An interview with the Apostates

A couple's story about leaving the Mormon Church

Midsummer New Zealand. Driving to Jen and Camilo's house I pass two missionaries. On a hot and humid February afternoon in Palmerston North, the two handsome young Mormons dressed in immaculate white shirts breeze along on bikes. Their flawless presentation and purposeful demeanour is a contrast to the dusty, lethargic city around them. Pondering them as I drive by, I formulate another question for the people I am going to meet.

They are Apostates. Jen and Camilo have willingly abandoned the One True Church, and in so doing have surrendered their chance of an eternal life with their family in the celestial kingdom. For the bulk of their lives they have trodden the path of righteousness, but no more. They have made their choice.

In the eyes of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, apostasy is a crime more serious than child abuse. It is a lurch from virtue to damnation, from security to the void. For the decades Jen and Camilo spent as Mormons it was, in a literal and very deliberate sense, unthinkable. But it did happen. It happened on a precise date, February 9th, 2014, in middle of the northern winter. In our interview Jen and Camilo described a sequence of tectonic events that led to a delusion falling away, and a world changing forever.

They told me their story at their home a year after they had crossed from one life to another. I interviewed them over the course of two fleeting hours. We traced their journey into the church, through it, and out again to where they now stand unrepentant.

CHILDHOOD, GREAT GOOD FORTUNE AND HAPPINESS

In fairness to them, apostasy was no choice at all; nothing could have been more inevitable. But I'll begin at the beginning.

Camilo and Jen both have memories before their families joined the Mormon Church. Jen was an American Catholic, whilst Camilo grew up in Colombia and Venezuela.

Camilo described the way that happiness and stability came to his family. They were recruited by American Mormon missionaries, and he remembers a Chapel in Venezuela with huge banners saying “Be Happy, Be Mormon”. This was no idle claim, it turned out.

The Mormon missionaries who came to town were clean cut American 19 year-olds who would show remarkable generosity and attentiveness. They would feed families and play with their children, and won over even South Americans, who distrusted the USA. They lured families into the church with a very specific promise: you will be with your children forever. The promise of happiness, for a child like Camilo, was fulfilled. Everywhere they went they met a ready-made family that welcomed them, that thought as they did, that provided for them. He saw his drinking, promiscuous father become family-oriented, and his mother become happy. “We thought that growing up in the church made us very lucky.”

At the same time, the church warned them of the dangers of being outside of the church. “We were told that we needed to be in the world, but not of the world.” The only safe place was in the Mormon family, and Camilo's family did indeed feel safe.

Jen also has memories of Catholicism before the Mormons, but at the age of six the family were baptised into the church. Jen confirms that the rhetoric in the church is that those baptised are enormously fortunate to have found the truth. “You are so lucky you found the truth! You made it, you're here, you'll get to be with your family forever!”

Jen was eight years old when she was given this message. As Jen says, for an eight year old, what greater fear is there than losing your family? “You just feel like you've won the lottery.” The sense of gratitude to the church, for both their childhood selves, was overwhelming. Questioning was out of the question. The stakes for the children in the church could not be higher; they were the chosen ones, saved for the latter-days, united forever with their mum and dad.

They lived glorious childhoods surrounded by love. Everybody loved them, they had become part of one big, sharing, attentive family. They remember the feeling of being new members of the church. “We were treated like rock stars,” says Jen. “These are our new members, aren't they fantastic? They found the true church, they want to be with their families forever.” This is called ‘fellowshipping' in the jargon of the church; everyone in the congregation would raise their arms in support of this new family. For Jen, it all worked like a dream; why would you question anything when people are being so kind?

One of the ways the church exacts its hold on its members is through constant repetition of doctrine. ‘Bearing your testimony' is a principle technique, where the onus is on the individual to publicly (and convincingly) rationalise their faith. To do so in front of the congregation is a major status symbol.

Jen describes it as a bit like an open mic night. Members of the congregation stood and shared their response to scripture. The testimonies followed a pattern: they generally start with “I'd like to bear my Testimony, I know this church is true, I know Joseph Smith was a True Prophet.” From this foundation individuals weave their own monologue that demonstrates to their fellow believers how, for example, The Book of Mormon is a true record of ancient Americans.

A MORMON FAMILY FEEL THE LOVE

The members of the church are encouraged to intellectualise this position, to rationalise it in front of the congregation. As Jen and Camilo say, it is an enormous status symbol to have a strong testimony, and as teens they stepped up. In their own words, to a packed house and an appreciative audience, they spoke of their acceptance of what they now understand to be a fraudulent Doctrine.

In these meetings Camilo and Jen not only delivered their own testimony, but listened to untold others. Smart, articulate people would stand and use the same formulaic utterance, but in this way it would be given subtlety and diversity and have behind it a weight of numbers that was undeniable to Jen and Camilo.

Children as young as two or three years old gave their testimony; they stood on stage, held a heavy mic in front of the congregation and parroted the formula whilst their proud, deluded parents whispered in their ears.

As Jen now says, “I believed absolutely every word of it, hook, line and sinker. I didn't have any need to question it. You are told, over and over again, this is the plan of happiness, and that the world is dangerous. You are taught to fear the world.”

The love they were surrounded by, the complete surety of their cause, and the adulation earned by having a strong testimony fuelled their teenage years. These were years which were filled with activities and social events that widened their social circle without ever taking them outside the shelter of their faith. It was a wonderful time for them both.

THE REAL WORLD SEEPS IN, AND THE CHURCH REVEALS ITS TRUE COLOURS

Camilo and Jen are burdened with inquiring and agile intellects. To control these powerful tools, these minds had to be systematically managed by the Mormon church using techniques that Jen and Camilo can now identify. “The last thing we thought was that we were being brainwashed,” Camilo says. The indoctrination was, and is, robust and adaptable. The process is one of self-indoctrination, and it a process able to assimilate cultural and intellectual challenges.

Camilo (second from right) with his family in Colombia in the 1970s. In the background is the

message, “Ser Mormón, ser feliz”: Be Mormon, be happy.

In the late seventies the now discredited Erich von Däniken's star was in the ascendant. It was no problem for Camilo's father to incorporate ancient aliens into a testimony that held The Book of Mormon to be a true record of ancient America. Why would there be any difficulty in melding two fantasies?

Everyone around them, the people they trusted and whom they counted as good friends, shared intellectual and emotional testimony that reinforced the message of the church. Friends would cry on stage, and the emotional reaction of the congregation confirmed for Jen and Camilo that the spirit had visited them that day.

And yet, despite the daily, systemic, emotional and intellectual reinforcement of the religion that they shared, Jen and Camilo were diverging gradually from the world that had nurtured and contained them. Unconsciously, they were questioning in ways that were both prohibited by the church and that they denied to themselves.

Jen was a true believing Mormon until she was nineteen and a half. She was due to marry a “returned missionary who was righteous and valiant”, and to enter the temple in a ceremony she had no idea about. Throughout her teenage years, Jen had been anticipating this mystique-shrouded occasion. She was so excited, “...everything was lining up perfectly for my Mormon story.”

The temple ceremony turned out to be a complete departure from the familial, supportive community that she had lived with all of the years of her childhood. It is a pastiche of the Freemason's ceremony, and was starkly at odds with the loving, familial face of the church that Jen had become used to. It is so sacred, so secret, that neither Jen nor any other child in the church had ever been told what happens; the experience was utterly alienating for her. The weird formality, the costumes, the arcane gestures and language, all of these left her baffled. She was surrounded by people congratulating her for attaining this exalted state, but Jen was like a deer in headlights. Three days before her wedding to her courageous missionary, the church shot itself in the foot.

WHEREIN WE ENCOUNTER ‘THE SHELF'

This was the moment in Jen's life when she was encouraged by her elders not to concern herself with doubts. Doubts can be parked, and can wait for the appropriate revelation. She used a mental technique that she now refers to, along with other ex-mormons, as ‘the shelf '; it is the place where doubts can be placed. It is the means, as Camilo says, of compartmentalising the mind. The shelf is a place where questions are placed, secure in the knowledge that at some point enlightenment will resolve those difficult questions. This is how intelligent, questioning individuals still adhere to the doctrine of Mormonism. They consciously park their doubts on a shelf that is managed in their heads. At some point, the answers will come, whether in this life or in the next. God will answer the question, all they need to do is park it and have faith.

Camilo was better at this than Jen. His status in the patriarchal structure of the church was higher than Jen's; he was a returned missionary with a strong testimony. He is a medical doctor, and he managed to compartmentalise faith and science in a way that may have continued to this day, if it were not for Jen. Women's primary role in the church is to populate it, certainly not to form opinions of their own: “I was a Mother of Zion,” she says later. “My role was to raise up seed to the Lord, and you can see with six kids I was on board with that doctrine!”

Jen was struggling to keep all of her doubts on the shelf. She says she “literally split into two”. She was aware of this, but kept it buried for many long years. Yet still it never occurred to Jen that the problem might not be with herself. She thought that she was broken.

For nearly two decades she managed to keep the two sides of her life apart. She became a channel for the souls that she was to bring into the world, and she dutifully raised Mormon children whilst managing a shelf that became ever more precarious. “I now have words for it,” Jen says. “The cognitive dissonance was getting unbearable.” In January 2014, experiencing panic attacks and taking medication to get through church, she assumed that “there was something very wrong and broken with me”. Part of the control that the church exercises over its adherents is to manage information, and the only place that provides accurate information for the devout is www.lds.org, the carefully managed information portal for the faithful. Anywhere else is labelled “anti-Mormon”. Yet Jen did what was expressly forbidden and Googled Joseph Smith's plagiarised opus, The Book of Abraham.

In a single free-roaming, Friday night internet session, following links and watching YouTube videos, the weight of doubts on Jen's shelf reached a critical mass and the entire flimsy edifice gave way. Jen now had evidence of the lies of Joseph Smith; she was presented with incontrovertible, objective evidence that the founder of her faith was “full of it”.

Standing amidst the wreckage of her shelf, surrounded by doubts that she had put away for twenty years, her mind took the most economical route to explain what had happened: it was all lies. “You could see how it had all been done! All of my issues just dissipated in an instant!”

It was a moment of intense relief, yet Jen immediately began to count the cost of what had just happened to her. It was a bittersweet moment; she was free of contradiction, but she was acutely aware of her friends and family who remained deeply entrenched in the church's monoculture. Jen turned to the only person she could trust, to Camilo, despite a taboo on injuring the faith of others. If you are in the church you do not share doubts, only certainties.

Camilo has a stronger shelf, and there is no indication that he would have lost his ability to compartmentalise faith and science. He does describe a scratch, a crack or two on his windshield. But Jen had no idea that he held the same doubts. Why should she? She certainly couldn't talk about them.

Cam's doubts were scientific in nature. The Mormon church holds that the first Americans were Hebrew, but Camilo is a doctor, he's steeped in science, he knows genetics, knows the elegant logic of mitochondrial DNA. He knew that the first Americans were Asians, crossing the Bering Land Bridge. He knew, and couldn't account for the fact, that the sacred temple rituals handed to Joseph Smith are actually Masonic in nature, and predate by a long way Smith's revelation. But the mental discipline instilled by the church allowed Camilo to function, more or less, with these contradictions sitting on his shelf, these scratches on his windshield.

Jen, meanwhile, had discovered that it was possible to leave the church. She discovered a website where hundreds of ex-Mormons told their stories. Apostates, the very worst kind of people, people worse than paedophiles, told stories that closely matched her own. She followed those stories, one after the other.

Then, with perfect synchronicity, their daughter came to them in tears. Three days after Jen's collapse of faith, her daughter cried over the church's treatment of gays and lesbians. Having friends directly affected by this prejudice became an issue that affected their daughter personally. Camilo agreed with his daughter, and now saw that not only his wife, but his daughter was losing her testimony. For a patriarchal religion like Mormonism, this is a reflection on the father. He is a priesthood holder, which is a really big deal, he's a spiritual leader. Camilo had failed as a member of the church in keeping his family's faith strong. He was on the ropes.

The conversation that Jen and Camilo had that night was shattering. Their daughter had gone to bed laden with platitudes, but Jen and Camilo faced a glaring, undeniable question about the direction of their lives. Camilo tried to hold onto past certainties and testimony, but it was far too late for that. Jen told him, shockingly, “Do not quote The Book of Abraham at me.” She was ahead of Camilo, she knew it was fake.

Camilo was deeply challenged, and rose at two in the morning to commit the same mistake that Jen had committed only days before: he Googled The Book of Abraham. Camilo braved himself and researched the archaeological evidence that the church had long claimed substantiated the claims to revelation made by Joseph Smith. With horror Camilo could see where the truth had been hidden, twisted, dodged and buried by his own church. “This sinking feeling came over me and I think, if they are lying to me about this, what else are they lying about?”

It is hard to imagine that night of internet exploration. Camilo knew by that point that if he kept looking, his faith would fail; but if he denied it, if he stopped and went back, what would he tell Jen in the morning? Jen had been right to doubt all along, and he knew this now.

The next morning Camilo didn't want to face Jen. He thought, “How am I going to tell her? Because what comes out of my mouth is going to change our lives.

“So I got up, turned round and said, ‘You're right. The church isn't true',and I just walked into the bathroom.” And that was it; standing amidst the wreckage of inadequate wall-mounted doubt-storage solutions, Jen and Camilo were on the same page again.

A NAUTICAL METAPHOR

Jen and Camilo's experience in the church, the people they knew personally, was benign in nature. The love, the community, the mutual support that they saw around them maintained a spell over them. Above them, they now realise, exists a level of exploitative and manipulative people who are very clear about what they are doing, and what the human cost is. These people can be tracked through their money, and Camilo says this is a trail that can be followed.

In losing their faith and the prescribed and constricted way of thinking that kept them blind to the ways of the church, they soon began addressing the question of the church's nature as an organisation, and how it operated. Key to the church's survival is the tithe, and Jen had been paying to the church 10% of every dollar she had made since she was six years old. With the family leaving, the church now faced the loss of 10% of Camilo's doctor's salary. The church would also lose the income from their children as they grew into wage-earners. Small wonder that Apostasy is such a crime.

With such considerations, Jen and Camilo now see the church that nurtured them so convincingly as a corporation, beset by massive croneyism and relentlessly protective of its interests. Camilo came to the realisation that “I have been conned all of my life! These people know they are lying, and they are persecuting the people who are bringing it into the open, and they are doing it for profit.”

Camilo lost a friend who died whilst on a mission for the church. It was a horrible accident that happened while they were progressing the church's interests. It seemed like sacrifice whilst Camilo held faith. But now Camilo thought, “How would I feel as a father to know that my son had died for a bunch of lies for a corporation?”

Like many large corporations, its purpose has become simply to perpetuate itself. But it is a church and has, at its core, an irrationality that cannot adapt to changing circumstances. Camilo and Jen outlined a huge effort it made to rationalise The Book of Mormon by beginning to teach history at the organisation's flagship, the Brigham Young University. The church filled the course there with indentured, bright, talented Mormon scholars, convinced that the combination of faith and well-funded brilliance would place their sacred text in its proper historical context.

It was a miserable failure. The more people knew about the book, the less historical validity it had. In September 1993 they purged the academics they had sponsored. They excommunicated them en masse for the blasphemy of pointing out that there were no horses or elephants in prehistoric America like The Book of Mormon says, nor steel, nor chariots.

Camilo suspects that the elders see this mistake and realise that they can't, in the information age, keep repeating lies. He sees their strategy shift away from recruitment to exacting tithes upon the faithful, whom it is hemorrhaging. “The church turned its strategy from baptising people in Africa to really running it like a business, and they started buying farms in Australia and real estate in Florida... So those poor missionaries [that you saw], they just bought the last ticket to the Titanic. They just don't know it yet.”

Jen disagrees with how flexible the church can be. She sees it continuing to believe in its central calling as it tries to control its flock, tries to stem the tide. Continuing the doomed Mid-Atlantic theme, she sees the wheel hard over but the iceberg still looming. “It's too late to turn the ship around. It's going to become more cult-like than ever... They'll probably say you can't use Google in any form... I want to have hope that they are not maliciously steering us wrong. I want to have hope that their intentions are good.” Camilo is pragmatic: “This has been going on since the first person made fire and said “It's god!”, and got attention and money for it. It's a business, they sell hope.”

Cam and Jen argue it out. It speaks volumes that the only hypotheses that these intelligent and informed people can come up with are equally unpalatable. It seems that they spent decades in the thrall of either a cynically manipulative theocracy or a deluded and desperate dictatorship. The jury is still out.

The Mormon Temple in Oakland, California; not exactly short of funds.

COSTS AND BENEFITS

In the month of the interview the church magazine published an article which, to Jen and Camilo, shows how much they are hurting. The article tells its readers “If you are doubting, if you have questions, you need to repent. Satan has a hold of you.” From the outside this is a church trying to control the ability of its flock to think. But Jen knows that her family is still on the inside, and she knows they read this propaganda.

She reads articles like this and knows that this will influence whether or not her family will even talk to her. The people she cares about most in the world see her as an agent of Satan because she has left Mormonism. The church has no qualms about driving a wedge between family members. Where once familial ties were the bait for baptism, those same ties are now the price of apostasy.

It seems like an awful cost. I ask straight out: “So, you are swapping eternal happiness with your family for what? What have you gained?”

Jen answers without hesitation. “Oh my gosh. I gained my mind. I get to think, and that was never a privilege I was ever granted until I was 38 years old. Now I have questions – and I love having questions!... It's not me that's broken any more, it's them!... I can't express the elation, how that felt in those first few days, when I realised that it's not true.”

Camilo agrees: “It's sad to know that you are not going to be with your family forever, but then something kicks in... A few days after I leave the church I feel that I am at last at the top of my pyramid. I feel like I am finally at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I am fulfilling my innate need to self-actualise. I have the right to wonder, I have the right to figure things out.”

Jen cries out delightedly: “I Google ten, twenty times a day! Anything I damn well please! We have become fully-fledged skeptics in every sense of the word. I hear something; I Google it. I want to hear both sides of the story!”

Camilo jumps in: “Someone made a statement to me the other day and I said, ‘Show me the evidence!” One of their first considerations was the health of their children. What would they think? How would they adapt to the change? Jen armed herself for what she thought might be a long battle. She went out and bought The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins and read it cover to cover. Filling the gaps in their knowledge, and explaining the new world to their children was part of the long and ongoing process of recovery.

Camilo as a young Missionary in Chile. He now regrets what he did in this

part of his life. His mission was to connect with happy families and to convince

them that they weren't, in fact, happy. From there he would lead them to baptism

into the church. Doing this to people, even as a believer himself, now leads Cam to

feelings of anguish, long after the event.

Jen and Camilo at their home in Palmerston North.

Jen had been brought up believing the absolute truth of Joseph Smith's idiosyncratic version of Adam and Eve, which, for example, placed Eden in Jackson County, Missouri.

Jen researched evolution avidly, and once sure of her ground passed this new wisdom on to her children. They too were read The Magic of Reality every night.

As it happened, the transition was a lot easier for their children than they had anticipated. Their eldest son had already ‘come out' as a rationalist, though he had continued to attend church with them. In her appetite for all things rational, Jen also read Raising Freethinkers, and realised that she had, in fact, already done much of the groundwork for the change that had occurred in their lives. She had raised her children to ask questions, to go to Google for answers, and this had happened every day except for Sunday. On Sunday, that enquiring approach was turned off, but in effect Jen found out that it never had been. Her children had a shelf in their heads, for sure. But instead of parking rational doubts there, it seems they patiently parked Mormonism as a side issue. They seemed to have quietly gotten on with being rational beings themselves. She had already raised freethinkers, and they took the change in their lives in their stride.

At Palmerston North Skeptics in the Pub, Jen and Camilo bless the sessions with their presence, where they still bear a strong testimony. But that testimony is now a warning against the dangers of unremitting faith, of the harm caused by the control of inquiring minds, of the hope that reality brings, of the light shone by science.

Jen is active in ex-Mormon groups and in skepticism. Their visas run out soon and they are leaving New Zealand soon to go back to America. They have already contacted skeptics groups in the States, and look forward to their new life. Jen's new testimony, stronger than any she proclaimed for the church, can be found on a blog that includes poetry and thoughts on her journey. Well worth a read at http://koruvoice.blogspot.co.nz

Their story should remind us of how much we take for granted, how valuable is our intellectual freedom, and methods by which it can be taken away if we are not watchful.

I drive off into the hot evening, back to my home where my kids, like Jen and Camilo's kids, live happily godless lives. They are so vulnerable, these inquisitive little treasures of ours.