I thought it would be nice to start this journey by describing what I enjoyed about the church.

From a cultural perspective:

• The church offered a close-knit community – sort of an “all for one, and one for all” situation. I had everybody’s back, and they had mine. When I was young, they provided excellent mentors and teachers that helped me grow. As I got older, I became that mentor for others, and many people helped mentor my own children.
• They provided their members with opportunities to serve and to contribute. This helped everybody feel invested and to be an active part of the community.
• The church mostly seemed above the fray. Some examples include:
  • When the Book of Mormon musical came out, rather than picket and complain, they instead advertised in the program that “the book is always better.”
  • In a 60 minutes interview with President Gordon B. Hinkley, they confirmed that even though the church receives a lot of money through tithing, they had never had a major financial scandal (of course this is no longer true).
  • I once watched a show about Scientology and I was horrified by how they used their lawyers to silence people, and very proud that our church would never do that (I was naïve).
• The church is very conservative, but usually tried to remain apolitical (with some notable exceptions). I was mostly conservative (or at least conservative compared to the Seattle tech culture), so this wasn’t a big problem for me.

From a doctrinal perspective:

• The doctrine is fairly deep and nuanced, and it encompasses all of humanity (or at least the heterosexual portion of humanity).
• The church is a “living” church, that is expected to evolve. The leader is called “the prophet” who we believe receives some level of guidance from God. This may sound a little cultish, but:
  • Most of what they said sounded sane to me at the time.
  • If I had an issue with anything that was taught, I was encouraged to study and pray about it until I received my own witness. They usually did not try to cram everything down our throats.
  • They acknowledged that we did not have all truth yet, rather than arrogantly declaring that we did.
• The church was not anti-science (at least not officially). There are certainly some crazy members and I had a few crazy religion teachers at BYU, but at least my geology teacher taught the earth was 4.5 billion years old.

But generally, I always felt that the church and its culture was a force for good. Even if it was all made up, I didn’t think that it significantly impeded my life and that it was an overall benefit to humanity.

But the one thing that you are not allowed to do in the church is to criticize the prophet. If you had doubts, you had better keep them to yourself. Ideally, you would not dwell on such doubts until they went away.