Part I: Inside Belief
Chapter 3: The Shortcut Around Judgment
Before I stopped believing in Mormon authority, I wrote a paper defending law. God's laws, I said in effect, make agency possible. Choices matter because consequences are real. Zion could not be coerced. The gospel was the recipe for exaltation, and obedience was part of learning to live like God.
I would not write it that way now, but the younger version of me had hold of something. Freedom is not the absence of structure. A person moved only by appetite, fear, resentment, fashion, or imitation is not free in any serious sense. Agency requires contact with reality: what choices do, what they cost, what they make possible, and what kind of person they make easier to become. Mormonism understood part of that.
Its contradiction is that it talked constantly about agency while often preventing people from developing it.
Agency was everywhere: the purpose of mortality, the difference between God's plan and Satan's, the reason evil had to be allowed. But in ordinary Mormon life, agency often meant choosing the answer already marked correct. Choose freely, but understand that there is one righteous choice and many ways to disappoint God.
That kind of freedom can produce morally earnest and psychologically underdeveloped people. I was one of them. I knew how to care about righteousness before I knew how to deliberate like an adult. I knew how to keep a rule before I knew what the rule was protecting.
This is one of Mormonism's most effective shortcuts. It gets people to do ethical things before they have developed ethical judgment. Sometimes that is useful. Children need shortcuts. Communities need expectations. A young person can be spared real harm by rules he does not yet understand. A culture that teaches fidelity, sobriety, service, family responsibility, and restraint will produce real goods, even when its explanations are false.
But shortcuts become costly when they become the whole moral system. If the reason not to betray someone is that God forbids it, you may never fully learn what betrayal does. If the reason not to drink carelessly is that righteous people abstain, you may never learn how alcohol interacts with loneliness, status, desire, grief, and self-deception. If the reason to serve is discipleship, you may never notice when service becomes avoidance, performance, or control. The behavior may look ethical. The person inside it may still be borrowing the ethic.
This helps explain why some former Mormons become excessive after leaving. Some drink too much, disclose too much, experiment too quickly, trust liberation stories too easily, or make identities out of transgression. Believers see this and think the church was vindicated.
I think it often proves something else: the church was protective in a way that delayed maturity. If you keep people in narrow lanes long enough, open space will feel like revelation. If you teach rules without the goods underneath them, the collapse of authority can make the goods look disposable too. If obedience substitutes for judgment, do not be surprised when people lose obedience and find that judgment has not fully grown.
Mormonism often imagines itself as the hard way. Obedience can be hard. Missions, tithing, chastity, callings, family duty, and small daily disciplines are not nothing. But obedience is also easy. It can spare a person from asking why a rule matters, when it fails, what good it protects, what harm it causes, and what kind of person can be trusted with freedom. That harder work is slow, revisable, and often learned through pain.
Hard-won ethics are different from inherited rules. A hard-won ethic is a form of perception. You come to see what fidelity protects, why some pleasures are not worth the bill they hand to your future self, why family bonds are not infinitely elastic, why appetite is a poor sovereign, why honesty without care can become cruelty, and why care without honesty becomes manipulation. No institution can simply hand you that. At best, a community helps you practice until the wisdom becomes partly your own.
That is the standard by which I now judge law. A good law increases agency over time. It protects beginners without keeping them beginners forever. A bad law consumes agency while praising it. It narrows the world, calls the narrowness safety, and treats the person's inexperience as evidence that the world is too dangerous for freedom.
Consequence is real. Commandment may or may not be. The fact that a choice has moral weight does not mean a church owns the explanation. A person can be right about a danger and wrong about the cause, remedy, authority, exceptions, and tone.
After leaving, I did not need a life without law. I needed better law: a way to stay close to consequence without pretending every consequence had already been interpreted for me. What does this choice do to my honesty? My children? My capacity for love? The people who trust me? What kind of self does this habit quietly build? Those questions are less dramatic than commandments and harder to outsource.
Agency is not the thrill of doing the forbidden thing. It is the adult capacity to live awake inside consequence. I learned the word inside Mormonism. I am trying to learn the thing after it.