There are hun­dreds of rea­sons to believe or not believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Lat­ter-day Saints is true.

For me I no longer believe it is true in the way it teach­es it is true.

How did I come to this conclusion?

I could give a list of issues and con­cerns just like the ceslet​ter​.com.

But ulti­mate­ly it all comes down to trust.

The mor­mon lead­ers have lost my trust.

And in los­ing my trust, I don’t auto­mat­i­cal­ly assume that what they say is true and every­one else is lying.

Con­verse­ly I also don’t auto­mat­i­cal­ly assume that they are lying in every­thing that they say.

But it breaks my heart. When my son left the church and I was try­ing to get the real answers to save his soul, I did assume my church lead­ers were telling me the truth and oth­ers were lying. I did assume I would be able to find the real answers that would strength­en my son’s tes­ti­mo­ny in the restored gospel.

And so when I found a repeat­ed pat­tern of mis­in­for­ma­tion, half-truths, and some­times out­right lies, not from anti-mor­mons, but from my beloved prophets and apos­tles, it broke my worldview.

But prophets would nev­er lie or inten­tion­al­ly deceive you say.

Here are four sim­ple exam­ples that have reframed how I view my prophets and church, which has ulti­mate­ly led to them los­ing my trust.

Would a prophet ever use scrip­tures to hide the truth?

Today the church read­i­ly admits that Joseph Smith prac­ticed polyg­y­ny and polyandry. They read­i­ly admit that some of these rela­tion­ships were sex­u­al. They read­i­ly admit that these prac­tices were dif­fi­cult and some­times hid­den through “care­ful­ly word­ed denials”. (lds​.org polygamy essays).

Dur­ing my search for good answers about polygamy, these essays did­n’t exist.

Dur­ing my search for good answers I stum­bled upon this quote from the 1835 D&C.

“asmuch as this church of Christ has been reproached with  the crime of for­ni­ca­tion, and polygamy: we declare that we believe, that one man should have one wife; and one woman,  but one hus­band, except in case of death, when either is at  lib­er­ty to mar­ry again.”

The rumors were already spread­ing about the prac­tice of polygamy. What was the church’s response? Admit to it? Remain silent?

No.

They chose to out­right deny its prac­tice. Hold it secret and sacred. Bold­ly lie that they were not prac­tic­ing it.

And for every­one who wants to throw this into the cat­e­go­ry of care­ful­ly word­ed denials, I say, shame on you.

The peo­ple ask­ing the ques­tion knew what they were ask­ing. The answer out­right denies the prac­tice and gives a very false impression.

Learn­ing that the prophet could and would use scrip­tures to hide the truth was the begin­ning of the church los­ing my trust.

But if this was the only point of con­cern, I could poten­tial­ly move on.

When con­front­ed with “anti-mor­mon lies” are prophets the most reli­able source of information?

While serv­ing as a mis­sion­ary for the mor­mon church, I was con­front­ed with many evan­gel­i­cals telling me “lies” about my church.

One “lie” in par­tic­u­lar dis­turbed me.

They told me that Brigham Young had taught this doc­trine that Adam was our God and the father of Jesus Christ.

If this were true, it would be very dis­turb­ing to me that a prophet could teach such a gross heresy.

I quick­ly searched for sup­port from the prophets and apos­tles. Could they help me under­stand how this was a lie and how I could refute these ene­mies of the church. This is what I found: