Into the Gray

I left the church in order to move closer to God. It’s pretty much that simple.

A little over a month ago, Truman and I attended the temple together. When we were talking in the car afterward and I asked how his experience was, I was surprised when he responded with, “do you really want to know?” I told him that I did.

That same week, he came from work one day and told me that he’d learned things that proved the Book of Mormon wasn’t true. Time stood still and it seemed like I could see everything in his face all at once: betrayal, disappointment, grief, shock, sadness. I know that he’s wrestled with different things about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for years and years, but he had never expressed anything of this magnitude before. For a period of time, he even “left” the church and lived a very different lifestyle, but “came back” shortly before we met. Even then, he still disagreed with and had so many questions, but he kept them to himself. While we were dating, I communicated to him that I didn’t want to know negative things about the doctrinal details of the church, but I did want to know about his feelings and experiences.

Exactly two years ago on this night, we had sex for the first time. Okay okay, I realize that might be TMI for a lot of you, but bear with me here (pun intended). In some sort of strange enigma, that intentional decision to make love with each other was the inception of my sexual healing as well as the beginning of immense spiritual and religious consequences. The next three months of my life were beautiful in so many ways as I fell in love with Truman, as he met and loved my children, and as I felt emotional wounds literally start to close and heal. Those three months were also some of the most difficult as I prayed and pleaded with God, and desperately tried to love Truman in every way possible without doing “immoral” things together. I went through multiple church disciplinary councils, one of them that took place even after we were married for “sin” that had taken place a few days before our wedding on July 2nd. I think what felt so incredibly painful was the dissonance between the religious consequences and the intentions of my heart. I KNEW that God knew how freaking hard I was trying to abstain, and the fact that we only had sex a handful of times in those three months was nothing short of a miracle. I wrote a blog post about this experience in late July 2022, and you can read it here if you feel so inclined.

Now, this is where we move from black and white, into the gray. I truly, deeply believe that sex can (and is meant to) be a sacred, vulnerable, and deeply connecting experience. I believe it’s a gift from God. But the thing is that the church teaches that it should ONLY be between a married man and woman, and although that makes a lot of sense to me, it also doesn’t. I spent nearly seven out of nine and a half years in a marriage, to a man, where I felt sexually broken. No matter how hard I tried or prayed or attended the temple I couldn’t heal. I didn’t fully understand this until later, but I eventually numbed out that beautiful, high-desire part of myself that I had previously loved so much, in order to just emotionally survive. I couldn’t stand to look at the shards of glass that were once a whole person, so I just kept my eyes up and slowly walked over them, hearing the crunch of my soul with each step.

From April to July of 2022, I wondered how I could be feeling so much healing and damage all at the same time. I finally felt emotionally, physically, and spiritually safe with a man that I was madly in love with, and I also felt immense guilt and shame for feeling like I couldn’t control myself with him. My spirit often felt racked with confusion. For more than half a year, both Truman and I were instructed to not take the sacrament at church. We couldn’t hold callings or even bear our testimonies in sacrament meeting. I had to turn down the invitation to say a prayer more than once during church meetings, and I was even instructed not to sing with the choir when I asked our bishop. For a year we couldn’t attend the temple - a place that I had previously found solace in and visited almost every single month for the 10 years I had been endowed. I felt like every ounce of my soul pleaded to have Jesus in my life, but I also felt like I was asked not to do most of the actions that helped me feel connected to Him. I had to reconcile with not feeling as guilty as I “should have,” although I did sincerely strive to repent. Regardless, my soul felt like a jumbled mess. *I would like to add here that my Bishop is a phenomenal human being. He has shown me immense love, support, and kindness during the past few years and he’s someone I admire greatly. My frustrations are not with him, but with the church structure that he’s serving in*

Truman and I both struggled a lot during that time. On one or two occasions he would start to express frustration about particular doctrine and I’d tell him that I was so sorry but I just didn’t feel strong enough to hear it. He was incredibly understanding and respectful, and I felt sad that I was incapable of letting him be completely spiritually vulnerable with me. But a month ago, he asked me this question - “if the church isn’t true, would you want to know?” Geez… talk about a buzz kill. My brain screamed NO NO NO. DON’T TELL ME ANYTHING, as if he was about to unlock Pandora’s box and let out some evil spirit. Instead I politely nodded, and he laid out his grievances.

The first few days after that were terrible. I found myself consistently spiraling in thoughts like, “if the church isn’t true, what’s the point? Is there even a God? Is Jesus Christ real and does He love me? What are the implications of all this?” Those were easily the scariest couple days of my life. I found myself on a slippery existential slope, grabbing around and grasping for anything that would prove I had any eternal worth. Through Truman’s unwavering support, lots of tears, heart-wrenching conversations, desperate prayer, and sincere journaling, I became sure enough of God and Jesus Christ to find peace and hope. I also experienced a few weeks of intense emotional grief as I struggled to let go of what I thought my life would be - attending the temple with my eternal companion, receiving priesthood blessings, etc. I came across this quote one of those dark nights and it resonated in the deepest crevices of my being: “There are losses that rearrange the world. Deaths that change the way you see everything, grief that tears everything down. Pain that transports you to an entirely different universe, even while everyone else thinks nothing has really changed.” I felt like my entire existence had shifted and no one (except Truman) had even the slightest idea.

Since publicly sharing my decision to “leave the church” last week, a lot of people have reached out to ask why. I’m going to attempt to answer what seems like an entirely impossible question. Here we go. During the 13 years I’ve practiced Mormonism, I’ve run into countless things that I either didn’t agree with or didn’t understand. Those things include but are not limited to: polygamy being practiced in the early years of the church, past and current views on same-sex attraction/marriage, disciplinary processes (specifically regarding sexual actions), some of the things we practice in the temple, the very specific guidelines of wearing the garment, the way “modesty” is often taught, many of the hymns we sing every week, and more. But to be honest, until a few weeks ago, I never spent much of my emotional energy on these things BECAUSE I was taught and believed that the church was restored by God, through Joseph Smith. I believed that to be true, and I believed that Joseph Smith had the authority of God, so I beautifully and faithfully decided to live by those teachings even though I didn’t understand them. I’m not mad at myself for that, I actually love that part of me! I love that I can find faith in things I can’t see and enjoy the freedom I find in meekness. BUT, when I learned the historical facts about Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, the way he received “revelation,” and how he wrongfully used “God’s authority”, the validity of the commandments I’d been following was stripped away. When I learned that what I had been taught, what I am being taught, and what I will be taught through the church is literally a very incorrect version of history, I felt compelled to take a good, hard look at why I’m living the way I am. 

This is where, if I were still “in the church” (even just a month ago), I would use the popular phrase “people are not perfect but the church is.” I call BS. Never mind that Joseph Smith had experiences in his life that perfectly mirror the stories of the Book of Mormon, or that he started sleeping with, marrying, and being sealed to women, in addition to Emma Smith, a very short time before instituting the “revelation” of practicing polygamy. Let’s just set aside the fact that Joseph would command to be married/sealed to women while their husbands were away on missions that he sent them on. Or how the church’s restoration video paints a picture of a mob coming to the Smith home in the night, forcing Joseph out of his home to be tarred and feathered in the name of religious persecution, his twin children subsequently dying from exposure to the cold, when in actuality that group of men was led by one of the husbands of a woman that Joseph was having an affair with, and they were there to do something much more gruesome to him, but lost their nerve. The God I believe in would not establish “His one true church” through a man that lied, cheated, coerced, and manipulated. It just doesn’t make sense to me. It doesn’t mean I hate Joseph or don’t believe that He’s deeply loved by God, but it does mean that I believe he’s wrong.

So now what? I gently stepped through the looking glass, and when I turned around, I didn’t like what I saw. And now, I have painfully become “other.” The church teaches that because they are the one true church, the restored gospel, that everything else is a partial truth. The perspective is that if someone leaves, they are wrong. Guys I KNOW this is how we talk about people because I just spent the last 13 years talking about people this way. I sincerely thought that I loved people and didn’t judge them for being different from me, but it’s been painfully sobering and humbling to see how wrong I’ve been. I often saw people who left the church as lacking in faith or wanting to live an easier, more worldly life. I’ve been of the opinion that people are weak when they leave due to being offended or mistreated. I’ve never been in a single church meeting where a member shares about a friend or family member who has left the church and found joy. They speak of them as “wayward” or “misguided,” hoping that they will return someday, and they usually list all the ways that person’s life has changed for the worse. They will also sometimes use language like “they have lost their testimony” or “they’re under the influence of Satan.” It has been absolutely fascinating to me that in the past week I have heard story after story of people (who are quietly and privately reaching out) who left the church and consequently  experienced the most painful and liberating event of their life. And do you want to know what that tells me? Not that someone is right or wrong, but that every single human is having their own, unique experience. Some people will thrive in the church and some people will thrive outside of it. It ALSO indicates to me that there is an intense, deep tangle of social and religious conditioning that tells us that members of the LDS church are right, and those outside of the church are wrong. And if that statement makes you feel uncomfortable, I’m glad. I hope there’s something inside of you, deeper and more intrinsic than what you’ve been taught, that intuitively whispers something in opposition.

There have been painful social repercussions to the decision that Truman and I have made to step away from the church. I do want to say that the majority of people have reached out with love and support, but that hasn’t been the case with every single person. I find myself constantly trying to let people have their own experience and let go of their judgments of us; desperately trying to find peace in people being wrong and not understanding. I feel deep sadness when people think that us leaving indicates that we don’t love or support them in staying, or that the spiritual experiences we’ve connected with them over are somehow invalid now - nothing could be further from the truth. We’ve had close friends and family reach out with feelings of anger and betrayal, and many have posted, commented, and emailed messages directly opposing the things we publicly shared. Some have even expressed the inability to be around us until they emotionally process this change. I think that says nothing about their love for us and everything about what the church has conditioned us to believe. It’s so painfully ironic and frustrating that the conditioning that keeps people in the church is the exact same thing that leaves members of the church feeling personally attacked and abandoned when someone decides to go; this is a perspective that I wasn’t able to gain until being on the “outside.” We cling to people in fear and call it love, but it’s not. Love is letting people find Jesus in their own way, even if it’s different from ours.

I’ve been taught for the better part of my life that God deals in black and white, but I’m starting to believe otherwise. I think God lives in the gray and I think He wants me to live there too. I cannot describe how expansive this experience has already been. I feel myself stripping away the layers of belief that no longer serve me, and I’m finding the purest forms of love I’ve ever felt. There is so much unknown ahead; sometimes it’s invigorating and other times it feels outright terrifying. God knows how hard it’s been to co-parent while all four of us have been in the church, let alone with this huge religious shift. Our children now see us drinking coffee and wearing different clothing, but we also pray together and talk about how much Jesus loves us.

When we sat our kids down to communicate this spiritual adjustment, we used the analogy of a tree. We said that the roots and trunk of a tree resemble the many, many people who believe in God, and up at the top of the tree there are branches, which represent many different ways to believe in, love, and worship God. We want them to know that all ways are beautiful, and that no one is wrong or right. A lot of people won’t like or agree with that perspective, and that’s okay. Ultimately, we want to encourage our children to live in the gray - always loving people, not in spite of their differences, but because of them. To us, that is Jesus.