The following thesis is an autoethnographic self-study about my early life in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is hindsight on the adverse effects the church had on me which ultimately caused me to leave. Before we get started, in a time-honored tradition of over-explaining myself, I feel compelled to state that I do not entirely blame the LDS (or Mormon) church for the shame, guilt, self-criticism, insecurity, and mental health issues I accumulated over my young years, which will be detailed here. However, while it may not have been the catalyst, it was certainly fodder. 

Critics of ex-Mormon experiences will say that the church doesn’t require perfection, that it is in fact understanding and accepting of imperfection, and thus any perfectionism I acquired as a member of the Mormon church can not have been the church’s fault but rather explained away by Something Else. This may be at least partially true because, after all, perfectionism, guilt, and shame are not exclusive to Mormons or ex-Mormons. 

But the fact of the matter is that it is impossible for me to extricate my (at times) debilitating perfectionism from my Mormon upbringing because I can never know what I would be like without having been steeped in an objectively perfectionist culture. So at the moment, it’s looking like a good suspect. 

In summary, the function of this thesis is not to debunk the doctrine of the LDS church, or to convince anyone to see it the way I do. That literature exists in the world already, and I think it would take me at least a few more semesters to comb through it myself. I have no evidence to analyze here other than the records of my own perceptions and the writers who have prompted me to do this reflection. So this thesis is intended only to be an exploration of my own journey, to finally lay it all out in a way that makes sense. I hope you understand.

My name is Devon Oyler and I was born into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some version of this statement is how I began my first serious journal when I was 10 years old. For the first 17-18 years of my life, the church was at the forefront of my identity. I was very proud of my membership, especially that it was my “birthright”, so to speak. It was how I learned to frame and interact with the world, and it worked seemingly beautifully, until it didn’t.

The most obvious question to ask here, or maybe this is just the Former Mormon in my head speaking, is: Why make the church you left over a decade ago the subject of your entire thesis? It’s an understandable question, one that I would expect a faithful member to ask an apostate (or ex-Mormon) in an attempt to discredit them. I say the question is understandable because when you are raised in a church like the LDS church, it seems a natural train of thought. If you are so done with the church, why can’t you stop talking about it? For someone who hates it so much, you sure seem obsessed with it. These are phrases I have observed members defensively ask non-members who dare speak about their experiences. Like many other cliche lines, these phrases are so ubiquitous to church culture that they are almost reflexive. For the record, I don’t even know that I would say I hate the church, but I think it makes members feel better to paint ex-members with that broad brush. It’s simpler that way: they hate who we are and what we do, so they left. It is just one manifestation of the “us vs. them” mentality that turned me and other apostates off and away from the church in the first place. 

Contrary to this sweeping generalization that ex-Mormons simply “hate” the church and all its members, there are parts of it that I still think fondly of, that I am grateful to have experienced. But, as any current member would hopefully understand, being a member of the LDS church is typically not like being a member of most other Christian denominations. As the opening lines of my journal reveal, it is an identity. It comprises a set of clearly defined rules, boundaries, and definitions. So, to answer the question: Why can’t you stop talking about it? Because it was designed to be inextricable from members’ very being, and especially if you are born into it, it’s where you spend a significant amount of time during your most formative years. I lived it just like any other member does. The effects of this are difficult to let go of, though for a long time I thought I had.

Just as being Mormon was deeply intertwined with my identity growing up, my journey to leave the church and my subsequent spiritual journey has been yoked to education and academia from the start. In my junior year of high school, I signed up to take AP Psychology at the recommendation of a friend. She raved about the teacher, Mr. Anderson, and how interesting the subject was. She was right: Mr. Anderson was an excellent teacher. Somehow he took a subject as potentially dry and dense (to a 16-year-old, anyway) as Psychology and made it fascinating and fun. The real-world applications were endless, and I suddenly became curious about the world in a way I wasn’t before, because I was getting all the answers I thought I needed every Sunday since birth. It was in this class that I first began to question the teachings and culture of the church. I couldn’t say what exactly it was that I saw or learned that first created this friction within me, but I began to feel that the idea of the LDS church being “the only true and living church” on the face of the earth was damn near impossible in the context of the world at large. At the risk of sounding cliche, I felt that I had been living in a bubble, afraid of how the world outside could spiritually harm me. Once I allowed myself to question things, to consider that maybe other people and ideas weren’t simply “the adversary”, the bubble popped and the resulting fresh air was invigorating.  

After a lifetime of more or less quietly accepting every religious principle that was put before me, learning how the human brain works–and consequently, how differently different minds can work–suddenly sparked big questions. Who am I to presume that I know the one and only path to happiness and salvation? What are the odds that this one church founded by this one man two hundred years ago is better and more correct than every other school of thought there is? Could I look someone in the eye and tell them they will not achieve the highest tier of heavenly membership because they were born Jewish or Muslim or Catholic or Buddhist, unless they reject their own upbringing after they die? But I get a free pass because my family happened to be Mormon? 

To be fair, I am oversimplifying things a bit. Just being a card-carrying member of the only true church will not automatically grant you a seat at God’s VIP table. You have to walk the walk too. But something about the world opening up to me in my Psychology class made me more wary of the policing I felt I had been trained to do. I had to closely watch myself to make sure I wasn’t doing or saying or thinking anything bad, but I also felt encouraged to monitor everyone around me. Comparison became compulsive. Who is doing all the right things and how can I be more like them? Who is fucking up and how can I avoid that? The result was an overwhelming and omnipresent feeling of shame, a feeling that I was also constantly being watched and evaluated. Any behavior that slightly deviated from holiness was humiliating. I was taught that Heavenly Father loved me, and that his love was perfect. But if I wasn’t good enough to get to the highest degree of heaven–if I didn’t read my scriptures every day, if I didn’t earn achievements in Young Women on top of struggling to stay on top of schoolwork, if I couldn’t think only pure thoughts–then I would never experience the true fullness of that love. So I grew to understand that being loved was being tolerated under the condition that you could someday be perfect. Being loved had degrees, too.

For a while I tried to reconcile the ideas unfolding within me with the principles I had always known to be true. I still went to church and listened to the lessons, still read my scriptures, still dressed modestly and said no to drugs and alcohol. But the rigid wall I had put up between myself and the world started to disintegrate. I stopped refusing to entertain the validity of lifestyles and experiences that were different from mine. I stopped looking at non-members as poor souls who might never understand the truth of life. Now, when I heard this rhetoric in church, I took it in and cast it aside. Life was no longer an either-or game. I could be faithful in the principles of the gospel and also respect the full humanity of anyone who wasn’t. 

It’s hard to remember exactly where my head was at once I went to college and had my first taste of adulthood, and for some reason I never wrote about my faith crisis in any of my journals. I got a tattoo and stopped attending church after a few half-hearted attempts to appease my new college friends. I think I still believed in God but everything else rang false to me and I couldn’t see the value in attending a church where the only way to feel truly accepted was to fall neatly in line. Although I felt the pressure to adhere as a child and adolescent and did my best (while beating myself up internally for the areas where I fell short), I knew that I had always been considered a gray sheep–she’s Mormon enough but is she the cream of the crop? The judgment was silent but palpable. Now, there was no use in pretending. My distaste for the teachings, the culture, and the invasiveness of authority all called into question the very foundations of the religion itself. At the time of my leaving, I don’t think the truth of Joseph Smith’s vision or the inconsistencies in church history bore too much weight in my mind, but over the years I slowly learned information that confirmed my suspicions and eventually I knew I could never go back to believing.

My religious deconstruction journey has not been a straight line. In the same way Mr. Anderson’s Psychology class shook loose my ability to question my religion and precipitated my leaving, Dr. Decker’s class on cultural rhetorics and Dr. Appel’s class on the works of Gloria Anzaldúa prompted me to return to the things I had been taught as a child. In these courses I came to a better understanding of how some of those early beliefs shaped my perspective of the world, how they continue to shape it, and how I have moved and continue to try to move away from those things.