Introduction and Welcome

Part 1 of 2 · Ep. 526

John Hamer [00:00:00] Foreign.

John Dehlin [00:00:06] Stories Podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you. This podcast is also available in high definition video@YouTube.com MormonStories Come, come, ye saints.

John Hamer [00:00:28] No toil nor labor fear but with joy wend your way.

John Dehlin [00:00:40] Hello, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. We're coming to you live, in a sense, from the Community of Christ Building in Salt Lake City and in Mill Creek, I'm told. What's the date today? It's February. What, 24th. It's 7pm and I'm delighted to be here in front of a live studio audience and to be here with John Hamer to give a little background on why we're doing this presentation. I've been working with an advisory board of the Open Stories foundation to try and figure out what our new direction is kind of going to be for 2015 and going forward. And the way we've kind of started to parse things out is in the following way. You know, there's probably 5 million active LDS Church members across the world, and then there's probably another 10 million or so that are either inactive or have left the church. And since the LDS Church does a really good job of, of taking care of many of those who attend, we think that's great. But we see sort of a very large audience of people who are trying to figure out what to do with their lives, you know, either as unorthodox members of the church or as people who are transitioning in some way away from orthodoxy. So there are lots of different paths that people can take when they're transitioning away from orthodoxy. Sometimes they stay in the church and try and make that work. And we're going to keep providing support for those who need to do that. But there's also lots of people who have to figure out what to do. Some of them are going to investigate other religious traditions and see if they can find a home in another religious tradition. And some people are going to leave religion altogether. And that's awesome, too. So we are going to focus in the Open Stories foundation on healing and growth, whether it's as an unorthodox Mormon in the church or leaving the church, either as someone who's choosing a secular route or some other faith or spiritual tradition. So in the light of kind of that focus, you know, I can, I can just remember several years ago, having a conversation with John Hamer as he was starting to get excited about the community of Christ. And I remember us talking about it way back then, about, you know, since the community of Christ has taken a bit more progressive steps in terms of its doctrine, its theology, its governance. You know, I remember John and I saying, wouldn't it be interesting if the community of Christ could be a haven for. For people who feel like they need or want to leave the LDS Church, but still want some type of church or spiritual tradition, maybe even building upon the restoration? Because, you know, there's so many stories. There's the scriptures, there's hymns that we have in common, and it's a way to sort of, in theory, and we'll see if John can tell us in practice to sort of have all the best of Mormonism without maybe some of the things that some have found less tasteful. And so tonight, John's going to. The way John framed this to me is that he's going to make his best case for why someone who is interested in possibly retaining ties to the restoration, why someone might consider the community of Christ as an option. And, you know, before someone immediately just turns that off and says, that's crazy, I've got no interest, you know, I just want to say that John Hamer is one of the. The brightest, most caring and thoughtful people I know. Incredibly smart. His. I would not say that in any traditional way. He's a believer of things, and we'll probably get to that. But he still feels like there's a real rich opportunity for those of us who might be interested. So we're not, as the Open Stories foundation, encouraging or pushing people in this direction. But. But we think John, absolutely, through his awesomeness, deserves fair consideration for a path that he's chosen and for a path that he feels could benefit others. And so we're excited that you're here with us in the studio audience, and we're also very excited for those of us who are joining us in Internet land. And John Hamer, welcome back to Mormon Stories for, like, the sixth or seventh or eighth time, I'd say bunch of times.

John Hamer Introduces Himself and His Background

John Hamer [00:05:23] Yeah. Thank you so very much. Thank you so much for, well, your generous welcome and introduction and also just the opportunity to do this. I think that we are actually very much on the same page as what you're talking about. And I think maybe we'll be able to make that case in this presentation, which I kind of titled Transitioning Mormons and Community of Christ and kind of want to go through that maybe with you. And then you can push back at me, you know, anywhere along the way and, or ask questions that you think everybody, your listeners and would be interested in.

John Dehlin [00:05:52] Absolutely. Before we jump in, I just want to say to our listeners who are listening via audio that John Hamer is a gifted graphic designer, graphic artist. He, he, you know, he's a map maker. He, he's even been hired as a, as a former LDS Church member by the Joseph Smith Papers Project to do maps for the church, Joe Smith Papers Project and other church needs. And he's put together a PowerPoint presentation that has like, what, 90 slides?

John Hamer [00:06:22] Yeah. So hopefully we'll see how long this takes.

John Dehlin [00:06:25] And it's good stuff. So this is gonna be on YouTube. So those of you who want to experience John's graphic awesomeness, pause your audio, jump onto YouTube and check it out there, because his visuals are usually always worth the effort. Okay, so with that, John Hamer, why don't you take us through and I'll interrupt you frequently.

John Hamer [00:06:46] Wonderful. Okay, let's get right in. So just as a proviso, right from the start, when in this presentation and this pitch I'm making to you, John, So if your spiritual home right now is the LDS Church and you have no problems, then there is no problem. If you are perfectly happy with the LDS Church, that's wonderful. You know, this presentation is not directed at you. And so you already have a spiritual home. And, you know, we're not going into, you know, the wardhouses, into sacrament meeting and trying to grab people out of there. That's fine. You're already in a great place. So that's the beginning. Okay. However, for some people, as you mentioned in your introduction and everybody on Mormon stories is very aware, your audience knows the reality is that some people don't feel at home or spiritually at home in the Mormon Church. And so there are people who are marginalized for whatever reason within the Mormon Church. And so, however, in my belief, there is not one true path. There is multiple valid paths, as you were even saying in your introduction. So I'm not here to say that the one true path is for transitioning Mormons to transition to community of Christ. You know, there's a perfectly wonderful, you know, as you mentioned, to find a spiritual home with the Unitarians, the Episcopalians, whoever. You know, there are all kinds of other wonderful denominations that you could go to. You can also go and become, you know, be spiritual, but not religious. Let's say organized religion isn't for you anymore. That's a perfectly valid way to be like you mentioned also being secular, being atheist, non theist, secular humanist. That's absolutely wonderful. And as you mentioned again, it's perfectly wonderful if your transition allows you to find a way that you stay lds. Right.

Community of Christ as a Home for Transitioning Mormons

John Dehlin [00:08:26] I just have to say it's so bizarre to hear a representative of a church speaking that sort of language as someone who recently has come out of the LDS tradition. That's, that's mind blowing just to have something.

John Hamer [00:08:39] Every slide is going to be like that. Right. Because in other words, this should be. Because my. One of the whole pitch I'm making here is to try to suggest to you and your listeners or whatever that the community of Christ is going to be a very different kind of religion than what you're going to your expectations and what you are used to. So.

John Dehlin [00:08:53] So get ready for a different experience.

John Hamer [00:08:55] I'm hoping that's going to be the case. Okay, so as I'm saying then, community of Christ, that's a path. It's not the path. So it's a community that I believe has a potential to become a good spiritual home, you know, for some transitioning Mormons seeking, you know, an alternative that honors our shared heritage while being honest about its many failings. So, and I mentioned again, you wrestlers know, Community of Christ is, you know, formally known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the RLDS Church. And so people are aware of that

John Dehlin [00:09:23] and people can go back and listen to former interviews.

John Hamer [00:09:26] We did a whole history that's on YouTube. I think we talked for 10 hours that day on the phone on Mormon stories. On Mormon stories.

John Dehlin [00:09:32] Check it out.

John Hamer [00:09:32] Yeah, so just in that exact same way, just with stepping backwards to get a starting point. So Mormons, as we were just saying, who are disaffected from the LDS Church, they frequently come to wonder, okay, given what I know, how could I ever associate with a church that has its origins with Joseph Smith? Yep.

John Dehlin [00:09:52] I'm wondering that myself.

John Hamer [00:09:53] Exactly. Given that my maybe hurtful experience with a particular religion, how could I ever feel at home in any religion? And frankly, do I even believe in God? I mean, that's just very natural. And lots of people coming out of the LDS Church are feeling that way. I'm not telling you anything new. So again with the common expectations. So when you're incredibly familiar with the LDS Church, it's really natural to suppose that all religions are fundamentally like the religion that you know so well. And then just thinking of the RLDS Church, thinking of Community of Christ, you've heard that it's maybe a liberal version of the Mormon Church, maybe some kind of lukewarm liberal version of the LDS Church. But what I'm really trying to make the case here is that all religions, I mean, there are religions that exist that are completely different from the LDS Church in completely unexpected ways. And community of Christ is anything but Mormon light. Okay, okay, so how do we get from this common point of origin to two very, very different places? So the church was together, was only one church from the 1820s to 1844, but now we're in two completely different places. How did we get from there to here? So obviously the Mormon Church is a church that was, for example, a major supporter of Prop 8, excommunicated the founder of ordained women this year, last year, emphasizes, and again, total obedience to leadership, and then excommunicated those who are perceived to be disobedient to those leaders. By contrast, Community of Christ has embraced marriage equality and performs same sex marriages as a sacrament of the Church. Ordained women are at all levels of church leadership, including the Apostles and the First Presidency. And we embrace unity and diversity as one of our enduring principles. And disagreement with leaderships is viewed as strengthening the community as opposed to a problem. I'm going to suggest then, okay, well, how did we get to these two completely different places? So I'm going to suggest that both those places existed in the early church because the early church had these tensions. And so there was one prophet, but then there was personal revelation. And those are competing and at odds with one another. For your relationship with the divine, is it direct or is it mediated through a guy, some one person? Likewise, there was the authority of the leaders and then there was by common consent who was governing the church. Is it the common consent of everyone or is it the authority of the leaders? That was there in both things were there at the beginning. And the different churches have taken different things from the same beginning. The other thing that's there as a tension in the early church is, you know, you have this idea of the restoration. The restoration is the restoration of an ancient order of things, you know, but then we have continuing revelation. So then something that gets restored in 1830 gets restored completely a different way in 1835. And the restored things contradict each other. So then how do you reason that out? How do you work that out? It causes attention, same thing. So therefore the way we look at it then is okay, the restoration of an ancient order. It's really harkening back to what is really a Golden age myth, something that it doesn't really exist and rather was maybe pined for or an ideal, but it isn't something that really exists. But rather there's the reality of ongoing change. And so those tensions exist in the very concept of restoration. So the way I draw this thing, and you've seen the slide probably, I think we did this in the other one is the early church is constantly changing. And so I kind of do this as a spectrum of colors. And it's also moving and across the map from New York across to Missouri and Illinois, Ohio, everywhere. So the church's name changed, obviously, the location changed. There's totally different concepts of priesthood, the leadership structure. I mean, from beginning to end, there were all new practices and sacraments. There were totally different conceptions of God, you know, and cosmology from the very beginning to the end. I mean, that's all well known to you.

Restoration History and Community of Christ Origins

John Dehlin [00:13:46] And this is not the community of Christ. This is actually.

John Hamer [00:13:49] This is the early church. So before the 20s.

John Dehlin [00:13:51] Yeah, yeah.

John Hamer [00:13:51] To 1844. So, yeah, I'm suggesting that that has. Was changing the entire time. And so if you go to 1844 and we were to say, okay, let's take the way the church was in 1844, if you could, as a church preserve, if we decided that was the fullness of the gospel or something like that, if a church absolutely preserved the way the church was then, as opposed to what it had been changing, and you tried to live out that experience from that point on, you would be reliving something that is totally static, that would have nothing to do with the actual lived experience of the church, which was one of constant, dynamic and continual changes. So, in other words, change was what the experience was. And so if you're just doing something where you're preserving, you know, one moment of it, that that's just a split second that only existed for a split second.

John Dehlin [00:14:36] And that kind of. For me, that's manifest in the doctrine and covenants that we use, because you just see new sections. New sections, new sections all the time. And then all of a sudden, with section 130, whatever, 136, 138, it stops. Right?

John Hamer [00:14:51] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:14:51] No more sections.

John Hamer [00:14:52] Right. Whereas in Community of Christ, the sections just keep coming and coming and coming. So the most recent sections, or the sections that allow for marriage equality, or 25 years ago now, or 30, whatever it is, years ago, the ceasing to discriminate in priesthood ordination on the basis of gender, so women's ordination. So the two paths back from 1844 on Brigham's Church, Emma's church. So when you go back to that restoration grab bag of things that were happening, there's different ways you can go. You can take, like I say that 1844, Brigham Young actually dials it back a little bit. What he does is he takes the secret practices that have been going on just with a couple people in Nauvoo or the inner circle in Nauvoo, and he brings that out to the entire church. So that is a little bit of a change. And then he also is not as interested in the last little bit of things that Joseph Smith was doing. The kingdom kind of stuff and the council of 50 and running for president, that kind of thing. He wasn't around for some of that, or he wasn't as familiar with it. And so he dials it back to what he's a little more familiar with. By contrast, for the majority of people that end up in Community of Christ, they actually go on all kinds of other movements. So they follow all kinds of different prophets and leaders. So they become Brighamites, some of them, or they became Strangites or Cutlerites or all the other different things, all the other different leaders. And then at a certain point when those church organizations are breaking down, that's when Joseph III and Emma are affiliating with the reorganization. So they hadn't been involved in any of those churches, but they joined with the reorganization right around the time that all those other churches are collapsing. And as a result, all those people that are gathered in are kind of like dissenters who have gone off and they have all their own different new weird kinds of Mormonism that, you know, are not, you know, that are not in communion with each other. So the Strangites have become, because of their new prophet that they had, you know, James Strang, they've become like seventh day Sabbatarian. So they have Sabbath on Saturday. And so when they come into the reorganization, Joseph iii, Herald House, our Deseret book actually has to publish a book on why the Lord's day is Sunday. And the only reason for that is because these other views that had existed. And so when Joseph III is trying to come to a place where everybody can have kind of a common view of the restoration heritage. What he remembers back to is this wonderful kind of moment in Kirtland, this great moment of outpouring of the spirit right after Kirtland Temple had been dedicated, but before Kirtland collapses because of the bank and everything like that. And so that's kind of the initial focus of where he is bringing the church to but then from that on, community of Christ has just been dynamically changing ever since, you know, he kind of gathered everybody together.

John Dehlin [00:17:34] I can see them wanting to go to Kirtland, Emma and Joseph iii, purely because it was pre polygamy.

John Hamer [00:17:40] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:17:40] Right.

John Hamer [00:17:41] Yeah. Well, or pre. Officially polygamy, that's true.

John Dehlin [00:17:45] Pre Nauvoo polygamy, I should say.

John Hamer [00:17:47] Pre Nauvoo polygamy. Yes. Okay. So just as an example, I always like to use of Joseph III's refocusing. So there's a hymn that's in the wake of the martyrdom of his father that's written, that's called, you know, praise to the man, and that's in the LDS hymnal, you know, praise to the man who communed with Jehovah. Jesus anointed that prophet and seer mingling with gods he can plan for his brethren Kings shall extol him and nations revere. And so for Joseph iii, who's actually growing up in the, you know, the ruins of Nauvoo, you know, the failure of, you know, his father's kingdom on the Mississippi, and he's trying to piece together what went wrong, and he's now feeling called to be prophet of a new organization of the church. He wants to refocus things away. He's not comfortable with something that really has kind of been moving towards, let's say, worshiping his dad, you know, and so he wants to refocus things away from, like, dad worship and then back to focus on God. So he himself rewrites that hymn and the lyrics he has. Praise to the Lord for the great restoration brought by an angel to Joseph the Seer, please. Pleading with God on behalf of his brethren, the church to establish the gospel declare. So again, goes from praise to the man to praise to the Lord. And so ultimately, you know, Joseph III is actually president of the reorganization for an enormously long time from 1860 to 1914. And so he ends up putting a big imprint on the movement. And. And he is very influenced by Emma. So in a lot of ways, we sometimes think of community of Christ as being Emma's church. In a lot of real ways, it is at the same time as he. At the end of his life, towards the end of his life, his cousin Hyrum's son, Joseph F. Smith, is LDS Church president.

John Dehlin [00:19:42] They're first cousins, right?

John Hamer [00:19:43] They're first cousins, yes. Been friends when they were little, but were not friends at that point, was not getting along well at all. So then by the early 1900s, then the path had really, really diverged. And so, for example, out in Utah, the church had gotten to the point where those secret beliefs, like I said in Nauvoo practices, polygamy and also temple practices and things like that had been brought to the general church. But by the 1900s that had started to be purged. I mean, the 1890 manifesto was not the end of polygamy, but it was the beginning of the end of polygamy. And so the beliefs for the LDS church had started to be Nauvoo theology, which includes eternal progression, multiple gods, the Nauvoo endowment, baptism for the dead, celestial marriage, which initially was plural marriage, but then it just became celestial without the plural. The book of Abraham is added to the canon and such things as tithing on income, and also word of wisdom becomes a test of fellowship. Whereas in Community of Christ, Joseph III had been bringing together old saints with all the different beliefs. He, he focused on a kind of a Kirtland theology. Their core thing was opposing polygamy. But this was essentially a negative identity. So the whole long time in the RLDS church was, you know, RLDS church. We're not the Mormons or you know, we're the actual, the good Mormons or they're there that stole our church from us or whatever it is, you know, so it's this negative identity. But there was also a positive identity that was remembered, like building Zion United Orders, you know, the return to Jackson County. All of those old ideals were kind of in the forefront. So making communitarian experiments, Kirtland theology. So pre Nauvoo theology, so something more normal Christian idea of God inspired version of the Bible. Emma had hold of the manuscript of that. It was incredibly important to her. And so that is published very early on in the Joseph Smith translation in the Reorganized Church. And then as you mentioned, new Revelations continually added to the dnc. And then right early on for the church, the church was very focused on peace. And so having had this experience of taking up arms against neighbors and having that go so badly every single time, having lost the Missouri Mormon War, lost the Nauvoo War, Joseph and Emma were very concerned about how to live with their neighbors as opposed to taking up arms against neighbors. So peace was at the forefront. So just over. So to fast forward to today, from the early 20th century to the present, there's been this massive change in American society. Of course, so everybody had been subsistence farmers, they became industrial workers, from industrial workers, they became service workers. And people went from primarily being educated in just primary and secondary School to being college educated. And, and education changes radically when that happens. So especially early 20th century primary and secondary education was really focusing on memorization. So in other words, if you were going to learn about history that was memorizing certain facts, you memorized whatever the story that Columbus was proving that the world wasn't flat. Right. But then when you go to college, then you were learning critical thinking. And so you learned that you need to look for the source for that story. You find out that that's a myth, that that's been totally debunked, that wasn't what was happening at all, that everybody knew the world was round. So anybody who was a scholar, Columbus wasn't proving that. So anyway, so the problem for it is then that churches got locked in on being this other kind of educational system. So a church is an alternative educational system in some ways. And it was a primary and secondary base for, for populations that were educated that way and who were completely content to memorize a list of doctrine or memorize how the plan works, or memorize this and that kind of list. And that was entirely meaningful. And it can be meaningful for people still. There's nothing wrong with that. But for when you start to become college educated and you start to then question what that list, where did that list come from? Does that list make any sense? Is it coherent then those faith crises that you are so familiar with, that everybody you know who is coming to you, you know, that's where they all arise from.

Critical Thinking and the Mormon Intellectual Tradition

John Dehlin [00:24:03] You know, that's kind of why we see the rise of, I don't know, Fawn brody in the 40s and 50s to dialogue in the 60s, to Sunstone in the 70s.

John Hamer [00:24:13] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:24:13] You get more and more of an educated base that's learned the critical thinking skills. You're going to get more questions, potentially more dissent.

John Hamer [00:24:23] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:24:23] More disaffection.

John Hamer [00:24:24] And that's exactly what happens. Right. So that happens in. But for both churches. So both churches have those populations and then those churches have what is called the challenges of the New Mormon history. So as early as Fawn Brody, but especially hitting hard in the 60s, 70s and beyond, professional scholars within the movement begun to challenge the kind of traditional stories, just how everybody had sort of understood it. And so what scholars then start to tell everybody in the movement or that what the research begins to yield is, okay, the Book of Mormon is not an ancient document. You know, the inspired version or the Joseph Smith translation. That's not a translation. It's not accurate. It doesn't reflect any old biblical text. The Book of Abraham is not a translation at all. Digging into the first vision, it turns out that there's conflicting accounts of the first vision, and the one that's canonized in the LDS Church is a late one, and it's probably, you know, the least historically viable. Therefore, Joseph Jr. Also, it turns out, did practice plural marriage or celestial marriage. And that was. That's a big one for some Mormons today because they have forgotten that their church, everybody was screaming that pretty loud that Joseph Smith had founded it in the 1800s. But it was a hard one for people in the RLDS church to come to terms with because the way we had always told the story was that Brigham Young had been the person that had started it and that Joseph had been this wonderful, innocent guy, you know, but obviously that didn't hold up, you know, so.

John Dehlin [00:25:57] And we tend to think in 2015 that, well, this information became available when the Internet sort of broke on the scene and, you know, in the late 90s, early 2000s. But the truth is, scholars started uncovering this stuff, like we discussed with the Tanners on Mormon stories, this stuff started emerging in the 50s and the 60s.

John Hamer [00:26:19] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:26:19] And without the Internet, this information was received very differently in the Reorganized Church than it was in the LDS Church. In some sense, they started facing these facts three, four decades earlier than the LDS Church is starting to face them. True.

John Hamer [00:26:38] Oh, yeah. Well, both churches kind of start to experience at the same time, but it. The LDS Church has done a different tactic and a different response to it, and that's why it's still experiencing it. And so actually, so this idea of the, like, for example, of the polygamy, Joseph Smith and polygamy, that would have been extremely well known to Mormons as of 1900, and it's only because its total absence from LDS manuals from 1950 on, or whenever it had got entirely purged out of the manuals that this, you know, this recent essay on the church website, you know, came as such a shock to so many people. Or why rough stone rolling is such a shock to so many people. Right. So because that has now that is no longer commonly taught throughout all the regular church materials. Whereas in my congregation, when that thing hit the New York Times, you know, and it's talking about Joseph Smith and his young wives and all this kind of thing, and it's all over the media, you know, my. The members were asked, came to me and asked, why does the Mormon Church keep on talking about, why are they bringing this up again? You know, or something like that. You Know, because everybody, as far as everybody in my congregation knew Mormons have always said that that's always been the Mormon message. In other words, we hadn't aware that that had been lost or that information had been lost. But like you say, it had been very hard for us, you know, for members of the RLDS tradition, old members, you know, to have been able to come to terms with that.

John Dehlin [00:28:04] So I'm just saying, while this stuff was really breaking in the 50s and 60s to both churches, the LDS Church seemed to have chosen to kind of purge it from the manuals and from the memory of its members, while the Community of Christ or the reorganized church kind of chose to face it head on a bit.

John Hamer [00:28:21] Right? Yes, exactly. So in the 60s and 70s, therefore, the past diverged further. Right? Because as you say, the LDS leaders largely react against the challenge of the new Mormon history. And so they deny or explain away evidence about the Book of Mormon, the Book of Abraham, the Joseph Smith translation. They entirely affirm the canonized version of the first Vision. Leonard Arrington, who had had this incredible dawn in the church history department out here In Utah, his department gets shut down, they get shipped off to BYU or whatever. I mean, as you know, then September 6th are disciplined, and then all the way up till the present day when K. Kelly and you, you know, Benex community.

John Dehlin [00:29:00] That's me on your slide.

John Hamer [00:29:01] You're on the slide. You know, whereas the other side is the. The leaders of Community of Christ largely embraced the. What we find in the. In the. The new Mormon history. So essentially, accepting the evidence about the Book of Mormon, the inspired version, polygamy, we begin to look at the earlier account of the first vision as probably being, you know, more accurate in our case, our version of Leonard Arrington as Dick Howard. He was the very first professional historian who became historian of the RLDS church. And in his case, his assistant, Grant McMurray, who is sort of the equivalent of Arrington's assistant, Mike Quinn. So instead of excommunicating the assistant, the assistant, the historian's assistant ultimately becomes prophet of the Community of Christ. So Grant McMurray became prophet of the community of Christ in the 1990s. And so ultimately, what ends up happening is the leaders become academics and. And vice versa. So instead of everybody having business degrees or, you know, and being really good at being a CEO of a company and everything like that, all the leaders in Community Christ tend to be guys with divinities, degrees, or theological studies and that kind of thing, religious studies. And as a result, we are really bad at running the church like a business and we're broke and all that kind of thing, you know. So anyway. But it did result in a number of firsts. And so, I mean, I'll have the slide here, but essentially, in 1980, the first Asian apostle. In 85 women ordained to the priesthood. 98, the first women apostles. 2000, the first African apostle. 2000, two women in the presiding bishopric. 2007, the first Latin American apostle. 2007, the first woman in the first Presidency, and Most recently in 2013, the first Polynesian apostle.

John Dehlin [00:30:45] Nice.

John Hamer [00:30:47] Still going.

John Dehlin [00:30:49] Okay, so just real quick. That was real fast for me. I couldn't see the slide.

John Hamer [00:30:52] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:30:52] Blacks received the ability to have the priesthood when.

John Hamer [00:30:56] 1860. Something in your.

John Dehlin [00:30:58] In your church.

John Hamer [00:30:59] Yeah, in 1860s.

John Dehlin [00:31:00] Okay. And then. And then women when?

John Hamer [00:31:02] 85. 85, yeah, 1985.

John Dehlin [00:31:05] Okay, okay,

John Hamer [00:31:08] okay. So how is it possible. So how is it possible to have this kind of a restoration church? And so the rest of the presentation, what I want to kind of illustrate is the difference between what I'm kind of thinking of as a literalistic, focused church and what I'm going to call a meaningfulness or meaningful meaning focused church, meaning focused religion. And I'm just kind of as a shorthand for that. The literal focus is a church that's focused on answering questions and then the meaning focus, questioning answers, just to set it up, the comparison. So for a literalistic conception, so the LDS Church focused on a perceived dichotomy between truth and fraud. The institutional LDS conception of cosmology, how the world, the universe works, the plan of salvation, that kind of thing, and the interpretation of Scripture are extremely literal. And the LDS leaders focus on doctrine and history rather than on theology. And we have to even divine define what theology is, because Mormons don't have a lot of experience with it often, or a lot of Mormons, of course, do. But in terms of from the manuals, let's say the institutional church. And so just to illustrate it, in the interview from the Mormons, the documentary on pbs, Gordon Hinckley said, well, it's either true or it's false. If it's false, we're engaged in a great fraud. If it's true, it's the most important thing in the world. Now, that's the whole picture. Either it's right or wrong, true or false, fraudulent or true. So I don't think I'm overstating it to say that there's kind of a truth fraud dichotomy. And so in that kind of a Dichotomy. LDS members then conceive of churches as something that can be true or false. I know this church is true. Something that said LDS church claims exclusivity of truth. The one and only true church upon the face of the earth. The LDS hierarchy interprets Joseph Smith's restoration as a literal restoration of authority on earth. And they consider themselves and their institution the the sole heirs of that authority. And LDS manuals primarily read the Book of Mormon as a literal history book. So I don't think that's saying anything. Okay. And so, but when you're having this truth fraud dichotomy, so then what's the opposite of literally true? I mean it's false, fraud, fiction. That's just the framework, that's just how the world is viewed. And so anyway, like I say, there's a very literal conception of scripture in the LDS Church. I went and saw the movie the Testaments one of the last couple years when I was here. It was kind of amazing to me. It's very literal, you know, so. But the problems with viewing scripture as, you know, you know, as literal are things like, okay, there's no Eden, there's human evolution. There was no universal flood. There was no confounding of the languages of the Tower of Babel linguistics. And we know that that's not how it happened in multiple languages. Archeology tells us there was probably, there's no Exodus or there's no record of that in Egyptian history. Most recent archaeology indicates that there probably was no United Davidic kingdom. So there was no United Kingdom under David and Solomon. If you go to the New Testament, there was no Augustan decree of a census. There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus. There was never any kind of census like that. There was no massacre of the innocents by King Herod. There was no immediate return of Jesus. So people put into Jesus mouth, you know, I tell you that this generation will not pass away, that you'll see the Son of Man returning in glory. That generation passed away. So if you go over to the Book of Mormon, there's no Lehigh DNA, there's no linguistic remains, There was no rearrangement of the continents. There's none of the western grains, animals, wheels, you know, all those kind of things in the Book of Mormon. If you go forward to the Doctrine and Covenants, the so called Civil War prophecy that was actually issued because of the nullification crisis. South Carolina was threatening to nullify federal laws over a federal tariff. And Joseph Smith then predicted that that would result in a war that would immediately bring about Armageddon and the world would end within a couple years. Obviously that didn't happen even if it was about the Civil War. If you want to have it be that way. Armageddon didn't happen. That didn't happen and didn't pan out. Or more obvious, there was a timeline for when Zion was going to be redeemed. So all the land that they got kicked out in Jackson county, they were going to get it back within a certain number of years. That prophecy also failed. So obviously much of scripture then is conclusively non historical.

Scripture, Literalism, and Doctrinal Flexibility

John Dehlin [00:35:24] Is that prophecy removed from the Doctrine and Covenants in our version? I don't think it's still there.

John Hamer [00:35:29] Yeah, with the timeline, I'll have to look it up. No, I mean it's like there's like Diana, it's amazing what we forget.

John Dehlin [00:35:36] We just read DNC132.

John Hamer [00:35:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:35:38] We don't even think about it. So.

John Hamer [00:35:39] Yeah, there could be all sorts of

John Dehlin [00:35:41] things in the Doctrine and Covenants.

John Hamer [00:35:42] Well, people don't read the whole DNC132 though. Right. You only want to read a couple verses out of that. Because if you start reading it.

John Dehlin [00:35:48] Yeah. It's the worst thing you can do sometimes. Read those things.

John Hamer [00:35:51] Yeah. I mean the manual only tells you to read like this and that verse. Right. The last thing you want to do is bring the whole.

John Dehlin [00:35:56] Read the whole thing.

John Hamer [00:35:57] Yeah, don't do that. You know, go ahead and read it. Yeah, okay, but so what's the result? So we have this bias and this is true for everybody actually post the enlightenment. So the entire modern era we have a bias that privileges literal readings. Okay. We have the reality that Scripture is not literal history. And the equation means is that equals a faith crisis in some degree or

John Dehlin [00:36:20] other, if you're thinking about it.

John Hamer [00:36:22] Yeah, but the middle part is Scripture is not literal history. If you're not thinking about that, then you won't get to this part of the equation. So like I'm saying if you were to point where you were not doing the critical thinking, if you're just, you know, like, if you're just, you know, like primary and secondary education kind of thinking where you're just. Or even you can do it, you can do this, you can do an apologetic path. There's another path where you can be involved in, you know, college type, you know, like farm style research where you're doing this thing where you're doing reaction, reactionary apologetics where you were coming up with more and more contorted ways in Order to distort the text to try to make it still be literal, you know, and so you end up, you know, getting to the extreme of saying that the horses are tapirs and that the swords are really sticks with rocks on the end of them or something like that. And so it just gets more and more contorted and it gets farther and farther away from the actual meaning or the intent of the author and in the text in order to just preserve at any cost this idea that it's literal.

John Dehlin [00:37:18] Right.

John Hamer [00:37:19] Okay. So if you don't go down well, anyway, actually that's what I'm gonna even say with this slide. So it's. How do you address this thing? So you can do this thing where you take that you go after this one thing that scripture's not literal history. And so you can go after that in all those ways like FARMS is doing, where you just deny, deny, deny, and you come up with this extreme position where you're saying if, which is not how history works as an academic discipline, but where you say if it's not 100% conclusively smoking gun proved fals, that means it's possibly true. That's not how history works. History is what is the most likely scenario given the preponderance of evidence. How does the evidence. What's the explanation that best fits the evidence? It's not, do we have to prove a negative false? Right. So that's the one way to do it. You can also go to address it on this end of the equation, faith crisis of some degree, which is like all these transitioning paths that we're talking about. So, so many people, there's a million ex Mormons in North America or more than that. And so whatever the Pew research is a million people that identified as Mormons when they were 13, and now they don't identify as Mormons in the United States or something like that. And so you can go that direction, and that's a perfectly valid way to do it. The other way I'm going to suggest, though, is we can attack. We can look at our own biases about how we think of scripture, how we think of religion, how we think about literalism in the first place. And so, okay, if we look at before the Enlightenment view of scripture that people had in the past. So did people believe that scripture was literal or symbolic when they were the medieval Christians, the primitive Christians at the time of the New Testament, the Israelites in the time of the prophet Jeremiah, did the people then believe that scripture was literal? Or do they believe that it was symbolic. They believed both. So in other words, it's both literal, but also symbolic of a deeper meaning. Right. So it's meaningful. So pre modern people, everything in life and the world, biology, nature, history, every single thing was simultaneously both, you know, literal and symbolic. Although for when I say literal, they had less. Less of a exacting sense of literalness that we do now. So, in other words, because we have developed the academic discipline of history and we are so able to understand that the past has undergone all this change, and we have so much access to data and for information, we have a much more exacting sense of literalness than anybody in the past ever had. They pretty much had stories. They presumed that the stories happened. They didn't think of the stories as happening in any more deep sense than the story, but we have this more exacting sense. So they believed the stories really happened. They also believed that everything had a symbolic meaning. However, the more important part of the equation there is the meaning. So it didn't so much matter that the thing had happened. But what was that a sign of? How was that a sign of? If an animal has a particular characteristic or if there's a certain number of planets, what does that number mean? What is that meaningful for?

John Dehlin [00:40:27] You know, it's kind of what Dan Witherspoon likes to say. It's. It's not about the thing. It's about what the thing is pointing to that there.

John Hamer [00:40:34] Right.

John Dehlin [00:40:34] That it's. It's not about the thing. It's about. It's about the direction we're going spiritually, how it moves you and what type of person it makes you become. That's right. That's more important than. Yeah, the actual thing.

John Hamer [00:40:46] And that was absolutely true for them, although they did. I'm not saying here. I'm not gonna say that they didn't think that the stuff happened. You know, they did, but they also felt that it had a meaning and that was the thing that they cared about. They would write the thing that happened, and they would spend all this time then explaining out why that's important and what that means, and that was the time that they would spend their most time on. And so just even to talk about literalism, just early Christians on literalism, I just have St. Paul here as a. Or Paul the Apostle as an example. So quoting from 2 Corinthians 3, 6. Christ has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. And it's not an uncommon Interpretation of whether things are by the letter and taken literally or whether they are, you know, by the spirit, the spirit of the event, the spirit of the idea and the meaning of it. And so all early church writers will. A lot of early church writers will express exactly that thing. So same thing. Origen, Augustine, have very similar things that they say and interpretations they make.

John Dehlin [00:41:53] And I think this spirit lives on in our love for fiction. Because the fiction genre, the fiction market's huge. You could read Harry Potter or, you know, John Steinbeck. Why do we have those people don't exist. They never existed. The time period is picked, and it doesn't matter because you're driving all this meaning from the story. So I think a modern mind can get that there's tons of meaning over fictional. Potentially fictional things.

John Hamer [00:42:19] Sure. I mean, and we wouldn't. Why would we continuously have all these superhero movies, except for Hollywood, makes money off of them and all that kind of thing, but it makes money off of them. And you can continuously apparently reboot Spider man every two years or something like that. Because the story of Spider man somehow has the resonance. And people like to, you know, see the story retold, I guess, you know, because they'll go to it, you know.

John Dehlin [00:42:40] Yep.

John Hamer [00:42:43] All right, so I also have A philosophical brief. L2 Briefly, a brief philosophical argument against. Against the idea that a literal. If Scripture is a literal history, that that history can. I mean, that that can have any meaning at all. Okay, so let's say that we have the Bible and let's say we have Genesis or Exodus, let's say Exodus. And that is a literal story of exactly, essentially what happened when Moses goes to Pharaoh and Pharaoh won't let the people go, and there's all the plagues and everything like that. So. So that literally happened, let's say. That's exactly history. And it was very important, you know, for a divine stenographer in the form of Moses or whoever it was who was simply, you know, able to, either through a vision, when he's writing about the stuff that he didn't actually see, or when he's actually the eyewitness and he's writing in it exactly the way God wants it written, and he wants it that way because that obviously is a meaning in our lives. It's some kind of rule book for us. In other words, it's not important from a historical standpoint, really, because history. There's all kinds of history. And history. It's not important, for example, what the history of the Roman Empire might be as scripture. That's not scripture or the history of the Hittites. That doesn't make it scripture. So this particular events of history is scripture. And it's also therefore a meaningful thing for us about how we should be living our lives. Right. So where is the role for free will there? So is Pharaoh a person? Was Pharaoh able to act in a particular way? So if Pharaoh was open to make decisions, how could that story, how could that history, how could those events be the message that it was exactly what God wanted us to hear if Pharaoh had free will? All right, so I'm just going to say there's no meaning to it if it's actually literal history, because there can't be unless Pharaoh is not a person. So in other words, there's a paradox of trying to believe it that way, that in making things literal and insisting on the literal, we have to get rid of the meaningful part. So going to this truth fault, back to this truth fraud dichotomy, I'm going to suggest that this dichotomy itself is the problem. And so where we are in community of Christ is taking that and seeing a completely different dimension, getting rid of that entire framework. And so life, instead of saying everything is either black or white, true or false, rather, life is not simply black and white. There isn't simply some simple answer to the problem of evil. Oh, it's just a test, or oh, this and that. In other words, if we were to say that the whole problem of evil, why are children dying in horrific ways around the entire world? Well, it's a test and they're going to the celestial kingdom anyway. If we have a simple little answer like that, we are just absolutely minimizing their experience, what they are going through. We're saying their suffering is simplistic. And so do I have a simple answer to that? That's no, of course I don't. And it would be simplistic. I would just be reducing it to simplicity if I had a simple answer. We have ways. We struggle with it, we go through it with a way, we try to deal with, with those issues, but they're not simple. Okay, so going back to then, these things that I gave you before when I was kind of just listing off characteristics, you didn't, you just went nod and you didn't care. You're like, that's exactly right about the LDS church. So LDS members conceive of churches that something can, that can be true or false. I know this church is true. So I'm going to now, you know, give you the what I think is a community of Christ perspective. People are all over the place in the community of Christ, but this is a valid way to do it in community of Christ. So all churches in the community of Christ perspective are human institutions. They are human responses to divine calling, built and filled with flawed but good, hopefully intentioned humans. All churches exist within their own time and place in history, and they are subject to cultural biases. Like all human institutions, all churches err and they have to repent of that error in order to learn from that error. So just to have an example of that, I'm going to quote from one of the most recent sections of the doctrine and covenants, DNC 163. It is not pleasing to God when any passage of Scripture is used to diminish or oppress races, genders or classes of human beings. Much physical and emotional violence has been done to some of God's beloved children through the misuse of Scripture. The church is called to confess and repent of such attitudes and practices.

John Dehlin [00:47:18] I'm just, I'm just blown away by the modern sensibility, captured sensibilities captured in that scripture, like so much of, of the scriptures that we, that we in the LDS Church kind of look to. I guess I've heard it described as kind of Bronze Age morality, like whatever got captured in the Old Testament, a lot of that carried through the New Testament and then the Book of Mormon some say is mostly a regurgitation of what's already in the New Testament with the little things mixed through. And as I've tried to sort of absorb modern sensibilities about the importance of equality with gender, sexual orientation, about peace and inequality in the world and social justice, like in so many ways, I feel like I've been hungering for a church that would convey these types of modern sensibilities. Not because, as Ralph Hancock likes to say, anything that's, you know, they like to sort of characterize our position as anything that's modern. It must be therefore better than anything in the past. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is I think we have reached higher levels of understanding and enlightenment about morality that are superior to two or three millennia ago. And it's almost just bizarre to me to hear scripture that reflects that sensibility from sort of 20th century, 21st century.

John Hamer [00:48:41] Yeah, 21st century scripty scripture. But I mean, the way that's one of the, that's the blessing whatever of continuing revelation though, right? So, I mean, if you have continuing revelation, if you have both being a people with a Prophet. And also being a prophetic people, hopefully you have Scripture that can speak directly to our time. So.

John Dehlin [00:49:00] And what. What Christian denomination has continuing revelation? It. Unfortunately, it seems like Protestantism and Catholicism in some ways are largely stuck in literalistic interpretations of Scripture. Now, Catholicism, maybe they issue new edicts from the Pope occasionally, but I mean, that is an interesting legacy that Joseph's left us. Because what are the Christian denominations? Islamic, even Judaism. To what extent they don't have. Do they feel the freedom. Yeah. To issue new scripture?

John Hamer [00:49:31] There's no new scripture.

John Dehlin [00:49:32] They don't, Right.

John Hamer [00:49:32] No, there's no new scripture.

John Dehlin [00:49:33] So are there other denominations issuing new scripture?

John Hamer [00:49:36] Yeah, probably in other religions. But, I mean, you know, like, I don't know.

John Dehlin [00:49:39] None that come to mind, Right.

John Hamer [00:49:41] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:49:41] No, no major. No major world religions that are producing new scripture. Right.

John Hamer [00:49:46] I guess not. I can't think about it. I think that's kind of.

John Dehlin [00:49:49] I mean, I just want to say that's kind of interesting.

John Hamer [00:49:51] Yeah, no, no, it's a wonderful. That's a wonderful. You know, whatever you think of Joseph Smith, and you can think anything you want of Joseph Smith in community of Christ, whatever you think of him, some of these things about these precedents ended up being just incredibly useful, meaningful, helpful. And they have developed into just wonderful things in our tradition, you know, and this is one of them. And so because scripture always speaks to the people in the immediate time period. I mean, it really, the scripture writers are always thinking about their own time. The Book of Revelations is not written to a couple people watching the Left behind series in 2015. It was written to those people in the seven churches of Asia Minor. Right. In the end of the first century or the early second century of the Common Era. And everybody else has misread themselves into it out of kind of egotism, what we have of time. So, yeah, it's a wonderful thing that we have.

John Dehlin [00:50:43] Even the Doctrine of Covenants, it's like, so and so, go sell the copyright to this.

John Hamer [00:50:46] Or so and so that didn't get in.

John Dehlin [00:50:49] Oh, that got left out.

John Hamer [00:50:50] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:50:51] But, you know, so and so go and set up something in, you know, Missouri or whatever.

John Hamer [00:50:57] Build my servant Joseph Smith a house.

John Dehlin [00:50:58] Right. Yeah, yeah. Emma, let your husband have some more wives. Right. It's very specific.

John Hamer [00:51:04] Both of those aren't in our dnc, but anyway, we do have a lot of those, though. So. Yeah. So anyway, that is a wonderful thing. And so and so in terms of that thing of being called upon to repent, you know, of attitudes and practices and error. So one of the things that I mean we mentioned before, we've talked about and you've wondered about is you always ask about, okay, so we, when, when we ceased priesthood discrimination on the basis of gender, you know, there were a lot of people that left the RLDS church. And it's hard to quantify it because it's a small percentage of the people who were names on the rolls, you know, but it's a large percentage of, let's say, really vigorously active tithe payers and that kind of thing. And so, you know, whatever it had been, possibly a quarter or a third of that group and maybe 2, 3% of people on the rolls or whatever it is. And so part of the reason for that, you know, and when in losing all of those people, they ended up either got lost to the restoration or off in their own sort of fundamentalist community of fundamentalist reorganized church style churches. And there's a bunch of them. And so at a certain point now, you know, a generation later, you know, you're stuck in a church or their kids are stuck in a church where the whole end all be, all of the church is not ordaining women, you know, and they would not necessarily be in that place if we had been able to go. We did the right thing, but we maybe didn't do it in the right exact way. And as a result of the way that happened and as a result of that anguish and civil war and everything else that was felt in the church, we, we left a lot of people behind and a lot of people are now stuck, you know, in that, in that kind of a, kind of a church now and that kind of an attitude that those churches are by contrast, Fast forwarding to 2010. You know, the way on the thoughtful and the amazing way that we got to marriage equality, that we got to, you know, ceasing discrimination for LGBT people, it left, it was done through thoughtfully, it was done across the church, church wide discernment as we all pondered these kind of issues. It was done through making institutions like the Welcoming Congregations Network, which went around and just trained congregations about these issues, how to be welcoming, what these issues even were. And this is for very older people, older religious people to come change on this issue. It was a very big deal. And so as a result of that, when it happened, it was a very small number of people, not in even any percentage or whatever. It's very tiny that we're left behind as a result of that. And in my own experience, in my own congregation, I'm pastor of the Toronto Congregation now, the preceding pastor, Roger, a wonderful friend and mentor of mine, he had been one of these guys who as of the year 2000, you know, he'd drawn the line in the sand for him. You know, he'd gone so far with this church and if the church went that much farther and you know, with the gays and had gay marriage and things like that, then he was going to leave the church, you know. And so for him to have gone through this and to gone through that transformation to the point when, you know, when we actually moved, Mike and I moved to Toronto, Roger performed our wedding there. And so having done hundreds of weddings, he had said this was the one that was the most spiritual and meaningful for him, that he was able to have gone to that place and, you know, performed a same sex wedding, you know. And so anyway, having repented of that, you know, we, you know, of the way we had done it in the first place, learned from, we are able to learn from error and you were able to hopefully have wisdom. Whereas if, for example, you, when, when you get, when there was the giving of, you know, we're ceasing to, I don't say giving blacks the priesthood. So if you say ceasing to discriminate in priesthood ordination on the basis of race, when that happened in the 70s in the LDS Church, instead of repenting of what had happened before and saying all the leaders before were wrong, Brigham Young is a horrific racist. Even judged by the standards of his own day, which was a racist time period, he's a horrific racist. The church was at the forefront of that kind of thing all the way up through Ezra Taft Benson here, he wants to run for vice president on the racist ticket in the 1960s, and he wasn't given permission to do it anyway. So the LDS Church was on the forefront of that, but now it's nothing. None of that. There's no saying the leaders were wrong or saying that the church was wrong anyway. So what happens? So then you fall immediately into error. So you fight the era, you're against women's rights, you continue to be against gay rights and everything like that because you didn't learn from the error. If you never admit error.

Priesthood, Racial Equality, and Institutional Reform

John Dehlin [00:55:43] And we can talk about this later, but the question is whether or not that's actually a smart move. If your goal is to. Is to maximize the numbers in your church and the loyalty of the.

John Hamer [00:55:53] That's not our goal.

John Dehlin [00:55:54] Right.

John Hamer [00:55:54] Our goal is to how are we, are we listening to where God is calling us, where we doing what is right and how many People can we bring along with us, you know, in that, in that way, you know, in listening and being open to those kind of things as opposed to, you know, maximizing our numbers or whatever. Like I told you, we're not business people.

John Dehlin [00:56:13] You're saying, you're saying your ethic is do what is right, let the consequence follow.

John Hamer [00:56:17] And that's what we've done. Yes.

John Dehlin [00:56:18] Okay, got it.

John Hamer [00:56:19] Yes,

John Dehlin [00:56:21] checking.

John Hamer [00:56:24] Okay. So another one of these things. The LDS Church claims exclusivity of truth, the one and only true church upon the face of the earth. So that's the LDS side. So what we have on our side is no person in community of Christ conception, no person or institution is exclusively authorized to speak for God or to act in God's name name. Among our enduring principles. They include things like the worth of all persons and all are called and after. You know, we used to think we were the one and only true church back in the 60s. Like, you know, we come from the same restoration tradition, but we do not any longer claim an exclusive monopoly on truth and authority. And instead we just feel that we have a special calling and that we actually. That this is a valuable thing that we're doing and it's a meaningful thing. It's worth. It's worthwhile enough to me that I consider it my life calling. I'm devoting my life to it. This is what I'm going to do.

Exclusive Truth Claims and Open Theology

John Dehlin [00:57:12] I had a friend mention something at a weekend event that I attended last weekend. And basically the person's opinion was there are few things more evil in the world than to tell someone to do something based on your knowledge of God's will, when in reality you don't know God's will. Right. Because you're kind of manipulating them with the full force of divine mandate. And if you happen to be wrong about that, then you're sort of performing some of the worst abuse you could possibly perform. Yeah, I thought that was an interesting perspective.

John Hamer [00:57:42] Yeah, I mean, an example is Joseph Smith and these marriages, underage marriages, other marriages in Nauvoo sort of marriages, whatever they are. I mean, it's an abusive authority of the worst kind of way.

John Dehlin [00:57:57] So that humility is very appealing to me, saying, we're doing our best to discern. We'll take your feedback. Let's discern together what God's will is versus, like, here's what.

John Hamer [00:58:07] Yeah, well, and also, and also to say I don't have to tell everybody in order for me to feel good about myself and to be like, doing a good thing. Or to be smart. I don't have to tell everybody else around me that you're stupid to be. Or in other words, I'm true and you're all false or something like that. I mean, in other words, for me to be doing something really, really wonderful and I'm really excited about that, doesn't mean, you know, we are very ecumenical and we have this thing called the Encounter World Religions center that's based in Toronto that our church does there. And so we go around and we have connections. So there's a wonderful rabbi that I know at the, you know, who's. She's in charge of a, you know, a Reformed synagogue that's really an important pioneering Reform synagogue, you know, and we know, you know, the head of the mosque. And we know, I mean, in other words, we have the different temples and everything like that. And so we have connections to all of them without saying, okay, you guys, you're all wrong, you know, okay, so we also took this one. So the LDS hierarchy interprets Joseph's restoration, Joseph Smith's restoration, as a literal restoration of authority on earth. And they consider themselves in their institution the sole heirs of that authority. And we kind of talked about that. And so we though, look back at that same Joseph Smith experience, and especially, let's say, going to the earlier narrative that he gives about the first vision. And we don't see it as restoring authority that was lost from the earth, but rather we see that experience when you go into the woods and you. Or he was worrying about his sins and he prays to have. He wants to have his sins forgiven of him, you know, and he has a vision, not a visitation, but a vision. And that is the same kind of experience that is open to absolutely everybody. That's not an exclusive thing, just Joseph Smith, that, that never happened. You know, for us, the heavens are always open. And they're open to absolutely everybody in spiritual practice. They're open through your own kind of prayer and through respection, thinking about the eternal, thinking about all that kind of thing, then you are able to access you know, the dynamic, dynamic eternity of God, you know, and it, and it

John Dehlin [01:00:05] feels antithetical to a 21st century Mormon. But if you think about the early years of the church, the messages coming through in the Book of Mormon, that seems more true to Joseph's form of Mormonism than the LDS Church is today to me.

John Hamer [01:00:21] Well, you know, I mean, one of the things that people think, okay, so in the exact same way that having learned from all the manuals and people wonder, you Know, I was lied to because none of the manuals have mentioned Joseph Smith and polygamy. And people say, well, no, that's not lying. We just didn't mention it in the same way. By having like all of these movies, you know, where you just, you know, there's this very physical visitation movies and you have all of these bronze statues of visitation and you have all the paintings and everything is so concrete and literal. You know, Joseph Smith, when he's recounting this story and he's calling it a vision, and in the Book of Mormon it even talks as vision. And it equates vision with dreams even, and dream to dream. You know, he is speaking in an ambiguous way. And so he could be talking about a visitation or he could be talking about a vision, but he's not speaking specifically, holding out a statue and showing it as a visitation. And so whereas I think that he isn't being particularly, he isn't being, I think in some ways ethically honest about, you know, because he's allowing for ambiguous interpretations of that. On the other hand, he is not outright doing it in this one really literalistic way that is portrayed now. You know, so in other words, where the LDS Church has gotten to with this thing and people think of it always in those very concrete terms and it's because you're bombarded with those kind of presentations of it.

John Dehlin [01:01:40] And in addition to that, I'm just sort of reflecting on my understanding of the early church and it seems like there was a bit more of a validation of the individual's ability to discern God's will through personal revelation.

John Hamer [01:01:56] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:01:56] Whereas sometimes it feels like in the modern 21st century church that you can have all the personal inspiration you want unless it conflicts with what the church has taught.

John Hamer [01:02:06] Right.

John Dehlin [01:02:06] And then that's completely invalidated. In other words, the only legitimate personal revelation is that which comes from the

John Hamer [01:02:13] institution or a revelation that confirms what the leaders have said.

John Dehlin [01:02:16] Right.

John Hamer [01:02:17] But yeah, because the LDS Church has evolved into something that is extremely leader focused. And as we talked about it right at the beginning, when I showed it that slide where there's that tension, there's a tension of being a people with a prophetic attention, of people who have personal individual revelation. And so we've on Community of Christ, we've taken it from the other direction. So, yeah, we are still a people with a prophet. But other sections of the dnc, recent sections of the DNC have really emphasized that as a people of the restoration, we are all called to be a prophetic people. And so when I was talking about marriage equality or for example, the recent change where we decided to recognize everyone else's baptisms as valid. So you can, you know, right now you can join without being baptized, John, because we recognize, you know, the baptism, you know, as being valid. When we did that, though, we did it as a. As all of the congregation. So my congregation got together and we, you know, sat around in somebody's house and we just said, okay, so what is really important about baptism to you? What does baptism mean to you? And we were all over the place and people, everybody had different views and different opinions about it all like that. And that was happening church wide. And we all thought about it and we kind of all came together. When we have our World Conference, which is the equivalent of General Conference, except for the difference is from each congregation, they have delegates that go to our mission centers, which are kind of like multi stake regions or something like that. And then the regions send delegates to the World Conference. And so the World Conference again is ruled, it is by common consent. And the delegates, it's still inspiration, but it's inspiration of the people to decide which way God is calling us to do something.

John Dehlin [01:03:58] And are the votes actually counted?

John Hamer [01:03:59] Yeah, yeah. Oh, of course.

John Dehlin [01:04:01] That's different.

John Hamer [01:04:02] Yeah. Because it's.

John Dehlin [01:04:03] So the sustaining actually means something.

John Hamer [01:04:05] Things are voted down. I mean, for the revelation parts, you know, for adding something to the dnc, the president of the church has to leave. And so then we spend the next couple days going over it and deciding if we're putting that in or if it's, you know.

John Dehlin [01:04:18] Yeah, it's a totally different mindset. And it seems to be what was originally intended.

John Hamer [01:04:22] Well, it was definitely. That was happening in Nauvoo. Right. So, I mean, in other words, there's this vote where Joseph Smith at some point or other was mad at Sidney Rigdon, but it was for a private, you know, the private thing, probably because of he had proposed to Sidney Rigdon's daughter who had rebuffed him or whatever. And so he's mad at Sidney Rigdon. And during the General Conference, he wants Sidney to not be suspended as in the First Presidency. But the people sustained Sidney Rigdon anyway. And he's like, oh, well, you put him on my back or whatever. Well, I mean, that's completely alien to the LDS experience. Now, you probably can't imagine how a conference could be voting against what Joseph Smith wants.

John Dehlin [01:04:58] Right, right.

John Hamer [01:05:00] The LDS hierarchy interprets Joseph Smith's restoration as a literal restoration of authority on earth. So the community of Christ is not dependent on Joseph Smith or on any prophet or apostle, because our relationship is with God and our relationships in community and that's our foundation as opposed to Joseph Smith. And so members are free to believe what they will about Joseph Smith and other figures in history. Okay, we said LDS manuals primarily read the Book of Mormon as a literal history book. So according to the community of Christ statements on Scripture, our view of Scripture is that Scripture is vital and essential to the Church, but not because it is inerrant in the sense that every detail is historically or scientifically correct. Scripture makes no such claim for itself. Rather, generations of Christians have found Scripture simply to be trustworthy in keeping them anchored in revelation, in promoting faith in Christ, and in nurturing the life of discipleship. For these purposes, Scripture is unfailingly reliable. So as you can see, that's a different view of Scripture than I think the LDS view a lot of other Christians. And then I'm saying here that I've also suggested to you that the LDS Church focuses on doctrine and history rather than on theology. And so just to look at where community of Christ is on history, we have another one of these statements that's like called the principles of history. And those include points like history informs but does not dictate our faith and belief. The Church encourages honest, responsible historical scholarship

John Dehlin [01:06:25] that's actually consistent with how the LDS Church views things. They're saying, ignore the history. It's all about what you feel inside. So there's an area where you're in agreement.

John Hamer [01:06:33] Well, we're on the same on that one, but I bet it's going to change. We won't be on the same page on all these principles of history. So seeing both the faithfulness and human flaws in our history makes it more believable and realistic, not less. The Church has a long standing tradition that it does not legislate or mandate positions on matters of Church history. So you can believe, like I said, whatever you think want about history based on your own reading of history. And then also the responsible study of Church history involves learning, repentance and trust transformation. So just from that statement then the kind of question is, okay, well, what is the community of Christ position on whether the historical Joseph Smith Jr. Initiated polygamy? What is our position on the historicity of the Book of Mormon? What is our position on the history which words and actions can be traced to the historical Jesus? And so according to the principles of history, that is, the Church does not legislate or mandate positions on matters of Church history. So Those are all not part of the Church. So doctrine versus theology. So what's doctrine? Doctrine you're aware of. So I just have them on the slide here. I just have the Articles of Faith, right? And so that's like a list of doctrine. And so essentially, things like the Articles of Faith, they're relatively arbitrary list. So that list omits, for example, important LDS doctrines like the Three Degrees of Glory, exaltation, Baptism of the Dead Sea, Families can be together forever. Tithing, the Word of Wisdom, observance, all that sort of thing, which are also doctrines. But essentially, therefore, doctrine is essentially an eclectic list of statements that are regarded as true without regard to whether the statements logically cohere with each other. So it's just a list, and we believe these things, okay? Theology, by contrast, it's not eclectic or arbitrary. Rather, it's a process of reasoned and thoughtful or prayerful discernment of general principles. And so it's systematic and rational. The principles logically go here, or they're challenged and modified. And so it's an ongoing process of discerning how to apply enduring principles to our life in our own time and place in history. And so just to take examples of how this works in doctrine versus theology. So one example here, Joseph Smith teaches families must be sealed in a ceremony in this life in order to live together in the afterlife. So from the doctrine perspective, this is pretty easy as a doctrine, and it's a true statement. It has to be believed. So from a theology perspective, though, what this is, is this is theology. It's a theological proposition that can be considered. So how do we consider something like that if somebody makes a theological proposal like this? So we would look at it. So what are the logical consequences of the idea? So sealing isn't just connecting a nuclear family together at one frozen moment in time. That's certainly the emotional feeling you have for it. And it's wonderful. You know that feeling. But if you go and look at it more logically, obviously it's connecting every generation together, from the remote past to the unseen future. And so the logical results of it are either one, that you're going to end up with heavenly tribes, you know, where you have like the Smith tribe, the Kimball tribe, the Young tribe, the Cannon tribe, or you're going to have like all these little, tiny, less glorious tribes, and then you end up with this heaven that is disunified, Balkanized, competitive with more glory or less glory, depending on how it all works, or if there's not. If actually, you think about it, everybody's going to be sealed to everybody else, really, since everybody's related to each other. So if everybody was sealed to each other, then the other possible outcome is everyone is connected to everyone, which is absolutely no different than the way all other Christians view heaven anyway. Nobody's separated in the unity of heaven. So the proposition therefore is either then one inimical to our conception of heaven as perfect, you know, it's tribal heaven, or it's lacking any utility since it doesn't add to our conception of heaven, since everyone thinks people would be connected in heaven. So therefore to my thinking, and it doesn't have to be the case for anybody in the church, they can. This is just how I'm reasoning out a theological proposition. It can be dismissed because it doesn't have any, it doesn't have any utility theologically. So same thing, doctrine versus theology. Example number two, Joseph Smith teaches God was once a man living a mortal life and men may become gods. So in a doctrine view, that's a true statement. You have to believe that in a theological statement, it's a proposition to be considered. You know, the same exact process. So what are the logical consequences of this idea? So God was once one way and now God is obtaining different ways. So God is ever increasing in power, glory and intelligence. So the result of that idea though is that means God is finite. God can't be omnipotent, you know, because you can't add infinity plus one. If he was infinite, there is no increase possible. So he's not omniscient. He can't increase in knowledge if he already is omniscient. So what this means is you're abandoning monotheism, another logical consequence of the idea. In contrast to the human reproductive strategy where most children achieve full adulthood, God produces billions of offspring, only a small percentage of whom will achieve godhood. So therefore God is reproducing as a very low order style reproduction style in the universe. So the proposition therefore is either one, inimical to all of theological thinking from Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, Paul, Augustine, onward, or and I'm sorry, and two, it conceives of God as a God with a very low order style of reproduction. And so to my thinking, it can be dismissed theologically. So that's how we would approach those things, as opposed to just making them doctrine. So rather than having therefore doctrines, we instead have what we think of as enduring principles. And we don't even say internal principles, because we know everything changes in time and space and history. We are limited by our own time and place in history. We're not aware of all our biases. It's impossible. People in the future will look back at us and the silly things, the horrible things that we do now and won't believe that we lived like this. So some of the principles, grace and generosity, sacredness of creation, continuing revelation we mentioned worth of all persons, all are called just the idea of responsible choices. So instead of just coming up with this laundry list of, you know, don't do this, don't do that, don't, you know, like one of the ones when I was growing up as a kid, you know, you can't swim on Sunday. You know, we had, in the Hamer family, we had this thing where you can't, obviously you can't drink Coca Cola, you know, you can't drink caffeinated pop unless you're traveling. Because if you're traveling, the driver, because the driver in the car has to use Coca Cola as a, you know, as a, as a medicine, you know, in order to stay awake, you know, for the safety of the vehicle. And it wouldn't be fair if only the driver gets to drink Coca Cola under those circumstances. And so the whole family could, you know, so anyway, so instead of having this kind of a laundry list of this and that and the other thing or whatever, responsible choices is the principle pursuit of peace, unity and diversity, the blessings that we have of community, building community together. So as we looked at this transformation of the United States from, you know, primary education, so from subsistence farmers to industrial workers of the early 20th century, so both churches had doctrine and in primary and secondary schooling, memorizing answers is education and therefore doctrine, which is a list of memorized answers that's totally satisfying to members. But when you go then post 1950s with the new Mormon history, when you go from this period where we're working class and going to high school to come college educated service workers, higher education teaches questioning of memorized answers and encourages the process based thinking. So doctrine is ultimately unsatisfying, resulting in the faith crises we talk about. However, for Communion of Christ, after paying that incredibly heavy cost up front of challenging and abandoning doctrinal truth claims, the theological conception actually aligns very well with the higher educational way of thinking. So it's very possible for somebody who has gone to graduate school, like me, to be completely at home in community of Christ and to be totally authentic in community of Christ. I don't have to feel like I am not able to be authentic with my congregation and everything like that. So community of Christ, our idea then of restoration just to sum up, you know, so we are seeing restoration as ongoing restoration. The restoration isn't static with simplistic answers. It's a dynamic process of continual restoration and exploration. I mean, it was constantly changing in its first years. It's been constantly changing with us all the way up until the present day, and it's still constantly changing. So we honor our heritage by being honest about it, not by enslaving ourselves to it. So looking back at Kirtland Temple here, we see it as a site of both triumphs, but also of tragedies. It's the place where Joseph Smith made a bank. It's where the whole thing collapsed, you know, So, I mean, you sort of

John Dehlin [01:15:39] embrace the whole restoration, not just the positive elements.

John Hamer [01:15:42] The whole restoration, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:15:43] Or the recreated elements.

John Hamer [01:15:45] We sell the banknotes in the visitor center, you know, I mean, we sell. In the Nauvoo Visitor center, we sell copies of the Nauvoo Expositor. I mean, you know, William Law's a Mormon hero for us, you know, so it's. He was standing up, you know, to, you know, abuse of authority. So, I mean, and he lost everything for it. So. So, yeah, the whole thing, you know, I mean, if we. If we don't look back at it and see all of the flaws in it, then we won't. We wouldn't have learned to be a peace church, you know, if we didn't see all of the, you know, in the meantime. It's not like we've been saints. The, you know, we call ourselves saints, but we haven't been saints ever since, you know, in between now and then. So we've made all kinds of errors and learned from those along the way, too. And so that's why I suggest, if people, you know, want to. Why would. Why would you want to join a church that has so much baggage? You could go out tomorrow and found reform Mormonism, and your church would be instantly perfect without any, you know, any baggage. Right. And. Yeah, sure. And you could just fall into error, though, the very next day. Right. You know, so. So, so anyway, if. Therefore, if people feel, you know, we invite everybody to join us on our journey, we think all are called. We strive to be fully inclusive, you know, Latter Day Saints, lgbt, transgendered Mormons. We just, you know, we very want them to come and join us and everything like that. You know, Boyd K. Packer's list of enemies, you know, feminists, intellectuals, homosexuals. That's who we want, you know, so anyway. And at the same time, though, if you feel called to blaze a different path. That's also wonderful. You know, we completely don't think that we are. There's only one and true one and only true path, including ours.

John Dehlin [01:17:25] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories Podcast. To discuss this podcast with others, please please check us out@mormonstories.org to join one of our 80 plus support communities across the globe. Click on the Support communities tab@mormonstories.org to keep this podcast alive. Please consider a tax deductible donation today by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org audio and video for this podcast were provided by Richard Holdman. A big thanks to the Saber Rattlers for providing the music for today's episode. The Mormosories logo was generously donated by studiocase. Com.

John Hamer [01:18:01] Come come ye saints. No toil nor labor fear, but with joy wend your way.

Part Two Begins: Audience Questions

Part 2 of 2 · Ep. 527

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Foreign. Stories podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you. This podcast is also available in high definition video@YouTube.com MormonStories Come, come ye saints.

John Hamer [00:00:28] No toil nor labor fear, but with joy Wend your way.

John Dehlin [00:00:40] Now for the. Now for some questions. I've been.

John Hamer [00:00:42] Yes, please. Yeah, I'm sorry I railroaded you.

John Dehlin [00:00:44] Yeah, no, no, no, no. That's good. So let's start from the top, I guess over, you know, from. Based on our research, our non scientific survey at why Mormons? Question.com. yeah, you know, we polled disaffected, you know, disbelieving Mormons about their beliefs in God and over half reported that they end up as either atheist or agnostic.

John Hamer [00:01:11] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:01:12] So, you know, how do you, how do you get to the place where you want to, to, to join a religion again? Yeah, that. That not only bases itself on God.

John Hamer [00:01:24] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:01:25] But also on Jesus and on Joseph Smith and on scripture when you can't even get past the God point.

John Hamer [00:01:31] Right. Well, in the very first place, the LDS Church teaches a very different conception of God than is really normal in almost all religion in general. Because in some ways, by the end of his lifetime, Joseph Smith is existing in this enlightenment time period. But he's at a time period when he still thinks that you may be, or he still is hopeful that you can thoughtfully react to it, but still be saying things that are scientifically valid. And so people in this time period in the Enlightenment have started to become what philosophically called radical materialists, where they believe that the only thing that matters is matter and everything else is really immaterial. I mean, we even say it, even just the phrasing it of saying it is immaterial, but throughout all of time. And so there's even a section in the ldsdnc, not in ours, but that where, where Joseph Smith is preaching somewhere and he says, you know, that he tells you truthfully that spirit is matter, you know, and so everything is. All spirit is composed of matter. And God is material, God is physical, God has a body, God is a limited being. So I say in some ways it's like God is, you know, like a superman, you know, or something like that, as opposed to the conception of God throughout all time other than that, which if you really go through what the theologians have said throughout time. And again, like I say, going back to the Axial age religious reform, when religious reformers like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, you know, are redefining. They're pagans in theory, and they in theory believe in all these multiple different gods. But in fact, they decide that they're looking at the universe and they're deciding that in fact there's just one force or there's one spirit which is not material. And that is the cause of everything, the first cause. And so that is all adopted into Christianity and throughout the Middle Ages and to the modern age. The definition of God is that which is greater than can be conceived. God is immaterial. God is infinite. Philosophers and theologians don't even will often argue that you can't even say things about God like that God has a body or things like that. You instead think or gender or gender, of course, doesn't have to simply. So rather than that, you're actually, if you're going to go back there for just as a shorthand, let's say you're better off if you were thinking of God as simply being wisdom or simply being all of the Platonic concept of intelligence or anything like that is going to be closer to the conception that people have in the past have had of the infinite. And so in some ways, I would suggest even the first thing to do is to, instead of thinking of God as, let's say, a guy, Elohim, heavenly father, kind of a figure, even just pulling back de anthropomorphizing and essentially thinking about the divine, thinking about not even using the word God because it may have too many connotations for you, thinking, thinking about something like how you are connecting to the universe, you're thinking about how you're connecting to the realm of ideas. So even if the word spirit offends you because you're thinking of it in Mormon terms of physical ghost or something like that, which is almost how it's defined in the dnc. It's not meant to be that way. The idea of spirit is the definition of it is that which is not material ideas.

John Dehlin [00:05:02] And that's very appealing to me. As I deconstructed God a few years ago. Kind of what I came back with was there's some power or influence that has brought creation to where it is now. It's as preposterous for me to think that this just all happened randomly without any power influence. That's as preposterous to me is that there might be some type of power influence making it happen. So. So in that sense, I can be a person of faith in just saying something's making all this happen and I can just slap the God label on that. And then I just like to think

John Hamer [00:05:40] it's not even just slapping the God nail label on it. I mean, I would even suggest that, in fact the idea of God is simply. Instead of having it starting with like this vision of the guy with the robes and the beard and all that thing like that, which is a modern anthropomorphic, you know, this is like a very physical idea of it. Instead, just this thing of defining what God even means has been part of the whole process.

John Dehlin [00:06:02] Yeah, no, I'm just saying, for me, God is power, energy, or inertia that seems to be moving mankind, the Earth, the universe, in some sort of positive direction. I mean, that's how I think about the world. That we're better off now than we were 100 years ago or 10,000 years ago or a million years ago. And maybe I have some hope that mankind and existence will keep evolving in some positive way. So, you know, and that there's some meaning in this existence. So that, you know. So what you just described about a more. A more universalistic, non literalistic view of God is appealing. The only thing that comes to my mind is that it's not in any way what Joseph Smith taught. Like, you're actually. You're actually undoing what Joseph would have said is one of his most important contributions, which was making God a very literal, specific thing. And so that's, you know, that's a little bit of a wrinkle because you're sort of undoing a bit of the restoration.

John Hamer [00:07:00] Except for that you didn't like that part of it.

John Dehlin [00:07:02] Right.

John Hamer [00:07:03] Okay, so I know, but I mean, in other words. But we are. You already. I already went through and I admit a bunch of the things he did. Right. Because what I'm saying is that when he is. He's perfectly part of the conversation. And in that he is able to make theological propositions like that.

John Dehlin [00:07:17] Yeah, yeah.

John Hamer [00:07:18] In that he can make a. The. He's made theological propositions. We can think about them, and you can think about them yourself and decide whether you think that those are, you know, those are meaningful within your conception of life in the universe and why the universe has meaning, why your life is meaningful. And so every one of those propositions that he makes can be near or dear to you or not. You know, and so when I went through and I deconstructed some of those theologically, the. That's just me, you know, I mean, that's not what everybody has to think in community of Christ.

John Dehlin [00:07:46] So there's just this radical sense of not being bound to. Deferring to Joseph's interpretations.

John Hamer [00:07:54] No, of course, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:07:55] No, that's just mind blowing, obviously to a Latter Day Saints.

John Hamer [00:07:59] But it doesn't mean that he didn't provide all kinds of wonderful contributions. Like we were talking about this idea that we may, that we have an open canon that we're actually adding to. I mean, the idea that, you know, even though the Joseph Smith translation, the Joseph Smith Bible revision, you know, is not, you know, doesn't restore the text to its pure and, you know, imperfect form like he thought or he said he thought, what he was doing. The fact that our first leaders. So in this era of, you know, Protestantism, for Protestants, the Bible is the sole source of authority. And so for Protestants, in a lot of cases, you know, some Protestants more or less fall into Bible worship is what I think of it as where you essentially are putting the Bible, you know, as a thing between you and God, because the Bible really almost is God to you. Whereas Joseph Smith was willing. When there's something that he didn't like about it. He. When that Pharaoh story, you know, it says in the Bible that God hardened Pharaoh's heart. And that's inimical to us, you know, as us saying that Pharaoh isn't a real person because God is forcing, you know, Pharaoh to sin, therefore, or to rebel against him. So Joseph Smith just crossed that out and changed it and he said, you know, Pharaoh hardened his own heart, you know, so in other words, we're not, we're not enslaved to the text at all. And I'm in the same way that I told you that we can, you know, listen to the different things that Joseph Smith had to say and see whether those are meaningful in our lives. Now you can do the same exact thing when Paul, when Paul's writing. So Paul has all kinds of rotten things to say about slavery or gay people or women, you know, if it's. Whether or not it's the real Paul or not in some of those texts, and we can look at what Paul's saying and then we can say, you know what, Paul, you're wrong on this and that with that proposition. And so instead of trying to make, you know, where we try to either explain away the text or apologize for it and say, oh, well, it really was in Paul's day, it was okay to like slavery or okay to have slaves. No, you know, you know, that we don't need to apologize for them. Yes, they were part products of their own time and place in history, but we don't have to bend over backwards to say, oh, and that was all really good, or something like that. We can go ahead and condemn those attitudes.

Open Canon, Christianity, and Historical Jesus

John Dehlin [00:10:05] Okay, next, next thing that comes to mind, I'm just going down the hierarchy here. You're a Christian church. There are two challenges that many struggling or disaffected Mormons have. One is that they doubt that Jesus ever existed oftentimes. And they certainly doubt any divine power or resurrection or atonement.

John Hamer [00:10:25] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:10:26] And so that's. That's a problem.

John Hamer [00:10:27] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:10:28] And then I'll go to a second problem in a second. So I don't ask you a compound question because I get grief from my listeners for doing that. Okay, so address that and then I'll address that problem.

John Hamer [00:10:37] So, so I addressed that. We had the principles of history, right, where we don't take positions on historical events, and that would include the life of the historical Jesus. And so

John Dehlin [00:10:49] isn't that fundamental Christianity, that Jesus rose on the third day and was resurrected and then he died for our sins? And isn't that like, central to.

John Hamer [00:10:57] That's the Jesus of scripture. So, okay, so we are talking about the historical Jesus and historical events. So the historical Jesus is somebody that we can get at through the academic discipline of history and literary criticism, especially because we don't have too much historical evidence at all. So we pretty much have to do literary criticism on the actual competing gospel accounts. And we can do that and we can get at the historical Jesus. I contend that I'm on board with most scholars that there was a historical Jesus. The outlines of his life are. We can only have in. We can only say specifics in Very short list of specifics. And we can say that huge chunks of the gospel narratives are not historical. You know, I mentioned a lot of those when I was going through the problems in Scripture. So those aren't history. That's fine. But it's completely possible, you know, where I'm at, and I'm not sure this is not going to be true for everybody in community of Christ. But where I am at, it isn't necessary for there to have been a historical Jesus. That's not important any more than there needed to be a historical Joseph Smith,

John Dehlin [00:12:07] nor a resurrection nor an atonement.

John Hamer [00:12:09] Right. I'm saying the guy didn't have to exist for you, for me, for this to matter, because that's not where we put our. We don't build our church on the, you know, the sand of history is what we'll say, or the sand of Joseph Smith or history at all. There's a second kind of way to go get it at Jesus. So there's the historical Jesus, then there's the Jesus Christ of Scripture. So Christ is a title, not a name. And you know, it's the belief that the early Christians had that Jesus was the Messiah, that he was the anointed, the Christ. And you can experience there's actually multiple Jesus Christ of scripture because there's the different evangelists and each one has a different picture. And you can experience the Jesus Christ of Scripture, you know, when you read scripture every single time and the story is made anew. So that is how you experience the Jesus Christ of scripture and through that and prayer and thought and that kind of way. So you can talk to, you know, that's the, you can conceptualize the Jesus Christ of scripture when you are, you know, reading individual accounts or as a composite, because we have the composite picture that we synthesize. So when we tell the Christmas story, which is totally not historical, when we tell the Christmas story, we don't tell the two individual Christmas stories, which are totally different from each other and have totally different details. The Matthew account and the Luke account. Instead, we always synthesize them and go back and forth between the two and pretend it's all one story and it becomes one story in our synthesis.

John Dehlin [00:13:28] Right, so you're saying we're doing it anyway.

John Hamer [00:13:30] We do that already.

John Dehlin [00:13:31] We're sort of making a fable or a myth out of it, ignoring or ignoring important parts of the historical record.

John Hamer [00:13:39] We don't ever worry about it as history. Frankly. That's not what you do in church. You shouldn't even. I mean, it's not part of the church, whether it's historical or not.

John Dehlin [00:13:46] You would want even to an active LDS believing tbm. They're really ignoring the history.

John Hamer [00:13:51] Yeah, well, they, they just, they're viewing the accounts of scripture as if it's literally history, which it's not. So they just have an incorrect conception of the, of the, of the scriptures, which we can definitely tell. I mean, they contradict each other just at the basic level. So Judas dies in two different ways in the two different accounts, you know, and I mean, the stories not only totally contradict each other, but we can tell that events that are in the stories, like I say, like the massacre of the innocents by Herod, you know, we have Josephus. If Josephus has this entire history of Herod, if Herod is running around killing thousands of babies and things like that, this is going to get Mentioned with this Augustinian decree from Caesar Augustus, the Roman Empire didn't make everybody go back to their hometown. It would cause chaos. That was just not, you know, anyway. And it didn't happen. So, anyway, so we can look at that. And those are. There's things that are not history in those. That's not what we're. How you approach. So for me, what I'm saying, yes, LDS people do that because they think of it as being history. It's not. So I'm saying, though, if you want to talk, you know, if you want to conceive of the Jesus Christ of Scripture, you can do that through Scripture. And then finally there is the Christ of theology. And this is Christ as our. With all of the theological conceptions that you're talking about, like the idea of atonement, those are all theological ideas. And so the Christ of theology is this idea that God, because God is infinite, because God is beyond the conception. Our conceptions of the. Because our conceptions are always finite, because we are mortal. God is what is not mortal, you know, because we are, you know, only able to conceive of so much. And God is everything beyond that. God is the inconceivable. So because of that, you might think that we would have no way at all to even connect with such a thing. And so if God is in all those different ways, what is even the point? I mean, is there any relationship that can be had? And so the theological idea of Christ is God incarnate. And so the idea is that there is the living word or the connection. It is the model, the way we envision. So by envisioning Christ, we are envisioning the uninvisionable. We are conceiving of the inconceivable. We are making a mental bridge, you know, that we are making that connects us to this, the divine. But we have to all the while understand that every one of those pictures that we have aren't literal, right? So that's the Christ of theology. And I would separate all three of those out entirely. And the Jesus of history and the historical stuff, that context, you know, historical context is important because it can help us understand what the evangelists are meant when they're telling their stories of the Jesus Christ of Scripture. We know based on the times they're writing. Actually, it doesn't matter so much the times that they are saying Jesus was alive. What matters is the times that they're alive because they are writing within their own time and place in history, which is 40, 50 years after Jesus. And they're talking about things that aren't occurring in Jesus's life, you know, so we need to know about the context of the authors in the same way that when we read the Book of Mormon, it doesn't help us at all to know anything at all about Mayan history. That has no help, no benefit. It distorts the text. What we need to know is about second great awakening, you know, the United States in the 1820s. That's what we need if we understand the Book of Mormon. We have to understand that context.

John Dehlin [00:17:05] What I'm hearing you say is that, is that even for someone who doesn't believe in historical Jesus, they can still find a value in Jesus as a symbol that points towards how a human can start to conceive of what is divine, what is good, what is noble, what is kind of an enlightened life. Right.

John Hamer [00:17:26] And so it's the Christ of theology. And you can. You don't even have to use the word Christ to do it, though. So in other words, if Jesus. If somehow, you know, the historical Jesus is upsetting enough to you or whatever it is, you don't have to even think of it that way. Right. So I think that the historical Jesus, in some ways, he isn't as important. Although I think if you actually do study the historical Jesus, you end up finding out that he is a pretty great teacher. He is a philosopher with some very, you know, good ideas. A lot of these parables and teachings, especially the most authentic ones are. The ones that are most likely to be authentic, are quite radical, you know, about social justice and poverty, especially things that people don't even want to hear about, you know, you know, about some of these radical teachings on poverty. And so, I mean, I think that there's actually, you know, fortunately it turns out that the historical Jesus actually has a lot of great stuff. But you can be doing over here with a theological Christ, you know, without having the focus on the historical Jesus.

John Dehlin [00:18:31] The second part of my question about Jesus is, you know, some people would say that sort of focusing on Christ privileges, you know, one dominant world religion to the expense of Judaism and Islam and Buddhism. And you're sort of, instead of sort of saying maybe a Unitarian Universalist message, which is, let's draw from the wisdom of Buddha and Muhammad and Jesus and secular people, you're basically saying this is the way, and those others are, you know, somehow inferior or, you know, not. Not legitimate in status.

John Hamer [00:19:08] Yeah, if we were. If we as a church. And I've said this in a. I've had a sermon that was like this. And you know, I said if we as a church had moved from where we were at in the 1950s, where we were this little tiny church that believed we were the one and only true church, including those. Damn. Including the Mormons, you know, in other words, this. If we had been a church where we were the one and only true church in the 1950s, including the Mormons, you know, we're apostates from the Latter Day Saint tradition and we gave up that cherished, that cherished but very offensive idea. Right. So in other words, it was very hard to give that up. If we learned from that and moved then though, to this new place where we saying, well, we're part of the body of Christ, but Christianity is the one and only true religion and all these other religions are false. If we had gone from that one really powerful but unpopular place to a less powerful but maybe way more popular place, but then still had around us all of these other religions that we were saying are not part of the one and only true religion, we will have learned absolutely nothing from our experience. So, yes, no, Christianity is not the one and only true religion.

John Dehlin [00:20:20] And yet you're named the community of

John Hamer [00:20:22] Christ because that's our religious tradition that we've come from. So in other words, we honor our heritage without being enslaved by our heritage. We are also a restoration church. We were organized in 1830, reorganized in 1860. So Joseph Smith is at the historical. Joseph Smith is at the origin of our, you know, of our church, you know, so, yes, that's all of our heritage. That doesn't mean that we can't bring, let's say, spiritual practices from other religions. So in my congregation this year, every single week during the service, we have what we call a prayer for peace. And every week as part of the prayer for peace, we are learning about a different world religion. So one of the weeks we would do, for example, all the whole kind of, what's the history of Zoroastrianism? What are their beliefs? What are their practices? And then we pray for priests. We're not praying for the Zoroastrians. We just pray for peace and understanding. And the next week we'll do, let's say Shiite Islam and then we'll do Unitarian Universalists, then we do secular humanists, we do atheists. In other words, we learn about everybody, where they're all at, and we think about it, you know, and then we. And we. And it's part of the prayer for peace because we think we are pursuing peace when we are Learning more and understanding about people. And so that's why we have that encounter World Religions center too. So when we go to the mosque, I mean I myself, no matter how much I think as an academic that I knew all this stuff about Islam and I don't have any biases and things like that. And I'm still a little scared when I'm going inside the mosque for the first time. Right. Or actually I was even more nervous about going into the Hare Ka temple for some reason. And it turns out they're just the nicest people people when you go in there. But anyway, so that ecumenical outlook is one of the ways we pursue peace.

Joseph Smith's Legacy and Emotional Barriers to Joining

John Dehlin [00:22:11] Okay, next question. Probably the most common response I have when I shop this idea around and you've probably responded to this a lot, is just this visceral sort of anger and disgust with Joseph Smith himself. Yeah, it's just this, this man, you know, people get really upset about it in their minds. They say he was a pedophile, he was abusive, he was a monster.

John Hamer [00:22:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:22:39] And, and for them they just say, you know, you may as well found a church on like Genghis Khan or Adolf Hitler, you know, it's just that's that spoils it, that poisons the well.

John Hamer [00:22:51] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:22:51] And I being part of any institution that's tracing its lineage through that monster, that's fine.

John Hamer [00:22:58] You know, you can go to any of the other churches too. In other words, I'm not going to try to say to people who, let's say, feel especially strongly on that in the first place, or they feel damaged or abused by Joseph Smith in particular, that you should go back to your abuser in any way. I mean, you know, even in even a way that's completely different. So this isn't the only path by any means. So if in, you know, if you really feel that kind of strongly, then by all means, you know, maybe it isn't, you shouldn't even think about it. But on the other hand, you can have any of those views. You can feel that way. There are many people who are a longtime multi generational rlds people who have that same kind of feeling about Joseph Smith. It's not. We have a very different perspective on prophet the prophets, what it means to be a prophet. Prophets aren't demigods. Prophets aren't people that have a different connection to God than all the rest of us do. Prophets, you know, are, have, do make errors like that. And they can be, we can condemn them. I mean even the examples in the terms of scripture stories about Prophets, you know, are filled with prophets doing quite horrible things, you know, and that is still in the stories, you know.

John Dehlin [00:24:07] So how do you personally get over that hurdle?

John Hamer [00:24:11] So for Joseph Smith, I am actually, I always have to. I tell people on all the podcasts, for whatever reason, I'm like the only Mormon historian who isn't interested in Joseph Smith almost at all. I mean, I just really bizarrely don't. I mean, I'm not excited about him. I'm really excited about the movement and I like what happened and I like the restoration and I like. And so I'm not worried about Joseph Smith myself. So how I personally worry about it, it doesn't matter to me. I think that he, I think that he had. He was trying to do some good things. I think he behaved unethically often. I think that he created many good things. I think he made many horrible errors, including doing things that were abusive and really can't be anything but condemned. And I mean, the main one of those things ultimately is what he did with women and his practice with plural marriage and community of Christ is founded by the people who were standing up and opposing him in Nauvoo. And then there were people who were absolutely against it the entire time thereafter. You know, so it's not just a Joseph Smith thing. You know, I mean, we now look, now when we tell the story, we start the story with Joseph Smith's first vision. Nobody in the early church started the story with Joseph Smith's first vision. They'd never heard the story that way. They hadn't heard that story. David Whitmer, when he had been kicked out in the late 1830s and he's later interviewed, he'd never heard, you know, that story or some of these stories, you know, so that wasn't how it was told. It was told that a bunch, you know, six people came together and they organized the church. There are other early church founders. You know, it's also, it's also Emma's church. It's also Oliver Cowdery's church. It's also the Whitner's church. It's also William and Jane Law's church. It's Sidney and Phoebe Rigdon's church. So I like my ancestors church. So it's the Stephen and Nancy Winchester's church. It's not just a Joseph Smith joint start and finish. And I know it's people in the LDS church are really focused on him and Mormon history is really focused on him, but I'd be just as happy to just talk about everything else besides him. So I can see why.

John Dehlin [00:26:21] But the fact that your church starts with the word community, I think what you're basically saying is whatever the history, positive or negative, there's this community, there's this heritage. We come from this. There's this opportunity for us to commune together. And that's what's worthy of attention.

John Hamer [00:26:39] I mean, I think that that's the thing that the movement has done well from the beginning, which is the idea of it was we are going to build Zion together, right? And what is Building Zion? That's for us, it's saying building community. And community is something that we've always been good at as a movement. And so even every problem that people have in the LDS Church with leaders and policies and correlation and everything like that, a lot of times people are still connected because of the word experience, which is not the maybe the headquarters experience, even though correlation continues to maybe affect the word experience constantly. But it's the community building that has been the thing that we've been really good at. And when we decided we were going to change the name of the church and try to get back to something closer to the original name of the church in 1830, which was church of Christ, we thought, let's focus on this aspect of it, Building Zion, building community together. And that's why that emerged as the name of the church. But the other aspect of it, I think in the 21st century, it's meaningful to all of us to have different kinds of communities. There's so many of us are feeling totally disenfranchised. We are in the situation where we're at the individual level and we have our friends or something like that, and then we are somehow totally alienated and disenfranchised from an increasingly centralized federal government that seems to have a lot of power that would have been very different. Instead of having corner stores and all the local institutions that are all around us that we know, there's mega corporations, there's the Walmarts or whatever kind of thing. And so increasingly we aren't connected to communities, to local institutions. You know, I make as an example, when we invaded Iraq, when George W. Bush, you know, wanted to spread democracy to Iraq, the idea he had was spreading democracy was as easy as knocking out a dictator holding elections. And suddenly there's democracy, because you have an election at the top and people at the bottom. And that's all democracy is. And they absolutely failed and didn't do anything. Because what really is necessary is the entire fabric of society, which all these local Institutions and everything like that. And what we've done systematically is dismantle the fabric of our society. We don't have these communities. We got rid of all of our churches, our little churches. We get rid of all of our corner stores, everything like that. We're disenfranchised, we're disconnected. And so it's really meaningful to me that I have a little group of people that I get together with and we talk about ideas, we talk about what our lives are like. They are coming from all walks of life. I wouldn't normally interact with people if I didn't have this institution. And what I never would have thought when I was a little kid was I actually spend all week looking forward to going to church because it's just so much fun. And it's a wonderful experience that I have.

Why Stay Connected to Religion at All

John Dehlin [00:29:30] If I can editorialize a bit. I've been thinking about this. Why do I still care? Why am I still hanging on? Why am I still part of this whole discussion at all? And I think about a story where I was riding on a horse with a bunch of other friends in, like, a group, and I think a snake came by the path. And all of a sudden all the horses scattered. And at first I was freaking out because the horse was just shooting off in its own direction. I was worried I was going to fall. But then when. When I was alone, I was kind of excited. I was like, oh, no one's around me. I can enjoy nature by myself. I can just really be with this horse and nature alone. And I was looking forward to it. And almost immediately, the horse started kind of bucking, started kind of shaking, started getting nervous, and. And I was, like, starting to feel scared, like the horse was going to bolt or something. So I didn't know what to do. So I just rode the horse back to where the group was. And I asked some people why. Why was the horse acting so weird? And their answer was, because horses are. Are herd animals. They're. They're used to being in a tribe. And why is a horse most comfortable being with other horses? Because in nature, horse gets separated from. From herd, horse gets eaten by wolf or mountain lion. And that's just the way it is.

John Hamer [00:30:50] Right?

John Dehlin [00:30:50] And. And for us to think that as humans, we've transcended the need for community, I think that's kind of arrogant and probably folly. Even if we happen to have the financial or community resources to carve our own path. As a formerly religious person, whether it's ourselves or our children or our grandchildren, what if they're not going to be able to fare so well because it turns out that part of what allowed us to transcend maybe a mindset that wasn't super healthy was the religion that brought us to the point where we could become educated enough to develop the critical thinking skills and the monetary ability to then transcend it. You depart from that. You know, I don't want to be a fear monger because I know people who leave religious traditions that do just great.

John Hamer [00:31:41] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:31:41] But I just wonder whether we are abandoning a bit of the wisdom of the ages that we do do better in, in religious community or in communities. Right.

John Hamer [00:31:50] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:31:50] And if it's not going to be a religious community, some form of community, what if we or our children, our grandchildren are going to fare better in a, in a tight knit group that cares about you, that notices when you're missing, that brings you food when you're sick or takes care of your kids when you need it, or just motivates you to want to be a better person and to try and keep your family together and try and live a happy, healthy life. And I just don't, I don't think that's a trivial matter. Even though so many of us sort of in the 21st century kind of go, I'm good now, that's the last thing I need. You know, I, I think we should be careful before we just sort of throw off some of the lessons or best practices of our past. And that's not to say we all need to join religions. I'm just saying I think we need to be careful about this decision and a little bit more deliberate and, and not radically modern in the sense of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. That's my editorializing. Not that I'm shilling for any church particularly.

John Hamer [00:32:51] Yeah, no, and I think that makes a lot of sense. So one of the most, like I listen like religiously to this American life and one of the, one of the more chilling episodes for me was there is a, there was like a woman who was a, who grown up Jewish and she was a lesbian and not interested in religion and everything like that. And you know, like her family had been, they were Jewish, but they were raised atheist essentially. And her little brother was Jewish, was raised atheist and they had obviously been Jewish, therefore, going backwards for thousands of years. And they're very sophisticated people. And for whatever reason, her little brother converts to a fundamentalist Christian cult and moves to an island in the Aleutians in Alaska or something like that. And so one of the things that it Struck me about that. And again, this is not like everybody's going to have this happen to them, but is that what we don't always realize is when you are converting away from a church, you are actually a convert to the new thing that you are at. And so this is a new thing. And when you're in a new area, a new thing, the hardest part in being in a new space, whether we call that a religion or not, but let's say in a new worldview system, the hardest part is transmitting that to the next generation down because people don't immediately just have what you were raised with because you were raised in a completely different circumstances, exactly like you just said. So it doesn't have to be like you say, there's every possibility you could make an association, let's say that has nothing to do with religion, the secular Humanist association that is able to do charity. I was just reading there's a, a new orphanage that's being started in Congo I.e. the Atheist Society or whatever is founded in orthodox. So it's completely possible to do that that way and it's wonderful to do it that way. But yeah, I think that the need for communities, the need for having this interaction is really important and vital. And it also is a way that we aren't disenfranchising ourselves. We're connected, we're able to leverage what we're doing, we're able to have impact because it's not just us, we always think, well, what can I do? What can one person do? Well, one person can only do so much. But then if you're connected into a network of like minded people, you can maybe do a little bit more.

John Dehlin [00:35:17] Yeah, for me, I don't know if I'm ever going to join another church again. But what I do know is a couple of things. I know that the people that I have met who are unorthodox or disaffected, Mormons, number one, are people where in a matter of 30 minutes I can sit down with any one of you here and then for the next hour or two have the most deep and meaningful conversation where we're sharing our vulnerabilities, where we're sharing our experiences, and I know you, I could get to know and know many of you better than I ever knew you know, anyone else in my life or member of my congregation in just a few hours because of the shared experience that we have and because of the, in my biased opinion, the caliber of the individual that it takes to learn all that you need to learn to decide to transcend the religion and the courage that it takes to step away from it at the expense sense of, of so many family relationships and social costs, sort of that crucible. And I don't mean to like privilege ourselves as awesome, but that's how I experience it, if I'm being honest. These people in this audience, the people that I connect with, these are some of my favorite people in the world. And I feel safe with them, I feel comfortable with them, I feel at home with them. And these are people that I just want to hang with when I can. And so it's a matter of like having that shared experience and being these great people that I love to hang around with. I want to hang with these people for the rest of my life if I can and grow with them. So I don't know if that's in a church or not, but that's really compelling to me. And that's one of the reasons that I keep doing this is because I get to hang out with you guys. Maybe not enough of you, but, you know, a few thousand others and some of you, and maybe you in the future. That's me being selfish. On another note, you know, you think that if you are secular, you've reached this stage of enlightened atheism or secularism, that you're going to raise your kids and that's what's going to happen. But as you just noted, atheists don't necessarily. Secular people don't necessarily raise secular people. What so often happens is they raise their children, but then their children, my

John Hamer [00:37:43] different, my, my grandparents are, we're, you know, were totally non religious, probably agnostics or whatever. My dad converted to Mormonism and then when he became an ex Mormon, he went to evangelical Christianity. So, you know, there's. Anyway that's just.

John Dehlin [00:37:59] So sometimes you can think you're doing your children or grandchildren this huge favor to yank them out of whatever tradition you came from, because it's awful. But what you end up doing is you lose them to some other place, the very well may be worse. And so, you know, that's kind of an argument to say those of us who have reached this sensibility of whatever our sensibilities are. Let me just finish this point. Whatever our sensibilities are. Why not embrace our heritage and say, let's not run from it, let's not be embarrassed by it. We come from where we come and then let's get together with the finest of those people who share our sensibilities and, and build something that we can give to our children so that they can carry on with the learning and the enlightenment that we have and carry that forward versus risking losing them to something far worse. I mean, it's an interesting thing to think about.

John Hamer [00:38:49] So, sorry, no, no, this is your interview, but I, what I'm saying is you should do that. So in other words, yes, that's what people should be doing. I mean, because unfortunately I'm just, I would think that the way that you were able to transmit those things better is by having that kind of having an association. Right. And so by building an institution so that there actually is something to help with the transmission of that. In other words, so you have all of your thousands of friends, but then after amount of time, maybe they caught in because they were questioning, then they are really angry and they're learning more and that's motivating them to learn more. And then they already know it all, they're bored by it and they've integrated into non Mormondom and then they've diffused out into regular society and then they're not, you know, they're gone, you know, to that, you know, you don't have them in that group anymore. And so how do you come up with creating, you know, the same way that there are cultural Jewish organizations or cultural Catholics, you know, how do you create a cultural Mormonism when Mormonism is so, you know, insanely associated with one institution that is so incredibly centralized? You know, just the LDS Church and its leaders, you know, and it's, and so how do you make it? And it's not easy. I mean, they've been able to do it. Sunstone has been able to have a community that works. There's ways to make it. I mean, you've created all kinds of virtual communities and institutions that have been, a lot of them have incredible staying power. And so anyway, keep building those. I think that's really what should be done.

John Dehlin [00:40:18] So real quick, couple more questions.

John Hamer [00:40:20] Yeah,

John Dehlin [00:40:23] you listed all these, you know, from our sensibilities weaknesses of the LDS Church. It's, it's patriarchy, it's corporate top down structure, it's emphasis on literalism, it's absolute as truth claims. And it's easy from our point of view to list all those as weaknesses. But I think, you know, you just, you know, in basketball we've got this term numbers, you know what I mean? Scoreboard. It's like who's got the higher score? And you look at the LDS Church and they've got the numbers, they've got the money, they've Got the real estate, they've got the members. And it's likely that those things that we sort of look down upon are actually the secrets to their success. Yeah. And so my question to you is, you're choosing your church, is choosing a model that the numbers would show might not even be sustainable? I mean, the fact that you're embraced in the church and that you're able to sort of ascend to a pretty high level of authority, at least in some ways, or influence could. Could be interpreted as sort of this act of desperation. It's like, wow. Not that I think of you this way, but someone could say, wow, they're so desperate, they're taking this gay ex Mormon guy and letting him try and revamp the church. Right.

John Hamer [00:41:31] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:41:33] Now, I think you're brilliant and I love you, and that's why I drove down here tonight.

John Hamer [00:41:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:41:39] But. But what if. Isn't this just like a really, like a fool's errand? Isn't this just like. Just like a dream that's sort of foolish? Like, are you trying to resuscitate Xerox when we know that Xerox is on its way out? You know, personal computers is the future of the Internet, not photocopy machines.

John Hamer [00:41:57] Right.

John Dehlin [00:41:58] Are you trying to sell Xerox basically to the world?

John Hamer [00:42:01] Yeah. If. If Community of Christ hadn't absolutely transformed itself into something that is totally different from what it was in its provincial form back in 1950, I wouldn't think there'd be any hope for it at all in transforming itself. When it did that, it created, in some ways, a brand new religion. When you create a brand new religion, how do you keep the second generation in again? You know, it didn't do a very good job of that because during the creation time, you know, during that transformation time, there was actually a civil war that was ongoing. And people weren't good at inviting people into a war zone. What has emerged, I wasn't part of that war. I started investigating. I started encountering Community of Christ just 15 years ago. By that time, what had already emerged was something that I saw as being unbelievably valuable and amazing that it had gotten to that point, even if the people that were in it had no idea what they ended up with. And so as far as I was concerned, what people in Community of Christ do is they can't find a bushel big enough to hide their light under. But I looked under there and I said, look at what this is. And when I lifted this up, it's so incredible in my Opinion and so necessary and so useful in where we are in the 21st century. And I look at it from a historian's perspective, this long term of history and where it's going and what its potential is. If I didn't think there was an incredible potential in the church, and also incredible potential in the church as also a haven and a way to support and empower disaffected progressive Mormons, Mormons who are marginalized within their own faith community, an alternative for young LGBT people who are, you know, who think they have no alternatives. And it's when you think you have no alternatives that you attempt suicide. Creating that and making it real, building that bridge, making that alternative. If I didn't think that was viable and that was sustainable and that that could work, I wouldn't devote my entire life to it. But I'm devoting my entire life to it because of that potential that I sense and I feel called to, and I'm very confident in it going forward. So

John Dehlin [00:44:32] that's beautiful. Thank you. I know you like science fiction and I know you thought a lot about Star Trek, and sometimes when I think of John Hamer, even though I know he's a deeply caring and sensitive person, I think of you as Spock because you're so incredibly rational.

John Hamer [00:44:48] Right.

Community of Christ for Doubters and Former Members

John Dehlin [00:44:50] So now I'm going to ask you to change gears a little bit. Even though you just, in my perception, give a really emotional testimony.

John Hamer [00:44:56] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:44:58] Tell us emotionally how this works. Have you seen it working? Have you seen the fruits of your labors?

John Hamer [00:45:04] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:45:05] Share with us from an emotional perspective, if you can, if you're prepared, touch us in our hearts about the possibilities now that we've made a large logical construct of why this might be viable. Talk to us emotionally about. About why this might be viable. From what you've seen.

John Hamer [00:45:24] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:45:26] Or from what you see.

John Hamer [00:45:27] Yeah. Well, I do think it's very viable because. Okay, so I've been involved for a whole long time. I only myself joined in 2010, but I was already very associated with the church long before that, having been in the church history community and that kind of thing before that. From where we were at, let's say, when I first encountered the church, when I was first investigating Community of Christ, when I was Googling, and I tried to even find, like a picture of the temple, I thought that temple looks so cool and neat and like, I could only ever see a picture that was like this big on Google at the time. There was no Internet presence. There was no idea that anybody, I think, had in the LDS Church, that there was maybe this thing, there was this. There was a reorganized church. They knew about that, but nobody was thinking that that may well be a viable alternative. And I think that through a lot of just intensive seed planting and a lot of intensive bridge building in talking to church leaders and Community of Christ, but then in coming back and talking to the progressive Mormon community here, that there has been an enormous, already an enormous change in. Just like this is like, for an institutional thing, in institutional terms, there has been an enormous change just in that amount of 10, 15 years that I've seen it. And I've been pushing myself. And so for something that is an institution, the Community of Christ isn't really big, like you say. It's small enough, in fact, and it's dynamic enough and it's open to change enough that all by myself, just me pushing has had an effect in the direction it has allowed and is one of the things, it's not just me, but other people that were coming to Community of Christ, other seekers, other disaffected Mormons who were asking and the people in the church had no idea about. And so the church has completely opened to this and has been thinking about, okay, we don't know who are these Mormons? You know, we haven't been in communion with them for 150 years or something like that. Right. And so they didn't know how to do anything about it. So we have seen this enormous change on the part the of. Of the leaders. I have seen this enormous change on the part of leaders, this openness to and other. And the members too. I've been going around now talking to, doing seminars for individual members who are interested in being welcoming. If disaffected Mormons come into a Community of Christ congregation, it happens all the time. People come in, the members, the Community of Christ members are just freaked out. They've never had somebody come into their church at all. We don't, we don't do missionary work in that way. Missionary work for us means going and doing service, things like helping the homeless or something. And so we don't. We're not good at it. That's one of the reasons why we don't grow and we don't have the numbers that you're talking about and everything like that. And we also don't know what to do when somebody comes in the church. Often, you know, and same thing, the Mormons come in and then nobody's particularly giving them the hard sell, hey, join or something like that. You know, people have been attending my congregation for 10 years before anybody even asked them to get, get baptized, you know, and I mean that just that, that just routinely happens. Anyway, so there has been that openness and awareness that has changed. I'm not being very emotional here. I'm still Spock. I'm sorry. And so, but there is also, there's also just been an enormous amount of change that has happened in the Mormon community. So in the same, in the same side that there's now an awareness in the exact same way. Okay, when, how many Democrats, you know, when George W. Bush got reelected, they said, if George W. Bush gets reelected, I'm moving to Canada, you know, Well, I move to Canada, you know, not everybody does that. But they didn't have. Back then, people didn't say if this and that happens or whatever, if they excommunicate John Dehlin, you know, then I'm going to, maybe I'm going to go visit a community of Christ. I think that Christ congregation, I think that that idea has been planted and people actually are kind of thinking about that as an alternative. And so just all by itself, just creating those awarenesses and also having programs and making it ready to happen, I think is already a pretty big thing to change institutionally and then also culturally. And so how have I seen it happen? So it's just within the past, I think it's just two years or it's about two years ago or a little less than two years ago, year and a half ago, this congregation here, this building was essentially, it's owned by the denomination. And their congregation here had dwindled to just a handful of members that were meeting on a monthly basis instead of a weekly basis, in part because it's simply really hard for old RLDS members to live in Utah. They've found it throughout history to be kind of oppressive. And people who are living here often, or can even convert here often move away. And that's just been the history here for a long time. So this building was more or less sitting vacant. And so we, as a prototype of this program that we call Latter Day Seekers, where we are trying to be intentional about when disaffected Mormons, when Mormons in transition come to us and knock on our doors and we can be open and listen to them and understand their stories and share stories like you do in Mormon stories, and be aware of what they've been going through and what they're looking for in a new spiritual home. And so we were able to refound this congregation essentially as a Latter Day Seekers congregation. And it has now become so amazingly vital already, just in this short amount of time, a year and a half or so since it was refounded. And so now just these incredible people, these incredible families, young families who were disaffected and marginalized in the LDS Church, and they come here, are able to come here now and bring their kids and their kids. They can have 30 kids on a Sunday or something like that. When, you know, my congregation back in Toronto, we have one kid, you know, so it's. So it is completely. That's just been an amazing transformation. And also we're able to be completely welcoming for transgendered Mormons or, you know, gay, lesbian Mormons, bisexual Mormons, everything like that. People who are completely ostracized often and. Or not at least not appreciated properly in Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:51:44] So you've gone from a handful of members in this Salt Lake congregation meeting once a month to what, 30, 40, 60. So 30 to 60 people on a weekly basis.

John Hamer [00:51:53] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:51:54] Yeah, that's growth.

John Hamer [00:51:55] There you go.

John Dehlin [00:51:56] That's pretty good growth.

John Hamer [00:51:57] So there's some numbers for you.

John Dehlin [00:51:58] Yeah, okay. There's some numbers.

John Hamer [00:51:59] And that's our prototype of doing this.

John Dehlin [00:52:01] Okay. So I guess.

John Hamer [00:52:04] And so I was just in Logan on Sunday and we were, you know, just having an organizational meeting for a house church, which is what we have, like an emerging congregation, you know, again, for a Latter Day Seekers congregation, where, you know, specifically, I mean, it was about 30 people or so came to the organization. That doesn't mean they're all committed to being part of the house church, but a couple core families, you know, have committed to meeting on a monthly basis and starting, you know, a house church congregation in Logan. And there's, I think, two other house church congregations in Salt Lake. And a month ago I did one of those kind of like a very early seed planting ones in Phoenix, and we had 100 people show up actually, for an organization, one in Phoenix. If we could get somebody down to Phoenix, we could have a congregation right away down there.

John Dehlin [00:52:53] Carolyn Pearson says there's a really nice branch in her neck of the woods in kind of Bay Area, in San Francisco.

John Hamer [00:52:58] Yeah, if I could go. Yeah. The pastor of the San Francisco congregation has really asked me to go out there because we need to do some organizing there. Yeah, San Francisco would be fantastic, too.

How to Get Involved and Next Steps

John Dehlin [00:53:08] So what's the call to action? Let's say there's listeners who are like, yeah, that John Hamer's not. Not too bad. I kind of. I kind of like what he's saying. What's the call to action for the yeah, the thousands of people who listen to this podcast. And for the members of the audience

John Hamer [00:53:21] here, well, the best place they can go right now is to the. There's a Facebook group, Latter Day Seekers. And so if they type that in and ask to join that Facebook group, because then they're going to be able to talk to all the other people in the program and they're going to be able to talk to, so all the other seekers, all the other people who've come from the LDS background and either at different stages, people who have already joined the church or not, or people who are still investigating, they can have all this ongoing dialogue. And then they would be talking to also, though members of Community of Christ all around, from all around the world who are committed to talking to seekers. So as opposed to just chatting up a random Community of Christ person who might be all over the place and on any kind of question. So that would be the best place. There's also a website, ladder-dayseekers.org that gives you just some basic materials.

John Dehlin [00:54:14] How many are in your Facebook group? How many people in your Facebook group?

John Hamer [00:54:16] About 500 or so.

John Dehlin [00:54:18] Nice.

John Hamer [00:54:18] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:54:21] Okay. So go to the Facebook page.

John Hamer [00:54:23] Go to the Facebook page. Or friend me on Facebook.

John Dehlin [00:54:26] But then what comes after that?

John Hamer [00:54:29] Well, after that, I mean, if you are in, if you're in Salt Lake area, if you're in Salt Lake Valley or Utah Valley or something like that, you can come here to this congregation. And so what time do they meet? It's got to be 11 o'. Clock. I mean, it's 10 o' clock. At Sunday school, 11 o' clock service. That's what usually 10 o', clock, 10 o', clock, Sunday school, 11 o' clock Service, and then usually a social gathering afterwards.

John Dehlin [00:54:50] Okay. In Mill Creek, we'll have the link,

John Hamer [00:54:53] the address to this link and the

John Dehlin [00:54:54] address on the, on the MormonStories.org website page. And that's if you're in Salt Lake,

John Hamer [00:54:59] any of you in Salt Lake, and otherwise Toronto, you can come to me, of course, in Toronto. But actually you can go to, you know, our website, the church's website, which is, I think it's sea of Christ.org and so you can go to the church's website and there's find a congregation and you can do that and you can just go to go to one, and hopefully you're going to go to one where you're going to find somebody who is, who is maybe aware of this program or who is going to not freak out that you've gone into there. Or you may well get anything, though, because so the congregations are all over the place. We're not correlated. And the individual believers are all over the place. You can go into a congregation and you could even go to my congregation sometimes, and there might be a speaker who, if you just listened to him and thought that that's what the whole church is about, you would be very surprised. Right. And so it would be very different the very next week. And so you kind of have to give it a little bit more than once.

John Dehlin [00:55:49] Yeah. It sounds like what you're appealing. You're sort of making a pioneering proposition. It's pioneering to audience, to the people listening. Right. You're basically saying there's this religious tradition that that has had that has lived in a very ethical and courageous way.

John Hamer [00:56:06] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:56:06] That now maybe is. Is far less vibrant than the traditional Latter Day Saint church, but that is. But that has embraced progressive and some would say, Christlike and very diverse and welcoming sensibilities that's embracing peace and universality and love and kindness and community. And it's basically to some degree, a bit of a shell of a church that allows for room for people to then come into it and use the infrastructure and the resources of the church to build something even better that we can kind of build together.

John Hamer [00:56:45] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:56:46] And so people say that's pretty. People should come. Is that okay?

John Hamer [00:56:49] I mean, I don't say a shell of a church, but yes. In other words, there's existing congregational network that you. That we can integrate into. And I'm in a traditional congregation, and it's wonderful. So I love all the people. So there is a congregational network, but there is simultaneously. You can also do it another way, like here with the prototype, where this congregation itself, or the one in Logan or anywhere where there's enough of enough ex Mormons or something like that, you would be able to form an emerging congregation and build it. And like you're saying, it's maybe a little bit of a pioneering proposition. But if you think about the amount of time as a Mormon that you've committed to churches and the amount of money that you've committed to church, and you're not talking about even that amount of time and certainly not that kind of money when you're talking about tithing and you get together, let's say, six families, I mean, you start to add that up and what you really. Your personal commitment and investment and things like that, and the amount of work it is, I mean, you are able to build something that you. The congregations are their own corporations and their own little institution. And so once that emerging congregation is incorporated and everything like that, you are investing in something that isn't. Like the, you know, guy in Salt Lake is calling up and saying, let's get rid of John delind now. In other words, it's something that you're invested in and you have way more control over and also the direction it goes. I mean, I didn't get appointed to be pastor from, you know, somebody in Independence, Missouri, called up somebody, and then they called up, you know, and then they appointed me. I mean, the congregation itself discerns and selects, you know, together or elects who God is calling to be the pastor, and they elect the pastor. So you have control over your own, you know, your own thing that you're building.

John Dehlin [00:58:32] So I just have to correct you on one small thing. My stake president assured me that it was a local matter. Okay.

John Hamer [00:58:38] Okay, good. I'm glad to know. I'm glad I didn't. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I got that wrong.

John Dehlin [00:58:46] I don't know why.

John Hamer [00:58:47] I don't know why I would have thought that. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:58:49] Okay. So I hope you're prepared for this.

John Hamer [00:58:52] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:58:53] This is how we end every Mormon stories. It's been wonderful. I love your vision. I'm so thrilled. It's just an example of courage and commitment for me to see that. We talked about this in 2006 or 2007, and you're doing it. You could make a lot of money. You could go do a lot of things. You're an extremely talented, talented person and bright, and this is how you're choosing to spend your time. So that. That's a witness to me. That's. That's not insignificant. So this is beautiful. I'm proud of you. I'm proud to call you a friend. And I'm excited. I hope you're successful. I really do. And I guess I just want to end by giving you a chance to bury your community of Christ, seek your testimony with us.

Personal Testimony and Closing Reflections

John Hamer [00:59:42] Okay. Well, when I. When I left as a doubting teenager, when I left the LDS church over sexism, but also because I, you know, deconstructed all the narratives because I decided that it was all wasn't true, that the Book of Abraham was a fraud, et cetera, et cetera, I never actually imagined in any way that I would find my way back into religion. And I was entirely away from it in the Mormon community and every other thing for a whole long time. And it was only when I went back to my roots and started researching it and encountered these people, the people and where they were at, it just amazed me. It was not anything that I imagined was remotely possible. And as they became part of my community, in the historians community, I started to see what they had done in their faith community and their spiritual community and in the church community. And I realized, like I say, the value of it and how impressive it was and how much good it has the capacity to do. And it also. And like I say, when I started going, even when we first talked, you know, in, you know, all these years ago and I saw that part of it, I never then imagined that I would be, you know, I didn't feel the need. I didn't feel like, oh, I don't need church or community that might be good for some people and they need it or whatever. But I'm beyond all of that, right. I'm, you know, logic. I'm Mr. Spock, as you say, right? So that, you know, I'm a Vulcan. There is no pain or need for emotion or community or anything like that or whatever it was. And so I never imagined that that would be what I, you know, what that would be for me either, right. And so in joining my congregation and meeting all the people and connecting with them in just, you know, in fact, so, for example, in knowing older gentlemen who are gay men in their 70s and 80s, right. Who I. Otherwise you don't have in the gay community, we have very poor intergenerational connections and ability to transmit wisdom. I mean, essentially, it's youth culture. It was always. Or gay bar culture or hookup culture. In other words, there's very bad capacity for mentoring, for transmitting experiences and wisdom from the past. And so just being able to interact with people, different generations, different places, different thinking. And it's also, it's amazing to me how much it grounds my own thinking. So if I'm off in my own lala land of reading my books and just reading whatever Augustine and Boethius and this kind of thing, I'm having my conversation, it becomes entirely ungrounded and entirely esoteric. And so actually being hooked into community is infinitely valuable to me in a way that I never imagined was going to be the case. And so it's a vital thing in my life. And I love going around to meeting everybody where I go, if I go anywhere, like you're saying, you are able to go and just have these wonderful conversations with people who are. Have had a similar journey to you and are part of Mormon stories, extended community and everything. And so I just loved being able to go I mean, I was in Idaho last weekend and just spent a weekend with a whole bunch of a cohort of old, long time Community of Christ and new converts too. Community of Christ members that were engaged in essentially like a college seminar where they were studying how scholars approach restoration scriptures. What do we do with the Book of Mormon as scripture, considering it's not a literal history, that kind of thing. And just, it's just wonderful to interact with them. So after this marathon, I did like 14 hours of teaching. You know, one of the ladies at the end of it, she was like, you know, this was life transformational for me. This weekend transformed my life. And it was, it's just so incredible to, you know, make those connections with people and to be able to go all around the country and you have a family wherever you go, you know, of these people who have like you say, these like minded people from the restoration tradition and that you otherwise would never interact with. So I think it's, it's been, I've always seen the potential for this as being absolutely incredible historically, but I never imagined that it would be so meaningful to me personally.

John Dehlin [01:04:35] There you have it. The testimony of John Hamer. Beautiful. Thank you so much, John Hamer, for joining us again on Mormon Stories. We wish you the best. For listeners who are interested, please check out, you know, mormonstories.org to get links to all these great resources. And thanks to everyone for joining us both here in our live audience, but also on the podcast. We hope to continue the tradition of helping people navigate their transitions in lots of directions. And we hope that this is a direction that people will find useful and valuable. And most importantly, John, thanks for your friendship.

John Hamer [01:05:15] Thank you, John. Thanks for having me again.

John Dehlin [01:05:16] All right, thanks everybody. Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories podcast. To discuss this podcast with others, please check us out@mormonstories.org to join one of our 80 plus support communities across the globe. Click on the Support communities tab@mormonstories.org to keep this podcast alive. Please consider a tax deductible donation today by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org audio and video for this podcast were provided by Richard Holdman. A big thanks to the Saber Rattlers for providing the music for today's episode. The Mormont Stories logo was generously donated by studiocase. Com.

John Hamer [01:06:02] Come ye saints, no toil nor labor fear, but with joy wend your way.

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