Review: E. Marshall Brooks. Disenchanted Lives: Apostasy and Ex-Mormonism among the Latter-day Saints. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018.

Authors

Sara M. Patterson

Keywords

ex-Mormonism, disenchantment, community, E. Marshall Brooks, religious doubt

Abstract

In a February 1990 newsletter from the Southern California chapter of Saints Alive in Jesus/Ex-Mormons for Jesus, an anonymous author wrote: I am currently a Mormon who is searching for answers. So far, my studies have led me to have serious doubts about Mormonism, however, I am so fearful and emotionally distraught over leaving the religion that it’s sometimes difficult for me to think rationally. I have been a member for 25 years (I am now 34) and I have 4 children who are very involved in LDS activities. All my friends (most of them anyway) are members and my immediate family is too. T he concerns that this author articulated—over doubts generated by study, over being socially embedded in the Latter-day Saint community, and over what it might mean to leave that community—are precisely the kinds of anxieties explored in E. Marshall Brooks’s Disenchanted Lives: Apostasy and Ex-Mormonism among the Latter-day Saints. Taking an ethnographic approach to the question of the “cultural causes and consequences of religious disenchantment,” Brooks describes Mormon disenchantment in the twenty-first century as “a personal experience and cultural phenomenon [that] is characterized by an ambiguously conflated intimacy with and estrangement from religion, including the people, places, beliefs, and practices that define it” (vii)

BYU ScholarsArchive Citation

Patterson, Sara M. (2020) "Review: E. Marshall Brooks. Disenchanted Lives: Apostasy and Ex-Mormonism among the Latter-day Saints. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018.," Mormon Studies Review: Vol. 7: No. 1, Article 18.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr2/vol7/iss1/18