I have so many feelings about this…
So someone from my mission (be warned that that wikipedia page is almost a full-out propaganda page for the Mormon church - it’s not at all objective) added me to a secret Facebook group for people who went to the same mission (Frankfurt Germany) around the same time I did (2003-2005) and who’ve also left the church.
It’s difficult to explain the significance of this to a never-Mormon. Basically, people don’t leave Mormonism. Or rather when they do, it’s one of those things you don’t ever talk about, EVER, in a very 1950s way, like abortions or gay people. Which makes sense because the Mormon church still acts like it is 1950. So apart from furtive gossip, those who leave the church are often cut off from each other because the web interconnecting them was made up of people who now totally shun them.
Anyways, the point is, I have a LOT of feelings about this and I’m not sure how to proceed. On the one hand, it’s kind of cool to know there are other people I know form a time when I was going through a gruelling and just plain horrible ordeal (being a Mormon missionary) who also no longer believe / have shed the brainwashing. At the same time, I really don’t care to be reminded of a part of my life where I was suicidally depressed and where I was constantly treated like garbage for being queer. I’m not at all sure if I want to associate with people who, yes have left Mormonism, but were still taught to have completely disgusting viewpoints on women, sexual minorities, racial minorities.
It’s all bringing up a lot of memories and creating an intersection between my past (Mormon) and current (atheistic) life that makes me uncomfortable. I don’t know how to deal with this intersection of things that aren’t supposed to intersect. I mean I have several irreligious, previously Mormon friends with whom I get along very well with and have known for a long time, but either they’re gay, or they’ve tons of queer friends and are very feminist.
Suddenly I feel as if I’m thrust back to the point where I was when I was coming out as gay but was still Mormon and where everyone around me was a believing Mormon, and it’s a really gross feeling. That was a horrid time in my life. Yet I can’t at all fairly judge any of these people because I have no idea what their views are (and no doubt they differ greatly) on queer issues or feminism or other stuff I really care about.
I’ve already checked out one person’s profile who added me as a friend, and from what I can tell, he’s a weird sort of atheistic Libertarian, Obama = evil communist guy which is really one of my very least type of people - people who 1) think communism is evil 2) don’t understand that Obama is a right-leaning moderate and 3) are irreligious and so don’t even have that excuse for their idiocy. The other issue that makes me uncomfortable is that all but one of the people in the group are men, and are (or were) that type of straight, sports-loving, arm-punching, dude-bro-ing heteronormative-to-the-max guys that I absolutely loathe to be around, but were still sort of/mostly nice to me.
Ugh, and yet I sort of want to connect with these people. But at the same time totally do not. So many conflicting feelings. It’s the definition of ambivalence.
