Start here · Mormon Faith Crisis

If you are reading this at two in the morning with your heart pounding, start with this: what is happening to you has a name, it has happened to hundreds of thousands of Latter-day Saints before you, and nearly all of them are all right now. Many of them will tell you it was the best thing that ever happened to them. That will sound impossible tonight. It is still true.

What a faith crisis is

A faith crisis is what happens when a believing member of the Church learns something they cannot un-know, and their belief starts to come apart. Usually it is history: polygamy, the Book of Abraham, the priesthood and temple ban, the seer stone, the way the founding stories changed over time. Sometimes it is doctrine, or the treatment of women or LGBTQ people, or the gap between what leaders say and what they do. Almost never is it a desire to sin or a bruised ego, whatever you may have been taught about people who leave. What the data says shows what people actually say.

The word “crisis” fits the first stage. Your body is in a stress response. You may not be sleeping, you may be reading compulsively, you may feel nauseous, panicky, furious, numb, or all of them in an hour. Some people feel relief almost immediately. That is normal too.

The crisis does not last. What follows it is a longer process, a transition, and it ends somewhere good for most people. The Understand what is happening path explains why it feels the way it does. The map shows the stages most people move through.

You are not alone

The Church’s own internal research in 2013 and our survey of more than three thousand former believers agree: the people who leave are overwhelmingly former “true believing” members, returned missionaries, bishops, Relief Society presidents, seminary teachers, people who paid tithing on gross for thirty years. If you were all-in, you are exactly the kind of person this happens to. It happened to us.

The first weeks: what to do

Slow down. Nothing has to be decided this month. Not whether to keep attending, not whether to tell your parents, not whether the whole thing is true. You are allowed to not know.
Take care of your body. Sleep, eat, walk. Put a limit on late-night reading; obsession is a symptom of anxiety, not of rigour. The research will still be there tomorrow.
Tell one safe person. A friend who has been through it, a therapist, a stranger on the Recovering from Religion helpline (84-I-DOUBT-IT). Secrets are heavy and they make everything worse.
Tell your spouse before anyone else, and before they hear it from someone else. See Telling people you no longer believe and the scripts. This is the one conversation not to delay for months.
Read both sides. Read the Gospel Topics Essays and the critical sources. Notice how each treats evidence. The questions themselves explains how to do this without losing your footing.
Treat it as grief. You are losing a worldview, a community, an afterlife and a version of yourself. Grief comes in waves. Grief is the guide we wish everyone read first.

The first weeks: what not to do

Do not announce anything on social media, to your ward, or to your extended family while you are in shock.
Do not resign, move, quit your job or end your marriage in the first month. Every one of those is reversible later and none of them are reversible now.
Do not try to deconvert your spouse or your parents. It rarely works and it costs trust you will need.
Do not read only one side and call it research.
Do not decide that you are bitter because you are angry. Anger is what hurt feels like on the way out.

If you are not coping

Thoughts of not wanting to be here are common in a faith crisis. They are a symptom, not a verdict, and they respond to help. Tell one person tonight: a therapist, a doctor, or someone who loves you. If you are in immediate danger, contact emergency services where you live. You do not have to explain Mormonism to the person you tell.

Where to go next

Not sure which of this applies to you? Answer five questions and get a short plan.
Want to see the whole road? The map.
Want the people who wrote this to walk you through it? The podcast, starting with 11 Tips When First Navigating a Mormon Faith Crisis.

In their words

From the podcast. Machine transcripts, lightly edited; the video is authoritative.

“The first thing it does is keep people from feeling isolated in their own hardships, so they don't feel like they're so alone, or they're weird, or crazy. Those are all the words I hear. People come in and say, I think I'm going crazy, or I must be the only one. So it helps people understand that they're not alone.”

“Adjust your life speed. Our expectations for ourselves may stay the same, but this is really a different time. Feel free to slow your life down a little bit. Shortcut meals, make them really basic, simplify where you can, and above all, try to be gentle with yourself and those around you.”

“Take it slowly. Take your time. Take months and years if you need to. Don't feel like you need to rush it.”