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Alison Udall [00:00:36] The kindly light amid encircling gloom

John Dehlin [00:00:43] Lead

Alison Udall [00:00:43] thou me on the night is dark.

Alison Udall's Background and Faith Journey

John Dehlin [00:00:49] Hello and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. The date is November 16, 2015. It is 2:37pm Mountain Time. I'm broadcasting to you from my basement here in North Logan, Utah, and I'm very excited to have with me Alison Udall. Alison is known throughout social media within Mormonism as being a very active and effective contributor and participator, but I think her biggest splash to date, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, Alison, is when she teamed with my friend Steve Holbrook and a few other friends to create a website that has become very important for progressive and post Mormons called Mormon Spectrum.

John Dehlin [00:01:39] You can find it on mormonspectrum.org and there's several cool things about the site that we'll get into. But probably the two most important things about Mormon Spectrum are number one, it sort of explicitly names and profiles various types of Mormons such that people can really start developing a vocabulary and an understanding of the fact that there are various types of Mormons and people can start to explore and understand their identities and their situations in life better.

John Dehlin [00:02:14] And so there are resources made available for people based on, you know, whether they're whatever type of Mormon they happen to be and we can talk about that. But the other thing that's really important about Mormon Spectrum and what I've seen as being the most impactful so far is that it puts up a map of in person, face to face sort of geographically based communities across the world such that if you are looking for local face to face support, you can go to Mormon Spectrum and find community.

John Dehlin [00:02:47] And for progressive and post Mormons, I think the value of community cannot be overstated. So this is actually going to be a joint release. I'm going to release this episode both through Mormon Stories and through Mormon Transitions Podcast because it's going to be important and valuable for both audiences. So with that, Alison Udall, welcome to Mormon Stories and Mormon transitions.

Alison Udall [00:03:16] Thanks so much. Yeah, thanks for having me.

John Dehlin [00:03:19] Our pleasure. So, so let's just start just hearing a bit about your background with the church and sort of the events that led to you wanting to get involved in online progressive post Mormonism.

Alison Udall [00:03:35] Sure. Let's see. I was actually, I was born in Germany. My dad worked for the service. He was in military intelligence. My dad was born in 1928 in Utah. So he had grown up in Utah and Idaho area.

Alison Udall [00:03:49] My mom was full blood German. Her parents are all, all her bloodlines German. And she had actually she was born in 41, 1941, and she joined the church in 61. So she was, she was 20 years old when she joined the church. She grew up in a Catholic family and the missionaries taught her the lessons after she was dating a Mormon boy.

Alison Udall [00:04:13] So they met in Germany and my dad majored at BYU in Germany and took this position. So I spent 12 years living over there in Germany in different parts of Germany growing up. So that was a little bit different for me because a lot of times online when you're interacting with people, most of them or many of them have grown up in much more predominant Mormon areas, or at least in the United States. And so sometimes when I share my experiences, they're a little bit unique because of the fact that I grew up in small little German branches and the only material that we had in those branches was what came from the church.

Alison Udall [00:04:56] So because we were over there, I didn't get to tend efy. We didn't have a Deseret bookstore. We didn't have those kinds of things. We would get on the duty train. When I lived in Berlin, before the wall came down, I would get on the duty train, go overnight to make it to the Frankfurt temple or the Frankfurt area so that you could meet and have conferences together. And you'd have large groups of youth that would come together and they would rent out like a hotel and they'd have a general authorities come. And that's how we would do our youth conferences. So when we did have them, they were kind of like bigger events because we had to come from such distance.

Alison Udall [00:05:39] So a lot of my friends were non members. But I think when I was 16, the only boy my age that I could have dated probably might have been my brother. So that didn't work out so well.

John Dehlin [00:05:52] That would be a problem even for Mormons. That's a problem.

Alison Udall [00:05:55] Yeah. When I was baptized at age 8, I was baptized in a German public swimming pool. So they closed the pool down and that's where I had my baptism. So, you know, that upbringing was. Was a little bit unique. Everything that I experienced was official, Official narrative from the church. My parents are very Orthodox, very conservative, Orthodox, traditional.

Alison Udall [00:06:24] And so growing up, I remember having some questions about things, but they kind of. My dad took just a very traditional approach to those. And. And, you know, that's kind of how my childhood went. When I reached about 14, I rebelled. And between 14 and 18, I was actually very inactive, which caused a lot of stress for my family.

Alison Udall [00:06:52] My brother at that time, I have an older brother who came out to me as being gay. That was a unique experience as a teenager, because he came to me to disclose that, and I was young. I had no experience, no understanding.

Alison Udall [00:07:07] And I actually think that I was the one that told my parents, thinking that that might be helpful, to let them know, which was a disaster. And my parents did not handle that well at all. Now, to their credit, my parents are really wonderful people. It's just that they're very. Believing traditional, and they very much are loyal and rely on the church. And at that time, if you could imagine, that would have been during the time period where the message regarding LGBT stuff would have been really harsh. And so that messaging came to my brother, and that was really hard.

Alison Udall [00:07:51] He spent a summer at a church pineapple farm in Hawaii, where it was not unusual to send kids that might be having problems. Having homosexual feelings was one of those considered. He went there and worked for a summer on that church pineapple farm.

John Dehlin [00:08:10] That's still there. People still send their gay and problem kids to that pineapple farm.

Alison Udall [00:08:16] And that experience for my brother was very traumatic. That's not a good experience. He was bullied. And. Yeah, so that was. Had always been LGBT issues, had always been something that had been close to me because of that, relate that issue with my brother and watching how my parents had navigated that, my parents pretty much took whatever the official church line was, and that's what they adopted with my brother. And they really felt, you know, at that time, the messaging was extremely strong, obviously, that it could be changed and that it was a choice, that it was not inherent, and that if he was just righteous enough and tried hard enough.

Alison Udall [00:09:02] And so he served a mission, he went to byu, he served a mission, he came back, and when he came back, he came to visit me, and he basically said, you know, I just think that the brethren are wrong on this. I just. I can't accept that they're right on this. And I got to the point where I'm just going to Accept myself and leave the church.

Alison Udall [00:09:25] And that was really traumatic because my parents did not know how to navigate that and wrote him a letter which was extremely hurtful and painful. And he basically lived in his car for a while and came extremely close to committing suicide.

John Dehlin [00:09:44] What year did he write that letter to your parents?

Alison Udall [00:09:47] I mean, that would have been in the 80s.

John Dehlin [00:09:49] Oh, wow. That's early. Yeah.

Alison Udall [00:09:51] And so he had been at BYU campus with the counseling there, where the messaging was not good and healthy towards students that were going through this.

John Dehlin [00:10:04] It's better now.

Alison Udall [00:10:06] It's much better now. But he was basically, he says, really. He credits not killing himself and being saved to a very unorthodox family that lived in California, where he was at the time. And this family took him in, and they were an active, believing family, just unorthodox and nuanced. And they loved him and accepted him and reached out to him, and they basically saved his life. And since then, he's gone on and he actually has been. He's married. He's married to a wonderful man. They've been together for almost 20 years now.

John Dehlin [00:10:44] Wow.

Alison Udall [00:10:45] And really happy and wonderful.

John Dehlin [00:10:46] That's cool.

Alison Udall [00:10:47] But that whole thing had really kind of attuned me to LGBT issues and kind of had always been in the back of my mind as I couldn't quite sort out. I couldn't quite figure it out through my teenage years when I was inactive, that really put a lot of pressure on my family. And my dad put in for us to be transferred back to the United States. He felt that that would be better and get me back on the path. So my 16th birthday, we moved from Berlin where we were living, and moved to a small Arizona town called Sierra Vista, kind of down by Nogales. There was a military intelligence school there, and my dad taught there. And that was a huge shock to have come from. Grown up in Germany and then moved to the desert out in the middle of nowhere. That was really hard for me.

Marriage, Family, and Shifting Beliefs

John Dehlin [00:11:45] You know, Nogales was in my mission. The last four months of my mission were in the Tempe, Arizona mission. And Nogales was part of that mission in 1990. And it was considered the whole. One of the holes of the mission.

Alison Udall [00:12:01] Yeah, that's kind of how I would have looked, too. And I'm sure Sierra Vist has grown quite a bit since then. But at the time, it was kind of like one long street called Fry Boulevard, just filled with fast food restaurants and there was nothing else to do.

John Dehlin [00:12:16] French Fry Boulevard. Yeah.

Alison Udall [00:12:18] So I got a job at McDonald's and I made the french fries while being in high school and tried to make that work. I ended up the end of my junior year, actually dropping out of high school. I dropped out of high school, did finish, and basically my parents and I decided I would go try to live with an uncle in Ogden, Utah, and see if that could kind of help me get my act together.

Alison Udall [00:12:50] And so it was kind of, you know, an interesting time of my life when things kind of. Because when I look at it now, what was interesting to me now when I look back is I really had not been given the skills to make healthy life decisions and choices. It had always been framed as just right or wrong and not so much how to give more context and background to why you make these kind of decisions. What are the implications? And so I just, I wasn't equipped with the skill set to handle some of the things that approach you when you, when, you know, leave the church as a teenager.

Alison Udall [00:13:35] And I made some poor choices and I hit rock bottom. And I called my dad, I had moved to Seattle and was living there, called my dad and said, dad, I'm ready to come home and I'm ready to figure out what I'm doing. And my dad was amazing and he rented a U Haul and he drove all the way from Arizona and he came and he got me and he brought me home to Sierra Vista. And that was the first time that my parents were able to actually start to talk to me a little openly and our relationship started to mend.

Alison Udall [00:14:13] And I think it's. I really, it was a wonderful time for me to be able to actually open up and share with them a little bit and have them not just tell me what, what was right and wrong and quote the brethren.

John Dehlin [00:14:28] So how many siblings did you have total?

Alison Udall [00:14:31] I. I have three other siblings.

John Dehlin [00:14:33] In addition to your brother or including your brother?

Alison Udall [00:14:35] My brother, yeah. So there's four of us. Totally.

John Dehlin [00:14:38] Okay, got it. Okay.

Alison Udall [00:14:39] And so I came back to Sierra Vista, decided to get kind of come back to the church I had. The thing is, when you're raised in the church, you know, you're told that when you leave the church, you're going to be miserable and you're going to make horrible decisions. And when you're caught kind of in that middle road, you have a lot of guilt about your decisions. And so I was ready to be done with that guilt. I was ready to have the support from my family again. You know, I was 17, living on my own. You know, I had been living in a trailer, working two Jobs to support myself. And so I was ready to come back, have parental support, have the church community support. I got my ged. I decided to apply to Arizona State University, and I got accepted.

John Dehlin [00:15:33] You're a Sun Devil?

Alison Udall [00:15:35] Yeah. So I went to asu, and in the process of doing that, also, I went through a church discipline corps at age 17. I just turned 18. Yeah. And when I went to my bishop and said I wanted to do the right thing and I wanted to come back, he felt that they needed a hold, a court. And so I was disfellowshipped officially.

Alison Udall [00:16:00] And I don't. I don't remember. I don't think. I mean, I definitely, because it was disfellowshipped meant I didn't have to go in. I didn't have to talk in front of anybody other than my bishop. I just had to talk through everything with my bishop, which was hard as a young woman to sit in the office with my bishop and talk through all of that and have him ask me specific questions. But I decided I was going to do it right. And so for six months, I reported to my bishop. We had conversations or emails, and I reported how I was doing, and I threw myself into the Arizona State University program there for the church, had and took classes, attended the ward, and tried to blend in.

Alison Udall [00:16:48] The hard part for me was, is that I wasn't a typical Mormon young woman. I had kind of wild hair, I had a wild car that I had graffitied, and I had never enjoyed doing homemaking stuff. You know, that was part of the problem for me was as a teenage girl, you know, they were going to teach you how to. How to cook or how to do something and put something in your hope chest. And I just thought that was boring. And I wanted to do the stuff that the boys were doing. And I couldn't figure out why we couldn't do more exciting things, why we had to prepare to get married when we were teenagers.

Alison Udall [00:17:25] And so that was a challenge for me at ASU to try to pull myself back into that more traditional box. And so it was a very interesting time for me, but I made really good friends. And I met my husband, Jordan, Jordan Udall. And he was just. Just returned from his mission in Japan.

Alison Udall [00:17:51] He's from a big family, extended family there in Arizona, a lot of Udall there. And his parents were wonderful. His dad had been stake president and a regional rep, and, you know, very well known in the church and just great people. And the first time that I was going to meet them, I was really concerned because I still had kind of a more wild hairdo and my car. And so I actually rented a sander and primed my car myself, painted it over and grew my hair out so that it wouldn't be quite. Quite as shocking as mother and father and tried to blend in the Udall family.

John Dehlin [00:18:41] There have been at least a few US Senators or members of the House of Representatives that come from the Udall clan. Is that right? Right.

Alison Udall [00:18:49] Yeah. They have some pretty well known politicians as well as well known in the church as far as serving in different callings too. So a well known family, but also Democrats.

John Dehlin [00:19:04] Right?

Alison Udall [00:19:05] Yeah. Well, and that it's funny to hear Jordan, he says kind of, you know, that was the other side of the family. So, you know, his dad, I think would say that in that regard they were quite different. You know, his dad was more definitely on the Republican conservative. And then you had, you know, Stuart Udall and Mo Udall and they were more on the Democrat side. And then you had, you know, Stuart Udall and some of those that weren't active any longer in the church, but the majority of Udall were very active.

John Dehlin [00:19:42] What about you with the Joe Udall, by the way?

Alison Udall [00:19:44] Oh, you did?

John Dehlin [00:19:45] Yeah.

Alison Udall [00:19:45] Okay. And so that was. I mean, you know, we had a very short courtship. Very short. When I think about it now, I think it's absolutely insane. But, you know, we dated three weeks and we got engaged.

John Dehlin [00:19:59] Whoa.

Alison Udall [00:20:00] And yeah.

John Dehlin [00:20:01] Yeah.

Alison Udall [00:20:02] And when we. And we got married in the Mesa Temple and that was wonderful. And he was finishing his bachelor's at Arizona State. Six months after we got married, we kind of had a surprise pregnancy. And so I kept working as long as I could. And then we had our first child and he was still finishing up.

Alison Udall [00:20:32] And three months after we had our first child, we ended up being pregnant again. And my father in law said, are you sure you guys know how this works? And so we did, but we just. Yeah. So we ended up having another baby and our son was born so, you know, about 11 and a half months apart, the first two.

Alison Udall [00:20:58] And he was born actually during the last finals that my husband had at ASU for his bachelor's. I didn't get to attend as a graduation because I was in the hospital. And about five days later we loaded the U haul and we moved to pro Utah so that he could start BYU law school.

Alison Udall [00:21:17] And so that was a really exciting time and a hard time because we had two little ones and Jordan was trying to navigate fatherhood and being a first year law student. But that was a great experience. We made good friends there. And when we graduated from there, we moved kind of all over the place.

Alison Udall [00:21:38] Probably the first 15 years of our marriage, we moved 12 times. Because during law school, you clerk at different places. And then after law school, Jordan decided to. He kind of got into law software at BYU with another fellow professor that was doing some things. And so he decided rather than going into a law firm, he would work for a publishing company, a legal publishing company. And so he.

Alison Udall [00:22:07] Yeah, okay. And so we. We moved. We moved to Colorado, we moved to Missouri, we moved to Massachusetts. We moved to. We just moved all around as he had these different consulting projects and things that he did. And it was great because we always had a ward to welcome us. We were very active and just a normal, traditional little family.

John Dehlin [00:22:35] Alison, real quick, I had you put the microphone a little bit too close to your mouth. Push it like five inches away from your mouth. I'm hearing your peas pop.

Alison Udall [00:22:45] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:22:46] It'll just be better audio. Sorry about that. It's my fault. It's my fault. Say Peter Piper picked a pick of pickled pepper pickup. Okay, so keep going.

Alison Udall [00:22:59] So let's see. So we moved. We moved all around. We got to Massachusetts. We had a third child by now, and we were not. We were very active, held callings and all different kinds of things. And we finally made it to Ohio. When we moved, we transferred, and Jordan was able to get a job with LexisNexis still in Ohio, and as a full time employee. And when we got to Ohio, we ended up staying there for 15 years. So it moved around a whole lot. And then we plopped down in Ohio, which was not a state we ever thought we would end up in.

Alison Udall [00:23:42] And that was a wonderful place to raise our family. The Midwest is a great area. And through that, the last few years, Jordan had been doing some homework, researching about how your brain works. And he was interested in what happened physiologically in your brain when you made decisions and you felt emotions. And. And he'd had some things that he wanted to change about himself that he was trying to understand. And that kind of fueled his interest in this studying. And he was reading a lot, and he had a day where he remembers distinctly that basically he came to this realization where he believed that the experiences that he had that were spiritual were actually physiological, that they were responses to his upbringing, the connections that had been made and forged through all of those various things that impact your brain.

Alison Udall [00:24:42] And when that realization came to him, it was as if everything on his shelf kind of Then he didn't know how to put it back up. He didn't feel that he could rely on spiritual experiences in order to discover those, because now he thought those were just physiological occurrences. And so he, for two years, tried to get that testimony back, tried to

John Dehlin [00:25:08] figure out what years would have this been.

Alison Udall [00:25:11] That would have been, I mean, in 2000, the early 2000s, 2000, 4, 5, 6, and now we had four children at the time. Our two oldest were in finishing up high school. Our oldest was going on to byu, Idaho. So she was there.

Alison Udall [00:25:31] And so this was a really big change. He came every week for two years with me and attended and was very open with our bishop about what he was experiencing and that he actually no longer believed that there even was a God, that he believed all churches were probably fine and good. He hadn't studied church history. He hadn't delved into any of that. It had just totally been this physiological thing. And so he felt like, you know, the Mormon Church is as good as any other church. And he came and supported me. But through that transition for him, the ward didn't not know quite how to navigate that.

Alison Udall [00:26:10] With Jordan, he had been the young men's president for five years, and so we'd been really heavily involved. And so now all of a sudden, he wasn't believing. He didn't disclose that and talk about that with other people. But the bishopric knew, and somehow, you know how those things happen in correlation meetings. And the word kind of got out and people began to really pull back from us. And we had been in that ward for 15 years where, you know, all of our social network were members and we did things together.

John Dehlin [00:26:43] This is Ohio still.

Alison Udall [00:26:44] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:26:45] Cleveland or Columbus or Cincinnati.

Alison Udall [00:26:47] Dayton.

John Dehlin [00:26:48] Dayton. Okay.

Alison Udall [00:26:49] Kind of the Dayton area. And they just didn't know how to navigate it. It was like all of a sudden there was this drastic change. And even though all he wanted to do was the same things we'd always done. Go out on our boat and go camping and hang out, they just felt uncomfortable. And so I was trying to go every week and make it work, and people were really pulling back, and that was super hard for us. And one Sunday in particular, I remember I reached out to them. I pulled everybody kind of in the overflow. After sacrament meeting was over, I pulled my closest friends all in there.

Alison Udall [00:27:30] There was a group of us, and I basically just poured out my heart and said, guys, you know, I'm trying so hard to make this to still come. And, you know, I'm trying to navigate this huge change with my husband and. And you guys are pulling back, and this is so painful to me. And please don't do that.

Alison Udall [00:27:47] It was very emotional. I made myself very vulnerable by expressing how much this was hurting me. And even so, after that, they just were not able to navigate it. We slowly just stopped getting invited to anything. We just became more and more isolated. And so every week I would go. And what began to happen was over the next couple years, I began to notice things that I hadn't noticed before, as when you're the traditional Mormon family and everything is fine and you're both holding callings and you're both active, I didn't notice some of the stuff. And now I was this woman who had a husband who had returned from a mission and now didn't believe wasn't coming.

Alison Udall [00:28:36] And suddenly I became acutely aware of people who didn't fit into that traditional box. So I would notice things in lessons and talks and comments that referred to feminists or people that didn't have children or single adults or people that. About comments and things about people that had left the church.

Alison Udall [00:28:58] There were things that just began to stand out to me that I just hadn't noticed, and they began to make me uncomfortable. And I noticed more and more kind of this us versus them thing and the way that the generalizations happened about people who stopped believing.

Alison Udall [00:29:16] And I had watched Jordan, you know, I knew how hard he had tried to regain that testimony. It had been extremely painful for him. And so I began to realize, wait, those generalizations don't fit. Fit everybody, because I know they don't fit him.

Alison Udall [00:29:30] And so more and more that just. I. I started noticing and Prop 8 happened during that time. I remember John and I talking about it and me trying to hold on to the arguments that the orthodox members were using and the church was using and trying to say, well, there's got to be something more to this. And, you know, there's got to be reasons. But having this kind of cognitive dissonance that began happening more and more for me.

Alison Udall [00:29:56] And that first two years of that transition from Jordan were really hard for us. You know, suddenly everything that you plan on as is like, drastically altered. You know, you find yourself, you're married to somebody that maybe you would not have even dated and married because you were a Mormon. And so it was almost as if we had to learn how to communicate all over again.

Alison Udall [00:30:21] And we had to learn how to find commonalities that were outside church, which was super hard. I had not realized how much of the messaging and a part of Our life was wrapped in this idea that we both thought the same things, and now that we didn't, it was like learning how to figure out how that was okay. It was okay that we were individual, that we didn't have to agree on the same things, and it was all right to respect each other. And Jordan was really, really great about not pushing me.

Alison Udall [00:30:55] He was totally supportive. He didn't bring things up, and he let me do all the things I wanted to do and was completely supportive of that and support of the kids. But every week was really hard for me. And it got harder and harder because as I got more isolated, I realized I was becoming more and more unorthodox, and some of my ideas were not meshing anymore. And I felt like I didn't fit in. Not only did I not fit in, but I started to disagree. And now we were completely alone. So we actually, that was one of the big reasons we decided to move to Montana.

Alison Udall [00:31:33] So in between now, we had my daughter at BYU Idaho. She got married in Idaho Falls. And I went in with her during her wedding, and the temple ceiling and Jordan sat outside. And that was really hard for us, but Jordan was really supportive. We tried to. We did a. Our daughter Jessica, was wonderful. She and her sister, soon to be husband, Jared, they agreed to do a beautiful ring ceremony. And so we really had a special ring ceremony afterwards where actually Jordan walked her down the aisle and we played music and he brought her to the front and they said beautiful things to each other and lit a candle.

Alison Udall [00:32:23] And so it was really special. But it was really hard. It was really hard. Hard for me to be in the temple without him, hard for my daughter, and hard for Jordan to be outside. So our son was on a mission.

Alison Udall [00:32:41] He went out on a mission to serve at Quebec. And Jordan wrote him and supported him and was really great about that. But during the time that he was out on his mission was the time that Jordan realized, I'm done. I've tried everything I can.

Alison Udall [00:32:58] This isn't working for me. I'm an atheist, and I just can't make this work anymore. I remember writing my son that on his mission and how hard that was for him to get that letter on his mission and try to figure out how to react to that while being a missionary.

Alison Udall [00:33:20] So we decided that it was ready. It's time for us to have a change. And luckily for us, Jordan had been traveling to Bozeman, Montana, as a product manager, and he was managing a product that was developed here. And our youngest daughter was about to graduate from high school. So I mean junior high. So it was between junior high and high school. Our third son was just about to graduate from high school and he was going to try a semester at byu.

Alison Udall [00:33:48] He got into BYU in Provo and he was not active anymore and really was non believing, but he thought, I'm going to give it a shot. I'm going to go there and I'm going to try for one semester and see if I actually believe.

Alison Udall [00:34:03] And so we put in for a transfer and we were able to move to Bozeman, Montana between that summer break, which was really awesome for us.

John Dehlin [00:34:09] What year was that?

Alison Udall [00:34:10] That was, gosh, four years ago. Four and a half years ago.

John Dehlin [00:34:15] Okay,

Alison Udall [00:34:19] 2011. So we got here and we thought, all right, the good thing about this is our ward will just know us as we are now. And that's what we were hoping. They won't know Jordan as a member. They won't have seen young men's president, they'll just know that we're a part member family.

John Dehlin [00:34:33] So he resigned. Did he resign?

Alison Udall [00:34:35] He did not. No, he had not resigned at that point because I had asked him not to.

John Dehlin [00:34:38] Okay.

Alison Udall [00:34:40] But you know, we thought, well, this will, this will be easier for everybody. And so we moved here. I got called to be the first counselor in the young women's presidency, began teaching the M A. I love the young women. I love youth.

Alison Udall [00:34:54] And we began going every week. And to our dismay, we realized that the messaging was the same. It wasn't wasn't just that it was our Ohio war, it was the church messaging. And it really didn't matter where you were, that we were still outside the box, we still didn't fit.

Alison Udall [00:35:19] Kim, my youngest daughter, would struggle at young women's because the lessons would mention, you know, a father with priesthood holder and you know, temple marriage and you know, how important it was to have parents that, you know, stayed and endured. And I was sitting through the same type of messaging. And basically it was every week this idea that marriage was a tragedy. It was viewed in tragic terms.

Alison Udall [00:35:44] Even though I had a fantastic husband and Kim would try to say, look, my dad's awesome. The messaging was that it was a tragedy. And more and more we realized we just agree with some things and they were uncomfortable. And I tried the next two years to try that again, just continue with that unorthodox route. Could I make thing work? Could I just pick and choose?

Alison Udall [00:36:13] Could I figure out how to fit in my ward even if I didn't agree with some things? And that got harder and harder. And in 2012, we had an interesting kind of experience where there was an Ensign article that was written by an anonymous writer.

Writing Publicly About a Spouse Leaving the Church

Alison Udall [00:36:31] And it was. I think it was entitled something like why He Left or something like that. I don't know why He Doesn't Believe anymore something. And it was written about a woman who was writing about her husband who had stopped believing. And I had several people reach out to me and ask me if I was the author. And Jordan had several of his family members reach out and ask him. And I hadn't read the article yet. So when I read it, was.

Alison Udall [00:36:57] Was really kind of dismayed because the article itself, the tone of it, and the way the wife felt about her husband was not all how I felt about Jordan. And so, because I had been asked several times, I felt like I needed to somehow let people know that, no, I did not write this. I put it on Facebook because, you know, that's what you do now. You put a status on Facebook. So I made a Facebook status, and I basically just said I just wanted people to know that I was not the author of this article. And actually, I don't feel that way about Jordan.

Alison Udall [00:37:34] I feel like that there are some things that you just have to go by on faith, that there are some things that we don't know. I don't think he's wrong, deceived, deluded, controlled by Satan, any of those things. I actually don't think that at all. I think he's done the best job he could in interpreting the information and coming to the best conclusion that works for him. And he feels the same about me. He doesn't feel undiluted or any of that. And so we have this mutual respect. And I was trying to explain on my Facebook post that we genuinely felt that way about each other and that we didn't view each other as being wrong because we felt like if we had that view, we wouldn't be able to have a healthy relationship, it wouldn't work for us.

Alison Udall [00:38:17] And so I kind of expressed myself like that, and somebody told my bishop about that post, and I got a visit from my bishop. And at that point, I had been giving myself permission to try to start pulling back. What I finally realized was, is that it was actually the start to really weigh on me emotionally and causing me distress. I was having a lot of headaches. I was taking so much ibuprofen for migraines and headaches. I just. It's like all the years of trying to make this work had just really added up, and I was Exhausted, I was tired.

Alison Udall [00:39:02] It was really starting to affect me. And so I had begun on some Sundays, not going and. And giving myself a break. And we would still take Kim because she wanted to go. And I did the Facebook post. I ended up having this meeting on my front porch with my bishop.

Alison Udall [00:39:18] And it kind of went like this, where he let me know that he was a little bit concerned about some of the things I'd expressed, which surprised me, because basically the gist of what I was expressing was support for my husband and I. Unconditional love for my husband. But some of the things that I had said concerned him, especially the idea of not knowing, not being able to know something, know, as in a Mormon term is, I know the church is true, or I know God lives.

Alison Udall [00:39:50] He felt like he was concerned that I was saying, you really couldn't know that. And I said, well, Bishop, I think that there are just some things in life that you can't know, like, does God exist? So if we take this basic disagreement that Jordan and I have, he doesn't believe in God anymore. And I still believe that there is something. There's a creator and a God. There's no way either of us can know that. And he said to me, and I had heard this argument before, but never in person, he basically said, allison, it really is like the law of gravity. And, you know, there are people that may choose not to believe the law of gravity, but it doesn't matter because the law of gravity exists.

Alison Udall [00:40:28] And I tried to say, you know, I don't think you could equate the law of gravity to a belief in God, but it was like we just didn't connect. And I said, I need to take a break from church. And he told me that if I loved God and Christ enough, I would continue to slog through and come. And I remember saying to him, honestly, I've been doing this now for how many years?

Alison Udall [00:40:55] And I think that if God is actually my father and he loves me and he cares about me, he knows how much effort I am making into this and making this work, that he will be okay with me to take a break.

Alison Udall [00:41:10] And so I decided I was. It was time for me to have a sabbatical, in essence. And during that sabbatical, my son had now returned home, obviously from a Sabbath mission. He was back at byu, Idaho, and he was dating somebody. And I knew full well that at some point he was going to fall in love and he would be getting married.

Alison Udall [00:41:32] And my temple recommend had expired. And I started thinking about those recommend Questions wondering whether I could actually answer them again. And so I remember the last three years that we had been kind of. I would come home from church and I would be crying and it would be hard for me. And every once in a while, Jordan would kind of quietly say, are you sure this is still working for you? And I would basically say, it has to, it has to work. I have to make this work.

Alison Udall [00:42:01] This being what I have to make the church work. I have to stay in the church. I have to. You know, I felt this. My parents were believing, my two oldest kids were believing. I had all these people that were now kind of viewing me as the strong one in the family and that I was going to kind of hold the family together as far as the church was concerned. So I just felt this enormous pressure to not have this thing fall apart. And so sometimes when I would think about reading something or trying to understand some of these things that would pop up on my shelf, I would literally make a conscious decision to avoid doing that because I was worried about what I might find because I had to make it work.

Alison Udall [00:42:46] And so after this discussion with the bishop, as I thought about my temple recommend, I just thought, you know what, I just can't continue doing this anymore. I'm basically, I'm killing myself. I've either got to be in the church or I've got to figure out why I wouldn't be in the church, because if it's actually true, then I have got to figure out how to make this work as a wife with a non believing husband, as someone who's unorthodox, as someone who doesn't understand lgbt, why the church has these views, why does the church have these views about gender roles? You know, all these things that were bothering me, I just realized, okay, to me it boiled down to if it's true, then I gotta, then I have to make it work.

Alison Udall [00:43:27] And if it's not true, then, wow, does that mean. And so decided I would basically approach it like I had always taught in my lessons, which was the basic of your testimony. Joseph Smith, the Restoration prophets, the Book of Mormon. Those were kind of the four big things for me. Okay, so let's go back to the beginning on those. And I gave myself permission finally to go outside of what was just on my bookshelves from Deseret Book. Uh oh, and I began, I began reading the Fair Mormon. I began reading online, I began interacting and asking questions.

Alison Udall [00:44:08] I wrote a guest blog post that went up on feminist Mormon housewives asking about the temple recommend questions, saying Here I'm work. You know, I'm struggling with these. How do you guys handle these as unorthodox, you know, feminists?

Alison Udall [00:44:24] And I began reading, and I began ordering books and books and books. And I tried really hard to, you know, I read B.H. roberts, and I read Givens, and I read. I read the whole gamut. I read everything I could get my hands on. And for nine months, I read and read and studied and asked questions, and it felt like I was drinking from a fire hose. And I didn't tell Jordan I was doing it because I didn't want him to get his hopes up or have any jump to any conclusion. I wanted it to be my decision with no impact by him.

Resigning from the Church and Finding Community

Alison Udall [00:45:01] And I didn't want anyone to say, well, he was the one. I wanted to figure it out for myself. And so he would see me at night reading, reading, reading, and he'd be like, wow, you are studying a lot.

Alison Udall [00:45:12] But we didn't talk too much about it for the first, probably six months. And then I began starting to share after six months of reading some of what I was learning and reading. And that's when he became exposed to some of those unofficial narratives and historical things, which were very surprising to him at that point.

Alison Udall [00:45:34] And nine months after I gave myself permission to do that, I realized I couldn't answer those temple recommendations. I just did not believe some of those basic truth claims anymore. And I was really totally at peace with that. I felt like I had really tried my hardest. And I viewed the church now kind of like a good organization filled with people trying to do good things, but not inherently more true than any other church, not with any divine authority or guidance that was spent special above any other church. And if I was going to look for churches, I realized there was too much about this church that just didn't work anymore.

Alison Udall [00:46:18] If I was going to be shopping for a church now, it wouldn't be the warm church. And so I knew that was going to be devastating to my older kids. But I reached out to them. I mean, they knew that I'd been coming unorthodox. They knew because we shared things and I shared my views. So they. They were worried about me.

Alison Udall [00:46:40] And it was hard for. Really hard for them, really hard for them to hear that their mom now had come to this place, too, as well as their dad. But I did that right before my son was going to get married. He got engaged.

Alison Udall [00:46:56] And so I told. This is when I told him, I can't come inside the temple. And this is why I Can't answer those questions honestly. And I could fake it and I could lie my way through it and get that recommend, but I would not feel good about myself in doing it because I don't believe them anymore.

Alison Udall [00:47:20] And that was hard for him to have his mom tell him she wasn't going to be in there. So we both sat outside for our son's wedding. And that was in August of 2013. And that fall, I resigned my membership and Jordan resigned as well. And the reason I resigned was because I really felt like I had watched what had happened with Jordan all those years when he didn't resign. Part of it was that I knew there was a sense of responsibility in the world for him. The bishopric brought him up.

Alison Udall [00:47:58] There were home teachers that were assigned. There were visiting teachers that were assigned. People felt responsible for us. And also the bishop periodically asked if it was okay to talk to Jordan because he felt like he was still his leader. I mean, according to church, he was still his leader. And I just felt like I didn't want that at all. I didn't want to. I did not want to have to monitor what I wrote on my Facebook. I did not want to be called and asked to meet with someone. It's something I wrote or something. I said I didn't want that responsibility. And I was ready to officially disconnect myself from some of the things that I felt were really harmful about the church. So we resigned in 2013.

John Dehlin [00:48:44] And that was before resigning was cool.

Alison Udall [00:48:47] Yeah, I know.

John Dehlin [00:48:48] I'm kidding. That was just a current events joke.

Alison Udall [00:48:55] And yeah. So then we began navigating that mixed faith situation. Two kids that are active temple married and two kids that now have left, and figuring out how to do that, which is super challenging in the church. The church doesn't give you material and help in doing that as parents and children when you're not all active members.

Alison Udall [00:49:18] And I became quite involved more and more online in the Facebook support groups. I began moderating for you for Mormon stories and just became more and more aware that my experience was shared by lots and lots of other people. And that as people became unorthodox, they felt just like I had. Felt like they were. Couldn't quite fit in.

Alison Udall [00:49:44] They wanted to still be there. They wanted to make it work, but they didn't know they didn't fit in. And they didn't, like often they felt quite excluded and isolated, even though they were still common on Sunday, that it was very lonely and isolating kind of an experience. Because as an unorthodox Mormon you don't feel often depending on your ward, that you can actually express yourself or share some of the. Those nuanced views without making people uncomfortable.

Alison Udall [00:50:09] And so you kind of feel like you have tape on your mouth a lot. And so it's really challenging to be unorthodox. And I noticed that more and more online, and I had experienced that myself. And then I noticed that as people left like I did, that there were also huge rippling consequences. They often lost their social networks, their friends, they lost their sense of community, and they also did not have places to help them gain some of the skills, the life skills, just like I had as a teenager. You know, I didn't have those skills. So now you've got adults leaving the church who haven't also don't have some of those skills.

Alison Udall [00:50:48] And some, you know, it's hard for people they don't like. You know, they want to know, how do I keep my kids ethical and moral? How do I. They have all the same questions that everybody has. It's just now you're trying to navigate away from the church and figure out how to do it.

Alison Udall [00:51:01] And so that was really much aware on my mind, and I wanted to be able to figure out how to get back. And the first kind of thing I got involved with was we decided to write an open letter to Thomas S. Monson and ask him some things. We didn't anticipate that he would read it or we'd ever get an answer, but we decided to write it. That was the Mormon open letter. And that was kind of the first big thing that we did.

Alison Udall [00:51:30] And we had a lot of people sign it and read it. And then as things went on, I got interacted more with you, and you invited me to come to a weekend together. And we brainstormed ideas and we were talking about things we could do to support people that were unorthodox or that were post Mormon leaving. And we talked about community. And you had asked me if I would bring an idea. And so meanwhile, Jordan and I, when we moved to Bozeman, had started a meetup group. That's how we figured out he would meet friends. And we'd started to just with the two of us.

Alison Udall [00:52:10] I put things on there and it was just us. And then pretty simple. Had joined and joined and joined. And we have, you know, over 1700 members in our group now. There's nothing to do with Mormonism, just entirely a social type of a thing outdoors. But I, as you asked me to share an idea, that was the idea that I thought, wow, I wonder if we could help people figure out how to make friends and find community by doing something like meetup, you know, some way to pull people together. And so I came to your little get together with that idea in mind and a little PowerPoint that I put together.

Alison Udall [00:52:48] And my suggestion and idea was, can we figure out a way to help build community? And while we were there, we all shared ideas, and that was great. And we kind of came back from that and we kind of started running with it. And I asked Steve Holbrook, who had also worked with me on the Mormon Open Letter, if he would be willing to help me with those communities.

Alison Udall [00:53:12] And so he said, you bet. And what I basically just started doing was posting in every Facebook group I could come up with. Hey, we want to help people start groups that will help them make friends, find support, build little group individual communities in their own areas where they live. Are you interested? Do you already belong to one? Can you tell me about it? And I created a little Facebook group, which I called the admin group. And I just started collecting those groups and finding them that were out there. These were just meetup comm groups that had to do with Mormonism, Facebook groups that had to do with Mormonism, stuff that had been out there all over the place.

Alison Udall [00:53:53] Nobody really had collected it into one directory. And we just started adding them one by one into this admin group. And I just kept telling them, hey, at some point we're going to publish all of your groups in some sort of a directory. But I didn't really know what that was going to look like or how that was going to happen. I just knew that, okay, we're building all these groups, we're finding all these groups, and somewhere we're going to host this directory.

Alison Udall [00:54:23] And as time went on, we realized it really wasn't a place to host it. We weren't sure where to put it. And so as part of our ideas, you had shared an idea of ultimately that you thought it would be really cool to have a website that had directories, resources, and things like that. But it hadn't been something that you had had time to do, hadn't been something that you had had the energy or time to do.

Creating the Mormon Spectrum Website

Alison Udall [00:54:51] And so I asked whether you would be okay if I actually ran with that idea. And you were awesome. You said, yeah, you know, go for it. I don't have time to do it. You know, make it happen.

Alison Udall [00:55:06] And so we just reached out, we pulled together people, few people that were willing to do it. And in one of the. What I needed was somebody that had tech skills, because that's what I don't have. I'm more than willing to work 200% at it, but I didn't know how to build a website.

Alison Udall [00:55:26] And so I reached out into the various groups saying, hey, I want a website and I need somebody who knows WordPress. And in that admin group happened to be. One of the admins in that group was an admin that was running a group in Colorado. His name was Jason Howard and he's

John Dehlin [00:55:48] appeared, by the way, with the. With Eldon Karchner and his family on a previous Mormon Stories podcast episode, but never as his own interview. But Jason and his family are great,

Alison Udall [00:56:00] and he was so great. And he, he said, you know, I'd be interested in that. And he and I had a phone call and I basically kind of shared some of my ideas on what I was kind of picturing in my head, kind of here's a picture in my head of how I'd like the website to work or things that would. I think we should keep in mind. And as we talked through those and he asked questions at the end of that call, he said, I'll do it, but I'm super busy. And he's. I mean, what he does is he builds websites, he has his own company, and this is what he does professionally.

Alison Udall [00:56:35] And he's built some really incredible websites for different organizations. And so he's extremely successful and busy. And he said, if I do this, it's got to be around that. So I can't have any kind of a time frame. If you want me to do it, you're going to have to kind of go on my time schedule.

Alison Udall [00:56:51] And that was completely understandable and also probably one of the most challenging aspects for us because I tend to be one of these people that when I get an idea, I want to run a thousand miles an hour at it. And of course, I could run a thousand miles an hour doing my part, but I couldn't actually build the thing. And so you.

John Dehlin [00:57:11] I just have to say, you are one of the most tenacious, hard working, committed people I know in the Mormon blogosphere. So.

Alison Udall [00:57:21] Well, I can be good and bad too. So. But so I just. We started in, you know, at the same time that I was still finding these Facebook groups, finding these meetup groups. We reached out to all the existing Mormon Stories groups and tried to find which ones were still active, which ones were still going. We just started, as we were doing that, I began building the content for the website And I had several people that were willing to kind of be more like an advisory board for me, which was really awesome.

Alison Udall [00:57:52] Those people are incredibly helpful to me. Carson Calderwood and Gwen Hutchings and Timothy Chow and Michael Nicolaissen. And there were enough people that were really wonderful, but they did not have the time to actually spend on it. So what happened was I would kind of throw out an idea in my little web team group, and I would say, hey, guys, what do you think about this? And they would give me their feedback, and then I would go and do it. And so what I began doing was I began compiling all of the resources that I felt would be important and what we mostly wanted. And we got your ideas, we had you on a phone call, we picked your brain about what you thought.

Alison Udall [00:58:37] And then I just kind of took off from there and ran with it and started building these resources and files. And what we wanted to do was we wanted it to be. We wanted the website to be user driven. That was really, really important to me, that the user came in to the website, they feel safe. Because we know within Mormon culture, looking at things outside of what you're ready to look at is very uncomfortable.

Alison Udall [00:59:04] And it's uncomfortable because the church messaging tells you it should be uncomfortable. And so what I wanted to do was support the three groups of people that were most dear to my heart that I cared about the most.

Alison Udall [00:59:18] We had to come up with kind of umbrellas then of how to separate those groups on the website so that we could put content in each of those groups and the user would be able to decide which content they wanted to go into. And that was challenging because, you know, you had to kind of create these generic, huge umbrellas. And so and you had to come up with names for them. And, you know, all of that stuff is challenging to come up with a term or a name that's not going to make someone uncomfortable.

Alison Udall [00:59:46] And so I would post my ideas about the name names or the words in different Facebook groups in the A thoughtful faith group exploring sainthood group, post Mormon groups. And I would try to throw the words out and ask for feedback. Okay, tell me how you think about this. Would these be the words that describe you guys in this area?

Alison Udall [01:00:08] And the words we came up with were those, you know, we decided to break them down. We have, when you enter the website, that home, when you first pull it up, it's got that home page. And on the left side, there's this navigation. And if you already know exactly where you want to navigate to, you can select right from that left side navigation. If you don't, you'll see three little boxes that kind of give a brief description that help you maybe identify into a particular area. Because sometimes people won't know how to identify themselves. Am I unorthodox? Am I post Mormon? Am I?

Alison Udall [01:00:42] And so this way people select into the area of the website that they want to do and that's the content they see. They don't have to see the content that they don't want to see. And so we just, I spent a lot of time, a lot of time finding all these links, finding all these resources, putting them into word documents for Jason so that he could begin taking them and plopping them into the actual website design.

Alison Udall [01:01:11] And we kind of set ourselves up for a goal that we wanted to release at Sunstone. That was kind of our goal to be done so that we could be there. We wanted to get a table and we wanted to be able to display it and actually showcase it@Sunstone 2015. 2015.

Alison Udall [01:01:29] So I mean, you know, we worked, you know, six months, six months of working on it solidly and it was probably full time for me. Six months of working on it.

John Dehlin [01:01:42] Wow, that's a lot of work.

Alison Udall [01:01:44] It was a lot of work. But I loved. It was super exciting for me. It was exciting to be finding all the resources and plopping them into these files for him and then kind of waiting anxiously to get a peek from Jason on how it was actually going to look. And he would ask me questions on, all right, what do you think about this? Or he would show something and I could give him feedback like that, or that looks good. But really, when we went live at Sunstone, we did not have much of the content that's in there now in there. It was very basic, it was very bare bones because that's what he was able to accomplish at that point. But it was really a great reception by then to open it at Sunstone. People that came by the table and looked at it, they loved it.

John Dehlin [01:02:36] And you had a banner and T shirts and a display and you know,

Alison Udall [01:02:42] it was really interesting as that. Six months of working on it. There was a number of things that happened online, you know, that sometimes made me decide, what am I doing? I'm raisy, I've lost my mind. I should just give up on this project.

Challenges and Reception of Mormon Spectrum

Alison Udall [01:02:57] One was, which was interesting, I got pushback from all of the areas, it wasn't just one. So I got pushback from the post Mormon groups and big name supporters because they weren't sure they wanted to support a website and be involved with a website that would also be encouraging unorthodox and nuanced name members and supporting them when they wanted to stay in the church. That felt uncomfortable to them. I got pushback from the progressive, nuanced, unorthodox members because they weren't sure they wanted to be involved with a website that would be all right and support people that decided to leave the church.

Alison Udall [01:03:36] And what I began to realize was, wow, I was trying to do something that had really not been done before on one website. You know, we've got a lot of supporting material out there. We've got a lot of websites that are so awesome out there, but they typically are for a just a particular part of the spectrum. They're not for the whole spectrum. And so you've got the unorthodox areas, you've got post areas and they don't really blend very often.

Alison Udall [01:04:02] And so what I was trying to do was actually show in one website that we really can support everybody no matter what they decide that the first umbrella was that exploring Mormon. This for us was the Mormon that was just beginning to explore outside of the official church narratives and material. And then you had the unorthodox sections and then you had the post sections. And I was trying to show, come on guys, we really can do this. Like online in the progressive, nuanced areas we always hear this, let's support everybody and they're just their choices, let's support. Well, let's actually do it then. And what I didn't anticipate was the pushback.

Alison Udall [01:04:41] I didn't anticipate that. I thought especially online where we're more open minded in big tent. I thought people would truly be all right with a website that was big tent. And there was actually significant pushback from all sides.

Alison Udall [01:04:58] And there were times where I thought maybe I was trying to do something that was really crazy and that I wasn't going to be able to get anybody's support. And part of that was, you know, that I realized also fairly early on that if I actually was going to have any shot of having across the board support, it had to be done by no big named person. It needed to not be associated with any particular part on that spectrum. Because if a well named person, person like you for instance, or John Larsen or somebody that's really, well, big actually was behind it and heavily involved in it, I worried that it would just not get this widespread acceptance.

Alison Udall [01:05:45] And so I pulled that back and basically said we need to do this completely on kind of a neutral area. And I had to keep explaining that over and over to people because people, well, who's behind it? Well, who's doing it? Well, it's me. It's me and Steve Holbrooke and Jason Howard. Well, who are you guys?

Alison Udall [01:06:08] We're nobodies. And that's exactly what needs to happen. I mean, we don't have any big names. We're not well known at all. That's exactly. Kind of. I felt who needed to do something like this? And people asked, well, who funded it?

Alison Udall [01:06:21] Nobody funded it. We funded it. We didn't take donations. And like, wait, wait, how could you do this? It really was just a completely grassroots effort. There was no fundraising, there was no donor. There was no big names involved. You know, we went to you in the beginning and you gave us your ideas, and then you were hands off. The same was with all of the different groups. Everybody was waiting to see what would happen.

John Dehlin [01:06:50] So.

Alison Udall [01:06:50] And I think that. That I feel really good about that decision. I feel like that was really important in order for it to be neutral. And I think that once people saw the website and saw that it actually was across the board like that, I think that helped them be more supportive of it. But it was definitely a challenge to work our way through that. And since Sunstone, I was able to use Jason's templates and do crash course on WordPress. And I've actually added all of the content since we first went live. So I've built all of the additional pages and I've added all of the additional content that's been added since then, because I could just copy his initial page template and build on that and change it and adapt it, which was really wonderful because he's been too busy to help since then.

John Dehlin [01:07:49] That's awesome.

Alison Udall [01:07:50] Yeah. And here we are.

John Dehlin [01:07:55] Okay. Okay. So what I'm going to do, I wanted to have this interview be in two parts. So this is a little over an hour. It's a great sort of treatment of your history and the history of Mormon spectrum. So I'm gonna. What I'm gonna do is have you kind of wrap up and just kind of close out this interview as being about your story. And then I want to come back just as, you know, maybe a briefer interview, but in the next interview, sort of just have it be totally focused on. Someone wants to learn for the first time what Mormon spectrum is and what these communities are about and how they get involved. And it won't be about the history. It'll be Just about how to use it. Does that make sense?

Alison Udall [01:08:39] Perfect.

Closing Reflections and Lessons Learned

John Dehlin [01:08:40] So just really quick to close this interview. You know, you probably know that with Mormon stories, we often end by people sharing something they've learned or something they feel or kind of their uncorrelated testimony. You've shared with us a lot how you were raised in Germany, how you were inactive for a long time, how you kind of became reactivated, married in the temple, and eventually had your husband fall away and then had a part member family, and now you're both out, and then you've done this online activism. If you wanted to sort of make a conclusion to this interview of whatever you would want to share with the audience from all those experiences, and that's a lot to cover, how would you end this part of the interview?

Alison Udall [01:09:29] I think I'd probably say that I hope people, if they do listen to this, I hope that they can tell that I genuinely care about people in all of those different situations and that I understand and recognize from personally being through those, how hard and difficult and painful those are. And I want people to know that there are other people that are out there, support them and love them and that understand them. And also that it's okay to follow your instincts, that it's really hard and fearful to trust yourself, especially when you start to trust yourself and you're going outside the messaging that you've always been raised with.

Alison Udall [01:10:13] There's so much fear involved in that. But there's also, when you allow yourself to do that, oh my gosh, it's really wonderful and it's liberating. And you understand that you can make decisions and you are capable of sorting through this and whatever the outcome is, whatever you choose to do, whether it's to remain then as a more progressive, aware, historically aware member, because you find value in community and spiritual benefits to it. That's wonderful. And if you don't, that's okay, too. And that's wonderful that really everybody doing this and all these online groups and all this interaction that we do with each other, I really genuinely believe that people are just trying to figure it out and that people are trying to live with integrity.

Alison Udall [01:11:03] And that's what I'm trying to do. And that's what I've tried to share with my family and my kids that do believe all those things that I taught them, I still believe are important and being honest and hardworking and. And seeking out the stuff that works for you, and that I'm trying to live my life with integrity just like they are. And I think that we can learn how to respect each other's differences.

Alison Udall [01:11:27] I wish that we got that messaging more from the church itself, but I think we can help each other with it. And I am an honest believer in the fact that we can be big tent. And in my big tent, I would include post Mormonism, that it's, we're all in there, we've got this connection of the church together that kind of binds us all together. And we're all just trying to live our life the best we can.

John Dehlin [01:11:54] How about real quickly, that was very nice. What about how's it been to sort of be involved in a project and trying to make a difference? What's that been like for you? And what would you tell others in terms of. Terms of that experience of just trying to make a difference in tangible ways through some sort of project?

Alison Udall [01:12:16] I mean, for me, it's been wonderful. You know, you hear that I grew up, I grew up frequently hearing my dad use that phrase. You know, when people leave the church, they can't leave it alone. And he used it in a sense of kind of that it supposedly meant that the church. Church was actually true because c, people can't leave it alone when they leave. And I have had repeatedly people ask me, I don't understand, why are you doing this? Why do you even care? If you don't believe it, why are you spending so much energy at it?

Alison Udall [01:12:49] And I would say it's not all the same for all of us. We all have our own stages that we work through with this. For me, as part of my stages of working through it, I reached out online and became quite involved and there were people that reached out and supported me and I saw this need and I feel like we can make a difference.

Alison Udall [01:13:16] And when people say, why can't you leave it alone? And why would you do this? Alison, as a post Mormon, why can't you just walk away? Mormonism is still part of me. I'm not embarrassed at all to. To let people know that I was raised Mormon, that I was married in the temple, that I raised my kids. For the first 20 something years of my marriage in the church. It was a part of my life. It's a part of me.

Alison Udall [01:13:43] So I don't have to let that part go. Just because I don't believe that part doesn't mean I have to let all my Mormon cultural heritage go. It still is important to me and especially important because I have active believing kids and now two grandkids and a third one on the way.

Alison Udall [01:13:58] They're going to be a part of the church. I want the church to be healthier environment for them. For the unorthodox members that are staying, I want it to be healthier for them. And so if I can help and give back and be involved in projects that can make that happen, that's awesome. Why wouldn't I want to do that? Why wouldn't I want to give back?

Alison Udall [01:14:20] Because it's a win win for me. I am serving in a way that brings me a personal sense of fulfillment and I'm helping other people. And, you know, not everybody wants to do that and needs to do that, but for those of us who have the opportunity to do that, it's really awesome.

Alison Udall [01:14:39] We can help each other quite a bit. And I saw something the other day in Mormon Stories on a thread in the Facebook group, and the guy said, I don't try to get people to leave the church and I don't.

Alison Udall [01:14:55] What I try to do is be supportive of everybody. And he used the term pro post Mormon, which I liked a lot. I would say definitely, if I'm honest, I'm pro post Mormon. I mean, I think post Mormonism is awesome and it's wonderful and I am happy and it's worked for me. But I'm also pro whatever works for you. So, you know, I think being involved and helping each other find support is hugely valuable.

John Dehlin [01:15:27] Well, you've made a huge contribution to Mormonism, so congratulations. Hats off to you and Mormon Spectrum and the whole Mormon Spectrum team.

Alison Udall [01:15:38] Thanks, John.

John Dehlin [01:15:39] All right, so we'll come back next episode and do sort of a treatment just for the Mormon Transitions people, and it'll just be about Mormon Spectrum. Does that sound all right?

Alison Udall [01:15:50] Yep, sounds good.

John Dehlin [01:15:51] All right, thanks, Alison Udall and Mormon Stories listeners, thanks for joining us. Thanks for your support. Please join us@mormonstories.org if you want to ask Alison questions. If you have feedback or thoughts, we just are grateful for your support and participation. We hope to see some of you online. All right, Alison, we'll talk to you in a sec.

Alison Udall [01:16:09] Okay, bye.

John Dehlin [01:16:10] All right, Thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org music for this episode was provided by the Lower Lights.

Alison Udall [01:16:33] Cease to make me whole

John Dehlin [01:16:40] when with

Alison Udall [01:16:42] a wounded heart, anger or malice I

John Dehlin [01:16:52] draw myself apart Searching my soul.

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