Leaving Mormonism

The background

I grew up in Provo, Utah, which means I grew up Mormon the way a fish grows up wet. Everyone around me was LDS. My bishop lived two doors down. My scout troop met at the church building. My school teachers were in my ward. The boundaries of my world and the boundaries of my religion were the same line.

I was a good Mormon kid. Seminary at six in the morning before school, every day for four years. Eagle Scout. Priesthood holder at twelve. I didn’t drink caffeine, didn’t swear, didn’t watch R-rated movies. I paid tithing on my lawn-mowing money. When I turned nineteen, I submitted my mission papers without hesitation. I was called to serve in the Philippines, and I went with the absolute conviction that I was doing the most important work a young man could do.

My mission was hard and beautiful. I learned Tagalog. I lived in concrete-block apartments with no air conditioning. I taught people about the Book of Mormon and watched some of them weep with what I believed was the Spirit confirming truth. I came home after two years thinner, older, and more certain than ever that the Church was true.

The cracks

It started with a question from an investigator in my last area. He was a college professor, sharp and genuinely curious, and he asked me about the Book of Abraham. I gave the standard answer: Joseph Smith translated it from Egyptian papyri by the gift and power of God. The professor nodded politely and said, “You know those papyri were recovered, right? And Egyptologists have translated them. They’re standard funerary texts. They have nothing to do with Abraham.”

I didn’t know that. My mission president told me to stop meeting with the professor. I obeyed. But the question lodged in my mind like a splinter.

Back in Provo, at BYU, I did what the Church always told me to do with doubts: I studied. I went to FARMS (the Church’s apologetics organization) looking for answers. Some of their responses were creative. Most of them required me to accept explanations that were far more convoluted than the simple, obvious conclusion: Joseph Smith couldn’t actually translate Egyptian.

Then someone sent me the CES Letter. It’s a document written by a member named Jeremy Runnells — an eighty-page compilation of questions about Church history, doctrine, and truth claims. I read it in one sitting, on a Saturday night, in my apartment with the door locked. It covered things I had never been told: Joseph Smith’s polyandry (marrying women who were already married to other men). The multiple contradictory accounts of the First Vision. The Book of Mormon’s dependence on a nineteenth-century text called “The Late War.” The fact that the Book of Abraham translation doesn’t match the source material.

Every single one of these had an apologetic response. But taken together, the pattern was unmistakable. The Church had not been honest about its own history. And it expected me to keep paying ten percent of my income and organizing my entire life around its claims.

The turning point

I went to the temple one last time. I sat in the celestial room — the quiet, white room where Mormons go to feel closest to God — and waited. I had been told my whole life that if I was sincere, the Spirit would confirm truth. I was sincere. I waited for an hour. I felt nothing. Not emptiness, exactly — just the ordinary quiet of a nicely decorated room.

Walking out of the temple that afternoon, I knew. Not with anger, not with triumph. With grief. The thing I had built my life around was not what it claimed to be. The Church was a human institution with a human history, and I had spent two years of my life and tens of thousands of my family’s dollars promoting it to people in the Philippines as the literal word of God.

The aftermath

In Mormon culture, leaving is not a private matter. The Church tracks its members. Your ward knows if you stop attending. Your home teachers report on you. If you request to have your name removed from the records — which I eventually did — a bishop contacts you to try to change your mind.

My parents were devastated. In LDS theology, families are “sealed” together for eternity in temple ceremonies. By leaving the Church, I was — in their understanding — choosing not to be with my family in the afterlife. My mother told me, through tears, that she felt like I had died. She meant it as an expression of love. It landed as a statement of conditional acceptance: I am your son as long as I am also a Mormon.

At BYU, the consequences were immediate and practical. The university requires an ecclesiastical endorsement to remain enrolled. Students who leave the Church mid-degree can be expelled. I transferred to the University of Utah and lost a semester of credits in the process.

My social world collapsed overnight. Every friend I had in Provo was LDS. Not all of them cut me off, but most of them didn’t know what to do with me anymore. I was no longer part of the shared project. The ward activities, the temple trips, the mission reunions — I was outside all of it, looking in at a life that had been mine three months earlier.

What helped

The r/exmormon subreddit was my lifeline. Fifty thousand people (now hundreds of thousands) who had been through exactly what I was going through. They had names for things I didn’t know how to articulate: shelf breaking (when the weight of doubts collapses the mental shelf you’ve been stacking them on), PIMO (physically in, mentally out), the faith crisis that every exmormon knows is really a truth crisis.

Therapy helped enormously, once I found a therapist in Salt Lake who specialized in faith transitions. She helped me understand that the anxiety and identity loss I was feeling weren’t signs that I’d made a mistake — they were the normal symptoms of dismantling a total worldview. Mormonism doesn’t just tell you what to believe about God. It tells you what underwear to wear, what to drink, how to spend your Sundays, and who you’ll be married to in the afterlife. Leaving it means rebuilding everything.

Five years out, I can say this: I am more myself than I have ever been. The guilt is gone. The constant sense of not being good enough — of falling short of an impossible standard set by a church that moved the goalposts whenever you got close — is gone. I drink coffee now. I sleep in on Sundays. I have ten percent more of my income. These are small freedoms, but they are mine, and they mean more than I can express to anyone who hasn’t earned them the way I did.

This is a composite account. David is not a real individual but a fictional character whose story is drawn from the common, well-documented patterns of Mormon deconversion. No single person’s experience is represented here, but the themes — the CES Letter, the Book of Abraham, mission regret, BYU consequences, family sealing anxiety — recur across thousands of real accounts.