Stopping at times to wait out surges of emotion, Valerie Hamaker told supporters during a Wednesday Instagram Live appearance that she has “no regrets” about resigning her membership from a faith she always has loved — and still does.
" Nathan and I would have preferred to not have had this very sad thing happen,” said Valerie, referring to her husband and co-host of the podcast “Latter Day Struggles,” “where we’ve had to resign our membership. Our membership is valuable to us.”
Nonetheless, the mental health counselor said she views the loss of their formal membership as ultimately a “technicality that had to happen so that we could continue to do the work that we want to do on our own terms.”
That work, she explained, remains helping those “who are struggling with a faith crisis” and who have been “harmed” by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to heal and find peace with the institution and larger community — be it as a faithful or former member.
On Monday, the Missouri couple revealed that this effort had led to many long, difficult conversations with their local lay leaders and, finally, a Feb. 24 text inviting them to a church disciplinary hearing.
[Read more here about what led to the couple’s decision to leave the church.]
With rare exception, the church does not comment on issues relating to local member councils.
The Hamakers, for their part, explained that they decided to resign instead of submitting to the disciplinary council process, which Valerie called “fundamentally exploitative and spiritually abusive in nature.”
‘So much love and support’
Since Monday’s announcement, Valerie said she and Nathan have been overwhelmed with the response from listeners and members of their virtual community.
“I could not have anticipated so much love and support,” she said tearfully during the livestream, “from so many thousands of people.”
Other emotions Hamaker said she has been cycling through include grief and love — but not anger.
" I do see the good in them, to this day,” she said of her faith leaders. “These are good guys. And yet they couldn’t pull away from the loyalties that bind them to the system.”
As Hamaker framed it, those loyalties — paired with black-and-white thinking that insists on categorizing people as “for” and “against” the church — ultimately doomed the couple’s efforts to try and convince them that they were all on the same team.
" I just kept telling them that over and over and over again,” she said, “and they wouldn’t believe it.”
‘They couldn’t see it’
For them to do so, Hamaker explained, they would have first had to acknowledge that the church harms some individuals.
“They couldn’t see it,” she said. “And it occurred to me later on in the game that for them to see the good that we were doing…they first had to acknowledge that there was pain and suffering in the first place.”
It also didn’t help, she added, that these men were hearing all of this from a “woman with a voice and confidence” who wasn’t going to stop, regardless of what the “authoritarian patriarchy” said.
Asked if she now saw herself as an ex-Mormon, Hamaker said no.
Such titles, she asserted, only serve to perpetuate an us-versus-them mentality that fuels polarization.
“Why,” she asked, “are there camps and why must we see so much otherness in the other?”
Instead, Hamaker said she hoped to model a way forward that “transcends labels” that divide individuals.
‘We care about’ this faith
“As paradoxical as it may seem,” she said, “it’s because we care about this [faith] tradition that we are opening our mouths.”
Going forward, Valerie said she and Nathan plan to record a Friday podcast to answer more of the questions they’ve received.
The church, meanwhile, announced new resources Wednesday for those “seeking answers to questions about the doctrine, history and policies” of the faith.
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, the Utah-based church pointed to “three new [online] pages with clear and insightful answers” on topics ranging from race and science to women’s service and leadership in the faith.
