Chapter 7: Nobody's New Brethren

Six months after I announced my disbelief publicly, an old mission friend wrote to me. He had read my post, then read the history for himself, and now he and his wife were on their way out of the church. Then he said the sentence that has weighed on me since: your post gave me permission to have doubts. I had always viewed you as being very faithful. If you could have doubts, so could I. 0

I did not set out to take anyone with me. I wrote my post to stop lying by omission, not to recruit. But intention does not control consequence, and I knew that when I pressed publish. I had been a zone leader, a returned missionary, a good kid. My faith was other people's evidence. When the evidence changed sides, the people leaning on it felt the floor move. 0

Permission is a strange kind of power. The church organized whole lives around granting and withholding it, and I had just discovered I could issue it without meaning to, without office, without even knowing who was reading. There is no resigning from that. The only question is what kind of permission you give. 0

Another friend had come to me earlier, before I said anything publicly. He had heard secondhand that I had doubts, and secondhand was enough: he confided his own and asked how to tell his wife. When my post finally went up, he wrote something I have thought about ever since: that he was not converting to a different belief, that he had swapped the comforting surety of belief for the uncomfortable acknowledgment that we simply don't know, that losing the sense of belonging was hard, but that this felt more true. A year later he told me he had spent the time considering his morals in the vacuum of an absolute answer and was at peace. 0

Reading that, I felt something I had no right to feel and felt anyway: relief. He had not borrowed my conclusions. He had traded certainty for honest uncertainty and paid the cost in belonging without asking anyone to refund it. He left like an adult. 0

Not everyone leaves that way. Some people leave the way they stayed: all at once, and certain. I understand the temptation to celebrate every exit as a win for truth. But I have read my own chapters. If a person leaves the church because my confidence replaced the brethren's, nothing important has changed. The channel changed. The habit survived. My post becomes the new testimony, borne in the same voice, trusted the same way, deserving the same scrutiny it will probably not receive. 0

So what do I owe the people my honesty unsettles? The believing answer is silence: keep your doubts to yourself, protect the faith of the weak. That is the church's answer, loyalty over honesty, and I have already refused it once at greater cost. But the opposite answer — that I owe nothing, that adults own their own conclusions — is too cheap. It is what the peanut gallery tells itself while it performs certainty for the algorithm. I knew my post carried weight. Pretending otherwise would be one more way of refusing to know what I know. 0

What I owe, I think, is the difference between tools and verdicts. Here is what I read. Here is what persuaded me, and how slowly. Here is what I still do not know, and what I got wrong along the way. Doubt me too — especially me, because I sound sure and write well, and those are exactly the qualities that fooled us the first time. 0

The church trained us to follow the confident man. The last thing I want to be is the next one. If my leaving gives anyone permission, let it be permission to reach their own verdict at their own speed, including a verdict against mine. I am trying to be nobody's new brethren. 0