I left the church in part because I joined it for all the wrong reasons and none of the right ones (though I no longer really believe there are any right ones). I was nineteen years old when I was baptized, some four years after the premature death of my mother at the age of forty-three. I think that particular trauma led me to an obsession with family, friends, and connectedness. It also led me to some kind of belief in the possibility of God and reconnection with those we've lost and loved. In that sense, Mormonism seemed like a perfect fit.

I quickly discovered, however, that except for a supersaturated judgmentalism, Mormons were often enough made up in equal parts of great strengths and breathtaking weaknesses -- just like me. Too, I made the mistake of leaving Seattle and attending BYU for my undergraduate eduction. I don't mean the education itself was deficient in any way; only that the judgmentalism I thought I saw too much of among Seattle Mormons was multiplied by a thousand among the faculty and staff at BYU under Ernest Wilkinson. The strange unwillingness to trust the students to wear appropriate clothing; the incomprehensible decision of the Administration to place "spies" in the departments thought to be "too liberal," like the Department of English, which was my major field of study; the continual harassment of gay people and the insistence that they undertake barbaric forms of "reparative" therapy; the complete nuttiness of the people who ran the Religion Deparment (one professor there told my class in "Gospel Doctrine" that he would rather have his children learn about sex in the gutter than in a sex education class in public high school) -- all these things left me feeling like I'd somehow wandered into an even more nightmarish vision of Orwell's 1984.

But I stayed with it through a kind of inertia. Then, at some point in my senior year, I ran across a quotation from Gandhi, which went something like this: "I like this Christ of yours. But I do not like your Christians. They are so very unlike your Christ." That made me wonder whether the church itself -- its leadership and its members, including myself, were exactly the sort of people Gandhi meant to challenge.

I ended up marrying a Utah girl, one with great pioneer roots, but whose particular branch of the family had quietly left the chuch a couple of generations before she came along. She and I, somehow, became rather ardent champions of the ill-fated Equal Rights Amendment, and it completely astonished me when the Church not only opposed it, but single-handedly defeated it. Fed up, I requested that the Church excommunicate me, which in those days was a difficult thing to achieve. The man assigned to dissuade me from leaving was none other than Henry B. Eyring, who was then a member of my stake high council. (And I don't mean the current member of the first presidency, but his father, the chemistry professor at the University of Utah.) Brother Eyring was almost soley responsible for delaying my requested excommunication for a period of almost two years. But in the end my wish was granted.

Today, I have no regrets about leaving the Church but have still maintained some few close friendships among the members. These folks remind me, by their constant presence in my life, of the cost of real belief -- which they do have. But I've noticed over the course of years of observing these LDS friends that a good many of them do all that is required and more -- they attend their meetings, they pay their tithing, they devote their energies to whatever "calling" is given them. Yet most of them remain as unhappy -- moreso, really -- as the rest of us. Well, it doesn't matter. I wish them well in their quest, whatever it is. But from the moment of my leaving the church, I've known the joy of living an authentic life, one which lets me be -- most of the time -- who I really am, and not some cookie-cutter version of a human being whose whole existence is quashed under the weight of someone else's idea of what constitutes divine authority. In short, I grew up.