
This is the text I received from a good friend who knows that I’m all about understanding religious experiences and the religions they take place in. As I had absolutely no idea who this Heather Gay person was and because my friend is an extraordinary ally and advocate for “gay” people, I guessed it might be a memoir written by a gay Mormon. Crazy assumption, but the mind works how it does. Bad Mormon is not a gay coming out story. It is instead a story about a devout woman member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints awakening to the reality that she finds no place for her real self to exist in the church she spent most of her life in.
Bad Mormon begins with Heather, a young girl growing up in a loving middle to upper class American family; educated parents, successful working father, a stay at home mom, several siblings and a whole lot of church. Heather is a child of parents who were married in the temple before she was born. What it means to be a daughter of devout parents and a member of the larger church community of Latter Day Saints in the world enveloped Heather’s life from birth. Everything in her life was directed by and filtered through that reality. Her personal successes brought glory to God and the church. Her personal failures, shame. For the highly ambitious and sensitive like Heather, no small amount of time is spent overthinking obedience and perfection. She gave it her utmost to become the perfect Daughter of Zion.
A highly intelligent, gifted scholar with a degree from BYU but unmarried and not in a serious relationship upon graduation, she swallowed her shame and committed to go on a church mission. She was sent to France and did her utmost to serve with integrity. Upon her return to the US she met and married a disgustingly wealthy Latter Day Saint man who gave her a Porsche immediately upon becoming his wife. She was married to Mormon royalty and loved it for a very short time. Soon she discovered that she and her husband were almost nothing alike. Try as she might to stay married to him and be pleasing as his wife and mother of his children, it was impossible from her perspective. Neither wanted to deal with the reality of their marriage so for a long time they didn’t but continued to live out their lives as they always had. Over time they finally got a divorce but the cloud of shame she felt as a result still lingers to her present day.
As a single mom and ambitious entrepreneur Heather figured out how to buy and develop a med spa in partnership with a good friend. The two were savvy business women. Their work exposed them to other elite Mormon women across the Salt Lake Valley with disposable cash to invest in their lips and keep their wrinkles at bay. It’s as if the perfection of the religion spilled over into the perfection of life itself as defined by popular culture. Heather’s brain is wired to the extremes of a perfect life, a perfect faith and a perfect look. It wasn’t long before her skills at this level of perfection led to the connection with the production team from Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. It was that connection that allowed Heather to see herself outside of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints for the very first time in her life. It appears that it is the first connection she ever had to human beings who saw her actual self before seeing any other facet of her life. She was recognized for her own successes without having to share any of the credit with her church, her family or anyone else. It became so validating for her that she felt the freedom to reflect on her entire life as a Mormon woman and take a hard look at the parts of it that brought her a great deal of pain. At the end of the book she describes in detail her departure and reflects on how authentic she feels her life has become since.
I know a lot of Mormon women and I can honestly say that I have never met or been close to anyone like Heather. Though similar in devotion, the women I know are living out lives in the church very differently than she ever had the opportunity to do. The book Educated by Tara Westover is written as a Mormon departure story in a similar vein but her life in the very northern part of the Cache Valley was extremely different from Heather Gay’s. Both women found the patriarchal structure to be incompatible with their own core values and both women have departed at great cost to their relationships with friends and family. Perhaps when life is lived at the extreme end of something the weight of it breaks the back of the person carrying it the most. I think most people in religious faith live their lives somewhere in-between and as long as it works for them, they will stay and participate without any real desire to visit the shadow regions of the faith. Isn’t it like that with everyone of us in our own lives? As long as our perspectives work for us, we have no idea why we would need to upset the fruit basket and do any introspection that might lead us out of it and away from those we love and care about?
My personal faith story could be written in a memoir like this one, but unlike Heather, I wasn’t born into a devout family. My parents were dirt poor and away from both of their families. Their families were blue collar post Depression and post WWII families. A Lutheran church connection was alive in my mother’s family but not my father’s. Nothing in life could have possibly enveloped my life like the Mormon church did for Heather Gay, nothing. But here’s the deal, because I had such a weak identity within myself and within the context of a community, when I was first exposed to the Evangelical/Southern Baptist community I was quickly drawn in and enveloped my life in it all by myself.
Evangelical Doctrine, its faith and practice was very real to me because it taught me absolutes that I could adopt with certainty. It became my anchor in the turbulent world of the late 70’s and early 80’s. In the way that Mormon kids grow up knowing their place in the family, in the church and in life, Southern Baptist kids do too. I dove in head first and stayed in the Evangelical faith for 28 years. Post high school, I never imagined that I would ever leave organized religion, let alone that I would revisit everything and find my way out of it altogether. Like Heather Gay, I was ambitious and highly sensitive so I would expend no small amount of time and energy to pursue the most perfect understanding of God’s will for my life. Like her, I would build my life in accordance with my church’s teaching – for us, the Bible’s teachings. I would ignore my genuine thoughts and feelings because at the heart they were wicked and full of deceit. Any thought opposed to the church authority meant I was vulnerable to attack from Satan and I took that very literally. Thankfully, my genuine salvation in the end did not come from my church but from my marriage.
My husband is the most grounded and genuinely good person I have ever known. He and I met each other in the Evangelical parachurch ministry Campus Crusade for Christ. He was always this really nice guy I had no interest in whatsoever beyond friendship. On an outing as friends that he mistook for a date, he held my hand and threw his arm around me on a carnival ride. When I was going to set him straight a few days later he surprised me with an apology for doing both. He had me at the apology. Men had not been kind to me throughout most of my life and this one was clearly cut from a very different cloth. We remained friends but because we couldn’t seem to get enough of each other our relationship quickly deepened and soon we were talking marriage. Entirely nonphysical, we spent hours together talking about life and enjoying fudge crepes and coffee at the Village Inn restaurant in Lincoln, Nebraska. It’s been over 40 years and we’re still talking, still drinking coffee and trying to find those crepes somewhere.
Our marriage hasn’t been an easy one but really, if anyone says that their’s is, I think they are possibly loading up on too many CBD gummies because relationships are hard work. In ours, I process life through my emotions long before I do so through my brain. At 62 that has changed to some degree but for the most part I still feel life long before I think it. Dean, on the other hand thinks first. We’ve had many long disagreements about things as a result but somehow in those earliest days of getting to know each other we recognized the truest self of the other and that has allowed us to get through everything else. It has allowed us to supply ample grace to one another when we are operating so unlike each other.
As Dean and I went into our early marriage, we shared a zeal to be full time Christian laborers and missionaries. Shortly after the ceremony and honeymoon, reality hit us both very hard. Student loans kept us from full time staff with the campus ministry, a first baby came along with no health insurance and in general we were entirely uncertain about our future. As creatures lost at sea, we chose to put our whole selves into the life of a church community that would provide a familiar sense of devotion and mission to our lives. This particular church was one that during my freshman year in college when I was away from home, broke away from the Southern Baptist church I loved so much and was the source of more drama than CBS, ABC or NBC could possibly have come up with at the time. Believing that their pastor had been given the one right way from God as to how to structure and organize church leadership and Christian community, they started their new church. My parents stayed and remain in the Southern Baptist church.
Two years and a whole lot of nonsense later, I was home for the summer and thought of myself as a bridge-builder and peacemaker between the two churches. I contacted a friend from high school who was there and we went out for lunch together. I felt purpose driven and strong in myself and my life ahead with Dean. I had no intention of living any of that life back at home. As I was warned by my parents that it would happen, before lunch was over, I was challenged to believe God was calling Dean and me to join my friend’s church. At the time I told her that would be a fire much too hot for me to even consider and that it would have to be really clear from God that was what we were supposed to do. I had no idea that when the door was tightly shut for us with the campus ministry we would find ourselves so far adrift and in need of those who would give us certainty that we would one day be able to fulfill our missionary calling. This church was eager to give us that certainty. We picked up everything and moved home to be a part of it.
Our families were accommodating but thought we were crazy. Everyone in our church was from a family that thought they’d gone over a cliff with religion. Of course they were right but all we knew was that these people got us and we belonged there. It would be the best and worst decision we would make as a couple. Best because we had the opportunity to raise our children near both sets of grandparents and many of their cousins. The worst, because we entirely lost sight of our own selves for the sake of the church. Our involvement was so extreme that I became so physically ill from burnout and the onset of a serious autoimmune disease that I almost died. It took years to rebuild our own lives and then our daughter began to experience severe mental illness that almost resulted in her death. In 2005 we left the town and our families behind us to try to heal. We went to Utah of all places. The reality of life in an entire state of people devoted to the man Joseph Smith and his vision was so parallel to ours in Nebraska that we found ourselves constantly gobsmacked by it. We’d been taught that the Mormon church was a cult, its members going to hell and there we were right in the middle of them all. It was the best thing ever.
It took years and much pain before the two of us would come to understand that the church we had devoted our lives to was in every way itself a cult. We’ve been deprogramming since and might just be for the rest of our lives. I don’t believe anyone finds it easy to think of their particular church in the context of having the qualities of a cult. The one thing that I think separates a healthy religious community from a toxic one is this. Control.
I found these 7 characteristics of a cult from this Atlantic Article that genuinely define the small independent church I devoted so much of my life to. Be it said, any organization that has these characteristics does not have them displayed on a framed print inside the front door. It can, and in our case, did, take close to 35 years to realize that this church met every single hallmark…and at face value it looked exactly the opposite of each one.
1. Opposing critical thinking
2. Isolating members and penalizing them for leaving
3. Emphasizing special doctrines outside scripture
4. Seeking inappropriate loyalty to their leaders
5. Dishonoring the family unit
6. Crossing Biblical boundaries of behavior (versus sexual responsibility and personal ownership)
7. Separation from the Church
I could literally write a book on my own personal experiences that reflect every one of these 7 hallmarks of our family’s experience in this church. When you are deeply insecure inside and have devoted your life to one right way as the remedy for that insecurity, you are insanely vulnerable to life inside this kind of entity. We as human beings do not adapt to insecurity very well and it’s honestly for good reason. As humans it makes us seek safety and when we do that appropriately, it is vital for our survival. Life in this church took full advantage of my insecurities from day one and continually reinforced that the place that I would find health and happiness would only be there within that group. It took my own near death and the near death of my daughter to shake me loose from that grip. It was a horrific and painful break away that continues to be so very, very difficult.
I share all of this because in Heather Gay’s story, in Tara Westover’s story, I find kinship. Our three stories could not be more different from each other while simultaneously they could not be more exactly the same. I doubt the three of us would even know how to relate to each other should we be so fortunate as to find ourselves at the same table breaking bread, at least in the beginning. But in the end, in the end we would not see anything about each others outward appearance, life circumstances or personalities. We would simply see ourselves at home with each other. We’d be linked at the heart in a very short time.