Exploring the nastiest divide of all in Utah: Latter-day Saints vs. former members

Some say it’s like the breakup of Lennon and McCartney. Others describe it as Democrats versus Republicans, the North versus the South or the Yankees against, well, everyone else.

But the best metaphor for the antagonism between current members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and those who have stepped away could be a divorce.

These relationships can be more fraught than any neighborhood conflicts, which The Salt Lake Tribune covered last summer in a return to the state’s “Unspoken Divide” between Latter-day Saints and other Utahns. And they can be more vehement than dating across religious boundaries, the second issue The Tribune tackled in the series.

The battle between those who have remained in the Beehive State’s predominant faith and those who haven’t is arguably the most pernicious, the most polarizing, the most protracted of all the chasms in this divide, which scholar Patrick Mason has called “the defining feature of Utah cultural life.”

There often is “mutual suspicion” between the two groups, says Mason, who directs Mormon studies at Utah State University. “Former members often see Latter-day Saints as agents of harm or at least complicit in a system of harm.”

The stayers, on the other hand, view those who leave as disloyal, he says. “The traitor is always worse than the enemy.”

Every interaction “is loaded,” Mason says. “They know each other so well. They can see each other’s tactics. They are always seeking allies to validate their perception.”

Just like so many divorcing couples.

After all, these folks once knew each other intimately. They shared a history and hopes and goals. They made promises and, in the case of Latter-day Saints, envisioned an eternity of togetherness.

Simply put, Mormonism formed the fabric of their families. When one thread comes untied, the cloth frays or unravels. It can be rewoven into a new tapestry but will never fully return to the old pattern — no matter how beautiful some thought it was.

[Read quotes from Latter-day Saints and former members about this divide.]

As in a marital fracture, when someone breaks up with the church, a sense of betrayal, confusion or deep loss can set in. Accusations of broken covenants can erupt on one side and cries of insensitivity can emerge on the other.

The onetime partners may lobby kids, kin, neighbors and friends to support their side. Teams may develop, eager to lure more allies to their cause.

The split can be amicable with mutual respect or it can be agonizing with palpable disrespect. No matter what, it is always consequential for those involved.

This church divorce can tear not just individual relationships but also ties that bind the community. It can color nearly every association — familial, neighborhood, political, educational and, of course, religious.

This dynamic — with high stakes and social costs on every side — has existed since Mormonism’s 19th-century beginnings and shows no signs of stopping. Indeed, it seems to be escalating as the world grows more secular.

‘No family is immune’

Nearly every Latter-day Saint family in Utah has at least one member who has left the faith, says Scott Howell, a Latter-day Saint Democrat who served in the state Senate for a decade.

“No family is immune from it. We have so many friends whose kids have left the church. To me, it’s heartbreaking,” Howell says. “In those who have left, there’s often some anger and resentment, the feeling their parents brainwashed them.”

The onus is “on those of us who are active in the church,” he says, “to try to be understanding and not judge.”

When The Tribune asked readers about the tensions between current and former Latter-day Saints, the newspaper received nearly 1,400 responses, far more than either of the previous “Unspoken Divide” stories.

Respondents are almost evenly divided between the two camps, with some describing themselves as “one foot in, one foot out.”

The reasons for their choices are many and varied, but most talk about the decision’s impact on relationships with family, friends and neighbors.

Active members use words like “disappointment,” “deep sorrow,” “loss” and “baffled” to capture their feelings. Friendships become “awkward” and “strained.”

Even if they want to be supportive and nonjudgmental, some say they are uncertain what to do. If they continue to connect with those who have stepped away, those friends think they are trying to “reactivate them.” If they don’t visit, the leavers accuse them of abandonment or being a false friend.

They often are bewildered by their loved ones’ choice. Many members see themselves as kind to those who leave, though the leavers may perceive their words and actions differently.

Meanwhile, many of those who describe themselves as former members use words like “excluded,” “shunned,” “ghosted,” “pariah” and “hurt.”

Some say they are “ignored” or have become “invisible.” Others feel they are considered “under the influence of Satan,” “disruptive,” “mean” or are presumed to be “sinning.”

They then wonder if their former pew mates were ever their friends, or if the “ward family” was merely “an illusion.”

Both sides can feel they are walking a tightrope, unsure of what to say and how to avoid falling off into insensitivity and hurt. And both may feel that those on the other side read negativity into everything they say, presuming the worst motives.

Are members trying to “bring them back” if they drop off cookies for former members’ birthdays? Are the disaffiliated trying to undermine the faith of the devout if they question anything about the church?

Heavenly gamble?

It is a high-stakes choice to leave a faith that teaches adherence to its principles and practices carries forward after death.

In addition, a central precept of Mormonism is that family kinship — beginning with temple covenants, followed by church participation and lifelong obedience — is eternal.

In this version of Christianity, salvation is less of an individual task than a family project. Disaffiliation by anyone in the group, then, doesn’t just mean their seats remain empty at Sunday services or during a sibling’s temple marriage, but also at heavenly feasts in the hereafter.

That can pressure members to stick with the program for the sake of the family’s celestial reward. The decision to bolt, then, becomes more than a lifestyle choice, even long after they’ve discarded belief in such an afterlife. Some keep it to themselves as long as they can to avoid upsetting family members.

Such was the case for Santa Clara resident Sarah Peterson, a 35-year-old learning designer at Utah Tech University who left the church in 2016 before formally removing her name from the membership rolls five years later.

“The first person I told about my disaffection was my sister,” Peterson says, and then only when her sister asked her directly if she still believed in the church. “I told her no, and we both started crying.”

It was a feeling Peterson sensed again and again as word spread, not so much that her family was judging her as they were grieving her.

“Which I totally understand,” she says. “Because if they’re right, there are eternal ramifications. It throws into chaos what they thought their afterlife was going to be like.”

‘No one is a threat’

Several years ago, Matt Evans, an active Latter-day Saint in Draper, organized “Outabout,” a coordinated time for residents to go outside and visit with neighbors.

Think of it as trick-or-treating for adults and families, with people participating either by strolling around the neighborhood, he explains, or by sitting outside their home with a snack and some extra chairs so others can stop by.

This is Evans’ attempt to combat neighborhood divisions with neighborliness, but if participants catch “a whiff of church involvement,” he says, “they are very suspicious.”

He and his wife have discovered that some former members try to “evangelize why it was important for them — and others — to leave,” Evans reports. “If you don’t leave, they argue you are passing along the trauma to the next generation.”

Evans went to law school in Boston and “has no trouble with members who leave,” he says, but faces roadblocks when trying to convince others that “no one on either side is a threat.”

He grows discouraged by how many former members, he says, “can’t seem to remember a single good thing about their church experience.”

Yet the Draper entrepreneur still finds it easier to talk to “ex-LDS than ‘never members,’” he says. “They still get me better than those who are unfamiliar with the church and its culture.”

‘Impossible to think any other way’

Utah novelist Mette Marie Ivie (formerly Mette Harrison) has experienced these relationship rifts at various times in her own spiritual journey — as a devout, temple-going Latter-day Saint; as a sibling of disbelievers and after she lost her own faith.

Ivie comes from a family of 11 children, two of whom left the church they were reared in, while the future writer remained.

It severed their sisterly ties.

“I remember thinking that I was still pretty loving, bewildered by their response to my desire that they return,” she recalls. “Why wouldn’t they? Whatever sins they had committed, they would find a way to repent and come back.”

Ivie adds: “It wasn’t possible for me to think in any other way at that time.”

Ivie herself eventually departed from the faith but the damage to her family relations was done, she says, and she couldn’t repair it.

Of her siblings, seven are still practicing Latter-day Saints. Two of them are her closest allies.

Both “have been so wonderful to me,” she says. “My brother listened to every minute of my former podcasts. He’s still active, but not judgmental and has financially supported me.”

Her active sister has also aided Ivie, says the Syracuse mom who endured many losses in her divorce, including economic. “She pays for everything. Sometimes we talk about church stuff but always with the understanding that she is going to stay.”

Ivie has friends on both sides of the divide but says “it’s wider than people on either side can understand.”

She is constantly surprised “at how different the narratives of leaving are,” she says. “Church people think there is only one reason, and they already know it. And there’s nothing to talk about other than the church.”

Those who step away want to be asked why, she says, but “that doesn’t happen often.”

Just a ‘phase’

Over and over, the disaffiliated repeat the same sentiment, often word for word: “None of my believing family or friends show any curiosity for why I left.”

Many speculate that the reason for this lack of curiosity comes from fear. Their friends or family are comfortable in their faith. Hearing about negative experiences or problems with the church’s history, preachings or practices could challenge their own beliefs.

The departers say they find this a persistent point of pain and frustration. Relatives and friends, they lament, assume they just don’t understand the doctrine well enough and are quick to encourage them to “doubt their doubts,” a reference to an oft-quoted 2013 General Conference sermon delivered by church apostle Dieter F. Uchtdorf.

All of this may be wrapped up in a view that their journey outside the fold is merely a phase to be tolerated, rather than a deeply difficult decision made with soul-searching care.

Here again, Latter-day Saint theology plays a part. According to church founder Joseph Smith, missionary work continues in the next life, giving souls the chance to convert or return to the religion after death.

“So [the believers] haven’t given up on [those who leave] entirely,” says Alyssa Hughes, a 26-year-old former Latter-day Saint living in West Valley City. “But then that just feels like they’re waiting for us to change when we die.”

And that, Hughes says, “is hurtful.”

Religious competition

The football rivalry between the church’s flagship school, Brigham Young University, and the state’s oldest institution of higher learning, the University of Utah, has been dubbed a “Holy War.”

But it’s about more than sports.

Both schools have practicing church members and “doubters,” but at BYU those who lose their faith — whether faculty or students — can also lose their place at the school. So many just keep silent until they graduate or retire.

The perception that BYU is more “righteous” and the U. is more “anti-Mormon” definitely “animates” the antagonism between the two universities, says historian W. Paul Reeve, a Latter-day Saint who heads up Mormon studies at the U.

Reeve, who teaches a series on the history of Mormonism, has seen these perceptions play out in the classroom.

“It can be challenging,” he says, “Feelings in this state run very deeply over the dominant religion.”

Reeve says he tells students the first day that he “won’t tolerate anyone denigrating anyone else’s beliefs or nonbeliefs.”

“If you took this class because you thought it’s the U. so it’s a chance to grind an ax against the church, find a different class,” he declares. “Or if you took this class and thought you would be in Sunday school with a chance to bear your testimony and save the heathens, find a different class.”

These ground rules, Reeve says, prove crucial to a healthy learning environment.

Creating a new identity

In 2010, the church launched its “I’m a Mormon” ad blitz to help dispel misperceptions of the faith and the faithful in popular media and elsewhere.

The sweeping campaign encouraged members (who are now instructed to avoid the “Mormon” moniker) to share how their religion informed their choices.

But how do those who no longer attend sometimes signal their disaffiliation?

For some, it’s as simple as drinking coffee or beer (a violation of the church’s Word of Wisdom health code). They might become Unitarians, a liberal progressive faith, join a conservative evangelical church, reject organized religion, practice individualized spirituality or embrace atheism.

Or they might become Democrats.

Because the church has been so closely aligned for decades with the Republican Party, several prominent politicos say, the Dems had become a kind of “social club for Utahns who didn’t feel comfortable in the Mormon club.”

There have, of course, long been Latter-day Saint Democrats (the late Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, for instance, became the highest-ranking elected church member in U.S. history), but some former members have joined the party to show their independence from the faith.

Howell, the longtime Democrat and active Latter-day Saint, has seen that over and over.

Internal party discussions can be filled with friction, he laments, as ex-members turn to politics as a platform to “condemn the church.” Such debates can scare away devout Latter-day Saints and prevent Utah Democrats from becoming a viable political force in this rock-red state.

Howell says he would like to see the party unite around the values they have in common — which he argues actually align with Mormonism — not their animosity toward the dominant faith.

She lost everything

Pamela Bloom, a member of the West Jordan City Council, grew up “deep in the church,” she says. “My grandfather sang in the Tabernacle Choir.”

When Bloom left the church in 2010, she says, she lost everything — her faith, her family, her community.

Her recovery took years.

“Even in the suburbs, I didn’t have any [church] friends,” Bloom says. “And it was hard on my husband, who has never been Mormon.”

With help from associates in the film community, she says, she learned how to drink alcohol, went to R-rated movies (which some church leaders had frowned upon) and tried “other things like this for the first time.”

Still, Bloom felt something was missing.

“When you leave a high-demand religion and you are very type A,” she says, “you have to find something else equally consuming.”

For her, that was politics.

Bloom began as a volunteer with West Jordan planning committees and eventually was elected to the City Council, where she was surrounded by active Latter-day Saints.

“When I was sworn in on the planning commission, members were talking about allowing a tattoo shop in town,” she recalls. A fellow commissioner declared his constituents didn’t want “that kind of place” in their city.

So Bloom leaned forward and put her hand on her chin, showing her tattoo.

That small move, she says, helped change minds.

As city leaders “get to know someone outside their box, it makes them think,” she says. “That’s when progress happens.”

It has been, she says, “a joy to watch.”

Can this marriage be saved?

Kattie and Allan Mount, both in their 40s, experienced the dissolution of their shared faith after he left the church in 2017. Since then, the Murray couple have guided countless others through the minefield of a mixed-faith union via their podcast, “Marriage on a Tightrope.”

“This idea of forever families, that’s the big thing,” Kattie stresses. “When someone breaks the contract, so to speak, and decides that they can no longer be a part of the church, the [believing] spouse often feels like the other person is not just abandoning the faith, they’re abandoning the [eternal] marriage.”

Especially in the beginning, she adds, there is a sense that the spouse is “selfish” to leave the church.

This is one reason, the duo says, that not every marriage can survive a spouse who departs from the faith. That’s especially true, Allan emphasizes, when the partner who has left suffered trauma while a member and needs a clean break.

“They can’t be close to it,” he says. “And that’s really untenable” when the other spouse is.

Another potential death blow, Kattie emphasizes, can be when the believing spouse maintains a strict, traditional interpretation of Latter-day Saint doctrine.

“I’m fairly nuanced,” she says, deploying a term that has gained traction to describe a member who remains active while questioning and even opposing some church teachings and policies. “That adds to the flexibility [on my side] that allows it to work.”

A steadfast rule they’ve formed: a firm ban on proselytizing — by either side.

“It’s not effective,” Allan says. “It’s not compassionate. So just don’t do it.”

Reading into everything

Heidi Mason, a 46-year-old technical writer in West Jordan, has many of the same friends she had when she was in first grade. All took the news of her disaffiliation hard, at times accusing her of trying to poison their own faith, although Mason says that has never been her intention.

All, that is, except one.

A male friend used an analogy from the “Twilight” series to explain his continued affection for Mason.

Jacob, one of the characters in the saga, tells Bella, “If you stop liking motorcycles, we can still be friends because there are other things we have in common.”

While Mason and her friend have different religious connections, she explains, “we do share other interests.”

Her friend was confident and grounded in his faith, and didn’t see her atheism as an attack on it, she says. “It was very affirming and wonderful to have such a friend.”

That was not so true, she says, with the rest of the group, where she feels her every sentence is seen as a threat.

It culminated in January, when Mason used two tablespoons of wine in a recipe, and a friend presumed she was “trying to trick her into drinking alcohol.”

Her roommate, a devout Latter-day Saint, was also offended by the wine. Mason says they haven’t spoken more than a few words since.

“I see a lot of beauty in faith. It can be powerful for some people who are on spiritual journeys of their own,” Mason says. “I am not going to judge them, and I hope they won’t judge me.”

Empathy for the other

Mosiah Gonzalez can understand what drew his Mexican-born mother to Mormonism.

“My grandpa, her dad, was an alcoholic,” says the Roy father, and, “there was a lot of tumultuousness in her family of origin.”

When his mom was about 15, Latter-day Saint missionaries found their family in Los Angeles, and “after four or five years of arguing with her dad,” Gonzalez says,“he finally relented and allowed her to get baptized.”

The Utah-based faith “was a very good thing for her,” says Gonzalez, who teaches child and family studies at Weber State University. “So there’s a lot of meaning there for them, about [what] is good in the church. It helped us get through very real difficult times in our lives.”

The family eventually moved from California to northern Utah’s Weber County when he was in his teens and where he has spent most of his adult life. He says he had concerns with the church, at times, but put them on “on the shelf” during his mission followed by graduate studies in Mississippi.

During that time, Gonzalez and his wife, Julia, continued attending church. They believed “some of the doctrine,” he says, and “enjoyed the community — it was very helpful to us.”

In fact, if they had remained in the South, Gonzalez speculates that they might have stayed in longer, “but a breaking point or a reckoning would have come up anyway.”

When the couple returned to Utah in 2023, he says, they were confronted by “the reality that the church is ubiquitous here.”

They no longer could run from issues that troubled them.

When the devoted son told his mom that they were leaving, he expected “to be written out of the will,” he jokes. But her immediate response was “surprisingly empathetic.”

That conversation caught him off guard “in a very good way,” he says. “Since then, it has been pretty mutually respectful on both sides.”

His mom dropped by one day and saw a bottle of liquor in their kitchen. She asked his wife about it, who told the worried Latter-day Saint that they did drink now. When Gonzalez later discussed it with his mother (the daughter of an alcoholic), he assured her, “If it makes you feel better, I think beer is gross.”

He recalls her saying: “That does make me feel better.”

His mom navigates the divide “with humor,” Gonzalez says. “My dad acknowledges it and then never mentions it.”

Article of Faith

Throughout Mormonism’s 195-year history, there have been believers and dissenters. It has been a persistent problem.

Former friends of Joseph Smith published an expose of his involvement in polygamy, and the church prophet destroyed their printing press in Nauvoo, Illinois, just weeks before his slaying. In Latter-day Saint scripture about the afterlife, it labels those who face the worst judgment as “sons of perdition.” They once knew the “truth” and then fought against it.

And in Utah, former members, troubled by the autocratic leadership of Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, created The Salt Lake Tribune.

Historian Reeve points out that Smith provided a formula in his Articles of Faith for dealing with opposing opinions:

“We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.”

So many members “tend to focus on the first half of that statement,” Reeve says, and “ignore the second.”

Religious freedom and agency were essential to the church founder, the historian says, but too many of today’s believers do not think it applies to those inside the faith.

Agency is a crucial principle for graphic designer Alexis Rausch. It is how the Fruit Heights resident sees the world and her own faith.

Rausch is an active churchgoer, while the majority of her friends in the arts community are “ex-LDS or non-LDS,” and do not even know about her religious devotion.

She says if anyone asks her, she will, of course, acknowledge her association. For the most part, though, they don’t ask and she doesn’t tell.

“I grew up with an LDS single mom (my dad wasn’t part of the picture) who did a lot of theater in New York in the 1980s,” Rausch explains. “All of my mom’s friends were LGBTQ+ and not religious at all.”

Rausch was reared to believe that religion was important, she says, “but it wasn’t the only way to determine whether a person was good. People aren’t defined by their religion.”

Rausch doesn’t speak about her faith much because she doesn’t want friends to feel “they have to censor themselves around me,” she says. “...I have less fear of them judging me, but I don’t want them to feel I am judging them. Their choices and beliefs don’t affect me.”

With such attitudes and friendships, the 30-year-old Utahn hopes to do her part to “co-parent” a divided community in the midst of a religious breakup.

She’s hardly alone.

Utahns may not be aiming for a statewide version of “The Parent Trap,” in which children scheme to get their parents back together. Clearly, only active members, one side of the divorce, desire their former family and friends to return to the fold.

Perhaps, though, a new script can be written for this religious split, one that includes the presumption of positive intentions on every side, and sparkles with humor and generosity.

It’s already been used, but the new narrative might be called, “Good Will Hunting.”

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