave it. And returned to EFY every year I was allowed.

This pattern went from 0 to 100 as I joined the missionary program at 18.

When I was a missionary, I was allowed one hour a week to email my friends and family. I was allowed an hour long phone call only on mother’s day and Christmas during the entire two years I served. Since then, the church has opened up the opportunity for calls home to be more frequent.

During the time I was a missionary I was surrounded by extreme pressure to study scripture, pray, and convert non-believers to mormonism. It was a program of complete immersion where the only sense of safety or familiarity available came from the church. They provided housing, rules for dress, behavior, diet, as well as a fellow missionary companion with whom you were expected to keep within sight and or hearing distance 24/7 (with the toilet as the only exception).

I say all this to point out what an incredibly isolating program it was. No family. No chosen friends. The only available support are heavily invested leaders and peer missionaries from the church and they’re all deeply committed to you continuing to share the gospel every day (13-15 hours per day), and to you remaining the full duration of your two-year calling.

What happens if a missionary summons the unbelievable courage to leave before their two years are up? They would be considered to have returned home “dishonorably”. And with no exaggeration I can say, I was deathly afraid of that outcome. I knew how frequently the young women in church were taught to marry an “honorable” return missionary. To leave early, or worse be sent home early for being unworthy was absolutely my worst nightmare. It was, I think, the equivalent for girls of having sex before marriage in church teachings. People would consider you weak, unclean, and unworthy of a righteous spouse. An embarrassment. Coming home early was never even mentioned as potentially on the table between my parents and I, though they knew I really struggled in the initial months of my mission.

So, there I was in Finland. It was early February and about -5˚ Farenheit. I was living with a complete stranger assigned to me as my companion in a city just outside Helsinki, Finland. We were new to the area and so had no friends nor prospects for teaching. Every day we spent hour after hour in the freezing cold trying to talk to strangers about the church on the street and at their doorsteps in broken Finnish. I remember struggling with my mouth being too cold to even form what few Finnish words I did know.

Something else to note is that missionaries in the church view themselves as direct representatives for Jesus Christ himself. And thereby, are held to an extreme level of morality.

Beyond the physical pain of cold and exhaustion, I was writhing with moral pain for having been somewhat intimate with an ex-girlfriend before entering the mission field and not having confessed all my sins in detail to a church authority previous to leaving on my mission. And for reference, this was PG-13 level stuff I had done with my girlfriend.

I can almost laugh about how ridiculous it sounds now, except that I still recall the depth of the depression it brought. I remember considering ways in which I could “accidentally” be maimed or killed so that the moral pain would be over and I could have still served “honorably” in my community’s eyes. Standing next to the speed trains in the freezing snowy night, I remember how terrifyingly close I came to “slipping” off the platform or putting a leg out in front of a passing train. That’s how seriously this commitment to serve God honorably had been taught to me. And how catastrophic the prospect of going home early felt.

I felt so trapped. In the end, I was able to put the value of my life over the shame of coming home early and confessed to the mission president. I considered myself unbelievably lucky that the mission president allowed me to stay.

I’m really glad I chose to live. But shame on the church for promoting that kind of self-loathing, especially in vulnerable and isolated teenagers. It is in my opinion about as close as you can get to child abuse without being able to legally prosecute. Sadly, most missionaries I’ve talked to about these experiences share similar memories of anxiety, depression, and thoughts of self-harm.

In more recent years, I’ve become keenly aware of how my still-active parents are being isolated from their inactive children and grandchildren. Time during the week with my parents is regularly occupied by either church attendance, administrative meetings, temple attendance, or church assigned duties. It is a genuine disappointment to not be able to do things with them on these occasions. It doesn’t take all of their time obviously but it’s also not a small amount of their time either. And frankly it just feels bad that they’re spending hours every week doing ceremonies that are supposed to let dead strangers be saved in the afterlife rather than spend quality time with their children and grandchildren in their current life. 

Similarly, older members are encouraged and often expected to serve long-term full-time missions away from home and family for the church. Church missions range usually between 6-24 months and are served both nationally and internationally. It’s been an expectation my whole life any married member would serve a mission with their spouse after retirement. It wasn’t until I had my daughter last year that I recognized what a heartbreak it would be to deprive her of 6-24 months of relationship with her grandparents. It is hard for me to not feel personally hurt to have my parents choose to spend months or years of their life with strangers in a multi-billion dollar organization rather than with their children and grandchildren.

I don’t judge them at all. I understand it comes from a place of love and hope for their family. But sadly it doesn’t change how it feels for me and my family.

So, you’ll see why I feel some sorrow for the ways in which the church has separated family members from one another and continues to do so.

There is good reason for believing others by default. It is horribly inconvenient to start interactions from a place of doubting the veracity of others’ testimonies. I write this today, not because I found it easy to leave the church, but because it was horribly painful and yet completely unavoidable for me. And it didn’t feel like I had much of a choice in the matter. I was taught that people leave the church because they’re “hearts failed them” or “they were deceived” by the devil. It was never even hinted at that they maybe came to feel deeply that the church’s doctrines were untrue or that upholding church doctrines became unbearable to teach to their children. That was my experience, and I was a staunch believer for 30 years that I would never leave. I thought I was more likely to die. Probably from all the shame.

I think many of us can easily acknowledge that confidence is not directly correlated to truth. We see confident people and groups fail or proven wrong regularly. We often even enjoy to see it when the overconfident get reality-checked.

But what happens when there is no way to prove a confident person wrong. That is the issue set before anyone questioning Mormonism or religion for that matter. That is the issue set before young children born into the church. That is the issue set before vulnerable investigators. And when you’ve not yet had any doubts or misgivings with the church, why try to prove it wrong? Why try to prove wrong the organization on which all of your most treasured hopes and relationships hang. The love of your parents and siblings, the respect of your peers, the promise of your future family. They all hang on the hooks of this confidence.

I couldn’t earnestly question that confidence until the fear, shame, and isolation in the church’s teachings grew so large that they matched my previous hopes and confidence.

This confidence is usually coupled and indistinguishable from the absolutes of the church’s precepts. And though I know it is an oversimplification, I love to juxtapose these two quotes, one from a church leader and another from Star Wars.

Crisis capitalism is the practice of exploiting the crises of others in order to further one’s own interests and power. This is already a devious practice. But the penultimate evil, in my opinion, is to not only capitalize on crises but to manufacture crises for others only to then use them for one's gain.

If you haven’t, you should watch “V for Vendetta”. It is the perfect example of an organization manufacturing crises in order to take advantage of a population. The church, as a whole, is practicing this and promoting it through their missionary efforts. They taught me to beg for forgiveness by teaching me I was sinful. They taught me to yearn eternal life by teaching me to fear eternal damnation. They taught me to need God by teaching me I wasn’t enough.

In my attempts to regain my wellbeing, I have found a lot of peace in some quotations from Alan Watts:

Modern Mormonism is definitely evolving. The temple is far less violent. African heritage members can hold full-privileged membership. Members can get tattoos and multiple piercings. Even some level of critique for previous and current church leaders seems to be openly embraced by members with increasingly nuanced beliefs.

Writers like Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye portray the mindset of a new generation of LDS members who seem able to set aside mistakes and misalignment and focus on the general faith and community the church promotes. This paragraph stood out to me.

It’s a conflicting feeling to empathize with and understand the struggle staying in the church. I have family and friends like this writer Michelle doing it now. I did it for about 2 or 3 years. I do respect the endeavor. And I hope the church does grow to be a place that aligns with my values. But for now, the difference between what I feel is good and what the church teaches has more dissonance than I can uphold.

Unfortunately, the historical, social, and logical evidence feels stacked beyond the resonance of my values. And I don’t feel I need the church to live according to my values. If I thought there was a chance of real reform in the church to abandon harmful and untrue doctrines and practices, I’d probably still be an active member.

The first and probably most important question to answer is, “How do I explain the spiritual experiences I had while in the church?”. I did have strong emotional experiences that I would happily characterize as spiritual. My answer is that all the spiritual feelings I labeled as evidence for the church’s authenticity were the natural consequences of connecting with other human beings and learning uplifting ideas.

The church does provide many opportunities to experience great love and to learn deep truths of life. But I also believe that in those moments of natural joy and spirituality the church asserts its proprietary association with those personal feelings and claims that the only reason they happened is because the church is the one and only true church on Earth. Each time I felt strong feelings of love or learning while doing anything related to the church, I was then immediately directed to log it as evidence that the church is true.

The fallacy of composition is a logical fallacy where one assumes something is true of the whole because it is true of a part. For example, a tire may be made of rubber but you’ll get very different results hitting a tire vs a car with a sledgehammer. The church uses this logical fallacy to convince people that their beautiful spiritual experiences while in or around the church are evidence of the truthfulness of the church as a whole, of its divine origins, and its authority to act on God’s behalf. When the more intellectually honest conclusion is that some of the activities the church promotes will occasionally produce a strong emotional / spiritual reaction. The evidence regarding the church as a whole is a correlation at best. A correlation it shares with innumerable other experiences and organizations.

While I was a member, I chose to accept those claims of truth via association. I was taught and chose to frame all my positive experiences as evidence in the church’s favor. And I did, because that’s what my people said I should do. I wanted to belong. 

If, as a child, everyone you loved, respected, and revered worshipped the color yellow, would you not likely color all your pictures yellow?

Now I see that there are many beautiful colors in the spectrum. And coloring exclusively with yellow all your life, though it is my favorite color, eventually came to feel not just monotonous but unbearable.

I now believe that those moments of love and learning have nothing inherently to do with the church or its claims of God’s authority and divine ordination, and everything to do with the inherent beauty of love and learning. Love and learning bring light into life, period. I’ve experienced just as potent and frequent spiritual feelings outside the church as I did inside. And I haven’t been keeping the commandments I was taught to. It just depends on how often I’m connecting with those I love and how often I’m taking the time to learn and share new things.

Fear of separation through death or abandonment are indeed as old as time. But I think it’s time for humanity to evolve above this base motivation, especially as a means to enforce obedience in children. The church teaches children and adults alike to fear things that are unhealthy, manipulative, and untrue. They do so because fear is one of the quickest ways to cultivate obedience, at least in the short term. 

In his book “Combatting Cult Mind Control”, Stephen Hassan refers to this behavior as “instilling phobias”, a process by which leaders repeatedly and emphatically teach members to fear separation from the group above all else, and promise catastrophic consequences for dissension. 

Here is a quotation from Brad Wilcox, a well-known leader in the LDS church, that exemplifies the attempts at scaring members into staying.

I felt so much fear as a teenager that I would be rejected by my family and neighbors. That no worthy woman would want to marry me. That any children I had, I would then lose after this life because I wasn’t going to be good enough. And that fear only grew as I got married and had a child.

Church members taught me throughout my life with incredible confidence “Families can be together forever” but the implicit message is, “Only worthy members of families in this church can be together forever.” 

For me, the fear of losing my loved ones or being separated from them eternally is as visceral as it gets. It wasn’t until I left the church that I could see the irony of a church using one hand to pat its back for the idea of “eternal families” and with the other hand introduce and uphold the doctrine of separating families for eternity. It’s not a giant mental leap, once a person knows how rare it is to be Mormon, to see that the church is actually introducing kids to the belief that most families won’t be together forever. As a kid, I just thought, “I am really lucky I was born into the church that lets me be with my family forever.”

Paradoxically, as I was being taught to fear losing my family, I was taught to be prepared to sacrifice them for the church. 

A quote from the church’s founder Joseph Smith conveys the general sentiment well…

I can unquestionably say, no God nor person is going to ever put me anywhere close to purposefully harming my child, much worse killing them. And excuse my expletive but any God asking someone to kill their kid deserves an unequivocal, “fuck you”. 

And what a sad figure to follow, the parent who would be willing to obey it. I found that I was holding myself to much higher standards than I was holding God to, much less any prophet.

It is a common doctrine in Christianity to forsake one’s family if they are not faithful. Even Christ himself teaches it in the New Testament.

I feel embarrassed to ever have espoused even an interpretation of scriptures like this that so blatantly threaten damnation, abandonment, separation, and violence to individuals and their families. At the same time as being taught to fear I will not be worthy to be with my family after this life, I am being taught to fear having to deny and fight my family if they are not worthy. Divisive, starts to look like an appropriate adjective for the doctrines of Christianity. Fending off damnation with one hand and abandonment with the other.

A similarly disturbing Mormon scripture story is that of Emma Smith, Joseph Smith’s first wife, being coerced into accepting polygamy. Joseph Smith delivered the following verses to Emma Smith and the church amidst his active practice of poligamy, including marriage to a local 14 year old girl. Joseph introduced the following revelation from God shortly after telling Emma about having begun the practice of polygamy without her knowledge.

God speaking through Joseph Smith to his wife Emma…

I can’t imagine being put in the position where you’re told by your spouse and your children’s father that God has commanded them to marry other people, including children as young as 14, and they are telling you that God is commanding you to accept it on threat of destruction. I’m sure this woman and mother was put to the ultimate test of God vs her own morality. If she doesn’t accept her husband’s numerous brides, including child brides, God will not only separate her from her husband, but from her children, and will destroy her completely. That’s the God taught in the most recent scriptures of the LDS church, one of polygamy, pedophilia, separation, and destruction.

Sadly, I learned what it was like to be separated from my child. After my divorce, I was given 50/50 custody of my son. It was and often still is excruciating to spend every other week away from my son. And I can confidently tell you, I’m not interested in being part of any organization that has the balls to tell me whether or not I can be with my son after death. It’s cruel and divisive to use a person’s love of their family to garner devotion to any type of organization.

To spiritually and emotionally hold hostage a child’s family, demanding a lifetime of devotion as the due ransom, is psychologically abusive. To hijack a child or parent’s most delicate and vulnerable feelings of love for their family, will often do irreparable harm to that child’s ability to form healthy attachments.

In the temple I recall feeling real fear regarding remembering the temple name, signs, and tokens of the priesthood (the secret associated gestures for the promises I'd made). Similarly, I was very scared of sharing that information outside the temple.

The endowment is described this way, “Your Endowment is to prepare you to receive all those ordinances in the House if the Lord, which are necessary for you to enable you to walk back to the presence of the Father, passing the angels who stand as sentinels, being able to give them the key words, the signs and tokens, pertaining to the Holy Priesthood, and gain your eternal exaltation.”

The understanding I had was that those “sentinels” will destroy me if I don’t have the words, signs, and tokens. Not long before I went through the temple, those signs and tokens had associated penalties: gestures which represented “different ways in which life may be taken” including the cutting of the throat and body. In addition, the pledge of secrecy that comes with these signs and tokens used to include the pledge that, “Rather than [reveal these tokens, signs, and penalties], I would suffer my life to be taken”.

Like I said, many of the threats of danger and violence have been removed, obscured, or softened, but some remnants are still there and the sentiment of secrecy and fear is absolutely still present. All of this takes an even worse color under the historical context of the endowment’s introduction, about which there is disagreement and controversy.

Nonetheless, I always felt pretty uncomfortable in the temple and now I can better understand why. I’m not interested in an organization that would implement these violent and manipulative threats no matter how implicit they might be.

I’ll end this section with a short but perfectly representative quote from one of the church’s apostles. He gives a very smarmy assurance he doesn’t want to scare the audience, before the following comment…

In the later days of my membership I spent a lot of time learning about various cults and the patterns they follow. I learned that this pattern of irrational fear is in every cult. As mentioned previously, cult expert, Steven Hassan, calls this practice "Instilling Phobias", a hallmark strategy of unhealthy organizations.

Cult leaders convince members that they’ve accumulated all these blessings and guarantees by their obedience. Cult leaders convince their followers that they are illogically protected by their obedience and that by questioning their teachings or worse by questioning the leaders, they will expose themselves to evil, danger, and even death.

I think this practice is manipulative and dangerous, and as always, especially horrible to teach developing children and teens.

This practice is best encapsulated by a quote from a past prophet from the church.

I always wanted to be a “man of God”. I knew that’s what people thought of my dad as he served as the leader in our local congregation. I knew that if I kept all the commandments, stayed pure, and let my life be “swallowed up in the will of the Father” I could consider myself a man of God too. My self worth was almost completely wrapped up in my worthiness according to the church’s standards, and you can imagine why. It’s not a far jump to have conflated my worthiness with my worth.

So, as I went through life, I felt acute shame for the ways that I wasn’t worthy in the eyes of God and my friends and family, all of whom were members. The church makes it a very public affair whether you are worthy, especially for males. Every week the members are expected to take a sacrament of bread and water in a meeting with the whole congregation sitting in silence and watching. 

The sacrament is sacred in LDS teachings and should not be taken by those who have committed serious sins. Serious sins included any sexual expression outside of marriage. That itself was enough to create some soul wrenching anxiety as a sexually-developing teenager. 

To add insult to injury, young men from age twelve up are expected to organize, prepare, pass, and bless the sacrament; all of which is performed in front of their family, friends, and neighbors sitting quietly with nothing to do but watch them. Those who administer the sacrament are expected to be even more worthy than those taking it.

I recall suicidal ideation occurring regularly and directly related to the guilt and shame of sacrament meeting. On a weekly basis I was torn in two between what my family and friends think of me and what God thought of me. 

“Am I worthy enough this week? What will my family and friends think if I don't participate? Will I be damned if I take this sacrament when I’m not worthy?”

 It was excruciating. And It started at 12 years old. 

Public scrutiny in sacrament meetings is only the beginning. Other opportunities to loathe myself came all too often, and only increased in their level of intensity and public scrutiny. All of which require you to be worthy to participate. I was expected to attend the temple regularly, to be baptized, confirmed, or participate in other lengthy rituals on behalf of the dead. I was asked to give blessings to the sick or troubled members around me. I was expected to bless my child when they were born. I was expected to perform ordinance rituals of baptism and confirmation. Every one of those activities have either an implicit expectation of worthiness or require explicit declarations of worthiness in interviews with a designated local leader.

Regularly, I was expected to declare privately my worthiness and devotion to the church to the local leader by way of a “worthiness interview”. I sat in a room with countless old men, some of which I knew well, some of which I had never met before, and was asked to declare my devotion to Jesus Christ, the church, the global and local church leadership, my obedience to the law of sexual purity, the law of dietary restrictions including drugs, alcohol, and coffee, the law of tithing (a mandatory 10% donation of one’s income), and a various other commandments including Sabbath day behavior restriction and day and night wearing of the temple underwear garments. 

The shame of one’s worthiness is brutal in these one on one interviews. Despite most of these men being genuine and kind individuals, it always felt like I was not enough. My worth was completely tied up in my obedience. Even when I was declared “worthy” by a church authority, it only served to sait a religiously dependent ego.

I recall vividly the shame and terror I felt knowing I needed to go confess sins to the bishop, but not wanting my family to find out. My dad was the bishop for most of my teenage years and so I suffered in silence all those years, knowing I was unworthy but too ashamed to confess my unworthiness to my dad. I wanted him and everyone around me to think I was a good member and a worthy priesthood holder. And to be proud of me.

One of the events that triggered my deconstruction centers around this practice of confessing sins as a means of becoming worthy.

The church has a process for members who have been sealed in the temple, divorced, then wish to remarry. It involves some interviews and approvals from local leaders and submitting some online forms. One of the forms had a question that shook me. I wish I had taken a screenshot of it, but this was the gist of the question.

That was the first time in my church experience where I felt genuinely that the church had done something wrong. I know that members will likely also feel this was wrong to ask and just a procedural misstep of the church but to me, it was a misstep that unveiled a foundational misalignment. I realized slowly over the following years that not only did I believe that it was wrong for me to be asked to regurgitate all my sins, it is wrong to make people believe they are sinful.

I responded, “I will not be listing out all my sins nor those I have resolved with church authorities and I believe it is wrong for you to ask me to do so.”

It was around this time that I recognized how this idea of sin and worthiness might just be a sham. A farce used to instill obedience in me.

Obedience is a core theme in Mormon and Christian doctrine. The scripture “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” (John 14:15) comes to mind. And now having left the church, that frankly sounds to me exactly like a manipulative threat from a codependent partner. In essence what I hear now is, “Prove you care about me by doing exactly what I ask.” I wouldn’t tolerate that from a partner, but I embraced it from my church because I assumed it was all sourced from a perfect and loving God. I hoped that my obedience would make me worthy of God’s blessings. Just like a codependent lover hopes their subservience will earn affection.

It feels reminiscent of every cult documentary I’ve watched. Charismatic leaders making impossible claims of eternal and spiritual blessings attained by giving up everything you have and are to the cult. I learned that I was only really "safe" by trying my best to be everything the church required. I wanted to be worthy, so that I could be happy. So I could belong. So I could be loved. 

The prophet of the church taught it clearly as an apostle, previous to his ordination,

It’s pretty clear, the love of God in the Mormon gospel is not offered to those who don’t keep his commandments. It was clear from the start, I needed to give all of myself to the church if I wanted to be loved.

The temple covenant is the penultimate example of how members are expected to treat themselves.

Now, I know there’s a lot of variation to people’s experience with these rules. And I’ve completely left out the female rules. But just looking at that, it freaks me out how homogenous it makes a group of wonderfully unique and individual people feel. It is a trope of cults to make its members feel like they are no longer individuals but swallowed up in a larger purpose. There is a very tempting half-truth in the thought I remember having, “By letting the church decide these things for me, I am free from those decisions and have more capacity to serve.”

While these expectations and rules seem minor as individual issues, when taken as a whole, start to look a lot like erasing a person’s ability to express themselves and more importantly suppressing a person’s ability to dissent. The mission experience feels like a boot camp for disconnection, from self, from friends, from family, from reality. The dress code was just the surface-level manifestation of the deeply rooted psychological training underway for these young adults.

I remember some visceral experiences of shame from my teenage years around appearance. I’ve always really loved playing with my appearance. I wore all sorts of experimental and loud clothing. I had many hairstyles. It was and is still fun for me to step into different personas through changing up my appearance.

One Sunday, when I was probably 14, I decided to do something edgy. I wore a purple dress shirt to church. During the Sunday school lesson with all the young men (my friends and neighbors) present, a visiting local authority figure singled me out and remarked how I was not fit to do priesthood duties like pass the sacrament in my choice of apparel. My heart sunk. And over what, a purple shirt? I never wore a colored shirt like that again to church. I wasn’t going to get shame bombed like that again. Though I did continue to play with my hairstyles, there was a recurring sentiment from my parents and leaders that my hair was inappropriate for a priesthood holder and I would not be allowed to do so on a church mission.

The issue of personal appearance alone doesn’t hold a crazy amount of weight for me, but in the context of cult mind control, it’s a bad look. When a place doesn’t feel safe enough to express yourself in physical appearance, how likely is it for a person to feel safe enough to present their most delicate thoughts and feelings?

Another element around which I learned to feel shame in the church was prioritizing myself. A recurring theme of the doctrines I most treasured was that “sacrifice brings forth the blessings of heaven”. That I should be sacrificing myself at every opportunity for the building of God’s kingdom. I recall feeling a lot of relief in the idea that I could just surrender my life to God.

The church’s doctrine is rife with teachings about the folly of self-confidence and self-esteem. I really struggled to develop self-esteem, especially regarding sexuality, so these teachings felt like a relief for me. I could just give myself to God instead of developing confidence in myself.

The following teachings resonated deeply for me during those developmental years:

What that scripture meant to me…

I am right to be miserable because I struggle with sins. If this prophet speaking, arguably one of the more righteous men ever, calls himself “wretched” and grieves when he desires to rejoice, then I couldn’t be more correct in my suffering and depression over my failure to meet church standards.

What that scripture meant to me…

I am nothing to be proud of. I am less than the dust of the earth. I am and always will be eternally indebted to God, regardless of how well I keep his commandments. The only way to get anything good is doing what he asks. Do not prioritize yourself. Prioritize God if you want to eek out any sense of joy or meaning.

What that Apostle’s message meant to me…

I need to give God my will. Only by surrendering myself and all of my decisions to him can I be saved and rejoin God in heaven. Joy will come from me choosing God and his church over myself and my interests.

These lessons and countless others of self-deprecation and self-sacrifice contributed significantly to some of the most difficult parts of my life. Namely, getting married really young to someone who was a good choice by the church’s standard but a terrible match for me personally.

When I was age 16 I received a Patriarchal blessing (a fortune telling from an old local male authority). That was my first time being pressured to marry quickly, “After you have returned from your mission, …first and foremost, it will be your responsibility to search out your eternal companion and to marry her in the house of the Lord.” It was always the expectation to get married in my early 20s and only to a worthy church member.

So, at 16 I was primed to make getting married my primary goal after serving a 2 year mission for the church. Similar lessons were taught to me throughout the next 5 years. Then, on the last day of my mission, my mission president made the same exact type of commission to me that “when you get home, getting married to a worthy woman is much more important than any other pursuit.” When I got home, I attended one of many exclusive congregations specifically targeted at getting young adults in the church married to one another. I could only attend while between the ages 18-30. Temple marriage was the doctrine taught on repeat. Along with it, the message that “as long as two people are righteous members, they can make their marriage work”. I adopted that ideology wholesale. I thought, if anyone can make a marriage work it’s God and me. An absurd thought in retrospect.

So in dating, my main priority was finding someone interested in marrying me, “the wretched man that I [was]” and finding someone who was likewise committed to the church. And as long as I got along with this person decently and felt love for them, I should marry them. So I did. And it was a trainwreck. She and I were so different in so many ways when it came to living actual life. And all those differences just stacked on top of the issues around sexuality. Frankly, now I am just grateful that she had the gumption to initiate a divorce because I was so committed to God that I would make my marriage work, I think I would’ve literally died trying, maybe at my own hand. I distinctly remember getting married and I thought, “this is going to be hard, but the suffering will just refine me.” I had learned to in essence become a masochist. And it only makes sense, I had been taught to worship a man for being crucified. I worshiped him for his suffering. I sang all of my childhood, “I’m trying to be like Jesus.”

I want to insert here a very emphatic statement that I could not be more grateful for my son who came from that marriage and I would absolutely suffer it all again to have him in my life. But I would not have him suffer the same things I did if I can help it. Things I’d want him to know: first of all, marriage is optional. And secondly, marriage is an enormous and life-altering decision. The church doesn’t have to live with your spouse, you do. Every day of the rest of your life. So to my kids I’d say, be unrelentingly selfish and prioritize yourself more than you’re inclined to when you choose who to marry, not that you even need to get married to be happy. But for the love of God, please make it somebody cool.

What that scripture understandably meant to me…

You should become perfect like Jesus Christ and God.

What that scripture meant to me…

The goal of existence is to become perfect in everything we can. Through constant evaluation and unyielding effort to do your best, you can please the almighty God and he will bless you with the things you want.

What that scripture meant to me…

You ought to be anxiously looking for the right things to do. God will give you commandments, but if all you’re doing is following those commandments then you’re a slothful and unwise servant. It is not enough to do as God asks. We must be in a state of anxiety to preemptively anticipate what God would want us to do. Only through constant vigilance and fearful anticipation of God’s will can we avoid being damned.

It goes without saying that I was pretty much the archetypal boy scout. And I was actually in boy scouts and reached the eagle rank.

It didn’t really ever occur to me until I was leaving the church that this striving for perfection was bad. It was overwhelming and brought me a lot of shame, but I thought it was good motivation. I was raised to pursue excellence. In school, recreation, and especially in church my parents had high expectations for my performance. And largely, I’m very grateful to have been pushed to be ambitious and hard working. There’s a lot of value in hard work and ambition. Much about it was stretching in good ways. But when it comes to the spirituality of a person, I think it is a dramatic misstep to pursue anything so lofty and ambiguous as perfection.

Like life generally, I believe the soul of a person is a work of art. And you can no more perfect a person than you can perfect a song or piece of art. The value is in the enjoyment of it, whether that’s creating it or experiencing it. I feel like it’s best visualized in how unique and cool I find my siblings to all be. But we’ve all got some pretty crazy perfectionistic tendencies.

I believe that rest and relaxation are just as valuable and important as work and productivity. But it is extremely difficult for me to feel peaceful when I relax or rest. I learned to feel “anxious” about finding the “right” things to do. I don’t think that’s healthy. The benefits of work and productivity are obvious, we don’t need to add some unachievable weight of eternal damnation to them. I don’t believe human’s need to be taught that working hard and doing good things for others will win them invisible spiritual favor and reward from deity. I think we have a built in desire to create things and to care for each other.

Being shamed into working hard or caring for others only poisons the well of motivation. I have felt that very viscerally as I’ve left the church and many people have randomly dropped off treats at our home in attempts to reactivate us. Whatever genuine care there is, which I’m sure there is some, it is soured by knowing that the church tells them that their salvation depends to some degree on their attempts to fulfill their callings and reactivate us through missionary work. It really sucks to feel you have to be kind or work hard for any other reason than that we care about ourselves and we care about others.

This doctrine of never questioning church leaders, even when your feelings are at odds with the leaders, is the perfect example of teaching people to ignore and subvert their natural sense of right and wrong. And in turn, their self-confidence and self-trust. Thereby, you are distanced / isolated from your authentic feelings and thoughts.

The church’s general stance toward a person’s conscience is that it should be followed, except when it is in conflict with the church. The unspoken doctrine is that the church should never be in conflict with one’s conscience. But if it is, a person should follow the church. The token follow-up offered to members with divergent thinking is, “Do not worry, …

I didn’t think of it this way for the longest time but letting the church tell me to not listen to ex mormon’s negative experiences and critique is the same as a company telling me not to read their negative reviews. Would you be willing to hide the 1 and 2 star reviews from Amazon? Doubtful. Healthy organizations welcome critique and invite open discourse. Discouraging an open forum and dialogue between opposing viewpoints is a quick and dirty way to cultivate echo chambers, ignorance, fear, intolerance, and most of all, isolation.

Voltaire is attributed with writing, “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize”. Critique of the church and especially its leadership is not tolerated in the church.

The doctrine of specialness and being favored by God created a distance in my mind between me and all non-believing people. Having been taught that I was other people’s best chance at being saved for eternity, I struggled to have hope and love and kindness for those people who weren’t living in accordance with Mormon doctrine. I couldn’t actually be happy for other people who got tattoos, lived a homosexual lifestyle, or moved in with an unmarried significant other etc. Even if those things were incredibly happy and uplifting experiences for them. My humanity was constantly stunted by my discipleship.

Sadly that stunted humanity even manifested at times as apathy. When you believe the world’s gonna burn anyways, why bother worrying about global warming, ya know?

The most surprising moment of all my experiences in leaving the church was just minutes after my wife and I had finally decided that we were really going to leave. I remember feeling a myriad of emotions but one caught me off guard. I felt a swell of love and appreciation for humanity. All the diverse people and their ways of pursuing happiness went from tainted by their lack of the gospel, to inherently beautiful and worthy of love. It has been a journey to maintain that sense of love sometimes, but I can confidently say that I feel so grateful for the freedom to admire people genuinely for who they are, without the siren song of my specialness and their lostness playing in the background.

Ironically, another way in which I was isolated by the church was from my own family.

The church encourages members to teach their doctrines at home but the vast majority of my doctrinal learning was done in classes with kids of a similar age isolated from my family.

The most dramatic example of isolated indoctrination I experienced as a minor was at a summer camp called EFY e.g. Especially for Youth. I spent 5 consecutive days during the summer for most of my tween years at this doctrinal bootcamp. The curriculum is a mixture of playful socializing with other youths and intensive doctrinal workshops and lectures. I was surrounded by young adults paid to be counselors and promote testimony building. Hundreds of youths were all around me with the primary objective of obtaining a spiritual witness that the church is true. Families paid a good amount to have their child there. And the expectation of a testimony building experience is completely upfront.

The culmination of the weeklong experience is a testimony night. Each day leading up had been full of exhausting, spiritual, and socially intensive experiences, such that I felt extremely bonded with my peers and counselor. On the final night, we were gathered in a small room and exhorted to each share our testimony of the gospel. I recall feeling overcome by emotion in those meetings. I thought it was the spirit. But that’s what I was told by all of the people I loved and trusted most. Now, I think it was a combination of cult mind control tactics used to produce strong emotional reactions and interpersonal bonding.

We were young, uninformed, exhausted, desperate to be seen as holy, desperate to belong to our tribe, and surrounded by cool camp counselors being paid to generate testimonies. One by one we went in front of the group and proclaimed our love of the gospel and our knowledge that the church was true. I genuinely felt it was a highlight for me of my teenage years to bond with other kids my age and feel so accepted. The love between us and the environment of friendship was quite genuine. That acceptance, love, friendship combined with exhaustion, social anxiety, and peer pressure was the perfect cocktail for an intense socio-emotional reaction in a hormonal 13-15 year old. And this intense emotional week was inextricably presented as evidence that the church is true and devotion to it will yield continued comparable experiences.

I returned home fully convinced that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was God’s only true church on the Earth and that I would never leave it. And returned to EFY every year I was allowed.

This pattern went from 0 to 100 as I joined the missionary program at 18.

When I was a missionary, I was allowed one hour a week to email my friends and family. I was allowed an hour long phone call only on mother’s day and Christmas during the entire two years I served. Since then, the church has opened up the opportunity for calls home to be more frequent.

During the time I was a missionary I was surrounded by extreme pressure to study scripture, pray, and convert non-believers to mormonism. It was a program of complete immersion where the only sense of safety or familiarity available came from the church. They provided housing, rules for dress, behavior, diet, as well as a fellow missionary companion with whom you were expected to keep within sight and or hearing distance 24/7 (with the toilet as the only exception).

I say all this to point out what an incredibly isolating program it was. No family. No chosen friends. The only available support are heavily invested leaders and peer missionaries from the church and they’re all deeply committed to you continuing to share the gospel every day (13-15 hours per day), and to you remaining the full duration of your two-year calling.

What happens if a missionary summons the unbelievable courage to leave before their two years are up? They would be considered to have returned home “dishonorably”. And with no exaggeration I can say, I was deathly afraid of that outcome. I knew how frequently the young women in church were taught to marry an “honorable” return missionary. To leave early, or worse be sent home early for being unworthy was absolutely my worst nightmare. It was, I think, the equivalent for girls of having sex before marriage in church teachings. People would consider you weak, unclean, and unworthy of a righteous spouse. An embarrassment. Coming home early was never even mentioned as potentially on the table between my parents and I, though they knew I really struggled in the initial months of my mission.

So, there I was in Finland. It was early February and about -5˚ Farenheit. I was living with a complete stranger assigned to me as my companion in a city just outside Helsinki, Finland. We were new to the area and so had no friends nor prospects for teaching. Every day we spent hour after hour in the freezing cold trying to talk to strangers about the church on the street and at their doorsteps in broken Finnish. I remember struggling with my mouth being too cold to even form what few Finnish words I did know.

Something else to note is that missionaries in the church view themselves as direct representatives for Jesus Christ himself. And thereby, are held to an extreme level of morality.

Beyond the physical pain of cold and exhaustion, I was writhing with moral pain for having been somewhat intimate with an ex-girlfriend before entering the mission field and not having confessed all my sins in detail to a church authority previous to leaving on my mission. And for reference, this was PG-13 level stuff I had done with my girlfriend.

I can almost laugh about how ridiculous it sounds now, except that I still recall the depth of the depression it brought. I remember considering ways in which I could “accidentally” be maimed or killed so that the moral pain would be over and I could have still served “honorably” in my community’s eyes. Standing next to the speed trains in the freezing snowy night, I remember how terrifyingly close I came to “slipping” off the platform or putting a leg out in front of a passing train. That’s how seriously this commitment to serve God honorably had been taught to me. And how catastrophic the prospect of going home early felt.

I felt so trapped. In the end, I was able to put the value of my life over the shame of coming home early and confessed to the mission president. I considered myself unbelievably lucky that the mission president allowed me to stay.

I’m really glad I chose to live. But shame on the church for promoting that kind of self-loathing, especially in vulnerable and isolated teenagers. It is in my opinion about as close as you can get to child abuse without being able to legally prosecute. Sadly, most missionaries I’ve talked to about these experiences share similar memories of anxiety, depression, and thoughts of self-harm.

In more recent years, I’ve become keenly aware of how my still-active parents are being isolated from their inactive children and grandchildren. Time during the week with my parents is regularly occupied by either church attendance, administrative meetings, temple attendance, or church assigned duties. It is a genuine disappointment to not be able to do things with them on these occasions. It doesn’t take all of their time obviously but it’s also not a small amount of their time either. And frankly it just feels bad that they’re spending hours every week doing ceremonies that are supposed to let dead strangers be saved in the afterlife rather than spend quality time with their children and grandchildren in their current life. 

Similarly, older members are encouraged and often expected to serve long-term full-time missions away from home and family for the church. Church missions range usually between 6-24 months and are served both nationally and internationally. It’s been an expectation my whole life any married member would serve a mission with their spouse after retirement. It wasn’t until I had my daughter last year that I recognized what a heartbreak it would be to deprive her of 6-24 months of relationship with her grandparents. It is hard for me to not feel personally hurt to have my parents choose to spend months or years of their life with strangers in a multi-billion dollar organization rather than with their children and grandchildren.

I don’t judge them at all. I understand it comes from a place of love and hope for their family. But sadly it doesn’t change how it feels for me and my family.

So, you’ll see why I feel some sorrow for the ways in which the church has separated family members from one another and continues to do so.

There is good reason for believing others by default. It is horribly inconvenient to start interactions from a place of doubting the veracity of others’ testimonies. I write this today, not because I found it easy to leave the church, but because it was horribly painful and yet completely unavoidable for me. And it didn’t feel like I had much of a choice in the matter. I was taught that people leave the church because they’re “hearts failed them” or “they were deceived” by the devil. It was never even hinted at that they maybe came to feel deeply that the church’s doctrines were untrue or that upholding church doctrines became unbearable to teach to their children. That was my experience, and I was a staunch believer for 30 years that I would never leave. I thought I was more likely to die. Probably from all the shame.

I think many of us can easily acknowledge that confidence is not directly correlated to truth. We see confident people and groups fail or proven wrong regularly. We often even enjoy to see it when the overconfident get reality-checked.

But what happens when there is no way to prove a confident person wrong. That is the issue set before anyone questioning Mormonism or religion for that matter. That is the issue set before young children born into the church. That is the issue set before vulnerable investigators. And when you’ve not yet had any doubts or misgivings with the church, why try to prove it wrong? Why try to prove wrong the organization on which all of your most treasured hopes and relationships hang. The love of your parents and siblings, the respect of your peers, the promise of your future family. They all hang on the hooks of this confidence.

I couldn’t earnestly question that confidence until the fear, shame, and isolation in the church’s teachings grew so large that they matched my previous hopes and confidence.

This confidence is usually coupled and indistinguishable from the absolutes of the church’s precepts. And though I know it is an oversimplification, I love to juxtapose these two quotes, one from a church leader and another from Star Wars.

Crisis capitalism is the practice of exploiting the crises of others in order to further one’s own interests and power. This is already a devious practice. But the penultimate evil, in my opinion, is to not only capitalize on crises but to manufacture crises for others only to then use them for one's gain.

If you haven’t, you should watch “V for Vendetta”. It is the perfect example of an organization manufacturing crises in order to take advantage of a population. The church, as a whole, is practicing this and promoting it through their missionary efforts. They taught me to beg for forgiveness by teaching me I was sinful. They taught me to yearn eternal life by teaching me to fear eternal damnation. They taught me to need God by teaching me I wasn’t enough.

In my attempts to regain my wellbeing, I have found a lot of peace in some quotations from Alan Watts:

Modern Mormonism is definitely evolving. The temple is far less violent. African heritage members can hold full-privileged membership. Members can get tattoos and multiple piercings. Even some level of critique for previous and current church leaders seems to be openly embraced by members with increasingly nuanced beliefs.

Writers like Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye portray the mindset of a new generation of LDS members who seem able to set aside mistakes and misalignment and focus on the general faith and community the church promotes. This paragraph stood out to me.

It’s a conflicting feeling to empathize with and understand the struggle staying in the church. I have family and friends like this writer Michelle doing it now. I did it for about 2 or 3 years. I do respect the endeavor. And I hope the church does grow to be a place that aligns with my values. But for now, the difference between what I feel is good and what the church teaches has more dissonance than I can uphold.

Unfortunately, the historical, social, and logical evidence feels stacked beyond the resonance of my values. And I don’t feel I need the church to live according to my values. If I thought there was a chance of real reform in the church to abandon harmful and untrue doctrines and practices, I’d probably still be an active member.