I’ve got the biggest fish in Mormon podcasting!  In this first episode, we’re going to talk to Dr. John Dehlin about his dating an Oscar-winning actress, Renee Zellweger.We’ll talk about John Dehlin’s early years.

Copyright © 2022

Gospel Tangents

All Rights Reserved

Except for book reviews, no content may be reproduced without written permission.

John Dehlin is the grandfather of Mormon podcasting. That doesn’t mean he’s old! He’s just internet-old! His podcast, Mormon Stories, was one of the earliest, and the first attempt to talk about sticky Church topics. We’ll talk about his journey in and out of the Church, his dating an Oscar-winning actress in high school, his dealing with general authorities, how his approach has changed over the years, how he deals with critics, and the difference between apologists and neo-apologists. Does he want people to Stay LDS? Check out our conversation…

I am really excited, I’ve got the biggest fish in Mormon podcasting on the show, Dr. John Dehlin from Mormon Stories podcast. Yes, you got it. We’re going to talk a lot about his life, dating an Oscar winning actress in high school. What was that like? We’ll also talk about Mormon Stories, how it’s changed over the years, his interactions with Daniel Peterson and Elder Jeffrey Holland. So, it’s going to be a fantastic conversation. You definitely won’t want to miss this one. Check out our conversation….

John  00:56  Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. I am both your host and the guest for today’s episode. Here’s what I mean by that. Today we have in studio, THE man, the myth, the legend, Rick Bennett. Hey, Rick.

GT  01:11  Hey, John, how you doing?

John  01:12  Good. For those of you who don’t know Rick, Rick is the host of a really important podcast/YouTube channel called Gospel Tangents. For several years now, Rick has been interviewing what I would say mostly is members of the Mormon Studies scholarship community. He’s interviewed Richard Bushman. He’s interviewed Matt Harris, Shannon Flynn, lots of cool people. It’s a great library, a really important asset. For those who are in the know, even yesterday, in my interview with Thomas Murphy, he mentioned how important Rick Bennett’s stuff is. Steven Pynakker really loves Rick Bennett.

GT  01:52  Steve is definitely a fanboy.

John  01:53  Yeah, and we’re both mutual fans of Steven. Anyway, I’ve also known Rick for many years, kind of on the bloggernacle. He does great work. Rick has wanted to interview me for a little bit. We tried an interview several months ago. When it was done, it was during a really stressful time, where we were getting a lot of attacks. After Gerardo reviewed it, Gerardo said, “I don’t think we should release this.” So, it’s one of those bootleg unreleased interviews. Now, if I went back and watched it, maybe I wouldn’t care. But, anyway, Rick’s back. He’s willing to go one more time and try and interview me. So, Rick going to interview me for this episode. But I may ask him questions back, because Rick is an active believing Mormon. I’m always fascinated to understand how people who know more about Church history than me, in Rick’s case, still remain an active faithful member. So, I reserve the right to return some questions back to Rick. (Rick, pull your mic a little bit closer.) All right. I’ll turn the time over to Rick of Gospel Tangents for what I hope is a fun, edifying interview where I’m going to try not to get too exuberant. So, I’m going to try and be uncaffeinated John.

GT  02:10  You can be exuberant. It’s fine with me. I don’t mind.

John  03:00  Well, thanks for the honor of wanting to interview me.

GT  03:19  Well, thank you. So, John, I’m a little bit different in my style, in that I usually like to go to somebody’s academic history first, and I’m going to go there. But I’ve never met anybody that dated an Oscar winning actress. So, we’ve got to go there first. Who is this person that I’m talking about? Tell that story.

John  03:43  Okay. Well, when I was a freshman in high school at Katy High School in Katy, Texas, which is a suburb of Houston, I met Renee Zellweger at a Speech and Drama tournament. She was into speech and drama.

GT: And still is, I think.

John: Yes, she still is a little bit. She was just this bubbly blonde, vivacious, talented human. We became friends from that moment of my freshman year and we were friends all through high school. We were in the same graduating class. We did date. We used to sing Beatles songs together. We went to Galveston Beach together. We did kiss. I will kiss and tell. But that’s as far as it went. But I consider her one of my closest friends. We were so close that she made my girlfriends kind of jealous.

GT  04:40  I can imagine why.

John  04:41  She was cute and a cheerleader, and she was a basketball player. She was on track. But she wasn’t the most desired girl in the whole high school, but she was up there. But she was different from maybe some of the other more popular girls. She was really classy. She was smart, but she wasn’t like an honor student, but she was smart. But again, she wasn’t the most popular of the girls. So, I’m repeating myself. Of course, as a good Mormon boy, I wanted her to be Mormon more than anything. So, the big story that you probably want me to tell is that, I think it was my junior year, I decided to invite her to a stake dance. So, I invited her to what I remember to be the New Year’s Eve stake dance.

John  05:43  I brought her. I just wore, as I remember, khakis and a blazer and a white shirt and tie. That was my standard outfit back then, as I recall. She wore this lovely velvet black dress that just kind of went off the shoulder, and she’s petite. She wasn’t buxom or anything. So, I didn’t think anything of it. It was certainly modest by my standards, even back then. As soon as we entered the chapel, some of the female leaders just immediately kind of swooped in, pulled me aside and said, “Whoever this is, her dress isn’t modest. She’s either going to need to wear your jacket or go home and change.” And I’m huge. I’m 6’ 6” [tall] by this point. She’s like, five whatever, five and change.[1] I was just shocked. I was just like, “Oh, no, wait a minute. You don’t understand. She’s not a member. Like we don’t want to create this first impression.” I just thought for sure, they would just like buckle and say, “Oh, okay. It’s a nonmember. No problem.” But when I said that, the leaders said, “No, the other girls will be frustrated that we have a double standard here.”

John  07:07  So, I pulled her aside, and I explained the situation and offered to let her wear my jacket. But she started crying and she asked me to take her home. So, I took her home and dropped her off. She didn’t want to do anything. She just kind of cried and went home. I remember going back to the [dance.] Weirdly, I went back to the dance. I remember just going into the chapel and lying down on one of the pews and just staring up at the ceiling just wondering what had just happened and why she was treated this way. It didn’t make me question the Church or anything because that was off limits. But it was definitely sad. We remained very close friends. I had the sense that part of her wanted to go to prom with me, but I wasn’t–I was student body president and on the basketball team, but I wasn’t popular like the football boys were.

GT  08:05  How can you be student body president and not be popular?

John  08:08  I’ll explain. It wasn’t a voted position.

GT  08:10  Oh, really?

John  08:11  So, you got chosen by the students, as I remember you got–well, you had to qualify. So, you had to have served in an office on student council to run for president. So, I had been leader of the safety committee the year before. There was no one else to run against me who had served on the committee who was a senior. So, I ran unopposed.

GT  08:39  Oh, wow.

John  08:40  That was different than class president. The class president was a close friend of mine, and he was super popular, but student body president, student council president, was different. So anyway. I don’t know.

GT  08:52  So, they didn’t vote for student body president at all? There was no vote at all?

John  08:55  It was technically student council president. There was no student body president in my high school. There was student council president and then senior class president. So, I was student council president. My friend, Chad, was the senior class president.

GT  09:11  Okay.

John  09:12  They did vote, but I ran unopposed.

GT  09:15  Okay.

John  09:15  So, anyway, I was popular-ish, but I was a Mormon kid in a Baptist town, kind of goofy. So I was not, and, by the way, football ruled Texas back then.

GT  09:25  It still does.

John  09:26  And it still does. So, yeah, being a basketball player didn’t get me up there with the football players. I was popular, but not that popular. Renee chose to go to senior prom with a football player. I went with a girl I was dating. I think maybe both of us were sad that we didn’t go together. I don’t know. I remember her seeing me dancing with my girlfriend at senior prom, and her like crying and running away from the boy she was dancing with. I never actually talked to her about why that happened. In my mind, I thought it was because she was sad that we weren’t at prom together. But that’s just my high school memory.

John  10:14  We stayed in touch. When I went on a mission, I sent her a Book of Mormon that I signed, tried to get her to join the Church. She wasn’t buying it. Then, after my mission, I got back in touch with her. She was at the University of Texas at Austin. She knew Matthew McConaughey, she said. She had been in a couple Phil Collins–I guess she’d been a couple of music videos. She told me she was going to be an actress. She invited me down to come hang out with her. Her boyfriend had just died by suicide. He was South African Jewish. That’s just what I remember, which was interesting. But I was afraid to go see her. Because I was afraid, I would break the law of chastity if I was with her, and there was a spark there. So, she invited me to go see her in Austin. I didn’t. But she told me she was going to be an actress, which I kind of laughed off and I’m like, “Are you serious?”

She’s like, “Yeah, I’m going to be an actress.” So that was that was last time I talked to her until I was married to Margi, and we were living in Chicago. I saw the trailer to Jerry Maguire. I’m like, holy crap! That looks like Renee, and it was. I didn’t even know that.

John  11:30  I don’t know that I’ve tried to reach out to her since she became famous. She’s never reached out to me. There have been times where like, a couple times she came to Sundance, and I’m like, “I wonder if she’ll reach out.” But she never has. She probably forgot about me the moment she graduated or the last time we talked from Texas. But, anyway, that’s my Renee Zellweger story, and I’m sticking to it.

GT  11:58  Do you have any pictures? I should get a picture. We need a picture for this episode.

John  12:01  We may have a picture together, maybe.

GT  12:06  I’d love to see that, if I could. So ,yeah, that’s interesting.

Dr. John Dehlin served a mission in Guatemala back in about 1990. He was distressed to discover that missionaries often baptized young children without parent’s consent, people with mental disabilities, and other unscrupulous baptisms.  He’ll share his experiences, including notifying the mission president about this and being punished for pointing it out. Check out our conversation….

GT:  You kind of mentioned your mission there. I don’t usually talk about people’s missions, but you have quite a mission story. I think it was in one of your very first episodes of Mormon Stories, like 15 years ago [that you talked about your mission.] So, there’s probably a lot of people who haven’t heard that story. So, talk about your mission to Guatemala.

John  12:36  I didn’t ever try alcohol in high school. I didn’t try smoking. I didn’t try drugs. I was a virgin when I graduated. I was seminary president and like, really in the Church. So, I was really orthodox, I believed, in my mind. I was really faithful and got called to Guatemala and did two months in the MTC under, I think it was Ed Pinegar.

GT  13:05  Ed Pinegar, right.

John  13:05  It was in 1988-90.

GT  13:08  I was under Durrant. I was before you.

John  13:11  Yeah. So, Ed Pinegar, Guatemala City North mission, and long story short. I went to Guatemala and immediately noticed that we were baptizing people that probably didn’t have any business getting baptized.  [We were baptizing] drunk people, people with Downs syndrome, people who didn’t have all the discussions, people who hadn’t been to church. There were some companionships that were starting to baptize 10, 20, 30 a month. There was one zone in particular, the La Laguna zone, where the zone leaders had over 40 baptisms in a month. The zone had like over 100 baptisms in a month, with like four or five companionships. So, several of the companionships had like 20-30 baptisms in a month. I’m like, there are only 30 days in a month. How do you have 40 baptisms in a month? And the whole zone’s doing it? So, I talked to a friend who was in that zone, and he’s like, “Oh, yeah, dude, it’s crazy. Like, we’ll goof off all week long. We’ll swim, we’ll go to movies. It’s a party. But then on Saturdays, we’ll go to a soccer field and gather as many young, poor children as we can. We’ll go to the poorest area of town, play a soccer match with as many young kids as we can. Then, we’ll invite them all back to the chapel to cool off, and we’ll have the baptismal font filled, and we’ll baptize eight or 10 at a time,

GT:  These are just kids.

John:  These are all like just little kids, barefoot, poor, in the worst slums of Guatemala City, zone 15, La Lagune.

John  13:11  He even told me that kids were doing cannonballs in the baptismal font because there’d be no leadership at the baptism. The missionaries had the key to the chapel, and they would just baptize like 10 at a time.

GT  15:16  There was no service. There was no talk about baptism, the Holy Ghost.

John  15:20  I mean, they may have done all that, but there was certainly no ward mission leader there, no Bishop, no primary president, no parents.  There were no discussions.

GT  15:28  No signed consent form.

John  15:29  No consents.

GT  15:32  These are just kids that are eight to…

John  15:36  Seven. They actually baptized seven-year-olds.

GT  15:39  Oh, wow.

John  15:41  From what I remember. But, then, the mission president loved it. Gordon Romney was my mission president, and he loved it. He made those zone leaders APs. Then, they would travel around the mission and teach these techniques to other missionaries. So, early in my mission, I talked to President Romney about it, because I was a Fleche, an arrow. I was an obedient missionary, and it seemed like a perversion of God’s holy ordinances. So, I talked to Gordon Romney about it. He’s like, “Elder, don’t worry.” He said that even if we just give them a Book of Mormon, that then there’ll be a Book of Mormon in their home. But once they’re baptized and have the gift of the Holy Ghost, even if they fall inactive, it will give them a spiritual leg up for the rest of their lives. If they have the gift of the Holy Ghost, it may awaken later. I’ll never forget this, he ended by saying, “And even if they are never active again, we want them to do their work for them when they’re dead.” They will have had their work done.

GT  16:52  That’s the benefit.

John  16:55  So, I had been taught exactly obedience by Elder Pinegar, and that was the way the mission worked. So, I just, “Okay, I guess that’s the way it’s done.” I didn’t do that, ever, on my mission. Like that felt wrong to me. But I was just a few months into my mission at the time. So, he made me a branch president and a zone leader early on. I was branch president twice and zone leader for most of my mission.  But towards the end, we had a month where the mission president had made a goal that every companionship would have a baptism in the month. And because we had had a really good month before, the pipeline in my zone was kind of down.

John  17:42  So, we got to the end of the month, and they were two companionships, in my zone, a zone leader that didn’t have a baptism yet. So, I got a call from President Romney. He seemed disappointed. He told me the night before, “Fill up your baptismal fonts in the two areas. Frijanes and one other area. Fill up the baptismal font. The APs are going to come pick you up tomorrow morning, and they’re going to show you how real leaders in the mission manage their zones.” So, he picks me up, they picked me up in their Toyota Forerunner, Frontrunner, or whatever it was, Land Cruiser, I don’t remember. They pick me up, take me to the first area, which was Frijanes. They pick up the missionaries. They’re like, “Alright, take us to whoever you’re investigating with. We went to one guy, and they offered him gum and ice cream. They’re like, “Hey, any way we can get you to get baptized today?” He’s like, “Nah, I’m not. I’m not feeling it. I’m not ready.”

John  18:45  So we left and they’re frustrated. So, literally, they start driving around the town, and they go to the poorest part of town, drive up to the shack, and they find this 80-year-old woman who was toothless. They had a hut, dirt floors, like laminate. They’re just, like, super impoverished. They’re like, “Hey, Hermana, “Quieres segura Jesu Cristo pasado.”  He said, “Do you want to follow Jesus and get baptized?”  She’s like, half sane, half senile, and she’s like, whatever. So, they walk her down to the nearest creek, where women are washing their clothes in the creek. She’s praying to Mary on the way down.

John  19:33  There were no discussions, no interview that I remember, [she’s] never been to church. They literally baptized her there in the creek or the stream. Then they said to the missionaries, “Hey, can you make sure and confirm her with the gift of the Holy Ghost? We have to get to the next area.” So, we didn’t even wait for her to get confirmed with the gift of the Holy Ghost. We go back up, drive to the next area and do something very similar, pressure someone else who’s not ready to get baptized.

John  20:09  Then I’ll never forget.  On the way home, and this is Elder Peterson and Elder Cruz, like I totally remember their names. I mean, memory is weird. So, they stop at a payphone and they call President Romney. They say, “President Romney, we witnessed a miracle today,” and they told him that the two areas had gotten a baptism. That felt dishonest. It felt like a desecration of the Lord’s holy ordinances. It felt deceitful. I felt really gross and sick inside.

John  20:48  So, at the next zone leader conference where other zone leaders would come receive instruction, I had my interview with President Romney. I told him what had happened, because in my mind, kind of naively, [I thought] he would never be okay with this if he knew.

GT  21:04  Right.

John  21:04  So, I told him, and weirdly, he started yelling at me, telling me that I was kicking against the pricks, that I was opposing priesthood leadership, and that if I ever did something like that, again, he would demote me.

John  21:20  This is the second time I’d brought it up to him. Then, even though my companion had more time in the area than I did, I was transferred to Uspantan Quiche, which was like, as I remember, like a five-hour bus ride to the nearest telephone, and like an 11-hour bus ride to the mission home. I was banished, basically, for questioning my priesthood leadership.

John  21:49  It was there–I’d had asthma problems [in the past.] It turns out, I was allergic to dust mites in Guatemala. So, I had been in areas that were less dirty, before. The President knew this [and] sends me to the dirtiest, filthiest, one of the dirtiest, filthiest areas in the mission.

GT  22:09  He knew that you had asthma.

John  22:10  Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. He sends me to one of the dirtiest, filthiest areas in the mission, Uspantan Quiche, look it up.  There wasn’t even a telephone in the town, imagine. You know, this is 1990, no telephone?

GT  22:26  Right.

John  22:28  I got so sick that I called him after a month. I just said, “I can’t breathe here.” He says, “Come home, come back to the mission home.” So, I get on the bus, come back to the mission home. The next day, he had me on a plane flight home, sent me home. There was only four months ago on my mission. So, I was kind of confused. But I interpreted that as him wanting to get rid of me, because I was questioning. By that point, we were the second highest baptizing mission in the world. According to my president, the only other mission that had more baptisms than us was the Chile Vina del Mar mission, which had over 1000. I just think he didn’t want me ruining…

GT  23:11  Per month?

John  23:11  Yeah, 1000 per month, and I think he didn’t want me ruining his good thing. So, I got sent home honorably. They offered me a release four months early, and I’m not ending my mission four months early. So, I asked them to reassign me. They reassigned me to the Arizona Tempe mission. I served my last four months there. They made me a zone leader immediately when I arrived. So, there was no question about my worthiness. He must have not spoken ill about me, which I was grateful for. I served the last four months over the Spanish speaking missionaries in the Arizona Tempe mission.

GT  23:12  And you were a zone leader in Gilbert, right?

John  23:16  Yeah, I was zone leader over the Spanish speaking missionaries in Gilbert, Chandler, Tempe, Queens Creek, kind of that area. I actually, while I was there, Durrel Woolsey was the mission president. He had just been called as a general authority or an area authority to go work in the Philippines. So, I told him everything that happened to me, thinking that President Romney was just rogue. So, he said [that] well, he’ll deal with it. He’ll go report it to Church headquarters. Then, he left the mission and Elder Bailey, David Bailey replaced him.

John  24:02  I never heard from Woolsey what happened. But I followed up with Bailey and President Bailey, who’s still alive, he said, “Yeah,  did hear back from them, and what they said is that he’s only got a few months left on his mission.” They didn’t want to cause a big stir. So they’re just going to let him finish his mission, Gordon Romney.  So, that was in summer of 1990. He gets released, I get released, go to BYU. I find out later he was called to the missionary committee for the Church, to serve on the missionary committee for the Church. And he was called to lead the Church’s sesquicentennial committee, which led me to believe that the Church was okay with what he was doing. That was the first time I wondered whether the church–whether the fish rotted from the head, you know what I mean? I didn’t lose my testimony. But it was the first time I’m like, “Wow, something’s wrong at church headquarters.”

GT  24:35  Let me make sure I understand, so who is leading–I know, you said it was the sesquicentennial mission.

John  25:42  No, this there was a sesquicentennial, like, celebration for Joseph Smith’s death or something or the Church’s founding or something.

GT  25:49  I don’t know, okay.

John  25:50  But Gordon Romney, I was told, was called to lead that committee.

GT  25:56  Okay. That’s what I wanted to make sure. I couldn’t tell if it him or Woolsey. But yeah, it was Romney.

John  25:59  Not Woolsey, it was Romney.  So, when I find out Gordon Romney might be a general authority, like literally in my mind, I thought, missionary committee, sesquicentennial. This guy may make general authority. And if he does, I don’t know that my testimony could withstand that. You know what I mean? So, I’m starting to feel like really–and I worried about what damage he could do. So, I ended up reaching out to some professors at BYU while I was there, Ted Lyon, Bill Bradshaw, LaMond Tullis. I just told them the situation. It was LaMond Tullis who said, I think, “I’m friends with Elder Oaks.”

John  26:43  LaMond Tullis, interestingly, was part of the committee that Leonard Arrington selected to write that set of books…

GT  26:57  In the 70s.

John  26:58  In the 70s, that Richard Bushman ended up writing, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of early Mormonism. LaMond Tullis was asked to write the book on the history of the Church in Latin America, because LaMond Tullis had served I guess, his mission in Latin America. He was a political science professor, a Harvard guy, brilliant. I think he may be still alive. I don’t know. He said, “I know Elder Oaks,” for whatever reason, “I’d be willing to put a cover letter on a letter that you wrote to Elder Oaks.” Because I was thinking about going to Nightline. I wanted to be heard about this because, I literally took the gospel so seriously. I felt like it was an abomination, again, to the Lord’s holy ordinances. So, if the Church was going to just blow it off, I was going to do whatever I could to make the Church fix this problem before Gordon Romney was made a general authority.

John  27:55  So, I wrote a big letter. Bill Bradshaw, Ted Lyon, who is the son of T. Edgar Lyon, who was an important Church historian, back in the day, and LaMond Tullis all reviewed my letter. I think it was LaMond Tullis who put the cover letter on it, sent it to Elder Oaks. Then, while I was doing Washington Seminar for BYU, back in DC, doing a congressional internship on Capitol Hill, I was in my apartment, and I got a call. It was, literally, Church headquarters. “Can you hold for Elder Oaks, please?”

GT  28:30  Wow.

John  28:32  Elder Oaks called me, and I talked to Elder Oaks. He asked me a bunch of questions. He asked me if I was still active. My memory is that he asked me if I still had an active temple recommend, which I did. I was still worthy. I was a faithful member at BYU. I didn’t mess around. My memory is that he apologized for the experience that I had. I don’t know if he used the word I apologize, or if he just expressed regret. But what he did is he told me that he was going to be drafting a speech for the upcoming mission president and wives training that they do every year, and that he was going to address this issue of like using sales techniques, and high-pressure techniques to baptize people. Because also on my mission, if you got seven baptisms in a month, you’d get a certificate with your name on it, and you’d get to stand up in front of the group and the President would hand you your certificate.

John  29:41  If you got 10 baptisms a month, you’d get a Janice Kapp Perry Serving With Joy cassette tape, and then you’d also get a special lunch with the mission president and his wife.  So, they had all of these incentives to get as many baptisms as possible. In Oaks’ speech that he gave to the mission presidents and their wives in training, he discouraged the use of sales techniques and high pressure techniques, and sent me a copy of that speech after he gave it. That saved my testimony for at least another 10 years, I think, just to feel heard, to feel that direct reaching out, and to see that the Church was going to maybe try and do something about it. Unfortunately, I would talk to missionaries from that point further whenever I could. And I heard about baseball baptisms. I learned about the baseball baptisms in the UK, in the early 60s, which Jeffrey Holland and Quentin Cook were a part of, by the way. I learned about the…

GT  30:46  What do you mean, they were a part of it?

John  30:48  They were in those missions.

GT  30:50  As mission presidents?

John  30:51  No, as missionaries.

GT  30:53  Okay.

John  30:53  My understanding is Quentin Cook and Jeffrey Holland were missionaries when T. Bowring Woodbury was mission president over the British Isles in the early 60s. Now, I could have that wrong. But that’s my memory.

GT  31:09 Okay. But they were essentially doing the same things. “Hey, let’s play baseball. Hey, let’s go get–let’s go cool off in the pool.”

John  31:17  Yeah. It turns out the Church has this long history of these techniques. It started with the baseball baptisms in the early 60s.There’s an amazing Sunstone article about baseball baptisms that Michael Quinn wrote for Sunstone. It’s really good. The PDF is available online. We should include it in the show notes.

GT  31:35  Yeah.

John  31:35  But then there were Japanese baseball baptisms that followed the same pattern. And again, they had to excommunicate thousands of British converts, because they were filling up all the rolls. American baseball was popular back then, post war, UK, America was great, because they’d helped save the British from Hitler. But they were filling up all the rolls with all these young men that had no interest in actually being Mormon. But there was no way to remove them from the rolls without excommunicating them. So, all these missionaries had to do this cleanup, where they’re excommunicating.  I don’t even think they had them attend a disciplinary council. They just kind of, as I understand it, had to just excommunicate thousands of converts, because they were all baptized for the wrong reasons.

John  32:27  I learned about cheeseburger baptisms in North Carolina, where they would give poor people cheeseburgers. I heard about missionaries getting names and dates off of tombstones, which made no sense to me. The Church has never stopped this problem. It culminated in Elder Holland being sent to Chile for three years to try and clean up the mess there. I did an interview with Ted Lyon, son of T. Edgar Lyon, on Mormon Stories, where he acknowledged that this happened, because he was a mission president in Chile. He was an MTC president and a temple president there. He was Elder Holland’s personal interpreter, when Elder Holland went down to Chile. Elder Holland ended up closing 30 stakes, while he was in Chile. He had to collapse them, because the country, the Church was dying in Chile, because they had expanded wards and stakes based on the numbers. But there was no leadership substance behind it. It turns out Philippines has had the same experience. Elder Oaks was sent to the Philippines for the same reasons. What years were these where Holland went to Chile and Oaks went to the Philippines?

John  33:37  I don’t know.  I’m rusty on that.

GT  33:39  Within the last 20 years?

John  33:41  I would say late 90s, early 2000s.

GT  33:43  Okay.

John  33:44  Because when I met with Elder Holland, for the two lunches that I had with him, let’s just say around 2009-2010, I talked to him about his time in Chile. He acknowledged all of this, including the 30 stakes.  He said [that] there were people protesting, you know, the area offices. There were like parents protesting the area offices in Chile, because their kids had been baptized without their consent. He said, it was a public relations fiasco for the Church, and just the vitality of the wards in and the units and the members there.

John  34:18  So, that’s a lot.  You asked, that’s a big question. But, anyway…

GT  34:22 I knew it was.

John  34:24  That was the beginning of my real questioning about the Church, was just to see a problem so big be generally ignored or downplayed, to experience ecclesiastical abuse firsthand, to be punished for doing what was right. And then to see the top leadership bungle it and really not be able to fix it. I talked to Elder Holland about this. He said to me, and my brother was there. He said to me, “People think that if you’re an apostle, you can just change the Church.” He’s like, “Number one, if you’re a junior apostle, you’ve got 14 other people to contend with. The leadership of the church is run by unanimous consent.” So, nothing gets done, if there isn’t unanimity in the quorum. And until you work your way up in seniority, you’re just one of like, 15 voices, anyway. “Then, even if you tell the Church what to do,”  he made it sound like that doesn’t mean the Church members are going to do what you tell him to do.”  Then, he also talked about this mid-level management, that it’s hard to manage these mid-level managers.

John  35:46  My sense from him is that these mission presidents and area authorities, they’re bucking to become General Authorities or apostles. So, sometimes they’ll engage in shenanigans, that it’s just hard to manage and control when you’ve got so many around the world. So, he actually said to me, “Who are the brethren?” Because I refer to the brethren as like the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve.  He kind of made the joke like, who are the brethren? Like, we’re just a bunch of individuals. That’s the sense I got that we’re just a bunch of individuals trying to do our job. And if you think that one apostle can make substantive, meaningful change in this Church–he just kind of laughed at that idea, not expressing doubt. I think he’s a sincere believer, but he’s just like, it’s way more complex than anybody would ever guess. So anyway, that’s my story.

John  35:56  No, that’s really interesting. Do you think it’s still going on today?

John  36:44  Oh, yeah, all the time.

GT  36:45  You still think it is?

John  36:46  Every, I mean, what I got a sense for is that a mission will be sagging, and so they’ll call a mission president that’s like a military guy or a corporate person, and they’ll go and they’ll ramp up the baptisms. Then it’ll get out of control, and there’ll be complaints and they’ll have to tamper it down. Then when they call the next mission president, it’ll be someone who goes in to clean it all up, who’s more low key, who’s not about the numbers. Almost every missionary I’ve talked to, there’s been that kind of cycle within the mission. But if you go to, I mean, if you go to Latin America, or the Philippines, and you look at the rolls, unless they’ve been purging them, the activity rates in Latin America and the Philippines are like 10%. There are wards with 1000 members on the rolls, and like 50 people are attending. Like, it’s crazy. They’ve been collapsing wards and stakes to try and fix this problem. But it’s undeniable. Yeah, how would you stop it? Unless they put into the missionary training, never baptize someone, ever, without multiple times attending church and all the six discussions and a really good sense that they are…

GT  38:08  That’s how it was on my mission.

John  38:11  But that wasn’t in the white handbook. That wasn’t in the missionary training.

GT  38:16 Teach all six discussions and go to church?

John  38:19  You think that was a rule?

GT  38:20  It was a rule in my mission.

John  38:22  But was it a rule in the white Bible? And was it a rule in the training curriculum? I would be willing to bet $100, that that was not a stated rule in the missionary curriculum, that you had to go to church at least twice and receive all discussions before baptism. I’d be willing to–it may have been a mission specific rule. But I would be almost willing to bet a large sum of money that it was not a global policy.

GT  38:52  Well, I agree with you that it probably wasn’t a global policy. But like, that was a big deal. I went to South Carolina. So, I was American. But, yeah, that was a big deal that they had to come twice. You had to teach all six discussions.

John  39:08  I would be curious to see if what happened was a previous mission president, things had gotten out of control, and so they called your mission president in to clean it all up. I’m not saying that’s what happened, but that’s a pattern that I’ve heard about over and over and over again. But if you talk to almost any missionary, especially in Latin America, or the Philippines, they’ll have stories about how either things were out of control when they were there or they were in areas where things had been out of control before, and they had to be cleaned up.

GT  39:37  It seems like I’ve heard those stories. It seems like it happens in Latin and South America a lot more.

John:  And the Philippines.

GT:  Until I heard your stories I didn’t know about Japan or the UK or anything like that. I mean, that was back in the 60s, I guess.

John  39:51  It also happened in Southern California. Also, I guarantee it’s happening in Africa, right now. I guarantee it. The one thing, have you ever had Matt Martinich, is that his name?

GT  40:06  I don’t know who that is.

John  40:07  So, there’s a guy that has a website called the Cumorah Project where he tracks  LDS statistics in detail.

GT  40:14  I thought that was Cragun,

John: Ryan Cragun is a scholar, but he doesn’t do the Cumorah project. The Cumorah project is done by this guy named Matt Martinich. Peggy Fletcher often uses him as a source for her articles on Church membership and growth. But check out the Cumorah project. Just talk to anyone in the know. Whenever they do a census in like Brazil or Argentina or Chile or Mexico, the number of people who self-identify as Mormons is literally a fraction of the number of people that the Church claims on the church membership rolls. That’s because of all these people that were baptized as an eight-year-old or a 10-year-old, that never went to Church, never had a testimony. And they’ve never identified as Mormon, but the Church keeps them on.

GT  41:05  Oh.  They may not have even known they were baptized.

John  41:07  A lot of them wouldn’t even remember it. It was just something that happened when they were a kid right.

GT  41:11  Right.

John  41:11  Yeah. So, that’s why I’m sure your listeners/viewers know that the Church boasts 17 million or 16.8, but there’s probably only 3 to 4 million active members across the world right now. This has been true for many, many years, as I understand it.

GT  41:32  Yeah.

John  41:32  [You should] have Matt Matinich on your podcast.

GT  41:35  Yeah, I’ll have to check him out. I knew about Cragun, but I didn’t know about him.

John  41:39  Cragun is ex-Mormon.

GT  41:41  Yeah, but he does stuff on–because I swear, he was just on Peggy Fletcher’s Mormonland podcast.

John  41:48  He’s brilliant, and he does social science. Yeah. But this guy, Matt Martinich is [a] different [person.]

GT  41:55  Okay. We’ll cool.

John  41:58  I hope that didn’t take too much time.

GT  41:59  No, no, this is why we’re here.

John  42:01  This was my very first episode of Mormon Stories.

GT  42:04  Your first?

John  42:05  Where I tell this, yeah. My very first episode.

GT  42:08  There’s probably a lot of people that haven’t heard this. So it’s probably good.

John  42:11  Oh, for sure.

GT  42:11  So, it’s been 16 years, or I don’t know how long.

John  42:13  About 17 years, and I don’t think I’ve ever recorded it on video in this depth. So, thanks for asking.

GT  42:20  Yeah, no problem.

After leaving BYU, Dr John Dehlin talks about his time as a seminary teacher in Washington, and his loss of faith while working at Microsoft. Check out our conversation….

GT  42:22  So, let’s dive into your academic history. I usually do that. I know you went to BYU. So, what can you tell us there?

John  42:34  Yeah. So, I graduated like 11^th in my class in high school. I was a late bloomer, academically. But I did get a two-year scholarship to BYU, academic. I was able to keep a 4.0-ish GPA and renew it. So, I had an Edwin Hinckley scholarship for my last two years at BYU, which was a full ride and full tuition and books. I decided to study political science and international relations. I had a great GPA. I graduated with a 3.96 GPA, summa cum laude.

GT  43:12  Wow!

John  43:13  I did Washington Seminar, got into BYU law school, got into University of Texas law school, got waitlisted at Harvard, but didn’t get in Harvard. Those were the only three law schools I applied to. But I didn’t know anyone who loved their job as a lawyer. So, I didn’t want to just go to law school and then hate my life. I was really a believer that you had to love and believe in what you do as a career, because you only live once. You can’t take it with you, as they say. That was a film, I watched a movie by Frank Capra called You Can’t Take it With You, where that was the theme. It was at a BYU film class that I watched that movie. It just sold me on the idea that you don’t just go for the money, go for a fulfilling, meaningful job.

GT  43:58  So why did you choose political science? Did you want to become a politician?

John  44:02  I chose political science before. I thought, yeah, I thought I might want to be a politician. But then I went and worked on Capitol Hill and just got disillusioned with all the graft and with all the special interests and the way Congressman could be bought off and I was just disillusioned.

GT  44:24  So, that was after you graduated from BYU?

John  44:28  That what?

GT  44:28  That you started working in the Capitol.

John  44:30  No, it was during Washington Seminar between my junior and senior year.

GT  44:33  Okay.

John  44:34  Which was the same time Elder Oaks called me.

GT  44:36  Oh, okay.

John  44:38  But then I was stuck with my degree because I couldn’t go back at that point. So, I finished political science, applied to law school, but by that point, I knew I didn’t want to be a politician. I just was unsure about law as a career [that] I would enjoy.

GT  44:54  Okay, so you graduated and then, well you ended up at Microsoft somehow. I don’t know if you can tell us about that.

John  45:06  Yeah, so what happened was I got married in the DC temple to Margi. And my first real job was with Bain and Company, which was Mitt Romney’s company. So, I was at Bain when Mitt Romney was a Bain.

GT  45:22  Did you know Mitt?

John  45:24  No.

GT  45:24  Is he related to Gordon Romney?

John  45:26  Yeah. Mitt Romney and Gordon Romney were cousins for sure.

GT  45:29  Okay.

John  45:30  Yeah. So I went to Bain Dallas. Mitt was at Bain Capital in Boston. I was at Bain Dallas. Bain is a management consulting firm that helps turn around fortune 500 companies. So, I did that. But that’s when the internet first emerged. So, this is around 1994. I first saw my Netscape Navigator and the internet being used. I was just like, “Whoa, this is going to be big.” So, I left Bain and went to Chicago to work for Arthur Andersen, which was the number one accounting firm at the time. They were big into tech. My brother had worked there, before he left for Microsoft. I went to Arthur Andersen, started to learn computers. I eventually became a programmer, did computer programming for a few years, including…

GT  46:27  Arthur Andersen, I always thought of them as like an accounting firm.

John  46:30  Yeah, they were an accounting and audit firm. They were the largest one in the world, based in Chicago. But they were cutting edge with tech. So, I went there as part of their tax and technology group, so I could learn computers. I didn’t need an accounting degree, to be able to help them run their computers. It was just like a bootcamp. It was like a tech bootcamp.

GT  46:53  So, they just trained you to become a programmer, essentially?

John  46:56  No, they trained me to be like an IT systems guy. Then, I left after only a year and then I joined a tech consulting firm called Parian, where I taught myself to program. I mean, there was so much of a demand for programmers that you could literally bring a programming book to work, set it there on the table, ask them what they needed, and you could learn on the job, studying the manual and programming. I did some self-study, took some exams, got hired on Parian as a computer programmer in Chicago, and just started programming.

GT  47:01  You just taught yourself how to program.

John  47:18  Yeah.

GT  47:20  What did you use? I’m a computer science guy.

John  47:40  So what programs?

GT  47:40  Yes.

John  47:42  Okay, so I started doing Visual Basic for Applications.

GT  47:47  Okay, I know a little bit of Basic.

John  47:48  VBA, so, I did that in Excel and in Access. So, I learned Access as my database, VBA as my programming language. Then I learned Visual Basic 4 and then slowly, I learned SQL server so I could do Enterprise back end.

GT  48:07  Because Access wasn’t big enough.

John  48:08  Yeah, exactly. Yep, and I love Access to this day.

GT  48:12  I do, too.

John  48:13  I still use it to do my donor statements at the end of the year. Yeah, so I was a VB/SQL server programmer, for the most part. I did that.

GT  48:21  Sorry we got a little nerdy there, but…

John  48:22  Yeah, I love it.

GT  48:24  I’m sorry, to the audience. They’re probably like, “What are they talking about?”

John  48:27  There’s always somebody who’s like, “I love VB! I’m a Client-server programmer.” I did that for a couple of years. One thing that people always like to hear the story of is after I worked at Parian for a bit, we wanted to move back to Salt Lake. So, around 96-97, we moved here to Salt Lake in Cottonwood Heights, and I got a job at Church headquarters. So, I worked one year at Church headquarters during their Y2K initiative.

GT  48:54  Oh, I remember that.

John  48:55 They were converting DataEase, these are DOS based databases, DataEase databases into Access databases. And because I had programming with Access, they brought me on. The coolest thing I did for the year I worked at the Church was I worked on a general authority candidate tracking system where in Access, they had a database, where they would track mission presidents, temple presidents and stake presidents. Whenever area authorities or general authorities would go out to stake conferences to interview all these people, they needed kind of like a knowledge management system to track the progress of these potential general authority candidates over time. So, they’d ask them questions about their financial situation. Did they have any debt? How was their wife? How were their kids? Were there any members of the family that had mental illness, and other impressions, and they would track these candidates for general authorities until they selected them. So, that was the coolest thing. I think Greg Brown was working in the presidency of the Seventy office at the time. That was my coolest assignment while I was at Church headquarters.

GT  50:14  So, if somebody had mental illness in their family, they were disqualified?

John  50:18  Well, I can’t say how the final decision was made. I’m sure nepotism was highly involved in that decision. But that was a factor. Yeah.

GT  50:27  Wow.

John  50:28  I mean, you can imagine if there’s a family member who would be very embarrassing to the Church, once this person started rising in the ranks of leadership, they would want to screen for that.

GT  50:41  Like a Billy Carter with Jimmy.

John  50:43  Exactly, like Billy Carter. Yeah, like a wife with a drug addiction or alcohol addiction, you know, whatever, right? A gay son.

GT  50:54  Right.

John  50:54  Heaven forbid.

GT  50:55  Well, that’s not a problem anymore, is it?[2]

John  50:59  I mean, we’ve come a long way.

GT  51:03  Any other insights into your year at the Church there?

John  51:06  No. I mean, it was just super bureaucratic, nice people. It was super inefficient, bureaucratic. Super inefficient. It was there that I got hold, I wish I had this information. It was there, because of my experience on my mission, I wanted to know what the activity rates were for the Church. And because I did some consulting for the building construction department in the Church, for constructing chapels, I was able to get the data for total membership per ward, or branch, and then active membership per ward or branch in the Church. I imported all that in Excel or Access, and I crunched the numbers. I found like a 1/3 activity rate, globally, back then. At the time, I would never have shared that. I didn’t want to violate confidentiality. So, I don’t have that data, and I didn’t publish it. But that’s when I was like, “Whoa, it really is low.” And I thought, “It really is around a third.” So, a third of the people the Church claim are active. A third of the members that the Church claims are actually active. I think it was only a third of those were temple recommend holders. So, anyway, that was interesting.

GT  52:30  Interesting. So, your brother used to work at the Church, right? Did he help you get that job? And does he still work at the church?

John  52:36  He had nothing to do with me getting the job for the Church, because he was at Microsoft at the time.

GT  52:40  Okay.

John  52:41  I worked at the Church before he did. But while he was at Microsoft, he helped me find leads to apply. It took me seven times to get hired, seven formal interviews over multiple years to get hired at Microsoft. This is the time where if you got hired at Microsoft, you’d get stock options, and within five years, you’d be a millionaire. There’s just what happened. So, it was really hard, really competitive to get it. It took me seven tries. But eventually, I got in around 97-98, I got hired at Microsoft, while my brother Joel had been there for several years. That’s when we moved to Seattle, left working for the Church. I did seven years at Microsoft in Redmond.

GT  53:25  And you got stock options and you’re a millionaire now?

John  53:27  I got stock options. But, no, I left. Between the appreciation on my house and the vested stock options, and us paying down our mortgage, I left Microsoft with like, $240,000. We used that to buy our house in Logan with cash, so that we wouldn’t have a mortgage.

GT  53:50  Wow. That was nice.

John  53:50  So, Microsoft was a great career. I met Bill Gates twice. I presented on stage with Steve Ballmer, the CEO, who was the owner of the Clippers.

GT  54:02  Right.

John  54:02  I had a really rapid ascent. I did demos, technical support for the salesforce, speech writing for executives, and then business management for VPs. But I was always depressed, because I had my faith crisis at Microsoft while I was teaching seminary for the Church in my Issaquah ward. I just got super depressed. So, for the last three or four years of my time at Microsoft, I was like unshaven, wore Birkenstocks.

GT  54:34  Wow.

John  54:35  Just depressed, because I studied the seminary and Institute manuals, that’s where it started. I got Church History in the Fullness of Times, that dark green manual and learned a bunch of stuff and that was troubling. Then, I read Bushman’s book, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Early Mormonism. I read about Leonard Arrington and Lowell Bennion and then, eventually, I went to Michael Quinn.

John  55:10  I read Simon Southerton, Losing a Lost Tribe.  I read Eugene England and Lowell Bennion biographies, and then eventually I read Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History.  That’s what kind of, well that and Bushmans book. It was a one, two punch.  It was Fawn Brodie’s, No Man Knows My History, but then Bushman’s book confirming basically all the stuff that I read in No Man Knows My History, knowing that he was a Patriarch and a stake president and a faithful Mormon. I could always discredit Brodie as having an axe to grind and as not being credible. But once I paired Bushman’s confirmation with Brodie’s history, it’s like, “Well, this is true. He was a folk magic treasure digger, and he was a polygamist and he lied about it.”

John  56:05  One of my friend’s named Paul at Microsoft, introduced the term polyandry to me, because I thought it was the polygamy that was disturbing. But he’s like, “Have you ever heard of the polyandry?”

I’m like, “What’s that?”

Because this is back in 2001, 2002. There’s no podcasts. There’s no Facebook. Theres no Instagram. There’s no CES Letter. There are just books. There’s not even a website. It’s like Sunstone barely had a website, and all it did was release like the September 6 anniversary videos and even Sunstone’s weren’t online yet. So, how would you learn about the Church, except through books? And none of the books mentioned the word polyandry, by the way, that I’m aware of.

GT  56:43  I thought Rough Stone Rolling did, but I…

John  56:45  Rough Stone Rolling came years later.

GT  56:47  Okay.

John  56:47  So, I’m talking about 2000, 2001.

GT  56:49  Okay.

John  56:50  I think Rough Stone Rolling was released in 2004, 2005.

GT  56:53  Okay.

John  56:53  But does the does the word polyandry appear in Rough Stone Rolling? I’m not sure.[3]

GT  56:59  I think so. It’s been a long time since I read it. I mean, that was really troubling to me. I’ll tell you that.

John  57:08  Yeah. But it doesn’t appear–like Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, because it was part of that Leonard Arrington series, it only covered like, pre-Joseph Smith’s ministry to the founding of the Church. So, it didn’t talk about polygamy at all. So, there wasn’t Rough Stone Rolling, yet.

GT  57:28  But you were bothered by the treasure digging in Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism.

John  57:33  I was bothered by it all. I was bothered by the treasure digging, the peep stone in the hat. I was bothered by the Kirtland Bank scandal, by Mountain Meadows Massacre, and that the fact that the Church would teach about Hawn’s Mill in its curriculum, but I could never find any, any teachings about the Mountain Meadows back then. So, why would you make us feel sorry for you with Hawn’s Mill massacre, but never take ownership of Mountain Meadows? That’s just my memory of how the Church handled those types of things. But then I was troubled by the