Part III: Freedom Is Not Permission
Chapter 11: A True Warning In The Wrong Mouth
Some of the hardest experiences of my life happened after leaving Mormonism. That remains true even though leaving was right.
The Mormon story says life outside the church is dangerous because the church is true. Leave the covenant path and you lose protection. Reject the prophets and misery follows. The warning is totalizing and self-serving.
The ex-Mormon story often reverses it. Leave the controlling religion and you become honest, free, adult, and finally yourself. The church's warnings were only fear tactics. The dangers were propaganda. That story is kinder to the person leaving, and sometimes kindness is needed. But as a philosophy of life it leaves too much out.
Divorce is where I feel that most sharply. I do not believe the church's theology of marriage. I do not believe a sealing ordinance makes love real. I do not believe every marriage should be preserved, that staying is always noble, or that family stability should be purchased with someone's slow disappearance. Some marriages should end. Divorce is often devastating. Both sentences need to stand.
Mormonism was wrong to make divorce carry so much shame. It was wrong to teach marriage through idealism and fear without enough psychological maturity. It was wrong to imply that righteousness could solve incompatibility, loneliness, sexual pain, resentment, immaturity, or the ordinary ways two decent people can fail each other. It was wrong to make family breakdown feel like metaphysical catastrophe.
But Mormonism was not wrong that family rupture hurts.
That sentence needs care. Too many people have survived marriages they should not have been asked to save. Too many divorced people already carry enough shame without another former Mormon saying the church had a point. But the church did have a point, though not the authorized point it thought it had. A true warning can come from the wrong mouth. The pain of divorce is not made less real by the fact that bad theology warned against it.
Marriage is not just private romance. It is a shared world: habits, rooms, meals, jokes, calendars, money, bodies, disappointments, children, plans, and the tiny assumptions by which a person knows where he belongs. When a marriage breaks, the world does not vanish. It divides. Familiarity remains, but changed. The family still exists and no longer exists in the old way.
This is the truth Mormonism handled badly. It found a real danger and responded with pressure, panic, metaphysical overstatement, and social control. It taught permanence, but not always repair. It taught sacrifice, but not always mutuality. It taught people to keep covenants, but not always how to tell love from self-erasure.
The Mormon version sounds strong because it speaks in absolutes. Marriage is eternal. Families are forever. Divorce is tragedy. Keep your covenants. Adult life requires more distinctions. Some commitments should be defended fiercely. Some should be renegotiated. Some should be released. Some endings are failures. Some endings are mercies. Some are both.
I did not have enough of that language when I needed it. I had reverence for family, suspicion toward old rules, longing for freedom, fear of being trapped, love, immaturity, hope, pain, and children whose lives made every adult choice more consequential.
Some of the fault lines were mine and older than my disbelief. When we were courting, I did not come clean about my doubts, because I knew what they would cost me. I let her marry a testimony I was still hoping to grow into. That is its own kind of dishonesty — gentler than the church's, and pointed at the same fear.
Some of that pain was nothing exotic — the standard mid-life kind, available to anyone in or out of a church. Mormonism did not cause it, and leaving did not cause it either. But I met it between scripts, and that made it stranger.
I could watch it happen in the links we sent each other. For years they had been church links — uplifting, a little eye-rolling sometimes, but ours. Then they changed: subversive, cynical, confident in a new direction. Once I sent a quote from an actor about how the child he had not planned turned out better than anything he could have planned. I thought it was beautiful. It landed as an insult. We were reading from different scripts by then, and neither of us had written either one.
When it became clear the marriage was ending, I wrote to a friend: turns out the church had more of a binding influence than I realized. I had spent two years cataloguing what the church got wrong, then discovered how much of our shared world it had been quietly holding up. We did not divorce because we left. But leaving knocked out a wall neither of us had known was holding anything up, and the house showed it. She was not doubting her way back, either. She was angrier at the church than I was — she wished I were angrier. Even our wreckage refused the simple story.
What I needed was not less seriousness about marriage. I needed seriousness that could tell repair from self-erasure, and an ending from a failure.
That is what I want now: a post-Mormon moral language that can say marriage is one of the highest human goods, divorce is often terrible, some divorces are necessary, and institutions that moralize marriage can still be untrustworthy.