Letters to a Leaving Mormon: Introduction
Chapter One
The first Sunday morning I stayed home from church, I made a German pancake that touched the top of the oven as it rose. I worried that the kitchen would burst into flames. I heard my children teasing each other, still in their pajamas, and wondered if I had pulled the moral framework out from their lives. I was proud of finally making the choice to step away from a church that was causing me so much dissonance, but now, alone and staring out at this new landscape, all I could do was open the oven door and watch the pancake rise.
When I took it out, let hot syrup slide along its surface, put it on colored plastic plates and sprinkled the powdered sugar as I called my kids to breakfast, all I could think was that right now they are singing the closing hymn without us. Right now kids are running from the chapel and into their classes. Adults are mingling in the foyer. Do they know I’m not coming back? Everyone is sitting down for Sunday School, passing the attendance roll on the clipboard, someone marking a 0 next to my name. My three kids came crashing into the kitchen, impervious to the weight of my decisions, not theirs to parse. My husband was at the church, helping record and stream the meetings for the elderly people who couldn’t leave their houses, so I was alone as I slid from feeling elated to wondering if I had ruined my life.
I was at the beginning of something that had been coming for years. I knew I would leave the Church long before I found the courage to stay in my pajamas that Sunday morning. To an outsider, it seems like the decision should be easy, simple, and clear to leave an institution you fundamentally disagree with, but for anyone who has left someone or something that was a part of you, you know that it is anything but easy, simple, or clear.
In the ward I grew up in, there is a man who plays the organ at the front of the chapel every Sunday as if his life depends on it. On more than one occasion, his interludes between verses brought me to tears. In my box of treasures, I still have a necklace that a Young Women leader brought back for me when she went on vacation. I was thirteen and I had never felt remembered by someone in that way. I spent eighteen months in another country as a missionary, and even twenty years later, those dirt roads lead to somewhere inside me.
Leaving is more than just acknowledging that you no longer see an institution as holy and true. It is renouncing a life that held you comfortably for a long time. It is setting aside certainty for the unknown. It is trusting in yourself for perhaps the first time in your life. It means living without a roadmap and learning to be okay with that. It means discovering that there is so much more beyond the fences you were told never to climb over.
That morning, I sat quietly, a film drying over the syrup still on my plate, long after my kids left the table and went back to playing together. I wanted someone to tell me I would be okay. I wanted someone to tell me about wholeness, how it was possible after leaving Mormonism. I wanted to know I would find myself, that what had felt untenable could be mended.
I wrote these essays to be the kind of words I needed then and am grateful for the people and places who offered similar words to me when I felt lost as I was leaving Mormonism. I wrote them while still missing aspects of Mormonism. I wrote full of clairvoyant anger at the way the Church treated people I love. I wrote while still deconstructing my own experience. I wrote not because I am healed from religious trauma, or smarter than people who stay, but precisely because I am neither. I took on this project because I wanted to articulate for myself the experience of making decisions I never thought I would be brave enough to make. I wanted to unravel emotions, beliefs and perspectives that the Church gave me. I engaged with the emotional subject of leaving a religion to know that I would not only be okay post Mormonsim, but that I could heal and thrive in ways I didn't think possible.
That first Sunday morning, as I washed the bright-colored plates and joined my kids in the living room for a round of Mario Kart just as my husband walked in and picked up a controller to play with us, I did not know that my decision to leave something I had loved would allow my understanding of compassion, of trust, of the sublime, to expand in ways I hadn’t thought possible. On the television screen, my character careened around the track, trying to anticipate the turns. I lost the Mario Kart race; I always do, but it never stops me from playing. I sat back on the couch. The kitchen had not burst into flames, my kids were laughing, and none of us had fought about putting on Sunday clothes and getting to church on time. This was a start of something new. I could not articulate how I would get there, or where I was even going, but it seemed that not knowing was perhaps the point of this journey.
These essays are not a road map to leaving Mormonism. Not a comprehensive guide or a how-to. It is simply my experience at a point in time, a single tree in a forest, a story that I lived and am living still. It is an attempted act of compassion toward myself. I will change and transform a thousand times before I am finished. I know many who are hurting as they navigate their own journey out of Mormonism.
My intent in putting this book into the world is not to diminish the experiences of active and practicing Mormons, nor to judge or make definitive statements about what someone should or shouldn’t do. My intent is to challenge Mormonism and its premise of truth claims, but I have no interest in discounting the personal experience of anyone else. My critiques have to do with the institution, leadership, culture and doctrine that is born of a high-demand religion. Personal and sacred experiences are just that, and it’s okay to disagree with what is written. I hope you write your own stories.
This book is for people who are still going to church but are unsure if they can stay. This book is for people who have recently left and are beginning something new. It is for active Mormons seeking to better understand someone they love who has left, or for people who left long ago, but still need to process emotions, trauma, or questions. This book will likely resonate to some degree with anyone who has left a religion, institution, or belief system that shaped their lives.
Many people who have left the Church find themselves without a guide, road map, or support, and some of those who want to leave are held in place by this fear. This book is for the people who, for most of their lives, had entire libraries full of books, talks, courses, podcasts, and history from which to draw inside of the Church, but found the shelves relatively empty once they left. Those shelves are beginning to fill with stories like this one.
I do not have the answers about spirituality beyond Mormonism. I do not have all the understanding needed to heal and change. My heart and mind left the doctrine of the Church many years ago, but physically, I have only been away for a few years. There are still times when I walk past the church on Sunday morning and see all the people going in and feel a pang of missing my life when I was a part. Mostly though, I feel gratitude to have shed beliefs that kept my personal life stagnant, confused, and chaotic.
The next Sunday after the first time I stayed home from church was a little easier, and more so each week after that. I stuck to simple things like pancakes, Mario Kart, watching the birds in the backyard, letting my dog lay her head in my lap, making the beds, playing Chopin on the piano, sleeping in, talking to my kids. A life post-Mormonism is an evolution I have not fully lived into yet. Each Sunday is both the same as it’s always been and completely new .
I hope this space can help you feel less alone. I hope you know you are good, and that there is not a right or wrong way to leave Mormonism. I hope you know your feelings are valid. I hope you know that the world is wide with beauty and joy, and you are capable of stepping into it. You do not need permission from anyone except yourself.