Those who remained with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints entered in what Mormon historians Linda Thatcher and Roger Launius have characterized as a “contract”: “the assumption that personal feelings must bow below that of the church, that no disagreement be allowed to harm the church.” Those who tested the limits of this contract tended, according to Thatcher and Launius, to have some footing or standing in the secular world, to believe that they stood for an “honest minority” opinion, or to feel that the affordances of belonging were no longer worth the costs of submission.
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