Doctrine and theology

Three out of four respondents named this as a major factor, more than any other item on the survey. The authors acknowledged that "doctrine" is a broad word, and the written comments show it covering several distinct things.

For some it was a specific teaching they could no longer accept: that God would withhold priesthood by race, that a woman's eternal role was to be one of several wives, that a loving Father would separate families forever over a Word of Wisdom question. For others it was the architecture. A God who created billions of people and revealed the only path to exaltation to a few million of them, mostly in the American West, struck many as implausible on its face. "The god I believe in," one respondent wrote, "does not operate through just one approved church that reaches only a minuscule percentage of humanity."

For still others it was the instability. Members are taught that doctrine is eternal and that policy changes; but polygamy, the ban, and Adam-God were all taught as doctrine by prophets and are now described as something less. Respondents who tried to pin down what the Church actually teaches found that the answer was whatever the current leadership said, and that the previous leadership's teachings could be discarded without anyone admitting they had been wrong.

Doctrinal disbelief was also the strongest predictor, among all the reasons, that a person would leave rather than stay. Members who lost faith over history sometimes kept attending. Members who stopped believing the teachings were about a quarter more likely to be gone.