While looking for something else, I came across this:

https://www.lds.org/ensign/1976/07/the-saints-in-knoxville-stake?lang=eng

You know how the Ensign features the church in various areas, and interviews and profiles some of the members. This one struck me kinda funny because I moved to Knoxville in 1984 and was active in the church until 1997. I didn't expect to find anything stupendous in the article, but as I read through it, I realized that I knew about half of the members who were mentioned. A lot of those members mentioned in the this 1976 article were either inactive, had left the church, or were nutjobs when I was attending there. I thought it would be interesting to comment on a few of those people. I won't mention them by name, so as to preserve their privacy, but all of these people are noted in the article.

#1: This lady and her husband were some of the long-time pillars of the ward. He was a high councilor when we moved here. The wife died of cancer, and the husband stopped attending. When I was in the bishopric, we went to visit him to determine his status, and he said that he'd never believed in the church, that he only went because his wife wanted him to, and to take his name off the records. This guy was active and served in leadership positions for 25-30 years, and never believed in it. All of their grown children were semi- or inactive when I attended there too.

#2: This guy was the SP when I moved there, and he was and is still active. But his brother, who was a high councilor, left the church shortly after my family did. We got together for dinner with him, Eric and Kathy K., and some other evil apostates one night.

#3: If memory serves me, this guy was Eric K's SP. If it's the same guy, Eric said that he was a strict, militaristic *sshole who made his sons all wear crewcuts in the 1990s.

#4: This guy moved from Knoxville to my city in Alabama in 1977. He was my bishop, and I was the ward clerk. I could write ten pages on this guy. Even though he was an RM, BYU grad, and was a CES instructor for eight years, he only lasted about a year as bishop. The SP fired him. This guy got into the real estate business, did some very shady things, lost his license, his wife divorced him, and he moved away (he's now dead.) He's the bishop whom I talked about in my 2002 ExMo conference speech---the guy who "counseled" my bride and I to not have sex until after we had been sealed in the temple, even though we were already civilly married.

http://www.salamandersociety.com/randyjordan/

#5: This guy was one of those befuddled, clueless types. He taught gospel doctrine class shortly before we left the church, and he didn't know his *ss from a hole in the ground about church history. Class members had to constantly correct him on his facts. His wife once confessed that she was in love with another ward member, but she stayed with her husband because they had kids.

#6: This guy was an obese, jolly guy, and was okay, but he was pretty much inactive the whole 13 years I was in the ward. I home taught him for years, and he came to church maybe once or twice a year.

#7: This guy was okay, just a blue-collar dude and a so-so member, but his wife was the piece of work. She used to brag that she had dated Donny Osmond. She had a blown-up photo of them together on her fridge, which she said was taken while they were on a date. Problem with her story is that this was a public event in the late 1970s which my future wife (then a teen) had also attended. My wife took photos of Donny too, and once when she was looking through her photos, she saw that crazy lady (then also a teen) was in the background of some of her photos. And of course, they were all wearing the same clothes in all the photos. The poor lady, who had mental issues, just wanted people to think that Donny Osmond (from Utah) had somehow hooked up with her (in Tennessee), and out of all the thousands of girls Donny could have dated, he chose her.

These were supposed to be some of the shining examples of good church members to be featured in the Ensign article. One wonders if the rate of inactives/apostastes/nutjobs in this article is close to that of other areas around the world which the Ensign has profiled.

Truth is usually way more interesting than fiction, and you've put another brick in that wall.

I like it.

e-mails. I don't remember why. I think I hit the "last" button instead of the "first" button or something.

Anyway...I noticed someone I was good friends with 20 years ago. We had lost touch. I e-mailed her and she e-mailed back. I returned an e-mail saying I'd left the church. She returned an e-mail saying she had also left the church.

She was one of the good ones, so I was glad to hear that.

I think that must happen a LOT!

Great post, randy. I love those stories.

"Great post, randy. I love those stories."

Thanks, Don. I was hesitant to post that, because I feared that some readers might object to me criticizing those Mormons, who are really just people like any other people, with about the same rate of problems or weirdness as any other group of people. But I thought it was instructive because of how the church wants to give the impression that the gospel improves lives, and feature these local members as wonderful examples of the one true church.