“It’s OK To Let Go” — A Response

Examining the epistemological, psychological, and evidential problems with LDS Discussions’ framework for abandoning faith.

Overview

In a blog post titled It’s OK To Let Go In Search of the Truth, LDS Discussions argues that the only path to honest inquiry into Church history and truth claims requires the reader to first “completely let go” of prior beliefs, suspend emotional loyalty to the Church, and approach the site’s annotated essays as the authoritative endpoint of that investigation. The post presents this as a brave, rational act of intellectual courage — and frames those who decline as victims of cognitive dissonance who are simply too afraid to look.

The argument sounds compelling. It also contains several serious logical, epistemological, and evidential errors that deserve careful examination. This response addresses each major claim in turn.

We do not question the sincerity of those who have gone through a faith transition, nor do we dismiss the genuine pain that can accompany it. What we do challenge is the methodological framework presented in this post as the only legitimate path to truth — because that framework is itself riddled with the very biases it claims to cure.

Claim 1: “Until Someone Is Open to the Possibility the Church Might Not Be True, No Amount of Facts Can Overcome an Emotional Approach”

This is the foundational premise of the post, and it is stated as though it applies only to believers. But the claim is symmetric: it applies with equal force to those who have already concluded the Church is false. A person who has emotionally committed to the conclusion that Joseph Smith was a fraud faces precisely the same barrier to reconsidering that conclusion as a believer who cannot consider the opposite. The author himself acknowledges this symmetry inadvertently when he describes his own process: he “did everything wrong” at first, “spouted off every single point at once,” and had to revise his approach over time. That is not dispassionate inquiry — it is the description of someone already committed to a conclusion, refining the rhetorical delivery.

Cognitive science confirms this symmetry. Motivated reasoning — the tendency to evaluate evidence in a way that supports a conclusion one is already disposed to reach — operates in critics as powerfully as in believers. Research by Dawson, Gilovich, and Regan (2002) in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin demonstrated that individuals perform worse on logical tasks when the correct answer conflicts with their prior commitments, regardless of whether those commitments are toward belief or disbelief. The claim that “letting go” of belief removes bias assumes that non-belief is a neutral epistemic state. It is not.

In formal epistemology, this is the problem of underdetermination: both the believer and the skeptic are selecting from among competing interpretations of the same historical evidence. The call to “let go” of belief before evaluating the evidence does not produce objectivity — it merely substitutes one prior commitment for another.

Claim 2: The Post’s Methodology Is Objective; FAIR Uses “Tricks”

The post identifies what it calls “tricks” in FAIR’s apologetics — specifically, switching between tight and loose translation theories depending on the problem at hand. This is a legitimate intellectual concern worth examining. But the post presents LDS Discussions itself as a transparent alternative, one that simply documents problems “sufficiently enough to make it clear when apologetics are not plausible or honest.”

This self-presentation deserves scrutiny. LDS Discussions’ methodology involves the following structural features that introduce systematic bias:

Structural Biases in the “Let Go” Framework

Selection bias — The site curates problems and presents apologetic responses only to undercut them. Positive evidence for the Church’s claims is systematically absent from the framing.

Asymmetric evidential standards — Apologetic explanations are dismissed as “not plausible,” while critical explanations with equal or lesser evidential support are presented as settled conclusions.

Predetermined endpoint — The post explicitly invites readers to ask why the Church “never taught” these problems, presupposing that the Church hid information rather than that the history is genuinely complex.

Emotional priming — Before engaging a single piece of evidence, readers are told they were “misled,” that believers were “not honest,” and that the apologetics “simply cannot work.” This is not neutral framing.

Genuine intellectual honesty requires acknowledging these structural features rather than simply labeling them the opposite of the biases attributed to FAIR. Both sources have a perspective. The reader should know that about both of them.

Claim 3: The Tight/Loose Translation Inconsistency Proves Apologetics “Cannot Work”

The tight vs. loose translation debate is one of the most substantive issues in Book of Mormon scholarship, and LDS Discussions treats the existence of competing apologetic positions as evidence of intellectual dishonesty. But this is a non-sequitur. The existence of competing scholarly hypotheses about a historical event does not falsify the event; it demonstrates that the evidence is complex. This is the normal condition of historical inquiry.

Royal Skousen of Brigham Young University, who has spent over 35 years producing the definitive critical text of the Book of Mormon, has argued on textual grounds for a tight translation. His analysis of the Original Manuscript demonstrates features — including the spelling out of proper names upon first occurrence and the near-total absence of revision during dictation — that are more consistent with a controlled, word-for-word process than with loose paraphrase. This is peer-engaged scholarly work, not motivated deflection.

John Welch’s discovery of chiasmus in the Book of Mormon — a Hebrew literary structure virtually unknown in 1830 Western scholarship — remains one of the most discussed positive evidences for the text’s antiquity. The post dismisses apologetics wholesale without engaging the strongest form of these arguments.

The rule in epistemology and in law is that one should evaluate the best version of the opposing argument, not a weakened proxy. LDS Discussions evaluates the weakest apologetic arguments — those from fringe sources that “still claim Joseph Smith never had sex with other women besides Emma” — and attributes the refutation of those weak arguments to apologetics as a whole. This is a textbook strawman fallacy.

Claim 4: Cognitive Dissonance Is a Problem for Believers, Not Critics

The post invokes cognitive dissonance as the mechanism that prevents believers from engaging honestly with Church history. This is presented as a one-directional problem: believers suppress doubts to avoid the discomfort of revision. But cognitive dissonance theory, as developed by Leon Festinger (1957) and elaborated in subsequent decades of psychological research, describes a universal feature of human cognition. It is not a feature of religious belief in particular.

People who have already left the Church face their own form of cognitive dissonance when confronted with positive evidence for its truth claims. The psychological cost of acknowledging that one was correct to believe — after having publicly and often painfully announced one’s departure — is enormous. The same mechanisms that make it hard for believers to consider disconfirming evidence make it hard for former members to reconsider their conclusions. Neither group is uniquely rational. Neither group is uniquely biased.

The philosopher Austin Farrer wrote: “Though argument does not create conviction, lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned.” The existence of robust, serious, scholarly apologetics for the Restoration — whatever one ultimately concludes about them — means that dismissal requires engagement, not merely the emotional act of “letting go.”

The post’s implicit claim is that the emotionally vulnerable state of having “let go” is epistemically superior to the state of still believing. But vulnerability is not a truth-tracking virtue. A person in emotional crisis who has “let go” of a prior belief is not thereby equipped to evaluate complex historical evidence more accurately — they may in fact be more susceptible to motivated reasoning in the direction of the conclusions that relieve the emotional pain.

Claim 5: The Church Is Hiding Problems — Members Were Never Taught These Issues

The post repeatedly asks why members were “never taught these problems growing up.” This framing presupposes institutional suppression. But the actual record is more complex. The Church has published a series of Gospel Topics Essays — directly available at ChurchofJesusChrist.org — addressing polygamy, DNA and the Book of Mormon, the Book of Abraham, the First Vision accounts, race and the priesthood, and other sensitive topics. These essays are footnoted, scholarly in tone, and do not pretend the history is simple.

Whether any given member encountered these topics in their youth depends on many variables: the curriculum in use at the time, the depth of engagement in their ward, their personal reading habits, and the degree to which they sought out Church history beyond Sunday meeting curriculum. The failure to encounter complex history in a block meeting is not evidence of conspiracy — it is the universal experience of every religious tradition in the world, which must balance depth with accessibility in institutional settings.

The operative question is not “why didn’t my Sunday School teacher cover the Kinderhook Plates?” but rather: “Given the full range of available evidence, properly weighed, what is the most reasonable conclusion?” That question requires far more than “letting go.” It requires rigorous, good-faith engagement with the strongest arguments on all sides.

Claim 6: “If the Church Is True, There Is Nothing to Be Afraid Of”

This is the post’s most rhetorically effective move, and it deserves to be named as such. The post says: “If the church is true, there is nothing to be afraid of. Spending a few days or weeks going through these issues in depth should only strengthen your testimony.” It then immediately directs the reader to LDS Discussions’ own annotated essays as the primary vehicle for that investigation.

This is sleight of hand. The statement “if the church is true, investigation should strengthen faith” is true as a general principle. But it does not follow that reading a curated collection of one-sided critical essays — designed from the ground up to lead to a specific conclusion — constitutes genuine investigation. One could equally say: “If atheism is true, reading C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and Alvin Plantinga carefully should only strengthen your unbelief.” The statement is vacuous as a guarantee of outcome; it only works if the investigation is genuinely symmetric.

We make the same offer in reverse, and we mean it: if LDS Discussions’ conclusions are correct, reading serious scholarly apologetics — FAIR’s conference proceedings, Skousen’s critical text work, Welch’s chiasmus research, the Church’s own Gospel Topics Essays, the Interpreter Foundation’s peer-reviewed journal — alongside the critical literature should only sharpen the case against the Church. If a reader cannot do that without fearing their conclusion will change, the epistemological critique the post levels at believers applies with equal force to them.

True intellectual courage is not the willingness to “let go.” It is the willingness to follow the evidence wherever it leads — even if it leads back.

Claim 7: Believers Were “Misled” — It Is OK to Have Been Wrong

The post closes with a compassionate-sounding message: believers were not stupid for trusting the Church; they were misled. It is OK to have been wrong. Letting go is progress.

This framing has several problems. First, it assumes the conclusion: in order to have been “misled,” the thing one believed must have been false. The post presents as compassionate reassurance what is in fact a loaded presupposition. Second, it conflates the question of the Church’s truth with the question of whether any particular member was given complete information. Even if one grants that some missionaries simplified the history — and that is sometimes true — it does not follow that the simplified version pointed in the wrong direction. Simplifications can be faithful to the substance of a thing even when they omit complexity.

Third, and most fundamentally, the emotional permission structure the post builds — “it is OK to have been wrong, it is OK to let go, you are not alone” — is designed to lower the psychological cost of a specific conclusion. This is not neutral encouragement toward honest inquiry. It is emotional scaffolding for a predetermined destination.

We offer a different form of reassurance: it is equally OK to study carefully and conclude that the Church is true. That conclusion, arrived at honestly after engaging the full range of evidence, is not less rational, not less courageous, and not less free than any other. The fact that millions of educated, intellectually serious people have done exactly that — and continue to do so — is itself evidence that “letting go” is not the only honest path.

The Evidential Case That the Post Ignores

LDS Discussions’ post focuses entirely on the emotional and methodological process of leaving the Church. It does not engage — even briefly — with the positive evidential case for the Restoration. A genuinely balanced inquiry would need to reckon with at least the following:

Positive Evidence the Post Does Not Address

The Witnesses — Eleven men, from multiple backgrounds and with varying motivations, left formal signed testimonies to having seen and handled the gold plates. None ever recanted. The weight of eleven unretracted witnesses is significant evidence.

Chiasmus and Hebraisms — The Book of Mormon contains complex ancient literary structures, including chiasmus at the level of sophistication found in Isaiah, first identified in the text by John Welch in 1967. In 1830, chiasmus was known to virtually no scholar outside of Hebrew and classical studies, and was entirely absent from general Western literacy.

The Original Manuscript — Royal Skousen’s 35+ year critical text project demonstrates features of the dictation that are inconsistent with a solo-authored fraud: no revision during dictation, names spelled out on first occurrence, and a textual complexity exceeding what the dictation conditions would allow for a fabricator working in real time.

Restoration Sequence — The restoration of priesthood keys, temple ordinances, and the organizational structure of the primitive church occurred in a specific historical sequence that parallels patterns in early Christian theology, before Joseph Smith could have studied those patterns systematically.

Sustained Global Growth — As of 2025, the Church reported 17.9 million members with 385,490 convert baptisms in the year alone — a 24.9% increase over the prior year. Sustained conversion growth among informed modern adults is an evidential fact requiring explanation on any account of the Church’s history.

None of these points is unanswerable on the critical side. But they are precisely the kind of points that a genuinely symmetric investigation would need to engage. The “let go” methodology produces an investigation that begins with a conclusion and selects evidence accordingly — which is precisely the error the post attributes to apologetics.

The Distinction Between Social Grievances and Truth Claims

The post identifies the author’s initial reason for leaving the Church as “polygamy and the treatment of blacks.” These are moral concerns, not epistemological ones. They describe dissatisfaction with specific practices or policies of the Church, not falsification of the claim that Joseph Smith translated an ancient record through divine power.

This distinction matters enormously. Moral grievances against specific institutional practices may be entirely legitimate while the underlying truth claims remain intact. A person can believe that polygamy was practiced in ways that caused harm while also believing that the Book of Mormon is an ancient text. These are separable questions. Much of what presents as a faith crisis over “truth claims” is in fact a faith crisis over institutional behavior, social policies, or cultural expectations — issues that are real and important but that do not, by themselves, bear directly on whether Joseph Smith was a prophet.

Research on LDS faith transitions consistently shows that the triggers are often social or moral — disagreement with the Church’s position on LGBT issues, dissatisfaction with gender roles, cultural conservatism — rather than purely evidential encounters with historical complexity. This does not invalidate those concerns. But it does mean that the leap from “I am troubled by this policy” to “the Church’s foundational truth claims are false” is not a logical entailment — it is an emotional one.

Genuine intellectual honesty requires that a person separate these two questions and answer each on its own terms. The “let go” methodology collapses them together, producing a single emotional trajectory toward departure that presents as a rational investigation of evidence.

What Genuine Open-Mindedness Actually Requires

We agree with the post on one essential point: genuine inquiry requires openness to conclusions one did not anticipate. But that openness must run in both directions. A reader who is truly open must be willing to find that the Church’s historical record is more complicated than simple curriculum suggests — and willing to find that the critical literature is more selective and less conclusive than LDS Discussions implies.

We recommend a genuinely symmetric reading list:

For Honest Inquiry — Read Both Sides

Critical — LDS Discussions’ annotated essays; Jeremy Runnells’ Letter to a CES Director; Richard Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling (a faithful historian who does not minimize difficulties)

Apologetic — FAIR Latter-day Saints (fairlatterdaysaints.org); Royal Skousen’s Book of Mormon Critical Text Project; the Interpreter Foundation (Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship); BYU Studies Quarterly

Church Primary Sources — The Gospel Topics Essays at ChurchofJesusChrist.org; Saints Unscripted for accessible engagement with difficult topics

Epistemological — Alvin Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief on the rationality of religious belief; C. Terry Warner’s work on self-deception and inquiry

If after engaging all of this material honestly a person concludes the Church is not true, that conclusion deserves respect. But if a person engages only the critical literature after having been told to “let go” of their beliefs as a precondition — having been emotionally primed to find betrayal — what they have done is not inquiry. It is confirmation of a social and emotional trajectory that was already underway.

Conclusion: The Question LDS Discussions Does Not Ask

The post poses one pivotal question: “Would you want to know if the church wasn’t true?” This is framed as the gateway to honest inquiry. But there is an equally important question that the post never asks: Would you want to know if the Church were true?

If the answer is “yes” — if someone genuinely wants to know the truth in either direction — then they should not let go of anything prematurely. They should hold everything carefully, weigh all of it deliberately, and resist the emotional architecture that any single source (including this one) constructs around its preferred conclusion.

The Restoration’s truth claims are extraordinary. They deserve extraordinary scrutiny. But extraordinary scrutiny is not the same as predisposed rejection. The burden of proof does not fall only on the believer — it falls on anyone making a confident claim about what happened in the Sacred Grove, in the translation room, and through the mouths of eleven witnesses who died without recanting.

It may indeed be OK to let go. But it is also OK — more than OK, it is intellectually defensible — to hold on with eyes fully open, having examined the evidence in full, and having concluded that what you were taught about Joseph Smith and the Restoration is, at its core, true.

That conclusion is not the product of cognitive dissonance. It is the product of exactly the kind of rigorous, honest, open-eyed inquiry that LDS Discussions claims to champion — applied symmetrically, in both directions.