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Issue 13 – Christ the King 2022

Apologia

Tolle Lege

On Mormonism.

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It was October 12, 2015—my wife’s birthday, of all days. I still cannot figure out why I told her. It was thoughtless. But it had to come out. “It isn’t true,” I said. “Whatever else Joseph Smith was, he was not a prophet. Whatever else the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is, it is not what it claims to be.” Before that moment, I had never said anything to her intimating any doubt about our shared lifelong faith in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

My wife was shaken. She had never expected me to say this. Some years later, she told me one of her first thoughts was, “We can’t have any more children, not with this.” I had already been saying I was done having children for some time at that point; I was twenty-eight, and we had two boys and two girls. Work, school, ambition, and a mental health episode had overwhelmed me, and I had decided that, as far as I was concerned, our family was complete. For my wife, it was more a matter of sad resignation that our family would now have an irreparable religious rift. In what had to that point been a deeply religious household, more children would only further complicate an increasingly uncertain life as she worked to preserve and pass on to our children a faith that I resolutely rejected. 


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About the author

Jeremy M. Christiansen