I was born in the early 1960’s to very TBM parents. Both sides of my family go back to the early days of the church.

From an early age, I remember my mom talking about the church and the “gospel”. I used to love hanging out in the kitchen on Sundays as my mom was cooking dinner because she would often be talking about the church. I took it all in and ate it up.

Through my mom, I learned that I had to live according the rules of the church with exactness. This, of course, led to a lot of guilt.

I was excited to get baptized when I turned eight. I felt peaceful even though my dad had to baptize me twice because he used the baptismal prayer in the Book of Mormon instead of the Doctrine and Covenants.

I couldn’t wait to get my patriarchal blessing and made an appointment to get it just after turning twelve. I loved the promises in it and felt it was very personal.

I loved turning twelve and getting to pass the sacrament. I wanted to do everything correctly. I tried to be as reverent as possible. I carried the sacrament trays with my elbow bent at a 90 degree angle, which I was led to believe was more reverent.

At my first six month interview with a bishopric member, I remember him asking me if I masturbated. I had no idea what that was and automatically said, “no.” He asked me if I knew what it meant and I said, “no.” He then told me to ask my dad.

Of course, I didn’t ask my dad. If it was that embarrassing for him to defer it to my dad, I knew I couldn’t ask my dad about it. I’ve always been shy and quiet, especially around strangers. I don’t like sharing personal things with others, even (or especially) my family. I am quite introverted.

When I was about thirteen, I discovered for myself what masturbation was. It felt great, but would always leave me feeling guilty. However, I couldn’t stop. This led to me going through my early teen years feeling guilty.

I progressed from deacon to teacher to priest. I would more often than not volunteer to bless the sacrament. As with other things church-related, I would try to bless the sacrament as reverently as possible.

Sometime when I was sixteen, I was walking through my living room to my bedroom. My parents were in the living room talking with my aunt and uncle. My dad was talking about a boy in the ward who was nineteen and hadn’t gone on a mission. My dad was saying, “He developed a masturbation problem and was excommunicated.” My heart sunk and I felt lower than I had ever felt. I was crushed, defeated. I didn’t know what to do. For several months, I couldn’t think of anything else.

Even though I had been doing the deed since I was thirteen, I had never confessed to the bishop. Yes, I had lied during all of my interviews. Now, I felt that if I confessed to the bishop, I’d get excommunicated. No one in my family, or my extended family, had ever gotten excommunicated. Also, at that time in the church, whenever someone was excommunicated, it was announced in priesthood meeting. I knew everyone in the ward would know. I didn’t know how I could face my family or the ward.

I prayed fervently and fasted. After some time, I came to the conclusion that I had to confess to the bishop, no matter the consequences. I had to face up and get myself clean.

It was with very heavy heart that I made an appointment with the bishop. Walking into his office and confessing my “sins” was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do. I was extremely surprised when he told me that this was a lesser offence and if I didn’t stop, he’d have me stop passing the sacrament.

Leaving the bishop’s office, I felt like a great burden had been removed. I was happy and relieved beyond belief. I later found out that the boy my dad had been talking about had actually gotten excommunicated for homosexuality and my dad had gotten his facts wrong.

I went through all four years of seminary and graduated from seminary. I read the Book of Mormon all the way through and felt, well, not quite sure if it was true. But I trusted my parents and my leaders and prepared for a mission.

I was called to the Australia, Sydney mission for an eighteen month mission (I served from 1983 to 1984). I’d never been outside of the United States, and hadn’t really travelled much outside of the four corners area. I also loved warmer climates and was happy to be called somewhere foreign, in a warm climate, and where English was spoken. I felt it was the best of all worlds.

I loved my mission, but I hated tracting. Hated, hated, hated it. And in Australia, we did a lot of it. So, what did I love about my mission? I loved learning a different culture. I loved hanging out with the other missionaries. I loved seeing new things, especially the flora and fawna. I loved feeling like I was serving the lord.

I’ve never been the leader type, even though my patriarchal blessing told me that I would be “a leader among men, a leader among your generation.” I did serve as a district leader on my mission, but never got to be a zone leader or AP. I wanted to be a zone leader because I wanted to have a companion who wanted to work. Most of my companions didn’t want to follow the rules as strictly as I wanted to. I was totally about keeping the rules and focusing on the outward appearance.

I served a faithful mission and enrolled in BYU. I wanted to get married, but didn’t find anyone for some time. I still had a problem with masturbation and felt like the lord wasn’t blessing me with finding a wife because of it.

I dated a lot at BYU, fell in love twice, got engaged once, and had the engagement broken off. The girl who I had been engaged to went on a mission and I wrote her and was hoping to marry her when she got home.

I had to pay my way through school, so it took me longer than usual. I worked full time and went to school part time. I didn’t want to have a lot of debt when I graduated. This worked out well for me, because I married one of my coworkers.

When I was twenty seven and still going to BYU (and still writing to my missionary), a coworker asked me out. I had known this coworker, who I will refer to as Mrs. Shonto, for about three years. She had recently gotten a divorce and had five children. She asked me out in August, we got engaged in October and married the following April. We’ve now been married for almost twenty years.

Mrs. Shonto joined the church when she was seventeen and in the army. She married at nineteen to a man who joined the church because he wanted to marry her. They had a rocky marriage, but were sealed in the temple after their first child was born.

We got married in the temple in April, but couldn’t be sealed because my wife’s sealing cancellation hadn’t been approved yet. We got sealed in the temple the next January.

We tried to bring up our children how the church wanted us to. We had home evening. We tried, off and on, to have family prayer. We didn’t do so well with scripture study.

Mrs. Shonto and I had three children of our own, so our house consisted of eight children total.

We were called to various callings and accepted them all. We tried to do our best in our callings even when we had multiple ones at the same time.

When our second and third oldest children were 16 and 14 respectively (my step-children), they started rebelling. They didn’t want to attend home evening. We forced them to, anyway. Our home evenings turned into home fights. They didn’t want to go to church. We forced them to go. We thought we were doing the right thing and what the lord wanted. But, thanks to what we thought the church taught, we were assholes as parents. I can’t blame the church completely for being such bad parents with these two children. We should have worked harder and done more studying and learned better parenting techniques. Still, we thought what we were doing was right.

Because they couldn’t obey the family rules, the second and third oldest children moved in with their father, my wife’s ex.

About eight years ago, we found out that our third oldest son, who had moved in with his dad, was addicted to heroin. He got clean for a while on his own and we sent him to a clinic to get clean a second time. Seven years ago, he committed suicide because he couldn’t handle the addiction. This was a very dark time for us, but especially for Mrs. Shonto. She felt so much guilt, she could hardly stand it. We somehow managed to keep our sanity and our marriage, but we had dark times.

Our marriage was pretty shaky for a while, but got better as the years progressed.

Through all this time, I had little doubts about the church. I didn’t express them to anyone. One thing I could never get a handle on was priesthood blessings. They didn’t make sense to me. I could never figure out how they did any good, especially in life or death situations. If we gave a blessing to someone, and they were supposed to die, they would die, whether or not we said so in the blessing. And vice-versa. I never felt particularly inspired when giving them.

In March of 2011, I finally had enough questions that I was ready to ask the all-knowing source – Google. I went into my search thinking I was going to prove the church true. I thought that I’d find out that my doubts were unfounded. The first question I had was about the three witnesses. Having three witnesses who saw an angel and the gold plates and who never denied their testimonies was pretty compelling. I wanted to verify this story first because it seemed so convincing.

I came away thinking, “Wow, just wow! Seeing with their spiritual eyes? Many other cases of witnesses for things that were obviously a scam?! This is incredible.”

I googled question after question. I found sites that explained things so well, and that were well documented. These were unlike any anti-mormon literature I’d ever seen. On my mission, I read some anti literature. It affected me for a while, but then I realized that it was based on half truths and I was able to dismiss it.

But now, I found well backed-up truths. Truths? I thought Mormonism had all truth? I was sick to my stomach. After about a week of studying, I was in a daze. I was still in denial, but I was realizing that my whole believe structure was most likely based on lies.

I had to be sure, so I studied more and more. I put in more than a hundred hours of reading in that first month. I prayed more earnestly then I ever had. I was all-consumed. I tried to otherwise carry on my life as usual, but inside, I was torn up. I kept praying and… Nothing. I felt nothing. It was as if god had gone away after I learned the truth. I hadn’t done anything wicked. I was still living the church teachings, except for looking at unapproved material. That was it. After praying the hardest of my life and begging god to let me know he exists and that the church was true, I received nothing.

My wife’s patriarchal blessing says, “I bless you that you will always help and encourage your husband to honor that Priesthood, and I bless you with the promise at this time, that when your husband honors his Priesthood the way he should by living properly the Gospel principles, you will never need or want for the necessities of life, and you will have a happy, safe and long life, filled with fulfillments.”

So, if I was wrong and the church was true after all the evidence I’d found, and I left the church, my wife would die early! I studied more. The more I studied, the more convinced I was that the church was created on lies.

The biggest convincers of me that the church isn’t true are:

1. The Book of Abraham translation errors

2. The multiple stories of the first vision, including having no mention of it in the biography of Joseph Smith’s mother.

3. The problems with the restoration of the priesthood.

4. Polygamy. Where do I start?

5. The temple ceremony being copied from the masons.

I now knew enough to be completely convinced that the church was a sham. I had to tell my wife.

My wife has always had a strong testimony of Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. The Book of Mormon, not so much. In fact, the more she reads the Book of Mormon, the less she believes it. I’d always had a problem with that, but I figured some day, she would just get a testimony of it.

Sometime in May, I took my wife to a restaurant and somehow got the courage to tell her about my studying and doubts. She asked me a lot of questions and expressed to me again her doubts of the Book of Mormon. However, she wanted to have proof. She has a master’s degree and wanted to see sources and, preferably, multiple sources of each of the items I told her about.

She questioned me on everything I told her. She called bullsh*t on things she considered hearsay.

I bought some books and had her read from some of the sites. The thing that got her, I mean really convinced her that the church wasn’t true, is when I showed her the evidence that Joseph Smith copied the temple ceremony from the masons. She told me, “The masons don’t have the truth!” She knew there was no way that the temple ceremony could be from God if it was copied from the masons.

Mrs. Shonto read “The Mysteries of Godliness: A History of Mormon Temple Worship” by David John Buerger. She was convinced. She stopped wearing her garments. I had already thrown mine away.

We have a son (my youngest step-child) on a mission. He is in the Philippines. He gets back August, 2012. Even though Mrs. Shonto no longer believed, she still felt that the church wasn’t harmful. She felt that she had never had any bad experiences in the church (there was one thing she hadn’t thought of about our son who committed suicide - more about that later). She wanted to leave our son alone – to not disrupt his mission in any way.

I sent off my resignation to the church in June. That week, I told my three youngest children, who are still living at home, that I had resigned. My wife didn’t want me to go into detail about why I was leaving the church. She was OK with me resigning, but wanted to keep everything else as it was until our son got back from his mission. She is very protective of him and he really has changed for the better after going on his mission.

My eighteen year-old daughter, who is still in high school, was devastated. She is on the seminary counsel this year, which is very important to her. My two younger sons, the youngest was twelve, were sad, but got over it the first day.

We hadn’t planned on telling my missionary son until he got home. However, my eighteen year-old daughter, wrote and told him. Our missionary son was devastated. He vowed to re-double his efforts on his mission. He is now quite the uber-missionary. I hope we can convince him when he gets home, but I’m not so sure.

Our bishop, who is our friend, contacted me and asked to come over. I decided to let him because he is my friend and I wanted to set the record straight. We talked for an hour or so. He wanted to make sure I was serious about resigning. I told him the main reasons why the church wasn’t true. I told him, even though I didn’t have to, that there was no transgression involved, that I had not been offended, and that I was not weak. The elder’s quorum president had just told the bishop the previous month that I was the best Home Teacher in the ward, so he knew I wasn’t a weak member. The bishop asked me to consider not resigning at that time. I told him I would consider it even though I was pretty committed to resigning.

My wife freaked out at how badly our missionary son took the news. She asked me to not resign until he got home from his mission. According to her wishes, I told her I’d let the bishop know that I going “to stay in the church for now.” The bishop was happy and cancelled by resignation request. I wasn’t as happy. I was looking forward to August when I could officially resign. But, in my mind, I was already out. I hadn’t been attending church for about a month.

I found RfM at the end of June. It has been great to be on it and see so many people who are finding and have found the truth.

I wasn’t going to tell my extended family until I resigned, so I waited. At a family reunion, I told my nephew, who is atheist. He was excited to have someone in the family who was leaving the church and wrote about it on a forum after the family reunion. His brother was spying on him and told his mom, who, in a panic told my mom and siblings about it. My siblings told their children. I found out about my family knowing when my niece sent me a message on Facebook asking me to reconsider. I guess by that point, they’d already had a family fast and my name had been put on the prayer roll in multiple temples. That did a lot of good :). I sent a reply to my niece stating my new beliefs, knowing that she would tell the rest of my family.

It was actually a relief to have my extended family find out without me having to send out “the coming out letter.” One of my sisters wrote on her Facebook that it felt like a family member had died. My mom replied, “Someone has died, but there is always the resurrection.” The same sister told one of my older daughters, after a heated email exchange (my daughter was trying to back me up), that I died the day I married Mrs. Shonto. I guess my family was now blaming my wife even though I was the one who found out first. Mrs. Shonto was always the more liberal one in our marriage.

Anyway, I’m now feeling pretty estranged from my extended family. But, worse things have happened, right?

At the end of October, my wife suddenly realized that out missionary son already thought I had resigned. (When I told my youngest three children, I had already sent in my resignation letter, so I told them I had already resigned.) Also, his emails showed that he was more or less OK with my new beliefs. She knew that I wanted to resign as soon as possible and granted me her blessing.

I sent in my resignation letter on November 1, 2011 and got the official letter from the church stating that my name had been removed from their records on January 5, 2012.

My wife is going to wait to officially resign after our son gets home from his mission. My fifteen year-old son hasn’t attended church for six weeks now. Every week he stays home from church, I show him something I’ve found out about the church. He is starting to figure it out. Our second oldest daughter has been out of the church since she was a teenager. All of the other children are still active, but I hope we can influence them.

A couple of months ago, it hit my wife about our son who had committed suicide. All of our problems with him started with our wanting him to attend home evening and church. He rebelled (wisely we now realize). We’ll never know whether things would had turned out differently if we hadn’t been so strict with him over an untrue church, but we will always wonder. He didn’t start doing drugs until several years after he moved out. We did what we thought was best for our family at the time.

I wish I had found out about the church being untrue years ago! But for now, I’m alive. I’m happy. My marriage has never been stronger. And I feel free!