Ex-Mormon Stories

This is part four of my story of how I left the LDS Church.  To start at the beginning, please check out part one: My Life as a True Believing Mormon.

It had been almost a year since I first questioned whether there was a God or not.  As I already mentioned, I am an impulsive person, so for me to spend a year trying to decide something tells you the magnitude of the decision.  I spent about .25 seconds contemplating whether or not I should say yes to my future husband’s proposal, and roughly 1.3 seconds deciding whether or not to buy a pick-up truck I really wanted (the answer was yes on that too, btw).

But for once in my life, I was spending months trying to make a decision, and I had been all over the map during that time, from absolutely dead-certain there was a God, to hoping there was one, to not wanting to think about whether there was one or not, to being absolutely dead certain there wasn’t one.

My faith had taken a beating of the first degree, and I was worn out.  I just wanted to regain my testimony and have life go back to the way it was.  Life was so much easier when you didn’t spend every waking moment contemplating the cosmos!

All of this brought me to the bishop’s office.  Because bishops don’t tend to hang out with nursery leaders often, I only knew the bishop in passing.  He had always seemed pretty nice though, and I was sure he’d see why I needed this release so badly, and be willing to let me out of my calling.

He sat me down in his office, and asked me why we were there.

What came out was a rambling story of the last 12 months - questioning if there was a God, the different reasons for my doubts, and how I wanted to be released from my nursery calling so I could start attending Sunday School and Relief Society regularly again, and regain my testimony.  I explained my history of callings in the church (6.5 years of no Sunday School or Relief Society), and why I thought that was the reason for me losing my testimony.

Twenty minutes later, I finally ran out of things to say, and he sat there, hands steepled in front of him, looking at me for a moment.  I squirmed uncomfortably, wondering what he was thinking.  When he opened his mouth and removed all doubt, I rather began wishing he hadn’t.

First off, you have to get his tone of voice right.  Have you ever talked to someone who thinks they are smarter than you, and they lecture you as if you are just a couple of bricks shy of a whole load?  That was the tone of voice that the bishop had.  He was smarter, he knew more than me, and he was treating me just how a slightly retarded child would be treated.

Believe me when I say that didn’t go over so well with me.  My father has this tone of voice perfected - he spent twenty years in the military and thus has had plenty of time to work on it - and so it pissed me off to no end that the bishop would also talk to me this way.

His first question was why I had such a problem with polygamy (one of the things I mentioned as being a stumbling block for my faith).  I told him that the whole idea didn’t agree with me and that I thought it was degrading to women.

I started to tell him that I had read a lot of books by former polygamous wives in the FLDS Church (like Escape, Shattered Dreams, and others) but he cut me off, telling me that even if we didn’t agree with something, didn’t mean that God should change what he wanted us to do to suit our feelings.

This wasn’t going well.

I tried to explain that I didn’t think there was a reason to need polygamy, and the bishop told me that God needed to have it because there weren’t enough men to go around, and women couldn’t take care of themselves, so they had to depend on the men to do it.  Thus, the men needed to marry multiple wives.

NOTE: I have since found out that this is a load of bull.  Think about it - this is pioneer time, with the wild frontier and single men all over the place.  The absolute last thing that was lacking was single men to marry.

Secondly, this explanation falls flat on its face when you consider the fact that Joseph Smith mostly married already-married women (try saying that five times fast).  If it really was just to provide for the women, then why did some women need two husbands?

In short, this explanation was something that Church members came up with afterwards, to try to explain polygamy away, and had no basis in something I like to call reality.

Unfortunately, this was the first time anyone had mentioned this explanation to me, and so sitting there in the office, I didn’t have the time to think through it, nor did I know at the time that Joseph Smith had been married to a lot of married women.  So I didn’t try to argue against this.

The bishop then started into my other huge problem with the Church: The scientific evidence that points to the idea that there is no God.  Even though my true-believing brother told me that the Church was neutral on evolution, after I thought about it for a while, that just made me more confused, not less.  If the Church was being led by prophets of God who could talk things through with the Man Upstairs anytime they wanted to, then why would there be neutrality on such an important subject?

Either evolution really did happen, or it really didn’t.  Having prophets here on earth today said to me that we ought to know one way or the other.  And since the scientific evidence all SCREAMS that it happened, it only led (in my mind) that therefore the Church was wrong on their stance, and that this disproved the Church being true.

Well, the bishop didn’t take any of this well.  He started off on a rambling story about how scientists just make stuff up, and then they make up other theories, and then they support their made up stuff by pointing to the other made up stuff, and it was all just a house of cards.

He told me, “If scientists decided today that there was no gravity, then people would go throw themselves off a bridge because they would believe they could fly.  And then,” he finished with no small amount of rage, “the scientists would have their deaths on their heads!!!!!!”

I just stared at him in shock.

He went on quite a bit longer, but the upshot of the whole discussion was that science was all bad, and that you cannot rely on it at all.  Silly me, I had started to rely on science a lot, since it seemed rational and provable (as opposed to religion, which cannot be proven) and so this train of thought went over like a lead balloon.

He told me at one point that because I had gone through the temple, that me leaving the Church now meant that I was going to go to hell.  (Again, I found out later that this is wrong.  “Hell,” or Outer Darkness, is reserved for those who have actually seen God but have chosen to turn their backs on Him.  I don’t qualify by a long shot.  According to Mormon doctrine, I would either go to the Telestrial or Terrestrial Kingdom, a long shot from hell.)

Then he got on my case for wanting to be released from my Nursery calling, telling me that many people serve in callings that keep them away from Relief Society and Sunday School for years at a time, and they didn’t have a problem staying faithful in the Church.  He lambasted me for wanting to attend since “just” attending those meetings wouldn’t do any good.  I had to have the “right spirit” and the “right frame of mind” for attending, and I obviously didn’t have either of those.

I meekly asked, “Does this mean you won’t release me?” and he angrily retorted, “I didn’t say that!!!!” but then wouldn’t clarify.

The meeting lasted for an hour and a half, with most of that being spent with the bishop saying patently untrue things and/or condemning me to hell for questioning the Church.  I finally broke down - I couldn’t handle it anymore.  I stood up and said, “Thank you.  Thank you for your time,” right in the middle of one of his tirades.  I headed straight for the door.

“Oh!” he said, and jumped up.  “Well, I’ll have you back in my office again next week and we can talk again,” and held out his hand for me to shake it.

Staring at the floor, I shook his hand quickly and practically ran for the exit, thinking all the while, “Over my dead body.”  I walked out of the building and to my car.  I sat in the car with tears rolling down my face.  I replayed scenes from the meeting in my mind.  Did I just live through that?  Really?  I felt like I had just come out of the Twilight Zone.  I had gone in there hoping to regain my faith, and came out feeling like a discarded piece of trash.

I drove home, wiping tears away as I went, and avoided DJ when I got there.  I climbed into bed, pulled the covers over my head, and promptly burst into tears.  I could not believe what I had just lived through.

A small part of me knew that the bishop couldn’t be all right - that some of that had to have just been his opinion - and I started contemplating my options.  Should I start attending another ward instead?  How would that work?  I never wanted to go back to that ward again, but the Church was weird about attending the correct ward - you can’t just pick and choose where you want to go.  Would another ward even let us in?

I finally fell asleep, questions tumbling through my mind.  I had to figure something out, and soon.

Check back tomorrow for Part Five: There is no God, but the LDS Church is True.

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