Who has read Jeff Strong why people leave and what we can learn from them?

[bluebell]

On 9/12/2026 at 2:45 PM, BlipBlap said:

Not correct.  Again, their denominations would not exist were that not the case.

Why did the Reformation happen?

Why did every schism happen?

I think you are conflating two different ideas. Different denominations exist (generally) because people disagree about doctrinal or theological issues. Not because they believe (again, in general) that they must be a member of that specific church to be saved.

For most Protestants, salvation is not connected to authority or doctrinal accuracy. That’s why a methodist and Baptist might completely disagree about certain doctoral issues, but still consider each other saved.

[Notatbm]

On 8/11/2026 at 6:24 AM, grapevine said:

Was a Bishop and Mission President and had children leave the church.  One in Mtc.  Said there was poorer retention since the early 2000’s.  Not every person the missionaries teach and baptize will stay active.   Ot every faithful parent will have children that stay active.

 

however are we to learn from people that leave?  If the church is true and leaders called of God what are we to learn from people that don’t stay faithful?  Do the scriptures saying anything positive about Adam and Eve’s children that did t stay faithful?  Laman and Lemuel, people that didn’t hold to iron orod great aand spacious building?

 

Most faithful parents want there children to stay active.  Learn for. People wanting to go to Celestidal Kingdom.  Those that leave are not listening to the spirit and people wanting loved ones to partake of the spirit.  Go to Celestial Kingdom.  Don’t talk about wayward children in positive light.  Pray for wayward family members to return. Ot validate there descriptions, what did we learn when prodigal son left?  No happiness there.

I have not read the book, but I just ordered it from Amazon... that said, I'll share why I left for anyone who cares:

• BIC and raised in household of father who was in bishopric and stake presidency and ultimately THE stake pres by the time i graduated HS.
• I never wanted to go on a mission. It just never appealed to me. May have been because one of my siblings was very free about sharing how much he hated his mission. He went in the late '70s and I recently (within 90 days) have found out he has now left the church along with the rest of his family
• Parents, bishop, seminary teacher, priesthood leaders made full court press on me to compel me to serve a mission. This started the week after I joined the military while a senior in high school. This whole thing devolved into public call outs in both seminary, priesthood and MIA. Also my bishop engaged in name calling over the whole episode.
• Family put serious pressure on me,,, yelling, screaming, throwing things etc. Six months of pure hell before I went to bootcamp. I was openly called the worst thing that ever happened to our family and what a disappointment I was and always would be for not going on a mission
• we have an extended family member who is extremely popular and was by all accounts a stellar missionary in his youth. He was much older than me. His reputation was used against me and how i definitely didnt want to disappoint him. He was our family version of Paul H Dunn ...more later on this guy
• I even said I didnt have a testimony and didnt want to lie to investigators. Family and bishop didnt care and said well just go lie anyway. We know its the truth and it doesnt matter what you think.... go on your mission or else. We will pay for your college, a car etc if you go... bla bla bla

I didn't go on a mission and made a career out of the military. I stayed active, married in the temple and all that good stuff. Stayed active until my early fifties. This early experience at 18 taught me.... 1- my church leaders advocated lying in order to convert people. Sure they believed it all to be true, but they wanted me so testify on a mission as to the truthfulness of the gospel...even if I didnt believe it. I was actually suprised by this push to go anyway and just regurgitate a fake testimony and 2- question everything because if my leaders will openly tell me to lie about a testimony, what else do they approve of lying about? or what will they lie about in order to keep people in-line?

And moving on:

• I also learned all these years later that the stud missionary guy the whole family adored actually had sex with a couple of women on his mission. He got caught, but they didnt send him home and he got no discipline. It helps to have GA friends apparently.... I mean I guess thats the favor that got pulled. My family knows tons of them. This happened before I was born and the whole family knew, but kept it a secret. They used his stellar "example" to try and leverage me into going on a mission because I wouldn't want to disappoint him. He ended up being excommunicated near the end of his life lol... 
• I learned that the Sealer who sealed my wife and I had previously been involved in a sexual tryst close in proximity to our marriage. So.... he wasn't worthy to be there in the temple doing that... more lies... No discernment on the part of the temple presidency. I understand the first presidency approves sealers??? If true, no discernment there either.... lies lies lies
• I was active in the scouting program and frankly I was stunned by the award fraud that went on there in multiple wards and stakes. It pretrty much seemed to be the thing to do. Much easier than enforcing standards. Lies Lies Lies
• Gospel Topics Essays come out. Doing a dive there it is obvious the church lied about its history. That pretty much got me. Much of what I was taught growing up and what I was teaching out of manuals at church turned out to be shades of truth...., but not really true. Richard Bushman said it perfectly. The dominant narrative of church history wasnt true. Lots of lies about church history
• SEC scandal pops up... Reading the SEC decision was the final straw.... more lies and deception.

Bottom line for me. The church leaders have lied, will lie,  and they encouraged me to lie to convert investigators and the discerment they say they have is fake. End of story.

Now My wife, me and nearly all our kids are out. The end.

 

Edited yesterday at 12:11 AM by Notatbm

[Calm]

51 minutes ago, Notatbm said:

Family put serious pressure is on me,,, yelling,screaming, throwing things etc. Six months of pure hell before I went to bootcamp. I was openly called the worst thing that ever happened to our family and what a disappointment I was and always would be for not going on a mission

This is abusive.  This would not be okay in any healthy family, in or out of any faith, no matter how ultimately true or false for any reason.  Abuse being done for a good cause never ever justifies it.  With this getting attached to the Church and faith, it makes any emotional detachment of the child as they grow from both very understandable.  Given that context of likely emotional distance, the warts, inconsistencies, hypocrisies, mistakes, etc. are reasonably sufficient reason not to believe, imo.  That is not a child’s personal failure, but the adults who refused to examine their own behaviour themselves, imo.  While I get that the adult themselves in this may have come from abusive backgrounds themselves and this what they learned was ‘proper’ behaviour, in this day and age I find it hard to believe that they weren’t exposed enough to other POVs that caused them to consider they might be wrong.  Maybe I am just too optimistic about changing family dynamics.  I think that’s one reason having two parents it’s important, more likely to get a reality check.

Quote

 I was actually suprised by this push to go anyway and just regurgitate a fake testimony

‘Fake it till you make it’ was a very popular method of self improvement gurus not that long ago.  I remember those talks.  My interpretation from hearing to many of them and other such pep talks on  other subjects was there was a sincere belief it would become true and most seemed to think it would happen quickly as soon as being immersed in an environment where one cares about and serves God and others 24/7.  They portrayed the mission field as practically an irresistible force of self conversion.  There was even accepted by many iirc that the desire was enough for it to be seen as true, desire to believe made it true that you believed in your heart of hearts or you wouldn’t have that belief.  It wasn’t lying, it was anticipation.  
 

Pretty dysfunctional anyway, imo.  Not something to justify basing behaviour on, committing an entire life’s track to just because there might be good intentions (btw, turning one’s kids into puppets for self gratification is not good intentions in my book, wanting them to become something because you sincerely believe they will be happier themselves is, again imo).  The way to hell and alll…..

It was misguided, imo, based on an oversimplification of how our brains work.  It also ignores the other person, treating them as a thing that thinks and acts by one’s own rules and not their own, assuming our desires for them are the same desires they have for themselves.

Fake it till you make it is still promoted as an effective behavioural change method, though it’s better framed.  I still have doubts on how well it works.  Human behaviour is complex and it could be other variables that often go along with this idea that may be what is effective.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/think-well/202301/when-is-it-ok-to-fake-it-till-you-make-it

Quote

She found a post of mine from 2010 about similarities between AA and CBT. Specifically, the adage "fake it till you make it.” She was interested in understanding how such a notion can be so powerfully helpful in mental health treatment yet so toxic in other contexts, like business and Silicon Valley.

This is what I offered: In the mental health space, the saying of "fake it till you make it” has a very narrow and specific meaning. It is most usually directed towards a specific behavior or pattern of behavior that people engage in—ones that do not serve their overall best interests and might be described as maladaptive. Hence, people are often encouraged to “fake” specific actions that they would like to eventually feel are genuine, and thus actually experience the positive feelings that are part of the “act.” Indeed, my pithy maxim "your head and heart will follow your feet” is one I have been invoking for my entire professional life. As well as "act as if," which is another way of saying it. 

Naturally, this notion is emphasized in a great deal of behavioral and cognitive behavioral psychology, as well as their more recent derivatives such as DBT, or dialectical behavior therapy. One of the central tenets of this is “opposite action.” For example, when people suffer from irrational anxieties and phobias, they are often advised to expose themselves to their anxiety triggers rather than avoid them or escape from them. In other words, behaving opposite to how they feel; that is, “faking it“ by acting as if they were not anxiously avoidant.

Similarly, encouraging clinically depressed people to engage in activities, involvements, and more movement is usually a very helpful method called behavioral activation. Again, encouraging people to act opposite to their negative emotions and “fake“ the behavior of their undepressed selves usually helps loosen depression’s grip on them. 

So in behavioral psychology, the idea of "act as if" and “fake it till you make it" can be a pivotal therapeutic intervention. This is simply because it is much easier to act ourselves into feeling better than to think ourselves into feeling better, or be talked by someone into feeling better.

After this, it goes into what can make it a disaster.  Bottomline is if it’s manipulative for personal gain, where often the person pushing faking it is pretending to manipulate others into belief in them.  This can certainly happen in a church or family setting unfortunately, not just business or political.

This guy’s “your head and heart will follow your feet” feels very much in line with how missionaries and others were told they would find their testimony by bearing it.

Edited yesterday at 12:57 AM by Calm

[Calm]

1 hour ago, Notatbm said:

Richard Bushman said it perfectly. The dominant narrative of church history wasnt true. Lots of lies about church history

Except that’s not what he said.  He never used lies or even untruths, implying intention.  He clarified a month later saying it’s “not a fair judgment” in his opinion that the Church was lying.

Quote

Thanks for coming to my rescue Dan.  I had begun to pick up indications of these exchanges a few days ago.  I have been using the phrase “reconstruct the narrative” in recent talks because that is exactly what the Church is doing right now.  The Joseph Smith Papers offer a reconstructed narrative, so do some of the “Gospel Topics” essays.  The short First Vision film in the Church Museum of History mentions six accounts of Joseph’s experience and draws on all of them.  That is all reconstructing the narrative.  I got the phrase from a young woman who reported that she and her husband had both been through faith crises.  She had come back; he had remained alienated.  But both of them had to reconstruct the narrative.  We have to include, for example, the fact that that the first words to Joseph in the First Vision were:  “Your sins are forgiven.”  That makes us look again at his life and realize how important a part forgiveness played.  Similarly, we now have assimilated seer stones into the translation story.  A picture of a seer stone now appears in the Church History Museum display.  That would not have happened even five years ago.  The list goes on and on.

I consider Rough Stone Rolling a reconstructed narrative.  It was shocking to some people.  They could not bear to have the old story disrupted in any way.  What I was getting at in the quoted passage is that we must be willing to modify the account according to newly authenticated facts.  If we don’t we will weaken our position.  Unfortunately, not everyone can adjust to this new material.  Many think they were deceived and the church was lying.  That is not a fair judgment in my opinion.  The whole church, from top to bottom, has had to adjust to the findings of our historians.  We are all having to reconstruct.   In my opinion, nothing in the new material overturns the basic thrust of the story.  I still believe in gold plates.  I don’t think Joseph Smith could have dictated the Book of Mormon text without inspiration.  I think he was sincere in saying he saw God.  The glimpse Joseph Smith gives us of divine interest in humankind is still a source of hope in an unbelieving world.

If anyone has questions about what I believe, I would be happy to hear from him or her.  I believe pretty much the same things I did sixty years ago when I was a missionary.

 

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2016/07/richard-bushman-and-the-fundamental-claims-of-mormonism.html

Edited yesterday at 01:12 AM by Calm

[Notatbm]

33 minutes ago, Calm said:

Except that’s not what he said.  He never used lies or even untruths, implying intention.  He clarified a month later saying it’s “not a fair judgment” in his opinion that the Church was lying.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2016/07/richard-bushman-and-the-fundamental-claims-of-mormonism.html

Ur right I should have put quotes around the part he did say… I added the lies part in keeping with the ending of some of my other bullet points. Here’s the quote from his fireside:

"I think that for the Church to remain strong, it has to reconstruct its narrative. The dominant narrative is not true; it can't be sustained. The Church has to absorb all this new information or it will be on very shaky grounds and that's what it is trying to do and it will be a strain for a lot of people, older people especially. But I think it has to change." [1]

 

I know he walked back the comment, but I’m inclined to believe something a guy like him says when they say something the first time. It’s more likely what they really think. 
 

this dominant narrative being not true thing reminds me of the mitt Romney talk at byu…

“It is an honor to be here today and to address you. It seems like only a few years ago that I sat where you are sitting—actually, it was in the Wilkinson Center. Things were different then: the Beatles were the only boy band, Bell Telephone was the only telephone company in the country, BYU cafeteria food was all they served in the Cougareat, and Emma was Joseph Smith’s only wife.”

https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/mitt-romney/life-lessons-front/

Edited yesterday at 01:44 AM by Notatbm

[Calm]

21 minutes ago, Notatbm said:

know he walked back the comment, but I’m inclined to believe something a guy like him says when they say something the first time. It’s more likely what they really think. 
 

So if you think he is lying?  That he really believes saying the Church lies is true even though he never said that in the first comment?

Something may be not true for reasons other than lying.

Edited yesterday at 02:02 AM by Calm

[Notatbm]

2 hours ago, Calm said:

This is abusive.  This would not be okay in any healthy family, in or out of any faith, no matter how ultimately true or false for any reason.  Abuse being done for a good cause never ever justifies it.  With this getting attached to the Church and faith, it makes any emotional detachment of the child as they grow from both very understandable.  

Perhaps to you and me the detachment would be reasonable… can you think of any general authority back then (1980s) allowing thst as an excuse to distance oneself from the church? I can’t and I knew most the q12 back then personally. 

2 hours ago, Calm said:

 

Given that context of likely emotional distance, the warts, inconsistencies, hypocrisies, mistakes, etc. are reasonably sufficient reason not to believe, imo.  That is not a child’s personal failure, but the adults who refused to examine their own behaviour themselves, imo.  While I get that the adult themselves in this may have come from abusive backgrounds themselves and this what they learned was ‘proper’ behaviour, in this day and age I find it hard to believe that they weren’t exposed enough to other POVs that caused them to consider they might be wrong.  Maybe I am just too optimistic about changing family dynamics.  I think that’s one reason having two parents it’s important, more likely to get a reality check.

the pov they were exposed to is literally the apostles. At the time my family entertained many of them at the house… on numerous occasions. In fact Packer was a regular and he and my father got along famously. Here’s a quote of what the guys mindset is in testimonies and missionaries:

“It is not unusual to have a missionary say, “How can I bear testimony until I get one? How can I testify that God lives, that Jesus is the Christ, and that the gospel is true? If I do not have such a testimony, would that not be dishonest?”

Oh, if I could teach you this one principle. A testimony is to be found in the bearing of it! Somewhere in your quest for spiritual knowledge, there is that “leap of faith,” as the philosophers call it. It is the moment when you have gone to the edge of the light and stepped into the darkness to discover that the way is lighted ahead for just a footstep or two. “The spirit of man,” as the scripture says, indeed “is the candle of the Lord.””

Boyd k Packer  https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/teaching-seminary-preservice-readings-religion-370-471-and-475/the-candle-of-the-lord?lang=eng

in context this can be explained away, but Mormonism is a religion of one-liners and this one is still around. Remember this is my parents buddy and his pov. 
 

how bout the one about coming home with honor or in a pine box? Yep that one got used on me as well. I don’t recall who said it, but that one still is being tossed around as well. 
 

my point is the church and its leaders created this culture. 

2 hours ago, Calm said:

‘Fake it till you make it’ was a very popular method of self improvement gurus not that long ago.  I remember those talks.  My interpretation from hearing to many of them and other such pep talks on  other subjects was there was a sincere belief it would become true and most seemed to think it would happen quickly as soon as being immersed in an environment where one cares about and serves God and others 24/7.  They portrayed the mission field as practically an irresistible force of self conversion.  There was even accepted by many iirc that the desire was enough for it to be seen as true, desire to believe made it true that you believed in your heart of hearts or you wouldn’t have that belief.  It wasn’t lying, it was anticipation. 

I agree that was the theory. Oddly enough when I presented this lack of testimony and called the behavior lying, my bishop told me… he was talking about the consequences with lds girls after not going on a mission. Oh man I still can’t believe this.
 

“ you think you have integrity by not bearing your  testimony thinking it’s a lie, but I can tell tell you that by not going you will never be considered by any good lds girl to have any integrity at all. In fact you will just be looked at as another faithless apostate who isn’t worth the time and you will get the wife you deserve.” 
 

Im guessing he was saying I’d marry a non Mormon hooker or something. He was right about one thing though..  I am an apostate as it relates to the Mormon church but I can sleep well knowing I didn’t trick anyone into joining the church. 
 

the wife on the other hand… boy did I marry up. 
 

I have to add. Looks like we still have church leaders putting the verbal beat down on kids

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8KCnpq8/

Edited yesterday at 03:00 AM by Notatbm

[Notatbm]

30 minutes ago, Calm said:

So if you think he is lying?  That he really believes saying the Church lies is true even though he never said that in the first comment?

Something may be not true for reasons other than lying.

Yes… he knows who butters his bread. It would be the end of him if he admitted it. He said the dominant narrative is not true… who is the one teaching the dominant narrative??? The church and by extension the q15

besides in the quote you provided look at what he said: 

“Similarly, we now have assimilated seer stones into the translation story.  A picture of a seer stone now appears in the Church History Museum display.  That would not have happened even five years ago.  The list goes on and on.”

 

why would that bot have happened five years ago??? The church had the seer stone the whole time and they knew it. 
 

It is because the part of the dominant narrative they were teaching our kids (and me) didn’t include that even though they knew it. They lied. 

Edited yesterday at 02:33 AM by Notatbm

[Calm]

26 minutes ago, Notatbm said:

Yes… he knows who butters his bread. It would be the end of him if he admitted it. He said the dominant narrative is not true… who is the one teaching the dominant narrative??? The church and by extension the q15

besides in the quote you provided look at what he said: 

“Similarly, we now have assimilated seer stones into the translation story.  A picture of a seer stone now appears in the Church History Museum display.  That would not have happened even five years ago.  The list goes on and on.”

 

why would that bot have happened five years ago??? The church had the seer stone the whole time and they knew it. 
 

It is because the part of the dominant narrative they were teaching our kids (and me) didn’t include that even though they knew it. They lied. 

It makes it simple to think of it in one dimensional terms.