Part I: Inside Belief
Chapter 1: The Problem With "I Know"
Some time after I stepped away from the church, an old religious leader wrote to me. He had known me when I was younger, more obedient, more publicly certain. He had heard me bear testimony. He remembered a version of me who could stand in front of people and say the words Mormons are trained to say. He asked, gently but pointedly, whether I could still feel what I had once felt.
The question assumed that what I once had was clear and firm. If I no longer stood where I had stood, then something had happened to me. I had drifted, hardened, sinned, forgotten, rebelled, or failed to keep alive what I already knew. I understood why he asked it that way. That was not how it felt from the inside.
Even as a missionary, I was never fully comfortable saying "I know." I was not pretending in the simple sense. I prayed. I worked. I studied. I wanted to be good and useful. I had experiences I interpreted as spiritual. I felt hope, loyalty, tenderness toward God, or toward what I thought was God. But the word "know" felt too large.
In Mormon life, "I know" is the approved grammar of belonging. Children learn it before they can understand knowledge. Teenagers say it because that is what a testimony sounds like. Missionaries say it because hesitation feels like weakness. Adults say it because the community is built around the sound of people saying it together. I said it too, and something in me often tightened.
For a long time I thought Mormon testimony culture simply asked people to believe too much. I no longer think that is the best criticism. One of the best things religion does is ask people to publicly believe in aspirational things that cannot be proven in advance. A community that never asks anyone to stand up for possible goods will not become good at building them.
I believe human beings are good and valuable, as good as any other creature, despite our capacity for stupidity, cruelty, and self-deception. I believe love is real. I believe children deserve safety. I believe families can become places of repair instead of domination. I believe humanity may be headed, painfully and unevenly, toward something better. I do not know any of that the way I know a table is in a room. But I want to live among people who say such things aloud because saying them makes us responsible for making them truer.
That is what testimony could have been.
The problem with Mormon testimony was not faith. The problem was that it converted faith into knowledge, then converted that claimed knowledge into institutional loyalty. "I have faith that love is worth organizing a life around" became "I know the church is true." "I trust that goodness is worth serving" became "I know Joseph Smith was a prophet." "I want to belong to a people trying to become holy" became "I know these men speak for God." A real human need was identified, and the institution overclaimed ownership of it.
Yuval Noah Harari makes a useful distinction in his discussion of the U.S. Constitution. He calls it an "extremely creative legal fiction" and contrasts its opening "We the People" with traditions that pretend their rules came down from heaven.[^harari-nexus] The Constitution is powerful partly because people publicly commit themselves to it, but it also admits its human origin. A human-authored order can be amended. It can repent. It can discover that its promises were too narrow and try to widen them.
That seems close to the faith I can still defend: not a fiction pretending to be the universe, but a human-authored commitment to possible goods. We the people declare that human beings have dignity, that love is worth practicing, that children should be protected, that cruelty should be resisted, that truth should correct power, that our community should help people become more honest, generous, and alive. None of those declarations becomes true automatically. But public vows can help create the world they name.
Mormon testimony came close to that power. It gave ordinary people a ritual for naming what mattered. It trained children to hear adults speak reverently about goodness. It made private aspiration social. I do not want to lose that practice merely because Mormonism corrupted it.
A healthy testimony would preserve the difference between aspiration and fact. It would say what we are trying to make true, what we are willing to be corrected by, and what goods we will serve together. Mormon testimony too often teaches people to call aspiration knowledge, treat strong feeling as evidence, and hand the resulting certainty to an institution that has not earned it.
That habit trains people to confuse moral seriousness with epistemic exaggeration. It treats "I hope," "I trust," "I am trying," and "I commit" as weaker than "I know," even when those humbler phrases are more truthful and more useful.
I wish Mormonism had taught me to say: I have faith that love is real, and I want to become the sort of person who makes that faith credible. I have faith that human beings are worth saving from contempt, including my own. I have faith that truth matters more than institutional preservation. I have faith that goodness becomes more real when people publicly bind themselves to it.
That would still be testimony. It might be stronger testimony because it would ask more than confidence. It would ask for participation.
The old leader's question stayed with me because it touched something real. I had felt redeeming love, or something I called that. I had felt awe, gratitude, moral aspiration, and the desire to be clean. Those experiences did not vanish when my beliefs changed. They also did not add up to knowledge that the church is true.
I used to think faith meant speaking as if certainty had arrived. Now I think faith is public loyalty to goods that remain unfinished. The problem with "I know" is not that it is too serious. It is not serious enough about the difference between what we can prove, what we hope, and what we are trying to make true together.
[^harari-nexus]: Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, discussion of the U.S. Constitution as a human-made legal fiction and amendable social order. Source checked via available PDF excerpt.