Faith & Testimony
Why People Leave the Church: There Is Only One Real Reason
Members give a million reasons for leaving the Church. Alma 32 gives one.
Anyone who leaves The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does so for the exact same reason as everyone else who has left.
Yes, they do.
The reasons they give are endless. They may say they found something they did not like in Church history, something they believe no one else knows about. Maybe they read anti-literature and it planted doubts in their mind. They may say they disagree with what a previous prophet did or said, whether the account is true or not, and claim God would never allow a true prophet to do such a thing.
They may say they were offended by a member. Someone looked at them sideways or did not invite them to the Christmas party. Perhaps no one ever came to minister to them, or nobody brought meals during a hard stretch, while those same people took care of the Johnsons who were not nearly as bad off.
Maybe they were defrauded of money by a member. Maybe their child was abused by a member. Maybe their spouse beat them, or they got fired from a job owned by another member.
Maybe their husband held a high calling and was caught having an affair.
Maybe they did not like a doctrine, a policy, or a proclamation. Perhaps they disagreed with something the prophet or apostles said. Maybe they were upset with a group the Church supported.
Maybe they broke sacred covenants and let Satan take the wheel.
Maybe they were deceived by a Facebook group claiming secret knowledge, or persuaded to follow someone practicing priestcraft like Nehor or Korihor. Maybe they turned to the occult or to Eastern religions for solace and felt something there. How can that be?
Maybe they got rich, got greedy, filled up with the cares of the world, and lost the Spirit.
Maybe they stopped praying, stopped reading, stopped attending, stopped keeping the Word of Wisdom, stopped paying tithing, and simply did not feel like doing it anymore.
Maybe they became so educated they decided they knew more than God, or at least had a better way of doing things.
Perhaps they built a large following on Facebook or Instagram and people praised them for their knowledge, and Satan tempted them with pride until it took them down.
Perhaps they started finding fault with their bishop or stake president and criticizing every decision.
Maybe they prayed and prayed and never got an answer, even about something that mattered enormously, and eventually gave up.
Maybe they watched an illness drag on for years and could not understand why God allowed the suffering. Perhaps it was a spouse or a child who suffered.
Maybe they saw a member get drunk, drink coffee, vape, or act like a poor sport in a ward basketball game, and decided the whole thing was hypocrisy.
Maybe they could not beat an addiction. Maybe pornography. Maybe a crime. Maybe they knew a member who fell asleep at the wheel and killed someone, or got a DUI.
Perhaps they simply forgot what they promised, or set aside their patriarchal blessing, and things started to look hopeless. Maybe they were too embarrassed to come back after something they did.
There are a million claims about why people leave the Church. There is only one real reason.
First, an honest question
Before I give you the answer, answer this for yourself. No one is going to see it.
If you are not a full tithe payer, keeping the Word of Wisdom, holding and using a temple recommend, engaged in your calling, in the scriptures daily, and on your knees every day, what is the actual reason?
Fill in the blank in your own head: I am ______ percent active. Then finish this sentence honestly: The problem I have with not being one hundred percent is ______.
Hold that answer. It matters for what comes next.
They stopped watering the tree
Alma teaches how faith actually works. Plant a good seed in good ground, nourish it, and it grows into a tree that produces fruit sweet above all that is sweet. Stop nourishing it, and this happens:
"But if ye neglect the tree, and take no thought for its nourishment, behold it will not get any root; and when the heat of the sun cometh and scorcheth it, because it hath no root it withers away, and ye pluck it up and cast it out. Now, this is not because the seed was not good, neither is it because the fruit thereof would not be desirable; but it is because your ground is barren, and ye will not nourish the tree, therefore ye cannot have the fruit thereof." (Alma 32:38–39)
They failed to nurture and water their tree of faith.
That is the whole answer. Every reason on that long list above is a description of the weather. The heat of the sun comes for everybody, sometimes more than once. What determines whether the tree survives is whether it had roots when the heat arrived.
Look at the line Alma buries in the middle: this is not because the seed was not good. The gospel is true. The Book of Mormon is the word of God. The seed is perfect. The tree can still die if nobody waters it, and when it dies, it is not the seed's fault.
The hard part is this. They knew it was true. Every person who has ever left this Church felt the Spirit at some point, or the seed would never have sprouted at all. They did not lose something they never had. They stopped feeding something they did have, and then blamed the seed.
Jesus taught the same thing in the parable of the sower. The seed is the word of God, and it lands on four kinds of ground:
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"Those by the way side are they that hear; then cometh the devil, and taketh away the word out of their hearts, lest they should believe and be saved. They on the rock are they, which, when they hear, receive the word with joy; and these have no root, which for a while believe, and in time of temptation fall away. And that which fell among thorns are they, which, when they have heard, go forth, and are choked with cares and riches and pleasures of this life, and bring no fruit to perfection. But that on the good ground are they, which in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience." (Luke 8:12–15)
Four groups. The first never lets the gospel in at all. The second receives it gladly and loses it before it can root. The third loves the word but lets the cares and pleasures of this life crowd it out, and it never bears fruit. Only the fourth group keeps it, and the word Jesus attaches to them is patience. A tree that can survive what is coming takes years of daily, deliberate care. There is no shortcut and no substitute.
The wedge
In April 1966, Elder Spencer W. Kimball gave a General Conference address built on an account by Samuel T. Whitman called "Forgotten Wedges." President Thomas S. Monson revived the story in April 2002 with his talk "Hidden Wedges."
A man splitting wood left an iron wedge in the crook of a tree and forgot about it. He kept meaning to go back for it. The tree kept growing until the bark closed over the wedge entirely. Years later a storm tore off one large limb, the tree lost its balance, and the whole thing split apart. When they examined the trunk, they found the wedge that had been sitting there quietly the entire time.
Satan works the same way. He does not open with apostasy. He opens with one small thought, left unattended:
You can take it easy. Everything is fine.
You do not need to read every day. Do it when you have time.
You are too busy to pray, and you never get an answer anyway, so what is the point?
It is stake conference this weekend. Let's take a little trip.
You do not have to go every single week. Miss one once in a while.
You have accomplished a lot in life. You do not need God anymore.
You feel the Spirit more in the mountains than in a church building.
Nobody ministers to you. Why should you go minister to anyone?
The Church does not need your tithing. Think what else you could do with that money.
If you share the gospel with your neighbors they are going to think you are strange.
You do not need to wear your garments all the time. They are inconvenient and they do not fit right.
One cup of coffee is not going to keep you out of the celestial kingdom.
Go to the store on Sunday. Everybody does it. It does not matter anymore.
Stop listening to him. Every one of those is a wedge. None of them looks like leaving the Church. All of them end there if you let the bark close over them.
The wedge I am watching right now
There is a newer wedge, and it is doing more damage than any of the ones above, because the people it takes do not believe they are leaving anything. They believe they are going deeper.
I watch it happen almost weekly now. Someone builds an audience. He is articulate. He knows scripture better than most people in your ward. He talks about the last days with an authority that feels like the real thing, and the Spirit you feel while listening is partly your own hunger for the subject. Then, slowly, the message shifts.
The Church has gone astray. The Brethren have lost their way. The temple has been altered. The correlation department buried the truth. He has received revelation that the prophet has not received. Sometimes he tells you he is the one mighty and strong. Sometimes he tells you he is the servant spoken of in Isaiah. Sometimes he never says it out loud at all, and lets his followers say it for him.
The people who follow him do not walk out the back door. They walk out the front, certain they are the only ones awake. Then in a year or two the man himself is gone, and the tithing has stopped, and the temple recommend has expired, and a dozen families are sitting in the wreckage he left behind.
The Lord addressed this in the first year of the Restoration. Hiram Page had a seer stone and was producing revelations for the Church. A woman known as Mrs. Hubble came claiming to be a prophetess with commandments for the Saints. The answer the Lord gave applies word for word to what is on your feed this week:
"And this shall be a law unto you, that ye receive not the teachings of any that shall come before you as revelations or commandments; And this I give unto you that you may not be deceived, that you may know they are not of me." (D&C 43:5–6)
Three questions will protect you from every one of these men, and you can ask all three in about ten seconds.
Does he tell you the Church has gone astray, or that the prophet is compromised, deceived, or asleep? That claim alone is enough. He has told you everything you need to know.
Is he claiming revelation for people he has no stewardship over? God gives revelation to every worthy member, and He gives it within boundaries. A father receives for his family. A bishop receives for his ward. The President of the Church receives for the Church. A man on YouTube receives for himself and nobody else, and the First Presidency has said as much in plain language about the one mighty and strong.
Is he gathering people to himself, or to the temple? Watch where the loyalty lands. Every true servant God has ever sent pointed away from himself.
I want to be direct about my own position here, because I write about prophecy and I understand exactly how that looks. I hold no authority over you. I have received no revelation for this Church, and I never will. What I have is a scriptural argument that you are free to test, reject, or set on a shelf. I sustain the prophet. If I ever tell you to follow me instead of him, or that the Church has gone off the rails, close the book and walk away from me. That instruction is not humility. It is the actual safeguard, and it is in the Doctrine and Covenants.
Trials are not evidence that the Church is false
One of the biggest reasons people walk away is that they expected the gospel to make life easy. Then something terrible happens and they conclude either that the Church is not true or that God is not there.
Peter, who knew a great deal about suffering, said the opposite:
"Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you: But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy." (1 Peter 4:12–13)
Not strange. Not unusual. Not a sign that something has gone wrong with your standing before God. If you spend years fasting and praying for a child or a spouse and the relief never comes, that is not proof you did something wrong. Christ knows more about your situation than you do, and He knows you better than you know yourself.
Peter said something else in that same chapter that deserves more attention than it gets:
"For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?" (1 Peter 4:17)
The Lord repeated it in our own dispensation:
"And upon my house shall it begin, and from my house shall it go forth, saith the Lord; First among those among you, saith the Lord, who have professed to know my name and have not known me." (D&C 112:25–26)
That is why this matters more right now than it did twenty years ago. A sifting is coming to the house of God first, and the falling away arrives before the great day. A testimony by itself is not going to be enough to survive it. Only a tree with roots will.
How to bring someone back
If you have a loved one who has left or is leaving, I can tell you from personal experience that the only thing that ever works is love. Yelling accomplishes nothing. Wrecking the relationship is the single worst move available to you, and it is the one fear pushes people toward. Remember that Ammon served the Lamanites and won their hearts long before he taught them anything (Alma 18). That principle applies inside families too.
A good friend told me his daughter came to his wife and said she no longer believed the Church was true. His wife answered, "OK. Let me know when you're ready to come back." He was stunned. He would never have responded that way. His daughter went through some extremely hard years, and she came back, and she is more committed now than she has ever been.
That mother could have argued. She could have cried. She could have tried to prove the Church was true. Instead she spoke with the calm of someone who knows what she knows, and she left the door standing open.
We fear our children's choices, and we still have to let them choose. We teach correct principles. We are not accountable for their agency. Anger over their decisions accomplishes nothing except to make the road back longer.
And when someone does come back, welcome them the way Joseph Smith welcomed the men who had done him real harm.
Where this leaves you
There is a current fashion of digging through the lives of past Church leaders and announcing, "There is no way this is true, look what he did." Some of them did things they should not have done. So have you. Their failures have no bearing on whether the Book of Mormon is the word of God. You were not there, you do not know the situation, and you do not know whether it was reported accurately. Even if every word of it is true, let God be the judge instead of trying to do His job for Him.
The only way back is repentance and the humility to say out loud that you made a mistake. That is it. And you can. We want you back.
I am not writing this as someone who cannot fall. Anyone can fall. My faith will be tested exactly like yours. What I am asking is that all of us do something every single day to water that tree, because we are going to need every ounce of faith we can grow.
No matter where you stand in relation to the tree of life right now, staying near it and partaking of its fruit is the only thing that will hold in the coming days. You do not have to be in Jackson County. You can be anywhere on earth. But everything that is not rooted is going to come down.
If this describes someone you love, send it to them.
This material comes from The First Horseman, Donald Trump and Biblical Prophecy, a study of what the scriptures actually say about the servant God has raised up in our day and the events now unfolding around him.
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