Religion fills me with anger. God does not.

About a week ago, Meta’s algorithm found it necessary to present me with a Facebook post.

It arrived wearing the colors of religion. And while that made the whole thing more suspect, it was still useful. Silly algorithms are rarely pastoral, but occasionally, the stars align and they are timely.

It was penned (typed? Bleated? Excreted?) by a man named Rexford, who described himself as having spent thirty-eight years as a faithful Latter-day Saint. He framed it as a labor of love. A warning. A careful explanation. A testimony of departure.

I remember adjusting my posture in my chair. I sighed; familiar thoughts inside me moaned.  I've lived long enough to know when I’ve seen this before.

Those are the hardest things to read. While a cheap shot announces itself, a post written by someone who once lived inside the same religious house speaks with borrowed authority. It does not simply accuse from outside. It says, "I know who you are, and I know right where it hurts."

I read it with disquiet. Not panic, though I am known for both panic and anxiety. But I recognized the posture immediately: someone holding both the wound and the weapon, mistaking blood on his hands for clarity.

Some of what Rexford wrote was familiar. Some fell flat. A small portion was predictably, yet undeniably, chilling. In the end, it was all choreographed to make LDS faith seem not merely strained, but impossible.

Where I am in life now, I have enough perspective and grace to avoid mistaking my first reaction for my final one. I am less interested in engaging the argument than understanding why these arguments keep happening. Over, and over.

Because we are not arguing only about facts. Faith has facts around it. Documents. Dates. DNA. Translations. Papyri. But faith itself is not a spreadsheet. It is closer to the old analogy of asking someone what salt tastes like.

What is scripture? What is translation? What counts as evidence? What kind of thing is a prophet allowed to be? Can God speak through damaged people, unstable language, partial records, institutions, and memory? Or does human limitation disqualify the whole thing?

That is the argument beneath the argument.

Both sides wear lenses. Critics have them. Believers have them. Former believers have them. “Just following the facts” people have them too. I posit that nobody approaches questions of faith cleanly. We all arrive with wounds, betrayals, favorite verses, unanswered prayers, and our desperate need for belonging.

That does not mean truth is unknowable. I do not believe that. It means truth is rarely received without static.

And yes, dammit, the stakes are real.

People lose faith over this material. Marriages crack. Families go quiet. Parents wonder what they did wrong. Children feel lied to. Former members feel dismissed. Believers feel mocked. Everyone claims, with such righteous violence, that they are finally telling the truth. Listen, and be saved.

When the stakes are this high, the human brain craves safety. So we retreat to our corners. We become fluent in confirmation bias, calling it discernment when it agrees with us and bias when it belongs to someone else.

Critics scour the record for facts that justify their anger. Believers hide inside filtered materials to protect their peace. Both sides end up doing the same thing: fingers in ears, eyes closed, hoping the uncomfortable parts disappear.

That is not medicine. It is fragility paraded as testimony, or pride laid bare and calling itself research and science.

This is where I part ways with the counsel that “research is not the answer.” I understand the pastoral instinct. Some people wander into the storm unprepared and get shredded. But when the stakes are families, marriages, integrity, and souls, any type of retreat feels less like faith and more like the abdication of free agency.

If the Restoration is a living search for all truth, we cannot honor God by keeping our minds half shut. If the gospel is as robust as we claim, it should not require managed ignorance to preserve our peace.

So yes, read Rexford and other critics. Understand the apologists. Read the footnotes. Read Joseph Smith as strange, gifted, and flawed instead of a marble statue or a carnival fraud. Read the Book of Abraham honestly enough to admit it is difficult. Read DNA and archaeology without panic. Have enough grace to hold sacred living ordinances without turning them into social checkpoints, theater, or rites of passage we use to measure one another.

But my unsolicited advice is to know what clothes you put on in the morning; read all of it with your lens in your hand.

My bias is not hidden. I still believe in the Restoration. Not because every answer satisfies me. Today in particular, not many answers give me even the semblance of peace. I have eyes opened wide enough to realize that our present course is just as untidy as our pockmarked history. And it frustrates me more than I have time to explain.

I believe, my dear world, because an open heaven speaks to my soul more than a God who doesn't speak to his children. Human language is unstable, scripture is mediated, memory is fragile, prophets are human, and God needs to keep speaking through it all.

I believe in the Restoration less like a person defending their faith, and more like a person listening to God and looking for Jesus.

That voice, for me, has not gone silent.

And until it does, I refuse to confuse fear with faith, certainty with truth, or someone else’s departure with my obligation to leave.