I was born a Mormon. My family has a relatively long-standing tradition of it — so were my 40+ cousins, along with all nine of my dad’s siblings, and all ten of them went to BYU. I especially enjoyed singing each Sunday: both sight reading hymns from under the pews and learning primary songs specifically for the younger kids. These feature hits such as “Follow the Prophet” — one that I can still follow the melody of in my head — “I’m Glad to Pay a Tithing,” and “Pioneer Children Were Quick to Obey.” The pioneer children are a common theme, with a different pioneer song often coming up on hikes, describing how pioneer children “sang as they walked, and walked, and walked, and walked, and walked…” The church emphasized a strict moral code and severely looked down upon questioning any of their teachings. However, it all seemed as natural to me as breathing; the only way that I should be living my life.
But right before I was going to be baptized, what seemed to be the rite of passage into adulthood and responsibility, my family left the Mormons for good. I was distraught, the world upended, so much of how I saw it now exposed to be false. The church’s narrative had been unraveling for my parents over the course of months, but I got the crash course of it in a single night. My dad explained to me for the first time how evolution worked, how the grass in our lawn diverged as a species over millions of years, rather than being spontaneously created. How even the Earth as I knew it was wrong, as it was 4 billion years older than I was told.
This upheaval created a hole in my knowledge and in my perception of the world around me. I now had to seek new explanations for why the grass grew, for the creation of the universe, for just about everything. This curiosity manifested through the sciences, and I became even more fascinated after I began watching Cosmos. Tyson’s ship of the imagination drew me through the world beyond what I could see, from the atomic level and electron activity to the surface of stars, and even physical laws like those of Newton or Hooke. Sometimes this pursuit of knowledge comes with a new answer — we don’t know. In the past, anything that we didn’t know was explained away as the work of God. Science reframes not knowing as acceptable, as an emerging field to explore rather than something shameful. This is part of what draws me to university research, where inquiry into the unknown is both encouraged and supported. In addition, deconversion caused the answers we do know to be far more compelling. Rather than a set of stories, they are complex models honed over time by countless experiments. When the easy explanations vanished, only the deeper ones were available to be sought.
Furthermore, I’ve learned to question anything I consume. While in the car I’ve stopped listening to Mormon Stories and Veggie Tales, and replaced them with podcasts such as The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe and The Huberman Lab. This new audio debunks initially cogent ideas and beliefs and often puts forth new scientific ideas. I’ve begun to question the biases of any articles I read, which eventually steered me away from opinion pieces and toward BBC News. My inquisitiveness also drives me to be more engaged with new information, be it related to government or biology; because I’ve already been lied to on how it works, I want to know exactly why it works as it does. Upon leaving a community built on faith, my life shifted from one of unquestioning belief to one of curiosity and skepticism.