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Letter to My Parents When I Left the Church



Dear Mom and Dad,
                You did not fail. I know with what emotion and commitment you look upon the issue of the truth claims of Mormonism, because I have felt them also. You must feel that I am more than leaving a religion. I imagine it feels like I am leaving the family, rejecting your parentage, and abandoning your values. More than anything in my life I love my family and I intend to live in such a way as to prove that. Fully, emphatically, and undeniably I love you so much.
                My new philosophy and lifestyle are not repudiations of any person, least of all you two. I did not leave because I began to sin, or because Dani and I started to have problems, or because of any personal tragedy. I am not mad at The Church, or at you, or at God. All I have done is utilize the best possible mechanisms for seeking truth and shedding error. This inquiry has made the maintenance of my faith in The Church no longer tenable.
                It is the high, wonderful, standard to which you have set my life that has lead me to the happiness I have always enjoyed, and that I so fully enjoy now. Cold as it seems, crude as empirical reasoning first appears in matters of faith, though cold and crude it certainly is not, the claims of The Church are testable premises. The test of personal experience, of spiritual manifestation, is the first and most retried test by which I have sought my answers. This test failed in two ways. First, I fully own that the experience we call The Spirit has manifested the truth claims of Mormonism to me. The problem with this is that this same experiential proof has lead countless Muslims to Islam, Catholics to Catholicism, and Scientologists to Scientology. It is not an independently verifiable, replicable, or dependable phenomenon. Second, in my time of greatest need, and when the weekly training and exposure of Church meetings were not available to me (through no fault of my own) the answers did not come. Weeks of kneeling and crying and praying and reading and keeping pure as The Church measures purity could not help me find the confirmation I felt so often.
                I am still your son, the brother to your children, and the personality that you know and love. You are still my parents, my confidantes, and my place of absolute refuge – my type specimens for the experience of love. I promise that I will never stop seeking. This impulse too is a legacy in me of Mormonism. Such a search, we can agree, coupled with honestly just living, cannot ultimately land us anywhere but the best place here or in eternity that there is to be. I will so live and so search that if The Church is true, my discovery will be inevitable, and The Christ behind it all could not help but redeem me, if indeed His redemption and worthiness of worship are faithful.

Loving you as ever,

Tanner Mitchell Barker

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