Red Ryder wrote: ↑Fri Oct 09, 2020 10:57 am
I think about this often because participation on NOM has changed my life for the better because it’s allowed me to process my awakening and I’ve met some great people in real life I’m proud to call life long friends.
I found NOM back in 2006 but thought these “middle way” Mormons were crazy. Like why do you want to stay? Then I realized it was a soft landing spot for people who were just falling down the rabbit hole and learning to maintain their most precious relationships at the same time. I read the board every day but never participated. I had found my place in between the floorboards and was comfortable in my position trying to figure out how to get out of the church. Well that never happened mainly do to my wife’s emotional attachment to the church.
It wasn’t until 2013 that I actively started to post and for me “Peak NOM” was 2014 -2016. Thayne was always the guardian of the soft landing and would slap our wrists when we got too rough. He would always say there’s other places on the internet for that, go post over there. I miss that time tremendously from a nostalgic point of view. I still am irked the content just vaporized when Thayne walked. There was so much history and my personal journey captured in writing that I would have loved to keep given the chance to download or whatever. Oh well.
I agree the church has killed the middle way. But I don’t blame the church 100%.
I would often meet one of the guys I met on this site for lunch and we used to get into these long debates about the wave of apostasy That was coming. I think it came in two waves. First when the essays came out. Then with the CES letter followed by the excoms of KK, JD, and Sam.
In the last 7 years, the narrative has changed. No longer is the need to hide behind avatars and user names. People are now processing leaving the church in real time on Facebook under their real names. People are no longer scared and the church has lost its power and control.
Leaving the church has become normalized. We all know people who have openly left. We all have family members that have openly left. I still hear testimonies at church from a parent crying over their grown up kids leaving the church. It’s become normalized. Even the rhetoric coming out of conference every 6 months points to the exodus and the talks like Bednars are a response to that.
So where does this leave places like NOM? Inevitably it leaves us as a small insular group of friends bound together by our bond of understanding the nuance of survival within Mormonism with loved ones still in.
It leaves us as a small group of long timers too weak to walk away, too strong to let go, and time against us as we don’t have new members join to keep the balance. In some ways, we are like the church, slowly fading in relevance. Yet here we are. Internet friends who support the twilight zone we all live in.
The great Cwald once said (paraphrasing), “this ain’t NOM, it’s just an attempt to recreate the original NOM.” He was right, and he was wrong. This place may not be the middle way soft landing spot anymore, but it’s still a pretty damn great place to learn from each other.