My name is Shane.
I am, at the time of my writing this (2025,) twenty-four years old. I live in New York with my wife and two cats, Meesh and Newt. They’re both boys and they fight constantly.
I spent most of my childhood in Montana. I was a Mormon. Through and through. Inside and out.
Having been raised by Mormon parents, I knew my religion very well. I gave talks. I served as the President of my quorums, Leader in my scout troop, and taught the youth as a Sunday School teacher in my young-adult years. I served a mission in Brazil. I’m not going to say the name because it doesn’t sound great in English. Okay, it was Campinas Brazil.
To say I was devoted would be quite the understatement. I read “Jesus the Christ” as a high schooler. I’d read the Book of Mormon cover to cover nearly fifty times by the age of 18. I’d read “Preach My Gospel,” cover to cover about as often. I walked through the halls of my high school, listening to Mormon Tabernacle Choir in my headphones. I went to sleep nightly with a conference talk playing on the nightstand (this part was pretty easy.) I said my first swear word as a 19-year-old.
I prayed every day. I had a testimony that could not be shaken. I did not lack faith.
I learned all of this from my mother. She was, and still is, a faithful Latter-day Saint, who tends to follow a rigorous schedule of ritualistic worship, praying and reading scriptures, and churching, and studying, and Relief-Societying, and humming hymns, and serving, and being, overall, a really good Mormon lady. My parents divorced when I was twelve.
I wanted to kill myself on my mission.
I stood at the train station in Campo Limpo Paulista, Brazil, and daydreamed about laying on the tracks. Every day. Every night.
I couldn’t tell my family this, of course. They’d send me home. I couldn’t tell my Mission President this, of course. He’d tell me to pray, and then he’d send me home.
When I finally came home, I’d changed. My mission had created these deep cuts in my brain and on my arms. I didn’t feel that peace that I used to, going to Church, reading my scriptures—all the rest. My eyes were beginning to open.
Why did God allow me to suffer so badly on a mission where I was serving Him? Why would he abandon me, leave me with molesting companions, strip my comfort away and throw me to a Mission President who was too busy baptizing to care about the cuts on my arms?
I came home from my mission in early April, just in time for General Conference. I did, then, what I always did. I put a question on the tip of my tongue, and I fasted, and prayed, and I asked for an answer, and I trusted that the answer would come during the Conference.
It didn’t.
And when this happened, my eyes opened a little wider. And I saw, on the pulpit, an old man. He had a few hairs on a spotted scalp, and a thin nose, and a wet mouth that slimed and swallowed after every sentence, and spoke the same thing that it always did. And I saw, then, what I’d failed to see for twenty years of devotion. The man at the pulpit was a man. Just that. Just a man. There wasn’t anything special about him. There wasn’t any prophetizing happening. No communication between him and Him. And there was something else, too. Something in his voice. Something in his voice that didn’t sound good or honest or pure. It manipulated.
My study began soon after. I pursued it with the same devotion which I showed to Mormonism.
And I found what I was searching for. I found my answers. And those answers said, in a loud voice, a pure one, an honest one, a good one, “The Church is not true. It’s never been.”
I officially denounced my Mormonism and all of my religious beliefs a few years later. It took me that long to decide I’d been duped.
My life after leaving Mormonism was sad for a long time. Really sad. And those Brazil feelings came back and I found myself in a hospital for a few months. And people said to themselves, “Well I bet this wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t have left.” And that really sucks and is terrible.
I’ve gotten past that, since then. I got married. I made friends. I drank coffee. I sipped alcohol. But I didn’t come away from it unscathed. And I don’t want anyone to go through that same thing. In that hospital, I decided I’d finish this little document I’d started a long time ago. The document, which was really just a rough outline, spoke of all those reasons that the Church wasn’t true. All those reasons that I cared a lot about.
I cared a lot about the First Vision and the Book of Abraham, too; but it took me years to make up my mind about those. I kept getting convinced by foolish lies and foolish people and my neck hurt from all of the whiplash. So I made a list. A list of things that couldn’t be debated with any kind of honesty.
I spent a million hours and a billion more days writing the thing. I had a job at the time. And when I was done, I saw that it was good, and that it might be helpful to someone, somewhere, out there. Someone like me, maybe. Someone who cares too much about Mormonism to let it go quickly. Someone who needs an extra push, or a better hand to hold.
So that’s this. “Latter-day Wasteland.” I hope it helps you. I really do.
