Conversion of an Anti-Mormon

Although I also qualify, this is not me. This is one of many examples that there is always hope for everyone:

About Me

I'm a mum of three lovely daughters, I work for a legal charity, and I am the author of four published novels.

Why I am a Mormon

In December 1987 I had just arrived home from a wonderful first term at University. I was sitting on the deep windowsill in my bedroom and my best friend, Ruth, was telling me what she’s been up to while I'd been away.

“I’ve found a wonderful church!” she declared.

I was delighted with this news. Just before I left, Ruth had told me that she was looking for religious faith. I was a committed born-again Evangelical Christian and so she had turned to me for advice. I had been too busy to give her much guidance, so had simply suggested she go along to a local church. She asked me to guess which church she was now attending. “It begins with M.”

“Methodists?” I ventured. Then, “Moravians?” Wrong again.

A cold fear gripped me and I felt my heart sink. I could only think of one more church beginning with M. “Mormons?” I whispered in horror.

She nodded. Immediately I berated her for being so foolish, and told her that it’s not really a Christian church at all but a cult. I told her everything I remembered hearing about Mormons – it was all bad. But to my surprise, she refused to listen.

As memorable traumatic events go, I know that might have been much worse, but for me it was horrifying. My dear friend had been brainwashed into a cult, and it was my fault! My first task was to find out all I could about it and present it to her so that she would see that she had been duped.

I bought anti-Mormon books and leaflets and set about what would become a five-year campaign against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. My entreaties to Ruth failed, and two years after the bombshell in the bedroom she married a returned missionary and moved to Utah. I responded by widening my anti-Mormon activities, determined that, while unable to save Ruth, I would prevent others from being caught in the Mormon web.

Such was my obsession that it nearly broke up my relationship with my then-fiancé. He was a trainee vicar, and one day two missionaries called at my house just as he and I were about to set off for a day in London together. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to confront them with my ammunition, so invited them in. By the time they left, so had my fiancé - to the pub. While he supported my anti-Mormon position, he felt I was a little too obsessed. He was right. I was intrigued and fascinated by everything to do with the LDS Church. I drove by the local meetinghouse regularly and would often park and just look at it.

I became involved with an anti-cult organisation called Reachout Trust, distributed flyers door-to-door advising householders not to answer the door to missionaries, printed an anti-Mormon booklet which I circulated through religious newspapers, and started giving talks to church groups. I loved meeting with missionaries, often using an assumed name since I was well known among the beleaguered members in the area.

What I wanted most of all, though, were Mormon things. Manuals, books, pictures, videos. I had discovered that much of the content of anti-Mormon books was incorrect and they were generally poorly researched. I was very angry to find that I couldn’t rely on these books, and decided that I would have to use the Mormons’ own materials against them. I found out how to get them from the distribution centre and I ordered a long list of items. Missionary discussion booklets, Sunday School study guides, Relief Society manuals, magazine subscriptions, even and a missionary badge in my name. I pored over the books, fascinated to discover how well organised and structured the church was, and what a loving and supportive spirit seemed to be conveyed. I didn’t find much ammunition in those books, though. The doctrines were certainly different from those I held, but I had come to realise that different didn’t automatically mean wrong.

I think that was where I came unstuck. I had filled in the form without recognising (or admitting to myself) that I was not entitled to these things. When I later tried to order Temple Recommends, the result was a solicitor’s letter threatening to sue me for misrepresenting myself as a member of the Church, and for defamation and libel.

I was terrified, and sent all the precious items back to the Church Area office along with an apologetic letter. My husband – by then a Vicar – had stern words with me about the depths of my obsession, and I promised him that it was over. I would never have anything to do with the Mormons again.

That was OK, because I was no longer filled with the hatred I had once felt. What I felt, most of all, was sadness and envy. I saw how my own faith and church didn’t measure up. I knew that if there was a perfect and true church on the Earth, that the LDS church was it. I wanted for myself the wonderful spirit I had felt reading those manuals.

But without the Mormon element, my life felt empty. I couldn’t have anything to do with the church locally, I knew, but what about America? So I wrote to Ruth, apologised for my past behaviour, and flew over to Utah to visit her. I had the most wonderful two weeks attending church, social events, and getting to know many individual Mormons as well as renewing the friendship we had enjoyed.

Arriving home I again longed for that contact with the church, and felt painfully guilty about the way I had attacked such honest, devout people. I was too afraid to apologise directly to the local Bishop or the members, but I figured the missionaries wouldn’t have any idea who I was or what I had done. So one evening when my husband was away on a course I called to invite them, and a male fellowshipper, for Spaghetti Bolognese at the Vicarage.

Elder Bleakley and Elder Merl barely listened to my explanation and apology before launching into the first discussion, and challenging me to read the Book of Mormon. As I admitted to them that I had never read it before, I wondered why it was that the anti-Mormon groups I was involved with advised their associates not to read it. I resolved to do so.

I didn’t get much beyond the first few verses before I felt a sudden rush of knowledge and certainty which completely filled me. I could see clearly for what felt like the first time ever. I knew it was all true. I knew that I had known for years that it was true. I knew that it was time to stop fighting that strange magnetic pull and fascination which drew me to the church. In short, I knew that I had to be baptised.

I was terrified. Terrified of what it would mean for my marriage. Terrified of what my parents would think. Terrified that I wouldn’t be allowed to be baptised. Terrified of meeting with the Bishop of the local ward and throwing myself on his mercy. I remember a lot of tears during that meeting, but also a lot of warmth and forgiveness.

Area Conference was coming up, and Elder Jeffrey R. Holland was then the Area President. It was arranged that I would meet with him before the conference session so that he could interview me for baptism. I was very nervous, especially when he invited me to give the prayer. He knew all about my past, but he was also very friendly, humble, direct and Christ-centred. I liked and admired him. I still do. As we left the room to where the missionaries and Bishop were waiting nervously Elder Holland said to them, “There’s going to be a baptism in your Ward tonight.”

Somehow I was never asked whether my husband gave permission for me to be baptised, only whether he would attend. I knew he wouldn’t; he was away a lot these days, and took very little interest in what I did. I later learned that he was having an affair.

The Ward took me to their hearts and I loved being part of the Church, but six months after my baptism my husband’s affair ended and he decided he needed to make of a go of his marriage. All I knew was that suddenly he cared what I did, and he wasn’t happy that I was going to the Mormon church when I had promised him I would have nothing more to do with it. He asked me to stop going, and promised that we would start a family if I agreed.

It would be eight years and two children before I was able to become active in the Church again. By this time my husband had lost his job due to his alcoholism and womanising, and our marriage broke down. Even though I had attended other churches during my marriage I had a very strong testimony that bthe Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was Christ's true church. Reading the scriptures and the Ensign had cemented my testimony, and as my marriage disintegrated I was finally able to attend the Preston Temple to receive my endowment, a truly wonderful day filled with happy memories. I moved back to the town where I had grown up. Six months later I started dating a returned missionary, and we were married and sealed in the London Temple in 2006.

It’s been quite a turnaround, and I'm not proud of my ignorance and stupidity, but I am so happy to have finally come to be a member of Christ's Church.

Testimony of Latayne C. Scott

When people ask me why I became a Mormon, I tell them that I wanted to please God, and I believed that I could do that in Mormonism. No ulterior motives, no grand plan, just simplicity and the literal faith of a child. I (the Baptist I was) had a great respect for Scripture and a love for my Creator, and Mormonism gave me the chance to expand and act on that love while learning more about God and His mysteries than I’d ever dreamed.

I found it incomprehensible then that everyone would not want this expanded, updated, self-correcting and plenary version of Christianity. It seemed all very black and white to me. My senior year of high school, an English teacher had all her students write themselves letters, which she would mail to each of us after five years.

I with eighteen-year-old sobriety spent the entire letter scolding my 23-year-old future self for any minor infraction or distraction that would take me away from my wholehearted devotion to the Mormon Church. I congratulated her for staying faithful, for either going on a mission or being married in the temple, for beginning to fulfill the patriarchal blessing which promised me influence in the church and in my community.

The next fall I went away to BYU, where I was gloriously happy. I took English, Spanish, writing and religion classes on the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, “Teachings of the Living Prophets” and “The Gospel in Principle and Practice.” I studied, believed and lived Mormonism as it wanted to be understood.

My yearbooks show pictures of a relaxed, smiling, clear-eyed young woman, across the pages from Mitt Romney and my friends Deborah Legler and Paul Toscano.

When the Provo LDS temple was dedicated, I was in the crowd with a white handkerchief, waving it with the solemn “Hosanna shout.” I honored the prophet and my leaders as personal heroes. I was there. I believed. I worked hard, putting myself through school without any outside help other than writing scholarships and earned good grades and loved, just loved, being a Mormon. I participated in every ward function and continued to write and be published in BYU’s publications and to read voraciously.

Of everything I read or studied at BYU, one work stands out in my memory above all others. In a literature class I was required to read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “Young Goodman Brown.” It is a highly symbolic story about a man who has a traumatic experience that causes him to lose what I would have then called “his testimony.”

The closing lines of the story read: Often, waking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of [his wife] Faith; and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom. (italics added.)

Why was that story so terrifying? Because I could not think of anything more dreadful than the loss of beloved belief. Apostasy from Mormonism — the idea of becoming what is called a son of perdition — is that of the sealed fate of a creature past redemption, a being of utter loss, beyond any spiritual lifeline nor resuscitation, dead to God yet still living, a walking corpse of dismay to anyone who sees his or her spiritual condition.

Someone with no hopeful verse on his tombstone, someone for whom her dying hour would be gloom. Such were the rushing fears of the person who in May of 1975, two years after leaving Mormonism, read the letter she’d written herself five years before in high school, saying that Mormonism was the only source of happiness, that it was worth dying for.

“You’ll never be happy again. . .” The words of my last LDS bishop rang in my ears as I remembered making the decision to leave Mormonism. The process of coming back to faith – in anything – was a difficult one, yet one whose steps I can recount. Though it sounds simple, this process was agonizing.

First of all, I looked around me at the beauty and diversity of nature, and concluded that such order and creativity indicated the existence of a Creator. But power and ability to create do not necessarily imply goodness – look at the bloodthirsty Hindu goddess Kali, for example. I looked again at nature and decided that whoever made all that was both complicated and good. If He created all of nature, and I was part of nature, He had created me. If He created me and all mankind, I concluded that surely He would want to communicate with us. Since I had seen the danger of unfettered “personal revelation,” I supposed that there would have to be a type of communication that would be beyond human contrivances, something truly reliable.

And that’s where the true leap of faith was – to believe the Bible was the inviolate communication of this good, relationship-seeking, Creator God. I couldn’t trust anyone or anything else on earth but that Book. But sometimes it was almost too painful to read, and I shrank from His touch. I began The Mormon Mirage to explain to myself as much as to anyone why I had made the decision to abandon the single most satisfying and soul-healing thing in my life.

Of course, the head-decision was reaffirmed constantly. I was startled over and over by the contrast between what I’d been taught in my BYU classes and what Mormon history really was like—the deceptions of Joseph Smith, the failed prophecies, the ignoble shams. The Book of Mormon continued to crumble before my eyes, unredeemed even by its quaintness and platitudes. The Book of Abraham was an embarrassing fraud. Different god, different heaven, different eternal past. Again and again the glaring difference between Bible doctrine and LDS doctrine disquieted me as if I’d never seen it before; new, like God’s distant mercies, every morning.

But still I wanted to believe the best about Mormons themselves and was genuinely, continuously surprised by their actions as well. I didn’t want to believe that people would lie about an apostate who left for doctrinal reasons, until another woman who left the Church learned that it had been announced in Relief Society meeting that she – who had always been faithful to her husband — was excommunicated for adultery.

I didn’t want to believe that my own local LDS leadership could be deceptive until I asked to be excommunicated from the LDS Church several months before The Mormon Mirage was to be published. (Unbeknownst to me, a Mormon who was a self-appointed mole in ex-Mormon organizations was corresponding with me under the pretext that he had left the Church too and apparently had been reporting my research to Church leaders.) When the new bishop of my hometown ward told me that I couldn’t be excommunicated because they had no record I had ever been a Mormon, only the existence of my baptismal certificate and temple recommend made the procedure go forward.

The unarticulated and un-targeted sense of betrayal I felt became the permanent inner garment of my soul. Charles Spurgeon articulated it best: “If God be thy portion, then there is no loss in all the world that lies so hard and so heavy upon thee as the loss of thy God.” I have tried to describe the state in which I lived for years after leaving Mormonism by comparing it to the aftermath of the discovery that your “forever” lover has left you and will never come back.

Who do you blame when you have been duped by a church?

For me, I couldn’t find anyone to blame. Not my Mormon friends. I knew their good hearts. Not Church leadership – at that time I found it incomprehensible that people I knew— my bishops, stake presidents, regional representatives — could be aware of what I had found out. But how far up the chain of command would I look to find the ones who did know these things and had hidden them? Could it be possible they were unaware too? I had no way of knowing where the line of inner-sanctum complicity began.

I couldn’t blame myself, though the responsibility surely lay there. I wanted to reproach myself for being suckered – but how could I hold responsible the trusting eleven-year-old? The trusting teenager? The trusting college student? If there is no loss as great as the loss of one’s god, there are few tasks to compare with setting out to learn to serve another One. If you’ve been burned by a god, how do you learn to trust another one? Make no mistake about it, I knew I needed what only He could provide: forgiveness of sins, eternal life, church and community based on truth, not beloved fictions.

I knew from the beginning that I would walk with a spiritual limp the rest of my life, the price I paid for being there, and believing. From this I have learned a truth about Mormonism: The power of its sociology – its cultures, its traditions, its people – is of such intensity and persistent power for those who love it, that doctrine and history can pale in significance unless truth is more important than any other thing.

Truth is worth any limp, any price.

More than I paid, more than any price payable; because truth alone can bring peace.

Testimony of John Divito
Since my birth, I had been raised in the atmosphere of the Mormon faith. My parents were dedicated to the Mormon Church, and I was in church every Sunday. I was also involved in many of the other activities the church offered. When I turned eight years old, I was baptized at the youngest age the church allowed. After I was baptized, I continued as a member of the church for a long time. I received the Aaronic priesthood at 12, had a temple recommend, and was baptized for the dead when I went to the temple. I also looked forward to the time when I could serve my two-year mission.

But as I grew older, things started to change. I had come to the age where I could work. The church had begun to change in my eyes, and I did not really have problems with neglecting it by working on Sundays. When it came down to it, I had grown unhappy with the Mormon Church. I came to the point where I was more of an agnostic. I never really denied God’s existence — I just didn’t care. I had my own life to live. So I worked through the rest of high school.

Then I turned eighteen, and I had a decision to make. Of course, this is the time when I was supposed to go on my two-year mission. I had been raised to go on a mission at this time, and I had even wanted to go through most of my youth. But I didn’t care much about religious matters anymore. I wanted to go to college so that I could get a good education and live a decent life. Therefore, I began attending college. After all, I thought it was going to determine how much money I was going to make.

While attending college, something amazing happened. I met a woman named Jennifer. I certainly was not looking for anyone. But through a mutual friend, we had begun talking on the Internet. Now at first I just thought of her as a friend. But as we continued to talk, I started to really like her. After about three months, we decided to meet. And after meeting, we began to date. I was on cloud nine. There was only one problem — she was a Christian. Not that I really minded; I didn’t necessarily think that there wasn’t a God. I just hadn’t cared for so long. She was very active in a campus ministry, and I began attending some ministry activities to spend more time with her. In time, I decided to prove to her that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was the true church. After all, if she was going to be devoted in her beliefs, it should be with the true church. I realized that in order to accomplish this, I would need to study and understand the materials out there written against Mormonism. Then I could refute their arguments and demonstrate to her how Mormonism was true.

This wound up leading to a huge problem. What I was reading could not easily be disproved. As a matter of fact, they could not be disproved — they were telling the truth. The evidence they gave was well documented and easily verifiable. I started to understand more about the history of Joseph Smith and of The Book of Mormon. There were also doctrinal problems that made the theology of the church illogical and irrational. I began having a crisis of faith. Was everything I had ever been taught through the Mormon Church wrong? After my research, I found out what I had believed was wrong. For me, learning the truth about Joseph Smith and the dubiousness of The Book of Mormon were the two primary reasons that caused me to leave the church.

As more time passed, the minister from the campus ministry began to make some sense. I decided to go with the group to a mission trip in Mexico over spring break. When we finally got down there, I took some time to talk to the associate minister. We spent a long time talking about spiritual things. I realized that I was a sinner — that I had disobeyed God by trying to run my own life and do things my own way. I also knew Mormonism did not have the answer, and I knew that I could never be good enough to make things right with God (even by keeping the ordinances of the church and the law of the gospel). Worst of all, I knew that I deserved God’s punishment for my sins. So I confessed this to the associate minister and he told me that Jesus Christ died on the cross to take all of my punishment upon Him. Then Jesus rose from the dead three days later and He has been alive ever since. The associate minister continued by saying that if I came to faith in Christ and what He had done for me, my sins would be forgiven and God would judge me based on Jesus’ perfection and righteousness instead of my sinfulness. This was the key. Nothing I could do would help or make me better off. It was not about me anyway. It is about God, whose creation rebelled against Him, and about what He did to restore His relationship with this creation. I realized that what He did through Jesus Christ was glorious, and I wanted nothing more than to trust in Him. As a result, I told the associate minister that I wanted to become a Christian. He celebrated with me, and we told God together of my decision by prayer. He then recommended I should get baptized. Later in the week the entire campus ministry went down with me to a lake where he baptized me. This was the best decision I ever made.

I realized that my separation from God no longer existed. Through Christ, the barrier my sin had made was removed. And as a result, I was in a wonderful relationship with my Creator. I now had purpose in my life. I existed to serve God and to glorify Him. Learning the Bible and about Christianity had totally changed my life. I began to see a real need for Christians to be better trained biblically and to be able to discern truth from error. I gained a passion to use my talents and gifts to serve God in this matter. I also continue to have a heart for the LDS people, and a desire to show them the truth. Hopefully, with my involvement with Mormonism Research Ministry, I will be able to help others in the pursuit of this truth. And I will never forget that for the rest of my life, I will live first and foremost to serve the Lord and to do His will.

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About Me

Why I am a Mormon

How I live my faith