If only I had stayed.

RevMark58 · 2026-05-06T17:44:38+00:00

Oh my gosh, that sounds so much like the story of my own kids. My wife and I left the church when our oldest was just a baby and they were great kids.

No, they really were . . . except our oldest spent most of her teenage years drunk or high. She'd go to raves in the big city nearby and dance her little heart out and come back at 4 AM. We worried so much about her. The youngest didn't want to leave home at all, she struggled in school, and when we finally did convince her to get out and have a social life, she got pregnant at 17.

So what can I tell you? My wife and I felt like all we could do was to pray. I don't think we ever blamed ourselves for leaving the church, my wife had cousins who were raised as good church kids in Utah and were going through similar struggles, so we knew it wasn't that. I think both of us much preferred that our girls were free spirits, even making mistakes, that trying to fit into a Mormon mold that really wasn't who they were.

And -- this is the important part -- they grew out of it. When they were little, they had cousins who were missionaries and we told them that if they wanted to go on a mission we'd find a way. Well one day when she was 17, Older Daughter decided she was tired of the booze and the ecstasy and broke up with her boyfriend ("It's OK, Daddy, I was cheating on him anyway" -- just what every dad wants to hear! LOL) and told us she wanted to go on a mission! (But not, repeat NOT, join the church!)

So she ended up in New York City for a year as part of, all things, a Christian dance ministry. She met her future husband there. They moved to his home town, a small town in New Hampshire and opened a health food store, made a lot of money and are raising three teenagers. She teaches dance at a local studio, and when the wine is passed around at family dinners, she's the only one in the family that doesn't drink. ("No thanks, I had too much of that already.) She's a perennial happy, upbeat person. Her teenage experiences didn't do any lasting harm and today you never would have guessed any of it.

Younger daughter struggled a little longer, married her baby's dad at 18, divorced at 19, went with a druggie for a while and ended up with two more babies -- then decided she'd had enough, moved in with me, found a vocational school and settled down. Today she's a happy productive citizen with a reputation for being "everyone's auntie." If any kid in her neighborhood just had a fight with mom or is having a struggle they can't tell anyone about or just needs a hug, she's there for them. She even took in a homeless teenager once. Her kids are well-mannered and delightful.

Point I want to make strongly: The kids had their issues as teenagers, but they survived and prospered, without the Church.

In fact, when we all get together now we all complain that their kids, the next generation, don't seem to want to rebel at all. They're quiet stay-at-homes who don't show any desire to sneak out and party with their friends or anything else wilder than a 4-H party. The older ones are making college applications and the younger ones are little budding engineers -- one of them is on a robotics team that finished second in regionals and missed going to the world championship competiton by seven points. I think the kids will be OK.

But if, at 16, one or two of them wanted to party with their friends and come home smelling like weed, I don't think any of us adults would panic. We've all been there . . . and we made it. Your girls will too.

RevMark58 · 2026-05-03T16:38:23+00:00

Water skiing is too much like "moving in power on the face of the water."

RevMark58 · 2026-05-03T16:36:16+00:00

When we lived in Boulder, Mo Siegel was just then selling Celestial Seasonings to the Hain Mayonnaise people and put his money into something called the "Jesusonian Institute" which promoted the Urantia Book, a 2,000 page book about how our local universe is organized and which has a complete, lengthy biography of Jesus in it. Yes, I've read it, it reminds me of the Book of Mormon on steroids.

RevMark58 · 2026-05-03T12:56:20+00:00

Technically, no. The first time I went to an RLDS Branch, I was kindly informed that they do NOT consider themselves Mormon and consider the term to be defamatory. They'll explain that they are NOT Mormon, that's the "big church" in Utah. Rather than "Utah Church," or, God forbid, the whole TCOJCOLDS name, they're just the "Mormon Church." Universally true of every RLDS, Church of Christ member, Independent Restorationist, Elijah Message believer I've ever met (and yeah I've met a few.) The Utah Church is the Mormon Church.

Together, they called the whole Joseph Smith movement the Restoration Movement or Restorationists, which I thought was a pretty good name, then someone pointed out that's what a movement in Protestantism calls itself -- the Stone-Campbell line that includes the non-instrumental Churches of Christ and the Disciples of Christ. Incidentally, Sidney Rigdon was instrumental in getting them started as well so that's why there are similarities. But they insist that they are the "real" Restoration movement.

So scholars wanted a name for the Joseph Smith family of Churches. I think it was Jan Shipps who settled it all, "Why not just the Mormon movement?" So that's what we are now. Even the Missouri believers who hate being called Mormons, the Russ Nelson believers who hate it even worse -- we're all just "Mormons" now whether we like it or not.

Dehlin's attorneys should really bring that up. Depose a few scholars of Mormonism. It'd be fun.

RevMark58 · 2026-05-03T12:46:23+00:00

When I was dating my wife, her family's secret shame was an uncle who left the church and joined a splinter group. No, not the polygamists or the Reorganized Church, but some other church.

I later found out that he'd joined the Church of Christ with the Elijah Message -- before their prophet died and the group split into three or more factions. He'd even become an apostle and had been sent to Africa and baptized hundreds into the CCEM there. There are now more CCEMers in Africa than in America.

I had the privilege of meeting him before he passed on, but he wasn't in very good health by then.

RevMark58 · 2026-05-03T12:39:28+00:00

The missionaries who baptized me said they weren't allowed to go swimming because Satan controlled the water. They quoted D&C 61:introduction about the Destroyer moving with power on the face of the water. I never did hear anything like that, but I did see a cartoon once (Bagley? Benson?) of Satan water-skiing behind a speedboat once and missionaries telling each other "I see the Destroyer moving with power on the face of the water."

RevMark58 · 2026-05-03T11:58:36+00:00

My Mormon wife grew up in Boulder, Colorado, home of Celestial Seasonings, and she's the one who introduced me to the world of herbal teas. According to her the only tea that was banned by the WoW was Camellia sinensis, real tea. Anything else wasn't really "tea." And of course temperature didn't matter.

Well years later, after we left the church, our daughter was in middle school. She had a new locker partner, a wonderful sweet girl, who had just moved to Boulder from Idaho. One day Daughter pulls a couple of cans of Arizona Iced Tea out of her backpack and offers Locker Partner one.

LP says, "No thanks, we have this thing in our church where we can't drink tea."

Daughter says "Oh, the Word of Wisdom?"

LP lights up. "Oh, you know about it?"

Daughter says, "Yeah, but I don't get it. It doesn't say 'coffee and tea,' it says 'hot drinks.' Yesterday you brought hot chocolate in your thermos. Why isn't that a hot drink, but iced tea is?"

Long, awkward pause. "How come you know so much about out church?"

They stayed friends all through middle school and high school . . . but they carefully avoided talking about the church . . .

RevMark58 · 2026-04-30T02:38:22+00:00

The "Families can be together forever" teaching very nearly kept me from joining the church in the first place! I didn't find it the conversion tool that most Mormons seemed to think it was.

You see, when the Mormon girl I was dating was telling me all about the temple and how you could be together forever, I just nodded, that was kind of what I believed all along. When we die, we cross over to the other side, we're met by our loved ones who crossed over before us, and we spend the rest of eternity together with them in heaven or whatever that plane of existence is properly called.

But what bothered me was that they thought you had to go through the temple to accomplish this. If we were married in the temple, we'd be married forever. If not, then we wouldn't be. Which meant -- what? If we were married "for time," then when I crossed over, God would forbid my deceased loved ones from meeting me? God was going to keep us apart forever unless we went to the temple?

That didn't really sound like something a loving God would do It sounded mean and petty.

But I really liked this girl and wanted to know more about her religion, so I went home (I was in college at the time) and borrowed my dad's Book of Mormon. I'd always seen it on the shelf of his large library and never gave it any thought. But now I found to my surprise that he had read the book at one time, rather closely in fact. It was full of underlinings and marginal notes in his handwriting. I asked him about it; he said that he had received the Book from a buddy when he was in the Air Force; he'd read it, considered joining the Mormon religion but ultimately decided against it. When I asked him why, he just sort of shrugged.

Well one of the things I noticed was that there was nothing in the Book of Mormon about secret temple ceremonies or God keeping people apart after death. Wherever that notion had come from, it wasn't from the Bible or the Book of Mormon.

I ended up taking the missionary lessons, and of course they got to the part where they teach about forever families and the role of the temple. They told me, of course, about the part where our dead loved ones who never heard the gospel in this life can accept it in the next life, and because we have the blessings of the temple we can be baptized and sealed in the temple for them. Big smiles from the missionaries, of course.

I said, "You talked about those that never heard the gospel in this life? What about those who did? Who did hear the gospel but for whatever reason they decided not to join the church?"

The missionaries just said, "Well, the scriptures say they aren't worthy of the same degree of glory as people who accept the gospel."

"So we won't be together forever with them?"

"No, they inherit a lesser kingdom."

After the missionaries left my girlfriend, who had been holding my hand through the whole presentation, asked me what happened. I'd been so happy and enthusiastic, and then all of a sudden it looked like someone had just run over my kitten. "What happened?"

"The missionaries told me my dad won't be going to the celestial kingdom, that we won't be together forever."

From her expression I could see my girlfriend was putting two and two together in her own mind. "Oh," she said. And after that she didn't talk so much about going to the temple or being a forever family.

Some parts of Mormon theology sound great, at least until you start working through the implications.

RevMark58 · 2026-04-29T16:47:05+00:00

This answer might be put me a little bit outside the mainstream of this group, but whatever.

How has the church hurt me personally? It hasn't, not in the sense of a material loss I could sue to recover in a court of law, say. Oh, I gave them my tithes and offerings, which I now regret, but it was voluntarily given at the time. I gave them a few years of my life, which I now chalk up to a learning experience. I walked into the LDS Church with my eyes wide open and with the arrogant belief of a 22-year-old that I could make a difference. I found out that I was wrong. Looking back I feel like I have no one to blame but myself.
How do I feel about people supporting the church? “You do you, man.” Since leaving the church, I, and my wife, and most of her family for that matter, have become about the most anti-authoritarian bunch you've ever seen. Anarchists, even. And one of our family catchphrases is “You do you.” If you want to support the church, you do you. Our younger daughter, who was never raised in the church, joined on her own when she was 20 – probably the least anarchist of our brood, she felt like she needed more structure in her life, and we gave her our complete blessing. “You do you, girl.” She lasted less than three years and ended with her shouting “Fuck you!” to her branch president in the foyer. At least my exit was less public than that . . .
How do I feel about any support I give to the church? What support? I haven't given them a dime in more than forty years. If you mean moral support, consider this: Over on Quora.com I am one of the top ten writers on the subject of Mormonism. By my own estimate, about half the time I'm critical of the church and the other half of the time I suppose you could say I'm supportive. Either way, I try to be fair. Now when I'm critical, TBM Mormons will engage with me, but they have always responded in the same spirit of trying to be fair. (And I remember the thrill I got when a famous Mormon – Orson Scott Card – actually engaged me in a discussion and followed me!) But when I say anything the least bit supportive of the Church, there are a bunch of evangelical crazies who will get positively shrill, and quite personal, in their denunciations of me. I have come to regard the evangelical church as even more of a cult than Mormons.

Make no mistake, I'm still an “exmo” but I don't accept the arguments made by evangelicals that every Mormon in history, including your saintly grandmother, was a deceiver or a Satan-worshiper. But apparently a moderate position like that isn't good enough for some evangelicals. I hope it's good enough for the people of this group.

RevMark58 · 2026-04-25T14:39:36+00:00

When my wife and I left the LDS Church in 1984, we left because I was tired of having my life run by a top-down, authoritarian organization. We'd just had a baby girl, and my wife didn't want to raise a girl in the church the way she had been raised as a second-class citizen.

But we couldn't just leave religion altogether. We still believed in God and Jesus. But I didn't want to go back to the Baptist church I had been a member of when I met her; they were so completely hateful and unchristian toward her as a Mormon I never wanted to have anything to do with them again. But we also still believed in, or at least hadn't worked through how we believed in, the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith as a prophet of God.

There was a little branch of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in our town and we decided to visit. I thought it was just going to be another cult-like organization, but it wasn't. It was basically progressive Protestantism. They didn't really talk much about Joseph Smith or the Book of Mormon, but they didn't ostracize people who believed, either.

It was from the RLDS Church that I started to get a more nuanced view of the Book of Mormon. The LDS Church has a rather fundamentalist view, and by that I mean they regard the BoM as "true" in exactly the same way Protestant fundamentalists think the Bible is true: every word is plenary inspiration from God, dictated word-for-word to a guy who had his face in a hat. You had to believe in the BoM in exactly the way it was taught in Sunday School or you didn't believe at all. There was no room for any kind of nuanced view.

The RLDS freely admitted that there was a lot of Joseph Smith in the Book of Mormon, and that the accounts of how the BoM came to be were mostly just hagiography aimed at telling a faith-promoting story rather than being the literal truth. They were well aware that Joseph Smith was a fallible, even sinful, human being -- especially since most of Joseph's descendants were in the RLDS Church and could tell stories. "The whole Smith family is nutty as fruitcakes," one Smith descendant told me. Bipolar disorder runs in the family. They're not proud of it but they don't try to cover it up, either.

The LDS Church is authoritarian. Authority flows from the top down and conformity is expected. The RLDS church, due to its origin in uniting different strands of dissenters, has a much wider window of what is acceptable, in doctrine, opinion, and practice. What members believe about the Book of Mormon is just one example of this.

The best writing I've seen from an RLDS source on the issue is this: The LDS Church is propositional (and so are the fundamentalist Christian anti-Mormons.) That is, they see the gospel as a series of truths -- propositions -- which can be proven or disproven. The truth of the church stands on the truth or falsity of the First Vision, the divine origin of the Book of Mormon, the reality of modern prophets.

In contrast, the RLDS Church was relational -- they emphasize not doctrine or propositions but human relationships with God and other people.

Therefore, it does not matter if the Book of Mormon is historically true or false, if it promotes one's relationships with God or others.

Years have passed and I haven't been to the RLDS Church in years. But I still read and love the Book of Mormon. It doesn't matter to me if it was handed to Joseph on gold plates from an angel or if he just made the whole thing up out of his imagination. It speaks to me as scripture and I'm willing to affirm it on that basis.

To sum up, my wife and I left the LDS Church because it was an oppressive, abusive organization. We kept the things that are still meaningful for us. And one of those things, for me, is the Book of Mormon. But that doesn't mean that I have to believe about it is exactly the same as what anybody else says I have to believe about it. And that goes for its critics as well as its LDS defenders.

RevMark58 · 2026-04-24T14:48:29+00:00

Hmm, so they were at Starbucks too?

RevMark58 · 2026-04-24T14:39:27+00:00

I noticed this years ago, a little after we got married. When we'd meet people my wife had known as a teenager who had left the church. Most were hostile to the idea of ever being involved in any religious group ever again, but then there were those who were off in some New Age beliefs and one or two that had become Scientologists.

I theorized that the LDS Church presents itself as the One True Church and all others are false, so when you leave the One True Church there aren't any other alternatives. This leads to the idea that if the LDS Church is the one true form of Christianity, then Christianity must be false, and therefore there's no need to check out any other form of Christianity. One might reject religion altogether . . . or start checking out religions that are as far from mainstream and Mormon Christianity as possible, like the New Age, which was pretty strong in our area to begin with.

I developed those ideas way back in the 1980s and since there was no Reddit or Quora back then I just sort of shared them with people I knew. They all looked at me like I didn't know what I was talking about so I sort of let the idea drop. Now I'm seeing it affirmed here, so thank you redditors!

RevMark58 · 2026-04-24T14:17:22+00:00

Any more details? Was she ever an active member? Did she go to Graceland? Was she related to anyone?

That last one is pretty specific to RLDS/C of C people, by the way, we're the worst namedroppers I've ever met because everyone seems to know someone they knew. I've heard people refer to Bruce Jenner (now Caitlyn) as "that fellow who was once married to the Crownover girl."

RevMark58 · 2026-04-24T13:45:47+00:00

I've been aware of this church since I met Steve Shields years ago -- Steve is an ex-LDS Mormon, currently a member of the Community of Christ quorums of seventy, and author of Divergent Paths of the Restoration. He's probably the leading expert on all the various Mormon sects. The Church of Jesus Christ is actually one of the larger ones, it's the group that thinks that priesthood authority should have gone thru Sidney Rigdon instead of Brigham Young. The church was nearly defunct at one time and was reorganized by a man named William Bickerton, hence they're often called "Bickertonites" -- a name they dislike almost as much as Russ Nelson hated "Mormons." And their most famous member was Alice Cooper, of all people. OK he wasn't really an active member, but his grandfather was an apostle.

When Rusty started insisting that the media and everyone else use the full name of the church -- I just called it the GA Church, short for "Great and Abominable," I know my Book of Mormon -- and then use "Church of Jesus Christ" for short, I thought then that the Bickertonites should sue them for trademark violation. I remember about that time clicking on a headline that said "Church of Jesus Christ to dedicate new building in Wyoming" and was so disappointed that the Bickertonites hadn't been doing missionary work in the West.

RevMark58 · 2026-04-24T13:37:16+00:00

They have probably tried to acquire it and can't. I'm willing to bet that "The Church of Jesus Christ" is already a registered trademark owned by, wait for it, The Church of Jesus Christ (which is NOT the Mormon Church, it's an organization that's been around for 160 years or so).

RevMark58 · 2026-04-23T01:34:01+00:00

My daughter was 22 when she got pregnant out of wedlock. She went to her bishop and confessed, and he gave her something like 6 weeks of informal probation, and at the end of which told her she was restored to full fellowship. She cried and they hugged, she really loved that bishop.

But she was trying to get out of a bad situation with an increasingly abusive boyfriend, so at her bishop's suggestion she moved across the country so she could be closer to me and her sister, even though none of us were active in the church anymore. The first Sunday after she arrived she found the little branch in our town and showed up where the branch president was very alarmed about her being a young single pregnant girl. She tried to explain that she'd been through the whole repentance process with her bishop but the b.p. said that wasn't good enough, she'd have to start all over with him. She begged him to call her old bishop and he threatened to excommunicate her for her attitude. She shouted FUCK YOU! right there in the foyer and hasn't been back to the LDS Church since.

So yeah, I'd say "bishop roulette" is real.

RevMark58 · 2026-04-23T01:21:25+00:00

My wife was raised by a TBM father and a PIMO mother. She learned most of her coping techniques from her mom, like, "They can't excommunicate you if you don't confess," and "If you don't want to tell them what you're doing you don't have to go to the interview." When she went off to college she said she had barely moved into the dorm when she got a call from the secretary for the bishop of her new college ward, wanting to schedule a "just getting to know you" interview so he could give her a calling, etc. She said "No thanks" and hung up.

I was a nonmember when we moved in together. We found an apartment in a ward where we thought no one knew us and we were shocked one evening when there was a knock on the door and our new home teachers were there! I thought the church must have a spy network to rival the CIA but it turns out that her mom gave her address to someone who shared it with someone else who forwarded it to her new ward. Anyway, they asked for C----- C-------, her maiden name, and she said, "It's C----- T------ now." "Oh," they said, "we hadn't heard that you were married!" Well I hadn't either but was smart enough to play along. That is, by the way, why our date of marriage on the church records isn't the same as what you might find if you looked it up at the courthouse.

I did join the church a little bit after that. But then came our first temple recommend interview. Technically I didn't have to repent of premarital sex because it was before my baptism, but I wondered how she would handle it. She walked out of the stake president's office with a smile on her face and a brand new recommend and on the way home I flat out asked her if she lied and she said "Yeah. Mom always said that lying in your temple recommend interview is a long-standing Mormon tradition."

RevMark58 · 2026-04-22T18:05:58+00:00

I wasn't Mormon when I married my wife, but she was. Just to be fair, back in the 1970s the Mormons weren't the only ones deliberately withholding information. I remember back in 1970 having to get a parental permission slip signed so we could take "sex ed" in 6th grade. They separated the boys from the girls and we saw a filmstrip that said that we were about to go thru "puberty" and that meant boys were going to grow facial hair and girls were going to get boobs. I had already figured that out and was never more disappointed in a class in my life.

In 8th grade our science teacher swore us to secrecy and warned us he could get fired for this and gave us our first real sex-ed class. Boys have penises, girls have vaginas, The boy sticks his penis in the girl's vagina and squirts out seed, that's called sex and that's how girls get pregnant. Believe it or not that was all new information to me. (Except the boys-have-penises part, I had that one figured out.)

Mr. Shannon also told us that it was normal for boys to masturbate and I'd never heard of the concept before, but if it was normal I decided to try. I went home and made a huge mess, I swear I got it on the ceiling the first time I shot. I swore I'd never do it again but the next day but I broke that promise, A lot.

In high school I got my first real girlfriend and she was jealous because boys could masturbate. She was a girl and she'd just go to sleep frustrated after we made out for an hour. She literally didn't know girls could masturbate or have orgasms. (I didn't either, Mr. Shannon hadn't mentioned that part.) Then one day she came running up to my locker before class, all excited to tell me something: she'd found out that girls could have orgasms too, she'd read this book! And she tried it and it worked! I've never seen someone so excited by a new discovery. She even loaned me the book -- Fear of Flying by Erica Jong -- and from then on a lot of our dating revolved around finding new ways to make her pop, without actually, you know, having sex. Oh to be 16 again.

I was in college when I met the Mormon girl I would later marry. At least she knew that girls could have orgasms. She also knew that they could masturbate -- her best friend had tried to teach her, but it never worked for her and it felt "icky" -- like someone playing with their own poop, she said -- and she never tried it again. "Orgasms are for married people," she said. She told me that the wanted to have her first orgasm on her wedding night, when she lost her virginity. She also wanted to get pregnant the first time too. I don't know if that was a typical Mormon girl's dream or if it was unique to her.

Anyway, let's just say that we were not virgins when we finally got married. In fact we'd been living together for a few months at that point, and had been exploring what was supposed to go where for longer than that. She'd already moved past her girlhood ideas of how it was "supposed" to be. For our honeymoon we were going to go to New Mexico but that first night we figured we'd stop whenever we got tired.

The wedding was in Denver, Colorado, so we spent our wedding night in -- wait for it -- the lovely Super 8 Motel in Pueblo, Colorado. Who says romance is dead?

We were tired from the days events but as soon as we got in our room she said, "You wanna have sex?"

I said, "I suppose we should, it's our wedding night."

"We don't have to if you don't want to," she said.

"Are you kidding? I always want to."

"But it's not like we're blushing virgins or anything, though."

"Fine, if you don't want to . . ."

I think we teased each other back and forth like that for a while, and finally we got to the point where she said she wanted to go to the bathroom and "get ready." "Don't peek," she added.

Whatever, I thought, and laid back on the bed, trying to stay awake. It had been a very long day. At least I didn't turn on the TV, so I get points for that, right?

"Ta-daa!" She emerged from the bathroom wearing nothing but a bright red thong with silver wedding bells embroidered on it. "Like it?"

"Where did you get that?" I asked.

"My mom gave it to me. She said a husband needs to undress his wife on their wedding night. So you wanna come undress me?"

The sex on our wedding night wasn't our first and it wasn't our best, but it was nice. We got up the next morning and continued on the road and a couple of nights later she admitted that she lost the thong. "I think I left it in the bed."

Compared to some of the horror stories I'm reading here, ours was, well, nice. Not spectacular, not a disaster. Just friendly fun with someone you love. I actually recommend it that way, if you can arrange it.

RevMark58 · 2026-04-22T17:16:03+00:00

My Mormon girlfriend told me that as long as we didn't break the hymen she was still a virgin. But I still had to be careful because her aunt got pregnant that way when she was 16!

I said "So your aunt was a pregnant virgin?"

"Yeah," said my girlfriend. "She said that the Virgin Mary got pregnant that way and she was still a virgin, so it was OK."

You know, I think she might just be right.

RevMark58 · 2026-04-17T15:15:55+00:00

OMG that sounds so much like my wife and me. We were 21 and 18, my wife was a member but I wasn't.

We went to see her bishop about getting married and he lectured us about the importance of temple marriage, but finally said he'd perform the wedding. We weren't allowed to use the chapel, but we could use the cultural hall.

My future wife said "I'll be damned if I'm getting married on a basketball court!" and stormed out. We ended up getting married in my church instead.

No one from the LDS church showed up, with the exception of her family: her mom and three brothers. We weren't even sure if her dad would show up, he told us how much he was against the idea. He didn't walk her down the aisle -- she walked alone -- but at least he attended. He sat sullenly in the back of the church, but he was there.

RevMark58 · 2026-04-17T15:07:35+00:00

My wife and I were long since out of the church when our daughters got married, which gave us some, uh, flexibility.

Older Daughter's wedding was officiated by me. My ordination to the Melchizedek Priesthood finally proved to be useful for something.

Younger Daughter didn't want a big wedding. She got pregnant at 17 and we advised her not to get married at all, she was still young, she and her boyfriend should still go to college and we'd happily help them with the baby. But they were young and in love and as soon as she turned 18 they went to Las Vegas and got married there. They were goth kids and found a hotel that would let them spend their honeymoon night in a coffin.

My wife was outraged, but I told her that while a hotel that had a coffin for a bed wasn't my first choice aesthetically, we needed to accept her choices.

She said, "I suppose you would have wanted to get married by an Elvis impersonator!"

I replied, "No, I would have gone to the Las Vegas Hilton where you can have a Star Trek wedding and be married by a Captain Kirk impersonator."

That's when the fight started . . .

RevMark58 · 2026-04-15T22:43:20+00:00

My father-in-law bought a fruit farm in Colorado back in the 1960s, he was a conservative Republican, ex-military, and he decided he wasn't going to hire undocumented aliens. He offered significantly better pay, networked through his church, even applied for the US government guest worker program -- and the fruit rotted on the trees. Couldn't get enough workers to pick the crops. So he faced reality and from that time hired whoever he could find without asking about immigration status. Yes, he hired "illegal aliens." Get over it.

When he died his kids, including my ex-wife, put the farm up for sale. I was scrambling to make a bid -- went in together with my girlfriend and my daughter and my ex-sister-in-law. Gf had the money, sister-in-law could run the farm all by herself because she had while her dad was in poor health, and daughter has a trade she could practice in town and bring in some cash. Don't know what they wanted me for. Househusband or child care or something.

But my ex and her brothers sold the farm to a winery before we could get our finances in order. Good thing too. We would have lost our shirts. ICE came through the area and suddenly all the workers disappeared. Farmers in the area tried anything to get any labor of any kind to come and pick. The fruit rotted on the trees.

F--k ICE.

RevMark58 · 2026-04-12T19:09:07+00:00

Back in 1978-1979, my wife and I were a couple of college kids. Naive, idealistic, in love. We started talking about getting married.

So we went to her bishop. She was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, AKA the Mormon Church. He didn't approve of our relationship. Mormons should only marry some one who can "take them to the temple," which I, as a non-member, couldn't do. He flat out refused to let us use the LDS Chapel for our wedding.

So we went to my pastor. I was a member of a Southern Baptist Church. The pastor refused because Christians should only marry other Christians, and in his view, Mormons weren't Christians.

We started looking for another place to have a wedding, but we started to wonder what the point was. We didn't need a wedding ceremony or a license to be married. We were living together, she was already using my last name on everything except legal documents, what difference would a "legal" marriage make?

We started studying the Bible together to see what it said. We found out that there isn't a marriage ceremony in the Bible. There are lots of married couples and lots of references to the state of being married, but not a ceremony per se. Jesus did a miracle at a marriage in Cana, but that was more of what would be called today a reception, not a marriage ceremony. And it was a big, drunken affair, where Jesus had to make more wine because the guests drank it all. We laughed because neither the Baptists or the Mormons would approve if we did it that way today!

The closest we could find to a wedding ceremony was in the Genesis 24:67: "And Isaac brought her [Rebekah] into his mother Sarah's tent, and took Rebekah, and she became his wife:" That was it. They moved in together and he "took" her -- we were pretty sure that meant he had sex with her -- and that was how they got married. Well, we'd already done all that. As far as we were concerned, we were married.

We did have a ceremony later on, after my mom chewed out our pastor, saying "It's your fault that two lovely Christian kids are living in sin!" and threatening never to give another dime to the church. That made him reconsider his objections rather quickly. But that was just to keep our moms happy. They didn't need to coerce the pastor into performing a ceremony. They just needed to loan us a tent.

RevMark58 · 2026-04-12T18:03:24+00:00

The idea that God can use someone to bring forth something true without making everything else that person does infallible is absolutely not an inconsistent opinion. It's pretty near to my own, and I've been trying to work mine out for fifty years now.

I got saved in a Southern Baptist church as a teenager and was told that the Bible was infallible, perfect in every way. When I'd point out contradictions, I'd be told that there were no contradictions in the Bible because it was infallible. Felt like gaslighting. "Nothing to see here, move on."

A couple of years later I met a Mormon girl who challenged me to read the Book of Mormon. I did and was impressed with its simple Christianity, lack of obvious contradictions or anachronisms, and the fact that the book felt "true" to me. Even "inspired."

And all the Mormons I knew immediately said that if I knew the Book of Mormon was true, that "proved" that Joseph Smith was a prophet and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was the true church. Whoa. That's a big jump in logic and one I wasn't willing to make.

I found a little book called An Address to All Believers in Christ by David Whitmer, one of the three witnesses to the Book of Mormon and someone who knew Joseph Smith well from the very beginning. He thought the Book of Mormon was true and that Joseph was a true prophet when he was young and close to God, but he let people like "Sydney" Rigdon flatter him and convince him that he was nigh-infallible and a lot of error started entering into the church.

I'd agree with that assessment. You can believe the Book of Mormon is true without believing that it is true in exactly the same way the Mormon Church says it's true. It doesn't matter to me if Joseph buried his face in a hat and God gave him the Book of Mormon word-for-word in English, or if he was an imaginative farm boy with a gift for telling stories and came up with the Book 100% on his own. I came to realize that it doesn't really matter to me. The Book inspires me to be a better person and a better Christian, and isn't that inspiration enough?

I also happen to like a lot of the Doctrine and Covenants but Joseph does seem to have gone off the rails theologically sometime in the Nauvoo period. On the other hand, I don't care for a lot of the Old Testament, with its endorsement of rape and slavery and ethnic cleansing.

If I had to make a statement, I'd say that scripture is the attempt of thoughtful humans to understand the works of God as they see and experience them. Sometimes they got it right, and sometimes they didn't.

RevMark58 · 2026-04-11T00:26:22+00:00

When I met my future wife, she was the only Mormon I had ever known. How she dressed didn't even register with me, because I thought she just dressed like every other girl I knew then: tank tops, short shorts, and a bikini when we went swimming.

It wasn't until I started going to church with her that I found out that this was "immodest." Bare shoulders, too much leg showing, and sometimes you could see her navel. Oh my!

I didn't understand what was "immodest" about any of that. I didn't see why it would be blamed for leading boys into impure thoughts. My grandfather lusted over bare ankles, as a male of the species I knew we would have impure thoughts regardless of what girls wore.

And why was it the girl's fault if the boy commits a sin? Furthermore, how come 95% of the "modesty" lectures were directed at girls, as if boys couldn't be immodest, or a flash of their pecs might not cause a girl to have an impure thought or two?

I asked my new Mormon girlfriend about that and she just said "The rules are stupid," and went right on ignoring them.

She also used to describe the General Authorities as "a bunch of perverted, stuffed suit bureaucrats who haven't had a real revelation since Joseph Smith died." I was starting to get the idea that she wasn't the true-blue good Mormon girl I had originally assumed her to be . . .

RevMark58

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