April 6th

April 6th is a date of significance to Mormons and to me. To Mormons, it's the date Joseph Smith began the church. It's also, at least to many Mormons, the true birth date of Christ. (No, I don't know or even care why.)

It will come as no surprise to people who know me that I have a love-hate relationship with the Mormon church. Actually, it's more complicated than that. On any given day, I feel annoyance, bemusement, anger, pain, or disinterest. Sometimes I ignore anything to do with Mormonism. Other days, I have to rant. And then I hear back from Mormons I know. Admittedly, they speak mostly in silence: You're making too much of this. It was never intended that way. It doesn't matter. Why are you still talking about it? It isn't nice to talk about it. Sometimes I even hear It didn't happen. You're making this up.

Oh, how I wish I were.

I have a fantasy of somehow producing an x-ray of my psyche. I could then display and point to each wound, scarred and ugly as if from the lash of a whip. I could say not only "That one is Mormonism," but with some I could be awfully specific. "That one there," I would say, "is when, at the age of three, I first realized my parents could be excommunicated from the church." In fact, I have a special cluster of psychic scars just dealing with excommunication. During the recent transition to a new pope, one of the CNN experts said that, once they entered the conclave, the cardinals could not communicate with the outside world, "under the threat of excommunication." I looked at my dad and said, "Under The Threat of Excommunication would be a good title for a book about my childhood."

Not that I myself ever faced that threat personally because I never got baptized. That's another story. All I will say now is that it was not an accident. You're supposed to get baptized at eight and I spent a year, from when I was seven and a half to when I was eight and a half, with a perpetual stomachache. If any of my relatives baptize me after I die (yes, they can do that) I hereby promise to wreak as much havoc on them from the other side as I can. It doesn't matter that even in Mormonism, there is a caveat that the soul being baptized can decline. I will still get even with you. (Can you tell I have a cluster of scars all from being pressured about baptism?)

Between the two of them, my parents wrote and spoke about plenty of subjects the Mormon church didn't really want discussed, let alone criticized, and it usually drew the attention of church officials to them. It wasn't just my parents. For instance, the reason I felt it so young was that a Mormon feminist named Sonia Johnson fought against the church and its stance towards the Equal Rights Amendment. (They disliked that about as much as, decades later, they would dislike California's prop 8.) My mom began a series of articles about Sonia. By the time I was three, Sonia had been excommunicated, and I somehow knew, if they could excommunicate her, they could excommunicate my parents.

(An interesting factoid about Mormon excommunication. They call the meeting where they decide your fate a "court." This does not mean the person in question gets to have representation and plead their case. In fact, Sonia was not even allowed to attend her court. My dad tells me that as far as he knows there isn't even a set procedure. Basically, they can do whatever they want.)

As I got older, I became familiar with the patterns of what my parents and their friends referred to as "purges." Sometimes the church reacted to individual misdeeds, but most of the time it was a purge. They'd put out an edict, remind people that certain subjects shouldn't be spoken of, certain publications were frowned upon, certain gatherings (particularly the annual Sunstone symposium, which was and still is a big draw for historians and intellectuals) were forbidden. When people didn't fall into line, they intensified the pressure. First, your bishop would warn you, then a stake president would get involved. If you couldn't get back in his good graces, it could go further up the chain. Purges lasted a few months to a year and always ended the same way. The church made examples of people, excommunicating a few, disciplining others, and, at that point, everyone else did fall into line, at least for a while.

One day in late March, when I was in junior high, the church was in the midst of another round of purging, and my parents were on their list of targets, I came home to find, among the mail, an envelope from the church addressed to my mom. It was not the first envelope like that I'd seen, addressed to one or both of my parents, especially over the last few months. For some reason, though, I thought this was it. This was the letter telling her they were holding a court against her. Not that she would care about losing church privileges. She'd long since stopped attending, but, because she was well-known, it would become very public.

The way my mom remembered this day was that she pulled into the driveway and I raced out. Pale and trembling, I held the envelope out to her. She opened it, found it was something innocuous like a reminder to pay tithing, which she hadn't paid in over a decade, but they still seemed to think she would, and told me, "Cynthia, it's nothing, sweetheart." I think I burst into tears.

And in that moment, she decided it was enough. She would no longer let the church wield that kind of power over us. She spoke to her devoutly Mormon parents in person, sent letters to her siblings, and then wrote to the church and asked to be removed from their rolls. (My dad later did the same.)

With the eye for symbolism she always had, she timed it so the date on her letter to the church was April 6th.

Or, as I like to call it, Liberation Day.