By Yvette Harding –
After becoming a high priest of Mormonism, Michael Wilder worried about polygamy, once a part of the religion.
“It was always one of those things on the shelf that I was never comfortable with,” Wilder says. “I just prayed, ‘God is polygamy and an eternal principle?’ It’s almost like I felt a presence behind me. I actually heard these words in my right ear: ‘No. It is not of me. It is of man.’”
After three decades in Mormonism, the high-ranking clergyman left the religion by reading the Bible. He is exposing the secret Temple ceremonies, like Masonic handshakes and symbols, that he swore to never tell on pain of death.
Michael Wilder got pulled into Mormonism by the nice people. First the missionaries who came to his home night after night explaining the doctrines to him and his wife. Then the ward members and leaders treated them like family. His boss at his work was Mormon and favored him.
He kept serving and ranking up for 30 years. He got baptized into Mormonism and gave 20 hours of his own time a week to the church. He paid his tithes.
A critical moment in his rise in Mormonism was his visit to the nearest Mormon Temple in Washington D.C. He drove all the way from Muncie, Indiana, with his wife. You have to interview and qualify to get in. They seal your wedding, which makes your marriage eternal. You’ll be able to have sex with your wife for all of eternity.
You learn secret handshakes and symbolism. Later he learned these were adopted from Masonism. Back in the day, temple workers washed and anointed “every part” of your body (wait, EVERY part???) with water and oil. You are given holy underwear.
With each secret symbol or name given, you swear to never reveal the secrets outside the Temple.
“If I reveal this name or token outside of the temple to anybody else, we would take our hand
with our thumb extended and put under our neck as a knife that we would say and we would suffer
our lives to be taken,” Wilder explains. “In other words you would lay down your life. You will allow somebody to kill you.”
It seemed weird.
Some Mormons are usually thrilled with the experience that the they go through a second, third and fourth time, in the name of all their relatives and ancestors, to save them vicariously through the ritual.
“It was not a pleasant experience,” he says. ““We went to our hotel room and we were physically ill.”
The temple experience had struck him as odd, but he plugged away serving the religion. He taught youth, oversaw wards and held different positions of rank. Eventually, he was named to be a temple worker himself.
Outside of the church, Michael was an accountant and his wife Lynn taught. When she was offered a position at Brigham Young University, they moved to Alpine, Utah, which he says 98% active Mormon. His kids got scholarships to Brigham Young and went two years on missions.
One son went to Russia, and the other, Micah, went to Florida. Micah was zealous to proselytize. Audaciously, he decided to win a Baptist pastor to Mormonism.
It didn’t work. For every verse from the Book of Mormon about earning your salvation, the pastor countered with a verse out of the Bible showing salvation by grace. The pastor let him go with a challenge, if he would just read the Bible. Micah left discouraged but took up the challenge.
Officially, Mormonism gives equal value to both the Bible and the Book of Mormon; in practice the Book of Mormon is highlighted, emphasized, favored and more frequently read over the Bible, Wilder says now.
The unadulterated Word of God took its effect in Micah’s heart. He realized he didn’t need the Mormon Church, its leaders or its prophet. As his confidence in the Bible grew, he eventually testified. He was still officially a missionary for the Mormon Church, and he was flouting its doctrines.
A crackdown came. Micah was confronted, charged with having the “spirit of the devil” and being an Anti-Christ. With only three weeks remaining on his mission, Micah got kicked out – something like a dishonorable discharge.
The judgements brought by the Mormon church, including appearing in front of authorities, seemed rather like the Spanish Inquisition. Micah didn’t cave.
His father, on the other hand, was shocked and confused. “I didn’t know what was going to happen,” Wilder says.
Micah went to Florida to avoid the shaming and branding expected in Alpine from the Mormons. When he left, he encouraged his dad to read the Bible, as he had done.
It was 2006. Wilder continued serving in the Mormon Church, his wife at BYU. But he was reading his Bible, which he hardly had read before out of preference for the Book of Mormon. And he wondered about the weird old doctrine of polygamy.
Under pressure from the U.S. government, Mormonism banned polygamy in 1890. Breakoff Mormons in the countryside continued the practice.
Wilder scoured scriptures: the Book of Mormon commanded it; in the Bible, he found, there was no such command from God. Yes, there were cases in the Bible of polygamy, Abraham, David, Solomon; but they seemed more to be mistakes, not obedience. In the beginning, God made ONE woman for Adam, showing his intention.
But he had given 30 years to Mormonism, and it was hard to see the truth after so long being under delusion.
Wilder was working at the temple. One day, inside the “celestial room “ – where according to Mormonism, Satan cannot enter, where God will talk to a man – he prayed, “God is polygamy and an eternal principle?”
Behind his right ear, he heard an audible voice: No. It is not of me. It is of man.
Right then, he realized he must quit the church.
He was scheduled on Sunday to sing a hymn with his wife praising Mormon’s founder, Joseph Smith. He couldn’t do it. All his reading in scripture taught him to worship Jesus alone.
It also taught him that salvation came through Jesus alone.
He took off the Mormon underwear. He put on a cross.
“In 30 years in the LDS church (Latter Day Saints = Mormons), never once did I hear a sermon about the blood and the cross,” he says. “Now I know the importance of the cross.”
Eventually, he turned in his letters of resignation in 2007. His wife had to quit BYU. All of his children left the church. They moved to Florida with Micah.
“I did not have the Good News for 30 years. I did not have the cross or the blood (of Jesus),” he says. “I want people – especially my LDS friends – to know there is a better way (than earning your way to Heaven with good works).”
Related content: Mormon girl never questioned her faith.
