I’m a Mormon
There was a memorable ad campaign by the church in the 2010s, featuring brief interviews with members of the church from all professions and walks of life, across the world. Each interview overviewed the achievements and traits of the individual, and ended with their declaration that “I’m a Mormon”. They especially favored public-facing members like Lindsay Stirling in these interviews, probably because that was an easy way to normalize the church: by presenting people that were already known for other characteristics. The success of the ad campaign, in my opinion, was the “and” of it all: “I’m an artist and a Mormon”, “I’m a politician and a Mormon”, “I’m a mother and a pastry chef and a welder and a Mormon”, or any other unlikely combination of hobbies and positions. It illustrated that being a Mormon was just part of a person’s story, and in every other way they’re just like you and me!
However, this ad campaign also subtly highlighted one of the most insidious aspects of Mormonism, the issue I would go so far as to say is the main factor contributing to the pain of deconstruction.
The ad campaign was intended to establish that you can be many things as well as being a Mormon, but it also inadvertently acknowledged something that has always been true about Mormonism: that being a Mormon tends to choke out every other aspect of your identity, both to yourself and to others. That’s why they needed the ad campaign in the first place, because when people hear that you’re a member of the church, you’re A Mormon and everything else about you becomes secondary. You’re one of “them”.
This isn’t purely the fault of popular media, which has historically enjoyed and sometimes exploited the spectacle of Mormonism (there’s a lot of material to work with, to be fair). You’re also explicitly and implicitly encouraged in the church to adopt Mormonism as yourself, to become not just a Mormon in the way people are Christian but to become the Mormon church itself. Everywhere you go, you’re asked to be an example and a representation of church values and doctrines. Every conversation, every relationship should lead back to the church and promote its lifestyle. You are the biggest advertising tool the church has.
For some people, who believe deeply in the church and its mission, this feels natural and even faith-affirming. For many others, though, this perpetuates the perceived gap between them and the rest of humanity, and begins a process of thorough enmeshment with the church.
The divide
The biggest divide I see between the people I know who are still TBM (true believing members) and those who have left is the perception of why people leave. In the church, the narrative you’re given for why people leave (or rather “fall away”) is centered around petty quarrels and a desire to sin; when I heard about people leaving during my orthodox days, I saw anger and vindictiveness as the only possible motives. The story given over the pulpit is of people who are either offended by an imperfect priesthood leader and unable to forgive mortal weaknesses in favor of embracing the light of the gospel, or else are lazy and flippant about church policies and fall away so that they can drink coffee and wear tank tops. Either way, it’s a story of anger, of pettiness, of immaturity.
Having spent time in online ex-mo spaces, there is certainly anger and resentment. There’s frustration and flippancy. But that tends to come after people have left, after the work of deconstruction has been done and nothing is left. People who leave, generally speaking, don’t start out angry, they start out desperate.
Anger is a secondary emotion, and for many people, it’s a reaction both to genuine historical injustices that the church does not acknowledge and, more to the point, to the very real feeling of betrayal that you experience as a deconstructing member. Many of the people I know who have left did so only after giving everything they had to the church, especially once they felt their faith start to crumble. Deconstruction usually begins with a period of intense effort to revive faith, to reconcile historical issues, to forgive injustices, and for many people it feels less like they left the church than that the church left them.
Because when you begin to deconstruct in earnest, there are no resources for you. Nobody wants to talk about how to cope with a faith that’s disintegrating in front of you, because it feels contagious. Telling people that you’re deconstructing only serves to alienate you, in many cases, because they don’t want to catch it. And then once it’s all burned down, and nothing is left, it’s suddenly your fault, and everyone seems to forget how you tried so hard to make it work, how you gave everything to the church only for their promises to turn out to be smoke and mirrors.
That would make anyone mad. And it’s excruciating, beyond that.
The grief of deconstruction
The emotion I’ve experienced most intensely and often over the course of my deconstruction isn’t anger, it’s grief. Not just the infuriating pain of betrayal, but a genuine sense of loss.
That’s another myth about ex-mos: that once you’re out, none of it matters to you. It matters, even if you wish it didn’t, because— and now we’re getting to the real point here— leaving the church is loss, of worldview and security and certainty, yes, but also of self.
You’re trained to see the church as part of you, as some combination of threatening parental figure and an extension of yourself. I’m a Mormon, remember? Part of why deconstruction feels like free fall is because everything is gone once the church isn’t true. The initial stages are terrifying, because everything from your understanding of why you’re alive or even if you actually exist to your perception of yourself is suddenly up for debate.
Once the initial terror is gone, you’re left with grief. Because there’s no going back, and after deconstructing that’s a part of yourself you can never get back. The version of me who wore garments every day and read the Book of Mormon cover to cover more than twenty times is gone forever, and I was taught to make that my whole identity, so what’s left?
I’ve always had a strong sense of self, and I innately understood that I was my own person who could and would make my own choices outside of church direction. I was always planning to be unconventional. But I’ve still found myself in that free fall, because overidentification with the church is insidious and frankly inevitable if you learn from earliest childhood that the way to make your parents proud of you is to follow the rules perfectly.
I feel like I’m left with scraps of who I was. And that’s due to a lot of converging factors in my life, but at the heart of it is the intense disorientation that occurs when every time you deconstruct a new piece of church culture or doctrine, you deconstruct part of yourself. That’s a unique and terrifying kind of loss.
That’s the first aspect of the grief of deconstruction: the self, the future you can’t get back. But a secondary grief comes from loneliness, because TBMs don’t want to hear about your grief. It doesn’t square with the narrative they have for people who leave.
Even people you love may not accept or acknowledge that deconstruction is tremendously painful and difficult, and not at all about gleefully thumbing the nose at the church. I don’t really blame TBMs for that; the fear you have as a TBM of someday losing your faith is real and profound. And the possibility that the people you know who left didn’t want to leave, that they didn’t walk away with a huff after someone was mean to them at church but after hours of study and prayer and facing stomach-churning historical facts and attempting to put it all back together again, is terrifying.
Because that means it could happen to you. It means that nobody “asks for it” or “deserves it” or just didn’t try hard enough. It means that sometimes, the system breaks down for people just like you, and no amount of effort can make it work again. It means that someday you could lose it all, because that’s what the church is— everything.
So as an ex-mo, not only do you not have your selfhood anymore, you don’t have the respect of the people you want it from. You’re alone in your grief, because nobody wants to believe that you can lose it all so suddenly, and the stakes are high when your identity is on the line.
This is the impact of overidentification with religion: it leaves you with nothing when religion fails you, and it drives a wedge between you and the members of that religion, since doubt feels contagious and the risk of loss of identity associated with catching the disease of deconstruction is too high.
I’m a human
I haven’t removed my records, or stated publicly that I’ve left. I live in a gray area, and some days I feel furious and like I want nothing to do with the church, and sometimes I still resonate enough with the principles of love, service, and hope that I was taught to look past the baggage.
There’s pressure to label yourself in the ex-religious space, broadly, both because people want to understand each other and themselves and also because people who leave religion and are facing the grief of deconstruction crave community. You don’t want to feel alone.
But I find religious labels itchy, and frustrating, and besides the point. I don’t want to run the risk of overidentifying with any one thing, since I know the pain and trauma that can cause. The only label I want to carry is human.
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