Introduction and Guest Welcome

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 January 6, 2023. Happy New Year. We are so excited for kicking off the new year with a really exciting Mormon Stories podcast episode. Today we are going to be discussing a new book that has recently been released in the United States and will be coming to the UK and elsewhere hopefully soon. The book is called the Making of Ex Christian America by Stephen Bullivant. I hope I said that right. He holds professorial positions at St Mary's University, London and University of Notre Dame, Sydney. He has doctorates in Theology, Oxford 2009 and Sociology, Warwick, 2019. His studies of contemporary non religiosity have received wide international coverage including from the BBC, New York Times, Economist, Financial Times and Der Spiegel. I hope I pronounced that right.

Stephen Bullivant [00:00:58] And Mormon Stories, most important.

John Dehlin [00:01:00] And Mormon Stories. Thanks, Stephen. I should say, Dr. Stephen.

Stephen Bullivant [00:01:04] That's going to be added. That's going to be added front. The first thing that's going to be on that list.

John Dehlin [00:01:09] I love it. Yeah, it's like us, the New York Times, Financial Times. All right there.

Stephen Bullivant [00:01:13] I'll probably get rid of the New York Times now.

John Dehlin [00:01:16] We bumped the New York Times. I love it. I should say I'll just read a little bit about the non vert's description. The United States is in the midst of a religious revolution, or perhaps it is better to say a non religious revolution. Around A quarter of U.S. adults now say they have no religion in the United States through the Pew Foundation. These are my words. This is called the rise of the nones. N o N E s that the Pew foundation has kind of popularized. I'll go on to read the description. The great majority of these religious nuns also say that they used to belong to a religion but no longer do. These are the nonverts think converts. But from having religion to having none. There are currently 59 million of them in the United States. So the book Nonverts explores who they are and why they joined the rising tide of the ex religious. And so we are super excited to have I'll, I'll say Stephen or Dr. Bullivant here, but I do want to bring on my colleague, my partner in truth and righteousness, Nemo the Mormon. Hey Nemo.

Nemo [00:02:18] Hey everyone. How you doing?

John Dehlin [00:02:19] Nemo runs the NEMO the Mormon YouTube channel. And also happy birthday. I apparently, I hope you don't mind me saying, Nemo's birthday is January 1st. So you're what, 26?

Nemo [00:02:30] Is that what you said I'm 26 now. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:02:33] Which basically means I can retire. If you're. If you're as brilliant as you are at 26, I may as well just retire at 53.

Nemo [00:02:42] Well, I am retiring, you know, so that's fine. Not from this. No one panic. But. Yeah, well, my work and YouTube balance is being redressed, shall we say.

John Dehlin [00:02:54] I love it. Well, Nemo, I asked you to help kind of produce and arrange this. So let me hand it over to you to talk about kind of why you're so excited and then you can give an additional introduction to Stephen.

Nemo [00:03:07] Well, I'm always really excited when actual experts can be consulted on things because I am not one.

John Dehlin [00:03:14] Why are you snickering, Stephen? You're snickering.

Stephen Bullivant [00:03:17] Well, I was just the only reason that my. I've got four children. The an 8 year old daughter who only watches YouTube and will only listen to anything I say because I'm on YouTube and she asked me to give her a shout out. So if she is watching, I just wanted to remember those words. It applies to everything. It applies to everything that, that I talk about in the day.

John Dehlin [00:03:40] Yeah. Steven's daughter. Let us be the authority. That Steven is a cool dad. If you don't. If you don't think so, we can be the authority. Okay, Nemo, back to you. Sorry about that.

Nemo [00:03:49] No worries. But it's always good when you can consult actual experts who have their ideas and everything backed up by research and they can talk you through that research and you can pick their brains and so when the topic of why people are leaving the Mormon Church, which is such a critical issue right now, when that comes up and we have an expert on tap to talk to about that, that's exciting.

John Dehlin [00:04:10] Yeah, absolutely. All right, so Stephen, I guess we've given a little bit of a brief intro, but why don't we have you introduce yourself if you don't.

Stephen Bullivant's Background and Research

Stephen Bullivant [00:04:19] Sure. So I'm British, you probably guessed that. I do two things mostly like most of my. The research and the teaching I do is mainly sociology of religion. Now that's just the way things have panned out. And the department I'm in, you know, I'm kind of the religious studies guy. There's plenty of other people who can do kind of like proper theology. My background was originally in Catholic systematic dogmatic, as we call it, theology. But then as I was doing my doctorate on dogmatic theology, on looking specifically at the Catholic engagement with atheism and unbelief and agnosticism and secularity, beginning in the 1960s onwards, I realized that if I was going to do a doctorate on the theology of anything, I'd need to kind of read up on, you know, the, the non theological literature on that thing. So if it was, you know, the Catholic, the Judaism or the Catholic theology of football, then, you know, I'd want to read the philosophy of football, the philosophy of Judaism, you know, the sociology, the anthropology, the psychology. Turned out at the time that there was surprisingly little work done in the social sciences. Looking at atheism, this was like. I began my postgrad work just before the new. You remember the new atheism. It's not that new anymore, but you know, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens suddenly had these massive million selling, best selling books in the United States. And it was just at this time when it hadn't been anyone's particular kind of focus for a long time, suddenly it was becoming interesting again and there was this kind of vacuum of, you know, work to be done. And so I ended up stepping very kind of naively at first, but, you know, obviously, you know, learning on the job, as it were. And, and then that became more and more of what I did and I've ended up getting a doctorate in sociology and it's become more and more of what I do. So the Non Verts book that we're talking about is, is very deeply rooted in this kind of sociology perspective. And, and so that's what I do. So I'm a university college professor who teaches mostly sociology of religion. I'm late 30s, I've got four kids, you know, and, and, you know, very little else of interest to say about me, frankly.

Nemo [00:06:57] I like how he says that. He just, you know, just. And so I ended up getting a PhD, right, because you just, you just end up getting a doctor by accident. They just, they just slip and hand you the certificate, right?

Stephen Bullivant [00:07:11] They kind of do, you know. Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:07:15] I mean, come on, Nemo, some, you know, get a PhD.

Nemo [00:07:17] I mean, I am, I'm the least qualified person in this room. I have a, I have a bachelor's. That's it.

John Dehlin [00:07:23] Well, just go get one, brother.

Stephen Bullivant [00:07:25] Yeah.

Nemo [00:07:28] Giving them away.

Why People Leave Religion

John Dehlin [00:07:31] All right. Well, I guess one thing I forgot to mention in the introduction is, is that the focus for today is on kind of why Mormons leave. That's kind of the working title because of course in the Mormon Stories podcast audience, Stephen, we're all kind of Kremlin watching the Mormon Church to try and see, you know, what his future is. But it's also okay to kind of start at a macro level and kind of zoom into Mormonism. So. So I guess we've got a million questions, but Stephen, is there any context you want to provide at kind of the 500 foot view that then we can use to jump into Mormonism discuss?

Stephen Bullivant [00:08:15] Yeah, I mean, so the book isn't about living. Excellent books about Mormonism. I've read many of them. This isn't a book about ex Mormons, except that ex Mormons ended up being kind of centered in the book. So the. It's a book that's tried. It's basically trying to write. You know, there's been all this kind of talk of the rise of the nons, you know, and it's from kind of 8% into the late 90s when, you know, when Western Europe, when Britain is kind of at like 40, 50 people who say they have no religion now, you know, France, you know, all sorts of modern, Western, industrialized kind of, you know, democracies, you get this kind of secularization that hits. And there's a big debate about when it happens, why it happens, but, you know, by the time you're getting into the 70s, 80s, 90s, it's a pretty big thing. Except in America now, the. There was always this kind of talk of like American exceptionalism. You got Christian America versus Godless Europe, you know, kind of. Which one's the weird one? Is it that Western Europe is weird or is it that America's weird? But it, you know, there was this sense that, well, if America hasn't secularized yet, then, then it. Then there's no reason to think that it will. And then suddenly. And difference. We might talk about this, but different surveys, depending on how they ask the question, end up kind of, you know, charting the phenomenon beginning at slightly different times, all within the 1990s, but certainly by the late 90s, the. And certainly going into the 2000s, the proportion of the population who say they have no religion starts to rise and rise and rise and rise and rise. So now, I mean, now it's probably around a third of the adult population. The data set I particularly focus on in nonverts, which by now is quite conservative, is, you know, looking at about a quarter of the adult population, which is about 60 million people. I mean, this is vast numbers. So the book is trying to give a kind of a. On the one hand, a readable, accessible, entertaining book for kind of normal people, if I might put it like that account of how this has happened and to do it in a more nuanced way than you know, other attempts to do that out there, you know, that I've seen now. Hey, yeah, sorry, go ahead.

John Dehlin [00:10:58] No, no, no, I love it. I love it. And will you put a pin in exactly where you wanted to go? Because I am very, very interested in exactly where your brain takes this discussion. But I do have a quick question, if it's okay. So, you know, I've heard about kind of secular, secular Western Europe my whole adult life. Can you. I'm sure there's been discussion and analysis of, like, when Western Europe was mostly or even like 80 to 90% religious. And, like, what were the factors that led to the secularization of Europe? Let's just say 40, 50 years before these trends start in the U.S. what is understood about what secularized Western Europe.

Secularization in Western Europe

Stephen Bullivant [00:11:45] Yeah, well, I mean, there's this. That's an excellent question, and it's one of the great debates. One of the problems we have is that we don't have kind of modern poll. You know, Gallup doesn't come along until, like, you know, the 1930s or whatever. Like, we don't get kind of modern opinion polling that asks the question. So we're relying on kind of less easy to interpret data, but certainly after the Second World War. And I wrote a book before nonverts. Well, a few books before nonverts, actually, but a book came out in 2019 called Mass Exodus, which is looking specifically the Catholic story in Britain and America. And the critical thing is the. It's the baby boomers, and everyone blames the baby boomers for everything. And the argument is that actually the Second World War had this hugely disruptive effect over the normal kind of transmission of religion. You know, like, you know, you were brought up Catholic because your parents were and, you know, their parents were, and that kind of stuff. The argument is, is that the Second World War, especially in Europe, changes normal social life in all sorts of ways, and that the children born after the Second World War are brought up in a very different world than their parents were for all sorts of reasons. This is to do with, especially in Europe, you get the kind of. The beginning of these kind of socialized medicine, welfare states. You get the. The opportunity for. This is a thing in Britain, you know, that the baby boom generation who come of age in the 1960s are the first, often the very first of their generation to be able to go off to university if they're from the working classes, which therefore means that you're far more likely to kind of, you know, move away from the kind of, you know, the Catholic, the Classic example is kind of like Liverpool Irish Catholic ghettos, if you like. You know, you're far more likely to move out, move away from parents, meet people who aren't from your particular kind of bubble. And then the 60s hits, which has all sorts of effects on, you know, sexual mores, on, on all sorts of kind of moral and social attitudes. And so there's a kind of a big story in Britain, I think that the Second World War and particularly the generation after it, and then obviously the children of that generation are then raised in an even less religious context to the one that their parents were. And then it kind of, you get this kind of generational effect. So with, with, with Catholics and I think we're seeing this with Mormons too. I know this is about Mormonism, let's talk about Mormons. That you get this kind of second generation effect of kind of a cultural, the people who leave have a kind of a cultural attachment because they were raised in it and it was such a big part of who they were growing up. So even if, even if you've kind of moved away, even if you're not quite sure what you believe, even if you're kind of like, well, I certainly don't believe that you still can't, not unless you have a very kind of antagonistic kind of anti reaction, then you know, you're far less committed than your parents were, far less kind of intentional in the upbringing of your children, partly because you're often now living in a much less kind of Mormon world than you were brought up in if you've moved away. But obviously that kind of cultural belonging, you know, you'll still bring your kids up in a sort of a Catholic way, but a far less intensive Catholic way as you were brought up. And you know, you won't be going to mass every Sunday and that kind of stuff, except when your parents around. But your kids, you know, when they grow up and become young adults, you know they're going to possibly not even. It won't mean as much to them, you know, and they've been brought up in a very much more secular world and certainly they a may not kind of identify even as Catholics by then, but certainly their kids, it'll be one further remove and it'll be even less and it would just won't mean anything to them. And especially by this time you get kind of like all these horror stories and there's plenty of horror stories in the Catholic Church, you know, that you might not, you may no longer want to associate yourself with the brand so there's one thing to say that, you know, all my family are kind of, you know, we trace up way back to Donegal and, you know, we're Irish Catholic and, you know, St. Patrick's Day is a big thing. And it's a, you know, it's a real kind of family pride. Well, actually, when you get a sexual abuse crisis, then there's less pride to be had in that kind of Catholic cultural belonging. So we're beginning to see that now. Well, we've been seeing that for quite a long time. But that kind of, you know, the generations now, unless they've kind of booked that trend, you know, these kids are just kind of completely normal.

Nemo [00:16:51] It seems like Mormonism kind of jumped, like it held off a generation. So you've got that decline coming after the Second World War and into the 60s. But then Mormonism almost started to ramp up in the UK during that time, and it's now seeing its decline later. And I wonder whether it was this shifting away from those religious values of, you know, the kind of the Catholic Church or whatever, but not wanting to go completely off the rails and maybe moving to Mormonism. You've got these exciting Americans coming up, selling you this, this idea of something different and new in a big community and that sort of stuff. And then I just wonder whether that's why you've got that almost staggered shift when everyone's declined in Mormons were rising Nemo.

John Dehlin [00:17:31] You're wondering if Mormonism filled the vacuum that general religious defection created.

Stephen Bullivant [00:17:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:17:38] Okay.

Stephen Bullivant [00:17:38] Within the uk Actually, I don't know the UK Mormon context as well. I'm fascinated by it. I've got a student who's converting to Mormonism at the moment.

Nemo [00:17:48] Adopted.

John Dehlin [00:17:49] Yeah, send them, send them to our podcast. Stephen.

Stephen Bullivant [00:17:53] Yeah, just a brilliant undergraduate student who's just finished, who, you know, raised British race Mormon and. But certainly. And we're going to talk about this with America because what. What you find is that. That you're going to get certain communities that book. That general trend for longer. Evangelicals and Mormons are a very good example in the States particularly, but. But the ability to create a kind of a subcultural world. Having more kids than the average helps as well. But also was having some. You know, there's a big story about the decline of the mainline and that's a much bigger part of the picture in Britain because of the Church of England. But, you know, if you're wanting something religious, then you're going to go to Catholicism or orthodoxy or more, you know, you're Going to go to somewhere where there's a kind of a real kind of religious thing to believe if you want that. And it. That may well be the case with British Mormonism. And I think you're right about stressing the American angle as well, because, you know, Americans are cool. Like, you know, and this has always been, you know, this is the case of the 80s, in the 90s, you know, America was cool. It's my daughters, you know, watching. I've talked about YouTube, you know, YouTube, you know, America, tick tock, YouTube. America is cool. And they want to go to America. They want to do the, you know, whenever they sort of film themselves, they always put an American accent. So there is this kind of cultural cachet America. And I think the Book of Mormon musical makes a big thing about this as well. And so it's possible that within the British context that that kind of American cool does help. But I think there's other things is that. And one of the things that Mormons are brilliant at and even outside of kind of the. What's it called? The sort of. The Jello.

John Dehlin [00:19:57] Jello belt.

Stephen Bullivant [00:19:58] Belt, right.

Nemo [00:19:59] Green jello belt.

Stephen Bullivant [00:20:00] Yeah, exactly. Even outside of that, you know, they're brilliant at creating these kind of subcultures where, you know, you're. Even if you, your neighbors aren't Mormon, you know, you're the only Mormon in your school. Nevertheless, your social life is deeply connected with other Mormons. You know, your parish is a far bigger part of your social religious life than it is for, you know, Anglican members of their local parish or Catholic members of their local parish.

Nemo [00:20:31] So I think it's the several meetings a week and, you know, all the extracurriculars rather than just church on a Sunday.

Stephen Bullivant [00:20:38] Well, this is the thing. This is what keeps people in. And, you know, the biggest predictor of, you know, if a child will grow up to be religious as an adult is religious practice during childhood. So, you know, those traditions that kind of give you a big dose in childhood. Yes. There's more to kind of react to if you then, you know, leave. And it's a much more dramatic kind of thing to kind of leave. It's a far more dramatic thing to leave Mormonism or kind of the Jehovah's Witness or, you know, Catholicism than it is to like, leave Anglicanism or, you know, kind of Presbyterianism. Right, but. But it also does keep people in because that's the way there's all sorts of studies of kind of religious psychology. But, you know, this is how socialization works.

World Wars and the Decline of Religion

John Dehlin [00:21:27] I do wonder and we're going back to kind of just this question about the secularization of Europe. I wonder if it, if a big part of it is having a war on, having a world war or multiple world wars on your soil. Yeah, because when America, you know, we were involved in several wars, but we were always sending our troops over there. And I wonder if there's something about the immediacy of mass, of multiple world wars, you know, bombs dropping on your house sort of thing that leads to secularization just around the theodicy question of like, if God is all powerful and good, why isn't he answering our prayers? I wonder if there's something about the world wars that, that contributed to the, to the death of religiosity in Western Europe. Is that a stretch?

Stephen Bullivant [00:22:19] You know, like any village in, in England will have, well, one or two war memorials that will list, you know, the young men of that village and First World War, Second World War, and there's dozens of names on them who died. I mean, you know, every little village in the UK will, will have a war memorial. And you just, and you know, you look at it and it's like, you know, there's, there's 4, 4 18, you know, 4 18, 19, 20 year olds with the same surname, you know, who, who die in the, in the Great War, either First World War. So I think the, there was a kind of, you know, obviously there was this kind of massive kind of psychological, just catastrophe. But also the, the Second World War, that's the real kind of break, I think. But also it, you know, it wasn't just the men who went away to war. The women went away to, you know, to either work the land or to go and work in munitions factories. And if you were brought up in your little kind of, you know, whatever bubble, Catholic bubble or, you know, Anglican bubble or whatever. You didn't know it was an Anglican bubble because it was, it was everywhere except for the bubbles. But you know, there's a sense in which it was a big bubble the first time that you're kind of associating and making friends with people who aren't, you know, from your very immediate neighborhood. And then you get all these kind of flashy American GIs as well, who, you know, kind of turning heads as well. But also after the war, you know, our cities just get bombed. So the inner city kind of tight knit, you know, urban communities built around parishes and you know, like the Catholic geography of cities, you've got like in places in the northeast of the U.S. places like Pittsburgh, places like Philadelphia, places like New York, you know, you've got a Catholic parish, you know, every kind of couple of streets now once those, you know, cities get bombed out and then the rebuilding happens in the suburbs. So, you know, people are moving out of these kind of ghettos, people are moving into a very different world. And obviously that level of social disruption just didn't happen in America. I'm not saying there wasn't a lot of social disruption, but it wasn't that kind of, you know, unless you lived at kind of, you know, next to Pearl harbor. You know, it wasn't that your house was destroyed or that, you know, the slums that you lived in. Suburbanization did happen in the US but it, it wasn't because, you know, you were living in this kind of, you know, bleak kind of, you know, post apocalyptic hellscape, you know, which many of our major cities were, you know, by 1945. You know, and then you talk to, you know, my parents generation, you know, you know, we're living in, you know, we're playing in the bombed out ruin of cities.

Nemo [00:25:29] My dad talks about growing up in Liverpool in the 50s and it still wasn't recovered. You know, they used to play on old places where houses used to be.

Stephen Bullivant [00:25:39] Yeah. And every so often, every so often they'd find an unexploded bomb.

Nemo [00:25:42] And you know, you know, this was great fun.

Stephen Bullivant [00:25:46] Was not unknown. I, I grew up in, in the northwest, in the Lake district in the 1980s. It was not unknown for like mines to wash up on the beach from the Second World War. And you know, the bomb disposal crew would kind of, you know, mobilize. You know, this is. Yeah. So I mean, just to emphasize that the, the Second World War and the First World War, you know, was very different. And of course that's in Britain. I mean, you know, we weren't ever invaded. I mean, imagine what it was like in Belgium, you know, in France or you know, the Netherlands, somewhere like that. You know, that was really kind of ground zero. I mean, probably not the, not a good metaphor to use, but actually, you know, this was a war zone, a literal war zone.

John Dehlin [00:26:30] And here I am arguing against my own point. But you also hear kind of the saying, there's no atheists in foxholes, that somehow war brings out the religious in us all. And so I'm trying to decide whether war would contribute heavily to secularization. I know that the secularization of Jews, Judaism really accelerated after the Holocaust, as far as I understand it. So on the one hand, there's the argument that War would accelerate secularization. But then there's always the, you know, the understanding that heavy levels of adversity or strife or pain or suffering make people more religious. So I'm more confused now than I was 20 minutes ago.

Stephen Bullivant [00:27:12] But it's the next generation because the baby boomers have like, you know, the most privileged, you know, war free, you know, upbringing and this new prosperity. And, you know, it was obviously even more so in the States. You get this kind of post in post war boom, this kind of great economic growth. You know, we still had a rationing into the mid-50s. You know, one of the things I quote in the mass Exodus book is that, you know, Americans invented the all you can eat buffet in California in something like 1954. And you know, that was the year that like meat and sugar stopped being rationed in Britain.

Nemo [00:27:53] The Mormon temple was built in 1950s.

Stephen Bullivant [00:27:56] Sure. The secularization is, is the next generation. But you're right that there's no kind of obvious, you know, that the kind of greatest generation, as we call them, you know, there's no kind of obvious, you know, they're still the most religious. And obviously we're getting to the point now where they've. Queen Elizabeth just died, you know, and you know, she helped in the war effort, you know, that my grandparents generation, you know, there's very few of them left now. But actually that means that the reason why, you know, every year we, you know, the non religion goes up is that it's partly generational replacement. The oldest and most religious generation have died off and every generation after them is much less religious. So it's that baby boom generation who kind of Everything, everything's different for that generation.

John Dehlin [00:28:50] Yeah. Okay. And so Nemo, I don't know if this, this flagged. Flagged a notice in your mind, but, but, but the Book of Mormon does predict that prosperity leads to a loss of faith, doesn't it?

Nemo [00:29:07] I was thinking, at what point of the apostasy cycle are we in at the moment?

John Dehlin [00:29:12] Yeah. Did you know, Stephen, that you're just merely quoting Joseph Smith when you talk about.

Stephen Bullivant [00:29:17] I didn't know that. I did not. But again, I mean, Book of Mormon was a fascinating document, but I think

Nemo [00:29:23] the Book of Mormon's right there in a sense that one of the things I discovered on my mission when I was out trying to convert people is I was in Surrey and Sussex. Very wealthy people don't tend to need religion. If you're not feeling like you're in

Stephen Bullivant [00:29:36] need of something as they sent you.

Nemo [00:29:38] Yeah, that's as far away as they sent me. So yeah, the people aren't in need of religion because they've got everything that they feel they need. So you go to someone's mansion and you're like, oh, do you need God? Nah, I got a Ferrari.

The Welfare State and Post-War Secularization

Stephen Bullivant [00:29:51] Well, actually, this is one of the other big arguments and kind of post war secularization is the, the rise of the welfare state, you know, the rise of this kind of social safety net. The fact that so much that used to be provided by the churches is taken into the hands of the state means that the kind, it's often called existential security, which is the kind of the phrase that gets the jargon that gets used in the sociological literature. But this is one of the arguments as to why it is that Western Europe becomes much less religious than many other parts of the world. And the argument always is that even though America is the most kind of prosperous, the disparity between the rich and the poor and the lack of a safety net and you know, the numbers of people who, you know, you know, don't have access to, you know, who aren't insured for health care and you know, like the kind of, like if things go badly, they can go really badly in a way that they can't go quite so badly in Western Europe. I don't want to kind of idealize this, but one of the arguments is that kind of existential kind of fear is a bigger part of the post war American story than it is in at least parts of Western Europe. So again, that's one of the other big arguments that gets made is that kind of people's people live a far more comfortable life after the Second World War generation. That first generation, the baby boom generation, you know, these are often, you know, the first. Obviously you get things like car, all sorts of kind of cool stuff that kind of come down in the 50s and 60s. But you know, this is very often the first generation who come to university, for example, you know, the first generation who've kind of been homeowners. There's all sorts of things that contribute to this generation and their descendants being kind of cushioned from the, the harsh existential realities that, you know, probably many of their previous generations hadn't had to, you know, had, had had kind of faced on a much, you know, infant mortality, you know, goes down. There's all sorts of things like this that, that kind of all lessened. And again, there's, there's a huge debate around sociology, religion. But this is one of the factors that is often argued as to Kind of playing into sexualization. Okay, Joseph Smith has many sociological friends in this respect.

How Social Scientists Assess Secularization

John Dehlin [00:32:42] Before we dive into Mormonism, how do sociologists, psychologists, social scientists, how do they assess the benefit or cost of the secularization of Western Europe? Do they view it as having overall been a good thing, a bad thing? Communities, mental health, Is it viewed poorly or. Or is it celebrated?

Stephen Bullivant [00:33:11] Well, it's different. I mean, sociologists, social scientists are the most secular of all the. You know, you often think, well, it must be the physicists, there's a social scientist. The anthropologists, sociologists are the most atheistic of all academics. Right. So you do get, and there's been some really interesting work done in the States. Christian Smith wrote an excellent book. There's been other really interesting work done on this kind of secular bias that you get within sociology. Okay. And this goes right back to Freud, Marx, Comte, Durkheim, Weber, all of whom were, you know, varying degrees and in different ways, kind of non religious and, you know, with a kind of a. Kind of a, you know, obviously in different ways, but, you know, with and meant it. So there's always this argument that kind of the sociology and anthropologists are biased against religion. Now, you know, obviously it's a big field and there's pocket. You know, there's different. So, you know, this is kind of like, you know, a very big picture. Generally speaking, you know, I think the social sciences, see, it's hard to generalize. I mean, you do get social scientists who think that, well, actually, you know, we've lost a lot. You know, we've lost all sorts of social capital, you know, kind of Robert Putnam kind of social capital kind of stuff around, you know, churches, irrespective of, you know, truth claims, which sociologists and anthropologists always like to bracket out. You know, you do lose something when, you know, these kind of, you know, critical hubs of social community and belonging to dissipate. You know, there's a huge literature looking at religion and mental health and religion and health generally that suggests that, you know, more religious people have better health outcomes in all, you know, kind of, you know, live longer and they are happier and all sorts of stuff. Now, sociologists tend to say, well, actually that's not the religion. That's sort of things that aren't the religion but are associated with the religion. So it's not religion, it's the community belonging. It's not religion, it's the kind of whatever. So, you know, you often get this kind of, well, we need to kind of build secular. And no one, no, you Know, few, few sociologists are saying what we need to do is bring back, bring back God and re. Evangelize the country. But they might say something like well okay, we don't have parish churches, but we should do more about community. Community organizing, that's the kind of the big thing in America, isn't it? Community organizing.

Nemo [00:35:50] But the cynic looks at it and just says, well people only really get together and join together in a community. They're afraid of God. So.

Stephen Bullivant [00:35:56] Well, the thing is that people only join together if they actually care about the thing that they're joining together for. It's very difficult to build community for the sake of community. People will band together in all sorts of ways. I talk about this in the book around all sorts of, kind of weird niche interests. It doesn't have to be religious. I talk about Bronies in the book, which we might talk about. I talk about Chris Gaines fan. Chris Gaines fandom, which dates me rather in the book, in fact, Nemo has no idea who Chris Gaines is.

Nemo [00:36:25] Who's this?

Stephen Bullivant [00:36:26] It's an alter. It's a, it's a soft rock alter ego of the country singer Garth Brooks. A short lived.

Nemo [00:36:33] Right.

Stephen Bullivant [00:36:34] Alter ego of the country singer Goth Brooks. Okay, exactly. So I've just lost, you know, all, you know, readers of Non verse are just completely lost at this point. And you know, so I mean, you know. But one of the arguments is that the Internet and Robert Putnam. Talk about Robert Putnam because he wrote a very famous best selling pop. Well, not pop, but it was popular serious sociology book that was sold vast numbers which is always a dream called Bowling Alone where he was talking about the decline of community and then the kind of all the sorts of negative knock on effects this then has in a society. And one of the things he talks about, and this is like 2001, is that while the, the Internet may be mitigating at least some of this because the Internet allows people to kind of find people who are into their particular kind of interest. I mean this could be like, you know, BMW fans or this could be kind of, you know, foot fetishists or I think. Okay, I don't think Robert put him used that example. I do. But it does allow people to come together. So people will happily hang out with each other. People will happily devote their hours online to arguing about minute points of kind of Star Trek canonicity and timeline. Right. But they won't do that to kind of just hang out with people because it's, because it's good for them. So there is always that thing you can't kind of focus. Exactly. You people are. People will congregate, but they need a shared interest, vision. And obviously religion has for much of society and history, been the thing that brought people together.

America's Delayed Secularization and the Internet

John Dehlin [00:38:22] Got it. Okay. So even though the secularization in Western Europe really started accelerating after World War II, if I got that right, somehow held off, we might even say two generations in the United States. Is that right, Stephen?

Stephen Bullivant [00:38:42] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is, this is the big question. Like, I mean, the 60s, you know, in, you know, you could almost call America the epicenter of the night. You know, the 60s, you know, the kind of all the upheaval, you know, riots, you know, civil rights, Vietnam, you know, women's lib, all sorts of, you know, and like, religiously you get kind of liturgical reforms. In the Catholic Church, you get all sorts of changes. And this battered the mainstream, you know, especially the mainline churches in the Catholic Church, you know, like, you know, attendance starts going down, you know, and, you know, they emerge battered from this. But what you don't get in America, but you do get in Britain and other places is that you get this. You don't get this kind of sudden growing of non religion now in America that only really, it kind of goes up a bit. So if you look at Gallup polls from the 1940s and 50s, it's kind of like 2% of the population say they have no religion. And actually, if you dig into the figures, it looks like a good proportion of those are Chinese immigrants, like they're kind of Confucians or whatever. Right. Well, this isn't a religion, you know, and, and there will be, you know, those non people who were non religious, some of them will be kind of like, you know, conscious atheists or agnostics who've thought about it and have reacted. And, you know, college towns and certain places like Portland, Oregon, are going to be kind of, you know, particular hotspots, but it's still very small and very kind of socially weird. But after the 1960s, it goes to around kind of 7, 8% and stays there for about the next 25 years. You know, it fluctuates a couple of percent or up or down. And it's only at some point in the mid to late 90s and certainly by the early 2000s, that it grows and grows and grows and grows and grows.

John Dehlin [00:40:42] And you may have already, and you, Stephen, sorry, you may have already answered this, but what, what do sociologists, social scientists, what do they, how do they explain America's, you know, United States's ability to kind of fend off that, that secularism. Maybe you've already said it, but, but can you summarize that for us?

Stephen Bullivant [00:41:02] Yeah. So that, I mean there's, you know, again, it's a diverse field, there's all sorts of. One of the arguments is just to say, well, it doesn't need particular, it doesn't really need explaining. It's. It's you who are weird. So, and this is fair. This used to, you kind of think, well this is fair enough because it used to be European sociologists would look at America and say, well, America's not doing what Europe does. And that needs explaining because when is it ever. Well, yeah, you think, right, but so Max Weber at the beginning of the 20th century like goes to America and he does exactly what kind of. I did goes around America, talks to people, you know, that is sort of like, you know, declaims on the state of American religion. Right. And, and this is a classic thing of European intellectuals, like Charles Dickens does it, GK Chesterton does it. Alexis de Tocqueville very famously does it. Right. And, and he comes back and says, well, actually, you know, it may not be, it's, it's very religious now, but obviously because Europe has secularized, then it won't be long until America does because Europe is the kind of the vanguard of civilization, if you like. Right. And it just doesn't happen. And so the argument is, is, well, American sociologists, people like Rodney Stark, for example, Peter Berger eventually would say, well actually maybe Europe's the weird one. Maybe it doesn't need explaining. Maybe we need to explain why Europe secularizes, why other places don't. And there's something to this. Right. So I absolutely agree that, you know, first of all, I don't think America is kind of doing something called Europeanization. I think it can secularize in its own interesting way. Right. Also Europeanize it. You know, like Europe is a very diverse place with very religious and very non religious places often side by side. Okay. We don't need to kind of see as a pattern, but. And it does seem to be that there's something about anglophone, like places like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain that tended to be the vanguard of secularization. So it may well be, I mean, in America is the outlier in those countries. It may well be that, you know, there's something about those that we need to. Why did they secularize so fast?

John Dehlin [00:43:23] Got it, got it.

Stephen Bullivant [00:43:24] But nevertheless, now that America and it really, I mean like you will get very serious far more, you know, far more sort of, you know, starry sociologists, I mean, people like Rodney Stark, who have a huge amount of respect for. He's written a lot on Mormonism, of course.

John Dehlin [00:43:43] Tell our viewers and listeners what he projected Mormon growth rates to look like back in the 80s.

Stephen Bullivant [00:43:49] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, this was, so he kept saying, and this was right when he said it was that, well, if you look at kind of Mormon growth rates, as I've not read the particular paper, he's like, look, more, you know, Mormonism is growing by X percent every 10 years. And every time this has been pointed out, sociologists have said, yeah, but it can't keep doing that. And Rodney Stark rightly comes along and says, yeah, but it does keep doing it. And, and every time you come up with a reason why it's going to stop, then it keeps doing it. So maybe we should kind of be like, you know, the Chicken Little or whatever. You know, maybe we should just stop assuming it's going to stop. Right. And it's going to keep growing and growing and growing and growing. And this is when he starts talking about Mormonism is kind of like the new world religion. You know, it's not an, it's not a new religious movement. A new religious movement is the word that sociologists use because rightly they don't like the word cult. But you know, when they use the word new religious movement, it's what normal people think about cults. And absolutely, you can understand why, especially because they're not new anymore. You know, this kind of term doesn't fit groups like the Seventh Day Adventists or, you know, groups with millions of members worldwide, for example. You know, you know, it seems strange to use these of the same sorts. You know, if I set up a religion tomorrow in Bicester in North Oxfordshire, you'd call it a new religious movement. It seems odd regard that as the same category of thing as, you know, a 200 year old tradition with millions of members worldwide. Okay. But equally, you know, people aren't putting these on the same level as Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, these kind of almost the big religions. Exactly. So Rodney Stark comes along and says, well, actually the way it's going to the numbers, it keeps growing and it keeps growing not only in America where like everyone else has stopped growing, but it's really growing in all parts of the rest of the world. Then you know, there's going to come a point when like Christianity splitting off from Judaism and kind of doing its own thing. And after a certain number of years you say, well, actually, it's no longer kind of a weird variant of Judaism. It's its own thing. They're not. I mean, it. You can absolutely see where the analogy is going to say that. Well, actually, Mormonism is. Is to Christianity, is to Protestantism what Christianity was to Rabbinic Jew.

Mormon Growth Predictions and the Reality

Nemo [00:46:28] Especially. Especially when the numbers, the predictions were 36 million. Absolutely anywhere between 36 and 121 million by 2018.

John Dehlin [00:46:36] Actually, actually, I'm. I'm seeing anywhere between 64 million and 260 million by 2080.

Stephen Bullivant [00:46:44] And if you say, well, actually, this is like there's about. Meant to be about 15 million Jews in the world or something like that. So, like, when you're talking those numbers, you can see why you might say, well, I think there's meant to be about 9 million Mormons in the world at the moment. Maybe I've made that number.

Nemo [00:46:57] The church's own numbers, say 16 million.

Stephen Bullivant [00:46:59] Right. I'm sure you've discussed these. Right. And actually. But actually, this is something we talk about in the book. Who counts and how you count is itself a very interesting question.

Nemo [00:47:11] The Mormon Church does very accurately. They just don't tell anyone what the actual numbers are. Sorry, go on.

Stephen Bullivant [00:47:16] No, but this is.

John Dehlin [00:47:18] I mean, Steve, and while you're eating a drink, we estimate between 4 and 5 million active faithful Mormons in the world.

Nemo [00:47:26] We've got good access to the UK data. We reckon about 12% activity.

Stephen Bullivant [00:47:30] That's really fascinating. Actually. I'd love to talk more about that because this is something that interests me very much because. But equally, you could, if you played this game with other, like Anglicans in the uk, for example, like, if you count people who actually turn up to church. Mm. Very much smaller than the people who. Even the people who get the kids baptized and, you know, kind of tick the box. Right. Catholics, again, again, talked about this in another book, but you know that cultural Catholicism is. Is. Keeps people ticking the box long after they've stopped believing or practicing. But even so, there's plenty of people who. Plenty of people who don't really believe who were on. In church on a Sunday, actually. But actually, lots of people who would absolutely see themselves as Catholic wouldn't. Wouldn't dream of not. You wouldn't dream of not having a Catholic wedding or a Catholic funeral will absolutely get their kids baptized and probably think it important for their grandkids to be baptized, but, you know, won't darken the door of a church very often at all.

Nemo [00:48:35] I think you see a lot more of that in Utah, if you were allowed to. The problem with kind of the Mormon attitude is that it's an all or nothing attitude. But if you allowed secular Mormonism, you would see a lot more of that. Particularly in Utah where essentially someone's entire culture is Mormonism. It's green jello, it's funeral potatoes. It's everything. It's not to reduce your culture, John, to those two things, but it is, it's my culture.

John Dehlin [00:48:58] Wait, I. Wait, Nemo, who's the active, faithful devout Mormon.

Nemo [00:49:02] Well, yeah, that's true but here in the UK you've got something to step away to.

Stephen Bullivant [00:49:07] Yeah, right.

Nemo [00:49:07] You've got, you've got something to step out into. Whereas in, in Utah there isn't necessarily. Although there is a rising counterculture which is exciting.

Stephen Bullivant [00:49:16] I suppose Salt Lake City is, is, is, is different in, in terms of. It allows that kind of more cosmopolitan space. But I mean talking, going back to the non verse book, you know, talking to some of the interviewees who were brought up in kind of southern Idaho, you know, towns where everyone was like, literally one of my interviews says like he, he was eight until he met someone who was like a non Mormon Christian and he rang his mum. Like it was just astounded. And again. But equally you can understand why in those kind of situations either you kind of, you can fall. I mean, and, and I, I don't think it's simply the case that people, you know, don't believe, don't practice, you know, don't believe, but just to conform. But they're kind of complete because I think we're so influenced by people around us, you know that. But although it's possible that you kind of just going through the motions because of family, because of jobs, because of every neighbors, but people who, you know, really can't live like that, move out.

John Dehlin [00:50:20] Yeah.

Stephen Bullivant [00:50:21] And you're right that in Britain that, you know, you don't have to do that, you just stop going. Right, right. And it's, and it, but this used to be the case in those kind, you know, Liver Catholic Liverpool or Catholic Preston or kind of Catholic, you know, Pittsburgh or New York or Philadelphia, you know, like kind of the Catholic ghetto in inverted commas, you know, where all your neighbors were not just Catholic, but probably Italian Catholics or Czech Catholics or Irish Catholics or whatever Catholics. Right. A living in that kind of situation really does help to cement one's own commitment. But also for those who for whatever reason end up wavering or being outcast, then, then you leave because it's just.

Nemo [00:51:21] Can I just pose a quick question? Yeah, on that point. And to kind of ask John this really. Everyone views people, the Brits, as traditionalists. We have these amazing traditions, this pageantry that everyone loves.

Stephen Bullivant [00:51:35] We do, we do a funeral and a royal wedding.

Nemo [00:51:37] Well, we do it well. But America is the land of immigrants. And everyone is so obsessed in America with where they came from or where their family came from before they got to America. And do you suppose that some of America's holding onto its religiosity for so long is to do with people's feeling the need to hold onto their parents traditions and to hold onto their ancestry more than it is about their actual religious belief. And so they identify with their Irish Catholicism, with their Italian Catholicism. They need to hold on to that lineage. Because every American you meet will tell you where in Europe their family comes

Stephen Bullivant [00:52:12] from, apart from England. No one ever like says, oh, you know, I'm eighth generation because we're boring. Yeah, like none of them do. And it's really like. So the, my favorite example of this is the national. I keep talking about Catholic stuff. The national Catholic shrine, whatever in Washington D.C. has like, literally it has a mayor, a chapel to the Our lady of like every single immigrant communities, like favored Mary, you know, Our lady of Knock for Ireland or Our lady of Fatima for Portugal. Right. There's about 50 of these chapels, you know, like Korea, Vietnam, Japan. The only one it doesn't have is England. And it's like, come on, it has Wales, I think, and it has. Ireland doesn't have England. It's like, come on. No one is proud of being English.

Nemo [00:53:02] No. Why should they be?

Stephen Bullivant [00:53:04] Exactly. I've seen Hamilton enough times. You know, there's a history there and it makes sense. But I think you're right that especially that cultural belonging and this is something that comes up when you. In the book. So this. We'll get back to Mormonism. And there's a reason why Mormonism is particularly kind of front and center in the book. But there's four separate kind of deep dive chapters of different kind of denominational worlds. Mormonism, mainline churches, evangelicals and Catholics. And it's really interesting that one of my interviewees was raised kind of Polish Catholic, but you know, like he was Catholic because he was Polish. The parents didn't practice. It was important that they went to Catholic school because they were Polish. And like he's like a real kind of Catholic history buff in the way that many ex Mormons I know are kind of like really into like Nauvoo numismatics or something like that. Right. Right. But there is that kind of ethnic, cultural, family belonging. But again, and I think this changes. And I talked about this earlier in the interview. Well, whatever this is conversation was, the sexual abuse crisis really tarnishes that. You might still say Irish, but the Catholic bit might be something you mentally is something that you're less keen to attach yourself to. It's a bit. It's a bit like. It's very much like this. It's a bit like kind of being culture. What's word like kind of cultural fans of a particular sports team. Right. So like when a particular sports team wins the super bowl, there's suddenly all these fans who you didn't know were supporters of whatever team, but, you know, they can give you chapter on verse on, you know, how their father, you know, was always a massive fan and they're from a long line of whatever.

Nemo [00:54:57] Manchester United fans.

Stephen Bullivant [00:54:58] Right, exactly. And they're suddenly getting the shirt out and getting shirts for the kids. Right. And I'm a Nottingham Forest fan. So, you know, we've had those in our lives. But what happens is that when those teams aren't doing well, then those fans kind of dis. You still got the hardcore, but that kind of bigger penumbra of people, you know, legitimately. It's not that they kind of like invent that that's their team, but it only kind of is made real and manifest when there's something to kind of hang it on. There's a particular. I forget what it's called, but there's like psychology, social psychologists have studied this, that this is something that people do. Like when college sports teams, like you

Nemo [00:55:44] might call it bandwagoning.

Stephen Bullivant [00:55:46] Yeah, absolutely. The day after that they've won a game that you talk about our team that our. We did well, if they lose, it's like they were terrible.

Nemo [00:55:54] Oh, it's like. Like Andy Murray, the tennis player was always British when he won, but Scottish when he was.

Stephen Bullivant [00:56:00] That's exactly what they say. Exactly. It's exactly that kind of effect. And I think we do see that with. Because the thing is about religious belonging is that religion, you know, identity in all sorts of ways is very complex. And especially in secularizing societies such as in Britain, is that you get a lot of people who can tell two stories. They can. And this is even more true in America. Even if they don't believe, they don't practice, even if they never practice, they can say something like, well, yeah, I guess I am an Episcopalian because I was baptized and my parents are. And we got married at the Episcopal, Episcopalian Church. Right. But equally, they can tell an equally honest, equally true story about how they're not at all religious because they don't believe any of it. You know, they're atheists and you know, they think it's all nonsense and they never even go to church and all that kind of stuff. So the, the nature of the thing is that, so there's this kind of huge middle in societies of people who are kind of, you know, half in or half out. And depending on, we see this on surveys, depending on how you ask the question, depending can kind of nudge a certain proportion to tick one box or the other and it will do that consistently. So different ways of asking the question can get kind of big differences in the number of people who say they are, you know, Episcopalian or Catholic or whatever.

John Dehlin [00:57:28] Really quickly, just not to jump back to the Rodney Stark conversation, but if I'm kind of doing an analysis of why Rodney Stark's predictions failed, I would say it's a couple things. One is that a lot of that exponential growth that the Mormon church claimed in the 70s, 80s and 90s was built on kind of fraudulent statistics. And what I mean by that is, Stephen, I as an example, served a two year Mormon mission from 88 to 90 in Guatemala. And you know, our mission baptized up to like 700 people a month. There were companionships in my mission that baptized up to 40 people in a month. But oftentimes these were 7, 8, 9 year olds. The parents weren't involved. It was these rich, white, well dressed American teenagers showing up in these super impoverished towns, baptizing these little 8, 9 and 10 year olds without parental consent, without them even attending church, let alone having any sort of conviction. And then them falling away, you know, never being active for them to even have any belief or participation to fall away from. And so whether it's Chile or Brazil or Guatemala or the Philippines, a lot of those numbers were padded by statistical baptisms that did not represent actual conversions. So that's going to be one. And I'm seeing you nod your head, Stephen, so I'll pause and give you a chance to jump in. And then I want to give my second point.

Stephen Bullivant [00:59:09] Well, just to say that that's something I've heard a lot and there's been studies done. And again, I'm talking about to people who know far more about this than I do, but I think Rick Phillips is the guy whose name is in my head for certain reasons on this. You know, studies of you actually look at censuses where people have answered the question versus the kind of the official numbers and absolutely, that's the sort of thing. But you see this in other denominations. So in the Catholic Church, if you're baptized and you're Catholic forever, there's nothing you can do about not being Catholic. You can't leave the Catholic Church, really. So I mean, actually the Catholic Church doesn't count. I mean, technically anyone who's validly baptized, which isn't Mormons, it's kind of every. Everyone who's baptized except Mormons almost. But. But technically, sacramentally, if you look into kind of deep sacramental theology, anyone who's validly baptized is really a Catholic because there's only one baptism and there's only one true church. It's a far more complicated than that really.

Nemo [01:00:05] Actually been doing the one true church stick way longer than Mormons, so.

Stephen Bullivant [01:00:10] Well, original and best so. But actually the way that you count people has all sorts of bearings on the numbers that you get, obviously.

John Dehlin [01:00:21] Yeah, Nemo. And I think we agree on this, that it's disingenuous for the church to claim 17 million members. It's certainly fair to say, well, we count people that still privately identify as Mormon but don't attend. If the church wants to count those people, that's fine. But when you've got like you mentioned, you know, a Brazilian or a Chilean census that shows a fraction of what of the membership that the church claims by the self identified, you know, individuals themselves, then it's disingenuous for the church to claim.

Nemo [01:00:58] And I think it's just a point for Stephen's benefit is the church does have this data. The church and in every unit, the ward clerk. So the guy who's responsible for the admin and the finance and that sort of stuff, they will count. They will take a quarterly count of bums in seats on a Sunday. So they know just how many members are attending every congregation and they also

John Dehlin [01:01:20] know how many people are lost. And you know, they centralize the records in Salt Lake City and they know how many people are just completely lost to the church.

Stephen Bullivant [01:01:30] Well, actually this is something that comes up in the book book because there's various people I interviewed who you know about also, you know, as you'd expect, you know, like if you leave, if you leave the Presbyterian Church or the Episcopalian Church, it's not a big deal. And everyone kind of expects that you will. Right. If you leave the Mormon Church, then it's. It, it has to be a big deal. And, and there's a big kind of family thing. And, you know, it's often been very traumatic for all concerned. And so several people of the. The people I interviewed said, well, look, I don't believe. I absolutely don't see myself as a Mormon, but I couldn't go through the process to actually formally resign because if I do, then. And I don't know if this is true, but certainly they believed it was true. Is that like when my parents go to their bishop for their annual. Whatever it's called, meeting true tithing settlement, print out, and it'll say, like, you know, you've got all these kids born in the covenant or whatever, and, oh, I see that. You know, whoever has left.

John Dehlin [01:02:28] Yeah. And.

Stephen Bullivant [01:02:29] And they wouldn't do that to their mother. It's like, maybe when she dies, I'll do it, but I just. It would just destroy it. And, and not only, like, it's not even like her knowing. It's the kind of. The public humiliation of everyone, you know, like, it being known. They just couldn't do that. So you get people who. Some of them were like, no, I'm sorry, I had to leave. And it's been a massive thing. And now I'm, you know, now thankfully we're on. It's still awkward, but, you know, and thankfully we're back on speaking terms and that kind of stuff. But for some of them, it's just like, I just. Look, they know we don't talk about it. They know I don't go. They know I've got a chapel around the corner. Literally there was someone I spoke to with it, literally with one of the. The Kensington Chapel, which is in London, like, literally around the corner. You would walk to it. They go, when they're in town, they know I don't. They, you know, we just don't talk about it. But I couldn't. I couldn't take that step because it'd be like a knife in a heart. And I just couldn't do that to her.

John Dehlin [01:03:23] Yeah. And that leads me to the second point. I really like that you've. In your book, in your book, the. The Making of Ex Christian America, you talk about, as you already have, these. What do you call it, the micro communities. I'm sorry, I just lost it for a second.

The Rise of the Nones in America

Stephen Bullivant [01:03:46] Kind of subcultures.

John Dehlin [01:03:47] Subcultures. You talk about subcultures where your religion is your world. And in a place like Utah or Idaho, it's not just your spouse that may leave you if you leave the church, it's not just your parents that may disown you. It May affect your income, it may affect your job. If you're a dentist or orthodontist, you may lose a huge percentage of your patients. You may lose all your friends, you know, all your neighbors may turn their backs on you. And it's. It's. And so there's. So there's such a large percentage of members of the Latter Day Saint movement that no longer believe and either attend just to avoid familial or social or financial retaliation. And so they continue to attend or they. They silently fall inactive, which is the term that we use. You'll know that, Stephen. And they stay on the rolls. Everyone still thinks they're members in good standing, but they've just silently disappeared because the cost of going that extra step to, you know, ask to resign your membership and ask for your records to be removed from the church, there's just too much potential damage. And that's true in these subcultures. It's a lot less true, as you say, Stephen, and Catholicism or. Or Presbyterianism or Lutheranism or Episcopalianism, whatever, all the isms.

Stephen Bullivant [01:05:14] But actually, going back, we talked about this kind of, you know, like, you know, new religious movement thing is that it's. I mean, it's not like that in more. Bigger, more mainstream denominations, but in lots of slightly less mainstream than Mormonism groups like the Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, or, you know, another ex. Sort of another. Remove the Amish, then that's a really big thing. You get this kind of formal disfellowshipping or this formal shunning. So there's this kind of spectrum that you see in, you know, and there's a whole sort of ways you can categorize different kind of tensions with the outside in religious communities. But. But actually, the. The LDS is a kind of a middle point between a kind of a formal, you know, that you are not, you know, if your daughter leaves, you are not allowed to be in touch with them. You know, you. These are people who are kind of Persona non grata to. To the saint, you know, the one I don't mean in the. In the. In the LDS term, you know, to the elect. And Scientology is another good example where, you know, like, you. You can be declared as what's called a suppressive person that, you know, other Scientologists, including your own family, are not allowed to have any contact with because you were seen as this, you know, kind of. This kind of malevolent element. And. And so there's a sense in which the Latter Day Saints is. Is. Is very much not that extreme, but there is this continuum of kind of the, the social pressure to stay in and the costs of leaving. And partly that's an official process, but partly it's kind of like, you know, the stigma of, of one's friends or you know, it used to be the case 50 years ago that, you know, if you married, if you were Catholic and you married a Protestant, you know, your, your, you know, your parents wouldn't attend your wedding and you know, it would be a really big thing in that that isn't the case anymore. But equally, you can say, well, that's not the case anymore. But like that's also a, that's both a symptom of and a cause of secularization because these, these kind of subcultural walls partly kind of officially built, but also a lot of it is kind of social norms and pressures do help to keep people in and, and do really create costs for the people who leave. And, and this is one of the, you know, it used to be we, again, we're going all over this and I've already, I apologize to the people in the comments for these kind of like, you know, wild rambling disquisitions you get from me and I'm blaming it on the time and, and the day, but it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a lie. I'm just like this all the time. But it used to be the case that if you were brought up in, you know, rural Utah and you kind of left, then you left and you probably weren't heard of again, partly because, you know, people, you might, there might have been a letter or a postcard, but you weren't, you weren't, you know, if there was a black sheep of the family, then you might a bit about it if you ever seen the film Encanto. But there's kind of we don't talk about Bruno type thing, right?

John Dehlin [01:08:39] Absolutely.

Stephen Bullivant [01:08:40] But the Internet changes that because A, you can keep in touch with, hey, what happened? Why, why, you know, 18 year old female cousin of mine did you suddenly leave town or whatever? What's the story there, you know, or why, why did you leave? You know, we were just told that, you know, you got a job and you had to leave or you, you know, whatever, you'd walked out or something. But A, you can keep in touch with people, but also then it's possible to find a whole community of these people online or wherever and suddenly there's this whole world of people who are kind of either ex Mormons or Doubting or know exactly what it's like to be in your position. Possibly like they live down the street and they're conforming in the same way you are, but you have this space where you can talk about this. And there was a brilliant study of people who leave ultra Orthodox. So this is kind of like Hasidic, you know, these kind of like kind of classic, you know, ultra orthodox Jewish communities in New York. You know, there's a whole kind of ethnographic study of people who haven't left but they've kind of seceded in place. Like they can't leave because of the family, you know, because they don't want to leave the kids, they don't want to leave their parents, you know, they don't want to leave wife, but they don't believe just going through the motion.

Nemo [01:10:06] We call them physically and mentally out.

Stephen Bullivant [01:10:08] Sure. But there's, there's meetup groups for them, there's online spaces, there's like WhatsApp groups and that kind of stuff. Abilities of that is currently exponentially risen with, with the Internet, obviously.

Nemo [01:10:25] I think what's interesting coming off the back of that is that you said you raised that point about oh, 18 year old cousin of mine, why did you leave? What happens now is the organization or the religion doesn't get to control the narrative about why people leave. Because for years they got to, they got to say people leave because of this. And all those that are within the community are like, well yeah, sure, but now there is a place where people can actually share and people can start to learn. Well actually people leave for this reason. And that's the thing I think that the most scared of because if you get to control the narrative about why someone left, then you can keep people's fears at bay. It's the same way as like when there's abuse in a congregation. If you can convince all the members that it's an anomaly isolated to your congregation and stop them seeing the bigger picture that it's going on broadly, then you can control it. It's about compartmentalization.

Stephen Bullivant [01:11:15] No, absolutely. And this is again the in fact I talk about in the non verse book, particularly with regard to Catholics. But not only there's evangelical scandals, but those kind of, you can't with it, you know, you can't say to the particular congregation, oh we've dealt with it, that Father whoever, he's been sent off and he won't ever go anywhere near children again and you know, he gets moved to a different diocese, you can't do that. Anymore, right.

Nemo [01:11:40] No, because Mike Resendez will tell you exactly what diocese he got moved to.

Stephen Bullivant [01:11:43] Exactly. But and one of the arguments is that, well, what kicks off in kind of 2002, the Boston Globe is that suddenly you get the Internet and then suddenly people realize people just Google it and like, hey, that was the guy who abused me. And we were told that, you know,

Nemo [01:12:01] it's been taken care of, it'd be taken care of.

Stephen Bullivant [01:12:03] And obviously it hasn't. And then we find other people.

John Dehlin [01:12:06] Yeah.

Stephen Bullivant [01:12:07] Who had also been abused. And this is that kind of the ability to. And also that these stories don't stay within regional silos, that suddenly something can be kind of like national news or you can particularly look for these stories in a way you couldn't do when you're like kind of reading like a local regional paper or whatever.

John Dehlin [01:12:27] So, Stephen, really quickly, not really quickly, but so you said that maybe beginning in the 1990s, you start to see that percentage of. Did you have it at 7% of non religious start to grow. So let's just go back to the early 1990s and if you want kind of give us a. I don't know if it can be chronological. I believe that 9, 11 in 2001 plays an important role in the secularization of the United States. But why don't you just take us through as best as you can kind of a timelines. I would also put Newt Gingrich's Contract with America and the rise of the religious right.

Stephen Bullivant [01:13:10] That's one of the things that's often cited here.

John Dehlin [01:13:14] Give us your accounting of the rise of secularism in the United States.

Stephen Bullivant [01:13:19] I mean, I think the rise of the religious right isn't. And it's often cited as what, you know, the, if you like the churches and we've seen this happen kind of even more extreme. But like the church has kind of hitched themselves to right wing politics and this alienates people. And I think there's a truth in that. But I think the biggest story is that like from the end of the 60s is that kind of mainstream American culture and social mores and morals are moving further and further away from kind of traditional family values. So in a sense, yes, there is a doubling down from the churches in the 80s, but also it's more that the wider population, including many who were in those churches, have shifted far more liberal. So it's not that suddenly the church has moved to the right. It's that like the cultures kind of move to the left in inverted commas and the church kind of holds its line, or at least aspects of the church do, and then that there's this backlash. So I do think that the kind of religious right is important, the big thing and the big. I hadn't realized that this was kind of that original because it seems fairly obvious and it may be because I'm coming from the outside, but having read various reviews of this book, apparently this is distinctive. But I. One of the things I do make a fairly big thing of in this kind of historical narrative as the rise of the nones is the Cold War and the ending of the Cold War. One of my arguments is one of the reasons why the post war generation and the 60s didn't have this growth of the nones effect that you would have expected from the 60s, 70s, 80s, you know, not, not necessarily on the scale of Britain, but you'd expect it to go, you know, it went up a bit and then stayed where it was for 25 years. I mean, that seems odd. One of my arguments is, well, this was kept kind of, if you like, artificially low because of the Cold War. And in America, you know, we, we had a Cold War here, you know, three miles away, you know, there was a USAF air base with, you know, nuclear weapons pointed at Moscow. You know, we were up to our necks in the Cold War. You know, my uncles were in the army stationed at, you know, military bases in Germany alongside US personnel. It's not that we didn't have the Cold War, but the Cold War here was not framed in Christian Britain versus Godless communism. Right? Christian America versus Godless Communism was a thing. And one of my arguments is this kind of religious framing of the Cold War dampens down the possibility of not just atheism as kind of this un American thing, but kind of non religious. Thinking of oneself as non religious, you might think of yourself as kind of, well, I'm Presbyterian, I don't suppose I'm a very good Presbyterian, but, you know, I'm still a Presbyterian. You, but you wouldn't think of yourself as being not religious even if you didn't believe and if you didn't practice. So one of the arguments is that the Cold War kind of keeps the lid on no religion in a distinctively American way because it wasn't framed like this anywhere else. Right? Plus the kind of the big, you know, the public atheists in Europe in the 60s and 70s are people like Bertrand Russell or Jean Paul Sartre or Albert Camus or kind of, you know, respectable establishment figures, men who are, you know, university philosophers or whatever, like respectable Intellectuals in America is Madeleine Marie, who hair. Who you know, is seen as a. Rightly, in many ways as a kind of a feminist trailblazer now, but at the time, you know, she was an ex communist who tried to defect to the Soviet Union and they wouldn't take her. You know, she was divorced, she had two kids from different fathers. I think I'm right in saying so. If you read the headlines reporting on, you know, her atheist kind of, you know, organization making community organizing in the 60s, you know, the headlines are like blonde divorcee, you know, attacks God or whatever. And that's just not how, you know, Bertrand Russell was being reported in Britain, for example. Anyway, the big thing that happens in the end of the 90s and the early 2000s is that the generation who were either. But the millennials who were either born after the end of the Cold War or, you know, much of their upbringing was my lot. Yeah. And was either after the Cold War, after it was real high, you know, like I was born in the mid-80s and you know, I. My only kind of real memory of the Cold War was like watching like Rocky 4 or like Red dawn, you know, on like holiday, like, why are you guys laughing?

John Dehlin [01:18:18] You guys are laughing at how old I am basically.

Stephen Bullivant [01:18:21] Yeah, but you weren't doing Duck and Cover because the atheist commies are gonna bomb you, right?

John Dehlin [01:18:27] Yeah, right.

Nemo [01:18:27] No, I was watching Hunt for Red October.

Stephen Bullivant [01:18:30] Right.

Nemo [01:18:30] That's what I was watching.

Stephen Bullivant [01:18:32] So the argument is I watched, I

John Dehlin [01:18:34] watched Rocky 1 when it came out in the theater. How's that, fellas?

Stephen Bullivant [01:18:38] But you and like there's a whole kind of. The Borg in Star Trek are very clearly communist. There's a whole kind of thing. You're not getting that. Not just, not just after the fall of the Berlin Wall or whatever. But you know, the people brought up in the 80s are getting less of it, then none of it. And then. And you're absolutely right, John. The kind of. The big existential threat isn't people with no religion. It's people with too much religion and it's religious extremists and it's Islamists. And then. And then straight after 9, 11, you get the new atheists. And like Sam Harris, you know, he was the first and he was the light, the, the one who wasn't already a best selling author. You know, he came out of nowhere and he makes a big thing in that first book, the End of Faith 2004, that he began writing it on the 12th of September 2001. You know, Richard Dawkins makes a Big thing about how he wanted to advertise the television series that accompanied the God delusion with just a big skyline of New York with the Twin towers there. And, you know, the John Lennon imagine no religion above was very easy to frame not being religious as a patriotic, reasonable response to danger and chaos. So I think that played into it. And also you get the Internet. And as I say, and this was much bigger thing, I think, for those communities that had booked the trend. I mean, like, you know, Catholics have been worrying about, you know, decline for 70s, 80s, 90s. But, you know, the number of nons wasn't high, but people weren't going to Mass. Same with the main line. You know, the mainline church attendance has fallen off a cliff. From the 60s onwards, the evangelicals and the Mormons numbers held up pretty strongly. And one of the arguments in the book is that in those communities, the Internet is kind of what really, kind of puts cracks in the subcultural walls for exactly the reason we've just talked about. You know, people brought up in rural Utah have this whole world that.

Nemo [01:20:43] Because Mormonism has a highly correlated curriculum as well. Like, I always used to say that, you know, no matter where you go in the church, I. So I went to Germany, went to church in Germany once. And then I knew I was going to be getting the same lesson as I would be back in the uk, just in a different language. You like this. It was just. So the correlation committee did a number on the church to the point where everyone was just getting the same information. And so when they had no access to other information because they didn't have the Internet, that it was fine. But the Internet comes in and all of a sudden you've got, as Peter Bleakley likes to call it, people who are. They have. They've made their testimony of fired clay and they've got a pot that just shatters because it's been so rigid and so tightly held that it just breaks.

Stephen Bullivant [01:21:26] Absolutely. And like, one of my interviews, and he was. He was a dentist, and I didn't realize there was a whole Mormon dentist thing. We've talked about dentistry.

John Dehlin [01:21:34] Absolutely.

Stephen Bullivant [01:21:35] Which pleases me. But he, you know, and he talks about how he's ethnically Mormon, that, you know, he still hangs out with ex Mormons. You know, he still kind of sees it. He doesn't. He doesn't smoke, he doesn't drink, he doesn't drink coffee, he doesn't swear, he doesn't believe it, any of it. Right. But he still is culturally Mormon. Right. And he talks about how it was his cousin and his cousin left, but kept in touch and kind of sensed something in him and kept sending him links. Like, hey, did you. Did you ever hear about the Mountain Meadows massacre? Or, you know, hey, we weren't told this about, you know, like, Emma Smith's, you know, views about other wives at Sunday school or, you know, what, it's seminary. Right. So absolutely. It then opens up this kind of possibility of information. And again, in. Again, in a slightly more extreme way, and I don't. I don't actually equate the two, but it's a. Just a clearer and more extreme example. Scientologists, you know, that you get with the Internet that suddenly they kind of. You get it in south park as well. Like this kind of secret Scientology teaching was suddenly like anonymous kind of put it out there that, you know, you're. It's only if you're a certain feature level, you meant to get operating theatre. Right. But it allows that kind of. I mean, it's called democratization of knowledge, but certainly a viewpoint. And, you know, I'm sure that a lot of the stuff out there is very tendentious is all, you know, like, there's all sorts of stuff out there, but certainly it's the exposure to different information, different views, and a different community of people to discuss it with.

The Internet's Role in Religious Disaffiliation

Nemo [01:23:25] Yeah, well, it's the endowment ceremony. The Mormon Endowment ceremony is now on YouTube.

Stephen Bullivant [01:23:28] Absolutely.

Nemo [01:23:29] Whereas that was hidden behind walls before, and now that's out there and you can talk to non Mormons about it. So you're. You're not just getting the reactions of those around you immediately in the endowment room, which are your friends and family or whoever's there. You're getting the reactions of people who aren't Mormon at all in the comments going, what is this? And you're like, yeah, actually, that does look pretty weird from an outsider perspective.

John Dehlin [01:23:52] Yeah, Stephen, I'm just gonna. We're just kind of bantering this back and forth a little bit. But as someone who kind of predates the Internet, what I, you know, when I was at BYU in 1993, I watched, you know, six to 10 scholars get excommunicated and, you know, the clear message for speaking about women's rights, for speaking about polygamy, for speaking publicly about racism and Joseph Smith's full folk magic stuff. And back then, before the Internet, really, you know, the church was able to kind of put this wet blanket over public discourse by excommunicating people and sending this fear of God, fear of Heavenly Father into all Mormons saying If you talk publicly about this stuff, you will be punished. So what the Church does is it has this sketchy history. The Mormon Church, it's got this super sketchy history that it whitewashed for a couple centuries and that it punished people forever talking about it and what that did combined with creating a semi, you know, robust middle class with a lot of high tech workers and white collar professionals. What you see in the early 2000s are a bunch of us who were paying attention during the early 90s that all of a sudden have the Internet and we start with blogs and we say, whoa, the church has a history of hiding its history and punishing those who talk about it. Maybe we can talk about it on blogs and there'll be enough of us to where the church kind of like a Martin Luther King, Selma, Alabama effect, where there'll be so many people talking about this on blogs that the Church won't be able to excommunicate us all. So you see these Mormon blogs emerge with web 2.0 around 2004, and then immediately you see as soon as podcasts exist and there are podcasts that Mormon Stories was started in 2005, but there were Mormon themed podcasts that predated Mormon Stories Podcast. You see a really robust sampling of Mormon themed podcasts emerging in 2005. And when you combine the blog, the blogger knackle, as it was called, with the Mormon podcast families that emerged in the mid-2000s, then you see these communities really start growing. And then once Facebook and Reddit and Instagram and Twitter emerge, forget about it, as they say in New York, like the church was toast because it not only had to deal with people openly discussing issues that they could no longer control, it had to deal with the backlash of having suppressed, having hid information and suppressed its hiding of information and misleading of people by the punishing of scholars and of people who spoke openly. So at least within Mormon's case, you have to ask, why does the ex Mormon Reddit have 250,000 members whereas any other ex religious subreddit has a fraction of that? You have to wonder, why Mormons? Why are there more ex Mormons on the ex Mormon subreddit than ex Jews or ex Catholics or ex Scientologists or ex Jehovah's Witnesses? And some of it, I think, you know, has to do with some of those dynamics that I mentioned. Now, Stephen, you tell me whether any of that makes sense to you or not.

Stephen Bullivant [01:27:39] No, it makes perfect sense. And the other reason, of course, why there's lots of people you, you don't get, you know, hundreds of thousands of people on like X Anglican subreddits, right, Or X. I don't know.

Nemo [01:27:52] The ex Anglican subreddit sounds so tame, Steven.

Stephen Bullivant [01:27:55] Oh, well, it would be, but because they don't get, and this is, this comes out in the main line and the mainline chapter in the book. And, and they, they don't care enough. You know, there's a quote from Taylor Swift about, you know, I, you know, it's not like I forget it, I, you know, you know, I don't love it, I don't hate it, I'm just indifferent. And actually the interesting thing, and again, it is partly a factor of the swiftness of the non version, right? So you've got people who were brought up very Mormon who are now able to find, you know, have now left and have found this sort of whole other world, but they still, they have a kind of a dog in the fight, right? So it's personal. And one of the bigger arguments of the book is about the reason why we're foregrounding non verts. Why is nonverts important rather than, than nons? Well, nonverts are important because they used to be something else. And that past is kept with people. It's either like positive or negative. It's often both. So people often have a nostalgia, obviously, like people's parents, people's families, people's memories are all bound up with the religion. But also people often have very kind of negative, dramatic, traumatic kind of journeys as to why they left. And, and often you both are true of the same person. Now that means that you've got people who, who, who care, who are interested, who are invested in not just kind of culturally with it, but actually in the kind of other people leaving and it being a massive thing for them. And like one of my former Mormon, you know, interviewees talked about it as kind of free therapy, you know, like just kind of having a group of people who know what it's like, who get the in jokes right, who get the pop culture references, who know exactly what it's like to have been brought up like this, in this kind of place and to have left and to have to deal with the, the sisters in law and the spouses and the mothers in law and everything that goes along with the, that and that's why you see a strong kind of ex Mormon thing in the same way you do less so with ex Catholics, you know. You know, no one talks about being a recovering Presbyterian, right? But people might talk about being recovering Catholic because there's Something to recover from. Exactly. And evangelicals are the, you know, the most like the Mormons in kind of mainstream America in that there's got people who have been brought up with something, a serious dose in childhood and early adulthood, and it's often been a very big thing leaving. But also they've been brought up in this kind of, as they see it now, weird subcultural world with its own kind of. You know, it's so like, the. The nice thing, I. In the event, I interviewed two. They were from Texas. I interviewed them in Portland, Oregon. It was a couple. And they were just delightful. They're about, you know, kind of younger than me. You know, it was like their one night out. Either got a babysitter, I was buying the drink. And they were just reminiscing about the kind of, like, the weirdness of kind of evangelical pop culture in the 80s. And it was like there was this thing called the Power Team, and it was for, like, kids who were, like, into wrestling but weren't allowed to watch wrestling. So it was like these kind of beefcakes who shredded phone books for Jesus and, you know, and, you know, they'd sort of, like, wear, like, chains and then shatter them through the Holy Spirit. And there was a whole kind of biblical learning being done. But it was basically a wrestling show, right? And it's just kind of really weird, but it was, like, massive. This was. This was a massive thing in the evangelical subculture, right? And if you. If you were saved at one of their shows, you got to meet them. So, like, it was like, I think I got saved about four times, you know, but, like, it was massive celebrities. But, like, anyone who wasn't brought up, like, evangelical would have no idea what this was, right? They were just watching Hulk Hogan. And it's the same with. And I Talk. One of the endnotes in the book was a lot of fun researching Mormon rom coms, right? That you'll know that there's a whole sub industry of. I don't know why I'm telling you this, but it's for anyone who isn't morbid who's watching this.

Comparing Mormon and Catholic Decline

John Dehlin [01:32:18] Stephen, Half of our audience has never been Mormon, if you can believe that.

Stephen Bullivant [01:32:21] Okay, so this is worth looking out because they are great film. I. But there's like a whole genre of films, and I'm thinking here of the Singles Ward, the Singles War to the rn, My top three favorites. I've never seen Baptist at the Barbecue. I've never seen no.

Nemo [01:32:39] Oh, goodness.

Stephen Bullivant [01:32:39] Sadly. But those three. And it's the Genre is basically American pie, but where the end result is finding your forever spouse and having seven kids and being heavily involved in your ward.

Nemo [01:32:55] You don't speak of sound bites, Stephen. That is the sound bite of this evening.

Stephen Bullivant [01:32:59] But that's literally so you what, you know, and like, I don't want to ruin it, spoiler alert. But you. I mean, Singles what is brilliant. I love, I really loved it. Singles what is a really good film. But, you know, there's a guy who's, you know, he's brought up more, but he's not really committed and like, you know, he makes jokes, he's a stand up comedian and he's. And then, you know, through, through a good woman, he's kind of brought back into the fold. And then the sequel is like, they're a young married couple who are kind of like really active in the ward and there's probably a baby on the way and that kind of stuff, right? So, like, what interest? I mean, I, you know, I'm a sucker for kind of Americana and pop culture, right. But what really fascinates me about those films is that it proves, you know, these are kind of professionally made, good films, right? This is serious actors, seriously, you know, whatever. There's a market, there's a, there's a big enough movie going teen market in the Jello belt that this is a viable industry. And actually this says a lot about the strength and size of that kind of subculture that you can have a film industry dedicated to creating kind of Mormon versions of the mainstream culture. And you, you see this in a much bigger way in the evangelicals because you get Christian rock, which is kind of like a, you know, the classic line in the Simpsons about, you know, you know, it's just like secular music, but you change the word baby to Jesus, right? But there's that exact, you know, when rap's a thing in American culture, you get Christian rap. You know, when, like hip hop's a thing, you get Christian hip hop. So the fact that you've got this kind of religious group who can create its own multi million dollar music industry and film industry and publishing industry tells you a lot about the kind of, the size of these subcultures, you know, these kind of worlds, these bubbles.

John Dehlin [01:34:59] Interesting. Yeah. Interestingly, Stephen, movies like the RM and you know, God's army, which I'm trying to look at, it came out in 2000. There was kind of this heyday of Mormon cinema in the early 2000s, right? As the blogger knackle, the Mormon blogosphere and the Mormon Podcasting world kind of emerged. Interestingly, that all died out by the mid 2000s. And I don't even know what, what I can say to account for the death of, of, of that industry. But I can't name one main, one decent Mormon rom com or cultural movie that's come out in the past 15 years.

Stephen Bullivant [01:35:46] I, I can't be the next book.

Nemo [01:35:48] They hit the best two years and then that was just it. I mean, what's Kirby Hayborn doing with himself these days? He's still kicking around.

John Dehlin [01:35:55] He is, yeah. But anyway, Stephen, I'm not trying to disagree with your points.

Stephen Bullivant [01:36:00] No, no. But leading into my point, because the point is, is that this subculture is dissipating for all sorts of reasons.

John Dehlin [01:36:09] Right? Yeah.

Stephen Bullivant [01:36:10] And the bigger, you know, the kind of, the big kind of a wider culture, you know, the reason, the reason why the first denomination specific chapter in the book is the Mormons. Right. A lead with Mormons. Mormons. And I do that for several reasons, but one is because the Mormons were the ones who were holding up better than everyone, and the Mormons were the ones that the other churches were looking to saying, I wish we were more like the Mormons, not, not in many ways, not theologically. Yeah, but you know, they keep the young people, not only to keep the young people, but they can persuade teens to go and spend two years trekking around, you know, Rainy Bicester, which, you know, I met, I met two missionaries, took him out for lunch here. A pretty thankless task. You couldn't get, you know, you couldn't get, like persuade, you know, unite, you know, Missouri, whatever, Missouri Synod, Lutheran teens to go off and spend two years of their lives in each other's pocket pockets trekking around.

John Dehlin [01:37:20] Not, not, not only do they donate two years of their lives, but they pay to do it.

Nemo [01:37:24] They pay to do it.

Stephen Bullivant [01:37:25] And, and so you look, other churches are looking at the moment and say, well, there's things that they do and like the singles wards and all that kind of social architecture around the, kind of the Sunday, you know, everything that happens around it and the seminary and the catechesis, you've got other churches saying, well, if we did that, then we'd be faring a lot better. And then once Mormons are starting to worry about people leaving and nonverts, then, you know, there's a real problem. If, if this is a problem for Mormons, then how much more of a problem must it be in the wider society? So the reason why I find Mormonism so fascinating in this particular context Is that Once. And Jana Reese's book, the Next Mormon, she talks about this. She's not the only one. I read a book by. I've got a Mormon friend who's a sociologist, and he recommended a book by Patrick Q. Mason. He talks about kind of, kind of, kind of to address some of these problems. But once, and I think general, general conferences have started talking about this as a problem. Once the Mormons are worried about losing young people. People, which is kind of what Catholics and, you know, Presbyterians were worried about 40 years ago. Right. And nothing that they tried to stop helped. But once the Mormons are worried, then, you know, things are really getting.

Nemo [01:38:53] I mean, you've got this. You've got this geriatocracy at the top of Mormonism, which means they're like two generations at least removed from the young people. So I'm surprised they kept young people for this long. I just wonder whether they stopped listening to those that had advice for them on how to keep young people because they seem to know what to do and now they just don't know what to do.

Stephen Bullivant [01:39:09] Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is that, you know, you only. I mean, this is true of all, you know, big religious organizations is that they only start trying to address a problem when it's too late, generational too late. Like my favorite example of this, and, you know, I write a lot on kind of church history and you know, like the, the, you know, the Council of Trent, which is kind of like the Catholic Church's big reaction and response to the Reformation happens, you know, once the Reformation is already kind of out of control. Right. And you always get this. So by the time you get round to, at the top levels to kind of trying to deal with it, then it has to be such a big problem that it's. It's often kind of too. You might kind of find ways to mitigate and work with and live with the new situation, but they very rarely are reacting at a time when you can actually stop the thing that they want.

Nemo [01:40:06] I mean, just to put my cynical hat on, it's surprising that a church that claims to be led by prophets, seers and revelators would have a hard time of knowing what's going on.

John Dehlin [01:40:15] You're very cynical, Nemo. Come on, Nemo. Stephen. No, I'm just kidding, Nemo. It's a fair question. From a Mormon standpoint. It's a fair question, Stephen. So how bad is it for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints? How much are they suffering by your estimation and in what ways are they suffering? How badly are they suffering? And, you know, how does that look like from your perspective?

The Future of the Church in America

Stephen Bullivant [01:40:43] Sure. Well, I mean, this is, again, this is. Mormon numbers are difficult because, you know, the kind of the metrics that we have of, you know, X proportion, you know, there's however many ex Catholics, about 15 million ex Catholic nones in America, for example, and because the Mormons are such a small proportion of the whole population, then it's very difficult to get a big enough number of them in kind of these big social surveys to have, you know, to be able to say, well, 20% of people raised now identify as nons or whatever. So the numbers are very sort of hazy. We certainly. It certainly seems the case that it's. It's a bigger thing than it used to be. It largely depends on your perspective. And this is important because compared to kind of almost everyone else, kind of Evangelicals, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Catholics, whoever else, compared to everyone else, the Mormons are doing better and will probably continue to be doing better compared to how the Mormons were doing 20, 30 years ago. It's gonna feel like, you know, the end of days. And actually this is important. If you go to Ireland, which I do, and, you know, present statistics on kind of secularization in Ireland and you say, look, hey, Ireland is, you know, one of the most religious countries in the world, but they're not comparing it to the other countries in the world, they're comparing it to Ireland 20 years ago. And certainly compared to the levels of retention and, you know, not just kind of people who were kind of just conforming for this because of. It's easier to do that than leave, but actually because we're so bound up socially with each other that actually, that it has its own effect. It just kind of, you know, compare, you know, families are going to find more and more of their kids, you know, more and more of their 10 kids leaving and not just not attending, but, you know, having their names taken off the rolls or whatever. And, you know, that might be three of the 10 kids rather than none of the 10 kids or whatever, which is. Which is huge. Right. So, I mean, but compared to, I mean, the evangelical. Again, the evangelicals are going to be doing better than most other denominations in America, but less well than they used to. And, you know, the, you know, it's going to carry on. But still compared to everyone else, Mormons have much better kind of social architecture, much better catechesis, a much better way of socializing children both in the home. But Also in the wider community into the faith, you know, those mission trips, I mean, again, this will be, you know, no secret to many of the people listening, but certainly the people I'm talking to, John and Nemo, that, you know, one of the, the biggest effects of the mission trips isn't on the people you bring in. It's the kind of the galvanizing effect it has on the people themselves. Now, obviously, you know, I know several ex missionaries who, you know, this was. It certainly didn't keep them in and if anything, it kind of, you know, cemented their reasons for leaving. But on average, it will cement the people in. And you get these films like the rn, you know, like, you know, to be a returned missionary is a kind of, you know, it's a, it's a material. Right, you know, but, but also for the girls, Gotham. So. So compared to everyone else, you know, the Mormons are still doing. Are still going to be better. But I think the bigger point is that it's becoming a more and more uphill task because the wider culture is more secular. And actually, every time that the number of nones goes up and every time a book like mine comes up that makes out, you know, the nones are like this kind of like the rising tide again, like we talked about before, this bandwagon effect, lots more people think, well, actually I think I'm a norm. And, and that becomes the, you know, I still, I think one of the factors in the rise of the nons was like every, you know, every six months there'd be a new, you know, news headline from Pew saying that the norms are rising and people would be like, oh, who were they again? Nuns. Oh, no, not. Oh, yeah, that's what I am. Yeah. And then the next time you tick the box.

Nemo [01:45:17] So that's why I kind of made that cynical comment about profits, is because as you say, we as members of the church, or for the members of church who see people leaving, they're comparing themselves not to the rest of religiosity because there's this exceptionalism within Mormonism that it is the one true church, that it is led by a prophet who speaks for God. So the disappointment comes when, hang on, this man who's meant to be able to lead and guide us isn't able to stop the people leaving compared to the thriving that we did have. So they're not worried about how. I mean, they're starting to now. For example, you know, the church's president recently said in a trip to Europe or is about a year ago now, he said, you know, secularism is indeed on the rise in Europe, but the church has a bright future here, don't you worry. So they're kind of. They're starting to acknowledge that. They're starting to compare us, the outside world, and say, well, actually we're doing better than them, but a lot of members will be internally kind of comparing ourselves to our expectations. There's a lot of expectations within Mormonism that the church will just continue to grow, it will roll forth, it will fill the whole earth.

Stephen Bullivant [01:46:20] Sure. And actually that's going to. I mean, it's going to slow and it's going to be, as I say, it's going to become harder and harder work.

John Dehlin [01:46:29] So, Stephen, what I hear you saying is, you know, there's a broader problem of religious disaffiliation in the United States, but it's not hitting the Mormon Church nearly as hard as it. That's hitting other churches. And that by comparison, the Mormon Church is still doing pretty well. If I look at kind of boots on the ground, what I'm seeing in my family, in the families of people that I talk to, and this is admittedly, just definitionally anecdotal, what we're seeing is a massive wave of disaffection and disaffiliation where it's very, very common. Now, if I just do a random sampling of my listenership, you know, 50 to 80% of their siblings who were all raised Mormon have either left or no longer attend or no longer believe. And so, you know, and maybe some of this is confirmation bias, but what we're seeing is the church really in free fall. We're seeing the church, you know, declining to release its membership statistics. So for imagine, Stephen, for decades and decades, maybe even over a century, every single year, when the church, the Mormon Church, held a general conference, it would release its statistics to the membership. And then just a few years ago, it all of a sudden just announced it's no longer going to be releasing its membership. The church does these internal customer research polls or inquiries where they hire social scientists, and they're constantly now sending out these surveys to active, faithful Mormons saying, why do you still attend? If you're having doubts, what are you doubting? What would be the things that made you leave? And of course, just like with pornography, 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, the church just could not stop talking about it. Now you see Mormon Church leaders, they can't have a meeting without talking about how many people are leaving and why the members need to stay. And so it's a tiny bit. Maybe. Well, it's. It's not what. Maybe many of us would expect to hear anything other than sort of Chicken Little, the sky is falling. But again, there's probably some confirmation bias in that.

Stephen Bullivant [01:49:04] No, I think it's more that, again, this perspective thing, because, I mean, there's a sense in which, you know, if you're raised in. If you're raised. I keep picking the Episcopalians, you know, if you're raised Episcopalian, then, you know, it would be noteworthy if one of the. If your siblings or cousins attended church, you know, not that half of them no longer do. You know, it would be astounding if any of them do. So I think it's more about the fact that the norm within the LDS has been so high for so long that, yes, I mean, you know, this is a huge fall, but compared to how low many of the mainstream, the much bigger denominations are, you. You wouldn't expect, you know, someone, you know, in their early, late teens or early 20s to be darkening the door of a church, you know, and it's.

John Dehlin [01:50:04] Sure.

Stephen Bullivant [01:50:05] So it's more. And actually, those churches have stopped talking about it because it's no longer a thing that bothers anyone because they're so used to it. And people are delighted when a young person attends church rather than worrying about, well, where. Where are the other 10 who aren't? It's like, wow, we've got a young person. Wow.

Nemo [01:50:26] And whenever I go to, like, an Anglican church or something.

Stephen Bullivant [01:50:29] The young one. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like the village church, you know, it's a village church, but I mean, there's probably about six people there on a Sunday. And, you know, you could probably say one, 10 years, you know, there might be one who's still alive. I mean, it's that kind of difference that we're looking at. And the evangelicals, you know, the, the. The most kind of like the Mormons in that respect. And it's interesting that suddenly, in the past kind of 10, 20 years, there's suddenly been this kind of a huge industry of books about prodigals. So the, the euphemism within the evangelical churches seems to be we talk about prodigals because that's hopeful. You know, if your son or daughter has left the church and doesn't go to church anymore, obviously, if they're prodigals and, you know, you could. There's the hope that they're going to be back again. So there's this kind of vast industry of books about praying. Your prodigal back home, you know, like. And obviously, you know, you don't get those kind of books, you know, in Episcopalian, you know, maybe you did 50 years ago, but now it'd be like, you know, it's more literally they're not going out after the one sheep. They're going out, you know, it's out the 99 sheep, you know, who the shepherd to go and find on the hillside. So. But it feels a bigger deal within the LDS because it is a bigger deal. Because religion. Because religion you used to the norm and you're used to it being much stronger. But I think not in no way to say that actually everything's fine, but more that compared to everywhere else. Everywhere else is much, much worse or much, much better, depending on how you think about these things, of course.

John Dehlin [01:52:14] Totally. So again, we're talking to Dr. Stephen Bullivant. The book is the Making of Ex Christian America. Stephen, I'm curious and this may not even be part of your book and it may not even be part of your research or analysis. Oh, well, normally I do. Normally I always do, but I have not this time. So I'm just going to be honest about that.

Nemo [01:52:40] I've excused. It's not available in the uk,

John Dehlin [01:52:46] is it, Is it inaudible, Stephen?

Stephen Bullivant [01:52:48] It is an audible.

Nemo [01:52:49] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Stephen Bullivant [01:52:49] You don't get me. You don't get my dulcet tones reading it. You get like a professional actor reading it. But yeah, it's on audible.

John Dehlin [01:52:55] Okay, well, we will be reading it and I encourage everyone to buy it. Again, the book is nonverts the making of U.S. christian America. What I read was the Jana Reese article. That was kind of what Nemo and I did in preparation for this one.

Stephen Bullivant [01:53:10] And that's when I. Reese's article was very good.

John Dehlin [01:53:13] Yeah. Actually what happened was we decided to interview you based on Jana's article. And then as I was prepping, I'm like, whoa, this book looks really cool. So maybe we'll have to have you back to talk about the book. But what I was going to ask is, Stephen, do you do any analysis on what churches are doing or can do to stem this tide? And do you have any specific ideas what, if anything, the Mormon church could do to keep. To slow the hemorrhaging? Or does that, is that not, is that not part of what you do?

Stephen Bullivant's Personal Journey to Catholicism

Stephen Bullivant [01:53:46] Part of what I. Because I, you know, I'm a. I've gone the other way. I was raised as a non, which is very normal in the, in Britain, and became a Catholic at university. And, you know, practicing Catholic. And so, you know, a lot of my time is spent kind of thinking about. I've written a lot of kind of books about the decline. And obviously, you know, there's a. Some of the next books are looking at, well, you know, what happens next and what could happen next and, and what ought churches be? Because, you know, we're not suddenly going to bounce back to where we were 50 years because just the situation has changed. But what should churches be doing? And I mean, there is a sense. I mean, I can't. I can't think of anything that the LDS could do that would keep its. Not get its numbers back to what they were 20 years ago, because the numbers 20 years ago were crazily high. And all the sorts of. All the reasons why there was this. You get this thing in like, you know, pastoral theology of, you know, by Catholics or evangelicals that talk about Mormon envy. Right? Because they look at the Mormons and it's like, wow, we should copy some of the things they do. You know, wouldn't it be great if we could get, you know, all the young singles in, you know, the parish or the kind of, you know, the area to kind of come together and then they can marry other good, committed Catholics and all sorts of stuff. Right. You know, so there's a sense in which the more the. The eldest and I talk as an outsider, you know, I really don't know it like, like you do. And, you know, many of the viewers will know it. Looking at it from the outside, it seems to me that, you know, the LDS is doing everything that it could be doing, right? Kind to kind of lean into the sorts of things you'd want to be doing to keep young adults in and that kind of stuff. But it's an uphill battle and it's gonna. And it's becoming more and more an uphill battle. I mean, honestly, there's no kind of like, I mean, if I was talking to any other. If I was taught, you know, the Episcopalian stories again, there wouldn't. There wouldn't be an audience. No one would care. Right. Anglican friends, this is, you know, but you wouldn't be getting this kind of interest and. Real care about this in many other denominations. If I was talking to them, I'd be saying, well, if you talk to Mormons and ex Mormons, you know, they'll tell you that kind of everything is kind of, you know, declined, which it is compared to what they're used to. But frankly, you know, all the other churches, the best thing they could possibly do is, you know, okay, you know, don't write a new Bible. But everything else, maybe not name badges, but everything else, like, you know, this, this would improve where you are now. And it's, you know, if you go to the Philippines, you know, the Philippines is one of the most Catholic places in the world. And, you know, it's full of young, committed Catholics. You talk to them and they say, you know, they. All they talk about is secularization and we're losing the young people. And it's almost like, well, compared to what you're used to, sure. But anywhere else in the world would dream of your kind of numbers. And there's a sense in which the, you know, any, almost anyone else, especially a big, big denomination, you know, you can always. It's very easy to find a very small kind of group of like super committed people that has kind of hived off. I mean, this is kind of like where things go weird and you end up with a Netflix special. But, you know, it's very easy to kind of form a bunker. But any kind of like quasi mainstream large denomination is going to be dealing with exactly these kinds of problems and have been dealing with them longer and have suffered more than the LDS is used to having to deal with.

Nemo [01:58:04] Interesting, because I think I sit here as someone that's watching the church fall off a cliff. Compared again, having that perspective of, compared to what I was told it would be like it is nose diving. And again, the UK statistics show, know it's in free fall. And I'm there thinking, oh, what more could they do? And then from your outside perspective, you're looking and going, actually they're doing a lot of what they could do to me.

Stephen Bullivant [01:58:29] I talked to my, you know, I've talked to Mormon students and you know, there's someone converting, you know, like those missionaries were like, wow, he, he, he sought them out as well. I mean, it's wonderful, you know, like looking at it from the outside, then it again compared to everyone else, then, you know, much stronger kind of situation. Yeah.

Nemo [01:58:56] Okay. John.

Are High-Demand Religions Cults

John Dehlin [01:58:58] Stephen, let me just, let me ask you just as a side question. You've, you've alluded to the answer to this question, but I want to hit it head on anyway. You know, there's this, there's this fascination these days with cults. Whether it's, and I know as someone who, you know, studied in the academy, that the term, that the term cult is discouraged in an academic setting, even when talking about organizations like Scientology, Jehovah's Witnesses, mostly because I'M guessing it's either viewed as offensive or as none productive. I struggle with that because even as we're all talking here right now, we're all acknowledging that there's a huge difference between Presbyterians and Lutherans and Episcopalians and Catholics and, you know, mainstream Jews. There's a huge difference between all of them and Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons and Scientologists. And a lot of that has to do with, with the types of behavioral controls, controls on information, thought control, punishment, marginalization of the disaffected and shunning that goes on and even emotional manipulation. And so I'm very often torn between wanting to stay productive and scholarly and diplomatic and never, ever, ever use that term, but then also wanting to give name to, you know, to practices and beliefs that lead to things like Lori Vallow and Chad Dabell that lead to things like Mark Hoffman or, you know, the Lafferty Brothers, you know, religious excess that leads to, you know, just this past week in Ephraim, Utah, a devout Mormon father kills his wife, his five kids and his mother in law and then himself. And I'm going to guarantee you that when that story comes out, there's going to be elements of Mormonism that probably raised the stakes in severity that led to that sort of activity. So can you talk to us about, you know, how outsiders view the Mormon Church, you know, what to make of this term cult and how to make sense of it all.

Stephen Bullivant [02:01:39] No, I mean, you're right. I mean the trouble with the world, you're right. That academics don't. Some say, well, actually it's a good word. And like when we talk about something like the Jonestown in Diana or Branch Davidians or Nexium.

John Dehlin [02:01:55] Nexium or David Cross.

Stephen Bullivant [02:01:57] So some say, well actually, no, there's a certain sort of. And you, you know, with definite. A certain sort that actually this is a very good description for. Okay. And so yeah, but the trouble is that when it just gets used of everything and because it does have a, you can't use it in a neutral way. Right. It's not a term you can use in a kind of a neutral way. And rightly scholars want to be able to talk about things in a neutral way, that it doesn't kind of prejudice the issue at hand. Now it's certainly true that, I mean, any closed group, you know, this isn't just religious groups, but any kind of closed group where, you know, people are deeply invested, where they're, you know, like hippie communes are a good example. Right. You Know, where all kind of like, you know, Marxist communes or, you know, any kind of like the kind of small Maoist collectives in the 60s. You know, the kind of abuse that you kind of hear about from these. With a charismatic leader, you know, with all sorts of stuff, things can go awry. And of course, you know, the Catholic, you know, the Cardinal McCarrick, you know, was just this kind of serial predator who kind of everyone knew about. But, you know, either everyone had. This was a cardinal Archbishop of Washington D.C. and, and you know, it was one of those things where he had a lot of friends in hype. Everyone, everyone had a good reason to try and give him the benefit of the doubt. Like. Like everyone was kind of implicated in some way. A bit like J. I mean, Jeffrey Epstein's a good example, Harvey Weinstein, people who. A lot of people stand to fall, if they fall. And so the whole system kind of protects them until hopefully it all does collapse. Right. And that, you see this, just that, you know, you see this pattern in kind of, you know, us, you know, abuse in, like, U.S. athletics or, you know, abuse in. Jimmy Savile was a Nemo will know who I'm talking about was a massive thing in Britain. He's kind of big kind of children's entertainer, essentially, you know, beloved national treasure. You know, he's been our worst serial predator, you know, hundreds and hundreds of victims. Just horrifying things that, you know, all sorts of people. And when people do come forward, they're not believed or, you know, they're told, well, it's got to be your word against theirs and that kind of stuff. So we see this pattern everywhere. Obviously, you know, religion adds another element to that and, you know, the, the status of religious leaders and that kind of social stigma about speaking out and. And that kind of blaming the victims, you know, you see that. But again, you see that. You know, it's not just. You don't only see it. You know, classic example is these kind of like, you know, bunker communities where everyone goes off and, you know, you know, there's no connection to the outside world. But of course, we see this in suburban parishes. You know, we see this in all sorts of settings. So, I mean, I have nothing particularly profound to say on this except to say that it's. The more we learn about these kind of, you know, power abuse dynamics and these sexual abuse dynamics is that there's an all. There's. It's almost endemic. You know, we see this all over, not just in religious settings. And when I think the thing Is. Is that when you have religious groups, especially kind of like closed off religious groups where everyone is kind of. There's a real kind of social pressure to conform and to revere the leader and that kind of stuff. You know, the FLDS are a classic, classic example of this. But you know, there's all sorts of examples is that it's very easy for those kinds of groups to go. To go awry. You know, there's a. It's. They can be very. It's not saying that every small religious group will, but it's a kind of. It's a system that's open to abuse, you might say. And yeah, I mean, again, it's awfully late on a Friday night and I have nothing more profound to say on that topic. Suffixed every answer I've given with that caveat.

Final Questions and Closing Thoughts

John Dehlin [02:06:37] So, Nemo, I'm going to give you a chance to ask him any final questions, but I do want to ask you, how in the world does someone raise secular in the UK who's got two PhDs end up as a faithful, devout Catholic? That may seem like an insulting question, but I know that my audience is very interested in understanding.

Stephen Bullivant [02:06:57] This is a huge, huge, huge, huge, huge story. Like I'm gonna give my testimony, you know, and I. It's a bit like the thing in the Book of Barodi that, you know, like you. Not quite, but I mean, you know, lots of things. It was a long process, partly intellectual, you know. One of the interesting things for me, I think was that growing up in 1980s secular Britain, not being baptized, not even being baptized in a very nominal way, which lots of people still are into the Church of England, even if you don't practice, you don't believe, you still kind of baptize the kids kind of thing was, I knew we were never really exposed to any of it, you know, you were never kind of, you know. I think a lot of former Christians, you know, are kind of, you know, they've often not been given a sort of a strong enough dose to. For it to hold, but they've been given a sort of a sort of a weak enough dose to sort of turn them off it for life kind of vaccination kind of type thing, you know, dead strains of cultural Christianity kind of stops you ever catching it. I think for me, you know, I went to university to study archaeology, wasn't enjoying it a few weeks in and wanted to do philosophy, which I'd studied at high school at Oxford. You can't just do philosophy, you have to do it with something. The only thing I was qualified to do it with was theology. You couldn't do with maths or physics or something. So I thought, well, fine, you know, I'll do the minimum theology and go off and be a philosopher. First time I was, you know, I thought it was all nonsense. If the God delusion had come along when I was 17, that would have been me. First time I ever read a gospel, first time I'd ever seriously engaged with serious philosophical arguments. People like Thomas aquinas, people like St. Augustine, people like, you know, Alvin Planting and people like Richard Swinburne. Over is a long intellectual process of. From thinking it's like literal nonsense to thinking, well, it's wrong, but it's interesting to kind of thinking, maybe there's something to this. Plus, and I'm enough of a sociologist to know I was hanging out with Catholics, you know, I was drinking with Dominican priests. And. And there's. There is a socialization, you know, in all kind of the way we adopt worldviews and beliefs. So it came to a point where I was, you know, long story short, you know, I've been studying this stuff for six, seven years, philosophy and theology at a fairly high level, doing a doctorate on two sentences of Vatican documents. And I'd got to the point when actually I thought, well, pretty sure I believe this stuff and I probably ought to go and do something about it. So then I was baptized and received into the Catholic Church in Rome. Well, getting on for 15 years ago.

John Dehlin [02:09:45] Wow, that's amazing. Well, that, that you're right. I think that's its own podcast episode. Because I want. I've got a million questions that I want to ask, and it's probably late there. Nemo, any final questions you want to ask, Stephen?

Nemo [02:10:00] Just what Stephen thinks of the X Mormon community, if he has engaged with it.

Stephen Bullivant [02:10:04] I love, love, love them all. Actually, no, that was a. That said that as a joke, but actually it's true. And I don't mean that in any kind of glib way. What I mean by that is my engagement with the ex mo community is looking for when you go in to try and interview kind of, you know, dozens of people, there's all sorts of ways you try and get people to interview you talk to friends, you kind of put word out. You know, you kind of go on Reddit boards, you kind of do stuff. Most places I'd go, I just put a gen. I wouldn't go to like the atheist group because you don't want a particular group. You want to kind of get the spectrum from everyone. So I'd go to like, you know, craft, be a NYC and ask if people fit the bill to talk to, you know, or whatever. And the ex, because there's so few, unless I'd gone to Utah, which I didn't. There's so few kind of ex Mormons in any one place. I wanted to make sure I spoke to enough. So I went on to the ex Mormon Reddit board, like 2018, I think just, you know, put, you know, who basically, you know, who, who wants to, who wants me to buy them a beer or whatever. And you know, I'm happy to talk, you know, I know that, you know, really want to talk. Keen to kind of include this thing in the thing. And you know, obviously, you know, being on the ex Mormon board, you know, you, it wasn't a full digital ethnography but, you know, I'd read posts, I'd see what people were talking about. I'd see the kind of memes people, there's a good meme. I talk about this in the book. I particularly compliment the X the R Ex Mormon board as having an excellent meme game. And as I say, I was deluged with, you know, you're all, as I say, you know, I'm going to say something offensively, sort of stereotypical, but, you know, everyone was very nice and willing to help, very well brought up and, you know, conscientious and I was deluge with people wanting to tell their story and, you know, I ended up not just from that board but in various places. I spoke to maybe, I don't know, can't even think, maybe half a dozen, probably more as full interviews for the book. And you know, I say this about all my interviewees and because it's true about all the interviewees, but it was a real pleasure to talk to these people and for them to take time out of their day to sit down and, you know, tell me their life story. So I've, I've very, I've only, no, not I don't spend my life there. But, but no, I've very warm feelings about the ex Mormon community, at least on Reddit, which has been my kind of only connection apart from, you know,

Nemo [02:12:49] well, we'll get you to a Thrive event and show you how ex Mormons party.

John Dehlin [02:12:57] All right. I want to be there. I want to be there when that happens. Well, Dr. Well, Dr. Stephen Bullion. Sorry, Bullivant, thank you so much. The book is the Making of Ex Christian America. You have many, many other books as well, so that by no means is your only book, but it's the one we're featuring today. We really appreciate your time and interest on our people because it's really important for us to understand where we are, because our church won't tell us frankly, even though they have the information. So it's nice to have other people who can, from an academic and objective standpoint, take a look and give us an update on how we're doing and how we're doing compared otherwise. But otherwise than that, you're just a delightful, thoughtful human. So thank you for coming on Mormon Stories.

Stephen Bullivant [02:13:53] It's a genuine pleasure. Can I tell people to like and subscribe?

John Dehlin [02:13:56] Yeah, tell us.

Stephen Bullivant [02:13:57] Smash. Smash the like and subscribe button. This is what I see.

Nemo [02:14:00] Your daughters will be proud.

Stephen Bullivant [02:14:02] Exactly. Yeah. Like and subscribe.

John Dehlin [02:14:04] I love it. Yeah. So please do subscribe. Mormon Stories viewers and listeners, please subscribe to us on YouTube and on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and wherever else you see the podcast. And Stephen, how do people. How do people support you and your work and, you know, follow?

Stephen Bullivant [02:14:22] You buy the book, you know, if it's interesting, you buy the book. And honestly, if it's. If you like the book, you know it, tell others about it, you know, post about it on Facebook and Reddit and leave reviews on Amazon. I mean, like, genuinely, those sorts of things really, really help get the word out. And, you know, hopefully it's a book that resonates with. With, you know, a significant number of listeners, viewers, you know, ex Mormon or not. I was to say, it's not a book by ex Mormons. It's a book about America. And, you know, the ex Mormon story is a distinctive and interesting one within that bigger picture.

John Dehlin [02:15:09] That's great to know. All right. All right, Stephen, please don't be a stranger. We hope to have you back to tell your Catholic story. How does that sound?

Stephen Bullivant [02:15:18] Pleasure.

John Dehlin [02:15:18] All right. And Nemo, you are the one that helped make this happen. You have an amazing channel. Please also go subscribe to Nemo, the Mormon channel. Nemo, you just hit 10,000 subscribers. That's a big deal, right?

Nemo [02:15:31] I did, yeah. Exciting. I redid my studio in honor of the milestone.

John Dehlin [02:15:36] Yeah. 10,000 YouTube subscribers. That's no small deal. So keep that going, Nemo.

Nemo [02:15:41] Yeah, thanks. Thanks.

John Dehlin [02:15:42] Anything else people can do to follow you or support you?

Nemo [02:15:46] Yeah, I mean, I'm. I guess now's good times to talk about as any. I'm going full time with this, so any support, donations, any help, subscribes, likes, all that sort of Stuff is helpful to me. And how do people.

John Dehlin [02:15:59] How do people donate to you, Nemo?

Nemo [02:16:02] There'll be links in the descriptions of my videos. I'm just setting up a donor box and people can just subscribe, can give a monthly donation of however much they like. Really?

John Dehlin [02:16:12] That's amazing. Okay.

Nemo [02:16:13] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:16:14] Thanks, Nemo. Support Nemo the Mormon. Subscribe to his channel. And Nemo, we hope to have you back more in 2023. Do you think that's something we can count on? Maybe?

Nemo [02:16:24] I think so. Given I'm going to have more time on my hands, I think you should keep me busy.

John Dehlin [02:16:29] All right, well, thanks, Nemo. Thanks for making this happen. Thanks again, Steven. Keep up the good work.

Stephen Bullivant [02:16:34] Pleasure.

John Dehlin [02:16:35] And thanks to everyone who's joined us today on Mormon Stories. The livestream was vibrant. The live stream chat and comments were vibrant. We want to thank everyone who makes all this possible. And if you value content like this and you want to see it continue, you can go to MormonStories.org, click on the donate button and become a monthly donor. That makes a big difference. And also you can always send us a super chat. So you can you click on the little dollar sign in your YouTube chat window and send us a donation. And we're a nonprofit. We're transparent in our finances. And you know, your donations are tax deductible in the US and every dollar you contribute, we try to use to improve our channel and support the mission of the organization. So please, be good to each other, be kind to each other, support the programming that's valuable to you. And last but not least, please, please buy this book, book Nonverts the Making of Ex Christian America. Because we want to support good scholarship about the Mormon people and about religion in general. So take care everyone, and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Bye bye.

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