Welcome Back and Episode Introduction

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. We are in the middle of an out of another epic Mormon Stories podcast series. We are in the middle of interviewing Jim Bennett, author of A Faithful Response to the CES Letter. As many of you know, I'm sure Jeremy Runnels several years ago published a PDF of his letter to a CES director where he articulates many questions and concerns with the LDS Church, with its history, with its doctrines, with its teachings and policies. And I think it's fair to say, I think that was released in 2014. I think it's fair to say that many, many, many Mormon testimonies have been jeopardized and, or have been lost as a result of reading Jeremy Runnels CES letter. I don't think that's Jeremy's fault, but that's kind of been the result. And so a few years ago, Jim Bennett emerged onto the scene. He is the son of former Utah Senator Bob Bennett, and he wrote A faithful Response to Jeremy Runnels CES Letter. It's been published. And of course, I've mentioned before that Jim was on Bill Real's podcast. Did like 14 hours with Bill Real, and I really wanted to have Jim on. So we've done two segments so far. Part one, we talked about Jim's upbringing in the church, how he questioned his faith after hearing about the movie the God Makers. And then we talked about how Jim became, I don't want to say an apologist. I don't know if you like that term or not, but how he ended up writing that response. And then we talked about, in part one, believing in God after a Mormon faith crisis, believing in Jesus after a Mormon faith crisis. And, and then we dug a lot into the role of prophets in the Mormon Church and this claim that the Mormon Church is the one true church. So that was part one. Part two, we then really dug into Joseph Smith first vision. We talked about the, the Book of Mormon, the Book of Abraham, Mormon scripture, what it means to be Mormon scripture, things like that, Kinderhook plates. And that's part two. Part three. Today we're going to be talking about what I'm calling more social issues. We're going to be talking about Joseph Smith's polygamy. We'll talk about the, the temple ceremony, the Masonic Lodge. And then we're going to dig into the kind of the classic racism, feminism, and, you know, women in the priesthood and LGBTQ issues, homophobia. That's, that's mostly what we're going to cover today. We may talk a bit about how the church handles sexuality and, you know, mass porn and masturbation and one on one interviews. If we have time. We'll get to all that stuff and it's handling of abuse and then what we're going to do. I'm super happy to announce that Jim is willing to come back for a part four, because I put out a call this morning on Facebook and on Twitter for all the questions any of you have about Jim, and I got dozens and dozens of really good questions. So we're going to actually have Jim back for a fourth part at least. I don't know if we're going to reach 14 hours like we did with Bill Real, but we love Bill and RFM and as well.

Jim Bennett [00:03:32] But we didn't set out to do 14 hours with Bill. It just kind of snowballed, so kind

John Dehlin [00:03:37] of worked out that way.

Jim Bennett [00:03:38] Well, we'll.

John Dehlin [00:03:39] Jim Bennett, welcome back to Mormon Stories podcast.

Jim Bennett [00:03:41] Thrilled to be back.

John Dehlin [00:03:42] Yeah, I feel bad that we hadn't. It would be, it would have been fun to have released the first couple parts and then hear your response. I guess we'll get that for part four.

Jim Bennett [00:03:52] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:03:52] We all hope to. I hope to Release all parts 1 and 3 before I bring you on. And that way you can also have a chance to respond to any of the comments or criticisms. And by the way, a lot of people are giving you kudos both for coming on Bill Real's podcast and for coming on mine. So again, thank you for engaging in such a respectful and a thoughtful way and for doing what so many aren't willing to do, which is just to have direct heart to heart, mind to mind conversations. It's great to have you back.

Jim Bennett [00:04:25] Well, appreciate the opportunity. Thank you very much.

Joseph Smith and Polygamy Overview

John Dehlin [00:04:29] Okay, so I think we ought to start with polygamy.

Jim Bennett [00:04:33] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:04:34] And there's so many softballs then. Yeah.

Jim Bennett [00:04:38] Diving right in. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:04:39] Well, I mean, polygamy is probably one of the biggest shelf items for so many people or reasons that they leave. I can, I can jump into the questions, but do you want to just start with kind of your. An overview of your stance on Joseph Smith's polygamy, or do you want me to start with questions?

Jim Bennett [00:04:57] No, I think an overview might be helpful just because I don't know anybody in or out of the church who isn't at least somewhat troubled by polygamy, by the history of polygamy. It's, it's messy. There's no way to get around that. And I think if you are comfortable with it entirely, I don't think you've necessarily thought about it much. It's very interesting because I'm coming at it. I try to put it in the perspective of my own personal experience. I'm not a polygamist. I guess that's the wrong way to put it. But my family experience, my family legacy, my grandmother, my paternal grandmother, is the youngest daughter of Heber J. Grant. Heber J. Grant had three wives, and the church downplayed that quite a bit because two of them died before he became president of the church. And I remember my grandfather telling me the story of writing a letter to the improvement era because there had been a church statement that talked about President Grant and his wife. And he said, you have made my wife illegitimate. You have erased her because you refused to acknowledge that President Grant was married to my wife's mother as well. And, you know, they tell stories of Heber J. Grant's experience with polygamy. And Truman Madsen, who is my grandmother's niece, she's my. He was my father's first cousin, would read these letters that Heber J. Grant would write to his wives and said to my grandmother, you need to publish these, because these demonstrate that plural marriage works. And these show a great example to the church of a model for how plural marriage wasn't the terrible thing that people think it was. And my grandmother called Spencer W. Kimball at the time, who was president of the church, and he showed up on her doorstep and said, you are under no obligation at all to publish these, because we have polygamy in our family, too, and it's not as attractive as the thing that's being described here with President Grant. So the legacy of polygamy will always be with us. And as I look at it, the challenge, particularly when you start talking about Joseph Smith's polygamy, is that the contemporaneous documentation of what was happening in Nauvoo is really quite scanty. What we know most about polygamy comes from the Temple Lot case long after Joseph Smith was dead and the then reorganized church, now Community of Christ. But the reorganized church went to interview people in Utah trying to prove that Joseph Smith had never practiced polygamy. And they start interviewing the women who were married to Joseph Smith who make it very clear, no, Joseph Smith did practice polygamy, and no, it wasn't completely asexual. He was married to these women, although in many instances, sex was not necessarily part of the equation. So when you look at polygamy, if You. If you are eager to see Joseph Smith using polygamy as a license for sexual adventurism, you can write that narrative. I don't think that's the only narrative, or even the correct narrative of what was going on. And I say that I want to be very clear that polygamy's. Polygamy is probably one of the most difficult things for me to deal with, because it is messy. It is difficult. It's impossible to deny that Joseph Smith did several things that are not just wrong, but deeply disturbing, particularly with regard to. How he dealt with polygamy and plural marriage with his wife Emma. Uh, it's clear that there are several instances where he's not honest with her. Now, at the same time, the extent of that dishonesty and the idea that he completely lied to her all the way through, I don't think the historical record supports that either. And so I think very often when we start talking about the relationship between Joseph and Emma and how honest Joseph was with Emma, we are treading into an area where we just don't know a lot of stuff. And so I want to give Joseph the benefit of more doubt than I think a lot of critics are willing to give him. But I'm not willing to say, oh, no, Joseph was completely above board all the way around on this.

John Dehlin [00:09:55] That's reasonable.

Jim Bennett [00:09:56] And so the other thing is that when people talk about polygamy, and Jeremy gets into this in the CES letter quite a bit, the idea that Joseph was lying to the public about polygamy, I think, needs to be qualified by a better understanding of the context of how those statements were made, because those statements are certainly misleading, but they are also saying something different than I think a lot of modern readers are interpreting. For instance, the affidavits that Joseph Smith had some of his plural wives sign condemning John C. Bennett's spiritual wifery are predicated on the idea that what John C. Bennett was doing. And I'm not related to John C. Bennett, by the way, just want to make sure I throw that out there. Although my great grandfather was John F. Bennett. Different guy, different middle initial. But John C. Bennett was practicing what he called spiritual wifery, where he would approach a married woman and say, we are now spiritually married, and therefore we can have sexual relationships and it's not adultery, and that's just fine. And Joseph Smith saw plural marriage as something vastly different from that. And so when you read these affidavits condemning John C. Bennett, a lot of modern readers look at that and say, joseph is Lying. He's saying he's not a polygamist. And I look at that and saying, well, Joseph is. Richard Bushman describes these as carefully worded statements. Joseph is denying that he is practicing John C. Bennett's spiritual wifery. Now, is he also all but explicitly saying that he's not practicing plural marriage, too? Yes, he is. I mean, yes, there's no way to say that that's not misleading. But the fact that Joseph is sort of wrestling with this idea and trying to be honest to a degree, I think, speaks to the fact that Joseph, in sincerity, believed this was a religious principle.

John Dehlin [00:12:00] Sure.

Jim Bennett [00:12:01] And I look at how polygamy was practiced in my family by my ancestors, and certainly they believed they were practicing a religious principle. They did not see this as a license for sexual adventurism. My great grandmother, who was married to Heber J. Grant, Heber J. Grant proposed to her when he was not married to anybody else. And she said, no, you're going places in the church. If I marry you, you're going to end up having to be married to somebody else. And I don't want to be involved in polygamy. And she later on started dating somebody and fell in love. But he said, I'm going to convert you to the idea that polygamy is a true principle. And she says, well, if you do that, then I'm just going to go and marry Heber J. Grant. Which is what she eventually did. She was converted to the idea that polygamy was a godly princ. And she went back to Heber Grant and said, I want to get married. So if it's okay.

John Dehlin [00:12:57] Is it okay if we. Let me take you back just in the chronology a bit, and we'll kind of follow the chronology a tiny bit. Is that all right?

Jim Bennett [00:13:04] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:13:04] But I love that context. That's super important. So I was always told, and I'm not always sharp on the history, but there's this story of them breaking into Joseph Smith's cabin and pulling him out into the street. I think it might be the Johnson brothers, but they try and, like, start and feather. They tar and feather him, or they try and, you know, pour some poison down his throat and they chip his tooth and someone, a doctor's there to castrate him. Like, there's the. There's. You know, that story comes from early in Joseph Smith's marriage. I think it's from the Kirtland time period. And I was always told that story of, like, oh, the. You know, the Satan works really hard to defend God's true church and Satan. You know, you know, evil people want to destroy Joseph and his truth. And when you, when you read the details behind that story, you get the sense that there were allegations very early on. And I think Grant Palmer makes this claim. And I even did an interview with Grant Palmer late in his life where he makes this claim that there was evidence of Joseph Smith's sexual impropriety, you know, even before Fanny Alger in 1830. 1835. And so I want to start with that. Do you allow for the possibility that Joseph Smith just had a really strong libido and that maybe he just, he started off with this template of like many charismatic, kind of type A alpha male personalities where he always had to fight off the urgent to, to sexually explore with, with other women. Is that something as a foundation that you allow for as a real possibility or do you even think that is true?

Jim Bennett [00:14:54] Well, those are two different questions because I don't answer both because I don't think it's true. I mean, I mean, never, never, never.

John Dehlin [00:15:01] You don't think, well, that's not how you see Joseph.

Jim Bennett [00:15:04] That's not how I see Joseph. I can allow for the possibility. I can certainly allow for the possibility, if that makes sense. And this goes back to what I was saying with regard to you can look at Joseph Smith's life and apply that template to it and use that to explain polygamy. The thing is, we don't have conclusive evidence one way or the other.

John Dehlin [00:15:30] You don't think there's enough evidence?

Jim Bennett [00:15:31] I don't think. There's certainly not enough evidence to show that he was philandering prior to Fanny Alger in 1835. Okay, okay. You can say there were rumors or you can say this, that and the other.

John Dehlin [00:15:41] Are you familiar with that, that incidence that I'm talking about where, where they brought someone to castrate him and.

Jim Bennett [00:15:47] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:15:47] And that there were allegations that he had made untoward sexual advances to one of the, yeah. Miranda Hyde or one of the Johnson sisters or whatever.

Jim Bennett [00:15:55] I, I, I don't know the specifics enough to be. You're not, but I'm familiar with, with, I, I, I had the same primary stories you did about Joseph Smith.

John Dehlin [00:16:03] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [00:16:03] You know, and there, there were instances, you know, the tar and feathering instance, I don't think had anything to do with accusations of sexual impropriety. But I could be wrong on that too. I don't know.

The Fanny Alger Affair and Early Plural Marriage

John Dehlin [00:16:15] Okay, so, so getting 1835 and Phineas, there are several problems with, you know, the, even the church lists Fanny Alger as Joseph Smith's first plural wife.

Jim Bennett [00:16:27] Right.

John Dehlin [00:16:29] And I think Richard Bushman, everyone, every Brian Hale, everyone acknowledges Fanny Alger is the first. And, you know, there. There are several problems with that. Number one is Joseph hadn't yet received the sealing power, the power to seal anything, you know, man, woman, families. So there's no ceiling power yet by 1835. And then he had not received the. The polygamy revelation. DNC132, because that happened in Nauvoo much later. So there was no. No revelation yet. There was no authority yet. And then when you add to that, she's like domestic help. When you add to that Oliver Cowdery, who's in the First Presidency, called Joseph Smith's sexual relations with Fanny Alger a dirty, nasty affair. And then Joseph, you know, excommunicated or, you know, punished Oliver Cowdery for. For confronting him on that, that Emma didn't know. You know, the Fanny Alger event looks by all accounts as just an extramarital affair that Joseph then retrofits polygamy onto much later. And when even a member of the First Presidency is calling it, you know, and again, we're going to say believe Oliver Cowdery's witness to the Book of Mormon, but ignore his witness that Joseph Smith was caught in a dirty, nasty, adulterous affair and then punished him for speaking openly about it when there was no polygamy revelation, when there was no sealing power. Yet. That seems super problematic and fishy to me. What do you make of those things that I said and just the faint Alger affair?

Jim Bennett [00:18:16] Well, there's no question that Oliver Cowdery believed it to be an extramarital affair. It's interesting. You read Bushman and he talks about where Oliver Cowdery is brought before church councils, and Joseph Smith does not try to deny a sexual relationship. What he tries to deny is adultery.

John Dehlin [00:18:34] Oh, can I add one thing? I forgot one important thing. I'm sorry.

Jim Bennett [00:18:37] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:18:37] Doctrine and Covenants and Book of Mormon. Both the Book of Commandments, Doctrine and Covenants, 1835 version, and book of Mormon all condemn polygamy. So, like, again, that's. That seems like irrefutable evidence that what Joseph Smith was doing with Phani Alger was super wrong because the Doctrine and Covenants at the time itself condemns polygamy. And I just had to add that.

Jim Bennett [00:19:01] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:19:01] Because how do you square that? Okay, sorry, I interrupted you.

Jim Bennett [00:19:05] Well. Well, just Joseph, when he confronts Oliver, does not try to deny a sexual relationship. He tries to deny its adultery. Leans very heavily on the definition of what adultery is and gets Oliver to adm. No, you have never confessed to adultery. I'm not sure how much that mattered to Oliver because, you know, Oliver's like, I don't care what you confess to, what I saw or what. I mean, we don't know what he saw or what he knew, but he certainly viewed that as an extramarital affair, and that's what drove him out of the church. I think it's remarkable that Oliver Cowdery, later in his life, decides to come back to the church. That. That for Oliver, even. That even believing that Joseph was guilty of adultery was not enough for him to fully deny the restoration for the rest of his life. But that doesn't necessarily excuse what's happening here. You frame this in terms of dates and times and when revelations were received. Richard Bushman talks about. And many scholars talk about the fact that D and C132 at the beginning, talks about Joseph questioning how David and Solomon could have had many wives and concubines. And they presume that that would have happened somewhere around 1831 when Joseph Smith engaged in his translation of the Bible. A lot of the revelations that we have in the Doctrine and Covenants come when he encounters a passage in the Bible that he has questions about. He asks a question, and he receives a revelation. And I would say the faithful perspective on that is that Joseph received a revelation that plural marriage was going to be restored somewhere around 1831 and sat on it and didn't want to do anything with it.

John Dehlin [00:20:51] You're speculating there, is that right?

Jim Bennett [00:20:52] Well, I'm speculating with.

John Dehlin [00:20:56] Because he didn't write it down. He didn't tell anybody this.

Jim Bennett [00:20:58] He didn't write it down and tell anybody this. When it was written down, according to the community of Christ, Brigham Young forged it. The Joseph Smith had nothing to do with it. That section 130. I don't think they believe that now, but they.

John Dehlin [00:21:12] They believe. Yeah.

Jim Bennett [00:21:13] For a long time. I. I'm not sure what their official position for.

John Dehlin [00:21:16] For now, they acknowledge that.

Jim Bennett [00:21:18] They acknowledge the Joseph polygamous now.

John Dehlin [00:21:19] They do. Yeah.

Jim Bennett [00:21:20] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:21:20] But they didn't. For they did over a century.

Jim Bennett [00:21:23] Yeah. For most of their history, Emma denied it.

John Dehlin [00:21:25] Right.

Jim Bennett [00:21:25] Right. Which makes Emma a very problematic witness because she insists Joseph was never a polygamist. And yet we have records of Emma approving certain plural marriages. So.

John Dehlin [00:21:34] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [00:21:35] So that becomes. That's all part of the mess.

John Dehlin [00:21:37] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [00:21:37] Right. And sifting through that, I don't think anybody has the Ability now after the fact to really nail down all of the details.

John Dehlin [00:21:44] But you're saying you think the way that you're making peace of this is to fill in that gap by. And you said Richard Bushman supports this, that perhaps Joseph Smith received a revelation in 1831.

Jim Bennett [00:21:57] Well, we do know that.

John Dehlin [00:21:59] We do know that he writes some letter to, like, missionaries going out on the frontier of Ohio and he gives them, I believe, permission to take Native American women as plural wives.

Jim Bennett [00:22:11] Oh, I'm not familiar with that.

John Dehlin [00:22:12] Yeah. And I. And I think that's what some people. When, when. When the 1831 date is given. I think that's part of the basis is if he's. If he's giving missionaries to Ohio permission to take Native American women as plural wives, then he must have received some revelation as early as 1831.

Jim Bennett [00:22:31] Well, so, so I haven't heard of that. I'm taking it from the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible that that's where he would have been in the Bible at the time. You know, but. But the story that we have about the. The production of DNC132 is that Hyrum is. Is who. Who had previously been an opponent of polygamy, is converted to polygamy by Joseph. And Hyrum says, if you give me a revelation in hand, I can take it to Emma and I can convince her.

John Dehlin [00:23:08] Joseph was afraid to confront Emma.

Jim Bennett [00:23:10] Right. Well, Joseph says, I don't think that's going to work, but okay, here's the revelation and dictates the revelation and even says, and they said, do you want to make another copy of this? And he says, no, I can dictate this anytime I want. I'm familiar with this. And the idea is that even though it's not dictated or written down, and incidentally, Hyrum takes it to Emma, Emma tears it up in his face. And Hyrum says, that was the worst experience I ever had. You know, of course it would be. But the idea is that the revelation. Joseph had the revelation but didn't record it until 1842. And the way that I understand Joseph's relationship with revelation and Scripture, I mean, I think a lot of people look at the Doctrine and Covenants and think that Joseph received these sort of by facts, that he received the words. They were dictated on a ticker tape or something like that. And I don't see revelation that way. And I see revelation as he gets the concepts, and then it's his responsibility to clothe it in language. And people have left the church because they find out Joseph Smith edited Revelations. You have this text that's the word of God, and Joseph goes in and he edits it after the fact. And that doesn't bother me at all because I think Joseph's trying to find the right words to express the kinds of insights that he's getting. So I can make allowances for the idea that he receives a revelation in 1831 that he is very uncomfortable with and finally takes action on in 1835. And there is evidence to support that he had talked to. I can't remember the name of the guy, but he talked to different people about arranging an actual marriage with Fanny Alger. There's very little documentation or understanding of that. But the idea that this had absolutely no possibility of being a marriage is belied by some of the historical record.

John Dehlin [00:25:08] Why would he receive a revelation about plural marriage in 1831? And then right into the first couple versions of the Doctrine and Covenant, slash, Book of Commandments that polygamy was forbidden, and then the church didn't practice it. That seems deceptive and problematic.

Jim Bennett [00:25:24] Well, the language, again, the language in the Doctrine and Covenants leans heavily on the idea that the church doesn't practice it. The language of the.

John Dehlin [00:25:33] You mean like the section 101. Section 101 at the time of the 1835 version.

Jim Bennett [00:25:38] I mean, if you look at the Book of Mormon condemnation.

John Dehlin [00:25:41] But he kind of was practicing it.

Jim Bennett [00:25:43] Yeah, but the church wasn't practiced. He hadn't introduced it as a doctrine to the Church. You look at polygamy, you look at Joseph's struggle with polygamy, and, you know, it's very easy to look and say, well, this guy was just looking for an excuse to have as much sex as he possibly could. And I look at that and say, well, if that was what he wanted, he set up a terrible, terrible.

John Dehlin [00:26:07] And I see that as a straw man, a little. No, I'm not saying you're giving a straw man. I'm saying that that's a common response I hear, is you don't. You don't form a church. You know, if you want to have sex, go have sex. You don't need to form a church to have sex. And I don't see it that simplistically. I see it.

Jim Bennett [00:26:25] I.

John Dehlin [00:26:25] The way that I make sense of it is, is that he had a libido. He had a lot of charisma. He had a lot of power. And. Pick anybody. Pick Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam. Pick David Koresh. Pick Jim Jones. Pick. Pick freaking Martin Luther King Jr. Right. Pick any. Anyone who has risen to a level of power and prestige. They're going to have a lot of opportunities for sex or women who are attracted to them and want to have sex with them. It almost feels very primal, like gorillas, like alpha male. The women want to have the. Want to mate with the alpha male. And so it's not always him. It's often women wanting to be with him. A lot of women in unhappy, unfulfilled marriages. But the way I see it is he. He feels torn about his sexuality, about monogamy. He feels desires to have sex, but he also believes in God and Jesus and purity. And he's trying to square what he reads in the Old Testament. And polygamy becomes a way that. Not a justification. But I can see how you can be like, man, I'm really feeling these urges. And, well, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob did it, and David and Solomon and man, I'm really attracted to these women. And we have to do the restoration of all things. And if prophets did it of old, and it becomes a melding of justifications, that isn't necessarily sinister. I can still allow for the fact that he believed somehow God was okay with all this. So I don't want to reduce it to some straw man, simplistic straw man that then can be easily knocked down.

Jim Bennett [00:28:16] Right.

John Dehlin [00:28:16] I can see it as just a lot of power, a lot of opportunity, probably a lot of dissatisfaction in his marriage at times. The prophet stuff and a high libido. And this is the mess. That's why it's so messy. It is birthed out of all that. And is that.

Jim Bennett [00:28:36] Well, no, I don't want to make a straw man either because I think the reality, whatever the reality is, is far more complex than any kind of straw man could demonstrate. But I don't know what Joseph's libido was like. I can't read his mind.

John Dehlin [00:28:52] That's speculation.

Jim Bennett [00:28:54] I mean, you can look at that. And again, if that's the template you want to apply to it, I don't think there's anything in the historical record that prevents you from applying that template. Well, but I think there are things that discourage that, I think, should he have also.

John Dehlin [00:29:09] I'll ask you a different way. Should he have, in your view, when he engages with Fanny Alger, he's clearly starting the practice of polygamy. Should he not have gone to the first presidency, gone to Oliver, gone to Sidney Rigdon, whoever gone to the quorum of the 12 and said, I'm going to start this practice, shouldn't he have changed the Doctrine and Covenants to say, hey, we're starting this practice now? Shouldn't have gone to Emma and said, hey, Emma, I'm going to be doing this now and do it on the up and up. Isn't that what we would. Isn't that the type of honesty that the church taught me and you? Full, complete honesty. Shouldn't he have done it that way? And if he didn't, why didn't he do it that way?

Jim Bennett [00:29:54] Okay, and again, those are two different questions.

John Dehlin [00:29:56] Start with should he?

Jim Bennett [00:29:57] Well, should he? Is a question of expectations and it's also a question of assumptions because we don't know who he talked to. The fact that he's approaching somebody about saying, I'm going to. I want you to help arrange a marriage with Fanny Alger means he's talking to somebody about the possibility of him being married to another woman. Could he not have had that conversation with anybody in the First Presidency? You know, it seems unlikely that he did though, because Oliver's reaction demonstrates that Oliver wasn't happy with it. But you look at the. Should he have done this? Should he have done that? I mean, if I were in Joseph Smith's position, I like to think I would have done things differently. But I mean, it all becomes hypotheticals. It all becomes second guessing. It all becomes reading Joseph's mind. I am certainly willing to allow that it does not look like Joseph handled this situation ideally. That's probably too soft to say. I think there's things that Joseph did that were really sort of profoundly wrong in the practice of polygamy. And I think that you look at the early history of the church and polygamy is really. It's really fascinating because the other thing is the way I interpret it from a broader perspective, people, there are people now who say we just need to erase DNC 132 from the canon because polygamy is so destructive and we just need to completely repudiate DNC132 and just wipe it clean, admit it was a huge mistake and be done with it and move on. The problem with that is that there is so much in DNC132 that is beautiful and majestic and powerful. DNC 132 is where we get the idea, essentially canonized in Scripture, of becoming like gods. It's when children sing, families can be together forever in primary families. Yeah, they're singing D and C.132.

Doctrine and Covenants 132 and Polygamy Problems

John Dehlin [00:31:59] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [00:32:00] And so polygamy is inextricably tied to the sealing power and to the idea of sealing the entire human family. And so I see polygamy as Joseph Smith receiving revelation about tying the whole human family together and Joseph's clumsy attempt to make that happen. And again, I'm reading Joseph's mind and doing this, but this is how I see it. He gets this. This is what you need to do. And he assumes that the only way to do that is to marry lots of people and that that's the only way to seal each other. The concept of sealing children to their parents doesn't begin until after Joseph Smith dies. You know, I think some of these, like Helen Mark Kimball, which is the one that everybody is up in arms about because she was 14 years old, or in the church's essay, she was, what, three months shy of her 15th birthday, which was a very unfortunate thing to put into that essay, I believe. But Helen Mark Heber C. Kimball goes to Joseph Smith and says, I want Helen to be sealed to you. And she's sealed to him and stays and lives with her parents and writes a poem that is heartbreaking called For Eternity Only. And the poem describes, I was told this would just be for eternity only to bind myself to this, but it's ruining my life. You know, other boys won't dance with me at dances, and my life is absolutely miserable because of this thing that was only supposed to be for eternity only. Now, that poem demonstrates that it's very unlikely that there was any sexual relationship between Joseph Smith and Helen Markimball. But it demonstrates just how, even without the sexual component, how destructive. Destructive is nothing. Just how dangerous and powerful polygamy was as a force. And there have been many that have made the argument that polygamy was the doctrine that bound the church together in the early years, that when Joseph died, that it was plural marriage that kept the church as a cohesive thing, that they were so far apart from the world that that allowed Brigham Young to be able to bring them out of the world, into the wilderness, out into the. You know, and I look at some of that and go, okay, okay. But that feels like retroactive justification to me. I see polygamy very much as kind of Joseph's attempt to implement the sort of sealing power and the sealing idea that still drives the church today. That is fundamental to the church today. And I see him doing it in a way that causes a lot more heartache and mess than I would like to have seen.

John Dehlin [00:35:02] But so. So it's such a. I mean, again, laying out the fact that the DNC Forbade it. No ceiling power been given yet. The revelation that we now know hasn't been given yet. It wasn't told to the First Presidency. It wasn't told to Emma. And then he punished Oliver for confronting him about it. He didn't announce it. Like, that's all super problematic, I think. I think it's. I think it's fair to say that's super problematic, and it was, at best, super mishandled. But you have to do a lot of contortions and even backflips to try and make a better narrative out of this. You know, there's kind of. You've probably heard the term Occam's razor.

Jim Bennett [00:35:52] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:35:53] That the simplest answer is. Is often the most true, you know, or accurate one. It.

Jim Bennett [00:35:59] Your.

John Dehlin [00:36:01] The explanation. Do you. Do you. Are you mindful about the fact that there's a really simple explanation for this? That anything else feels. Feels kind of like somersaults, a little bit like. Like really stretching, but you know what I'm saying?

Jim Bennett [00:36:21] Yes and no. I think it's more complicated than that. I think you have to accept that Joseph made some serious mistakes in the practice of polygamy. I don't think the narrative allows you to assume that Joseph handled this without some serious missteps. I fully acknowledge that. Acknowledging that. However, I don't think you have to allow that this was entirely divorced from any kind of solid moral principle or revelation. I mean, I don't think Occam's razor leads you there.

John Dehlin [00:37:02] Yeah, I understand that.

Jim Bennett [00:37:05] And I think when you look at how polygamy is practiced, the community of Christ or reorganized church at the time constantly made the case that Joseph was not a polygamist based on the fact primarily that he fathered no children with any of his plural wives. I don't think that makes the case that he's not a polygamist. But it does suggest that sexuality, in the way that the critics are describing it, was not as preeminent in many of these relationships as you would expect if this were Joseph's sole purpose. I think a great number of these women got a sealing ceremony and nothing else.

John Dehlin [00:37:46] But the Book of Mormon, when it talks about polygamy in the one place the Book of Mormon talks about forbids it. But then it says, but if I, the Lord, were to raise up a

Jim Bennett [00:37:58] people, to raise up seed.

John Dehlin [00:38:00] Raise up seed, then I'll do it. So, I mean, the Book of Mormon, when it allows for polygamy, says that. That. That bearing children is the main purpose. Right. So how can you have it both ways. Where the Book of Mormon says polygamy is for sex, meaning raising seed. But then to try and backstep with Joseph and say, well, Joseph, it wasn't really about sex all the time. But then every prophet after Joseph had like 20, 30, 40 wives and had sex with all of them. And it feels like, it feels like again, that's trying to really do back. Back stands or backflips or somersaults or twisting to, to try and make it okay when all the evidence points kind of in a different direction. I'm not trying to argue with you.

Jim Bennett [00:38:51] No. Can you see that, though? Well, certainly. I mean, is it just. I can certainly see. Again, as I said at the outset, I don't know anybody that looks at polygamy and comes away and says, oh, that's all okay. Oh, I got no problem with that at all. That completely makes sense.

John Dehlin [00:39:09] No, no.

Jim Bennett [00:39:09] Even the most. I don't think if you had Russell Nelson sitting on this chair that he'd tell you that he thought polygamy as practiced by Joseph Smith was lovely in a.

John Dehlin [00:39:18] And he's a polygamist himself.

Jim Bennett [00:39:19] Well, in the heaven hereafter, the whole idea of that rests on whether or not you accept that the sealing power is a real thing.

John Dehlin [00:39:32] Well, he believes he is.

Jim Bennett [00:39:33] He believes he is.

John Dehlin [00:39:34] Yeah. His wives believe he is.

Jim Bennett [00:39:36] His wives believe he is.

John Dehlin [00:39:38] You know, so it's messy. It's messy.

Jim Bennett [00:39:40] It's messy. I mean, I don't, it's honestly.

John Dehlin [00:39:43] It's honestly not fair for me to be asking you because how. Basically, I mean, what. We touched on this as we ended the other day, but basically you've had a strong emotional witness that the restoration is true. You've had a strong emotional witness that the Book of Mormon and other scriptures are true. And so really, you've acknowledged that polygamy is super messy and problematic and Joseph probably made mistakes. Anything you can say about polygamy has to sort of be like, well, I believe in the foundations and there's good. There are signs that there's some revelation or some good intentions throughout it. Everything else you say is just basically going to be trying to say, we don't know it's messy, but I believe that somehow it was divine. You know what I mean?

Jim Bennett [00:40:31] Well, I mean, I can't, of course, I can't speak for anybody but myself. I certainly can't speak for the church. I do believe you can look at polygamy and you can look at Joseph Smith and come away with a far more charitable understanding. Of what happened than the critics paint generally. I think the record demonstrates that for all the messiness and for all the dishonesty and for all the problems that we see with the practice of polygamy, I think it also demonstrates that Joseph believed that what he was doing had a divine component to it. That I believe that.

John Dehlin [00:41:07] And that there was a sincere desire to seal people for eternity in heaven, that that was a sincere desire. And I think anyone who knows him would agree.

Jim Bennett [00:41:17] And not only is that a sincere desire, that is a beautiful core doctrine of the church in the 21st century that was born in this messy, difficult practice with which we still have to come to terms. You know, it's. It's. It's. It's nice to see that we're just tiptoeing towards acknowledging the difficulties there, But I really feel like if we're. The church needs. We need to come to terms with this.

John Dehlin [00:41:46] Okay.

Jim Bennett [00:41:46] We need to be able to accept what this is and what it isn't and move forward from there.

John Dehlin [00:41:51] Okay. So the fact that this was all. So I'm going to do a lightning round where you could just say, if you want, that's a problem, and we can just move on. Or you can say, I don't think it's a problem, but I do want to touch a couple of things. So the fact that the ceiling power had not yet been given to Joseph and the revelation hadn't been given to Joseph, I guess your answer to that is maybe he had a mini revelation that he didn't tell us.

Jim Bennett [00:42:13] No, my answer to that is that the 1842 revelation was writing down the revelation he received in 1831.

John Dehlin [00:42:19] Okay. In your view. Okay, what about. What about not telling the first presidency in the quorum of the twelve and, you know, announcing it in the church? What's your. You know, and just being upfront and straightforward about it.

Jim Bennett [00:42:34] I would like to have seen him.

John Dehlin [00:42:36] You wish he had done?

Jim Bennett [00:42:36] I wish he had done.

John Dehlin [00:42:37] Okay. Okay, what about. Do you acknowledge that he did lie to Emma for many, many, many of those early Navu marriages and just hid it from her and was practicing, practicing it for at least a dozen to 15 of the marriages before he even let her in on it?

Jim Bennett [00:42:54] No, I don't. I acknowledge that he lied to Emma about some of the marriages. I don't know how many, and neither does anybody else. I mean, I don't know.

John Dehlin [00:43:02] He lied some, but maybe not.

Jim Bennett [00:43:04] I don't know the extent of it,

John Dehlin [00:43:06] but there were some lying.

Jim Bennett [00:43:08] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:43:09] Okay. What about the fact that Emma was like the 15th wife sealed to him.

Jim Bennett [00:43:15] 23rd, I thought.

John Dehlin [00:43:16] 23rd, yeah. Why. Why did he seal 22 women to him before getting sealed to Emma?

Jim Bennett [00:43:23] Because Emma didn't accept plural marriage. And at the time, the sealing power was inextricably tied to plural marriage.

John Dehlin [00:43:32] I mean, I. And I know DNC132 may even come later. I'm not sure if Joseph was sealed to Emma before or after DNC132 came out, but even DNC 132 says that the first wife, I think it's called the Law of Sarah, but the first wife needs to consent, right? And so the fact that he's lying to Emma, at least in some cases, if not many of the cases, and sealing a lot of women to him without Emma's knowledge and. Or without her consent seems to violate the. The Scripture, the revelation that he even releases.

Jim Bennett [00:44:09] Well, but it talks about the Law of Sarah also being waived if the first wife isn't willing to accept plural marriage. I really don't see it productive. I got into a big, huge Reddit thing on this because the 132nd section talks about virgins. You need to be sealed to a virgin. And I write in my reply, okay, well, what does that mean? And my response is, I believe that means it's not that somebody is going to do a medical exam to make sure you've never had sexual intercourse, but it's making reference to how the Lord sees us and that the Lord sees us as sexually pure. And so there was never anybody concerned at the time. They are retroactively, but at the time, nobody ever raised the problem, well, Joseph's marrying women who are not virgins because he's marrying women who are sexually pure. They said, why are you trying to say that the word virgin meant something different in the 19th century than it means now? And you're contorting yourself and it's like, well, I'm not contorting myself. I'm not reading Scripture legalistically. I just don't think it's productive to read. I don't think that's what Scripture's intended to be. I don't think this is sort of legislation. I think this is Joseph putting into words concepts and ideas and doing so imperfectly. So when you start saying, well, it doesn't match up with this sort of legalistic interpretation of how D&C132 is supposed to work. And I just go, I just don't see that productive. Because either. Because usually people making that argument are making the argument that D&C132 and even the pretense that this could possibly have any kind of divine origin is all nonsense anyway. And I say that to Jeremy in my reply. It's like, if you think this is all nonsense, then why are you concerned that Joseph isn't dotting the, the dotting his eyes and crossing his T's according to his own revelation? Why does that even matter if this is all just a front for sexual predation? So I, I mean, I'm happy to continue to talk, go through those things, but, but I, I, that doesn't strike me as particularly productive.

John Dehlin [00:46:24] Well, I, I don't think. Okay, this is getting off track a little bit. And this comes out in the fair Mormon videos. Just this idea that, well, if you don't believe in the church or God or Joseph Smith, then you, you aren't allowed to ask these questions.

Jim Bennett [00:46:38] No, I'm not saying that at all.

John Dehlin [00:46:39] Okay, okay.

Jim Bennett [00:46:40] I'm not saying you're not allowed to ask the question. I'm saying I'm not particularly interested in the question. I'm, I mean if you can demonstrate in sort of a legal case that Joseph Smith is not following his revelations to the word. That doesn't do anything for me one way or the other. It's like, oh, okay. Well, I don't see the scriptures as sort of legally binding documents that way you're living, breathing.

John Dehlin [00:47:07] They're always in draft form. Always.

Jim Bennett [00:47:10] Yeah, yeah. That's an interesting way to put it. Right.

John Dehlin [00:47:12] I mean continuing revelation implies that, you know, and they have been changed and they have been added to and taken away from. So for you, the, the scriptures are living, breathing things that are not.

Jim Bennett [00:47:24] Well, I.

John Dehlin [00:47:25] Perfect, so to speak.

Jim Bennett [00:47:26] Of course they're not perfect.

John Dehlin [00:47:27] Yeah, of course.

Jim Bennett [00:47:28] I mean, you look at the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:47:30] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [00:47:30] The title page of the Book of Mormon says if there be errors, they are the mistakes of men.

John Dehlin [00:47:35] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [00:47:35] You know, on the first page it's announcing its fallibility. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:47:39] So that makes sense.

Jim Bennett [00:47:40] So anyway, okay, what about.

John Dehlin [00:47:44] So some people have real concerns about the way that he would approach some of the women. Kind of this like teenage girl, get her into a room alone, tell her you've got 24 hours to decide your family's salvation depends on it and

Jim Bennett [00:48:07] otherwise

John Dehlin [00:48:07] they'll be dead kind of this and then the power differential, like he's this God's prophet. Here's this 16 year old girl, he gives her 24 hours, pulls her in a room, makes this ultimatum. Some call that kind of abusive. Do you have concerns about that approach.

Jim Bennett [00:48:23] Of course I have concerns about it. I don't think. I also think if you read the firsthand accounts from the women, and they're all we have, we don't have any accounts from Joseph. Joseph didn't write anything about this. But the template you're describing, I don't think is an accurate representation of it. I think the power differential, regardless of how well or.

John Dehlin [00:48:51] Or

Jim Bennett [00:48:54] how well handled it may have been on Joseph's part, just the fact of that power differential is problematic. I don't think there's any way around that. The description that many of these women describe is Joseph comes in and says, this is what's going to happen, and I've received this revelation and you are to be my wife. They recoil, as you would think they would. And the promise comes from Joseph is that you will receive a witness that this is correct. And then they almost, to a person, describe these remarkable spiritual experiences where they receive that kind of witness. And I get really uncomfortable with people who describe. Well, Joseph goes in and says, you have 24 hours to marry me or you're going to burn in hell. That is not an accurate description of how these interchanges took place. There's one interchange where he says something about the gate being closed forever, which is the second time he'd approached. I can't remember which women it is. I should have looked this up before I came. But this is the one that gets quoted all over the place. He says, you know, you have 24 hours. The gate will be closed forever. And this was actually cited in a pundit's piece during Mitt Romney's election that I wrote a response to. And where I investigated this. And what happened is Joseph Smith three months earlier had proposed marriage, and she turned him down flat. And he didn't raise it again for three months. And then finally, three months later says, look, you know, Fisher cut bait. I'm not going to ask you again. You have 24 hours to decide. Otherwise, we're not going to get married. And she turns him down. And he says, God bless you. You will receive a great manifestation that you should marry me. And then she describes having that manifestation the next night and going back and saying, okay, I'd like to get married. So, you know, I'm not trying to paint any of that as anything but strange and weird and difficult. But is it Joseph Smith going in and saying, you need to have sex with me, you're going to burn in hell? It is not. That is not something that Joseph did. People always talk about the angel with the drawn sword. And the angel with the drawn sword comes up when he's telling people about whether or not he should be practicing plural marriage as a principle. We do not have any instances where he goes and says, you need to marry me, or an angel with a drawn sword is going to kill me. And critics frame it that way as if that's what he's doing. So. So the difficulty here is that I'm defending something that to some degree, isn't defensible, and I recognize that I'm defending something that makes me extraordinarily uncomfortable. I remember Bill Real in my podcast said, well, would you want Joseph Smith. Would you want your daughter working in Joseph Smith's household, given that Joseph Smith proposed to all these women in his household? And I said, no, I wouldn't. Although I wouldn't want my daughter involved in polygamy. Regardless, I'm grateful that we live in a time when that's not something that's expected of any member of the church. So I recognize just how fraught this all is. But I want to make allowances for the fact that there is still a way to look at this with faithfulness, and there is still, I think, charity, and there is still doctrinal beauty that comes out of the polygamy experience, right? The doctrinal beauty of the ceiling of the entire human family, which I don't think we would have without. Without plural marriage. So. So. So there is. There is, to me, a divine core in this that is muddied up by a whole bunch of human error.

John Dehlin [00:52:44] Did you study the. Just really quickly. I'll jump to these really quickly. Did you study the accounts where if he propositioned a woman like Nancy Rigdon, and I think there's at least one other polygamously, and then she turned down his advances and then spoke openly about him making polygamous advances to her, that then he would kind of malign them as harlots or sluts or whatever. He would kind of. And I've read the accounts. I know that at least in two instances, he did this, that. That in the church publications they printed that these women were. Or sluts or whatever, because these women declined his advances and spoke. And let's be candid, he was not admitting polygamy publicly. He was afraid for it to be admitted publicly. So it all lines up that he would have to slander or malign a woman who accused him of this publicly. I think there's just no question that that happened. Do you have. Do you have. Is that just the Messiness.

Jim Bennett [00:53:47] It's okay. I don't, I don't.

John Dehlin [00:53:48] Just messy.

Jim Bennett [00:53:49] I don't know what to say to that. I mean, you acknowledge.

John Dehlin [00:53:52] Have you read those accounts or have you not read.

Jim Bennett [00:53:53] Yeah, I have read those accounts. Okay. I, I mean the difficulty too is because you get later accounts, you get Ann Eliza Young, who was not even born when polygamy began talking years and years after the fact about Joseph doing all kinds of terrible things. The difficulty then is, okay, well what happened behind closed doors? What was actually going on there? And can you look at that and say, well, Joseph was behaving awfully? You can, can you look at that and say there's something we don't know. You can. So I, you know, I can sit here all day long and you can.

John Dehlin [00:54:42] No, that's great. That can be enough.

Jim Bennett [00:54:43] That can be enough.

John Dehlin [00:54:44] But I'm not trying to beat a dead horse. I just.

Jim Bennett [00:54:46] No, no. But I am more than willing to acknowledge.

John Dehlin [00:54:49] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [00:54:51] I think I've repeatedly acknowledged the fact that this was not handled well on a number of fronts. And I don't know anybody who would argue otherwise. And I think to argue otherwise to argue that polygamy is sort of this bright shining spot of particularly nauvoo polygamy because I think by the time they got to Utah and you had families that, because Joseph Smith never practiced the kind of domestic polygamy that Brigham Young did and that the brethren and that I think it's 25% of the church eventually did, His ceilings were not okay, I'm going to set up a life with this person and we're going to live as husband and wife the way it was later. And I think as you get later into polygamy and it's later practice, you get experiences like Heber J. Grants that aren't awful, that are, that fully involve consenting adults and arrangements that, that were not the kind of oppressive things that you, that you see in, in the navu practices.

John Dehlin [00:55:53] Sure. So, okay, what about the polyandry is probably the most disturbing part of the polygamy thing for most people, which is this idea that Joseph didn't. I mean, I guess the, the underage girls is a problem. 14 year old, 15 year old, 16 year olds. And, and some people are bothered by that their sister pairs that he married and mother daughter pairs that he married. You can speak to those two if you want or you can just say messy and then. But, but then the big one is. I don't mean that in a mocking way or even a belittling way. Because you know what? I'm, I'm. I probably told you this. My grandmother is the daughter of a polygamous marriage. I knew my grandmother. So my, my grandmother, Karma Benson Parkinson, she's a cousins of Desert Tab Benson. Her mom was the third wife of, of, you know, so, so I am, I am the product of a polygamous, sure, several polygamous marriages. And my, my grandmother looked on polygamy fondly. So I don't, I don't know. I'm. And so this isn't mocking, this isn't condemning. But anyway, underage women, mother, daughter pair, sister pairs. But then polyandry. Why was Joseph Smith marrying other men's wives when, when they were legally married, sometimes happily married? Any. You can just say messy or if you have no.

Polyandry and Joseph Smith's Marital Practices

Jim Bennett [00:57:18] Polyandry actually doesn't, doesn't disturb me nearly as much as it disturbs other people. Only because the accusation of polyandry that is often made is not one that was made against Joseph Smith contemporaneously. And part of the reason for that is that clearly Brian Hales likes to say that this is the case with all of them. I think that's overstating it. We don't know, we don't have records. But certainly in the case of some of them, he's approaching women and saying, I want you to be sealed to me and you stay married to the man you're married to and you will live with him. But in the eternities, we are sealed together. And this happened with some of these men's consent. They knew this was happening. So this is clearly not a sexual relationship. And I like to believe it's Joseph saying, okay, well, this is a way of easing into this in a way where I don't have to upset Emma by actually being married to another woman and having sexual relationship with another woman. I can approach this married woman and maybe that will satisfy the Lord's requirements for polygamy. So I look at the fact that that accusation was not made, that Joseph is bedding other women's wives while Joseph was alive or even, I mean, that accusation really doesn't come up until Grant Palmer. To a large degree, that's sort of a 21st century. We're looking back at that and go, oh, that's what's happening. When I don't think that's the way they described what was happening. I look at, for instance, and Jeremy raises this in his letter, the Heber C. Kimball experience, where Joseph goes to Heber C. Kimball and says, you need to give Me, your wife. And it's horrific. And Heber C. Kimball is up all night, and his wife, they're crying all night. And then finally the next day, they go and they say, okay, Joseph, we're going to do this. And then Joseph said, this was an Abrahamic test. I'm not going to take your wife. I think that's awful. I think that's abusive. You know, I look at that, because

John Dehlin [00:59:25] Jim Jones did that kind of stuff. He would give people Kool Aid that had poison in it, or he would say, this has poison in it. They would drink it, and it didn't have poison in it. And then they'd go, oh. You know, he'd say, oh, that was just a test. Well, and then eventually it.

Jim Bennett [00:59:39] Eventually there was koolaid. But.

John Dehlin [00:59:41] Yeah, but.

Jim Bennett [00:59:41] But what. What that highlights that experience is that Heber C. Kimball and Joseph Smith and Sarah Kimball, all three recognized that polyandry like that is transgressive, that that was not acceptable behavior. So if that's something that Joseph Smith was engaging in on a large scale, I think you would have seen far more rumblings about that. I think the Nauvoo Expositor would have screamed about that from. From, you know, in all of its. And those were not the accusations leveled against him. So when I look at polyandry, I think. I think we're bringing a lot of assumptions to it that are not sustained by the historical record.

John Dehlin [01:00:24] You're saying there wasn't as much sexual activity with the polyandrous wives as there was.

Jim Bennett [01:00:29] I don't think we have any conclusive evidence of sexual activity.

John Dehlin [01:00:32] It's hard to, you know, that's part of the argument is, like, there were no VCR cameras. Like, no.

Jim Bennett [01:00:38] And.

John Dehlin [01:00:38] And. And it's obvious that Joseph didn't want this to get out. It's obvious that Joseph didn't write about it. So you'd never get that. And then I'm sure he would have told. And I think there's probably lots of evidence that he did tell the wives not to talk about it. He was denying it publicly. He wasn't telling his top leaders. So, like, it's gonna be hard to get evidence, right?

Jim Bennett [01:01:00] Well, yeah, but you're talking about the entire polygamy experience, as opposed to specifically polyandry, because we do have evidence in polyandry that these men were aware of the ceilings to Joseph Smith and were fine with them and continued to live with their spouses as husband and wife without any sexual relationship with Joseph.

John Dehlin [01:01:21] That we know of.

Jim Bennett [01:01:22] That we know of. But Even after Joseph Smith died, Heber J. Grant, his father, Jedediah M. Grant, who was in the First Presidency with Brigham Young, was sealed to my great great grandmother, standing in proxy for Joseph Smith, that people continued to be sealed to Joseph Smith for decades after Joseph Smith was dead. And polyandry, or the way we describe polyandry, seems to be that element of that kind of a sealing that these people are being sealed to Joseph Smith without an expectation of a sexual relationship.

John Dehlin [01:02:00] But why does a woman who's already married need to be sealed to Joseph Smith and not the husband? Like, why is Joseph needing to get sealed to someone else's wife or wives?

Jim Bennett [01:02:15] I don't think they do need to. I mean, I. Why was he doing that?

John Dehlin [01:02:18] Why was he doing that?

Jim Bennett [01:02:19] I think he was doing that because that was his understanding of what the sealing power was.

John Dehlin [01:02:24] But why not the couple? Why not?

Jim Bennett [01:02:26] Well, I think this is the glory of. Of the message. No, I think it's the glory of continuing revelation and the ongoing restoration, because we've stopped doing that. We used to.

John Dehlin [01:02:38] He was kind of experimenting, and not in a demeaning way. He was trying to figure this out, and he didn't quite get it right, but over time, we've gotten more right. Is that kind of.

Jim Bennett [01:02:49] Yeah, Okay. I think that's fine. I think that's fair.

Joseph Smith's Martyrdom and William Law

John Dehlin [01:02:51] Okay. All right.

Jim Bennett [01:02:56] Are you.

John Dehlin [01:02:57] Are you the. The way. You know, when I was told what I was told growing up about Joseph Smith's death, it was always like, he went like a lamb to the slaughter. You know what I mean? He was pure as the driven snow, and he was blameless before God, and. And, you know, these evil, bad people killed him. You know what I mean? The truth is something much different. The truth is that William Law, who was in the First Presidency, found out he wasn't told that Joseph Smith was practicing polygamy. He found it out, confronted Joseph with it. Joseph had finally admitted it. And then William Law talks about it publicly, which some would argue Joseph should have done if he was being honest and open. And then through the Nauvoo printing press, and then Joseph Smith commands the printing press and all the copies to be destroyed. And that's what led to him being incarcerated in Carthage jail. And that's what led to him being. You know, because he's violating principles that I know are near and dear to you, which is freedom of the press and free speech. Like, that's super. If you love the Constitution, if you love the press, if you love America, that's super sinister. And again, calls into question the whole enterprise in so many ways, but also how the church spun it for so many years. And to this day, they haven't really, ever really told that Joseph's martyrdom story at a general conference in a way that's really accurate. And they demeaned and defamed William Law for so many years. And I think in my view of history, William Law was a hero. He was a courageous hero who was telling the truth, not, you know, evil, apostate, backstabbing, you know, discontent. So do you have. Do you have problems with how the church has spun Joseph Smith's martyrdom as it relates to polygamy and William Law?

Jim Bennett [01:04:55] Well, as it relates to the polygamy and William Law. I kind of want to go back to the Nauvoo Expositor because I don't recall any ever growing up in an experience where anybody tried to pretend that the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor was anything but a tragic mistake at best.

John Dehlin [01:05:14] Well, I never heard about it, and, I mean, most of us never heard about the Novo Expositor.

Jim Bennett [01:05:18] You didn't listen to the Truman Madsen Joseph Smith tapes on your mission over and over again?

John Dehlin [01:05:23] No, I didn't. I was in Guatemala. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Jim Bennett [01:05:26] We used to imitate them on.

John Dehlin [01:05:28] Did they talk about the Navajo Expositor?

Jim Bennett [01:05:33] If I try to quote him directly, somebody watching this will go, that's not what he said. But it's something like it was rash and this, and it's what ultimately led to his death. You know, my first mission president, Ben B. Banks, who was called as a general authority while he was serving as a mission president and was also the temple president of the Jordan Temple. Remember reading a talk by him where he talked about the Nauvoo Expositor as being, you know, a grievous error. Dallin Oaks, I think, has written an extensive legal document about legally, what a huge misstep that was. So have I heard anybody sort of stand up and say William Law was a hero? No, I haven't heard that, and I don't think anybody's heard that. But I don't think anybody has tried to pretend that. The destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor is a bright, shining moment in church history. And I think people recognize it was a huge mistake and certainly was probably the catalyst for Joseph's death. So, you know, Joseph's martyrdom, Joseph's death, whatever you thought of polygamy or whatever else is going on, I don't think there's anything heroic about a mob bursting into A jail and opening fire on four unarmed men. Well, three unarmed men. Joseph had Cyrus Wheelock's pistol. But, you know, I don't see anything in terms of what I was taught growing up being particularly problematic on that score. I certainly wasn't taught anything about polygamy being a part of that. And the Nauvoo expositors destruction, however, did come up. And every time it came up, it was always acknowledged as a mistake.

John Dehlin [01:07:18] Is it fair to say Joseph was innocent as a lamb to the slaughter?

Jim Bennett [01:07:23] Given the quoting John Taylor here, I don't think anybody's as innocent as a lamb to the slaughter. I mean, I think it's fair for John Taylor to have said that as he's rhapsodizing about his lost prophet, as he's grieving. I mean, I think it, that that whole.

John Dehlin [01:07:45] No one deserves to be lynched. I mean, that's.

Jim Bennett [01:07:47] Yeah, no one deserves to be murdered in cold blood. And Joseph was murdered in cold blood.

John Dehlin [01:07:51] So. I mean, I can see that.

Jim Bennett [01:07:52] So, so. Well, but, you know, it's like he wasn't perfect and he wasn't like a land, you know, pure as the driven snow. Well, no, he was a human being and he certainly didn't deserve what happened to him. He did not deserve to be murdered in cold blood. And he was.

John Dehlin [01:08:08] Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fair. Okay. The only other thing I think that comes to my mind is this, this the time or two where he sends a man on a mission and then propositions their. Their wife while they're away without the man's knowledge or consent.

Jim Bennett [01:08:28] Yeah, the, the, the most prominent of those is the Mirinda Smith, Miranda Hyde. Yeah, we're in the Hyde story. There are dueling explanations for that. There are people who insist that.

John Dehlin [01:08:44] I don't think anyone argues that the husband was told until after.

Jim Bennett [01:08:49] Well, no, but there are people who are propositioned. While Joseph Smith absolutely insisted that he never propositioned Mirinda Hyde and Mirinda Hyde. So you've got. He said, she said sort of thing going on there.

John Dehlin [01:09:04] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [01:09:05] And. And Mirinda Hyde eventually was sealed to Orson Hyde, which they would not have done if she had been sealed to Joseph Smith. So it's. I mean, I, that's one I just kind of want to wave at and say messy, just because there are conflicting accounts as to what that is and what that means. I don't think that there is a sweeping pattern of Joseph sending off all these missionaries.

John Dehlin [01:09:36] No, I just said a couple. One or two.

Jim Bennett [01:09:37] Yeah. And, and, and I think that the, the evidence is Contradictory in those one or two. And so I. So I don't know that I have anything useful to add to it.

John Dehlin [01:09:48] Okay. All right. All right. Well, that. I mean that. Anything else about polygamy you want to add or you think we could. Did we beat a dead horse here?

The Church's Ongoing Reckoning With Polygamy

Jim Bennett [01:09:56] Well, I think these are conversations that we need to have as a church. I believe, before the church essays, I felt very strongly that we just haven't come to terms with polygamy one way or the other. And if we're going to repudiate it, then we need to repudiate it. If we're going to accept it, then we need to accept it. If we're going to find some kind of middle ground, which is where I think I've landed, we need to do that, too. But what we've done is just sweep it under the rug and pretend it's not there. Just one quick personal story. I was the artistic director at the Tuacan center for the Arts in Southern Utah.

John Dehlin [01:10:38] Didn't know that. Yeah.

Jim Bennett [01:10:39] Yeah. For five years. And. And they. They were built for this.

John Dehlin [01:10:47] This.

Jim Bennett [01:10:47] Did you see their original. No, Utah, exclamation point?

John Dehlin [01:10:52] I have it on my bucket list to go there. I've never been there.

Jim Bennett [01:10:55] Well, they're not doing that show anymore, partially because of. Of the fact that I wrote the last version of it and it bombed.

John Dehlin [01:11:01] But for four years, they just mean going at all. But what show was it?

Jim Bennett [01:11:05] It was. It was. They built it in order to do this massive musical written by Doug Stewart. And. And I can't remember who did the music. Dang it. Anyway.

John Dehlin [01:11:16] A musical about what?

Jim Bennett [01:11:18] About the settling of Southern Utah. It's the Jacob Hamblin story.

John Dehlin [01:11:21] Oh, okay.

Jim Bennett [01:11:22] I didn't know anything about Jacob Hamblin, but it talks about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and Jacob Hamblin has plural wives. And people were furious about this, and they just didn't want to mess with any of that. And they kept revising it, and it kept bombing, and then they started doing Broadway stuff, and people started coming. But it was 2002 that the CEO of Tuacan came to me and said, we want to do Utah again, but we want to do a version that doesn't have polygamy in it and doesn't have the Mountain Meadows Massacre in it and doesn't do that. You know, and the Indians can't be the bad guys and the Mormons can't be the bad guys. And I'm like, well, what do you want me to do? Do you want Jacob Hamlin to Go to the North Pole and visit Santa Claus. What's going to happen in this thing? And so we ended up doing this story that's at a very limited time frame before Jacob Hamblin takes a plural wife and there's a misunderstanding that blows up. It wasn't good, and it got savaged by the critics. But I remember writing that and going, how is this helpful? This isn't history. This isn't anything. This isn't Jacob Hamblin.

John Dehlin [01:12:28] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [01:12:29] You know, this is nothing. We've got to figure out a way to come to terms with this.

John Dehlin [01:12:33] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [01:12:33] And we. And we've got to do it with our eyes open. We. We've got to confront it.

John Dehlin [01:12:37] So we're not there yet.

Jim Bennett [01:12:38] I don't think. I don't think we're there yet. But. But I also. I don't think it's faithless to acknowledge that it's troubling and problematic. I don't think there's anything faithless about that, you know, But. But where I've landed is I do believe that there is something divine about what Joseph Smith was inspired to do and that the implementation of it fell short. Yeah, Fell very short.

Belief in Polygamy in the Afterlife

John Dehlin [01:13:04] Do you. Do you believe that in polygamy, in the afterlife? Do you believe that you will be a polygamist? Are you open to being a polygamist? Do you believe that other people will be polygamous? Do you believe that God's a polygamist?

Jim Bennett [01:13:15] Oh, well, now, that's an interesting question. Only because I think that's the reason why we don't talk about Heavenly Mother is. You know, everybody says, well, we just don't talk about her. It's like, well, we don't talk about her because you have statements by early church leaders that talked about God having dozens of wives or hundreds or thousands. You know, the God Makers talks about an infinite number of wives. I remember on my mission, I was on splits with my zone leader, and he turned to me and he says, do you think you and I both have different spiritual mothers? And I was like, what are you talking about? And it never even occurred to me. But I think that's why we don't talk about heavenly mothers, because there's so much history there with regard to polygamy. When I got married, my wife made it very clear that she did not believe in polygamy in the next life at all. Up to that point, I think I did. At this point, I don't care. I don't believe that anybody is going to be in a marital circumstance that does not bring them the kind of joy that they want. And I don't see how that marital circumstance would be polygamous personally for you. For me and your wife and my wife. And I don't, you know, if the law of Sarah is in effect. I just don't see my wife approving any of.

John Dehlin [01:14:26] You're not closing the door, but you're not seeing it in your future.

Jim Bennett [01:14:28] Well, I'm not close. I'm not. I'm not even visiting the room. I'm not. I don't. I don't care.

John Dehlin [01:14:34] What about for other people?

Jim Bennett [01:14:35] You know, if Dallin Oaks and Russell Nelson want to believe they're going to be married to both of those women in the next life, then more power to them. And if everybody's happy about that and they're happy in the next life, more power to them. It doesn't. I personally, I don't worry about it at all. That's kind of a cop out. But I just don't see getting to the next life and then being forced into this sort of oppressive marriage relationship that makes anybody unhappy.

John Dehlin [01:15:02] Yeah. I just don't see how that's not heaven.

Jim Bennett [01:15:04] If there is some way that makes polygamy work in a way that I don't fully understand now. Great.

John Dehlin [01:15:11] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [01:15:12] I'm not looking for that.

John Dehlin [01:15:13] Okay. And is God a polygamist in your eyes?

Jim Bennett [01:15:20] I choose to believe that he isn't.

John Dehlin [01:15:22] That he isn't.

Jim Bennett [01:15:23] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:15:24] Or Jesus or I. And what. What's gonna happen all those polygamous marriages then?

Jim Bennett [01:15:29] I don't know. I don't have any idea.

John Dehlin [01:15:32] Is it possible? I know. I know what you say, but that it was all a mistake? That. Do you leave room for the possibility that even the probability. And. Or what do you think about other faithful members of the church that just go polygamy, one huge mistake, disaster. And you know, is that possibility and

Jim Bennett [01:15:54] probability are two different things.

John Dehlin [01:15:55] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [01:15:55] I do leave open the possibility. I do not leave open the probability.

John Dehlin [01:15:59] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [01:16:00] But I certainly leave open acceptance of those who disagree with me on that. On that.

John Dehlin [01:16:06] Even in the church.

Jim Bennett [01:16:07] In the church, if somebody says to

John Dehlin [01:16:08] you, I'll stay Mormon, but I'm DNC132 is no longer scripture for me. I do not believe in polygamy at all. Your response is,

Jim Bennett [01:16:19] can you come and help clean the church on Sunday, on Saturday? You know, that doesn't strike me as a deal breaker at all.

John Dehlin [01:16:27] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [01:16:27] In terms of participation in the church.

Racism in the Book of Mormon and Church History

John Dehlin [01:16:30] Okay, let's switch to racism

Jim Bennett [01:16:34] out of the frying pan. Into the fire.

John Dehlin [01:16:37] So I, I mentioned this in our second part. Well, let me just begin. Simple question. Do you believe that in the history of mankind God has ever cursed any human with dark skin?

Jim Bennett [01:16:50] No.

John Dehlin [01:16:51] As a curse?

Jim Bennett [01:16:52] I do not.

John Dehlin [01:16:52] Let me get that on camera.

Jim Bennett [01:16:53] I do not. No, no.

John Dehlin [01:16:55] Okay, so God, in your, in your view God does not curse people with dark skin?

Jim Bennett [01:17:01] No, I believe that men have interpreted dark skin as a curse. But I do not attribute racism to God. I attribute it to man.

John Dehlin [01:17:14] Okay, so the Book of Mormon. There are people who try and finesse and explain away the language of the Book of Mormon. I've tried to have a really charitable, open minded view of this. I don't think the Book of Mormon leaves any question as to whether or not according to the Book of Mormon narrative, that God is cursing people with dark skin because of their wickedness and to make them physically unattractive to the lighter skinned people. That's my. Now we could talk about all the other stuff, but I mean like, no,

Jim Bennett [01:17:49] I think that's the Book of Mormon certainly is the most explicit language in that regard. For instance.

John Dehlin [01:17:55] And you acknowledge that?

Jim Bennett [01:17:56] Absolutely, I acknowledge that. Okay, the Bible, for instance, the idea that black people are the curse of Cain, that's nowhere explicit in the Bible. That's nowhere explicit. That's not even explicit in the Pearl of Great Price, which is where many people get that from. But the Book of Mormon is explicit in that regard. So I don't attribute that to God. I attribute that to human error. I attribute that to either the Nephites being racist or Joseph Smith being racist in terms of the translation. But I'm not willing to attribute that kind of racism to God. And I look at the Book of Mormon in total. I mean, you look at the passages in 2 Nephi 5 which explicitly talk about dark skin being a curse to make them unattractive. There is no question that that is racism. And there's no question in my mind that that is an error on somebody's part. I don't know who to attribute the error to. I personally attribute it to the cultural expectations of the Nephites and the Lamanites, that the Nephites are looking for a way to otherize the Lamanites and this is a convenient way to do it. And they say, well look, their skin is darker. Or maybe the Lamanites had intermarried with tribes of darker skinned people and they said, aha, see this is a way that we can separate ourselves. And then they attribute it to God. But I don't think I don't see a revelation there in 2nd Nephi 5 where God says, and behold, I have cursed these people. What happens is you have Nephi saying God cursed them. And that's Nephi's interpretation, and I think that's Nephi's cultural racism.

John Dehlin [01:19:32] So a couple questions on that line then. If Joseph can be engaged in this process where by, by the most credible account, he's literally reading words off of a stone. Right?

Jim Bennett [01:19:45] Right.

John Dehlin [01:19:46] He can get Zarahemla, he can get Kumarman and Kumamon, and he can get very specific Zarahemla, very specific words, very specific teachings, sermons, names, geographies, currency. Why can't God clarify this so that then 150, 200 years of subsequent Mormons aren't not only interpreting it this way, but like people of color, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, are absorbing these false teachings and identities into their own identities. Like, why wasn't that clarified in the translation process between God and Joseph in your mind?

Jim Bennett [01:20:27] Well, it all comes back to expectations and assumptions about what the translation process was and how that worked. For instance, if Nephi had made a mistake and had put that down,

John Dehlin [01:20:44] do

Jim Bennett [01:20:44] we assume then that the translation should be such that Nephi's errors would be accommodated within the translation? That seems to make sense in terms of how you're framing this.

John Dehlin [01:20:59] I mean, yeah, it's just the fact that God would allow such racist teachings to be attributed to God in canonized in his Scripture and that that would influence 200 years of the prophets and the church. It just seems so serious if it's not true.

Jim Bennett [01:21:13] Well, but no, what God will allow

John Dehlin [01:21:16] in Scripture or in life.

Jim Bennett [01:21:19] Well, look, look, I mean, one of the things that I point out is that the Bible as a document in total is nowhere condemned slavery. The law of Moses has God explicitly making allowances for slavery and talking about different ways to, you know, and in the New Testament, you have Paul writing a letter saying, here's your slave, I'm sending him back to you, please be nice to him. You know, and I. So you look at that and say, well, why does God allow that?

John Dehlin [01:21:48] Right.

Jim Bennett [01:21:49] Why does God in the law of Moses more explicitly allows for slavery than the Book of Mormon allows for racism? And in fact, there are condemnations, very explicit condemnations of racism later in the Book of Mormon. I really feel like you have to take the Book of Mormon in total in terms of what it says about race, because I don't think. I think if you just stop at 2 Nephi Chapter 5 and say, this is what the Book of Mormon says some races are cursed because they have dark skin. Then you have to look at the fact that you have intermarriage and that you have. After Christ comes Lamanite is no longer a racial designation. And that for 200 years in 4th Nephi people of Lamanites there were no manner of ites and everybody of every race and every tribe and every background is intermarried. I don't think you can walk away from the Book of Mormon and say, well this is a book that in, in total is endorsing racism. I think the Book of Mormon condemns racism. But I don't think there's any question that you have racism in the Book of Mormon and that very likely the Nephites are the perpetrators of that racism. And so should God have removed that? If God had removed that in the translation process, then the later condemnations of racism don't make any sense. They don't put. I just don't see how that's how that works. So you know, you always come back to well, why would God allow any kind of error? Why would God allow any kind of evil or evil? And it becomes the much broader question rather than the specific question of racism in the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:23:29] Okay, so, so, so the, the follow on question is, and I think we kind of covered this already in part one, but, but every prophet from kind of Brigham Young down to recently pretty much interpreted the Book of Mormon in very literal ways, interpreted the dark skinned cursing, you know, as the Book of Mormon seems to say they should. They could have, they could have received revelation. They could have been instructed by the Lord that to stop associating dark skin with the curse. And then they taught that to all the members. So we basically have 200ish years where the members were taught this. People are taught to believe it. And prophets, seers and revelators of every generation perpetuated these very racist teachings and included, you know, the, the priesthood ban on, on men of color and well, families of color. Yeah, families, you know, temple as well. So like, why would God allow couple, couple hundred years of prophet seers and revelators to perpetuate such, not just error, but such egregious, destructive, destructive error. And you'll probably be repeating yourself a bit on what the role of a prophet is. No, well, prophets work and how revelation works.

Jim Bennett [01:24:55] But well, do you read Paul Reeve? Have you read any of his religion of a different color? He framed this in a way that has been very helpful to me. You look at the Book of First Samuel, the Old Testament and the Israelites come to Samuel and say, we want a king. And Samuel goes to the Lord and comes back and says, the Lord says, all these terrible things are going to happen if you have a king. A king is going to be an awful, awful thing. And they said, no, we want to be like other nations. We want a king. And eventually they get a king. And in fact, the Lord helps to anoint the king. The Lord sanctifies the choice of the king. And you look at that and go, well, that doesn't make a lick of sense. And all the things the Lord said would happen if you have a king ended up happening. And it turned out to be a total disaster for Israel. But the fact that they wanted it that way means that the Lord did it that way. There's a scripture in the Book of Mormon, I think it's Jacob, chapter four. Don't know the verse, but it says, because they have wanted it, God hath done it that they may stumble. And Paul Reeve frames this in terms of Mormons were being depicted in the newspapers of the day or in the discussion of the day as almost being an entirely separate race of people. You had editorial cartoons where you had Brigham Young standing there with all of his wives, and they were all of different races, including a black woman, and they were being otherized and ostracized. And Paul Reeves says that the. The embrace of the Protestant justification for slavery, which is where the curse of Cain comes from. You know, we talk about it as if we invented this, when in fact this was a common 19th century justification for why it was okay to keep black people enslaved because they were cursed. They bore the curse of Cain. Brigham Young embraced that wholeheartedly and did it in a way to say, we want to be like other nations. We want to be, you know, we want to be accepted. We are white. It's Brigham Young asserting his whiteness, asserting the fact all this, and embraces this. And I very much can see, all right, God looking at that and saying, that's what you want. You got it, man. There it is. You got it. You live with the consequences. And you know, God hath done it that we may stumble. And boy, have we stumbled. And we have taught. One of the reasons why it lasted so long. People say, well, why did it last so long? Is it was completely consistent not just with what the members of the church wanted, but with the country in the world at the time. The idea that black and white people are equal is not something that any member of the church would have questioned until well into the 20th century. And I really think it was David O. McKay, who was the first person, first leader of the church, to even sort of question whether or not this should be changed. So the fact you don't get a revelation up until then is because no one's asking for one. It doesn't even occur to anybody that there's anything wrong with this, just as it doesn't occur to anybody in the New Testament that there's anything wrong with slavery. It's just. But, you know, and I grew up as David O. McKay's great grandson, being told the story of my grandmother going to. My grandmother was the General Relief Society president, not general primary president, and said, we've got black boys that go, and they're 12 years old and they can't go into deacons, quorum. What are we supposed to do about that? And he says, well, they can't, because they can't have the priesthood. And she says, well, I think it's time for a new revelation. And he says, well, so do I. And I was taught that, see, clearly this must have come from God, because David O. McKay wanted a revelation and didn't get one. And the deeper I've dived into that, Greg Prince's wonderful book, you know, David O. McKay and the rise of Modern Mormonism, for which my family are a number of the sources in that book. But it's very clear that David O. McKay was a segregationist. And I look at that and go, well, if you're a segregationist, what kind of revelation are you asking for? Are you asking for a revelation that would allow a black man and a white woman to kneel across an altar in a temple and be sealed together for time and all eternity? I don't think he was asking for that revelation. I don't think he would be willing to accept that revelation. Whatever revelation he's asking for is one that allows the blacks to have the priesthood. But clearly they're not quite on the same par as we are. I mean, they're sort of limiting what the kind of revelation can be. I don't think you get revelation that way. And so my answer to that is it's an indictment of us as a people.

John Dehlin [01:30:03] Including the leaders.

Jim Bennett [01:30:05] Of course, including the leaders. But you look at the race in the priesthood essay, it talks about, we condemn all racism in leaders and members, past and present leaders, but we are the leaders, Stake presidents, bishops, we are all the church. And I think the church as a whole wasn't at all interested in any kind of revelation that would make people equal. Until well into the 20th century.

John Dehlin [01:30:34] So one of the questions that comes up with that possible explanation is that mankind wants to have lots of sex. Oftentimes mankind wants to drink lots of beer. Mankind wants to, you know, do all sorts of things that are labeled as sin. So it's weird to know, you know, mankind wants to drink coffee, mankind wants to drink tea. There are lots of things that mankind wants to do that God says, no, that's a sin, that's wrong, you can't do it.

Jim Bennett [01:31:06] Right.

John Dehlin [01:31:07] So I mean, I guess, I guess you can't know the mind and will of God. But I guess for me that that's my response is like there are all sorts of ways God can say, don't drink this specific beverage, don't say this specific word. Hold the sacrament with your right hand. Like there's all sorts of very. Wear a white shirt, don't wear a tie, don't have multiple piercings in your ear. Like there are all sorts of rules that, that mankind would be very happy to disobey all behaviors that mankind would be happy and womankind would be have to engage in that God says, nope, can't do that. That's wrong. Here's a white handbook or here's a manual of instructions a thousand pages long of all the do's and don'ts.

Jim Bennett [01:31:49] Yep.

John Dehlin [01:31:50] But somehow racism doesn't make it into that. And so God. But God's going to say, well, men want it, men and women want that. So I'm going to allow that. I don't know. That kind of is throwing God. And this is one of my issues with the blacks in the priesthood essay. It kind of throws God under the bus. It basically says we don't know. God just does it and we're all just doing whatever God tells us to do. And I know that you are acknowledging racism on the part of the members, but there's a degree to which God's being thrown under the bus there and blamed.

Jim Bennett [01:32:28] The race of the priesthood essay is really fascinating because it doesn't throw God under the bus, but it refuses to cross the line into saying it was a mistake. I mean, it comes right up to that line. It doesn't say God commanded. It says there is no revelation, which there wasn't. There was no revelation that was.

John Dehlin [01:32:51] Although it was declared to be doctrinal. Right. Well, by at least two first presidencies, signed statements saying that the black priesthood ban was doctrinal. Yeah.

Jim Bennett [01:33:01] The word doctrine and doctrinal we could have, but it's the first president sign. First What I'm saying is, what does that mean, that it's doctrinal? Because I don't believe that there's any such thing as unchanging doctrine.

John Dehlin [01:33:12] But it's a, it's a signed first presidency state.

Jim Bennett [01:33:14] No, there's a signed first presidency. There's two first presidency. There is no doubt in my mind that every member of the First Presidency, probably even today, believes or believed that this was, this came from God, that the ban came from God. And I think that's probably why the essay isn't willing to say. The essay opens the possibility that there's a mistake, but it refuses to cross the line and admit that it is. You know, Spencer Kimball, if you read Edward Kimball, his son's really beautiful essay, where he talks about him wrestling with this. Spencer Kimball acknowledges the possibility of error. I think Jeremy even mentions that in the CBS letter. He's like, well, he mentions that this could possibly be an error. He's not willing to admit that it is. He's not willing to just stand up and say it is. But the essay leaves that possibility open, but it refuses to take a stand on it. And that frustrates me to some degree. But, but so, because I was going

John Dehlin [01:34:12] to ask you that next, doesn't, if anything, deserves an apology. Isn't it, you know, not, not just all the white members of the church that were taught racist, racist things from canonized scripture and from prophet seers and revelators.

Jim Bennett [01:34:29] You weren't taught it from canonized scripture. You were taught it from. But you were taught it by prophets years in Revelation. Yes. There isn't a canonized scripture that.

John Dehlin [01:34:36] Well, the Book of Mormon.

Jim Bennett [01:34:36] Well, I'm saying the Book of Mormon

John Dehlin [01:34:37] is talking about racism.

Jim Bennett [01:34:39] The Book of Mormon. The scriptures in the Book of Mormon were never used to justify the priesthood ban because they're in reference.

John Dehlin [01:34:45] I'm now mixing things up a little. So I'm just saying overall, Mormons, myself,

Jim Bennett [01:34:50] we were taught doctrine.

John Dehlin [01:34:52] Yes, we're taught super racist things, including from the scriptures by prophecies and revelators for a couple centuries. Don't we deserve an apology? And more importantly, don't Mormons of color, African American Mormons, Native Americans, all the people that were called Lamanites, you know, Pacific Islanders, all the, all the Latin Americans, don't they all deserve an apology from the church and its leadership saying, we're sorry for all these racist teachings that were perpetuated along with we're sorry for the ban? This was really bad and we should have gotten this right. Do you Wish. Do you wish an apology like that would be.

Jim Bennett [01:35:35] Yes, I do. Okay, that. But that's not the same thing as. As insisting that the church do it.

John Dehlin [01:35:42] Right.

Jim Bennett [01:35:43] I mean, I really feel like we need to get there collectively, and it's not my responsibility. Yes. I would love to see that apology. When that fake apology came out a few years ago and people were weeping, and then it was, no, no, this is fake. We're not really apologizing. That demonstrated the hunger that there is for an acknowledgement. Again, it's like polygamy. This is something we have to confront, and it's something that we are starting to confront. I really want to give the church kudos. You know, I look at. Do you know who Derek Knox is? Ever listen to the beyond the Block podcast? Derek Knox and James? I can't forget his. Remember his last name. My wife is the gospel doctrine teacher, and maybe I'm throwing my wife under the bus, but she, like, they do a come follow me podcast that she listens to religiously and. And repeats in gospel doctrine class. But I don't know why I was talking about that. What was I saying? Apology, apology. You know, I completely lost my train of thought.

John Dehlin [01:36:50] Oh, it's okay.

Jim Bennett [01:36:51] I've just plugged Derek Knox, and that's fine. The beyond the Block podcast. But I can. Well, I.

John Dehlin [01:36:59] Let me ask you a different question, then I'll come back to it. I'm sure that's going to come to you. All right, so, okay. Well, we were talking about apology and whether the church should apologize. You were talking also about, oh, no, no, no.

Prophets, Revelation, and Racial Teachings

Jim Bennett [01:37:11] This is. This is. It came to me. I was talking to Derek Knox, and he said, I know that Dallin Oaks is a prophet, seer, and revelator, because why else would he stand up and say black lives matter? Because that's not Dallin Oaks. That's not what he was raised on. And, you know, the Desnatters, I looked at that and said, well, he was condemning the Black Lives Matter movement, though. And it's like, no, he really wasn't. You go back and read that talk. And he's very careful in what he says, but he's not condemning the Black Lives Matter movement. He's never saying all lives matter. He says that, you know, defunding the police and those kinds of things are appropriate areas for advocacy, and that's the closest he comes to any kind of condemnation. And that doesn't sound like a condemnation to me at all. It's that they just shouldn't be mixed with the concept that Black lives matter. And you know, the church is reaching out to the naacp. I think the NAACP is a little frustrated that it's like, okay, great, we'll be your friends, but we'd like to see more action, please. But the church is moving in that direction and the church is moving that direction in a way that would have been unthinkable when I was in primary, you know, before the priesthood revelation. I was 10 years old when the priesthood revelation happened. And I remember when it happened thinking, I mean I had no idea. It was like, what, what were we doing with black people? We weren't what, you know, I was, I was a kid, but my parents were just beside themselves with joy over this. And it was.

John Dehlin [01:38:43] Sure your dad was both your parents.

Jim Bennett [01:38:45] Yeah, you know, I um, yeah. So it, it's, it's something that we need to confront and we need to. But I think it's something that we are making progress on. But would I like to see an apology? I would like to see an apology.

John Dehlin [01:39:02] Okay. Thank you. The, the race stuff, at least the Book of Mormon race stuff does speak to the truth claims in a couple ways. And I did referenced this in a previous episode, but I'm going to reference it again in this context because there is a really good, I think a super good explanation for the Book of Mormon teachings around Lamanites and Nephites. And it's not just view of the Hebrews. You can probably find 10 or 15 books written in the eight before or during the 1820s that explained this very pervasive narrative that, you know, these, these dark skinned Native Americans that we're committing genocide upon as a nation and so we have to dehumanize them. They clearly couldn't have created all these wonderful civilizations that we keep uncovering. So and we know that the lost tribes of Israel, they got lost somewhere. So there must have been a light skinned group of Native Americans that were intelligent and sophisticated enough to create these amazing artifacts and civilizations that likely have some tie to Israel lost tribes. And that's why it was a pervasive belief in the 1820s and not just in the view of the Hebrews but in other books and with lots of other people that this pervasive belief that there was a dark skinned group of Native Americans and a light skinned and that the dark skinned savages killed off the light skinned so that instead of putting the racism on Mormon or Moroni or Helaman or you know, Alma, I think a much more reasonable explanation is that is that Joseph Smith authored the Book of Mormon and simply incorporated into the Book of Mormon narrative what was the pervasive view at the time, which was based on the mound builder myth. And if anybody wants to just go Google mound builder myth, there's a really good book on the mound builder myth. There's episodes I did with Dan Vogel and with John Hamer on this pervasive mound builder myth. That's to me, there's really no other explanation. And that's where Joseph Smith got the idea. Not necessarily from the view of the Hebrews, but I mean, it's no small coincidence that Oliver Cowdery was in the congregation of Ethan Smith, who was the preacher that wrote View of the Hebrews, where he wrote that narrative into the book. And then Oliver Cowdery makes his way to Joseph Smith and very likely carries that, that structure that was also in the common understanding into what becomes the Book of Mormon. Like, can you see that? That's, that's, it's almost like fingerprints. Like, it seems so obvious that that's where the, where the Lamanite, the Nephite kind of story originates from. Can you not acknowledge that or can you or.

Jim Bennett [01:42:07] No, I can't.

John Dehlin [01:42:08] Really.

Jim Bennett [01:42:09] No, I can't. In fact, I really disagree with just about all of that for a number of reasons. Well, let's work backwards. Let's start with the view of the Hebrews, because the structure of the view of the Hebrews does not make its way into the Book of.

John Dehlin [01:42:24] Well, we don't have to recover that.

Jim Bennett [01:42:26] We don't.

John Dehlin [01:42:26] People can go to part two to hear that.

Jim Bennett [01:42:28] I mean, the fact that Oliver Cowdery was in the congregation with the guy with the view of the Hebrews, you would think more of the view of the Hebrews or any of the view of the Hebrews would make its way into the Book of Mormon. And it doesn't. The idea of the mound builders myth, the Book of Mormon doesn't get into mound building. There's very little or, you know, I follow.

John Dehlin [01:42:48] I'm only talking about the light skinned and the dark skinned skinned.

Jim Bennett [01:42:50] Okay, so light skinned and dark skinned. So if the premise is that dark skinned people couldn't have done all this because they're cursed and they're terrible and only light skinned people could do that. That's not a premise. That's argued in the Book of Mormon because by the end of the Book of Mormon, after Christ comes. It is argued at the beginning.

John Dehlin [01:43:12] It is argued at the beginning. At the beginning of the Book of Mormon, the Lamanites were dark and filthy and lazy. And loathsome. Now yes, there are these fun little plot twists at the end, but the Book of Mormon absolutely associates lazy, slovenly, lack of uncivilized. They, they attribute the Book of Mormon attributes an uncivilized nature to the early mid Lamanites.

Jim Bennett [01:43:37] I think that's indisputable to the early mid Lamanites. It does. By the time you have Mormon who talks about these massive cities.

John Dehlin [01:43:45] Yeah, at the end.

Jim Bennett [01:43:46] At the end.

John Dehlin [01:43:47] It's a plot twist.

Jim Bennett [01:43:48] It's what's not a plot. It's a 200 year plot twist twist. Because for 200 years after Christ comes, you don't have a differentiation, a teeny

John Dehlin [01:43:57] number of actual pages in the books compared to the rest of the book.

Jim Bennett [01:44:01] But if the thesis is dark skinned people can't build big civilizations, that is not a thesis that's found anywhere in the Book of Mormon. It's not the Lamanites. The other thing Bushman talks about this in Rough Stone Rolling is that far from just being condemned and being told you're terrible. The Lamanites are told you are the ones who will blossom as the rose. You are the ones who are of the house of Israel. You are the. You know, we had a foster, a Navajo foster sister when I was growing up in the Lamanite placement program. But the promise was these are Israel. These are, you know, look up to these people. Not look down on these people because

John Dehlin [01:44:47] they're the pure blood of Israel.

Jim Bennett [01:44:48] They're the pure blood of Israel.

John Dehlin [01:44:50] Which is also a racist teaching. Well, well the fact that God has favorites and.

Jim Bennett [01:44:55] Sure. And, and

John Dehlin [01:44:59] I just think I, I know where you're going.

Jim Bennett [01:45:01] I, with all the, but the. I, I just push back hard on the idea that, that the Book of Mormon is, is the kind of racist. But see the document that you're describing it as. I don't think it is, I don't

John Dehlin [01:45:13] think you're responding to actually what I asked because what I'm saying is, is just the idea of a light, light skinned Native Americans and dark skinned Native Americans and the lights dark skin killed off the light skin. That was a pervasive belief in frontier and, and in New England sort of America in the 1820s. And there's entire, entire book that lays this all out and it starts with the Conquistadors.

Jim Bennett [01:45:44] What's the book?

John Dehlin [01:45:45] It's called the Mound Builder Myth or something to that effect. But it lays that all out. And, and I can, I can provide you with 10 or 20 books or articles or magazines that all say this by 1823, 1826 and I've got the sources. And so it forget view of the Hebrews, forget how the Book of Mormon ends. Like every, I think any reasonable reading of 19th century kind of frontier America will, will acknowledge that that was the pervasive view so that it makes every bit of sense that that is what narrative would be incorporated into, into the Book of Mormon.

Jim Bennett [01:46:29] I will certainly acknowledge that was the pervasive view which makes it so remarkable that that's not what ended up in the Book of Mormon. I mean talk about that's only the end we don't have.

John Dehlin [01:46:38] Not only the fact that there are two civilizations light skinned, dark skinned and that one kills off the other. That's all I'm talking about.

Jim Bennett [01:46:44] But the Book of Mormon does not argue that a dark skinned civilization killed off a light skinned civilization. It argues that the Lamanites at the end of the Book of Mormon, which was no longer a racial designation, killed off the Nephites, which again was no longer a racial designation. And in fact in the Book of Mormon they make it very clear that by the end it's the Nephites who are the wicked ones, it's not the Lamanites. So even if you want to ascribe dark skin to the Lamanites, you have the wicked civilization being killed off by the more righteous civilization. This is one of the things that's so remarkable to me about the Book of Mormon is that it does not meet those kind of expectations because I think you're absolutely right that pervasively that's the idea in the 19th century. So why doesn't the Book of Mormon argue that kind of a premise? What's really fascinating to me is that the early members of the church misinterpreted the Book of Mormon, including Joseph Smith. It's very clear a number of times that Joseph Smith talks about the Book of Mormon, that he doesn't necessarily understand the Book of Mormon, which would make sense if he didn't write it. And so you know, anyway. But no, we're going to have to agree to disagree with this one.

DNA Evidence and Book of Mormon Geography

John Dehlin [01:47:58] What, what about another seemingly really damning piece of evidence is DNA analysis. And I know you talk about this a bit, but. And I don't want to, I don't want you to go to arguments I'm not making. Okay, I'm, I'm going to try and be very specific.

Jim Bennett [01:48:14] Well, I'll agree to go to, not to arguments you're not making as long as you don't go to giving the Book of Mormon arguments that it's not.

John Dehlin [01:48:21] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim Bennett [01:48:22] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:48:23] So you would expect. Well, there's two problems with DNA as far as I'm concerned. One is that you would. You would expect that we would find somehow some sort of genetic association between, you know, when Joseph Smith was like, sending missionaries out to the Lamanites, he was sending them out to Ohio. Right, right. To. Not to Central America and some tiny little sub city or pueblo somewhere in Guatemala. It was Joseph Smith's understanding and pretty much every prophet, Syrian revelator from Joseph Smith to the present, that Lamanites meant any Native American North, Central, South America, and they threw the Pacific island in as well. Right.

Jim Bennett [01:49:08] All that.

John Dehlin [01:49:09] Right. So, so, so even Joseph Smith is in the. In the whole title page of the Book of Mormon is for the Lamanites, the pure blood of Israel, not for the Asiatics, not for the Mongolians. Like the Book of Mormon is for primarily the Lamanites, who are the pure blood of Israel. Right. But what we find out is, is that virtually all, if not all, of North Central South Americans and. And Pacific Islanders trace their genetic lineage to Mongolia, to Asia, and we're still not finding any DNA that can really, in any credible way be associated with what we would expect to be Middle Eastern DNA at the time. And so again, both the, you know, Bering straight migration, along with the DNA evidence, along with every prophet's revelator's interpretation from Joseph Smith to now just sort of begs this question. Who are the Lamanites? Who is the book even written for if everybody's getting that wrong, and if DNA evidence, again, doesn't show any real support for the Israelite migration from Jerusalem to America as being the principal ancestors of. Of the Lamanites, who we don't even know who they are anymore. Like, that's. Come on, man. That's problematic, Jim. That's problematic. Who are the Lamanites?

Jim Bennett [01:50:40] Who are the Lamanites? Well, who's the book for if it's not for them? Well, it makes it very clear. The Book of Mormon talks about not just the Lamanites, but it's for the people in the latter days that it was written for our time and not just for the Lamanites, but it does have a direct call to Native Americans and saying, no, ye are the house of the Lord.

John Dehlin [01:51:01] I think the title page of the Book of Mormon says it's primarily for the Lamanite.

Jim Bennett [01:51:05] Well, it's for the convincing of the Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ, the eternal God, manifesting himself. Unto all nations because. And Gentile, you know, Anyway, anyway, well, well, I want to back up quite a bit there. I mean, I, I, I don't know enough about DNA that anything I say about DNA, neither is, is remotely authoritative. Neither other than to say that what DNA evidence tells us can tell us is extraordinarily limited in investigating this. I mean, you use the word we would expect. I mean, it's all about expectations. What would we expect Middle eastern DNA in 600 BC to look like? How would we expect it to manifest itself if the small population is intermarrying with a larger population? Book of Mormon itself, even prior to all this DNA, Hugh Nibley talks about the fact that the Jaredites were very likely Asiatic. So you have people that have come in and you have a group of people who are already Asiatic. You have, you know, they meet the people of Zarahemla, who are Mulek. And Orson Scott Card has a fascinating theory that I've kind of adopted, which is the people of Mulek. Mulek is a, is a Jaredite name. It has sort of Jaredite construction. But the people of Mulek are saying, okay, yeah, we're of Israel too, and that they weren't necessarily Israel, that they were probably Jaredites because they'd lost the language, but they were trying to find common ground with these guys. I mean, that's his speculation that I think is kind of interesting and answers a lot of questions for me. But you don't have to believe, I mean, the Church certainly doesn't teach that. They teach that Mulek was indeed the son of King Zedekiah and they believe they found his seal on a stone somewhere or this, that and the other. The point is, if you are going to argue as the Church did and no longer does, but if you were going to argue that Lehi and his family arrived on an empty continent and populated the entire continent, north and South America, solely from their, from the dozens of people at most, who were there and who became millions of people over the course of 500 years or whatever it was then. The DNA arguments, I think hold a whole lot more weight.

John Dehlin [01:53:33] Because you believe that Joseph taught that and believed it, right?

Jim Bennett [01:53:36] I don't think there's any question.

John Dehlin [01:53:37] And prophecy and revelation, I don't think

Jim Bennett [01:53:39] there's any question that that has been the predominant.

John Dehlin [01:53:42] We're not just like making that up, right? No, that's what we were all led to think and believe.

Jim Bennett [01:53:46] Well, yes, yes, it is, by people.

John Dehlin [01:53:49] We believe through Prophet Susan, Revelation.

Jim Bennett [01:53:54] This is a huge controversy now. I don't know, if you follow the whole Heartlander thing, I think it's fascinating because you've got these guys that are. The most important principle of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ is the location of the hill, Cumorah. And to me, I think, what the heck is your problem? Who cares? That doesn't matter to me at all. That has nothing to do with anything. But the point is, and they point to all of these statements that are made by all these prophets, seekers and revelators that insist that the Book of Mormon has a hemispheric geography, that Cumorah was in fact the Drumlin in New York where Joseph Smith got the plates. And that's which Joseph claimed. Well, Joseph never did.

John Dehlin [01:54:32] He called it Hill Cumorah.

Jim Bennett [01:54:34] No, he never did. We don't have. Oliver did. There's a letter from Oliver where he defines that Joseph. The only time we have Joseph referring to Cumorah is in the 121st section of the Doctrine of Covenants where he talks about glad tidings from Cumorah. But when he recounts his history, he does not refer to the hill where he got the plates as Cumorah. So I think he probably believed it was. But there is no statement by any prophet, seer or revelator that claims a revelation that delineates where Cumorah is or delineates a hemispheric model for the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:55:09] But it'd be weird to say that that's not Cumorah. I mean, isn't that kind of weird? Like, the Moroni buried the plates on the hill. Joseph went to the hill. Like, why would there be any more than one Cumorah?

Jim Bennett [01:55:21] Well, no.

John Dehlin [01:55:23] Or why wouldn't it be there?

Jim Bennett [01:55:24] Because. Because Mormon 6, verse 6 talks about how Mormon buried all the plates at Cumorah except for this handful of plates that he now gives to his son Moroni, which means that Moroni spent 20, 30 years wandering from the scene of this massive carnage, trying to get as far away from Cumorah as possible. Nowhere in the Book of Mormon does it talk about Moroni burying the plates at Cumorah. He talks about burying the place. He does not identify the name of the hill. That is a tradition that sprung up over time innocently. I believe that that was an assumption that was made by Joseph Smith and by the Church in general and was

John Dehlin [01:56:03] perpetuated and hilk more pageant. Right.

Jim Bennett [01:56:06] The hook. More pageant. Sure. And as we answered by the Church as we dive into it and we actually textually analyze the Book of Mormon, faithful scholars almost all entirely believe that the Book of Mormon took place in a limited geography. In your mission in Guatemala is essentially the area. But this is a small group that took place and that they quickly intermarried the minute they got there. And if we assume that the Jaredites who got there thousands of years earlier were Asiatic, then all of a sudden making any kind of bold claims about what DNA is saying just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It just doesn't. You know, we don't know. I would love it if we had this sort of DNA evidence that said, well, this is clearly genetically, this is Lehi's gene. We don't have that degree of specificity in terms of what we can learn about ancient populations. So, so I, you know, so who are the laymanites?

John Dehlin [01:57:09] Who are the laymanites? Like, who are they? Who are they? If some, if, if, if 99% of, you know, Latin Americans, Mesoamericans, South Americans, Pacific Islanders. Yeah, if they're. If they. They and their ancestors had no connection with Lehi or Nephi or any of those people. Are they. Are they Lamanites?

Jim Bennett [01:57:34] Oh, I don't.

John Dehlin [01:57:35] I'm not. Are they Lamanites? If they're, if they're descendants of people that came from the Bering Strait, Asian. The Bering Strait came down populated, never had any connection with this tiny little Mesoamerican pueblo that people seem to want to say is the only thing that really mattered. Are they not in.

Jim Bennett [01:57:52] I'm not saying that's the only thing that really mattered at all.

John Dehlin [01:57:54] But are they Lamanites? Are they?

Jim Bennett [01:57:55] They are. They are of the House of Israel, as are.

John Dehlin [01:57:58] Why, if they're from Asia?

Jim Bennett [01:57:59] Because. Because belonging to the House of Israel as we. As we are, they.

John Dehlin [01:58:04] You're saying they're adopted into the House of Israel like we. Like we are. Do they have the blood of Israel running through their veins, do you think?

Jim Bennett [01:58:12] I don't know. And. But I do not matter.

John Dehlin [01:58:15] That's a. That's a material claim. If you are a. I mean, the whole Book of Mormon is all about blood and non blood and Jew and gentile.

Jim Bennett [01:58:24] Yeah. But I think the focus on blood and the focus on race is a human failing. And I think that God is far more interested in the covenants we make than in the blood that we have. And I think that's a mistake that we continue to make in thinking that bloodlines matter because bloodlines are assigned by God through adoption when we are willing to make covenants. So when I say, who are the Lamanites, you know, you can, you can make a genetic case that anybody that lived in 600 B.C. that has any. Any descendants that, you know, all of us have intermarried to the point that all of us to some degree are related to these people. You know, you can go back in genealogy and find some kind of connection to just about anybody who's ever lived. So. So the bloodline doesn't matter to me, and I know that it matters to many.

John Dehlin [01:59:20] It matters in the Old Testament, it matters in the New Testament, it matters in the Book of Mormon, and it mattered to prophet seers and revelators between then and now. And it's the whole foundation of the patriarchal blessings, whether it's the pure blood of Israel or the adopted.

Jim Bennett [01:59:35] Does your patriarchal blessing adopt you or does it assign you as blood? Because mine makes reference to the fact to which tribe I belong.

John Dehlin [01:59:43] I don't think I'm the blood tribe of Israel, according to the.

Jim Bennett [01:59:47] It just says, you know, you are of this tribe. Is. Is how the patriarchal blessings that I've

John Dehlin [01:59:51] seen described, I was taught that meant I was adopted into. Because I'm clearly not a direct descendant of Ephraim and Manasseh.

Jim Bennett [01:59:59] When we start talking about, well, I know my genetic background back to 6,000 years ago.

John Dehlin [02:00:04] So. So just to summarize, like, there's this teaching we all receive that the prophets will never lead us astray, right?

Jim Bennett [02:00:12] Well, that's a discussion in and of itself.

Prophets Leading Astray and Institutional Accountability

John Dehlin [02:00:14] Okay, well, with that, because it feels like we have all been massively led astray in terms of race, racism, dark skin, curses, laymanites, all that. It just feels like we have all been completely led astray as. As it relates to race, and that. That's had really sad consequences. So if I say I feel led astray by prophet seers and revelators and the Bible and the Book of Mormon, do you have sympathy with that? Do you even agree that we've been led astray?

Jim Bennett [02:00:48] I have plenty of sympathy. I think I have empathy for that.

John Dehlin [02:00:51] Do you agree that the prophets in the scriptures have led us astray as it relates to race?

Jim Bennett [02:00:57] No, I don't, because I don't think that's what the promise that the prophet will never lead us astray means. I do not think if you go back, because people cite that as a sort of de facto promise of prophetic infallibility. Prophets never going to lead you astray. Prophets never going to tell you to do something that's wrong. Profit's never going to. And this week you're saying they will.

John Dehlin [02:01:23] You're saying prophets will sometimes tell you things that are wrong. Prophets will teach things that are wrong, and they'll lead. They'll do things that are wrong, and they'll lead members to believe things that are wrong and do things that are wrong. You're saying that that will happen, right?

Jim Bennett [02:01:39] Yes.

John Dehlin [02:01:39] And it does happen.

Jim Bennett [02:01:40] It does.

John Dehlin [02:01:40] Okay.

Jim Bennett [02:01:41] I don't think that's being led astray. I think that's a different thing. Brigham Young focused on this, and I wish we would quote him more than we quote Wilford Woodruff. Because it's Wilford Woodruff. Wilford Woodruff, when he introduced the manifesto, was trying to calm a church that thought it was coming apart at the seams and thought that they had been promised that it could never, ever change. We will never, ever give up polygamy. And then here he is doing this manifesto saying, we are going to comply with the federal government. And he's saying, I'm not leading you astray. I will never lead you astray. And that's not in the program. And he insists that when Brigham Young is asked the same question, can a prophet make a mistake? And I don't have the verbatim quote for you. I need to memorize more things. But the word he uses in the quote is designedly. He says, I will make a thousand errors, but I would no more designedly lead you astray. Then the Lord would never allow that. And what I think that goes to is, I don't think the promise that the prophet will never lead us astray is a promise of prophetic perfection. I think it is an assurance of prophetic intent that if a prophet stands up and says, well, I know that this is right, but I'm going to do something otherwise. And I'm going to purposely do something that I know is going to lead this church down the wrong path. The promise is that the Lord is not going to allow that to happen. The promise is not that I'm going to extract the agency of a prophet when he is called as a prophet and make it impossible for him to do anything that is wrong. We are not given that assurance. And so when we talk about leading astray, to lead someone, you have to know where you are going. You have to set a direction. And so the promise is the prophet is never going to set a direction that he knowingly knows is wrong. It is not a promise that the prophet is never going to be wrong.

John Dehlin [02:03:40] They will be wrong.

Jim Bennett [02:03:42] Well, I'm happy to acknowledge that, but I'm happy to acknowledge that in the context of. I firmly believe that they have been far more right than they have been wrong.

John Dehlin [02:03:52] Not about race, though.

Jim Bennett [02:03:54] Not about race, though. I mean, I'm happy to concede that, but. And people see this as a cop out, the men of their time sort of thing. And we talk about these men being men of their time. And I think it is a bit of a cop out because you had abolitionists and you had people who were far more racially. That weren't racist the way Brigham Young was. So, you know, but you look at the society as a whole and the church's teachings on race did not stand out against the teachings of the world until the 20th century, until the mid 20th century. And so the fact that you had a group of people that didn't even question racist assumptions is not particularly surprising. It is disappointing. I wish it were not the case. But just as you did not have people in the New Testament who were railing against slavery. The reality is that the Lord's people are certainly capable of making egregious errors, as are the leaders. But the promise is that those errors are going to be made in good faith. I firmly believe that David O. McKay, a segregationist, really did want to give the priesthood to the blacks and believe that he was constrained by God from doing that most.

John Dehlin [02:05:20] You know, Matt Harris, I think, is the best source on this. And if you haven't gotten into Matt Harris, there's a fantastic interview I did recently with Matt Harris, both on Ezra Tap Benson and his political history and church history, but also on the Race in the Priesthood essay. And Matt's working on an amazing book that's going to be coming out, and this will be the book on race in the church. But he makes the argument that I think is kind of irrefutable, that the biggest thing holding David O. McKay back from, from making the change regarding race in the priesthood was other apostles like Ezra Tab Benson, like Martin Peterson, like Harold B. Lee, who were super racist or racist in their context. He needed the right people to die, basically. Well, that's what was holding it back. Not, not, not the Lord or, you know, anything like that. Let me just say this. This will come back with the LGBT stuff and the women's stuff. But I think what so many people keep saying is what's the purpose of a prophet, Syrian revelator, if they're not ahead of the times? Why is it that, you know, whether it's with, with blacks in the priesthood or women or LGBT stuff, we're always like, add 10 or 20 years and then we'll make the change that other people are on the cutting edge for. Can you, can you empathize with this wish that our prophets, seers and revelators would have been leaders in, you know, on the cutting edge of civil rights, on the cutting edge of attacking racism, on the cutting edge of inclusivity, on the cutting edge of abolishing slavery, on the cutting edge of these matters of race. Wouldn't, you know, wouldn't that have been and should not be? Isn't that a reasonable expectation?

Jim Bennett [02:07:08] Sure, it's a reasonable expectation, but again, it's an expectation. I mean, this, this is the thing is that, well, the prophet seers and revelators aren't functioning the way I expect them to. And I can certainly point to areas where that's the case. I mean, when you say that they're not ahead and they're not all I had this, this conversation with Bill Real too, is that I expect them to be ahead on these issues. I expect them to be ahead and I think in terms of our understanding of the atonement of Christ, they're ahead. And they see that as their purpose. They don't see their purpose as being sort of instruments of social justice or social change. I know a lot of people would like them to. And I know, for instance, you have a big strain now of people who are very frustrated that we haven't pursued the kind of Bensonite political path that people get very mad because they start quoting Ezra Taft Benson about socialism and they start quoting Ezra Taft Benson about this, that and the other. And it's like, well, Ezra TAF Benson's not living prophet anymore, guys. And in fact, when he was the living prophet, he didn't have a whole lot to say about politics. That was all when he was an apostle and there were other brethren who were fighting tooth and nail against him. You know, Hugh B. Brown and Ezra Taft Benson didn't see eye to eye on just about anything. So, you know, what is the purpose of the church? Is the purpose of the church to be a vehicle for social change? I would like to see the church be a greater vehicle for social change than it has been. But I don't think that's how the leaders of the church see themselves or how the church sees itself. And the church has been extraordinarily in terms of the way it improves the lives of its individual members on a day to day basis. I think the church has been way ahead of the game all the way along, the sense of community, all those kinds of things. The Church has done magnificent and wonderful and powerful things that have uplifted and done a great deal of good. So when you do this and say, yeah, but we've been racists. Yeah, but currently we are struggling because we, I believe, are dropping the ball with regard to LGBTQ issues, I can't argue against that. I would agree with you, but I don't think that negates all of the good that the church has done and is continuing to do. Sure.

John Dehlin [02:09:47] I don't either. It doesn't negate it, and it is an expectation. I do think that the fact that we're white males makes this fraught. I had someone write in. You know, we're like, oh, well, you know, it's. It's unfortunate to other people. This is deeply, deeply serious, and it really impacts their lives. And I had someone write in, and we'll get to this. But if you and I were gay, if you and I were women, if you and I were people of color, you know, would the church be true for us then? You know what I mean? And it's just so easy for us as people who, some would say the church was kind of made for. Right. White, straight, you know, men who were raised Mormon.

Jim Bennett [02:10:26] Right.

John Dehlin [02:10:26] It's convenient for us to be able to say, yeah, these aren't as big of a deal. You know, these. These aren't huge. These are. These are kind of. You know, the church does so much good, but, like, if this was touching us more directly, we might have a harder time explaining some of this away.

Jim Bennett [02:10:41] I think that's fair. You know, I can't. I can't waive my privilege away, and I recognize that I have a great deal of it. And I'm not trying to say, oh, this is no big deal. I think it's a huge deal.

John Dehlin [02:10:52] Yeah. Yeah.

Jim Bennett [02:10:54] I think it's a devastating deal.

John Dehlin [02:10:55] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [02:10:56] So I recognize that, but I also recognize how fraud it is that I'm the one who's. Who's saying this. I just. I can't go to anyone's lived experience but my own.

John Dehlin [02:11:07] Sure.

Jim Bennett [02:11:07] And. And I see the church as. As being a great benefit to me and to my family. But I also recognize, you know, to some degree, the church was made for me. I'm not a minority woman, you know, transgender. You know, the kinds of people that feel oppressed and feel like the church isn't made for them.

John Dehlin [02:11:29] Did you say 130 or 2?

Jim Bennett [02:11:31] What time is it now?

John Dehlin [02:11:32] It's 120. Can we do LGBT?

Jim Bennett [02:11:34] Yeah. Okay.

John Dehlin [02:11:36] Okay. Well, thank you for engaging that exchange. I know it's a tough thing. Thanks for being willing to talk about it. And that's. That's why I had you on let's talk about the LGBTQ thing next. I don't want to not talk about women in the priesthood. But anyway, with LGBT stuff, you know, for so many years, you know, it's never mentioned in the Book of Mormon. Never mentioned. It's never mentioned in the Doctrine and Covenants. It's not mentioned in the Pearly. Great price.

LGBTQ Issues and Church Doctrine on Sexuality

Jim Bennett [02:12:10] Right.

John Dehlin [02:12:12] And here's the thing.

Jim Bennett [02:12:14] It's not mentioned in the Family Proclamation.

John Dehlin [02:12:16] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [02:12:17] People don't realize that. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:12:18] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [02:12:18] They brandish the Family Proclamation as this huge weapon against LGBTQ people. And I always say, can you please point to me where it mentions anything about LGBTQ people?

John Dehlin [02:12:27] Right.

Jim Bennett [02:12:28] In any. In any respect.

John Dehlin [02:12:29] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [02:12:30] And everything that we. That we interpret the Family Proclamation to mean comes implicitly, not explicitly from the text.

John Dehlin [02:12:37] Right. But having said that, you know, I was taught that being gay is dark and loathsome and sinful and evil.

Jim Bennett [02:12:45] Yep.

John Dehlin [02:12:46] We all read Miracle of Forgiveness. We all know what boy Gay Packer said. Said that it was you get.

Jim Bennett [02:12:52] You.

John Dehlin [02:12:52] You become gay when you masturbate.

Jim Bennett [02:12:54] Or.

John Dehlin [02:12:55] Or that it's perversion. You know, just really hard task. That it's a choice. You know? You know, that that all comes from. Again, prophet seers and revelators. You. You have what? What? The church's long history of encouraging aversion therapy or conversion therapy.

Jim Bennett [02:13:17] Where.

John Dehlin [02:13:18] Where for decades and decades, Mormon, gay Mormon men and women were subjected to really abusive forms of treatment.

Jim Bennett [02:13:26] Yep.

John Dehlin [02:13:27] Psychotherapy, even electroshock therapy to try and make them not be gay. All of that was endorsed by the Church, either directly or indirectly. And then you've just got this. Decades and decades of LGBT Mormons that either live celibate lives, and by all accounts, by many, many, many accounts, the celibate choice is one of the least healthy choices of all in terms of just living without love or without sexual intimacy. You try it. But also living without companionship. But then all the mixed orientation marriages where all these gay Mormon men and women were told, just get married. Go on your mission. Be faithful. Go. Go get married. It'll go away. Even given blessings by general authorities and bishops, you'll be cured of this one. And then they get married.

Jim Bennett [02:14:11] And.

John Dehlin [02:14:12] And not only are they the casualties, but their straight spouses are special casualties and their children. And then you've got. You know, again, we talked about, well, there's Prop 8 and the church inserting itself in the Political process undermining the sovereignty of a sovereign state, using its money and influence and denying that it was doing it. And then you've got the November 2015 policy and the reversal, just like. It's almost like, I don't want you to use the term holocaust, but just like significant harm on a very vulnerable population, compounded by, by all accounts, a significantly high suicide rate, along with depression and anxiety. Not to mention all the divorces, because mixed orientation marriages have, like, twice the divorce rates. How do you. How do you talk about the LGBT issue?

Jim Bennett [02:15:08] Hopefully with great empathy and humility to recognize the damage that has been done. Because this is the area that has been of most concern to me. I mean, we've raised a bunch of issues, and I can look at polygamy, and I can say I can come to terms with that without feeling a serious threat to my faith. But all of the things that you've described in November 2015 particularly, is when that all broke for me. This is wrong. The church is wrong. It's the first time I could say to myself and publicly, the church is fundamentally wrong on this. And I had to sort of reorient my faith as to what that means for the church to be this wrong, you know, because even with racism and all of that, I can now look back and say, yeah, that's wrong, too.

John Dehlin [02:16:10] The church was wrong on that.

Jim Bennett [02:16:11] Oh, I said, oh, yeah, I think I've said that. But I. The. But this was happening, you know, when the church reversed the priesthood ban. I was 10 years old and didn't understand what's going on. This happened when I'm an adult, children, and I look at this and say, this is absolutely wrong.

John Dehlin [02:16:33] This meaning what? Of all those things I mentioned, which parts of those are wrong? Just so that I know what you mean.

Jim Bennett [02:16:42] Well, that's a good question, because I'm not sure I know what I mean. I grew up, you know, I was given a copy of 40 young men, two young men only, the Boyd K. Packer pamphlet about little factories. Had no idea what it was talking about. I was 12 years old, and I'm like, what? What on earth is this factory? And I remember going and asking my mother about it, and she was not probably not the right person to ask because she was quite embarrassed by that. I don't want to get into that. That's a whole other rabbit hole. But. But I was taught growing up that, yes, if you're gay, it's because you chose to be gay and there's something wrong with you. You know, again, Boyd K. Packer, you get into his two to one speech where he talks about it's a form of selfishness. You're so deeply selfish that that's what makes you gay. But of course you're not born gay and no one is locked into this kind of life is one of his things, he says. And, and of course you can change. And it's the miracle of forgiveness that I think is the most brutal of the texts that talk about this. You know, it's Spencer Kimball talks about. There are those who say, you know, that this can't be changed. Well, how can you know the door will not open until you have pounded on the door until your arms are bloody and your muscles are sore. It can be done. And I just think of the people who've pounded on that door until their arms are bloody stumps and the door never opens. So you look at that. And the thing about that though is that as awful as that position is, it has the benefit of being logically consistent with itself. In other words, if you choose to be gay, then the church is justified in withholding its blessings and full participation until you choose not to be gay. That's a tenable, defensible position. Of course, it rests on a false assumption, which is that people choose to be gay. I have yet to meet anybody of any stripe, any walk of life, who ever made a conscious decision about which gender they would find sexually attractive. You know, I never made that decision. It came upon me. I, you know, I see a. Nevermind, you know, homosexuality. I've often said that if homosexuality is something that's environmental, then I should be gay. I hate sports. I grew up and was involved in musical theater and all that kind of stuff. All the things I'm interested in are things that gay men are interested in. But I'm not attracted to men. I'm attracted to women. You know, it's, it's. That doesn't make any sense to assume that. Anyway, where we are now, and I, and I think Proposition 8 did this. If there's any silver lining out of Proposition 8, which, which by any measure was an unmitigated disaster for the church, a huge, colossal embarrassment, and it didn't, it didn't do anything to stop the inevitable progression of acceptance of gay marriage. In fact, probably accelerated it did.

John Dehlin [02:20:06] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [02:20:08] But if there's any silver lining out of that, it's that the backlash caused the church to reevaluate how it's been teaching these things. And we've moved away from the Spencer Kimball model. And I Remember when the Mormons and gays. It's not Mormon and gay. Or now it's whatever it is. Dot com. The website was the first time the church openly acknowledged that people do not choose.

John Dehlin [02:20:33] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [02:20:33] Who they're going to find sexually attractive.

John Dehlin [02:20:35] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [02:20:35] And that. And that just sort of was slipped in. But to me, I looked at that and go, this is a momentous. This is massive. This is a huge shift from what I was taught.

John Dehlin [02:20:46] Yeah.

Jim Bennett [02:20:46] As a kid. This is a huge shift from the miracle of forgiveness. This, this doesn't bear any resemblance to the teachings that I. And, you know, and so, and so going from there, then the church backs away from the idea of mixed orientation marriages. The church backs away. The church even backs away from the idea that homosexuality is quote, unquote, curable. Okay, I'm talking to you as if you were there. Okay. All right. I hate using that phrase, curable, to talk about homosexuality as if it's a disease. But we no longer teach that. So we've shifted massively, I think, in what we teach. But we're still sort of trying to protect a very small and shrinking piece of ground, which is the idea of, okay, we acknowledge you do not choose to be gay. You do not choose who you will find attractive and it won't change. No matter how righteous you are, no matter how much you pray, you're not going to no longer be gay. But to some degree, we are going to treat you as if you do choose it. We're going to continue to exclude you for things that you have no control over and didn't choose to be. And we're going to call on you to live a kind of life that we don't call on any other member of the church to live. So I look at that and I say, this is ground. This is not, you know, this is not a position that is logically tenable. Whether or not it's a position. That's correct. You know, the Spencer Kimball position is logically tenable. Our current position is not. We need to resolve one way or the other. We need to either go back and say, Spencer Kimball was right, you all chose to be gay and let's live that way, or we need to move towards greater acceptance and we need to move towards full inclusion. And that's the direction I desperately want us to move in.

John Dehlin [02:22:44] And for you, what does full inclusion mean? Because. Because obviously a lot of people want gay temple marriage.

Jim Bennett [02:22:50] Right. And I am not going to. I'm going to cop out on that only because I don't want to be seen as advocating or protesting for any kind of specific change. I believe that we are going to get there, wherever that is, wherever that is.

John Dehlin [02:23:10] And you believe that someday there'll be gay, gay temple, Mormon marriage. Well, let me first say you would like to see that happen.

Jim Bennett [02:23:25] I'm being, I'm being cautious here.

John Dehlin [02:23:27] Are you afraid to say that a

Jim Bennett [02:23:28] little bit or you're.

John Dehlin [02:23:29] Is it that you're afraid or that you feel like it will be counterproductive? In other words, that it won't get us there faster? So there's saying it because you're worried you'll get punished, saying because it'll hurt your reputation. No, it's not saying it because you say, I don't think it'll be effective.

Jim Bennett [02:23:46] It's not that I'm worried about punishment, but if I say that, that becomes the focus. Right? I mean, that becomes. Because I am willing to accept whatever it is that the Lord wants. And whenever I talk to this about it, it's like I am looking for further light knowledge. You're going to be angry at me for looking for further enlightened knowledge. You're going to be angry at me for continuing revelation. I do not want to see gay temple ceilings if there is not a revelation that authorizes them. Right, right. I'm not saying the church needs to do that. Now. We haven't received the revelation to allow us to do that.

John Dehlin [02:24:23] Now that would be doing what Joseph Smith did with polygamy.

Jim Bennett [02:24:26] Right.

John Dehlin [02:24:26] Well, which was a problem.

Jim Bennett [02:24:29] So when I say that, it's like, I am not. Because whenever you cross swords with the Desnat types, who are the scariest people in the world to me, but it's always like, oh, well, you know, you're telling the brethren what to do. It's like, I don't want to tell the brethren what to do, but I don't think we're going to get there unless we're asking that question. And I don't think anybody's asking that question, particularly in the highest offices of the Church. I think, just as for David, the

John Dehlin [02:24:59] question of whether or not there should be same sex marriage in the temple

Jim Bennett [02:25:03] or even same sex marriage, period, well, I think we may be getting there. We may be getting to the point where somebody is willing to say, okay, you can't get married in the temple, but we will allow you to be married and take no action against you and you can have a temple recommend.

John Dehlin [02:25:19] Some are asking that question now, but that's not the church policy now.

Jim Bennett [02:25:22] No, but I think in order to get a revelation, you have to ask the question that leads to it. I mean, you can't ask the question, should gay people be sealed in the temple to each other? If you are absolutely convinced that that is completely unacceptable and can never happen? And I think that's the position of many in top church leadership at the moment. So I don't expect to see. Although sometimes I fantasize about the idea that we're being set up for a sort of Nixon to China moment. You know, when they. When they reversed. You know what I mean by that?

John Dehlin [02:25:54] I think I do, but go ahead.

Jim Bennett [02:25:56] Well, well, you know, Nixon was this fervent anti communist, and he's the one that opened Red China. Yeah. To normalization with relationships with the United States. And it had so much more credibility because it was Richard Nixon doing it. It wasn't some, you know, pansy liberal who did it. You know, and when they reversed the 2015 policy, it was Dallin H. Oaks who came out and issued the reversal, and I think gave that reversal a whole lot more weight and credibility with people who otherwise might not be willing to accept it. You know, and it's very likely that Dallin H. Oaks is going to be the president of the church. Are we being set up for Dallin H. Oaks being the one to, you know, if Dallin Oaks were to say, you know, we now accept gay marriage on any level, not just. Not ceilings in the temple, but just on any level, that would have a whole lot more credibility than any other church leader saying so. You know, I sometimes fantasize that that's what's what may be coming. I. I recognize rationally that's probably not likely. So I don't know. But. But this is something I continue to wrestle with. And I. I am still, you know, as I said in a previous one of our previous conversations, you know, somebody, when I came out publicly and said, I disagree with the November policy, I was amazed at how many people. Their response was, well, then leave. Get out of the church. We don't want you here. How stunned I was by that had been my first experience with that. I've been toeing the line my whole life, and now the first time I step out of line, your first response is, get lost. And then when I wrote my CES letter reply, one of these same people wrote to me and says, I'm so glad you came back. Like, what do you mean, I came back? I never left. I never went anywhere. And I still feel exactly the same way about LGBTQ issues as I did before. I wrote this reply, and it's interesting that the CES letter doesn't cover LGBTQ issues at all. Jeremy doesn't get into that. But anyway, so.

John Dehlin [02:28:09] So I. I heard you. Basically, I feel like what you're saying is that the church's current stance on LGBT issues is wrong.

Jim Bennett [02:28:17] Yeah. Well, is. It's less wrong than it was wrong,

John Dehlin [02:28:22] but evolving in the right direction.

Jim Bennett [02:28:24] I think it's evolving in the right direction slowly, with steps forward, steps backward. I think more importantly than whether or not it's wrong, because I just don't think that's productive. I just think that that's kind of. Score one point for the church. Score one point for the critics. I don't want to score points.

John Dehlin [02:28:44] Let me ask you this way. Do you think Heavenly Father approves of two men who love each other making a lifelong commitment to each other? Do you think Heavenly Father approves of that and getting married?

Jim Bennett [02:28:56] I personally do think that, yes.

John Dehlin [02:28:58] And women. Two women.

Jim Bennett [02:29:00] Well, I want to qualify that a little bit in that the phrase I use very often when I discuss these things is the idea of the righteous outlet. When I was growing up and I was a frustrated teenager and I wanted to hook up with every girl in

John Dehlin [02:29:22] the world,

Jim Bennett [02:29:26] I was promised, if I don't give an outlet to these feelings now, eventually I will have a righteous outlet for these feelings. Eventually, I can get married to a woman I love, and I can have all of those things that our Heavenly Father wants all of us to have. We don't have a righteous outlet for homosexuality. And so, I mean, the fact that I believe what I believe is is somewhat irrelevant. The question I would like to see the church ask is not jump right to, well, should they be sealed in the temple and all these kinds of things? It's, what is the righteous outlet for it? Because we are now slowly, painfully acknowledging the fact that it is not a choice that people are, in fact, born gay or born with a different sexuality than is the cisgender norm. And so what's the righteous outlet for that? What's God's purpose for that? So rather than just say, do I believe that God wants gay people to be married? I would say I believe that God has a righteous purpose for homosexuality. And if a prophet were to come and say, this is the purpose for it, because they haven't really framed it that way, the way they framed it is, okay, yes, oh, we love you, and, yes, God made you who you are, blah, blah, blah. I'll say that, but there is no outlet for you to be gay. In any way, shape or form, you need to act like a straight person, no matter what. That doesn't work. But I don't want to limit what God's answer to that question is. I don't want to say, I expect you, Lord, to do it this way and allow gay marriage to be conducted this way in the temple. According to what I expect. That's not the way I would want to frame it. I want to say I believe these people, your children, your LGBTQ children, you have created in this way for a reason, for a purpose. And there has to be a righteous purpose for their lives, because currently the church says there is no righteous purpose for. For this huge part of who you are. And not only do I think that will change, I think it has to change because we are on logically indefensible, untenable ground. We can't acknowledge that an LGBT person is exactly who they are because God made them that way. And that also, God has absolutely no purpose for them to be that kind of a person. We can't continue to do that. Eventually, something has to give.

John Dehlin [02:32:16] So in your perfect Mormon world, LDS world, an LGBT youth would be able to date people the same gender, get married. Eventually, legally, in the same gender, in

Jim Bennett [02:32:32] my perfect Mormon world, there would be a revelation that would authorize all of that. Yes.

John Dehlin [02:32:36] And eventually, temple, same sex marriage

Jim Bennett [02:32:42] again. I think I go back to what you said. I don't think that's helpful if I go that far. Okay. I really don't. I think that becomes. Because I don't think that gets here if I become an advocate for it.

John Dehlin [02:33:00] Yeah, yeah, I get it.

Jim Bennett [02:33:01] I get it.

John Dehlin [02:33:01] Okay.

Jim Bennett [02:33:02] So.

John Dehlin [02:33:02] And this. We've already covered the spinozekit just slightly differently. Like, you know, the church was big on polygamy, and then the government freaks out and bears its weight down, and people write nasty stuff, and eventually we're forced to abandon it.

Jim Bennett [02:33:21] Right.

John Dehlin [02:33:22] It's the social justice or the social outcry preceding the revelation.

Jim Bennett [02:33:27] Right.

John Dehlin [02:33:28] You know, the world is outraged about how the Mormons are still in the 60s and 70s, discriminating. And it's. It's protests with Stanford and Wyoming and all these NCAA schools and shaming and. And that. That leads to the. That leads to the revelation to give Lex blacks a priesthood. Now we're in the same situation where the world is outraged. And by the way, I was watching some of these Prop 8 videos, and when the church was. Was using his propaganda to convince Mormons to support the Prop 8 campaign, they actually use as the justification if we don't fight same sex marriage, then we're going to be viewed as bigots someday by the rest of the United States. Right, and that's exactly what's happened is as it's become more and more accepted across the United States, we're viewed more as more bigots. Right? But it's always the, the social justice advocacy, advocacy that precedes the revelation. And for someone who believes in Revelation, they'll have a nuanced view of what revelation is, but for an objective viewer, it's like there is no revelation. The church just caves to social pressure. And again, it's always 10 or 20 years behind. Society gets it right long. The average member of society gets it right long before the brethren do. And again, what's the point of having a prophet if really what they do is they. They don't lead with revelation showing us the way they respond to social justice, and outcries super late with, with a decision that the rest of society figures out 10 or 20 years prior. It begs the question, why have prophets at all? You know, what are they doing? And I don't really want you to get into why are prophets at all? Because I agree with you, there are a lot of good things that they do, but why are they always. Why are these revelations conveniently coming after decades of social outcry? Isn't there something broken there? Isn't that a problem? Isn't that a problem?

Jim Bennett [02:35:43] It's the human problem. I mean, that's the way humans and organizations function. I mean, the idea that revelation comes without pressure. I mean, the idea that revelation comes in some kind of a vacuum that isn't influenced by what's happening to the church and outside the church. I think that's kind of a childish. I don't think I'm taking a nuanced version of Revelation by saying revelation comes when it's necessary, and it becomes necessary when the world is doing all kinds of things that are pushing on the church. And the fact that the world is pushing on the church with regard to LGBTQ issues means it's far more likely we're going to get revelation on those issues than it was at a time, you know, in 19 when David O. McKay was here. The idea of getting any kind of revelation about LGBTQ anything is almost ludicrous because nobody even in the world was talking about these things to any kind of large degree. So, I mean, I listen to that and I go, well, of course revelation comes in the wake of these kinds of things. Of course, I don't see that as kind of a cop out. I see that as kind of, that's what revelation is. And so I mean, if you go, what's the purpose of a prophet? You know, we've talked about, we talked before about the idea of cults and whether or not the church is a cult. And I hate the word just because there is no objective definition of a cult. Right. You can apply anytime anyone tries to define it. You can apply it to early Christianity, you can apply it to any kinds of things. But a cult in my mind is when a person is the object of veneration and not an ideal. I mean, Christ is a person, but Christ is also an ideal. And we don't venerate, we shouldn't, I think sometimes we do, but we shouldn't venerate the people that stand at the head of this church. We should venerate Christ and we should venerate all that. And so I think the purpose of the prophets is to, you know, as a, I think we are so much stronger in community than we are individually. And the prophet stands at the head of the community together. But I don't think the prophet gets us to places where the community isn't willing to go. I mean, I think the fact that we have not received this revelation is not necessarily as much an indictment of Dallin H. Oaks or Russell M. Nelson as it is as to who we are as a community. I don't think as a community, as Latter Day Saints. You know, if you were to poll Latter Day Saints, do you want people sealed in the temple and same sex marriages, I don't think you'd get a majority.

Prophetic Authority, Obedience, and Expectations

John Dehlin [02:38:45] But isn't it because we've been taught follow the prophet, follow the prophet. You know, obey with blind obedience is what I was taught, like exact obedience. And don't disagree and don't criticize the loads and loads anointed like this goes back to our, our first couple conversations that they've created this culture where you don't question them, you don't, you're, you know, you even realize, I'm not going to say you're afraid to criticize them, but you realize that it probably at best isn't constructive. And I will tell you as a firsthand witness that at worst it gets you excommunicated.

Jim Bennett [02:39:18] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:39:18] And so haven't they fostered this culture where we're looking to them? And so yeah, we don't want same sex marriage because they taught us that it's evil and we didn't want blacks to have the priesthood for so Long because they kept telling us it was doctrine and revelation. Like, I understand why you want to say that we need to make progress. And I think that's true, and I think that's healthy, and I think there's truth to that. But an objective observer who's just trying to get to the bottom of it is going to look at Mormonism and say the way revelation happens post Joseph Smith is enough. Social pressure mounts, and eventually the Brethren cave.

Jim Bennett [02:39:55] Do you think it was different with

John Dehlin [02:39:56] Joseph Smith and then post Joseph Smith?

Jim Bennett [02:39:59] But I don't think it's post. I think Joseph Smith was the same way.

John Dehlin [02:40:02] Okay, well, regardless. But it looks very. A cynical view, and I think even in an objective view is that revelation, especially the declarations and what we have modern is social pressure that then eventually the Brethren cave when they. When they do the calculus, that it's least bad to make the calculus. They make the change, and then they call it revelation. But what that really is is just caving a social pressure. It feels like. And it feels like that's reasonable to make that conclusion, even though to Mormon ears, that's insulting.

Jim Bennett [02:40:38] I'm not insulted, and I don't think it's unreasonable. What I think is that it's. It's a misunderstanding of what revelation is expected to be, because I don't think it's a cynical view. I think that's what revelation. That's how we get revelation. That's how I get revelation. I would never have been crying to the lord after the 2015 policy and received what I consider the great revelation of my own personal life. There hadn't been a huge pressing question on my soul. And so it's cynical. It's like, oh, well, the Brethren finally just cave. I think the more objective way to look at that. Why are the Brethren not changing now? Is it because they hate LGBTQ people?

John Dehlin [02:41:28] Well, they say they don't believe it yet. And they look at the church and they look at Desnat and they look at Denver Snuffer, and they realize that it. It's lose people now or lose people later. It's lose some now or lose a lot now. And they just like they did with the blacks in the priesthood. It's like, do we have the apostles who will vote for it? Because there has to be unanimity, and we can't pass anything without unanimity. So there may not be the votes among the quorum of the 12 yet.

Jim Bennett [02:42:00] Right.

John Dehlin [02:42:00] And then how many people will we lose versus keep if we make the change and when we make it and they just basically wait until enough apostles have died or changed. And they do a calculus and they use a lot of internal polling, a lot of internal social scientists that are constantly sending surveys to the members. What do you think about LGBT issues? What do you think about faith issues? What do you think about race issues? And they've got some internal decision making mechanism that's like, we'll make the decision. When will. It'll do the least amount of damage. And then they make the decision, you know, knowing that a bunch of people are going to leave, a bunch of conservative members are going to leave and get angry if you make that decision too soon. Right.

Jim Bennett [02:42:48] I mean, I can't, I can't, I can't disabuse you of that framing of it. What I hope I can do is add to it the idea that the reason why the brethren won't change is because the brethren firmly believe that their position is representative of God's position.

John Dehlin [02:43:15] Yeah, I believe that.

Jim Bennett [02:43:16] I mean, I absolutely, I have had enough interaction with these men. You know, we can talk about their weaknesses and failings all day long. These are good men who very much are doing what they think is the right thing, for sure. And so I think that's essential to include in this kind of a calculus because as they're cynically sort of bargaining back and forth as to what this will work and that will work. I mean, that's the process to some degree, of any kind of group negotiation. It just comes back to what is revelation? What do we expect revelation to be? I mean, I look back at, again, I go back to Edward Kimball's article about his father and how he wrestled with the priesthood ban. And yes, you had racist members of the quorum of the 12 that he was concerned weren't going to accept it. You know, one of them was Delbert Stapley, who wrote that awful letter to Mitt Romney's father to George Romney. Yeah, I mean, I read that and seared my eyes. I mean, this idea that he believes that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated because he freed the slaves. I mean, it was just heinous, awful.

John Dehlin [02:44:31] Heinous, egregious.

Jim Bennett [02:44:32] Egregious. And so, yes, so you've got things like that to deal with. But you look at how Spencer Kimball wrestled with this and wrestled with his own bigotry. He wrestled with the idea that, look, I was raised to believe that these were cursed and that they shouldn't receive the priesthood. And you know, that's, I mean, he recognized that and confronted that and wrestled with that. And it was only after all of that, which, of course, was influenced by the world around him. I mean, people like to point to the fact that the civil rights movement had sort of died down by 1978. But the reality was it wasn't acceptable in 1978 to be discriminating against black people. That just wasn't acceptable. And of course, there was societal pressure. But the way people wrestle with God, I think the way that our prophets wrestle with God is the same way we do. And I know in my own experience, I don't receive answers until there's all kinds of pressure and difficulties and challenges. And then the answer finally comes. I don't know if this is analogous, but a lot of people talk about the revelation they received as to who they were to marry. And you hear the terrible horror stories of people go in the cougarette to walk up to a woman they've never met before. And it has been revealed to me that you are to be my wife. You know, those really awful, stupid, ridiculous stories. I very much wanted a confirmation that I was supposed to marry the woman I was going to marry. You know, we were dating, and it seemed like the right thing to do, and I loved her and all of that, but I wanted this sort of spiritual confirmation. And I would pray and pray and pray to get this spiritual confirmation, and it never came. I didn't get the stupor of thought, but I thought I put my nickel into the revelation machine and out comes the revelation. And I remember kneeling across the altar in the temple because I kept praying, oh, I'm going to get married. Now you realize I'm going to get married. I haven't gotten this revelation. I'm going to get married. And I remember kneeling across the altar in the temple and getting this very clear message that the Lord was extraordinarily pleased with what I was doing and that this was the right thing to do. And I actually got angry in the temple, and my thoughts were, I could have used this like an hour ago, you know, let alone two weeks ago. And, you know, let alone two months ago. I think our expectations of what revelation is. I don't think there's any reason for us to expect revelation to be divorced from our experience, Revelation to be divorced from our circumstances. And so I don't think there's anything, you know, we didn't get into temple ceremonies, for instance. We didn't get into the Masonic sort of influence. But I look at that and I say, I don't think there's any reason to think that the Masonic Ceremony influenced Joseph Smith in his revelations about the temple. He looked at that and he saw something that was valuable and he saw some way that God could use that to teach the members. And there it is. And I don't see anything sinister about that at all. So it all comes down to what do you expect revelation to be?

John Dehlin [02:48:11] But can I, can I phrase it differently? What have we been taught to expect revelation to be by the people claiming to have revelation? In other words, we come by these, we come by your words, unreasonable expectations. We come by them honestly.

Jim Bennett [02:48:26] That's fair. I think that's fair. Although I think that's also, I don't think that's entirely a sort of centralized edict that came down. I think that's a cultural expectation that grows up from the day to day lived experience of members of the church. As a great grandson of prophets, you know, the discussions that would happen when people would find out about that, about how, you know, just sort of this expectation as to how different our family must have been from every other family because we had prophets in our family. You know, I don't think that came from any kind of specific general conference talk. I think that came from just a general cultural understanding. So I don't see anything particularly sinister in that. I mean, I agree that it exists. Not sinister, but I think it arises out of a long standing cultural way that we interact with our leaders and with a natural, a natural willingness to sort of see our leaders as somehow better than we are. And I said this in another said this previously. I don't think they're better than I am. That may be a very arrogant thing to say. But I, I think they're people like I am. I think they struggle like I do. So.

John Dehlin [02:49:48] So we'll end today's segment on this question and then we're gonna have to just got more, more to come with Jim Bennett. Grateful you're willing to do it. I think, I think a way to summarize this conversation.

Jim Bennett [02:49:59] I'm having a lot of fun. I just want.

John Dehlin [02:50:01] Oh, you are, you are.

Jim Bennett [02:50:03] I feel bad though because I just keep. You're just letting me waps rhapsodic about stuff. But.

John Dehlin [02:50:07] Well, I appreciate it.

Jim Bennett [02:50:08] But I, I very much appreciate you having me doing this.

John Dehlin [02:50:11] I love it. I love it too. I'm having fun too. I could go all day.

Jim Bennett [02:50:15] So anyway, 10 hours a day.

John Dehlin [02:50:17] But I guess a way to summarize what we've been talking about today and I still want to talk about a few social issues and then get to questions listener and Viewer questions. But you there, it's kind of like if you want, if, if you, if we live in the United States and we wanted to hook our worldview and our beliefs to an organization that gets it right most reliably, most quickly, whether it's racial stuff, LGBT stuff, stuff with women, you know what I mean? There are, there are other organizations that historically get it right quicker. You know, you could say the federal government, you could say the Democratic Party, you could say, and that's not me advocating one party or another. You could say public schools, you could say, you know, there are a lot of organizations that figured the civil rights stuff out before. We did a lot of churches that did a lot of organizations. I was at Microsoft, and they were allowing same sex couples to have health insurance back in the 90s.

Jim Bennett [02:51:30] You know what I mean?

John Dehlin [02:51:31] 90s, right. Like, you could pick any, lots of organizations that get it right reliably a decade or two before the Mormon Church eventually does. And so I guess the question is, why do we need these guys? Why do we need these prophets when they are, when they are reliably behind the times? What are they doing then?

Jim Bennett [02:51:58] What.

John Dehlin [02:51:59] It seems like what they're doing is holding on to the status quo for as long as they can until they're forced to change, and then they make a change. That's not what I was sold. What I was sold is that God talks to the prophets. The prophets lead us. And instead what we're getting is, you know, we're not getting what we want. We're getting dudes that are old and super slow. And there are lots of other organizations that, whether it's with women, civil rights, lgbtq, pick your issue. They're decades ahead of us. So why do we need them? How are they really helping us if what they're doing is just delaying where all the other people get quicker, you know what I'm saying? And influencing millions of people in the process. Right? And it's easy for us again to talk about this, right? We didn't. We're not gay. We didn't have our kids kill themselves over these issues. We, you know, we weren't for. We were on straight spouses that were forced into mixed orientation marriages and had spouses that cheated on us, you know, or didn't love us or weren't like, we are not the collateral damage. Right. In many instances. So it's so easy for us to go, well, let's. What does it mean to be a prophet? What does it mean? What does revelation really mean? Like, we're Doing that with so much privilege.

Jim Bennett [02:53:21] Sure.

John Dehlin [02:53:21] When in reality these are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives that have been very deeply and severely negatively impacted by it. So I guess I'll just end with that is like, how is that not a condemnation of Mormon prophets in the modern era? And what are, what are they good for if it's not just to give like the same type of advice Dr. Phil gives? Be kind, you know, Oprah, love your neighbor.

Jim Bennett [02:53:49] Right.

John Dehlin [02:53:49] Be a good husband, be a good father, be a good parent. Don't get into debt, don't spend too much money. You don't need a prophet to tell you any of that. You can get that from Oprah, Dr. Phil. The government was, you know, Eisenhower integrated the military long before we were integrating in the church.

Jim Bennett [02:54:07] Well, the church is Microsoft.

John Dehlin [02:54:09] Microsoft was pro LGBT long before the Mormon Church was like, why do we need prophets? So that's a two part question and we're going to end on this today. House is not a condemnation of prophets. And why do we still need them?

Jim Bennett [02:54:21] Why do we still need them?

John Dehlin [02:54:22] Start with the condemnation part. Why is this all not whether it's blacks, LGBTQ women, why is that not a condemnation?

Jim Bennett [02:54:31] I don't know if those are two different questions. I think those are variations on the same question.

John Dehlin [02:54:34] How you want that's answer?

Jim Bennett [02:54:35] Well, because I mean, Microsoft offers benefits to gay couples.

John Dehlin [02:54:42] In the 90s.

Jim Bennett [02:54:43] In the 90s, does Microsoft offer a covenantal relationship with Jesus Christ?

John Dehlin [02:54:50] No.

Jim Bennett [02:54:51] No. If you want to create an organization, I mean, if you want to find the organization that always gets it right, the reality is.

John Dehlin [02:55:01] Or that gets it right sooner than everybody else, reluctantly.

Jim Bennett [02:55:04] Well, but I mean, you go back to the Old Testament and one of the indictments, I think, or condemnations of the Old Testament to the children of Israel, these guys didn't get anything right. These guys wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. Cause they were idiots. They're complaining about food that's falling from the sky. They're doing all these kinds of things. And you go through the Lord's covenant people in every generation and you do not necessarily find that these are the best people that the children of Israel or the Nephites or the Lamanites or anybody else that could be identified throughout scripture as the Lord's people. It's not that these are. Well, these are the best people. It's that these are the people who have established a covenantal relationship with God. And the purpose of the church is to connect people to God and to connect them by means of those covenants. And so that's where I personally find value in it. And I can do that and find that value, even knowing that we're behind in spots where I would like us to be ahead. So how is that not a condemnation? How is that? It comes back to what the purpose of the church is to me or to anybody, and what we would like it to be. What we would like it to do. The purpose of the church is to connect us to God. Microsoft doesn't do that.

John Dehlin [02:56:34] The Department of Defense does.

Jim Bennett [02:56:35] Department of Defense doesn't do that. And you could say, well, the Catholic Church does that. And then I can come back and say, well, the church is just as behind on LGBTQ issues as we are.

John Dehlin [02:56:44] You know, okay, so the Episcopalian church or the Episcopalian.

Jim Bennett [02:56:48] Right. So it comes back to. The purpose of the church is to connect people to God. And from my personal experience, the church does that. And I think from the experience of many people, including LGBTQ people. You know, Derek Knox, who I talked about earlier, I had a wonderful conversation with him. He just kind of called out of the book blue. We were in an Internet group, and he says, I would like to get to know you. I said, you have time for a phone call? And we had this really wonderful, long phone call. He joined the church the month after the November policy as a gay. As a gay man. And I said, how could you do that? And he says, because I knew that policy wasn't going to last. He says, when it happened, I said, well, I'm going to be around longer than this policy, and guess what? I am right. And he has found a connection to God within this church, and he is a gay man. And I'm sure he absolutely would like to see inclusion on every level within the church, but he sees something here that has value to him. You know, he isn't representative of the whole gay experience within the church. Absolutely. You know, my sister in law is a lesbian and was excommunicated after serving a mission, and that was a devastating experience for her. We've done things that are devastating to people, and I recognize all of that, and I am responsible for it. I mean, I personally feel as a member of the church, it is my responsibility to be within the church and be. I don't even want to say an agent of change, but to be an ally, to be. You know, there can continue to be LGBTQ people born into this church and raised in this church, and I need to be there for them regardless of what happens. Regardless if we ever get where I would like us to Get. It is my responsibility to mourn with those that mourn and comfort those who stand in need of comfort. And I feel that most acutely with my LGBTQ brothers and sisters. So, you know, the church. Why do we need prophets? We need prophets because the Lord has established a way for us to enter a covenantal relationship with him through community, through churches. And I think we are stronger with them than without them. And I wish there were an organization that got it right 100% of the time. To my knowledge, that organization has never existed. I don't think that organization existed when Jesus Christ himself was on the earth. This is who we are as human beings. We're going to continue to get things wrong. And it's my responsibility to do whatever I can to help get things right.

Why Stay? Community, Joy, and Closing Thoughts

John Dehlin [02:59:51] Yeah. And I'll just say that I get in trouble for saying this even with my own family, but I have not been able to replicate the type of community and joy in some ways that I experienced growing up in Mormonism. And there's something to, I, I don't know about the supernatural or spiritual backing to what you say, but there is something really special about a regular practice, a set of beliefs, a strong community that, that can have a really good impact on people's lives. And if that's part of what you're saying, I'm actually acknowledge that and say until the rest of us can pioneer something superior, even adjusting for all the bad things that happen, I think there's something to what you're saying.

Jim Bennett [03:00:52] Well, thank you, but. And I think maybe we can pioneer that with these kinds of conversations. I mean, I think that these are good questions to be asking and we ought to be. And we ought to be engaged in, in these kinds of discussions.

John Dehlin [03:01:09] Yeah. All right, Jim Bennett. Well, thank you for coming on Mormon Stories again.

Jim Bennett [03:01:14] Thank you.

John Dehlin [03:01:15] It looks like there's at least going to be a part four where we're going to talk about women. We're going to talk briefly about porn, masturbation, and one on one interviews and a few more social issues. But then what we're going to end by is just jump to questions. A lot of people have questions about your response to Jeremy Runnels and then just some detailed questions about why, why does the church need apologetics? Why does it need apologists? I'll give you all those, as many of those questions as they can in advance. But also listeners, if you want to go to the. The MormonStories.org or YouTube or Facebook or whatever and post your questions for Jim, I'll do My best to assemble them or at least consolidate them so that we can have a semi wieldy. Is it fun? Will these word semi wieldy needs to be a word. A semi wieldy final episode where we. We give you guys a chance to ask Jim your questions. But, Jim, I just. I'll end as I tried to begin. I can't thank you enough for being willing to sit in the hot seat, take the tough questions, to acknowledge the legitimacy of these questions, and to treat people like me and Jeremy and others with civility and respect. And I think that's the most respect you can offer is engagement. I think engagement is one of the highest signs of respect.

Jim Bennett [03:02:32] And so I appreciate that, and I appreciate your willingness to engage with me. I think that goes both ways. I very much appreciate. I don't feel like you have been trying to pin me down or score points or do any of that. I really feel like this has been a really productive dialogue, and I think that's a credit to you, to how you've handled this. So I very much appreciate that.

John Dehlin [03:02:57] All right, well, go have fun with your family, because it's December 31st.

Jim Bennett [03:03:02] New Year's Eve.

John Dehlin [03:03:02] It's New Year's Eve. We should be having fun.

Jim Bennett [03:03:05] Well, this is fun. Are you not having fun?

John Dehlin [03:03:06] We are having fun, but we should be having fun with our families.

Jim Bennett [03:03:10] That's right.

John Dehlin [03:03:10] My eldest rebuked me this morning. Why are you working on New Year's Eve? And there's some truth to that. So go have fun with your family.

Jim Bennett [03:03:18] All right, well, thank you very much.

John Dehlin [03:03:19] All right, and listeners, thanks for joining us. Support us at MormonStories.org, become a monthly contributor if you can. Check out Jim's book, A Faithful Response to the CES Letter. Yep, check out CES Letter. And most importantly, as my final moment of a Mormon stories interview in 2020. Most importantly, above all else, be kind to people. Be kind, be civil, be kind, be loving. That's more important than anything that's ever been said on Mormon Stories podcast or anywhere else. Can we agree on that?

Jim Bennett [03:03:57] Absolutely. Yeah, Absolutely.

John Dehlin [03:03:59] Be kind, be kind. Be loving. All right. Thanks, everybody, and thanks, Jim Bennett. You're awesome.

Jim Bennett [03:04:06] You're awesome, sir. Thank you.

John Dehlin [03:04:07] All right, take care.

Jim Bennett [03:04:11] All right. I'm late, aren't I? Yeah, that's all right. Okay.

John Dehlin [03:04:17] Yeah. Yeah.

Jim Bennett [03:04:18] Get out of here.

John Dehlin [03:04:19] And thank you.

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.