What If Mormonism ISN'T TRUE? Part 2

You're entering outer brightness. The zeitgeist of the moment is the idea that we are living in a post-truth world, the idea that objective facts either cannot be known or are less important than personal truth or feelings. Sometimes people refer to my truth or your truth to suggest that there is no objective reality, but rather only what each of us perceives to be true. Within Mormonism, the idea of truth reigned supreme.

Mormons had it and wanted to share it with the rest of the world, while all others who were not Mormon had some portion of it, but not the fullness. I'm a Gen-Xer. I'm in that group of people who were in their teens and early twenties when the internet went live for the general public.

Dial up and slow downloads. When I first began discussing my religion online back in 1999, there was a lot of optimism about what this new medium could do for communication between people of different backgrounds. Only a few doomsday prophets suggested that it could be detrimental to the very idea of objective truth. My fall down the rabbit hole began with an attempt to be a missionary for my faith. I had been a full-time Mormon missionary in Hungary for two years from 1997 to 1999.

When I returned to the U.S., I moved to greater Cincinnati area, married and began working for an insurance company. I tried to share my Mormon beliefs with one of the security guards in the building where I worked. She was a kind, older African American lady named Charlotte. We would talk and discuss religion for a few minutes each day. I gave her a copy of the Book of Mormon and sent her a pair of full-time missionaries to begin meeting with her.

It looked as if my missionary efforts were paying off. After several weeks of lessons, she handed me the copy of the Book of Mormon that I had given her and a packet of printed pages from various websites. She told me that she had spoken with her pastor and that he had told her that the Mormon religion was racist. I appealed to my own conduct with her. She asked me if I was aware that black people were not allowed to hold the LDS priesthood until 1978. I told her that I was aware of that. She asked if I was aware of any of the other things about my church that were represented in the materials that she had handed me.

I told her that I would have to look into them, but that anyone can post anything on the internet, and that doesn't make it true. In this episode, I and the other Sons of Light discuss what it's like to stare down that scary question, what if Mormonism isn't true? I'm Paul Bunyan. He's Matthew, the nuclear Calvinist, and he's Michael, the ex-Mormon apologist. Let's get into it. Here at the Outer Brightness Podcast, we're not just about deconstruction. I know we've talked a lot about, so far this episode, about deconstruction of belief in Mormonism and fears and what that's all about.

That's definitely a real experience that people go through. But the idea of this podcast is to reach people who have come beyond that as we have, and are either ready to begin building faith in Jesus Christ and walking with him as a disciple, or are just curious about what that might look like, but maybe not ready to take that step. So as important as deconstruction is, we're about reconstruction here. So what I'd like to ask each of you, and Matthew, we'll start with you here, why did you rebuild faith after Mormonism? Why didn't you just become an atheist or an agnostic? That's a really great question. Ultimately, of course, I think it's God that led me to him. But God uses many means to bring us to him. And so I think it was the fact that God has blessed me with a certain amount of understanding of the Latter-day Saint doctrine, of his scriptures, of the Bible, and the experiences that I had throughout my life.

They all kind of witnessed to me. I just remember wondering for a while, what am I going to be? Am I going to be an atheist?

What am I going to do with my life? Trying to reconstruct my life, trying to reconstruct my self-image. And I just looked back at all the times where I felt like God had protected me during my mission, when I felt like I was being led to do certain things. I just couldn't get it out of my mind. I just had this thought that there has to be a God. It's just so obvious that he's been working in my life ever since I was a child. Maybe there were times where I was not attuned to that, or I wasn't really capable of understanding God's work in my life, but I feel like he'd always been working in my life. And so that was kind of like where I started. That was my platform, my foundation that I started off with, is that there has to be a God. And I felt like that God exists, and that he loves me, and that he's not going to abandon me, and that there is truth, that there is a reason that we're here, and the reason why he saved me. So from there, then I started to study the Bible, and that's where I started to learn about Christian doctrine, and really started to understand the Bible by God's grace. That's awesome. That's awesome.

What about you, Michael? Why do you think you rebuilt faith after Mormonism? Yeah, I was definitely thinking about going atheist initially.

I was so tired or being told what to do and where to be all the time. And just, like, I felt like I'd been taken advantage of, but when I really sat down and thought about it, I realized I couldn't blame Jesus for anything. That it was, it was just this man-made religion that had hurt me.

But there was, Jesus was guiltless, blameless. And I also thought back to experiences in my life where I felt like God had reached out to me, and it didn't make any sense to turn our way into atheism. Now, I had accidentally stumbled across the true gospel, and I didn't realize that I had it.

God, he got me really good. I was trying to defend the church from this argument called the impossible gospel argument that says, you know, the Book of Mormon says we are saved by grace after all we can do, and we have to deny ourselves of all ungodliness before God's grace is sufficient for us. And so I was struggling with that, and I found an answer for it. And that was the doctrine of imputed righteousness, that it's okay if I haven't done all that I can do, because Christ is perfect, and it's his righteousness that is given to me. And, you know, God allowed me to kind of find passages in the Book of Mormon, of all places, that teach imputed righteousness, and then I found it all over the place in the Bible, obviously.

And at first I was just like, oh, this is really cool. Like, the Book of Mormon and the Bible support each other because, you know, they're both true. And so I was walking around believing in this Protestant doctrine, and then one day it just hit me, and I realized, you know, I'm a Protestant.

I didn't even realize it, but this is definitely not LDS doctrine. And so when the rest of the church fell away for me, when I realized it wasn't true, that part remained because it wasn't connected to the church. It was something that God led me to beforehand in preparation so that I wouldn't become an atheist when I had my faith crisis.

Nice, nice. So when I think about this question, I think about God drawing me to his Son. So when I was at the point where I was ready to say, I'm not Mormon anymore, I don't know what I am, but I'm not Mormon anymore, I was having discussions with some Christians online. And at the time I probably came across as some of the Mormons that we know that we interact with who on the outside sometimes seem to be defending the LDS church and its teachings.

But then they'll say things that kind of reveal that in their heart they are in rebellion to God, in rebellion to his word. And I know I was presenting very much that kind of mindset online as I was discussing with these Christians, and was asked kind of directly by one of them, you know, why aren't you an atheist? Because I was presenting some of the standard arguments against the reliability of the Bible and arguing for, okay, so maybe Mormonism's teachings on eternal families aren't true, or on, you know, basically universal salvation to one of the three degrees of heaven.

Maybe that's not true, I would say, but at least it's appealing, at least it's better than anything you've got. You know, I would throw those types of arguments at the Christians that I was discussing with, and was asked fairly directly, why don't you become an atheist then? If you don't believe Mormonism and you think Mormonism is better than Christianity, then why don't you become an atheist? And my answer was that because I believed in Jesus, I believed in what he did for me. And then that person posed the question to me and asked, do you think you could deny Jesus Christ and walk away from that? And I left that conversation late that night, and went and sat in our living room and thought about that question for a long time, and realized that no, I couldn't deny Jesus Christ, that where I had been brought to was faith in Jesus Christ, even though there were a lot of things that I didn't have worked out in my mind. There was a lot of study that I needed to do to understand kind of the foundations of Christianity coming out of Mormonism, but as far as faith in Christ, that was solid for me. That was something I held on to, and I'll get more into that when I tell my story, but that's why I chose to rebuild faith, because that was there for me, and it was something that didn't come from all of the study that I had done. It was something that God had done in my life. He had brought me to a place where I had, while everything else was crumbling, I had trust in Jesus Christ. So we've talked a lot about fears, what fears we had about Mormonism being not true, what fears we had about walking away from Mormonism and trying to make a life in Christianity, but let's talk about what it is about life after Mormonism that has given us hope and joy. Matthew, what would you say to that question? There's so much I could answer.

One of the fears that I had was, where do I go from here? I think we remember that talk. Who was it that gave it? Ballard, I think? Elder Ballard. Oh, yeah. Gave that talk, where do you go from here?

We're the only church with prophets and apostles. Where do you go from here? Those words kind of bothered me. I was like, he's right.

Where do I go? After a lot of study and prayer, I started watching debates, and I started to be introduced to Reformed theology. I won't get into that right now, but I just found it so logical and so coherent and so consistent that it just completely illuminated my mind every time I would read it and study it. I just wanted to know more, and I just had this huge thirst for knowledge. I was buying commentaries and Bibles and books and everything I could find. I just loved it.

I couldn't stop reading it. While I had that fear of losing my friends and family, at the same time, there was just this thirst for knowledge. That led me to the church that I attend now, and the fear where I didn't know where I was going to go. I've just been so blessed by God to find a faithful Christian church where I do have that same kind of fellowship and love and inclusion that I felt when I was a Latter-day Saint. Not only that, but we're fed by the Word of God every week. We're just praising God. We're just enjoying and loving God and just becoming so enraptured in God's holiness and His love. It's just an amazing feeling to go there to church every week. You kind of have... I don't know about you guys, but some days I would struggle as a Latter-day Saint to wake up on Sundays and say, oh, I got to get ready for church.

I'm not a morning person, so that's where I struggle. Sometimes I'm still like that, but then when I get to church I'm like, yes, this is just so incredible. I just praise and thank God that I have a family now. I'm a part of a family of fellow Christian believers where we all have the same experience of knowing God's love and knowing salvation through Jesus Christ. To share that is just incredible. I think that's just why I love wanting to share the gospel with Latter-day Saints, because they have this fear of where could they go, and I have this, and I say, there's so much out there.

You could have something like this. You could be part of a family of Christians. You can find fellowship.

It's not as scary as they make it out to be. There is life after Mormonism. That's just one of the very great blessings I've had in my life since leaving the church and finding my Christian church. Thank you.

Michael, what about you? Yeah, I remember not long after I left the church, just kind of laying on my bed and thinking, oh my gosh, what have I done? I just sacrificed my exaltation for my morals. You know, I'm going to go to outer darkness now, and somebody sent me the book The Prodigal God. I read that, and it's just life-changing. I finished that, and I was like, I made the right decision. I literally felt a weight coming off of my shoulders after I left that I didn't know was there. All of a sudden, I just had this freedom. At first, I didn't know what to do with it.

It's like, you know, you've been so long. They say you have agency in Mormonism, and yet they tell you what time to go to church, where to go to church. They tell you basically how you should dress at church, what kind of shirt you should wear if you're going to pass the sacrament. They tell you what your calling is going to be. You don't have choices.

I actually kind of missed that initially. I was like, I don't want to decide. I can go to church now, and I can decide how I want to serve? That's crazy.

When's the pastor just going to come tell me what God told him for me to do, because I don't want to make these choices? But you end up loving it after a while. It was like, I could see color for the first time after a couple of months.

I remember one time just driving and seeing a raindrop hit my windshield. I'm just looking like, man, this is beautiful. I feel like I haven't been able to enjoy the world at all, because I've been so laser focused on my worthiness and being a little bit better every day.

That was all I could ever think about. I was just stuck in that mindset. It's just been amazing for me to just have this simple faith in Jesus Christ and to be able to trust that He's got everything under control. I don't have to worry if I'm not a little bit better today than I was yesterday, because my worthiness or my salvation doesn't hinge on my perfect obedience anymore.

It hinges on His perfect obedience, and He never fails. There are just so many things that I've enjoyed. I got the ESV Bible, and I love it. I started reading that, and just John 1.1, I'm like, wow, this doesn't really support the church like I thought it did. Just being able to read whatever translation of the Bible I want and to go to whatever church I want to go to is incredible.

But to me, nothing beats the fact that when I was Mormon, I was afraid that if I sinned, the Holy Ghost was going to leave me. It was going to abandon me in the teeth of sin when I needed Him the most until I got my act together. But now I know that no matter what I do, nothing can pluck me out of God's hand, and He's not going to let go because I'm His child. To me, this is just incredible. It is so much bigger than what I believed my whole life. Yeah, that promise of grace is so mind-altering, isn't it?

When you realize that you are His, and He's brought you to that point, and He's not going to let you go. That's a total mind shift for someone coming out of the LDS faith. So for me, one of the things that was immediately apparent to me about the difference, and it's similar to what you said, Michael, when you said that it was like you could see color for the first time. One of the first things I started telling people after we left and started attending other Christian churches and trying to find a good home church to attend was that it was so amazing to actually worship God for the first time. And it seems strange because some of the hymns you sing are the same, right? So in the LDS faith we sang How Great Thou Art, and that's been a favorite of mine for a long time because it was my grandma's favorite. And you sing that in Christian churches as well. But the act of on a Sunday morning going to church and singing praise to God was something so different than what I had experienced before.

It's hard to describe how important that was to me. So I remember singing one Sunday Amazing Grace, and the last verse really hit me. It says, When we've been there 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun, we've no less days to sing God's praise than when we first begun. And standing in a Christian church singing that song amongst maybe 600 other believers, just belting it out, I realized that I was experiencing joy, maybe for the first time.

Maybe I shouldn't say that. There's definitely been plenty of points of joy in my life, the births of my children, my wedding day, but to experience that joy in my relationship with God, I think was definitely a first for me. And I couldn't help but contrast it with some of the arguments that you see sometimes online from Latter Day Saints, when they argue about how paltry the Christian view of heaven is compared with theirs. You know, Oh, what you think you're just going to be floating around on clouds and worshiping God all day.

And that last verse of that song is like, Yeah, I wouldn't mind doing that at all. That was, that's amazing. So, and he's worthy of it. So yeah, let's give him praise forever.

I'm good with that. It was a, it was a real eye opener for me. Yeah, I, it just, you know, making me think too, like, for all the fear that I had about leaving the church, you know, if I could go back in time and make the same decision, knowing that I would experience the same pain that leaving the church cause I would do it a hundred times over because, because I just know that it's, it's worth it. And once you experience Jesus, you realize he's worth dying for. And all those things that you lost are just nothing compared to what you've gained.

Yeah, for sure. Matthew, any, any final thoughts? Just want to say praise God for bringing us to the truth and bringing us to Christ. And I really, really just want, if there are Latter-day Saints here who are listening to us, maybe just ask yourselves, what, what if Mormonism isn't true?

What is, is it so terrifying as, it sounds or appears to be? I mean, we've all, we three have been very blessed by God to have been led out of the church and to be led to Christian congregations where, where we feel welcome and loved and, and we found Jesus Christ and we have happiness and joy and there is life after Mormonism. So I just wanted to leave with that comment. Amen. We thank you for tuning in to this episode of the outer brightness podcast. We'd love to hear from you. Please visit the outer brightness podcast page on Facebook. Feel free to send us a message there with comments or questions by clicking, send a message at the top of the page, and we would appreciate it. If you give the page alike, we also have an outer brightness group on Facebook where you can join and interact with us and others. As we've discussed the podcast, past episodes and suggestions for future episodes, et cetera. You can also send us an email at outer brightness at gmail.com.

We hope to hear from you soon. You can subscribe to the outer brightness podcast on Apple podcasts, cast box, Google podcasts, pocket casts, pod beam, Spotify, and stitcher. Also, you can check out our new YouTube channel and if you like it, be sure to lay hands on that subscribe button and confirm it. If you like what you hear, please give us a rating and review wherever you listen and help spread the word. You can also connect with Michael, the ex Mormon apologist at from water to wine.org where he blogs and sometimes Paul and Matthew do as well. Music for the outer brightness podcast is graciously provided by the talented Brianna Flournoy and by Adams road. Learn more about Adams road by visiting their ministry page at Adams road ministry.com.

Stay bright flyer flies. Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life and we have believed and have come to know that you are the holy one of God. The word made fresh, the risen son. Heaven and earth will pass away, but the word of the Lord endures forever. All this world is in decay, but the word of our God through ages remains.

Lord, you promised that we, as your church, would remain upon this rock and the gates of hell will not prevail against us cause you have power to keep your world unspoiled in purity. Heaven and earth will pass away, but the word of the Lord endures forever. All this world is in decay, but the word of our God through ages remains. As the rain falls down from heaven and waters the earth, bringing it life so the word goes out from your mouth. The Lord will turn empty, but does what you desire. Lord, we hear your word and believe in you. Heaven and earth will pass away, but the word of the Lord endures forever. All this world is in decay, but the word of our God through ages remains. The word of God remains.