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When I first truly began to explore the history and truth claims of the LDS church, it was intimidating and quickly became the biggest source of anxiety in my life. Once I began to explore the origins of Mormonism outside the confines of the correlated materials, I very quickly learned that what I had been taught my entire life was far from the complete picture. Instead, it was a highly distorted one. It was like being seated before a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle of which someone had placed 20 pieces together somewhere in the middle—with several of the pieces mismatched and jammed together in inappropriate ways—and being told that the rest of the pieces do not matter. “Don’t worry about those other pieces; just focus on these 20 pieces—they accurately represent the entirety of the puzzle and those other pieces are just noise. In fact, don’t touch any of the other pieces because they are laced with a deadly poison and in the day you should partake thereof, you should surely die.”

You shall not surely die, but shall be as the Gods, knowing good and evil. … Thus your eyes will be opened, and you will have knowledge.

Lucifer, LDS Temple Endowment

The fear of surely dying kept me from looking at the other pieces for 36 years. To be fair, for the first 12 or so of those years, I didn’t even realize that other pieces even existed. As soon as I did, I was taught they were dangerous and spiritually deadly. To look at the other pieces was to court spiritual death, and that deadly trap had been laid by a cunning adversary intent on my destruction. The fear of this trap and of this adversary kept me from thinking about the other pieces, because to even entertain the thought of them was dangerous. Besides, I was repeatedly assured that the pieces already presented to me represented the whole picture anyway. Even in my more rebellious teenage years, the idea of investigating the church outside of the prescribed boundaries of the correlated materials was a line I refused to cross—the fear was too strong. This attitude continued until I was well into adulthood, having served a mission, married in the temple, earned a Ph.D., and had started raising my own children in the faith.

This all changed when a dear friend (and the bishop of my ward) confided to my spouse and I that he was asking to be released because he no longer believed in nor could support the church. I will not tell his story here, as it is not mine to tell, but suffice it to say that he encountered some of the forbidden puzzle pieces and what he learned had destroyed his testimony of the church. Under normal circumstances, this may have reinforced my fear of unsanctioned information about the church. However, this was a trusted and respected friend, and my bishop, and I knew that their intentions were pure—they had not come to this conclusion dishonestly. Moreover, I had been trained in graduate school to be skeptical and to value independent verification. Up until then, I had privileged the church and its teachings by protecting it from the same skeptically critical lens that I applied to other information, but it never quite sat well with me. I knew that there were other, forbidden puzzle pieces out there—though I feared them—and I knew that by purposefully avoiding them, I was deliberately biasing my perspective.

Finding the Courage to Solve the Puzzle

Therefore, when my friend told me that they had looked at the forbidden puzzle pieces and learned that the completed picture was not the beautiful and peaceful scene that the church said it was, I finally mustered the courage to do my own investigation. I figured that if the church was true, skeptical inquiry should only affirm that fact. But if it was false, limiting myself to information from only church-approved sources wasn’t going to give me an unbiased picture of the church’s legitimacy. Thus it was that I privately asked my friend what sources they had consulted, and decided to read them myself. I approached these with a highly critical and skeptical eye searching for any signs of deception, and always making a note of the biases of the sources.

The sources my friend pointed me to were the LDS Gospel Topics Essays, Letter to a CES Director, and FairMormon‘s responses and numerous apologetics. These were only the beginning. Over the next several months, I sought out all the information I could find to verify the information I was now learning. As far as I was able, I tried to find within church-friendly sources verification for the new and challenging information I encountered. I made it a point to seek out counter arguments to anything from a critical source, and apologetics for any information that countered the correlated LDS narrative. Thanks to the tremendous work of scholars and historians in Mormon Studies, this was surprisingly easier to do that I anticipated. However, the work of most these scholars I would have never encountered if I had never deviated from the church’s correlated materials.

One of the grand fundamental principles of Mormonism is to receive truth, let it come from whence it may.

Joseph Smith Jr.

For a period of roughly 6 months, I voraciously read everything I could get my hands on, and chased down countless sources and footnotes from books and articles. Below are a list of the books I remember reading during this brief period—in addition to the sources mentioned above—and my evaluation of the perspective presented by their content:

• Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (faithful)
• No Man Knows My History (critical)
• Studies of the Book of Mormon (faithful)
• An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins (critical)
• Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (neutral)
• Saints: The Standard of Truth (Vol 1) (faithful)
• Mormon Stages: Navigating Mormon Faith Crisis (faithful)
• LDS Faith Crisis Survey and Narratives (neutral)

I also read numerous articles from Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and Sunstone Magazine, read deeply on FairMormon, MormonThink, and the Exponent II, started listening to podcasts like Year of Polygamy, Mormon Stories, and Gospel Tangents, and browsed several blogs like Feminist Mormon Housewives and By Common Consent.

Fear of Knowledge Makes Ignorance Bliss

Roughly six months into this process, the bishop of my ward (the man called to replace my friend) scheduled an interview with me to renew my temple recommend. I was serving on the ward council during this time, and as such had gotten to know the new bishop rather well through regular ward council meetings and other conversations. It was in this interview that I revealed for the first time to anyone at church that my beliefs about the church were evolving. We went through the interview questions as usual, and when asked if I believed in the Restoration or sustained the leaders of the church, for the first time in my life I answered, “No.” We had a conversation about why my beliefs had changed, and I mentioned that I had been researching church history outside of the church’s approved materials.

The most notable developments in this conversation with my new bishop were that he had never heard of the Gospel Topics Essays, but was willing to read them; yet when it came to anything else that was not directly supported by the church, he did not want to read or hear of it. He had to be initially convinced that FairMormon was a safe resource, after I explained that it was indirectly funded by the church and its content composed largely by faithful Church Education System employees. Importantly, this LDS bishop—supposedly bestowed with the gift of discernment—expressed apprehension regarding reading anything outside the approval of the church, for fear of being infected with doubt by those lying in wait to deceive. I’m sure that his predecessor’s exodus from faithful activity after encountering uncorrelated information only intensified this man’s fear of looking at the forbidden puzzle pieces. As a consequence, the only advice he could give me was to focus harder on the handful of approved puzzle pieces, to pray, and to not touch or worry about the unapproved pieces lest they inject me with their deadly poison.

Only error needs to fear freedom of expression. Seek truth in all fields, and in that search you will need at least three virtues; courage, zest, and modesty.

Hugh B. Brown

Of course, at this point I knew too much about the greater scene of the puzzle to simply ignore the forbidden pieces. For one, I had learned that the approved pieces were carefully selected and arranged in such a way as to completely distort the actual completed picture. Not only were they presented out of context, some had even been modified a little to fit where they shouldn’t, or to disguise the parts of what would indicate their naturally adjoining, forbidden partners. No—I continued to read and research insatiably over the following year. The more I learned—the more pieces I allowed myself to see—the more I was convinced that not only was the church’s narrative inaccurate, the church itself was founded upon a wholesale fraud. What’s more, at several points the official narrative approved by the church was carefully crafted to perpetuate that fraud. It wasn’t the forbidden pieces that were poisonously deceptive, it was the highly distorted image created by the cherry-picked, approved puzzle pieces that was the real deception.

It is now approaching three years since I first entertained the idea of picking up the forbidden puzzle pieces. In the time since I first asked my friend to share his sources, I have read countless books and articles in Mormon Studies and my interest has not died one bit. While the pace of my reading has definitely slowed, I have come to view the study of Mormon history and culture as one of the most fascinating subjects in American history. The pile of books I have read grows ever larger, as does the number of books on my reading wishlist. I have examined many of the forbidden puzzle pieces, and the more I uncover the more intricate and fascinating the overall picture becomes.

If we have the truth, it cannot be harmed by investigation. If we have not the truth, it ought to be harmed.

President J. Reuben Clark

What’s more, my passion for literature and spirituality outside of the Mormon tradition has also blossomed. Not only have I developed an interest in Mormon history and theology, but I’ve become keenly interested in the history, theology, and practices of other spiritual traditions. In exploring my own faith tradition beyond the confines of the church’s approved materials, and as I have wrestled with the implications of my discoveries for my own spirituality, I have discovered a wealth of spiritual resources and practices that I would never have encountered had I continued to focus only on the 20 puzzle pieces the church had prearranged for me. In many ways, I find my life to be far more spiritually fulfilling than I ever did while an actively engaged Latter-day Saint. Rather than destroying my soul, partaking of the forbidden puzzle pieces enlarged it beyond the bounds it had been confined in.

Escaping Eden With Forbidden Knowledge

Herein I wish to draw an ironic parallel. In the LDS temple endowment ceremony, Adam and Eve are instructed not to partake of the forbidden fruit, for in the day that they partake thereof, they shall surely die. Shortly thereafter, Lucifer enters and tempts Adam to partake, promising that if he should, he will not surely die, but shall be as the Gods, knowing good from evil. Adam refuses to partake and chooses to remain in willful ignorance. This is counted to Adam as a virtue because of his unwavering obedience. Lucifer then tempts Eve to partake and promises her the same, adding that her eyes will be opened and she will have knowledge. After asking if there is no other way, she agrees to partake and her eyes are indeed opened to greater knowledge. We learn from this narrative that Adam and Eve were required to partake of the fruit, lest they remain forever in ignorance and stunted in their progression.

Herein lies a profound irony: the LDS church forbids its members from partaking of forbidden knowledge outside its correlated curriculum, threatening that in the day they should partake thereof, their testimonies (and thus their chances at eternal salvation) will surely die. In the temple narrative, it is Lucifer—the great adversary and Father of Lies—who convinces Eve to partake of the fruit. The same adversary the church warns is lying in wait to deceive those who partake of the forbidden knowledge outside of approved sources. Yet as in the endowment ceremony, it is the access to forbidden knowledge that makes progression possible, whereas willful ignorance produces spiritual stagnation. In both the temple endowment narrative and in real life, a willingness to access the knowledge forbidden by a threatening authority figure is the key to spiritual growth and liberation from a contrived paradise that is actually an intellectual prison.

I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.

Richard Feynman

This has been my experience with investigating the forbidden puzzle pieces—of looking beyond the confines of the approved materials and engaging in a thorough and skeptical inquiry of my native faith. Like Eve, I had to first disregard the threats of destruction from a religious authority figure and exercise faith that seeking knowledge, wherever it may lead, is a worthy endeavor. Like Eve, my eyes were opened and I did indeed gain knowledge and perspective. Like Eve, I did not surely die upon gaining this knowledge, but I learned that I could progress beyond my previous confines. Like Eve, I did experience anxiety and sorrow at the loss of my comfort in Eden, but I also was empowered and learned how to turn hardship into strength, enabling a richer and deeper appreciation of life’s joys. And while the LDS version of this narrative turns Eve’s story into one where she must learn submission and obedience to the male authorities through which she will ultimately be saved, in examining the forbidden puzzle pieces, I have learned how to take back my own authority and to develop my own spirituality without depending on the church as a mediating gatekeeper of my access to the Divine.

No—in partaking of the forbidden knowledge by accessing what the LDS church has tried to keep hidden from me, I did not surely die. I have finally learned to live.