There’s a whole genre of blog posts and articles out there in Mormon land that analyze precisely why people would leave the Church. I guess this isn’t surprising coming from the rank and file of Church membership, as GAs themselves both address people on the fringe in their Conference talks and make pronouncements about their motives when they leave.
In this post, I thought it would be fun to turn the question around and try to come up with reasons why I think we Church members are so interested in attributing motives to people who leave the Church.
First, people leaving violate the Church’s growth narrative. Although this has dropped off in recent years as growth has flattened out, the Church has for decades liked to trumpet its growth numbers as evidence of truthfulness. We’re the stone cut out of the mountain without hands, rolling forth to fill the whole earth. We’re carrying the gospel “till it has penetrated every continent, visited every clime, swept every country, and sounded in every ear.” We are the church that “will fill North and South America—it will fill the world.” So if the Church is supposed to make all this tremendous progress and experience all this growth, how does it even make sense that people would not only refuse to join, but some who are already members would proactively leave?
