I was born into TSCC, so I don't have any experience with conversion. I can remember meeting many a new convert and their families, but I never met that convert that said all of the following;"I'm well off finacialy, happy in my marrage, have high self esteem, happy with my job, have a great relationship with my parents/kids. You know what? becoming a Mormon is my next logical step..."
It always seemed to me they had something they were going through at the time, whether a short term problem, or long, that made them susceptible to letting the mishies in the door, and our freakshow religion, into their lives. This was out in Virginia, so I don't know if things were different in the valley. There are some very smart, witty, and sucsessful people on this board, and I'm wondering, looking back now, what was that thing that made letting the mishies into your home, seem like a good thing, back then?

Hormones.

Mrs. Hela insisted I convert if I wanted to marry her.

So I did.

Men will do a lot of stupid s**t for women.

My dad was a hormonal convert too.

The girl dumped him, and he was already so far in it.

I was in the military, barely graduated from HS and had no direction. Myself and three other soldiers hooked up with a young adult group (with some relatively cute girls) and then the missionaries got their hooks into us. All nice people.

Seemed like a good thing to do at the time. All I can say is that myself and one other buddy of mine ended up on the right path for education and careers. He's an attorney and I ended up in oil/gas finance. We're both set for life, I would think. When I met him in the service, he was also a "loser" of sorts with no HS diploma and a knocked-up HS sweetheart. She divorced him while he was in boot camp.

Ron

I'm not a convert, but my husband was. He joined because his marriage was failing and his ex wife decided she wanted to be a Mormon. Apparently, she had seen some beautiful LDS family in a restaurant and decided that's what she needed for their family. One day, she decided to take the kids to church. My husband went along with it because he knew there was no use fighting it. He got lovebombed and, I think for awhile it kind of took his mind off of how bad things were.

But the church didn't save his marriage. Three years after their conversion, he and the ex divorced. She has since married for the third time and gotten her current husband to convert, while my husband has long since resigned.

I like to think I joined for all the *right* reasons........ but, looking back logically..........
I was in a college course, (all male, engineering) and lived 'off campus', at home.
I was captured by the lovebombing and the ready made social scene of the YA's, especially the easy integration with people *of the opposite sex* :-0

I had moved out to Los Angeles to be near my husband's family following grad school. I had a great career. I worked in Century City right near the L.A. Temple (a majestic sight at night all lit up at the top of the hill - I felt strangely drawn to it).

My husband was Iranian and my marriage imploded when we began living near all of his relatives. Man, you guys think MORMONISM is a patriarchal system!! Sheesh, Mormons got nothing on Muslims in that department. When I didn't bow to my husband's authority, especially in front of his family, he became physically abusive to me.

I finally ended up in the hospital for surgery on a damaged knee. We split up when I was discharged.

So. I was sick, alone, unable to walk, on leave from work . . . pretty much a sitting duck for the helpful, smiling Mormons (who seemed infinitely more normal to me than the Muslims).

A friend from work introduced me to the missionaries. I was eventually baptized into the most infamous singles ward in the church - the L.A. First Ward on Temple Hill. All of my new friends were single professionals who had brazenly escaped BYU without getting married. (In retrospect, I realize now that a lot of them were actually gay). Their parties and weekend outings were fabulous! We had a *blast.*

It was just the kind of clean living and All-American, yuppie lifestyle I needed at the time. I had no earthly idea what the "real" Mormon church was like in Utah. By the time I saw Zion up close and personal years later, I was already in too deep to leave (sealed to a Mormon man and a gazillion kids).

It took a few years to get out . . . a nightmarish story for another time.

;o)

Thanks for sharing it, Shannon.

I was friends with an Iranian-American woman when I was in grad school. She would go back to Iran (she called it Persia) for a vacation and family visit every year. Watching her shop for her going-home wardrobe was a hoot. She hated to dress that way, all covered up. She kept wanting to fix me up with one of her brothers, but I wasn't having it. I felt that there would be too many cultural differences.

I was young, believed in God, and before meeting the missionaries had been thinking about the requirement in the Bible to be baptized. Having never been baptized, I had started praying about it - a couple of weeks later my friend asked me to meet with the missionaries - at the time it seemed like an answer to prayer. Now I think that my casual belief in God and the bible made me vulnerable to the coincidence of having an opportunity to meet with the missionaries. I wasn't necessarily unhappy with my life, but I was looking for something and the church seemed to have all the answers and I didn't dissect them too much. I wanted to believe that God had finally answered my prayers.

I was young too. 20, 21. Fell in love with a boy about to go
on a mission. Fell in love with his family. Wanted to be part of their family. The church just made me feel so important and loved.

I don't think I was missing that in my life. I think that late
teens and early 20's is just such a vulnerable age in life. That is when 'kids' are trying to find themselves and figure out who they are. That's got to be the prime age for a cult snagging.

Luckily, I was active a very short time. The garment idea bothered me as well as the fact that my family wouldn't be able to come to my wedding.

I got baptized after my missionary boyfriend came home and got engaged and married to a BIC girl after only a few months. My last ditch effort didn't work and I quit going to church shortly after.

I am a happy atheist now, 25 years later :)

They canvass neighborhoods in hopes of catching those in bereavement, relocation, divorce, or dealing with serious illness in family. They try to get to new college students while they're homesick and haven't had a chance to settle in and make friends. Sometimes the mishies check obituaries or hang out at funerals or hospital waiting rooms.

Anyone in personal crisis is vulnerable to fake friendship offered by mishies and local wardmembers. This can boost their self esteem and make them feel special and chosen, ideas that mormons enjoy and market.

Every convert I can think of was taken in this way.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/22/2010 09:30PM by Cheryl.

I'm a non-believer, agnostic. I'm calling you out for bull. Keep it real. As full of crap as the mormon church is, missionaries don't hang out in emergency rooms and peruse obituaries. Give me a break.

Many people have talked about how mission presidents specifically advised them to use the obituaries as jumping points.

My ex served a U.S. mission. His MP made them peruse the obits every day. The mishies were supposed to find relatives of the deceased who might be responsive to the "eternal families" doctrine.

That's a fact, darlin'.

;o)



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/24/2010 09:37PM by shannon.

Blah Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I'm a non-believer, agnostic. I'm calling you out
> for bull. Keep it real. As full of crap as the
> mormon church is, missionaries don't hang out in
> emergency rooms and peruse obituaries. Give me a
> break.

I don't know about the emergency room ,but many mishies check the obituaries on a regular basis.

I often see converts demeaned on this board as low-live unachievers, which frustrates me because my DD is a convert. She is bright (just completed a master’s degree), beautiful, and a great person. Remember what Steve Hassan says: people don’t join cults, cults recruit people. That was certainly the case with my DD.

She converted because, like Curly, TSCC made her feel important and loved. They seemed to have all the answers. All her mormon friends were thrilled when she joined and that made her feel even more special. Despite that, she was wavering in her decision when she met her future DH (a great guy) and fell in love. That sealed it for her.

Fortunately, they have gone against the Mormon mold and are putting off kids until they are secure in their careers and finances. (That speaks to their intelligence as well.)

Please understand, I don't look down on converts. I shook their hands and sincerly told them it was the right thing for them to do. We all were duped in some form or another. I'm just curious as to why rational people(everyone on this board) do irrational things(join TSCC). It's not for the jesus jammies...

When I joined, I was just medically discharged from the Air Force and lost my commission. At the time, I was severely depressed at that time. Basically I lost my life long goal. Serve as an officer in the USAF. To say the least, my life went on, I met a wonderful gal years later, we got married, had 3 great kids. So the adage .. The front door may close, but god opens up a window. If not for my lost career, I would not have met my wife. We have been married 25 years now.

So for me, I just needed someplace to lick my wounds, the church sounded good. Now, I have support groups for my issues. For one, I am the caregiver of my mom who has alzheimers. The support from the group is far far ahead of any support I could get from the church.

I was loved bombed at a time I needed love. And you don't know the irrational beliefs until you join up. I was told it would enhance my faith I already had, not completely change it.

Believe it or not, I have only been a member from 2002-June 2010, but feel I am not recovered from it, even though I didn't grow up in it my husband and his family are LDS and my little daughter will be 8 in 2 years. I need this group to help me out because I feel very alone at times even though I was only a convert.

I thought it was just a regular old church with an emphasis on family....

you don't hear the other stuff until it is too late.

I had wanted to be a Mormon since I was a child. I had a certain fascination starting with seeing a particular television commercial and this was exacerbated when I met an actual Mormon child whose family mirrored the family in the commercial. My family was critical of my interest in Mormonism and it wasn't until I turned 18 that I, unencumbered by being a minor, quickly joined this dreamy faith. Unfortunately, it really was just a dream. I was of course saddened to have to reconcile that the outer image and tidy organization of Mormonism had a dark foundation that I could never and did never believe in.

It was 2002. I was getting another divorce. My adult child was upset with me. I was working in a boring, menial job. I loved then (and still love) Jesus Christ (my Jesus is all-loving and inclusive) and I thought the Morg was all about Jesus Christ. Stoopid me.

But really, I'm glad I went through it. Going from zealous covert to WTF? to OMG!! has taught me a lot about a lot. My next step will be resigning, but I'm not yet ready to handle the fallout.

Mom was going through menopause and having some difficulties with my father. She mentioned some things to her hair dresser and hair dresser sent the missionaries to our home. Dad took one discussion and begged off. I believe Mom liked being listened to and also liked how easy TSCC made the purpose of life sound. She said she always wondered why there were no prophets in modern days and the Mormon answer hooked her. She found something that changed the focus of her less happy life.

I was 12 and just starting to question what religion was all about. Again, Mormonism kind of makes eveything so cut-and-dry easy to figure out. At least at surface level. Once you are an insider and get more of the crazy stuff it gets harder to figure. Anyway.... I liked the Joseph Smith story and because I was still very young, and liked fantasy and romance, I guess that appealed to me. The clinch was that when I left for summer camp two of the counselors were returned missionaries and they zeroed in on me.

Now happy to say that my Mom thinks TSCC is wacky, I'm out officially, and my sis and her kids are all inactive and non-believing.

End of story.

They got me when I was a teenager. When I reached 12, I began to wonder about God, life, all that stuff. I'd been baptized as a baby in the Catholic Church, but had never been taken to a Catholic service, so I didn't quite know what to do there.

I was taken to the Anglican Church at about age 3, but not since then, so I had no real background there either.

A friend and I started going to a local Baptist Church, but the Pastor stood up one day and started naming other churches, like the Mormons (didn't even know what a Mormon was), the Catholics, etc., saying, "Don't you pat them on the back and say, 'God bless you.'" I was appalled, so I left.

Then the missionaries showed up at my friend's door and we began taking the lessons. We joined the Church pretty close together.

For one thing, I was a very shy kid (still am shy actually), and I was getting involved with a nice group of kids, with high standards, as I seemed to just have naturally. No one taught me to have them. I just did.

Secondly, they saw God the Father and Jesus as two separate beings, which made much more sense to me than telling me that Jesus was always talking to himself. He was praying to himself, calling himself his own Father, and throwing his voice up to Heaven like a ventriloquist to say, "This is my beloved Son."

So I stayed. For 30 years. Then I found out the truth, got mad and left.

...and decided the Mormon Church would give me the direction I needed.

After about 13 years, I found the therapist and got out. Better late than never.

I was coming off of 2 really bad years in my life. At 15 I began to have very intense anxiety attacks (back in the late 70s they had no idea what those were) plus my father had just been transfered in his job to an area 3 hours south of where we were living.

Those two things together really hit me hard. I quit high school because I could not longer focus and I had no friends.

For 2 years I struggled. I finally earned my G.E.D. and started college when a guy from one of my classes who had just converted to Mormonism bugged me until I finally gave in and went to see the elders. I hit it off with them right away. Suddenly I had friends and for the first time in my life I was totally accepted.....but....to keep my new friends I needed to convert to their religion. As one elder told me "if you are not making progress in your investigation of the church then we are instructed by our leaders to drop you and move on to others who want to hear our message". (MASSIVE RED FLAG!)

Being 17 years old and craving acceptance and friendship, I tried to accept Mormonism and convert....but so much of it just didn't feel right. Some of it was just crazy sounding (I listen to feeling like that now. It's called being skeptical).

After going back and forth for 4 months I finally fell to the pressure and was baptised. This earned one elder the "Baptise the last week of your mission" award.

After I joined I found the more that I did what the Mormons said, the more they accepted me and liked me. They treated me like a hero when I said, one month after my baptism, that I wanted to go on a mission. They wre so impressed when I worked and saved the money to go. They were thrilled as I progressed to being ordained an elder 9 months after my baptism.

I was baptised December 13, 1981. On January 13, 1983 I entered the MTC. In the space of 4 years (1981-1985) I served a mission, was elders quorum president twice and got married in the temple.

From 1985 to 1990 I discovered the real Mormonism. The esteem building went away. The love bombing stopped. I was now their bitch. Just pay your tithing, do what we tell you and shut the f*ck up.

In 1997 I got tired of their dictatorship and their abuse and left. It was not a person or people that offened me. It was not sin. It was abuse by a corporation.

I said all that to say this: You are correct that the average convert is a troubled person who has his/her neck exposed to the vampire called Mormonism. The organization is structured to prey on the weak and vunerable.

It's not the spirit that converts. It's the conmen who strip you of as much as they can before moving on to feed on fresh blood.

You and I almost had the same timeline. Me:

Baptized in 1984
Mission in 1986-87
Temple Marriage 1989
RS Pres twice; Primary Pres & Stake; YW Pres when I left
Got out in 1997

Only diff is that you were male and I was female. Weird coincidence.

That is interesting! Did your husband leave with you? My wife is deathly loyal to the Utah Reich but at least she went inactive.

...five years after leaving the church together. He and I both maintain that without each other, we would've never left. That and our two kids are the reasons we are grateful to have been together.

After losing our testimonies, we were radically different people: Since I converted in my early twenties, I had a Lutheran past with the normalcy of parents who drank, ideas about sex, etc. He was BIC and reacted like a kid with a free-pass in a candy store. I didn't know his behavior was a normal thing among some who leave the church after being born in it because the wildness of it kind of freaked me out.

He calmed down, though, and eventually we looked at each other and wondered who we'd married. We married each other for outward church reasons: both RMs, he liked that I was a convert, we were the only ones in our families who were active (my family being no-mo and his being inactive), wanting to marry in the temple...

Even though neither of us embraced a belief in a higher being, I wanted my kids to have a church they called home in mo-dominated SLC. So I found the Unitarian Church where the three of us attended until about five years ago. My former husband didn't like the idea of any church, or my activity at the time of our departure from the church on this bulletin board (I've been around here since then), and the distance between us widened.

Yet again, without him I wouldn't be where I am: a little more normal. Not quite arrived at normalcy, but getting there.

toto

So many people have commented that around 1985 the Mormon church changed for the worse.

Young, had a crush, and coming from a not-so-stable family life. You know the rest.

Crush didn't work out, and I got an education and emotional/financial stability. I started looking at the whole thing with clarity and said to myself, "This is cr*p." That was over 30 years ago, way before the internet where I could research and compare notes with other like-minded people, before the Indian-Lamanite theory was discredited and the Book of Abraham proved to be a hoax.

But, I did a lot of reading: church history, the Journal of Discourses, Mormon Doctrine, etc., and "res ipsa loquitor": the thing speaks for itself. The Joseph Smith-Brigham Young-prophet stuff is pure bs, with a very creepy history.

The church itself is a social system with not much room for individual differences. It's run by businessmen like a business. Money (tithing/offerings) is all important, and guilt/fear are the main motivating factors. Women are irrelevant. How dumb is that?

With all the new research discrediting Mormon beginnings, history, and teachings, it stuns me that anyone buys into it today.

For my convert daughter it was when my lying, cheating, thief of a hubby (didn't know this til later) decided to leave our family. My daughter had told the Mormons who love bombed her to take a hike just 5 months before he did this. She was done with their pressure. And boy had she been love bombed!!!She loved her family and knew this would hurt us badly and she had a good foundation in our church. The two girls she liked a lot stayed around - the other 21 kids took off for their next conquest.

The week her dad left the closest Mormon girl got her involved again...even went to her college to get her back on the track SHE wanted for her. My daughter quit college too. Well, it still took them 41/2 yrs. but they got her.....her marriage to a Mormon didn't help....but that was almost a given once she let them back in her life so much. Yes, they go after vulnerable people....they never let go. Intelligence has nothing to do with it....when someone is sad peers can influence you a lot. One day she will become an exmo....I continue to hope.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/24/2010 10:00PM by honestone.

I was 19 and dating my future BIC husband. Raised Catholic but my family only went to church about 3 x's a year. I started looking for meaning in my life, after going to mass regularly for months, still wasn't finding it. Met the missionaries at boyfriend's house and they did and said everything they could to get me to convert. I questioned a lot of things and was promptly lied to (it was way before the days of the internet). So I joined and shortly afterwards we were married in a civil ceremony. He had a friend that started sending him 'anti-mormon' literature and I read it voraciouslly. He admonished me to throw it away, but I secretly kept and read it. We were sealed in the temple before our children were born and that first temple experience totally freaked me out. Afterwards the babies started coming, I was a stay at home mom and held just about every calling in the church over the next 20 years. Marriage was never great, he was abusive and I started going to counseling. It's a long story, but left the marriage and church. No one in my family was ever LDS and I never tried to convert a single one of them. My ex was the Stake Missionary Leader for many years, I guarantee they do all of those things to get converts. My four children are all adults now, none of them consider themselves LDS, but ex still goes to church. Don't even know if I'm a Christian anymore, but do know I could never be member of any church ever again.