Gogo Goff, or Jeremy Goff, posted an article on his blog this week titled “Why Ex-Mormons Can’t Leave the Church Alone”. He said he was reading a Facebook post from an Ex-Mormon who is “always hating on the church online and talking about how happy they are now that they left the church, how it is easier, and how they are now guilt-free.” He discussed it with his wife who asked him why he thought those horrible Ex-Mormons can’t leave the church alone. He responded the reason is, “They know they are wrong.” I’d like to address Jeremy directly today, I hope he can find it in his heart to read this with an open mind.

An Open Letter To Jeremy Goff

Hi Jeremy! Can I call you Jeremy? You posted this publicly for your ten thousand followers to see, so I think you might be open to some kind of discussion here. My name is Jake, and I’m an Ex-Mormon.

Now, I know that when most members of the LDS faith learn of a sheep that has left the fold, they often make one or more of the following assumptions:

The person left because their lifestyle didn’t align with the gospel, meaning they left because they wanted to sin. They were offended by something a member or leader said. They never had a testimony in the first place. They committed a serious sin. They’ve had their minds poisoned by anti-Mormons who have given themselves over to the devil to bring others down.

Because of one or more of those assumptions, many members tend to discount any reason for leaving as being a valid reason, as the “real” reason boils down to one of those assumptions in their mind. There are many reasons why someone may choose to leave the church, and some of those assumptions may even be the reason. But there are many more reasons why someone may choose to leave that are not those assumptions, and it’s unfortunate that their experiences are dismissed so easily and without any further consideration of their experience. None of those assumptions apply to me or my story.

First, A Little About Me

Would it surprise you that I was a fully believing and committed member of the faith for nearly 30 years? I achieved all of the milestones of a faithful member: advancing in the ranks of the priesthood, serving a mission, being married in the temple. I paid tithing faithfully, even at the expense of my own abysmal financial situation for the length of my first marriage (7 years). I once paid tithing over rent because that’s what I believed was right. I paid tithing while buying groceries on credit cards to feed my family after my job that I relocated for cut my hours and I could barely afford rent. I never looked at pornography. I never tried drugs or alcohol. I even felt bad once in college because I had some juice that according to the label contained green tea, and spent the rest of my day in silent prayer begging for forgiveness because I didn’t know it contained tea. I held FHE weekly with my family. I attended my church meetings, watched conference, did my home teaching, prayed multiple times a day. I did everything that I believed I should do as taught in church. I believed I was doing the right things at the time based on my experiences and the things I’d been taught my whole life.

So how did I get to where I am now if I was doing all of the right things? Before I explain why I left, I want to say that I won’t go into the specifics too much. The point of this is not to convince you one way or the other what you should or should not believe. I don’t expect you to agree with my conclusions. I just want to explain my experience so that you understand my perspective. I only hope that you’ll extend some empathy and try to understand that it was a difficult road for me to get to this point. Like you, I knew the church was true. I had a fiery conviction. But I now have a different but equally as powerful conviction.

In the past I’ve tried to go into the specifics with people at work, with friends, my parents, etc. What I’ve learned from lots of conversations is that if you believe something and the person you’re talking to believes something else, the conversation tends to focus on proving why one or the other is wrong in believing what they do. All it does is make both parties frustrated and feeling like they’re not being understood. There’s a reason that some people say they refuse to talk religion or politics. Beliefs are personal. Our own experiences, understanding, study, faith, and outlook on life make up what we believe. My experiences are not yours, my understanding is not yours, my path is not yours. I can’t say what is right or wrong for you because I don’t have your experiences. Only you can decide what is best for you. All I know are my experiences and the things I’ve learned, and what I believe is right for me. Though you may have reached different conclusions than I have, I hope you can at least understand that it wasn’t something I took lightly. In fact, leaving the church was almost as painful and difficult a decision as it was for me deciding to get divorced. So my purpose in explaining to you about what happened is so that you can understand what the experience is like to lose your faith, which I would characterize as a traumatic event that caused an existential crisis in my life.

So, What Happened?

I think everyone has some questions that they don’t have answers to. I know I do. Several years ago I had a question that I reflected on daily. I prayed and fasted about it a lot. I asked others and got various answers that didn’t feel right to me. I eventually spent over two hours discussing it with my bishop but he couldn’t give me a satisfactory explanation. I finally gave up searching for an answer and just put it in the back of my mind. If the topic ever came up again, I just tried not to think about it. I had other questions without answers, but it was easier to box them up and file them away in a dark corner of my brain and try to ignore them because if that burning desire for an answer came back, I’d just be disappointed again when no one could give me an answer.

Skip forward a few years. I was at work and was talking with a coworker about church-related topics. He was a very sharp guy who was regarded by many in his ward as being the ward expert on scriptures and church history. He was disappointed when he was called out of teaching gospel doctrine to be in the young men’s presidency because he was so passionate about it and dedicated much of his free time to reading and studying. He brought up a gospel topic that I thought I knew a lot about, but the stuff he was saying was very different than what I’d learned about in Sunday school, seminary, and institute. I didn’t believe what he was saying, so I asked him where he was getting his information from. He gave me some church sources to look into which I did. He pointed me towards autobiographies and biographies that I could get from Deseret Book or the library. I was careful with the things that I read, I insisted on only reading authors who were endorsed by the church or active faithful members.

I started to get really discouraged. The more I read, the more questions I had. I would listen to audiobooks and podcasts at work and in the car whenever I was alone and whenever it was possible, and nearly all my free time was spent reading. Like I said, I won’t get into the specific things that upset me. But what I was finding really upset me because it went against things that I’d been taught my whole life, yet was found in histories of the church, journals of the early saints, and publications of the church. Some of the topics even had their own essays devoted to them on LDS.org. I found some websites that, though they are not owned by the church, LDS.org had links to them for more information so I knew they were endorsed by the Church. On those sites, I found essays written by historians that attempted to give faithful explanations to the difficult information I had read, with even more information that upset me and raised more questions. Events in my life brought up the questions I’d set aside before, and the answers started to be more apparent: what I believed my whole life and was taught was not consistent with scrupulously recorded history.

Before long I found myself in a faith crisis that quickly became an existential crisis. I was very discouraged, upset, depressed, angry, confused, and felt betrayed. I found that if I brought up these topics with others they’d dismiss them as “anti-Mormon” or tell me that I was wrong, even though I was talking about things from church approved sources, church-endorsed authors, and church-endorsed historians. Or people would simply say it didn’t matter, don’t think about it, focus on something else, just forget about what was bothering me. Going to church quickly became a very frustrating experience for me and I no longer felt warm fuzzies when I attended. I’d get frustrated watching members give tearful testimonies about things that I’d learned weren’t actually the way they were describing them. How could they know that specific thing was true if LDS.org said it wasn’t like that?

Going to the temple didn’t give me any peace. My anxiety at church got so bad that after sacrament meeting I preferred to just sit in the chapel instead of going to class and quorum so that I could pray, meditate, and read the scriptures to try and make sense of it all. I felt worse at church than anywhere else. It was a very lonely time, I didn’t have very many people I could really talk to about what I was reading or how it was affecting me. I didn’t talk about it very much with my wife at the time because I didn’t want her to go down the rabbit hole that I had gone down. I found a support group online with people just like me who were conflicted by the information they’d discovered and were trying to make it work anyway. It helped me for awhile, I was able to talk to others and see how they were able to know what I knew and still attend. My beliefs were starting to change. With the new information, I couldn’t believe some things the way I used to.

An Allegory For Understanding

Please bear with me as I switch gears for a moment. When you think of yourself and who you are, your identity, the essence of who you perceive yourself to be, it really comes down to core aspects of your personality, beliefs, and relationships. In many ways, your sense of self is defined by those things or your association with those things, that gives your life meaning, direction, and purpose.

Imagine if you will the following scenario:

One day out of the blue your parents sit you down and tell you they’re not your parents. The people you believed to be your parents actually kidnapped you when you were a baby and raised you as their own. Almost in an instant, your world has turned upside down. Your whole perception of yourself has changed. If you’re not really part of that family, then who are you? You feel you belong with your “family” because of the time you’ve spent with them, but at the same time you now have a sense of “otherness” that you’re not actually one of them and don’t completely belong. You had a good childhood, they treated you well, but they kept this secret from you your whole life until now. You know that going forward you can eat meals with your “parents” remain friends with your “siblings”, but there will always be in the back of your mind a little voice telling you that you don’t quite belong here, that this isn’t your real family, and it is tearing you in two. In this hypothetical, nothing has physically changed, everything else in your life remains constant. Except that with this new information you’ve obtained your whole perception of yourself, your identity, is in crisis. One piece of the very core of who you are is shifted. If they’re not your family, who is? Who are you if you’re not a member of their family?

How Does It Feel To Lose Your Faith?

For me, the above hypothetical is what losing my faith felt like. I was losing something that had always been a part of my identity. I was a Mormon. I believed in all the aspects of the gospel. Without that piece of me, who was I? My crisis was a long, drawn-out process of nearly two years. It was particularly painful because one of the only things that I clung to during the darkest years of my life was my beliefs from church, which then began slipping away from me. Perhaps the best way that I can describe the experience is with a poem that I wrote when I was at the height of my faith and identity crises. I wrote this in September of 2016:

Please tell me that You’re there

That You hear my humble prayer

Because I am lost and I am scared

Am I the wheat or am I the tares? More and more as time goes by

It feels my whole life has been a lie

I want to scream, I want to cry

I can’t give it up, and I can’t try Always feeling out of place

No more smiles on my face

Will I forever feel this way?

Not saying all I want to say I can’t unknow all that I know;

or continue to blindly follow

With so many bitter pills to swallow

I can’t shake feeling so hollow I can’t sleep, no longer dreaming

A constant state of simply being

Always looking but never seeing

Always listening but never hearing I don’t know who I am anymore

Or what it is I’m fighting for

I thought I knew but I’m not sure

I feel sick but there’s no cure Please tell me that You’re there

That You hear my humble prayer

Because I am lost and I am scared

And I’m not going anywhere

So why couldn’t I just believe anymore? Well, for me many aspects of the church became to be like how we think of Santa Claus. At some point every child realizes that Santa Claus can’t possibly be what they’ve been told. The logistics alone of a guy visiting every child in the world in one night makes it hard to believe. But then you realize that Santa gives really awesome gifts to the rich kids, and really lame gifts or nothing at all to the poor kids, and then it all just clicks in your mind why that might be the case. And from that point forward, no matter how hard you try, no matter how hard you pretend, you just can’t believe in Santa Claus the way you did before. The toothpaste is out of the tube and there’s no way it will go back in the way it was before.

Now, you can say you believe in the spirit of Santa Claus and what he represents. But that’s not the same thing as believing that Santa is making a list and checking it twice, then flying around in the air and shimmying down chimneys. For nearly two years I attended church believing in the spirit of Santa Claus rather than the man himself, if that makes sense. I clung to the nostalgia of things that used to comfort me even though they no longer did. I found nuanced ways to believe, assigning metaphorical meaning to them. I had to believe in the church somehow if not literally. But after nearly two long years of trying that strategy, I couldn’t do it anymore; it felt inauthentic. It felt like I was lying to myself. It was difficult knowing that I was surrounded by people at church who believed in literal Santa Claus while I was believing in the spirit of Santa Claus. I just couldn’t connect with them or the things they were saying. Not even my support group could give me effective strategies to ignore the things that caused my beliefs to shift.

Beliefs

Beliefs are interesting things. A belief is something that you accept as true or real and have confidence in. You can have a belief in gravity based on your experience that every time you hold out a pencil and release it, it falls to the ground; you accept gravity as a true or real concept. You can believe in gravity, and gravity is real. You can also believe in Santa Claus based on what your friends and family have told you about him, and accept that he delivers presents hand-crafted by elves at the North Pole. But believing in Santa Claus doesn’t change the fact that Santa doesn’t exist.

You can believe in things that are true, and also things that are not true, and have a strong conviction of it. Just ask the flat-earthers. It all depends on what you accept as truth. For me, after years of praying, studying, searching, fasting, reading, crying, hoping, asking, and begging, I can no longer accept the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints as being true the way I used to. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t accept it as true. My experience is not your experience, we have reasons why we accept or don’t accept what is truth. Just as I don’t see myself ever believing in Santa Claus again, I don’t see myself believing in the church again.

I know how much your beliefs mean to you because I used to share them, too. Please don’t think that because I no longer accept the same things as truth as you do that I’m suddenly a terrible person. In many ways I’m the same old Jake as always. It’s been nearly two years since I stopped attending church, though it’s been longer since I no longer shared the same beliefs as you. I’m still committed to raising my kids to be honest, empathetic, and caring people. We still have plenty of things in common, and I still believe that many of the life lessons I learned in the church were good and shaped me to be the successful person that I am today.

You say in your post that members who leave the church know their actions are wrong and feel guilty that they are denying their witnesses from the Holy Ghost, and have two options: admit they are wrong and repent, or lie to themselves and rationalize their actions. The irony here, is that I was rationalizing why I was still attending church, praying, reading scriptures, fasting, paying tithes, etc. because I found that it was the church that was wrong in many ways, and it refused to issue apologies or repent.

Why Are Many Ex-Mormons Angry?

So why are many Ex-Mormons angry? Why do they leave blistering comments in the comment sections of news articles and on social media? Why can’t they just walk away and disappear?

I’ll tell you why I get angry about the church from time to time. I don’t live in a constant burning rage, but there are things that set me off. Here’s a few of them:

Relationships are ruined over a difference in belief. My relationship with family members has never been worse. Just because I no longer believe the way my family members do, they don’t talk with me more than they absolutely have to. My parents used to invite my family over at least once a month for dinner, sometimes more often. Now it’s maybe every four to six months. One time, my dad literally sat with his back to me during the course of an entire meal, and it was only my parents, me, my wife, and my kids at the table. Sometimes they’ll invite us to come over and then hardly speak to us the whole time we’re there, or leave the room when I come in, which makes me feel unwelcome. Coworkers who find out that I am no longer a member suddenly have nothing to say to me, despite working together for many years. So when I see people posting how close they are with their family on social media and talking about what an awesome holiday they had, it hurts because our relationships are so strained from me following my conscience. You could say, well then just go back! If you want a relationship and can’t have one without the church, just go back! I would hope you can see that that if I were to go back, I would just be lying to myself and others about my stance with the church. It feels as if I’ve been written off entirely as a person with no value because I won’t be in the Celestial Kingdom with them, so why bother waste time with me now? It hurts more than you can imagine. The church won’t leave me alone! I’ve had repeated visits from home teachers, elders quorum presidencies, missionaries, and even primary teachers. I told them all very clearly that I had no interest in going back to church, paying tithes or offerings, sending my kids to primary, participating in or affiliating with the church in any way. How many times do I have to ask them to stop before they do? I removed my records from the church to stop the harassment, but the missionaries and relief society still come to my house on occasion. No means no. Respect my wishes. I’ve asked to be left alone, so leave me alone. Why is it that members can leave the church, but the church can’t leave them alone? I’m sure my family is discussed from time to time in Ward Council. How can I be fellowshipped? How can they get to me? I’ve been invited to dinner with neighbors who I’ve never even spoken to, and it feels like they invited us as an assignment, not because they really want to get to know my family. Please respect my wishes of being unaffiliated in all capacity with the organization. Any criticism of the church, even valid criticism, is considered an “attack” on members. I understand that personal beliefs are just that: personal. But when your church does something egregious, like protect sexual predators because of their calling or status or celebrity in the church, that is not an attack on you. That is a valid criticism of the institution and how it addresses difficult problems. When I’m upset that the church protected Sterling Van Wagenen from church discipline or notifying local authorities for the sexual abuse he was committing, its not your fault. It’s not your beliefs fault. It is the fault of those who did nothing and allowed him to continue to sexually abuse children. You are not your beliefs, yet often times with Mormons they seem to think so, and ignore valid criticism. I gave a lot of my time and money to the church. I served a full-time mission and served in many callings from the nursery to the stake young men’s presidency and from ward missionary to ward financial clerk. I gave up time with my family, time at work, and my own money for those callings. Yes, the church required me to spend my own money on a calling I did not ask for or want, but accepted because that’s what you do. And then they made me spend money that I did not have, I had to use credit cards! For my calling! When I asked if I could get a reimbursement for the expenses, the stake president told me no. I will never get that time or money back that I now believe was wasted. I’m sure you’ve probably seen in the news the story about the church’s non-profit stockpiling $100 billion that could very well be a violation of the law and against IRS regulations for non profits. If these allegations are true, then I faithfully paid tithing for years that I really could have used for myself and my family instead of buying the City Creek Mall. Like I said above, I paid tithing instead of rent once because that’s what I was told to do. I bought groceries with credit cards when my hours were cut at work at my first job after I graduated, but faithfully paid tithing. I qualified for medicaid, CHIP, and WIC benefits from the government, and faithfully paid tithing. I could have just used that tithing for food and healthcare for my family. The church doesn’t need my money, or yours. Even if all donations ceased, they are earning 7% on their multi-billion dollar investment portfolio and within a decade or so will have $1 Trillion Dollars in assets. I thought that Jesus said “lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth”, not “build me a mall with excess tithes” or “bail out my for-profit organizations that aren’t doing so well” or “invest the excess billion into my portfolio”. If these allegations are as true as they appear to be so far, then the church is not honest in its dealings with its fellow man and would not qualify to enter its own temples. This makes me angry. I now believe that the church is not what you believe it is, and I will never get that time back with my family or the money I gave that I desperately needed to stay out of debt and get out of debt. The hypocrisy I see in both the leaders and the members of the church, and the double standards. If you research church history you will soon find that we hold members to a higher standard than Joseph Smith himself. You can justify it by saying the gospel is perfect but the members are not. Okay. But the gospel as taught now is NOT the gospel that was taught in the early church. The perfect gospel has been changed in countless ways, starting with scripture itself, so that’s a really weak argument. In the news the last two years in particular there have been several men who abused their positions of power in the church to sexually abuse others. And they are the same people who are excommunicating members for far lesser “sins”. The church’s legal shenanigans, especially in Utah, where the members of Utah’s legislature are largely LDS and listen to the LDS lobbyists over their own constituents. They frequently advance bills that only forward the agendas of the church. They enact laws that impose on the free will of others who are not LDS to live as an LDS person. That’s completely inappropriate to use government to enforce religious beliefs. Or when the church uses their law firm to silence abuse victims through non-disclosure agreements and settlements. Justifying bad policy as the will of God. This was clear with the exclusionary policy issued in 2015 regarding gay members of the church. It was paraded around as revelation from God and His will at the time. Three years later it was reversed. So Why didn’t God get the decision right the first time to not issue the policy? Maybe it wasn’t God at all that made that change? Yet they claimed it was revelation the first time it was issued, and then claimed they prayed and begged the Lord for an explanation and the explanation was it was a mistake, so they reversed it. The idolatry in the church. There were countless times that I attended church and never heard the name of Jesus Christ spoken except in the opening, closing, and sacramental prayers. But I sure heard Joseph Smith’s name a lot, and names of current apostles and prophets. I see on Light The World posts all the time how great Joseph Smith was. Members talk about apostles and prophets like they would Justin Bieber or the Beatles. They brag about connections they have to them to gain status in their ward and community. There is so much focus on these men who aren’t that special, and they’re practically worshiped. They buy every new book or biography released by “the brethren”. They quote “the brethren” more often than Jesus or scripture. They hang pictures of them in their homes. They pray for them all the time. If the church is true like you believe it is, and they really are chosen of God, then why would your prayers matter to keep them healthy? Wouldn’t God do that anyway? The leaders in the church are revered and treated like celebrities, and it feels like they’re worshiped more than the person who’s name is printed on ever church building. The way members, especially in Utah, treat people who are not Mormons, are not cookie cutter Mormons, inactive, or Ex-Mormons. They pity them, dislike them, and distrust them. The irony is that there have been several members in the news the past few years for taking advantage of the blind trust that other members put in them. In your post you said “It is important to understand that Anti-Mormons are not honest brokers. They are miserable and they seek that all men might be miserable like unto themselves.” It was the search for Truth that led me out of the church in the first place, and I continue to search for the Truth. I’m not miserable. I’m considerably more happy than I’ve been in years. I don’t send my siblings or parents links to articles to ruin their faith. I don’t preach my nonbeliefs at them. But you prove my point in your article that in Mormonism there is only black and white, there’s us and them, and guess what? The people who aren’t in your club can feel your contempt for them in the most trivial conversations. For example, here in Utah many Mormons automatically assume everyone they meet is also a member. I’ll be buying groceries and the cashier will ask me my thoughts on the recent conference, and then be surprised that I didn’t watch. Then they no longer want to engage in small talk as we bag my groceries in silence. Or they will ask you what your calling is in job interviews to determine if you’re worthy or not for employment at their for-profit business, which is completely illegal. They will discriminate in housing against nonmembers, which is also illegal. You see, its a super special club, and if you’re not in it, you’re not worth their time. You have no value to them unless they can convert you and share their testimony in sacrament meeting about how they saved you from everlasting torment and hell. As you read above, my transition out of the church was extremely painful for me. To be constantly harassed by others as being one of them is tiring and frustrating. On social media I see Mormons bare their testimony in comment sections of news articles about why that stance is the one and only correct stance. Mormons make up less than 1% of the entire population of the world, yet claim they’re the only ones that have anything figured out. They’re arrogant, self-righteous, and outlandishly pious and obnoxious. Tone it down. Your attitude towards non-Mormons sets the tone for how they will treat you back.

Conclusion

You don’t have to believe the same things to be kind. You don’t have to believe the same things to be authentic. Not all who leave the church maintain a belief in what they were taught and feel tortured for not complying with the rules of a 19th century view of the world. I sleep better at night. I get more time to spend with my family during the week and on weekends. I am happy. If the church makes you happy, genuinely happy, then good for you. Stay in the church. Do what makes you happy. I became increasingly unhappy by going to church, and have found happiness elsewhere. Live and let live.

Your perceived enemy and apostate,

Jake