Why I Left the Mormon Church

A couple of weeks ago my daughter invited a friend to go to church with us.  The same friend that she went to church with the previous week.  She sat in the living room while the friend's mom started yelling in the other room and saying that if she allowed her daughter to go to church with us that the next thing she knew her daughter would be wearing short skirts and over here drinking with my daughter.  All of that over a visit to our church?

This episode has stuck in my head, and brought up a lot of memories for me.  I remember asking my mom if I could visit a friend's church once, and while she didn't say I would end up a short-skirt-wearing drunk, she did tell me no because they would try to convert me but that my friend was welcome to visit our church.  I was about 12 or 13 at the time and it opened up a line of thinking to me, that ultimately ended in my leaving the Mormon church.  That day I realized, and it was never in question to me, that if my friend visited our church, that they would try to convert her.  I had heard story after story of people who converted to the Mormon church leaving broken families behind and how proud everyone was of these stories.  It seemed hypocritical to me.

I have realized that I left the Mormon church over 30 years ago and not one person who stayed Mormon ever asked me why.  It was hard.  My mom cried; I lost many friends. I am not invited to family events, and most family won't come to some of ours.  There is division and it hurt then and still does.  It was far from a light decision and took me over 9 years.  I grew up as a Mormon and even as a teenager I knew very few who were not.  I certainly didn't know anyone who was really anything else except for this one friend, and I wasn't allowed to learn what she believed.  To this day I don't know what denomination she was.

I first left when I was 17.  I know to my family it seemed like I was just rebelling, and I admit, I was rebellious.  I had also spent over a year studying and trying to learn.  In my high school, as in all schools in Utah, every day one period was spent in LDS Seminary.  It is a 4 year program to correspond with high school and the schools have the buildings in very close proximity so that students can go easily.  I had an exceptional teacher in my junior year who allowed me to monopolize the class time with my questions.  He really tried to answer me and gave me a lot of material to work on, and was very honest.  I am sure it would sadden him to know where his answers led me, but I am very grateful to him.  I began by asking a lot of questions about polygamy and the "pre-existence".  The places I kept getting stuck were things like: What were we before we were spirit children of our Father and Mother in Heaven?  The answer I was given was that we were "intelligences without form yet".  Since I knew that the teaching was that we were eternal without beginning it just didn't make any sense to me that we existed without form prior to our spiritual *physical* birth in heaven before Earth.  I just couldn't accept that one.  Another question was about Polygamy since Mormons do believe in polygamy but do not practice it.  I was taught in an official class that all men would be given 7 wives in heaven.  I kept asking where all the other men would be.  There was no answer.

I also discovered that my questions could have many different answers depending on who I asked.  Especially the really tricky ones like how I was one of the lost tribes of Isreal?  Or like the one about what we were before we were spiritual children.  There were so many.  I saw complete hypocrisy everywhere I looked.  I am old enough now to know that the people are not the religion, but it was just everywhere.  I didn't know anyone who was the same person in church as they were out of church.  I saw so many who said they believed in something and then behaved in diametrically opposite ways.  And then.  A dear friend's mom was near death and later died.  She was a good Mormon, and did all the stuff she was supposed to do and tried hard.  When she thought she was dying she said that she hoped she had done enough.  She didn't know if she had done all she could do and didn't know where she would go when she died.  Her words made me realize that even the very best of those Mormons I knew felt the same way; they didn't know and because of that they pretended to be better than they knew they were.

And I knew it was wrong.  I knew that I couldn't go on pretending, and that I just couldn't believe all that nonsense I had been taught.

I knew I believed in God. And I knew  He loved me.  I just didn't have any more use for religion.  I began then to call myself just a nondenominational Christian, not even really knowing what that meant.  I just didn't see anything else that made any more sense to me.  I still prayed and I continued to believe in God, and just left it all alone.

Over the years I would occasionally look into it again.  I would pull out my Bible and talk to people.  Once in a while I would start to think about it.  But no answers came forth.  I still lived in Utah and everyone was still either Mormon or decidedly NOT Mormon, drinking, partying, drugs and so forth.  When I was in my mid 20's and had 3 kids and was a single mom, I started to want to look at it all again.  My first thought was that maybe I had been wrong.  Maybe I really had been just a rebellious teenager who wanted to see it that way and I knew so many really smart people who believed it.  I thought they must have  answers to the hard questions.  So I started asking questions again.  I started looking.

This was the mid 80s and there was no such thing as the Internet, so research was a lot harder.  I did start by asking Mormons for answers, and just couldn't get any.  So I started looking for what I had been taught was Anti-Mormon material.  Most of it I just hated!  It was caustic, mocking, bitter, hateful stuff that was just designed to inflame emotions and cause dissension.  It was not unbiased and it was far from loving.  I read some of it and then went to Mormon friends to ask them about what I had read.  It was not helpful on either count.  When I asked hard questions I was told we shouldn't ask them and that anything that was anti-Mormon was just designed to persecute.  But some of it...some of it...I knew was true from what I had learned as a Mormon myself.  It isn't persecution to speak the truth.

And then I found some material that spoke real truth in a loving way.  It was not designed to hurt Mormons.  It was simply designed to tell the truth, and I learned some truth that I was able to verify for myself.  Most importantly I also learned how and why I could trust the Bible!  For the first time I was able to compare because I learned that the Bible hadn't been translated and re-translated.  It had been translated once!  It had been meticulously copied to preserve it, and even that had been done in such a way to virtually eliminate mistakes.  But is a far cry from the translations from one language to another to another that I had been taught happened and why it could not be depended on to be accurate still.  I learned that I could compare the Bible to Mormon teaching and see what was real and what was not.

I also could research the history of the Mormon church for myself based on some material I found.  It was crazy what I discovered was true.  I am a very scholarly type and not inclined to believe anything that is presented to me.  I know how to think for myself and I had thoroughly learned how to research for myself in debate in high school.  I knew how to dig out material, and I was on a mission to find out if the Mormon church was true.  I kind of hoped to find out it was to be honest.  I really did.  A big, blunt, reason was because I was a single mom and very poor, and the Mormon church has a fantastic welfare system and I could have gotten help.

So by now if you are still reading you might be curious about what led me to make the final break.  What did I learn that made me certain that the Mormon church is not true?  Here in brief form and not in any particular order, since they all combined together to a whole are my biggest reasons and some of the documentation behind them.  For the most part I tried to use Mormon publications to be as sure as possible that it had not been corrupted.

1. The Golden Plates and translation.

Joseph Smith did a few things that I could not reconcile and there are several serious problems with the translation story as I was taught it and as the Mormon church presents it.  The one that really made the decision for me was that the original version of the Book of Mormon had literally thousands of changes made to correct it.  I was taught as a Mormon, that when Joseph Smith was writing, the translation of the plates would appear to him and until his scribe wrote it correctly it would not disappear, so it had to be 100% correct before the text would disappear and the next passage appear.  Since there were thousands of grammatical and spelling errors, this would necessarily assume that God had made these mistakes, and that would be impossible.

All of this is well documented and not hard to find but here is a sampling:

Text	Original 1830 Edition, Book of Mormon	Editions 1837, 1888, 1920, 1964, 1978
Title page	Joseph Smith, Jr. The author and proprietor of this work	Joseph Smith, Jr. the translator of this work
Title page	now if there be fault, it be the mistake of men...	now if there are faults, they are the mistakes of men...
1 Ne 13:40	the lamb of God is the Eternal Father	the lamb of God is the son of the Eternal Father
1Nephi 11:21	the Eternal Father	son of the Eternal Father
1 Nephi 11:32	the Everlasting God	son of the Everlasting God
1 Nephi 20:1	words added	or out of the waters of Baptism
2 Nephi 12:9	the mean man boweth down	the mean man boweth not down
Alma 29:4	Yea, decreeth unto them decrees which are unalterable	words deleted
Alma 37:21,24	directors	Interpreters
Alma 30:16	it is the effects of a phrensied mind	it is the effect of a frenzied mind
Throughout B of M	now there was seven churches	now there were seven churches
Throughout B of M	there were no blood to shed	there was no blood to shed
Throughout B of M	there is two churches	there are two churches
Throughout B of M	and also much horses	and also many horses
Throughout B of M	these things had not ought to be	these things ought not to be
Throughout B of M	as I was a journeying	as I was journeying ("a" removed)
Throughout B of M	They did prepare for to meet them	They did prepare to meet them ("for" removed)
Throughout B of M	some have arrested the scriptures	some have wrested the scriptures
Throughout B of M	when they had arriven	when they had arrived
Throughout B of M	having no respects to persons	having no respect to persons ("s" removed)
Throughout B of M	they had fell into great errors	they had fallen into great errors
Throughout B of M	which was wrote upon the plates	which was written upon the plates
Throughout B of M	they were exceeding fraid	they were exceedingly afraid
Throughout B of M	they had began to possess the land	they had begun to possess the land
Throughout B of M	this they done that they might provide food	this they did that they might provide food
Alma 23:1	nor neither of their brethren	nor either of their brethren
Mosiah 21:28; Ether 4:1	king Benjamin	Mosiah (Benjamin was dead at this time)
1 Nephi 12:18	Jesus Christ	Messiah (Jesus had not yet been revealed to the Nephites)
1 Nephi 20:1	come forth out of the waters of Judah	or out of the waters of baptism (these words added after "Judah"
2 Nephi 16:2	seraphims	seraphim (verse copied from older copy of KJV which made a gramatical error)

summarized from "Mormonism: Shadow or Reality" Jerald and Sandra Tanner

I also had some other serious problems with the Golden Plates and Book of Mormon.  One of them is the plates themselves.  I just could not get past a few facts.  One of them is that the description of when Joseph Smith received the plates has him running home with them to hide them per the angels instructions.  The description of the plates, has them in such dimensions that the weight of them would have been outrageous!   In 1828, Martin Harris, is reported to have said that the plates were "fastened together in the shape of a book by wires" In 1859 Harris said that the plates "were seven inches [18 cm] wide by eight inches [20 cm] in length, and were of the thickness of plates of tin; and when piled one above the other, they were altogether about four inches [10 cm] thick; and they were put together on the back by three silver rings, so that they would open like a book"  

A bar of gold is 7 inches x 3 and 5/8 inches x 1 and 3/4 inches. Weight of a standard gold bar: approximately 400 ounces or 27.5 pounds. If the book was one inch thicker and 7 inches wider it would have been at *least* twice as heavy or something like 55 lbs. It would have weighed far too much for one man to carry at all easily, let alone run that far with! Then there is the problem of the weight of the gold on the plates themselves. Gold is very soft, and very heavy and those lower plates would have not been able to maintain the inscriptions. Surely another metal would have been a better choice.  Below is a scale model of the plates as they were described.

Then there is another big problem with the other document that Joseph Smith obtained from Egypt and "translated" into the Book of Abraham in the Mormon scripture The Pearl of Great Price.  At the time no one could, or ever expected to be able to, decipher hieroglyphics.  Since the Rosetta Stone was discovered and they were able to find a key to decipher them, the hieroglyphics depicted in the papyri that Joseph Smith "translated" have been found to be funeral instructions, and have nothing to do whatsoever with Abraham or anything else in the book. 

A portion of the papyri considered by some to be source of the Book of Abraham. The difference between Egyptologists' translation and Joseph Smith's interpretations have caused considerable controversy.

Add to that the Kinderhook fraud where people, who admittedly were trying to hurt Joseph Smith, gave him fake plates to translate, and he did.  He gave a translation that he said came from God, and God didn't tell him that it was all a fake.

On May 1, 1843, William Clayton, Joseph Smith’s private secretary, wrote in his journal: 

I have seen 6 brass plates covered with ancient  characters of language containing from 30 to 40 on each side of the plates. Prest J. [Joseph Smith] has translated a 

portion and says they contain the history of the person with whom they were found and he was a descendant of Ham through the loins of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

Clayton’s diary account then became the basis for the entry about the plates in the official History of the Church, vol. 5, page 372.

On May 7, 1843, Apostle Parley P. Pratt wrote a letter that included:

Six plates having the appearance of Brass have lately been dug out of the mound by a gentleman in Pike Co. Illinois. They are small and filled with engravings in 

Egyptian language and contain the genealogy of one of the ancient Jaredites back to Ham the son of Noah.

Front and back of four of the six Kinderhook plates are shown in these facsimiles, which appeared in 1909 in History of the Church, vol. 5, pp. 374–75.

All of this combined to be inarguable proof that the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith could not be what I had been taught.  Not at all.

2. The Masons and Mormons

My grandpa was not a Mormon, but was a Mason, and I remember well how upset my mom would get by many of the Masonic rituals, and in particular the aprons that they wore.  As a child I didn't understand any of it since I didn't know anything about either Mormon temple rituals or Masonic rituals.  In my investigations however I learned how similar they are.  I also learned that Joseph Smith became a 33rd degree Master Mason in 1842 and that the temple rituals are beyond similar to the point of being nearly identical at times. This is verified by the Mormon History of the Church and by my speaking with former temple Mormons who verified the rituals for me personally.

Tuesday, [March] 15. — I officiated as grand chaplain at the installation of the Nauvoo Lodge of Free Masons, at the Grove near the Temple. Grand Master Jonas, of Columbus, being present, a large number of people assembled on the occasion. The day was exceedingly fine; all things were done in order, and universal satisfaction was manifested. In the evening I received the first degree in Freemasonry in the Nauvoo Lodge, assembled in my general business office. History of the Church (Joseph Smith)|History of the Church, by Joseph Smith, Deseret Book, 1978, Vol.4, Ch.32, p.550-1)

The link between Mormonism and Masonry is undeniable, and incompatible with the church being true.

3. Joseph Smith Prophesied too many things that didn't happen.

If a prophet is a prophet and when he is publicly saying he is prophesying it has to happen or it isn't from God. There are many many examples of his prophesies that didn't happen, but a few examples from Mormon literature and history are:

A. The Coming of the Lord

President Smith then stated that the meeting had been called, because God had commanded it; and it was made known to him by vision and by the Holy Spirit. . . . it was the will of God that they should be ordained to the ministry and go forth to prune the vineyard for the last time, for the coming of the Lord, which was nigh — even fifty six years should wind up the scene. (History of the Church, Vol. 2, page 182).

This prophecy was spoken by Joseph Smith in 1835, and recorded by Oliver Cowdery. 1891 marked the end of the 56 years and the possibility of it being true.

B. David W. Patten to go on a mission

Verily, thus saith the Lord: It is wisdom in my servant David W. Patten, that he settle up all his business as soon as he possibly can, and make a disposition of his merchandise, that he may perform a mission unto me next spring, in company with others, even twelve including himself, to testify of my name and bear glad tidings unto the world. (Doctrine & Covenants 114:1)

This prophecy was made on April 17, 1838. David W. Patten died in October of 1838 and of course, never went on a mission the following spring. This one is even part of Mormon scripture and is untrue!

C. Oliver B. Huntington wrote in 1892 in the "Young Woman's Journal", a church publication:

"Astronomers and philosophers have, from time almost immemorial until very recently, asserted that the moon was uninhabited, that it had no atmosphere, etc. But recent discoveries, through the means of powerful telescopes, have given scientists a doubt or two upon the old theory.

"Nearly all the great discoveries of man in the last half century have, in one way or another, either directly or indirectly, contributed to prove Joseph Smith to be a Prophet.

"As far back as 1837, I know that he [Joseph Smith] said the moon was inhabited by men and women the same as this earth, and that they lived to be a greater age than we do, that they lived generally to near the age of 1000 years.

"He described the men as averaging near six feet in height, and dressing quite uniformly in something near the Quaker style.

"In my Patriarchal blessing, given by the father of Joseph the Prophet, in Kirtland, 1837, I was told that I should preach the gospel to the inhabitants of the sea -- to the inhabitants of the moon, even the planet you can now behold with your eyes," (Vol. 3, pp. 263-264).

Learning these things, and finding them in Mormon literature, and trying to find a way to reconcile them is impossible.  It can't be done.  Either he was a prophet or he was not.  There is a lot more than this to prove he was not.

4.  Polygamy

It is true that polygamy is found in the Old Testament.  No question about it, so to say that the Mormon church is completely off base is not really fair.   My problem is in how it was instituted and how many lies, and outright moral problems with it were proven to be associated with Joseph Smith personally.  He married girls as young as 14.  He married women who were already married, and he did it long before the "revelation" came to Emma Smith.  He did it behind her back and even a few weeks before Smith’s death he preached,  “What a thing it is for a man to be accused of committing adultery, and having seven wives, when I can only find one.”   (Joseph Smith, History of the Church, (Sunday, May 26,  1844), vol. 6, p. 411)  He had at least thirty-four wives at the time of this sermon.  

5.  The Word of Wisdom

This one is more experiential and more of a specific irritation than historical and therefore somewhat different than the others.  In Mormon literature there is a passage that they call the Word of Wisdom.  To most Mormons it is a defining precept that differentiates them from others, and they take it very seriously.  It specifies that there should be no smoking, alcohol, or what they call hot beverages, and Mormons generally define as coffee and tea.  In modern years most Mormons acknowledge that by hot beverages the Word of Wisdom was talking about caffeinated beverages.  The problem is that almost universally Mormons drink Coke, Mountain Dew, take caffeine pills and so forth, but refuse to drink coffee or tea, and yet do drink herbal teas, hot chocolate and so forth.  So either it is hot beverages or it is caffeine that is the problem, but which?  I don't think even Mormons could answer that question.  

The Word of Wisdom also says,

16. All grain is good for the food of man; as also the fruit of the vine; that which yieldeth fruit, whether in the ground or above the ground—

17. Nevertheless, wheat for man, and corn for the ox, and oats for the horse, and rye for the fowls and for swine, and for all beasts of the field, and barley for all useful animals, and for mild drinks, as also other grain.

The revelation suggests that barley-based mild drinks (such as beer) may be permissible. As recently as 1901, Apostles Brigham Young, Jr. and John Henry Smith argued that the revelation did not prohibit beer and revered Mormon Porter Rockwell owned and operated a brewery well known to Brigham Young where the state Prison now is at the point of the mountain in Draper.  Church leaders now teach that consumption of any form of alcohol, including beer, violates the Word of Wisdom. (LDS Church (2002, 2d ed.) “Chapter 27: The Word of Wisdom,” Gospel Fundamentals (Salt Lake City, Utah: LDS Church) p. 150.)

I could go on, but this is enough for today.  So where did I land?  I landed in the Bible.  I landed on the cross of Jesus Christ that does not depend on all I can do first.  I landed as a Born Again Christian and everything I believe can stand up to scrutiny, scholarship, and investigation.  I am not afraid of my kids visiting a Mormon church and we allow them to do so.  I will speak the Truth to them, and they will see it for themselves.  I will never be afraid of Truth.

I should say that I spent a great deal of time deciding whether I should write this.  There are a lot of people in my life who I love dearly, family and friends who are Mormon, and I do not want to hurt them.  I will delete immediately any comments or posts that are in any way ugly or hurtful to them.  I am expressing MY views and why I left the Mormon church, and I am not trying to convince anyone to my views.  I just felt like it was time for me to publicly say why; to explain to them why I left, and to show them that it was not a casual decision or that I was deceived by someone.  It was me.