Once upon a time....
actually, a while ago at the church we attended for Bible school, we had a speaker come to our cl*** to talk about the Mormons.
She was a ex-Mormon, she had grown up in a Mormon family, married a Mormon guy...had Mormon kids..etc.
She came to our cl*** and taught on how to reach-out to Mormons at the door...
and what to say to them.
She had the normal stuff to say to us...like when the Mormon says __ we should answer with ___.
after her main presentation we had a time for questions and she was asked about how she came to see the truth about the Mormon church?
Her answer was to say it was not the teachings she learned from the Mormons that she called into question at first...it was the fact that on a issue she ran into in her life the Mormon church had left her unprepared for the hard truths about Smith she was running into.
She talked about the fact that her Mormon teachers did not even know about the many women Smith had.
She was taught that all the whispers that Smith married other women were all lies told by 'anti-mormons".
That was the way she answered anyone who tried to bring up the topic of Smith's sex life outside his real marriage to his wife.
"It's all lies"
But...what changed for her was the rise of the Internet...and the way it gave every Mormon and Christian the ability to do their own private research into history...and find out the facts.
what happened was that as the truth about Smith's running around started to be more widely known to everyone.
Her Mormon friends and her Mormon teachers started to say that Smith might have had other women, but that he was given special permission to "marry" them.
as she dug deeper into this topic, she started to see the record of the justifications that Smith would use to get women to agree to 'marry" him.
(Now remember this was years and years before the Mormon church finally admitted that Smith had many wives)
She told my cl*** that she would read how Smith would tell a girl that "God has given you to me as wife"....
and at first she believed in this idea...
for a while ....
But after a while, as she read more and more on how Smith would approach women, even married women and feed them this line, it started to look to her to be less a statement from Heavenly Father to Smith...and started to sound more and more like a cheap pick-up line you would hear at a sleazy bar.
"It's ok Honey, God wants us to do it"
Once it started to dawn on the lady speaking to us that she had started to see that Smith was not telling the truth about hearing from God about marring other women, she started to see that Smith was a very flawed man...
Smith appeared to her now as a flawed man with a very flawed view of marriage.
Once that happened, once she saw Smith was actually inventing stuff and saying it ws from God...it was like a crack had formed in the wall of Mormonism around her.
other things that Smith claimed now appeared to her in a different light.
Soon it was not just the "women issue" that the lady doubted Smith's word on...it was the whole matter of him finding the Golden Plates and the book of Mormon in the first place.