Diary of an Ex-Mormon...it begins

I think I was 12 the first time I noticed something was weird about my religion. The missionaries were over, giving my 10-year-old sister and I their shpiel. Another thing to keep us kids entertained while the adults were out doing God knows what. Basically imagine Bart and Lisa Simpson sitting half-eyed on the couch listening to two chuckling young "Elders" drone on about religion. Bla bla Jesus Christ. Bla bla God. Until one of the missionaries mentioned something in passing that made me raise my head up.

"Wait--did you say that we become gods someday?"

The missionary looked at his companion, with a look asking if he should answer. His companion smiled.

"Yeah, man. Someday we can create our own planets."

I laughed and thought of all the possibilities. I told them I wanted to make a planet someday where the show Beast Wars was real, and dinosaurs and robots could have awesome wars all for my pleasure. All of a sudden I had the best religion at my school! Wait till my friends heard about this! I'm going to a way better heaven than you, bitches.

They continued on in their lesson and started talking about the temples, those beautiful buildings we've all seen. I had recently gone inside one and participated in the Mormon practice of baptism for the dead. I had been baptized like 40 times in a hot tub by a guy dressed in white, "for and in behalf of" a bunch of dead foreign people.

I was telling one of the Elders about my experience and I mentioned that the guy who was doing the confirmations for the dead (laying hands on the head of the newly proxy-baptized kids and praying) had seemed like we was gay. I didn't say it with judgement, it was just mentioned in kind of a detail-remembering way. But they laughed to each other and said, "No, if he were gay he wouldn't have been in the temple." And I just remember feeling really weird right then. Like, oh. This is the trade-off. If I want the planet with the robots that fight the dinosaurs…I've got to say I have a problem with two dudes being together, I guess. There's always a catch. Well. Whatever.

I think there are a lot of moments when you're a kid and you have to say Whatever to the situation you're in. When the girl you like at school would never like you back. That's one time we all have to learn to say Whatever. But it gets harder when the situation is that your father is screaming at the top of his lungs in the kitchen about how he's going to leave, which had happened two years before. When you've already had that big of a Whatever, a lot of other Whatevers can kinda hide under it.

I have a journal from my mission that contains an entry in which I talk about how I'm trying to figure out why homosexuality is a sin. None of the explanations I had heard make any sense; they all just basically appeal to tradition, ignorance, and bigotry. Eventually my half-sister Kristy (from my dad's previous marriage) got married to a cool girl that I like and started having kids that I really love. They're one of my favorite families. Not long after, the church told us all from the pulpit that we had to tell all of our friends and family in California to vote for Prop 8. At that point I knew something was wrong. I started to realize that all those "Proclamation to the World" pamphlets about family that I passed out on my mission were actually gay-hate propaganda. I started to realize that the church had an agenda. Something was moving this organization that I had never before thought could have had any motives other than to try to help people come to Christ. It was moving the church in a bad direction. 

Eventually I learned about politics, how modern conservatives and liberals are, and I figured out that the church has aligned itself with the far-right for political purposes, much like Joseph Smith would have in his day. Right now they're sending out a lot of missionaries by lowering the age to 18 for kids to go, so I guess they hope to accomplish something politically by that. Joseph Smith actually sent out political missionaries when he ran for president, so that kind of parallels this.

Anyway, long story short, here I am, an ex-Mormon (well still technically a member of the church I guess, until they excommunicate me or whatever), writing about the things I learned as a Mormon and the things I've learned as a non-Mormon. I still live by a lot of the things I learned as a Mormon, like striving to be humble and a good person. It's just that my journey to become a good person led me away from the church. I've come to see that the church has been misled by false prophets into ignorant philosophies of prejudice and hatred, the very philosophies that Jesus of Nazareth fought so hard to destroy.

Eventually when I spoke up to my bishop about my feelings about how the church should keep politics out of religion, first I was given a pamphlet on how to deal with my gay thoughts. After explaining to the dude that I wasn't gay, he then proceeded to tell me about when he was on his mission and he had a problem with the church not giving the priesthood to Black people before 1978, and his mission president just told him to "put his thoughts on a shelf." That seemed to solve everything for him. I was just floored by how this guy seemed to take an easy solace in simply accepting the notion that he did not deserve to think his own thoughts. That was the last time I went to church.