Jeremy Christiansen was raised in a faithful Mormon family. As a young man, he spent two years in Argentina as a missionary. When he returned, he married another member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and started a family. He held prominent roles in his faith community. Then one day he asked himself, “What if what I’ve been taught isn’t true — wouldn’t I want to know that?” His research and soul-searching eventually led him and his whole family to the Catholic Church.
When Mormon and Catholic friends asked why he converted, he wrote down his story, which became the book “From the Susquehanna to the Tiber: A Memoir of Conversion from Mormonism to the Roman Catholic Church.” LDS members believe that Peter, James and John appeared to LDS founder Joseph Smith on the banks of the Susquehanna River and conferred upon him the keys of the kingdom that Christ gave to Peter.
“For Catholics, I hope that this can help them see the world from the Mormon perspective so that when they try to evangelize, they might understand a little better,” said Christiansen. “For Mormons who might be doubting their own faith, this might (show) there’s something else and that something else is the true, the good and the beautiful of Catholicism.”
Christiansen, 35, grew up in the small town of Blanding, Utah. “Our faith was really central to our lives, I suppose in a lot of ways similar to how devout Catholics grow up,” he said. “We said prayers every morning and every night as a family, we read from the Book of Mormon, we went to church every Sunday, we participated in youth activities during the week.”
Though he was rebellious in his teens, his faith became his own as he reached the end of high school. “I had the key religious experience Mormons are taught to seek out — they call it ‘gaining a testimony,’ ” said Christiansen. “In the Book of Mormon, it says that anybody can read the Book of Mormon and pray to God and through the power of the Holy Ghost, God will manifest to each individual that it’s true. It’s really a subjective, emotional experience that many Mormons have and that forms the basis of their belief.”
After high school, Christiansen spent two formative years as a missionary. “It felt like you were living in the Book of Acts,” he said. “I spent every day, all day, stopping every person on the street, knocking on doors, trying to convince people of the truth of my faith.” Though he faced a lot of rejection, when there were successes, he felt even more affirmed. “LDS missionaries will stop in the middle of the road and pray about which street (they) should go down,” he said. “And when those things pan out, it really reinforces in your mind that God is leading you to all these people.”
When he returned to the U.S., he met his wife, Carly, and they married in 2008. “My wife comes from an equally devout LDS home and our religion was super important to us,” he said. “We volunteered on top of school and work and having kids.” They had two children while Christiansen earned his undergraduate degree at Southern Utah University in Cedar City and two more while he was in law school at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. They now have seven children: Raymond, 13, Virginia, 12, Rex, 10, Goldie, 8, Opal, 3, Peter, 1, and Linus, a newborn.
“Things were happy,” said Christiansen. But in law school, things started to unravel. The stress of studying was difficult enough. But then he was called to a new leadership position in the church. “When you’re called, there’s a ceremony where they put their hands on your head and they pronounce an extemporaneous blessing upon you, believed by everybody there to be what God is saying to you. This (church leader) made some really specific promises to me. It gave me a lot of comfort.”
But when those promises about what he would accomplish in law school didn’t come to pass, Christiansen started to doubt. “It was really devastating and it caused a huge amount of cognitive dissonance,” he said. At the same time, a number of prominent members of the LDS church resigned their memberships due to historical and doctrinal issues with Mormon history. So, for the first time, Christiansen decided to research the life of founder Joseph Smith.
Learning more about Smith’s participation in folk magic and treasure digging as well as his extreme polygamous lifestyle deeply concerned Christiansen. But overall, it was knowing that the scholarly biographies he read painted a more believable picture of the founding of Mormonism than he ever had received growing up.
“You’re taught a particular narrative in the LDS church and there are maybe a few things here and there that don’t quite make sense, but you don’t think about them a whole lot,” he said. “After doing all the reading, (I was) presented with a coherent narrative that explained things better.”
In 2015, he told his wife that he no longer believed. He continued to take his children to church with her, but it was hard. “It’s a really unpleasant time to think about because my entire universe was just ripped out from under me,” he said. “You feel lied to, you feel silly for having believed. On top of that, I’m married to a devout woman and she’s raising our children in the LDS church. It became increasingly difficult as my children were growing and I would hear them being taught things that I knew were not even arguably true.”
Though he no longer considered himself Mormon, he still thought of himself as Christian, and one day he picked up a book of the writings of the early Church Fathers. “I thought it would be interesting to see what early Christians believed and that I (could) pick and choose a few things they believed and build my own beliefs,” he said. “I was shocked to find that all these people were Catholic, or seemed like something really close to Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. That really bothered me because it was not what I was expecting to find. One issue that touched me was the Real Presence. It seemed really obvious to me that whether I believed it or not, these people did.”
That discovery led to a year of intense research into Catholicism. At that point, the family had moved to Northern Virginia for Christiansen’s job and he decided to go to St. Rita Church in Alexandria for his first Mass. “It was so powerful and moving to me. It was really like being transported to another universe,” he said. “And in a way it was very different from the kind of emotionalism of Mormonism. There was something so rooted and ancient about Catholic liturgy.”
In 2018, Christiansen resigned his membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and was baptized at St. Rita. His family was there to witness it. “In (my wife’s) mind, it was not ideal but she has said, ‘It felt like I got my husband back.’ She sensed that this was a good thing for me,” said Christiansen.
At the start of the coronavirus pandemic two years later, Carly began to watch Mass online with her husband. Their children also started at St. Rita School. Gradually, they all decided to become Catholic. His wife was baptized with their newborn son, Peter Ambrose, in 2021.
Ten years ago, Christiansen would never have dreamed that he would become Catholic, let alone that his wife and children would, too. “I couldn’t think of anything crazier,” he said. “Sometimes God works in our lives in ways that are difficult to see in the moment, in very unexpected ways.”
