Under the Pretense of Love
I am an apostate and I’m tired of hiding. Why don’t you come after me too? Just don’t tell me that it’s because you love me.
This week’s post is a reprint of a post I wrote in 2014 for the blog The Church of the Fridge. I wrote it in the wake of breaking news that three notable dissenters within the Mormon faith, John Dehlin, Kate Kelly, and Rock Waterman had been summoned to a church disciplinary counsel—an ecclesiastical court of sorts where members of the faith are tried by “judges in Israel" for crimes against the faith.
I was familiar with their crimes.
John Dehlin was a podcaster. His show, Mormon Stories Podcast, featured the voices of members and ex-members, telling their stories of trying to make sense of a religion that was hurting people—especially members of the LGBTQ community. We all knew he was mentally out, even though he billed himself as a bridge to help people “Stay Mormon.org” (the name of one of his early websites). His crime? Advocating openly for a change in church policy and culture to accept openly gay members. This was contrary to the doctrine of the family, of course, so, “Off with his head.”
Kate Kelly wanted priesthood for women. As a human rights attorney, Kate believed that her activism from the “inside” under the banner of the Ordain Women Movement might move the dial on women’s rights in the church. At the time I saw it as a fruitless crusade, but I applauded the woman, and coveted her courage, along with her black hair, red lipstick, and thick-rimmed glasses. To say she was polarizing was an understatement. She was a lightning rod. Did she move the dial within the church? It’s debatable. Did she help a lot of women wake up and get the fuck out? Absolutely. Off with her head.
And Rock Waterman? Well, he was a kook. But a loveable kook who claimed that the modern LDS church had strayed from its roots. (I don’t disagree, btw.) On his blog, Pure Mormonism, Waterman advocated for an almost Fundamentalist Renaissance of the mystical, magical “pure religion” Joseph Smith had received by revelation. Even my parents liked him, which became a bridge of sorts between us. But to the Mormon Church, his criticism of church leaders and his growing following were both threats to their power and authority. Off with his head.
The news of Dehlin’s and Kelly’s summons, delivered by official letter from leaders they had never met, and likely part of a coordinated action right from the top, hit the New York Times on June 11, 2014 under the headline Two Activists in Mormon Church Threatened With Excommunication. The news of Waterman’s summons hit the same day through social media channels (he was a little less appealing to the Times readers, I suppose).
The letter that Dehlin provided to The New York Times, began, “Because of the love I have for you, I have become concerned about some of your recent statements and actions regarding this church and your place in it.”
For me, this statement triggered the memory of another letter, delivered on the eve of the birth of my fourth child, the stress of which very well may have triggered the labor. (That’s my belief anyway.) It was hand-delivered to my house by our stake president, who came to our door in a black suit on a Wednesday night. My husband wasn’t home, so I took the envelope, thanked him for his visit, and took it inside and opened it myself. The letter began the same way as Dehlin’s letter: with a declaration of love.
Talk about zero to sixty. Reading the words of Dehlin’s letter set my whole body ringing with the somatically stored trauma of that night nine months previous, and sent me into a rolling series of panic attacks. Finally, all my pent-up anger, grief, and betrayal burst like a cyst. In a fit of passion, I dashed off the blog post and sent it over to Darrin, the owner of The Church of the Fridge, so that he could publish it while the news was still as hot as my rage.
I had previously written a couple of posts anonymously for The Fridge under the nom de plume, B. Very Chill. Darrin liked my posts so much, he called me to the position of 1st Popsicle (a play on the word “Apostle,” seeing as how The Church of the Fridge needed leadership, and I was willing and anxious to heed the frosty call.)
I had lain low for over a year, negotiating my faith crisis quietly so as not to cause pain to my family who still believed, especially my parents. But these pending “courts of love” as they were called colloquially in the church, roused in me an especially potent sense of injustice—a veritable volcano of emotion—and I felt the need to finally stand up and be counted. So this was my coming out.
Fast forward ten years to 2024. Yesterday, I was engaging on an ex-Mormon social media group, when a member of the group recognized me and asked, “Did you post an essay a while back on Church of The Fridge about how you (and your then) husband had gone down the rabbit hole and were summoned for a "court of love"? I believe this was written when the Kate Kelly excommunication happened. It was really good.”
Honest to God, I broke into tears when I read it. For any writer, it’s a rare and precious thing—having someone remember your words even a month after you wrote them, let alone a decade. The truth is, I asked Darrin to remove the post a year or so after I posted it. I was nervous about my name being out there, tied so closely with my trauma. I’m still navigating how to present myself to the world. If I use my maiden name, I hurt my family. If I use my legal name, I hurt my children. My current nom de plume reflects a future I believe in for myself, and hopefully gives my family and my children some breathing room. So the only edit I’ve made to the original post is the changing of my name.
One more note about this piece. A note about coincidence, or synchronicity, or magic. Call it what you will. Someone else read this article that day in June. An old friend from my LDS mission back in the Netherlands. It was this article that alerted him to my faith crisis. After I published it, he reached out to me to let me know that he had read my other articles as well, not knowing I had written them, but thinking they were good. He said he had been having his own questions about the truth claims of the church. He told me that, knowing me, I wouldn’t have left the church for frivolous reasons, and that knowing me made him want to look into it deeper.
My friend from my mission is now my husband. And I suppose I could say that our relationship and a journey of true, authentic, anything-but-pretense love began right here with this piece.
So without further ado, a reprinting of Under the Pretense of Love.
Under the Pretense of Love
By Elizabeth Hood
Originally Published on June 12, 2014 on The Church of the Fridge Blog
Yesterday the world learned of the purge of three notable voices who spoke out on real Mormon issues from within the LDS church. John Dehlin of Mormon Stories, Kate Kelly, founder of the Ordain Women Movement, and Alan Rock Waterman of Pure Mormonism were delivered letters summoning them to church disciplinary councils where they were to be tried for apostasy. The news hit me harder than I expected it would. I have not met any of these people. But I know intimately the emotions they are facing in this moment.
Exactly 9 months ago, on September 10, 2013, I was nearing the end of a long and difficult pregnancy. My pregnancy began in trauma because at the same time we were reading the results of the pregnancy test, we were reading books, blogs, and online articles that exposed ugly truths about the history of the church we loved and had devoted our lives to. As this new life was growing in my body, my faith in the church was dying. And I felt like I was dying. My husband and I were traveling this path together. The only difference was that he was more vocal, expressing his doubt and anger born of a deep sense of betrayal on his Facebook wall. I remained silent, fearing the alienation of my family and friends too much to speak about my doubts and dying faith openly.
I was home with my children preparing dinner when I saw through the window a dark-suited man approaching the door. My husband was still at work and my heart began to race as I realized that it was our Stake President ringing our doorbell. I knew him fairly well from the days when my husband served with him as a Stake Executive Secretary, from his talks in Stake Conference, and from temple recommend interviews where I sat alone with him in his office answering questions about my worthiness to enter the temple. I knew why he was there, and my heart leapt into my throat.
When I opened the door, he greeted me warmly and explained that he wanted to stop by and see how we were and to express his love. Immediately I felt relieved and thankful. We had not attended church or spoken to any local leaders about our doubts since we came to the awful conclusion that we no longer believed. Neither he, nor our bishop knew that I was pregnant. Nor did they know exactly where we stood. How could they unless they had spoken to us? Once more he expressed how much he loved us and then handed me an envelope, which contained, he said, a letter he had written “in love.” I thanked him, and as he left I said to him, “Thank you. It’s nice to be treated like people.” He nodded and left.
I dished up the kids’ dinners and then sat down with my own plate of food and opened the envelope. As I began to read the words of the letter, my heart sank. This was no personal communication expressing love or sympathy. This letter was an official summons to a church disciplinary court for my husband, which was to take place within a couple of weeks, right when I would be trying to take care of a new baby and my own postpartum body. I was rocked to the core. I sat there with the letter in my hand in a state of shock, fear, and hurt. This letter referred several times to the disciplinary court as a “Court of Love.” But this did not feel like love. No one from the church leadership had reached out to us. No one had shepherded us as we were struggling with the loss of our testimonies. No one even knew that I was about to have a baby.
It was after midnight when I went to bed that night. My husband and I spent the night crying, talking, and calling the Stake President to discuss with him the ramifications of this aggressive move by the church. We found out that one of my husband’s “friends” on Facebook had printed out all of his posts that criticized the church, its origins, and leadership, and had fed them to the Stake President. To my husband’s credit, he confronted the Stake President directly, calling out the hypocrisy and dishonesty of this claim that love was the beginning and end of this action against him.
That night, only an hour or two after I finally fell asleep, I woke up suddenly to the sensations of my water breaking. I ran to the bathroom and sat on the toilet and cried, beating my fist against a wall and cursing that damn Stake President who not only caused me to lose desperately needed sleep right before giving birth at home without drugs, but who maybe even caused me to go into labor because of the stress and shock I felt that night. I was especially angry that my baby was going to be born on 9/11, a day of national grief and mourning, and a bad omen by anyone’s standards. My labor was overshadowed with these feelings of anger and grief. My ability to cope with the pain of labor was diminished, and instead of feeling strong and calm, as I had trained myself to be, I suffered. Four hours later I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy, but all I could do was look at him and tell him how sorry I was for my anger.
Now, on the nine-month birthday of my baby boy, I read of the letters delivered to “The June Three” and I am reminded of that night—the fear, the anxiety, the pain, the utter devastation at feeling that our tribe had turned against us—and I weep. I weep for them and I weep for me. When I read that the same expression of love was used in the summons letters for Dehlin, Kelly, and Waterman, I convulsed at the hypocrisy. This is not how you treat someone you love. This is how you treat someone you fear. This is how you treat someone you want to discredit and shut up. This is how you brand someone with the Scarlett A of Apostasy and exile them from the tribe.
I have a feeling that this action by the church will not happen as quietly as ours did. I have a feeling that there will be people like me—maybe in the hundreds, maybe in the thousands—who will realize that this is the moment to speak out. To add our voices to those of Dehlin and Kelly and Waterman. To come out of the closet with our thoughts, or our doubts, or our disagreements.
My name is Elizabeth Hood. My name is still on the records of the church because I did not want to break the hearts of my family members who still believe that if my name is expunged from the records of the church that I am lost to them for eternity. But I do not believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is true. I believe Joseph was a fraud, that the Book of Mormon is a piece of fiction, and that the historical records prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt. I stand with the LGTBQ community and I believe they deserve the right to marry. I believe that if women want to remain in a misogynistic church and try to transform it from the inside, more power to them. I am an apostate and I’m tired of hiding. Why don’t you come after me too? Just don’t tell me that it’s because you love me.
You’re right, this isn’t about love. It’s about control.