Hi, I’m Nathanael.

The earliest memory I have of any kind of dissonance about church doctrine, related to the necessity of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. As a teenager, I couldn’t understand why God would make the conditions of salvation so unattainable that he had to sacrifice his only perfect son in order to let us have a chance to return to him. It seemed unnecessarily complicated and incoherent, and no explanations/parables/metaphors that were taught to me helped me understand it more. It was one of those things that I just accepted on "faith."

Like most young men in the church, I grew up terrified of my own body, since I was taught that sins of unchastity were second in seriousness only to murder. And yet I found it very confusing that God would give me such powerful sexual urges, then forbid me from expressing those urges in any way... and with perilous consequences if I did, and didn’t repent.

And that is exactly what happened… except I compulsively repented. I couldn’t stop repenting. Just as I couldn’t stop “sinning.” It broke me. It made me feel that I was outside the reach of divine grace. And with my desire to marry a good Mormon woman tied up in that struggle, I felt like I would never be worthy enough realize that hope. Even though I eventually did, somehow.

But I also found myself in similar cycles of shame inside my marriage. More often than not, because I was also very honest and forthright with my priesthood leaders, I was deemed “unworthy” to go to the temple with my wife, which was a source of great disappointment and pain to both of us.

In the wake of the sociopolitical tumult following the 2016 election, and especially the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was able to put some emotional distance between myself and the church, which allowed me to be more objective about why I continued to believe in a “Plan of Happiness” that wasn’t making me happy. Watching two formerly faithful friends, whom I had never guessed would leave the church - and did - emboldened me even more.

But I also felt conflicted about the positive experiences I had in the church - to say nothing of the spiritual experiences I had, which I then believed constituted proof of the church’s truth claims. It was a very confusing time.

I spent a lot of sleepless nights thinking and pondering, anticipating how much I had to lose if I decided to part ways with the church, and especially how much it would hurt my wife, who I loved very much, who agreed to marry me with the understanding that we would make covenants together in the church’s temples, and keep them. Months passed as I let all of this marinate.

What eventually tipped the balance for me was learning about the excommunication of Natasha Helfer, a licensed marriage counselor and former Mormon, who was excommunicated the year prior for openly speaking out against the harm the church's doctrine of chastity, and it's accompanying purity culture, do to good people in the church. I researched her story more. What she had said made sense, and resonated with my own experiences. She seemed to want to help people find healing, but in the end was punished for it.

Something clicked in my brain as I contemplated what all of this meant. It became very clear to me that no benevolent God would accept or condone any of it. That’s when I realized that my integrity was on trial, not my faith. I knew then that I needed to resign from the church immediately. This was in June of 2022.

I wouldn’t begin to learn about the critical historical and contemporary issues the church has until several months after I left. I didn’t read, listen to, or watch anything that the church would classify as “anti-Mormon” prior to my resignation. For some reason, it was very important to me to make the decision to leave without any outside influences steering my thinking. But learning about the many unflattering facts that had been deliberately withheld from me, and others, ensured that I wouldn’t be able to come back.

I still grieve at times for what I once hoped the church was. I sometimes miss the community, which is the greatest strength of the church. Finding out that this thing that I built my life around was based on a fundamentally deceptive premise has been the most difficult struggle of my life. Having to find purpose on my own, after having outsourced it to the church, is still a work in progress. But it's getting better.

As I anticipated, my resignation has also caused pain to those that love me. It has made relationships with friends and family more difficult, where once they were so effortless and rewarding. I sometimes wonder if the price I paid for my integrity was worth it.

Even though I have renounced my former faith, I still have a basic faith that truth matters; and that embracing it, as I learn more of it, will lead to a better life. And in some ways, it already has. 

To be able to shape my beliefs around evidence, instead of ignoring evidence when it conflicts with a received belief that others had defined for me, has been the single greatest benefit of leaving the church. I didn't realize how much cognitive dissonance had been weighing me down until it wasn't there any more. It's allowed me the space to truly put people in front of ideas; where as a member of the church, I was expected to show my loyalty to "god" (i.e. the leaders of the church) above all else, when push came to shove. And I was incapable of seeing how that belief hobbled me. The inevitable result of that was a life that was no bigger than the small world of like-minded believers that I surrounded myself with.

I now donate the money I would have exclusively allocated to tithing to charities of my choice, and it's wonderful to know that it's going to organizations that offer completely transparent accounting of how my donations are being used. That's courtesy that the church never afforded to me.

I also no longer have to pay a substantial amount of money to an organization that clearly doesn't need my money, to be in the presence of "god" (ie the temples). Nor do I have to meet man-made and arbitrary benchmarks to be considered "worthy" to be in such a place. For the mere cost of the effort and resources it takes to get myself out to the natural world, I can be in a temple made without hands, and have similarly powerful experiences in complete solitude with my maker - whoever or whatever it is - with total self-honesty and humility.

Of course life is still hard... and in some ways, it's harder, mainly because it's difficult to navigate relationships with the many people in my life who still choose to believe, who are understandably incapable of understanding what I and others like me have been through.

And life is still fundamentally unfair. Especially when contemplating the very likely reality that there is no benevolent deity pulling the strings for us, who will make everything right in a future eternal life that very likely won't happen. That's been hard to confront after having avoided it for my entire life.

But now more than ever... the small joys of living mean so much more than they used to, now that I can feel in my bones how precious, temporary, and fleeting they are. And I feel much more urgency about the need to help others experience those same joys on their own terms, and to pursue justice for them to the extent that I can. There is still so much more that I could do.

If nothing else, I have learned that a joyful, moral life is possible outside of the belief that I once had, in spite of the great lengths my former church went to convince me otherwise.