To the wives and children of men who apostatize

[Greg West]

I felt impressed today to write something to the wives and children of men who are on the path of apostasy. There may be instances where the apostatizing spouse is the wife, but in my experience, it's almost always the other way around. I hope that this will provide some encouragement and strength as you read and recognize that the signs you are seeing in your mate are part of a known pattern. This may not give you a lot of hope for a turnaround, but hopefully it will let you know that there are people around you who care about you and who are praying for you.

I was surfing around today and stumbled upon the web site of an exMormon from Canada. He claims to have been a lifelong member of the Church, served a mission, and was a bishop at age 35 or so. I have no reason to doubt his story, but I'm always wary of how these guys tend to inflate their importance. As I read some of his story, I was struck how his tale is just the same old song I've heard a zillion times. It amazes me that, for all the demands that they have their story heard, it's always the same old story.

This unfortunate case-study begins like most of them. After his mission, college put a bunch of doubts in his mind. Universities seem to be the place where the proud begin to succumb to the temptation to be smarter than everyone else. I don't know if it's competitiveness so much as it is the desire to be accepted by those one looks up to. I've heard many times of a LDS member who was humiliated because all he could do was bear a simple testimony in the face of a direct intellectual assault on his faith by an esteemed professor. Determined to never be humiliated again, his pride sets him off on a quest to know more than anyone else. This strategy is a trap, because the gospel is intentionally designed to not be "provable" by man's sciences.

The Lord is an expert on transforming his spirit children into exalted beings. He knows the process depends of the power of faith. There is real power in faith. Evidence doesn't have that transformative essence. As Alma says, "for if a man knoweth a thing he hath no cause to believe, for he knoweth it." It's just a dead fact. Faith is a living essence--a gift from God. When a prideful person says, "I'm going to know so much that I'll be able to confound the smartest professor," he's stepping into a trap. Satan knows it's a trap. He knows a person can spend years trying to "prove the gospel is true" using methods that are not approved by the Lord. It wastes their lives, it drains their strength, and eventually leads them to a spiritual dead end.

The Lord's approved method is given to us in James 1:5-6, Moroni 10:4-5, along with other scriptures that invite us to come to him in humility and seek his wisdom directly. The Lord wants to teach us himself. He wants to touch our lives. He will be our evidence if we will just let him.

The next phase of this unfortunate brother's demise was that he begins to seek learning from men while ignoring the teaching that comes from God. He began to study existentialist philosophers, trying to link the false teachings of men with glorious, revealed truths from heaven. The point of this is often to feel superior to others. From time to time, I've seen brothers in elders' quorum lessons who, seeking to sound more intelligent and well-educated than their more humble brethren, will pull out some esoteric twist from their university-instilled mind clutter and try to impress the class. Sometimes these individuals will try to prove they are more knowledgeable than their appointed quorum instructors. When that happens, the Spirit of unity and fellowship just evaporates. After their comment, the individual will then settle back in the seat smugly as the instructor tries to recapture the Spirit.

As this process continues, the individual begins to feel the need of attracting a group of "elites" around him. This brother began to have discussion groups with other members where they sought to share their false ideas or engage in intellectual critiques of fundamental gospel doctrines or their leaders. They further distance themselves from spiritual promptings and become increasingly hostile towards attempts to invite the "elites" back in to the mainstream. Because their mindset is critical, they believe themselves to be more open-minded or progressive than their peers. They come to feel like their less enlightened priesthood leaders are simply trying to "control" them and engage in censorship of their radical opinions.

Eventually, they end up in their bishop's office. They might make a token effort to comply, but the prideful promptings continue to drive them on the outward path. Eventually, as this brother did, they end up in the stake president's office making impassioned demands for answers to their challengs. Filled with the Spirit of superiority and dismissiveness towards an authorized servant of God, they ask questions they have entertained for years, the ones that have been specifically devised to rob them of their faith.

This is often the moment of truth they've aspired to in the vain imaginations of their hearts. They picture themselves as a martyr for the misguided cause of an unspiritual truth. They rail, they accuse, the mock, and they gloat. They interpret the kindness and forebearance of their priesthood leaders as weakness. They interpret the bearing of testimony as an admission of profound ignorance when it is they who are profoundly ignorant of the God they have professed to adore. They interpret the pleading to repent and to keep their false teachings to themselves as an attempt at censorship.

In some cases, as with this brother, the next step came in the form of letters written to general authorities. This is a pride-driven quest to rise to a confrontation with the apostles of the Lord Jesus himself. It's a form of trophy hunting. Can they confound one of the Twelve? If an apostle can't satisfy their desire for answers that please the carnal mind, then they have bragging rights.

The brother about whom I write apparently wrote to Elder Holland of the Twelve and didn't get a satisfactory reply. His next step was to write an open letter on the Internet to Elder Holland. Still not receiving a reply that satisfied him, he wrote again--this time an 80-page rant--wherein he listed all his grievances, his critiques, his unanswered questions, and posted it as a PDF file.

As I perused the document, I was stunned to see that almost every single page of it contained a "carbon copy" of every other anti-Mormon's rants. It had obviously been a long time since this brother had read the Book of Mormon with any regularity, but it was apparent that he had studied every single anti-Mormon treatise available. It was like a catalog, every page plagiarized, cut-and-pasted from anti-Mormon books and web sites.

The last step was that he "resigned" his membership in the Church, much to the dismay of a still-believing wife. As his marriage lurched towards divorce, he began to lay the guilt trip on his spouse. "How can you say you're committed to families if you won't stand by me?" This is a common argument that Satan uses to bring down the wife. A woman fears that divorce will leave her without support and leave her children fatherless. She reluctantly leaves the Church she has loved and the Lord she has seved.

If you are a woman who has a husband that is placing you in this situation, for the sake of your own salvation and that of your children, it is better to cut the apostate husband loose. As tragic as it may be, it would be more tragic for him to pull you and your children down to hell with him. If he insisted that you and your children remain inside a house that is burning down, would you stay or would you flee for your life and take your children with you? Remember the very purpose of your mortal life is to be proved by God and to see if you will do whatever the Lord will command you. Jesus himself said that anyone who loves father or mother, brother or sister, more than him is not worthy of him. Stay worthy. Your spouse does not have power to save you, to raise your body from the grave, to exalt you and your children to the celestial kingdom. Stay faithful to Jesus who died and shed his own blood to save you. If your husband truly loved you, he would not do this to you. He is following Satan's voice. If he will not repent, let him go. Save yourself and your family.

Our apostate brother wrote impassively about his missionary son who cried for two whole days when he learned that his father had asked for his name to be removed from the Church records. Who wouldn't be upset to learn that your father would toss the sacred temple sealings in the refuse bin? It's like a death! Not only did he lose his sealing to his father, but also his mother and his siblings. It's the spiritual equivalent of a murder-suicide.

I don't wish to dwell on this much longer. It is a sad, discouraging tale that always has the same ending. Pride and vanity give way to belligerence and eventually to open hostility. The final state is resentment, bitterness, envy, and the obsessive drive to pass this spiritual cancer on to someone else. Happiness vanishes and misery takes over every other aspect of life. We know the ending here on S.P.A.M. because we see it all the time. The amazing thing is how the path to this state is so consistent and predictable. If you are on this path, we urge you to turn around while there's still time to repent. If you're the spouse or the child of someone who is on this path, our thoughts and prayers are with you. Stand firm no matter what. The members of the Church will stand by you. The Lord Jesus will never, ever forsake you.

=============================================
Click here to read the follow-up article
=============================================

[Greg West]

[Greg West]

I also worry about their children. Atilano says they'll be raising them in the Church, but there will inevitably be contacts. It begins with "Mommy, why doesn't Daddy go to Church with us?" How do you answer that? Does the mother then answer, "Daddy doesn't go to our Church because he believes we're delusional dupes who follow a deceiver and he's too educated and smart to fall for the ruse?"

Can an anti-Mormon hold his peace and allow his children to grow up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord? Eventually the dialogue has to take place.

One day I'll have to post the whole story of my friend and former missionary companion, whose father fell away from the Church just a few years after joining it. My friend was only about 9 or so at the time. The father, like Atilano, continually "nudged" the wife with annoying comments, ill-intended teasing, ridicule, and eventually undermined her faith. To just have a little peace, she stopped going to Church, even though she still believed.

That wasn't enough, however. The father could not rest until the mother and the children didn't BELIEVE it anymore. My friend said that his father took his brother to weekly meetings with Evangelical pastors to get bombarded with anti-Mormon lies all throughout their teen years. They would simply bear their testimonies and leave after listening politely.

The father didn't force them to stop going to Church. It was as if the only thing that would satisfy him was for them to renounce the faith. Over the years, he went from making disparaging comments about the Church, to haranguing his family, to writing books against the Church. (The Internet didn't exist back then, or I'm sure he'd have had a blog.)

When his sons accepted mission calls, the father disowned them and kicked them out of the house forever. My friend served nearly 30 months as a missionary because he came out to the mission field early, having nowhere else to go when his parents threw him out and then he stayed in the field to assist with the reorganization of a new mission after boundary changes. He was one of the finest missionaries I ever knew. He went on to become a stake president in France. His story still moves and inspires me today.

I know intimately from him sharing his experience with me, that children of apostates suffer in silence. They know what is true and they can see the conflict for what it is. Children inherently have faith. They're very forgiving when they know we're doing our best and fall short of our ideals. However, it's disturbing to a child to see a parent fight against God.

[Rebekah]

*sighs* Very sad. I find myself sad for this sister because she justfies her husband's behavior, and justifies his deception. A lie is a lie and even the smallest of deceptions doesn't come from God. He may not be "anti" as he claims but anything that causes deception is most assuredly not "Pro" or as Greg states, "Neutral" So what does that leave on the spectrum? Hmmm....

[Greg West]

And one last thing... You said that you are not "anti." That indicates self-deception. From our point of view, you are decidedly not "neutral." Thanks for the lesson you taught us and the total validation of my premise.

[Greg West]

A follow-up: Our newly banned member, Atilano sent me a message as follow:

Sorry for the deceit, I am not a mormon, but my wife is. She knows that I don't believe in mormonism. We have an open and honest relationship with eachother (though I am dishonest to online groups-always) She did see my post on both sites, laughed, and admitted that she must not be as TBM as she thought. She was mad that I falsified the story, but when she saw my FLAK post she understood why I had to. I knew I would get busted and I wanted her to see that both anti-mormons and mormons can go to extremes. Thanks for proving that to her. I am no longer mormon. But I am not anit. I am just me and I love my family. yes I am rainsing my children as mormon because I don't have a problem with it per se...just the extremists.

Like I said, we all make choices that will determine whether we go to the celestial, terrestrial, or telestial kingdoms. It looks like she has made her choice. Some people will choose money and fame over the gospel. Some will choose sensuality and carnality. Some will desire position, prestige, and worldly power. Others will be drawn the accolades of academic honors. Some will seek the assurance of the things they can see over those that must be hoped for. The celestial kingdom will not be attained without sacrifice of the desire for all of those earthly things. I can only hope you both will be happy with her choice in eternity.

[Rebekah]

Agreed,

My father has no "spirtual hatered" for my religious choices or my mother's for that matter. He supports our choices. And I agree their is something vile and disgusting about a person who wants to destroy another person's faith.

[Greg West]

Rebekah,

We all have family members we are concerned for. I would think it would be tough for someone to live in an LDS family when you're not fully converted to the gospel. I can sense your love for your father and I'm sure he loves you, too. To me there's a big difference from even grudging acceptance of you and your mom's faith and a desire to be left alone compared to some guy on the Internet plotting with strangers to take his wife's faith. It's like plotting a spiritual "assassination." There's few things I've run into that are more disturbing.

[Rebekah]

I live and have grown up with a less active father. These men end up causing a lot of hurt and pain to their wives and to their children. I've ached inside my heart to want my father to change a lot of his ways. He has a lot of stumbling blocks in his life and he knows he has the power to change it on his own but it is a matter of free agency. I've begged, I've pleaded, I've prayed and I know my mother has done the same.

It reminds me so much of a portion of Jacob 2:35
....Ye have broken the hearts of your tender wives, and lost the confidence of your children, because of your bad examples before them; and the sobbings of their hearts ascend up to God against you. And because of the strictness of the word of God, which cometh down against you, many hearts died, pierced with deep wounds.

[Mike West]

Yeah, shoulda done more research on that. Gonna have to learn your research methods to figure out where these guys are coming from. I may have to dig the user name and email for the site stat counter and start using it.

[Greg West]

Banned member Pete Bowen wrote this message to me:

"Thanks for your article advising wives to leave their husbands. It helped my wife understand a little more about the challenges of having untrained clergy. You see, she spoke with her Bishop and Stake President when I gave up Mormonism and both of them advised her in the strongest terms to stay married to me because even though I no longer believed I'm still a good husband. She sees now how these mixed 'inspired' messages are just whatever the man in charge thinks - not some direct revelation from God."

Pete, there are different situations and not all counsel will every be the same, especially when advising a woman to stay with an apostate husband. If you will carefully read the post, you'll see that my advise is just that, advice: not revelation. I hold no priesthood keys to counsel your wife. I don't know the particulars of your case and I'm sure her local priesthood leaders do.

I don't know that you are actively trying to undermine her religion in your family as "Atilano Alexander" is obviously doing. If you don't believe, we don't begrudge you your right to believe or disbelieve. Inasmuch as you don't begin to try to destroy your wife's faith, I'd also tell her to stay with you. It's not the belief or lack thereof--it's the overwhelming desire to destroy Mormonism that is the key.

It's obvious from the case noted above, that "Atilano Alexander" is conspiring with others to undermine his wife's beliefs. It's a a covert, adversarial relationship. He's trying to take her down. That's not loving or tolerant or anything good. If you're doing the same to your wife, shame on you. If you can live with a Mormon wife and still love her, show her kindness, and give understanding, that's fine. There's a difference.

Many, many women are married to non-members or less-active members. Those men don't try to destroy their faith. However, if a woman's husband apostatizes and beings to attack the faith in the home, they have a choice to make. One is the celestial kingdom and the other is the telestial kingdom. If they want the blessings of the telestial kingdom, losing their sealing to their husband, their children, their parents, etc., well that is a valid choice, albeit not the best one possible.