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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormons), often heralded as the fastest growing religion in American history, is facing a crisis of apostasy. Rather than strengthening their faith, the study of church history and scriptures by many members pushes them away from Mormonism and into a growing community of secular ex-Mormons. In Disenchanted Lives, E. Marshall Brooks provides an intimate, in-depth ethnography of religious disenchantment among ex-Mormons in Utah. Showing that former church members were once deeply embedded in their religious life, Brooks argues that disenchantment unfolds as a struggle to overcome the spiritual, social, and ideological devotion ex-Mormons had to the religious community and not out of a lack of dedication as prominently portrayed in religious and scholarly writing on apostasy.

At the eve of the bicentennial anniversary of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, fifteen scholars explore the relationship between Mormon historical consciousness and the belief in a universal Christian apostasy. Latter-day Saints have a paradoxical relationship to the past; even as they invest their own history with sacred meaning—as the restoration of ancient truths and the fulfillment of biblical prophecies—they repudiate the eighteen centuries preceding the founding of their church as apostate distortions of the truth. Since the advent of Mormonism, Latter-day Saints have told narratives about the origin of their church using the paradigm of apostasy and restoration. Constructing a boundary between apostasy and restoration has generated a powerful and enduring binary of categorization in Mormonism that has profoundly impacted their self-perception and relations with others. Standing Apart explores how the idea of apostasy has functioned as a category to mark, define, and set apart “the other” in the development of Mormon historical consciousness and in the construction of Mormon narrative identity. The contributors trace the development of and changes in LDS narratives of apostasy within the context of Mormon history and American Protestant historiography. They offer suggestions for and predictions about ways that these narratives might be reformulated to engage with the past in generous and charitable conversation, recognizing mutual concerns stemming from shared divine inheritance and humanity while offering new models of interfaith relations, as the LDS church and Mormon culture respond to challenges and opportunities in the twenty-first century.