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The Church as an Abusive Father — Revisited
A response to Elder Lawrence E. Corbridge
I originally wrote this piece more than a decade ago, when I was still an active, believing member of the Church and trying to make sense of the troubling things I was discovering about Mormonism.
https://mdpodcast.org/2016/05/church-farther-figure/
Recently, Elder Lawrence E. Corbridge suggested that even if your ward were like Alcatraz and your bishop were like Darth Vader, you stay.
Hearing that brought this old post immediately to mind, so I dusted it off and made a few minor updates.
What strikes me now is that I think the analogy I used back then was even more accurate than I realized. In some ways, I underestimated the dysfunction because I was still living inside the family system and trying to make the relationship work. Mormonism is much farther in my rearview mirror today, and distance has allowed me to see some things more clearly.
Which is why Elder Corbridge’s comments land so differently for me today.
If your bishop really is behaving like Darth Vader and your ward really does feel like Alcatraz, perhaps the healthiest advice isn’t “Stay.” Perhaps the first question should be: Why would God require you to remain in an unhealthy relationship simply because the institution insists that leaving is not an option?
With that, here is the piece I wrote all those years ago, viewed now through somewhat different eyes.
The Church as an Abusive Father
Years ago, an acquaintance explained that he didn’t understand me. He saw my willingness to speak openly about problematic Church issues as being “critical of the Church” and therefore placing me on the wrong side. If I felt that way, he suggested, perhaps I should consider leaving.
He explained that the Church, to him, was like a spouse whom he loved dearly—someone whose flaws and weaknesses he was willing to look past and accept in the name of the greater good. I got it. We often accept, protect, and defend the people we love. His analogy actually helped me understand his perspective.
But the Church never felt like a spouse to me. Then it hit me. The Church, for me, was much more like a parent. And not just any parent. It increasingly felt like an abusive father—a father who had done real good in my life, whom I genuinely loved, but who was also deeply dysfunctional and desperately needed help, accountability, and encouragement to change.
Stay with me while I work through this.
I love my dad. He is a huge part of who I became, and I owe him a great deal. While he fell short in many areas, he was also there for me at important moments in my life. Those positive experiences don’t excuse harmful behavior, but they do allow me to acknowledge two things at once: my father did tremendous good in my life, and my father also caused harm.
Early in my life, my father could do no wrong. I placed him on a pedestal and saw him as one of the greatest things that had ever happened to me. What kid doesn’t idealize Dad? Dad taught me right from wrong. He taught me the value of hard work. I felt validated by him and sought his affection and approval. When I was doing well in Church, I seemed to earn his approval and those proverbial pats on the back.
The problem was that I didn’t really know about some of his other behaviors. Or perhaps more accurately, I didn’t know how to interpret them.
Looking back, I had actually seen glimpses. I simply brushed them aside. I told myself they weren’t really indicators of his character. Sometimes I ignored them completely. Other times I dismissed accusations against him as false, distorted, or “anti-Mormon.” I even blamed and shamed some of the people who spoke badly about my father. They claimed he had done and said things I simply knew couldn’t be true.
So I defended him. For years.
Then, as time went on, I began hearing stories from some of his other children. They told me Dad had hurt them. Some of the harm was physical. Some was emotional. Some was sexual and psychological. Some of his children weren’t accepted for who they were, and some were subjected to efforts to change fundamental aspects of themselves.
Others were taught to distrust siblings who had discovered troubling things about Dad. Dad sometimes pitted his children against one another by suggesting that certain siblings were too intellectual, had a feminist agenda, were gay, had been deceived, were offended, wanted to sin, or simply lacked faith.
Some of his children developed deeply unhealthy relationships with sexuality because of the ways Dad taught them to think about their bodies, purity, masturbation, intimacy, and worthiness. Some internalized messages that their sexual “virtue” was worth more than their lives. And some experienced devastating shame because they came to believe that something fundamental about themselves made them unacceptable to God.
When I was young, much of this abuse seemed invisible. Later it seemed negligible, and then inconvenient. Eventually, I couldn’t honestly pretend it wasn’t serious.
Dad quietly moved past a few of these behaviors over the years. But even in those instances, he rarely stood in front of his children and simply said, “We were wrong. We hurt you. We are sorry.” And some of the behaviors that marginalize and harm his children continue even today.
Eventually, I could no longer turn a blind eye to the way Dad demeaned some of his children who developed questions and doubts after discovering troubling things about his history. These were often the very same children who had once been extraordinarily faithful.
But then they discovered Dad’s life history. They discovered that the story Dad had told them about who he was, what he had done, and how he came to be was sometimes very different from the historical record.
Dad didn’t seem particularly comfortable talking openly about those things. And when some of his children refused to stop asking uncomfortable questions, Dad sometimes distanced himself from them, disciplined them, or cut them off from the family.
While I loved my dad, eventually I stopped trusting him as the ultimate source of truth. He had disappointed me too many times. That didn’t mean he never had wisdom. On occasion, he did. But I could no longer assume that because Dad said something, it was therefore true. There were simply too many instances where that had not been the case.
Dad became one voice among many that I consulted for wisdom, advice, and enlightenment.
For a long time, I still wanted his company. Some of my siblings distanced themselves from Dad for their own health and inner peace. Others visited only occasionally or on holidays. I kept showing up every weekend.
But something had changed. I no longer saw him as the hero I once had.
I also became troubled by some of my siblings who continued defending Dad’s behavior, explaining it away, or deliberately remaining ignorant of his abuses because they loved him too much to let go of the image they had constructed of him. For some, it seemed easier to shame the siblings who spoke about the abuse than to confront the possibility that Dad might not be exactly who he told us he was.
I understood that. There were days when I desperately wished I could go back to seeing him the way I once had. But I couldn’t. Once you see something, you cannot simply decide that you didn’t see it. There was no going back.
Some of us tried talking with Dad. We tried helping him understand the hurt he had caused. But Dad seemed remarkably reluctant to apologize. At times, a small part of him would acknowledge that “there may have been things said or done that were not in harmony with our values, principles, or doctrine.”
But what seemed far more difficult was simply saying: We were wrong. We harmed people. We taught things as God’s truth that weren’t true. The people harmed by those teachings deserved better from us.
For years, Dad demanded that I follow him. He taught me never to choose a path contrary to what he required and taught, and for years I obeyed.
Eventually, after coming to grips with Dad’s flaws, mistakes, contradictions, and harmful behavior, I decided I could no longer follow him blindly simply because he was Dad. I reached a place where I would follow him when my conscience told me he was right and dissent when what he required violated my conscience, evidence, reason, or my understanding of what was morally good.
Dad occasionally softened this by telling me that I could seek answers from God when I struggled with something he required. But there was a catch. I was permitted to ask God. I just wasn’t really permitted to receive an answer different from Dad’s.
And to be clear about the analogy here, Dad isn’t God. Dad is the Church. But Dad claims to speak for God, and when God and Dad appeared to disagree, somehow the problem was always assumed to be with me.
That need to be right—and the expectation that his children should follow him regardless—only increased my skepticism that everything Dad said actually came from God.
I eventually discovered that Dad had taught things in the past with absolute certainty, only to reverse himself years later. Things once presented as doctrine became policy. Things once taught as God’s will became the opinions of men. Things once defended as eternal became temporary. Yesterday’s certainty quietly became today’s disavowed teaching.
Yet somehow Dad’s authority was never supposed to be questioned.
You might read all of this and think I hated my Dad. I didn’t.
When I originally wrote this piece, he was still a gigantic part of my life. And even today, I still relate to the label “Mormon.” I didn’t wish him harm. Quite the opposite. I wanted desperately for him to recognize the hurt he had caused some of his children, to apologize, to repent, and to change. I mean, wasn’t that what he taught me to do?
And I still believe minor flaws shouldn’t be placed under a microscope. Every human being is imperfect, and every organization composed of human beings will make mistakes.
But there is a line between imperfection and dysfunction.
There is a difference between making mistakes and constructing systems that protect the institution from accountability for those mistakes. There is a difference between occasionally hurting someone and teaching the person who was hurt that their job is to remain loyal to the person or institution hurting them.
And this is where Elder Corbridge’s recent comments bring this old analogy roaring back to life for me.
If Dad tells you, “Even if this house feels like Alcatraz, stay,” and “Even if the person Dad placed over you behaves like Darth Vader, stay,” I no longer hear devotion in that message. I hear something disturbingly familiar.
The relationship itself has been made non-negotiable.
Think about what that means. The quality of the relationship doesn’t determine whether you should remain in it. The behavior of the authority figure doesn’t determine whether you should remain. Apparently even the psychological cost doesn’t determine whether you should remain.
You remain because Dad says leaving Dad is not an acceptable option.
Today, after having finally left the house myself, that troubles me even more than it did when I originally wrote this. Because when I first wrote this analogy, I was still trying to stage an intervention. I was essentially standing in Dad’s living room saying, “Dad, we love you. Please listen to us. Please acknowledge what you’ve done. Please change.”
Today, I recognize something I couldn’t fully see then. Sometimes the healthiest response to an abusive family system isn’t getting the abusive parent to finally understand you. Sometimes it is recognizing that you are allowed to leave the house.
You are allowed to establish boundaries and decide how much contact you want. You are allowed to take the good things your family gave you without pretending the harmful things weren’t harmful. And you don’t owe someone continued access to you simply because they call themselves your father.
That doesn’t require hatred, and it doesn’t require pretending nothing good ever happened.
In fact, one of the things I still value about my Mormon experience is precisely how much good it gave me. The Church took me in when I was 17 years old, using and selling drugs and making a lot of bad choices. It helped me discover my worth and develop discipline. It cultivated my love of learning and truth seeking. It helped me develop communication and leadership skills. It gave me opportunities to serve people and introduced me to relationships and experiences that profoundly shaped my life.
Those things are real. Leaving Mormonism did not require me to rewrite my past and pretend that none of the good happened.
But neither does gratitude require me to pretend the harm wasn’t real.
That is perhaps the biggest thing that has changed for me since I first wrote this. Back then, I ended by essentially telling Dad, “I love you. You’re still my Dad. I’m staying. I believe your best days are ahead.”
Today, more than a decade later, Mormonism is much farther in my rearview mirror. Strangely enough, distance hasn’t made me see the Church as less dysfunctional. If anything, it has allowed me to recognize forms of institutional, spiritual, psychological, sexual, and relational harm that I couldn’t fully see while I was still inside the system trying to preserve my relationship with it.
I can appreciate what Mormonism gave me without granting it authority over me. I can be grateful for parts of my upbringing without moving back into the house. And I can love many of the people who still live there without believing they are obligated to stay there.
So perhaps Elder Corbridge and I simply arrive at very different conclusions from his analogy.
If your ward feels like Alcatraz and your bishop acts like Darth Vader, I don’t think the obvious moral lesson is “Stay.”
I think that is precisely when healthy people begin asking harder questions: Why does this relationship require my unconditional loyalty? Why is leaving treated as morally suspect regardless of how I am being treated? Why does the institution get to determine the conditions under which I am permitted to withdraw my participation?
And perhaps most importantly, if this really is God’s kingdom on earth, why should I expect it to operate like an abusive family system in which the one option I am never permitted to seriously consider is leaving?
I couldn’t ask that question clearly when I first wrote this.
I can now.
The post The Church as an abusive Father Figure: My Response to Larry Corbridge appeared first on Mormon Discussions Podcasts - Full Lineup.
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Primary sources used include: Joseph Smith Papers Project Doctrine & Covenants 101, 103, and 105 John Whitmer’s History John Corrill’s A Brief History of the Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints Contemporary journals, letters, meeting minutes, and financial records from 1833–1835
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