Dr Jesse James is a research psychologist and assistant professor at Graceland University in Lamoni, Iowa. He gives a scientific explanation for spiritual experiences. We’ll get into artificial intelligence, free will, whether chimpanzees can communicate with humans, and lots of other topics! Check out our conversation…

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GT  00:35  All right, welcome to Gospel Tangents. I’m excited to have the outlaw Dr. Jesse James. (Chuckling) Anyway, could you tell us a little bit more about yourself and where are we?

Jesse  00:51  Yeah, so we are right now in Lamoni, Iowa. This is my home, now, for the first time. We have moved away from the west where Mormonism is pretty strong, the Brighamite branch of Mormonism is pretty strong. We’ve just come out here to Lamoni so I could teach at Graceland University, which is the university that is sponsored by the Community of Christ.

GT  01:13  So it’s a Community of Christ version of BYU.

Jesse  01:16  Yes, exactly.

GT  01:17  Now, is it just as conservative as BYU?

Jesse  01:19  It’s not even close to as conservative. It’s incredibly liberal. There were some comparisons that I expected to be a lot more parallel than they have been. Like, for instance, here at Graceland University, hardly any of our students are Community of Christ members, maybe like I think an estimated 20% are members of the Community of Christ. Whereas like 99% of students at BYU or Latter-day Saints.

GT  01:47  Except for on the football team.

Jesse  01:48  (Chuckling) Right. Yeah, so because Graceland is so focused on their athletics program, kind of like how BYU’s football program is more interdenominational, Graceland University has all kinds of athletics and we pull in students to play those sports who are, many of them are not members of Community of Christ. Lots of the faculty are not members of Community of Christ. Because we live here in this town, that a hundred years [ago] was the headquarters of the Community of Christ Church, a lot of people here are Community of Christ.  But, also, a lot of people here are kind of ex-Community of Christ or no longer really participating.

Jesse  02:25  So we’ve got a lot of people on campus, a lot more professors, I think, are Community of Christ than students are. But, still, maybe 50% to 60% of faculty are not members of the Church.

GT  02:36  Oh, so more than a half?

Jesse  02:38  I would estimate that.

GT  02:39  Because you’re LDS. (I would say Mormon, but I’m not supposed to say that.)

Jesse  02:44  Yes, I’m LDS. My boss at the institution is Catholic. Even our president, President Draves, right now, is not a member of the Community of Christ. She’s the first president of the university that has not been a member of the church.

GT  03:04  Wow.

Jesse  03:06  I mean, they still put a lot of emphasis on their faith statement, and their value statements and things like that. But it’s not been so focused on denominational membership anymore. It’s a lot more about, are you willing to live up to the standards? [It’s] kind of their version of the Honor Code.

GT  03:31  I was going to ask about the honor code. In the Community of Christ, the Word of Wisdom isn’t such a big deal, I’ve heard.

Jesse  03:34  Yeah, and so many facets are not [the same.] They don’t have the same standards and regulations that the Latter-day Saint Church has.

GT  03:43  Anybody can go to their temple.  You don’t have to have a temple recommend.  They don’t even exist.

Jesse  03:44  Yeah, it doesn’t even exist. It’s not even a thing. So, you’ve got lots of people, like, for instance, sexual relationships outside of marriage is not a frowned upon thing, as far as I’m aware. What’s important is that when you have sex, that you’re doing it in committed relationships, that it’s consensual, things like that. So, there’s not even like an honor code on campus that prevents students from having sexual relationships with each other before they’re married.

GT  04:17  It’s a liberal place.

Jesse  04:18  It’s very, very different from what you’d expect at BYU.

GT  04:19  Wow, that’s interesting.

Jesse  04:20  Yeah. So, it’s a very progressive version of Christianity. So it’s focused a lot more on the liberal concerns of avoiding harm to other people, caring for other people, but not the conservative concerns, things like loyalty to your ingroup or things like…

GT  04:44  I know they’re big into peace.  They’ve got the Peace Plaza in Independence and like, world peace and LGBT is, well, the interesting thing about that is LGBT is okay, if it’s okay with the law of the land.

Jesse  05:02  Uh huh. Yeah.

GT  05:03  I think it is a really strange revelation. But, yeah, we’re very correlated in the LDS Church.

Jesse  05:08  Yeah. It seems foreign to us. But, if you’re going to be international, it’s almost the only viable position you can take where you have to reconcile the fact that different countries are going to have different laws. So, what’s acceptable in one place might not be in another. Therefore, if you decide that you’re going to allow for gay marriage, or other liberal practices, they can only be acceptable, morally, if they’re consistent with the law of the land. Right? So, it seems like if you’re going to open it up, like the only way you can do that is to do what the Community of Christ has done.

GT  05:49  Oh, by the way, before we get too far, but polygamy is actually okay now in the Community of Christ, if you’re in India or Africa, where it’s legal.

Jesse  06:00  Yes, exactly, where it’s legal. I don’t think they encourage it. I’ve even heard that they encourage people not to marry additional spouses after they become members of the church, but, if you’ve already married to a few wives, then you can be baptized and, just don’t take any more. It’s fascinating. Isn’t it?

GT  06:20  Do you ever see the LDS Church doing such a thing?

Jesse  06:24  Oh, heavens no. We spend so much effort to try and distance ourselves from polygamy that, even in places right now, where there are people who are interested in meeting with the missionaries, who are already married in polygamous relationships, we discourage our missionaries from teaching them and we don’t allow them to be baptized. So, would it ever happen? Perhaps, but it just seems really unlikely, given how hard we’ve tried to distance ourselves from the practice.

GT  06:56  So, who’s the most famous alumni from Graceland University?

Jesse  07:00  Bruce, or Caitlyn Jenner went to Graceland University.

GT  07:03  Isn’t that crazy?

Jesse  07:03  Yeah, it’s pretty fun.

GT  07:05  I want to go to Jenner Field. I can’t wait.

Jesse  07:07  Yeah.

GT  07:08  Bruce Jenner Field, I understand they took the Bruce off.

Jesse  07:10  Yeah, they took the Bruce off.  Though, originally, they asked him/her, like, should they change the name of the field? And Caitlin said, “No. When I was at Graceland, when I was an athlete, I was Bruce Jenner. So, there’s no reason to change the name of the field.” So, they ended up changing it, but not at Caitlin’s request.

GT  07:29  Yeah. Well, now it’s just Jenner Field.

Jesse  07:31  Yeah. It’s just Jenner Field.

GT  07:33  I can’t wait to go there.

Jesse  07:37  It’s pretty neat to see the heritage there.

GT  07:39  Any other things we should know about Graceland?

Jesse  07:41  I’m trying to think.

GT  07:45  How many LDS faculty are at Graceland?

Jesse  07:48  I think I’m the only person there right now who’s LDS. There is another person in our ward, who worked at the library for a number of years and is now working in another local library nearby. But that’s the only other person that I’m aware of who was a member of the [LDS] Church working at the university. There may have been others through the years.

GT  08:08  They get along with you, though?

Jesse  08:10  Yeah, they’ve been so open. The Community of Christ is so pluralistic and open that it’s not about denominational membership for them. It’s really about the relationship that you develop with Christ. So, as far as I’m aware, they accept other Christian baptisms, and other Christians accept their baptisms, in much the same way that every Christian denomination, essentially, accepts each other’s baptisms at this point, unless you’re an isolationist branch, like the LDS Church. So, in the Community of Christ, we’ve got people from all different faiths, who are working there, who are attending there. You have people who attend the Community of Christ congregations who have never been baptized there, but are in full fellowship. It’s a really pluralistic organization.

GT  09:04  They treat you well.

Jesse  09:05  They’re really respectful. I’ve really enjoyed working here. It’s a lot of fun.

GT  09:07  Well, cool. Tell us let’s get a little bit of your background, especially your academic history. Where’d you get your bachelor’s and Master’s and Ph.D.?

Jesse  09:15  Yeah. I grew up in Washington State, and I finished my bachelor’s and master’s degrees, both at Central Washington University, just a tiny little town in the center of the state. I went there because they had what’s called the Chimpanzee and Human Communications Institute. So, they had some chimpanzees who had been cross fostered meaning they had been raised as if they were human infants. So, they had been kind of raised in a trailer and they had human parents who spoke sign language with them.

GT  09:23  It sounds like Jane Goodall.

Jesse  09:47  Right. It’s, so fascinating. So, the chimpanzees, prior to this group had been raised, cross-fostered by humans. They had been taught English and chimpanzees do not have the same vocal structure that we have. So, they can’t learn the same kinds of words. They can’t construct the same sounds that we can make. So, one chimpanzee, for instance, learned only to say four words: mama, papa, cup and up. There are only phonemes that they could construct. They could understand more words than that. They just couldn’t produce more words than that. So, that was kind of a failed experiment. Then they decided, well, chimpanzees probably can learn to sign, even if they can’t speak English. They have the same hands we do, similar hands. Their thumbs are much further down on their wrist than ours, but, they essentially have hands enough to be able to sign with.

Jesse  10:39  So, they decided to raise them as deaf human infants. The principle here is you don’t teach them sign language as a party trick, you raise them naturally speaking sign language in naturalistic conversation, like you would raise a human infant. You don’t tutor and train an infant on natural language. You just speak with them, and they pick it up naturally. Right. So that was the principle at these chimpanzees. You would raise them and try to just interact with them and see if they picked it up. Several of these chimpanzees ended up learning sign language reasonably well, like, a couple hundred signs. And kind of telegraphic speech was just like the kind of speech you hear from a toddler, where a toddler might put together a couple of words. They might say, like, “Want more or…” exactly. So, you drop a lot of articles and things like that. But you put together, like a telegraph would, that’s why it’s called telegraphic speech, because a telegraph would kind of cut out all the unnecessary language, then you just piece together the necessary words.

GT  11:45  Infamous, that means more than famous.[1]

Jesse  11:47  Yeah. So, these chimpanzees ended up going through this cross-fostering study in the 1970s. Then the study was kind of concluded. We concluded that they would be able to master approximately toddler language skills, but no more than that, no matter how old they got. So, after that was done, then, you know, chimpanzees live for, 40, 50, 60 years, depending.  Then, what you do with them? So, these chimpanzees were essentially retired to a research institution, Washington State, where they lived out the rest of their lives, and participated voluntarily, when we could convince them to, in other language studies. So, we would kind of interact with them in sign language. We cared for them, of course. We had video cameras filming all the interactions with each other. So, we would kind of like code videotapes and stuff for humorous interactions, or the way that they would use vocabulary words, when one chimpanzee would always sign the word black, to indicate something was cool, right? It was like, it was just, she just liked the color black. So, whenever something else was cool, she would sign all that as black. So, those kinds of linguistic nuances and the interchanges that they would have, that’s the kind of stuff that we studied at that institution. So, that’s why I chose to study in Washington state at that university. I only ended up staying there for a little while, like, about a year and a half or so before I ended up kind of bowing out because of some political things going on with the director there at the Institute. So, I didn’t end up doing my master’s thesis there, like I anticipated.

GT  13:27  So what was this like languages or what was your bachelor’s?

Jesse  13:30  So my bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD are all in psychology, not clinical psychology, research psychology. I was studying, intending to study the psychology of language. My master’s thesis ended up being about sign language. But it was studying the memory capacity of interpreters of American Sign Language. That’s what I ended up studying. I had intended, at some point, to go to Gallaudet University where the deaf congregate in the United States and learn to be a clinical psychologist for deaf people. But I didn’t end up following through that. So, I speak sign pretty well, not perfectly, but pretty fluently. I was disappointed not to serve a sign language speaking mission.

GT  14:19  I almost wonder if we should do this. We have subtitles, we’ll be okay.

Jesse  14:26  So sometimes people who, if you can’t hear, we’ll fill you in. Let’s see. So, then I ended up going to BYU, instead, for my PhD.

GT  14:37  Rise and shout.

Jesse  14:37  So, I finished my PhD under Dr. Brock Kerwin, who is researcher of memory. My emphasis was behavioral neuroscience. So I studied a lot about the brain. Some people study the brain in abnormal ways, like what goes wrong with the brain, and I studied the brain primarily in normal functioning ways. Like, how does the brain allow us to do everyday things that we all do, that we kind of take for granted. So, my emphasis was memory during that time. After I graduated, I started to study more religion, generally, and emphasizing a little bit, not a ton, but a little bit in the neurobiology of memory, or neurobiology of religion and spirituality, I mean.

GT  14:55  See now that’s fascinating to me, because I think there’s a field of study that says freewill does not exist.

Jesse  15:34  Yeah.  Neuroscientists are…

GT  15:36  Very non-Mormon.

Jesse  15:37  Yeah, so neuroscientists are not philosophers, and, therefore, not really equipped to say one way or the other, right? Neuroscientists have collected some evidence that suggests maybe freewill is an illusion. It seems we make decisions in our brain before we’re consciously aware of them. And that suggests, maybe we’re, if we’ve already made the decision, and then we kind of post hoc rationalize the decision in a conscious way, and that’s all we’re actually doing is justifying the decision that was already made by our brain, then maybe we’re not actually free, after all. Maybe our brain is kind of automatically responding to the environment. And maybe we are just giving ourselves the illusion, because we have metacognition, where we can reflect back on our own thinking processes, maybe that allows us the illusion of free will, that maybe perhaps other animals don’t have. But that’s a question that, despite the scientific evidence, really requires integration with philosophy in order to answer. Because most neuroscientists are not sufficiently trained in philosophy, it’s not a question they can answer.

Jesse  16:50  So as an example, it doesn’t matter to me how many studies–I mean, I’m pretty hardcore scientist, but it doesn’t matter how many studies come out to suggest that freewill is an illusion, I will never not believe in freewill. As a philosopher, as a theologian, I am convinced that freewill exists, independent of the empirical evidence. So, I think…

GT  17:16  Doesn’t that show your bias?

Jesse  17:18  It could show my bias, but it also, to me, shows the limitations of science.  Science is a pretty impressive tool. But, being a scientist, I can also look at it and I can say, “People who are too radical of scientists are as theocratic about their science…

GT  17:42  Dogmatic.

Jesse  17:42  Yeah, dogmatic about their science as a theologian might be.

GT  17:47  Are you familiar with Steven Pinker from Harvard?

Jesse  17:49  Yeah. He’s a phenomenal speaker. I love it.

GT  17:52  What do you think of Pinker?

Jesse  17:55  He is an expert on a bunch of different things. One of the things that he primarily studies is the psychology of language. He is what’s called a nativist. In other words, he believes that we have, born within us, from the very first moments of life, kind of an empty language module that allows children to pick up language faster and easier than they should be capable of picking it up, given basic principles of behaviorism. So, he thinks that all children, regardless of what language their parents speak, they have kind of like, the empty skeleton of a language, and they’re fitting into that skeleton, the things they’re hearing from their parents. So, they’re ready-primed sponges to pick this up in a way that they don’t pick up other things more naturally.

Jesse  18:44  As I’ve read the evidence, I disagree with that argument. There’s a lot of research that shows that other animals who don’t have any reason to have a language module have the same capacities for picking up language sounds that we have. So, like chinchillas, for instance, have been demonstrated to have the same capacity for hearing the differences in phonemes, after just a few exposures that human infants have. Nativists, like Pinker, have kind of pointed to this ability in infants and said, “Wow, this suggests that we have this innate, fantastic ability that’s unique to language.” Well, if chinchillas have it, too, probably it’s not a unique, fascinating ability. It’s still impressive, but not unique and probably not suggestive of an innate language module.

GT  19:38  Wow. We’re going deep into the…

Jesse  19:43  Sorry, I didn’t mean to get sidetracked here.

GT  19:45  No, that’s good.  We’re all about tangents here. This is where the best conversations happen is when you’re not expecting them. So, you think humans have freewill.

Jesse  19:57  I do. Yeah.

GT  19:58 It’s not just an illusion.

Jesse  19:59  I’m pretty convinced of it. Yes.

GT  20:00  It’s not just a bunch of biological processes.

Jesse  20:03  Yeah, I mean–here’s the thing. None of us can know for sure. No matter how much evidence comes out, there’s never going to be a firm answer to say [that] yeah this is fact, or this is… It either is or isn’t. But we’re not going to know it. It’s not something that can be determined, I don’t think. In part…

GT  20:30  This gets into artificial intelligence, though, because that’s kind of a new [bogeyman.] In fact, wasn’t it Stephen Hawking just said that we’ve got to be careful with this, right?

Jesse  20:42  Yeah.

GT  20:43  I mean, is there a way where we can take a robot and give it freewill?

Jesse  20:49  So many neuroscientists believe that the capacity of metacognition–to reflect back on your own thinking is what gives us the illusion of freewill, which would be the same thing for a robot. If you give a robot or AI sufficient computing power to be able to not only learn, but also to reflect on its own learning. In other words, to look back on itself in that way, then, presumably, they would develop agency. They would develop the feeling that they have free will, that they’re sentient. It doesn’t seem like something that’s right around the corner to me.  We have this Turing Test. I think Alan Turing, in the 70s, developed this test where, basically, it’s a kind of test where, if you have a typed conversation with somebody, on the other end of a computer program, and you can’t tell whether it’s a human or a robot speaking to you, no matter how hard you assess, no matter what kind of questions you ask, or what kinds of things you say, then that would be evidence of artificial intelligence, real artificial intelligence.

Jesse  22:09  If you’ve ever tried to communicate with a bot today, like the best bots that exist, they pale. I mean, you can vet a bot in moments. You can automatically know this is not a person, right? Because they’re not flexible enough to communicate. The computing power of the human brain is so–okay, here’s a couple of just anecdotes to anchor us in how complex the human brain is. Google recently got from–there was a woman who had some brain surgery, and they took out a segment of her brain that was causing seizures. In order to get to that region of the brain, they had to take out a healthy part of the brain, as well. So, they took this healthy part of the brain. It was like one cubic centimeter, a tiny little portion of the brain, cubic centimeter.  They put it in some resin to harden it, and then they sliced it in thousands of slices, and then they computerized it, and then they created a computer program to kind of create a three-dimensional technological model of that segment of her brain. The amount of time that it took to produce that–I can’t remember the exact numbers, somebody’s going to fact check me here, and it’s going to be wrong, but it was something like a decade to produce this computer model of a centimeter of brain. It took terabytes of information. I mean, it took an unbelievable amount of information. And that was just to just to represent the physical structure of that segment of brain, not even the functioning, not even the neurotransmitters or the glial cells, that support and interact with neurons, not the firing of individual nerves. None of that was represented in this terabytes of information. It was just the structure of the brain. If you wanted to represent the entire human brain, it would take something like 700,000 average computers to represent one human brain, just the structure, not even the functioning. So, it feels to me like the best AI in the world right now can’t even come close to what the human brain is capable of, in terms of not just even function, but just structure. We’re not even close. It’s just so far off.

Jesse  24:37  So, is it possible that 1000 years from now we might be able to create artificial intelligence and 1000 years from now we might realize the answer to the question of do we have freewill? And maybe we create AI that has freewill. Maybe, but I don’t think we’re even, I think we’re nowhere close.

GT  24:53  We’ll see, this is so funny. There’s a new movie out. It’s got Ryan Reynolds in it. I wish I could remember what the name of it was. My kid loves it. It’s a video game where they create this

Ryan Reynolds is a video game character in the game, and then he becomes sentient, basically. They refer to him as blue shirt guy. I wish I could remember what the name of that movie is. But he kind of becomes conscious. That’s the whole part of the movie.

Jesse  25:24  Yeah. This is on the Disney Channel, right? It’s like Free Guy or something.

GT  25:29  Free Guy.

Jesse  25:29  Okay. Yeah, I haven’t seen it yet.

GT  25:30  You’ve got to watch it. Because the artificial intelligence in this video, because they would have human characters go into this video game and they would rob banks or whatever, anyway. Then, all of a sudden, they kept calling him blue shirt guy. He became sentient. It’s really interesting.

Jesse  25:52  Yeah. I think a lot of people are kind of concerned that this is around the corner. I think it will probably happen someday, but I think we’re way off from that happening. I could be wrong.

GT  26:05  Because from a theological point of view, just…

Jesse  26:12  Well, transcendental Mormon humanists, or I can’t remember what they call themselves. There’s this little group of people in Provo that, I mean, they’re pretty convinced that all of the spiritual things we talk about are based in some kind of unknown technology, as yet. So, God is maybe an alien species or something, and they’ve discovered a capacity to communicate with us, telepathically or something. And, that, when the millennium comes, it’s going to be because the human species has become so peaceful and so technologically advanced, that we’re capable of living in this transcendent state of harmony and plenty. It’s not going to be some metaphysical, supernatural kind of intervention. It’s going to be like the human species just gradually becomes better and better, like we’ve seen already over the past couple of hundred years.

GT  27:12  The thought occurs to me is, supposedly, you could reconstruct your ancestors just from your own memory. It almost sounds like artificial intelligence, as a form of resurrection.

Jesse  27:25  Yeah, so the reason I raise this issue is because people of this mentality, kind of believe that we’re already modeled. What appears to us to be some biological existence is actually like a simulation. That’s the word that I was trying to come up with. So, they think that this is like a simulation, like some advanced species created this illusion for us, and that what feels real to us is really just a simulation. So, I mean, if you’re simulated anyway, then why can’t you become an eternal thing within a simulation. Like, we’re not actually limited by biological constraints, except that they’re programmed into the system. That’s what they think. So, I’m not thoroughly convinced by it, I mean, it’s certainly interesting food for thought.

GT  28:23  All right, well, you have a big statistics background, right?

Jesse  28:25  Yeah.

GT  28:26  Because I think you even teach a statistics class.

Jesse  28:28  Yeah, I have in the past. I used to teach for Central Washington University.  I had attended there, and then after I graduated with a Ph.D., I went back and taught there for a few years, and then I kept teaching online there. So, I’ve taught that class more than any other psychology class, and I really love it.

GT  28:46  Well, that’s why we get along, because I’m a stats guy. So, you have to take a lot of statistics to do what you do with research psychology, right?

Jesse  29:00  Yeah. I took a few classes in undergrad, a few classes as a grad student. I just self-taught a lot of things. Whenever you come up against a statistical problem, you have data that needs to be analyzed, and you know that you don’t have a particular statistic in mind that’s going to be able to handle this data, then you go and Google and you figure out what can handle these data? Then, you learn how to run that statistic. So, a little bit self-taught as well.  Once you have the foundation of statistics, you can learn any additional statistical analyses you need. I really do love statistics. I think it’s so, so much fun, once you start to delve into the theory a little bit. It’s just so boring for other people, but I’ve instilled in my students a passion for statistics, because once you start learning about these population distributions and the sampling distributions, the sampling distribution, the fundamental undergirding foundation of statistics is the most fascinating thing in the world. I mean, this doesn’t even exist in the real world. But this idea of the sampling distribution is just so fascinating.

GT  30:14  Well, yeah, and I always like to say, because a lot of times I will teach freshmen, and a lot of times they’ve been like, “When am I ever going to use this?” So, what I will do is I will give them a statistics project that they have to come up with the idea. And then they’re like, “Wow, this is useful.”

“I told you. This is the best math there is. It’s statistics.”

Jesse  30:36  I know, it’s so painful, because yeah, exactly. It’s so painful, because statistics carries the baggage of the rest of math. And so much of math really is not useful unless you’re a mathematician. Like, you’re never going to do it. But statistics is so different. Statistics is used all the time in everyday life. I would say, maybe 25% of news articles that you’ll read will include some form of statistics in them. Often, they’re descriptive statistics. But sometimes they’re even inferential and they’ll give you an r squared or something or a correlation. If you don’t understand what’s going on there, then you can’t really like you can’t really grasp the concept that the article is talking about. Oftentimes the journalists, themselves, don’t really know what’s going on. So, they misreport things and, if you don’t know yourself, then you’re just swallowing false information. So, I always try to encourage my students to kind of learn how to interpret a few basic kinds of statistics really well, so that they can be good consumers of information.

GT  31:38  So you’ve got a good background in statistics. I know Jana Riess and Benjamin Knoll did the book The Next Mormons. It was a great book and great interview. You guys should watch it if you haven’t.

Jesse  31:49  Definitely.

GT  31:50  What did you what did you think of Jana and Ben? Did you learn anything there?

Jesse  31:54  Yeah. So, Jana’s work is fascinating, and I think, really important. I think it’s important, in no small part, because she has answered questions that the public has not had access to for a long time. So, before coming to Graceland University, I worked at Church headquarters in the correlation research division. There we did all kinds of studies with members of the Church. We answered, already, most of the questions that Jana answered. But the information is considered proprietary, and people who work there aren’t really allowed to talk a lot about what they’re doing, or the findings that they’re coming up with. They share it with the brethren and some project managers at the headquarters, but most of the information is just kept within headquarters, behind closed doors. So, Jana answered a lot of questions that I already knew the answer to, because I was privileged to have the information, because I worked there. But, most people didn’t have the answer to those kinds of questions. The one thing that really surprised me of what she found was related to the Word of Wisdom. So, oftentimes we don’t investigate questions at Church headquarters, we don’t often dig into like the worthiness issues of people’s lives, because it’s maybe too sensitive or because we leave that up to individual members and the Lord and individual members and their ecclesiastical leaders.

Jesse  33:27  So, we’re not collecting, oftentimes, data about whether people are keeping the law of chastity or the word of wisdom, or, sometimes we ask, “Do you hold a temple recommend,” which is a proxy for a lot of worthiness questions, but also belief questions. So, you can’t know from just seeing somebody’s temple recommend or not–if they have it, you know a lot about them. But, if they don’t, it doesn’t mean that they’re unworthy. It could mean something about their belief. It could mean something about one question not… So, it doesn’t feel so sensitive to ask about do you have a temple recommend or not? But we don’t ask, for instance, usually, we wouldn’t ask, “Do you pay a full tithing?” and things like that. So, when Jana found that many people are consuming, like many self-proclaimed Mormons are consuming coffee on a regular basis, that was really surprising to me. I hadn’t realized that.

Jesse  34:19  When you were interviewing Jana, you kind of asked her, who does this survey represent? She seemed to struggle to answer that question. Having read, not her whole book, but I’ve read parts of her book, and having heard her speak, and having asked her similar questions, I was surprised that it was a little bit of a struggle for her to answer that. Because, to me, the answer is incredibly clear. The people that she surveyed were self-proclaimed Mormons. Okay, they could be active or not. She said, “Eighty-five percent of our sample self-described themselves as active,” but many in our sample said they were active and didn’t attend church regularly.

GT  34:54  Right.

Jesse  34:54  So, this is another thing that really surprised me. Most of the time people, like at headquarters when I’m working as a researcher for the Church, I define active as participating weekly, or most weeks. So, usually, if we’re trying to figure out what active members of the Church look like, we’ll survey a bunch of members who are in–sometimes we send out paper/pencil surveys that get distributed, like in second hour or something like that. So, it captures everybody who happens to be there on a particular Sunday, whether they attend every week, or just every once in a while. But, if you want to know what active members look like, we kind of screen out those people who say, “I only attend every once in a while.” We just look at those people who attend like two to four times a month, and we say this is probably what active members of the Church look like today.

Jesse  35:43  Well, to know, from Jana’s research, that many people consider themselves active, even though they’re not attending, was also a really fascinating insight. It suggests that what it means to be Mormon and how people think of themselves as a righteous Mormon is shifting. Because it used to be, well, back in Brigham’s era, people thought of themselves as Mormon, even if they never attended church. Because you just were. It was similar to being Jewish. If you never attend, Jewish is a heritage, in addition to a religion. So if you never attend synagogue, you still are Jewish. You don’t have to be participating. In Brigham era, there were lots of people who considered themselves to be Mormon, even though they weren’t attending church. But, as we kind of drew harder boundaries, and said, “You’re in only if you do all these temple recommend things and only if you live the standards, and only if you pass the home teaching interview,” and all these kinds of things, then all of a sudden, we start to have higher standards of what it means to be a Mormon. So, as those standards become more and more strict, then people stop, I think, for a long time, identifying as active, if they’re not participating, and doing their home teaching, and doing all the stuff. You kind of think of yourself as active, only if you’re all in. But in recent years, according to Jana’s research, it suggests that some people are calling themselves active, even if they’re not really participating, not doing hardly anything.

GT  37:07  Do you have a sense–because like you said, Jana said that 85% of people call themselves active. Do you have a sense for what percentage of that group the Church would agree were active versus would call them inactive?

Jesse  37:22  There are people online who write blogs and do Mormon statistics stuff. You can infer a lot from percentages that are reported by Pew Research when they do national studies and things like that. So, I’m going to say some stuff that that can be inferred and can be learned, just from the general population. Many people who are baptized members in the Church do not consider themselves Mormon. They don’t mentally affiliate with the Church. So, if you were to give them a survey, according to our numbers, according to membership statistics, you would expect for about 2% of the US population, two to three percent, to self-report as a Latter-day Saint. What you find is about one percent report as Latter-day Saint, one to one and a half. So, about half the number of people on statistics, like on our member records, actually think of themselves as a Mormon. So, Jana’s research is applicable to that half who think of themselves as Mormon. Church records show another twice as many people who don’t think of themselves as Mormon. So, of Jana’s research, what is it representing?

Jesse  38:46  Well, we know of the half who consider themselves Mormon, we’ve got some people who are participating and some people who aren’t. I don’t remember from Jana’s research, what percentage of people were actively attending, like, two to four times a month. But I would guess, just based on some of the broader statistics that we know, that most people have a tendency to over inflate in when answering a survey, how often they do any religious thing, because it’s socially desirable. So, they want to come across as better than they really are.

GT  38:46  I feel like everybody in my statistics class teaching this. This is awesome. Most people don’t know that, but I teach this every semester.

Jesse  39:12  So, you get these bias representations. People overestimate by about 50%. When you ask them on a survey, “How often do you attend church?” They kind of inflate by about 50% more often than they really do, at the population level. Not every individual, but like, if you look at a population, you can expect that people are saying they go about 50% more often than they really do. So, if you kind of extrapolate from some of those statistics, and you look at what we hear people saying [about] how often they go to church in Pew research studies, you can kind of suggest that maybe half of the people who identify as Mormon are attending regularly.

Jesse  39:59  So, Jana’s research appears, to me, to be biased, a little bit, in terms of sampling those people who–well, not biased. I shouldn’t say biased. It represents the people who are both attending and not attending. And that’s another critical reason why I love Jana’s work because she is contributing to the knowledge about members, who consider themselves Mormon, but aren’t really actively participating in what they do. So, I think some of the kinds of people who she’s finding are not participating in the–not following the Word of Wisdom, not wearing garments, and things like that. So, they consider themselves Mormon, but they’re not doing all of the Mormon-y things.

Jesse  40:42  Much, much of the work that we did at the Correlation Research Division for Church Headquarters, represented the active members who were attending regularly. Because that’s who we have access to that will answer a Church survey, if we email it to them. People who are not that attached to the Church, who still call themselves a Mormon but aren’t really participating that much…

GT  41:02  The Church doesn’t know that much about them.

Jesse  41:04  We don’t really know that much about them. They’re not really that willing to take a survey from the Church. If it comes from somebody else, if it comes from Jana Riess, they might take it. I think, sometimes, they don’t trust the Church to listen to their opinion. So, every once in a while, maybe 10% of our survey respondents will be somebody who’s not actively participating. They kind of rail against the Church, like, “Nobody ever listens to me.” I’m reading these surveys, and I’m just like, “Well, I’m here, I’m listening.” We really do convey what comes across in these surveys to the brethren. The fact that that doesn’t end up making it to the end of the row, like through General Conference, sometimes, isn’t because they don’t know what you’re saying. It’s not because they’re not listening. It’s because they’re torn. They’re between a rock and a hard place. They can’t make everybody happy. I think a lot of people just have this general sense, like, “The brethren don’t know what I’m experiencing. The brethren don’t hear my troubles, and don’t care.” I don’t know what the brethren do and don’t feel. But I do know that the brethren are aware. I do know that the brethren here about this stuff.

GT  42:14  So, one of the other interesting things about Jana’s research, was she had a 500 ex-Mormons in her [survey.] Does the Church study that?

Jesse  42:26  Yeah, so we have done studies about ex-Mormons.

GT  42:28  Really?

Jesse  42:28  Yeah.

GT  42:30  Cool. I know, because she said that was the first time anybody had ever studied ex-Mormons.

Jesse  42:33  Yeah, so, certainly, within the public domain [that’s true.] I think her sample of 500 is a really, really impressive sample of ex-Mormons. I’m not sure. I mean, John Dehlin and some others were involved in this faith crisis research, right?

GT  42:54  Right.

Jesse  42:54  And she gave an answer why that wasn’t the same, and I don’t remember…

GT  42:58  Well, it was a self-selected sample. That’s why.

Jesse  43:01  Oh, it wasn’t representative. That’s right.

GT  43:02  Yeah. Whereas Jana’s was statistically significant.

Jesse  43:05  Yeah, it was statistically representative. Yeah.

GT  43:07  Yeah.  Because she used, I don’t remember who she used, but she used a national firm to find those people.

Jesse  43:13  I don’t remember which firm she used either. But what she essentially did was, she used what’s called a quota sample. A quota sample is not actually, like a probability sample, it’s not perfectly representative, but it’s about as good as you can get in a society like we live in, where, basically, you know what the population is supposed to look like. You know that Mormons are way more white than the general United States population. So, we might be like, 90% white. I don’t remember exactly what it is, but it might be like, 90% white, whereas the general US population is like 70%, or 60% white.

Jesse  43:14  So, you know approximate age brackets of what people are participating in the church, because of representative Pew research, for instance. You know gender breakdowns, and you know education breakdowns and things like that. Then, you go out, and you collect people who fit within these different groups: I need a person to fill out a survey who is white and has a bachelor’s degree and is a female and falls within the age bracket of 20 to 30. So, once you fill that, once you grab that person, they fit into a quota. They fit into that group. Once you fill all your quotas, then you say [that] this wasn’t actually randomly selected, but because the sample that we got approximately represents the population parameters on these demographic characteristics, then you can say it’s probably representative, even though we didn’t collect it in a randomized way. So, it’s a good approach. It’s about the best anybody can do when you don’t have access to a random sampling approach. So, it definitely is better than what’s been done so far.

GT  44:57  Even with random sampling, you’re going to oversample people with phones, versus people who don’t have phones and that sort of thing.

Jesse  45:04  Yeah, even like the census, we spend something like $6 billion, conducting the census every 10 years, and it’s still biased. It still underrepresents people in gated communities and underrepresents the homeless and things like that. So, a sample is more than adequate. It’s silly that we continue to do the census. Because, if you just allowed the Census Bureau to perform representative samples of every community, then it would be good enough for a fraction of the cost.

GT  45:07  Oh wow. Well, it’s in the Constitution.

Jesse  45:09  We have to do it, whether it makes sense or not.

GT  45:39  So what do you think about her sample of ex-Mormons? Was that pretty representative of what the Church already knows?

Jesse  45:45  Yeah. You have to remember. She hasn’t written that book yet.

GT  45:48  Well she did, with The Next Mormons. She’s on another book.

Jesse  45:50  My understanding is that her original sample represents, like, she collected, at the same time, these people who were ex-Mormons and the people who were actively participating, identifying as Mormons. So, The Next Mormons, characterizes people who currently say that they’re Mormon. And so she hasn’t written this book yet about the 500 people who are ex-Mormons. We don’t really know–I don’t know what she’s saying there.

GT  45:54  No, it was in there. Yeah, she talked about Mormons and ex-Mormons. I can’t remember what her new book is going to be about. But, yeah, because she had a thousand people who self-identified as Mormons and then she had 500 people who were ex-Mormons, and there was a chapter or two in the book, about the 500.

Jesse  46:35  Maybe it was peppering in or something. But I think [in] her next book, she’s planning to do a lot more analysis about that. So, I haven’t dug into that enough to really say, but my impression is that, because just having worked at Church Headquarters, we’ve done a lot of research about people who are formerly Mormons, and who have left the Church. [The Church has done] representative samples about the reasons why they leave and what’s going on. One of the things that Jana said in her interview with you that I found really insightful, and a critical takeaway was that most of the people in her survey, and most of the people we know more generally, who leave the Church, are not leaving for faith crisis reasons.

GT  46:45  But they are the most vocal.

Jesse  46:45  So the faith crisis people appear to us to be like the huge group of people who are leaving, because they’re so vocal about it. But most people actually leave, like she said in her interview, that the median age of leaving was 19, which is not at all surprising. Most people are leaving any church, not just the Latter-day Saint Church, any church, they’re leaving around the time when they’re in their late teens, and they’re kind of grappling with this for the first time in deciding, “I don’t have a religious personality and this is not for me,” or right when they first leave home. They have to decide for the first Sunday of their life, whether they’re going to [church.] They’re attending a college and they live in a dorm, and they have to wake up Sunday morning and decide, “Am I going to actually do this? Am I going to go to church? My parents always made me but, is it my thing?”

Jesse  46:45  So, you’ve got people who, for the first time, are grappling with this question. And, if you don’t end up getting married right away, in your early 20s, and you’re a Mormon, it feels like you’re heretical, or, like, you’re not doing the right thing. You’re not on the right path.

GT  48:15  You’re a Democrat.

Jesse  48:16  Yeah, exactly. So, increasingly, people are kind of feeling like what the Church represents is not aligned with my personal life, my experiences, and so they just grow distant. They just fall away. And it’s not like a faith crisis. It’s not like they dug into the hard issues, and they decided, “I don’t believe this.” Most people just drift. And we find that that’s especially concentrated in that late teens, early twenties period. But it can happen to anybody. Most people who leave the church really do leave because they drift away. Like, for instance, maybe you’re traveling for business, or you’re going on vacation or something. You don’t go to church for a couple of weeks while you’re gone. You realize it’s kind of nice to not go to church. You come home, and you’re like, “Honey, do you want to go?” So, you go every other week instead of every week, like you did before. Then, eventually, you’re like, every three weeks, and then it’s every month. Then, you just kind of gradually part.

Jesse  49:09  This is the reason why the pandemic is so scary for the church, because by shutting down church meetings for a period of time, people got in the habit of waking up Sunday morning and not having to get dressed and maybe wearing their pajamas to church. It’s like General Conference on steroids. It’s nice to bake pancakes in the morning and just hang out with your family and have a more relaxed Sunday morning. And because it feels so good, you’re like, “Do I want to go to church as often as I was?” And you just kind of drift away. I think both local and global church leaders are looking at the pandemic right now as a potential catalyst for a lot of people just drifting away, not necessarily having a faith crisis, but just parting ways with the church because it’s easy. It’s just easy to fall away.

GT  49:59  Hmm.

Jesse  50:01  We’ve already seen some anecdotal evidence. I mean, I suspect, I haven’t been at the church [headquarters] for a little while, now. But I suspect that people there at headquarters are continuing to do research to kind of quantify how many people do we have fewer now than before? How many people have left? But we kind of have some anecdotal evidence that’s come from certain wards and stakes where it seems like maybe our in-person attendance is down maybe a third compared to what it used to be. We don’t know if that’s [permanent.] How do [we] extrapolate that? But it seems like a lot of people might either still be attending online, or maybe not participating anymore. So, it’s a little scary.

GT  50:40  One of the things I love about President Nelson is letting cameras in sacrament meeting, which was–that was completely different than before.

Jesse  50:49  Yeah.

GT  50:50  So it’s been nice. Do you see? Do you see cameras going away? I mean, we think we’re at the bottom of the pandemic, but it could come back. Who knows?

Jesse  51:02  Yeah, exactly. We keep hearing maybe this pandemic is kind of wavering out. But I’ve heard some epidemiologists say, like, “This isn’t ever going to go away. For the rest of our lives, we’re always going to have flare ups of COVID, where we have new variants with spikes.”  We’ll probably be able to deal with it. Basically, you just have to have a healthcare system that can kind of handle spikes in cases and hospitalizations. But you have to get back to real life. This is going to be with us for a long time. So, whenever we have these spikes, going forward, we may kind of revert back to a more virtual temporary kind of thing, whether it’s in the workplace or in church or whatever. You might have these periods where people kind of lock down again. As that happens, I think you have to have kind of an openness to continued videography of sacrament meetings and other things.

GT  51:51  I had conversation with Richie Steadman, from The Cultural Hall podcast one time and he said he hopes that the cameras never go away. Because he has said, and I don’t look and see who’s online, or whatever. But he said he’s noticed people who never went to church that are going now because it’s online.

Jesse  52:09  Yeah.

GT  52:10  And you know, there are a lot of elderly people. I know in my ward, my Aaronic priesthood son used to go take sacrament to people couldn’t come to church.

Jesse  52:21  Yeah.

GT  52:21  Well, now they can come and so that’s an option. While I understand that physical attendance might be down, I wonder if they keep track of virtual attendance, because that’s probably up.

Jesse  52:37  Yeah, it’s hard to know because when you have a single person joining with their name on the screen in Zoom, you don’t know if four people are at home watching or if one person is at home. So, you can’t count heads the same way you could when they’re in seat. So, it’s really hard to know what’s going on. Again, at Church Headquarters, they may be doing some kind of research to ask ward clerks to do an in-depth follow up in certain sampled wards to see how many people are behind the names on Zoom? How many people really are attending? How under counted are in-seat sacrament meeting numbers right now, for instance?

GT  53:15  I was in Boise a few months ago, and my nephew had a missionary farewell. And because it was online, even though I was in Boise, I tuned in and watched. I don’t know, if I was home, I probably would have gone in person. But I wonder how many people–because I’ve heard some wards that actually shut off the virtual because they’re like, “You have to come to church.”

Jesse  53:39  Yeah.

GT  53:39  I know that’s ticking off some people.

Jesse  53:41  So far, they’ve left it up to the..

GT  53:41  So, that’s just a rogue state president or whatever?

Jesse  53:48  I mean, it’s not even rogue. They’ve kind of left it up to each individual leader to decide for their stake and their ward whether they’re going to do it. Many local leaders are deciding [that] we need to be as accommodating as we can, for people who are elderly or are sick or immunocompromised or something.  “We need to be as accommodating as we can.”  There are other leaders who are kind of more hard-nosed, who are deciding [that] if we don’t shut this off, then we’re going to train up some people to expect it for the rest of our lives, and we can’t do that.”

Jesse  54:20  At some point, I’m hoping that the Church will make a decision to allow it for everyone, all the time, kind of encourage stakes and wards to [do it,] maybe not leave that up to their own decision making. [I hope they] maybe just universalize it so that everybody can [attend virtually.] So far, it appears like, again, this is anecdotal, but I’ve lived in a few wards since the pandemic and as I look at who’s joining online, often the numbers are kind of small. You might have like seven people joining offline. When I go to in-person church, often I’ve gotten–most everybody I’m seeing. This is like a full ward. This is what we had before. So, it seems like most people are back to attending church in-person who are going to go back to attending church in-person. And if you shut it off, you may be disenfranchising people who are not going to go back, if you shut it off. So, allow them, perhaps, to participate in the only way they will.

Jesse  55:19  Just from my personal life, my wife has a lot of health concerns. She, already, before the pandemic, she wasn’t able to attend church, probably more than once or twice a month, if she was lucky, because she just has a lot of pain all the time. She’s been attending church every single week, virtually, since the pandemic started, and she feels so much better.

GT  55:47  This has been a blessing for her.

Jesse  55:48 It’s a huge blessing. She loves it. But her pain over the course of the pandemic, I mean, it’s gotten worse for the last 14 years, but it’s kind of gotten worse during the pandemic, as well. And if we shut it off, I don’t think she would be able to even attend once a month. She’s got all kinds of issues. I think that she would be precluded from attending church, almost always if we shut it off for her. So, I’m hoping that bishops will recognize, whether the institutional church tells them they need to, or whether they leave it up to individual bishops decisions, I really hope that bishops will recognize this is important for some members to have access in a way they didn’t before.

GT  56:21  Yeah. Cool. Well, so I guess that kind of leads into the other question about, I know it was Elder… Oh, I can’t remember his name. But he talked about–Jensen, Elder Jensen. He was the former Church Historian, two church historians ago. So, it’s been a while, but he said, this was the biggest crisis in the LDS Church since Kirtland, with the number of people that are just leaving the Church. When I talked to you, you said, it’s not just the LDS Church. Every church is losing members. Can you tell us what do you think are the reasons behind that?

Jesse  57:09  Yeah, so there seems to be well, let me just reference my notes here. Because there’s a lot of things going on. And I just don’t want to overlook some things. Okay, so there seems to be a generalized distrust in institutions today. It’s not just churches, though people feel kind of icky about churches. More and more people are kind of saying, “I’m spiritual, but not religious.” I want to connect with God, but I don’t want to do it through that institution. Because they have rules and regulations that don’t feel true to me or don’t feel right to me. Or they seem judgmental in that church, or they seem hypocritical in that church or things like that. So, people are viewing churches with more distrust, but that’s not specific to churches.

Jesse  57:55  In an individualized society, like we have, with such rampant individualism… The United States of America is the most individualistic country in the world, where we care mostly about ourselves, everybody else be damned. “[I care about] my unique personality, my needs. I am not that concerned about other people.” It’s like, self-