What’s the Big Deal?

This is one of a series social media posts that I wrote in 2021 during the height of my Faith Transition. Because I was publicly deconstructing in front of an entirely faithful network of friends and followers, I received a lot reactions, questions, and backlash from people I loved regarding my journey. Many of them were dismissive or hostile towards me because they had been trained to me as a “defector.”

Since an overly long response in a comment or personal message would have been seen as aggressive, I took quotes from these reactions to write these public posts in response. I never attributed the person who asked the question since I didn’t want anyone to feel specifically blamed or called out for having the response. The questions are also not unique. They are part of the scripted response we were taught to have as members of the “in-group.” Still, each post begins with a quotation because it is a question I personally received during my Transition.

Q: “Is this really that big of a deal?”

Ohhh, good question! Let’s talk about this.

💦Baptized Mormons have ever only made up .2% of the Earth’s Population, at best, while if we consider only the ~15-25% active members, that percentage falls to .002%.

🤷‍♀️In that sense, no. This is isn’t a big deal.

😳 Within the Church, however, these issues are definitely big.

😓 For many of us, everything from shopping for clothes to ordering ice cream to choosing where to live and how to spend our evening hours rests on the internal logic given to us by the Church.

Which means, that these issues are super, duper important.

🎩 If the Book of Mormon is a 19th century religious fantasy,

👑Then Joseph Smith was a fraud,

The Priesthood is an illusion (or perhaps the renamed use of other intuitive abilities),

🎓The Temple ordinances are placebos,

🪖Brigham Young really was just a shrewd and selfish jerk,

🧢We have been cultural colonialists (sometimes violently) for centuries,

👒There is no spiritual basis for excluding or dehumanizing anyone from membership or leadership,

And the dominoes just keep falling into the very most important and personal decisions of many of our lives…

⚖️So, in my view, yes–it’s pretty important to let everybody figure this out.

🛠That doesn’t mean we’ll figure it out in the same ways and (again) I think it’s totally possible that the lay-membership of the Church could turn this whole thing around, reframe the objectives, give informed consent to every convert, and donate the hoarded hundreds of Billions to administering to the sick, needy, and the fatherless.

🙌That is possible.

🙏I hope, hope, hope it happens. 🙏

🧮But before anything like that can be attempted, there’s a whole lot of historical, social, scientific, and ethical reckoning to do.

📍And it starts here, with a faith/truth/church crisis because this is where the fusion of realities and/or the fission of loyalties is happening.📍

📈📉If the question about whether this is a big deal is referring to internal statistics– that is tricky. The Church fondles the idea of itself growing to fill the whole Earth, so it’s not transparent with many numbers, except those that make it look like it’s growing.

📑However, from the published statistics we do have (easily readable here), we can see that in the past 10 years, membership growth has fallen from a low, yet decent rate of 2.2% to a dribbling .6% before reportage stopped in 2021.*

🗳Those statistics pair interestingly with this survey of disaffecting members from 2011 (published 2013).

🔍In summary, it says that even before the Exclusionary Policy of 2015, Ordain Women, the CES Letter, or the Gospel Topics Essays, the Church was already reeling as people found out they had been lied to manipulated their whole lives.

🔍It also confirms that older members who have spent more significant amounts of life-energies in high-level callings are more likely than younger members to continue active in the Church after discovering the betrayal. 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦This, in turn, means the primary drops in growth are because families, young adults, and youth.**

🦠More recently, the Church also seems to have been experiencing a spike in attrition and/or active non-belief, due to the downtime provided by the Pandemic and to ultra-conservativism and Fundamentalism.***

📊To me, numbers are not especially important.

The Church was no more true in the 1800s, when it’s growth percentages were higher than it is now–there were just different factors pulling or holding people in.

There are a billion followers of Islam in the world, too, and that doesn’t make it more true.

🤓 In my opinion, growth and numbers are only interesting because they reveal a movement that’s happening. They are another clue as to how many other people and families are experiencing the same things. They are an indication that we are not alone. They are also an indication that many people we know might also care about these issues, if they were brought up.

👧🏼👱🏼‍♀️👦🏼 My husband and I, like many others, looked at our kids and decided that if there were issues to resolved, that we would rather face them, than pass the buck.

📘We, like many others, decided that an organization that would consciously lie to us about the historical authenticity of the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham was not an organization that would “lead us to truth.”

🥀We, like many others, reflected that if Jesus really were leading the Church, he would probably care more about the deepening Climate Crisis, the destitute refugees from war-torn countries, and world hunger, than he would about owning resort hotels in Maui, 2% Florida, and a butt-load of stock in Silicon Valley Companies. Your treasure or the Church’s treasure, in this case, still shows where your heart is.

🪡We, like others, concluded that the prospect of trying to parent our kids within a system that would be telling them we were myopic, lazy, and selfish for attempting to nuance their views was way more intimidating than a faith crisis.

That’s been a pretty big deal, for us.

*speculative onlookers have assumed that the Church stopped disclosing membership numbers because they no longer support the growth-narrative.

** this assumption is supported, too by the 2008 leaked leadership meeting in which General Authorities discussed the 70-80% disaffection rate for Church youth.

***anecdotal evidence and hearsay, but for more information: see or listen to Mormon Scoops episode 1552