Introduction and Welcome

Part 1 of 2 · Ep. 1017

Guest [00:00:11] Your mom and me, we've seen this life with eyes that only see in black and white.

John Dehlin [00:00:21] Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the Donate button on the right side of the page under Support. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible in the United States and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support.

Guest [00:01:03] Tune me out if you must I know you've heard enough But I sing this song Just because I hope you'll be wiser than your daddy was I hope you'll be wiser than your daddy

John Dehlin [00:01:28] hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is November 20, 2018. It is very early in the morning, it's 7:14 in the morning, and we are here under somewhat sad circumstances. We have brought Bill Real back to Mormon Stories Podcast for at least the fourth time. This time under the sad news that Bill Real, former Mormon bishop, former current Mormon Bishop Bill Real, has been summoned to a disciplinary council. He is set to be excommunicated on November 27, 2018 in St. George at 8:30pm and as we've tried to do on Mormon Stories podcast, we've tried to interview everyone who is being faced with the Disciplinary Council for Apostasy. So we, you know, we interviewed Denver Snuffer, we interviewed Kate Kelly, we interviewed Marisa and Carson Calderwood. You know, we interviewed Jeremy Runnels, we interviewed Sam Young, and there have been many, many others who have been disciplined over the years. Bill Real is the next in a long line. Bill Real is a podcaster. He podcasts for a podcast called Mormon Discussions. Right, Bill?

Bill Reel [00:02:52] Yeah, Mormon discussion podcast podcast.

John Dehlin [00:02:54] And he's been doing this for quite some time and we've had him on Mormon Stories several times. I think Bill Real's very first appearance on the Mormon Internet was back in 2012 when he interviewed with Mormon Stories Podcast as the first sitting bishop to interview on Mormon stories back episodes 363 and 364. That feels like an eternity ago, doesn't it Bill?

Bill Reel [00:03:17] And a long, long time, John.

John Dehlin [00:03:21] He came back on in 2015 to discuss his split with Mormon apologists, and then he came back just last year in August to talk about his evolution. Some have been expecting this disciplinary council for many Many years. I know I have. And it's finally here. So it's with much regret and sadness, having been through an excommunication, that we have you back under these circumstances, Bill. But in any event, welcome back to Mormon Stories podcast.

Bill Reel [00:03:54] Yeah, I think that I've been on as many times as maybe John Hamer. Right. Like, I think we're tied for the lead.

John Dehlin [00:03:59] Yeah. I mean, this is your fourth, so.

Bill Reel [00:04:02] And I'm guaranteed a fifth visit. Right.

John Dehlin [00:04:05] Sure. Yeah. If you want to come back and talk about your disciplinary council, how this all goes.

Bill Reel [00:04:09] Yeah. How this all goes down.

John Dehlin [00:04:11] Yeah. All right, so we're broadcasting very early at 7:17am in the morning. We welcome those who are joining us live. We do want to incorporate your questions and comments. We feel like that makes a more interesting meeting. So please do. Listeners, number one, please share this on your walls, viewers and listeners on Facebook, on social media, Instagram, Twitter. It would be cool to get a live audience for this. We want to give Bill Real as much exposure as we did Sam Young and others. So please do share, if you don't mind. And we also just invite you to add your questions and comments as well. All right, so, Bill Real, anything you want to say at the very beginning before I jump into my questions?

Bill Reel's Background and Faith Journey

Bill Reel [00:05:00] No, no. I'm just excited to be on and to have a chance to kind of talk about what's all led up to this and what's going on behind the scenes with it.

John Dehlin [00:05:10] Okay, well, we're going to try and go for about 2 hours, 2 hours and 15 minutes. But let's back up a bit. Bill, as people know, you converted to the church in your early adulthood. You became a bishop at age 29. Is that right? A Mormon bishop, 29 years old. And that was in Ohio. I don't want to restate your whole story because listeners can just go back and listen to that, some of our past episodes. But let's just suffice it to say you served four years as bishop. You started having doubts and questions during that time, is that right? Yeah,

Bill Reel [00:05:50] doubts and questions all along the way, from 17 years old to when my shelf falls at 32. But I was also ingrained in apologetics as well, and a lot of those answers worked for a while until I understood the issue more deeply.

John Dehlin [00:06:05] Yeah. So questions all along the way. Let's just start maybe in terms of your faith crisis, when did that. For those who haven't listened, what were kind of the main issues and what was the trajectory of your faith crisis? Take us from the starting point yeah, sure.

Bill Reel [00:06:25] So 17 years old, even before I joined the church, I read no Man Knows My History by Fawn Brody. I understand there's some treasure digging. There's this Book of Abraham issue. We weren't solid on this race and priesthood, although that was an evolution because I had a father in law who taught me that, yeah, these people of color were cursed. They were less value than premortal life. So it wasn't until later on when I start to see the church is kind of backtracking with the gospel topic essay on that particular issue. But I knew that, like, there were seer stones. I knew there were issues with polygamy and there were accusations on Joseph's character. Again, I knew all the issues, but I knew them from such a surface level. And I'm reading apologetics from day one. And so when somebody says, like, hey, don't worry about masonry being in the temple, because that goes back to the Temple of Solomon, those simple answers worked really well. And it's not until I start to, you know, I'm older, my brain is becoming. Developing. I'm. I'm entering some, you know, I'm leaving a little bit of ethnocentricity behind. I'm entering what you know, well as the stages of faith. And as I leave that, that binary world and I start to see there's messiness, I start to deconstruct these issues and get into the actual details of them. And so again, at 32 years old, I just wake up one morning and I realized two things. One is that, wow, these issues don't add up as smoothly as the apologists want you to think, number one. And number two, my church intentionally mistold the story in order to have people believe in a narrative that simply doesn't hold up to the data.

Serving as Bishop and Leader Interactions

John Dehlin [00:08:14] Yeah. So you asked to be released as bishop. How did your interactions with your leaders progress from that point?

Bill Reel [00:08:27] Yeah, so from the very beginning, I'm in full in. I'm serving as a bishop. I have this faith crisis. I reach out to Elder Holland.

John Dehlin [00:08:38] How'd you reach out to Holland?

Bill Reel [00:08:39] So I'm a bishop. So I go on to lds.org, i sign in, I find the leadership directory, I go right to the top, and I find his email. And he's the guy. I liked his charisma, I liked his personality. And I felt like if anybody would be willing to take a moment and spend some time with this, it was him. I hadn't even told my wife yet about my faith crisis. You know how this goes. We're all scared to death to tell anybody. And now it's a little better. But if you go Back to even 2012, John, very few people even know about Mormon stories. And so, on some level, there's nobody that even knows somebody else in their ward or their stake that's swimming in these waters. And so you feel so alone. And so before I told anybody else, as a sitting bishop, I reached out to Elder Holland, and he ended up contacting Marlon Jensen, who was church historian at the time. And Marlon reaches out to me, and I talk to him for about 45 minutes on the phone. And then we have. Yeah, and then we have two or three emails back and forth.

John Dehlin [00:09:37] What'd Marlon say?

Bill Reel [00:09:39] Essentially? Can I just say sure.

John Dehlin [00:09:41] It's super. You know, there was this joke that you and I have both seen, and I'll just say it because it's funny. As Bill Reel is, John Dehlin once was. As John Dehlin is, Bill real may become. And the only reason I bring that up is because there's so many parallels. I had a personal meeting with Marlon Jensen. I had a personal. Two personal meetings with Elder Holland. I had a podcast before you. Like, the. Some of the similarities are really uncanny. I'm just going to state that up front.

Bill Reel [00:10:15] Let me say, too, John, it also. It's funny from that perspective, and there are those connections, but it also diminishes the fact that this is real growth and development.

John Dehlin [00:10:24] Right.

Bill Reel [00:10:25] Like, you leave a binary world, you leave dualistic thinking. You become more aware of nuance. You become more, well, of your inner authority. You no longer look to the outer authorities of your tribe as having the ultimate answers. And as you deconstruct your religion, you become deeply aware that it's myth. And so as that process happens, it's easy for the TBM or the orthodox member on the inside to say, like, oh, yeah, that guy used to believe and now he doesn't, and he's just like that other guy. The reality is that there are thousands upon thousands of Mormons, and there are millions of people in the world going through this developmental process, and many of them are, and most of them maybe are deconstructing their religious paradigms and looking at it as myth. So it also diminishes people, too, to simply label it as that simple kind of as one person is, the other person's going to be just like them.

John Dehlin [00:11:16] Yeah, in fact, I would. I only mention it as a joke. But the truth is, in science, if there's a study that's been conducted and Then somebody makes a replication of that study. It actually serves as an additional witness. So, of course, the church is familiar with the idea of multiple witnesses. The church has banked its credibility on multiple witnesses. And the fact that you would go through a very similar path and reach a very similar conclusion. It was a very independent journey. You and I have not spent a lot of time hanging out or talking over the years. Your independence been. Your journey's been very independent from mine. And for me, it serves as a second witness to or a third or a fourth or a tenth or a hundredth witness to the problems that are out there. Yeah.

Bill Reel [00:12:02] And every person who's sitting right now looking at this, this video and watching this, or listens to this podcast later, they've gone through this exact same process as well. So it's not. It's diminishing to make it sound like, yeah, he's just like that other guy. The reality is we're all just developing and growing. And what that means is we leave behind the literal belief of our faiths.

John Dehlin [00:12:21] Yeah. Okay, so Marlon Jensen, he's the one. Now, this would have been in 2012 that you talked to Marlon.

Bill Reel [00:12:27] Yeah, 2012.

John Dehlin [00:12:29] He was still a general authority at the time and still historian.

Bill Reel [00:12:32] Yeah, I believe so.

John Dehlin [00:12:33] This is before the essays had been come out. It was probably after I had met with Marlon personally.

Bill Reel [00:12:38] Correct.

Bill Reel [00:12:38] Yeah, I believe it was.

Bill Reel [00:12:39] So Elder Jensen essentially tells me the standard response, which is, I don't have any good answers for any of your questions. And I've followed up with Marlon, by the way. I had an email conversation with him maybe a year ago or so, and it's the same story. We don't have any answers. But I love you and I love this faith, and I've had some experiences, and so if you hold onto the other side, it'll all work itself out. The reality is, man, the unhealthiness here is so deep that to just wait it out to the other side just feels like a slap in the face in some ways. Elder Jensen offered his love, and I felt that was sincere. I think he's a deeply caring human being, and I think he cares about those who go through this process.

Guest [00:13:21] But.

Bill Reel [00:13:22] But what it comes down to is whether this works or doesn't work. And the facts are deeply against the claims the church makes about its stories and its foundational truth claims and its narrative. And you can see that changing right before our eyes as this new Saints book comes out. I got finished up with Marlon. It was about a 45 minute conversation again a couple I just have to

Correspondence with Church Leadership

John Dehlin [00:13:46] say it's remarkable that someone who knows church history, who studied it for as long, who sat at the top of church history department for, for as long as he did, who oversaw the creation of the essays, who had unrestricted access to all the, the vaults and everything,

Bill Reel [00:14:02] and he has no answer.

John Dehlin [00:14:03] Able. Was not able to provide answers. Think about that.

Bill Reel [00:14:08] The church historian, the top guy, the, you know, on the hierarchy of church history. He's the guy who oversees all of it. He has access to everything, as you point out, and he doesn't have a single good answer for any of this.

John Dehlin [00:14:18] Yeah. So he basically just leaves you with, I'm sorry, I can't help you or keep the faith.

Bill Reel [00:14:25] Yeah, keep the faith. We love you. Church is true. But yeah, I can't answer any of your questions. These are real issues. Everybody's struggling with these. That reaches out to me and I don't have a way to solve it.

Bill Reel [00:14:35] That's the gist.

John Dehlin [00:14:36] Okay.

Bill Reel [00:14:36] Elder Holland follows up with me about two months later.

John Dehlin [00:14:39] What does that mean? What do you mean he followed up?

Bill Reel [00:14:42] So Elder Holland, originally, he's the guy I reach out to. He has Elder Jensen reach out to me. He then a month or two later has his secretary call me at work. And the secretary gets on the line, says, I've got Elder Holland on the line. Can you take a phone call? So I'm on my cell phone, I go back to a private room at my workplace in Ohio and I have a conversation with Elder Holland via the telephone. And we also had follow up conversations by email. Elder Holland.

John Dehlin [00:15:07] I've talked to Elder Oaks and Elder Holland. What was that like to talk to Elder Holland directly? Man.

Bill Reel [00:15:15] Part of the solution at the time is the fact that somebody simply validates

Bill Reel [00:15:21] you and is making a safe space for you to express the fact that this isn't.

Bill Reel [00:15:26] The dots aren't connecting the way you thought they were.

Bill Reel [00:15:29] And so that was very soothing at the time. Right. Here's an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ and he's telling me it's okay that I'm having a faith crisis, that that doesn't diminish me in any way. So that's beautiful. The trouble is he's also offering the same answer, which is, I don't have any answers. The church is true, warts and all. And that's an exact quote from him

Bill Reel [00:15:50] during that phone call. But he doesn't have any way to

Bill Reel [00:15:54] put any of this back together. It's just, hold on, have faith. Trust in those experiences that you've had. And this will work itself out on the other side.

John Dehlin [00:16:03] And how does that feel to kind of go to the top? It's all. For me, when I met with Holland, it was like going to Oz and then peering behind the curtain and seeing that they had no good answers. That was ultimately very disappointing for me because if Holland doesn't know, you know, he's younger, he's been to Yale, he's been to a pretty good school, he's read a few books, as he says. If Holland doesn't know, does anyone know any good answers to these problems?

Bill Reel [00:16:32] Yeah, it did two things. The emotion of it was soothing, so it allowed me to slow down a little bit. It allowed me to probably stay more believing for a longer period of time. But, yes, the other thing happened as well, which is that you've now talked to the church historian, a general authority. You've now talked to a special witness of the Lord Jesus Christ. And you now realize that there just isn't never. There's never going to be good answers for these questions. They don't exist. And you have to come to terms with that.

John Dehlin [00:17:04] Yeah. Okay, so you get done with Holland and you're feeling like there's no good answers. What does that leave you with?

Bill Reel [00:17:13] So as time goes on, I'm continually thinking about Mormonism. I mean, if you know me, if you ask my friends, you'd essentially know that I'm always reading something, I'm always thinking about something. I'm always trying to find one more detail, one more fact, something that no one else knows. And so as I dive into these issues, I'm just continually. It's this slow, fluid process of continually learning that this is not only messier than you thought it was on the issues you knew, but you're also always learning new things. And as you learn new things, you realize, like, oh, wow, that's messy, too. And so as time goes on, I become more willing to kind of put my foot down and not let these guys just being nice smooth it over. So as I'm continually reaching out to Elder Holland, things are happening. Elder Bednar, a few years back in General Conference, reiterated that Jesus was born on April 6th. I know that's not true. I know the history behind why we made that claim. And I know that where it's founded in is not based in a historical or accurate way of posing that as a truth. So I reach out to Elder Holland and I say, what is up with this? Elder Bednar just told us in General Conference that Jesus was born on April 6th. Here's the data. We know that's not true.

John Dehlin [00:18:31] Are you having email exchanges with Elder Holland?

Bill Reel [00:18:34] Yeah. Regarding Elder Bednar teaching false doctrine in general conference.

John Dehlin [00:18:38] That's pretty cool. I'm actually surprised he's willing to engage with you on that stuff. Yeah.

Bill Reel [00:18:43] And that's about the time it ends. Because he begins to perceive that I'm

Bill Reel [00:18:46] no longer just going to accept nice conversation as satisfactory. So as I start to put my foot down and say, like, I have real questions. And the logic of these questions walks us out to knowing that this doesn't add up. Like, can you answer this stuff? So I began asking him things like, how much do you guys make? What is the details of how you guys are called? Have you ever seen Jesus? Are we going to start teaching a different history? Because our history doesn't add up. And very quickly it gets to the point where he no longer responds to my messages.

John Dehlin [00:19:18] Yeah. So when we interviewed Hans Mattson, you know, originally Hans was promised, I believe, by Elder Perry that he was gonna get some book that was gonna nail, you know. Yeah. Book in his briefcase that was gonna nail, you know, the ex Mormons and the apostates.

Bill Reel [00:19:35] How's that working?

John Dehlin [00:19:36] Gonna nail them?

Bill Reel [00:19:38] Not working so good.

John Dehlin [00:19:39] What's that?

Bill Reel [00:19:40] I said, that's not working so good, is it? There's no such thing. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:19:43] Yeah. But the thing that Hans said is, all Hans did is he waited for this book to come out. He never. He thinks it was rough stone rolling, but he, but he never actually heard back from Elder Perry about, you know, what, what book came out or what was it or. And. But when he tried to ask Elder Perry and follow up and ask what the book was, he was. It was made very clear to him that they don't like it when you ask them questions. Yeah.

Bill Reel [00:20:10] It's kind of the story of Mormonism.

Bill Reel [00:20:12] Right.

Bill Reel [00:20:12] Like I've got some magical thing in my back pocket that I can't show you. But at some point, if you just hang on long enough and have enough faith, sooner or later you'll get a chance to experience it.

John Dehlin [00:20:22] Yeah. Yeah. So that must. So what was it like when Holland kind of stopped communicating with you? How'd that make you feel?

Bill Reel [00:20:29] In some ways it was actually validating because I realized that he had run out of tricks, he had run out of things to appease me, and now it was down to the actual data and the details and he knew he had lost and so he had backed off.

John Dehlin [00:20:44] So where is your testimony at this point? You know, where you've talked to Jensen You've talked to Holland and you've just discovered they don't have answers. Had you stopped believing by this point, was it nuanced? Was the progressive. Where was your testimony at that point?

Bill Reel [00:21:01] It would have been realizing that most of this doesn't add up and leaving space that there still might be something to it. Right. There might still. You know, Joseph Smith may have had an experience that the church is now operating from the position of just managing that and that God literally never steps into the room anymore to talk to these guys.

John Dehlin [00:21:25] Okay, so sort of other many paths up Mount Fuji, the Mormon Church may be true, may not be true, but there may be goodness in it. And this is my tribe kind of thing.

Bill Reel [00:21:36] Yeah, that would have been what I would have held then. That would. I would have tried to have hold on. Like, I wanted to be Mormon. I still do.

John Dehlin [00:21:41] Yeah.

Bill Reel [00:21:41] This is my tribe. Right. Like, we can get into this. This is my tribe, and I want to be Mormon. And yet it's not my fault that the story doesn't add up. It's not my fault that the facts don't lead to a way of putting this back together in a way that you go, yeah, all right, that makes sense. I believe, again, like, that's not my fault. That's not my problem.

John Dehlin [00:21:59] Sure. Okay, so Holland stops communicating with you, then what happens?

Bill Reel [00:22:07] At that point, I realized, like, I'm out of options there. So I. In 2014, there's the fireside in Henderson, Nevada, that I'm at. The owners of Family Pond, which is where I work, they're at that fireside. And after that fireside was over, they reach out to me to take a job in southern Utah. I'm really quiet with my stake president in Ohio, because I could tell he wasn't a safe space to talk about this. When I get to southern Utah, I'm living in Santa Clara, which is on the northwest side of St. George. And while I'm there, I send a letter to the top 15. About half of them I picked out who I thought were the nicer, more receptive of those top 15. And I sent a letter to them essentially saying, you've got a major issue on your hand. You've got five problems. And I don't remember what all five were, but it was history. LGBT family feminism, the fact that prophets don't produce any real revelation, prophecy. Seeing none of that. And I don't remember what the fifth one was, but I lay. So you've got these five things coming at a head right now, and you've Got to deal with all five of these, and I'm just some nobody. But here's how I would handle those five, which I thought was pretty cocky, but in some ways, I wanted them to be aware, like, this isn't going away. These are real issues. And about two weeks later, my stake president reaches out to me and says, I'd like to meet with you. So I go sit down with my stake president. Nice guy. He actually helped us find our home in Santa Clara. And he said, look, I'm going to be honest with you. The brethren sent your letter back to me, and they think you're an apostasy, and it's my responsibility to evaluate that. And so we sit down over the course of, I don't know, three, four or five meetings, and. And he reads. I asked a bunch of listeners to send in letters, just being honest about their experience with me and with the podcast and whether I had a positive or negative effect on them. And about 25 letters came in. I gave them all to my stake president. He read every one of them.

Bill Reel [00:24:12] He said.

Bill Reel [00:24:12] And he comes back and says, bill, I've read those letters, and I just don't think you're an apostasy. And so my entire time in Santa Clara, it was, you're making us all uncomfortable, but you haven't done anything wrong. And he left it alone. At that point, I bought a. We bought a house in Washington, which is on the southeast side or maybe the northeast side of St. George. I'm still kind of getting used to where things are at. Bought a home in Washington and move into a new ward. At this point, I should probably go back a moment. About a month before we bought this house. It's December of last year, and it gets to the point where when I go to church, I'm getting headaches and my hands are shaking. And as people say, the nonsense that orthodox members say at church when they retell the stories that aren't true, when they spout anti LGBT rhetoric, when they impose ideas that simply just don't hold up. I'm kind of a challenger. And people. You mean, obviously everybody knows that. So I raise my hand and I'll say, hey, guys, that just isn't accurate. The story you just told doesn't hold up to the data or, hey, we shouldn't be talking about people that way. We're not as informed as we think we are. And there's lots of issues around gender or sexuality that are complex. And as I would stand up to these people, and I'm again, no offense, to them. But I'm more well read, I'm more informed. I get that they believe in something and my beliefs are one off from where they're at, but I'm sharing with them actual data. And these people would get loud and they would cut me off and they would say, hey, we're just not going to go there today. Or they would couch their answers in a way to keep me from being able to respond to them. And so by the time I go home on Sundays, like, I'm a mess and I would have trouble sleeping. And so my body is now presenting this trauma that comes from pushing against the unhealthiness of Mormonism. It's expressing itself. And so in December of last year, I roll over, look at my wife on Sunday morning, and my wife is already disconnected from the faith. My kids are already disconnected. They're all going because I want to go. My kids are leaving. After sacrament, we say, hey, just go to sacrament. You guys can go home after that. It's to the point where everybody doesn't want to be there and I'm the only one trying to get us to go. And I roll over and say, I just can't do it anymore. I'm done. So in December of last year, we quit going. We move into a new house. When we move into a new house, I reach out to the new bishop. He doesn't really say much. I'm asking him questions. I've got one daughter, by the way, who's bisexual, and so I'm. That obviously changes how you approach church. And so I tell the bishop and the stake president, if this isn't a safe place for my daughter to be, there's not even a chance of me considering being active in this area. And all he responds back with is, hey, our meeting started 11am he doesn't even address the issue. And so that tells me right away this isn't a safe space. The stake president doesn't respond at all, doesn't reach out to me at all. About a month later, maybe three weeks later, that stake president is released and a new stake president is called.

Stake President's Efforts to Prevent Discipline

John Dehlin [00:27:39] Do you know how long he had served?

Bill Reel [00:27:41] It was.

Bill Reel [00:27:42] I'm assuming he had served his full time. I think he was released honorably. And I don't think it had anything

Bill Reel [00:27:45] to do with my move there. I think it was just the normal process of things. Okay, the new stake president is called. I reach out to him. He says, look, I'm new. I'll get to you when I get to you. And it's probably four Months or something before I get a first contact from this guy. And so now he says he asked me to come in and actually comes to my home and he brings the bishop with him.

Bill Reel [00:28:07] And

Bill Reel [00:28:09] they sit down in my house, and I've got two friends of mine there. And so there's my wife, me, my two friends, and the stake president and the bishop.

John Dehlin [00:28:18] And what month is this?

Bill Reel [00:28:19] This would have been approximately.

Bill Reel [00:28:22] I'm going to guess, probably we've been in our home now probably eight months.

Bill Reel [00:28:26] So probably four months ago.

John Dehlin [00:28:28] Okay. So we're talking Juneish, July. Ish.

Bill Reel [00:28:32] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:28:32] Okay.

Bill Reel [00:28:33] And so he reaches out to me

Bill Reel [00:28:34] the first time he's in my house.

Bill Reel [00:28:36] And I had put a bunch of

Bill Reel [00:28:38] questions on Facebook that day and said, hey, I'm meeting with my stake president. These are the questions that point to the unhealthiness of Mormonism and the fact that things don't add up. These are things I'd like answers to. He comes into my home and says, somebody sent me your questions. I don't know if it was the Strengthening Church Members Committee.

Bill Reel [00:28:52] I don't know if it's another member

Bill Reel [00:28:54] on Facebook who happened to know me. But he says, I'm not going to answer your questions. I don't have answers for them. I don't know the history.

John Dehlin [00:29:01] So he admits, again, your stake president admits he has no answers to you.

Bill Reel [00:29:04] Right.

John Dehlin [00:29:05] He had immediate get out of excommunication card if the church can't answer the question. Right.

Bill Reel [00:29:11] That's the thing, John. I've never said anything.

John Dehlin [00:29:12] There's no grounds for apostasy. Yeah.

Bill Reel [00:29:15] I've never said anything that's untruthful. Nobody's ever come to me along this whole way and said, bill, you said abc, and it doesn't hold up. Here's why. Nobody's ever done that. He also says that Salt Lake's been calling him once a month and telling him what I've done over the last 30 days. So I'm not sure why it took him so long to get to me, but he has this one meeting with me. He said, I can't answer your questions. He says, you really have three choices. My friend at the house, and you've met my friend Chris Bloxham. So my buddy's at the house and he says, bill's always worried that telling the truth is going to get him in trouble. And my stake president says, yeah. He goes, it's getting to the point where you're going to have basically three options. You have the option to soften up and Stop doing what you're doing. You have the option to resign. Or the third option is this ends with you being excommunicated.

Bill Reel [00:30:07] And that meeting essentially the.

Bill Reel [00:30:11] We spent several hours talking, but that's the gist of it.

John Dehlin [00:30:14] So the first condition was to stop the podcast. Is that right?

Bill Reel [00:30:17] Stop the podcast or soften up considerably.

John Dehlin [00:30:21] Okay. Because that's for me, that's what it was. It was take the podcast down, take any episode in the past down that challenges the church, and stop speaking out publicly in any way about the church.

Bill Reel [00:30:31] Yeah.

Bill Reel [00:30:31] Nobody specifically said you have to stop

Bill Reel [00:30:33] the podcast or you have to remove these things. I think that's something they learned from dealing with you and others in the

Bill Reel [00:30:42] past, is to not specifically ask somebody

Bill Reel [00:30:45] to do something, but simply leave it in their court and suggest that something has to change.

John Dehlin [00:30:51] So you were given conditions to escape a disciplinary council, and that was chill out and soften up.

Bill Reel [00:30:58] Yeah.

Bill Reel [00:30:58] Or resign.

John Dehlin [00:30:59] Or resign. Okay.

Bill Reel [00:31:02] So that meeting essentially ends.

John Dehlin [00:31:04] Did you respond to the request?

Bill Reel [00:31:08] No. I told him I was point blank with him.

Bill Reel [00:31:09] I said, I'm not going to soften up.

Bill Reel [00:31:11] I said, unless you can, I'm welcome. If you want to tell me where I've been dishonest, if you want to

Bill Reel [00:31:16] tell me where I've been inaccurate, I'm happy to do that. That night we talked about Elder Holland's

Calling Out False Claims from Church Leaders

Bill Reel [00:31:21] comment that I've used in the podcast even recently, where Elder Holland says we have staggering growth, the most growth we've had since Adam and Eve walked out of the Garden, double digit state creation every week of our lives.

Bill Reel [00:31:36] Now, when you look at the data,

Bill Reel [00:31:37] the church itself says we create between about 50 and 70 stakes a year. That's 1.15 to 1.7 stakes a week.

Bill Reel [00:31:49] And even if you go to a

Bill Reel [00:31:51] month, that's not double digits. So we know it's dishonest, we know it's inaccurate. My stake president, when I shared that with him, because that's one of the things he was told was Salt Lake

Bill Reel [00:32:02] had called and they were not happy. It was not sitting well that Bill Real had called Elder Holland a liar.

John Dehlin [00:32:08] Okay, so let's back up. When did Elder Holland say that?

Bill Reel [00:32:11] I think this was back in 2014,

Bill Reel [00:32:14] but Radio Free Mormon and I had

Bill Reel [00:32:16] had a conversation about it somewhat recently and we each.

Bill Reel [00:32:19] He had done an episode called Lies,

Bill Reel [00:32:22] Damn Lies and Statistics.

Bill Reel [00:32:25] And I had put out a post where I lay out point by point,

Bill Reel [00:32:28] the data of Elder Holland's comment. Show you where you can see what the actual data was and you can see that he's not telling the truth.

John Dehlin [00:32:37] Why did you care so much about that? Why was that issue number one, elder, the substance of his lie, which is trying to communicate that the church is growing abundantly without end, and then the fact that he's lying. Why were those two things such a problem for you, even four years after he said it?

Bill Reel [00:32:56] If I. I guess the simple answer

Bill Reel [00:32:58] is, I think integrity matters. And every step of the way, John, I've tried to. I've tried to act with integrity, and

Bill Reel [00:33:07] I've tried to be honest and vulnerable.

Bill Reel [00:33:10] When people ask questions, I answer them. I don't deflect.

Bill Reel [00:33:13] I don't.

Bill Reel [00:33:13] I don't try to skip the question and answer something else. I try to be forthright.

Bill Reel [00:33:18] And those things are important to me.

Bill Reel [00:33:19] And so when you talk to my friends, and again, you know my friends, you've met with them, you ask my friends, they'll say, bill's. Bill's. He's transparent. He's got integrity, and he'll tell you like it is, and he'll take any question. So this church has built itself into what it claims is 16 million members worldwide based on a story that has been inaccurate and deceptively told at every single turn.

Bill Reel [00:33:47] The data points demonstrably at that. And these leaders feel like they have

Bill Reel [00:33:54] a free pass to embellish and tell stories at every turn that don't hold up.

Bill Reel [00:33:59] And enough's enough. We live in an Internet age now, John. I think they're learning the hard way,

Bill Reel [00:34:04] but that's just not gonna hold up anymore. They're gonna have to tell things accurately,

Bill Reel [00:34:08] and they're gonna have to back off

Bill Reel [00:34:09] the stuff that doesn't hold up.

John Dehlin [00:34:11] And you have to know that there's this idea. As long, you know, I was able to go 10 years with Mormon Stories podcast without getting excommunicated. One thing I never did or tried to never do is, like, directly criticize the Brethren, because I knew from the very beginning, from 2005, that that will get you excommunicated. You know, criticizing the Brethren or, you know, publicly denouncing the church's truth claims in a way that's sort of final or categorical. So you realized that when you were going after Holland and calling him a liar that you were probably inviting an excommunication. Is that fair to say?

Bill Reel [00:34:50] I knew that the church had set itself up in a way as to shield itself from members pointing and shining a light on its deceptiveness, and I knew that such could not go unpunished.

Bill Reel [00:35:02] Yes.

Bill Reel [00:35:03] On the other hand, what does that say about an institution when the guy who lies gets to keep doing what he's doing and the guy who shines a light on it has to stand before people and be judged and excised from his tribe?

John Dehlin [00:35:18] Yeah, yeah, it's condemning. So.

Bill Reel [00:35:22] So my state President Holland.

John Dehlin [00:35:23] So the first was the Radio Free Mormon episode. Then your part in that was what?

Bill Reel [00:35:28] Putting a post on Facebook where I lay out the data. As there's just no debate either Elder Holland has to make up a story about being misinformed. But see, here's the trouble. You have to understand the background. Elder Holland says he got this information from his Thursday meetings in Salt Lake. In other words, he goes to the meeting with all the other brethren and they're deciding, they're praying and they're deciding the stakes to create. For him to say, like, oh, I was just misinformed. Somebody gave me a bad number. That doesn't hold up the guys in the very meeting every single week where stakes are created, he knows roughly how many stakes every week, week in and week out for a decade, that he's been an apostle for 15 years, that he's been an apostle. He knows how many stakes the church is creating. Unless he's taking naps and letting somebody else tell him what's going on in the meetings that he's present for, we know he's not telling the truth in this instance. So as I put that post. Go ahead.

John Dehlin [00:36:25] Was that the Liar Liar post or was there a different one?

Bill Reel [00:36:28] It was a original post with his face and with a stamp on it that said liar. And it was just on this one issue.

John Dehlin [00:36:35] That's pretty bold, though.

Bill Reel [00:36:37] That's pretty bold, but it's also true. So if you can't tell the truth, I thought when I joined Mormonism As a 17 year old, I thought I found the kingdom of God on earth. And I thought integrity was what was like honesty and integrity and charity and compassion and kindness. Those things mattered. And now, as you learn, that's not really what's important. Loyalty and obedience is what's important. In the meeting with the stake president of my house, I shared this data. And as I shared that data, he even says, it looks like he's lying. It looks like Elder Haaland's not telling the truth. I don't know why he would do that. And my stake president, in a sense, was confounded. He had these two things. One was it looked like Elder Holland was lying, and yet he held this belief that that wouldn't make sense. Like Elder Holland wouldn't lie, and he couldn't reconcile those himself. So again, that meeting comes to an end. A lot of time goes by, I don't know, another month, and my stake president reaches out and meets with me again, and my wife is at the meeting, just the two of us with him, and it's the same story. I can't answer your questions. I can't reconcile your concerns. The church isn't happy about you pointing at these things, but I don't have any good answers for them. Yes, it looks like Elder Holland was lying. The other thing I asked him to do in this process, and I'm sorry, I'm being kind of back and forth, he said, there's got to be a better way to get answers to your questions. I said, great, let's talk about that. He goes, I said, let me guess. The process is you send things up and somebody addresses it. He goes, yep. I said, wonderful, let's try that. I said, I'll pick five questions, John, and let's send those five questions up. And I don't know if you want to copy and paste those questions maybe into the Facebook feed or if you want to go over them, we can do that too. They're long because, as you know, I'll

John Dehlin [00:38:24] paste them in, but I'll just read them. So one is about LGBTQ members, right? And homosexuality, same sex sexuality.

Bill Reel [00:38:33] Yeah, but. But I'm forming the argument based on if guys like Elder Oaks or Elder Nelson, if their first wife passes away and they've checked all the boxes, what's their reason for needing to remarry? And the only reason to remarry, if you're an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ who's received all the ordinances, you've been married once in the temple, you've had the second anointing, is that you're lonely and you want to have relationship. And if an apostle of the Lord who's checked all the boxes is lonely and wants to have a relationship, then how dare we tell our LGBT members that they're to sit alone for the rest of their lives and that's the only way they can get back to heaven and get back to God? It makes no sense. So that was the first question.

John Dehlin [00:39:17] It's also an acknowledgement that they believe in polygamy and that they practice celestial polygamy. Right?

Bill Reel [00:39:21] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:39:22] Yeah. Okay. I pasted the questions in. What's the second one?

Bill Reel [00:39:26] Let's pull it up here.

John Dehlin [00:39:27] Okay. The second one is on past doctrines of race. So the Lowry Nelson stuff.

Problematic Doctrines and Church History

Bill Reel [00:39:36] Talk about that Just the idea that prophets in the past have declared that certain things we know now to be false were doctrine. Somewhere along the way, somebody sorted out. Somebody sorted out which things we can disavow and which things we can't. And yet Jesus has never come into the room at all and said, like, yeah, you can keep that one, but you can throw this one out. The reality is these guys are just guessing, and when things get too uncomfortable, then they disavow it. But as long as it can be mildly comfortable, they leave room for it to stay. And it's just a cat and mouse game. So the question essentially walks them into the logic of that.

John Dehlin [00:40:16] So it wasn't just the issue of racism. It's the issue of who's leading this ship. How can it be that our first presidency 50 years ago can state that the black priesthood ban is doctrine, and then through an essay, they can say, oh, past statements were wrong and misinformed. There's no accountability for how these decisions are made, and God can't be changing. So if God's not changing, it means first presidency and quorum of the 12 got it wrong. But where's the acknowledgement that they're getting it wrong?

Bill Reel [00:40:49] If Elder oaks, at the 40th anniversary of the 78 revelation, or 50, whatever that was, when he stood up, he articulated a talk that still said, like, hey, the ban was still from God, but the reasons behind the ban weren't. And Elder Oaks talked about his spiritual impressions around that. The problem is his spiritual impressions mean nothing because he's automatically telling you the spiritual impressions of the past leaders, they meant nothing. So if one leader acknowledges the leader in the past with the same stewardship, the same authority, the same access, can believe with all of his heart that he has an impression from the Holy Ghost, only to be thrown under the bus by a later leader, then how can I trust that later leader that his impressions by the Spirit are any more accurate? It's just. It's a broken system. There's no way to know when God talks and when he doesn't. Even when they tell you God talks?

John Dehlin [00:41:46] Yeah. Basically all they can say is, if my mouth is moving, I'm speaking for God.

Bill Reel [00:41:52] Wherever I'm saying I'm alive.

John Dehlin [00:41:54] Pay attention to what I'm saying now. Ignore anything that's ever been said in the past.

Bill Reel [00:41:59] I'm alive, and so it counts while I'm alive. And when I'm dead, somebody else can decide I'm not. It doesn't count anymore. Like, it's just. It's Just nonsense.

John Dehlin [00:42:07] Okay, the third point was Joseph Smith's translation. Right. About the Book of Mormon. Talk about that point.

Bill Reel [00:42:16] There's five things. There's five translation productions that Joseph Smith produced. We have the Book of Mormon, which everybody now acknowledges has a ton of 19th century material and more than we have explanations for. Richard Bushman's the front man on that. We now look at things like the late war, the first book of Napoleon. We look at thematic theme or. Yeah, thematic themes from like the view of the Hebrews. There's just too much stuff from Joseph Smith's culture in milieu to discount the fact that the Book of Mormon at a minimum is at least a large part of Joseph Smith and his culture and at a maximum entirely Joseph Smith and his culture. The Book of Abraham. Everybody knows the problems with that. Joseph claimed it was a translation off Egyptian papyri and everything, including the facsimiles and whatnot are translated wrongly, inaccurately. And the apologists who stand up for the Book of Abraham are seen as non credible by other Egyptologists outside of Mormonism. The Book of Moses borrows heavily from Luke chapter four and Matthew chapter four. The Book of Moses has exact phraseology and sentence structures from those books. Those books were supposed to have been historically written after the Book of Moses. If the Book of Moses is historical. So now we know it isn't the Joseph Smith translation.

John Dehlin [00:43:45] Wait, wait, wait. Also we now know through David Bacavoy that there's no evidence that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament.

Bill Reel [00:43:54] No. Yeah, that's a.

John Dehlin [00:43:56] The Old Testament itself doesn't have Moses. And we know that because in the Pentateuch it talks about Moses death. So who wrote Genesis? You know, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, who wrote those books if not Moses? And it couldn't have been Moses because it talks about his death. So why is it that Moses is not writing the Pentateuch, but somehow he's writing the Book of Moses? It doesn't make sense.

Bill Reel [00:44:20] Yeah, the moment you walk these questions out in their logic, it falls apart. So the next one is the Joseph Smith translation of the Bible. Jst it is a direct borrowing, which

Bill Reel [00:44:31] is a nice way of saying plagiarism from a contemporary source, which is Adam Clark's commentary in large part. So again, every one of these things is not what we claimed them to be in our Mormon narrative. And the last one is the Kinderhook plates, which was a complete scam that Joseph gets a few sentences in. And for whatever reason and we can accept the apologetic argument. He comes to find out from God that it's not that he's being scammed, and he puts it aside or tries to translate it in a different way,

Bill Reel [00:44:58] and it's not working.

Bill Reel [00:44:59] That's fine. But the fact is, all five translation productions are not what Joseph Smith thought

Bill Reel [00:45:06] they were, and they're not what Mormonism

Bill Reel [00:45:07] told us they were. So that's the point in that question.

John Dehlin [00:45:11] So the translation problem, Joseph, is a translator problem.

Bill Reel [00:45:16] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:45:16] Okay. The fourth is polygamy. Fanny Alger.

Bill Reel [00:45:21] Yeah. Fanny Alger is a big one, but I think the biggest one is Lucy Walker. Lucy Walker's mother dies. Joseph Smith comes into the picture, sends the dad on a mission.

John Dehlin [00:45:33] Wait, just mentioned the problem with Fanny Alger is that Joseph is claiming to have been sealed to her before the sealing keys were restored. So how can he marry Fanny Alger when there aren't sealing powers? Right?

Bill Reel [00:45:45] And not just that Joseph Smith has a problem with young girls working in his home.

John Dehlin [00:45:49] Right?

Bill Reel [00:45:50] You've got the Partridge sisters, you've got Fanny Alger, you've got the Lawrence Sisters, you've got Lucy Walker. I mean, when you start to look at all these things, every time Joseph Smith gets a teenage girl doing laundry in his house, he ends up married to her. He ends up sealed to her. And we can debate ceilings and marriages. That's just all apologetic games. The reality is, Joseph enters what we would absolutely deem today as inappropriate relationships with young girls who are vulnerable to coercion in his home.

John Dehlin [00:46:20] And it looks like he's using the claims of God revealing polygamy as just a cover for his adultery.

Bill Reel [00:46:27] Basically, yeah, it sure looks that way. The bigger story is Lucy Walker. So her mom dies, her dad, Joseph Smith, says, come look, I'll take care of your oldest kids. The youngest kids we'll put in other homes. We'll send you on a mission so that you can get away from all of this and put your mind back at ease and get over the death

Bill Reel [00:46:45] of your wife, and I'll take care

Bill Reel [00:46:47] of your kids as my own. So he takes the kids into his home, and then he tells the general public when he goes out with the Walker daughters, he says, these are my daughters. He refers to them as his children. He tells Lucy, Lucy records in her own journal that he took care of us as if we were his children.

Bill Reel [00:47:05] And then the problem is, within a

Bill Reel [00:47:06] very short time, Joseph approaches Lucy Walker and proposes that she enter into a celestial marriage with him. Now, here's the trouble.

Bill Reel [00:47:15] You're put into A Sophie's choice, which

Bill Reel [00:47:19] is that I either have to believe in a God who is comfortable taking

Bill Reel [00:47:23] a father daughter relationship and making it

Bill Reel [00:47:26] into a husband wife relationship, or I have to accept that Joseph Smith lied and neither one of those are acceptable choices. I won't accept either one of those.

Bill Reel [00:47:35] They're non negotiable. That's not a God I want to put faith in. And that's not what I would call a prophet.

Bill Reel [00:47:41] So I'm stuck. So that makes the polygamy question, the Lucy Walker story, makes the polygamy issue come right to the surface. And again, nobody's got an answer.

John Dehlin [00:47:50] Don't forget the fact that, you know, Emma becomes like the 22nd wife sealed to Joseph. So he's violating D&C 132. It's supposed to be your first wife that's sealed to you. He lies to Emma, keeps it from her until she's something like the 22nd wife sealed to him. And he even gets sealed to those. Was it the sisters who then he has. Because Emma's like, okay, if I get to choose who you get sealed to, let me choose these two sisters. They had already been sealed to Joseph without Emma's knowledge. So Joseph perpetuates sort of this deception and has them resealed to him in front of Emma to not have Emma get mad at him. And that shows just incredible duplicity and deceit, Right?

Bill Reel [00:48:37] Yeah. If you were to go ask Stephen Harper, Mark Ashurst McGee, Matthew Grow, say, tell that story and then say, did Joseph have fidelity to Emma? And the fact is he didn't. And those guys would either have to admit that or they'd have to dodge the question or somehow deflect from it.

John Dehlin [00:48:54] Yeah. So, yeah, polygamy. All right, fifth point, unhealthiness in the church. What do you mean by that?

Harmful Cultural Practices Within the Church

Bill Reel [00:49:03] So not only do we go behind closed doors and ask kids sexual questions, which Sam Young has worked so hard to try and put an end to, but we have an untrained lay ministry. Like, it's one thing and it's still wrong. It's one thing if I take a minister who goes to school and I teach him the ethics of being a minister. I teach him boundaries, I teach him safe practices, I teach him appropriate questions and why other questions aren't appropriate. What we do in Mormonism is we say, hey, I know you're a plumber from nine to five, and nothing against plumbers. I know you're a plumber from nine to five, but now we decided that you're going to Be the ecclesiastical leader of this congregation, and here's a handbook. And there's no training, and even the training isn't training. I served as a bishop, I'd meet with my stake president, I'd meet with the other bishops, we'd have training meetings where we talked about how to get numbers up and be better home teachers. But nobody's talking about boundaries. Nobody's talking about what's appropriate to ask kids and what's not. Nobody talks about the psychology of trauma and how you hurt someone or how

Bill Reel [00:50:02] you make their issues worse.

Bill Reel [00:50:04] So not only do you have one of the very few churches that is approaching young kids behind closed doors and asking questions of a sexual nature, you also have an untrained ministry who has no clue how to navigate that space in any kind of a healthy way, even if you're going to still say, we still need to be able to do this. And that's just one of them. When you look at anti feminism, anti lgbt, when you look at any time someone doesn't fit the mold of Mormonism, the church has mechanisms that cause trauma. If you are a doubter, the church has mechanisms that shame and marginalize you. So anytime you don't fit the box, you get hurt. And anytime you do fit the box, there's still trauma being imposed on you as well.

John Dehlin [00:50:53] Yeah, it's just kind of a toxic culture that punishes well, that is discriminatory against women, people of color, sexual minorities, etcetera, and hostile towards any thinkers who ask questions and aren't willing to defer and bow down to the authority. So it's a toxic culture.

Bill Reel [00:51:12] Yeah, in some ways it is a white, male, European, good old boys club.

John Dehlin [00:51:20] Yeah. It's a. It's a toxic patriarchy. That means. Well, it means. Well, I believe that sometimes. Yeah. But at the end of the day, it's a corrupt structure. Yeah. So you send. What did you do with those five questions again? Just to get back to the story.

Bill Reel [00:51:36] Yeah.

Bill Reel [00:51:36] So those five questions, I said, look, let's do this. I'll give you five questions and you pass them up and let's see what happens to those. He takes the five questions, he sends them on to a 70. I don't know who, but that 70 immediately sends them right back and says, we're not going to answer those. We're not going to touch those questions. In fact, it's your job to answer those questions. Stake president. Now, let's be honest. A local leader answering questions that are about the collective church is impossible. He doesn't have a Stewardship to do that. He doesn't know the history. And so when he meets with me the second time, he says, I sent your questions on. They're not going to answer them. I said, I told you, told you they weren't going to answer them. He goes, they told me that I'm supposed to answer them, but I'm not going to answer them either, because I don't even know. I don't even know where to start with them. So he's admitted there's no way to address these issues, no way to answer these questions. And he essentially touched base and said, look, they're still calling me every month. It's completely in my court. And I pushed him on that. This is one of the things I wanted to know, because we all talk about in Mormonism, that at some point, this is taken out of the stake president's hands, and the church comes in and imposes that a disciplinary court is to be held. His correspondence with Salt Lake was that, yes, Bill is making us uncomfortable. Yes, we think he's an apostasy, but the decision is yours. And my stake president read the letter to me. I don't have a copy of it. I don't know the wording of it, but he read it to me, and it essentially said, it is in your court. You get to decide how this proceeds. But my stake president admitted. He goes, look, Bill, you've asked good questions. I don't have answers, but I'm a loyal guy to the church, and if the church tells me to excommunicate you, I'm gonna excommunicate you. So I knew sooner or later it was gonna happen. That meeting. I'm trying to remember off the end if there's anything else important there. That meeting comes to a close, and now we're. Again, we're another two months later, and I get an email from him that he wants to meet again.

John Dehlin [00:53:37] What month is this?

Bill Reel [00:53:38] Oh, this would have been somewhat recent. Maybe maybe three weeks ago, maybe four weeks ago.

John Dehlin [00:53:44] Okay.

Bill Reel [00:53:46] And I responded and said, just this. This is a burden. These meetings are draining. And, you know, this. These meetings, you just.

Bill Reel [00:53:53] You're wore out.

John Dehlin [00:53:54] Yeah.

Bill Reel [00:53:55] And so when this meeting is that he wants to set up, I essentially respond like, I'm not planning to meet with you unless you have something you want to meet about. And if you have something to meet about, then I will be happy to. And by the way, I still have this email, and this is. I'm happy to share it. I've cut and paste parts of it so that People can see that I have offered to meet. I said I'm fully willing to meet, but I would like to know what we're going to meet about. And I'd like you to actually have a reason for meeting. Not just to meet to check the box, because Salt Lake's asking you to meet with me. So that happens. And he essentially responds, okay, fine. And that's the end of the conversation. So I think, okay, no big deal, it's done.

John Dehlin [00:54:40] Then.

The Liar Liar Episode and Its Fallout

Bill Reel [00:54:40] In the meantime, my episode Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire comes out, which I know people are asking, like, why such the harsh total. The title, I mean.

John Dehlin [00:54:52] And I know you've said that he is lying, and so that's why you're using the term liar. But you've got to know that using the phrase liar, liar, pants on fire to a Mormon apostle is just like basically saying, shoot me. It's almost suicide by policemen. It's just like it's taunting them, begging for a disciplinary council. Is that fair or not fair?

Bill Reel [00:55:20] See, I wouldn't say it that way. What I would say is that this system has no healthy way for recourse. If you perceive somebody has wronged you, if you perceive the church is teaching something falsely, if you perceive that people are being marginalized for unnecessary reasons, the church has given you no healthy way to go back to the system and say, there's something wrong here. Can you please at least take a look at this, address it, and have a conversation about whether my points are valid or not? They don't have that. So when I put out an episode like Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire, my point here is that this. You've left me. You've left me with the only way to get your attention and to say you're not doing something okay here. You're unhealthy and you need to fix it. And obviously, if it means I'm excommunicated, then so be it.

John Dehlin [00:56:19] But you could say you're unhealthy or the church has toxic culture, saying, elder Holland, you're a liar, liar, liar, pants on fire. That's different than saying church. Your culture is dishonest and toxic. Right?

Bill Reel [00:56:34] If we had a system where people permitted you to have the soft conversation and for your concerns to actually be addressed, then I would agree with you. The only way you get the church's attention is when you begin to publicly point out its unhealthiness in ways it doesn't want you to.

John Dehlin [00:56:55] So it's a way to get the church's attention. Is that what you're saying?

Bill Reel [00:56:58] That title, it's the only way to get these guys to take notice.

John Dehlin [00:57:02] Okay. And you're trying to get. You don't think they were taking notice.

Bill Reel [00:57:07] I think they're willing to live with it if they feel like you're not shaking people by sharing the truth with them. And they want you to couch it in the softest of terms.

John Dehlin [00:57:17] Right.

Bill Reel [00:57:18] Like, even the games they play where doubts are okay, but. Or questions are okay, but doubts are bad. When we pose things in certain ways, we're essentially saying, like, if you have a question and that question leads you to being more faithful in the Church, that's good. But if you have a doubt and a doubt leads you to not being able to make these things add up, then that is bad. The Church has all these mechanisms and it has no problem shaming you or marginalizing you. And so I wanted to turn this around a little bit and say, look, you're doing something unhealthy. You've been dishonest on multiple occasions. By the way, that episode lays out, using the audio from Elder Holland's own lips on five occasions of him being demonstrably dishonest.

John Dehlin [00:58:05] Well, can you, can you take us through some of the instances? I've got it written somewhere.

Bill Reel [00:58:10] Yeah, give me two seconds here. I'll just type it in.

John Dehlin [00:58:13] And, and what I'll do is I'll include a link to that as well. That's Mormon discussions, episode 316. Elder Holland, liar Liar, Pants on Fire. I'll paste that in the show notes.

Bill Reel [00:58:23] In the show notes. If you look at them. So the first one is Elder Holland

Bill Reel [00:58:27] claims to hold the very copy.

Bill Reel [00:58:29] Now, when you say very copy, that

Bill Reel [00:58:31] is understood to mean there is one

Bill Reel [00:58:33] copy, and I'm holding it. The very copy of the Book of

Bill Reel [00:58:37] Mormon that Bathsheba Hyrum Smith's wife had in her possession, from which Hyrum Smith,

Bill Reel [00:58:41] the prophet's brother, read to her and had turned the very corner of the page down from where he read. The problem is that the Church had

Bill Reel [00:58:49] talked about this story in the past, and they show pictures of the book, and you can see from the links that the two books are not the same.

Bill Reel [00:58:57] The book that Elder Holland holds up

Bill Reel [00:58:59] is a book in mint condition.

Bill Reel [00:59:02] The book in the link is rough

Bill Reel [00:59:04] and tattered, and there's no if, ands or buts about that.

Bill Reel [00:59:08] Number two, Elder Holland is asked about

Bill Reel [00:59:11] the church's contribution to Prop 8 at a college event, and he says the Church did not give one red cent to the fight against same sex marriage in California. The trouble is that we have documentation that the Church did give donations and at the very minimum, a significant amount of at least 200 grand in donations in kind. Now you can use the loophole and say, when I said one red cent, I meant cash.

Bill Reel [00:59:39] But the reality is he's trying to portray to people in a deceptive way that the church did not have any

Bill Reel [00:59:46] connection to that and did not give anything. The reality is the church gave quite a bit.

John Dehlin [00:59:51] Oh, can I just say we've covered this on Mormon stories for years. The Church actually rented out office call banks in Provo and through their stakes recruited BYU students to man the phone banks and call citizens of California to get them to vote for Proposition 8. And people very, very close to me, hundreds of people I've talked to, were called in by their stake presidents and asked to give money to the Prop 8 campaign very specifically and directly. So the Church was shaking down members to get money manning call banks, donating indirectly. Somewhere around $40 million, I think was totaled given by Mormons at the request of the church to support Prop 8. So it is a very deceptive comment indeed. Yeah.

Bill Reel [01:00:39] And let's go one step further. Thanks to Ryan McKnight in MormonLeaks. We actually got a hierarchy chart. So the Church said, no, no, no, we have nothing to do with this. It's just local members and their own interest in this issue. And the reality is that once the hierarchy chart was released, we could see that who the people on the ground were all the way up to Elder Ballard and other members of top leadership being involved directly in the fight against Prop 8.

John Dehlin [01:01:08] So that was a big lie.

Bill Reel [01:01:10] Number three, Elder Holland told that faith promoting story about the young missionary who goes out on his mission, goes to like Idaho, finds this guy out in his front yard with some dogs and ends up talking to him and this ends up being his own brother. And soon after the story's told, Radio Free Mormon and I are having a conversation. The moment that story went out and we both are on the phone with each other going, this story doesn't add up. There's too many embellishments, there's too many miracles. And so within about, I don't know what was it, maybe a week and a half or a week and maybe two weeks, that story is pulled back. The Deseret News pulled it. But here's the trouble. If you started doing a search for that story and I give the links to some of these stories, Elder Holland and other general authorities had been telling this story for three years. This isn't just something recent they picked up. This story had been told over a long period of time. It's only when the story made the Deseret news and the general public started going like that story doesn't hold up that Elder Holland suddenly pulled it back. There's lots of holes. And you can go back to Radio Free Mormon's episode on this too, by the way, where he details the deception. I'd have to look and see which one it is. And I can pull, pull that up here in a second. But you can click the links. You can see where missionaries from three years ago talked about the story when Elder Holland and other leaders visited their mission. This story isn't. It's just a made up story. It's a false faith promoting story and it simply has no truth. It's Radio free Mormon. Episode 16, Make Way for Dodos is a good one. It's a really good one. Number four, Elder Holland, when asked directly whether Mitt Romney would have made penalty oaths in the temple, answers no.

John Dehlin [01:03:05] Of course, that was on the BBC interview called Meet the Mormons that was shown a long time ago. Right?

Bill Reel [01:03:13] Yeah. And here's the trick. When these guys sit down with somebody, they're always gauging what does the person across from me know? And let me frame my responses in a way that takes advantage of, of any ignorance or naivete that they have. This BBC guy, Elder Holland, underestimated him. Elder Holland assumed he could throw in an answer and that this guy would move on. Except this guy had been prepped and he knew the next question to ask and how to do the follow up. And Elder Holland ends up getting caught with his pants down having lied about Mitt Romney having taken penalty oaths in the temple prior to 1992 when he was endowed. So that's number four and then number five. The final one is the double digit state creation every week of our lives. And so I take the cuts of audio from each of those and I put them in juxtaposed with the data and when it's all said and done, there's no if, ands or buts. But that Elder Holland seems to have a real issue with habitual lying.

John Dehlin [01:04:20] Yeah. And I, I met the guy. He's very charismatic. He makes you feel really good.

Bill Reel [01:04:26] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:04:27] I don't even. Can't say that I can judge his heart, but it's just very clear that he, he's not always being honest with, with people publicly.

Bill Reel [01:04:37] Yeah, yeah. I've had experiences face to face with Elder Holland as well. Went to A meeting in Ohio where he was at. And at this time, I'm still wanting

Bill Reel [01:04:48] to make it work so bad, trying to find a way to believe in this stuff.

Bill Reel [01:04:52] And I walk up to the front

Bill Reel [01:04:54] because we had had conversation. I told him I would be there, and he said, come find me.

Bill Reel [01:04:57] Come, you know, come.

Bill Reel [01:04:58] Come seek me out. I went up to the front to shake his hand.

Bill Reel [01:05:00] He grabbed my ear and said, oh,

Bill Reel [01:05:03] the famous Bill Real.

Bill Reel [01:05:04] And my wife was standing right next

Bill Reel [01:05:05] to me, so she can vouch as that happened. But yes, to your face, it's niceness,

Bill Reel [01:05:11] but away from you, right?

Bill Reel [01:05:12] You get the taffy pulling experience. So to your face, like, it's okay to doubt, it's okay to have questions.

Bill Reel [01:05:18] And then on the other hand, when

Bill Reel [01:05:20] he gets into a private conversation in a regional conference with a bunch of kids, it's okay to mock people who have questions. It's okay to mock people who have doubts. And so when you start to see the bipolar ness of Elder Holland,

Bill Reel [01:05:34] it

Bill Reel [01:05:34] becomes stressing, it becomes concerning, and you begin to see that this guy is one person when he needs to be.

Bill Reel [01:05:42] But in reality, I think he's somebody.

Bill Reel [01:05:45] He's entirely somebody else.

John Dehlin [01:05:47] I'm just going to say I had a very similar situation where I met with him. He reassures me that he wants people like us in the church, that he understands people like us in the church. And then he gave that Book of Mormon talk where he said, if you leave the church, you have to crawl under, over, around the Book of Mormon as if to taunt and mock people who struggle with the Book of Mormon. And it was very duplicitous. So I actually think you've hit on something very important. I think Elder Holland is misleading people and being dishonest, and I think he needs to be held accountable for that.

Bill Reel [01:06:20] Yeah. And we now live in a world where our scholars are now pointing to the Book of Mormon, the Book of

Bill Reel [01:06:25] Abraham, and other translation productions as pseudepigrapha. Richard Bushman himself has said these translation productions are pseudepigrapha. So this whole crawling around the Book of Mormon no longer is necessary. All you have to do is be interested in knowing the truth and to start reading.

John Dehlin [01:06:42] And for those who don't know what the word pseudepigrapha means, we'll be covering it with David Bacavoi in early December. But it basically means writing as if you're someone in the past trying to stay faithful to what they would have written.

Bill Reel [01:06:55] Like I, Nephi, having been born of

John Dehlin [01:06:57] goodly Parents, even if you're not Nephi, you're Joseph Smith writing that. And some apologists are starting to wonder if the Book of Mormon isn't really a translation, but instead is Joseph Smith writing as if he were Nephi, writing as if he were Mormon, as if he were Moroni. And that's where this word inspired. It's Joseph's greatest revelation instead of Joseph's translation. This comes from Spencer Flume and the Maxwell Institute. The church is now trying to do a bait and switch where instead of claiming the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham are translations, they're now claiming that they're Revelations, meaning Joseph's channeling this directly from God and there's actually no translation happening at all.

Bill Reel [01:07:39] And notice I said I don't know what it was a couple months ago that I knew there was a 10 to 20 year plan to do that.

Bill Reel [01:07:45] And Dan Peterson and others said no way.

Bill Reel [01:07:47] And the reality is, if you've watched

Bill Reel [01:07:49] over the last few months, you've seen seen several talks, seminars, different things said by Stephen Harper, Matt Groh and others. That is absolutely now framing this as we're going to slowly let go of the word translation and we're going to slowly move into using the word revelation. And that switch is happening really quick.

John Dehlin [01:08:08] We've got about 227 live watchers on our Facebook feed. That's fantastic. I just want to make a call out to our listeners both now and in the future. Please share this on your wall. It would be so amazing to get three or 400 people and just say, hey, Bishop, Bill Real is being excommunicated for holding the Church accountable, for asking the church questions that it can't answer, for calling out dishonest things Elder Holland is saying. Please join in. If we could get three to 400 people watching this interview today, this morning, that could really not only help show you more support, Bill, but also really help bring attention to the problem. So I'm just going to ask everyone now who's listening to please share this interview on their wall, in Facebook groups that they're a part of in email. Share it with everyone because if we don't lift up our voices, you know, there won't be openness and awareness to the problems that are going on and positive things won't, won't ever happen. Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org. Wiser is a song written and performed by Mormon Stories listener Russell Ash a message intended for his children to have love and kindness be their guiding star.

Receiving the Disciplinary Council Summons

Part 2 of 2 · Ep. 1018

Bill Reel [00:00:11] Your mom and me, we've seen this life with eyes that only see in black and white.

John Dehlin [00:00:21] Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the Donate button on the right side of the page under support. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible in the United States and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support.

Bill Reel [00:01:03] Tune me out if you must I know you've heard enough But I sing this song Just because I hope you'll be wiser than your daddy was I hope you'll be wiser than your daddy

John Dehlin [00:01:27] okay, Bill, so this became personal for you, kind of personal between you and Holland. Where did it go from there when you made these claims?

Bill Reel [00:01:38] So when I released the episode, and again, I don't know what the release

Bill Reel [00:01:42] date was on it going free to

Bill Reel [00:01:44] the general public, but I'm assuming it's

Bill Reel [00:01:46] about two weeks ago. And so just this past week on the 14th, the night of the 14th, two guys stopped by my home and

Bill Reel [00:01:56] knocked on my door.

John Dehlin [00:01:57] This is a week ago.

Bill Reel [00:01:59] Yep. Knocked on my door and shook my

Bill Reel [00:02:01] hands, which is such a. Such a Mormony thing to do. Right?

Bill Reel [00:02:04] Like I'm going to give you bad

Bill Reel [00:02:05] news, but I'm going to smile and shake your hand first.

Bill Reel [00:02:08] And so they hand me the envelope

Bill Reel [00:02:10] as soon as they hand me the envelope. Soon as I see it. I mean, you and I know how this process works. When two guys show up your door to hand you an envelope, it's automatic, what it is. And so I excused them, closed the

Bill Reel [00:02:22] door, went upstairs, held it up to my wife.

Bill Reel [00:02:25] She knew immediately what it was and

Bill Reel [00:02:28] opened it up and read it.

Bill Reel [00:02:29] And it was a church summons to a disciplinary council on November 27 at 8.30pm but it was couched in some

Bill Reel [00:02:36] language and I can pull it up

Bill Reel [00:02:38] here because I think there's something going on here and I think I nailed

Bill Reel [00:02:43] it on what is going on.

The Summons Letter and Charges Explained

Bill Reel [00:02:49] So page one. Dear Brother Real, since we have met and discussed your concerns with church doctrine leaders and its history, your open opposition to the church and its leaders has increased and continued in your social media channels. So, first off, I know that I

Bill Reel [00:03:05] was harsh in the title of Liar Liar Pants on Fire, but the reality

Bill Reel [00:03:12] is, if you actually compare my Facebook post over the last, say, two months with the Previous six months. I think you'll actually find I'm posting less and I was less pointed. So I think that that is, at least on some level, a slight exaggeration. But then it gets worse.

John Dehlin [00:03:31] Well, but calling an apostle a liar publicly is really crossing a line.

Bill Reel [00:03:37] Yeah. Well, except that I didn't. I didn't lie. I didn't not tell the truth.

John Dehlin [00:03:44] That's true. Yeah. Right.

Bill Reel [00:03:46] So it's one thing to say if

John Dehlin [00:03:47] there's a temple covenant, not to criticize, you know, the Brethren. Right, I know.

Bill Reel [00:03:52] Isn't that nice to hear the Lord's anointed?

John Dehlin [00:03:55] I mean, that is a covenant you made, right?

Bill Reel [00:03:57] Yeah. Isn't it nice when you're the judge,

Bill Reel [00:03:59] jury and executioner that you can put rules into your system so that nobody can criticize you? That's always a nice thing. He says, I hoped that we could patiently work together to resolve your concerns. But as I've already told you, the guy has admitted at every single turn that I cannot resolve your concerns. And nobody else is willing to try and resolve them either. Then he says, but given your intensified efforts to oppose the church and its leaders, as well as your recent unwillingness to meet with me again, that's not exactly true. I did tell him I didn't want to meet, just to meet, but that I was more than willing to meet with him if he had a purpose. He says, because of that, that does not seem possible. And hence he announces the disciplinary court, which also includes the fact that I'm going to be having to sign a confidentiality agreement not to record it.

Bill Reel [00:04:49] And that there's also

Bill Reel [00:04:52] trying to think.

Bill Reel [00:04:53] There was one other thing I thought in there.

Bill Reel [00:04:55] Oh, the witnesses that I have to submit the names of witnesses. The bishop that's over them, the warden stake that they're in, which means anybody I ask to be a witness will

Bill Reel [00:05:05] automatically be put on a blacklist too.

Bill Reel [00:05:08] And the church will now have to start a new file in their file

Bill Reel [00:05:11] cabinet in the Granite Mountains on that person as well.

Bill Reel [00:05:14] Which makes it really hard to get

Bill Reel [00:05:16] somebody willing, who's both active and who

Bill Reel [00:05:19] at least looks like a believer to stand as a witness when they're trying to go under the radar.

John Dehlin [00:05:28] Yeah.

Bill Reel [00:05:29] So the letter comes, and the first thing I did was the next morning was respond to him asking him. So Tuesday night at 8:30pm I'm going to be excised from my tribe. Now, that seems pretty serious. That's going to come with some emotion, that's going to come with some inflicted trauma.

Bill Reel [00:05:45] That's going to come with my family

Bill Reel [00:05:46] and I having to kind of recoup from that. It would be nice if it wasn't 8:30 at night, since I have to get up at 6:30 the next morning

Bill Reel [00:05:52] and go to work and get ready and go take on my daily. Take on my daily life and in partake of the daily grind.

Bill Reel [00:05:58] That's all of our lives. It would have been nice if we could do this on a Saturday night. So I asked him if he could move it to a Saturday.

Bill Reel [00:06:04] And I also said that is reasonable.

John Dehlin [00:06:07] I'm sure he asked every member of the Stake Presidency and the High Council if the date worked for them. Wouldn't it have been polite for him to ask you, what's a date that works for you?

Bill Reel [00:06:19] You would think so. The other thing too is the handbook makes guidelines so that besides him as the stake president and besides me as the person who's charged, everybody else in that disciplinary council can be substituted for. So whether the night works for them or not, to be honest, frankly, who the hell cares? The reality is, just as long as the two of us are there and he can find enough replacements inside the stake to replace those men, we can continue with the council. But whether they can make it or not is important. Whether Brother Real can make it or not, who the heck cares if he doesn't show up, we'll just have it anyway.

John Dehlin [00:06:55] That's true. And they'd rather have you not show up because things you say could be disturbing to those who are in attendance.

Bill Reel [00:07:02] I can only imagine they're going to be disturbing.

John Dehlin [00:07:04] Yeah. Okay. All right.

Bill Reel [00:07:13] So the summons comes in and I asked about the date change. I also told him, I said, I know they're going to tell you that I have a certain amount of time to speak, probably 45 minutes. And I would like, because my salvation's at stake, because my eternal ties to my wife and children is at stake. I'm sure you would consider it kind and considerate to give me an additional 45 minutes and let me speak for 90. I'm sure in the whole scheme of eternity, an additional 45 minutes isn't going to cause too much of a backlash and the other things that people have to do. He responded the next day and essentially said no to both of them, that he had consulted with all of the members of the High Council and his Stake Presidency. This was the only night that was going to work. No way to push it off to any other day. Just impossible. Notice too, I wasn't consulted and that I would be given 40 to 60 minutes, which he also said specifically was four times longer than he would need to speak. Now, that rhetoric, when you say four times longer, if I remember right. Oh, that's right. It was Sam Young who also had that same kind of rhetoric in his statements, which means you now can see the church's fingerprints on these responses. So anytime I go to him with a request about this disciplinary court, it now is apparent that he also has to coordinate with Salt Lake and make sure that he gives the response that they want him to give.

John Dehlin [00:08:34] Yeah, yeah. There's for sure a template. This all dates back to 2015 or even 14. The fact that they make you sign a document that you won't record. I had to do that. You know, allowing you to have witnesses but wanting the names ahead of time. That was true with me. They gave me an hour. So I spoke 30 minutes and then had each of my witnesses speak for five. They did let me bring my wife Margi in. So I hope you're bringing your wife in. Are you?

Bill Reel [00:09:02] Yeah. So I asked, I made three requests two days ago. Three days ago, where I asked for the right to question him. Since he is the one who is presenting the evidence and making the conclusion that that means I'm in apostasy, he's the only person for which I can question to say, like, let's show you why that doesn't add up. So I asked for the right to question him as a witness and my

John Dehlin [00:09:31] stake president explicitly said to me, you will not be allowed to ask us any questions. We are, you know, you were on trial here, not us. That's what my state to me.

Bill Reel [00:09:41] Yeah, except the handbook says you have a right to question the witnesses who

Bill Reel [00:09:45] present evidence against you. So I get it.

John Dehlin [00:09:47] I mean, that's when I never saw any of the witnesses present evidence against me. That if there was evidence other than what the stake president presented, I was not privy to that right.

Bill Reel [00:09:57] But when the state president presents evidence, is he not acting as a witness?

Bill Reel [00:10:01] Yeah, so the handbook says I have

Bill Reel [00:10:03] a right to question the witness. So I don't expect to be able to do it either.

Bill Reel [00:10:07] But I'm simply going to point out that we don't follow the handbook when

Bill Reel [00:10:10] it's convenient for us not to follow the handbook. I asked to know what the charges were like, what is the evidence? So I've been charged with behavior unbecoming of a member of the church. That's pretty general.

Bill Reel [00:10:21] What is that?

Bill Reel [00:10:22] I've been charged with working against the church and its leaders. Now, I can make assumptions about what that is, and I assume it's the Elder Holland conversation, but in reality, until you say it was this post on this day, you're not giving anybody a chance to look at their own work

Bill Reel [00:10:38] and to come into that room prepared

Bill Reel [00:10:40] to talk about it and defend themselves. The handbook also says that a disciplinary court, the stake president, is responsible to be both kind and considerate.

Bill Reel [00:10:50] And so, again, he's already been dishonest,

Bill Reel [00:10:53] saying, bill, you don't want to meet with me anymore.

Bill Reel [00:10:55] That's why we're having this, Bill, I

Bill Reel [00:10:57] thought we could resolve your concerns. So he's already been dishonest. Now I've made requests to ask for a chance to fairly represent myself in this disciplinary court.

Bill Reel [00:11:05] And he's not following the handbook in

Bill Reel [00:11:08] terms of being able to question the witnesses, which I assume will happen. And two, not responding to giving me

Bill Reel [00:11:13] the exact post and the exact things that I've said, both audio or on

Bill Reel [00:11:21] Facebook or other social media that he sees as justifying the charge of apostasy.

Bill Reel [00:11:27] And so I would like, in all

Bill Reel [00:11:29] fairness, to be able to come into that room prepared. He did answer the question about my wife being able to come just last night. He said, surely your wife can attend. Not a problem. But he also avoided answering any of the other questions that I asked him.

John Dehlin [00:11:43] Honestly, the problem with wanting to have a conversation about the evidence, if we're just being really practical, is that the decision's already been made.

Bill Reel [00:11:52] Yeah, we know that. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:11:53] And so why. I think from his perspective, why allow you to ask questions? Why have a conversation? They know the end before you know they sent you the letter.

Bill Reel [00:12:03] No, I've got zero chance of winning this. I know that there's.

Bill Reel [00:12:07] There.

Bill Reel [00:12:07] I don't walk into this room that night saying, like, oh, if I just say the right things, I'm going to sway this my way. No, that's not the intention at all. And everybody hopefully knows that. I already know that the moment that letter showed up at my door, the moment he typed it up and copy and pasted the church's rhetoric into it, I was done.

John Dehlin [00:12:31] Yeah. Okay. Christian asks, if they said, can you take down the Elder Holland episode and we won't excommunicate you, would you do it?

Bill Reel [00:12:42] I would consider it.

John Dehlin [00:12:43] Oh, wow. Interesting. Okay.

Bill Reel [00:12:45] Yeah, I'd consider it. Also show up on Radio for Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:12:48] After that, though, it looks like about 25 people, 30 people have shared this episode. I want to thank everyone who shared it so far. Man. If another 20 people could share this episode, even 30 or 40 people, we've got over 250 people tuned in live. If some more of you can share this, if we can get that shares up to 50 or 60, I really think the multiplier, the kind of the network effect of people sharing would really help this get out because I think Bill's passion, his knowledge, his story is going to be really compelling to people. And I really hope you guys who are listening will share it even after the livestream. Please share this interview everywhere you can because people need to know what the church is doing. Transparency is important. Sunlight is the, is the great disinfectant. So please share it everybody. Okay, Bill, so you get the letter. What come. You know, you've had these exchanges with your stake president and it looks like it's still going to happen next Tuesday, right?

Bill Reel [00:13:47] Yeah, Tuesday at 8:30 at night.

John Dehlin [00:13:50] I've never seen a disparate council start at 8:30. That's the latest I've ever heard.

Bill Reel [00:13:54] Yeah, and we know this. I mean again, If I have 40 to 60 minutes to talk, and I sure as heck hope that he gives me the full 60 minutes because I'm going to try and speak for 60 minutes. I'll have 60 minutes of material. To have it at 8:30 means this thing's going to go at least an hour and a half.

Bill Reel [00:14:11] Right?

Bill Reel [00:14:12] So an hour and a half. And now we're 10 o' clock at night and I've got to work the next day. So it becomes insane at this point. But yes, and essentially I don't, I think that's essentially it. In terms of the disciplinary court, we've talked about the correspondence back and forth. We did make an announcement yesterday. I think it's being shared in a few of the groups that we're trying to, I guess they're trying to hold a vigil essentially in my, you know, on my behalf that night where they meet there at 8pm and show support for me, which is really appreciated. And I don't mean this as a negative way. If 10 people are there, it doesn't matter to me. I know people have been sending in emails and comments to me and those are deeply touching. I know that the podcast has touched people. I know that my speaking out has been supportive to people. I know that people have gotten validation. I know that people have claimed that I've saved their marriage. People have claimed that it helped them get away from their suicidal ideology. I feel great about what I've said and what I've done. And I know one of the questions I saw people wanted to ask is would I take anything back. And in reality, I wouldn't. I think I've handled this as honestly and transparently as somebody could go through this entire journey. So whether 10 people show up or whether a thousand people show up, either way, I recognize that people have gotten something out of this and that people appreciate somebody standing up to this thing and holding it accountable.

John Dehlin [00:15:44] Well, I'm going to just make a call to all my listeners. Please support Bill Real. Please go to St. George if it's at all within your resources to do it, and please show up. People have showed up for me. They've showed up for Jeremy Reynolds, they've showed up for Sam Young. They showed up for others. Please don't leave Bill Real unsupported. He needs your support. And so again, the date is November 27th. Show up at 8pm what's the address, Bill? Actually, let's cover that later because we've got more to talk about.

Bill Reel [00:16:21] I'll pull it up while we're talking.

John Dehlin [00:16:23] Okay. Okay. So what? So is there anything else you want to tell about your story before I kind of ask you questions?

Bill Reel [00:16:31] No, no. You can fire away. Ask whatever you want.

John Dehlin [00:16:35] Okay. All right. So, Bill, I've got. Oh, wow, 30 or 40 questions from listeners. I'm not sure we'll be able to get to them all. One really simple question is, shouldn't an organization be allowed to enforce its boundaries and get rid of those who it feels are not healthy for the organization?

Debating the Church's Right to Discipline Critics

Bill Reel [00:16:58] And I would fire back with the question, doesn't an organization have an obligation to have a system for healthy discourse? So I would agree with you. An organization absolutely has a right to deem who can belong and who can't belong. I get that. I agree. And it can deem that I don't belong. That's fine. But let's also acknowledge that an institution or a system should always have healthy ways for discourse about its unhealthiness. And Mormonism doesn't have that.

John Dehlin [00:17:29] One of our listeners found a quote from your website in 2014 that says we each must find a path that is ours. I hope people stay and make it work, but I don't see the LDS path as the only path back to God. You go on to say we can't expect to be in the church if we get too far from it. So what we choose to believe and what we choose to act faithful within is up to us and unfortunately leads some out of the church as they follow their own path. So that's sort of Bill Real, four years ago, basically saying, hey, if we make the wrong decisions. We can't expect to stay a member.

Bill Reel [00:18:07] Yeah. And I think that these journeys are fluid, and we're constantly growing. In fact, I look back, I did a talk at Sunstone in Kirtland, Ohio, and it would have been maybe 2013. I think this is the talk that Natasha Helfer Parker was pointing to in her Facebook post recently, where she was talking about me being called into a disciplinary court. And she essentially said that I listened to Bill real early on, and he didn't realize how condescending he was. And I think when you are in ethnocentricity, when you're inside the tribe and having that loyalty to the tribe, you sometimes don't realize how condescending you are in that talk. In Kirtland, I gave a talk on grace, and I'm looking out across the room of 40 or 50 people, and I'm essentially challenging them to stay in. Meanwhile, I still had things to learn about the church's history and the way in which it behaved that were going to cause me to move further away from that perspective. And so I simply would say I reserve the right to grow, and I reserve the right to look back and wish I had worded something a little differently. And so what I would say to those people is the first part I think is true, which is there are lots of paths in this world, and I honor and validate whatever path people choose. Those who stay, those who go, none of that matters to me. What matters to me is that people have validation for being human beings and that people have the support and the information to make the best choices in their lives.

John Dehlin [00:19:42] Yeah. Okay. A lot of people are wondering, well, let me ask you this. Why do you think the church is doing this? And this is total speculation. Like, there are people that aren't excommunicated. There are podcasters who haven't been excommunicated, and there are people who express public doubt who haven't been excommunicated. So I don't think just doubting or disbelieving parts of the church is grounds enough for excommunication. And also, I don't think speaking out publicly is grounds enough for excommunication. We know that Tyler Glenn, you know, Dan Reynolds of Imagine Dragons, they have not been excommunicated, and they've, you know, publicly opposed the church, called the church harmful, even publicly denounced the church's truth claims. They've been left alone. And again, there are several podcasters who have been left alone. Why do you think you got the Ax.

Bill Reel [00:20:41] So each of these situations, from the church's standpoint. Sure. So I think each of these situations is different. I think you and I both understand that someone like Tyler Glenn would be a PR nightmare. I think in some ways, Dan Reynolds has been a little softer publicly in the way he's articulated the argument. Tyler Glenn has been more pointed. But both of those guys would be PR nightmares if the church were to go after them. It would make serious media.

Bill Reel [00:21:10] Right.

Bill Reel [00:21:10] It would get coverage in various places, and the church maybe doesn't want to deal with that. I think some of it is local.

Bill Reel [00:21:16] Right.

Bill Reel [00:21:17] A local leader can decide on his own to excommunicate a member who's expressing and sharing information that works against the church's narrative and truth claims. In my particular instance, I think I'm too loud. I think I'm too pointed. I think I'm too determined to state things and to hold them accountable in ways that they can't fluff around. They can't deflect and dismiss from. They have to address it. And so it's easier to just have me on the outside where on some level, I lose credibility with those who are in the church.

John Dehlin [00:21:54] Yeah. For me, it seems like once they feel like you're affecting a large number of testimonies in a large platform, that's when you've got to go.

Bill Reel [00:22:05] Yeah. How's that working, though? Is the number of people leaving the church over finding out the church doesn't add up? Is that number diminishing because you and I and Kate Kelly and Jeremy Runnels and Sam Young and we all get excommunicated? I mean, is that. It feels like that number is going to grow regardless. So it feels like it's their way to try to fight back against the fact that their story doesn't add up. But the reality is they can keep excommunicating all these public voices and new public voices will simply replace them from inside the church. Those people will be on a trajectory. Those people will eventually get too loud, and those guys will get excommunicated as well.

John Dehlin [00:22:40] Maybe. But, you know, you can't fault them for trying to slow it down. And if you're the point of the tip, if we're the point of the tip, at least they can poison the well, call us apostates, and allow kind of the rumor mill to discredit us so that they can slow down, stem the tide of people disaffecting.

Bill Reel [00:23:02] Yeah, but what they can't do is put you on the wrong side of history.

John Dehlin [00:23:08] Yeah. No, that's true. But I think what they care about is minimizing the number of people who lose their faith.

Bill Reel [00:23:15] Sure. If so, there's that magician on TV who puts a mask on and then

Bill Reel [00:23:21] he shows you how the magicians do all their tricks. And all the magicians hate that guy. They can't stand him.

Bill Reel [00:23:27] Right.

Bill Reel [00:23:27] So anytime somebody stands up and says, look, I'm going to show you why all of this doesn't add up.

Bill Reel [00:23:33] I'm going to walk you through the

Bill Reel [00:23:35] deconstruction of this, show you the historical data, show you why these guys aren't being honest. It makes perfect sense that they wouldn't

Bill Reel [00:23:42] be okay with that. And I agree with. You can be really soft and you

Bill Reel [00:23:47] can leave intentionally, make your comments more ambiguous and leave extra space for people not to be as drawn to your side of the conclusion. And you can probably stay in the church forever. That just doesn't. Again, I respect others who do that for me, for me to have integrity.

Bill Reel [00:24:07] I just.

Bill Reel [00:24:07] As I grew in this, I needed

Bill Reel [00:24:09] to become more pointed.

John Dehlin [00:24:10] Sure, yeah. Okay. But my point is, I guess we can see from the church's point of view why they would want to minimize the number of people you take out of the church.

Bill Reel [00:24:20] Yeah. I'm the guy with the mask on showing you how all the tricks are done.

John Dehlin [00:24:23] Yeah. Okay. Someone asked, do you sense any reluctance from your stake president? Any cognitive dissonance on his part? I felt sad for my stake president, Brian King, only in the sense that now his name was being drugged through the mud on the New York Times and elsewhere. People were kind of mad at him. But there's a personal side to this. These men are private people. They have families. They have private lives. What do you sense about you? Are you willing to say the name of your stake president? Do you want to avoid that? I heard on Radio Free Mormon they did mention the name of your stake president. Any personal thoughts about what your stake president's going through and any sympathies for him?

Bill Reel [00:25:07] So I've been reluctant to share his name. I don't really have a problem doing it. And here's the issue. Every time I went out, from the moment I moved into Utah, I've notified my bishops and my stake presidents to say, hey, this is who I am. This is what I do outside of church. You need to know that I'm sorry that I'm in your area, because now this is your burden to have to deal with. And I've had compassion for these men as well. That changed, though, when the summons letter has dishonesty in it. When my stake president says, I really thought we could resolve your concerns, Brother Rio, and I'm sorry to hear that you don't want to meet with me anymore. But when you say those things and you know what he's doing, and this is my point I wanted to make earlier, the reason he says those things in the letter is because he wants Salt Lake to perceive him as the really good stake president who's trying to work with Brother Real and resolve his concerns. And he wants Salt Lake to look at him fondly and say, there's a guy who's trying. The reality is the guy hardly met with me. He hardly reached out to me. Nobody. I never had a home teacher stop by. My bishop shows up one time. The stake president is sporadic in terms of his reaching out to me. We had two conversations in the eight months I've been in that ward in that stake, and only again one month ago, did I decline one meeting and say that I was open to other meetings. Just this one meeting, because it was just to meet to meet. Once you start framing things in dishonesty and you start trying to portray yourself as somebody you're not, then all. Then, like, you know, all the. All the fair play, all that's gone. At that point, trying to be kind and considerate and nice, like you're trying to assault my character, and you're trying to say things in a way to paint you in a light that's different than the way the events actually transpired. And I'm just not okay with that.

John Dehlin [00:27:01] So, anyway, I can't find his name on your site.

Bill Reel [00:27:04] Yeah, well, I haven't posted it as of this point. I'm happy to tell you. It's President. Carnevale.

John Dehlin [00:27:09] Carnevale.

Bill Reel [00:27:10] Carnevale.

Bill Reel [00:27:10] Yeah.

Bill Reel [00:27:11] C A R, N A V A L E. And I don't want people doing any kind of hate mail. I don't want people to. The worst thing in the world that shows that we're not doing this for the right reasons is if somebody sends some kind of threat or some nonsense like, that's just ridiculous. If you want to write the guy and you want to tell the guy, and, you know, I can figure out an address or something to send it to, but if you want to write the guy and say, like, bill Reals helped me in my faith journey, he's helped me slow down, he helped me stay in. He helped me process things, the guy speaks truth, great. But nothing negative or just that you

John Dehlin [00:27:48] disagree with what he's doing.

Bill Reel [00:27:49] Right.

John Dehlin [00:27:50] But let's all explicitly say no harm, you know, no attacks.

Bill Reel [00:27:56] That would be silly.

John Dehlin [00:27:57] I would say this guy's a victim of the system, not a perpetrator. So we call on people to be loving and compassionate, be direct, but do not ever do anything that would harm this individual.

Bill Reel [00:28:10] And my effort is always right. My efforts always been to be pointed and to be honest and to be forthright and transparent and vulnerable. And I would hope that anybody reaching out to him would help convey that message.

John Dehlin [00:28:24] Do you sense that he's ambivalent or reluctant or sad that this is happening?

Bill Reel [00:28:33] Yes, early on. And I think, too, I don't know that he understands or understood at the time, some of the media, some of the pressure from other. Once you see, like, you're a stake president, you're operating with this stake, and then all of a sudden you realize, oh, there's these thousands of people out there who also have some stake in the game, and they don't think so fondly of what I'm doing. I think it does add some extra anxiety and some extra pressure. I'm sure he's feeling that. I think early on he would have been deeply hesitant, not wanting to do this. But the problem is, at some point, he realized he had to. I'm sure Salt Lake called about the elder Holland. Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire, and he needed to do something about that. And he realizes he needs to show his loyalty to the Brethren. He needs to show that he is willing to be loyal and obedient to them. And at that point, he allowed himself to paint this summons in an articulation that wasn't accurate. And at that point, he loses credibility.

John Dehlin [00:29:33] Was there a point where he showed you his humanity? Like, I don't have answers either. I know you said he didn't have answers, but was he ever communicating his humanity to you? Like, I don't like this. I'm sorry this is happening to you. I'm sorry you haven't been able to find answers. I acknowledge I haven't been able to find answers. Have you ever been able to get a sense for his humanity towards you in all this?

Bill Reel [00:30:00] Yes and no. So, yes, the guy comes off as a nice guy, and I think he is. I think he's got a good heart. At the same time, he made it clear to me in every step of the way, he says, bill, I'll try to have patience with you, but if I need to show my loyalty to this thing and I need to excommunicate you, I'll do it in a heartbeat. And he made that clear on multiple occasions.

John Dehlin [00:30:22] It's kind of the Stanley Milgram obedience to authority study. The electroshock studies happened in the 50s and 60s. People are obedient to authority and they're willing to do really awful things. When push comes to shove, being part

Bill Reel [00:30:35] of this tribe, in order to be looked upon as being successful in this tribe, being dependable in this tribe, it requires you to sacrifice sometimes doing the right thing, but to do the thing that the tribe wants you to do.

High Council, Theories, and Emotional State

John Dehlin [00:30:52] Do you know any of the members of your stake High Council?

Bill Reel [00:30:55] No, not a one. I really had hoped I would get lucky and have some listener that's in the stake or in the stake leadership or. I've had nobody from any kind of leadership position reach out and say, hey, I'm a closet doubter. I know who you are. Nothing like that.

Bill Reel [00:31:10] So I just. I happen to be in one of

Bill Reel [00:31:13] the unlucky places where everybody's orthodox and

Bill Reel [00:31:16] nobody seems to have any doubts at

Bill Reel [00:31:17] any kind of high level.

John Dehlin [00:31:19] Okay. One of the listeners wanted to know if you have a theory on is there a higher up, a general authority or apostle that you think is behind this? I know in my case, Ballard was definitely behind it. Do you have any theories as to who might be behind yours?

Bill Reel [00:31:34] My stake president has dropped a couple of 70 names, but nobody that would have stuck out. It's not like it's L. Whitney Clayton or something like that. There were names that either I like. One I didn't remember, and the other one was just somebody I'd heard in passing, but nothing to connect to any other dots. So as far as I know, no, nobody that we would all say, like, oh, yeah, that guy.

John Dehlin [00:31:59] Yeah. As far as I know, the ability to ascend up the ladder of being a general authority is to be able to keep your fingerprints off of things like this. And this may be why El Whitney Clayton hasn't made the quorum of the 12. Because his fingerprints were discovered on, you know, Denver Snuffer's excommunication. Kate Kelly's in mine. And that just implicates him in ugliness that I'm not sure they want apostles implicated. Implicated in. Right. Let me ask you about your words. You know, and I use these types of words, too. Calling a disciplinary council barbaric, saying that it's traumatic. Is that. How is that accurate versus. Let's just say someone wants to accuse you of being overly dramatic.

Bill Reel [00:32:49] So if I'm just completely honest, like, on some level, I'm handling this pretty well. I'm sleeping okay. At night, I'm happy. I've got good friends around me. I'm not in the fetal position, crying every day. But on some level, too, let's acknowledge there's some level of anxiety. My wife is feeling some level of anxiety. My kids are talking about this in our home at night. They're wondering how this all works itself out, what it means. So it's barbaric in the sense that you've put more time and effort and more concern into understanding this church and its claims. Starting off with just wanting to know about the kingdom of God on earth, wanting to know about this church that you love. And as you study and as you read and as you care more than the guy next to you who doesn't, you begin to find that things don't add up. And it's not like you go like, oh, no, it adds up. But I just want to deceive people, and I just want to get people out of the church. No, you sincerely come to this position of looking into the church's truth claims, and they don't. There's not good answers for the questions. So you've come to this place sincerely, and now these people who don't know as much as you, they get to bring you into a room and tell you that you can no longer be one of them, even though they don't have a clue about any one of the things you said, they wouldn't even know where to start to understand any context around the points of view and the historical examples you're sharing or why you said the things you did. You don't have enough time in 60 minutes to even lay out the five times elder Holland lied to show that you're telling the truth. So the truth really doesn't matter. And when you recognize, like, the truth matters to you, but it doesn't matter to these people, all that matters to them is deciding whether you fit the mold or not of what it means to belong to this tribe and to be excised from it. Imagine walking into the Thanksgiving dinner at your family's house, and your mom, dad, and your brother and your sister are all sitting there, and they say, sorry, but you can't be a member of our family anymore. And they tell you the reasons are because you bring up the fact that I beat your brother and I shouldn't do that, or that your sister's out shoplifting and she shouldn't do that, and you bring attention to it. To be excised from one's tribe, to be excised from one's family is traumatic. It comes with trauma, and it comes with having to deal with emotional things that I only now begin to kind of sense from past experiences and what I'm feeling in my body right now, but with a recognition that that's going to increase as we go through this.

John Dehlin [00:35:35] When you talk about, you know, if I read correctly in some of your statements where you were frustrated that they wouldn't give you more time to lay out your case, you sort of. I think I remember you making the argument that they're going to cut you off from your eternal family and they're going to, you know, demote you in your eternal salvation, but they won't give you enough time to make your case. You don't believe that God's going to cut you away from your family or that God's going to, you know, demote you in heaven, right?

Bill Reel [00:36:11] No, I don't believe that.

John Dehlin [00:36:12] Okay.

Bill Reel [00:36:13] But my point is, if he believes that, then there should be no question on his part to say, like, yeah, there's a lot at stake here. And so because there's a lot at stake here, we ought to be more kind and more considerate to give Brother Real the best chance possible to explain why he said and done the things he's done.

John Dehlin [00:36:33] Unless he feels like he's already God enough. You know, if the church has told him you're an apostate or the church headquarters considers you to be an apostate, what else does he need to know?

Bill Reel [00:36:43] Yeah, but I thought the way these things worked is this whole point of having a disciplinary court is for people to show whether they did or didn't do what was claimed about them. If we walk into disciplinary courts with an assumption that somebody's already done something, then it is a kangaroo court.

John Dehlin [00:36:58] Yeah, and I think it probably is. I think that's pretty fair. What do you think about the. And this is something they did with me not allowing you to record it? I'm not asking you whether or not, you know, you have any plans that way, but how do you feel about them telling you you can't record seems and making you sign a legal document promising that you won't?

Bill Reel [00:37:23] Yeah, it's a strange thing. We know why it's done. It's done so that you look like a liar. Right. So that you, you know, you put your name on the line, you said you wouldn't do something and you did it anyway. So now you come off looking like a dishonest, deceptive person. And that's enough for most orthodox members to Go like, yeah, I know about that guy. He told them he wouldn't record it, and he did. Right. The other side of it, too, is it's just this odd thing that we try to say, like, disciplinary courts, we're trying to protect this person being charged from ridicule. We're trying to protect them, we from being marginalized and shamed. But the reality is, if the person in the court wants it recorded, then all that's gone. And so for them to say, like, you know, nobody's going to record anything. We're all going to sign papers. That isn't true either. Somebody's making notes and sending them to Salt Lake. Even if it's just mental notes that get written down later, on some level, there are things being recorded from that. The other thing is that my letter actually goes a step further than anybody else's has before. I'm not only being told not to record things. I'm told that I'm going to have to sign a confidentiality agreement where I don't even speak about the disciplinary court afterwards. That seems to be one step further than even recently with Sam Young.

John Dehlin [00:38:43] I've seen that before. But, yeah, I didn't have to sign that. So that would be really.

Bill Reel [00:38:50] So I essentially just have to go home and say nothing.

John Dehlin [00:38:53] Yeah, that's really bizarre. I would think that a no recording policy would be to protect the accused, not to protect the church.

Bill Reel [00:39:01] Yeah, you would think so. Unfortunately, you can tell this system set

Bill Reel [00:39:06] up so as to protect them.

John Dehlin [00:39:08] Somebody asked, kind of questioning your sincerity, I think. Was he caught off guard and is he actually feeling hurt? They wrote Bill's recent post on his own podcast seemed odd to me. It was as if he was caught off guard and extremely hurt. And that follows my questioning about calling Holland a liar. Can you really act surprised and act hurt when you've crossed a line some would say you knew would lead to this result? How can you act hurt or surprised?

Bill Reel [00:39:39] I'm hurt that this was framed the way it was. So my understanding with my stake president was essentially, if something needed to be discussed, he would reach out to me and we would discuss it. Suddenly, the summons shows up, and there's been no conversation with him reaching out and wanting to have a conversation first. There's been no effort on his part to say, like, I'm probably gonna have to do this, but let's at least sit down and talk about was him being dishonest about how he framed it in the summons? And it was about the fact that he didn't reach out to me to have a conversation before two guys just showed up at my door. That caught me off guard. And his dishonesty in the summons hurt me because I thought this was a guy of credibility.

Whether to Sign, Attend, or Resign

John Dehlin [00:40:25] Somebody, one of our listeners, Jan, writes, no one can make you sign a document without your consent. Take your power back. My response to Jan is, yeah, they dismiss you if you refuse to sign that statement around not recording. They disinvite you from the disciplinary council, and you're not even able to attend,

Bill Reel [00:40:44] and they have it anyway.

John Dehlin [00:40:46] Yeah. What do you mean?

Bill Reel [00:40:49] If you don't sign the papers, then you walk home and those guys still meet in that room and decide you don't belong in the tribe anymore. Except you don't get a chance to have a say and to stand in front of them and to at least share, like, hey, if you're gonna ex me, at least X me for knowing where I stand and what I think.

John Dehlin [00:41:06] Yeah. Cause they want to spread the rumors, if they can, that it's because of adultery or because of some sexual sin or, you know, something they don't want. You know, just like when a recent general authority was excommunicated, they want to make sure no one thinks it's because of apostasy, because that would be really scary if top church leaders like Hans Matzson started defecting because of apostasy. So they want to do all they can to make an inference that there's some sort of sexual sin or financial sin, because it certainly can't be the church. That's wrong. Right?

Bill Reel [00:41:41] Right. No. So the only chance you have is to sign it, to go into the room and to at least share with those 12 high councilmen and that stake presidency of four or five members, and to say, like, hey, I know you're gonna X me, but at least know who I am and what I stand for and what I think and what I believe and why I've done what I've done and at least go out that way.

John Dehlin [00:42:06] A lot of listeners, this is probably the biggest question I got asked, is why even attend? Someone wrote, by attending, do you feel like it lends unique credibility to their authority to issue a summons? Others write, why give them the pleasure? Why play their sick games? Why don't you just quit? Why don't you just resign? Don't you see that playing their game bolsters their collective ego? You know, why not just resign? Maintain your dignity and control. And then in my case, people were just like, you're just trying to get attention. What are your responses to people who just say, don't play their game, just don't attend or resign.

Bill Reel [00:42:48] So I think there's pluses and negatives,

John Dehlin [00:42:51] especially if you don't believe. Right?

Bill Reel [00:42:54] Yeah. But again, I'm not comfortable saying I don't believe. I don't believe. Literally I don't believe the story they gave me. But I'm a big fan of myth. I'm a big fan of finding other truths inside a non historical, non logos truth way of framing things. Like, I think it's not fair to say like he doesn't believe, because I don't think Elder Oaks believes the same way that Elder Uchtdorf believes. And so I think we ought to be really careful when we say like that guy believes and this guy doesn't, because I think that's a thousand conversations about what it means to believe and to not believe. I don't think that Bushman and Givens and Patrick Mason believe anywhere near orthodoxy. And yet guys like that were very comfortable saying they're believers.

John Dehlin [00:43:51] However, let's just say that's true. There are lots of shades of belief. What if somebody says to you, Bushman and Givens and Mason all believe that Angel Moroni delivered golden plates to Joseph Smith and you don't believe that, so you've crossed the line of nuanced or progressive belief to the point of literally not believing that the Book of Mormon's historical or that golden plates were even delivered by an angel.

Bill Reel [00:44:21] Yeah. Let me ask you a question, John. If we hooked Bushman, Givens and Mason up to a lie detector test and we asked him that question, do you think that's the answer that would come forward?

John Dehlin [00:44:30] I actually, you know, when I interviewed Michael Quinn and he's been excommunicated, he's gay, he's got every. He knows more about church history than all of us put together and he still believes. And every indication I have from Givens, Mason and Bushman is that they all do believe that golden plates were delivered by an angel to Joseph Smith. Do you have inklings or evidence maybe to suggest that they don't hold on to those beliefs? Because for me, that's really what it comes down to. If golden plates were delivered by an angel to Joseph Smith, then the church is true. But if that didn't happen, then everything, then the church is not true.

Bill Reel [00:45:11] Yeah, it's funny that we've walked everything back. Right. Pseudepigrapha, 19th century material. Bushman says in Rough Stone Rolling that the evidence is there that possibly Peter, James and John is a fabricated event when we walk everything back, just back to those bare basics, I guess we'll never know because a lot of times in this arena, what people say publicly and what they say privately are often two very different things. And I don't mean that as a knock on those guys. There are very much times in my life where if you would have had a private conversation with me, I would have articulated it differently than I would have articulated it if I was standing in front of a microphone or in front of other people. So I guess we just were just left not knowing. But my guess is those guys deep down are less literal. Oop, got a phone ringing. So bear with me for a second. As we get closer to opening, that may happen a few times, we're left guessing. My hunch is that their private beliefs, because I know guys like Mark Ashurst McGee have expressed to me that if you were talking to me privately, Bill, I'd tell you something differently than the conversations I'm going to put on an email or to a microphone. And I think almost all of us in this space when we're trying to make it work, we think very different things privately than we do publicly.

John Dehlin [00:46:34] Right.

Bill Reel [00:46:35] So back to why.

John Dehlin [00:46:37] Yeah, so why attend? Why not just resign and maintain your dignity and control?

Bill Reel [00:46:42] Yeah, because. So here's what I think it boils down to. I'm privileged. I'm a convert. My parents aren't members of the church. I'm not going to lose any bit of my relationship with my mom, my dad, my brother with his wife, my sister in law. I'm not going to lose any relationship with my children. My wife is 100% on page with me. I'm not going to lose anything. I'm also privileged in the sense that I have this public voice. And so if it were just up to me, just Bill real, the human being resigning makes a lot of sense. Because why put yourself through this process of this anxiety and feeling what I keep calling is trauma. But the reality is that I have an opportunity to continually point and shine a light at this system and say this system doesn't act in healthy ways and let's ride this out all the way, shining that light on it. And that feels for me like it's the right thing to do.

John Dehlin [00:47:47] Someone's asked, let's see, they wrote. By the time many of you prominent ex Mormon celebrities get to be excommunicated, you're already showing zero belief or trust in the church or its methods. I think it is admirable that you push the process and make them declare their reasons for excommunicating you rather than going away quietly. But the question is, are these prominent excommunications damaging the church? Are they affecting the church? Are they reaching the lay membership? If so, how? In other words, what is your goal by going through? You just said it's to shine light. Do you think that's working? Does anybody care? Sam Young, me, Denver snuffer Kate Kelly, the Calderwoods, Rock Waterman. You do you think, do you have any evidence that suggests that these excommunications going through with them actually does some good?

Community Response and Personal Impact

Bill Reel [00:48:43] Yeah, my inbox on my email account. So over the course of the last week, I've probably on Facebook, email, phone calls, text messages and voice messages left for me. I think we're probably nearing maybe 400 or so. Those messages are all individual people who express gratitude that there were voices out there who helped them to process this journey and to understand it in the context of development and growth. So, yes, it makes a difference. On the other hand, we like to make the debate that, hey, the church isn't moving. The reality is the church is moving. Sam Young had an effect. It wasn't the effect he's asking for, but the church did make some gentle policy changes, right? So it is moving. And those movements, the things that's done with women, are directly a result of Kate Kelly and others and what they've pushed for. The gospel topic essays, are a result of John Dehlin in Mormon Stories and his work with the Open Story survey and Marlon Jensen being aware of that and pushing it with the 12. When I look at these conversations, they never accomplish what these people set out and are asking for, but they're always moving the ball. And so as long as the ball is moving, this thing is retreating. And I think that's what we need to come to grips with. This thing is retreating. It's giving up ground. It's backpedaling. And it may not be as fast as everybody wants it to be. And I don't think it's fair to say, let's burn this thing down and make it disappear. There's going to be Mormonism in 200 years, but it's going to look a lot different than it does today. And it's because of the voices who speak out.

John Dehlin [00:50:16] It is so weird that the church became better about women after Kate Kelly. The church became better about truth claims after me and Jeremy and others. The church has become better about LGBT issues after the work we've done with LGBT people. The church has become better about children, child Interviews after Sam Young. And yet they go ahead and excommunicate the people that are actually instigating the positive change. How do you make sense of that?

Bill Reel [00:50:46] Yeah, I think ego gets in the way, and it does for all of us. But I think ego gets in the way for the top 15 collectively. And what I mean by that, that they need. It's important to their feeling good about themselves, that the members of this church count on them in terms of having authority and seeing them as being these special mouthpieces of God. The reality is there's no God magic here. There's no, you know, I've asked if anybody's had an ear cut off or lost a finger that's had it restored through a priesthood blessing to please reach out to me. That doesn't happen. There aren't any seas parted. There aren't any great, mighty miracles. No fires from heaven, no women being turned into salt as they turn back and look at a city. Those things are gone because we live in an age of verifiable history. But it's important to these men to be up on these pedestals and to be seen as having some access to some special God magic. And anytime it's us at the bottom pointing up at them that something needs to change, and then they have to come to grips that they're losing members, and so they do have to make the change. I think it's a way to get back to say, like, hey, I'm going to get rid of you. I might have to make this change. You forced my hand, but I'll make you pay for that. And I think there's a little bit of that in this process.

John Dehlin [00:52:02] And I think also they can't ever give the impression to the membership that the grassroots members are the source of change, because doesn't that undermine, ultimately, their. Their claims of divine communication? If really all they're doing is responding to social pressure. Right.

Bill Reel [00:52:19] The narrative is that revelation comes from Jesus on down through them. The reality is that revelation in this church always works from the bottom up and works through pilot programs and surveys.

John Dehlin [00:52:35] Yeah, absolutely. And just this week, the church released another kind of, you know, marketing survey where it polls its members to try and figure out what changes to make next. Right.

Bill Reel [00:52:45] I mean, if you, John, if you were a prophet and you had access to Jesus, would you need a pilot program or a survey?

John Dehlin [00:52:53] Yeah, marketing survey. Or a protest. Right. A lot of people are worried that other podcasters on your show may be getting excommunicated, too. Any word on that?

Bill Reel [00:53:06] So as far As I know, and I'm, you know, we're in a text group together, Radio Free Mormon and I talk several times through the week. I don't perceive as of right now that anybody is being gone. After that said, I know that Radio Free Mormon is on their radar. That's been made clear because McKenna Denson was aware of the fact that Radio Free Mormon was part of their questioning of her. But outside of that, no.

John Dehlin [00:53:38] Does the church know who the. Who the host is of Radio Free Mormon?

Bill Reel [00:53:42] They do what they do.

John Dehlin [00:53:44] Is that guy gone public yet?

Bill Reel [00:53:47] No, it's never gone public, but there's enough pieces of the puzzle laying around. If someone's a good puzzle putter together, they'll figure it out.

John Dehlin [00:53:56] Okay, so you think the church knows who the person is and is that person. Do you know if that person's still attending church?

Bill Reel [00:54:03] So first off, I know the church knows who that person is.

John Dehlin [00:54:05] Okay.

Bill Reel [00:54:07] And that person is not an active member of the church.

John Dehlin [00:54:12] But still on the records.

Bill Reel [00:54:14] Yeah, still in the records.

John Dehlin [00:54:15] Okay.

Bill Reel [00:54:16] So, yeah, I mean, it's potential. I mean, he's as pointed as I am, I think.

John Dehlin [00:54:21] Yeah.

Bill Reel [00:54:22] And so. So there's a short list of people to go after next. And I would put him on that short list.

Plans to Appeal and Spiritual Reflection

John Dehlin [00:54:30] Do you plan to appeal this decision once the verdict is reached?

Bill Reel [00:54:34] I haven't decided that yet. You and I both know it's fruitless. The only reason to do it is if it helps any way to shine more light on the unhealthiness of this thing. And maybe it does that, but I haven't decided that yet.

John Dehlin [00:54:51] Okay. For me, I wanted to appeal because I wanted the First Presidency to be accountable so that they couldn't blame it as a local decision.

Bill Reel [00:55:00] Right, Right. Essentially, at the end of the day, they put their stamp on it.

John Dehlin [00:55:03] Yeah. And they did. Thomas S. Monson approved my excommunication.

Bill Reel [00:55:09] Gotcha.

John Dehlin [00:55:10] Do you think this will harm the church to excommunicate you? I mean, one of the problems is a lot of people resigned when I got excommunicated saying, if the church doesn't want people like John Dehlin, then I don't want to be a member either. Rejecting John means rejecting me. A lot of people, you know, you helped keep them in the church. You helped. They kind of followed your journey. You were just a heartfelt part of their journey. And now they're going to feel hurt that the church is excommunicating you. Do you think this could harm the church to do this or help the church? Like weed from the tears Right.

Bill Reel [00:55:47] So I think it's a mixed bag. I don't think we ever, as a group of people who can see this thing doesn't add up to what it claims to be and who see it causing harm to others unnecessarily. It never reforms to what we want it to be. But I think that every time there's an article in a newspaper, every time there's a conversation on a podcast and a new person tunes in, every time there's a light being shined on these things and someone is opening themselves up for the first time to going like, huh, I wonder if there's anything to this, then I think it causes both damage to what the church wants to be able to hold and also is very positive in terms of making the church what Jesus would really like it to be.

John Dehlin [00:56:33] So you think it will hurt the church?

Bill Reel [00:56:35] Yeah, I think it hurts the church from what the brethren want the church to be, but I don't think it hurts the church. I think in a perfect world, if the church were softer and more kind and more loving and more inclusive, I don't call that damage.

John Dehlin [00:56:53] One thing that I definitely underestimated was the impact that this would have on my wife and kids. The excommunication, a very public excommunication. It seems like the news media is less and less concerned about these excommunications. When Kate and I were excommunicated, it was world news. New York Times was tweeting was a big deal. It seems like the news media is less interested now that Mitt Romney is no longer president or running for president. And Mormonism, the Mormon moment seems to have passed, or at least the most recent Mormon moment seems to have passed. But, you know, it was very, very, very difficult for my wife and kids. I think they still bear scars today for sort of being in Logan, Utah, and Cache Valley as this massively public excommunication comes down. They have all these friends, people they're dating, you know, friendships in the ward relationships, and I think they're still healing and still bear scars. How is your family doing so far? Your wife and your kids?

Bill Reel [00:57:59] Yeah. So good question. Thank you for asking. Again, my kids and my wife are completely disconnected. I know to some extent that may be partially true or mostly true in your circumstance as well, when this was happening. But for us, we're all disconnected from activity. Our friendships are not with ward members in the church. We have really good friendships, people we get together with every weekend that were around a dozen of us now, and we're all Mormons. Who have deconstructed it and are on a new journey now and finding value in truth in other places. So in terms of, like, friendships for my wife, and I'll add me to that, I see little effect if we're talking my children, I'm deeply concerned because I don't know how it'll play out. My kids giving voice to that question say, like, they don't think it's going to be an issue. And their friendships aren't with members of the church either. You know, there's kind of in the school, right. There's those kids that are Mormon and there's those kids that are not. And. And my kids have found themselves with the kids who are not. And so I don't think there's a lot of relationship jeopardy there. That said, we'll see. And I'm concerned about the unknown that does play out in this.

John Dehlin [00:59:19] Sure makes sense. Yeah. I'm going to wish you and your family well, because it is. Even though some are questioning how if the term trauma is overly dramatic, I think excommunication is barbaric. It is medieval, and it is a very traumatic thing to do to people. And that's been my experience. And so I'm going to give you my personal best wishes and love and support to your family because it is very, very hard.

Bill Reel [00:59:52] Is it? It is a strange thing. And I get. I get we can debate the harshness of telling the truth. Like, do we owe it to always tell the truth softly? Do we owe it to always tell the truth in the nicest of words? So we can debate that. But the reality is, doing this for seven years, and in seven years, not once has someone in leadership come to me and said, bill, that wasn't honest, or bill, that wasn't factual. Every step of the way, people admit, like, wait a minute. It looks like the data is on your side. It looks like the facts are on your side. These are questions I can't answer, and nobody wants to answer your concerns. So, again, I'm not speaking in terms of family and children. I'm worried about that. But in terms of me, it just seems like an odd thing to be kicked out of a tribe for telling the truth. But we'll see how this plays out.

John Dehlin [01:00:49] Do you consider yourself a believer in God still?

Bill Reel [01:00:53] Ooh, that's good. It's strange. So I don't really like the question, because if we were sitting. If you were sitting, John, if you came down to Southern Utah and you spent time with me and my friends on the weekend, we're still asking ourselves that question, and we're still living in the mystery of it, so. And I know that sounds like a cop out, but we love guys like Richard Rohr, Rob Bell, the Literature's podcast, Jordan Peterson, John Shelby Spong. And what those guys tend to speak to is none of these stories. They're all myth. All the stories are myth. And yet there's something bigger in the universe that connects all of us together, and nobody can name it. The moment you name it, you're further away from it, but it's simply allowing a space that there is something. There's something. I don't even want to call it God, but there's some mystery in the universe, and whatever it is, it is. And I don't really have a need to label it or to define it. And I think if I try to label it and define it, then I actually stepped further back away from it.

John Dehlin [01:01:57] Okay, so kind of a question mark for God.

Bill Reel [01:02:01] Yeah, sure.

John Dehlin [01:02:02] How about kind of Jesus, resurrection, atonement, that kind of thing? Yeah.

Bill Reel [01:02:07] I would give you the same answer I gave before, which is, I think Jesus is a myth. At least the stories about Jesus are a myth. I don't think they're historical. I don't think a guy reanimated three days later. But at the same time, I've been deeply impacted by the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ. I've been affected by his grace. And I find Jesus so worth consideration and emulation that in spite of no longer holding literal ground, I started a new podcast called the Mythical Jesus Podcast, where I dissect the New Testament, looking at it from outside of religion and looking at it more from a stages of faith developmental model, and using Jesus as the example of that.

John Dehlin [01:02:54] Love it. What you know, you've. I sort of, for many, many years tried to play this role of you can stay in, but question and you can be faithful, but also ask questions and know hard things. And it almost felt kind of, by the time I got excommunicated, you kind of filled that vacuum. You kind of jumped in and filled that void.

Bill Reel [01:03:21] And.

John Dehlin [01:03:21] And for so long, you called your podcast Faith Seeking Understanding. You really tried to hold down a faithful position. And that's what made those people make those jokes about. As Bill really, as John Dehlin once was, and as, you know, John Delinquent, as Bill really may become, there's sort of this sense that you really can't. And it almost. I remember Marlon Jensen acknowledging this, that once you're exposed to the facts, to the history, to the problems. And I would even add, on top of that, as a podcaster, once you're exposed to all the pain, the divorce, the suicidality, the depression, the anxiety, the ripping apart of families, once you're exposed to all that, as a podcaster, you really are never the same again. And you can't just go back in the box, and you can't continue to hold down that faithful position. And then you can't continue to put the gloves on when it comes to the Brethren, because you realize that their denial, their avoidance, their dishonesty is complicit in the harm that's being done. And so, inevitably, you take off your gloves and you start punching with your real fists, which inevitably means you lose your faith, and it inevitably means they excommunicate you for criticizing the Brethren. So now that Mormon discussions podcast is no longer going to be Faith Seeking Understanding, I'm assuming, who fills that void? Do you have any sense for who's going to carry the mantle after you and I let it down?

Bill Reel [01:04:51] I think there's always people entering the journey and people exiting the, you know, a space. I would simply leave it open that somebody's going to fill that void. Somebody's going to come along and think that they can be John Dehlin or Bill Real from the inside, that they can pose a more faithful view, and then they'll start dissecting the issues, and they'll start having interviews, and they'll start realizing there aren't good answers, and they'll start moving through these stages of development. There we go again. Give me two seconds.

John Dehlin [01:05:20] All right, we'll wrap up soon. I do want to make the point that Dan Witherspoon continues to hold down that front in the sense that Dan, as far as I know, is still active. Dan is still attending. So if you want a podcast that's still trying to hold down that faithful ground, Mormon matters does it. I should also note that Gina Colvin tried to hold down that ground, but as I understand it, since then, she's been ordained an Episcopal priest and she's joined another church completely. Now, she hasn't been excommunicated yet, and she's been very critical, but maybe her podcast hasn't been popular enough quite to get her excommunicated. I'm not sure. But we still have Dan Witherspoon.

Bill Reel [01:06:01] Yeah. And I think there'll be other people that enter the space. You know, you see an anonymous guy like Randall Bowen who's having conversations, at least on Facebook and on his blog, that try to walk that line. I'm sure new people will come into that space. They'll go on the journey. We kind of know what the general trajectory of that journey looks like, and we'll see what the next 10 years holds for other people who try to put their voice in front of a microphone.

Future of the Podcast and the Post-Mormon Community

John Dehlin [01:06:26] A lot of your listeners want to know, what are the plans for your podcast? How will your podcast change? Is it going to become more negative? Is it going to become more critical? And what's your. Are you going to give up the podcast? Are you going to keep it going? And if you're going to keep it going, how do you keep it fresh? How do you keep it interesting? Do you have any content or strategy plans for your podcast?

Bill Reel [01:06:46] So I've got episodes recorded through, like, June of next year. There's a queue. And those things sit for a while, whether they're premium or whether they're free. They sit for a while and eventually they get published. Sorry, my friend, it's gonna be annoying. I wish I could disconnect it. There's like seven phones in here, so just keep talking. Yeah. So essentially it'll keep going. I don't actually expect much to change. There are certain words that will change. Rather than saying high demand, fundamentalist religion, I can probably shorten that up a little bit. There's gonna be other words that I can probably add in. I don't have a problem with bad language from time to time if it suits the right conversation, but I don't anticipate becoming like, oh, I'm just going to all sudden just go on the complete other side and be on the attack all the time. I just recently released an episode about the Seer Stone that I thought was quite faithful. I anticipate, if I see something interesting that points positively at the church, we'll talk about it. The thing about Mormonism is you really never run out of material because these guys all the time get up and say something and the things they say are unhealthy. So there's not really an issue with running out of stuff to talk about.

John Dehlin [01:08:02] One of our listeners wants to know if you've tried other churches, like Community of Christ, for example, and if so, what your experience has been.

Bill Reel [01:08:08] Yeah, so I did try the Community of Christ, and I love them. I wish that our church had the Community of Christ theology and inclusiveness, but our structure, and I wish there was a way to mesh those. There's not. And so when I went to the Community of Christ, I loved who they were, and I don't have a single bad word to say about them. But it didn't fit with me. I didn't feel at home there. I felt at home in Mormonism the first day I showed up as a 17 year old and for whatever reason and the community of Christ just didn't appeal to me in that way. But I'm an advocate for it. I wish everybody would try it and see if it's a home for them as they leave Mormonism, because it's a slower way to process leaving the Latter Day Saint side of things and still entering this new space, but still having this slight little Mormon rope to hold onto.

John Dehlin [01:09:02] What about like evangelical Christianity?

Bill Reel [01:09:05] Once you deconstructed Mormonism, you recognize that every other church has these same kinds of issues, maybe in more healthy ways, but they're still there. I couldn't go to a church where the Bible was authoritarian. I couldn't go to a church where. Where they're not LGBT friendly. And to be honest with you, my second Saturdays are so much fun now that I don't know that I want to spend an hour at some place where we just talk about being nice to each other. My friends do enough of that for me to give me that kind of encouragement and help me keep on the straight and narrow. As I see it.

John Dehlin [01:09:39] I want to come hang out with

Bill Reel [01:09:40] you guys and say, you'd have more fun than you probably have had in a long time, my friend.

John Dehlin [01:09:45] I bet I was having a really interesting conversation with David Bacavoi after my interview with him last week, and there was this point where By Common Consent blog was really strong. A lot of these really strong believing Mormon scholars like Christine Haglin Harris and Steve Evans and Jonathan Stapley and Matt Bowman and all these Mormon scholars were really strong, vocal, strident supporters of the church. And it seems like all these faithful Mormon studies people have just kind of disappeared. They just kind of vanished. And there's so little faithful support for Mormonism by scholars and thinkers these days other than, you know, random unnamed people or paid apologists. But as for people on Facebook, on the read it on the groups actually supporting and defending Mormonism, it's almost like this faithful Mormon scholar community is like disappeared. And even Bushman and Givens now try and just only do things in secret in these little firesides. But they're not really speaking up too much publicly. And I asked Bacavoi what his theory was on that. What he said is, he said it was the November 2015 policy that before then you could still be faithful and remain in the church and support it. But that, that like eviscerated the Mormons studies, the faithful Mormon studies community. And none of those scholars are willing to sort of stand behind the church anymore. Do you feel like we're getting to the point where people are just not able to stomach defending the church publicly?

Bill Reel [01:11:35] I think it's bigger than that. If I look around, I don't even see fair Mormon having that much of a presence anymore. In terms of all of us talking and communicating with each other. It feels like collectively we have become apathetic to the church pounding in its view. It seems like all of us say like, yeah, there's those guys and they say that stuff, but I'm just not that committed to what they're saying. And I know that's not true for like the, the orthodox member, but what the orthodox member doesn't realize is young people are leaving, smart people who are reading and thinking and deconstructing or leave. If I said like, out of every thousand people who open themselves up to saying like, I wonder if this really adds up and I'm going to go down the rabbit hole. As you pointed out, Marlon Jensen knows that out of that thousand who do that, 923 of them end up five years later outside the church. So on some level, anybody who's smart enough to be paying attention to what's being said and why it's being said, I think they're becoming apathetic to the institution and to its leaders and they just prefer not to defend that.

Prognostications on the Church's Future

John Dehlin [01:12:43] So do you have a prognostication about the future of the church? People ask me that all the time. Do you think the church is in trouble or not?

Bill Reel [01:12:52] I think no matter which route it chooses, it's in trouble. So if it maintains rigidity, it's demonstrably not holding up to, to its own claims in terms of juxtaposed against the data. Hence people will discover that and they will leave. If it softens up, becomes a safe space, it becomes a community of Christ. And as beautiful as that is, it also becomes non dynamic and it doesn't have any kind of growth at all. And it loses members left and right. So either way it becomes a dying thing. And I think that's already begun.

John Dehlin [01:13:25] So the brethren, whenever they make a choice, it's not about what will return growth to the church. It's always about how do we lose less people, how do we slow the decline. But there's no way to kind of stop the decline, right?

Bill Reel [01:13:42] Or less money. Those two paths, those two paths both end in decline and becoming less of a force in Utah and in the world generally. But one of those paths maintains more tithing money than the other.

John Dehlin [01:14:01] Yeah. And that's, you know, and that's just the way that it works. And those of you who are critical of the church for the City Creek Mall and all the real estate development and owning 2% of the real estate in Florida and the billion dollar residential development projects that are going on in Florida and elsewhere, the church has to offset the decrease in tithing that's coming and the increase of expense of being a global church outside of the US and the only way they can do that, just like with Scientology, is to increase their commercial corporate investments so that they can continue to fund the church. Yeah.

Bill Reel [01:14:41] When you realize that one income stream that they've depended on forever is declining, then you have to understand why they create other income streams.

John Dehlin [01:14:51] Yeah. What about the future of progressive and post Mormonism? Do you see it as vital as it was five or 10 years ago? Do you feel like your number of listeners is growing? I know you have a lot of downloads, but do you feel like there's sort of like this weakening of progressive and post Mormonism where people are just kind of moving on and this vibrant community of progressive and post Mormons we've been a part of for so long is starting to kind of weather away?

Bill Reel [01:15:20] So I think there's a big thing happening which is as the narrative changes and becomes something different, people are less invested as they see that happen. They also perceive that that story becomes softer and more open to what I always call the messiness of Mormonism, the fact that things don't add up. The more that the church acknowledges that people become more apathetic, the more that our scholars say, yeah, it's just pseudo pigrapha. Yeah, it's not translation anymore. It's just a revelation. You know, when. When Elder Holland said this wasn't made out of whole cloth, and now we have our scholars essentially saying, yeah, maybe there's some inspiration here, but now it's made out of whole cloth. People are just going to become apathetic. I think it's a natural trend. So, yes, I think. And again, I'm stammering because there's different segments. So I think people wake up every day and they need to hear things and they need to deconstruct and they need to understand what faith development is. And so that number, I think, is growing. The number of people deconstructing and leaving the church is growing. So I don't see downloads going down. But I do think that collectively Mormons are becoming more apathetic to their truth claims. And it's more of like, hey, I feel good there. It's good for me. And so that's why I go. And I really don't care about any of the other stuff because they know deep down the other stuff has got problems. They don't want to go there. I don't know how many friends I've talked to from my old ward in Ohio and other places where they're like, look, I get it. I don't want to hear anymore. This doesn't add up. I get it. But I just don't want to go there. This works for me. It's where my family, you know, it's supportive to us. I don't want to hear any more about it. But everybody seems to subconsciously know that the data is not in the church's favor.

John Dehlin [01:17:07] One of the listeners writes, there are probably 100,000 U.S. post Mormons. Are we organizable? Have you considered helping mold and formalize the post Mormon community into some sort of more formal community? Have you thought about that?

Bill Reel [01:17:24] Yeah. You write our 13 articles of faith, John. Let's see if we all follow those. The point is, once you deconstruct and you leave ethnocentricity, getting everybody to agree on something is gone. So all you could agree on is just.

John Dehlin [01:17:37] Or to defer to authority. Organizations generally need authority and organizational structure.

Bill Reel [01:17:45] Yeah. And once you deconstructed all that and left that stage of development, you don't want to be in charge of anything and spending your life organizing and putting things together. So all of us are like, yeah, I'll live my life my way, you live life your way, and let's just be good to each other.

John Dehlin [01:18:01] And what about the idea of like a secular church, like Reform Judaism, some type of Reform Mormonism, where you don't have to believe in the truth claims? You know, you can just enjoy the ritual and the community and even spirituality without the truth claims and the problematic parts.

Bill Reel [01:18:17] Yeah. Speaking for myself, the further you get away from church activity, the more Second Saturday becomes a really cool thing.

Closing Reflections and Listener Gratitude

John Dehlin [01:18:27] All right, Bill. Real well, on a personal note, so many of our listeners have just said thank you. I'll just read a couple no questions for Bill. While I know he can will read this. I just want to express to him verbally that I and many of us value and honor him and the work he's done to help those of us with transitioning faith and crumbling shells. Although I'VE never met Bill. I love him, support him, and stand with him as the LDS Church persecutes him for doing nothing other than acknowledging facts and asking for honesty and clarification. Another writes, I first listened to Bill as a true believing Mormon when my husband was down the rabbit hole and listening to him in the bathroom while getting ready in the morning. And I agreed with everything he said. He was safe. So I listened. He opened my eyes a little bit. And then between Mormon discussions and Mormon stories, my eyes opened a lot. So thank you both. So on behalf of thousands and thousands of listeners out there, so many of us are grateful for the role you've been playing and we just want to say thank you.

Bill Reel [01:19:27] Yeah, back at you as well, John. And to each of the people who have written me in the last week and write me just all the time. Anyway, this all started because I felt alone and I felt like there was no way to have good conversations around these issues to try and figure it out. And all I wanted to do because I knew there were lots of other people out there was to make a safe space where we could all explore this thing and figure out, like, if truth matters, let's figure it out. Let's deconstruct, let's reconstruct if it means we stay in, if it means we stay out. But let's make people feel safe and give them validation and make sure that they've got the information to kind of work this out and do it the best way possible. It's for them rather than for an institution.

John Dehlin [01:20:11] Yeah, and I've already brought this up, but I'm going to just bring it up one last time. You played such an important role filling the vacuum when I got excommunicated because people need a podcast to refer members to who are still believers. And so, okay, Mormon stories may have been unsafe for some, but it's still what a lot of people need. But then they could always refer people to Mormon discussions now that you've been excommunicated or about to be, people can no longer refer their orthodox believing members to Mormon discussions, potentially, because it will have been branded as an apostate led podcast. And so now we're left with this vacuum where what is the podcast we can refer people to for the faithful? I guess the answer is Dan Witherspoon's Mormon Matters. But this is a really big vacuum and a real problem for those of us who want more awareness, who want more penetration throughout the membership about honesty and integrity and issues. This is a real loss and I Don't know what we can do to replace it. Bill?

Bill Reel [01:21:15] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:21:16] Are you worried about that at all?

Bill Reel [01:21:17] No. Because I think somebody's listening right now who's saying, like, yeah, I think I could go buy a mic at Walmart and start doing something. That's what I did. And so somebody will fill that void. Somebody will. Whenever there's a need, somebody fills it. And that's the way this world works. And so there's somebody sitting out there right now who's gonna run to Walmart today and buy a Logitech microphone and record the first episode.

John Dehlin [01:21:41] Is there any part of you that will look at excommunication as a badge of honor? Rex just wrote, excommunication puts you in enviable company. I'm not trying to be flippant, but is there a part of you that will feel proud having been excommunicated for standing up for what you believe in?

Bill Reel [01:22:01] Yeah. And this will have to be the last question because I've got to go answer the door here in a second. But I'll simply say, like, I don't feel that. But what I do recognize is that people are appreciative of voices who stand up for them and who for them being the person on the margins and this other person saying, like, I'll stand next to you and I'll also point out this unhealthiness and help you to have a safe space. I think that's a badge of honor.

John Dehlin [01:22:29] All right, well, really quickly, Bill, real for those who want to support you, it is November 27th in St. George, starting at 8:00'. Clock. And what is the address they come to?

Bill Reel [01:22:43] The address is 446 E. Mangum. M A N G U m Road, Washington, Utah 847-80446 East Mangum Road, Washington, Utah 84780. Next Tuesday, a week from today, 8:30pm

John Dehlin [01:23:04] Please, everyone support Bill. I kind of think it'd be fun to put a big caravan together or a bus, do karaoke all the way there and back.

Bill Reel [01:23:11] Love it.

John Dehlin [01:23:11] If anybody's interested, please reach out. I'm going to try and come. Bill. Thank you, my friend. Bill, is there anything else anyone can do to help and support you at this time?

Bill Reel [01:23:20] I think everybody to be a voice in their own way. And I'll let you determine that. Whether it's raising your hand in Sunday school, whether it's starting a podcast, whatever it is, just stand up for people and be vulnerable to the fact that there's problems here and that we're just not going to As a group, sit quiet while these things get worked out.

John Dehlin [01:23:40] I want to just let my listeners know we had hundreds and hundreds of people tune in. I want to thank the 50ish people who shared this episode. We did get to over 50 shares. For those of you who are listening afterwards, I think this is a very worthy interview. Please consider sharing Bill's interview on your Facebook page, on Instagram, on Twitter, on any social media, in any groups. If we speak out publicly, that protects and provides comfort and support to those who put their necks out. It builds awareness. The more awareness there is, the more support there is, the more safe it is for people to be open and honest. The more transparency there is and the more healthy we all get because we're living in sunshine with truth instead of under the thumb and the knuckle of authority with ignorance and fear.

Bill Reel [01:24:32] Yeah. Amen.

John Dehlin [01:24:34] Bill Rill, we love you, brother. Thank you so much for all you've done for all of us.

Bill Reel [01:24:38] Take it easy. Thank you as well, my friend, and thanks to everybody. Appreciate everyone for their support.

John Dehlin [01:24:42] Keep up the great work, Bill, and good luck next week. And if you want, of course, we'd love to have you back on Mormon Stories. If you want to come on after your interview, we'd love to do it.

Closing Remarks and Support Information

Bill Reel [01:24:53] Gotta go.

John Dehlin [01:24:53] All right. Take care, Bill. Take care, everybody. Thanks for tuning in today on Mormon Stories. Please email us@mormonstoriesmail.com with questions or comments. Really important. If you value this programming, if you support it, we rely on your support to keep it going. We try to be that megaphone for people like Bill Rill, for people like Sam Young, for ordained women, for any big movement. Mormon Stories has always tried to be the slingshot in the hand of David to get the word out. So if you value this stuff, please support us. Mormonstories.org you can click the donate button. $10 a month, 25 bucks a month, 100 bucks a month. Whatever you can afford. Please make a recurring donation. And we're a 501C3. We've always been transparent. We always will be transparent. You can know that your donations go are tax deductible in the US and go towards the expenses of the nonprofit and the staff and the podcasters that keep all this going. So please do support us. Please spread the word, please share us your feedback and please let us know if we can ever do anything to help. We've got a lot of great episodes coming in the months and weeks and years ahead based on your support. Huge thanks to Cody Layton for his support as editor huge thanks to our donors that make all this possible and to our amazing Board of Directors right now consisting of Jeremy McDonald, Kim Sandberg Turner, Steve Holbrook, Ann Nadine McCombs Hanson, with Craig Woodfield supporting us as an accountant and overseeing our finances because he's a partner in accounting firm. We want to thank all our board and supporters for making this happen. We'll be interviewing lots of cool people in the coming weeks and months. Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org but sing this song

Bill Reel [01:26:54] just because I hope you'll be wiser than

John Dehlin [01:27:01] wiser is a song written and performed by Mormon Stories listener Russell Ash, a message intended for his children to have love and kindness be their guiding star.

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.