Losing a Child After Losing Mormon Faith w/ Jennie Latham Johnson | Ep. 2019

When Faith Fails, Children Suffer: A Pattern Emerging in Mormon Exit Stories

A child loses a parent twice: once when the parent leaves the church, and again when the child chooses to stay. This is the hidden crisis within Mormonism's faith crisis narrative, one that surfaces repeatedly in testimonies from families navigating simultaneous departures from belief. The Mormon Stories Podcast episode featuring Jennie Latham Johnson explores precisely this terrain, revealing how the religion's grip extends so deeply into family bonds that even losing faith cannot fully sever them. For those researching the psychological aftermath of losing Mormon faith, and especially for families facing these ruptures, Johnson's story illuminates what the institutional church rarely addresses: the collateral damage when one generation's exit becomes another generation's tragedy.

The question is not whether faith transitions fracture families. It is how completely they can destroy bonds that were forged in shared belief, and what happens when a child internalizes religious doctrine so thoroughly that rejecting it feels like rejecting the parent who taught it.

The Architecture of Religious Identity Formation

Johnson grew up in a devout LDS household in Austin, Texas as the youngest of five children. Her mother, a British convert who found in Mormonism an escape from childhood chaos and alcoholic parents, brought to the faith an intensity born from desperation. Her father, a missionary veteran who met Johnson's mother in England and brought her across an ocean to a small Texas town, embodied the post-mission commitment that treated doubt as moral failure.

The childhood Johnson describes was not abusive in the conventional sense. It was something more subtle and, arguably, more lasting: a systematic training in self-distrust. The institution provided a clear moral architecture. Girls were taught that their natural desires were dangerous. Modesty lessons employed object lessons (the licked cupcake, the chewed gum) that equated female sexuality with permanent damage. Her father prohibited certain films while allowing others based on a logic that protected daughters from thinking about dating.