To all my friends and family:

I have undergone a transformation in my belief system in the last year that has been confusing to myself and to many of my friends and family too. My hope in making this public is twofold; first that it will help the people that I have relationships with to understand why I have made the choice not to participate in the LDS church, and second that it will allow me to be authentic about the way I choose to live, facilitating real connections with the people I love without things being hidden or held back out of fear of acceptance.

I ask you to read with an open heart and mind and to realize that although my religious beliefs have changed I am still the same son, brother, and friend that I have always been. I still want to continue my relationships with those that I love and I still stand for loving and helping others. My life is still devoted to the understanding of the human heart and mind and sharing what I learn in my professional and personal life. I appreciate your understanding and I welcome a dialogue where questions and concerns can be resolved peacefully and openly.

The following is a synopsis of my relationship with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and my struggle to reconcile my personal beliefs with the official beliefs of the Church.

I was introduced to the Church when I was thirteen by two engaging sister missionaries that came to our home and taught my family. The missionaries were always excited to see us and they were kind and full of love. They gave me a lot of attention and told me how similar I was to Joseph Smith since I lived in rural upstate N.Y. and was about the same age as he was when he had the first vision. I liked them and I wanted to believe that what they taught was true. After several months my parents decided to be baptized and they encouraged me to pray about the truthfulness of the Church so I could know whether or not I should join too. I prayed and nothing much happened but I figured if my parents (especially my pragmatic father) believed what they were being taught that it must be true. I was baptized soon after and was a fairly typical LDS youth through my adolescence.

When I was twenty I entered the Missionary Training Center and gained my first testimony of the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith. We were repeatedly told that if we didn’t have a testimony of the church that we would likely find it in the MTC. It was in a group meeting where we were talking about Joseph Smith that I had an experience where I became very emotional while listening to my teacher share her beliefs about him. She noticed my reaction and explained that this was the Spirit confirming the truth of the things that she was teaching. I believed her and went on to the field strengthened by the power of that experience. In my first area there was a strong anti-Mormon population and I was confronted with some very persuasive literature about the falsity of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. I was briefly upset and confused by the things I saw but after talking to some fellow missionaries I let go of it and avoided anti-Mormons after that. I went on to serve an honorable, successful mission.

Not long after my mission I had some negative experiences with the Church that left me feeling alienated and uncomfortable. I soon fell away from the Church that I had lovingly served and began living a destructive lifestyle that resulted in a state of unhappiness. A trusted Church leader and friend contacted me and helped me move to Provo, Utah to try to find my testimony again. Almost immediately I felt like I was trying to fit into a mold that just wasn’t me and within a year I stopped attending Church. I felt like a misfit in Provo and I began to hate the “Utah-Mormon” culture that surrounded me.

I moved to Salt Lake City which was better for me but I found myself in the middle of the draining “civil war” between non-members and members in that chronically divided city. I wasn’t active in the Church and I didn’t feel compelled to defend it but I didn’t want to tear the Church down either. I still had many LDS friends and family members and I have never seen the Church as a negative. Again I felt that I just didn’t belong. I visited a friend in Portland, OR. and I loved the openness and diversity; I knew I was home so I moved within a few months and have lived happily here since.

Less than a year after leaving Utah I made some changes in my life that precipitated a return to the roots of my religious upbringing. I decided to affiliate myself with a religion again and I had a powerfully emotional experience when I came in contact with the LDS church. I prayed about the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon, and felt peaceful and good about it. I agreed with the precepts of charity, love, and forgiveness which it contains, and that was good enough to satisfy me that it was true. I returned to the Church and was an active, temple recommend holding member for about two years. When I started back I quickly made friends and felt a fulfilling sense of belonging, but eventually I started to have problems with doctrinal aspects of the Church.

Some of the friendships I formed were with members who suffered from same sex attraction. Getting to know homosexual/bisexual people caused me to question the Church’s policies on homosexuality. These friends told me how they started to recognize feelings of attraction for members of the same sex from a very young age and that they felt like they would have to either forsake their sexual selves or live in a state of fraud in order to remain active members of the Church. I couldn’t understand why God would create these beautiful, loving people as “morally flawed” individuals. Soon after that I took a human sexuality class that added researched facts to the anecdotal evidence from my friends telling me that sexual preference is not always a choice but rather a part of our identity that we are born with. I also learned that gender and sexual identity are sometimes ambiguous and that there is a wide variation in sexuality that does not fit into the Church’s construct of the family or sexuality.

The questions about sexuality kept coming up and I wasn’t finding any satisfactory answers. This led me to start questioning other things. The more I asked, the deeper the questions got until I was asking about foundational issues like the historical validity of the Book of Mormon and the veracity of Joseph Smith’s first vision. I found that some facts had been changed or omitted in our official Church history from earlier accounts and I found scientific evidence that shows the dubious nature of the Book of Abraham, and even the Book of Mormon. How could this be when I had my prayers answered about it before? This question haunted me and led me to start looking at the way that our prayers are answered.

In the last year my studies have led me to a place of inquiry where I have been seeking the truth in a more definitive way. I’ve decided that feeling peaceful and warm, transcendent, or intensely emotional is not a reliable indicator of truth. I’m beginning to understand the origins of those good feelings and that they are common in many different systems of belief. If these feelings are the best indicators of truth then we have to recognize all the other religions where people have felt the manifestation of the spirit as just as true as the LDS Church. We cannot own the “only true Church” thing any more than any other religion can.

These realizations and my many unanswered questions have brought me to a place where I can no longer be a part of the Church. I miss the associations and the opportunity that the Church afforded me to serve and be a part of a great organization, but I can no longer silently sit through meetings listening to others proclaim beliefs that I strongly disagree with. The Church has blessed my life in many ways but it has also tormented me too. I have had to admit that it was damaging me more than blessing me and that is why I have decided to leave and continue my search for the truth elsewhere.

I have no intention to tear down the Church or to lead anyone away from it and I’m thankful for the blessings it has given me. In reviewing my history with the Church one thing stands out to me; in all the years that I was an active member I never made a balanced inquiry into an organization that I would devote many years of my life to. I never truly “studied it out in my mind” before I asked. I never really explored all the information out there that says that the Church isn’t true. I ignored the things that could lead me away instead of testing them with the same kind of reasonable inquiry I would make before buying a product or making an investment. Before buying into something I would usually check into the history of the company and read reviews (from other sources than the company selling the product) to find out if others were satisfied with their experience. Do most people do this when investigating the Church? I suspect some do but from my missionary experience I know that most don’t. Why? The question fascinates me. It’s definitely not for lack of information.

There is so much information about the Church available in so many formats from so many sources that searching it is daunting and confusing. There are many online communities that provide starkly different perspectives although they all consider themselves LDS and there are many more that are not LDS. In my recent searches for information I have found vitriolic anti-Mormon sites rife with ridiculous lies and compared them with sites that present compelling information on historical and scientific issues of the Church in a factual, unbiased way. I have found forums of “new order Mormons” that hold no belief in the Church’s doctrines but still actively attend and I compared them with forums of “liberal Mormons” that believe the Church is true but they differ in their opinions from the official Church stance on a variety of issues. Then there is the FARMS website which consists of articles written by LDS intellectuals/apologists refuting the writings of those trying to show that LDS doctrine is false. Of course you have the information provided by the Church itself from the standard works to a Deseret Bookstore full of other writings.

After investigating these different perspectives I find all of them very interesting and none of them very satisfying. The conclusion of my investigation is that there are too many unanswered questions about the Church’s historical origins, doctrines, and policies for me to believe it is “the only true Church”. I can’t ignore all of the evidence and just go on the good feelings that I’ve had. I have to also factor the confusion and the “stupor of thought” that I’ve experienced in regards to policies that disagree with replicable evidence that I’ve discovered through school and my personal studies.

There is so much to learn and discover about people and the world that we live in that is factual and holds up to the rigors of science and skepticism. There is much to learn about spirituality that is built on a strong foundation of fact and that is where I’m choosing to spend my time. I want to learn about the brain and how those good feelings that we feel at Church are produced. I want the truth that I can understand and that applies to all people, not the confusing, conflicting “truths” that different religions offer. I guess the bottom line is that I don’t want to live by faith, I want to live by knowledge. I know that it’s impossible to have all knowledge but there is enough for me to learn in my lifetime that I don’t think I’ll ever tire of the pursuit of it.

I want all of you to know that I don’t expect anyone to think the way I do and I don‘t think that my way is necessarily better than living by faith. The decision to live and learn in the way that I’ve described above inspires me and works for me. I hope you can be happy that I’m living in a fulfilling way and likewise I will be happy for you and your life.

If anything that I’ve said appeals to you and you are engaged in an inquiry of your own I would love to hear about it. I’ve realized how painful it is to change my belief system and how disappointing and depressing it feels to go through this process.

Ernest Becker said that if we have a passion for the truth, we shall encounter a “temporary period of forlornness.” He added that joy awaits us on the other side of this forlornness. He said that “disillusionment must come before wisdom.” I feel like I’m getting past the disillusionment and beginning to feel the joy of the truth.

Separating from the LDS Church is especially difficult because active members are so immersed culturally, temporally, and spiritually in the Church that it can be difficult to connect without that commonality. My hope is that I won’t lose the ability to connect with those of you that I love that are LDS, but that our relationships may be strengthened through an honest discourse.

I want to conclude with a quote that sums up my thoughts on truth and a passage from a message board that I thought was relevant to this topic:

It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.
-Edmund Way Teale, Circle of Seasons

I found this on a message board in reply to a post made by a woman named Ann that was explaining her reasons for staying active in the Church despite her disbelief in its doctrines. It strikes a chord with me.

I suspect that there are many in the church who haven't ever confronted any of the trickier doctrines or historical issues, so we can't really say that they've resolved those issues for themselves because they don't know about them, they've never felt the need to address them, or they've never found themselves in a forum in which those issues are even brought up. So it would be fair to say that they attend for exactly the same reasons as Ann -- sociality, community ritual, and the opportunity for personal spiritual experiences -- because they perhaps don't have any more of a real conviction of church historicity than Ann does. Yet they wouldn't ever think to call themselves anything less than fully devout.
I suspect, for all of us on some level, the search for "what is true" is also/instead a search for "what 'true' is."


I love you all,

James Paul Bryant - 10/31/2005