Hello and welcome to Not So Mali Mormon podcast, Minisense.

This is Katie. I have an email today titled outsider in a Mormon town.

It reads, I wanted to share from the perspective of a non-Mormon growing up in a largely Mormon community.

The Mormon Church inflicts a lot of pain on non-members too.

I intentionally say Mormon rather than LBS because I don't like to validate the notion that they are saints in any way. I like that and I find

that interesting. Growing up in the Mormon church, I didn't really, I guess we referred to

ourselves as saints, but when you take the perspective of someone looking in who hasn't called themselves a saint. It's very, very

weird. I live in a very Mormony part of Alberta, Canada. Followers of Joseph Smith fled north to

escape persecution and settled here in the 1880s. In this city of 100,000, there are 11 Mormon churches

plus the usual array of seminaries, welfare hubs, stake centers, and plus the

the temple in a nearby town. Most of the local dentists, surgeons, optometrists, chiropractors, etc. are Mormons.

I feel you, you know, growing up in Oram, Utah, it's really, really similar.

And there are definitely, I know, places in Idaho and even here in Arizona that are very much like that. So I feel you.

Growing up here, I had numerous hurtful experiences that took years to fully comprehend.

Childhood friendships that started as genuine shifted around age 11 or 12. My Mormon friends were beginning to learn how special and

different they were from people like me, a half-hearted Christian who attended both Catholic and

United Church services sporadically with my interdenominational parents. The Mormon boys became

arrogant little pricks when they discovered they were actually priests.

Not only better than all females, but also better than all other non-Mormon males. Wow, that's

heady stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Meanwhile, my Mormon girlfriend suddenly got busy trying to convert me. They said they really liked me and wanted to stay friends and they didn't have a lot of free time anymore because of all their church activities and commitments. If I wanted to stay connected with them, it meant going along to their church events. I didn't realize I was a project.

Oh, yeah, that's so hurtful too.

But yeah, that's definitely how it goes and you're taught every member of missionary

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