What happens after

Believing members are told that people who leave become miserable, lose their morals, and drift. The people who left were asked. Here is what they said, and what it cost them.

Leaving is the middle of the story, not the end. The surveys that asked former members what came next agree on the broad shape: most do not join another church, most keep believing in something, the costs fall on relationships more than on anything else, and very few want to come back.

Where they go

In the 2011 survey, 53% of former believers now called themselves agnostic, atheist, or humanist. Twenty-two percent still called themselves Mormon in some sense, 16% exclusively so. Eleven percent had become Christians of another kind, 2% Buddhist, and about 17% were undecided. Source.

Later surveys with different samples land in the same place. In the B. H. Roberts Foundation's 2023 survey of 1,183 former members, about 44% did not believe in God or thought the question unknowable, and nearly 90% now had no religious affiliation at all. Source. Jana Riess's 2016 Next Mormons Survey found that 86% of former Mormons still believed in God and that only about a third had joined another organized religion (Riess, "Why Mormons are leaving the church: 4 myths," February 2019). The consistent finding is that people leave the institution more often than they leave faith, and that almost none of them are recruited away by another church.

What it costs

The 2011 survey asked respondents to rate the cost of their disbelief, and of being open about it, across their lives. Fifty-four percent rated at least one cost as high or extremely high. The pattern depended on whether they stayed or left:

Cost	Higher for those who…
Mental and spiritual health	stayed active
Relationship with spouse	stayed active
Relationships with parents, siblings, and friends	left
Job	roughly equal; higher at lower incomes

Young people paid most with their parents. Older people paid most with their spouses and children. Lower-income respondents paid more everywhere. The marriage comments are the hardest reading in the report; several respondents described a bishop advising their spouse to divorce them. Details, and what they asked of their families.

Who they tell

Disbelievers who stayed active mostly kept it to themselves. Among those still attending, 72% had told their bishop little or nothing and 92% had told their ward members little or nothing. Even 14% of their spouses knew little or nothing. Those who left were far more open: only 1% of their spouses were in the dark. The person on the pew who has stopped believing is, statistically, not going to tell you.

Whether they come back

About 24% of the 2011 respondents who had left said they would consider returning under some circumstances, but more than half of those attached a condition they knew would never be met. The remaining answers clustered around four requests: acceptance of doubt and non-literal belief, honesty about the history, equal treatment of gay members, and respect and equality for women. By 2023, in the B. H. Roberts survey, fewer than 8% of former members expressed any interest in returning, and two thirds had never bothered to formally resign.

What they build instead

Most of the infrastructure for life after Mormonism has been built by the people who left. THRIVE runs local groups, a weekly online meeting, and conferences. Mormon Faith Crisis walks through the experience stage by stage. Therapists who understand religious transition are listed on the resources page. And Mormon Stories has recorded more than two thousand people telling the whole arc, including the part after; the stories page is a place to start.

The finding that surprises believing readers most is also the most consistent one across every survey: the people who left were not looking for a way out. They were, by every measure the surveys could take, among the most committed members the Church had. What they lost was belief, and what they kept was almost everything else.