Part IV: What Survives
Chapter 13: Debunking Mormonism Is Not A Way To Live
There are things Mormonism did better than the world outside it often knows how to do. I do not say that because I want to go back, or because I think the church's claims are true. 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 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 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 am wary because I run the trick myself. Being ex-Mormon is a magnificent party trick, especially in Europe, where it makes me an instantly exotic American. I play it up for a minute — the dog loves a party — but a minute is about how long the act holds. Then my honesty becomes a letdown, because the partygoers have usually confused me with the Amish, or with whichever fundamentalist compound Netflix showed them last, and the truth is suburban: minivans, casseroles, sincere people, a normal boyhood with extra meetings. And sooner or later somebody ordinary humbles me. One kind woman was fascinated by my exotic religious childhood — until I learned her father had died when she was twelve, and my hardships shrank in my hands. A friend once heard me out on the difficulties of divorce and, reaching to connect rather than to one-up, told me about his father abandoning the family and the mother who raised him alone. Our stories were worlds apart, and not in the direction the party trick implies. Mormonism is strange, controlling in real ways, unique enough that its harms have their own texture. But unique harm is not uniquely terrible harm, and everybody at the party has a special story. Mormonism harmed people in Mormon ways. That matters. The average Mormon harm, as far as I can tell, runs close to the going rate for a childhood.
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.
What is left is to keep honest books. 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.
I keep returning to the builder's word: falsework. Falsework can hold people at heights they could not otherwise survive. But falsework is not the building. If it stays forever, it blocks the light.
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 somewhere to be known on a schedule. 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 whatever is open late.
The question is not academic in my house. I was formed by a total system. My children are being formed by whatever I have built since, plus everything that rushes in where a ward used to be. I argued earlier that children need shortcuts, and I meant it — children cannot run on discernment they have not grown yet. The church handed my parents a complete set: songs, Sundays, assigned service, a week with a shape. I do not get to hand my children nothing and call it freedom. Whatever I fail to build, the feed will build for them, and the feed does not love them.
So my reconstruction has a deadline. Not a book deadline — a childhood. My children will not learn what I believe by reading my arguments. They will read the shape of our weeks: what gets sung, what gets repaired, who gets visited, what their father does when nothing makes him. If the only inheritance I interrupt is the false one, I have done half the job. The other half is having something true enough, and regular enough, to hand them.
Modern secular life is better than Mormonism the way a hotel is better than a childhood home: more open, more options, nobody inspecting your nightstand. It is also worse the way a hotel is worse: nobody knows you, nothing is your chore, and everyone is checking out soon.
The hotel is no argument for returning to false belief. It is an argument for building homes. 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 inventive force 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 anyone serious about moral invention should notice that religion is the most successful instrument of it the species has built. It does not have to be superstitious to do that work again.
I do not want old belief back. 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?"