Hi, I'm Kendall.
I love good music, good food, skiing, and spending time with my spouse and crazy kids. I was a Mormon.
About me
I was born into an LDS family and born and raised in Texas. My father is second generation Mormon after his whole immediate family converted from mainstream Protestantism when he was young. My mother is the only member in her family and converted as a college student after being raised Southern Baptist.
My whole life I believed the church was true because I didn’t have any good reason not to. I was raised in a good home with loving parents and a really strong extended family on both sides. My dad’s parents were very devout with my grandfather serving as the stake patriarch and my grandmother giving all her time and energy to the church and serving people in it. All of my siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins on my dad’s side were close and they participated fully in the church (missions, temple weddings, et al). My mom’s side, while not LDS, was also very strong and family oriented and I had many good examples of how important family was.
I had a few core friends who were Mormon and lots of other really good friends who weren’t. All of them respected my values and I managed to have a lot of fun in high school while still being as true as I could to what I believed God expected of me. That doesn’t mean I didn’t still find ways to cause mischief and get myself in trouble though (more on that later).
I always thought of myself as an individual first and a Mormon second (I got my fierce individualism from my mom). There were definitely lots of times where I didn’t want to do what the church expected of me as a kid, but I usually bucked up and did it because I knew it was the right thing to do.
I guess I didn’t really develop my own strong testimony until right before my mission. I wasn’t very excited to go but knew it was what God and my family expected of me. I was trying to dutifully read the Book of Mormon and really pray to get an answer about whether or not it was true, but I wasn't getting any spiritual confirmations of note. Then, about 6 weeks before I was scheduled to enter the MTC, my mischievous youth caught up with me and I found myself in trouble with the law.
I prayed and fasted harder than I ever had in my life (as did all my family and friends). I promised God that if he got me out of this pickle, I would consecrate my life to him. As it turned out, I somehow miraculously escaped the worst of my legal troubles and entered the MTC on my originally scheduled date by the skin of my teeth, lol.
After that, I was more than happy to take the cold brick buildings and strict schedule of the MTC over the prospect of actual jail time. I believed God had personally intervened in my life and, as a show of gratitude, I committed myself to him the best I could for two years. Even though I didn’t like some parts of the mission experience (the sales tactics, hassling strangers, some of the shaming and guilt, the heavy focus on numbers, etc) I genuinely believed what I was selling would help everyone.
I got along well with my mission presidents and most of my companions and still managed to cause a little bit of (harmless) chaos from time to time. To this day, I still have fond memories of my time as a missionary. I wouldn’t trade it even now that I no longer believe in the church. It felt good to be a part of something so much bigger than my small town Texan life and I learned a lot about myself.
After I came home, I moved up to Utah to pursue skiing, Mormon girls, and—occasionally—schooling at UVU. I met my spouse and best friend after a few years, got married, and we both finished up our degrees before we started having kids.
We decided to stay in Utah County for work and to be close to her family. All was going well externally, but, under the surface, my faith problems were growing.
# Why I left More stories of 'Why I left' the Mormon church
While, overall, my mission was a great experience, there were some things I learned and experienced about my faith that started to bother me.
I started really reading and studying the Book of Mormon (BoM) for the first time on my mission and, honestly, I struggled with it. I loved the Bible, the NT in particular. I loved how authentic the OT felt and learning about all of the interesting ancient history and foreign concepts to a young westerner. I loved the various takes on Jesus in the Gospels and how much of a revolutionary he was (I was into punk rock as a kid and reading the NT made me realize how counter-culture Jesus really was for his time).
The BoM, on the other hand, had some nice verses that I would quote, but reading it felt incredibly tedious. I also started to notice how the writing in the BoM sounded nothing like the writing in the OT during the same period. While OT prophets were obsessively focused on the mosaic law and the regional goings-on in the various kingdoms and times they lived, the BoM prophets spoke like 19th-century American Protestant preachers. They gave almost zero attention to the mosaic law and focused instead on post-Calvinist ideas like grace and works and the evils of infant baptism—even referring to Jesus by name—all hundreds of years before anyone would care about these topics.
The biggest question for me at the time, though, was why Joseph Smith claimed the BoM contained the fullness of the gospel when it didn’t mention so many important gospel concepts - temple ordinances, eternal families, the three degrees of glory, the Melchizedek priesthood, polygamy (except in a few conflicting verses) and all the things we were teaching people about. They were scarcely anywhere to be found in the “most correct of any book on earth” —but I just shelved my concerns.
It was also on my mission that I first felt a ping of shame about belonging to the Church. The first time was when we pressured a young black man into getting baptized quickly, only to have him approach us a few days later and ask about the black priesthood / temple ban. He was smiling and said his family told him some crazy stuff about how our church used to treat black people and there’s no way that was true, right? I still remember how awful it felt to have to tell him that it was true and try to dance around it and gloss over it. He walked away and I never saw or heard from him again.
The second time was Prop 8. I was in California and was wrapping up my mission in 2008 right as all the LDS campaigning was in full force. It all felt so wrong to me. I had loved how the church generally stayed out of politics and let members make up their own minds politically, and this felt like a major about-face.
I would often quote the article of faith on my mission about how we (paraphrase) “claim the privilege of worshipping God according to our own conscience and allow all men to do the same” and all the sudden, that didn’t seem true anymore. I knew a female Methodist minister who believed that marrying a gay couple is exactly what Jesus would do. How was I supposed to square my beliefs that she and her congregation could practice according to their own conscience while my church was feverishly campaigning to keep them from doing so?
I also genuinely couldn’t understand how allowing two consenting adults to get married would have any impact on our faith - especially when we preached SO much about agency and freedom to make choices. But, I took the explanations given (that it would somehow impact our religious freedom), and decided God’s ways were not my ways and he must know what he’s doing.
Fast forward a few years. I was busy with work, marriage, small kids and callings and my shelf items had only grown.
I had come to dread attending the temple, especially the endowment. I didn't understand what the rituals had to do with Jesus and the atonement and didn’t feel I was getting revelation when I attended it, despite my earnest attempts to do so.
Plus, it had always really bothered me that, in the endowment, men were allowed to covenant directly with God and women would turn and covenant to their husbands (and not with God). But, I figured that was just the “influence of the world” on my beliefs since the covenants came directly from God and he doesn't make mistakes.
I had also started independently reading and studying a lot about 19th-century American history and world history generally, and it led to more and more things bothering me about the BoM. There were so many obvious anachronisms (wheels, steel, wheat, horses), 19th-century ideas (manifest destiny, American exceptionalism, Columbus being led by God to “discover” the North American continent—which, it turns out, he never actually set foot on) and disproven racist teachings ("lazy, evil" Indians, black skin being a curse, the idea that ancient Israelites would use "white and black" to refer to race when those terms weren't invented until the 16th-century by europeans, etc).
The race issues were especially vexing to me. Once I was chatting about race and religion with a friend who was a Christian youth minister and he mentioned that the curse of Cain / Ham being black skin was not in any way biblical. I had always taken for granted that it was. But, as I looked into it more, I learned he was right. It was a common western belief pushed by Christians in the 17th-century as a way to justify chattel slavery. The OT only made vague allusion to a "mark" being put on Cain and Ham with no indication it was skin color. While many Christians had believed the racist dark skin curse nonsense, It was only MY religion's perfect and undiluted scriptures that had canonized it.
There was a lot more but, suffice it to say, I began experiencing a growing cognitive dissonance.
So, in 2018, I decided I needed to give "Moroni's promise" another shot and get serious about studying the BoM. I listened to it everyday on my commute to work, praying before and during for a confirmation it was true. But it didn’t help. The more I read, the more dissonance I felt. So, I put it away and decided to just focus on what was good about having the church in my life.
That didn't work for long though, because the gnawing, unshakeable feeling that my religion wasn’t what I thought it was only continued to grow. And, since my religion expected me to give everything to it (even my own life, if necessary), I decided I damn-well better figure it out.
I started trying to seek faithful answers to my biggest shelf items. I wouldn't allow myself to read or study anything not favorable to the church but I found the gospel topics essays on the church’s library app and started reading the articles about race, the first vision, polygamy, the Book of Abraham, etc and that sent me into a tailspin. There were so many things in those articles and foot notes that I had been told my whole life were “anti-Mormon lies” and it turns out they were just factual history now confirmed by the church.
Once, while reading the gospel topics essay on the BoM translation in the back of a Sunday School lesson, I suddenly had a vivid flashback to watching the Mormons South Park episode as a teenager. I remember laughing about the silly things they got "wrong," like when Joseph Smith looked at a rock in a top hat to translate the Book of Mormon. Reading the article, I was suddenly slapped with the realization that a stupid TV show had given a more accurate portrayal of my church's founding history than the leaders I'd trusted for 32 years.
I tried visiting FAIR, the LDS church apologist’s website, to get more insight, but their answers just felt like insane mental gymnastics and only made it worse. So once again, I put it all away and told myself that the church had given me a good life and that I would just have to focus on what was working and ignore the rest.
In 2019 my spouse was following a very public pressure campaign led by Mormon and ex-Mormon women to get the church to eliminate sexist teachings and policies, improve Women's standing, allow them to participate in saving ordinances, etc. Then, just a few months later, I was sitting in an endowment session and discovered that church leaders had quietly changed the part of the endowment that had always bothered me. All of the sudden, women could now covenant directly with God instead of to their husband. I was already aware that there had been changes to the temple ordinances over the years but this one was much harder to rationalize. I was always taught the covenants you make in the temple are the most important thing you can do for your salvation and they were eternal truths given directly by God to Joseph Smith. Witnessing first-hand the church leaders quietly change a covenant in what was obviously a response to external pressure finally gave my brain permission to think, “ok...maybe they’re just making this all up as they go.”
By the time 2021 came, my cognitive dissonance was so severe it manifested as an ever-increasing physical headache that felt like an ice pick right between my eyes. I was getting tired of white knuckling it and I decided I could not go through my upcoming temple recommend interview in good faith. My plan was to quietly take a step back during Covid.
But, after only a few months of “stepping back”, the stake called me and asked me to be the executive secretary for my bishop, lol. I thought, “::sigh:: maybe this is God reaching out to save me from leaving.” Plus, I liked my Bishop and was ok with the idea of a calling that allowed me to do admin work and not have to teach or preach something I wasn’t sure was true anymore. This did require me to renew my temple recommend, though, and it was torture to sit in a room as a grown man and lie to two other grown men I barely knew about my beliefs. I swore I would never do that again.
The next two years in that calling I really tried, but every interaction with the church became more painful. I made sure to pray earnestly, seek priesthood blessings, repent of every sin I could think of, and ask God one more time if I should stay or go. The answer I got was a resounding confirmation of what I already knew - the LDS church was an organization full of generally good people trying to do their best, but it wasn’t built on what it professed to be - the truth. So finally, I decided to be honest with myself and my family. And, I was surprised at how quickly relief came when I was.
My life is far from perfect, but I can honestly say after stepping away from the LDS church that I’m happier and a better person for going through the journey. I’m incredibly grateful to my spouse and my whole family for loving me and accepting me even as my beliefs have changed. My family is amazing.
If you’re a faithful member reading this, please know that if you’re happy in the church - then I’m genuinely happy for you. I know we still share enough common values to foster mutual respect. I also know how troubling and confusing it can be when someone leaves your tribe. I’ll admit, I judged people who left before me. It was so much easier to tie a nice bow around their choice than to actually try and grapple with it.
I guess I'd just like you to know that I don’t feel guilty or angry (most of the time). I’m not trying to be rebellious or edgy or proud. I don’t feel like I’m superior to anyone. No one offended me. I don’t have an addiction. And I don’t feel like I’m betraying my integrity. Actually, I’m being true to my integrity and the values the church and my family instilled in me. I feel if I meet God tomorrow, he will understand that.
If, like me a few years back, you’re starting to slip down a rabbit hole and aren’t sure where / if you’ll land, please know it’s all going to be ok and you're not alone!