Why we call it a gift

When we named the podcast The Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis in 2018, some people were angry. A faith crisis had cost them a marriage, or their parents, or years of their life. Calling that a gift sounded like a taunt.

We understood, and we kept the name, for one reason: after two decades of doing this work, the thing we hear most often from people years down the road is some version of “it was the best thing that ever happened to me”. Not because it did not hurt. Because of what came after.

What people say they gained

• Honesty. The end of pretending, in prayer, in interviews, in testimony meeting, in bed, with your children. Many people did not know how much energy the pretending took until it stopped.
• A conscience that is theirs. Doing good because it is good, not because someone is watching. Margi calls it the difference between transactional morality and a gift.
• Relationships with fewer conditions. Marriages that survive this are often stronger than before, because the two people finally know each other. Friendships chosen rather than assigned.
• A bigger world. Other religions, other ways of being good, science, art, Sundays, coffee. The things you were told to fear turn out to be mostly people.
• Their children’s trust. Children raised by parents who say “I don’t know” and mean it tend to come back to those parents with their own hard questions.
• Better mental health, eventually. The scrupulosity, the constant measuring against an impossible standard, the fear of the next interview: for many people those lift, and what is left is ordinary human anxiety, which is treatable.
• Tenderness for the tradition. The surprising one. Years on, most people can feel affection for the hymns, the ward, the grandparents, even the founding stories, once they no longer have to be literally true.

What you get to keep

Leaving the Church’s truth claims does not mean leaving everything it gave you. Service, hard work, family, honesty, self-reliance, community, singing together, showing up with casseroles: those were yours before, and they are yours now. Most of the people we know kept them.

Two things at once

The gift does not cancel the loss, and you do not have to feel grateful before you have finished being angry. John’s point in the very first episode was that people can run both processes at the same time, and that insisting on one or the other is what keeps people stuck. Grieve fully. Be furious where fury is earned. And watch, over months and years, for the things that are quietly getting better.

If you are not there yet

You are not supposed to be. Nobody feels this in the first year, and some people take five. The map shows where it comes in the sequence. The thriving path is about how to get there.