Over the last few years in both public and private discussions about apostasy from the church, I have encountered an increasingly frequent complaint. It goes something like this:

“Practicing Mormons incorrectly attribute all apostasy to sin. There are many, many sinners in the church who do not leave. People leave the church for a variety of reasons, but it is not because they are sinners.”

In their own minds, they leave the church because they have discovered apparent incongruities that lead them to believe the Church is not true.

Of course everyone within and without the church sins. But when members say that people “leave the church because of sin” it is an idiomatic shorthand. What they mean is that people leave the church because they are unrepentant for their sin. We are all sinners, but we are not all penitent. Justification of sin eventually leads the unrepentant to leave the church.

The notion that those who reject the Gospel do so because of sin is not a just a cultural invention, it comes from the scriptures.