This is an infant on thrones.

Listener Eshar.

Listener Esho. Listener Esho.

Yeah. Welcome back to Infants on Thrones. I'm Glenn Ostland and today's

listener essay comes from Peter and it's titled Religious Family

Members.

I think I gave it that title, not Peter, but...

If you want to vote for Peter's essay and give him feedback,

it's at our website, and I'll give more details at the end of the essay but for now take it away Peter.

Hello I'm Peter Nixon. My essay is on trying to have a relationship with religious family

members after you leave the church. It gets a little complicated, I think in a lot of ways.

But let's start with, I guess my history. I was brought up in a very Mormon family.

Me and my brothers, five brothers and one sister, we were all homeschooled for our entire pre-college

lives.

The closest thing we had to regular school was seminary, which could be taken as an elective in the high school system here.

We were taught all kinds of things like dinosaurs are just placed on earth as a test of our faith, that the Constitution was

co-written by Jesus, that vaccines were bad. So bad in fact that it wasn't until my

mother brought it up a few years ago that I realized that we had never gotten vaccinated

even though the profit at the time had said to do it that it was okay.

Anyway, my parents have always been a bit controlling and have used guilt to try to get us to do what they want so many times that I couldn't tell you how many times in the last month she's dropped a guilt trip on me and my brothers.

Anyway, me and my family, we left the church recently a few years back, and we haven't necessarily

been quiet about it. We don't try to put it in anybody's face, but we're not going to

...