Hi! My name is Anja.

When the church began openly pushing against gay marriage in the late 90's and early 2000's, I struggled to reconcile that with the 11th Article of Faith, where we supposedly allow all others to worship according to their own conscience. But I believed in following the prophet, so I mostly kept my doubts to myself.

Then in 2013, I moved from the heavily Mormon area in the Phoenix area I'd lived most of my life to Texas, and found myself working with openly gay coworkers for the first time. Getting to know actual people in the LGBTQ+ community, combined with a church scene where I no longer had the comfortable friendships I'd made with other more progressive and nuanced Mormons even as the things being said over the pulpit and in Sunday School and Priesthood got more narrow-minded, only intensified my concerns, and I started struggling to find the motivation to stay involved.

Then came the November 2015 policy changes, and I simply could not continue. I could not reconcile the Divine I knew from my own spiritual experiences with the policies punishing and ostracizing children for the actions of a parent. And I couldn't believe men who were supposedly special witnesses of Christ could approve something so egregious and still trust their claims of revelation and guidance. And since, as I was told by leaders for so many years, the church was either God's true church or a complete fraud, I left.