This piece was created as a profile on a former member of the LDS Church.
This is the profile of a man who grew up in a
generations old LDS family in Salt Lake City, Utah. He had never left home
until he went on a 2 year religious mission for the Church in Mexico City,
Mexico. He left the LDS Church in 2008, and experienced an incredibly traumatic
fallout5 with his family, friends, and former leaders in the Church.
Only through therapy and lots of support has he been able to recover from his
experiences.
Adam is a natural leader. It's a combination of his lofty height, strong
personality, and a personal drive to be there for everyone that brought souls flocking to
him like moths in the night. When he was a child, his bishop had told him he
would go far with his church callings. When he received his patriarchal blessing (a foretelling of blessings, should the member stay the course) at
18, he was promised a high status in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day
Saints. He was perched on the edge of a life filled with pre-ordained choices.
So, what happens when the heart, mind, and soul of a being rebels against the
call?
It dies.
It dies.
It dies.
And then it is reborn.
See, our souls are immortal beings. So, naturally, our bodies carry our poor mutilated souls on, and we must have another. The new one rises out of the ashes. Oh, but the poor things are ragged for some time. They wear the feathers of former habits for a while, unsure of where to go.
They try new
feathers, and they lose some of those along the way.
They are sooty, sad phoenixes.
And the saddest part is that they are so terribly alone.
Let
me show you this single journey……
He came back from his mission. He GLOWED. A golden boy, his
mother’s pride and joy. Eighty-six souls saved! Somebody get this man a trophy!
In that time after stepping off the plane, it was his moment: a stage to share
his accomplishments. He spoke blessed words from the podium. Girls flocked to
his side. Grandmothers cooed at his stories of conquering the wilds.
In all this excitement, his parents decided they didn’t want him
in their house anymore. He needed to find a nice girl and get her to the temple
STAT. He was hustled into a small apartment. All of a sudden, he felt an echo
in the room. After 2 years of constant missionary companions, he was completely
alone. He didn’t have anyone. But the Church has the answer: eternal marriage,
son. You’ll never be alone again. (Can you feel the textbook desperation here?
The case of depression building?)
In that mad dash, he picked someone who liked his resume. It lasted long enough to get to the temple and back.
It was here when he went a little mad. It was here when he
answered an ad on Craigslist for a roommate, and left. (She had already left,
but he left behind everything else in that sad apartment.) His family begged
him to go see the bishop. Go promise to take your wife back. Go back to
church. Go sit in the temple for days. God will tell you, you’ll feel it.
And it was here that he had an experience of being questioned about
his faith. He tried to use his missionary tactics, and they were thrown back in
face. He tried to salvage the situation by insisting that those questions came
later, that deep discussions about church history or questions about dogma were
unnecessary to a faithful heart. In this moment, he had no answers…and with it
came a deep sense of being undereducated on the very platform he was defending.
6
So he went asking his own questions.
God was silent. The covenants crumbled. His family withdrew.
When he threw away his garments and bought his first pair of red
plaid boxers, they were shocked. When he took up coffee, whiskey, a lumberjack
beard, they gossiped. When he started dating a girl who was (gasp) a Pantheist,
they were appalled. When they moved in together, unmarried, they sent letters. Mean letters. Horrible letters.
Letters that used the word apostate.
Apostasy7 is an act of refusing to continue to follow, obey,
or recognize a religious faith, according to the dictionary. If you go back to
the Greek root, it means to defect, to rebel. He always found it entertaining, being labelled as an apostate. Was it meant as a slight? A loaded word,
with the intent of scaring him back into shape?
The fear
tactics were heavy. The shame dialog was heavy. The ostracization was heavy.
The gossip was heavy. His mother calling all of his college roomates and
telling them that he had been overcome by sin was heavy. His stepfather telling
his siblings that he was written out of the will was heavy. His grandparents
refusing to acknowledge his presence in the yearly Christmas newsletter was
heavy.
But this is
where his story gets lighter: he left the valley of the white steeples. He left
his mission pictures, ex-in-laws, awkward former friend run-ins, and letters
from family members behind. He left his mother telling him he was dead to her.
He left his stepfather refusing to speak to him ever again.
He left behind
original sin, purity culture8, obscure rituals, an intolerant God, a
panel of old white men eternally irritated by the young and the restless. He
threw away the remnants of his old life. He had nothing but a kitchen table and
boxes of books. A naked phoenix.
In the next 8
years, he found feathers: a kind wife who saw his soul was tired and lonely,
but good. A son to put his hope towards. A community who saw his love of people, and
who loved him back. He was home. This did not, however, completely scrub away
the ashes of the past. He still was sent letters. He was still ostracized. He
felt all of it, and once, just once, dipped below the water. Suicide seemed
like a quick way to lighten the load. His wife pulled him back up, and together
they found a therapist who showed him that coming out of a “high demand religion”9 meant
he was rebuilding his brain. He had unlearn the shame structure. He had to go
every week and scream out his triggers. He had to build a wall between himself and
those people he now knew were narcissists with child brains, stuck in a cycle
of being told what to do, with a dose of self-importance on the side.
Today, Adam is
a lovely man. He has a wife, three children, two dogs, and a well-paying job as
an IT Network Engineer. His family doesn’t associate with him. Their
speculations about him dying a drunk under an overpass never came true. He does
love coffee, however. Really good coffee, the kind that, as he says, tastes
like shoving your face in the loam of Colombia. He has healthy hobbies, fosters
homeless cats, plays board games with his children, and is learning to find
friends that aren’t Mormon.
He’s still growing in those phoenix feathers….because sometimes when you lose, you win.
Adam won this story. This is not the case for everyone. Utah has a
deplorably high suicide rate among young people.10 It has one of the
highest rate of anti-depressant medication use in the country.11
While the reporting of numbers of members left is not accurately shown within
the church records, there is evidence to suggest that the numbers are climbing
every year.12 Support groups grow every day. Therapists specializing
in post-Mormon deconstruction are becoming more popular.
Ultimately, what it boils down to is this: Mormonism is a
high-demand religion. It asks members to commit their lives to a very intense
dogma (a principle or set of principles laid
down by an authority as incontrovertibly true), which proves to be very
difficult to maintain, especially considering the changes in the world, and the
lack of changes within the Church. The Church isn’t adapting to the world fast
enough, and with the speed of education in this day and age, the self-education
of the masses of members proves to be exceptionally challenging to Church
retention. The Church leaders, and its older members resort to gaslighting and
emotional abuse in the hopes of retaining these questioning members. This is
proving to be exceptionally damaging to the young population. This population
is still leaving, though, but it doesn’t have to be this way. They don’t have
to walk through the valley of shadows. My greatest hope is that everyone who comes
out the other side can smile again, like Adam does, confident in the faith that
they made the right decision.
1. 1. Sandau, J. (2019, September 18). One Phrase Church Leaders Never Say Anymore + Why. Retrieved December 03, 2020, from https://www.ldsliving.com/One-Phrase-Church-Leaders-Never-Say-Anymore-Why/s/78358