Introduction and Welcome

Part 1 of 2 · Ep. 422

John Dehlin [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3. Mormon Stories Podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you. To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today@mormonstories.org. hello, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin, and today we have with us a guest that I've wanted to have on Mormon Stories for a long time. This is not his first appearance on Mormon Stories. John Hamer was part of some of the very early Mormon Matters panel discussions that we had several years back. Is that true, John?

John Hamer [00:00:51] Yeah, absolutely. That was a great, great set of discussions. And I also came right after you restarted your podcast, the Mormon Stories podcast. Joanna came on and then I came on.

John Dehlin [00:01:03] I think that's right. That was around 2009 or 2010. But one thing we've never done, and something I've wanted to do with John for a long, long time, is to actually have him tell his story, because I think his story is fascinating. John's interesting for a number of reasons. As far as I'm concerned, he's super nice and super smart. He is a. Is it cartographer? Is that what you call yourself, John?

John Hamer [00:01:31] Well, I usually just say map maker. The reason why I say that, obviously cartographer is the more scientific word. I don't do precision cartographic work like you might do if you were a geologist or something like that. The kind of maps that I make are historical maps where generally I'm illustrating a history book. And so in that case, it's less about precision and more about conveying the ideas of history through maps.

John Dehlin [00:02:02] Right. So if you look at, for example, your LDS set of scriptures, where they have those maps that show, you know, the journey of the Saints from New York to, you know, Nauvoo, it would be that type of map that has some geography on it, but also has stuff related to people. And. And John is not just he has a master's degree from University of Michigan in this type of stuff, but also he's been involved with the Joseph Smith Papers project, doing maps for them, and has been doing maps for Mormon history, various books, for many, many years. He's also been one of the leaders in the John Whitmer Historical association, which is the community of Christian, sort of parallel to the Mormon History Association. And he's actively involved now in the community of Christ, which is the new name for the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. So there are many, many reasons why John is interesting to me. But most importantly, he's just a super knowledgeable person about church history. He's very astute in terms of his navigation of these very complicated Mormon cultural waters. He's been a longtime blogger on the By Common Consent blog as a non member of the church. But we'll get into all that. John, is there anything else I left out that should be noted before we jump in?

John Hamer [00:03:40] That's just a really generous introduction. Now I'm really excited to be back on your program and talking about the story.

John Dehlin [00:03:48] And one really important thing that we're going to be talking about is the fact that John, for the reasons that we'll get into, felt like he needed to leave the LDS Church. And probably, I don't know if you we'll talk about whether you call yourself an atheist or an agnostic now or whether you don't like those labels, but my guess is you, you went through times of self identifying as atheist or agnostic. And what I think is really interesting is that John has decided to affiliate with the Community of Christ Church and has been super active there. And so understanding that decision for someone that knows all of the church history, has probably dissected not just Mormonism but religious belief as well, but has then still chosen to remain affiliated not just with the faith tradition, but with a restoration branch or sort of a Mormon related branch of a faith tradition is super interesting to me. So we're going to get into all that as well. So that's a big long introduction for our listeners. All right, John, so let's start with just kind of a little bit about your early years within the church so we can get a picture of what type of Mormon you were.

John Hamer's Family Roots in Mormonism

John Hamer [00:05:13] Sure. So I have a long time family connection in Mormonism, so through my mother's side. I'm a seventh generation Latter Day Saint. Goes back our ancestors were go back to kind of 1832, 1833 Kirtland. The family was the Winchester family and one of their daughters is one of the little known or is the little known younger wife of Joseph Smith. So that people are more aware of Helen Markimbell. But the other one is Nancy Winchester in the Nauvoo period. And so we have kind of a long early history that goes all the way back. But then for my family there's never been a, it hasn't been people haven't been in the entire time. And so the Winchester's kids, the family split apart in 1844 during the succession crisis. And so the oldest son went off with Sidney Rigdon and ended up becoming one of Sidney Rigdon's apostles. The youngest son that I'm descended from did go out to Utah but ultimately ended up leaving the Mormon Church. And so he was kind of an ex Mormon early on in Utah. And the family has kind of gone through cycles of younger children have gone back and then people have left and that's kind of gone all the way down to the present day where my mom is a very active member, as are two of my sisters. My sister Carol is a fairly prominent she frogs is chance in the outer blogness kind of ex Mormon bloggernackle and my brother Ben is a Unitarian and my dad is ex Mormon who became an Evangelical Christian. So we have kind of a whole spectrum of religious affiliation in my family

John Dehlin [00:07:15] and I know a few of your siblings and love everyone I've met. So it's just a great family.

John Hamer [00:07:20] Yeah, well, the nice thing about it for our family is that we have a real policy in the family of family first before all of these things. And so I get along absolutely great with my mom and my Mormon sisters and same thing with Carol and Ben. So that hasn't been in my dad. That isn't an issue. I mean we don't agree obviously in our own where we are religiously, but that hasn't stopped us from staying together as a family and also putting that before.

John Dehlin [00:07:54] I see that as a great role model for all religious people. Just families should come first in my view. So that's great.

John Hamer [00:08:04] I was just going to say growing up we were a mission field Mormon family. I was born in the suburbs of Chicago and we moved to New York and then New Jersey, Ohio and finally Minneapolis, where I grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis. I was one of the kids who was very active. I was the deacons quorum president, I was the seminary president. I was all those kind of things. And Eagle Scout at 13 I was the. There was a girl too, but I was the boy that the bishop would always call on if they wanted a youth to give a prayer. Went around and gave talks with the Stake High Councilmen when we would, you know, go around to do those kind of things. So it was very active in that way and also was able to talk to adults early on and so was kind of the kid that they called on Trevor to present the face of youth in the church in my ward. But on the other hand also very early on, as early as when I was a teacher, I was Kind of a closet doubting Mormon. And so I didn't, I would feel like a lot of doubt about a lot of the truth claims. I didn't think that the Book of Mormon seemed particularly ancient in comparison to the Old Testament. I definitely didn't think that the. When I was looking at, I remember looking as a young teenager in church, kind of looking through the facsimiles of the Book of Abraham and saying, you know, this is, it's very clear that this is a diagram of someone being mummified and it's not Abraham being sacrificed. And below the Canopic jars are even there, which are part of the Egyptian mummification rituals. And so I was kind of a closet doubter on those things. And then as a doubter, when I was making those kind of talks in church, then I'd have these very spiritual ladies in the church would come up afterwards and say, oh, I felt the spirit, you were so strong, this kind of thing. And I thought, you know, the entire time I'm giving this, I really don't believe it. And so I became very skeptical of what they felt, the feeling the spirit was. And so pretty well by mid teenage years, I was not a believer in the truth claims of the Mormon Church and then considered myself to be not a believer at all and out of it by the time I turned 18.

Deep Church Involvement and BYU Years

John Dehlin [00:10:29] Okay, so, but you were also like president of your deacons, teacher priests quorum, right? I mean, yes, yeah, so. So the church meant a lot to you and you were really into it, but you're saying your faith kind of fell apart by age 18.

John Hamer [00:10:48] Yes. And then the main thing was, so I had really kind of felt by the time I was so 16, I didn't believe in the truth claims. But I still decided, okay, I'd be the head of the teachers, I'm sorry, priest quorum, the bishop is the president or whatever, but it was the leader of it. And so my feelings at that point were. So I had a policy which was something like, you didn't have to go to activities if you didn't want to, and we would have donuts every Sunday, this kind of thing. So it wasn't. So I kind of felt like, okay, I'm enjoying the social aspect of it, I'll probably stay Mormon all my life. But what really was the thing that I decided I couldn't stay in about when I was 18 was I thought the sexism that's inherent in Mormonism is something that I just can't overcome. Inherent in Utah Mormonism. And I was Also very uncomfortable with the. I was only eight when the priesthood ban for black people changed and the doctrine that underlay that ban was continuing to be taught. So my seminary teacher when I was 16 had, you know, just repeated essentially the same kind of race doctrines that justified that priesthood ban. And I also, you know, did not feel comfortable with that at all. So I thought, well, this is actually as much as I enjoy the social aspect of it, this is actually not something that I feel comfortable with in terms of it, the overall good that it's accomplishing. Because I felt like what it is doing for my mom, her place, you know, kind of without being able to have exercise real leadership in the ward when she's here, she's the smartest person in the ward. And also my sisters who were just not as, you know, just not as valued for what their accomplishments were. So I mean, I remember just a very like one of my terrible, searing memories is I was this whatever overly proud 13 year old eagle Scout and my sister who had earned the highest award in the Girl Scouts. I just remember saying something like, well, that, you know, something just really flippant and awful where that, that doesn't count or it isn't the same thing. Right. In other words, that this doesn't have the same. It doesn't, it's not, it's certainly the program isn't recognized by the church and it isn't, it's just a kind of girl's counterfeit of the thing. And it was an awful thing to say and my mom, you know, kind of reprimanded me for it right then and I don't remember what it was. But anyway, that was one of the things that allowed me to start to see why is it that only in this worldview, why is it that only boys are people and men are people and women aren't real people?

John Dehlin [00:13:41] Right. So you felt like the church was a little bit too sexist for your taste, a little bit too racist, at least historically for your taste.

John Hamer [00:13:51] Right.

John Dehlin [00:13:55] And yet, and yet you chose to go to byu?

John Hamer [00:14:01] Yes, I went to byu.

John Dehlin [00:14:03] Okay. Did you tell your family about your doubts or lack of belief at the time? Did your mom or siblings know that you didn't believe anymore?

John Hamer [00:14:15] Well, so my official I, I absolutely don't believe anymore dividing line occurred two weeks after I went to byu. Right.

John Dehlin [00:14:24] Okay. So you couldn't talk to them before.

John Hamer [00:14:27] So before I was a closet doubter and hadn't decided to write everything off. I thought, okay, well maybe I'm going to live with this. I'M going to do this and that. But then when I went to BYU a couple weeks after that, then I like, okay, this is not the direction that I'm going. I'm not going to stay in this.

John Dehlin [00:14:40] So what happened at byu?

John Hamer [00:14:42] So at byu, okay, so I had been in the Mission as a mission field Mormon and there had only been in my high school a handful of other Mormons. And so I had kind of been able to have for myself this sort of identity that Mormons were a model minority, like my Jewish friends or something like that in my school where we were able to say, I don't know, I was able to feel like there was this kind of a, a special identity there where anyway that I, because I didn't have a lot of real firsthand connection to, you know, kind of a real Mormon society where a Mormon majority society and you know, getting to byu, then I was, you know, immediately immersed into the middle of a Mormon majority society, which, you know, as a kind of a, you know, young adult or whatever, an 18 year old, I judged very harshly. And I thought, well, this is, this is pretty hypocritical and everybody here is the same as in any other society and this is really not, it isn't really special. And so that was like, I thought, okay, I'm done with this. And so, yes, no, I did tell my family right away. And I wrote to my sister, who's a year younger than me, and she wrote back and said, well, I believe exactly the same as you, I'm not interested in this. I'm really happy that you wrote me that. You know, and then my mom and dad didn't feel that way at all. So my mom, I don't know, I'm sure she was maybe upset with people at byu. She thought that maybe I wouldn't, you know, that this decision was a phase or something like that. But it ultimately wasn't. So I ended up staying at BYU for three years. I graduated after three years. It would have been, I would have had to go. My undergrad would have taken five years if I had decided to leave and go to the University of Wisconsin or something like that. So I just decided to knuckle under and, and batten down the hatches and plow through and get done with it.

John Dehlin [00:16:39] So was it hard to be at BYU as a non believer?

John Hamer [00:16:42] No, it was pretty easy.

John Dehlin [00:16:46] How'd you pull it off?

John Hamer [00:16:47] Well, so, you know, the way you get in trouble at BYU, this is a while ago too. I'm sure BYU is a little different now. So this was 88 to 91, 92. At the time, there was, you know, everybody was talking about, I don't know, the BYU standards, secret police and this kind of thing or whatever. It was the kind of things that you had to go through. But people really would get in trouble as a doubter or an unbeliever when they would. When they would confess that to their bishop. Right. And so if they would say that, then you'd get flagged and people would have to be in interviews all the time and there would be these, you know, all of the kind of troubles that everybody goes through. But as somebody who was absolutely a non believer and who was just determined to finish and graduate, I didn't feel any qualms at all about, you know, just smiling at my bishop when I would have the occasional interviews. And even the last. The last year, I didn't even have to go to church at all because all I did was to get an ecclesiastical endorsement. I transferred into a new student ward in like May or something and, you know, attended two weeks, smiled the whole time. Then I said, oh, I need this thing signed because I was away for a semester in Europe or something. And he just signed it right off and that's it. I had to go like three times for an entire year. So it really wasn't tough at all.

John Dehlin [00:18:10] Now, that was the time I was at byu. Joanna Brooks was at byu.

John Hamer [00:18:14] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:18:14] Do you remember any of the sort of activist, liberal things happening the September 6th kind of stuff? And to what extent were you a part of any of that?

John Hamer [00:18:25] Well, in fact, I was at the time. Just surprisingly, I was able to construct a kind of a non Mormon life there. And so actually I was not interested in anything to do with Mormonism. And I was incredibly unaware of the September 6th or anything like that that was happening, even though I was in the History department, so I didn't really know about that. I was a part of the liberal Mormon community. So the Student Review newspaper, I was on the staff of that for a whole long time. I was the creative and production director of Student Review. And then ultimately I became the publisher of Student Review and worked directly with Joanna Brooks, who's a good friend of mine, who was the editor.

John Dehlin [00:19:07] Now that's a pretty historic time to be working on the Student Review. Did you enjoy that?

John Hamer [00:19:13] Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, so I had a lot of wonderful friends who were progressive Mormons and doubters and non Mormons. So I had a really good community there at BYU and also had a lot of great professors who I really, really enjoyed.

John Dehlin [00:19:30] Yeah, that's a really cool time to be at byu. Now, something we haven't talked about is stuff relating to sexuality. As I understand it, you began experiencing same sex attraction as a teen, right?

Being Gay and Mormon in the 1980s

John Hamer [00:19:48] Well, as a kid, yeah. Or whatever. So, yeah. So this was. So I'm. I'm a gay man. The. I'm. But from. This is again, from an earlier era for young gay people, that young gay people have so many role models in the media that they're able to come out, you know, in junior high and things like that these days. But for me, growing up in the 70s and 80s, I had never met another openly gay person. I'd never seen gay characters in media. And so there was this era still where it was possible to know who you're attracted to. I know all the way back to who I was interested in in junior high and that kind of thing. But not having put that together to say, okay, that means I'm gay. And so definitely this wasn't. This is something that back then, coming out wasn't only just coming out public, it was actually coming out to oneself. In other words. Oh, that's what this all means. Right, Right. And so two years after I got into byu, in about two and a half years after I really had put the church and Mormonism behind me, although I was still living in this heart of it at BYU in Utah County, Utah, I met for the very first time a friend of mine on the student review. We went up to Salt Lake. We met a guy who was, you know, was living in Salt Lake, who's openly gay. He's a couple years older than me, really nice person. And I'm like, wow, okay. So within about a week, you know, I'd been talking to him on the phone. Within about a week, I was like, okay, this all really makes sense to me. I'm gay. Okay? Now it's all very clear. And so within about a month of that, I had told everybody I knew on the student review and my sister. Within two months, I told my parents and everything like that. And I was fairly. I mean, for me, it wasn't something that was traumatic at all. It was something that was very sensible and it made a lot of sense. But in coming out in Utah Valley, Utah, in 1980, this wasn't the best and most supportive environment for being gay. And so the social environment for gay people at the time was essentially independent support groups. And so I met the group that was met there. And so for a lot of the people who had come out or had been coming out in the last couple years. They also were experiencing just the total collapse of their worldview because they came out at a time when they still. Or maybe believers in Mormonism, believers in the church, and so their worldview would then collapse at the same time. And so people not only were going through all of this identity issues, they were also going through a terrible faith crisis. And so even though I was very newly out, I kind of immediately became one of the people who was more doing counseling than being counseled in the support group there.

John Dehlin [00:23:05] You sometimes hear about sort of a gay underground at byu, and you even hear unsavory things. You know, was that. Was that going on? Were you plugged into that at all? And what can you, you know, how can you describe that or dispel myths or whatever?

John Hamer [00:23:28] Well, so in most cases,

John Dehlin [00:23:32] a large

John Hamer [00:23:33] percentage anyway, the people that I knew who were gay at byu, again, because the church was so totally unsupportive of who they are and had a kind of an. Has an unrealistic idea, this denial that gay people exist, this kind of thing. So the church is itself discrediting. If you're gay, you immediately see that the church is wrong about things. So as a result, there's this, like I say, this collapse of the worldview and spiritual crisis that tends to happen at the same time. And so most of the people that I knew in the gay community there at byu, therefore, were kind of functionally ex Mormon. They had left the belief system of it. And then simultaneously, what is happening is they're having kind of an initial adolescence where you're actually dating. You're dating people you're attracted to for the first time. You're experimenting. You weren't like a kid who I never had had, for example, alcohol in high school or anything like that, but that's the kind. So there were definitely drinking parties. We would definitely. Throughout the whole last year I was at byu, I would routinely go up every Friday night to the gay bar up in Salt Lake and so didn't meet people there and that kind of thing. There was, again, all of these stories that the secret police were writing down your license plates and everything like that, But I never had any trouble with any of that.

John Dehlin [00:25:14] And. And how do people keep it secret? How did they keep it secret from their roommates and from others around them? You know, I would think that it would lead to this sort of paranoia that you're going to be told on and that, you know, the honor, the honors, what is it the standards office is going to get rid of.

John Hamer [00:25:33] Yeah, I think that there's. It, you know, it could be totally different now. So I don't know how they, you know, how they might have reformed or changed or what their new procedures would be at the time. The, I think the real, the two ways that you really would get in trouble are one, through confession. So if somebody is busily confessing something, they're really torn up and they're busily confessing things to their bishop, they get in trouble. And then the other way is if you are some kind of, if you're really standing out, you shave your give a mohawk and you stand in the middle of the campus and really made a lot of noise, this kind of thing. You know, I was the publisher of the Student Review and I was totally out to all my roommates and you know, most of the people on student Review and that kind of thing. And there was no, I mean we would, we met with administrative. I mean I wouldn't, I didn't go up and tell people in the administration, I've met with them about the student review and that kind of thing. But so I didn't ever have any, you know, any run ins with standards. I would theoretically have been a problem, but I never had a single run in at all.

John Dehlin [00:26:41] I would think that I'd be paranoid that roommates would tell on me. Did you just pick your roommates really carefully or were you just lucky or is that not a realistic fear that roommates might tell on someone if they found out?

John Hamer [00:26:54] I guess I should probably have been more fearful, John. Very fearful. I didn't have any problem. I mean, one of my roommates was at different times I had a couple different roommates who were gay at different times. I was living, you know, I was living in unapproved housing sometimes, you know, but I didn't find it too hard to skirt any of those things. So.

John Dehlin [00:27:17] Yeah, the only reason I mention is because I found there's a lot at stake. Because if you, if you do invest three or four years at a LDS church run university and then you get kicked out, that can add, like you said, a couple years to your education and sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. And so there is a lot at stake.

John Hamer [00:27:40] I was probably way too honest and flippant about it in that way. So in other words, I was having a little bit of a disregard for it. But also since I wasn't doing a lot of things to stand out or to offend anybody, I mean I was, at the end I was working for half. I mean, I had Five different departments that I was a TA for. So I was working for Bill Hamblin as his research assistant, the History Department. Whoa.

John Dehlin [00:28:03] Bill Hamblin?

John Hamer [00:28:04] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:28:05] That's awesome.

John Hamer [00:28:06] I mean, I was working for his dad as a research assistant drawing maps for geology books in the geology department. I was the production director for the business college's newspaper. I was production director for the honors department's newspaper, production director for the History department journal. So, I mean, I really was kind of tied into the publishing and that kind of thing and was working directly with, you know, administrative people in the different departments and occasionally again, meeting with the administration in terms of the student review itself. So.

John Dehlin [00:28:40] Yeah. Did you ever feel guilty that you were being dishonest? You know, that you.

John Hamer [00:28:45] No.

John Dehlin [00:28:46] How did you avoid that? Because I think of you as. I think of you as an honest person.

John Hamer [00:28:51] Yeah, well, I didn't feel that the regulations were. Were reasonable. So in other words, like you said, these are things that people can. For no particularly reasonable reason, you can lose something that is as serious as an education degree, get kicked out and get set back, like you say, tens of thousands of dollars in all these years. And so I thought, well, these are the rules under which this whole thing operates. The system itself is dishonest. I'm just going to, like I say, graduate as rapidly as possible and do what the system actually wants, which is keep your head down and not make a lot of noise and offend everybody all around it, as opposed to the letter of the law and all that stuff. Right, right.

John Dehlin [00:29:41] Okay. So I guess you weren't super sad to leave Provo.

John Hamer [00:29:45] No, I wasn't sad at all. My sister graduated at the same time as me, and we almost. We almost had done this as we were driving the U Haul truck home or something. We almost having the dusting off our feet. Richelieu. Which is good that we did, because I've ended up going back so many times, but I didn't think so at the time. I didn't think that would ever happen. So I thought at the time I would be leaving my Mormon identity entirely behind me. So what had happened was.

John Dehlin [00:30:19] And your religious identity?

John Hamer [00:30:21] Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:30:23] So for you, I wasn't religious at

John Hamer [00:30:25] all in byu, and I didn't consider. I mean, again, I wasn't religious and I also wasn't interested in Mormonism. I was in history, but I was in medieval European history and classical history, the history of map making, this kind of thing. I had no interest whatsoever in Mormon history, which I had only ever been exposed to in the Kind of Sunday school and seminary sanitized versions, which I therefore assumed that the history was just intensely boring and dull and dumb. And so as a result of it, I actually, what I'd learned from Mormon history, no matter how much I love history, what I'd heard in Sunday school about Mormon history actually turned me off to American history in general. And I just assumed that kind of American history and modern history was just intensely boring. And so it turned me to ancient history and medieval history. And I had had this period of time I was going to go and be a. I was going to go be a TA research assistant or teaching assistant at the Jerusalem center for a semester. And this ended up being the semester that Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait. And so as a result, I was in Europe waiting to go. And we kept on getting delayed and delayed. And so I was spending this time in Europe traveling around and seeing historical things, but also traveling by rail paths and meeting young students, college, other fellow college students from around the world who had nothing to do with Mormonism. And so right from the day one when I was there, I kind of had made my decision that I was going to excise my Mormon background entirely from my identity. And so I went to the very first youth hostel. I met a guy who seemed like a really cool guy. We went out and this is in Strasbourg, France. We went out to a bar and got a beer. I'd never had alcohol in my life, but I'm just like pretending, oh, I'm cool. I'm just a regular American college student. None of this Mormon background. I drank the beer and I just like, oh my goodness, this tastes like hairspray. I gotta be cool. I gotta be cool. I don't have. Anyway. And so I had this incredible experience and so much more enjoyment by having left Mormonism entirely behind me than I had when I was on that semester abroad that I decided when I leave BYU and Provo, I'm just, this is not going to be part of my story anymore. I am not going to have it be part of my story. And so when I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan to go to the University of Michigan as a grad student, I told nobody at all that that was part of my backstory, that was just written out.

John Dehlin [00:32:56] And would you have self identified back then as an atheist or agnostic?

John Hamer [00:33:03] Yes, One of the two, I mean, atheist would be, depending on what you mean with an atheist. Atheist is like if you are some kind of a hard atheist, where you're saying there is proof that some kind of God doesn't exist, I don't think that's supportable. So it would have probably been agnostic. In other words, this isn't something that interests me, which is what I guess I would have said at the time.

John Dehlin [00:33:26] Right, right. So tell us how you went from desiring to leave all remnants of Mormonism to extricate all remnants of Mormonism from your identity and experience to becoming one of the most Mormon associated people that I know. Although not lds. Tell me how that happened.

Leaving the Church and Life in the 1990s

John Hamer [00:33:53] So I did spend then the better part of the 90s, just not involved at all. And so it's kind of a little bit of a strange thing. So if you, you know, as you recombine with all of the people who know you from different times in, in your life on Facebook, people who know me from being a Mormon kid in high school to people who know me from being whatever, a liberal gay guy at BYU to people who don't have any connection with. Didn't have any connection with Mormonism, for all of my friends that I had in graduate school to then, like you say, more recent people I've met since the 2000s who have known me as either a secular Mormon, a Mormon historian, or now more recently as a member of Community of Christ. There's a lot of question marks, I think, above everybody's heads as they're kind of looking at the different phases that I've gone through for all of this. What ended up happening was so. In the course of being in Ann Arbor and having nothing to do with it, just studying medieval history, I was also, I also still had all kinds of Mormon values kind of wired into me. And so one of them is just the obsession with getting married and having this companion and being with somebody and sharing your life with somebody forever. One of the problems with that is that you put so much pressure on dating when you're dating because you're really. This is probably universally true or often true for Mormons is that when you're doing dating, you're doing this. The first date is like this marriage assessment interview almost. Right. And so there's all of this kind of pressure on dating that it's just not. Doesn't exist outside that Mormon universe. But I still felt was putting that kind of pressure on kind of the dating that I was doing. And so you were looking for your

John Dehlin [00:35:56] gay eternal companion, basically, my gay eternal companion.

John Hamer [00:35:59] Somebody I was going to be with for a time in all eternity. And I was like, first date,

John Dehlin [00:36:05] awesome. Love it.

John Hamer [00:36:07] And so I've had some, you know, really great guys, you know, who I was like, okay, let's get married, you know, right away. And so obviously that I wasn't prepared to, you know, I wasn't really. I wasn't emotionally prepared to have like, I was. That's like the kind of thing where you're also in love with love. I would say, sure, you're in love with the idea of having an eternal companion and you are, therefore you're missing the person that you're pushing into that ideal.

John Dehlin [00:36:42] I would also guess that because you have such an awesome family, you are in love with the idea of having your own family.

John Hamer [00:36:51] Yeah, maybe so. I'm actually have never had any interest in having kids.

John Dehlin [00:36:57] Oh, I didn't mean kids.

John Hamer [00:36:58] Yeah, so yeah, no, definitely. I was definitely interested in having, you know, in producing a family and you know, having. Having a family in terms of being married to someone. And so. And so definitely though I would put way too much pressure on things and so. And had. And also then the other thing that you're dealing with as, as a gay person in say, a small town, even a progressive college town like Ann Arbor, where. So I went from a place that was very anti gay, Utah Valley, Utah in 1992, to a place that was really progressive and open and accepting and everything like that, in ann arbor in 1992. But the problem was still that there's a pretty small population. So we're a little college town. There's only so many potential people who I can find to be my eternal companion. Right. And so at a certain point, I had just decided that this was too important to me and that I needed to move to a bigger place where I can find more people that I could actually prioritize this a little bit more rationally. I felt like I'd matured enough to actually be able to date without just falling in love with love and that kind of thing. And so I had made this decision to move to California where I would maybe become a creative director for a magazine either in the LA area or San Francisco. And on the way I stopped back at Minneapolis, which is where I grew up. And I had never really gone out to a gay bar, met anybody in Minneapolis. And I thought, well, I'm here for a month. I'm working on redesigning a museum, panels and graphics and making maps for museums in Minneapolis. While I'm here, I'll go out and I'll give Minneapolis a chance. Minneapolis, you got a month to show me what you got. And the very first night I went out, I met Mike Karpowitz. And we've been together ever since. The difference then, though, was that unlike all the previous dating that I'd done in Ann Arbor, Minneapolis is where my family lives. And so when I brought Mike home, like, a week after we'd gotten together, introduced him to my parents, Mike. I couldn't. Suddenly, I couldn't have this backstory that just had this gap where I didn't talk about Mormonism at all, because Mike immediately meets my mom, who's a Mormon. And so he's very interested. What's all this Mormon business? And so I began by telling him kind of my, you know, the backstory, that I knew the Mormon story as well as I'd known it, which wasn't really very deep at all. And so it was kind of through discovering more of what that Mormon story was and then my own family story in it, that kind of led me to realize how interesting Mormon history actually is. And so my mom actually had a copy of Fawn Brodie. No Man Knows My History. I read that, and I was like, oh, my goodness, this stuff is so interesting. And so kind of from there that that got me back into, or got me into for the first time, being really interested in my own family history, my own Mormon family history. And from there, the Internet had started to be created, social connections. There were social boards for ex Mormons. And so I started communicating on those. I also then got in touch with the people who are writing these books through wonderful institutions like the Mormon History association and the John Whitmer Historical Association. And I started to realize that all these people whose books that I've written were so accessible. They're such wonderful people. People like Lavina Fielding Anderson became really good, great, close friends. Everybody from Mike Quinn, Dan Vogel, Brent Metcalfe, all of the people who you end up meeting. Jan Shipps end up being just an intensely close mentor. And so that kind of brought me back into touch with the Mormon community, because I got in touch with the Mormon history community.

Finding a Partner and Reconnecting with Religion

John Dehlin [00:41:15] And how long you been together with Mike?

John Hamer [00:41:19] Since 1997.

John Dehlin [00:41:21] 1997. I want to do the math. So that's 16 years. Is that right?

John Hamer [00:41:25] Yeah. Yes.

John Dehlin [00:41:26] That's awesome. 1997. Okay. And. And so, in part, we kind of have Mike to thank for bringing you back to Mormon culture.

John Hamer [00:41:38] Oh, absolutely. Yeah. In fact, he was so interested in it, there's nothing he likes more than road trips. And so we added to. I mean, he likes to go and see, like, president, you know, presidential history sites and that kind of thing or any other number of things. But we just added into the mix Mormon history sites. And so we started, you know, going to different Mormon visitor centers. And, you know, we went to the Hill, Cumorah and to Voree, Wisconsin and St. George and any other number of places. And so, in fact, it was for my 30th birthday that Mike took me to the Kirtland Temple for the first time. And that is actually when I encountered members of the Reorganized Church Community of Christ for the kind of. For the first time. So that was before I got involved more, more directly with the.

John Dehlin [00:42:31] The history Association.

John Hamer [00:42:53] Come, come, ye saints no toil nor labor fear, but with joy.

Part Two Introduction

Part 2 of 2 · Ep. 423

John Dehlin [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3. Mormon Stories Podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you. To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today@mormonstories.org so how did you go from, you know, from disaffiliating with the LDS Church and identifying as an atheist, agnostic, you know, to sort of not wanting anything to do with Mormonism per se, to then rediscovering a love for Mormon history? I can get all that.

John Hamer [00:00:50] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:00:51] Now, what I want to understand is how you go from that to wanting to actually be baptized a member of the community of Christ and to be an active participant in it, because I know a lot of people who follow those steps out of the church. But I think it's more rare for people, for ex Mormons to find their way back into a church and even more significantly, into a restoration branch church that's affiliated with Joseph Smith in any way. How'd that happen?

John Hamer [00:01:22] Yeah, well, I'll say that for one of the things that I think that one of the reasons why atheism or agnosticism ends up being such a common end state for people who leave the LDS Church are that people have the idea of the idea of God, the idea of kind of a God as a literal heavenly father, as a being with a body, finite being with a body who is all powerful but who performs different miracles. This kind of thing, this kind of very physical and direct, connected to a luminous being kind of concept of God in Mormonism. And then they kind of a very fundamentalistic, not fundamentalist Mormonism, but fundamentalist in the religious sense in general, and literalistic view of Scripture ideas that the Bible is more or less a history book and that things that are told in the narrative stories, the sacred stories there in scripture, are actually historical and not simply symbolic. And so I think that when you have that vision of theology, if you have that vision of God and Scripture, it's hard not to simply reject it altogether. But that is certainly. But I would say that ultimately that is not the only view of Scripture and it is not the only view of what God is. And in fact, it's a. Not also the main traditional view of what God is, but rather it's a recent and modern kind of reaction to the challenges that theism has had since the Enlightenment.

John Dehlin [00:03:29] But it is a very Joseph Smith consistent view to view everything as literal, to view God as some type of anthropomorphic being. I mean, those are probably some of the most defining traits of Joseph Smith. Right.

John Hamer [00:03:43] Well, especially his late theology. Right. So Joseph Smith is a moving target too. His thoughts are evolving. His original conceptions of God that are composed into the Book of Mormon, those are very different from King Follet sermon progression theology that ends up being at the end in Nauvoo. Okay, so I agree. Go ahead.

John Dehlin [00:04:10] Yeah. And so before we dig into that, though, you're just saying that what you've come to realize is that religiosity does not necessarily need to denote a reliance on the literality or the anthropomorphism of a deity or literal interpretations of Scripture.

John Hamer [00:04:31] Right. And so what I would even say is what does in our own restoration experience? What does Joseph Smith, the God, So the Joseph Smith who is in praise to the man, the exalted Joseph Smith, that occurs after the martyrdom, what does Joseph Smith the God tell us about Jesus the man? In other words, we actually have in the restoration tradition a window on how ideas like that evolve and that we can use those to actually unpack what happened in early Christianity. And that can also inform us, have a more realistic assessment of the Jesus of history as opposed to the Jesus of scripture or the Jesus of theology.

John Dehlin [00:05:22] Okay, so that's a beautiful high level sort of preview for what we're going to talk about maybe in parts two and three of this podcast, because in part two, we're going to dive into the history of the community of Christ or the reorganized church. And then in part three, we're going to talk about where the community of Christ is now. But many people who end up leaving the LDS Church feel angry, they feel resentful, they feel disillusioned, they don't want to trust any authority. They certainly don't want anything to do with Joseph Smith because they view him as a charlatan and a fraud. And they just feel oftentimes just, I don't want anything to do with religion or faith at all. And so did you. You know, I can tell your emotional experiences were a little bit different in that I don't know to what extent you ever really felt angry or bitter or, you know, disillusioned by the church. But maybe you did. But regardless, the step from, like, being fascinated with Mormon history to, to the step of like, joining a religion, you know, that's something happened there. So what can you tell us about how that happened?

Why John Returned to a Restoration Tradition

John Hamer [00:06:36] Well, so unlike most people, I think, who you meet when you're Meeting an ex Mormon, you're meeting somebody who's a new ex Mormon often, right? And I wouldn't say that I am immune from emotion and no anger or those kind of things, but for me, that is consigned to, you know, when I was 18 to 21 years old or 22 years old, and then I have this whole long period of time where that was done. I was gone. That was nothing to do with me anymore. I didn't. And so when I came back at it, I'm coming back at it, even though I'm, you know, I'm something of an insider, but I'm an outsider insider. I'm a person who no longer is the whole thing. The whole thing isn't causing me, you know, me, some kind of pain. I'm not like a person who was being kept in, in the movement longer, let's say, if you're a longtime ex Mormon, one of the things that may make you still engage with the community is because you have a spouse who's active or something, and that can just cause continual friction and continual irritation and continually renewal of anger. And if you don't have something like that, you tend to just simply leave after four or five years. So you're upset. You are learning more and more. You're reading all of the ex Mormon boards and you're finding out this and that more thing. You're like, oh my goodness, that, that also, you know, the, you know this. And that is also not the case. According to the, you know, the scholarship on, against this truth claim. At a certain point you're less. The person is less angry and they're more than telling, they're telling those same kind of things to newly angry persons. So the next Mormon boards, you know, and so they are. So there's a kind of a transition where you are, you are more angry and less knowledgeable. Then you're more knowledgeable and less angry, and then finally you're bored, not angry. And then you leave. And so I was really kind of excited when I first started doing all this Mormon history, tourism and Mormon history study. I was just excited also then that simultaneously when there was started to be social chat boards and that kind of thing. And so I was interested to start talking about all this stuff with other people. But I kind of quickly discovered that pattern that there were very few other ex Mormons that were kind of coming at this from where I was coming at it from. And so I had even like, early on, I had even bought like a website domain culturalmormon.org, i thought, wouldn't this be great if we had a model where this is my heritage, this is my family identity going all the way. There's no reason why I should cede the definition of what it is to be a Mormon to the president of the Corporation of the First Presidency in Salt Lake City or something like that. They certainly are in charge of the largest institution within a Mormon culture. But there could, in the same way that we have cultural Catholics or cultural Jews, there could also be cultural Mormons. But I ended up finding that very few people who identify as ex Mormon want to even they don't like the idea of being called a cultural Mormon. They want to separate themselves from the Mormon identity, which they do view as being so totally connected to Thomas Monson.

John Dehlin [00:09:59] So for you, you loved the culture enough that you didn't. You ultimately decided you wanted to embrace it, not reject it.

John Hamer [00:10:08] Well, and I found that it was ultimately that honestly, it's informing me, like I explained to you in terms of my. What even the crazy thing I was doing in dating. I thought, you know, there are things deep inside of me here that are informed by the fact that I have this, what was still at the time maybe a semi ethnicity, but you know, quickly waning as an ethnicity. And so, and I was excited interested in that and I wanted to explore that more with other people who shared that. So that's definitely something I was interested in.

John Dehlin [00:10:40] But not just it was inside of you, but you must have valued it on some level. Some of your Mormon ness you valued.

John Hamer [00:10:47] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:10:48] Okay, so again, now I can see you going, hey, I like this culture. You know, we're not going to cede our culture to, you know, the LDS Church president. But then there's another step between that and actually joining a church, getting baptized in a church.

John Hamer [00:11:05] Right, right, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:11:06] How'd that happen?

John Hamer [00:11:07] So, well, as I say, then I had trouble, you know, generating any interest one as a. In cultural Mormonism because my experience creating, working with ex Mormon support groups, I was administrator for of an ex Mormon chat board for a couple years. I actually orchestrated a couple ex Mormon or New Order Mormon pilgrimages essentially to Kirtland, where we could have, you know, we could talk about it as a place. This is a place that my ancestors helped build. You know, these were their this. But this is the actual, you know, honest history about it. This is not just a sanitized history or a history that reflects the one view of any one institution on it. I kind of gave tours that way. But it was like even in that case, it was some, often, you know, we had one, for example, a, a guy who had been a Mormon bishop in Michigan who came to one of those and at a certain point he couldn't go on anymore. He broke down because it was just too new. And so the emotions were all too raw. And then at a certain point people did lose interest once the emotions were not raw anymore. And so I didn't find that to be very effective. And so I moved from there to spending a lot of time with the different historians institutions. So MHA and jwha and fairly early on, Mike and I became directors of the John Whitmer Historical association, which you mentioned as the Community of Christ equivalent of the Mormon History association and just found wonderful community of historians in those and just sharing all that kind of thing. And so that's one more step. So like you say, move out to back into, okay, so then the next step from there. So at a certain point I then also then started to though see how many of the people in that community, how many of the people in like maybe the Sunstone Mormon community, in the progressive Mormon community, how many of the people and then how many women in the LDS progressive community, how marginalized they were within their own religious tradition. So you could have somebody who is just this incredibly talented, this intellectual giant who, you know, in the case, let's say my good friend Christine Hagland, who is the editor of Dialogue, the premier journal of Mormon studies. And yet she doesn't have a respected role than inside her own congregational experience, inside a ward, inside a ward. She's a divorced woman who is in an age range that how are you even connected to the hierarchical priesthood structure of the local congregation? And so for all of these people who are people who I just enjoy, I are great friends of mine, but they are nevertheless, they fall under, for example, Boyd Packard's list of enemies of the Mormon Church. You know, so they, so people who are intellectuals, people who are women, self realized women feminists, people who are gay, you know, so all of those. I started to therefore see that need simultaneously as seeing the idea that cultural Mormonism in actual secular institutions didn't seem like it was particularly functional or likely to go anywhere. And so then I simultaneously, in the whole course of this thing, as being the director of the John Whitmer Historical Association, I came into a lot of contact with Community of Christ, the RLDS Church. I became way more familiar with the history of the RLDS Church, the incredible brave transformation of the RLDS Church over the past 50 years. And I started to see the real benefits that an alternative and progressive faith community could have for people who are marginalized within the restoration tradition. So that's kind of, as you can see, this path is eventually leading. It is over the course of 20 years. So it did take a little while to go.

John Dehlin [00:15:53] Yeah, yeah. So to summarize, you tried to organize sort of communities around Mormon culture with marginal or liberal or disaffected Mormons, but found that that was hard to do. You saw a lot of people that desired to maintain affiliation with the church, but specifically within the LDS Church's case, women, sexual minorities, and liberal intellectual types. You saw them as sort of being destined to remain affiliated with the church that undervalued, underappreciated, underutilized them from your perspective. And so you saw maybe the community of Christ as a. As a place for these people to potentially congregate, Is that right?

John Hamer [00:16:51] Yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:16:52] But was there anything spiritual inside of you? Was it an intellectual choice for you? Was it a purely social choice for you? Was there any spiritual or theological elements or factors for you?

John Hamer [00:17:10] Yes, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:17:11] Talk about that.

John Hamer [00:17:13] Yeah, I absolutely would not feel comfortable or I would not feel that it would be appropriate at all for me to advocate something, you know, without. Without having, you know, a personal spiritual dimension and a feeling of calling. And so in the course of. Although my whole background had been history, as of about six years ago, in kind of seeing this kind of need and also this potential, I switched almost entirely all of my field of study and focus to looking at the entire history of theology, to looking at the history of philosophy, to looking at philosophy and theology, to looking at scripture study so that I could actually speak meaningfully, so that I could actually understand the issues, theological issues, Mormon tradition. There's always. People make the aphorism that Mormons don't have theology, they have history. And I think that that still remains true. There is so much to theology that can be looked at, and there's. It's such a. Anyway, it's a very deep and challenging thing. And that's kind of what I was trying getting at. Like you were saying before in this sort of high focus thing, what are other ways of looking at God than in the kind of the late Nauvoo progression style, literal Heavenly Father kind of God. What other ways can we look at how people have viewed God throughout time? So I definitely, in becoming informed about that for the very first time, I also then definitely have felt a sense of calling that this is, in fact, this is what I'm called to devote my life to. So I am really, I'm entirely committed to helping people within this, you know, this tradition, my cousins, people who are marginalized within their own faith community, helping them to empower themselves by being able to be a part of a community that values them, that they have total ownership of, and that is therefore, you know, incredibly empowering and meaningful to them.

John Dehlin [00:19:58] And I, and I love this, and I love this about you. But. But I'd like to maybe end this segment by talking about your actual beliefs. And I'd start by saying you are called by what or who, who or what is calling you or what is your, how is your belief structured? Is it in a literal anthropomorphic God? Is it in a sort of deistic God that either created the universe and then just kind of checked out, or is just not intricately involved in the universe? Or is it some just type of force? Or do you prefer not even to give any form or description to the belief and just say you don't know, but you just feel called, and that's all you know, like, where do you stand?

Theology, Revelation, and the Nature of Scripture

John Hamer [00:20:51] So for me, calling is the. And actually revelation, inspiration, scripture, all of these things are human response to the divine. And by the divine. I do not. Yes, I don't believe in an anthropomorphic God or a God that is spirit, a God that is body, a God that is finite in any way. So I, I do kind of reject those ideas. I'm going to make a blog post that is something like, there literally is no trinity. In other words, I'm not interested in a view that is literal, rather literal, physical, in terms of a human conception. So I think that anything that we do when we're talking about God as humans and we're ascribing different human anthromorphic characteristics to the divine, we are attempting to limit the imponderable or the infinite. I think the definition of God that I believe in is that God is infinity, not that God is something finite within infinity. And the way that we're able to. Then you say, okay, well, this is the imponderable. How can we, how can we even relate? What's the point? And so my definition of Christ theologically, as opposed to Jesus the human, the Jesus of history, who I don't believe was divine. I think that the historical record that we have, the literary record we can pull out from studying the New Testament, is that Jesus is a prophet, a wonderful teacher who had an incredible gospel message that is still resonates with us today, but that Jesus was not in some kind of literal way imbued with divinity, but rather the idea of the Christ of theology. What I would say about that is that Christ is a model that we use so that we can understand and connect with God. So if we want to think of God as God the Father, if we want to think of God as your mother, if you want to think of God as Jesus the brother, the Son, if you want to think of God as the community of the righteous, the kingdom of God or divine law, or however you want to think about it, that is the way we are able to get our hands around it. And I would call that Christ the model of the bridge that connects us to the imponderable. How do we ponder the imponderable? But we just have to be very aware when we're doing that that our models aren't literally true. And if we start to decide that we worship an individual model where we say God is Elohim, he has X number of wives, this kind of thing, if we understand that as to be some kind of literal thing as opposed to a model that we're using to relate to God, then we are worshiping a model which I would call the danger of putting gods before God. So if the two great commandments are love God and love thy neighbor as thyself, the idea of thinking about the model and worshiping the model is where you are putting a God before God.

John Dehlin [00:24:26] It's a form of idolatry to think that you can encapsulate God in any finite way.

John Hamer [00:24:32] Right.

John Dehlin [00:24:33] And this is revealing a bias for me. But that's something that I hear you saying. And you tell me if this is wrong. You're not coming out of a desire to minimize or marginalize God. You're basically saying God is so powerful or God is so complex or significant or powerful that that any attempt we make to try and put God in a box as humans is ultimately going to fall short.

John Hamer [00:25:05] Right. That's a human way. That's a thing that we just have to understand. That's the thing that humans are doing. We have to do it because that's what we can do. We have the capacity to do. And there's nothing wrong with doing it. It's just a matter of if we make. Then we make that box and we make that be an ironclad checklist, and we then say this checklist is exactly the way it absolutely is, then we've really made. Yeah. Then we're doing what you're saying what I would call idolatry.

Joseph Smith, Polygamy, and the Book of Mormon

John Dehlin [00:25:32] Okay, so where does that leave you with Joseph Smith and the Doctrine and Covenants and the Book of Mormon and the Restoration?

John Hamer [00:25:44] Well, I think it leaves me in really good standing with Joseph Smith and the Restoration and the Doctrine and Covenants. I think that the result of the Restoration and the result of the Doctrine and Covenants of opening up the canon and the canon and community of Christ tradition continues to be open. And so the Doctrine and Covenants, there's continually new Scripture, including some of the very best, in my opinion, best chapters or sections of Scripture in the entire canon are some of the most recent ones that have been added to the community of Christ Doctrine and Covenants. So I think that the idea of opening the canon up to understanding that there is no difference between us and the time period when people are actually in the Scriptures, so that that idea of restoration, that the heavens aren't closed, that the time period that existed, the time period of the apostles or ancient Israelites and all the gifts that were there are available to us today, I think is incredibly powerful and empowering. And also I think that the idea that, like Joseph Smith did with the Bible revision that he had, if there are problems with the Bible, if things in the Bible don't work for our current sensibilities, our understanding that we have, Joseph Smith went so far as to cross it out and change it. This is kind of completely unthinkable in the Protestantism of his day and then modern fundamentalism too, where Scripture is viewed as the sole source of authority and it's almost an imprisoning authority, where every little thing in the Bible is this rule book and the idea of it. That conception itself, though, doesn't hold up because it doesn't understand even the basis of the Bible. The Bible isn't simply something that was dictated out from God in whole cloth in the King James English. It is this incredibly complex collection of texts that two centuries of scholarship have given us incredible insights about where it came from and the historical context of its different components.

John Dehlin [00:28:08] And I love that vision. I think it's beautiful. And it's the only vision that makes sense to me because there's so much that I morally object to in many of the modern, you know, in the LDS canon, there's so many stories or scriptures or verses that morally I just find objectionable. And it makes sense that people are going to write according to their own biases and opinions and perceptions. And it makes sense that if there's a God, the God isn't going to like, go for whatever 1500 years and not communicate with his children. Like, all of that makes. It takes all these difficulties that used to be problematic, and all of a sudden they all make sense. It's like, okay, yeah, yeah, this all makes sense except for, you know, and I hear a lot of my listeners who are traditional LDs saying the following, that Joseph Smith claimed a specific experience with the divine, with actual personages, not some type of less literal type of God.

John Hamer [00:29:17] Well, he later re remembered it with personages. I mean, your listeners may. Well, you've probably done a podcast before on the various iterations, the different variants of the first vision story, which. Which does, I think we can definitely say, refers back to an actual event that was a meaningful event, a vision in Joseph Smith's life. I think that Dan Vogel, who's an atheist, obviously a good friend and a great researcher, has gone through, and I think he doesn't argue that nothing happened, that Joseph Smith just made this thing up later. But what we do know is that the way memory works as time went on, as Joseph Smith's thinking changed, as his circumstances changed, he later remembered the vision differently than what he remembered it in the earliest instances. And so later, once the progression theology has developed more in his mind, then he remembered different personages. But they didn't remember different personages the first time it was written down.

John Dehlin [00:30:23] Right, right. And as a psychologist studying memory a little bit, it is factual, that memory is very malleable and subjects, I think

John Hamer [00:30:35] it's lying later and that he's making that up. I just think that as I remembered when I just told you my story just now, I remember it in the light of where I am right now. And so I would not have told that story precisely that way in 1994, because I would have remembered different parts of it quite differently then.

John Dehlin [00:30:53] Right, right, right. But then the claim that Angel Moroni visited him, that brought him literal plates, and that the Book of Mormon is the product of a translation, those claims come before he even formed the church or even before he started speaking publicly about his vision. So that combined with the Book of Abraham, sort of mismatch between what's known as the Source papyri and what his product was, plus maybe what some view is the unsavory practice of polygamy or of hiding it, or polyandry. How do you get around what many perceive as a history of deception or fraud?

John Hamer [00:31:47] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:31:50] Do you view those, you know, the Book of Mormon translation, Book of Abraham translation and polyandry, polygamy. Do you view those things as acts of conscious fraud? Or do you View them in other ways.

John Hamer [00:32:05] Well, okay, there's a couple different. There's a couple different ways to look at it. I don't think I would say that. I don't think that everything that Joseph Smith did is something that I would justify myself ethically right now. But there's a difference to that in a question, in terms of that and committing outright fraud in a way where he is having some kind of a conspiracy with Oliver Cowdery and saying, oh, we'll sure fool these morons, this kind of thing. All of these different issues you've raised. So in terms of, of polygamy, I mentioned that one of my great, great, great, great aunt is one of the underage daughters. And in Nauvoo, not underage daughters, underage wives of Joseph Smith, 15 year old wives. The things that Joseph Smith was doing is experimenting with redefining the family in Nauvoo, you know, when he has total ecclesiastical, total executive and judicial and legislative control over that city, social control, the pressure that he then put on these women, these young women, women who were married to other people, I think you can very easily. The historian of the community of Christ has called that abuse of priesthood authority. And I think that that case can easily be made. In other words, this is an abuse of people's trust. This is something that Joseph Smith was doing that was wrong, was very wrong. And so that's how I would label that.

John Dehlin [00:33:44] Okay, so that's the polygamy. How about the scriptural stuff?

John Hamer [00:33:47] So there is no doubt that the Book of Abraham is not translated from a document written by Abraham's own hand upon papyrus. That isn't, that's not in question. The Book of Abraham is. There was a papyrus. The papyrus has nothing to do with Abraham. It's thousands of years too late. Abraham is most likely not an actual historical character. In any event, Abraham is most likely to the extent that Abraham was an actual person, we probably know very little about Abraham because all the things that are written about Abraham are written late by people who are writing in Abraham's name. So anywhere in scripture what Abraham has written, and likewise the Book of Mormon, the Book of Mormon is not a translation of an ancient text. The source text, by and large, for the Book of Mormon draws its inspiration from is the King James Bible. The Book of Mormon is literarily dependent on the King James Bible. So it is scripture. It's scripture in community of Christ tradition and I consider it to be scripture. But it is 19th century scripture, not ancient scripture. And that is, I think, totally in Keeping with our understanding of the component texts of the Bible as well, both the very core of the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, so called, they're not obviously written by Moses and also the four gospels that are canonized. So for example, the book of Deuteronomy in the Bible claims to be written by Moses. It's Moses last speech. It's written much later than much of the other component texts of the first portions of the Bible. It was not written by Moses. And so the book itself could be called, if you were going to call it susceptible to the same charge that it's a pious fraud that the Book of Mormon would be and set. Likewise, much of the writings of both the Old and New Testaments, in any event, they're not historical books and they're not written by who they claim to be by. So we are dealing with in religion a much more complicated picture than in Scripture, than what we'd like to believe. If we're going to have a very simple and literalistic idea that all of scripture is history and that includes the Book of Mormon and the Bible.

John Dehlin [00:36:27] Yeah, and I can totally understand that. And I concede just personally that there's metaphorical, spiritual, symbolic, even myth based value in all of these scriptural texts. What would be helpful? You know, I think when most people engage the Old and New Testament, they don't think of it as some dude sort of made it all up. When they're engaging it, at least from adolescence through adulthood, for most people, they're really thinking there was a Moses and they're really thinking there was an Abraham and a Jesus and the 12 apostles, that these cities actually existed. You know, so I think most religious people just that's where they are now. I think there's an enlightened group of liberals who are like, well, it may have not happened exactly. You know, of course, you know, they'll read Spong or whoever and they'll realize that, or Bart Ehrman and they'll realize that the Gospels weren't written by, you know, Jesus's apostles, but instead there were oral traditions handed down. But even then it's text that's tied back to people that probably existed and you know, stories that may be stretched or influenced, but still grounded in a real geography, in a real group of people and not some prime author that sort of just manufactured it. And it seems like there is a difference at least. Maybe there's no difference at all. But for many, I think there's going to be a difference between like some guy in the 19th century making this thing up, not grounded in any reality, no source text, no traditions handed down where it can be traced to anything real. It's just sort of. Many would just view the Book of Mormon as this wholesale work of fiction coming from one man, whereas you have to look at the New Testament as lots of different people who may have known Jesus directly, who were operating in real cities, writing real epistles in some cases. And it's much more tied to the plausibility of some semblance of historicity and reality versus just complete fiction. Now tell me where I'm wrong here, because I think you've studied this more than I have.

John Hamer [00:39:03] Yeah, well, it's based on that impression, is based on a misunderstanding of what the Bible is.

John Dehlin [00:39:08] Good. Tell me how, tell me how.

John Hamer [00:39:09] Right. So for example, there are whole. I mean, yes, the Bible isn't all just one author. So that is a difference for the Book of Mormon or, you know, as opposed to the Doctrine and Covenants, which in the community of Christ there's all kinds of prophets that have added to that. But the Book of Mormon is simply one of Joseph Smith's scriptures as opposed to the Bible, which is a. An entire compilation of all kinds of scriptures. But the Bible includes all kinds of books that don't talk about actual historical figures and that are completely whole cloth have nothing to do with history. So for example, the book of Job, the book of Jonah, most of Genesis, all of the beginning things from Noah to Cain and Abel and Adam and Eve and all of these characters who are not. Not in any way is there any handing down of actual history that's going back from. To an actual person. When I mentioned that Abraham and Moses and these, these are names that may well have been remembered. It may well be that Moses is some kind of a lawgiver, but all of this stuff is written centuries after they the person would have existed. And most likely all we're dealing with in most of those cases, David, we have a recollection of an important name. So David is the founder of the royal house of Judah. But almost all these stories with the, you know, Goliath and that kind of thing are all brought up. Those are much later literary creations. In terms of the more recent things, the gospels, like you mentioned, it's not just Spong and Ehrman. The scholarship on this goes back two centuries. And it's a problem that Christian scholars, that people who have done all of this research haven't been able to or haven't been willing to talk about that the actual reality. So what Are the results? What are the conclusions from all of this really deep literary analysis? What can we say about these biblical texts? So the book of the Gospel of John, which is so intensely different from the Synoptic Gospels, which tells the story of a completely different Jesus than the first three gospels do, and that doesn't speak in parables, that is constantly wandering around and is acting like he's already divine, as opposed to the Jesus that appears in Mark. What do we make of contradictions in all of this? Well, it's been studied very, very extensively, but unfortunately, that information hasn't really been transmitted to anybody in the pews.

John Dehlin [00:42:11] And so what I'm hearing you say is that the traditional view that LDS Church members get, which is that, hey, God talks to the prophets, the prophets write it down, and we have Scripture, you're not holding to that view.

John Hamer [00:42:30] That's a modern view. That is a view that has existed since the Enlightenment. And it is a modern view that is a reaction to the Enlightenment. So this literalistic view that people have of the Bible as history has only existed since. Since we have developed history as an actual literalistic discipline. So in other words, people in the Middle Ages did not read the Bible that way. Now, they did believe that those stories existed, but they viewed every aspect of their lives as being symbolic. So if you were to read a medieval book on biology, a bestiary, the book will talk about lions. But the lion is immediately in that book. Everything that the lion does, all the characteristics of the lion are immediately explained symbolically. So the lion represents Jesus in this way and all these kind of things. It's not that they didn't think that lions were like that, but their entire worldview was entirely symbolic like that. In other words, they thought that the reason why lions were that way was to provide symbols for, you know, these eternal truths. And so it's a completely different way of looking at the world that we don't look at the world like that, you know, and so we have this. So anybody who has this kind of modern, literalistic view of Abraham, you know, living within these certain dates and doing precisely what is recorded in either the Book of Abraham or the Book of Genesis, has a modern view of that that would not have been shared by the original authors of either scripture, either Joseph Smith or the underlying authors of the Book of Genesis.

John Dehlin [00:44:18] So one question that I got as recently as today on the a Thoughtful faith forum, because I basically made a very similar argument that you made to people who are, you know, they're basically saying, oh, well, Joseph Smith in the Doctrine and Covenants, you know, he's told this is the one and only true church. And then all the others are an abomination. And the Book of Mormon claims to be a real history. And I say, well, sometimes prophets get it wrong or sometimes they have their own interpretations and we should feel free to accept or discard the things that feel or seem right to us. The response was, well, what's the point? Well then that's not really scripture. What that is is just a bunch of other people's opinions, biases, what's holy about that, what's divine about that? And why is that compelling enough to warrant our attention if in reality it's not inherently superior to what my friend might write in his journal down the street? And so construct, and I don't mean to deconstruct because I'm all about Reconstruction. Construct for us a view of scripture that can be both very flexible and realistic, but also is enlightening or ennobling and worth our attention.

John Hamer [00:45:43] So, okay, there's a couple things. So one of the, I guess one of the points I would make is that the goal again I think of the Book of Mormon and of the Book of Deuteronomy is not to be, not to be deceitful. They're not attempting to pull the wool over the eyes of people around them, but rather there's a very pious motive and a very positive end that's envisioned. And so in the case of the ancient prophet that pseudonymously authored the Book of Deuteronomy and said that Moses had written it, the goal was to institute a religious reform in ancient Judah. And in fact the result of that act is scripture based religion, period. So in other words, Judeo, Christianity, Islam, those are descended from that act of writing Deuteronomy with the intention of, you know, creating that pious religious reform. Likewise, Joseph Smith is in this era, embedded in this era of the Protestant Reformation, the Protestant post Reformation Protestant world of North America. And everybody, all he has all around him is this incredible sectarianism where the Protestants of the day have determined, they've decided that the only source of authority is Scripture. But because every time you read scripture, you are interpreting scripture, they all had their own readings of it. And so everything was immediately breaks into sectarianism. And so if you go to Palmyra, New York, there's just this wonderful square in the middle of the town on the four corners, there's a Presbyterian church, a Methodist church, a Baptist church and an Anglican church or whatever it is. So there's four, four different Churches, and they're beautiful old churches that are opposing each other. And now, obviously all those sects get along quite well. But before, they were arguing that their different interpretations were essentially life and death, life and afterlife, death questions and hurling anathemas at each other. And so Joseph Smith's, and that extends to his own family and Joseph Smith's, I think, pious motive response is we can solve these questions if there is simply new authority, if there is new Scripture. And so I think that that's a completely justified idea. And his response to that, I think, sets in motion a tradition that is still empowering today.

John Dehlin [00:48:46] And so what I hear you saying is that Scripture is born out of mankind's attempts to understand his or her surroundings spiritually and to advance the conversation towards more enlightened or ennobling sort of values or conclusions.

John Hamer [00:49:10] Yeah. And it's a common document amongst all of us. You can read it. You can find new things in it all the time. Every single time you read anything, you're interpreting it. None of the script. We can't read Scripture. We can't read the book of Isaiah the way the first portion of it was written by the first Isaiah writer. Because we are in a completely different worldview. We live in a completely different time. That's why all of these issues of historicity, of literal, of all these things are impacting us all the time, because that's the world that we live in. So we read it differently every single time we do. But if we are able to simply, if we are reading it for other, you know, looking at how other people have wrestled with these issues throughout time in their own time and context, if we aren't saying that what every single jot and tittle that they have written down is some sort of rule book that we have to be imprisoned by if we have to. Every single time we see something in there that's totally objectionable, we have to say, oh, well, in their time, it was great to have slaves, this kind of thing. In other words, all these things that we do to justify the behavior of past people, that's where we're having problems. But instead, if we say people in the past had their own limitations, and some places in Scripture where they have said things that they believed with all their hearts, but we realize, or we decide now are objectionable, we need to not excuse them. But we can condemn that Scripture. And because Scripture is a source of inspiration for us that we have alive in our lives now, we. We can pull the wonderful things out of it. And we can also feel Free, I think, and have to feel free to condemn the awful things at it.

John Dehlin [00:51:11] And this is sort of what I said to my friend on again, the Thoughtful Faith forum. I basically said this is one of the great legacies of Joseph Smith, which is something you referred to earlier, which is that God, divine communication is still happening, the heavens are open, that the canon is still open, but even more importantly, that individuals can receive direct personal communication with the divine, and that they should. And that this notion of continuing revelation sort of implies and almost mandates that we don't look at any. Any question or decision is closed, but it's sort of a continual refinement or advancing or unfolding of truth. Right.

John Hamer [00:52:07] Well, and I would say that again. So, yeah, there's no. So one of the problems we have, I think even in the Restoration and one of the misconceptions that the Restoration, the early Restoration people had was that given the idea that the Gospel or God is all the same past now and the future, that every single time something is revealed, this is this thing that is totally set in stone. And so then when we later roll forward another six years later and we get something that's totally different, this sets up a contradiction. But I think that what we have to understand instead is that nothing can exist outside of its place in time and history as far as the human response to it. So the person who is writing can only conceive of everything within their worldview around them. And the idea ourselves that we have of the divine being perfect and static and unchanging in that way, I think is actually born out of the kind of the Greek philosophers like Plato, who were seeing this idea of the perfect table, which is the perfect unchanging table of which our physical tables are simply shadows of. Instead, I would like to propose a view of God that isn't like the static watchmaker that wound the universe up and went away, but rather God as the dynamic system. So I prefer, as opposed to this perfect stone obelisk that is totally unchanging and static and dead. I prefer to look at Scripture and revelation through the metaphor of the river of revelation that is just constantly rolling forward and it's encountering different things as it goes.

John Dehlin [00:54:00] Right. So real briefly, how would you differentiate scripture from like good literature like John Steinbeck, you know, east of Eden?

John Hamer [00:54:11] You know, I think that ultimately anything can be scriptural to you. And so I. And so I actually, you know, I teach this course, it's kind of a weekend long, 12 hour intensive course for people in, you know, in community of Christ we go on a retreat and things like that. People are doing intense scripture study or study of how scholars use scripture. And one of the things, the very first night that we do is just this shaking up into the question, what is scripture? So we read things. Is your patriarchal blessing scripture? Well, it could be scripture to you. Right. So it may not be commonly held scripture if you read a hymn. That's one of the samples that I give is a hymn scripture. Well, in some ways it talks about theology. When I'm trying to get. We're playing this kind of a little game and I have all kinds of famous scriptures and people half the time can't identify them. But when you're reading off the lyrics to the Spirit of God, that's the one that everybody knows. Right. So the hymn is part of the lived church experience. It's talking about theology in some senses. It also has an idea of scripture to us. So I do think that anytime where we just have a very closed, fixed notion of scripture, like by and large people have with the King James Bible or say that it's very limiting and I think we're better off having a much more expansive view of scripture and that you can find truth and inspiration all over the place. And part of the thing that one does then is bring it back to your faith community and share it there.

John Dehlin [00:56:02] Yeah. And. And much of what you're saying appears, seems to me to be consistent with even modern day LDS teachings in the sense that I've heard it said culturally that the hymns are scripture. And I've even been taught multiple times that the most recent conference ensign should be considered Scripture and carried around in your scriptures as Scripture. Once a month we study from the conference ensign because the conference talks are viewed as scripture, which means that the journal discourses at the time would have been considered scripture too. And so it's clear that even within what some would say is a rigid LDS context, that the term scripture can have a very expansive meaning. And so what I hear you saying is that canonized scripture is simply group of writings that a group sort of officially agrees to honor and study from, but that does not necessarily preclude other things from being considered scripture either as a group or individually.

John Hamer [00:57:14] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:57:15] So back to a question. I don't mean to harp on this, but I do think for you to be persuasive to others, you need to give a little bit more about this one question, which goes back to Joseph Smith, and that's that how do we view, for example, the Book of Mormon as Scripture if We sort of start from the assumption that there were no plates, there was nothing anywhere close to a Nephi or a Lehi or a Mormon or Moroni, and that in reality, it's got to be probable that Joseph just said, I'm going to write this book and tell everybody that I saw an angel and tell everybody that it's a historical record, when in reality there weren't plates and there weren't angels. And, you know, it does have more of a sense of intentional deception or fraud than the New Testament or Old Testament, which, you know, we're going to tend to more view as, you know, less direct or intentional attempts at fraud. And so do you view the Book of Mormon in a different way than how I've described and Joseph's involvement in it in a different way, or do you think.

John Hamer [00:58:34] I think it's entirely consonant with the writers, the prophets who wrote the Bible.

John Dehlin [00:58:40] Okay, So I think there's no moral or legitimate difference between the Book of Mormon and the Bible in terms of its validity or historicity.

John Hamer [00:58:51] So the Bible isn't any one thing. So we have to go through it all. But I think that the idea of writing Scripture and writing with the prophetic voice like the original Isaiah did, or writing with the prophetic voice and pretending to be Isaiah, writing in Isaiah's name like the secondary Isaiah and the third Isaiah, who are writing as if they were the original Isaiah and also still, and therefore that's a deceit, if you want to call it that way. So I think that that's entirely consonant with how the Bible works. The Book of Mormon itself justifies this philosophy, which is that by your works you'll know it. So if you are bringing people to Christ, which is the purpose of this book, if you were bringing people to end sectarian conflict over, let's say, what are probably meaningless issues about whether or not exactly how many people are saved in terms of universalism, of exactly what age you need to be able to be baptizing people, and when it's not a valid baptism, if you do it a day before that, or this kind of thing. So in other words, we can have new answers, answers to all of these sectarian questions that are not in the Bible, because no one ever even imagined these questions, because they're later developments in Christianity that that is the pious motive that the Book of Mormon is taking, that Joseph Smith is taking in composing the Book of Mormon. But the. Then you can say, now there's another question, whether or not I personally would feel justified morally in doing that. And I wouldn't do that, in other words, because I would not write as Terdeo. Isaiah. I would not write as the author of.

John Dehlin [01:00:51] What did you just say? What Isaiah?

John Hamer [01:00:53] Well, Turdio, whatever, the third Isaiah. In other words, the person who we know is not Isaiah, the person who composed the book of Daniel centuries after it's a work of fiction centuries after when it supposedly took place. So the person who again made the Gospel of John, which has probably little or no relationship to the historical Jesus, the persons who pen some of the various epistles, who are not Peter, those kind of things. So people justify that in writing those things. And prophets have justified writing those things for the positive ends of religious reform. Bringing people to God, bringing people to living right behavior and meaningful life. And that is certainly something that has happened. I would hope that in our. In growth and where we are now, where we are, let's say in recent sections of the Doctrine and Covenants that we're maybe behaving. We're doing things that I think are less ethically challenged on that. So I wouldn't do it. But it's what's happened and it's consonant throughout all of religion, all the way back to ancient Israelite religion, to Christianity's origins, to the restoration.

John Dehlin [01:02:16] And, you know, is there anything that you needed to do? Because I think people are going to need help with this. I don't feel this way. Like, I think Joseph Smith was probably one of the most amazing humans, you know, to be born in the 19th or 20th century in terms of some of his gifts and abilities and even I would even say his heart. But many people need some way to rehabilitate Joseph in their mind because they simply just say sexually inappropriate, deceptive. Therefore, I don't want anything to do with any institution that's built upon his foundation. They basically say Joseph is a cracked foundation. So how do you. Have you found a way to interpret Joseph's actions or consider his motives in ways that qualified him for building upon what he did? Do you have a reconstructed sort of favorable view that would justify his actions?

John Hamer [01:03:27] Well, in the first place, I would say one, you don't have to rehabilitate Joseph Smith, in other words, in the same exact way. You don't have to, I think, to be validly a part and an heir to the faith community. So to be in community of Christ, in this case, you don't have to have this view that Joseph Smith was a saint and we justify all the things he did. Oh, well, they just really needed to have more children and polygamy is just the ends to that, or however we want to justify all the different things that were done. So in the exact same way that we need to challenge scriptures, ancient scriptures, views that we have that are sexist, that condone slavery, that condone all sorts of atrocities, genocide, that don't view people initially, they don't view people outside of Israel as actually being actual people that God cares in any way about. They're simply scourges that God uses to test the faithful, this kind of thing, or to purify the faithful. So these views we shouldn't just justify and say, well, that's just how things were at the time, or this and that. And so I think that things that Joseph Smith did that were wrong, that he should be held out, again, you know, condemned for. And he did. He made some awful mistakes and did some awful things. And so I don't need to. To rehabilitate him for everybody. I think if people don't want to forgive Joseph Smith for some of those things, then that's completely within their rights to do that, and they're justified in that. On the other hand, I would say that. Okay, so why do you want to. What is the point of having a church that has all this baggage? The baggage from the Old Testament, the baggage from the New Testament.

John Dehlin [01:05:22] Wait, I want you to answer that, but I want to ask you a question in between that. I guess let's just say that I were to take an extreme example and say, well, you know, Charles Manson thought he was Jesus, you know, but let's forgive him. You know, he did kill some people and, you know, he did do some horrible things.

John Hamer [01:05:41] I don't think that's. Yeah. When there's. I don't even have to go to Charles Manson because there's been a lot of Mormon leaders in little tiny churches that, you know, have killed people. Right. So when you were, you know, when you did, like Warren Jeffs or something. But anyway, so.

John Dehlin [01:05:54] Exactly.

John Hamer [01:05:55] So, okay, I guess there's a lunatic fringe. Right. And so I think that when you're talking about severely deranged people, there's a big difference between Charl Manson or any kind of person who's a mentally unstable murderer and somebody who is. There are all kinds anyway. Somebody who's a visionary leader who isn't a deranged psychopath murderer. Right, Right. So even if Joseph Smith did things where he lost control of his perspective, he didn't have any boundaries by the time he got to Nauvoo. So when he first starts, he's Way more humble. He isn't every single thing that when he restores different offices, he doesn't start off as I'm the, the mayor, the general in chief, the head of the courts, I'm the first president of the first presidency, all the different things. He's just the first elder among all the other elders. And all the elders in the church are apostles. And as different things are founded or restored, he isn't always saying, well, now that we have bishops, I'm the bishop and now that we have a presiding patriarch or evangelist, I'm the evangelist, or now that we have, we're doing Zion's camp and marching. I'm the general of Zion's camp. Well, Lyman White's the general of Zion's camp when they move to Nauvoo. Bennett's initially the mayor of Nauvoo and this and that and the other thing. In other words, he's not initially pulling all things to himself like some kind of an egomaniac, but over time he loses the kind of boundaries around him. So he's more and more. By the end, I think this is my interpretation of Joseph Smith and everyone has their own interpretations, but by the end I think he's more and more surrounded by people who are yes men, people who do believe that everything is justified. And it's Joseph Smith says that that's what it is, right or wrong. And so Kevin, no matter how much of a genius and a religious innovator and every other thing that he is, it is very hard when you are surrounded by yes men to not succumb to this sort of boundaryless flattery that is all around you. You can give orders and people will do that thing. And so you lose this perspective, especially if you're coming in this case from pretty humble circumstances where he doesn't have a lot of grounding that might have helped him. He would never have imagined ending life as the mayor of a large city and this kind of thing from where he started, right? And so he doesn't equipped for it. And by the end I think he is in a self destructive loop where he is doing more and more outrageous things like with polygamy, with polyandry, with consecration, sending people to stealing things, maybe sending people to vengeance killings or any of the things if Puerto Rocco was sent to assassinate bogs or whatever, all of these kinds of things. And then redefining, let's say eternity and heaven and God and everything like that. He's looking for boundaries and I think that it almost isn't finding them anywhere. And it almost has to spiral out of control to the point where he gets killed because he doesn't. He doesn't have anybody stopping him. And so ultimately it's the exterior society that stops him because he just doesn't have any boundaries. He can't find any boundaries inside.

Community of Christ and Institutional Power

John Dehlin [01:09:36] Right. And that all makes sense to me, and I don't even fault them for it because I think with power comes all those trappings. It's just the way it is. Do you have a way to think about the Book of Mormon itself not as just this objectionable, awful deception, but as something more ennobled or enlightened? The production of it and the selling of it as a scriptural text from Plates with an Angel. Is there a way to look at that where it's not so much of a sort of malevolent kind of endeavor?

John Hamer [01:10:18] I don't think it was a malevolent endeavor. I really think that the motivation is, even at a personal level, the sectarianism that is happening even in the Smith family. So Joseph Smith Sr. And Lucy Smith, you know how they are in a religious turmoil in the family. I think that the goal of the book is to end religious sectarianism, to create answers where in the only way that contemporary Protestantism, you know, accepted authority. So, in other words, having new scripture. So I think that the motive for the thing is actually a. A pious motive. I think that the motive of actually having scripture that explains what are we doing in this new world. Where are these Indians coming? Did they come from? None of this stuff exists in the Bible, which is the sole source that anybody had for understanding the religion at the time. And so the problem with the Bible is the Bible is written by people who had no idea about the existence of the Western hemisphere. So it doesn't figure in. There's no. So people who are religious believers in the new world can't look to the Bible for answers, even though their worldview tells them they should be able to. It doesn't exist in the Bible. And part of the reason for that is that the Bible, contrary to what we have tended to imagine when we're reading, let's say, prophecies of Isaiah or Daniel or John in the Book of Revelations, people imagine always with this incredible temporal centric view that those prophecies all relate to their own life right now, in point of fact, all prophecies in all scripture relate to the immediate audience of the writer of that scripture, this prophet is speaking to his or her contemporaries. And in the exact same way, then the book of Mormon has the additional value of speaking way more directly to us and our worldview and our needs today than anything in the Bible does, which is thousands more years out of date in terms of what our contemporary needs around are. So I'll just take one example. So there is this point in the. It's not in the Book of Mormon, but in the inspired version in the Book of Moses and the Pearl of Great Price, where there is a vision that Moses is given and Moses sees this Copernican worldview where there's this giant universe and everything, all the space in it, and the earth is a fleck within it, and Moses is just a fleck on this little earth. And he says at the end of that, which thing I had never thought before or something. And it's true. Moses had never thought that before because nobody had ever thought of that before in the Ptolemaic worldview. In other words, this is a Moses who was responding to the post Copernican worldview that we all share. And the previous Moses that we have from Genesis, Exodus and all that also is written in exactly the same way where prophets at the time, in whatever it is, 6 or 700 BC are writing about a figure that would have existed hundreds of years before that, who would not have had the same perspective as the Moses that exists in that writing. So the exercise is exactly the same.

John Dehlin [01:13:46] Okay. And so. And so Joseph is doing his best to add light and wisdom to humanity, right?

John Hamer [01:13:58] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:13:59] And what do you make of his decision to wrap that in, you know, claims of some type of Native American historical text? Is it just sort of like, do you think that he believed that the truths he had been revealed by some divine source were legitimate and that he just made the decision to wrap that in claims about plates or Native American history as a way to both explain history, a history that we didn't have, or to legitimize his teachings in a way that. That, you know, people would be more likely to view them as holy? Or do you think that maybe in his mind he really was channeling ancient history and teachings and that he believed that it was. It was actually had a historical basis? Like, those are two possible, maybe favorable interpretations, maybe there's others. What do you think about that?

John Hamer [01:15:03] I don't think that he believed he was channeling an exact story that would have been the case. So in other words, the, let's say, the details of Alma the Younger's life or something like that, I don't think that he would have imagined that that actually happened in Those ways, he's a storyteller. He's a very creative storyteller. I think that the overall. The overall concept of the narrative arc of the Book of Mormon, the idea that the Indians are connected to the biblical history via ancient Israel and also the. And also the Tower of Babel story, that. That is actually a fairly common historical idea at the time. And so I think that he probably viewed that as being the actual history and people at the time who believed that hoped to find the record that Joseph Smith said that he found when he was publishing the Book of Mormon. But in so saying it, what he's doing then is speaking with whatever, with pious intent, but also not saying something that was accurate. So in other words, he did not believe that he had actual physical plates, and the physical plates artifact that he ultimately probably must have felt that he needed to have in order to. In order to convince the people around him that that artifact itself is. That artifact itself is not an, you know, is not a spiritual thing. So it is an avatar or whatever, something that was created in order to help convince people around him.

John Dehlin [01:16:54] So a way to put this all together to explain the Book of Mormon would be that Joseph had spiritual truths maybe even revealed to him by a divine source that he felt like could really contribute to humanity. He probably maybe wanted to write a book and even hoped that somehow this book might contribute financially to his position because, you know, who can't use money, and he felt like wrapping it in scripture or claims of plates or historical basis could add to its legitimacy of being. Of being received and valued and that. That all kind of amalgamated. Any probably believed that in some. To some degree, there was at least some historical basis for at least the framework of the book, and that in some way, all those things munged together to motivate his actions relative to the Book of Mormon. True?

John Hamer [01:17:56] Yes. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:17:58] Okay. All right. And thus we have. The restoration movement gets kicked off.

John Hamer [01:18:06] Yes.

The Reorganized Church and a Path Forward

John Dehlin [01:18:06] All right. So these two hours have been wonderful for me to understand your history and then understand your views of the restoration and potentially a more enlightened or advanced view of how we can still value and utilize this great inheritance of culture and of spirituality and of teachings that we have. So what I'd like to do now, you know, this episode's going to end, but as a preview, we. We're going to jump onto PowerPoint. You know, John Hamer is this amazing, you know, graphic designer and mapmaker, and what we're going to do is go through a comprehensive. Well, as much as can be comprehensive in an hour or two, a history of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ slash the Community of Christ. A lot of this history is relevant to LDS Church members as well. And it's going to be this wonderful, wonderfully visual but yet insightful treatment of that history that I think everyone is going to find both fascinating and relevant to their lives. That will be the next segment that we tackle and then we'll finish talking about where the community of Christ is today and the ways in which they're hoping to provide value to people who aren't able to affiliate in any healthy way with the traditional LDS church. Is that safe to say?

John Hamer [01:19:46] Sounds fantastic. I'm excited.

John Dehlin [01:19:48] All right. So those of you listening, thanks for joining us so far. Please join us on YouTube or the audio will still be available for the subsequent episodes because there's more awesomeness, more John Hamer, Community of Christ awesomeness to come.

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