Earlier this month, I posted about a new website to help Mormons leave the Church for good. QuitMormon offers free legal representation for people ready to resign their membership.

In case you’re wondering why ex-Mormons might need a lawyer’s help and why they can’t just “leave” on their own, it’s because the Church won’t let them go. If you want out, they’ll send people to your home to talk you out of it. They’ll contact your family and neighbors about you. They’ll basically harass you until you come back. And then, just to make it tougher on you, they make you fill out paperwork in order to be officially taken off their lists.

A lawyer can serve as middleman, filling out the forms on your behalf and being the Church’s point of contact for you. If the Church doesn’t confirm that they received your paperwork, the lawyer can follow up so you don’t have to. Anyone who’s gone through the process can tell you how much of a relief that sort of help would have been.

Mark Naugle is an attorney who has been helping many Mormons through the process. It was only recently that a software engineer reached out to Mark and helped create a website to facilitate this whole process.

QuitMormon has only been in operation for a month now. But in a message posted to the Ex-Mormon subreddit yesterday, Mark provided an incredible update:

I genuinely appreciate all of your patience throughout the process. I was not at all prepared for the massive response. Right now we are sitting at about 6,500 resignations processed through me.

So including Mark’s work both before the website’s launch and since then, he has processed a staggering 6,500 resignations from the Mormon Church. (And counting.)

For what it’s worth, back in November, when Mark was still processing everything by hand, the count was only at 2,500 resignations. The website has made things much easier.

Now we know what happens when leaving the Church is only a few clicks away.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)



