Category: Religion

The most sacred titles in Mormonism—Prophet, Priest, and King—are conferred in a temple ceremony accessible only after worthiness interviews, a full tithe, and a current recommend. In Catholicism, they’re spoken over every infant at baptism. The Melchizedek Priesthood, the LDS Church’s highest authority, is built on linear succession and a traceable chain of hands—which is almost exactly backwards from what Hebrews 7 is actually arguing. And the temple endowment, stripped to its structure, turns out to be Catholic baptism and confirmation filtered through degraded Masonic ritual. This companion to “It’s Just Tuesday for Catholics” asks why Joseph Smith built an elaborate system to restore what was never actually gone—and how a man brilliant enough to see what Protestantism had lost was blocked from finding it by the one thing his culture wouldn’t let him question.

A seventh-generation Mormon walked into a Catholic church for the first time, thought it was all pretty damn weird, and then started ugly crying during the liturgy with absolutely no idea why. It took seven more years to figure out what happened. Along the way, he sat down with Catholic and Orthodox priests and listed everything he’d lost when he left Mormonism — baptism for the dead, the endowment, celestial marriage, eternal progression, continuous revelation, priesthood authority. Every sacred thing Joseph Smith restored that had been lost in the Great Apostasy. The priests kept giving the same answer.

My fourth great-grandfather died from exposure during the Mormon persecutions of 1846. Seven generations later, after serving a two-year mission on the Navajo Nation where I baptized dozens of families, I left the LDS Church—not from doubt, but because the evidence demanded it. I became an atheist. Stayed one for seven years. Then something shifted, and I gave myself permission to hope. This essay traces fourteen years from exodus to Easter Vigil, through philosophy and theology and the uncomfortable question of what you do when the institution you can’t defend intellectually is replaced by one you never wanted to join.