Part II: What Broke
Chapter 7: The Dog Comes On Every Walk
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.
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.
And here is what the humble version of this chapter would hide: I loved it. For a few days after the announcement I was addicted to the notification bell. Every chime meant I existed a little harder — someone shaken, someone grateful, someone furious, and all of it attention, all of it evidence that I was consequential. I like dunking on the church as much as anybody, even if I mostly did it in group chats and let the public posts stay respectable. The dunking voice, I eventually noticed, is testimony voice with the polarity reversed: same cadence, same confidence, same pause before the line you already know will land, same little reward waiting at the end. The church trained the performer. The performer survived the faith.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The church had a name for the part of me that loves the bell: the natural man, an enemy to God, to be put off. I no longer believe in the enemy. The natural man is not a demon. He is a dog. He likes treats — applause, victory, the chime that says you matter — and I do not fault him for any of it; he came with the animal, and the animal is good. But the divine part of me, the part Mormonism was right to insist on, has agency. I can act for noble reasons even when the carnal collects a treat on the same errand. The dog comes on every walk. The only questions are who holds the leash and who picks the direction.
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.
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 will not pretend the trying is grim — the bell still tastes like sugar, and the dog still hopes. What I am after is smaller and harder than purity: to enjoy the attention without needing it, and never to let the dog write the sermon. The dog comes on every walk. The work is learning who holds the leash.