Lyn Smith Gregory: Joseph Smith's Great Niece Escaping Mormonism | Ep 78 | Moral Combat

In Episode 78 of the Moral Combat Podcast, hosts Nathaniel and Zachary welcome Lyn Smith Gregory, who brings a unique perspective on religious trauma from her experiences with Mormonism. Lyn, a descendant of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon church, shares insights from her memoir, detailing the hierarchical structure and beliefs of Mormonism, including tithing, polygamy, and financial success. She recounts her journey of questioning her faith during college, leading to atheism at age 19, and the subsequent impact on her family relationships. Lyn discusses the ingrained guilt and shame she struggled with, eventually seeking therapy at age 28. She delves into her fascination with brainwashing and groupthink, her triggers when watching "The Book of Mormon '' play, and Mormon beliefs about the afterlife. Lyn highlights the growing trend of millennials and Gen Z leaving the Mormon Church, particularly over LGBTQ+ issues, and emphasizes the importance of finding common ground in family estrangement. She reflects on whether complete healing from religious trauma is possible, suggesting that wounds can be transformed into compassion. Lyn's advice to those struggling includes seeking support, being patient, and finding like-minded individuals and professionals for help.

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Moral Combat, hosted by siblings Nathan and Zach Blaustone, is a heartfelt exploration of life's complexities, with a primary focus on healing from religious trauma. Step into their world as they navigate the realms of music production, confront the lingering echoes of religious trauma, and embrace laughter as a universal healer. With each episode, Nathan and Zach weave together their unique perspectives, seasoned with dynamic personalities that make every discussion an engaging adventure. From unraveling the complexities of personal growth to fostering open communication, healing the scars of religious indoctrination, and embracing the unfiltered authenticity of siblinghood, Moral Combat is your passport to thought-provoking conversations, heartfelt insights, and the pure joy of shared moments. Join us in the combat for morality, one conversation at a time.

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Hello, everybody. Hey, moral combat fans. What's up, moral combat podcast fans, MCPFs? Mm-hmm. Thanks for being here for another episode. I'm one of your hosts, Nathaniel Christopher Blaustone Faust. Wow, full introduction, I am Zach. Hi, Zach. Yes. Zach Blaustone. We don't share the same name. No, we don't. No, we don't. No, we don't. No, we don't. No, we don't. No, we don't. No, we don't. No, we don't. No, we don't. We don't share the same name anymore, last name, because I recently got married. That's why I share my full name. This is something to be celebrated. It is. Here on the moral combat podcast, this is episode 78, Dear Lord. Congratulations on that. For those of you that believe in the Lord. Dear Lord. Those of you that don't, deers, whatever. Here on the moral combat podcast, we like to talk about something very specific, Zachary. Religious trauma. Religious trauma. Zachary and I were both raised in the Christian evangelical faith or religion. Our father is a pastor, still is, going on like 30 years now or something. Getting close. We love our father and our mother very much. We started this podcast over two years ago now, kind of more in the thick of the pandemic. We felt it necessary to start having these conversations with one another about religious trauma, how that creeps into life, how it presents into all the different areas, especially after you leave any sort of radical group. With us today, we have a very special guest who is sitting in our chat room, looking at us, ready to jump in. I have personally been very excited about this interview. It's been planned for a while. It's taken some work to get it to this point. They reached out to us or their team did, which was for Zachary and I having our podcast. When anything new happens, it's something that him and I celebrate. And never in our lives here for 78 episodes have we had someone's press crew or management reach out to us to want to be on our podcast. So that was a huge boost of confidence and support. With us today is an individual who recently finished their own memoir, their first real book, talking about their story. Obviously, something that has to do with religious trauma. And this is the first time we've ever interviewed somebody that isn't directly related to like the Christian faith cult, as we like to call it. This is the first time we've kind of branched out of, I'm going to say there's similar religions, they're different sects. We were always raised to believe them to be very different. But this is somebody that was raised in the religious faith of Mormonism. And they have a very direct connection to somebody very specific in the Mormon religion. I'm going to let them do all of that explaining, but let's get them in here. Please give a warm welcome to Lynn Smith Gregory. Lynn Smith Gregory. Hi Zach. Hello. Hello. Hi Lynn. Thank you for being here. How are you doing? Great. I'm delighted to be here. I'm so interested in your podcast and what you've been doing with the different episodes. So I'm happy to be here with you today. Awesome. Yeah, we're very happy to have you. And this is our first time actually officially meeting each other face to face in the past. There's been some face to face, but you're like our most distant interviewee. It's felt really good for us. I guess a lot of the people we've interviewed have had direct connections to us. Like friends of friends, more people directed to the specific church organization we were raised in. And so you're as far out as we've gotten in there on our podcast. So super happy to have you. And it is Sunday. And so I don't know, did Mormons... Did you normally go to church on Sundays in the past? All day long. All day. Okay, well, happy Sunday where it's not church. This is the podcast day now. We're redefining Sundays. What brings you to the Moral Combat podcast? Why in the hell are you here? Why do you want to be here? Well, I think you're doing important work in reaching out to survivors of religious trauma. And I'm fascinated by the aspects that are similar and that are different between individuals experiencing religious trauma. There's a lot of similarities, regardless of the organization or religion that you were traumatized by. Mormons are considered Christians by themselves. But a lot of other Christian faiths don't think of them as being Christian at all. So there's that disparity. But the trauma of high control religions manifests in the same way. To exemplify that point, we were raised very specifically that Mormons were not Christians. I remember being super young thinking there was a similarity to Christianity. But Mormons, they were the cult. I always thought Mormons are the cult. I never thought of us as the cult. It was like, they're the cult. At least that's what we were told. Yeah. And of course, I didn't think I was in a cult being in the Mormon church, especially because of the size of the organization and the fact that I grew up in Utah, where the vast majority of people who live in Utah are Mormons and very familiar with the church. And it was the most powerful religion in the state. So I always felt like the majority. So it was easy to look at other religions as being, oh, that's probably just a cult. But I never considered myself because of the size and importance, in my mind, as a cult. What do you mean by size? So then you're a young kid thinking this way? Well, the Mormon church has 16 million members worldwide. And in the Mormon church alone, in Utah alone, it has about 2.3 million members. So it's substantial. And I think of cults as being these small little organizations run by a charismatic leader where people are doing weird things. And when you grow up in a faith, the weird things you're doing are normalized so that it doesn't seem cult-like to you. It doesn't seem bizarre, especially when you see everyone around you doing the same thing, behaving the same way. Interesting. I now consider, I think, almost every religion to be a cult in some way or form, right? On the other side of things, it's kind of hard to define really what a cult is. And so I like, as a kid, right, we think of cults as, we always are raised with Hollywood films. Cults are tiny groups of people, like Ted Bundy or these other, right, and they all die. In the cult you were raised in, in the cult we were raised in, they tend to kill more than die, right? Historically. Is there a way, how would you, could you define, could you give me a definition in your eyes or in your experience what a cult is from your experience? I think, I consider it the most significant is the high control the leadership of the cult has over its members. The number of rules and restrictions that apply to membership. But there are certain characteristics that I think set cults apart from more tolerant and inclusive religions or organizations. And one is an inappropriate level of authority for the leaders, an inability to question the leadership. They're suspicious of outsiders, which is Mormons we were. People who are not Mormons were called Gentiles, and they were the bad guys. And also separating individuals from the family unit and the church becoming paramount over the family, particularly if they were being converted and their family wasn't Mormon as well. And lack of transparency in the workings of the church, particularly when it comes to financial disclosure, what they do with the money, how it's being used, and how your contributions are utilized. And this has been a recent problem for the Mormon church when it was disclosed by a whistleblower that the Mormon church had a $200 billion private equity investment fund, which is primarily funded by Mormons paying 10% of their income into the church as tithing. A requirement, not a suggestion, to be able to fully participate in the religion. It's impossible to go to the temple to perform the secret ceremonies and make these covenants without being a full paid tithing member. And people bring their tax records to verify their income. I mean, it's not a subtle thing. It's a very clear cut, we expect 10% right off the top. And when the whistleblower revealed that this private equity fund, the second largest private equity fund in the world, was using these funds not for charity, which ostensibly gives it the tax exempt status, but to prop up Mormon businesses and purchases. There's a hue and an outcry. And then the third being the church kind of having control, or if you will, having full knowledge of the financial background of that said family. What was the first thing that you had said to? An inappropriate level of loyalty to the leaders. Okay, so it's like, right, so it's like the actual family or the leader or whatever, I would imagine the father of that family, right? That's the one in charge, as well, seeing how sexist these things goes. They're the ones that are giving all that power to the church, the church then takes the power and the church then decides what that money does. It's kind of like that's the power of what this cult is. You said $200 billion private equity loan. That's a massive amount of money. And you were talking about these 16 million plus Mormons. Was that an international number? Or is this just in America? No, not worldwide. I think it's closer maybe to 18 now. The last figures I have on are a couple of years old. They have, as you know, an extensive proselytizing program. Over a thousand missionaries are sent out every week to foreign countries to preach the gospel of the Mormon Church and convert new members. And so it's the second fastest growing religion in the world, the fastest growing Christian religion. Wow. Wow. And they don't realize its reach and power. It's also the biggest private landowner in the United States. Oh, I can imagine. Oh, wow. So the most amount of private land owned in this country is by Mormons. The privately owned, yes. Which we know how powerful privately owned land truly is in this country. Right. Lynn, I have a question. Are there different sectors in Mormonism or is it just Mormonism? Well, there's mainstream Mormonism, which is very tightly controlled and very tightly run by a hierarchy of white older men. But there are splintered groups that people identify as Mormons that the Mormon Church would like to disavow, and these are practicing polygamous groups. Interesting. And a lot of media attention is spent. Polygamy is fascinating. The Mormon Church has a history of polygamy, but it hasn't actively been practicing polygamy for many years. However, the doctrine of polygamy is still in effect in the Mormon Church, which the Mormon Church sort of is silent about. Meaning when they stopped practicing polygamy, it was in order to achieve statehood. They could not become a state without giving up polygamy. And so it went underground, and a lot of splinter polygamous groups at that time were formed. And the splinter groups felt like they were remaining true to the Prophet Joseph Smith, who's my great, great uncle, to his counsel, revelation, and advice, which was to take more than one wife and have as many children as you could to raise the army of Zion and usher in the second coming of Jesus Christ. Wow. Interesting. And so, yeah, you're saying that there's still sections of that polygamy that goes all the way back to the beginning that you still see in the Mormon Church, but given the modern times and how much that's not accepted in modern culture, you're saying they kind of shush that area. Well, they can't really disavow it, which is creating a PR problem for the Mormon Church, because these splinter groups are quoting Joseph Smith, the founder of the church. And their argument for polygamy. And so the Mormon Church really kind of has their hands tied in terms of distancing themselves from these polygamous groups. And it's an embarrassment to them. They really would like to be seen as to normalize the opinion of others and them to see the church, the Mormon Church, as a mainstream Christian religion. It's all about normalizing the abuse. Now, does the money that comes into one church per se, does it go to a collective Mormonized organization, or is it church by church base? It is totally up to the very top leader, the prophet, who is currently supposed to be getting revelation from God and who is considered infallible. And him and his 12 apostles decide what happens to the money. There is not a voting group. I mean, they have this financial equity fund set up, obviously investing in businesses and properties, etc., etc. But that's all tax-free, since they're a religion, and they don't have to disclose their financials to anybody. Wow. And so these are 12 people on the top of just the Mormon Church as a whole, yeah? Right. And it's a very hierarchical structure in the Mormon Church. A, it's all men. And you usually ascend to higher levels of position by being one of the quorum of the 70s. They're called 70 men, once again, all men, who aspire to become apostles, shall we say. And it isn't until you're in the quorum of the 70s that you receive a salary. Otherwise, all positions, pastoral, everything else, is done on a volunteer basis. Of course. There are no paid clergy in the Mormon Church. Wow. Just so I'm hearing you correctly, you were saying there are 12 men or apostles that are following the one true prophet of the Mormon Church today. Correct. And that was like Jesus and the 12 apostles. So who's the new Jesus? Who's Jesus today? Who's running it today? Right. In terms of... Who's the head prophet? Yeah. His name is Hinckley. Hinckley. Yeah. He keeps a low profile. Shocker. And he stays in his position until he dies. So these guys are really old. And sometimes I suspiciously think they are, I mean, because they serve until they pass away, really not only out of touch, but might be even suffering from dementia or other old age factors. Totally. Their cognitive abilities definitely are questionable at times, which has led to problems. But of course, there is absolutely no ability to criticize or even speculate that this might be the case in the Mormon Church because of the reverence accorded to the prophet. Wow. I'm sorry. Are we talking about the most recent debate? No, we're talking about the Supreme Court. Oh, wait. The Supreme Court? Wait, hold on. The Mormon Church. There's too many connections. The hierarchies are the same. It seems like the culture of these religions, these Christian religions, kind of how the way the country still runs today. We don't need to get political, but it doesn't sound like the apple falls far from the tree when we're seeing how the leadership goes in this country, especially when you have a 200 billion plus private equity fund with no... The wild thing is that these profits, these businessmen really can get such an insane amount of money, invest it normally into property and into, I'm assuming also like stocks and certain things that the Lord tells them to do tax-free. And I guarantee you they can sell, take profit tax-free because it's for the church as well, which is just wild when you think about it. It's almost like the laws were written this way so that this could happen. I think of the Mormon Church as primarily a big business, honestly. I think the people at the top are not true believers. I think the evidence about the narrative it tells about Joseph Smith and the early history of the Mormon Church can be discovered to be false, inaccurate and wildly misleading. And there's no way these men at the top don't know that. And so I'm just speculating here, but I think they rationalize it and say, well, every church is like this and we're as good as any other church. We're just more successful financially than a lot of other organizations. But this fund is not being used to help with poverty or disaster aid relief. It's not being used in the way that you would assume a church's financial contributions are being used. It hasn't been spent that way. From what you said, a lot of the money is used to reinvest to make more money or to prop up Mormon-owned businesses, right? Correct. I mean, the church-owned businesses. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think... Now, there is an internal charity program where, and this is also a little wild, where if you lose your job or something, you can go to your bishop, which is like the pastor of your local church community, and ask for financial help. And based on your worthiness and the bishop's assessment of your needs, you may be given food, clothes, et cetera, from the bishop's storehouse. So the Mormon Church owns farms and factories that can grow and can food, and all this is a private sort of supplementary welfare program. If you're in the Mormon Church, then you can benefit from this. And you've been paying your tithing. Yeah. And your taxes and your tithe. Yeah, you're a high-paying customer of the Mormon Church. Right. And going to church and no scandals attached to your name. Wow. Yeah, right. Which we'll get into what happens when you break the rules. When I was growing up, just a quick side note, I grew up with a lot of Mormons. I was the president of the Christian Club in high school for freshman and sophomore year. So I was like a very religious kid in the beginning, or seventh and eighth grade, sorry, junior high. I went to a school dance with a young girl who was a Mormon. Family was very Mormon. And we weren't allowed to go to the dance together, so we met up at the dance. It was all really funny. And I was like the Christian, radical Christian. She was like the radical Mormon. Their family was so wealthy, right, compared to a lot of the Christians that were part of the church growing up with us. All of the Mormons I knew at our school were very wealthy. They all were so nice. Every family that I made connections with through this person, tons of kids. And I never liked generalizing. I always had this preconceived notion of Mormons. They were so sweet. They had way more money than the rest of the Christians. And even at a young age, I was making connections of those connections, that if you were part of the Mormon church, you were rich. Why are Mormons always something I always thought? I was just making that connection because it makes a lot of sense hearing you say that, that the Mormon church supports you in the Mormon church. And even if you're in a place of need, it sounds like they really prop you up to get back up to the standard, or if you will, that high success sort of like you're talking about. We're the successful religion, right? We're the one that kind of gets to that. It's interesting. You know, they value success and they emphasize a strong work ethic. There's a lot of very successful businesses, Marriott Corporation to be one. But the CIA and the FBI actually have a recruiting program for Mormons, specifically to recruit Mormons. And there's several reasons for this. One, because so many Mormon men have gone on missions to foreign countries and been trained in another language, that is an asset to the CIA specifically. But also, they don't drink, smoke, or have extramarital affairs, which makes that kind of clean cut a lower risk for the CIA or the FBI. That's the scariest shit I've heard on this podcast. That is pretty terrifying. That is terrifying. But I mean, we've made that connection a lot in our podcast with just how much religion seems to be a funneled process for the military, for everything you just said. For capitalism. For capitalism. For anything. Hardworking, working class people. Yeah. And that's just basically everything you just said there. Yeah. Wow. Creepy. Let's segue. Because I feel like you're going to continually update us and educate us on just popping the lid on the Mormon church, which I love. But one of the things, you kind of dropped a little golden ticket there earlier about how you had some sort of relationship to, well, the founder of all this, Joseph Smith. You also have a memoir that you've written imagining this is about your whole life story being born, having a direct connection to, well, Joseph Smith as your great, great uncle. Yeah, go for it. A lineage, a bloodline connection is really valued in the Mormon church. It's a way of being seen as special. And there weren't a lot of Mormons in Utah who could claim a bloodline connection to Joseph Smith. So we were considered Mormon royalty and held up as an example to be emulated. It just meant that we had to be more perfect, more devoted, more obedient and high performers. My family, for example, my father grew up in a family of 10 and all of his brothers, he had six brothers, and they were all president of their high school student bodies. They all went on Mormon missions. They were all Eagle Scouts. This standard of excellence is just part of the culture. And for us, because of our visibility, it was like Mormonism on steroids, I guess. So my biggest fear was bringing shame to the family. So I was a top performer and a true believer at the time that I left for college. And my memoir is about what happened after four generations of devotion and obedience that I found myself having to leave the Mormon church because I didn't believe it anymore. And I had graduated a year early from high school. And I was planning to attend BYU, which is the Mormon University in Utah. But I had missed the application deadline. So I went to Utah State University planning to transfer after one year. But while I was there, I had taken a class with a professor I adore. He was a creative writing professor. And he found out that I was a believer, a Mormon and a believer. And he challenged me to take the Bible as literature class and warned me that he expected me to be able to defend my faith in class. And I was so naive, I was excited about the challenge. I was going to show him. And so to do that, I didn't go home in between the break between semesters and went to the library, ordered all these books about Mormons and Joseph Smith that had been forbidden to me to read, forbidden for all Mormons to read. And when I got them and started reading them, I was shocked. The narrative that I had grown up with was so different than what these historic scholars, researchers and historians were saying about my great-great uncle and his family, my great-great-grandfather and the early days of the church. That I was stunned. And this was the first time I understood context for religion. And it was in context that I understood how Joseph Smith became this charismatic figure and developed this idea of a religion. It evolved from his family's belief in visions and magical folklore and spirits. And he was arrested for gold digging. He used to tell his neighbors that he had a special peepstone that he could put in a hat and look at, and it would tell him where buried treasure could be found on his neighbor's land. And when it didn't happen, he was arrested and he absconded before he was sentenced. But it wasn't that big of a leap for me to see how he took that and then claimed to have found gold plates in a hillside near his farm in New York and claimed that they were gold plates. On these gold plates was the history of the ancestors of the Native Americans. Nobody ever saw these gold plates, but he said he had them and that with a special stone, he could put it in a hat and look into it and translate this ancient record into English. And I mean, I think about it now and it seems so ludicrous to me, but at the time it was like, oh, wow, that's so cool. But understanding context, there was a lot of religious ferment at the time that Joseph Smith started his church. And I only think that the Mormon Church survived as a separate entity and wasn't reabsorbed into the general evangelical movement was because this huge group of people moved and were isolated in Utah, where they remained isolated for the next 50 years building a church they called the State of Deseret. And they felt like they were rebuilding Zion and preparing for the Second Coming. But by that time, Joseph Smith had been murdered. He had been arrested for burning down a printing press, which I didn't think that was why he was arrested. I thought he was arrested because people were unhappy with what he was prophesying. But he had burned down a printing press that claimed he was practicing polygamy. That's what happened. That was the reason he was in jail. And an angry mob stormed the jail and the guards basically walked away and he and his brother were murdered. Holy shit. And my great, great grandfather, Samuel, rushed to the scene on horseback but got there too late. However, he was the next designated heir apparent to the church. But Brigham Young had designs on becoming the next prophet. First of all, my great, great grandfather, Samuel, didn't want to practice polygamy and didn't think that was a good direction for the church to go. So all the rest of the hierarchy in the Mormon church, they were practicing polygamy. And when I grew up, I didn't even know Joseph Smith was practicing polygamy. I thought it started with Brigham Young in Utah. But no, he had married 41 women in less than a decade, some as young as 14, and some who were already married to friends of his that he had sent away on missions to proselytize and bring in new converts. And Brigham Young had two henchmen who were notorious for getting rid of his enemies. One was a doctor. And when Samuel complained of a stomachache, this doctor gave him some medicine and he just got sicker and sicker and eventually died. So a month after Joseph Smith was murdered, my great, great grandfather died of poison. And his wife and Joseph Smith's remaining brother all claimed he had been poisoned by Brigham Young in an attempt to circumvent his appointment as a successor to Joseph Smith. Which is why most of the people in Utah are not related to Joseph Smith. This left my great grandfather an orphan, and he was farmed out to an uncle who then took him west with Brigham Young and he settled in Utah. But Brigham Young was worried enough about him that he sent him on a mission to establish a settlement in Wyoming because he didn't want an heir to the throne, so to speak, someone who had a bloodline connection to Joseph Smith making waves in Utah. I talk about all this. These were the facts that I was discovering. And Fawn Brody wrote a book called No Man Knows My History, and it's still one of the definitive biographies of Joseph Smith. And it felt like the trap door had opened underneath me, and I was absolutely shattered. The thing that had made me special, set apart, unique, I was so proud of my heritage and my connection. And now he looked like not only a scoundrel, but a con artist, a predatory womanizer, a liar. He cheated people out of money. He was despicable, and there was nothing about him that I was proud of anymore. And it left me absolutely unmoored. It took me a while to kind of absorb what I was reading. But I realized at some point, I think the nail in the coffin was when I found out that he had copied supposedly the special Mormon ceremonies, the rituals, and the ordinances. From the Masons, Joseph Smith had become a Mason. And the secret handshakes and the words and some of the procedures were exact duplicates of the Mason secret ceremonies. And when I found that out, I was like, I can't believe that this is true, the narrative I've learned my whole life. It's just simply not true. And once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. But of course, that left me with a dilemma, how to tell my family. I didn't believe that my great, great uncle was a prophet of God. And I didn't believe that I thought that the Mormon church was a fraud. But when I stopped attending the Mormon church, their social events, going to church on Sunday, going to their religious education program that continues into college, the church came looking for me. And they had people checking up on me, and they knew who I was. And they asked what I was doing, why I wasn't going to church, when I told them that not only did I not believe in the Mormon church, but I wasn't even sure about the idea of God. I mean, if Joseph Smith was a fraud, maybe God was just a myth as well. And I think throwing the baby out with the bathwater is something a 19-year-old can do easily. But at the time, it seemed like a reasonable leap to me. And so I defined myself as an atheist from that point on, causing a lot of heartache to my family because I knew they were going to go back to my parents and tell them I wasn't attending church or Mormon education program. And so I let my parents know. And my mother was absolutely devastated, tried to convince me that I was throwing away my eternal salvation and that I was now the reason the whole family wouldn't be together in heaven. So I knew I was breaking her heart. But she elected to believe that I would return to the fold one day. And I think the denial kept her going. My father had a bigger dilemma on his hands. We were very close. He held me up in the family as the golden child, the one on the pedestal who could do no wrong. And suddenly, I was the one who had left the church. And he had always pointed me out as the example to follow to my younger brothers and sisters. And now, he was kind of caught between a rock and a hard place. And he basically advised me to rethink my position clearly and not make any hasty decisions. But essentially, from that point on, I was persona non grata in my family. They didn't disown me. They didn't cut me off. I was on my own financially independent anyway. And I didn't take any money from that point on. And I finished school, college. But I knew I was bringing shame to my family by staying in Utah. I was an embarrassment, and there was no place for me in a Mormon state. So I left and, sight unseen, moved to New York City as something only a very young person who is naive can do. After a white Wonder Bread diet in Utah, only seeing other white middle-class or upper-class Mormons, moving to New York City was a shock, to put it mildly. But I thought I could just shed my skin and lose my old Mormon background and emerge shiny and new with the anonymity of New York City that it provided. But I found that I couldn't outrun my past as easily as I thought. When we are indoctrinated from birth, you absorb that. We're held hostage by the early reality we have as children. And until you unpack it and deconstruct it, it runs the show. And I made a list as an atheist and prioritized all the things I'm going to do as an atheist that I could not do as a Mormon. And systematically went through and was checking it off. Drink alcohol, smoke a cigarette, swear, have sex. And I was in New York City in the 80s, and it was awash in booze and cocaine. And I went from being a good little Mormon girl to partying at Studio 54. So it was quite a transition. But as much as I tried to escape my past, I felt lost. I didn't feel like I belonged anywhere. And it was before the internet, so I couldn't find other people like me, other Mormons who had left. I didn't know any Mormons in New York City. Nobody had even heard of Mormons, practically. And I would get questions like, Is it true that Mormons have horns? And other things. It was remarkable, which was a real eye-opener for me. But I felt the old tapes play whenever I made a decision that was against my early training. I would feel shame and guilt, even though intellectually, my head told me, You don't even believe that, Lynne. Why are you letting this bother you? It was a visceral kind of reaction. And that's why I sought help. I went to a therapist and tried to describe what was going on. And while she wasn't trained in religious trauma, it was so helpful to have the support of someone to help me take a fresh look at all the assumptions and beliefs that were ingrained in me. What age were you at when you first went to therapy for help? I was about 28. Okay, so at least a good amount of time with you trying to deal with it on your own. Yes, I did. And it wasn't until my anxiety, and I would call it existential angst. I mean, I was saying, Well, what's the whole point? I mean, if this is a random universe, what does it matter? Are there any rules? Where's the rulebook? Where's the guide? I was really lost. Totally. And started drinking and partying too much as a way of escaping the incessant perfectionism that was so deeply ingrained in me. And as I was starting to spiral, I realized I needed help and sought professional help. Yeah. Yeah, it's like looking in a mirror. There's a lot of similarities to mine and yours. I was at that age. I was the same. 19 years old. You're at a because I got a loop back. There's so much that you said, and I've had questions all the way through. But you were 19 when you're at this secular college, right? Because you originally you'd said that you didn't get into BYU because you missed the application date. Right. Which is fascinating to me that these mistakes we make in life end up leading to our salvation. No kidding. Yeah, right. And so that professor that challenged you and you being that perfect Mormon, you were like, bring it on. That's what kind of like it was the challenge that somebody pressured you with. And you were like, I'm going to figure that out. At the age of 19, you're sitting in that library by yourself and you're sitting there, if you can remember the level of denial while you were reading this history from these like books that were otherwise not allowed to read. Right. Which has just hit the history. What exactly did that feel like confronting that reality then right before trauma hits or whatever? I mean, how traumatic was that? Can you remember at that young age? Were you in denial? Were you like, did you refuse the information at first? Well, yes, I tried. But it was, I mean, it was documented. I mean, these were newspaper articles, first signed affidavits by witnesses. It was really difficult to refute the facts. And I was shattered, really. I don't know how to. And I wasn't even angry yet, because that came later, you know, when I felt betrayed by the people who told me a different narrative and that I had been lied to my whole life. Then I started feeling angry. But initially, I was shocked that part of me still wanted to believe. Somehow, in spite of what my head was telling me, this is true. These are facts. This person has no motive to lie about the church. They're obviously not sent by Satan to try to lead me astray. This is just innocent bystanders who are reporting on the facts of history. And I realized I still wanted to believe. And I was really confused by that. And I decided, and I talk about this moment in the book where I go to, we had a ranch in the middle of Utah. And I went for a weekend unexpectedly. My parents were expecting me and got up early one morning and I had decided to go to follow the Mormon prescription to find out if something was true. And that was to fast, pray, read the scriptures, and then ask God to reveal the truth to you. And so I figured I needed that closure. And so I saddled up my horse and rode off into the hills. And I got down on my knees and prayed. I said, I need to know if the Mormon Church is true. And silence, crickets. Cricuts. Cricuts. And I said, I mean, is there a God? If you're out there, I need to know something. And I wasn't expecting a burning bush, but I was half expecting to be struck by lightning. But I wanted a feeling, some sense that there was something bigger than myself out there, God. And I didn't get any confirmation. And I just realized I felt foolish kneeling in the muddy dirt and praying out loud. And I got up on my horse and I rode back to the house. And that was the moment that confirmed for me that I was an atheist. And I was terrified of losing my family. I knew I would lose all my Mormon friends, one of the only friends I had. But I also felt this little tiny bubble as I was riding home. And I let my horse gallop home, as horses tend to do when they get to go to the barn. And I was galloping home and I felt this little bubble. And I was trying to figure out, what am I feeling? And I realized it was freedom. Suddenly, I didn't have this oppressive weight of expectation on all the ways I was a horrible, terrible, bad person because I had unclean thoughts. And the world just got so much bigger. And so there was a sense of excitement as well. Yeah. It's fascinating to be ghosted. Being ghosted by God leads to ultimate freedom. It's like the greatest breakup you could ever ask for that leaves the same horrific trauma, right? It's like, I know that feeling so well. Just as a kid, I was wanting so bad. I remember looking up in the sky and being asked, like, God, please show me any sign so I don't have to be so I can still be a Christian. I remember that it was like it felt like I was going through one of the worst breakups. And I know what you're talking about. It's like there's so many layers to the trauma that you went through just to break free from all of this. Right. And so I guess my next question when I'm thinking about this is who else in your lineage or your family had walked away? Did anybody else walk away from the Mormon church before you? Not that I'm aware of. You're the first of your lineage. So I had this extended clan of righteous cousins and aunts and uncles, etc, etc. And none of them ever publicly, they may have had their doubts or reservations. But none of them. And to my knowledge, still to this day, none of Joseph Smith or his family, the Smith family descendants, have publicly gone on record as saying they recognize that their great-great-grandfather, their great-great-uncle was a fraud and a false prophet. So that was difficult, especially knowing I had lived my whole life embarrassed to take a misstep that might shame my family. So all of a sudden, I was doing the absolute worst thing you could possibly do. And I was considered a heretic, an apostate. And the only reason I think the Mormon church didn't excommunicate me, which is a very formal process in the Mormon church, is that it would have been an embarrassment to them. So they kept tabs on me. Every time I moved, I don't know who was providing them with my address. I'd have people knocking on my door trying to reconvert me. That's creepy. And that was another thing I'm hearing you talk about. They. They. At least in our experience, being pastors' kids, the Christian church truly is, especially if we come from the Calvary Chapel, Christian sort of denomination, they all know each other, they all talk with each other. One of the things I always say is all of the Calvary Chapels in our county know that we have this podcast, and we're part of their prayer chain pretty quickly, too. And so we're very familiar with that feeling of everyone knowing everything about our lives because we're the pastors' kids. But it sounds like for you, the difference was when I took my parents out to tell them I wasn't a Christian, it was this formal thing, I took them out to dinner. There wasn't an elder calling me and being like, you have so-and-so amount of days before we tell your father. And so it sounds like there were these men that were contacted you. That, to me, sounds really creepy. That sounds terrifying. Terrifying. Yeah, it's very intimidating. But I mean, you were raised in this, so I'm sure you're more familiar with that process. Who exactly are those people, I guess? Well, the first people who initially checked it up on me were my visiting teachers, which were women. And women checked up on women and men checked up on men, and they were the ones. And in the Mormon church, you call each other not Mr. So-and-so or Mrs. So-and-so, it's sister and brother. So these two sisters—unrelated, but of course that's the greeting—these two sisters came to my house and were following up with my lack of attendance. But I knew they were going to report it to the local bishop who was going to report it up the chain, and I would assume my parents would be notified. So it forced my hand to disclose. Yeah, if that's not a cult, I don't know what is. That sounds very cult-like. Well, I tend to agree, and I find it shocking how successful the Mormon church has been in presenting themselves as a very wholesome, innocuous, warm-friendly, everybody-wants-a-Mormon-for-a-neighbor. I mean, they're the nicest people. And I think that's what makes it so tragic. I mean, these are really nice people who truly believe what they're doing. Mormons are not Sunday churchgoers. They're a Mormon. Every single minute, they get up in the morning and breathe. And they really try to practice what they preach and also what they believe. And it's just so sad to me that they're duped this way and that the image the Mormon church has spent a lot of money to promote is one of a wholesome, family-centered Christian organization. But I want to ask you, where are the people of color? Where are the misfits? Where are the LBGTQ? I mean, Utah has one of the highest rates of LGBTQ suicide in the country. Wow. There are no women in leadership positions in Utah, not in business and not in politics and not in the church. And it's a very sexist place to grow up. But women in Utah have the highest rate of antidepressant use in the country. Wow. And I call it the mother of Zion syndrome. And that is they have been told their primary job is to be a wife and a mother, a helpmate to their spouse, the patriarch of the family who makes all the important decisions. And their job is to have as many children as possible to usher in Zion. And if you're there, if you're struggling with three kids and you look across the street and your neighbor, Sister Anderson, well, she's got five kids and she still looks like she's happy and always smiling and has everything under control. She's got two more kids than you and you're personally having a meltdown every day. You don't say what's wrong with the picture, this picture, you say what's wrong with me. So it doesn't surprise me that Utah women have very high rates of depression. You have very little autonomy. Your choices are wife and mother, period. Yeah. Regardless what your personal ambitions, desires, interests are. Mothers of Zionism. Is that what you called it? Mother Zion syndrome. Mother Zion syndrome. I love that. I guess you could say mothers of Zionism, too. Yeah, the way that you're sharing all this, I'm not seeing any sort of differences between the Christian church we were raised in. So the only real difference of that pressure for women and mothers, the only real difference I'm seeing is how much more collective the money is funneled. And the organization, it's so highly organized. Yeah. With our upbringing, it was who has the bigger church? Because then you'll have more money, but it's very church focused. It's not like an organ. It's not like it's huge. I know that they could go to like the head Calvary Chapel. Yeah. That would help fund things, but it was more like individual churches. People would leave one Calvary Chapel to go to the next door Calvary Chapel. So there was kind of animosity and drama in between the pastors. Something Lynn mentioned earlier on how she really thinks of this as a business, Mormonism as a business. And then when you think of that structure of the 12 disciples and the one prophet, and they're getting the 10% of the tithe, or everything's kind of being funneled in some sort of way, so that they get this lump sum of money that they can do immense things with to keep the religion getting more powerful and expanding. It's fascinating in a very terrifying way. It sounds like the emperor from Star Wars. Dude, totally, 100%. Which isn't much different than a lot of the Western religions that we see. There's always somebody in charge who's making all the decisions that nobody has a checks and balances over. Nobody has any idea what the tithing money for each individual Christian church is being used for. It goes into that box that nobody has the key for, and then it gets distributed otherwise. And we know that that money helps missionaries, which those are the warriors that are otherwise colonizing these other countries. So it's a very similar system. It's just so much more highly organized than the Mormon Church. So organized. It's fascinating how organized. Yeah, very hierarchical. The ultimate control, it all rolls up to one guy. And by the way, in the Mormon Church, missionaries fund their own missions. So they're not even getting help from the Mormon Church. Oh, really? So they're just zealots. They're just like, I'm putting my own money for this. Really? I did not know that. That's a pretty big difference. You see, in the Christian Church, we see a lot of ex-drug addicts, ex-prisoners. The misfits, right, you called them? Where are the misfits? Well, in the Christian Church, the misfits are the ones that are shipped off to other countries to be missionaries, and they're funded, right? Because it's hard to find work if you are an ex-convict or if you have drug addiction or whatever. But the church will take you in and pay you a little bit of money to help be a youth pastor or help be a missionary, right? So that's one way it's cheap labor. Yeah. The Mormon Church figured it out. They're like, don't even pay them. No, no. Yeah, it's big business. Follow the money, they say. Yeah, no, seriously, follow the money, which I think, like what you're explaining, it does get really blurry, and then it drops off, and we have no idea where this money is going and how it's being used by these people in charge. Right. So then you're sitting in this library, you're 19, you're having all this denial, you're wanting it to not be true. It is true. You confront your mother and father. How did you tell them? What did you do, take them out to dinner? Did you go out for a cup of coffee? I guess you guys didn't have coffee, sorry. Right. No coffee. No alcohol, coffee, tea, Coca-Cola. I didn't have the chance to even get home. I knew I needed a column. This is back in the days before cell phone, and I was always making my Sunday call home. I had to call home, and I talked to my mother first, and then I talked to my dad. Like I said, it rocked their world. I was the last of their children they thought would stray. So there was that shock, and they were devastated. It's very hard to hurt your parents like that. I love my parents. I wanted them to be proud of me. And all of a sudden, weren't they proud of me? They were ashamed, and I was someone they had to basically lie about. They didn't want other people, the community, to know that the Smiths had an apostate for a daughter. So I was an embarrassment. And I think what hurt too was she just continued to refer to the family as, well, we're all Mormons here, even though I'd be in the room. It's this sense of not being seen and part of anymore. For example, my brothers and sisters all got married in Mormon temples, right? Well, I couldn't go. So I would wait outside the temple while they were getting married to take the pictures afterwards and go to the reception. And they didn't understand why my feelings were hurt. Literally, they didn't. They were like, well, why would you want to go? You're not a Mormon. And I'm like, well, usually marriages take place, weddings or affairs that are inclusive so the whole family can see. Well, everybody was there, except you. It was hurtful. Yeah. That's horrible. That's terrible. That's trauma in the making. That's religious trauma in the making on so many levels. Like, oh, that's something you'll deal with in 10 years. Have fun with that. You know, normalizing the segregation. That is one major difference I've noticed in my experience when I left is Mormons would be excommunicated, and guess where they would go? Our youth group. That's true. Really? Yeah. We took in, I think if I'm thinking this correctly, two or three Mormons. One was a young man that was gay, and when he came out, his family and the church excommunicated him, and we took him in with open arms, right? It was like a transfer of religion, or if you will. And I also knew somebody who was also kept out of one of his weddings for his family, and those Mormons are so mean. I can't believe that they would treat you that way. You know, where I was still popping into my parents' church, you know, out of guilt for like a decade after, you know, and with open arms, they would convince that I'd come back to the faith at some point. Oh, well, I mean, that was after years and years of forcing you to go to church after you denied your faith too. They would force me to go. That might be another difference of like, you will believe. You will be forced to believe. Yeah. Kind of like how you said your mother was like, we're all Mormons here, right? It was denying, like, let's just deny you of your age. Let's remove your agency and make you sit in that feeling, you know, is terrible. Yeah. I think, you know, for me, it took a long time, decades really, to try to parse out all the different nuances of how much damage the ideology had contributed to my ability to trust myself. And to even know who I was, because when you had somebody else do all your thinking for you, I mean, I mean, literally you would have a question. It's like, well, Sister Smith, meaning me, you know, you don't need to worry about that because the prophet has told you this. And if I persisted, it was answered with, everything will be explained in heaven, and it will all make sense to you then. Your job is just to follow the prophet's teachings and leadership. And so you don't have a sense that your assessment of a situation is valid when you're constantly being told that ignore your feelings, your doubt, your skepticism, your critical thinking skills, and just assume that you're wrong. And that takes a lot of undoing. So I felt like a lot of different practices helped me. After therapy, I got into yoga because I was disconnected from my body. There was so much shame. It's a very purity-oriented, you know, no sex before marriage and sex for procreation. They don't believe in birth control. And so the practices of yoga and meditation were important for me to place myself back in my body and pay attention to the signals my body was telling me about how I felt. And also meditation, learning to watch my thoughts and see what came up. And so those were things that were helpful and finding, eventually, a community of other individuals who had left high demand, high control religions and share that sense of not being alone anymore. I also was able to stop treating my family as a unit and reached out to some of my sisters. And that was more helpful one-on-one in terms of trying to deepen the dialogue and have something other than just a superficial conversation. So therapy, which started at the late 20s, is when you actually got into and this was, sorry, the 80s, or now you're in the 90s, in the 80s when you started therapy. So religious trauma, that term wasn't even really brought into therapeutic conversation until the last decade. 30 years later. So in therapy back then, in your late 20s, are you somebody that considers yourself somebody that suffers from religious trauma for one, right? Do you still consider yourself somebody that suffers from religious trauma is my first question. And second, how did you start to figure that out or when did that reality of everything we're talking about, how did it become more of a part of your life in your healing journey? Right. Well, initially, the issues I had were more family-oriented. Like my overbearing, patriarchal, authoritarian father, who I also adored because he was the one who had all the power in the family. And my helpless, powerless mother, who I blamed for not protecting me from him. He was physically as well as verbally abusive. And so initially, therapy started from that point of reference. And then I started to realize that my mother was a victim as well. And I started looking at the larger picture and realized she was playing out the role that had been prescribed to her. She had given up her dreams to get married at 19. And so it was something that came to me gradually, and I didn't really even label it religious trauma until the last decade. I just had a lot of anger at the Mormon Church for what I felt robbed me of my sense of self. But I wouldn't have used language that would have said religious trauma, but definitely that's what it was. Totally. So then during these years and years of therapy regarding parental trauma, familial trauma, all of these things you're working on, did you see a big jump in your healing or a big jump in your awareness of self when these terms or when religious trauma became more well-known? Did you see changes in the way that you were viewing your history or just yourself in general? No question, which talks to the need for the specificity of religious trauma therapy, because accurately labeling something, the clarity that that brings, oh, I see now. It's also a way of understanding that your situation is not unique, that this is what happens when you are part of a high control organization or religion, a cult. It started when I got a degree in journalism and psychology, but I remember being fascinated with brainwashing and group think. And even then I was starting to make the connection between the psychological aspects of my upbringing and how that played out in psychology. And I just continued to follow everything that I could get my hands on about the Mormons and about the religious trauma from other groups and cults. And of course, there were several big stories, Jim Jones in the intervening years, the massacre in Guyana and other things. And I would make comparisons to the Mormon Church and other organizations. What a fascinating time, right, for you. You just said that you have a degree. By the way, I think I misspoke earlier. Hinckley was president, but the new president is Russell Monson. It's okay. The more names we get on to blow the lid on this shit, the better. Russell Nelson. Russell Nelson. Sounds like the emperor. Hinckley was the one before him. You know, something fascinating that you said, Lynne, that you said was told to you as a young adolescent being raised in Mormonism is that some of the questions, some of the critical thinking you might have already done, you'll learn when you die. I remember being told that, too, where it's like, anything that you think is wild or unknown, all answers will be told to you when you die. So just keep being oppressed and keep following against your judgment as a human, and then you can keep the culture moving. Yeah, the term was, you'll stand before God after you die. Like, how do you know that to be true? The response is, you'll stand before God and know the truth. Yeah, it's such a cop-out. You know, well, what if God isn't real? Well, you'll stand before God and confer. Every sort of thing that you can say against the religion normally can lead to that. Well, you'll stand before God after you die and answer for all of it then. And that kind of lets people off the hook. Yeah. Right. And it discourages that kind of thinking. It's all right. And it took a while for me to trust my thinking, because you haven't had that experience of making your own evaluation of a situation and acting on it. So I was taking baby steps. And I think the hardest part was feeling so alone in doing it, not knowing that other people had left cults and the Mormon Church, et cetera. I mean, I knew they existed, but they weren't in New York City where I was. And I spent the first part of my time in New York City trying to just outrun it. You know, move away from it, dismiss it. And then I would get triggered again by a situation. And it's interesting how long it takes to really let go of really ingrained indoctrination. I went to see the Book of Mormon play when it first came out in New York. Are you familiar with that? Yeah, of course. I've never seen it. I've never seen it either. Because every time there's been opportunity to see it, I didn't go, but I've wanted to go see it. Were you triggered when you went and saw it? And I was shocked that I was triggered, because I've been out of the church for decades. But I went to it, and it's a good-natured, poking fun of some of the more far-out belief systems that the Mormons have. And everyone around me in the audience was laughing uproariously, and I didn't find it funny. And I realized that a part of me was reacting to them. They're laughing at something that is sacred. And I couldn't believe I was capable of that thought. Wow, yeah. But it disturbed me to see that the Mormons were being laughed at. And I had to finally pull that thread and realize on some level, deep, deep, deep down, I must still identify as a Mormon. I'm not sure I'll ever get past that completely. And so I had found it disrespectful. It could also have the impact of, you know how important that religion is to so many people. It was so important to you. It's so controlling. It was sacred. So sacred, yeah. And so you watch people laughing at it, and you're like, stop laughing at something that is incredibly sacred to my entire family, to my whole lineage. Yeah, totally. That's very true. They were making fun of some of the more not widely known beliefs. Mormons believe that when you die, there are three levels of heaven. And only Mormons who are married in the temple and have had children will ascend to this celestial top level of heaven and be in God's presence. But the goal is after that, you become a god yourself, just like God, and on another planet, and create your own worlds. And that's when polygamy comes back into play, because you'll have multiple lives in heaven and populate whatever worlds you create and design. Yeah, and we've known that since we were little kids. I don't remember when I knew that, but I knew Mormons had, when they died, they were gods with multiple wives. I remember always thinking that. What did they say? Because I know what our Christian upbringing says. What did they say the women's job is in heaven? What is your reward if you were a good Mormon? Well, that's just it. I mean, you're one of many wives, for starters. And I don't know how modern Mormon women deal with the fact that they're looking forward to a future of sharing their husband with multiple wives. I mean, that certainly wouldn't be my idea of heaven. So I don't know how they wrap their brain around that, but their job is not one that's even explained. It's so male-oriented and patriarchal in nature. And for example, in the Mormon Church, they never talk about a mother god or your mother in heaven. And so, you have a male religious figure, for starters, that you're supposed to emulate, which is screwed up if you ask me. No, totally. Anyway, so it's not explained, and it's not explained because it's not deemed important enough to explain. Yeah, this idea of femininity is ripped out in the Mormon religion. There's like, all forms of femininity are gone, and we're going to replace with all forms of toxic masculinity. Go! Even after your death, you shall. And I think you asked the question, how could a modern Mormon woman deal with that today? Well, when you rip agency from somebody from birth, do they even have the ability to know fully? Exactly. And I think that's why the depression rates are so high. It's unconscious rage. And it's so sad. And I'm making connections to our own personal experience and our lives right now with everything you're saying. It's actually very powerful because we're experiencing that in our own family right now. Speaking of family, I'm interested, do you still have a relationship with your brothers or sisters or anyone at the moment? Yes. There was a crisis in my family, and I talk about it more in the book, but that led our family to get family therapy. Oh, wow. And I realized that in and of itself is such an anomaly that everyone in the family would choose to participate. And we all showed up for one day of family therapy and then three days of being together as a family at these, every other year, a family reunion and therapy and gathering. And we learned about the fact that it would be almost impossible for us to communicate respectfully to each other on the subject of religion and politics for that matter. Because what was traumatic for me is sacred to you, the exact same thing. And so how do we have a discussion about this when we are so far apart in our viewpoints that we can't even understand truly where the other person is coming from? I say I feel like I could better understand their position because I was once there. But I feel like my Mormon brothers and sisters can't really wrap their brains around. They feel like they are overtly respectful to me about what I believe, but it's condescending because they know deep in their hearts that they have the true faith and the answer to everything. So they may give lip service to the fact that, you know, Lynn, I like your idea of spirituality, and that's all well and good. And they've learned not to be critical of it as I have learned not to be critical of their beliefs. So we've built a fragile bridge of reconnection, but it's fragile. And I wrote my family when my agent was sending the book to publishers and said there's a possibility that this book is published. And if you want your name changed, let me know. And if you want to read it, let me know. And to my surprise, everyone wanted to read it. I really thought my Mormon brothers and sisters, knowing where I was coming from, would choose not to read it. But I did tell them, you know, you can unfollow me on social media and other places, LinkedIn, etc., because I'm going to have posts that may be offensive to you. And I won't take offense. I know you're just doing what you feel like is best for you. But they read it, and the Mormons have requested that I change their names in the book. Now, since I left decades and decades later, I've had some other brothers and sisters leave the Mormon Church. My little sister with her nine children, very devout, but one of the most beloved family members of her nine boys, well, six boys and three girls, came out as gay. And he was beloved in the family. He was known as a peacemaker, a gentle soul. Everybody adored him. And when he came out as gay, that rocked my sister's world. And she and all of the rest of the kids, except one, left the Mormon Church. Wow. That's the right thing to do. That's the right thing to do as a parent. But it doesn't happen that often. But my sister basically said, I cannot believe in a God that would view this child of mine as an abomination. That's unacceptable to me. And the millennials are leaving the Mormon Church in record numbers, and it's largely over this issue. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And even worse, the Gen Z problem. And the Mormon Church has not evolved. Other than getting rid of polygamy, which they had to, it hasn't really changed its policies since its inception. So it's not like one of the churches that has evolved to keep up with the times. And I don't know if what you're reading has told you, but recently I was reading the Pew Report last year said that spiritual, but not religious, represented 23% of how people identify themselves. And that's a growing number. Particularly since the pandemic, there has been a real interest in spiritual matters, a growing interest in spirituality and other communities that are not church-centered. Totally. Yeah. I've read a lot over the years. I mean, that's what I said leaving the church forever was I'm spiritual, not religious. I didn't know what else to say. I was too scared to call myself an atheist. But it's true that I think we're evolving into becoming a more spiritual species overall and less religious. That would make sense on an evolutionary level. Totally. And the powers that be don't like evolution. That's why they don't believe in it, right? I remembered what I was going to say earlier in tying in everything that you just shared about your family and your sister and all this. One of the things that you had said, two things. One of them was the connection you had with your mother, you had this point in life where you realized that she was a culprit also of where she came from. That she too was just a person who was born in a system that otherwise oppressed her substantially, just like you were. Since Zach and I have started this podcast, I've started to in our healing journey together doing this, just having this conversation, both him and I together have really started to see our mother and father as culprits of this system. And that has been a huge part of my healing because it takes me out of it. I don't have to be the victim anymore when I realize we're all in this together. How old were you when you came to that conclusion that your mother too was just part of this? It took quite a while for me to lose my anger and realize that she too was a product. She had wanted to have a career in opera. When she was a junior in high school, my father, six years older than her, they started dating. Even though her mother had groomed her to go on and she had a scholarship to Juilliard, she turned it all down and married my father because her mother said, that is the most important thing to your spiritual salvation. In the big picture, it's the only thing that really matters. He's a smess, as we kind of chuckle now and call it. Yeah, she thought she had a golden ticket to heaven. So I realized that she had lost out on all of her dreams and that she had been raised, even though groomed by her mother, to have a career as an opera singer. That flipped on a dime. When this catch, Smith Mann showed up and wanted to marry her, her mother quickly acquiesced and said, marry him. So I really became a lot more aware, sensitized, and forgiving. My mother and I, she just died last year at 89. Yeah, but the last, I'd say 20 years, we had a wonderful relationship. Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah, and I'm really, really grateful for that, that healing. And my father and I as well. Wow. That's really, really cool to hear. Yeah. Part of my memoir is about the fact that estrangement is different in everybody's situation. There's toxic estrangement. There's just estrangement. It's a continuum. And as long as it's not toxic and there is a willingness and a desire on both sides to try to find some common ground, I think that estrangement can be healed. And I think my message is one of hope that regardless of how far apart you are in a family on your religious or political views, for that matter, there are ways for you to be a family. And we figured that out. And even though it sometimes feels very tenuous, fragile, I mean, we're going, the sibling reunion, we're going, because both of my parents have passed, to Panama in February on a family sibling reunion. And we won't discuss religion and we won't discuss politics. And we'll look for places where we have common ground, where we basically see each other as fellow human beings and give each other the dignity of having, making our own choices and making our own decisions about the path we're on. That's beautiful. Congratulations to you and your family for that. Thank you. Our podcast, we've been able to hear a lot of different stories of what people need to do in terms of what you just said, estrangement. And toxic estrangement seems to be a very well-known symptom of this or outcome of these situations. And so that's beautiful to hear that. That's kind of what I think of me and Zach with our folks. There is a heavy estrangement, but it's becoming less toxic, right? The more that, as individuals, we're able to let ourselves off the hook becomes less toxic for us. I'm glad to hear that. The last point that I wanted to, sorry, go ahead. No, I said, I'm just glad to hear that, you know, that there's progress. And I think, you know, focusing on what you share, what you have in common is the path to closer relationships. Yeah. Yeah. Not focusing on the shit that we disagree on, but let's focus on the tiny things we actually can talk about. And I totally understand that. One of the things that you'd mentioned a while ago, you had said that you were kind of talking about the Mormon play. You were talking about the Book of Mormon ever. And you were saying that you were sitting in there and you were having these feelings and you were like, you know, I was triggered, which I was surprised I was triggered. I didn't think I would be triggered. But who knows, maybe a little piece of this is with me forever or something you had mentioned. And so this religious trauma, right, that's the triggers that we know about that I know very well, that no matter how strong I am or how soft or healed I feel to be at times, it's so surprising that these triggers can still happen. And I can find myself having like hiccups of trauma or hiccups of fear or anxiety or doubt. Can you touch on that for yourself? We always want to be fully healed as humans. Do you think that that's the goal? Should we be searching for ultimate healing from this religious trauma? Or is it something we live with forever? Well, you know, I guess I don't believe in perfection. I think we're perfectly imperfect. So is there such a thing as a fully actualized, fully evolved enlightened person? I don't think so. And I think it's the same thing in terms of healing from religious trauma. John Bradshaw, who's probably the father of family therapy, said, you know, if you lose a leg, you know, you can still ice skate, but you're ice skating with one leg and you can be a damn good ice skater. And I think that's really a way of reframing it. I will always have those wounds. But that doesn't mean I can't go on with my life and be happy and have successful relationships with both my family and now my own family, and that the experiences can be transformed into compassion and a greater understanding so that we tend to judge others less. And realize that when we really get down to it, we're more alike than we are different. Ain't that the truth, huh? Yeah. And there's beauty and diversity. That's like the basis of evolution. So all of the shit you've been through in your life, taking that leap literally of faith into the unknown has like helped chop that generational curse in your family and led you to our podcast today. And that is so fucking cool. You've really been through it. You said that your agent has sent the memoir. The memoir is out on the search to be published, right? Well, it's with eight publishers right now. They've asked to read the manuscript and we've given them four to six weeks to read it and get back to us. So I should know something, you know, hopefully in the next month or six weeks, and that it's found a home and then I'll know the publication date. But I have a website. I have a podcast. I mean, I'm a guest on podcasts. I have a blog, Heretic Survivor, From Mormon to Me, and that can be found on my website. And it's just LynnSmithGregory.com. That's my handle on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. You said that you do have a podcast or you've been on podcasts? No, I've just been on. I've been a guest, but it lists all the different podcasts. Podcasts you've been on? Well, I hope we make it on that website for sure. Is The Heretic Survivor From Mormon to Me the title of your memoir? No, my memoir is titled We Were Smiths, Escaping the Shadow of Joseph Smith's Mormon Legacy. Spicy, love it. Yes. When you Google that, it should come right up. I would really hope that your team emails us or sends us a copy when this all happens so that we can have it up in our studio for you. Yeah, we'll put it in the back on the guest cam. Yeah, we can put it in our guest book counter and then also I would love to read it. Well, I can definitely do that. I have your email. We'll stay in touch. I'll let you know if and when it gets picked up and what the publication cycle is going to look like, when it will be released. And also, let this guest spot be up on my blog and newsletter that goes out. Love that. Yeah, because you did an absolutely amazing job. I mean, you had such a life and you put it down into like an hour and a half there very nicely for us to get a pretty well-rounded idea of just the absurdity of the Mormon Church. And the absurd connections between the Mormon Church and the way we were brought up is actually to a T, pretty much. Almost. Almost. Yeah, it's very close. I think very important because a lot of the points you made today was about being raised in a radical cult group, right? Yeah. Take the religion out of it. If you're raised in a radical cult group, you're probably going to have a lot of similarities with all the other people raised in radical cult groups. And that's what part of our mission as we've been healing from our own upbringing, we are really wanting to make that connection more on our podcast just by the stories. And so thank you for doing that for the first time with us here today on our podcast. Well, I've really enjoyed being with you, and I think the work that you're doing is really important. Yeah, it's much more universal than we suspect when we're in the beginning of it. Totally. And more powers to you going through all this before the internets because one of the greatest securities me and Zach felt doing this was going public this way. And then building the community that we had. I mean, of course, we've been shit on and still are. And you'll probably get, you know, a fair amount of comments too, which if you'd like to read, please do if not. But the way technology has, we can do this now. We can start having these conversations. We can start posting them publicly. And even if the algorithm isn't happy with it, here we are. So thank you so much for doing this, for putting yourself out there. I'm so excited for your book. Thank you. We have one more question for you. Yes. So to all the other kids or adults, what have you, that are struggling either in Mormonism, Christianity, Islam, Catholicism, what have you, are battling their faith, maybe suffering from some severe religious trauma. Do you have any advice you could give them to help them through this time? Well, I would say seek support and have patience with yourself. A lot of gentleness and compassion. This is sometimes a journey that's two steps forward, one step back, and it takes time. And so just be gentle with yourself, be as compassionate as you possibly can, and get the support of like-minded individuals and professionals who can help you unpack it. Beautiful. Be patient with yourself. Yeah, that's like the key. Don't rush anything. Trust the process, which is the rest of your life. It's the process. It's a gift of celebration. Baby, every day is a celebration of life. We should be actually feeling that. And for some of us, I think for all of us, but for some of us raised in radical cults, you have a lot of work to do. I love that analogy of being a one-legged ice skater. It feels like that some days. It's just like, well, you know, keep skating, figure it out. You know, don't do it alone. It's nice if you have other people holding that one leg up as you're going down the ice. Yeah, 100 percent. All right. Well, thank you so much, Lynn. I've really appreciated you, your energy. You're really wonderful and amazing. Thanks for reaching out to us. And I'm so happy you found us. And I really look forward to building our connection and maybe having you on again in the future after your book is out. Oh, totally. And you've done many, many more podcast circuits. We'd love to bring you back to talk about how your book is doing, how you have evolved from this process of going public. Because we have found going public with our own stories is like what a therapeutic process that's been, shockingly. And so here you are doing the same thing. And that's very powerful. Well, thank you. I appreciate that and your support. Yeah. I really enjoyed myself. Yeah, us too. Well, thank you, everybody out there in the YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, wherever you're watching this. Thanks for being here. The Mortal Kombat podcast has been episode 78. I am Nathan. I'm Zach. And this is Lynn Smith. Thank you again, Lynn. And we will be back in a couple of weeks. Bye, everybody. Bye, everyone. Bye. Bye.