Prologue: What I Miss About Mormonism
The churches I wrote to about playing never wrote back.
I was not trying to rejoin Christianity. I was trying to find somewhere to put the part of me that still knew what to do with hymns. I no longer trusted the authority structure, the history, the testimony language, or the institutional habits that had once framed reality for me. But I had grown up playing church music, and after leaving I discovered that no other room knew what to do with that part of me either.
I was already playing more than I ever had as a believer. That was the strange part — the music had not dried up; it had only changed rooms. Now it came at night, for strangers with drinks in their hands. There was real mercy in being impressive to people who did not know me, and some of it was wonderful. But people wander into a bar not knowing what they came for, which makes them more honest, and harder to move. None of it was church. What I missed was quieter: playing in daylight for sober people, where my children could see me do it. The congregation probably did judge my playing, but they were warm about it even when I was bad, and they came to a hymn already wanting to feel something — which is most of how feeling something works. Their faith made the music real. Leaving Mormonism had not made the goods Mormonism organized easy to find elsewhere. I missed more than music. I missed a week with a shape, a community that expected me to show up, a reason to serve people I had not chosen, a language for responsibility, and a place where music was shared ritual rather than taste. Something I no longer believed had solved problems the wider world does not solve automatically.
Builders have a word for a temporary structure that holds an arch until the arch can bear its own weight: falsework. False, load-bearing, and meant to come down. That is the closest I have come to understanding Mormonism.
Mormonism is not true. Its core claims are lies and exaggerations. Its institutional self-protection has done real damage. Its testimony culture trained sincere people to overstate what they knew. Its loyalty too often outran honesty. But a false structure can still hold real weight. The church pointed at loneliness, drift, selfishness, family collapse, appetite, guilt, moral seriousness, and the hunger to make ordinary life sacred. It answered those problems with too much certainty, too much control, and too much institutional self-regard. But the problems were real.
Some people were hurt by Mormonism so badly that any attempt to salvage wisdom from it will sound like an insult. I do not write over those stories. I am writing from a different wound, and toward a different problem: what to do when the church was false, harmful, useful, beautiful, and not enough.
It is satisfying, after leaving a religion, to describe the whole thing as a cage. There is truth in that. The church lied. It overreached. It trained people to confuse loyalty with integrity and confidence with knowledge. But religions are not only cages. They are systems for surviving a brutal world. At their best, they give the week a pulse and turn private difficulty into shared obligations: songs, meals, blessings, visits, chairs to stack, people who notice when you stop showing up.
When you leave, you do not only lose beliefs. You walk out from under something that was carrying more than you knew. Some of what it held never should have been there. Some of it was yours to learn to carry. This is where a lot of ex-Mormon common wisdom lets people down. It tells the truth about the church's flaws and underestimates how bad the alternatives can be. It is not hard to find people more dishonest, cruel, shallow, appetite-captured, or tribal than ordinary Mormons. The world outside the church is larger and freer. It is not wiser by default. Many people leave the frying pan and walk, understandably and sometimes triumphantly, toward a fire they have not yet learned to smell.
The first danger is staying in a false structure because it still holds you up. The second is kicking it down before you have learned how weight is held. After control, many noes are necessary. The mistake is treating every no as wisdom. Family can be overpraised by a church and still matter. Alcohol can be moralized against and still deserve caution. Sex can be fenced with bad theology and still carry consequences. Authority can be abused and still leave us needing teachers, vows, and shared standards. The question is not whether Mormonism touched a thing. The question is whether that thing is true, useful, beautiful, dangerous, or worth rebuilding under better terms.
I am not interested in proving that life outside Mormonism is happier. I am interested in whether it can become truer, braver, more loving, and sturdier than the thing it replaced. There are better ways to live than Mormon, but we are far from guaranteed to find them. This book is about the work after the exit: learning what can come down, what was actually holding it up, and how to become load-bearing without lying.