Emotions among Latter-day Saints across the country were raw as the news spread on Thursday. In Charlottesville, Va., Meredith Marshall Nelson was at her son’s violin lesson when her brother texted her. She began to cry in relief, and recalled how the weekend that the 2015 policy was announced was the first time in her life that she did not want to go to church.

“It felt so incongruous with the teachings of Jesus,” said Ms. Marshall Nelson, 33, who is the editor of the Mormon Women Project, a storytelling outlet. “He said, ‘Let the children come unto me, and forbid them not.’”

In Rexburg, Idaho, Kristine Anderson said she and her friends were overwhelmed. “Everyone’s freaking out,” she said. “There is anger, frustration, happiness, all of it mixed.”

“Everything just broke” in 2015, said Ms. Anderson, who has three young children. “I couldn’t get out of bed for three days. I cried and cried. I couldn’t even look at the church building, it hurt so much.”

Even though the policy is now history, she remains frustrated. “There are so many people who disagreed with the policy the whole time, and we’ve been looked at as apostates and heretics, because you are not supposed to disagree with the prophet,” she said.

The decision came nearly eight months after Russell M. Nelson, the president of the church, said that he had received a revelation that the church should no longer be referred to as Mormon, but by its full name. Many observers saw it as a sign that the church aimed to align itself with mainstream American Christianity.

“On the one hand, the church is trying to figure out how to keep its younger members and how to be a large church in the 21st century,” Amanda Hendrix-Komoto, an assistant professor of history at Montana State University, said of this moment. “But in other ways, it is also trying to retain its distinct identity.”