You and I chatted via PM on reddit several times about 6 or 7 years ago when I was going through my own period of questioning and eventual distancing from Mormonism. bwv549 and the content eventually hosted on his GitHub site was absolutely critical for my path out as well. I just wanted to say thank you for all the posts you've made on this topic, I appreciate it. (I had already read probably two-thirds of these submissions from your profile on reddit, hah!)
Trace / Jack, thank you for posting this. I'm an ex-evangelical whose journey out was just as brutal as yours. I don't think most people know what it takes, and what it does to you and for you, to walk away from everything and everyone you've ever known, straight into the arms of the people you've always been told were The Enemy. Sadly the relationships I treasured in that old world mostly did not survive. But I read this piece feeling repeated jolts of recognition, and appreciated the reminder that those of us who've made this journey are not alone, and are so much better for having done it.
Staring into a shrieking abyss, making the impossible-but-only-available choice, and finding yourself a healthier person in the end gives you a lot of courage, though. I often think of the poet Nayyirah Waheed:
i don't pay attention to the
world ending.
it has ended for me
many times
and began again in the morning.
I appreciate knowing more about the courage and pursuit of truth that drew me to your twitter feed. Anyway, giving you the Robert Redford nod (.gif) over here. The abyss-starer in me greets the abyss-starer in you. Here's to finding ourselves healthier on the other side.
I was an agnostic Mormon fellow traveler for over a decade, taking my kids weekly but undoing the theology lessons. I had some hope for them due to Brigham Young's comments on accepting all truth and making it their own. But I finally had a rather public debate with a member who had a rather senior role in the department of religious education who was making a young earth claim. I pointed that this was riduculous and that the BYU Departments of Physics, Astronomy, Geology, and Biology did not teach this. His response was that they young earth claim was true and that the science departments would be brought to teach the biblical truth.
So much for Brigham Young's instruction to accept all truth and make it your own.
Unlike many non-members, I read though the Book of Mormon several times. It was my impression that the Mormon Church was deliberately downplaying one of the most consistent lessons in the BoM - the corruption of consumption and status culture. You could make a strong argument from the BoM for something approaching a pseudo-Mennonite anti-consumption status game lifestyle. I raised this in discussions with the home visitors, who were not happy with such a challenge. I also pointed out that the Nicean creed was probably a more accurate description for Joseph's Smith's encounter that the creed that was adopted. Such observations / challenges were not welcome - later prophets have spoken on those issues.
My background is from another religion with continual revelation - the Quakers, who are organizationally the antithesis of the Mormons.
I do not associate with deliberate and willful fools if I can avoid it. Neither I or my kids returned.
I grew up in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Went to church all of the time in the 50s and 60s. My father was pastor. Attended church camps and graduated from our church college.
The RLDS church is an off-shoot of the LDS church. It was formed by Joseph Smith's son, after Brigham Young took many LDS to Utah.
My relatives, on their way to Utah, had a bad winter in Iowa. Many died (we have visited the cemetery). When the RLDS church was formed they went in that direction.
The RLDS church is a dying religion. It's even changed its name. I haven't attended in 50 years.
Yet, I consider myself a member. It was a beautiful religion. It shared my things with the LDS religion, but not all (e.g., no polygamy).
In my church our sermons were about Jesus' love. Not much about "rules." My father loved the parables, his favorite being the Prodigal Son. We sang and we sang. We'd have Sunday night "sings" where we would raise the roof. My mother was often the music director, and boy could she ever do it!!!
I loved it. It was kind and sweet. Once in awhile someone would try to preach from the Book of Mormon or the Doctrine and Covenants, but it always fell flat. They were not inspirational texts---just lots of names.
I am sure that in my childhood congregations there were people will wide political views. Nobody would have cared. We were much more interested in what they were bringing to eat at the regular church socials.
I stopped going because where I moved to there were no congregations close enough. But my church experiences, followed by my college experiences, were beautiful and formed my character and views of people.
I still have copies of many of my father's sermons. Some day I plan to put them into a (free) book, so anybody can use them.
It'll take me a while to read all this, but I'm greatly looking forward to it. My journey was similar to yours (I think, from what I've seen so far). I left the church over 10 years ago after thinking I never would. It's been grueling but also a fascinating journey and I've shared some of your similar interests and perspectives.
Anyway, I'll just comment right off the bat that I also find r/exmormon unhelpful, at best. It served its purpose, but it's such a motivated reasoning spot to only highlight the worst. I spent a lot of time at r/mormon as it was more fair and intellectual, but even that is so highly skewed to non-believers like me that it's often too one-sided.
Read my poetry. It’s Christian and subversive with a brodernist edgelord vibe. It’s not weak like the Mormon faith, it uses strong language sometimes. Definitely red pilled.
I'm sort of jealous that you had a long, introspective road when for me it was a single goofy moment in 6th grade history class when we were reading a story that took place in ancient Egypt and a character made a reference to capital G God and I was like "wait that's bullshit, this is ALL bullshit"
I mean I guess, but it wasn't exactly a time-critical process and I was never in real long-term danger of being Christian. If anything, it would have been moderately more socially productive to have skipped the edgy late-teen 2000s-era atheist phase. I skipped out on at least one relationship I probably shouldn't have that way.
Pretty interesting stuff. From someone with a completely different angle on spirituality than the Mormons, the ultimate issue seems that Mormonism (like the rest of Christianity) is primarily an emotional path. Psychologically, not everyone is cut out to let a particularly intense emotion overrule or consume the other parts of themselves. You weren't meant for that (otherwise, this would all have been very simple, and this never would've been written).
I like spiritual paths that rely heavily on intuition. You can check out the Ashtavakra Gita for an example of a scripture that doesn't really ask intense emotion from the reader.
Incidentally, since you have written about this period, I thought you might be interested in the following about McMeekin’s book Stalin’s War and its treatment of Lend-Lease. https://nonzionism.com/p/stalins-war-book-review
What an incredible story. I went through something similar as a Protestant ministerial candidate. I have two questions.
The first is about your conviction, one that you seemed slow to relinquish, that the Book of Mormon could not have been a human product. That it must be divine. I gather that that is a common LDS sentiment, presumably one that is explicitly reinforced. I've seen people from other faith traditions (Muslims, Protestants) make similar claims, which get cashed out differently depending on the tradition and individual. How did it apply in your case? In what way did your encounters with the Book of Mormon carry a sense of divine origin?
Second, could you clarify the concept of inspiration as pertains to the decisions of church leaders? I was intrigued by the part where your supervisor admits that only some of his pairings were inspired, while the rest were just making the best of his situation. As an outsider, I lack the background knowledge to understand how this admission struck you.
Being LDS was always so frustrating, not only because I was never good enough, but because the path to "truth"―what I expected truth to be―was invisible. I kept thinking that getting an answer from God according to Moroni's promise was like a high jump competition in which the bar is invisible, you can't tell how high you're jumping, and you can't even be sure whether you did clear the bar at some point and just couldn't tell.
> In response, he asked what it would take for me to let that guard down and really, completely trust in God. My answer, more or less, was this: “Then what would I do if nothing happened?”
For me, the trouble with trusting in God was that I had taken seminary classes about the Old Testament, and as a result, God bothered me. (NonStampCollector on YouTube can fill in on some of what's in there, if you haven't heard.) But Moroni did not require complete trust:
> and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.
Sincerity? Check. Faith? Check. Real intent? Hm, not sure what that means. But like you, when Moroni's promise failed, I assumed for many years that the problem was me, not that the church wasn't true.
I think the reason I blamed myself was clear now. I was surrounded from a very young age by people who "know" the church is true. People who sometimes said Moroni's promise worked for them, but never said that it did not. People who had "spiritual experiences". In order for the church *not* to be true, it meant that all these people were wrong. How likely is that―that you are the only sane one in a large group? The church leaders especially were very believable. To this day, I believe that somehow they really believe what they preach. Most of the apostles probably think they are really apostles.
I didn't know what I didn't know. First: typical mind fallacy. You see, every week, even now in 2025, my wife goes to church. She knows it's not true. She goes to church and pretends she's still a real member. Why? Well, it's a Filipino ward, and she's Filipino. It's a way of staying in touch with her culture and chatting with her friends in her native language. She likes hosting parties and being invited to parties and having members drop off gifts when she's ill. To me, the idea of going to a false church to maintain friendships with people who believe in the false church is completely bonkers. *I* would never do that. Typical mind fallacy.
Second: survivorship bias / evaporative cooling of group beliefs. When I left the church, I told no one *at* the church. I couldn't even explain it to my best friend, because he didn't want to hear it. So I just left, because I didn't want to cause a stir by challenging anyone's beliefs. If you are *in* the church, you don't realize that the environment is just hostile enough to prevent people from openly challenging the factual truth of the church. You think intellectual inquiry and factual challenges are welcomed, because people give off that impression. It's somehow hard to notice that the church environment isn't really as welcoming as it appears to be. So you think that your environment is the way it is because the church is true, but that's an illusion.
Third: failing to notice the typical mind fallacy. You see, on Fast Sunday, person after person would get up and say "I know the church is true".
They're not supposed to "know" the church is true. That's why we have "faith"; faith is not to have a perfect knowledge. Everyone is taught this. Everyone should know this. But everyone still gets up and says "I know the church is true". Everyone, that is, except me. I would get up and say "I believe the church is true". In the whole building, I was the only person who said the correct thing. (Granted, somebody might have seen a finger of God, or an unmistakably clear voice of God in their head to arrive at such certainty, but testimonies rarely contain such claims.)
It just took me four decades to realize that there actually is something wrong with most people ― not even leaving the church was enough to clue me in about this. In reality: most normal people are weird, and a subset of the weird people are the only normal ones. Because what makes humans special is their ability to think, to use logic and reason. But almost nobody seems to make a habit of it. For almost everyone, other concerns (e.g. social cohesion) take priority, and using their special human superpower just isn't very important.
Many of these stories frustrate me because they seem to be more based on oversimplified narratives that have developed in Mormon culture and not essential beliefs. For example, the idea that everyone who prays sincerely about the BoM will get a positive answer does not have to be treated so literally. Each person's life story is different, and what is right for one person might not be right for another, especially depending on the particular phase in life they might be in. Answers to prayer need not be so formulaic.
Rather than make these facile and manipulative promises, why not just take a more personalized approach? For example, "We need folks like you in our faith community, and we're here to determine if this message is right for you at this time in your life. If it doesn't resonate with you, we'll thank you for your attention and leave you with a blessing."
It goes without saying that I don't blame you for leaving at all, but I wish that both Mormons and ex-Mormons would be willing to upgrade their discourse a bit. We shouldn't want to belong to a church where all the answers are so cut and dried.
You and I chatted via PM on reddit several times about 6 or 7 years ago when I was going through my own period of questioning and eventual distancing from Mormonism. bwv549 and the content eventually hosted on his GitHub site was absolutely critical for my path out as well. I just wanted to say thank you for all the posts you've made on this topic, I appreciate it. (I had already read probably two-thirds of these submissions from your profile on reddit, hah!)
Trace / Jack, thank you for posting this. I'm an ex-evangelical whose journey out was just as brutal as yours. I don't think most people know what it takes, and what it does to you and for you, to walk away from everything and everyone you've ever known, straight into the arms of the people you've always been told were The Enemy. Sadly the relationships I treasured in that old world mostly did not survive. But I read this piece feeling repeated jolts of recognition, and appreciated the reminder that those of us who've made this journey are not alone, and are so much better for having done it.
Staring into a shrieking abyss, making the impossible-but-only-available choice, and finding yourself a healthier person in the end gives you a lot of courage, though. I often think of the poet Nayyirah Waheed:
i don't pay attention to the
world ending.
it has ended for me
many times
and began again in the morning.
I appreciate knowing more about the courage and pursuit of truth that drew me to your twitter feed. Anyway, giving you the Robert Redford nod (.gif) over here. The abyss-starer in me greets the abyss-starer in you. Here's to finding ourselves healthier on the other side.
I was an agnostic Mormon fellow traveler for over a decade, taking my kids weekly but undoing the theology lessons. I had some hope for them due to Brigham Young's comments on accepting all truth and making it their own. But I finally had a rather public debate with a member who had a rather senior role in the department of religious education who was making a young earth claim. I pointed that this was riduculous and that the BYU Departments of Physics, Astronomy, Geology, and Biology did not teach this. His response was that they young earth claim was true and that the science departments would be brought to teach the biblical truth.
So much for Brigham Young's instruction to accept all truth and make it your own.
Unlike many non-members, I read though the Book of Mormon several times. It was my impression that the Mormon Church was deliberately downplaying one of the most consistent lessons in the BoM - the corruption of consumption and status culture. You could make a strong argument from the BoM for something approaching a pseudo-Mennonite anti-consumption status game lifestyle. I raised this in discussions with the home visitors, who were not happy with such a challenge. I also pointed out that the Nicean creed was probably a more accurate description for Joseph's Smith's encounter that the creed that was adopted. Such observations / challenges were not welcome - later prophets have spoken on those issues.
My background is from another religion with continual revelation - the Quakers, who are organizationally the antithesis of the Mormons.
I do not associate with deliberate and willful fools if I can avoid it. Neither I or my kids returned.
I grew up in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Went to church all of the time in the 50s and 60s. My father was pastor. Attended church camps and graduated from our church college.
The RLDS church is an off-shoot of the LDS church. It was formed by Joseph Smith's son, after Brigham Young took many LDS to Utah.
My relatives, on their way to Utah, had a bad winter in Iowa. Many died (we have visited the cemetery). When the RLDS church was formed they went in that direction.
The RLDS church is a dying religion. It's even changed its name. I haven't attended in 50 years.
Yet, I consider myself a member. It was a beautiful religion. It shared my things with the LDS religion, but not all (e.g., no polygamy).
In my church our sermons were about Jesus' love. Not much about "rules." My father loved the parables, his favorite being the Prodigal Son. We sang and we sang. We'd have Sunday night "sings" where we would raise the roof. My mother was often the music director, and boy could she ever do it!!!
I loved it. It was kind and sweet. Once in awhile someone would try to preach from the Book of Mormon or the Doctrine and Covenants, but it always fell flat. They were not inspirational texts---just lots of names.
I am sure that in my childhood congregations there were people will wide political views. Nobody would have cared. We were much more interested in what they were bringing to eat at the regular church socials.
I stopped going because where I moved to there were no congregations close enough. But my church experiences, followed by my college experiences, were beautiful and formed my character and views of people.
I still have copies of many of my father's sermons. Some day I plan to put them into a (free) book, so anybody can use them.
It's all about love... Full Stop
p.s. thanks Mom and Dad
Beautiful — thanks for sharing.
Have you ever considered going on Mormon Stories?
I'd go if Dehlin invited me on. As far as I know, he doesn't know I exist
It'll take me a while to read all this, but I'm greatly looking forward to it. My journey was similar to yours (I think, from what I've seen so far). I left the church over 10 years ago after thinking I never would. It's been grueling but also a fascinating journey and I've shared some of your similar interests and perspectives.
Anyway, I'll just comment right off the bat that I also find r/exmormon unhelpful, at best. It served its purpose, but it's such a motivated reasoning spot to only highlight the worst. I spent a lot of time at r/mormon as it was more fair and intellectual, but even that is so highly skewed to non-believers like me that it's often too one-sided.
You became a Redditor, oof.
Read my poetry. It’s Christian and subversive with a brodernist edgelord vibe. It’s not weak like the Mormon faith, it uses strong language sometimes. Definitely red pilled.
https://open.substack.com/pub/theflood/p/blind-man-at-bethsaida?r=58i60e&utm_medium=ios
I'm sort of jealous that you had a long, introspective road when for me it was a single goofy moment in 6th grade history class when we were reading a story that took place in ancient Egypt and a character made a reference to capital G God and I was like "wait that's bullshit, this is ALL bullshit"
Why are you jealous of Trace's path? Didn't yours save so much time?
I mean I guess, but it wasn't exactly a time-critical process and I was never in real long-term danger of being Christian. If anything, it would have been moderately more socially productive to have skipped the edgy late-teen 2000s-era atheist phase. I skipped out on at least one relationship I probably shouldn't have that way.
Not only are you not bad for refusing to accept easy answers to hard questions. It is a reflection of your goodness.
such a big fan of this post! its really impacted me a lot
Pretty interesting stuff. From someone with a completely different angle on spirituality than the Mormons, the ultimate issue seems that Mormonism (like the rest of Christianity) is primarily an emotional path. Psychologically, not everyone is cut out to let a particularly intense emotion overrule or consume the other parts of themselves. You weren't meant for that (otherwise, this would all have been very simple, and this never would've been written).
I like spiritual paths that rely heavily on intuition. You can check out the Ashtavakra Gita for an example of a scripture that doesn't really ask intense emotion from the reader.
https://realization.org/p/ashtavakra-gita/richards.ashtavakra-gita/richards.ashtavakra-gita.html
It's about consciousness, still a mystery to this day. I think the claims it makes are not so easy to falsify.
Incidentally, since you have written about this period, I thought you might be interested in the following about McMeekin’s book Stalin’s War and its treatment of Lend-Lease. https://nonzionism.com/p/stalins-war-book-review
What an incredible story. I went through something similar as a Protestant ministerial candidate. I have two questions.
The first is about your conviction, one that you seemed slow to relinquish, that the Book of Mormon could not have been a human product. That it must be divine. I gather that that is a common LDS sentiment, presumably one that is explicitly reinforced. I've seen people from other faith traditions (Muslims, Protestants) make similar claims, which get cashed out differently depending on the tradition and individual. How did it apply in your case? In what way did your encounters with the Book of Mormon carry a sense of divine origin?
Second, could you clarify the concept of inspiration as pertains to the decisions of church leaders? I was intrigued by the part where your supervisor admits that only some of his pairings were inspired, while the rest were just making the best of his situation. As an outsider, I lack the background knowledge to understand how this admission struck you.
Being LDS was always so frustrating, not only because I was never good enough, but because the path to "truth"―what I expected truth to be―was invisible. I kept thinking that getting an answer from God according to Moroni's promise was like a high jump competition in which the bar is invisible, you can't tell how high you're jumping, and you can't even be sure whether you did clear the bar at some point and just couldn't tell.
> In response, he asked what it would take for me to let that guard down and really, completely trust in God. My answer, more or less, was this: “Then what would I do if nothing happened?”
For me, the trouble with trusting in God was that I had taken seminary classes about the Old Testament, and as a result, God bothered me. (NonStampCollector on YouTube can fill in on some of what's in there, if you haven't heard.) But Moroni did not require complete trust:
> and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.
Sincerity? Check. Faith? Check. Real intent? Hm, not sure what that means. But like you, when Moroni's promise failed, I assumed for many years that the problem was me, not that the church wasn't true.
I think the reason I blamed myself was clear now. I was surrounded from a very young age by people who "know" the church is true. People who sometimes said Moroni's promise worked for them, but never said that it did not. People who had "spiritual experiences". In order for the church *not* to be true, it meant that all these people were wrong. How likely is that―that you are the only sane one in a large group? The church leaders especially were very believable. To this day, I believe that somehow they really believe what they preach. Most of the apostles probably think they are really apostles.
I didn't know what I didn't know. First: typical mind fallacy. You see, every week, even now in 2025, my wife goes to church. She knows it's not true. She goes to church and pretends she's still a real member. Why? Well, it's a Filipino ward, and she's Filipino. It's a way of staying in touch with her culture and chatting with her friends in her native language. She likes hosting parties and being invited to parties and having members drop off gifts when she's ill. To me, the idea of going to a false church to maintain friendships with people who believe in the false church is completely bonkers. *I* would never do that. Typical mind fallacy.
Second: survivorship bias / evaporative cooling of group beliefs. When I left the church, I told no one *at* the church. I couldn't even explain it to my best friend, because he didn't want to hear it. So I just left, because I didn't want to cause a stir by challenging anyone's beliefs. If you are *in* the church, you don't realize that the environment is just hostile enough to prevent people from openly challenging the factual truth of the church. You think intellectual inquiry and factual challenges are welcomed, because people give off that impression. It's somehow hard to notice that the church environment isn't really as welcoming as it appears to be. So you think that your environment is the way it is because the church is true, but that's an illusion.
Third: failing to notice the typical mind fallacy. You see, on Fast Sunday, person after person would get up and say "I know the church is true".
They're not supposed to "know" the church is true. That's why we have "faith"; faith is not to have a perfect knowledge. Everyone is taught this. Everyone should know this. But everyone still gets up and says "I know the church is true". Everyone, that is, except me. I would get up and say "I believe the church is true". In the whole building, I was the only person who said the correct thing. (Granted, somebody might have seen a finger of God, or an unmistakably clear voice of God in their head to arrive at such certainty, but testimonies rarely contain such claims.)
It just took me four decades to realize that there actually is something wrong with most people ― not even leaving the church was enough to clue me in about this. In reality: most normal people are weird, and a subset of the weird people are the only normal ones. Because what makes humans special is their ability to think, to use logic and reason. But almost nobody seems to make a habit of it. For almost everyone, other concerns (e.g. social cohesion) take priority, and using their special human superpower just isn't very important.
[Edited]
Many of these stories frustrate me because they seem to be more based on oversimplified narratives that have developed in Mormon culture and not essential beliefs. For example, the idea that everyone who prays sincerely about the BoM will get a positive answer does not have to be treated so literally. Each person's life story is different, and what is right for one person might not be right for another, especially depending on the particular phase in life they might be in. Answers to prayer need not be so formulaic.
Rather than make these facile and manipulative promises, why not just take a more personalized approach? For example, "We need folks like you in our faith community, and we're here to determine if this message is right for you at this time in your life. If it doesn't resonate with you, we'll thank you for your attention and leave you with a blessing."
It goes without saying that I don't blame you for leaving at all, but I wish that both Mormons and ex-Mormons would be willing to upgrade their discourse a bit. We shouldn't want to belong to a church where all the answers are so cut and dried.