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Reflections on People Who Leave the Church

Reflections on People Who Leave the Church

Last updated on: July 26, 2026 at 4:46 pm by Dan Peterson

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Reflections on People Who Leave the Church 2026-07-26T16:46:12-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The cover of Torn, by Jeff Strong. (Fair use, I hope, from Amazon.com)

In this video from the Interpreter Foundation, Kyler Rasmussen briefly reviews Jeff Strong’s still rather new book Torn: Why People We Love Are Leaving the Church and What We Can Learn from Them: Interpreting Interpreter: Reviewing Torn. He also introduces himself and briefly explains his own academic and professional credentials, thus showing why the subject matter and the method of Torn are very much within his personal wheelhouse.

On a very different note: The twenty-seventh installment in the Interpreter Foundation’s Becoming Brigham series will go up on Monday morning. In the meantime, though, you can (vainly) attempt to sate your ultimately and appropriately insatiable craving for more of the series by watching this 33-second teaser: TRAILER for Ep. 27—They Found Apostles From Where?

It’s a real pity that, as prophesied by critics, the Interpreter Foundation died more than a decade ago, and that it hasn’t produced anything at all since that time.

The Vancouver British Columbia Temple (LDS Media Library)

Prior to the dedication of the Vancouver British Columbia Temple on 2 May 2010, the closest Latter-day Saint temple to members of the Church in Victoria and the rest of Vancouver Island was located just outside of Seattle, requiring either air transportation or car ferry and quite a bit of driving, not to mention crossing an international border. Even the opening of a temple near the city of Vancouver didn’t really help people over here on the Island very much. A ferry or a flight and a lengthy drive were still unavoidable. So I’m very pleased that a small temple will soon be built in the Victoria suburb of Langford — and, for that matter, that new temples will also be erected in Marysville, to the north of Seattle, and in Tacoma, to Seattle’s south southwest.

“To fortify our hope in a time of increasing wickedness, the Lord has directed His prophet to dot the earth with His temples.” (Elder Neil L. Andersen of the Quorum of the Twelve, “The Triumph of Hope,” in the October 2024 semiannual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints [Liahona, November 2024, 4].)

Two killer whales or orcas jump off of the Aleutian Islands in 2006 (public domain photograph from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

We went out on a four-hour whale-watching trip on the Strait of Juan de Fuca on Saturday afternoon. It was a pretty successful expedition, in my judgment: We watched at least five individual humpback whales for quite some time. Then we found a pair of orcas, or killer whales, and followed them just off of Vancouver Island. The two are evidently siblings, and it was quite touching to watch a brother and a sister get along so well during an innocent and rather lazy afternoon of killing and eating mass quantities of marine life. (I’m referring to the two orcas, not describing my own gustatory activities.) On rocks further offshore, we also saw harbor seals (to which our onboard naturalist referred as “rock sausages” — they are a favorite food of killer whales — and as [get the joke?] orca-d’œuvres), California sea lions, and Steller sea lions, as well as a large variety of aquatic birds.

It was interesting to be told about seemingly altruistic behavior on the part of humpback whales. Our naturalist supplied two illustrative stories that I consider quite remarkable:

She mentioned an instance of a woman scientist who was out swimming among a group of humpbacks when one of them began to act quite strangely toward her, coming very close to her and clearly pushing her back toward her boat. Only when, frustrated and more than a little frightened, she actually boarded her boat did she realize that she had been being stalked, perhaps, by a massive tiger shark. (See this video about the incident and the fascinating encounter that followed a year later.)
She also mentioned instances of humpback whales rolling onto their backs and lifting seals onto their bellies or flippers so as to shield them from attacks by orcas.

I was also intrigued to learn that female orcas experience menopause, and that they live longer than any other non-human species beyond the age of reproduction. In fact, female orcas have considerably longer life spans than male orcas, which — since orca families and pods are matriarchal — seems to serve the function of permitting the matriarchs to pass their wisdom on to the younger generation. Female orcas eventually separate from their mothers, but male orcas apparently don’t. In fact, it’s evidently not uncommon for a first-born orca son to die shortly after the passing of its mother. (By contrast, salmon die immediately after they lay and fertilize their eggs, if, indeed, not before. [I don’t know what percentage of them die while attempting to return to their native waters, often caught by waiting bears.] As a result, the parental generation never meets the next generation. Of course, it seems unlikely that mature salmon possess any real accumulated wisdom to impart to their posterity.)

Interesting fact: The naturalist was unaware of any case in which an orca has clearly, deliberately, killed a human in the wild. Altogether, orca attacks on humans (outside of captivity) are quite rare, and they may all be cases of mistaken identity (e.g., where a killer whale has wrongly imagined a human in a wetsuit to be a seal).

Strictly speaking, the Seattle Washington Temple is located in suburban Bellevue. In any case, its dedication in 1980 established it as the first Latter-day Saint temple in the Pacific Northwest. (LDS.org)

For those who worry about the continuing influence of theists and theism in our otherwise wonderful world, I close (as is my occasional preference) with a trio of grossly disturbing items from the essentially inexhaustible Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™:

Unfortunately, as presently constituted most legal systems (in the West, at least) provide no real way to thwart such meddling in the lives of others by religious zealots. One can only weep.

Posted from Seattle, Washington

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