The stereotypes about people who leave

Every high-demand group has a story about the people who leave, and the story always does the same job: it protects the people who stay from having to take the leaver’s reasons seriously. Here are the ones Latter-day Saints are taught, and what we have found in twenty years of listening.

“They wanted to sin”

The least true and the most common. In our survey a desire to sin was the lowest-rated factor of all. Most people who leave were keeping every commandment on the day they stopped believing, and many keep most of them afterward. What changes is that they stop doing good things out of fear.

“Someone offended them”

Also near the bottom. People are offended at church all the time and stay for decades. What ends belief is information, not hurt feelings. The stereotype persists because it lets the believer avoid the information.

“They were lazy” or “they never really had a testimony”

The opposite is closer to the truth. The people hit hardest are the ones who took it most seriously: returned missionaries, temple workers, bishops, the seminary teacher who finally read the sources. If you had not cared, you would not be in crisis.

“They were deceived by anti-Mormon lies”

Most of the history that ends belief is now on the Church’s own website in the Gospel Topics Essays, and the rest is in the Joseph Smith Papers, which the Church publishes. The “anti-Mormon” label survives because it is a way of not reading.

“They can leave the Church but they can’t leave it alone”

It is true that many people who leave keep talking about it. That is what people do after any major loss, and it is what people do when the institution still holds their family, their marriage and their children. Nobody accuses a widow of not being able to leave her marriage alone. The essay Why you can’t, and shouldn’t, leave the Church alone from the original site says more.

“They are bitter”

Some are, for a while. Anger is a stage of grief and it passes. The people you meet years down the road are mostly not bitter; they are busy. If the only former members you know are angry, it may be because the calm ones stopped needing to talk about it and you stopped hearing from them.

Why this matters

If you are the one leaving, these stories will be told about you, sometimes to your face, and you should know they are not about you. They are about the teller’s need to keep the world simple. You can answer them once, kindly, and then decline to answer them again; the scripts have wording for that.

If you love someone who is leaving, the most useful thing you can do is refuse the stereotypes and ask them what actually happened. For someone who loves them is for you.