Jen Blair never anticipated the comfortable world she grew up in would become the world she wished to escape.
“I absolutely believed it all,” she said.
Raised as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), Blair’s life circled around the church as she and her husband held prestigious roles.
That was until their 16-year-old son came out to them as gay in 2014. Blair assumed the church would help her family with this parenting challenge but instead she felt let down.
“They were 100 per cent wrong about my kid,” she said. “It was like this weird fissure in the earth.”
From that moment, Blair, who lives near Boise, Idaho, began a yearslong process of studying church history. She said her viewpoint of the church came from an apologetic place, but this time she was critically focused.
Unraveling beliefs
As Blair moved through this “earth-shattering” experience, her husband remained a devout follower and continued to hold a high role in the organization as a member of the bishopric.
According to the LDS church website, the bishoprics highest priority is to “oversee Aaronic Priesthood quorums and Young Women classes, watching over and nurturing the young men and young women in the ward.”
Blair and her husband found themselves growing apart over the role of faith in their lives.
“He would just hold me while I cried, and I would say ‘I’m really struggling, I don’t think I believe this anymore. I don’t know what to do,’” Blair said. “I never started going into the details of why because he would say things like, ‘The church works for me. I think it makes me a better person. I don’t want to go there.’”
Blair’s husband did eventually “go there,” after overhearing a podcast Blair listened to about the CES letters.
The CES Letter is a book written by Jeremy Runnells, a now ex-Mormon. His foundation’s website describes the book as “one Latter-day Saints honest quest to get official answers from the LDS Church on its troubling origins, history, and practices.”
Piquing his interest, Blair’s husband took it on himself to research what he had overheard. After reading the book, Blair’s husband remained silent for three days.
“I kind of panicked on his behalf, because it had been a really painful year to go through this faith transition and losing all my friends, and I didn’t really want that pain for him,” Blair said.
The couple eventually decided to remove their church records, and their children’s, completely from the organization in 2019.
Removal of records
Removing one’s records is considered a serious act within the church. According to The Salt Lake Tribune, the highest number of records ever removed in a year’s time was slightly more than 140,000.
The church did not respond to the Calgary Journal’s attempt to get additional statistics on the number of record removals per year.
Looking for a way to remove their records without having to be in contact with the church, Blair and her husband went through Quitmormon. According to their website, “Quitmormon eliminates most or all unwanted contact and gets you resigned much quicker than resigning on your own.”
Blair said the church was attempting to limit access to Quitmormon at the time, requiring additional information such as photo ID and a notary. Even though they provided all the information, Blair and her family continued to remain in the church’s database.
“We kept checking in with Quitmormon and they’re like ‘We don’t know what the delay is,’” Blair said.
Blair’s husband eventually contacted their local bishop to find out what was delaying the process. Blair said the bishop had confirmed the removal of her records, but decided not to remove any other records of the family.
“The bishop said ‘I thought really Jen was probably the only one who wanted to,’ so he had removed my name, but nobody else’s because I was the instigator of the family exodus,” she said. “My husband told them ‘No, we want everybody’s name off.’”
After hearing this, the bishop requested the family resend all the information they had previously submitted to Quitmormon directly to him. Their records were removed shortly after.
“We didn’t feel relief to finally be out or emotionally removed,” she said. “Mentally, we felt like we were gone long before that.”
