Leah escaped a cult worth $265 billion. Now she's sharing their secrets.

Until three years ago, Leah was a devoted member of the Mormon Church, which has an estimated worth of $265 billion. By the time she left, she had given the organisation 35,000 of her hours and 10 per cent of her gross annual income since childhood.

Her journey out Mormonism was gradual; a slow awakening that culminated in a complete life reset.

"It did take me a long time to, as I put it, leave the Truman Show," she told Mamamia.

Watch: The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives S2 Trailer. Post continues below.

There were parts of the religion that Leah found comforting, like the community it offered.

"I have three children, and I knew that with each pregnancy, if I had to be on bed rest or something, I would just have a whole team of women who would come to my aid and help clean my house, or hold my baby while I took a shower, or watch my kids if I had to go to the emergency room," Leah recalled. "And I know that because I was on the giving end of that as well, and it's incredibly supportive and loving."

The church also provided an existential comfort that many outside the faith might envy.

"The doctrines of it give you a sense of peace, because you feel like you know what's going to happen when you're going to die. I never felt scared of death as a Mormon because I was going to heaven," Leah explained.

She continued: "Mormons actually don't believe in hell; they believe in three heavens, and even the bottom heaven is better than this life, which is why death by suicide becomes a problem [in the community], because if your life is really horrible and you believe that, well, whatever's next is better."

The awakening.

Despite the comfort it provided, Leah couldn't ignore the red flags. Her views when it came to politics and the COVID pandemic seemed wildly different from many members of the church.

"During 2020, there were these huge protests where people wouldn't wear a mask. And at that time, there were obviously lots of people seeking asylum from south of the border, and there were a lot of Mormons who were anti-immigration, which shocked me," she said.

The cognitive dissonance became unbearable when she saw that the same people who had funded missions to these countries were now rejecting immigrants.

"These are people that paid the church money to have their son serve a two-year mission in Honduras. And then from that same country, you have people coming in. They're like 'our borders are closed' — this could have been somebody that your son taught?

"You would have flown them over and live in your home. What's the difference? And so the cognitive dissonance that I started to see even within my own family and my close circle, the community that I felt so comfortable in, I just couldn't reconcile," she said.

The breaking point.

Leah's breaking point came when some members of her church attended the January 6th Capitol riots. In 2021, a mob of President Donald Trump supporters attacked the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., in an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

"There were two people very close to my husband and me that attended the January 6 rally," Leah said, adding that they later apologised as they "didn't realise" what the violence that would ensue.

"I remember, at the time, just being so baffled and angry, because it's like, 'What did you think was going to happen?'"

From there, the red flags intensified as Leah began to do some more research into the history of Mormonism.

"If I actually start to open the box, the bees come out, and it's really hard for me not to make a whole list of all the problems that I have," she said,

"I always thought the Mormons were special, and that they were those chosen people, not for any genetic reason, but that everyone could be chosen. And that's why you go out and serve a mission, because you want everyone to be part of this wonderful group. I thought we kind of had like, little fairy dust. But for these people that I knew to have been deceived, I was like, 'I'm gonna go my own way with critical thinking.'"

The great escape.

Despite knowing that she could no longer remain part of the church, Leah said it was "really difficult to make the decision to leave that community".

However, the COVID pandemic provided the perfect opportunity for a quiet exit, as no one questioned why she wasn't attending church regularly.

By August 2021, Leah, her husband, and kids made a clean break.

"We got rid of everything we owned, and then we lived nomadically for a year as a family. We lived for six months in the UK, and we lived in different cities about a month at a time, and then we went across the US and lived in each city that we were considering moving to."

The family eventually settled in Philadelphia, giving them 'a fresh start' where they knew nobody. It was equal parts scary and exciting.

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Mixed family reactions.

Breaking the news to family brought mixed reactions.

"People ask me sometimes if Mormons disown you when you leave. They don't. If anything, I would say some of them will try harder to win you back," Leah said. "They'll send you little scriptures. Or, 'I'm thinking of you.'"

"My stepmom was great about that. She was really sweet. There was no judgment or finger-wagging."

Not everyone was so accepting, though.

"We did get an email from a family member that was, like, a little bit more, 'I'm not surprised; lots of people are leaving because of Satan's hand'. It was more like, 'This is very serious'. And, obviously, my dad wasn't happy about it."

Now, Leah has to walk on eggshells around certain friends and family, which she describes as "painful".

"It would be like if you were gay and you didn't tell your family, and they had a problem with it, and then you came out, and so they knew it, but you wanted to talk about your boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever, but you couldn't, because you knew that it's like, kind of painful to them."

She added: "You kind of mask or filter what you're talking about to put them at ease. So it is a bit uncomfortable, for sure. I love them, but I've changed a lot, so it's hard for them."

The Mormon money machine.

These days, Leah delights in sharing surprising aspects of Mormonism that outsiders wouldn't know. Like how in the early days, Mormons tried communism.

"Even though in the States, they tend to be very hard-line conservative Republicans," she said. "They called it United Order. And the idea is that there are no poor among us.

"Everybody would bring everything they had, and they would give it to the bishop, and then he would distribute it, because you'd have all these immigrants coming in, and they didn't have anything."

That eventually stopped, but bishops claimed they would start it again "when Jesus [came] back".

She also critiqued the church's massive wealth and their financial practices.

"They have $265 billion and a lot of that has been stocked away," she added, the frustration evident in her voice.

Mormon rules and "logic".

Leah also humorously described what she calls 'Mormon logic' — the sometimes inconsistent application of church rules.

"Mormons aren't supposed to have coffee or tea, but they can have caffeinated sodas. It doesn't make sense," she laughed.

"There are a lot of Mormons waiting for the coffee ban to be lifted. I have members of my family that pound cases of Mountain Dew Code Red, but they've never had decaf coffee."

She also recited, in her words, "the naughty list for Mormons".

"Mormons are famously supposed to abstain from coffee, tea, tobacco, alcohol, premarital sex, pornography, masturbation, gambling, tattoos, and R-rated movies".

As a rule keeper, Leah followed the rules to a tee while in the church.

"I had something called 'scrupulosity', which is a religious form of OCD, and so I was just very obsessive about it," she said.

The church's social media strategy.

The church's relationship with social media was another revelation from Leah.

"When social media came out, the church saw that it could be used to be very destructive; that some of the things that they've hidden could come to light, and so their response was, 'Share your light. Share what you know; show yourself at home, holding your babies and how much you love the gospel'.

"And so the church created a whole generation of influencers. It started with the blogosphere, and Mormon mommy bloggers baking cookies. You know, the Trad wife thing, Ballerina Farm, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives."

While there has been some speculation that Mormon leaders encourage their influencers to post on social media so that the church can take a cut of the earnings, Leah had a different perspective.

"It's not that they're not looking for their tithing dollars," she said. "But what happens is [that] these influencers become incredibly wealthy because the church has a huge PR department.

Leah described it as a mutually beneficial situation for both the church and influencers alike, where the church will buy advertising that's placed around Mormon content — say, ads that play during a YouTube video, which the influencer will receive a portion of. Then, that influencer will offer some of that back to the church in the form of tithing, and perhaps more people join the church along the way.

"They're spending so much on ad revenue that that influencer gets," Leah said. "So it's kind of like when you work for the government, and then you pay taxes. But I don't think they're doing it because they get a lot more money from it. There are plenty of rich Mormons already."

Finding freedom in uncertainty.

Today, Leah finds unexpected freedom in leaving certainty behind.

"I really liked the certainty in Mormonism. But now that I'm out, I kind of like the uncertainty," she reflected.

"It's like, 'What happens to you when you die?' I'm like, 'It's probably fine'. It's almost [like] the burden of knowing what was next meant that I needed to do certain things so that the next thing was okay. It's so nice to be free of the responsibility."

Now, Leah is taking her story on stage for her comedy show Best Cult Ever.

"I went into comedy after leaving Mormonism, and I didn't really feel like talking about it, not because of trauma or anything like that, but in the process of writing this show, I figured out that I've given Mormonism enough. 

"What I was aiming for in the show was to show the good and to show the struggle and the agony, because it's very easy to crap on religion. It's an easy target, and I could have made the show like, 'Isn't this crazy?'. But I can't speak ill of it without speaking ill of the me that lived in it for more than three decades.

"It's like, when you badmouth an ex, it's like, 'Yeah, but you were with him for eight years', you know? So I wanted to give a fair picture, but a funny picture as well."

Feature Image: Instagram/@leahreneecomedian