Hello, I'm Trace.

There was no single “shelf item” that caused me to leave the Church. My loss of belief was cumulative. I began with the expectation that a careful examination of the evidence would confirm what I already believed. Instead, as I examined the major pillars of the Restoration individually, I found problems that became increasingly difficult to reconcile with the narrative I had been taught.
One realization eventually became central to my investigation: the entire Restoration narrative ultimately rests upon the credibility of Joseph Smith.
Almost every foundational claim comes through him. Joseph said that God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him. Joseph said that an angel directed him to an ancient record buried in a hill. Joseph said that he translated that record by the gift and power of God. Joseph reported the restoration of priesthood authority through heavenly messengers. Joseph produced the Book of Abraham and said it contained the writings of the biblical patriarch Abraham. Joseph introduced plural marriage and the Nauvoo temple ceremonies.
If Joseph Smith was a reliable witness and demonstrated the prophetic abilities he claimed, those claims deserved serious consideration. But if his accounts proved historically unreliable, if his explanations changed in significant ways, or if claims that could actually be tested failed those tests, then I had to consider what that meant for everything else resting upon his credibility.
The First Vision
I had always understood the First Vision as the beginning of the Restoration: in 1820, fourteen-year-old Joseph Smith went into a grove to ask which church he should join, was visited by God the Father and Jesus Christ, was told that all existing churches were wrong, and later suffered persecution for telling people about the experience.
When I began examining the historical record, I discovered something considerably more complicated.
The earliest surviving account, written in Joseph Smith’s own hand in 1832, differs in important respects from the familiar 1838–39 account that became the Church’s official version. Additional accounts from 1835 and 1842 contain still other differences. I was also surprised by how little evidence I could find that the First Vision played the foundational role in the early Church that I had always assumed it did.
Differences in recollection do not automatically make someone dishonest. But these were not merely differences in insignificant details. I found myself confronting questions about when the story became part of the public Restoration narrative and whether the later account accurately represented what Joseph had originally claimed.
That put the first significant cracks in my confidence.
The Great Apostasy
The Restoration only becomes necessary if something requiring restoration had first been lost.
I had been taught that after the deaths of Christ’s apostles, the original Church fell into a Great Apostasy. Priesthood authority disappeared, doctrines became corrupted, and Christ’s true church ceased to exist until God restored it through Joseph Smith.
I therefore investigated the history of early Christianity.
What surprised me was that I could not find historical evidence for the complete disappearance of Christianity or its institutional and sacramental continuity. Christianity certainly changed, developed, divided, and experienced corruption, as human institutions do, but that was very different from demonstrating that Christ’s church and divine authority completely vanished from the earth.
That raised a fundamental question: if the Great Apostasy described by the Restoration narrative did not occur as claimed, what exactly needed to be restored?
The Book of Mormon
The Book of Mormon was another foundational pillar. I had regarded it as tangible evidence of Joseph Smith’s prophetic calling, an ancient record of civilizations that flourished in the Americas and that Joseph could not possibly have produced himself.
I began looking at that proposition as a historical claim rather than beginning with the assumption that the book was ancient.
I examined archaeology, geography, DNA, anachronisms, the book’s dependence upon the King James Bible, the translation accounts, the witnesses, and the apologetic arguments offered in response.
Again, I encountered a very different picture from the one I expected. I found interesting arguments and proposed correspondences, but nothing approaching the kind of independent evidence I expected should exist for the civilizations described in the text. At the same time, I found evidence within the Book of Mormon that appeared much easier to explain as a product of Joseph Smith’s nineteenth-century environment than as an ancient American record.
My shelf was becoming increasingly heavy, but I continued investigating.
The Book of Abraham
The Book of Abraham became a turning point for me because it presented something different from many of the other Restoration claims.
Here, Joseph Smith’s claimed ability as a translator could actually be tested.
Joseph Smith acquired Egyptian papyri in 1835 and produced what he identified as a translation of writings of Abraham. The Church canonized that text as scripture. The Book of Abraham also contains facsimiles accompanied by Joseph Smith’s explanations of the Egyptian figures.
Unlike the gold plates, Egyptian papyri still exist. The facsimiles still exist. Egyptian became a readable language after Joseph Smith's lifetime, and qualified Egyptologists can evaluate the material.
That test was devastating to my confidence in Joseph Smith.
The surviving papyri are Egyptian funerary texts, not writings of Abraham, and Joseph’s explanations of the facsimiles do not correspond to their Egyptian meanings. I also studied the surviving Egyptian-language documents associated with the production of the Book of Abraham and the various apologetic explanations proposed to reconcile the evidence with Joseph’s prophetic claims.
This was different from arguing about how many horses might have existed in pre-Columbian America or whether a particular archaeological discovery might correspond to something in the Book of Mormon. Here was surviving source material against which Joseph Smith’s claimed ability to interpret Egyptian could be compared.
I could not find a single demonstrable instance in which Joseph Smith had correctly translated Egyptian.
That presented me with a credibility problem I could no longer put on a shelf.
If Joseph Smith claimed the ability to translate an ancient language and the portions of his work that could be independently tested failed that test, what rational basis did I have for assuming that his untestable translations were nevertheless correct?
The bottom line for me was simple: had Joseph Smith’s translations proved correct, no alternative explanation would have been necessary. There would be no need for a “catalyst theory,” a “missing scroll theory,” or other explanations intended to reconcile the evidence with the Book of Abraham. A correct translation would have stood on its own.
I concluded that the Book of Abraham irreparably damaged Joseph Smith’s credibility as a translator and prophet.
Polygamy, Polyandry, and Joseph Smith’s Credibility
Once credibility became the central issue, Joseph Smith’s practice of polygamy and polyandry became much more significant to me.
I had known that polygamy existed in early Mormonism. I had not understood its history.
I learned about Joseph’s relationship with Fanny Alger, his secret plural marriages in Nauvoo, marriages to women who already had living husbands, marriages to young women, the secrecy surrounding the practice, and the public statements and denials made while plural marriage was occurring privately.
The question for me was no longer simply whether God theoretically could command plural marriage. The more immediate question was how Joseph Smith actually behaved while claiming divine authorization.
That distinction mattered enormously.
The Temple and Freemasonry
I also examined the development of the Nauvoo endowment and Joseph Smith’s involvement with Freemasonry.
I had understood the temple ceremony as the restoration of ancient ordinances originating with God. I was therefore surprised by the extent of the similarities between elements of the nineteenth-century Masonic ritual Joseph encountered and the endowment introduced shortly afterward.
Apologetic explanations proposed that Masonry itself might preserve corrupted remnants of ancient temple practices. I considered that possibility. But again, I wanted evidence rather than an explanation that merely made the problem theoretically reconcilable.
I did not find evidence sufficient to support the ancient-restoration explanation I had once assumed was true.
The History I Had Been Taught
As troubling as the individual historical issues were, another question began bothering me: How had I spent roughly forty years in the Church without knowing so much of this?
I grew up in the Church during the 1970s and 1980s. I attended Primary, Sunday School, priesthood meetings and seminary. I listened to General Conference, read Church publications, taught lessons, and defended the Church. Yet the Mormon history I encountered during my investigation was often strikingly different from the clean, faith-promoting narrative I remembered being taught.
Joseph Smith translating the Book of Mormon by looking at a seer stone placed inside a hat was not the translation story I had grown up with. Joseph's extensive secret practice of plural marriage, including marriages to women who already had living husbands, was not part of the history I had been taught. Multiple First Vision accounts and their significant differences were not part of my understanding of that event. Neither was the extent of the documentary problem surrounding the Book of Abraham.
Some of this information had existed in historical sources for many years. Yet ordinary members were rarely exposed to it through the correlated curriculum I experienced. Worse, some claims that I remembered being dismissed broadly within Mormon culture as “anti-Mormon” distortions later appeared, in substantially similar form, in the Church’s own historical publications and Gospel Topics essays.
That realization created a second credibility problem for me.
I was already questioning the credibility of Joseph Smith. Now I had to consider the credibility of the institution that had taught me his history.
I understand that historical scholarship develops. New documents are discovered, interpretations change, and no Sunday School curriculum can possibly contain every uncomfortable detail from nearly two centuries of history. I do not expect a church lesson to resemble a graduate seminar in Mormon history.
But there is a meaningful difference between simplifying history and presenting a carefully selected version of history that leaves members with a materially different understanding of foundational events.
The contrast between the history I had been taught and the history the Church itself increasingly acknowledged became impossible for me to ignore.
Ironically, I did not need “anti-Mormon” literature to reach that conclusion. Much of the evidence was eventually available through the Church's own publications, historical archives, Joseph Smith Papers, and Gospel Topics essays.
For me, the issue was no longer simply whether Joseph Smith had been credible.
I had also lost confidence that the institutional Church had been candid with members of my generation about its own history.
How Do We Know What Is True?
Eventually my investigation returned to the question that had started it.
How do I know?
I understood the spiritual method. I had lived it. I had prayed, borne testimony, felt spiritual experiences, and interpreted those experiences within the framework I had been taught.
But sincere people throughout the world report remarkably similar experiences while reaching mutually incompatible religious conclusions.
I could no longer use spiritual conviction as a trump card over contradictory evidence. If a proposition makes claims about events in the real world, people, places, documents, languages and historical events, then those claims should be examined using the evidence available in the real world.
My Conclusion
No single issue destroyed my testimony. It was the cumulative weight of all of them.
The First Vision raised questions about Joseph Smith’s accounts and the development of the Restoration narrative. My investigation of early Christianity undermined my confidence in the Great Apostasy that supposedly made a restoration necessary. The Book of Mormon did not have the independent historical support I expected to find. The Book of Abraham provided a rare opportunity to test Joseph Smith’s claimed translation ability against surviving evidence, and, for me, he failed that test. His secret practice of plural marriage and the circumstances surrounding it raised still more serious questions about his credibility.
Eventually, I realized that I was repeatedly searching for ways to preserve my conclusion rather than allowing the evidence to determine it.
So I changed my conclusion.
I did not conclude that Latter-day Saints are foolish, dishonest, or bad people. My family and many people I love remain members of the Church. I know from personal experience that intelligent, sincere people can examine these questions and reach different conclusions.
My conclusion was narrower but personally consequential: I no longer found sufficient evidence to believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God or that the Church he founded represented a divine restoration of Christ’s original church. Quite simply, it is a 19th-century church founded by an intelligent, charismatic, and morally corrupt leader, Joseph Smith.
Once I reached that conclusion, remaining a believing member was no longer intellectually honest for me.
So I left.