9 Ex-Mormons share why they left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints [EXPLICIT]

[Music] i was born into the mormon church well i was raised a mormon i grew up in a really small town and it was dominantly mormon both of my parents were mormon my whole family is mormon going back six or seven generations my mom's side of the family actually comes like way back from when the church was founded my mom's line actually goes all the way back to lyman white who was like a really good friend and bodyguard of joseph smith who started the church we were there from the very very beginning mormonism runs in

my blood i think i'm kind of like a very generic form of what it is to be mormon all growing up at 8 years old i was baptized that 12 years old i got the priesthood i was a deacon was a teacher was a priest 18 years old i became an elder when i was 19 i went on a mission i was into it i i was like the seminary president served a mission all of that stuff so i was pretty mormon in high school all my friends called me morgan the mormon because i was

in st louis and i was like the only mormon in our school and it was kind of my identity i jumped head on into it full force i went through they call it seminary and you meet every morning before school for a couple of hours it's like a mini church service it's very time consuming that's for sure you know church they've changed it recently to where it's a two-hour service but it was always three hours for me growing up when you learn about your family history and then mormons put a big emphasis on family history

and for me specifically my grandparents were really really into talking about it so we would get together you know they would show us oh here's like a book that your great great great great grandfather wrote about when they crossed the plains to utah and you know here's photos of your very distant relatives that were pioneers i do think that our our family relationships are a lot more close-knit in mormonism our our whole family dynamic was very centered around the church so you know scripture study together every day church every weekend we'd get up in the

morning and we pray together and then when we're going to bed we'd pray together again every sunday we went to church every monday we did family home evening which means you get together as a family they teach us we sing we play games we have refreshments well i don't know if i ever enjoyed family night [Laughter] a family night in my in my family was alway always felt forced as a child and as a parent of my own kids i think a big thing that they push is like your temple attendance or your scripture study

or even just your relationship with god you know you go to church every sunday and you hear these people having these like amazing conversations with god and when you feel like you're not having those you're like what's wrong with me the most unique part probably for me was having people trying like purposely trying to get me to do things that were against my religion you know like i had kids that i worked with they'd sneak beer into the to the walk-in fridge and we don't drink beer we don't drink coffee we don't smoke you know

when we're mormon and he and and he tried to get me to even like swear he would go down the line of things that he'd be like can you uh take take a drink of this jack daniels i was like no and he's like come on man just smoke one cigarette it's like why is this why does this matter so much to you that feeling like i was somewhat more important like and it sounds funny to say that but i did i was like i'm on god's like mission to like save everyone like and i

have this special calling and i so i remember feeling like i i'm like i need to help other people see that they're important in god's eyes too i found the church to be and the culture to be rather natural for me i fit in where the town i grew up in is i think about 50 mormon i mean since i was raised in it i didn't really question much of what it was because that's just like life is how i knew it and everyone around me was doing it and i felt comfortable with people around

me just the the genuineness i guess if that's the word of the people of the church was so much more than any church that i've ever been to such loving kind compassionate caring people they would answer the phone at two o'clock in the morning if i had a question they would come and pray with me they would bring and eat lunch with me at school like it was all about just being present they were kind of like the rock the foundation that gave me security they taught me about god they taught me values uh how

to live a a a good clean life it was a fairytale it was an amazing life as a mormon i just did what i was supposed to do and we went to church all the time and my family was pretty right with the church but it just didn't really last in my older years i think that um predominantly the most of that was me being identifying as lgbt i identify as gay and so that doesn't really correlate with a lot of the beliefs of the um of the mormon church or the mormon faith i was

talking with a friend of mine in high school and she was struggling really bad because she wasn't a member of my faith or anything but she was gay and she was crying to me about it and saying i don't want to go to hell and i was like whoa like rewind for a second i saw her sincerity and i just remember thinking like there's no way like that there's anything wrong with this girl like there's no way because through the eyes of mormonism the lds church i mean it's not allowed and it's very frowned upon

and you'll get disfellowshipped if you do pursue a homosexual relationship within the church they will claim to high heaven that they're not homophobic in any way shape or form but that's completely false and now almost every aspect of it so they they say that they're fine with fine with gay people and they're able to be active members and that they can have all the blessings and benefits of the church given that they don't act on their home of their homosexuality at all i felt like it was inclusive because everyone i was around was mormon so

everyone was included right but as i grow up and i get older i realize wait this is not inclusive because the whole world is not mormon when i was in the church we felt like we were the only ones with the truth and everyone else was lost and i started to feel like that it wasn't like that i always just knew that my church was true there was never a doubt or question and i never really had a moment where i thought maybe it's not you know and and because what happened for me was that

i you know they tell us not to look at information that's not church approved and i never did because they told us not to and then one day i thought that a family member of mine had looked into that and so they were struggling with their faith and i decided my face was strong enough that i could look into it and then help my family member through their struggles and when i finally did look into it it was all at once it was never like oh it might have a little doubt it was like i

learned all of this information all at the same time and all of a sudden my entire world came crashing down so the first moment was very clear in my mind it was the first time that i went through the temple ceremony so i know for a lot of mormons that's a pretty challenging time pretty challenging moment um i got in there and in some ways it was less weird than i was expecting and i think for a lot of people like kind of the the ritual and like the clothing you wear and just kind of

the whole nest seems a little culty to them and that's why they don't appreciate it or like that kind of makes them doubt but it actually wasn't any of that i was pretty prepared for that part um it was actually just kind of this insinuation that a a man answers to god and like a woman answers to her husband so and they kind of put that forth in the temple and it was just this terrible cold feeling that like came over all of my body and i just didn't even really know how to handle it

and i actually just bawled the whole session and i think that all of my family thought i was having like this powerful spiritual experience because a lot of people will cry if they're like you know really feeling it and i was just like the whole time and then you know afterwards they're like do you have any questions and i was like oh boy do i have questions within this the church is very patriarchal driven where the man is the household the leader of the household and the woman presides with him and then that's just kind

of how the house is established my mom all growing up she was more the like church side leader of the household because my dad wasn't mormon so she kind of had to step up on all right we're going to church we're doing these things you gotta get baptized you gotta do this and so coming out to her was like the hardest thing because well i felt like i was gonna disappoint her and then finally coming out and telling my mom was difficult um and at first it was okay when i first told her she just

told me that she loved me which was the right thing to say but then given the circumstances she got a little less okay with it i told her that i i came out but i also told her that i was seeing a guy and that's the part that she was less comfortable with because she's like i don't know who this guy is um is he safe are you being safe or is he like a crazy person that's gonna come in the middle of night and like murder everyone like she just went off on tangents and

any sexual sin has to be brought to the bishop directly um whether it's gay straight by orgy i don't i don't care whatever it is sexual sin is brought to the bishop so you go and speak to the bishop the bishop of the church calls in all of the young people the teenagers basically and sits down with them and asks them very pointed questions like are you having sex are you um are you masturbating are you um are you letting boys touch you kiss you things like that and that just so freaked me out and

i remember getting up being angry and i called him a sicko and i said i can't believe you're asking me these things this is none of your business um it's really creepy i'm leaving prior to my mission i came to talk to the bishop i said hey i was dating this guy we did a lot of things this is kind of where it's at where we going from here and he actually brought out so there's actually a handbook that has a description of how the leaders of the church are supposed to approach certain situations and

he actually just pulls it out from me and he goes up in that section he says well right here it says that you have this amount of time that you're supposed to um wait before you're allowed to take the sacrament you're supposed to um basically not be able to do like if i remember correctly you can't like pray in church you can't um do a lot of your jobs he encourages you that you're supposed to do like scripture reading you're supposed to do personal prayer you're supposed to do all these different things to work towards

repentance but that it's a good like three years before you can i think it's like a good year before you can like take the sacrament it's a good three years before i could go on a mission and then flips over to the section on heterosexual sin um in regards to sexuality and he said well right here it says that they have a third of the time of times that they have to repent and time before they can go on a mission and he's like i don't think it's fair for them to say that heterosexual sin

is less bad than a homosexual sin where a sexual sin is a sexual sin let's make it a year we'll do the year that's that's demanded of like the heterosexual couple and um you can still go on your mission the mission experience is very culty it's very controlling we had a list a checklist called exact obedience work out for 30 minutes check brush your teeth check shower check and everything there was this this kind of double hand of shame of like i'm not good enough to be in god's church like i'm not doing everything i

should be doing i'm not doing it the right way i'm not perfect enough i think that there's a very large cultural aspect where it's like there's these things that are expected of you you don't want to break this cultural expectation um and if you do then it's seen as like a form of shame i was burned out i was burnt out with like things to do within the church and i wanted more time for my family for my kids it's too much that you have to do within the church by for free not nobody pays

you like oh i wish i wasn't in this church so that i can do other things that i like i could have hobbies things that i like spend time with my kids that's what happened to me i was burnt out that's the pinnacle of missionary virtue is obedience so one of the best examples i can think of and this is something that my mission president told me a lot he used this example from mormon scripture i think it's the book of abraham adam and eve had just been cast out of the garden of eden and

they built an altar and they were sacrificing a goat or a sheep or something and god sent his angels to come talk with adam they asked him why are you why are you doing this why are you sacrificing this animal and he said i know not save the lord hath commanded it right and my mission president thought this was very profound because he said adam is like the father of physical father of everyone on on the earth and if he didn't need to ask why then how come you guys need to ask why i like

that the whole reason this church was created is because joseph smith according to him asked why um after i had told my bishop everything about myself um he i went on the mission he's like this is like don't jump out of the church now you've been in this long give like it one last fighting chance and after that you can you can go like no one's requiring you to stay but i don't think that you should just abandon everything that you've known until this point just because of one guy that you had met and so

i went on my mission and i feel like i for the most part i was kind of preaching something that i didn't fully believe i thought i believed it up here i believed it but not down here um and so out towards the end of my mission i was like you know what i need to just kind of figure out my life and there is a large group of people who were um completely in the church and wanted to abandon their homosexuality all the way through um and were ashamed of it completely there's people who

felt like the church was completely wrong and they needed a change and the gays the only right way to be in if you want to stay in the church then you're stupid and there's many people sort of like myself who are on the fence and in the middle is like you know what i'm going to figure out a way to make this work and this is back around 2013 2014 come 2015 um the church made a policy that um meant that like let's say hypothetically i was to get married to a man and have kids

whether biologically or adopted those kids could not be baptized until they're 18 years old and that they denounce the beliefs of their parents and their parents marriage and everything and then they can get baptized in the church and i think that that was it was a slow progression from i'm a missionary and here's like all the church and you should join to i came to this point i was like i am bending over backwards to fit a cookie cutter mold to be in a church that doesn't want me and i think that that's kind of

the point i was like i don't think i want to do this anymore i think that this is this is the sign i've been waiting for this is not meant to be when i went to college my two best friends were gay and they went through a lot my family always taught me gay people are not born gay they make themselves to be gays why is it that every time i go to church i'm being fed more and more shame and that was my experience personally anyway not that it was always a bad lesson or

anything but i felt like there was generally an undertone of you're not enough me and my husband got married and i was 19. very typical mormon marriage get married really young when you don't know each other very well and luckily it worked out for us but we were really young we didn't know what we were doing i was 19 he was 21 he just came home from his mission and um he started to have a faith crisis he started to doubt the church and what it was saying and his doubts largely came from stuff he

was reading online and when he started to have his faith crisis i started to freak out and was like no this can't be happening i was like devastated because the most important thing the church teaches you is to get married have a family and you all go to heaven together and the church leadership in the past has even said there's only three good reasons for divorce apostasy is one reason that they give you that's a good reason to leave your marriage so one thing that actually started to get me to question my faith in the

church was when everyone told me you need to get a divorce and i was shocked i have a good marriage like why would i throw it away just because we believe differently and that got me really starting to question like what is going on here all these people are saying i should leave him just because we believe differently and that is crushing me with my husband we were always like um strolling you know and he would always beg me to just um you know be with me please i love you don't leave me like i

love you and once i left the church he's like you can go i don't want to be with you anymore and we filed for divorce because he didn't want to be with someone that doesn't believe in the church i saw that that experience of like this spiritual connectedness happens in like every religion like it's not just mine and somehow i grew up with this idea that mine was so special that it was just like the religion and after a while i was like i don't know like i feel like every religion has this like amazing

story behind the founding of it and it has like its individual books that go with it and it's it's people and miracles and all this stuff so like what makes mine special we go over the founder which is joseph smith and how he discovered his truth right so he he read the bible he read james 1 5 it says like if any man like black wisdom let him ask of god and then he prayed and he got his answer and i was like okay like that is what i need to do i need to pray

i need to get my answer and in my mind i was going to get the answer that the mormon church was true beyond the truth of other religions and i went back to james 1 5 which is like the missionary scripture and it says like let him ask in faith nothing wavering right and i was like if i learned that the mormon church wasn't true would i actually have the courage to leave it the next phase of my mission was trying to get rid of my confirmation bias like trying to be like if i was

an investigator and i was reading this and hearing this for the first time would i believe it and unfortunately the answer was no unfortunately the answer was i wouldn't believe this um and it was that was kind of the beginning of the end for me was like even though i i love this religion i actually don't think that it's true my faith was part of my identity and having that taken away all at once was like i mean i didn't even know how to go on i had four kids and i didn't know how to

raise my kids without my faith i didn't know if my husband was going to leave me if i decided to leave my face i didn't know if my family was going to disown me because i no longer was a part of their church it was i mean it was an emotional rollercoaster i spent a few weeks just in tears half the time my grandpa that i was really close to died and at his funeral i was reflecting a lot and you know just kind of comparing his life to what i believe and i was like

if i believe this and i compare his life to this he's not necessarily going to go to heaven and and yet that hurt me because i felt like he was a good person my husband and my best friend left the church at the same time you know there's just two more people that are really close to me and i'm like really struggling with the idea that if they make these decisions where does that leave me it leaves me a lot like even if i do all this stuff to make it into heaven it leaves me

alone in heaven like i'm i'm going to be i'm not going to have the things that would make heaven heaven for me i really got into some of the history and technicalities of the religion and it quickly fell apart for me and again i don't think mormonism is a bad religion overall um but one of the things you're constantly fed is joseph smith is a prophet and the book of mormon is true and based on the research that i was doing even from lds approved sources i was like this is falling apart on every single

end because joseph smith is starting to not seem like the great guy that i really really wanted him to be and the book of mormon is not historically accurate according to pretty much everyone one of the things was that there is a book that the mormons view a scripture called the book of abraham and we're taught in the church that this is it's an egyptian scroll that joseph smith our first prophet bought and then translated and it was the story of the prophet abraham and then i found out when i started looking into it that

it's actually a common egyptian funerary text and it has nothing to do with abraham he's not mentioned it's not a part of it at all and from i mean that was one of the things that i was like okay well if he was wrong about that what else could he possibly be wrong about and in revelation chapter 22 verse 18 it says i testify to everyone who hears the word of the prophecy of this book if anyone adds to them god will add to him the plagues which are written in this book and so to

me that was just a big eye-opener for me that that verse of scripture right there revelation 22 18 is what really started my journey with leaving the church in mormonism there is a pre a pre-earth life basically we existed before this in some capacity and during that time there you know there was a divide between god and satan and jesus was saying i have this plan i'm going to come down and sacrifice myself anybody who takes my sacrifice onto them will be saved and satan had a plan that was saying i'm going to save everyone

basically the way to do that is by taking away their free will they won't have free will so they will make all of the right choices and there was a whole war in heaven fought over this and i thought man that whole war in heaven over over free will it must be the most important aspect of the gospel right the most important part of mormonism is free will and i thought that was awesome i i clung to that i really liked that idea and then i read a story about joseph smith one of his followers

daughters who was 14 at the time that she was going to be his wife the way that he went about it is he told her look i don't want to do this but god god is saying that you have to be my wife i told him i didn't want to do it and he came back with he sent an angel with a drawn sword and said he would destroy me if if i didn't marry you and i heard that and i was like well that's just kind of that that just spits in the face of

this whole free will idea that they have set up you know they've jesus died so that we could have free will the whole reason he died was for that and now he's here taking away joseph smith's free will and telling him i'll kill you if you don't marry this 14 year old girl and i was like that's a little absurd i also learned that joseph smith had something like 34 plus wives and i was never taught that he was practicing polygamy i mean i knew that the early saints did but i didn't know that joseph

smith specifically did and he had so many wives i also didn't know that he had underage wives that really really bothered me when i learned that he was marrying teenage girls i also learned that he was marrying mother-daughter pairs and that he was marrying women who were already married to other living men as this all started to unravel i started to feel like i'm starting to get scared i'm starting to get scared that maybe the church isn't true but i'm also starting to get scared that the church is true because i started to feel so

conflicted as far as how i wanted to perceive myself and also how i wanted to live my life and one of the reasons it bothered me so much was because i was a super super faithful mormon i went to church every sunday i did all of the things that was expected of me and i figured you know i know everything there is to know about the church because i've spent my entire life learning about it so then to start learning all of these other things that they never told me it felt like a huge betrayal

a lot of ex-mormons will have like a big coming out on facebook or whatever where they tell everyone i'm leaving i didn't do that i just as it came up in conversation with other people i would tell them but and my mom sent me a text message a couple years into it and said hey i just want you to know i don't i don't really care if you're mormon or not i just want you to be a good person i just want my kids to be happy and i want you know i love you no

matter what you believe and and that was very sweet my mom is most mormons aren't going to shun you really for leaving the church but um they might be a little bit cold with you or not totally know how to deal with you but my mom is very abnormally okay with it the hardest part was there was a lot of shaming and guilt tripping and not all of my family was this way or friends that i grew up with or anything but there was just there was a lot of people telling me you can't be

a good mom if you don't go to church you can't um you can't you know be in the celestial kingdom the highest degree of glory for mormons like the the heavenist heaven you can't uh you can't be happy outside of mormonism those kind of comments were so so hurtful to me because and i don't think people realize like even sometimes how hurtful it was because they're trying to save me by saying these things they think if they can convince me to come back that they're saving my soul and saving my children some of the things

that were really hurtful were see when they would try to leverage my relationships to keep me in so they would say like you have to stay and bring your husband back like you have to be the strong one that saves your husband that hurt because i didn't want to feel like i was controlling or in charge of his salvation um another thing was when they tried to use my children against me and this one still makes me really sensitive because i had a great childhood growing up in the church so i do worry about depriving

my children or or ostracizing them but the words that hurt the most is when people tell me that my children are going to be damned because of my decision so the church responded when i left in such a loving kind caring compassionate way um all of my friends would call me all the time the bishop from the church which in essence for for baptist methodist the pastor of the church reached out to me i had several meetings in his office we discussed a lot of things we went out to lunch like they they in no

sense of the word shunned me at all do you think that people would ask why we left the church but almost nobody did there was almost nobody i mean i honestly can't think of a single person that asked why we left nobody even to this day has wanted to know in depth why we left the church and i think that part of that is that the church tells you not to listen to people who have left we're thought of as you know people who are possessed by the devil people who have been led astray and

so anything we have to say isn't something that they should listen to and some of my friends are lds we don't hang out anymore but luckily my family they are very accepting they all have the hope that i'll go back one thing that i truly miss about the lds church is is the sense of community the sense of family they're very big on family if mormons do something awesome kick ass it's community they're so good about planning regular activities where you get to know people with your same beliefs and you get to enjoy company with

each other it's just really easy to find belonging there um they have it set up or when you join the church or if you're in the church there's always a network of people that you can meet no matter where you're at um and they're going to have a similar belief to you and you're going to probably get along with them i mean it's not a guarantee we're not guaranteed to get along with everyone in life um but i think that um they do really good with the net networking you have this whole history you have

all of these stories that you heard as a child i mean all of this lore there's just things about being a mormon that when you are a mormon and somebody else is a woman all of a sudden you've made a friend i realize leaving means i have to be more proactive in my community they have a cohesiveness in their their church they're very loving and they're so giving to each other and to people their neighbors and anyone they're just taught to be such a good neighbor on a more personal note there is something so insanely

comforting about just thinking that you know the answer to everything it's just insanely comforting honestly like it's wonderful um i i feel like i have a little bit of envy for the girl i was before i started thinking critically um because it was just so comfortable and no matter what happened in my life i was like it's gonna be fine like god is gonna make it right jesus like died to make everything right in our lives so we're gonna be good you know everybody in the in the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints are

human beings i mean and just in general they're not weird they're not different they're they're just the same as you and me they just believe differently they make it seem like they are family oriented that all we care about is family but actually they divide families they have this logo families can be together forever only if all the family keeps all the commandments and all the rules and they go to the temple and they pay tithing every month only there so what they are really saying is like families cannot be together forever as much as

the church wants to claim that it is the only true church on the face of the earth and the only one that has the real jesus and it is run by god it really is an organization run by men that has the problems that men have i think the church has done a lot of good and i think i've spoke a lot to that i think the thing that people in the church don't realize is the damage that it can do and i know that because in the church i never saw the damage until after

i left i wish that people knew that one size doesn't have to fit all that you can be mormon and you can love it and you can live it and you can breathe it and you can enjoy it or you cannot be and that perhaps maybe god wouldn't care either way i wish that a lot of people knew that the church itself isn't going to give you validation and everything um and i think that when it does do that for people that's good because they need that but i think that people should understand that they

are important and they are um impressive and they're amazing just for being who they are whether they are male or female or of a different ethnicity or a different orientation or maybe they identify as a different gender than themselves i think that they um a lot of people will join the mormon church because something happened their life and they needed something to kind of carry them they thought that they needed a meaning to find god but i wish that they knew that they were um the entire world already and that they they should embrace their

wonderfulness just for that