What a Facebook Comment Thread Reveals About LDS Worthiness Culture, Status Games, and the People We're Actually Losing
On May 7, 2026, a woman posted anonymously in a Facebook group called LDS Dating – Midsingles. Her post was long and carefully honest. She described meeting a genuinely thoughtful man, the accumulating exhaustion of single parenting and full-time work, and a strange paradox: that she craved physical connection when alone, but the moment that craving was briefly satisfied, all she wanted was quiet. Nobody needing anything from her. Peace.
She ended with a direct question to her community: Please tell me other women feel this way sometimes.
The post drew over 250 comments at the time of writing. A significant portion of the thread never engaged with what she asked. Instead, a small cluster of commenters — predominantly men — redirected the conversation toward the two words "sleep together" that appeared midway through her post, and spent the next several hours publicly correcting, shaming, and in several cases attacking her. One called her an "anonymous coward." Another described her as "toxic" and "adulterous." A third informed her that he doesn't "sleep with toxic, adulterous single moms," as though she had propositioned him. The tone escalated steadily. The substance of her question — exhaustion, the cost of connection, the particular burden of single parenthood — was almost entirely abandoned.
One commenter eventually named what had happened: "Interesting that so many people focused on the making out or sex part and not the actual point about emotional exhaustion in dating."
It was the most accurate observation in a very long thread. And it points toward something worth understanding carefully — not because this particular thread is unique, but precisely because it isn't.
The Mechanism, Named
Will Storr's 2021 book The Status Game offers a framework that is uncomfortable to apply to religious communities, but is difficult to argue with once you do.
Storr's central thesis is that human beings are status-seeking creatures by evolutionary necessity, and that all group behavior is organized around three primary modes of status competition: Dominance, in which status is earned through force or fear; Success, in which status is earned through demonstrated competence or achievement; and Virtue, in which status is earned through moral conformity, purity, and righteousness. Most human institutions are blends of these modes, but one tends to dominate — and the dominant mode shapes the character of everyone who plays inside it.
The most dangerous configuration, Storr argues, is the Virtue-Dominance hybrid: a system in which status is earned both through moral performance and through the coercive enforcement of that performance against others. He calls this a virtue-dominance game, and its distinguishing feature is that the act of correction, condemnation, or public shaming is itself a status move. The player who identifies and attacks the deviant is not merely defending a principle. He is earning rank.
This is not a conscious calculation. Storr is careful to note that the brain generates a self-serving narrative that presents status-seeking as principled moral action. The person who called a struggling woman an "adulterous coward" in a Facebook comment thread almost certainly experienced himself as defending something sacred. His brain told him so. The feeling of righteous indignation and the pursuit of status are, in Storr's framework, neurologically indistinguishable — and that is precisely the problem.
The enforcement behavior that appeared in that thread was not, in any meaningful sense, about her. It was about rank.
The Tyranny of the Cousins
Storr borrows the concept of the "tyranny of the cousins" from evolutionary anthropology to describe the mechanism by which tight-knit groups enforce conformity and punish deviation. In ancestral environments, the collective — the clan, the extended family network, the community of co-players — used gossip, shaming, ostracism, and sometimes violence to regulate individual behavior and protect the group's shared status system. These cousins were not external oppressors. They were built into the social architecture itself. And they are still operating, recognizably, in every tight human group today.
A tight culture — Storr distinguishes tight from loose on a spectrum correlated with historical ecological threat — enforces strict norms with severe consequences for deviation. It produces high conformity, strong group cohesion, and predictable failure modes: purity spirals, moral panics, and what he calls witch hunts, in which the group hunts and publicly destroys deviants to manufacture status and enforce consensus.
The LDS community is, by almost any structural measure, a tight culture. It maintains formal worthiness standards enforced through regular institutional interviews. It links access to its most sacred rituals — and by theological extension, to eternal family relationships — to demonstrated behavioral compliance. A working definition of Worthiness Culture notes that the system "converts private morality into audited status" and "raises the stakes of disclosure" to the point where honest admission can restrict participation and generate public shame. The incentive structure does not reward authenticity. It rewards impression management.
This is not a critique of the doctrine. It is a description of what happens structurally when a virtue-status system is formalized, its stakes are raised to include eternal consequences, and its enforcement is distributed among members who can earn rank by participating in it.
The cousins arrive. They are not strangers. They are your neighbors, your former bishops, your fellow group members. And when a woman posts something vulnerable in a public forum, the cousins recognize an opportunity — not consciously, not maliciously, but mechanically — to signal their own virtue by targeting hers.
What the Data Actually Shows
Jeff Strong spent three years as a mission president and served in senior executive roles at Johnson and Johnson before spending nearly a decade researching why members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints leave. His resulting book, Torn: Why People We Love Are Leaving the Church and What We Can Learn from Them, draws on what he describes as the largest disaffiliation study ever conducted in the LDS context, with over 15,000 survey respondents.
His findings are important here for two reasons.
First, they dismantle the narrative that the people who leave are the ones who didn't try hard enough. Strong's data shows that 85% of those who stepped away spent more than one hundred hours across several years attempting to work through their concerns before leaving. Forty-nine percent spent what he describes as "limitless hours" over at least five years. The modal experience of a person leaving the LDS church is not someone looking for an exit. It is someone who loved the community, found something that troubled them, and tried for years to reconcile it before concluding they couldn't.
Second, and more directly relevant to what happened in that Facebook thread, Strong's research identifies what he calls the most pivotal variable in faith transition: not the content of the concern, but the quality of the conversation that follows its disclosure.
His findings are stark. When a person in faith transition reaches out — and 83% do — 40% of those conversations go badly. When the conversation is with a devout parent, it is twice as likely to go badly. When the conversation is with a devout church leader, it is four times as likely to go badly. And when the conversation goes badly, Strong found that "relationships suffer, questions and concerns get stronger, and the individual is much more likely to withdraw."
Most critically: "The conversation itself is more important than what the person actually believes in whether they stay or go."
The woman who posted in that Facebook group was not in formal faith transition. She was exhausted, lonely, and trying to find out if she was alone in an experience she couldn't quite name. But the dynamic that met her is structurally identical to what Strong describes: a public disclosure of private struggle, followed by a response organized around correction rather than connection. And by Strong's data, that response pattern — deployed at scale across a community — is not protecting anything. It is accelerating exactly the outcome it claims to prevent.
Strong describes the failure mode clearly: "If your church experience is great, you can probably deal with some of those other issues without too much trouble. But if you've got those issues and you're having a spiritually unnourishing church experience, you're probably not going to stay."
The men who dominated that comment thread with moral enforcement were not guarding the community. They were, by the weight of available evidence, making it smaller.
The Soil Problem
Strong frames his analysis around an agricultural metaphor — the word "culture" itself derives from the Latin colere, meaning to cultivate soil — and identifies four tensions in the current LDS cultural soil. Two of them are directly illuminated by the comment thread.
The first is what he calls "hard and unyielding soil": the tension between standards and acceptance. Strong is careful to say that the solution is not to lower the standards. His argument is more precise: "Standards exist to elevate people, not sort them." When standards function primarily as sorting mechanisms — as gates that determine who is in and who is out, who may speak and who has forfeited the right to be heard — they have been instrumentalized in a way that serves the status system rather than the person. The woman in that thread was not asking for her behavior to be endorsed. She was asking to be heard. The response she received was sorting: you are not in good standing; therefore your experience does not merit engagement.
The second is what Strong calls "shallow soil full of stones": the tension between sanctuary and growth. A culture organized primarily around protection and stability — around maintaining the appearance of a community without blemish — does not produce the deep roots required to survive genuine difficulty. Strong quotes his research directly: when the heat comes, those without deep roots discover they have been standing on tradition rather than the gospel itself, and the traditions fail first. The performance of collective moral purity is, in this sense, not a sign of strength. It is evidence of shallow soil.
Robert Ferrell, who served as president of the Lima Peru Central Mission and previously as a Young Single Adult stake president, names the same problem from inside his institutional experience. Speaking on the Leading Saints podcast about the missionaries who arrived in his mission, he said: "Performance-driven instead of growth-driven. Perfectionistic type of attitudes." He described missionaries who believed God was punishing them for minor transgressions when their baptisms fell through — a direct product of a system that had taught them to experience moral compliance as a transaction with predictable returns. And he described the response of those missionaries when he convened a candid seminar on topics the culture typically avoids: "Nobody has ever talked to me like this before."
That sentence is worth sitting with. These were returned or serving missionaries — people who had been embedded in LDS culture for their entire lives, who had attended thousands of hours of church meetings, who had received regular individual interviews with priesthood leaders. And the experience of being spoken to honestly about their actual human lives, without the architecture of shame, was so unfamiliar that they named it.
The Witch in the Thread
Storr describes a recurring cast of characters in tight virtue-dominance games. The Witch is not hunted for what she has actually done. She is hunted because the game requires a target — because the act of publicly identifying and denouncing a deviant generates status for the players who do it. The specifics of the accusation matter less than the performance of righteous outrage. What marks the Witch as the Witch, in Storr's account, is not genuine transgression but visibility: she has said something, done something, or admitted something that the game's rules mark as impure, and she has done it publicly enough to be seen.
The woman who posted in that Facebook group was visible. She posted anonymously, but her experience was legible, her honesty was real, and her admission that her life did not conform to the expected template — that she was sexually active, that she was exhausted by both her children and the men she dated, that connection and peace existed in tension for her — was precisely the kind of visibility that activates the game.
The men who attacked her were not villains in any simple sense. They were players operating within a system whose rules reward what they did. The game told them, through the architecture of accumulated cultural norms, that identifying and correcting her was righteous. Their brains supplied the supporting narrative. The community supplied the audience. The result was predictable.
What is worth noting is the cost. Strong's data is specific about what happens when a person's disclosure is met with correction rather than connection. The individual withdraws. The questions get stronger. The relationship — to the community, to the institution, to the people who claim to represent the faith — is damaged. The person most likely to respond to genuine engagement does not get it. They get a performance of moral enforcement that tells them, as Strong puts it, "there's not space for me."
One commenter in the thread said it plainly, in the direction of the loudest enforcer: "And thank you for demonstrating exactly why so many women in this thread feel this way."
She was correct. And she had the data to prove it, even if she hadn't read it.
The Distinction That Matters
None of what is described here constitutes an argument against the faith, its doctrines, or its standards. Strong, Ferrell, and Storr are each making a more precise and more uncomfortable claim: that the cultural operating system installed on top of the doctrine is producing outcomes the doctrine itself does not endorse, and that the people running it are largely unaware of the mechanism because the brain is very good at presenting status-seeking as principled action.
"Our role as members of the church is to gather. God is the sorter. And the sorting doesn't happen now." - Jeff Strong
Ferrell puts it in terms of practice: when leaders focus on behavior and consequences rather than the underlying contention — the source of disconnection that the behavior is expressing — they get compliance at best, concealment more often, and departure eventually. The pattern he observed across hundreds of missionary interviews was not one of people who didn't believe enough. It was people who had never been helped to build a relationship with the Savior that could survive the gap between the life they were living and the life the culture expected them to present.
The woman in that thread was not asking anyone to endorse her choices. She was asking to be known. She wanted to find out if what she felt was real and shared — if the gap between her craving for connection and her capacity to sustain it made her broken, or human. What she received instead was a demonstration of the sorting mechanism in operation.
What she needed was a gatherer.
What the Thread Was Actually About
A comment posted late in the thread made an observation that was almost entirely ignored: most of the 237 comments were generated not by her question, but by the moral enforcement response to her question, and the counter-response to that, and the counter-counter-response. The actual subject — the exhaustion of a single mother trying to date, the gap between longing and capacity, the particular isolation of a life in which everyone needs something from you — was discussed seriously by perhaps a dozen people.
The rest was status competition. The thread became a virtue-dominance arena. Players on multiple sides earned rank by performing outrage, defending the original poster, attacking her attackers, and arguing about whether the argument was appropriate. Virtually none of it was about her.
This is what the Tyranny of the Cousins looks like in a digital space with 250 data points attached. The woman's actual experience — the thing she came to the community to understand — was nearly entirely consumed by the game that her visibility triggered.
She thanked the people who responded with genuine empathy. She confirmed that just knowing others felt the same way helped. And then, presumably, she closed the app and went back to her life.
The question worth asking, and the one this essay cannot answer for her, is whether she comes back.
A Note on the People Being Lost
Strong's research found that the people leaving the LDS community are not, in the majority of cases, the ones who didn't try. They are the ones who tried the longest — who spent five, ten years attempting to reconcile what they were experiencing with what the culture required them to perform. The people most likely to leave are among the most thoughtful, the most honest, and the most genuinely committed to working through hard things.
They are also the people most likely to post anonymously in a Facebook group asking if anyone else feels this way — because the cost of asking openly, with their name attached, is too high.
Ferrell's observation about his missionaries applies just as precisely to the broader LDS midsingles community: "We're not doing that as well as probably we could be doing — helping them come ready for a great spiritual experience." The structure of the culture teaches people to manage the presentation of themselves rather than to understand the actual interior experience they are having. When the experience becomes too discordant with the presentation, the easiest resolution is the one Strong's data captures: find somewhere else to be honest.
The woman in that thread was trying to be honest in public. The community's response — not universally, but loudly, and without meaningful intervention from those who saw it happening — told her what the cost of honesty was.
That is not a problem she created. It is a problem the culture created. And the culture, as both Strong and Ferrell argue from within the tradition itself, can choose to do something different.
The gathering is the job. The sorting comes later.
The question is whether the people who know that are willing to say so loudly enough to be heard over "the cousins".
This essay draws on Will Storr's The Status Game (2021), Jeff Strong's Torn: Why People We Love Are Leaving the Church and What We Can Learn from Them (2026), and the Leading Saints podcast interviews with Robert Ferrell (2021, 2025). The Facebook thread referenced was posted on May 7, 2026, in the LDS Dating – Midsingles group and generated 250+ comments.