Posted by:
sparty
(
)
Date: January 07, 2014 02:36PM
I knew most of the facts about the church for a long time before I left - I just ignored them because I enjoyed that I felt the church had evolved into. If nothing else, I enjoyed the friendship of others in the ward, so if the church had a shady underbelly, I didn't really mind too much.
What started the downward spiral was tithing...not that I had any problem with it - I didn't (I do now that I know where the money goes, but I was a naive TBM at the time). The problem came when my never-mo mom decided that she wanted to do the right thing and pay tithing. Since she didn't attend a church at the time, she sent her tithing money with me each month. When I told the bishop about what she wanted to do, he was geeked and couldn't wait to share it with the other leaders in the ward. Over time, I started to notice the missionaries casually drop "mini-lessons" about the importance of a very generous tithe when they would come to visit me - something seemed fishy, but I just ignored it, thinking I was being paranoid. The tipping point was when my mom got a call from the bishop's secretary, telling her she had an appointment to meet with the bishop for a tithing settlement. I was fuming, and decided that no, I wasn't just being paranoid, the church was indeed trying to bleed more money out of my already financially-struggling mother. I called the bishop's secretary back and chewed him 5 ways to next week - he dropped some gems "well if she's paying an honest tithe, why does this appointment even bother you?" and "I think you might want to set up an appointment with the bishop yourself to discuss obedience and repentance." I thought that was a great idea, so I decided to visit the bishop at home. When I told him what was going on, he seemed visibly confused and upset. He told me that he had mentioned my mom in PEC earlier in the year - thinking it was awesome that she would want to pay tithing, but then just sort of forgot about it. After some digging, it turned out that the bishop's secretary (who had been pestering me for over a year to put in my paperwork to go on a mission, even though I was adamant that I had no desire) saw this as an opportunity to softball me a missionary-opportunity. He had been sending the missionaries, etc.
That's when it all started falling in place. They never had any interest in visiting my family, they only wanted another baptism...they didn't care that a non-member was giving a monthly donation to their church, they only wanted to make sure that it was enough. After that, church just seemed really creepy. The final straw was one night, when I was trying to explain my beliefs to a non-mormon friend, I actually took a step back and LISTENED to what was coming out of my mouth...I haven't been inside an LDS building since that week.