Welcome and Opening Remarks

Part 1 of 5 · Ep. 259

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3. Come, come, ye saints. No toil nor labor fear, but with joy wend your way.

John Dehlin [00:00:18] The 2011 Salt Lake City Mormon Stories Conference was brought to you by the Salt Lake City Mormon Stories support community, found on Facebook, and also by the Open Stories foundation and by the generous support of our listeners. To join or start a Mormon Stories support community in your area, please go to MormonStories.org and click on the Support Communities tab to host a regional conference in your city like this one. Please email us@mormonstoriesmail.com for more information on how to host a conference. Finally, to keep this podcast and all of these communities and projects alive, please donate today@mormonstories.org oh, and please enjoy the conference.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:01:04] So thank you for coming. This is the first Salt Lake City Mormon Stories Annual conference, and we're excited to have you here. Before we start though, special thanks need to go to Jared and Katrina Anderson for putting this entire thing together. We also though, if we really want to get down to it, we need to thank Facebook. Kind of a funny thing to thank, but it wasn't too long ago that I actually met Jared and Katrina on a Facebook group called Moo 2.0. And I don't know them very well yet, but it's coming along. We had a great picnic yesterday and it was fun to see so many of you there. And I hope that we can have many more events like this in the future. I wanted to bring Jared and Katrina something nice, so I brought them something that I love, which is chocolate from Boston. So. So, Katrina, Miriam, come get this.

John Dehlin [00:02:08] Thank you.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:02:08] You're welcome. As most of you know, Mormon Stories met together for our first ever conference in New York City not too long ago. And John planned, coordinated, he did everything for the entire event all by himself, of course. He was also at the time, trying to go to school, be a husband

John Dehlin [00:02:31] and father,

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:02:34] do the podcast. Yeah, yeah, he's got everything. And by the end of the conference, John was beat. So we were sitting together at Planet Hollywood in Times Square and discussing how great it was that we had been able to get a community of people together and to enjoy that face to face contact that we don't get online and we don't really get. It's wonderful to have Facebook, but we don't really get what we need as far as human interaction there.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:03:03] So as we were brainstorming, we came up with an idea of putting together some regional Facebook podcast groups. And the purpose of these groups was pretty much simply to make it possible for us to have these communities and to get together and have conferences and see each other in the real world without John having to do everything or be in charge even anymore. Because, you know, the guy, podcast guy, he's not really.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:03:30] He doesn't need to be in front and doing everything by himself. So thank you to John for everything that you've done. But we hope from now on, we can make this a community thing and an us thing and an everyone involved thing. So let's give John a round of

John Dehlin [00:03:42] applause,

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:03:53] And we'll see if together we can relieve him from a lot of this work by making everything happen ourselves. Because we've got everything we need between us right here. We've got skills. We know who we are. We know what we want to do. We want to have fun. We want to be friends. So I want to make it clear that the conference that we're attending today is a glorified community event, meaning it was put on by the people in Salt Lake City that had enough energy to jump in and make it happen. We had one person from Salt Lake put together a beautiful graphic. We had other people jump in at different places.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:04:27] And I hope that in the future that many more of you will feel like you want to come on, because there's an opportunity, and we'd love to have you. And there will be another conference here next June, so I look forward to seeing you.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:04:42] The primary reason we wanted to do this is because a lot of us have been sadly feeling a great sense of isolation. We've been online, and we've tried to express ourselves there, but because of the differences that we have, sometimes that isolation feels even larger. We've got members of the LGBTQ community here. We've got feminists. We've got intellectuals, atheists, agnostics, deists, traditional believers, fundamentalists. And it's a difficult thing to put together a community made up of such a diverse group of people. Some of us are active. Some of us haven't stepped in a chapel in years.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:05:23] Some of us were never endowed. Some of us have temple recommends. Some of us have chosen not to get a temple recommends renewed, and others have been told that they're not worthy to have a temple recommend anymore. So we've just got.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:05:34] We've got everything. We've got people who've been excommunicated. We've got people who've resigned their memberships, and we've got people that go to church every week and love it. So one of the things that happens online when we're speaking to each other is we tend sometimes not all the time to argue among ourselves and to fight because of these differences.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:05:59] And we're hoping that somehow we can come together and on top of not just being virtual friends and not just having the community that we have here, that we can learn to love and accept each other in our differences and make this a place of cohesiveness and caring where everyone can speak, regardless of his or her beliefs or status in the church or whatever. This is just to be a safe space.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:06:35] That deserves a round of applause. We as a group, some of us, because we have such a diverse community and we're asking people with different beliefs and different needs and whatever to get together and respect each other despite those beliefs and accept, you know, agree to disagree and love each other within this safe realm. So a few of us decided to get together and write down some things that we do share, some ideas that we share as common values among a distance as in hopes that we know we can define perhaps who we are. But I want to really state that these shared values that we've written out are just written in a draft form.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:07:18] They're something that we can take and look at and you guys could discuss, we could discuss online, we can discuss it here today and see if it's something that we really want to accept and also accept that these values will grow and change and continue to evolve over time, as pretty much that's what's happening on the Internet at all times. Things are changing and evolving and we're discussing and we're improving.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:07:38] So let's do it. But let me present them in draft form to you what we came up with and you can see what you think. Number one, we choose to self identify as Mormons. We claim this identity based on our genealogies, upbringings, beliefs, relationships and other life experiences.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:07:54] Two, we believe that one could be Mormon or claim a Mormon identity without necessarily adhering to the teachings or doctrines of any religious organization. 3. We celebrate the richness of Mormon heritage, teachings and community in all of its diversity.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:08:09] Four, we seek spaces where we as Mormons can live lives of intellectual and spiritual integrity, individual conscience and personal dignity. Five, we acknowledge and honor different spiritual paths and modes of religious or non religious truth seeking. We respect the convictions of those who subscribe to ideas and beliefs that are difficult. Excuse me. We respect the convictions of those who subscribe to ideas and beliefs that differ from our own.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:08:35] Six, we recognize the confusion, distress, emotional trauma and social ostracism that often accompany personal faith crises. We seek constructive ways of helping and supporting those experiencing such crises. Regardless of their ultimate decisions regarding church affiliation or activity. 7 We affirm the inherent and equal worth of all human beings. We seek spaces where Mormons and all people can interact as equals, regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation. In this spirit of egalitarianism, we prefer non authoritarian and non hierarchical means of organization and affiliation.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:09:14] So our conference today then will again will be an attempt to celebrate this community and to celebrate both our differences that we have and we share, and also hopefully some shared values that we can enjoy and love and learn to grow with.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:09:34] One thing that happens when we get together as a group like this is we realize that when it's time for prayer that we have different people who have different ways of praying. And we recognize that we can't really have one standard. We can't necessarily have one standard correlated way of praying if we've got such a diverse group of people on here. So the way we've decided to deal with this is to keep in mind that the way any one of us prays is fine. We each may have our own way of praying, but that we can all respect one another's ways of praying and expressing themselves and enjoy that.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:10:08] And it may be different than our own, but there's nothing wrong with that. So we will begin today with a prayer, and it will be given by Randall Graham. So, Randall,

Opening Prayer and Community Gathering

Guest [00:10:35] Our Heavenly Mother and Father, we are grateful for this chance we have to gather here in this safe space where we can enjoy and celebrate our differences and, and similarities and shared heritage and beliefs and practices. We're grateful for those that have labored so diligently to make this happen. We're grateful for the peace that we are finding in our lives as we, as we find members of our community that think and feel that the way that we did. We pray that we might be able to develop new friendships and develop a stronger community and help others who are searching to find answers and hope as we have. We also ask that we might be able to learn and enjoy this evening. And we say these things with grateful and hope hearts. Amen.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:11:42] Thanks, Randall.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:11:46] Since we started with the prayer, I'd like to address a question that's come up quite a lot. And that's the question as to whether or not we're starting a new church. And the answer is no. Please. No. We have a church. Some of us have a church, some of us don't have a church. Some people use other denominations. This is a group of people getting together and enjoying the love and cohesiveness that we can find. So it's Just really important to me.

John Dehlin [00:12:16] At least

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:12:18] not starting a church.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:12:19] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:12:20] Just.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:12:20] No. After the performance, Katrina will be standing up to introduce our lovely Carolyn Pearson.

Carolyn Pearson Introduction and Talk

John Dehlin [00:12:30] It is truly an honor to be able to introduce our first speaker today, one of my personal heroes, Carolyn Pearson. If not for her, I probably wouldn't even be at this conference today. A year ago, I read her beloved play Mother Wove the Morning, and it changed my life.

John Dehlin [00:12:51] Literally, it changed the way I viewed the world. I realized that for 27 years, I have been living in a motherless house. As Carolyn says in her introduction to the play, not only is our society a man's world, God's world is a man's world, too. The heavenly beings we sing praise to are all male. Every prayer we utter is to a male. And through a male, God's prophets, ancient and modern, are all male.

John Dehlin [00:13:18] Every prayer we. Sorry. Why had I never realized how damaging this was as a woman before? Why had I never reached out to my heavenly mother? Carolyn's words woke me up to how much I missed my divine mother.

John Dehlin [00:13:35] Shortly after reading her play, I found her interview on Mormon stories. And after many hours of listening, not just to her Mormon story, but to many, many others, we are here today. So thank you, Carolyn, for helping me and my husband also discover this truly remarkable community of saints that we are with today.

John Dehlin [00:13:59] Okay, now back to Carolyn. She is a native of Utah from pioneer stock. She graduated from Brigham Young University with an MA in theater. She taught at Snow College and BYU and then went on to write educational and religious screenplays for the church Motion Picture Studio. While performing in a University City play, she met and fell in love with Gerald Pearson, who Carolyn has described as a shining, blonde, enthusiastic young man who in turn, fell in love with Carolyn and her poems. It was Gerald who, when Salt Lake City publishers didn't want to publish Carolyn's poems, decided to publish them himself.

John Dehlin [00:14:35] Carolyn's first book of poetry, called Beginnings, was published by her husband and sold more than 150,000 poet copies before they gave it over to Doubleday and then to Bookcraft. But as the title said, it was just the beginning. Carolyn went on to write more than 40 other books and plays, including the beautiful memoir about her life as a homosexual husband. Goodbye. I love you. In the years since gerald's death of AIDS, Carolyn has been a tireless advocate for our LGBT brothers and sisters. In 2001, she published Sorry. In 2007, she published no More Goodbyes, Circling the wagon around our gay loved ones. It is a call to lovingly include our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters in our families and congregations.

John Dehlin [00:15:17] Carolyn has devoted much of her life advocating for those considered other, especially women and gays, and championing for inclusiveness in the church. Carolyn is a poet, a mother, author, advocate, grandmother, playwright, philosopher, friend, and a true 21st century Mormon pioneer. Please join me in welcoming her today.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:15:57] Thank you so much for that introduction and thank you for that stunning music that we just heard.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:16:03] Oh my.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:16:06] And John and others, thank you for the time and energy you have put into creating this event and thank you for allowing me my half hour up here at my Rami Umtum. I would much rather be right down there where I could reach out and touch somebody's knee, but nevertheless, here we are. And I'm grateful that we are here together.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:16:34] In one of John's postings, in preparation for this, I read the little joke, you know what you call an atheistic Jew? A Jew. And of course that's part of the mentality of what has brought this group together. But it also reminded me of one of my favorite Mormon jokes. And I collect and make up and adapt Mormon jokes, which we could have a whole hour of if I had the time here at my Rami Antum, which we do not. So here's the one that I thought of at that moment.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:17:10] Do you know what you get when you cross a Mormon missionary and an atheist? Somebody who knocks on your door for absolutely no reason at all. And speaking of Mormon missionaries, are you as excited as I am to watch the Tonys tomorrow night and to see the Book of Mormon, the musical, sweep the musical awards and be such a beautiful paradox there of every review that I have read, a symptom that really makes the Mormons look really good.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:17:49] And I think we should just make everybody look really good so when everybody, anybody can do that. I'm pleased. And still, speaking of Mormon missionaries, on Thursday I came in on the airplane and as I came down to my luggage, I saw this big rolled out sign, welcome home Elder. Let's say Jensen, I forget.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:18:14] And all kinds and around him, around the sign were 40 or more people with that look of anticipation and love on their faces. And I thought, this is just so great. I went and got my luggage and just when I got it, I heard this eruption behind me and I thought, oh, Elder Jameson's home.

John Dehlin [00:18:34] So I

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:18:37] wheeled my luggage back over there so I could see. And here they all were, so, so excited. And sure enough, here in his wonderful suit and his missionary tag was Elder Jansen. And he was just shining and so delighted to be home and smiling and everybody was hugging him. And, well, one of my thoughts was, oh, I hope this sweet young man is not gay. I hope, you know, whatever. Whatever it is, he's able to work out a beautiful life. But then he. So he was hugging. Here's his grandfather in the wheelchair and all these older people and younger people. And I thought, I want some of that. So I lined up and he came

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:19:23] around here,

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:19:26] and I grabbed him and I said, elder Jensen, you don't know me, but I'm just walking through and I just want to tell you welcome home and I love you. Well, I have chosen to speak today about no more us and them.

Beyond Us and Them: Pioneer Stories

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:19:51] And that's a huge hope of mine for all of us as we travel through this world. You know, when I grew up in Happy Valley, Provo, Utah, the only them that I was aware of were the Russians. Honestly, I knew we were. And we were, you know, but that was the only strange, scary otherness that I was aware of. And now, I mean, we've got otherness everywhere.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:20:25] It depends on which station you get your news from that if you're us or them or there's nothing you can look at politically or internationally that doesn't show the extraordinary deep lines that have been drawn all over the place between us and them.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:20:46] And it is my belief and my hope that this group is here primarily to erase some of the lines between us and them, whoever that us or them might be. A favorite quote of mine, in fact, that I chose to put in this book that was mentioned, no More Goodbyes.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:21:10] In fact, while I'm holding this book, because I'll forget, let me mention that out there on the book table, there's a whole bunch of these, and I marked them down from 15 to 10 bucks. So any of you who want. I was waylaid in the ladies from a minute ago by a young woman who said, you know, my family has this book and to turn my father 180 degrees around about his gay son. I get that information all the time, which you can imagine. Nothing thrills me more. So those of you who need this book and have 10 bucks, put it in the little blue box.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:21:45] If you don't have ten bucks, take one of these books. Because whether you have it or not, if you need this book, book for yourself or somebody in your life, I want you to have it. And I mean it. Just pick it up and take it. If you don't have the 10 bucks.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:21:58] So here is the quote that I love so much by archaeologist Howard Winters. Civilization is the process in which one gradually increases the the number of people included in the term we or us, and at the same time decreases those labeled you or them until that category has no one left in it.

John Dehlin [00:22:34] Now isn't that great?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:22:35] Won't that be the millennium or the shift of the ages or whatever it is that we're looking toward and hopefully working toward? Because it's not going to happen unless you and I every day decrease the number of people of them and increase the number of us.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:23:05] In my stake towards the Auckland style, I live in Walnut Creek, California. On Easter weekend we had just a remarkable event that typifies what I'm talking about here. My stake president, who is one of the most splendid people on the planet, some months ago approached Bishop Cordelone, who's not a Mormon bishop, but yes, a Catholic bishop of the Diocese of there in Oakland, and said, would you like to join the Mormons in creating the largest church organized blood drive for the Red Cross that's ever happened? And Bishop Cordelian said, yes, I would. So we have been working on that. And next month July will be this huge ongoing push for Mormons and Catholics and whoever else wants to join to bring everybody in.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:23:56] Because this is traditionally the month when the Red Cross runs out of blood. So we had the kickoff of that on Easter weekend of some programs featuring music, chorus and orchestra by the Mormons. Mormons do music so well, don't they?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:24:17] And this was presented on Mormon property at the Interstate center by the Temple and then at the Cathedral of the Light in Oakland. And with my stake president greeting and the Red Cross head greeting and on one of the occasions our regional representative greeting and Bishop Cordleone of the Catholics greeting. And most lovely for me, I got to participate as my stake president had asked me to read a poem of mine that demonstrates the importance of giving blood. So I got to get up there with all of these wonderful people and give this little poem called Giving.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:25:06] I love giving blood. Sometimes I walk in off the street when no one has even asked and roll up my sleeve. I love watching my blood flow through the scarlet tube to fill the little bag that bears no address.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:25:23] I love the mystery of its destination. It runs as easily to child or woman or man, black or white, Californian or Asian, Methodist, Mormon, Catholic or Jew. Rain does too. Rivers do. I think God does. We do not.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:25:52] Our suspicious ego is clot on the journey from us to them. So I give blood to practice flowing, never knowing where it's going and glad. Now sometimes it is easier for us

Guest [00:26:20] to

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:26:24] erase the lines between us as Mormons and those that we at least used to identify as the great and abominable church. Sometimes it seems to be a little easier perhaps to make that kind of dramatic erasure than it is to erase the lines between the people that have already been enumerated today. The orthodox Mormons, the questioning Mormons, the Jack Mormons, the excommunicated Mormons, the whatever else label there might possibly be for where you might be sitting in your own heart just now?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:27:07] And also, can you imagine that within 20 seconds in so many families when a child tells the parents that he or she is gay, there is suddenly this remarkable, terrible thing that happens where this loved child suddenly becomes not us, but them.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:27:34] Well, we have so many terrible opportunities for them to stay them or for us to become them. And the consciousness of the globe at this moment, though, so many things seem to be working against it. I mean, the Arab Spring as we call it, I think is working toward no more us and them as a lot of things that appear to be well and are really scary. But I wrote a poem, I said I have to remember frequently that all pain can be labor pain. And I'm hopeful that for everyone here who is experiencing pain because of the kinds of things that we're talking about here today, that that might bring a birth of some better thing.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:28:29] And there's for us as individuals, there's only so much that we personally can do because a lot of it is in the hands of those above us in the organization that we're talking about. And I believe that there are a lot of leaders in the Mormon Church who are wanting very much as is the the name of the talk that my own Stake President gave. Now, because I am speaking so highly of my Stake President, I don't want anyone here to think that he ought to be suspect in any way whatsoever. He is 100% devoted to the work of the church, as are the other members of the Stake Presidency.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:29:14] Last fall he gave a talk in Stake Conference called Enlarging the Tent of Zion. And I have also seen that phrase in some of the emails and the posts that have been going on around this particular activity. And I'm going to read to you just a couple of paragraphs from his talk, which I think you will find very warming and encouraging.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:29:43] He said, our purpose is to enlarge the Tent of Zion by showing an increase in charity both as individuals and as congregations. In short, Jesus challenged his disciples to enlarge the Tent of Zion so that it was big enough to cover literally everyone who Had a desire to accept the good news.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:30:10] Several years ago, a set of full time missionaries introduced me to a lovely lady whom they had been teaching for months. She attended church services regularly here on Temple Hill, but she was making no progress toward baptism. During our visit, this lady told me, look, I love to come up to the temple grounds and join in singing the hymns and I enjoy the friendship of the worshipers. I also appreciate the special spirit of love the missionaries bring into my home. But honestly, I don't believe a word they say about Joseph Smith or the Book of Mormon. Of course, I respect those who do and I would never say or do anything disrespectful or disruptive.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:30:55] The end of her quote. And now my state president goes on. Is the tent of the Oakland stake large enough to cover this lady and others like her? Yes, of course, the church is not just for committed members because charity seeketh not her own.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:31:19] He gave two other specific examples of people for whom, yes, our stake will be large enough to cover these people as well. Now, yes, you can all move to my stake if you want to, or you can in your own way encourage by your own conversation with a letter that you might write, however you might want to approach.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:31:52] Well, you know, we all have our own intuition or our spiritual gifts that help us figure out what is our calling in terms of who and when and where we might say something that would be useful. And you don't have to wait around for me or for your stake president for anybody else to invite you to have the kind of conversation that would be your contribution to enlarging the tent of Zion.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:32:31] Because everybody here is a pioneer. And it was only now, just as I used again the word tent of Zion that I am, I'm connecting it with the word pioneer, which is a word that has been used a lot in creating this event.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:32:51] And as I was thinking through some of the things that I wanted to say, I remembered and one of my books out there is a book that used to be called Consider the Butterfly. It is now in paperback titled Embracing Coincidence and it tells 44 personal synchronicity stories of mine. This is one of my spiritual touchstones, or the synchronicities that almost daily crop up in my life. And these for all of us can be little special delivery messages from the universe, from God, like a dream can be, that is designed for us to give us something important and very personal to think about.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:33:34] So I was remembering a synchronicity from a long time ago. And thanks to word search, I found that it happened in 2002, and I knew already that it was on July 24th. So this is what I wrote down in my diary, that I happened to be in Utah for some other reason. I don't remember what. And I had made the decision that I didn't want to do any of the 24th of July celebration things. I didn't want to watch the parade. So I decided to just go up and spend the day and then the night with a cousin of mine, whose name is Cindy, in her home up the canyon.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:34:15] So I was up there, and Cindy wrote out for me because I wanted to go for a walk. She said, okay, here are some good little walking trails that I use. So I went out for a walk on the 24th of July, and I went here and there, and then I got a little bit lost. So I followed the highway for a ways, walking. And as I was walking in the highway, I had what I have come to know to be just suddenly moved into what I call my synchronicity space, where something kind of big was going on. Because I realized that I was walking down Immigration Canyon Road and the exact road that the pioneers had followed as they came into the Valley on July 24, way, way, way back when the first company came, which said to me, like it or not, you're a pioneer.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:35:14] And actually, I do like it that I am a pioneer. I did come here. I came to this world with women's issues, and then I married into gay issues. And I have had a wonderful opportunity to be a pioneer on both of those paths, which, of course, are not entirely different.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:35:43] And those of you who have listened to all five hours of John talking to me, I cannot believe anybody would do that. I mean, I. Could never do that. Although I've been listening to some of those now, and I listened to all three of brother Dustin's podcasts here. So, anyway, for the first. Yeah, yeah, that's another good one.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:36:11] Anyway, some of you will have heard me recite this poem of mine, which I think has only been published. Yeah, I let Dan do it in Sunstone a few years ago, probably the time that I. We had my sandstone centerfold that my one and only glamour picture.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:36:38] And yes, I do have. I do come from Mormon pioneer stock. My. Oh, before I forget, this little thing that I'm wearing here is a. I almost never wear it, but it's in my little box of jewelry in my family heirlooms. And if you get close enough to me and please get close enough to me to take a peek at this thing and Also, give me a hug while you're there.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:37:02] It's a seagull. And I don't know quite where this came into my family. I'm sure it was the first several decades of the 1900s. And I wear this to keep the crickets away. And it works. So, yes, My own grandmother walked across the plains when she was 8 with her parents who left Nottingham, England. He was a lace maker. And I have.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:37:29] That was my grandmother, Sarah Okey Sorine. And I have Thomas Morris, who was in the Mormon Battalion, and I have George Warren Serrine, who is on the Good ship Brooklyn. So I have about all the pioneer blood that you can find. Find that I love to know that it's there, and I call on it from time to time. And I certainly thought of that as I was writing this poem.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:37:57] My people were Mormon pioneers. Is the blood still good? Truth flew by like a dove and dropped a feather in the west where truth flies, you follow if you are a pioneer. I have searched the skies and now and then another feather has fallen.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:38:24] I have packed the handcart again, packed it with the precious things and thrown away the rest. I will sing by the fires at night out there on uncharted ground where I am my own captain of tens, Where I blow the bugle, bring myself to morning prayer, Map out the miles and never know where or when or if at all.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:38:51] I will finally say this is the place I face the plains on a good day for walking. The sun rises and the mist clears. I will be all right. My people were Mormon pioneers, And I'm believing that everybody in this hall has something of the pioneer calling.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:39:28] And it's a calling that we should be very, very proud of. There are ways in which our forefathers and foremothers came and established themselves in this valley and then said, glad that's done. Glad the pioneering's done. Unorthodox Mormons should be constantly thinking, what's my next pioneering step?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:39:58] Where do we go now? And it's my belief that everybody here has some experience or some desire toward that. I realize that I have been placed in a very protective kind of circumstance, geographically and perhaps for other kinds of reasons.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:40:22] I feel very loved in my work, Ward, and in my stake. And there's one story in my book of Synchronicities, there talks about. It's called Wally's Tie. Talks about me and a friend in the ward who is the most different from me you could ever imagine politically and in so. But this story that came together, that brought about Wally's Tie is just the sweetest story.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:40:46] And I love it when those things happen that bring together people who ordinarily would not be close in any way. Wally and I hug every Sunday in the foyer and every time we happen to see each other. And that is as it should be.

Personal Callings and Support for Marginalized Members

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:41:01] I know that for many of you, you had a lot of pain in the process of wherever you have been moving in your own pioneering. And I know that some of you have had pain caused by our own church in ways that from my limited point of view, is extraordinarily unnecessary and hurtful and simply wrong.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:41:28] And many of you, I know, have had hurt delivered by family members and friends because you have moved outside the circle of whatever they deem to be appropriate. I know that for those who have made the decision to completely leave

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:41:54] the

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:41:56] Mormon Church, there are a couple of things that I think can be useful to think about. Carol Jung, that was Brigham's brother who did not come west with the group psychologist Carol Jung. It is my understanding that as he was doing work with his clients, that he insisted that they come to terms with their family religion.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:42:29] Now, I'm sure he wouldn't insist that they go back and participate in whatever way they would have left, but that they make peace in some way with their family religion or their psyche would not be as healthy as it otherwise might be.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:42:44] And similarly, a woman that I appreciate her writing a lot, Joan Borisenko, who writes about mind, body, work on a set of tapes, the first that I have. She says a similar thing that that while in our mature years we choose the spiritual path that feels most correct to us, that it's important, she says, to make peace with your ancestral religion, even if you've left it, that to find something in it to honor would be very, very useful to you.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:43:24] So as we repack our handcart and I think the phrase that I used in that poem was packed it with the precious things and thrown away the rest. It's a great sadness to me when people who are or have been Mormon throw away the precious things that we have that have made us who we are. A lot of the things that I kind of like about myself I cannot say, well, I'm this in spite of, of being a Mormon. I know that a lot of the things I like are because of being a Mormon. And so walking this sometimes difficult path to say what is really serving me and what is not.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:44:07] Let us not make the mistake of throwing out things that could be really useful. And Joan Borisenko suggested, as a Jew, she has chosen certain kinds of observances that she reframes in her mind and makes use of them in her life.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:44:28] And maybe somebody who does not feel that they any longer can be within the Mormon community specifically might be able to say, well, as I say, I think the visiting teaching program and the home teaching program, I think are geniuses ideas.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:44:48] Last Sunday in Relief Society we had a lesson to which I had no objection whatsoever. And occasionally, I mean, the sisters love it. The sisters love it when I raise my hand and offer a second opinion on this or that or the other.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:45:04] Right now, my visiting teaching list consists of the three that's been assigned to me and four that I have assigned to me. Four people that I have told you can count on hearing from me the first Sunday of the month.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:45:19] One is a schizophrenic gay man in Denver who, well, never mind about the difficulties that he has. And two are people close in my family who have health challenges that I can give them the exact encouragement that they need. And, and so there are.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:45:40] You could do that. I mean, anybody here who. And if your calling is to be a former Mormon, and you know that that is your calling, everybody here will or ought to support that, it might be also a useful thing for you to be able to say, you know what?

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:46:01] I'm going to be able to create my own calling. Now, I know Brother Dustin here said he's not accepting callings at this moment. He's creating his own callings. Everybody here in the church or out of the church, you can create your own callings. And I think a brilliant thing for you to do would be to say, I'm going to make up my own home teaching list or my own visiting teaching list. And those people, I keep thinking, oh, I got to contact them, say the month's not going to end. And then I report to myself that I have done my visiting teaching or my home teaching.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:46:33] Well, I think I have used up my, my given half hour at my Rami Umtum here. One other. Well, maybe the final thing that everyone here can do, you know, the presidency of the church, the Quorum of the the 12, your stake presidency, your bishopric, they all have things that they can and may or may not do to assist in minimizing the US and the them in the kinds of ways that we have been talking about here. There's one thing that all of us can do, and this is one. When I receive as I do so many emails from LDS gay people, especially gay men who are in a lot of distress and who feel so.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:47:29] And many of them have wonderful stories of how their families have given them absolute support. And even I got one last week. My BYU bishop has given me the best support. My BYU counselor has given me the best support I could possibly imagine. No matter what decisions I make around this. That's wonderful. There are those who don't get that kind of support. And so I find myself often in an email reply to, for example, a young gay man who's saying, I don't think I can even go home for Christmas. And I write back and say, hey, you go home for Christmas and you be the most shining person that they remember ever since you were 8 years old.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:48:11] Maybe you stun them them by being the most beautiful person that they could ever imagine. It'll surprise them. Maybe because they have an idea that maybe now you're not going to be as shining as they want you to be. Go ahead and surprise them. Be the most amazingly generous, bright, happy person that you can possibly be in their presence.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:48:36] And it's my belief that I'm supposed to stay up here for 15 minutes for questions. Is that right, John? Or is that changed now? Okay, that's great. So I will conclude then with a little tiny verse that is not mine. You've heard this a hundred times and yes, it is absolutely a cliche. It is also absolutely true.

Carol Lynn Pearson [00:49:02] William Markham they drew a circle that shot me out Heretic rebel A thing to flout but love and I had the wit to win we drew a circle that took them in May it be so. Thank you.

John Dehlin [00:49:40] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Music today was provided by the Saber Rattlers. Check them out@sabre-rattlers.com the Mormon Stories logo was generously donated by StudioCase.com thanks for listening.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:49:55] Come, come ye saints no toil nor labor fear but with joy wend your way Though hard to you this journey may appear Grace shall be as your day Tis better far for us to strive Our useless cares from us to drive to the San Jo Hearts will swell oh, all is well all is well.

Musical Performances and Community Songs

Part 2 of 5 · Ep. 260

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3. Come, come, ye saints. No toil nor labor fear, but with joy wend your way.

John Dehlin [00:00:18] The 2011 Salt Lake City Mormon Stories Conference was brought to you by the Salt Lake City Mormon Stories Support community, found on Facebook and also by the Open Stories foundation and by the generous support of our listeners. To join or start a Mormon Stories support community in your area, please go to MormonStories.org and click on the Support Communities tab to host a regional conference in your city, like this one. Please email us@mormonstoriesmail.com for more information on how to host a conference. Finally, to keep this podcast and all of these communities and projects alive, please donate today@mormonstories.org oh, and please enjoy the conference.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:01:07] What's not to love? Thank you, Carolyn. We're very, very lucky to have you here today. Beautiful. We will now have another musical performance by Holly Robbins. Thank you so much for agreeing.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:01:22] There's a story behind this song, and I hope it's all of our stories. I hope it's a bunch of Mormon stories all condensed down into one hokey little country rhythm. A few years ago, well, let me go back to when I was seven. I was in second grade and I drew a picture of a bunny like you would see in a coloring book that you color. And so I drew the outline of this bunny and I colored it pink.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:01:55] And I took it up to my. I took it up to my second grade teacher's desk and I showed it to her. And I adored her. I worshiped the ground she walked on. And she said to me, only babies outline their pictures in black.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:02:19] And as a seven year old who, you know, loved her teacher that much, I was just shocked and so hurt. Hurt. And I went back to my chair and, you know, just kind of cried. And I kind of carried that with me for a few years, you know, into high school. And, you know, and as I grew, I began to look back and think, you know, she must have been having a bad day or, you know, I didn't. I didn't know how to frame it, but I just kind of matured into it. And then eventually after I had kids, I thought, yeah, she was really busy.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:02:48] So anyway, one day I was going through all sorts of trauma. This was five years ago with regard to my own Mormon story. And I was having some serious divine feminine things going on and thinking, I've got to reject this. And I was in a serious panic about this, just praying that what I was doing was right. Worshiping Heavenly Mother and all of this and looking for Some kind of a sign from heaven. And we were in our. I was teaching a class of little children and we were doing watercolor. I had never done watercolor before. I like black lines. I like safe black lines.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:03:26] I like to color the bunny. Dry out a picture of the bunny with black lines and then color it. That's what I like to do. And calligraphy and all that. And so anyway, we were doing watercolor and I'd never done that before. And the instructor was showing us how to do that. And I was shocked at what I had turned out. It was this soft yellow sun against a summer blue sky. And it was beautiful. I didn't know that I could do that. So I went home and took it home with me. And the next day I was doing laundry or some mundane thing. And all of a sudden Mrs.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:03:59] Miller's words came into my head. She said, only babies outline their pictures in black. And I was just stunned. I thought, I'm not a baby anymore. I don't have to live inside these safe black lines. I can live my life in watercolor. And I realized then that Mrs. Miller wasn't insulting my 7 year old self. She was instructing my 37 year old self. And I think that must have taken her a lot of faith to be able to say something that would seem so cruel for such a long time. So this song is called Summer Girl. And I hope it's every one of your stories because that's what I intend.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:04:43] I drew the hard line every time, but I could never get it right. It was the quintessential tragedy in my world of black and white. And then the fire of heaven came. Consumed my charcoal in the flame. It was the end of shadow black and winter white.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:05:06] It was the world come to an end. But I'm alright because my colors bleed into the misty sunset. I cannot tell tell where I end off and you begin. My soul's a raging fire in the wind. And I'm not afraid to look into the sun.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:05:39] No, I never saw a solid line in the rainbow that appeared. God's rays of summer glory in that sky. The pains I mixed with tears that brush flies lightly across the blue. I'm so happy and in love with you. You were the end of shadow black and winter white.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:06:02] You were my world come to an end. But I'm alright because my colors bleed into the misty sunset. I cannot tell where I end off and you begin. My soul's a raging in the wind. And I'm not afraid to look into the sun.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:06:35] I'll lightly Fall the blossoms now the leaves and glistening snow. Somehow I carry August fire inside my soul. Cause I'm a bright summer girl in this watercolor world. So now my colors bleed into the misty sunset? I'm the sky I cannot tell where I end off and you begin. Oh, how we fly.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:07:12] Our soul's this raging fire in the watercolor wind. That's why I'm not afraid to look into the sun. No, I'm not afraid to look into the sun.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:07:34] Thank you. Thank you very much.

Joanna Brooks on Mormon Identity and History

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:07:43] Our next speaker is our very own lovely Joanna Brooks. You may know her from the Mormon Matters podcast. She also blogs@religion dispatches.com. it's an online religion magazine and has the Ask Mormon Girl column at Feminist Mormon Housewives. And I just want you all to know that as I've gotten to know Joanna, if you ever have a friend, Joanna is your friend. She's here for you. We love her. And I want to tell you one

Joanna Brooks [00:08:13] thing that I heard on Mormon Matters

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:08:15] podcast that she said that I may or may not be repeating correctly, and you'll have to go to her and find out, but this comes from Judaism, supposedly. And she was talking about the three Bs, and she told me that the three Bs, orthotolas were believe, behave, belong, or belong, behave, believe, depending on which order you put them in. And one of the things I think is beautiful about this opportunity that we have is that perhaps we've been. Some of us have experienced this idea that if we believe something and we have it in our minds and we hold it in the right way,

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:08:55] and

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:08:56] then if we behave, then, therefore, we can belong. And what I love is the idea, as Joanna presented it, was to reverse that and say, first, we belong. Secondly, yes, there are some behaviors that we need to keep up with. We need to treat each other with love and respect and acceptance. We're not here to argue and fight. We're here to be a community and join each other. And then finally, what we believe, what we hold in our own heads is going to change over time. But it's up to us, and it's something that we hold and we choose as we grow and move forward. So thank you, Joanna, for your wonderful wisdom, and we love you. And thank you for making so many moves to help us move away from isolation towards a place where we belong and. And have a place to be. Joanna.

Joanna Brooks [00:09:59] Oh, heck, don't make me cry before I even get up here. Be warned, I'm a Mormon and I cry sometimes and I have my bonnet that some of you took pictures in because. Right. This is Open Mormon Pioneers and I have this Sharpie and I'm going to ask Carolyn to sign my pioneer bonnet after during the break because I can't think of anything cooler than a hot pink pioneer bonnet signed by Carolyn Pearson.

Joanna Brooks [00:10:28] Thank you, Carolyn. And thank you for the planning committee, Katrina and Jared and John and Ann, and thank all of you for being here. You look amazing. Do you feel good? I want to describe for the people who will be listening to this someday what this room looks like. It's this beautiful. When was this building built, do we know?

Joanna Brooks [00:10:49] Early 1900s. It kind of looks like a very small version of the St. George Tabernacle without the all seeing eye on the wall. There's gorgeous natural light and high ceilings and a balcony and a lot of people who are smiling and breathing deeply, excited to be here.

Joanna Brooks [00:11:06] And they're in church on a Saturday and some of the women are wearing pants. There's two microphones. Okay. In honor of the theme Open Mormon Pioneers, I'm going to begin by telling you two pioneer stories. My great, great, great grandmother, Lucy Evelina Waterbury was born in 1833 in the very cold northern reaches of St. Lawrence County, New York. One winter afternoon when Lucy was 12, her father left her to watch over her dying mother and two younger siblings while he trudged out to a neighbor's for help. Lucy's mother, Charlotte Post Waterbury, died. And Lucy, who must have been really terrified, she really didn't feel like she could stay in the house with her mother's body.

Joanna Brooks [00:11:56] And so she took herself and her two younger siblings and bundled up and trudged out into the cold. And we don't know anything about her story for about three years. And then three years later, when Lucy was just 15 years old, somehow she shows up at Nauvoo.

Joanna Brooks [00:12:13] We don't know how she came those miles. And then three years later again in 1852 when she was 19, Lucy crossed the plains with her husband and her one year old daughter Rachel and arrived in the Salt Lake Valley.

Joanna Brooks [00:12:25] My grandmother who I love America. Pearl Thornton was born in 1919 in Garland, Utah. When she was just a young girl, Pearl's family dissolved and her parents divorced and she moved with her mother to Salt Lake City. And these were very humble working class Mormons. On the morning of her eighth birthday, with her mother sick in bed, my grandmother set out by herself to walk the long blocks down South Temple Avenue past the mansions of the prophets, seers and revelators, governors and bankers, homes where her Mother had found work cooking and cleaning to present herself alone for baptism at the Mormon Tabernacle. Alone, she changed into a little handmade one piece suit of white clothing and she stepped into the baptismal font, that majestic golden bowl resting on the back of the 12 oxen.

Joanna Brooks [00:13:16] And a stranger, a total stranger, took her in his arms and lowered her beneath the water and raised her up again. My grandmother always remembered that long, lonely walk and this bone soaking sense of loneliness. It pervades so much of my pioneer history. Do you find it in yours? A lot of loneliness.

Joanna Brooks [00:13:35] But I also find in these stories a great reason for hope as well. For what my grandmothers found at the end of their terrible and lonely walks was community. 15 year old Lucy Waterbury found it when she walked out of the shadow of her mother's death and made her way somehow to Nauvoo. 8 year old Pearl Dorton found it at the end of the long sidewalk in a lighted tabernacle. And a stranger, a total stranger who recognized her as a fellow Mormon and baptized her with dignity.

Joanna Brooks [00:14:04] A long and often lonely walk has brought me to this place, this moment. Perhaps that's what brought you here too. A walk of searching or isolation or fear or difference. But now we find ourselves here together because we recognize one another as Mormons.

Joanna Brooks [00:14:23] And in that sense of mutual recognition, that belonging, that sense of identity, many of us are finding a renewed sense of kinship or hope, new relationships, new common grounds. As Mormonism enters the 21st century, I'm going to take a moment to reflect on what it means to be Mormon, what it means to claim a Mormon identity.

Joanna Brooks [00:14:44] I'm going to speak personally as an unorthodox Mormon, and I'm also going to use some of the sinky crunchy analytical tools that come from my day job, which is not having a good time with Dan Weatherspoon on a podcast, unfortunately. But I'm a professor and I have a scholarly background studying race and religion and culture, and I've done so for the last 20 years. And I'm going to talk in some academic terms because I think thinking critically about what it means to be Mormon or about Mormon identity can create more space for us to tell the truths about our lives and experiences as Mormons.

Joanna Brooks [00:15:17] So what does it mean to be a Mormon? Who defines Mormonism? In the field of religious studies, there's a divide on the question of who defines what a religion means. Some scholars focus on religious institutions, churches, policies, people in charge. Others take what's called a lived religion approach, focusing on the thoughts and the practices and the hopes and the feelings of everyday people.

Joanna Brooks [00:15:44] And according to scholars in the lived religion camp, the story of a faith tradition is not just written by the institutional powers, but by all those who identify with it. In Mormon culture and scholarship, it's been very common to take a very institutional perspective on Mormonism. An institutional perspective on Mormon identity would hold that what makes you a Mormon is your membership, activity, and according to some people, orthodoxy in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And according to the most rigid proponents of this institutional view, not maintaining membership or activity or doctrinal orthodoxy as defined by the institutional church is tantamount to forfeiting your Mormonism.

Joanna Brooks [00:16:28] And some of us have kind of felt how this logic feels when someone says, if you disagree on Prop 8, or if you have questions about historicity of the Book of Mormon, or if you think that Joseph Smith's polygamy was a little bit objectionable and you dare to talk about it, you might as well leave the church.

Joanna Brooks [00:16:44] Or maybe you already have. We felt that. But as Mormonism enters the 21st century, this sort of institutional, all or nothing approach to Mormon identity tells only a fraction of the whole glorious story. A lived religion approach to Mormonism would say that what makes up Mormonism is a phenomena far broader and more complicated than the official record.

Joanna Brooks [00:17:05] It encompasses all of the lives, ideas, practices, hopes, fears of all of the everyday people who have called themselves Mormon in the last 175 years. All of it. It includes not just the official and the orthodox, but the incredibly imaginative, diverse, contradictory and unorthodox stories of all Mormon people. Our lives help define what it means to be a Mormon in the 21st century.

Joanna Brooks [00:17:32] Now, this lived religion approach to Mormonism is backed up by 20 years worth of scholarship on identity. Identity, experts tell us, is not something fixed, static, objective, unchanging. It's not a thing. It's not a property that can be given or taken away.

Joanna Brooks [00:17:50] It's an ongoing process. It's not a property. It's a process. It's a process of assessing what we inherit and constructing something meaningful from encompasses contradiction, discontinuity, change, dissatisfaction, hurt and difference, as well as joy, happiness, belonging, all of it. So to translate that idea into familiar terms, what Mormon identity is is far more complicated than your ascent to a set of orthodox beliefs and practices, practices. It's the story of your consciousness as a Mormon, the sum total of everything that you've invested in Mormonism over the years. It's your genealogy, it's your family, it's your upbringing. It lives in your relationship to Mormon places, from the temple to the welfare cannery, to the small towns where your grandparents lived or the place you served your mission.

Joanna Brooks [00:18:41] It resides in your knowledge of Mormon history, scripture, doctrine for folklore, culture, books, food. You can't wash that stuff out, right. It lives in this set of spiritual practices you've engaged in over the years, from prayer to rites of passage like baptism or endowment, Sunday worship, temple worship, scripture study, community service. It lives in your relationships, real and imagined, to God, your ancestors, your parents, the church, church leaders, the ward you grew up in, the wards you may or may not attend now, the people you interact on Facebook with, and the people sitting in this room and the people who will be listening to this podcast.

Joanna Brooks [00:19:15] All of this makes up our Mormonism. The whole range of feelings we have towards everything we've experienced as a Mormon, and most importantly, the way you wake up every day feeling responsible to make sense of it. If we think of identity as this process, this process of trying to make sense of everything we've experienced as something always being worked on, always unfolding, it follows that Mormon identity is a historical phenomena.

Joanna Brooks [00:19:43] It emerges at specific moments in time, in response to specific conditions, and it changes over time. Here are some parallel examples of historical identities. There was no such thing as a black identity as an African American before the 17th or 18th centuries.

Joanna Brooks [00:20:00] People didn't call themselves black. There's no such thing. Africans who were brought captive to the Americas came, identified with different African cultures, Fawn, Yoruba, and became black after being grouped together, told they were black, and abused collectively as black people. That's how people became black. And then black people reclaimed and reinvested that category of experience with positive cultural associations. They fashioned themselves over time.

Joanna Brooks [00:20:29] Let's bring some real church to this church. All right, then. The term homosexual is a very similar identity. For queer identity, the term homosexual was coined in 1869. No one necessarily identified as a homosexual before the late 19th century. And yet we've seen how that identity, including the word queer, formerly a term of abuse, has been reclaimed and reinvested with meaning fashioned by gay people, people themselves. The comparatively modest queer.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:21:11] Shout out,

Joanna Brooks [00:21:20] It's okay. Don't have to be silent here. Okay. Similarly, there were no Mormons before 1830. The appellation Mormonite or Mormon originated as an anti Mormon slur. It was reclaimed and reinvested over time by meaning by LDS people, with meaning by LDS people. In the 1850s and 1860s, it was very rare for a GA in conference to use the word Mormon. There's a nifty tool. Someone emailed me. Somebody at BYU put together all the conference talks on a corpus. You could search them by a keyword. Gas over the pulpit in the 1850s, did not talk about, did not call ourselves Mormons except for in scare quotes as a reference to what mobs call us.

Joanna Brooks [00:22:07] It was not something we were calling ourselves a lot. The pattern reverses 100 years later. General conference talks, use of the term Mormon to refer to a positive individual identity peak in the 1970s. Conference talks are 10 times as likely to use the phrase Amormon in the 1970s as they were in the 1860s.

Joanna Brooks [00:22:26] So we see that over time, the transit from the idea of Mormons being this hostile label applied to us by outsiders to something we've adopted for ourselves and invested with tremendous personal meaning. The cradle of Mormon identity was our migration to the American west, the Mormon corridor stretching from Canada to northern Mexico from the 1850s through the 1930s. In our lovely Deseret, we developed a sense of almost ethnic belonging based in shared communities, shared history, shared collective experiences, and Mormon kinship networks. Our relationships, including plural wives, observance and orthodoxy, did not play as great a role in fostering Mormon identity. Many a Mormon in a small town in small town Utah kept a coffee pot on the stove.

Joanna Brooks [00:23:09] Believe me, my grandmother told me so. She's from Garland, okay? And no one thought anything of it. However, with the Depression, greater numbers of Mormons began to out migrate from the Mormon corridor in search of work and education. We began to live in communities where we were the minorities. And at the same time, the church expanded its global missionary program.

Joanna Brooks [00:23:29] Out migration and missionary work put new stressors on Mormon identity because the traditional proximity and intimacy of Mormon communities was changing. Mormon leaders reacted to these new stressors on Mormon identity by instituting the program we now call correlation, an effort to discipline the definition of Mormonism around a systematic, historically static set of concepts. How many of you have listened to the correlation podcasts that Damon Smith. Yeah, good stuff. Are you here today? Damon? You were here last night. Where is he? He was here last night. Okay, so correlation, this notion, you could develop a set of terms, like 75 static terms for church doctrine that were the key words that was the core of Mormonism.

Joanna Brooks [00:24:13] These key words and both church leadership and rank and file members extended the social logic of correlation by putting a new emphasis on behavioral boundaries, like, for example, the Word of Wisdom. Identity as a Mormon retained for many of us its familiar bases in cultural belonging, kinship, place and genealogy. But it also saw an emerging sense of something that was rooted in discipline and orthodoxy.

Joanna Brooks [00:24:37] This idea of correlation to the structuring force of Mormon identity was best explored by Damon Smith. And we'll get really thinky here for a second, and then my Mormon story is coming. This is Saturday. You don't want to be too thinky, but stay with me. Smith traces the beginnings of the correlation process to the early 20th century, when, under pressure to abandon polygamy and assimilate, Mormons adapted by withdrawing our difference into our minds. What made someone a Mormon under the logical correlation was whether or not he or she had internalized a certain kind of conformity with central church administration, mandates, and doctrines, as well as a strategic adoption of language used every day designed to protect our Mormon identity. We keep sacred right here while surviving in a non Mormon world. Does that make sense?

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:25:24] Right.

Joanna Brooks [00:25:25] Keep it here. Learn to get along here. Okay. We learned through this logical correlation to monitor ourselves and others to adopt habits of speech and behavior that quietly telegraphed our Mormon identity. You know this. I call it like, you know, six degrees of Kevin Bacon. It's like three degrees of Mormon Bacon, right? Who do you know? Okay, where's your word? Got it. We learned to monitor ourselves, to adopt habits of speech and behavior that quietly telegraph Mormon identity while protecting the core secrets of our culture. Public Mormonism was always to be orthodox or correlated Mormonism, and that was it.

Joanna Brooks [00:26:02] The logic of correlated identity reached its apotheosis, its high point in the 1990s, when several Mormon feminists, liberals, and scholars were excommunicated or otherwise disciplined for having and publishing unorthodox thoughts. For most the 20th century, excommunication was reserved, was a routine ecclesiastical function. And this is, I'm kind of taking from Leonard Arrington, used to either terminate the institutional relationship between the church and people who wanted to separate from the church, or, in the case of serious sin, as one step in a repentance process.

Joanna Brooks [00:26:31] For either reason, excommunications were fairly rare. The 1990s saw morphing in the use of excommunication, a very public use of excommunication to discipline members who failed, who had expressed public nonconformity with church institutional positions and processes. And there was, like, no way back when Lavina Fielding Anderson was excommunicated and yet continued church attendance.

Joanna Brooks [00:26:54] She was told the only way she could be reinstated was that she, quote, stopped thinking the brethren could do wrong. So we kind of just see in the historical record how excommunication morphed from an ecclesiastical process to a tool used to sort of discredit or spoil the identities of Mormons who publicly were unorthodox or dissented from orthodoxy on matters of conscience.

Joanna Brooks [00:27:16] And this had profound effects, not just for the people excommunicated, but for a lot of us rank and file. Mormons came to understand over the process of the 20th century that unorthodox public expression was a threat to belonging in the community. And that has real consequences for the way that we've treated one another and defined ourselves. Many in this room have seen or experienced how Mormons, I like to say, correlate on each other or discipline one another for perceived lack of orthodoxy. And we've seen or felt the intense anger and bitterness that kind of treatment engenders.

Joanna Brooks [00:27:50] And many of us who are unorthodox in our beliefs or practices, we've absorbed deep feelings of vulnerability, fear, shame and guilt, as if we don't deserve to belong, as if we are vulnerable to being put on trial, as if our belonging in the world of Mormonism can be revoked.

Joanna Brooks [00:28:11] Thousands upon thousands of unorthodox Mormons have experienced these feelings in isolation, walking that path alone. Right? Have you experienced them? There's a lot of nodding heads now. We're leaving the thinky. There may be tears ahead. Don't worry, we'll all get through it. You're Mormons. You know how to deal with crying.

Joanna Brooks [00:28:32] That loneliness was my world for almost 15 years. I was 22 years old when the September 6th was excommunicated. We're excommunicated. Born in the Covenant, pioneer stock, always active, highly orthodox Mormon girl, a seminary graduate, a bu, BYU scholarship student, and a feminist.

Joanna Brooks [00:28:52] I had seen BYU fire my feminist mentors and punish liberal students and faculty. And I had held in my hands a copy of a talk given by a member of the quorum of the 12 declaring Mormons like me, feminists, intellectuals, gays and lesbians, to be dangerous to my own church, the church of my childhood, my ancestors, my aspirations. I'd invested everything in my Mormonism.

Joanna Brooks [00:29:15] And yet I was feeling like I no longer belonged. At worst, I was a danger. And I saw the church keeping files on people like me, feminist women who wrote and published. It was only a matter of time, I felt, before they would revoke my membership, my belonging. But I continued to try.

Joanna Brooks [00:29:33] For many years, I continued to attend church. I taught gospel doctrine, I served a stake mission until the church began its formal involvement in anti LGBT equality politics in the late 90s. That's when something inside me broke. I couldn't set foot inside a chapel without Crying, and I am not kidding. It was not an act. It was ridiculous. I couldn't write a sentence or two about Mormonism without crying. The fear sat on my chest. I remember sitting at my desk. I couldn't do was physical.

Joanna Brooks [00:30:04] I stopped attending church. I stopped writing about anything related to Mormonism. And I associated with no Mormons at all, except for one very gentle visiting teacher. And I have a testimony of visiting teaching. Let's just say that. And yet I did not abandon my Mormon identity and my Mormonism did not abandon me. This should be fun, but I'm crying.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:30:29] I don't know.

Joanna Brooks [00:30:29] I'm going to talk about green jello.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:30:31] Why am I crying?

Joanna Brooks [00:30:33] I convened Pioneer Day dinners for my non Mormon friends, introducing them to the wonders of funeral potatoes and my grandmother's green jello recipe. When my babies were born, I sang Come Come Ye Saints to them every night in the rocking chair. And I prayed. I kept praying. I prepared to pass on to my daughters what I knew. My culture, my heritage, my faith. Even though I felt so alone, so betrayed, like such an exile. But I was determined not to let anyone. Oh, goodness. Unitarians don't cry. There's no Kleenex. Don't. John, sit down. I'm okay. I got a sleeve. I'm a pioneer. I was determined not to let anyone tell me I wasn't. Oh, don't hurt yourself.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:31:31] Thank you.

Joanna Brooks [00:31:32] I was determined not to let anyone tell me I wasn't or couldn't be Mormon. I knew who I was. I'm a Mormon. Yes, I am. And I was not an enemy to my own people. A turning point came for me in 2007, when, still not attending church at all, I very ambivalently tuned in to see the Mormons on pbs.

Joanna Brooks [00:31:57] I saw face after face of people I knew and loved. Gail Houston, Michael Quinn, Albert Peck. And I recognized that as a young feminist during the purge years, I had lived through an important moment in Mormon history. And that's when I figured it out. Being an unorthodox Mormon did not mean I did not belong.

Joanna Brooks [00:32:21] It meant that my life experience was, in fact, an important part of the larger Mormon story. Six months later, my heart pounding with fear, I took my daughters to church. And you should see it. When Ellen, who is now 7, was 2 and she heard, like other people sing, Come Come Ye Saints for the first time, she was shocked. She started dancing in the overflow. It was awesome.

Joanna Brooks [00:32:46] I took my daughters to church, determined to connect them with the resources they needed to understand Mormonism. This wonderful, massive part of their mother. And as luck would have it, six months after I went back to church in California, the church initiated the Proposition 8 campaign.

Joanna Brooks [00:33:07] As a queer, positive, less active Mormon in California, I knew that I was in the vast minority of LDS people. I felt sad and ashamed and once again estranged from my community and family. But one of my closest friends, a 60 year old non Mormon lesbian, took me by the hand and said, you've got to come out of the closet. You've got to tell the truth about who you are. And I did. Especially when I showed up to work the phone bank at the no on 8 campaign in San Diego.

Joanna Brooks [00:33:43] When all the volunteers introduced ourselves, I said, my name is Joanna and I am a straight Mormon feminist. I felt I had to claim space for and represent the Mormon tradition I loved in all of its diversity, with its emphasis on daring to be different, kindness and hard work.

Joanna Brooks [00:34:12] Now, telling the truth about who we are as unorthodox Mormons has costs. You've experienced them. But it also brings many benefits. And among those are the opportunity to connect with others. In my work on the Nounate campaign, which was not tremendous. It was, you know, I showed up and did my part. I met many LGBT and pro LGBT equality Mormons for the first time in more than a decade. Thanks to this unorthodox tribe, I found my way back into a Mormon community.

Joanna Brooks [00:34:46] And in January 2010, John Dehlin called and welcomed me to the world of Mormon stories and into the podcast. Nervously, I began to tell my story. And then I started writing again. And then I met you. All of you.

Joanna Brooks [00:35:04] Along with becoming a mother to my two daughters, being heard and welcomed home by a family of unorthodox Mormons has been one of the great healing and transformative experiences of my adult life. So here we are together. No longer as strangers on earth need we roam.

Joanna Brooks [00:35:29] You're laughing. It's never going to be washed out of you. And the great question before us is, can a broad, shared sense of Mormon identity carry us through the hard parts of our lives and serve as an anchor for being in this world?

Joanna Brooks [00:35:49] Can we as Mormons, regardless of our relationship to any institution or doctrine, pursue in the language of our common tradition, the great, distinctive, beautiful, unique Mormon tradition, lives of goodness and meaning? We are not the first people of faith, of course, who have faced this basic modernizing shift.

Joanna Brooks [00:36:11] I feel like I've become the Jewish informant for the Mormon Stories people. And there are other Mishpuka out there, so, you know, give me a little help. But I think, for example, Mishpuka is Yiddish for family. I think, for example, of Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism. In 1885, a group of American rabbis 1885 met in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and developed a platform, a state of principles for modern or reformed Jewish life. They formulated a modern definition of Judaism that set aside literal Zionism and recognized the validity of other religions like Christianity and Islam. They called on Jews to engage in acts of tikkun, tikkun olam, social justice as an expression of modern Jewish identity.

Joanna Brooks [00:36:56] They rejected Jewish observances that placed an undue emphasis on ritual rather than morality. They even held a completely unkosher or traf banquet, sitting down together as rabbis to dine on clams, soft shelled crab and shrimp, all forbidden. And this was in the 1880s. It's like stake presidents having a cappuccino or worse. It's like it's big time now. I don't mean to be facile in drawing comparisons with Judaism. There's some serious thinking required here, and there are significant differences between Judaism and Mormonism. But there's a saying in Reconstructionist Judaism that Anne referred to and it gives me great hope. Belong, behave, believe in that order.

Joanna Brooks [00:37:41] It's not correlate or die. It's not that if you believe you get to belong. It's not that if you stop behaving, we may not claim you and we should give credit. There are a lot of Mormons, like even orthodox Mormons who don't live like this, but there are some who do. And there's some non orthodox Mormons who are really judgmental too. Let's notice that. But it is belong first. Claim your identity, claim this community, show up and put in the work and we will claim you and good consequences will follow. Belong. Mormonism is a religious tradition that emphasizes belonging. We are a tradition with a theology bold enough to define eternity as a state of mutual belonging to one's ancestors, to one's beloved and to one's descendants.

Joanna Brooks [00:38:29] We are a tradition with a history distinctive enough to foster something miraculous, a modern form of peoplehood, belonging. And yet in some spaces, and in some moments, we've seen an incredible brittleness creep into that sense of belonging, a willingness to disown or revoke just because one of our own turns out to be liberal or gay or a non literal believer or an atheist or an intellectually curious soul.

Joanna Brooks [00:38:57] That's not the Mormonism my grandmothers handed down to me. Perhaps you've come some long miles alone. Perhaps you have been silent. Perhaps you have felt disappointed, sad, angry, afraid, frustrated, unworthy to belong. Surely there is a place in the Mormon story for all of us.

Joanna Brooks [00:39:23] As healing as it was for me to hear someone like John Dehlind say and to be able to tell my story. And I hope we'll talk about storytelling a little bit in the round table, but as healing as it was for me to hear someone like John Dehlin said, I hear you. I recognize you. I claim you.

Joanna Brooks [00:39:41] Let me say the same to you, too. Clamp down the tears so I can say it. If you identify as a Mormon. I hear you. I recognize you. I claim you. I claim you. Gay or straight, liberal or conservative, white, black, brown, perfect, imperfect, active, less active, post, present, literal, non literal, agnostic, atheistic. Your story matters. You belong.

Joanna Brooks [00:40:07] We are Mormons. We may be uncorrelated, but we are still Mormons. We are open. We are open to each other. We are open to difference. We are open to the beautiful and the difficult facts of our Mormon history. And we are open to the potential of mormonism in the 21st century. Let's see what beauty we can make of our Mormon identity together. Thank you.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:40:56] Thanks, Joanna.

Joanna Brooks [00:40:57] We need you.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:40:58] We obviously need you. And we need all of you, everyone. So let's take a moment now.

Joanna Brooks [00:41:06] We'll have a break.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:41:06] We've got about 15 or 20 minutes and let's be a community. So we've got some food over here. Come partake and meet new friends. Thank you.

John Dehlin [00:41:19] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Music today was provided by the Saber Rattlers. Check them out@saber rattlers.com the Mormon Stories logo was generously donated by StudioCase.com thanks for listening.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:41:34] Come, come, ye saints. No toil nor labor fear but with joy wend your way though hard to you this journey may appear Grace shall be as your day. Tis better far for us to strive Our useless care from us to drive to the San Jo your hearts will swell. Oh, all is well, all is well.

Conference Organizers and Founding Pioneers Recognized

Part 3 of 5 · Ep. 261

John Dehlin [00:00:01] 1, 2, 3.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:00:04] Come, come, ye saints. No toil nor labor fear, but with joy wend your way.

Guest [00:00:18] The 2011 Salt Lake City Mormon Stories Conference was brought to you by the Salt Lake City Mormon Stories Support community, found on Facebook and also by the Open Stories foundation and by the generous Support you our listeners. To join or start a Mormon Stories support community in your area, please go to MormonStories.org and click on the Support Communities tab to host a regional conference in your city like this one. Please email us@mormonstoriesmail.com for more information on how to host a conference. Finally, to keep this podcast and all of these communities and projects alive, please donate today@mormonstories.org oh, and please enjoy the conference.

John Dehlin [00:01:27] Born and raised in Franklin, Idaho, she's a Benson and a Parkinson. And when I just started having my crisis of faith when I was at byu, mom became a Dialogue and a Sunstone subscriber. And she's been attending Sunstone faithfully and reading Dialogue for, I don't know, 20 plus years.

John Dehlin [00:01:47] And I can't tell you how meaningful and affirming it's been to have a parent who understands, and I actually have two parents, if three if you count her husband. But to have parents who understand your journey and don't judge you and support you all along the way, I couldn't. I probably could never have done the podcast. If I had parents that ridiculed and judged me and made me feel terrible, I wouldn't have felt comfortable even starting. So, mom, thank you.

John Dehlin [00:02:27] I want to spend a little time recognizing the planners. Jared and Katrina, you guys have already been introduced. This is Jared Anderson. This is Katrina and Ann Peffer. They're the ones who got this all going. You guys stand up and let us give you a round of applause.

John Dehlin [00:02:53] There are people here from as far away as North Carolina, Chicago, and even as far as the United Kingdom. Someone came from the United Kingdom, particularly for this conference. It's very humbling, but thank you all for coming. Even if you live a block away, I want to recognize just a few other people. There are a few people here that are currently serving on the Open Stories Foundation Board of directors Jackie MacArthur and Ashley Murbach.

John Dehlin [00:03:28] There's Ashley. Please stand up. And Jackie in the back. Anyone else on the board of directors that I'm forgetting? The other three aren't here, right? Except myself. They're the ones who helped get this foundation started. That's kind of the way that we're able to make a lot of this possible. So Ashley and Jackie, thank you so much.

John Dehlin [00:03:52] We have a few Mormon liberal superstars among us. I want everyone who's been featured at some point on a Mormon Stories or Mormon Matters podcast to please stand up. So we've got Dustin Jones in the back. We just released his podcast the past few weeks. We've got Perry Krall. We've got Dan Witherspoon, who runs Mormon Matters, and Jackie in the back again,

Guest 2 [00:04:24] who,

John Dehlin [00:04:29] Who did a podcast about mixed faith couples. It was very good. And her husband Eric, of course, has been a great support for her. I want to thank Richard Holdman in the back. If you guys have enjoyed those Carolyn Pearson or Paul Toscano or Margaret Trescano or Sean McCraney videos, it was Richard that did the video and the audio for all those productions. He's in the back.

John Dehlin [00:04:51] Thank you. And of course, we have our distinguished panel. We have Jared Anderson, Joanna Brooks, Margaret and Carolyn Pearson. Thank you so much for being here. And they're all superstars, and you know them. Thank you. This is going to seem a little bit odd or out of place, especially for the person I'm about to mention. And because she's a member of the media, she's probably not going to like it that I'm going to mention her, but I'm going to mention her anyway.

John Dehlin [00:05:29] There's a very important Mormon pioneer that's here who is one of the founders of Sunstone, one of the first original founders of Sunstone, first editor of the magazine and someone who ran the conferences for many, many years. And these were during the days where it was a lot harder to do a lot of the things that we're doing now. Her name is Peggy Fletcher Stack, and she's a little bit anonymous because she now has been writing for the Deseret New or. Sorry.

John Dehlin [00:05:57] She's been writing for the Salt Lake Tribune for many, many years. There's a former journalist from the Deseret News here as well. He's in a beer. He has a beard.

Guest 3 [00:06:07] Where is he?

John Dehlin [00:06:10] I had that on my mind. Peggy's been writing for religious stuff for the Salt Lake Tribune for many, many years. But Peggy is a true pioneer of, you know, and contributed significantly to why we're all able to be here today. And I just want to recognize Peggy. So I'm introducing this panel. But before I introduce the panel, we're going to have a special musical number. And the musical number is by a gentleman named Wade Walker. He is going to. He's going to perform a song called Bless the Broken Road. So take it away, Wade.

Guest 2 [00:06:58] I'M really happy to be here. I was invited by my friend Randall to come and share my talent with you all. And I was thinking about why I chose this song in particular, and the reason why was because even though the song is speaking about finding true love among the paths of life, I really think it is a good message as well for finding ourselves and finding what we believe in, what we feel, what we think, where our faith is, and all those good things as we travel through life. And so I hope that inspires you as I sing. Thank you.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:07:52] I set out on a narrow way Many years ago Hoping I would find true love along the broken road But I got lost a time or two Wiped my brow, kept pushing through I couldn't see how every sign pointed straight

Guest 3 [00:08:18] to you

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:08:22] Every long lost dream led me to where you are Lovers who broken my heart they were like northern stars Pointing me on my way into your loving arms this much I know is true that God bless the broken road and led me straight to you yes, he did.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:09:08] I think about the years I spent just passing through I'd like to have the time I lost and give it back to you but you just smile and see Take my hand, you've been there, you understand it's all part of a grander plan that is coming true Every long lost dream led me to where you are Others who broken my heart they were like northern stars Pointing me on my way into your loving arms this much I know is true that God bless the broken road that led me straight to you.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:10:25] And now I'm just rolling home into my lover's arms this much I know is true that God bless the broken road and let me straight to you. That God bless the broken road Then led me straight to you.

John Dehlin [00:11:38] Beautiful. Thank you, wade. In the field of developmental psychology, stages are really popular things to talk about. Some guy named Erickson developed these stages of human development, and lots of other psychologists have taken their own approaches at trying to develop stages for various phases of life or various conditions. And we all know about. Many of us know about Fowler's stages of faith.

Stages of Excommunication and Mormon History

John Dehlin [00:12:14] I think that there are stages involved in how we as Mormons think about those who have gone before us who have been excommunicated, and specifically about the September 6th or the people that were kind of fighting for us during those kind of years in the late 70s, 80s, and early 90s.

John Dehlin [00:12:43] I'm saying all this because we're about to introduce Margaret Toscano and Jared, and you guys already know Carolyn and Joanna. The first phase of. Of processing A member of the September 6th or those during that time is sort of one of righteous indignation.

John Dehlin [00:13:09] It's a stage where you label these people as dangerous, and it's one filled with judgment. For those of you who don't know, several Mormon intellectuals were excommunicated in September of 1993 for things that they wrote or said or felt or believed about things that were a little bit controversial at the time.

John Dehlin [00:13:30] So that first stage of righteous indignation is the most common. It's the way most of Mormonism who know about the September 6th probably look at these people as dangerous and bad and with a lot of judgment. Then if your sensitivity sort of wax a little bit progressive, then you start developing, you know, you start moving on to stage two, which is sort of curiosity.

John Dehlin [00:13:54] You're like, huh, I wonder what they were. Wonder what they were trying to do and what happened there. But of course, it brings with the judgment as well, because these people, after all, are heretics and apostates. Then after curiosity, you move to the stage of kind of liberal appreciation for the September 6th, and you kind of look at them and you say, well, what they did was bold and courageous, but if they could have just been a little bit less angry, if they could have just been a little bit more careful, if they maybe could have been a little bit more diplomatic, they would have been much more effective, and they would have helped a lot more people.

John Dehlin [00:14:39] So we're grateful for them, but we're probably not going to embrace them or we're probably going to keep marginalizing them or keep our distance. Maybe that's the third phase. But then at some point, when you really dig into these issues and you really learn the history and the pain of those who are marginalized and ostracized, and that fit on the margins of Mormonism, you know, feminists, homosexuals, intellectuals, many others.

John Dehlin [00:15:15] When you start really feeling the pain that these people feel and experience by being on the margins, you move to that fourth stage. And that's just a stage of gratitude. And I'd like all those who are willing to join with me to please stand and thank Margaret Toscano for all that she's done for us.

Margaret Toscano [00:15:39] It.

John Dehlin [00:16:08] And Margaret, that extends to Paul and Lavina and Lynn Whitesides, Michael Quinn, Maxine Hanks, and many others. I also want to add that there are many who weren't excommunicated who were just as much in the battle. Obviously, you guys know that Carolyn Pearson was. Was touring the country with Mother War of the Morning around that same time. Somehow she escaped.

John Dehlin [00:16:40] She must have an angel watching over her or a really good friend that sits high up in the church hierarchy. But somehow she was able to escape that. And I just want to give my personal thanks to Jordan Brooks. I was at BYU from 87 to 93, and I had not brought to Mormonism my Mormonism, the intellectual rigor or the discipline to really even understand the issues at that time. So because of my mission experience, I became aware of the student review and I became aware of voice, and I became aware of people like Cecilia Farr and Gail Houston. And I watched Joanna Brooks with this kind of curious intrigue and fascination from the sidelines.

John Dehlin [00:17:34] But in no way did I understand how incredible it was to have a person like her at a university with so much that was at stake, who had so much of an emotional and an intellectual investment in the church to be standing up at that time, trying to.

John Dehlin [00:17:50] Trying to talk about these issues openly. And she took a really big personal hit as a result as well. And so I want to thank you, Joanna, for

Guest 1 [00:17:58] us.

John Dehlin [00:18:08] So I guess my final thanks is to all of you because many of you support Mormon stories and Mormon matters through your financial contributions. And this absolutely would not be possible without your contributions. It's the way that I fund graduate school. It's the way that we pay for the venue and all the materials and the web costs and everything that we do. So thank you all so much who have contributed to Mormon stories. Thank you. So I'm sorry for that introduction. That wasn't planned and I ate up a lot of our moderating time, but I just felt like I had to say those things. So we have these four special guests with us. You all know Carolyn and Joanna. Margaret is a assistant professor.

Guest 2 [00:18:56] Still.

John Dehlin [00:18:56] Assistant professor. I don't mean still. I just want to make sure I didn't get it wrong. Assistant professor at the University of Utah. She focuses in classics. I think her specialty is Greece and Greek.

Guest [00:19:10] Is that right?

John Dehlin [00:19:12] Ancient, ancient civilization. I do everything she does. So I wanted to make sure and introduce Margaret and also Jarrett Anderson is an amazing bright light along with his wife Katrina, that have burst onto the scene of Mormon thought and discussion just in the past, I don't know, six months or so. But Jared is completing his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He studied under Bart Ehrman, who's the scholar that wrote Jesus Interrupted and probably many other important scholarly works. But Jared has an amazing grasp of the New Testament. We've interviewed him on Mormon Stories. It's a fantastic seven hour series on the New Testament, it's brilliant.

John Dehlin [00:19:57] And Jared is just an important thinker and an important force and supporter of what we're all trying to do. And so I'm really excited to have them all here. So to begin, I guess I wanted to give Margaret and Jared a little bit of time to just share some of their initial feelings. The theme of this panel is navigating an open approach to Mormonism. And Joanna and Carolyn have already set that tone so nicely.

Panel Discussion on Open and Unorthodox Mormonism

John Dehlin [00:20:28] But you know, if you think about it, we are in the majority in Mormonism. And what I mean by that is, as far as I understand it, if you create this category of Mormon that has either left the church or is in the church, but has kind of liberal or progressive or kind of even open minded tendencies or sensitivities, that makes up more than 2/3 of the population of everyone who's living on the earth that has ever been baptized into the LDS Church or any of the other restoration branches.

John Dehlin [00:21:09] So there's this weird sense that we kind of feel like we're in the minority, but in the sense of from a global perspective, we are in the majority from that standpoint, even though it doesn't feel that way. But, but many of you are here because in your experiences with the LDS church, something broke and left within you this deep, gaping, empty chasm you miss.

John Dehlin [00:21:36] If you're still going to church, maybe it's not always a pleasant experience for you. Maybe talks that are given make you feel sad or angry at times. Maybe you are gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgendered and you've come to learn that the church isn't a place that welcomes you anymore. Maybe you've read the wrong history books or got a little bit too interested in archaeology or anthropology or some other element of American history, and you found yourself unable to bridge the gap between the traditional faith that you were taught and the facts and the data that you've come to grasp. And regardless of where you are on that, or maybe you're a feminist, or maybe you're an intellectual or whatever, when your heart becomes broken by the disappointment of the church not living up to an unfair, unrealistic caricature that somehow you inherited through no one's fault, but just through the way that we learn as Mormons, once that gap opens up, there's a spiritual gap, there's an emotional gap, there's a community gap, there's sometimes a moral gap, there's an identity gap.

John Dehlin [00:23:01] And sometimes that chasm is so deep that it can lead to intense pain and Sadness and turmoil. And what we're here today is to figure out how to start filling that gap for us, spiritually, intellectually, community wise, culturally. There's got to be a way to fill that gap.

John Dehlin [00:23:24] And it has nothing about judging anybody, criticizing anybody. It's not angry. This doesn't come from an angry place. This doesn't come from a vindictive place. This comes from a place of love for Mormonism and for our experiences. I would bet that there's not a person here that didn't love their experience within Mormonism at some level, or you would not be here. Hate doesn't. If there's hate at all, it doesn't arrive in a place where there wasn't love to begin with. Usually. Usually. And so in some sense, we all love Mormonism and are trying to find a way to cling to it, if not through the institutional church, through our identities and through our relationships.

John Dehlin [00:24:07] And so that's what this panel's about. I'm going to invite Margaret to say a few words, maybe take five, 10 minutes, whatever she's comfortable doing. I would just love her to share just some initial reflections on how she feels about what's been said so far and her experience here. I'm going to ask Jared to do the same. And then we're going to open it up to questions from me and from you. And so, without any further ado, Margaret Toscano.

Margaret Toscano [00:24:33] Thank you. So is the microphone working? Am I heard? Am I fine? Okay, good. First of all, I'm so touched by both John's introduction and by your very kind standing ovation. It's really funny. I get very nervous about being in the spotlight, even though I've been in the spotlight a lot, partly because I start counting up all my own flaws. Right. And thinking about my weaknesses.

Margaret Toscano [00:25:11] I've certainly never thought of myself as either a pioneer or as somebody who's courageous. I think my husband sometimes tells me that I'm very stubborn. Maybe I'm more stubborn than courageous. But I appreciate very much the support that I felt from all of you with that.

Margaret Toscano [00:25:34] I was thinking there were several questions that John asked us to think about as well. Of course, both Carolyn's and Joanna's wonderful talks. And I would like to respond to a little bit of that and also talk about, just briefly, how I see Mormon identity.

Margaret Toscano [00:25:53] Because for me, I think, like many of you, I've really struggled with who I am and how I'm Mormon and how I can claim that. And that's a very important part of my own Journey. So this whole theme of pioneers, I've been thinking about it. And of course, as the person who studies languages, I always have to look up the origin of words, right?

Margaret Toscano [00:26:16] Jared knows this. He took grief from me. So I was very interested at the word pioneer. And, of course, the meaning of pioneer is often the person who begins something or kind of carves out new territory, who is innovative, and the first that does something is the pioneer. But when I looked at the root of the word, it said that it came. At least the dictionaries that I checked said that the word comes from a Middle French word that has to do with foot soldier.

Margaret Toscano [00:26:48] And I love this sort of paradox. I like paradoxes. I wrote a book about it once. And I like the paradox of the idea that you're sort of the forger, the one that goes out front, that is brave and courageous and you take the first step, but also the idea of the foot soldier where you're the one that's plodding along and you never give up, right? That no matter what happens and the trials and the things that come along, you kind of keep going along and you don't give up on things. And I think that what we're talking about with Mormon identity really both includes both of those ideas of this pioneer, that both here we are, we're trying to forge new territory as a group, that we want to have a Mormon community that is more inclusive.

Margaret Toscano [00:27:40] We want to claim our Mormon identity. And yet, really, I see a lot of this as that ability of endurance where we endure a lot of things and we kind of plod along and we keep going no matter what. And I certainly feel like that that's been true with my own journey.

Margaret Toscano [00:28:01] One of the questions that John also asked us to think about was what we were most proud about in our own journey of being a pioneer and maybe what we most regret. And as I was thinking about this, I thought about my excommunication, and it's interesting, John was talking about the September

Guest 3 [00:28:21] 6th,

Margaret Toscano [00:28:24] which happened in the September of 1993, where there were six prominent Mormon intellectuals, feminists, that were excommunicated in that period. And I actually wasn't one of them. However, that summer, the summer of 1993, I was threatened with a church court. So in a sense, it began with me. And I was given a letter by my stake president and my bishop. And in this letter, I was told that I had to be silent. I was given an ultimatum. The ultimatum was that I was not allowed to. And it was really broad. The ultimatum was that I was not allowed to discuss, write, talk about anything to do with church history or doctrine in any forum, or they would hold a church court on me.

Margaret Toscano [00:29:20] So they asked me to be silent. And I think the thing I'm most proud about is that I didn't obey. And maybe the thing I regret most of all is that I didn't get more angry. My husband's always criticized for being too angry, but I tried very hard not to be angry, although I later discovered that I was angry.

Margaret Toscano [00:29:52] And I think anger sometimes is a good thing because it has to do with a recognition of injustice. So I was threatened at that time, but they didn't actually go through with my court until seven years later in 2000.

Margaret Toscano [00:30:06] And that's a whole other long story about why the delay. But finally, in the year 2000, they held a court on me. And interestingly, they brought as the primary evidence against me that I was an apostate. The evidence was this letter that I had been given in 1993 and that I had been told that I should be silent, and I wasn't. And this was a sign that I was an apostate because I did not obey my church leaders.

Margaret Toscano [00:30:37] And so for me, though, it's a very defining moment, the idea that, no, I am not going to be silent. I'm going to keep talking as a Mormon woman, as a Mormon, and I'm going to claim my identity as a Mormon.

Margaret Toscano [00:30:53] Well, I have to say, though, that I, like most of you, I've gone through a huge struggle over this, that I have gone through all sorts of agony about what it means to be a Mormon and whether or not I even wanted to be a Mormon after what happened to me.

Margaret Toscano [00:31:14] I have to say that I went through a lot of anger, a lot of feelings of betrayal, a lot of sadness. And an interesting thing happened, which is another tension I want to talk about just briefly, that I was thinking about in response to both Carolyn and Joanna, that there's this tension between freedom being free, and having bonds being bound.

Margaret Toscano [00:31:41] I remember after I was excommunicated, even before, after the September six, and kind of being marginalized in the church and then finally being excommunicated communicated that I would have people from the two sides, kind of the polar opposite, speak to me. And there would be those of the people who had either left the church or they were not Mormon, and they would say to me, aren't you glad that you're finally free, that you don't have to be involved in Mormonism again? And are you going to now. And almost like they were giving me a sermon, kind of like, I want you now to walk away from Mormonism, you know, see it as an addiction and not have anything more to do with that.

Margaret Toscano [00:32:22] You can just walk away. You don't have to be, they kicked you out. You don't have to do anything more with that. You're free now, you know, you don't have to wear garments and all of that, and you're free and all of that. And then you had the sort of. My friends that were still in the church, including my family, who would say, we're going to pray for you. We'll put your name on the temple prayer roll. If you just humble yourself, you can come back. And so you have these two sides that both were pulling me. And yet my question was, what do I want?

Margaret Toscano [00:32:56] And I have to say that I had many years where I struggled with, yes, there's a way in which that I'm glad that I do feel a freedom that I'm not bound in the same way that I was in the past.

Margaret Toscano [00:33:14] And yet the bonds of love create connections and obligations and the bonds of belief and the bonds of practice and the bonds of all these other things are very real. And so I went through this long struggle of how am I still Mormon and how can I express my Mormonism?

Margaret Toscano [00:33:35] And, you know, there were times where I just simply wanted to walk away from the Mormon thing, never talk about it again, never think about it again. But over the years, I began to realize that it was such a part of me that I could not walk away from it and that I wanted some way in which I could express it.

Margaret Toscano [00:33:59] Part of this for me was also why I had been excommunicated in the first place, which was that I had written about women's place in the church and had argued that women have placed priesthood and should be allowed to express it and use it, and that the church would never be whole, could never really achieve its mission unless women, the role of women, was elevated and women were allowed to express their spirituality on every level of the church. And I began to feel that that call that I had felt to be a voice and to work for Mormon women, that I still felt that call, and that wherever I could express that I was hoping that I could.

Margaret Toscano [00:34:48] And that for me has been a very important thing, the ability to once again connect with Mormon women and to know that I could still have a role in that. Now I'm just going to say one more thing, and then I'll let us go on to something else.

Margaret Toscano [00:35:04] I love what you talked about, Carolyn, with inclusiveness. And I thought that what you said fits so well with what Anne talked about, the shared values that we all have. And if you look at those, they all have to do with being inclusive and diverse and supportive and creating a space for people to express their spirituality as Mormons. But I think it's really interesting, and here again, I think we have a paradox that's very important, that identity is actually, you create identity by distinguishing between the I and the you.

Margaret Toscano [00:35:49] I am what I am because I am not you. And so I see this as a paradox that on the one hand, we want to be inclusive and not set up these judgments and these barriers. And yet, if we're going to have an identity, there's a way in which identity of itself sets up some kind of a distinction. And so to me, I see this as this wonderful paradox that we have to keep working at. How can we be individuals and be different and celebrate that difference at the same time that we have this inclusion?

Margaret Toscano [00:36:28] How I was talking to somebody during the break. How can we still celebrate various things in Mormon theology and Mormon ideas and Mormon beliefs at the same time that we're not dogmatic? How do we negotiate that space so that, I mean, if we're going to say that what unites us, I mean, we can just be Unitarians, right? And be inclusive and diverse and supportive and all of these things.

Margaret Toscano [00:36:57] And I love the Unitarians, but that's not Mormon. Right? We're Mormons. We want to have a Mormon identity. There is an us. But we don't want it to be this exclusive us, them, that creates this hierarchy or hostility or enmity. And how do we do that? How can we talk about ideas of Mormon theology or other things, or Christianity, Mormon Christianity, and yet be an inclusive, open group? And I think that that's our challenge. But I want to tell you how excited I am to be part of you. I have struggled a lot with my own Mormon identity. I've had a lot of pain. I felt a lot of betrayal.

Margaret Toscano [00:37:40] And yet I see us at this point where there are, as John said, there are a lot of us out there that want to be Mormon but don't want to be in this kind of narrow space where we have to be, we have to identify in one way only. And I can't tell you how pleased I am to be with you here today. Thank you so much for including me as part of this group.

Guest 3 [00:38:16] I have to say I feel very humbled and kind of overwhelmed to be part of this panel because I am so young in this. Well, in general, but in this process as well. As Katrina said, we have only been aware of the bloggernackle for less than a year. It seems it's shameful, but I just would write word documents to myself like 50 pages long about how I had one on scholarly reflections, I had one on Book of Mormon problems, I had one. I just talked to myself and does

Guest 4 [00:39:00] your dissertation advisor know you're doing this?

Guest 3 [00:39:04] Right? Bart Ehrman and I actually have had some very interesting discussions on faith which during, during the break, maybe we can discuss. So I'm really young in this process and I remember ironically now thinking several years ago, thinking and we discussed, Katrina and I discussed. I'm like, I'm kind of good at thinking about this Mormon theology stuff. It's really too bad there's nowhere to talk about it.

Guest 3 [00:39:32] Little did I know that right on the other side of the wireless connection was this whole community. So as Katrina said, we found Mormon stories and I found a home. I love our relationship because she, Katrina does not really need this part of me.

Guest 3 [00:39:57] She puts up with it. But I have felt such a sense of belonging and that I have been able to serve by being my true self, where I am able to do that nowhere else. And many of you have probably heard the Mormon Matters podcast that Dan, Joanna, I and Blair did about identity in Mormonism.

Guest 3 [00:40:26] And I've been thinking about this a lot. I was invited to contribute to Faith Promoting Rumor and I feel like I'm kind of against the grain over there because all I want to do is speak about identity, you know, identity and nuancing and where we fit in. So I've been thinking about these issues for several years and I frankly, again, paradox. There's so many paradoxes.

Guest 3 [00:40:58] If it is done wrong, it cannot be done. We cannot have this open inclusive engagement. I've been thinking about this idea of star crossed believers, like star crossed lovers, where no matter how much you love each other, you just cannot get through through to each other.

Guest 3 [00:41:18] And a lot of us have experiences like that with those we love. It was a very moving experience for me when my mother read my piece the Blessings of an Unknown God about agnosticism. And I self identify as an agnostic theist, a hopeful agnostic theist Mormon.

Guest 3 [00:41:41] And we talked about the labels and qualifiers. But this is an important, important part of myself. And yet what's interesting, when I had my podcast on the New Testament and then my own journey, it's interesting that a lot of people who had left the church, said, you don't have integrity.

Guest 3 [00:42:00] How can you stay in the church? How can you be honest and remain in the church? So I think what this wrestle of identity is one thing that I say. I had a really nice light bulb moment when I was commenting on the Mormon Matters podcast where someone said to me, I finally get it. I finally understand what you mean when you say our way or your way is not better than the literalist firm believer. It's just different.

Guest 3 [00:42:35] And I don't think it's difficult to understand, but I sincerely feel this. I value the straightforward kind of faith that powers so many millions of good loving Mormons and religious people overall. We don't need to have a complicated view of history in order to be loving. We have that. I feel that the solutions, yes, becoming disaffected and complicated makes you, you less of a jerk. But so does reading the New Testament, you know, so does taking seriously the principles of the gospel that are already there.

Navigating a Post-Modern Mormon Identity

Guest 3 [00:43:17] And so one thing that I've been thinking about writing is this piece called Neither Shaken nor Moved, where I am in a place, and I feel like a lot of our place, where nothing could shock us anymore. You know, bring it on. You know, bring on the complicated history and philosophy and theology and we can handle it because our foundations have already been broken.

Guest 3 [00:43:43] You know, it's like, so I'm in the church, I have a temple recommend. And it's a very interesting experience getting my temple recommend. And so it was a couple months ago, and my bishop, I go in with bishop, really cool guy, and he had me speak to the youth about Greek translation in the New Testament, things like that. So I knew he was cool. And so I ask him, I say, do you want the footnote version or the non footnote version? And his brow furrows a bit and he's like, we can be honest and talk about everything.

Guest 3 [00:44:19] So I tell him that I don't really have a testimony of the atonement of Christ, that I love it. I love the idea. I try to repent, I try to live well. I try to live in a way that if Jesus really is our Savior, he would be pleased. And meanwhile, my bishop is looking at me, you know, the crease in his brow. And that was all good. And I try to explain philosophically, a little bit agnosticism to him, and he's not quite there with me. And so he said, he said, I think you're okay. I think you're just honest. He signed my temple recommend.

Guest 3 [00:45:01] And my favorite part was he Said, but if. But if you ever get to a stage. I wish I remembered his exact words. I don't. He's like, if ever you wake up and suddenly you don't believe in thus and such, talk to a priesthood leader.

Guest 3 [00:45:16] And through my head, I didn't say this. I'm like, and what? It's like I'm gonna read the Book of Mormon three times fast, and suddenly it's all gonna go away. And then I was planning on speaking to my stake presidency member and being really simple, you know, like, yes, no, thank you.

Guest 3 [00:45:39] But they came over to our house before a world conference, and being a PhD student in religion, it, you know, people know that there's something going on. So this great council stake president, he says, how's your faith? And I have to admit, I'm proud of this answer. I said, it has been stripped down to its bedrock elements and rebuilt. And he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, that sounds good.

Guest 3 [00:46:09] And so little did he know where I placed the foundationals of Mormon thought on where that bedrock really is. But I believe in spirituality. I really do. That is what I have the most testimony of. I believe in religion as a symbolic system with an unknown referent.

Guest 3 [00:46:36] So that means even though I don't know, I take seriously the fact that we cannot have any knowledge beyond our own perceptions. And my uncle and others will disagree with me, but that. That I actually bore my testimony from the pulpit on this.

Guest 3 [00:46:52] And it went over really well. I said that when we say, I know, we are speaking of the sacred realm of. Of personal experience. And in that personal realm, no one can contradict us. This is something that we know and that is its own reality.

Guest 3 [00:47:07] But I didn't say this part in my testimony. We cannot project that personal reality onto an external system of truth. And so this is why we're wonderful, loving postmodernists, that all of our truth is valid. And what I want to say is I honestly do not think that the straightforward believer, and I'm trying very hard to stay with neutral terms because I do not devalue the literal, firm, unquestioning belief. It has vulnerabilities. It's spelled Google.

Guest 3 [00:47:50] But if you can be a firm believer and still love, which a lot managed to do, and if you can also manage to avoid the Internet, you're fine. So what I'm saying is that the, you know, of course we find a way to do it.

Guest 3 [00:48:14] People find a way to keep their faith. But I sometimes I talked with Richard Bushman about this. I honestly think that you cannot Take history and philosophy seriously without deconstructing the whole jobby, it all falls apart. I try to explain this to some of my friends who are evangelical Christians, and they're like, yes, I'm so grateful that I found the New Testament now that I left behind that messy, messy Book of Mormon, Mormonism worldview that falls to pieces. And, oh, I love my Bible. And I say, you know, the rabbit hole goes all the way down. You know, it falls apart there too. And as soon as you're.

Guest 3 [00:48:59] As soon as Christianity dumps you too. And some very respected friends sometimes have lovingly accused me of pushing agnosticism. And that's not the case. It's just. I try to make the point, yes, you can have faith if you have this personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I respect that and I'm so grateful for that. But do not go to history, do not go to philosophy to hold you up. Because the problem with that is once you're a hap, you know, the apologists.

Guest 3 [00:49:40] I personally think that academics. And this happened to me in grad school. When I was going into grad school, I had a word document where I was gonna. Gosh darn it, I was gonna harmonize the pearl of great price Mormon view of scripture, starting with Moses six, six. You know, Adam had a pure and perfect language and he started the Bible.

Guest 3 [00:50:01] And I was gonna take the Mormon narrative of scripture and the academic narrative of scripture and I was going to harmonize them. And then it took me about a semester to realize it didn't work like that, that the academic explanation of religion made a lot of sense and it explained the church approach to academia much better than the church sees evil. Scholars don't learn that stuff. Then that model works.

Guest 3 [00:50:33] And so I think that apologists. So scholars say, here's the best picture of Jesus, here's the best picture of Joseph, here's what we can understand. And yes, it's not certain, but you can just cuddle up with that lack of certainty and say, oh, I can believe everything that I've ever learned in Sunday school. So I think that academia, as best they can, says, here is square A, B, C, D.

Guest 3 [00:50:57] This is the story of Christianity. This is the story of Joseph Smith, this is the story of the Book of Mormon. And apologists can say, well, dot A isn't quite as firm as they think, and DNA doesn't cause quite as much of a problem as people think, but they can't create another square A, B, C, D that is as persuasive as the academic model. But that does not change the fact that that spirituality is real, that religion has value.

Guest 3 [00:51:28] But what I would say is that we need to transcend the standard model of religion, and it can be done. But what I want to say before we move on to the question and answer part of the panel is I really do not believe that the straightforward believer and the questioner, deconstructed type person, I don't think they can ever communicate without being transformed and becoming different than they are.

Guest 3 [00:51:58] I taught in the Bible Belt, and so some of my students would say, I will get an A in this class, but I am ignoring everything we're learning. And I encouraged my students. I said, don't do that. You know, don't. There's also a pastor therapy group with Bart Ehrman's New Testament class.

Guest 3 [00:52:18] And I said, don't throw your faith out the window and don't ignore everything in class either, but make this an organic process where we become something else. But the major point that I want to make is we cannot force this journey on anyone.

Guest 3 [00:52:39] And so if so, what I do, I feel like similar to what Paul says, you know, when I'm with believers, I speak as a believer, and when I'm with doubters, I speak as a doubter. And I wrote a paper for a Bush seminar that Bushman put on called On Love and Integrity, Identity and Interpretation in the Pluralistic Mormon Culture. And so what I would say is that even though we want to be inclusive, even though we want to say there's no us, there's no them, we still need to be very, very tactful and very careful and very loving about how we blend our identities and how we engage with each other's identities, because either we will abrasively hurt each other, or we will have to have a ceasefire agreement where we just don't talk about these things, or we will need to be ready to be transformed, and we can never force that process.

Guest 3 [00:53:36] And so I think it is a very complicated, personalized journey about how we become inclusive and how we communicate with those different and how we make the us larger to encompass it. Thanks.

Guest [00:53:57] All right, thank you, Margaret.

John Dehlin [00:54:00] And thank you, Jared. Is my microphone working? Is it. Can you guys hear me? It doesn't sound good. Okay, like, the battery's maybe dead on this. I'll talk loudly. So I want to get to questions. I'm going to ask those who ask questions. Please don't tell stories or share opinions for this part. That's what the test 20.

John Dehlin [00:54:30] So ask simple, short, direct questions. Try and direct them to Specific people, if you can, or just we'll try to moderate that. I'll ask maybe a question or two. One of the groups of people that I've interacted most with, I should be talking to microphone for the listeners.

John Dehlin [00:54:55] One of the groups of people that I interact most with are people who have left the church or are in some way disaffected. And there's a certain group of people that say, the last thing I want to do is be associated with the word Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:55:15] I want to run as far and as fast away from the word Mormon as I possibly can. Why would I ever want to go to a conference talking about Mormonism, speak about Mormonism, think about Mormonism again? Margaret, I'm going to ask my first question to you.

Panel Q&A: Why Stay in the Church?

John Dehlin [00:55:32] You of all people would seem to be someone who might adopt a similar attitude. Yet you're here, and yet you've continued to make Mormonism a part of your life. I'm not, I want to say as a disclaimer, this conference is not about convincing people to stay in the LDS Church. It is not about that at all. I'm currently inactive from the LDS Church. I'm not proud to say that I'm not happy in that state. Perfectly.

John Dehlin [00:56:04] If I could find a way to reconcile and be able to feel like I could do it in happiness and with integrity, I would and still will. But I'm still in a journey. It's a process for me, too. So I guess what I'm saying is that we're not here to convince anyone to stay in the LDS Church. We validate all paths, including those who have left, who have resigned. We're not trying to nudge anyone in any direction.

John Dehlin [00:56:32] But I remember something said on a podcast with Dan where when you hate Mormonism, maybe one of the risks of hating the church and Mormonism is you hate a part of yourself. And I liked what Carolyn said about some of the psychologists early on who said, if you want to reach a state of peace, you need to make a peace with the faith of your childhood. And so, Margaret, I would love you to make a quick plea or a case or an explanation for why someone who might have every reason to run away from Mormonism has chosen to stick around in some way.

Margaret Toscano [00:57:15] I'll see if I can do it quickly. Like you. I mean, I have never felt like I either wanted to persuade somebody to stay in or persuade them to leave. Because for me, I believe very much in the personal choice of following where you feel your heart, your desire, the spirit, whatever is leading you on the Other hand.

Margaret Toscano [00:57:44] And I don't think I ever hated Mormonism, although maybe I did. I think, in fact, for me, part of my journey or my struggle has been, as I sort of hinted already, is to be able to tap into my anger and my hatred because there's kind of the more conscious part of me always wants to be loving and kind and understanding and kind of sympathetic with every position and, you know, not being all of that. And so for me, part of my journey was to be able to fully embrace my anger and the sense of betrayal and the sense that I had been really hurt and that what they had done to me was really bad.

Margaret Toscano [00:58:30] I had to do that. And so I think that that's very important. So maybe to now go to a short answer. Why would somebody not want to completely reject their Mormonism? I think you've already said part of it, John, which is that. And Carolyn, that if you've grown up in the church or if you were a convert, as my husband was, it's a part of your identity. And if you're going to be whole and healthy, you have to deal with that in a positive way. My other part, the other part of the answer would be, and maybe there are two parts to this, that in response to something you said, Jared, I agree with you that spirituality in and of itself is.

Margaret Toscano [00:59:13] Is a very important value. And that whether you're agnostic or atheist, to sense your own, that you are not simply molecules, but there's something in your identity that is deeper than that, is a very important part of psychological wholeness, too. That we have a need as human beings, even if we are molecules somehow, we still need meaning. We need. The interior is a very important part. Part of this.

Margaret Toscano [00:59:43] But I think that not only do we need spirituality, but that spirituality needs specific stories and symbols. That it cannot be this amorphous thing that has nothing to cling onto it. That symbols and stories and images are very powerful and that spirituality is connected to specifics.

Margaret Toscano [01:00:13] And that wherever you are, whether you're in Mormonism or you're a Buddhist who lives in another country, the specifics of the material world we perceive the spiritual through objects, through rituals, through myths, through things. And that we all.

Margaret Toscano [01:00:40] It's why your stories that you give, John, are so powerful. You just say we should all be nice, we should all be inclusive. We should all be this, we should all be that. It's pablum. It doesn't speak to us. We need the specifics.

Margaret Toscano [01:00:56] And I think that one of the reasons that a lot of us want to still be Mormon is that that there are specifics about the theology, about the people, about the history that are powerful. And I would hate, you know, I'm not one that wants to lose any language that has been spoken among humans. I want to keep all languages because every language. As somebody who has studied a lot of languages, you can say things in Greek that you can't say in English. And I love the nuances of. Of the language. And if we lose a part of human experience, human language, we're losing the richness, the diversity of our experiences.

Margaret Toscano [01:01:41] And I would hate to see that happen. There's so much. There's so many wonderful things in Mormonism. There's a lot I hate, I admit, but there's so much good that it would be just a shame to lose that. And I don't want to lose that part of myself.

Margaret Toscano [01:01:57] I have no desire to be part of the LDS Church right now at all. I don't want to go back, but I want to keep my Mormonism because that there's something material, something gritty. I mean, I'm trying to think of a way of saying this, that if we lost it, it would be like an extinct language, which would be so, to me, so sad that we had lost it.

John Dehlin [01:02:25] Any other. Any other quick responses that wasn't quick.

Margaret Toscano [01:02:27] I'm sorry.

John Dehlin [01:02:28] That was awesome. Thank you. Thank you, Margaret. Carolyn, I want to ask you the next question, please. For those. For those who are struggling to find a way to stay, or for those who have left. I don't think that. I don't think that any of us could claim that your life has been a cakewalk as it relates to the

Guest 3 [01:02:53] church,

John Dehlin [01:02:56] maybe, and you have decided to maintain your membership and to engage. And I think there's a lot of people here who would want to know how. Kind of, what are your top bullet items for surviving active LDS Church membership?

Guest 3 [01:03:20] Okay. Now that this would be more how I managed to stay rather than why I want to stay.

John Dehlin [01:03:27] That's right. Tips for how to make it work if you want to, from your experience.

Guest 3 [01:03:33] Wow. Well, I got lucky in. In a lot of ways. And when you said maybe I had. When I was out there doing Mother of the Morning and Margaret and the others were here being excommunicated, I. Geography played a part in that.

Guest 3 [01:04:01] Well, here are some of the things that have been on my side. I developed my own Persona pretty early on as a very safe little poetess that was quoted in General Conference. And that was a good first building block of people who came to know me that way.

Guest 3 [01:04:22] And then when I did sort of step out in a big way of publishing, goodbye, I love you. There were some people who thought that was pretty harsh to a bad thing to have this compassionate view of homosexuality. But most Mormon people thought, I like that. I like what she did. And that gave me another bit of plus for giving me some credibility and also for allowing me to believe that I could have a place in the church. As I said on the huge podcast that you. That I was terrified when I knew that Deseret book had ordered a preview. And then when they decided I learned they had ordered a thousand copies, I thought, my gosh, this is going to be okay.

Guest 3 [01:05:13] And the huge amount of positive response that I got to that was another good link between Mormonism and me and the fact that during the time that Margaret and others were talking about the divine feminine and I was out there doing Mother Wilbur the morning, my own stake president at that time came to see the play about five times when I was playing in San Francisco, bringing high powered guests there because he wanted to show me off, to say, we can do this in our church.

Guest 3 [01:05:46] And at that particular time, and because this is not my current stake president, I will say that the stake president I had at that time, which. Whose name I don't need to mention, I was always in good contact with him about what I was doing. And he said, yes, Carolyn, the Brethren call me about you from time to time and say, should we be doing anything about Sister Pearson?

Guest 3 [01:06:09] And I say to them, leave her alone. She does better PR for this church than you could ever buy. Leave her alone. So I have had that kind of unusual support from the people who have been in ecclesiastical authority over me. So that combined with good luck, plus with the fact that I have been both honest and pushing the envelope as far as I wanted to, and I have not done any personal attacks against the church, against any of the Brethren.

Guest 3 [01:06:46] So I feel that, I mean, we all have a calling. And I think that I have had a calling, that I have been protected in some ways. Mormon feminists don't kill themselves. Mormon gay people, the men especially, hundreds.

Guest 3 [01:07:06] And I think that I have been protected because I have a calling to do something significant about that. So that's really all I can say at the moment.

John Dehlin [01:07:15] Thank you. Thank you. Is this microphone working?

Guest 3 [01:07:20] Could I say something really quick?

John Dehlin [01:07:21] Yes, please.

Guest 3 [01:07:23] As someone who's not a famous poetess. So first, I think there's a term that I like called enlightened self centeredness, where we need to make our own Peace with if we want to make being in the church work and it hurts.

Guest 3 [01:07:45] My lovely wife organized a feminist book group. We read Sue Monk Kids Dance of the Descendant Daughter. And I was in tears after because of the stories that were shared and homosexuality issues. I break down, I break down in tears because the church is so, so harmful. And I think that we need to give full weight to both the good and the harm that the church does and then make our choice about what we want to do about it. So feminist homosexuality issues. But I think I know why I want to be part of the church, part of the community. I live Mormonism the way that I want to live it.

Guest 3 [01:08:33] You know, we pray to Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father. There's. So spirituality is good. And I think in its ideal form, Mormonism does religion as well as many other systems. And it's a beautiful thing. And then I prefer to stay. And I make no pretensions as to whether I will be able to do this long term. I want to, but I focus on what's real to me, the real value that it has in people, in people's lives. And then I am very, very careful about how I share what I feel. I said in priesthood that prophet was a mistake, but I knew that I could do it in that.

Guest 3 [01:09:10] And if I were in a ward where I could say nothing, I would try to say as much as I could. I would wait. I try to be governed by love, but I have this sense of self. I'm self centered enough that I am nourished and I have my own spiritual relationship and I choose to stay so I can be the voice. And okay, I do not think it works to just white knuckle in the church and say, if only I can stay active and keep a temple recommended and maybe in 40 years it'll be better. That's not a way to live. I don't think that's helpful.

Guest 3 [01:09:46] But if we can find the meaning, we can connect with others and we can be happy even in a flawed system. I'm not running and leaving America even though there are many problems with the country. So embrace the good and the bad and be a voice for the good.

Guest 4 [01:10:07] I just want to pull out a little common thread I'm hearing is that I think a lot of us just really want to be useful. You know, I mean, we received such good training. We really did. And it, you know, it takes a while, especially if you're sort of, you know, different, to find a way to be useful.

Guest 4 [01:10:29] And I think one of the things that I Find most. And I think we're better at feeling like we belong when we find a way to be useful to the tradition. And that may or may not, and everyone finds a different path. And I think one of the things I find most promising about this sort of moment is this idea that, especially with the web, there is a de facto decorrelation of Mormon discourse.

Guest 4 [01:10:52] There really is. There is a lot of space in this world, and there is a lot of space to do good as Mormons. And, you know, maybe at some seasons in my life, I really, you know, I mean, maybe some seasons in my life are gonna coincide with opportunities to serve within the institutional church. And I do. I have a calling, but in other ways, I serve the tradition. I think about the Rabbis back in 1885 who said, One of the ways we're going to express what it means to be Jews in the modern world is through tikkun olam, which means literally healing a broken world, acts of reparation.

Guest 4 [01:11:27] And so I wonder if it's just not up to us to find ways to explain, express our Mormonism and be useful. You know, whether or not that coincides with seasons of perfect activity or maps directly onto the needs of the institutional church. The institutional church has so much it needs to accomplish, and maybe our needs don't map perfectly onto those needs, but I think we're all united by a desire to be useful to the tradition. And I love what Carolyn said about, you know, she has three assigned and four other visiting teaching people. I mean, you know, so I think that's helped me stay connected or get reconnected, is finding a sense in which I felt I could be useful.

Audience Questions and Panel Reflections

John Dehlin [01:12:04] Thank you. I'm going to ask one more question before I let the audience. We're going to have you come up to the microphone for your questions. Joanna, you just spoke, but this last question that I'm going to offer is directed to you.

John Dehlin [01:12:16] I started reading Kaim Potok books a few years ago. Kaim Potok is a Jewish authority who wrote the Chosen, the Promise, David's Harp. My name is Asher Lev. All these books and many others. All these books explore the clash between Judaism and modernity, Judaism and science, Judaism and secularism, Judaism and biblical criticism, higher criticism. And it's all about that shady middle ground that Holly sang about because there really are no blacks and whites. And it's all about this middle ground of can we bridge the divide between faith and modernity?

John Dehlin [01:13:04] And when journalists write about John Huntsman and Joanna and Dan, you guys helped me think about this when Journalists write about John Huntsman. They don't know what to call him. In fact, he doesn't even know what to call himself.

John Dehlin [01:13:21] So there's no name for us. And so we can look at Judaism. Who's got Hasidic, Orthodox, Reform, Reconstructionist. You can pick your flavor of Judaism. You can be a rabbi in certain forms of Judaism and not even believe that Moses existed.

John Dehlin [01:13:44] You can believe that the Bible is fiction and be a rabbi and marry people and perform the most holy rituals of Judaism. Now, I'm not. I'm not a scholar, so when I talk about comparisons between Mormonism and Judaism, I get eviscerated by people who are more thoughtful about this kind of stuff.

John Dehlin [01:14:04] So I bring my smart friends to talk about it for me. So, Joanna, have you thought at all about how this can unfold? How do we get to a place where there is an identity? I'm not saying let's create new churches. I'm actually explicitly not saying that.

John Dehlin [01:14:27] I'm not saying anything other than asking the question, how do we get what the Jews have so that those who want to maintain their connection, give it

Guest 4 [01:14:39] a few thousand years? And, you know, I'm not Jewish. I just married a nice Jewish boy. So let's, you know. But I have learned a lot. And Judaism was a refuge, you know, has been a spiritual refuge to me. And it seems it's so important not to, as I said during my talk, not draw facile comparisons. There are some significant differences, and there are places that. In which I would not trade.

Guest 4 [01:15:02] There are ways in which I find Judaism limiting. Everyone should know that. There are ways in which I find Judaism limiting that impact my spiritual life directly as well, and my children. So, you know, to be continued. But, you know, something that I noticed right away with the way my husband and his family conducted themselves in relationship to this religious tradition was that they never sensed that their identity was imperiled. I mean, there's a sense of danger a lot of us get right, and I'm interested that we're talking about that. September 1993 has come up a lot for all of us. And in part, I see kind of this moment as a moment that's kind of seeking to exhale and see what's next.

Guest 4 [01:15:51] I can't tell you how many young Mormon feminists I talked to who are in their 20s, who were babies in 93, who still assume that for something fairly innocuous, they say they're going to get called into a court. I mean, that's been absorbed, that fear, that fear has really been absorbed. And I noticed how unafraid my husband was, and it was a revelation to me. I mean, and part of that, again, is through the very distinct historical processes that have formed Judaism. You know, I mean, Jews died for being Jews by comparison. Very few Mormons have died for being Mormons. Maybe Mormons have died for being Mormons.

Guest 4 [01:16:25] But, you know, so that sense that this is something you carry inside you, that history has tried to take away from you, but it's not going to. You helped shape the history of the people. And, you know, I'll close out because I could tell many funny stories about this, but, you know, Jews fire their rabbis all the time, right? And my husband's parents helped start a Reconstructionist temple, which is a branch that's in some ways more conservative than Reform, which is the one you're probably most familiar with.

Guest 4 [01:16:57] More conservative, but also more progressive, very LGBT welcoming, but also more intellectually curious. And, you know, they fire rabbis. They hire and fire their rabbis. And we have a very different relationship to authority in our tradition. And I wonder, and I don't say that with judgment, it's just very different, right? And I wonder if there's not some way for. For us in this period of, I hope, healing, right, in this period in which we might begin to shed ourself of fear that is so inhibiting to usefulness if we can exhale and not think about firing anyone, any rabbis or anyone else that might, you know, be an authority, but think about ways to feel the strength of the tradition we carry inside of ourselves and exhale a little bit and just dig in and find somewhere to be useful and don't worry so much about it.

Guest 4 [01:17:45] And I think one of the reasons we're labeling ourselves in this moment unorthodox, because we feel we need a label to make sure we're safe before we can go on. But I think there are many reasons to be hopeful and to begin to feel safe again in Mormonism. And they're there if we claim them, if we act with the kind of assurance and positivity that says, I will not apologize. I will not apologize for being Mormon, and I will not allow anyone to diss my tradition. I will not allow you to make fun of my relative, his magic underwear. I will not forget it. No way.

Guest 4 [01:18:13] I'm not ashamed. But at the same time, I'm going to live the life I feel called to live, and I'm going to enlarge the spaces where I can. I'm going to try and be useful, and nothing can take this away from me. I'm not afraid. So that's one way, in a non reductive way that plus a thousand years.

John Dehlin [01:18:35] We just went from 2,000 to 1,000.

Holly Anderson Robbins [01:18:36] Right.

John Dehlin [01:18:37] Did you start with the question? That was a lot of progress. Thank you. Okay, time for your questions. Please make them very brief and if you can direct them to who you want to start with. The answer.

Guest 1 [01:18:48] I'm interested in talking to Jared and Margaret especially. You talked about going down the rabbit hole. Once you leave Mormonism, the rabbit hole continues going.

Guest 2 [01:18:57] I'm wondering though, if you think that

Guest 1 [01:18:58] there's qualitative differences between the history and the mythology of Christianity and Judaism, for example, versus a history and mythology of Mormonism where it seems Mormonism's mythology is a lot more malleable right now. And particularly comment on the trajectory of Mormon studies because it seems like right now it's mostly Mormons trying to reconcile something about themselves versus non Mormons digging into what actually happened with the foundations of Mormonism.

Margaret Toscano [01:19:25] Well, Mormonism has the disadvantage of being more recent and therefore you can prove or disprove the history easier. As soon as it's 2000 years old, it's harder to separate the myth and the history. Right. So I mean, that's kind of both the joy and the curse of Mormonism is that it is so recent and there's so much that's there.

Margaret Toscano [01:19:47] But I think that we have to. From my perspective, one of the most productive things that we can do is stop thinking in terms of sort of the simplistic either ors, and to get rid of the notion that you're either this literalist or you're just simply, you're kicking out all of the literal and the factual and everything that again, those black and whites and those either ors to me are very destructive. That if we're going to have productive discussions about either Mormon history or Mormon theology or Mormon identity, I think we have to have a new vocabulary and a new way of talking that is not reductionist, that really deals with the complexity about how history works and about how myth works and how those things, they always interplay.

Margaret Toscano [01:20:42] There's never a way in which you can get down to the facts without dealing with interpretation. And for me, the hopeful thing about Mormon studies is that I think we're beginning to have more people. I mean, I see this with you, Jared, that more people that can talk in a complex way so that we're not just kind of fighting about, you know, we're not having this sort of naive discussion about what happened. But we understand the complexity about how we create history and how we create theology and so forth. And so that's my hope. I think that there's a lot of hope in that area that people are getting more sophisticated tools to talk about it rather than this kind of really simplistic black and white. I think that's what we need to do.

Guest 3 [01:21:37] Okay, so two commonalities or a commonality with Christianity and Mormonism is we both have historical investments. If certain things are never happened, there are serious consequences to our faith. It's very difficult to say, well, if Jesus never was resurrected, I can still believe all I want. You know, him being, him being the Savior. And so if there were no, no gold plates, I can still be, still be a good Mormon. So there's similar historical investments and we need this to be historical, some would say to believe as we, to move forward in our faith. I think that priesthood is a very sticky issue here with the LDS narrative.

Guest 3 [01:22:23] There needs to be that restoration of priesthood, which very frankly, I don't think it doesn't go off very well on the biblical side because I don't think priests Peter, James and John and had the authority that Mormons imagine they did. And I don't. And then there are problems on the Mormon historian side. I do think that with the Internet, I was very impressed. Someone in one of the groups I'm in pointed out that on LDS.org there's a section on the Mountain Meadows Massacre on the multiple forms of the first vision. So I think the church is because becoming aware that we cannot hide from these issues anymore.

Guest 3 [01:23:03] So the hope I have, I know a lot of people in my education, age bracket and we're still hiding a little bit because we know we need to tread very carefully in order to maintain legitimacy in our institution. But I have a lot of hope that with the Internet and with the openness that the church will be able to make much better use of its specialists than we have before. So instead of disciplining specialists, we say, oh, okay, you interpret in some very interesting ways and you may not believe exactly the way we do, but you are still the safe, faithful person that we can claim as our own or that some members of our community can claim as our own. So I hope that in part answered your question.

John Dehlin [01:23:49] Thank you.

Guest 1 [01:23:53] My question is for you, Carolyn Pearson. I'm kind of curious about your opinions and whatnot on the future of the world due to like global warming and environmental stuff, because the church believes that, oh, the resources are here for us and yada, yada, yada, but we're also supposed to respect the world and whatnot. So I've been able to justify being gay, but I haven't really been able to justify being an extreme environmentalist. So.

Guest 3 [01:24:23] And you would think that I would have a good answer because.

Guest 1 [01:24:26] No, I've just never heard anything about that. I've read a lot of stuff from you and I'm curious.

Guest 3 [01:24:34] Well, no, I really haven't addressed that yet. Darn it.

Guest 4 [01:24:38] You know, Canyon. Oh, sorry.

Guest 3 [01:24:42] Would just say that. Why would we think that if our church doesn't at this moment clearly have all the answers about homosexuality, why would we look to this church for ultimate answers about global warming or look anywhere else? I mean, actually Mormonism is more on board with global warming than a lot of other places. But just for, for my vision of the fate of the world in general, I mean, could we make it that simple or large?

Guest 3 [01:25:19] I have a lot of confidence in the human family and I believe that probably we are going to survive as a species. But believing, hopefully, I'm a hopeful believer that we are all eternal beings and that one way or another, our journey in the. This physicality will prove to be really useful and positive and take us where we're supposed to be going. And in the meantime, I do my little part of it and you do your part of it. And if there is, which I hope and believe, something that is larger than us, including all of us, that we're moving toward higher and higher joy and better vibration of understanding and relationship. So that's a very strange answer to a very strange question.

Guest 3 [01:26:11] One potential problem is the Latter Day Saints, our belief in the Second Coming. I think that we need that. It would be nice to temper a little bit this imminent belief in the Second Coming. How to do that? Not enough time.

John Dehlin [01:26:24] It's in the name, isn't it, to

Guest 3 [01:26:25] talk about it, but the fact that we're like, we don't need to take care of the world. It's going to end in the 30 years. So we only need 30 years of oil. Right. So I mean, it would be nice if we could emphasize the stewardship because Moses, where the earth cries out, we have the beautiful theology about stewardship, about taking care of the earth, about the earth having a soul. And it'd be nice to focus on that. So Mormonism has the answers. I just wish we could mix up the ingredients differently than the institutional churches.

Guest 3 [01:26:58] Yeah. And I think Mormons don't disavow our need to be good stewards over the earth like Certain extreme evangelicals really, truly do say, you know, well, never mind about the trees. You know, we're only going to last for a short period of time anyway. I think Mormons don't do that. So I think we're in much better light on that particular thing.

Guest 4 [01:27:21] There's a Mormon Matters podcast Dan did on environmentalism. You know it. Okay, good. George Handley, you know him. Okay, good.

Guest 1 [01:27:32] My name is Brad Carmack. I had a question for Joanna, if you wouldn't mind. It's a governance question. There's a number of predictable shortcomings that come from a very rigidly authoritarian sort of governance structure. One where power's very concentrated in the hands of about 15. They're all English speaking, all white, all very old. They're selected for conformity and for seniority. One of those shortcomings is a slow pace of change. So I was wondering if you could speak to a feasible next step for improving governance.

John Dehlin [01:28:04] Of what?

Guest 1 [01:28:06] Of the institutional LDS Church.

John Dehlin [01:28:08] How to improve the governance of the LDS Church. That's it.

Guest 2 [01:28:17] I'm going to put on my I'm

Guest 4 [01:28:18] married to a Jewish guy hat and say in Jewish tradition, there's a wonderful teaching rhetoric that they teach us to use when our children ask us questions, and you're not my child. But when someone asks us a question, we say, what do you think the answer is? I don't know. I don't feel. I mean, I don't feel in a position to instruct the church and how it's governed. You know, I did note there's been changes in the last year, year and a half, with women in priesthood executive councils. We've seen some open role modeling of more egalitarian interactions between male and female leaders done in leadership training sessions, as I understand. I didn't attend, so it's all hearsay. But, you know, I. I don't. I don't fall, you know, I don't feel in a position to correct the church.

Guest 1 [01:29:06] How do you democratize, for instance, to a greater extent than the current.

Guest 4 [01:29:09] You know, I think that, you know, gender is an obvious. Anyone who wants to think caringly as stewards of a Mormon tradition. It sounds like that's where you're coming from, about next steps, feasible next steps, which I think is a really lovely way of putting it. You know, there's two big axes here, and one is north, south, you know, basically the fact that the global growth of the church, I mean, you know, as multi generational, mostly ethnic Mormons, basically, in this room, we are going to be. We're minority and we'll continue to be the minority. So it's interesting to think about how the faces we see in institutional church leadership do and don't reflect our global majority and how that works.

Guest 4 [01:29:46] I'm even acutely aware, as a Mormon feminist of how difficult it is to reach out to third world women right here in the US who share my faith, who are employed as housekeepers in the places I sleep overnight when I come to Salt Lake City. You know what I mean? I'm in poverty wages. That dialogue is difficult enough for me as a simple Mormon feminist to do so. I can only imagine the burden the church is facing. And then the gender axis is another one. And I really enjoyed a podcast Dan did a few weeks ago where I got to be on with Jana Reese and Christine Haglin.

Guest 4 [01:30:13] And, you know, we talked very openly about, you know, what would happen if every role that wasn't in the priesthood chain of command was desegregated by gender. Wouldn't that be interesting? You know, I mean, what if, you know, what if, what if ward clerks, you know, like, there's a lot of women who keep the checkbook at home, right?

Guest 4 [01:30:35] I don't know. Is that a priesthood thing? I'm not clear on that. You know, so. But that was the thing that came during the course of the podcast. I really enjoyed that avenue of just thinking about desegregation of things that aren't priesthood, clearly priesthood related. But I don't make those as suggestions. I'm just sharing with you conversations I've been a part of.

Guest 3 [01:30:51] Can I make a super quick comment? I'm optimistic about the rate of change. I'm very optimistic because information, it's speeding up so fast with the Internet, information, everything. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I do not think our generation will finance the church as it is now. And I have a lot of confidence in the church to protect itself and to survive. And I think that because of our social awareness and other factors, that it will get the message a lot faster than it otherwise would, because it won't be feasible in a survival sense otherwise.

Margaret Toscano [01:31:24] And I want to add something quickly to that. I think that that's how change is going to happen, that outside forces that combined with inside forces are going to pragmatically demand a change. I mean, one of the things that we've seen is that I don't know what the statistics are actually are, but it has been quoted that you have 80% of single women between like 18 and 40 that are leaving the Church. If something like that keeps happening, the church has to eventually respond. And I think that those kind of pragmatic changes are going to force the structure to realign in some way. Thank God.

Temple Recommend Questions and Closing Panel Thoughts

John Dehlin [01:32:07] Last question, Holly.

Guest 2 [01:32:11] I'm kind of still waiting for the lightning bolt on this one. So this is for Carolyn and Joanna and anybody else has an idea. As a feminist, how do you philosophically get to a place where you will consent to answer questions in a temple recommend interview situation? Do you internally grant them authority to question you or how do you frame that? And also, this is the second part of the question. Why? I mean, do you do it for them or because you love them and you want to kind of humor them, or is it because of the temple? Or that? And I'm asking it sincerely. I'm not trying to be facetious. Would you answer the temple recommend interview questions if they ask them to?

Guest 3 [01:32:58] Oh, if I was just having a good conversation with my stake president and he's said, let me ask you a few things. Oh, absolutely. Oh, totally. I believe that there's nothing that my stake president doesn't know about my belief system or my activity.

John Dehlin [01:33:14] Are you asking whether she would answer in the appropriate way or whether she would be candid about her feelings?

Guest 2 [01:33:19] I'm asking if you would answer as a buddy.

Guest 3 [01:33:23] As a what?

Guest 2 [01:33:23] As a buddy. Right. I mean, if my stake president says, hey, Holly, let's go out to lunch, I'd really like to ask you these questions. You know, just because we're buddies, I'd say, oh, okay, I can answer questions.

Guest 3 [01:33:32] You know, I don't know that it would make much difference to me. I wouldn't put a. I would not put a label on it like that. It would be as a friend and someone whom I respect and that I do acknowledge that there is a certain kind of relationship with that I have unusual respect for. I don't know how else to answer that.

Guest 2 [01:33:55] Okay.

Margaret Toscano [01:33:56] Are you asking, Holly, whether or not, as a feminist, you feel like you should give a male leader authority over you? Is that sort of the crux of your inquiry?

Guest 2 [01:34:06] I feel like if I were to go in for a temple recommend interview, I would have to grant him authority to ask me those questions in order to do that. And I'm thinking, well, how do I grant him that authority? Maybe I still have too much pride, but at the same time as if I don't. I just don't even acknowledge that authority anymore, I guess. And I can't really go back to that. I don't know how. I don't necessarily want to go back to that. I'm just thinking, how can I get to that point? Not like I even care right now, obviously, but I always. I want to know how other people would frame that if they did that.

Margaret Toscano [01:34:43] Yeah, I know as a feminist, I have the same problem, Holly. I mean, obviously I'm not in the position where I, you know, the situation arises. Right. But I think if I were in the church right now, it would be really hard for me to go in and be willing to say that I would just submit to anything that they ask me.

Margaret Toscano [01:35:04] I would have a hard time as a feminist doing that as well. I think the only context in which I could is if I felt there would be two contexts in which I could. Either that I felt like I trusted that leader because I knew him as you're talking about, Carolyn, or if I felt like that somehow it was important for me to have the recommend and therefore I could reveal enough of myself and still feel like I had integrity. Because for me, the sense of integrity is so fundamental for me to have. You know, my identity is so connected to me feeling that I am being true to what I feel inside, and I don't.

Margaret Toscano [01:35:49] So I think it's possible that a woman could feel that. That she can feel like that she's not giving up her own sense of authority or her own integrity and answer the questions in a certain way, depending on the circumstance. But I completely agree with you that I think it's a really problematic issue, but maybe not just for a feminist, but anybody, you know, who can be the judge of my spiritual life other than myself.

Margaret Toscano [01:36:19] And I think it's a fundamental problem in the Mormon Church talking about the whole structure. I feel like that we have to. I mean, in my ideal church, we would return to a notion of, you know, it would be more democratic, a parliament of profits where we all can speak in the name of God, where we are all our own judges of our. Of our spiritual life. But I think it's really hard,

Guest 3 [01:36:48] I think. And people. People do critique me on this. And it needs. It's that my. The spirituality that I have forged is as sacred as the way that my priesthood leaders interpret that authority. And so I have this idea of translation. And for some, this wouldn't work, and I understand that. But I feel like I can maintain integrity by this idea of translation where I know what the Stake president is thinking and where he's coming from, or I try to understand that he wants to know whether I am worthy to go to the temple. I feel I am worthy to go to the temple. I feel I am worthy to be part of this community.

Guest 3 [01:37:25] And so I'm open to critique on this, but I will translate myself in whatever way I need to to get across the deep message that I want to be part of this community. And I feel I'm worthy to go to the temple. And I don't think that his interpretation is any more valid than my interpretation. Some people would call that disingenuous. Some people would call that lying. Some people. But I think I am being true. We have constantly competing claims to integrity. We have competing truths to which we need to be truthful. And so I think by being true to the deeper of, like, I do love and respect this community.

Guest 3 [01:38:05] I do also love and respect my thing. And so one thing that my line for integrity is, I feel that my positions are defensible. Do you see what I mean? That I may not choose to get all out there sometimes. I do. I do as much as I can. But if the precious leader confronted me and said, you're lying about this, this, and this, I could say, say yes. And this is why, because it's a complicated issue. I don't want to spend more time.

John Dehlin [01:38:32] Thank you, Holly. It's time to wrap up. We've eaten into our break intentionally, which means that our break's going to be shortened because we need to start right at five because Pizza's coming at six and Bent Washburn is going to be performing seven. And we want to give you lots of time to talk. I'm going to just really end really quickly. I'm going to put everyone on the spot. I'm going to have each panelist, I'll talk slowly for one minute each to share their remnants of thoughts of feelings of love for Mormonism. What are the elements of Mormonism? And I'm speaking longer so that they can think about it for a second. What are the remnants of Mormonism that are pillars for you in the life that you're currently living? And I'm gonna start with Jared and we'll just move in that direction.

Guest 3 [01:39:29] This is my people. I love my people. This is my faith language. I love the good that Mormonism can do for people, and I love its potential to do good even more. And so I want to be a bridge as much as I can between the present good, which I cherish and love, and the even greater potential good that I see.

Guest 4 [01:39:58] Talk loud. A few weeks ago, I did an interview with an evangelical author of some significance named Warren Smith. And it was a fairly spirited exchange. And at one point he said, believing that I was going to take the tack that, oh, of course Mormons were just like you.

Guest 4 [01:40:17] He said, well, you know, if you do believe in the same Jesus, why don't you just come over and join the Baptist church? And I said, well, that's easy. I really love being Mormon. And I do. And this is my language. This is a language in which I've had some pretty incomparable experiences that have been the bedrock of my life. I've never stopped praying.

Guest 4 [01:40:37] Surrendering doctrinal specifics has not meant for me surrendering faith. It's a religion I'm willing to bet my life on every day. And I do. I live as a Mormon every day because I love it. I believe in the tradition, and you're my people.

Margaret Toscano [01:40:54] I love Mormonism because of the open theology. I have always loved this notion of eternal progression and this openness in theology and these possibilities and potentials. And I think Mormonism has an incredible wealth of images and ideas that enliven me, and I still connect with those. I also connect with the people.

Holly Anderson Robbins [01:41:24] People.

Margaret Toscano [01:41:24] I think that there's something about the way Mormonism works, that it creates these incredible human beings who are seeking and who want to do good and who want to connect and who want to have community. I see it here. I feel so much love for the Mormon people and what they can do. And. And I have a lot of faith that. Not in the church institution, but I have a lot of faith in Mormon people because I think they are. There's something about the incredible makeup of what has made them who they are that gives them a special thing that they can contribute. And finally, I feel that fate and the divine have put me in this place and that I need to do good where I am putting.

Guest 3 [01:42:18] I love that, Margaret. We have all maybe sung the little song where love is there, God is also. And to me, that means wherever in any religion or in any circumstance where we see love operating, that means that God is there.

Guest 3 [01:42:37] And I have long ago given up the idea that God is only in Mormondom or that Salt Lake City is the center of the universe. But what I do know is that because I experience love to a very high degree within the Mormon community, I know automatically that that's where God is, along with so many other places.

Guest 3 [01:43:03] And we, all of us, I know, have this. This built in immediate, immediate way to know, is this love? Is this not love? We can argue about the versions of the first vision. We can argue about DNA. We can argue about anything, but nobody needs to argue. Because when I feel love coming at me, when I feel love going out of me, I know that it is just a fact of absolute knowledge. And because Mormondom for me is a place where there is a great deal of love that is given and received, I know that there's a great deal of God that is present.

John Dehlin [01:43:53] Let's take a moment to thank our panel.

Guest [01:44:11] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Music today was provided by the Saber Rattlers. Check them out@sabre-rattlers.com the Mormon Stories logo was generously donated by StudioCase.com thanks for listening.

Holly Anderson Robbins [01:44:26] Come, come ye saints. No toil nor labor fear but with joy wend your way though hard to you this journey may appear Grace shall be as your day. Tis better far for us to strive Our useless cares from us to drive to the San Jo Hearts will swell. Oh, all is well, all is well.

Evening Session Opens with Music and Gratitude

Part 4 of 5 · Ep. 262

Guest [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:00:04] Come, come, ye saints. No toil nor labor fear, but with joy wend your way.

John Dehlin [00:00:18] The 2011 Salt Lake City Mormon Stories Conference was brought to you by the Salt Lake City Mormon Stories Support Community, found on Facebook and also by the Open Stories foundation and by the generous support of you, our listeners. To join or start a Mormon Stories support community in your area, please go to MormonStories.org and click on the Support Communities tab to host a regional conference in your city like this one. Please email us@mormonstoriesmail.com for more information on how to host a conference. Finally, to keep this podcast and all of these communities and projects alive, please donate today@mormonstories.org oh, and please enjoy the conference.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:01:06] So I just want to take one quick second here and thank you all for coming. This has been a lot of work and we're really grateful to have so many people here to appreciate it and to share in this community. And I just have really felt a lot of love here today. We are going to start with a musical performance by Eric Kulik. He's going to be singing and performing a song called Bearing Witness, which I think is fitting at the beginning of our little testimony meeting here. And. Then I'm going to take the opportunity to say a couple things before I turn it over to you, but we'll go with Eric first. Go ahead.

Guest 2 [00:01:56] I'd also like to maybe say a few words, I guess, in lieu of coming up later on. It's been an amazing experience. I've been so grateful for everything that John and everybody else has done, has gone through. Everyone's wondering about where we're going, what's going on. I really think that this is a major watershed moment for us. This is like our first annual, hopefully. Daniel, I'd love to.

Guest 2 [00:02:23] I hope so. Good conference to really, to speak to the voices of those who are, who are, you know, who've been trodden upon, who have been less than, you know, perfectly fitting the mold of the community that we've grown into, whether through birth or through conversion. I myself am a convert from Long Island, New York. I think I know probably just about every single person that lived in the county that was a member of my church out there.

Guest 2 [00:02:51] And it really coming to Utah was good and bad. My disaffection didn't really, my questioning didn't really start until coming here, I guess, I mean, I guess not to really rip on us as Mormons. I guess it's anytime you have a community that is so prevalently one faith, it's very easy just to kind of get into the dogmatic routine. But I feel like there's something that we're doing here that just is just. It's actually, I almost see it even beyond Mormon community. I see this man, David Bazan, who's my musical hero. I'm actually playing one of his songs today.

Guest 2 [00:03:25] I've seen him perform 15 times. I've hung out and talked to him 14 of those times. Really cool guy. He's from the evangelical community and it's happening everywhere. I think what's happening, it's a human experience. It's this experience of questioning and understanding and growing. And when you look at the Old Testament, you see they blamed God when or credited God for all the crazy things that happen around them. I think it just. As human beings, we want to process where we are and who we are. And I think that we really are moving forward. And if there is ever going to be a Zion built, it's going to be through this love and community and questioning that we're able to go through right now.

Guest 2 [00:04:04] So I also, as far as temple recommend stuff for me, I had an experience where luckily my bishop in the ward here has been really nice. But he kind of, even though I broke it all out for him and told him basically just about everything I felt in a nutshell, he came down, he's like, well, one question really would kind of determine whether I'll give you a recommend or not. And he asked if I associated with or supported any groups that stood against the church. And that was the big question for him. And I told him, honestly, I have to say that I would support and stand with any group that needs the support and love of others.

Guest 2 [00:04:39] And if it means standing against an organization every single day, any single time, any place, I will always stand with that group. So without further ado, this is bearing witness.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:05:20] I clung to miracles I have not seen from ancient autographs only Margaret and Jared can read. Though I've repented, I'm still tempted, I admit. But it's not what bearing witnesses. Too full of fear and prophecy to see the revelation right in front of me. So it's sick and tired of trying to make the pieces fit. Cause it's not what bearing witness,

Guest 3 [00:06:19] The

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:06:19] gap between what I hoped would be and what is, makes me weep for my kids. I take a cleansing breath and make a positive confession.

Guest 2 [00:06:35] But is that what bearing witness is?

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:06:41] Though it may alienate your family and blur the lines of your identity,

Guest 4 [00:06:54] Let

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:06:54] go of what you know and honor what exists so that's what bearing witness is, daughter. That's what bearing witness is.

Community Members Share Their Mormon Stories

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:07:44] Okay, so to start, we're going to welcome you guys can come right up here to the lovely podium. It's pretty impressive to stand here, I gotta say. And we are really asking everyone to keep their remarks as brief as they can so that as most people as possible can take advantage of this time.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:08:06] And I don't want to have to give you the evil eye to tell you to wrap up. So please be brief. I just want to take the chance myself to say how grateful I am that I got to be a part of this and to feel such community with all of you and to feel sorry about that love.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:08:29] There's been a lot of love in this room today, and I really am so appreciative of Carolyn and Margaret and Joanna, who took so much time to share their thoughts with us today, and for my wonderful husband, who I get to go on this journey with, and how thankful I am for that.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:08:57] So thank you for letting me be part of this. And I love being a Mormon. I love the church. It has its problems, but I'm thankful that I get to be a Mormon pioneer with each of you. So the podium is yours.

John Dehlin [00:09:31] Maybe I'll be an example of short

Guest 4 [00:09:33] I have a testimony that.

John Dehlin [00:09:40] Spirituality works and that miracles happen and

Guest 2 [00:09:45] that the teachings of Jesus are a

John Dehlin [00:09:49] pretty good expression of what people for

Guest 5 [00:09:54] thousands of years have been trying to

Guest [00:09:55] express of what they have experienced and

Guest 6 [00:09:59] seen and been amazed and enjoyed by.

Margaret Toscano [00:10:15] Well, this has been absolutely beautiful and I loved being here. I've been very uplifted and enlightened being with all of you. I love Mormonism. I love being part of this community and being a Mormon. And I think we have such rich potential in our theology and kind of in the spirit of the idea of open Mormon, I think there's a lot there in our theology to make space for that as well.

Margaret Toscano [00:10:43] I joke with some of the guys in my ward that I ascribe to two of the seven deadly heresies, the first of those being evolution. But I just kind of think of that as a glorified version of family history.

Margaret Toscano [00:11:00] The second of those relates to Doctrine and Covenants, Section 76. My wife and I took an Institute class and the issue came up between progression between kingdoms. And it turns out that we're both universalists, very much so. And my wife put it great. She said, I just think of the Celestial Kingdom as a big party and I want everyone to be there. And I think in our theology, in the Doctrine and Covenants there's place for that. And I think that's the spirit of this conference as well, that Mormonism, the whole world, we all want to get to that big party together and don't leave anyone out.

Guest 7 [00:12:03] Awesome.

Guest 8 [00:12:04] I'm the DES news guy. I helped kind of, kind of very not. I'm an atheist. And I ended up working at the Deseret News and I helped build their Mormon Times website. And she gave me an awesome, interesting perspective. I saw a lot of Joanna talked a lot about the institutionalized church and the living church.

Guest 8 [00:12:28] And so I got my direction every day from institutionalized church, I mean, directly from general authority who's coming in saying what we should build and how we should build it and what we should print and how we should publish it.

Guest 8 [00:12:43] But every day I was getting emails in from around the world from the living church. And there were two very different stories, two very different landscapes. And that troubled me a lot. And I had trouble reconciling, like, where does Mormonism live? Because the institutionalized church seemed to have way more sway over the direction it was going to go. But as John points out, we've got the numbers. And those emails did flood in every day from marginalized people saying, tell my story, tell my story.

Guest 8 [00:13:14] And so I thought that was really sweet. And I'm more moved by their story than the institutionalized church. And so I just want to say, as an atheist dad, though, living and raising a kid here in Utah, when I want to get my 5 year old to come, I say to him, and some people think it's just a cute thing I'm doing, but I say, come, come, you saint. And I don't want him to see Mormonism as this backstory that his parents are keeping from him that, you know, he shouldn't participate in. He shouldn't realize his own heritage as a Utahan. And so, yeah, I side with the living church, and I think my kid will grow up feeling those stories as well.

Guest 9 [00:14:11] My name is Sophia shepherd and I am an ex Mormon. And while I hear myself say that proudly and boldly, the reality is there is no such thing as an ex Mormon. And I think that's where a lot of ex Mormons get their negativity, is that trying to escape that. But to say I'm an ex Mormon and really mean it would mean to erase 30 years of who I am, what got me to this beautiful place that I am, and, and the fact that I can look my children in the eye and my husband in the eye and know that I have a future ahead of me, and I'm unafraid and I love you all and I'm thankful for Jonathan Lynn's work.

Guest 9 [00:14:47] Without Mormon stories, my transition from my new consciousness that was just in November to where I am today would have been a lot more dramatic and probably stretched out for many years. So thank you for Mormon stories, thank you for being fabulous and I love you.

Guest 3 [00:15:14] So this will be brief, but as I'm looking around and as I've met some of you, I've heard some relatively unique stories. It seems like everyone has a unique journey and I guess that's what I'm here to express. I don't feel particularly unique, but as I was reflecting there, I thought, well, maybe I am. So we'll see if anyone can beat me on this aspect of my uniqueness. I was raised by married parents for 27 years, one of which was a Unitarian, one of which was a Mormon.

Guest 3 [00:15:44] So I feel some degree of, I'm not sure what mixed feelings as I sit here in a Unitarian locale discussing the intricacies and nuances of Mormonism. So maybe my journey is unique. I think we're all unique. But it's that uniqueness that brings us together. And I'm thankful that this organization exists, that people have been willing to dedicate the time, resources, energy that it must have taken to bring us all to this point. So I just want to express gratitude to John and all the other people who have been a part of the podcasts and making this happen and things that seems like are going to continue into the future and I hope I can be a part of that. So thank you.

Guest 10 [00:16:42] My heart is literally pounding. I feel like the 25 year old full of belief sitting in the pews is like, it's telling me you have to go up.

Guest 9 [00:16:51] So here I am.

Guest 10 [00:16:53] But I, I just feel so much hope today. It's coming back again, but it's just so awesome to be here face to face. The online community saved me in a time when I needed to know that I was normal, you know, but now I'm in a place where I want the face to face and I'm so grateful for this that's providing these local communities and being here is so awesome. And I just feel, you know, Mormon stories saved my marriage, literally. And I feel like what we're doing here today is saving Mormonism for us, for people like us, and it's saving that thing that we love and providing a space for us.

Guest 10 [00:17:35] And I'm just so grateful to all of you. We are pioneers and I'm especially grateful to the pioneers who did it when there wasn't these mass numbers people like John and Carolyn and, and Margaret and all the people who went before us really alone. And I'm so grateful to have company because I couldn't, would never do this alone. So just so grateful to meet all of you guys. And I'm thankful for Mormon stories.

Guest 11 [00:18:08] I just really wanted to come up and stand here because this thing is awesome. I was like, this beats any Mormon looking set up. I love this place. Anyway, well, I'm Stacy and I'm not an ex Mormon or anything. I guess I'm just a human.

Guest 11 [00:18:24] And I was at BYU Idaho for four years and it was very difficult. About three years in I decided I wasn't very on board with things when Prop 8 came about. That for me was a huge deal because back in Oklahoma, where I'm from, I'm at the gay bars and gay clubs every other night. If I could live in one and wake up and watch a drag show and go back to sleep, I would be perfectly fine.

Guest 11 [00:18:52] So my journey at BYU Idaho ended actually with my bishop kicking me out my last semester, one class to go. And he told me that when he looked at me that he didn't see the countenance of Christ. And I wish I would have thought of it at the time, but I was very glad to hear that because I don't want anybody seeing a bearded man named Jesus when they look at me.

Guest 11 [00:19:12] And he also told me that I single handedly was driving the spirit out of my apartment, which was very impressive. I'm a force to be reckoned with if I can single handedly push away God's spirit. But it was an interesting journey and I felt very, very alone. All of my friends are LDs and my siblings are all active LDs and I'm really grateful to be here today. This is my first experience and exposure. I'm now in Logan, going to USU and I graduate in August.

Guest 11 [00:19:41] So I'm very grateful. I'm really glad that I've met the people here that I've met and John is great, he's a great man, I love him. And Carolyn, you're just an inspiration. Your book Goodbye I Love youe was amazing and it was really eye opening to me and I appreciate that and I appreciate everybody coming here and putting forth the effort to share your stories and I love all of you. You guys are all great.

Joanna Brooks [00:20:04] So thank you.

Guest 12 [00:20:15] Ah, sorry. Mormon is such a word that I battle with and yet being here I really do realize that it's a word that's near and dear to my heart. And for me to admit that, oh, that kind of hurts.

Guest 12 [00:20:33] And it's just because there is just such a sense of betrayal in some ways from the church, between me and the church. But at the same time, I'm so grateful for the talks about. About not being able to wash it out, and I shouldn't feel the need to. You know, it's just, you know, you can't get rid of half your life. Well, 30 years of my life, you know, But I'm. When I resigned, my bishop said something that bothered me. It just ticked me off. He's like, you know, Kylie, there is a place. Place for everyone in this church.

Guest 12 [00:21:07] And I didn't. I don't believe him in the way that he said it. But when I look out at the people that are here, I can see it, and I feel that. And I'm just so grateful to John Dehlin.

Guest 12 [00:21:22] I don't comment, I don't send him letters. I don't send anybody anything. But, like, there have been so many people that have helped me in my journey. And I just want to say thank you to all of you for. For being here.

Guest 13 [00:21:33] Anyway, So much more of a commitment coming up here. But I just want to say that I've always loved the church, and I love how diverse this group of people is. I think my biggest problem with the church has always been that I'm an eternal optimist. And I've always seen areas in the church where I thought, you know what? It would be so much cooler if we could include these people. Imagine what we could do if we had these people involved.

Guest 13 [00:22:11] And that's why I'm here today, because I see the church putting us into boxes after they've taught us our whole lives that we're infinite beings and that we're going to become gods. And I think it's really hard to take a group of people who you've told their whole lives, you're infinite and you are large and contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman would say, and then try to compartmentalize those people into boxes. And so I'm so grateful because I feel like this intellectual movement of. I think when you educate young people and women, you're going to have some problems.

Guest 13 [00:22:51] And I think that they're finding that out in society and they're finding that out in our church and. Well, at least in my church. But I'm so grateful for that because I know. And, you know, I have a friend who is More of a spiritual person than she is. She wasn't raised lds, and she. She's the healer, but she said that her version of the Second Coming is that rather than Christ coming over the mountain and appearing to all of us, the Second Coming will be a change of thought and a change of mind, and it will slowly happen in a collective around the world, and that's when we will have perfection.

Guest 13 [00:23:31] And I think we're seeing that. I don't think there's any way we can avoid that any longer. And I'm so grateful, so, so grateful to be here. And I'm so full of love, and I thank everyone for having me and allowing me to be here and for being part of my life. And I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Guest 14 [00:24:06] I had to think a lot about coming up here. I go to church every Sunday. I've been a single mother since 1987, and I raised three daughters. And I was excommunicated during most of that time. But, yeah, I couldn't take my children away from the gifts that I felt I had been given and raised with. My parents were converts to the church, and they sacrificed everything to make this part of their life. I didn't have pioneer stock back to Brigham Young or any of those wonderful things that.

Guest 14 [00:25:10] It's funny, you can start to feel like an outsider because you don't have those long roots. But I did have pioneer stock because my parents sacrificed, leaving behind their traditions of their families. And I found my children were embraced and loved and nurtured and taught in a way that I was never able to do.

Guest 14 [00:25:39] If I had tried to do that on my own. And I have three beautiful, amazing, loving, kind daughters that I can't even imagine where. I just don't know how I would have gone through that process without this loving community around me.

Guest 14 [00:26:04] And it's not easy to sit in Relief Society and be quiet and know that my daughters are sitting in young women learning that their mother is next to a murderer or whatever doctrine is being taught at that time.

Guest 14 [00:26:26] But I knew I wasn't. And I knew there was a vast difference between me and someone who was willingly taking another person's life. And I knew that I could hold my head up high and that I was a good person and I had integrity. And if I sinned on the area of loving, then that's where I was.

Guest 14 [00:26:59] When I listen to the whole Prop 8, I'm Canadian, so I have to tell you, part of the whole discussion about gay marriage is a little. I mean, the church is still conservative in Canada, but I would say not to the same extent.

Guest 14 [00:27:18] And I think why are we spending all this time distracting ourselves and trying to keep people out instead of embracing people? And really to me, if you want to be a true Christian, it's about learning to love and embrace one another. And if humanity and whoever they call as their creator takes that lesson on and instead of trying to divide ourselves, learn ways to love and include, then that really, as some of you have mentioned, that is the millennium to me. That is how this planet will change and it won't change until then.

Guest 14 [00:28:04] And as another aside, I was sitting listening to Al Gore talk about An Inconvenient Truth and I remember it struck me, this is our modern day Noah. He is telling us to smarten up, pay attention and respect the planet around us.

Guest 14 [00:28:28] And how different is it than seeing, you know, that story of Noah building the ark and how many people just merrily go on the way and think that he's crazy. And I think we need to embrace things in the outside world and,

Guest 6 [00:28:47] and

Guest 14 [00:28:47] I'm really grateful to be here and listen to all of you and whatever stages we're all at. And I am way far off from being able to love unconditionally, everybody. But I want to be there. And I do want to actually tell Carolyn Pearson. I told John Dehlin this, that you single handedly changed my life when I read in my early 20s, goodbye, I love you. Because I had been very black and white about what was right and wrong. And for the first time I got inside and empathetic in a way that I don't think I was. Well, I had never been exposed to. And it opened up my eyes and my thoughts in a way that I think changed the way I parented and befriended others and included people in my life. And I'm grateful. I'm grateful that you did that and thank you.

Guest 5 [00:30:20] Hi Jeff. My husband thinks I went to the restroom. I didn't have the heart to tell him I was coming up here.

Guest 10 [00:30:26] So.

Joanna Brooks [00:30:27] Hi.

Guest 5 [00:30:31] I hope this isn't a testimony meeting where I'm supposed to express my feelings about my beliefs in the church because I apologize, I'm very emotional today. That is all in question right now.

Joanna Brooks [00:30:42] So what I want to bear my testimony about is this community.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:30:47] So sorry.

Guest 5 [00:30:53] I've been in a lot of reflection lately. I have been in Utah for 13 years. I do not come from Mormon stock. My father converted to the church before he went to Vietnam and then went inact rejoined after Vietnam converted. My mother And I was born into the covenant, so I don't have this great heritage that everyone else has. I just have what I learned from my parents. My father passed away when I was 15, 16 years old, and a year later, we moved to Utah because my mom thought that would be best for us because we were so lost with the emotion of losing my father.

Guest 5 [00:31:32] So having been in Utah this whole time, I wasn't allowed to question the church. I rebelled a little bit. Well, kind of a lot. And I tried to express different views with my mom. And not to say that I have mommy issues, but my mom would make it sound like it was disrespecting my father because my father was the one who brought us to the church.

Joanna Brooks [00:31:58] My father was the reason that I'm Mormon. And so now, 13 years later, finally feeling like I can start to question things and that there's other people out there who are feeling the same, who are going through the same, is so comforting because I have always felt so different here in Utah. I have always felt like there's nobody there out there like me, and I'm not allowed to question this. The Mormon Stories podcast has been amazing for me.

Guest 5 [00:32:32] I am relatively new. I haven't listened to very much. Carolyn, I haven't even gotten through all of yours yet. I apologize. I think I'm on the second of. I don't know how many, but it's

Joanna Brooks [00:32:46] going to be a feat.

Guest 5 [00:32:49] But the thing that I find so interesting about what this podcast has done for me and my husband, we've been married nine years, and when we met, we met on the Internet, and his status per se was lds, but not the norm. I didn't know what that meant, but I was like, okay, I'll go with.

Guest 5 [00:33:08] Took us until just recently to realize that we both have the same ideals on a lot of this. And it was because of the Mormon Stories podcast and the other things that are out there. I had no idea that my husband had these things, thoughts or that he was questioning things. But I noticed he was spending a lot of time listening to this stuff, and it started sneaking into my ipod and I started listening to it, and we finally got to the point where we could discuss it. Not that we weren't afraid to discuss it before, but I don't think he knew that I had these thoughts.

Guest 5 [00:33:36] I didn't know he had these thoughts. And we didn't want to bring it up for the controversy sake of it. And so by this podcast, it has opened up a lot that we can listen to the podcast on our own time and then come together and talk about it. And it has really strengthened our marriage. And I am so grateful for the many people who have been involved in making this community.

Guest 5 [00:33:56] My first entrance into the community was the Feminist Mormon Housewives Book Club that I went to. And I want to thank Katrina and Jared so much for opening up their home so that we can have that experience. And that was the first time that I could face to face, meet people who had questions, whether I understood what they were talking about, agreed with them or not. It was just an awesome feeling to feel like there are people out there who understand and have issues like I do and that were so open to share it. And I love that we have this conference so that we can share our thoughts and share our questions and concerns and be open to everybody's ideas.

Guest 5 [00:34:39] I feel like everybody is saying a lot about Carolyn Pearson tonight. And no offense, Carolyn, I don't have anything against you, but I want to focus on Joanna Brooks, because

Joanna Brooks [00:34:48] I saw

Guest 5 [00:34:49] her in the hallway and I told my husband, I'm like, I don't think I can look at her without crying. Like, your talk today meant so much to me.

Joanna Brooks [00:35:01] I think what I got most out

Guest 5 [00:35:03] of it was just that you struggle, too.

Joanna Brooks [00:35:07] And I am in the middle of my struggle. Not even the middle. I think the beginning. And it's giving me hope that at the end of all this, if it ever ends, that I can still be a Mormon. I don't know if that's gonna be my outcome. I really don't know. But that that opportunity is there and that you can still be happy and can still be a Mormon, and the end gives me so much hope that wasn't there before today. I honestly, just a few days ago, was telling myself, I can't be a Mormon. I can't do this. There's so much behind this, and I just can't tell myself that I can still be Mormon after this. And I just have so much renewed hope, Joanne. And I want to thank you so much and being up here saying this to you, I'm gonna bawl later saying, I can't believe I did this, because

Guest 5 [00:35:54] you're like, my spiritual celebrity right now. I'm starstruck. But again, I just want to thank everyone for this. I want to thank the Unitarian Church for being open enough to allowing us to be here today and to accept, express our opinions. And I think that says a lot about the Unitarian Church and how much love they have for people as a whole that they can allow us to meet here. In their church. And I do look forward to having more opportunities to meet more of you guys and mingle and know more of your stories so that we can kind of connect on a deeper spiritual level. Thank you.

Guest 15 [00:36:45] A couple years ago when I was really, really mad because I was really. Everything had come to a head. That whole shelf of everything I'd put away just gone, smashed to pieces. And I was so angry and still going to church and my husband's like, don't go, bear an anti testimony, don't do it.

Guest 15 [00:37:04] Because I was going to get up there and tell them all, this is so dumb. What's wrong with you? And I still went every Sunday and still try to go a lot of Sundays. And I'm grateful that I'm a Mormon.

Guest 15 [00:37:21] And I tell you, even though I go every Sunday, I quit every Sunday too, because I come home and I say that's it. I can't believe they said that. Done. But you know, to be honest, I was born and raised in the church and I'm so grateful, so grateful for it. Because when I finally did bear my testimony, which thankfully to my husband wasn't an anti testimony, I said what really made me want to get up that fast and testimony meeting, which is the only meeting I think I born my testimony in, and I didn't even know how long because I don't want to disrespect the meeting.

Guest 15 [00:37:58] But we were listening to primary songs and Jesus said, love everyone, came on and treat them kindly too. And I thought on all the things I've learned as a Mormon, it was to love everyone and treat them kindly and with respect.

Guest 15 [00:38:17] And I don't live here, I live in St. Louis and we came out here and I'm so excited to be here for this conference. But that's the thing I feel the most everywhere I go as a Mormon, I know I can love everyone regardless, regardless of any orientation.

Guest 15 [00:38:34] And I'm grateful for that. And I thank you so much for taking the time to put this together and for everything that everyone has shared. I'm grateful for the mother who shared about raising her three daughters because to be honest, today when I came, that's really what I wanted to know. How do I raise my kids here? How do I do it? Because when I have so many issues, I just don't know what to say when they have questions. And I want to make it right and I want them to be okay. I don't want them to be mad like I am or have been because sometimes I'm not.

Guest 15 [00:39:07] But I Just thank you all for doing all of this and for doing such a wonderful job. I enjoyed it all so much, and I hope you have a wonderful evening.

Guest 16 [00:39:26] I really didn't plan on standing up here. I'm just old enough that I straddle the generations. And I'm listening to these young mothers talk about feminist Mormon housewives. Oh, and how great that they can talk to each other and that they have the book club and they have all these things.

Guest 16 [00:39:47] I have to tell you a little bit about my history. I was raised in Provo. I'm just going to let that sink in for a second. My father was a convert, and the family joke was always that as he opened the door to the missionaries, my mother was in the kitchen clutching the wine bottles, saying, no, don't do it.

Guest 16 [00:40:12] He converted and decided that he wanted to be among the Saints, so he took a job at byu. My mother cried from Palo Alto all the way to Provo, and I was born a year later. My mother, I love what you said about, how do you raise your children in this? Because I can tell you how. Because my mother did it.

Guest 16 [00:40:41] She never pretended that she knew everything. She never pretended that she believed everything she used to say to us when she would get really angry. If it's true, what are they so scared of? And that was such a blessing to me to know that I could doubt, I could have questions. I didn't have to agree with everything.

Guest 16 [00:41:05] Half my family wasn't Mormon, and that made it really difficult for me being in Provo. You guys talk about all of your. Not everybody has the pioneer history. And when I'd go to young women's and everyone was coming in with their stories of Brigham Young and whoever, and, you know, you can't look at them and say, well, you know, my great grandfather's nickname was dammit.

Guest 16 [00:41:31] It's not something that goes over well. So I learned very young to. To hide what I needed to hide to be able to survive. And my mother taught me how to do that and that it was okay to protect yourself that way. And I am so grateful to her, and I am so amazed that there is a congregation here today, because my mother never had that.

Guest 16 [00:42:03] She never had that. And I know that it was so difficult for her. She is. She goes to church every Sunday and she holds a temple recommend. But she also knows that she has a mind of her own and thoughts of her own and feelings of her own that don't always coincide with what she's supposed to think and see and feel. And I'm So grateful to her. And I am so grateful to all of you for making a place for people like my mother and people like me to feel welcome and to feel safe and to feel community.

Guest 16 [00:42:43] I also told my husband that I was going to thank Joanna, first of all, for dumping Trent so that he would marry me. But secondly, she is. She is an inspiration to all of us. And the fact that she.

Guest 16 [00:43:08] I'm sorry, should I just sit down now? I have a beautiful life. And a part of that is because of who I married. And I am grateful for that. And I am grateful for the inspiration that you have given, not just to me and not just to my husband, but to so many people to know that it is okay to be who you are and that that can be accepted and valued. And I do value it. And thank you for letting me be here.

Guest 4 [00:43:58] Oh, this is crazy. And it's cool. I left the church a year ago, and I'm still glad I did it. It was the right thing for me. And I just want to say, I guess I'm sort of a humanist, I think.

Guest 4 [00:44:20] But the thing that I've found is there doesn't have to be as big a disconnect as we make, like with our neighbors are still cool, you know, And I'm sure that there are places like maybe Provo. I'm. I'm good with that. We don't live too far from. From here, and it's sort of a rainbow kind of an area.

Guest 4 [00:44:42] And so that sort of works in our favor. But I have a lot of faith in humanity. And I think what some of the panel said, that the change that needs to happen will happen. And I'm really sort of. I think it's cool to see all the young people in here.

Guest 4 [00:45:06] Part of my. I mean, in the 70s, before the blacks in the priesthood thing, before got put somewhat right. I mean, it still. It still affects everything. But I didn't live too far from here. And we had a whole lot of hippie elementary school teachers. And there was a three dog night song, black and white, and they were setting us up as fifth graders to sing this song at a school assembly. And what effectively was the church shut it down.

Guest 4 [00:45:45] I mean, and I think that was probably the beginning of my questioning. I mean, at the age of 10 is like, what's going on here? Because, you know, there's not supposed to be differences. We somehow got that message from our hippie teachers or whoever it was, and for Mormonism, honestly, from Mormonism, that there weren't supposed to be differences. I Mean, it says it in the scriptures, right?

Guest 4 [00:46:12] But there were and there still are. And that's probably, I mean, I'm the kind of person where I could probably do the, hey, history's history and whatever, and, and as long as the church is cool, I can stay here. It doesn't have to be true, I can stay here, but the inequality just is not, it doesn't work for me. But what I think is really cool, we have, okay, I have from my first marriage a gay son. And my wife from her first marriage a gay daughter. And then she also has tbm. I mean, I hate to use the label, but they're in the church, kids, and they're okay.

Guest 4 [00:46:57] And for them, at some point in time, if there's a transition that's going to be made, it will be just like, yeah, well, that was how it was supposed to be. And so that's how it is. And I think that'll happen with time. And so I'm excited for that. I mean, there's, there's some kind of momentum that's going to make that happen and I'm excited for that.

Guest 4 [00:47:17] And in some ways, I guess my only regret is, you know, I see people that can stay inside, which I don't think was right for me, but that will influence that. And I'm sure there's some of you here and that's, hey, that's great and thanks, John. And I want to say, I think the reason Carolyn Pearson, I think her protecting angel was her generation of women that would have left the church en masse if something had happened to you. I know my mom, I mean, she was the Relief Society lady, you know, but there's a lot of love out there for you and for what you taught, I mean, all of us about the divine feminine and humanity. And so thanks for that and thanks to all of you. And that's it.

Open Testimony Meeting and Community Reflections

Guest 17 [00:48:23] I'd like to bear my testimony that I don't know the church is true. And it feels liberating to say that from a pulpit. Actually, there's not a lot that I would say that I do know, but I know I love my family. Especially grateful for my wife, who has always been very, not only loving, but understanding and tolerant from the time that before we were married when I told her I didn't know the church was true and I didn't know that I would ever know.

Guest 17 [00:49:03] She's good at dealing with that kind of stuff. And like all of you here, I appreciate that, you know, people that are open minded and accepting and anxious to Focus on inclusion and compassion rather than on whatever else.

Guest 17 [00:49:23] I don't think any other values will be as important as love. And I've always known that. I'm a social person. I like to be in groups, but I never thought that I really needed to have validation and people that would understand and all the rest. But over the back when I was going to church more regularly, it started to wear on me that I felt like I always had to keep my mouth shut and that people would not be interested in me talking. And I didn't want to derail there their lesson. I didn't want to chase the spirit out of the room.

Guest 17 [00:50:04] And so I appreciate, I appreciate this group. I appreciate those that have organized it and done a lot of work being the pioneers and all that you've done for paving the way. And I'm glad to be a part of this group and to feel like, like I have a tribe. So thanks.

Guest 7 [00:50:36] I wasn't going to come up here, but Betsy's my wife and I'm an attorney and I'm not going to let what she said go unrebutted. For the record, Joanna Brooks broke up with me 20 years ago because I wasn't Mormon enough. So in a way, this is an interesting closing of that circle. Now, to be honest, we had only gone out a couple of times,

Guest 8 [00:51:13] but

Guest 7 [00:51:13] I had an opportunity to talk to Joanne a little bit yesterday. I absolutely adore my wife. She is very active in the church. I am not. We weren't married in the temple. Joanna was right. I wasn't Mormon enough.

Guest 7 [00:51:30] And I've spent 20 years trying to figure out where I belong. I have served in a bishopric in the last few years. At a time when I was called to serving that bishopric, I was very open about the fact that I was not a believing, not even a well behaved Mormon.

Guest 7 [00:51:51] But we were at a war that was very small and they needed the labor. It was a very shallow labor pool. And just a few months ago in high priest group, I said, I have tried to leave this church 20 times, but I keep being pulled back.

Guest 7 [00:52:16] Not because I believe it's true. And everyone in that high priest group, they know me enough to say, okay, that's just Trent, let him talk. But there is something about the community and the tradition. In fact, just before this testimony meeting started, I looked at Joanna and I said, I don't get this. This feels no different to me than Sunstone or other places where I've gone. But this testimony meeting has changed that for me. You know, it is nice to know, there's a community of people out there that share those feelings that I do.

Guest 7 [00:52:57] There is something about this, as people have said, that you can't wash out. And probably 10 years ago, I decided, why am I even thought, why am I even trying to wash this out? This is a beautiful thing. And so I'm hoping that we meet here every Saturday. It would make my Sunday so much nicer. But there is a spirit here,

Guest 5 [00:53:31] and

Guest 7 [00:53:31] I know that that's a cliche for a lot of us who grew up hearing about the spirit, but there is a spirit here, and it is an incredible thing. And I would also just like to thank this community and it's nice to see faces associated with names and stories and thank you.

Guest 6 [00:54:10] Hi, my name is Scott and I'm a Mormon. I'm probably going to scare my wife to death, but I couldn't. I couldn't let the day go without thanking you for the support that you've given my wife and the support, the community that I found in you for myself.

Guest 6 [00:54:28] Carolyn, really interesting thought process here, and I just want to throw this out to you. I've spent probably 30 years in the youth organization in the church and I probably served in every single calling that there is in the young men's organization.

Guest 6 [00:54:46] I just was released a few months ago as the young Men's president. Again, we need your support. We need people like you in the church talking to the youth. This is why 80% of the youth are leaving, because they don't hear your voices. Carolyn has been a really interesting example of that to you. She sits here. She said, I haven't had a recommend for 20 years, but I believe in the church and I love to be there. I'm a Mormon and I want to support my community.

Guest 6 [00:55:19] I would encourage all of you that the children of our Mormon heritage need to hear your voice. They love you. They love every hair on your head. Please do that for your children. Please be honest with them. Please, please bear testimony to them of the things that you know that are true. And thank you again for your loving, loving friendship.

Anne McMullin Peffer [00:55:55] We're going to testify till pizza.

Guest [00:55:57] Oh, so this is a pizza. Limited testimony meeting. I was. My name is Mike Nelson and I was. My wife's probably worried what I'm going to say. My wife came. For those of you who I've talked to. She doesn't like me talking about her when she's not around. So I can talk about her here just a second. Because she doesn't like being talked about. She's like heavenly mother. But I want to do something here. I want to take a picture of me with you all.

Guest 8 [00:56:34] Oh, one more try.

Guest 2 [00:56:37] Here we go.

Guest 18 [00:56:41] Come on.

Guest [00:56:48] Okay. Sorry about that. Okay. What was I going to say? I was going to say something good. Oh, I want to let you know that I'm I in the Mormon Stories Salt Lake community. I organized the monthly lunch which just essentially says, post a thing, says, hey, show up at this place and eat and come and talk. So if you haven't come to that, several of you have. Try coming to it. I also want to say, John de Lynn, thank you so much for Mormon stories. It's made a big difference for me.

Guest [00:57:26] I'm glad to meet you in person. I gotta say, I was disappointed your daughter didn't come. I wanted my oldest daughter to meet your daughter so that she could see, so at least there'd be somebody the same age there yesterday. So you can pass that on to her. I'm disappointed even though I've never met any.

Guest [00:57:42] Thanks to the panel. I appreciated your words and even Jared, how long winded you were, I appreciated that. So. But it's all good. I mean, the long wind is good. What's that? And so I hope to see all of you at other things.

Guest [00:58:10] This is really enjoyable for me. And let's see, there's something else. Oh, I want to let you know that you know how Larry Wilmore is the senior black correspondent to the Daily Show. I was thinking the Daily show needs a senior Mormon correspondent because of all the Mormons coming through. So I actually wrote the Daily show yesterday and offered my services.

Guest [00:58:35] I don't know how that's going to work out. My wife's rolling her eyes at me. My kids were all excited. They all gathered around the computer and writing this message. So if you see me on the Daily show in the future, which I really don't think think will happen, but I think it'd be a good idea. Maybe. Maybe it'd be a better choice, John.

Guest 15 [00:58:51] I don't know.

Guest [00:58:53] All right. But thanks. Good to meet you all in person.

Guest 19 [00:59:03] Okay. I could almost honestly say that my wife drugged me here today, but I didn't give up much of a fuss because I am interested in meeting a lot of you. This pulpit makes me think of John Edwards narrative, Sinners in the hands of an Angry God. I don't know if you ever read that but Hell and Damnation's speech. But anyway, I do want to thank John for his podcast. My wife kind of twisted my arm into listening to one back in November when she was first having her faith crisis. She had me listen to your podcast about how faithful members can help lovingly encourage spouses and family members through their transition and kind of help open.

Guest 19 [01:00:04] It opened my eyes to kind of see what she was going through at the time. And so I could probably say that that was one of the main factors that saved our marriage. So thank you for that. And this community has done wonders for my wife and myself. It has opened my mind to different possibilities. It's helped me break away from the literalist view and see a more symbol, symbolic and mythic view of the church and doctrines and scriptures. And it's just helped me see things in a little different light and be a lot more accepting of others views.

Guest 19 [01:00:49] Just kind of helps me realize that, hey, you know, we're all in this together as this community, as Mormons, but global picture as human beings, we're all in this together. So. So thank you.

Anne McMullin Peffer [01:01:10] I just want to reiterate what others have said, that this testimony meeting really has been an excellent experience for me. And the other thing is that I'm really enjoying applauding after people speak and after the musical numbers give credit for where credit is due. Right. I think it's bringing a spirit of love rather than pushing it away. So I just want to say that and thank you all.

Guest 20 [01:01:42] It's been a long time since I stood up in one of these. The words that keep coming to my head are, I was lost, but now I'm found. And I have felt that ever since I listened to the podcast, the James Fowler podcast, and I don't know who it was that went up and spoke to James Fowler after our conference and asked him, how do I, you know, how do I do this? How do I manage this crisis of faith? And James Fowler told him, well, you stopped praying, didn't you?

Guest 20 [01:02:14] And someone else in the podcast said, well, of course I did. That kind of stopped after I stopped believing in God. And I kind of stopped. Hit rewind. I'm like, whoa, these are my people. I finally had found someone who believed or who was expressing the feelings that I had been feeling. And he also talked about James Fowler gave him this advice. He said, if you're standing in front of the train, get off the train tracks. And I had always thought that that's what was going to happen with my crisis of faith. I was going to be crushed.

Guest 20 [01:02:47] And hearing that helped me believe and see a different path that I could take, that I could continue on my journey, but just veer off a little bit to the side. And not stand in front of those train tracks and get crushed. And that's what I'm grateful for, is now I've relearned how to pray to God. And not just to God, but to a heavenly mother too. And had it not been for this, I wouldn't have even thought of that.

Guest 20 [01:03:16] And so I'm grateful for that. I mean, besides, there's so many ways that this podcast has changed my life and helped me be able to stay kind of stay LDs, but also to be able to be my true self as well. And that's it.

Guest 21 [01:03:44] So about two years ago, I started drifting away from the church for various reasons, but mostly because I was told that my love was a sin. And so it was hard for me to understand that and take that in. But I tried different things. And I actually go to this church most Sundays now, but it's never quite fit. And so it's nice to know that like we've talked about today, that I can still be a Mormon, that I still am a Mormon, and that I'll always be a Mormon.

Guest 21 [01:04:14] And I really appreciate Mormon stories and John de Lynn for what he's done to help me. Because although I had separated from the church and was never angry, it helped soften any rough edges that had been there and also helped me prevent being too angry with my family or any people that I love and still do.

Guest 21 [01:04:36] So I'm just grateful for that and grateful for this great community that we're developing. And I hope, as I've talked to people from different parts of the country and different parts of the world, I hope this can spread because this is a beautiful thing.

Guest 18 [01:04:58] I've had a lot to say already, so I'm going to be very pragmatic. If you have felt something good here today and you would like to put your shoulder to the wheel, there are things that you can do to help the work of this community that we've experienced.

Guest 18 [01:05:15] One, I think we've all recognized that and this is, I think one of the geniuses of the core idea of Mormon stories is that we all have these stories. One of the things that's hard is when we don't get feel, we get a space to tell our stories in conventional Mormon settings. So tell your story. 1. Number two, find a local community. If a local Mormon stories community doesn't exist in the place where you live, consider being the person who starts that.

Guest 18 [01:05:40] Number three, if there is or is not a Mormon stories community in your community, consider convening a house meeting, inviting other people that you may meet online through this community to tell their stories. Because you tell your story. You tell your story, you're going to get comfortable with your story, and then you can do work in helping other people tell their stories. Right.

Guest 18 [01:05:58] Number four, consider supporting the community with a donation. I know that's not something Mormons typically do. Jewish people don't have a problem with it. So here I'm learning that from my husband's people. But I say all this in a spirit of profound gratitude for what we've experienced here today and in a desire that we can continue to be a blessing to each other.

Anne McMullin Peffer [01:06:17] Thank you.

Joanna Brooks [01:06:27] All right.

Anne McMullin Peffer [01:06:27] Thank you, everyone. I think this was exactly what we had in mind when we planned this. Is Missy here?

Guest 18 [01:06:34] Okay.

Anne McMullin Peffer [01:06:35] She is great. I just didn't see her coming. Missy's going to be our pianist for us for our closing song, and we will be singing Come Come Ye Saints. Hopefully you picked up your sheet of music when you came in. And then Jackie MacArthur is going to give us. Yes, I'll just do it. Yeah, I'm fine. Jackie MacArthur will give us our closing prayer and then we can have pizza. It may take a minute for us to, like, get drinks and stuff out since we've all been enjoying this so much.

Joanna Brooks [01:07:10] Sam. Reward.

Holly Anderson Robbins [01:08:56] All is well.

Guest 4 [01:08:59] All is well.

Guest 11 [01:10:04] Hallelujah.

Guest 15 [01:10:21] Heavenly Father, please fill our hearts with gratitude and love for all the good things in this world and all the good people. And please help us to learn more fully that each of us is the answer to the prayers of our fellow human beings. For those of us who claim to be followers of Christ, help us to be followers indeed, and not just in word. In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

John Dehlin [01:11:05] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Music today was provided by the Saber Rattlers. Check them out@sabre-rattlers.com the Mormon Stories logo was generously donated by StudioCase.com thanks for listening.

Holly Anderson Robbins [01:11:20] Come, come, ye saints no toil nor labor fear but with joy Wend your way though hard to you this journey may appear Grace shall be as your day Tis better far for us to strive Our useless cares from us to drive to the San Jo Hearts will swell oh, all is well all is well.

Stand-Up and Humor About Mormon Life and Belief

Part 5 of 5 · Ep. 263

Matt Washburn [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:00:04] Come, come, ye saints. No toil nor labor fear, but with joy wend your way.

John Dehlin [00:00:18] The 2011 Salt Lake City Mormon Stories Conference was brought to you by the Salt Lake City Mormon Stories Support Community, found on Facebook, and also by the Open Stories foundation and by the generous support of our listeners. To join or start a Mormon Story support community in your area, please go to MormonStories.org and click on the Support Communities tab to host a regional conference in your city, like this one. Please email us@mormonstoriesmail.com for more information on how to host a conference. Finally, to keep this podcast and all of these communities and projects alive, please donate today@mormonstories.org oh, and please enjoy the conference.

John Dehlin [00:01:04] If you guys want to learn more about Sunstone, they're here and please go talk to them. Also, for those of you who live anywhere, really, I wanted to make sure you understood how to join the Mormon Stories Local Support Communities. Because our goal is to take these conferences to Provo, to Atlanta, to Seattle, wherever people have a need.

John Dehlin [00:01:27] We could do it multiple times each year in Salt Lake City. So you go to the MormonStories.org website. There's a little link that says support Communities up at the top. You click on it, you find your city, click it, and it'll take you to Facebook. And then you just join the community and someone approves it, and then you're on it.

John Dehlin [00:01:45] That's how you'd find out about lunches and playgroups and book clubs and all the different things people are doing. If there isn't one in your geography, tell me. We'll create it in about three minutes and you can be the leader of it. You can be your own bishop and stake president of your local non church congregation. Is there anything I've forgotten?

John Dehlin [00:02:06] Any announcements? Okay. Bent Washburn was kind enough to come on the podcast. He's brilliant. He's funny. We told him to keep it at a PG13 level. I'm hoping that he will. I've never been in a church service where lots of swear words were done. But, Ben, we love you and we want you to do your duty. So come do it. Matt Washburn, everybody.

Matt Washburn [00:02:26] Thank you. Thanks so much. I am very glad to be here. It's like, I don't have to explain stuff. Normally I travel around the country and a lot of times I do talk about growing up Mormon and all those things, and I have to provide all this background. But here you already know that. It's kind of weird.

Matt Washburn [00:02:47] Kind of know that. So a Lot of those jokes won't work. I guess I start out, I'll just talk. When I do stand up comedy, I usually end up just talking anymore because I don't have time to really work at it and get good with the show anymore. But no, I'll try. It should work first. Write off, they said Mormon comedian. I don't know, you know, I'm one of those confused guys about that. I was very devout for the first 26 years of my life. And then after that, I, I, I don't know, I started to have doubts. I think we all do, but I really had doubts.

Matt Washburn [00:03:25] Some of the rules, I questioned some of the rules. I think the first rules we question are the, the rules we want to break. You know, like, I used to believe in abstinence, but then I met a woman who would actually have sex with me and the doubts creep in.

Matt Washburn [00:03:45] Are you guys, you're with me, you understand that? So it's been about 20 years. I'm inactive, I guess you could say. Very much so. My wife's not Mormon. She's an Irish Catholic. She's a practicing Irish Catholic. I mean, every weekend, drunk.

Matt Washburn [00:04:06] In fact, when I met her, she had a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She was breaking two Mormon rules at the same time, one with each hand. Ambidextrous sinner. And of course the Mormon in my head looked at that and thought, this is hot because it's wrong.

Matt Washburn [00:04:23] So we hit it off. So well, she quit smoking for me. Second date. I was just looking for a good reason to quit. So then we got married, which was apparently a good reason to start back up again.

Matt Washburn [00:04:37] But then she did quit again and to her credit, she has been quitting ever since. She's kind of a rebel. That's what she says. I was a rebel. We would drink all the time. Well, you're not a rebel, you're Irish Catholic. When you drink, that's not rebelling, that's conforming.

Matt Washburn [00:04:53] How can it be rebellion when everybody's doing it? She says, but we were underage then. You're an early conformist, right? My dad told us not to. He was drunk when he told you not to drink. That's Wisconsin. I don't know if you've been there, but it's bars full of drunk parents complaining about their kids drinking.

Matt Washburn [00:05:14] Come home Friday drunk again. I don't know what I'm going to do with him. I know what you're going to do with him. Drink. That's what you're going to Do. I told her, I'm the rebel. I'm the one. I'll drink coffee, I'll have coffee. And I'll never forget when my mom first found out that I was drinking coffee. She said, oh bent, when did you start using coffee?

Matt Washburn [00:05:33] She said, using, where did you score? I remember the whole conversation. Mom is not really a drug. Yes it is. You drink coffee, then you'll probably have a beer and then you'll get a cigarette. What's to stop you? It's that coffee is the Mormon gateway drug.

Matt Washburn [00:05:52] I was there about two weeks and then it hit me. You know, I was sneaking out every morning like six in the morning out to buy a cup of coffee in secret with money I had swiped off her dresser.

Matt Washburn [00:06:09] So I might have a drug problem. I don't know why I started doubting. There's things I love about my religion and I miss it. I had a much stronger faith. I miss that part. I miss knowing everything. It was awesome.

Matt Washburn [00:06:30] I knew everything. The pre existence. Think about that. That's before time. I knew that stuff. I knew about. I knew why I was here. I knew where I would go after I die. That's everything. That's everything. That's the whole kit and caboodle. I knew everything. Now I really don't know anything. I don't know the pre existence for sure. I don't know why I'm here for sure. I don't know where I'm going after I die. I don't know where I go next week for sure. Actually I don't even know how I'm going to turn this, what I'm saying into a bit.

Matt Washburn [00:07:03] I know nothing. Some of this I do love. There's many things about my religion, the pre existence. I actually kind of liked that idea. I always liked that. But I always wondered what it would be like. I mean if you're there and did we have a face in the pre existence, what did we look like and did we know we were going to look? Did I know I was going to look like? This is my question. Did we get a briefing packet with a photo?

Matt Washburn [00:07:33] We're looking through? Where are you gonna be born? What language? Your iq. Gee, that seems a little low. And then, and then the picture, the picture would be the bummer. You'd see yours, you'd see the guy next to you. You go what?

Matt Washburn [00:07:50] This is kind of bullshit. Oh, do we have any questions? All the ugly people's hands shoot up. I got a question. Why do I look like this and he looks like that? Well There must needs be opposition in all things.

Matt Washburn [00:08:14] So I'm here to make him look good. That's gonna be depressing. Well, just look at him. Holly cow, he's gonna be born like that. Born. That's not an accident. It comes out like that. That's one of the things that right away just makes it. Life's not fair and it starts to make. It gives you doubts. Just that does for me. Really, really beautiful people and really ugly people. Just maybe this is just this not right.

Matt Washburn [00:08:49] It's not fair. There's lots of good things about. There's some of the things about in the religion they shouldn't have told me. Like they shouldn't have told me that hell isn't forever. In Mormonism you don't go to hell forever. It's just you do some bad things and then they notch up a few years. You get like a sentence and that's the problem. You know, you have a beer and you think, well, I've already probably got 20 years. What's another beer?

Matt Washburn [00:09:15] Pretty soon you start running up a tab. I'm going to die. I'm going to look at the tab and go, I did all that shit. I mean, shoot, I'm gonna be here a while. I like that idea that it's not forever.

Matt Washburn [00:09:32] There's questions that you always have about faith. You work them out. And some of the things about Mormonism answer it really well. I remember, I have friends that say, well bent. I remember telling them this, you know, in Mormonism you really believe that, that after we die, all of us, all human, since we made a choice in the pre existence to follow God, we are all kind of basically pretty good. And we get rewarded for, you know, putting ourselves on the line like that. We get, we go to a better place. That's what I was always taught. Everybody goes to a place much better than Earth.

Matt Washburn [00:10:03] And I had friends tell me, well then why doesn't God just tell us that? Why doesn't just, you know, it take off some of the edge of life if you knew it's going to be better? And I said, because we would kill ourselves and we would. If you knew that in the next life it was better if suicide was the equivalent of like hitting the reset button on your Nintendo.

Matt Washburn [00:10:27] Everybody would do that, would they not? Because life's hard. Any God would be running into people early all the. Mary, what are you doing here? Well, I burned the roast. Life's hard. I can't remember what else I was going to tell you. The ideas I have sometimes I'LL have belief, I think in the Bible. It was Bible times. It had to be easier if those stories are literal in the Bible. It would be so easy to believe. Come on, that'd be easy if you. Well, I'm not sure if there's a God and someone came over and raised your uncle from the dead. You okay? That was okay.

Matt Washburn [00:11:09] So easy to believe, said Elisha. Like stuck his hand out and flames shot out of his hands and he burned a whole mountainside of people. I mean that's a really, that's amazing. That's. I would believe if a guy came through the back door in like a bathrobe and flip flops, told you to shape up. And then I would give that guy 10% of my stuff, no questions asked.

Matt Washburn [00:11:40] But here's, Sometimes it's hard to believe. I don't know, some weird things will make me question things. Like I was thinking this the other day, just intelligent design. Sometimes I'll think it makes sense and then you see things that just don't seem intelligent. Like this, this right now, what I'm doing here, this one hole, the same hole. I use the same hole to breathe, eat and talk.

Matt Washburn [00:12:04] Are you crazy? Surely there was someone up there in the room. Are you sure that's safe? And then they went ahead with the design. And you know the first time someone choked to death, that guy's like, ah, what do you know? Food in the windpipe.

Matt Washburn [00:12:25] Nobody listens to me. I still, I still love my, my, my religion, I guess I call it my religion even though I suck at it. I, I, I think one of the things that happens is I've know some people, they will stop being when they stop going to church. They go say stop going because they know something and I stopped going because I didn't know anything. That's it. Hi, how are you? You're cute.

Matt Washburn [00:13:01] I have a little tiny baby right now. I have a five month old baby which, yeah, when I tell people I have a five month old, I get that. Exactly that reaction. It was different with my first child is like congratulations. And now when I say I've got a baby, people like, oh, you're 46, aren't you?

Matt Washburn [00:13:21] What were you thinking? I was thinking this will be fun to try because I'm a guy. All right, another one. We are in Utah. All right. Know how to add. So anyway, we'll move on now to more, more stuff about growing up Mormon. I think we're about. Where are we? I better tab or I could get in trouble at the comedy club. Seven. Oh, sweet. We got 15 minutes. All right, I can go into all this stuff about the first time I left home when I grew up. Of course it was all there. I loved it all. I loved everything about it. I believed it.

Matt Washburn [00:14:02] I followed it as best I could. When I turned 19, they gave me the suit and the 10 speed bike and I went to Seattle and I knocked on strangers doors, like many of you, right. And I talked to strangers about religion on their doorstep. And that's when I learned that when you knock on a stranger's door, anything's a better icebreaker than religion.

Matt Washburn [00:14:27] And I think that's because religion brings up everything that's sex and politics all in one big everything. I remember not understanding. I think, why don't they understand that we got something awesome. I didn't understand that you're 19 saying, hey, everything you've been doing is wrong. Come with me.

Matt Washburn [00:14:46] You know, I didn't understand how difficult it was. But yeah, anything's a better icebreaker than anything. Sex or politics. Or would you look at my rash? It's a better icebreaker. Sure. Come on in. What the heck? For a second there, we thought you boys were Mormons.

Matt Washburn [00:15:08] That is when I learned that growing up Mormons kind of weird to the world. I didn't think it was weird growing up in Utah. Mapleton, Utah, we thought Catholics were weird. Isn't that. No, they're not actually. Mathematically they're quite normal.

Matt Washburn [00:15:25] But I thought that. But I found out we were the weird ones. I learned that because only weirdos would let us in. And that's a clue. When like the really weird trailer park carny workers come on in, we're weird too.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:15:40] Woo hoo.

Matt Washburn [00:15:46] So I found out we were weird. I think all religions are weird. When they get exposed to logic, they can become very weird. Any, any religion, you just don't know it because it's your religion now. I didn't know it was weird in Maple in Utah because everybody was Mormon. That's the thing. Everybody, right. Everybody thought coffee was evil. So that didn't strike me as weird as all at all. Because everybody thought, right? And when. When everybody's doing something, it's not weird, it's normal. One person doing something weird. Yeah, that. I mean, a group of people doing something weird, that's. That's normal. One person doing something weird, that's a nut.

Matt Washburn [00:16:27] A group of people doing something weird, that's a church. And I butchered that joke. But it's true. And I think that's one of the good Things about church, you get to check in with other people who believe weird things, like you. You know what I mean? So you can reaffirm your faith. That's why you need to go. Part of it, anyway. Because during the week when you tell people coffee's evil, you get a look on like, huh? And you start to question. You're only human. Right? You're only. And then after a week of that, you need to go back to a church and say, okay, so everybody, coffee's evil.

Matt Washburn [00:17:02] Right? Okay. No, I'm on the same page with you. It's just during the week, that seemed pretty crazy, but all right, I'm back. We're together. The word of wisdom, which has some good things in it. People get carried away with it, though. Like, I had someone. I had this little thing about coffee, and I got some angry people, got an angry woman, well, this is coffee. She posts all this scientific how bad coffee is for you and how this revelation had saved the saints. And I said, well, if. If the. The coffee evil information was about health, why didn't God just tell the saints about germ theory?

Matt Washburn [00:17:45] Because that would have saved a lot more people back in the 1800s, you know, wouldn't that be better advice for your health? You know what? Just wash your hands, you idiots. I don't understand. He's sick. We lost the baby. We didn't have any coffee in the delivery room.

Matt Washburn [00:18:05] Nobody was drunk. There's no germ theory in the word of wisdom. The word of wisdom makes a lot of sense, though, when you couple that with polygamy. Yeah. If you're gonna have multiple wives, you shouldn't have alcohol anywhere.

Matt Washburn [00:18:29] Polygamy is one of the embarrassing things. Of course, as a missionary that you weren't supposed to talk about, just. That's the one we just don't talk about. But I remember being young, thinking, oh, I'll explain it to him.

Matt Washburn [00:18:41] I got the answer. Polygamy is how we survived. I remember telling people. That's how we survived. In the beginning, we were very small. It was tough. That's how we managed to spread and grow and survive so that now we can spread the truth to the four corners of the earth. And I remember my companion, hey, that's creepy. That's creepy. And it is. It makes it sound like polygamy is part of our two prong attack on the earth.

John Dehlin [00:19:09] Right.

Matt Washburn [00:19:10] First we try to tell you the truth. That doesn't work. Well, we'll just screw our way to the top. Is that too much? Why not? The Catholics did. Was Very effective. That's when I was found. I was weird.

Matt Washburn [00:19:35] Seattle, Washington was 19 years old. Of course I was also not just weird as a Mormon, I was weird in Mormonism. I was like double weird. You're in trouble when your name is weird in Utah. That's weird. Yeah, the normal people wouldn't let us in ever. Anybody have that? The normal in Seattle? The nice normal houses, like the lawns all manicured. If they had a lawn, you weren't getting in.

Matt Washburn [00:20:07] They have like a walkway up there is always these winding walkways with little flowers winding all the way up to the door. Cuz it's not about getting to the door, it's about the journey. You finally get up to the door, there's a welcome mat. Yeah, bull crap.

Matt Washburn [00:20:25] Welcome, right? Yeah, we're not welcome. It's a lie. You went to Walmart and you bought a lie. We're not getting in. Not letting us in. You're not even coming to the door. They would not even come. We knew they were in there. We know you're in there.

Matt Washburn [00:20:44] You know, we're not, we're not, we're not blind. We can see you. That your window is transparent. Do you ever have that? You see like the guy we see. I remember seeing this. The back of a bald head and a recliner.

Matt Washburn [00:20:55] We could hear them too. They don't know you can hear them. Are they gone yet? Are they still out? Can you see them? I can't see them without giving up my position. Call the neighbors, see if they can see them.

Matt Washburn [00:21:12] They're not answering. Well, they're still hiding too. That's what's happening. Stickheads have the whole neighborhood in lockdown. Sure hope the pizza doesn't come while they're out there. Should we knock? As any of you? They don't knock doors so much anymore. All my family, very devout, all their kids are going on missions. They don't do that so much. But we always knock doors. Hours every day knocking doors. And then one day it happens right after months you get the knock and there's a hi, we're representatives of Church Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints.

Matt Washburn [00:21:54] This is my companion, Elder Reese, and we're here with the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day or we're the Mormons and we're just wondering when you're going to slam the door in our face. Sorry, this is kind of awkward. We've never gotten this far before, but.

Matt Washburn [00:22:16] We didn't even bring the flip charts. Like heavy. They're heavy. And the guy let you in. You remember the first time you get in. And at first it's like, yes, I'm in, I'm in. And then it kind of hit you. Like, wait a second, what kind of a freak are you?

Matt Washburn [00:22:31] I'm a sick. We're not. Nobody lets us in. Like, scanning the living room for a pile of, like, polyester sewer suits or if I see bicycle parts, I am going to evacuate my colon. All right, so. So the question, though.

Matt Washburn [00:22:57] Are you a Mormon? It's a baffling question. I don't know. I'm not very good, I guess. I don't know. I've had some friends in other religions say, he should switch. Man, you should just do this. We're that you can do anything in our church. Anything you'll be. But I. I can't do that because I still have that faith there, you know? I'd rather believe that I'm going to hell than not believe anything.

Matt Washburn [00:23:18] You know what I mean? I prefer that because I need my faith. Especially when I go to hell. I'm really gonna need my faith down there. I'm gonna need to believe that it's not gonna be. Plus, there's a lot of great things in Mormonism to believe. There's one I love. We're like one of the few where you actually get to keep the fun things in the next place. Nobody else, everybody else. You check it at the door? Nope. Give me that. You're not going to be using that.

Matt Washburn [00:23:50] You know what I mean? But in ours, it's like, no. If you're good, you get to keep that. If you're not, you don't. Which makes our judgment better. Very pressure, a lot of pressure at our judgment. You are sweating, like, please.

Matt Washburn [00:24:04] But you get to, you know, to. To be able to have sex. Well, with your spouse, but still awesome. So I guess I still. I'm Mormon, I guess pretty much. I learned. I guess it's always in there. I don't know. I learned this when I had a near death experience. It almost killed me.

Matt Washburn [00:24:25] It was an earthquake. Now, I've survived many earthquakes in my world travels. A big one in India. 20,000 people died. I survived because I was standing in a doorway in Seattle. And that's the key to survival. Distance from the epicenter. But this earthquake, I was at the epicenter. Olympia, Washington. I was in a coffee shop. All of a sudden, everything was shaking. Things flying all over the place. And I'm like, wow, this coffee works.

Matt Washburn [00:24:54] Now, the rule of the earthquake is standing the door. Do I do that? No, I run through the door out into the street so I can take a brick in the head. Why? Because I grew up Mormon. I cannot die in a coffee shop.

Matt Washburn [00:25:10] You guys have been great. Thanks so much for having me here. I better get off the wise guys and we'll start astute our Mormon Stories group. Thank you, doctor.

John Dehlin [00:25:27] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Music today was provided by the Saber Rattlers. Check them out@sabre-rattlers.com the Mormon Stories logo was generously donated by StudioCase.com thanks for listening.

Holly Anderson Robbins [00:25:42] Come, come, ye saints. No toil nor labor fear, but with joy wend your way though hard to you this journey may appear. Grace shall be as your day. Tis better far for us to see. Stride our useless cares from us to drive. Do the San Jo, your hearts will swell. Oh, all is well, all is well.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.