Visitors sometimes ask why wasmormon.org exists, or why former members don’t just move on. Fair questions deserve straight answers. Occasionally, though, the mail isn’t a question—it’s a script: pity, prophecy, and the old line that people who leave should leave the Church alone.
We recently received that kind of message and had an insightful exchange. Below is the full thread (lightly edited for readability), followed by an explanation of why it matters for our mission.
Message 1
This message projects a caricature (tragically destructive ex-members), mislabels our actual aims, and closes with pity, prayer, and prophecy instead of curiosity or evidence. It shows he already thinks he knows who we are. We share this as a useful case study in how the “can’t leave it alone” meme pairs with moral judgment and misunderstanding of ex-Mormon spaces.
Hey, ever heard “You can leave the Church, but then you can never leave the Church alone”?
Kind of applies to all those, who tragically are more active in trying to destroy and harm the Church, than living the restored Gospel before they left.
I’m sorry for people like you. I’ll pray for you. You’ll see in a soon coming day, that you left the only true lasting way to salvation. Not, that others are entirely wrong, but they will be a dead end. Times will get worse. The Lord is preparing His return.
It’s humorous that they had to ask if we’d heard the phrase after having written extensively about it on the site.
The tired “You can leave the Church, but you can never leave the Church alone” line is cultural shorthand, not an argument. It’s meant to pathologize former members who still talk about Mormonism: if you really moved on, you’d be quiet. It ignores why people speak up (family still inside, harm, honesty, the same “share truth” impulse missionaries are praised for) and pretends silence is the only respectable option. Framing the whole exchange with it signals whose side the rules favor before any facts appear.
“Kind of applies to all those who tragically are more active in trying to destroy and harm the Church…”
This does several things at once:
1. “Tragically” — Pity and condescension in one word. It casts us as objects in his moral story, not real people with reasons he has engaged.
2. “More active in trying to destroy and harm the Church than living the restored Gospel before they left” — This is a strong, specific judgment about how we spent our time as believers and after leaving—and there’s no way he could know about any of it. He doesn’t know our callings, our sacrifices, our sincerity, or our private devotion. He’s not reporting data; he’s projecting a stock image of an “angry apostate” onto us before we’ve said anything about your own life (though the site itself is full of such stories that are available to any who are curious or brave enough to engage). That’s preemptive character assignment, not conversation.
3. “Destroy and harm” — It misstates our published purpose. wasmormon.org and similar efforts are overwhelmingly about telling the truth as members and former members see it, sharing history, normalizing doubt, and reducing shame—not about vandalism or violence. “Destroy” is inflated language that turns disagreement and documentation into malice, which makes it easier to dismiss without engaging with what we actually do.
4. The comparison (“more… than…”) — It implies a zero-sum moral ledger: either you were really living the gospel then, or you’re really out to hurt the Church now. Real lives aren’t that binary. Many people tried hard to live the faith, then concluded the claims didn’t hold, and speaking honestly about that isn’t the opposite of having once believed. It’s what the church taught us to be and do.
“I’m sorry for people like you. I’ll pray for you.”
“People like you” continues the category judgment: you’re a type, not an individual. “I’m sorry” can sound compassionate; here, it functions more as “I’m sorry you’re wrong,” which preserves his moral high ground without listening.
“I’ll pray for you” varies by intent. It can be genuine care. It can also signal spiritual superiority and closure: the real work is done on his knees, not in dialogue with your reasons.
“You’ll see in a soon coming day… only true lasting way to salvation… others… dead end… Times will get worse… the Lord is preparing His return.”
This assumes the conclusion (the Church is true; you’ll be proven wrong eschatologically). It does not engage evidence, harm, or your mission—it ends inquiry with prophecy and urgency. “Dead end” for “others” is a sweeping dismissal of every other path while sounding mild (“Not that others are entirely wrong”). That’s rhetorical, having it both ways: pluralism-ish language, exclusive outcome.
Purpose, mission, and “if truth destroys it”
He’s already mapped you onto destroyers and tragic figures. That misreads wasmormon.org–style work: spread truth, destigmatize doubt, let people tell their stories—not harm an institution for sport.
A fair question to hold next to his framing: If honest information and sincere questions are treated as “destruction,” what does that say about the thing being protected? A community confident in its truth claims can answer criticism; one that equates truth with attack is treating transparency as the enemy. If a church were destroyed by truth, that would say more about the church than about the people telling it.
Our first reply
We sat on the message for a while and, after some thought, sent a reply. We didn’t expect that the message would receive a response, and doubted even that the original submission included a valid return email address. We couldn’t help but address (yet again) the “leave the church alone” rhetoric.
Thanks for writing.
You’re repeating a line Mormons hear often: that people who leave should then leave the Church alone. On its face it sounds like a request for peace. In practice it’s often used to shame people into silence—as if caring about truth, harm, or loved ones still inside were the real moral failure.
A few things worth separating:
1. “Leave the Church alone” isn’t symmetrical. The institution and its members don’t leave former members alone: ministering, reactivation efforts, narratives in general conference about “apostates,” family pressure, and cultural surveillance are routine. Asking only the people who left to go quiet while the Church still teaches about them, visits them, and shapes how families see them isn’t a neutral rule—it’s control of the narrative.
2. Many of us were trained never to leave “the truth” alone. Missionaries are sent to persuade others every day. Questioning that same impulse when someone concludes the Church’s claims don’t hold up is inconsistent. If persuasion is virtuous when it flows toward baptism, it’s worth examining why it’s framed as “destructive” when it flows the other way—especially when it’s about accuracy, consent, and accountability, not personal spite.
3. wasmormon.org isn’t about “destroying” anyone. It’s a space for people who were Mormon to tell their stories, share what they learned, and support others navigating the same path. That can feel threatening if you believe doubt is always sin; from our side it looks like honesty and solidarity.
4. The “you’ll see in the soon coming day” framing assumes the conclusion you’re trying to prove. We’ve heard it before. It doesn’t address history, evidence, or the reasons people leave—it ends conversation while claiming the moral high ground. We’re not interested in trading insults; we’re also not going to pretend that kind of prophecy settles anything.
You said you’ll pray for us. People mean different things by that. If it’s a sincere hope for our wellbeing, that’s your prerogative. If it’s a way to feel righteous while dismissing us, it won’t land the way you might think.
If you’re open to understanding why sites like this exist and why “leave the Church alone” gets pushed back on, you might start here:
- Elder Maxwell tells ex-Mormons to go bowling and leave the Church alone
- No surprise that every ex-Mormon is still a missionary
- The Church leaves the term Mormon but can’t leave it alone
- “Leave the Church alone”—would you allow others to unknowingly drink poison?
- More on the “leave the Church alone” theme
You’re welcome to disagree with everything we publish. What isn’t persuasive is telling people who’ve already left to shut up while the Church—and apparently some of its members—still won’t leave them alone.
Message 2
The contact replied! The reply was so quick it’s hard to believe they’d even read or thought about the long response, but it was useful anyway. It shows how the rhetoric shifts from shame to condescension, all while still avoiding the claims.
Their response was one complex line:
Thanks for your effort. I am sorry that you and others can’t see past beyond human errors and let just for a moment sink in the logic of the Restoration, the ordinances and the covenants. Not to speak of the spiritual impact they can have – if you let it happen.
Again, humorously, he resorts to “logic of the restoration,” and the guilt trip that if we “let it happen,” the gospel will have a great spiritual impact.
“Thanks for your effort.”
Sounds polite; it also reads as a patronizing closure: our reply is acknowledged as work, not as something that changed or complicates anything. It keeps the speaker above the exchange—thanks-for-trying, not “here’s what I owe your arguments.”
“I am sorry that you and others can’t see past beyond human errors…”
1. “I am sorry” — Same pattern as message one: sorrow framed as compassion for our blindness, not curiosity about what we actually see. It preserves his stance as clear-sighted and ours as stuck.
2. “You and others” — Again, we’re simply a category or characterization (“people like you”), not individuals with specific stories and reasons. It’s a generalization, so no one’s actual story has to be engaged, and no reason merits a response.
3. “Human errors” — This is minimization dressed as generosity. It lumps historical problems, doctrinal shifts, institutional harm, and truth-claim tension under ordinary fallibility—leaders are human, so move on. That framing avoids the harder question: whether the issues are peripheral mistakes or load-bearing for the Restoration narrative. If the foundation is wrong, calling it “human error” is a misdiagnosis.
4. “Can’t see past” — Implies fixation and lack of proportion: we’re obsessed with flaws instead of the big beautiful picture. It doesn’t ask whether those “errors” are why people left; it pathologizes the attention you give them.
“…and let just for a moment sink in the logic of the Restoration…”
1. “Let it sink in” — Suggests we haven’t really tried or haven’t paused long enough. It treats doubt as impatience or resistance rather than as a conclusion after long immersion (often decades in the Church).
2. “The logic of the Restoration” — Assumes there is coherent, inspectable logic waiting for anyone who will suspend skepticism. Many former members did exactly that—and found gaps, contradictions, retcons, and circular appeals (e.g. testimony as proof). The phrase begs the question: it names “logic” without showing the chain of reasoning in primary sources.
“…the ordinances and the covenants.”
Insider shorthand as an argument. Ordinances and covenants feel weighty to believers because they’re embodied commitment and community. Rhetorically, listing them evokes sacredness without proving the authority that makes them more than a meaningful ritual in any high-demand religion. For someone who doesn’t, or no longer accepts exclusive priesthood claims, this doesn’t advance the debate—it reasserts the frame inside which everything already “makes sense.”
“Not to speak of the spiritual impact they can have — if you let it happen.”
1. “Spiritual impact” — Shifts ground from history and logic to subjective experience, where disagreement is hardest to adjudicate and where every intense tradition produces powerful feelings.
2. “If you let it happen” — This is blame-shifting in a soft voice. If we didn’t feel what he feels, the default explanation is that we didn’t let it, not that the claims failed us, not that confirmation bias and sunk cost shape feeling, not that other religions’ devotees also report undeniable experiences. It turns epistemic mismatch into a moral failure to receive.
What this message is doing overall
Message two drops the open insult and puts on an empathetic facade, but the structure is the same as many correlated responses. It sounds more reasonable than message one, but it still doesn’t engage truth-telling, destigmatizing doubt, or our real stories. It reframes the project as failure to get past petty flaws and failure to “let” spirituality in, rather than as honest conclusions from the whole package (history, claims, outcomes). If “human errors” and “just let it sink in” were enough, there wouldn’t be shelves of primary documents and divergent First Vision accounts waiting for unsanitized reading—logic would be visible in the sources, not only in the correlated story.
Our reply
Thanks for writing back.
If I translate your note into what it’s actually doing, it seems you’re framing every serious concern as “human errors”—small and beside the point—so you don’t have to weigh whether the core claims hold up. You’re asking us to suspend judgment long enough for “the logic of the Restoration” to feel unassailable, but what many of us found under the slogans were gaps, retcons, and circular reasoning, not logic we’d failed to “let sink in.” The ordinances and covenants only land as good if the authority and story behind them are true. When those look different in daylight, the feelings people report aren’t proof—they’re what every intense religious tradition produces when people invest heavily and want it to be real. “If you let it happen” quietly blames the person who doesn’t get the same hit, as if doubt were a refusal to cooperate rather than an honest read of the evidence. So, we’re not “stuck on” leaders’ mistakes instead of the gospel. We looked at the whole package! Including history, truth claims, and outcomes. We reached a cohesive conclusion. If that reads to you like a failure of openness I can’t change that; from here it looks like refusing to call wishful thinking logic.
What about the restoration is logical? Have you read the multiple accounts of the first vision? Did you know these accounts contradict each other in doctrinally important ways? I’d implore you to read them and come to your own conclusions.
- https://wasmormon.org/why-worry-about-different-versions-of-the-first-vision/
- https://wasmormon.org/joseph-smith-and-the-first-vision/
They can also be found on the church website, though it takes considerable effort to dig through the apologetics. The only logic found is in the whitewashed stories the church teaches, if you look at the actual accounts in their historical context it’s impossible to see any logic.
Message 3
I accidentally deleted my old message.
I don’t want to argue. There is no point in it. I’m a very rational person, working as a LEO, and wouldn’t it be for the undeniable spiritual experiences I’ve had in my life that were no autosuggestions or being on LSD – I wouldn’t be part of the Church anymore. But I know it to be true and the only fully true and living Church. That’s just it.
A few things are happening at once—some probably sincere, all of them familiar in conversations with believers who don’t want to stay in the weeds of sources and contradictions.
“I accidentally deleted my old message.” Maybe true; it also resets the thread so the sharper lines from earlier don’t sit on the page anymore.
“I don’t want to argue. There is no point in it.” That’s a closure move: it frames further exchange as futile. Often it means I’m not going to walk through your evidence—not “I’ve refuted you,” but I’m done.
“I’m a very rational person, working as a LEO.” That’s an appeal to credibility: my job trains me to be grounded, so my religious conclusion is trustworthy. You can honor someone’s profession and still note that rationality in one domain doesn’t automatically transfer to every historical or theological claim—especially when private experience is doing the decisive work.
The spiritual-experience paragraph is doing the heavy lifting: without those experiences, this person implies, they might not remain in the Church—so the institutional case is partly propped up by subjective certainty, while autosuggestion and LSD are ruled out in advance so the experience can’t be reduced to “mere” psychology or intoxication. Fair enough as a personal report; as a public argument, it walls off the very thing critics are allowed to compare across traditions: how we know intense feelings track one true church and not many sincere mistakes.
“I know it to be true… That’s just it.” That’s testimony as epistemology: “I know” closes the loop. It doesn’t answer which First Vision account, or how folk magic-era practices square with modern correlated narrative—it ends the conversation on inner certainty plus official phrasing (“only true and living Church”).
Astrology and the irony of “unapproved” superstition. Bringing astrology into a Mormon discussion is oddly illuminating. Contemporary LDS teaching and culture do not endorse astrology, horoscopes, or miscellaneous superstitions that are not owned and framed by the Church. Members are generally steered away from spiritual practices that feel outside institutional control. Yet, ironically, the early Restoration milieu (the world Joseph Smith and his peers lived in) was saturated with folk magic, seer stones, treasure lore, and vernacular supernaturalism that modern manuals don’t exactly foreground. So when a conversation dismisses outside “superstition” while treating inside spiritual experience as undeniable, it’s worth naming the tension: the Church today polices certain kinds of magical thinking while asking members to treat its own origins and claims as uniquely above that same skepticism. That doesn’t decide the truth one way or the other—but it complicates any simple line between “rational LEO” and “magic/suggestion/drugs for everyone else.”
While it’s nice that they’re de-escalating and stopping the exchange, they’re also reasserting that their membership rests on subjective spiritual certainty (which they treat as undeniable) plus identity. We’ve arrived at a real sincerity, but also with rhetoric that avoids answering our actual points: they’re not engaging or saying “here’s why the First Vision accounts cohere”; they’re saying “my experience trumps your argument.”
This time, we didn’t reply again; it feels like the thread has said what it needs to say. Maybe they’ll later refer to any of the links or points we made, and maybe later on, we’ll have an undeniable experience (maybe even drug-induced) that brings us back to the church.
What this thread really does
Round one combined pity, prayer, and prophecy—a way to end inquiry without touching evidence.
Round two sounded gentler but carried the same burden-shifting:
- “Human errors” treats serious problems as noise so the core narrative never has to lose.
- “The logic of the Restoration” assumes that logic is there for anyone who will stop being picky—without showing which Restoration story counts, or how it stays consistent under primary sources.
- Ordinances and covenants are presented as self-evident goods, even though their moral weight depends on whether the authority claims are true.
- “If you let it happen” blames the person who doesn’t feel what the speaker feels—as if skepticism were stubbornness rather than a conclusion from reading.
That’s why our reply pivoted to something concrete: the First Vision accounts—multiple, divergent, and doctrinally loaded—are a test of whether “logic” is in the slogan or in the documents.
After that, a third message arrived: shorter, softer, and designed to stop the exchange—testimony and credentials in place of documents.
Why publish pieces like this
We’re not here to mock individuals. We name patterns so people who are newly out—or newly vocal—know they’re not imagining the double bind: speak and be labeled bitter; stay quiet, and you’re “fine.”
Our work is to host stories, link sources, and challenge rhetoric that pathologizes former members while shielding truth claims from the same scrutiny that members were once praised for applying everywhere else.
If this exchange felt familiar, you’re not alone. You can explore hundreds of profiles, contribute your own, and dig into the threads below.
Further reading
“Leave the Church alone,” and the double standard
- Elder Maxwell tells ex-Mormons to go bowling and leave the Church alone
- No surprise that every ex-Mormon is still a missionary
- The Church leaves the term Mormon but can’t leave it alone
- Leave the Church alone—would you allow others to unknowingly drink poison?
First Vision and “logic.”