I am not a Young Woman anymore, and I may not even be a young woman anymore. I’m forty-four. That makes me a millennial, but only barely. I am also not planning on “leaving” the Church anytime soon if we mean where you’re likely to find me on most Sunday mornings.

So in some ways, I’m the wrong person to write about the young women who are leaving religion in their numbers. But humor me, everyone, and let’s call me young-adjacent. Also, I have a confession: I left a long time ago.

I resist the PIMO label (physically in, mentally out). I am definitely mentally in. Every Sunday I listen carefully. I observe. As a function of one of my callings (organist), I get to sit on the stand. It’s a fascinating privilege to observe a congregation, week after week, year after year. You learn things about people. You feel for them.

But the Church lost the Margie it wanted when I was earning my Personal Progress Medallion, the girl I was back when I really was a Young Woman. I am here now on my own terms, and they aren’t the terms the Church had in mind for me when I was a Beehive—or a Builder of Faith, I guess. (Are the names retroactive? Can they do that? Is “Beehive” a victory for Satan now too?)

There is so much I’m just not invested in: obedience, truth claims, covenant paths. None of that is especially important to me—fun academically, though. (Why do truth claim issues break some people’s shelves and not others’? What psychic and social benefits does Mormon obedience confer, if any? What about this moment in our people’s history has made “the Covenant Path” appealing rhetorically?—all potential topics for future blog posts, btw.) I am not the mother in Zion the Church was after. That girl vanished sometime in her early twenties. And the one in her place kept going to church. She went because it mattered terribly, urgently to her own parents. She went for the ancestors and the debts she felt she owed them. And she stays because of what she sees every Sunday when she looks out over the congregation.

But I have nothing but respect—and often admiration— for the ones who go away.

Many of the Mormon girls I grew up with have daughters now in their late teens and early twenties. The young women who are going away. And I wonder if part of the story is that these young women learned different things from their parents than I learned from mine. They were taught they mattered, and not because of a role they’d fill; that they were worthy, and not because they could give the “right” answers to a list of questions. Their mothers taught them that their own minds and moral judgment could be trusted. And they did not doubt their mothers knew it. That is how I’m trying to raise my daughters.

So that’s me. Margie. And I am beyond thrilled to be a perma here now. But I’m curious about you:

Have you gone away? In what sense? And what have you found there?

Have you stayed? On what terms? And what has it given you?

Discuss.