SALT LAKE CITY -- It took 16 months for Suzy Colver and her husband to work up the courage to quit the Mormon church, because, they said, they worried about what would befall them once word of their defection spread through their Mormon-dominated town of Ogden.
They said they didn't have to wait long. Instantly, Colver said, her family became the neighborhood pariah. She lost every one of her Mormon friends, even though she had been a leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' prestigious Relief Society. She wasn't asked to volunteer at her kids' elementary school anymore.
"If Mormons associate with you, they think they will somehow become contaminated and lose their faith too," Colver said. "It's almost as if people who leave the church don't exist."
Colver, a 33-year-old mother of three, was among a group of ex-Mormons who gathered here recently to wrestle with problems that, they say, plague some who leave the church but remain in Utah and other communities heavily dominated by Mormons: rejection from Mormon spouses, children and relatives; the disappearance of Mormon friends; the end of a social life; a sidetracked career.
How, they asked each other at the inaugural Ex-Mormon General Conference, can you carve out a regular life within the immense shadow of the Mormon church, which claims roughly 70 percent of Utah residents as members?
"In Utah, the church has created an almost impossible box to climb out of," said Sue Emmett, a 60-year-old great-great-granddaughter of Brigham Young. She left the church in 1999.
Tales of ostracism are familiar in other close-knit, conservative religious communities. In some circles of Orthodox Judaism, for example, families will consider a relative who marries outside the faith dead, even observing the Jewish mourning process. Some Latino mothers weep for their sons who turn their back on the Catholic church. And the Amish banish from their community anyone who leaves their faith.
But only in Utah and pockets of neighboring states does a single religion have such a dominant hold over nearly every aspect of society. Which was why Colver, Emmett and about 60 other heretics held their gathering at a symbolic place and time: a block from Salt Lake City's Temple Square, where 21,000 faithful Mormons had flocked to the church's 171st semiannual General Conference. They told stories, often tearfully, of prejudice they encountered upon leaving.
One recalled volunteering to say grace at a Thanksgiving dinner, only to be stopped by her mother, who said, "You can't. I don't know what you'd say."
Another expressed relief after moving out of state to a non-Mormon neighborhood: "It was so nice to go to the grocery store and know no one's going to look down on you."
In Mormon country -- a strip of states from Montana and Idaho in the north to Arizona in the south -- Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints members make up huge majorities in many communities.
The 11 million-member church is one of the fastest growing religious organizations in the world, adding 40 percent to its membership each decade since 1960, church officials say. The church says it doesn't release the number of Mormons who drop from the rolls.
Church Elder Tad R. Callister said the church recognized its shortcoming when it recently released its "Doctrine of Inclusion," which implores members to better embrace nonmembers -- whether people of other religions or former Mormons.
"We're imperfect people ... [but] we want it to be said that we're the best neighbors in the world," Callister said.
Most at the conference of ex-Mormons said serious doubts about the faith's authenticity drove them away.
Mormons believe "the one and only true church" of Jesus Christ was restored to the Earth by the prophet Joseph Smith in the 1820s.
A primary source of attack by critics is the Book of Mormon, a sacred text for the church called "Another Testament of Jesus Christ." Mormon tradition holds that the angel Moroni -- a resurrected ancient American prophet and warrior -- led Smith to gold plates buried in a hillside in upstate New York.
Engraved on the plates, Mormons believe, were holy writings by ancient Americans in "reformed Egyptian," a combination of ancient Hebrew and Egyptian hieroglyphics used by Americans who had first emigrated here from Jerusalem about 600 years before Christ. Viewing the plates through special stones and devices, Smith is said to have deciphered the writings.
"It has no factual basis," said Steve Benson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist with the Arizona Republic and grandson of Mormon prophet Ezra Taft Benson. "Once a crack of truth in the dam emerged, it wasn't long before the whole superstructure broke loose. Soon I was swimming in the intellectual ocean of freedom."
At turns, the three-day ex-Mormon event resembled a self-help recovery group, an academic seminar, a class reunion and an all-night college party.
The former Mormons, from young adults to seniors, drank coffee and Cokes in the morning and martinis and beer in the evening, and the women wore sleeveless blouses -- all against church teaching.
Humor masked much bitterness. All participants said they'd lost major pieces of their lives after they walked away from the church.
But because of family ties, jobs, familiarity or just plain stubbornness, many of the former Mormons have decided to stay in hostile territory and try to make friends -- or at least live a peaceful life alongside the church.
"I want to be me and still be respected," said Maxine Hanks, who was excommunicated from the church in 1993 after publishing her book, "Women and Authority: Re-Emerging Mormon Feminism." "I'm tired of being seen as an outsider."
Many of the apostates still enjoy parts of the Mormon culture, especially the emphasis on family and moral values. "I want to be a Mormon like Woody Allen is a Jew," said one conference participant. "I don't want to be robbed of my Mormonism."