“I don’t know any little old ladies,” Chris Hanna observes about stepping away from religious participation 20 years ago. “And I don’t know kids or teenagers whose lives I can celebrate and contribute to as they grow.”
Lack of what he calls “the forced familial relationships of a ward” doesn’t mean he’s without friends. “But it leaves a community gap when I only hang out with who I want,” he says, “not people who differ in interests, ages and in other ways.”
Not everyone who leaves behind their faith in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does so with the confidence described in a recent Wall Street Journal piece about former church members waging “a TikTok war against the Mormon Church.” While the article offers up the trope of the devout clinging to simplistic belief, the ex-member side also comes across as simplistic in their unbelief. No more questions or wrestling with doubt. Just the relief of a deconstructed religious worldview.
Not so fast, say Hanna and others who’ve gone down the secular road and discovered that other questions, along with unforeseen challenges, arise.
Hanna has friends, a graduate degree, a successful job and a girlfriend. But with loss of faith comes difficulty finding meaning and transcendence, a sometimes challenging search for community, and forfeited opportunities.
Perspectives from several former members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints offer honesty and nuance to the often oversimplified social media declaration that “I’ve never been happier” since leaving the church. While they may not embrace the truth claims of believing Latter-day Saints, they recognize that separation from religious commitments and belief systems comes with very real trade-offs.
Transcendence, meaning and moral compass
Lauren Jackson, a New York Times writer and former Latter-day Saint, recently authored an article titled “Americans Haven’t Found a Satisfying Alternative to Religion.” In it, she describes how, in a small Latter-day Saint chapel by an Arkansas freeway, she grew up knowing “the potency of believing, really believing, that I had a certain place in the cosmos. That I was eternally loved. That life made sense. Or that it would, one day, for sure.”
Jackson goes on to explain the ways in which she and many Americans born, like her, in the mid-90s “became part of the mass exodus from Christianity.” Jackson’s secular university played a part, as did “being steeped in secularism for a decade” that changed her beliefs and led her to see what she calls the “constraints and even danger of religion.” Still, she delves into the three B’s sociologists attribute to religious practice — belief, belonging and behaviors – and, through research, data and interviews, sums up how it’s going for those trying to live without God.
“There is overwhelming empirical support for the value of being at a house of worship on a regular basis on all kinds of metrics — mental health, physical health, having more friends, being less lonely,” Jackson quotes researcher Ryan Burge summarizing. And she also brings in her own attempts to compensate for loss of faith: worshiping at the altar of work, implementing well-being ideas, volunteering, working out, therapy, meditation, philosophy books.
But still, she writes, “Nothing has felt quite like that chapel in Arkansas.”
Hanna and some of his former Latter-day Saint friends have undergone an interesting trajectory from, early on, considering religion maladaptive, then moving on to what he calls “philosopher William James’ perspective that religion is not only adaptive, but pretty crucial.”
As a group, Hanna says, “we often ponder questions like what is lost when you see the world only as a material resource, or see ourselves as just synapses firing with no agency, our actions predetermined?”
Though no longer a believer, Hanna became concerned over what he saw happening in ex-Latter-day Saint forums.
“People bought into the idea that truth and reality are based on subjective personal interpretations,” he said. “They would parrot nihilistic ideas they didn’t realize came from Foucault and other morally relativistic philosophers, not knowing where these postmodern ideas originated from or the morally compromised places they’ve led to.”
Hanna also remains aware of what Columbia psychology professor Lisa Miller calls our innate wiring for transcendence and meaning.
“People can’t stop thinking transcendentally even if they don’t want to,” he said. “I can think we are just our bodies and chemical reactions, but I will still look up and see a soul in the person I next talk to.”
For Marti (who asked that her last name not be used), finding meaning and purpose after stepping away from her Latter-day Saint faith consists of “just trying to become the best version of myself, trying to make incremental improvements,” she says.
Avoiding self-deception, she explains, is a critical component of her worldview.
“I’m not sure if that came from my Latter-day Saint background or if it’s a personality trait,” she wonders, “but I am accountable to my husband and family and have an intense desire to be honest.”
Moral accountability is another aspect of religious participation Jackson writes about in articles like “The Psychological Value of Repentance,” where she says, “every major world religion has a process for moral accounting. That’s something we rarely talk about in secular society.” Confessing sins can lead to reduced depression and anxiety as well as increased self-esteem and motivation to change.
When you step away from religion, former Latter-day Saint Jonathan Streeter cautions in online forums and podcasts, be careful not to abandon values and moral framework.
“Science gives you abilities, but not values,” he said. Referring to Christian philosopher G.K. Chesterton’s fence analogy, Streeter says that “when you see a fence, it’s there for a reason, and if you tear it down, you may end up endangering yourself.”
A collaboration with Latter-day Saint hosts of Ward Radio, a faithful, light-hearted show by several members of the church, ended up being titled “Good things ex-Mormons tend to abandon that they shouldn’t,” with Streeter suggesting those who leave think seriously about retaining three Latter-day Saint beliefs: universal humanity (seeing everyone as a child of God), seeking the good as summed up in the 13th Article of Faith (being honest, benevolent and doing good to all men), and practicing forgiveness and grace.
Streeter’s respect for religious concepts like forgiveness and grace recalls another philosopher, Francis Bacon, who once observed that “a little philosophy inclineth a man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”
However, Streeter makes a case that you can be philosophically grounded in moral frameworks, even if you’re unsure spiritually. In different ways, they provide a buffer, he says, “to being overcome by prevailing societal ideas that lead to moral erosion.”
Community and belonging
While adapting a new moral framework seems more challenging for some than others, this particular group of former Latter-day Saints agrees that loss of community posed, and continues to pose, a particularly painful adjustment. Jokes, novels, films and memoirs deal with the pressure, conflicts and annoyances inherent in religious communities — whose members and leaders are, after all, flawed and human. But those communities, especially Latter-day Saints with members serving together to run their local congregations, also offer a sense of belonging hard to replicate elsewhere.
“I miss what I had,” writes Jackson in The New York Times. “In leaving the church, I lost access to a community that cut across age and class. I lost opportunities to support that community in ways that are inconvenient and extraordinary — when the baby arrives, the moving truck comes or grief overwhelms.”
Hanna agrees that it’s not just what he got out of the community that’s missing, but the ways in which he’s been unable to contribute. Recently he ran into an older woman at Costco from the ward he grew up in: “She knew all the beats of my life as a youngster, recounting stories about me as if she were telling me my own story.”
Hanna began thinking about “the larger family behind me I hadn’t appreciated — older members cheering me on from the rafters, a nest system.” And he misses not only their gifts, but also “the loss of not returning the favor to others, to be able to mentor and help the next generation.”
“There’s a gap,” he said, “when my connections are atomized and preference-based.”
When he went to his friend’s ward in Saratoga Springs, Utah, the first time back to a Latter-day Saint church in 20 years, Hanna noticed that his friend “didn’t just know his neighbors, but knew them well — their lives, struggles and joys,” he says. He’s learned “not just from isolated cases, but from personal experience across decades,” that “other communities have a hard time being as cohesive” as the Church of Jesus Christ.
Marti feels the lack of “my family and kids having automatic acquaintances from various age groups.” She has worked hard to get to know her neighbors,” she says, “but I could have met half of them by just going to church. It’s way easier.”
For Streeter, church communities offer cohesion and stability, living out values that “have stood the test of time.” Religious communities offer what he calls a “moral foundation against which members can test outside ideas, instead of embracing societal values that may end up being destructive.”
But replacing the sense of communal loss is complicated. Former Latter-day Saints often try out other churches, which Marti and her family did, but the poor timing of the pandemic, she says, “made that search terrible.”
While Marti remains curious and open about other faiths, her limited exploration nevertheless left her with a perceptive insight that makes her quest what she calls a catch-22: “Either a church has core beliefs that make it something I envy, but can’t get on board with, or they are so loose with their claims that I might justify participation — but it just turns into political activism.”
Hanna has tried Latter-day Saint intellectual groups that don’t expect belief or consensus, but came to the conclusion that “the benefits of religion arise from true belief. Leaders must have genuine belief and there’s no substitute for that.”
He’s tried Bible study, but “it devolved into constant proof-texting that they were correct and became very dull,” he says. “I also regularly attended Catholic Mass with a former girlfriend, but never formed a single acquaintance with anyone.”
Jackson writes that she tried out a group called Sunday Assembly in which “I sat in the back and watched people sing pop songs by Miley Cyrus and Adele instead of hymns and give talks about morality.” Afterward, she socialized over cookies and discovered those attending had all left religion behind and were attempting to form new communities — yet, she observes, “none of us became regulars.”
Opportunity costs
Jackson admits that her secular beliefs and values currently make it impossible to return to a religion that gave her answers about “planets, galaxies, eternity.” On a more superficial level, she enjoys “the small vices (tea, wine, buying flowers on the sabbath) that were once off limits to me.” Nevertheless, her New York Times piece hunkers down on the losses involved in well-being for those who don’t practice.
The actively religious are happier, healthier, less likely to be depressed or to die by suicide, alcoholism, cancer, cardiovascular illness or other causes. They are also more likely to feel gratitude, spiritual peace and a connection with humanity, a particularly important point, Jackson highlights, considering that “positive relationships are the single most important predictor of well-being, according to the longest running study on human happiness in the world.”
For Hanna, the losses are more personal. “When I left the church two decades ago, I made a trade-off I’m honest about. I have no kids. I didn’t mean for that to happen.”
Streeter has raised a family first in, then out of the church.
“Yes, there’s a great deal of freedom and you lose a lot of pressure when religion goes away,” he says. “But you don’t have the same guardrails for your kids or peer environment surrounding them.”
Instead of thinking of your life as “a snapshot,” observes Streeter, Latter-day Saint belief gives a sense of intergenerational connection. “It’s not so much an oppressive chain of control,” he says, “as it is a strength, a link that brings things valuable, cherished and dear” into not just the life of an individual, but into his or her family and descendants.
Hanna sometimes daydreams “about a way I could participate if there could be respectful acceptance of my pace and place,” hastening to add that “I’m not there to twist the tradition to my politics, and think the church needs to be wary of those who come back to reshape it.”
Still, it’s hard for those without spiritual imperatives or sacred manifestations to think of returning. C.S. Lewis wrote of two sisters, one of whom could see the palace on the mountain that housed a god, the other of whom caught a brief vision, then could no longer see the castle and doubted its existence.
While Hanna, at this point, just can’t see the castle, he’s disillusioned with postmodernism and found solace in the recent general conference talk of President Dallin H. Oaks.
“He seems like he knows what’s happening in the world and how to combat it,” Hanna reflects. “Turning the heart to the Father, telling everyone to touch grass and get more familial. Who knows? Maybe coming back could be in the cards.”