About this project

The "Why Mormons Leave" project is a production of the Open Stories Foundation and Mormon Stories Podcast. Its goals, unchanged since 2011, are to:

• Promote awareness and encourage discussion around the main reasons why people are losing their belief in the LDS Church, and dispel inaccurate or damaging myths about their reasons for disbelieving or leaving.
• Help to minimize the alienation, ostracization, and judgment of LDS Church members who are unable to maintain traditional belief.
• Reduce the number of marriages and families that are damaged or divided over these issues.

Who we are

John Dehlin started Mormon Stories Podcast in 2005 with a microphone in a spare bedroom, after leaving a senior position at Microsoft and moving with Margi and their four children from Seattle to Utah. He founded the Open Stories Foundation in 2010 to sustain it. He holds a Ph.D. in clinical and counseling psychology from Utah State University (2015), where his research focused on religious scrupulosity and on the experience of LGBTQ Latter-day Saints, and he ran the 2011 survey that this site is built on. He was excommunicated from the Church in February 2015 for the podcast and his public support of LGBTQ members and the ordination of women. He is the executive director of the Open Stories Foundation and a co-founder of THRIVE.

Margi Dehlin has walked hundreds of people, and many couples together with John, through faith transitions as a coach, with a particular focus on grief, staying grounded, holidays and family culture, and the experience of women leaving the Church. She co-hosted Mormon Transitions and The Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis, hosts THRIVE Stories on Mormon Stories, and has told her own story in the essays Broken Open and Coming Home. Her transition began more than a decade before the podcast did, the night John told her what he had found.

Where the material comes from

The 2011 survey. In the fall and winter of 2011, John Dehlin and collaborators fielded an online survey of people who had once believed the Church was "the only true and living church" and no longer did. 3,086 responses were analyzed and published in March 2012 as Understanding Mormon Disbelief. It remains the largest published study of former believers' own stated reasons. It was not a random sample, and every page on this site that quotes it says so. Method and limits.

The 2014 comprehensive list. In February 2014 readers of this site were asked what the survey had missed. Their answers were compiled into a sixteen-part list of reasons that is the source of the "what people actually name" section on each reason page.

Mormon Stories Podcast. Since 2005, more than two thousand long-form interviews with people inside and outside the Church, including many of the historians, scientists, and former leaders whose work is cited here. Where a page links to an episode, it links to the episode page on mormonstories.org.

The Church's own publications. Wherever the Church has addressed an issue on this site, usually in a Gospel Topics essay or a Church History Topics entry, that page is linked under "What the Church has said." Readers should read both.

Privacy

We measure how the site is used with Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity so we can see which pages help and which do not. Neither records who you are, and the site has no forms, accounts, or comments. If you would rather not be counted, a browser content blocker will stop both.

Corrections

Every figure here is meant to be traceable to its source. If you find one that is not, or one that is wrong, write to mormonstories@gmail.com.

The original site

The posts published here between 2011 and 2014 are preserved unchanged in the archive.