Missionaries didn't break my relationship with my family. Life did.

As a convert whose baptism and membership in the Church was the subject of a lot of strife between me and my immediate family, it's hard not to see myself in this essay that was published over on Exponent II. There was a giant part of me that wanted to respond to Abby Maxwell Hansen and share what I've learned from being in her convert mother's shoes. But the longer I thought about it, the more I realized all my thoughts on that subject were never going to fit into a comment. So instead, I'm putting them here.

To provide some context, I'm from a poor family full of untreated mental illness and addiction. The only goal and dream I'd ever had for my future was to leave my hometown on the East Coast (and by extension, my family), to build a healthier and more stable life for myself somewhere, anywhere else.

I joined the Church in high school at sixteen years old. It didn't take me long to realize it would be my ticket out of my situation. I chose to go to college at BYU in Utah, served a mission in Brazil, got married in the temple, and later ended up moving to Idaho with my husband. I've spent more of my adult life away from my family than I've spent near them.

That was not an accident. It wasn't a mistake. It wasn't a negative, unwanted consequence of joining the Church. The separation itself was a deliberate choice I made, which I don't regret in any way.

I say with my entire chest that the Church and its members are an essential part of why I didn't end up being a statistic of poverty, addiction, abuse, and incarceration. The Church is in no way responsible for destroying my relationships with my family. I'm sure that's not how some of them see it, but here's the thing. When two family members desire to maintain contact (or reconnect) across physical distance, they will do so. If they don't, there are other reasons for that which membership in the Church doesn't create.

Baptism and temple marriage weren't the reasons my relationships with my family were strained. All my church membership did was reveal the preexisting fractures that were already there, and would've existed regardless of whether I'd ever been baptized or not. I still would've moved away. I would've maintained the same separations from family members with whom I have zero contact at this point. All the Church did was give me the options and resources to build that life for myself. The Church gave me what I needed to start over in a totally new place without family support. Which is great, because there was absolutely no reality in which my relationship with my family was ever going to be any different.

There was no version of my life with a happy extended family OP is describing, with enough mutual respect and restraint to have that kind of closeness. For that kind of closeness to exist, people on both ends of a relationship have to be willing to put in that work. If they wanted to, they would. If they didn't, it's because they didn't want to. And I can tell y'all from personal experience: if it's been decades and a family hasn't moved on from "you're in a cult" and "you have a coffee pot," the fractures go deeper than that, no matter what anybody says.

I don't have children who can misinterpret and blame my personal and religious choices on missionaries. It wouldn't matter if I did because my branch didn't have missionaries. I joined the Church with the support of church members who found me, taught me the discussions, and baptized me. It was what I wanted and they were the only ones available. But know this: you could get rid of missionaries entirely and it wouldn't stop people from finding the Church and being baptized. I'm living proof of that. And as long as people continue to be baptized, there will always be familial strife that will become wrapped up in that decision. Even if it didn't start there.

Imagining an alternative timeline in which family members don't join the Church and consequently end up with better lives and closer families is an exercise in fiction. The opportunity cost of choosing This and not That deals entirely in an unknowable hypothetical, which isn't enough of a foundation to go assigning blame to anyone. Especially when the hypothetical is predicated on people making choices against their own best interests when it comes to going low or no contact with their own families. As someone who has made, and is still making that decision, I can't fault anyone who does so looking for peace in their own lives. The idea that they could've tried harder, done things differently, or prioritized themselves less to maintain those familial relationships is wishful thinking at best, and dangerously delusional at worst.

The idea that missionaries walk around bumping into walls and causing generational trauma all by themselves? That's attributing way too much of what a family's dynamic already is on innocent bystanders who don't have the power or support necessary to force anyone to do anything. Instead, it's worth considering that infrequent, lukewarm, awkward family visits are (perhaps) the best of all possible worlds.

[And as an aside: Can we stop advocating for the Church to get involved in the United State's broken healthcare system by forming their own hospitals and medical clinics? 

Any unmarried woman who has had BYU's insurance and health care can tell you why that's a bad idea. Enough people have already had their access to medication and treatment curtailed in the name of "religious freedom." In my experience, the doctors at BYU's student health center don't even bother diagnosing or treating conditions like PCOS because hormone therapy (i.e. birth control) is part of the treatment for it. And even if they did prescribe it, the student health insurance wouldn't pay for it because they view it solely as contraception, not hormone therapy. 

Low income and under served populations deserve real, inclusive, comprehensive healthcare. That's not what they would get if the Church was sponsoring it.]