The whole phrase “The people aren’t perfect but the gospel is!” is deeply flawed. First of all, the gospel is not perfect AT ALL, and it’s actually the gospel doctrine that enables these imperfect people to be complete assholes to one another.

The “people” and the “gospel” are two sides of the same coin, and they 100% enable/influence one another. In fact, the “people” use the “gospel” to justify being shitty to one another all the time.

When I was going through my faith “crisis” I had SO MANY PEOPLE tell me that I should just focus on the gospel and stop focusing on what the members were doing or on the culture. So I did that, and I soon realized that the people are this way BECAUSE of the gospel.

The Mormon gospel incites WAY more judgement in their members than love. It’s a religion obsessed with perfection and “righteous judging” and “saving others” and being an “example.” It’s only about “love” at the tail end of it all.

And it’s so funny because you can easily find love and acceptance outside of Mormonism, but the people AND the gospel tells us all that it’s not “true” joy or acceptance, it’s all temporal and not eternal. They manipulate you into thinking that a more shallow version of it all

is actually what joy feels like. I was terrified to leave the church because I thought that I would never feel happiness or community or love or spirituality ever again. But that was all a lie that was told to me by the Mormon gospel. The amount of connection and love I feel now

surpasses what I felt in Mormonism by hundreds of miles. My current spiritual path left Mormonism to eat my dust. I remember when I was first taught about missionary work, they told me that if I knew the cure to cancer, would I shout it to the rooftops, or keep it to myself?

Of COURSE I would tell EVERYONE and not shy away when the opportunity arose. I had found the cure to CANCER! It’s funny because now, I use that same analogy for telling people to leave the church. It’s a cancer, the cure is out there. You don’t have to suffer for another moment.

It’s not those who endureth to the end who are lifted up— it’s those who break free from suffering who are lifted up, and it’s amazing how high you’ll go. I never knew that I could feel this level of inner peace. This magnitude of joy. Or this depth of spiritual connection.

And the freedom to express those things in the way that resonates with YOU is so powerful.

Leaving Mormonism was absolutely the most difficult, darkest thing I have ever gone through, but it also taught me that I never should have been afraid of the darkness to begin with.

Leaving Mormonism gave me the opportunity to sit down with my shadow, my darker self, and actually have a conversation with her instead of praying her away or distracting myself with some half-baked General Conference talk. Leaving Mormonism means doing the inner work

that Mormonism never taught you to do. And once you kinda walk through outer darkness and befriend it and bring it into you and accept it as part of your balanced self, you’ll never be afraid of yourself anymore. You learn that anything can be healed.

So anyways, this is just a really long tangent after having a little too much wine just tell ya to keep questioning things, keep growing, follow your intuition, and don’t let others dilute it