My husband and I met through church. We were friends for a very long time and enjoyed each other's company. We drifted apart for a while because I had moved out of state after my parents divorced, but reconnected after I had moved back not too far from where he lived. I had made questionable choices in partners before reconnecting with him, and I had drifted from being a hardcore believer in the church and it's teachings to being more blase about religion in general. When we got back together, though, we both started going back to church and talked about getting married in the temple.
Our bishop didn't think that we were worthy of a temple marriage, however, and we didn't want to have a long engagement, so we had the bishop marry us in another church (we had chosen a church that we found beautiful not too far from our own ward building).
During the two and a half years that we were married, we would end up drifting into and out of the church as our ideas and lives and personal beliefs that we were growing into changed us. In 2010, he drifted further from the church and I clung to the family and support that I'd grown up with. Even as I made choices that would ultimately lead me to leaving the church and feeling as far from that community as I could possibly be.
In 2011, my oldest was born. He was a happy, healthy, wonderful baby boy and I was determined to raise him in the church to be surrounded by the same feeling of family and community as I'd been raised with. It wasn't to be, though. Every time that I came to church with my son, they would ask me to leave the chapel because he was either disruptive or I was nursing him. Since the building in the was a third-word building, there was no speaker system to the other rooms of the church. So asking me to leave the chapel meant that I was literally hearing nothing that was being said and I felt ostrasized, unwanted, unloved, like a lepar in the very same community that I had come to rely on as a youth and teenager. After about 6 months of this treatment, I stopped coming.
For a while, I still believed and read my scriptures and prayed. When my mother came to stay with me for several months, I would study and pray with her and even go to church with her (though I still ended up in another room during sacrament meeting). The longer I spent in another room of the church, though, the less I held onto my belief or the community that I had so desperately tried to reclaim as a newly divorced, single parent in the LDS church. The only person within the church that I felt like had my back and best interest in mind was my saint of a mother.
Eventually, I admitted to Mom that I just didn't believe anymore and that, the longer I interacted with the members of the branch that we attended, the less sure I became that I belonged anymore. I still studied with Mom, but I stopped believing it in my heart and soul and was only going through the motions for Mom. When I got to the point of not believing in the Heavenly Father that I'd talked to, prayed to, and believed in with all my heart, I broke down in tears because I didn't want to disappoint my mother, but I simply couldn't live a lie anymore. I didn't know where I was going to fit in with my "spiritual" needs, but I started talking to the Universe or Mom when I would have previously prayed to Heavenly Father.
This was the first nail in the coffin of my LDS life.
I started searching the internet for the language that I needed to convey what I believed in and what my spiritual path would be most closely associated with. Along the way, I learned that polygamy (which is no longer practiced by the mainstream LDS church and is illegal in all 50 states) was not the only relationship type that out there outside the monogamous lifestyle that I had practiced, but never felt fulfilled in. At first, I'd been looking into polygamy (for lack of a better term at the time), because I wanted to give my son a village that loved and cared for him. And the village that I'd grown up with had turned its back on us.
One day, I stumbled across an article that quoted a passage from More Than Two. That lead me to find and read More Than Two and search for more articles on polyamory and other forms of ethical non-monogamy. This spoke to me. It felt like it was what I'd been searching for in a way that polygamy never had. I spoke to my live-in boyfriend about opening up our relationship because I believed that polyamory was right for me. He was not on-board at first, so I gave him things to read to understand better than what I could convey with my own words and told him to think about it. Eventually, a couple of weeks later, he came to me and agreed that we would open up our previously monogamous relationship and practice polyamory.
That was the second nail in the coffin of my LDS life.
Shortly thereafter, I reconnected with my ex-husband and we agreed to try having a relationship again. We'd both grown and matured since we'd divorced. We'd both been on the dating scene and had a better idea of what we wanted out of a relationship or life in general. Mom was both pleased that my ex-husband and I had started dating again (she'd loved him since we had started being friendly way back in the stake building's hallways when I was 12 and he was 17) and distraught that I was committing a sin by practicing polyamory and exposing my own child and my boyfriend's older children to my sinful lifestyle. But I was content with my relationship dynamic for the first time in my life and I didn't feel like I was always looking and calculating relationships and jumping from one monogamous relationship directly into another because "if you are lusting after someone other than your partner, then you obviously don't love them and should leave the relationship."
I still had not found my spiritual outlet, though, and that bothered Mom more than polyamory ever could, but she tried very hard not to push me on the matter and left me to find my own way. I spent years saying that I was Agnostic, because I didn't know if deities were real or, if they were real, whether they gave two shits about the mortals on Earth. So, I kept searching.
I remember watching an episode of Bones with Mom during this time of indecision and searching. During the episode, Brennan says to Booth on the matter of her own disbelief, "can't you just accept that if I'm wrong I'll burn in Hell?" I remember turning to Mom and asking her this. I don't think I have ever seen her look so sad in all my life as she said, "no, I can't. I don't want you to burn in Hell. I want you to be happy and at peace when you die, not tormented for eternity." The thought and emotion behind her statement caught me off-guard and I thought about it for several days before I went to her and apologized for upsetting her. I told her that I couldn't believe in a "kind and loving Heavenly Father" who lets all the evil of the world happen. Especially to innocents. It didn't make sense to me that He would allow it all to happen - to let all the bad things that had happened to me and my sisters, the abuse that came from my father throughout our lives, and all the pain and hate that so permeated the world. And how He could support all the hypocracy and mean-spiritedness of so-called Christians in His name. It just didn't make sense to me. But, knowing that this was going to be a tough topic for us to broach, I agreed that I wouldn't say or do anything to show my lack of faith while she was staying with me. I still took her to church, but I rarely went in anymore and didn't attend any of the activities or invite the missionaries to come to dinner.
Mom passed away in 2013 after returning to her own home in another state. Any hold that the church had had over me and my siblings was gone. We didn't have any reason to pretend or "play nice." But we still didn't go throught the legal process of getting our names removed from the membership roster.
Fast forward 8 years. I am happily married to my ex-husband again and we both practice polyamory. We have a total of three (living) children. One of my sisters and my mother-in-law live with us in a home that we own. None of us believe in organized religion. My husband still considers himself loosely Christian, my MIL is devoutly Christian, but doesn't believe that organized religion is the way to go, my sister is a loosely pagan witch of a couple of years, and I am a loosely pagan witch of a handful of years. Our children are being raised to believe that monogamy is not the only acceptable relationship dynamic and that spirituality is a very personal thing. I involve them in my practice and the girls enjoy making "potions" with me for my Etsy shop. My MIL teaches them about God, Jesus, and reads them Bible stories from time to time.
My sister and I made a resolution that we would be more devoted to our practice of witchcraft and learning about the deities believed in around the world as well as officially getting our names and my children's names removed from the membership rosters of the LDS church. To that end, we have filled out the paperwork and had it notarized and sent to a lawyer that does pro-bono work for the people that want to resign their membership of the LDS church. (Yes, it is a legal process and yes, you do need to have the forms notarized for the LDS church to accept the resignation letters.)
This has been something that has been coming for a long time. Longer for some of us than others, but a long time nonetheless. And it is almost over. The end has started and we are determined to not be beholden to the church or the measures they take to make sure that your location is known by your local bishopric.
I'm still not 100% sure what my spiritual path will end up being, but I know that I would like to be free to worship whichever deities speak to me instead of one that wants to silence my voice (except in worship of Him) and tie me to out-dated laws and rules. I won't let my children grow up believing that they deserve abuse of any kind or that they "asked for it" through something that they said, did, or were wearing. I won't hold myself to a religion that teaches that male people do not have control over their actions if a female person is attractive or showing some skin. Such beliefs are victim-blaming and -shaming and have no place in Christianity. Jesus, the Savior of the Christian people, said that if a man was tempted by the way a woman looked, that he should pluck out his own eye rather than have it lead him to lust. (Matthew 5:27-29). But, as youth in the LDS church, we are taught that girls and women must prevent boys and men from lusting after them by dressing and behaving kindly and modestly.
Being brought up in this church made me think that it was MY fault that a grown man raped and molested me for years as a child. That a "friend" raped me after coming to my home uninvited or announced because I had "led him on." And that the rape inflicted by a neighbor merely a month later was my fault because I shouldn't have been dressed that way or invited him in. I should have been more careful, more modest, less attractive, and less inviting (though never less friendly or kind).
These beliefs aren't specific to the LDS church, of course. Many churches preach modesty and purity and kindness in women over the self-control of a man. It is a huge problem all over the world. My experience was with the LDS church. That taints my perception based on my experience. Just because I have a problem with it does not mean that others do. And that is fine. They are free to believe in whatever they want as long as it doesn't get forced on anyone else and doesn't hurt anyone.
For me, Christianity doesn't fit. The way it is practiced and weilded by many does not speak kindly to me. There are exceptions to that, of course. I know some lovely, wonderful, kind, accepting, friendly, and charitable Christians - in and out of the LDS faith, but I do not believe in the existance of their God or Savior with them. I am happier believing that there are many beings that fill the roles of gods and goddesses and that the love of the Earth, man-kind, and the Universe is the important thing. I don't know that I will ever worship a specific deity in more than a passing manner, but I appreciate the beliefs that they are there and that there was a time and place for them in the world even if that time and place isn't here and now.
Someday, maybe I will find myself of a different mind and discovering that worship of a deity - or many deities - is the perfect fit for me. Until then, I will appreciate the idea of deities from afar. I will learn more about them. I will make offerings and introduce my children to the mythologies of the world - including Christianity. I will let them find their own path to happiness and spiritual fulfillment in a way that I didn't until I was an adult. And this is the start of that. I'm not sure that I'm right. I'm not convinced that I'm wrong, though, and that is more powerful to me.
It is my fervant hope that leaving the LDS church officially will not mean that the people that I grew up with, loved, and considered family turn their backs on me, but I'm not willing to stay to make someone else happy or comfortable now that Mom isn't the one that I am making happy and comfortable.
Blessed be.
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