Introduction

I started going through my crisis of faith in Januray 2012 during my last semester of college. This experience completely turned my world upside down and destroyed all my previous assumptions about people who left the church or "lost their testimonies". I'll give a short bio to provide some context. I come from a strong LDS family and can trace my ancestry to pioneer heritage on both sides. With few exceptions, all of my predecessors have been born and buried in Cache Valley, Utah for the last six generations. My background is about as Mormon as it gets. I grew up in the church never missing a Sunday unless I was sick or traveling. I had almost nothing but positive experiences with the church in my youth. I served a Spanish-speaking mission in Long Beach, California. It was difficult and stretched me in many ways, but I would consider the overall experience a net positive. When I returned home I finished my bachelor's degree at BYU-Idaho. I absolutely loved it there, and was the type of guy that actually liked the quirky subculture.

I had asked many serious questions earlier in life about religion. When I was about fifteen for example, I remember being really bothered wondering how we could claim to "know" that our church was true because of certain feelings we attributed to the Holy Ghost when people in other religions felt many of the same things.

While historical issues weren't the biggest issue in my faith crisis, I wrestled with many of these on my mission. In the end, I was either able to find answers that satisfied me for the moment or at least put the questions on the shelf and move on. I do remember being a little different on the mission. While other missionaries delighted in pointing out how 'ridiculous' the doctrines were in other churches, I couldn't quite accept that  people would commit their lives to something simply because they were stupid, and chose to find out what others actually believed, and why they believed it. This especially opened my eyes when I started learning more about the Jehovah's Witnesses and realized that some of the doctrines I thought were unique to Mormonism (like the ideas of apostasy and restoration) were also shared by them. 

I also hated the cop-out of bearing your testimony when you didn't know the answer to something, so I spent a lot of time studying arguments people raised against the church so I could respond to them better. This opened my eyes a lot as I began to see that not all criticisms against the church were anti-Mormon lies, but there were some legitimate questions that did not have easy answers. 

Despite all the questions I encountered on my mission, I returned home an extremely literal and devout believer and continued to be so for the next couple of years. 

I can't attribute my crisis to one or two issues; it's not that simple. But the thing most predominantly on my mind before the downward spiral began was the idea of "the one true church". I had started studying world religions fairly seriously about a year before my crisis. I had come to love the words of the Bhagavadgita, the Dhammapada, the Quran, and the Tao Te Ching and found great inspiration in these sacred books. The apologetic statement "all religions have some truth in them" didn't really work for me anymore. I found just as much truth in other religions as I did in my own, and the idea of there being only one true church became very difficult for me to accept. I had also recently learned some things about psychology from classes at school and other books I had read that made me a little skeptical of the religious indoctrination I had been receiving since I was a little child.

Under normal circumstances I may have struggled with these questions for a month or two and put them back on the shelf. However, there were many other things going on in my life at that time. I had been making serious plans to marry a girl, and things didn't work out, I was starting my last semester of college and was having second thoughts about my chosen career path, I was extremely over-scheduled, and under the weight of it all I started to experience depression. All of this created the perfect storm. I kept pushing things out of my mind in order to deal with my school work which was more pressing at the moment, and simply dealt with the tension I felt sitting in church every Sunday. But a few weeks after returning home from school everything collapsed for me. I went from not being sure if the Mormon Church was really the one true church to not being sure if God really existed in a relatively short time. 

Because the rhetoric in the church was so often presented as "it's either all true or it's all false" I initially felt my only two options were to continue faking it hoping that my doubts would eventually go away or leave entirely to preserve my intellectual integrity. Over the last several months however, I have come to abandon seeing the world in such a black-and-white, all-or-nothing way. I am beginning to find ways to rebuild my faith, although my current approach to faith may seem unusual and maybe even a little unorthodox to the traditional believer. I am beginning to be able to give up my desire for certainty and embrace ambiguity. I am beginning to find that there is beauty in simply admiring the mysteriousness of God and accepting that he may be unknowable. 

The purpose of this blog is to share the spiritual lessons I have learned while going through this faith crisis. I have found it much more productive to express my beliefs positively by expressing what I do believe as opposed to negatively by expressing what I do not believe. As such, I will avoid writing about any particular doubts or criticisms I may still have and instead choose to focus on the insights I have gained. I hope I am able to reach out to others who face serious doubts. While my experiences may be different than yours, there is comfort in knowing you are not alone.