Narrating Departure: Understanding the Exodus
How do people narrate and make sense of their prior departure from the Church, especially now that they are back in full activity again?
Leaving something or someone you love (or used to love) is, by nature, intense, dramatic, emotional, sensitive, personal, heart-wrenching. Just ask any divorcée. Ask a former member of any faith why they left, and you won’t find a departure story that reads blithely, casually. The drama of conflicted emotions are on full display and they are much more complex than an outsider might realize.
Given this intensity, perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that there are so many widely diverse interpretations of what happens – and why it happens – in narratives of departure from faith (in this case, from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). Ultimately, we have come to believe it’s not just what happens that matters in these accounts, but also how people perceive, interpret, and talk about what happens.
While differences in objective events are clearly worth paying attention to, it’s these narrative differences – the contrast in how different people make sense of departure now, compared with their previous understanding – that has been especially interesting to me, especially among those who eventually return to activity. Exploring how their understanding and interpretations evolve over time as they leave (and come back) is fascinating.
In particular, we have become interested during this analysis in the way in which different unsettling or destabilizing experiences appear to have ushered many individuals into a unique narrative that was distinctive for its portrayal of the Church and its people. This narrative was often accompanied by an equally strong certitude about there being no possible way they would ever return. How this potent narrative gets disrupted in various ways is the focus of the upcoming section following this one below.
First, we review below some of the experiences narrators emphasized in their discussion of choosing to step away from the Church.
UNMET EXPECTATIONS
The way in which some spoke of experiencing the Church and gospel earlier appears to have left them feeling empty, stretched, and dissatisfied somehow in a way that is different from their idealized expectation, which appears to make them vulnerable to other things that arise. Jamie Pon described feeling unsatisfied with her life as a teenager, and how this contrasted with her expectation: “I thought that I should be happy by being a member of the Church; however I was not happy and not satisfied at all.” After watching older brothers opt out of church, and deciding to live “without Church influences” – and watching friends at school seem “happy without the Church and the gospel,” she naturally “wondered why they were so happy but I was not.”
This includes a sense of fatigue, along with a confusion about why prayer and other worship isn’t eliciting a more personally satisfying or gratifying experience.
EXHAUSTING OVERWHELM
While for some a set of specific incidents wounds their faith, for others it’s a longer-term, progressive burden that arises from many different sources. And as one woman remembered wondering, it’s also easy to feel that no matter how hard you try, some mistakes can never go back to the way they were before:
It was over. The damage–on a grand, eternal scale–was irrevocably done. I had failed my personal mission, and there was nothing I could do about it. I had to accept my reality…
“You can’t do this, Misty. You aren’t good enough. And you never will be.”
I walked away from everything I believed in. If I could put my trust in faith and make the “right choice,” then why did it continue to hurt so badly? Why were things still so very, very messed up? Why, when I was doing everything I had been told and everything I was supposed to do, wasn’t the repentance process working? What was wrong with me? That’s when I decided I had been entirely too much of a disappointment. That I had fallen past the point of no return. And that’s when I quit. I no longer had a testimony. Of anything. I had no idea who I was, what I was doing, or why I was even here. I gave up, not just on the concepts I’d known and believed in my entire life. I gave up on me. I gave up on mortality. I was done. (31)
Misty writes that she “wished it had been [as] simple as…’one Sunday I slept in late and it kind of became a habit.’” However, the reality was much more deliberate:
One day I made the conscious decision that I was not going to go back….I came home from church, kicked off my heels, plopped down in the chair in my office, and decided I was done. I was done with squirming through Gospel Doctrine classes. I was done with adding my painfully-earned insight to every Relief Society discussion. I was done dragging myself around after third-hour to collect sign-up sheets, done spending hours setting up and cleaning up enrichment activities, and done feeling burned-out and misguided. I was done ending my Sunday evening even more spiritually drained than when I’d started. I was done wondering what business I had even being there in the first place. I was done trying to make up for my mistakes. I was done being a hypocrite. (31)
That’s where the story pretty much ends for many online accounts. But not hers. Her description continues, highlighting her internal conflict:
The truth was, I still didn’t feel worthy. Sure, I could run a house like a well-oiled machine, “mother hen” like nobody’s business, and look smokin’ hot in curls and a Wonder Woman t-shirt for date night, but I was no longer “Molly Mormon” enough. I could no longer get through a Relief Society discussion without crumpling into panicky fits of hyperventilation. I could no longer feel the Spirit during Sacrament. I was no longer one of the “elites” that the Bishop “didn’t have to worry about.” Inside I had accepted the fact that I was never going to make it to the Celestial Kingdom. As far as the outside world was concerned, however, I was SuperWoman, and I didn’t want to have to admit I really wasn’t. (31)
UNSATISFYING WORSHIP
For different reasons, some spoke of grappling to feel any sense or feeling from God anymore. In such a place, sometimes even desperate prayers are not met with the response they anticipated.
Joe Tippets wrote, “Before I left the church, I had stopped feeling God. I was worthy and checking all the boxes, but the more I wanted to experience God, the more impossible it seemed.” Grappling with a sense of routine and rote worship is common among believers, including those that stay. And Joe remembers intensely seeking divine reassurance:
I remembered the theme of many prayers from years before. ‘God, I’m scared that I’m going to leave you and never come back. My kids won’t go on missions. They won’t care about the temple. Please let me know you’re there. If I can’t believe you’re there, I can’t go on living this way. It’s too stressful to believe in you but have you absent in my life. I can’t fake my belief in you.’ Despite my pleading, I would get no answer. No peace or assurance. Just the feeling of being an idiot for thinking God was real. Or the self-loathing that led to suicidal fantasies, assuming I must be doing something very wrong for God to stay away from me, but I had no idea what it was or how to correct it.
He continued, “When we hear the sacrament prayer, we aren’t promised that the Spirit might always be with us, but also might go on vacation for a couple of years when we need God most. That we may always have his Spirit to be with us. It made no sense to me why God had disappeared.”
The change in his worship experience corresponded with an eventual change in his attitude towards God and the Church. Joe described what happened next in his own experience, “I finally stopped looking, first for a few days at a time, then weeks, then months. I stopped feeling like I needed to obey the rules of a god I no longer believed in. I had to re-evaluate the experiences I had labeled as god. Psychology and sociology offered reasonable answers. I was primed. It was reinforced socially. I was done with imaginary God. I filed him away next to Superman” (34).
Much of this may seem natural – one doesn’t feel the presence of God, thus one stops believing in God. But, of course, there’s quite a bit more to the story.
DESTABILIZING INTERPERSONAL EXPERIENCES
Kevin spoke tragically of experiencing ongoing bullying at Church early on – and without the kind of accountability that would have stopped it:
I picked up a bully at church – a kid that would show up and just terrorize me and it lasted about two years and I never had the courage to actually say anything about it. I didn’t talk to my parents about it and we had a couple confrontations in the hall, fists cuffed kind of thing and me being scared to say something, and then people not noticing.
He admits, “at that point in time I stopped trusting authority. I stopped trusting adults. I stopped trusting what people around me would do because I felt very vulnerable, and I felt victimized. And going to church and being terrified to go to church, and, then, being forced to go anyway” (38).
These painful interpersonal moments have an unfortunate impact on people’s faith. Similar kinds of destabilizing impacts come from other kinds of jarring moments as well.
NEW INFORMATION THAT SHOCKED MY PREVIOUS FAITH
Compared with those who found themselves not experiencing the same satisfaction, peace and power in worship and fellowship anymore, others experience a more jarring, injurious moment in relation to the Church that shifts things – generating heightened levels of dissatisfaction and struggle. These include painful interpersonal moments – and other moments of alarm in confronting a new narrative of history or doctrine.
DESTABILIZING NARRATIVES ABOUT HISTORY OR DOCTRINE
Some who leave the Church frame their departure as prompted by a discovery of unfortunate, painful historical truth. From the perspective of those who came back, however, similar situations end up looking very different. Don Bradley describes “dig[ging] into Smith’s history to enhance his LDS devotion and then to uncover uncomfortable facts and omissions in the faith’s story, which bred disillusionment and distance” (5). Dusty Smith’s account is paraphrased this way:
Gradually, Smith descended into a spiral of anti-Latter-day Saint literature and disillusionment, angry toward the faith he had sacrificed his family, a fiancée, and two years of his life to join. Smith poignantly recalls the exact day—November 11, 1989—when he lost his testimony of the Church (3.)
Leo Winegar spoke of his “extreme doubt” as having “developed through listening to cynical viewpoints” (32). And another individual said, “I did leave, briefly, when anti-LDS literature made known to me by a ‘friend’ had put some doubts in my head” (29).
In such a moment, it’s easy to stop experiencing gospel fundamentals (such as reading, praying and going to Church) as the same foundation they always used to be. As Leo said, “For over 25 years, I had spoken those sacred words thousands of time – I know that the Church is true, that Joseph Smith is a prophet, and that the Book of Mormon is the word of God,” before recounting finding himself “sitting in my stake president’s office, feeling lost and in despair, questioning everything I had previously ‘known’ to be true” – and coming away unconsoled by the encouragement to stick with the fundamentals. (32)
This predictably prompted some new discomfort in Leo’s connections with members around him. After “extreme doubt” had been induced, Leo reflected on feeling like a “closet atheist.” As a result, he said, “I had stopped praying. Sure, I had continued to pray with my wife because I didn’t want to hurt her, but each time I prayed, my words felt empty and my heart was hollow. I was only going through the motions at that point. Church meetings were drudgery. Dragging myself to fulfill my calling was even worse. I was completely checked out. I felt tired, hurt, worried, angry, and worst of all, I felt like no one in the Church understood me” (32).
Kristi described her husband getting baptized, but “quickly became inactive.” Even while she grew in her faith, he “started to look in other places for information on the Church, turning to sources on the internet and YouTube.” This influenced Kristi too: “As his discomfort grew, I also became less active.” Her efforts to continue going to church caused tension in their marriage: “I returned to church periodically, trying to resume activity; however, each time, it became a stumbling block in my marriage. I became confused. Who did I choose? My husband, or worshiping my Heavenly Father and my Savior in the true church?” (13)
As reflected above, similar to interpersonally destabilizing moments – these jarring encounters with a new narrative of history or doctrine left them shaken and in a profoundly different relationship with their own faith – all of which prompts further changes and unraveling that can ensure next.
Compared with narratives of those who leave the Church for good, however, these people have come to see the encounter and influence of jarring information as not simply a “discovery of reality,” but rather, as encounter with a particular message or argument that they eventually worked through and found reconciliation about. Sometimes, however, that didn’t happen until their faith underwent other tumultuous shifts.
THE DECONSTRUCTION
Don Bradley continues his recollection, “I had a few evidences that I thought were sufficient foundation for my continuing belief, then I picked those apart.” Rather than a “freeing” of their minds from previous doctrine, those who have returned see it differently.
Bradley goes on to reflect upon how his newly adopted narrative of suspicion moved him to selectively focus on evidence that supported it. As one journalist summarized: “Using the Joseph-as-fraud model, Bradley examined Smith’s statements with the question: ‘How could this benefit him?’” As “he began to look cynically at all LDS accounts,” Don also rejected “religious experience as an avenue to truth” and “determined he no longer could be, in good conscience, a Mormon.”
After speaking about leaving behind a “belief in God and Christ” what Don says next is interesting. Rather than the end of the story, he reflects on his current insight on what had taken place. As he put it, “I understand the process of belief-deconstruction, very, very well. I’ve personally lived it and I’ve studied it for a long time” (5).
Others speak of similar questioning of their previous spiritual assurances. As Jamie Pon describes her process of departure, “I questioned my own testimony and doubted that I had ever had one….During that time I did not think I had gained my own testimony” (21).
PULLED SOMEWHERE ELSE
We’ve seen how a worship that shifts in one’s experience of faith can lead someone along a path of disaffiliation – whether from coming to see one’s faith as empty and exhausting, or coming to see that same faith as scandalous and deceptive. Each of those can naturally set the stage for drifting from their faith. In other cases, it was the pull and allure of something else outside of the Church that contributed to a readiness to step away.
THE DRAW OF OUTSIDE EXCITEMENT
Letitia describes how for her: “You’re wanting to go out, wanting you to drink and there was a lot of pressure on me to do that and just dating outside the church as well. Yeah that kind of took me off that path” (39).
Kevin remembers feeling resistant to the Strength of Youth and announcing to his family, “sorry, everybody, mom –I’m not going to do that. I’m just going to do what I want to do. I’m just going to chase girls.” Later describing himself as a “wayward waif kind of waste of a kid with no real direction” or “really, life ambitions” he continued, “I just wanted to go have fun. I wanted to experience things….Let me just try everything” (38).
Jamie – the woman who remember her dissatisfaction as a teenager, and her intrigue at watching her brothers leave the Church – describes how this eventually moved her to act:
I envied them because they could go hang out on Sundays. I thought I would be happier not going to church and hanging out with my friends instead….Attending church seemed to limit my happiness and seemed like a waste of time, so I let my parents know that I did not want to go to church with them anymore. It was shocking news to my family…I stopped going to church and decided to experience the “real world,” have my own life, and do my own thing (21).
Pam Shorr also described “want[ing] to see what it was like out in the world.” (18)
While rejecting constraints and pursuing unfettered freedom is a tempting draw for anyone, this pull obviously doesn’t act in a vacuum – with all we described earlier also potentially setting the stage. That is, once life in the Church starts to feel less rich and potent than they imagined, other lives start to look more intriguing.
A GRADUAL UNRAVELING
As you can see, the perceived influences one someone’s departure are diverse. And connected to all these different experiences – from experimentation with another life, to deterioration of the old life – people come out the other side seeing their faith and faith community very differently.
To be clear, however much dramatic moments that lead someone to this new view of the Church rightly receive attention, stepping away is rarely predicated on a single disruptive moment. While for some a set of specific incidents wounds their faith, for others it’s a gradual dissatisfaction that builds over time and arises from many different sources. A series of different moments can sometimes pave the way for a relationship with the Church that starts to feel chronically tense and painful. Who wouldn’t want to walk away from that?
Prompted by moments and experiences like these, the unraveling happens gradually. And yet, although painful moments sometimes show up in many departure narratives, the objective happenings rarely constitute the main focus of the accounts. Instead, people stepping away from the Church of Jesus Christ often emphasize their own evolving feelings and perceptions of the faith in connection with circumstances – a receding love, a dwindling trust, and often what is characterized as growing, uncomfortable enlightenment – and the “integrity” to follow this new sense of truth.
This diverges from how those who return often see their experience in retrospect. As they look back on the experience, their language reflects a great deal of new nuance, including insights about anger, distance, and how they had come to see “the Church” itself.
INTENSE NEGATIVE EMOTIONAL RESPONSES
When looking back, many admitted to being influenced by a sharp hatred that sometimes emerged after feeling betrayed. As Dusty Smith put it: “I spent from 1989 on battling against the Church. I hated the Church. It had deceived me. It had broken up my family. It had cost me so much.”
This feeling can propel individuals towards certain language and actions. In Smith’s case, “Smith joined several online debate boards, using his skills as a litigator to tear down Latter-day Saint beliefs. He taught classes in other churches demonstrating why he believed the Church was false and deceptive”; as he put it, “I was very vocally anti-Mormon” (3).
Raquel Cook also recollected, “I was angry. I’m just going to go ahead and say that I was angry at life. Not necessarily because of the way I was raised, but because I had been witness to some things growing up and I had been the victim of some pretty severe wrongdoing that went largely ignored.” Partly as a way “to get away from here, to get away from the expectations, to get away from the anger, to get away from people” she stepped away and left the Church for a time (17).
THE DISTANCE
In these accounts, the distance people feel is often explained largely as a function of judgment, shaming or lack of love from active members. Another perspective arises in stories of those who have returned. In recounting how her relationships with her parents and siblings deteriorated, Tami said, “I was angry and bitter and they didn’t want to be around that.” The account reads, “Although she felt like she was the same person—minus the Church—she realized later that wasn’t true” – quoting her as saying, “I pushed them away because I was mad at them because they didn’t understand my journey.” (2)
This is not to delegitimize the sense of feeling unwelcome. Not only is that real – but we get a closer view of it on return narratives. For instance, it’s striking the extent to which those experiencing of disaffiliation and reaffiliation speak of a sense of distance – underscoring a clear sense of distance between the narrator and the people and religion they left behind, along with a feeling of banishment and alienation from something they once felt at home in (see here for more in-depth analysis on the “Conceptual Metaphor of Distance”). Along with distancing themselves from “the Church,” it’s common to see people separate the gospel message of Jesus from “the Church” (for more in-depth analysis, see “The Church” Metonymy).
I’M NEVER GOING BACK
All the foregoing leaves people in a place of striking conviction at never likely going back. What’s striking to us is the extent to which this “place” is a narrative and interpretive place – as much as an objective reality. In many ways, the narratives of people appear to be shaped by experiences over time to a point where the view of the Church and its people is so despairing, accusing and suspicious – that people have little to no expectation of ever returning. Appreciating that feeling – and how some people still maintain a small possibility is the focus of this final section.
NOT SEEING OTHER POSSIBILITIES
Although this growing number of return narratives demonstrate how many people come back, this possibility isn’t always that easy to even consider in the middle of the experience. Janice Oviatt admits that, “It had been a dream of mine to be sealed in the house of the Lord. However, I did not think that was possible anymore.”
At a time when her desire to come back was not strong, Tami found herself googling “Ex-Mormon returns to church” in the hopes of finding stories of others who had left and come back. She couldn’t find anything, though: “It would just pull up more anti-Mormon literature. I couldn’t find anybody who left the Church and became an anti-Mormon and came back.”
So she created a secret Pinterest board called “Going Back to Church” – with only a few pins she would look at now and then to reinforce the idea. Despite the strained relationships, Tami texted her dad one day, “Is anyone too far gone to come back?” Her dad responded, “Of course not.”
This helped her regain some hope that it’s possible. My life doesn’t have to look like this forever. Around the same time, Tami’s brother was visiting from out of state and they met up for lunch. She asked him the same question, and he bore his testimony to her of the same thing—no one is too far gone. (2)
For a larger analysis of this idea of possibility, please see our article: Possibility and Permission
KEEPING A TOUCHSTONE
Regardless of what they were feeling or experiencing in their time away, men and women who describe coming back to their faith acknowledge the influence of having some kind of touchstone to the Church. This was something Elder Uchtdorf highlighted in referencing Dusty Smith’s story in a 2016 conference talk.
Dusty’s connection to the Church never fully disappeared, even while actively fighting against Latter-day Saint beliefs…thanks to a guy named Mike he met on a debate board. Even though they debated intensely, a friendship developed. As the story goes, Mike kept saying, “You’ll be LDS someday” – an idea that “seemed not only impossible but insane.” Yet Dusty’s friend Mike didn’t give up on him, as he recalled in a voice breaking with emotion: “Every week [beginning in] 1999, he put my name in the temple” (3).
Compared to the many who are cut off completely, those who return speak of maintaining some connection with someone – the kind of “no matter what I love you” friends and family who were always still there. Joe Tippets describes his wife “who stuck with me when I left the church despite some very difficult years. The wife who loved me no matter what” (34). And Jamie Pon recounts a mother who, when she “decided to find my own happiness in the ‘real’ world and leave the Church,” showed her patience and did “not give up on me” and “continued to support me and love me as her daughter.”
More than only comfortable love, though, Jamie acknowledged the gentle encouragement they continued to show:
During the time when I was not active in the Church, my parents continued to show their love to me. They continued to encourage me to pray even though I did not feel like doing it. They encouraged me to read the scriptures, even just a few verses every day. When I was not active in the Church, I did not pay much attention to their words. Now when I look back, I am grateful for their patience and persistence. They never gave up on me. Without them, I would not be able to be who I am today.
Pam Shorr, whose child later asked, “why don’t we go back to church” also said, “My brother Eric was on his mission at this point. My mom and dad were inactive. I was inactive. [My child wasn’t] baptized. Eric told us that he had been praying and fasting for us constantly on his mission. It was his desire that we would all return to the gospel.” (18)Even when not conscious, such a connection seems to keep one’s heart sof(er). Even in one of Dusty’s hardest moments against the Church, it’s striking to find him joking with Mike, “If God wanted me back in the Church, he’d transfer my wife’s job to Salt Lake City.” (The following week, he called back, you’ll never believe what happened – with Mike reminding him, “Well, you know what you told God.” When Dusty explained that he had only been joking, Mike quipped, “God wasn’t” (3).
One person not giving up seemed to make a substantial difference – consistent with research that shows just a single contact can make the crucial difference for other people in a difficult situation, like foster kids. These kinds of enduring, not-going-away relationships seem to be consequential in setting the stage and preparing a heart. Robyn Burkinshaw refers to the “people who were always there to make sure that I didn’t go so far over the side that I couldn’t be brought back.”
While a single individual connection is significant, of course, having an entire family connected is even better. About his time away from the church, Tom Christofferson remembers, “Mom told us, ‘I’ve realized that there is no perfect family, but I believe we can be perfect in our love for each other.’ And then she turned to my brothers and sisters-in-law and said, ‘The most important lesson your kids will learn from the way that our family treats their Uncle Tom is that nothing they can ever do will take them outside the circle of our family’s love.’” He notes, “That set the tone for everything that happened in our family after that—we were going to love and enjoy each other wherever anybody was in their journey, and we were going to be loyal and united as a family. [My parents] couldn’t give up on either the Church or their child because each one was essential to the other. The Church gave meaning to their understanding of family, and the family fulfilled their understanding of the gospel, so they were unwilling to let either go.”
Even though Tom pushed away from the Church for many years, the Christoffersons created a family culture of understanding, compassion, loyalty, and great love for one another—all while refusing to give up on anyone for any reason. (41)
Thus we see that even when people come to see the Church with great suspicion and resentment, having a physical, relational touchstone with a member makes a difference. This makes the possibility of coming back, however distant, not quite so crazy.
