‘Like a Cord Snapping’: Toward a grounded theory of how devout Mormons leave the LDS Church

Marginality and leaving Mormonism: Engaging extant scholarship

For this project, I engaged in bracketing—the gathering and analyzing of data prior to conducting the literature review. Although this is a much-debated practice in Grounded Theory (see Charmaz 2006, 2014), I chose to bracket as an intentional strategy to enable immersion in the data and to follow the emerging patterns without being channeled or constrained by theories of disaffiliation or studies about leaving Mormonism. James S. McGraw et al. (2018) produced a wide and thorough literature review of leaving the LDS Church in their work on “radical deconversion” from Mormonism. Here, I narrow my view to the scholarly work most germane to my research question and method to explain or describe devout adherents leaving Mormonism, conceived of as a high-cost religion.

Three classic theories of disaffiliation sought to discover the reasons why adherents leave religious communities but not how they leave, that is, not the work that must be done in order to leave. Armand Mauss’s foundational work argued for a three-part typology of “apostasy” that saw adherents leaving because of intellectual learning or disagreement, social conflict, and emotional disconnection, by which Mauss meant a rupture with the community caused by perceived hypocrisy (1969). Merlin B. Brinkerhoff and Kathryn L. Burke (1980) constructed a framework for understanding the contexts of leaving religion, where “disaffiliation involves both the dimensions of communal identification (or the feeling of belonging to a group) and religiosity (the embracing of a set of beliefs or doctrines)” suggesting that the dynamic relationship between how tightly connected to the group an adherent is and the degree to which they believe in the group’s claims channels and transforms their leaving experience. Brinkerhoff’s and Burke’s relational framework shows that a leaver’s reasons for quitting religion must be viewed relative to their level of devotion to the religion, and in turn raises the question of how individuals with differing levels of belonging and belief might have different reasons for leaving. My data in this study not only confirm Mauss’s theory, but per Brinkerhoff and Burke, they also flesh out the contextual specifics of how a deeply committed Mormon must confront more and different obstacles than do Mormons who are already marginal to the religious community. More recently, Phil Zuckerman’s (2011) work on atheism generated a theory focused on full secularization after leaving religion, leading him to a schema that divides leavers into early vs. late, and disaffiliation into soft vs. hard. Zuckerman’s schema strongly suggests an element of time, which is so far undertheorized in studies of disaffiliation.

In the empirical realm, six past studies have sought to explain disaffiliation from the LDS Church, using a range of methodological approaches: mail surveys (Albrecht and Bahr 1983), interviews (Albrecht and Bahr 1989; Zuckerman 2011), and narrative analysis of online accounts of leaving the LDS Church (Avance 2013; Payne 2013; Hinderaker and O’Connor 2015). Both of Albrecht’s and Bahr’s studies and Payne’s more recent narrative analysis were produced from within a Mormon context (Brigham Young University and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, respectively), but none contains a systematic self-reflexivity in their methodologies that would account for their Mormon contexts. Avance, Payne, and Hinderaker and O’Conner relied on public fora for ex-Mormons, particular the static apostasy narratives found online, rather than dialogic or interactional data, and have the usual limits of narrative analysis.

Most of these earlier studies of ex-Mormons saw leavers as already marginal within their LDS communities (see especially Albrecht and Bahr 1989; Zuckerman 2011). A more recent book length work by E. Marshall Brooks, Disenchanted Lives (2018), examines the cultural and social work of ex-Mormons or disenchanted “inactive” Mormons living in Utah. Brooks’s ethnographic work demonstrates clearly that leavers are not necessarily already marginal, but can and do sometimes begin as “wholly committed and faithful members” of the LDS Church (2018). Brooks’ analysis resonates with the underlying stance I took both in conducting interviews and in coding the data, “viewing apostasy [sic] as an analytically rich crystallization point for analyzing underlying tensions within Mormonism,” rather than seeing leaving the LDS Church as a problem of the individual’s marginality. Importantly, recent quantitative work clearly shows that most leavers quit the LDS Church young, before they are “credentialed”, and/or they are already marginal to the LDS communities, for example, because of their politics, social lives, sexual identities, etc. (see McGraw et al. 2018; Riess 2019). Further, Riess (2019) shows that the majority of leavers switch religions. This quantitative work, combined with Brooks’s ethnography, helps explain why earlier studies of ex-Mormons found that leavers were already marginal, and points to the need to focus research on the devout, committed, “credentialed” Mormons who eventually leave. Because I assume that disaffiliation is a transformational process, full of effort that requires time, I asked how leavers become marginal in the first place. By beginning with participants who had once been fully “credentialed” Mormons, I found that marginality is neither disaffiliation itself nor an adequate explanation for disaffiliation.

A Multi-modal approach to studying ex-Mormons

If I was correct, that devout, “credentialed” Mormons required significant time and work to leave Mormonism and disaffiliate from the LDS Church, I needed a method that would allow this work to rise up and become visible in whatever data I generated. As an interactionist, I began by joining two closed, password-protected online communities for questioning and doubting Mormons in 2007 (more details below). The particular iteration of Grounded Theory method that I ultimately followed emerged over several years as I participated in these groups and discussed with forum owners, moderators, and group members their thoughts on being the objects of an academic study. Members of both online communities felt that my participant-observation was too risky for their privacy, and they did not want their personal, often raw posts about their experiences “dissected,” even though they’d built a certain relationship of trust with me. Ultimately, I designed a grounded theory study with the addition of a rigorous multi-modal, systematic memoing process to account for some key variables in the research process. Further, following Kathy Charmaz’s theory of constructivism (2014) and the feminist critique of constructed knowledge (e.g., Harraway 1988), I chose a method that would foreground my own position in the interactive and participatory generation of the study’s conclusions to make the interactive process of study fully visible.

After four years of participating in these two communities, I received permission from their owners and moderators to solicit participants for interviews. From a pool of just under 100 volunteers, I excluded those with whom I had personal friendships offline, and selected fourteen men and nine women, aiming to give a range of experiences and entry points into committed practice of Mormonism, which resulted in a slight gender imbalance in the final pool. The pool was designed not to be representative of ex-Mormons per se, nor to be demographically representative; rather, as a descriptive project, my goal was to achieve a breadth of experiences of leaving Mormonism from various positions of fully credentialed, devoted practice, in order to see if there were patterns, structures, or common experiences across a possible range of leaving journeys. To achieve this, I zeroed in on volunteers who self-identified as having been “true believing Mormons” and/or who had demonstrated a high level of devotion in their previous Mormon lives through tithing, church callings and volunteer work, missionary service, temple worship, obedience to the LDS health and sexual laws, etc. Interview participants ranged in age from late 20s to early 60s; they were all white; all identified as heterosexual but one; and they came from a range of economic backgrounds from working class to highly paid professionals. Of those, two participants asked to not be quoted in the final research but gave permission to be part of the coding process. Two of the men and one of the women had converted to Mormonism in their early 20s and had left Mormonism in middle age. My interview subjects were from across North America (including Canada), as well as two from the European Union (interviews were conducted in English). After selection, I conducted a series of twenty-three in-depth, semi-structured grounded theory interviews, with shorter follow-up interviews, email exchanges, and telephone calls to probe my results as I analyzed data over a period of several years (see Charmaz 2006). I conducted the initial 60–90 minute interviews during 2011, with follow-up telephone calls, emails, and online chats as recently as 2017, and a final set of questions made to the women in 2018. All quotes and paraphrases from the interviews use pseudonyms and approximate age at the time of the initial interviews; all other identifying markers have been removed.

Rather than a “blank slate” approach, I formulated interview questions from a set of sensitizing concepts I had developed during the four years I interacted in the fora: the nature of belief, the nature of godhood (the supernatural), the significance of gender, political values and orientation, the commitment of means and time to religious practice, and two Mormon doctrinal issues, the Word of Wisdom (health laws) and the Law of Chastity (sexual laws). After asking a question, I allowed the participant to guide the conversation, while I added follow-up and clarifying questions. Because participants knew me from a few years of interactions on the online fora for ex-Mormons, I also openly answered their questions to me. My own leaving experience hews more closely to the statistical patterns of leavers as described by Riess (2018): I left when I was young and was pushed out because I am gay, or “already marginal.” Because my experience contrasted in important ways with all but one of the participants, my answers to their questions created some of the most enlightening and revealing moments of the interviews.

I knew that the memoing process would be key to formulating the codes and ultimately the conclusions I drew from the data. In addition to the traditional memoing of Grounded Theory research, I generated three kinds of analytical memos within each code in order to interrogate my own position as researcher and to carefully frame what I was learning from the interview data in terms of larger contexts and issues. First, I compared, contrasted, analyzed, and critiqued my interview data based on the notes I’d taken during four years of participation in the two online fora. Forum A was a community of people questioning their Mormon beliefs and struggling with the contradictions between their doubt and the cultural expectations within Mormon communities. Many members of Forum A continued to practice Mormonism and to identify as Mormon in their daily lives, often trying to thread the needle between unbelief and practice, or to negotiate challenging family relationships. Forum B was a community of people who were trying to reject Mormonism in some way, by ceasing practice or “coming out” to friends and family as unbelievers. Both groups contained many people who, again, matched the larger trends outlined by Riess’s recent quantitative work; they were younger, leaving early, or already-marginal to the community in significant ways. So as I memoed during interview analysis, I compared my notes from participating in these communities with the coding data as it emerged, which allowed the texture and detail of individual experiences to challenge, problematize, and reshape my earlier conceptions of leaving Mormonism, while also putting interview participants into context with these larger groups of leavers.

Second, I conducted auto-ethnographic analysis within memos in order to account for my personal history, which both informed my research design and provided me with a degree of access that would likely be unavailable to cultural outsiders. As noted above, as an already marginal early leaver, my own experiences differed significantly from nearly all interview participants. To ensure self-reflexivity and criticism, I wrote out my own leaving narrative, answering the same questions, in as much detail as possible, that I had asked participants during interviews. I then ran my own answers through the same coding process so that I could use the analysis as a foil in memos to minimize my personal bias from entering the results. Within the auto-ethnographic memos, as I consciously contrasted my experiences to the patterns I was finding in the coding, I found significant and meaningful differences as the codes solidified over time. I only realized after conducting the lit review that these differences reflected a contrast between devout leavers and those who leave early and/or due to their own marginality within Mormon cultural norms.

Finally, in order to carefully frame and understand, I engaged in archival and textual analysis memos. For these, I consulted current church documents, announcements, and policies, as well as historical and scriptural primary texts from the LDS Church to flesh out, support, or problematize participants’ memories and the conclusions they had drawn about Mormonism and their Mormon lives. I sought out and analyzed these primary documents—ranging from public speeches, to Mormon scriptures, to LDS periodicals—and included a critical comparison of participant experiences with these texts during the final phase of memoing. I cite some of these sources here where they are clarifying.

In the discussion that follows, I have chosen to present my findings in a more interdisciplinary mode, rather than with the standard social scientific, qualitative results formula. I am confident in the rigor of Grounded Theory’s methodology, yet my purpose is to paint a complex picture of the cultural and psycho-social work that formerly devout leavers engaged in, rather than to generate a rigid framework or schema for that leaving process, which would be more in line with a standard Grounded Theory project. By combining the traditional data analysis and discussion into a descriptive text organized by aspects of leaving Mormonism, I hope to achieve something more akin to an ethnography, a look at how devout Mormons end up leaving their religious community.

“Punctuated” journeys outward

Participant interactions showed that devout leavers had to engage in an ongoing, effort-full process of immanent critique, which often took years to accomplish, and that required work to gradually reconstitute the leaver’s self and their world. Previous studies of leavers have included but not focused on devout adherents and have tended to focus on moments of rupture, that is, the events or final experiences that pushed adherents out of the religion (see especially Albrecht and Bahr 1989; Hinderaker and O’Connor 2015; Vargas 2011). By expanding my lens to look for a process over time rather than an event, I found that leaving journeys for devout Mormons consisted of a series of lesser breaking points that were neither end-points nor the cause of their leaving; rather, such experiences seem far more like punctuating moments, moments of disruption, rethinking, and adjustment. In other words, formerly devout Mormons went through a series of ruptures, over time. Participants’ journeys outward, then, were more akin to evolutionary theory’s notion of punctuated equilibrium (see Eldredge and Gould 1972), where a would-be leaver had an experience that prompted a moment of reflexivity about their Mormonism or the church, including experiences of upheaval, dissonance, and necessary adjustment and change. The punctuating moment was then followed by a period of stabilization and a “new normal,” where they grew used to a new, modified view of themselves and the LDS Church and/or their Mormon practice.

Through the course of the interviews, I found several kinds of experiences that functioned as such punctuating moments: personal crisis (emotional, familial, financial, etc.), intellectual shocks or discoveries, institutional discipline (i.e., the church’s formal punishment for “sin”), family or community conflict, and external politics (e.g., Proposition 8 from California’s 2008 ballot). Each of these categories of experience occurred at the intersection of the overall Mormon context with the leaver’s current position within Mormondom. A punctuating moment severed only those ties to Mormonism that the leaver was prepared to sever at that moment, such that over time, more and more lines were cut with each new disruption. Punctuating moments involved a brief or momentary experience—for example, reading something that contradicted their beliefs, a challenging interaction with someone, witnessing or being subject to institutional discipline, etc.—followed by the leaver’s efforts to make that experience intelligible, to make it somehow fit within the bounds of what they understood their Mormonness to be. All but one of the participants underwent multiple punctuating moments of multiple kinds over an extended period of time, as they became increasingly marginal within their Mormon communities.

Spencer (early 30s) told a striking story of a punctuating moment in a university archive when he read Joseph Smith’s multiple accounts of his revelatory experiences that led him to found the LDS Church.

…it was almost as if I felt a physical tie—a string or something that bound me to the church—snap. I almost felt it. It’s hard to articulate exactly what I felt in that moment…. I remember sort of pushing my chair back from the computer and turning to one side and going something to the effect of, ‘After all of this, it’s not true.’

Truth-seeking and “Christ-like Love” as foundational immanent critiques of Mormonism

Rather than focus on the specific aspects of Mormon belief and practice that leavers struggled with, I sought to find what linked these struggles together and what underlay those struggles. Mormonism's truth claims and moral authority—epistemology and ethics—emerged as the twin loadstones around which leavers' experiences revolved, whether it was the Law of Chastity, tithing, temple worship, volunteer service, weekly church attendance,³ or the World of Wisdom. Ex-Mormons’ focus on truth and morality is similar to religious leavers generally. Yet devout leavers’ processes were particularly constrained by Mormonism’s conception of truth as a value, and by the particular ways that Mormonism teaches and practices its ethic of “Christlike love.”

Beginning with Mormon conceptions of truth, Joseph Smith’s foundational teachings, ⁴ through various Mormon scriptures, ⁵ and modern teachings of LDS leaders and church education materials ⁶ have all elevated truth-seeking to the level of a spiritual goal, a fundamental value of Mormon religious devotion. Mormonism makes clear, strong claims about the nature of truth and how to find it—in short, a kind of Mormon epistemology. Participants described this epistemology as being limited by both institutional pressures within the church and by communal surveillance, that is, Mormons monitoring each other’s beliefs and levels of devotion through practice. Similarly, every participant I interviewed had come in their own way to see a moral contradiction at the heart of Mormonism. On one hand, they had been taught to live by a high ethical standard, which participants often referred to as “Christ-like love”; on the other hand, the rules of the Church and the cultural norms of Mormon communities often discouraged or made impossible compassionate and humane interaction. As these devout leavers wended their way out, they used various strategies to avoid or soften these contradictions, at various stages turning their critique inward on themselves or outward onto their fellow adherents, sometimes defensively deflecting critique away from the LDS Church itself onto a putative imperfection of practice and adherence among Mormon people. Their numerous and varied punctuating experiences ultimately cohered into an ongoing and growing immanent critique of both Mormon truth-seeking and ethics; none of the participants equivocated on these points, describing them in terms of a growing disillusionment or disappointment, which was ultimately profound and rupturing.

Through the interactive interview process, participants described an increasing dissonance between what they had been taught about truth, and what they experienced with Mormon social contexts. Illustrating a common theme among participations, Omer (mid 50s) had learned of “a god who wanted you to be inquisitive and learn how the world works and be empathetic and learn how people move forward and use their knowledge.” Similarly, Deborah (early 40s) explained, “The thirst for knowledge was something I really loved about Mormonism. So I was a voracious student of everything.” These devout who left the LDS Church had to become to some degree reflexive and critical about their own knowledge, leading toward a reconstruction of their relationship to truth in overlapping tension with other ways of knowing, such as science, academic historicism, or aesthetics. Because Mormonism had taught participants that truth is revealed as a spiritual experience, through direct intervention of the Holy Ghost or Spirit of God, two different kinds of binding contradictions occurred on their outward journeys. If an individual had indeed experienced a revelation of truth in some way, when they encountered evidence that the church’s truth-claims were false, they had to resolve the contradictions between their religious experiences and their intellectual discoveries. By contrast, if they had been unable to experience a revelation of truth, they had to conclude that the promise of the Holy Ghost was “inherently, fundamentally invalid” (Aurelia, mid 30s). Socially, surveillance within Mormon communities pushed adherents to evaluate each other’s worthiness or faithfulness based on what they claimed to have experienced and to “know.” Laban (early 50s) described how his “own parents would say, ‘You’re thinking too much. … You’re so open-minded your testimony is going to fall out’ kind of thing.” Eliza (late 40s) was told both by fellow Mormons and church leaders that her doubts and questions, indeed her actual truth-seeking, were inspired by Satan to lead her away from the Church.

Leavers had to manage these contradictions, sometimes for years, as they worked their way out of their Mormon world views. Porter (late 30s), for example, described attempts to put his “doubts on a [mental] shelf,” a kind of denial. Esther (mid 30s) described it as constantly performing “mental gymnastics.” Spencer (early 30s) described a process where, as he learned more, he was constantly having to reinterpret Mormon teachings to make them fit, which exacted a “cost to people who, like myself, have to twist their minds into a pretzel knot to keep believing, even when things are becoming increasingly unbelievable.”

Despite all of this, when asked if there was anything of value that they still held from their Mormon pasts, all but two participants named immediately how Mormonism had taught them to value the truth, to seek it out, and to be open to it. Aurelia (mid 30s) found her truth-seeking to be, in the end, joyful.

It was just like a light bulb turning on, like a lightning bolt hitting my brain. And it just [long pause] everything changes, nothing is the same. And you can’t help it. It’s like a wave. It just pushes you along. You can’t fight against it.

As with truth, ethics and morality as practiced within Mormon communities challenged devout leavers to consider deeply their own senses of right and wrong and whether they accepted Mormonism’s moral claims. During the interviews, their critiques returned constantly to the contradiction between the institutional practices of the LDS church and their desire to lead truly ethical lives. Helaman (mid 40s) noted that the Christian ideal of love in action “were the Mormon values [vocal emphasis], but I couldn’t live them inside the church.” Spencer (early 30s) was more direct: LDS leaders were “hacks who were more interested in the dogma of the church and the institution than they were in the people.” In other words, in their active-undergoing of Mormonism, participants came to see that, in practice, belonging trumped ethical action, and that LDS institutions worked against Mormonism’s ethical imperatives, putting bureaucratic function and church continuity ahead of human needs and well-being. In other words, the pressure to conform to Mormon communal and cultural norms functioned as barriers to participants’ own ethical development. Spencer observed, “If you’re not ‘active’ [i.e., practicing Mormonism] there’s something wrong with you [vocal emphasis].” More than half of participants noted that social status within the church arose from how tightly an individual adhered to communal norms, not from actually behaving ethically in the world.

One particular moral construction arose in every interview. Devout leavers in this study eventually concluded that Mormonism drew a clear socio-moral boundary between Mormons and “gentiles,” which thwarted meaningful ethical action. Aurelia (mid 30s) remembered “being able to look down my nose at people who didn’t have the Gospel in their life, and so, therefore, were somehow inferior.” By and by, she saw this social boundary as twisting and distorting her own ethical sense. Seeing the non-Mormon world as benighted was often bolstered with a teaching from The Book of Mormon that “wickedness never was happiness” (Alma 41:10). Participants found this created a false perception of other people and a bulwark preventing a deep ethical critique of Mormonism, because it encouraged them to see non- or “fallen” Mormons as, by definition, sinners. They had been taught that such people could not be truly happy, making any happiness outside of Mormon contexts nothing more than an illusion (see e.g., Scott 2004). Nearly all the participants reported that their efforts to conform to Mormon communal norms led to behaviors that they later regretted as unethical. Mosiah (early 30s) explained that, if Mormon practice truly lived up to its own ethical standards, “Mormons should theoretically be the smartest, most creative, best people….” Instead, he found them to be uptight, naïve, unethical. Omer (mid 50s) agreed, but self-reflexively noted that he “was incredibly judgmental, was a total douchebag and prick, because, you know, it was the kind of the environment I was raised in.” For her part, Aurelia frankly admitted, “I’m really horrified by a lot of the things that I said and did because of that.”

So as part of their journey outward, many participants felt they had to learn right and wrong all over again, as if they were children. Although they described this process as difficult, causing them a great deal of shame for the ways they had judged and treated others as Mormons, they also found it to be enlightening and ultimately freeing, bringing them to a place of what both Eliza (late 40s) and Dinah (early 30s) described as a new “moral integrity.” Nephi (late 20s) explained how, since leaving the LDS Church, “I just do a good thing because it’s the right thing to do. I’m not afraid of punishment and I’m not looking for a reward. It makes me happy—selfishly—to be nice to other people.” As a whole, I concluded that these once-devout leavers moved through a punctuated critical process toward a post-Mormon experiential ethics, described throughout interviews, where the individual ex-Mormon had come to derive ethical decisions in situ, as they lived in the world, trying not to cause harm and to enact true compassion. Several participants described leaving Mormon ethics behind as a childish or underdeveloped ethical system of specific behavioral rules. In my coding, I found that post-Mormon ethics among the formerly devout were an ongoing process of discovery through experience, rather than adherence to a list of ethical rules, thereby building an ethical life more congruent with the intrinsic value of themselves and other people. Finally, I found their descriptions of ongoing ethical discovery were often linked to and coextensive with the reconstructed and revalued post-Mormon practices of truth-seeking.

Emotional transformation

During the iterative coding process, I began to notice constellations of emotion words that appeared across participant accounts. Without addressing their emotions directly, participants repeatedly described how or what they were feeling throughout their leaving experiences. Their accounts also suggested changes in their emotions as their journeys outward progressed, often as a constitutive element of a punctuating moment. I noted that participants were working to make sense of their emotions in a complex interrelationship between what they were feeling as they were talking to me and what they were feeling during their leaving process. More specifically, their emotional words, thoughts, and feelings revealed a relationship among three different feeling contexts: what emotions had meant to them as devout Mormons, what they actually felt at a given punctuating moment, and the new role emotions played once they had made a final break with Mormonism. Mormonism had connected, for participants, both truth-seeking and ethical action to emotional states, which were seen as spiritual and social signals of being in harmony with “God’s will.” I concluded that inasmuch as Mormonism had shaped their emotionalities, it therefore also necessitated a reconstitution of emotions as part of the leaving process.

Leavers had been engaging in what Arlie Hochschild (1979) called emotion work, reconstructing their senses of themselves as well as their relationship to social structures and interactions with other people through their emotions. This emotion work seems to have followed a general pattern. First, participants would experience an emotion that disrupted their habitual way of feeling or that contradicted what they thought they should have been feeling, per LDS teaching and practice. Second, participants recalled working through why their emotions did not match their Mormon expectations. This work was often not consciously directed at the emotion itself, but rather at their relationship to the object of the emotion, usually ending at a new state of adjustment. For example, participants talked about how they felt about the law of chastity at various stages of leaving without addressing directly the fact that they were doing so or consciously noting the shifts in their own emotions over time. But these changes in emotion words and feeling-states demonstrated that, third, they gradually transformed their emotionality, that is, the social-interpretive structure and context within which emotions were operative.

Within a sociological framework, emotions are a barometer of adjustment to the individual’s environment (see Fields et al. 2006), and the meanings of somatic feelings become socially constituted emotions (see Turner and Stets 2005). From this perspective, I had to ground my interpretation of the words participants used to descript their feelings and thoughts about their feelings in the specific context of the LDS Church’s teachings about the meaning of emotions. Historical and contemporary teachings of the LDS Church—as well as reinforcing cultural practices within Mormon communities—function to produce what I will call Mormon emotionality. Across interviews, participants described how Mormonism constructs emotionality primarily through the way it hooks emotion to both truth-seeking and to ethical action. All but three participants quoted or paraphrased two concepts from LDS scripture written by Joseph Smith in 1829: “burning in the bosom” and the “stupor of thought.” In verse eight, Smith connected recognizing truth and rightness to a somatic experience of warmth. Conversely in verse nine, Smith taught that falsehood or wrongness creates “no such feelings” but instead a “stupor of thought” (Doctrine and Covenants 9: 8–9). In a broadly binary system, Mormon emotions give a thumbs up (true or good) or a thumbs down (false or evil) to any object of intellectual or moral evaluation. Over time, both LDS leaders and Mormon communal cultures have expanded this good/bad binary, adding more detailed descriptions of feelings and affect states and instructions on how to use emotions as a tool to reveal truth or morality (see e.g., Dallin H. Oaks 1982 or more recently the June 2014 issue of The New Era). Mormon emotionality, then, ascribes clarity, enlightenment, knowledge, and moral rightness to “good” emotions; and it ascribes confusion, doubt, and moral wrongness to “bad” emotions: Mormon emotionality functions as an affective-epistemology for discerning both truth and morality.

The devout leavers I interviewed came to experience Mormon emotionality as an overestimation of emotions; that is, it stretched the salience of emotional states into the most mundane aspects of their lives (several participants joked about looking for guidance from the Holy Ghost to find lost keys by listening to their inner emotional states). This overestimation drove them and the Mormons around them to scrutinize every emotion for potential spiritual, intellectual, and moral significance. Spencer (early 30s) described how he, his family, and his local LDS leadership interpreted his emotional states as indicators of either his righteousness or sinfulness. He recalled, “I hated the church’s inability to distinguish a person’s personal life, the ups and downs, the happiness, the sadness, from worthiness and spirit” (emphasis mine). In participant explanations and descriptions of their leaving processes, I concluded that Mormon emotionality functioned as a feedback loop that kept would-be leavers doubting and mistrusting their own emotional experiences as indicators of their own unworthiness rather than as maladjustments to and within their LDS contexts.

Fear and happiness, the two most common emotions described by participants, illustrate how Mormon emotionality consternated and confused would-be leavers, causing them simultaneously to question their own judgment and the validity of Mormon teachings. Emma (early 30s) observed that the obligation to trust in church leaders was “created a sense of, like, fear of ‘if I don’t’” and that she would end up “cosmically alone.” Kathy (late 30s), a convert to the LDS Church in her early 20s, reported a profound fear of reverting back to her “gentile life” prior to conversion. Nephi (late 20s) saw fear at play in how he had eschewed and ignored his own life experiences, where “things that should have been my experience I didn’t have because I was fearful of what would happen if I did.” Participants interpreted fear as a sign that something was evil, wrong, or false. Throughout the interviews, they noted how this fear took on a social quality, where non-Mormons and “gentile” lives become the primary object of fear, a threat or danger to their well-being. Overcoming and reconfiguring their Mormon-constructed emotions were necessary tasks of participants’ leaving journey.

Similarly, happiness had to be reconstructed. Participants reported that they had been taught that a believing, practicing Mormon should be happy, indeed joyful: “men [sic] are that they might have joy” (The Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 2:23). And they’d also learned that life outside of Mormonism could only result in unhappiness, because “wickedness never was happiness” (Alma 41:3). This created a kind of happiness double-bind. If in reality Mormonism made them depressed or unhappy, then Mormon emotionality created an emotional conflict that turned blame back onto the doubter and removed blame from the church. Deborah (early 40s) provided the most detailed analysis of Mormon emotionality, when she described a gradual realization that took several years.

I didn’t feel like things were working for me very well in my life, because I wasn’t feeling happy. My whole life I was told that I was supposed to be happy. You did this certain formula and you would be happy and I had never—I mean it had always worked for me, I had done the things that I was supposed to do, and I had always been happy. So when I hit this—the crisis of where I felt like I was depressed and I was looking for some way out of the grey cloud, I decided that it wasn’t working for me and that I had better do something else.

In other words, participants came to see their own emotions as a point of manipulation that kept them in Mormonism. I observed in the interviews as a whole a continual misinterpretation of emotion generally, and of fear and happiness specifically, that led would-be leavers to believe that if they were unhappy, they must be doing something “wicked,” and if they were happy but doubting Mormonism or acting against Mormon teachings, their happiness must be untrustworthy. This caused many leavers to return to fear, transforming the affect state of happiness itself into a means of containment and control. As devout Mormons, participants believed that if they left Mormonism, they would never find happiness; but if they were unhappy within the LDS context, it was their own fault. So for them, the leaving process necessarily included a reconfiguration and reclamation of their baseline emotionality. As ex-Mormons, participants painted a stark contrast between their former emotional lives and their new emotionality. Gideon (late 30s) said his most important discovery was that “you can be happy, and you can live your own life without the convention and the structure” of the LDS Church. Emma (early 30s)

realiz[ed], like, maybe I could be happy outside of it, even though I had no role models or anyone to really know that that was the case. …the whole point of life is to be happy, so I cannot stay in Mormonism.

An added burden for women

When Aurelia (mid 30s) noted that, after she left Mormonism, she felt behind or inadequate relative to other women because she had spent her entire life devoted to Mormon patriarchy, she was pointing to a way that Mormon constructions of womanhood and femininity made women’s paths outward different from those of men. Whereas Sandorsky and Wilson (1990) found that disaffiliating women were more sensitive to variables within the religion than were men, my participants described how, by virtue of being a woman in the LDS Church, they bore an added burden on their journey. Two aspects of the day-to-day functioning of the church appeared repeatedly in women’s stories, pointing to their subordination within the church. First, they all chafed under the power men bore to make decisions that were binding and final, where women were often not even included at the table; and second, participants grated against how their lives as women were relegated off into separate organizations within the LDS Church. The women-run organizations of the LDS Church—the Relief Society, which is for adult women, the Young Women’s organization, and Primary, which is for children—caused constant cognitive and social stress as reminders of women’s subordinated status. The women I interviewed had experienced these organizations ultimately as “always controlled by men.” They were “run by women who were controlled by men” (Eliza, late 40s). Dinah (early 30s) observed how the subordination of women felt to her in women’s meetings.

I didn’t like it. I hated it. I tried to avoid it at all costs, but I can’t tell you back then exactly what it was. … But it felt—they’d go on these, like, obnoxious lists of things that they had to do and talk about their husbands as if [pause] I don’t [longer pause] they just seemed to be really stupid women.

This structural subordination led to, in the experience of the women in my study, a stark undervaluing of their lives, knowledge, thought, and work, constrained within rigid gender roles that limited women’s expectations of themselves. Having been shaped by Mormon patriarchy, these women who left Mormonism had to either reclaim or create for the first time an effective ability to trust their own intellect and their own judgment and to take action independent of their Mormon communities. Deborah (early 40s) recalled a constant message she received at church, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implied, that “Satan is trying to destroy the home. And if it collapses, it is the woman’s fault. So [women should] stay out of the work force.” Josephine (late 30s) had been raised by a mother who encouraged her to reject Mormonism’s messages about women, including the message to get married and have children young. “I was raised to be independent,” she observed, which then left her “a little out of place” in Mormon social circles. As a whole, I found that participants were describing an interplay between the internalization of their devalued position and a growing consciousness and rejection of that internalization.

These devout women who left Mormonism described their gender in a series of metaphors that I interpreted as a kind of vicious circle: the meaning of “woman” in an LDS context produced women who worked and participated constantly in the creation of Mormon families and communities but were treated as submissive, subordinate, and less-than, regardless of their own behavior, self-perception, or identity. To leave Mormonism, these devout women had to each become aware in her own way of her relationship with the Mormon construction of womanhood and how it had dominated her, particularly how she may have internalized and been complicit with that subordination. Each of these women ultimately had to consciously reject Mormon patriarchy’s subordination and rebuild a womanhood outside of or beyond their Mormon understanding of gender. For all the women I interviewed, this process took time and constant work; talking with other women who had made or were making the transition was also key for all but one of them.

One particular experience in Josephine (late 30s)’s Mormon life gives a punctuating moment revealing all of the gendered axes all the women described. For Josephine, her life as a Mormon woman came crumbling down when she was asked to organize a weeknight event for teenage girls to explore motherhood.

I decided to bring in all kinds of different mothers. I had single mothers, and I had an adoptive mother, and I had a divorced mother, and I had somebody who had lost a child, and I had—I had a grandmother. I tried to bring in a lot of different types of mothers, just to kind of give a wide range of experiences to show that there’s more than one type of mother—somebody who would just have kids, you know. The next week I was called into the bishop’s office. I will never forget how he phrased this. He said, ‘We have found it necessary to release you from your calling.’ … I just was like, “What?” And I was like, “I don’t understand.” He’s like, “Well, we just don’t feel that you are a good fit for this program.” I couldn’t—I just cried. I was just [pause] I was so hurt because I [pause] the girls loved [pause] and I got really good feedback from the girls. And the women who participated in it were so [pause] some of them were just so happy to be able to show their experiences because a lot of them felt, you know, very isolated in the church because they’re a little different …. One of the things that the bishop said to me [was] … they were worried that I was setting a bad example, because I had made all these bad choices [to work outside the home] but my life was turning out all right.

Leaving Mormonism

Leaving Mormonism required of participants a series of social disengagements—family, friendship networks, institutional obligations—as well as a retooling, often from top to bottom, of an entire worldview and way of life. And all along the way, the social and intellectual barriers that keep adherents in, which are common among high-cost religions, tripped leavers up. From the interviews, I identified three boundaries that the formerly devout had to traverse on their paths outward: from believing to unbelief, from doing (practicing) to doing something other than Mormonism, and finally from identifying to a kind of disidentification with organized religion in general. In the case of my participants, it was most often somewhere on the secular-agnostic-atheist spectrum. Through various punctuating moments as I described above, these three boundaries were traversed at different times or at the same time, or in various combinations; and more importantly, most participants crossed and retreated across one or more of the boundaries multiple times before finally moving past them. Aurelia (mid 30s) said, “I wish people understood how difficult it is to go through that process, how gut-wrenchingly difficult it is to experience that.” And Deborah (early 40s) laughed looking back: “You have to be extremely brave.” Yet Mosiah (early 30s) echoed a common sentiment among participants when he noted, “But it’s worth it—in the end.”

In my analysis, ceasing belief and ceasing practice overlapped and contradicted each other in fascinating ways. The fallow periods of readjustment I described above required leavers to recreate their Mormon selves after each punctuating experience. Echoing Brooks’s (2018) ethnographic work, my participants creatively and interactively together with other questioning or doubting Mormons worked out new ways to think about faith, “testimony,” truth, knowledge, ethics, institutional fealty, family loyalty, and identity. For most participants, they had to do this multiple times and with varying degrees of success and in various configurations before their final exit. For example, some participants continued practicing Mormonism long after they stopped believing, sometimes for years. Kathy (late 30s) called this being a MINO, Mormon in Name Only. Conversely, a few stopped practicing because of the church’s onerous participation requirements, but nonetheless still believed in some of the church’s truth-claims. Most moved back and forth between either pruning away beliefs or pruning away practices in a kind of back-and-forth process that flowed from the punctuating moments they experienced.

Unbelieving Mormonism often required an intense and focused attention on critical thinking to unwind the doctrine from reality, in what I call a reformulation of personal epistemology. That is why, for most participants, the leaving journey could be so long, often spanning many years, where they had to “gradually peel off various Mormon beliefs” to try to find the core of what they actually believed (Emma (early 30s)); or to “take Mormonism apart, piece by piece, labeling some of it ‘true’ and some of it ‘false’ (Oliver, mid 30s). Crossing the boundary into unbelief required a constant defense against the surveillance within participants’ LDS communities and families, ranging from hiding their doubts or their truth-seeking research, to conscious efforts to block the church’s doublespeak out as much as they could. Ultimately, each traversed the line into permanent unbelief. For some, this was a powerful “deconversion” moment; but for most, it was more like the final step toward intellectual balance or clarity.

Undoing Mormonism, that is, stopping the practice and communal participation of the religion, was a bit more complicated than it might seem from the outside. Leavers had to both stop their day-to-day Mormon practices and also decide whether or not to officially withdraw their names from the Church’s records. Unlike mainline American churches, which regularly purge their membership rolls based on who is attending meetings and donating time and money, the LDS Church counts you as a member of the church for life, unless you are excommunicated or officially request to be removed from the church’s rolls. This final barrier to leaving Mormonism bifurcates leaving into two parts: ceasing practice and official disaffiliation, which don’t often go together or happen at the same time for leavers. Indeed, at the time of the interviews, most participants had made complete internal and social breaks with Mormonism, that is, they had made what in most religious contexts would be a full withdrawal from the religion; but had not jumped through the hoops of the official disaffiliation process. Deborah (early 40s) describes how she realized that this extrication process was going to be very painful, so “it was very deliberate on my part to try to extricate as slowly as possible to minimize the amount of damage that it might cause me.”

Beyond the difficulties of official disaffiliation, the cessation of practice also followed the punctuated-fallow pattern. All but two participants went through what online ex-Mormon communities refer to as a “New Order Mormon” (NOM) phase, where they tried to rebalance Mormon practice with their new unbelief, often asking if it was possible to still be a Mormon without belief (all had ceased practicing altogether before I interviewed them). They described living as a NOM as exhausting, requiring too much mental, social, and personal gymnastics to get through day-to-day life among “TBMs” (true believing Mormons). I identified experimentation to be the most common method my participants used to cease practice. This was especially clear in discussions of the Word of Wisdom (Mormon health law), tithing, wearing temple garments, and the Law of Chastity. Based on personal preference, experience, curiosity, and desire, participants would pick a particular aspect of one Mormon practice to stop, and then see what happened. Nearly all participants described this experimentation process as a kind of simple relief, as the world did not end and they did not descend into misery as they sipped a whiskey, or touched their significant others under bras or belts, or didn’t wear their temple garments for a day, or went a month without tithing. These small experiments built up over time, leading to full cessation of practice for all participants, but at different speeds and with different challenges (both personal and social) along the way.

In conversation with earlier research on ex-Mormons and religious disaffiliation more generally, my study points to further directions for future study. First, drawing more generalizable conclusions would require additional studies with more participants. Relatedly, my pool was focused on English-speaking and primarily North American Mormons, raising the question of what differences there might be among leavers living in the other half of the LDS world outside of North America. Second, as McGraw et al. (2018) noted, most recent studies, including my own, rely on online community sources for their data, but do not interrogate the impact or roll of online communities per se on leaving Mormonism. Because my method was interactionist on two levels—I participated in two communities for four years, and my data came from interviews and follow-ups rather than static online text—my study differs significantly from other extant work on online ex-Mormon communities. However, I also did not seek to understand the role of the Internet or of the online communities in the leaving process. My data strongly suggest, however, that the Internet fora for ex-Mormons, particularly the two I focused on, create tight, safe, supportive, and mutually reinforcing communities that serve as “home bases” for would-be leavers as they do their work of leaving and thereby facilitate the leaving process. But such community dynamics need to be studied in their own right. Finally, although it seems clear that there are key differences between the majority of ex-Mormons who were already-marginal, and those who were “credentialed,” devout adherents, I can’t help but think that a large-scale study of formerly devout ex-Mormons could be fruitfully compared to research about leavers from other high-cost religions, such as those leaving Hasidic Judaism (Davidman 2014) or Islam (Cottee 2015). Such comparison might better illuminate the journeys of devout ex-Mormons, as well as produce a fruitful general theory of leaving high-cost religions, building on and extending Iannccone’s foundational work in the area.

In the end, I see two main through-lines in my participants’ experiences. First, leaving a high-cost religion like Mormonism, for those who are not already marginal, requires time; and over time, there is a back and forth between disillusioning moments and fallow periods of calm and new equilibrium. Second, to undo and remake oneself out of Mormonism takes real, concerted, conscious work—epistemological, moral, emotional, and gendered work. Participants had begun as devout, believing, fully “credentialed” Mormons, and had ended with a complete unbelief in Mormonism and full cessation of religious practice. They had followed a winding path that required work, experimentation, shrugging off the mindsets they had internalized as devout followers, a transformation of truth, and for women, the burden of unlearning internalized misogyny in order to arrive at permanent unbelief and undoing.

As of last contact with participants, most of them used the same word “freedom” to describe lives that now explore and try on new spiritual practices, new foods, new relationships, new communities, new causes, and pastimes. All participants but one (who later converted to an older, traditional form of Christianity) report a strong aversion to dogma and orthodoxy and have eschewed Christianity writ large. In my final contact with Deborah (now late 40s) in late 2018, she expressed surprise that in the intervening seven years, she had ceased to see herself as Mormon at all. Each participant I spoke with in 2017 and 2018 did, however, see themselves as still on a “journey,” one that they alone—not an external, institutional power—control. Each of them in some way or another insisted that they would never relinquish control of their lives to a religious institution again.