Life outside a cult

last updated 8 January 2015

Zach Bowers is learning how to live in the modern world, said John Glionna in the Los Angeles Times. The 18-year-old is a defector from the secretive Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a breakaway Mormon sect that practices polygamy and forbids members from reading newspapers or watching TV. Bowers ran away from the sect’s Arizona compound in 2009 after an argument with his father—who has 31 other children with two wives—and was adopted by a loving Mormon family in neighboring Utah. Adapting to life in mainstream America proved tough. Bowers had never heard of Osama bin Laden or Star Wars. “I didn’t even know what the president was,” he says. “I knew there was somebody over the United States, but I didn’t know they called it the president.” On his first ocean swim, he gulped water and almost vomited: He’d never been told about saltwater. Bowers also had to learn to talk to girls, whom the sect’s elders called “poisonous snakes.” In his first encounter, he swallowed hard and walked up to a schoolmate. “I was like, ‘Um, do you know where class is?’” Bowers now relishes his freedom, and enjoys skateboarding and playing basketball. He rejects the term often used to describe teens who leave extremist sects: “lost boys.” He shakes his head. “I’m not lost.”