Calling all apostates!

[Craig Jessop]

Disclaimer: I have not left the Church, and I continue to believe in its truth claims. A lot of the things my friends have left over, which are likely similar to the issues causing you to leave, have never really been a problem for me. Having earned a degree in Church history, I feel like there's really not anything out there that would shock me into leaving or disbelief either. I've read the CES Letter, and listened to John Dehlin, and looked at the popular blogs (I don't care where you fall on the belief spectrum, Zelph on the Shelf has the most clever blog name of all time)... but I continue to have very good reasons for believing, despite my distaste for apologetics and the emotional zeal of your garden-variety testimony meeting.

That said, what caused you to leave? How did you finally decide to take the leap out? What challenges have you faced after leaving, and what things have gotten better? How have you filled your need for spirituality?

Help me understand.

[Portia]

Thanks, Craig! Always good to see you around.

I had waffled on the "is it true" question for about four years between 2009 and 2013. I had seriously considered mission and then marriage at 21. (So young, eep!) I felt that the "answers" to my prayers were entirely wish-fulfillment, and I would say that I lost the belief in a traditional God at that time. The temple also unsettled me, and the prospect of such a marriage lost its appeal. I dated "less-active" men seriously before I myself left fully; it was easier without some of the pressures around "lifestyle."

I know I talk about it a lot, but obviously my mom being diagnosed shook my belief system: I knew she would die, but between wanting to form a truce with her and good ol' fashioned fear/uncertainty, I found myself back in Utah and active in the YSA ward for the first time in two, three years. I'm sure I came across as the jaded rebel to the conservative virgin stalwarts, but looking back, it was a significant, deliberate choice. It's not very common, either, but I think it was important for me to work out my own ambivalence.

Although I made close friends, went to Church every week, and even went back to BYU, I'm not sure that I can say I regained my testimony. I think I wanted a lot of counterfactuals to be true, of which the Mormon faith system was only one.

I started dating my current boyfriend when I went back to BYU, and he was completely "out," so that was a solution to both the marriage question and the idea of "what to do with my life." Of course, what I thought would be simple at 24 isn't at 28, but I have a career/school plan and at least some stability and seem to have ironed out most the glaring issues with the various exes in my life.

I left the Church for good in Oct '13 during a Conference talk about women's roles. I've read it again, and it's bad, but is it the worst of the worst? I think it was the last straw, though -- I had a real job in a non-Utah city with plentiful beer and good people who had left. I like grand dramatic gestures, and I don't regret walking out, getting a drink at a fancy hotel, and never going to a Church meeting again that wasn't a funeral or some such.

What's better: I like having my free time to myself. I love, love, love coffee. I was sexually active to one degree or another since I was an adult, so not having guilt over that is nice. Not having the defend the indefensible is a good change, because I have some pretty black-and-white views on morality.

What's worse: I don't think I have a lot of close friendships anymore, and I don't feel like I fit in all that well into general society. Sometimes I think I wasted a lot of time trying to be something that I wasn't, on both sides. I don't have much native impulse control, either, so I'm surprisingly lazy.

[yayfulness]

It's hard to describe my experience except by saying that I basically woke up one day and realized God probably does not exist and that all of my previous arguments for God's existence no longer made any sense. I fought with that feeling for about a year, and it was just about the most miserable year of my life. In the end, I just kind of decided to accept it and deal with it as best I could. I was still at BYU, so I kept going to church, got married in the temple, and so on and so forth. My wife quit going to church for unrelated reasons a little while before I graduated; I haven't been to church since leaving BYU. Like I mentioned during reunion week, she might start going to church again once we move to California (or she very well might not); I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do. I appreciate a lot of things that are a part of my life as a result of growing up in the church, but there are also some pretty significant things I no longer agree with and it's really hard to find a place (or motivation) in the church as an atheist-leaning agnostic. I have no intention of taking my name off the Church's records out of respect to my wife and to my family, but I honestly don't know if I'll ever start attending on a regular basis again or how I'll participate and present myself if I do.

Right now, I'm in a much better place than I was when I attended Church as a nonbeliever, but not as good of a place as when I attended as a believer. I don't have the sort of dissonance that makes me feel like nonexistence is a preferable option, but I haven't been able to find the same sense of optimism and purpose that I had when I still believed. There are a ton of major confounding variables in my life, though, so I have a really hard time saying what is the cause of what.

[Random]

This'll be an interesting exercise for me, since I've never really written or told my de-conversion story. Yay, introspection and self discovery! I'm not quite sure what I'm going to write yet, so I might ramble a bit. You have been warned.

For me, it was a very gradual transition out. I don't think I ever really believed, I just went because that's what you do in my family. I spent the majority of my church meetings doodling in my sketchbook or playing sudoku or something other than paying attention. I liked some of the scriptural stories, the ones that were cool or inspirational, but I think that's all they ever were for me. There are tons of other stories out there that are cool and/or inspirational that I can read or even study if I feel inclined, so why continue to re-read the same old books? I never felt a part of the community, either. I'm a tomboy, so I never enjoyed the more "girly" young women's activities, which was most of them... I would have rather done any of the young men's activities, even the ones where they were just doing yard work or helping someone move. At least it was something useful, instead of learning to groom myself to be more pleasing (but not TOO pleasing) to the menfolk or trying on wedding dresses. That actually sums up how I felt about being in the church in general, not just while I was a teen. I didn't feel useful. There was never anything for me to do. All that was expected of me was to sit there and look pretty, both of which are things I can do occasionally, but I don't really want to do on a regular basis. I didn't fit in with the other women in any of my various wards, and I wasn't around the men enough to have a chance at fitting in with them. It didn't help that almost every time a guy would start talking to me and sitting next to me in Sunday school or whatever, they'd always end up trying to ask me out, and I wasn't interested in anything more than a platonic relationship with any of them. Every time I'd tell a guy I was more interested in friendship they'd stop interacting with me.

Then there are the actual "gospel" bits that I have issues with. I hate that, since I was born female, I wasn't allowed to hold the priesthood. It always seemed like a silly reason to exclude a person from anything. Before I was totally disillusioned, I was a member of Ordain Women. I remember pouring through my set of scriptures, trying to find any reason why women should be barred from taking on a priesthood role if they were worthy members, finding nothing. I read the stories of the priestesses and the prophetesses that I'd somehow never read or even heard of before, and I wondered why on earth we wouldn't talk more about them in Sunday school or in talks. There aren't a ton of stories about women in the scriptures, but there are some real badasses in there that they totally gloss over in lessons. I got more and more bothered by talks that continued to tell me that my sole and divine purpose on this earth was to get married and have kids, even though I was pretty sure from a young age that I didn't ever want any. The only thing that interested me about having kids was getting to name them, and since I can do that to pets or characters I doodle, I don't actually need kids for that anyway. It bothered me that, despite the fact that my wards were 50% women, more often than not the Sunday school teachers and the sacrament speakers were male. I got more an more frustrated with with the modesty rhetoric, too. I got so tired of the frequent talks and lessons that told me that if I didn't dress and behave perfectly, I was literally pornography, and I was going to lead any man I came into contact with to sin, and it would be all. my. fault.

Then I made a lot of friends in college who are fabulous and supportive and love me for who I am, most of whom were non or ex mormon. Eventually we'd get around to talking about religion, and I'd tell them that I was sort-of-mormon. They'd ask what that meant, and I'd tell them about my dissatisfaction with the church, but that I still went semi-regularly (at least every other week) despite that. Then they'd ask the big question: why stay? And I'd never have a real answer for them. I finally recognized that my membership in the mormon church wasn't doing me any good, and was in fact, emotionally damaging to me. Add to all that a terrible bishop, and I was done being a part of the church. My attendance started dropping and eventually ceased.

Ever since I stopped, it seems like every move the church has made since has reaffirmed my decision to not go back. It tears me up inside that my family can't understand my decision. Other than that, the hardest thing about leaving has been missing singing songs with a large group of people. There are several hymns that I still love, and I catch myself singing them every once in a while. I always feel kind of weird singing them now. I still believe in a higher power, but I have no idea if it's just the force of nature, a being or beings, or something else entirely that I can't comprehend. I'm not sure I believe in an afterlife anymore, so if anyone close to me dies any time soon, I'm sure that'll be an interesting roller coaster of emotions I'll have to ride. I don't think I've felt a need for spirituality, but if I did, I've probably been filling it with people. I think understanding and connecting with other human beings is the most important thing I can do with my life.

As for things that have gotten better, I'd say my self worth has skyrocketed. I just try to be the best me I can be, whether that means I do hard things that I don't want to do, or allow myself to take a break from stress and take care of myself for a change. I'm still working on figuring out how to do that second thing, though. I enjoy my various "sins" quite a bit, now that I've (mostly) gotten over feeling ashamed for them. I don't know how I did those first couple years of college without coffee. I didn't even drink caffeine then, so it wasn't that either. I know I'm not perfect, but I've never felt more at ease with who I am as a person as I have the past couple years of not being mormon. Looking back on my life, I think the moments I've regretted most were moments I did terrible or stupid things because of my self-righteous attitude that I acquired from the church. There are friends that I pushed away because I thought they were going to drag me down the path of sin, and now I wish I were still in contact with them so I could apologize for being such an idiot. I love the people that I know now, and I might never have known them or gotten close to them if I hadn't left.

[Marduk]

I'll also begin with a disclaimer of my own. This is a process that has taken years, has involved intense soul-searching, theorizing, thought, and actions, and will be impossible to sum up in a few paragraphs (even if this is a long comment by message board standards.) One of the most irritating things that many members believe/say is that leaving the church is simple or easy. It isn't. Quite the opposite.

I've divided my thoughts on the subject into three categories, but there's a lot of overlap and my reasons for disaffection are not limited to these (nor are they, in reality, distinct categories.) I'm going to approach them in order of ease of explanation.

First, simply put, I felt the church as it currently stands (distinct from its historical genesis) was not a moral institution nor one that helped my own morality. I'm also a student of history, and the history of oppressed peoples who are then enfranchised and empowered I think is one of the most important historical trends to observe. In the beginning I think the church held some important positions in the progression of history; they did things like ordaining a black man to the priesthood, organizing an autonomous group for women, and encouraging discussion and disagreement about the nature of the universe. However, as the church moved through history, they both pulled back on important achievements like this AND took more regressive positions on other social issues. A religion that truly has the well-being of all people as its core doctrine would be at the forefront of social and cultural change. Instead, we see a church that lags behind every single progressive movement. It eventually catches up, sure, but why does it take two decades after the civil rights movement to stop restricting access to heaven based on skin color? Why is it taking decades to catch up on treating women and LGBT individuals like, you know, people? Why is it only now starting to relinquish a singularizing narrative of heathenism about Latinos and Native Americans, or to be forthright about its own history? Why does it still enforce standards based in white, middle class American culture that have nothing to do with its doctrine (like sleeve length, or putting pianos and basketball courts into every church, or restricting instruments in sacrament meetings based on anglo culture, or its prohibition on tattoos?) Really, the church ought to be changing these things BEFORE there is a groundswell of desire to change, not long after.

Concomitant with the larger moral issues are the personal moral issues. My morality primarily came from -- and continues to come from -- Christianity and the Biblical narrative of Jesus. Again, to put it simply, I did not find this morality within the walls and strictures of the church. I wanted a church where members could speak openly and honestly about their struggles to treat others as Christ would, and where the majority of time was spent trying to understand the difficulty of the lives of others, others who were far different than those we saw in church. There were -- and will continue to be, absent me -- bright shining moments where these things happened, but they were incredibly rare. Instead, church time is occupied discussing how much better we are for having the "truth," and how glad we are to know everything, and consequently not to have to think for ourselves. I understand that the sort of moral exploration I'm asking for is difficult, but when I'm able to do that Christ-like work so much better in a dozen other places, the value of church is very little. Not to mention, there are always explicit restrictions on how far that love and understanding can go. We have to be always careful that we are hating sins. We spend so much time hating sins, that there is no more room to love the sinner. We imagine that simply clarifying that we "hate the sin, not the sinner" is enough. But that mode was never in Jesus, who spent so much of his time offering love and healing to everyone. Simply put, I went looking for Jesus and I did not find him in the LDS church.

The last issue I have is with the "truth" claims themselves. I've spent literal decades studying epistemology and discourse, looking at what we know and how we know it. What I've learned is that knowledge is explicitly constructed in paradigms, and through media which -- for example, language -- are arbitrary, without meaning anchored to external loci. For example, when we say "the earth revolves around the sun" or "schizophrenia is a form of mental illness" the meaning or truth of each of those is contingent upon arbitrary markers of language (among other arbitrary markers) that do not have permanent meaning. If there IS some sort of universal unchangeable truth to either of these statements, every method we have of defining that truth is only ever capable of approximation. And by definition, our beliefs are based in those approximations. So within a schema of universal truth, we can never access that through language or any other media we have access to, because those meanings are dependent on other signs in the system which are moveable. If we don't accept an idea of universal truth, then the claims which religion makes are not inarguable. The church, however, presents them that way (as evidenced by your original statement.) But either the dogmas a religion presents are based in arbitrary and moving signifiers, like language, and hence moldable and changeable, or they are not, in which case they are utterly inaccessible and always approximations. In other words, when you ask me if the church is true -- or even the perhaps more accurate "are the claims the LDS church makes true or false" -- I don't think the question itself is intelligible. This is the primary inhibitor to ever getting better as a church, to ever learning more, to ever developing a more cohesive and logically consistent narrative. We have to anchor the meaning of what we say in specific times and places, which pulls them out of reach of better means of approximating knowledge. To use an earlier example, it is like we are too busy talking about people being possessed by spirits, and whether or not they are in fact possessed by spirits, to point out that discussing what is happening in terms of mental illness is a much better approximation to understand what is actually happening. Someday we may abandon that language in favor of something else, and continue to move forward, but as long as our definitions and dogmas within an organized religions are anchored to what they perceive to be some sort of meaning that is external -- and therefore, by definition inaccessible -- signifier, our ability to understand the world around us gets further and further behind. (I don't know how much meaning my explanation can give, but if you want to know more about the way of understanding knowledge that I'm describing, read Foucault and Derrida, and probably Saussure too.)

These are a few reasons, but they are far from the only ones. Like you, I've been a student of church history my whole life, and little surprises me about it. But what the church is doing now is infinitely more important, and really what we should be judging on. (On that topic, I think a more accurate narrative for most people is that they become bothered by the church's current actions, so they anchor their belief on the white-washed version of its history that they learned in Sunday school. Then they learn a better narrative of its history through something like the CES letter, and even that foundation crumbles. But I think if you ask people what is more important in their decision of participation or non-participation in the church, they will usually say that what the church is doing now is more important than its history.)

[Marduk]

My other answer was getting pretty long, so I figured I'd answer your other questions separately.

The process of leaving itself was fairly immediate. After wrestling with all of these questions, one day I just decided to stop going. I went from going to church pretty much every week to just not going. Once you accept that the church is not a healthy place to be, it makes not going much easier.

The primary challenge has come from interacting with my family. Family has always been hugely important to me. I'm Mexican, after all. So I have a huge family, and like many LDS families, it is split into believers and non-believers. For those who believe, I feel like my church participation is the only thing that matters to them. Right now, I'm in a graduate program -- which is fully funding me! -- and presenting at conferences. I'm in a healthy and happy relationship. I'm becoming more financially secure, and I'm making long-term plans about my life. When I was in the church, none of those things were true. I was floundering. I didn't know what to do with my life. I was miserable. Now, I'm happy. But if you ask my mom or any of the rest of the family, NOW is when I'm really struggling, and when I need prayers. It doesn't matter how educated I become, how much financial success I have, how happy my relationships are, how well I raise my (future) children, I will always, always be a failure in the eyes of the believing members of my family. And that breaks my heart.

But outside of my family, everything about my life has gotten better. I'm able to connect to others on a deeper level. I'm able to determine what to do in my life based on what is actually good for me. Some of those things are the same as my church days -- I still observe the word of wisdom, in fact -- but my reasons are different, and it is about what is actually good for me, rather than following exactly what the church lays out. My spirituality has improved by leaps and bounds. It now comes from understanding and loving people. Now that I'm not trying to fit everyone into the same Mormon mold, I can actually learn more about others and love them more deeply than I ever have before. And that value, that rich and abiding connection to others, is what feeds me spiritually.

[Craig Jessop]

These are all very interesting answers, thank you for replying. It helps to hear de-conversion stories in a calm and measured way.

Marduk: I'm sorry that your family is so negative about your life. It sounds like they should have a lot to be proud of, and I sincerely hope they recognize it soon.

[Portia]

These are all very interesting answers, thank you for replying. It helps to hear de-conversion stories in a calm and measured way.

Marduk: I'm sorry that your family is so negative about your life. It sounds like they should have a lot to be proud of, and I sincerely hope they recognize it soon.

I'm interested to hear "personal conversion" stories, too! Was there a definitive time in anyone's life where they felt they would never leave the LDS Church? Is that an experience that gives you personal comfort even if there are times when your conviction wavers or there are troubling social policies?

[TheBlackSheep]

I think "apostate" is one of those words that you have to be really careful about using, even playfully, unless you are one. That's just gentle feedback from somebody who likes you. And it probably has more to do with the fact that I'm on a road trip with my awesome girlfriend and we spent the day at important civil rights sites in the south while discussing LGBTQ issues in between. Gees I love her.

I left a while ago, before it felt as common as it feels now. I stopped going in 2009, and I only lasted that long because before then I was at BYU. I only read the CES letter a couple of years ago, and while it greatly interested me it had nothing to do with why I left. Some reasons I left:

1. Going to church made me miserable. I was anxious and depressed and just generally a wreck, and it would get worse the closer to Sundays I got.

2. I generally have a really strong sense of what my values are, and involvement with the Church wasn't helping me live them. Kind of like what Marduk described above. All of my values were, I think, good ones -- compassion and integrity and honesty and empathy and being willing to stand alone for what was right and trusting others and valuing human experience. I'm not saying that the Church is against any of those things. I just was not able to live them fully while involved in the Church. The places where the Church appeared to lead people were not where I wanted to be.

3. Prop 8 at BYU was a traumatic experience for me. I don't say that hyperbolically. It was one of the hardest periods of my life.

4. I didn't really do anything "sinful" until after I left, but once I did, I didn't feel bad about any of it. Dating women enhanced my life. Sex enhanced my life. Drinking (responsibly, in the right situations) enhanced my life. Coffee enhanced my life. Using Sunday differently enhanced my life. I felt zero guilt about any of those new choices.

I don't feel a need for spirituality, at least not the way that Mormons couch it. Everyone from shrinks to friends have told me that it is a need that I have, but I don't even know how spirituality would be relevant to me.

[Craig Jessop]

I'm interested to hear "personal conversion" stories, too! Was there a definitive time in anyone's life where they felt they would never leave the LDS Church? Is that an experience that gives you personal comfort even if there are times when your conviction wavers or there are troubling social policies?

After a terrible experience with some roommates (remember the guy who didn't think women should have the right to vote?), and an equally terrible bishop, I had a decision to make. I waffled for a while, but decided that I wouldn't leave BYU or the Church until I had absolutely made up my mind -- why do something drastic unless you're sure?

On a drive home to Arizona, I listened to a talk by Teryl Givens. He said that early Mormons saw ample evidence to believe, and ample evidence to not, but chose to believe. The idea of belief being a choice was new to me, and it resonated.

I decided that I, too, had ample reasons to believe, and ample reasons to disbelieve. I had seen miracles on before, during, and after my mission, and felt the Spirit (distinct from emotions). I found deep enlightenment in the endowment. Reading the Book of Mormon gave me a solid ethical foundation, and I found it complemented the New Testament.

On the other hand, prophets have been inconsistent and have said a lot of crazy stuff. Bishops are fallible, and sometimes abusive. There is little-to-no archaeological evidence for the Book of Mormon, and Joseph Smith has a host of issues that contradict the narrative told by the Church.

When it came down to it, I chose to believe. Since making that decision, it has been confirmed and reconfirmed to me through experiences that have been tangible and intangible. I know that Jesus Christ lives. He is literal, real, and alive. The Plan of Salvation, as taught by the LDS Church, resonates deeply with me. Joseph Smith was a prophet, despite his imperfections, mistakes, and sins. I believe that the LDS Church today is the modern expression of the original Church of Christ, and that the priesthood it claims is the organizing power that will lead the human family back to God. Imperfections, misdeeds, and problems with history do not diminish that.

[Amity]

I've been chewing over this question for a few days and I think I finally have something to contribute. For some background, I come from several generations of church members, did all the Mormony things growing up (primary, YW class presidencies, seminary, girls camp, etc.), was a temple worker for five years, and married in the temple a year ago. I still believe in God and Christ and some of the core LDS doctrines, but I'm increasingly skeptical that the LDS church is the only true church out there. My faith transition began in earnest about 2012-ish and I ceased church activity last October. I haven't ruled out a return to LDS activity, but I have no plans to do so right now.

I have some of the same issues that others have brought up, namely with the church's treatment of LGBTQ people and women and its handling of certain historical issues. But I think most of my objections lie with the institutional church, instead of with the gospel. I disagree with the notions that there is only one correct way to approach God, religion, spirituality, and worship, that the one correct way to do these things is the LDS way, and that if you have disagreements with or don't like or don't click with the one correct LDS way of doing things, the problem lies with you the individual. If there were more tolerance for individual variation in beliefs and worship practices and scriptural interpretation, I would probably be more active than I currently am.

What caused me to cease activity is that I moved across the country into a ward where I had a difficult time connecting with people. My interactions with the institutional church were already leaving me feeling bored and brittle and angry, so once I lost my social network at church it just didn't make sense to spend the time and mental energy on something that left me feeling so dissatisfied. I've filled my need for spirituality through online communities, including Mormon blogs and podcasts (I plowed through the entire Year of Polygamy series in less than six months!). I might try a little Methodism or Unitarian Universalism, because I've missed having a IRL community. But I'm okay with where I am now and with not knowing what my spirituality might look like in the future. My main source of stress comes from not having told my extended family about my heterodox beliefs or my inactivity because I worry that they'll react poorly or try to fellowship me back into activity (and I do NOT respond kindly to being made into the ward or family project).