I am officially inactive. It’s official when the missionaries come by to get to know you, right? Today I remembered how I ended up on this side of the Mormon coin. How I became that person I neverever thought I would be.

It started when my best friend went inactive. She wrote a long letter to family and friends trying to explain her decision. I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand her issues with Joseph Smith. No one is perfect. What did she expect? But she kept saying that no one was even willing to look. Look at the ugly stuff. No one even really knows our polygamy history. So, I said I’d look. I was not afraid. The Church was true, and truth would always shine through even the most difficult to understand issues. I trusted in truth and my testimony. I had read all kinds of anti-Mormon literature, and it had not shaken me one bit. There was nothing to fear. And if my friend said no one was even looking, I could be friend enough to look. I started trying to learn more about our polygamy history. The most damning book I read was one from Deseret Book. It left me shaken. There was a point where I called my dad, and cried and yelled in disgust of all I had learned. How could Joseph Smith be a prophet and do what he did? How was any of this possibly God’s will? Who was this God if that’s what he wanted???

It was a challenging time. I pondered. I prayed. I tried to find truth in the chaos of what I had learned. I tried to hear God. Eventually, I felt that it simply was a mistake. This had not been God’s will. Joseph Smith had made a mistake at best, or worse had sinned. Maybe that is why his life was ended young. Who knows. But with the belief that this was not supposed to be, I could move forward. No one is perfect. Why should prophets be perfect? It’s possible for them to sin, and this must have been just one such situation.

Then a few years passed. During that time, I learned of a few situations where people dear to me had experienced sexual assault and shared how leaders had handled these instances when they were brought to their attention (not well). I. was. FURIOUS! My somewhat shaken testimony of leaders’ inspiration and ability to act for God was now getting another beating. How could they manage these things so poorly? How could they show so little concern for these victims? How could they blame victims even in the slightest for any of the things that happened to them? As these doubts about leaders surfaced, I became more vocal in my comments during Church expressing the possibility at times that things were maybe not always as we thought they were. It resulted in my comments (always quoting prophets and apostles and being carefully expressed in a way that wasn’t outright heretical) being discussed in ward meeting and me being asked to cut out the “controversial comments” (like the one where I quoted President Hinckley). We moved away shortly after. I was in for another surprise in the new ward, when a few weeks after a temple recommend interview, my bishop called me and my husband into his office, and basically called me a liar, and suggested he had to take my recommend. It turned out that he had talked to my old Bishop, who apparently had read a blog post I had written expressing my concerns that leaders may not be perfect. That they sin. This alarmed the old bishop enough to be concerned about my testimony, but apparently not enough to ever discuss it with me. The new bishop seemed to need no further information either than the word of an old bishop he had never met to know I was lying.

It took a good while after my initial shock and confusion to explain my stance and convince my new Bishop that I wasn’t actually lying about anything. I simply didn’t believe leaders were perfect, and above sinning. He agreed that this was not a problem to believe, and let me keep my recommend.

But I walked out of his office shaking and feeling like I was going to throw up. I could not believe what had happened. I called my old bishop to understand the whole situation better. He explained that he had been concerned after a “concerned” member shared my blog post with him. But he said in conversations with me he felt reassured that all was well, so he saw no need to bring it up officially with me. And he had only acted out of love and concern for me. He never apologized. I don’t think he ever felt that he had handled things improperly. My new bishop also never apologized for basically inviting me into his office, and then pouncing on me with accusations instead of verifying my side of the story. Neither one of them seemed to think it was inappropriate to dig through someone’s personal writings and keeping an eye on their writings if tipped off by a member.

I shared what had happened with friends and family who were active. It felt so haunting to me. The threat of losing my recommend. Being called a liar, and not even knowing what was going on. The whole thing just felt awful and embarrassing.

Friends and family though reacted in ways I did not anticipate. They were silent. They weren’t necessarily saying that what had happened was totally ok. But they also did not come out in full support of me. They mostly just stayed quiet as I shared. There was no verbal shock and no verbal outrage. There was no verbal acknowledgment that things should not have gone this way. That was the most painful part. I realized that in their eyes, there was probably something I had done, too. Maybe they thought I shouldn’t have written a blog post about such thoughts. Maybe they really felt that the bishops has acted in my best interest. Maybe they didn’t see a problem with ward members passing on private blog posts from other members to the bishop, and having the bishop protect their identity, while snooping around to see if there was anything to the concerns. I don’t know. The silence broke me, however.

It was then that I understood how powerless a woman is within the Church when something goes wrong. She will not be heard. She will not be believed. If anyone as much as concedes even the slightest possibility of things not having been perfect, it will be brushed aside under “we were acting out of love and concern”. I saw that my story would not even bear weight with those who knew me closely and loved me. The Church was bigger than that. When I was suddenly faced with a difficulty and bishops, who felt it was ok to snoop around in my private business without an open conversation with me, and who trusted another bishop’s word (who they had never met) above the words of a person they had known for a few months, and leaders who in all of this never thought there was a need to simply apologize for maybe not having handled things perfectly, I was forced to see where I stood. As a woman in the Church, I now saw that my default position was on the pyre, ready to be burned the moment I uttered a word of disagreement. You cannot prove your innocence, because your guilt is a given.

I read about the woman who has recorded the interview with Joseph L. Bishop, and I feel anguished. Because I know that despite him having conceded wrong doing to her in the interview, and to the police, and having admitted that he confessed sins of sexual transgression to his leaders, she will not win. She cannot win. The Church will not let her win. We are conditioned early on to believe leaders above else. We will believe them over our loved ones, over our friends, over common sense. We will be suspicious of those who are not active, who have left the Church, who have not finished missions, or who show any sort of short coming in any other form. We will assume that people want to harm the Church. That they are out for money. For fame. For vengeance. We will assume that leaders have done their best, that they had no other recourse but to leave things as they are. We will be told that this person is flawed and broken and cannot be trusted. We will be told that the offender repented. We will be told every imaginable thing under the sky that frees the Church of being responsible in any shape or form. The Church attorneys will be busy. The Newsroom will make statements. It will be all explained, with a nice voice, why the Church is innocent and this woman is the problem.

We will most definitely not hear one thing: an apology. We will not hear an acknowledgment that things could have or should have been handled differently. We will not hear heartbreak and compassion for this woman. There likely won’t be questions wondering what may have happened in her life to have ended her mission shortly after it began. She will not be given the benefit of doubt. That benefit will be given to the men. To the organization. To those that apparently are more important to protect than the one. We don’t go after the one anymore. We just protect the 99.

I know this, because I’ve seen it in my life. The word of a sister is not equal to the word of a priesthood leader. And often, not even the chorus of sisters is equal to the word of one priesthood leader.

And when you see this so clearly, you give up. And don’t come back to Church.