Why Mormons Leave

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The one true church

Members are taught that theirs is the only church with God's authority and that the feeling confirming it is knowledge. Many respondents discovered the feeling is not unique and the claim does not hold.

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What members were taught

This is the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth. Other churches have some truth but lack authority. If you read the Book of Mormon and pray with a sincere heart, the Holy Ghost will confirm it, and once you have felt that, you know.

What the record shows

Members are taught that theirs is the only church with God's authority and that the feeling confirming it is knowledge. Many respondents discovered the feeling is not unique and the claim does not hold.

Latter-day Saints are taught from childhood that the Church is "the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth." That phrase, from Doctrine and Covenants 1:30, was the screening question for the 2011 survey. Every respondent had once believed it and no longer did.

The method the Church gives members for knowing it is true is a spiritual one: read, pray, and attend to the feeling that follows, which is identified as the Holy Ghost confirming the truth. The single most consequential discovery many respondents described was that this method is not unique to Mormonism. Members of every faith describe the same peace, the same burning, the same certainty, about claims that contradict the Church's. Once a person notices that, the feeling stops being able to settle any question of fact.

This is why the survey found "I re-evaluated what it means to believe or know" a major factor for 38%. The written comments are full of it. Respondents did not first decide the Church was false and then reject the method; they noticed the method could confirm anything, and were left with the history to judge on its merits. One respondent summarized it with Carl Sagan's rule: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. "I never saw that evidence."

The exclusivity claim then became a problem in its own right. Members who came to admire the goodness and depth of people outside the Church found that a plan in which those people were missing something essential no longer described the world they saw.

In their words

“I left because I went toward my values. I left because my values were goodness and love and growth and all these things, and I failed to find them in my local chapel.”

Margi Dehlin Mormon Stories 686 at 1:05:41, 2017. Episode

Quotes are taken from machine-made transcripts of Mormon Stories interviews and may contain small transcription errors. Each links to the moment in the recording so you can hear it for yourself.

What people actually name

From the crowd-sourced 2014 comprehensive list, lightly edited.

  • Realizing that members of other faiths, including ones the Church considers false, report the same spiritual confirmation of their own truth claims.
  • {'Recognizing circular reasoning': 'a spiritual witness counts if it agrees with the Church and is dismissed as deception if it does not.'}
  • Concluding that emotion is not a reliable way to determine historical fact.
  • Encountering good, wise, and spiritually serious people outside the Church, and finding the "one true church" framework could not account for them.
  • The exclusivity felt like a franchise model of religion rather than a description of God.

More episodes on this, ranked

Mormon Stories interviews where this comes up most, beyond the ones chosen above.

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