- I grew up Mormon.

(speaks foreign language)

I was Mormon most of my life, up until a few years ago.

- Hi.

- I then left the Mormon Church, and that is a whole story

that I want to talk about today with all of you.

My purpose in doing this is to share my perspective

so that anyone who is in a situation like I was

a couple of years ago, who is questioning and wondering

can have another perspective to lean on.

I'm not looking to get into debates

or to talk about the history or the theology of the church.

I'll do that in future videos.

Today, all I want to do is tell you the story

of how and why I left the Mormon Church.

23rd of May, 2000, 2009.

What are we even doing out here, man?

I grew up Mormon.

Both my parents were Mormon or LDS, Latter-day Saints.

I grew up going to Mormon youth camp.

I then eventually served a two-year mission

in Tijuana, Mexico, where for two years, I went around

and spoke to people in Spanish about the church

and learned a lot, learned to speak Spanish fluently.

(man speaks foreign language)

- [Man] How you feel?

(speaks foreign language)

(man laughs)

(speaks Spanish)

I then went to the Mormon university

called Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah,

where I graduated.

I went through all Mormon rituals in the church and temple.

I worked in the temple as a volunteer for a time.

I was very, very Mormon, and I believed it.

I believed deeply in the unique doctrine

of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,

which is a Christian organization

unlike any other Christian organization in its doctrine.

(heartfelt music)

The story of how I decided to leave this

really begins with the birth of my son.

Isabelle, who also grew up Mormon,

and I got married in the temple,

which is a huge Mormon ritual.

It's a huge part of being in the church.

We got married in the temple.

We went back to BYU together,

and a few weeks before we graduated from BYU,

we had a baby, or Ize had a baby.

I didn't have a baby.

She had a baby.

Then we took finals and graduated, like,

literally two weeks later.

Here we are literally in our cap and gown

with Henry, who is, like, two weeks old.

After we graduated, we moved out to Washington, DC,

and that's when my wheels really started to turn.

I started to think, you know, I have a child now.

I have to decide how I raise this child

and what I teach him about the world.

(rolls tongue)

Da, da, da, da, da.

I think having Henry really made me wonder

and think about how I should teach him about the world.

I'd grown up with this firm conviction of the LDS doctrine

and its beliefs about the world,

which are very specific and very peculiar.

And I really started to question,

is this what I want to teach my son?

And the answer initially was yes.

I want to teach him everything that I know about this faith

because I really believed it.

So, we're moving out to Washington, DC,

and I realized that if I'm gonna teach this to my son,

I need to double down on my faith.

I need to go deeper than I ever have

and really, really establish a strong foundation

and conviction around this doctrine.

I had one, but I knew it needed to be stronger

if I was gonna teach my son this.

One of the things I loved about Mormon doctrine at the time

was that there was always a push to ask God if it was true.

Not to trust any people or any organization,

but to, like, get on your knees and say, God, is this true?

Is this church actually real?

Is all of the things that they say actually the real deal?

I had kind of taken advantage of that promise before,

but never really.

I'd always been in a setting of pressure,

whether it was my home as a kid or my mission or BYU.

In other words, there was always an incentive to believe.

So I'd never really been in a situation

where I could truly ask this question

and not feel like there was some price to pay

if I decided I didn't believe.

Being in Washington DC with my child out on my own

in the workforce was my opportunity,

so I spent an entire year

reading the "Book of Mormon", going to church.

I had a responsibility at church

that I was putting a lot of work into,

and praying every morning and every night

for some sort of conviction.

I said, I am more earnest and sincere

than I've ever been about this.

I'm willing to listen to any answer.

I just need an answer.

I spent a year doing this.

A year.

That's a long time.

And then I remember this day,

I was biking into Washington, DC,

on a sunny, like, spring day,

and it just hit me in some really strong way

that no, this isn't working.

I've put in the years of asking

and the effort towards (sighs) making this work,

and it wasn't working.

This isn't true for me.

And like a switch, it just so much came out of me,

and I quickly decided that I was done.

I don't think it was all at once.

I think I had been slowly moving in this direction

for a long time, but in a moment of clarity,

it clicked for me in a very satisfying and, like,

very true way.

So Iz, who, Ize, Isabelle,

whatever you want to call her, my wife,

it didn't click for her.

She was not on this journey that I was on.

And I came back and I told her.

I said, I think I am done being Mormon.

And I had always been the sort

of more devout, convicted Mormon.

And she was just like, "What?

"Like, you just, like, have decided

"to be out of this church?" And she full on said, like,

"This is gonna end our marriage.

"Like, you can't just leave the church."

And I just told her.

I said, "This is where I stand and this is what I feel,"

and I felt very strongly about it.

Luckily, soon enough, Ize was on her own path

of reconciling her thoughts about the church,

her qualms with the church,

and soon she would join me in this path

towards leaving the church.

Now, I call it a path because that's exactly what it is.

Leaving any Orthodox religion is not easy.

There are layers and layers of psychological

and cultural conditioning that you don't even realize

is there until you start to peel it back.

So, even though we started to leave the church,

we were still going to church every Sunday,

which I don't really understand in retrospect.

All I can say is that, like, we were just,

that's what we did every Sunday.

We went to church,

and there was some guilt if we didn't go to church,

and so we went to church.

But we slowly started to feel an emptiness towards it,

and over the course of six months,

we finally decided to stop going to church.

My behavior didn't change all of a sudden.

Like, I didn't leave the church

so I could start drinking alcohol or coffee or smoking.

Like, that was not a part of the agenda for me.

I kind of just carried on exactly how I'd always been,

except for now I looked around in the world

and I didn't have a doctrinal theological framework

to understand it, which was at once exhilarating

and horrifying at the same time.

My existential view had been so neatly packaged

by the plan of salvation,

which is at the key doctrinal framework

within the Mormon Church, and that was now gone.

I had no plan.

I had no framework to make sense of the world.

Exhilarating, but horrifying.

There was also a deep fear

of the cultural and social repercussions of my decision.

Most of my friends were still LDS or Mormon,

and, of course, my family was, too.

So was Ize's. And let me just try to give you a perspective

on why this is such a big deal.

A quick primmer on Mormon theology

is that our whole purpose in life

is to come down here to Earth to learn and to grow

and to progress and to attain knowledge,

and to fulfill certain we call them covenants or rituals.

There are four of them that are really important

to do while you're on Earth, baptism, confirmation,

this hour-long ritual inside the temple,

and then, called the endowment,

and then the ceiling or marriage.

If you can do those four things,

then you're in really good shape.

You have the knowledge necessary

to go back and live in the top tier of heaven.

And yes, in Mormon theology,

there are multiple tiers of heaven.

If you're not able to get these rituals done

while you're on Earth, no worries.

When you're in the next life, people on Earth

can do all of the rituals for you when you're dead,

and then you can have those,

the chance to accept those rituals or those covenants

when you're on the other side.

It's a huge deal.

I had gone through all of the rituals.

I had accepted all of those covenants,

which are very serious covenants.

You wear undergarments that are symbolic

of those covenants that you've made.

People call them, like, secret underwear or whatever,

but it was just religious clothing

that symbolizes your commitment to these doctrines.

And the beauty of all of this within Mormon doctrine

is if you do this and everyone in your family does this,

then all of you are sealed together

in this never ending chain of eternal family

that is at the epicenter of Mormon doctrine.

If you know Mormons

and you know that they are family-centered,

it's because of this.

The whole doctrine is based on creating family units

that are all tied into this covenant,

these promises that bind you, that seal you together

for time and all eternity.

If you've accepted those covenants, and then you leave,

you break away, you reject those covenants,

you take off your garments, you say I'm done with this,

that's a pretty big deal within the LDS framework.

You are no longer able to be with your family

in the celestial glory of the top tier of heaven.

So if you believe that, and you're a parent,

and you see your child rejecting those covenants,

rejecting that eternal ceiling to the family,

you're basically seeing your child go away,

and you feel like you're losing them.

So unsurprisingly, people leaving the Mormon Church

creates huge upset within families,

like many other religions.

It's not just an insular cultural experience.

It is a deeply held doctrinal theological belief

that if you leave the church, there are major consequences.