Kate Kendrick and Mariah Daytims are two women who are now free from the church, sharing their experiences as to why they chose to leave this powerful institution behind.

Kate, from Utah, hosts a podcast “deconstructing” the Mormon faith.

She says, “I grew up in a cult. I was told what my future would look like, and I didn’t have a choice. I was given the facade of having a choice, but it was cloaked in shame and guilt, and I never felt like enough. It was being told what I could do, who I could associate with, and what I could read. I had a lot of my freedom taken from me.

“Everyone I knew was a member of the church. All of my neighbours, my family, my friends at school, my teachers, everybody. Growing up, there were high expectations of what you needed to do.” Kate said.

According to the World Population Review, the estimated number of Mormons living in the Beehive State (also nicknamed the Mormon Mecca) is 2,173,560, which is 68.55% of Utah’s population.

“Kids were just indoctrinated from the time they were little. In nursery school, you’re singing songs about following the prophet and doing what’s right.”

But not everyone is born into the church.

Mariah, a student from California who has also since left the faith, says, “I went into foster care when I was 11, and it was a very vulnerable time for me. That was when I was placed in a home with a family that was LDS. As much as I hate the religion, it was a community that I needed. But I feel this sense that they got me when I was young; they got me when I was very vulnerable. They put a lot of love and time and energy into me for a price.”

Both Kate and Mariah married young, a common practice within the Mormon church, and premarital sex is forbidden.

“Leading up to the marriage was hard. When you’re in love and you’re 19 and engaged, your hormones are raging,” Mariah says.

“We didn’t have sex, but we touched each other. They call it ‘Heavy Petting’ in the church. I felt so horrible.”

She added how within the church, you’re encouraged to go to your bishop and confess when engaging in any sexual activity before marriage

“My husband and I went to the bishop. He pointed his finger at me and said, ‘Shame on you.’ I remember my whole heart and stomach just dropping. Then he told my husband he could leave the room. He told me that he knew that it was my fault, that my husband was a worthy man, and that I was leading him astray.”

Mariah described how the first time she doubted her faith was the day she got married.

“I walked into this room, and all the men were wearing white. I looked around and I didn’t see a single woman’s face, which was very representative of how I felt in the church. I was just a woman put to one side in a veil, and I looked over at the men, and I thought, oh, fuck, I’ve joined a cult. That was when it clicked. I lost my mind. I remember shaking, sitting down, being like, oh, my God.” She said.

“It was like The Truman Show. It was ‘oh my gosh, none of it’s real’, this thing that we’ve sacrificed, that we give so much money to, that we work our butts off for.”

Ex-LDS members often refer to something they call the ‘Shelf Analogy,’ which refers to doubts about the church.

“If something doesn’t make sense, you just put it on that proverbial shelf in the back of your head.” Kate said, “ They tell you you’ll figure it out in the next life. One day it’ll all make sense. Just have faith. Ex-Mormons will say that eventually, that shelf will break. My shelf came crashing down a year and a half ago.”

However, she claims the real problems are much darker than just indoctrination.

“There’s a lot of abuse that happens in the church, and I learned that the church just sweeps that under the rug,” Kate added.  “There’s a website called floodlit.org, and they focus a lot on people who have sexually abused others within the church. People will go to confess to their bishop, and the bishop is given a phone number to call the church’s lawyers. Not the police. You don’t call the police if somebody confesses, ‘I’ve sexually assaulted someone’. They’ll call the lawyers, and the lawyers will try to find a way to save the life of this man, and they just cover it up, it’s appalling.”

Mariah said, “Foundationally, the Mormon church does not believe in consent. If they did, you’d know what happened in the temple before you got married. If you’re married, you have sex.

“As a little girl, I remember women would say ‘Oh, I don’t want to be with my husband tonight, but, you know, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do’.”

The Mormon church is often challenged for its ‘traditional’ approach to gender norms, and both Kate and Mariah echo this.

“Men don’t need women at all,” Kate says. “They can exist without women. It’s a very 1950s, post-World War II kind of view that the church wants to preserve. Members of the church are very conservative, your number one responsibility as a housewife is to raise children and support your husband.”

“The dynamics of women within the faith means they’re treated as second-class citizens, and the whole idea of polygamy just boggles my mind that they believe that in the next life, you get to be a second wife or a third to your husband.”

Despite traditional stereotypes, in the last few years, there has been a rise in female Mormon social media influencers on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, as well as the release of the hit reality television series “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives”. Among them are groups such as “Mom Tok” and accounts like “Ballerina Farm” that have gone viral globally, but they haven’t gained fame without controversy.

Mariah says, “It’s staggering the amount of Mormon women who have accounts and are mommy influencers because guess what? They’re so fucking good at pretending to be perfect. They’ve been primed, and I think part of it is we are made to be perfect.”

Now ex-members of the LDS church, both women refer to the church using the ‘BITE Model’ of authoritarian control, which stands for ‘Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional control,’ and they both claim the Mormon church fits all aspects.

“It’s a cult…they have you make this covenant that we never speak negatively about the church or its leaders because they’re in charge. They say if you read anything about the church, let it be from them. They control it all. They treat us like children.” Says Kate. 

“It’s coercion at its finest because they don’t hold a gun to your head, but they use shame and guilt in the best way. Especially in Utah, when you’re surrounded by so many other Mormons. I don’t know anyone judgier than the Mormons, because I used to be one.” Kate added.

Despite the two women being completely unconnected, their experiences within the church are strikingly similar.

Mariah said, “I think when you feel enough shame, it does weird things to a human being. It makes you feel so dirty, so gross, that all of a sudden, really bad things don’t seem as bad.

”The most dangerous part of all of it is they don’t know what’s worse, killing someone or drinking a cup of coffee, because it’s all under one umbrella.”

Within the Mormon church, it is considered a sin to drink tea and coffee.

Relaying her experience of leaving the LDS, Mariah added, “I have the feeling that they (members of the church) would have rather seen me die than see me leave the church.”

It’s not just Mormonism. It’s more than that. Living in delusion can happen to anyone, you’d be shocked by what you could fall for because it’s everywhere. It’s in your workplace. It’s in your schools. It’s in your country. Propaganda is everywhere, and it’s never going away, so you have to be able to recognize it.”

When questioned what one message both women would like communicated, they said:

“Mormon women are special and give a lot, they help out their community so much, and they have more power in their pinky finger than the prophet does in his whole body. They’re a vessel to move mountains for people, and they can choose to do better.” – Mariah

“Take ownership of your belief system. You’ve been given that agency. Use it. Choose to be who you want to be and not who you’re told to be” – Kate

Scarlet Threads contacted the LDS on the claims made within this article, but they failed to respond.