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Introduction: Why People Abandon Belief in
Mormonism--Their Personal Breaking Point
In one of his consistently substantive and interesting contributions to this
forum, Deconstructor made some pertinent observations about the typical
tension evident on this board between theists and atheists, in the context of
recovering from Mormonism:
" . . . [S]omething . . . has always baffled me about this board and
recovery from Mormonism in general.
"When I first started posting my exposé’s on Mormonism, everyone was
cheering me on. I'd quote prophets and Mormons scripture and everyone was
supportive and agreeable.
"Then one day I made the mistake of making a list of New Testament
scriptures, just as I had done with the Book of Mormon. I was totally
surprised at the response. Suddenly all of these ex-Mormons who had
understood and appreciated a list of questionable BoM passages went berserk
when I did the same with the New Testament. My approach was the same, but the
reaction was completely different. And the response was personal attacks on
me instead of refuting what I said with actual facts.
"I realized then . . . that a lot of ex-Mormons really haven't recovered
from the magical/superstitious thinking.
I think this gets back to something you said to me when we talked at
Fuddruckers. You said something like 'people don't leave for intellectual reasons,
but because they've had a bad experience of some kind.' I'd like you to
elaborate on that, because I think that explains why we all take different
paths after exiting Mormonism.
"We didn't all leave for the same reasons. Some leave and still want to
go to church every Sunday and hear about Jesus. Some still want to pray and
feel like God is watching over them and blessing them. Some still want to
feel like they are in the one-and-only true church of Christ. I even know an
atheist ex-Mormon who still wears garments because he says they are
comfortable!"
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Intellectually versus Personally Breaking from the Mormon Church: The Role
of the Bad Experience in Making the Exit
In response to Decon’s invitation, I would note that, based on both my own
individual experience and my general observation of others, that many
individuals end up leaving Mormonism for a combination of reasons: personal,
emotional and intellectual—but that it is often the negative personal
experiences that tend to crystallize, focus and propel them to take the final
step of actually disassociating from the LDS Church.
These personal experiences can take many forms, including:
--marital stress with a TBM spouse or with other family members;
--the discovery of acts of hypocrisy or other inappropriate conduct by
formerly trusted and respected Church members and/or leaders;
--a sense of personal betrayal at the hands of Church authorities; and
--conflicts with Church leaders who abuse their authority in heavy-handed
efforts to control one’s individual life and decisions.
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My Intellectual Road Toward Leaving the Mormon Church
For years leading up to my ultimate decision to resign from Church
membership, I had been actively investigating several basic issues of Mormon doctrine,
history and practice, including:
--the historicity of the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham;
--the “translation” of the fraudulent Kinderhook Plates;
--the Masonic origins of the Mormon temple ceremony;
--the rewriting and altering of LDS Church history;
--the question of consistency within Mormon doctrines;
--the racist and sexist teachings of Mormon scripture; and
--the reversal and denial of official Mormon teachings
The more I studied in these areas (reading many sources from both
"pro" and "con" perspectives), the more I developed an
intellectual resistance to, and eventual disbelief in, bedrock Mormon claims.
In fact, I had reached the point of intellectual rejection of most of the
above areas some time before I formally withdrew from the Church.
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Breaking from Activity
Even in the final stages of my growing intellectual disenchantment with
Mormonism, I nonetheless remained active, as I struggled up to the last
moment attempting to reconcile my growing doubts with my continued activity.
Ultimately, however, the rift between the two became so wide that I found it
necessary to put my Mormon Church participation on hold, without actually yet
resigning my membership.
For instance, when I concluded that there was no other reasonable explanation
to account for the obvious connection between the LDS temple ritual and the
rites of Freemasonry, I stopped paying tithing and discontinued temple
attendance.
When I reached the point where I could no longer accept the Book of Mormon
as an authentic historical document, I notified my bishop that I could not,
in good conscience, continue teaching my Aaronic Priesthood class that it was
a genuine document. I did, however, offer to continue instructing the young
men under my charge, on the condition that I be allowed to focus on issues of
human character development and general moral behavior--but not on the Book
of Mormon. My bishop found this offer unacceptable and released me.
I eventually discontinued my home teaching duties and requested that the home
teachers assigned to our family stop making their monthly visits.
I turned down a calling from the stake president to be ward mission leader.
In short, I needed time and space to deal with the steadily growing gap
between what I had been taught was true in Mormonism and what I was
discovering was, in reality, false about Mormonism.
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Personal Experiences: The Basis for My Foundational Disconnect from
Mormonism
As important as my intellectual awakening to the falsity of Mormon claims was
to my eventual decision to leave the LDS Church, the most powerful influence
in that ultimate decision took the form of personal experiences, from youth
to adulthood, which served to raise growing doubts in my mind about the LDS
Church’s claims to divine and singular authority over my life.
What made these personal experiences even more powerful to me than the
intellectual arguments was their direct and obvious effect on my individual
life, as brought on by people I knew and had contact with in the Mormon
Church--from family, to teachers, to Church leaders.
The cumulative effect of these personal experiences led me to make the final
decision to leave the Mormon Church. The intellectual reasons served to
reinforce and validate that decision.
What follows is a list of the personal experiences, in cumulative order, that
formed the underpinnings for my decision to resign my membership from the
Mormon Church. These included:
--the failure of a priesthood "healing" blessing, given to me as a
young boy while hospitalized for pneumonia, to have any discernable effect on
my recovery;
--the false promise made to me in my patriarchal blessing that I would return
from my full-time mission to find things just about the way I left them.
Contrary to the blessing's assurances, my girlfriend, whom I wanted to marry,
died barely six weeks into my mission. Within a year, several members of my
Seminary class, along with their instructor, were killed or injured in a
tornado while returning from a Church trip to Nauvoo;
--the failure of "the Spirit" to register positively when I heard a
flamboyant youth fireside speaker reveal to us the Masonic origins of the
Mormon temple ceremony (including garment wearing), even though many of my
peers in attendance were moved to Holy Ghost-inspired tears;
--my family’s discouragement of me from making any public reference to
struggles I had experienced on my mission with my own testimony, insisting to
me that I, in fact, had always possessed a testimony of the truthfulness of
the Gospel and that it was my duty to set an example for others in the Church
to follow;
--unjustified perks and privileges provided family members of high-ranking
Mormon Church leaders, including free passes to General Conference that were
expressly off-limits to non-family members; reserved seating in the
Tabernacle for relatives of Church leaders; and access to special lunches for
the kin of General Authorities during Conference proceedings. The Bensons
consistently took advantage of these perks, at the expense of respect for,
and belief in, the supposed equality of all before the eyes of God;
--the effort of my grandfather, Ezra Taft Benson (after being solicited to
intervene by my parents, especially my mother), to stop my planned marriage
to Mary Ann. He did so, but only temporarily, by invoking his authority as
President of the Council of the Twelve Apostles in order to exact my
compliance--commanding me that I should defer to parental
"inspiration" and seek family peace, rather than make my own decision
on whom I should marry;
--the refusal of a trusted BYU professor to answer my growing doubts about Book
of Mormon historicity, saying that I needed to put my questions on the
shelf and accept LDS scriptures on faith;
--the on-the-spot demand of another BYU instructor (in a private interview
into which he called me) that I bear him my testimony of the atoning
sacrifice of the Savior (I felt inappropriately intruded upon and left the
encounter in tears);
--the efforts by my grandfather and other family members to stop me from
completing an undergraduate BYU research paper on the Church’s official
position on the theory of organic evolution, fearing that it would be
critical of Mormon leadership and undermine faith and testimony in the
Brethren;
--the refusal of Mormon Church leaders (including President Spencer Kimball,
Apostles Bruce R. McConkie and Mark E. Peterson, Correlation Committee
Director Roy Doxey, Kimball’s personal secretary Arthur Haycock and my
grandfather) to give me direct and straightforward answers to my questions on
the subject of organic evolution; combined with the LDS Church’s refusal to
honestly acknowledge to its members the actual history of the official LDS
position on organic evolution on the basis that to do so would be too
controversial;
--the extremist political views personally conveyed in our home by my
grandfather and other family members, including that the U.S. civil rights
movement was Communist-inspired; that President Eisenhower himself may have
been a Communist; that political liberals (such as apostles Hugh B. Brown and
Neal A. Maxwell) could not be good Church members; that the John Birch
Society was the most effective organization (outside the Mormon Church) in
fighting Communism; and that the Beatles were Kremlin understudies groomed to
sew revolutionary destruction in America;
--the attitude in certain quarters of the Benson family, conveyed to me as a
4th-grader on the day he was assassinated, that President John F. Kennedy
deserved what he got;
--the preaching of racist religious and political doctrines in my home and in
the Church--including opposition to school integration; support of
segregationist George Wallace’s presidential platform as being more in line
with those of the Founders than that of either the Republican or Democratic
parties; opposition to my participation in demonstration marches urging the
passage of a Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday in Arizona; and the refusal of
the Mormon Church to officially endorse passage of a Arizona state holiday
honoring Rev. King;
--efforts by an anonymous Mormon Apostle, local Arizona Church leaders and
Mormon political authorities to silence my public cartoon criticism of Mormon
governor Evan Mecham--including direct contact from the state regional representative
of the Church to me, a phone call to my stake president from H. Burke
Peterson of the Presiding Bishopric and complaints from a Mormon state
senator--all which led to my eventual removal from the stake high council;
this combined with efforts by local Mormon Mecham supporters to have me
excommunicated for my opposition to Mecham, whom they claimed had been
elected by God’s will;
--a warning from my home teacher that if I did not stop asking critical
questions about the Book of Abraham, I would be excommunicated;
--personal meetings with my stake president about my growing disillusionment
with Mormon Church doctrines and practices, followed by his personal letters
to me, in which he accused me of being consumed with pride and in the grip of
Satan, and in which he also warned me to cease my public cartoon criticism of
unequal treatment of LDS women by the Mormon Church;
--criticism by a local Mormon male stake youth leader of Mary Ann’s Sunday
School lesson to a joint young men’s and young women’s class, in which she
taught that during the last days of Jesus’ life, his female friends were more
faithful and brave than were his own apostles (a criticism that was, in
typical Mormon sexist fashion, relayed to me by the stake leader, rather than
directly to Mary Ann);
--efforts by Mormon Church General Authorities and members of my own family
to discourage me from speaking the truth about the Church’s deliberate
misrepresentations of my grandfather’s actual deteriorating physical and
mental state, combined with the threat from my own family that if I continued
to speak out publicly about his health, I would be barred from seeing my
grandfather. This last warning was issued to me by my father in the name of
protecting God’s prophet from enemies in the press (of which I happened to be
a member); and, finally,
--admissions by Apostles Neal Maxwell and Dallin Oaks in private
conversations with Mary Ann and myself in their Church offices just prior to
us leaving Mormonism, which included discussion of what they themselves
regarded as problems with Book of Mormon historicity; failed
prophecies of Mormon Church presidents; contradictory accounts of the First
Vision; Joseph Smith’s inconsistent behavior in the wake of receiving the
First Vision; difficulties with Smiths’ alleged Book of Abraham
translation; the role of FARMS in protecting the Quorum of the Twelve from
criticism; the actual means by which revelation is received by Mormon
prophets; lies publicly uttered by Oaks about fellow Apostle Boyd K. Packer’s
inappropriate involvement in the excommunication of LDS author and feminist
support, Paul Toscano; the unimpressive nature of Maxwell’s and Oaks’ own
testimonies of the Gospel and, in particular, of their supposed callings as
Special Witnesses for Christ; their obsessive concern for secrecy concerning
our conversations with them; and their compulsion to pry into our personal
lives regarding our individual worthiness to ask them questions in the first
place.
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Conclusion: Leaving the Mormon Church Because of Personal Experience, Not
Intellectual Argument
Many questioning Mormons harbor serious intellectual doubts about the claims
of the LDS Church. These concerns are real, valid and substantial.
But it is often the grinding, eye-opening effect of jarring personal
experiences in their own lives with Mormon Church authority, family pressure,
Church hypocrisy, individual mistreatment and a sense of smothering control
that leads many of them to finally make their escape from the captivity of
Mormonism's depersonalizing prison camp.
In the end, disillusionment with, and ultimate disbelief in, the Mormon
Church frequently boils down to intensely personal conflicts between fact and
myth in which people come to a clear sense that they have been fundamentally--in
their heart of hearts--betrayed by a corrupt institution that professed to
love, trust, respect and accept them as the individuals that they are--and
then acted in ways to totally undermine that assurance.
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