Since I left the LDS Church a year ago I have written and spoken about my journey in quite a few places, but I have not published a more detailed written account. I feel like its now time to publish something that I wrote last year (when it was all still quite new and raw) where I detailed the most significant parts of my journey out of the LDS Church and to faith in the Biblical Christ. Everything that I wrote then is still true now. I have been incredibly blessed and led by God over the past year beyond all that I could “ask or imagine” (Eph 3:20).
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Why I am Leaving the LDS Church

I first began to attend the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the fall of 2008 and was baptized into the Church in the summer of 2009. I had been an atheist for a few years, but was ready to find God again. I fell in love with so many of the Church’s distinct doctrines regarding the premortal life, the plan of salvation, and the possibility that families can be together forever.  I had a powerful conversion experience outside of the temple where I felt the presence of God and knew that he loved me and was there for me. 

Since then I have faithfully served in the Church despite opposition from family and friends including serving a full time mission. I have loved serving in the Church and especially teaching Sunday School or serving as Sunday School President. And I have loved going to the temple and felt God in the ordinances of the temple. In short, the Church has worked remarkably well for me over the past 14 years. Until even very recently, I found it spiritually rewarding and engaging. I have been blessed through my membership in many ways. 

So why am I now leaving the Church?

Simply put, I no longer believe that the LDS Church is Christ’s  “only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth” as Latter-day Saints are taught.  (D&C 1:30).  To the contrary, I believe that the Church teaches some false doctrines that prevent people from drawing closer to Jesus Christ 

A few months ago my wife ended up in the midst of a faith crisis that was brought on at first largely by learning more details about Joseph Smith’s practice of polygamy. She had been through a similar faith crisis a few years prior after reading the CES Letter and Letter for My Wife and I had been able to be a good source of support since I was very knowledgeable about Church history and other issues that people had with the Church. I was very familiar with all of the issues raised in those documents and had developed faith prompting answers to my questions. With her earlier faith crisis she eventually regained her faith that God was there and felt settled enough to continue in the Church. 

I thought this time would be similar and that I would be able to help her through her doubts. But there was one big difference. When she felt that she was going to be losing faith in the Church, my wife turned to looking for another Christian church in our area as a fallback option. And as she looked at sermons and other material from a local Church she began to feel the Spirit of God really powerfully. She began to attend this Church soon afterwards and fell in love with it. 

My wife had long struggled with feeling inadequate in the LDS Church and like she could never do enough or be good enough. As a result she dealt with years of depression and anxiety. I had prayed for years that God would help her to overcome these feelings and feel God’s love for her more fully.

At her new Church, my wife encountered for the first time a doctrine of true and free grace where Christ’s death on the cross offers complete justification and takes away shame and guilt completely. She also found a new understanding of covenants where Christ fulfilled the obligations and offered us the blessings of the covenant freely.  And she realized that she had full access to the power of God instead of the limited access she felt as a woman in the LDS Church. 

I could see the positive changes in her. The things that she learned filled her with joy and confidence. This was an answer to years of both of our prayers.

At first I was happy thinking that God was eliminating roadblocks that had stopped her from worshiping in the Church and would eventually lead her back. I thought that if I researched some of the things she had been thinking about I could help to show her how ultimately what the Church teaches isn’t that different from what she was learning.

With the topic of grace in particular, when I joined the Church I had adopted as strong of a pro-grace stance as is possible within the Church. I read Stephen Robinson’s Believing Christ before I even joined the Church, and loved his emphasis on truly believing that Chirst could save us and justify us wholly and completely so long as we entered into a covenant with him. My views on grace were also expressed well a few years later by President Uchtdorf’s conference address “The Gift of Grace.” I strongly believed that so long as we were baptized and remained in our covenants we would have a guarantee of exaltation and eternal life with God. I thought that I understood grace really well.

As I talked to my wife about this, I realized how different my understanding of Grace was from what she had understood growing up. I set out to show her that my view was right, and instead came across a mountain of books, talks and quotes from leaders such as Harold B. Lee and Spencer W. Kimball emphasizing heavily the role of works. This earlier view essentially saw Christ’s atonement as guaranteeing a resurrection, but emphasized that otherwise we were required to follow Christ’s example and become perfected through our own obedience. 

I knew based on Paul’s epistles that this was impossible. We can never be sufficiently obedient or righteous to earn heaven. We need the merits, mercy, and grace of the Holy One of Israel.  Our salvation comes from “a righteousness that is by faith from first to last” (Romans 1:18 NIV). The lack of grace that I saw in talks by these leaders really bothered me. I had previously written off these types of talks, books, and sermons. But I realized that these speeches and writings influenced a generation of members and still had consequences today. And I also realized that it was highly problematic that those that we call Apostles and Prophets could get such a core doctrine of salvation so wrong. If they could get something so important wrong, I wondered,  what else might they have gotten wrong?

I then began to look also at our understanding of the nature of God since that was another major point of contention between Latter-day Saints and Protestants. Here, I recognized a disturbing pattern of changing views by Church leaders about the nature of God. Joseph Smith early on seemed to adopt a modalist (the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are different manifestations or roles for one God) or trinitarian view of the Godhead (and to alternate between them somewhat inconsistently). There are passages in the Book of Mormon that seem modalist in nature that Joseph Smith later went back and updated to remove that and make them seem more trinitarian or consistent with his emerging views on the Godhead. Later the Lectures on Faith (which was the “doctrine” part of the Doctrine & Covenants until it was removed from the D&C in 1921) describe two persons in the Godhead with the Holy Ghost as an impersonal force. Joseph later embraces a multiplicity of Gods in his famous King Follett discourse where he emphasizes that God was once a man like us and that he also has a father God. I had previously dismissed this as merely an evolution in Joseph’s thinking. But I now stopped to think about what this means. Those who followed Joseph Smith as a Prophet were at some point or another taught false doctrine about one of the most important questions in the world. That really disturbed me.

I then did a deep dive into Brigham Young’s Adam-God teachings. Brigham Young taught that Adam was the God of this world and the father of our spirits including the Spirit of Jesus Christ (whom he did not identify as the same as Jehovah) . I had come across this doctrine before and had been able to dismiss it as either Brigham Young being misquoted or misunderstood or a mere pet topic of his. I wasn’t fully aware of how many times he taught this doctrine over the pulpit while declaring it to be revealed by God. He also incorporated it into the lecture at the veil that was part of the endowment ceremony of the temple. Church leaders declared that since the Prophet had spoken this must be the will of God. And Orson Hyde a member of the Quorum of the Twelve was threatened that he would be removed from the quorum if he would not back down in his opposition to the doctrine. You can read all of the documents related to the Adam God theory here.

But today this doctrine is repudiated as completely and totally false. Indeed, it was one of Bruce R. McConkie’s “Seven Deadly Heresies” The best case scenario is that the Prophet of God was catastrophically wrong about the nature of God but that this heresy did not gain popularity and so luckily we do not believe it today. But what if it would have stuck? It is entirely possible we would be defending it as divine revelation until today because the Prophet said so, just as we defend Joseph Smith’s more radical teachings and just as we defended Brigham Young’s racist policies as doctrinal for more than a hundred years. There were also other major changes. For instance, Jesus Christ was not clearly understood to be Jehovah until a 1916 statement by the First Presidency on the topic. 

As a member of the Church I loved the notion that we had Prophets and Apostles who could authoritatively reveal divine truth. But I had to ask myself, if Prophets and Apostles cannot get the nature of God and what we need to do to be saved right, then what good are they?

After all, LDS apostles have warned that “There is no salvation in believing any false doctrine, particularly a false or unwise view about the Godhead or any of its members. Eternal life is reserved for those who know God and the One whom he sent to work out the infinite and eternal atonement. True and saving worship is found only among those who know the truth about God and the Godhead and who understand the true relationship men should have with each member of that Eternal Presidency.”

I realized that I could no longer trust that what we are being taught about the key questions of eternity such as who God is and what we need to do to be saved was divinely inspired and unchanging truth.

If we cannot rely on Prophets and Apostles to consistently teach true doctrine, then what can we rely on? I turned to the Bible. In the Bible I found little to no support for any of Joseph Smith’s unique doctrines other than out of context proof texts.  I also found no support in the Book of Mormon for most of the Church’s distinctive teachings. 

These are not minor topics to get wrong. Indeed, nothing less than salvation rests on them. I realized that ultimately the truth of these things and my eternal salvation rested on whether Joseph Smith truly was a prophet, a pretty weighty burden to place on someone who lived 1,800 years after Christ and who at best was a “rough stone rolling.” 

Instead, I realized that I would rather rely on Jesus’s own words in the Bible, and on the witnesses of Peter, James, John and Paul who were all direct eye witnesses of the Risen Lord. I began to entertain the possibility that I had been wrong about all of these core doctrines. 

As I opened my heart to the possibility that I had been wrong about grace and the nature of God, I experienced some pretty amazing changes. In particular, I was filled with a far greater sense of awe, reverence, and worship for the almighty God. I hadn’t realized it, but seeing God as an exalted man had cheapened my relationship with him by making him too familiar and similar to me. I had missed out on the majesty of a truly all-powerful God . I also came to appreciate more fully how dear the sacrifice of Jesus Christ was and that God himself literally came down from heaven to die for me. 

I also realized that even though I had been advocating for grace, that there was a part of me that I was holding back from grace in order to establish my own worthiness. I determined to myself that I would submit that pharisaical part of my heart to God and once and for all accept that I could never get back to God based on my own worthiness or righteousness and that it was only through the righteousness and worthiness of Christ that I could make it back to his presence. As I surrendered myself, I felt transformed by the grace of God. I felt completely and totally justified by God and clothed in the righteousness of Jesus Christ my Savior. I felt renewed and longed to sing with the angels in Heaven “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise! To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!” (Revelation 5: 12-13). I was filled with an even greater desire to do what is pleasing to God not out of obligation but out of a feeling of gratitude for him. 

As I let Christ more fully into my heart, I felt like my eyes opened and I could see all of the evidence in Church History that the Church wasn’t exactly what it claims it was. I could see that Joseph Smith had conveniently received revelation to cover up his own failure and had revealed a God in his own image. I could see the manipulation and dishonesty unbecoming of a Prophet of God. In particular, I could not look away from Joseph Smith’s practice of polygamy which involved deception– hiding his actions from the Church and his own wife, coercion–-putting pressure on underage women to accept his offer in order to bring eternal life to their families, and abuse–slandering those who refused to marry him.  This conduct was utterly incompatible with being a prophet of God. And yet I was asked to believe that at the same time that Joseph was marrying dozens of women and lying to his wife he was accurately receiving and conveying truth about the nature of God that departed from centuries of Jewish and Christian orthodoxy? 

And in the modern Church, I could see that we were led by well-intentioned, sincere, and good men, but that there was no direct conduit to heaven. These men try to do the best with what they have inherited and to lead people to Christ. The good things I saw in the Church and have experienced in my time in the Church are thanks to their sincere efforts to draw people to Christ. But their foundation is a sandy one that is not based on timeless truth. 

I still felt very conflicted. God had given me so many seemingly sacred experiences in the Church and I kept feeling like he spoke to me through inspired friends who urged me to stay. 

One of the last straws for me was coming across a BYU Idaho devotional from 2015 about the Prophet Joseph Smith. It bothered me so much at a very deep visceral level how much the devotional elevated Joseph Smith to a status so close to the Savior. According to the speaker, Joseph was “righteous and pure,” indeed “more like the savior than any other person on this earth.” This wasn’t a talk by a General Authority, but the talk was filed with quotes from LDS Prophets and Apostles. These leaders asserted that “no man on the earth can say that Jesus lives, and deny, at the same time…the Prophet Joseph” or that he was  “the hinge on which turns the gate that leads to salvation and eternal life.” 

This talk put into stark relief for me that so much of what is believed in the Church rests on Joseph Smith. We have elevated his words above that of Jesus Christ and Christ’s original Apostles. And we have whitewashed his many character flaws to make him appear next to perfect. I realized that I am not comfortable putting my eternal salvation in this one flawed man’s hands.

I should be sad that I am leaving the religion that I have dedicated 14 years of my life to. But the truth is that I am not. I know that God has led me out of the Church to direct me to a fuller and more complete relationship with Jesus Christ. I trust that God is in charge and that he is leading me and guiding me. 

I do not resent or regret my time in the Church. To the contrary, I now see the Church as a schoolmaster that brought me to deeper and richer faith in Christ. I know that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are good people zealous after righteousness and that they are genuinely looking to follow Christ. But members of the Church are held back by the philosophies of men (specifically one man, Joseph Smith) that take away from pure biblical truth. I am grateful that God helped to open my eyes and lead me to Jesus. 

Since leaving the Church I have been attending a local Christian Church. I have been amazed at how powerfully I have felt the Holy Ghost in my new Church. For 14 years I was repeatedly told that only Latter-day Saints have the Gift of the Holy Ghost. But now,  I have felt the presence and power of the spirit descend upon me more fully. Indeed, what I have experienced since accepting Christ and becoming a mainstream Christian reminds me of the indwelling of the spirit that I expected and hoped for when I first joined the LDS Church. I was sad at first to think that I would never be able to go to the LDS temple again. But I have since realized that I am the temple of God and that the Holy Spirit now dwells in me directly. (1 Cor 3:16 NIV – “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?”).

For the last 14 years, I built up my testimony on what felt like a really firm foundation. I had a strong faith that God was real and loved me and that Jesus was my Savior. But I also had built up my house based on a lot of other things that I believed in like living prophets, temples, and the calling of Joseph Smith. All of these things felt like they reinforced each other and were impregnable, a fortress that could withstand all the storms.

But I found that when the rain came down and the streams rose and the winds blew that what I had built up out of so many different doctrines and ordinances was swept away. Each of those walls came tumbling down swept away by the truth. And in its place what was left was the Rock, Jesus Christ, and my faith and trust in him.

My testimony is a lot more humble now. I don’t know everything. I don’t have the answers to everything that I used to say that I knew. I have a lot still to learn and discover about my God and myself.

But I am filled with awe and gratitude for the outpouring of love that I have felt from God. I am humbled to know that over so many years my savior  pursued me and broke down those thick walls with almost surgical precision. He broke down everything that kept me from embracing him and being fully healed by his amazing grace. He is the one and only sure foundation. Anything that is not built on him cannot stand.