Introducing Levi Peterson and His Utah Pioneer Roots

Part 1 of 7 · Ep. 88

John Dehlin [00:00:00] What is your name?

Levi Peterson [00:00:03] Levi S. Peterson.

John Dehlin [00:00:05] And tell us a bit about your ancestors.

Levi Peterson [00:00:11] Well, my middle name is Savage, and on my Savage my mother's side. Savage, that's my mother's maiden name. The family goes quite a way back, in fact, to John Savage, who was a private soldier in General Wolfe's army at the Battle of Quebec and who after the battle deserted. Showing that the line I come from has a lack of fidelity to England. But at any rate, around what year was that? 1769. And my savage ancestors moved from Massachusetts to Ohio, to New York to Ohio to Michigan and along the way became Mormons and ended up in the exodus of 47. In fact, my first ancestor of my name, Levi Savage Sr. Arrived in Salt Lake Valley in 1847, but a month or so after the Vanguard Company, his son Levi Savage Jr. Went on a mission to Siam, was in the Mormon battalion, was in the willies handcart disaster and married his two stepdaughters. So he was a full scale polygamist and served time in the penitentiary. So everything that could happen to a pioneer Mormon happened to him. But my Peterson ancestors are a little tamer. My Peterson ancestors migrated in 1862, so they arrived in Salt Lake before the railroad came. So I qualify for membership in the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, except for gender. But at any rate, That kind of heritage of course explains why I remain so firmly attached to Mormonism, I think.

John Dehlin [00:02:41] Absolutely. So tell us a bit about your parents.

Levi Peterson [00:02:46] Well, my father was Joseph Peterson. He was born in Lehigh and was called on being a graduate of by academy. He was called on a teaching mission to to Snowflake, Arizona. My mother, Lydia Jane Savage, daughter of Levi M. Savage, was born in a nearby town called Woodruff, where her parents had migrated on a call from the church as pioneers. My father was 19 years older than my mother, taught her in the academy. But she got into an unhappy marriage and divorced soon and was a grass widow for a number of years. And my father divorced, having no husband because of divorce. And my father's first wife, Amanda died after a period they corresponded and got married, he having six children and she two daughters. My dad had four sons, two daughters. My mother had two daughters and they married, combining their composite family and had five sons together and I was the last. So I came from a big family and there was no distinction between those who for me between my step siblings and my full siblings, except for the fact that step siblings were all old enough to be my mother or father and I tended to regard them as uncles or aunts. For a while, but as I grew up, I came into full fellowship with them.

John Dehlin [00:04:55] But it wasn't like they went away.

Levi Peterson [00:04:57] No, they were around in my growing up and many of their children, my nephews and nieces, were my full peers, not only in age, but in camaraderie. I bonded with them and they're very much like brothers and sisters to me also. So I come from a large, intense family. The familial bond is very strong in it still. There's still big family reunions and I go to them, the great multitude of descendants of my father and mother and Aunt Amanda. They were. 90% of them are active, believing Mormons and the other 10% are backsliders. And I provide something of a bridge between them because I get along comfortably with both sides of the family. But the backsliders show up at funerals and reunions, and while the believing side, the family, is somewhat ill at ease with them, trying hard to make them feel comfortable, but not quite managing, they still come and I fraternize with them. But at any rate, a big composite family is what I come from.

John Dehlin [00:06:23] Okay, lots of siblings. So what was your childhood like?

Growing Up in Snowflake, Arizona During the Depression

Levi Peterson [00:06:31] Well, I was raised in fairly primitive conditions without realizing it, because in Snowflake, Arizona, in the 1930s, I was born in 1933, in the middle of the Depression. My father had a salary because of his teaching at the high school. We had something of a little farm and everybody else in town was equally poor, so I didn't grow up with a sense of poverty. But Snowflake had a population of perhaps only 900 people and it was, I suppose, one of the largest towns in Northern Arizona. There were two or three others on the railroad bigger, but it was range country and very little water, and Snowflake was on a creek that ran year round, and that's why it was there. I started grade school in the first grade. It was an eight year grade school and a four year high school. The grade school was across the street from my house and the high school was just a block further away. I felt comfortably a part of not only my family, but the town. I remark in my autobiography on how Snowflake had fostered in my childhood a piratical fraternity. And that was a figurative term referring to me and my schoolmates and my other friends, the friends of my older brothers and so on. And my point was that we were ordinary Mormon children and Christian children and believed as our parents believed and knew what was right and wrong. And we cheerfully disobeyed what was right and wrong. And went about doing evil.

John Dehlin [00:08:48] Do you have any stories of a thing or two that might well.

Levi Peterson [00:08:52] Coming home from a movie, urinate in the dust, write our names in the dust at night, there's a town movie because if your parents paid their award budget, the family got go to movies Wednesdays nights and Saturdays. So as I say, you're coming home from the movie on a Wednesday night, writing my name in dust with urine, irrigating at night, seeing a skunk emerging from a ditch, throwing the dog on it just to see what would happen. One time my friends and I were three friends. Two friends and I were loitering in our cowshed after a sacrament meeting on a Sunday afternoon. And one of my nephews, a little younger, was on top of the cowshed and one of my friends walked out of the cowshed and the nephew above urinated on him. And he, the friend had a magical power. He could hold his foreskin tight and build up urinary pressure and eject

Guest [00:10:11] trajectory of Europe, I suppose, 15ft. He did that often coming home from movies and so on. But this time he decided to punish my nephew, who simply stood on the roof of the shed with his arms akimbo, jamming at him. And so my friend ginned up his shotgun and fired.

Levi Peterson [00:10:36] And at that point I peered around

Guest [00:10:40] the corner of the shed with my eye and spat it every square feet behind. Anyway, sorry about that. That's what I meant. Kind of an evil childhood. That kind of incident was more or less commonplace. And that nephew, incidentally, is a very pious man and he won't own up to that ever having happened. But it did

John Dehlin [00:11:07] tell us just briefly about the conditions when you say humble circumstances, but you didn't know it. For someone who lives in the 21st century, maybe a young kid, they might have even no sense of scope of comparing their lives today to what? Do you have a story or two or an example of what life for you would have been like? That may contrast kind of heavily with what kids today might experience.

Levi Peterson [00:11:34] Well, our house had a large living

Guest [00:11:38] room,

Levi Peterson [00:11:40] an added front room that had a hardwood floor in it and was our fancy room, an indoor bathroom. I did grow up with an indoor bathroom, which not everybody in town did, and a very small kitchen, two bedrooms. One of the bedrooms was heated with a wood stove. The dining room had a wood stove. The bathroom had a small wood stove. The kitchen, the bedroom, the one bedroom I and four brothers shared, had no stove in it, and we certainly didn't have central heating. Though Northern Arizona is generally summer sunny and somewhat Warmer than northern parts. The plains of Arizona are susceptible to air masses from Canada coming down through the Great Plains and looping around into Arizona. We had temperatures at 30 below. My dad was a. He kept a rain weather station and so I was aware of that. So we had to sleep under heavy loads of quilts and my mother would fix a flatiron cold night, put in bed, wrap it in a towel and put it in bed with us. Early morning my mother would get out of bed. My father was older and

Guest [00:13:14] she built

Levi Peterson [00:13:14] the fire in the living room, in the dining room and the kitchen. And there were no other fires in the house, commonly during the week. All winter long you lived in those two rooms, including a very small kitchen. I was born in that house, so was a brother. And another brother was born in the kitchen before it was converted to a kitchen. I guess that's self sufficient.

John Dehlin [00:13:46] What about like farm labor, manual labor?

Levi Peterson [00:13:50] Well, we had our chores. We had chopper wood, get the chips, feed the chickens, feed the pig, milk the cows. Depending on our age, my dad wouldn't do much of that. He was older and he had my brother Charles milking Cows at age 7. I was a little older before I got into it, but I could milk a cow and milked a lot of them. But we did our chores. My father had a small farm on the creek and we were required to do our share of hoeing and hay tromping, hauling hay and so on in the summers, ordinary farm chores in the winter. So yeah, we had those.

The Influence of Parents on His Formative Years

John Dehlin [00:14:43] Tell us a bit about the personality of your parents, your mom and your dad, or either one, and how that was an important part of shaping your formative years.

Levi Peterson [00:14:56] Well, my father was, I think, a very intelligent man who I think toyed with going to getting an advanced degree in anthropology. In fact, he moved his first family, when he was married to his first wife, to the University of California at Berkeley to pursue a degree in anthropology. But he left and came back to Arizona and hired on permanently there at the high school after a year and a half because he said from ill health. But he also, I think was fleeing from disbelief. I think he was maybe in the LDS church and Christianity. I think perhaps my father was instinctive, skeptic, but he struggled against it and basically remained. Well, he did remain an active Mormon all his life and in fact he made a strong contribution to the building up of Northern Arizona and the church there because of his educational activities. He became county school superintendent after a while and was very instrumental there. And he spent his last 20 years teaching English in the high school. He'd been a math and science teacher earlier, but a very intelligent man. But he had a hobby, an interest in the Indians of Northern Arizona that he pursued extensively. That's why in my autobiography, I called him a failed anthropologist. I think he wanted to be. But in the end he just became an amateur anthropologist instead of a professional one. My mother was a very intelligent woman, but instinctively more faithful than my father and probably more adamant in obedience. She was somewhat a mixture of severity and in demanding obedience and in affection. I never doubted my mother's love for me, ever. And that's a nice thing to grow up with.

John Dehlin [00:17:27] You were her baby boy, right?

Levi Peterson [00:17:29] I was her baby boy, and I think she felt that way. She was passionate about all her children, very much a mother in Zion. But my father died when I was 9 at age 70, and my mother continued to raise the four sons that were at home. Her first child by my father died at age 3. But the four of us, other four of us grew up, and my mother cared for us even after my father's death. So she was a sturdy woman, and she did that, as I said. She would get up early to do that, build the fires and get the housework going. Because my father, he was 50 when he married her. She was 30. I think I've had very. My father was not a person with whom I engaged deeply in an emotional way. He loved me and I loved him, and he was a model for me. But my mother was much more influential on my character, and I suppose in the eyes of some people, both good and bad, in that. I think my conflict with Mormonism has a lot to do with the conflict with her.

John Dehlin [00:19:05] So give us some examples, some stories maybe on both sides of that equation that might illustrate that tension.

Early Doubts and Drifting from Mormonism

Levi Peterson [00:19:17] Well, I think we're moving toward maybe an area time in my life that became significant when I was older, until I left for college, I don't think I was. I. I was an obedient Mormon, and I considered myself a happy young Mormon, and I still think I was. But when I went off to college and was at the point of. Trying to shift out of adolescent mentality into an adult mentality at age 18, I suppose I started on the road, then toward disbelief and revolt against my religion. You know, in the introduction opening to my autobiography, I speak of my vexed and vexing relationship with Mormonism. And it has seemed that way to me ever since my early college years. That's when it began.

John Dehlin [00:20:54] Was there a stage of just pure belief and devotion and dogmatic zealotry on your part.

Levi Peterson [00:20:59] Yes, indeed, I. In fact, I recall my very first religion class at BYU Book of Mormon. I was not even 18 yet. The professor bore his testimony and I had a distinct sensation of doubt, which frightened me. Other things, other circumstances were involved that I narrate in my autobiography. But I immediately began searching for a testimony of my own. I was on a three year track, my three years of college before I went on my mission. I was in an intense quest for my own testimony. I ended that era by going on the mission and then shortly deciding I not only didn't have a testimony, I didn't believe anymore, which made my mission complicated. But my early college years were that period. I had bouts of disbelief which I would smother and return to my more tranquil believing state. And I was a very zealous and scrupulous keeper of the commandments. And being my mother's son, I would have had to be. I've described myself as a Mormon monk and there's some true validity to that description. I didn't manage to overcome the carnal man and myself too well because at one point I even got so far into ardent petting with a girl, a college girl, that I henceforth thought of myself as a fornicator. And I even ended up at one point going to my bishop when I got home from my college year in the summer and confessing myself a fornicator. And he handled it well and thank goodness told me not to talk, said I was forgiven and not talk about it with anybody else. But in reflecting back on that, I attribute quite a bit of zealotry to myself to have induced me to do that kind of thing that I certainly didn't want to do. But I paid my tithing on the pittance of money I earned and I, I fasted scrupulously and I prayed night and morning and I did what you're supposed to do, you see. But in later years, in delving into my introspectively into my mind, I could see that a lot of what was going on was struggling between being like my mother and not being like her.

John Dehlin [00:24:21] So talk about, can you tell a story or two about what she that would illustrate what she was like that then made you drive towards trying in some ways to be like her and not like her, just give us a sense for who she was and how she lived? That would be, I don't know about colorful, but illustrative of what later led to tension.

Levi Peterson [00:24:48] When I was a little boy, one day for play I broke a slice of bread on a plate, took it into the living room where she was polishing the wax floor and offered her like a deacon, a plate of the broken bread. Her face was horror stricken and she gasped, you must never ever play like you doing the sacrament. And I could see from her face and her tone of voice that the big guy upstairs was a mean one. You had to approach him with caution. And later on I would say in my fiction I sought to evaluate the costs of Christian belief. One of the costs, at least in my mother's life was, and I think numerous other Mormons, is that God dispenses his blessings at the high price of a very scrupulous and strict and uncomfortable obedience. What might I mean by uncomfortable in her old age? When my mother stayed with Althea and me six weeks or two months of the year in the spring, usually she was deaf somewhat and a little senile, not too bad. But her day long entertainment or distraction was crocheting afghans. And she'd do them over and over and over, give them all over the place and everybody she was staying with, all my brothers and sisters and I, we would make sure she had her yarn because it was a pleasure she loved and it made her day tolerable. Well, Sundays, however, she would do her crocheting and they were hellish, this I can tell you, because she would stamp around the house, I'd take her to church and that helped. And she might write a letter and she'd read some scriptures, but then she'd simply get sigh and move about angrily. And I'd say, I don't think Heavenly Father would mind if an elderly woman

Guest [00:27:21] did a little crocheting on the Sabbath. But no way,

Levi Peterson [00:27:27] you weren't to work on Sunday and that was her work.

Guest [00:27:31] Now that's the kind of woman we're dealing with. That.

Levi Peterson [00:27:39] The costs of God's protection and benefits were high. That was my observation.

John Dehlin [00:27:46] And so you in your own self felt split between trying to honor that and trying to say this discomfort maybe isn't worth it or can't be what a good God that I want to sign up to would over the long haul.

Levi Peterson [00:28:01] I decided I'm not a near religious man, but I do not believe in that kind of a God. And I won't. And I'm told by my Mormon confreres, well we don't. We believe in a benign, easygoing God. And I say that is not what I'm intuiting when I go over to my gospel doctrine class. That's not what I'm intuiting. I'm feeling a lot of vibes that say you got to keep your eye on the big guy because you got to be obedient and obedient to a long list of things that a lot of people would just call, would think are not very important. Obedience for their own sake, for its own sake. So.

His Mother's Story and How Green Was Her Valley

Part 2 of 7 · Ep. 89

John Dehlin [00:00:00] So let's just drill a bit more into learning about your mother and maybe a bit about that chapter in your book called How Green Was Her Valley.

Levi Peterson [00:00:12] Well, that chapter comes at the end of. Following my father's death when I was nine years old. And so. In the chapter. In the previous chapter, I'd assessed the relationship of my mother and father as being mutually respectful and both of them independent people. And they disagreed, but they didn't do it in front of their children. After my father died, my mother proved a capable parent as far as I was concerned. I think, to be truthful, I think we got along financially as well as we did. Before he died, my brother started teaching school. But the school was only across the street from where we lived. And I went to the same school, I and my brother. So we didn't have a sense of removal from our mother. What I'm saying is that she was a sufficient parent to us. And I admired her, in retrospect, intensely for that, her sturdiness and carrying on. And she did it very independently. She wanted to make her own living and did. But the she. In the summer, when my mother. When we boys were in bed, my mother would leave the doors open between the bedroom and the kitchen where she was working. And in the winter, of course, it being cold, they'd be closed. But you could hear my mother saying, talking to herself. She always talked to herself when she was working in the kitchen alone. I assume it had something to do with the fact she lacked adult company, which my father had plenty of. He had a number of very intelligent friends and so on in town. But my mother, I think, had very little conversation with her peers. So maybe that's why she talked to herself, I don't know. But her conversations with herself were quite animated. And you could tell that she was talking to somebody with an intonation, just as a person would in a real conversation. But I'd sometimes listen a little as I drifted off to sleep, hear phrases. But I became aware of a phrase in these discussions. How green was my valley. And she repeated it often enough that I fixed on it and wondered what she meant. Because the word valley to me had only one meaning. Our house stood on a little hill, and then the lot fell away into a little. Into a little gully or valley. We called it the valley where the wood pile and so on were. Down in the valley. Well, that's all the word valley meant to me. It was only as an adult, as I was traveling in Europe. In fact, I was in Sweden, in an English bookstore, picked Up a copy of a novel called How Green Was My Valley that I realized that this had some reference to that phrase my mother had used, which I still remember. It's a book about the coal mines in Wales. Correct. I read the book at that point and later, some years later, realized that a video, a VCR had been made on it. I determined to get it and look at it, but I put it off because I associated it. I knew that that phrase had to be from my mother. Well, in fact, going back, I did. I finally, as an adult, asked her what that meant. And she explained to me. My father died of cancer in 1943. It was diagnosed in 1941. He and my mother went to Phoenix for the operation the day after Christmas and were there six weeks. A very depressing period of my life. I can remember still some of the episodes, depression about it. But while she was there, The doctors removed a tumor from my father and looked into his abdomen and saw that it had metastasized and he was fated to die. He was told that, as was the custom then, that the operation had been successful and he would be free of cancer. He was okay, but my mother, the doctor told her. The doctors told her in private. He has a year to two years to live and he will die of lung cancer. It will transfer to his lungs, which is exactly what happened. But for a. This was actually. Incidentally, this is the way the doctors used to do it when I was a boy. They don't now. But at any rate, A year and a half after the operation, my father got feeling so bad and had so much pain in his lungs that he and my mother. Went to see a doctor. Somebody drove them to McNary where there was the only doctor anywhere around. Up at a lumber mill town, sawmill town in McNary. And on the way they passed through Lakeside. And my father lamented Lakeside being where he had had his ranch with Amanda not living there. But at any rate, my father, the doctor at McNary told my father, you have lung cancer and it's inoperable and you're going to die. He went home, turned blue in the face, went home and he died in five days. The doctor, the local doctor, not really a certified MD but he was a good osteopath. He could attack my father's lungs and preserved him another three, four weeks. Drained the water off. But he and my mother made the decision together to not do that. And so my father died quite quickly. My mother. Oh, I'm forgetting myself. While they were having the operation, while he was recovering from the operation in Phoenix in 1941. It evolved into 1942. Some friends that my mother was staying with took her to this movie, How Green Was My Valley. And it was just current. It was just out 1941, 42. And in it, the son of the youngest son of a happy Welch mining family, this son observes as the family slowly disintegrates, children growing up and moving away. And finally, in the end, the father of the family is killed in a mining accident. But the narrator, no longer a child, now an adult, says, men like my father never die. They will always be there in memory. Then the novel ends with the phrase How Green was my Valley. Once I knew that as an adult and I knew that's where that phrase came from in my mother's soliloquies with herself. Then I realized that she was transferring that novelist movie maker's interpretation of that Welch family as. I mean the life of the family together as being very happy and fulfilling. How Green was My Valley. And I knew that's what my mother was applying to her period. Well, I'd like to go to another topic, please. Sure.

College Years, Mission, and Mormon Anxiety

John Dehlin [00:10:49] Tell us about your college years and, well, what led you to your mission and talk about your mission.

Levi Peterson [00:11:00] Well, the primary thing, I suppose, in my college years is that my exposure to the ideas of. Of intellectual people all over the world. My freshman English reader, for example, had Bertrand Russell's A Free Man's Worship in it. Well, here I am an 18 year old reading that. And it appealed to me, which frightened me. Bertrand Russell's an atheist. And that was a part of my. I was aware that I was attracted to disbelief.

John Dehlin [00:11:48] This is at byu, right?

Levi Peterson [00:11:49] At byu.

John Dehlin [00:11:50] You're reading Bertrand Russell.

Levi Peterson [00:11:52] Well, it's in an English reader. Yeah, there's 1951, 2001. But. By the end of that three year period, my struggles against disbelief became stronger and my anxiety became very intense. And in fact, the spring quarter of my third year, I had a period of intense doubt and strong anxiety. Anxiety was attached to doubt for me. Well, one night I was still maintaining my custom of praying. At. At one point I thought, well, I don't believe anymore. But that's not so bad. I don't need to be anxious about it. It doesn't make my life any longer or shorter whether there is eternal life or not. But at that point I was admitting I didn't believe in eternal life. As I knelt down to pray that night, as was my custom, I thought on the theory, well, it doesn't hurt to pray to express my reverence. To the universe, just like deists Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson did. When I got to the ending, the Mormon ending in the name of Jesus Christ, all of a sudden I thought, you know, it doesn't make sense to end my prayers in the name of Jesus. But then like that, the scripture went through my mind like a flash. He who believes is saved and he who doesn't is damned already. I can't remember the precise wording of that scripture, but like a jolt, this overwhelming panic struck me. Anxiety. And I mean overwhelming. It was an impulse to run and run. I had no idea where to, but to run. Well, that's insane. I recognized it immediately as insane, but it.

John Dehlin [00:14:21] Did you run or did you not run?

Levi Peterson [00:14:22] No, I did not. But it seemed to me I was investing an enormous emotional energy in not running, that my ability to. Well, I was therefore at that point introduced to an intense anxiety that I would frequently suffer many years and for long periods it didn't last too long. In that particular time it lasted maybe 10 days. Long enough though for me to be aware that it wasn't a pleasant experience.

John Dehlin [00:15:03] And for 10 days you're feeling what?

Levi Peterson [00:15:05] Ready to run for 10 days, 10 days, just physically run, physically run, Just bolt and get out of here. Where to? I had no idea where to. And I could, mercifully I could sleep at night, but when I woke it was right back. And so I went about doing my job for my little part time job, going to my classes, trying to study. Just because it's the alternative. There was no alternative. But I was extremely uncomfortable. Well, that bout didn't last too long. That was in May, toward the end of the summer, when I'd gone home to Snowflake. My bishop asked me to go on a mission. I thought it over and I decided I'd go. I did go. But almost immediately after being out on my mission, that experience caused that intense anxiety to return, but it accompanied my disbelief. In other words, this anxiety was a factor of my not believing. Somehow my Mormon faith had been bulwark against that anxiety. So I can't remember exactly where I'm headed with this.

John Dehlin [00:16:41] A mission must have been a traumatic thing for you to be considering.

Levi Peterson [00:16:44] Well, not to consider. My mood was such that I welcomed going and thought it would be all right. And I recognized I didn't have a testimony, but it didn't seem to matter. I felt okay about being committed to preaching and going with it.

John Dehlin [00:17:02] Having an eye of faith that would resolve itself.

Levi Peterson [00:17:05] Yeah, it would be all right. But very early in my mission, I remember Maybe three weeks into the mission in Denmark, in Switzerland. Switzerland, French being Switzerland. And later I was transferred to French speaking Belgium. There was just one big French mission in those days, but my companion and I were invited in by. First of all, within days of having been the mission, I was aware that the people of the world weren't exactly panting with eagerness to receive this happy truth the Mormons had. And it seemed like to me, unfortunately, that on the whole they looked just as calm and happy and solid and decent as the Latter Day Saints. I knew. Finally, after long hours of knocking on doors and not being admitted, he and his wife sat and listened to our lesson. And then they let us come back and they compared in their Bible everything my companion, who could speak French showed them. But after the end of the second meeting they said, no, you don't need to come back anymore. We've taken a look at it and what you've told us doesn't seem to us to square with the Bible. And so thanks. Well, for my companion that was the end for those folks. They had heard the gospel and had rejected it. And it suddenly dawned on me that here's this God that sells his blessings at a high price. You've got to jolt yourself out of a happy spiritual condition and a happy social condition and join with this bunch of people from Utah or you're not going to make it upstairs. All of a sudden my belief not only in Mormonism crumbled, but my whole belief in the Christian God because I realized I couldn't believe in a God who gives rewards and punishments. And I haven't believed since. That was 60 years ago. Well, nearly 55 years ago.

John Dehlin [00:19:29] In God or in a God that requires that doles out rewards and punishments.

Levi Peterson [00:19:33] Well, a personal God that doles out rewards and punishments, the Christian God. So that makes this other business about a Christian by yearning, you see, even more relevant, which I get the title of the book. Yeah, title of the book of an essay and so on. Well, I won't go on with the mission except to say it was. I did try to come home at a certain period. My mission president leaned on me not to. My mother was sending me money for my fare home on the ship. But she of course didn't want me to come home. And I realized at last nobody, nobody that I knew that meant anything to me would be happy to see me home. So I stayed. But incidentally, I came home from my mission believing it had been a good experience and in fact I was glad I'd stayed. But I came home from my mission determined that from then on my relationship to Mormonism was going to be totally on my own terms. That's why I married a gentile wife.

Meeting Althea and Coming of Age Sexuality

John Dehlin [00:20:56] In about a year after getting home, you met Althea. She was at byu. A non member at byu, few people,

Levi Peterson [00:21:03] but she'd had four years of college there and had learned how to live comfortably with Mormons.

John Dehlin [00:21:12] What brought a Gentile to Provo?

Levi Peterson [00:21:15] She had a Mormon girlfriend down Long beach and came California. And the woman girlfriend was going to go to byu. And Althea's parents were pretty poor and BYU was cheap in those days. 50 bucks a month, a quarter for tuition. So Althea went along and besides her parents quarreled quite a bit and she wanted to go anywhere that wasn't home. She liked her roommates at BYU and the friend she come with left after one quarter. And Althea finished her four years there. She was in her fourth year when I came home from my mission and met her.

John Dehlin [00:22:02] And I'm sure with the family that you had, the notion of marrying a Gentile wasn't maybe received well.

Levi Peterson [00:22:10] That was a difficult thing. My. In the summer of my first, I came home in May. My brother Lynn introduced me to Alethea within a week or two of my being coming home. And right then I decided I'm going to pursue this relationship. And I had Althea come down and visit me. I had to work in Arizona for the summer, earn money to go back to school on. But. But I had her come to Snowflake and in August when BYU was out, summer school was over and the family then awakened to the fact that I was fraternizing with a gentile girl. And the next summer when Althea and I were engaged, 1958 my mother worked all summer on schemes to get Althea baptized and so on and put the marriage off till she baptized and we could go to the temple. So anyway, I broke her heart marrying Althea. But I was adamant and I couldn't alter and I think the fact that I'm still happily married to Althea these 49 plus years later that as far as our marriage was concerned, it was an excellent thing to do. She said 49 years next 19582008 congratulations.

John Dehlin [00:23:48] I have to ask this. I kind of meant to ask it earlier and you did allude to this a tiny bit when you talked about your BYU years at first. But sexuality comes out quite a bit in your books and it must have been that that was an important thought or consideration or concern of yours in your formative years. And you talk about being a monk and I wonder if that was maybe a subtle reference. But is there anything you want to talk about your struggles with coming of age sexually in those formative years prior to marriage and even in the backslider. I believe Frank marries a non member and struggles even with sex before marriage and even during marriage he struggles with sexual role of sex. So is there anything, and you could say no, but is there anything about sex in the role of that or sexual urges in your formative years that you feel like are important enough for you to make sure get addressed as someone's understanding how all these elements played into what you did later?

Levi Peterson [00:24:54] Well, I come from a Mormon tradition that interpreted sex as suspect. I will point out that Christianity has interpreted sex as suspect as you see in the Catholic priesthood and their monastic tradition. The family has a letter from Wilford Woodruff to my grandmother, my mother's mother, explaining, dealing with the question that my grandmother has obviously asked in a letter. We don't have whether it's alright to have sex, married people to have sex for reasons other than procreation. And it's really interesting to see Brother Woodruff dance around that business admitting that, well, it'd be better off if we could restrain ourselves. But he says human nature being what it is, you can't indicating well, if you go it's better to be married than to burn, etc. But at any rate, Part of the problem with my mother's first marriage was she knew she didn't want to stay married to her husband. He smoked and he wouldn't take her to the temple and I don't think she even wanted to have sex with him. But she was in circumstances where it was really hard for her to turn him down. There's a letter extant in which she writes to her mother asking her mother to pray for her because she's done two or three times she's done things she shouldn't have done. Which means that she let her husband have sex with her. Well, I don't just think it's an oddity of my mother and my grandmother. I think it's, it's Victorian Mormonism and there's more of it out there than you think, including a niece of mine who had 11 children and she and her husband made their mind up that they would not have sex unless they were willing for her to get pregnant. Well, that's a woman my age, so it's out there. And yeah, I have to deal with that. I felt guilty for just kissing a girl and the first time I ever put my hand inside a girl's bra. I suffered excruciating guilt over that for a long time. And as I said, having got so far as to trying to fornicate with a girl in the front seat of a car and not being successful at it, thank goodness. Still, I considered myself a fornicator for the attempt. Well, I think a lot of people reading that would say, what a wuss. That's not significant. I said, well, if you are not. If you knew it came in my background, it was big time significant. So yes, I had hang ups about sex. It's okay. I never did truly fornicate before marriage and I've never committed adultery after. And I don't mind saying I've had an obliging wife and that makes a big difference to a human being to do so. And before that, I recommend masturbation on the part of man because I can't imagine the master that universe cares a fig about whether human beings relieve their sexual tension in solitude. Seemed like me it'd be the last thing God would pay any attention to.

John Dehlin [00:29:04] And your work actually discusses that?

Levi Peterson [00:29:06] I say that.

John Dehlin [00:29:07] And did you experience maybe guilt or.

Levi Peterson [00:29:10] Well, I went through a period after I came back from my mission but before I married. Having to deal with that something I go on feeling guilty about, or is it something I just say? Well, that's just the way it shakes out.

John Dehlin [00:29:29] No pun intended.

Levi Peterson [00:29:30] No pun intended.

John Dehlin [00:29:32] And so you inflicted this condition upon Frank Windham as well? Yeah.

Levi Peterson [00:29:38] That device where he has his. He rigs up some gloves to have his hands tied at night so he can walk past your baby. That was going around in a letter reputed to have been written by an apostle. I don't know if it really was, but at any rate there are a lot of Mormons who thought that was church policy. It's better for young men to tie their hands at night than it is to masturbate in their sleep. As far as I'm concerned, that's pernicious and evil doctrine, that idea.

John Dehlin [00:30:11] And do you see this actually as a serious. This notion of sex sexuality as a serious issue that actually causes traumatic issues or pain for people today or throughout the history of Mormonism?

Levi Peterson [00:30:24] I do. I think I'll bet a dollar. A lot of confessions on the part of missionaries in the MTC are over masturbation rather than what they've done with a girl. And I bet a lot of mission presidents get that kind of confession going.

John Dehlin [00:30:43] And you feel like that's damaging because what?

Levi Peterson [00:30:45] Well, because it's so it's damaging because it's so useless. Why does deity care? What business is it of my mission president or an apostle or my bishop? It's none. It's zero.

John Dehlin [00:31:02] See,

Levi Peterson [00:31:05] I've worked it out with God.

John Dehlin [00:31:08] He's okay.

Levi Peterson [00:31:08] He's okay with. It's just the bishop that might not be okay with it. Sorry about that.

Marriage, Family, and Life After the Mission

Part 3 of 7 · Ep. 90

John Dehlin [00:00:00] So talk a bit about after getting married, what course your life took?

Levi Peterson [00:00:12] Althea and I stayed at BYU for two years. I had a bachelor's degree. So did she. She was secretary of the freshman English program, and I had a graduate assistantship. I pursued a master's degree in English there, and I taught freshman English, and she was secretary of the freshman English program. So we'd see each other during the day, off and on, all day long, as well as we lived in an apartment there in Provo. And at the end of the two year period, I. I had a master's degree. We migrated to Berkeley, California, because I had received a university fellowship at the University of California. I stayed at Berkeley one year. I think there were two reasons for leaving Berkeley. Undoubtedly an important one was that I prematurely took their master's, the oral examination for a master's degree. That they required people with master's degrees from other universities to take. I took it prematurely and I failed it. And while it was understood that I could retake it, and in fact a lot of students failed it and did retake, was very discouraging to me. Second, both Althea and I realized that we had bonded with Utah in our undergraduate years at Provo and then our two years as a young married couple in Utah. And so we transferred back. I transferred back to the University of Utah and entered for four years and acquired a doctorate in English with a minor in history. Althea, after the first year working as a secretary, she started taking English classes. And she got hired as a graduate assistant too. She didn't work as a secretary anymore. She pursued a master's degree. She didn't ever take it, but she. She had all the coursework for a master's degree in English at the University of Utah. Those were happy years. In some ways, I was bedeviled off and on by my extreme anxiety. Excuse me, I'd have bouts of it, periods of it.

Stepping Back from the Church and Battling Anxiety

John Dehlin [00:03:02] Was the Church playing any role in your life at this point, or had you just ceased in activity?

Levi Peterson [00:03:07] It actually did play a role. I belonged to a student ward, and I would go occasionally. And in fact, toward the end of my stay at the University of Utah, I was in the elders quorum, and I might have been an instructor. I can't remember what my duty was, but I attended. I was aware that I didn't believe, but I was socially a Mormon. And Althea and I, though we had many friends who weren't Mormon at the U. Even there, a lot of our friends were Latter Day Saints. And I felt that I didn't have much of an investment in Mormonism. At the end of that period, as my doctorate was coming closer, I sought employment and ended up with offers from byu, an assistant professorship at BYU in English and a similar one from what was then a very small four year college, Weber State College, now Weber State University. But it was. Perhaps 5,000 people, but the salaries were equivalent they offered. And I recognized that if I could make myself enough of a Mormon to go to BYU that they. That I would have access to upper division courses. Not only upper division courses, but also graduate courses probably which Weber State had upper division courses. But most of my load was under a lower division. But I toyed with the idea of paying my tithing. In fact, I think maybe I should started paying right then briefly and going to church more scrupulously and so on. But finally realized no, that would be a very bad decision to go there because it would be an inhibition on what I could say ever after because I'd be financially dependent on the church. So I made the decision to go to Weber State, where Althea and I arrived in September of 1965. I will say in passing that was an excellent decision. I was very happy at Weber State, but it's true I never taught graduate courses there. I did teach honors courses which were strenuous and had a high level of student in them. But Althea fit comfortably into that all the way along. My arrival at Weber State that first year though was probably emotionally the low point of my life. The most critical time of my life, I think because of my emotional difficulties. This intense anxiety struck me very hard as I arrived at Weber State and took on the duties of teaching. I had this overwhelming fear that I was. That the anxiety would block out my ability to think and be coherent enough to conduct a class. I had taught comfortably as a graduate assistant for four years. Two at BYU and two at the University of Utah. So I couldn't explain why now suddenly teaching became such a trauma to me. In consequence, for that whole year I wrote all of my lectures out so that if I was seized with a block of my thought that I could go just rotely read. And the truth is that would kick in about three, four times per hour, lecture hour in a class that I did find myself. So my mind so seized up with anxiety that all I could do was read. And then I'd get through the 40 seconds of crisis and be back to the coherence.

John Dehlin [00:08:25] Almost debilitating.

Levi Peterson [00:08:27] It was debilitating. And considering that that was going on for months and months and months I mean, this is a daily occurrence. If I had any relief from the anxiety, it might have been evenings at home and maybe reading or something of that sort. But most of my waking time was intensely anxious, very uncomfortable. But what tipped the scales terribly was the birth of Corin, our daughter, our only child, in the spring of 1965. I wasn't yet at Weber State. I was still at the University of Utah. But she was born in April. And I discovered her birth triggered this intense anxiety. And again, inexplicably, why should a beautiful little child do that to me? I couldn't explain that, but it was a fact. It did. I had made some adjustment to her. And in fact, by the time I got her home from the hospital, she was born cesarean. And so Althea was in the hospital a week, and that was really a tough week for me. But by the time we brought Corin home and I could actually hold her myself, they didn't let you do that in those days. They put the kid in the nursery. But when I could actually start holding her, then I started at least relaxing. I could recognize that I had a deep affection for her along with these emotions over being a father and all of that, plus this business of breakdown in the classroom over and over and over, all year long. Not a breakdown, but a near breakdown. In 65, 66, in the. In the break between the two quarters, spring and summer 66, a kind of crisis came. I'd been going to a psychiatrist. I was on a tranquilizer. But it wasn't enough to make any discernible difference in my anxiety, because if I'd taken more, I wouldn't have had another reason not to be coherent. I used a different tranquilizer to sleep on, which blessedly worked for me. But still, my waking hours were extremely uncomfortable. I got to a kind of crisis. I thought of suicide. But above all, most critically, I felt like I had to get out of teaching. I had no idea what I would do for a living, literally. But I had to get out. And I even started not paying my bills so I'd have money to make a transition. What? I don't know to what, but the psychiatrist prescribed antidepressant pills. They took three weeks to kick in, but when they did, it was like a miracle. They worked. And all of a sudden, life seemed good. Being a teacher at Weber State seemed good. Being Karn's father seemed good. I couldn't hardly anything seemed better. It was fine. I didn't get over being anxious in class quickly, but slowly I weaned myself from note, from writing the lectures out to just notes. And after a while, after I taught a number of years, I'd simply review the book. In some of the classes I was very familiar with, I just reviewed the book five minutes before class time and go in and teach. But it was a turning point in my life. And in fact, the chapter of my autobiography that's titled what Coming out on the Edge of a Commanding Ridge. I can't remember the precise title. Something like that has to do with that year and the way it ended and how. Or the next two or three years at Weber State and how suddenly my life kind of opened up, looked good professionally, family wise. And though I've had many, many recurrences of the anxiety, never nearly so intense and much briefer. And essentially I've considered myself ever since a happy person. But I have to characterize myself for the ten year period preceding that as basically an unhappy person, a pretty unhappy period. And I'm glad to say that my life turned around.

John Dehlin [00:14:09] Two good questions. Did you have to stay on that medication for the rest of your life or it was just like a jump start?

Levi Peterson [00:14:16] Jump start.

John Dehlin [00:14:17] And then how much do you associate this anxiety with the crisis of faith? Or was it just something biological or conditional that was a multiple faceted thing that, you know, this wasn't you fearing your ultimate, you know, or was it.

Levi Peterson [00:14:38] Well, yes and no. My anxiety is multifaceted, but I think. And I was trying to use my Mormon faith as a wall, a defense against it. It was in there. It makes me wonder if my mother had it too, but she was successful in keeping her faith up as a wall. Or did my dad have it? Did I inherit it? Did I inherit it genetically from my Swedish father? But that doesn't matter. I stopped seeing the psychiatrist about 1976. I'd been seeing him for 11 years. Thereabout. I think he considered me cured. And I guess I was. I was reluctant to admit it in some ways then, but. In the 70s, before I stopped going to him that five or six or seven year period, I had some very vivid experiences, introspective experiences, where I got exceedingly uncanny insights into why I had this anxiety. For one thing, in 1968, I'd been appointed to be director of Freshman English in the English department at Weber State. I flew off to an English professional conference in Milwaukee for three or four days. I'd been a long time without having any of this anxiety. Althea and Karen took me to the airport, and in those days they could go to the loading gate with me. And. And as I departed from them and got on that airplane, all of a sudden I was slammed with the anxiety. And while it stayed for the entire four days, it stopped when I walked off the airplane and saw them. And all of a sudden I realized there's something about my relationship. And I attribute it not so much with Althea as to Corinth. There's something in my relationship to Corinth that is healing. And I've come to conclude the insights that I got in the early 70s thinking about that experience is this, that curiously, if I am in a parent child circle, it doesn't matter which role I'm in, I won't have that anxiety. If I'm the father of a little girl or these grandsons of mine, I don't have that anxiety. Or if I can remember back when I was a child, if I was my mother's child, I didn't have that anxiety either. That has seemed like a very secure, anchoring insight to me that whatever the root of my anxiety is, that that's what kept it at bay. I was secure against it in that kind of relationship. That's been a very helpful insight, though. The truth is, as I said in my autobiography, I still feel, I can still feel that it's important to me to be in connection with my daughter and now her two sons. I can be in either role. I do what a father ought to do. I do what a grandfather ought to do. But in doing it, there's this sense that I'm feeding not only the father and grandfather in myself. I'm feeding the infant, the child in myself. I actually think a lot of what goes on between parents and children is that kind of a mutual. The parent feels very fulfilled doing something for the child. It's because doing it also vicariously fulfills the child in the parent. So that seemed, like me, a crucial insight and a helpful one. You see that even though I would like to be more independent, at least I know what to do if I want to have some escape from the anxiety.

How Anxiety Became an Impetus to Write

John Dehlin [00:19:54] So how did this condition of anxiety, did it become sort of an impetus for your desire to write?

Levi Peterson [00:20:05] Well, I think it did. It certainly showed up in my writing, and my writing became a factor in it. I had had the impetus to write from my first becoming an English major back in my second year of college. I that early thought it would be nice to be an English professor and to be an author. I put off writing fiction, however, for many years. In fact, I was in my 40s and I had been a long time. By then a teacher. I had written scholarly stuff by then articles. In retrospect, I think it was good for me to wait until I was in my 40s to write. Because I finally had something to write about. And I don't think I did. When I was in my twenties and wishing I could write something and doing some of it, but not successfully. But as I started. My short stories in the Canyons of Grace reflect a lot of my own experiences. And particularly my anxiety, some of it. And the things I'm anxious about. My belief and disbelief. The. Well, I've lost my thread plot there?

John Dehlin [00:21:54] No, just writing. So you wrote essays, you published a first book.

Levi Peterson [00:22:01] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:22:03] And it was in your 40s.

Levi Peterson [00:22:08] Well, I saw as I was thinking of the stories. And particularly as I moved on from the stories to thinking about a novel. It was the late 70s when I first started thinking of the novel that would become the Backslider. I got my. Inner hang ups pretty prominently involved. The character Jeremy in the Backslider is a kind of projection of an impulse within myself.

John Dehlin [00:22:50] This is the brother, Frank Windham's brother,

Levi Peterson [00:22:52] who emasculates himself there in the early 70s. One morning, morning after morning, when I'd go down, get ready to go to school and shave, I'd shave. I had an image come into my mind. And it was of a piece of wood with crisscross marks on it. And feathers mashed into those criss cross marks. And I wouldn't have paid any attention to that if it happened once. But it would come back to me morning after morning when I was shaving no other time. It finally dawned on me that what I was seeing was the stump of wood on which we used to chop chickens heads off at Snowflake. The feathers mashed into the crisscross marks of the axe. Pretty soon I began having an image, A clear image of the chicken. Always a decapitated chicken, jumps for a little while on its feet. Big jumps in the air. But it does so with its raw neck protruding. The skin of the neck falls back and you see a piece of the neck protruding. Suddenly I realized that reminded me of my own penis. With the foreskin pulled back and it was bloody. And it seemed to me that I wanted to. It had something to do with my fear of emasculation. And then there was another image that occurred to me over and over. I saw myself at the edge of my father's grave. And I saw myself throwing something into the grave. Now I knew I had watched my big brothers throw dirt on my father's grave. I'd watched. That was a real memory as they filled his grave. But I knew I had not thrown something in the grave. Somehow that image I had of doing it over and over was an imaginative construction. I was convinced of that. But I put the two things together. My mother, the self emasculation, or the emasculation and throwing something in the grave. My mother always wanted me to be a girl. Told me so, but then said she had adjusted after three days to my being a boy. And she was very happy with me.

John Dehlin [00:25:44] She wanted her last kid to be a girl.

Levi Peterson [00:25:45] I was the last child, and she wanted another girl. Her first two had been girls, and then she'd had four boys in a row. Wanted this fifth one so that I knew my mother would be a little more pleased with me if I were a girl. And while my father, I don't think ever gave any sign that he was wanting me to be anything but a boy. And I modeled on him. I took him as a masculine model. I didn't have any way of knowing that my father and mother had different ideas on things. As far as I knew, they were unified. And I opined then that I was making a bargain with my dad. I would throw my masculinity into his grave if he would come back. And while that was a crazy idea, of course that's what you're dealing with. Pathology, like mine is a crazy idea. But at any rate, whether that's valid or not doesn't matter. It was enough in my mind and convictions that I turned it into a character. Into it. That's where Jeremy came from. Well, as the novel got written and rewritten, he changed and changed and as did his brother Frank. And there's not too much resemblance between the present Jeremy and the backslider and me. But that's where he started from.

John Dehlin [00:27:19] And did that have anything to do with. I mean, in today's context? I think. Well, homosexuality is such a big issue in some way. Were you trying to make some statement about if we oppress people who have homosexual tendencies, maybe extreme consequences will emerge? That's me writing my perceptions. Into what? Or was there any awareness of the plight of a homosexual or the condition of homosexuality or of gender confusion that was also part of what you were experiencing before you wrote the book? Not with yourself, just people you knew?

Levi Peterson [00:27:56] I don't know. I've always been pretty tolerant of homosexuals and. And in fact, gone far from being merely tolerant. I endorse entirely their right to be who they openly follow. Their gender, but I don't think that I had any concept of that was involved in my. At that point it wasn't a matter of sexual desire, incidentally. As far as I can tell, my interests have been awfully strong on what women have rather than what men have. I can't see homosexual impulse in myself.

John Dehlin [00:28:49] Sure, sure. But nor was it written from the standpoint of empathy or sympathy for someone with same sex attraction at that time.

Levi Peterson [00:29:00] No, it wasn't. I think that as the novel grew and I grew into Frank and his relation to his mother Margaret, that Jeremy almost became a supernumerary, that he wasn't a very important character. But it dawned on me since I had as I started the first chapter of the Backslider with the Frank Wyndham who now exists in my novel. As I started that, I realized if I kept Jeremy, What that first chapter does is shows that Frank. Frank is a composite of the rebel. Frank is partly comic and he's partly very serious. Eventually he's so serious that he may he considers emasculating himself or killing himself in an act of blood atonement. But every other page Frank is funny, it's comic. And I realized, I think, that I could use Jeremy pretty nicely to be both a sobering character, but also a character that you could make humor out of. And so I think that's one of the reasons I kept him and developed him as intensely as I did in the novel.

Aspirations and Inspirations Behind The Backslider

Part 4 of 7 · Ep. 91

John Dehlin [00:00:00] So when you, when you started contemplating the backslider, did you, you know, have aspirations of writing the great Mormon novel or the great American novel? Did you have any writers that had influenced you that sort of said that informed your approach to that book? You know, so I guess, you know, what was in your mind and what was your intent when, when you started constructing this book. And if there were three or four ideas at a super level that you wanted to get across, that you wanted to convey, you know, what were they? Two part question, have at it.

Levi Peterson [00:00:40] Well, I think the message of the backslider and the one I had in mind, even though I maybe didn't articulate it very well, was articulated for me by a cashier at Albertsons who had read the Backslider. And he says, what you're trying to say in that book is that God is no enemy of human appetite. And I said I couldn't have figured out how to summarize it better myself. And I think that's accurate. It was a blow against my mother's refusal to knit on crochet on Sunday. I don't think God's an enemy of human appetite. That's the God I believe in. And he's a lot more tolerant of appetite than a lot of us could imagine. But how to get that message across? It seemed to me I conceived from the start that Frank needed to go. By the time I had thought of a character, a young Frank Windham, I needed a character who would go from being a full scale backslider over to a monk, over to a person with a sense of forgiveness and a greater relaxation about his appetites, a sense that his appetites were okay with God and therefore he could go ahead and live. I felt like the novel was an argument against, first, the Christian tradition of asceticism and second, the Mormon tradition of asceticism as. Which is part of the

John Dehlin [00:02:40] self denial, suppression of appetite.

Levi Peterson [00:02:42] And God likes self denial. And so. The big problem was to come up with it. Seemed to me I could see the structure of the novel the way it ought to go. Backslider, monk. But then how do I save him in a credible way? I won't go into how I came up with the cowboy Jesus. I treat that in my autobiography. But it was the solution that finally occurred to me to do it that way. Now, as to what lay behind the backslider in terms of my education in fiction, of course, I'd had years of reading novels and short stories by mostly the masters. I read very little popular literature once I got out of high school, most everything I read was. Almost everything would be by one of the great authors.

John Dehlin [00:03:56] Give us some names of authors and books if you don't mind. Well, not reading list for future Generation. Five of the most formative books for you.

Levi Peterson [00:04:06] Yeah, I remember someone on the blog asking what three great books I'd recommend to my grandkids. I don't know what I'd recommend to my grandkids, but I can tell you what books were formative to me. The autobiography of Albert Schweitzer, particularly the final chapter, the Epilogue. I read as a missionary and it was exceedingly influential in my thinking. As far as imaginative writing goes, Faulkner was an eye opener for me, especially the Sound and the Fury and his long story the Bear, as I realized, boy, you can do things with language. But I have to say that the novel from which I learned the most about how to write not only novels but short stories was the Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald. And I love it still and it's my book, one of the outstanding, one of my out American novels. It is so simple, but it's so tightly structured and carefully written that everything counts and everything moves, works. It's in fairly simple language, but it's appealing language. I would recommend that, you see, is a very important book for me as far as learning how to write was concerned. There were some short stories that had a lot of impact on me. Barth's. I can't remember whether it's Lost in the Funhouse or what the name of that book is, but stories that there I used his patterns and then a book by Malamud, Bernard Malamud, the Monkey Barrel, something like that. Jewish short stories. It seemed like me, I could see how they had a lot of influence on the stories in my stories in the Canyons of Grace. Even though you might say a reader familiar with both those stories and the books I'm citing might fail to see the connection. I studied them as I was trying to write those stories.

John Dehlin [00:06:57] Steinbeck doesn't come to mind for you? I was reading Steinbeck as I read your book and I felt a lot of. I felt like this guy's Mormonism Steinbeck. But that's not something that comes to you.

Levi Peterson [00:07:06] Well, I certainly liked the Grapes of Wrath, certainly a fine novel. But no, I don't think Steinbeck was as. There's no question that Faulkner was a very important influence on me. People have likened my stories to. To Flannery o'. Connor. I have read truly very little of Flannery o' Connor and Only because stories are in books. I was teaching in a class. But Faulkner, yeah, I could have indeed been influenced by him. You've got to understand, Faulkner is not only unusually flamboyant or florid, those aren't good terms in his style. But has that kind of style. He created plenty of grotesque characters. All you need, you see, you don't have to go to other authors to get permission to write that way. Boby Dick was a book that had a lot of impact on me, but I don't know that I recommend it to people. It taught me that human beings might appropriately resent God for creating evil as well as good, because that's what Ahab does. He goes out and tries to kill God, of course, and it doesn't pay off. But. Well, I won't go on. I could go on with novels like that that had impact on.

John Dehlin [00:08:52] So I'll definitely want to in no way taint our future readers of the Backslider sort of experience in getting the full surprise and experience of the novel. But given that when you think about the content of the Backslider having been written and published in the early 80s, 1980s, is that right? More or less.

Levi Peterson [00:09:13] 86.

John Dehlin [00:09:14] Yeah. You know, I think of the early 80s as sort of the Church's retrenchment. There's sort of the reaction to the Sunstone Dialogue years in the 70s, and then, you know, the Camelot, you know, Leonard Arrington, the thing was shut down. And then near the 80s, that's when it seems like Boyd K. Packer and Bruce R. McConkie were really starting to clamp down a bit again, it seems. And you know, it certainly wasn't a flowering time of openness for Mormon culture. And so when I think about the contrast between that time period and the content of the Backslider, you know, you're trying to make sort of this debut of your. Of a work or your great work. And it's dealing with blood atonement, it's dealing with polygamy, it's dealing with masturbation, it's dealing with emasculation, it's dealing with marrying non members and almost excoriating, if that's a word of orthodoxy and type, you know, conservatism. That's quite a contrast. So, I mean, were you thinking to make a stir? Were you just expressing what was in your soul? Were you wanting to sort of shake things up, you know, what was? Or were you not even that smart or calculating? You were just doing something quietly that was part of your soul, you know, what were you thinking? Is another short way of saying that in terms of how it would be received and what impact it might have.

Levi Peterson [00:10:47] Well, I likely was wanting to startle, offend, not profoundly, but just. It's like maybe two brothers sharing a college dorm room, and they get on each other's nerves a little, so they lightly pick at each other or irritate each other. Maybe that's my relationship to the church. Falling back just a moment to the Canyons of Grace, I put the final story where I did about a young woman who. Revolts against God by fornicating and eventually comes not to believe and in fact symbolically kills a man as a symbolic act of killing God, an abusive man who deserved killing. But at any rate, I put at the end of this book because I thought it could be interpreted as my announcement of my distancing myself from institutional Mormonism. But the odd thing was the book as a whole, even that story did the opposite. Mormon readers, as they turned out to be liberal Mormon readers, liked it, and they didn't see me as being. They obviously were not interpreting it as a statement that Levi Peterson is out of Mormonism now. It was circumstances at that time, the early 80s in my own home ward and all the way people reacted to me in my ward in Ogden and so on, that I finally began feeling an investment in Mormonism. It was about the time I was doing these stories or that the book had come out that I gave my first. Wrote my first essay on Mormonism called the Civilizing of Mormon the Essential, the Crucial Role of the Indispensable Role of the Intellectual. That was the title of the novel, of the story of the essay. And I announce in that, that Mormonism needs to civilize itself. But I realize in retrospect that that announced an agenda that I have pursued ever since, of making everything I do somehow an attempt to influence Mormonism to be more liberal. By liberal, I mean more openly accepting its own history, more willing to give women executive positions in the church, more willing to accept homosexuals in the church, certainly more willing to. Well, by then, of course, the blacks had the priesthood and so on, so that race wasn't as big an issue. But I've seen that as my agenda. It was then, and I recognize now that I had announced in that essay, which I read at an association for Mormon Letters luncheon. I had been president of the organization that year, and it was a tradition that the president gave the luncheon address. And that's what I read, that I have actually almost everything I've written Since then that had any relation to Mormonism followed in that vein. So in a sense, in the early 80s, I was growing into an investment, a sense of having something of an investment in Mormonism. Even if I wasn't a believer emotionally I was attached and I couldn't get away from it and I should at least make my efforts positive. I'm certainly no anti Mormon, but urge the change for the better for Mormonism. In light of that, would I see the backslider moving in that direction? Well, yes, I think the large purpose of the backslider was. But I grant that I can't quite keep control of myself. If I see a good line, I say it. Even if I think it's going to offend somebody. It's so good. It's like somebody wanders in my autobiography, why I vaunt myself on liking coffee because it's such an easy and inexpensive way to stay out of harmony with one's church. Well, yeah, that turns the certain faithful Mormon off and therefore reduces the potential readership of my autobiography. Well, it's as if I couldn't help having thought of the line. I couldn't help saying it even though I could see I might get beat up for saying it.

The Civilizing of Mormonism and Its Themes

John Dehlin [00:16:54] What's the line?

Levi Peterson [00:16:56] Well, I drink coffee because it's such an inexpensive and convenient way to stay out of harmony with one's church. So something like that.

John Dehlin [00:17:09] And now it's decaf, by the way.

Levi Peterson [00:17:11] Yeah, now I.

John Dehlin [00:17:12] You're almost ashamed of the decaf.

Levi Peterson [00:17:14] High blood pressure and drink decaf, which is acceptable. I. Coffee's lost a lot of its savor for me. The truth is I can see that I have mixed motives. I would like to be an influence for the good on Mormonism, but I can see that I shoot myself in the foot to some degree. I have other impulses going, which is thumbing my nose at people, the righteous ones who surround me.

John Dehlin [00:17:48] So what about the argument that would say you're not a true believer, you're not really in the church as a sincere, active, devout, believing member. It's not yours to try and reform Mormonism. Go away.

Levi Peterson [00:18:03] I just say, heck no, you don't have any ability to drive me away.

John Dehlin [00:18:12] Why do you care?

Levi Peterson [00:18:14] Well, I suppose because my deep emotions bond me to Mormonism from childhood. They're irrational, they're inexplicable. But with time you learn to relax and go with those feelings. That's just the way I am. I need to go to church once in a while. I need to sit next to believers once in a While. One night after I'd been talking about my biography of Juanita Brooks to a group books group in the Lion House or those houses where they have a restaurant there near Temple Square, I came around the corner of the Hotel Utah and I looked up and I could see Angel Moroni with the sun glinting on. The gold statue. And I had this deep, deep feeling, these are my people. And it had nothing to do with my intellectual belief. It had to do with the emotional person. So that I have to say, I am an ethnic Mormon, but I am a Mormon. And I don't care who tells me that I don't count, that I'm not a Mormon. Of course I count. I count myself at a situation where the church may excommunicate me, but it can take me off its records, but it can't remove the way I feel about Mormonism. And that makes me a Mormon. As my autobiography said, it's a Mormon autobiography, and it is one.

John Dehlin [00:20:09] So the backslider was an attempt to sort of influence the culture you felt a part of and that you loved and loved and hated.

Levi Peterson [00:20:18] I think Mormons need to rely less on works and more on grace, because grace is the. Whatever hang ups you have about your appetites, grace erases them, takes care of them. I suppose it's something of a Protestant message, but I haven't studied Protestantism. And it's not so much any theological conviction, it's just that it seems wrong to say, as I hear over and over in my gospel doctrine class, well, sure, we believe in grace, but not until you deserve it by obeying the commandments. So actually, grace is something you got to buy, if only with refusing to crochet on Sunday, you got to buy it somehow. And I'm saying, I think, brothers and sisters, you've missed what Christ was talking about.

John Dehlin [00:21:36] What was he saying?

Levi Peterson [00:21:39] He was saying, come unto me. He said it to the prostitute, said it to the publican tax collector. See, Down at the family reunion this year in Arizona. It's quite a bit of trouble to get there, but Althea and I showed up, Karen and her two sons. It's held on the old ranch at Lakeside, south of Snowflake, 30 miles. And one of my nephews, Jack, fine guy, nearly my age, he hosts it. It's a beautiful place in the pines, by a little pond, a little stream of water. And there are about 120 people there, two thirds of them. Half of them will be different one year or the other because it's a big family. But. Some of my nephews There who are a couple of them who are backsliders. One of them particularly who's a backslider, showed up, he always does at reunions and funerals. He quit high school without graduating, got a good job on the railroad and therefore worked at all his life and had a good retirement. And he wears western clothes and they look like they fit him. I mean he looks authentic. In fact, he owned a ranch for a while. But at any rate, he said to me, he sat across from me from the table and he said, I read your book, the Blackslider. He said, I read it in three days and that's something I don't do. He said, I'm not a reader. I'd go months reading a book, I read it in three days. And he says, you know Levi, you had a wilder youth than I had any idea. He'd observed me from a distance and thought I was just a tame kid. Well, I was, but I wasn't failing to observe how people around me were living, including my nephews and my friends and relatives who were Frank Quindums. And here's my nephew accusing me of being a Frank Wyndham when I was a boy. Well, at least I knew enough about him to imagine one of them. But he and I had a very close communion there. And a little later, Jack, after everybody had left the reunion, his brother Jack took Althea and me and Karn and the boys in and showed us his big barn. And now he's built himself a little house out to the side, a little lean to apartment, really a nice one. He's a builder, he can do that kind of thing. And he retreats there if things are not comfortable at his house down the road where his wife is. But my autobiography was lying on the table there. I'd send it to him and he says, I read it twice and he appreciated it and it touched him. Well, the empathy. I empathize with those guys and I have bonded with them and I sympathize with the fact that they are actually down deep religious people. But they grew up in a dysfunctional home. I hate to say that about my brother and his wife, but it was true. And they grew up in a ward up there in Lakeside where their church leaders were ham fisted and didn't have tact. And those guys, well, I don't know if they all did. I won't accuse say that Jack grew up that way, but that some of them grew up with. They had to be non Mormons. And I don't mean they took themselves off the Rolls they didn't. But their associates have always been Gentiles. Their social life has always been Gentile oriented. That mostly means Baptists and in fact at their funerals you'll have Baptists doing the music and things. Sometimes a Baptist minister will preside, sometimes it'll be a Mormon minister. But the. I don't know how accurate that last statement is, but at any rate they have a built in reason not to be Mormon. But I think down deep they are believers. There's some kind of a need in them for God. In fact, one of my nephews now dead. If you, if you bad, he never went to church. But if you badmouth Mormonism in a bar to him, he'd fight you. He didn't consider himself a Mormon, but he wasn't going to let somebody else say something about Mormonism. Well, those are the guys I wrote the Backslider for as my nephew. He said I read that in three days. Well, he said he saw me in it, but maybe he saw himself. But that doesn't matter. Where I'm headed with this is last month my home teacher and his wife came over here and had dinner with Alfie and me. We usually go out somewhere like Mexican restaurant for the home teaching session. That's a good way to get through home teachings, just go eat together. But we had food left over from a dinner Alfie had put on and we invited them over and we were sitting here, I was here and they were there and I got telling them about. We showed them pictures of the family reunion and I got shown pictures of these nephews of mine. And that got me thinking of what I've just been telling you about them and my empathy for them and these are wonderful people. But my home teacher and his wife. But the home teacher, he's so duteous and he does things by the book. He likes to have prayer and he likes to have a message, if we can, if I'll let him. And so on. My evil nature emerged as I sat here thinking about that and I started talking about my nephews and I started telling him, these are the guys that I. These are the guys that I'm going to speak for with God. These are the fellows for whom I've been writing this stuff. Then I got telling him about that I didn't think the punctilia of the Mormon faith made that much difference. He took it, but I could tell he was uncomfortable with it. He's a good man. He'll come back. He has the duty of bringing me and Althea along and he won't relax on it. But still, I could see that. Yeah, I guess what I was getting irritated about is I come around quite often to the feeling that the moral superiority of my Mormon loved ones and friends bothers me. I've got in the past 20 years or so feeling like it's wrong for me to feel spiritually inferior to them, that I am. Spiritually they're equal. I won't pretend to be their superior, but my brand of spirituality is worth what their brand of spirituality is. And I guess that's what I was doing. And so when you talk about maybe there being a mixed message in the backslider and so on. Well, yeah, maybe so that I cease to be a little tactful and I enjoy peaking people a little. So I slightly disturbed the tranquility of this good man, my home teacher, you see, preaching to him. That's what I was doing. I was preaching to him.

John Dehlin [00:30:50] And that's what the backslider is all about.

Levi Peterson [00:30:52] That's what the backslider is about.

The Cowboy Jesus Figure and Its Meaning

Part 5 of 7 · Ep. 92

John Dehlin [00:00:00] So let's just conclude by having you talk a little bit about the cowboy Jesus. It seems like, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but I imagine that that is probably the one moment in the book or the character in the book that probably people have provided you the most feedback about. So talk whatever you want to about how you came up with it and most importantly, what it meant to you and what it has meant to others and what is it. Or if you want to leave that for the person to read the book, that's okay too. Or not.

Levi Peterson [00:00:37] From the start of writing the book, I had in mind of turning it in the direction of Frank. First the ardent backslider and then the. And then a Mormon monk, having him arrive at enough of a sense of atonement and forgiveness in the sight of God that he could relax and live his life happily, including being married, conventionally married to his formerly gentile wife that's converting now as the novel ends, to Mormonism. So it seemed to me that Frank needed some kind of inner conversion. I think that people who are deeply conflicted sometimes come to a kind of. The psyche heals itself. They come to a kind of settlement within themselves. But often with religious people, I think the resolution of intense conflict is accompanied by some kind of religious experience, even epiphany or vision. Frank comes from a family who believe in visions and a lot of Latter Day Saints do, more so hundred or fifty years ago even than they do now. But. I decided, Frank, that we need to have a. Frank needs to have a vision and earlier in the novel I have him have negative visions that he thinks have come from God and they have to do with him becoming almost, well, entirely self punitive Mormon on the assumption that that's pleasing to God. So I thought, well, it won't be entirely unrealistic to have Frank have some kind of a vision or an epiphany. But it struck me that the nature of it was going to be very crucial because it seemed to me that if I had, say, God the Father and God the Son descend from the heavens and speak to Frank, that just wasn't going to go in that book. So I was puzzled to the very end, almost. I was well into the final chapter before it finally occurred to me how to handle the problem. The cowboy Jesus. Now you need to know that early in the novel, first chapter, in fact, when Frank first meets Mary Ann, she emotes over her mild Protestant faith and feelings and she's a Lutheran, but she speaks of a pleasant daydream. She has in which a cowboy approaches her. She's lost, and she realizes as he gets closer on his horse that it's Jesus. And he says to her, well, you're lost, I expect, but now you're found. And she feels nice. Now, in the novel, of course, Mary Ann goes through an evolution of disdaining Frank's Mormonism and then realizing that he really loves her and he has got her pregnant when he believed he didn't love her. And they've married, making things good. She agrees to become a Mormon and is trying sincerely to get a testimony, put it one way. But she accedes to Frank's terribly ascetic way of life. They have agreed to have sex only when they want to have babies and they eat unpalatable food. It's a bad scene. But this particular night in the final chapter, the culmination of Frank's asceticism comes with that episode where he has Mary Ann tie the gloves on his hands so he won't masturbate in his sleep. He's been refraining from having sex with her, but he'll still wake up on occasion and masturbate in his sleep. So he has his hands tied. But then in the middle of the night he wakes up and he shouts for her to come take the gloves off. And she doesn't want to, but he insists. And then he forces her to have sex. She's not against it in principle, pregnant though she is. She's just against it because she knows how he's going to feel about it when he gets really waked up and they do it and Jesus merely pleads with him not to regret it. But he then goes and commits this terribly violent act, the second graphically violent act of the novel where he scrapes the skin off the back of his hand with a vegetable grater. She has earlier said to him that she has repudiated her vision of the cowboy Jesus. She knows that Jesus isn't kind. She knows now that his Jesus is right. His Jesus is the rider on the white horse in the book of the Apocalypse that brings death and destruction to the earth. But she bandages Frank's hand and sends him off for a long haul trip to northern Utah from the ranch in southern Utah and shouts to him as he leaves ranch house. She says, I don't believe in your Jesus. I believe in the cowboy Jesus. I can't believe in any other kind of Jesus. Well, that was the first time I was using it simply as a way of characterizing Marianne, showing first she had this sweet, beautiful concept of a Kind Jesus then trying to be the kind of Mormon Frank thinks he ought to be. She is trying to switch over to the Jesus of the Apocalypse and then repudiates it, goes back, shouts at him as he leaves. Well, that was when it dawned on me. There is Frank's epiphany. That's what Frank is going to see when he gets back from this trip and goes through with the baptism of Mary Ann, since they're going to go through that ceremony the next day. And I guess it was two days later. But at any rate, that struck me as being the right something that was workable. Well, of course, at the baptism, Frank goes ahead and baptizes her and they're in their respective dressing rooms. Well, she leaves, goes back upstairs, but he's still in the dressing room. And he approaches the urinal and uses it and flushes it. And there's this sound of flooding water, of course, that you hear in the urinal. But earlier, Frank had associated visions with a rushing sound, the Holy Ghost. And suddenly he has a vision. And he sees a stand of juniper trees. And out of the junipers rides this cowboy. And it's Jesus with a very kind face. And then Jesus says, you're lost, etc. And they go through this fairly long discourse where Frank tells Jesus all the long list of bad things about his life, his griefs, and how he can't discipline himself to leave his wife alone, and how he hates good food. I mean, he hates bad. He hates the healthy food, his vegetarian diet of his mother and that he believes in. And he still dedicated to evil foods like pie and ham and things that taste good and so on. Well, Jesus finally, more or less just gently tells him, get off it. Why don't you relax and enjoy your life like a man with some good sense would do, et cetera. Jesus even lights up a cigarette. Bull Durham. The old cowboys used to wear those. And Frank, it was early in the 50s, Mormon men still smoked Bull Durham. It was cheap. You rolled your own cigarettes. That's what Jesus had done, was rolled himself one and was smoking. But when it's over, Frank suddenly has been saved and he knows it. And a little later, as the novel comes to an end, he tells Marianne, I had a vision. I can't tell you too much more about it, but Jesus is kind, just like you always said. Now, that ends the novel. But my. It has always seemed the right ending to me and it offends a lot of people, the smoking part and the urinal part. Dick Craycroft calls it the Vision of our Lord of the urinal. A lot of people just cannot take Jesus lighting up one and smoking was evil nature on my part to put that in, kind of knowing it would. On the other hand, the message is, why don't we get focused on important things in the matter of ethics, what's right and what's wrong. And the word of wisdom is a voice of moderation in all things. And to pin it down to one bad thing or another. Well, anyway, that's the vision of the cowboy Jesus.

John Dehlin [00:12:23] And what has been people's reaction to it or tell us a story that would illustrate that.

Levi Peterson [00:12:29] Well, of course, the people that don't like it, I guess a lot wouldn't. They probably don't read the book in the first place. But I had no idea the book would become meaningful to Mormons. I don't know who I was writing it for. I could see I was writing it for Mormons, but I wasn't really very conscious of that when I was doing it. But Brazil. And after it came out, a nephew of mine, excuse me, a cousin, the son of one of my cousins first cousins, told me he had bought two copies of it and he had. Oh, he came to the BYU bookstore where I was signing it, but before they caught on what it was about. But he bought two copies. And that worried me that he was doing that. But he said later he met me on the steps of the Salt Lake Courthouse and he said he had given it. He and his father had given it to two friends and it had turned them around in their faith, which startled me to think that was the first inkling I had that the book seemed to firm a lot of Mormons up in their faith rather than doing the opposite, which I wondered.

John Dehlin [00:13:53] And your intent was probably neither way, is that right?

Levi Peterson [00:13:56] Yeah. It didn't occur to me that it would become a factor in making more people be Mormons, remain Mormons. But I've had numerous over the years communications and I still probably get one a month these 20 years later from somebody who has just for the first time read the Backslider and talks about how meaningful it is and how it's helped him stay Mormon. One woman told me at a party that it helped her accept for the first time that her father, who had committed suicide, wouldn't be damned. She said, your book made me think maybe there's hope for him. So some people have talked about it as if it's scripture. They will talk about reading the passage over and over and over about the vision. So it's emerged yeah, it was a very notable thing. And I didn't know that wasn't planned. It just happened. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:15:18] Do you at all see the process of coming up with that figure, cowboy Jesus, as inspiration? Or do you just see it as just what you had for dinner?

Levi Peterson [00:15:30] I thought it, Gibbs. You know, people tell me that I've. Well, I'm just missing the promptings of the Holy Ghost. Over and over, they're there. I write them off as something else. I don't mind that. It's okay, you know, if people worry about the fact I'm not married to my wife in the temple. And I say, don't you wish you had her for eternity? And I say, well, my God, he's not impressed by a ceremony over an altar. He's impressed by whether people have loved each other. And he's not going to be that petty and mean if people have loved each other. I just can't believe in that kind of God.

Reception, Sales, and Legacy of The Backslider

John Dehlin [00:16:18] So do you have a sense for how many copies the book has sold?

Levi Peterson [00:16:22] Oh, I don't know. It's. I don't know. My books aren't big business. My income from royalties are very modest and always have been for all of them. The biography of Juanita Brooks won a $10,000 award, so that made it the most profitable. But no, I don't know. It came out in the blue slick paperback copy, and then it came out in a much reduced trade paperback copy, and that's the one that sold and sold and stole, still on the market. And then just recently, last year, the signature book published a very fine enlarged hardback copy with etchings about including the cowboy Jesus in it. And so the book's still very much alive these 20 years later and still on sale by the same publisher. The blue covered book is long out of print, but the small paperback, yet very inexpensive, still there. And that's the one people couldn't afford it.

John Dehlin [00:17:39] And just for historical sake, if people were going to try and ballpark it in the hundreds and the low thousands. 10,000. Do you even have a ballpark range?

Levi Peterson [00:17:49] Yeah, somewhere toward 10,000. But not more. I don't think I have it. I don't think so. We're not dealing with big business in anything I write.

John Dehlin [00:18:00] Sure. Do I remember correctly that you had hoped to maybe sell it to a big publishing house and you'd even gone to New York and tried it?

Levi Peterson [00:18:09] Well, yeah, I didn't go there, but I submitted it to three publishers and two top level agents. And one of the publishers and the two agents looked at it really closely and spoke respectfully of it, but said it won't sell in our market and they probably knew what they're talking about. So I was grateful this to have Signature book, take it and publish it. See, Signatures done well by me and I appreciate them. Jared Hess of the Napoleon Dynamite, Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre fame approached me a year ago last summer when I was at the Sunstone about doing a movie of the Backslider. And I was very agreeable and I went to Ron Brittis Signature because they hold the copyright, and he was agreeable. A year ago, January looked like Hess's agency in Los Angeles was giving it a serious consideration. But I had no answer from Jared until finally I phoned him this summer and he said that it had fallen through, which I rather expected. I don't know if it would make a. It'd be really hard to turn into a film.

John Dehlin [00:19:47] I think not for Dutcher.

Levi Peterson [00:19:51] Well, yeah, Dutcher. Well, Dutcher's done. In my judgment. Dutcher's three Mormon films are classics already, and they will be. I think classics aren't necessarily bestsellers, but they sit there and the critics slowly start absorbing them and talking about them. I feel a great affinity with Richard because. I admire greatly how he, particularly in Brigham City and States of Grace, how he deals with the atonement. That's what he's dealing with. That scene in Brigham City where the bishop refuses the sacrament and then the ward members won't take it until he finally does. That was a genius stroke, I thought, on Dutcher's part. There's a kind of overstatement in some of Dutcher's portrayals, like in States of Grace. They all end up, you remember, over at the creche of the living Baby Jesus. I can't remember if all of them kneel, but some of them do. You could say, well, that's not going to happen in real life. Well, no, but it struck me as just the exactly right statement. That's a profound film on the atonement. People, for example, think that the adultery that the poor elder gets into, the fornication that sends him home and writhing with guilt is too quickly done and agreed. But sometimes you have to do that in a work of art. I think Dutcher is a great artist and I think that will stand whether he does anything more or not.

Mormon Literature, Art, and Comparisons to Richard Dutcher

John Dehlin [00:22:04] One of the things Dutcher expresses. Well, first of all, a lot of the people who have written questions for this interview for you have compared you to Richard Dutcher, and they've sort of seen you as this champion of candid, earthy, heartfelt Mormon literature that's sort of real. And they sort of see that as Richard in Richard as well, for cinema. And that reminded me of the statement that Richard's been saying lately that he used to fear, you know, that

Levi Peterson [00:22:38] he

John Dehlin [00:22:38] used to really try and drive people to make sure that Mormonism would express itself in its most meaningful and sincere ways through cinema. And now as he's reflected upon that, really what he sees is that maybe this kitsch and this cheesy, humor based sort of Mormon cinema that's been inflicted upon us for the past couple years from Hale Entertainment and others really is the ultimate expression of Mormonism and the Mormons have expressed themselves and that unfortunately, that's the best that Mormons really have to express in both literature and in cinema. Does that resonate with you? Do you take a slightly less cynical approach? Maybe he's being provocative, but do you have any. You know, some people see you as a champion for candid quality Mormon literature as well. So do you have any thoughts on.

Levi Peterson [00:23:34] Well, I think the distinction people make between the serious work of art, serious novel, the serious film, and the popular novel. Popular serious novel is valid, even though the two tend to meet at a certain point. But I think it's inevitable that you will have this kind of popularized version of the Mormon film and comedy, and that for a lot of viewers, that's satisfactory. I think Richard would have to simply be satisfied with his feeling that he did his best and he did it the way he wanted to do it. That's certainly the way I feel about what I've written. Probably the most outstanding Mormon novelist I know of right now is almost totally unrecognized. And that's Rob Van Wagener. He's up there living on The Skagit River, 100 miles north of right here in Issaquah. He's up in a little town on the Skagit called Concrete. Lives there on 12 acres right on the. He and his wife and two sons right there on the border of the Skagit River. And all Rob does is write. And he's got this Mormon. It's really a Mormon murder mystery. And it's been looked at by some big houses very closely. But finally, it doesn't quite fit their formula for a murder mystery. They want him somehow to make it fit the popular sense of what a murder mystery ought to be. And Rob is treated like the artist is. He's an impeccable craftsman of the word. I have no idea whether I think he may revise it. He's working at revising it. But whether. I have no idea what will happen with it. I hope it gets published. I hope it gets published by a big house back East. That would be a triumph for him and Mormon literature too. But nonetheless, Rob is a true artist of words and he's the foremost that I know of right now in Mormon letters. I suppose that's where Richard's at. But what more he does, who knows? We hope for more and maybe he'll do it.

John Dehlin [00:26:20] Do you have any final thoughts on what Mormon literature, Mormon art is, isn't, or should be?

Levi Peterson [00:26:29] Well, I think Mormonism, Mormon art ought to express Mormonism in some manner. The world still hung up, the non Mormon reader still hung up on the fact that Mormonism is still a proselytizing religion. A Mormon, the typical conservative Mormon, wants other people to be Mormons and they're always a little puzzled why they're not quite accepted in. In the culture. Well, it's because of this sense of moral superiority. You're more or less saying to your non Mormon friend, you need what I've got here, even though the friend may feel pretty satisfied with what he or she has. So I. Don't think. Should Mormon writers start doing what Orson Scott Card does and slip Mormon themes subtly into a kind of literature that the non Mormon is accustomed to? Well, yeah, if you want to. It wouldn't satisfy me because I want to write about Mormons, not about. I mean, my sense of. I like to write realistically and all I know well enough to write closely is Mormons. And that's why I would call for a Mormon literature rather than a general American literature that somehow reflects Mormon themes.

Biography of Juanita Brooks and Mountain Meadows

Part 6 of 7 · Ep. 93

John Dehlin [00:00:00] So you did a biography on Juanita Brooks.

Levi Peterson [00:00:04] Correct.

John Dehlin [00:00:07] What led you to do something on Juanita Brooks? Tell us a story or two that would capture the essence of how remarkable you feel she might have been, and then talk about your feelings around the churches. In 2007, the churches quote, semi apology regarding the Mountain Meadows Massacre. It's a big topic, but I'll set you loose.

Levi Peterson [00:00:34] Well, in 1973, Juanita came to. She'd have been 75 then. She came to Weber State and spoke to us in the Special Collections Room in the afternoon. And she talked, among other things, about her insistence on publishing in her biography of John d. Lee, published 11 years after her history of the Mountain Meadows Massacre had been published, she wanted to publish the fact that the church had reinstated John D. Lee.

John Dehlin [00:01:11] In other words, they had excommunicated him posthumously.

Levi Peterson [00:01:15] Yeah, for his participation. In fact, he was the only person executed for participating in the massacre, and he'd been excommunicated. Her purpose in writing both those books was partly to vindicate John D. Lee, not to exonerate him from participation, but for having been singled out as the only one among about 55 prominent Mormons who were at the scene the massacre and a lot of others that were involved in the decision making that weren't at the scene. Well, the church had insisted that the Lee family not make generally known the reinstatement of their ancestor Juanita Brooks. Got.

John Dehlin [00:02:08] Do we know why? Do we have a sense or even a guess as to why?

Levi Peterson [00:02:12] Well, I'm going to guess that it was because they were admitting that Brigham had driven a bargain. He'd done a plea bargain. If they focused on John Deeley and leave the rest of his Mormon confreres alone, then okay. And that happened, said Juanita. I'm afraid. I think the church thought that reinstating John D. Lee might be admission that Brigham did that. That's unthinkable for a prophet to scapegoat somebody. But the Lee family were so excited, they were told if this becomes a big public issue, President McKay will rescind the reinstatement. Juanita was summoned to the office of Stapley, Delbert Stapley, Apostle down Temple Square or the church office building. And he leaned on her in person not to publish that. She said she promised not to publish it in the first edition of the biography. What? She didn't tell him that there were only going to be a thousand copies of that printed for the Lee family, and then the printer would put new plates in and issue a new edition of it, and it would Carry at the very end this announcement of the reinstatement.

John Dehlin [00:03:57] So she was deceiving him a little bit.

Levi Peterson [00:03:59] He felt so now. But in arguing with him, she tried to persuade him that the Lord wanted that reinstatement put in there. She said, I have had unknown obstacles to publishing this biography. It's been ready, and I now believe it was the Lord's way of waiting till the reinstatement had occurred so that we can get den. That's my testimony. And she said she didn't identify it as Delbert Stapley. I learned that in my research.

John Dehlin [00:04:30] He was an apostle, right?

Levi Peterson [00:04:31] He was an apostle. She said, he slapped the table and said, it is of the devil. In other words, her revelation was from the trumped.

John Dehlin [00:04:40] Got trumped.

Levi Peterson [00:04:41] Yeah. And she said to us in that group that day at Weber State, she said, I looked him in the eye and I said, brother, in this matter, I know the will of the Lord as well as you do. I thought, well, I love that woman. That's what got me going on reading the two books for the first time. And I wrote that little essay called the Mormon Juanita Brooks, the Mormon Historian as Tragedian. And it was very. It's still being used in certain classes at byu. And then the University of Utah Press asked me to write the biography on basis of that, which I eventually got around to doing.

John Dehlin [00:05:25] Give our listeners a sense for the feat of doing what she did as a mother in the 50s, as a woman against all odds in a very conservative church.

Levi Peterson [00:05:38] She lived in St. George, a housewife. She was a mother of both children and stepchildren active in the church. And she still wrote that book and she still researched it. And what she wrote was so well written and so well researched that it stood as the classic statement of the massacre for 50 years and only now is being challenged for that position.

John Dehlin [00:06:09] I've heard a story about how she kept her writing materials in a.

Levi Peterson [00:06:13] She kept her typewriter under. Under a cloth. And she had her ironing board with damp ironing on it. And if a neighbor called, she'd cover the typewriter and be up ironing. One neighbor remarked, you know, you're ironing every morning, aren't you? She says, I didn't say this to her, but only if you only knew it. I'm only ironing while you are here.

John Dehlin [00:06:38] But at any rate, she was hiding it. Why?

Levi Peterson [00:06:42] Well, it wasn't a woman's role in St. George to be writing history. But as she got the book moved along in the late 40s, getting near, she had a Lot of qualms about excommunication. She had watched her friend Fawn Brody. She was keenly aware of Fawn's excommunication.

John Dehlin [00:07:07] For no man knows my history, right.

Levi Peterson [00:07:10] 1945. And so she feared excommunication. And I suppose she came closest to it. Not then, but after doing what Delbert Stately thought was lying to him, he proposed to President McKay to excommunicator. But there's a story I ought to tell you about that, but before I do, I later discovered in my research that Juanita was exaggerating. In talking to us at the group, she told us she did what she wanted to do in this. I know the will of the Lord as well as you do, brother. I'm convinced on other things I researched about that episode and the detail her husband Will gives in the his diary at that time. Things I didn't realize until I was researching for the biography. I think Juanita was one emotionally battered woman. I bet she didn't say that, but I do think she emerged from there having decided what she was going to do. She lived up to her promise. The first edition, no mention, but the second edition would follow immediately and she would accept excommunication if that's what it took. And I think she truly was closest to it. So I think she was telling us there what she wanted, would have liked to have said and felt and felt. I learned since from some research that Greg Prince did in his biography of. Of President McKay, that. Delbert stapley. Recommended to President McKay that she be excommunicated. And he said simply, I'll leave her alone. And Delbert told that to a friend from Australia who turned up, coincidentally, at a home of a friend in Salt Lake where Juanita was that afternoon. And he told her the story about Delbert Stapley wanting. Delbert told. This friend told Juanita that Delbert had recommended excommunication, but that President McKay had said, I'll leave her alone. And he said that Juanita took both his hands and tears came into her eyes as she heard that. So she finally realized how close she had come. But the President McKay himself, far from rescinding the excommunication, I mean rescinding the statement of John D. Lee, also refused to excommunicate her.

John Dehlin [00:10:17] And do you have a sense that she was a sincere believer?

Levi Peterson [00:10:21] Well, people argue that she wasn't in her later life, but on the whole, given the fact that people go up and down a little in their faith, I think Juanita was a believer to the end. She Argued with Dale Morgan over Joseph Smith. When Fawn Brody's book came out, Dale Morgan was an unbeliever. He was an agnostic. And Juanita could take Joseph Smith with all his faults and still believe he was a prophet. And as Richard Bushman shows us, that's the way you've got to do it. You see, Richard gives you all this detail, show the faults and foibles of Joseph. But Richard's a believer.

John Dehlin [00:11:13] Do you see Juanita Brooks as a hero?

Levi Peterson [00:11:16] Oh, yeah, very much for me. She's been a model for me. To me, she's a model of dissent. That works because I think the church's building of the monuments, buying the site of the monument and building monuments on it is directly related to Juanita's work. It might have happened, but it wouldn't have happened as fast if Juanita hadn't written her book when she did. It took 50 years, 40 years at least, for that first monument appeared. I do think that people like Will Bagley ought to get off the anti church bit. Will's big, thick book on Juanito I think will be very appealing to gentile readers because. Because it is so anti Mormon. But I think it's trying to kick a dead horse. And the spirit of Juanita would be, well, look, let's look at the facts and then let's get over trying to keep the resentment going. So, yes, I think Juanita's big message for me is you take things like the massacre and you realize that it was a tragedy for the perpetrators as well as for the victims, and you have to get to some sense of forgiveness for them and be thankful that you aren't put into the circumstances where you would be tested by that.

John Dehlin [00:12:47] So one of compassion and empathy.

Levi Peterson [00:12:49] Right? That's the attitude you should have rather than wanting to press the church's face further into the gravel. Rather than realizing the church has basically made its apology for the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

John Dehlin [00:13:05] Do you feel the same thing about the blacks then, that maybe the church has already apologized?

Levi Peterson [00:13:10] Well, yes and no. I don't know.

John Dehlin [00:13:14] Different topic for you.

Levi Peterson [00:13:16] Church has a hard time apologizing overtly, doesn't it? Explicitly, you have to interpret. Interpret it. It's still got to apologize for what it does to women and for what it does to Heavenly Mother, but that'll come.

John Dehlin [00:13:33] So what do you think of the latest statements about the Mountain of the Massacre by the church? Is that a further apology? Is that a wonderful step forward?

Levi Peterson [00:13:42] It's a wonderful step forward. The fact that Richard Turley could put published that brief summary of their book in the Ensign. The beauty of that is now the rank and file church member knows that it's okay to read about and talk about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. There are a lot of topics that are still like an article we've recently published in dialogue and we'll be talking about it. The Little Northwest Sunstone Symposium wither Noah's Flood can be reinterpreted as referring the scriptural reference to the Noah's Flood referring to a localized regional flood rather than a global flood, which science says is impossible.

John Dehlin [00:14:39] Right. If you had to summarize this is just going to come out of left field. But if you had to summarize the lessons of Mountain Meadows, what would the lessons be for us today?

Levi Peterson [00:14:53] Human beings need to read into their own, read their own behavior closely enough to see how they provoke one another. I happen to believe that the massacre at Mountain Meadows had an awfully lot to do with the American public back East. America of the. 1850s, It wasn't divided into sane, civilized non Mormons and these fanatic Mormons. It was divided into groups of people, all who vilified one another. The rhetoric of anti Mormonism that came out of the earliest existence of the church in Palmyra, then Kirtland and then Missouri and then Illinois. You can see that the fanaticism that created the massacre in southern Utah was alive and well among non Mormons back east. And they had given the Mormons good doses of it. So that in a way, even though true, the the Fancher train did not merit at all. What happened to it by any civilized standard for the man who did was a blow. They were still fighting Nauvoo and Far west and the purgings from back East. I think the problem with Will's book, Will Bagley, is he still wants to side a sane and civilized non Mormon America against the Mormons who even today refuse to recognize their will, their responsibility, rather than realizing that the that massacre grew out of a large Mormon culture of violence, only an American culture of violence that had a lot of the. You've got to go all the way back to there to start explaining the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

John Dehlin [00:17:38] Not unlike what we're experiencing maybe today with the war

Levi Peterson [00:17:44] failing to see our own contribution to what's going on in Iraq, which ought to be very visible.

John Dehlin [00:17:52] So that's not just a Mormon lesson.

Levi Peterson [00:17:54] No, it's a national lesson.

John Dehlin [00:17:59] Human human lesson. You talk a bit in your book about retrenchment on the liberal Mormon front. What's that about?

The Crackdown on Liberal Mormonism in the 1990s

Levi Peterson [00:18:13] It's about the 1990s when liberal Mormonism took it in the chops. Big step back and I don't know that it's recovered.

John Dehlin [00:18:23] And were you heavily involved in Dialogue in Sunstone?

Levi Peterson [00:18:26] Oh yes. The church denounced symposia and everyone knew what that meant. And. The Committee on Strengthening the Church distributed a lot of summonses all over the Utah area and many Mormon writers, contributors to Dialogue and Sunstone were evoked, convoked and September 6th were disciplined.

John Dehlin [00:19:03] How much of that did we bring on ourselves versus was merit, you know, versus was unjustified in terms of using harsh rhetoric, in terms of being too strident in the criticisms as a metaphor for what we just talked about. Do you see it as a two sided affair, the clamping down on intellectuals and dissenters, or do you. Do you see them as mostly victims?

Levi Peterson [00:19:25] They. Well, certainly they provoked it. They made choices and got the results of their choices. Yeah, I think he could have been more tactful. You know, Gene England didn't go under with the September 6th, but his slide out of favor at BYU started at that famous Sunstone meeting in which he stood up in the camera, denounced the Committee on Strengthening the Membership around what year was that? That would have been 92, I think.

John Dehlin [00:20:20] So he stood up and said, and this is. The committee was investigating dissenters, keeping files on people and sending the telling stake presidents and bishops to interview people and to start putting pressure on them.

Levi Peterson [00:20:31] It was that same session that got Lavina in trouble. I believe that she wrote an article that was published, I guess in Dialogue and then that got her excommunicated. But at any rate, the. I gave a Sunstone speech in 93 urging liberal Mormons to retreat and not confront and just survive for a while and stay in the church. But those who are on the church payroll to stay on it, not lose their jobs. I spoke to what was coming with Lavina, for example, that hadn't quite happened yet. I said, those who just have to make a stand here and go out, well then at least don't abandon Mormonism. Keep going. Lavina did that. I'm sure it wasn't my advice. I think that's her nature. But some of the others didn't. But I said that I would. I said if I were excommunicated I would show up next Sunday on the back row and sleep as usual in sacrament meeting. But

John Dehlin [00:21:55] did you think there was a. Were you scared that you might be?

Levi Peterson [00:21:58] Well, I didn't know. I wasn't very scared. However, the next spring my stake president phoned me and very deferentially asked me if he could visit me in my office at the English department at Weber State. I was chairman of the department at that moment.

John Dehlin [00:22:15] Was this for your book or for your speeches at Sunstone?

Levi Peterson [00:22:19] I didn't know what it was for. All I knew is that other people had been being summoned.

John Dehlin [00:22:23] What do you guess it might have been for?

Levi Peterson [00:22:25] Well, I know I'm going to tell you. But at any rate, He was very deferential to me. He was a former student of mine, incidentally. But he came to my office, he came in and I came out behind my desk and I sat facing him. We each had a conference chair and he began asking me about my attitude toward the church. And I simply. I told him I had a. That I was a liberal Mormon, I certainly wasn't an anti Mormon, and that I valued my membership in the church and that I recognized the sovereignty of the First Presidency and the twelve and so on. And I spoke then of my heritage coming from a long line of Mormons and the big Mormon family. And I. I said I valued all that. And also I said, I spoke of what I wrote in my essay, Christian by Yearning. I said I hoped for salvation and would be grateful for it if I were to wake up and find it was extended to me from death. He finally told me, very anticlimactically, the essay had come in. For it was an essay in Sunstone on the. Called A Hike to Timpanogos or something of that sort, where with family members, I had gone to the summit of Timpanogos and looking down on Utah Valley where all those babies were born hand over fist. Written about what? Overpopulation. How overpopulation is fed by the great value of love. And I don't mean just sexual love. I mean love for little children. Everybody loves little children. And you've got an impulse to have more of them. You overpopulate the earth. But he didn't seem much disturbed by that. He told me that that's what send him in. But as he left, he was so kind and all that I realized that I was off free, that I'd passed the interview and he was very. So I didn't have a difficult, a bad experience with it.

John Dehlin [00:25:00] How did you feel when the excommunications came down in September of 1993?

Levi Peterson [00:25:04] Well, I didn't. I regretted them and wished the church could be more acceptive of a liberal contingent. Some ways the church is more liberal now than it used to be. I think its attitude on the Mountain Massacre is one evidence. But on the other hand, it seems to me that BYU is. Campus is turning more and more non scientific insistent upon the disparity between science and faith rather than working to show their harmony as it ought to be doing. I see quite a bit of evidence of that and I regret that. Too bad. I don't know what will happen. The liberal Mormon is like the little dog barking at the freight train, remember?

John Dehlin [00:26:12] Tell us about that.

Levi Peterson [00:26:15] The train doesn't know the little dog's there and the little dog is okay if it stays off the track. But the little dog's got a bark or it doesn't feel good. That's what the label Mormon has to do. Has to keep telling the church, shape up. Church largely ignores it goes its way.

John Dehlin [00:26:37] So is the barking of no consequence then?

Levi Peterson [00:26:39] Little consequence.

John Dehlin [00:26:42] And that's just something we have to.

Levi Peterson [00:26:44] Well, you hope it makes a difference. I put together a panel at Sunstone on early return missionaries about four years ago and it was a very mixed panel of the people on it. But a reporter from Deseret News showed up and there was a very affirmative summary of that panel in the Deseret News, which startled me a little. The Trib is usually the newspaper that publishes Sunstone. And it seemed to me the church was willing to recognize that missions aren't for everybody, that it needs some kind of reform in the way it preaches missions for everybody and the way it treats those who come home early.

John Dehlin [00:27:45] You cite that as an example where

Levi Peterson [00:27:46] maybe might be liberalizing a little when it wants to.

John Dehlin [00:27:52] So should the dog keep barking?

Levi Peterson [00:27:54] Yeah. Has to

John Dehlin [00:27:58] tell me about the importance of sense of dialogue in your life and the extent to which you see them both as important to the church or to its members. And I don't mean to conflate the two, but I'll start that way and you can split them up if you want.

Levi Peterson [00:28:15] Well, in a sense, the Sunstone and dialogue and also the old association for Mormon letters, which isn't in as bad odor as Sunstone and Dialogue. But as I first really came to terms with them in the early 80s, I think they kept me a Mormon and I don't know that I would have ever withdrawn my name voluntarily from the role to the church. I never had any impulse to do that. But as I said, I had little sense of investment in Mormonism, little sense that there was anything for me in it. I realized there are Mormons here who think I'm a Mormon and in a sense that made me one. I got my sense of having an investment in Mormonism from Gene England and Charlotte and Bruce Jorgensen and those friends who Linda Sillitoe and John, those people who were members of the first writing group that I belonged to and the people I knew on the staffs at Sunstone and Dialogue. I realized there's a. There is a Mormonism that I belong to. And I will say this, that to my observation, nine tenths of those people are believers. They're liberal Mormons, but they're believers. Leviathan is a believer. Gene was a believer just as fervently and sincerely as the most ardent conservative Mormon. While I didn't pretend to have a faith of that sort, my closest approach to faith is hope, the hope of the Christian by yearning. The fact that there was this sizable contingent of Mormons of this sort bonded me to the church. I then had my family, the tradition and legacy of my family that bonded me. And I had a group of contemporaries to bond with. Very important. And they need to exist, they need to continue, they need to persist. We don't want either Sun Stone or Dialogue to go under. And as far as I'm concerned, the Symposium is vital, even though some people say you ought to rename it the Sunstone Conference, as if that would make a difference. But whether or not I think the outlet given by Sunstone Symposium has done immeasurable good for the church. And the denunciation of symposia directed chiefly at the Sunstone Symposium was misbegotten. It was wrong headed, and I think the ruling apostles of 50 years from now will have quite a different attitude about it.

Lightning Round, Gene Ward, and Staying in the Church

Part 7 of 7 · Ep. 94

John Dehlin [00:00:01] So let's begin our lightning round. You've been very patient as I've forced you, compelled you to help us through the chronology of many of the important points of your life. Now it's time for the lightning round where we're going to just ask you to tell some stories or answer some questions that our listeners have sent in. Okay, so we've heard that you're quite a storyteller. We've seen that now. But Christine has asked us for you to share with us the chicken story.

Levi Peterson [00:00:32] Well, this is a sister in law's

Levi Peterson [00:00:35] sister who she and her husband lived in Livermore at the moment when out on the outskirts, it was basically rural Livermore, California. And some good neighbor gave their children three or four chicken eggs. And the children wanted to brood them and raise them. So their dad helped them fix up a little box to keep warm. And they hatched the eggs out. So they had some hens and a few hens and a rooster and they. I can't remember how when they grew to maturity, how they got out of their pen. But quite soon those chickens had free run of the little farm there. It was kind of a suburban farm. It turned out they were game fowl. They were those fighting fowl, the kind that grow spurs and fight. And that meant that even though they were out in the free, they survived skunks, raccoons and so on. They were tough and they fought off predators and they multiplied until they had 30 or 40 of them and going around the place and they would do what chickens do on porches and walks and so on and were a general nuisance. And the mother of the family became very impatient with him and pleaded with her husband to do something about him and the kids and so on. Nothing happened. And one day as she was driving home up the lane to their house, one of the gamecocks confronted her car and wanted to fight it and it

Levi Peterson [00:02:46] wouldn't move and she didn't have the presumption to run over it,

Levi Peterson [00:02:53] but it made her angry. So she finally was able to get her car back to a parking place.

Levi Peterson [00:03:00] But.

Levi Peterson [00:03:00] But she had her mind made up. She phoned a neighbor and borrowed a.22 rifle and then she went to the store and bought a box of shells and came back and went out on

Levi Peterson [00:03:15] the back porch and started shooting chickens. She must have shot 15 or 20, 25 of them. But at any rate the kids, when

Levi Peterson [00:03:28] the father, he was a dentist, came

Levi Peterson [00:03:32] home that evening, the kids were clamoring. Mothers killed all the chickens. Well, she hadn't killed them all, but she had demolished quite a few of them. And there were chicken carcasses all over the backyard and there was even some over in the neighbor's place. But the poor neighbor came up wringing

Levi Peterson [00:03:51] his hands and I can't remember, it seems to me that he had in mind that it was somehow that he was to blame and this was retaliation against him. At any rate, he had had to kill some of the wounded ones and was complaining. But if you knew this good woman, my sister in law's sister, she's sweet, mild mannered, churchly, duteous wife, church member

John Dehlin [00:04:24] and so on, who went postal.

Levi Peterson [00:04:26] Who went postal.

Levi Peterson [00:04:28] But now there's another good story about the Relief Society in rural places. The sister in law I spoke of, she and her husband lived next door to a. I guess it was two doors up from a woman who had a billy goat, had goats and she. One of them was. And they had. Were generally in the backyard, but they also could get out front and the billy goat was belligerent, had horns and all. And one day when the Relief Society visiting sisters came to call on the woman and came time to go home, they tried to open the front door and the billy goat was on the porch and wouldn't let them go out. So that good sister went to the closet, took out a 3030 and went

Levi Peterson [00:05:27] out and killed the billy goat. The rural sisters know how to handle emergencies, but that's another testimony to what Relief Society will do it to people.

John Dehlin [00:05:42] Oh, wow, those are good stories. One of the most touching parts in your book for me was your discussion about Eugene, England. And today most people don't have the benefit of ever knowing Gene because he's passed on. You knew him. Talk a couple minutes about what he meant to you, what he was like. If you have a story that encapsulates what he was like to you and any of those moments or thoughts you expressed in your book about the end of his life. I know it's a big topic.

Levi Peterson [00:06:16] Yeah, Gene. Well, Gene was quiet and he just exuded tranquility in a sense you felt comfortable around Gene, very accepted that he had a Christian acceptance of all people. And he was untroubled by lack of faith. He was untroubled by sinners. He was just acceptive of them. And the. I felt that very much that I particularly had originally a pretty strong sense of guilt for not being a faithful Mormon. But in Gene's presence it didn't count. It wasn't anything that he would worry about. Quite a few years At BYU he conducted taught Mormon literature classes and he would use one of my novels or book of short stories. And he would typically have me come down and speak to classes once a year a class or two on the backslider. Quite a few students later years I'd meet people who were introduced to to, they would say to serious Mormon fiction by Gene in that class. But Gene's students, almost invariably somebody would wonder why I had so much graphic sex or violence in my writing and I'd make some defense of it. But what always struck me with Gene is that didn't trouble him the existence of that in my writing. Gene esteemed my writing to be Mormon writing and I was always impressed with that

John Dehlin [00:08:33] because it's good taste.

Levi Peterson [00:08:35] Yeah. Well, at any rate, another thing that struck me about Gene is he was the quintessential liberal Mormon. Now, my definition of the the essential liberal Mormon isn't myself. I'm a peripheral liberal Mormon. But a liberal Mormon is a person who believes deeply believes both that reason with all its apparatuses like science and the faith, the Mormon faith can be reconciled. Gene believed that. He believed it implicitly and I marveled at it that he could get in the 90s, when we were having our closest friendship, the late 80s and the 90s, I marveled as I could see that Gene was sincere in that position, both he believed and in the prophet the church. But he also. That's why he found a dialogue. He thought the role of dialogue was unnatural. Slowly through the 90s, Gene became disillusioned in that maybe I shouldn't say slowly. I think the treatment he received following that impetuous speech he gave and that was uncharacteristic of Gene to get up and angrily denounce the committee for strengthening the members. He assuming that it was got up without the knowledge of the brethren at the highest levels by functionaries. And then he was publicly rebuked, if not explicitly rebuked, at least the church declared that that committee happened to have a couple of apostles on it. So it wasn't just a group of functionaries doing was I think in the aftermath of that that Gene was what you ought to say, mauled by Elder McConkie that who wrote Gene a letter which became public while Gene was in England and before Gene ever saw it, a letter basically saying to Gene that when you and I disagree on a point of doctrine, I'm the one who it's your place to ask to defer to me, not vice versa. Which shows Elder McConkie and his quintessential arrogance. He's the most classic example of the abuser of the priesthood that I know of.

Levi Peterson [00:11:47] But

Levi Peterson [00:11:50] that was only, I think, a phenomenon on the way of Gene being advised heavily to retire when he didn't want to. He was old enough to retire, 65 or somewhere along in that range, and he was urged to retire. And so he did. And he went down over to the Utah Valley State College campus and tried to set up a program in Mormon studies there and felt like he was having success. But he came to feel at the end that church opposition was official. Church opposition was stopping him there, as people may know. Toward the end of his life, Gene died in 2001. Gene was actually suffering from a large cyst growing in one of his frontal lobes. He didn't know that, but he began suffering a lot from depression. And he attributed the depression to the lack of success he was having in getting his program going at Utah Valley, a state college, which he felt was owing to church opposition. Just a month or so before his collapse and operation on the cyst in his brain, about six months before he died, Gene was here at this apartment. He and Charlotte and her daughter had lunch with Althea and me. And after lunch, Gene and I walked down the nature trail that's over here. Band of trees with a creek running through it. As he and I walked down there, he said that he was very depressed, and for the first time in his life, he no longer relished work. And then he said that. He said that these are almost his words. I wrote it in a diary and entered it into my autobiography, the diary having been written the day after he said it. Something like. He said, you know, I have a testimony, and I believe in the church, and I believe in the apostles, but what do I do when apostles have treated me like s. He used the S word the only time, and he said it bitterly. The only time I've ever heard him, ever had heard him say a word that you wouldn't normally be able to use over a pulpit. I don't know which apostles he meant, but I'm certain he could have easily met McConkie. And in my judgment, he had been treated that way. I suppose persons of the opposite point of view could say, well, he invited it, and the liberal Mormon invites that kind of stern treatment. I think it takes something for a liberal Mormon to. To endure to the end

Levi Peterson [00:15:26] that

Levi Peterson [00:15:29] you can easily, as a liberal Mormon, realize that the church doesn't welcome the liberal Mormon. It ought to. It's too bad it can't, but it can't. It doesn't I. It's too bad. If it takes a liberal Mormon of my nature to stay with it, I can stay with it. Because I didn't expect anything different in the first place. And I can't be disillusioned. What the official church does isn't my Mormonism anyway. But it's too bad that it has to be on the shoulders of people like me. I hope it isn't. You didn't want that kind of a pessimistic conclusion.

John Dehlin [00:16:28] Was that the last time you saw Gene?

Levi Peterson [00:16:30] No, I saw him over the next six months, in April or May. I saw him and he was ambulating and rehabilitating. But by when we returned to the Sunstone symposium, he was dying. And Althea and I went to the house, Charlotte's house. And Charlotte told me in private, she said, I can't let him go. She says, friends tell me I'm keeping him alive, useless. And he's suffering uselessly because my will won't let him go. And that tells you something about how Charlotte felt about him. But be that as it may, she took us into the bedroom. She slept there with him at night. And somebody stayed with him. If not she, then one of the daughters. And I leaned over and I kissed his bald head. He'd been still shaved from therapy. Some kind of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy. And told him I loved him. Told him to put a good word in with God. When he got there on the other side, and he opened his eyes and looked at me and Althea. Then he closed them. I never saw him again. Sometime in September, he was dead. We were back down to his. That tribute they held for him at the Provo Tabernacle, which was a lovely event.

John Dehlin [00:18:12] So another hero of yours.

Levi Peterson [00:18:14] Correct. I knew that that tribute would largely emphasize Gene's orthodox side, and it did. So I pitched my remarks to emphasizing his liberal side.

John Dehlin [00:18:31] Have you published those anywhere?

Levi Peterson [00:18:33] I think so. I think Dialogue did an issue on Gene, and they're in there.

John Dehlin [00:18:40] Okay, real quickly, there are a lot of people leaving the church. Not percentage wise, but just in number wise. I'd say hundreds to even thousands a year over historical issues, disappointment, disillusionment, all sorts of reasons. You've made the case before. When I went through my crisis of faith, I came into this living room and I talked to you about it, and you encouraged me to consider staying. Yeah, if you were going to look some young people in the eyes who have left or have considered leaving and wanted to make the case for why they might consider staying. What would that appeal be?

Levi Peterson [00:19:27] Well, my appeal would be that. There's no reason why you can't build a happy life in Mormonism. Its irrationalities are no more irrational than those of a Catholic or a Baptist. Its irrationalities are no more irrational than those of an atheist. Anybody that interprets the universe imposes something irrational on it. I think, particularly if what I would say is what you have to learn how to do is pick and choose what kind of Mormon you will be. There's a lot of security in the church. It's got a good social program if you know how to tap into it. It's full of decent people and it's good to be around them. Particularly if the questioning person has a spouse or children. I'd surely tell somebody, think hard before you break up a marriage over the mere fact of belief or disbelief. I suppose a person has to at least negotiate the ability to take the church on his or her own terms. But by his or her own terms, I mean, I don't. I think this idea that you've got to accept whatever job you're asked to take is a bad idea, very bad idea. I think you need to cultivate a tactful way of telling the bishop, you can't do that one, you shouldn't do that one and take the assignments you ought to take. But as far as exposing your children to it, well, why not? It gives them a security and a foundation and a decent society where you've got a better chance of their not being exposed to drugs and drunkenness. So I think there are a lot of reasons to be a Mormon and it doesn't require a deep conviction that it's the one and only true church. In fact, I think you're better off if you don't think it's the one and only true church, but just adapt to people that do think. I think particularly people who were born and bred Mormon ought to think staying. I have a hard time being having much interest in converting somebody to Mormonism that isn't already there unless it's what he or she particularly wants, then by all means. So that's where I stand on it. My daughter is a Mormon. We raised her in Mormon because my wife said we should. She said, all the relatives you have, she'll have hell.

John Dehlin [00:23:03] Your wife said this the non member wife?

Levi Peterson [00:23:05] Yeah. She said considering how strong all her cousins and grandma and grandmother and uncles and aunts are in the church, we need to raise her a Mormon. And so while Karen was little, Althea went to church a lot.

John Dehlin [00:23:23] So A lot of people say to me, oh, but if I raise my kids, they'll learn to not respect women as much as men. They'll be barraged with this one true church thing. They'll get this arrogance about we're right and 99.95% of the world's population is wrong. And they say, why inflict that? That's abuse. You know, they'll say that's abuse to inflict all these notions on a kid repeatedly. How would you give people some coping mechanisms for raising children in what you could say, the dangerous waters of Mormon doctrine and theology for those who are liberal or concerned about those elements?

Levi Peterson [00:24:00] Well, I suppose I just let the church do what it wants to do at Sunday school primary and just make sure that the atmosphere at home is open minded and sees points of view. Karen is an active Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:24:22] Your daughter?

Levi Peterson [00:24:23] My daughter. Her two sons are. One son is a deacon now. The other son is getting close to baptismal age and I'm sure he'll be baptized. Her husband's a Mormon. I baptized him myself, which may indicate something of the quality of Mormon he is.

John Dehlin [00:24:44] But.

Levi Peterson [00:24:44] But because he's never.

Levi Peterson [00:24:47] He doesn't hold the Aaronic priesthood and doesn't seem to be much inclined to. But it seems to me that the atmosphere at Karn's house is those boys aren't going to grow up dogmatic, but they find they've got a pretty good society, network of friends and they certainly don't just fraternize exclusively with Mormons. There are non Mormons on the street that the oldest grandson is very good friends with. We have friends in Indiana who, the wife was a former Mormon. She may still be on the church rolls, I have no idea. But she has lived an absolutely non Mormon life for these 50 years or 40 years. And she, when we visit with them every couple of years for a weekend or so, I'm an inveterate talker about Mormon affairs. And she gets back into it and she'll say, you know, it's refreshing to be back in the company of somebody that understands what it was to have a Mormon foundation. She says, most of our friends, we don't talk about what it's like to be a Mormon or what it was like. So what that taught me is even the Mormon who goes apparently Gentile is still Mormon. And that's why I said those nephews of mine that may identify more with their Baptist friends than with Mormons, they're down deep. They've got the sentiments and the problems. They understand the problems of Being a

John Dehlin [00:26:49] Mormon, you alluded to this earlier, but in your encouragement for disbelieving folks to maybe consider continuing their Mormonism, I almost get a sense that there's a mission in your aspirations because you feel like maybe they're an important leavening influence on the church itself.

Levi Peterson [00:27:08] Well, that big thing, the more liberal Mormons there are, the better.

John Dehlin [00:27:13] Why is that?

Levi Peterson [00:27:14] Well, they influenced the others to ease up on the throttle a little, the self affliction throttle. That's why I told Richard Dutcher the last Sun Stone, you ought to stick with it. He didn't have time to pursue that. Maybe he is for all I know, hope he does. But the reason is, I think the

Levi Peterson [00:27:38] more

Levi Peterson [00:27:41] either doubtful or unbelieving Mormons who can stay in the church on friendly terms with other Mormons, the better off the church is in the long haul. The church is the church. How's that? I think the church is shooting itself in the foot. To think that going totally conservative to the point of deciding you have to believe there was a Noah's flood, global flood, it's damaging itself. I think the need, the need to affirm. The believer has such a strong need to affirm the faith that he wants to get out into a region of unreality to keep it affirmed rather than realizing that faith has to be some kind of tension with everyday reality rather than a system that lets you exclude everyday reality. And so liberals help, I think so

John Dehlin [00:28:52] keep the church grounded and the membership grounded in reality.

Levi Peterson [00:28:59] There's a reason why the church ought to liberalize in its attitude toward women. Whether the church gives women the priesthood or not seems irrelevant to me if it would work out a system for extending more executive power to them. We need a lot more women in decision making roles and the church isn't civilized in its refusal to do that. I think it's to its own detriment, own long term detriment. First of all in the loss of a lot of people, particularly women, particularly young women. It takes quite a will to be like my daughter, who I think is a liberal Mormon, but she's a very strong minded woman, always has been. Even when she was a little girl she commanded her father and mother considerably. But I think she manages to let people know in her ward that she's one of them. But she thinks that. Well, I think she feels like women ought to have more of a decision making role. I'm well known over to my own ward, I guess so I haven't been to church for six months. It's this dialogue between dialogue and My grandkids, I just haven't had time to go. But when I'm through editing Dialogue, I want to get back to sacrament meeting. I've known my bishop's, my former home teaching companion, and he knows I edit Dialogue. I give him copies of it from time to time. I finally got feeling comfortable enough in this gospel doctrine class up here that I could start saying what I think liberal Mormons ought to say in gospel doctrine classes, which I used to do down in Ogden regularly. I lived in the 33rd Ward of Ogden in the East Ogden Stake for 35 years. I'd become very much at home there, and they knew what kind of a guy I was. They knew I slept in sacrament meeting and that I couldn't be depended on for church duties and so on. But I was willing to raise my voice at the proper moment. If somebody's endorsing a global flood, the comfortable liberal Mormon says, hold on a minute, hold on a minute. You know, that couldn't have happened. And besides, it's not against the scripture to interpret that as a local flood. So I need to say that

What Religion and Reverence Mean to Levi Peterson

Levi Peterson [00:32:11] it's

John Dehlin [00:32:12] almost an act of. You're almost calling on people to consider the act of service to help be a leavening influence in the church. So to close, would it be fair for someone to just say Levi Peterson is sort of non religious, secular disbeliever, or is there a spiritual perspective that you feel like you still carry and operate with? And when that glorious day comes, where you pass beyond, do you have hopes and thoughts in that realm as well? And you know, those are, I guess, two separate questions, but I'll set you loose for your.

Levi Peterson [00:32:48] Well, first of all, I believe I'm religious because I feel reverence for the world around me. I became awake to that fact in Wilderness. And I wrote quite a bit. I've written quite a bit about wilderness. But the primary thing wilderness taught me was that I respond to the world with reverence. And to me, that's the essence of religion. I'm hesitant to ascribe personality to nature, but I would like to believe that, that the universe, nature, is moving in a direction that is in accordance with the deepest and most important human ethical values, which I hope are God's ethical values. Loving God through reverence, loving fellow creatures, which seemed to me what Jesus was saying, love the Lord thy God, love your neighbor as yourself, and so on, extended to all living things, which was the import of Albert Schweitzer on me. To learn that picking up on his concept of reverence for life that you expand the Christian ethic to. Toward human beings, to all living creatures making judgments, recognizing you are making value judgments as you prioritize where you're going to put your efforts. I'm a Christian by yearning because I was born into a Christian culture. I've studied Christian history, a lot of the Christian tradition. I admire it. I am glad to belong to it. I'm not ashamed of it. But I don't exalt myself over my Hindu friend Seshachari in Ogden, my colleague at Weber State, you and I always get together, we discuss religion, and it isn't with any sense of saying one Christianity. Sesh points out the guilts of Christianity to me, and I point him out the Hindu version of the same. But at any rate, I don't mind being called a Christian. I don't mind being called a Mormon. I'm proud of my Mormon background. I. I have a lot of doubt. I haven't been blessed with the gift of faith. I don't know whether I'll awaken into the miracle of eternal life, but if I do, I'll take it. You can bet I do. Expect my feeling that I know a lot about what God isn't, even if I don't know too much about what God is. I can't believe that if I do awaken into the miracle of eternal life that I will be arbitrarily denied seeing my loved ones there. That does not fit the God I know. It's possible that a group of human beings would like to interpose between me and God and tell me that if I don't approach God in their particular way, that I'm in trouble. But my sense of what God isn't, even if I don't have a strong sense of what God is, is that, no, that's not God. If people have loved each other in mortality, God will, and they arrive in immortality together. They will be allowed to stay together. So that I'm not ill at ease about the prospects for my wife. As I've said that I think our love for each other is our temple ceremony. And as I say in one of my essays or one of the chapters of my book, I feel that holiness is found in many places. And I don't doubt the holiness of the temple and the experience of it that happens to the attenders of it. But I'm also aware that I have felt holiness and I know that it's holy, the essence of the holy in the presence of a newborn child and the death of a loved person in a beautiful landscape in simply sitting with my family and my friends. That holiness is where you find it. It's as unprepted as the air. God doesn't sell it through a particular group of merchandisers. It's there to be taken. I have taken it. I do take it. I have valued being alive and don't regret living. It's been a good experience, regardless of what happens after death. I. I value the fact that so much of my life has been cast in with Mormonism. I'm very preoccupied with it. And that's all right.

John Dehlin [00:39:09] We done?

Levi Peterson [00:39:09] I'm done.

John Dehlin [00:39:11] All right.

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