Part IV: What Survives
Chapter 12: Debunking Is Not A Home
There are things Mormonism did better than the world outside it often knows how to do. I do not say that because I think it is true or because I want to go back. I say it because life inside it had structures that are hard to replace, and much of the wider culture is worse at forming people than it thinks.
Music is the easiest to name. I grew up where ordinary people sang together. Not always well, but they sang. They gathered in plain rooms and gave familiar songs another week of life. Outside religion, music often becomes performance, consumption, skill, taste, identity, or background. Church music had a different function. It bound time, memory, doctrine, and community into a repeated act. It made the week feel shaped, and a shaped week is not trivial.
Mormon life, at its best, created safety and charm secular life often fails to reproduce. A ward could feel like a small protected world: shared language, predictable gathering, unglamorous service, and ordinary people participating in something morally serious even when they were only moving chairs or delivering food.
Of course, the safety was not equally safe for everyone. The same world that felt warm to some felt suffocating to others. The same shared language that created belonging could enforce conformity. The same moral seriousness could become surveillance. The same music could hold or trap, depending on what the songs protected.
Habitats shelter and shape. They make life possible in one form while making other forms harder. They create identity and limit imagination. They can be useful and still not be free. Leaving religion is not only updating beliefs. It is losing a technology for getting through life.
If Mormonism had only been false, leaving would be simpler. If it had only been harmful, the lesson would be easier. But it was functional enough that leaving it can expose how little else is ready to take its place. Former religious people sometimes flatten their past because they fear that admitting usefulness will weaken criticism. I think the opposite is true. Criticism becomes more credible when it tells the truth about what worked.
This is why I am wary of the casual party version of ex-Mormonism, the kind that drops "I was raised in a cult" and lets the phrase do all the work. I understand the impulse. Mormonism is strange, controlling in real ways, and unique enough that its harms have their own texture. But unique harm is not uniquely terrible harm. Everyone is damaged by something: family, class, nation, school, market, war, politics, religion, loneliness. Mormonism harmed people in Mormon ways. That matters. But the average Mormon harm, as far as I can tell, is not obviously worse than the average damage produced by many other ways of being raised.
It may even have rescued some of the people before me. For ancestors raised in poverty, stifling churches, narrow villages, old hierarchies, and lives already mostly assigned, Mormonism could be a breath of fresh air. It offered movement, adventure, covenant, migration, land, community, purpose, and a world-historical story. I do not have to believe the story was true to see why it might have worked. Who am I to say Mormonism did not give them more freedom than the world they left?
That changes how I imagine the pioneers. I do not picture them only as the people whose tradition I had to escape. In some ways, I am doing something recognizable to them. Leaving home, disappointing family, trusting a frightening inner summons, choosing an uncertain future over an inherited one: those are not anti-pioneer acts. They are pioneer acts. Maybe some ancestors would be scandalized by me. Maybe some would understand exactly.
The mature task is accurate accounting. The rhythm helped, and I do not want the authority back. The singing mattered, and I do not believe the songs the same way. The ward could be warm and cruel. The inherited sacredness of time formed me, but I will not buy it again with false certainty.
The best metaphor I have for Mormonism now is scaffolding. Scaffolding can help people reach heights they could not otherwise reach. It can stabilize dangerous work, teach habits, create temporary order, and make a half-built life less exposed to weather. But scaffolding is not the building. If it stays forever, it blocks the light. Eventually, if the building is going to become itself, the scaffolding has to come down and be replaced by something stronger, more honest, and more fully inhabited.
One of Joseph Smith's best lines points that way, even if he could not live up to its best meaning. He once said that if the Saints went to hell, they would turn the devils out of doors and make a heaven of it. I love that line. It is reckless and grandiose, and in Joseph's mouth it carries all the danger of a man who too easily confused his society with God's purposes. But it also contains a real religious insight: heaven is not only a place you are assigned. It is something a people can make together, or fail to make, by the society they create.
Brad Wilcox put a gentler version of the same Mormon insight this way: "No, we are not earning heaven. We are learning heaven. We are preparing for it. We are practicing for it." I do not accept all the theology around that sentence, but the sentence is beautiful. Heaven is not just a reward for passing the test. It is a form of life. If people arrive selfish, cruel, incurious, or unable to love, no external assignment can make it heavenly. The question is not only how to get into heaven. It is how to become the sort of people who know how to make one.
That points to the hardest post-Mormon question: what replaces the habitat? Debunking cannot answer it. History podcasts cannot answer it. Anger cannot answer it. Even therapy cannot entirely answer it. Human beings need repeated forms of belonging and meaning. They need communities that can hold ordinary life across time: children, meals, aging, loneliness, celebration, failure, illness, repair. If those needs are not met well, they will be met badly by politics, consumption, status, romance, work, substances, or whatever community happens to be available.
Modern secular life is better than Mormonism in many ways: more open, more honest about plurality, less governed by priesthood claims, less likely to make one domestic template into the plan of salvation. It can also be thinner, harsher, lonelier, and less serious than it imagines itself to be.
That thinness is not an argument for returning to false belief. It is an argument for building better forms of life after belief. For a long time, Christianity was not merely superstition. It was a revolutionary moral achievement. It helped make weakness visible, dignity less dependent on status, forgiveness more imaginable, and care for the vulnerable more central. I do not think Christianity is the innovative force for good it once was, at least not in the forms I know best. Too often it protects inherited answers more than it discovers new moral possibilities. But moral geniuses should not discount religion as an instrument of moral invention. Religion has done that work before. It does not have to be superstitious to do it again.
I do not want old belief back. I want communities warm without coercion, rituals meaningful without pretending to be guaranteed by heaven, moral language serious without surveillance, and music that gathers people without requiring them to say what they do not know.
If I knew how, I might start a religion. I do not mean a new metaphysical system, priesthood, or set of men authorized to speak for God. I mean a community brave enough to stand for goodness without pretending to possess certainty. A religion without superstition, but not without faith. Agnostic about the hidden architecture of the universe, but not agnostic about whether human beings should become more honest, disciplined, loving, repentant, and alive.
I would want music at the center. Not performance as display, but singing as shared seriousness. I would want a Sunday gathering where people could admit human frailty without congratulating one another for having no standards; where repentance was not humiliation, but also not optional; where forgiveness mattered because people really do harm each other; where sacrifice was sometimes asked for because goodness is not only a mood. A religion that only reassures sinners that nothing is wrong with them is not brave enough. A religion that only condemns them is not true enough. I want the harder thing: a community that can say, with love, you are good, and you are not finished.
The question after Mormonism is not only "What was false?" It is also "What worked, what was wise, and how do we rebuild it without lying?"