Cultural Mormanism

The author of Letters from a Broad, an expatriate ex-Mormon in Switzerland, writes about chatting with Mormon missionaries in France. She writes:

Everyone knows that apostates like me are supposed to hate the church and everything about it with a fiery passion! The crazy thing though is that even though I think the Book of Mormon is a work of fiction, for some reason I don’t hate the church or its members. Even though they may not be too thrilled about it, in some ways they’ll always be my people.

I live in France. I’ve chosen to live here, this is where I want to live, and in fact I’ve gone native to the point where I’ve practically become a French person myself. Still, when I see a pair of LDS missionaries walking down the street, I see something familiar from back home in the old country. And I know that I share a common background with them that we don’t share with anyone else walking down that same street.

The author has since moved to Switzerland.

Ex-Mormon on polygamy

C. L. Hanson, the author of Letters from a Broad, explains why she touches on Mormon polygamy in a sub-plot of her novel:

Since Exmormon is about the mainstream LDS church, some might object to the fact that I included a significant sub-plot involving modern-day polygamy, which the mainstream church has disavowed.

But the specter of polygamy still haunts the mainstream church. It affects people who are raised in the LDS church — even far from Utah — as they learn that the early Latter-day prophets taught polygamy as an eternal principle and taught that not only is there polygamy in the afterlife but that God Himself is probably a polygamist. The manifesto putting a stop to the practice of polygamy did not address the doctrinal questions.