Why are so many young Mormons leaving the Church? Today, we’re joined by Hailey Walser to explore that question through the lens of her own Mormon story.
Hailey was raised in the Church in Alaska, where growing up Mormon looked very different from the experience many members have in Utah. As a teenager, she began asking questions about feminism, Church culture, and the role of women, but still considered herself a committed believer. Hoping to strengthen her testimony, she chose to serve a mission and was called to serve in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
What followed would fundamentally reshape her relationship with the Church. Hailey was serving her mission when COVID-19 broke out, and was sent home. She was eventually allowed to return to her mission, but was then informed that her service would be extended by an additional six months. She describes feeling trapped by the decision, unable to simply return home on her own because missionaries do not control their own housing, transportation, or finances.
Throughout the conversation, we discuss why so many young members—particularly young women—are questioning or leaving the LDS Church today. From gender roles and institutional authority to diversity, politics, and personal autonomy, Hailey offers a thoughtful perspective on why an increasing number of young people no longer feel at home in Mormonism.
Episode Transcript
This transcript is machine-generated and lightly edited for readability. The audio is authoritative. Please excuse occasional errors in names and spelling.
What Would cause a young Mormon missionary to begin doubting her faith
John Dehlin [00:00:00] What would cause a young Mormon missionary woman to begin questioning her faith as a missionary? Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is July 21, 2026, and today we have with us in studio, Hailey Walzer. Hey, Hailey.
Hailey Walser [00:00:18] Hi.
John Dehlin [00:00:19] Why in the world would a Mormon missionary start doubting or questioning her faith?
Hailey Walser [00:00:24] So many reasons.
John Dehlin [00:00:25] Okay, you served a Mormon mission around beginning what year?
Hailey Walser [00:00:30] 2019-2021.
John Dehlin [00:00:32] Okay, so just about five, six, seven years ago. So you're. You know, this is part of a series of kind of the younger generation. Why so many Mormons, especially in their 20s, seem to be abandoning the church in droves. This is an episode in that series. We've also covered in the past Covid missionaries a little bit. But, yeah, we're just really, really excited to learn more about your Mormon story. So, Hailey, I always like to ask, at least to begin with, whether your parents were Mormon and if so, when they met.
Favorite Stories of My Parents
Hailey Walser [00:01:05] Yeah, they were Mormon. They met in Colorado after my mom had served a mission, gone to college, done all of that, and she moved to Colorado for work. And my dad had been married and was divorced, and they were in the same ward, and my dad's or my mom's friends set them up on a blind date, and so that's how they met and started dating. And he had eight kids at the time.
John Dehlin [00:01:35] Oh, my goodness. Eight kids.
Hailey Walser [00:01:37] Yes.
John Dehlin [00:01:39] And your mom had never been married?
Hailey Walser [00:01:40] No, she'd never been married.
John Dehlin [00:01:42] Holy moly.
Hailey Walser [00:01:43] Yeah, she'd had a few serious boyfriends, but nothing too crazy.
John Dehlin [00:01:49] So a big age difference between them?
Hailey Walser [00:01:51] About seven years.
John Dehlin [00:01:52] What, eight kids in seven years?
Hailey Walser [00:01:54] Yes. He got married almost. I think it was like a year and a half, two years after graduating high school. So my dad started early.
John Dehlin [00:02:02] All right.
Hailey Walser [00:02:03] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:02:03] So around what year were they married?
Hailey Walser [00:02:06] 1998, I believe.
John Dehlin [00:02:08] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:02:09] Yes.
John Dehlin [00:02:09] And do you know if they were temple married?
Hailey Walser [00:02:11] They were. Yep. That was the only thing they did. They didn't have a reception or anything.
John Dehlin [00:02:16] Okay, so your dad wasn't a returned missionary, I'm guessing?
Hailey Walser [00:02:19] No.
John Dehlin [00:02:20] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:02:20] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:02:21] And did they stay in Colorado or.
Hailey Walser [00:02:24] Yeah, so we lived there until I was 8. So 2008. And then we moved to Alaska, and it was just my mom, my dad, my little brother, and I.
John Dehlin [00:02:35] Okay, so your mom had two biological children once she married your dad?
Hailey Walser [00:02:40] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:02:41] So that would have put the total kid count at 10.
Hailey Walser [00:02:44] Yes. Yep.
John Dehlin [00:02:45] So you were the second youngest of 10 kids?
Hailey Walser [00:02:48] Yes.
John Dehlin [00:02:49] That's wild.
Hailey Walser [00:02:50] The age gap was crazy, too. So it was almost like I was the oldest of my chunk of the family.
John Dehlin [00:02:57] Oh.
Hailey Walser [00:02:58] Because the brother closest to me is eight years older.
John Dehlin [00:03:01] Oh, my goodness.
Hailey Walser [00:03:02] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:03:03] So almost like a second family for your dad.
Hailey Walser [00:03:05] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John Dehlin [00:03:06] Okay. That's intense. Okay, so y' all moved to Alaska? Alaska, yes. So those first eight years, did it feel like, from what you understand about traditional Mormon families, did it feel like a traditional Mormon upbringing or.
Growing up a traditional Mormon in Alaska
Hailey Walser [00:03:22] It did. I knew obviously that we were a blended family, but I didn't know yet that that was uncommon.
John Dehlin [00:03:32] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:03:32] So everything to me felt normal.
John Dehlin [00:03:34] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:03:34] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:03:35] And so did you do all the things. Church every Sunday and.
Hailey Walser [00:03:39] Yes, yes.
John Dehlin [00:03:40] Primary and scripture study and family home evening and all that stuff?
Hailey Walser [00:03:44] Yeah, we did all of it. We were very traditional in our Mormonism, so.
John Dehlin [00:03:49] Okay, so did you go to middle school and high school in Alaska?
Hailey Walser [00:03:56] Yeah, I finished elementary school there and then did middle and high school and left for college. But Alaska is what I would consider home. That's where I did all my growing up, so.
John Dehlin [00:04:07] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:04:07] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:04:08] So what do you remember about your Mormon adolescence, you know, in middle and high school?
Hailey Walser [00:04:14] Yeah, I think that's when I started to realize that we were a little bit different than the other families in our warden stake, but we still. We were always very orthodox. You know, I dressed like I was wearing garments from the time I was a child until I actually did wear garments. We didn't play with friends on Sunday. We didn't swim on Sunday. We, you know, I did seminary. And graduating from seminary was just as required as graduating from high school. It was very. Yeah. Very traditional. But that was also when I started to pick up on some of the messaging around divorce or not serving a mission as a man, you know, things like that. And I just started to realize that my family was a little bit different, even if we lived very religiously.
John Dehlin [00:05:12] Okay. So I. I think I relate to that because my dad didn't serve a mission and my parents got divorced. So what I'm hearing is that maybe you felt like maybe felt self conscious that other members judged you as maybe an inferior kind of family. Is that what you're saying?
Hailey Walser [00:05:29] Yeah, there was definitely, you know, comments would be made, not necessarily at my family, but, you know, in young women's lessons, things would be brought up about how horrible divorce is or how you should only try to marry a man who is a returned missionary. And in the back of my head, there was always that question of, like, okay, but what about my family? You know, do you not see my family as worthy or as good Mormons because of those Differences? Yeah.
What was your young women's and kind of mutual experience like as
John Dehlin [00:05:57] What was your young women's and kind of mutual experience like as a teen? Mormon teen?
Hailey Walser [00:06:04] I loved it. It was fun. But I think it was very different than what it would have been growing up in a very LDS area like Utah or Idaho. It was more relaxed, it was more diverse. There were things like I have friends who grew up in Utah who talked about being frustrated that in young women's or girls camp or things like that, it was very. We're learning how to sew and we're learning how to cook and very traditionally feminine things. And that wasn't my experience as much. We had lessons on that, but then we also learned how to change a car tire or how to check your oil or, you know, girls camp. We did whitewater rafting and we learned how to shoot guns. And it, you know, so it was, I think, atypical in that way too. Just not as focused on traditional feminine ideas, which I appreciated. It was pretty well round, well rounded.
Mormon high-schooler on the missionary change
John Dehlin [00:07:13] So yeah, you would have graduated in what, high school graduating class?
Hailey Walser [00:07:18] 2018.
John Dehlin [00:07:19] 2018, yeah. Okay, so from 2014. So the missionary change, where the age for women being lowered from 21 to 19 would have happened while you were in high school, is that right?
Hailey Walser [00:07:32] Yeah, I remember. I believe they announced it a couple weeks before conference and then talked about it in conference, if that's correct. And yeah, I remember that happening. I think I was a sophomore maybe.
John Dehlin [00:07:43] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:07:44] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:07:44] By that point, were you already planning on going on a mission or not so much?
Hailey Walser [00:07:47] No, I did not want to serve a mission at all. I had no interest, really.
John Dehlin [00:07:51] Why not?
Hailey Walser [00:07:54] For the first little bit of my life, when I was younger, I thought I would be married by 21, so I just felt like it wouldn't happen. And then once I was older and knew more about missions, I didn't like the idea of getting sent somewhere I had no say in. I don't do well with like the heat, I don't do well with bugs, things like that. And I just. Enough of the world is hot and humid and buggy that I figured it's not for me. So.
John Dehlin [00:08:21] Okay, yeah. How was your testimony in those high school years in terms of your belief in God, your testimony of Jesus and the atonement and of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon and the modern day prophet, all that stuff?
Hailey Walser [00:08:37] Yeah, I would say it was really strong. I really felt like my religion was core to who I was and carried me through a lot of things. I had small questions, but I never questioned God. I never questioned Jesus or the idea of modern day prophets. That, for me, was very real and very solid.
John Dehlin [00:09:04] What were the questions? Do you remember any of the questions you did have as a high schooler?
Hailey Walser [00:09:08] Yes. So I know I stopped paying tithing for a little bit because I didn't like that it was going to byu because there were things I disagreed with about byu.
John Dehlin [00:09:18] Like what? As a high schooler?
Hailey Walser [00:09:20] The honor code, specifically.
John Dehlin [00:09:21] Wait, you knew about the honor code in Alaska high school?
Hailey Walser [00:09:25] Yes. Yeah. I mean, how. So many of my friends and family went to BYU or wanted to go to byu, and I have always. College has always been my, like, big dream in life. I just wanted to go to university and get a degree. And so I spent a lot of time thinking about where to go. And of course, as a Mormon, everyone was like, go to byu. It's amazing. And just in my research, I found the honor code. I found stories about potential discrimination against people of color, against women, obviously. Obviously against the LGBTQ community. And that just didn't fly for me. Didn't work. So I did stop paying tithing for a little bit to try to figure that part of my testimony out.
On The Feminists in the LDS Church
John Dehlin [00:10:13] Can I ask you a little more about that?
Hailey Walser [00:10:15] Yeah, of course.
John Dehlin [00:10:15] So as a. As a Mormon kid growing up, I could easily see a kid not necessarily being sensitive to race issues because of the LDS Church's history with discriminating its black people and teaching that Native Americans have dark skin because of a curse. I could see them not being sensitive to women's issues or feminism because the church has consistently excommunicated feminists who spoke it out. And then, yeah, the church has historically sort of been at war with the LGBTQ community. But you were believing Mormon, so why were you having sympathy for three groups that the church, I think, at some point, called the three great threats. Three great enemies of the church, the gays, feminists, and the intellectuals.
Hailey Walser [00:11:08] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:11:08] And they didn't say black people, but, you know.
Hailey Walser [00:11:11] But it's implied through history.
John Dehlin [00:11:13] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [00:11:15] So the feminism aspect, I think, was probably the first for me. The first big question I ever remember having was about Heavenly Mother and the absence of women in the church. Because my mom, although I don't think she would call herself a feminist. She, you know, she didn't get married until she was 30. She served a mission. She got a degree in the 80s at a time when the church was very clear that that wasn't necessary for women. You know, it was, you should focus on getting married. She worked for, I think, most of my childhood, and she raised me to do the same. And To.
John Dehlin [00:11:59] You mean she worked out outside the home?
Hailey Walser [00:12:01] Yes, she had a job.
John Dehlin [00:12:02] Okay, okay.
Hailey Walser [00:12:03] Um, which again, is atypical, depending on your. Your branch of Mormonism. Um, and I. Yeah, I was raised with those same expectations. It was very clear early on that I was to leave the home and leave the state and go to school. We talked frequently about the importance of having financial independence as a woman, even in marriage. And so I think that started me on that path of sympathy for people that the church might not traditionally encourage empathy for. I started reading feminist works and look which ones. So I read a little bit of the feminine mystique I've read. I'm trying to remember. In high school, we. I know we had.
John Dehlin [00:12:59] That's enough. Did you learn about Sonia Johnson and the LDS Church's opposition to the era, The Equal Rights Amendment?
Hailey Walser [00:13:08] So I didn't learn about that until college.
John Dehlin [00:13:11] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:13:12] I learned about the era, obviously, but we didn't really cover Mormon opposition to it in Alaska, in the system there. But I knew about early suffragettes, and, you know, Susan B. Anthony came and spoke to Mormon women in Utah, and I knew about that. I knew about. Well, now I'm forgetting her name, which. The one who wrote no one knows
John Dehlin [00:13:42] my name, no one knows my history,
Hailey Walser [00:13:43] or no one knows my history.
John Dehlin [00:13:44] Von Brody.
Hailey Walser [00:13:45] Yes. I knew about Fawn Brody in high school. Yeah. Yeah. I had a seminary teacher who I think tried to get ahead of common concerns by bringing them up in seminary.
John Dehlin [00:13:57] Oh.
Hailey Walser [00:13:58] And that did not work in my case.
John Dehlin [00:14:01] But for those who don't know, no Man Knows My History was the first legitimate biography written about Joseph Smith by a woman in 1945 named von Brody, who is the niece of Mormon Prophet David O. McKay. Total coincidence. Just last week, for the first time ever, the audio version of no Man Knows My History was released on Audible, and I was asked to be the narrator for that book. So I'm the narrator on that book.
Hailey Walser [00:14:30] I had no idea. That's so cool.
John Dehlin [00:14:32] Yeah. And I'll be announcing soon a way you can get it at a discount. And we may do an extension of the Joseph Smith podcast series focusing on meant a psychological. You might be interested in this on a psychological look at Joseph Smith that would be throughout his life, because that's what Fawn Brody did. She. She integrated really credible history with contemporary psychological sort of analyses.
Hailey Walser [00:15:03] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:15:04] Anyway.
Hailey Walser [00:15:04] Yeah, she was fascinating. So, you know, I learned about that, and then I think anything feminism or feminist starts to lead into intersectionality, which, of course, brings up sexual minorities and racial minorities and, you know, so I. And I also grew up in a very diverse state. Alaska has incredible diversity, a large indigenous population, and a lot of protections for the indigenous population. And I think just growing up around people who look and believe and act different leads to more sympathy and empathy and, you know, all the good things for people who are different from you. And so seeing BYU discriminate against people just, you know, hit a sore spot for me. So.
Why I Stopped Paying Tithing in the LDS Church
John Dehlin [00:16:00] Okay, so my next question is, did you differentiate that from the church? Because obviously the church runs byu, so it made you question whether you wanted to go to byu, but did it make you question the truthfulness of the LDS Church?
Hailey Walser [00:16:16] Yeah. And that's part of the reason I took that break from paying tithing was simply because I didn't understand how something that was supposed to be run by God could be putting time and effort and money into an organization that was harming God's children. And I struggled with that for a while. I don't think I ever reached a. A full, like, closure on it until leaving the church, because it just. I could never make sense of having an organization that can be so harmful and saying it's supported by God.
John Dehlin [00:16:56] Did you try to talk to your parents or your seminary teacher or your Sunday school teachers or young women's leaders or bishops? Did you try to talk to any Mormons about your doubts in high school?
Hailey Walser [00:17:08] I did try to bring it up with my parents, and I think with any concerns I brought up with them, there was this idea of, like, yes, that's a valid concern, but also, you just have to trust God that it'll work out and that it makes sense even if we can't see it. And I am someone who likes good, strong, clear answers, so that didn't work for me. But, yeah, I didn't try to talk to leaders about it much because their response wasn't satisfactory. And my friends, I was. For most of my childhood, I was by far the most orthodox of my friends, so.
John Dehlin [00:17:56] Really?
Hailey Walser [00:17:56] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:17:57] Huh.
Hailey Walser [00:17:58] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:18:00] Wow. Well, that's pretty precocious to be so awakened to issues around social justice in high school as a Mormon young woman that you stop paying tithing. So how in the world did you end up on a mission?
Hailey Walser [00:18:18] Good question. So I. I kind of fell into that progressive Mormon ideology at some point where I was like, okay, I. I have a good understanding of these social issues, and I. You know, my education is in psychology, and obviously there's things that overlap a little bit with social justice. And I just had to come to terms with the fact that parts of the Church were outdated according to what I knew. And I kind of put it in the Lord's hands and was like, he will make it work when it, when it needs to work. You know, eventually people of color were able to have the priesthood again, even if it never should have been taken away from them in the first place. But, you know, just things will work out somewhere down the road. And I was always very studious, very. I felt like I had a real personal connection with God and with Christ. And so I really relied on that and just felt like maybe a mission was the right thing for me and that it would help with my testimony, it would help me bring love to other people. And that was my biggest driving factor was just I need people to know that they're loved and cared for. And if the best way I have to show that is through Jesus or Christ or God or the church, then a mission would be the best way for me to do that. If that makes sense.
John Dehlin [00:19:58] Yeah, yeah. What were you into in high school besides the church?
Hailey Walser [00:20:04] Not much outside of the church. I was very, very religious, but I did small things. I was a swimmer for a little bit. I loved like debate and drama and we don't have a ton of programs at schools in Alaska. They've been cut back quite a bit. So I didn't have a lot of after school extracurriculars, but I did. They're such like nerdy things. But I participated in poetry out loud, which is a. It's similar to drama, but you get up and recite poetry and compete in that. I. German is my second language, so I competed in German language competitions. I mostly put my effort though, into having good grades and just being a good LDS girl. So dated a little bit, but that was pretty restricted, you know, per. For the strength of youth standards. Can't date much, so.
John Dehlin [00:21:11] Yeah, so no big. Sounds like, no big conflict with your bishop or with LDS church standards worthiness stuff in high school sounds like there wasn't really.
Hailey Walser [00:21:24] Not too much, no. I mean, I was thinking about this the other month. I feel like if you had asked 16 year old me, I would have been like, oh my goodness, I'm horrible. You know, like I'm. I don't pray enough and I don't read my scriptures enough and I, you know, told my mom I didn't want to go to family home evening so I could go to my friend's house instead. Or, you know, 16 year old me would have been like, I'm so bad at this Mormon thing. But looking back at it, I Was I just. I didn't get into a lot of trouble. I just kept my gaze straightforward and did what I felt I needed to do. So. Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:22:01] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:22:02] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:22:03] Okay. Any other thing about your story before you graduate from high school that you want to make sure and share, either personal or church wise or family wise or whatever?
Mormon women talk about the culture shock of Utah
Hailey Walser [00:22:15] I mean, I think just the biggest thing was knowing that what the church taught is like the one real path to success. And happiness wasn't apparent in my life. You know, like I said, my family was different from most of the families you sat in church with. And we were happy and thriving and successful and. And I grew up, like I said, somewhere very, very diverse. I had friends of all different religions, and they were happy and healthy and successful. And so I just didn't grow up believing that the church was the only way to happiness in this life or the next. I felt like I didn't see that.
John Dehlin [00:22:56] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:22:57] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:22:58] And the traditional thing that most Mormon young women absorb, which is that they're going to get married as soon as possible, preferably 18 or 19, and have as many kids as possible. Degree is optional, career is optional. Did you absorb that or is that not where you. Where your mind and heart were at at 18 or 19?
Hailey Walser [00:23:21] The marriage part? Yes.
John Dehlin [00:23:23] Yeah, you said that earlier.
Hailey Walser [00:23:25] Yeah, I definitely thought I'd get married super soon. And I, you know, by every other standard, I did get married early. I was like 22, which is early. But the degree and career, that was also very different for me from other women my age, especially. Once I did move to Utah, I was not dropping out of school for anything. And I knew I wanted at least a master's, if not more education. And I knew I wanted to work so that I. I mean, I heard it all. I was told by family and leaders and friends that my priorities should be marriage and children. But with my mom's experience and just with my kind of natural draw to school, that wasn't an option for me. So.
John Dehlin [00:24:13] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:24:13] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:24:15] So after graduating from high school, you came to Utah?
Hailey Walser [00:24:18] Yes. Yeah. I moved to Logan to go to Utah State University.
John Dehlin [00:24:21] Go Aggies.
Hailey Walser [00:24:22] Yes. It was a big mixture of I loved it and I hated it. You know, I loved school. I hated Utah.
John Dehlin [00:24:34] What the. But this is Logan. This is different. No, it's not different. It's not different.
Hailey Walser [00:24:41] It was better, I think, than if I had gone to BYU or uvu.
John Dehlin [00:24:47] Spoken like a true Aggie.
Hailey Walser [00:24:48] Yes.
John Dehlin [00:24:49] Aggies hate cougars for some reason.
Hailey Walser [00:24:52] I mean, like I said, my prejudice against BYU started early, so that's true.
John Dehlin [00:24:56] That's true.
Hailey Walser [00:24:59] But. Yeah. So I came here for school.
John Dehlin [00:25:00] But you felt like there was a culture shock coming to Utah.
Hailey Walser [00:25:04] 100%. Yeah. I've lived in.
John Dehlin [00:25:06] I mean, it's not like Alaska's a thriving urban metropolis.
Hailey Walser [00:25:09] No.
John Dehlin [00:25:10] So what was wrong with Cache Valley?
Hailey Walser [00:25:12] It was really just the Mormonism of it all really shocked me. You know, like I said, this was my life. The church was my life. But I remember trying to find shorts at the mall up there, and I asked one of the ladies who worked there where I could find some longer shorts, and she said, oh, like, long enough to cover your garments. I was like, you don't owe anything about me. You can't be asking me that. So just things like that where the assumption was you're Mormon or you know about Mormonism. And even though that fit me, it was weird.
John Dehlin [00:25:50] Interesting.
Hailey Walser [00:25:51] Yeah. Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:25:52] Well, now they're putting a target there. Where that mall. Where that mall was.
Hailey Walser [00:25:55] Yes. They are an exciting development for Logan.
John Dehlin [00:25:59] It's a big deal for Logan. Right up there with an in n out.
Hailey Walser [00:26:03] Yes. We're growing.
Coming to the Mormon Church in Utah
John Dehlin [00:26:06] Okay, so the Mormon. Even though you were a faithful, devout Mormon, the Mormon ness of Cache Valley, Utah, was strange to you?
Hailey Walser [00:26:15] Yeah, it was really just this operating from an assumption that everybody was Mormon was so weird to me. And Mormonism in Utah and Idaho and Arizona is different than everywhere else. And, you know, you've heard this a million times and you've experienced it, but there was this weird for me, growing up in Alaska, I had friends who were technically members of the church but didn't identify with it. And they would never say, I'm Mormon. You know, they would be like, well, my family's Mormon or I go to the Mormon Church, but that's not me. Whereas here, you know, I would meet people who lived Mormonism very differently than what it was taught and still claim their Mormon identity and, you know, still be in church every Sunday and give talks and things like that. And that was also weird for me. Not to judge the way they live it, but just adjusting to, like, okay, maybe you don't have to practice Mormonism a specific way in Utah and you can still be Mormon.
John Dehlin [00:27:22] That was positive for you.
Hailey Walser [00:27:25] I couldn't make up my mind about it, okay. Until after I left the church. And then I was like, it's whatever. People should live how they want.
John Dehlin [00:27:32] Okay. Yeah, interesting. I mean, I grew up in Texas. That was not very Mormon. And then I went to byu and I felt like Dorothy or Elphaba in Oz. I was just like, this is the greatest thing ever. You know what I mean?
Hailey Walser [00:27:45] Yeah. Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:27:46] So it didn't. It was weird. They laughed at me when I said y'. All. But, I mean, it felt good for me, but for you it felt off. But I wasn't. I wasn't awoken to kind of social justice sensibilities at that point.
Hailey Walser [00:28:02] Yeah. I also think just growing up where I'm expected to know and understand other religions and viewpoints and identities made it harder to live somewhere so homogenous.
John Dehlin [00:28:16] Oh, yeah.
Hailey Walser [00:28:17] You know, I went from. Because growing up, I always adjusted my language to whoever I was talking to. I never said ward. I always said congregation. You know, I didn't use bishop. I would say priest or my worship leader or, you know, whatever, depending on who I was talking to.
John Dehlin [00:28:33] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [00:28:34] And I felt like it gave me opportunities to connect with people more.
John Dehlin [00:28:38] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [00:28:38] And I missed that here.
John Dehlin [00:28:40] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [00:28:40] Yeah.
Mormon Student Experience at Utah State
John Dehlin [00:28:41] What about your dating experiences pre mission and your ward? Student ward experiences?
Hailey Walser [00:28:46] Yeah, I didn't date too much. Actually. The first person I dated in Utah was a Catholic, so.
John Dehlin [00:28:54] Whoa.
Hailey Walser [00:28:56] Yeah. That was the first real boyfriend I had, which also is atypical. But I didn't date too much before my mission. I just wasn't that interested.
John Dehlin [00:29:10] What about your professors at Utah State? Mostly they're secular.
Hailey Walser [00:29:15] Yeah, they are. And I didn't notice that much, except for I had an environmental studies teacher and I started out really liking him at one point. We talked about overpopulation, I believe, and the impact that can have on the climate. And he started with the sex ed lesson because he was like, I know most people in Utah don't get a good sex ed, so I'm gonna give that to you. Which was kind of funny. But then when we were talking about pollution, he had a picture of the Salt Lake Temple in just like a haze of pollution. And he made some comment about it was against the Mormon Church. But if you believe this is God's land, why are you treating it like this? Something like that. But that's the only time I remember noticing any sort of mention of the church, negative or positive, in my broader classes at usu.
John Dehlin [00:30:18] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:30:18] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:30:19] Did you attend institute?
Hailey Walser [00:30:22] I did.
John Dehlin [00:30:22] And tell our never Mormons what institute is and what it's like.
Hailey Walser [00:30:27] Okay. So seminary is kind of the soft launch for institute. And once you get to university, you have this whole catalog of university level religious courses about Mormon philosophy, Mormon history, Mormon religion, and you get to pick some fun ones. You have some generals you have to do. But if you follow through with it for the four years that you're there. You graduate with an institute degree of
John Dehlin [00:30:56] sorts, which is just religious education oriented towards Mormon University students, Right?
Hailey Walser [00:31:05] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:31:05] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:31:05] Yeah, So I did do institute my freshman year. I took a Women in the Bible class. I was deeply disappointed in that class. And then I took just some general. I think I took like the Restoration of the Gospel class and maybe. Oh, I did do mission prep right before my mission, which is also an institute class. So, yeah, I took a few. I wasn't thrilled by them. I would say they felt kind of entry level basic, but.
John Dehlin [00:31:44] Okay. So by 2019, the CES letter had come out. Lots of Mormons on the Internet had been excommunicated. Definitely. Podcasts and Facebook and Instagram were all going strong with a lot of content about Mormon issues and history. And I think TikTok was not yet emerging, but it was about to emerge. I'm curious whether you had stumbled onto the Mormon or the ex Mormon Internet in all of its variety and controversy pre mission.
When the CES Letter came out,
Hailey Walser [00:32:32] I hadn't actually. You know, I. Growing up, technology was pretty locked down for us. I got a smartphone, I think, when I was 17, and it was my mom's iPhone4, so it was barely alive. We didn't have. We had like a family computer in the living room. But I wasn't really on the Internet much. I did have Instagram, but I really just used it for family and friends. I wasn't on it much. I didn't know about Reddit. I was never on YouTube, so I really didn't find any anti Mormon stuff.
John Dehlin [00:33:20] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:33:20] But I don't even know if I knew about the CES letter at that point. I was pretty sheltered. Obviously I'd gotten enough to know about BYU honor code issues.
John Dehlin [00:33:34] Right.
Hailey Walser [00:33:34] But I don't think I got it from any super, super openly oppositional forces. It was people in the church who knew about it and had opinions.
John Dehlin [00:33:46] Would you have been. Would you have heard of the November 2015 policy when it was implemented? You would have been young.
Hailey Walser [00:33:54] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:33:55] And also the second part to that is, would you have also heard about the reversal in 2019 where it was undone? And this is obviously two policies that were heavily discriminatory against Mormon, LGBT, same sex married people and their children. Did that just pass above your radar? Under your radar?
Hailey Walser [00:34:15] No, that was actually a big issue for me too.
John Dehlin [00:34:17] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:34:18] At the time, yeah.
John Dehlin [00:34:19] Like in middle high school.
Hailey Walser [00:34:20] Yeah. I was 15 when it happened and I didn't have a lot of Internet access, like I said, but I was very much on the church website and the church apps and I was very, you know, I kept up with church news, and I remember. Remember that happening and just feeling like it made no sense. If one of the biggest parts of the church's agency and the ability to, you know, we're. We aren't responsible for our parents sins, we aren't responsible for Adam's sins. You know, it's all on us. And so I never understood this idea of, you know, you can't be baptized if your parents are gay until you're 18. That made no sense to me. I. There was no reason for it religiously, so I did have a big problem with that. I was happy when it was reversed, but it still felt like one of those things that shouldn't have happened in the first place. And I. I didn't. I wouldn't say I was an ally to the LGBTQ community in the way that I am now until later, but I did very much feel like everyone should have the right to live how they want to live. And so it did bother me when that happened.
John Dehlin [00:35:33] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:35:34] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:35:34] Okay. Okay. So did you do how many years at Utah State did you do before your mission?
On Hailey Walzer's Mission
Hailey Walser [00:35:42] Just one.
John Dehlin [00:35:43] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:35:45] Yeah. Because I went home to work before my mission in August, so I just did one full year.
John Dehlin [00:35:53] I will say, number one, I do think it's just fair to say, Hailey Walzer, that you were precocious as a teenager. Like, you were onto stuff that most of us took us 30 or 40 or 50 years to get onto. So that's impressive. But it's also a bit perplexing that as informed you were about things that you ended up on a mission, honestly.
Hailey Walser [00:36:18] Yeah. Yeah. It was a weird balance of being aware of a lot of issues and still being fully devoted to my religion, for sure.
John Dehlin [00:36:28] But also awesome. I mean, you know, I'm sure the church would love to have kept you. So. So what do you want to talk about going on your mission?
Going on a Mission at 19
Hailey Walser [00:36:37] Yeah. So I got my call in June or July. I.
John Dehlin [00:36:45] 19. 20. 19.
Hailey Walser [00:36:47] Yes. Yeah. So I think I had just barely turned 19 when I got my call.
John Dehlin [00:36:53] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:36:54] And I didn't really tell anybody that I was doing it. I did have to call my mom to get some insurance information, I think for the papers, but she was the only person that I told about it. I. I've always operated on, like, a need to know basis. I don't tell people things. So I just kind of surprised everybody. And then I left in December. I had a really long wait time, which was. I don't know, it was weird to me because I set my availability Date, I think for September 1st. Got my call in July and then left December 17th.
John Dehlin [00:37:36] Yeah. If you cared about school, that would have just kind of been lame to just have to sit out a semester unnecessarily.
Hailey Walser [00:37:42] 100%. Yeah. So I just went home and worked. I didn't really know what else to do. That was a bummer, though, that I missed out on that semester. And it did mess up all my school planning, which I was furious about. But yeah, so I went to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Spanish speaking.
John Dehlin [00:38:03] So not German?
Hailey Walser [00:38:05] No. I was shocked.
John Dehlin [00:38:08] If your parents had been like prominent, wealthy Mormons, you would have been called to a German speaking mission.
Hailey Walser [00:38:13] Oh, 100%.
John Dehlin [00:38:14] But they weren't. So you didn't.
Hailey Walser [00:38:16] No, no. My grandpa served in what is now the Alpine German speaking mission, I believe. So he served in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. German speaking. I had at that point four years of German under my belt. I was taking it in college. I was winning competitions, speaking German, you know, So I. I thought for sure I was going German speaking.
John Dehlin [00:38:46] And it wasn't Covid's fault because Covid hadn't happened yet. Right?
Hailey Walser [00:38:49] No. Yeah. Yeah. We were still a while out from COVID when I got my call.
John Dehlin [00:38:55] The truth is there aren't a lot of Germans converting to the Mormon church these days.
Hailey Walser [00:38:59] No, there's really not.
John Dehlin [00:39:00] So they're not. I'm guessing that might be part of it.
Hailey Walser [00:39:03] Yeah. There probably is not very many people that they need there, so. But Spanish speaking is pretty successful.
John Dehlin [00:39:10] Yeah. Relatively.
Hailey Walser [00:39:12] Yeah. Yeah. So I went to the Mexico npc, which I loved.
MTC: My Mexico Mission
John Dehlin [00:39:19] Okay, so you, you were called to Minnesota, Spanish speaking, but you went to the Mexico mtc?
Hailey Walser [00:39:24] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:39:24] That's cool.
Hailey Walser [00:39:25] Yeah, it was really cool. If it kind of didn't make sense to me because I, you know, I flew from Anchorage to Arizona and then Mexico and then all the way back up to Minnesota, so it felt a little bit silly. But yeah, I loved the Mexico mtc. I had a lot of fun. Like everybody, I got food poisoning. So it was a weird mix of the best time of my life and also horribly ill and unwell. But it was fun. I enjoyed learning Spanish. I enjoyed the lessons. We got to go to the Mexico City Temple, which was really cool. So I. I really enjoyed that part of my mission.
John Dehlin [00:40:09] Just two months.
Hailey Walser [00:40:11] Yeah, it was. Mine was a little bit off because I was there over Christmas, so I think the group before me had a shorter one and then my group had a longer stay. I think I was there for seven weeks.
John Dehlin [00:40:25] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:40:26] Yeah. And typically it's six For Spanish? Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:40:29] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:40:29] Yeah. So it was a long time.
Living in Minnesota pre-Covid
John Dehlin [00:40:32] Well, so you're in Minnesota. Okay. Wait, when did the George Floyd stuff happen? Yeah, sorry, Were you in Minnesota when that happens?
Hailey Walser [00:40:41] I had just left because of COVID Okay.
John Dehlin [00:40:45] Okay. So it happened. Okay. All right. So you're pre George Floyd?
Hailey Walser [00:40:48] Yes.
John Dehlin [00:40:49] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:40:49] Yes.
John Dehlin [00:40:49] Going to. So you go to Minnesota. Let's go there.
Hailey Walser [00:40:52] My first area was actually the area that George Floyd lived in.
John Dehlin [00:40:57] Oh.
Hailey Walser [00:40:58] So I was in that neighborhood. And I have a lot of love for Minnesota. That's if anything good came out of my mission, it was living in Minnesota and getting to experience it.
John Dehlin [00:41:11] What did you love about Minnesota?
Hailey Walser [00:41:13] I mean, first of all, it was beautiful in a very different way than Alaska. Obviously. No mountains, but it was very green, lots, lots of vegetation, very lush. And the people were incredible. They were so kind. And it, you know, it again, was diverse. Like Alaska, probably more so. I spent most of my time in Minneapolis and St. Paul. So I was right in the heart of everything. And I loved. We'd go to Walmart and I was hearing, you know, 10 different languages and seeing people of all nationalities and races. And I, I just love being surrounded by people who are different than me. It's. I, I think it's a really useful experience and it's also fun. So I loved, loved, loved, loved all the people there and just being exposed to so much. Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:42:09] Okay. I mean, I'm already starting to think if you're so sort of multiculturally minded and you're loving the diversity there. I'm just wondering if there's a train wreck about to happen with you telling all of Minnesota that you have the one true path for them. Whether that was at all a matter of cognitive dissonance in your mind. I don't mean to poison the. Well of your story.
Hailey Walser [00:42:34] No, no, not at all. No, that was. Well, like I said, I didn't feel that way. You know, I didn't feel like the church was the only path. So I. And this caused many issues between companions that I had because I, I wouldn't teach that. I didn't feel comfortable saying, the only way you can find happiness is through the church, so come get baptized. I. That did not work for me, with which my. With my first mission president, it wasn't too big of a deal. He wasn't very focused on numbers. He. I actually, we still talk every once in a while. He felt like a very like minded person. He wanted people to know that they were cared for and there were resources there if they needed them. And that was what he was worried about. We did so much service under my first mission president. And so that first up until Covid, so the two and a half months I was in Minnesota before COVID that was kind of the mission that I had dreamed of and hoped for because it was, you know, we were in food pantries and we were doing food drives. We were putting together homeless kits. We were really focused on just helping the community. And it was less of baptize as many people as you can. So that's kind of how the. How that worked out for me. The first time was having a mission president who felt the same.
John Dehlin [00:43:59] Okay, yeah. So it's sounding so far so good.
Hailey Walser [00:44:02] Yeah, yeah, it was great for the first little bit. And then partway through my second transfer, Covid hit. And obviously we're very restricted in terms of news and contact with the outside world, so we did not know what was going on. I remember being on a bus in downtown Minneapolis and someone. It was like a group of friends and one of them coughed and the other made a comment about don't cough near me, I don't want to get that. I don't want to get that disease or whatever. And then they started talking about COVID before it was called Covid. And that was kind of the first time I remember hearing anything about it. And then we got an email saying that we had to go to Walmart, not on a P day, and immediately put together an emergency kit with I think two months worth of food and water and.
John Dehlin [00:45:06] Whoa.
Hailey Walser [00:45:06] Yeah. So we went from not really knowing anything about it. Oh, I did have a friend who traveled internationally in February, I think, and she was talking about there's some weird thing. Like in Singapore, I was wearing a mask throughout the airport because there's something going on.
John Dehlin [00:45:21] Oh.
Hailey Walser [00:45:21] But we didn't know much about it until it was, okay, time to take action. Things are happening. So. Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:45:28] Okay, so we're in kind of mid 2020 by this point. Ish. Early to mid 2020.
Hailey Walser [00:45:33] Yeah, I think it was March. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it would have been March. And it went really quickly from there. We were asked to make our two month kit. And then there was talk about potentially people with health concerns having to go home. There was talk of people on international missions being sent back to their home country. And I think I had a friend who was in the Dominican Republic. And one week his email was fine and fun and normal. And then the next week his email was, well, I'm back in the States, I've been emergency transferred home with all the rest of the international missionaries and I have asthma. So there was a question around me and my safety. And I woke up one morning and was eating breakfast with my companion and got a text from my mission president that just said, sister Walser, I'm so sorry, but you have to go home. We have. We're sending you flight information. The missionary department has just decided that it's not safe for people with health issues to be out here. So we're going to send you back to Alaska. Oh. And that was that.
Sister Walser on the COVID case
John Dehlin [00:46:50] Whoa.
Hailey Walser [00:46:51] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:46:51] You got sent home.
Hailey Walser [00:46:52] I got sent home.
John Dehlin [00:46:53] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:46:54] Yeah. It was very quick, and it was devastating. I remember my companion and I just sitting at the table sobbing. I don't think we did anything that day. I think we made pancakes and cried. We're very unproductive missionaries. And that was still, like, to this day, that was one of the hardest days I've had, just because I was so happy. And then it just so quickly came crashing down. So, yeah, I was sent home for a little bit.
John Dehlin [00:47:30] Okay.
Hailey Walser [00:47:31] Yeah. So I think that was mid March or end of March probably. And my dad has pretty severe heart issues. So we did have to take Covid very seriously. And I remember traveling home. I actually made it on the last flight before Ingrid shut its airports, which I remember being on the plane. I was so mad. I was like, if we had just been a little bit later, I would have missed my flight. And I could have stayed.
John Dehlin [00:48:09] Oh, wow.
Hailey Walser [00:48:11] But I went home. And I remember on the way to Alaska, having to give myself a pep talk and be like, you cannot hug your mom. You cannot hug your dad. You're being exposed to so many things like, just don't touch anybody. Keep your mask on. Like, we can't risk getting your family sick. And then I walked through the airport doors and I saw my mom, and we both just started sobbing. And she came up and hugged me, and she's like, it's okay. Don't worry. I will wash all my clothes. I will shower when we get home. Like, don't worry about it. I. You know, I can hug you. And so then I rode back home, way back in the back of the car with my mom up front. Social distancing. Before we knew it was a thing, I quarantined for two weeks in our basement. My family would leave my meals on the stairs and I would eat in my room. It was. That was a really hard time. I was very depressed, and we didn't really know much about the state of missionaries at that point. There was kind of this Talk of, well, maybe it's just for a little bit, and then you get to go back. Maybe you won't get to go back. And I was trying to talk to my mission president and the mission department and my stake president, and my goal was very much get back on my mission. I just wanted to be back in Minnesota. I wanted to be a missionary again. They did release me the night I got home over the phone, and it was just kind of assumed I wouldn't go back out, but I really wanted to. So. Yeah, and then I just spent Covid, the first little bit of COVID with my family. There was an article published, I think, a month after coming home on the newsroom, the church newsroom, saying that the church department had decided that missionaries sent home for health reasons would not be allowed to go back out. And that, again, was devastating. That didn't end up being the case for me, but when I thought that was the case, it was really hard, especially because no one talked to me about it. You know, I found out from an article on the church newsroom. And then around that time, too, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis. And things got crazy there. So, yeah, I don't know if you want me to keep going about all that or.
Coming to the Mormon Church
John Dehlin [00:50:55] Well, so in terms of your Mormon story. Yeah. Did. Did. Did that affect your feelings about the church while you're home and how'd you get back out?
Hailey Walser [00:51:08] Yeah, so I remember feeling so distinctly before I went home. I think it was the night before I flew home from Minneapolis. I just felt so confidently that God was going to let me stay a missionary. I had been praying about it. I was just so distraught. And I. You know, they say, like, you can't bargain with God, but I was like, I will do literally anything if you let me stay here. Like, whatever you need me to do, it's done. Just let me stay in Minnesota. Let me be a missionary. And I. I just felt so sure that that was going to happen, that somehow there would be a miracle and I'd get to stay. And that did affect my testimony for sure, when I was home, feeling like I had misinterpreted whatever that feeling was. Like I didn't understand receiving revelation, maybe. And I relied very heavily on conference talks and studying and turning towards gospel things for support, which I think helped in some ways. But it also opened me up to things that emphasized all the questions I had, because I just. I wasn't listening to normal music and reading normal books. I was reading all of the general conference talks, and I was reading Saints And I was focusing solely on gospel things to try to help me get through these feelings. And so I started finding more and more things that I had concerns about.
John Dehlin [00:53:04] Oh.
Hailey Walser [00:53:05] Which I didn't expect from the Saints book from Saints, from old general conference talks. I had read and listened to every talk given in my lifetime. And so I started General conference. Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:53:21] Wow.
Hailey Walser [00:53:21] Yeah. And so I started going further back, and the further back I went, the worse things I found. I felt like I found a Richard G. Scott talk saying that survivors of abuse at some point need to recognize their own fault in the situation and ask for forgiveness. And that didn't hit well with me at all. Especially, I mean, like most women, I had been assaulted and sexually harassed, so I didn't like the implication that it was somehow my fault. But also my background is in psychology. And you never tell a victim that it was their fault because you know it's not their fault. And so this talk from a general conference address saying that victims need to acknowledge their own fault and their abuse. I remember that being a huge issue for me. And then I.
John Dehlin [00:54:27] Was that framing just something you arrived at just randomly going through or systematically going through talks, or did you see some Instagram or Facebook YouTube post talking about that?
Hailey Walser [00:54:41] I just found it scrolling through talks. Yeah. Because I was just.
John Dehlin [00:54:45] Huh.
Hailey Walser [00:54:46] I was just reading anything and everything I had available to me.
John Dehlin [00:54:49] Wow.
Hailey Walser [00:54:51] And then I started to learn more about sexual abuse issues in the church from that, because that made me look at other resources that the church had. Because I just was like, surely this is not the church's stance. There's no way that they can be condoning blaming victims for their own abuse. So I started to look more into church resources, and then I started to find people's stories of abuse. So that I found during COVID while I was at home. And that became a pretty big issue. I didn't learn about Sam Young until later. I don't remember his whole timeline.
John Dehlin [00:55:35] He would have been before your mission.
Hailey Walser [00:55:37] Okay, that's what I thought. But, yeah, I didn't find out about him specifically until later. But I did start to find patterns of abuse, cover up, and mishandling in the church at this point. So. Okay, yeah, so that was a big deal. And then the response to George Floyd's murder from members of the church shocked me. In Alaska, In Alaska, on the Internet, you know, Black Lives Matter was such a huge movement at the time after his murder, and it was talked about everywhere. And there was a trend at the time. It was like Blackout Tuesday, I think. And you just posted a black square. If. If you were supporting Black Lives Matter, which was, of course, performative activism. It didn't do anything. But I remember seeing some friends post that and then other friends who remembers being against it and talking about, well, white lives matter, too. And this is, you know.
John Dehlin [00:56:50] Or blue.
Hailey Walser [00:56:51] Or blue lives. Yes, lots of blue lives matter. And that response from church members surprised me, as well as the lack of statement from the church itself. And I think, especially because I had been in that area and that was what I knew and loved of Minnesota. I felt so close to the situation and having the church not say anything or I think they gave a basic message about, like, we love peace and we encourage peace.
John Dehlin [00:57:25] But, like, what would you have wanted the church to say?
Hailey Walser [00:57:29] I just wanted them to say everybody matters. Like, it doesn't matter your views, but George Floyd was a human being and he mattered. And his murder was wrong and so condemn. Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:57:48] The murder of George Floyd. You would have liked to hear the church.
Hailey Walser [00:57:51] I would have loved to hear that, even from local leaders, you know, just from. Because I, you know, I get. It's complicated with an organization as big as the church, even though they have no problem with things like Prop 8 and, you know, making statements when it benefits them, but just some sympathy, you know, it was a grieving community, and I felt like it wasn't met with anything other than a basic statement of we want people to be peacemakers.
John Dehlin [00:58:26] I imagine you serving in Minnesota amplified your feelings around that 100%.
Hailey Walser [00:58:32] Yeah. Because I would see. I could never bring myself to watch the video of his murder, but I saw videos of the aftermath. My companion was moved from the area that we had been serving in, further out from Minneapolis. I saw the fires, I saw the protests. I saw the counter protests. And just I knew the streets that they were on, and I knew people who were involved. And so it definitely made it harder. Yeah.
St. George on Polygamy
John Dehlin [00:59:05] And what about the Saints book was troubling?
Hailey Walser [00:59:08] Polygamy, of course.
John Dehlin [00:59:10] Oh, wait, so you learned about polygamy through the Saints book on a missions. About, like, a little mission.
Hailey Walser [00:59:17] I knew about it earlier. Polygamy and Joseph Smith's poly Polygamy. I learned about it a little bit in seminary, obviously. I had read Doctrine Covenants 132. Right. Which I always had a problem with because of the way Emma was spoken to and about drove me crazy. And I kind of expected the Saints to help with that. Getting, like, a deeper dive into the whole situation. It did not help. I kind of cemented the fact that it was a harmful practice in the very beginning. And, you know, the feminist in me hated everything about it. The way it was carried out, you know, secretly. And Emma didn't know that it was happening and how it treated women like commodities, and there was just no justification for it that made sense to me. So I felt like it had to either be polygamy was just straight from God as it was, and you had to suck it up and deal with it, or polygamy was never from God and it was just Joseph Smith being
John Dehlin [01:00:33] a gross man, which then makes it hard to believe he's a prophet.
Hailey Walser [01:00:37] Oh, yes, absolutely.
John Dehlin [01:00:38] And the church is true.
Hailey Walser [01:00:39] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because if that's wrong, and that's a pretty big thing to get wrong, what else is wrong as well?
John Dehlin [01:00:47] Yeah, yeah. So it sounds like your mission service is in peril, but is it?
I Should've Stopped Serving on My Mission
Hailey Walser [01:00:52] Yes. I think I was still approaching all this from a point of view, like, I'll figure it out. I'll find the answers. The God I believe in is loving and kind and cares for everybody. So there has to be a solution to all these things that are plaguing me. So I was still set on going back on a mission, and I still. That was my goal. I. I annoyed my stake president constantly about getting back out, and I feel bad. He was so patient. But, yeah, that was my goal, and it did end up happening. But it was a weird. It wasn't even cognitive dissonance necessarily. It was just a weird balancing act for me. So I was home for, I believe, four months. And then at about month four, my stake president called me and said, hey, we can't send you back to Minnesota, but we can have you serve as a missionary here in Alaska. Alaska is just one mission. It's just the Anchorage Alaska mission. But it is so big that I could serve everywhere but Anchorage and never run into family or friends. And so that was kind of what they were going to do. It wouldn't be Spanish speaking anymore, which was fine. Spanish wasn't my favorite, so I didn't really care about that part. But that was the solution that he had found. And I think a week after they said that that's what was going to happen, he called me again and he said, never mind. You're going back to Minnesota. Pack your bags. Still don't know what happened there. I don't know how, because there were so many missionaries with health issues with the same asthma that I have who were sent home and stayed home, and that was it. So I don't know if it was me bugging people so much that finally they were just like, okay, get her out of here. Let's just give her what she wants. I don't know why I was allowed to go back out, but I was. And I was so thrilled. And then it did not. It was nothing like my first mission.
John Dehlin [01:03:22] Because there was a new sheriff in town.
Hailey Walser [01:03:24] Yes. Yes. We had a new mission president. He got there the month before I did, so he was brand new. And some of the issues were Covid related, too, just because things were different, you know, we weren't prosely or knocking doors anymore. But my new mission president made a very big difference in the mission culture and how we functioned. And the rest of my mission was horrible. So.
John Dehlin [01:03:58] How so?
Hailey Walser [01:04:01] I think the most noticeable part right off the bat was just the isolation, which was not my mission president's fault at all. It was Covid. We were online missionaries, so we did Facebook. We were not allowed to have Instagram. I know they are now in a lot of missions, but that was being piloted when I was serving. So I never had Instagram as a missionary. Um, I had Facebook, and I hated it because we would just sit there and message people, and it wasn't very productive. I had a lot of explicit images sent to me. I was sexually harassed a lot on Facebook, which wasn't fun. It wasn't, like, too big of a deal, but it wasn't what I wanted to be doing. And then we started making little posts and videos, and some of the guidelines that they were giving us felt very sneaky and underhanded. We were to join groups for things that we were interested in, like if we liked hiking, join a hiking group in our area and then kind of weasel our way in and say that we were new in the area and looking to make friends and then see if we could get lessons from that. And I hated that. It felt so sneaky. And I was kind of like, well, if we're missionaries and we think that the message we have can help people, why are we being weird about it? Why aren't we just saying, hey, for the missionaries, we'd love to talk to you about Jesus, you know, why are we joining hiking and boating and fishing groups for things we can't even do as missionaries? You know, we can't go hiking and boating and fishing and. And then saying, we want to make friends in the hopes that somebody will listen to us as missionaries?
John Dehlin [01:06:03] And you were encouraged to do that.
Hailey Walser [01:06:05] That was the guideline they gave us
John Dehlin [01:06:07] by your mission president.
Hailey Walser [01:06:09] Yeah, I think it was coming from the mission department trying to Figure out online missionary work. That was one of their things. The other things were just to look up a name and message. Everybody with that name in your area, which did not work ever. We offered English lessons. That was the best part. That was the only part of online teaching that I enjoyed because it was organic. People actually wanted to learn English. They were interested in that, and I thought that was fun, and it was a good way to meet people. And we had a few people who would take the missionary lessons from there. But, yeah, most of our online work felt sneaky and it was isolating. So that was really hard. And then my mission president made it worse with all of his own personal rules and beliefs on missionary work.
John Dehlin [01:07:12] What was that?
Hailey Walser [01:07:14] So he started off really re. Emphasizing numbers. My first mission president hadn't cared too much. You know, every week we would set our goals for the week, but if we didn't reach, wasn't that big of a deal. You know, like, we would say, oh, we want to teach two people this week, or two new people. And if that didn't happen, it was okay. You know, we would talk about maybe what went wrong and if we could improve, but it wasn't the end of the world. And then with my second mission president, it felt like a business. He wanted clear goals and steps to achieve it. And if it wasn't met, we had to, in our, like, district meeting. So our small missionary group meeting, talk about why it didn't work and what we could do better and where we fell short and who we didn't try hard enough with. And it very quickly just became about the numbers, which I did not like because. And I was. I probably annoyed people a little bit in our district meetings because I refused to just talk about the numbers. You know, I would get up and I would write our numbers on the board, and then I wouldn't say a thing about them. And I'd be like, this week we talked to Jose, and, you know, Jose didn't want to have any lessons, but he was really nice, and we had a great conversation and a good connection. Or this week we stopped teaching Maria, but it was for the better because she's just not at a spot in her life right now where this is right for her. So very UN missionary, like.
Missions have lots of rules
John Dehlin [01:08:58] So contrast that with kind of the highly energetic missionaries. What were their reports like?
Hailey Walser [01:09:03] Yeah, they would get up and be like, so this week, our goal was to teach five new people. And instead we taught eight new people. And we had this and this discussion, and we have this person agreed to be baptized which is great. After our first lesson and they rarely after or they rarely said names. It was just very much like, we have five new people and two baptismal dates and one baptism. And I don't remember the other number that we were supposed to report.
John Dehlin [01:09:34] It's like a sales pipeline, basically.
Hailey Walser [01:09:36] Exactly. That's what it felt like. It felt like I was in sales and the commodity was the people we were teaching and I hated it. Yeah, because they were.
John Dehlin [01:09:46] The commodity wasn't the people you're teaching, it was the performing baptisms on the people you were teaching.
Hailey Walser [01:09:52] Yes, yes. Which, you know, I, I had friends, I had people that I was teaching who got baptized. I could not tell you how many. I didn't count. I didn't. And that was also very different. You know, people would, I think in my. When I got home and you do your like return and report thing, they asked me about that and I was like, I could not tell you. I have no idea. Because it just. If that was what was right for the person, then I was happy for them. But otherwise I didn't care. It wasn't about me and my performance. So the numbers focus was really hard. We spent so much time talking about that in zone conferences for the mission and then in smaller conferences. And then he started to put in weird rules. And missionaries always have lots of rules. You know, there's. We have a whole handbook on everything we can and cannot do. And you know, there were some that didn't make sense to me, but it was just kind of what you do. And there's even. I can't remember if it's in the missionary handbook or in the missionary president's handbook, which, by the way, you cannot access on the church library. And I don't know why that drove me insane as a missionary because I wanted access to his standards so. So that I knew kind of what was being expected of him. But I believe it was in the mission president's handbook. And our mission president told us this, that mission presidents are not supposed to add or take away from the rules in your missionary handbook more than what is necessary for your specific area. And my mission president was constantly adding rules. And I'm not like, I will follow guidelines and standards and rules. I really don't care that much. But it started to get controlling in a way that just made our lives harder. I remember at one point at zone conference, he said, okay, we're going to have a 30 minute move block. And at first we all took it as a. Oh, that's amazing. We have a 30 minute break in the day to go take a walk or, you know, just get outside and move our bodies because we were sitting at a kitchen table or our couch all day. And so that's kind of how we implemented it. And then the next zone conference, he got up and he said, I think there's been a misunderstanding. You have 30 minutes a day. You cannot use it in one block. It cannot be in more than 10 minutes at a time. And it is to use the bathroom, to get a snack and to stretch. And I remember being like, I don't think you can control when or how often we use the bathroom. I don't think that's appropriate. And I don't think that that's in line with what is wanted of missionaries. That feels excessive. So that was the first rule that I really remember being like, that's not okay. And then he limited how long we could talk to our families each week. He said we had an hour on our p day to talk to our family. And that was hard. As someone with nine siblings who don't live in the same states, you know, or spread all over. We don't have the same schedules, the same access to, you know, like, some of my siblings could take a break during work and FaceTime me. And then some of my siblings would have to wait until after work if they wanted to talk. And so this one hour a day to talk to your whole family didn't work for me. And I had companions whose parents were divorced, and it didn't work for them either. Their divorced parents don't want to be on a FaceTime call together. And so there were all these little issues with communicating with family. He set some limit on emails. I did ignore that one. I think that was the only rule that I outright was like, I'm not doing that. And then he started to do things. Like one day, our senior missionary couple in charge of housing showed up and said, hey, we're taking your couch. None of our missionaries are allowed to have couches anymore because it's not on the official furniture list. And they said the mission president can approve extra furniture like a couch. But our my mission president had not been to every apartment to approve what furniture they had. And so he wanted any furniture that wasn't on the list taken out of the apartments. And that seems like such a small thing, you know, like, okay, you lose your couch, whatever. But we were spending every waking hour in the house, and so we were left with a dining room chair to sit at for nine hours a day.
John Dehlin [01:15:23] Was he worried that People would become too comfortable. Was he worried that people would mess around on the couch? Like, any. Any idea?
Hailey Walser [01:15:32] I have no idea. He never gave any reasoning. Besides, it's not on the official list. And I have scoliosis. And I remember being so mad because the dining room chairs hurt my back so bad. Sitting on that hard chair all day was horrible. So we had an extra, I think two extra mattresses in the apartment I was in when this happened, because we usually would have another companionship in our apartment. And so I dragged those out to the living room and made a couch with those, because I was like, I'm not just sitting on this chair all day. So there were just little things. And I do think part of it was this idea of you're being like, you're too comfortable, like you mentioned. I. I would not be surprised if it was that, because I feel like a lot of the rules were geared towards driving up product productivity. And I believe he was a businessman. I don't remember why he did, but I'm pretty sure. I mean, he was a general authority at one point, so I know he has money, and I'm guessing it was in business. So a lot of it was just like, you're not working hard enough, and we need to find ways to make you work harder. And for some reason, taking away our couch was part of that.
I found out that I was not going home when I thought I was
John Dehlin [01:16:51] Dang weird.
Hailey Walser [01:16:53] Yeah. And then I. I don't know if we want to get to this point yet, but then I found out that I was not going home when I thought I was. And this is when. Because I wasn't the biggest fan of my mission president because of all the dumb rules. But this was when we really started to butt heads because it was a situation only involving me, and I got to choose how much I spoke up about it. And so I was going to speak up about it and bother him. So when I went back out, everything. For every missionary who went home and then went back out, it was reiterated to us over and over again that the time that we spent at home was not being added onto our missions. So if you were home for four months, you lost those four months, and you were still coming home when you were originally supposed to. And so that was the plan. That was what worked for me because I had a leave of absence that was expiring. I had planned it so that I would have just enough time to work and save up some money and then start school again. And like I said, school is my thing. That was what I wanted to be back to. So I was okay going Home when I was originally supposed to, which would have been in June of 2021. And then December of 2020, we were at a transfer. So we were all in this church parking lot, a bunch of us missionaries swapping companions, getting ready to go to our new area. And one of the office elders came up to me, and we had been in the MTC at the same time. And he made a comment about, like, how exciting. We're actually at, like, the year mark. We have a year left. And I figured he just forgot that sisters serve less time. So I was like, oh, no, I only have six months left. Remember, we started together. I'm going home in June. And he gave me this weird look, and he was like, no, I just looked at everybody we have going home in the next six months. You're not on the list. And so I remember being like, oh, well, that's weird. Maybe something funky happened just because I was sent back out. Like, I didn't have my missionary fund for the first, like, three months I was out because it just took them forever to get me back in the system. And so I emailed my mission president, or no, I asked him to double check and then tell me, the office elder, if I really wasn't on the list. And so he messaged me later that week and said, hey, I looked again. You're going home in December of 2021, not June. And that was a little bit of a shock, but I figured something was just messed up in the system and they would fix it. So I emailed my mission president our weekly email, and I said, hey, you know, this elder told me I'm going home in June or in December, but I'm supposed to go home in June. Can you just clarify what's going on just so I know what's up? And I never heard back from him. And that was obviously an issue I needed to know. And I was complaining to one of my companions about it. I think a month and a half later, just being like, I have not heard anything. I have no idea when I'm going home. I need to get things planned. And at the next zone conference, when all the missionaries in my area were together, I decided to pull aside the mission president after really quick and just ask, because he didn't do interviews. You're supposed to be interviewed every month by your mission president. He did not do interviews.
John Dehlin [01:20:59] That's weird.
Hailey Walser [01:21:00] It was really weird. I don't know why interviews didn't happen, but so I pulled him aside and he had heard that I had been frustrated. I had also gone to my sister training leaders, who are the sisters in charge of other female missionaries in their area. And I had said, the mission president is not getting back to me. Can you talk to him? Like, I need to know what's going on? And they just told me he was really busy and he would get back to me when he could. So I'm guessing they passed on to him that I had been frustrated. And so he sat me down in this interview and he said, so I heard you've been having some problems with priesthood authority. And that I remember just staring at him being like, what are you talking about? I am having problems with you not responding to my email, like, this has nothing to do with your priesthood authority. So that was a really rough conversation because I did not understand where he was getting that from. And now looking back, I'm sure it was just because I questioned him. You know, I was like, pushing him for a response. But at the time, I just remember being like, what are you hearing about me? Like, that's nothing. That's not what the issue is here. He still did not tell me when I was going home. And so finally, In March of 2021, I either had four months until I was going home or eight months. And at another zone conference, I was there waiting until like 7:38pm for him to be done talking to people. And then I pulled him aside again and I said, we have to talk because I need to know when I'm going home. And he said, if the office elder said it's December, then it's December. Oh. And that was that. He was like, I don't know why you're bringing this up again. And so then I started contacting anyone and everyone to figure out what was going on. And in mission, in the mission field, if you reach out to anybody above your mission president, it gets sent right back to them.
John Dehlin [01:23:31] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [01:23:32] So I did not have anyone higher than my mission president to talk to, which made it really difficult. So I contacted my stake president, I contacted the mission department, and I kept trying to talk to my mission president about it. My stake president was very much like, on my side with it. He was like, if you need to be home in June, then you need to be home in June and we'll figure this out. But he didn't know where the extension had come from. The mission department, when my mom called, said, I don't know what is wrong with these missionaries. If they, like, they just need to put down their heads and serve, I think was what they told my mom. So no answer from them. And I had another conversation with my mission president where I was expressing concern. And this time I laid out the fact that my leave of absence would expire, I would be out of savings, and I could potentially lose my spot at university. And that was not okay with me. You know, the whole point to me at this point of life was to get my education, and I was not jeopardizing that for a six month extension that I didn't ask for.
John Dehlin [01:24:55] And can I just note to our Never Mormons that serving a Mormon mission is voluntary. It's voluntary service that you're actually paying for.
Hailey Walser [01:25:04] Yes.
John Dehlin [01:25:05] So, like the fact that they're giving, almost forcing you to extend four months and pay for the extra four months.
Missionary Forced to Extend His Service
Hailey Walser [01:25:13] Yes.
John Dehlin [01:25:14] It's kind of abusive in a way.
Hailey Walser [01:25:16] Yeah, it was a horrible feeling. And my dad had lost his job with COVID and so I knew it wasn't like we had a ton of extra money lying around for this extension. I was. I was not going to have money left in my savings by the time I went home. I found out later that my ward ended up helping pay for the extension, which was so sweet. But there are better things that money could have been used for. You know, it was Covid. There were people struggling who didn't have missionaries who were just at home in Alaska.
John Dehlin [01:25:48] Wait, are you saying you were forced to extend?
Hailey Walser [01:25:50] Oh, yeah.
John Dehlin [01:25:51] Oh, my. What the. Yeah, I was not expecting that.
Hailey Walser [01:25:55] Sorry, I jumped ahead.
John Dehlin [01:25:56] No, no, it's fine.
Hailey Walser [01:25:57] Yeah. So I had this conversation with my mission president, sitting him down and listing out all the reasons it did not work for me. And I ended it with, I have to go home in June. And there was no. There was no hesitation from him. He looked me straight in the eyes and he said, sister Walser, there are other sisters who would kill for the extension you're getting.
John Dehlin [01:26:21] What the.
Hailey Walser [01:26:22] And I was like, okay, then give it to them. Like, I don't understand why that's a me problem. Because he was always. There was one sister I knew and who I served with who had wanted an extension and she was told no because there wouldn't be space for her. And so she went home, I think, in August. And I wanted to be like, give her my spot. I don't want a bed here, so let her have mine.
John Dehlin [01:26:49] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [01:26:52] And that was the last we ever talked about it.
John Dehlin [01:26:56] Huh?
Hailey Walser [01:26:57] And so I served the extra six months.
John Dehlin [01:27:00] Six months, not four months.
Hailey Walser [01:27:02] Yeah. I was supposed to go home in June of 2021, and I went home in December.
John Dehlin [01:27:05] Oh, that is. I Mean, I guess you could say there's a lot worse things in the world, but that feels abusive to me.
Hailey Walser [01:27:13] Yeah. Was a horrible feeling, especially because there was nothing I could do. I. You know, without access to the Internet, I couldn't get to my bank account, so I couldn't. Even if I wanted to buy a plane ticket, which I did. That was what I wanted to do. I had no access. I had no access to my money. My parents were the ones who were shuffling my savings to my debit if I needed it, or to my checking if I needed it.
John Dehlin [01:27:41] Why couldn't you escalate to your parents or your bishop or your stake president and ask them to just push back on your mission president?
Hailey Walser [01:27:50] Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:27:51] I don't mean to sound simplistic or glib.
Hailey Walser [01:27:54] No, no, not at all. I did. I did. My stake president. I left out of it a little bit at that point just because I actually really like him. He's a good family friend, and I knew there was so much going on in his own life that I was like, you don't need to be involved in this drama. I will leave you out of it. We've gone to the people that he told us to, and they were no help. And my parents, I think, were just shocked themselves that this was happening. And, you know, there's this idea in the church that if someone higher up than you says this is the way something's gonna happen, then that's gonna. Then that's how it's gonna happen. You don't push back. And I don't think my parents felt comfortable pushing back.
John Dehlin [01:28:40] I mean, he said the quiet thing out loud because he said from the start, you're having a problem with priesthood authority.
Hailey Walser [01:28:46] Yep.
John Dehlin [01:28:47] Which basically says, don't question.
Hailey Walser [01:28:49] Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:28:49] Anything we've decided, even if it's a mistake, don't question it.
Hailey Walser [01:28:54] Yeah. And that. I think it completely ruined our relationship. He and I never had a good conversation afterwards. And I do think eventually that's what it came to was he did not like how much I was pushing for something other than what was planned.
John Dehlin [01:29:11] Yeah. But I know a Mormon woman with conviction.
Hailey Walser [01:29:17] Yes.
John Dehlin [01:29:18] That's not good. No, Nothing good can come from that.
Hailey Walser [01:29:22] How dare I? Which, actually, my first day there, they picked me up from the airport, and my mission president asked, like, what makes you different as a missionary? And I told him, my perseverance. I will not give up. Like, I. If something needs to happen, I'm going to make sure it happens. And at the time, he was like, wow, that's really cool. We need that. I think by the end of my service, he was regretting that because I did not let him off the hook easily. But I know my parents felt bad. I remember my mom sending me an email. I think the month I was. Maybe the month before, I was supposed to go home. Originally, she sent me this little email, and she was saying, when you were little and I watched you walk home from the bus stop, I could tell if you had a bad day by how you were walking and if you were dragging your feet, if you were slumped over, I knew you had a bad day at school. I might get emotional talking about this. Sorry. And she said, I would run to the kitchen and I would make you chocolate chip cookies so that when you came home, you knew that there was someone there who loved you and cared for you and wanted you to have a good day. And we would sit and eat chocolate chip cookies and talk about your day and what we could do to make it better. And so she said, I can't help you right now. So this email is my version of a chocolate chip cookie. And this is me reaching out so you know, someone cares about you and that you are loved. And it was such a horrible feeling because I appreciated her reaching out and saying, you know, I'm here for you. But at the same time, this idea of, like, I can't do anything. She could have bought me a plane ticket. She could have made sure I got home. She could have called my mission president and said, no, my daughter is not staying six months. And, yes, I was an adult. I was. You know, I turned 21 during all of this. But when you're a missionary, you don't feel like a full adult. Like I said, I didn't have access to my bank accounts. I didn't have my own car. And so I knew my parents were struggling with it, but they did not know how to handle it. And that, I think, made it even worse than if they had just been like, just. Just serve the extra six months. Yeah.
Being Held Captive on My Mission
John Dehlin [01:31:59] You studied. You. You went on to study psychology. I don't know if you remember or got the chance to learn about Marty Seligman's learned helplessness. Did you ever.
Hailey Walser [01:32:09] Yes. Yep.
John Dehlin [01:32:10] Like, the fact that, like, they could. Do you want to describe the study with the dog or do you even remember it? I don't. I'm putting you on the spot.
Hailey Walser [01:32:19] No, you're good. Let's see if I remember this one. I believe that was the one where they were receiving shocks, right? Yes. Okay. So they had the. It's Horrible experiment. But many of the early ones were. So these dogs were receiving shocks, and it was kind of to measure their response. Right. And what they did to get out of the situation. And at a certain point, they just gave up. Were they shocked every time they tried to leave the cage? Yes. Okay. Yeah. So every time the dog or boundary.
John Dehlin [01:32:51] Like a boundary? Yes.
Hailey Walser [01:32:51] Yeah. So like a shock collar, they had a boundary. If they tried to leave, they were shocked. And so at a certain point, they stopped trying.
John Dehlin [01:32:58] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [01:32:58] Even after the boundary was removed, they would not leave their boundaries.
John Dehlin [01:33:04] Even after the collars were removed?
Hailey Walser [01:33:05] Yes. Right, yeah. After they knew there was nothing there that could hurt them, they still wouldn't try because they had learned there's no point.
John Dehlin [01:33:16] That was kind of what your leaders and your parents were operating under, a hundred percent. And you were just held captive on your mission? Basically, yes.
Hailey Walser [01:33:25] I felt like I had been kidnapped. Kidnapped. I was like, I am stuck here.
John Dehlin [01:33:28] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [01:33:30] And I had a range of. Some mission companions were like, I'm so sorry. That's so horrible. And I had mission companions who are like, I don't understand why you're complaining. Clearly, this is God's will. But, yeah, I felt completely trapped. And I just remember the rest of my mission feeling so hopeless because I was just watching time slip by and all the plans I had made slip by, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
John Dehlin [01:34:07] Oh, my gosh. Sometimes, you know, and it's worse overseas because the mission president keeps your passport.
Hailey Walser [01:34:14] Yes.
John Dehlin [01:34:15] And you don't know how to get around in a foreign country. And that's when some people start talking about, you know, human trafficking, because at that point, you really are held captive, but you kind of were even in Minnesota.
Hailey Walser [01:34:30] Yeah. And I remember hearing a little bit. Some of the complaints I heard about missions were related to, like, human trafficking. And at. When I first heard about them, I was like, oh, that's so silly. It's not human trafficking. You know, like, that's not an issue. And then when I got stuck in Minnesota, in my own country, I was like, okay, maybe there is something to that. You know, like, I had access to my documents. Whatever I had brought with me, I had, and I still couldn't leave. So it was. Yeah, it was a weird experience.
John Dehlin [01:35:03] No, it's abusive.
How To Survive a Mission's Last 6 Months
Hailey Walser [01:35:04] Oh, 100%. It was horrible. Yeah, it was horrible.
John Dehlin [01:35:07] Yeah. I'm really sorry that happened to you.
Hailey Walser [01:35:11] Thank you. Yeah. It took a long time for me to come to terms with and work through.
John Dehlin [01:35:17] And, like, no shade on your church leaders and your parents, because we were all under that control. We were all under that spell or illusion of authority and control at some point. But how terrible that must have felt to realize that in some ways, your parents and your leaders, maybe against their better judgment or will conformed.
Hailey Walser [01:35:46] Yeah. I felt like there was no one in my corner. I felt completely alone. And I don't. I do not hold it against my parents at all. Like I said, you know, I understand.
John Dehlin [01:35:56] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [01:35:57] No, but I just needed to feel like someone understood.
John Dehlin [01:36:02] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [01:36:03] You know, so.
John Dehlin [01:36:04] So did you. I mean, the church would want the narrative to end where those final six months, you converted a bunch of people or converted yourself or knew by the end that God had some really important. You're shaking your head.
Hailey Walser [01:36:21] No, no, it was. I had some of the worst companions of my mission in those last six months. I had.
John Dehlin [01:36:30] I'm sure your mission president would have sent you the honorary unpleasant missionaries.
Hailey Walser [01:36:35] Yeah. If I was.
John Dehlin [01:36:36] No offense if any of them are listening now.
Hailey Walser [01:36:38] No, if you're listening and you're my companion, I love you. I'm sure you were one of the good ones.
John Dehlin [01:36:43] Unless you're in the last six months.
Hailey Walser [01:36:47] It. No, I did get a lot of the. If I wasn't training, I was whitewashing an area. I opened an area. Oh, whitewashing is where you are completely replacing any missionaries that were there. So no one. None of the missionaries in that area know that area. You're taking over, redoing everything. Yeah. So I opened an area. I took over a lot of places that elders were in, and then they sent sisters there. I trained. It was. I had a virtual companion for a little bit because she was in Covid quarantine. And that was also horrible. Yeah. There was nothing great about the last six months. It was. I actually was paired with my indoor MTC companion, the transfer before she went home, and that felt extra cruel.
John Dehlin [01:37:43] Oh, my gosh.
Hailey Walser [01:37:44] Yeah, that was a horrible feeling because I dropped her off for transfers and knew that she was done and she was going home.
John Dehlin [01:37:51] That is brutal.
Hailey Walser [01:37:53] And I don't know that that was intentional on my mission president's part, but it felt like.
John Dehlin [01:38:00] It feels like it.
Hailey Walser [01:38:01] Yeah, that was horrible.
The Mormon General Authority Who served as mission president during the time of
John Dehlin [01:38:04] Did you say he was made a general authority after or before?
Hailey Walser [01:38:07] Before. Oh, yeah. Which is interesting because that's like a step down almost.
John Dehlin [01:38:13] But is he still a general authority? Okay.
Hailey Walser [01:38:16] Yeah, he was. So he served in a high position. He spoke in general conference. He was like a big name and then became a mission president. And I don't think he has a big calling now.
John Dehlin [01:38:30] Everyone Google Mormon General Authority who served as mission president of the Minneapolis Mission during the time of COVID Yeah, I. And then share it in the comments.
Hailey Walser [01:38:41] Yeah, I. Actually, the first thing I did when I was released was get on Facebook and block him and his wife.
John Dehlin [01:38:47] Oh, my God.
Hailey Walser [01:38:47] Because I was like, I don't want anything else to do with you.
John Dehlin [01:38:51] I'm so sorry.
Hailey Walser [01:38:52] That's okay. It happened. It was. It got me out of the church.
John Dehlin [01:38:58] Wait, so by the time your mission's over, where's your testimony?
Hailey Walser [01:39:02] It was. It had definitely taken a hit. And at this point, it started to change from, okay, there are just things happening that aren't right, but it's because of leadership to this whole system is messed up, and if it's this bad, it can't be from God. And I was exposed. Just having different companions and serving with different people, I started to get more exposed to, like, ideology in the church. I think that's the first time I was exposed to true racism from members of the church being like, I wouldn't want to marry anyone who's not white, or, you know, just things like that. And so I started to feel like if this was the culture that was created, it might not be from God. And then, of course, feeling so completely abandoned ruined my relationship with God because I felt like he also didn't care
John Dehlin [01:40:07] because you were probably. What were your prayers like to God during this time?
How I Learned To Love My Mission
Hailey Walser [01:40:13] It was just. I was begging him to find a solution or to show me a solution. It was the same thing as, like, before I got sent home. I was like, I will do anything. Whatever you need me to do, I will do. I don't want to steal a mission car and drive myself to the airport. You know, like, I. I want to follow the laws and follow any rules, but I need to go home. Like, of anybody, God would know how much it's going to hurt me to not go home.
John Dehlin [01:40:42] And under Mormon theology, God was. This was ultimately God that was doing this.
Hailey Walser [01:40:47] Ye.
John Dehlin [01:40:48] Because. Because Mormon leaders do what God says.
Hailey Walser [01:40:50] Yeah. And so that, you know, my mission president was very big on, like, I'm speaking from God. This is God's messaging. And that didn't work for me because I was being so harmed mentally and emotionally and physically. I was really sick for a lot of my mission, and we couldn't figure out why.
John Dehlin [01:41:10] But the church claims that free agency is central to the plan of Mormon plan of salvation.
Hailey Walser [01:41:16] Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:41:17] So Mormon God would have been just totally violating your free agency.
Hailey Walser [01:41:20] Oh, yeah. Apparently free agency is important, unless you're 20 or one year old missionary who wants to go home.
John Dehlin [01:41:26] Yeah,
Hailey Walser [01:41:28] yeah.
John Dehlin [01:41:29] By the way, not early, you would have served the equivalent of 18 months.
Hailey Walser [01:41:32] Yeah. Actually a lot of the missionaries called me Elder Walser because I served for two years.
John Dehlin [01:41:38] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you would have waited those extra three months or whatever because your call came late.
Hailey Walser [01:41:45] Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it was really weird. Weird. And I just felt like God either did not care that I was hurting or actively inflicting hurt on me.
John Dehlin [01:41:56] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [01:41:56] And that didn't, you know, that didn't make sense for me. There was no reason. I was doing everything right.
John Dehlin [01:42:02] I don't know if you've, if you ever heard my very first episode of Mormon Stories, but I had an abusive mission president and an abusive mission experience and it never, I was never the same.
Hailey Walser [01:42:15] Yeah, yeah. It, I mean, missions are so weird in of themselves, just a normal one without anything going wrong. That when things do go wrong, especially to this extent, it really does change you. I, I hate using the word trauma outside of context that like, you know, I aren't clearly trauma, but it felt very traumatic. And I was like you said, I was completely different, you know, and I came back less social. I used to be. I loved talking to people. I loved, you know, if I was having a party, everyone was invited. It was, you know, I just wanted to be with people. I was happy, I was outgoing and I came home and I didn't want to talk to people. I didn't want to make friends. I had no interest in socializing. And it took at least a year for me to start feeling normal again. And I still am not the same person I was before my mission.
John Dehlin [01:43:15] Dang.
Hailey Walser [01:43:16] So, you know, like you said, it just changes you. It's different.
John Dehlin [01:43:20] But I am so sorry.
Hailey Walser [01:43:23] No, that's okay. I'm sorry. You experienced it too.
John Dehlin [01:43:25] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [01:43:26] It's not fun.
John Dehlin [01:43:27] Yeah, Yeah. But also you had this awakening before your mission around authority and gender and even feminism.
Hailey Walser [01:43:43] Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:43:43] So dang. You know.
Hailey Walser [01:43:46] Yeah, it was. And you know, my mission president's accusations around my problems with priesthood authority were unfounded in that situation. But I did, in reading saints, you know, I learned about how women used to get blessings before that was taken away. And so I did have questions about things like that.
John Dehlin [01:44:04] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [01:44:05] Ordained women was happening while I was, I believe in high school. And my mission magnified those concerns for me because I experienced such a severe loss of authority over my own life. And I did feel like it would have been different if I was an elder. I was like, this can't happen to me ever again. And so that was a. Like I said, I think it was the catalyst. I had all these other things building up, and then when I realized that my authority didn't have any weight, it was like the final brick in the wall between me and the church.
Mormon student on her decision to leave the Church
John Dehlin [01:44:51] So you get home and did you go back to Logan?
Hailey Walser [01:44:55] I did. Yeah. So I came home in December. Luckily, I was able to work it out. I did not lose my spot at school. So I spent Christmas with my family, and then I moved back to Logan, went right back to school. And unfortunately, because my money had run out, it was harder to go to school. I had to do a semester and take a semester and then do a semester and.
John Dehlin [01:45:18] Oh, so.
Hailey Walser [01:45:19] Which was so annoying.
John Dehlin [01:45:20] Well, for someone who really cared about school, yes.
Hailey Walser [01:45:23] Yeah. That was all I wanted to be doing. I remember one fall semester, I had to take it off to work, and I remember just crying, watching everybody go to school the first day, because I just wanted so badly to be in one of those classes working towards my degree. And, you know, I knew I wanted at least a master's, so I knew I had years more of schooling ahead of me.
John Dehlin [01:45:44] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [01:45:45] And I just wanted my bachelor's done, you know. Yeah. But I just went right back to school. I lived with completely random roommates, and I actually ended up in an apartment with. I was the only member. My roommate was trans. And my other roommates, like, in the other rooms in our apartment, were just your typical college girls. They were out drinking and partying and having fun and. But that was also a new experience for me. And I think that also changed my approach to the church coming home.
John Dehlin [01:46:29] So by that point, had you stopped attending church, stopped believing? Were you still trying to make it work in your mind or by attending?
Hailey Walser [01:46:39] Yeah, I was still living as an active Mormon. I felt deeply hurt. And I kind of got to a point where I was like, if there is a talk that's bothering me or a song or a lesson, I don't need to be there. And so I. I went every week. But I think one, when it was probably in July, we had a fifth Sunday special lesson. And it was all supposed to be focused on the Constitution of the United States of America. And I hated that. And so I took the sacrament and I left. And so that's kind of how I handled it. Coming home. I was trying to make it work, but because I felt like my own authority had been so violated, I started to give myself permission to listen to myself more in my relationship with the church. And if I was uncomfortable. I listened to that and I left.
John Dehlin [01:47:41] Good for you.
Hailey Walser [01:47:42] Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:47:42] Really quickly. Like, I'm guessing you don't hate America.
Hailey Walser [01:47:47] No.
John Dehlin [01:47:47] So what. What was. Why was that hard for you?
Hailey Walser [01:47:53] I don't think you can claim to be a global church and at the same time focus so much on the political foundation of one country. I do. I am not okay with Christian nationalism. I am not okay with, like, American superiority. I married a Canadian man. I'm, you know, like, I. I don't have any interest in propping the US up on some great pedestal. And I don't think it has a place in church. You know, this idea that this is God's country, that doesn't work for me.
John Dehlin [01:48:36] So you're not big on American exceptionalism and you're definitely not okay with American exceptionalism integrated with your religion.
Hailey Walser [01:48:44] Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:48:46] In an allegedly global church.
Hailey Walser [01:48:48] Yes.
John Dehlin [01:48:49] Okay.
Hailey Walser [01:48:49] Yeah. So I had an issue with that. And I think if it had maybe just been like my local leaders, it wouldn't have been a big deal. But I remember it being a church wide, or at least a US churchwide thing. And in one of the general conferences on my mission Oaks, the current or the now prophet gave a talk about the Constitution and maybe the Bill of Rights. No, The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And so that was kind of the start of me being like, oh, people are trying to integrate, integrate this idea into the church. And that doesn't work for me. So.
John Dehlin [01:49:31] Okay.
Hailey Walser [01:49:31] Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:49:32] So you start going to church, you start leaving church when you're not comfortable.
Hailey Walser [01:49:36] Yes. Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:49:37] Did you start partying with your secular roommates at some point?
Hailey Walser [01:49:40] No, not at all. I had. I mean, there's a history of, like, drug use and abuse in my family. I had no interest in alcohol, no interest in the drugs at all. I would be around them, you know, like if they were having a party and getting drunk, I was there. I didn't. I wasn't bothered. I wasn't. I certainly wasn't like reporting them. I. But I didn't participate in any of the drinking or anything. I was happy to hear about their stories. I was happy to. I was their designated driver a few times, you know, like, I didn't care, but I wasn't participating.
John Dehlin [01:50:18] So when did things really go south
Hailey Walser [01:50:19] with the church from there? It was really gradual. I was.
Married Women Who Left The Church
John Dehlin [01:50:26] As sin always is.
Hailey Walser [01:50:28] Yes, exactly. Sneaky Satan just got in there. I just. There was one time where I was asked to speak in church because I was still. I had callings. I was, you know, I was very Much a part of the ward. And I gave a talk. I was supposed to pick any talk from General Conference. And I was looking through and I was like, I don't like any of these. So I picked one that was very bare bones, basic love everybody type of thing. And I had switched from speaking about Heavenly Father to Heavenly Parents. In my language, I only ever said Heavenly Father if I was truly speaking just about God. And so in my talk, I never said Heavenly Father. I said Heavenly Parents. I would even say Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother. And my bishop after came up to me and he handed me a talk and he said, I think you would like this. And it was from some conference about feminism and Mormon women. And I remember being kind of caught off guard. I had not said anything feminist in my talk besides, I guess, Heavenly Mother.
John Dehlin [01:51:52] And
Hailey Walser [01:51:54] there were little things like that that started to happen where people made comments about my views, the language I chose to use, the things that I was a part of. My minor was sexuality studies, which focused a lot on LGBTQ concerns. And people just started to make comments to me about having interests that were not accepted by the broader church. And there were just all these little things that started to pile on. I politically, I had an issue with church politics and their lack of addressing important issues. I started to learn more and more about history that I had a problem with.
John Dehlin [01:52:55] Church history.
Hailey Walser [01:52:57] Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:52:58] How did you learn that?
Hailey Walser [01:53:00] I. People are, like, sometimes shocked by this. I literally just found everything on the church app. I still had not turned to anything that would have been labeled anti Mormon. I was. If there is something on the church app, I have probably read it. I was reading anything and everything. I was watching videos. I was reading old pamphlets. I found an old for the Strength of Youth pamphlet that in the like guidelines for dressing, it said, women shouldn't wear things with open backs because it makes you look like a man. So I like, I was finding the most obscure things. And it just started to paint this picture of a constantly changing church that might not be changing simply because of revelation. Everything seemed very in time, just in time to avoid consequences for certain views or just in time to become acceptable after the world views had changed so much that the church was becoming outdated. And I got really interested in the early women of the church. I learned a lot about the founding of the Relief Society. Like I said, I learned about women being able to give blessings previously. And it became apparent to me that as a woman, I would have had more authority in the church if I had been alive with Joseph Smith than I did as an adult woman In 2024 or 2022, whatever year it was. 2022, yeah. And I had a problem with that. We should have only seen progress. And the fact that that was not the case really bothered me. And I honestly did not leave the church until two years after I got home. Right when I was getting married was kind of the final straw for me. I met my current husband, had a church activity. We went to church, we went to the temple, we prayed, we were very religious. And I could talk to him about my concerns, which I really liked, because there were times on dates or with guy friends where I would bring something up and they would just brush it off. You know, they'd be like, oh, that's like risky area feminism is, you know, a risky place for you to be in the church. And I would bring up things like, I'm not willing to change my name when I get married because I like my name. And they would take it as well. Then you're basically asking for a divorce. Or, you know, so I had a partner that I could talk to about these issues, and he was always willing to listen and talk through it and share his ideas and his perspective. And so we made it work as a super Mormon couple. And then a week before we got married, we had been talking a little bit more about kids and timing, all of that. And thinking about raising a daughter in the church made me sick. And that was kind of a big wake up call. If I felt like the church wasn't a safe space for my child, why would it be a safe space for me? And so the week before we got married, I remember the road we were driving on. I was so scared. We were sitting in the car and I said to my husband, I said, I think I want to leave the church. I don't think I believe in this anymore. And I'm sure it was probably the same for you, but I know for most of my life, the idea around divorce in the church was you don't do it. You don't tear apart a marriage unless it's abuse, maybe, you know, if. If your partner has done all the things with the bishop, then you work through it and you stay in the marriage. Again, my perspective was different. My dad was divorced, and so I was gearing up for my husband to cancel our wedding because I told him I wanted to leave the church.
John Dehlin [01:57:19] Like, the announcements had all been sent out, right?
Hailey Walser [01:57:21] Yeah. We were a week away from our
John Dehlin [01:57:22] ceiling, and it was a temple ceiling. Yeah.
Hailey Walser [01:57:24] Yes.
John Dehlin [01:57:24] Yeah. That's a big deal.
Hailey Walser [01:57:26] Yeah. I was Terrified. I was so scared. And I felt like I was letting him down. Because you are conditioned so much to just find someone in the church, you know, find someone who's an rm, find someone who's going to go to the temple with you, who will stay in the church, who will read their scriptures with you. And that was how we'd been living. I had been very honest with him about my concerns, but I had still been living the gospel. And he kind of looked at me and he was like, haley, that's okay. I'm marrying you for you, not your religion. So we'll figure it out. And ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. I was like, thank God. I was so scared. And, you know, we got sealed in the temple.
The 'Mormon for the Modern Woman' Podcast
John Dehlin [01:58:11] So you went through with it anyway? Yes.
Hailey Walser [01:58:14] Yeah. At that point, I was like, I'm not fully out of the church. I have not broken any of the commandments that would keep me from going to the temple. And I kind of wanted to see what a ceiling was like. I was curious. So we went through with it, and then we immediately moved in with my parents for the first three months of our marriage. So I kept going to church. We had callings in our ward there. I kept up appearances while I figured it all out. And then we moved back to Utah, back to Logan, for me to finish school. I told my husband that I was going to take a break from church and see how I felt. And so he would go to church on Sunday and I would turn on the podcast. At last. She said it. I believe you've had them on. No, right?
John Dehlin [01:59:09] I've tried.
Hailey Walser [01:59:10] Oh, okay.
John Dehlin [01:59:11] They're trying to stay. I get a sense they're trying to stay. Well, prevent excommunication, basically.
Hailey Walser [01:59:18] Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense.
John Dehlin [01:59:20] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [01:59:21] So that was my church. I would listen to it last. She said it.
John Dehlin [01:59:24] For those who don't know, tell. Tell everyone what that podcast is.
Hailey Walser [01:59:27] It's a great podcast. It really is. It's two active members of the church, two women who talk about concerns that they have. I know one of them is the mother of an LGBTQ plus child. So they talk a lot about navigating concerns with the church's treatment of LGBTQ plus individuals. They talk about feminism, they talk about just modern day issues. I think that might even be part of their phrase, something about, like, Mormonism for the modern woman. And I was trying to find a place of, can I be Mormon with my views as they are? Because I'm not. I wasn't willing to let go of the values I had Regarding people of color and women and LGBTQ individuals, I firmly believed and still believe that everybody is equal. Everybody should be able to marry who they want to marry. I. Like I said, I had a trans roommate. I felt so deeply that he deserved to live how he wanted to live. He was not harming anybody, and he faced a lot of discrimination in Utah. There were a lot of issues for him, being a trans man at a largely LDS school. I know it's changed a little bit, but it was still pretty Mormon when we were there. So I was just grasping for anything that would help me keep my Mormon identity and not compromise my values that had developed outside of the church. And I still love that podcast, but it. It didn't help me stay at all.
When I told my husband I Was Done With The Mormon Church
John Dehlin [02:01:14] So was there a breaking point where you were done?
Hailey Walser [02:01:19] I don't remember a specific day. I do remember after the first few Sundays of not going, and I kind of let go of everything because, you know, there's that whole idea of, like, test it out. You know, if. If you've read the Book of Mormon and you're not sure about it, pray about it, try living it. You know, that's how we get people into the church. Like, here's the standards. Try it out. See what you think. If you feel better. Oh, yeah.
John Dehlin [02:01:43] Hopefully you didn't let go of everything.
Hailey Walser [02:01:45] No, no. Like, if you feel better, it'll work. Or if you feel better, join or whatever. And so I. I test it out. Not living the church.
John Dehlin [02:01:55] Meaning. You tried coffee?
Hailey Walser [02:01:56] Actually, not at that point. I did wait. I do love coffee now, though, so. But I stopped going to church. I changed. I didn't stop praying, but I changed the way I prayed. I.
John Dehlin [02:02:13] To a divine feminine or to just something.
Hailey Walser [02:02:16] Okay, yeah.
John Dehlin [02:02:17] Something less formed.
Hailey Walser [02:02:19] Less Abrahamic.
John Dehlin [02:02:20] Less formed.
Hailey Walser [02:02:21] Yes. Yeah, less of. You know, I wasn't kneeling and, you know, saying, dear Heavenly Father. It was just whatever's out there. Like, I'm here and I'm looking for answers. And so I tried. I took a break from reading my scriptures, and I would read other things that I found uplifting, and I just started to feel better. Better. And I found a lot of peace waking up on a Sunday morning and just having a Sunday, you know, I. And I would still set it apart as a day to just do things that uplifted me. I would read or I would listen to a podcast or I would talk to family, but I let go of the Mormonism, of it all, and I started to really find peace in that. And I know now the. I've seen other People share similar experiences online, and the response is typically like, oh, well, that was Satan. He didn't have to work as hard on you anymore, so you got to feel peace. Which doesn't make sense to me because I was always told that true peace can only come from God. So if I was feeling peace on my non Mormon Sunday, then I was doing what was right. And I took a religious philosophy class that I loved. My professor was originally Protestant. I believe he had trained to be a pastor and had his own faith crisis, left his religion, and then became a philosophy teacher. And so I took religious philosophy from him, and we talked about so many different religions. And I was exposed to a lot of religions growing up and always loved religion, and I loved that class and that at that point. So this would have been about a year after I got married, I started reading the CES letter, which I still have not finished. I felt like a lot of it wasn't too new, but the parts that was or the parts that were, I felt were pretty significant. And I think that was when I was done. I had just found out enough that I felt like there was no place for me in the church because I wasn't going to compromise my beliefs. I wasn't willing to deny science either, which at a certain point, science comes into LGBTQ plus issues, it comes into race issues, it comes into feminist issues. And I was unwilling to let go of everything I had learned and worked for. And so I told my husband I was done and I wasn't going back. And that of course I was willing to support him. I didn't care if he was still Mormon or not. That was none of my business outside of, like, if we had children, then it was my business.
John Dehlin [02:05:45] Did he keep attending?
Hailey Walser [02:05:47] He did for a little bit. He doesn't anymore. And that's kind of his story.
John Dehlin [02:05:53] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [02:05:54] So I try not to talk on it too much, but he did for a while, went to church alone. But he was. He was always supportive of my whole journey. There was never concern for him. Even when we talked about having kids and raising them, you know, I would list my things like, I am not letting my child ever sit in. Sit in an interview with a bishop ever. Like, that's just not happening. And he was like, yeah, of course. That's fine. You know, so we just. He was really willing to work with anything, which was incredible. Yeah. So I told him I was done. I didn't tell my parents until last year. So I was out for a solid two years before I told anybody in my family.
John Dehlin [02:06:45] By the way that's a red flag. If you. If you are afraid to tell your parents for two years that you've left of faith that there's something wrong, people should be able to come and go with their faith. You're nodding, right?
Hailey Walser [02:07:00] Yeah. Yeah. And my parents are wonderful people.
John Dehlin [02:07:02] Sure.
Hailey Walser [02:07:03] You know, like.
John Dehlin [02:07:03] No, no, of course.
Hailey Walser [02:07:04] But there is a huge fear around leaving the church and telling people. I never told any of my siblings. I did tell my little brother because he was leaving on a mission, and I felt like it could be more jarring to find out mid mission.
John Dehlin [02:07:18] Yeah.
"I Never Told My Parents About My Wedding"
Hailey Walser [02:07:19] Than to know going out. So I did tell him before he left on his mission, but otherwise, I. I told my parents in a letter so that they could have whatever reaction they wanted to have without worrying about my feelings. You know, if they were angry or sad or disappointed, I wanted them to feel that, but I didn't want to take that personally, so I wanted them to have the space to do that. And then I just never told anybody else. And if they ask, I tell them the truth. But if not, I just live how I live. And, you know, I have tattoos now, and I clearly don't wear my garments and I drink coffee. So, like, it's obvious. But, yeah, I've been very. I've just lived how I wanted to live.
John Dehlin [02:08:07] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [02:08:07] And let people assume what they want, which is new for me, because as a Mormon, you know, you avoid the appearance of evil at all cost.
John Dehlin [02:08:16] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [02:08:16] And I definitely tried to do that.
John Dehlin [02:08:21] But let me. I want to talk about reconstruction a little bit. But before we do, if you like, let's just say church headquarters is listening, and we want to give you a chance. You're laughing. We want to give you a chance to spend one or two minutes distilling your sense for why young women appear to be leaving the Mormon Church in 2026 at a higher rate than men.
The Problem with Women Leaving the Mormon Church
Hailey Walser [02:08:52] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:08:53] If you had to distill that into a sound bite or an elevator pitch so that the church could understand the problem. I'm putting you on the spot. Could you do that?
Hailey Walser [02:09:03] That's fine. I mean, it's 2026. We, as women can vote and hold jobs and be moms. If we want to be moms and be politicians and world leaders and CEOs, and whatever we want to do. We are at a point in history where women have so much authority over our own lives. And culturally, we might not be fully there yet, but we've seen a lot of early feminist dreams come true. And the church is the only place where I Felt inherently less than because I was a woman. And talking to other women, that's the sense they have too. And we're at a point where we've seen what it can be like when we're treated as equals. And so we're going to go where we're treated as equals.
John Dehlin [02:09:59] What about the argument that. Thank you for that. What about the argument that. That you're separate but equal, that you're. Wait. That he presides in a relationship of equals or you're laughing. Why are you laughing?
Hailey Walser [02:10:15] No, that I always, when I hear separate but equal, I immediately think of obviously the racial tension in the US if it did not work, then it does not work when you apply it to the sexes.
John Dehlin [02:10:28] What about different roles? Equal, but different roles.
Hailey Walser [02:10:32] If you don't have a say in what your role is, it's not equal. And that's just. I feel like there's no. Because men have a say in your role. Right. Like my mission president decided I was going to be a missionary and in theory I was equal with the elders around me. But I hadn't chosen to be there. I was told I had to be there. And there was no one was going to listen to me say otherwise. And there's no position in the church where a man can't override your say. And that's true, you know, So I feel like that completely defeats the idea of separate but equal roles or different roles that are equal. And if I also think historically that's put women in a bad position. And my mom was, my mom emphasized this for me growing up, you need, as a woman, financial independence of some sort, you know, because if you are truly just a stay at home mom, which that is an incredible job, right? Like, it requires a lot of effort, you're doing so much. I don't think it's anything to be looked down on. But if you never get an education, if you get married, you raise kids, you don't have a job outside of the home, what happens if your husband dies or leaves you or, you know, your kids leave the home and then. And then what? And so if you're set up for this position where you can very quickly become unequal, or where you can very quickly be coerced into a situation that is harmful for you because you were following what you were told by your religion, then you are not equal. Does that make sense?
John Dehlin [02:12:24] Yeah, it does for sure. I mean, so many Mormon stories have been women who got divorced or their husband died and they were up a creek, basically. What about the church Occasionally releasing a short of some Mormon woman that becomes a doctor or a professor or something.
Hailey Walser [02:12:45] I am old enough to remember talks geared towards women saying that our priority should not be education, it should not be having a job, it should be getting married and raising children. And so the women who are now doctors did not listen to church leadership, and they can promote that all they want now. But that's new. That was not encouraged. You know, even Sherry Dew, who was a famous Mormon woman who was never married, a lot of her talks focused on motherhood and how our role as women is to be mothers and to be married and raise children, which, again, is a great option. But you can't just release one short about a woman who is a doctor and expect it to override a century of teaching women that that's not an option.
John Dehlin [02:13:52] Yeah. And then, you know, there's kind of. I've heard this kind of hostile rhetoric of like, you won't be happy until you have the priesthood. You know what I mean?
Hailey Walser [02:14:05] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:14:06] Is that. But what would you say to that?
Hailey Walser [02:14:09] I mean, even if I had received the priesthood, I wouldn't have been happy in the church, but I would want to challenge that and ask why that's a bad thing. You know, why does women having the church hurt the church in any way? Surely it gives us more opportunities to heal and help people and find peace in our lives if we have more priesthood holders. So why be afraid of that?
John Dehlin [02:14:41] I think the argument is that gender is eternal and that gender means certain
Hailey Walser [02:14:47] roles
John Dehlin [02:14:50] that the proclamation on the family says that a man needs to protect and preside and provide and a woman needs to nurture the children and take care of the home. And that by having a division, a known, familiar, proven distribution of responsibilities by gender that leads to the optimum outcome for the creation and the rearing of children. You're like, totally breathing deeply. That leads to the optimal production of the most amount of healthy children. And it's also how the afterlife is structured because you'll not just be parents here on Earth, you'll be heavenly parents parenting spiritual children as gods in an afterlife, ruling over your own earths. And so gender is eternal.
Hailey Walser [02:15:59] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:16:00] And so that's. The gender thing is division of labor for the earthly family and for the
Hailey Walser [02:16:06] celestial family, which now that they don't say we get our own planets anymore, I'm curious to see what else that walks back.
John Dehlin [02:16:14] But I mean, I think internally they still teach that, but externally they try and deemphasize it, honestly.
Hailey Walser [02:16:20] Yeah. Yeah. Which that's kind of a Like, cool. Part of Mormonism is your own planet. But I think that's where the science in me kicked in. You know, I was studying this intersection of psychology and sociology and sex and gender. And we had studies going over all the different types of families there can be. And who we see has the most success, the children who are the healthiest for women, young girls, they thrive. If they have a working mother, their self esteem is so much higher. And I'm not advocating one way or the other for you, you should stay home or you should work. But in these studies we started to see things that directly opposed what the church was teaching. And I'm a big believer in science. I always have been. That's another thing that my mom really raised me to support and to find kind of answers in is science. And so when the science started to show me that sex and gender didn't matter that much when it came to raising healthy children, in studies that have been done, the most successful children are the ones who were raised by a lesbian couple. And that clearly opposes what the church is teaching. And so for me, just seeing the science, it came down to, here's what I can see with my own eyes and in my own experience, again, my family was not traditional in the Mormon church and I'm very happy in my family. I love my family. So if it's not obvious that the way that the church says is best is actually best, I'm not going to bank on an afterlife that I haven't seen evidence of yet. You know, like, if it doesn't work in this life, let me phrase that. If we can see evidence of many different types of families working on this earth and being happy and healthy, that's what I'm going to follow. Because I see it with my own eyes and I have to believe that it'll be. If there is an afterlife of any sort, I don't see why it would be different. And I'm just gonna follow what I see. Yeah, yeah. So it's, you know, there's a lot of pushback for sex and gender issues in the church. And I think at some point you just have to decide what you believe.
Gay Christians on Same-Sex Families
John Dehlin [02:19:17] Yeah. As I'm thinking about an answer to my own question, in theory, I can, you know, a lot of, a lot of what I hear these days is, well, look fine if two lesbians can raise a kid and the kid turns out great, or a single mom or a working mom can raise a kid. But we in the church, we in God's kingdom, have to manage towards the Ideal. You know what I mean?
Hailey Walser [02:19:39] Yeah, 100%.
John Dehlin [02:19:41] And all I would say to that is. The problem with that is it ends up feeling very judgmental and, And I don't know, I want to say bigoted against those who, who are not of the norm. They end up feeling marginalized or excluded or looked down upon. And there's got to be a way, especially if Christ is kind of in charge, for everyone to be feeling great at their place in the kingdom, not to feel like they're in aberration.
Hailey Walser [02:20:18] Totally. And I. Yeah, I think I feel the same. And it's, you know, I've. There's the whole idea of like, well, maybe I'm gay in this life, but I won't be in the next, and then I can get married and, you know, have all the children. And I just. That's one of those things that. Why would God create all these diverse amazing people if he didn't want them to be diverse? What is the point of saying, I'm gonna make you this way, but this isn't the way you're supposed to be? Yeah, so fix it?
John Dehlin [02:20:50] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [02:20:52] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:20:52] That's when people start saying, oh, well, there's diseases and there's sin, and then that's just like.
Hailey Walser [02:20:57] Then it gets crazy.
John Dehlin [02:20:58] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [02:20:59] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:20:59] Okay. Thanks for entertaining some tough questions. And then let's just end with kind of the positive, like, how has reconstruction been for you? Like it. It does. It ends up for almost everyone. Feels like a lot to leave your community, your sense of spirituality, your sense of meaning and purpose, the future you thought, like to disappoint family, your resolutions about the afterlife. There's so many holes that leaving a high demand religion like Mormonism creates. How has it been for you reconstructing and filling those holes? Or is that not a metaphor that you choose? Choose your own metaphor if you have a better one.
Mormon Survivor on The Process of Reconstruction
Hailey Walser [02:21:47] I think at first I felt like there were holes. I felt gaps. But reconstruction has been great. It's been a really healing experience for me, largely because it is guided entirely by my own authority. You know, there's. There is no one telling me what I should believe or what I shouldn't believe. There's no one who can tell me that my revelation for myself was wrong or that I am interpreting something wrong or, you know, whatever. When I have a question or a concern or a problem, I'm trying to figure out if it's. If it solely involves me. I just turn to myself, you know, and I. And I say, how do I feel about this? What do I think is best. I'll talk with people whose opinions I value. And so I feel like that whole of church leadership was filled very quickly, and I found my own voice in my concerns. Community was harder, especially in Utah, which I. You know, I. A lot of the people I love are active members in. In Mormonism, and I'm happy to support them. I have no ill will at all. But, you know, I. I wanted friends who would go get coffee with me on a Sunday morning, you know, and. And hang out. And I got one of my tattoos with a friend, and I loved that I had someone who would just go get a tattoo with me. So community was harder, and I'm still working on that. But I found that my spirituality felt very innate. I didn't have to work a whole lot to get to a place where the spiritual holes were filled. There's not a lot of structure anymore to my spirituality or my views on religion and life, but it feels a lot more true to who I am. I am a yoga teacher now. I did my yoga teacher certification last year, and my mat and the studio I practice in feels like a sacred space to me. And it's a sacred space that I can share with anybody who wants to be there. And yoga feels like a deeply spiritual activity for me, and it's one that I can share with anybody who wants to be a part of it. There's no. I used to feel like when it came to religion, there were limitations to sharing it, because it was something that mattered a lot to me, But I never wanted to offend anybody else. I never wanted to act as if I was superior for my religious views. Obviously, there's limitations to who can come into the temple and things like that, and I love that. My spirituality, as I've reconstructed it now, is open to anybody and everybody who wants to be a part of it. And I can have all sorts of discussions with all sorts of people. And I have. There are ideas from Hinduism that I love, and there's ideas from Islam that I love and from Christianity. And, you know, it's. I get to find what feels true to me and live that. And it's made reconstruction feel like finding myself not just filling holes.
Marriage in the Mormon Church
John Dehlin [02:25:33] So this is maybe an intense question, but would you say that being on your yoga mat, doing yoga, feels more sacred than the Mormon endowment ceremony in the temple did?
Hailey Walser [02:25:49] I would. For me, it feels so much more peaceful, and I think because it's led by what I need in that moment, it feels much more fulfilling than a lot of the things I participated in when I was lds.
John Dehlin [02:26:11] And, you know, bizarrely, over the past couple years, not only has the church changed the temple ceremony to make it more feminist friendly, they've been changing women's garments to make them more shoulder friendly, more healthy for women, but they even now allow multiple piercings and tattoos. So if somebody says, hey, you've misjudged now a Mormon friend could go with you to get a tattoo, do you have a response? Because I don't think we talk enough about why the church changing things is actually a real problem.
Hailey Walser [02:26:43] Yeah, yeah, for sure.
John Dehlin [02:26:44] Do you want to address that? Because you talked about, at some point, noticing the church was just constantly changing in response to social pressure, so.
Hailey Walser [02:26:51] Yes. Yeah. I mean, for me, it came down to how are we supposed to know what's actually from God and what's actually from man if it's constantly changing?
John Dehlin [02:27:03] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [02:27:03] And I think change is. Is good. I think we should always be adapting and evolving. I think that's the whole point of being human. But if you're saying these are God's standards, maybe we shouldn't be changing them so frequently.
John Dehlin [02:27:21] Yeah.
Hailey Walser [02:27:23] And also, it doesn't ever get to the root of the issue. You know, for women, I didn't leave because I wanted to wear a tank top. I didn't leave so that I could pierce my ears or get a tattoo or have a coffee. I could have done all of that and stayed in the church. I know people who did.
John Dehlin [02:27:39] Plenty do.
Hailey Walser [02:27:40] Yeah. I left because I needed to know I had final say in my life, and it was not up to some random, typically man who does not know me to decide my path. And, you know, Mormonism has changed a lot just in the past few years. I do know quite a few active members who drink coffee and don't wear their garments and get tattoos and piercings and are serving in the Relief Society or the Sunday School, or do they still have Sunday School? Did they get rid of changing?
John Dehlin [02:28:18] They keep changing it. Yeah.
Hailey Walser [02:28:20] Yeah, they do.
John Dehlin [02:28:22] They do.
Hailey Walser [02:28:22] Okay. Okay. Whatever they. Whatever calling they have, they have a calling and still live like how I live now that I'm not a member. But for my female friends, there is not a single bit of inspiration they could receive that a man couldn't override instantly.
John Dehlin [02:28:43] So just to put a fine point on it, I can hear Mormon God, Mormon Heavenly Father, echoing what your second mission president said to you, which is, it sounds like you have a problem with LDS priesthood authority.
Hailey Walser [02:28:58] I do now. I do now. Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:29:03] You do.
Hailey Walser [02:29:04] Yep.
John Dehlin [02:29:04] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you choose your own authority.
Hailey Walser [02:29:11] Maybe Yeah, I know myself best and as a full grown adult, I should be able to say what is going to work best for my life, obviously, and in counsel with my spouse because it's his life too. But. Yeah.
Ex-Mormons on God and the Christian Church
John Dehlin [02:29:26] So do you even want to talk about a belief in a higher power or in Jesus or any of that?
Hailey Walser [02:29:32] I mean, I don't mind talking about it at all. I'm. For me, I definitely moved away from Christianity, any Abrahamic God.
John Dehlin [02:29:41] My Christian listeners hate it when ex Mormons leave Christianity. I know, why not keep Christ?
Hailey Walser [02:29:47] I have yet to see a Christian church that solves the problems I experienced in Mormonism. And I'm not gonna go from.
John Dehlin [02:29:55] Okay, Unitarian Universalist, better
Hailey Walser [02:30:01] still. Not for me.
John Dehlin [02:30:02] Yeah. Okay.
Hailey Walser [02:30:05] Yeah. So I left Christianity entirely and I think there could be something out there. I'm not opposed to it, but if there is a God or gods, I don't believe that they are completely benevolent. I don't think they can be. You know, there's the three all knowing, all powerful, all loving. And unfortunately, with what we see in the world, I don't think all three of those are possible at the same time, so. But yeah, I'm open to anything.
John Dehlin [02:30:42] Beautiful. Wow. Well, I've loved your story, Hailey. So any final things you want to say to those who are listening? There might be a young woman thinking about going on a mission or some, you know, a young man who just got home or someone thinking about getting married in the temple. I don't think of Mormon stories as trying to tear people's faith away or tell people how to live or even leave the church. But is there any counsel you want to give people as a final, or do you want your story just to speak for itself?
Mormon Stories: A Final Message for The Church
Hailey Walser [02:31:16] Well, I think like you said, it's not about tearing down people's faith, and that's. The church did not work out for me and it won't work out for me, and that's okay. So I think for some people it is the right choice and it does bring them a lot of joy and it's what they need in this life. And I think ultimately it comes down to trusting yourself and your intuition and your knowledge of what you need and want out of life. And if the church doesn't align with that, it's okay. You don't have to force it. Obviously it's hard to leave, but you need to listen to yourself and trust your gut. I think that's what I've learned the most, so.
John Dehlin [02:32:05] And if a missionary decides they want to end their mission when they want to end it. Any final advice for the church?
Hailey Walser [02:32:12] Let them go. But also I'll start a fund for missionaries who want to leave or something. Buy them a plane ticket.
John Dehlin [02:32:19] Yeah. Really?
Hailey Walser [02:32:20] Because I. Yeah. No one should be stuck anywhere they don't want to be.
John Dehlin [02:32:24] Yeah. Especially in the name of Jesus. Right.
Hailey Walser [02:32:27] Oh.
John Dehlin [02:32:27] Or the one true church.
Hailey Walser [02:32:28] Jesus would have let me go, I think.
John Dehlin [02:32:30] Especially when they're paying for it.
Hailey Walser [02:32:32] Yes. It's crazy.
John Dehlin [02:32:34] You were forced to pay to serve six more months.
Hailey Walser [02:32:37] I was. It was insane. Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:32:41] Again, I'm so sorry that happened.
Hailey Walser [02:32:42] No, that's okay.
John Dehlin [02:32:43] Yeah. All right, well, thanks for joining us, Hailey Walzer, and stay in touch. Good luck with what life brings you.
Hailey Walser [02:32:53] Hopefully many good things. It's been good to be here.
John Dehlin [02:32:56] Yeah. Well, thank you.
Hailey Walser [02:32:57] Thank you.
John Dehlin [02:32:58] Well, thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories. A couple quick things. Again, please subscribe and like and comment. That's always helpful on all the platforms. Please. Thank you. If you're a donor, we can only do this with your donations. If you're not a donor and you want to see this content Continue, go to MormonStories.org donate and become a monthly donor. We also are being sued by the LDS Church. We believe unjustly and we believe we're innocent. And if you don't think that it makes sense for the church to sue a podcast for calling itself Mormon Stories for the past 20 years and for other reasons and you want to support our legal fund, go to mormonstories.org legal and donate. And finally, we love your feedback. Please email us@mormonstoriesmail.com and the way that we found out about Hailey is just through our traditional application process. So if you've got a Mormon Story and you want to share it, we really want to hear it. You go to mormonstories.org apply and fill out the little application. It just takes a few minutes. You record a little three minute video and we'll review it. We're looking for people that really have watched enough Mormon Stories episodes to have a sense for what our audience will find interesting and compelling. But also we're just looking for good storytellers who've got a good story to tell. So if you've got a good story and or you're a good storyteller, we would love you to apply@mormonstories.org apply. All right. And Margi was going to be here today, but we had a family medical emergency. Actually, we've had it for the past several weeks, a family medical situation. So we hope to have her back soon. She hates missing these and she loves to be here. So we love Margi and we hope to see her soon. Also, huge thanks to Brooklyn and Julia for all they do in post production, along with our board of directors because we couldn't do any of this without them. So anyway, thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Be good to each other, be kind to each other, and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care.
One Response
I was deeply moved by Hailey Walser’s story. I found myself wishing we had been friends—I would have driven to Minnesota and taken her home!! Of course, we probably wouldn’t have been friends then, because she might have considered me entirely inappropriate: I was a feminist atheist who had taken assertiveness training during my sophomore year of college. 😊
It frightens me that Mormon young people are taught such unquestioning obedience. In a loving, healthy environment, deference may appear harmless. In a dangerous or abusive environment, however, it can be deadly. I found myself wondering why Hailey didn’t go to the police or a women’s shelter. But given the responses of church authorities and her own parents, she may not have realized that people outside the church would recognize what was happening as unacceptable—and help her escape it.
One more observation: Hailey was an absolute joy to listen to. She spoke thoughtfully, clearly, and in complete sentences, without the constant “ums,” “ahs,” and convoluted phrasing that can make very long podcast episodes difficult to follow. Her clarity made this interview especially compelling and easy to listen to. I also thought John did an excellent job during this interview.
Thank you, Hailey, for trusting us with your story. I’m taking her quote regarding separate but equal with me: “If you do not have a say in your role, it’s not equal.”