Hi, I’m Megan
I’m a sister to two brothers and mother to four sons. A fierce and loyal woman with a professional career in Software Sales who values liberty, integrity and intellectual honesty. I was a Mormon.
About me
I was raised in the Mormon church by parents who insisted I “could do anything a man can do, only better.” I believed this was true until Sundays when I was reminded in church that God was a misogynist. This blaring contradiction lived inside me silently through my seminary graduation, mission to Norway, graduation from BYU, temple marriage, and then each of my 4 son’s baby blessings.
On my shelf
# Why I left More stories of 'Why I left' the Mormon church
It wasn’t until my baby brother’s temple wedding that I began to finally lose tolerance for Mormon Misogyny. I sat next to my sister-in-law during her sealing because none of her family members were allowed to attend. I thought about Joseph Smith and the origins of temple “marriages” to teenage girls without Emma knowing. I thought about the language he used in D&C 132 that women are to be given to men like objects to be traded, never recognizing that women would have informed consent under a just and all-knowing God. All of the evidence of misogyny had been there in my native religion all along, but I had tolerated it using cliche’ thought-stopping phrases like, “we’ll never understand God’s ways” to dismiss my cognitive dissonance. The patriarch performing the sealing spoke my sister-in-law’s name incorrectly and quoted every misogynistic scripture in the Bible before it occurred to me that any all-knowing God would have understood that this was wrong. Joseph Smith was wrong. My sweet sister-in-law deserved equality and equity. She deserved so much more on her wedding day than to sit without her family in cult veils in front of a patriarch who didn’t value her enough to know her name, promising herself to my brother as he promised himself only to the Lord.
Slowly, over the next year, I took the time to study Joseph Smith and the foundation of the LDS church while allowing myself to think critically about his motives and acknowledge the injustices to women he and prophets who followed pushed forward in the name of God. It became clear “plural marriage” was a more palatable way to describe sex trafficking and pedophilia. As I read accounts from journals of women in early Mormon polygamy, I was horrified.
These were not values I aligned with, and I could no longer endorse an organization resistant to social progression calling it God’s will.
The modern LDS church still refuses to endorse the ERA, has not addressed the Bermuda Triangle of doctrine surrounding Homosexuality, and conveniently sidesteps any conversations about blatant racism remaining in the Book of Mormon after “disavowing” the “theories” outlined therin. Don’t get me started on the deliberate deception around members’ sacred tithes and the lack of ethics in accumulating over 150B in tax-deductible charity while children starve to death and homelessness is rampant in the world today. 150B is enough to end world hunger and homelessness, yet the only-male leadership of the LDS church remains symbolically high in their ivory temple towers claiming to represent God.
I simply expect more from the “one true church of Jesus Christ” restored to its fullness on earth today.