Why I Stay Mormon in 2025 - Proving Contraries w/ Dave McKenzie | Ep. 2004

Why Informed Consent Matters: The Case for Staying Mormon in 2025

In an era when more members than ever before are aware of problematic Church history yet choose to remain active, a crucial question emerges: What enables faithful engagement with an institution whose foundational narratives have been complicated by scholarship and archival disclosure? Recent discussions in spaces like the Mormon Stories podcast have brought this tension into sharper focus, highlighting a growing cohort of what some call "nuanced" or "progressive" Latter-day Saints. These are people who have encountered documentation about Joseph Smith's challenges, questions surrounding the Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham, and institutional positions on LGBTQ+ issues, and yet have chosen to stay. Understanding their reasoning matters not just for members navigating faith crises, but for anyone seeking to comprehend how people reconcile competing truths within institutional religions.

The Argument for Informed Consent Over Institutional Silence

The conceptual thread running through recent testimony narratives is informed consent, the idea that members deserve transparent knowledge of Church history, doctrine, and institutional positions before making commitments. This perspective inverts the traditional missionary framework, which has historically emphasized narrative coherence over complexity. Rather than presenting a smooth, triumphalist account of Mormonism's arc, advocates for informed consent argue that members should encounter the full historical record, including contradictions and difficulties, and then make authentic choices about their participation.

Dave McKenzie's experience during his mission in the 1990s illustrates this principle in action. According to the podcast interview, McKenzie encountered converts who had accepted baptism based on missionaries' teachings but were subsequently confronted with historical information about Church foundations that neither the missionaries nor their educational materials had disclosed. These converts, a woman who left the Church and a young man struggling with newly surfaced questions, felt betrayed not by the existence of these challenges, but by the asymmetry of information upon which their conversion rested.

A Generation Growing Up in the Archive Age