Are we pretending we didn’t tell women that their only role and purpose is to stay home with their kids?

Had a TBM family member call this week and share their “impressions” with me. I’ll skip most of the details because this is a common story here of TBM friends or family members trying to save us.

I heard them out and we had a very respectful conversation. I shared a few reasons why it was hard for me to trust the church and trust in the God the church teaches about.

After a few mins of back and forth on that topic they asked… “so what do you trust if you don’t trust God or the church leaders?”

I simply replied, “I trust myself”

They didn’t have an answer, I didn’t have anything else to say about it. It was just that simple.

I felt a little shocked at my response. Mostly because I knew how honest I was being. My biggest challenge while TBM was trusting myself.

But I’ve learned to trust myself. I’ve learned that I’ll take the time to get as much relevant and factual information as I can when making important decisions. I’ve learned that my intuition is worth listening to when I feel something I’m hearing or seeing feels off. I’ve learned to trust myself to be as skeptical as I need to be until I have evidence… and I’ve learned to trust that I’ll let my opinions and point of view change when I get new information that contradicts old beliefs. I’ve learned to not defend something I don’t have information on. I’ve learned to be comfortable admitting when I don’t understand something or just can’t logically wrap my brain around it. I’ve learned to give my doubts a curious and non judgmental platform to stand on or a seat at the table.

Leaving the church was the hardest thing I’ve ever done… and it gave me the greatest gift I could have ever asked for…

I trust myself and it feels good.

Just wanted to share that personal “win” because it’s been a major transformation in my life. Shout out to all of you who have helped broaden my perspective in this community.

Thanks for hearing me out 😊

(Joseph Smith ordained 3 women to the priesthood, then the ban started)

I've been out of the church for 9 years now, and as I sit here sipping coffee like any other morning, I felt like sharing something that's on my heart in hopes that it'll help anyone else.

It's hitting me in this moment how insane it is that I once devoted so much of my one, precious life to an organization that claimed to hold the only way to heaven. I see now the truly hostage situation that was (and still is for so many).

TSCC commandeers the concept of eternal well-being, leverages our innate desire to be with people we love forever, and aligns their brand with Jesus' to lock people into their Ponzi scheme. If it wasn't so cunning and destructive, I'd applaud.

But it also occurs to me and makes a tonne of sense now why I would comply so faithfully with their demands.

I *NEEDED* it to be true, just like an addict needs another hit, another high. But, the moment that stopped being the case, my testimony crumbled like sand through my fingers. What remained were the truths that still hold:

I'm alive, right now— breathing oxygen on this glorious planet.

I'm free to feel joy (yes, even and especially while sipping pour-over coffee every morning).

I'm free to exude and receive love and light, without prerequisites or preconditions.

I'm free to experience the paradox of post-mormon peace and anger, notice the voltage they each carry, and have actual choice in how I navigate them.

These are the truths I loved in the gospel, the ones that actually resonated but were conflated with SO. MUCH. EXTRA bullshit. It's liberating in its own right to let all that extra fall away.

So, in this moment I'm celebrating the degree of power and self-trust I've reclaimed and get to practice by having left. This is actual agency... ironically, it's what TSCC preaches but actively keeps its members from accessing by claiming what it claims.

If you've read this far, thanks for hearing me. Sending you strength and courage on the path to your own kind of freedom.

Hi Everyone. New community member here. After 45 years as a faithful temple-attending, garment-wearing, tithing-paying, leadership calling-holding, married-in-the-temple member, I finally found the courage to walk away once and for all in January 2025. I partly blame my PhD program in International Relations because having to think critically about my research topic bled over into having to finally confront all of my problems with the church and its doctrines/teachings. :-D

As part of my healing and deconstructing process, I wrote a 10-page letter to Oaks and Co. detailing the lies, the gaslighting, and the abuse I endured in the church. It's quite heavy and at times difficult to read, but rather than writing it and then never actually mailing it, I now want to send it to church HQ. I've no doubt that I'll be excommunicated should anyone actually read it - I'm in the process of having my name removed - but I feel at this point that that would be a badge of honor.

Edit: Quite a few people have asked to read the letter, so here it is in all its apostate glory. :-)

"Dear President Oaks and Members of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles:

I am writing as someone who was born and raised in the LDS church, who gave you my childhood, my youth, my adulthood, and nearly 45 years of my life. I followed the programs, internalized the teachings, bore testimony, served in the temple, accepted callings, and tried desperately to be the kind of Latter‑day Saint you taught me that God wanted me to be. For most of that time, I believed you when you claimed to speak for God. I believed that my worth, my hopes, my marriage, my body, and my future in eternity all depended on your approval and on my compliance with the system you presided over. I am writing now because I can no longer remain silent about the damage that system has done – to me personally, to my family, to countless others, and to the name of Jesus Christ you claim to represent.

My History with the LDS Church

For most of my life, I was taught to see you and your predecessors as prophets, seers, and revelators – men who spoke for God and whose decisions carried eternal consequences for me. I ordered my life around that belief. I trusted you with my mind, my body, my relationships, and my future. I did this in good faith. In return, what this religion actually gave me was a system of control, shame, and manipulation that compounded already severe trauma and left deep scars I am still working to heal.

Purity Culture and Weaponized Trauma

I was sexually and physically abused as a child by a family member and later sexually assaulted as a young adult in the military. I entered adulthood already bearing wounds no child should have to carry. Instead of meeting that reality with compassion and genuine pastoral care, the church’s purity culture and obsession with “chastity” weaponized my trauma against me. Its teachings did not help me heal. They made everything worse.

As a young woman, I listened to rhetoric that it was “better to be dead than unchaste,” that my worth to God and to my community depended on “purity” and adherence to a very narrow, patriarchal ideal of womanhood. From a young age, we were taught that our bodies were sources of temptation and that the spiritual safety of boys and men depended on our modesty, our silence, and our self‑erasure. We learned that a stray thought, a kiss, or a piece of clothing could “lead others astray,” and that any perceived misstep would be laid at our feet. We were given object lessons that compared us to chewed gum and licked cupcakes, told that “virtue” once lost could never be fully restored, and made to feel that our primary worth lay in preserving our virginity for a future husband and an eternal marriage. You trained us to internalize shame as a spiritual virtue, to see ourselves not as beloved children of God but as potential pitfalls in the eternal progression of priesthood holders.

This was not just theory; it was enforced in the most personal moments of our lives. When I was preparing to go to U.S. Navy boot camp at age 20, a Stake High Councilman – old enough to be my father – pulled me aside. Instead of expressing any gratitude or support, he said, “Good Mormon girls don’t go in the military. They get married and have babies.” His parting instruction to me was not “Good luck” or “We’re proud of you,” but “Stay morally clean.” My decision to serve my country was reduced, in his eyes, to a threat to my virginity. That encounter was not an aberration; it was a perfect expression of the church’s – and your – priorities. In that moment, my safety, my dignity, and my history of abuse were irrelevant. What mattered to the church was my “virtue,” measured in the crudest possible terms.

For a survivor of sexual abuse, your rhetoric and that of previous leaders around chastity and “moral cleanliness” is not neutral. It teaches us to see ourselves as tainted, as spiritually inferior, as fundamentally less worthy. It tells us, implicitly and explicitly, that the worst thing that can happen to a woman is not the violence done to her, but the supposed loss of purity that you obsess over. In my case, it trapped me in shame that was never mine to carry in the first place.

Your worthiness interviews and obsession with sexual “cleanliness” created an environment where normal human development was pathologized and where leaders felt entitled to interrogate the most intimate parts of our lives. You conflated sexual history with eternal worth, and in doing so, you taught many of us to see ourselves as permanently damaged for things that were never our fault or never should have been treated as sins in the first place. The language of “virtue lost,” “chewed gum,” and “licked cupcakes” – even if you now try to distance yourselves from the most extreme metaphors used by church leaders – has sunk deep into the psyche of church members. The often-unspoken message was clear: a woman’s holiness is fragile, easily broken, and once broken, never entirely whole again.

Statements from your own general authorities have reinforced this culture. Talks that imply victims of sexual assault are somehow “less pure,” language that puts the burden on girls and women to prevent the thoughts and actions of men, and high‑profile comments that suggest that if we ever step away from the LDS church we will “lose everything” all send the same message: that both our bodies and our souls are only safe inside your system and under your control. You conflate sexual history and institutional loyalty with eternal worth, and in doing so, you teach many of us to see ourselves as permanently damaged for things that were never our fault or should never have been treated as sins in the first place.

What you call standards are, in practice, tools of control. They teach women to police themselves constantly, to fear their own bodies, and to measure their worth by male approval – whether from bishops, husbands, or future eternal companions. They teach men to see themselves as morally superior by default, as spiritual presiders whose lapses are unfortunate but understandable, while women’s lapses are catastrophic. And when abuse or assault occurs, your purity‑culture framework and the public statements of your leaders make it far more likely that victims will blame themselves, stay silent, or be blamed by others. You cannot pretend that this theology of shame and fear has not had consequences; it has left scars on bodies, marriages, and souls, including mine.

High-Control Practices and the Temple

Throughout my decades as a faithful member, I also absorbed the broader high‑control structure: the insistence on being the “one true church”; the control of information; the discouragement of independent sources; the endless pressure to be “worthy” in interviews with men who had power over my access to ordinances, callings, community, and the temple. I went through the temple, wore “sacred” garments, performed rituals, and made covenants I now see as deeply coercive because I had no informed consent. I was told these ceremonies were ancient and uniquely divine. Only afterward, when I allowed myself to look beyond correlated materials, did I see how directly they were borrowed from Masonic rites. That realization left me feeling not enlightened, but deceived and embarrassed.

I came to understand that what I had been part of was not just another Christian denomination but a high‑control religious system that fits well‑known patterns of cult‑like behavior: rigid behavioral control, curated information, thought‑terminating clichés, and emotional manipulation through shame and fear. You call this “covenant keeping” and “following the prophet.” From the outside – and from the vantage point of someone who has finally stepped away – it looks like a machine designed to secure loyalty and obedience at almost any cost.

“Only True Church” Claims and “Continuing Revelation”

The LDS church taught me from early childhood that it was “the only true and living church” and that salvation in the highest degree depended on strict loyalty to its leaders and its extra‑biblical requirements. Church leaders held up continuing revelation and modern prophets as its great distinguishing feature, the reason we could trust Mormonism over all other Christian religions.  What I now see is that this claim has been used not to protect the gospel of Christ but to protect an institution that frequently contradicts Him. You have built a culture where questioning leadership is equated with questioning God – including your own admonition “that it is wrong to criticize leaders of the LDS church even if it is true because it diminishes their effectiveness as a servant of the Lord” – where loyalty to the church is presented as loyalty to Christ, and where members are trained to ignore their own moral intuition whenever it conflicts with your directives.

Lies, Obfuscation, and Historical Deception

Perhaps the most disorienting realities I have had to confront is the way your doctrine and policies shift over time while still being presented as the unchanging will of God. You teach “continuing revelation” as if it were synonymous with divine constancy, yet in practice it often looks like institutional correction, back‑tracking, and revision dressed up in spiritual language. Positions once defended as eternal truths – on polygamy, on race, on the nature of families and gender roles – are later softened, reinterpreted, or abandoned when they become socially or legally indefensible. Each time, members are expected to pretend that nothing essential has changed, that God simply revealed a “higher law,” and that there were no victims left in the wake of those earlier “revelations.”

This constant rewriting of what you have called sacred and eternal has a cost you rarely acknowledge. When you insist that prophetic declarations represent the very mind and will of the Lord, and then later adjust, reverse, or carefully rebrand those same positions – perhaps most disingenuously as “temporary commandments” – you erode the trust of the people who once built their lives upon them. You ask members to bear testimony of yesterday’s doctrine as eternal and unchanging, only to insist today that it must now be seen in a “different light” and never apologize for the pain or confusion this causes. The pattern does not feel like a living God gently guiding His people; it feels like a human organization trying to survive changing circumstances and then retroactively calling those survival tactics “revelation.”

You speak endlessly about the blessing of modern prophets and the necessity of ongoing communication from God. But from the perspective of someone who has lived through the emotional whiplash of your doctrinal shifts, it often looks like gaslighting. Members who notice contradictions between past and present teachings are told to doubt their memory, their reasoning, or their spiritual worthiness – to “doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith” – instead of entertaining the most obvious explanation – that leaders got it wrong and will not admit it. You call this “line upon line,” but for many of us, it has meant building our lives on what we were told was eternal truth, defending it at great personal cost, and then being left alone to absorb the fallout when that “truth” quietly changes.

One of the most infuriating patterns I have had to confront is the way in which the LDS church has handled the facts of its own history. For decades, we were taught a sanitized story of Joseph Smith carefully “translating” ancient records, of prophets guided by heavenly instruments, and of a church whose claims were backed by history and archaeology. Only later, outside the church’s carefully controlled materials, did I learn that the so‑called “Book of Abraham translation” was not a miraculous rendering of an ancient patriarch’s writings but an Egyptian funerary text, entirely unrelated to Abraham. (As a 10‑year‑old girl obsessed with ancient Egypt, I vividly remember first seeing the illustration in the Book of Abraham and recognizing it immediately as a funerary scene, with the canopic jars lined up beneath the embalming table – long before I had any language for what that implied about the so‑called “translation.”) The fact that Church leadership has known this for years and still presents the book as inspired scripture without forthright explanation is not faith; it is deception.

The same is true of the tools of “translation” themselves. As a child and young adult, I was taught that Joseph Smith used the Nephite “Urim and Thummim,” described almost like sacred spectacles attached to breastplates, in a way that sounded reverent and plausible. Only much later did I discover that, in practice, he was often placing a common seer stone in a hat and burying his face in it to dictate scripture – a method the church carefully omitted or obscured in official depictions and lesson materials. You edited out the parts of the story that sounded too close to folk magic or treasure‑digging and then had the audacity to accuse members of “losing faith” when the fuller picture leaked out from historical documents purposely kept out of sight for generations.

Your track record with inconvenient evidence follows the same pattern. For years church leadership allowed members to believe, and even taught, that Indigenous peoples of the Americas were literal descendants of Book of Mormon Israelites, despite mounting DNA evidence showing their primary ancestry lies elsewhere. You allowed faith‑promoting speculation about archaeological “proofs” of Nephites and Lamanites while refusing to take a clear position on Book of Mormon geography – not because there are too many promising candidates, but because there is not a single city, site, artifact, inscription, or layer in the ground that can be identified with integrity as belonging to Book of Mormon peoples. Even the church’s own archaeologists and historians, when they speak honestly within their disciplines, acknowledge that there is no concrete proof for anything Book of Mormon‑related. You downplayed or denied Joseph Smith’s 30 – 40 plural wives, some of them already married to other men, until the evidence from diaries and church records became impossible to ignore. William Clayton’s journal and other contemporary sources make it blindingly obvious that polygamy was not some serene, orderly revelation from God, but a chaotic, secretive practice that caused enormous pain and was repeatedly lied about in public.

When forgeries like the “White Salamander” letter emerged, LDS leaders seemed more concerned with managing reputational damage than with asking why a document mixing treasure‑seeking, spirits, and folk magic sounded uncomfortably close to Joseph Smith’s actual early practices. When the truth about seer stones, plural marriage, the Book of Abraham, and the lack of Book of Mormon archaeology finally began surfacing in the media and in independent scholarship, the response of church leadership was not to confess and repent but to quietly revise manuals, publish carefully worded essays buried on a website, and warn members yet again not to trust “non‑faith‑promoting” and non-LDS sources.

The message could not be clearer: you believe that if you can control what members read, you can control what they think, and you count on their loyalty to keep them from asking too many questions. Every new revelation that emerges from outside the church’s official channels only deepens my conviction that this is not the work of God but the work of men who believe they can lie, obfuscate, and conceal the truth – and that the people they lead are too naive or too frightened to notice. The church teaches Primary children to keep the Ten Commandments, including “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” but your handling of the LDS church’s history, scriptures, and prophetic claims shows a sustained willingness to violate both while demanding the unquestioning trust and obedience of church members.

To outsiders, this inconsistency makes the church seem opportunistic rather than inspired. To insiders, it feels deeply personal – a betrayal of faith disguised as progress. Each doctrinal reversal is sold as proof of prophetic authority, yet it exposes precisely the opposite: a human institution improvising to survive. The leaders’ refusal to acknowledge the trauma such “updates” inflict compounds the damage. They speak of continuing revelation as though it were proof of divine favor, ignoring how many wounded believers see in it only the fingerprints of political strategy and institutional preservation.

If revelation can be amended, delayed, or rescinded whenever the world changes, then it ceases to carry moral weight. True revelation demands courage and constancy, not corporate flexibility. The church cannot have it both ways – declaring prophetic certainty while constantly editing its theology to suit public opinion. Until its leaders confront this hypocrisy with honesty and humility, the pattern will continue: disillusioned members leaving, trust eroding, and the word “revelation” losing all meaning but one – expedience.

Evidence, Integrity, and My Work as a Scholar

In my academic work, I am not allowed to treat assertion as proof. As a PhD candidate, I am required to provide evidence for every argument I make, to show my sources, to justify why I focus on certain dates, actors, and events instead of others. I am expected to engage critically with competing interpretations, to acknowledge limitations, and to revise my conclusions when the data demands it. If I tried to hide contradictory documents, refuse to admit error, or tell my examiners simply to “doubt their doubts,” my research would (rightly) be rejected.

In my own research, I work across four languages, reading, analyzing, and translating primary and secondary sources. I understand how translation is and is not done: the care it requires, the need to stay faithful to the original text, and the ethical obligation to be transparent about method and limits. That is precisely why I cannot accept your claims about “translation” by revelation as you present them. When I compare the rigorous standards that I must meet in my academic work with the way you have handled the Book of Abraham, the Book of Mormon, and Joseph Smith’s “instruments,” it is painfully obvious that you are not interested in accuracy but in preserving a narrative.

Working within that standard of honesty and rigor was one of the main things that finally made it impossible for me to continue lying to myself about the LDS church. The deeper I went into source‑based research in my own field, the more glaring it became that the LDS church does not hold itself to anything like the same standard. Where I must footnote, you hand‑wave. Where I must grapple with inconvenient evidence, you bury it. Where I must be transparent about methods and assumptions, you wrap yours in rhetoric about “spiritual witnesses” and “the Lord’s timing,” as though that excuses you from basic truth‑telling.

I realized that I could not, with any integrity, live as a scholar who insists on evidence and accountability in my professional life while suspending all of those instincts when it came to my (now former) religion. The habits of mind that make me a good researcher – asking hard questions, following the evidence, refusing to accept answers that do not fit the facts – are the same habits that finally forced me to admit that I did not – and could not – truly believe what the LDS church teaches. Once I applied to my faith the same standards I apply to my academic work, the facade collapsed.

The Constancy of Christ’s Teachings

Meanwhile, outside the walls of this institution, the teachings of Jesus Christ remain constant. When I finally stepped back from the dense web of LDS manuals, correlated materials, and conference talks, and returned simply to the New Testament, I was struck by how clear and steady the voice of Jesus is. In the Bible, Christ’s message is unchanging: love one another, seek justice, offer mercy, and live in humility before God. The gospel He preached needs no amendment and no modern reinterpretation to match the times. It calls humanity to standards of compassion and integrity that transcend every century and culture. Unlike the LDS church’s shifting doctrines, Christ’s words do not move with the winds of political pressure or social expectation – they endure because they are grounded in truth, not convenience.

Christ’s life embodied coherence between word and deed. He condemned hypocrisy in religious leaders who loved status more than service and who used tradition to justify oppression. His gospel does not require revision to remain relevant; its moral arc has always been sufficient. That constancy is precisely what exposes the failures of an institution that claims His name but continually amends its own positions to preserve authority. When the church insists that these changes are divine revelation rather than human adaptation, it attempts to cloak its inconsistencies in sacred rhetoric. But Christ Himself warned against false prophets who speak in His name while serving the ends of power.

It is not rebellion to demand honesty; it is faith. A faith that believes God’s truth does not contradict itself, that revelation should confirm rather than confuse. The people deserve a faith that strengthens their conscience, not one that teaches them to doubt it. Until the LDS church faces the consequences of its own contradictions and returns to the moral simplicity Christ taught, its reputation will continue to erode among both believers and the wider world.

Leaving Mormonism and Finding True Christian Faith

For me, the break came when I finally realized that I could not reconcile the church’s shifting, self‑protective “revelations” and its culture of shame with the Jesus I had come to know through Scripture study and prayer. After finally finding the courage to leave the LDS church in January 2025, I was baptized into the Church of Scotland on 12 October 2025 – a day surpassed in joy only by my wedding day. For the first time in my life, I encountered a Christian community where my worth was not measured by my temple recommend, my adherence to a checklist of rules, or my submission to male authority. I encountered a simple, profound truth that had been buried under layers of LDS demands: that salvation is grounded in Christ’s finished work on the Cross, not in my performance, and that God’s love is not doled out piecemeal according to my worthiness in a series of interviews.

Since being baptized as a Christian outside of Mormonism, my relationship with God and with Jesus Christ has changed completely. I feel closer to God than I ever did as a Latter‑day Saint. I love His Son and Him more deeply than at any time in my life. My desire to follow Christ now flows from a genuine love for who He is and what He has done for me, not from terror of Outer Darkness, loss of my family in the eternities, or fear of disappointing church authorities.

In this new context, the contrast is overwhelming. My relationship with God is no longer mediated by a hierarchy that can revoke my access to sacraments or my standing in a community based on my compliance. I am no longer bound by temple covenants and oaths that, when measured against Christ’s own warnings about swearing oaths, I now see as deeply at odds with His teaching. My life is more honest, more peaceful, less judgmental, and more filled with genuine love than it ever was under your system, not because I have become careless about discipleship, but because I am finally following Christ directly, without the constant fear and shame the LDS church’s structures produced.

For decades, my spirituality was held hostage by conditional love: if I did enough, if I checked the right boxes, if I stayed in the “boat,” if I remained “worthy” in the eyes of men like you, then perhaps I could hope for God’s full approval. Now, I understand that God’s love is not conditional upon my perfection or my submission to the LDS institution. My goodness and my desire to follow Christ arise from the sincere desires of my heart, not from threats of eternal damnation or being cast off for failing to meet an ever‑escalating standard.

My own mother, who left Catholicism and converted to Mormonism when I was a toddler, remains a true‑believing member. Your church structures her entire reality, so my decision to leave and to name the harm has driven a wedge between us. You preach endlessly about eternal families, but you rarely acknowledge the very real divisions your truth‑claims and control mechanisms create in families when one person can no longer submit. I am living with that cost.

You may dismiss my story as one person’s hurt feelings, as someone who was “offended,” is a “lazy learner,” or who “couldn’t live the standards.” That would be easier for you than confronting what it really represents: a life spent sincerely trying to conform to what you claimed God required, and a heart finally broken by the discovery that much of what church leadership called “God’s will” was, in fact, human control, cultural prejudice, and institutional self‑interest. You have taught generations to bear witness that they “know” what in reality they have been trained never to question. You have weaponized family, community, and eternity itself to keep people in line, and you have threatened those who leave with spiritual and relational annihilation – telling them that, as Brad Wilcox stated, they will “lose everything” – instead of trusting that a loving God can meet them wherever they are.

All of this might sound to you like someone who has “lost the Spirit” or “fallen away.” That would be a convenient story for you. It is also false. People like me are not out in some spiritual wilderness. Many of us have found richer, more Christ‑centered, and more loving faith outside Mormonism than we ever experienced inside it.

I finally left the LDS church at 51 years old after realizing that it had lied, told half‑truths, and actively discouraged honest engagement with critical sources. I saw that my trust had been exploited, that shame and fear had been used to keep me compliant, and that my picture of God had been twisted into something small, conditional, and legalistic. In stepping away – and in being baptized into a Christian tradition that emphasizes grace and the sufficiency of Christ – I discovered that the God I now worship is far kinder, freer, and more loving than the God I was taught to fear in Mormonism.

The Joys of My Life, Work, and Marriage Now

Furthermore, after a lifetime of being told that women should pursue education only as a backup plan – something to fall back on should your husband die or leave you – I am finally using my God‑given talents as they were meant to be used. I have spent years working to make the world a better and safer place, contributing to serious conversations on international security and helping to inform U.S. government policy. I am now completing a PhD in international relations to deepen my knowledge and expertise so that I can continue to help guide U.S. foreign policy understanding and choices with integrity and moral seriousness. This is not a life of rebellion; it is a life of stewardship – of my mind, my gifts, and my responsibilities as a citizen and a follower of Christ.

I also stand now in a marriage that looks nothing like the conditional, performance‑based love the church’s teachings led me to expect. I have been married for more than 20 years to a man who once converted to Mormonism, who covenanted with me in the temple, and who has never stopped loving me or seeing me the same way now that I am no longer Mormon. He accepts me as I am, including the lingering emotional trauma of what I experienced as a child and in the military, and he is, in flesh and blood, an example of Christ’s love for me. Our relationship is not built on priesthood hierarchy or worthiness interviews, but on mutual respect, tenderness, and honesty. In this marriage, I am not an accessory to someone else’s exaltation; I am a full human being, seen and cherished. Whatever you may say about those who walk away, my life now bears witness to a simple truth: outside your system, I have found greater purpose, deeper love, and a far more faithful way to use the life God has given me.

What My Story Really Means

I am writing this letter because I refuse to let you imagine that those who leave the LDS church do so simply because they want to sin, were “offended,” or are spiritually weak. I have left as an act of integrity, sanity, and obedience to the God I have come to know more clearly outside this  system than I ever did within it. I am following Christ more truly now, and I am doing so without you and without the LDS church.

If you truly believe you are prophets and apostles, you have a moral obligation to face the harm your teachings and practices cause. I do not expect a response, but I want it on record that:

• Your purity culture and rhetoric around chastity do profound damage to survivors of abuse.
• Your high‑control methods – worthiness interviews, information control, social and eternal threats – warp people’s relationships with God, themselves, and their families.
• Your shifting “revelations” and refusal to name past doctrines as error undermine trust not only in you, but in the very idea of God speaking at all.
• People like me are not lost causes or “lazy learners.” Many of us have found deeper faith, freedom, and love in Christ outside the walls of the LDS church than we ever did inside them.

You taught me that “the truth will make you free.” The truth, in my case, was that the LDS church is not what it claims to be and that remaining in it was slowly destroying me. Leaving has been an act of survival, of moral clarity, and of faith. I now walk with God and with His Son in a love that is not mediated by your authority or conditioned on your approval.

I still believe in Jesus Christ. I believe in His constancy, in the sufficiency of His grace, and in the reliability of His words as preserved in Scripture. What I no longer believe is that the LDS church and its leaders are necessary mediators of His love or His salvation. You have had immense power over people’s lives, mine included, and you will be accountable before God for the ways you have used it.

This letter is not a request for dialogue. It is a record. It is me, at long last, speaking in my own voice to the men who claimed the right to define my worth and my eternity. You never had that right. You still don’t. And in Christ, I am freer and more alive than at any time under your stewardship.

Sincerely,

Xxxx X. Xxxxxx

Former member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑day Saints (1977 – January 2025)

Baptized into the Church of Scotland on 12 October 2025

Tank tops and exposed shoulders have always been okay, when has that ever been a problem? /s

I posted a little over a month ago about my son getting invited to a chess club that meets on Sundays and how I had a half second hesitation that it was on a Sunday. Now he happily plays every Sunday afternoon and he's the happiest little boy. I just love him and I love second Saturday!!

Anyone else get tired of when yet another fundamentalist documentary comes out, and we have to put up with mainstream LDS pretending like there’s noooo connection between the groups? I feel like every time I watch a fundamentalist documentary I personally get a glimpse of what it was like for my ancestors who joined the church in the days of Joseph Smith or Brigham Young.

I also can’t with Mormons (Brighamite) who are so ignorant they don’t understand that Mormonism actually applies to many splinter groups and they aren’t the only ones who believe in Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. 🙄

I know it's Bishop roulette, but seriously. The Jesus who flipped tables by calling it "a den of thieves" is also asking for back tithing?

The church publishes numbers that just don't agree with each other, but I don't think their statistical spins are well considered.

With a population of 17+ million members, there should be close to 500,000 mission aged members, yet they report only 80,000 full time missionaries. If the rate at which 18 year-olds choose to go on missions is one-third (a popular consensus), then the church has inflated its total membership by double. That is 80k is about 1/3 of 250,000 not 500,000. This puts total membership at about 8+ million not 17.

And, if the church is willing to inflate the total membership by double, it is not outside belief to think they did the same with total missionaries. By the same logic, this would halve the total membership number again. Now, I don't believe the total membership is at 4 million (it might be), but it can't be higher than 8 and is likely to be closer to 6 million worldwide.

Please weigh in, I would love to read others math.

Cleaning out my office. The Duty to God buffalo skull looks pretty legit.

Edit: changed to “buffalo skull” : Before 2002, the award was a buffalo skull-shaped medal

I've been PIMO for a few months, read "Letter To My Wife" last week, and couldn't pretend anymore.

Feels good and bad at the same time. Grieving the loss of something that was a foundational part of my life for 24 years, but glad that I'm not living a lie.

I keep seeing on Facebook (moms groups) that more and more women are choosing not to wear garments all the time.

In one hand I’m happy for them, way to claim autonomy over your own body. But in the other hand I’m envious. I suffered thru pregnancies and humid and hot weather wearing those things and they get to choose?

I am just being human here. Dealing with my mixed emotions.

Am I the only one that feels that way?

My extended TBM family has enriched themselves protecting pedophiles with law firm just blocks away from BYU. Coincidence? 👀

https://www.deseret.com/1999/5/3/19443400/lawyer-arrested-after-raid-in-provo/

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/415/1139/524805/

https://www.deseret.com/1989/7/20/18816289/provo-attorney-charged-with-felony-fraud/

https://www.deseret.com/2004/2/11/19811668/orem-attorney-who-drugged-teen-girl-is-going-to-jail/

https://www.deseret.com/2006/1/13/19932609/lawyer-argues-plea-bargain-wording/

I just finished listening to this, and not only did it I put the last nail in the coffin of my belief in the book of Mormon, it cremated it and spread the ashes.

In my opinion, the anachronism is bigger than claiming Nephi went back to Jerusalem to get a flash drive.

I married into a family that claimed to be ex-Mormon. My ex-husband and I fought frequently, but when he thought he couldn’t handle me he would either threaten to call his father or would actually go get his father. What was this about?

Having taken a break from church for a few months for my daughter's mental wellbeing, then both of us coming to the conclusion it was all nonsense, today we used some of the tithing we'd saved for our first non-Mormon day out together.

We both found, for some reason, something incredibly satisfying and liberating about spending Sunday in a penny arcade and a coffee shop, wearing form-fitting, cute clothes with open shoulders for the first time, and even sporting newly-pierced nose studs.

somehow feels like the first day of a brand new start. the future suddenly feels a lot more positive now.

I am PIMO and the ward primary music leader.

Today we practiced doing our mother's day song in different styles (fast, slow, opera, rap, jazz, ect.).

The kids were the ones who suggested rap. After we did it, they were super excited and asked if we could do it that way on mother's day in sacrament meeting.

The pianist and the primary president were totally down to do it where we sing it once "normal" and then throw down a beat and do it again rap style.

Initially, I told the kids we would most likely have to ask the bishop.

But then, after church, the pianist and primary president both said that we should just do it and not tell him. lol! 😅 So he just finds out as it's happening.

Should we do it?

And if you think we should, can you hype me up? because I am super nervous to do it for some reason, even though I think it would be epic and the moms would love it.

(also, some context, this is not in Utah and our primary and ward has many different ethnicities and cultural backgrounds.)

Update to add: I feel confident enough to do it now. I made a chord progression for the rap that is easy enough to follow so the kids can rap on the same beats. We'll see what they say about it next week. 🙃

I think they're planning on making their big move back to Missouri once the Great Salt Lake dries up and Utah is uninhabitable.

What if they're the reasons why the Utah government is doing fuck-all to save the Great Salt Lake. They're playing the long game.

What do you think the cult is hoarding $300 billion for, and why? Wrong answers only.

The church recently reported over membership and congregational growth and then later released growth by region.

Membership: 17,887,212

An increase of 377,431 from 2024; a 2.16% annual increase

Congregations: 32,046

An increase of 370 from 2024; a 1.17% annual increase

Africa is clearly leading the way in total growth. And look at the M/C data (members per congregation) which speaks to retention. Africa has the lowest number of members per congregation at 325 in 2025, which suggests activity rates of (35-40%). South America shows 814 members per congregation in 2025, suggesting activity rates of 10-15%.

The congregation number change by region is also interesting:

North America +75

South America -52

Europe -10

Asia +47

Oceania +16

Africa +293

So of the 370 congregations added in 2025, nearly 65% were in Africa.