Note: if you happen to be a Mormon, please read this explanatory note first.
Christians who learn that I left the Mormon faith are routinely shocked. For many of them, I’m the first such person they’ve ever encountered. But for me it’s not that remarkable; after my exit from the Mormon (also “LDS” or “Latter-Day Saints”) church, I met large numbers of recovering Mormons, many of whom later became Christians.
But the start of all this was me leaving the Mormon faith. This is hard to talk about, because my parents are still members, and they are obviously not happy that I have left.
The crux of the Mormon faith is that all members should have a personal testimony of the Book of Mormon, their “second testament” to Jesus Christ. If you accept the Book of Mormon, then you accept Joseph Smith, Jr. as the founding prophet of the Mormon church, and everything else that he introduced later. It’s like dominoes; once the first one topples, the rest are sure to go.
Mormons put great stock in this personal testimony, much as other churches put great stock in the testimonies of believers. All Mormons are expected to have this testimony; at the end of the Book of Mormon, a challenge is written: pray that the book is true, and the Holy Ghost will “manifest the truth of it unto you.” The challenge is set up very carefully: the expectation, of course, is that the book must be true. If you don’t get the answer that it is, well, you must not have done it right, or you didn’t read the whole book, or you haven’t prayed for long enough, or you’re not sincere—it has to be something wrong with you, because it can’t be the book. After all, millions of Mormons around the world tell each other it’s true, every month at testimony meetings designed to reinforce the idea that everyone else believes, so if you don’t, it’s just you.
I was born in the Mormon church and raised in that faith. I had never known anything else. As a teenager I actually wondered (as an intellectual exercise) what it would take to deny the faith. I reasoned that it would take a mountain of evidence that the church was founded fraudulently. Joseph Smith, Jr. would have to be a liar, a cheat, a complete con-man, to so hoodwink so many to leave their homes, over and over again. And surely, if there were that much evidence, it could not be hidden from the membership of the church!
But we return to the crux of the matter: the personal testimony. As a teenager contemplating serving a two-year mission for the Mormon church, to go to some place (selected by the all-knowing Brethren in Salt Lake City) and proclaim the Mormon gospel, I decided that I very, very much needed this personal testimony. I could not go and persuade anyone of the truth unless I was very sure it was the truth. So I made sure I read the entire Book of Mormon, cover to cover. I prayed. And prayed. And prayed. And… nothing. No burning witness that the book was true. Just silence. Surely I must be doing it wrong; all these other people had prayed and received their witness, why couldn’t I get mine? I was disillusioned, but still felt like it must be my fault.
Ah, but there’s the small matter of that mountain of evidence. You see, that evidence does exist. It is in fact easy to find, if you take the trouble to look. In order to dispense with this evidence, you must be willing to believe that the enemies of the church—and the members are indoctrinated to believe that the entire world is out to get them—have carefully prepared, forged, or twisted the evidence to support their view that the Mormon church is false. So on the one hand you have a group that says the evidence is exactly what it appears to be: documentation of how Joseph Smith, Jr. founded a church from his own imaginations and dabblings with the occult, later incorporating pieces from other religions and Masonic ritual. On the other hand, you have the Mormon church, saying the evidence is contrived, that Joseph Smith, Jr. was a true prophet, and the whole world is set against him and the church he founded.
Had I that personal witness, it would have clouded my thinking and made it harder to see that the evidence is what it appears to be. But I didn’t have that testimony. “All” I had to do was fight twenty years of indoctrination. It wasn’t easy; I wrestled with it for months. But eventually I repudiated the Mormon faith, and officially requested my name be removed from its membership rolls.
Then I was able to truly look for God.
