01 — Start Here
Whatever brought you here, we’re glad you came.
If you’re here, something is shaking your faith. Maybe you read something that disturbed you. Maybe someone you love has stepped away from the Church. Maybe doubts have been building for years and you’ve been afraid to say them out loud, even to yourself.
Whatever it is, you’re welcome. The pain is real. The questions are real. You’re not alone — most of us writing this have stood where you’re standing now. There is a way through, and it doesn’t require you to pretend the hard things aren’t hard.
How a faith crisis usually unfolds
Faith crises follow a pattern. We encounter information that troubles us — about Church history, about Joseph Smith, about doctrine — and almost everything we believed feels uncertain. The natural impulse is to chase down every claim, hoping that if we can answer them all, the doubt will lift.
For most people, that doesn’t work. Elder Lawrence E. Corbridge was assigned by Church leadership to read every piece of anti-Church material in print. He put it this way:
“You can spend a lifetime desperately tracking down the answer to every claim leveled against the Church and never come to a knowledge of the most important truths.”Elder Lawrence E. Corbridge, “Stand Forever,” BYU Devotional, January 22, 2019
What this site does instead
We start with the most important questions, not the hardest ones. Elder Corbridge calls these the primary questions. When they find their footing, the harder questions fall into a different proportion — still real, but no longer load-bearing.
Then we look at the harder questions — the ones that probably brought you here. Not to argue them, and not to dismiss them. We point you to what the Church itself has published on each one.
Along the way, we share practices for building faith and recognizing doubt. None of them is a five-minute answer. All of them have helped.
Four things worth doing before you read further
- Slow down.If your heart is racing, take a few minutes before you keep reading. Don’t make a decision about your faith from inside a panic.
- Step back from antagonist material for a while. Not forever. Long enough to let other voices back in. The Spirit is hard to hear when the room is full of louder ones.
- Don’t isolate.Doubt grows in isolation. You don’t have to talk about it yet. Stay near the people who love you.
- Take the pages in order, if you can.The order matters. But you can come and go — the site isn’t going anywhere.