In Part 2 of our conversation with Dr. John Dehlin of the Mormon Stories podcast, we’ll get into his criticism of the LDS Church. Is he a constructive or destructive Mormon critic? Is his podcast neutral towards the Church? Does he want people to Stay LDS? We’ll get into his tussels with both apologists and neo-apologists, and of course we can’t miss his role in the Swedish Rescue. Check out our conversation….

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Part 2

Around the year 2015, Dr. John Dehlin was excommunicated from the LDS Church. We’ll learn about his run-ins with apologists, and how he dealt with Church leaders who wanted him out. Check out our conversation….

Interview

GT  00:54  I used to listen to your podcasts all the time. I probably started in about 2006. So, I was a pretty early listener. I remember you would say on your podcast that you got messages from people, emails or whatever, that you were a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I know that really bothered you. Can you talk about that? I mean, was that a fair term? I don’t know what to say.

John  01:28  So, speaking of fair, one of the first things I did in 2004-2005, was I joined the FAIR Mormon, back then, yeah, I joined the FAIR Board. I learned about Lou Midgley and Daniel Peterson and all the apologists. I thought, “Oh, these are people defending the faith. “They’re worth engaging with. I was even on their email lists for a while. But I also learned about Grant Palmer, and I had read An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins. So, I was trying to decide how aggressive I wanted to be on the podcast. I remember interviewing Richard Bushman. I was so grateful that he let me interview him.  That was one of my first you know, along with Greg Prince, that was one of my first really big gets.

GT  02:14  Right. It took me six years to get Richard Bushman. It was hard.

John  02:20  Yeah, yeah. He probably didn’t love my experience with him and didn’t want to do another podcast for a long time. I don’t know.

GT  02:29  Yes, that’s what he told me.

John  02:30  Yeah. Well, I’d love to hear that story. But here’s what happened. So, I wanted to cover like the main [topics on Joseph Smith.] Think about the Gospel Topics Essays now. I was just really curious how such a believing, intelligent man dealt with polyandry, dealt with polygamy, dealt with the Book of Abraham, dealt with the martyrdom, dealt with the stone in the hat. You know what I mean? So, I said, Richard Bushman, “Would you come on Mormon Stories? We’ll cover 10 topics.”

John  03:07  He’s like, “Yeah, I’ll do it.”  We’ll cover 10 topics. So, he agreed. I was thrilled. I brought him on, and we covered, like, three topics. I haven’t ever gone back to really listen to the episode. I know he was sick during part of it, coughed a lot. But I’m sure we covered like the First Vision and maybe some of the treasure digging stuff. You might remember more than me what we covered on that episode, but I was trying to go kind of chronological. All I know is that after three of the 10 topics, he quit.

GT  03:35  Well, that was like six hours, though. Wasn’t it?  It was a long interview.

John  03:39  Yeah. But I was trying to go in depth. I was trying to be substantive. We had talking points that were shallow. I wanted to cover his story. But then I also wanted to cover the topics in enough depth that they would be meaningful.

GT  03:55  My guess is he wasn’t expecting a 10 hour interview.

John  03:59  Probably, yeah, probably. So, I don’t hate the guy. I still really respect him. But he quit. He didn’t keep his word. He quit, three of the 10 topics in and I was really disappointed in that. I still loved him. I still, you know, brought Claudia Bushman on later to Mormon Stories and to this day, I have a ton of respect for him. But that was a bummer. I was trying to decide, like, do I tell everybody that he quit? Or do I just kind of awkwardly finesse the ending of the series, and I chose the latter. So, I didn’t really make a big deal about him quitting. But it was disappointment. Because I…

GT  04:48  We can tell you were disappointed. I will say that. I remember that.

John  04:51  But he told me why he quit. He said, “When I interview with you, it feels like I’m being stung by bees, and you swat one bee and then another bee stings you.” The way I interpreted it. He didn’t say it was too long. He said, “I feel like I’m being swatted by bees.” I don’t think I was hostile. This is before I created StayLDS. I was trying to be a faithful member. But I also believed you should talk directly and openly about the hard stuff. I wasn’t a fan of finesse. I wasn’t a fan of soft pedaling the hard stuff. And that’s what apologists, in my view, too often did. So, I wanted to go in depth and really ask, “How do you stay a member with these really serious problems,” without finesse and I felt like he was uncomfortable with the level of scrutiny that I was putting him under, frankly, and I think that’s why he quit. I don’t think it was because of the time commitment, personally. I think he was surprised by the length. I don’t think he was probably expecting that length. But I think the reason he quit is because he knew he couldn’t really control the message. I did lose some respect for him at that point, honestly.

John  06:15  Later when he gives that fireside, in the basement, where he says, “The predominant historical narrative isn’t sustainable, because it isn’t true.” But then when it’s made public that he says that, he backpedals again. I don’t fault him for managing his political capital within the Church. Everybody who’s successful has to do that, including Terryl and Fiona Givens and Patrick Mason, and Spencer Fleming and others. I get it, I was doing it. But I lost respect, because I got this really clear sense that it’s like, “Well, what we say privately is going to be different than what we say publicly.” I feel like that’s that was the problem. The problem was that we weren’t being open, and whether it was my parents’ divorce and the secrets that led to that divorce, or mental illness that I saw my family where everything was kept quiet and wasn’t talked about. In my view, it was the silence that was the killer. It was the silence that was harming the Church, and I was tired of it. So, I did lose respect for Richard Bushman. And I lost respect for Terryl and Fiona Givens when I found out that they were doing these private firesides where they would say one thing in private, but that in public, they would say different things. I was never really a big fan of that kind of doublespeak. Because I think it’s what got us into that problem.

John  07:41  Anyway, back to your question about apologists and critics and everything. After I interviewed Bushman, I felt like it wasn’t, I knew I couldn’t interview Grant Palmer until I had interviewed Bushman. My memory is that a viewed Bushman before Palmer.

GT  07:06  I believe that’s right.

John  08:00  Yeah. But then I interviewed Grant Palmer, because I felt like let’s get both sides. We’ve got to do both sides. We’ve got to stop with the apologetics only. We’ve got to hear what critics have to say. So, I went to Grant Palmer’s house. What a freakin’ legend. He was willing to talk about the hard stuff, honestly and openly to the point of getting disfellowshipped for it. Eventually, he was threatened with excommunication. But he talked about the hard stuff in depth. His book, An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins was legendary. But it really pissed off Daniel Peterson and Louis Midgley, and all those apologists that I would even give a platform to Grant Palmer. But that’s a commitment I made on Mormon Stories that I’ve tried to live to this day. I’ll bring on faithful people. But I’m also going to bring on apostates and critics. It’ll be a dialectic where we’ll arrive at the truth and at wisdom, by interviewing all sides of the spectrum. I still think to this day–maybe your podcast is up there. It probably is. But I don’t think anybody has worked harder to do more interviews from all sides of the spectrum. That’s one of the things I really value about Gospel Tangents is because if anybody were to kind of challenge Mormon Stories in that regard, it would probably be you.

GT  09:26  Wow.

John  09:27  Yeah, and I respect that.

GT  09:28  Can I turn that into a commercial?

John  08:36  Yeah, you can. Yeah. Because you’ve had Sandra on, right?

GT  09:29  Yeah.

John  09:33  You’ve had…

GT  09:34  Will Bagley.

John  09:35  Yeah, and Steven Pynakker is following in that tradition as well. So, Mormon Book Reviews, thumbs up. Gospel Tangents, thumbs up. That’s the way I think it should be. But the Church does have a Strengthening the Church Member Committee. I learned about that while I was a BYU. Eugene England was a part of the discovery of that. Like the KGB or the CIA, the Church keeps files on people. Then, when the time is right–Church headquarters–and it’s often FAIR Mormon apologist types that were used as labor to track the internet writings and publishings of the members. Then, when the time is right, FAIR Mormon, Maxwell Institute people, FARMS people would contact local bishops and stake presidents, send them the file, inform them about what was being said and done, and then say, “Well, you know what to do,” all the while the Church would say, “We don’t get involved in local matters,” because they found out that was problematic.

GT  10:44  Well, it’s problematic in their scripture, right?

John  10:46  What do you mean?

GT  10:47  The apostles aren’t supposed to get involved in local matters.[1]

John  10:49  Yeah.

GT  10:50  I mean, it’s in the Doctrine and Covenants.

John  10:52  But they were, and they do, and they did. As the Christine Jeppson Clark episode told, General Authorities were telling stake presidents to excommunicate members of the September 6, but then trying to claim that they weren’t. And that was dishonest, right?

GT  11:06  That’s why I asked you the question, because you said you’d had your bishop call you in twice. Was it the Strengthening the Church Members committee?

John  11:12  Well, he clearly wouldn’t tell me that. So I don’t know for sure. I know, for sure, the third time they were involved. But, the first couple times was with a different bishop. I don’t know. I don’t know, because he wouldn’t tell me. But I suspect they might have been.

GT  11:30  Okay.

John  11:31  Yeah. But I got on FAIR Mormon’s–they were called FAIR at the time. I got on FAIR’s bad side, as soon as I interviewed Grant Palmer. From then on, eventually they kicked [me out.] For that, and probably for asking hard questions, they kicked me off their email list. From then on, they viewed me as an enemy. I kind of viewed them as an enemy to truth, and to honest, open discourse. I’ve had a battle with apologists, ever since then. But, still, from 2005, until 2014, there were two years where I went inactive for a year each. Both times were really bad. I just felt empty. I felt dark. I missed the Church. I missed the spirituality. I missed the hymns. I worried about how I would raise my kids, I felt like my family wasn’t doing as well. So, from 2006 to 2007, I went inactive for a year.

John  12:36  I just felt like I need the Church. Because like, I’m getting lost without it, and this anger isn’t taking me anywhere. So, from 2012 to 2014, we were back in church again. What really, I think, was the beginning of the end was I was completing my LGBT research. I’d researched scrupulosity/OCD for my Ph.D. in psychology. I’d started my Ph.D. in psychology, because by that time, over 10,000 listeners had reached out to me for support for their marriage, for their mental health, they’re gay, like, a million reasons. I didn’t feel capable of helping them in so many ways. So, I figured, I’ll get my Ph.D. in psychology. It’ll help me help them when they come to me for support. And if I can end up being a therapist or a coach for people in faith crisis, I can stop working for MIT and just do this full time. I didn’t know if I could ever sustain that financially, but it was this big leap of faith.

John  13:51  So, I started my Ph.D. in 2009, studied OCD/religious scrupulosity, for the first two years of my Ph.D. Then, [I] switched to the LGBTQ Mormon experience for the last four years of my Ph.D. I was invited to give a TED talk at Utah State in 2013. I had reconciled with Margi, back in church, faithful, but non-believing, but progressive. I gave a TED Talk. This is 2008, with Prop Eight.  [That] really bothered me. Then, Mitt Romney is running again in 2012, and the Church LGBT stuff is really bugging me. Reparative therapy is still a thing. The Church is still promoting conversion therapy by 2011-2012-2013. So, I decided to give a TED talk on the results of my LGBTQ research, saying that you can be an LGBTQ Mormon and an ally. And that, along with Kate Kelly’s Ordain Women movement and me supporting Kate Kelly, and Ordain Women, and writing an essay for the Ordain Women website, where I express my public support for the ordination of women. Those two things happened in the fall of 2013. By that time, the church had fired my Stake President, put in a stake president, Brian King, who they knew was going to take care of business. [They] replaced my bishop, and the Church was ready to take me out.

GT  15:30  So, do you think your first, was at one or two bishops, advocated on your behalf?

John  15:36  I do, and my stake president. I think his name is Mark Nelson. I can’t believe I’m spacing on his name. But, my first stake president, I think his name was Mark Nelson. We went through a year of counseling after this 2012-2013 time period. I also wanted to baptize my son Winston. He’s like, “I don’t think you’re worthy because of your beliefs.” So, we did like a year of counseling, sometimes weekly. He worked with me every year, to the point where he allowed me to baptize Winston, as a progressive believer, around 2012-2013ish. Winston was nine, so I had to wait a year to baptize my son. But then the Church got rid of him, [my stake president,] because I think he just decided he wasn’t willing to excommunicate me. So, I do my Ted Talk…

GT  16:33  So, he served, like nine years, because usually they serve about nine years.

John  16:38  Yeah, like nine years. Yeah, that’s my that’s my understanding.

GT  16:40  I mean, that’s about the time they would release him anyway. Right?

John  16:43 Right. Yeah. But my understanding is that is that L. Whitney Clayton and Elder Ballard decided that I needed to be excommunicated. So, they came. They did two stake conferences in my stake, within a very short time period. That bubble chart was created, where my name was on it, as one of the enemies of the Church. They showed that to the local Ward leadership in training, and said, “If you have anyone in your stake that meets these criteria, or that appears on this bubble chart, there are things that should be done.” I don’t know. But they replaced Mark Nelson, who had been a supporter of me. They replaced my bishop. They replaced the stake president, after I gave my TED Talk and by–and supported Ordain Women.

John  19:22  By January-ish of 2014, I was called in to my bishops office, by Brian Hunt, and he said, “I’m starting an investigation on you because of your support of progressive movements within the Church. This is all audio recorded. You can listen to this audio recording. But what I remember is him basically saying it was my support of same-sex marriage, and my support of the ordination of women–progressive initiatives.

GT  18:14  So Bryan King was your bishop. Is that right?

GT  18:15  Bryan King was my stake president. This is Brian Hunt, who was my bishop. So, Brian Hunt said that he started the investigation. That was in January or February and then it wasn’t until the summer that Kate Kelly– and at that point, my daughter Maya was Laurel president. I think my daughter, Clara, was Beehive president. So, we were in. We were still attending. My kids are being raised in the Church. I was worthy and faithful, but progressive and angry about the LGBT stuff, all the LGBT suicides. I was just getting more and more angry, and more and more conflicted about the ethics of staying in the Church as an non-believer, as a semi-believer, knowing that the Church was harming so many people and unwilling to change. Denver Snuffer gets excommunicated. It’s like the 20-year anniversary of the September Six.  Denver Snuffer’s excommunication, that was the first shoe to drop. It was like, uh oh. They’re starting to excommunicate for apostasy again. Then, in mid-2014, Kate Kelly and I were…

GT  19:31  Denver Snuffer is the anti-John Dehlin. Right? He’s on the other end of the pole.

John  19:35  But just like…

GT  19:36  He was too much of a believer.

John  19:37  Just like Avraham Gileadi, for the September Six was on the conservative fundamentalist, side.

GT  19:44  They need to have one to balance the other. Is that right? You’ve got to get a right-leaning or left-leaning person to balance.

John  19:50  Yeah, we get them all. The bubble chart had some guy with the last name of Norman, and Denver Snuffer on one side of the bubble chart, then me and Ordain Women. They didn’t name Kate Kelly. And like support for LGBT stuff. And, porn, like on the other side of the spectrum.

GT  20:11 Support for porn?  (Chuckling}

John 20:12   Something like that. So, Kate Kelly and I received our letters, summoning us to a disciplinary council, within a week of each other. That happened, I believe, in the summer of 2014. They did Kate Kelly’s excommunication pretty quickly, but I had worked with Marlin. I raised a stink. I had worked with Marlin Jensen, on studying people in faith crisis. We haven’t told this story.

GT  20:43  You need to tell that story. But we’ll save that for later.

John  20:44  I’d worked with Marlin Jensen, I had worked with the Church. I had met with Elder Holland twice. I had done my part to help the Church make progress. I think the Church felt like there was a real risk in excommunicating me. So, it was the longest drawn-out disciplinary council ever, but it wasn’t until like February of the following year, where they ended up actually holding the disciplinary council.

GT  21:14  Kate got excommunicated. Because you were both going to get excommunicated about the same time.

John  21:18  Yeah.

GT  21:19  Yours got delayed for a while. I don’t know why.

John  21:21  Yeah.

GT  21:22  Then, they excommunicated Kate, and then you were like six months later, if I remember right.

John  21:25  Yeah. One of the reasons why it was ridiculous is I received the letter about the excommunication, having never met with my stake president. So, the new stake president, Bryan King, had never actually met me. I didn’t even know his name, I don’t think. All of a sudden I’m getting a letter saying he wants to excommunicate me, and I was attending church. So, it’s not like I was inactive. So, I made a big stink about that. Then, he like, “Okay, well, let’s meet, then.”

Because I’m like, “Oh, you’re going to excommunicate me and we’ve never met. That’s interesting. My former stake president was fine with everything I was doing. What changed?”  So, we ended up with…

GT  22:08  So, that’s what caused the six month delay?

John  22:11  I think so. The Church had to make it look like they were working with me and counseling with me. So, I met with him three times. All those recordings, I made audio recordings of. They’re on Mormon Stories. They’re ridiculous, and everyone who listens to them gets sick to their stomach because of the way I was treated. I’ve actually almost had nobody, even believers say that I misbehaved in those interviews. But they were just going through the motions. We tried to have a dialogue. He was a man on a mission. He had been told to excommunicate me. He didn’t really ever want to listen. We never had genuine dialogue. Long story short is they pulled the trigger I think that next February 2015.

Introduction

Two of John’s early websites were called Mormon Matters, and StayLDS. We’ll talk about why he started those websites, and whether he still wants people to Stay LDS. Check out our conversation….

Interview

GT  23:03  Well, yeah, and so, I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about a couple of other projects. You’ve already mentioned StayLDS, and I kind of want to talk about Mormon Matters a little bit.

John  23:17  Yeah.

GT  23:18 Can you talk about why you started those two sites, specifically?

John  23:21  StayLDS was started to help keep people in the Church. I had left the Church for a year.  I felt dark, lost. Then, I saw a lot of people leave the Church and mess up their lives:  divorce, infidelity, drug, alcohol addiction. I view things differently now, but at the time, I just felt like, people were better off staying if they could stay. But they didn’t know how to stay. They didn’t think they could stay as a nuanced or non-believer. So, I’d write the manual for it. So, StayLDS was, literally–and it’s still up, as I understand it, staylds.com.

GT  23:57  You should sell me the domain.

John  23:59  Okay.  I’ll sell the domain name. I don’t know. I kind of like owning it. How about I lease it? I don’t need money. But I’ll let you take it over.

GT  24:06  I actually own staylds.org.

John  24:11  Okay, we’ll talk. I’d love people to do something better with it. Anyway, I started that, put out that ebook on how to stay in the Church. [I] worked with Brian Johnston. He passed away recently.

GT  24:25  I know. I’m sad about that.

John  24:26  Super tragic.

GT  24:27  He was a friend of mine.

John  24:28  Good guy. Yeah. So, that’s why I did StayLDS is literally to help people stay in the Church. Even, there’s a temple recommend guide of how to answer the temple recommend questions, keeping your integrity, but also being able to get your recommend.  You know, how to nuance tithing, it was all in there. It’s still there. It’s a fun essay. Look it up. So that’s what was behind StayLDS. We also created a forum where people could talk to each other and get to know each other.

GT  24:58  Yeah, that forum is still pretty popular.

John  25:00 It is?

GT  25:01  Yeah. So, my question is, do you really want people to stay LDS anymore?

John  25:02  Oh, okay. So one thing about StayLDS that’s really important is, even though I was able to stay with the nuanced progressive testimony, I would have person after person tell me that they couldn’t do it. They would tell me, “I tried. I followed what you said. It wasn’t good for my mental health. It wasn’t good for my well-being. It became a matter of conscience.”  I realized that I was propping up a set of recommendations that were only viable for a subset of people. But by putting the website up, it would allow other people to say, “Hey husband, all these other people are staying Mormon. Why can’t you?”  You know, what I’m saying; a believing wife to a non-believing husband or believing husband and unbelieving wife.  “Look, stay LDS.”  Even bishops were starting to use it. Bishops were using my ebook, from StayLDS, to help members stay in the Church. I was excited about that. I was proud of that.

John  26:21  But, then there would be the people that said it was literally damaging their health and well-being to stay. I started to feel this conflict of like, am I setting people up for false expectations? Am I setting up a standard that people could be judged by or pushed towards that wasn’t actually healthy or sustainable for many, many people? Because I found that many, many, many people could stay for a while. But, then they couldn’t do it anymore. At some point, I lost my confidence in being able to really say [that] this is a path that I recommend. It wasn’t a path that I, even to this day, have denounced. But it’s a path I could no longer recommend as being viable for most people. So, you can go read the most recent versions of that e-doc that I created with Brian, where I had to put a disclaimer on there: John no longer advocates for this way, because it’s not sustainable for many. But I kept the website up, and I let other people manage it. I still wanted it to be there as a resource for those who found it useful. I still feel that way to this day, which is why I’ve never taken it down and why I still refer people to it, occasionally.

GT  27:46  You still do refer people to it?

John  27:47  Oh yeah for sure. I’ve had, when I used to coach, I don’t coach much these days. I’ve kind of mothballed my coaching practice for now, because Mormon Stories is way busy. But all the time when I was a coach, and people would say, “My wife or husband believe, I don’t believe anymore, but it’s going to wreck our family if I if I leave. My spouse isn’t ready for me to leave. Or my job, I’m a Church employee. I’m a seminary and institute teacher. I’m a CES director. I’m a bishop. How can I stay?” To this day, I’ll point them to StayLDS, that manual. Absolutely.

GT  28:28  Okay. Well interesting. So, the other project that I thought was really interesting that you started was Mormon Matters.

John  28:39  Did you blog for Mormon Matters?

GT  28:41  A little bit.

John  28:42  Okay. So, there are all these cool blogs, but none of them would let me blog for them. I blogged for BCC for just a little bit and that just didn’t work out, because they were more neo-apologist types and finessing the problems. I just never had a taste for that. I felt like that was a form of dishonesty.

GT  29:10  When you say they, are you referring to By Common Consent?

John  29:11  Yeah.

GT  29:12  Okay.

John  29:13  Yeah, and the Millennial Star crowd and the Times and Seasons crowd. My form of progressive Mormonism was too bold, probably too controversial, too sharp-elbowed for them. So, there was never a fit, and they always suspected that I was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, too, many of them.

GT  29:35  Are you?

John  29:37  Do you want to talk about that now, or do you want to finish talking about Mormon Matters?

GT  29:39  Well, I mean, I think we can get both.

John  29:42  So, I started Mormon Matters as just a blog to do cool blogging, but more honest, more open, talk about the hard stuff, talk about the controversies, talk about the truth claims, talk about nuanced Mormonism explicitly. So, it was it was a super popular blog, probably one of the most popular blogs in its heyday. Then, there was just like, I would just say there was kind of conflict between me and some of the bloggers. There was some dissent within the perma-bloggers. I remember Cheryl Bruno being a part of that. I don’t remember the details of the conflict. All I remember was that it got to a head. I felt overwhelmed and stressed. I didn’t want to blow up what was happening. Maybe a lot of the bloggers weren’t comfortable working with me anymore. But it ended up, we ended up basically allowing Wheat and Tares to be created. We allowed them to migrate all the content to a new blog. Then, they continued as Wheat and Tares, and then I kept the domain and then later allowed Dan Witherspoon to take it over as a podcast. Dan Witherspoon did Mormon Matters podcast for a long time.

GT  31:00  Okay, because as I remember with Mormon Matters, one of the things, one of your goals was to bring together everybody: ex-Mormons, faithful Mormons, and just have everybody talk. But it sounds kind of like with StayLDS? Is that a sustainable model?

John  31:22  Well, you’re doing it and Steven Pynakker’s doing it.

GT  31:25  Well, Steve Pynakker is not LDS.

John  31:28  Right. Well, yeah. Well, you are.

GT  31:32  I am.

John  31:33  Yeah, and Sunstone does it. It’s doable, and I still try and do it. So, yeah, it’s sustainable. You just have to be super careful, and you have to not cross certain lines. My mistakes were, once I started studying the LGBT issues in-depth and found out about the suicide statistics in Utah for LGBT youth and LGBT Mormon adults, and the mixed orientation marriage fiasco that I gathered data about, and the high divorce rate, double the average divorce rate, sometimes for first marriages with mixed orientation marriages, super low quality of life, the suicidality. Between the celibacy, mixed orientation marriages, and LGBT suicides and depression, that radicalized me, along with my stake president, along with Ordain Women, and them excommunicating of Kate Kelly, and then my stake president asking me… Because when I met back with my stake president, Bryan King, he gave me an ultimatum. I said, “What do I have to do to stay a member?”

John  32:47  He said, “Take down Mormon Stories,” basically. There was a little bit of nuance to that, but it’s basically, “Take down every episode that would ever cause anyone to question anything.”

John  32:56  I’m like, “No, I’m not going to take down Mormon Stories.” Even though I told him how many people, and again, I had everybody reach out to him and email him and tell him how many people were active in the Church because of Mormon Stories. He didn’t care. He was fingered with a job to do. So, none of that mattered to him.

John  33:17  So, if I had to choose being censored about advocating for LGBT people, advocating for same sex marriage, because it was a matter of voting, advocating for honesty and openness versus censorship, homophobia, misogyny and sexism, I’m not going to roll back. So, that radicalized me, just along with all the pain and suffering of all the people in faith crisis, when the Church just didn’t seem to want to really do anything meaningful. So, that radicalized me, and my refusal to take everything down, led to my excommunication, which then made a lot of faithful scholars, apologists, believing people, just unwilling to come on the podcast. A lot of people blame my tone for some of the more liberal or progressive, believing people not being willing to come on Mormon Stories. But people’s started declining to come on Mormon Stories because of my excommunication, before my tone got more harsh.

John  34:27  Once people like Bushman refused to come on, Fiona and Terryl Givens, who had come on twice before, declined to come on. Fluhman declined to come on. Once the Church excommunicated me, that put the scarlet letter on me and Mormon Stories, which then made people who were previously willing to come on Mormon Stories, no longer willing to come on Mormon Stories. That’s when I started getting angry, and my tone got kind of more and more harsh and severe. But, to this day, I’ve had Jim Bennett on. I had Joe Tippetts recently.

John  35:09  I have believers on whenever they’ll come on, whenever they have something interesting to say. A lot of faithful people just won’t come on anymore. That’s probably partly me, but it’s partly the Church. I mean, they know what they’re doing when they excommunicate people, and then have a temple recommend question that says, “Do you support any apostate groups?” They know what they’re doing there. Plus, if you’re Pat Mason, and rich donors support your Endowed Chair, are you going to come on Mormon Stories? Maybe not. You’re Richard Bushman. You’re working. If you’re Phil Barlow, if you’re Terryl Givens working at the Maxwell Institute, can you keep your job at the Maxwell Institute and come on Mormon Stories? Probably not. So, I blame the Church as much as my tone for the way Mormon Stories is skewed towards more aggressive discourse, along with just my impatience at all the pain and suffering and death and divorce, and destructions of families that I’ve witnessed over the past 20 years. At some point, the Church becomes complicit in the deaths, and the divorce, and the depression and the anxiety, the carnage that is the way the Church handles all of these issues.

John  36:31  You know, one year, five years, 10 years, but really 20 years, 50 years in, the Church still can’t figure this stuff out how to be honest? How to handle faith crisis stuff, how to handle LGBT people, how to apologize for its racism, how to incorporate women? Like 100-200 years into it. It can’t learn how to be honest and upright about its history and apologize. At some point, you just, you lose your patience, and you feel like the Church has blood on their hands. So, back to your original question, do I believe there can be an open forum of balanced discussion between believers and unbelievers? Yes, it’s super hard. And at some point, they excommunicate you for it, if you are willing to criticize the leaders who deserve to be criticized, honestly, and if you’re willing to talk about the truth claims, in ways that are honest, but that lead people to look at the Church with intellectual scrutiny. And then the other thing is, you have to get popular.  Like, someone can say, “Well, Rick Bennett still does Gospel Tangents.” But, as unknown as I am, you’re probably less known than me. But if you ever got as popular as Mormon Matters.

GT  37:51  Well, you’re the man, the myth, and the legend, right?

John  37:52  No, that’s you.  Didn’t you hear how I started this episode? But part of it is you have to get popular enough.  They’re not going to excommunicate you if you’re flying under the radar. But, once you really get traction, and start becoming known by, let’s just say 5% of the Church membership, and you’re willing to criticize Church leaders or talk about the truth claims in a very explicit way that allows people to kind of see a more honest, realistic context for the problems of the Church’s truth claims, which I’d love to have a conversation with you about. That’s when you get put on the radar. That’s when you face Church discipline. That’s happened to Jeremy Runnells, September 6, Grant Palmer, Bill Reel. That’s what happens.

GT  38:45  So, there are a bunch of different ways I want to go.

John  38:49  All right! This is good stuff.

Introduction

If you’ve listened to Mormon Stories, Dr. John Dehlin has used a term called neo-apologists, which is different that apologist.  What’s the difference? John’s going to tell us the difference, and how he views apologetic answers to tough church questions. Check out our conversation….

Interview

GT  38:49  I’m trying to decide which way to go.

John  38:50  Now we’re getting to the good stuff.

GT  38:51  We’re at a big fork in the road with like three choices. So, after you got excommunicated, you became more harsh towards apologists. Is that a fair word? I know you use the term neo-apologists. What’s the difference between an apologist and a neo-apologist?

John  39:18  So, I think of classic Mormon apologetics as Hugh Nibley, Daniel C. Peterson, Louis Midgley style, where your number one tool is ad hominem smearing the reputation of the critic, or of the honest question or calling them gay, accusing them of adultery, calling them a wolf in sheep’s clothing and an apostate. Ever since Hugh Nibley published, No, Ma’am, That’s Not History, without ever really dealing with any of the merits of Fawn Brodie’s concerns in her book, he set the tone. Daniel C. Peterson has been super happy to pick up that baton. FAIR Mormon continued with it all the way to Kwaku and Cardon Ellis and the This is the Show videos that were taken down.  [There’s] this whole rich, multi-decade tradition of smearing critics or smearing on us questioners and then offering disingenuous science, specious, invalid science and ridiculous, illogical knowingly dishonest answers to the problems with the Church’s truth claims. And that’s what Hugh Nibley did. That’s what FARMS did. That’s what FAIR Mormon does and did.

John  40:14  It’s an embarrassing blight on the Church, in my opinion. I think those people have done way more harm than good, not just to the Church, but to people doubting. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve interacted with over the past two decades who say it was FAIR Mormon, or the Maxwell Institute or FARMS that caused their faith crisis, because their answers were so horrible, or they misbehaved so badly in their apologetic ad hominem, that the Church lost additional credibility, knowing that the Church was bankrolling all of these efforts, right? So that’s classic apologists.

John  41:26  Then, once the internet really got up to speed starting in the 2000s, we started calling out Daniel Peterson and Louis Midgley and others. In fact, there was a point where I learned from an employee of the Maxwell Institute, that Daniel Peterson and Louis Midgley, and–who is the Canadian apologist doctor guy who wrote the two hit pieces on me? Greg Smith was his name.

John  42:02  Anyway, I caught wind from within the Maxwell Institute, that another part of the Maxwell Institute, that another member of the Maxwell Institute or group of them, were writing two hit pieces on me back in in 2012, while I was working with Marlin Jensen directly, to help solve the Church’s problem with its faith crisis stuff. So, here I am. I conduct a study with my friend Travis Stratford and Greg Prince, in response to Hans Mattsson, Swedish Mormon area authority, who had lost his faith. We collaborate on doing a study of why people are leaving the Church. We get like 3000 people to fill out the survey. We compile the results with a dozen Ph.D.’s, compile that into a study and then literally share that with Church headquarters, share with Marlin Jensen. Travis Stratford goes to Church headquarters to present the findings of the study, to the missionary committee, to Church PR, to the correlation committee, to the priesthood committee, curriculum, CES, all of them.  [We] say, “Hey, Mormon Church. There’s a problem. People are losing their faith. And this is why. You need to start being honest with your history and stop deceiving people.” I, along with Greg Prince and Travis Stratford, we were the creators of that study, and this is the history. This has been covered a bit in Matthew Harris’s book on the Gospel Topics.

GT  43:40  Yeah, it’s the introduction.

John  43:41  Yeah. But there are other places where we’ve talked about this. But I met with Elder Holland twice, personally, to try and counsel him on how to deal with people in faith crisis. The Church is doing nothing, and with Mormon Stories, StayLDS, that’s literally how I’m spending all my time, is trying to keep people in the Church. So, that’s what I was doing. Then, you’ve got the Maxwell Institute writing a hit piece against me, a 100-page hit piece trying to smear me and call me a wolf in sheep’s clothing, while I’m helping the Church for free. It was ridiculous. So, as soon as I found out about that hit piece from a Maxwell Institute employee, I notified Marlin Jensen, and Elder Holland, and everyone that I knew. [I’m] like, “Can you help me understand why I’m helping you and you’re funding hit pieces being written about me.”

John  44:41  That was when Daniel Peterson was removed from the Maxwell Institute. He was removed from his position as the leader of the Maxwell Institute. I have it on good authority that Marlin Jensen and Elder Holland were both involved in the removal of Daniel Peterson, from the Maxwell Institute, directly for his unwillingness to back down. So, that’s my side of the story. Other people may have their sides of the story, but I was, again, I had a source from within the Maxwell Institute that was telling me what was going on behind the scenes. That was a classic instance of classic ad hominem Mormon apologetics. Once Daniel Peterson was dethroned from the Maxwell Institute, and Gerry Bradford dethroned him from direction from the BYU president and Elder Holland. Eventually, Spencer Fluhman was put in. A lot of people contributed to this. But the decision was, that was not an effective way to deal with doubters, to deal with critics, to deal with people who question.

John  45:56  So they migrated their apologetic approach was Spencer Fluhman of the Maxwell Institute towards what’s called pastoral apologetics, which is not to engage in ad hominem anymore, not to engage in specious ridiculous pseudoscience, non-peer reviewed pseudoscience with ridiculous answers like, maybe when Joseph Smith wrote horse in the Book of Mormon, he meant tapir. Maybe there’s two Hill Cumorah’s instead of one. Instead of all that garbage, we’re going to show support to people who are doubting. We’re going to love people who question and we’re going to just try and provide a more nuanced and progressive path for staying in the Church ala Terryl and Fiona Givens, ala, Patrick Mason, in his book, Planted. We’re going to show a more loving pastoral approach.  [We’re going to] stop trying to address the scientific criticisms of the Church’s truth claims, because we know we have nothing there. We know that science wins, every time we try and argue with science on any of the problems with the Church’s truth claims. So, we’re going to stop trying to provide those types of answers. [We’re going to] love people and stop with the ad hominem.

John  47:12  So, I named that neo-apologetics. They hate it. None of them like that term. I don’t even know how well it’s known, but that’s what I mean when I say a neo-apologist. And that’s Richard Bushman. That’s Terryl and Fiona Givens. That’s Patrick Mason. That Spencer Fluhman. That’s Adam Miller.  [These are] good people, smart people, lovely people trying to do, institutionally, within the Church, frankly, what I was trying to do with Mormon Matters with Dan Witherspoon, with StayLDS, try to create a progressive, faithful Mormonism that’s more liberal and non-literal, within Mormonism.

GT  47:57  Okay, so, apologetics are ad hominems, and neo-apologetics are nicer, but still lacking. Is that what I’m hearing?

John  48:09  Well, okay. I think it’s un-Christ like to engage in ad hominem attacks. So, that’s definitely improvement. Mormon neo-apologetics, for me, is an improvement on pretty much every level. I’m not aware of any way where it’s not an improvement. So, getting rid of ad hominem: improvement. Getting rid of stupid, pseudo-scientific, non-peer reviewed garbage responses to challenges to the Church’s truth claims: improvement. Showing love and empathy: improvement. All that’s an improvement. Are you asking why I’ve been critical of neo-apologists?

GT  48:51  Well, that’s where I was going.

John  48:52  Yeah. do you want to ask the question, or however you want to ask it?

GT  48:56  I mean, well, I wanted to make sure I understood the difference first.

John  48:59  Does that make sense to you? Do you want to push back on that in any way?

GT  49:03  No. Well, I mean, it does lead into the question of, if it’s such an improvement, because I know it seems like last year you were really going after Patrick Mason really hard. Because he had given a fireside and you put a rebuttal video out there. I know you’re frustrated with Patrick. He won’t come on your show. Richard Bushman won’t come on, Terryl Givens, etc., etc.

John  49:33  Before my tone changed, that was true. I just want to make that clear. Part of what people want to do is revisionist history that it’s because my tone changed. But they stopped being willing to come on my show before my tone changed.

GT  49:46  So, because they quit coming on, was the beast unleashed? Were you like, “I’m not going to hold back. I’m going to hold Patrick Mason to account for bad apologetics,” or whatever you want to say. I’m just asking. Is that why?

John  50:01  So first of all, I love and respect every single person that I mentioned in that group. I love and respect Phil Barlow, Terryl and Fiona Givens, Richard Bushman, Patrick Mason, Spencer Fluhman. They’re bright, Adam Miller. [They’re] brilliant, good-hearted, honest, bright people. I’ve felt really conflicted in how I’ve talked about them. I regret whenever I’ve been harsh or unfair or mean-spirited. I regret that. So, I’m happy to apologize to all of them and say, “I’m sorry for all the ways I’ve hurt any of you, if I’ve ever hurt any of you.” So, there’s that. Patrick and I wrote a column together once, after I was excommunicated, where we were trying to dialogue back and forth about truth claims and stuff, and Patrick quit the column because he didn’t like my expression of anger and frustration and concern. That was frustrating. In some sense, I felt relieved. But, in some sense, I felt frustrated by that. But we stayed on good terms.

John  51:27  Why have I been critical of the neo-apologists? There’s a couple pf reasons why. One [reason] is the private versus the public dichotomy. I started hearing about Terryl and Fiona Givens traveling around the world, doing these special private firesides, where rich Mormons would pay for them to travel around the world, and give these firesides. Only people who were questioning were invited. Then, they would give their best apologetic responses, but it could never be recorded. They would never publish what was said. It was all just their spin, but never shared publicly and never adopted by the Church. That sort of private, secret, elite treatment is a thing of privilege. It’s back to the doublespeak. It’s back to the two-faced kind of approach. When I started Mormon Stories, it was always about transparency. So, number one, are these people spokespeople? Are they prophets, seers and revelators? Are they apostles? Are they even sanctioned by the Church to be giving these, “Maybe the Book of Mormon isn’t historical? Maybe the Book of Abraham wasn’t a translation? Maybe it was inspired through, what’s it called?

GT  53:00  Revelation.

John  53:01  Revelation or whatever. Like, maybe Joseph Smith went off the hinge a little bit and polygamy was never–they’re giving all these answers to pacify people privately, that is not endorsed by the Church, is not shared Church-wide. It felt two-faced. It felt elitist. It felt disingenuous. Because number one, it’s only shared in private. They would never say those things in public that they would share in private, like when Richard Bushman backtracks on, “The historical narrative is unsustainable.” People say that I mischaracterized him. Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t. But he was uncomfortable that what he shared in private was made public. I think that’s duplicitous. I do. I think it’s duplicitous when they say things in private, that they won’t say in public. That’s dishonesty to me. So, it’s dishonest is my first concern.

John  54:05  It’s elitist, that’s my second concern. It’s unofficial. That’s my third concern, which leads to my fourth concern, which is that the brethren are never held to account and the broader Church never has–as long as neo-apologists can be carted out to deal with people in the super-secret, private, elitist engagements, the brethren never have to apologize. They never have to say they’re sorry. They never have to actually correct the record.

John  54:43  It is reminiscent of how the Church handled the Gospel Topics Essays, which were probably primarily, likely, legally motivated, and not motivated from a sense of true desire for openness and honesty and transparency. The way you know that is when Snow acknowledges that they were buried on the website, not known by the Church public at large. But they were published on the website for plausible deniability. Those weren’t his words, but they were mine. Then, they weren’t advertised broadly. To this day, most bishops and stake presidents don’t know about them, let alone have read them. Most members of the Church don’t know about them, let alone have read them. They’re buried in many ways. Then they’re only brought out when somebody’s having a faith crisis, so the Church can point to the buried Gospel Topics Essays and say, “See, we’re transparent. We’ve resolved it.” Not to mention that the substance of the essays themselves are highly incomplete or disingenuous or misleading. That’s a problem in and of itself. But aside from that, they’re hidden. They’re not advertised. There’s never been, as far as I know, a General Conference talk, where the members are encouraged to read them and to get to know them, to become familiar with them. There might be a talk here and there at a BYU thing or some random fireside that Ballard gave.

John  56:15  But to this day, my understanding is that the Church, general public has never been made aware of the Gospel Topics Essays. To me, that’s not the type of full honesty that the Church taught me to emulate and to show. To me, neo-apologists enable that duplicity, and they enable the Church never having to actually be accountable for not just deceiving a couple hundred years’ worth of members on its history, knowingly deceiving a couple hundred years’ worth of members on its history. But also punishing its truth tellers like the September Six, like Maxine Hanks, like Eugene England, silencing him, like Lowell Bennion, like so many. So, the neo-apologists are enablers of duplicity, and they’re enablers of the Church leadership, not having to be fully accountable and fully transparent. I’m torn.

John  57:24  I talked to David Bokovoy about this once. David Bokovoy said, and this is not a new thought. I knew this before, but David Bokovoy said, “They’re a bridge. They’re a way station, like all of this stuff, neo-apologetics, the Gospel Topics Essays. They’re like a soft-landing ramp, when people are in faith crisis, even if they’re going to leave the Church, they provide people this soft landing in a faith crisis, to then let them get their bearings, not blow up their lives, and then in a more peaceful way decide whether they’re going to stay or leave. And he’s right. So, I’ve been too harsh with neo-apologists, and I regret that. It takes all kinds. It took Malcolm X and it took Martin Luther King.

John  58:18  Richard Bushman has contributed more to historical transparency than almost anyone. I know Patrick Mason and Spencer Fluhman and the Givens are good people, trying to do good, trying to move the Church in progressive and healthy directions. So, long story short is I regret how hard I’ve been on them, but when I’ve been hard on them, that’s why. But I will also say, part of why it was hard on them was just like sour grapes that they used to support Mormon Stories, and then stopped. That forces Mormon Stories to shift to the less faithful when faithful people will no longer come on. It feels like rejection. Because I helped. When Terryl and Fiona Givens first came on Mormon Stories, many of their books weren’t even offered at Deseret Book. I think I helped resuscitate, I think I helped make Terryl and Fiona Givens prominent, as prominent as they are, within Mormonism, my first Mormon Stories interview did.  And that led to their book deal with the Crucible of Doubt, as I understand it.

John  59:30  They came on the second time, and I promoted Crucible of Doubt. So, you would think if we had that relationship, if we had that good faith, even if I had been excommunicated, even if I was a little bit salty, that they would say, “Hey, John has been good to us. We still support the mission of what John’s trying to do. Yeah, we’ll come back on Mormon Stories to promote our new book.” But no, they wouldn’t. And Patrick Mason, part of what made me super angry at him was that he agreed that we would cover one of his new books on Mormon Stories and then he backed out. That’s childish, and petty of me to be angry at them for that. But I was childish and petty. I struggle with that. I’m just going to keep trying to work on it. But I do regret it. I love you, Patrick. I’ve never really met–I mean, I’ve met Spencer, but we’ve never hung out. Terryl and Fiona, I respect you.  Richard Bushman, I doubt you care, but I respect you. If I’ve ever caused you grief, I’m sorry.

Introduction

It should come as no surprise to state Dr. John Dehlin is a bit of a lightning rod. I asked if he wanted to discuss his up-and-down relationship with Elder Holland. Check out our conversation….

Interview

GT  1:00:38  Very good. Well done. Another issue I wanted to talk about was, you had a good relationship with Elder Holland, and you had mentioned that you had broken a confidence. Can you tell us a little bit about that story?

John  1:00:58  Well, my memory is going to be fuzzy on this. But here’s what I know. On the one hand, when I met with him twice, he literally said to me, “You can tell anybody anything that I said here.” There was a point where he even encouraged me to make a particular statement to people un-attributed to him. But he certainly never said to me, “Never tell anyone what we talked about.” It’d be stupid for him to say that, because that would be an apostle of Jesus basically saying, “Don’t quote me.” I mean, they’re supposed to be bold and testify. So, I hope that makes sense to people. But I think there’s a code where if you meet with an apostle, you don’t talk about it. You know people that have met with apostles, and were like, “I’m not going to say who.” You know what I mean? Like there’s that code within Mormonism, where when you meet with a high-level church leader, you don’t say who it was, and you don’t really give any specificity, because they get in trouble. Even amongst themselves, when Jeffrey Holland speaks out, or Boyd K Packer says something dumb, the others, clearly, behind the scenes express concern and they get in trouble.

John  1:02:14  They don’t want dissent in the quorum. They certainly don’t want public dissent. And they’re all managing their political capital just like Richard Bushman, or Patrick Mason are. So, if they’re more progressive, they don’t want to be quoted in a way where the more hardliners who have more seniority might call them out or punish them in some way, just like when Marlin Jensen apologized to the saints of Oakland about the LGBT stuff. And then Packer found out. Marlin Jensen told me the story of how he was called onto the carpet by Boyd K. Packer, for apologizing to the saints in Oakland. I’ve got that on audio tape, by the way. But there’s an unwritten understanding that you just don’t talk about what was shared. So, after all this stuff at the Maxwell Institute went down, when Daniel Peterson was coming at me, and the hit piece was being written…

GT  1:03:08  That was when he was at the Interpreter, now. Is that right?

John  1:03:11  This is before The Interpreter was created. He created The Interpreter immediately after getting booted from his position that he was in at the Maxwell Institute. He stayed at the Maxwell Institute, but it was just with Arab stuff. He was no longer head of apologetics. He created the Interpreter right after and the hit pieces that he published about me, were going to go in, like, the Journal of the Book of Mormon Studies, whatever it was. Those were some of the first articles in The Interpreter. That’s how they were published. But, prior to that, while he was still in, and all this stuff with Geral