In 2015, I made a post on Facebook defending the Mormon Church against critics whom I accused of attempting to destroy people's hope without offering anything in return. The post ended up getting over 4,500 comments from dozens of different people, critics and believers alike. In making the post, I was thinking of people like my aunt and uncle who lost their son to a brain tumor at the age of five, and whose hope in eternal families was priceless to them. A couple years later, my testimony in Mormonism began to seriously splinter as I learned the full depth of the whitewashing and deception in the Mormon origin story as presented by the church. At some point I knew that no matter how much I wanted the church to be true, I could never again tell my children that Joseph Smith was a prophet. The impact of this change was fundamental and comprehensive, with a domino effect that touched everything in my universe.

Since then, it's been a process of trying to scrub the deep childhood indoctrination from my mind, with good days and bad. As things have become more and more clear, one thing I've learned for certain is that we don't need the church to have hope. I haven't been in a hurry to reconstruct any definitive belief system about God or the afterlife, but there is absolutely nothing stopping me from believing that I can live after death with my loved ones if I so desire.

The LDS Church is deeply invested in selling the idea that people need the church to have hope. This is a lie; but it is an effective lie that the church uses to keep members from exploring, learning too much, and leaving. Perhaps the single most important message we can share with our believing family and friends is that leaving the church doesn't have to mean leaving our hope. The church's discrimination and dogma causes tremendous division, trauma and suffering for many people. Discarding the idea that Joseph Smith was a prophet immediately opens doors that can immediately be walked through that make it possible to immediately become a better person. But it's not people's hope in an afterlife that is the problem. It's the other stuff. And we can leave the other stuff behind and keep the hope, which is ultimately the point of all religion.

Concluding the episode is a first-name call to the "Top-15" leaders of the Mormon Church, speaking past their office to what is left of the normal humanity they had as boys, to be more ethical on this topic, to stop weaponizing hope, and to set the example toward a more loving, honest and accepting organization.