Introduction and Coy Johnston's Background

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is August 13, 2026 and one of the most often requests I get on Mormon Stories is just to interview normal everyday Mormons. And while I think everyone's special and cool and we only interview people that we think are super cool and special, he also happens to be an everyday Mormon. His name is Coy Johnston. Hey Coy, how's it going?

Coy Johnston [00:00:26] Hey, Good. How are you?

John Dehlin [00:00:28] Good. It's great to have you. For those who are total Mormon Stories nerds, you'll recognize Coy because he was part of the panel was Colby on that as well when we had Bart Ehrman on Mormon Stories a few months back. So. But to the rest of you, a couple things about Coy. He lives in Show Low near Snowflake, Arizona. He's an ER doc. He's still a member of the church. He still attends. When he's not working, he's in, you know what you might frame as a mixed faith marriage. Five kids, some kids who are in the church, maybe at least one who maybe isn't. He had a daughter who just got married in the temple recently, another daughter who I believe might be at BYU and or going on a mission soon. And some of the themes we're going to be talking about today, we're going to be talking about scrupulosity or religious OCD and perfectionism. We're going to going to be talking about normal faith crisis stuff and how it affects your mental health. In this case, Coy would say it affected his mental health in pretty severe ways even though he's a medical doctor. We're going to be talking about how it definitely impacted his marriage and could have ruined his marriage and I'm happy to report it hasn't. So we'll be talking about that. And then Coy relatively recently started a sport group for people in faith crisis in his area which led to him being threatened with excommunication by his church leaders. So he's had a lot of meetings with his bishops and or stake presidents trying to make all this work. That's kind of what we are in for today. Anything you want to add or correct from the intro? You okay if I call you an everyday Mormon? Is that okay?

Coy Johnston [00:02:20] Yeah. Okay, I guess so.

John Dehlin [00:02:23] Does it mean you're not exceptional?

Coy Johnston [00:02:25] No, I'm just a simple guy.

John Dehlin [00:02:27] Okay. So thanks for joining us. Your T shirt, lift it up, no one can see it. He sported a Dr. Pepper T shirt which might have been more hardcore Just a couple years ago, but nowadays it's like shrug. Just Mormons would say, where's the coconut syrup to add to the Dr. Pepper?

Coy Johnston [00:02:45] Yeah, I had a little soda shop when I lived in Wisconsin. I was trying to start up to be kind of like swig.

John Dehlin [00:02:51] Oh, fun.

Coy Johnston [00:02:52] Yeah. Then we moved out here and they already have it.

John Dehlin [00:02:54] Okay. Anyway, well, fun. So before we hop into your Mormon story, and this is just again going to be a faith crisis, long form Mormon story for those who love those and miss those you, Coy wanted to begin by sort of stating some intentions. So the first question you wanted me to ask you as an intention is are you anti Mormon? Coy Johnston? I think we've established that through the intro, but go ahead and address that if you want.

Coy Johnston [00:03:22] Actually, I was hoping to ask you question.

John Dehlin [00:03:25] No, I consider myself pro Mormon and pro LDS Church. I'm just trying to help people make sense of things and help the church get better. I know you were kidding, but I have to answer it. You asked.

Coy Johnston [00:03:36] Yeah, yeah, no, I wanted to kind of just clear the air right out the gate that the purpose for us today is not anti Mormon and that the purpose for Mormon stories and interviewing people is. I mean, you know, is your intention to pull people away from the church? You know, that would be the question people ask. Is Mormon stories trying to hurt the church and pull people away from it and you know, focus on anti Mormon efforts?

John Dehlin [00:04:09] I guess you're asking me.

Coy Johnston [00:04:11] Yeah, I was wanting to ask you.

John Dehlin [00:04:13] No, no, I do not want to pull people out of the church. I actually don't. First of all, I believe the church does a lot of good. Some of my viewers and listeners hate it when I say that. I, I still believe the Mormon Church does a lot of good. And because it's so wealthy and powerful, it's not going anywhere. So because it's not going anywhere, then I just want to minimize the harm that happens for the people in it. But I've never been motivated to try and take people out of it. Although the one thing I will say is I want people who want to know the truth about science in the world and the Church's history. People who want to make informed decisions about their lives who weren't given all the information. I want them to have what we like to call informed consent where they get a chance to learn the things they weren't taught so they can make informed decisions. Now sometimes, as the Garden of Eden story reminds us, when you partake of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Sometimes your eyes are open and some people may leave. That doesn't mean my intent with informed consent is for people to leave. But sometimes that's just the decision people make. But never is my heart, because I don't think secularism, in addition to the good the church can do, I still don't believe secularism has come up with really viable solutions for a lot of things. And so I think there's still a place for organized religion. And I'm not atheist or, you know, I'm not an atheist or anti Christian. So anyway, for all those reasons. Hope that answers your question.

Coy Johnston [00:05:54] Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does. Thanks.

John Dehlin [00:05:57] Yeah. Okay. So is there anything else you want to say before you go in terms of why you're doing this interview? Sure, yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:06:03] I mean, my intention in coming on here was when I did go through my faith journey, and it was a crisis in my life, I had nowhere to turn and no one to talk to. And I did find my way to Mormon stories along that path. And it was listening to people share their journey and share their, their wins and their losses that made me physically and mentally healthy during that time. And so I, I really looked to Mormon stories for support and, and it was life saving and health saving, and now I hope to pay that forward and be helpful to. To someone else who's on that journey.

John Dehlin [00:06:48] I love it. All right. Well, I always say it's a real act of courage. Anyone who comes on Mormon stories, it's an act of courage. So where does your Mormon story begin? Coy Johnston.

Growing Up in Mesa and Serving a Mission

Coy Johnston [00:07:01] So I'm from Mesa, Arizona, originally. And where you served your mission?

John Dehlin [00:07:06] Four months of my mission, yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:07:08] In that area. Survive the heat. I grew up in a, you know, my parents were members of the church. Their parents were members of the church. Pretty traditional Mesa, Arizona, LDS family. I had a great ward. I had great friends, you know, early in the church. You know, some of the people that I grew up with were just fantastic influences on my life, and some of them weren't. You know, I had a few, a lot of bullies in our, in our ward, which looking back was, I guess, pretty unique. But I kind of thought that was part of life at the time. But how big was your, like, deacon's

John Dehlin [00:07:49] quorum or teacher's quorum in Mesa growing up?

Coy Johnston [00:07:52] We would have, we had two of them.

John Dehlin [00:07:54] Oh, two quorums. So big.

Coy Johnston [00:07:56] Yeah. Yeah, it's like a mini Utah, I guess. So probably North Mesa.

John Dehlin [00:07:59] Like 20.

Coy Johnston [00:08:00] Yeah, we probably had 20 at different times. And it just was uniquely rough. And so scouting and young men's was. Was a pretty rough experience. But despite that, like, I loved ch and I loved going to my classes and learning and I mean, it was. It was always a good experience. But some of us have looked back now and said, what on earth did we go through with some of these bullies that were present? So. But yeah, despite that, it was a great experience. I loved the ward there and still have a lot of great friends from growing up in North Mesa. My. My young childhood was very influenced by my parents losing their second son. So my younger brother died when he was two. And I think that really informed a lot of where my church influence from shame, scrupulosity, the pressure really comes from and obviously really affected my parents. I'm the oldest and so it was just us at the time. So somewhere in there is a lot of childhood trauma from a loss of a family family member. And so moving forward, I got my patriarchal blessing. My mom was actually the scribe for the patriarch. And so I got to hear patriarchal blessings being read because it was back then it was like a wheel to wheel thing that would be recorded and then typed. So I get to hear a lot of patriarchal blessings in the background. And since I knew the patriarch, I got a special, unique patriarchal blessing. So he had promised me in that blessing that I could do the work for my brother that he could not do when he was on the earth. And that through me and my good works, he would be proud that he would thank me after I met again. And obviously that was high pressure because now I'm not living for my own soul, but I'm living for my brother as well. That put a lot of. A lot of pressure on my behavior, trying to make sure I did a good job, but it was special. I also had a really cool part of my blessing that said that I would be blessed to serve my mission to the nations of the earth. I don't know if that rings a bell to anyone, but if you read the book from Gordon B. Hinckley, that was his big thing, was that he got blessed that he would serve a mission to the nations with an S of the earth. And that meant he would be the prophet.

John Dehlin [00:10:39] Okay, so that's how you interpreted that.

Coy Johnston [00:10:41] I mean, a lot of people that were around me were kind of like, yeah, you know, usually go to one country on your mission, but that's the nations of the earth. I mean, that's how literal we kind of take things sometimes. So that was this thing in my back of my mind. Maybe I'm destined For big things.

John Dehlin [00:10:58] Future prophet Coy Johnston. Yeah, Elder Johnston, that has a good ring to it.

Coy Johnston [00:11:02] And not to jump forward too far, but I was voted most likely to become the prophet in high school my senior year of high school. So anyhow, I don't think I'm on the track for that right now, but

John Dehlin [00:11:15] I've never seen a Mormon prophet wear a Dr. Pepper T shirt.

Coy Johnston [00:11:19] Well, it's time.

John Dehlin [00:11:20] It's time.

Coy Johnston [00:11:21] Here's the fit, right. As Dan McClelland would say. And I did have to go through my Scooby Doo shirts and other ones to decide here, but yeah, so, like, I was a good kid. I really tried hard to be a good, good Mormon kid, you know, true blue Mormon, like a lot of us do and got to be in the presidencies of, you know, young men's and all that. But as I got into high school, I went to a new high school. I went to Westwood High School in Mesa, which is kind of a little more of a. I don't know if you'd call it inner city school, but compared to where I was supposed to go at Mountain View, which is very large population of lds. So got to see some of the, like, real world, you know, go to the outer darkness, as it were. But I mean, they were my people. I love, I loved every bit of it and got a new life. But I thought I was always thinking I was sinning. I was always thinking that I was bad. Everything I did was shamed in my head. So, you know, I'm repenting all the time. Just classic early signs of scrupulosity, you know, which didn't even know what that was back then. But I got called into the stake president's office and in like 8th grade or whatever. And I thought, oh gosh, it's time. I'm in trouble. And when I got there, my girlfriend is sitting there, you know, and we hadn't done anything. Like it wasn't like, you know, like maybe I kissed too much or something. But I was like, what is happening? My girlfriend's here, you know, so that scared me. My shame, my scrupulosity is just kicking in. And he calls me in and he says, coy, we want you to serve as the seminary president of the Westwood High School. And that was not even on my mind, right? I was thinking I was going to be sent to hell or something. And my girlfriend at the time was also going to be on the seminary council. So they wanted us to be, you know, examples and leaders. But that was such a great, a great Opportunity to change my life and to be like, okay, now I'm going to be a leader. And it was a decent sized seminary. I was not super confident kid, so it was a big deal. It was kind of a big jumping point for me.

Deep Seminary Involvement and Scriptural Study

John Dehlin [00:13:42] Explain to people what amazing, because I would guess, yeah, a Mesa seminary would be pretty significant. So really quickly explain what a Mesa seminary experience would be like, because never Mormons have no idea. Well, a lot of Mormons who were raised like me with early morning seminary don't really know what release time seminary is like. And then never Mormons think, what were you going to be a priest? So explain that real quick.

Coy Johnston [00:14:09] So most Mormons who are in the United States at least, are going to go to seminary at some point in their high school day.

John Dehlin [00:14:15] Every morning, right?

Coy Johnston [00:14:16] Every morning or during the day. So if you're in a place that has a lot of Mormons like Mesa, you have release time, which you'll leave school for one hour and go do a class across the street. So they'll have like a seminary building right across the street. My kids, when we lived in Wisconsin and elsewhere, they did early morning seminary, which is, you know, wake up at four in the morning and go before school, try to stay awake and, you know, but for us, we got to leave one hour of the day. And they had so many students. There was hundreds somewhere in the ballpark of five or six hundred seminary students. And so you'd walk out your high school, you'd walk past the kids that were smoking and the different genres of people, and end up at seminary. So you'd kind of walk through this dark and dreary world and end up in this beautiful spiritual place. So we had 12 counselors, you know, like 12 apostles and then me.

John Dehlin [00:15:12] How many total seminary students do you think in your high school seminary?

Coy Johnston [00:15:16] I think it was five or six hundred.

John Dehlin [00:15:17] That's a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My entire Senior class was 400 in Texas.

Coy Johnston [00:15:23] Is it? Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:15:24] Katie growing up. So, I mean, you've got a seminary, you're basically elected as president of the Mormons of the 500 Mormons in your high school.

Coy Johnston [00:15:35] That's a lot. Yeah, yeah. And it's prestigious in that little realm.

John Dehlin [00:15:39] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:15:40] And I felt, I mean, obviously it can't not go to your head a little bit as a high school kid.

John Dehlin [00:15:46] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:15:47] And I felt like, so sometimes we'd be praying together for like, what's our theme? What's our scripture with? And I felt like, well, my, my answer is probably going to be the right one because I'm the president.

John Dehlin [00:15:57] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:15:58] And it wasn't. Yeah, but, you know, that's one of those learning curves that you have. Like, okay, I'm not special. I'm not. I don't have any special connection to God just because I'm the president. And it was just. It was a great experience. And I really, like, we had a lot of tragedy that happened in our school year that, you know, we had a lot of people that had gotten sick or died, and so we really bonded over trauma. And I'm still close friends with many of those. Those people that were on that seminary council with me, but. Yeah. And then at the end of that year, of course, I was voted as the seminary votes most likely to be the prophet.

John Dehlin [00:16:38] How does John, by the Way, come into your story?

Coy Johnston [00:16:41] So in high school, I didn't listen to anything but church music and country. I listened to country, you know, because back then I felt, you know, 90s country was pretty unique. It was fun. You probably didn't get any of that in Texas, I'm sure, but I listened to all the talks, you know, and John, by the Way, I would listen over and over again. And one of the things that he's.

John Dehlin [00:17:04] Describe who he is.

Coy Johnston [00:17:05] John, by the Way, is like a motivational speaker. He's an author, very gifted in the way he. He delivers his. His messages and fun to listen to. He wrote a lot of books.

John Dehlin [00:17:17] He's a church employee. Right. Church educator.

Coy Johnston [00:17:19] I think now he is. Yeah, no, he does like a podcast that's like an apologetic podcast, I believe.

John Dehlin [00:17:26] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:17:27] Faithful. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:17:27] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:17:30] But a lot of my generation would have grown up listening to his talks, you know, like EFY talks. EFY stuff. Yeah, yeah. And he. He sang, you know, some EFY songs and stuff. So one of his messages that really. And this is a message we got a lot back then. So, you know, I think a lot of the people that grew up in the 80s and 90s in that type of era where I grew up are gonna. It may have been like a peak. It may have been a peak of sort of a shaming era, a very strong dogmatic era of our church. Just after you have, you know, McConkey and Joseph Fielding Smith really getting their material out. And then in the 80s and 90s, we're hitting it hard, you know, and so. And so John, by the way, sending. Sending out his talk tapes and his messages, and one of the things that he said was, you know, people ask him all the time and, you know, in his voice, he'll be like, how far can you go. You know, he has this sort of like fun voice, you know, when making out. Yeah, yeah. Like, how far can you go with a girl?

John Dehlin [00:18:44] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:18:44] And. And so he says, let me reframe that for you. He says, so what you're saying is, how bad can I be? And I mean, as a therapy informed doctor yourself, obviously this is not correct thinking, because as a teenage boy or girl, nothing about that is how bad can I be? Everything about that is I'm hormonally, I'm experiencing hormonal growth and I want to be with a girl. Like, that's it, you know, Like I want to. Or. Or I want. I want to connect in some way like this. It's nothing about how bad can I be. But these natural feelings that are happening are being reframed as evil. And so that. That damaged. And in all fairness, I don't think he intended any damage. But. But it damaged so many of us to hear these types of messages, to think like, being with a girl, being with somebody else would be evil, you know, and I had a girlfriend and I'm like, well, I have feelings, but they're not evil. I mean, are they? You know, I mean, I feel like they're just normal. So, yeah, that really, that stuck with me and a lot of, A lot of people from my generation.

John Dehlin [00:20:02] You're saying it sometimes carries with people into marriage. Is that kind of what you're saying?

Coy Johnston [00:20:05] Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. Because even still, some of some people at, you know, I'm in my 40s and people in their 40s are still feeling downwind effects of this shaming culture about sexuality and intimacy.

John Dehlin [00:20:22] Yeah, yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:20:24] So. And we didn't have Jennifer from LA and Fife back then. You know, all we had was church talk tapes from John, by the way, and Brad Wilcox and the Miracle of

John Dehlin [00:20:35] Forgiveness by Spencer B. Kimball.

Coy Johnston [00:20:37] Yeah, I read that in my senior year as well. Yeah, I still remember reading that and just, Just saying, oh my gosh, like, the things that are being said in here are so hard to hear, hard to swallow. Like, yeah, we've obviously stopped using that book now, but back then it was the. It was the. For reals.

John Dehlin [00:21:02] Yeah. Okay, so really quick, what'd you do, What'd you do in high school? What would you like, hobbies or academics or.

Mission Experiences and Struggles

Coy Johnston [00:21:09] You know, so I was into music. I played jazz, so I was in the jazz band. I got to do. Got to do the Allstate jazz band. I was the drum major, you know, the one that directed the marching band. I played baseball for a few Years. So I got. Got to, you know, meet both sides of sort of the. The music folks and the. And the sport folks and.

John Dehlin [00:21:35] And any doubts or questions about your faith through kind of graduating high school?

Coy Johnston [00:21:42] No, I don't think so. I think I was pretty. Pretty solid. Okay. Yeah, I knew I wanted to go on a mission. I think I had some trauma stuff from my brother dying, so it was going to be really hard to leave home, but I knew I wanted to go.

John Dehlin [00:21:57] Okay.

Coy Johnston [00:21:58] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:21:59] I'm guessing you went to school before your mission?

Coy Johnston [00:22:04] No, I went right out.

John Dehlin [00:22:04] Okay.

Coy Johnston [00:22:05] Yeah, I went right out. So right after I graduated, I put in my papers and I got my call to Bristol, England, which covers southwest England and Wales.

John Dehlin [00:22:16] Okay, so. And should we go jump to your mission?

Coy Johnston [00:22:20] Sure. Yeah. So when I went to give my farewell speech, I just love looking back on this and remembering because my cousin reminded me he was there, and he'll tease me about this, but my talk was called brainwash yourself. So the whole idea is like, let's clean our brains. You know, let's get rid of all the bad and bring in the good. You know, the kind of irony of a religious organization saying brainwash yourself is a good thing. And so, yeah, I gave a talk. Really fiery. I was very zealous. I wanted to be the best missionary ever, and I prepared as much as I could to go out. I remember, remember writing my. To be mission president, telling him, hey, I'm going to be your. Your best missionary. I'm going to work hard. I'm going to do everything I can. And so I got to England, and I love England. It's. It's amazing. And this is 90s, you know, before we had the Internet really fired up. So I felt very disconnected. It felt kind of scary to be in a new place. I'd never traveled outside the country. I felt really vulnerable, but I was super excited, super zealous, and ready to go. And so day one, I'm going to do this thing.

John Dehlin [00:23:39] I'm sure you had read the church history stories of Mormon missionaries being sent to England and baptizing, what, hundreds, thousands in a month or whatever?

Coy Johnston [00:23:50] Yeah, yeah. And I was. I was like, I'm gonna do that. But times had changed. So when President Hinckley went there on his mission and he wrote home. It's a famous story that he wrote home and said, hey, you know, every. All the. Whatever he said, all the elected and gathered, there's nobody left. And then his dad famously said, was it, put your head down, get to work? That was like his motivation. So I already knew about that. You know, I'd read the biography of his mission there. But yes, people are not interested in the church in England.

John Dehlin [00:24:27] This is the 90s, right?

Coy Johnston [00:24:28] Yeah. So we had maybe probably one to two baptisms per missionary was our statistic for two years.

John Dehlin [00:24:37] So maybe one a year, maybe.

Coy Johnston [00:24:39] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:24:39] Wow.

Coy Johnston [00:24:39] Yeah. So it wasn't. Odds were not in my favor.

John Dehlin [00:24:43] Not Latin America or Africa, obviously.

Coy Johnston [00:24:45] Right.

John Dehlin [00:24:46] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:24:48] So I remember getting to the mission home and my mission president, who knew how zealous I was, you know, and he's. He's a great man. And he had been, you know, a leader in the church before that. He said. He says, hello, Johnston, I've had a revelation. You're going to. And I remember hearing this as, like, I'm sitting on the edge of my seat and, you know, I'm just like, this is going to be big. You're going to go to a new area and you're going to baptize ward.

John Dehlin [00:25:21] Whoa. Yeah. I mean, for a normal kid, that's still a lot of pressure, but for a kid with scrupulosity, I'm concerned. I'm concerned for you. Retreat.

Coy Johnston [00:25:34] You're seeing where this is going to go.

John Dehlin [00:25:35] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:25:39] So he says. I remember his eyes are big and he's just. He's very motivational, you know, he says, you're gonna. You're gonna go baptize ward. You're going to this new area. It's right across in Wales called Chepstow, and we're calling it the Miracle of Chepstow. And it's just. It's very. I was just like, ah, the angels are singing. It's beautiful. And he's like, all right, go get to work. So we. This is a new area no missionaries had been in for a long time. So we. We go out there and just hit it, hit the ground running, you know, start knocking on every door. We're working through lunch. We're doing all the things that a lot of people do when they go on a mission as a. As a zealous missionary. And we did see some success, as it were. You know, found some people and we had a couple baptisms because we did find some great people, and some of them are still are leaders in the church. That's awesome. So, you know, success in that, I guess that's awesome. But nothing like what, you know, so. Nothing like what he had, nothing like

John Dehlin [00:26:46] what had been prophesied.

Coy Johnston [00:26:50] So as a scrupulous teenager, by the time I. So two. Two months into that, I became A trainer. So then I trained my next companion and I had so many great companions, I mean, wonderful experiences and we, we had so much fun. But behind all of this is, is this nagging. I'm not doing it. There's no way we're going to get to a ward by the time I leave here, you know, and, and here's two, two young missionaries. I've been out for two months and I'm training this new guy in this new area. We had, you know, it wasn't a third world country, but like the place we lived was like rat infested and above a pub and it felt very scary. And so we were like, let's just work harder, nose to the grind, let's do this. And yeah, we did not see a lot of great success there. So after four months I finally moved out of that area. I became a district leader, you know, I was, I was rising in the ranks, you know, district leader after four months and got transferred out. So from that moment I knew I was a failure. I didn't do it. Something, you know, that never left me like for the rest of my mission, you know, just feeling like what happened? Like, did I, was I not good enough? Was I was like, was I sinning? Was I not working hard enough? I mean it felt like we were working hard. But yeah, that, that was a very difficult thing for someone with scrupulosity. So it's not a surprise that by about eight months when I had my next move, I became a zone leader and I got sick. And I don't know what all was going on, but I could not do a sit up, I couldn't hardly walk. And we had like mono going through our mission. And so a lot of missions get mono, so I got mono probably. And now as a doctor, a lot of this is like why I became a doctor. But like, as a doctor, looking back, I'm trying to make sense of what happened in my life. But I never got better from that moment on. So for the last like 14 months of my mission, I was just sick non stop and my companions would, you know, kind of watch me struggle. And I never stopped going out. I would leave every day on time, get up in the morning on time. But it was, it was a struggle, you know, I could hardly, hardly move.

John Dehlin [00:29:25] And you think this was psychologically induced?

Coy Johnston [00:29:29] There's a huge part of it, yeah, that was psychologically induced. There was physical parts of it as well, no doubt. But because, you know, later on I would go to a doctor and, and they would say, oh, you have mono. You have chronic fatigue syndrome. You have. You had this virus in your system. There's all these things that they would say, but. But for it to linger for 14 months the way it did. And looking back, yeah, I mean, a huge part of it was that the scrupulosity, just weighing this sort of religious ocd, right, that's just nagging in the back of my brain, like, I'm. I'm not doing what God wants. God's, like, upset with me, you know, I'm a failure. I was supposed to baptize a ward there. Despite all of this, I loved my mission. I loved England. I loved the history. I loved the people. It was such a great experience. But when I went home. And so you know how you write letters to the mission president every week? And the idea is that you're trying to communicate, you know, how's. How's things going? And he reads them all. So every missionary will write the mission president on Sunday a letter. And my letters would let them know kind of a little bit in code. Like, I'm feeling kind of sad. I'm feeling kind of like I'm a failure. But I didn't want to. Like, I didn't know how to point it out like that. I. I wanted to say what happened? You know, what happened to that revelation?

John Dehlin [00:31:02] So

Coy Johnston [00:31:07] I just kept working hard. I. They had this program where if you memorize scriptures and you read all the scriptures and you memorize the discussions, you get awards. And so it was like four levels of awards, and I worked my way up to the top, and I got the Gospel Scriptorian award, which was like the top award. I think there was, you know, a handful of missionaries who did that. Then they rewrote them. So they had a new stack of award or levels. So I did it again. So I think I was the only double master scriptorian. So I was like, I gotta do everything I can, right? I gotta overachieve perfectionism. I mean, you guys talked about that with another guest this week. Perfectionism is such a problem with scrupulous persons. But so, yeah, I. I tried everything I could to just be the best I could and just never felt good. Never felt good inside because it wasn't good enough. So at the very end of my mission, I got to do an interview with my mission president. And, I mean, we just looked up to him so much because he's just. He's such an amazing person, a very inspirational leader. And I was intimidated by asking him a question about, you know, that might have expressed Doubt. But I said, I just have to know, like, what happened? Why did I not baptize the ward in this area? And I remember being pretty emotional about it and really intimidated about it. And he said, oh man. Elder Johnston, I was just trying to motivate you. And I didn't know what to say

Scrupulosity and the Pressures of Devotion

John Dehlin [00:32:52] because

Coy Johnston [00:32:55] using the word revelation and making me believe that it was God that had said that, it just left me sort of reeling.

John Dehlin [00:33:07] So basically he's saying it wasn't necessarily revelation that you would baptize a ward.

Coy Johnston [00:33:14] Right.

John Dehlin [00:33:14] He was just trying to say something to motivate you.

Coy Johnston [00:33:17] Trying to motivate me.

John Dehlin [00:33:18] And for you, with someone with scrupulosity, that's the thing. Just really quickly, clinically or from a mental health perspective, you could look at someone like coy and like, boo hoo. You're like seminary president, you're graduating well in your class, you're rising the ranks to zone leader, whatever. Like, you're on, you're on. You become a doctor like, boo hoo. But the truth is, scrupulosity is, can be a very severe mental illness that can lead to depression, anxiety. Well, it is an anxiety disorder, but it can lead to suicidality and even death by suicide because it's severe mental illness. So something like a stake president making a prophecy to a normal person, it's like a normal person who just shrugs it off. But some of scrupulosity, it can, it can become, you know, it can threaten their life. It could become a life threatening thing because you take it so seriously. And so when he tells you I was just trying to motivate you, how did you receive that?

Coy Johnston [00:34:27] I mean, I did all the things to try to excuse that in my mind of why it was still okay. But yeah, I was very hurt.

John Dehlin [00:34:36] You were hurt?

Coy Johnston [00:34:37] Yeah. And the way that had affected my life already up to that point was so detrimental. And I know he didn't have any ill intent, but his well meaning effort, you know, did, did cost me dearly in my mental and physical health. So when I went home, I was still sick and they took me to a bunch of doctors. I went to an infectious disease doctor. And of course I'm still in the mind frame of like, Mormons are seen as weird people. And so I have to be a little careful with what I say because Mormons don't get sick, Mormons don't get depressed. They're not sad. Right. We have the gospel, you know, we're all good. And this infectious disease doctor he came back, said, well, you know, you have you have signs that you may. You may have been sick with this, this, or this. But he goes, you know what your problem is? It's depression. And this is 2000. This is 1999. Okay? So we weren't talking depression in 99. And I was so mad, I said,

John Dehlin [00:35:47] are you

Coy Johnston [00:35:50] just biased against Mormons? You want to say I'm depressed? And so I remember just blowing it off and saying, fine, whatever. My mission president had told me at the end of my mission that because I was sick the whole time, that if I were to go into medicine, for example, that I would become such a great doctor because of this experience. And I think he was right. That revelation was right, because going through that inspired me to try to help other people. And that's a big reason why I went into medicine, because I wanted to be better than the doctors that saw me and better than the doctors who tried to help me. But, you know, we've all been failed by people. Many of us have been failed by doctors and felt like the medical system has failed us. So I was inspired. I wanted to do better than that. But those. Those first months when I got home from my mission, my family had moved to a new house, new ward, and so everything was new, and I was super depressed and didn't know what that was. But I can't even remember most of those months. Like, it was just this dark time in my life that I can't remember anything. And I did not identify that that was depression until way later. Like, way, way later. But. But thankfully, I was able to climb out of that. I went to school and moved on, but I never did get that health back. I felt like, whatever it was, probably chronic fatigue and just depression. I mean, it took its toll. So it was really sad.

John Dehlin [00:37:32] Yeah. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry that happened. Yeah. And it's. You know, I was going to say there's always this tension. I notice in these Mormon stories, interviews, when you. My brother passed away, and so I was carrying his wishes with me or the bishops challenging me or whatever, There's a part of me that's like, is that bad? People who don't have meaning, who don't have purpose, who don't have structure, who are lonely, who are not challenged in my mind, they're the ones that often are the ones who flounder and get into all sorts of trouble. You had a bunch of standards, you had a community. You had people challenging you to do better. Yeah, you had pressure and stress, but it was also making you achieve and it puts you on track to become a medical doctor. So that's kind of one side of my brain, and then the other side of my brain is you're so depressed. It's starting to, like, you're internalizing the stress to the point where it's really negatively affecting your health. So, I mean, in your mind, you're kind of being terrorized. So it's a tough. How do you reconcile those two? You know, things in tension, those polarities. Yeah. Those players. Yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:38:54] So the. I think the hard part is that everything, everything in life is complex.

John Dehlin [00:39:01] There's.

Coy Johnston [00:39:02] There's very few things that are really, really that black and white. And so all of these experiences did give me amazing training and experiences, and they added to the richness of my life. And I absolutely loved the people that I was with. I loved my experiences there as hard as they were. And I have nightmares to this day about going back, like we all tend to do sometimes. But those experiences were valuable, and having that motivation about my brother was valuable. The complexity of that is that when you frame that from scrupulosity or when you frame it as part of your eternal salvation, that now you're taking something that could be motivational and you're making it be tied in with your success for eternity forever. And that's where it gets a little tricky, because if you just say, hey, you know, wouldn't it be great if you could do something cool for your brother? You know, like, you could do stuff and he might be. Be proud of you later, and that may be like, oh, cool, now that's something. If I choose to take that on, you know, that'd be pretty cool.

John Dehlin [00:40:08] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:40:09] But when it's placed upon you is like, you know, this is a mantle that I'm putting on you. And you do that under the. Under the idea of eternal perspective, it's framed very differently. And it wasn't something I chose. And so, yes, I think we gain, like, going to war is not a good thing, but people come back from that with amazing strength.

John Dehlin [00:40:36] Right.

Coy Johnston [00:40:37] You go on a hero's journey. You brought that up a few times recently. It's not a good thing to go fight battle or fight a dragon or whatever, but you come back with amazing knowledge and experience that will enrich your life. So we find this good from bad, and we can still bring good out of bad. It doesn't mean we should seek bad, but we should try to seek the good and all the things we can find. Patrick Kieran was our stake president there in Bristol, and he tell People who he is now. He's an apostle.

John Dehlin [00:41:11] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:41:12] We loved him. He was so amazing. And he just joined the church. I think it was like, 10 years before that. And then he was a stake president and just the most amazing person. And I remember watch, like, we were driving to church one day and on a Sunday, or driving around the church, and he was out running, and we felt like, oh, my gosh, like, we're so very black and white thinking, like, are you allowed to run on Sunday? And he said something like, hey, you know, I got to keep my physical and mental health well to be able to, you know, serve God. And, you know, these. These type of things were so taboo, you know, to a missionary. And then we had, you know, president or Elder Samuelson, I think it was, that came. I'm trying to remember if it was him. And he was talking to us, how literal we take things. He comes into the bathroom, and I was washing my tie because I got a little spaghetti in my tie. He says, elder, you know, if you get that spaghetti cleaned off your tie, you'll be perfect. And I mean, like, oh, you know, like, you take it so literally. I wrote it in my journal. He said I'd be perfect. I'm looking for any glimpse of, like, positivity that I'm gonna make it, you know. And then he gets up, and it might not have been Elder Samuelson, because I can't remember which 70 it was. But he gets up and he says, elders and sisters, I want you to follow the words of President Hinckley. And then he does his impression. He says, go forth with faith and serve the people of England. He does this whole thing, and, I mean, we just. We just died, you know, because, like, wait, he can do this. You know, he could do an impression of the prophet, because I'd been doing impressions my whole life and thinking, that was good. I'm gonna get in trouble.

John Dehlin [00:42:58] That was a good one.

Coy Johnston [00:42:59] But if he could do it, we're good. So, yeah, it was a lot of. That was a lot of fun experiences we had. We had some great members there. You know, I mentioned, like, the old Charlie Bartlett who. Who brought me in as a new missionary and had had one of the. He said there was a vicar from the local church who had come in, and they did this whole thing where he's trying to grill me as a young missionary. And turns out he was like, you know, one of the local members and just some really fun experiences and. And built friendships through there. Those experiences that, you know, remained forever, you know, still have so many great friends from there.

John Dehlin [00:43:37] Nice.

Coy Johnston [00:43:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:43:39] All right. So you talk about maybe doing some deep study and how that may be the first real crack to your shelf. Do we talk about that? Sure.

Discovering Troubling Scriptural Discrepancies

Coy Johnston [00:43:48] No, we haven't talked about it yet. So part of that becoming a master scriptorian is comparing scripture, doing this deep scripture study. So I took second Nephi Isaiah chapters.

John Dehlin [00:44:01] This is on your mission?

Coy Johnston [00:44:02] Yeah, this is my mission. And then I took Isaiah and I'm like writing in my scriptures, you know, comparing which verse goes to which one. And because, you know, I think it's second Nephi quotes, Isaiah chapters. And so I'm comparing them and I'm trying to see what the differences are. And I come across this verse that is very different. And as Mormons, we believe that Isaiah, the Bible, would have been written, you know, you know, long ago that before Lehi took the plates with him that included this. Right. So then the plates are taken to America, Joseph gets them, and then he's translating from those plates. So he should have. In our belief, you know, he should have had sort of direct access. And there's a difference. There's a discrepancy. And then I was, like, looking at. I think it was. I was looking at the Joseph Smith translation of it, and the Joseph Smith translation has a discrepancy. And it was this massive aha moment that I was like, this should not happen. That how can this be? How can we have the Book of Mormon, which was supposed to be the most correct of any book, and then the Joseph Smith translation does a different correction, and I don't know which verse it is now. I'd have to look it up, but I wrote that in the margin of that scripture and boom, first item on the shelf. And I never brought that up to another person, especially not my mission president.

John Dehlin [00:45:51] Why not? Like, you were close. Ish to him. Why didn't you feel safe asking a question as a Mormon missionary?

Coy Johnston [00:46:00] You know, expressing doubt, that's not a thing that's allowed. Expressing concern about scripture or discrepancy. Like, that's. I mean, back then, that you just don't do that. We have a lot of folks that are willing to do that nowadays. But I couldn't reconcile what could be okay about that. Like, it has nothing worked out in my. And so I knew that if I were to ask, it would be some type of answer that would be destructive to me or that he wouldn't have an answer and that would be destructive to me. So I was really scared. I shelved that for what, 15, 20 years?

John Dehlin [00:46:45] Yeah. Okay, so the shelf gets an early entry, Right? Okay, so marriage.

Coy Johnston [00:46:55] Yeah. So I came home, I met my wife at Mesa Community College, and we were in institute in the Book of Mormon class. And yeah, so we got married in the Mesa Temple and decided that we were gonna, you know, keep. Keep doing school. She graduated from ASU and so did I. Started having a family and decided to go to medical school. We started down that pathway. I had, I had a lot of great jobs, you know, so get to work in a lot of environments, which I think, again, these things inform your life. You know, working as a bus driver, a pest control, music teacher, construction dump truck driver, you know, doing all these real life jobs and meeting a lot of great people on the way. But, yeah, we ended up going to medical school. And as part of our journey, we spent a few years in Mexico. And while I was there, I got pulled aside by the local leader. He said, hey, we're going to call you in the bishopric. Oh, they liked it when the Americans would be there because we brought a lot of our American church experience. And he goes, we want you to be in the bishopric. I said, you know, I don't speak Spanish because I, I speak English really well from going to England. And then he goes, oh, really? Well, let me think about this a little bit more. And then he changed his mind. So it was like a fake, Fake, fake bishopric calling and never. Never happened.

John Dehlin [00:48:34] Okay.

Coy Johnston [00:48:35] Yeah, because I don't think I would have been very useful.

John Dehlin [00:48:37] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:48:38] Unable to communicate with them and they, they couldn't speak English very well. Like it was very, you know, I can speak a little bit of Spanish, you know, but not, not enough. So anyhow, that, that did not turn out one of, one of a few times where I was that close to being called into the bishopric. And then we ended up moving back to Mesa and I got a call from the local leaders again saying, hey, we want you to come in and meet with the stake president. They were reorganizing the ward. So I was like, oh, here we go again and get called in. And I was just nervous. I was just like, I just don't want to be in a bishopric. And then I got a call back right before my meeting and they said, oh, I'm sorry, we want your dad. He's the same name as me. We want your dad. He was in my ward. We want him to come in. He's going to be in the bishopric. Second time that I almost got called in. And we fought, we fought kind of heavily involved in the Prop 8 in

John Dehlin [00:49:41] Arizona, was it called Prop 22 or something?

Coy Johnston [00:49:45] Or Prop 8 was the one that was in California. California, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:49:49] You had your own problem.

Coy Johnston [00:49:50] We had our own 102, maybe.

John Dehlin [00:49:51] Yes.

Coy Johnston [00:49:52] And then there was one in Florida at the same time.

John Dehlin [00:49:53] Same sex marriage.

Coy Johnston [00:49:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:49:55] Legislation.

Coy Johnston [00:49:56] And I was making signs, I was making some online content to try to be in support of the family because the church told us to do.

John Dehlin [00:50:12] Yeah. So you were in support of fighting same sex marriage at the time.

Coy Johnston [00:50:17] Yeah, don't feel that way now. But they strongly encouraged us to donate as much money as we can to the cause in our stake. And there were a lot of our stake. They told us what. How much we could donate. So it would stay kind of off the radar. I think if you donated $10,000, it didn't. Didn't get reported under your name. So it was like a thing, you know, in our stake, I didn't have $10,000. I was, you know, in medical school.

John Dehlin [00:50:47] But.

Coy Johnston [00:50:48] But I was heavily involved in that. And. And I look back on that now, obviously with some regret and not understanding. I didn't really even understand as much of that journey that I was on, but I did it because the church told me to. And then, you know, obviously that originally passed and then got changed. And there was a lot of stuff politically that went on. I was involved in a political website for a while that was called Political lds. I think I remember that it was. I don't know how much steam it got because it was kind of early on Internet and we had a lot of people on both sides that would kind of debate. That's where I first got to hear quotes from Brigham Young and leaders about blacks and I mean, how much he loved them. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:51:43] How much he loved. Right.

Coy Johnston [00:51:45] As the apologists would say. Oh, that is hard to hear. When I hear people say. Oh, he just loved anyhow. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:51:55] So the racist. You started hearing the racist quotes by Brigham Young.

Coy Johnston [00:51:58] Yeah, yeah. Because they would bring these to these debates online. We'd have like an online debate, you know, and I'm like, that can't be. That can't be true.

John Dehlin [00:52:06] Do you remember the quotes?

Coy Johnston [00:52:08] I mean, I. I know what they are now.

John Dehlin [00:52:10] Like. Yeah. Which ones were they?

Coy Johnston [00:52:11] So when Brigham Young spoke about interracial marriage, you know, like, he would say that that's punishable by death. When he talked about that they will never get the priesthood. That, you know, I mean, there's just.

John Dehlin [00:52:32] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:52:32] I wish I could read them because I think people need to hear them.

John Dehlin [00:52:36] Yeah. He calls people Black people, dark and lowly. And he talks about, like, a javelin through the heart if. If a white man has sex with a black woman.

Coy Johnston [00:52:45] So there's a few. There's a few times that comes up. So, like, when he. When he talks about. So this is my first Brigham Young problem is coming up right now. Okay. This is going to happen again later as I jump into the discourses of Brigham Young. Right. To find out that they were true, that he did say all those things that were just, like, very hard to hear, or if you're, you know, I would say a rational person, you're gonna. You're gonna have a really hard time reconciling that. Where he said, you know, I have no wife that I love so much that I would not run a javelin through her heart and the heart of whoever's with her if she were committing adultery, and I would be justified to do so, because that is the only way to save their soul. And he spoke like that, like, all the time, you know, that if you need to cut off your head and let your blood spill upon the earth and let the. The dew. What did he say? The smoke rise as dew from the earth as a repentance to God. Blood atonement. This was the first I had heard of any of these type quotes, and all of those were mostly racial quotes that we were talking about at the time. But again, another shelf item, because no way our prophets would do that. No way they would say these things.

John Dehlin [00:54:14] We're the true church.

Coy Johnston [00:54:15] We get it.

John Dehlin [00:54:16] Right? Yeah. Yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:54:18] So.

John Dehlin [00:54:19] So, yeah, the Internet is not good for faith, for Mormon faith.

Coy Johnston [00:54:24] No. And I was. I was kind of trying to battle it, but I. What do you say to that? You know, I was supposed to be on the Pro. The Pro. You know, I was, like, coming from a conservative side of this. I've. I've kind of moved politically since then, but I thought there was only one way to be political, and that was to be a good conservative, you know, be a good Republican.

John Dehlin [00:54:42] That's.

Coy Johnston [00:54:43] That's what I thought growing up.

John Dehlin [00:54:45] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:54:46] So anyhow, this is part of my journey is, like, realizing that I'm so uninformed and I'm so in the bubble, as you might say. So we ended up finishing medical school.

Education, Career, and Music Throughout the Years

John Dehlin [00:55:05] Where'd you undergrad and where'd you finish med school? Do med school.

Coy Johnston [00:55:09] I finished med school at Ross University, which is a. It's a Caribbean school.

John Dehlin [00:55:14] Oh, cool.

Coy Johnston [00:55:15] So I. I found out that I didn't have to go through the long pathway. If I do the quick Pathway.

John Dehlin [00:55:19] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:55:20] And quick meeting, like time frame, because when you apply. I was finishing up my ASU undergrad and I did my undergrad in Devils and business. Go Sun Devils.

John Dehlin [00:55:31] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:55:34] And then my brother in law said, hey, you could go right now, you could leave right now, like in two months to medical school because so getting into medical school is different. If you go out of the United States. Getting out of medical school is very challenging because, you know, it's easier to get in, it's harder to get out of it, and more than half the class doesn't make it through.

John Dehlin [00:55:55] Dude. What I've always heard is what do they call a doctor who got his MD from the Caribbean?

Coy Johnston [00:56:02] You know, Doctor.

John Dehlin [00:56:03] Exactly.

Coy Johnston [00:56:04] So get her done.

John Dehlin [00:56:05] Get her done.

Coy Johnston [00:56:06] Yeah, yeah. I mean, in the end you have to pass the same boards.

John Dehlin [00:56:10] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:56:10] It's just, honestly, it's harder anyways, you know. Yeah. And do residency, it's, it's a different path. And it was, it was, it was very difficult. No doubt. So I went to Ross, which allowed me to actually do my clinical training in Arizona. So I did all my clinical training in hospitals in Scottsdale and Phoenix and, you know, out that way. Chandler. So when I, when I got time, when I got time for residency, we ended up getting residency in Wisconsin, which I like. My friend was there and he said it was amazing, but I never heard of Wisconsin. But we, we prayed and we felt good about it, so we accepted and went to Wisconsin.

John Dehlin [00:56:59] Let me just say you mentioned doing stuff, continuing to do stuff as a musician throughout all this time. Do you want to talk about that? Sure.

Coy Johnston [00:57:08] I mean, I had a really great opportunity to play with a lot of famous LDS artists. So. Yes.

John Dehlin [00:57:14] During this time. During this time, yeah.

Coy Johnston [00:57:16] So there's some fun stories like as a musician, I was getting into singing more and then playing saxophone and that's how I kind of paid my way through college. So we got to play with like Gladys Knight at an event played at, you know, I've like David Archuleta, Brook White was on the American Idol as well. And then I mentioned Michael McLean. So, you know, most Mormons might recognize the Forgotten Carols or some of the early 80s music of Michael McLean, which was like really moving stuff, you know. And so he was coming to town and a friend of mine said, hey, do you want to sing as his backup singers? You know, we have this little group. I said, yeah, of course. So we practiced all these amazing singers, you know. And he comes to town for his concert. It was the Forgotten Carols and we were going to be his backup singers for this thing. And when he gets there, you know, we're ready. We're like, we got this down. He says, all right, guys, let's do this. But I need you to lip sync. I don't want you. I don't want to hear you.

John Dehlin [00:58:19] We will not find out. What is it? Three kings Found the Lord. Different song.

Coy Johnston [00:58:25] No. You're mixing a few of them there, I think. Yeah, it was, you know. So Forgotten Carols is the story of, like, a Christmas story of, you know, the carols have been long forgotten of Christmas. Right. And then they had some other famous thing. I can't remember her name now. She was a rising LDS singer who had come. We were gonna lip sync her as well. They had a backing track, all these amazing singers. And he says, I don't want to hear you. So.

John Dehlin [00:58:57] So are you a good singer? Like a tenor, bass?

Coy Johnston [00:58:59] I'm like a baritone.

John Dehlin [00:59:00] Okay.

Coy Johnston [00:59:01] I mean, I wouldn't call myself a good singer, but I. I'm. I do it and probably are. You know, I've sung. I've done some plays, and, you know, I'm getting into it late, you know, never confident. But, yeah. And I. But I was singing with these folks. Not really, but. But I was like, I'm gonna sing. So when he got up there and did it, I was singing. I was singing. But what. I mean, what a. Fun. Like you fun. What a. What an interesting thing to do. You know, it's like, I don't want to hear any of all you great singers. These are people who sing sing in, like, you know, the big LDS choirs. And a lot of these people are amazing. And, you know, so not mco, like, Mormon choir organization. They have it here. They have it in Arizona. I sang with that. I sang in the mco, and we got to sing with a lot of amazing people there. It was a great experience.

John Dehlin [00:59:51] Nice.

Coy Johnston [00:59:51] And there were a few of us who were not orthodox, some who were ex Mormons that were singing in the choir even at the time, so got to meet a lot of great people.

John Dehlin [01:00:02] One thing people may not know is that Michael McClain just put out a book with his son. His son, I think, ended up going to performing on Broadway. Do you know about this?

Coy Johnston [01:00:12] A little bit, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:00:14] And became addicted to drugs and came out as gay and is now married, I think, to a man. And so I think Michael and his son have come out with a book about how they went through therapy together to improve their relationship and to heal together. So, yeah. Yeah. Michael McClain's story, Mormon's story is nuanced.

Coy Johnston [01:00:37] He actually made a video, kind of at the time of my faith crisis, about his faith crisis.

John Dehlin [01:00:42] Oh, really?

Coy Johnston [01:00:42] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:00:43] What'd he say? What do you remember him saying?

Coy Johnston [01:00:45] It was a short video. You know, he's sitting in piano and he's, as I recall, and he's talking about how he hit the depths, the dark night of the soul. But then it was a swing to a message of hope and he didn't go into a lot of detail. But I remember watching that video, like when I had my faith crisis a few years later and I was happy. And also, it brings out anger sometimes when they constantly tell the story of somebody who has arced back to hope so quickly, because that's not the journey for so many people.

John Dehlin [01:01:22] Right. And it's tough with artists because a lot of Mormon artists, who's. Michael McClain outside of Mormonism these days, just like Richard Bushman's an amazing historian, but the amount of respect he gets in the church is always going to be infinitely more than he's ever going to get at Columbia or Claremont. So these people whose reputation and career and even livelihood, they're going to have a boomerang effect to stay in the church. They're going to have whatever his sincere journey is, he's going to have forces that can boomerang him back that. That, you know, may not be normal for others.

Coy Johnston [01:02:02] Right.

John Dehlin [01:02:02] Is that fair?

Coy Johnston [01:02:03] Yeah, I think so, yeah. Anyhow, yeah. Later on, when I was having my journey, that was a big part of the, you know, watching people like him tell everybody how easy it is to get right back on. On course, yeah. On the path.

John Dehlin [01:02:16] Yeah. Yeah. All right, well, so should we go back to Wisconsin now?

Temple Ceremonies and Unexpected Questions

Coy Johnston [01:02:22] Sure, sure. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:02:26] That's where you go. You graduate from.

Coy Johnston [01:02:28] That's where I did residency.

John Dehlin [01:02:30] So you do residency in Wisconsin?

Coy Johnston [01:02:31] Yeah, so I did a family medicine residency in Wisconsin and I was working, er, kind of secondary to that. So. So along this path, another. My. My friend who was with me on this journey, he had gone to school with me and residency with me had brought up something that was. He had heard from. I can't remember his name now. He's an institute teacher in the Valley. That's kind of prolific, I guess his name's Porter something. Porter. But he had brought up the meaning of the penalties in the temple.

John Dehlin [01:03:06] So you're talking about the Masonic penalties that I would have done when I went through the temple. That would have not been there when you went through the temple.

Coy Johnston [01:03:12] Right.

John Dehlin [01:03:13] Those are taken out. So you didn't know about them when you went through.

Coy Johnston [01:03:17] Okay, I went through in 95 or 97.

John Dehlin [01:03:21] They were taken out in 90.

Coy Johnston [01:03:22] Right.

John Dehlin [01:03:23] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [01:03:23] So I knew nothing of them.

John Dehlin [01:03:25] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [01:03:25] But I. I remember that feeling, right. Of being told that that happened and

John Dehlin [01:03:31] just talk us through logically why that was emotional for you, for those who have no idea the context.

Coy Johnston [01:03:39] So do you want to just talk about the. What they are, just real briefly.

John Dehlin [01:03:42] Yeah, whatever. All. And the history of it and. Yeah. Before and after.

Coy Johnston [01:03:45] And I think it's important why your

John Dehlin [01:03:47] expectations would be that they will. There wouldn't be changes.

Coy Johnston [01:03:51] Right. Okay. So this is just. This is just factual information. It's not. I'm not going to talk about any taboo information. But, like, there have been changes from the beginning of the temple till now and starting with, you know, Joseph Smith becoming a Mason and then a few months later, coming out with the Temple endowment ceremony, which I dove into later on and needed to do some understanding of Masonry. And it's shocking to see that it's almost identical to Masonry. So as that developed from that point on, there was many different changes that happened in the temple ceremony. But they instituted things like the. The Oath of vengeance and other parts of sort of our own flavor of what we would do in the temple. Those went away. The penalties were something that you would say, I won't. I won't divulge this information lest I, you know, slit my throat, lest I disembowel myself or tear my heart out. And then the actions that were done were the Masonic actions that were just. With a little twist, perhaps.

John Dehlin [01:05:09] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [01:05:10] So when my friend told me this, he said, you realize that the actions that you do now, which are still Masonic actions, are the penalties. You're just not doing the actual action. So anybody who went through the temple before 1990, they already know this stuff. But for me, I had never heard this because we don't talk about the temple. We don't talk about these things. And I thought, at that point, I thought the temple couldn't change because I thought this was revelation. This is how. And Joseph Smith did say, this is the Temple endowment. It will not change. So I was really stuck on this item of how could this possibly be? How could you have these, well, very disturbing penalties in the first part, and then the second part is, how could that just change? Because that's what God wanted. I didn't know anything about the Masonry yet, and I just thought, if God wanted it, why, why did he change it? Did he give in to pressure? Did you Know, because it wasn't popular, and I put that right on the shelf as well. That's what we do. So. Yeah, so I carried that. My shelf is getting a little bit bigger as we go and we go to Wisconsin, and Wisconsin. The church is a little smaller. I was in Wausau, Wisconsin, and I was doing a program that was part of the University of Wisconsin.

John Dehlin [01:06:44] Go Badgers.

Coy Johnston [01:06:45] Go Badgers. That's right. Yeah. Loved it there. Oh, my gosh. So amazing. Wisconsin is amazing.

John Dehlin [01:06:51] Yes.

Coy Johnston [01:06:53] Oh, and I was at the game, by the way, when BYU came and. And beat them and when they were, like, headed for the championship and then they were upset by byu. That was a fun game. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:07:05] That's funny.

Coy Johnston [01:07:06] I was. I was not wearing. I think I wore white. Try to be neutral. Not blue or not red.

John Dehlin [01:07:13] Yeah,

Coy Johnston [01:07:16] yeah. So, so early on in my years there, I said, I'm going to be the most amazing missionary. I'm going to do this. I'm going to convert Wisconsin

John Dehlin [01:07:31] from the Book of Mormon musical. I'm going to be the Mormon who changed all of mankind.

Coy Johnston [01:07:35] Yes. Which later on, the Book of Mormon musical becomes a really fun part of my story, too.

John Dehlin [01:07:42] So the scrupulosity didn't take you down. You know, you resolved your depression, but you. You retained sort of this perfectionism.

Coy Johnston [01:07:52] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:07:53] Even though your shelf was building items,

Coy Johnston [01:07:57] I think, in the background, and this is so common for so many people that are in our cohort, is that even though I'm doing all the right things and I'm trying really hard, somewhere in the back is is this feeling that I'm just not going to make it. I never really believed I was going to make it into heaven. My wife is a very. She is a very pure person, and I knew she was going to make it, and I never believed I was going to make it to heaven, like, truly in my heart. And so I thought, maybe through her I'll get there, or maybe through my good works, I can overcome, you know. So, you know, we have, you know, five kids now and. And early family, and we're doing residency, and I signed early with them to stay there in Wisconsin for five years and work and just. We just loved it. The ward was amazing. Such amazing people. Our elders quorum group was a bunch of guys my age that spent time, like, almost on the weekly hunting, you know, going skiing, wakeboarding, wings night. I mean, just excellent fellowship and then meeting all these wonderful Christians that are around us because we're not. We're outside the bubble and realizing that these people, the Lutherans and the Catholics are the big groups there, you know, in Wisconsin. They're amazing. He's the most amazing people. And so good. Mike. We took our kids to other churches, so we'd see, you know, even evangelical churches or we went to a Lutheran church. We went, and it was a great experience. So I said, you know what? Let's bring each other together here. Let me do something good. So we started doing. If you've heard of Rob Gardner from Mesa, I went to high school with him. So he was at our high school. He wrote the Lamb of God, which is the oratorio.

John Dehlin [01:09:55] Are you familiar with Mormon opera? Basically, yeah, about Jesus.

Coy Johnston [01:09:59] And it's amazing.

John Dehlin [01:10:00] Okay.

Coy Johnston [01:10:01] It's a view. It's beautiful. So they just did it in New York here with New York Symphony or something like a few months ago. They've done it with the London Symphony. They've been getting really prolific because it's amazing music. They made a few movies of it, I think, or a movie. The Lamb of God. They've. So they. They did this with the MCO choir really early on, and we fell in love with the music. And I said, let's bring this to Wisconsin and let's do a multi faith Easter concert. So. So we did. And I knew that I needed to be strategic. I didn't want it to be a church thing, so I made it be a coy thing. You know, we. We sponsored it. And I said, coy, you know, coy presents Coy and Tanya present Lamb of God. We had a lot of people show up thinking it was the Lamb of God, the rock band. So because there's a rock band that's like a really heavy rock band called Lamb of God, and they were disappointed. But we put this on at our local theater. We got about 150 musicians to be a part of this. Only probably 10 of them were LDS. We called it a multi faith event. We had worked for a few years to gather some of the best talent kind of spread throughout our area and throughout the state. And I feel like what we brought there was amazing. Some of the most amazing musicians. We had to fight this sort of like negative bias that Mormons are not Christians. A lot of people would say, I don't want to sing with you guys. You know, Mormons are not Christians. I remember somebody saying, I don't want unchurched people to confuse us, to make it look like you guys are Christian like us. And so we fought, like. And I say fight, you know, like, we worked so hard to convince people that we were Christians, and that this Lamb of God is our way of showing Christianity because it's all about Christ. The Lamb of God is this beautiful music about Christ. So we put together this great group of people from all different churches, and we sold. I think we gave away tickets for free. I can't remember. But we ended up selling out the house, which was, I think 1200 seats on our first. First weekend that we did it. So we had this huge group of people that show up, and I was singing the part of Pontius Pilate, you know, which fit me, because I guess I was thinking I wasn't going to make it in, you know, but. And we put on this concert and it was amazing. You know, everyone's emotional, lots of tears. People are moved. And it was so popular that they wanted to do it again. So we did this for three, three years in a row while we were there. And each year it would get bigger and people would, you know, they would bus in congregations from other towns, like, you know, a couple hours away to come watch this, because they. They heard about it. It was really, really neat. We had baptisms from it. I had a. I had a mixed group of people. I had a Jew that was with us who was saying the part of, I think John or Thomas. So the Jewish man. Some people are like, you can't have a Jew sing that. He's not even Christian. I said, why? Why can't we celebrate Christ together? Why can't we just come together and celebrate what we do believe? Or what? Or just the beauty of this music. And if he wants to sing it, let's. Let's sing it, you know. And it caused some stir in our community. So up on the. You know, you'd be driving down the main road there, and this big sign for the church says Mormons, cult or religion. And so some of the people that were in the choir, that were part of the Lutheran congregation would call this Lutheran church up. And what is wrong with you? You know, these guys are more Christian than you are, you know, and go to bat for us. And we could see this amazing sort of good that was coming. And also they're having meetings. Like, what are these Mormons doing? Are they, you know, this cult. So introduced Mormonism as a cult, you know, in my life, because I was like, oh, are we a cult? So two years into was amazing. You know, we had some amazing musicians. It was.

John Dehlin [01:14:27] What is that? So for some Mormons, like, I had that experience growing up in high school, where the local Baptist church had a sign that's like Mormons and other cults. Come learn more. And of course, we're cults to them. For me, that kind of fed my persecution complex and made me feel better than them, made me feel competitive with them, and it had the backfire effect with me at the time, which was, we're even more true. How did it land with you at the point you were with several items on your shelf? How did it land with you?

Coy Johnston [01:15:03] Same.

John Dehlin [01:15:03] Okay.

Early Cracks in Faith and Leadership Tensions

Coy Johnston [01:15:04] Yeah, yeah. Because it just fed the complex.

John Dehlin [01:15:06] Okay, okay.

Coy Johnston [01:15:07] Yeah, exactly.

John Dehlin [01:15:08] So it didn't disturb you? It wasn't a shelf item for you?

Coy Johnston [01:15:11] That wasn't. No. I mean, I started thinking about the cult question.

John Dehlin [01:15:14] Yeah, right.

Coy Johnston [01:15:15] But no, at the time, I'm like, yeah, this all publicity is good, good publicity.

John Dehlin [01:15:19] Okay.

Coy Johnston [01:15:19] Okay. And I was putting it all on the line because I. I put Book of Mormons in my exam rooms at my office, and I'm like, talking to people about this.

John Dehlin [01:15:27] What do you mean, medical office? Oh, like at a hospital or.

Coy Johnston [01:15:31] It was a clinic.

John Dehlin [01:15:32] Okay.

Coy Johnston [01:15:32] Like a family medicine clin clinic.

John Dehlin [01:15:33] So you're being a. You'll pull in a Marriott putting Book of Mormons.

Coy Johnston [01:15:36] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:15:36] Books of Mormon, wherever you can.

Coy Johnston [01:15:38] That's right. And people would always, you know, hey, just a year Mormon. And we'd. We'd have a conversation about it. You know, I was like, any chance I could be a missionary? I'm going to convert everybody. And any news is good news. Right? I think that's what President Hinckley said. So I got called into the administration of my work because they're like, you can't be putting Book of Mormons in your room.

John Dehlin [01:16:00] You know, we're not a Wisconsin brother. This is a mesa. Yeah, yeah.

Coy Johnston [01:16:09] They're just like, well, we're. So I fought. I fought the administration because I said, well, you know, you have a cross in this hospital. This is part of your organization. You have Jesus's quotes in this place. And I kind of went, like, did this little exercise with them, and they said, sorry, you know, you can't do it. It's over. And they. They were going to. I mean, I got to the point where they were like, it's either you take them out or you'd walk away. You know, like, you know the point where I almost lost my job over this and when my wife was.

John Dehlin [01:16:43] Which would also feed your persecution complex.

Coy Johnston [01:16:46] Yeah, it would have. At the time, it would have been really bad. But, like, so then. So then my wife was running to get ready for the cause. She sang the part of the song Gloria.

John Dehlin [01:16:59] It's Beautiful.

Coy Johnston [01:17:00] And she's an amazing singer. And she. She was running to get something before we went to the concert, and she fell and she cut her eye.

John Dehlin [01:17:07] Dang.

Coy Johnston [01:17:08] And so I took her to the clinic and repaired it, which I normally do on my kitchen table. But I made a really bad choice because that was her face. And I want. I mean, really bad choice. And you'll see why. Because I wanted to get the right kind of suture and make her face look good. So. And suture's like two bucks. Okay. Like, it's not expensive, but I didn't have the right kind, so I took her to the clinic and I took a picture of her while I was there, and then I put it online, Said, this woman just fell and bashed her face in. And we're heading to the concert. Come watch her sing. Another missionary effort. Come watch this amazing, inspiring woman sing. By Monday, I was called in to my administration for a HIPAA violation.

John Dehlin [01:17:50] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [01:17:51] Which technically it was a HIPAA violation if you want to play that way

John Dehlin [01:17:55] because you're violating your wife's confidentiality.

Coy Johnston [01:17:58] Yeah, she was a patient.

John Dehlin [01:17:59] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [01:18:00] I was in the clinic and I took a picture of her. So I got. I got. And, you know, again, the. The person who had reported this was kind of out to get me. It was feeding my persecution complex. They were kind of.

John Dehlin [01:18:13] Oh, it was a non. Mormon.

Coy Johnston [01:18:15] Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:18:16] Who didn't like the Books of Mormon kind of thing. Yeah.

Coy Johnston [01:18:18] Okay. Didn't like what I was doing. Promoting everything. They weren't Christian anyhow. It ended up.

John Dehlin [01:18:24] Wait, they weren't members of a Christian church?

Coy Johnston [01:18:26] No.

John Dehlin [01:18:27] They're secular. Or some other.

Coy Johnston [01:18:28] Some other. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:18:29] Okay.

Coy Johnston [01:18:30] So they. So I did it fed my persecution complex even more. But they suspended me. So they said, all right, you're going to be suspended without pay for this. You have to bill yourself, and then you don't get paid for it, but your wife has to pay for it for the procedure. So, you know, that was their punishment.

John Dehlin [01:18:49] How long were you suspended for?

Coy Johnston [01:18:51] Three days. Okay, so it didn't get, like, reported. It wasn't anything like. But they're like, we're gonna do this exercise and the. And the.

John Dehlin [01:18:56] Teach you a lesson.

Coy Johnston [01:18:57] Yeah, that's what he said. He said, we need this to be an example for everybody. Never mind that every physician has done this with their family and friends in that office. Right. Like, But I took a picture of it. It was a mistake. I shouldn't have done. I could have just done it on my kitchen table. So it was. It was a Bad choice. But anyhow, it fed my complex. Right. So we went and sang, and she did amazing, and we touched hearts. So that was, you know, two years into it now, and this is. The community's just. Just vibing is amazing. And then my faith crisis starts.

John Dehlin [01:19:32] Okay.

Coy Johnston [01:19:32] So that's when this is, like, 2017, I think.

John Dehlin [01:19:35] Okay. Because, I mean, it feels like you rebound from your mission depression, you graduate, temple, marriage, med school, residency, and you're back being full Mormon in it to win it back on the profit. Seems to me like you're back on the profit kind of track in your subconscious. We'll say.

Coy Johnston [01:19:56] Yeah, right. I didn't actually think that anymore, but. Yeah, right. I didn't think I was going to be profit anymore.

John Dehlin [01:20:02] No, no.

Coy Johnston [01:20:03] I mean.

John Dehlin [01:20:04] Oh, you, like, blew it. Like.

Coy Johnston [01:20:05] Yeah, I think I blew it because

John Dehlin [01:20:07] you didn't cover the word on your mission. Yeah. So you blew it.

Coy Johnston [01:20:10] Okay, so.

John Dehlin [01:20:11] So that. That died.

Coy Johnston [01:20:12] That part died. Yeah. So that I still wanted to, like. I wanted to fix my. My brokenness.

John Dehlin [01:20:19] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [01:20:20] You know, I still had scrupulosity. I was never good enough. Never gonna make it to heaven.

John Dehlin [01:20:23] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [01:20:24] You know, so. Yeah, I was still gonna try really hard.

John Dehlin [01:20:27] Okay. Okay. So. So now we're at the faith crisis part. Yeah. So this is 2017.

Coy Johnston [01:20:34] About 2017. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:20:36] Okay. Yeah. Should we jump into it?

Coy Johnston [01:20:38] Sure.

John Dehlin [01:20:39] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [01:20:40] So that's the Lamb of God project that we were doing is what stemmed my faith crisis. Because I had a friend who said to me, you know, okay, wait, did

John Dehlin [01:20:52] you tell the story about being chastised with your state by your stake president for wearing the wrong clothes? Do you want to tell that? Oh, yeah. So I'm just. I don't mean people don't, like. I want to interrupt. I'm just making sure he covers the time frame in his outline.

Coy Johnston [01:21:06] No, I. Yeah, so that's the interesting little things that come up, you know, is like, I. I went to my stake president for temple recommend interview, I think it was, and I had just come from my clinic with my polo shirt or something, and I wanted to talk about the Book of Mormon thing in my rooms. And I remember getting chastised by. It wasn't the president. It was the.

John Dehlin [01:21:25] His counselor.

Coy Johnston [01:21:26] I think it was a counselor who's like, really? Like. Like, what are you. What are you doing? Like, you coming? You come here for your interview wearing that, like, white shirt, tie. What's wrong with you? You know, like, kind of give me a hard time about it, and I didn't let it weigh on me a whole lot. But I'm like, that is. That is the kind of thing that the black and white thinking is. Is hurting so many people, you know, because here I am rushing from work to go get my temple recommended. Like, why isn't that good enough? Why is wearing a white shirt going to change anything? Like, logically thinking here. But that's the kind of pharisaical view that we've adapted in our current culture. We do this with people. I see this when people show up to try to take the sacrament and they missed it. I missed the bread. And I've watched somebody say, hey, can I get the bread real quick? Sorry, it's over. You haven't blessed the water yet. Can I just get the bread real quick? Sorry, it's over. Why can't we do that? Why are we so stuck in our fear cycle view of there's one way to do things and I'm not okay to explore a nuance or your effort matters. So we get stuck in that a lot. And in this case, it was just like this, like, chastisement because of a polo shirt.

John Dehlin [01:22:47] And this is the type of culture point that Jeff Strong's making in his book Torn, that church culture can sometimes be a reason people leave. And then this is the type of thing that Corbridge's recent talk would address. Corbridge would say, if you had Darth Vader as a bishop and your war experience felt like Alcatraz, you should stay anywhere. And that's kind of what you did. But for you, was that. Were those chips, Were those items on your shelf?

Coy Johnston [01:23:18] No, I don't think. I didn't let those things. But what. They bothered me because I knew they would bother somebody else.

John Dehlin [01:23:24] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [01:23:24] Because those things are why some people leave. It's like you. You show up for an interview and you give him a hard time about what he's wearing, and they may never come back.

John Dehlin [01:23:32] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [01:23:32] And how silly is that? That we do. We chase them away, you know?

John Dehlin [01:23:36] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [01:23:39] And so when I was there, I remember talking to my stake president about the Book of Mormon thing. And so I'm thinking I'm going to be really like, you know, get accolades, you know, like, you did a great job trying to be a missionary. You put Book of Mormons or Books of Mormon whatever in the room. And instead what he said to me is, he said, coy, why would you do that? I was like, well, you've talked about being a good missionary and doing all that you can sacrifice. I remember President Hinckley talking to a young boy about Leaving his family and saying, doesn't that hurt you? That you left your family for the church and the boy saying back to President Hinckley, it's true, isn't it? What else matters? And that was my mantra, as it were. Like, it's true, isn't it? What else matters? And this is like, I was willing to lose my job if I, if I were to save a soul. And my stake president kind of said, why would you do that? I don't know what his mind frame was in the moment. Because he's a wonderful man. He just said, that's not your job. Like, that's, that's their clinic. You know, it's not what I expected to hear. So I guess I started thinking, like, you know, I'm kind of on my own in this. I'm just going to do my best.

John Dehlin [01:25:00] I mean, again, this is the scrupulosity. But it's where Mormonism can exacerbate scrupulosity, because we do covenant in the temple to consecrate all, even our lives if necessary. At least when I went through, that was the language used. So there's lots of Mormons that just kind of, oh, yeah, whatever. I don't pass out books of Mormon. I don't really proselyte to my secular neighbors, and they're fine with it. But you're, as a scrupulous self, you're in it to win it all the way. So what else matters?

Coy Johnston [01:25:38] At all cost, even? Yeah, it was a little shocking that I wasn't getting like a standup ovation or something, you know, like, you did it. You did it. You did more than most people.

John Dehlin [01:25:49] Yeah, yeah, but.

Coy Johnston [01:25:51] But I mean, part of me was probably looking for some type of validation. But anyhow, I realized, like, why am I, why am I putting my life, my family on the line for this? Like, if it's, if it's not what I'm supposed to do, like, are we just doing lip service to this? Like, what's going on here? Because I was doing so much, like, and I was called as ward mission leader, which I was upset about because I was already doing a lot of missionary work. And I kind of wanted it to be because I was doing it, not because, not because I was the war mission leader. So I got called to be war mission leader for that, you know, about 2017ish or 2016. And then one of my friends who was criticizing my Lamb of God project that we were working on said, you know, you Mormons are. You're adding scripture, you Know, and revelation says you can't add or take away from. And. And I said. I said, boom, that's it. I'm going to study this, and I'm going to learn it. I'm going to look at their arguments one by one, and I'm going to realize how to answer those things. And that's what started it. I said, I'm going to take a step back. I'm going to take away my bias. So working in medicine, one of the big things we try to focus on is removing bias. To get to answers, you have to kind of set yourself aside from the bias as best you can, because it's part of everything we do. So I said, I'm going to remove my bias and I'm going to stay. What does it look like to talk about these things as a. Never heard of Mormonism? You know, a person from the outside perspective that's. I have to do this. I have to remove my confirmation bias. So I started reading and I started looking into Bible scholarship.

John Dehlin [01:27:40] Do you want to talk about. Oh, is that the board? The Bart Ehrman stuff comes in.

Coy Johnston [01:27:43] Bart Ehrman comes in.

John Dehlin [01:27:44] Okay, so it's on the evangelical level, because those are the people challenging your faith in Wisconsin.

Coy Johnston [01:27:50] Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:27:51] So you're not going CES letter.

Coy Johnston [01:27:52] Not yet.

John Dehlin [01:27:53] You know. Yeah, yeah.

Coy Johnston [01:27:54] It started with the core biblical criticism. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:27:58] Which is. Does the Bible have errors and flaws?

Coy Johnston [01:28:02] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:28:02] You know, inaccuracies.

Coy Johnston [01:28:04] And how does that fit in with Mormonism?

John Dehlin [01:28:06] Yeah. Okay.

Coy Johnston [01:28:08] Because that is the core. Like, that's. That's where they're coming from. You know, these. They don't know anything about the church, really. So, yeah. Bart Ehrman. You know, enter Bart Ehrman.

John Dehlin [01:28:18] So feel free to go into a little bit of depth there if you want to on, like, what you discovered about the Bible.

Coy Johnston [01:28:25] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:28:25] What shocked you about that and then how that started causing you to question Mormonism, because Mormonism in some ways inoculates you to all that on a surface level, because Joseph said it, the Bible's flawed. It was interpreted wrong. The Book of Mormon is the word of God. So a lot of Mormons won't really be bothered by the Bart Ehrman route. They'll just go, oh, yeah, we know the Bible's flawed.

Coy Johnston [01:28:48] Right.

John Dehlin [01:28:48] Joseph told us that from the beginning. These are not the droids you're looking for. Move on. So what happened with you?

Researching Both Sides and the Faith Crisis Deepens

Coy Johnston [01:28:54] Yeah, so I started listening to debates because I wanted to hear both sides balanced. So Bart Ehrman and, you know, xyz, everyone I could find, I had to do this kind of secretly, because it wasn't going to be seen as a good thing by many people around me. So I kept it secret from everyone, and I started investigating, you know, mostly on YouTube. And then I started recognizing that Bart Ehrman had a. Had a more scientific presentation and logical presentation to his arguments. And I couldn't refute. And the people that were arguing with him, they couldn't refute his arguments. There was nothing but apologetics on the other side. And so I started realizing, wow, this is real. There's some really good points about this Bible historicity that are deeper than whether or not a few guys intentionally change something. It's deeper than that. And we have evidence. We have manuscripts. Like, it's not. I don't know, people often think that it's just some unknowable thing out there, like we could never know what the Bible was or says. Like, there is evidence out there for us to look at, and there's source material in many cases, you know, so, you know, starting to realize that there's some real tangible evidence of the Bible, maybe that the Bible isn't what I believed it was. And the scary thought that maybe Jesus wasn't who I thought he was.

John Dehlin [01:30:45] Yeah. And I'll just summarize a couple things. Like, you learn that there's inconsistencies between the four Gospels. I mean, you all should go back. We'll have Brooklyn and Julie put in the show notes the Bart Ehrman episodes that I've done. But it's inconsistencies across the Gospels. It's anachronisms. It's the story growing. Once you line the Gospels up chronologically, the Christ story becomes more and more fantastic, more and more miraculous over time. And the manuscripts start becoming questioned. And then you start wondering, how did the Bible get put together? What manuscripts were left out? Why were the ones that were included included? And then you add to that changes that legitimately, Joseph Smith was right. There have been edits and changes over time. Right. It all just starts to. I mean, it can, for many, crumble as, like, this is just not a rock to build your, you know, house on.

Coy Johnston [01:31:50] Right. And it was obviously something super scary. Most people who have been down that road will feel some type of cognitive dissonance. I didn't know that word at the time, but I said, I need to. I need to persist through this. I don't feel good inside, but I need to know what is true. And I love Britt Hartley and her approach to these type of things because I feel like we've kind of gone full circle on, you know, truth seeking and how important truth seeking is. And then you have Brit Hartley coming in and teaching us all that that's not always a way to happiness. And I found out that I'm a truth seeker. I'm not a happiness seeker. And for those who want to seek truth, you might do that at the expense of happiness. And for those who want to seek happiness, you might do that at the expense of truth. And there's nothing, anything to say that one is right or wrong or good or bad or better. Just that you chose what you chose. And if I chose to go on a truth seeking path, it might lead me to unhappiness, and certainly it did in many ways. But I needed to know the truth. I've always been a truth seeker, and I needed to know what I was hearing. So it just spiraled from there. From Bart, I went, I said, okay, let's. Let's go to the next thing. Let's go to the next thing. And I. Every day I would come home, I would sit in the hammock, you know, on the porch. And it was maybe summer in Wisconsin, so you could be outside, you know, because winters you had to be kind of by the fire, but. And I would read just voraciously reading, just like most people who go down this pathway. You just can't get enough information. It didn't take me long before I found Mormon stories and Grant Palmer. And I think the early interviews with Grant Palmer was one of the first ones I saw.

John Dehlin [01:33:51] And what was it about Grant Palmer? Most people now have never heard of Grant Palmer, but what was it about Grant Palmer's book, Insider's View of Mormon Origins, or his story that led you down other rabbit holes?

Coy Johnston [01:34:05] That probably was the first book I read, I think was Mormon themed.

John Dehlin [01:34:10] Mormon themed?

Coy Johnston [01:34:11] Yeah. The Mormon themed. Controversial. Would that be the right word? Or critical? Maybe critical.

John Dehlin [01:34:18] Definitely critical. I mean, for those who don't know, Grant Palmer is a legend. He was a seminary and institute teacher for CES for like 30 years. And while he was serving as a institute director, you know, high level CES person, he started losing his faith. And so he wrote a book called An Insider's View of Mormon Origins. And the focus is on Joseph Smith and the restoration in the Book of Mormon and how as a CES instructor, he lost his faith. But he becomes kind of a amateur historian as well. But his book was legendary, and it affected me all the way back in the early 2000s. But it's all about Peepstones and First vision and treasure digging and anachronisms and all that stuff.

Coy Johnston [01:35:07] Yeah. And his story was really meaningful to me, that he had been in CES and then had this issue come up with the Rock in the Hat, and that when he presented that to his, I don't know, superiors, I guess, that they didn't know about it and that he got almost fired over it.

John Dehlin [01:35:26] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [01:35:27] You know, they. They're like, this is ridiculous. I can't believe you're teaching this anti Mormon stuff. And here's a man who's been in this for, you know, what, 20 years and had traveled around the world and taught the gospel. He didn't know this most basic thing that now everybody's being taught. I never knew it until then that this Rock in the Hat was the way that it apparently happened. And he almost lost his job over that. He was willing to put his job on the line to seek truth. It inspired me. And so one after another, I kept finding these things. I would listen to Mormon stories alongside of all these other, you know, I couldn't. I couldn't get enough. I just needed to see and hear and understand. And it was by watching so many people's Mormon stories that helped me to navigate, you know, because I'm doing this sort of secretly behind the scenes. I didn't want anybody to know. People are still looking at me as a, quote, pillar of the ward, because I had been trying so hard to do so much good, and now I'm like, I'm seeing that so many things are crumbling in the background, and my wife doesn't know. You know, nobody knows. Who do I talk to? Who do I even ask about these things? And I'm learning really difficult things from people like Grant Palmer, people like Richard Bushman. I read Rough Stone Rolling and just all the. All the books, all the podcasts, all the things, just one after another after another. And. And early on, like, I. I really felt like it was in part, again, part of the reason why I really feel like coming here today is because this is where I found my first validation and first hope. It's weird to say that, but, like, hope to hear people like the Youngs share their story, that at the time, they were still in the church and they came on to talk about their story and to just say, yeah, this is real, this is hard. This is a legitimate challenge, and I was losing my hope and I needed something and you didn't.

Feeling Isolated While Questioning

John Dehlin [01:37:49] There was no one like brother, sibling, a parent, ward members, friends, college buddies, med school buddies. Did you just feel totally Alone were the. You know.

Coy Johnston [01:38:02] Yeah, okay. I mean, I found people later.

John Dehlin [01:38:05] Yeah. But I mean, in the. In the thick of it, when you're

Coy Johnston [01:38:08] in that moment, who do you talk to? Who can you bring it up to? Right. You don't know who's safe. And there was many people that were not safe when I brought it up to them. You know, the. I did find out later that I had a lot of people around me that would be supportive, but at that time, it's super scary. And why was it different when I listened to people like the Youngs? Because they were safe. They were actually still members.

John Dehlin [01:38:35] Right. Yeah.

Coy Johnston [01:38:37] And that's the unique thing, is Mormon stories has a lot of representation, but a lot of it would be critical, and that's fine, but something about that was still a little bit unsafe for me. And even now, when people listen to Mormon stories, they might feel that sort of like, ooh, you know, that cognitive dissonance pops up really quickly when you're hearing something that could be critical. And so there's something a little more safe about it coming from someone who's in the church.

Mormon Stories as a Resource During Faith Crisis

John Dehlin [01:39:05] Let me just address something, because this comes up a lot, that Mormon stories causes people to lose their faith. Like you just said it. You're struggling with the Bible, and that is a thing. But then you find Mormon stories, and then you lose your faith completely. People are constantly saying, I'm causing people to lose their faith. Will you address how you would respond to that?

Coy Johnston [01:39:27] I would say not being defensive, just

John Dehlin [01:39:29] so it's not that I'm being defensive here. I just want people who care to understand who the real enemy is or what the real problem is. Because I don't think the problem. I really don't. Is Mormon stories.

Coy Johnston [01:39:42] I would say the opposite.

John Dehlin [01:39:43] What? That is Mormon stories.

Coy Johnston [01:39:46] What's that?

John Dehlin [01:39:46] The problem is Mormon stories.

Coy Johnston [01:39:48] No, I would say the opposite. That Mormon stories helped me to stay in the battle and helped me not give up my faith.

John Dehlin [01:39:55] Got it.

Coy Johnston [01:39:56] I mean, it was odd because I know that reputation, but for me, it was not like that at all. Because it was through Mormon stories that I found ways to stay in the church and that I found ways to stay working it out. It didn't change the fact that the facts are there. Okay, the facts are there. But by watching and hearing people's journey and learning from other people's experiences, it helped me to better navigate instead of just throwing it all away.

John Dehlin [01:40:28] And I'll just say, not that I'm trying to be defensive, but I want people to just understand what's going on. I continually interview, like you, people who are still in the church and still attending mixed faith marriages, whatever, because I want to, on Mormon stories, provide role models for people who want to stay. And that's why I interviewed Patrick Mason and other believers, because I don't. I want whatever's best for you, Coy and your family is what I want. And so you're saying that helped?

Coy Johnston [01:41:01] Yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:41:01] I mean, you're still in the church, so clearly it did something right.

Coy Johnston [01:41:05] It didn't push me out.

John Dehlin [01:41:06] Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Coy Johnston [01:41:08] Honestly, I needed that in my life. Hearing the stories. Because stories are powerful, stories are educational, and I can find meaning in someone else's story, maybe different than they found, but hearing all of these stories. Watching your interviews with Richard Bushman, watching your interviews, I mean, the old interviews even, I went back and I started just diving in and trying to learn everything I could. And I wanted it to be safe. I did eventually watch the interviews with Decker and Noah, New Name Noah, New

John Dehlin [01:41:48] Name Noah and Ed Decker from the God Makers.

Coy Johnston [01:41:50] And I'll tell you what, I think that made me feel even better about Mormon stories. Because you weren't really nice to New name Noah or Ed Decker.

John Dehlin [01:41:59] I got grief both for how I treated Ed Decker and New Name Noir. Because I. I want people to be respectful to believers and to the church. And if I bring someone on and I feel like they're modeling disrespect even though I'm not perfect.

Coy Johnston [01:42:13] Well, you challenged him. You're like, why would you do that? Why would you secretly record. And I felt really happy to see that you were not just feeding it the same way the Tanners apparently don't just feed anti Mormon, you know, because that's not something I have time in my life for. I don't really have time for people who are just anti. I really am truth seeking. And so when I see, like that you're criticizing Ed Decker, like, why did you make that Hanna Barbera version of this movie or whatever, the God Makers? Why did you make. Why did you do this secret thing? Why did you be critical of, you know, whatever it was that you were challenging? You weren't like, feeding them, you know, so those that might be an anti Mormon in my. In my guess would be like, somebody like him might be considered like an anti Mormon. And then I have Mormon stories who's like, just trying to get to the bottom of things. And that meant a lot to me. And so, you know, I'm not saying that this. I'm not like Trying to, you know, sing accolades and say that everything is perfect, you know, but I found so much peace and hope by watching people's stories and then this platform where people could tell their. Their stories. And we need it. We do right now. You know, you're going through this lawsuit, and if, if anything, we need it now even more because this is. It's a. It's a stone cut from a mountain that is rolling. So many people are leaving the church and having these crisis, and we need support.

John Dehlin [01:43:49] Interestingly, I can't speak to what the church's motives are in their lawsuit against me. And for those who don't know, the church is suing me, claiming trademarking, copyright infringement. But everyone that I've talked to, unless they're like an orthodox apologist, believes it's to silence and bankrupt me and the Opus Stories foundation of Mormon Stories. But I think they don't like that I come across as open and as kind and as balanced. I think they would rather me come across as angry and as hateful because I think that would drive more people away. But because it's not that I'm trying to fool. What they're trying to claim is that I'm trying to fool people into thinking that this podcast is run by the church. Nobody serious that I've talked to believes that. Right, right. But what I do think they're bothered by isn't really that. Isn't that people are genuinely. Did you ever for once, and this is dangerous for me to ask you this, did you ever for once think that this podcast was run and sponsored by the corporate church?

Coy Johnston [01:45:01] No, not. Not at all.

John Dehlin [01:45:03] I mean, it takes like a minute. Right, right. Right. But what I do think they, my guests speculating, they genuinely are concerned about is because I come across as fair and as compassion kind. More people like you as a believer, are willing to trust and listen. And so it's. It's actually the truth is the opposite of what they're accusing me of. But I think that's really what. What bothers them most, I think might be right.

Coy Johnston [01:45:31] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:45:32] Yeah. So anyway, well.

Coy Johnston [01:45:34] And I just. I just felt like I. I wanted to talk about that because it's, It's a lot of why I wanted to be here is to. Is to share how this has helped me stay engaged in the church more than anything. That never once made me feel like it was pulling me away.

John Dehlin [01:45:50] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [01:45:51] And as you're truth seeking, you should listen to all sides.

John Dehlin [01:45:56] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [01:45:57] So I think of these analogies. I just thought of this yesterday, like, you Know, if I grow up eating, you know, this Mac and cheese, and I say it's the best Mac and cheese in the world, and I just want to tell everybody it's the best Mac and cheese. Number one Mac and cheese. The most true, most healthy. But I've never had any other Mac and cheese. And I'm. And I'm told how bad they are. The other versions, you know, don't ever eat Kraft. It's unhealthy. It's dangerous. I wouldn't even look at the box. How. How on earth am I supposed to know if I'm actually eating the world's best Mac and cheese? You know, it's like, you know, this silly analogy is kind of how we approach a lot of things in life with our bias. And we want to believe we have the number one anything, you know, politics, religion, whatever. And if we're acting cultish or like a cult and controlling every information about something else, or not even willing to look at something else or identifying something else as dangerous, how are we ever going to know if we have the best? We need to actually look at all the things and listen to all the things. Check out Kraft Mac and Cheese. See if it's better, you know. So that's how I decided I was going to approach my faith crisis. My faith journey. Sorry. Would be to. I'm going to look. I'm not afraid of that. And all the quotes from prophets, you know, if we have the truth, it cannot be harmed. If we don't have the truth, it ought to be harmed. That's President Hinckley, right?

John Dehlin [01:47:19] Or J. Reuben Clark.

Coy Johnston [01:47:20] J. Reuben Clark, Yes. J. Reuben Clark's that one. And then there's their own flavor of them.

John Dehlin [01:47:25] Now, Hinckley says it's either true or the greatest fraud that's ever been perpetrated.

Coy Johnston [01:47:30] Right?

John Dehlin [01:47:30] Yeah, I think.

Coy Johnston [01:47:31] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:47:32] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [01:47:32] And, and, and so forth. There's. There's many prophets who have given that challenge.

John Dehlin [01:47:37] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [01:47:39] And I said, okay, then that's, you know, let's do it. And so I dug in, and every time I would watch a video or listen or read something, I would then go to, you know, Fair Mormon or a pro LDS site, apologetic site, and I would read up on both sides. And I did that with every topic. I want to hear everything possible on both sides of this before I would make an opinion about it. And time and time again, I would find that the apologetics were either incredibly lacking or painfully dishonest. And how is that supposed to build my testimony? How is that supposed to make Me feel better about the church that says they're going to be true, that they don't have an argument for something that is, you know, even feasible, but more so that they're being dishonest about it. Almost so blatantly dishonest that it, it just felt icky. And then I learned, you know, about Leonard Arrington and how they controlled the narrative and how they punished him for trying to be honest and tell the truth.

John Dehlin [01:48:51] He was church historian, for those who don't know.

Coy Johnston [01:48:53] Yeah. What in the 70s. And you know, Greg Prince has talked about him a lot and that's where I heard so much of this. Like his, I think he wrote his biography

John Dehlin [01:49:07] from, from Brody in 1945 to still the present almost. The church just continually would either excommunicate or silence anyone who found out the history of its problematic. And a lot of that was like Joseph Fielding Smith and Ezra Taft Benson and Boyd K. Packer. But yeah, so many people were silenced or excommunicated over the past three or

Coy Johnston [01:49:34] four decades that didn't feel good. Right. For a truth seeking church to hide and control and I mean this is obviously putting holes in the wall. It's putting, you know, it's tearing off pieces of my armor

John Dehlin [01:49:54] because there's all the things you're learning and I'm guessing it's all the normal stuff, the peep stones in the hat and the treasure digging. The first vision changes the priesthood problems, the temple changes, the polygamy, all that stuff. Right. Book of Abraham. But then there's also feeling lied to and feeling like there was a cover up. Were those the, the biggest things?

Coy Johnston [01:50:17] Yeah, yeah. I mean being lied to is huge for a church that tells you to tell the truth, you know, do what is right and let the consequence follow.

John Dehlin [01:50:25] And for someone who had scrupulosity because you were trying to be so perfect, is it, is it extra difficult to feel like you were lied to?

Coy Johnston [01:50:34] I suppose it would be, you know, because when is a lie okay and you're trying to be perfect and yet your organization is. It's okay if we lie, it's okay if we change the truth a little bit. It's okay if we hide this version of the first vision because we don't like it. And so with each one of these things that came up, take the first vision story, take any topic you pick it as I would go side by side and look, let me see the church's argument on this, let me see the critics argument on this. It almost felt like every time that I thought I could find some type of a solid answer. The apologetic side would be incredibly lacking, and then the critic side would be telling the truth. I'm not saying always, but it felt to me like the critics were telling the truth more often than the apologetic side. I don't know if that's factually true. All I know is that's what it seems like in almost every time. And how am I supposed to feel about that? Yeah, that my church, who's. I've devoted my entire life to and given my time, my money, my life, my, like, almost lost my job. Like, all of these things that I've done for this church, and they're. They're manipulating and they're. They're lying. And it's demonstratable. It's. It's reproducible. You can see it. And then the critics are saying, you know, like the Tanners, they're. They're just like, here, let's get this information out. Let's just show people this. This stuff that's been hidden. And I started seeing. I started seeing this. Whatever. Whatever the church is, it's not what it said it was, and it's not the story I was told. And I remember driving in a night and looking up into the heavens and just saying, God, like, where are you? What is this? I need to know you. I need to understand you. I need to make sense of this. I'm dying here. And yet later, when people would find out about my journey, they think I'm being sucked away by the devil. And I'm like, I'm trying harder than ever to understand God, and where is God in all of this?

Wrestling With Church Truth Claims and Apologetics

John Dehlin [01:53:10] And there's a degree to which that's so insulting because you're accused of being satanic or demonic or sinful or whatever, but you're actually taking the doctrine and the history and the theology seriously when you study it.

Coy Johnston [01:53:25] Right?

John Dehlin [01:53:25] So that should be viewed as a sign of commitment, that you're believing it all, taking it all so seriously, learning about it, deepening it. And yet for the church leaders and family members and friends and members, sometimes the only way they can see it as faithlessness or a desire to sin or you never believed to begin with, all the tropes, all the stereotypes. And again, when you're the leaders, when the people that were demonized, like Sandra Tanner and Fawn Brody and others, turn out to be the truth tellers and the prophets, seers, and revelators that you blindly revered, Joseph Fielding Smith, Boyd K. Packer, turn out to be the deceivers and the liars.

Coy Johnston [01:54:19] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:54:20] And then you're being accused of following Satan. What side is up? It's like the Upside down on Stranger Things, right? You know?

Coy Johnston [01:54:28] Yeah, but it's not so distinctive which

John Dehlin [01:54:30] one's which, you know, like, you don't.

Coy Johnston [01:54:32] Yeah, yeah. And you know, you, you, you learn about. So, you know, you talk about how they've. They've demonized the Tanners. I remember hearing about the Tanners and thinking like, oh, these guys are like the worst evil people. Right. Just because of what I've heard about him. Having now listened to Sandra speak, I realized I was wrong. But what did they do when Mark Hoffman shows up and tries to sell his artifacts to them? Who's the first person to call him a fraud? It was Gerald Tanner. The church is buying this manuscript while he's over there saying, I don't want anything to do with you and everything about that. You would say that would be. If Gerald and Sandra Tanner were actually trying to tear down the church, that they would have been just like, foaming at the mouth about this Mark Hoffman fraud. Like, give me that thing. I don't care if it's true, I'm going to use it. Right. That's the narrative about them. And the reality is that they weren't interested in false. They weren't interested in dirt. They were interested in gathering things that were real. And I'm not saying they're perfect and I'm not. I don't know them. But what the evidence showed me was that these people are trying to find the truth and they're not interested in anti Mormon stuff. And that's not the narrative that the church was giving me. So. So I started just struggling through this information for, you know, month after month after month as I tried to just make sense of what, what I. What I was going to do, like how I was gonna, you know, tell people. Could I remain active in this church? Could I find truth in it? I remember spending. I think I spent like 14, 15 hours one week clearing snow around the church because it was my church week. It was my. My week to do the snow removal duties. And it snowed a lot. And I had a podcast in my ear, and whoever was speaking at that moment said, here's the questions you ask yourself. Do you want to know the truth about the church? So if the church wasn't true, would you want to know? If you can't answer that question, yes, then you can stop there. And if you say, yes, if it's not true, I want to know, move on, then and say, you know, would you be willing to look into that? You know, and. And I said. I said, that's. That's it. Like, I need to. I need to know, I need to do this. Yes, I am willing to do that. And I have to look at this objectively as an outsider. And so when every single person says. And when Elder Corbridge gives his talk and says, you know, that you need to look at this, I don't remember if it was in this talk where he says, you need to look at it through the eyes of faith. Right? You need to. I heard that so many times, like, look at this through the eyes of faith. And it began to feel really manipulative to me. Because we don't tell people to look at anything through the eyes of, you know, through a jaded perspective without recognizing that we're probably manipulating them. We don't do that in other areas. It's like, I want you to read this, but I want you to look at it, like, very positively. Like, I want you to. Whatever it is, like, I want you to love this. When you read it, like, we're influencing them. It's very obvious that we're doing that. And that is no way to get to an objective opinion about something. And so that's what I did. I started objectively looking at things. And as I put one after another after another on the table, as I piled all of these issues and just stepped back and looked at it, I came to the conclusion that either God wanted the church to look like it wasn't true, or it wasn't true. This is kind of where my mind was at the moment. It was like 99% of the data that I've collected. The preponderance of evidence stacked on the table points against validity. Now, could it still be true? Yeah, but why would all this evidence stacked on the table point away from validity? Why would God want to hide that and make it harder?

John Dehlin [01:59:14] And that's kind of the trickster God apologetic defense that God needs to be tricky and even deceptive, because it's a test. Of course, none of us know if God exists for sure, let alone the mind and will of God. But that's what people offer, right?

Coy Johnston [01:59:33] And if you start to critically think about things like church and God, and I'm not an atheist, but if you try to critically think about the caricature that we've made of God is that he has to be a trickster or he has to be a real deadbeat God, because the way we present him as that if we get enough people together and pray together, or if we, as I recently heard, if we pray in a certain space, like in the church or in the temple, that God values those prayers more, that he answers prayers when they're given xyz. And if you logically follow that train of thought that leads to the fact that God is sitting up there withholding his blessings, withholding his love, withholding his answers until you get enough people or enough, you know, or you're in the right place. And then he finally says, okay, I'll do it. I'll do it. I'll answer you for, you know, people who are gathering our ward together for a ward fast. It's like we're going to fast together for the health of so and so. And I started critically thinking that and saying, hold on a minute. So if you pray to God for your loved one to be healed, he's not going to answer that. But if you get the whole ward to pray together and to fast together, and he is going to answer that, that means that he wouldn't have done it unless you get enough people. So either he's withholding his blessings and he's not actually the kind of a caricature of a God that we've made, or we've got this whole thing wrong, like, we're doing it wrong. And, you know, then you go back to Brit Hartley, who's gonna help us understand that these type of things are. They're for us. We do it for us. It serves our ego. It serves our need to feel good. I was part of that, and that's fine. I was part of a fast. I was part of a group prayer, and that serves us. But my brain was wanting to know, is God really blessing, and is he really holding out on blessing unless we get enough people? And I see this view of God that we've made of all of a child drowning out in the backyard. And God is over there just chilling on the couch. And we get. One kid runs in. Dad, you know, come help. Come help our, you know, our siblings drowning. And he's. He's like, dad, you know, I heard you. You know, and he's drowning, dad, please. Another sibling comes in. Dad, come on, help him. He's drowning. And finally, four kids come in. And like, dad, like so and so's drowning in the backyard. Little Jimmy, let's help him out. Let's get him. And he's like, all right, since four of you came in and asked me, I'll do it. I'll come and help you. Guys, I mean, this is the caricature that we've logically created in a God

Stepping Back and Navigating Church Attendance

John Dehlin [02:02:16] who,

Coy Johnston [02:02:19] when we say things like, you know, that you need to go to the temple to pray to get answers, that you need to fast and get a whole ward to fast or a whole stake to fast to move the hand of God. And I started critically thinking this, you know, the plan of salvation and God, and it really deconstructed everything for me. So, yeah, I hit rock bottom.

John Dehlin [02:02:47] Yeah. Because now it's not just Bible, now it's not just Mormon theology. Then it's not just Christianity, it's God. Him, himself.

Coy Johnston [02:02:57] Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:02:58] And now you're how old?

Coy Johnston [02:03:02] I don't know, 40? Around early 40s.

John Dehlin [02:03:05] So now you're in your early 40s, five kids, temple, marriage, given your whole life to this thing, and it's all fallen to the ground. I mean, naked is one way to describe it. Right. You thought you had armor on. Turns out you're naked.

Coy Johnston [02:03:22] Right, right. And very vulnerable. And I don't know what I believe in. And I realized that I really needed to deconstruct everything so that I could rebuild based on truth. I wanted to rebuild my testimony based on true information. I didn't want to build my testimony on wrong information about the first vision. I don't want to tell promoting stories about, you know, things that we've now learned aren't true. You know, like perhaps, you know, the Sweetwater rescue. You know, Benjamin park talks about that story recently. You know, those are. Those are inspirational stories that we told about the three boys who go in the water and. And saved the lives of all these people, and only to find out that maybe that never happened. And there are countless versions of these stories that built my testimony, that I built my testimony on that either weren't true or they were very embellished. And I'm not interested in building a testimony on that. And so I decided I was going to go to my bishop and ask that I need to be released and need some time from. Just from my callings. I needed some space from the church.

John Dehlin [02:04:32] I wasn't gonna stop going, remind us the callings.

Coy Johnston [02:04:35] So I was ward mission leader. I had served in the young men's in that ward as well, but I think I was ward mission leader at the time, which is kind of ironic because I was, you know, supposed to be the. The missionary, but I'm actually needing to step away a little bit. So I. I called him up, I said, can we meet this week? I want to come chat with you. And and bless his heart, he did. He was doing the best he can. All these, all these people in my life, I, I recognize are just doing the best they can with what they have and what they know. But how do you handle a guy like that, like, like me that comes in there and says let's talk about something and then just drops this bomb on him like, like coming from where I was as being such a, a missionary minded person that he was referring to as a pillar in our ward. And then I come in and say I need some space, I need to take a step back. And he says, well, what's going on? I found out some things and I need to work it out. I need to find out if this is true. And he says, well, what did you find out?

John Dehlin [02:05:42] This is where it can get very perilous because church, the most important thing to realize when you're in this situation, so you're in your ward, you used to be the golden child and then all of a sudden you don't believe anymore and you want to be honest because you need to get released or you can't accept something. Sometimes you just want to disappear. But the church won't let you just disappear. You have to have a calling. And that's how they or temple recommend or pay your tithing. They've got all these flags that trigger alarm. So you can't just disappear like in the Catholic Church or in a Protestant church, you just attend and leave and nobody knows or cares what you believe. But in this situation, in an orthodox Mormon ward, you can't hide. So that forces you into this either to lie and to die inside or into confrontation where you have to ask for a change. And then your leader wants to know why in my experience is what's going on there is he wants to assess the threat. He wants to assess whether you are going to be a cancer who spreads your disbelief virus to other members of the ward and stake. So when he's asking you tell me more, tell me more. It's, I think a, I mean it could, I don't want to project because it could be he just cares about you and wants to help you. But in my experience, if it's half that, that's generous, but it's half threat assessment. What do you think it was or do you know or can you know?

Coy Johnston [02:07:30] Well, I think that does happen a lot. And I think in his case he was completely unprepared for what I was bringing. And I think he was trying to assess like how bad is this? I think a lot of times it's like, definitely damage control. And it definitely became that way. And because as I started to tell him things, you know, I said, I found out that. I found out that Joseph Smith may have been. Was. Was married to 14 year olds. I found out that he was polygamous. This is how I presented it to him. You know, I found out that he was a polygamist and that he did polyandry, you know, and I. And that he married. I mean, I just started dropping a couple bombs. Like, I found out that he may have been involved in the murder of. Or the murder attempts of people, you know, like Governor Boggs, you know, like through Porter Rockwell. Like, I found out that he may have done some of these things. This is what I told him at the time, because that was on my mind was I was learning the Rock in the Hat. I was learning about the dishonesty, about how we present the transition to Brigham

John Dehlin [02:08:44] Young, the succession crisis.

Coy Johnston [02:08:46] The succession crisis. And I'm just like, I'm seeing so many problems. There's so many holes in this foundation that I needed to work it out. And I said, I can't tell you in one meeting all the things that I've been reading and studying for months and months, and it's just going to sound like bad things to you. And he obviously had a really big response, triggered response. And he's just like, man, what you've been telling me is it's a load of garbage.

John Dehlin [02:09:25] Oh my gosh.

Coy Johnston [02:09:26] I mean, he's so.

John Dehlin [02:09:27] He's saying it's not. He's just. I haven't even learned this stuff. I have. I've spent zero time investigating this stuff, which I want to talk to you about. But he's saying, without having ever looked into any of this, it's all a bunch of garbage.

Coy Johnston [02:09:40] Right, right.

John Dehlin [02:09:40] Which means you're evil or something.

Coy Johnston [02:09:42] Yeah, I mean, obviously I was into anti Mormon literature. This is what we do, like when we're. This is where Stephen Hassan comes in. Later in my journey is realizing that. But when we are an organization that controls and has high demand, we control the information and we identify that outside information as bad and dangerous and evil. And that's exactly what was happening as I was being a victim of a high demand religion who was at least like a cult in many ways. So Stephen Hassan, who's our cult expert, cult characteristics. Yes, if we want to put it lightly, that I was experiencing that. Right. Like that. This material and by the way, the church material that I was using, I mean, it was from the church because I was getting most of my material from the church. But gospel topics, he didn't know that

John Dehlin [02:10:38] Joseph Smith papers project, things like that.

Coy Johnston [02:10:41] Yeah. And he thought I was getting it from anti Mormon stuff. So, you know, he's like, this is garbage. He says you're, he says you're, you're in the midst of darkness. Like you let go of the iron rod. You know, as the analogy from the scriptures go, you're walking in the midst of darkness. Now you're in Satan's control. You know, you need some help and give me your temple recommend. And I'm sending you up the chain because this is apostasy. You're going to go see this take president. And I told him, no. I said, I'm not giving you my temple recommend.

John Dehlin [02:11:16] Whoa.

Coy Johnston [02:11:18] I said, you've got this wrong. And he was a friend of mine, okay. Like, I felt like I had a relationship with him that we could, could, we could talk at this level. And I said, no, you've misunderstood. I'm not in a midst of darkness. I'm not under Satan's grasp. I said, I have never in my life worked so hard to understand God. I am trying harder than. And I confidently said this. I said, I'm trying harder than anyone in this congregation right now to understand God and to build a relationship with God. Like, no reservation about that. I said, I am not doing something evil. And he said, well, all right, we'll go talk to the stake president and we'll see. So this meeting was like four hours.

John Dehlin [02:12:05] Okay, wait, the one with the stake president?

Coy Johnston [02:12:07] With the bishop.

John Dehlin [02:12:08] With the bishop. Okay, can I just say one thing really quick before we move on? And I want you to continue, but this very much parallels what I experienced in 2001. But that's 25 years ago. And then you could even cut the church slack for between 2001 and, let's say 2013, when the gospel topics essays finally come out. It's like, fine. It took the church. They had to internally respond to the Internet and come up with their answers and decide to come clean about the history and then release the gospel topics essays. And then he could go, okay, I'll cut church a little more slack. Because maybe from 213 to 2:17, okay, they needed to deploy them and train people and get the word out and experiment with stuff. But by like 2020, there's no excuse for bishops and stake presidents to have literally no idea what you're talking about. Never read the gospel. Didn't even probably know the gospel topics Essays were there. Right? Right.

Coy Johnston [02:13:12] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:13:13] Let alone hadn't read them, let alone had received no training on how to deal with you. So you're confronting the same type of bishop and stake president who's gonna demonize you and threaten your membership as I did 25 years previous or 20 years previous. And there's no excuse for that, except there's an obvious reason for that. Do you wanna say why?

Coy Johnston [02:13:35] Or I. I think it's to not shed light on it.

John Dehlin [02:13:39] Why doesn't. I'll just ask you flatly, why hasn't the Mormon Church trained its bishops and stake presidents on the truthful history and on how to deal with their congregational members in faith crisis?

Coy Johnston [02:13:54] I think the easy answer is because that's going to cause harm. People are going to lose.

John Dehlin [02:13:58] How so?

Coy Johnston [02:13:58] People will leave.

John Dehlin [02:13:59] Who will.

Coy Johnston [02:14:00] The bishops will leave.

John Dehlin [02:14:01] Stake presidents. Right.

Coy Johnston [02:14:03] I think at the base level, that is it. It's fear that once you tell people the truth, and I'm not. This isn't for me because there's been many people like Patrick Mason, I think, of his level, let's just say, who have said the same thing. Okay, so it's this. We recognize when you put this information out there, it will cause harm. And I don't want to misquote Patrick Mason on that because I think he said something to that effect. But they are trying to do stuff. They're trying to do it in a controlled way, which I'll talk about in a minute, but that they're putting out information to help bishops, to help stakes teach people answers to gospel questions. They have a class now, an institute class, that's about that. It's not sufficient. They put Saints out. It's not sufficient. They're doing things little by little and slowly turning up the furnace on bringing out the truth. And it's helping and it's good, but it's not sufficient. Because still. And Saints, I think Saints was out, like the first book of Saints was out when I probably went to the bishop and he was just starting to read it because after we met, he ended up. He ended up reading Saints and said. He said, wow, a lot of the things I'm reading here are really. Are really challenging. I said, imagine that. That is the most whitewashed version of that story that you just read. Because if you want to pick any of those stories, I will tell you 10 steps deeper how disturbing it actually is. And he's like, well, I had a really hard time with that, know. So, yeah, the easy answer is that the church is trying to do damage Control. Now, for all that years where they controlled the narrative so hard and when Elder Snow, I think, became the. Well, you know, in, in the recent years when the historians have been trying to do a little less of damage or a little less of control in the narrative and more damage control, you're seeing more information coming out in a controlled way, which I'm grateful for.

John Dehlin [02:16:06] There's just been so much carnage along the way of depression and anxiety and excommunications and broken marriages. And from the church's standpoint, people leaving the church because they're treated like you and I were treated.

Coy Johnston [02:16:20] Yeah. And to this day, people still think that my journey is based on evil information.

John Dehlin [02:16:28] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [02:16:28] You know, and that's, you know, whatever they believe about me and my journey, I don't want other people to have to go through that. Now. We need to be better than that. We need to be better at how we treat people as they do their journey, especially when they're truth seeking, which is what I was taught in the church.

John Dehlin [02:16:46] So to just wrap this little rabbit hole. It took us on the church top. Church leaders know there's a problem here, but they don't know the answer because they don't want to accelerate the disaffection of their bishops and stake presidents. Because imagine how horrible that would be for the church. When all the bishops and stake presidents start leaving in droves, that'll be an exponential catastrophe. So we're stuck in this situation where people who question and lose their faith have conflict with their bishops and stake presidents. So back to you. So you have a four hour meeting with your bishop.

Coy Johnston [02:17:25] Yeah. So just to wrap up that part of the story, I.

John Dehlin [02:17:28] You don't have to rush it either.

Coy Johnston [02:17:30] No, I just, I drove. I got in my car and I drove home and just bawled. I lost it. And I mean, you know, like the person that I was supposed to go to for my hope. And I mean, that. That was just such a hopeless moment. And I know so many people have been there. And I just remember, like, driving. Of course I'm looking at the road, but I'm looking at the heavens. Just like God, where are you? And I remember, like almost in the words of Joseph Smith, like, oh, God, where art thou? Where's the pavilion that covers thy hiding place? You know, how long will you allow your servant, little old me coy, to suffer like this in my own little way, trying to know you? And my family was out of town, so I was alone. And I called up my good friend who later became bishop, and he Said, why don't you come over and let's talk? And he's a very strong, you know, TBM and true blue Mormon. And he sat with me. So I went over there the next day and he sat with me for a few hours and just listened and was just amazing. He doesn't agree with my perspective. He doesn't dive into these things, but he was just so loving and kind and supportive and just said, yeah, this is really hard. I'm really sorry. I'm really sorry that you went through that and expressed love for me and support, while at the same time not. Didn't need to agree with me, didn't need to validate anything I was saying, you know, what an amazing experience that was. And really what I needed in that moment to have a friend like that. He later became bishop and, you know, probably in his own way, was very supportive to many of the people in their faith journeys as they came to him, you know, because these things are so challenging. I know that my friend who was the bishop that sat with me for four hours, did everything he could based on what he knew, to the best of his ability, dropped this bomb on him that his main mission leader, man is now questioning things.

John Dehlin [02:19:58] Because if you lead the church as former All Star award mission leader, that's devastating to your ward. He's just afraid it's going to destroy the ward.

Coy Johnston [02:20:07] Yeah, there would be some problems that would, you know, with people I had brought into the ward or people that were looking to me as what he said I was a pillar. And so the next Sunday, he got up and said, we're changing sacrament meeting. We had these speakers planned and we're going to have a different sacrament meeting today. We're going to have the bishopric speak. Because I met with them on Wednesday. You know, it was like after mutual. And then so Sunday they spoke about the mist of darkness. And so each one of them gave a talk. And it was the entire sacrament, which I kind of feel was a little directed my direction. And I mean, I felt a lot of love from them because they were doing this out of love, but a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of injustice. And, you know, I honestly just felt like, why would you do this? Like, why?

John Dehlin [02:21:26] So you're basically feeling singled out and embarrassed or shamed, although the ward probably didn't know.

Coy Johnston [02:21:33] They didn't know.

John Dehlin [02:21:34] Yeah, they.

Coy Johnston [02:21:36] They would later, but they're like, why would you put all this effort in? I know it was because they were so worried about me, you know, and then. And that he felt this Desperation to save my soul. And I'm really grateful that they did that effort. I just don't know that it was the right choice. But anyhow, fast forward to the next week. And he called me and he said, hey, can you come and chat with me before church? And I went a half an hour early, and he brought me into his office and he said, hey, I just, I want to apologize to you. He said, I called my buddy that works in Salt Lake at the church history department, and I brought up the things you said, and he told me those are all true.

John Dehlin [02:22:24] How'd you feel and what'd you say?

Coy Johnston [02:22:27] I mean, he was so emotional, and he gave me a hug, and he's like, I'm just so sorry.

John Dehlin [02:22:32] Dang.

Coy Johnston [02:22:34] I mean, I obviously had every emotion in the world, like a little validation, a lot of sadness. And we kind of embraced and shed some tears. And I said, I said, buddy, I forgive you. Like, I'm not mad at you. Like, I know that you're doing the best you can. Like, we're good. And then he went and did sacrament. So after I met with my good friend, I felt a little bit more supported. And, you know, I had a meeting coming up with the stake president. I wasn't sure what to expect. But when I went to my first meeting with him, I think he asked me right out, right off the bat, he said, so, you know, what's this all about? You know, what's going on? And I said, I'm going on a faith, you know, a faith journey. I'm trying to understand what is true, and I need to know the truth. And it wasn't. But just a couple minutes into our meeting that he says, oh, you know, you're not apostate. You're just searching. And he's like, yeah, I thought the report to me was that you were going apostate. You were on some evil pathway. He's like, no, I, I, I see. And he was just amazing.

John Dehlin [02:24:07] Just so supportive.

Coy Johnston [02:24:09] Just loving.

John Dehlin [02:24:10] Dang.

Coy Johnston [02:24:12] Kind and understanding. He said, tell, just tell me about this. This, you know. Now, he was that kind of a person. He was just such a wise and understanding person. You can't but love the guy. His name was Jacob Lonsdale. And I don't mind mentioning his name. What's that?

John Dehlin [02:24:28] You don't mind using his name?

Coy Johnston [02:24:29] I don't mind using his name because we need more leaders, like, and I'm not saying that my other leaders are bad, but he was prepared and he was such a good person already that it came pretty Naturally to just be loving and supporting and really massively helpful for me and my wife. And so my first meeting with him was just me. And I said, I'm not following some evil path I have no desire to do. I have no new sins, same ones I've always had. I want to know God. I want to really understand what is true. And I need to do this. And I need to go to the temple to do this. So if you want to take away my temple recommend, it's not going to help me get answers. Like, I need to go there. I need to be in the temple. And he said, yeah, you're good, you're fine. You know, go and, go and do your thing. He, he said, why don't we do this? Why don't we. And I. Somehow it came up that I was like in the middle of the CES letter or something or that I had read it.

John Dehlin [02:25:31] It.

Coy Johnston [02:25:32] He said, why don't, why don't we read that together?

John Dehlin [02:25:34] Whoa.

Coy Johnston [02:25:35] Yeah. And. And then we'll talk. And so, so I finally decided I was going to tell my wife about it and the journey, because she didn't know yet. And, and I, I remember sitting down with her and just saying, I need to talk to you about this. And I'm not good at these type of things. I mean, who's prepared for this type of thing? And I said, I learned that. And I just vomited all the information. Too much information. Just Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, blacks in the priesthood, polygamy, everything. Book of Abraham, Book of Abraham. And I said, I don't know what is true right now, but I know that it's not what I thought was true. And I need to figure this out. And you know, from countless stories how that landed on her, it was just an overload and fear and everything. And she was just, I mean, how could she respond to the way I presented it? I obviously did a very poor job.

John Dehlin [02:26:44] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [02:26:46] And, and she responded in the only way she knew how, which was like, like defensiveness and fear. Like, are you leaving the church? Like, are you. So what are you doing? You know, she needed answers. I didn't have any answers. So this started what became many years of really difficult navigation of basically a mixed faith marriage because I was not orthodox anymore. I needed some time to figure it out. And she was still very. Just, you know, I know we hate the term Molly Mormon, but. But if there was a Molly Moorman action figure, it would look like my wife, you know, she was, she was just that authentically good. And this was a Big deal, you know. So, yeah, that was. And I don't want to touch too much on the journey in my marriage, but because we're still working it out, I hear seven years later, it's. It's not. Not something that we have fully completed our journey on because we were so in, we were so orthodox, we were so dogmatic, we were so black and white. And now I dropped this bomb on my wife that I'm. That I'm searching and I might need to step away from the church. I might not believe in it anymore. So that was really miserable. So then the next Sunday, they were going to release me from church, from my calling. And I don't tell this because I'm trying to brag, I'm not trying to say that I'm so amazing or good, but. The amount of perfectionism and effort and how TBM I was before all this is demonstrated in the moment that the counselor got up to release me from my calling. And it probably took him three minutes to get through saying the words of how he wanted to release me, because he was just sobbing. You know, he did his callings, whoever he's going to call. And then he said, and we're going to release Brother Johnston. And he just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. And I mean, I was feeling that. I don't know if anybody in the ward knew why he was feeling that way, but I believe that, you know, his sense of. I mean, he was praising the amount of work I had done as a mission leader. And just like he said in his words, and I don't agree with this, but in his words, like, no better missionary has ever set foot in Wisconsin. He's like, you've done more for the missionary efforts of Wisconsin than any prior missionary. This is his opinion. Right? And obviously it's not true, but that's the kind of effect that it had on him to then be releasing this guy who's coming from being so strong and so in to now maybe being in this midst of darkness, in his opinion. And it was devastating. And yeah, that hit kind of really strongly for me and my wife and what a loss that was feeling like to all those people. So then we went to meet with

Conflict With the Bishop and Stake President

John Dehlin [02:30:23] the state president, and I'll just say you're being humble, but with scrupulosity, you're going to be giving the church your all. So it would make sense that you were the best ward mission leader or whatever stake mission leader that had ever been. And the. And that's why your bishop freaked out so much, because you were that member who was a in it to win it. And so that's why it's going to be very impactful to have ward members find out you're struggling.

Coy Johnston [02:30:55] Right.

John Dehlin [02:30:55] So it's just catch 22, where a faith crisis, like in Judaism, you hear that, like some branches of Judaism have a culture of debate and criticism and learning. Like, that's like, built into the culture. And you fight and you disagree and you argue, but you still show up and perform the ritual. In mormonism, still in 2026. But doubt and questioning is viewed like a virus that infects everyone. Because from Jeff Strong and others, we're learning that over a million people, a million Mormons raised Mormon in the United States over the past 25 years have left the church. A million who were raised Mormon. Less than half of the people who were raised Mormon who are alive in the United States have left the church. So the church is. The leaders are just. They don't know what to do. It's viewed as a virus. And so everyone's going to be freaking out and scared and sad and terrified. Except apparently you're stake president.

Coy Johnston [02:32:04] Well, yeah. I mean, some are more prepared to handle it than others. Right. But to your point, why can't we be like that? You know, my wife has often brought that up. Like, why can't we be more like the Jewish faith and be able to find connection and strength in debating and, you know, hashing things out? I think it makes us stronger when we can do that, when we can tolerate disagreement and. But that's not what happens in our congregations. I've been amazed at how many times I've sat in a congregation full of very accomplished and very smart humans who talk about bringing cookies to their neighbors and how to forgive a friend who's offended you. And I'm not saying those are bad things, but that's the extent of a lesson for an hour is that we talk about how we need to read our scriptures more and pray more, and these are, like, the most basic primary answers. And I sit there and I look around at these amazing, you know, leaders of organizations, accomplished people, and the best we can bring to this right now is that type of a discussion. And if somebody tries to bring up something that's controversial, it's shot down. I did that. I remember in 2015 when a brother in our congregation said, I have a question about this policy that the church just came out with, which I knew nothing personally about at the time, and said, yeah, they have this policy that children can't get baptized if their parents are gay. And I identified that right away as trouble. And I shot him down and I stopped him right in his tracks. And I said, you know, God knows what he's doing. God knows exactly what's going to happen. We don't need to worry about it. There's a reason. And I remember, like, looking a little bit at that gentleman and feeling like he felt, you know, shut up by me. And no doubt I had done to him the thing that I would later have done to me time and time again. And I really regret that I did that. But that's, that's our wiring. We don't want controversy, we don't want, want any thought that's not right along the narrative, the correlated path. And of course, I come to find out later all about the 2015 and 2018 policies and in my own journey have been having a lot of changes and regrets about how I dealt with that, you know, Prop 8 and all that, and realizing. And as I meet more. This is something that happens as you meet humans, as you meet people and hear their stories and you see their faces, including what you do here on this work. John, as you put a face with a journey, as you put a face with a story, everything can change. And as I met so many individuals who were walking down the path of, you know, homosexuality, same sex attraction, and met with them and got to know them and cried with them about their pathway, I've obviously understood much better now and changed. And I'm really sad of how I treated that brother in 2015, you know, because he had a good concern, one that I now have.

John Dehlin [02:35:47] Have. Well, what Maya Angelou and Oprah always like to say is when you know better, you do better.

Coy Johnston [02:35:54] Yeah, that's true. And I hope that we all are learning so that we can keep knowing better. Right? Like all of this is to help people to know better. So my wife and I went to meet with the Stake president together next. She wanted to go. And he was so kind and gracious to us. He was patient. And he said, I mean, he asked a very serious question. He said, how do you feel about this? You know, to my wife, do you want to stay married? Which is an odd question to ask, but I guess it comes up a lot, right? Like, and she's like, I think so, you know, I want to work it out. He said, I read the CES letter and I felt so much despair. And he was very overtaken by emotion. And he said, I understand the darkness that you felt in this pathway. And he said, I may not come to the same conclusions as you, but I understand that journey that you've been on. And golly, I mean, the kind of validation and hope and love that I felt in that moment and the reassurance that my wife got that this is okay, like that darkness is real, that cognitive dissonance. He didn't use that word because I don't think he identified that. But for the win, I mean, he did such an amazing job. And he said, you know, you keep. Keep working this out.

John Dehlin [02:37:36] So.

Coy Johnston [02:37:38] But he wanted to send me materials. Of course, they all did. So they send me talk after talk after talk after talk. And I always read and listen to anything people send me. So Corbridge Talk. I can't count how many times the elder Corbridge talk has been sent my way, which is the. Called Stand Forever.

John Dehlin [02:37:56] Is it.

Coy Johnston [02:37:57] I don't know, it's the one that. But talks about the core truths and then all the other ones that are underneath it that are not important. And I can't count how many times somebody sent me that talk said, just focus on the core truths. And I said, but whether or not Brigham Young or whether or not Joseph Smith was XYZ is part of the foundation of the core truths. So whether Joseph Smith was a prophet or not is hugely impacted by whether or not he was honest, whether he was a fraud. I mean, like, so you can't divorce the core truths from the secondary truths. And I couldn't engage in that debate with people because they don't hear it the same way. But anyhow, yeah, talk after talk after talk and don't read anything but the Book of Mormon for the next two weeks. I did that exercise like, I don't know, a dozen times. You know, just read the Book of Mormon. I would say, you know, I've done this, I've done that my whole life, actually. But like, I'll do it again and then I'll listen to the conference talks, only conference talks for the next two weeks. I mean, how many times this come up? Unfortunately, it didn't change my concerns, so. So I did the. The last year of the Lamb of God while I was in my faith crisis, not knowing that many of the Mormons that were participating with doing their own faith crisis at the time.

John Dehlin [02:39:27] No. Really?

Coy Johnston [02:39:28] Yeah. And we didn't know how.

John Dehlin [02:39:30] Why, what was in the air.

Coy Johnston [02:39:33] I think it was just the time. And Mormon stories maybe.

John Dehlin [02:39:37] Well, ironically, the exclusion policy in 2015 and then the reversal in 2019, which was orchestrated by Dallin H. Oaks, current prophet, and Russell M. Nelson, the previous prophet. I believe that that's caused more people to leave the church than any other single thing in the past 150 years. Like maybe not the Kirtland bank scandal percentage wise, but few things have taken more people out. They want to blame me or the CES letter or whatever. They want to blame Alyssa Grenfell, Don H. Oaks and Russell Nelson need to look in the mirror because they've taken way more people out than me. And so that's probably affecting a lot of these people.

Coy Johnston [02:40:31] It was because that was the timing of it. And here's the hard part is if you go back and you look at how that went down, which I know you have, but most people haven't, and realize how it was presented in 2015 by President Monson and those who were around, and then how it was presented and after the reversal, the narrative changed and they're contradictory. And I brought that up to my leaders and I said, so which one is it? Was it that he was sitting in a meeting and had a revelation?

John Dehlin [02:41:05] Nelson.

Coy Johnston [02:41:07] Right, right, right. Or was it because there's at least two to three different versions of that that we're told in the Hawaii Talk. And I sat there and said, is this live action dishonesty or is there just a misunderstanding? I wanted to be graceful. Maybe there's just I forgot. Or is this using God as the ultimate unimpeachable power behind your. And I don't know the answer to that, but it doesn't have a good answer that would be favorable.

John Dehlin [02:41:45] No. And the way the church chose to deal with it was to just convey to the membership it was revelation in 2015 when God implemented it through the prophet and it was revelation in 2019 when God took it away.

Coy Johnston [02:41:59] Right.

John Dehlin [02:42:00] And that's Orwellian to me. I mean, that's right. That's culty. Because that makes no sense, especially when tens of thousands of people or more left the church over it. People died over it. You don't just say you take responsibility if you've got even a teeny bit of a conscience and a logical thinking brain. But Oaks is on the record saying, we neither offer nor give apologies. And again, the brethren want to protect the membership's faith and belief that they're talking to God. So they're going to just say, yep, God's doing this every step of the way, instead of actually saying we made a mistake and taking responsibility because they don't want people to leave the church and lose their faith that they're called by God and led By God.

Coy Johnston [02:42:47] That's a pattern that is practiced at every level. Yeah, right. Like in, in your. I see a letter come out from the local ward stake and it's, you know, we've been praying and God has revealed. This is the new theme, the new everything has the stamp of God on it. How could you ever disagree with that? You know, whether, whether he's really involved then or not, that is the ultimate that control is to say that God told you that. And I'm not here to say whether God is or isn't telling them that, but I'm saying that in many cases where logic points in a different direction, it begs us to ask, it begs us to consider, is God really behind all of this? You know, one of those things was for me was the logic of the race ban and polygamy, which I knew about my whole life, but I didn't know any of the details of it. And the more I looked and the more I looked, it got uglier and uglier. And I started to say, now hold on a minute, what was the purpose of the restoration? The reason that Joseph, according to at least one of the records, went to the grove to pray was to find out which church was true and he was told that none of them were true and then this church would be restored correctly. The whole point of the restoration, as I was raised, was to make it right. And then instantly we were back on the wrong path. We, you know, many people have admitted, even faithful high ranking people in the church have admitted that polygamy was probably now not church leaders, but you know, people who have been on your show, people who have, they've admitted that polygamy was probably a mistake and the church has not done that. But if polygamy is a mistake, that's huge because that means Joseph started right off making mistakes again. And with the ban for blacks in the priesthood, again, we're back on the wrong path again in major ways. So that up until 1978, an entire race of people could not even get access to the temple. And if that was a mistake, then what makes us any better than any other church? We're just another group of people doing our best and messing it up. And so I don't think that the church could come out and say it was a mistake without massive implications. Definitely I don't think they could come out and say that polygamy was a mistake without major exodus, because we all could see that and say, well then what makes us any different? If you can preach that it is a solid Doctrine. Like, how many times did Brigham say, this is the doctrine of the church, that Adam is God, this is the doctrine. And you can. I mean, he would even like, like, defy you. Like, you can challenge me on this. Like, this is the doctrine that blacks will never receive the priesthood until after this world. And we just kind of ignore those things now because if we go back and say that he was wrong, the implications there is that we just did the same thing every other church did. We started a church under the guise that it would be the right one and correct, and then we just started messing things up. We followed philosophies of men mingled with scripture. If they admit that. And so the implications are too, too big. I don't think it. So I recognized that as I looked from the outside in that if there's truth to be found in this, I don't know where it is and what it is, but it is not what I thought it was. So we did the final year of the Lamb of God while I was there. So, yeah, I was like, I'm gonna do one more of these Lamb of God concerts because it's just so really rewarding, even though my faith is, like, really on the rocks and I don't know where I'm at. So I contacted the. The who's the director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. That was Otley, or is it Matt

John Dehlin [02:47:15] Mac Mac, Wilbur Wilberg.

Coy Johnston [02:47:17] I contacted them and got their version of I Believe in Christ. And I said, can we do that as part of our thing? And so I directed it that year. And so I was the conductor. And at the end of it, I had the choir, you know, a big choir and orchestra, and then the entire congregation that was in the auditorium seeing I Believe in Christ. And so you've got 1300 non Mormons singing this song. And I was at the moment like, I do believe in Christ, but I don't know what I believe. And so I turn, you know, I get the first verse is the choir and the orchestra doing it, and then I turn and I invite them to sing the rest of it. And there are just people everywhere just bawling. And we had the projectors, the words, because it's really simple, you know, they don't have to know it.

John Dehlin [02:48:08] It.

Coy Johnston [02:48:09] And I mean, it was very moving for everyone. But me and these people that are unknown to me in my group are just like, having so many mixed emotions. I don't know if I'm a fraud right now. I don't know if I believe in all these things. Or not. We're all crying, and it's just so moving. And again, doing so much good for bringing people together and nobody even knowing that. I'm, like, in shambles inside. So that was the last year we did that. We did a few different nights, you know, and filled up like this big auditorium for our community. This is kind of a big deal. It was really neat, really brought our community together. They ended up continuing to do that without me later. Just so the local choir did this. So, you know, doing this LDS production without any Mormons involved, which is kind of fun. But that last part of Wisconsin, before we ended up moving, I did end up taking a job in Arizona. So I was kind of running away from my calling there, I guess. And they wouldn't have given it to me anymore after he found out where I was, obviously, so. So he says, hey, Coy, how would you feel about. So before I left, the bishop says, hey, Coy, how'd you feel about bearing your testimony or whatever you can bear, you know, in church before you leave? Because so many people have, you know, as his words were, so many people have looked up to you, you know, in this area. So I got up and I said, you know, the more and more I live and learn, the less I feel like I actually know. And I said, I don't know what I know anymore, but I believe. I believe in Jesus. I have hope in his reality. And I kind of just said that. I didn't say the words I know. And I said, amen. And I sat down. And that testimony caused so much trouble for me and some of the people around me because they. They were so upset that I couldn't say, I know. You know, that's our culture, right, that we. We insist that people know. And in reality, none of them actually know. What they're trying to say is, I'm convicted. I strongly believe I'm convicted. I'm. I'm convinced. But it goes against our scriptures to say I know. Because the scriptures say we need to have faith.

John Dehlin [02:50:46] Faith.

Coy Johnston [02:50:47] And to have faith is not to know. It's not to have a perfect knowledge of things. So even in our scriptures, we don't want people to know if the gospel is true, because then you don't need faith anymore. And so we do these weird pharisaical things in our church where we don't even recognize what we're doing. We just do them. But I got the silent treatment from many people around me because of that. So one of my friends who was in that ward, he got up the next week and bore his testimony. Because it wasn't testimony meeting. It was just a meeting. He went up the next week and he said, I want to share a testimony with you about my beliefs. And just as a nod to me, he just bore his testimony about. He just said, I believe. I believe in Jesus. I believe in whatever, you know, and sat down. Just kind of as a nice nod to me, that friend of mine is no longer in the church either. And neither is our previous bishop that was in that ward.

John Dehlin [02:51:47] Oh, wow.

Coy Johnston [02:51:48] A lot of people have sensed nothing to do with me.

John Dehlin [02:51:51] You sure?

Coy Johnston [02:51:52] Yeah, yeah. Because they didn't know. I didn't talk to any of them about my journey.

John Dehlin [02:51:55] Oh, okay.

Coy Johnston [02:51:56] But they had their own journey at that time or after and have since kind of walked away.

John Dehlin [02:52:01] It's an epidemic, really.

Coy Johnston [02:52:03] It really. Yeah. So. But each one, when we kind of talk about it, it's like the same things where.

John Dehlin [02:52:09] No, your story's sounding almost identical to mine, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Coy Johnston [02:52:16] And a lot of it. So Jeff Strong's book, you know, the torn book, is trying to educate leaders to say, like, we don't have to expedite their leaving, you know, we don't have to, like, chase them out. Let's do better. Let's support them so that when they come to you and they say that they're having, you know, this mental health duress and depression, that we could do better, that we could let them work it out while they're here. I think that's part of his goal. Bridges is one of my favorite books with David Osler. He's been on your show, and I mean, they're trying to just say, hey, let's just help out. It's here, it's happening. We can't pretend it's not happening anymore. Let's help them out while they're here.

John Dehlin [02:52:58] Here.

Coy Johnston [02:53:00] So I think that's kind of pretty much everything that I was Wanted to talk about from Wisconsin, I think. So we moved out to Arizona. And then, yeah, Covid hit right away. We moved, like, right before the initial Covid case came out. So I was going to be working in the local hospital there in show Low. And so I started working as an inpatient doctor. And my plan was to get out and do a clinic at some point. But, yeah, Covid hit that county in that area extremely hard. We were right there by the Navajo reservation and the Apache reservation, and those two areas were the. At different points during the COVID time, those were the heaviest hit in America. Those counties had the most cases you know, per capita or whatever it was, it was really severe. So it was a really devastating time. I was also still going through the faith crisis and having some difficulty with trying to be understood by people around me, including my family. And Covid did not help the situation. So now I'm a doctor who's working in the hospital, as a lot of my friends are reaching out and saying, you know, this is a hoax, or you're pushing your agenda. You're drinking the Kool Aid. So much politics, so much just mess. And that was really an ugly time. And then, of course, we started doing home church. So home church meant that we didn't meet anymore with a congregation, and I was supposed to lead church. So that made it very interesting. But a lot of people felt like that was inspired that again, I think it's kind of how we look at these leaders doing their best. Like, of all the things that could have been prophesied or helped helped out with COVID the one thing we got from it was home church. And if I could be a little sarcastic, I wouldn't have any clue how to do home church before that. But thankfully, I got taught how, right. Yeah, Obviously, I could have run home church at any point in my entire church life. Like, it wasn't. Like, that was a huge thing, but. But, you know, that was a big struggle through there. A lot of people accusing about COVID I felt very alone. And that's where, like, you know, not knowing where you're at, not having that foundation anymore. And now watching people. We had three different ICUs in our hospital, and I was covering all of them. And I mean, watching people die, like, every day, it was like, it was very traumatic. And then going home and having this sort of discord about the church, that's a very alone place to be.

John Dehlin [02:55:55] Really quickly, I just want to. Before you jump on, I still get people where I covered Covid at one point or another on Mormon stories, where they'll comment, they'll find the episodes now, and they'll say, I bet you feel dumb now believing that Covid was real. Like, and I don't mean to get political or controversial, but I still get people writing me saying Covid was fake. And I just. I'm very grateful that I had two friends, three friends who were ER docs, who were in my book club when Covid happened. And all of them told me about incubating endless people and people dying all over the place and all the ICUs being completely full. And that is all you need to know to know that Covid was real.

Coy Johnston [02:56:50] Right, right, right.

John Dehlin [02:56:52] And so I just. I just. It's. I can't. I know how much that impacted these ER docs to have to go through that for a year or two. It was grueling and heartbreaking, and it changes you.

Coy Johnston [02:57:07] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:57:08] So for those lingering people out there who, for some reason, don't believe Covid was real, again, this is not political. I just. Just fact. Yeah.

Coy Johnston [02:57:20] Right. I mean, it's. I mean, I want to offer.

John Dehlin [02:57:23] I'm offering you as a witness. Yeah. Yeah. Was Covid real?

Coy Johnston [02:57:28] I'm here to say, you know. Yeah, it was. It was real for all of us who were there. And I. I would often just invite my friends who are telling me that I don't know what I'm talking about to just come down. Come down to the er. Of course they're not allowed, but, like, come step foot in this place and see what we see, and watch family member after family member holding the hands of their loved one as they take them away because, you know, family couldn't go with them. We didn't want to spread it more and. And watch that family member be carted away to never see them again. And how many people. I mean, I obviously am one of the people who have countless stories that are very difficult or moving. You know, some wins and mostly losses. Yeah. 100 real. And the conspiracies. I mean, people used to accuse me of, like, you know, you guys are withholding medicines or you're giving medicines, or are you're killing people intentionally, all the things. And it's such a. I'll just say, it's such a disrespect to the nurses as much as anybody that sat there and at the bedside of all those people and cared for them and changed their diapers and put their lives at risk, some of whom also died and did that every day, all day. And then to have somebody say, like, that it wasn't real, or it's just. It's so devastating, so disrespectful. I used to tease, Like, I'm kind of a jokester, so I'd tease the nurses like they've been spending all day with this patient caring for every little need. And then I walk in the room, and I would say, like, five words. And then the family would just praise me. Oh, thank you so much, doctors. Thank you so much. You know, because that's our culture. And I'd walk out and I'd just say, hey, I know I've done so much for this patient, you know, So I deserve all that recognition, you know, just to get under their skin, because we all know that I've done nothing right. Like, these nurses have been, like, just working so hard and caring for them. So I do get a little triggered by that. I saw it yesterday on social media from a friend from my ward. I mean, like, every single day, we see this stuff still, so. But during that time, I finally was able to get, you know, once. Once Covid settled down and I was able to get myself in a little more healthy mental space, I wanted to be helpful again. I hadn't been serving in my ward or anything, because I just needed that space, but I was still active, I was still going. And I maintained my temple recommend so that I could spend some time, you know, thinking and praying and searching in the temple, because I didn't have any new sins. You know, I wasn't, like, picking up new sins along the way, like everybody thought you do when you want to sin, they say. So I said, I want to be helpful. So I proposed that I would meet with my stake presidency and that we would try to maybe teach a class or provide some education for how to help people in a faith crisis.

John Dehlin [03:00:34] So you'd been in your ward, stake how long?

Coy Johnston [03:00:37] It'd been probably two years, two, three years.

John Dehlin [03:00:41] And did you tell your bishops and stake presidents there, everything?

Coy Johnston [03:00:45] I let my bishop know that I wasn't ready for calling.

John Dehlin [03:00:48] Okay.

Coy Johnston [03:00:48] But we didn't talk much.

John Dehlin [03:00:50] Okay. Yeah.

Coy Johnston [03:00:51] But we weren't meeting for that first year, probably.

John Dehlin [03:00:53] That's a big. Yeah. Okay. So did you have enough of a relationship or rapport with your bishop or stake president to. Because, you know.

Coy Johnston [03:01:04] Yeah, not really.

John Dehlin [03:01:05] Okay.

Coy Johnston [03:01:06] Yeah. Because that takes a lot of trust to be vulnerable.

John Dehlin [03:01:09] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [03:01:09] Yeah. And I knew that they may not understand, but I did have a relationship with my stake presidency a little bit. I felt like I wanted to share with them a little bit of what was going on. I was very cautious. I really gained a lot of strength by listening to podcasts on every side of the. Of this journey. One of my favorite podcasts was At Last she said it, which is the more faithful side of things. And these gals that just so fun and so in such an inspirational way, talk about navigating within the church, like their disagreements and even talking to leaders. But one of the things that one of them said one time was, they don't deserve my journey. They don't deserve mine. And that's not in a mean way, but they don't deserve to know my inner conflicts. And I think that's really important. It's like they have a role, but their role is not that they deserve my most special and most guarded secrets or something.

Balancing Family Faith and Personal Integrity

John Dehlin [03:02:14] Well, the truth is, if you want to be able to go with your wife to church, you don't want to disrupt her faith journey. And your kids today are, you know, some of them are at BYU or going on missions. Like, the weird thing is, if you want to keep your family in the church, you don't disclose to your leaders, because otherwise what happens is what happens with me, which is I disclose. I can't baptize my son. I can't have a temple recommend because of what bishop I get or my stake president changes or whatever, and then I'm viewed as a threat. So eventually I get excommunicated, and then all my kids quit the church. So weirdly, it benefits the church for you to hide and or lie to its leaders if you want to do what the church would see is in their best interest, which is that you keep raising your family in the church.

Coy Johnston [03:03:12] Right, right. Because so many times they expedite your departure.

John Dehlin [03:03:17] Yeah, they do. They do. Like with the Youngs, you know, and

Coy Johnston [03:03:23] that's what I'm hoping. We can continue to push to move the needle by having these type of open discussions. You know, dialogue is always helpful. If we can talk about things and put things into the open and these kind of stories educate us. And so I wanted to be helpful. I met with our stake presidency along with my wife. We made just a little presentation. There was like 15 minutes on a little. On my iPad, you know, on PowerPoint. And I said, here's the need. You know, youth are leaving the church in these numbers. It's kind of like the Jeff Strong information that I had gotten from other surveys. And I said that youth are leaving the church. We can keep doing what we're doing now, which is not working, or we can try to learn and do something better and try to help them to work it out with us, because we don't benefit from them leaving, and they don't necessarily benefit from leaving. And I want to support people where they're at. I want them to feel support now, wherever they're at here inside these walls, I want them to feel support. And so I said, can we work together? Would you let me teach a class and you could be there? I said, I don't know if that would be the best idea if you're there, but you could be there, or I could record it so you could make sure that I'm not Saying something that's cross because I'm not trying to be an apostate. I'm not trying to challenge or go against you. And I don't think it landed very well on the leaders. Some of them were very, very receptive and very thankful. And then my wife started to bare her heart about how hard that journey has been for us. And she was very tearful. She's crying and she's sharing that she almost divorced me over it. And, like, we need to help you people. And at the end of that, she received a very smug, sort of a flippant comment, like, huh, okay, well, as long as you continue to face Christ, then we're going to be okay. And that was kind of the response. Like, you know, as long as you stay in line, we're going to be okay. And I was like, wait, hold on a minute. Like, I don't think you understood anything of what I just said. Like, I'm not here to say. I'm not here because we're going to be okay. Whether I'm facing Christ. I'm here to offer you help because I'm uniquely qualified to reach out to these people in our area who are leaving. Like, people that I know are walking away, like. Like I'm watching it happen. And I'm here to help you. And you're identifying this as me coming to you, like, in some adversarial way. And that just really hurt my wife's feelings, made her feel so unseen and so unheard and identified as a problem. We're here, like, trying to be. Trying to give service and to pour our heart out and be vulnerable. Well, that didn't leave her feeling very well at all. But after that, one of the Stake Presidency members reached out to me and wanted to go to breakfast and meet up a few times, and has been just absolutely supportive ever since then. So I feel like there's a few who are trying to really reach out and be supportive. But nonetheless, we did not get permission to do that, any of what I proposed.

John Dehlin [03:07:04] And I can just say, with the little experience I've had. Well, with the experience I've had over the years, lots of wards and stakes have tried, for example, alternative Sunday schools where people who are doubting or questioning or just more intellectually inclined can go to this special Sunday school and work through these things and. Or have a more interesting, meaningful discussion. And without exception, I think they've all been canceled and found, as we've been discussing today, found to be a place for people to become infected with the truth. Virus or the questioning virus of the doubt virus, and then leave. So they all get shut down. It also creates this bifurcated sort of like, what, intellectual apostate Sunday school class. And if we're not talking about Sunday school classes, if we're talking about support groups or whatever, Number one, the Mormon Church has this culture of ark steadying. Is that a term you're familiar with?

Coy Johnston [03:08:06] Yes. Yeah. Steadying the ark. Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:08:09] Do you want to tell people what that means?

Coy Johnston [03:08:11] I mean, basically, you get told that a lot when you're on a faith journey is like the Old Testament story of reaching over to steady the ark, which is even if it looks like it's falling, you're not supposed to touch it, you're not supposed to steady it, you know, leave it in God's hands. So, yeah, I get told that a lot. Like, don't. What's the word that they use now with the recent talk was don't. The.

John Dehlin [03:08:39] The.

Coy Johnston [03:08:39] The elder that just spoke, the African American elder. I'm trying to remember his name now, who said don't engage in. And he had a word that I'm forgetting.

John Dehlin [03:08:49] Activism.

Coy Johnston [03:08:49] Activism. It was spiritual activism.

John Dehlin [03:08:52] Ahmad. Ahmad Corbett.

Coy Johnston [03:08:53] Yes, Corbett. So Elder Corbett and his. Do not engage in activism. It's the same thing. Don't steady the ark. It's just put your head down and keep on following. And it doesn't work for everybody. It has never worked for me to want to just turn a blind eye to something. But, yeah, don't study the ark.

John Dehlin [03:09:16] Yeah. And it's just. They just don't know what to do.

Coy Johnston [03:09:20] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:09:20] So they're viewing you. It's like, who are you? We don't need your help. And it's true. The hard part is it's true because you and I remembered this very distinctly when I was talking to Elder Holland. You don't know what's going to be good for the church. You may want to help the sheep. You may want to help the one or the 50, whatever the number is. But the church wants to protect the church first, because if there's no church, there's no support for the humans. So church leaders, you know, the story of leaving the 99 to go after the 1 is a nice myth. But the leaders, not only they don't really believe it, but it would be catastrophic if they followed it, because they'd Basically leave the 99 to go after the 1, and the 99 would. Would fall off a cliff or get eaten by wolves. So they just stay with the 10 or the 30 and let the other 70 off be devoured by wolves or fall off cliffs, or go on to lead happy, healthy sheep lives. Whatever the metaphor is you want to use, but you can't help them. You can help some of the members feel supported, but everything you do with the support group you want to do is not only arc steadying, but it's destined to harm the ward and the stake. Even though your intent might be to help. Am I wrong?

Coy Johnston [03:10:53] That's the exact analogy that I brought up to them at the end of this all was like, I'm going after the One because I'm watching the One walk away. And I said, you can stay and take care of those 99, but don't get mad at me and say that I'm being evil or as they said, deceptive eventually by going after the One, because that was Jesus's work, as we believe that that was Jesus's work. It may not have been like, you're saying, it may not be the church's work, but Jesus's work was go after the One.

John Dehlin [03:11:24] Yeah, Right.

Coy Johnston [03:11:25] So.

John Dehlin [03:11:26] Well, you know, Jesus's doctrines are good in theory. They're not always good in practice. Like love your neighbor, like, love your enemy. Like help the homeless and the immigrants. There are a lot of things that Jesus clearly taught. Give up all your riches and follow me. There's a lot that Jesus taught that we just sort of like, go, yeah, no, yeah, with that part.

Coy Johnston [03:11:52] No, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [03:11:54] I don't even mean that in a cynical, mocking way. It's hard to do all those things.

Coy Johnston [03:12:00] And what you're saying is it's also, we don't practice it. Maybe we don't practice that what we preach. So, like, like, yeah, I mean, not to get into the financial situation of the organization either, but like, the amount of money that we give to the poor, you know, we, we say we do and we do a lot of work, like in the church, we do a lot of work for the poor. And, you know, don't want to diminish that. But, but we could do way more, we could do way better to help with the poor, you know?

John Dehlin [03:12:27] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [03:12:29] So, so, yeah, like I, I, I, I wanted to help out in some way with those who are in my little area just to say, let me see what I can do in, in my little realm. And after about two or three months, they came out with this new institute class called Answers to Gospel Questions. And they called a retired, not a retired a, a recently released stake president to run that class. And I think he did the best he could do, not having any real experience or knowledge with any of these challenging topics. And so I went. I committed I was going to go to all these classes, and I could only go to so many because of my work schedule. But they had like 14 different classes. And I said, I'm going to be there. I'm going to support what they're trying to do. And so this class was rolled out churchwide, I think, or at least in America, because it was taught in multiple different states. And I'm just not satisfied that this curriculum was actually written to be helpful to people who have gospel questions. One of the 14 topics they chose was pornography. I mean, where does pornography fit into answers to gospel questions? People who are struggling with the church, like, there's. There's really very little role to discuss pornography in the truth claims of the church. It's just not a focus. So just that type of a thing will tell you this is not about questions. This is not how supporting people who have questions. It's more teaching of the church's correlated doctrines. You know, kind of like our temple prep classes are. It's not really preparing you for the temple as much as it's more spirituality. And obviously they identified pornography as something that was getting in the way of. In their opinion, that was getting in the way of people getting answers to their questions or why they would have questions, I don't know. But I looked at this curriculum, and it wasn't until the very last few classes where you actually discuss any substantive, complicated material. And so I went to these classes, I tried to be vocal and very cautious ways to advocate for people whose family members were struggling with questions in the church. So most of the people who were in there were not struggling themselves. Most of them were just members just going to an institute class. But they all mentioned, you know, many of them mentioned, my son has left the church. My son has left the covenant path, fallen away. My son has had doubts. He's fed his doubts, he's rehearsed his doubts with other doubters. All the things, all the tropes, all the negative memes that we have. And I had such a hard time sitting in that class going, this is not an accurate representation of what's happening. And it's your son, it's your daughter. So I would try to speak up and just say, you know, it's really difficult when they're framed in this light that they've fallen away because many of them have actually fallen upward, as Richard Rohr would say, and they've moved on to their Second half of life now. And they've seen complexity in the gospel. And some of them will follow what Halverson would call the polarities. What does he call it? The. Where. Joseph Smith said that in the Gospel, you'll find two opposites that are actually contraries. They complement each other. And in reality, that's not what happens. Because most of the people who go into that situation either have to find an apologetic to appease him. Paradoxes or paradoxes. Is that it? I never remember the word. But many of them will just say, you know what? I'm going to follow the path of. Well, some will say I'll follow the path of. Of apologetics and just find something that will appease my need that it could be true. And some people say, I really want to know what is most likely true. So as Bill Real would say, what is most likely? When you're hearing a noise on your roof, is it. Is it the sound of it on the tin roof? Is it a sound of a cat or is it a sound of a zebra? Like, it's not impossible that it's a zebra, but it's probably a cat. So, you know, the outcomes raise like, you're going to follow the path. That's most likely true. And so when your son or daughter is doing that and they're moving on to Stage, Fowler Stage 3, Fowler Stage 4, or Bruce C. Hayfens, Stage 2, or whatever it might be, as they move from stage to stage and we identify them as falling or as in danger, we're pushing them away. And so anyhow, I got identified in that class as kind of a naysayer, unfortunately. And there was some people that were in the class who were there because they were struggling and they had their own journey. But it was very inadequate, in my opinion, to really address gospel questions. So that's why I decided. I was like, I want to do better. And not because I think I'm better and not because I think I can do it better, but because it wasn't done. We were not addressing gospel questions in people's faith journeys. And so I waited for a long time till I felt like I can mentally, like, muster the strength to brave that. And I said, all right, let's do this. Let's start Journeys Group, which is just our little local.

John Dehlin [03:18:02] Where'd you get the name Journeys from?

Coy Johnston [03:18:04] I just made it up okay. Yeah, felt. Felt right. You know, I was sitting on the beach watching the sunset, and I saw a person sitting out there in the beautiful view, and I took a picture of them in their silhouette as they stared off into the sunset. And I felt like that was indicative of all of us at some point where we sit there and just look at this beauty of the earth, and it's just keep wondering, what's up? Where's God? We're all on that journey at some point. So my goal was, wherever you're at, I want to support you there. I don't care if you're in the church. I don't care if you're out. I want to support you where you are with no agenda to move you from that spot. You stay there, and I support you where you're at.

John Dehlin [03:18:51] And this is in your city, in your state.

Coy Johnston [03:18:53] Like, anybody that could get there. It was in Northern Arizona. I mean, it's a smaller community.

John Dehlin [03:18:59] Facebook.

Coy Johnston [03:19:00] We did on Facebook. Okay. Yeah. And I secured a place to meet in the local office, and I would bring food and barbecue and just kind of have some food so people could mingle and talk. And for about one hour, I would just pick a topic, and it would be like, how to handle a loved one who's questioning how to support, you know, a friend. How do we handle information? That sounds scary. Educating about cognitive dissonance. I didn't want to actually get into the weeds of any topic, specifically because I knew that would be dangerous. So I was more talking about how we can support each other when they go on that journey, you know, because I didn't want to give an opinion about Adam, God. Right. I didn't want to give an opinion about the Book of Abraham. And heaven knows I would love to talk about Book of Abraham for hours. Because Robert Rittner and your interview that went on for, like, what, 12 hours was, like, amazing. And then I watched another 12 hours of other interviews about the Book of Abraham and then more. And then read the book.

John Dehlin [03:20:11] Books.

Coy Johnston [03:20:12] And I love that topic, but I wasn't going to address that in this meeting. I wanted people to know how they could just do their own journey. Right. And I'm going to support you where you're at. Telling them it's okay to read about the Book of Abraham, and it's okay to recognize that the catalyst theory has some possibilities, but it will. But it's not going to answer every question you have. And it. And I wouldn't say this, but it actually would be at odds with the. What's the other theory? I'm blanking now. The two prevailing theories of the Book of Abraham cannot both be right. Okay. And then there's all these other ideas, but they all kind of contradict each other in ways that make it so that almost neither of them will work. But if you won't work that out, like, work it out, like, I'll be here to support you. So I did not bring up Book of Abraham. I didn't bring up those topics. I wanted to just say, these are real, these are hard, and you're loved and supported where you're at. So we. We had a few great meetings, and there was a few people there that were kind of wanting to more provide apologetic arguments. So, you know, a couple of times it would get a little bit it off track, and I'd have to try to keep it on track to be like. Because there was at least a handful of people that came just to provide defense for the church. And then I got a letter in the mail or in the email from the Stake Presidency. And the letter basically said, we understand that you're having this meeting and this is not the Lord's way. You're practicing deceit. It's not following the covenant path, and you will cease having these meetings immediately or your membership is in question. And with love, I hope you feel our love. The Stake Presidency.

John Dehlin [03:22:19] Okay. And this was how long ago?

Coy Johnston [03:22:21] This is probably two years ago now.

John Dehlin [03:22:23] Okay. And I need to re release the Lee and Cody Young epic interview that I did. That really was a game changer. And you've seen it, right?

Coy Johnston [03:22:34] I have, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [03:22:35] Do you remember why they were. I mean, it's unbelievable in 2026 to think back about why Lee and Cody Young were excommunicated.

Coy Johnston [03:22:43] Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I don't remember all the details freshly, but they created a similar support group. Right.

John Dehlin [03:22:48] They created in Ohio. He's a physician. And they created a support group for just people in faith crisis. They weren't trying to get people out. Weirdly. Wade Christofferson was in their bishopric.

Coy Johnston [03:22:59] Oh, is that right?

John Dehlin [03:23:02] Wade Kristofferson, the nose he's interviewed recently. Yeah. Was in the bishopric that ended up excommunicating Lee and Cody Young. But they weren't on social media causing doubt.

Coy Johnston [03:23:14] Right.

John Dehlin [03:23:16] It was literally a support group they were excommunicated for. And so. So it's weird how history repeats itself. It's weird how the Church hasn't figured out how to solve this problem or deal with it, but all you're doing is what they were doing, which was just saying, there's people hurting. The church is not dealing with this appropriately. So the Church taught us that to not need to be called. What is it? I'm, I'm rusty on the.

Coy Johnston [03:23:47] You mean to be an agent unto yourself, so don't you. Talking about the Doctrine and Covenants when it, when it says it need not

John Dehlin [03:23:55] be that we're called. What is it? Oh my gosh, I'm rusty on my Mormonism.

Coy Johnston [03:24:00] It's not me that you're commanded in all things.

John Dehlin [03:24:02] You don't. It's not me that you're commanded in all things. You're taking upon yourself as someone who's following the principles of Christ to start a support group in your area to support other people who have been through what you've been through. And how does the stake president respond?

Coy Johnston [03:24:18] Yeah, so the thing that really pushed me over to do that was that I had a friend who was being. Who had tried to take his life in that time frame because he had been pushed out of his family after he left the church. And he was just at. And just an amazing, amazing person. And he thought it was not worth living anymore because of how his family had basically, and this doesn't always happen, but like they had basically, you know, disowned him after his kids had disowned him because he was not living a church lifestyle. And I mean, we know countless people that are like this. But that was what finally said, I need to do this. I need to do this. Like, I'm watching my friend almost take his life over this. I can't do this anymore. I need to do what I can do to help. So, yeah, after I got that letter, it was very painful. And I think that's. Somebody had shared that with you, and that's what kind of started us talking about sharing this story, was that despite every effort to try to be supportive and help, that you're not just identified as on the margins, but now identified as an enemy, you know, as like, as deceitful. And I can guarantee you that there's not a single thing that I have talked about today or that I talked about in those times that isn't verifiable with church records. Like, I'm not speaking from some anti Mormon. Like, I'm talking about our, our history, our church. And whether that's faith promoting or not is not. Not my effort or my decision or my goal. The facts are the facts. And we, most of them are not good or bad. They're just facts. And what we do with those or what we do with that information is what makes it good or bad. But yeah, we do this so often where we identify this person now as dangerous or as an Enemy. So my response to the Stake Presidency. Stake presidency was, and my bishop was included in that, was that I will stop having the meeting because I didn't want to lose my membership. I didn't want to be excommunicated. I didn't want to lose my temple recommend. My daughter was going to be married soon in the temple, and it. It wasn't my job. I said, this isn't my job. I said, it's actually your job to support the people in your flock. And I'm just sad that it's not happening and that I'm watching people suffer, but I'm not going to keep doing it if you threaten me this way. And no, I don't feel the love, because I did not feel the love. I felt like they do have love, and that was not a way to show it. And I know they do love us, but that's not how you show.

John Dehlin [03:27:29] So did you have contentious conversations with your stake president or bishop?

Coy Johnston [03:27:33] That was it. That was the last one. Because I did stop having those meetings. I've since met with the other members of the Stake presidency who've been extremely kind and supportive and. And we go out to breakfast from time to time. And they're just really doing a lot to try to fellowship, you know, to fellowship me and make me feel loved and supported. I think they're really trying. But. Yeah. So I'm not going to say where this goes in the future, but I wanted to not make any waves because my daughter was about to get married in the temple and I want to be there. And that just happened on Saturday and

John Dehlin [03:28:22] congratulations, and that's beautiful to me that you were able to do that. So much of my story parallels yours. And you didn't have a podcast, but you're coming on the podcast. But probably at least in part because of my podcast. But there's also the leadership roulette factor. But, you know, I wasn't allowed to have a temple recommend, and a lot of people aren't if they're honest, so they have to lie or hide it. I'm so glad you were able to see your daughter get married in the temple, even though you're not a believer. And that's going to blow a lot of people away because there's going to be other people who have had the exact same experiences or loss of belief that you have had, and they've been honest with their leaders, and the leaders take their temple recommends away and. Or threaten them with church discipline, and they're not able to go to their child's wedding or their sibling's wedding or their parents wedding or. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Coy Johnston [03:29:17] I think I'll correct you there and say that even though I'm not a traditional.

John Dehlin [03:29:22] Oh, please. Yeah.

Coy Johnston [03:29:23] Traditional believer. Because I wouldn't classify myself as a non believer.

John Dehlin [03:29:29] Good. Thank you for that correction.

Coy Johnston [03:29:31] Yeah. Yeah. And it's. We care about these distinctions in this realm. Right. Like, are you a tbm?

John Dehlin [03:29:36] Are you a.

Coy Johnston [03:29:37] A peabo? Are you.

John Dehlin [03:29:38] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [03:29:39] And I think it's harder to. I like Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I always get his name wrong. Is that the right way to say it?

John Dehlin [03:29:45] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [03:29:46] Yeah. I always like him. Because when you try to pin him down to atheism, he. He won't do it.

John Dehlin [03:29:51] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [03:29:51] He's like, no, I don't like what comes along with that. He says, I'm. I'm. I remain unconvinced. Yeah, that's what he says.

John Dehlin [03:29:58] But.

Coy Johnston [03:29:59] But I think you're trying to pin down a label onto him. He didn't like it. For me, like. Like, I just remain hopeful and believing that there, like, I will remain believing in some realm in some way, you know, able to answer those questions on the temple recommend is to say, do you believe in. Do you have a faith? And a testimony of. And that might be 1%. And when I left Wisconsin, that's how I described it. I said, I think I have about a 2% testimony right now. You know, So I think that it could be true. True. It could be that I'm. That the 99% leaning against it could be wrong and there could be truth here.

John Dehlin [03:30:37] Are you saying there's a chance?

Coy Johnston [03:30:39] Exactly. So you're saying there's a chance?

John Dehlin [03:30:45] Yeah, I love it.

Coy Johnston [03:30:47] And that's where I'm like, I'm not writing it off, and I'm not throwing out the baby with the bath water.

John Dehlin [03:30:55] I'm.

Coy Johnston [03:30:55] I'm saying that the facts on the table is that if you look at this, and this is my favorite analogy that I. That I. I shared with a therapist one time who was kind of having trouble with the fact that I was willing to not just look through the eyes of faith. And I said, have you ever been to Disneyland and you're in the Haunted Mansion? And when you're looking at the. The art in the Haunted Mansion, there are four pictures of people, and they look friendly enough. You've got the gal with the umbrella, and, you know, I think three different guys that are standing there, and everything looks fine. But as the picture starts to elongate and as that room you know, the illusion is that the room is growing. And as you start seeing the rest of the picture, you start seeing that they are not just safe standing, minding their own business. One of them is about to fall into an alligator, and one of them is about to be, you know, murdered, or they're all in peril. And that further light and knowledge, that further information that you're getting by looking beneath that picture is changing everything at what you once viewed as a normal picture of a person that was fine now has become a very perilous, dangerous, completely different picture. And that information that you didn't know made all the difference. And that Disney Haunted Mansion analogy has been something that has stuck with me ever since then. It's like, it doesn't mean that that lady in that picture wasn't anything that I thought she was when I first looked at it. Maybe she's a very nice person. Maybe I think one of them is sitting on top of the graves of, like, her previous husbands or something. There's more information that changes how you feel about those individuals and about what's about to happen to them. And so if you're going to go through your entire life and say, I don't want to know what's underneath there, I don't want to know the rest of the picture, I have enough of this puzzle, and I've heard this analogy from faithful sources so many times. I have enough of this puzzle to know what the picture looks like, and all the rest of the pieces will figure it out. But if you're not going to put those pieces in the puzzle because you can tell that they're going to be bad or dangerous, and you don't want to see the reality of that picture. Because now in the picture of this beautiful family, you see that there's a cliff that they're about to go over or a gun that's about to fire at them or something that's in this picture, and you say, I don't want to know that part. I'm afraid of that part. And if you're going to go through life not wanting to put that puzzle together, not looking at those pieces, that's. That's fine, and that's your choice. And you're going to go through life having a happy, you know, uninformed perhaps, but happy evaluation of what that picture was. But you have not yet seen the full picture. And when you see the full picture, it doesn't mean that everything is bad. It doesn't mean that now the church isn't true. It doesn't mean that now there's no God. It means there's more to that picture that you could know if you wanted. And it does change things. And so that Haunted Mansion scene is kind of an analogy for my journey that I wanted to know. I wanted to know what was there. And anybody who does want to know, anybody who wants to take a look behind the curtain, I want to support them. To say, this is going to be really painful. You might feel like the church is not true. You might feel like there's no God, but you're not alone. And there's on the other side of nihilism. There can be other meaning and there can be other happiness. And maybe I'm holding out reservation that I could have it wrong and maybe I'm wrong about everything. But right now, if there's truth to be found, it's different than what I originally had thought and different than what we were told growing up. So yeah, I wouldn't classify myself as necessarily a non believer as much as a journeyer who's holding on to hope and willing to engage in that wrestle. And I, when I went. Yeah, and when I went to my temple recommend interview, that wasn't the hard part. The hard part was that I did not have enough tithing in my account that made my bishop feel like I was actually a full tithe payer because I've donated a lot more to homeless causes and in other ways. And when they pulled up my records during the interview, which is probably not appropriate, he said, yeah, this isn't a doctor's salary here.

John Dehlin [03:35:41] My gosh, that should be its own short. So you're in there with your bishop, he pulls up your tithing donations and says, you're a doctor, you're not paying enough tithing.

Coy Johnston [03:35:54] That's right.

John Dehlin [03:35:55] What was that like for you?

Coy Johnston [03:35:58] So when I went in for my recommended interview, he had the iPad open in front of him, which I thought was for the questions. And when I got to the part about tithing, which I feel like I am donating, I feel like I'm a full tithe payer. But I understand that bishop roulette sometimes dictates that you have to do it in a certain way. And many people don't do it in that same way. They'll donate to some other organization and consider that to be okay. But he pulled up the records and when I said, yes, I'm a full tithe payer, he says, well, it doesn't look like it. You know, this is not a doctor's salary here. How do you explain that? I said, well, two things. Number one, I donate through the church centrally, which is something that they had had where you could not use your ward and he wouldn't have record of it. And also I'm donating to many other organizations now that I feel I want to put my money in.

John Dehlin [03:37:00] And you're considering that tithe Tithing.

Advice for Those Navigating a Faith Transition

Coy Johnston [03:37:02] I considered it tithing, yeah. And I understand that's not the church's black and white definition of tithing, but there are many people who I associate with who pay their tithing that way and still known to their bishops, get their recommends just fine. So, you know, I understood that I might not. But he said, no, it's a no go. So you can't have your temporary recommend until you pay it all to the church. And I can see it. So I did. I started paying it directly to him for however long so that he could see it. And then I was able to get my temporary commitment.

John Dehlin [03:37:34] I mean, that feels like extortion. Basically, holding your daughter's. The ability for you to attend your own daughter's wedding hostage until you pay up. It's almost like indulgences, like, that's given me medieval Catholic vibes.

Coy Johnston [03:37:50] Honestly, it felt like that. It felt rough when I. Because you're not supposed to do that. You know, Bishop's not supposed to pull up your tithing records and. And say, this isn't enough. And again, I know that he is trying to do his best and he did not have any ill will for me. But while trying to do his best is causing a lot of harm and duress for me, wanting to go there for my own search and connection with God, to try to find where he is there, and then to be a part of my daughter's wedding, you know, I couldn't really. It feels like extortion because I don't have any ability to do anything about it except for pay.

John Dehlin [03:38:37] You pay the piper paid the way

Coy Johnston [03:38:40] he wants me to pay because I'm a believer in donating, and I used to donate generously to Fast Offerings. Plus I think I paid 12% so that I could make up for it for a long time. So I think I have a stockpile in there.

John Dehlin [03:38:55] As I'm hearing your story, I'm feeling conflicting things. I'm feeling like you were treated terribly in some ways, and then I'm feeling like you're treated with so much privilege because I just know hundreds and thousands of people that were treated much worse than you've been treated. So I feel encouraged that you, through all of this, you got to attend your daughter's wedding and you haven't been disciplined and you're still a member. And on the other hand, so much of this is ridiculous.

Coy Johnston [03:39:29] I agree.

John Dehlin [03:39:29] Yeah.

Coy Johnston [03:39:31] I mean, that's where the Bishop Roulette Stake President roulette comes in. And I recognize that so many people have had it so much harder and the journey has been unique for all of us. And trying to stay engaged in that journey is the hard part, you know, and for each person and there's many people who've had it just different and yet it's harder for them. So, yes, recognizing that everybody is having their own experience and their own challenges, I'm hoping that by talking about these things that we can make it so less people are going to have to have any challenge in that journey.

John Dehlin [03:40:13] So before we totally close, I want to ask you, you know, there's going to be a lot of people that just can't stay in the church or feel like it's not right for them or they get kicked out or run out or whatever, but there's going to be some who either want or need to stay. But it's going to be hard. It's always really hard to stay. Once you are no longer an orthodox believer, and especially once you've been flagged as not fully on the train, it's really hard to stay, especially year after year after year. When we talked about doing this episode beforehand, a main theme for you is preserving your mental health when you're going through a really awful Mormon faith crisis. For those who want to stay or need to stay, and even for those who can't and decide they need to leave, what are the key tips you have do's and don'ts and, or tips for healing from the depression and the anxiety and the disappointment and the mistreatment. And coming out the other end is you seem pretty positive and upbeat about your relationship with the church in spite of all you've been through. And you seem to be in a pretty peaceful, healthy place. So what tips would you give people?

Coy Johnston [03:41:45] I don't think I've mastered the journey yet. But the biggest tip, I would say is just stay engaged in the journey. Stay engaged in the battle and, and try to find the hope and the meaning wherever you can. Because by definition, going through a faith crisis or faith journey is to lose your foundation. It's to lose your central meaning and being able to find something different that's tangible. I remember one of my, like, I. I found support by talking to people Slowly, I reached out to a family member who I was able to, you know, you kind of do this in coded ways. You know, when I needed somebody, I. I reached out and I. I said, how do you feel about the, you know, this church stuff? Just to see if there'd be a safe place to. To talk. I found multiple family members and friends. We formed a Marco Polo group and have supported each other for many years. And we have people represented all over this, all over the board. You know, some who have left the church, some who are in it. We have some who are bishops who

John Dehlin [03:43:09] just

Coy Johnston [03:43:11] allow us to air things out, to talk about it. And it's when you try to bury it and when you try to suppress it that you feel terrible. And it's in the ability to put things out in the open that allows you to work it out, to figure out where you're going to stand on it. You don't have to come to a conclusion if you're going to stay or leave the church. You don't have to conclude whether you have a testimony or not. You don't have to be at a certain spot. Life is always a moving target, and you don't need to define who you are by where you're at right now. I remember my cousin one time saying to me that recognizing that the church might not be true and that maybe there's no God was a time that gave him more hope and more meaning in living right now and recognizing how much more we need to work on being present and being good and helpful to each other now. Take advantage of this time together with our. With our family, with our loved one, whatever. And instead of it becoming more nihilistic like you would have thought, it's inspiring. And I found that that's exactly my experience, is that admitting that maybe the church isn't what it says it is, and opening my mind that maybe it wasn't true, maybe there was no God. I'm not an atheist, but being able to admit that possibility has actually given me more hope, more meaning to work on now. I'm going to take advantage of every minute I have now, because this is all I'm guaranteed. I'm guaranteed to be here and do what I can. And if coming on this podcast can be helpful to anybody in some way, I'm doing what I can do right now because this is all I have. And one of the culminating moments which recently happened was at the end of my journey was being brave enough to go to the Book of Mormon musical. And you've seen that I think many

John Dehlin [03:45:24] times

Coy Johnston [03:45:27] I didn't know what to expect, but I sat there with my son,

John Dehlin [03:45:32] and I took my son to it. Did you? Yeah. Yeah.

Coy Johnston [03:45:38] And he's on his own journey, and we. We have a sense of humor that's kind of similar.

John Dehlin [03:45:43] So.

Coy Johnston [03:45:45] But when that. I sat down and I looked around and I. And I said, I think I'm in a. Is it Gammage and Tempe? I think they fed a couple thousand people in there. And I said, I'm sure I'm one of the few Mormons that this play is about me, right? Like, I'm one of the few who's in the know, and I don't know what this is going to be like. And when it started, from the very beginning of that play, I bawled from the beginning till the very end. Yeah, I bawled and bawled and bawled, and I laughed so hard, and I went home and I bawled for, like, three more hours. And, I mean, every time that song would come on, you know, hello, my name is Elder. I couldn't. I couldn't not just break down. And it just reached into my soul and brought something out of me that was like. That was me. Like, I did that. And this is all making fun of me. And. And now I'm very critical of this organization, but it's all making fun of me. And I'm here laughing with all these people at me. It was so surreal and being able to laugh at myself and realize just how ridiculous some of the things I did was. But I knocked on, I don't know, hundreds, thousands of doors to tell people that they were wrong and I was right and I don't regret going on a mission, but I wish I would have known then better so I could do better at bringing them more joy and peace than just telling them that I know what is right and I don't know what is right and I don't know the right ways to go. I don't know. I don't know anything anymore. But I think that if we could take our journey with a little humor and laugh at ourselves a little bit, and if you're going to go through the temple, you can kind of chuckle at the way we still do Masonic things and just take it with a little. A little grain of salt and just don't take ourselves too seriously. And when we. Because it might change, too. And when we go through the rituals of, you know, whatever it is in our lives, that we can just look for the joy, look for the beauty, look for the connection that we can find to deity or the beauty in the liturgy, the beauty in the song. The beauty and whatever. It actually can bring us some peace.

John Dehlin [03:48:38] It makes me want to say hasadiga iboway. Yeah. Yeah, perhaps. No, that was beautiful. You said you wanted some humor, so I thought, yeah, it sounds like if the church leaves you alone, you may be in this as a member for the long haul.

Coy Johnston [03:48:59] I do plan on staying in the church. My activity in the church will be, you know, based on what I. What I'm available for. I work a lot of weekends, but I want to stay engaged. This is my community. This is my people. This is my church. Just. Just as much my church as anyone's church. I mean, I feel like you've felt that way and said that before. This is my church. You know, the word Mormon to me is. Is part of my. The core of who I am. You know, I was raised and gave everything in my life to this church for 40 years. And so I don't plan on walking away from it. I would like to try to make it a safer place for people who are not fitting into the mold or people who are on the margins or people who feel like they're not safe to be authentic. And I feel like we can do better. That's my goal by being here, is to try to help us to do better.

John Dehlin [03:50:05] Love it. And I mean, ultimately, you care. It's kind of. I hate to say it. It's not gimmicky. You're following Christ's teachings and the church's teachings. That idea of do what is right, let the consequence follow. Going after leaving the 99 to go after the 1. You're actually doing that, and you're basically saying you don't feel like you've done anything wrong. And by coming on this podcast, you're trying to help some people. And if. If the church comes after you for that, then, you know, so be it. You're doing what your conscience says you should.

Coy Johnston [03:50:43] Yeah, I mean, I don't. I don't see that happening, but if it did, then I. I mean, you know, yeah, I was going on a hero's journey when I tried to win souls for the church at whatever cost that might be at the cost of my job and in some ways at the cost of my mental and physical health and almost at the cost of my life to try to win souls for the church. And I think it would be very tragic of the organization or the church to then turn its back on me for trying to continue to help those people. In this way because I'm not trying to pull people out of the church or tell them that it's not true. I'm not trying to be anti Mormon. I'm just trying to help us be better for those who are going through this transition of one way of thinking into another way of thinking. So, yeah, do what is right. Let the consequence follow.

John Dehlin [03:51:42] And I will say this. I don't know how many people are. We're four hours in, so I don't know how many people are still are listening. But one last thing, in the spirit of support groups, I recently have been involved with a loved one who's involved in AA and Alcoholics Anonymous and they swear by the support group model. And it's inspired me to want to create a support group model that can be distributed massively at scale. But also that keeps Mormon Stories, the Noble Stories foundation, from being liable, but also keeps local groups from getting out of control and being crazy or unwieldy or doing harm. So if any of you are interested in being a part of a global initiative to create volunteer support groups for people in need, I'm very interested in and spinning that stuff back up. So anyway, there may be a support group in your area that you're not even leading.

Coy Johnston [03:52:49] Yeah, that'd be nice. I'll go.

John Dehlin [03:52:51] You'll attend.

Coy Johnston [03:52:52] I'll attend.

John Dehlin [03:52:52] Unless the stake president says you can't attend.

Coy Johnston [03:52:55] Yeah, I don't think that happened.

Closing Reflections and Farewell

John Dehlin [03:52:58] All right. Well, Coy Johnston, what an amazing four hour story. I hope my viewers and listeners, this is a, this is a regular old member Sharon's faith crisis story. Four hours long. I hope this is the stuff y' all have been wanting for and asking for. Hope you've enjoyed it. Any final words? You can check your outline. Anything else you wanted to say before we close?

Coy Johnston [03:53:23] I just appreciate the work that you do and a lot of the folks that are in this realm trying to give us informed consent and help tell the stories of all of us who have been on this journey. Journey. It's, it's healing. It's been incredibly healing for me to hear so many people's journeys, so many people's stories. And it's, it's been one of the most. One of the biggest blessings in my journey is to benefit from your sacrifice and the risk that you've taken getting out here and doing this. I'm grateful, I'm grateful for that.

John Dehlin [03:54:01] Well, thanks for showing that and your courage again and being willing to tell your story and the wisdom. You've processed a lot in your journey, including all the progressive stuff, progressive Mormon stuff as well. So I love this story as something I'll recommend to people who are trying to stay because there still are a lot of people who either want to stay or need to stay. And yours is a story that I really think could help a lot of people. I know it will. So thanks for being willing to share it.

Coy Johnston [03:54:37] Thank you.

John Dehlin [03:54:38] All right.

Coy Johnston [03:54:38] Appreciate it.

John Dehlin [03:54:39] All right, well everyone, thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories. A couple quick things. We exist because people donate to support what we do. So thank you. If you're a donor to the Mormon Stories podcast at the Open Stories foundation, if you're not a donor and you want to see it continue, please go to mormonstories.org donate and become a monthly donor. Other ways you could support us in addition to or instead of donations like and subscribe and follow the podcast and all our social medias. Commenting, sharing this episode with others. Those are all super useful. And for those of you who don't know, we're being sued by the Mormon Church, they say it's for trademark and copyright infringement. I think we've done a pretty good job of showing that the more likely motivation could be a desire to silence or bankrupt us. So if you value this content and you want to support us in that way, you can go to mormonstories.org legal and donate to our legal defense fund as well. The lawsuit's going well, as well as it can be. We're waiting on the church to respond to our response and to our motion to dismiss that happens in August 28th and then we'll just follow on from there. It's likely we won't get our first verdict on the motion to dismiss until October. Who knows, but that's when we might get the first meaningful verdict. But we're grateful for everyone who supported that. I hope to do an episode soon giving everyone an update on the lawsuit because I still owe everyone that. But in the meantime, please comment. Please email us@mormonstoriesmail.com we excuse Margi. There's some episodes that Margi feels like she wouldn't have as much value to add. And when it's a truth claims heavy episode, which this kind of was, she feels like it's better to keep it simple. If Margi had been here, it may have been a five hour episode. So anyway, we love Margi, we excuse her and we're excited to have her back soon. Thanks to Brooklyn and Julia for all they do and Margi and our board. Thanks for everything you do. We do have a new website called MormonNews.com we just launched it yesterday. It's the home of the Mormon News Podcast and also it's a podcast that provides all the Mormon news that we can find on the Internet refreshed hourly. So check out the Mormon News Podcast and see if you like it. Give us your feedback. We think it's gonna be really useful for people out there. And of course check out the Mormon News podcast recorded live, streamed every Friday. And we'll keep doing LDS discussions series. The Joseph Smith Podcast is gonna resume soon. Except it's gonna be the Brigham Young Podcast. We're gonna do 10 episodes with John Turner about that's coming up soon. And if that weren't enough, Fawn Brody's audiobook came out where yours truly is the narrator. And we're going to be looking to do a follow on series for the Joseph Smith Podcast covering Fawn Brody's no Man Knows My History with some special guests that I'm excited to announce soon. And I'm going to be announcing how you can get Fawn Brody's audiobook cheaply and be a part of that book club. So, so much cool stuff stuff coming up soon. Thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Be good to each other. Be kind to each other. Thanks again, Coy Johnston and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories Podcast. Take care.