Introduction and Welcome

Part 1 of 2 · Ep. 465

John Dehlin [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3. Mormon Stories Podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you. To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today@mormonstories.org hello and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin, and I'm super happily extra excited to announce not only who I'm currently about to interview, but also a bit of a series that I hope to embark upon in Mormon Stories that I think many of you are going to enjoy.

Introducing Brad Kramer

John Dehlin [00:00:57] So today, interviewing Brad Kramer. Brad may be known to some of you. He's married, he has five kids. He was raised LDS in Utah. He has a bachelor's degree in Russian from BYU and a bachelor's degree in history from the U of U. And then he has a master's in American history from the U. And then finally he just submitted his dissertation revisions for the completion of his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Michigan. So he's sort of a Mormon, would you say, sociologist or anthropologist? Brad?

Brad Kramer [00:01:40] Yeah, probably something like an anthropologist and, I don't know, aspiring polymath of.

John Dehlin [00:01:50] Aspiring what?

Brad Kramer [00:01:51] Polymath. Just I've got a number of kind of disciplinary backgrounds that I flirt with and, you know, at one point I was on the trajectory to become a fully fledged Mormon historian and then I veered more into the social science. But.

John Dehlin [00:02:09] So you, so you got a lot of interest. Well, excellent. Well, I, I'm particularly excited to have Brad on one because, and this is what we're going to be focusing on in our interview today. Brad, I think, represents kind of a new generation of, I'll just say believing, thoughtful, believing Mormon who doesn't take the traditional apologetic view, but is still very much interested and willing to stand up for belief, but from an exceptionally well informed and thoughtful, I would say, perspective. And so, you know, we've had Terrell Givens and Richard Bushman on, and of course I have respect for those, those men and others, but I think Brad represents something different and, and I think you'll get a sense for that.

John Dehlin [00:03:03] So we're going to be talking today with Brad about his, his sort of experiences with the church and where he's come to as far as his sort of fully informed testimony, LDS testimony. But then we're going to talk about a framework that Brad has been developing for what I'm going to call maybe a more mature relationship with the church. And he's going to make the argument that maybe those who have become disaffected with the church or have left, you know, might be, you know, might. Might benefit from considering sort of a broader, longer view that involves kind of viewing the church in a different light.

John Dehlin [00:03:49] And I'm not going to give too much away on that. But. But this is only going to be the beginning of what I hope to be is a series. So some of you will remember that, that in the first year of Mormon Stories Life, we interviewed a couple by who went by Roasted Tomatoes in Serenity Valley. They were prominent Mormon bloggers at the time who didn't want to use their real names.

John Dehlin [00:04:13] And we talked about how Serenity Valley had left the church, actually had her name removed, married Roasted Tomatoes, and then eventually rejoined the church. And I think the episode was called Finding Our Way Back Home. And it was really fascinating to me and inspiring to many. So we're going to be bringing back this couple now. They're actually willing to use their real names, and their names are Jason or J. Nelson Seawright, who's a professor of political science at Northwestern University, and his wife Taryn.

John Dehlin [00:05:00] And we're going to be bringing them back on to discuss their return, to discuss sort of how they've been since they've left the church. And just to give a little bit of a teaser, I don't believe that either of them are active anymore.

John Dehlin [00:05:18] And I guess I viewed Brad and Jason with a high degree of respect because they're both individuals who are extremely well informed and intelligent, but also they're respectful in their dialogue and their discourse. And so once I bring them both on, I'm going to bring on Jeremy Runnels, who is the author of a book called Letter to a CES Director, which is a book that expresses Jeremy's. The many reasons why Jeremy felt like he couldn't stay, you know, an active, believing member. And then to conclude, I'm going to have a series of exchanges. I'm going to kind of moderate a series of exchanges between Brad and Jason regarding, you know, some of the main topics.

John Dehlin [00:06:02] So I kind of view this as a bit of an epic series. We'll see if we can pull it all together. But that's just to give you a teaser for what all this is about. I hope you're as excited as I am. So I should also mention briefly that Brad is currently sort of the head of marketing and PR at Evangelism for Covert Books, Greg Covert Books, which is doing a lot of Interesting stuff. And so with that, Brad Kramer, welcome to Mormon Stories.

Brad's Critique of the Disillusionment Narrative

Brad Kramer [00:06:30] Well, thank you for the generous introduction. A couple of things I want to say in response to your description of not just what you and I are going to talk about today, but the series one is that you mentioned that I'm hoping to introduce a framework that would, that would at least invite disaffected or disaffiliated, you know, former Mormons to think in. I don't know, more to think slightly differently about the church. I would say that that's part of it. But I'm as much speaking to intellectual Mormons like myself who stay inside the church and, and hoping that this framework will also will really give both sides a kind of language for reacting more, not just more civilly, but more generously and more sympathetically to each other. So I definitely don't want to give the impression at the outset that I'm trying to talk down to ex Mormons.

John Dehlin [00:07:39] Excellent. Well, that's important.

Brad Kramer [00:07:43] And that leads to the point I wanted to make about Jason, which is, you know, there's a general. When it comes to talking about difficult subjects, sensitive topics, there's a general rule for civil discourse, which is that you are to sort of try to engage, you know, if you're going to engage the opposing side, you should engage them at their best. Right? You shouldn't, you shouldn't engage the sort of the knuckle draggers on the other side, the lowest common denominator on the other side, but you should engage, you should engage the other side at its best.

Brad Kramer [00:08:14] And Jay is a friend of mine. He's been a friend of mine for a long time. We became friends while he was still active in the church. He's no longer active in the church. We're still friends. And honestly, Jay is sort of, in my mind, in my imagination, he is the ideal interlocutor, sort of on the other side of this Mormon intellectual divide between people who stay and people that leave. And Jay is thoughtful. And so in my worst moments, when if I'm starting to think about people that have left the church in less generous or derisive terms, I try to make that correct.

Brad Kramer [00:08:58] The corrective for me is to make J in my head, sort of the prototype of the interlocutor that I can productively and sort of thoughtfully and generously engage and not, not sneer at, not look down on, not disrespect. So he's a, he's a gentleman and a scholar, and it's going to be great having that conversation with him when we have it.

John Dehlin [00:09:21] Yeah. And I feel. I feel the same way about you. And. And that's why I'm so excited about this series. So this is going to be good. All right, Brad? Well, I'm sure it's. It's hard to sum up. How old are you now?

Brad's Personal History and Background

Brad Kramer [00:09:35] I'm. Let me do the math. 35.

John Dehlin [00:09:37] Yeah. So I'm sure it's hard to sum up 35 years in a few minutes, but maybe talk to us a bit about your history to the extent that it touches on your interest in issues related to history and sociology or social sciences and faith. And I'd love to take that to the point where you can talk about whether you actually experienced, you know, some type of dissonance or, you know, let's just say intellectual disturbances with the church that can hopefully bring us to the resolution points that you hope to make.

Brad Kramer [00:10:12] Okay, so I'll give you a little bit of background. And in some ways, my own personal history with Mormonism is best under. You know, I understand it best in retrospect in terms of thinking about how my relationship with the church sort of engages with my intellectual life and what was interesting to me. And I think this is probably something like a point of origin for me when it comes to describing how I came to be the kind of Mormon that I am. So, as you mentioned, I was raised in the church, and I was raised by a. A fairly conservative, traditional father and a fairly heterodox, not traditional, sort of what you would call her. Like, her father was actually friends with Jean England, so she's kind of a Jean England type. I was raised by an iron rotter and Leah Honen parents.

John Dehlin [00:11:19] Wow.

Brad Kramer [00:11:20] And they're still married.

John Dehlin [00:11:24] And mom was a Liahona. Dad was the Aaron Rodger.

Brad Kramer [00:11:26] Yeah, mom was Liahona. And mom had something like a faith crisis in the early 90s around feminism and intellectualism and ended up making peace in the church. And I think, obviously I'm gonna be oversimplifying it, but I think a big part of it for her was that as she was going through it, she was also the primary president in her ward with an incredibly supportive bishop who.

Brad Kramer [00:11:51] And so. And so she was. She wasn't just sort of needed. She didn't. She retained a space in the community, but she also. It was fulfilling work that she did, and she sort of came out on the other side of her faith crisis with her relationship with the church still intact.

Brad Kramer [00:12:10] So that's kind of. I've sort of got Mormonism coming in different strains As a child. So when I start attending seminary and you know, I grew up in Utah, so it's release time, seminary, it's the full CES package, I start to realize that I'm bored, that I just, you know, I just don't.

Brad Kramer [00:12:38] It's not that I have any particular antagonism or any particular basis for disbelief or anything like that. I'm just bored. I'm bored with seminary, I'm bored with Sunday school, I'm bored with church. I still go to church because that's what you do, you know. But I'm not engaged. Mormonism doesn't grip me.

Brad Kramer [00:12:56] And a couple of things happened my second year of seminary. One is that I started, I started to feed myself intellectually, stuff that had nothing to do with Mormonism, but I started like reading popular science books, like reading Carl Sagan and you know, these kinds of just, just voraciously.

Brad Kramer [00:13:24] And I had a really good seminary teacher. I had a seminary teacher who was also a sort of a Gene England type, very intellectually engaging seminary teacher. So it was like my intellectual engagement with Mormonism sort of got activated at the same time as my general intellectual curiosity started to get fed. So it was funny because one would expect that I started to engage in hard science and started to realize, oh, evolution is real and science is an authority.

Brad Kramer [00:14:03] You would think that that would have caused me to disengage from Mormonism, but it didn't. It was like somehow I needed that part of my brain to be active in order to really care about Mormonism. And then Mormonism started to be intellectually interesting to me.

Brad Kramer [00:14:19] A third thing that happened around that time was I did have a kind of a transcendent, powerful spiritual experience praying about the Book of Mormon. And all of this basically led me to the decision that I would go on a mission. And I did. I went on a mission.

Brad Kramer [00:14:38] I went to Russia and I came back from my mission a very smug, self assured, self righteous iron rotter who still, I wasn't anti intellectual or anything like that. So I was still very intellectually engaged with Mormonism, but in terms of orthodoxy I was, I was a really hardcore iron rodder.

John Dehlin [00:15:04] And did you sense that your mom was a bit different and ever give her a hard time about it or judge her?

Brad Kramer [00:15:09] Well, so I didn't actually. So I knew even as a teenager that my mom was different. I mean, it was all, it was all very clear to me by the time I was 13 or 14 that there were differences between my parents.

Brad Kramer [00:15:24] But I do remember, honest, honestly, one of the most. One of the memories that I have that I regret most, like in my entire life, was my mom and my dad were fighting about something. I mean, something could have been trivial. I don't even remember what the thing was. But you know, all couples, married couples, fight.

Brad Kramer [00:15:47] And I remember pulling her aside and telling her that you receive blessings for submitting to priesthood authority, even if priesthood authority is wrong. And this would have been like six months after my mission or something. So in other words, I was leaving open the possibility that in this particular situation my dad was wrong and she was right, but she should submit to him anyway. And I'm so glad that she didn't, you know, in hindsight, because it honestly, it's one of the most shameful memories that I have as a Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:16:23] But every kid makes mistakes, especially right off a mission.

Brad Kramer [00:16:27] Right off a mission, it's just terrible. So I went to BYU.

John Dehlin [00:16:32] What year were you at BYU after your mission?

Brad Kramer [00:16:36] 2000. So I had quite a bit of college credit under my belt actually before my mission. This is kind of a funny aside. I'd been a music major at the U of U. I was a piano performance major. But I sort of set aside the music career path and went to byu.

Brad Kramer [00:16:53] Was thinking about pre law or something like that, started going to classes and BYU actually liberalized me quite a bit. It's probably just my inner nonconformist or something like that. But if I'd been at almost any other campus, I probably would have swung me in a more rightward direction because on almost any other campus you do your non conforming thing by being conservative, but at BYU you do it by being liberal.

Brad Kramer [00:17:29] But a couple of really important things happened in terms of my personal trajectory at byu. One is that I got married and we started a family pretty quickly. And having my oldest son born, it's just a really radical paradigm shift. It's not that it's a shift that necessarily pushes you in any particular direction. It just you radically rethink things about your life, about yourself, about what you want, where you're going.

Brad Kramer [00:18:03] And that happened at the same time as I was reading initially, as I was just reading Hugh Nibley voraciously. And it wasn't Hugh Nibley apologist. I never really got into Hugh Nibley apologist, but it was Hugh Nibley, social critic, Old Testament prophet, right?

John Dehlin [00:18:24] Oh yeah.

Brad Kramer [00:18:25] So like. Well, I mean, as an Old Testament prophet, this sort of critic of the church, right?

John Dehlin [00:18:31] Of the social structures.

Brad Kramer [00:18:34] So yeah, critic of the church to the extent that he was a critic of capitalism and a critic of militarism. And to the extent that Mormons or Mormonism embodied or supported those things, he was also a critic of the church. So it was approaching Zion, Brother Brigham Challenges the Saints, these kinds of prophetic writings of his that really struck a chord with me. And then I happened to be lucky enough that I met him one day and we struck up a friendship. And he and I were pretty close for a couple of years before he started to decline really rapidly. And I actually stayed fairly close with Phyllis, his wife, up until. Right until he died. And now I'm still pretty close friends with Zina and Boyd.

John Dehlin [00:19:24] That must have been during the whole Martha thing, huh?

Brad Kramer [00:19:27] Well, Martha thing was exploding right as he died. I remember the plug for her book was going to come out in Oprah Magazine, and I was on the U of U campus. This is after I'd gone back and I was doing my master's. I might have still been doing the bachelor's at that time, but I'd gone back to school. I was doing the history degrees, and I was in the Utah bookstore, and I saw that week's O Magazine. So I opened up and there was a little blurb on it on Martha's book. And so I called Phyllis to read it to her because I knew she wouldn't have seen it and she didn't want to hear it because Hugh had died that morning. So that sort of gives you a sense of the timing, sort of everything exploding, right? As he's completely out of the equation and his final inexorable decline.

John Dehlin [00:20:26] Man. Well, we should have you back just to talk about your experiences with Hugh.

Brad Kramer [00:20:30] But, yeah, it's definitely. There are interesting stories there. And then I did the. When they first. When they restarted the Bushman Givens Seminar, I was a master's student and I applied and I got into that. That first one that they did. And that's what got me into sort of like, at that point, I wasn't really interested in working on Mormonism per se. I was reading Mormon history, and I was starting to engage with the blogosphere and sort of the new Mormon intelligentsia, so to speak.

John Dehlin [00:21:08] But what year would that seminar have been? I'm just curious.

Brad Kramer [00:21:12] 06. Okay, so I remember it was during the World cup, and we would all. We would all find excuses to, like, leave. Leave where we were supposed to be studying to go over to the Wilkinson center and watch World cup matches.

Brad Kramer [00:21:27] But yeah, so summer 2006, and it was good. It was great experience, and I ran across some really terrific Archival materials that I initially sort of presented on in their little. We wrote a paper and we presented at this little symposium that they do at the end.

Brad Kramer [00:21:45] But then I really wanted to spend some good time with these materials and work them into my master's research. And they were materials that I felt like I could use the insight of an anthropologist on. So I contacted David Knowlton to see if he would be a sort of an adjunct on my master's committee.

Brad Kramer [00:22:08] And then David sort of ruined me for history by introducing me to all these anthropological literatures and sort of modes of analysis. And so I ended up just applying to anthrophd programs and so engaging really, really deeply with anthropological theory and with anthropology as a discipline. Sort of my point of initiation into it was engaging in this very sort of fine grained analysis of these historical Mormon texts. And so for me, the things were really tightly embedded.

Brad Kramer [00:22:51] So after I got out to Michigan, I started participating more robustly in the blogosphere, in the blogger NaCl as well. And you know, we, by the, by the time we moved to Michigan, we had three kids, three sons, and.

Brad Kramer [00:23:12] And then when we moved out there, we had two more daughters. While we were out there were so, you know, five. Five and done for the record. But. Right, but, you know, so that's. For me, it was like, I mean, going back to that seminar, it was interesting, right, because all the other seminar participants were more or less my age.

Brad Kramer [00:23:35] And one of the things that Terrell and Richard do is they bring in sort of guests, not quite speakers, but like guest Mormon scholars who just come in and kind of chat with us, maybe talk kind of informally around a table about the research, informally present something, but then just have a chat. And the repeated pattern in the seminar was, you know, scholar would show up,

John Dehlin [00:24:00] and

Brad Kramer [00:24:03] almost always a male scholar, because Mormon studies is almost all male scholars, but which is a separate problem. Mormon scholar would show up, he'd talk a little bit about his research and his background. And then when it, when it started getting to like Q and A or sort of conversation, the seminar participants, the actual fellows, me and my fellow fellows, we would kind of zone out because it would almost inevitably turn into this kind of tortured conversation about balancing faith and intellect, right? Like, how can you be faithful and intellectually engaged? Like, these two things were really in strong tension with each other.

Brad Kramer [00:24:52] And it was like for this older generation of scholars, these things were necessarily in tension with each other, right. These guys had come of age academically during the period following the lockdown after the Arrington spring up and through the.

Intellectual Crisis and Church Crackdowns in the 1990s

Brad Kramer [00:25:10] And the sort of. The shutting down of symposia and the crackdown on intellectuals in the early 90s. And so for them, this was like, these things were existentially in tension with each other, faith and intellect. But none of us had really. We were all still too young when that was going on to have it sort of deeply affect our psyches. So it was almost like the conversation would shift into Richard and Terrell and Visiting Scholar X talking about balancing faith and intellect, and the kids in the room rolling their eyes and just sort of waiting for it to be over. Because for us, this just wasn't. This just wasn't an issue.

John Dehlin [00:25:52] Now, is that. Is that if we want to talk about this in the second half? I'm just curious whether that was a product of. Of you. You being raised differently, or was it a product of you just not of being too young to have experienced what they were talking about?

Brad Kramer [00:26:11] I assume it's. I assume it's both. I mean, we all knew in our heads what they were talking about. We all knew the history, but we hadn' experienced it. So it wasn't a crisis for us. We weren't forced to choose sides ever. Right. So for us, it was just something that we were aware of but didn't sort of affect us deep down into our cores. And we didn't struggle with this. You know, it was like we would have these very candid conversations about difficult subjects or whatever, or, you know, I mean, we were sort of trying to canvas, as a seminar, trying to canvas like, 19th century intellectual Mormon history.

Brad Kramer [00:26:48] You know, it's fraught with all these difficult questions. And it wasn't as if we were like any of us were experiencing any kind of, like, challenge to our relationship with the church or whatever as we were. You know, I mean, they had us, like, read for. The first thing we did in the seminar was we just had to read Journal of Discourses. Like, we had to pick, you know, different participants would read different parts of it. And then we were like, we were creating this sort of crowdsourced chart of different themes and topics and quotes and stuff.

Brad Kramer [00:27:31] So, you know, we're encountering these problematic documents head on. And it just. It just didn't cause a problem. You know, like, it just. We weren't. We weren't. It wasn't being filtered through this underlying angst about, you have to balance these two things that are. That are working against each other.

John Dehlin [00:27:53] Is that because you didn't ever feel like you had been deceived or misled maybe, or was it because you maybe had been inoculated either by choice or by exposure, maybe having a sunstoney type moment where, you know, you just didn't grow up with the. You weren't ever set up for disillusionment. Is that possible?

Brad Kramer [00:28:13] I don't know. In my case, I don't think it was really. I think it was more that I just didn't have. I think if it had, if it had something to do with my upbringing, it had to. In a weird way, it had to do with having a father that was a little bit, a little bit too much on the iron rod side.

Brad Kramer [00:28:35] Because in a weird way what that did is as you're a teenager especially and you're butting heads with your parents. One of the ways that we all learned to engage with my dad when we would argue with him about any particular thing is he would invoke the authority of the church constantly. And that really actually diluted the church's authority in our eyes in its own way. It wasn't that we became completely disillusioned about the church, it was just that like we felt a certain freedom to roll our eyes because, oh well, a general authority once said this ironically, my dad sort of trying to play that as a trump card made us much less impressed with it, gave us the freedom to roll our eyes at certain things that came from the church.

Brad Kramer [00:29:27] And so it kind of watered down my expectations about the church a little bit. I just didn't have this sense that the church was this sort of omniscient organization that knew all the right things and was perfectly set up and organized to convey to us truths. I had a very humanistic idea about the limitations that the church had as an organization, even if I still fundamentally believed that God was behind it.

Brad Kramer [00:29:59] And so I think it was just a general. So in other words, I never really felt like I had been misled per se because I never really had a view in my starting in adolescence. I never really had an idea in my head of the church as an organization that has its act together enough to even be able to systematically mislead. You know what I mean?

Brad Kramer [00:30:29] I just felt like, because I knew I had heard things, I'd heard crazy stuff growing up all the time. I had crazy Sunday school teachers telling me teaching me fence sitters in the pre existence as the reason for the priesthood ban.

Brad Kramer [00:30:45] I mean, I'd heard crazy stuff my entire life. But I guess including in seminary, you know, and I guess even then because of the diversity of experience that I'd had and because my dad had kind of, let's say, overplayed his hand a little bit when it came to sort of trying to hold up the church as a perfectly authoritative organization.

Brad Kramer [00:31:10] I ended up just never really, like, realizing that. That so many of the things I'd been taught were crazy. Never really made me think that, like, the church is crazy or, like, the church is, like, lying. It was more like the church just can't get anybody on a message and nobody.

Brad Kramer [00:31:34] Like, I just never had any real faith in the ability of the church to, like, systematically control anything in our lives. So. And I suspect that growing up just at the time, we did sort of right at the dawn of the information age.

Brad Kramer [00:31:52] And being the first generation, I was born in 1979, right. So the first generation raised completely in the post 1978 Mormon world. There's something about that that I think that means that a lot of younger intellectuals, Mormon intellectuals, it's not to say that all of them are going to stay in the church or anything like that, but that Mormon intellectuals don't engage in these sort of these problematic questions through a filter that is ultimately defined by this kind of existential angst between, or, you know, this existential tension between faith and intellect that was so strongly cultivated in people even just a generation older than us. Right.

John Dehlin [00:32:40] Okay, cool. So were you going to tie that back to the Bushman Givens thing, or was that just a framing for beyond that?

Brad Kramer [00:32:49] Well, that was basically just a framing sort of trying to pinpoint one of, I think, the differences that, for me personally, and it seems like for a lot of people closer to my age, a lot of Mormon intellectuals closer to my age.

Marriage, Family, and Church Membership Tensions

Brad Kramer [00:33:06] So there's another thing, though, that I want to bring into the conversation before I kind of introduce this framework that you mentioned. And this also has to do with my personal history, but I think it's a part of my personal history that we may be able to extrapolate a little more from.

Brad Kramer [00:33:23] So grew up in Utah, grew up in Salt Lake, Wasatch Front. Heavily legacy Mormon, you know, third, fourth, fifth, fifth generation Mormon on both sides of my family. So all my, you know, parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, everybody's raised in the church, Right.

Brad Kramer [00:33:49] Big families, too. My Dad's family has 10 kids. My mom has six. I'm the oldest of six kids. You know, dozens and dozens of cousins. And I'm raised in, you know, like, I'm raised in a part of the church where your ward is like, you know, nine square blocks.

Brad Kramer [00:34:13] And more than half the people who live in that boundary are literally members of the ward or members of the church. So you're surrounded by Mormons. You go to school with Mormons. Right. So I knew lots and lots and lots and lots of Mormons growing up.

John Dehlin [00:34:27] Right?

Brad Kramer [00:34:28] Schoolmates, family members, extended family members, obviously ward members. And because I was Mormon, I was predominantly hanging out with other Mormons. So as I've gone through and I've sort of started to try to think about this, systematically going through and thinking about all the kids I knew growing up at various ages, up and through the mission, honestly, because I'm still surrounded by people my age that are all Mormons on the mission.

Brad Kramer [00:35:04] And of all the people that I know that I knew growing up, roughly half of them are completely inactive. They have no relationship to speak of with the church, which reinforces in my mind that there is a real serious problem. There's a real retention problem. There's a real membership hemorrhaging problem. The church really is hemorrhaging young adults.

Brad Kramer [00:35:39] But the flip side to that is that a very, very small percentage of that group, which, again, would include dozens of people that I could read a list of names, you know, 40, 50, maybe 60 people that I know that I grew up with that are no longer a part of the church in any meaningful sense at all, never ever go to church.

Brad Kramer [00:36:05] Only maybe three or four of them left for sort of principled intellectual reasons, right. That they came, you know, they learned more about the church. They learned more about its past. They learned more about scripture, they learned more about doctrine, whatever. And they came to the conclusion that Mormonism isn't what it claims to be. They came to the conclusion that Mormonism is false, that the church can't be true in the way that they had been taught that it was true, and therefore they left on principle. So

John Dehlin [00:36:45] why did the 96% leave?

Brad Kramer [00:36:48] That's the question that I really think needs to be. I think that's the question that church leaders are really trying to figure out. I think they see the problem of sort of transparency and not being able to contain sensitive information. I think they see that as ancillary to the general problem of retention. I mean, and to be fair, like people, a number of the people that I know, after they sort of bored, you know, left Mormonism, just sort of detached themselves from Mormonism. They also came to.

Brad Kramer [00:37:35] Believe that there were problems with Mormonism after the fact. But a number of them don't fundamentally disbelieve anything about Mormon. They don't think that Joseph Smith was a fraud. They don't think that Thomas Monson is a fraud. They're just not interested.

Brad Kramer [00:37:53] There's just nothing to keep them in the church. And they like life as a not active Mormon better than they liked it as an active Mormon. And that's really what it comes down to. And I would also say that there's a difference, just again, when I'm looking at this sort of cohort of peers of mine, of childhood peers, that social issues.

Brad Kramer [00:38:25] Are much more of a sticking point or much more of a source of alienation from the church than historical issues. In other words, with historical issues, the problem is like, oh, I didn't know this about the church and why was I not told this about the church and am I being lied to by the church? You know, it's this sense of betrayal. But with the social issues, it's things that are right out in the open. It's not as if the church is disguising the fact that it is, you know, anti gay marriage. Right. It's stuff that's right out in the open that they are ashamed by or that they, you know, they view as being sort of genuinely, genuinely bad, genuinely harmful.

Brad Kramer [00:39:08] And then that contributes to really serious alienation. And so I think that as a causal factor, I suspect that the social issue stuff, the anti gay marriage stuff, the gender stuff is. Is much more of a causal factor than these other kinds of more difficult abstract questions or historical questions.

John Dehlin [00:39:36] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Our research at Y Mormon's question, which was admittedly a snowball sample, but we had an n of over 3,000, and it certainly reflects issues with women, issues with gays and lesbians, and, you know, just spiritual promptings to go elsewhere or feeling bored or unedified at church is definitely being significant factors for many. So, yes.

Brad Kramer [00:40:05] See, the church does a great job at making you feel edified at church, if you fit.

John Dehlin [00:40:10] Exactly. Yeah.

Brad Kramer [00:40:11] And if you don't fit, it can be an intensely alienating experience. And I think my mom's experience is also a little bit telling, Right. Because even the way that we talk about it in sort of insider discourse inside the church and sort of faithful discourse, we talk about the importance of conversion and fellowship. We talk about the importance of having a testimony as this kind of inner conviction, and the importance of having a connection like being fellowshipped in the community.

Brad Kramer [00:40:44] And very often when there's a deficit in one, people can sort of anchor themselves to the other, at least temporarily. So if something happens that causes you to feel really alienated from your ward, that inner conviction, that deep testimony that Mormonism is true can help you weather that.

Brad Kramer [00:41:04] Conversely, if you're going through a faith crisis, but you still feel a profound connection to and support from, from your ward community, that can help you weather the crisis of testimony. Yeah, but when things happen simultaneously, it's somebody's not, you're not going to stay.

Brad Kramer [00:41:27] So if you're feeling alienated, and so that's a big part of the problem is that these things sort of on a macro scale are happening simultaneously demographically. Mormons are starting to their demographic changes happening for North American and Western European Mormons that reflect larger trends in society. We marry later, we place a higher premium on higher education, and we're less conservative, less and less sort of prone to Cold War type thinking.

Brad Kramer [00:42:10] And we are products of the information age. And so you have a whole generation of people that don't fit the mold because they're waiting longer to get married. And when you're an adult in Mormonism, but you're not married, you're not really an adult, you get treated by the church and the community, even not vindictively, but just by default, you get treated like a full grown child until you're married.

Brad Kramer [00:42:45] And so you're not experiencing full. So it's alienating to be who you are in the church. Plus you're encountering information that makes it very difficult to sustain the kind of unquestioned, unwavering faith that you had as a child. And so it's just no wonder that there's a crisis now.

John Dehlin [00:43:07] Brad, before we dive in, I always want my guests to connect with my audience and my audience to connect with my guests. And of course, my guess is that part of your motivation is to help people who are either on the fence trying to decide what to do or maybe even people who have left consider maybe a different paradigm that would allow re. Re engagement at some level. But if, if you've never, if you've never faced, you know, this sort of dark night of the soul that we've been talking about for so many years, if you've never really stared down some serious doubts or questions or, or even contemplated leaving or a crisis of faith, it's going to be probably harder for the listeners to connect with you.

John Dehlin [00:44:01] And I don't want to. I honestly am not trying to prejudice them against you or stack the deck, but is there anything in your Michigan years, you know, did you ever have that tough time or have you just never really experienced what so many of my listeners have experienced?

Brad Kramer [00:44:19] No, I think I have. I mean, I don't want to trivialize anybody else's experience. Because for me to. I want to be careful. I don't want this to sound like me saying to somebody who experienced a crisis and left, hey, I experienced exactly what you experienced, and I'm still here. I'm not saying that's what happened. Part of what I was trying to allude to before is, on the one hand, that it never really happened for me around historical issues.

John Dehlin [00:44:46] Okay.

Brad Kramer [00:44:47] For me, it happened as a part of two much more sort of contemporary issues. One of them didn't really quite make me. Didn't make me want to leave so much as it really ratcheted up my general cynicism about the church. And that was sort of being closely involved with Damon in the process of writing and preparing the Book of Mammon.

John Dehlin [00:45:16] Damon Smith?

Brad Kramer [00:45:17] Yeah, He's a good friend of mine. We're still good friends. And so, I mean, to me, there are parts of the story that he tells in the Book of Mammon that are significantly more difficult for me to digest spiritually than anything out of our deep history.

John Dehlin [00:45:40] And these are things about the corporate inside workings of the church, I'm guessing.

Brad Kramer [00:45:44] Exactly, exactly. So, like, Damon has this story in there, right, about how the whole re. Emphasis on flooding the world with the Book of Mormon and everybody writing testimonies in these paperback Book of Mormons and sending them. That was, in part, a resolution to a stocking problem.

John Dehlin [00:46:09] Inventory. It's an inventory.

Brad Kramer [00:46:10] Like an inventory issue. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:46:12] Yeah.

Brad Kramer [00:46:13] To me, that's worse than Mountain Meadows. I mean, that is so hard. That was so much harder for me than learning any of our skeletons from our past. But I don't think that quite got me toward considering leaving. It just made me much more cynical, and I think I'm probably a little less cynical now about the corporate aspect of Mormonism than I was when I was first sort of hit with it. But the thing that pushed me.

John Dehlin [00:46:50] Let me just refer my listeners, for those of you who haven't listened to the Damon Smith interview on Mormon stories. It's really, really good, so please check that out.

Brad Kramer [00:47:00] It is. It's one of the best podcasts you guys have ever recorded. Honestly, it's really, really, really good. And again, Damon's a good friend of mine, so that one didn't. Wasn't quite a membership crisis. It was more just like a crisis of cynicism.

Brad Kramer [00:47:18] But as to the question of whether or not I would stay, I struggled massively with Prop 8 and its aftermath, and I continue to struggle massively over LGBT and women's issues. In the church. And for me, where the rubber meets the road in terms of crisis is that I have daughters, and I regularly question whether or not I want them to go through the young women's program.

Brad Kramer [00:47:54] So it's these very practical family things, and then just having so many people that I'm close to that I care about, that my family cares about who are lgbt and knowing the kind of pain that affiliation with the church causes the vast majority of them and the kind of relief that they experience when they leave. You know, for me, it becomes a question of, like, I'm sort of in constant crisis.

John Dehlin [00:48:32] That's not fun.

Brad Kramer [00:48:33] It's not. But it's managed crisis, too. And it's a crisis that I think in part is more manageable because it has. You know, I'm a white male. Like, it hasn't. It's easy. It comes from a place of privilege. Right? Like, I can sympathize abstractly, but, like, I'm not just a white. I'm a straight white male.

Brad Kramer [00:48:56] And so I can sympathize abstractly with the pain, but it hasn't. Like, I haven't actually personally been abused by the church in the way that I think the church sort of systemically is in a systemically abusive relationship with its LGBT membership and to a lesser degree, with its female membership.

Brad Kramer [00:49:24] So for me, it's a kind of constant crisis. It's a managed crisis. And I can't say with absolute confidence that I won't end up on the outside at some point. I mean, I don't think I will. And that's in part because I also don't think that my spouse will.

Brad Kramer [00:49:45] In other words, I try to be very cognizant of the sort of the social and. And pre rational dimensions of this whole equation. For me, like, why is it easy for me to maintain, to stay inside? But whereas I describe it now as a kind of perpetual crisis, that is also a managed crisis, initially I think it was much more serious because initially it wasn't managed. Right.

Brad Kramer [00:50:21] It was just a crisis that came on, and it was a real long, long period of asking the question, do I want. Of me personally asking the question, do I want to remain and of Trace and I asking ourselves the question, do we want, as a family, to remain? So I'm not outside the church, but I know right where the exit sign is. You know what I mean? Like, I'm sitting inside and I know where the marked exits are.

John Dehlin [00:50:59] And yet you want to. You felt motivated to want to come on and provide a framework to potentially assist others.

Brad Kramer [00:51:09] Well, and in part to potentially assist others. I mean, I suspect that it's going to be impossible for me to not describe this in a way that reflects my own position and therefore isn't on some level going to come across as more of an outreach that's intended to keep people in or bring people back. But I guess really part of what I'm hoping is that, and the larger goal for me is to just make it easier for Mormon intellectuals who weather their crisis and stay in the church and remain believing and are sincerely believing, even if their mode of belief isn't particularly orthodox, to have productive conversations with.

Brad Kramer [00:52:06] In other words, for people like me and people like Jay to be able to have a productive conversations with each other where we don't sneer at each other, where we don't look down at each other, where we don't, you know, assume, where we don't sort of read one another's choices cynically.

Brad Kramer [00:52:30] So, and I guess if I were to introduce anything that was particularly calculated to help people potentially stay or potentially come back, it would be something that, an idea that I got from Jana Reese, actually, which I think is just beautiful, which is that. And this is the way that I think about it. When I think about the question of whether I will leave, I no longer think about it in terms of will I capital L leave. I think about it in terms of do I need a sabbatical?

John Dehlin [00:53:11] Right. And I think Joanna Brooks also has talked about that idea.

Brad Kramer [00:53:15] Yeah, I would imagine she has. So there are people that I know. I mean, I can imagine being in situations where I would advise somebody to leave, but I would advise it almost even, you know, like if one of my kids four or five, six years from now, during their adolescence came out to me. And you know, Trace and I have talked about this. I think that my.

Navigating Sexuality and Belonging in Mormonism

John Dehlin [00:53:45] As gay, as gay.

Brad Kramer [00:53:45] As gay, as gay.

John Dehlin [00:53:46] Yeah.

Brad Kramer [00:53:47] My instinct would be to tell him or her to take a sabbatical from Mormon. In other words, a sabbatical in the sense of not ruling out the possibility of coming back, but a sort of a guilt free dissociation from the church, make a life and make a happy life without the negative consequences that are going to come from you trying to remain directly affiliated with the church and then sincerely pray and sincerely hope that at some point the church becomes worthy of having you back.

Brad Kramer [00:54:25] To me, that's a pretty obvious example. But in general, I talk to people quite regularly who are having. Experiencing some degree of crisis or another. And that is, you know, in situations like that, or even like siblings of mine, like I have siblings who have left that I, and I don't blame them for leaving at all.

Brad Kramer [00:54:55] I don't think that they were wrong to leave. But I do think that if I had, you know, if I had a time machine or whatever and I could go back and influence the way that they, in some way influenced the way that they thought through their, their choice to leave, that I could encourage them to think of it more in terms of even a long term sabbatical than leaving. And this is a problem because the church doesn't, the church itself doesn't encourage that kind of thinking. It encourages very all or nothing thinking. And it talks about people, church discourse talks about people who leave in terms of having made, you know, lasting choices or whatever.

Brad Kramer [00:55:38] And of course it still wants people to come back, but it doesn't want you to think about your relationship with it if you're still in, in terms of taking a sabbatical. It wants you to think of it in terms of, in the kind of terms that, you know, Elder Holland describes when he talks about this stuff. He says, stay, don't you dare leave. Don't you dare, you know, hurt, hurt the, you know, do that to the people around you that love you, trust us, you know, like very, very absolute terms, stay, stay, stay. And that sort of codes the choice of leaving as being extremely severe and radical.

Brad Kramer [00:56:15] And this radical break, if you choose to leave, you're abandoning. And I just don't think that's a very useful way to think about it.

John Dehlin [00:56:22] And for some, it's actually leaving or taking a sabbatical might be critical for their well being.

Brad Kramer [00:56:28] Absolutely. I mean, this is part of what I'm saying that like, Mormonism is great for a lot and it's great for. It can be a great source of happiness for a lot of people in their lives and it can shape their lives in really beautiful ways. And a lot of this is easy for me to say because I've never really been, I've never been directly on the receiving end of the kinds of harm and abuse that the church is capable of inflicting on people. And so, and I think this is probably a good segue into the actual kind of model that I've been thinking about. If you don't mind moving into it now.

John Dehlin [00:57:17] Yeah, let's totally do it.

Brad Kramer [00:57:40] Come, come, ye saints. No toil nor labor fear, but with joy.

A Framework for Understanding Mormon Faith Transitions

Part 2 of 2 · Ep. 466

John Dehlin [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3. Mormon Stories Podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you. To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today@mormonstories.org all right, well, we're in part two of our interview with Brad Kramer. He's talked to us a bit about his history. He's talked to us about growing up LDS in Utah, pursuing various channels academically, and some of his biggest concerns that he's faced regarding the church. And it was a great hour. And now Brad's going to talk to us about, let's just say, a framework that he's developed for people to consider as it relates to intellectual Mormon discourse. Does that sound right, Brad?

Brad Kramer [00:01:12] Yeah, that sounds about right. So there are a couple of triggers for me to kind of thinking about church membership or church affiliation in this framework. One of them was I ended up doing in my dissertation. I know we didn't talk about the dissertation, but I ended up in my dissertation doing a lot of oblique descriptions of what temple work is like for Mormons and how the temple figures into Mormon life. I mean, obviously, I was respectful in my treatment, not just out of spiritual, but out of anthropological sort of professional obligations. I didn't divulge anything, but trying to, you know, work through what.

Brad Kramer [00:02:00] How the experience of the temple sort of shapes the lives of people that engage in it and of Mormons generally. So that's part of it. And then part of it was there's this great little. This great little chapter in Adam Miller's new book, Letters to Young Mormon, where I'm going to end up paraphrasing this, obviously, but he talks about faithfulness, which has certain overtones in Mormonism. Right? In Mormonism, faithfulness doesn't just describe commitment. It describes assent. Right. It describes agreement. It describes acceptance of ideological propositions, acceptance of truth claims.

Brad Kramer [00:02:59] It implies that you believe or know certain things about Mormonism and that you're faithful because you are orthodox, because you believe the right things, you don't believe the wrong things. In other words, faithfulness is highly, highly ideological in the church.

Brad Kramer [00:03:18] And commitment to the church is framed in terms of ideological commitments that you agree, you accept certain things as true. And Adam tries to reframe that by saying faithfulness is more like faithfulness to a spouse. It's faithfulness to family. It's faithfulness to a loved one. In other words, it's a faithfulness that, That fully acknowledges and recognizes the flaws in the other person and is grounded in a choice and a commitment and even a covenant of faithfulness irrespective of those flaws. Right.

Brad Kramer [00:04:02] And so, and I thought that was an interesting reframing. Obviously it's simplistic, but I think it's at least a very useful kind of way of an alternative or a kind of supplement to the more common Mormon mode of thinking about faithfulness.

John Dehlin [00:04:26] And Brad, I'm just going to say that immediately there's some questions that are jumping out of my mind about that. And I'm just going to, I'll tell you and I'll tell my listeners what I'm going to do is reserve my questions and concerns until the end, after you've laid out your framework, because I don't want to want to get us bogged down. But I also don't want you or the listeners to think that I don't have questions about what you're saying.

Brad Kramer [00:04:49] Absolutely. This is designed. I mean, this is one of the problems when you try to present a framework like this. You run into the problem of it coming across as being sort of totalizing and perfect. And really thinking about this framework that I'm introducing is more than anything else designed to sort of provoke conversation, dialogue and to enable that dialogue sort of across different spaces or across different positions to be more fruitful, more productive, more generous. So I absolutely expect that this will generate questions. So there's Adam's thing there.

Brad Kramer [00:05:34] And it reminded me of something that happened a couple years ago for me. So I wrote a blog post four or five years ago, it's been a while now, in which I sort of posed the question, what would it take for you to leave?

Brad Kramer [00:05:53] In other words, I figure a good portion of By Common Consent readers, by the way, I blog it By Common Consent. I forgot to mention that in the intro, a good portion of By Common Consent readers are intellectual Mormons who are more likely than not, I think, to still be inside the church. So I started sort of thinking about this question abstractly. What would church leaders have to do to provoke me into leaving, since I'm fairly committed to staying? And one of the obvious answers I had in my head was like, oh well, if they tried to say reverse the 1978 revelation, I would leave.

Brad Kramer [00:06:35] That was sort of a no brainer to me. So I'm kind of trying to think about like I'm thinking about, like, you know, where's the line for me? And at some point in that process I shut it down because I started thinking, this is not.

Brad Kramer [00:06:50] This isn't actually a productive way to think about something that you're already committed to. Like, you would never think this way about a spouse. You would never come up with a checklist, even though there are things, like if you're married, there are things that your spouse could do. And you know, in the back of your mind, if your spouse did this, it would probably.

Brad Kramer [00:07:10] It would probably be the end. But you don't think in terms of, like, you don't think in checklist terms about your spouse. You think in terms of commitment first, and if something bad happens, we're going to work through it.

Brad Kramer [00:07:25] In other words, you don't come up with a checklist of 10 things, and, oh, if four of the 10 things happen, I'm just leaving. You can't sort of predetermine those things. And it's not even particularly healthy, I think, for your relationship to think in those terms. Yeah, you know, there are things your spouse could do to provoke you to leave, but coming up with a checklist is just.

Brad Kramer [00:07:48] Just unproductive. And so I sort of backed away from that line of thinking, even though I know in my heart of hearts that there are definitely things that could happen that would cause me to leave. I just don't compose those checklists anymore.

Brad Kramer [00:08:05] And then. It's going to sound kind of funny, but one of the most proximate triggers for this line of thinking was on Facebook, they have those quizzes like, what Star Trek character are you? What flower are you? What cookie ingredient are you?

Brad Kramer [00:08:29] Whatever. One of those things was like, what religion are you? Not what religion do you belong to, but what religion are you? And I saw a bunch of my friends had taken that test, and it was interesting because all the ones that I noticed that took the test were all Mormons or former Mormons, Mormons that are right on the edge, or Mormons that are, you know, they're inside the church, but they know where the exits are, so to speak.

Brad Kramer [00:09:04] Or Mormons who have left the church, you know, that are not really. That are still Mormon in some sense, but not believers. They all got Judaism. And so at first I was thinking, well, you know, Mormons have this certain affinity for Judaism or whatever, these certain commonalities.

Brad Kramer [00:09:25] And then I started thinking, well, there's a really interesting difference between Mormonism and Judaism. And one is just sheer difference of age, right? Judaism's been around for. Even rabbinical Judaism has been around for 2000 for as long as Christianity and. And proto Judaism has Been around for even longer. And Mormonism is this very young, very immature faith, comparatively speaking.

Brad Kramer [00:09:51] And then I started thinking, well, maturity isn't just a function of age. What if you think about maturity in terms of relationships? Because then what stands out to you? What stands out to me is that Mormonism's. Maybe the biggest marker of immaturity in Mormonism is that in Mormonism, members tend to have a very childlike relationship with the church. In other words, it's a parent child relationship, it's a familial relationship, but it's a relationship that is calculated to be and is conditioned to be childlike or childish.

Brad Kramer [00:10:33] A relationship. It's like the relationship that a five year old child has with her parent. A relationship of sort of unquestioned trust. You view your parents as perfect, perfectly. Like you're absolutely dependent, absolute dependency, absolute trust. You view them in almost godlike terms. Your parents know everything and they're absolute moral authorities.

Brad Kramer [00:11:04] And even when they punished you or whatever, they don't relinquish that general authority that they have in your life. And most Mormons tend to retain that relationship with the church right into adulthood. There's something very. And in fact, we kind of, we kind of explicitly frame it in those terms, right? We talk about like obedience, obedience, submission and, you know, casting off the natural man and submitting like a child submits to his father, right? Or of such is the kingdom, right? Kingdom of little children. Like we venerate childlike faith in Mormonism.

Brad Kramer [00:11:53] Well, in Judaism, and of course, I'm massively, massively overgeneralizing and oversimplifying and every other anthropological sin I could be committing right now. But Judaism strikes me as more mature than Mormonism. Not just because it's older, in longer standing and duration or whatever, but because Jewish people of various stripes. I mean, if you can generalize, one thing about believing Jews is that yes, they have a relationship with God, they have a relationship with, with institutional authority, they have a relationship with scripture, they have a relationship with ecclesiastical authority, they have a relationship with tradition. And all those relationships are strong and meaningful.

Brad Kramer [00:12:40] But they are adult. They're much more adult than our relationship as Mormons tends to be with our God and with our institution and with our, in particular with the institution and with institutional authority. Tradition, right? So we have this very childlike. And again, that's kind of the ideal.

Brad Kramer [00:13:04] And it's not just that it's not that church members are immature, it's that the church itself is immature because the way that the church itself idealizes Membership is the way that a five year old would idealize a parent child relationship. The church seems to want us to be children.

Brad Kramer [00:13:27] Now that's probably a little unfair too, right? But I'm just, again, I'm talking in terms of sweeping generalities. I think it's possible in a way today that it wasn't a hundred years ago, 100 years ago, everybody knew, everybody personally interacted with apostles. They could see how flawed they were.

Brad Kramer [00:13:48] And as the church has become this kind of global institution and our relationships with church leadership have become so abstracted by media and as church messaging has been so sort of thoroughly correlated and as we've developed this sort of follow the prophet discourse, I mean, all these things have sort of happened at once as a way of consolidating, consolidating Mormonism as a global entity. Right. That.

Brad Kramer [00:14:19] I think the childishness of Mormon membership, the childlikeness of Mormon membership has really hit its apex about a generation ago. And now what you're seeing is. Various paths out of that childlike relationship. And I would note, by the way, just as sort of an aside, that there's an interesting component of that. This takes on an interesting flavor in terms of what goes on in the temple. And this is why I mentioned the temple initially as sort of precipitating this line of thought. For me, one way of thinking about the temple narrative, this sort of mythological dramatized narrative in the temple in which we all identify personally with the characters, in some sense become the characters in the play, is that initially they have a childlike relationship with God and then they move into maturity, into kind of adolescent maturity.

Leaving Eden: Mature Faith and Loss of Innocence

Brad Kramer [00:15:34] The onset of reproductive maturity basically coincides with leaving the innocence of the garden and actually being able to reproduce. And they desire to have a relationship with God still and to restore their relationship with God, but they cannot restore the relationship of childlike innocence. If they're going to reconnect with God, it's going to be as adults.

Brad Kramer [00:16:02] It's going to be as adults who see things the way they really are, who see the good and the bad, who understand good and evil, who understand death, who have lived in the real world, who have sweat and bled.

Brad Kramer [00:16:17] In other words, it's gone. Your relationship is not meant to be the relationship of a child to a parent. It's meant to be the relationship of an adult to a parent. And what I see happening right now in Mormonism, I think we. I think we can. Again, it's an incomplete analogy, it's an oversimplified analogy, but I think we can think about it in part in terms of these varying transitions out of a child childlike relationship with the church and optimally into an adult relationship with the church. But here's the problem. You don't get from childhood to adulthood without adolescence.

Brad Kramer [00:17:08] And again, we're thinking in very oversimplified terms here. Adolescence can be. Adolescence is almost like one of the ways that you would sort of stereotypically or define adolescence is that you become an adolescent. You become a teenager when you start to realize that your parents are wrong about everything.

Brad Kramer [00:17:34] But in some sense, there's still a certain childlike simplicity to your framing of that, right? Like you suddenly think that your parents are wrong about everything and that you're right and that you're smarter and that you know what's best.

Brad Kramer [00:17:49] And. And part of the way that you transition out of that into adulthood is by sort of reincorporating both, but from a more nuanced perspective. So an adult child, you know, adult child, an adult has a relationship, right? As an adult, I have a relationship with my parents that involves a very precise and acute awareness of their shortcomings.

Brad Kramer [00:18:19] And I no longer see them as anything like an absolute authority, even moral authority in my life. But I also see their beauty. And I also have come to really appreciate all that they did for me. And so in some ways, I think that I can see the flaws in my parents more clearly now than I could as a teenager, because I'm open to seeing them in very three dimensional terms.

Brad Kramer [00:18:54] Now. I want to be really careful here because what I'm not trying to say, and you could easily go in this direction. I'm not trying to say that people that learn about the flaws in the church and leave are stuck in adolescence. And I'm not trying to say that people like me weathered adolescence and became adults, and therefore we're adults. And people that left the church are petulant teenagers.

Brad Kramer [00:19:21] And I think there are other dimensions that you have to add to this that can account for that. And one is that the ideal parent sort of adult relationship with parent that I'm describing is only really possible, I think, in situations where the relationship. And sort of like, it's possible for me to have a very good relationship with my parents now, which I do, despite my awareness of their flaws and even my awareness of all the ways in which they screwed me up over the course of my life, because all parents screw up their kids to some extent.

Brad Kramer [00:19:58] But I'm able to still have, like, a very warm and a very close relationship with my parents because there was because really they never abused me. I mean, the harm they did to me, which again, all parents do to their kids to some degree, the harm they did to me was definitely outweighed by the good they did. Right. And there was never any serious abuse of any kind.

Brad Kramer [00:20:29] And so I think that there's, I think that part of the answer to the question that seems implicit in our whole conversation, John, about why I am where I am in the church and what the nature of my relationship with the church is. I think if I'm being honest, my relationship with the church pretty closely mirrors my relationship with my parents.

Brad Kramer [00:20:55] It doesn't have to be that. I mean, it could just as easily be like I said, I could leave at some point. Maybe if five years from now I'm left, I would still be every bit as close to my parents as I am now. And it wouldn't, you know, then that reflection wouldn't be there. So I'm not saying that that's anything like a universal rule, but I do think that in my case it's been sort of a striking personal insight for me to recognize just how strong that parallel is.

Brad Kramer [00:21:23] But you know, some people can't get to a healthy place in adulthood without like, for some people making peace with their parents requires distance from their parents because they did harm them, they did screw them up, they did hurt them, they did abuse them.

Brad Kramer [00:21:45] And so the only way that you're going to passage into adulthood in terms of your relationship with your parents is going to necessarily require you to maybe completely, maybe just sort of dramatically distance yourself from them or have them out of your lives.

Brad Kramer [00:22:05] And that's actually necessary for your health and well being. And I also think so in other words, I'm not saying that people that leave the church. Are failing to find adulthood. And I'm not even trying to say that you have to have been seriously abused by the church in order to, you know, be able to describe your departure from Mormonism as a transition into adulthood. Again, this is just a very kind of simplistic framework.

Brad Kramer [00:22:44] But I think it's much easier for me to sympathize with people who leave and to not when and to not just sort of get locked down, get locked into thinking of them as being petulant. And I mean, I'm sure there are people that are like that. There are people that sort of, they learn that their parents were wrong, they learned their parent institution lied to them, they learned the parent institution was wrong, they have a knee jerk reaction in a very simplistic way. I Mean, there's something very adolescent about the way that they react.

Brad Kramer [00:23:29] And I'm sure there are people that do fit that model. But even then, I think I have an obligation to sympathize with them, on the one hand, because part of the reason they reacted the way they did is that their parents, the parent institution, tried so hard to keep them in childhood to prevent them from, you know, to lock them into this childlike mindset. And so, of course, they react the way that they do when they can no longer sustain that childlike faith.

Brad Kramer [00:24:08] And so I can be very sympathetic even to people that do fit that model. But I can also be sympathetic to the fact that even if your initial reaction. When you come to really question things about the church or to really doubt what you once believed about the church, even if your initial reaction is somewhat dramatic or whatever, it's still very possible that at that point, the only way for you to actually develop maturing your relationship with the institution involves leaving.

Brad Kramer [00:24:49] It has to involve leaving. And then suddenly, I'm just. I've essentially given myself a framework that takes away from me the ability to assume anything, to assume that because you left, you reacted petulantly to learning about Mountain Meadows Massacre or something like that, or because you left.

Brad Kramer [00:25:09] In other words, it forces a kind of charitable framework onto me. And I think it forces a kind of a potential framework of understanding onto people who have left who can look at somebody like me and say he was really in a position where.

Brad Kramer [00:25:30] A fully maturing relationship with the church was totally compatible with him retaining close ties to it. And that's. And then, you know, that's comfortable. And he really can see the church now more clearly than he could when. Because I underwent my own adolescence. Right. And again, this is a funny parallel that's personal. A personal parallel for me is I wasn't a particularly difficult teenager. I didn't. Obviously, I knew my parents were wrong about a lot of things, and I thought I was smarter than my parents and stuff, but I didn't act out much, and I didn't butt heads with them very much.

Brad Kramer [00:26:13] So it was a more or less quiet adolescence for me, and it was with the church, too. Like, I used to be much more cynical and much more certain about things that I saw the church as being just totally wrong about than I am now.

Brad Kramer [00:26:36] So for me, moving on from a more adolescent relationship to a more adult relationship with the church has been. One has been fairly peaceful and one that allows me to maintain close contact with it. Whereas I can totally see for somebody for Example, like Jay, like my friend Jay.

Brad Kramer [00:26:56] I just can't look at somebody with his story and think that, I mean, and in any way judge his choice to impose distance between himself and the church. I cannot hold that against somebody with his story. Anyway, I assume you have tons of questions and you want to sort of talk through this now because it's admittedly an imperfect framework, and I'm not trying to come up with a grand unified theory or whatever, but I just think it's. I just think it's helpful way for us to think about each other as sort of fellow siblings with an admittedly somewhat dysfunctional parents. And if, you know, if you, you know, like, I don't.

Brad Kramer [00:27:46] I would never begrudge. I don't know. I just. I can't begrudge somebody, given what I know about the dysfunctionality of our collective parent, I cannot begrudge somebody

John Dehlin [00:27:59] who.

Brad Kramer [00:27:59] For whom personal peace has required them to distance themselves from that parent totally.

John Dehlin [00:28:07] So I love it. Let me just tell you all the things I love about what you're saying. I love it that you acknowledge that in some ways this framework is developed from a place of privilege. I love that you account for the fact that there are going to be people who are. For whom church affiliation might be untenable or unhealthy, that you're not casting judgment upon them explicitly. You're not casting judgment upon them if they feel like for their health, they need to leave. I like it that this is sort of a full acknowledgment of the Church's frailties and weaknesses, that it's not.

Brad Kramer [00:28:48] And by the way, that we're all going to judge those weaknesses differently.

John Dehlin [00:28:52] Sure.

Brad Kramer [00:28:53] We're all gonna say even different. Those of us who have moved into adulthood. I mean, that's part of what's going to define the difference between people who stay, or, you know, the people who stay close to it and the people who are distant from it is that we differently evaluate those weaknesses, those frailties, those imperfections and those problems, those. Even those. Even those points of sort of harm and abuse.

John Dehlin [00:29:15] Right, right. And so. And so that's, you know, and I love that it's calling for maturity, I think. I think that I definitely have had my moments and still do of acting in, let's just say, a less adult way, an adolescent way about feeling frustrated or angry or acting out, externalizing my feelings. And it's basically just a call for all sides to be charitable and mature. And I love all that. So let me just. You know, we've got about 30 minutes, I think, before you got to run. And I think there's much more than 30 minutes of conversation here. But we'll start it and then we'll.

Brad Kramer [00:29:57] And some of it'll come in, in the conversation with Jay, I think.

John Dehlin [00:30:00] Yeah, I think so too. But let me just, let me just ask you first and let's try and match, let's try and manage our, our comments to be able to fit as much in as we can in the next 30 minutes. Okay, so. So, you know, one of the immediate questions that came to my, my, my mind about your framework is let's just say somebody has lost all belief in God completely. Or, or, you know, they sort of, for them, the, the fact that the church claims to be the one and only true church on the face of the earth, but in their mind they've concluded that that that's just not, not true and that, well, it can't be

Brad Kramer [00:30:40] true if there's no God.

John Dehlin [00:30:41] Yeah. Or let's say they believe in God, but they, but they just say the church isn't what it claims to be. And that matters to them, you know.

Brad Kramer [00:30:50] Yeah. And it should matter.

John Dehlin [00:30:52] So does that. Is this model. Are you just sort of saying that as you circumscribe for whom this model would apply? It's just sort of not for that type, that type of person, a person who's in that place. Does this model assume a certain willingness to believe at the outset?

Brad Kramer [00:31:13] So a couple of things. I think it does assume a certain willingness or a certain presence of belief, but I would say two things to attenuate that. One thing that I would say is that I think maybe it makes room for people who simply cannot believe, for example, that there is a God. To me, that's actually the most difficult thing to swallow. I mean, that's where when it comes to sort of questions of belief and faith, I have a much harder time swallowing the whole thing than I do any particular aspect of Mormonism. It's much more difficult for me to absolutely accept the existence of the God of monotheism or something like that of a supreme being who's deeply entangled and interested in our individual lie and is guiding history somehow.

Brad Kramer [00:32:05] I mean, that is much, much, much, much more difficult for me. I think at my most sort of psychologically and intellectually naked to swallow than, you know, like pre Christian Israelites, like getting on a boat and going to the new world or whatever.

Brad Kramer [00:32:27] It's so much harder to swallow. So, so in some ways, not believing that there's any not believing in God, period, is the kind of doubt that I actually most strongly sympathize with.

John Dehlin [00:32:40] Okay?

Brad Kramer [00:32:41] And that's, I think, gonna be one of the most difficult kinds of doubt to reconcile with any kind of close relationship with the church. However, thinking in these terms still may put somebody in that position, may make it easier for somebody in that position to still say, like, I really don't think that there's a God. But I still have this deep natal relationship with Mormonism, and I still feel a strong place here.

Brad Kramer [00:33:13] And so maybe that person might still stay inside in some formal way, you know, retain church membership, be more or less orthopraxic. Or it may mean, like, yeah, I just can't be a part of the church because I just.

Brad Kramer [00:33:27] I can't believe that God exists. But it could soften any sort of antagonism that I might feel toward the church or any need to kind of forcefully distance myself from it. The other thing I would say to that is I think that we vastly overestimate both inside Mormon circles and actually inside ex Mormon circles, frankly, I think we vastly overestimate the degree to which we.

Brad Kramer [00:34:01] Make rational evaluations about matters of faith or the degree to which faith is something that we choose versus that faith or non faith is something that we choose versus something that happens to us. So it's something that I think can very often feel like is completely out of your control, which is why it can be traumatic for people to lose faith. You feel like you lost your faith because you feel like something was taken from you. You feel like it happened to you, it stripped something from you, and that can be very traumatizing for people. So we may be moving into more of a tangent there, but.

John Dehlin [00:34:40] No, that's fine. What about the question of, you know, someone might say, look, if the church isn't what it claims to be, if it's not the one true church with exclusive authority, you know, I have to. My parents are my parents. It's biologically undeniable. I'm stuck with them. So, yeah, but if the church isn't what it claims to be, then there's no reason to give it the benefit of the doubt or to try and develop a more maturing relationship. It's sort of in what they would frame to be a fraudulent position and just pluck it out, you know.

The Parent Analogy and Confronting Institutional Betrayal

Brad Kramer [00:35:14] So one way to think about this, I think, would be to sort of imagine. Imagine that in the parent situation. Okay, so say you came as an adult to learn that your parents had lied to you about something. Very fundamental. That lied to you about their identities. It turns out that they are.

John Dehlin [00:35:35] How about not your parents, not your

Brad Kramer [00:35:38] parents would be one. Or it turns out that they're fugitives, something like that. Or it turns out that. Or spies. I mean, that's a little outlandish, but they're KGB agents that are undercover or whatever. Or you just find out something about one of your parents, like, oh, it turns out that your dad was cheating on your mom for 20 years.

Brad Kramer [00:36:05] So you can find something really devastating. You can find out that you've been lied to, that something has really been misrepresented for you. And you could even imagine like say it was the question of fugitives, right? Like say, say you had two. You had parents and you had two kids and the kids, as, you know, as teenagers or as young adults, learned the truth about their parents.

Brad Kramer [00:36:29] On the one hand, it would be impossible for either of them, I think, to retain the kind of relationship that they had prior to learning that. Right. On the other hand, you can still imagine both children reacting somewhat differently in terms of like how much they become estranged from their parents by their new information and nevertheless both being able to still.

Brad Kramer [00:36:54] So there's a whole range of responses that you could have as a child. You could completely denounce your parents and say, I never want to see you again and don't ever contact me again and stay out of my life and this is the last time we're ever going to see each other. That would be kind of the most extreme. Or I'm going to turn you in, I'm going to turn you into the authorities as fugitives because that's the right thing to do and because I'm so damn angry that you lied to me my whole life. That would be like the extreme end, but you could imagine much less extreme versions of still alienation or estrangement.

Brad Kramer [00:37:27] And you could imagine two siblings, one more or less retaining a more arm's length but still fairly close relationship with the parents and just never really being able to trust them in the same way that, that, you know, that was once possible and it really affecting the kind of moral authority that the parents had in this child's eyes.

Brad Kramer [00:37:50] And then you can imagine another child moving, you know, much more arms length, saying like, you know, I just, I really don't want much of anything to do with you. I mean, I'll still, I'm not going to denounce you, but I'm just not going to, I'm not going to, I'm not going to come see You. I'm not going to. I'm not going to reach out. We're not still going to be close. You're just going to have to deal with that. I'll send you a card on your birthday or something like that. So you can imagine these very different reactions, neither of which is at the outmost extreme.

Brad Kramer [00:38:16] And you can imagine both siblings kind of sympathizing with and maybe even envying the other one's position a little bit. Like you could imagine the closer sibling feeling like, I just don't. I didn't have the guts to push away, or I just couldn't do that. But in some ways I envy that you've got them out of your lives because it's messy having them in your lives. Conversely, you can imagine the more distant siblings saying, I just couldn't handle having him in my lives. But in some ways I wish that I could. I wish it were easier for me like it is for you to be closer.

Brad Kramer [00:38:52] In other words, again, I think that there's a wide range of ways that people can react. They can interpret like the church is not for me what it was on my mission, but I believed it to be on my mission. It's not.

Brad Kramer [00:39:04] But it's also not for J, what he. Maybe I don't know what he believed it to be on his mission, but it's certainly not for Jay what he believed it to be when he was 8 or whatever, when he was having this sort of absolute, unwavering faith in the church, cultivated.

Brad Kramer [00:39:21] It's not for either of us what it once was, but for J. But it's not the same thing for either of us either. Right. Where we've resolved ourselves isn't. We're not in the same spot. I'm closer to it than he is.

Brad Kramer [00:39:35] And I think we can both sympathize with one another's perspectives and positions, and I think we can both, in a weird way, envy one another's perspectives. Sure, maybe not. I mean, maybe he's just. But I would imagine, you know, that's possible. And so I guess, again, I think the framework is more than anything useful for, once again, sort of generating sympathy when it comes to how the range of different reactions that people have to. Again, that transition out of childhood, which is essentially what you're describing in one way or another. Every transition out of childhood involves a coming to awareness that the church is not what you thought it was and in some ways isn't really what it isn't entirely what it claims to be. Right.

John Dehlin [00:40:23] And I think That's a valuable exploration of all the different scenarios of distance and proximity. I think where I was getting out with that question is that if we go with an extreme example of finding out that your real parents were put in a box and someone took over as fake parents and claimed that someone

Brad Kramer [00:40:48] stole their identities and claimed to be those parents.

John Dehlin [00:40:50] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brad Kramer [00:40:51] You were abducted.

John Dehlin [00:40:52] Yeah. Because, you know, it's one thing if we're going to do analogies, you know, the Church has maybe done some harmful things in its history or whatever. For me, that would be analogous to parents hiding an affair or, you know, embezzling money or, you know, cheating on their taxes. And that's the type of stuff that for people, you know, the people are willing to give the church the benefit of the doubt, who have enough good experiences that they want to try and preserve some type of relationship, I can see those things as being forgivable. But for the category of person that just says, I think Joseph made it up, I think the Church is a fraud from the start. And even though I have good memories in it, it lied to me. It misrepresented itself.

Brad Kramer [00:41:39] Right.

John Dehlin [00:41:40] You know, I could see them. I'm just wondering whether you see this for them, because many of them say to me, why bother? Why bother? There's so many other things to do with my time.

Brad Kramer [00:41:51] Exactly.

John Dehlin [00:41:52] Why bother even trying to have a mature relationship with the church? I'd rather just be done with it.

Brad Kramer [00:41:57] Well, I guess part of what I'm saying is that for some people, a mature relationship with the church really does mean walking away. In other words, if you've really come sincerely to the conclusion that you just can't believe any of it, that you believe that Joseph made the whole thing up and that you believe that it's just a lie built on a lie built on a lie, I don't really see how.

Brad Kramer [00:42:23] I mean, in some ways, I would think that person remaining in the church would actually signal a kind of immaturity. Right. Like a kind of adolescent thing where, like, you as an adolescent, you hate your parents and you think they're liars and you think they're terrible and you think they're, you know, you want nothing to do with them, but you're dependent on them, and so you sort of cynically retain a relationship with them because it benefits you or something like that. You know, that's not a mature relationship. That's not a fully adult relationship. If you have concluded that your parents are horrible, horrible people, if you've seen the abuse, if you concluded that Everything that if they lied about their identity to you, I mean, for whatever your basis is for concluding that they are insufferably horrible people who bring real harm and with whom you cannot have a good faith, positive relationship, then I think in that case, maturity for you means being willing to let go and walk away.

Brad Kramer [00:43:30] And that's something that people in my position can, I think we have to learn to consider when we evaluate people that we encounter who say, look, I think Mormonism is a fraud. I think that Joseph Smith's a liar. I think that.

Brad Kramer [00:43:44] And I don't want anything to do with it. And we can react sympathetically and generously to that person in part because we can imagine a similar scenario involving, you know, we can still see that person as a sibling. We can see that person as a brother or sister who has been forced by any number of factors into walking away as a way of becoming a healthy adult.

John Dehlin [00:44:16] Yeah. And man, if we could see that in, in the church discourse, that would go a long way to healing a lot of pain is just to say, I believe it, but I can totally see why you don't. I find joy in it, but I can totally see why it makes you sad. And I respect your. I see as holy your decision to leave as I do my own to stay.

Brad Kramer [00:44:41] And this. And this is the problem. Right. The problem is that we're only engaging each other as siblings because we have no control. We have very little, if any control at all over the dysfunctionality of our shared parent. And our shared parent is in some ways, I think, undeniably dysfunctional, in part because the shared parent actually is itself very immature. It is demanding of its children. And I think, by the way, there's a kind of growing pain thing that's starting to just happen right now in church discourse. Right. But I'll get there in a second. But in general, and for a long time, the church as a parent has been demanding of its children to remain in their five year old mindset. And occasionally you'll see Elder Pullman trying to sort of crack through that armor and then get smacked down.

John Dehlin [00:45:39] Or Marlon Jensen.

Brad Kramer [00:45:41] Or Marlon Jensen. But, you know, but Marlon Jensen had more success with it than Elder Pullman did. Right. And so now what I think you see is this kind of like this very cautious, very tepid, like we're going to say, okay, we're going to allow a little maturity, we're going to allow like a little nuance into the equation. We're going to acknowledge just a little bit of our own frailty as an organization, but not a lot, because we don't want to open these floodgates. But you can see a move toward like, okay, maybe 5 years old isn't the optimal age. Maybe 10 years is the optimal age because 10 year olds still get stuff a lot better than 5 year olds do.

Brad Kramer [00:46:22] Right. They see more nuance. But I honestly see the church also right now as just like petrified adolescence. Right? So like, they don't want. They don't want. They're fearful that if they open the sort of the floodgates of transparency and relinquish this very managed self image of the church as this pure and utterly trustworthy parent, that everybody's gonna hit adolescence and just get the hell out. They're just gonna run away. Like, it's just gonna like. I don't think they can see their way through how to get us into adulthood.

Brad Kramer [00:47:14] I think all they see is everybody bolting for the exits as soon as they give themselves permission, like an enlightened 13 year old, to see. See all the flaws and to no longer absolutely trust the church. And so I think they're just terrified of that. And you can kind of see like, they're so they're trying to manage it, but they don't want to get too close to that adolescent threshold when really there are people.

Brad Kramer [00:47:42] They're not doing it, but it's happening anyway. People are doing it anyway and they can't stop us from doing it anymore. And so they're trying to sort of wrestle with that and reckon themselves with that.

John Dehlin [00:47:58] Right. And that's part of what makes this so complex. Just two things I'm going to reiterate. One, it is almost. It's like a child trying to manage children. Because from a church perspective, when you compare Mormonism to Judaism, it really is a baby, right? It's a child.

Brad Kramer [00:48:17] Absolutely, it's a child.

John Dehlin [00:48:18] And so that kind of.

Brad Kramer [00:48:19] It's a powerful child. It's a powerful child with a lot, you know, that, that has. That it's a real force. It's almost like it's an adult that's in a state of arrested development is what it is.

John Dehlin [00:48:32] And that makes this metaphor more complex a little bit, but also just this idea. And I've had some other people, I've studied Kohlberg stages of moral development, and I've had some people write about this on the Mormon Stories Facebook group. But. But this idea that there's an organization that's literally attempting to stunt people's development explicitly, I mean, maybe they're not doing it consciously. But if we're sort of agreeing that the church sort of might feel stuck out of fear in allowing people to progress not just to adulthood, but even adolescence, well, then that's. I mean, some would probably even call that a form of abuse.

John Dehlin [00:49:18] Right. If you'd never let your baby, you know, your child go to. Go to school, if you ever let them out of the home, if you never let them learn to drive and you just kept them as immature as you possibly could, you know, in the real world, that would be a form of abuse. So it would be that. That makes this a little bit complex. But I'm not. I'm not trying to trash your model. I'm just. I'm just looking at it.

Brad Kramer [00:49:38] And. Well, I think. I think even within the model, there's an interesting way of looking at that, which is that the church views itself as a steward. So it's almost like the. So I think that the church. I think the church leadership really believes that the way that you optimize people's relationship with God is by having them.

Brad Kramer [00:50:00] That because the distance is so vast between the people and God, and perhaps the most appropriate relationship between mere mortals and God is that of, like a child to parent. That. I believe that. I think the church leaders believe that the best that the church does that it's to our benefit to have a childlike relationship. In other words, that's going to optimize our relationship with God for us to have this simplistic relationship. So there's no kind of cynicism.

Brad Kramer [00:50:39] They're not. It's. It's that they genuinely believe that you have to be childlike in your faith or that your faith will dissolve into something else and that it will weaken and dilute your relationship with God.

John Dehlin [00:50:51] Yeah. Yeah. And so it's not quite like the. The Tangled, you know, movie where the mother is deceiving the child intentionally and holding her in the tower. It's. It's a. It's a derivative of that where it's just. It's this benevolent. We need to protect you. It's like, I need to keep you, the soap bubble, in the palm of my hand because I'm scared that the soap bubble will burst.

Protecting Belief Versus Embracing Doubt

Brad Kramer [00:51:14] And if the soap bubble bursts, all bets are off and you could be in real trouble and you could be lost. And we will have failed in our stewardship to protect you and keep you for God.

John Dehlin [00:51:25] Yeah. And that's the whole. What was Packer Oaks's analogy of, like, the sentinel on the tower or something like that?

Brad Kramer [00:51:33] Yeah. I mean, I think that's really the way that they see themselves, is that they're charged with reminding us and helping us navigate a scary world with our childlike devotion to God intact and not sort of ruined by the cynicism of a lone and dreary world.

What Distinguishes Stayers from Leavers

John Dehlin [00:52:01] Right. Okay, a couple more questions before we have to wrap up. I really could go another hour or two on this. So I guess I want to reiterate. And I actually made a comment on my own Facebook page directed at you just the other day, just about this notion of privilege.

John Dehlin [00:52:21] I'm glad you acknowledged that. I'm sure that wasn't the first time you had thought about it, but it is worth noting that there's so much privilege, I think, that is involved in being able to maintain this position. And I'll just speak briefly to it. I mean, you know, likely somebody. You know, what's the difference between someone who's left the church and someone who's able to maintain this position?

John Dehlin [00:52:46] I would love to do a study. You know, what's their skin color? Likely Caucasian. You know, what's their socioeconomic status? Likely middle to upper class. What's their sexuality? Likely heteronormative. What's their marital status? They're likely married. Not only are they likely married, but they likely have a spouse or parents or siblings, wherein, if they were to disaffiliate from the church, maybe they would experience very severe consequences.

Brad Kramer [00:53:16] And I think that last one in particular is a real. Would probably show up as being one of the most likely predictors of this kind of behavior on both sides.

John Dehlin [00:53:30] Yeah. And so in some ways, this really isn't an exercise in coming up with the right framework or a model. It's more, as you said, us trying to justify where the social ties or our emotional pull may already be taking us. Is that fair?

Brad Kramer [00:53:48] Well, in a certain sense, yeah. I mean, I'm the first to admit that I think that all of my reasons, all of the primary reasons that explain where I am now are not rational. That I've sort of. I think that the rationality enters the equation after the fact in the way that it does in almost any strong social affiliation in life. Right. People who are.

Brad Kramer [00:54:19] I mean, when you look at actual data in political science. Right. Political affiliation is almost never like. People don't choose what political affiliation they have rationally. They rationalize the political affiliation that they are in. And it's really easy to do that. But even when people shift, they almost always do it for reasons that. That deeply sort of transcend Changing your mind based on the facts or whatever.

Brad Kramer [00:54:52] And so I'm the first to admit that in my case that there are probably factors that I don't even have any, that I can't even access consciously at all. But I will also say that I think that there's some complication to the experiment that you're describing. Just even in, like, Even in my own situation. Right. Like, it's actually a very mixed bag for me in terms of the benefits of staying and the benefits of not staying.

Brad Kramer [00:55:26] I would benefit professionally from leaving. Right. Being a social scientist who is, especially by virtue of the dissertation I wrote, who is obviously and recognizably and sort of out as a Mormon, as a basically a believing Mormon and a practicing Mormon is not going to do me any favors professionally.

Brad Kramer [00:55:57] However, there are also flip sides to that, which would be that there are other aspects of my life in which leaving the church would entail obvious costs. And I think of a lot of the people that I know that are right on the inside or right on the outside or whatever and it's impossible for me to sort of see a clear pull in one direction or the other. For those people, you know, I have friends for whom remaining in the church is very, very difficult and they stay anyway.

Brad Kramer [00:56:33] Friends that I think if I were in your position, I don't think I'd be able to stay. Conversely, I have friends that I know, I have people that I know, you know, that I know stay in the church because they benefit from staying and they don't want to. I mean, for social reasons they are, they're scared to leave. They're afraid that they'll lose their spouse if they leave. They're afraid that they'll be disowned by their parents if they leave. So, you know, these sort of non rational comments, I don't want to call them irrational, but these non rational factors or pre rational factors I think are massively important for everybody all along the continuum.

John Dehlin [00:57:09] Right, right.

Brad Kramer [00:57:11] Including for people who frankly, like, who have say, been deeply scarred and hurt by their experience in the church and who would, if that hadn't happened, would probably be inclined to still strongly believe in it and strongly stay. And they just, they, they can't reconcile the two. And so they're, you know, the, the, the harm is just so, is just so deep. Right. That it's just right. They're, they're all the, all these factors.

John Dehlin [00:57:42] Yep. Okay, I've got like at least five more questions and I know we're running short on time, so, so I guess

Brad Kramer [00:57:50] tell me what they are and I'll pick one of them.

John Dehlin [00:57:53] I'd rather you answer them really briefly. Okay, I'll try and ask him really briefly.

Brad Kramer [00:57:57] Okay, let's do that.

John Dehlin [00:57:58] So we talk about. We talk about the church in some ways being a child in and of itself. And when I hear like the Ted Lyons of the world, the T. Edgar Lyons, when I hear them talk about what the church was like in the 1910s through the 1950s, it almost seems like the Church was more willing to treat its members like adults than it is now.

Brad Kramer [00:58:22] I think that goes back to what I was saying about how it was very difficult for that not to happen because everybody was in contact with everybody. I mean, if you lived in Utah, around Utah, and you were a Mormon, there's a good chance you had actually. Not just that you had actually met and encountered apostles, but you knew a number of people who knew apostles well. And nobody was under any illusion that these men are these kind of oracles.

John Dehlin [00:58:49] So I guess in some sense you're agreeing that in some ways the Church is even treating us more like children now than they did 50 years ago.

Brad Kramer [00:58:57] Well, what I would say is that, is that it really started about 50 years ago, sort of with post war globalizing. Yeah, but. So I would say that the church is treating us more like children than it was 100 years ago. But honestly, I think it's treating us a little bit less like children than it was 20 years ago.

John Dehlin [00:59:16] Right. Okay. All right, good. Okay, just really quickly, there's this notion of ecclesiastical roulette that you may be able to. You know, I've even had conversations with general authorities and apostles where they were very encouraging. But then it can often come down to just a bad bishop or a hostile elders president. You acknowledge that all politics is local to some extent and that.

Brad Kramer [00:59:38] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:59:39] And that one can develop a framework that then a local congregation just totally undermines. True.

Brad Kramer [00:59:45] Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And in that way, I feel like that's sort of where my particular station of privilege is most strongly.

John Dehlin [00:59:54] Yeah.

Brad Kramer [00:59:56] And it's totally. It's a crapshoot. It's luck. I mean, I've had really, really, really. Since I, since I went back to school. I mean, I haven't always had a good bishops my whole life, but since I went back, went back to the university, you know, 10 years ago, I had really good bishops and really good wards, including even the family ward that I'm in now on the Wasatch front, which I didn't particularly expect to be good. The postscript to that is that I'm moving. So we'll see what.

John Dehlin [01:00:27] Yeah, right, right, right.

Brad Kramer [01:00:27] We'll see what the not too distant future holds. But so far, I feel really, really lucky that, that I've had good ward communities and that I found a way to ingratiate myself into those communities without it being super alienating.

John Dehlin [01:00:46] Right. Okay, next quick question. I guess, I guess in some sense, and this is how I see things, and maybe some people I know, but I'm not saying everyone sees things this way. But you know, you mentioned Hugh Nibley. You know, there seemed to be a class of apologists, let's say in the 70s, 80s and 90s and even 2000s, that basically was saying, you know, that was hesitant to acknowledge the frailties in the church that was willing to sort of. That made attempts to explain things away without really just saying, yep, that's difficult. Yep, that's awful. You know. Yep, the church does terrible things.

The Church's Relationship with Critics and Doubters

Brad Kramer [01:01:23] And that really attacked doubters, right? That attacked critics.

John Dehlin [01:01:28] Yeah. And I guess my question to you is, do you see yourself and Adam Miller as kind of the new generation of apologists?

Brad Kramer [01:01:38] I think that there's quite a number of scholars that would actually fit that model, and they go along an ideological spectrum. So I would see myself and Adam as fitting that model, or Kevin Barney, Christine Haglin. I'd also see Nate Oman, frankly, in that model, even though he's much more conservative, politically conservative, and socially conservative than I am. I just, I think that there's a desire. I mean, I remember on my mission reading, like farm stuff, and as somebody who was already strongly believing it was like a pep rally, like, it really invigorated me. Right. But I also remember reading Lewis and Chesterton on my mission and having that edify me. And there was nothing particularly edifying about the farm style apologetics, but it was a sort of a rallying cry. For me. The problem is that people who are sincerely questioning don't need a pep rally.

John Dehlin [01:02:42] Right? That's right.

Brad Kramer [01:02:44] The people who are sincerely questioning need to be reached out to and acknowledged and empathized with and gently. So I'm actually co editing a volume with Seth Payne on a kind of a new approach to apologetics. And it'll be a. It'll be like a hard questions volume with individual essays on difficult topics.

Brad Kramer [01:03:14] But the point in these essays is to write in a kind of a spirit of absolute candor, generosity. In other words, we're not reaching, we're not targeting enemies, we're targeting doubters, and we're targeting them from a pastoral perspective.

Brad Kramer [01:03:34] So the idea is to say, look, if you're struggling with question X, I acknowledge that this is difficult. I acknowledge that this is painful. I acknowledge that these are real problems. You're not, you're not crazy for doubting because of this, or evil or bad, or you're not evil for doubting because of this. Because this is the biggest problem, I think, in the church.

Brad Kramer [01:03:59] It's not that these difficult questions exist. It's that believers are not in a position to listen when doubters express doubt. Because instinctively we react defensively and we blame people who have doubts. So somebody says, well, did you know X?

Brad Kramer [01:04:19] Did you know that there are these multiple and divergent accounts of the first vision? And you're like, shut up, I don't want to hear it. I don't know why you allow yourself to read that terrible anti Mormon stuff, but put it down.

John Dehlin [01:04:32] You must be into pornography or cheating on your wife.

Brad Kramer [01:04:34] Be faithful. You know, and we react defensively and we blame the person for what they're experiencing, right? And that's the antithesis of what we need to do. I mean, it goes back to this, this combination of fellowship and conversion, fellowship and testimony, right? Like, if they're struggling with their testimony, the last thing they need is for you to like kick them in the solar plexus and call them faithless and react to them like they're an enemy, like they are a threat.

Brad Kramer [01:05:02] And so we need to empower believers to react generously and sympathetically to people who express doubt. And we need to develop a language for talking to doubters that acknowledges the legitimacy of their concerns and then does something rather than saying, and doesn't try to neatly resolve them. So it doesn't try to say like, oh, well, I know you're concerned over this, over X, but all you need to remember is just A, B and C and that it's totally fine and so you don't have any reason to doubt at all anymore. That's a terrible approach. It's almost as bad as reacting. It's like the flip side of the worst reaction.

Brad Kramer [01:05:46] One worst reaction is to treat him like an enemy or like a threat. The other is to just dismiss it by trying to sort of neatly tie it up in a bow. The reaction then is to say, like, I get it.

Brad Kramer [01:05:57] And this is how I've learned to accommodate the doubt that I experience with regard to this question or the uncertainty that I experience with regard to this question. To generally still having faith in the church and wanting to be a part of It.

Brad Kramer [01:06:16] Because that's really the only thing that you can tell to a person who is really in good faith, seriously doubting. And it's not going to always work. It may not work the majority of the time, but we really need to get better at not just at accommodating doubt into our ideological framework, but accommodating doubters into our social framework and into our fellowship, making a space for people that are sincerely struggling with some doubt.

John Dehlin [01:06:50] And for me, the irony or the complexity is that to develop, to grow a membership that is mature enough to be able to love and empathize with and accommodate doubters requires you to advance your membership from the childhood stage to the adult phase.

Brad Kramer [01:07:09] Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:07:10] Which is exactly what the church is hesitant to seem to want to do.

Brad Kramer [01:07:14] Exactly. So it's an uphill battle for somebody in my position. Right. And it's not as if I have any delusions about, like, I mean, honestly, this, you know, this may end up being a very surprising statement to you, but this is part of the way that I. I guess maybe this is a good transition into some final thoughts. But thinking about what does this quote, unquote, more mature? And I mean, I know it's really problematic that this entire conversation has essentially been about me framing myself as super mature.

John Dehlin [01:07:53] Right.

Brad Kramer [01:07:53] But there was just no way for me to outline the framework without at least implicitly doing that, but trying to describe some of the particulars of what this more mature or more adult, whatever relationship with the church looks like. For me personally, one of the things is that I've come to the conclusion that in terms of everything that the Church does, in terms of its missions, in terms of its.

Brad Kramer [01:08:29] In terms of its growth, in terms of its vitality as a religion, I don't think. I think that the church, that it's healthy for the church for there to be a space for people like me, for very progressive Mormons who have very sort of unorthodox ideas about the nature of revelation, the nature of scripture, etc. I mean, I recognize that I'm not at all a good example of what a standard Mormon is or what orthodoxy is in Mormonism.

Brad Kramer [01:09:00] I think it's healthy for Mormonism for there to be a place for man. I think it would be bad for Mormonism to drive to say, there's no place for people like you, Brad. I also don't think it would be particularly good for Mormonism if everybody were like me.

Brad Kramer [01:09:19] In other words, I think that Mormonism is at its. Is at its most vital when there's room for people like me, but people like me are the minority. And I don't mean, I don't mean necessarily in terms of maturity. I mean because I think that people like me would actually be in the minority even if the majority of the church membership had a much more mature relationship with the church.

Brad Kramer [01:09:43] Because I just, you know, I'm ideologically right out on the edge, you know what I mean? I don't think I have made peace with my place on the margin and with the idea that Mormonism is good when there's room for me, but I'm not the prototypical member.

John Dehlin [01:10:07] Sure.

Brad Kramer [01:10:08] Another thing is that, and again, I think that there's a framework for this within Mormon discourse for having much more adult, say, expectations about the nature of church leadership. And that comes from the way that we talk about missionaries. So even the dyed in the wool hardcore iron rod faithful LDS believers believe that missionary work is one of the most important works in the universe and that it's a work that is guided and directed by God and that God specially calls individual missionaries and endows them with like mantles of authority and special power and special inspiration and special access to revelation and gives them unique ability to carry out this work and sets them apart to do this Right.

Brad Kramer [01:11:04] And they believe the missionaries are screw ups. Everybody in the church believes that missionaries are screw ups. And in fact we actually make that into a central way of our thinking about the divine guidance of the work. We say I know this work is true because if it weren't, the missionaries would have ruined it a long time ago. In other words, I know God is running this because if he weren't, it would be a disaster. Right?

Brad Kramer [01:11:38] And so the fallibility, and not just like the technical fallibility, but like the constant mistakes of missionaries actually affirm for us that missionary work is guided by God. And for me, and this is one thing that I think could actually, we could actually shift really easily in church discourse and maybe it will shift at some point. I mean, if I had a magic wand and I could get Uchtdorf to give one talk, it would probably be this.

Brad Kramer [01:12:11] I know the church is true because if it weren't, the church leaders would have ruined it a long time ago. I know that God is guiding the church because if he weren't, it would have been an unmitigated disaster a long time ago because the general authorities would have ruined it. And so we can extend that same logic to church leaders. And that's a faithful, that's an internal logic. Obviously outsiders are still going to believe. I Mean, it's still possible to conclude that it actually is a disaster and that therefore, therefore it's not guided by God or whatever, but it's a more. And that's essentially the way.

Brad Kramer [01:12:48] And actually, Nate Oman once gave a really good response to sort of Framework for thinking about the inspired nature of church leadership. And he said something like, I think that the church leaders are just barely inspired enough to get the job done.

Brad Kramer [01:13:06] I mean, and again, that's not a fix all, that's not a solution to everything, that doesn't paper over all the problems. But I think it's a healthier way, a more mature way of thinking about the notion of a church guided by revelation and the role of church leaders.

John Dehlin [01:13:23] Right, okay.

Brad Kramer [01:13:25] And then just one more thing. I think that there are also, for me, there's been a real shift in expectations about even what the church is and what its destiny is, because. And again, it's one that derives, I think, out of faithful Mormon discourse, just a slightly different emphasis. Like with the missionary thing.

Brad Kramer [01:13:50] Nephi in the Book of Mormon says that the church is going to be everywhere, but that it's going to be everywhere in tiny, tiny pockets. And Jesus, when he talks to his disciples, he says, you're the salt of the earth.

Brad Kramer [01:14:17] Salt is designed to, I mean, it enhances other flavor. So you can put salt on anything. I mean, you actually can put on, you can put it on sweet things, you put on fruit, you can put it on ice cream, you can put salt on anything. I mean, chocolate chip cookies without salt are terrible. Right, Right.

Brad Kramer [01:14:38] But salt by itself is disgusting. Right. So if we're supposed to be the salt of the earth, that means that we're supposed to be the thing that enhances other flavors. And if we take that logic seriously, I think we can couple that with another important logic in Mormonism, which is this logic, which we don't emphasize explicitly, but is definitely in Mormonism, which is that like a very small amount of people can make a difference for everybody. Like a very small group of people can, because we do work for the dead. I mean, it's embedded in the logic of the church that like, not everybody has to be Mormon for everybody to be saved.

Brad Kramer [01:15:28] And so I think a more robust version of that logic, we sort of get around it right now by saying, well, eventually everybody will be Mormon. But there's another way to look at it, which is saying that Mormonism is still true and you can still view Mormonism as essential, as having a unique authority and a unique position and having sort of the Totality of truth or whatever, without necessarily. And at the same time, believe that not everybody needs to accept that in order for Mormonism to do the work it's destined to do. You can believe that Mormonism saves all of God's children literally by being salt and not by turning everybody into salt.

John Dehlin [01:16:14] And the only challenge people have with that is that it's certainly a framework that the brethren or local church leaders likely wouldn't endorse.

Brad Kramer [01:16:24] No, they wouldn't. So you'd have to. It's something that, for me and for most people, I think to the extent that you imbibe that framework, it's just going to be kind of privately, because we have this other, I think, very toxic framework, which is the stone that fills the whole world, that rolls down the mountain and engulfs everything.

Brad Kramer [01:16:46] And that's not really compatible with either Nephi or Jesus model of discipleship. There's an old parable that says Christians make great subversives and terrible kings. And I think that Mormons make great minorities and terrible majorities. I mean, like, the culture on the Wasatch front and from just the social culture right up through the, you know, the state politics is just toxic, because when we're actually powerful enough to, like, impose our will, we're terrible. Mormons are terrible when we. And I say this as somebody who, like, you know, strongly identifies as a Mormon, we're wonderful when we have an appropriate sense of our place as a small minority that can hopefully enhance what is already present. And we're terrible when we think of ourselves as a majority, whereas we're as awful as it would be to eat straight salt.

John Dehlin [01:17:49] Right, Right. Okay, so I'll ask you my final question, and it's kind of merging a couple questions. There's one reaction you're going to receive to this, which is, you know, if this is God's one true church or if God is leading this church, this is just too messy. And your bar is set so low that, man, it's just too ugly and messy for it to possibly be true and worth it. And then a second part to that, it's different.

Harm to Women and LGBT Members as a Moral Challenge

John Dehlin [01:18:26] But I know it's something you'll resonate with, which is if the church is truly doing harm to women and LGBT individuals, and if it's, let's just say, misappropriating the widow's might to purchase, you know, commercial real estate and investments in ways that Damon Smith would be critical of, that's, you know, why, you know, that's just too much.

John Dehlin [01:18:53] You're either complicit in the harm that the church is doing. Right. Or you're just, you're almost like, you know, the Stockholm syndrome. I don't mean to use extreme metaphors, but it's just like you've got this abusive relationship and you just can't let it go.

Brad Kramer [01:19:08] Yeah, I think that does happen. I think that's a real thing in the church. And yeah, it becomes something which again, this is why I've been trying so hard to make sure that this framework isn't just about helping people with doubts accommodate, staying in, but it's also about helping people who have doubt and you know, who have doubted and remain in the church to have more sympathy for people that don't. And even a framework for, I think letting, making it easier for people who feel stuck in the church but feel like it does them real harm or feel like they just like there's a tremendous amount of emotional or cognitive dissonance involved with their membership to give themselves permission, they go ahead and have that sabbatical, go ahead and walk away.

John Dehlin [01:20:02] Right. Well, my question, but my question to you was, is the final question. I always like Mormon stories to have people and with some type of uplifting kind of sentiment. And so my, my question to you is, and it's sort of a why do you stay question. It's sort of what do you still believe question, but really it's a question of what is it, what is it that allows you or motivates you to stay knowing that there are a large number of people that get harmed? How do you, what is it? Is it that you just get so much joy from it, that you just are okay with the pain that's caused? Or is there another way you look at it and go ahead and express it in a way that might even be motivating for those who are willing to consider your point of view. And this is sort of your wrap

Why Brad Chooses to Remain in the Church

Brad Kramer [01:20:57] up, my little wrap up quasi testimony. Okay, so part of what I will say is that I have very little faith in any large scale institution to not do harm in the sense of doing no harm. The most benevolent institution in the world, which I don't think is the LDS Church, but is still going to, by virtue of its scale and by virtue of the humanness of the people involved, is going to screw up.

Brad Kramer [01:21:30] And so I don't have any expectations from the church in terms of not causing pain. I just don't. It doesn't mean that I just give all pain a free pass either, but it means I don't have any expectations in terms of not causing pain.

Brad Kramer [01:21:46] So it's not. That's sort of my starting point. And another thing is that there's no time in the church that I feel, in sort of church conversations that I feel more like I am obligated to turn in my progressive Mormon card than when we talk about real estate developments and the mall and stuff, because it just doesn't exercise me at all.

Brad Kramer [01:22:16] I don't think there's anything wrong with the church saving as opposed to spending money. And I think that saving money through real estate investment is a good way to save money. And I don't think that. I don't think that anything that the church does, including this particular part of its operations, is perfect or optimal.

Brad Kramer [01:22:47] But there are plenty of things that the church does wrong that bother me quite a bit more than building the Maldives. So I don't really think of it at all in terms of, like, misappropriation of faithfully paid tithing or the widow's mite or anything.

Brad Kramer [01:23:08] For me, the victims of Mormonism right now are primarily LGBT persons and to a lesser degree, women. Not that I'm trying to minimize the harm that Mormonism does to some women and that I think it systemically does in some respect to all females in the church. I do believe that I don't think it's fair to the LGBT community to treat those two things as equal.

Brad Kramer [01:23:46] So, again, thinking in terms of harm, again, it's very difficult for me to square staying in the church with the harm that I see done. That said, I think what it comes down to is, again, that I don't really consider my relationship with the church or my membership in the church primarily in terms of the harm or the pain that it causes to people, including to me, which, again, is significantly less than it is to a lot of people, and in particular, the pain that I'm afraid it will eventually inflict on my daughters.

Brad Kramer [01:24:41] So that's not my primary sort of framework for evaluating being in the church or not being in the church. I think, for me, the primary framework has something to do with having just such a deep structural relationship with Mormonism and Mormonism in some ways being my processing system, like my operating system for how I think about the world, for how I think about. And again, it's a different. I'm the first to admit that it's a different kind of Mormonism. It's not. It's not.

Brad Kramer [01:25:18] It's not seminary Mormonism. Right. That is. That is the operating system. But it's not just that I see beauty in Mormonism, or that Mormonism intrigues me, or that I see intellectual richness in Mormonism. It's that I think that Mormonism actually allows me to see those things everywhere.

Brad Kramer [01:25:38] And so I have a really difficult time even imagining myself detaching from that framework without losing. I'm trying to think of a way to succinctly put this. I think that, like, I'm afraid that I wouldn't. Like, I wouldn't be able to see the beauty in things that aren't remotely Mormon.

Brad Kramer [01:26:08] Without Mormonism in my life, Mormonism is the salt to me. I think that. I think I would like the wire less if I weren't a Mormon. I mean, that's sort of a silly. You know, a silly example, but it's the filter. It's more than just a filter. It's my language.

Brad Kramer [01:26:32] It's the language in which I encounter everything in the world. And above and beyond that. You know, Mormonism is a bet I used to. On my mission, I used to try to try to entice people to Mormonism by saying, how would you like to learn how you can spend eternity with your family?

Brad Kramer [01:27:00] Which is a really, actually, really stupid question to ask because it presumes a concern on their part, which doesn't exist. It's not as if there are a bunch of people out there who think I need to find something that will help me stay together with my family, or else I won't. You know, Mormonism isn't unique for believing that it's possible for families to be together forever. Mormonism is unique in thinking that it's possible for us not to and believing that something else has to be added to the equation in order for families to remain intact.

Brad Kramer [01:27:36] And one of the things that I learned is I was sort of. I went through this kind of inventory of friends and relations growing up and thinking about all the people that I was close to as a child. And one of the things that I realized is that when I was a child, there were relationships that mattered more to me than anything in the world. You know, best friends, that I just.

Brad Kramer [01:27:58] This was the most important person in the world to me. And the transition from childhood into adulthood, among other things, meant that those relationships didn't matter to me anymore, that my worldview is so different now than it was then.

Brad Kramer [01:28:15] That the relationship. It's not just that the relationship isn't there. It's that I don't even care that it's not there. I don't even care about these relationships. I've just. I'VE moved beyond them. And I think one of the kind of terrifying claims that Mormonism implicitly makes about the universe is that there is an eternal world, there is an eternity, and that the difference between mortality and eternity is so vast that you can find yourself on the other side and your relationships could be meaningless.

Brad Kramer [01:28:53] Your relationships can just not matter to you anymore because of the vastness of that chasm, right? It's even more vast than the difference between childhood and adulthood. So you can make these meaningful relationships here in this world that just don't feel relevant at all in the eternities.

Brad Kramer [01:29:13] And then Mormonism also provides a solution to that. It says, look, we can make kinship in a different way. We can use sacramental and priestly authority in a different way. Prophets can collaborate with representatives of the gods and create and develop a way of making kinship relations that somehow has the ability to retain something in the transition to the eternal world, where some kernel of your relationship remains vital enough that you can build on it, and the eternities and the relationships that you make here can continue to matter there.

Brad Kramer [01:29:55] And I am far from certain that Mormonism is either framing the question correctly or providing a reliable solution. But I think there's a good chance that, again, if eternity exists, I think there's a good chance that. That that framework is correct.

Brad Kramer [01:30:22] And the things that matter so much to you here, in a world where you're bound to your loved ones in part by death, right? You love the people that you love so much because you are constantly aware that they are going to die.

Brad Kramer [01:30:37] Is it possible to love somebody the way you do in this world? If you're not afraid of death in a world where even in our. Even in our myth, in our origin story, right, Like Adam and Eve are indifferent to each other when they're stuck in this eternal paradise and they don't care about each other, they don't interact with each other.

Brad Kramer [01:30:57] It's not until death gets introduced that they cling to each other. So Mormonism is almost saying that, like, we value relationships in the eternity, but we can't actually make and sustain relationships because there's no death. So death is a part of this plan of happiness. You have to go somewhere where you can die. And there in this death world, you can make relationships that are meaningful. Real love can emerge. And if you do it the right way, the kernel of that love can be brought back with you into the eternal world, and you can have meaningful relationships in a world where nobody dies.

Brad Kramer [01:31:33] So I'm not positive that this is an appropriate framing, because I'm thinking about this through the lens of my own Mormonism. Right. But I think that there's a chance that it is. And if that's the case, I think that there's a chance that Mormonism does make kinship differently in some sense. Mormonism is kinship. I mean, I argue that anthropologically in the dissertation that Mormonism is best understood as a kinship system and that we do make kinship not just with our families, but with each other in a qualitatively different way than other kinship formations.

Brad Kramer [01:32:15] And so what I'm doing by remaining in the church is essentially accepting the terms of the bet. I don't know that it's. I don't know that I'm right. I sincerely believe that there's a good chance that I am. And I sincerely believe that the experience that I had, that I mentioned earlier as a teenager praying about the Book of Mormon, I sincerely believe that that was.

Brad Kramer [01:32:43] That something in that moment originated outside of me and was real. And so it's a combination of these things that I think are sort of the affirmative substance of a testimony that I have of Mormonism, and that those things don't really depend a whole lot on having a childlike relationship of faith with the church as an institution or stopping up my ears and closing my eyes to the very, sometimes very terrible problems of our collective past.

Brad Kramer [01:33:27] You know, for me, Mormonism is that claim that we can make something here that will last, that will persist into the eternities. And I genuinely believe that claim to be highly plausible.

John Dehlin [01:33:44] Will you paint a beautiful picture? May it be true.

Brad Kramer [01:33:47] Thanks, John.

John Dehlin [01:33:48] All right, Brad, so we'll be bringing you back on later to talk with Jason about letter to CES editor and all the particularities therein. Want to encourage everybody to please go up to MormonStories.org give Brad your feedback and comments. I'm going to ask everybody to be respectful, and I know Brad will be the same. And so I hope we can have a good conversation there and. And we'll carry it forward. So, Brad, I love your perspective. I see lots of hope when I talk to you for the institution, and I just want to thank you for having the courage to come on Mormon Stories. So thank you.

Brad Kramer [01:34:30] I really appreciate you having me on, John, thanks a lot. Thanks for all you do.

John Dehlin [01:34:33] All right, we'll talk soon.

Brad Kramer [01:34:56] Come, come, ye saints, no toil nor labor fear. But with Jo.

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