Part IV: What Survives
Chapter 15: A Serious Life Without False Certainty
For a long time, I wanted certainty to arrive and settle things. Mormonism trained me to expect that. Faith could precede knowledge, questions could remain for a while, but the arc pointed toward certainty. If I studied, prayed, obeyed, served, and endured, the pieces would come together. The borrowed confidence would be repaid. The testimony would become solid. The mind would kneel and the soul would rest.
That is not what happened. The confidence never really arrived. I live with less certainty than I once performed.
That is a loss. There is difficulty in not knowing, in losing a world where death had an answer, family had an eternal mechanism, suffering had a plan, and the right men could tell you what mattered most. But there is also peace: the peace of no longer overstating what I know, no longer forcing every good feeling to become evidence, and no longer treating openness as failure.
This is the hope I want to hold: not cheerful certainty, not ex-Mormon triumph, not a promise that life after church is simple, healed, rational, and free. There are some things I liked better about myself when I was Mormon. I parted with money happily, as a habit, for causes that were at least trying to be good. I helped people move. I visited the old and the sick. I sat in rooms with ordinary men I had not chosen and worked at loving them, and we talked about how to be better husbands and fathers. Nothing stops me from doing any of that now except that nothing makes me. People need pressure to be great, and I have not yet rebuilt mine.
Life outside Mormonism still contains divorce, loneliness, money, and aging — the ordinary difficulty of being human. It also contains new authorities, orthodoxies, temptations, and ways to surrender conscience while feeling sophisticated.
Leaving can feel like being born again: terrifying, exciting, exposed, alive. That is not only a metaphor. Leaving religion can become a religious experience of its own, complete with conversion, testimony, saints, villains, scriptures, fellowship, and the intoxicating feeling that the world has finally become legible. That is one reason to be careful. A person can lose one false solution and immediately join the emotional structure of another. But the experience is still real. False solutions are costly because they ask people to pay with honesty, and leaving one can open the possibility of building a truer form of life. The work is less lonely than it first appears. There are impressive, generous, serious people living without the old framework, and finding them is part of the new birth.
I am glad I left, and I would encourage anyone to leave — not because leaving fixes a life, but because honesty is a better foundation to suffer on. The church has a phrase for finishing a calling well: honorably released. That is how I have come to think of it. Not escaped, not lapsed, not lost — released, with the work complete enough to leave, and thanks owed in both directions. I do not want to spend the rest of my life merely having left. Leaving asked what was false. Living afterward asks what can still be built, what disciplines still matter, what warnings were clumsy but real, and what forms of life can help people become good.
Leaving Mormonism was more like a breakup than a completed philosophy. You can need to leave a relationship before you have found a better one. That does not make the leaving wrong. It does mean loneliness, confusion, and longing are not arguments for returning. They are signs that the next form of life has not yet been built.
So what survives? Family survives, without the totalizing script. Agency survives, as adult discernment rather than supervised obedience. Restraint survives, without taboo. Ritual survives, if rebuilt without false claims. Music survives, even when the old words no longer mean the same thing. Transcendence survives, not as cosmic promotion, but as responsibility for other beings' experience. Faith may survive too, if faith means trustful action under uncertainty rather than counterfeit knowledge.
I do not know what God is. I do not know what death does to love. I do not know whether prayer reaches anything beyond the one who prays. I do not know what final justice exists, if any. I do not know how much of the desire for eternity is revelation and how much is the human refusal to let beauty vanish. I do not know. But I know some smaller things, and they are not small.
Children need safety. Families need truth. Institutions need limits. Desire needs discernment. Grief needs dignity. Beauty needs making. Doubt needs room. Love needs practice.
Maybe Mormonism taught me to want too much certainty. It also taught me to want a serious life. I am trying to keep the seriousness and give back the certainty. That may be the work after Mormonism: to live without old guarantees and still refuse a small life, to admit what we do not know and still build, to recover wisdom without pretending the old authority was valid, to love without metaphysical insurance, and to make homes, songs, friendships, rituals, and forms of care that do not require us to lie. The church was wrong about many things. It was also reaching for some of the best things. My task now is to separate those as honestly as I can, imperfectly and without certainty, but still with hope.