Introducing Adam Miller and the Book

Part 1 of 2 · Ep. 470

Adam Miller [00:00:00] One. Come, come ye saints. No toil nor labor fear.

John Dehlin [00:00:28] Hello and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. And today, May 9, 2014, I am super excited to have with us a man that some of you may be familiar with, but I'm guessing a lot of you won't be familiar with. His name is Adam Miller. Adam is a professor of philosophy at Collin College in McKinney, Texas. He was born and raised in the church in a small branch in Pennsylvania, served as mission in Albuquerque. He's been married to Gwen Miller for the past 15 years with three children. He's active in his ward, he's a teachers quorum advisor, and he's heavy into, I just say, Mormon philosophy and theology. He's written several books, one of which we're going to be talking about today. And he's the director of the Mormon Theology Seminar. What's that, Adam?

Adam Miller [00:01:39] The Mormon Theology Seminar is a little independent project that organizes short term seminars that collaboratively read specific chapters of scripture together and then produce papers and conference and books eventually on the topics that were covered in those chapters of scripture.

John Dehlin [00:02:02] Excellent, excellent. Okay. And I'll just tell my listeners up front kind of why I was interested in interviewing Adam. You know, I've talked to some, several people about what's going on in Mormonism. I'm kind of always keeping my ear to the ground. And if you talk to people like Brad Kramer or Dan Witherspoon or Lloyd Erickson and probably many other people, they'll tell you that Adam Miller is doing some of the most interesting and inspiring writing in Mormonism. Currently, Adam has several books, the letter that we're going to be talking about today, the book that we're going to be talking about today is a book called Letters to a Young Mormon. Interestingly, it was published by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute, an organization of course, near and dear to my heart. And I actually am not being facetious. I've got friends there. And right now I really like what the Maxwell Institute's doing. But Adam is a really, he's an excellent writer, a really interesting writer and I think a really deep thinker. And one of the problems I had before I interviewed before today was trying to figure out how to make this interview relevant to all my audience. You know, because Adam is active and considers himself believing, you know, there's a degree to which that could turn off maybe half my audience because, you know, there's a lot in my audience who are either struggling with belief or have left the church But I think this is still an interview that will be valuable to believers and non believers, to people in and out of the church. And I talked with Adam quite a bit about how we might structure it, and I guess that's going to be my goal for today. So we have this book called Letters to a Young Mormon. Adam, tell us a bit about what you were hoping to do when you wrote this book.

Adam Miller [00:04:26] Well, let me say I'm entirely on board with the project for today, as you described. Seems to me that all of the fundamental religious problems are problems and concerns that cut across the divide between believer and non believer. And if they can't speak to both sides of that aisle, then I think we're missing something. The book we're going to talk about today, Letters to a Young Mormon, is a little, teeny book, only about 80 pages, that I started composing a year or two ago as my oldest. My oldest daughter was just turning a teenager, and I started to think pretty hard about what kinds of things I would want to say to her about what it means to be a Mormon and why Mormonism matters to me. And I just started jotting down ideas, and they eventually turned into little letters that I was writing for her, and that eventually turned into a book.

John Dehlin [00:05:31] Excellent. Now, I've read through the book, and actually my daughter, Anna. Audrey. Anna read through the book the day it arrived. She marked it all up and wrote a bunch of notes. Would you say it's only for youth? That's not the sense I got.

Adam Miller [00:05:49] Yeah. I would say I wrote it with my own children in mind, but I wrote it with. I wrote it with them in mind, not just at the age of 12 or 18, but also with them in mind at the age of 25 and 35 and on up.

John Dehlin [00:06:08] Got it.

Adam Miller [00:06:09] So in a sense, I kind of wanted to lay out for them the things that they might need to know as a teenager and kind of preemptively lay out some of the things that they might not need to know until later.

John Dehlin [00:06:24] Got it. Okay. And, yeah, my daughter certainly enjoyed it, and so it's accessible, certainly to youth. But Adam, like I said before, is kind of a deep thinker and a deep writer. So I think this is certainly a book that is at an adult level. And so I think people shouldn't. Adults shouldn't be dissuaded by the title, I guess.

Adam Miller [00:06:54] Yeah. And it was important to me, too, rhetorically writing the letters, that even though I had my children in mind, that I wanted to speak to them as adults, as people who could stand on their own two feet with lives and minds and concerns of their own. And I wanted to treat them like adults and write to them like adults.

John Dehlin [00:07:17] Right. So this book is topical. It has, I don't know, 13, 14 little chapters. Is that right?

Adam Miller [00:07:31] Yeah, something like that.

John Dehlin [00:07:32] Eight, nine, 12 chapters, each one on a various topic. And because I'm so certain that this interview will be useful to people regardless of their belief on the spectrum. Adam and I talked before about. About starting with his chapter on faith and God. And I kind of want to define the terms because, you know, we may be talking in religious terms, talk about God, talk about belief, but I don't think a literal belief in God or even in Jesus or the Atonement is necessary for us to derive value from what Adam writes about. So, Adam, let's start on page 26. And it may be a little bit of a weird place to start, but let's start where it says, on the other hand, about two thirds of the way down the page. If you'll just read that paragraph.

Grace as the Central Pivot of the Book

Adam Miller [00:08:33] Yeah. Let me say, you know, the book does often use frame things in terms of God, which is kind of standard way of talking, of course. But the term that's pivotal for me throughout is grace, God's grace. And I think it's entirely possible for grace to show up in people's lives, even. Maybe especially in God's absence. So I think every time I use the word God, we could substitute the word grace, and that would be fine.

John Dehlin [00:09:05] And I don't want to. What do you mean by grace? What can we understand about that word from you?

Adam Miller [00:09:12] Well, I mean the word in a pretty broad and general sense. I don't mean grace in a very specialized sense to mean like the kind of supernatural supplement that comes at the end of your life that would boost you into the celestial kingdom. I don't mean that kind of thing. I mean instead by grace, I mean it as a kind of general term to describe what it is that we've been given here and now in this world, whether we deserved it or wanted it or earned it or not, but just what's straightforwardly given to us as a gift, the world itself as it presses on us. Something like that.

John Dehlin [00:09:56] And why should. This may seem obvious, but why should somebody feel the need or the desire to be inherently grateful for what life is offering, especially if life's super hard for some people?

Adam Miller [00:10:17] Yeah, Gratitude, I think, is an important part of responding to grace and to what's given to us. But I don't think it applies in every case

John Dehlin [00:10:29] Certainly. So there's going to be people that aren't feeling super grateful, depending on what's dished out. But why is it that you feel like grace is important in your life? Is it just it's so obvious that everything is so wonderful to you that then grace becomes important?

Adam Miller [00:10:51] Well, I think it's the case, as you hinted at a moment ago, that there are lots of things that are given in our lives that aren't in any simple way wonderful. There are lots of things that are given that are difficult and painful. And the thing is not to have a kind of Pollyanna ish gratitude for everything good or bad, but to respond to everything good or bad with care and charity, regardless of whether it was good or bad. The same kind of care and charity on our part is called forth in response. And that can involve maybe gratitude on some occasions, but maybe some occasions, gratitude would not be an appropriate way of caring for, you know, what. What's shown up in your life.

John Dehlin [00:11:39] So that. That it's a. It's a pot. It sounds like it's kind of a posture.

Adam Miller [00:11:44] Yeah, that's right.

John Dehlin [00:11:47] And is that at the core of what religion's about to you is just saying that life affords us this grace and we can approach life with this faith or this hope or this sense of gentleness to just say, I'm going to do my best here and I'm going to try and be as loving and as kind and as strong and as courageous as I can to face what life gives me. Is that what's core to being religious for you?

Adam Miller [00:12:27] Yeah, I think that posture of care is the core of what it means to practice religion. And that care, sometimes responding with care to what's going on, that may solicit a kind of gentleness from you. Sometimes responding with care to what's going on may require you to take strong and decisive and uncomfortable action for yourself and for other people. You know, what care looks like will depend on the situation. But care is a kind of general posture, I think is. Is the beating heart of religion. You know, there may be supernatural things, may be real, but I don't think supernatural things are what religion is about.

John Dehlin [00:13:12] Religion's not about supernatural things.

Adam Miller [00:13:15] I think that's pretty obvious.

John Dehlin [00:13:18] Okay, so forgive me. So, you know, you go to church. I went to seminary. It's all about the miracles. It's all about the healings. Christ healed the blind. He healed the lame. My seminary teacher saw angels when he was being baptized for the dead. Jesus was resurrected. Priesthood's all about healing and special powers and prayers are all about getting things that you want that you wouldn't otherwise get by definition. Now, of course, I'm simplifying things, but let's just say that that's. That's a common way to perceive what religion's about. It's basically filling in kind of the God of the gap, so to speak. But you're saying that's not what it's about for you, and you're saying it's obvious, so talk about both. Because it's one thing to say that's not what it's about, but it's another thing to say it's obvious. It's not obvious to a lot of people I know. So tell us what it is to you.

Adam Miller [00:14:22] I think we do often talk about it as if religion were about supernatural stuff. But if religion were about supernatural stuff, I think we're in big trouble. Because I've been going to church for almost 40 years now, three hours at least, every Sunday, and I've never seen or heard or felt anything that I would classify as supernatural. But nonetheless, my religious experience has gripped me and transformed me and put me in palpable connection with what I would call spirit or grace. These things are at work in our lives. They're at work in our congregations on a weekly basis, and it's right in front of us here and now. And supernatural stuff may. May show up on the periphery,

John Dehlin [00:15:17] you

Adam Miller [00:15:18] know, sometimes, sometimes reflecting back to us in a kind of heightened aversion or normal religious experience. But I don't think. I don't think our normal religious experience is a failure. And I think our normal religious experience on a typical Sunday has nothing to do with supernatural stuff.

John Dehlin [00:15:40] And so what's the difference between, for you, what's the difference between going to LDS church and sitting through the three hours and getting whatever you can out of it versus what you might experience walking through nature, for example, in the sense that a walk might be enlightening or edifying. Is that religion too, for you?

Adam Miller [00:16:12] Well, I certainly think that spirit and grace can show themselves to you going for a walk in the woods. But I think that there's a different kind of urgency to the experience that you have in church on Sunday when you show up and you sit for three hours with a group of people who. Who, like you, are sinners, who, like you, are struggling with things in their lives and who will make demands on you for your time, for your care, for your attention. That's not the kind of thing I think that you're likely to Find walking by yourself in the woods, though. I don't want to downplay the importance of that kind of silence and solitude either.

John Dehlin [00:17:00] Right. And those social aspects become so key. But that's kind of the Eugene England why the church is as true as the Gospel argument. Is that an unfair way to simplify kind of that approach or is that pretty fair?

Adam Miller [00:17:17] I think there are strong parallels, yeah.

Beliefs About God and Anthropomorphism

John Dehlin [00:17:20] Okay, so for you, you know, a lot of people want to say that God is male, that God is a resurrected human, that God is anthropomorphic, that God's, you know, directly involved in our affairs. Do you have beliefs or convictions around any of those types of things?

Adam Miller [00:17:50] I'm, I'm happy, I think, to repeat the party line on that kind of thing. I don't have any. It's not as if I have any kind of first person experience with God as a person. Other people have, you know, other people have reported back that he is a person, he has a body, he's, he's a man in form. That's not, that hasn't been part of my personal religious experience. You're looking at firsthand, daily palpable interaction with spirit and grace. I can talk about that. But you know, God as a person. We have never met, but I'd be happy to meet him.

John Dehlin [00:18:34] And so, so many people, when they describe their convictions, you know, not only are they relying on the accounts of what other people offer. You know, Joseph Smith claims that he saw God in Jesus. Not only are they relying on secondhand evidence, but they're also describing their convictions in terms of knowledge. Right. I know that God lives. I know that God, you know, that Jesus resurrected. And these are all things that people, you know, some would say they can't know these things. Certainly they can't know it. And, and to be able to describe things with such specificity and form just is extending beyond what you're comfortably able to assert with any credibility. Do you understand the concern that some may have and how do you approach that? If your award is anything like mine, where that's the average testimony, you know, a five year old knows, you know, the unknowable. How do you, how do you look on that? Do you look on that as just immature or as, or as deep or just. Do you say that's not my experience and kind of stop there? Or do you think we err when we, when we speak with such certainty about matters of faith?

Adam Miller [00:20:13] Well, I don't think, I mean, I can understand the kind of concerns people might have about others making those kinds of claims. I certainly don't want to rule out the possibility that other people have had very different kinds of religious experiences than I have had, that other people may in fact know all kinds of things about God and worlds other than these, and things that are supernatural that haven't intervened to this point in my religious experience. But even if it seems to me that even if other people have had those kinds of transcendent supernatural religious experiences, they have a kind of. They have a kind of knowledge that goes beyond what shows up in a typical sacrament meeting, I think that it doesn't excuse them from still coming back to church and doing the same ordinary, everyday church work that all the rest of us do. Whether you do or don't have some kind of supernatural knowledge, the question always boils down to the issue always boils down to whether or not you're going to show up in the pew and go home teaching and bake someone a casserole and go camping with the teacher's quorum. It always boils down to that. Again, because that's what religion is about, I think, in the end, not the supernatural stuff. But I don't want to rule out the possibility that some people do know about those things.

John Dehlin [00:21:51] Got it. Okay. Okay, so we'll come back. But if you're comfortable, go ahead and read starting from on the other hand, on page 26. You haven't read that, right?

Adam Miller [00:22:06] Nope. I effectively sidetracked us before we managed to do that.

John Dehlin [00:22:10] All right, go ahead.

Adam Miller [00:22:14] Let me start just a little bit before where you.

John Dehlin [00:22:16] Okay, yeah, sure.

Adam Miller [00:22:18] Before where you pointed out, I say faith is not the same thing as common sense. It may be that for you, God's reality is so natural and so consonant with common sense that you've never doubted it and don't have to work at believing in it. God's just given as part of how things are. This is true for many people. Believing in God isn't something they chose any more than they chose to believe that the sky is blue. They couldn't unchoose it if they tried. But this isn't enough, though, this common sense. Acceptance of God's reality can be a blessing. It can also get in the way of practicing faith. It can lull you into thinking that the hard work of being faithful is done when in fact you haven't even started. Or on the other hand, it may be true that for you, the existence of God is so unlikely and runs so counter to common sense that even an earnest kind of wishful thinking is more than you can credibly muster. God is just not given to you as part of how things are. This is also true for many people. Not believing just is. And it's not something they chose or could magically unchoose. Though this common sense godlessness can make things harder, I think it too can open a path to practicing faith because it may free you from common sense idolatries. Neither kind of common sense is faith. Moreover, what seems like common sense, what seems so sensible because it's so conveniently complicit with your stories, should itself regularly come in for a healthy dose of skepticism. Either way, whether God is or isn't obvious to you, the work is the same practice, faithfully attending to the difficult, disturbing, and resistant truths God sets knocking at your door. Faith is a willingness, story or no, to care for what's right in front of you. Faith doesn't wish these difficult things away. It invites them in, breaks bread with them, and washes their feet. Faith is what you need to persist in truth as your sweet story, regardless of its content, gets overwritten by the real.

John Dehlin [00:24:20] That's really. That's really good stuff. And so what I'm hearing you kind of say, and correct me if I'm wrong, faith for you isn't sort of like there's this being supernatural being out there that it's really important that I believe exists. It sounds like what you're saying is for you, what's central to religiosity is faith is doing not necessarily knowing about the unknowable. Is that at all fair? You're kind of saying faith is jumping in and getting your hands dirty.

Adam Miller [00:25:01] I'm saying the question of having or not having faith is. That's an issue that runs in some ways diagonal to the issue of believing or not believing in certain kinds of doctrines. There's a famous passage in the New Testament that says something to the effect that even the devils believe and tremble. The devils believe that God exists. That's not the decisive thing. The decisive thing is what you and I described a little bit earlier as our posture in relationship to the world as it gives itself to us. Whether that posture involves, on our part, care and responsibility and consecration, or whether it doesn't, that's what decides whether or not we are or aren't faithful to what God's trying to give us.

John Dehlin [00:25:59] So I like that. And I think when religion is being engaged in. I'll just say it correctly, forgive me, I think it can bring out that that type of posture of care and of hope and of engagement with what's right in front of us. You know, that that does seem to me like religion gone. Right. I can also envision plenty of people, plenty of listeners that are, that are plenty caring, plenty engaging with what's all around them without any belief. But they wouldn't describe that as being in any way related to religion or God. It's just I'm a secular humanist, but I care about people and I care about our environment and that's important to me. But I reject that. I have to kind of lend my beliefs towards, towards anything supernatural. And since you've already said at the beginning that it's not about supernatural, I'm guessing it's kind of the same. And yet there's going to be people who, because you're coming from a religious frame, are going to not want to listen even though you're simultaneously saying that it has nothing to do with the supernatural. Is there any way to bridge that, that you can think of? Do you know what I'm asking?

Adam Miller [00:27:31] Well, I don't quite want to say it has nothing to do with the supernatural, but it's not about the supernatural at any rate.

John Dehlin [00:27:37] Meaning what, what does that mean? What's the difference between those two?

Adam Miller [00:27:43] Well, I mean, I'm open to the possibility that there are supernatural things, but I don't have any first person experience of them. But that's not the, that's not the stuff my religious experience has been made of.

John Dehlin [00:27:59] Then why have religion? Why not just say be a good person and live your life caring about what's in front of you and just skip the God part?

Adam Miller [00:28:11] Well, I think it's possible on the one hand to be, certainly possible to be a secular humanist, an atheist and comport yourself with care and responsibility and consecration to the world as it gives itself to.

John Dehlin [00:28:31] You certainly know people, you know, people like that.

Adam Miller [00:28:34] Yeah, sure, okay. But I think, I think part of the problem with that is that outside of a religious context we tend to, number one, really underestimate how deep the problem of sin goes. And we tend to really underestimate how hard it is to maintain that kind of posture without a community of people who are explicitly dedicated to helping each other maintain that kind of posture. I think we really underestimate how hard it would be to do it on your own if you're not getting together with a group of like minded people for at least three hours every Sunday to encourage each other to, to do it and to help and to put each other in a position to reach out to other people to do it.

John Dehlin [00:29:26] Right, so you're saying it's much easier to do it when you're surrounding yourself with people who are also trying on a weekly basis in a religious setting.

Adam Miller [00:29:39] Yeah. Because part of what it means to have that posture of care and consecration is to be a committed part of a community that is visible. As such, if we end up just walking in the woods by ourselves, if we end up just reading alone in our living rooms, if we end up just waving occasionally in a friendly way to our neighbors in the suburbs, that I don't think that doesn't have the power to address in a fundamental way the problems that go along with being a human being.

Faith, Common Sense, and Religion 2.0

John Dehlin [00:30:16] Okay. And I actually tend to agree with you. And so please forgive me, but I'm going to just push this question a little bit further.

Adam Miller [00:30:27] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:30:28] Are you familiar with Alain Debutant at all?

Adam Miller [00:30:31] The name is familiar.

John Dehlin [00:30:32] Okay. So he wrote a book, I think, called Religion for Atheists.

Adam Miller [00:30:37] Right, right.

John Dehlin [00:30:37] And he gave, he gave a TED talk called Atheism 2.0. And his basic premise is, you know, Dawkins and Hitchens slamming on religion. They've got it wrong. Religion actually has done so much good and has, does so many things. Right. What we as atheists need to do is form secular communities that mirror religious communities. And he's doing this in London. If, if you've heard anything about this, they meet weekly. There are sermons, there are hymns, there's music, and there's just no godspeak. What are your thoughts on that? Is there something about the God part of the formula that you see as an essential secret sauce ingredient? Or is it just meet weekly in a community with others who are dedicated to care and concern about what's in front of them, with or without, kind of, let's say, a supernatural narrative that precedes. Does that make sense?

Adam Miller [00:31:50] Yeah. Yeah. I think on the one hand, part of what's crucial for the religious experience is the bare fact of getting together. But on the one hand, that's, that's absolutely essential. And that goes, it goes a long, long way toward addressing the kinds of basic human problems that religion is meant to address. But I think too, beyond the bare fact of getting together, it does matter what you do and what you say when you do get together. And I think more than anything else, the one thing that I think a community would have to do in order to make progress in really helping people shift their relationship to their desires and fantasies and be able to step out of the kind of repetitive and soul crushing constraints of our experience of sin is that the community would have to take Very seriously how deep the problem of sin goes. And I think that's the kind of thing that a secular humanist approach that especially worries me on that front, that a secular humanist approach tends to be, I think, overly optimistic about human beings and maybe doesn't take the problem of sin seriously enough. It's not enough for us to be healthy people. It's not enough for us to have decent jobs and to be kind to one another. There are more basic problems that have to be addressed at the level of the way we relate to ourselves that I think religion is after that can easily get lost in the shuffle.

John Dehlin [00:33:46] Okay, so that's a beautiful segue to the chapter on sin, but I'm going to show a little bit of restraint because there are a couple things I want to touch on that's still in the faith chapter before we go to sin. Is that okay? Sure. Okay. So, Brad Kramer. Did you get to listen to Brad Kramer's podcast interview by chance?

Adam Miller [00:34:07] I did hear that.

John Dehlin [00:34:08] Okay, so he quoted you because you're so awesome.

Adam Miller [00:34:11] I did like that.

John Dehlin [00:34:16] So on page 28, read that first paragraph and we're going to talk about that.

Adam Miller [00:34:20] Yeah. Faith is more like being faithful to your husband or wife than it is like believing in magic. Fidelity is the key. You may fall in love with someone because of how well they complement your story, but you'll prove yourself faithful to them only when you care more for the flawed, difficult, and unplotted life you end up sharing with them. Faith isn't the opposite of knowledge. Rather, like love, faith perfects knowledge by practicing fidelity to it.

John Dehlin [00:34:49] Okay, and I love the metaphor. I've been married 20 years, and there was a time where I could probably say my wife and I, neither of us necessarily felt like we fully understood what we had gotten ourselves into when we got married. And. And what I can say is there were parts of. There's been parts of my marriage where I kind of said, well, I guess this is the best it gets. And I'm really disappointed, but I'm going to stick it out because I made that commitment. So what I can tell you is 18, 19 years later, I. I became so grateful that I stuck it out after years of not being happy. And I'm not dissing on my wife here. We've talked about this very openly together, and she would probably describe her experience very similar to mine. Especially when with kids, rearing and difficulties of complexities of busy lives, there are times of some deep unhappiness, or at least some chronic unhappiness. But sticking around for us paid huge dividends at some point, huge dividends. Like I now look at Margi as my soulmate and I'm so glad I stuck with it, right? And if I had just been a little bit more casual, a little bit more about me, my immediate wants and needs versus just say, reaping the harvest of an 18 to 20 year commitment, that takes patience, I would not be reaping the beauty and the benefits of my marriage today. So I like that. Okay, I like that concept. Is there anything you want to add to that before I then ask you kind of a follow up question or do you think so far we're kind of striking at what you're trying to say?

Love, Marriage, and Religious Commitment

Adam Miller [00:37:01] I think you put it nicely, right. When you first, especially when you first fall in love and the birds are singing and the bees are humming, you have a certain kind of expectation about what things are going to be like and how they're going to turn out. You have a kind of story that you're trying to tell yourself about where your life is going to be and how the other person is going to make you happy or not and what that'll mean to you. And the thing that I think strikes people right smack in the forehead almost right away upon, upon getting married is the way that the marriage is going to deviate sharply from the story that you're trying to tell yourself about what the marriage was supposed to be like. And it's at that point, right, when life deviates from your story about it, it's at that point you, you're going to have to choose sides and you're going to have to decide what you're going to be faithful to. Are you going to be faithful to the story that you were trying to tell about your life or are you going to be faithful to the life that's unfolding regardless of your story? And I don't think it's the case that religion is about being faithful to our stories even when those stories part from life. I think religion is about siding always with life against our flawed and failed and small versions of the stories we were trying to tell about it.

John Dehlin [00:38:25] Right. And the benefits of sticking with it are what?

Adam Miller [00:38:31] Well, the benefits of sticking with life are that you get to be alive.

John Dehlin [00:38:34] No, with life. But I think you're saying a faithful life, a life of faith, and I'll even say religious faith because I think that's what you mean.

Adam Miller [00:38:43] Yeah, I think a faithful life is being faithful to life as it's unfolding right here and now. You can't Cheat. If you choose your stories over life, then you just reap what you sowed. You chose something other than life. And you will be, as St. Paul puts it, you will experience a kind of spiritual death. Your life will go on without you, and you'll just continue to live more and more in your own head, in your own fantasies, in your own story version of the world.

John Dehlin [00:39:13] Okay, I'm clearly slow because I keep thinking when you say faith, you mean faith in some divine or supernatural. But you keep coming back to really grounding your discussion of faith in the life that's right in front of you, not in supernatural tenets. And I just keep tripping on that. But you're saying, go ahead.

Adam Miller [00:39:41] I think that's what God himself insists on. Right, God. According to our. According to our religious version of the story, God has absented. He's absented himself purposefully from our experience of the world so as not to get in the way of our straightforwardly caring for the life and the world as it. As it shows up right here in the present tense. Right. If you tried to connect directly first person with God, God's strategy is to always detour you and redirect you to the person that's standing right beside you. If you want to know Jesus, Jesus says you need to care for the person who's right next to you, care for your neighbor, care for the person who doesn't have enough to eat, the person who's in prison, the person who doesn't have clothes. If you want to know me, you'll see me only in them. You can't cheat and kind of escape this world. Some kind of, you know, some kind of escape velocity to head for outer space. God's going to turn you back around and send you back to Earth over and over again. That's God's own strategy, as far as I can tell.

John Dehlin [00:40:51] Yeah. And you could argue that that's explicit and yet.

Adam Miller [00:40:54] Yeah, I think it's explicit.

John Dehlin [00:40:55] And yet again, in the LDS Church context, when people talk about their testimony, it's not. I know that God is. You never hear somebody say in their testimony, I know that God is around us every day. And the people that I have an opportunity to serve and who serve me, they always want.

Adam Miller [00:41:14] I think you do hear that plenty of times, though not exclusively.

John Dehlin [00:41:18] Well, okay, you're right. I don't mean to be unfair there, but I think the common narrative is I know God lives, which is an emphasis on his resurrected or anthropomorphic status as a being. Do you see how, I guess I've been conditioned to keep thinking in a direction. You're not kind of nudging me? I mean, I want to feel like I come by this honestly. Are you saying I've just been misunderstanding what people have been saying?

Adam Miller [00:41:52] I think that. That most of the way we talk about these things, we borrow from other people and other times and other places. And that's good in the main because it connects us to them. Right. It makes us part of a bigger, deeper, larger tradition. Even though in some ways our ways of talking about things, though they may connect us to the tradition and help us comport ourselves in a way that's caring and consecrated. They can also, you know, they're not always. They don't always end up being the most straightforward way of talking about what it is that matters most to us.

John Dehlin [00:42:42] Right. Well, can you even. Are you willing to say that maybe we're missing the boat by trying to emphasize the literality of the supernatural? I mean, I know that you're conceited that it's possible that there's supernatural stuff, but in emphasizing the here and the now, you're kind of privileging that. And so it does follow for me that you're saying we're kind of missing the boat when we emphasize the literality. I know you don't like to. It seems like you don't like to ever say a disparaging thing about someone's perspective, but I do think people get tripped up there. And do you agree?

Adam Miller [00:43:29] I think what happens when we emphasize the literality is that mostly what we're after there is. We're trying to just stake a really strong claim that the things that we're talking about are real and the real impalpable in our experience of the world right here and right now. I mean, if we do a kind of survey of the kinds of things that people stand up and say in a fast and testimony meeting. People stand up and bear testimony about their families, about their wives, about their children, about what happened this week when they were sitting in their living room reading a book about what happened when they were driving in their car listening to a talk by general authority about what happened when they were trying to go to sleep and they were, they felt, prompted instead to get up and write a letter to a missionary. That's the kind of thing. That's the kind of stuff I think a fast and testimony meaning is made out of. And, you know, oftentimes we frame. We frame the substance of those remarks with familiar, traditional religious language that gestures toward the Supernatural. And I think that's entirely appropriate. But I don't get the feeling when I go to fast and testimony meeting on Sunday that people think that this is mostly about supernatural stuff. I get the impression that people want to tell me about what happened when they were doing the dishes and what happened when they were trying to put their kids to bed. I mean, is that true in your experience, do you think?

John Dehlin [00:45:05] In my ward, I have studied enough psychology to know that you see what you're looking for. Right. So I will concede up front that I may be guilty. Honestly, it could be that because I'm actually in the ward and many view me as a skeptic or questioning of faith, that people feel like they need to react to that in some very strong and specific ways. But that would be narcissistic of me to think that people are shaping their views based on what I think. So I think it is a common Mormon trait, irrespective of John Dehlin's presence in a ward, to feel this urgency of saying, no, no, no, this church is true. God really does live. Jesus is the Christ and was resurrected. And again, just kind of emphasis on it's real, it's true, come on, it's legitimate. And again, it's all about. I think it feels like for many there's this urgency to emphasize the literality or the truthfulness over the practical day to day experiences of the lived human.

Adam Miller [00:46:25] Well, I think when someone gets up and says in church, Jesus is real, he lives. The substance of what they're saying is that just this past week, right, there was, Jesus is active in my life, he's palpable. The spirit and grace, it's manifest here. And maybe that means that in a kind of secondary way they're alluding to a supernatural experience they had in which they, they met Jesus. That's probably pretty rare as far as I can tell. I think that, you know, what that means is there is their insistence and I think their correct insistence that something is happening here. It's real and it's palpable and it's changing me and it's transforming me in some respect. It's saving me and making me alive. And I can't deny it, okay?

John Dehlin [00:47:22] And I don't want to beat a dead horse. So I, I'm ready to depart from this topic that I keep insisting on talking about. So I'll summarize by saying this. I think that many people, when they talk about their testimonies, when they say, I know Jesus lives, I think what many And I might even venture to say, most are saying is there's some bearded dude who lived 2000 years ago who died, who was resurrected and has a physical body, and he's sitting on some cloud somewhere existing and governing creation. I think that's what most Mormons mean when they say, I know Jesus lives. And you could disagree with me, but that's what I think they mean, because I think people are desperate for an afterlife. I think they're desperate to know that life continues and that they too, will someday be sitting on that cloud, hopefully with Jesus having a really good conversation. And so that's what I think people mean. And I think if I'm speaking on behalf of the skeptic, that may be what gets in the way of a lot of people's engagement with religion, is that they don't feel comfortable making that leap. And for some, that gets in the way of them feeling comfortable engaging in a church or religion. And so what I love about what you're saying, I think your framing is very charitable, and I think there might be some confirmation bias in it on your part. But I see that as a very charitable and healthy and constructive bias, which is to say there's something deeper going on. And I actually think you're right. I do think that when people bear their sweet testimonies, they are talking about more than literality and corporeality. I think there are many who are just saying, this essence of love that I associate with Jesus is around me everywhere, and it's goodness, and I like it and I see it here and Jesus lives. I do agree that there's some of that going on, but I guess what I want to end with is that I really like how you frame this in a way to wear those, because Doctrine and Covenants does say to some it is given to believe, and, and some it is not. And for me, your framing provides a very important avenue for the skeptic or the person to whom the gift of faith wasn't given, to still be able to use that shared symbol and the shared language of Christ as an example, but in a way that has a deeper meaning when maybe the literality may be wanting. Anyway, that's my thank you.

Supernatural Belief and Church Membership

Adam Miller [00:50:19] You're welcome. I think it's true that people have. The people in general, as members of the church, are straightforwardly committed to a belief in supernatural things, like the existence of, like, the resurrection of Jesus, his continued existence as a living body. But I think it's true that people would not care at all that Jesus was alive and resurrected if that right, good for him if he's alive and resurrected. Right. But people would not care about that at all unless that had some kind of palpable present tense consequence in their experience of the world. And that palpable present tense consequence is the substance of religion. An additional supernatural belief in Jesus. Ongoing resurrected body is certainly part of how we talk about it, but no one would care about that if it didn't have real present tense first person consequences for us.

John Dehlin [00:51:29] I think that's probably true. The only thing I'll say in response to that is just that there is this notion of how religion has been used at times as the opiate of the masses. It's as if to say, let's subject you to being in the lower class and working in the factory 80 hours a week and suffering disease and mistreatment and malnourishment, but it's okay, because in the afterlife you're gonna have it sweet. You know what I mean?

Adam Miller [00:51:59] That's, that's baloney.

John Dehlin [00:52:01] What's baloney? That that's happened.

Adam Miller [00:52:03] Yeah, well, no, that's certainly true that it's happened, but it's that version of the story. I think I was agreeing with you by saying that it was. Oh, okay, okay, right. That's. It's a bunch of baloney. That, that's, that, that's. I think people are being sold a bunch of baloney. Okay. If they buy that version of religion. There was often been. It's often been sold and it's often been bought. And part of the problem has to do, I think, with the way that our churches are filled with and run by sinners. And there's no, really, there's no way of getting around that problem, I don't think.

John Dehlin [00:52:42] Okay, so that leads me to the. Okay, so back to the marriage metaphor. Just because I want to. I had a big question. This may bleed into other chapters. And so if you want to tie it in to other chapters, this may tie into the history chapter. But I don't want to just force ourselves. I kind of like the natural organic nature of this conversation. So I don't want to like force shoehorn us into specific chapters just as a device. So the biggest problem I had, and I'm sure you'll anticipate this in Brad's usage of your analogy to the marriage is okay, if you're a true believing Mormon who isn't doubting. I think they're going to say, fantastic. I love it. I love the metaphor sold. I'm with you. If you're A questioning but believing Mormon. That may be a valuable new framework that you can have to engage Mormonism, you know, especially if overall your interface with the church is a net favorable one. And that's what I talked to Brad about when I said privilege. You know, if you're, let's just say, white, middle class or upper middle class, or even upper class, relatively well educated, you know, you've had good experiences in the church. Let's just say you're heteronormative, meaning you're not lgbt. Let's say you're not a feminist or too much of an intellectual. Or at least if you're an intellectual that kind of follows the Bennion, Arrington, Miller sort of strain of approaching belief, then, yeah, this framework becomes like the way that you make it work in spite of imperfections you may detect. But where the analogy can fall short is in the case of people who, when they go to church, it's not just. It's lots of good experiences plus some minor inconveniences. If you're gay or lesbian and you go to the LDS Church, you could be, depending on your ward, almost weekly, called an abomination or a sign of the times that the earth has become wicked in a way that becomes what many will describe as spiritually abusive or degenerative. And so, of course, in the marriage analogy, if a husband beats you and you're the wife every single week, even if they say nice things the rest of the week, there's a point where fidelity to that union no longer makes sense. And do you acknowledge that there are people for whom the LDS Church experience is actually the opposite of edifying? And if so, do you say stay anyway or do you say stay loyal to the marriage anyway? Or do you, like Brad, say there's some people who absolutely, for their own health and benefit, need to run away? How do you approach that part of the metaphor? Do you acknowledge that it fails for some that are just good people? And if so, what do you say to them?

Adam Miller [00:56:15] Well, I think the metaphor as I use it in the book is different than the way that Brad used it in your conversation. In my metaphor and the way that I use it in the book, the spouse to whom you must be faithful is not the church. The spouse to whom you must be faithful, no matter what the cost, is life. And I think it's pretty clear.

John Dehlin [00:56:38] Not the church.

Adam Miller [00:56:39] No, no, not the church. The spouse is the difficult and troubling and often uncomfortable life that God is trying to give you. That uncomfortableness may or may not involve your relationship to the church. I think it's pretty clear that, you know, 99.999% of the people who have ever lived, you know, have nothing like any kind of connection to or experience of the Mormon tradition. And I think it's. It would be a little crazy to think that God isn't working just as much with that 99.999% of people and their experience of their lives as he is trying to work with the people who are part of the Mormon tradition.

John Dehlin [00:57:28] Yeah. And as I look at the paragraph, you're not saying be faithful to the church, but it could be implied, right? I mean, it could be.

Adam Miller [00:57:36] Well, it could certainly be a part of your experience of the world, that part of what you're called to be faithful to is the church as an institution.

John Dehlin [00:57:44] Okay. And there again, I'm. I'm failing to remember what you're explicitly telling me numerous times. So this is useful, and this is just a side question. Okay, so what about that person who finds their church experience aversive? What would you say to them? Go find a better church. Just stick it out. What would you say? Pray and read your scriptures?

Adam Miller [00:58:29] I think that sometimes the right answer for people is to stay and to stick around. And I think that sometimes that's because it's good for them, too. And I think that sometimes it's because we as a church need them to stick around for us. But I think it's also true that sometimes, sometimes it's better for people not to stick around. It's better for them to. You know, depending on the. Depending on the nature of the situation, God may have them, God may have them go a different way for a while. I'm certainly open to that possibility that God can work with people outside of the church to bring them closer to him and make them more fully alive. And that sometimes, if we're honest, the church can get in the way of what the church is itself trying to accomplish.

John Dehlin [00:59:34] And you do acknowledge that.

Adam Miller [00:59:38] I think you can see that in any congregation on any Sunday, anywhere in

John Dehlin [00:59:42] the world, that sometimes the lived LDS church experience can actually get in the way of

Adam Miller [00:59:51] the church's own mission.

John Dehlin [00:59:54] What's that about?

Adam Miller [00:59:56] Well, again, I think we come back to the. To the basic facts of the situation, that these churches are filled with people that, like you and me, are sinners and frail and mortal, and we don't have enough time and we don't have enough strength and our bodies are weak and we tend to be selfish and get stuck in our own stories in our own heads. We're there to help each other with that. But. But we bring all of our problems with us as we try to help each other through them. You can't leave your problems at home if the very thing you're trying to do is help each other with your problems.

John Dehlin [01:00:37] So it's part and parcel of the experience.

Adam Miller [01:00:40] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:00:42] It's the reason for the experience.

Adam Miller [01:00:45] I think that's right. I think that's right. Come, come, ye saints. No toil nor labor fear. But with Jo.

Part Two Begins: Faith, Doubt, and Works

Part 2 of 2 · Ep. 471

John Dehlin [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3. Mormon Stories Podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you. To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today@mormonstories.org. hello, and welcome back to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. We are in part two of what I think is a fascinating discussion with Adam Miller, author of Letters to a Young Mormon. Tell us your book or books by Cofert Books. Just as a favor to Greg and Brad and Lloyd, my book with Greg

Adam Miller [00:00:54] Cofer Books is called Rube Goldberg Essays in Mormon Theology. You know what a Rube Goldberg machine is?

John Dehlin [00:01:04] Actually, I'm cheating because Brad explained it to me thusly. He said it's some type of machine that does something very simple in a very complex, unnecessarily complex way.

Adam Miller [00:01:16] Yeah. You know the Home Alone in the movie Home Alone, the kid rigs up all those crazy contraptions that. That trip up the burglars, but in the end, all they do is drop a brick, even though they went through, like, 15 steps in the process. That's a Rube Goldberg machine. And the analogy is that doing theology is a little bit like being a professional philosopher, is a little bit like building Rube Goldberg machines. You spend your time building elaborate contraptions, conceptual contraptions, that in the end are really just trying to do something very simple.

John Dehlin [00:01:52] Right. But, you know, it's needed, I think. Why is it, you know, have you ever thought about why that's needed? Why is it needed? Why don't we just, like, believe and serve and that's it?

Adam Miller [00:02:09] Yeah. I don't know that such a thing is possible. I don't know that it's possible in the end to avoid Rube Goldberg machines. Because part of the human experience, I think, is that we're always working kind of ad hoc with materials that aren't quite designed for what we need to do. And we're always making things up on the fly, and we're always having to rig things up that maybe weren't quite intended to do what we need them to do. I think that's just part of the human experience.

John Dehlin [00:02:41] Yeah.

Adam Miller [00:02:43] It's as true in religion as anyplace else that we're working that way. That's what makes religion real, the fact that it's making real Rube Goldberg machines, just like everything else. Right.

John Dehlin [00:02:56] Okay. So just to close, we've been talking about faith for quite some time. We need to get to sin. But before we do, there's a sentence on page 29. It's the last two sentences in that first paragraph, starting with practicing doubt. Can you read that?

Adam Miller [00:03:20] Yeah. You want to read the doubt paragraph?

John Dehlin [00:03:22] Sure, go ahead.

Adam Miller [00:03:23] I like the doubt paragraph.

John Dehlin [00:03:24] All right, let's do the doubt paragraph.

Adam Miller [00:03:29] Or, as they say in Zen, waking up to life requires three things. Great faith, great doubt, and great effort. Faith isn't a way of going to sleep. It's the work of waking up. And in order to wake up, you'll need both great faith and great doubt. In itself, doubt is neither good nor bad. Its value depends on what you do with it. You can doubt what's real in order to stay asleep, or you can doubt your daydreams in order to wake up. You can use doubt to protect you from the truth, or you can use doubt to leave you vulnerable to it. You'll have doubts regardless. Repurpose them for the sake of faith. Saving doubt is a strong solvent that can burn holes in your stories and lead you back to the work of being faithful to life and thus to God. Practicing doubt for the sake of faith is hard work, and it demands great effort. Great faith, Great doubt. Great effort. When your faith falters and you're tempted to run, stand up and bear testimony instead. A testimony is a promise to stay. A testimony gives form to your great faith, it gives direction to your great doubt, and it publicly commits you to the great effort of trying to live what God gives. It's less a measure of your certainty about a list of facts than it is a mark of your commitment to bearing truths that, despite their weakness, keep imposing themselves as a grace. In this way, bearing a testimony is like saying, I love you. A testimony doesn't just reflect what someone else has already decided. It is a declaration that in the face of uncertainty, you have made a decision. Saying I love you or I know the church is true commits you to living in such a way as to make that love true.

John Dehlin [00:05:09] Okay, so let's talk about the doubt part first. So you say saving doubt is a strong solvent that can burn holes in your stories and lead you back to the work of being faithful to life and thus to God. And I like that. I like that you're embracing doubt. Okay, what about when your doubt leads you to burn holes in your faith? Because in the classic example of sort of discovering Mormon history, you kind of have this narrative of what you either were taught or what you Kind of expect from, let's just say Joseph Smith. You know, you don't, you find out that he married, you know, other people's wives or, you know, really young girls and maybe there was even some coercion involved. And you know, it's, you discovered that through doubt because you were willing to doubt the narrative you were taught. And so you study further and then you uncover these things that, you know, there's some point at which if you discovered, for example, a prophet was a pedophile or, or you're killing people randomly just for pleasure, they become disqualified. And for some people, that doubt leads them to disqualify either Joseph or other church leaders as being worthy of belief. So I love that you're embracing doubt. And it seems like you're saying embrace doubt to the extent that it burns holes in the false narratives or the un non constructive narratives that you embrace and tell yourself. But what about doubt as it turns back on your perceptions and loyalties to the church? What about that doubt?

Adam Miller [00:07:09] Well, I think again, the issue here with respect to being faithful to God is being faithful to life. And you know, in the same kind of way that, you know, going into a marriage, I have, you know, you have in mind certain kinds of expectations about how your life is going to go. You have a certain kind of story that you would like that marriage to fit, right? A story that you're trying to tell yourself about yourself, about who you want to be and what you want your wife to, or your husband to do in the story of your life for you. In that same kind of way, we have stories that we tell in the church too. And you know, stories I think are an inevitable and oftentimes beautiful byproduct of life. But the problem comes when we start to value our stories more than we value the lives that have produced those stories as a kind of byproduct. And I think it's just as true that a marriage will require you to choose between the story that you wanted to tell about your marriage and the actual life that you're living with your spouse. In the same kind of way, being a member of the church will also demand that in the end you choose whether you're going to stick with the stories that you were trying to tell yourself about the church, or whether you're going to stick with the actual life of what it's like to be a member of the church. God will require you and I to sacrifice our stories about the world and choose life instead. And that's just as true of the stories that we tell in church as it is about the stories that we tell about ourselves to ourselves, about our own lives.

John Dehlin [00:08:58] Well, you know, in some ways your words are mellifluous. You know, they, they sound great and they're beautiful. And I think they do call us just like Eugene England did to, to maybe, maybe a bit of a higher self to some degree. Right. So I'm going to seed that. Like, I'm going to say, I love this. This feels like a really healthy, mature perspective that leads to growth and edification. It's filled with charity, it's filled with perspective, and I like it. Right. So if you can just tell me and tell our listeners, if you also, because it's not, you say, the stories we tell ourselves, but much of the narratives that we end up believing are told to us by our leaders and by our CES instructors, by those who are in authority. And many of us aren't enlightened enough, education wise or philosophically to be able to reach the level of maturity. There's a meat and potatoes sort of Mormon that's just like, hey, man, I was told, you know, it's not like somebody invents the idea that the Book of Abraham was translated from Egyptian papyru. That's the story that Joseph told. Right. We're not inventing some story that we're refusing to let go of. We're simply believing Joseph's own words. And maybe he didn't say that, but that's. I kind of think he did. And then when we find out that that's not even close to reality based on the evidence we have, well, for some that becomes a problem. And so we don't want to get to this point where we're kind of blaming the victims. Sort of like, oh, you're just holding on to a narrative that's one of self deception that you're clinging. You know, these are narratives that we come by honestly. And in some ways there's people that feel like we've really been deceived, just like a con artist might deceive a victim. Do you have any sympathy for that perspective? And if so, how could you address it in a way that doesn't. That may not feel a victim feeling like they're being blamed for, for false narratives that they were taught by people under the church's employ. You know, tell me you at least empathize with that perspective. I beseech thee.

Self-Deception, Joseph Smith, and Testimony

Adam Miller [00:11:54] I happily acknowledge that I empathize with that perspective. You know, I think we, Our tendency to both intentionally and unintentionally deceive ourselves and other people with the stories that we tell. At least. At least only because those stories are always just partial. Right. They're always just a sliver of what's actually going on. What we can manage to say about something that deception is the possibility for deception and self deception is so deeply woven into our experience of what it means to be a human being that in some ways it's. That's just another way to describe the very problem of sin that we are trying to address. Every time we get together as members of the church, we ought to. We ought to expect having some experience of ourselves and other people that. And that things are going to be more complicated than the way that we say, than the way that we say that they are.

John Dehlin [00:13:14] And again, it's a very respectful and almost diplomatic language. But for some, it's more than just kind of unfortunate or slightly problematic. For some, it reaches the level of outright deception and potential. I don't want to say fraud, but maybe even falseness. Maybe, you know, because you would if a magician, you know, let's just say a faith healer. I watched a movie called An Honest Liar yesterday or the day before by Tyler Meesum that talks about the amazing James Randi, this magician who went around debunking faith healers as an example. And these faith healers were getting people to go out in the audience to gather details about these people, and then they would whisper the details into a microphone that would go to the earpiece of the preacher, and the preacher would make it appear as though he was channeling God's influence and giving people the perception that he had the powers of God when in reality he was perpetuating a fraud. And that. And then he would go on to tell people that he had healed them of being blind or lame or cancer and even encouraged them to throw away their medicines. And some would argue that that's a severely, deeply damaging fraud.

Adam Miller [00:14:45] Right, I'd agree with that, Though I would have to say I've never seen anything like that in my experience in the church.

John Dehlin [00:14:53] Right, right, right. Okay. But if we take that as an anchor. Right. What if people. Well, you certainly wouldn't use the language you're describing to the member of that church that, you know, oh, we all tell false narratives and we all fool ourselves. And, you know, you should just kind of expect that as being part and parcel to the religious experience. You wouldn't respond that way to them. You might.

Adam Miller [00:15:22] Why not?

John Dehlin [00:15:23] What would you say to them? You wouldn't say, get the heck out of that corrupt and false institution?

Adam Miller [00:15:29] Sure, I would.

John Dehlin [00:15:30] You would?

Adam Miller [00:15:31] I would say you should get, you know, keep your eyes open and get out if it's the case that that kind of systematic and harmful deception has been going on. Okay, get out.

John Dehlin [00:15:44] So I think, what then? If I can just draw connections, then you're saying that in your review of the evidence of our church history, there's nothing you found that rises to that level of severity for you. Not the Book of Abraham, not the Book of Mormon, the historicity problems of the Book of Mormon, not the polyandry, the coercion that may have happened. You know, pick your five most awful, embarrassing moments in early church history or modern. And is that kind of what you're saying, that there's nothing there that rises to that level of severity? Thus you're willing to use a gentler language and talk about self deception and the naturality of deception in a way that's distinct from the previous example. Is that how you're. Is that why you're telling the followers of Pop off to run away? But to the Mormon, you're saying, hey, there's good here. This might be worth sticking around for. Is that the difference your review of the evidence doesn't find? The level of severity?

Adam Miller [00:17:05] Yeah, I would say I have never seen anything in my experience of the church that would remotely resemble the kind of systematic con performed by a faith healer.

John Dehlin [00:17:21] Okay. And you've read the narratives where Joseph takes someone up to the cellar, A female. Just say she's 16. I don't know the historical examples, but I'm kind of paraphrasing. And he says, you've got 24 hours to either be my wife, or the gates of hell will grasp you, or the gates of heaven will be closed unto you. I'm not quoting anything specific. This is just my understanding of the history. Some people say that that was pretty. Pretty coercive and pretty severe.

Adam Miller [00:18:02] I would agree with that. But again, that's not any part of my experience of what it is to be a Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:18:12] But Joseph kind of defines Mormonism to some extent. It's hard to be a Mormon and escape Joseph's legacy. And isn't it, or is it not for you?

Adam Miller [00:18:27] Well, I think even if we allow. That there are things about Joseph with which we ought to be deeply uncomfortable, That doesn't exclude the possibility that in other times and in other ways, God could just as surely work through him as any of the rest of us.

John Dehlin [00:18:57] And that's true. That's true of Popoff. Right. The faith Healer. Right.

Adam Miller [00:19:04] Yeah, I wouldn't. Well, I mean, I wouldn't say the proof is always in the pudding, I guess. Right. The proof is in the pudding of whether or not you put something together that 200 years later has transformed the lives of tens of millions of people for the better. Right. And I don't know that that guy's done anything remotely like it.

John Dehlin [00:19:31] Right, right.

Adam Miller [00:19:32] The proof is in the pudding here with respect to the way that it transforms your experience in the here and

John Dehlin [00:19:38] now

Adam Miller [00:19:40] with respect to life and grace and spirit.

John Dehlin [00:19:45] Okay. And that's a position that I think is totally a fair one to arrive at, which is that I hear you saying you acknowledge that Joseph may have done some bad things, maybe, Almost certainly, but that you also have to explain the good that he did. And in the end, kind of the positive fruits of Mormonism are compelling enough to sort of call someone to give it fair consideration.

Adam Miller [00:20:18] Yeah, I think so. And I think on the church's own account, the good things that Joseph did that you and I still benefit from are not things that Joseph himself is in any straightforward way responsible for.

John Dehlin [00:20:35] Right.

Adam Miller [00:20:39] It's not to Joseph's credit that we have such a church, whether he did or didn't have aspects of his life that are troublesome.

John Dehlin [00:20:49] It's just the good that we as members have done well.

Adam Miller [00:20:53] And the good that God managed to work through him. Right. It's not as if he can claim responsibility for that.

John Dehlin [00:21:02] Right.

Adam Miller [00:21:03] He wasn't the one that did it. That's the Mormon claim from the bottom up. He's not the one that did it.

John Dehlin [00:21:10] So I hear you saying that we're a little bit at risk for overemphasizing the role of Joseph in Mormonism, maybe.

Adam Miller [00:21:19] Yeah, I think that's partly true. I think in general, we tend to. We tend to give leaders in particular way too much credit for what's going on. The church, even just as an institution, the church is an extremely complex phenomenon made up of all different kinds of layers, made up of millions and millions of people. And there are an uncountable number of forces pushing and pulling in all different kinds of directions at the level of institutional discourse, at the level of finance, at the level of home and visiting teaching, at the level of scripture reading, all these different levels. There's no straightforward unity to the operation of the Church that could be manipulated in some way by. By individuals. I think we tend to give leaders in general way too much credit for what's going on. Instead of looking at how complex a thing the church is and how the church is composed of a series of overlapping but not even entirely compatible elements.

John Dehlin [00:22:44] And so the inertia and the momentum and the sheer size is so large that the most well intended, even apostle or first presidency member might have a very hard time really making a substantive change, you know, potentially.

Adam Miller [00:23:05] Oh, I think that's absolutely true. It's as true here with respect to the Church as it is with respect to any other real body or institution out there in the world.

John Dehlin [00:23:14] Right. Okay, last point on faith.

Adam Miller [00:23:20] We're doing good.

John Dehlin [00:23:21] I think we're touched on a lot of stuff.

Adam Miller [00:23:23] Yeah, I think we are doing good.

John Dehlin [00:23:26] So I have bad news for you. Okay.

Adam Miller [00:23:28] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:23:29] So my daughter Anna is a sweet, charitable, kind, thoughtful, faithful girl.

Adam Miller [00:23:38] That sounds like good news.

John Dehlin [00:23:39] Yeah. But she drew a couple frowny faces in the margins.

Adam Miller [00:23:47] That's good, though. I think that's good.

John Dehlin [00:23:48] Why is that good? Because she's doubting.

Adam Miller [00:23:51] Yeah. Yeah. It's not as if I don't want. This is not a magic pill that people are meant to swallow to make their lives special. This is the kind of advice that they're meant to chew on and see what's digestible and what isn't.

John Dehlin [00:24:03] Okay, so I'm going to read to you what she wrote the frowny face by. And then I want you to guess for me why she wrote a frowny face. Okay, so the first sentence you wrote a frowny face by is when your faith falters and you're tempted to run stand up and bear testimony instead. Why do you think she wrote a frowny face there?

Adam Miller [00:24:24] I think she wrote a frowny face because I'm kind of assuming in having said that, that the right thing to do is always to stand up and bear testimony.

John Dehlin [00:24:37] Okay.

Adam Miller [00:24:38] I don't. So there. I mean, I think, as you and I have already agreed, there are circumstances in which it might be right just to head for the door.

John Dehlin [00:24:48] Oh, well, I don't think she wants to head for the door necessarily. She's pretty squarely wanting to make the church work.

Adam Miller [00:24:57] No, but I think that my impression was that she might want me to have left open that possibility for people.

John Dehlin [00:25:04] Oh, well, I think. And I'll read the other part. She put a friendly face by.

Adam Miller [00:25:11] Should we get her on? Is she here?

John Dehlin [00:25:13] She's in school, unfortunately.

Adam Miller [00:25:14] All right, we'll have to do without her then.

John Dehlin [00:25:16] She wrote a friendly face by. A testimony doesn't just reflect what someone else has already decided. It is a declaration that in the face of uncertainty, you have made a decision saying, I love you or I know the church is true commits you to living in a way, in such a way as to make that love true. And this is something that a lot of sort of skeptical or disaffected Mormons really take issue with. If I'm understanding what you're saying. It's sort of the notion that to have a testimony, you should bear your testimony. And a lot of people that have studied psychology sort of conclude that that could be perceived as kind of sheer manipulation. It's kind of, I don't want to say a tautology, but it's sort of, I don't want to say brainwashing either, but those are two words that come to mind. It's sort of like, you know, it's not that you gather the evidence first and then you make your declaration as to what's true, you just convince yourself that it's true by saying it enough. And that can lead to the same type of self deception that it seemed like you might have been speaking about earlier. Because it may not be true in many ways or even at all. And I think any cult or any deceiver is going to try and get you to bear testimony of something even when it's not what it claims to be. Because eventually we. We can kind of convince ourselves of anything as humans. Right?

Adam Miller [00:26:58] Well, I entirely agree that the possibility of self deception is always open. It's always there. I think, you know, we need to maybe just come back again to what? To what? From my perspective, I think the people ought to be bearing testimony of. And when you stand up and bear. When you stand up and bear testimony, I think the substance of that testimony ought to refer in a very direct and concrete way to the way that grace is manifesting itself in your life. It's a question here of our willingness to bear testimony to the way that life keeps breaking in on our stories and self deceptions. We always risk self deception again in speaking about the way that it's breaking in on the stories that we're telling. Because bearing a testimony is itself another kind of story. But we can't get around that problem. I don't think, and I do think it's true, despite the risk. I do think it's true that there's something about a testimony that's different in character than a straightforward description of a set of facts. That there's something performative about a testimony that in some respect is like saying I love you, right? When you say I love you, it's not just the case that you're describing objectively something about Yourself. It's the case that you're enacting something by saying it. Right. You're literally. You're doing the. You're making an act of love in the business of. But just by saying it. It's not just kind of a raw, abstract, objective description. Something happens as a result of your doing it. And if you don't say it, then the thing that you're trying to describe doesn't happen. And I think that's true. There's something true about that with respect to testimonies, too. Testimonies aren't just kind of sterile descriptions. They're a kind of. They're a way for us to stake an existential claim about who we are and what matters to us and their way of making something that wouldn't have existed otherwise.

John Dehlin [00:29:11] The best analogy I can find to what you just said is something that Bill Bradshaw taught me as an undergraduate at byu. He would always say that you haven't learned it until you've written it. That if you think you understand a concept, but the only evidence of that is that you say that the idea has bounced around inside your brain.

Adam Miller [00:29:36] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:29:38] It's not clear or certain that any learning has actually taken place until it's actually been articulated. And he privileged writing down over verbally articulating it. Is that kind of analogous to what you're saying?

Adam Miller [00:29:53] Yeah, I think that's true, though. I think there's even additional dimension beyond that here. The part that, as with saying I love you, there's a sense in which the love that you're claiming in saying that gets made in the process of your saying it. Something is brought into existence here by your willingness to stand up and say it. That wouldn't have existed otherwise. Not just that you've. In the case of writing, showing that you understand something by writing it. Right. That you've made it a part of yourself. But part of what you're writing about or speaking about with respect to testimony only comes into existence. Like when you say I love you by saying it.

John Dehlin [00:30:39] Got it? Yeah. So some new material is created. It's not just something is repeated or copied. You're saying something new is generated from the experience.

Adam Miller [00:30:49] Yeah, I think that's right.

John Dehlin [00:30:50] Okay. Hey, we're done with the chapter. How's that?

Adam Miller [00:30:54] We're doing good.

Understanding Sin and Guilt

John Dehlin [00:30:55] All right. So what is sin? I mean, to a believer, they know what sin is. And even to a thinky type of believer, there's still no problem with this notion of sin. So for them, it's going to be face value. Obvious. But for a skeptical person, there's probably a lot of charged skepticism around this word. They probably associate the word sin with shame, with guilt, with coercion or manipulation, with arbitrary guidelines that are imposed on people that sometimes are even counterproductive to one's well being. So tell us what you mean when you say the word sin.

Adam Miller [00:31:47] I think you're right that in some respects, in contemporary discourse, especially in the world at large, the word sin has become pretty useless and in some ways misleading. I read a beautiful little book last year called Unapologetic by Francis Spufford, who's an Anglican. In one of the early chapters, he talks about how useless the word sin has become in contemporary discourse for talking about what traditionally Christians mean by something like sin. Because in contemporary discourse, right, he says sin is a word that you use to sell things. It's a word that gets associated with chocolate and lacy underwear and things like that that are actually quite desirable. And so, Right. In that respect, the word, the word sin as it's been co opted by late 21st century capitalism is. It's useless for religious purposes because in

John Dehlin [00:32:48] many senses we're calling evil that which is good. Right.

Adam Miller [00:32:52] Yeah. All the wires get crossed and the water gets pretty muddled. And how many other metaphors can I mix in here?

John Dehlin [00:33:02] Sure,

Adam Miller [00:33:05] but such that. Well, let me just say what I think is actually at stake in sin. Normally when we talk about sin in the context of the Church, we talk about sin in terms of breaking specific commandments. Right. We always talk about particular sins in relationship to particular laws. If you break a particular kind of law, then you're a sinner in that particular respect because you broke that rule. And I think that's certainly part of sin. We can't just set aside the rules, the law, etc. But I think that only scratches the surface of what's at stake in the broader experience of sin, especially with respect to the kind of description that St. Paul gives us in his letters and his epistles and Romans and Galatians. Right. In St. Paul's description of sin, we get a really robust description of sin that has to do not just with the particular things that you and I tend to do wrong, but with our larger way of being in the world. So that even if you and I aren't breaking particular rules, that would, that would be obvious to other people that were sinners. There may nonetheless be something fundamentally wrong with, as you and I put it earlier, Right. There might be something fundamentally wrong with our posture and relationship to the world as it gives itself to us. And I think when we talk about sin, when we talk about being saved from sin, that has less to do with the problems related to breaking particular laws and much more to do with that fundamental posture that you and I have in relationship to the world. When you and I. I think one way to describe a sinful posture in relationship to the world is to come back to the language that we've been using all along and say that you and I are sinners in general. To the degree that we tend to choose our stories about life over life itself, whenever we choose our stories over life, instead of being faithful to life, then we sin. We're sinners. And I think we do that all the time. We tend all the time to prefer our fantasies and daydreams and expectations to the actual stuff and the actual lives of the people that we live with and love.

John Dehlin [00:35:42] So I saw that part of your book, and I took a little bit of ego umbrage in the sense that, you know this podcast, what's it called?

Adam Miller [00:35:52] Mormon Stories. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:35:55] And I've wondered that. I've wondered whether all this podcast. Sometimes in my darker, sadder moments, I'm like, all this podcast is doing is building ego, and ego in the classic Buddhist sense, which is attachment to a narrative that probably isn't fully true may not be at all true, and in a way, is keeping people from kind of really attending to that which might be most uplifting. You know what I mean? So in the very same sense that you're talking about how stories can mislead us and attachment to stories can fool us, I've. I've wondered about that. So I guess I'm not asking you to give us a verdict on Mormon stories, but I will say, wow, is that what we're doing? And is there a good element to stories, too, so that I don't get too discouraged about what I've done the past nine years, 500 hours in.

Adam Miller [00:37:07] Well, I think it's always a risk every time we tell a story that that's what we're doing. And I think it's also true that sometimes when we tell a story to ourselves or to other people in a certain time, in a certain place, that it could be more than one thing. It could be more or less good. It could be. Whether it is more or less good could depend on the time and the circumstance in which the story is told or reheard. So I don't think there's any. I don't think it's ever the case that those stories are straightforwardly. All bad or straightforwardly all good. But we're always running a risk whenever we tell a story. But what I hear you saying, it's a complicated thing.

John Dehlin [00:37:57] But what I hear you saying is that if a story takes us away from living in the here and now, of participating in the grace of life, which you associate with God, that's when we're out of step.

Adam Miller [00:38:13] Yeah. Though I think it's true too, that it's not the case that we could get rid of stories. I think stories are an inevitable byproduct of life and they can be a beautiful part of life. It's just a question of whether or not we let those stories be part of life or whether we try to substitute them for life. And when we make that second gesture, when we say, I'm going to choose my stories over life itself, that at the heart of it is what sin amounts to.

John Dehlin [00:38:48] Okay, got it.

Adam Miller [00:38:50] We can't stop telling stories. And I don't think we should. I certainly don't think we should want to. It's always a question. It's always a question of our relationship to those stories. It's a question of our posture in relationship to those stories as themselves part of what life is giving to us.

John Dehlin [00:39:07] Right. Read, if you will, the last two sentences, last three sentences on page 23.

Adam Miller [00:39:22] Jesus doesn't want you to feel guilty. He wants you to be responsible. Your stories aren't the truth. Life is. And only the truth can set you free.

John Dehlin [00:39:31] What do you mean by that?

Adam Miller [00:39:35] Well, I think guilt is an interesting phenomenon. I don't think Jesus is interested in guilt. I don't think Jesus is interested in making us feel guilty. I think guilt is. One way I try to talk about guilt in the chapter is that,

John Dehlin [00:39:58] you

Adam Miller [00:39:59] know, guilt is the kind of thing that we feel when we choose our stories over life and then recognize that that was the wrong thing to do from the perspective of our story, if that makes sense to say sin. Guilt is. Guilt is the thing that you feel when from a sinful perspective, you recognize that you're a sinner. Jesus is interested in having you recognize that you're a sinner. That's pivotal. But Jesus is not interested in having you recognize that you're a sinner from a sinful perspective. In fact, to the degree that we feel guilty about things, I think that tends to get in the way of our actually taking responsibility for them. And that's what would be necessary in order to see the truth about our sinfulness from a non sinful perspective.

John Dehlin [00:40:53] Right. And so. And this is, for me, the classic difference between guilt and shame. Guilt is saying, oh, wow, I recognize that that probably wasn't the best thing for me. And it's that feeling that's probably, you know, can be healthy in redirecting our course. Shame is kind of getting all caught up in it and thinking that I'm bad versus what I did was bad. Is that kind of what you're saying, too?

Adam Miller [00:41:28] I'm not sure how to map that onto the point I was making, but I think they're maybe after similar things.

John Dehlin [00:41:35] Yeah, but it's more about the direct. It's more about. For you, guilt is more about. Or sin, I guess, or not. Sinning is more about not like the bad thing you did that you feel awful about. It's more like, I want to be going in the right direction and let me learn from my mistakes. Don't get so caught up in my story and just start moving in the right direction.

Adam Miller [00:42:06] I mean, I think I'd put it a little bit more pessimistically than that. I think I would say something like, It's a question here. The difference between sinning, the difference between being saved and not being saved is not the difference between. Between failing and not failing to keep the commandments. That's not the difference because everyone fails to keep the Commandments. That's Christianity 101. We're all sinners. All of our hands are covered with blood to one degree or another. So the difference there between being saved and not saved is not the difference between failing or not failing to keep the commandments. We're all failing. The difference has to do with the way that we relate to our ongoing experience of failure. The question always has to do with our posture in relationship to our ongoing failure. Is our posture in relationship even to the truth of our failure, one of care and consecration? Can we care for and consecrate even our failures back to God? That's the pivotal question. Not whether. Can you, in some dramatic, cinematic way, manage to be perfect and never fail? The question is, how are you going to care for and consecrate and relate to your failures?

John Dehlin [00:43:40] And you're saying turning them into learning experiences. Is that a too simplified way to describe what you're recommending we do?

Adam Miller [00:43:47] Well, I think that can be one of the things that happens, yeah. Though I think different kinds of circumstances and different kinds of problems will call for us to care for and consecrate them in different kinds of ways.

John Dehlin [00:44:00] Right. Excellent. Talk a little bit about your chapter on sex.

Sexuality and the Church's Teachings

Adam Miller [00:44:11] There is a chapter in the book that is baldly titled Sex, it's right there.

John Dehlin [00:44:16] S E X.

Adam Miller [00:44:17] Right there it is. I felt like I was breaking taboo there just a little bit by using

John Dehlin [00:44:24] a chapter on sex published by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute.

Adam Miller [00:44:28] That's right.

John Dehlin [00:44:28] Look at that.

Adam Miller [00:44:31] The basic point I make about sex in that chapter, I think, runs parallel to the point that I just made about sin in general. We, you know, fundamental to our experience of sex is, I think, a kind of. A kind of basic raw hunger for intimacy with another human being. And I think that's a hunger in almost every instance for intimacy with another human being on a bunch of different levels. On an emotional level, on a physical level, on an intellectual level. That hunger for intimacy with another human being is written right into the very DNA of our bodies.

John Dehlin [00:45:26] So you're sex positive?

Adam Miller [00:45:28] Well, I think I'm. Yeah, certainly. I think that's fair to say, though, the bigger point here is that sex is just a fact of life, whether it turns out to be a net positive or not. In your experience of the world, in some ways, for you and I, right, our very 21st century way of talking about sex is pretty far afield, maybe from the experience of most of the people in most of the history of the world who didn't have some kind of straightforward, consensual role in the choice of their partners, et cetera. So our way of thinking about sex, right, may not be universalizable in a kind of straightforward way. But I think regardless, we experience sex as a kind of ongoing. As a kind of ongoing desire, as a kind of ongoing hunger for human intimacy. And that the hunger and desire, they show up to the degree that you and I are lacking something, to the degree that we're missing something. So in this respect, our hunger for human intimacy, especially the form that it takes, and our hunger for sex that marks in our human experience, it marks in us a kind of hole. There's a kind of a hole kind of lack at the center of us that on a daily basis, our bodies are feeding us information about the fact that we're missing something, that we're lacking something. And you can try to do. You know, there are a couple different things you can try to do in relationship to that experience of hunger. You can, on the one hand, you can go all in on the project of trying to satisfy that hunger, to get rid of it by satisfying it just by always and every time giving in to that hunger and throwing everything toward everything into that hole of hunger that you can possibly get your hands on. And I think that approach to the hunger of sex is pretty straightforwardly and obviously a disaster. So we give constant warnings in the context of the church not to try to solve the problem of your sexual hunger by just always giving into it because it will lead you to dark and disastrous places, not just for you even, but for other people. So we tend to. The other problem, though, is that you might try, in response to your experience of hunger, you might try to get rid of it not by satisfying it, but by purging it from you in some respect. And I think this is the danger. This is the risk that we run in the way that we tend to talk about chastity in the church. We tend to be so strong in our encouragement to people to not just give in to their hunger that we risk giving the impression that we want people to purge their hunger, to get rid of it, either by purging it or by. Or by satisfying. Neither is a viable path. In the end, I think chastity amounts to learning how, with time and experience to care for and consecrate that lack that is your sexual hunger itself as part of your life, but adopting a posture of care and consecration, even toward the. The hunger that shows up as a desire for intimacy.

John Dehlin [00:49:13] And what does it mean to concentrate that, to consecrate that to God?

Adam Miller [00:49:19] Well, I think again, the details of that are going to have to be. Are going to have to be worked out in each individual's life.

John Dehlin [00:49:28] Let me ask you this way. You find out that your son or daughter has masturbated, or you find out that on a date they. They engaged in what I was taught to refer to as heavy petting. You know, what is that conversation like between you and your child?

Adam Miller [00:49:48] I think the conversation is something like, this is not the end of the world. Congratulations, you're a human being and you're. You're filled with. You're filled with hungers and desires that, that you neither understand nor are entirely in control of. And the thing to do, the thing you're going to have to learn how to spend your life doing, is to learn how to care for that hunger without trying to get rid of it. And you're going to have to learn how to direct it in a way that, instead of hurting people, expresses love for them.

John Dehlin [00:50:31] It almost feels philosophically sacrilegious to ask a question that is going to be so concrete and specific, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Are you comfortable sharing a position on masturbation itself as to whether it's good or bad? Right or wrong, evil or perfectly fine. I know that I should never ask a philosopher that question, but. And you can say you're not comfortable sharing if you're not, but I'm just dying to know.

Adam Miller [00:51:10] I think that for nearly everyone it is going to take a lifetime's worth of work and care and effort, attention, to consecrate their experience of sexuality back to God. And that in the end, chastity is not something so much that you had at the beginning and then could lose in some way. As if chastity were the same thing as innocence. Everyone's going to lose their innocence in one respect or another. But I think chastity is not the same thing as. In a sense, chastity is the kind of thing that you don't start out with and lose. It's the kind of thing that you can only build and put together over a long period of time with a great deal of care and attention. And I think the more we can do to learn how to control and direct our sexual desires, the better. But we also need to be, we need to be pretty charitable with ourselves in the process of learning how to do that. In some ways, learning how to have chastity is kind of like learning how to play the piano. You're thrown into the deep end of life here, full of sexual desires without already knowing how to, how to use them and control them and direct them. And you're going to have to learn on the fly and you're going to make mistakes along the way. But there's only one way to learn how to play the piano here, and that's by playing the piano. You can't get around the business of going through all the trouble and difficulty and even making the mistakes that go into learning how to play the piano. You can't do it in the abstract. You're going to have to do it on the ground in the middle of things without already knowing how to do it. That's a pretty long philosophical answer to a pretty straightforward question. Is that useful?

John Dehlin [00:53:21] Yeah, it was useful and it's what you get when you ask a philosopher the question. But actually it's very helpful, so thank you. I think I understand the message you're sending and I think it's a healthy, constructive one.

Adam Miller [00:53:35] Good.

Prayer and What It Means to Pray

John Dehlin [00:53:36] What's prayer for you is prayer. There's that bearded 10 fingered dude on the clouds. Let me try and have a conversation with him where he's listening to everything I say and speaking back to me in some way that I can decipher and hopefully giving Me a thing or two that I ask for so that I can have a little bit more peace and happiness and joy in my life. Or is it something different for you?

Adam Miller [00:54:10] I think one of the things. One of the things that we risk with prayer is that we risk using prayer just as a vehicle for our own egos, right? In the same way that we can bend stories around to just be about us, we can easy enough to bend our prayers around to just being about us, too. Our prayers can just become another vehicle for the expression of our stories, a way of trying to coerce God into helping me get my story to turn out the way I want it to be. And I think that's not the best possible version of prayer. I think in the end, prayer has to look something like the prayer that Jesus offers in the Garden of Gethsemane, in which rather than trying to get God to agree to make his story go the way that he would like it to go, he uses prayer as an occasion to submit his will to his fathers and receive with as much care and consecration as he can muster what it is that life is going to send his way. That, in the end, I think, is what prayer is about.

John Dehlin [00:55:24] Say that again.

Adam Miller [00:55:26] Prayer is about that same kind of thing that Jesus does in the garden, where you say, nevertheless, you say, I might like things to turn out this way, but nevertheless, not my will, but thine. And you bring yourself back, regardless of your stories. You bring yourself back to life and what it's going to bring for you.

John Dehlin [00:55:47] So you're saying it's an exercise in acceptance of the now?

Adam Miller [00:55:51] Yeah, I would think prayer at its most fundamental is the practice of bringing our attention back to bear on life as God's giving it to us.

John Dehlin [00:56:01] It's not a laundry list of things we want.

Adam Miller [00:56:06] I mean, I think we can, especially to the degree that our prayers are verbal. We can use laundry lists of things to kind of systematically bring to our attention things that matter to us. But I think we're wrong if we think about prayer as a way of coercing God into making our stories turn out the way we want them to.

John Dehlin [00:56:25] And what about the repentance part of prayer is like some grand chalkboard eraser in the sky that erases out the bad things we did. Is that what repentance is?

Adam Miller [00:56:38] Well, I think repentance is. Repentance is that kind of the ongoing work of laying down your stories and taking up life instead. And prayer is. Prayer is one way of practicing, of literally practicing turning your attention away from what you thought you wanted toward what life is actually giving.

John Dehlin [00:57:04] Go ahead and read, if you don't mind, the first paragraph on page 39, what you're calling prayer. You know, I practice a form of therapy called acceptance and commitment therapy, which is very much mindfulness based therapy that borrows from the Buddhist traditions in terms of, you know, contact with the present moment or mindfulness. And the way you're describing prayer there seems to borrow a little bit from Buddhism. Is that something you would embrace or. Or not that Buddhism somehow influences your approach to prayer?

Adam Miller [00:57:40] It certainly does. I'm deeply interested, both practically and theoretically with. I'm deeply interested in contemplative practices both in Eastern and Western traditions. And I think they have a lot to help us see more clearly about the nature of what we're doing when we pray.

John Dehlin [00:58:01] Well, with that, maybe read us that paragraph, page 39.

Adam Miller [00:58:08] But talking is just half a prayer. As a rule of thumb, take however much time you spend talking and then devote at least as much to listening. Listening, though, is harder. Without the threat of a particular concern to guide you, you'll be especially prone to forget to keep your attention steady. You might go for a walk and to calm your mind, pay attention to the feel of each footstep. Or you might stay still and pay attention to your breath. In this case, be still and breathe naturally. Feel your lungs slowly expand and contract. Notice how the air is cold when you draw it in through your nose, but warm when your body presses it back out. Let everything settle. Then, against the backdrop of this stillness, note what feelings you have and what impressions come. Don't get carried away by these thoughts or feelings, but sit with them. And when you're done, try to act directly on your impressions. And try to carry your prayerful stillness into the rest of your day.

John Dehlin [00:59:11] Yeah, that's a different kind of prayer than maybe many of us practice. But I like it. It's expansive.

Adam Miller [00:59:19] I think even in the context of the church, we're often encouraged to not just talk, but to listen when we pray. Though, as a matter of practice, we're probably even worse at staying and listening than we are to even managing to say something ourselves. Because then I think that's. Because the listening is the hardest part. Listening is the difficult thing.

John Dehlin [00:59:45] What are you listening to? Is God literally communicating or is there something else?

Adam Miller [00:59:52] Well, I think the thing to do is to just listen. I mean, to pay attention to whatever there is to hear. Maybe the beating of your heart, maybe your breath coming in and out, maybe the door opening and closing, maybe the wind in the Trees, maybe the birds, maybe your kids fighting with each other, whatever. Just to plug in to the present moment and make yourself available for a revelation. Even if the revelation is only of the fact that, ta da, you're in your closet and it's Wednesday and it's 8 o' clock at night or whatever. Even that is a revelation worth having, I think.

John Dehlin [01:00:39] But that's, I mean, that's so different from like God. Do I turn left or right? You know, do I go to the nursing program or do I go to law school?

Adam Miller [01:00:49] Yeah, those are. I think God can help us with those things, but I think those are pretty special cases. For the most part, when we pray multiple times on a daily basis, we're not looking for particular guidance with particular kinds of things, especially big life changing things. We're just looking to plug back in to the flow of spirit, to be present again to the world in front of us and the people around us, and even to the way that God is trying to give himself to us in our ordinary experience of the world. The most common prayers that we say are the prayers that we say at the dinner table. And that's exactly the purpose of those prayers is to get us to stop for a second and be still and notice that we're about to eat food before it's all gone.

John Dehlin [01:01:46] Right, Excellent. Well, I do have some questions from some listeners, but before I dive in, is there any other final concepts that you're kind of dying to talk to? I think I could do an hour on each of these chapters with you and feel like it was worth it to me. But sometimes people pound on me for having interviews that are too long. So with that, any final points you want to make from the book before we go to a couple questions?

Listener Questions for Adam Miller

Adam Miller [01:02:27] No, I think we've done a great job of covering what for me are the fundamental points.

John Dehlin [01:02:32] Okay. All right. Well then I'm going to honor a few of my listeners and on their behalf, ask you some questions. Is that all right?

Adam Miller [01:02:41] Yeah, that's great that people took the time to send in some questions.

John Dehlin [01:02:44] Okay. And I'm just going to read them. Okay.

Adam Miller [01:02:46] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:02:47] Okay. So Jamie Handy writes, does he feel comfortable with how the church presents the book of Abraham? How, as a scholar, do you explain the constant revisions with no explanation or apology to our history and then the quick forgetting that things were ever different?

Adam Miller [01:03:06] Yeah, I don't have any good explanations for that. Okay, good question though. Good question.

John Dehlin [01:03:13] Are you saying you sympathize with some of the frustration from which it comes?

Adam Miller [01:03:18] Yeah, sure. I think I would. I wouldn't be happy asking that question myself. Might know the answers better than me.

John Dehlin [01:03:25] Excellent. Well, that's a good answer. I like that. Okay, George Andrew Spriggs. It appears that Adam's early works are heavily informed by French continental philosophy. But his most recent work, this book we're talking about now, Letters to Young Mormon, is designed to be more broadly accessible while still challenging the stories we tell about Mormonism ourselves, et cetera. I believe there's some book reviews, as one from Ralph Hancock, where Adam has gotten. Did Hancock criticize you? What?

Adam Miller [01:03:58] I think Ralph is a friend and I think he's kind of an equal opportunity criticizer.

John Dehlin [01:04:04] Okay, so Adam is. That's good. That's to his credit, where Adam has gotten some criticism on this very angle. But his question is this. How does Adam respond to feedback or pushback that your approach to Mormonism is non traditional or foreign, whether from a traditionalist believer or from a disaffected member? Or for a different question, how would Adam respond to someone who doesn't buy into his approach to Mormonism because it doesn't align with what the institutional church says Mormonism is or should be? Good question. Is this Mormonism or is this Adam flavored Mormonism?

Adam Miller [01:04:44] Well, I think, number one, the question asker correctly points out that not only is my professional training in philosophy, but that my professional training in philosophy focuses on contemporary French philosophy, which is maybe a particularly abstract and difficult kind of contemporary philosophy to work with. I think my. I think I would say I'm always. I'm always working on two things at the same time. Whenever I try to write about Mormonism. On the one hand, and I think this is especially true of this book, Letters to a Young Mormon. On the one hand, I try very hard to only ever talk about the kinds of things that are central to what we talk about when we go to church every single Sunday. So I talk about faith and I talk about the law of chastity, and I talk about temples and I talk about repentance and I talk about agency. I take up all those. All those themes that would be familiar to every Mormon as meat and potatoes Mormonism. But on the other hand, I always try at the same time as I'm talking about those things that are. That are basic for all of us to say, to talk about them in a way that maybe isn't the same way that we usually talk about them. But I try to talk about the things that we already have in common. But I try to talk about them in a way that we don't normally talk about them. And I think mileage will vary with respect to how helpful people find my way of talking about things, and I'm good with that. I think my way of talking about things is just one way of talking about things. And though I think it has some strengths, it also has some pretty obvious weaknesses. And I don't think. I don't think I've offered here any kind of once and for all solution to the basic problems involved in talking about Mormonism. But I think, in my view, I've said enough that's useful that I feel compelled to share it and hope that other people find some of it useful too.

John Dehlin [01:07:08] I'm reminded of an interview I remember, One of the founders of Sunstone or one of the early Albert Peck. I did an interview with him, and I think it was with Gordon B. Hinckley, where he was telling a story. I think he was sitting down with Gordon B. Hinckley, could have been another apostle, where he's trying to say, come on, man, we're doing good stuff at Sunstone. And Gordon B. Hinckley's response was, who called you to this? In other words, you know, the way that Albert tells the story, it was almost like, it's not yours to be trying to help or trying to explain. That's what we do. It's your job to kind of reflect back and to promote how we're encouraging things. I know that's a kind of strong position, but what would you say to that? That this isn't yours to be providing interpretations or perspectives. That's what the brethren are for.

Adam Miller [01:08:13] Well, I think I would say in one sense that's right, because it's not my place to speak with authority on behalf of the institutional church, and I wouldn't want to claim to be doing that. On the other hand, I think you know that that way of talking about things misses the responsibility that you and I have to be doing what good we can in the world without. Without being prompted, right? Without having to be commanded in all things. We're commissioned by the church itself to roam the world doing as much good as we can, laying claim to all things that are beautiful and virtuous and lovely and of good report and trying to see, even if only in experimental fashion, how those things connect with our experience of Mormonism. And that to the degree that you and I forfeit our responsibility to do that kind of work, we're being remiss in the commitments that we've made in the context of the church itself.

John Dehlin [01:09:25] Got it. Okay. Lindsay Hanson park asks, how does he reconcile his philosophy of the church with actual lived experiences of the majority of most American members? Wow. You might consider that to be a loaded question. Do you think you understand what she's asking there?

Adam Miller [01:09:50] Yeah, I would say, for my part, the very thing I'm after in the way that I've described the very thing that I'm after is to try to give a more substantive account of what religion is actually like for a majority of members. That's the very thing I'm trying to describe. What does it actually look like to be in church on Sunday every week for three hours? What actually happens? What does a member actually experience? What kinds of things do we actually say? What does it actually look like? How does it actually change your life? Those are the kinds of questions that interest me the most.

John Dehlin [01:10:32] Yeah, I mean, as I hear her question, I'm just. I'm reminded of how often you're just talking about the lived experience as the meat of what you're talking about. I don't think you're really calling attention to much else. You're basically saying everyone has a lived experience. Pay attention to that.

Adam Miller [01:10:50] Yeah, and it's true. I mean, I think her question puts its finger on the way that, you know, there is a kind of. There is a kind of distance between the richness of our lived experience as Mormons and the way that we tend, perhaps especially at a kind of formal institutional level. The way that we talk about that experience. The way that we talk about that experience, especially at a formal institutional level, I think is a very. It's a very, very thin description of what's actually going on in your experience as a Mormon. And there are all different kinds of reasons for that, I think, both positive and negative. Why there's a kind of gap between the thin description we get at the institutional level and what the kind of thick, robust, messy, complicated experience that we're actually living on the ground. But there is a kind of gap, there is a kind of distance between the two. I think it's okay to acknowledge that, though. I think. I think the thing that deserves our allegiance in every case is not just the thin institutional discourse, but the thick, messy, complicated, real world experience.

John Dehlin [01:12:04] Right. Okay. Here's another question that sort of relies on a very heavy premise. Jared Warner asks, why aren't more Mormons waking up?

Adam Miller [01:12:21] I think it depends. I think it depends what you mean and what you have in mind when you're thinking about that. I think on the one case, on the one hand, a lot of Us as Mormons aren't waking up because like most people, we're weak and selfish and preoccupied and all the kinds of typical problems that go along with being a human being. But I think, on the other hand, you know, for instance, when I think about it, really so much depends what you have in mind by waking up. When I think, for instance, about my parents, my parents, they don't. They roll their eyes a little bit whenever I talk philosophy with them. And I think that's. I don't mind that really, in the end, but they don't have any interest and theory and philosophy and speculative theology. Right. But despite the fact that that kind of thing doesn't really play any part in their experience of what it means to be a Mormon, I think it's without a doubt true that over the space of their lives, 60, 70 years now, Mormonism has progressively, invisibly tangible ways, woken them both up to each other, to us as their children, to their friends, to their neighbors, to the richness of their experience as human beings, that's palpable. And I think that that's. I don't think that experience of progressively being more and more awake to and in tune with those things, I don't think that's unusual. And I think it's especially not unusual at all in the church.

John Dehlin [01:14:11] So I'm going to borrow on this question a little bit, And this is clearly coming from a place of heavy bias, right? If someone like you were an apostle, I would. I would be like at your feet, you know, eating the crumbs of what spills from the bread that you eat, you know, because I'm sitting here feeling truly enlightened and edified from what you say. Now, I'm not saying that I don't get good feelings when I listen to General Conference. I do. And I'm not saying that the apostles that we currently have are worthless idiots. I'm not. These are good, smart, capable men who are capable of saying good things, right? But so much of what I hear them saying in General Conference feels defensive. It feels outdated, it feels not particularly enlightened. And in some ways it's almost more like they're in a defensive posture of trying to justify outdated and in some cases harmful positions than they are trying to, like, really provide us with nourishment and wisdom that can really lift us to a higher place. And, of course, I'm revealing my own bias here, but when I read, like, something that the Pope, you know, the current pope has written, and then I read, like, some General Conference talk. There's a huge chasm and I'm wondering if you can relate to that at all, that feeling and if in any way you can explain that. Is it that what you offer just isn't that important, you know, and that's why God doesn't call people like you to be an apostle. Are you hearing apostles provide the level of wisdom that, that inspires and uplifts you? And I'm not inviting you to speak ill of the Lord's anointed, but do you have anything to say about that perspective? And I hope it's received not as some broadside sweeping criticism of the brethren, because I have tender feelings for them, but I do sometimes have frustrations with the level of discourse that I hear from them.

Adam Miller [01:16:52] I think that's, I think on the one hand. That's a pretty super over optimistic account of what I've managed to do such that I would say that we're, were I to be a general authority in the church, that might be the point at which you ought to think seriously about going someplace else.

John Dehlin [01:17:22] No, that modesty's, you know. No, but seriously, Adam, this is wise stuff. I'm feeling enlightened and edified and I'm really angry at certain things right now. I'm partially ready to throw a lot of things out sometimes. And yet when I talk to you, I'm like, wow, I didn't think there was a person on earth that could make me turn back a little bit. But you're doing it. So I consider that significant. And the fact that Brad Kramer and I mean, look, Robert Millet, Christine Hagland, James Faulkner, they're showering praise on you. And those aren't lightweight people. So I appreciate the modesty, but I think you're doing great stuff.

Adam Miller [01:18:06] And anyway, well, you know, I appreciate that. I think. I'm glad to be able to say something useful. But I think, you know, the kinds of things that I've said and the way that I've said them right, they'll be especially useful to maybe, you know, to a very particular subset of people of which you may be. To a very particular audience of which you may be one. I think too, you know, the things that I talk about in this book that really, really matter to me, that I'm convicted by and have conviction about, they're all things that I have learned from the time that I was old enough to know what words meant in the church itself. I mean, it's my attempt to say again, from my perspective, the things that the church has been trying to teach me for decades now, and that to one degree or another, I'm only just starting to. Just starting to understand.

John Dehlin [01:19:18] So a heavy dose of humility is what I'm hearing.

Adam Miller [01:19:22] Well, you know, that's a good rhetorical posture, but I think there's something to it, too.

John Dehlin [01:19:27] Right? Yeah. Yeah. I'm not hinting that it's false.

Adam Miller [01:19:32] No. Well, there's a degree to which it is. You know, we're doing a podcast, and there's a broad audience here. I needed one to present myself in a certain light. But there's a sense in which that it really is true, too. Everything in here. Everything in here that matters to me, I learned it at church.

John Dehlin [01:19:49] Right.

Adam Miller [01:19:51] But I learned it at general conference. Regardless of the weakness of the kinds of talks that are given in an institutional, worldwide, institutional setting like that, regardless of all those problems and weaknesses, my life has been fundamentally transformed by them.

John Dehlin [01:20:12] So what am I missing? What am I doing wrong?

Adam Miller [01:20:18] That's it, Waj. I don't know. I don't know.

John Dehlin [01:20:24] Why do I leave feeling angry and upset or bored? And you're leaving feeling transformed?

Adam Miller [01:20:30] I mean, I feel. I feel angry and upset and bored frequently enough myself, but I don't. You know, I wouldn't want to rule out the possibility that feeling angry and frustrated and bored is part of what the Lord is doing, is saying to you through them when you hear them.

John Dehlin [01:20:52] And that's very. And I'm not trying to reduce what you say, but that's very Buddhist to say that you're not your enemy. I'm not saying they're my enemy, but kind of like adversity is your teacher or your enemy is your teacher.

Adam Miller [01:21:05] Yeah, I'm totally not down with the school of thought that would think that the only way that God manifests himself to us is through warm, fuzzy feelings. I think it's often the case that God manifests himself to us instead in feelings that are strong and difficult and uncomfortable, and that can involve anger and frustration as much as it can involve peace and satisfaction.

John Dehlin [01:21:33] So when we interpret that Ephesians scripture about the fruits of the spirit are joy, peace, love, you're saying it's missing half of the emotions.

Adam Miller [01:21:42] Yeah, those are some of the fruits of the spirit.

John Dehlin [01:21:46] Well, we need the other verse that says it's a sinking feeling in your pit of your stomach. Well, we do have the Holy Ghost, too.

Adam Miller [01:21:55] We do have verses kind of like that. Right? We do have verses. You know, you pray about something, you can get your answer in terms of a sinking feeling. That's good doctrine, straight out of the Doctrine and Covenants.

John Dehlin [01:22:06] That's true. That's good. Okay. David Banach, you know David, right?

Adam Miller [01:22:12] Yeah. David's friend.

John Dehlin [01:22:14] It's no secret that the church is losing some of its young adults, sometimes due to negative information about the church, but also because in some sense, the church just doesn't fit or work or click with many in that cohort. It seems less relevant, even irrelevant to some. If you wrote letters to a young adult Mormon, how would you address that issue? What would you say to such a young adult Latter Day Saint?

Adam Miller [01:22:48] Well, I think my. This wouldn't be my full response, but at least my initial response might center on encouraging people to take responsibility for the degree to which their religious experience felt relevant to them. You know, there's a degree to which you and I bear responsibility for how relevant our religious experience seems and how relevant what happens at church is or isn't to us. A lot of that relevance, that feeling of relevance may in the end depend on whether or not people give themselves up to the work that the church is asking us to do. That's not the whole story. It's always a little more complicated than that. I think you and I have agreed on that before. But as a place to start, I'd encourage people out there to take responsibility for it. Take responsibility for what they understand the Scriptures to be saying. Take responsibility for how the church is or isn't relevant in their lives, see what they can't make of it.

John Dehlin [01:23:53] And one of the responses that's kind of burned into my brain from many listeners would be it always comes back to, you're doing it wrong, you know, and this is kind of the blame the victim kind of thing. Again, that there's some people that feel like they've really tried and it's just not working. It's just not resonating.

Adam Miller [01:24:14] I think that's totally possible. It may very well be the case that some people have tried to and it isn't working. And it may be the right thing to go. May be the right thing to go someplace else for a while, but that's not the place to start.

John Dehlin [01:24:32] I don't think leaving isn't the place to start.

Adam Miller [01:24:36] You're saying, yeah, I don't think so.

John Dehlin [01:24:39] Struggle. That's what Dan Witherspoon's always saying. Stay in the struggle. At least give it a fair shot.

Adam Miller [01:24:44] I think that's right.

John Dehlin [01:24:47] Okay, so I have no idea what this question means. Daniel Bride writes, I'm hoping that Adam hints about, quote, the Gospel according to David Foster Wallace or any info or eta. So what in the heck is this question saying?

Adam Miller [01:25:07] Do you know who David Foster Wallace is?

John Dehlin [01:25:09] I'll probably be embarrassing myself to say I don't. I'm sure Christine Hagland is rolling her eyes at me right now.

Adam Miller [01:25:15] Well, Christine, she tends to roll her eyes quite a bit. David Foster Wallace is a contemporary novelist. He passed away a few years ago. Novels and nonfiction essays and short stories. And he had a lot to say about the experience, the contemporary experience of addiction and boredom and our kind of non stop pursuit of entertainment and distraction. And the book that I finished writing last December that I'm trying to sell right now, find a publisher for is a book called the Gospel According to David Foster Wallace. In which I explore themes like boredom and addiction and our heedless pursuit of entertainment in the context of what it means to live a religious life. So there's no ETA on that book yet. I'm still trying to sell it and find a publisher, but the publishing industry is glacial. Even if things go as smoothly as possible, it'll probably be years before it sees the light of day.

John Dehlin [01:26:19] Right. I can relate to that.

Adam Miller [01:26:21] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:26:23] Katherine Dutton. That's a name that should sound familiar. I think she's in your ward because she writes. I don't have a question, but I'd just like to say that his lessons in Sunday school are the reason I go to church. Or at least the reason that I want to go. That's what Katharine says.

Adam Miller [01:26:41] That's very kind.

John Dehlin [01:26:42] So you teach Sunday school?

Adam Miller [01:26:44] I did until just a couple months ago.

John Dehlin [01:26:46] Okay, so now she's inactive.

Adam Miller [01:26:49] Yeah. I don't know. I don't know what her story is now. But she has to come to teachers quorum if she wants to hear me now.

John Dehlin [01:26:55] Okay. All right. Jamie Hannis Handy. She offered the first question. She writes your quote, which is, Boredom is a sign that the church is working. Boredom is an invitation to step outside the limit of what interests me and to instead continue practicing interest and attention to people and things that aren't about me. So boredom is a virtue. And she writes her question. So that was a quote from you in your Maxwell Institute. Ask the scholar. Q and A, I guess.

Adam Miller [01:27:32] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:27:33] And her question is, why does the church even need speakers or curriculum or activities or anything if we are supposed to come and be disinterested? I could just sit. I don't think that's what you're saying. But she says I could just sit in a room on a couch doing nothing and be bored. She's Missing the point, but I'm going to keep going. I suspect most of the world sits around bored. Plenty. But I don't see it lending itself to great spiritual awakenings. Okay, I probably didn't need to read that question, but I'll have you answer it anyway.

Boredom, Suffering, and Closing Reflections

Adam Miller [01:28:05] Well, I've spent a lot of time thinking about boredom, especially as I was writing the book about David Foster Wallace. And I've spent a lot of time thinking about boredom, too, in the context of contemplative practices, like something simple, like zazen in the Buddhist tradition, where you literally do just sit on a cushion and stare at a wall for hours and hours and hours. And it's, you know, it's really prompted me to think about what's going on in our experience of boredom and whether or not there might be something in general spiritually valuable about our intentional exposure to it. A lot of times when we're bored, it's only very much against our will. But if week after week after week, you choose to go back and be bored again, the intentional aspect of that experience, I think, can transform it. I think something really important happens in our experience of boredom, where, in your experience of boredom, boredom is a kind of door where you're brought right up to the limit of what interests you as a human being. Boredom is the very moment in which your interest in things starts to fail and starts to flag and starts to flounder. But in that moment, right in that moment when you've reached the limit of what interests you, it's an opportunity, it's an occasion to see if you can't cross over that boundary and pay attention to things that aren't about you and that don't interest you with respect to you, but that are about other people. And in this sense, I think boredom is perhaps especially insofar as boredom is ubiquitous in the 21st century. For first world people like us, boredom is an occasion for charity. It's a door that opens on to caring about something more than what is interesting to us.

John Dehlin [01:29:56] I like it. Okay, well, that I actually agree, and it's a big problem I have, so I like the call.

Adam Miller [01:30:10] It's a very human, very human problem.

John Dehlin [01:30:12] Yeah. Okay. So Chris Henriksen. I assume you know Chris.

Adam Miller [01:30:18] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:30:19] He says, I'm curious if Adam Miller might address the following. Faith is often framed as the opposite of doubt. I like how Adam frames faith as a relationship or loyalty with God. In what ways is certainty as much an opposite of faith as doubt? Hmm. What do you think about certainty?

Adam Miller [01:30:51] I think I would want to Contrast kind of passive certainty with active conviction and say that, you know, draw a clear line between those two things and note the ways that they're very different phenomenon. I think the gospel calls for us to be. To be actively convicted, to have conviction about key things, and to be compelled as a result of those convictions to do something about it. But I don't think that. I think Chris is right to point out the way that a kind of passive certainty about the way things are can often get in the way of active conviction and that those two things aren't necessarily good bedfellows.

John Dehlin [01:31:45] Right. So there's a danger in certainty.

Adam Miller [01:31:48] Yeah, there's a danger in certainty, especially insofar as we experience that certainty as kind of passive permission to. To not act

John Dehlin [01:32:02] or a perception that we have it all figured out.

Adam Miller [01:32:08] Right? Yeah. Because if you have it all figured out, then you don't have to do anything. You can sit back and relax. You crack the code.

John Dehlin [01:32:18] Well, even if you think you've got it all figured out, you can still serve know your fellow man. Right?

Adam Miller [01:32:23] Yeah. Though I think it's. It's a lot harder to do it because if you've got it all figured out, then every time you try to serve your fellow man, you're going to be that service will take the form of your trying to get them to fit the bill that you've figured out instead of bringing yourself to bear on. On who they are and what it is that they need from you.

John Dehlin [01:32:42] Right.

Adam Miller [01:32:43] You'll always be trying to get them to fit your story instead of bringing yourself to bear on their life.

John Dehlin [01:32:49] Right, right. So that's as it relates to other people.

Adam Miller [01:32:53] Yeah, that was true, I think, with respect to ourselves, too.

John Dehlin [01:32:56] Yeah, Right, right. All right. Aaron Brown is his typical self. He writes. Why do you write about unimportant things? Why don't you devote yourself to valiantly combating the gay menace like Ralph Hancock does?

Adam Miller [01:33:15] Yeah, I think we could probably skip that one.

John Dehlin [01:33:17] Okay. And Aaron's just joking, everyone. He's a funny and smart guy. All right, last question. Jason Dean Unsworth writes. I would like to hear a more full explanation on his thoughts on the question of suffering. He touches in this, in speculative grace, but I would like to hear it fleshed out more. Well, that's a pretty broad question. Your thoughts on suffering?

Adam Miller [01:33:43] Well, Speculative Grace is a book that I wrote that was published last year with an academic press. It's kind of a professional philosophical piece of writing that from a professional philosophical perspective, tries to say something about grace as an ordinary in this worldly phenomenon. But I talk a lot in that book about the way that grace and suffering are two sides of the same coin. Because grace, grace by definition, is something that is given to us that we didn't earn and didn't deserve and maybe even didn't want. And it's in those cases when we're being given something that we don't want. Right. That grace is something that we suffer to the degree that it's a gift, we are necessarily passive in relationship to it and suffer its imposition. So, I mean, a really easy example is something like. Something like your children, where your children are a kind of grace that's given to you, but still all the time they're imposing themselves on you in ways that you would prefer that they didn't. And they cause you different kinds of suffering, all the way from mild frustration and irritation, maybe even to kind of the kind of heartrending anguish some parents experience in terms of their relationships to their children. But their children are nonetheless a kind of gift kind of grace. But you can't. I think the thing to see about grace is that you can't untie the two from each other. You can't have one without the other. Bringing ourselves to respond with care and consecration to grace is always part and parcel of bringing ourselves to respond with care and consecration to suffering. They go hand in hand.

John Dehlin [01:35:48] Right? Right. Beautiful. All right, Adam Miller. Well, you've. We're probably at two and a half hours into this podcast, and I think. I think it's been really edifying for me. So those are the questions from the listeners, and I feel like we got a good way into starting to appreciate Letters to a Young Mormon published by my dear friends at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute. And I guess we could end. Is there anything you want to end with? You've probably heard enough Mormon stories to know that I like people to kind of bear their testimony at the end. Are there any parting thoughts you want to leave with people or just a testimony standard or unstandard? What would you like to end with?

Adam Miller [01:36:45] Well, I really appreciate the time that you spent talking to me. I think we did do a good job of covering really key points. I told myself when we started that as long as we finished up in half the time that you spent with Ralph Hancock, that it would be a kind of victory. I think we've met that mark. But let me just say that I know people's experiences vary in all different kinds of ways for all different kinds of reasons, but it is for me, without a doubt, true. The case that to the degree that I'm awake and alive and saved and tuned into Grace, that that has been a gift given to me in my life by my experience of Mormonism. And I hope that as many other people as can have that experience by way of Mormonism will find their way to it.

John Dehlin [01:37:50] Excellent. Beautiful. Well, thank you for your time, Adam Miller. I hope you don't feel like we shortchanged you, giving you half the time of Ralph Hancock.

Adam Miller [01:38:02] It was excellent. That's what I was hoping for.

John Dehlin [01:38:05] The book is Letters to a Young Mormon Rube Goldberg Machine. Is that what's the name of the other.

Adam Miller [01:38:11] Yeah, Rube Goldberg Machines, Essays in Mormon Theology.

John Dehlin [01:38:16] I hear that is an amazing book. That's what some people are saying. So buy lots of Adam Miller books. Adam, if people post to Mormon Stories, is there a chance you'll have a little bit of time to maybe respond to some of the more respectful comments that might be there?

Adam Miller [01:38:33] Yeah. Draw my attention to them when they show up, and I'll be happy to take a stab.

John Dehlin [01:38:37] All right, so join us@mormonstories.org for some questions for Adam. And again, thanks to all my listeners and supporters out there who helped me kind of keep putting food on the table and purchasing health insurance while I'm going through grad school. So thanks to all you who support and Adam, I've really loved it. And thank you so much for being willing to join us today.

Adam Miller [01:39:02] Thank you, John.

John Dehlin [01:39:03] All right, take care.

Adam Miller [01:39:24] Of. Come, come, ye saints. No toil nor labor fear, but with joy.

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