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“Surviving Mormonism”

“Surviving Mormonism”

Last updated on: October 23, 2025 at 9:01 am by Dan Peterson

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“Surviving Mormonism” 2025-10-23T09:01:30-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The Washington DC Temple (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo by Joe Ravi)

The curious obsession of cable television with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continues: “Bravo Announces New Limited Series Surviving Mormonism with Heather Gay: Exposing the ‘Dark History’ of the Religion: According to Bravo, the series “delves into outdated and controversial practices and empowers victims to share their experiences”” This is something to which serious scholars of theology and religious history will definitely be looking forward, and it will obviously contribute mightily to interfaith respect and mutual understanding.

“Heather Gay confronts Mormon Church abuse in Bravo’s new series ‘Surviving Mormonism’. When and where you can watch it?”

“A ‘Real Housewives of Salt Lake City’ star will confront the LDS Church in a new documentary series: Heather Gay’s ‘Surviving Mormonism’ will debut on Bravo and stream on Peacock in November.”

I know that I’m thrilled!

I want to point out here, by the way, that I too am a survivor of Mormonism. And I’m willing to sell my heroic story of survival for (starting bid) a few hundred thousand dollars to Bravo, the Daily Mail, MSNBC, L’Osservatore Romano, KUER, the Salt Lake Tribune, Hulu, or anybody else who is willing to buy it. In the meanwhile, more than 80,000 of my fellow survivors are, at this very moment, going door to door around the world, from Korea to Ghana to Taiwan, from Patagonia to Alaska, from Samoa to Madagascar, trying to share their own stories of survival.

I encourage all of you to come forward on social media and everywhere else, outing yourselves as “survivors of Mormonism,” telling your stories. The media will, of course, privilege Heather Gay and people like her. But others have stories to tell, also. In fact, if there’s somebody out there with the energy and the expertise to do this, I think it would be a great idea to launch a website bearing a name like Surviving Mormonism or Survivors of Mormonism. I envision a platform for regular Latter-day Saints to tell their stories, to bear brief and simple witness. In the hundreds if not in the thousands.

Sam Parnia, M.D., Ph.D. (The status and provenance of this photograph are unclear to me. If there is an objection from an interested party, I will happily remove it.)

I dip, once again, into Sam Parnia, Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2024), for a few passages that I think might interest you. I commend it to the attention of anyone who is interested in the question of consciousness and/or in near-death experiences (or in what Dr. Parnia himself prefers to label “recalled experiences of death”).

As I’ve mentioned here before, the Anglo-American Dr. Parnia is an associate professor of medicine at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, where, additionally, he serves as director of research into cardiopulmonary resuscitation. He also leads the Human Consciousness Project at the University of Southampton, in England. He received his medical degree in 1995 from the medical school of King’s College London and then earned a doctorate in cell biology from the University of Southhampton in 2007. He also received fellowship training in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of London and at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.

[W]hat if death itself is not the end we have thought and assumed? What if who we are—our very consciousness and selfhood—is not annihilated with death? And what if science can prove it? What will that mean for us, for society, for religion, for philosophy, for how we live our lives? . . .

Many scientists consider what happens after death as mere philosophical or theological speculation. I don’t agree with this position and thankfully, today this no longer needs to be the case. Using sophisticated brain technology, we can peer inside the brains of people as they approach and then transition beyond death by recording and analyzing their brain waves. Advances in mathematics, artificial intelligence (AI) technology, and computing power are allowing us to objectively analyze realities about life and death that we never could have until recently. And this research is giving us the first real-time ability to study what happens to the brain and consciousness in people as they cross from life beyond the boundary of death. (4)

There is much more to be discovered, but science does, at a minimum, suggest that our consciousness and selfhood are not annihilated when we cross over into death and into the great unknown. (8)

Dr. Parnia writes of “a unique hyperconscious lucid mental state” (8) that would surely seem improbable of occurrence when both the brain and the senses are shutting down or actually have shut down. And he is impressed by what people who have returned from that mental state report:

These people, having had a recalled experience of death (or RED), return with a uniform, standardized series of experiences. It doesn’t matter that they’ve never met or communicated with each other, or that they died in Mexico, Iran, Thailand, America, Denmark, or the United Kingdom. No matter how varied their lives, their encounters with death have a startling narrative unity. (9)

But such experiences are widely distributed in time as well as in space:

In the late nineteenth century, Sir Francis Beaufort, a highly respected and esteemed admiral with the British navy, wrote about his own lucid experience when he had almost drowned to death as a young sailor in Portsmouth harbor in 1795. He described this in the following manner: “Though the senses were… deadened, not so the mind; its activity seemed to be invigorated in a ratio which defies all description, for thought rose above thought in rapid succession.” He then described how he had relived every minute aspect of his life. He wrote, “A thousand other circumstances minutely associated with home were the first reflections. Then they took a wider range, our last cruise… a former voyage and shipwreck, my school and boyish pursuits and adventures. Thus, traveling backwards, every past incident of my life seemed to glance across my recollection in retrograde succession.” (51)

In his article, he explicitly highlighted the immensity and depth of his own lucid review of life. He explained that “[ those life incidents were experienced] not in mere outline,” but “the picture filled up with every minute and collateral feature… the whole period of my existence seemed to be placed before me in a kind of panoramic review, and each part of it seemed to be accompanied by a consciousness of right or wrong, or by some reflection on its cause or consequences; indeed, many trifling events which had been forgotten then crowded into my imagination, and with the character of recent familiarity.” His testimony, written almost two hundred years ago, when virtually nobody had heard of these experiences, is consistent with what millions of people would come to describe in modern times. (52)

The Cathedral of Our Lady of Paris (Notre-Dame de Paris), which was briefly known, under the state-sponsored atheism of the French Revolution, as the Temple of Reason. Not far away, during the same time, the guillotine was methodically used to support the Revolution’s arguments. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

Many secularists lament the evil effects of theism and theists on society — I’ve documented only a small proportion of those evil effects here, with my discoveries in the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™ — but, in Canada, they’re actually attempting to do something about the problem. And, predictably, wicked religious fanatics and zealots are yelping in protest: “Report warns revoking churches’ charitable status could devastate faith sector.”

Happily, too, young women may be disconnecting from religious faith and practice, suggesting that religiosity may be greatly diminished among common generations: “Gen Z Women Struggle to Find Their Place in Christian Faith and Community.” This could have profound implications for the future of so-called “charity” and purported “mental health.”

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near-death experience

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Surviving Mormonism

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