Why I Left The Mormon Church
[Music] i grew up mormon it was mormon most of my life up until a few years ago i then left the mormon church and that is a whole story that i want to talk about today with all of you my purpose in doing this is to share my perspective so that anyone who is in a situation like i was a couple of years ago who is questioning and wondering can have another perspective to lean on i'm not looking to get into debates or to talk about the history or the theology of the church i'll do that in future videos today all i want to do is tell you the story of how and why i left the mormon church 23rd of may 2009 i grew up mormon both my parents were at mormon or lds latter-day saints i grew up going to mormon youth camp i then eventually served a two-year mission in tijuana mexico where for two years i went around and spoke to people in spanish about the church and learned a lot learned to speak spanish fluently keris how you feel malicious i then went to the mormon university called brigham young university in provo utah where i graduated i went through all mormon rituals in the church and temple i worked in the temple as a volunteer for a time i was very very mormon and i believed it i believed deeply in the unique doctrine of the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints which is a christian organization unlike any other christian organization in its doctrine [Music] the story of how i decided to leave this really begins with the birth of my son [Music] isabel who also grew up mormon and i got married in the temple which is a huge mormon ritual it's a huge part of being in the church we got married in the temple we went back to byu together and a few weeks before we graduated from byu we had a baby or izzy had a baby i didn't have a baby she had a baby then we took finals and graduated like literally two weeks later here we are literally in our cap and gown with henry who is like two weeks old after we graduated we moved out to washington dc and that's when my wheels really started to turn i started to think you know i have a child now i have to decide how i raise this child and what i teach him about the world i think having henry really made me wonder and think about how i should teach him about the world i had grown up with this firm conviction of the lds doctrine and its beliefs about the world which are very specific and very peculiar and i really started to question is this what i want to teach my son and the answer initially was yes i want to teach him everything that i know about this faith because i really believed it so we're moving out to washington dc and i realized that if i'm going to teach this to my son i need to double down on my faith i need to go deeper than i ever have and really really establish a strong foundation and conviction around this doctrine i had one but i knew it needed to be stronger if i was going to teach my son this one of the things i loved about mormon doctrine at the time was that there was always a push to ask god if it was true not to trust any people or any organization but to like get on your knees and say god is this true is this is this church actually real is that all of the things that they say actually the real deal i had kind of taken advantage of that promise before but never really i had always been in a setting of pressure whether it was my home as a kid or my mission or byu in other words there was always an incentive to believe so i'd never really been in a situation where i could truly ask this question and not feel like there was some price to pay if i decided i didn't believe being in washington dc with my child out on my own in the workforce was my opportunity so i spent an entire year reading the book of mormon going to church i had a responsibility at church that i was putting a lot of work into and praying every morning and every night for some sort of conviction i said i am more earnest and sincere than i've ever been about this i'm willing to listen to any answer i just need an answer i spent a year doing this a year it's a long time and then i remember this day i was biking into washington dc um on a sunny like spring day and it just hit me in some really strong way that no this isn't working i've put in the years of asking and the effort towards making this work and it wasn't working this isn't true for me and like a switch it just so much came out of me and i quickly decided that i was done i don't think it was all at once i think i had been slowly moving in this direction for a long time but in a moment of clarity it clicked for me in a very satisfying and like very true way so is who is is he isabelle whatever you want to call her my wife it didn't click for her she was not on this journey that i was on and i came back and i told her i said i think i am done being mormon and i had always been the sort of more devout convicted mormon and she was just like what like you just like have decided to be out of the church and she she full on said like this this is gonna end our marriage like you can't just leave the church and i just told her i said this is where i stand and this is what i feel and i felt very strongly about it luckily soon enough izzy was on her own path of reconciling her thoughts about the church her qualms with the church and soon she would join me in this path towards leaving the church now i call it a path because that's exactly what it is leaving any orthodox religion is not easy there are layers and layers of psychological and cultural conditioning that you don't even realize is there until you start to peel it back so even though we started to leave the church we were still going to church every sunday which i don't really understand in retrospect all i can say is that like we were just that's what we did every sunday we went to church and there was some guilt if we didn't go to church and so we went to church but we slowly started to feel an emptiness towards it and over the course of six months we finally decided to stop going to church my behavior didn't change all of a sudden like i didn't leave the church so i could start drinking alcohol or coffee or smoking like that was not a part of the agenda for me i kind of just carried on exactly how i had always been except for now i looked around in the world and i didn't have a doctrinal theological framework to understand it which was at once exhilarating and horrifying at the same time my existential view had been so neatly packaged by the plan of salvation which is the key doctrinal framework within the mormon church and that was now gone i had no plan i had no framework to make sense of the world exhilarating but horrifying there was also a deep fear of the cultural and social repercussions of my decision most of my friends were still lds or mormon and of course my family was too so was izzy's and let me just try to give you a perspective on why this is such a big deal a quick primer on mormon theology is that our whole purpose in life is to come down here to earth to learn and to grow and to progress and to attain knowledge and to fulfill certain we call them covenants or rituals there are four of them that are really important to do while you're on earth baptism confirmation this hour-long ritual inside the temple and then called the endowment and then the ceiling or marriage if you can do those four things then you're in really good shape you have the knowledge necessary to go back and live in the top tier of heaven and yes in mormon theology there are multiple tiers of heaven if you're not able to get these rituals done while you're on earth no worries when you're in the next life people on earth can do all the rituals for you while when you're dead and then you can have those the chance to accept those rituals or those covenants when you're on the other side it's a huge deal i had gone through all of the rituals i had accepted all of those covenants which are very serious covenants you wear undergarments that are symbolic of those covenants that you've made people call them like secret underwear or whatever but it was just religious clothing that symbolizes your commitment to these doctrines and the beauty of all of this within mormon doctrine is if you do this and everyone in your family does this then all of you are sealed together in this never-ending chain of eternal family that is at the epicenter of mormon doctrines if you know mormons and you know that they are family centered it's because of this the whole doctrine is based on creating family units that are all tied into this this covenant these promises that bind you that seal you together for time and all eternity if you've accepted those covenants and then you leave you break away you reject those covenants you take off your garments you say i'm done with this that's a pretty big deal within the lds framework you are no longer able to be with your family in the celestial glory of the top tier of heaven so if you believe that and you're a parent and you see your child rejecting those covenants rejecting that eternal ceiling to the family you're basically seeing your child go away and you feel like you're losing them so unsurprisingly people leaving the mormon church creates huge upset within families like many other religions it's not just an insular cultural experience it is a deeply held doctrinal theological belief that if you leave the church there are major consequences luckily i had parents who by the time i told them that i was leaving the church were very open and loving and accepting of my decision certainly it was hurtful for them but they did not project that onto me in any way that made me feel ostracized unfortunately that is not the case for a lot of my friends a lot of other people who have left the church but even still with parents who were accepting and loving despite my decision i still had years of purging and processing to do something that continues to this day now four or five years later what i didn't realize is that i had internalized a lot of assumptions of shame and guilt and fear and judgment that i didn't even realize i had and for the years following leaving the church it was a process of slowly purging and peeling back and processing those things i went through the mr nice guy phase which is a very common thing for people who leave the lds church which is like i'm just leaving the church nice and peaceful i'm going to not be mean i'm not going to be spiteful towards the church because in the church when you're in it there's sort of this like like archetype of the spiteful angry anti-mormon who goes out and spreads lies about the church and they're just offended and angry and and i didn't want to be that person i don't want to be that archetype and so i tried to maintain very cordial relationships with everybody i tried to be super nice like you know the church was really great for me and and yet i just you know disagreed with it so i walked away i went through that phase for a couple of years but through therapy and through a lot of thinking about this i came to understand that i actually had some deep problems and anger towards the church and what it instilled in me i had anger and resentment towards a lot of the authority structures that made me feel unclean or dirty i had anger towards the systems that made me feel like obedience was the most important thing that submission to allah from god was much more important than self-expression and self-actualization i developed a resentment towards the church structure that has very homophobic and heteronormative and misogynistic structures that taught me to think in those terms a church that purports to love everybody but deeply condemns certain people because of who they love i'd rewire so much of that upon leaving and perhaps most frustratingly and maybe this is going to be hard to communicate the nuance to to someone who's not lds but i felt deep frustration at the church's claim to have a monopoly over the fullness of truth that the few million members are the only keepers of the real truth of what god wants today for us and that everyone else has truth too but through prophets and apostles and modern-day revelation the mormons are actually the ones who have the full picture they know what's going on i believed that they had the truth that was going to deliver me and my family to eternal bliss in celestial glory i believed that and i modeled my life around it deep into my adulthood and i feel resentment that i did that and that the stakes were so high for leaving for expressing myself and my qualms for this doctrine because after all if you question it you're questioning prophets people who are talking to god you can't do that it all left me very confused and required a lot of healing and processing in that is still going on and let me just be clear about something this isn't my millennial brain trying to reject authority structures and subvert old institutions like it's happening in a lot of religious contexts right now a lot of people are leaving religion i wasn't trying to get away from some disciplined structure my life is still a disciplined structure i still have a lot of the artifacts from my mormon upbringing what i was fleeing when i left the mormon church was a structure that i feel like put down who i really was made me cover it up in the name of a broader vision of what righteousness is and what jesus wants me to do it wasn't me it was harmful towards me and it was harmful towards others and the consequences were severe if you spoke up and you challenged the status quo the culture is not one of discourse and debate it's one of obedience obedience obedience obedience obedience is a hallmark belief and tenet of the lds experience and as a member you feel it leaving the church is painful socially mentally you experience a cost for doing so and if you're in that situation now which i know some of those watching are where you know that your family and your peers will think differently of you if you decide to leave just know that it's a lot better on the other side if you choose yourself and you choose your personal experience and your personal expression and you honor that as opposed to honoring the fear of obedience there's some years of pain and adjustment but there is a sense of freedom on the other side this is uncomfortable for me to say even right now i'm imagining whether it's family or friends who are still active believers in the church watching this i can feel that discomfort even now years later of what are they thinking of me making this video and and effectively talking to others who might be in the church and telling them to leave that that old archetype of the bitter ex-mormon who's polarizing and an extremist is is is ringing in my ears and yet day by day those voices and those old models they dissolve more and more and they become less loud and they become less part of my identity i for many years did identify as someone who used to be mormon and now i'm not but yet with time i'm slowly developing my own new identity that isn't pinned to my reactionary experience with the church but it's just pinned to who i am what i love i'm a father who loves my children i love to learn about the world and explore and explain things i love film i love animation i love moss i love cooking i love reading stories to my boys and teaching them about the world i love traveling i love trains i love science i love the beauty of our world and the mystery that it is and the mystery of life and cultures that appreciation is enough for me i don't have a spiritual framework to fill the vacuum i haven't joined some religion maybe someday i will maybe i'll develop that but for now the wonder of the world outside of the plan of salvation and god looking out over his children for this big plan of obedience outside of that i feel like there is plenty to stand in awe of and love without a god and a savior to create meaning for me and yet there's a strange paradox within all of this that i have to talk about which is the mormon experience also gave me so much my mission while i feel conflicted about what i was doing and how i was doing it i learned to work hard i learned to speak spanish i learned to navigate in cultural experiences outside of my own i was in tijuana for two years next to a giant international border one of the most violent and intense borders on earth and that instilled a love for the stories of people who live near borders which helped create my career my parents raising me in that environment gave me beautiful experiences and community taught me how to be industrious and hardworking and disciplined it taught me how to care and love and serve others those are all good things so how do i reconcile the pain and the psychological confusion that this organization brought to my life packaged tightly with the reality of all of the beautiful things that i brought to my life the good the community the memories the values of honesty and service in love that's a paradox that will probably be with me forever it's impossible to summarize this experience as one thing good or bad and that's okay that dissonance is okay so that's a little bit of my story and my thoughts around why i left the mormon church i want to hear from you especially those who have experience with this and can speak about the complexities i also want to hear from those who have questions and are worried or scared this isn't an easy decision i also want to hear from those who have experience with this whether it's from the mormon church or any other orthodox insular religion or culture breaking out of those systems is hard and sometimes not worth it but sometimes it is sometimes it's worth it and sometimes on the other side of that hard journey there is a much brighter future hey thanks for listening everybody um before you go i want to thank today's sponsor audible which is something i've been using for it feels like eight years of my life audible is a giant repository of amazing audiobooks and other audio content i learned so much on audible and i am really grateful that it exists the way it works is you subscribe as a member you get one credit every month and you can choose any audio book in the entire library there are tens of thousands of titles to choose from i listen to audible books when i'm researching a story to make me feel more informed about the story that i'm working on as well as just for fun like i'm listening to this book right now called project hail mary by andy ware it's like an accessible sci-fi audiobook and it's just so delightful and the reader is so good the performance he does all these accents and like it's just such a joy to listen to and it's not just one audio book a month that you can get which has been plenty for me but now they give you access to this plus catalog which is filled with thousands and thousands of audiobooks original entertainment guided fitness and meditation sleep tracks and podcasts that are ad free and some that are totally exclusive to audible so you can be going through the plus catalog all of this is included with your membership in addition to the credit that you get to to get an audio book for me this has been a no-brainer for literally almost a decade i've been a member because audible just makes a lot of sense it's how i learn about the world you can try all of this for 30 days for free without paying any money so go to audible.com johnny harris or text johnny harris to the number 500 500 to get in on this giant repository of audio content thank you audible for sponsoring this video and thank you all for watching this more personal video um i hope it was helpful to some of you and i will see you all in the next video which is going to be an explainer so buckle up for that see ya
2021-06-14 15:35
