Fact Check: Did Elizabeth Smart Leave the Mormon Church After Her Kidnapping?
Elizabeth Smart has not resigned her LDS Church membership, nor has she stepped away from church activity. Public records, local community accounts in suburban Salt Lake County, and her own media appearances confirm that she remains a practicing Latter-day Saint. She attends weekly Sunday services, participates in church community programs, and frequently references the spiritual convictions that anchor her life.
Her relationship with the church reflects an intentional maturity rather than passive compliance. Following her rescue in March 2003, Smart completed a full-time, 18-month proselytizing mission for the church in Paris from 2009 to 2010. Two years later, in February 2012, she married Scottish native Matthew Gilmour inside the Laie Hawaii Temple, an LDS sacred space requiring an active temple recommend based on orthodox belief and standard behavioral compliance.
In her 2013 memoir, My Story, and her subsequent 2018 work, Where There's Hope, Smart explained that her personal relationship with God provided her primary survival mechanism during captivity. Rather than abandoning her spiritual foundation after her ordeal, she doubled down on core Christian tenets while discarding local cultural assumptions that failed to protect the vulnerable.
