Welcome and Introduction to Brittney Hartley

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I am one of your hosts for today, John Dehlin. It is November 27, 2023. We just finished Thanksgiving weekend here in the United States. And we are super excited to bring you today TikTok sensation Brittney Hartley. And we're going to be talking about nihilism and, or meaninglessness and or atheism and or agnosticism. After a Mormon Christian faith crisis, that's what we're in store for. I am joined by my partner in, as I like to say, truth and righteousness. Margi. Hey, Margi.

Brittney Hartley [00:00:42] Hey.

John Dehlin [00:00:43] Thanks for joining us.

Margi Dehlin [00:00:44] I'm so happy to be here today.

John Dehlin [00:00:45] Yeah. Glad you're here. And here is Brittney Hartley. Hey, Brittney.

Brittney Hartley [00:00:50] Hi, everybody.

John Dehlin [00:00:51] All the way from Boise, Idaho.

Brittney Hartley [00:00:53] That's right. You visited me last time, so I came down this time.

John Dehlin [00:00:56] You're returning the favor. M. Brittney has a website called no Nonsense Spirituality. How do you describe yourself in terms of the services you offer to people?

Brittney Hartley [00:01:07] Yeah, so I'm an atheist spiritual director, which I know just right off the bat can be like a paradox and a conundrum which we'll talk about. But I do a lot of deconstruction and reconstruction work. I have a master's degree in theology and I'm a certified spiritual director at this point.

John Dehlin [00:01:24] Yeah. And one of the most common pieces of feedback I get, it's some combination of like, why do so many Mormons, if they lose their faith, lose their faith in God and Jesus? That's kind of one flavor of what I've been hearing for a couple decades now. Another is like, I can't lose my faith because I can't let go of God or Jesus. If I let go of God or Jesus, there'll be no point to living. I'd rather die than lose my faith in God and Jesus. A belief in God and Jesus or even in the LDS Church is what keeps me going. You know, a lot of Christians or theists look upon those who end up as agnostics or agnostic theists, atheists or whatever, look at them with kind of pity. And that's something that we often have to address. And by the way, I don't think any of us here have the goal of promoting atheism or agnosticism at all. I'll just say as a disclaimer, I've never identified as an atheist or an agnostic and I certainly don't consider myself a missionary for non belief. Anything you want to say about that as a disclaimer before we start?

Brittney Hartley [00:02:31] So A couple of things there. So Sam Harris did. He had this quote that said there's no one more ardent in their atheism than ex Mormons. And there is some truth to that because we've kind of looked behind the curtain and you see how the sausage gets made versus something like Christianity where just there's so much there that we'll just never know. So much of it is shrouded in mystery, but with Mormon history, just not as much. So. So there is kind of a. There is a Mormonism to atheism pipeline, I would say. And what I think we're really going to talk about today, you know, a little bit about my Mormon story. But that percentage of people who after Mormonism keep deconstructing, they lose God, they lose Jesus, they lose sense of self, they lose free will, and then you end up in a place that we call either the void or nihilism. Some people call it the abyss of like, you can't even tell up from down or left from right. And I think that there's not enough resources for that space. What happens when a Mormon keeps deconstructing? So I think that's where our conversation's going to be headed today.

John Dehlin [00:03:40] And you started a TikTok channel just this year, Just recently.

Brittney Hartley [00:03:43] I didn't know it was a thing. I didn't know. I thought it was for kids. I thought you had to dance on it. I don't do any dancing on it, but I. Yeah, about six months ago I had knee surgery and I hopped on and realized it's kind of a hop in place. So started to do some content creation on TikTok and giving words to Nihilism and Tools for Nihilism has been resonating with a larger audience, you know, because that's not a specifically Mormon problem, obviously. And it's resonating with such a large audience, especially younger and younger people, because we're seeing that it used to be that you had a religion and a community and you go to college and you start a family and then you have an existential crisis at 50. But for the kids now, where a lot of those societal structures have crumbled, there's a meaning crisis. I'm finding that I'm talking to kids and 20 year olds who are struggling with nihilism and don't have the tools to be able to make sense of this space. So when I my spiritual direction kind of career, it was mostly Mormon deconstruction. And now at this point it's honestly mostly nihilism coaching and we'll get into all that as we go.

Margi Dehlin [00:05:00] It's brilliant.

Growing Up Mormon and Early Faith Experiences

John Dehlin [00:05:02] Margi, is there any disclaimer or sort of introduction you want to give in terms of whether or not this topic is personal to you and what it means to you or how excited you are or anything like that?

Margi Dehlin [00:05:15] Well, I mean, I'm very comfortable relating in real time with Brittney as she shares, but definitely, I mean, in my Thrive Stories interview, talked about my own, let's just say, experience of nihilism as kind of part of my story. So I'm just happy to be here to witness Brittney.

John Dehlin [00:05:36] Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [00:05:37] And I plan on being super vulnerable. So at any point in this interview, when I talk about times where I was suicidal or I talk about times where I had some really deep, dark, existential thoughts, I plan on being very open about that because I think talking about it kind of normalizes when you're in that place. And so if at any time that feels unsafe, you know, please, please shut this off because I'm going to try to be as open about my struggles with nihilism when I was going through that as I can.

John Dehlin [00:06:06] Yeah, perfect. We. We were trying to decide whether or not to just record and release later or do a live stream. We actually decided to pull an audible and do a live stream because I thought getting live questions and comments from the audience could be really fun. And so welcome to our live audience. And I'm going to have Maven and Julia doing the timecoats in the moderation. Star, any comments or questions or recommendations or concerns that people have. Because really, I think the biggest questions we're going to ask today is can you find meaning and purpose? And after faith or after Mormonism or in some cases after God and Christianity, can you be spiritual but not religious? If so, what does that mean? And can a person who identifies as nihilistic or atheist or agnostic or some combination of them all still find a happy, meaningful, fulfilling life? Or does it mean you have to carry around with you this pit of dread and morose meaninglessness? I think that's kind of what today's about. So let's jump in. We're going to go lighter on her Mormon story by her own request and try to focus more on her journey of deconstruction, reconstruction, and then kind of the topical Q and A. Okay, so that's. That's. So where do we begin? Brittney Hardy and how many YouTube, how many TikTok followers do you have already?

Brittney Hartley [00:07:36] I think I'm at like 160.

John Dehlin [00:07:38] That's amazing.

Brittney Hartley [00:07:39] Yeah. So my Just as a warning, I don't do any dancing, I don't do any cool tech things I don't even do like, like Cara, like what she does is amazing and funny and quirky. Mine is really like, I'm. I'm a history teacher by trade and so like when I get a soapbox, I can be quite verbose. So there tend to be three to five minute long kind of really educational pieces. So I don't know if I'd ever have a huge TikTok following because it's, it's sometimes not as strong, short and cute and entertaining as some of the amazing ex Mormon content creators that, that I follow. But for tools for deconstruction, especially when deconstruction leads to a nihilism kind of place, those aren't really short ideas. Some of these existential questions, they take time. And so my, my TikToks tend to be a little bit longer because of that. So that's a fair warning. So I guess we start at the beginning. I was raised Mormon, just a classic Mormon family. I'm the oldest daughter, I have three brothers. Both my parents were active, just normal Mormon family. Didn't have any trauma or abuse as a kid, just a good, normal Mormon life growing up. And I was always a thinker. I was always had somewhat of a philosophical mind. I knew by the third grade that I wanted to be a history teacher. I was always interested in the question of what is, like what and why. I was always that driven. So my faith crisis is kind of in three phases. So my first kind of start with faith crisis was when I was 15. We got the Strength of Youth pamphlet and here it is. It's what God has to tell me, a teenager. And then it's all about, you know, don't drink coffee and the tattoos. And I remember then, I have words for this now. I was feeling cognitive dissonance then. I didn't have words for what was happening. All I knew is that my body felt rebellion and it just came out as teenage angsty punk rock rebellion. And so for me, that eventually ended with such rebellion and sexual activity at the time that I was kicked out of my home. So at 16, I was removed from my home and sent to my uncle's house, who's a bishop, a Mormon bishop. And I spent my senior year there. So that was super traumatic, super traumatizing for me.

John Dehlin [00:10:11] Can we talk about that for just a second?

Brittney Hartley [00:10:12] Yeah, we can talk about that.

John Dehlin [00:10:14] How does a parent kick a teenage kid out?

Brittney Hartley [00:10:17] It was kind of that time period where the thing to do with troubled teens was to outsource. And so that was kind of the thing. And my brother, who also really struggled with my strict. My parents at the time were not in any kind of nuanced place. It was just so strict. And we were so rebellious from this kind of strict way of control that he went kind of the drug route. And he was also removed from the home and sent to one of those kind of youth group kind of camp things. And that was just kind of the thing. And we were in Henderson, Nevada at the time. It was kind of a rich Mormon area. And when you have a troubled teen, you send them away somewhere. That was kind of the. The best resource that I felt like my parents had at the time. So I went.

John Dehlin [00:11:12] How did that feel?

Brittney Hartley [00:11:12] It was super shamey, right? Because I go to a new sacrament meeting. I can't take the sacrament. So it's very obvious that I'm here because I'm a troubled girl. And so I.

John Dehlin [00:11:23] And you're not with your family?

Brittney Hartley [00:11:24] I'm not with my family. It's very obvious that I'm there because I'm a troubled. I'm a troubled little girl. So the whole thing was shame. And I didn't really make any friends. It's senior year. I'm just, you know, this new girl with a lot of trauma probably.

Bishop Interviews and BYU Idaho Culture

John Dehlin [00:11:41] Can you talk really quickly about bishop interactions? Was the bishop asking prying questions? Like, did you feel weird about a bishop valuating your morality or worthiness or talking about graphic sexual things one on one behind closed doors?

Brittney Hartley [00:11:58] All of that was awful, but not as awful as some of the stories that I hear here on Mormon stories. So as far as bishop roulette, that I did pretty well. But even so, there was just so much shame and there was just so much trauma in being put on a plane the next day. And that was just. I. I didn't. I didn't realize until later on in my story how much trauma that gave me and how much that influenced me. So at the time, then I. I don't have friends. I'm in this new place. He's got a gospel library. Of course he does. He's a bishop. My uncle. Sweet, sweet man. And by the way, just like a spoiler alert here, like, all of my family relationships turned out to be great. And so these wounds are not fresh for me. These wounds have healed as I'm talking about them, but he had a gospel library. And so it was almost like this life raft back to my family. When I look back at My journey back to Mormonism is I was reading. I was reading C.S. lewis, and I was reading Nibley, and I was reading, oh, who's the grace guy?

John Dehlin [00:13:12] I can't remember him. Robin Milleton?

Brittney Hartley [00:13:14] No, Millet. I was reading Robert Millet. And as I was reading his gospel library, I'm realizing that there's more to Mormonism than just the first strength of youth pamphlet. Because when you're a teen, the doctrine is the first strength of youth pamphlet. Didn't make sense to me.

John Dehlin [00:13:28] It's like, don't watch R rated movies. Don't masturbate.

Brittney Hartley [00:13:32] Even then, as a thinker, I'm like, I understand why this is the creator of the universe's message to me. Like, this is so trivial.

Margi Dehlin [00:13:39] Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [00:13:40] But in these other gospel library books, in this nuanced gospel library that he had, there was another level of Mormonism that I never saw before. And it was a life raft to my family. Right. That I'm disconnected from. I'm. I'm totally by myself. And I think that was enough. Like, that was enough. That, okay, there's some good things about Mormonism. There's some depth of to Mormonism that I didn't know. There's maybe some culture that I can separate from some doctrine that I feel like is good and helpful and thought out. Even. There's some Joseph Smith stuff in the King Follett discourse that's at least interesting. There's some panentheism in there. Like, that's at least interesting.

John Dehlin [00:14:21] What's that word mean for those who don't know?

Brittney Hartley [00:14:23] So, you know, pantheism is this. I think John Larsen had to answer this question last week, but Pantheon is this. Is this idea that everything has a soul and is a part of God. Theism is this creator God? Panentheism is that God is in everything and yet also distinct. And so this idea that God isn't the sole creator of the universe, that he is a part of the universe, is very interesting because it helps to solve the problem of evil. So I'm thinking about all of this my senior year of high school, and there's enough there to bring me into what I would call nuanced mormonism. So by 17, I would call myself a nuanced Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:15:01] Around what year is this?

Brittney Hartley [00:15:02] Oh, geez. So I graduated high school in 2003.

John Dehlin [00:15:05] Okay.

Brittney Hartley [00:15:05] So this would have been 0203.

Margi Dehlin [00:15:08] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:15:08] Yeah. Progressive Mormonism hadn't really broken through yet. So that's. That wasn't really a thing.

Brittney Hartley [00:15:14] No. At least this is me putting words backwards of like cognitive dissonance and nuance. Mormon. I didn't have any of that language. Yeah. And so that was enough for me to get back on board with Mormonism and in my own little nuanced way. And I went to BYU Idaho. I went to Rexburg when I got out of high school and I went into the history and philosophy departments. And the thing is, there, by definition, if you're at BYU and you're a history teacher or a philosophy teacher, you're nuanced. That's the tea that everybody drinks. I did very well there. I didn't have a bad experience at byui know fully why. I hated my religion classes and I hated my Book of Mormon class and I hated some of my other classes. But I knew that I loved my history classes. I knew that I loved my philosophy classes. And I had a teacher that had a profound impact on me. His name is David Peek. In fact, I would love for him to come on Mormon Stories. He'd love to. Who is a history teacher there. And he's a practicing Sufi. He's a mystic, really. And just kind of playing in Mormonism as a mystic. And I read Dante's Divine Comedy with him and I did exegesis Scripture with him. And it was very impactful for my soul and found some good soul food in some of those history and philosophy classes from these kind of nuanced Mormon, you know, professor characters. They're all kind of Leonard Arrington types, just by definition. So that was my experience at byu. I got married. Married to my. Really quickly.

John Dehlin [00:16:58] Was BYU Idaho culture difficult for you? It's known as maybe the most conservative city in all of Mormonism. Rexburg, Idaho, for a progressive Mormon kid in 2004, 2005, brave trying to embrace their progressive Mormonism in what many would say is the most fundamentalist place for Mormonism. How was that?

Brittney Hartley [00:17:22] Yeah, that was sometimes hard. I definitely got some run ins with the law from time to time because it's all just so silly to me. But there was so much going. I tend to be a cerebral kind of driven person. I'm very in my head. So just hanging out in the history department all day where the other history professors talk about how this is stupid. There's just a camaraderie there about like, we know that. That the institution can be dumb and that these rules are silly. And there was just enough camaraderie in that nuanced brand of Mormonism that was the history and philosophy department. That was enough for me to not be bothered too Much by my run ins with all of that.

Margi Dehlin [00:18:11] It's lovely, I think, to hear these little pockets of safe places I think within. I definitely, I feel like I had it in the English department, byu, Provo and what you're kind of saying as part of your experience. I was going to ask you really quickly, I have a couple questions, but the first question is you kind of quickly mentioned, so I'm going to have you go back just for a minute that you had a lot of questions. Your brain was always like growing up a really thoughtful, you know, thinking, reflective child. How, how did you grow up perceiving yourself within your family system? Growing up in a religion that doesn't particularly value questioning. What's your experience like? What was your experience like?

Brittney Hartley [00:19:05] This is really where I have to credit my father and the environment and his family. So my, my grandfather was a professor at University of Hawaii and he even back then, so this would be. My grandfather had kind of interfaith dialogues and he was very nuanced and he wrote papers and he was always into discussions. And so I wasn't the black sheep of the family for being able to have discussions and think about things. So it was common around the dinner table. And I didn't know this was rare until I moved out of the house and that we would be asked as kids what we thought about things and asked to consider, well, what would the other point of view say? And so in our family we play this kind of chess where you're allowed to have an opinion and let's play it out without emotion, without identity, without having to kind of defend that to the death. It's almost this playful, I'm going to take this position and you take this position and let's see how this plays out. So it was definitely an intellectual environment. The dinner conversations had a lot of nuance. Of course, at this time my parents were younger, they were trying to just do the right thing. So we had a little bit more, you know, it was strict in a lot of ways. But the dinner conversation was. Could be philosophical, could be asked to look at different points of view. And I really, really valued that as a child. And I didn't know how rare that was until I go, of course you get married, you go to your husband, family, and I'm just trying to play verbal ping pong and all of a sudden someone's mad at me and someone's, you know, ego is in this now or someone's feelings are in this now. And I'm like, oh, I'm just playing here. So we do have in that extended family an environment of discussion that, that is really beautiful and really healthy. And so my dad currently is still an active member of the church. Very, very nuanced. He listens to Mormon stories, he reads rough stone rolling, he reads all the things. And so we're still able to have really productive conversations. And so my relationship with my parents, even though it was so fractured at the time, I have a relationship with both parents now.

Margi Dehlin [00:21:31] Wow. Yeah, that's beautiful. I also had a question with regard to this moment where you're sent away to live with your uncle. And I feel like you described it for a moment that you didn't have friends, that it was this kind of new environment. So I wanted to just kind of explore with you your relationship with feeling either isolated and, or lonely and how long that kind of lasted if it did. And did that change when you went to byu, Idaho and found this kind of pocket of, as you say, the history and philosophy departments? Like, how would you describe your connection to other people amidst this time that you were sent away through byu?

Enneagram, Personality, and Early Belief

Brittney Hartley [00:22:24] So enneagram wise, I'm a. I've taken the test twice now professionally for, for different jobs. And the first time I took it I was a four with a five wing. And the second time I took it I was a five with a four wing, something like that. But I do know that in that time of trauma, my kind of five wing withdraws into ideas because that feels safe. I can sit in this room, in this classroom with the history people and we can do ideas. And I didn't realize how much of that is a trauma response because if I got close to someone, that may break my heart because that broke my heart when I, you know, when I got sent away from my, my friends and my family at that time. So I don't know if I actually. I do know I could not have verbalized it then I would have just said that close relationships maybe weren't super meaningful to me because I'm so excited about these ideas. I wouldn't have known then, hey, that's a trauma response. You're doing that because ideas feel safer than people right now. So at the time I was just fully in Idealand and I stayed there for a long time, not knowing until later how much of that was a trauma response.

Margi Dehlin [00:23:35] Yes. Yes. That makes so much sense.

Brittney Hartley [00:23:37] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:23:38] Part of the reason, I think it

Brittney Hartley [00:23:39] was what you were predicting, that some of that was a trauma response. Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:23:44] Part of the reason I asked about the year is because, you know, like, we talked about this. Before we started, there was a RESTORE conference this, you know, last month where 3,500 progressive, liberal, nuanced Mormons met at the Mountain America Conference center in Salt Lake City where they're just celebrating being LGBT affirming and anti racist and theologically progressive and feminist and mother in heaven. But like 20 years ago, the world, the land, the Mormon landscape is very different. So I want to ask another question about your high school, BYU, ID years, and maybe even after. And that is, to what extent were you A, just like already a decided atheist or nihilist and just lying to everyone or B, like you had just sort of said, no, no, no, I'm still a believer. I still even believe in Mormonism. I just, I just am going to redefine the words. Redefine what it means to be a prophet, Redefine what it means, what God means. Redefine what true church means. That's kind of a part one question and then a part two question to that is how much were you open versus sort of hiding and lying, like when it came to temple recommend questions or how you would talk to the bishop? Were you an open progressive or were you. Or were you sort of faking it and having to do that dual compartmentalization and even dishonesty that sometimes is called.

Brittney Hartley [00:25:17] So the first question, I was not an atheist. I believed in, in Mormonism because there was something beautiful, especially about King Follet discourse and a God who weeps. And there's some really beautiful strands of that early intellectual Mormonism, especially compared to what I knew of Christianity, which is kind of even at the time was, was still kind of this Reagan Christianity. And I, I still believed that, that, that was really beautiful and interesting. And as far as how much I was able to be open at that age, I think if I'm going to be honest here, because I was more well read than the bishop or the stake president or the whatever, I just, I probably just took pride in. If you want to argue this with me, I'm going to win because I've read about this more than you have. And so I just felt like the pushback that I get that I got to me was like, you're on the right path. You're doing what Jesus would do. You're flipping tables when you need to. You're raising your hand in Sunday school. And I felt like I did a good job walking that line at the time where, you know, I'd had callings. I was young women's president and I tried to make spirituality as as good Jesus and good doctrine and good Mormon doctrine as I could. And most people responded well to that and liked that and liked my talks and would come talk to me afterwards. And I enjoyed being nuanced, progressive, better messages guy in Mormonism. I enjoyed that role. That was. That was almost an identity, and I enjoyed that identity. And I would, of course, get. Get pushback. I'd get sent to the principal's office for various things, but it didn't bother me because I felt like, I know this. I've thought about what you're asking me about more than you have. I can explain myself if I need to. And so being the progressive member of my ward was a nice identity for me for a time. I enjoyed that identity. I think you did, too. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:27:36] Margi and I are both nodding our heads, I think.

Brittney Hartley [00:27:38] Very relatable.

Margi Dehlin [00:27:39] And what it. So do you feel like in that time there, it was values based. It was also that you were connecting to the deeper. The deeper value.

Brittney Hartley [00:27:50] Right.

Margi Dehlin [00:27:50] That there could be some discourse in Relief Society or in. But where you're coming from is kind of this deeper place, and to you that's more important, and that can justify some means. Is that how you would talk about it? Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [00:28:09] Again, like, it's.

Margi Dehlin [00:28:10] It's.

Brittney Hartley [00:28:10] It's hard to know how much of that I could have verbalized then, because now I look back and I can see that this was an identity that I enjoyed.

Margi Dehlin [00:28:18] Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [00:28:19] But, yeah, I would say that I did fairly well trying to pull out the good and stand up to the bad in. In the ways that I could at that age.

Margi Dehlin [00:28:31] Yeah.

Progressive Mormon Marriage in the Mid-2000s

John Dehlin [00:28:31] Did you feel totally alone or had you discovered either mentors or community in those mid-2000s?

Brittney Hartley [00:28:38] I didn't have mentors or community, but I did have books. And I had enough of this. There was this kind of community of intellectuals. There were these people writing these books that resonate in my body. I remember their ideas, that it felt like there was a community there, but it was through books so low.

John Dehlin [00:29:00] Benyan, Eugene England, Leonard Arrington, all of that.

Brittney Hartley [00:29:03] That. That there was a club there, that even though I didn't meet with them, I didn't know them, they were much older than me. There was a strand there that I resonated with that was interesting, that was philosophically interesting, that I. There was enough of the community just in always having my head in those books, essentially.

John Dehlin [00:29:25] Did you find Phil Barlow's a Thoughtful faith back then?

Brittney Hartley [00:29:28] Not then. That was. That would have been later.

John Dehlin [00:29:30] Okay. It's weird for me to think of you being a Progressive Mormon teenager right at the time. I'm starting Mormon stories like around 2005. Can you imagine a little Brittney like

Margi Dehlin [00:29:42] I'm having the appreciation for.

Brittney Hartley [00:29:44] Let's talk about.

Margi Dehlin [00:29:45] That's right.

John Dehlin [00:29:47] Okay, keep going. This is great.

Brittney Hartley [00:29:48] Okay, so what's next? So I get married to my husband

John Dehlin [00:29:52] and he was an orthodox believer.

Brittney Hartley [00:29:53] He was. When I look at kind of his family environment and kind of his faith, I would say he's more. Was always more of a social Mormon than a true believing Mormon, which was why we were able to. I'm still married to my husband currently. I think if he would have been more of the true believing brand. I don't know if our marriage could have gone through what's coming next. But more of a. This is a good thing for me and my family. This is a good just structure to have in my life. More so than the guy who's reading his scriptures and praying every night. So it was a little bit more of that.

John Dehlin [00:30:34] But temple marriage.

Brittney Hartley [00:30:35] Yeah, temple marriage, the whole deal.

Margi Dehlin [00:30:37] What do you remember loving or appreciating about your husband?

Brittney Hartley [00:30:43] Yeah, good question. I had to Dear John a missionary to marry him. So I really. So for me, I spend so much time in my head and I doubt and I'm skeptical of everything. And my husband just has this stability and confidence and surety. And he's an enneagram3. So he's just always doing something. And he kind of got me out of my head and into a deeper way of living where we were traveling and doing other things and playing soccer

Margi Dehlin [00:31:21] and so kind of into the world of being as opposed to like in your head.

Brittney Hartley [00:31:28] He's not the guy that I met in my philosophy class and we philosophize all day. In fact, I don't know if a marriage like that would be good for me. I'd probably be homeless. He's more. I was attracted to him for. He's my opposite essentially, in many ways. But there's something that I bring to the table and just the deepening aspect. But he has this stability and this confidence and can pull me out of my head and get me into life that I still appreciate him for.

Margi Dehlin [00:32:00] Yeah, that's lovely. I'm gonna have you, if you don't mind, just give a brief summary because you've referenced Enneagram. Just really quick for people that don't really know what it is and what an Enneagram 3 is. And you as an Enneagram 4 Wing 5 or 5 Wing 4, was it?

Brittney Hartley [00:32:20] Yeah. So enneagram is just A tool. It's just a personality tool. I just see it a lot in this ex Mormon world, where if you're trying to get a sense of someone's personality, sometimes a shortcut is just like, hey, I'm an enneagram 4 with a 5 wing. And that can just give you a little window into what someone's motivators are. So an enneagram 4. I'm not an Enneagram coach. There. There are certainly other coaches who've been on the podcast and ex Mormon coaches, but enneagram4, you know, you're just. You're a deep feeler. Authenticity is a high core value. Your enneagram5 is going to be your more logic, kind of headspace person. You'll retreat into those places when you're. When you're threatened. So if someone told me if you're a four with a five wing, then there's almost this attraction to melancholy because it feels more real. And this attraction to the deepest thoughts and the deepest feelings and the deepest end of the pool. And I've just always found myself swimming in the deepest end of the pool. And it doesn't mean I'm smarter or better than anyone else. It just means that that's a motivator of mine, of my behavior. So in enneagram3, which is. My husband is more of a goal setter kind of motivator. And so he's just very active in his life. He's an entrepreneur. He's a triathlete. He's an amazing person and brings. Brings so much life into my life that I wouldn't get because I can get lost in my.

Margi Dehlin [00:33:50] Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [00:33:51] Kind of darker head spaces. And so it's just a little shortcut that I use for people who are familiar with the Enneagram. I'm not an Enneagram coach, though.

Margi Dehlin [00:33:59] Yeah, perfect.

John Dehlin [00:34:02] All right, let's keep going.

Brittney Hartley [00:34:03] Okay. Get married. I became a history teacher. I finished my degree at Boise State, started teaching history. I was history teacher, young women's president, and soccer coach at the high school. And that was my life for many years. Wow.

Margi Dehlin [00:34:24] That's very full.

Brittney Hartley [00:34:24] It was a very full life. It was a very, you know, I was just surrounded by teenagers. And I love. I love the age when teenagers first start asking the questions why. I love when they start playing with, you know, these critical thinking skills for the first time. It's just a very fun age for me to work with. And so I was doing that. We didn't have kids for several years. And then through in vitro and infertility I had my first child. And this would be in 2011 is when I had my first child. And that is when it's the first time that I'm not working. It's the first time that I'm home. It's the very first time I was working. I was the progressive Mormon. I was the cool young women's president. I was doing the girls camp. I was the soccer coach, I was the history teacher. That was my identity for a good seven or eight years. I have my first child, it's my first time home. I decide I'm going to take polygamy off of my shelf. And I'm going to look at this thing because it's never quite sat well with me. I haven't had the time recently to really dig into it. And this is before year of polygamy. This is before really public information about polygamy. So you have to imagine me, I just have a baby and this is where I would have kind of my. I would call my Mormon faith crisis a classic Mormon faith crisis. This is in 2011, I take polygamy off of my shelf and I'm. I'm in my spare bedroom at 2 in the morning when I should be sleeping because I have a baby reading microfilm on my computer, trying to make sense of polygamy alone. And through all of that study and through all of that, it would have been so easy. I sometimes envy the people who have such better resources now. Thank you. Then in 2011. But I was totally alone and through kind of that journey of going through the whole polygamy story and all of the stuff that comes with that, lost my faith in Mormonism. So 2011, I lose my faith. I believe that Mormonism is not the one true religion. But at the time I still believed in God. I still believe that there's a God. So can we just appreciate this?

Margi Dehlin [00:36:53] Is it your, let's just say your fourness, whatever, where really you're having your first child, which is a major transition not just for your body, but mental health, relationship wise. Like it's challenging. I think it's a challenging transition. And then bringing something like. And here would be a time for me now to dive into polygamy, right? As something that you're taking along for the ride for that time and again, the aloneness, like I'm hearing that theme, a little bit of a theme so far of this world of ideas that it tends to be solitary. It has hit you in times in your life where you are solitary. What was that like to Be holding something like this new life, all these new things that you're kind of taking on with something as heavy now as a loss of faith.

Faith Crisis and Emotional Unraveling

Brittney Hartley [00:37:54] It was looking back, it was so hard. My husband actually called my parents to say, like, hey, like, Brittney, I'm really worried about her. And there was a lot of discussion in my family around. My family's much more nuanced now. And again, these relationships have healed, but at the time, it was very, Brittney's let go of the iron rod. Brittney's lost her way. And because there's no. Like, I can't send people this podcast to Lindsey Hansen park, because that doesn't exist yet. It's like, I couldn't send people the microfilms that I was looking at to try to make sense of this. People at that time didn't even. I mean, most of the people I talked to didn't even know that Joseph Smith was a polygamist. So the isolation I'd experienced before of just really feeling alone, the harder part of it was feeling like you're in the Truman show, feeling like you go to church. And like, I know now I have the data, this is not the story. This is insane. And when I try to say something about it, it's, I'm wrong. And then you start to think, well, maybe I am wrong, or maybe I did lose my way. And it's that Truman show feeling of, like, this isn't the story. I feel like I'm going insane. I feel like I. At the time, of course, this is so, like, egotistical to say, but at the time, I was like, am I the only Mormon going to church and knowing that this story that we're going over is not the story? Am I the only Mormon who knows this? I feel insane. I feel so insane. And so it was a lot of that. And that was very. That was very lonely. It was lonely in my marriage. The whole thing. The whole thing was lonely.

John Dehlin [00:39:41] Now there are progressive Mormons that process polygamy and come out just, oh, Joseph made mistakes, or God lets prophets make mistakes, or Moses killed someone and Noah got drunk. And, okay, Joseph was a polygamist, but, you know, God let Joseph make mistakes. There are lots of progressive, believing Mormon justifications for polygamy that allow Mormons to stay.

Brittney Hartley [00:40:05] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:40:05] What kept you from being able to do that?

Brittney Hartley [00:40:07] For me, it was like, polygamy is this string that's attached to everything else. It's attached to doctrine. And then you start looking at how doctrine is created, and you start looking at magic Mormonism and You start looking at Joseph Smith. Smith's a cult world. You start. It's this string that just doesn't end with polygamy. By the time you really, if you really do the whole polygamy story, you see how scripture gets made, you see how doctrine gets made, you see how people become prophets. You see it, it, it shows you how the sausage gets made. And by the end of that journey, it was like, I, I just don't see enough God in this that I can't explain all of this as human behavior. I don't see God in this anymore.

Troubling Discoveries About Polygamy and Church History

John Dehlin [00:40:52] Julia is asking if you can go a little bit more in depth about what were some of the specific things about polygamy that were most troubling to you.

Brittney Hartley [00:41:01] Yeah, it's hard to go back and kind of remember at the time because I just, I know more since then.

John Dehlin [00:41:07] I can prompt you.

Brittney Hartley [00:41:10] Yeah, It was really watching Joseph Smith's character and it was really watching how he used his ability to create doctrine to always kind of COVID his tracks. It was watching when you really get into the story, it's watching a human navigate these things. And it just for me took out any idea that this is some kind of God led prophet because I could see, oh, he has this tiff with Emma. So he's gonna go over here and he's gonna make section 132 and then they're gonna bring it to, to her. And then like you, you see the dynamics behind all these sections of doctrine that are coming out. You see how the ceiling, you know, we're not talking about polygamy and celestial marriage with Fanny Alger. We del, we develop that years later when he's being asked about things. And so you just begin to see how this is a human responding to pressure. And that in the end became a better explanation for how Mormonism came to be a human receiving pressure and dealing with it than some kind of God driven path that I just couldn't see anymore.

John Dehlin [00:42:27] There's another side of the spectrum which is just behavior that's beyond the pale. So like for some people it's the 14 year old girls. For some people it's the polyandry of women having multiple men. There's Joseph lying to Emma. Were there behaviors that just because God's. If there's religion and if there's scripture, God can just allow humans to make mistakes.

Margi Dehlin [00:42:51] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:42:51] So were there, I think at the

Brittney Hartley [00:42:52] beginning I would have said that. All the apologetic things I would have said, you know, people are imperfect or God could have given this revelation And Joseph messed it up and mistakes and I probably even could have allowed at the time, like at the beginning of that journey that yes, you know, polygamy was revealed by God. But no, Joseph shouldn't have done that with a 14 year old girl. And that was sin. Or I could have at the beginning, I could have probably apologetic, a lot of that. But by the end, it was just. When you fully just look at his story, I just couldn't hold on anymore to like seeing God in this story. I just really saw a man reacting to pressures. But then also in how he creates scripture, you know, he'll read something and we now know like, oh, he'll read Adam Clark and then he's reading the Bible and he's making sense of things. And he did have a philosophical mind. Like I don't, I really don't think he was an idiot. You know, when I hear that kind of insult I can. But once you get into the story, I can see all of the things that he's reading and thinking about that then become the doctrine. And so, so for me it just, I got so into that process that it was how the sausage is made and I just at the end of it didn't see God in it. And that's just. Was my experience with it.

Margi Dehlin [00:44:20] Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [00:44:22] Okay, good.

John Dehlin [00:44:23] Okay. So you have that dark night of the soul and you feel alone.

Brittney Hartley [00:44:27] I feel alone.

John Dehlin [00:44:27] Even in your marriage?

Brittney Hartley [00:44:29] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [00:44:29] I was going to ask you how long if you just a rough estimate of your, your kind of deep dive into polygamy to kind of your sense of like. Oh, nope. Yeah, yeah.

Brittney Hartley [00:44:41] A year.

Margi Dehlin [00:44:42] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:44:42] This is pre CDS letter, right?

Brittney Hartley [00:44:44] Yeah. Yeah. So everybody doesn't know anything that I'm talking about at this point. This is pre essays, this is pre social media. Really. It was very, very lonely. I sometimes envy the people that I have. People who started Mormon stories on a weekend trip and by the end they've deconstructed and it took me a lot longer than that. It was a lot more drawn out than that. Just weren't as many resources then. So at this point I would call my. So I was a nuanced Mormon. At this point I would call myself a mystic. I was a mystic Mormon.

Margi Dehlin [00:45:20] Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [00:45:20] So mysticism is really this stance of rather than define God, we actually dive into what people have called God at the experience level. And so it's more experience driven rather than theology driven. Which is why Christian mystics and atheist mystics and mushroom mystics and Sufi mystics all speak the same language. Because in that space it doesn't matter what you call God. It doesn't matter your theologies that really are trying to get to God. What matters is the experience of it. And so I was in that place. I was a Mormon mystic. I still believed in God. I didn't believe it was the one true church, but I believed that there were many paths up the mountain, and Mormonism is just one of them. So I actually did the rare thing. And I never went into teaching seminary when I was younger. I might have if it had been available, but everyone told me, if you have a kid and you're a woman at the time, you'll never be able to teach seminary, so you can't go into seminary. Once they changed that rule, I actually went in Boise and I took the class and I became a hired paid seminary teacher. And I realized that that's a rare move for most of the stories on Mormon stories. But for me, I was just in this place where I can still use Mormonism and as one of the ways that people experience God, there's still some good here that I can highlight that allows me to interact in this community. So I was a seminary teacher, and I did my best to pull out whatever in the lesson that day was healthy spirituality and do that for the kids, and they responded to it. I think any who are listening can chime in. Of course, I got in trouble multiple times. Had to go to the principal's office for things that I said or whatever.

John Dehlin [00:47:23] This is the. When they say principal, it's like the leader of seminary teachers. I had the exact. You said this isn't a typical Mormon story story, but it's my story. I know I had to sit in the principal's office. I know John because he evaluated my lessons, and it's really degrading as an adult. I was a volunteer, by the way. I wasn't even getting paid.

Margi Dehlin [00:47:42] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:47:42] And this guy's like, and I'm waking up at 5 to go teach these kids at 6am yeah. And this dude is like, sitting in and then critiquing.

Brittney Hartley [00:47:51] The thing that got me in trouble the most is when I did the thing that. And like, mind you, I'm in Idaho and it's a conservative area. But there's a lot of things in Mormonism that are very feminist. Right. And I wanted to always highlight whenever we came across those things, and that would be the thing that gave me the most pushback. So even things like Fiona Givens style Adam and Eve lesson where, like, Eve is the hero of this story, like, moving it Forward, like, instantly canceled for that. Like, instantly. Like, absolutely not for that. So feminism was probably the thing that I got punished for for the most during that time. But I enjoyed looking into the lesson and saying, there's a bunch of stuff here. How can I pull out something meaningful? And I tried to do that every time. So it was, like, for Book of Mormon year, if Nephi has this moment with God where God comes to him into a tent, but he doesn't talk to him right away. He says, you gotta come. You gotta come talk to me. So rather than just talking to God in the tent, since they're already talking, Nephi has to go climb a mountain. Mountain to go talk to God. So we had a whole lesson on ways that humans experience spirituality, what they do to climb their mountain, to have. To have their kind of God experience. And what would that look like for you? And the class would say, you know, after a run, I just lay down and I look at the sky, and that's a peaceful moment. And it was a beautiful moment. I mean, was it what the manual wanted me to teach about Nephi? No. But I pulled out something from the story, and we went off into some discussion about some form of what I consider at the time healthy spirituality, healthy relationship with God was how I approached my kind of seminary class.

John Dehlin [00:49:42] Margi's nodding. Why are you nodding, Margi?

Margi Dehlin [00:49:44] Oh, I just. I. I love it because in the process of that, they're connecting with themselves, their experience, which oftentimes isn't a part of the seminary, the typical seminary experience. And I really. I relate to that. Yeah, really beautiful.

Brittney Hartley [00:50:01] I enjoyed that. And then had other children. I have four children currently. And so each time I had a child, my time at home, where you're. Where you're. You're doing a lot of sitting and feeding and that kind of thing. And that would be my time to dig into what was on my shelf. So then I, you know, I have another child, I have another shelf, and I decide I'm gonna go to school to really study theology so I can make sense of this God character because I'm in this mystic place, but I'm not super confident in where I'm at. I know I need some more education. So, like many people, I go to theology school to try to find God. And that's the place where I lose my faith in God. And that, for me, was. Was more painful than my Mormon deconstruction, because with Mormon deconstruction, I still had an anchor. I had a sense of self. I felt like I had free will. I felt like I had God. I felt like there was at least some truth in the universe that I could attain. I still had psychological anchors, but for me, like having. Having the next kid and the next phase where I lost all of that was the hardest part of my deconstruction. Because that's when you hit it. The void where you're in a black hole trying to grasp onto something and there is nothing there.

Theology School and Losing Faith in God

John Dehlin [00:51:22] So on some level, it makes no sense to go to theology school and then lose your faith in God. And then in another sense, it makes all the sense in the world. So talk about what you went in hoping for or wanting or anticipating, and don't hesitate to kind of talk about the strains of thought or the. Or the writers or the thinkers that led you down to.

Brittney Hartley [00:51:46] It's specifically called open and relational theology, which is kind of process theology, which is a new thing that's actually gaining a lot of popularity. And it's this idea. It's actually kind of a really beautiful God in some ways. There's the Mormon God, especially the God who weeps. God fits into this umbrella, which is what I was kind of hoping for at the beginning. But it's this. This place where God isn't kind of this classical theistic creator God. It's a kind of God that's relational and the future is open and we are all kind of in relationship with God, progress, progressing in some way. And that God is kind of the electricity of the universe that's connecting everything. And so in process theology, God is still in process with us. It's a much more. Much more compassionate God. It's a much more loving God. It's a much more present God. And I studied under Thomas Ord, who is the. A lead theologian in open and relational theology. And he lives in Boise and he's a friend of mine. And I. I studied under him. And so I did my master's degree and I made it to all but dissertation. I was at dissertation. And I, as I'm doing this, and this is a really cool God that they're working out then they're open to evolution. They're very liberal, and they're still. But there's still a concept of God there that everybody's trying to make sense of. And what happened for me is I had this. This creeping feeling that I couldn't shake, that we were all creating the God that we wanted to worship and that maybe God didn't create us, maybe we're creating God. And that was the thought. It was like this little seed of doubt that as I kept going in that program and watched how people created a God that was more worthy of worship than the God that they were given in evangelical Christianity, I came to realize how much we were creating gods. And then you look at. Look back at the history and realizing that for at least a hundred thousand years we've been creating gods. And you look at that story closely and you look at what people needed from their God and how it was such a reflection of society. And I eventually got to this place and I didn't want to. I didn't want to lose my faith in God. I had no intention. I had spent my entire life studying religion, studying theology, making sense of what is. I wanted there to believe. I wanted there to be a God. I wanted there to be an eternal sense of justice. I wanted things to be okay for the people whose lives weren't okay. I wanted all of that. But I could not shake the more that I studied this idea that I think we're. I think we're the ones doing this. And in the end, it came time for me. I kept learning just because I love learning and I love the discussion, and I kept going all the way to my dissertation, and then all of a sudden realizing it's time to write a dissertation in open and relational theology, and realizing then as I'm talking to my professor, trying to what I can write for my dissertation, realizing I don't have anything to write because I don't believe in God anymore. And I didn't want to get to that point. I had no intention of being there. And so I left. And I have such positive. Like, the people in this space are so beautiful. Thomas Ord, one of the most beautiful humans. These people really believe God is love, and they act as if God is relational love. And so they're some of the most beautiful people I've ever met. But that seed of doubt of I think we're the ones doing this became more and more clear to me. And I just couldn't write my dissertation about a God I didn't believe in. And that was really painful. And that's when I started to really open the door into what we'll talk about, which is what happens when you keep deconstructing and then you lose everything.

Margi Dehlin [00:56:03] I have a couple questions. So with regard to what you're studying as part of this program, who. What are you reading? And, you know, I would love to just kind of hear a little bit more about that.

Brittney Hartley [00:56:17] Yeah, so I did a lot of work. So my. My Master's degree was specifically, the focus was. So, like, on my degree, it says applied theology colon Gen Z and the future of religion and spirituality. So a lot of my work was. Was focused on, okay, I understand people are deconstructing organized religion. I'm a part of that movement. I understand it. My next question really was, where is this going? So a lot of my focus on my master's degree wasn't in kind of reading Tertullian or Old Christian Fathers. It was a lot of work in postmodernism. It was a lot of work in Gen Z spirituality and the polls going on there. It was a lot of work in understanding spirituality in general and even getting into what Gen Z is doing with New age spirituality and the rise of the feminine in a cult. And it was really just watching, okay, people are deconstructing religion, but humans are humans. These behaviors and these needs are going to show up somewhere else. Where is it showing up? Up, where is this train going? And it was all kind of conversations in that direction. So it wasn't a ton of heavy theology study, even though I did some, obviously, you know, in a Christian seminary. But my focus was, where is the deconstruction train going? And so that was a little bit, you know, more modern concepts like, like postmodernism.

Existential Fears and Postmodern Depression

Margi Dehlin [00:57:53] And did you ever have a thought, you know, as you went through your masters and you kind of come to this place of, wait, are, you know, this idea of is God creating us or are we actually creating God? That this sense of like, well, what's wrong with that? Like, that rub of, you know, is that a problem? Was that. Was that something that was like a conversation in you, or was it a realization of, no, I can't do that. Does that make sense?

Brittney Hartley [00:58:34] Yeah, it makes sense. So for me, what makes that hard? Because for some other people, I've seen other people go through that and just kind of breeze by it and just be okay with that. The reason that made me so not okay is because my identity was truth seeker. That's my. That was my identity. And if my identity is truth seeker. And I've always been working on the question of what is. I've always been doing metaphysics. I've always been, I just want to know what is the ultimate. What is ultimate reality? Because, and I, again, I think this is a trauma response, and this came out in therapy years later that, that there was a part of me that if I could find out what is, then I could pattern my life according to it, and then I won't End up kicked out of my home.

Margi Dehlin [00:59:23] That's right.

Brittney Hartley [00:59:24] I won't be that little girl who's lost. I'll be okay. I'll be safe. And so for me, when I came to this realization, especially when you're studying postmodernism, where I'm coming to this realization that I don't think that we're interacting with ultimate reality at all, that for some people is okay and they can enjoy the freedom of that space. For me, it was devastating because my entire sense of self would then have to die. Because if my sense of self is built on, I'm gonna find what is and I'm gonna find the truth. And that's how I'm dealing with my trauma of all of this too. And my identity has always been truth seeker. And my ideas is my safe place. And if there's no truth and there's no and we're not interacting with ultimate reality at all, what the hell am I? I don't know what I am. I don't know who I am. I don't know what I do. I don't know how I make a decision. It was a true ego death that had to happen there because I had built my identity around being a truth seeker. And if there's not ultimate truth, I don't know what to do with my life. I have this religion degree. I'm in this Mormon community marriage. I'm married. He's still active. My kids are going to church. I've lost all tethers to reality at all. I don't even know how to get out of bed in the morning. I don't even know why I can't how to do that.

John Dehlin [01:00:52] Did it get that severe where you were not wanting to get out of bed?

Brittney Hartley [01:00:55] Yeah, for me, yes. So this. So sometimes depression, you know, it's a brain chemical thing. You need to go out in the sunshine and you need friends and you need to take care of yourself and you need maybe some medication, blah, blah, blah. But I'm finding more and more that kind of. What other kind of therapists are talking about, even in this space, that sometimes it's the existential crisis that is the true cause of the depression. So you'd look at me, I have young children. I'm definitely experiencing depression. I'm definitely experiencing suicidality. And you would say, okay, you know, it's postpartum, she's going through some stuff, she's depressed. But at its core, it was an existential crisis that was creating the depression. And then they would just feed into each other because then I'm not taking care of myself. I have young children anyway, so that's hard to do. And, and this is where I open the door into nihilism. So nihilism is the belief that there is no ultimate meaning in the universe. And for some people, I think Alan Mount's one of these characters where that is optimistic and freeing. That means I can create my own meaning. And they do just fine in nihilism. For me, like so much of myself and my identity had to die and then it opened up in the void. There are what we call monsters in the void. Nietzsche talks about this. Monsters in the void. And this is where you meet the four existential human fears, which I'd really love to talk about. And the four existential fears are meaninglessness, death, isolation and fear of freedom. And it wasn't until I understood the four existential fears that I really understood why we have religion.

John Dehlin [01:02:50] Tell us, tell us them again. One more time.

Brittney Hartley [01:02:52] So this is from the work of Irvin Yalom, who did a lot of work.

John Dehlin [01:02:57] That's I, I pronounce it Yalam. I don't know if that's right. He's a psychologist that focused on group therapy.

Brittney Hartley [01:03:03] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:03:03] But he's also an existentialist.

Brittney Hartley [01:03:05] Yeah, he's and psychologist. A Buddhist guy. And he really.

John Dehlin [01:03:08] Y A L O M for those who don't know. Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [01:03:11] And he really did the work on human existential fears and how much of that is subconsciously driving our behavior. So fear of death. And you can get into terror management theory and his work for how much of our creating gods and religions and even our actions is really just because we're scared to die. Fear of meaninglessness, fear of isolation and then fear of freedom. That last one sometimes counterintuitive, but. But we also can have a fear of freedom.

John Dehlin [01:03:44] I was afraid of freedom.

Brittney Hartley [01:03:45] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:03:46] Because I was afraid I was going to mess my life up and wreck my kids and my marriage.

Brittney Hartley [01:03:50] Yes. Which is why all the cult leaders and the leaders of every religion could die today and tomorrow we would recreate them because we have a fear of freedom. And when someone says, I have the path for you, I have the 12 step program for you, we give up our moral compass because we're so afraid to mess up our lives. Right. So those four existential fears really showed up for me. But meaninglessness was the one that was really hard for me because I had so much identity around trying to. Trying to find the truth. And what do I do when maybe there isn't any? Maybe there Isn't any truth. Maybe there isn't any meaning. What do I do with that? And I'm going to be a little vulnerable here. The most dangerous thought I had, and this is a thought loop I got stuck in, was that because at the time, also realized, like, I've lost sense of self as a concept and I've lost free will as a concept. So I'm. I'm totally. I could not deconstruct another thing.

John Dehlin [01:04:51] So basically, we're meat robots, not even making our own choices.

Brittney Hartley [01:04:54] Yes, I have deconstructed that bulldozer kept going from Mormonism, and it just kept going until it was rubble and there was nothing left. All you have is nihilism as a philosophical concept is, you know, that there's no ultimate meaning in the universe, but as a feeling, as an experience, it's that it's. I'm in a black hole. They call it the void. They call it the abyss because it's this black hole place where you have nothing to build on, nothing to grab hold on. There's nothing solid anywhere, and you're just kind of floating out there. And that's what it felt like, that I just could not grab onto anything. So when I have to make a decision about, you know, I'm a mom, I have to make decisions. All of it was so hard. I don't know up from down, I don't know left from right. I don't know what I am. I don't even know if it was ethical to have children. At this point, I'm having to deal with those thoughts. But the most dangerous thought that I had was, was if we have no free will and evolution is pulling the strings of all of this, and this is a system of violence because in order for me to be alive and to eat, I have to cause violence onto another conscious creature. Even if you're a vegan, you can't escape that. Even as a vegan. Even as a vegan. To live means the destruction of other conscious life. Then this is a violent system that I did not consent to. And the most moral thing to do would be for me to remove myself from this system of violence that I did not consent to. And that's actually the most moral thing I could do, which. Which is unaliving. And I spent probably two years in that thought loop.

Margi Dehlin [01:06:37] Wow.

Brittney Hartley [01:06:38] And had to think of my. See, this one's a little bit more fresh because I'm having some emotion come up. But I had to think of my oldest child, and I had to think of him Seeing my body. And that would bring me back into the moment of if there's anything that matters, he mattered. And that kept me alive. So when I say I spent time in nihilism, I spent time there. I spent about two years there totally alone. Totally alone. And I'm not in that place anymore, which is why I wanted to talk about this place today. Because I know that there are other Mormons who, when they started deconstructing Mormonism, they kept deconstructing everything else. And if you do that, if you keep deconstructing, if your only tool is skepticism, you will eventually end up with rubble in one way or another. And you may not call that nihilism. You can maybe call that just, you know, complete psychological disintegration at some point. But if you keep asking questions, especially if you're a thinker type and a feeler type, that's a place where I see a lot of our deepest thinkers and feelers go. And there wasn't. Of all the ex Mormon content that was available for rebuilding your life, nobody was talking about antinatalism. Nobody was talking about what happens when you lose your free will, what happens when you lose your sense of self. Nobody was talking about the existential philosophical questions that I was in because I was no longer interested in studying polygamy and whatever was going on with the 12 and the church and the whole thing. I'd passed that game a long time ago. I'm thinking about, is it even ethical to be alive?

Margi Dehlin [01:08:38] Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [01:08:39] And there weren't resources for that space. And there are, but they were harder to find than hopping on TikTok and following your favorite ex Mormon content creator.

Margi Dehlin [01:08:50] I have.

Brittney Hartley [01:08:50] There are many.

Margi Dehlin [01:08:52] Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [01:08:52] But there weren't people that I felt like I could talk to at that time in that space. Yeah, John, go ahead.

Postpartum Depression and Dissociative Darkness

Margi Dehlin [01:08:59] Okay.

Brittney Hartley [01:08:59] My.

Margi Dehlin [01:09:00] I have a quick question. So tell me. So I'm getting. I'm totally getting the feeling of what it felt like for you on the inside. What did it look like on the outside? Like, with regard to you in your everyday with, you mentioned having to make decisions like, how did it impact relationships? Yeah. A little bit of the outside world during that time. Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [01:09:31] I think someone looking from the outside in would see a mother struggling with young children and just see sweatpants. Tired, depressed, not alive, not, you know, connected face, light off, not connective. They would probably just. Just see a postpartum depression mom with a couple young kids. And part of that was like, that was a reality too. That was definitely not helping the situation.

John Dehlin [01:10:00] Right.

Brittney Hartley [01:10:00] Because it's hard. Like, it was hard already. So I was going through an existential crisis at the time that I had very young children. So you would just see a mom who, oh, Brits, let herself go, and she's wearing the sweatpants that she wore three days ago in survival mode. And, you know, that's not too terribly uncommon that it. It would have raised more red flags if my kids were older and I was showing such large signs of depression. But I think everyone from the outside could just see I was struggling, but saw reasons for that other than the existential crisis? And I couldn't explain. I mean, how could I explain these philosophical things that I was thinking about when. When I felt like no one was thinking about the. That thought at the level that I was? And so I just had no one to talk to in that space. And so what did I do? I went back to my books, and I found the philosophers, because the philosophers. This is a place where philosophers will often end up. Because if you keep asking why, if you keep asking these questions, oftentimes you'll. You'll end up in a place like this. And so that's when I started reading Camus and Nietzsche and people like that and started to gather some tools for my shift out of that space.

John Dehlin [01:11:23] John, do you have. I have a question, but did you

Margi Dehlin [01:11:26] have something else I can integrate with you?

John Dehlin [01:11:29] Okay. Well, I wanted to just relate, if it's okay. Yeah, I love it when the. When the storyteller just tells the story. But I also sometimes love it when we can all kind of reflect. And for me, I just want to share what it was like for me, interestingly, even though my faith crisis, my dark night of the soul happened in 2001, my real existential dread came around 2011, 2012, you know, like, seven years into Mormon stories, because what happened, my process was I lose my faith, I go to progressive Mormonism like you, and then I start Mormon stories thinking I'm going to lead everybody into progressive Mormonism and build a big progressive wing within the church. And I think my podcast and my activism served a role of avoidance of me confronting a little bit more deeply a lot of the things that you were confronting. So my existential Crisis hit around 2011, 2012. John Larsen's Mormon expression is going strong. Wrong. I'm a few years into my PhD, and for me, what it looked like was, oh, my gosh, I made all these decisions. If there's no God, what fun did I, you know, would I have gotten married? Would I have had more fun in College. Would I have dated more? Would I have married Margi? And we've talked about this, I'm not just throwing this on Margi now. Margi might have felt the same way or might still. Would I have married Margi? Would I have had four kids? Would I have made different education or career decisions? What did I miss out on? And then for me, part of the dread was I didn't really. I didn't really sink into the free will problem. I still just sort of felt like, ah, I don't know, I'm just gonna side on. I've got some free will and that's good enough for me. I function better when I believe that. So for me, free will was sort of like a leap of faith. But what I definitely did, I had been a rule follower in my mind for my whole life. I had been. In my mind, I had been Nephi. I had been the faithful, righteous one. And a lot of that was because I was being a faithful Mormon. So if there's no God looking over me, if there's no angels note, silent note taking, then, then what's, what's moral and what's not moral?

Brittney Hartley [01:13:51] And am I good? Because then that's your identity.

John Dehlin [01:13:54] Yeah, what does it matter? And then if I'm on the road and, you know, someone's attractive to me and I just keep it all, whatever I do, I keep it on the road as long as Margi or the kids don't find out, is it immoral because there's no morals? I'm not saying I, I went and acted on that. I'm just saying I didn't know morally if there was any grounding at all. And yes, for the record, I did make mistakes too. So I'm not trying to say that I did or didn't. I'm only saying I felt just like what matters anymore and angry that I'm 20 years into this and now I'm finding this out. I can't get that time back, I can't get that money back. I can't get those decisions back. And so I was dealing with a lot of like, Like a sense of lost opportunity.

Brittney Hartley [01:14:49] Even though I'm happy marriage, you have to grieve. You have to grieve. The John that never came to be. It's like the John that never got to live and experience a different life. You have to mourn that life as a person who could have existed, who didn't.

Margi Dehlin [01:15:04] That's right. It's the Cheryl Strayed ghost ship.

John Dehlin [01:15:07] Yeah, exactly.

Margi Dehlin [01:15:08] In tiny, beautiful things, she writes about it that sometimes that's all you can do is you salute all those things. Potential realities, potential people, potential choices you could have been. And it's kind of like a retroactive grief.

Brittney Hartley [01:15:24] Yeah, I think so.

John Dehlin [01:15:25] Yeah. And just. And also, just to clarify, I felt like it was in a happy marriage. I loved and loved Margi. I loved my kids. So it wasn't like. Think about the people that I know who don't like their spouse and who don't like being a parent and who had a lot of trauma happen to them because of their decisions. That wasn't me. And I was still barely hanging on. And when you. When you think now we're talking a lot in 2023 about, like, these murders that keep happening where these Mormon couples that are like elders quorum presidents or like leaders in their local community, and then all of a sudden, sudden they're killing themselves and their spouse and taking kids with them. I don't. I don't. You know, rarely will we ever know what was going on there. But in my mind, it definitely occurs to me that, like, this would be the. A point where some of those really horrific activities happen if and when somebody reaches this point doesn't know who to read or who to connect with and they aren't able to find their way out.

Brittney Hartley [01:16:37] Yeah. And the more I started to tell my vulnerable story, the more I realized I wasn't the only person who took the Mormonism to nihilism train and that there were so many others and that we were all silently suffering. And when I started, I'm jumping ahead a little bit. We'll go back and fill in the gaps. But when I started doing spiritual direction, it was just. Just almost all Mormon deconstruction. And the more I talk about that moment of emotion that you just saw, that place, the more I talk about that place, the more that that is resonating with people. And I'm finding more and more people in that space. And so almost all my coaching now is people in that space, which is

Margi Dehlin [01:17:22] so interesting because that. What it feels like to me. You could tell me if this is. But it. It can feel quite vacuous. Right. In this dark place where all these things are removed and all those fears are omnipresent and you're aware of them. You're very aware of them. And it feels like what that gives you. But did it feel like this to you is just one fixed point or one grounding, something that keeps you in the conversation? It keeps you so that you can now it feels like Part of your coping. Go and start to read, which is what you do. You kind of. How would you describe what that was to you? The meaning of thinking about your oldest. Was it a son? Your oldest child?

Living With Nihilism and the Struggle for Meaning

Brittney Hartley [01:18:12] It was this thing that, like, even though philosophically, I was in a place where nothing mattered in an eternal scale and the sun's just going to blow up and the earth's going to die and the universe doesn't care and none of this will have mattered. I was in that place. But when you look, there was a different part of me that was coming to life. That was when I looked at my child. Even though philosophically, logically, I was in that place experientially, there was something in my body that said, but his happiness matters. Yeah, that matters.

Margi Dehlin [01:18:49] That's right. It was outside the reason.

Brittney Hartley [01:18:52] Yes.

Margi Dehlin [01:18:53] Realm.

Brittney Hartley [01:18:53] It was a different way of being, which is hard for Mormons because we are deseret busy bees. Right? We do do, do, do, do. So we never have to feel anything about anything. We never. We're not a being. We don't have that in our theology. This kind of beingness, right, that we. You've talked about before. It's doing. Yeah, we're busy bees. And so this idea of life mattering because this. This moment with my child matters in the moment, in the experience of it was a new shift for me. I'd never operated from that place. I'd always operated from a headspace place. And it was. And I think that shift can be especially hard for Mormons because even when your Mormon faith dies, all of that scaffolding, all of those thought processes are still there. And I was still wanting a plan or a path or a truth or something like that in order to do life. And so moving that shift from life, from this kind of big, grand story, a grand narrative, a truth claim kind of life to a life that is worth living at the level of experience is a big, big shift that I now help people with.

Margi Dehlin [01:20:07] And it was born.

Brittney Hartley [01:20:09] And it was born in that moment of this matter, this experience with my child right now, if anything matters, that matters. I love that.

Margi Dehlin [01:20:20] I love that so, so much. All right, so I want to ask you a question around the experience for you emotionally, of being in the place of, you know, nihilism, the dark, the. Yeah. Was it. Was it a lot of intense emotion? Was it numb? Was it a not. Was it a disconnected feeling? Was it all of it? Like, how would you. How did you experience it on an emotional level?

Brittney Hartley [01:20:51] Yeah, the best. It was definitely dissociative. Depression. So the best way I can describe it is I would get up every day and this is all a video game. All of this, these clothes that I have to wear. And when we, you know, when we small talk as humans, we play these little games. These are all just little games. They're so absurd, they're so stupid. They're so exhausting. They're so meaningless. But the people in this video game of life really care about this character. So I'm going to get up in the morning and I'm going to put on my character, I'm going to put on my human face and I'm going to participate in these stupid human games because these humans apparently care about it. But this is a video game and this is stupid. That's what it was. And it was exhausting just getting up and doing enough to play human, to just be a mom.

Margi Dehlin [01:21:40] Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [01:21:41] Was the most that I could do. It was my Mount Everest climb. Every day that I'm going to put on my video game character that I have no association with. And I'm going to play this level even though it's stupid, because the video game characters in this level need me around. And that was my life for a couple years. Just complete dissociation.

John Dehlin [01:22:05] I don't think I could have done that.

Brittney Hartley [01:22:06] It was so hard. It was so lonely. I just really felt like. And I felt. And some people feel this too. And this is where the ex Mormon community tends to not be as helpful. Because sometimes in the ex. Like in the Mormon community, everyone's pretending to be happy to show that Mormonism is true. But then in ex Mormonism, we do that too sometimes we're all pretending to be happy to show that life is so much better outside of Mormonism. That's right. And so sometimes ex Mormonism can be. Look how fun it is getting a tattoo and having coffee. Life is so fun and amazing. And I wasn't in that place. So ex Mormonism wasn't helping me at all. The community. Because I wasn't in a place where eating, you know, drinking a coffee and getting a head tattoo was enough to be alive. That wasn't doing it for me. That's not enough.

Margi Dehlin [01:22:55] Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [01:22:56] And so the ex Mormon community, even though I had many, like, if looking back, you wouldn't think that I had no friends. I had many friends and acquaintances, but nobody could understand this matrix place that I was in, this video game of life place that I was in this level of deconstruction where. Where gender and reality and choice and sense of self and Identity and ego and religion and God and politics. Everything had been deconstructed to nothing. I. Nobody. And. And that's something that happens sometimes with fours Enneagram wise is we're always waiting for that moment for someone to say to us, you're too much. Like, that's a little much. And so. And I also didn't want to, like, push people there either. So it's not like, you know, when I first was going through my Mormon faith crisis, I was that guy sometimes on Facebook that would post an article about this, and it wasn't. It wasn't productive and I was angry and I wanted people to know about the truth of things. And I did go through that phase, but with nihilism, it was almost this sense of, I don't even want to talk about it because I don't want anyone else to come here. I don't want to push anyone here.

Margi Dehlin [01:24:14] Like. And protective of them.

Brittney Hartley [01:24:16] Yes. Like, I don't know. At the, at the time, it's like, I don't know if it's healthy that you even know this. Maybe it's better for you to be in this video game and feel like this is really important and feel like you have an identity and sense of self and feel like you have free will. Maybe it's better that you don't even know. And so that also fueled the isolation because I started to doubt. Maybe it. Maybe I've learned too much. Maybe I went too far and I can't come back, and I don't want anyone else to have to do that. So maybe I'm not even going to talk to someone about this because I don't want my thoughts to push them into this space because the reality is too much order, which I think Mormon Stories does a great job of explaining this, but too much order is suffocating. It's a box. It's limiting. You'll die there. Our kid, our LGBTQ kids die there. Right? But the reality is that too much chaos, the. The complete opposite side of fundamentalism.

Margi Dehlin [01:25:18] Right?

Brittney Hartley [01:25:19] Which is where I was. Where it's just. It's literally the complete opposite of the ordered. Fundamentalism is also dangerous. People also die there. And it may be suicide. It also may just be numbing yourself to death. It may just be drinking every night and being isolated and then dying of alcohol related problems. And so I came to this reality that all the ex Mormons were talking about the dangers of too much order, but I was in a place of, I'm in danger of too much chaos. Mormonism Isn't the reason that I want to die now. The reason I want to die now is because I don't even know if it's moral to be alive. And that's a place of too much chaos. And that's when ex Mormonism as a community, even though I had so many friends in that space, I was still alone.

Margi Dehlin [01:26:13] Yeah. There were no resources and no conversations

Brittney Hartley [01:26:16] and I didn't even know if I wanted to have that conversation because I didn't know if I. I didn't want to push someone there because I've seen people die there. Philosophers have died there, artists will die there. It was too much chaos.

Margi Dehlin [01:26:33] So your husband?

Brittney Hartley [01:26:36] Yeah, Poor guy. So let's see. We were in a functioning mixed faith marriage. We were. For a few years we would go to church every other week. So we would do church one week as a family and then the next week we would do church at home with mom where I'd have a little lesson, take a walk, sing a song, whatever. And for a few years it was a functioning mixed faith marriage where we both still felt lonely in the marriage, but it wasn't toxic, it wasn't abusive. It was just we're in this different place and we've come to a compromise, we've come to a new normal, but it wasn't intimate, like emotionally for both of us. And eventually I got to a place where and we were fine doing the mixed faith marriage thing and that was at least stable for a time. And then I was holding my daughter, who's adopted and she has brown skin and was holding her in sacrament meeting. And I just talked about this the other day because someone asked about my moment of actually like leaving church, like I'm leaving church and I'm not coming back, is holding her. And realizing as much as I was doing to try to excuse me, as much as I was doing to try to bring out the good in Mormonism and push away the bad, that she would have to read in the Book of Mormon that her skin is a curse from God. And I've read the apologetics on that. I've read every which way to explain that. I've read how they try to make that the priesthood. And I looked at her and I realized I know all the apologetics around this, this. It's not enough for me as a mother to keep you here and have you read that someday that your skin was a curse from God. And that's when I started pushing with my husband, saying, I think we can do this better outside of church. I'm looking at this community. I have kids who have special needs. I have kids who are adopted and so they have brown skin. And I'm looking at this realizing this isn't going to be your community. You're going to have to read that in the Book of Mormon and I'm subjecting you to that. Which I didn't have that thought with my oldest who's baptized and just a white neurotypical kid who was doing pretty well in Mormonism. Just, you know, as well as a boy can do. It's boring, but it's fine. And so that's when I started to say, I really, I think, want to take my children out. Whereas before it was a compromised kind of situation and I was doing the best that I could. And in all the ways that you make a mixed faith marriage function. And what happened was when you're the person who is, and I understand more of this now, but when you're the spouse who is on the train of someone else's deconstruction and you're in kind of the caboose and you don't know where it's going, there's this fear of chaos because there's always this fear that if I leave this structure, it's going to be boom, boom, boom, heroin addict. Right. And so the best thing that I ever did for my mixed faith marriage and what brought us eventually together to this space where we're now, it's like our first marriage died, but we were able to build a second, a functional and intimate second marriage, is when I started to rebuild. And we'll go back and talk about how I did that. But when I started to rebuild so that I was doing church at home and we had a moral lesson and we read books together and we took a walk out in nature and we played a game as a family and it was a list on the fridge. And then I started for family prayer. Instead of doing a family prayer, we would hold hands and we would say a line from Lilo and Stitch. My kids love that line. Movie. So before we eat, we hold hands and we say ohana means family. Family means no one gets left behind or forgotten. So these little things, when I started to reconstruct everything that Mormonism was doing, that was good structure wise because kids need ego, ego building and identity and community and moral education and values. They need all of that. Once I started to replace all of that in my home and Chad, my husband, saw that it's not going to be leave the church boom, boom, boom, heroin addict, which is the fear of chaos. When he saw that what I was doing was ordered and it was better, and it was better for my kids, and it was resonating better with my kids, that's when he left. And now we are raising our kids outside of the church at this point. And so it was. It was that because. And I think he was holding on to the church because here I am going through existential crisis after existential crisis in chaos. Where is that going to go? He's so afraid it's going to bring up his ego defenses that once he saw some order outside and once I started to restructure our home, that's when he felt safe enough to say, you're right, this is actually better for everyone. And that's when he left the church. And now we're raising our kids in a secular spiritual home outside the church.

John Dehlin [01:32:13] Yeah. When we did a lot of faith crisis retreats a few years ago, we would caution the faith crisis individuals to try to go slow on things like alcohol, drugs, sexual experimentation, even things like not paying tithing or atheism or just because the more. I would always say my main point in those faith crisis retreats was make your partner feel safe. If they feel safe, they won't have their amygdala triggered. They won't be operating with the lower IQ in the fight or flight model

Brittney Hartley [01:32:50] that would have helped me because I didn't. I didn't do that. Safe. I just like, like jumped into chaos and then, like, disintegrated and died out there. And that, just for Chad, made him retreat into. How can I just, like, keep things ordered enough for the kids? And that included the church.

John Dehlin [01:33:08] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:33:09] I think what's hard with that is. And this is. This is one of the challenges of partnership and let's just say being alive, is that sometimes we don't get to choose how it comes to us and how we ride that, you know. And so, you know, one thing that I was thinking about, and I have questions, you know, as you start to actively rebuild and use energy and, you know, kind of start to create these new systems or within your own family. Right. I want to hear about that. I want to hear about kind of what gave you the. But before we leave the nihilism kind of space, I think another thing that is. I view it as inevitable when you're in relationship to someone over decades is just there are these moments where people are unreachable. Our loved ones, you feel like you cannot reach them. And that's what I was curious about with regard to you during this two years is are you alone in a bubble? Not. And people can't quite penetrate it. They can't quite get to you. You know, and I. I just think we all have these moments. I know I've been there. I know John's been there where I have looked at John and I'm doing everything to flag him, to reach him, to, you know, like, desperate to just get to where he is. And sometimes you just can't. You. Your. Your love is unreachable, you know, for a time. And do you think your. Your partner would. Would talk about you in that way? Or did you have moments with your children? Did you have moments with your. Your husband in that time where they were. You were pen. Like it reached you. You were able to kind of feel something in those times? Or do you feel like it was impenetrable, that it was just so incredibly isolating?

Brittney Hartley [01:35:18] I wouldn't say I had moments where the connection penetrated. Maybe with my oldest son, that would have been the closest that I got, but because I was also like, in an actual state. I mean, it may have been spurred by an idea, but psychologically, I was in a state of dissociation, dissociative depression during that time. During that whole time.

Margi Dehlin [01:35:41] Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [01:35:41] Yeah. And so nothing. I don't think anyone's attention could have gotten through to affect that. But I do think if I could have had someone who would have listened and understood the rationale of the ideas and the thought loops that I would. Was stuck in. In my brain, that I would. That that would have helped. But my husband's not a philosopher. My best friends aren't either. Even I haven't brought up Bill Real at this point, but Bill Real, like in my first Mormon deconstruction, like Polygamy, back in 2011, Bill Real was the first person in my life. I got in contact with him right when he started his podcast because he was doing a lot of stuff and I thought it was interesting. But I emailed him. This was the beginning of our friendship. I emailed him and said, you're not really talking about the female experience at all. And I have another point of view. And we became friends. And he was the first person in my life to say, you're not broken, you're growing. To which I will always be eternally grateful for him for saying. And we kept in touch with each other over the course of his journey and my journey, but he also. And I, I adore this man. And we'll talk about the podcast that we've done together for the past two years.

John Dehlin [01:37:08] What's it called?

Brittney Hartley [01:37:09] The Almost Awakened Podcast. And we did this thing with the Almost Awakened podcast where we don't talk about Mormon Mormonism all at all. We talk about what happens when you're listening to all the Mormon podcasts and you say, okay, what next? We only do what next. And so it's a different side of Bill Real. I love snarky Bill Real. I love like him and RFM doing their thing. But on Almost Awakened, I get a different side of Bill Real. I get a little bit of a mystic side of Bill Real that I really, really enjoy, enjoy talking to. Anyway, so. So Bill Real has been friends with me this whole time, but he also didn't spend as much time. We've been open and talking about this, that he also didn't spend as much time in nihilism as I did. And it was easier for him to move into all the things that he loves doing and how much he's enjoying life post Mormonism. And I just really wasn't. So even though I really had friends, like I really had people in my life, there was something about the thought loops I was stuck in that unless you can meet me here, I can't get out of this. And it's this thought loop that's causing the existential depression, that's causing the dissociation. But unless someone can talk to me about this thought loop that I'm stuck in, none of this other stuff is meeting me at all. Because this is the core. That's right, this, this nihilistic thought loop of I don't know if I can justify being alive here.

Philosophies and Practices That Helped Recovery

Margi Dehlin [01:38:41] Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [01:38:43] So I, I don't think even my well intentioned people could have met me. But the couple times that I met that I either talked with someone or read something or there was someone working in the ideas in that space that actually was helpful. There just wasn't anyone like that in, in, in kind of my circle that was in the same place that I was.

Margi Dehlin [01:39:06] Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. So given that, given this extreme kind of dissociative state for months,

Brittney Hartley [01:39:18] what allowed,

Margi Dehlin [01:39:19] what allowed you to get to this place you've already described where you recreate a Sunday for your. What allowed you then to, let's just say, emerge.

Brittney Hartley [01:39:32] Yeah, there's this thought that helped to break the thought loop that I was in and start to move in a different direction. And then there's lots of tools that we can talk about as I started to move forward. But the person that helped me the most was the Philosopher Albert Camus. It's spelled Albert Camus. Say Camus.

John Dehlin [01:39:58] C A M U S. Yes.

Brittney Hartley [01:40:00] And in. In TikTok even talking about this, I've met now thousands of people whose lives have been saved by this particular philosophical shift where he talks about the shift from nihilism to absurdism, which was really helpful for me. We'll talk about it. And it's this shift into, okay, let's say there is no ultimate truth. Let's say that life is absurd. And there's this quote that Kumu had that I would say in some ways saved my life. And the quote is the only way to deal with it, deal with an unfree world, is to become so incredibly free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. And at the core, this idea. And Albert Camus spent a lot of time in this space. He's the philosopher most known for this, this space, along with Nietzsche, that in his belief, the very first philosophical question is that of suicide. And he writes about this, the first question of philosophy is, do you consent to life as it is or not? And he talks about actual suicide and reasons not to. And he talks about philosophical suicide, which is just grabbing the nearest idea to make you immortal so you don't have to deal with it. And then he talks about a third option which is embracing the absurd. And for me, this was really life saving because it's this idea that, okay, if life is a video game, if we don't know what ultimate reality is, if this is all just some absurd game and we're never going to know how life started and how life's going to end, and the nature of consciousness and the nature of evolution and free will. And so some of these questions that were never going to. Going to know, okay, if this is a video game, can you change the nature of the game so that it's enjoyable to play just at the level of playing it? And that was the thought that changed my life, that, okay, if this is all a matrix, if none of this matters to the universe, if the universe isn't watching and it doesn't care, can I use this radical freedom? And this is what all the, the, all the philosophers in this place, they use different words, but it's the exact same idea of can you use radical freedom of. With all this deconstruction that you've done to now build a life that is worth living at the level of experience? Not because the universe cares, not because of a truth claim, not because of a grand narrative, not because your actions will matter 10,000 years from now. But can you make the ride of life, life so enjoyable that you want to be on that ride just for the sake of the ride?

Margi Dehlin [01:42:43] Yes.

Brittney Hartley [01:42:43] Can you bring back the magic of what it is to be alive? Like, okay, maybe your sense of self is. Is different now, and. And all of those things and deconstruction can still be true. But can you lean into. Okay, this is all rubble. Fine. How can I play in this space? And when you lean into. Into. And this is where the philosophers will converge. When you lean into experience being rather than kind of doing. When you lean into play. How do I play? How did I used to play as a child? How do I like to play? When you lean into. What are my core values? How can I discover them? Because we discover them rather than create them.

Margi Dehlin [01:43:25] Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [01:43:25] How does this meet flesh suit with thousands of years of evolution behind it and all this family history that's in my body? And how does this thing like to play? How does this thing like to connect? What does this thing like to do? What does this thing resonate with? I don't know.

Margi Dehlin [01:43:39] Which is like bringing you back to your body.

Brittney Hartley [01:43:42] It really is. And it's not bringing me back to my body because I don't think I was ever in my body. It's like bringing me to my body for the first time. For me. It's the first time.

Margi Dehlin [01:43:51] Right.

Brittney Hartley [01:43:52] And so it's all about this shift into. Okay, if it's a video game that eventually ends, fine. How can you change, Use this radical deconstruction freedom that you now have to change the nature of this game so much that you can build the level that you want to play just for the fun of it. And that thought, what would that life be? Gave me a path because I'm here in my Mormon world, in my theology school, in my marriage, where we're alone with my kids, where we're still going to church on Sunday, in this life over here. But now I'm starting to think there might be a life over here that's worth living just for the experience of it, for the rare experience that you get to pop your head up in this universe and check things out, and you have a turn, and the people before you took their turn, and now it's your turn. And your turn eventually ends. You make peace with that, and then you get to just play in the reality, the play in the magic of what it is to experience being, which is such a rare right. Like we are. Like, I can get into this place now where, like, even anything simple that I'M doing like right now I'm sitting on a couch, but we are hurtling through space in these meat suits. I'm using these sounds from my mouth. They're resonating in your body through something that we don't understand. And it's, it's magic. Like reality is magical when we get down into the actual experience of it. Ultimate reality more mysterious than like Mormonism and like occult Joseph Smith. All of that stuff is magical. But like what consciousness is and how an eye works and quantum entanglement and what happens to people on mushrooms. Like the magic of reality is far more mysterious than even Mormonism story about reality. And so I started to lean into the, the space. That's what gave me the path out of. I think there may be a life over here. I know that I'm not in it now where life could be worth living at the level of experience. And then that gives me the path. Direction, A direction. And so. Okay, so that's, that's why I think that nihilism, even though it can be a hard place, it can also be the ultimate rock bottom place that forces the level of honesty for you to build the most authentic intentional life that you can create. And that is a catalyst for that life. And so what I did, okay, I need a community. I created a post Mormon community in Boise. We've been going for six years. We've had the Givens come talk. We had Patrick Mason last week. We've had Jackson Washburn. John came up, up a year or two ago. Natasha's come up and it's a thriving. It's where now all of my best friends are. And I wanted to create a community that was like the Mormon ward that I've always wanted to be in. And I intentionally did the work to. With another couple that started this journey with me to create a community where I could be real and honest and not have to mask like you do at church. And that community, when my daughter fell out of a window last year, did all the things they brought the casseroles and they came over and they cleaned my house. And it was. I created a truly Mormon ward that I always wanted to be a part of and I'm very proud of it. And then I left theology school, even though I loved that world because I. That academic world, because I had to be honest that I didn't believe in this God anymore. And I said, okay, what would I want to do? What would be a life and a job that I could do? Because here I am, I have this degree in Religion, I'm totally deconstructed of everything. What do I do with that? And it's like I want some kind of job where I can help people find healthy spiritual, healthy spirituality, whatever that looks like for them, and do it from a place where I can even be open about my atheism. I don't even know if there's such thing as an atheist spiritual director. I don't know if a single person will resonate with any of the messages that I have. But the blessing of nihilism and facing your existential fears is that I don't care anymore if I'm making up a title or if people won't understand or if people call me crazy. Because I have this one life. And I want to build a life that's worth experiencing. And I know for me that means deep conversation about deep things. Not because I'm seeking truth anymore as a truth seeker, as my identity, but because this is how I play. Like, this is how I connect. This is meaningful to me, this conversation. If there was a comet that was going to hit the earth, I would just keep wanting to have this conversation just because I'm enjoying the hell of this conversation. So I recreated my community. My marriage died because I started to be honest, more honest, and was willing to risk the marriage in order to be more authentic and open in my marriage. The marriage died, but we were able to rebuild now a second marriage. I rebuilt kind of the spiritual, you know, the prayer and the what church looks like and all of that for my children and our rituals. And I rebuilt friendships where I started to be now even more authentic and show even more of myself so that I could take the risk to find the people that I could have a deep relationship with. And about a year ago found these two phenomenal women who are probably listening, who I have talked about all of this with them and just I can be totally naked emotionally and psychologically and philosophically, just totally naked in all the ways and be seen and held and loved. And it's been such a blessing in my life to leave just my isolated headspace that I've been in in so many years and truly have deep, intimate friendships. So once I started doing this work of what would an authentic life worth living at the level of experience look like? I look back now and I rebuilt my marriage and I rebuilt my family culture and I rebuilt my community and I rebuilt my job into something that I didn't even know existed. But I'm resonating with people and now I have this, this career as an Atheist spiritual director, even though I didn't know it was a thing, and really rebuilt my more moral code. I rebuilt kind of my sense of self. I rebuilt kind of how I play and how I approach life to the point where I used to wake up and want to die and now I wake up and I'm so excited for the projects that I have that I have intentionally chosen and curated because they're things that, that it doesn't matter if this all will end and the game gets unplugged because I so enjoy working on this project or I so enjoy this people, or I so enjoy. Last weekend, you know, we hosted a Q and A with Patrick Mason. I, I still love Conversation is still where I play. And so now, because I've read a lot in this space, I have gathered tools, whether it be secular spirituality, which is how to get all the tools of spirituality without having to believe something, whether it be shifting from absurdism to nihilism, or shifting into play, or using mushrooms as a way to kind of open the door to some of these spaces or, you know, philosophical places that you can get stuck in. How to make sense of free will, how to make sense, make sense. All of that are tools that I've gathered into. How do you go from rock bottom to an authentic life worth living? And now that's the work that I do. But it was that one thought that disrupted my mental, philosophical, existential looping that I was stuck in. That said, is there a way to do life differently where it would be a ride worth taking just for the ride? And I was not in that life. Like I was in a marriage where I was alone. I was showing up at church every other week. I was in theology school. Like I was masking a thousand different ways. That wasn't the authentic life. I wasn't in it. But the rock bottomness gives you the courage to push through things that I might not have before to create the life that would be worth living, that I feel like I've created now.

Rebuilding Spirituality, Morality, and Community

John Dehlin [01:53:01] So I want to dive into, maybe I call it filling the holes, but spirituality, morality, community, I want to talk about several of those a little bit more in depth. Margi, you had a thing first?

Margi Dehlin [01:53:13] Yeah, I just had a question with regard to, you know, if you were going to talk about this time, like this experience of nihilism. And let's just say what it gave you toward this creation now of your ongoing relationship with experience as opposed to, like, what are some of the things that honestly, because I think we like to kind of gloss over the pain, it's like, made it out of that and now we're gonna. But I think just like being there for experiences of death, being there for, you know, confronting sometimes our deepest fears. Like, you did wrestle with, like, what do you feel like it gave you in this new you?

Brittney Hartley [01:54:20] Yeah. So we were talking about this a little bit before we came on about how these fears at first glance are enemies. Death, meaninglessness, isolation, fear of freedom, nihilism, losing sense of self. All of these at first glance, they're. They're scary enemies. And there's this great quote from Nietzsche that says that you eventually can learn to throw a rose into the abyss to thank the monsters who didn't succeed in swallowing you whole. And what he means by that is that even though there are scary subconscious monsters that we literally create religions to deal with so that we can handle these psychologically unhinging places, when I learn to look at it more directly, these enemies had gifts. When you face death directly, we have evidence from this, from terror management theory that, that looking at death is unsettling and it's hard. But there are gifts. People who've actually who face their mortality, they're more present, they're more willing to take risks into their authenticity. They're more willing to say, hey, I love you. Just, just for that, they're. They're more willing to just be so sucked into the present moment and the preciousness of it that it changes them. And so each of these monsters, even though some of them damn near killed me, had gifts that once you learn how to shift and process in these spaces and once I got some tools for how to think and experience life differently than what I had been doing before, these. These monsters become friends. They have gifts. And so there. It's not like. Like you say, it's not like I left. I process these hard feelings around death and meaninglessness, and now I'm free. It's like, no, these, these are ever constant presences in my life. But rather than being scary and completely debilitating, they have reminders. Hey, this moment is so precious. Hey, how can we play in this? How can I connect in this? What's my body doing? How can I, you know? And. And that's the gift of really rock bottom. And why rock bottom is such a sacred place is because it's a place of such deep honesty that has so many gifts for presence and learning how to play in life in a way that's. That's joyful in a way that's intentional. And so now, even though I still have to get up and like put on clothes and like play human, which is like absurd. Like it wouldn't matter to me if like our clothes were different and, and all of that. But I now do it intentionally of I'm going to put on these human shoes because that's what humans do. Because then I'm going to walk over here and I'm going to meet with John and Margi and we're going to have this conversation. It's going to be great. And I'm going to enjoy that so much. So now, even though I still find myself playing in the Matrix, it's not because I have to, it's not because I'm stuck there, it's not because I'm doing dissociative. It's 100% intentional. I'm intentionally doing this in order to get at the aspects of life that I enjoy that are worth experiencing. And will I play some of the little human games to get there? Yes. But I'm doing it intentionally and mindfully and not in a place of like, dissociation where I'm doing it because I have to, because I don't have to. You don't have to do anything?

Margi Dehlin [01:57:50] Yep. You're conscious of it?

Brittney Hartley [01:57:51] Yes, I'm much more conscious, I'm much more present, I'm much more intentional, I'm much more playful and much more joyful and much more connective. And these are all gifts from nihilism that I don't think I could have gotten at this level if I wasn't. Like, until you lose everything, can you really risk everything to create that life? And so for me, losing everything is the catalyst for, okay, you've lost everything. Now you can take big risks into what a life worth living looks like. And that recon and that reconstruction journey, which is totally authentic and unique to each person, which is why I can give someone tools, I could give someone language, I can give someone resources, but what their life looks like, I cannot do at all. Like, I can't. It's not, it's not a. Like if I were to ever write a book, it wouldn't be a 12 step path to where you are in nihilism, to your authentic life. Because I have have no idea in another person what that looks like. Really, only you do. And so I can only work with tools and language and shifts. But what that looks like for each person is a very individual journey that I can only honor and hold space for and hold hands with someone. But I'm never leading someone down any particular path.

Margi Dehlin [01:59:12] Yes. It reminds me almost of parenting, where it's like, it's your path to have. It's your journey. Journey to have. Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [01:59:21] And you're just witnessing it. You're there to support it.

Margi Dehlin [01:59:24] That's right.

Brittney Hartley [01:59:24] But I don't know what that looks like for another person. I can just only talk about. I can meet people here so they don't feel like they're the only person who's in, you know, a place of nihilism. And I can offer some tools, but that. That point of bravery of. Of taking the risks to your authentic life is. Is an internal journey that I. That I just witness.

John Dehlin [01:59:49] Okay, well, let's. If it's okay. And I'll just say that the viewers and listeners are loving everything you're sharing so far, Brittney. So thank you so much. And, Margi, your participation as well. Maybe let's. If you want, let's spend our last hours so maybe just trying to give. Put a little bit of meat on a few bones.

Brittney Hartley [02:00:09] Sure.

John Dehlin [02:00:10] Not to tell people where to go, but to open people's minds up to the language and to the possibilities that some of these holes that I like to call them can open up to. To help people feel, let's just say, motivated or hopeful, that these holes have potential fills.

Brittney Hartley [02:00:31] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:00:31] Does that make sense?

Brittney Hartley [02:00:32] Yeah.

Reconstructing Meaning and Purpose After Mormonism

John Dehlin [02:00:33] Okay. So normally I would start with God. Should we start there, like. But what I really think is that people want meaning. They want to know how life is meaningful and what their purpose. Meaning and purpose maybe are even more important than whether or not there's God. But they think of it as God. Right.

Brittney Hartley [02:00:57] Because God is holding justice. God is holding a lot of those things. So for meaning and purpose, it's really the shift into the creation, the creation of meaning and the creation of purpose. And there's lots of voices in this space you can do, you know, Viktor Frankl. And this is not something that you have to have. Privilege always helps. Always. But some people will say, yeah, well, I would love to build a life that's more meaningful, but you have to have money to do that. I can't even afford to live. And my pushback to that is that, you know, Victor Frankl and some of these other writers who have been in worse situations than you're in. Right. We're talking about concentration camp, trying to find meaning and purpose. Because he's noticing that people will, if they don't have some kind of created meaning and purpose in a concentration camp, you get something called give up itis, and you literally lay down and die. Because you don't have enough meaning to match the level of suffering that you are experiencing in your life. And that is why we do have to have meaning and purpose. Because you're going to suffer in life and if you don't have something to meet that, then you're going to start to think that life's not worth living. So for meaning and purpose, it's really about creating it intentionally rather than having it be given to you. So for me, what I do with clients is rather than start with God or start with truth claims, I really start with why do you need to know? Because it's something that I think we can get around and we can work around instead of. And a lot of Mormons do this, myself included, where we have this thing in Mormonism where this is the truth, therefore this is the way to live your life. And so when Mormonism crumbles, we're still looking for what is the truth. So I can know how to pattern my life. And so people will jump headfirst into near death experience sciences and they'll jump headfirst into kind of occult sciences or God or other religions. And it's really the brain looking for some way to get some kind of truth so that there's a path, so that there's a plan. And so what I find to be more helpful, and it's not that I know what happens after we die and I'll dive into all of that kind of near death experience science, but what I find is if you do that right after your faith deconstruction, you're clinging. It's not a place of freedom, it's not a place of playing. You're clinging to an idea because you need it. And so what I tend to do with people is rather than find some kind of truth out there that you can cling to, let's make peace with uncertainty first. What are your biggest fears? Why don't you want to lose God? Why do you want to believe in God? Why do you feel like you need to believe in an afterlife? Because underneath that question, and I'm listening when I'm working with a client, underneath those questions, there's a fear. And if we can name your fear and face your fear directly, then you get some of those benefits that we talked about, then we can go back and see if there's a religion that makes sense to you. Because you're not doing it from a clinging place place, you're doing it from a place of openness where if it turns out to be wrong, you don't have another faith crisis because your identity isn't in this. So I don't do anything with clients of like, let's find a belief system that resonates with you right now. I don't want to do that. First, let's take all of that out of the equation and sit with uncertainty and sit with your fears and face that and build up a level of meaning from the ground up that meets that. Then we can go play with gods and religions and the occult world and horoscopes and near death experiences and past live regressions and you can explore all

John Dehlin [02:04:55] of those things and foot zoning and energy work. Oh my gosh, like essential oils.

Brittney Hartley [02:04:59] The spiritual world is, is so like there's so much right. And it's, and it's really overwhelming. So my encouragement is, can we take a pause on all of that so that we're not clinging to those things and deal with your fear first and deal with creating meaning from the ground up first. Then we can go and play in some of those places because then you'll be able to do it in a place where you're not going to have another faith crisis because you're just jumping on the next idea that helps you not face your fears. So I very much, I mean, this is hero's journey stuff is that you don't get to the next phase of the journey till you go to your deepest, darkest cave. And so for me, I don't want to skip deepest darkest cave. That's the most important part of the hero journey.

Margi Dehlin [02:05:46] It's kind of like go to the root.

Brittney Hartley [02:05:48] I want to go to the root. So my digging with clients is let's get to the root of the fear. Let's face it, let's give a name for it. Let's, let's sit with it, let's get uncomfortable with it, let it shift us, let it change us. And then let's try to build your meaning and purpose from the ground up. How does your body like to play? How did you used to play as a kid? How do you like to experience what things get you excited, what things help you to suffer less? And once we get into those questions, we can start to make some movement into building meaning and purpose from the ground up, regardless of whatever is going on with ultimate reality. Because I think that's the wrong place to start of when we look back at human history. You know, we start with what our story is about. Ultimate reality. And then we build a life. And then it turns out every time we've done this, we've been wrong. Every time in human history, we've come up with the grand story of what the universe is. We're always wrong. So for me, can we have the intellectual humility to say, maybe we're bad at that game? Is there another way we can access the good life without having to play the truth claim game? Because I've been a Mormon and I've been hurt by that game, and I don't want to play that game anymore. And I think we can bypass that game and still get to the good life anyway.

Margi Dehlin [02:07:08] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:07:09] Yeah. Noah. Well, both Eckhart Tolle with his book the Power of Now, and in newer books the Power of Now and A New Earth were influential for me. But also Noah Rashetta's secular Buddhism podcast. Like what? People love the certainty of Mormonism.

Margi Dehlin [02:07:26] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:07:27] And what I had to understand, and Noah helped me understand this, is that certainty was always an illusion.

Brittney Hartley [02:07:34] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:07:35] We weren't sure. No, we just.

Brittney Hartley [02:07:37] It was just nice to feel that way.

John Dehlin [02:07:39] And it wasn't solid. It just felt solid. Solid.

Margi Dehlin [02:07:42] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:07:42] But, but, but giving up trying to tell someone in. In their dark night of the soul. Hey, I got a good swap for you. You had. You knew you were the one true church, God's chosen people. You knew exactly where you were going. And I'm going to swap that for groundlessness and total. Yeah, you don't know anything anymore. That's a hard sell, right?

Brittney Hartley [02:08:05] Yeah, it's a hard shift, I think, especially for Mormons, because we just are such doers and we love our surety of things and love the feeling of being sure we know what's going on. And so that uncertainty piece can be especially hard. But I think when we face it, it really changes us, and it allows us to create a foundation that's not centered in a story about ultimate reality. Because as humans, we are bad at that game. So maybe we can try another way to build the good life. And this is where I bring in a lot of tools of secular spirituality, because at the time, during my deepest kind of darkest phase, I couldn't touch spirituality because it all just felt so elusive and illusory, like you're saying, John, where everything's just an illusion. To try to escape this psychological place that I'm in, I'm like, oh, now I realize why break brains work so hard to not be here, because I am not functioning. Like, this is not healthy. This is not okay. I know now why my brain wanted to stay in black and white world, because this is what it knows is out there in the Chaos. So that's where secular spirituality became the only tool that could reach me in that place. Because like you said, John, there's so much in this world of spirituality, and. And it's so overwhelming. After you come out of Mormonism, you know, you got past life people, and you've got the mushroom people, and you've got the horoscope people. And then you get people who, the day after they leave mormonism, they see 11:11 on a clock, and they're sure that the universe is telling them that they're on the right path, and that has even less science behind it than Mormonism did. And it's all so overwhelming. And so for me, secular spirituality became the tool to separate the woo from the helpful tool, because we actually have science to show that rituals psychologically help us to process emotion, they help us to mark values, they help us on so many things, even when you know that the ritual is made up. And. And so I started to really look at the science of spirituality. What is the science of rituals? What is the science of awe? What is the science of transcendence? What is the science of community? What does it do to our brain when we sing together? What is the science of marking values and rituals like rites of passage or saying a prayer before a meal? And once I had kind of a sense of the science, the tool that lied underneath all the stories and all the woo, that's when I could step back into the world of spirituality and say, okay, this is. Is the actual tool. We don't need the truth claim to get the tool. We can just take the tool. And so, along with kind of the philosophical nihilism journey and getting tools in that space, I was also getting a ton of tools in just secular spirituality of how can we separate the tool that's helpful for people that lies underneath all of the religious stories that have been vessels for the tools? And that gave me even more tools for rebuilding. But I couldn't have done it without that science piece, because that's the only way. And Margi and I were talking about this before. I have such an allergy now as an ex Mormon, to truth claims, especially big ones, that I needed a way to access those spiritual tools, which there are so many for building the good life. There's so much in. In the history of religion that are helpful tools, but there's a lot of just baggage that gets around those tools, and then you have triggers to the baggage around the tool, and then you're stuck without a tool. And so for me, kind of science driven Spirituality was such an important piece of this journey because it's my access back to all the spiritual, all the spirituality tools on states of consciousness that are less neurotic and make life more enjoyable. There's a lot of tools for that in spirituality that are helpful, but I could only access that through, like, show me the data that felt safe enough for me. Otherwise it just felt like the spirituality world was just. There was just so much woo that I just couldn't. I couldn't have any patience for it in where I was. So the combination of, of philosophical tools and getting back into your body and this honesty about a life at the level of experience and being, there's a lot of mysticism in that place combined with secular spirituality has been, I think, the most helpful combination for how to recover from some of those, especially dark nights of the soul where the ex Mormon community just wasn't able to reach me there. Or going out and getting sunshine wasn't enough for me there, or trying another religion, I would have not resonated with it at all because my body just can't feel like it's going to be deceived again. And I was just stuck there. So the combination of those things with secular spirituality has been for me the most powerful tool of building the good life without requiring any metaphysics or truth claims at all. Because I'm in a place where I don't know if I'll ever know the questions that I set out and asked when I was 17, kicked out of my home, wanting to learn what is so that I could do my life right. Those questions I may not, I probably will not have an answer to in my lifetime. So how can I build the good life anyway to make this ride as enjoyable as I can for as long as it lasts?

Margi Dehlin [02:13:53] Yeah. So, so beautiful. I'm curious if you would mind just sharing quickly just a couple of examples of tools that come to mind right now that actually can parse apart where you're taking out the truth claim or like, let's say a harmful narrative or does anything come to mind that. That way just kind of right now? Yeah, that's an example of what you're saying.

Practical Tools for the Deconstruction Journey

Brittney Hartley [02:14:21] So rituals is often a good place to start with clients. Scientifically, it's one of the best places to give you some psychological safety as you're in this place of chaos is to do a ritual. And there's this study that showed that, you know, you take two groups of people, you tell both groups of people that you're going to win, you're going to win $200, and they actually give the money to someone, they leave, and you have to write about how disappointed you are. And then with one group, they checked in various times of the day, and they were still kind of grumpy about it, that they didn't get to what they would have spent the money on and all of that, they kind of stayed in that emotion. And then the other group that did the ritual, they said, okay, write out your feelings on a piece of paper, put some salt on it, crumple it up, throw it over your shoulder. Even knowing that the ritual was made up, you check in with these people. An hour later, they've forgotten about it, they're on with their day, they're doing whatever. And so we have scientific evidence that shows when you get your body involved with something and you do a ritual, it does a ton of things for you, physiologically, nervous system, psychologically. If there's a way that you can do a personal ritual, for example, to show up for yourself every morning, to give yourself a container, give yourself a kinkin, give yourself a container for the experience that you're in. Can do so much psychologically to ground you while you're in chaos. Or like you were talking about John, the John that never got to be doing a ritual and writing that out and burning it and having a funeral for the John that never got to live is something that I've done with many clients, because let's do a ritual and mourn this and process this, and it actually gets it out of their body, and they're able to move on with less anger or grief. So there's so much science that we have about something like rituals, even for passage of time, and a young man becoming. Or a child becoming a young man. And once I kind of got into the study of. There's some science of rituals that religions are sitting on top of that they're claiming the ritual that they're doing. You know, the temple ceremony is the thing, but it's just the vessel that's carrying the tool. Now I can say, okay, I can build my own personal ritual in the morning. What would that look like? What are my values that I want to remind myself of? Okay, now I have a personal ritual, and now I have a prayer ritual for my family, and now I have a Sunday ritual for my family. And when my. My son, I wanted him to have mentors other than his parents. So he got into karate. So we went all into karate. And he had a black belt ceremony when he was 12. And I invited all of the Mormon friends and family, because this was his priesthood ceremony, this was his rite of practice or his rite of passage. And so once I got into the science of rituals and really understood the science, now I can build all these tools into my life so I get all the benefits of being in a religion. But rather than the liturgical calendar and the rituals being given to me and you have to believe these things and you have to pay 10% and you have to blah, blah, blah, blah, I don't have to do any of that baggage. I'm just accessing the tool directly and building my life from the ground up. Up. So I did that with rituals, I did that with community. I did with that with states of awe and transcendence. We have science on states of awe. You can take a group of people and move them through a guided meditation, like at Yosemite national park, and you ask them to draw themselves on a piece of paper, and they'll draw themselves very small because they have a moment of awe where they feel connected to something bigger than themselves. It may not be God, it's just. Just a moment when you're out of your neurotic brain. But if you were to ask someone on the street to draw themselves, we draw, you know, ourselves really big on a piece of paper because we're in our neurotic brain. Okay, I'm getting a sense of the benefits of states of awe and transcendence as states of consciousness. How can I access those without truth claims? How can I access those states more directly? How do I feel on transcendence? And how can I schedule that regularly into my life, like Mormonism used to do for me? But how can I do it now on my own? And so I. I look at all the aspects of spirituality. Some of it may be like, I think it's beneficial to be getting messages, like having sermons on Sunday and general conference. I want to have mentors in my ear, but I want to choose my prophets. I want to choose my prophetic voices. So how can I. So I just look at all of what religions do because they're lying on top of all of these tools. I look at the science, and then I say, how can I implement that into my life in a way that's authentic? And then it's almost. It's essentially building your own religion. I don't really like to say that because it sounds superstitious or metaphysical, but it's really taking all these tools, building it into your life in a way that's helpful, but it's all authentic and it's all chosen, which that consent piece is really important rather than someone giving it to you and saying, you know, it's like, it's hard now in the world of spirituality because it feels like you have three choices. It feels like you either go to organized religion and you get some of the tools, but that comes with baggage and trauma and toxicity, or you go into the world of kind of New age spirituality, which is a lot of intuition. But then there's also, with no checks to intuition, you can also get lost in there in that space. It can become just as superstitious and just as prosperity gospel as religion without any kind of checks or mentors. And then there's the space of just like cold deterministic atheism, where spirituality is stupid. And those tend to be like the three loudest camps of options for spirituality. And so what I really try to do with no nonsense spirituality is what are the tools that religion has claimed a monopoly on and how can we get those tools in your life? What are the tools of intuition from the occult world? And how can we access that in a safe way that's not spiritual bypassing? And then what are the tools of science that can ground us, that can keep us kind of grounded and safe in this world of spirituality, kind of that world of, of, of, of atheism and logic and all of that? Can we take the benefits of those three worlds without getting sucked into the problems of any one particular stance on its own? And so for me, no nonsense spirituality is all about how can we get you balanced between order and chaos, because that's where we do the best psychologically. How can we build your most authentic life from the ground up? And how can we use all of the tools from the world of spirituality in a way that's science driven and safe and helpful and doesn't require you ever to believe something that you can't believe? And that's been my approach to my own personal spiritual path. And it's not the only spiritual path for people. I talk with all kinds of people who have found their own way and their own way to make balance out of order and chaos. The difference between the most deconstructed Christian and the most spiritual atheist is just a hair.

John Dehlin [02:21:49] I agree.

Brittney Hartley [02:21:50] It's an approach. They're not that different.

John Dehlin [02:21:52] It's like different adjectives and nouns.

Brittney Hartley [02:21:54] I'm not advocating this like you said, John, at the beginning, I'm not advocating this as the only way. But for someone who was damaged from Mormonism, from. For someone who spent so much time in some of these deep, dark places, secular spirituality has been the safe, safest way for me to access all those tools that are good for building the good life.

John Dehlin [02:22:14] I really like what NO always says in secular Buddhism. Don't, don't study Buddhism to become a Buddhist. Study Buddhism to become a better whatever you are. Yeah, I, I agree with you that the meaningful difference between a thoughtful secular person and a thoughtful religious person is almost none. Whether you call it nature or like

Brittney Hartley [02:22:35] the most deconstructed Christian has deconstructed so much that their concept of God is so, you know, it's not the classic theistic God who's like, you're gonna go to hell. There's so much beauty in. I can still resonate now with Richard Rohr and Brian McLaren and some of these other voices, because the difference between someone like me who built it from the ground up with secular spirituality, but has all of the elements, elements there, and someone who just tweaked those elements from their religion to make it authentic, it's like coming to the balance between order and chaos. I came more from chaos. And if you're kind of a deconstructed religious person, maybe you come that way from the side of order, but you end up in the same place, which is a healthier place in the middle, where you're not in fundamentalism, which is dangerous, but you're also not in chaos, which is dangerous, is you have a place between order and chaos that you, that is safe for you, where you're, you're building that authentic life. So, so I don't, I don't say that it's the only way. I don't say that it's the only path. It's just the one that resonated with me. And it's resonating, I think, most with those who had such significant religious trauma that they're so skeptical of any of this that it has to feel super safe and super science driven to even get aboard, even trying something like a ritual. So for me, it's resonating more with people who have really significant religious trauma and also people who are kind of deep thinkers who, who, you know, you're never going to find that little truth nugget that's stable enough to build a life on, because you're always going to be skeptical of it. Is there another way that we can, can build your life anyway, regardless of what's going on with ultimate reality? So those two groups tend to resonate most, I think, with secular spirituality. But I, I still, I still have my Sufi teacher. I still have spiritual mentors that are more on the religious side. I still talk with people who. Or have clients where we're just trying to make healthy, healthier spirituality wherever they are, in whatever religion that they're in. This was just my path back to a place that was good and authentic and worth living based on kind of where I was before that. I just want to be more available to people who, especially with Mormonism, have been. Have such an allergy to truth claims that they feel like they don't have any tools at all because that's not a safe place to be. Yeah, what I really.

Margi Dehlin [02:25:20] I'm connecting so much with what you're saying right now, what you're expressing. And I was thinking about something that has been really powerful about what you're explaining with regard to what it means to create rituals that really resonate with. With your life now. And there can be some exploration there. Like, there can be a lot of, you know, kind of trying out. Maybe you don't know, maybe you're not sure what things. What the content of those rituals maybe will be or who your mentors will be. So I love the. But what I love about it is that you're engaged with the process of it and you're empowered. You are the chooser of the content. And I was really reflecting on, you know, our own process after John had told me initially that he no longer, you know, felt like the church was what it kind of said it was. And one of the first places that I turned was ritual. One of the first places I started implementing things in our home or was in this place of ritual. How we start our days as individuals, how we start our days with our children, how we end our days. Like, I really kind of thought through what would feel grounding, what would feel

Brittney Hartley [02:26:49] comforting and just intuitively like, you started there.

Margi Dehlin [02:26:53] Yeah, like, I just ended up. But you're. This. This point that I think is so different from where we've been, and I think people who are in belief spaces can do this too, though, is that it changes to reflect us, our rituals, John and my. Our rituals now are not the same as. Not individually, not as a family unit, not as. And there's such power in that. And I think sometimes that's not something we come by in religion. We take what we're given, we use it, sit in this very static environment, no matter what we experience around it. And I just think the whole process of, like you say, using tools, finding mentors who we listen to, who we learn from, what makes Us feel less alone. Rituals, all these things that I think what I love most about it is that sense of it. It changes, it moves, it's fluid. It goes with us, as opposed to this sort of static, dead thing that we're just trying to make ourselves fit with. Does that make sense?

Brittney Hartley [02:28:02] Yeah. And this is why Nietzsche was. He was pessimistic that people would be able to do this. So he saw nihilism coming, and he predicted rather accurately that when God died that we would turn to political gods to fill in the gap and that there would be political demagogues and political figures that in a sense, acted like they were God. And when you look at kind of the history of the 20th century, you know, he wasn't far off. And so he was predicting that as people realize how much of religion was an illusion of control and as people confront nihilism here, he was very pessimistic that people. That the whole human race would be able to do the process of intentionally building your life from the ground up because it is easier to show up at a church on Sunday and have. The liturgical calendar is done for you. The rituals are done for you. The opportunities for reflection are done for you. The holidays are done for you. The what to do with your life is done for you. The parenting moral education is done for you. There's a cost. Cost to that, of course, and it's a high cost. But in some ways it's easier because it's not. You don't have to do that in intentional wrestling work of building your life from the ground up. And so he was pessimistic that. That people would be able to do this on a grand scale. But he was optimistic that individuals could do this. Individuals could break away and realize the illusion and create. He calls it the Ubermensch or the Overman, something more than a man, where you are living according to your own moral code and leaning into the creative expressions of whatever you are and the enjoyment of expressing it. And so he saw people individually do it. I don't know if ever collectively there'd be a kind of new Earth like, you know, Eckhart totally hopes for because our capacity as human brains are so wired for cults, and it's so much easier to get sucked into someone saying, I know the realities of the universe and I know the path for you. Here it is. That's so enticing based on all the work that you have to do to build your life from the ground up. But my encouragement for people is that. That I've had All kinds of lives. At this point, I've lived what feels like many lives. And the life that you choose, the life that you create, the life that. That is so uniquely you that no one else could live it except for you, is a life so worth that journey, is a life so worth the dark nights of the soul that I've gone through in the isolation and everything. And so to me, even though it may be a harder path, and I do think that nihilism, the people who face that place are people who are so brave because it's the ultimate form of sobriety. Because it feels like everybody else is on the opiate of the masses. They're on some kind of opiate so that they don't have to feel these realities. They don't have to feel uncertainty. They don't have to feel like. I know when my family goes to a funeral, they're taking a little pill so that they don't have to feel this whole thing. And when I go or I see a documentary of a kid being abused and then killed, that was that kid's life. I don't have a drug for that. I just sit with that and I have to feel it, and I'll be sick over it for days. And it's. It's. It's a form of sobriety, this way of life that's hard. And in some ways, you know, it can be easier to have life given to you, but the life that's given to you is never going to be as worth living as the life that you create from the ground up.

John Dehlin [02:32:02] I remember as a progressive Mormon teaching elders quorum, and I was trying to, you know, this is pre Essays, Gospel topics essays. So I'm trying to introduce the idea of a seer stone in a hat.

Brittney Hartley [02:32:13] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:32:13] Or of, you know, the difference between doctrine and policy as it relates to the priesthood, ban on black people or polygamy. Just introducing polygamy. And, you know, after a year of sort of these lessons, kind of probing the boundaries of their willingness to go a little deeper, one dude just raised his hand and he said, my life's super hard. I just want someone to tell me what to do, to tell me what to believe. I don't want all the extra effort, and I don't want to do the effort of even figuring out what's right. Right for me. My life is so stressful and hard. I just want someone to tell me what to do. And that was. That reminded me that one of the main things we have to shed is the idea that there's one answer for everyone. And even though, you know, there's this idea that the unexamined life is worth living, I think there's a large percentage of people that literally this path that we're talking about probably isn't for them and they need to be exactly where they are. And maybe they'll never pursue a different phase. And I don't even want to number the phases as having hierarchical levels of a higher phase. I do think that there's some people, either their brains or their DNA or their conditioning or their life experience or the complexity of whatever they're facing makes it so they're not even going to benefit from anything we're saying today. Is that possible?

Brittney Hartley [02:33:40] Yeah, absolutely. There's this little cute bit from Neil Brennan, who's an atheist, who says in his latest kind of comedy hour that atheism is the ultimate form of white privilege because someone comes up to you and says, hey, can I offer you an afterlife? And the white person goes, how good? How much better could it get? No, thanks. I'll just, you know, eat my supplements. Life is great. Right? And so I. I do actually think now, especially after going through the level of psychological unhinging, like I was unhinged, like I was not psychologically okay. And realizing that I do think sometimes atheism is a privilege because it means that you had enough resources in your life to be able to break away from a church. And I think it's, for example, unethical for me as a white atheist educated person to go into the deep black south where there is a history and theology of restorative justice, that Jesus will come and set this right that kept this people alive during Jim Crow and slavery. Is it unethical to me to walk into that space and say, this is all an illusion or this isn't true? So in some ways, I do think my ability to go to the levels of chaos that I've been able to go to is not because I'm better than anyone or smarter than anyone. A lot of it is a lot of privilege that I had a husband who always had the bills paid through all of this, who was stable as a rock, that

John Dehlin [02:35:21] didn't want to reject you. So many people I deal with divorce their spouse.

Brittney Hartley [02:35:26] Yeah, didn't divorce me. Didn't divorce me. Like, like things were not great, but, like, loyalty is a very high core value of his. But even my core value of, like, truth seeking. What if, like, one of my husband's core values is loyalty? If you have a core value of loyalty, your Faith journey is going to be totally different than mine where I have an identity of a, of a, of a truth seeker. So I, I want to ask the question, but if you go to church not to find out what's true, which our brain was doing that in Sunday school. If someone's going to Sunday school because this is what feels safe or this is loyalty or these are my people or this feels you whatever they're getting from. I do think that sometimes atheism can be a privilege and that the level of psychological chaos I was able to go to was because my childhood was ordered. I didn't have, I wasn't, I wasn't raped, I didn't have trauma. And so for the people who, you know, being unsafe is a, reminds them of their trauma from childhood. Well, it's not safe for me to say let's go jump out into this world of chaos with all my privilege of a good childhood when for someone else those feelings of uncertainty and unhinging are actually unsafe. And to John's point, I have a brother who, you know, he went the drug route and, and had a come to Jesus moment and is now an active member of the church. For him to lose his faith or to go through something like I did would be a threat to his sobriety and a threat to his life. And so I don't want him to go down my path. I think it may kill him. We have evidence that the people who tend towards fundamentalism have a psychologically higher need for, for structure and closure. And for addicts, they have a psychologically higher need for closure. So if someone found Jesus as part of their coming out of rock bottom as an addict, a faith crisis could actually kill them. It could be bad for them. And so for all of those reasons, and there's a myriad of reasons I don't, I'm not a missionary for my path because it's the only way to build a good life. I, I'm, I talk. This is such a mystic place because it's an experience based place that I can hang out with all the Christian mystics. I still hang out with Sufi mystics and I've benefited so much from my Sufi mystic training. I'm actually ordained as a Sufi, I'm in an order of Sufism and I talk with all different kinds of religious pasts and I want, I still work with Mormonism and had that conversation last weekend with Patrick May because I want Mormonism to be better for the people who are in it. And I don't think that my path to the good life is the only path because I think in some ways it was a privileged path. I was able to go to those levels because I had some privilege to go there. And we know from Maslow's hierarchy that if you don't get that safety, security, order, level, that your ability to have an ego death later on and experience more freedom, that that's. You can't do that until you have that stuff. You can't have an ego death, an identity death, and experience the freedom after that if you've never built your ego or identity. So I absolutely believe that there are parts of my path that were privileged that I can't push on other people who don't have the same privilege. I just want this path and resource and conversation more accessible for the people who keep deconstructing to the point that the tools in ex Mormon communities isn't enough for where they're stuck at. Exactly.

Margi Dehlin [02:39:11] And thank you for bringing up the privilege piece as well as this piece of like, this isn't about you trying to get people on board or to get people. It's more a resource for people who find themselves, for whatever reason, where in a similar place to where you were

Brittney Hartley [02:39:33] in a dark place.

Margi Dehlin [02:39:34] Yeah.

Morality, Sexuality, and Ethics Beyond Mormonism

John Dehlin [02:39:36] Let's touch a little bit on this idea of morality in Mormonism. Morality isn't like in the Mormonism that I absorbed. It was less about, do you help the poor? Do you treat all genders with respect? It's more like, do you drink alcohol? Do you do drugs? Do you have premarital sex?

Brittney Hartley [02:39:56] Mm.

John Dehlin [02:39:56] It's not even about, like consensual, healthy sex. It's just about like, do you do it or not? If you're not married to the person you're doing it with, there's this. And let's just start from the standpoint that it's still an open question as to whether any amount of alcohol is healthy. Drugs are still illegal. And you know, and at the same time, I think any a living adult these days sort of believes that, like, there's probably some healthy level of alcohol use and some, you know, a lot of people into psychedelics these days are saying psychedelics aren't only not always harmful, they can actually transform your life in a good way. And then there's always a group of people that just sort of question traditional sexual mores, saying that there's something beyond just strict monogamy for some, that there's kind of this idea of ethical non monogamy which can take lots of different forms. But what I see is many people Transitioning out of high demand religions. They've been, their behavior's been super controlled, their identity has been shaped by I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't do drugs, I'm monogamous, what with my spouse. And so number one, they're reeling. Number two, they're rebelling against something that felt hurtful. Three, they, they didn't get the normal developmental experiences that many people do. And sometimes they're trying to numb themselves and then sometimes they're just doing honest exploration but at a really intense destabilized time. And, and, and while many find healthy relationships with all the things I just mentioned, there are some that I've noticed who blow up their marriages, who try non monogamy when maybe they're not ready or at all. They can become addicted to alcohol or have unhealthy drug experiences that can really wreak havoc on their own mental health and well being or on their relationships or on their families. And again, I'm going to put an asterisk and there's many that find healthy relationships with all those things. But that's just a long introduction to the question of morality. And if you have wisdom or guidelines or tools for those dilemmas that I think are real. Are they real?

Brittney Hartley [02:42:32] Yeah, they're real. Yeah. And for this area, I keep in touch with, with all the Mormon therapists and what they're seeing and from what I hear from them, you know, the day after someone has a, their shelf crashes, you know, they want to kid in a candy store a little bit, try all the things and open their marriage the next day. When they haven't learned sexual communication, they've never. Sexual health, sexual health, the principles of sexual health, all of that, they don't have any of that. They just want to jump into it. And then, you know, I've seen marriages fall apart. I've seen that process be maybe not as graceful as it could have been. So I do think that repression response is a thing. And I also think that there's this quote, I think it's Viktor Frankl who says, you know, when people don't have meaning, they resort to pleasure. And the pleasure train can be fun, right? When you get out of Mormonism, you can get the tattoo and go get drunk and it's almost a rite of passage into the ex Mormon community. And you can do all the things, but the pleasure train doesn't stay fun forever. It's not the pathway to the good life. It's more or less a distraction, right? And so eventually, kind of that pleasure train, while it can be fun, is never a replacement for meaning, for deep, deep meaning and deep relationships. So when we go back to morality, I really am always reminded of Socrates, who's on trial for corrupting the youth of Athens, and he's raising doubt about the gods. And then people literally say in his trial, but without the gods, how do you be a good person? How do you have morality? And it's 2,500 years later and, and still, just like Socrates, we're getting the question, but if you don't believe in Zeus, how do you have ultimate? How do you have morality? How can you have objective morality? And when we look at it, even when someone is using the Bible and saying that they have objective morality, we've never had objective morality. There is not, you know, more than anyone, there is not one doctrine in the Bible, in Mormonism, in one sect of Christianity that stays the same.

John Dehlin [02:44:50] We have never had, in all circumstances,

Brittney Hartley [02:44:52] for all people, we have never had objective morality. Like many things in religion, it's only been an illusion that we think is objective morality, but it has always been a conversation. And so what people do who say that they have objective morality and they say they use the Bible as their objective kind of middleman is they're reading the Bible and they're using their modern moral values that came from modern conversations around morality to pull out the scriptures about love and ignore the scriptures about slavery. But there is nothing in the text that gives you permission to do that. There's nothing in the text that says this is doctrine and this isn't. You are doing that. You are bringing relative morality to the thing and then calling it objective morality. It's all relative morality. We have only ever had relative morality. So what Socrates says in this time when he's being asked about how can you be moral without the gods, is he says, I have an inner daemon which is something like a conscience, and it's between my conscience and reason that I try to be a good person. So his response to how can you have morality without the gods? Is empathy and reason. And those are the. Are the two best tools that we have. That empathy piece, which is the golden rule, which exists in all religion and also is older than all religion, all religions kind of are built on top of that. Morally. We have this capacity for that, for empathy, that I'm a human over here, and some things feel good and some things feel not so good. And it appears that you're a human too, who also is experiencing feelings. And so the golden rule and that's always been the basis for our morality. But that combined with reason and the science of happiness and the science of well being and conversation and getting data about how humans thrive and how humans don't, can get that empathy with reason, is the best tool we have for morality. And I do think you have to have morality in order to live the good life. So for me, I don't particularly right now believe in a God or an afterlife. I don't believe even necessarily in karma. But if there was a time where I could steal from someone or kill someone or do something to someone in order to, let's say I screw over a bunch of people and I live in a mansion now, it wouldn't matter. I wouldn't want to do it it even if no one found out, even if I never went to jail, even if there were no consequences eternal or in my life. Because the kind of wholeness and inner peace that you can have with the intentional good life that we're talking about, where I can sit in a room and be totally at peace with myself, I don't need to distract myself, I don't need to numb myself. That comes from living, from treating people, health, you want to be treated and living a moral life, even if the universe doesn't care. And so I do think that you do have to have some sense of morality in order to live a good life. But for me, it comes from the sense of wholeness and inner peace and wanting relationships and wanting the world to be at a better place because I'm in it. And all of those things that I experienced that are good, that we wouldn't be available to me if I stole them. Because if I stole that mansion and I sat in it like I'm nihilistic, like who cares? I'm going to be worm food soon if I can't sit in this mansion and be at peace with myself. There's nothing that's worth whatever I would have had to do to, to steal that or to get that or to acquire that. So morality can be built from the ground up through empathy and reason. And the best way to do that is to really tap in to your beingness, your empathy, your. Your human capacity for that kind of compassion combined with reason and as much science of happiness as you can get that together can give you that kind of moral compass that I think you do need in order for the good life. Because a moral life is a better life to be experienced than the immoral one. Even if there's no eternal consequences, it's a better Life to live.

John Dehlin [02:49:17] Excellent, Beautiful. Let's do a couple more. The next one is, we'll call it Woo. You've mentioned a little bit. It's really come to the forefront this year with the near death experience stuff. People have dreams, they want these dreams to be meaningful. They have a dream, all of a sudden they think they have special powers. And whether you look at it through near death experiences or crystals or essential oils or foot zoning or muscle testing, like Utah, Idaho, Arizona, even believing orthodox Mormonism is full of this stuff. And there's clearly, like you said, you could shoot down, you could kill all the cults, all the religions and they would spring right back up again. So there's clearly something in the human impulse that wants there to be special powers, that wants there to be some divine force or influence that can be called upon to predict the future, to heal someone that's sick. So like, is there a place for any of that? Is there such thing as healthy secular woo or is that not a part of your equation?

Brittney Hartley [02:50:29] Yeah, I think there is space for that. It's, it's. I'm still trying to make like with religion. I have so much education that I'm very confident in kind of where I'm drawing the line between the tool and the woo. I'm, I'm digging more and more into the occult world. I don't feel like I'm as confident in sometimes where I'm drawing that line. And I can change my mind, right? I can change my mind. I'm learning, I'm growing. I do think that there's a way to get the benefits of these spaces without getting sucked into some of the problems. So I, I see a couple things going on. So first of all, one of the best benefits of all these occult tools is supporting a conversation between your conscious and subconscious mind. And I do think that that is a helpful tool. So for me, I don't mind the tarot cards, I don't mind the oracle cards for some of that because I, and I've, I've gone to these kind of pagan nights. I have some friends who are witches, some of them are atheist witches who I really love because they're doing this, you know, without some of the supernatural pieces. And I do think that there's a tool there where our subconscious mind responds more to symbols than language. So if you get a card and it's, I don't know, a phoenix or something, and you ask your conscious mind just asks, what is the part in me that is ready to die so that something new New can come to life. Your subconscious mind will put. Will throw an answer into your conscious mind. And you can learn a lot from those conversations. People can go into those tarot, especially with a good tarot reader, where it's really a conversation between all the things that are kind of buzzing outside of your attention. And you're doing these symbols in these pictures, in these archetypes to dig into your subconscious so that you can make. You can dig into your inner wisdom in order to make decisions. And I don't think you have to. I don't think that the universe has to spin in such a way where you only could have got that card in order for that process to work. Because the work, what's working is this conversation that you're supporting with pictures and symbols and archetypes between your conscious and subconscious mind. So I think that there are tools for this, this place. But what I see mostly is spiritual bypassing, which is rather than sit with my uncertainty, I'm looking for signs from the universe. I'm looking for the clock to say 11:11, because that means that I made the right choice. There's so much spiritual bypassing in this world to do what religions do, which is give you some kind of drug. So you don't have to feel uncertainty and you don't have to feel confused and you don't have to feel afraid and you don't have to feel alone and you don't have to feel like the world is chaotic and you can't control it. It gives you that element of control. So so much of that world I see as spiritual bypassing and I see it as doing what religions do, which is finding some way for you to not have to feel things that you don't want to have to feel. I see delusions of grandeur in that world that are as big as anything in Mormonism where you're special, you're psychic, you had a past life. I just had. I did a TikTok the other day and it's really funny these, these parties where you come as you were as one of your past lives, there will always be 20 cleopatras because you're always effing Cleopatra and Napoleon, right? And so I see delusions of grandeur and I see spiritual bypassing and I see superstition and I see talismans and I see prosperity. Gospel of like, if I do this, this, the universe will bless me with this. I see cognitive bias, which I think the game of manifestation is just a sexed up way to be playing with your cognitive biases. I see all of that going on in the cult world, occult world, and I do think that some of these tools can be helpful. For these are all tools of intuition. And the reason that they're in the occult world is because they were never integrated into religion.

Margi Dehlin [02:54:33] Right.

Brittney Hartley [02:54:34] Religion tendency tends to be more male, at least in the west, it's been more male and hierarchical and ordered. And the occult world has always been the female and the body and intuitive and inner conversation and shadow work and all of this kind of space. So I do think there are tools in that space. I have seen people for bodywork. I've gone to tarot things and pagan things and resonated with some of it and not with others. I think that there's some tools there. But I think you do have to be aware of all of the other elements that are just like religion going on as people are leaving religion. But they haven't deconstructed what creates religion. They haven't sat with their uncertainty, they haven't sat with the world being chaos, they haven't made peace with that. And so we're seeing new religions essentially popping up in the occult world that are no different to me than Mormonism. I mean, maybe it's less codified and, and it's more, it's definitely more female driven, which I can appreciate. But the psychology of feeling like you're special and your past lives and your near death experience, science and your spiritual bypassing and the tarot cards promising this or that, a lot of that is because you'd never deconstructed what made you religious in the first place. And so you're just replacing those behaviors. And I see a lot of that. But I do think that there's tools there to help. You have to be careful, though.

John Dehlin [02:55:59] I had some tense moments with some friends at a little guys night we did where one of my friends was just like, what's wrong with Reiki? Like they're just, they're just putting their hands over you. And whether it's real or not, there can be metaphor there and they can share some wisdom and you could learn something or you can become inspired. And I said to him, yeah, but as soon as the Reiki person's like telling you to have another baby because they feel like that's the energy, that's the blockage that they're unblocking, or they start telling you that maybe you were sexually abused as a child and you just don't remember it, all of a sudden you're giving your power away and you're creating a new profit for yourself.

Brittney Hartley [02:56:40] In essence, it's a dangerous world for all the opposite reasons. Right. So religion can be dangerous because you have an authority always telling you what to do. And this world can be dangerous because there's no authorities in the space, which can be freeing and enjoyable to explore because there's no kind of codified way that you have to do kind of these occult places. But there's, you know, then it comes with its own problems of people being able to say and do whatever and, and like if you walk into one of those kind of metaphysical crystal shops and you were just to write down all the truth claims in that space, I mean, it gets quite unbelievable and really contradictory and really woo. Really fast. Right? Really pseudoscience really fast. And they're all dependent on quantum entanglement or the double slit experiment. But there's this place of kind of like mysterious quantum stuff going on that everybody's trying to fit their spiritual, their spirituality into. And it's really messy. And so I really encourage people, people you can play in all these spaces. I play in all of these spaces as a spiritual director because I want to be up on, on everything that's going on in the world of spirituality. And this is a big part of it. It's a big part of Gen Z spirituality. But I just want to remind people that some tools are more effective than others as vessels. Right. So for me, studying archetypes and mythology and Jungian archetypes is a faster path to that self exploration than going headfirst into the horoscope world, which tends to be for me, not as effective as a tool because there's going to be more spiritual bypassing, there's going to be some more woo. There's going to be some more truth claims, there's going to be some more claims on science there. That's going to be a harder path for me. So I go the Jungian archetype route instead. So I think in this space you have to find the tools that are more effective than others because some of these tools, there's a tool there, but there's so much spiritual bypassing around it that it becomes almost impossible to kind of get at that tool.

John Dehlin [02:58:47] Beautiful. Okay, a couple more. The biggest one, and I've had big talks with Bill Real about this and many other people, is community. You talked a little bit about it. I love the little group, the awesome group you have in Boise.

Brittney Hartley [02:59:00] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:59:01] One of the first things I did after getting kicked out of the Mormon Church was to start Oasis, which was this series of secular Sunday meetups where you have TED talks instead of sermons, where you sing secular hymns instead of Mormon hymns, you have potluck and you organize book clubs and meetups and playgroups and thinking that the answer. I was feeling a void of like Sunday words, worship service, of singing, of spirituality. And I was missing community. So my, my immediate thought was, let's recreate it in just a secular way. Sunday assembly is an example of this. Started in the uk, Oasis, started here in the US There's Unitarian Universalist, you know, churches and others that just do their best to do church, but in a secular way. Even Elaine de Bouton wrote a book called, called Religion for Atheists.

Brittney Hartley [02:59:58] I really loved that book. I really like his messages. He has a TED Talk called Atheism 2.0, which I really loved.

John Dehlin [03:00:04] Yeah, we'll include that in the show notes. But I agree, I love Elaine Debouton, but I tried it for years and Thrive, which is something we tried over the past couple years, was just a new stab at trying to create secular community. And I am convinced that as hard as it was to split the atom or fly to the moon or now we're trying to fly to Mars, I think creating secular community is like that hard. I think so too, because you don't have the guilt and the shame and the elitism and the truth claims to motivate people. So who's gonna pick a Sunday meeting over brunch or over binge watching Netflix? You're just, it's not, you don't get the passion and the commitment that you do with guilt, shame, exclusive truth claims and superiority.

Brittney Hartley [03:00:54] And so like, yeah, so I talk about this a lot because it was a lot of my master's degree program is, is I was looking at all the secular churches who were trying to do like, let's do church, but with the values that resonate with us. And I've watched now hundreds of these churches and within five years they all die. And trying to figure out why that is. And for me, I mean, the guilt shame, people piece is a part of it, but I think it's the myth piece that's the biggest hang up. And I think the cold, harsh truth reality of this is I don't think there will ever be something like secular humanist preschools on the corners. Like there's Lutheran preschools and Mormon or, you know, Catholic preschools and all this. And I think the reality is once you get, you know, over a hundred people, we have an evolutionary thing that you have to have a collective myth. And so all of these secular churches are trying to operate without a myth. And for whatever reason, as humans we're coming up with this, we're coming up against this barrier that we can't get past, which is without the myth, we're not motivated to do this. And so your options are to participate in a religion and maybe shift the myth so that it's not as maybe egregious, but still participate in all the benefits of a myth driven people, or you're going to have to do this locally on your own. I don't think that there's ever going to be something like secular humanism that operates like Mormonism because without the myth it doesn't tap into that tribal cult brains that we have where you're giving your money and you're giving your time and you're giving your resources and you're motivated to do so. And so you're either going to have too much of that because it's going to be an institution, which instantly means there's going to be too much of that, or there's going to be too little. Can there ever be just enough? I don't think so. Because without the myth that we don't have. And this is one of the most important conversations in this space face is the four part dialogue between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson. And this is one of Jordan Peterson's points, is that he understands what Sam Harris is trying to do with secular spirituality. But he's saying without that collective myth, without something holding this together, there's never going to be, you're never going to be able to build this, you're never going to be able to do anything with this. This is never going to reach people. And so why don't we try to do this within kind of the archetypes of religion and the myths of religion. And so that's what one of the reasons that keeps him more on the religion side, whereas Sam Harris is more on the secular spirituality side. And it's a fair point in the sense that I don't think that we're going to ever be able to create what church felt like when you're in Mormonism as a secular person. Because it's the myths that get into your cult brain that create all the resources, that create that moment where you're singing the song and people are making the hymns and they're making the art and they're donating their money and they're donating their time, they're donating their resources. And without the myth, yeah, you can Go to one of these places on Sunday or you can watch the game. And eventually we just choose to watch the game. That's just human nature. So my. My hope with secular spirituality, I'm not optimistic that I'm gonna make or be a part of or see anything like a functioning secular Mormonism. I actually don't think it's possible. I think it's harder than going to the moon because we went to the moon and we haven't built that. Right. I think it's harder because without that myth piece, we just don't do it. So I think you have to do it individually. And you've talked about this when you came to our group, because we were talking beforehand about kind of the struggle in thrive at the time. And, you know, you were trying to tell us, like, hey, don't look to an outside institution to do this for you. You're gonna have to do this on your own. You're gonna have to build your pod from the ground up with a couple families that you decide to do life with. And so my approach with my post Mormon group here in Boise is it's. It's not church. It's not going to be everything that Mormonism was. But it's a Facebook group. If you want to do a social thing, people post, hey, meeting for lunch. Come join. Some people want to go do a pagan night. I'll have speakers from time to time on Mormon things. Sometimes people don't want to do the Mormon thing anymore or even go to some. Sorry. Or even go to some of those nights. And so it's just a landing platform for people to build connections and find people to do life with. And I think that's the best that we can do in the secular world. I don't think we're gonna have anything more than that.

Margi Dehlin [03:05:47] Yeah, yeah.

Brittney Hartley [03:05:48] The myth is too hard to replace, and it's too. It's too culty and it's too tribal. So I tell people this fight that I'm fighting with secular spirituality because I go on TikTok and I'm battling the religious voices in that space. Right. And I don't do that because I think that I'm gonna win. I think religion. And after going through nihilism and seeing all the subconscious fears that we have and how much religion is keeping that at bay, religion and dogma and myth and tribalism and us versus them is so deep into our brains. I just don't see, like, even though religion's declining, it's just popping up, you know, in wellness culture. It's popping up in the occult world. It's popping up everywhere else. I don't think. I don't think this is a fight that I'm gonna win. It's a fight that I enjoy fighting because I think it's a better way to build a good life. And it's how, you know, what. What brought me out of nihilism in a way that was safe for my religious trauma. But it's not a fight that I think I'm gonna win, because it's just that myth brain is so strong. And so I think it's a lie. When atheists say that all babies are born atheists. Like, that may be true. Like you're born without a specific God. But the truth is we are born superstitious. We are born preferring black and white. We are born preferring tribalism. We are born wanting to create stories, to feel special because we subconsciously know that we're going to die, and we have to face that. And so there's all these things in our brain that you have to. It's not like if religion didn't exist that we would just all be fine. We would recreate it tomorrow because of the way our brains are. And for whatever reason, we are the product of religious people who survived because they have a collective myth, and that is in our bodies and in our brains. And you have to do a lot of unlearning and education to unlearn that, to do the kind of path that I'm talking about that I don't think it's a battle that I'm gonna win, but I do it anyway because this is part of my life worth living and gives me meaning and purpose.

Finding and Building Secular Community

John Dehlin [03:08:00] Yeah. So for me, that was beautiful. For me, the threefold answer is, we need people like you or Clinton, Jenny Martin and others who will become a semi permanent fixture in the community. I'm thinking of Wayne Hepworth in St. George. Just these people that are just like, I'm going to be the axle for this local community in Boise, in St. George, in Cache Valley, and I'll put up a Facebook group. I'll endure the pain of moderating it, of letting people know about it, of. Of establishing some norms and some standards so that it could be a safe enough of an environment for people to meet each other and to come to some events. So that's. We need people who are willing to do that.

Brittney Hartley [03:08:46] And I did that because I needed that. Right. It wasn't like, I'm going to do this as a service. It's like no, like I. All of my best friends are in that group too now.

John Dehlin [03:08:54] Yeah, so we do need that. So if any of you feel. Need some meaning and purpose, I be that guy.

Brittney Hartley [03:09:01] If you don't have that guy, you need to be that guy. Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [03:09:04] So we need a lot of that. Second thing is book clubs. Like when, when we did Oasis or, or Thrive, there was always this. Lots of people would come up first, then they'd meet four or five couples that they really like to do life with and then they would stop coming. But they would continue to create this pod that we've talked about.

Brittney Hartley [03:09:24] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:09:24] And Margi and I did it. When we moved to Salt Lake, we were alonely and we found four other couples to do a book club with. And now we travel once to twice a year with this book club. We meet quarterly, if not more frequently. We have relationships with individual members or with couples in the book club. And. And it hasn't completely provided all the good feelings that organized religion did, but in many ways it's provided way better feelings.

Brittney Hartley [03:09:50] Yeah, it's gonna be smaller, but the intimacy is deeper.

Margi Dehlin [03:09:54] That's okay.

Brittney Hartley [03:09:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:09:55] And more meaningful and probably more real. Cause I was always surprised at how quickly those Mormon relationships evaporated when I got excommunicated. I mean, it was like 10 seconds and they were gone. Almost all of them. So the second thing is pods, small groups, book clubs can be amazing. And then the third thing I think is acceptance and time. Because it was religious, you know, like, yes, some of my most powerful. We should talk about flow. But some of my most powerful spiritual. And I'm saying that with air quotes for those who are just listening transformative spiritual moments. Were singing Yielders of Israel at the conference center during general conference. And you know, I get close to that with karaoke these days with a group of close friends. But that's hard to replicate.

Brittney Hartley [03:10:48] It's one of the hardest for that music piece is one of the hardest for the secular world to replicate.

John Dehlin [03:10:53] And songs, even secular songs, can be triggering. Just group singing, even if it's secular, can actually be re traumatizing for people that are coming out of high demand religions where music was such an important part of their programming.

Brittney Hartley [03:11:07] Some of that is concerts. There was a really popular TikTok that went viral that was talking about how people who love church just don't go to enough live concerts because you can get some of that. What happens to your brain when you're all singing together? That collective. Your brain actually starts to function in a collective rather than individually that's right. It's really cool things.

Margi Dehlin [03:11:26] And feel that unification with a lot of people all at once has been

Brittney Hartley [03:11:32] replaced in just live concerts. And it may be. So for me, that would be Weezer concerts. I experience that when we're all screaming our emo emotions at Weezer concerts.

John Dehlin [03:11:43] What's their biggest hit? I'm just old enough to know them.

Brittney Hartley [03:11:47] My name is Jonas was on their Blue album a long time ago. They're kind of. They're kind of punky.

John Dehlin [03:11:51] Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [03:11:52] My soul is very punk rock. So for me, it's Weezer concerts. I can get that feeling. But. But I'm not getting at the Weezer concert. Also, a secular sermon and the Relief Society like it. All of this casseroles. Yeah. I'm not getting. I'm not getting that. I had to, like, a lot of this has to be more piecemeal. And that's really your option. Do you want the Big Box store? And it's not going to be authentic to you. By definition, it's big Box religion. And you can. Maybe there's enough there that you can tweak to make that work. But if not, you're gonna have to piecemeal this together to get all of the benefits. It's not like everyone has to do it. But if you want all the benefits that, you know, these tools in religion are for building the good life, you. You can do this piecemeal.

Margi Dehlin [03:12:41] Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [03:12:42] And it does take some work and some intention. It's more intention than showing up on Sunday. But once you kind of do that work, it becomes its own.

Margi Dehlin [03:12:50] Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [03:12:50] Rhythm in your life. Where I don't have to tell my kids it's time for church. Our. Our Sunday family time. It's just part of our family environment that they know on Sunday mornings not to grab their screens because we're going to read books as a family and have a little lesson and do our family game and whatever. So with a little intention, you can replace everything that Big Box was trying to give you, but it's going to be inauthentic. And so for me, it's Weezer concert over here and friends over here and philosophy book club over here. And I was able to replace most of those elements. Singing is. Yeah, singing is a tough one.

John Dehlin [03:13:29] I say karaoke for that one.

Brittney Hartley [03:13:31] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:13:33] One of the. You know, the whole term existential, I think, stems out of this idea of death. Should we talk about death really quick?

Brittney Hartley [03:13:40] Sure.

John Dehlin [03:13:41] And kind of of. Because so many people just. That's one thing they can't get over.

Margi Dehlin [03:13:45] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:13:47] It's a big topic. I know.

Margi Dehlin [03:13:48] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:13:49] I gotta figure out what it's five minutes.

Brittney Hartley [03:13:51] How to recover from death. So like any of these things, you. You process the anxiety of it like you would any other fear. So if you were afraid of spiders and went to a therapist, you would sit with a printer, you know, printer printed picture of a spider, and you'd gauge your anxiety and what it feels like in your body. And then you realize with the passage of time that you're not dying. And then you sit with a spider across the room, and then you literally are processing your anxiety and reteaching your body that this feels scary, but you're not actually dying. And your body is able to kind of reprogram that fear. So for death, we really do the same thing. And I have videos and resources for all of this that we can talk about at the end, the resources that I have available for people. But I have a video where we look at art and music and even videos that touch on death. And we're going to sit with it. What is exactly about this that you're afraid of? Is it not being? Is it disconnection from your family? Is it fear of hell? Is it not knowing how the story ends, which is part of. Was part of my fear. It was really hard for me to let go of this idea that I'm part of this human story and I don't get to see how it ends as like a story person. That was really hard for me. So let's sit with this. What is the anxiety? Is it the pain? Is it it? And so once we sit with it, we realize that while it's uncomfortable to sit with mortality, you don't actually die from thinking about it. And you can actually start like you would your fear of spider, that as you get closer to it, it starts to change you. And it has those. You know, facing death has those benefits. You're more present, you're more loving, you're more able to take risks for authenticity, things like that. And so the way. The way kind of to work around death is not to go around it, it's to go through it. And so to find the thing that brings up your anxiety, to sit with it, to name it, what about it, is scary. And then to actually kind of work with it in that space, and then it becomes not so scary. And it also starts to give you benefits that you wouldn't have imagined before. So with all the fears, these are your hero's journey. Deepest, most inward cave. And the hero doesn't get the Magical sword for the next part of the journey and the return home and, and all of that part of the hero's journey.

John Dehlin [03:16:40] We're getting Joseph Campbell

Brittney Hartley [03:16:44] until you go through deepest, darkest gates. And so I would say lean in to whatever you're most afraid of safely. So that as you get closer to starts to. You start to realize that thinking about your mortality actually doesn't instantly kill me, even though it's uncomfortable. And then the uncomfort starts to decrease and then the hidden blessings start to kind of show up. And then this enemy, this is the, this is the message in Harry Potter I'm a millennial. I go to Harry Potter. That Snape and Lupin and Dumbledore, they had a reason. They, they faced death. They walked into it because they were part of this kind of bigger meaning and purpose. Versus Voldemort, who's always tried to escape his mortality, right. By creating these Horcruxes. And then Harry in the end learn, learns the lesson. I'm I who am about to die. He meets death as a friend. He faces it as a friend. And in that way that's how you conquer death. You meet it as a friend.

Margi Dehlin [03:17:48] That's right.

Brittney Hartley [03:17:49] And you, it just forces you to focus that we don't give each other silk flowers. If I were to bring you flowers today, I wouldn't have brought you silk flowers. Even though they last a long time. I would have brought you for fresh flowers. Because the fact that they're only blooming this week in their own unique way is what makes the flowers precious. And so that's what happens with death. Can we get closer to it? Can we sit with our uncomfort with it? Can we name what we're afraid about it and let it change us in a way that we realize that thinking about it doesn't actually kill us, but it does change us and allow it to do that work. And that's an inner journey. There's not like a quick, you know, 12 steps video that would get you from afraid of death to making peace with death. It's such an internal thing. But I can hold hands with someone and show them things and get closer to it and just gauge what are you feeling? Where are you feeling this in your body? What are you exactly afraid of? What is most terrifying about this? And by naming it and shining a light on it, it does a lot to decrease your fear of this thing.

Margi Dehlin [03:18:56] I love that. I love that. I've found too for me personally, this idea too of learning to and maybe this isn't for everyone. You know, but this idea of learning to recognize that as we move through life, we're experiencing deaths all the time. Deaths of certain times of life or people we've been or how we've shown up. I know, you know, my youngest son moved out in January and I experienced it like a. And the value of experiencing things in loss or a death of an era of children at home or an actual deaths as well, is that we actually can conceptualize that we are different. We on a level, live differently after those losses. And I think, think there's some benefit for some people in kind of embracing this idea that we die and we are born consistently throughout our lives as

Brittney Hartley [03:20:02] we engage with this was one reason why indigenous communities, I mean, they outstrip kind of what we're doing in so many areas. But one area that they do really well with is there doesn't seem to be as much death anxiety. And, and the. When you talk about Maslow and he was talking about how the people who reach self actualization, they're living authentic lives that they're choosing and intentioned. He guessed that in Western society that was maybe 1% of adults. But when he went and studied the Blackfoot indigenous community, he was estimating that about 80% of the adults were there because they did life so differently. And one of the reasons that people didn't seem as driven by death anxiety, which makes you want to become pharaoh so that you can kind of cheat death and make this big legacy and blah, blah, blah, is because you're so connected to nature and the cycles of life and death and hibernation and caterpillars to butterflies all the time, that you've already as a child accepted that you're part of a cycle of life and death. And we can appreciate that death is a part of life and that you don't get this turn forever and that the elements that were. You get to become other things that get to experience being repurposed. And that can be a very helpful way for children to kind of grow up with death. That closeness to nature that he saw, like, wow, these people really aren't driven by death anxiety and really driven by community. And the self actualization was normal versus rare in Western society because of that kind of closeness and acceptance to what nature appears to be.

Margi Dehlin [03:21:49] Oh, I feel that so much trying

Brittney Hartley [03:21:51] to chase around it by our. By our big religions and our big stories and our big buildings that, you know, make us feel like we're immortal.

Margi Dehlin [03:22:00] That's right. And that kind of places. Do you feel like that plays back to the specialness idea that we're separate. We're separate somehow from other living things that we witness all the time.

Brittney Hartley [03:22:10] The really sad thing is that we've had so many religious wars. Right. And when you look at terror management theory, one of the reasons that we are driven, our fear of death drives us, is that we want our culture and our religion to be lasting because then we're a part of that. And it means that we're special and we're not just a footnote of history. That my culture mattered. Right. And so isn't it interesting that the reason that we killed each other for our gods was because we were trying to fight death itself, and we killed each other trying to fight death itself. Like that was underneath that. That's why we do crusades. It's because we're trying to cheat death and be a part of something that's bigger than us, rather than go back to what the indigenous people did, which is, I can be so connected to these cycles of life and death that I realize that I'm a part of it, and I accept that my turn will someday end and I don't need to go on a crusade to experience life.

Margi Dehlin [03:23:18] Yeah. And then you get to experience the connection. Yes.

Brittney Hartley [03:23:22] Being a part of that thing, Just beingness in general. Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:23:27] Love it. Before we jump to resources, there's a great question. Faith. Mary Perior writes, please ask Brittney about how deconstructing ego, in her view, is more helpful for man. And maybe that women. And I know gender. The gender binary is fraught in our opinion, period. But they're saying, is deconstruction different sometimes for women than for men?

Death, Deconstruction, and Closing Reflections

Margi Dehlin [03:23:52] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:23:52] In terms of breaking down the ego versus building up the ego. Right.

Brittney Hartley [03:23:55] It's something that I talk about a lot because we don't have enough voices. So even in the post religious space, it. It's a male dominated voice. Ex pastors, you know, ex Mormon Stories podcast, it's still male dominated. And so what happens in what I see a lot happening, and this is bigger. This is a bigger problem than Mormonism. This is a bigger thing that's going on is that the men who were in religion or just in society got to build an ego. They got to be a personality. They got to be a person with needs. They got to lead something. Right. Even when you look at Mormonism, the apostles have personalities. They have. They're people. They have different personalities. The women in the leadership, it's the same woman. Right. Like they're not. But it. Like, that's right.

Margi Dehlin [03:24:50] You can't discern.

Brittney Hartley [03:24:51] It's one kind of woman, right? That's the box. And so what happens is I see a lot of people in the post religious space, especially kind of the meditation space, especially men, guru mention, really talk a lot about ego death. And for a man, it can be the very best thing for you to do after leaving something like Mormonism, where you are literally the center of the universe and you have internalized that, like in ways that you don't even know. Like you have to unpack all that. And so ego death can be very healthy for a man to let go of some of that and experience the freedom that comes when you're not doing things. Based on how it looks and how it appears to my ego and my identity, it could be very freeing. It can be a spiritual path. And so sometimes women will deconstruct, they'll jump into the post religious space and there's all this work about dissolving your ego. But the reality is two things. One, women never got to finish developing their ego. They started repressing their personality at the age of four. They started smiling when they were sad when they were six. And so you can't dissolve an ego. That's not a spiritual path if you've never built one. And there are not enough spiritual voices telling women in the post spiritual space that building your ego and building a personality and taking up space and being selfish is the most spiritual thing for you to do right now. There are not enough voices for that. So what happens is a man goes to India for three weeks and says he dissolved his ego. And he comes back and he's a guru and we praise him. What a spiritual guy. A woman through her whole life, you know me as a mother, I'm cleaning up poop in the middle of the night. I am elbow deep in shit it that and I, in that moment, my ego does not want to do this. And I choose love. And my ego is dissolved because I am choosing to pick up poop and tend to my diarrhea child rather than sleep, which is what I want to do. But that is not seen as spiritual. That is just woman's work. And so we listened to the guru who went to India and sat on a mat by himself, which for a month is a vacation, and dissolved his ego. And we give him a microphone. And then the women flock to him because he's a spiritual guy, post religion. He's meditative, he's inner peace. He has a man butt. He sits in a lotus pose and he looks really calm and it looks like I want inner peace. I got to be like that guy. I have to dissolve my ego. And they'll try for years and not get the benefits of it. Why? They never built their ego. And it probably wasn't the thing that they needed because they're already doing. Their life has already been built around ego dissolving exercises where you choose love over ego, which a woman has to do every day as a mother. So it's one of my kind of soapboxes. It's one of my things that I talk about is telling women to order. When you order pizza on Friday and you've only ordered what your husband and children like for so long that you can't even remember what your favorite pizza is. Order your favorite flavor of pizza. You know how many Mormon women have never done that? Even post Mormon women? What. What is your favorite. What do you like to do? What is your personality? What is your opinion?

Margi Dehlin [03:28:27] And that is your healing practice.

Brittney Hartley [03:28:28] And that is that speech. And that is spiritual. And the men in the ego dissolving kind of meditation space will not validate that as spiritual because it looks selfish to them. It can be like, well, why are you so egocentrical and looking selfish?

John Dehlin [03:28:46] I like pepperoni.

Brittney Hartley [03:28:47] You got to do this when you were eight. We didn't.

John Dehlin [03:28:50] Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [03:28:50] We were already repressing our personalities to become one. The one Mormon woman box, which is available. That we lost that a long time ago. So for women, I do a lot of inner child work because we have to go back and heal that inner child that was told to repress and to smile and to be quiet and to defer because that's been internalized. We need to maybe do personality typing. You can do big five. You can do enneagram. What is your personality? What are your motivators? Who are you? We have to finish that work first before we can jump into any of those kind of meditative spaces with the man Bun men. Because that. That is still the overwhelming look of spirituality. Is that what you know? That's what spirituality is. And if I don't sit in a lotus pose on a mat, I'm not a spiritual person. That is a huge kind of conception and myth, even in the post religious world that I want to dispel that there are so many ways that humans experience connectivity. And one of the best studies for this is the Tree of Cond. Tree of Contemplative practices, which you'll have to add, John, which is the. The study that talked about all the ways that humans experience spirituality and some of it is body and some of it's creativity and some of it silence and meditating. And some of it is active work like political activism. And there are so many ways. But the only people writing what is spiritual is the men. And so for women, women have never been able to claim some of the things that they do that fill their cup as spiritual. But a women's group, where you have a lunch and you deeply do so soulful talk, is absolutely a spiritual practice. But because men have always been the ones, even in Buddhism writing the rights of rituals and religion, so many women have never been given permission to claim what they do as spiritual. That taking up space can be spiritual, that having a personality can be a spiritual path, that being selfish can be the best spiritual thing you need to do right now. That writing or running or lunch groups or things that men have never called spiritual can be your spiritual practice. And so I really want to provide more language for that space because I do think even in the post religious world, it gets dominated by men who sit in lotus poses and tell us about their inner peace. But his journey and his ability to build an ego is different than my journey as a woman.

John Dehlin [03:31:29] The comments are going wild. Rebecca, Beautiful. Rebecca writes, my gosh, I'm just crying over here. I feel so seen right now. It's unreal. Thank you so much. Jim Anderson writes, this section should be its own TikTok or reel. This is so informative and it's resonating with me. So many people are loving what you have to say. It's probably, unfortunately, it's probably time to start wrapping up and I think there's so much we could say about resources. So maybe some books, maybe some podcasts. Your, your, your coaching practice.

Brittney Hartley [03:32:06] Sure.

John Dehlin [03:32:07] And just. Yeah. Give people some branches they can start pursuing, if you don't mind.

Brittney Hartley [03:32:13] So if you're resonating with any of this, I'm just going to throw a bunch of things out here. So the podcast that I did with Bill Real for the past two years, I'm really proud of all the ex Mormon podcasts. We've been able to get some pretty big names in the post religious space. We had on Nick Jankel, who's the writer of the Spiritual Atheist. We had on Bart Campolo, who does the Humanize Me podcast and had a big public faith crisis. We've had on Lisa Miller, who is really the leader in the science of spirituality. She wrote the Awakened Brain and the Spiritual Chakra Child. She's the leader at Columbia University in the science of spirituality. We've really had some big names in this space, and I'm really proud of the conversations we've had and what we do. Bill and I will look at some aspect of spirituality, try to dig out the tool, separate it from the baggage and the woo, and find ways to make it practical for people. I have recently stepped away from the podcast in order to do more content creation, since my TikTok is kind of going. And that's a little bit easier for me as a mother of four to do kind of little videos rather than long podcasts.

John Dehlin [03:33:19] You can also reach hundreds of thousands of people in a minute. It's just.

Brittney Hartley [03:33:23] Yeah, it's been a little bit easier on me. And so I have pulled away, but I still will come. So Bill's still doing the podcast, and then I come back from time to time and try to bring in some really big and important guests. Tomorrow I will be on the podcast with Bill, and we'll be talking to Dan McClellan, who's also kind of blowing up on tech talk and asking him about some of this stuff. So I'm really proud of all the free content that Bill and I did together on the Almost Awakened podcast. It was two years where we almost didn't reference Mormonism at all, except for, like, you know, our experience in religion.

John Dehlin [03:33:59] Does that have its own podcast feed or do you have to go Mormonism Live or it has its own page.

Brittney Hartley [03:34:04] Yeah, almost awaken.org but, like, if you

John Dehlin [03:34:06] go to Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Brittney Hartley [03:34:07] Yeah, own. Yeah, it's.

Margi Dehlin [03:34:09] It's.

Brittney Hartley [03:34:09] It's its own thing. And so even though we'll sometimes kind of reference our experience, it's not. It's not the place to go to learn about the Book of Abraham or polygamy. Like, those podcasts are covered by other people. It's only the what. The what next.

Margi Dehlin [03:34:22] Right.

Brittney Hartley [03:34:23] And so that has a ton of free content that I think is very helpful. I do a lot of my Gen Z stuff, and I did. I did bring, you know, Bill did so much of the tech and so much of the, the. The. The work behind it that I couldn't do just as a mother of four. And so I tried to bring really good content to that. And so I have a lot of free content with that. My TikTok handle is no Nonsense spirituality. I haven't been doing it very long, but I'm enjoying popping up there and just doing an idea at a time. And then I have my own website, which is Nonsense spirituality dot com. I have some courses on there. I do have a nihilism course where you can go through kind of the 10 tools that I use with people in nihilism. I have a deconstruction course, I have a reconstruction course, I have a Mormonism course. So I do have some courses on there where I go through kind of the process that I would go through at a client that you can kind of work on on your own time. I also do coaching. I'm not able to see as many people people as I have demand for. So I'm currently booked up till Christmas and I'll open up some new some new spots come the new year. But I do do coaching. And then as far as some of my favorite books and podcasts you mentioned. Elaine De Baton, Religion for atheists I really like spirituality or sorry, Atheist. Sorry. Nick Jenkel Spirit the Spiritual Atheist by Nick Jenkle is one of my favorites. Lisa Miller, the Awakened Brain is one of my favorites. Sasha Sagan, who does Small Creatures such as we, which is like her focus was just on ritual and the science of rituals as the daughter of Carl Sagan. So she's totally secular and how to integrate that. And I love her approach with rituals. I just want to do it with all the things right, not just rituals, but I loved her approach. Rational mysticism I really like a lot of times in this space you'll get dual words. So it's it's secular spirituality, it's rational mysticism, it's spiritual atheist, it's atheist witch, it's. I mean there's lots of dual terms in this space because we don't have one term for all the things under the umbrella of spirituality, but secular. Like we don't have one word for that. So you'll get a lot of different double terms. And so some of those books are my favorite. I like the podcast this Jungian Life, which is a deep Jungian archetype podcast with Jungian analysts that I really love. There's a podcast that I really love for Mormon women coming out called Unfuck your Brain, which is with Carl Lowenthal, which really gets into cognitive biases and how to recover your brain from being in patriarchy. That's been that was one that I recommend to people a lot. So I have some free resources out there. And then for people who really want to dig in, I can I do some coaching and then also have lots of courses. I also right now and halfway through a live course that I'm doing with ex Mormon content creator Jenny Gage. So we're two weeks in to a four week long Mormon after Mormonism kind of reconstruction course where you'd be able to get the last two weeks of material and also do two hours with me the next two Sundays. So I have a live course that I'm doing for that. So I'm. I'm trying to speak on this as much as is helpful for people. And people will email me. Sometimes they just need to email someone who has thought about the things that they're thinking about so they don't feel alone. And I'm pretty good with my email if you want to reach out to me. So, yeah, I still have, you know, young children at home and so I'm not able to do this as much as other people who are able to do this full time. But as much as I can, I want to make spirituality more helpful for as many people as I can.

John Dehlin [03:38:28] So, like Maven's saying, we have to answer a few more questions. So we'll do a lightning round.

Margi Dehlin [03:38:33] Sure.

John Dehlin [03:38:33] This will be really quick.

Margi Dehlin [03:38:34] Sure.

John Dehlin [03:38:37] So just Nancy is asking if you had to pick one tool to start with on the journey, what's the most important tool?

Brittney Hartley [03:38:45] Yeah, it depends on where she is.

John Dehlin [03:38:47] Give a couple. Just give a couple.

Margi Dehlin [03:38:48] Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [03:38:49] I would say rituals are a great place to, if you're in chaos, to just stake some ground. And it actually really does a lot for you psychologically. So scientifically, ritual is often the place that people are encouraged to start looking at what you're most afraid of. That's often your path to the most kind of growth is to really look at the monster under the bed, whatever that is for you, and then maybe leaning into taking more risks with vulnerability. We all know from Brene Brown that these friendships, they don't just knock on your door. You have to take a risk. So is there a place in your life where you can take a risk and maybe that's jumping into a job or a side hustle or something that you're interested in, or a program or a friend or a new friend or a group. But there's opportunities all around you of things that would make your life more enjoyable that are you're not jumping into because of a fear of vulnerability. Is there something that you can jump into and take the risk? Because if you don't. To me, the most sad thing possible is to be at the end of your life and not know if there's anything after this and realize I only ever did what was expected of me. I never really lived. To me, that kind of regret is the most painful. I can't imagine something more painful than. Than hearing People on their deathbed saying, I never really lived. Is there something that you can do today to lean into something that feels vulnerable, that can make your life better, whether that be a friendship or a group or a program or whatever? So I would say, yeah. Rituals. The fear that's most driving your behavior that you probably need to look at, and leaning into vulnerability somewhere, taking a risk somewhere.

John Dehlin [03:40:47] Love those. I know Margi started a lot of transformation and healing with just getting the Headspace app or, you know, wake up or calm.

Brittney Hartley [03:40:57] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:40:58] And just doing a daily meditation ritual. That's almost cliche at this point. But, Margaret, you know, that was transformational for you, right?

Margi Dehlin [03:41:05] Definitely.

John Dehlin [03:41:06] Someone wants to know how they find this Boise community. They're like, oh, my goodness, she's in Boise. I didn't even know.

Margi Dehlin [03:41:12] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:41:12] How do they find your community? And do you have recommendations for how to find other similar communities if they're in other geographical regions?

Brittney Hartley [03:41:20] Yeah. So this is on Facebook, and you can. We actually call it the Post Orthodox because some people are still active, and we kind of have space for that. So it's the Boise LDS Post Orthodox group, and it's a private group, so you kind of have to search for it to find it. And we don't do anything kind of publicly because some people who are in the group, if we ever have pictures or anything, some people don't want other people to know that they're in a group like this. Some people haven't told their spouse yet that they're even in a faith crisis. And so we, you know, it's not something that I'm posting on my public Facebook feed all the time of. Come to this group. It's. It's definitely more of a. Of a private thing to protect the individuals that are there. So you can search that, you can read the rules for the group. We do have you ask, you know, answer some questions, and then I can admit you into that group. And then we kind of have a system now called Post and Host, which is us, me, and kind of the other moderators of this group telling people, this isn't my job to create or the moderator's job to create everything that you're wanting. If you want game nights with people or a book group with people, I'm not gonna do that. No one's gonna do that for you. You have to do it. And so people know if you want it, you have to do it. And so we do a Post and Help Host, and so people can join, you know, the events that they want to and. And Then we do like a, like a. We'll do a Christmas party this year. We do. We do every year. And so people will. Most of the group will kind of come to that and you can meet people. But it's not a place where I'm doing this community that you can step into what you want out of it. You have to do create. You have to create. It's just a platform for laughter that

John Dehlin [03:43:04] I'll do a quick couple quick shout outs. If you're like generally over 40 and you're a woman, there's women of a certain age or Waka, you can go to Facebook. Waka Worldwide, there are lots of central and distributed women's post Mormon women's groups. Waka if you're under 40, there's faith journey Meetups, which is an amazing Facebook group run by Chelsea Homer and a wonderful board. They do events up and down, down the Wasatch Front. Thrive, you can go thrivebeyondreligion.com and there's still local Thrive communities listed on a map there. You can go to Reddit, the Ex Mormon Reddit and the Ex Mormon Reddit every week posts local ex Mormon or post religious meetup groups on the Ex Mormon Reddit. You can also go to the Mormon Stories podcast Facebook community. There's a lot of. And you can just go to Facebook and type in like, literally if you go to like Billings Ex Mormon or like SoCal post Mormon, you just do a couple little queries on Facebook or on Meetup, you're likely going to find Utah Valley has an amazing post Mormon community. So just with a little bit of searching, you could almost always find a starting point community.

Brittney Hartley [03:44:24] Because the reality is that people are. You're not the only one who's lonely. Like you're coming out of Mormonism. We're all lonely. We all miss some things. We all lost friends and families in this transition. And so yeah, just a little bit of intention and searching on Facebook and some of these resources that John has and then sometimes even just being the person. So for me, there was an ex Mormon group in, in Boise and they would get together on Sundays and get drunk and talk how Sunday talk about how stupid the church was, which is great for like a certain phase of your deconstruction. Maybe that's like what they needed. To me, that's not. That wasn't a sustainable community that I wanted to show up with every Sunday. And so literally I joined a Thomas McConkey kind of retreat that was in the area. And it was just me and one Other couple where we looked at each other and we said we need better friends. Like I don't have friends. Friends who are doing this kind of inner work. And so this group that's, that's now, you know, over 100 people really started with the three of us of just like I them vulnerably saying I need friends and me saying me too. And it started just with that and then I had a friend and then they had a friend and then da da da da da. And now it's, you know, been running more than five years. But all it started with was me and another couple vulnerably saying I don't have the tribe that I want to. I don't have good enough friendships.

John Dehlin [03:45:53] Yeah.

Brittney Hartley [03:45:54] How are like tell me more about you. All it started was that and they'll always be my friends for that vulnerability piece of, of saying that because that, that move of vulnerability that they did and I think they did to me more than me to them them was the piece that started what became the group that was the essential piece was someone being vulnerable and saying I need better friends. Tell me about you. And so if, if you don't have that group around you, that moment is so powerful and so many more people are going to want that than you're ever going to realize once you kind of start something. So take a risk and you'll, you know there's lots of people who have said no when I reveal myself and I'm vulnerable and I take a risk in a relationship. But when you get the people who say yes in those moments of vulnerability, it makes all the no's just so worth it because intimate relationships is one of the best things on this side of life is how naked and real I can be with people pe with my people that I never could have imagined that level of intimacy and love. It's worth whisking for.

John Dehlin [03:47:11] Brock writes post and host, not post and coast. That's what Brock says.

Brittney Hartley [03:47:17] Did I say post and coast?

John Dehlin [03:47:18] No, no, no. It's just like a saying.

Brittney Hartley [03:47:20] Oh okay.

John Dehlin [03:47:20] They're basically saying don't just sit on your laurels. Create that group.

Brittney Hartley [03:47:24] I think that's a Brock saying.

John Dehlin [03:47:26] Beautiful. Well yeah. So the, the website is nonsense spirituality.com I'll just throw a bone. Margi does coaching too. Her, her website is beautyinthenow.org she's great. She'll never plug herself. And there is a thrive St. George coming up I believe in early March. So a lot of cool speakers are going to be there if you, you want to go to St. George or you want to, you know, do a southern Utah kind of late winter, early spring get together. I'll probably be there. It would be fun to have you. But there's just so in Arizona, Idaho, Oregon, California, there are so many post Mormon groups or progressive Mormon groups or whatever. We should, we should mention Restore. Like there's this amazing annual conference now called RESTORE that had 3500 people attending just a month or two ago. And I don't know if they're. If they dare create local communities because that can be alarming to the Brethren, the Mormon Church leaders. But there's got to be progressive and liberal Mormon book clubs and meetup groups. And I'm guessing there's the podcast Faith Matters that you can check out to try and find community as well. If you're a progressive library, liberal Mormon, there's Waters of Mormon, which is a Facebook group for liberal progressive Mormons. I started it under a different name. Now it's called Waters of Mormon. Yeah, there's a place for you friends

Brittney Hartley [03:48:57] with one of the moderators for, for Waters of Mormon now. But yeah, so there's lots going on because people are looking for this. But the, the barrier between you and this place is a risk. Like, it's always going to be a risk. You're going to have to show up to a new room with new people and share your story. And I get that that is scary and vulnerable, but there is no other way to get the kind of friendships that are available to you on this side of life. Unless you take a risk, it's not ever going to be given to you. We've looked at secular community and secular churches. I've looked at hundreds of them now. There's never going to be a secular ward for you to walk into that's going to just be perfectly made for you. You're really going to have to take a risk and create it. But the good news is that it's going to be okay. You're not. It feels scary, but you don't die. And the benefits really create a life that's just so much more worth living that you don't then end up on your deathbed and regret not taking a risk.

John Dehlin [03:50:04] Did you just say there is no other way

Brittney Hartley [03:50:08] for relationships? I don't think so. There's very few absolutes. I'm not a Sith Lord. There are very few absolutes in this world. But if there were one, it would be that. I don't think you can have intimacy without vulnerability, without taking a risk. I don't think you can get it.

Margi Dehlin [03:50:22] All the yeses. Yeah.

Farewell, Resources, and Encouragement

John Dehlin [03:50:23] All right, well, Brittney Hartley, thank you so much for coming on Mormon Stories and for all your great work. We're cheering you on and we'd love to have you back back to do some collabs.

Brittney Hartley [03:50:33] Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you so much. I enjoyed this.

John Dehlin [03:50:36] And just really quickly, if you have just 30 more seconds. We're losing donors. We lose them every year, but, you know, we're at a space where we're starting to think about services we may need to cut because we haven't been plugging donations like we normally do, and we're not replacing the donors that are moving on. So I'm going to just make a quick plea. We talk about super chats sometimes or other things. The most important way we stay alive on Mormon Stories at the Open Stories foundation is to get these recurring monthly donors. They go up to MormonStories.org, click on the donate button, and they become monthly donors. We need your support. If you and people like you who value this content will step up and become monthly donors, we can keep providing this content and these resources.

Brittney Hartley [03:51:30] Can I say something, John?

John Dehlin [03:51:31] Yeah, sure.

Brittney Hartley [03:51:32] I used to be really skittish in this space about, you know, this is a job of mine. So I'm asking for money for my. For my courses or for, you know, when I'm podcasting. And at the beginning, I was really skittish about it because I don't, you know, I don't want to ever be one of those gurus that's just kind of doing this work and saying these things so that they do it for the money. I was really scared of, like, becoming that I was just really skittish about all things money, especially kind of after Mormonism and paying tithing and all of that. And it wasn't until someone showed me that the only way that secular spirituality and healthy spirituality has a chance in this world is if it's supported monetarily. Which means that if the race is is religion with ultimate resources and all this money flowing into and the church has billions of dollars, and yet outside of the world, outside of that world, people trying to do healthy spirituality are doing it part time, and they're doing it after kind of their day job, and they are have to do it for free, right? So that, you know, they have to have a day job in order to do it, religion will always win.

Margi Dehlin [03:52:43] Right?

Brittney Hartley [03:52:44] The money will always win. It just has more resources. And so one of the best ways, and this really changed my perspective, one of the best Ways to combat toxic spirituality and support healthy spirituality is to take the 10% and send it to voices that you appreciate in the world.

Margi Dehlin [03:53:03] Right.

Brittney Hartley [03:53:04] And that is actually a thing that helps shift the conversation and it helps shift the power dynamic. And so I have no shame now in what John just did and asking for support because if you're someone who watches a podcast over and over and over and you are getting years of therapy in this content, I think it has value in this world and I think you should support it. And so now I still give 10% of my income and I give it to the voices in this world that I want more of. And it's actually kind of voting with your money. Right. And so I know the money thing is really weird, especially in spirituality. There's so many scams. I have just like an. I have, I think, 25 impersonators on TikTok taking my content, trying to send people readings and psychic things for money. It's a really icky world, the spirituality and money. But I think if you find voices that are actually helping, that they need to be supported monetarily or else they have no chance against some of the religions that are able to be so culty that they're able to get so much more money. And it's just never going to be a fair fight unless we're all supporting the voices that you guys want to hear more Mormon stories or almost awaken podcast or whatever is working for you. I. I really think that one of the ways we do good in this world is, is by supporting the voices that most that you most want to hear. World.

John Dehlin [03:54:31] Thank you.

Margi Dehlin [03:54:32] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:54:33] All right, one final comment. Emily writes, love the beard, John. Thank you. This is no shave November. Yeah, I'm gonna keep it for a while, but Margi's blessed the beard. Oh, you bless the beard.

Margi Dehlin [03:54:46] Not that you need my blessing, but I do like it.

John Dehlin [03:54:50] Well, thanks. Thanks. And no, I don't color my hair. For some reason my beard is gray, but my hair is brown and that's. That's just the way I'm built. So anyway, no more hair dyeing conspiracy theories. Thanks for joining us. No nonsense spirituality. When are you going to do your book?

Brittney Hartley [03:55:06] I do have a book about all of this coming out. I just finished it and I'm working with an agent to find a publisher currently. So I do have. I didn't in my story mention that I wrote a book on Mormon philosophy called Mormon Philosophy Simplified. And it was supported by, you know, Dan Witherspoon and James McLaughlin and some of the people from the Society of Mormon Philosophy and Theology. So somewhere in that journey, part of my process was to write a book on.

Margi Dehlin [03:55:35] You also published a book, Mormon Philosophy,

Brittney Hartley [03:55:39] because that was kind of my way of processing what Mormonism is so that I could make sense of it. So I have published one book before. I don't talk about it anymore. It was just something I left behind in my Mormon era. Yeah, it's not on my website. I don't promote it anymore. But I did just finish a new book kind of about this space and secular spirituality and tools and am working to look for a publisher at this point.

Margi Dehlin [03:56:02] Do you have a title for it?

Brittney Hartley [03:56:04] I mean, it might be just like no nonsense spirituality, just because that's kind of my brand, but it might just be kind of secular spirituality. All the twins tools without the woo or something like that. Just how can we get these tools? No truth claims required. No belief in the unbelievable required. Because that's a hoop that as Mormons, we're just not going to jump through that hoop again. We've been burned. Too bad. But there are tools here that make life better.

Margi Dehlin [03:56:32] Well, we will be looking for it.

Brittney Hartley [03:56:33] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [03:56:33] Thank you.

John Dehlin [03:56:35] All right. Thanks, Brett Hartley. Thanks to everyone again, MormonStories.org become a monthly donor. No nonsense spirituality. BeautyInTheNow.org Mormonism live all the good things Nemo the Mormon like. Support all the good initiatives out there.

Margi Dehlin [03:56:50] Black menaces.

John Dehlin [03:56:51] Black menaces. Yeah, Girls Camp. Like so many good worthy efforts. Pay your 10% tithing. Just pay it to the voices and initiatives you want to support. I love that. Thanks everyone for joining us today. We've loved our live stream. Thanks to Maven for moderating the chats and Julia for doing the time codes and show notes and the shorts. Thanks to Gerardo who does our thumbnails and strategy and all sorts of other things. Thanks to our board Thanksgiving. Thanks to all. Thanks to you, our donors who make all this possible. We have lots of good stuff coming up the end of this year and next year. So be kind to each other. Be good to each other. We'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories Podcast. Take care, everybody.

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