The Tale of Sir Joseph: Part 2

Previous Entries in this Series:

Anne's Journey
The Tale of Sir Joseph: Part 1

On to Married Life

When I got home from Japan, I bought a replica of an original copy of the BoM from Deseret Book. I read from it for a couple nights in family scripture study, which was kinda fun because I would have to keep reading until someone told me to stop since there were no verse divisions. I had earned my way back to Ricks by virtue of serving a mission, but I didn't want to go back there. I soon moved to Utah, went to a singles ward, and like my time at Ricks, went to church faithfully. Not long after, I met my future wife, and got married all within about 6 months. For the first few months of our marriage, we went to the temple almost every week because Anne was convinced that she was clearly missing something in the temple that everyone else seemed to understand (I didn't know this at the time – I assumed she just really liked it).

We got callings in the Primary and felt that we went above and beyond the call of duty for our little class. Like always, we went to church every week and a lot of the “extras” like temple dedications and firesides.

One day while driving home from work, I saw “josephlied.com” written in cups in an overpass chain link fence. I visited the site, and was a little surprised at some of the “anti-mormon” information. It had a list of the significant changes to the BoM, as well as significant changes to the temple ceremony. Just then, my memory of my mom talking about removed penalties resurfaced and gave a little credibility to this “anti-mormon” webpage. Some of it made sense, some was quite shocking, and I had heard about very, very little of it. I talked with my cousin about it and he had visited it too. We were unsure of what to think, so we just changed topics and moved on. I didn't share it with Anne, out of fear of divorce, and didn't want to appear as though I was questioning. I knew I had to be the strong priesthood holder and couldn't show any signs of wavering. Though I felt a “dark” feeling when reading that information, I now realize that it was just cognitive dissonance - when one's beliefs don't match up with reality. I had been taught to recognize this feeling as "Satan" (or Stan, as we now call him).

At some point around here, Bishop Librarian apparently went nanners. According to my mom, he started getting revelation about taking on a teenage bride or something. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this information as I got it second hand, but she described his countenance as dark and depraved, and it was visibly obvious that he had lost the spirit (paraphrasing her).

Around age 25, I started on serious studies of Physics, math, and science in general as my major. I learned about scientific method and inquiry, and learning to question reasoning and see false reasonings. I grew accustomed to using logic and deduction to figure out what I needed to know. I also read about the research and evidence concerning evolution and Big Bang theory and how it was reasoned out.

I felt huge amounts of cognitive dissonance as I was trying to reconcile all of this solid evidence with what the church and scriptures taught. At some point, it finally occurred to me that the Old Testament can’t be correct. Since the church stands by it, it can’t be correct either. That realization suddenly made everything make sense. This gradually grew into a questioning of the church as a whole, and I started to see some of the problems. I again sporadically found sites discrediting the church. I found that the temple ceremony had changed several times, and a page online had the old and new versions.

Soon after, I heard the Initiatory ceremony at the temple was also changed. We went to the temple to confirm it and found the sides of the “shield” sewn up, and that now the washing and anointing to be done symbolically with none of the creepy touching that I remembered (later I would find out that it used to be an actually washing/scrubbing, and then was changed to be the symbolic creepy touching that I remember at 19 yrs old, only to become even MORE symbolic – sorta what the mormons accuse the Catholics of doing with baptism).

There were a couple of things that started to bother me about the church. Their involvement in Proposition 8 in California really rubbed me the wrong way. It seemed to go against church policy to stay out of politics. Also, when we heard that they were building a multi-billion dollarmall, I wondered why Jesus would need such a high-end shopping center. But for the most part I kept quiet, occasionally discussing it with Anne. Every once in a while we'd notice that information that should have been kept private was spread to the Ward Gossipers Council. We knew details about the private, personal lives of members of the ward that we really didn't need or want to know. Much of it came from Bishop Coach's wife, who apparently thought that her thinly veiled "anonymous" stories were okay to share as lesson examples in Sunday School.

Throughout all of this, I kept going faithfully to church for family/cultural reasons. I was terrified to tell Anne, and worried about the impending divorce if I were to do so. I served in the Elder’s Quorum Presidency because my good friend James and fellow Japan RM was the president. I did my home teaching during this period like I never had before because I had to set a good example. I taught lessons, I went to Ward Council a couple of times, and I called guys about their HT numbers for the month. Had it not been James who asked me, I might have said no to it. I had already turned down being the EQP once before years ago in our old ward. Actually, I accepted because [stake] President Blowhard wouldn't take no for an answer, so I said yes then wrote a letter turning it down. Anyway . . . after James was done being the EQP, I was called to replace him. I again turned down the calling but this Stake President was gracious about it.

Soon after, Anne was in the Primary Presidency and they discussed getting a new Cubmaster for the Cub Scout program. She suggested me because I was an Eagle Scout. I took that calling and ran with it. In fact, it was a combined Pack so I had 3 wards to deal with. But I soon grew to love it and went to any training I could, including Woodbadge. If there was a definition of “magnifying a calling,” I’m pretty sure this was it. In addition to not wanting a divorce, I stuck around to be “The” Scout leader of the ward. I really wanted Avery to have a good Cub Scout experience, so I used this opportunity to make it the best Pack I could for him. But I felt that I was doing some good in the ward by being a dedicated scout leader, and I like it, so that helped me get through things. During church time, I often brought Scout manuals/information to read as a way of passing the time during the boring services.

The Beginning of the End

All of this experience culminated in October of 2012, when I was 33. By now, Anne was the Young Women President and in charge of lessons and such. While she was on Facebook one day, she clicked on a link posted by a friend to Feminist Mormon Housewives about the church’s stance on modesty. I read it, and read some more on the site. I discovered a whole online community that, while members of the church, didn't subscribe to everything they had to sell. In my mind, you were either a completely faithful member, or you were some form of inactive. It sounds funny to say now, but I didn't realize you could disagree with the church!

After reading some of the things and talking about it with Anne, she didn't like where the conversations were leading, so she asked me to stop reading it. I agreed, but I remembered a site from several years ago, and went to there instead. It was Exmormon.org, and then later, MormonCurtain and Mormonthink. The more reading I did, the more it made sense. I couldn't stop reading. I spent my lunch breaks reading, as well as staying after school for a couple hours each day.

At first I was a little skeptical, so I checked on the references to the Journal of Discourses and some of the early mormon newspapers. I also remembered my original copy of the Book of Mormon, so I checked it against some of the changes it was supposed to have and confirmed them all to be true.

It was at this point that my shelf came crashing down. It had been straining all these years under the load of the issues that I did know, but I wasn't prepared for the mountain of things that I was completely ignorant about.

And here was all this information that was clear proof of not only the church’s claims being frivolous, but of the intentional, willful omission of this information. I had considered myself to be fairly knowledgeable about the church. I have a fairly good memory, and had only missed church meetings and seminary a handful of times, and I had NEVER heard 95% of this stuff. About the only controversial issues I knew of were Polygamy and the fact that the 3 Witnesses left the church. I had never heard that there were multiple, conflicting versions of the First Vision (LDS.org's essay on it). I had heard that there were changes to the Book of Mormon, but I was certain they were all punctuation/grammatical in nature. I had no idea that there were about a dozen changes that seriously affected doctrine and fixed some goofs that didn't jive with the story. Likewise, I had no knowledge of the numerous anachronisms in its text, nor that it had 1769 KJV Bible errors in it. I learned about the fact that multiple Native American DNA tests showed no relation to Jewish DNA, but confirmed what anthropologists and linguists had thought all along: they came from Asia many, many moons ago.

I had thought that the South Park episode about the Mormons was pretty accurate except for that bit about Smith putting rocks in his hat. Turns out, they knew more about the translation than I did, and they aren't even members! I didn't know the church had suppressed information on a whole slew of things: The Mountain Meadows Massacre, the finding of the original Book of Abraham papyri, the Kinderhook plates, Polyandry, Elder Poelman’s 1984 conference talk, Hinckley lying to TIME magazine and Holland lying on camera to the BBC, the Second Anointing, how it's actually a corporation masquerading as a church, the Strengthening Church Members Committee, and a whole bunch more. Answers to certain church history items that had always bugged me suddenly became very clear, and I figured out why I had never been told the truth. A guy named Jeremy Runnells had a similar crisis and was offered a chance to ask a CES director about them. He made quite a list that's a good read.

After a few weeks of this, it was very, very apparent that the whole church was a fraud from the very beginning. I recalled that the Book of Mormon was the "keystone," and as its credibility fell, so did the entire church's. I felt sick to my stomach. Then the questions of, “What do I do now?” and “How do I tell Anne?” started to trouble me. I latched onto a few of the exit stories that were listed on the Recovery from Mormonism board. I printed two of them out and highlighted the parts that I felt resonated with me. Simon Southerton’s story in particular was especially relevant to me because of his scientific background, but there was another one that was also helpful.

I had planned on showing them to Anne, and had them in my backpack, but she forced my hand and confronted me about all the extra time I was spending at school. I told her the news and pulled out the stories for her to read. She didn't want to read them that night but we ended up reading them the next day.  We’d had a couple of tithing checks we had kept forgetting to turn in and she asked if I wanted to keep them and stop paying tithing on my money. I said yes, but she said she’d still pay tithing on what she earned.

The next few days I walked on egg shells because I had caused a major disturbance in the force, and didn't want to push my luck. To her credit, she decided to sincerely investigate the issues. She would read MormonThink, then read FAIR. She found John Dehlin’s site StayLDS and learned about “cafeteria mormons.” In a matter of days, I saw her go through what I had been through over the course of 10 years. I had been a closet unbeliever for the better part of a decade and slowly come to terms with it, but didn't realize how deep the rabbit hole went. I had felt the usual feelings of betrayal that most people get when they discover the fraud, but to some degree it wasn't as much as a shock as it could have been because of my years of unbelief. But Anne got all of this compressed in about two weeks. It is quite literally like going through the stages of grief, only instead of the loss of a love one, it's the loss of the elaborate fantasy that encompasses one's life.

Then Anne came across Brandon Pearce's experience. It matched up with mine so much that it was scary. About the only thing that he and I differed on is that I didn't move out of the country, and didn't get involved in some of the "New Age-y" type stuff.

At this point, we realized the Emperor really was naked. We had come out of Plato's cave. We took Morpheus' red pill and woke up in the real world. Our eyes were opened, and we could not un-see the things we now saw. It was a systematic cover up of troubling history and purposeful deception put out by the leaders. The terms mind control and cult came to mind. Everyday that we read something new that we didn't know, we realized how much we had been taken in by the bamboozle. It was sickening that we had given so much money in tithing to a church that can literally support itself on its for-profit enterprises alone, in addition to any additional donations we made. The amount of time we wasted doing things for callings and church-related activities became abundantly clear.

Continued in Our Journey Together.