Protected: My Church Story
First and foremost, a huge thank you for reading this. It means the world to me. You may have a rough idea of where I’m at, but just in case you don’t, the best way to describe where I am spiritually is this.
Over the last couple of years it’s gotten much harder for me to believe in the church.
Now, as you read that you may be feeling sorry for me or wondering what happened or be confused. So let me tell you the story as simply but as honestly as I can to hopefully address those thoughts.
Quick Note: Church issues (doctrine, history, etc.) did play a role, but I will not dig into those here. This isn’t about getting you to agree with me, it’s about helping you understand my heart. If you have any questions about issues, just ask, but I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.
Sound good?
My Story
I have an incredible life. I really do. I have a wonderful wife, two healthy kids, a good job, great work/life balance, supportive parents, loving family, and…yeah…I live 7 minutes from a ski resort.
I’m pretty dang lucky.
And the church has been there from day one. I’d be lying if I said the gospel hadn’t played a huge role in how good my life has turned out. I met my wife Kim at church, church standards helped keep me out of trouble when I was younger, and my mission taught me priceless lessons about work and getting along with people. I owe so much to my parents and their upbringing which was centered on the church.
Testimony
Speaking of church, as you may know, testimony is a really big part of the gospel. The church describes the role of testimony like this:
A testimony is a spiritual witness given by the Holy Ghost. The foundation of a testimony is the knowledge that Heavenly Father lives and loves His children; that Jesus Christ lives, that He is the Son of God, and that He carried out the infinite Atonement; that Joseph Smith is the prophet of God who was called to restore the gospel; that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the Savior’s true Church on the earth; and that the Church is led by a living prophet today.
And while “knowing for yourself” is baked into the church, it also aligns with how I seem to be wired. Even in marketing I like things to be real to me through experience, not just on paper.
The trick, at least for me, is that I’ve never been super confident in knowing what is me and what is the holy ghost. And this is especially true when I’ve tried to get a spiritual confirmation that various parts of the church are true. It’s not to say that I’ve been alive for 40 years and never been inspired or uplifted or felt what I came to believe was probably the spirit, it’s just that I never seemed to have those feelings in the moments I was asking if it was all real.
Over the years I’ve actually kept a written collection of my spiritual experiences. One of the more interesting realizations in this journey was going through those again and reading about moments where something unlikely happened or I felt some form of awe, but discovering that none of them had anything to do with the church being true.
Let me unpack that a little bit before we go on.
Praying About the First Vision
I’d been to Palmyra once as a teenager, but I was tired and grouchy and didn’t have that great of an experience. So when I lived in Syracuse, NY I spent a half-dozen or so afternoons in the Sacred Grove trying to get that confirmation I’d heard so many people talk about.
I’d wander the paths, find a bench on a quiet trail away from people, and pray as sincerely and deeply as I knew how with the hope of getting that answer for myself that Joseph Smith really had seen God. But over and over again I just never felt anything.
I remember once, I think it was the last time I visited before moving home to Utah, being a little frustrated at my lack of answer. I figured if I didn’t get it there, it may never come.
Praying About the Book of Mormon
It was a similar story when I finished the Book of Mormon for the first time when I was about 17. I even went and did baptisms at the temple so I could read the last few pages in a place where I’d have the best chance of feeling the Holy Ghost. I prayed with all my little teenager heart and reached out for some sort of feeling or words or something, but I just felt…nothing. I had always believed it was true and I told myself that now at least I knew what was inside, but I never felt something deeper that confirmed for myself that all that stuff really happened and came from God.
And it wasn’t just these two experiences. You know when people at church say things like this?
“I’m sure we’ve all had those moments when God feels so far away and our prayers just don’t seem to make it through the ceiling.”
That’s actually a pretty good description of my lifelong experience with prayer. I’ve prayed faithfully for as long as I can remember and tried so many ways to get my words “through the ceiling” but I’ve just never really felt a whole lot, much less something I could confidently say was real or beyond myself.
Believing
That said, even without that spiritual witness, it was so easy for me to believe. The stories I’d been taught painted a beautiful, miraculous story of God’s one true church and all the pieces fit neatly together to create a consistent, inspiring picture.
I think it’s also worth pointing out, though, that I just didn’t have that many chances to bump into stuff that would give me any reason not to believe. Over my first 30+ years of life, I can think of maybe 3-4 items I encountered that seemed just a little bit off. But that’s probably a pretty common experience because we members don’t really talk about the tricky stuff and neither did the church. For example, when addressing the tension between learning history and building faith, Boyd K Packer taught church educators that:
“Some things that are true are not very useful.”
And when asked about the ways church teachings avoided talking about some of that trickier stuff, church historian Marlin Jensen once said:
“We chose to emphasize the strengths, what we felt were the more relevant parts of our history.”
A simple example of this is polygamy. It’s a huge part of the first 70 years of our church and doctrine, but it’s also one that’s a little bit taboo to discuss. The last general conference talk that mentioned the word polygamy was more than 15 years ago in 2007. Only three talks have used that word since I was born. As a result, I’d only learned a couple random things about polygamy and both turned out not to be true.
On the flip side, if I had been born in 1850, I would have heard polygamy mentioned 337 times in conference talks by the time I turned 40. In other words, even for an active member like myself, it’s rare to be taught about even big, important chapters of our church’s story.
That’s changed in the last decade or so with the release of things like the Gospel Topics Essays, Joseph Smith Papers, and Saints books. The tricky stuff wasn’t exactly front and center, but it wasn’t hidden either, and it created more opportunities for a normal member like me to bump into ideas I wasn’t familiar with.
New Information
Well, a couple years ago I bumped into one of those ideas and it really knocked me off balance. More specifically, it shook the trust I felt in the reliability and credibility of the church, its leaders, and their teachings. I started to wonder if I’d just misunderstood the idea of how God speaks to his prophets and where doctrines come from. My hope was that if I could wrap my head around that piece, maybe it would help me make sense of this thing that had knocked me off balance.
As you read that, you may be smarter than I was and realized that everything in the church touches prophets and revelation. So you may not be surprised to learn that the next couple months turned into a whirlwind tour through much of the new information the church had been publishing.
And the best way to describe that experience? Well, I once said it like this:
“It’s like a sort of whiplash. I go into a church topic thinking one thing and then soon realize the truth is totally different. So I go back and check to see if I got it wrong, but all the old manuals and talks I found showed me that I actually had it right. First vision, temples, scriptures, revelation…everything was different than I thought it was.”
That doesn’t exactly capture it, but just that feeling of having two tabs open in my browser – both from the church’s website – that said two different things was bizarre.
That kind of stuff doesn’t seem to faze some members, but it was really tough for me. I remember seeing people early on talk about reading Saints and soberly say this like, “wow, yeah, there’s some tough stuff in there” but then a second later snap out of it, put a smile back on their face, and go on with Mormonism like nothing had changed. For whatever reason, it’s hard for me to do that and brush stuff like this off.
The “New” Church
Slowly, the beautiful story and picture of the church I’d always loved transformed into a jumble of mismatched shapes that just didn’t seem to fit together. Instead of being inspired by the church, I found myself having to make excuses for it. I read a lot of explanations by members and apologists, but what they described also felt off. And it seemed odd to trust some random person’s version when it was so different from Russell M. Nelson’s or Joseph Smith’s.
I once described it like this in my journal.
“It feels like I lost the beloved golden retriever from my childhood and these apologists have knocked on my door saying they’ve found my dog and keep insisting it’s the same dog. But the dog on the other end of the lease they’re holding a shih tzu.”
Both a golden retriever and a shih tzu are technically dogs, and technically the same “church” I had been a part of my whole life, but at the same time it was also so different.
Feelings
Now, here’s where I need to circle back where I started. It wasn’t just that things didn’t add up logically, it was that so many things I learned just didn’t feel right.
There were about at least a half-dozen times where I learned something about our church that made me physically ill. My heart would sink and my stomach would churn and I’d just feel…not sure of the word…gross? Dark? Confused? Angry? Probably a little bit of all of those. I remember once staring out the window in something close to shock, almost numb as I tried to process a part of our church I’d just learned about. Over and over I’d find myself asking a question like this:
“If all of this is supposed to be from God and I know things are truly from God by how I feel, then why do I feel so awful about this stuff? Why does it feel so wrong? And why is this wrong feeling so much stronger than anything I’ve ever felt when I’ve prayed about whether this church really is true?”
For the first time I was feeling something unmistakable, but it wasn’t a good feeling. I just couldn’t make sense of some of this stuff I was learning in either my head or my heart. And to the testimony experiences I mentioned at the top, I didn’t have a spiritual confirmation about these things to fall back on.
Finding Peace
This went on for a few months. I’d be up till way after midnight chewing on all of these ideas floating around my head, trying to connect the dots again. I remember late one night laying in bed and saying something like:
“Heavenly Father, you’ve gotta understand what all of this is pointing to. You’ve gotta know what’s at stake here. If I’m missing something, please help me. Give me something – anything – to help this all make sense.”
Finally, there were a few days where I had some alone time to just put everything out on the table – feelings, facts, experiences, questions, etc. – and try to make sense of what it all meant. As I did I kept arriving at the same conclusion. It felt like the most honest, the most fair, and the most likely scenario. At the end of those few days of pondering I said something aloud to myself that I honestly never thought I’d say:
“Gregg, you don’t want to, but you’ve got to admit there’s a good chance the church isn’t true.”
If you’d asked me 5-10 years ago how that kind of moment would feel, I probably would have used words like dark, depressing, or terrifying. I would have thought that this is when Satan would have won and my back would be full of fiery darts or something.
Instead, I felt incredible peace. My memory is not perfect, but I can’t remember feeling peace like that ever in my adult life.
Was that God finally answering all those prayers? Was it my brain finally resting after an exhausting experience? Was it Satan tricking me? Was it the lack of cognitive dissonance I’d been wrestling with? Honestly, I don’t know. And has life been hunky dory since then? No, of course not. Making sense of my feelings is one thing, making sense of my place in a church that’s built on 100% belief is another thing.
But I will say that, even with some down days, that deep feeling of peace is still there.
Today
I think it’s important to note that if you would have asked me a few years ago if I knew the church was true, I would have said something like:
“No, but I believe it is.”
Given my lack of solid, clear answers, I had already adopted a sort of “likelihood” testimony idea. I still felt there was a 90-95% chance the church was true, but embracing the fact I was just doing my best as a human, didn’t have my own witness, knew there were a few things that didn’t quite add up, and I could be wrong felt…well…right.
So just like I didn’t know the church was true then, I don’t know it’s not true now. To circle back to where I started, all of this new information the church is sharing has simply made it a lot harder for me to believe that it is what I thought it was.
I once described it like this:
I always assumed that if the church was sitting at a poker table with the Catholics and Muslims and Athiests and Methodists, we’d be holding a royal flush. The church has given us a lot of new information to make sense of. And as I’ve done my best to make sense of that information, it looks like we’re holding something closer to a pair of 7s instead. It’s not that a pair of 7s can’t win, but looking around the table you can’t help but recognize how many other hands could easily beat yours and that no amount of optimism or faith will change that.
So if there’s one way to describe where I am, it’s simply that I’ve embraced the uncertainty of it all. And that is the place where I have found peace.
Lucky
But I want to quickly recognize how lucky I am to be able to find a place like that where I can feel that kind of peace. I owe that completely to Kim for loving me through this experience and giving me a safe place to make sense of my feelings without a threat hanging over my head if I couldn’t get a certain outcome.
Not everyone is so fortunate. President Hinckley famously said:
“Either the church is true, or it’s a fraud.”
And that kinda forces us all into a black/white mentality that doesn’t leave much room for anything but “all in” for ourselves or others. One of the saddest things I learned during this journey is how many spouses are threatened with divorce the moment they open up about struggles like these. So please, please, please have patience and empathy for people who go through a similar experience but end up leaving the church or feeling angry or depressed.
They’re not looking for a way out, they’re trying to make sense of real, legitimate issues.
And there are so many factors at play when people learn things that challenge what they believe. Sometimes those factors make it easy to continue believing like normal, sometimes those factors mean their testimony evaporates overnight.
Church
Speaking of church, though, where am I on that side of things?
Well, I go to church every week with my wonderful family. It’s not always a party, but I actually enjoy it more than I have in years. It’s easier for me to see the people as on their own, personal, doing-their-best journeys just like I am.
I teach Primary with Kim. During most of this stretch I was the 2nd counselor in the Elders Quorum Presidency. I was very open with the Bishop and Elders Quorum President so we were all on the same page. It was a little tricky at times, but overall it was nice to be a voice for people in my shoes because along the way I’ve learned there are many people in our ward who have been quietly hiding deep doubts for years, feel extremely alone, and often feel a bit marginalized by the way we publicly talk about people who leave or doubt.
I still pray. Though I tend to use prayer more as a habit of gratitude to recount blessings than anything else. I don’t really ask for anything and just focus on what I’m thankful for, which feels a lot better.
Honestly, I do a lot of the same things. I just do them with the realization that there’s a good chance that what I’ve always believed is probably wrong. I’ve since learned the name for this is intellectual humility and it’s an idea that really resonates with me in almost all areas of my life. But whatever the label, it feels right to both do what I’ve always done but also have that humility to recognize the likelihoods.
Again, I have a great life so I wasn’t looking to change that, I was just trying to make sense of things. So the only thing that’s different really is what’s between my ears.
Now What
I first wrote this in the fall of 2022. It’s now the fall of 2023 with another year living in this new reality. Some weeks I don’t think about this stuff at all, other weeks my brain makes some new connection and these feelings surface again. Whenever they do, the question that comes to mind most often is a very simply one.
“Now what?”
We have such a specific blueprint for our lives in the church, but I quickly realized that while letting go of certainty has brought me a lot of peace, the church organization struggles with that because so much of what we do is tied to worthiness, specifically temple worthiness. And that worthiness is based heavily on being sure that specific things are true (e.g., “having a testimony”).
For example, I’d never considered not baptizing Sam but the bishop had to sit down with me to be sure I was still worthy enough to do so. Not because I’m doing terrible things, but because it’s harder for me to believe. That was a weird moment for me. And even stranger when a friend who feels similarly to me wasn’t so lucky; his Stake President wouldn’t let him baptize his daughter.
And just like there’s a blueprint for when you’re in the church, there’s also one for when you’re not sure anymore. That one involves eventually no longer attending church, no longer wearing garments, trying your first coffee, etc., but I don’t really care for that blueprint. So I’m sorta just chilling in between these two blueprints with the realization that I probably wouldn’t be a great fit for most callings and will likely never be asked to speak again, but also don’t see a big reason to stay home on Sundays or a reason to not raise my kids in an environment that gave me some great tools to build my life.
So every once in a while I find myself once again asking:
“Now what?”
I don’t have an answer yet, but I thought it’d be insightful to add this little sidebar.
Love
One last note. When we talk about people in the church who lose all or part of their testimony, there’s a feeling of mourning or sadness for their loss. Maybe even a little pity?
I totally get that and felt that a few times during my life, but along with the peace I mentioned, I also feel more joy than I’ve ever felt and it seems much easier to be present. I also feel more love for people than I’ve ever felt before. I think part of it comes from realizing that I’m not alone. There are millions of people just like me who are trying to make sense of their faith as they grow. And just seeing everyone – believing on not, church attending or not, similar or different – as just like me trying to do their honest best with that? It’s somehow gotten a lot easier to see that desire in others and love them for their effort.
And for a guy like me who has struggled to not judge people throughout his life? I gotta say, feeling that sort of love and empathy come a bit more naturally and genuinely has been a beautiful thing. In his book Faith After Doubt, Brian McLaren described this as the fourth phase of faith called Harmony:
[These people who struggled were] all being pulled through all the simplicities and complexities of faith toward this one treasure, this one pearl of great price, this one thing that truly matters: love. Faith was about love all along. We just didn’t realize it, and it took doubt to help us see it.
So, that’s the quick and dirty version of my story.
Again, thank you so much for reading. I realize no document could ever answer every question about one person’s experience with something like this, so if there’s anything else you’re curious about just let me know. I’ll be happy to clarify and share as much or as little detail as you feel comfortable with.