Perhaps one of the most singular moments of my life was a day, ten years or so ago, when I realized that I must write to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (commonly referred to as the "Mormon" Church) and have them remove my name from their records. The reason for my leaving was simple: my membership in that church suggested that I believed something that I no longer believed, and my personal integrity demanded that I take action. After twenty-five years in the LDS faith including a mission served to the New York area, the Joseph Smith story, the Book of Mormon, revelation, the priesthood, the temple, the Bible, Jesus Christ, and God - all of these things meant nothing to me; I left them all for atheism. So I wrote the letter. My departure from the LDS church was not bitter, and I had very little emotion about it; I simply didn't believe it anymore, so it was time to leave.

More recently, after several years in corporate life and a year at the helm of a dot-com company that was born and buried in a blaze of glory in 1999-2000, I found myself deliberately arranging a life sabbatical. I had read somewhere that one year in the dot-com world had the equivalent impact upon your mind and body of four years in the normal business world, and I found myself in complete agreement with that sentiment. The sabbatical allowed me time to read, and I found myself turning to religious and spiritual texts - something that surprised me, since I had such little interest in the subject up until that point.

My reading included the few books I could find on atheism. Atheists are routinely misunderstood by the populace, and it's no wonder - I discovered there's really very little meaningful and truthful material out there about them. On the other hand, I encountered and read many volumes on the great religions of the world, seeking to broaden my knowledge about the subject generally. As an LDS missionary many years ago I had studied these religions, but only from a defensive perspective; now my reading was simply to learn.

Eventually, I stumbled across the "new Mormon" histories - and found myself immediately drawn to them. My desire for this reading material reminded me of the look I had seen in the eyes of rabid mystery novel readers, who devour pulp mysteries as though they needed a "fix." I spent entirely too much money on these books and consumed them immediately upon acquiring them.

This draw to Mormon history and theology, especially my connection of its theology to other esoteric religious ideas from history, surprised me. I did not understand why, after ten years of atheism and a palpable dislike of Mormon society and culture, I would find myself so engaged with these materials - but the draw was unmistakably there. I knew that at some point this draw needed to be explained; that I would have to come to terms with it at some point, and develop an understanding of why it was there.

During the years of my sabbatical, I began visiting other religions to see what their services were like. I can't describe my activities as a search for God - that wasn't the motivation. I was after knowledge, the type of knowledge that comes from experience. My years of atheism had created within me a great respect for rationalism, and I searched for it within the religions I explored. While I was willing to admit that life seemed to exist somewhere between the "traditional" worldview and the "scientific" worldview, the idea of God was still, to me, the ultimate irrationality.

Once I discovered Reform Mormonism, and its approach to the divine - that the search for knowledge was divine - all of that changed; I was able to reconcile my necessity for rationalization with a view of God that I felt made sense.

The basics of Reform Mormonism are presented in the book I authored in 2002 entitled Reform Mormonism. What I hope to share with you today is how Reform Mormonism formed as a result of distinct personal needs that I see reflected within the ex-Mormon (and questioning-Mormon) culture. Some of that is reflected within my story of how I came to terms with the draw of Mormon history and theology, and how I reclaimed my past.

During the years immediately following my departure from the LDS church, I was surprised that many of my friends and associates, some of whom had become non-believers long before I, felt absolutely no motivation to follow my lead and ask that their names be removed from the records of the organization. I recently had a conversation with a dear friend of mine who departed from Mormon theology and practice more than a decade ago. She confided in me that she had decided that she would never remove her name from the records of the LDS church, because of the significance of her membership to her parents. I had always felt that she remained a member on record simply because she felt the membership was irrelevant, and that she had never simply taken the time to sit down and write the letter needed to remove her name. Her parents were very well aware of her religious views and their remoteness to LDS theology; I hadn't realized that her reticence to remove herself from the LDS rolls was based upon her relationship with them. In the conversation, she did confirm to me that she had always felt the membership to be irrelevant and non-binding. Even though I suggested she was a pawn in LDS marketing, when they counted her as one of their own when preparing their growth statistics, she considered this a small price to pay for the peace and/or comfort she felt her retained yet unpracticed and faithless membership gave her mother. I have no doubt of her sincerity in the matter, and the whole experience helped introduce me to the emotionally complex world of ex-Mormonism.

There has been a good deal written on the ex-Mormon phenomenon, though it is mostly scattered and available mainly through exploration on web sites. I believe that much more is still to be learned and explored in this regard. When I use the term "ex-Mormon," I mean anyone who has or had an affinity for LDS beliefs who later moved away from those beliefs; under my definition there are many ex-Mormons who are still active members of the LDS faith, perhaps as many or more than those who are now outside of the church. As the LDS faith continues to grow (at present it seems to almost double in size every decade) the numbers of ex-Mormons will grow also, and I believe there is important information about life and how to live it in the stories of ex-Mormons.

Within these stories, certain experiential themes and feelings emerge. Not every ex-Mormon has all of these themes, but here are three common ones:

· I felt suffocated while in the church
· The church lied to me
· I'm angry

In my case, when I left the LDS church in 1990, I merely didn't believe its claims and was living my life in such a way that the church was completely irrelevant - so I certainly did not feel suffocated, and I was not particularly angry. I did feel that the Church frequently manipulated the truth for its own purposes; I had been instructed on how to do this as a missionary; if I did not feel that the Church had lied to me, I certainly felt that it had taught me how to selectively represent only the most marketable parts of it to others. Some people consider this shady at best and dishonest at worst; others see nothing wrong with it, and consider the underrepresented parts of LDS theology as marketed today a process of "precept upon precept;" the more difficult aspects of LDS theology are not hidden from investigators, they feel, but simply saved for presentation later, when an individual is more prepared to receive them. While I understand the practicality of the latter approach, I tend to support the former approach of "full disclosure," erring on the side of providing too much information from which an intelligent person can draw their own conclusions. To me, the latter seems like hiding something, while the former seems more honest, even if it is disorganized or, as a result, unintelligible.

Yet, as I turned to study Mormonism ten years after formally leaving it, and came to terms with the totality of information about it (what I often think of as "the good, the bad, and the ugly") I found myself vividly experiencing these themes of suffocation, betrayal, and anger. Anger arose out of the discovery that the LDS church had indeed not been upfront with me about its own past. As I learned more about the history of the Church, this sense of betrayal increased - yet, what had I to be angry about? I was no longer a member, ten years running - by what grounds should I feel betrayed?

As I contacted others who were ex-Mormon or questioning-Mormon, it became apparent to me that I was not experiencing anything unique, though ten years later than most. These feelings were rampant within that community, and still are - probably always will be. To me, the most interesting dynamic of this situation was what many people had turned into a slogan that describes the attitude of many ex-Mormons: "you can leave the Church, but you can't leave it alone." It is as though, upon leaving the LDS faith (whether in secret, mentally, or through formal means) the leaving, in and of itself, is not enough. My questions regarding this phenomenon were these: Why do so many people (myself included) feel the need to disparage the LDS faith upon leaving it? What about having been involved in Mormonism sticks with a person even after they've left the LDS church? What happens to the person whose formative years were steeped in Mormon society, culture and theology, who later leaves one or two of these? Why is Mormon theology, society and culture so closely interconnected, and can parts of it survive if not so connected? What happens to a person who, acting in harmony with their integrity, removes themselves from a belief system that they no longer have faith in, but find that, due to the tight integration of Mormon theology, society and culture, they have also removed themselves from their own personal history and tradition?

Answers to these questions came to me from two surprising sources. The first, through a Catholic friend, the second through a Jewish friend.

My Catholic friend is an avid believer in her faith, and attends Mass weekly. She was married in the Catholic church, and received a civil divorce some years ago. She disagrees with her church's position on many social issues, and has no difficulty telling you that when it comes to those issues, her church is wrong. But she loves her faith; it is obvious in her speech, emotion and actions.

When asking her about her plans to ever remarry, she told me that she had always considered the idea of obtaining a Catholic marriage annulment to be a silly idea; to the Catholic church, a civil divorce is insufficient - unless a formal church annulment of the first marriage is granted, a Catholic cannot be married again in a Catholic church. She said that she thought the idea of annulment to be silly because annulling her past marriage of twenty-five years - suggesting that it hadn't really happened - was ludicrous. But as she contemplated the prospect of remarrying, she could not imagine being married any other way, and she decided that seeking an annulment was, indeed, something worth doing. Her Catholic tradition was and is as important to her as her faith; if she is married again, she wants it to be in the Catholic church. She began to view the annulment not as negation of her past experience, but as a sort of ritualistic artifact; a hold-over bureaucratic process that must be accomplished in order to maintain her tradition; upon undertaking the process, she discovered that there was some value within it, even though if the process had not been required, she would not have done it. This respect of one's tradition in the context of disagreement over theology and application suggested to me that one's tradition is very important, and that a lifetime of investment in a particular tradition needn't be abandoned simply because one does not believe, or no longer believes, the formal teachings or rules of their religion. I began to wonder why my tradition had been so easily dispensed with.

The second insight into this issue happened when I visited a Jewish synagogue one day in the spring of 2002. I had never been exposed to the day-to-day world of Judaism, and I didn't even realize that I was walking into an "Orthodox" synagogue. Later I would study about the history of this religion and discover that although Orthodox Judaism is just as authoritarian (perhaps more) than the LDS faith, there is also Conservative Judaism and Reform Judaism, each progressively more liberal in views and practice than Orthodox Judaism. Though those within these three groups do not agree with each other entirely (in some cases, at all) no one would look at any person belonging to any of these groups and not consider them a Jew.

I would say this is where my anger peaked - and then began to dissolve. My anger was at having been lied to, yes; and it was at how corporate Mormonism ran things, yes; but really, my anger came from realizing that I had turned over control of my history and tradition to those who claimed the authority of my theology. I could find no organization or group of people in whom this history and tradition could be maintained that did not radically disagree with, or refuse to entertain, my personal, rational view of the world. I have since learned that - unlike the particular method I used - many people conduct this search prior to leaving the LDS faith, but have the same result. My anger only subsided when I decided that I would not allow my history to be removed from me even if it meant that I had to create that organization - tolerant of that view as well as others - myself. I took back control of the terms of "Mormonism" and began to organize it in a way that worked for me; I quickly discovered that I was not alone in this need and these views; I did find myself alone in the action of having created some sense of organization around it.

My decision to act in this regard played out first in the publication of Reform Mormonism, in which I attempted to present the ideas and foundation of Reform Mormonism in a positive way, with as little polemic writing against the LDS faith as possible; mentions of LDS views are used only to draw contrast. It's practically impossible to discuss Mormonism and not deal with the LDS in some manner; they dominate the subject. I realize that, in the tradition of Luther, sometimes a direct statement of the causes for the need of separation is required. I suspect that I did not approach Reform Mormonism this way as a result of having felt already separated from the LDS faith - the creation of Reform Mormonism was a personal and partial return to it rather than a separation. However, in returning to it, I was determined to accomplish several things in the interest of my own religious future.

First, I was not willing to rebuild my faith upon a foundation that could be so easily dismantled by confrontation with simple facts - both historical facts about Mormonism itself or any religion, and scientific fact, of which I am a great admirer (no doubt due to my ten years of rational atheism.) I was not going to spend my life simply dismissing arriving facts I couldn't resolve, or expending energy to defend my religious views against them; they had to fit. Something within me told me that when I hit upon the real thing, they would naturally fit, that this shouldn't be a big deal.

Second, I was going to reclaim my history and tradition, and find a way to become at ease with it and eventually embrace and love it. For example, out of storage came the triple combination - a little wary at first, but eventually I rebuilt my comfort with it. Now I cherish it; not in the way that I did as a youth, as the "only true scriptures," but now in the same way that I cherish my copies of the Koran and the Upanishads; there is an additional dimension of affinity for these Mormon writings because of my history with them, even though my view of the validity of scripture is now radically different than when I was LDS or an atheist. I can become as upset as I want about the fact that I know my way backward and forward through the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants but it doesn't change the fact that I am intimately familiar with these writings. Once I refined my views about scripture, I found I was able to enjoy these documents once again; the same refinement allowed me to enjoy the scriptures of the world. It does not mean that I believe they are the "word of God," inspired, or literally or figuratively true - but it does allow me to embrace my history with them and enjoy them in a different way than before. Perhaps one day science will develop a pill that will allow people to selectively erase their memories - thereby erasing their past. There is a time when I would have happily swallowed a pill that would have removed from my brain and heart the knowledge of Mormon scripture. Now I would never consider such a thing; the reversal of knowledge goes against my new religion. Knowledge simply must be appropriately applied.

I also remember the moment when I found myself able to call myself a Mormon again (albeit a Reform Mormon); it came as I was editing the introduction to Reform Mormonism. I felt a tremendous sense of completion and having "arrived home" when I said in my mind: "I'm a Reform Mormon" and it felt good. It felt like restoration.

Third, I felt that I could not involve myself with a religious structure, church, or organization that functioned with a top-down dynamic, interested in exercising control over its adherents. I had rebelled against the authoritarianism of the LDS church when I was within it; as an outsider I found that authoritarianism repellent. My new view of spiritual and religious opportunity called for a church or organization to support my progression through life, not dominate or control it. This required the organization - if it even was an organization - to place every adherent - including me - at the top of the chart, and to exist under me as a constant and unfailing support, unwilling to remove itself from my life unless I chose to remove it.

Once these three key needs had been clarified within my mind, and with the thankful catalyst of my interaction with my Catholic and Jewish friends, Reform Mormonism emerged rapidly.

I certainly understand the perspective of those who are still very angry at the LDS faith and can never imagine calling themselves "Mormon" again. I felt the same way; I still experience an internal grating at certain Utah colloquialisms and practices, but I suspect that is because I equate those things with a culture of authoritarian religionism. I do not feel that any individual LDS member is bad or wrong as a result at their use of such silly phrases as "oh my heck" but I am less than honest if I do not acknowledge an irritation with the culture in which such phrases can emerge.

That is not to say that I do not consider the action of the LDS church corporately to be misguided. The anger I describe dissipating occurred when within my Reform Mormonism I came to accept that the LDS path to God is as valid a path as any other. We cannot dispute that many active LDS find their path to be of particular value; yet, even some on the LDS path - despite the teachings of their faith to the contrary - realize that the path is not suitable for everyone, just as those outside of the LDS path recognize that it is not appropriate for everyone. In light of all of this, the fact that the LDS path is both valid and valuable  for some people is an important thing to accept in order to release the anger and resentment that one can develop over having walked and left that path. This is particularly important if you have family and loved ones still within the LDS tradition. It is even more important as you consider how to restore your own personal past.

This view came about only after I was able to reconstruct a view about God such that "paths to God" were available. As one might imagine, returning to a concept of God after a decade of atheism is quite an adventure. What still surprises me about this adventure is that, because of my LDS upbringing, I spent a tremendous amount of time trying to understand the concept of God as an concept external to myself. I later found that this is not a uniquely Mormon problem, but one that much of the world engages in: the belief in separation from God. It was only when I was able to understand God as an internal concept - internal meaning God  within myself - that I made progress on this front. God as an external embodiment, or objectification, never worked for me, and I knew it would never be in harmony with my needs. That is one of the reasons why Reform Mormonism's first chapter is "God."

Some will no doubt view this as rationalization, as my refusal to accept God as presented by others, and having constructed God to meet my needs. That is exactly what I have done. That is exactly what Reform Mormonism does. Laying out the ideas behind Reform Mormonism required a great deal of thought and rationalization; that is how it became rational. In that rationality was something I could call "home." Others I showed it to found a home in it as well. I believe there are thousands of people - active LDS, non-active LDS, and non-LDS - for whom this rational approach may be a path that provides both the opportunity to reclaim their Mormon past and the opportunity to enhance progression. To those for whom this path appeals, I believe it provides support in place of control; fresh air instead of suffocation; positive movement instead of warnings against exploration; opportunity instead of obligation; joy instead of fear.

Those reasons were enough for me to publish this approach, to be willing to call it a valid separate path to God, and to give it a name: Reform Mormonism. That others may choose to look at it, dismiss it, consider it, or adopt it is something I cannot control; I only worked to organize it as a possibility for those for whom it may appeal; and because I knew I had to do it. In it, I have come to lose my anger with the LDS; this seemed to occur at about the same rate as the reclamation of my past.

So that is how I refused to abandon my history, and went about reclaiming it. I realize that it is not the fault of the LDS church that nothing exists for those who refuse to have their tradition and history taken from them after leaving the church, either voluntarily or not. It was up to me to create that, to create a way in which that retention could occur. I believe that the desire for that, and all of the concepts behind Reform Mormonism, had existed long before me and were active in the minds of many people in the past and the present. I merely chose to organize them into form and present them formally. I believe that they present an opportunity for good in many lives, and that belief became my motivation for sharing them.

Whether they eventually wind up being such in the lives of others remains to be seen; for now, I know that when asked what religion I am, it feels really good to say "Reform Mormon." Since I do not live in Utah, the "Mormon" part usually raises eyebrows, as it always did - the "Reform" part seems to calm people, suggesting that perhaps I'm more liberal and less dogmatic than my LDS friends. Some people ask me about the distinction; I'm happy to let them know that although I'm Mormon, my Mormonism is far more benign, tolerant, and inclusive than the LDS variety. It surprises me how many people accept the phrase as though it has existed for years.

I think that, in the minds of many people, it has.

Copyright 2002 by Mike C. Richan. All rights reserved.