I’m starting a new project called “Snapshots of My Son.” I’m not sure this will be of interest to anyone other than myself, but I’m feeling a need to preserve what Jesse meant to me. The following is the first snapshot I’ve written. They will be collected and revised under the link: Snapshots of My Son.
The Pun
Days ago my fourth demon-haunted Christmas passed. But how can something that isn’t haunt me? How can an emptiness be a demon? What does it mean when demonic devils show me to be one of their own?
Where the sky is blue Daemenoth Diablos queries? “If possession is 9/10th’s of the law, how come there aren’t more exorcists with legal firms?”
This devil knows what will tempt me. The Pun. That play on words I can’t resist. It pulls me in with need to make the interaction last. I am one of those odd ones, a lover of puns. I’m an odd because I lost my mate, the other half of myself. I passed to him my love of puns, but I can’t pass on this latest one, as I have so many before it.
In his snapshots, he preserved our mutual love. Screenshot of text from Mom:
In his response, he showed himself to be an odd one’s mate. “Hahahahahah! I laughed very loudly.” My son, my boy, my sweetheart. He appreciated how deliciously, devilishly terrible the pun is. Blood of my blood even got the adverb right.
As young as ten, he knew how to eviscerate a pun gone bad. I don’t remember the pun I created that day, but I will never forget his response. “Mom, that isn’t even worth a disgusted look.” He knew, knew what a pun needed whether a good one or bad.
My son, my boy, my sweetheart wasn’t merely a lover of puns, but a pun maker. Another screenshot of a Mom text he saved:
This time my son, my boy, my sweetheart punned in response:
What a proud Mom I am. How can puns fail to haunt me when I can’t pass on the need for exorcists in law offices to the one who understood that eating paladins made a dragon’s stomach holy with their lawfulness?
This song is taught to children in primary (the Mormon auxiliary for children under the age of 12). I remember singing it myself and with my students, during my unfortunate stint as a primary teacher to the 11-year-olds. One of the main ways Mormons differ from other Christians is that they believe their founder, Joseph Smith, was called of God as a prophet in the same manner Abraham, Moses, and Isaiah were. Moreover, every president of the church since Joseph’s time has similarly been a prophet of god with a direct link to God himself. The prophet tells Mormons what God wants them to hear today. While the Bible and other Mormon holy books tell of God’s interactions with this people of the past, the prophet can deliver a direct message from God himself. At General Conference (held twice a year), the current president of the church is sustained as a prophet, seer, and revelator.
Russell M. Nelson or Rusty
Current prophet is Russell M. Nelson (for some reason, Mormons always include the middle initial in the names of those in the church hierarchy). His appearance kind of reminds of Voldemort. Nelson was a celebrated heart surgeon who was appointed to The Quorum of the Twelve apostles by former prophet Spenser W. Kimball (the prophet of my youth), at a time he was falling into dementia. Nelson had operated on Kimball, and as Kimball started to lose his mental facilities he appointed both his doctor and his lawyer to be one of the fifteen men who lead the Mormon church. When the current prophet dies, he is replaced by the most senior member of the Quorum of the Twelve, meaning that by the time a man reached this position he is invariably old. Nelson is over 90. Among Ex-Mo’s, Nelson is referred to irrelevantly as Rusty.
In processing my religious trauma caused by growing up in a cult, I’ve spent a good deal of time watching atheist YouTubers responding to sermons, religious books, and apologists. There is comfort in hearing from others who have deconverted, but many of the points they address don’t line up exactly with the doctrine I was taught as a child because, as I said in my first post on Mormonism, Mormons are weird. As I considered what to write about today, I thought about doing a similar thing with one of the two speeches Rusty gave at the most recent General Conference, which was held just last weekend in Salt Lake City.
As a whole, his speech titled “Peacemakers Needed” presents a fairly good message. But there are subtleties and dog whistles throughout that the non-Mormon would miss. Today I’m going to go through the beginning portion of his speech, let me know in the comments if you’d be interested in hearing the rest of this speech analyzed. Although readership of this blog has gone up slightly since I started this, comments are rare, and I’d really appreciate hearing from you to help me decide what to cover next.
The words in italics are from Rusty’s speech.
My dear brothers and sisters, it is a joy to be with you. During these past six months, you have been constantly on my mind and in my prayers. I pray that the Holy Ghost will communicate what the Lord wants you to hear as I speak to you now.
In every sermon I’ve heard from local leaders up through the top of the church hierarchy, listeners are always assured that the leader loves us, thinks and prays about us. Rusty’s use of this technique is colder and less personal than they often are, most notably in that there is no mention of love. I don’t mind this omission. During my long deconversion process, I found these “reassurances” insulting and condescending. None of these leaders knew me and what my challenges were, so how could they love or pray about me? It seems, and I believe it was meant to be, manipulative, as if hinting that they had special knowledge about us individually directly from God.
Mentioning the Holy Ghost as the communicator is also typical of Mormon sermons. Mormons don’t believe in the trinity and see the Godhead as three separate beings. The Father and the Son have bodies, but the Holy Ghost hasn’t received one yet so that he can testify to us spirit to spirit. We were told that if we ever doubted anything we heard in church or read in scripture, we should pray, and the Holy Ghost would let us know if it was true. I somehow missed the memo that there should be only one possible answer to such a prayer, a confirmation that it is true, and I had far more mixed results in the answers I believed I got, if I felt my prayer being answered at all. While Mormon doctrine on the prophet’s infallibility is a bit convoluted and contradictory, most Mormons do see him as uncapable of being wrong, even though the prophets often contradict their predecessors. This near defying of the prophet is one of the things that makes Mormonism a cult. My unwillingness to simple “follow the prophet,” as the song instructs, was seen as sigh of unrighteous pride, the few times I ever voiced it, so I tended to keep my thoughts on the matter to myself.
During my surgical internship many years ago, I assisted a surgeon who was amputating a leg filled with highly infectious gangrene. The operation was difficult. Then, to add to the tension, one of the team performed a task poorly, and the surgeon erupted in anger. In the middle of his tantrum, he threw his scalpel loaded with germs. It landed in my forearm! Everyone in the operating room-except the out-of-control surgeon-was horrified by this dangerous breach of surgical practice. Gratefully, I did not become infected. But this experience left a lasting impression on me. In that very hour, I promised myself that whatever happened in my operating room, I would never lose control of my emotions. I also vowed that day never to throw anything in anger-whether it be scalpels or words.
This part is the seemingly obligatory personal story that nearly every conference sermon contains. Like nearly all of such stories, I sincerely doubt that it is true. When I was a child, one of my favorite conference speakers was Paul H. Dunn (they love that middle initial) because he had better stories than most of them. He spoke about his time as a solider in World War II and his career as a professional baseball player. Dunn made his stories specific enough that they could and were fact checked by those unfriendly to the church. It turned out that his combat stories were completely fabricated, and he never played professional baseball. While most of the stories Mormon leaders tell don’t include enough specific details that they can be proven lies, I suspect that vast majority of them are as fictional as Dunn’s were. In this case, it seems hard to believe that a highly trained surgeon would act in such a dangerous and childish manner. But no conference sermon would be complete without a story.
Even now, decades later, I find myself wondering if the contaminated scalpel that landed in my arm was any more toxic than the venomous contention that infects our civic dialogue and too many personal relationships today. Civility and decency seem to have disappeared during this era of polarization and passionate disagreements. Vulgarity, faultfinding, and evil speaking of others are all too common. Too many pundits, politicians, entertainers, and other influencers throw insults constantly. I am greatly concerned that so many people seem to believe that it is completely acceptable to condemn, malign, and vilify anyone who does not agree with them. Many seem eager to damage another’s reputation with pathetic and pithy barbs!
Starting with this part of his speech, I agree with much of what he has to say. As Americans, we have become increasingly divided and hostile toward each other. Political discussions on social media tend to quickly dissolve into toxic name calling. We can no longer simply disagree on the correct policy to address a problem. We must eviscerate our opponents. The other side isn’t simply wrong. They are evil, and evil can’t be compromised with.
But there is a subtext behind this speech that he doesn’t directly address. The Mormon Church has a Trump problem. Mormons have cultivate right wing political policies for decades, and as they have attempted to become more mainstream, they have joined with other conservative churches to advance conservative political viewpoints. Proposition 8 in California passed largely due to the financing and activism of the Mormon church. It is rare to find a Mormon Democrat. My own parents claimed that my ancestors would roll over in their graves if their descendants ever voted for a Democrat. If this prediction was correct, they have been doing a lot of rolling over on my behalf. Mormons cultivate this monster, and now the monster is escaping their control.
While Mormons were slower to embrace Trump than Evangelicals, many have converted to the Trump cult. With this conversion, they have become as toxic as most Trumpists. I had a Facebook interaction with one of my aunts that demonstrates this. During Trump’s presidency, I posted something on Facebook (I don’t remember what) that was critical of Trump. My aunt responding in the public comments, asking me what had happened to me and told me that my parents would be disappointed and ashamed of my actions. I was shocked and hurt by the vehemence of her attack. This aunt was always my favorite aunt as a child. She is married to my father’s youngest brother. Since I left Utah at 23 years old, I have had limited contact with her and basically none at all since my mother died 20 years ago. When I confronted her in a private message how hurt I was that she would use my father who died when I was barely 21 against me for a political point, she did apologize. But I still feel somewhat battered by the venom she directed at me for daring to express an anti-Trump opinion.
The problem that the Mormon church has is that Trumpism is also a cult, and as Matt. 6:24 says, “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” You cannot serve both Rusty and Trump. When the Mormon church finally decided to push back against the anti-vaxxers by encouraging all members to get the Covid vaccination, Trumpist Mormons went nuts. They started to question whether the leaders of the Church had gone astray. It got ugly. It is hard to overemphasis how significant this reaction was. Questioning the prophet’s words is something few believing Mormons would ever do, but when the Mormon church went against where Trumpists had gone, the membership question the church leadership instead of their political masters.
While the fervor over vaccination has died down, the infection of Trumpism remains in the church, leading to enormous difficulties for Church leadership. Like many religions, the Mormon church is bleeding membership, especially among the youth. Their conservative rhetoric on women and gay rights is alienating Generation Z, who are leaving in droves. Of course, the future of the Church depends on the keeping the youth, but they can’t move to the left to accommodate the younger generation without losing the older generation (today’s big tithe payers) to the Trump cult. And as Trumpism has poisoned all political discussion in this country, the venom directed at the church over vaccination is a sign of what would come if they ever dared to go against Trump on anything else. They are caught between a hemorrhage from the left and bleeding to death from the right. They have helped to create a monster they now can’t control. This speech is, in my opinion, an attempt to calm this descension. I don’t think it will work, and the church will continue to bleed membership from both directions. Its death will be slow since they have so much money they’ve been hoarding, but eventually they will bleed out.
The Mormon church has become a modern object lesson that if you create a monster, it will always turn against you. Decades of right leaning politics have helped to create the monster that is Trumpism, and now that monster is turning against its parent. I can’t say I’ll shed a lot of tears on their behalf.
Still, Rusty is right about how toxic our culture has become. If we don’t learn again to disagree with hatred, we will tear this country apart between us. But how we will heal our divide or even if it is healable, I have no better answers than Rusty offers.
If you enjoyed this and would like me to discuss more of Rusty’s speech or if you have other issues about Mormonism you’d like to see address, please comment below.
Sorry, I missed last week. I was having a bit of an emotional meltdown. The death of my son still disables me sometimes. I’m back this week.
I have spent several posts discussing my deconversion story, which highlights the problems I had with the Mormon cult I was raised in, but Mormon doctrine isn’t all bad. In some respects, it reflects a superior moral system than mainstream Christianity. Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, took several deeply problematic Christian beliefs and changed them to make the align better with our natural sense of right and wrong. This is one of the reasons that Mormons, who come to doubt the truth of their own religion, rarely gravitate to a more mainstream Christian church. They are much more likely to become atheist or agnostic than they are a different type of Christian. While I questioned my faith for decades, I never considered joining a different Christian church because I found their beliefs horrifyingly awful. For me, probably the most immoral of these beliefs is the doctrine of original sin.
Mainstream Christian theology states that God created the world and humankind perfect. He intended us to live forever in a blissful garden, but Adam and Eve sinned. Because of this, not only will we die, but as David Vanacker, pastor of Grace Church of Wyoming puts it, we have all become “fundamentally depraved.” (1) Dan Vander Lugt of "Questions.org: Answers to Tough Questions about God and Life" states it even more bluntly (2):
There are no “normal people.” Everyone deserves judgment. We are fallen creatures under a spiritual curse in a fallen world. Apart from God’s grace, hell is our natural state of being. Apart from God’s grace, this world would be a place of unmitigated horror and suffering. . . Normal people deserve hell because they are willing participants in the events of a fallen, cruel world.
Because two people failed an unfair test (see my comfy blanket) thousands of years ago, we all deserve to be tortured for eternity, and only a belief in Jesus can save us from a fate we absolutely deserve.
I reject this belief on both epistemological and moral grounds. First, the fundamental depravity of humankind is not evidently true. While no one is perfect and a small percentage of people are depraved, most people do their best to do the right thing most of the time. Most people, no matter their religious beliefs, view things like murder, rape, torture, abuse, theft as morally reprehensible and even more morally reprehensible if these things are done to a child. While we do sometimes act selfishly, actual depravity is rare, and altruism abounds. History, literature, film, and the everyday news are full of people who risk their own lives to help others, even people they don’t personally know. (My own son was killed attempting to help a person he’d never met.) These are the people we admire and who are held up as heroes, while we deplore those who inflict senseless pain and suffering onto others. These are not the actions or beliefs of fundamentally depraved individuals.
Even more that it not being true, the doctrine of original sin posits a god who is a moral monster. Unlike Lugt claims above, we are not willing participants in this world. We didn’t choose or even consent to being born, and there is no justice in punishing one person for the actions of another. We recognize this in human society. We don’t prosecute the children of murderers for their parents’ crimes. Nearly everyone would consider it unjust to do so. So how much less just is a god that punishes us for what our 1000s time great grandparents did, especially since he is the one who created people, knowing that they’d be unable to follow his commandment. I personally don’t believe anyone could possibly deserve eternal torture, and absolutely no one deserves it for the simple sin of nonbelief. There is no justice in a system that sends a person who has spent their life doing their best to do the right thing and help others into a fiery pit of eternal torment, just because they didn’t believe in an undemonstrated being. No matter how apologists try to twist their minds to accommodate this belief, any being that would do such a thing is fundamentally evil. Arguing that god loves us, but will torture us forever if we don’t believe in him is simply absurd.
Not only is it morally problematic for a god to punish people for what someone else did, a belief in this god perverts Christians’ view of themselves and others. They live in guilt and shame for their inability to be perfect, thinking the alternative is complete depravity, and it taints their views of people not of their faith. If we are fundamentally depraved without Jesus, non-Christians must, therefore, be evil, so there is no reason to treat them with kindness and compassion, at least not after they make their lack of interest in Christianity apparent. Threatening atheists with hell is one of the favorite pastimes of Christians in the toxic world of social media. The relish with which some do so calls their own morality into question.
In opposition to this destructive belief, Joseph Smith rejected the idea of original sin. As he wrote in the 2nd Article of Faith (3), “We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression.” Mormons have an entirely different concept of the Fall. For one thing, notice the Article of Faith calls it Adam’s “transgression,” not Adam’s sin. Mormons believe before the Fall there was no reproduction. If Adam and Eve hadn’t eaten the forbidden fruit and chose to know the difference between good and evil, they would have lived forever alone in Eden. The rest of us would never have been born. God couldn’t violate their free will by forcing this knowledge on them. They needed to willingly make the choice, so yes, they violated the law they were given, but it was a necessary violation for humanity to come into being. So it wasn’t a sin, merely a transgression of the law.
Rather than Eve being the villain, who caused all suffering in the world, Mormons see her as somewhat of a hero. She is the first that recognized the necessity of the transgression, so partook of the fruit and gave it to Adam. Adam then realized that she had made the necessary choice and followed suit. We have Eve to thank for our existence, and we are only accountable for our own actions. We are not fundamentally depraved, but all are born with the light of Christ (our conscience) that makes us understand right and wrong, and therefore, act in the morally correct manner most of the time.
If you’re wondering how Joseph Smith reconciled this doctrine with the Bible, he didn’t. Smith didn’t teach that the Bible was inerrant. The 8th Article of Faith states, “We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly.” The Bible didn’t stay pure as it was passed from generation to generation, and corruption crept into the word of god. The doctrine of the Fall isn’t fully taught in Mormon scriptures either, but can be found in the temple ceremony that only faithful members are allowed to attend. Mormons aren’t supposed to talk about anything that goes on in the temple outside of it. Of course, this doctrine has the same problem is any belief in a literal Garden of Eden, but it is far better that what mainstream Christians teach.
So yes, the Mormon church has a lot of problems, but as far as the doctrine of original sin, Smith fixed a belief that has figured into many of the deconversion stories I’ve heard from atheists who had been mainstream Christians. After growing up believing that I am only responsible for my own actions, a god who holds me responsible for what a couple of people did thousands of years ago seems so fundamentally unjust I never entertained the idea that it could be true.
Yes, Mormons are weird, but not all that weirdness is negative. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the justice of the idea of the Fall or the concept of Hell. Also, if there’s anything about Mormons, you’d like to learn more about. Post your questions in the comments.
Today, I finish my deconversion story. I’d love to hear your comments or your own story in the comments below..
It took until my son was two to earn my doctorate. Jobs in academia are hard to come by, but I did receive a job offer at Auburn University in Alabama, so there we moved. As is probably unsurprising, the Mormon church in Alabama is more conservative than it is in California. While being a Mormon feminist had been difficult in California, it was close to impossible in Alabama. Conservative gender roles were emphasized constantly, and I continually felt the need to justify my career. I hated to go to church and felt angry and literally sick afterwards. I started having breathing difficulties at church and needed hours long naps afterwards to recover. It was unsustainable. After a few years in Alabama, I stopped attending church.
But even then, Jane’s eyes were boring into me from heaven, reminding me of everything she’d sacrificed and endured for the church. Here I was not being able to endure a little (well a lot) of sexism at church while she had endured a 1000 mile walk on a ration of 3 tablespoons of flour a day, what kind of weak, faithless loser was I. None of my siblings seemed to have any problems with the church, so why did I have so many doubts? What was wrong with me that I would simply throw away what Jane had sacrificed everything for? Despite the enormous guilt I felt, I could not stomach attending church, but because of Jane, I also couldn’t admit my reasons for doing so. I blamed it on my asthma and the carpeted walls at the church that harbored so much dust that I was allergic to. While it may have been the true that asthma and dust was partially responsible for my breathing difficulties at church, I think most of it was psychosomatic. Being inside that building was so suffocating, I literally couldn’t breathe freely.
I used this excuse with other church members, with my husband, and with my son. I didn’t want my son to doubt the church just because mommy didn’t attend. I couldn’t stop believing that taking him away from the church would be taking him away from salvation, something I loved him far too much to consider. I just needed to be patient. Things would change, and I could happily go back to church. I just needed to wait a little bit longer.
I continued in this limbo status until my son was about 14. At that age, he started objecting to going to church himself and especially resisted attending the early morning seminar that Mormon teens start attending in the 9th grade. At that point, I worried that my lack of faithfulness was endangering my son’s salvation, so I tried going back for his sake. However, that was too little and far too late to save my son’s faith. My own doubts had stopped me from indoctrinating him in the way that so many Mormon parents do their children. My biggest fear when he was little wasn’t that he would leave the church, but that he’d become like the condescending Mormon men I despised. Instead of indoctrinating him in Mormonism, I stressed feminism, equality, acceptance and other liberal values at odds with the church’s teachings. I always discussed morality from a secular humanist, rather than Mormon, perspective. If he took a toy from another child, I didn’t berate him for stealing because the Bible said stealing was a sin. Instead, I asked him if he liked it when other children took things from him. When he admitted he didn’t, I told him we shouldn’t do to other people what we don’t like done to ourselves. With that background, his atheist best friends had an easy time convincing him that the values he held were at odds with what he was taught at church.
On top of that, my nieces were reaching their 20s and saw them being channeled into the same restrictive roles that I had fought so hard against when I was their age. The Church wasn’t going to change because it wasn’t true. Jane had sacrificed everything for a lie. She left her country to follow a con-man out into the desert. She was no hero to be admired. She was a victim to be pitied. The Church didn’t save people. It did incredible harm to them. I was finally ready to allow it to do no more harm to me. I embraced the label “ex-mo” and have never looked back.
Now, my moral code is best summed by Bill and Ted on their excellent adventure.
Be excellent to each other.
Party on, dude!
Treat others with kindness and compassion and embrace the joy of living. This life is all we have. Make it a life worth living.
If you have any questions about Mormonism or would like to suggest a topic for a future post, please leave it in the comments. Also, please do me a favor. If you are enjoying this series, please hit the like button.
In last week's post, I started my deconversation story. Today I bring you part II of the story. The third and final part will appear next week. I'd love to hear your comments or your own deconversion stories. If you have any questions about Mormonism, leave them in the comments, and I will address them in a future post.
I did indeed find the right man at BYU, my husband of 33 years, Tim. However, he was the right man because marrying him didn’t require changing my mind. Tim is one of the few Mormon men who never treated me condescendingly. He treated me as an equal and saw my career goals having equal importance to his own. We got engaged my senior year. Friends nodded knowingly as if I had finally come to my senses. They were shocked when they learned that my upcoming marriage hadn’t changed my future career goals, except for influencing where I applied to graduate programs. I applied to my top choices and various graduating programs within driving distance of Long Beach, California, where my soon-to-be husband had gotten a job. If I got into one of my top choices, my husband would find a new job and we’d move there. If I didn’t get into one of my top choices, we’d live in Long Beach, and I’d commute.
As it turned out, I didn’t get into my top choices and attended graduate school at Claremont Graduate University, which is about an hour inland from Long Beach. Californian Mormons tend to be more liberal than Mormons in other parts of the country, so it was easier to be a married, childless graduate student there than it would have been elsewhere, but still the pressure to have children and be a stay at home mom was intense. But not only didn’t I want a baby at 22, I wasn’t sure I ever did. I resisted the pressure until I passed my Qualifying Exams and had only my dissertation left before I finished my degree.
I would have resisted maybe forever had my husband not badly wanted a child. After I passed my exams, I figured with the time it would take to get pregnant and then the 9-months that pregnancy lasted I would be finished before the baby was born. It is rare for a Mormon couple not to have a child within the first two years of marriage, often in the first year. When Jesse was born, Tim and I had been married for 6 years.
While my childless, career path wasn’t a popular thing at Church, my Mormonness caused me to stand out in my feminist graduate program. I never talked about the Church, but I didn’t drink coffee or alcohol, so my classmates figured it out. I knew Mormon’s patriarchal teachings were indefensible from the time I was 10, and in graduate school I came to see its homophobia as equally indefensible. But I was still sure both would change in the not-too-distant future.
You may ask if I knew at least two aspects of the church were wrong and harmful, why didn’t just drop the whole thing then? I should have, but my heritage and my family made that impossible to consider at that time. Six generations of my family had been Mormons, and family lore was full of the persecution and sacrifices they had endured in order to be members of the “true” Church. One ancestor in particular was a nearly unbearable weight about my neck. Her name was Jane Davis, and I was named after her, although I stopped using the name Jane when I entered college. Jane Davis, along with her family, joined the church in Wales in the 1850s, after which she married the man who converted them and the whole family emigrated to the United States, as those who joined the church were encouraged to do at the time. She gave up everything she knew in life to go to a strange country where she couldn’t speak the language. When she and her family reached the end of the railroad in Missouri, she walked over 1000 miles to Utah pulling a handcart. Mormon history is full of stories of the hardships hardcart pioneers experienced and praise for their faithfulness in the light of such difficulties. The church only sent pioneers to Utah by handcart for 2 years, so having a handcart pioneer bestows a somewhat elite status on an individual in Utah.
Jane Davis’s experiences as a handcart pioneer were detailed in her life story that was written by one of her daughters. Besides the hardships of the 1000 mile walk, the leaders of the handcart companies planned badly, creating an even worse situation and resulting in low rations. At one time Jane and the members of her company were down to nothing more than 3 tablespoons of flour per person per day. They also left Missouri too late in the year, so they were facing snow before reaching Utah. But Jane and her husband made it, and Jane remained faithful throughout her life. How could I, a person who had never gone hungry, dare to doubt the religion my ancestor gave up so much for. She sacrificed everything and endured tremendous hardships in order to be a Mormon. In the weight of my namesake’s experience, it seemed a gross obscenity to even entertain the idea that the religion she gave so much to was nothing more than a con man’s scheme. So while I had rejected large portions of Mormon doctrine as wrong and harmful, I could not yet question that idea that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God sent to restore the truth to the world. The guilt in even admitting I had doubts, after all Jane went through, made it difficult to breathe. So I lived in limbo, half in and half out of the church, that I was still waiting to change.
As is common with life, things didn’t work out as planned, and my dissertation didn’t get written at the speed I anticipated. Having a baby made finishing it more difficult, but I never considered for a moment not doing so. Ideally, I think I should have waited a few more years, but I can’t regret having Jesse. I was ambivalent about having a child throughout my pregnancy, but the very second Jesse was born, I fell deeply in love with him. I doted on that child. My son was the greatest joy of my life, and his death at 24 was the greatest tragedy I could have experienced. But my love for my son in no way affected my career plans. I never considered full-time motherhood as a option and knew I would be miserable if I took that route. Having breaks from caring for Jesse meant that when I was with him, I was fully with him. I was happy to see him and happy to play with him. If I had had to take care of him full time, I would have been a far worse mother and far less able to meet his needs. At Church I saw Mormon women my age and slightly older with four or five children. They looked exhausted, beat down, and miserable. I pitied them and hated what the church had done to them.
I’m sorry for missing last week, but I’ve been very ill with Covid. I’m feeling better than I was, but still not completely recovered.
Today I thought I’d address my deconversion story. I have heard a lot of deconversion stories over the years, and while I’m not arrogant enough to think my story is unique, but I’ve never heard another like it. My deconversion started much younger than most people’s and took far longer to complete. Since it is long, I will tell it in at least two parts.
I was born a 6th generation Mormon in Bountiful, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City. My ancestors joined the Mormon Church early in its existence, some of them even met its founder, Joseph Smith. All of my great, great grandparents were Mormon. Mormonism was engrained almost in my DNA. All of my large extended family was Mormon, as was nearly everyone I knew as a child. I rarely had any interaction with people who weren’t Mormon, and I had no non-Mormon friends until I was a senior in high school and became friends with Ana, an exchange student from Spain.
With such a background, you might expect that I was fully indoctrinated from the beginning and lived my life with no doubts of its truthfulness. This is the way many deconversion stories begin, but not mine. From my earliest memories I was uncomfortable with the patriarchy in the Mormon Church. All positions of authority in the Mormon Church are held by men, and Mormon men are given the priesthood (the power to act in the name of God) at 12. Women never are. In my family, my father, as a holder of the priesthood, presided. He was the one who lead family scripture study and called on one of us to pray at mealtimes or in family prayer. My mom only did such things when my father was absent. It bothered me slightly that my dad was put before my mom, but the idea of a male-exclusive priesthood started to make me angry when my oldest brother turned 12. After my brother received the priesthood, rather than my mom presiding in my father’s absence, my brother now did. It seemed grossly insulting that my adult mother had to defer to her 12-year-old son. This I hated. But at 10 years-old, I started to believe that this imbalance in power mandated by the Mormon Church was a temporary wrong that would soon be corrected.
Before 1978, the Mormon Church taught some incredibly racist doctrine about African Americans. They denied black men the priesthood and forbade all black people from attending the temple.* The justification for this exclusive was the teaching that in the War in Heaven** before the creation of the earth, black people hadn’t been valiant. They were fence sitters who watched to see who was going to win before taking part. Because of their lack of valiance, they were condemned to being born in the lineage of Cain, the mark placed on Cain being that of dark skin. This was a symbol that they were to be denied some of the blessings of mortality. Despite the fact that the Church today tries to claim that it never taught any such thing, I clearly remember being told this as a child.
Then in 1978 with BYU’s participation in the NCAA and even its accreditation in danger, Spencer W. Kimball, the Mormon prophet at the time, had a “revelation” that black men should now receive the priesthood and black people should have all the rights of membership in the Mormon church. When I was merely 10 years old, everything I’d been taught about black people was suddenly no longer true.
In light of this monumental change, it didn’t take me long to decide that what the church taught about women was equally untrue and would be changing shortly. There are several aspects of Mormon doctrine and Mormon history that allowed me to hold this belief without questioning the basic truths of the church or doubting that Joseph Smith was a prophet who restored God’s true church to the earth. The first of these is the belief in ongoing revelation. Mormons believe that not only did Joseph Smith talk to God, but all church presidents since Smith have also been prophets with a direct line to the Big Man upstairs. The 9th Article of Faith*** states: “We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God.” The church taught God revealed truth as people were ready to receive it and that new revelation usually came in response to the prophet asking questions. For example, in the Mormon history as I was taught it, Joseph asked God why it was okay for David, Solomon, and other Biblical prophets to have multiple wives. In response, God told him that He was super cool with polygamy. In fact, it was actually the divinely sanctioned way marriage should be. Joseph was merely following divine command when he had married and had sex with teenage girls behind his wife Emma’s back.****
Another doctrine that allowed me to justify waiting for the Church to fix itself was that of personal revelation. The Mormon Church teaches that everyone should pray to God to know whether or not the Church or any particular doctrine of it is truly from God. If we prayed with faith, God would let us know it was true through a “burning in the bosom” (the witness of the Holy Spirit) or not true through a “stupor of thought” (what this means was never clearly explained).
Somehow I missed the memo that the only correct answer to such a prayer is that everything that church is currently saying is true, so when I prayed, I was open to either answer. I got a burning in my bosom when I prayed about the general idea if the Church was true, but I received a lot of stupors of thought in response to my prayers about the Mormon patriarchy. (Yes, I realize now that my emotions were merely confirming what I wanted to believe, but at the time, I believed the feelings were from God.) I reasoned that the persecution of the early Church was what made it necessary to deny African Americans the priesthood to begin with (the Church was founded in the years leading up to the Civil War.) Then it took a long time afterwards for Church presidents to ask God for an update on the issue. They were only human after all. They did get around to and fixed the problem. Now, because the Church’s leadership were all extremely old, white men, it was taking even longer for them to ask about women, but eventually they would. In the not-too-distant future, the Mormon Church would cease to be sexist, just as it had ceased to be racist. After all, in American history, granting civil rights to black people has always preceded granting the same rights to women. I just needed to be patient.
And so I was. For years and years. I bristled and raged inwardly about the constant lessons about how women should support the priesthood, get married and have children young, and be a full time homemaker. I was never that fond of children, and I hated housework. I knew I would be miserable if I did what the Church told all women to do. To me it seemed as ridiculous as telling all men to be doctors. While some men would love and thrive in a medical career, others are just not cut out for it either intellectually or emotionally and would be miserable failures if they tried to become doctors, but could well be happy, successful men in another field. Women all doing the same thing made no more sense to me than men doing so. However, I knew saying such things at Church wouldn’t go over well. So I kept quiet, but planned my own life to avoid this horrible fate and waited patiently for this “truth” about women to change. Mormons taught that it never would change because truth never changes. This, I knew was a lie. I had watched the truth change about black people when I was 10 years old. So I was patient, kept praying and receiving those stupors of thought.
It was by no means easy to maintain this balance as a teenager, and even more difficult to do so when I started college at Brigham Young University, the Mormon college. When I reached college, the message given to girls changed FROM NEVER EVEN THINK ABOUT SEX to pair up and get married right now. This pressure to marry is the constant drumbeat that permeates everything at BYU. It is not at all unusual for freshmen girls to get engaged, and men frequently joke that women are only there to obtain their MRS degrees, a joke which I always found offensive. Still, I had a boyfriend seriously interested in marrying me when I was a freshman. I broke it off, finding the idea of marrying that young revolting. Other than my freshman boyfriend, I didn’t date much in college. Partially because I couldn’t stand the condescending way nearly all Mormon men treat women and partially because I wasn’t the ideal Mormon woman that men were looking for. I wasn’t after my MRS degree, but planned on having a career. After graduating BYU, I planned to go to graduate school, get my doctorate, and become an English professor. I was repeatedly told that I’d change my mind when I found the right man.
I will stop at this point and finish the story next week. If there is anything you have questions about or would like to know about in more detail, please leave your questions in the comments. If you’ve deconverted from Mormonism or any religion, I’d love to hear your story as well.
* Denying temple attendance has important implications in Mormon doctrine. It is only through temple ordinances that people can be exalted. This doesn't mean non-exalted people go to hell. Mormons don't really believe in hell, but instead posits three kingdoms of glory with the Celestial Kingdom being exaltation. In other words, by denying black people the temple ordinances, Mormons believed they were denying them the opportunity to achieve this highest degree.
** Mormons believe that we all existed with God before we were born into this world. People, Satan, Jesus are all equally the spiritual children of our Heavenly Father and Mother. In the council of heaven, we discussed how earth life would be run. Jesus proposes giving people free will and allowing them to choose whether or not to obey God, which would mean many would be lost. Satan proposed forcing everyone to be good so that everyone could return to be with God. Jesus's plan was chosen, but 1/3 of the host of heavens rebelled and followed Satan, leading to the War in Heaven. Satan's followers were defeated and throw out, condemned never to have a body.
*** The Articles of Faith were written by Joseph Smith as a summary of Mormon beliefs. All children need to memorize these 13 articles before they are baptized at age 8. For a full list of the Articles of Faith, click on the link.
Imagine you are a 12-year-old girl, and a 50-year-old man (known as the bishop (1)) calls you into his office. Not only is this bishop about 3x your age, you are alone with him. He asks you a series of questions to determine your “worthiness.” Most of the questions have to do with whether you believe all the right things. (2)
But then, he gets to the questions: "Do you strive for moral cleanliness in your thoughts and behavior?" and "Do you obey the law of chastity?” If you just say, “yes,” he will probably move on, and minimal harm is done.
But it can be much worse. As a typical 12-year-old, you might not understand exactly what "moral cleanliness" or “chastity” mean, so you ask this 50-year-old man to explain. He turns red and mentions masturbation or necking and petting. (3) You don’t know what these words mean either, so you have to ask for further explanation. The much older man explains sexual acts in increasingly specific detail. (4) If after this incredibly embarrassing and uncomfortable interaction, you say that you do strive for moral cleanliness and obey the law of chastity, you can move on and suffer nothing but a little humiliation.
But it can get much worse. Suppose you have masturbated. Not wanting to talk about something so personal with a 50-year-old man, you might be tempted to lie. However, you have been taught that the bishop has the spirit of discernment and will know if you’re lying. (5) So you admit the truth. He will then go into questions about when you started, when you last did it, how often you do it, whether you look at porn while doing it, etc. He might even ask you about your technique. He then might just tell you to repent and pray for forgiveness.
But it can get even worse. He might decide that you need continued counseling to overcome your sin and insist on follow up interviews in order to monitor your progress. You now have to go monthly into an office alone with an adult man and discuss touching yourself. He also might tell you that you can’t take the sacrament for a period of time. (6)
The first Sunday after this, your parents notice that you didn't take the sacrament. When you get home, they ask you why. If you tell them that the bishop told you not to for a period of time, they will ask for details. Now you have to either lie to your parents or tell them about your masturbation habit. If your parents suspect you are lying, they will press you on it, or they could even call the bishop who will likely tell them. You have now been shamed and humiliated for a completely normal and age appropriate activity by a 50-year-old man, your parents, and the entire congregation. You feel unclean, disgusting, and shameful. You imagine you are the only one in the ward who has done something so awful. You now obsess about your behavior and feel guilty even thinking about kissing a boy. As obsession often does, your hyperfocus on masturbation makes it even more difficult to resist, leading to you masturbating more often rather than less. The guilt and the shame can be debilitating. You decide you are a hopeless sinful person. (7)
But it can get still get worse. The above scenarios supposes a bishop with no nefarious intention. Imagine, instead, you have a bishop who is less than noble. You now face a child predator prying into your every sexual thought and action. You are incredibly uncomfortable every time you have to be alone with him, but there’s no way to escape it. If you tell your parents how uncomfortable the bishop is making you, they will probably interpret as a sign of you feeling guilty about sinning and insist you keep going. It can escalate from having you talk about touching yourself to him asking to see how you do it, etc. You can imagine how much further it can and does go. Yes, the Mormon church has covered up case after case of the sexual abuse of children through their high powered lawyers and non-disclosure agreements.
In the best case, you are like me and never have a bishop with bad intentions. I still grew up with extremely unhealthy feelings of shame about anything sexual that took me years to undo as an adult..
Yes, this still continues to happen in 2023. One might ask, “Isn’t the church aware of how damaging this can be for children and how easy it makes it for child predators to find and manipulate victims?”
The answer would be yes, yes, they are. In 2018, Sam Young, a 65-year-old former Mormon bishop, learned of his daughters’ experiences with bishops and realized how inappropriate these interviews are. He started an organization called Protect LDS Children, (8) which collected stories of Mormons who had been victims of abuse due to these interviews and circulated a petition calling for an end to bishops asking youth sexual questions. This petition garnered 55,000 signatures, and Young personally delivered it to the Church office building in Salt Lake City. He even staged a 23-day hungry strike outside the Church office building in Salt Lake City, trying to get one of the church’s top leaders to come down and hear the stories of abuse from victims. Instead of doing so, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a press release stating, "They have received and reviewed his materials and understand clearly his viewpoint. Further meetings with him are not necessary to clarify his position on this matter.” (9)
In response to Sam’s activism, the Church did make a couple of minor changes to the process, including allowing the child to have a parent with her if she desired, but they refused to eliminate these completely inappropriate sexual questions. When Sam continued to protest, he was excommunicated. So yes, the church knows how harmful these interviews are and will relieve you of membership if you get too noisy about it.
After last week’s post, I had several current Mormons objecting to my characterizing the Mormon church as a cult. I stand by that characterization. These interviews are only one of the many reasons .
I would love to hear any of your thoughts on cults, purity culture, or Mormons. If you have a question about Mormons that you’d like answered in a future blog entry, post it in the comments. Or tell your own story of how purity culture, either within the Mormon church or elsewhere, affected you.
1 A bishop is the leader of a local congregation (known as a ward), and he is an unpaid, parttime lay minister chosen for the position by the church hierarchy. He could be anything from a dentist to an engineer in his profession. He has no theological training, no counseling education, no experience of any kind that would qualify him to work with youth. After being called, he is provided little additional training.
3 Necking and petting were archaic words 40 years ago when I was asked such questions. I didn't learn what they meant until at least college. Up at least until I left the church about 10 years ago, they were still being used by church officials.
4 There are any Mormon youth who first learn about masturbation while alone in the room with a much older man.
5 Since 12-year-olds tend to be bad at lying, he actually might know.
6 People who confess to sin are often told this. The sacrament is passed in church every week. People notice who doesn’t it take it.
7 In case, you are wondering boys have to go through this process as well.
In deconstructing my trauma with having been raised in a cult, I have a habit was watching YouTube videos that react to Christian claims. In one I watched recently, Jimmy Snow (an ex-Mormon atheist) critiqued a video by YouTube creators who called themselves 3 Mormons. In their video, 3 Mormons promised their audience that we would never regret staying pure until marriage. One of them claimed that a married Non-Mormon friend recently told them, that he regretted having sex before marriage, but no one ever regretted purity.
While I was somehow able to discount most of the sexist bull shit the Church (this is how Mormons usually speak of the institution to which they belong, as if it was the only one) taught me as a child, I was completely indoctrinated in its purity culture. When I married my husband, I was a virgin, and so was he. However, proving the 3 Mormons were lying, we both regret this fact. While there are many ways this purity cult harmed me, today I’m only going to talk about one of them.
Purity culture left me dangerously naïve. Let me demonstrate how embarrassingly ignorant I was. When I was in my early teens, I came across the word masturbation in a novel. From context, it was clear that masturbation was sexual in some way, but I didn’t understand exactly what it meant. I knew it would be useless to ask my mother. Whenever sex was brought up, she grew red in the face, and her answer to every sexual question was the same.
Me: What is a prostitute?
Mom: Someone who breaks Heavenly Father’s commandments.
To prevent my mother from dying of embarrassment, I learned young not to probe for a clearer answer from her. Since I was already pretty certain that masturbation was something that broke Heavenly Father’s commandments, I knew I get nothing further from her. The internet was about 25 years in the future, leaving me with the dictionary and the encyclopedia as resources. But they were about as helpful as my mother would have been. I don’t remember exactly what they said, but it was so vague that I knew no more after reading the definition than I had before. It was certainly something that broke Heavenly Father’s commandments, but just how?
Sex education in public schools was basically non-existent in my childhood, but with as often as my church leaders talked about sex, you’d think it wouldn’t be too hard to learn. In our Sunday Young Women’s lessons, it seemed that every other week we talked about staying pure and modest. Other than don’t do it, the only thing I remember learning was about the manipulative nature of boys. I was warned that they would try to get away with as much as I will let them. It was my job to enforce the purity of the relationship. Every year the Young Women combined with the Young Men for what they called Standards Night, an entire evening devoted to purity culture. But they always used vague language or words I didn’t know. When Church leaders talked about sexuality, they always warned about necking and petting. Even at the time, these were arcane words, and I had no idea what they meant. They taught me to fear sex, not understand it. They taught me to feel ashamed of my sexual nature, not to respect my own body.
To make matters worse, every year the bishop (what Mormons call the leader of the local congregation) interviewed every youth to make sure they were staying pure. The bishop (always a man and usually over 50) would ask if I obeyed the law of chastity, including if I masturbated or participated in necking or petting. While I didn’t know what any of the words meant, I knew I wasn’t necking or petting because they required a partner. But was I masturbating? Since I didn’t know what it was, how could I know? But I certainly wasn’t going to ask a 50-year-old man to explain masturbation to me, so I always answered that I didn’t. But I secretly feared that maybe I did. I think about sex at times, quite a bit actually. I knew having sexual thoughts was against Heavenly Father’s commandments, but was it masturbation? How could I know if I was sinning, if I didn’t know what the words meant?
Through continued novel reading, I did come to understand that masturbation had something to be with stimulating yourself, but I remained even embarrassingly ignorant .To illustrate just how ignorant consider the following conversation from my freshman year at Brigham Young University, the Mormon university. Among my fellow Mormon girls, I was hardly alone in my lack of sexual knowledge. During a conversation between my friends, Lisa and Carey, and I, the subject of masturbation came up. I don’t remember how. Carey, who was even more ignorant than I, asked how women masturbated. I answered that they stuck something in their vagina. (I didn’t understand the clitoris at that the time). Then she asked about male masturbation, and I hate to admit my answer. It was so embarrassing. I said they found a hole to stick their penis in, although I doubt I used such a vulgar term as penis. It was probably something more like they found a hole to sick their thing in. Lisa chimed in, “I think most of them just use their hand.” This thought had never occurred to me.
While in retrospect, this may be amusing. It was dangerous to be this ignorant. No one ever taught me about respect and consent. No one discussed me looking at my own wants and needs or making decisions about sexuality based on my own comfort. The limits were absolute and couldn’t be questioned. Just don’t do it.
While whether or not I was masturbating did concern me, necking or petting wasn’t an issue because I was shy and a nerd, so I didn’t date much in high school. The first time a boy ever expressed significant interest in me was during the summer between my junior and senior year of high school. My girlfriends and I (without any adult supervision) went on a two=week camping adventure throughout Southern Utah. While camping at Lake Powell, we met a local boy who had a summer job in the campground. John was a year older than me and not Mormon. He stopped by our campsite a lot, and it became clear that he was interested in me. After being ignored by high school boys, John’s interest in me was heady. I ended up staying over at his house one night. We kissed, and his hands began to roam. When he touched forbidden areas, I said no and removed his hand. As I had been warned about boys, he kept doing it. I never thought to consider if I wanted him to touch me or to assess my own needs or comfort. The only question I considered was whether or not it was sinful. In my mind, he was tempting me to sin. It never occurred to me that I was being sexually assaulted. No one ever told me that touching without consent was sexual assault. It was just something that boys naturally do. Somehow I just accepted that all males were sexual predators.
My ignorance and the terrible sex education I had received caused me to put myself in a vulnerable position. The story could have ended much worse than it did. He didn’t rape me, but he wasn’t the only man I allowed to continue to sexually assault me without my recognizing it as assault.
So yes, I regret how ignorant I was. I regret the lack of opportunity to explore my own sexuality while I was young. I regret that in my encounters with boys and eventually men, I never even asked what I wanted sexually. I regret that I didn’t know enough to recognize sexual assault and protect myself from it.
So you’re wrong, 3 Mormons, many of us do regret waiting until marriage. I’ll address more about purity culture in future blogs. If you have any questions you’d like answered about growing up Mormon, post them in the comments. I’d also like to hear about your own encounters with purity culture or healthy sexual education. Did you have sex before marriage? Either way, do you regret your decision? Why?
I am continuing my blog series on religion, and I plan (really hope to) make a new post every Sunday. I’m going to try to keep myself to a schedule.
Christians the United States over are calling for a return to Biblical morality. They claim that the downfall of our civilization was caused by removing the Bible and prayer from public schools. In their minds, the moral nature of the Bible is an irrefutable fact. As an illustration of this, I found the posted on one social media channel just yesterday: “The Bible must be the foundation for moral philosophy.” They see the rejection Biblical morality is a sign of moral bankruptcy. When I responded that the Bible was a terrible foundation for any moral code, the poster insisted that I “wouldn’t know immoral if it slapped [me] in the face.” The poster was convinced that I couldn’t have read the Bible, and I must just want to sin. This is the most frequent accusation they throw at non-believers.
On all accounts, the poster was mistaken. As I’ve stated before, I was raised in a conservative Mormon family. Not only did we attend church for three hours every Sunday, we had family scripture study and family prayer daily. When I reached ninth grade, I started what the Mormons call seminary. Not to be confused with seminaries that train pastors, Mormon seminary is a daily religious class for teenagers. Mormon teens the world over get up early before school to attend an hour long religious study course. However, since I grew up in Utah, getting up early wasn’t necessary for me to attend seminary. Throughout Utah, the Mormon Church builds seminary buildings across the street from every high school. Students can get release time to cross the street to attend seminary during any class period throughout the day as well as early morning or after school. In seminary, we studied the Bible and other Mormon scriptures.
Yes, I’ve read the entire Bible, more than once in fact. While I remained a believer for far too long, reading the Bible was a part of my long deconversion. The amount of cognitive dissonance the Bible caused me and the mental gymnastics it forced me to perform in order to remain a believer was a truly impressive feat. But the doubts could not be satisfied and wouldn’t go away. I eventually had to face the reality that the Bible is not a moral book nor is the god it depicts a moral being. Maybe, if you just confined your Bible reading to the Gospels, you could argue for a moral foundation, but step outside those four books, and Biblical immorality is nearly ever present.
While the examples of this immorality are nearly endless, today I will just discuss the Israelite conflict with the Midianites in the Book of Numbers. In the first two verses of the chapter, the Lord commands the Israelites to “take vengeance” upon the Midianites, and so they do, killing all of the adult men. They bring back the women and children as spoils of war, but God isn’t satisfied with this revenge. In fact, Moses is angry that they “kept all the women alive.” He orders them to “kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man intimately. But keep alive for yourselves all the young girls who have not known a man intimately.” (emphasis added)
This foundation of moral philosophy commands the genocide of all males and all adult women in a population, but allows the men to keep the young girls as sex slaves. How is this moral? Even if you can somehow argue that the adults were bad so they deserved it (a dubious claim at best), how is ordering the slaughter of little boys the act of a righteous god? How can keeping little girls as sex slaves be morally justified?
Anyone who wants to claim that the Bible is a good guide to a moral life explain this to me.
