Leaving the Mormon Church Taught Me to Laugh at 666

All of us carry pieces of our childhood around like loose change in a pocket. It doesn’t matter where you grew up or what flavor of chaos you were handed early on. Something sticks. It sneaks into your humor, your preferences, the way you interpret the world at 11:47 p.m. while half-watching television and pretending you’re not doom-scrolling.

Those early influences tend to show up in strange little ways. Mine usually surface as small, harmless acts of rebellion. Nothing dramatic. No tattoos in ancient languages I can’t translate. Just tiny, private jokes with my former life.

Last night I was watching a rerun of The Golden Girls, because sometimes Blanche and Dorothy are the only theologians I trust, and scrolling Threads. I came across someone proudly explaining that they never let the number of accounts they follow dip above or below 666. It must remain perfectly balanced. The aesthetic of damnation, curated.

I laughed.

See, I grew up Mormon. And if you didn’t know, Mormons have a very… active relationship with The Devil. Not in a vague, medieval painting kind of way. More like a regular cast member. Lucifer is the main character in the Mormon temple film. He’s the explanation for bad choices. He’s the whisper behind every questionable decision. Leave the church? Satan. Drink coffee? Satan. Feel skeptical? Definitely Satan.

It’s impressive, honestly. The man never takes a day off.

I left the church years ago, and with distance comes clarity, and a decent sense of humor about it all. But when you grow up hearing about “the adversary” as often as other kids hear about Santa, you end up with a weird relationship to things like the number 666.

So naturally, I opened Instagram to check how many accounts I follow.

1,274.

A perfectly boring number. Spiritually neutral. Not even mildly ominous.

For a split second I thought, There’s no way I can trim that down to 666. That would require focus. Discipline. A spreadsheet and maybe a minor existential crisis.

But I started scrolling anyway.

And here’s the surprising part: it was ridiculously easy.

Accounts that hadn’t posted in a year. Brands I don’t care about anymore. Aesthetic phases I’ve outgrown. People I don’t remember meeting. Influencers who once felt essential and now feel like background noise in a crowded airport.

Unfollow. Unfollow. Unfollow.

Somewhere along the way, it stopped being a joke and started feeling… clean. Like clearing out a closet and realizing half of what you owned was just habit. My feed started to feel more like me and less like an accidental museum of former interests.

And then, somehow, I hit 666.

Exactly.

I stared at it for a second, waiting for my phone to overheat or a thunderclap to roll in from nowhere. Nothing happened. No sulfur. No dramatic music. Just my profile quietly displaying the most feared number of my childhood.

Will it stay that way? Of course not. I’ll discover a new photographer. I’ll follow a bakery I’ll never visit. It’ll drift. But for now, I’m enjoying it.

Not because I worship chaos. Not because I’m trying to be edgy. But because there’s something deeply satisfying about taking a symbol that once carried so much weight and treating it like what it is, a number on a screen.

And if somewhere, someone from my old ward happens to see it and feels a brief, dramatic gasp forming in their chest?

Well.

Consider it my tiny, harmless love letter to the kid I used to be, terrified of devils, now amused by algorithms.

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