If you have ever watched Spiritual Witnesses knowing that your own burning bosom once testified of golden plates and American prophets, I do not understand how feeling alone can still anchor your faith. Either the Muslims, Hindus, and Branch Davidians on that screen are lying to you, lying to themselves, or—hardest of all for a Mormon to admit—you must concede that others have felt the same sacred fire for traditions that call yours an abomination.
I refuse to think so poorly of humankind as to imagine a global conspiracy of pious frauds. Yes, the world has its liars, but that scale of self-deception strains even God's patience. The simplest conclusion is also the most devastating: they are telling the truth as they know it.
This changes everything.
A friend asked me once, walking circles around my house on a Sunday afternoon: "If it was wrong, would you want to know?" I said yes—truth should withstand all scrutiny. That night I read everything he sent. Not anti-Mormon propaganda. Just history. Just facts. The one that gutted me: Joseph Smith smuggled a gun into Carthage Jail and shot three men before he died. I had rehearsed my own martyrdom since childhood—how I would die like Abinadi, like Stephen, singing hymns and forgiving my killers. My patriarchal blessing, delivered by a man whose hands smelled of consecrated oil, promised I would "join the ranks of apostles and prophets." I was fourteen. I believed him. I dreamt of dying in Jerusalem streets and rising three days later.
But prophets, it turns out, die like everyone else: afraid, armed, and firing into the crowd.
The unraveling came in waves. First the gun, then the wives, then the bank fraud, then the Book of Abraham, then the DNA, then the rock in the hat I was never told about while singing "I Belong to the Church of Jesus Christ" in Primary. Each fact peeled away another layer of certainty until I stood naked before the mirror of history, seeing my faith for what it was: beautiful, sincere, and built on sand.
I kept attending institute for a while. My justification: I had made a commitment. But there I was, late in college, sitting with kids I'd grown up with—kids who kept approaching me to say how much I'd inspired them in youth. Which frankly baffled me. I barely knew them. Still, week after week, I sat in those carpeted rooms beneath fluorescent lights and asked respectful questions that slowly dismantled everything. "Why does God's one true church keep changing eternal doctrine?" "If feelings confirm truth, why do Muslims feel the same thing about the Quran?" Some stopped talking to me. They could smell apostasy like smoke in my clothes.
But one kid was gay. We sat in that church building where institute was held for three hours after class while he lamented about wanting to die rather than want what he wanted. I told him God—if God existed—made him exactly as he should be. He needed to leave the church to find love. He did both of these things—ironic.
My mother-in-law found out before we meant to tell her. My wife wanted to wait, but I had already lost my own mother to righteous indignation—she chose the church over her apostate son—and I couldn't bear the pretense. So I told her over Sunday dinner, the smell of pot roast still thick in the air. I watched her face rearrange itself from confusion to grief to something worse: pity. She thinks I'm lost. Maybe I am. But at least I'm honest about it.
Here's what haunts me: the divine keeps happening anyway. I don't believe in God, but something made me check my wife's blood pressure after our first child. From nowhere, a voice—not audible but undeniable—said check it now. Her BP was over 190 systolic. The ER doctor said she could have stroked out that night. Postpartum preeclampsia. Rare. Fatal. I knew nothing about it until I knew everything about it in a single, pressing instant.
I still interpret dreams. Still feel promptings. Still catch myself starting prayers in crisis before remembering there's no one listening. Or maybe there is, and they're just not who I thought they were. Maybe God is quantum. Maybe consciousness is collective. Maybe I'm still just Mormon enough to need meaning in coincidence. This is the cruelest joke: not that God is silent, but that something keeps speaking in a voice I can no longer call God.
My son turns eight soon. In Mormonism, this is when children enter the waters of baptism, suddenly accountable before God for every sin. No more automatic heaven. No more innocence. Just eternal record-keeping and the weight of worthiness interviews asking eight-year-olds if they touch themselves. I watch him play, unburdened by cosmic scorekeeping, and think: if heaven won't accept him exactly as he is—unbaptized, uncovenanted, free—then I choose our exile. Some fathers would break their integrity on the altar of tradition. I'm breaking tradition on the altar of love.
During my unraveling, I clung to Lincoln's words like scripture:
I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.
This is my testimony now: I might be wrong about God—or about the absence of God—but I will not serve a deity who plays cosmic hide-and-seek with salvation. I will not worship a God who demands I guess which of a thousand churches is true, then congratulates the lucky winners with eternal families while the rest burn in spirit prison. If God exists and prefers obedience to honesty, submission to integrity, tradition to love—then God and I will have words at the judgment bar, and I'll bring receipts.
My mother texts me scripture every few Sundays. I delete them unread—not from anger but from a tenderness that I can no longer afford to think is genuine. Sometimes I catch myself humming hymns while washing dishes and have to turn on the radio to drown them out. "I Am a Child of God" was my favorite. Now it feels like a beautiful lie I told a younger version of myself who deserved better stories.
They painted Mormon heaven white: white temples, white garments, white veils, white walls in celestial rooms where everyone whispers in reverent terror. How fucking boring. Give me a paradise in bruised violets and paradox greens. Give me a God who laughs at our doctrine and says, "You thought I cared about coffee?" Give me a heaven where my gay friends don't have to marry women to enter, where my son doesn't need secret handshakes to find me after death, where my mother can love me without qualifying it with "despite your choices." Or give me nothing at all.
Here's what I know: I loved being Mormon. I loved the certainty, the community, the cosmic importance of every choice. I loved believing I was peculiar, chosen, set apart. I loved my mission, my temple marriage, my place in the great chain of ordinances stretching back to Adam. But I loved a lie. And when you discover you've been loving a lie, you face a choice: pretend you never learned the truth, or grieve what you've lost and move forward.
So I commit—quietly, stubbornly—to the path that offers the most truth, even if it's godless. When my son asks about death, I tell him: "Nobody really knows, but we get to be together now." When he asks about God, I say: "Some people need that story. We need different ones." When he turns eight and asks about baptism, I'll tell him the truth: that I was baptized at his age, and it felt like drowning, and I've been trying to surface ever since.
Better to greet hell with my son's hand in mine than enter heaven having taught him to fear his own questions. Better to fail Abraham's test than raise the knife. Better to break my mother's heart than my son's spirit.
Better hell in truth than heaven in white.
