This topic has come up before in the exmormon community, but it's not a widely discussed one and I've been thinking about how useful and life-affirming it would be, given that my daughter has now written a powerful memoir of her entrance and exit from the church, sharing incredibly heart-breaking ironies and behaviors performed by (one presumes) well-meaning but entirely blinkered and self-defeating members of the church.

I wondered what others thought of the need (and the obstacles as well as the opportunities) for such an exit process being created: Why doesn't the church just *own* the exit process and make leaving the church a more humane and civilized experience? For example, offer counseling through LDS family services. Help individuals and families negotiate this process. It might help steady more wavering members, but also such a process would recognize and accept that people leave and that the church owes them and those who continue as members a lifeline of charitable exit.

People lose faith. It's just a fact of existence. It doesn't make them sub-human or criminal or on the fast-track to becoming homeless drunks and drug addicts. So, a faith-based institution should take some responsibility for helping people out of its fold in the same degree to which it helped people into its fold. No blame. No shame. Just shaking hands, remaining friends, being mature, maintaining basic human bonds, and releasing disaffected members from their enmeshment with the church. This would go a long way to preserving part-member families.

This is what a mature, wise, humane, and compassionate institution would do. I think there are other mature religious institutions that do something like this. Some churches do exit interviews, and the sorts of questions asked show a lot of institutional self-awareness: e.g., "What do we not know that we do not know, but that you (the person leaving) know might be vital to our work prospering in the future? hard information (files, documents, transactions ...) soft information (relationships, human systems, networks ...)" Search "presbyterian church in NZ 'A guide for exit interviews.'"

Thanks for your attention!

Sounds very nice. Unfortunately cults don't work that way.

But, your idea of them "owning" the process would probably be more appealing to them if they could charge a fee for a more humane experience. I would have paid a modest fee for resigning if they would have insured that my records would be erased, or if they refused to erase them they could insure I was never dead dunked. I'd like the ability to access my record if they aren't going to erase it. I'd also like my records to say that I resigned (not had my name removed) under good conduct as I didn't break a single commandment nor even a single jot or tittle of their blasted dogma. They are going to keep me on their records anyway so they could at least give me the clean record I deserve.

Charging a fee works in Germany. Inthe 1980s, leaving Catholicism or Lutheranism had a fee of about $100. But until you left, you paid an income tax to your church from every pay check or capital gain. Leaving the church put you money ahead, but they collected what they could until then.

A German friend told me this, years ago. Because it said "Lutheran" on his birth cert., the Lutheran Church is authorized to collect a certain amount out of his paychecks before he gets paid, kind of like garnishing wages for alimony.

I don't know if it's still true now that he has emigrated to Canada. I'll have to ask.

It´s about as crooked and slimy as the entrance process.

The only thing is tscc won´t own up to anything. Bad morals.

In no way, shape or form do you or anyone in your family want to use the so called services of any LDS sponsored therapist or councelor.

Would a chiropractor help me exit Mormonism?

That would only work if they cared about their members. They
only care that their members are doing good things for the
Church. If someone's leaving, that contradicts all the
testimonies about how we ALL love the Church and KNOW that it's
true. So they can't help the process along, or even acknowledge
that it's a respectable option.

The exit process is hell and it still isn't over in my opinion. I have a feeling I will rail against the old pricks and family pricks for a while longer. If I somehow get to the top of the pit and get my health back to top form there will not be any forgiveness for anybody, My family knows I am more serious about life than before and they know it is not going to be pretty when I verbally get tevenge, which is perfectly legal by the way.

Sounds about as effective as scolding a puppy for pooping on the floor. Their religion trains them to leave presents everywhere they go. But in honor of the late Marty Balin:

Woah, I've been so many places I've seen some things (yes I have)
I know that love is the answer (yes it is)
Keeps holding this world together (oh yeah)
Ain't nothing better? Ain't nothing better?(Nothing's better!)
And all the answers to our prayers,
Hell, it's the same everywhere. (just the same now)
Nothing ever breaks up the heart(love's a game now)
only your tears give you away (Ain't it a shame now).

Well you are wiser than me so you may have a point. Verbal arguments won't get me anywhere with family I think. The cult is strong with them mentally to a point where I will never reach their brain. And it bothers me that they are so far gone.

If they can’t take the high road on their high horse, the way is clear for you. Mormonism is an institutionalized kind of blindness that’s hard to overcome. It would be nice if it were the only kind, but they are a dime a dozen. You might treat cult capture as a form of mental illness. It’s too bad your family rides the short bus.

Yea its crazy that I see them in the mentally ill category now but they give me no choice. I have no clue how to help them or if I even can.

They COULD do that... IF ONLY... they would OWN Tithing.
Secret ["sacred"] money.

You know/ notice how it isn't sacred when You own it.
BUT ONLY when you give it to the so-called LDS 'church'.

You aren't/ Your life isn't sacred [good enough] on it's own.

If the LDScULT was open, honest, and forthright in it's 'dealings', with members,
And THEIR MONEY, and allow people to come and go, Freely, and without Bother, Hoops,
Fanfare/ Punishment!, or Manipulation, it would have nothing to hide... but all the rest.

It's simply not [open and] honest with the numbers, unless it's their own.
There is the numbers the world sees and the number God sees. You see

LDSinc really needs to own the entrance process TOO.
Baptism-immersion in truth omission & fantasy fiction.
Tell them the truth and you wouldn't need missionaries.
ALL would have the truth, both in-and-outside morbidism.

What do you think?

M@t

The MormonCult has shown by its actions since its existence that the only thing it "needs" to do is look out for its power, money and prestige. Members are only peons to help them accomplish these three goals and the guise of being a "religion" is just that, a cover-up to fool the world.

Does it care in the least that over and over the program of sending out very young members as missionaries amounts to child abuse, an abuse it is always trying to hide?

Does it care in the least that statistics show that Utah has the highest number of teen suicides in the nation which can be tied to their own LBGT policy?

Does it care, does it see any "need", to stay out of politics in Utah as it should if it is "really" a religion?

I could go on and on and on with the danger the so-called-mormon-church commits. How it is clever is by being ever so subtle, so deceitful, and so good at hiding its deeds made possible by its abundant money gained from peon tithing. The cult should be known as the "Mormon Church of Power" because that is what it really cares about.

What the church "needs" is to be exposed, just as this site is doing, because its track record continues to show that it has NO INTEGRITY and the only way it will go down is to be pulled down screaming.

And you and I and the others, plus the Internet, all more powerful because we deal in truth not lies. will oblige.

I want to tear it down screaming on live television to make a statement to other organizations.

The exit process from the mormon church used to be that you tell your bishop that you don't believe in it anymore and want to resign. The bishop then either excommunicated you or he arranged for a high-council court so they could excommunicate you. The ONLY reason that changed is because the church got tired of losing lawsuits from excommunicated people who resigned and were then excommunicated. In some cases now, church leaders will recommend to someone that perhaps they should resign.

I recall, in bishopric or ward council, when a report would come up that some "less active" person wanted to resign, that the bishop would instruct the missionary or EQP to have the person write the bishop a letter. The bishop didn't seem to care too much. He just wanted documentation to move forward with.

Local bishops, from what I've seen, will usually not try to force the issue of resignation. Unless the person is vociferous about not believing and is acting mightily and publicly pissed about the whole thing, in which case resignation and excommunication would seem to be on the agenda. Otherwise, people just stop coming to church.

You seem, however, to have identified a big part of the problem, this all or nothingism one finds in fundamentalist religions: Believe or resign. Do you want to resign? Then you'll be excommunicated. Public mockery. Trial. Local infamy. The whole nine yards of ritual drama. Most people aren't up for that. They'd rather quit than be fired.

Most people just go inactive and deal with the emotional fallout *privately*, and that's where the church wants it. So it's an interesting dilemma for the disaffected: Make the fight public and the church locally has to cope with your ouster and its social ramifications, which it has chosen to do, self-protectively, as a ridiculous medieval-style trial. Make the fight private and anonymous online, and the church could give a fig. Suffer all you want. Whatever. Who cares? Just go away with your disaffection. (One hears this echoed in what members say of exmormons: "Why do you have to be so angry? If you don't believe it and don't love it, then why can't you just let it go and shut up already?" That's a typical response.)

The church has made resignation so difficult in the past one would think that being able to resign on one's own was some sort of big secret.

In fact, one of the benefits of the online exmo community is that there are people who post the process for how to resign--who to email and what to say--and this is done often and repeatedly to help people who want to resign. There's even an office in the church HQ setup for this resignation process.

But I guess that's the point. People leaving the church go online and have to search out how to resign. You just email someone at church HQ and say you're done. Meanwhile, these solitary folks are processing their disaffection and exit, usually alone, and usually in all manner of ways, often in pain, their marriages and families in upheaval, and all in private. The church owns none of it. Maybe this is why the church is an inadequate organization: It doesn't really help people when they need help the most and it doesn't want to except on its own terms and for its own needs.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/12/2018 07:55PM by derrida.