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Ex-Member Anecdotes and Motivated Memories

Stephen C

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There was a kid I knew growing up who was a Grade A toxic masculinist. Like, really, really bad. A real Lord of the Flies type. Copious uses of the F-slur, especially if you showed any sensitivity and he smelled blood. He especially enjoyed trying to make kids cry, at which time he would get the other boys together and hound them even more. One time he threatened to cut off my [edited] and I remember thinking that he totally would if there wasn’t any adult supervision in the world. (As a strange aside, his dad was a real Mr. Rogers type, so this wasn’t a case of an abused kid lashing out, he really did seem to just be born that way.)  

So anyway, you can imagine my surprise when I saw a leaving-the-Church Facebook post where he noted that when he was growing up he wondered why women couldn’t have the priesthood. My eyes rolled back hard. I grew up with the kid. The only “women’s issue” he was concerned with was how many of them he could hook up with. 

I don’t think he was being insincere in his post, he probably does remember something along those lines, but the past several decades of memory research has shown us just how incredibly malleable our memories are, especially when motivations are at play. It is actually quite easy for scientists in laboratories to implant memories in subjects that they, for example, were lost in the mall for an extended period of time as a child when they weren’t. 

To awkwardly transition, the latest thing in the LDS sphere that has been making the rounds is a book by Jeff Strong that interviews a very large number of disaffiliated members.. At the outset, I should note I have not read the book (although I have seen slides he’s put together summarizing the take-aways), so this isn’t a critique of his book per se, but if my understanding is correct, the idea is that a lot of the people who have left have been hurt, therefore, the Church wronged them, ergo the Church and its culture needs to change. 

I’m sure there is useful information in ex-member accounts that we can learn from. However, I can’t help but think that for many ex-Mormon leaving narratives that you run across online, there are Church leaders or family members involved in those same events who saw the blue car swerve left instead of right, and have a very different take on what happened. (And of course, those people are also biased. Unless you’re an emotion-less automaton, we all are, and that’s fine.)  

That’s one reason why in adversarial settings both sides of a court case, for example, collect their own testimonies and evidence, under the idea that if you juxtapose both arguments against each other it helps facilitate the truth rising to the surface as both sides push against and hold each other to account.* In the case of leavers, I assume that the truth is often somewhere in the middle between what they say and what their TBM parents/leaders would say, but assuming that the corpus of leavers presents the unvarnished truth is equivalent to only listening to the prosecution in a court case. Of course the person (in this case the Church and its culture) is going to sound guilty if you haven’t heard the other side of the story.  

Of course, there are some contexts where an adversarial, both-sides approach is inappropriate. I don’t expect fast and testimony meeting to start including rebuttals, that’s not what it’s about. It’s supposed to just be faith-affirming, and if there’s a context where you want something to just be faith destroying by its nature then I guess that would be the equivalent.   

And above and beyond motivated memory, sometimes we’re just bad at perceiving things. A famous illusion I show to my class when I teach the social psychology section shows how easy it is to miss very big things when you’re focusing on something else. In this case, while students are trying to count how many balls are being bounced, about a third of them routinely miss the man in a gorilla suit who walks in the middle of the frame, beats his chest, and walks off-screen. On one hand, if you’re focusing on things that fit into the Church-is-offensive narrative you can find it even if you have to misinterpret things to do so. On the other hand, if you’re focused on getting speakers for that Sunday, you can easily miss the things that are actually offensive and hurtful–the sword cuts both ways. 

Does that mean that all is well in Zion with how we treat our brothers and sisters who have left? No, but in the same way that we should be skeptical of a devotional take on Church history that seems all roses and cream, neither should we feel an obligation to take the accounts of the hurt as unvarnished, unqualified reality and set our frameworks accordingly. Life and perception are messy.

*To be clear, Strong did interview orthodox members about Church culture, but according to what I saw, in particular regards to the phenomenology of leaving the almost exclusive emphasis was on the accounts of those who had left. This makes sense–it’s hard to track down the TBM associates who went through the same thing–but even so it still has the limitations outlined above.

Comments

21 responses to “Ex-Member Anecdotes and Motivated Memories”

  1. REC911

    Funny how most of us had that same bully in our past. I have often wondered what prison or company they ended up in.

    The reasons why people leave the church has been a personal curiosity for me. All my children, (all adults) my spouse and I, (old people) are still in and my siblings are still in but some of my siblings kids are out. (all adults)

    As most here know, I am far from being “orthodox” in the church. It works for me. I have never been what I would call orthodox even tho I partook in most of the traditions in the church such as mission, temple marriage, and church service.

    Lots of reasons out there to leave the church but if members would just live the gospel in a heathy way to them, I think it would help them stay for the stuff they like instead of leaving for the stuff they dont like.

    Our culture doesn’t like members who don’t do/believe everything the church teaches 100% of the time. We are viewed as “cafeteria members” that are slacking in the faith. Not a fan of that culture.

    We tend to be an all or nothing religion of overachievers. Slackers are welcome only if you are on the overachieving covenant path at the same speed the “elect” are on. Having said that, nothing wrong with being an orthodox, overachieving 110% kind of member if that works for you. Nothing at all wrong with that.

    This is what I mean by a “healthy way to them” life in the church. What works for you, not me.

    Having recently retired, many in the church have asked me straight out “so when are you going on a mission?” Very few ask me IF I will go on a mission. The culture expects me to go. Some of the orthodox well intended members are actually disappointed in me not going. Like I just leaped of the covenant path or something. Some family treats me like that as well. (the orthodox family)

    There is room in the pews for all of us. IMO.

  2. Robert

    Fascinating, Your memory of events from decades ago is correct, while his perceptions of the time are wrong. You make a perfect point in your piece about the ephemeral nature of memory but it sits so completely hidden by your blind spots, that you cannot detect it in yourself.

    As I said, Fascinating.

  3. Stephen C

    Only a superficial reading of the post would draw that conclusion. I specifically said on multiple occasions that these memory issues affect all of us–orthodox or not, stayers and leavers, etc. That doesn’t mean that memory is irrelevant or useless, just that we often need to triangulate different accounts to get at the truth, and that presenting one side is going to skew things.

  4. Jonathan Green

    You know what they say about the plural of anecdote.

    One issue I see in a lot of the popular research on exit is that it often proposes highly LDS-specific causes for worldwide trends. If the phenomenon you’re describing is just secularization – which it is – then the driving causes at the group level are going to be similar to whatever causes secularization elsewhere in the U.S. and globally. Was there an Episcopalian Kinderhook Plates that was just too much for a bunch of 20th-century Episcopalians? No, there was not. Individual experiences and outcomes certainly vary, but collectively, the list of historical issues for exit is just an acceptable way for people to justify their decision in favor of secularization.

    I’ve posted before about how we remember our experiences as teenagers or missionaries, and people didn’t take it well. But we really are terrible at it.

  5. Robert

    Just once I would like to encounter a mormon who when confronted with their bad behavior (or writing) stops and says. Hmm, maybe I am wrong. If you care at all about those members who have been hurt you might try it just once.

  6. RLD

    I remember the day my parents and I (and my younger siblings, though I doubt they remember) learned about the revelation on priesthood. We had picked up my Dad from work, and on the way home we heard it in the news on the radio. My parents were thrilled, but they had to explain to me why, because I didn’t know Blacks couldn’t hold the priesthood up to that point. (I was seven at the time.)

    But…for many years, when I replayed that memory in my mind, the scenery I saw through the car window was a specific street in the city where we lived in 1977. Maybe a decade ago, we were reading Official Declaration 2 in a class when I realized that it was given in 1978, and by then we had moved to a different city. I noted it as a lesson on the fallibility of memory. But I can now add a lesson on the malleability of memory: if I replay that memory now, I see a similar street in the city where we lived in 1978. Given the drive, that probably is the street where the event took place, but I doubt my brain dug up a more accurate memory–it just substituted a location in the city where I now realize this happened. Picking my Dad up from work was a fairly common experience in both cities, and it was the same car, so the background of the event is pretty interchangeable.

    Yes, memory is weird and not entirely trustworthy. It’s a fun family game to compare early memories–there will be surprises.

  7. Kay Cookie

    If you look at his data, the biggest reason people leave is history, not being hurt. That tracks with my experience. But honestly, I think the idea of many things all culminating in leaving is true. Probably members who stay or join the church also have many, many factors combining there. I think casting doubts on people’s stories and experiences is not a useful way to approach them. It is true that memories change over time, but so do everyone’s. A short encapsulation of my story is that as long as I believed, I could put up with all kinds of hurts and offenses, but once I no longer believed, they all combined to bring me out of the church. But the final straw was really church history and doctrine.

  8. ji

    I haven’t read Jeff Strong’s book, but for some reason (maybe a review?) I thought he approached the matter from a faithful perspective. It so, I am glad he gathered the information.

    I have a few extended family members who have stepped away (loudly or quietly), but really no one in the church hierarchy cares. I wish someone did.

    Anyway, one may leave the church, but someone who was a brother or niece or neighbor before leaving is still a brother or niece or neighbor after leaving.

    Regarding cafeteria Mormons, aren’t we all cafeteria Mormons? When invited to a grand buffet banquet (or even a ward potluck), I can nibble here and nibble there, or I suppose I could gorge on one thing in particular, but I likely can’t eat some of everything, and that’s okay. In the old days, I once observed that I was spending hours on Scouting for Aaronic Priesthood youth, while someone else was spending hours on temple work, and while someone else was spending hours on missionary work, and that was okay. As shown in another recent posting, for example, I’m not thrilled with including heavenly mothers in our worship meetings, but I still identify as a faithful Latter-day Saint. So yes, I think we’re all cafeteria members — hopefully, we can all sustain each other like in Paul’s parts-of-the-body expression.

    Last thought: I agree that Latter-day Saints are affected by broad societal trends.

  9. Dave B

    Interesting post. If motivated memories or implanted memories explain what Exmos say about leaving the Church, I wonder if the same dynamic holds for conversion stories of those who join the Church. Maybe some conversion stories have grown over time or simply been implanted. Especially when they regularly hear conversion narratives recounted monthly in fast and testimony meeting, in LDS magazines, or in General Conference.

  10. Jonathan Green

    Of course it works both ways; that was Stephen’s point. That means that we should try to rely on more than just personal memories, for example. And it also means that often it comes down to a choice: if we choose to believe, we can find ways to interpret our life stories and church history in line with that. And it breaks down the idea that believers are just brainwashed sheep. People who leave also have motivated memories (to see themselves as victims, for example), because otherwise they look like garden-variety covenant-forsakers evading their responsibility to the community that helped form them.

  11. Seth

    I’m not sure what truth you’re looking for here, Stephen. If someone decides to leave because their temple recommend was revoked for what they felt were unreasonable causes do you expect telling them not to feel that way is standing for the truth? That seems to be entirely opposite the charity we’re expected to strive for in living through gospel.

    And that’s not an example chosen at random. The person I know in that case stayed in the church, not even a consideration of leaving as far as I know. And that is in every regard as valid of a response. People have different backgrounds, different needs, and different abilities.

  12. Stephen C

    RLD: My grandfather-in-law had a memory of meeting Albert Einstein when he was at Princeton for a conference–and then he later somehow found out that Einstein demonstrably wasn’t in the area during the conference…. But yeah, a lot of fun cases like that.

    Kay Cookie: I think the idea that people largely simply leave when they stop believing makes sense–no reason to overthink it. (And, to Jonathan’s point, it’s more difficult for people to believe exclusivistic religious truth claims nowadays for a broader set of reasons).

    Dave B: That’s reasonable. However, I do suspect that the total mass of memory-shaping energy from online fora and popular culture far, far outweighs the effect of once-a-month testimony meetings. It reminds me of a point somebody else made that religious parents relying on Sunday attendance are nuts if they think that the one hour of religious socialization a week would be able to hold a candle to the deluge of what’s coming out of their kids’ phone.

    Jonathan: Amen

    Seth: “That seems to be entirely opposite the charity we’re expected to strive for in living through gospel.” Sure, but I’ll push back a little bit when it seems like the appeal to charity is being weaponized. “You have to change X, Y, Z because I’m hurting, and if you doubt my diagnosis for my hurt then you’re being uncharitable,” is often used as a way to use the principle of charity to coerce a particular prescription. I can be sympathetic to your hurt and recognize that it’s real while still disagreeing about your take on what its implications are for Church culture and policy.

  13. DaveW

    I think Stephen’s point is that people who leave have some vested interest in telling themselves that they were always uncomfortable with certain things in the church, that they never were all that convinced it was true, and that certain bad experiences were really bad. All those things justify their current choice to no longer affiliate, or to affiliate differently than they used to. So, we should keep that in mind when listening to their stories.

    The converse is obviously also true. Active members have an interest in limiting their personal investment in complicated history, placing things “on the shelf” that aren’t to be worried about, to fondly remember past spiritual experiences, to minimize stories of people who have left, and to minimize our own past negative experiences with the church. We all do these things because they reduce the conflict between our understanding of the church and our current actions and situations. Human brains get overwhelmed if they are constantly fighting with conflicting views, so to keep our whole species from anxiety-induced paralysis, we evolved to pick narratives that lesson that discomfort.

    This is good to the extent that it lets us function in the world. It is bad to the extent that it locks us into our current beliefs and shuts us down from considering other experiences. And none of this is unique to the LDS church or religion. We clearly see it politically. We see it in rooting for sports teams. We see it in relationships, decisions at work, and everything we do that gets messy.

    I think the point of this post is just to be aware of this. We have biases, and sometimes they need to be broken down and eliminated. But there’s a limit to how much we can do that, and there will always be remaining biases. But in being aware of our bias, we can hopefully not let our lives be ruled by them.

  14. James

    @REC911: good on you for staying, but since the topic is memory / perception, I don’t think it’s accurate to paint “the culture” as a homogeneous thing. There are certainly a subset within the church who would expect you to go on a mission, and that may even be dominant where you are, but I don’t think it’s “the culture”. I certainly perceive very little of that where I am from. Senior couples going on missions while not unheard of here, is far more the exception than the rule and it’s certainly not expected.

    I’m skeptical of the concept of “the culture” as a whole because it’s not the same everywhere, and two people in the same ward can perceive it very differently, based on many things but in this case where it rubs against whatever their own individual thoughts / beliefs / actions are.

    I know this isn’t an LDS-specific thing, but I’ve heard various young women over the past few months talk about how “the culture” expects them either not to have children but go out and work, or not to go out and work but stay at home and have children. “The culture” expects no such thing, but these individuals had encountered other individuals who had opinions about their life choices and these have been salient because they were points of disagreement. If I’m making sense.

    @Stephen C: Good article, fair points. I haven’t read the book either (yet) but Jeff Strong has been on lots of podcasts in the LDS circle and I’ve listened to many of them. I find his work quite compelling personally.

  15. REC911

    @James: Good point. Culture where I am at is very different than everywhere else. I am in the mormon corridor where the culture is completely different away from here. I lived in Utah for a while when young and that was even a weirder culture for me. I fit better with a CA, HI or small branch in MI church culture/vibe…more chill.

    The author of the book mentioned above spoke about the culture needing to change and I agree. As you point out, depending where you experience the church and its culture, it can be a positive or negative experience based on the experiencer. But there is a culture present wherever you church at. I would love to move out of my current church culture into a chill one. I dont “fit” in my current ward culture.

    I think members that leave are focusing too much on the culture and not the gospel and they tend to not know the difference. For example…when some leave they feel a sense of relief. A relief from being burdened by the busy church life can be one such relief they experience which is a very common one. IMO, you dont have to leave to feel that, you just have to adjust your church experience to fit your current situation. Slow down, say no, take a step back vs leave the church because the 110% all the time culture is something I cant keep up with anymore.

    90% of the meetings I go to in my ward/culture someone is pounding the “do more” pulpit. Add to that the new current “Jesus is coming soon” culture we are re-experiencing as a church and some members are whipped into a frenzy of “do more” culture. This is culture, not the church. Local leaders pet projects are culture, not the church. My stake is trying their best to bring home teaching back. The local culture cant handle the fact that most do not want to be visited and they take that as a failed program. They want us back in the home every month because not wanting to be visited is not an option. Culture. The temple pres that speaks in stake conference tells the members to “double their efforts” in temple attendance. The mission pres in that same stake conference is telling the members to double efforts in missionary work. Culture, not church. The church is overworking me….I am out! No, dont do it all, do what you can and stop chasing the checklist and to-do’s.

    Now, if a member left because a local leader “offended” them, which is a real thing and unfortunately happens all the time, and that x-member says the “church” was the offender, then yes I agree about the perception being off. The church did no such thing, the local leader is not the “church” nor be considered as such. Hope I am making sense. Think Mountain Meadows. The church did not make that happen, the local culture did. Most blame the church.

    Culture is a very real thing and the church gets most the crap about that bad culture when IMO it should be local leaders and members getting the crap for it.

  16. REC911

    @DaveW: Well said.

  17. Jack

    REC911,

    I appreciate your separation of the church from the culture–I think that’s an important distinction that we need to remember. And also, while I agree that some folks have been treated unfairly by local leaders, I think these little quips by Neal A. Maxwell are a good reminder that sometimes we are too easily provoked:

    “If one has a chip on his or her shoulder, you can’t make it through the foyer, so to speak, without getting it knocked off.”

    “By the way, let us not, as some do, mistake the chips we have placed on our own shoulders for crosses!”

    And ironically:

    “Do not, if you have been offended, recall that while you may have been bumped by an ecclesiastical elbow, the chip was on your shoulder long before the elbow appeared.”

  18. James

    @REC911: Very well said. And it’s something that I have often pondered about. Why does God send us to places where he knows we’re not going to fit?

    For most of my life I’ve been lucky enough to have a very good fit for the church culture, though there have been places that have chafed. But at the same time I know many who haven’t been a fit, some have struggled to stay, some have left as soon as the fit wasn’t so good anymore.

    I’m still not entirely sure what lesson one should learn. But many thanks for sharing.

  19. Dario

    I just finished reading the book. It says a fuller description of the methodology for his survey is on his website; but, if it is, I can’t find it (even after giving up an email address to get a password). Based on the brief methodology appendix included, there are some obvious concerns: (1) the sample is nonprobability and self-selected, so it may capture people unusually motivated to discuss LDS disaffiliation rather than the broader LDS population; (2) because there is no known sampling frame or denominator, the study cannot credibly estimate how many people are leaving or the prevalence of particular reasons for leaving; (3) the excerpt gives insufficient detail about recruitment channels, response rates, duplicate prevention, and eligibility verification; (4) selection bias likely affects the findings, since quiet leavers, disengaged members, highly orthodox members, international members (i.e., MOST members), and people outside the recruitment networks may be underrepresented; (5) the study relies heavily on retrospective self-report, which is vulnerable to memory distortion, identity reconstruction, social desirability, and post hoc explanations; (6) the validity and reliability of the survey instrument are unclear, including question wording, scale construction, typology validation, and whether measures were pretested or benchmarked; (7) inferential statistics and subgroup comparisons are methodologically limited because nonrepresentative samples make population-level confidence intervals, significance tests, and generalizations potentially misleading; (8) the “AI-assisted qualitative coding process” relied on is underdescribed; (9) expert advisory review (if we accept that the unnamed advisors are experts) improves seriousness but is not equivalent to independent peer review, replication, or public scrutiny of data and methods; and (10) the findings are geographically and demographically limited, especially because international responses were excluded and the sample reportedly overrepresents women and more devout or satisfied participants, which may skew conclusions about LDS disaffiliation overall.

  20. ji

    Today, the Deseret News published an interview with the book author Jeff Strong — it may provide helpful background…

    https://www.deseret.com/faith/2026/05/23/jeff-strong-latter-day-saint-faith-survey-research-religious-disaffiliation/

  21. REC911

    ji -Thanks for posting. I enjoyed the article.

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