For the ex-Mormons I talked to, life in the church had been all-encompassing—their entire sense of self and identity articulated vis a vis their church membership. In daily living, they strove to fill themselves with the Lord’s divine presence, to “choose the right” in all actions, and to imbue within themselves a permanent disposition toward “righteous living.” In particular, they learned to attune themselves to the “promptings of the spirit,” to treat their physical bodies as sacred temples, and to devote all of their worldly and sexual labors to building a “celestial family.”

While matters of religious doctrine and theology could be intellectually debated and jettisoned after leaving Mormonism, ex-Mormons said they still felt Mormon at times. Mormonism “gets into you,” they exclaimed. A lifetime of ritual practice in fact seemed to have created a disturbing sense of being haunted by vague embodied memories that reemerged from time to time—inhibitions, anxiousness, or fear—as they felt the church surreptitiously reassert its control over them. They complained of lasting sexual deficiencies, frequent fluctuations between emotional panic and detachment, and occasionally being lulled into experiencing unwelcome sensations of “feeling the spirit.” Even long after ex-Mormons thought they “were over it,” the banal routines of daily life often served as a catalyst for the untoward return of ostensibly forgotten memories of what it was like to be Mormon, even if the beliefs and practices of Mormon life were gone. The intractability of these embodied memories, their continued presence despite the absence of belief, unnerved the ex-Mormons I spoke to. It’s a traumatic experience, they told me, not only because of all that was lost in their departure from the church, but also because of everything that still hung on and refused to go away. As one man told me, “You’re driving in your car, and you hear a song on the radio, or you go someplace you haven’t been to in a while, and a memory or a feeling will pop up… it might make you feel guilty for leaving, sad, or lonely, and you say, ‘Whoa, I didn’t realize that was still there.’”

The philosopher Henri Bergson, believing that our whole past exists within us in latent form, taught that physical sensation, embodied practice, and memory are inextricably intertwined. Similarly, in their early work with “hysterics,” Freud and Breuer (1895) found that the affective force of psychical trauma— “fright, anxiety, shame or physical pain”—stemmed from unwelcome, unconscious memories burrowing into the depths of the psyche. The traumatic experience, whether originating from a singular event or a chronic condition, lodged itself into the unconscious mind and “[acted] like a foreign body,” which long after the fact continued to function as an autonomous “agent that is still at work.” Trauma, in this vein, came to be thought of as a disease of embodied memory.

It seems for ex-Mormons that the church’s persistent ability to inhabit their daily lives, long after recanting their beliefs, registered as a persistent form of psychosomatic trauma in their post-Mormon lives. This was particularly virulent in issues of sexuality where ex-Mormons contended with a lifetime of pressure to “build eternal families” and admonitions to protect oneself from sexual temptations. Ex-Mormon women seemed particularly afflicted by this lasting form of sexual-spiritual embodiment. Although this issue echoed throughout my interviews, once while attending an ex-Mormon support group meeting I witnessed a woman I call Sara poignantly describe this experience. Gesturing with an open palm over her midriff and breasts, Sara explained how her body had changed after giving birth to three children within the first 4 years of her marriage. “I lost my body to the church,” she declared. “I wasn’t always like this.” Before marriage and children, she had been proud of her physique—young, firm, and fit with a trim waistline and “perky breasts.” However, now she said she felt sunken, heavy, and unattractive. It was not that she did not want or love her children dearly. “They’re everything to me,” she stated. But the choice to have as many as she did, and when she did, felt like it had not been hers. “I never got a chance to just be young and beautiful,” she lamented. Other women in the group sympathized with her. Each had her own story of loss, her own embodied memories of sacrificing her figure and sexuality to the church.

I lost my body to the church” indeed became a common refrain among many of the ex-Mormon women I encountered. Inevitably, talk of loss was paired with descriptions of lives spent in the church in which they felt “trapped” in their bodies—“locked behind the bars of patriarchy,” as another woman put it—constrained by frumpy clothing, a demeaning self-image, and teachings that slotted them solely as childbearing mothers attached to priesthood-holding men. Most importantly, though, loss was a language of the enduring and ambivalent absence of self in their post-Mormon lives, brought about by the church’s continued constraining and controlling presence. Although they could begin wearing more flattering clothing, they said, it was not as easy to ignore the stretch marks and drooping breasts that are immutably etched into their flesh, constant reminders of a body transfigured in service to the church. For those like Sara, the body became a potent mnemonic device that stubbornly reminded her of what was lost (in the form of a youthful buoyancy) and what was gained (in the form of wrinkles and stretch marks) during her life in the church. She now found that even mundane practices such as looking in the mirror, provoked anger, sadness, and memories of a life lost. “Every day I can literally see what the church did to me!

However, these mnemonic triggers were not isolated to the presence of visible markers on the body. They also registered as an unshakeable awareness of absence and deficiency. Because the values and beliefs that tacitly inform habits are entrenched in people’s modes of conduct with themselves and with each other, they may continue long after the rationale supporting them has been forgotten (Csordas 1994). For ex-Mormon women, loss was a polysemic metaphor that pointed to feelings of not knowing how their sexual bodies worked, of realizing that for decades they had been unable to use their bodies as they wished and had been trained to look at them as an enduring source of sin, not pleasure. Ex-Mormon women described lifetimes of “not knowing” their bodies, feeling unable, or unwilling, to fully explore their pleasure potential. For another woman named Patti, this registered as a continued lack of control and ownership, a colonization of self that scared her away, even now, from exploring what was ostensibly “hers.” “The church did a good job of drilling into me the idea that even thinking sexual thoughts was a sin. Touching myself was a sin, talking about sex was a sin. I got lessons regularly about chastity and staying pure and protecting my temple. Even though it was my body, I had no control over it. It’s sad, but I know so many women who never knew they could achieve an orgasm before they left the church. It took me over a year before I was comfortable enough to have one myself.”

Among ex-Mormons, a prominent, lingering form of this was also talked about in terms of having “God in the bedroom.” Despite rejecting the church’s teachings, ex-Mormons often found that God may have left their day-to-day thoughts but had somehow stayed between the sheets, appearing and reappearing during their most intimate moments. For example, John and Lana could talk about sex easily and openly with me and each other, but they were unable to put that talk into action. Over drinks at their house one evening, Lana described what it meant to have “God in the bedroom.” “Sometimes when we try something new, I literally get nauseous. I don’t know what it is… I try to talk myself out of it, but it’s always there. We’ll talk about trying something new, but when it comes to it, I always end up crying.” The physical act of sex, especially John’s attempts to “try something new,” made her question whether leaving the church was the right thing to do, the affective power of guilt for using her body “inappropriately” in these moments of sensuality drawing her back into what she described as “a Mormon mind-set.” “I can go into the room feeling one way, but as soon as we start going, something changes and I’m sucked right back into it.”

An understanding of ex-Mormons’ religious disaffection is therefore incomplete if all that is taken into consideration is their rejection of particular ideas and beliefs associated with the institutional church or its formal doctrine. Even after rejecting the church’s teachings, Mormonism’s presence in some ways lingers on in the form of a persistent, tacit embodied ontology that divides one’s sense of self between a polluting body and a sacred spirit and creates an aversion to sex in its libidinous forms and a leeriness of the bodily pleasures sexual activity may produce. This inhibition no longer takes the form of an explicit ideology but a tacit colonization of the coterminous mind/body subject. As Katie Stewart writes, the body is not “incorporated into the self as inert substance or bodily ‘self-image’” but rather manages to “retain an affecting agency all its own” (1996, 132). Ex-Mormons know this “affective agency” all too well, as the body persistently reemerges as a problem amidst their disenchantment. The embodied habits, dispositions, ways of feeling and moving, and internal divisions and external boundaries have all been crafted and disciplined through years of envelopment in church activities, families, and doctrinal teachings, resulting in a persistent “interpellation” of self as “Mormon” (Althusser 1971).