The Price Of Honesty: Why Ex-Mormons Keep Quiet About Their Lack Of Belief

          The Daily Beast recently published an article featuring an interview with Sue Emmett, who is the president of the ExMormon Foundation and the direct descendent of Brigham Young.  Sue talked about her experience as a Mormon woman with clarity, insight, and compassion.  I am grateful for Sue’s courage in going public with her experience as a Mormon woman.  

          For years, I have been standing by the sidelines, wanting to tell my Mormon story but too afraid to speak out.  I want my family to listen when I tell them who I am as a person.  In all the years since my exit, no one in my family has ever asked me what I believe in and what my values are.  No one has ever thought to ask why I left.  I remember the Mormon mindset very well - even the slightest hint of criticism felt like religious persecution.  And so I have been keeping quiet, out of love for my family.

          I have reached a point where I realize my silence is doing more harm than good.  Ex-Mormons keep quiet because we love the Mormons in our lives.  We keep quiet because we are afraid of what will happen to us and to our families if we speak out about our experiences.  We keep quiet because we do not want to face the condemnation of the people we once thought were our friends.  However, silence does not fix the problem - at best, silence is a temporary solution.  

          In the ten years since my exit, there has been some progress within my family.  My mother treats me with all of the love and affection that she treats her other children, although even my mother does not ask about my beliefs.  My love for my mother strengthens and balances me, soothing a broken heart.  My father has dampened his rage towards me.  I feel more comfortable with my identity as a liberal agnostic woman.

          But in other aspects, life has not gotten better.  One of my brothers has been treating my husband and me badly.  He makes snide comments about my husband’s ethnicity, cracking jokes about how all the Indians in this country either own Motel 8’s or 7-11’s.  We live three hours from my brother - in the three years since we moved to Texas, we have visited my brother a dozen times, during which he pokes fun at my husband’s vegetarianism, oblivious to the irony of mocking a Hindu’s dietary restrictions when as a Mormon he abstains from coffee, tea, and alcohol.  On the rare occasion he visits our home, he feels comfortable bringing meat with him, when my husband and I refrain from bringing coffee into his home.  And yet I have kept quiet about my brother’s behavior; I still do not feel that I am an equal within my own family.  I am still afraid of losing my family, as so many other ex-Mormons have lost theirs.

          I had a difficult exit process - I first started questioning Mormonism when I was fifteen and I stopped believing when I was sixteen, when I was still living under my parents’ roof.  I survived for two years by concealing my unbelief.  The pain of living a double life - exacerbated by the very negative reaction I got when I confided in a Mormon girl I thought was my life-long friend - drove me to the brink of suicide.  When I did leave, my decision was made harder by my mother’s heartbreak and my father’s rage.  

          Last year, I read the book “Heaven Up Here” by John Williams.  I was astonished by his honesty in chronicling his mission experience.  Although I never served a mission, I recognized much of his Mormon mentality in the young girl that I once was.  After reading his book, I cried.  I cried and I cried and I cried, hiding my tears from the world.  I had started writing about my Mormon experience six months before, attacking the subject with an honesty that I never dreamed I could talk about publicly.  And here was a man, living in the heart of Utah, married to a faithful Mormon woman, who had the strength to leave the Mormon Church and then to write about the good, the bad, and the messiness of his experience with a candor that I had never seen before.  He gave me hope that I too could one day be as honest.  

          My family deals with my lack of belief through willful blindness.  And maybe this will never change.  But the burden of silence has been lifted.  I still don’t know what the full price of my honesty may be.  But the freedom is worth the price.  

In Memory Of A Friend

         My friend Billy* was a year younger than I was, a sweet kid with brown hair that curled into ringlets and enormous blue eyes.  He came from a very poor family; he was also a non-conformist who wore chains on his Sunday dress-pants and listened to Linkin Park.  The opinion of the ward was stacked against my friend, as adults and teenagers alike whispered about him.  There were rumors that he skipped school, that he smoked cigarettes, that he had “bad” friends.  I never knew the truth of these rumors - we attended different high schools - but I do know that he loved his little sister dearly.  Her face lit up when she saw her older brother and he always gave her a hug.  My junior year of high school - my final year of church attendance - we were both prone to skipping sacrament meetings.  Sometimes we would cross paths as we wandered the empty church halls.  Our discussions were always topical - school, life, jokes.  The elephant in the room - our personal reasons for skipping sacrament meeting - was never addressed.  I was too afraid of the possibility of condemnation to confide in my friend.  

         Billy committed suicide my freshman year of college; he jumped off a bridge to meet the jagged rocks below.  I never mustered the courage to tell him about my shattered belief; now I am left with the empty feeling of having failed him in some crucial way.  I reached my limit at the start of my senior year of high school; I quit attending church and withdrew into a shell as I struggled to cope with my father’s anger, my mother’s heart-break, and the various gossip surrounding my exit.  We lost touch as I sorted out the aftermath of my exit; dealing with any Mormon, no matter how sweet or atypical, was just too painful.  And then he was dead and there was no second chance for reconciliation, no way of letting him know that he wasn’t alone.  I suspect he may have been going through the same struggles I was.  But I will never know the truth.  

          But what I do know is that being a non-conformist or a non-believer among Mormons is a very stressful and isolating experience.  A year after Billy committed suicide, I attempted to take my own life.  My father was making petty judgmental comments about my character while my mother was interrogating me about my “sinful” lifestyle.  The idea that my parents - the two people in the world that were supposed to love me unconditionally - had turned against their apostate daughter was too heavy a burden to bear.  The prospect of the impending years seemed bleak; I thought I would never regain what I lost when I left.  That was a very, very low point in my life and one that I never wish to return to.  And so I am compelled to write, in order to describe the warp and weft of a life spent traveling a different path in life.  A life that, in the years since my suicide attempt, has grown deep and rich from a curiosity about the world at large.  

         And so this brings me to the issue of why I write this blog.  Why I am going public with my story.  I grapple with the issue of sharing my story in a public venue; I worry that I am self-centered, that I will hurt my family, that my story is not relevant.  But then I am reminded of Billy and of why I need to write.  I want faithful Mormons to know that people who choose to leave the Church are not bad people.  We exist and are fellow human beings, with all the hopes and dreams and aspirations that make humanity so wonderful.  We deserve respect, to have our choices and beliefs honored.  I want the people who have never been involved with the Mormon Church to have a deeper understanding of what it means to be associated with this peculiar American faith.  And most of all, I write because I want others who are struggling with their faith to know that they are not alone.  I want them to know that their doubts do not make them a bad person and that life will get better, as they find the courage to shape their own destiny.

          Billy deserved better; he deserved to know that he wasn’t alone.  I have failed one person by my silence; I will not fail another.   

*Name has been changed