Ep. 297: Ex-Mormon, Ex-MAGA, Ex-Tradwife: How Lesbians Broke the Spell with Jennie Gage
She Burned Her Bible in the Backyard. Here's What Led Her There.
Jennie Gage was a kindergartner in Northern Arizona when she drew a picture of the Oval Office and told her teacher she wanted to be president.
Her mother looked at that drawing and cried. Then she told Jennie that Heavenly Father had made her to be a mommy.
That was the beginning — or really, just one visible moment in a lifetime of drip, drip, drip. Jennie grew up Mormon in the early 1970s, which she is quick to distinguish from the Mormon church of today. No internet. No accountability. Strict doctrinal control over who she was allowed to be friends with, who she was allowed to marry, what music she could listen to, what news she was allowed to watch. She accepted it all as truth. She didn't know how not to.
By 19, she'd been assaulted on a second date and then marched to a bishop's office, where she was told the only way to make it right was to marry the man who assaulted her. She did. For 24 years.
When the marriage collapsed — her husband was caught with a 19-year-old escort — Jennie had no job skills, four financially dependent kids, and nowhere to go. She ended up sleeping in her car. And even then, her first instinct was to find another man to take care of her. That was all she'd ever been taught.
This is how indoctrination works. It doesn't just tell you what to believe. It replaces your nervous system.
The Drip, Drip, Drip
What Jennie describes as the "drip, drip, drip" of Mormon indoctrination isn't Sunday church. It's Sunday church, plus Monday family home evening, plus youth seminary four nights a week, plus being taught to doubt your doubts, plus a primary song you sing as a three-year-old called "Do As I'm Doing, Follow Follow Me," plus another one called "Follow the Prophet, He Knows the Way."
By the time she sat in that bishop's office at 19, she had been told for 19 years that her own voice — her own intuition — was Satan. When everything in her mind screamed that this was wrong, she had a theological framework ready to explain that away. Natural man is an enemy to God. Doubt your doubts. The prophet knows best.
She married Stinky Jake.
The Lesbians?
The first crack didn't come from a book or a documentary or a crisis of theology. It came from doTERRA.
MLMs thrive in Mormon communities for obvious reasons — built-in network, trust, women with skills and time and no outside income. Jennie built a real business out of it: home classes, a radio show, a whole downline. And because she didn't want to discriminate, she let a lesbian neighbor into her network.
The lesbian brought her lesbian friends. They were nice. Genuinely, disarmingly nice. And Jennie — who had been taught that LGBTQ people were sinners burning in the Telestial Kingdom — found herself caught. She liked them. She felt more cared for by them than by most of her Mormon community.
She filed that away. She told herself Satan was tricking her. She kept the friendships and kept her beliefs for years more.
Then in 2018, she was sitting in Relief Society — the women's class at her ward — when a 23-year-old teacher began a lesson called "The Evils of Homosexuality." And something in Jennie's brain just broke. She thought about her six lesbian friends. She thought about everything she'd heard in that room that morning. And she raised her hand, said this was the most hateful thing she'd ever heard, told the teacher that generations of her family would not be Mormon because of this lesson, grabbed her purse, and walked out.
She has never been back.
What Nobody Tells You About Leaving
The name "Life Take Two" sounds like a fresh start. It is. But it's not the fresh start people assume.
Two months after leaving the Mormon church, Jennie woke up from a coma in a hospital. "Life take two" is what a medical staff member said to her when she came around.
She shares this openly now, because she thinks people romanticize religious deconstruction — congratulating ex-Mormons as if leaving a cult is something to celebrate. It isn't. When you leave a high-demand religion, you lose your identity. You lose your cosmology. You lose the version of reality you've inhabited for decades. Mormon garments aren't just underwear — Jennie had them physically laid on her skin by nurses while she was hooked up to monitors during surgery for an ovarian tumor, because she believed that if those garments weren't touching her, she would die.
Leaving means reckoning with the fact that you believed that. And everything else.
Erika Kirk, Shield Maidens, and What's Coming for Your Kids
Jennie has spent years tracking the Mormon-to-MAGA pipeline — the documented overlap between Mormon missionary infrastructure and the organizing playbook of Turning Point USA. More than 50 percent of Turning Point USA's staff are Mormon. The Mormon seminary model is being copy-pasted onto college campuses. The return missionary program has been reframed as campus organizing.
And fronting all of it, she argues, is the figure of the shield maiden.
In white supremacist organizing, a shield maiden is a woman deployed to soften an ideology — to make it palatable, even aspirational, to people who might otherwise recoil. Erika Kirk, Jennie says, is exactly this. Not necessarily by design — Jennie doesn't think Charlie Kirk planned for his wife to become CEO. But the function is the same: blonde hair, cross necklace, children, the optics of tradwife domesticity wrapped around a movement that is anything but soft.
Jennie is also clear that Erika Kirk is not just playing a role. She believes in the mission. That, Jennie says, is what makes her dangerous.
Cults operate on two tools: fear and inspiration. Right now, MAGA is leaning hard on fear. But fear wears off. Inspiration wears off. New Year's resolutions always collapse by January 20th. The people who understand this — the ones who've been running Mormon missionary programs for decades — are not counting on converting adults. They're going after the kids.
What She Found Instead
Seven years out from Mormonism, four and a half years out from Christianity, Jennie identifies as atheist. Not nihilist. Not lost. She burned her Bible in the backyard fire pit when she couldn't explain to her teenagers why she had that book in the house. And she found something on the other side of all that noise.
She describes it as the life force underneath everything — the electrical system of the human body that beats for a hundred years without being plugged in, the interconnectedness of people who show up for each other, the beauty of a planet that doesn't need mythology to be miraculous.
She says the God she spent 44 years looking for in the sky was under her feet the whole time.
She does it scared every day. But she does it.
Listen to the full conversation with Jennie Gage on Culture Changers.
xo, Allison
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