Family and friends,
We are sending you this letter because we care deeply about you. We value our relationship with you and don’t want to jeopardize that, but we find ourselves in the uncomfortable and perhaps impossible position of trying to explain our journey without offending anyone.
As some of you are aware, we have distanced ourselves from the LDS church recently. Assumptions have been made about us and rather than let rumors dictate our story, we decided to send out this letter. Our desire is certainly not to convince you of anything, but rather to clear up the most common misconceptions we have encountered:
- We were lazy about our testimony
- We were led astray by lying apostates
- We were offended by church members or leaders
- Deceitful “anti-Mormon” literature tricked us
- We sinned and were looking for a way out
We can state categorically that none of those are true. We have each been active, faithful members our entire lives. We love the members of the church and have a deep respect for their faith and devotion.
As we grew up, our faith in the church and its teachings became inseparably linked to the narrative about church history related to us. But lately we have come to realize that the history as taught in church is simply inaccurate and incomplete. We stumbled upon a wealth of factual information that was contrary to the narrative as we knew it. We discovered, for example, that we could spend 10 minutes on Wikipedia and get a more accurate history of the Book of Abraham than 30 years of church, seminary, and institute lessons on it.
We didn’t take this process lightly at all. We were skeptical of every source and thoroughly investigated each claim for bias, dishonesty, and motive.
Our search for truth
J. Reuben Clark: “If we have the truth, it cannot be harmed by investigation. If we have not the truth, it ought to be harmed.”
George Albert Smith: “If a faith will not bear to be investigated, if its preachers and professors are afraid to have it examined; their foundation must be very weak.”
We set out with the goal of figuring out the truth to the best of our abilities and then making an informed decision that would best benefit our family and those around us. We were willing to look objectively at all evidence in an honest pursuit of truth.
It should be noted that we desperately wanted the church to be true. It encompassed our entire lives, from our friends and family to our belief system and way of viewing the world. Coming to grips with some of the painful truths we discovered was devastating. There was an expectation as we began our research that the official version of church history was complete and true; that so-called “anti-Mormons” were just liars and frauds.
We felt as members that we were discouraged from studying the church using outside sources. Our years of experience in the church taught us that any information that could be perceived as negative towards the church was automatically untrue and didn’t deserve our attention. Even unbiased scholarly research is easily tossed aside if it does not agree with the faithful history related in official church curriculum.
What we found shocked us. It’s not “anti-Mormon” and it’s not falsehoods or deceit. It is truthful history that hasn’t been whitewashed to only include the positive aspects. With almost every event, we were able to dig up official confirmation from church sources. But each time it was like finding a needle in a haystack. The church clearly does not want its members to know about certain events in its past. It appears that anything not ‘faith-promoting’, whether it is truthful or not, is hidden as much as possible.
The Gospel Principles manual states: “When we speak untruths, we are guilty of lying. We can also intentionally deceive others by a gesture or a look, by silence, or by telling only part of the truth. Whenever we lead people in any way to believe something that is not true, we are not being honest.”
We felt the church had led us to believe many untrue things by remaining silent or telling only part of the truth.
Conclusion
If you’ve read this far, you probably know where this is heading. Particularly in light of recent events in California, where the church participated in a campaign to aggressively discriminate against a minority group and remove their basic civil right to marriage, we no longer wish to be considered members.
The church has very lofty claims, but we cannot in good conscience be part of it when we don’t believe it meets those claims. We feel that the church is asking us to have faith that flies in the face of logic, evidence and reason. We also feel lied to by church curriculum that covers up, ignores or misrepresents basic events in church history. The sense of betrayal is not our only reason for leaving though; examining the story and doctrine as a whole left us with a firm belief that it is not the one true church.
We have decided to voluntarily withdraw our membership. There is a temptation to stay in and enjoy the fellow-shipping and culture. But we felt it would be dishonest to ourselves, our children, and others who would take our participation as agreement with the church and its policies. We sincerely hope that this doesn’t affect the many great friendships we have with church members.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for being a friend. While the process of having our belief system crumble has been difficult for us, we don’t regret deciding to study it and are very much at peace with our decision. We are excited to teach our children to be skeptical, question the world around them, and make their own decisions about their beliefs. We also look forward to the process of exploring new beliefs for ourselves.
If you have any questions or want to discuss anything, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We are constantly working on a website detailing some of our research here. We enjoy discussing this and would love to be corrected if we are wrong about anything.
If you don’t wish to look at the information or discuss it with us, that’s fine too. We hope that this letter and our decision to leave won’t negatively affect our relationship with you.
Our quest for truth 
I love you guys. This whole site is awesome. It has ALL the words I WISH I could share with my family, and which I know they would never read. I applaud you.
Well, very few of our family members read it. It’s that Mormon persecution complex. Mormons are convinced that anything critical of the church is false and a deception by Satan.
My husband and I left last year. I am BIC and he is a 20 year convert. My two adult children also left.
After a lifetime (55 years) of being a mormon, it’s no small thing to find out that your church has been deceiving you and 6 generations of your family. I was speechless for an entire day when I came to this realization. I couldn’t take it all in. Even now, the enormity of the deception is incredible. That they are still persisting on maintaing the lie is unbelievable.
The church has done enormous damage to me and my family. I don’t think we will ever be able to overcome it in our lifetime. Their arrogance, and lack of caring flies in the face of all that is good and right.
The way I have been treated by men at the very top has left me with a sure knowledge that they are not only liars and deceivers, but they are the most evil men I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet.
They hide behind a shield of expensive suits and feigned love and humility, when their true motive is to destroy you at any cost.
I’m in awe that these men had the misfortune to come into the leadership of the church during the age of the internet. Anyone who is willing to put a little bit of time and effort into it, can know the truth for themselves. These men are their own worst enemies.
Thank you for doing the work for me. I’ve been compiling a lot of this information to be able to use when I talk with my family and friends.
Wow. Just stumbled across your site from your reply to the desnews article. Great research. Mirrors a lot of what I found. Knoxformon.blogspot.com. Look forward to reading more about your journey.
Thank you so much for sharing this letter. What a world it would be had your family and friends actually read it, and perhaps researched alongside you.
My family and I walked out this year for all the same reasons you so eloquently stated in your letter. When my youngest son came out to us this year it prompted me to act upon the desire to search out the truth for myself.
In what could be considered our best FHE ever, my son asked his dad why we don’t go to church anymore. My husband, the diehard among us, answered simply, “We cannot associate with an organization that believes you are anything less than God intended you to be when He created you.”
Our 5 children (including “adopted” lesbian daughter and 4 of our creations) are all on the same page.
Now to figure out how to find out what we believe on our own. Perhaps my biggest disappointment is that I could have used more time to do this since the church has been doing too much thinking for me for 47 years.
Oh, and the lying. That’s “disappointing” to say the least.
But I digress. You are brave and I thank you for sharing such a personal letter.