Episode Transcript
Host: John Dehlin · Guest: Emma
This transcript is machine-generated and lightly edited for readability. The audio is authoritative. Please excuse occasional errors in names and spelling.
Welcome and Introduction to the Episode
John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. I am here with my co host and partner in goodness and righteousness, Kara Burrell. Hey, Kara.
Guest [00:00:11] Hi, guys.
John Dehlin [00:00:12] Thanks for joining us.
Guest [00:00:13] Happy to be here.
John Dehlin [00:00:14] And we're here for part two of our interview with Emma where we are discussing growing up as a Mormon prepper, preparing for the second coming. We're taking a slight detour for part two and because in preparing for this interview, I found out that Emma served a mission in the Philippines, which along with Latin America and Africa, is one of the three major growth areas for the Mormon Church, where hundreds of thousands of, if not millions of its baptisms have come from. And the Philippines is just this major, major area of statistical growth. But like with my mission in Guatemala and Latin America, the history of the Mormon Church's missionary program is fraught with these periods of what I would say are fraudulent baptisms, where high pressure sales techniques are used to pressure missionaries to get ungodly amounts of baptisms to meet kind of statistical quotas for, you know, whatever purposes the leaders might have for generating super high numbers that end up with very high attrition and very low retention in the Mormon Church. Anyway, we just finished part one with Emma where she talked about growing up as a Mormon prepper, and now we're going to talk about serving a Mormon mission in the Philippines. This is an episode, Emma, that I've wanted to do for a very, very long time. So welcome back to part two of your story. Thanks so much for being willing to talk about this.
Emma [00:01:40] Yeah, absolutely.
John Dehlin [00:01:42] So really quickly, just like I did with part one, I'm going to give a tiny bit of history, if that's okay.
Emma [00:01:46] Go for it.
John Dehlin [00:01:47] And it might be history you've never heard of, but I think it's really important history for providing context for the story you're about to hear. Is that all right?
Emma [00:01:55] Yeah, for sure.
Baseball Baptisms and Church Culture in the Philippines
John Dehlin [00:01:56] Okay. So in the. Have you ever heard of baseball baptisms, Emma?
Emma [00:01:59] I haven't.
John Dehlin [00:02:00] Okay. Okay. So in the late 1950s, early 1960s in the Mormon Church, there was a leader named Henry Moyle who was like in the first presidency of the Mormon Church. And he had this mission president in the British Isles who I think his name was T. Bowering Woodbury. But they got this idea that they could build a bunch of chapels in, in the UK and all these Mormon chapels and stake centers had baseball diamonds, right? Softball, baseball fields, and they would start these, these baseball leagues for youth in the British Isles. And at the time, baseball With America and, and you know, the Yankees and whatever the baseball, American baseball was kind of sweeping the world. So baseball was super popular. America post war Cold war was expanding. John F. Kennedy had just been made president. There was all this kind of hype and pro Americanism throughout the world. And the church builds these baseball diamonds and they start these baseball leagues in the British Isles. By the way, this is when Jeffrey R. Holland and Quentin Cook were missionaries in, in the British Isles, right? And thousands and thousands and thousands of British youth, mostly young men, converted to Mormonism because they had to get baptized into Mormonism to play in these baseball leagues. And Kara, I'm going to have you share a link to this full article that none other than D. Michael Quinn wrote in Sunstone magazine about the baseball baptisms era in the British Isles in the early 60s. And they again, they baptized thousands and thousands of, of young Mormon men. All the church news, you know, the church newsletters at the time were just, wow, what an inspiring growth of, of Mormonism in, in the uk. All these, you know, mission presidents and the, in the general authorities were super proud of the growth. And it turned out that like less than 10% of these young men ended up staying in the church. Many of them didn't even remember getting baptized. Oftentimes parents weren't told. These youth were baptized without consent, without testimonies, without really being a part of the church. And it left future missionaries in this really uncomfortable position of having to excommunicate all these, you know, because there was no way to purge them from the roles at the time. And so they would have all these wards or branches with all these members where no one was attending church. And then they would have to find some way to purge the role so that they could manage the members that were actually living in the area or interested in attending church. And it was this big scandal that was covered up. And Michael Quinn writes about it in Sunstone. And it's one of the most important things I've ever read. Kara's gonna include a link to it in the show notes. That's the baseball baptism scandal. Later. Let's just say 10 years later, these baseball baptisms re emerged in Japan. And so there was like a Japanese version of the baseball baptism scandal. And then what we find in the 80s as the church is really starting to grow with kind of Reagan, you know, Cold War bring, bringing the Soviet Union down, sort of American expansionism, this huge wave of massive baptizing in Latin America that I was a part of. And so in my mission in Guatemala we got up to 700 baptisms a month as a mission. There was a mission in Chile, Vina del Mar, that had over a thousand baptisms a month in Chile. And care I'm going to have you include both my interview of Ted Lyons so Ted L Y O N in the show notes because he was a mission president in Chile when this happened. The, the baseball, you know, sort of like the soccer beach party baptisms that happened in chile in the 80s. My very first episode of Mormon Stories talked about my. There were soccer baptisms in my mission in Guatemala where you play soccer with the kids and then baptize them. High pressure sales techniques, newsletters about how many baptisms, the companionships and the zone leaders and everyone were getting. And you know you'd get promoted to AP if you had the most baptisms. All that that happened in my mission. That's episode one of Mormon Stories podcast. And then Roger Hendricks also we did my first set of interviews with Roger Hendricks will include those in the show notes because he served in Chile as well when all that stuff was happening. And this has been something that the church has done and has battled with forever. And there would be eras of high baptism rates and, and high attrition and low retention rates. And then the church would like curtail it and clean it up and, and beat it back and it would, there would always be these surges and then retrenchments as the church wants to grow statistically, it wants to have this expansion in Latin America and then it starts to regret it and pulls back. One other quick thing I'll have to mention is this, this fraudulent missionary practices became such a problem that, that in the 90s or 2000s, Elder Holland went to Chile for three years to clean up this mess. And he closed 30 stakes while he was in Chile. Imagine shutting 30 stakes because it was just this, this statistical expansion based on fraudulent baptisms was destroying the church in Chile. And So Holland closed 30 stakes while he was in Chile. What you may or may not know is that Elder Oaks down H. Oaks, who's now first president, first counselor in, in the, in the current modern Mormon first first Presidency, Oaks was called to the Philippines to do the exact same thing. And by the way, I had lunch with Elder Holland in the 2000s, let's just say 29, 2009, 2010, when where he admitted all of this to me and admitted that he went to Chile and did these things and he acknowledged that these baptismal practices have decimated the church and have been really difficult for the church for all Sorts of reasons. But I don't even know if you knew that. That the Philippines, prior to you ever going to the Philippines, had this history, and that Elder Dallin H. Oaks had been called to try and clean it up. Okay. So that's just the introduction to kind of baseball baptism, fraudulent baptisms in developing countries, and of course, now in Africa. This is all going on right now in modern Africa. Mormon missions, the same type of thing. So tell me if you knew any of that or how much of that you knew or if that's all news to you.
Emma [00:08:56] Most of that was news to me. I did find out about Elder Oaks going to clean up the Philippines. Like, when I was almost done with my mission, we found out about some rules that he had set for baptisms that had not been followed the whole time I was there. So.
John Dehlin [00:09:13] Yeah, so. So basically, Oaks had come to the Philippines, had tried to set up rules to curb these fraudulent baptisms, and even an apostle of the Lord was not able to, you know, in the Mormon Church was not able to. To implement lasting policies to curb these practices. That's what you're saying, correct?
Emma [00:09:34] Yeah. Someone, like, came back to try and clean it up again while I was there.
John Dehlin [00:09:38] Yeah. And I'll just say, when I talked to Elder Holland about this, he's like, people think that we, if we're in the quorum of the 12, that kind of, like, what we say goes. And he made it very clear they have very limited power that they can go do something like this, really clean something up as an apostle, as a special witness of Christ, at a year or two, and it's just right back to normal. And Holland expressed to my. My brother and I this real deep frustration about how hard it is to change the church because there's just so many different competing apostles with competing agendas. Ballard has been behind the missionary program for a long time, and you get a sense that Ballard likes these techniques and these practices. So. So it's just a testament to we as ex Mormons or progressive Mormons think, oh, if just one of the brethren can get on board, he can just make some changes, and then the whole church will change. And that's just not the way change happens in the Mormon Church at all. And that's interesting. Back backstory.
Emma [00:10:40] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:10:41] Carrie, did you want to. You look like you might be wanting to say something.
Guest [00:10:44] I'd like to look into that more because I feel like there are some people in the church that they will like, you know, the church. The prophet just has to say one thing, and they're like, yeah, jump how high? But I'm, I think in developing countries where there isn't such a long standing tradition of following a prophet and it's not as a cohesive group as you'll find in Utah and Idaho. I bet it's a lot different when they're trying to change church culture, when they're, you know, it's the churches going into a, a different land and doing this whole like colonial perspective of like foisting their new church perspective on people who are just unfamiliar with it. I bet that I would assume, I don't know, that things are a lot different when they're trying to change things.
John Dehlin [00:11:24] Yeah.
Guest [00:11:24] From place to place.
John Dehlin [00:11:25] Yeah, for sure. And there. I don't want to make this about me, but my mission president that engaged in the tactics that we're about to talk about had very significant reasons. It keeps missionaries busy, helps create the feeling of success and growth and, and it gets movement so that missionaries aren't bored or distracted or breaking the rules and their implications to the, to like the spirit prison and like getting the ordinances to people anyway. There are all sorts of justifications, not to mention the, the, the fame that a mission president or an area president might get if they oversee what's perceived to be a statistically successful mission or area of missions. So anyway, that's all a bunch of context that I, you know, for those of you who are Mormon that get all this, forgive me, over half our viewers and listeners are not Mormons. So we're trying to not only share this stuff for history's sake, but also for the majority of never Mormons that are listening to Mormon stories. So thanks for your patience. Now we can begin. You are, you know, growing up in Colorado in a Mormon prepper family and then you, you decide you might want to serve a mission. Do you want to back up and just talk about your, you know, what made you think because, because in my day, most Mormon women decided not to serve missions. There even wasn't the pressure or the expectation. So let's talk about what, what led you to even want to serve a mission? Maybe we start there or. Where would you like to start?
Emma's Decision to Serve a Mission
Emma [00:12:56] Yeah, I think that's a great place to start. It kind of connects like my, the part one a little bit. So I was living in Idaho. Byu, Idaho. And because your freshman year, well, I graduated early because I was like, okay, Mom's gonna die soon. I don't want to be at home to have to take care of dad because he doesn't cook or clean or help just because that was the roles in our family. So I graduated a whole year early and went to byu, Idaho. And then I just had a hard time picking a major because one I was taught that my role was as a wife and mother and to the world was ending soon. So I was like, why? Like, I don't even know what to study. Like, what's the point of school? So I dropped out of school. And then I moved to Provo, Utah and was just working here for a while. And one day I got a phone call from my dad, and he was like, hey, what's your plan? I was like, what do you mean? He's like, well, you're not dating anyone. You're not getting married. Are you going on a mission? Like, what are you doing with your life? And we got in a big fight. I cried. And then later, like, had this feeling like, you're right, like, I'm not doing anything with my life. So I decided to go on a mission, which at the time I was like, oh, yeah. Like, he helped me feel the spirit to know that I needed to go on a mission. But now, in retrospect, it was a totally emotional decision to make the people around me happy so that they would get off my back because I wasn't doing what you were supposed to do as a Mormon young adult, which is go to school, get married, go on a mission. Yeah, those three things. So that's how I decided to go on a mission. And I at the time, like, knew that my testimony wasn't, like, I didn't think it was great. So I figured if I went on a mission and, like, sacrificed my time and did all those things, that it would make my testimony solid and I would be a good Mormon girl. And that's how I decided to go.
John Dehlin [00:14:55] Yeah. And this was after the age change where the Mormon Church was experiencing a significant decline in. In men serving missions, which continues to this day. Right now, I'm told that in many Mormon wards in Utah and Stakes, only a third of the young men are choosing to serve missions. So it's a real problem. The church saw this ahead of time and all of a sudden doubled, in effect, its missionary force. Whereas before, women weren't encouraged to serve missions unless they couldn't get married, they weren't encouraged to serve missions. The church lowered the mission age to 18 for boys, 19 for girls, from 21 or 19 respectively. And then. And then all most Mormon women were encouraged to serve missions. So yours came after that age change, right?
Emma [00:15:44] Yep. It was 2017 when I decided to go on a mission.
John Dehlin [00:15:47] Okay. Okay.
Emma [00:15:48] And then I just did it really fast. Within a week I had gotten all my appointments done and put in my papers and then got my call and left two months to the day after I got my call. It was really fast.
Receiving a Mission Call to the Philippines
John Dehlin [00:16:00] Did you have a sense for where you wanted to go?
Emma [00:16:03] I wanted to go English speaking because I was afraid to learn a language. But I wanted to go foreign because I wanted an adventure. So I wanted to go to like London or Ireland or somewhere. And that is not where I went.
John Dehlin [00:16:16] So when you got the call about the Philippines, did you know anything about the Philippines? Did you even know where it was or what language they spoke?
Emma [00:16:23] So the language I spoke was Hilligainen and I had never heard of that before. And I was like, what is this language? All I knew is my uncle had served in the Philippines and that was about all I knew about the Philippines.
John Dehlin [00:16:33] Would you have put that on the application for the mission that an uncle had served in the Philippines or.
Emma [00:16:38] No. I had mentioned like brothers and my dad, but I. I didn't even think about aunts and uncles.
John Dehlin [00:16:43] Okay, so. So you got the call. What you feel?
Emma [00:16:48] I remember crying and who know, like, I don't even really know what I was feeling. I just remember crying when I started reading my mission call. And I was excited because in my mind, like, if you got called to serve foreign instead of stay side, you were like more righteous. That was how it was in my mind. So I was like, yep, I'm righteous. I'm going to go foreign. I was really excited. I remember my parents being nervous. I'm the only girl in my family to serve a mission. All my brothers served, but I'm the only girl. And they were really nervous about sending me to the Philippines. But they were also like, well, God's going to protect you so you won't get hurt even though you're going to this third world country.
John Dehlin [00:17:32] Okay, so. So what was. Do you want to talk about the MTC next or what? Anything else you want to.
Emma [00:17:39] Yeah, I mean, I think my MTC experience was pretty basic. I got along really well with my companion, which would probably be one of the only companions I got along with really well. I was there for six weeks because it was a language and then we were a tight knit community because there are only two missions that speak this language. And so unlike other languages where you're with people that go to all sorts of different countries or missions, it was just two. So that was really neat because we all got to stay in the same mission or a neighboring mission. So we got to, like, see each other's progress as we went through our missions.
John Dehlin [00:18:17] Do you know how many missions are in the Philippines? Or at least were 23 at the time. That's a lot, right?
Emma [00:18:22] And it's very. You can fit, like, I don't remember, but a lot of Philippines can fit in Utah, and there were 23 missions in the whole islands.
John Dehlin [00:18:33] Yeah. So that's like four. I want to say four, five, six thousand missionaries. Mormon missionaries in the Philippines.
Emma [00:18:39] Yeah. Actually, so many missionaries.
John Dehlin [00:18:41] Yeah. Yeah. And what is it about the Philippines that makes it such a. I mean, because there are way more populous countries with way less Mormon missions and Mormon missionaries. What is it about the Philippines, do you think, that makes it so attractive
Emma [00:18:55] for the church culturally? They're just really polite people, and they don't know how to say no, which came up always. And they even told us that in the mtc, they're like, these people don't know how to say no. So you would extend a baptismal date, and even though they didn't want to be baptized, they would say yes just because it was the polite thing to do. Also, as a white American, we were almost like celebrities, and so people would come and talk to us just because we were white. And so it just, like, people flocked to us, and it was so easy. It's one of the only Asian countries that is predominantly Christian, so most people there are Catholic or some sort of Christian sect. And so you didn't have to do the whole background work of, like, this is who Christ is. This is who God is. You could just walk up to people and say, I talk to you about Christ. And they would say, yep, sit down. So it was really easy to find people to talk to.
John Dehlin [00:19:58] And isn't there some kind of World War II history where Japan was expanding in the Pacific theater during World War II? And. And Philippines was something that ultimately we would have liberated.
Guest [00:20:12] We.
John Dehlin [00:20:12] We. America with. With other allies would have helped liberate the Philippines from Japanese expansion. And so there might have been a real post World War II pro American sentiment in the Philippines. And isn't there a military, like a US Military base in the Philippines, too?
Emma [00:20:30] I believe so. I. We kind of stayed away from politics at the time, but it definitely came over. So they travel in things called jeepneys, which are leftover remnants from the American jeeps that they used in the war. So that's their. One of their main forms of transportation. And then they call all Americans Joe, because that happened During World War II, they just say, like, hey, Joe. So there definitely is a lot of leftover sentiment from World War II.
John Dehlin [00:20:59] So poor, polite, pro America Christian, you know, not. Not good at saying no. What's not to like about From a Mormon missionary standpoint? Right.
Emma [00:21:11] Yeah, it was. I mean, speaking to other people who served in other places, like, relatively a very easy mission to teach and find people because they all just said yes.
John Dehlin [00:21:23] Yeah. Okay. So you. You go to the Philippines. What was it like? Was it culture shock? Was it. Was it awesome? Was it comfortable? What was it like? Was it like a warm glove?
Arriving in the Field and Culture Shock
Emma [00:21:35] Yeah, definitely culture shock. I hate the heat. Colorado is really cold, so it's super hot. There's bugs everywhere. I'm afraid of spiders. And they have, like, banana spiders that are bigger than your hand.
John Dehlin [00:21:47] Really?
Emma [00:21:48] Yeah. And they, like.
John Dehlin [00:21:48] Do they bite you or are they poisonous or.
Emma [00:21:51] They usually stayed away, but I imagine if they bit you, it would. It would be bad. But they lived in our houses. Like, I killed a lot of those. They were frequently in our houses.
John Dehlin [00:22:01] Scary looking.
Emma [00:22:03] Very scary looking. Huge terrifying. The natives hate to kill them. Cockroaches everywhere. Lizards were in our house. Ants. You can't leave food out because within five seconds, ants will be crawling all over it. So definitely a huge culture shock. And the food was different. I got really sick because I just did not have the bacteria to fight all the other bacteria that was entering my body. When we arrived the very first day in the field, we went to the mission home, and the mission president would invite missionaries to come, like, welcome us into the mission. And the way he chose missionaries were people who were weekly baptizers. So my very first experience in the mission was sitting in the mission home. And he told everyone to stand up. He was like, all right, everyone sit down. And he was like, sit down. I don't remember how he did it, but basically he had people stay standing based off of how many weeks they had baptized previously.
John Dehlin [00:23:09] What?
Emma [00:23:09] Yep. So it was like, stay standing. If you baptize the last six weeks. So it was everyone in the room, minus the new missionaries were standing. And then he was like, stay standing. If you baptized the past 12 weeks. And he just kept increasing the number, and then he got to, like, 60 something. And then there was one missionary standing, and that was our AP was that missionary who had baptized the most weeks. So that was my very first introduction to the mission, was like this show of, like, who's here? They're all baptizers. And so then he was like, you will baptize the next six weeks and maybe you'll come back and, like, be in the mission home next time. We welcome new missionaries. And so the way that they chose trainers was you were not allowed to train a new missionary unless you had baptized six weeks previously.
John Dehlin [00:23:59] And when you say six weeks, you mean six weeks in a row, an entire every week you had a baptism, Is that what you mean?
Emma [00:24:06] Yep, absolutely. You had to have at least one baptism per week, six weeks prior, and then you had to project six more weeks. Like, you had to have six lined up almost ready to be baptized in order to even be chosen as a training area. So they would text, like when transfers were coming, they would text out and they'd be like, who's a training area? And then you would respond and say, we are. Here's our baptisms. And then from the people who had responded, they would choose trainers, which I later came to find out that you could not baptize every week unless you were doing something wrong or against the rules, like against preach my gospel. And so you instantly put missionaries in this position of a terrible companionship. You know, you come from the MTC, where you don't stay up at 10:31. Like, the lights are off at 10:30, like, you are exactly obedient. And then you show up in this mission where it's like, oh, yeah, we just kind of do whatever. So it was like a rough.
John Dehlin [00:25:06] Get baptisms. What I hear you saying is if you need to stay up to 11:30 or 12 at night to get baptisms, you break the rules to get the numbers. Is that what you're saying?
Emma [00:25:17] Exactly. Which I never stayed up past night to get baptisms because it was already dangerous to be out past 6 o'.
John Dehlin [00:25:27] Clock.
Emma [00:25:29] But that was the mentality, like going into the mission. So there's always, like, from what I heard, especially between American companions and native companions, there was a lot of fighting because there was different ideas about what was obedient. But that's how you show up. I had a very. I had a baptism like three days after I got to the field, and then he got confirmed and never came. I never saw him again. And that was my very first baptism was we baptized him, he came to church, got confirmed, and then he was gone. And I was like, who even was that guy? And then the next five weeks were all children. We baptized a lot of eight to nine year olds, and that was predominantly who we baptized, which the parents loved it. You know, it gave them a sense of community. People would come and teach their kids a lot of times we teach them how to read so they could read the Book of Mormon. We would try to teach them English. And so the parents would readily agree, like, yeah, teach my kids, take them to church. That was my first six weeks. And then the next 12 weeks. Yeah, we just had a baptism every single week. And I was just following my trainer. But I remember feeling a lot of, like, fight inside of like, wait a second, like, this doesn't seem right. Like, this doesn't seem like the way it should be going. But then we would go to the mission home and the president would be like, yeah, this is exactly what we're supposed to be doing. So I was like, okay, like, we must be following what we're supposed to be following here.
Pressure to Baptize and Mission Tactics
Guest [00:27:05] So when you baptize somebody and you're fresh into the mission field, is there like this understanding in your missionary brain that like, hooray, like, he's got the gospel, he's gonna go and become member of the church? Or was it already you understood implicitly that like, this person will never see again? Or had you not, like, had that bubble burst yet?
Emma [00:27:24] It definitely burst the first few weeks there because, you know, the first baptism, I had nothing to do with it. Like, I met that person that day and I was like, all right, this person's getting baptized. And then I was like, well, whatever happened happened with the previous missionaries. But then as we got towards the end of my first transfer and they were people I was teaching, and then I started to never see them again, then my bubble burst where I was like, what's happening? This isn't what I thought it was going to be.
Guest [00:27:51] And what you thought it was going to be would be. How could you describe that?
Emma [00:27:55] Yeah, like they would be happy and they'd start to come to church every week and they'd get a calling and they'd be involved and they would be so grateful because we brought them the gospel instead of just disappearing off the face of the earth.
Guest [00:28:09] Yeah, I feel like that is the number one thing my sister told me that burst my bubble even when I was like an active Mormon, like she described. Every missionary has their bubble burst at some point. You go in with like these rose colored glasses about how the world's gonna be, that you're bringing them this amazing gift and people don't suddenly become like Book of Mormon carrying like white shirt wear and tie, like Priesthood Holden, like Peter Priesthoods, as soon as you have them dip in the waters of baptism. Strangely enough, that's not. It's almost like this fairy tale That I hear a lot of missionaries paint in their heads. And it sounds like that kind of is what you went in with a little bit. Until. Yeah, until enough instances happen where you realize that this is not actually making converts out of people.
Emma [00:28:53] Yeah, well. And the whole time it was more like an internal shame of like, oh, what did I do wrong? Oh no. Of like, why aren't they, you know, like it was viewed as if someone doesn't continue as a convert, it was the missionary's fault for not teaching them well enough or for not reviewing the lessons. And so it was like, okay, I need to do the baptisms better. Like it's my fault that they're changing.
Guest [00:29:17] Were you instructed on your mission that during a first discussion you should invite the person to get baptized on the very first discussion?
Emma [00:29:26] We were taught that briefly in the mtc, but after that it wasn't really like encouraged, but we were told there was like a certain number of baptismal dates we were supposed to extend every week.
Guest [00:29:39] Okay, that's. Oh, that's a strange way of. Yeah, like a quota. Because I always heard it's like extend. Don't put baptism off for like a long far awaited date and tell them that that's the intention for you that God has for them is that they should be getting baptized. In the moment you meet somebody, let them know that God intends for them in their life, they should be getting baptized. So if our discussions are going to continue, just know that we want to set a date today for like March 5th with you to do that. But I guess you're saying it's just depends on. You just needed to have a lot of baptism dates thrown out.
Emma [00:30:12] Yeah. So we didn't really do like first lesson extensions unless they were like really into it. But we would like mentally think like, okay, maybe next time we see them or in two times when we see them will like it was always on our mind.
Guest [00:30:28] Right.
Emma [00:30:29] So.
John Dehlin [00:30:31] So, you know, I really relate to this story because I remember going to Guatemala and like they baptize a drunk person or they'd baptize a 8 year old without the parents even knowing. And I remember like I would have thought the spirit at the time, but now looking back, it would have been my conscience basically saying this feels wrong. And you're saying you, that was your immediate feeling was that some of this felt wrong. What felt wrong to you about it if you had to give voice to those feelings that you were feeling inside.
Emma [00:31:08] Um, at the time we were not like quote unquote, being exactly obedient. And so sometimes we would leave the house a little bit late or in the morning. In the morning. Or we would come home early. And so at the time, I was like, the feelings that I'm feeling are guilt because we're not doing everything right, and so it's our fault or we're not giving the lessons correctly. And so, you know, this is why this is happening. Um, but I definitely felt like there was something off, and then that shifted. You know, after I got out of my training phase, and I wasn't just following my trainer, I started to lead that area, and then I was the one calling the shots of, like, okay, we're gonna go visit this person instead of this person, and we're gonna do this. And it still felt off. And so that's when I was having a hard time reconciling, because it's like, I'm doing everything I can, and I still feel bad about this. Like, why do I feel bad about this?
John Dehlin [00:32:07] And it's. It. Was there a point in your mission where you're like, these baptisms are problematic. Like, they're not. These aren't. People aren't converted. These. These people aren't staying in the church, or they don't quite know what they're doing or they're being pressured or influenced. Like, was that early, middle, late in your mission where you started having questions like that?
Emma [00:32:29] I would say early. I had two mission presidents, so the first one was for the first nine months, and the second one was for the second nine months.
John Dehlin [00:32:34] And real quick, was that first mission American or Filipino? And did they have a profession that you knew of, like, what their profession was before being a mission president?
Emma [00:32:45] Yeah, they were both Filipino, and as far as I know, both actually worked for the church. One was, like, a Filipino church historian, and then the other one was a building coordinator. Like, he would make sure all the clocks were right and everything. Um, so they both worked for the church.
John Dehlin [00:33:04] Okay. Okay. And so they're both local Filipinos. And then you were saying about your impressions or intuitions. You had two mission presidents. What. What were you gonna say about that?
Emma [00:33:14] Yeah, the first one was definitely more outright about it, like, the very first day. So our. He called them standards of excellence. These were the things that were expected of us every week as a missionary. So we were expected to find 30 new people to teach every single week. We had to extend 15 baptismal dates every week, have 10 people at church in our ward or branch, and then baptize one person every week. And we would report on those to Our district leaders and zone leaders. So this is what he would bring out. And a lot of us were concerned because we were seeing like, hey, people are going inactive really quickly. But whenever we had a conference with the mission president, he had like these things that he would say. Like one of them would be like, what's better? Five baptisms that go inactive right away or one baptism that stays faithful their whole life. And he would pose this question. And as a missionary, I was thinking one baptism that stays faithful their whole life. And then he'd be like five. And he'd be like, only losers would say one what? Like he literally would say this. And he's like, if you're playing a game of basketball, you know, you don't say that one is better than five. You only say that unless you lose. And he would say things like, it's not your job to make sure they stay active. That's the members job. Your job is to just baptize as many people as you can. And it felt wrong to me because as a missionary you have what's called Preach My Gospel and you read it and you study it.
John Dehlin [00:34:50] What's that?
Emma [00:34:50] Yeah, it's like a guide for a missionary. They have different chapters that include the lessons. They teach you how to feel the spirit, how to study. And in there it's like the, the code and the guide to missionaries. And in there it talks about, you know, teaching them correctly and retention. And what I was reading and Preach My Gospel was contradictory to what I was hearing from my mission.
John Dehlin [00:35:13] What did it say about conversion? Teaching baptism in terms of quality or standards?
Emma [00:35:22] Yeah, Preach My Gospel it talks about, I mean, it did mention extending baptismal dates in the first lesson, but it also talked about taking time with each person and resolving their questions and making sure they understand it. And if someone's not ready, you know, you wait till they're ready. President Hinckley has a quote in there where he says, every person needs a friend. Nourishment from the word of God and a calling. So things that talk about, like retention, it talks about finding less actives and helping them reactivate. But then I would hear from my mission president, like, you don't worry about that. Like you just worry about baptisms. And so I started to feel conflict. Like, this is what Preach My Gospel says, but this is what my mission president says, who do I trust? And so then I would read in the missionary handbook, which is a little white book full of rules, where it talks about, this is when you wake up, this is when you go to Bed. This is what's okay and what's not okay. There's one section towards the end that says that as a missionary you are not allowed to contact general authorities. All questions are deferred to a mission president, to your mission president. So you're not allowed to like reach out to the prophet or any general authorities and ask questions. And I remember reading that and we talked about it with almost all my companions because several of us were like, hey, we think things aren't right, but there's no one that we can talk to about it. So we just have to trust that God will work it out because if we're going to do what's right, we just let them take care of it.
John Dehlin [00:37:03] Yeah, that, that's problematic to me because it can lead because a mission president can have a lot of power. They can have the power to take your passport, to punish you, to exile you. Like these things happen on my mission, you know, the control your communications back home and it's just power. Power can corrupt and so, or to make medical decisions that can really harm you and even lead to long term medical problems for the rest of your life. Deny you health care. They control the money that you receive every month. So if you happen to have an abusive mission president and it's a rule that you can't ever go over their head, you're literally, you know, subjected to potential abuse and there's nowhere to go.
Emma [00:37:50] Yeah. And it felt, that felt very problematic to me even while I was in the field, because we later discovered that there were was potential illegal activity happening in the mission. So in the Philippines, marriage is a really sticky situation. There is no divorce in the Philippines. The only way you can get a divorce is through an annulment which you have to pay like thousands of pesos. It just doesn't happen.
Marriage, Catholicism, and Converting Filipinos
John Dehlin [00:38:17] It's heavily Catholic. Heavily Catholic, yeah.
Emma [00:38:20] Which is why that rule exists because they don't believe in divorce. So there are a lot of people who have a live in partner who are married to someone else because they can't get divorced. So they just live with whoever. And this is problematic for missionaries because you will find so many people that you're teaching and they say they want to be baptized, but you can't baptize, baptize them until they marry that person. And even if someone's never been married before, the process to get married is ridiculously difficult. They have to like pay a fine to get a certificate. You have to travel to like the main city, which for some of my areas was four hours away. So many people just don't get married because it's so difficult. But missionaries to get baptisms would process marriage papers. So I remember traveling to a neighboring area, which was against mission rules, but we got clearing because we were helping someone get baptized. So we went all the way into the mountains to find someone's parents to sign a certificate saying that was their child so that they could get certification to get married. And things like that would happen. And then we would take the papers to the mission office, and the mission office would file their marriage for us. But when that mission president left, we later discovered that there were so many marriages that we thought were valid and real, but we're not.
John Dehlin [00:39:45] So the mission president was kind of faking that there were legitimate marriages because he wanted the numbers and he wanted the baptisms, and he didn't want to have to deal with all the legal ramifications of divorcing people or marrying people. And so he would fake the legitimacy of people's marriages and just tell the missionaries everything was okay.
Emma [00:40:08] And how much of this is, like, factual? It's hard to say, because all of this was, like, the mission gossip that was going around. But we do know that something weird was happening, because I remember one specific couple that they got sealed and then later discovered they weren't actually married. And it caused a lot of problems. But I only knew about that because they were in my particular area at the time when they found out they weren't legally married. And so that's when the talk started of, how many marriages has this happened to? But as a missionary, it's hard to find out what's actually going on because you're discouraged from talking to other missionaries that are not in your district, that are not in your zone, that are not in your area. And so, like, factual information was hard to come by. I could only, like, know what I heard and what I experienced in my area. So I don't really know exactly everything that happened, but this is what I'm assuming happened. And this is, like, what people in my mission thought was going on was the illegal marriages. And I remember taking papers to the office, and they were like, yeah, we'll take care of it for you. And then it didn't happen.
John Dehlin [00:41:21] Yeah, like, this. This developing country dynamic, along with high pressure to get numerical success, leads to all sorts of abuses, like beach party baptisms in Chile, where you just go to the beach, have a party, and then baptize whoever's there. Or the soccer baptisms, where you just play soccer and then you baptize all the kids, you know, that are there without parental consent, without lessons. But also you hear about like gravestone baptisms where for some reason Mormon missionaries would go to gravestones, get names and dates off of tombstones, fill out the paperwork as if a real baptism happened, but it was actually dead people, and then submit those as, as actual baptisms happening. And for the past 40, 50, 60, 70 years, these things just keep recurring mission across mission. So it would make total sense to me that this setup would lead to, to kind of fraudulent marital paperwork as, as a, as an incentive to increase the numbers. It's just, it's every mission story I've ever heard. Really? No, no, you know, it's just, it's ubiquitous for some reason.
Emma [00:42:32] Yeah. And as far as I know, like no grave side baptisms were happening, but there were occurrences where I found out one of the people that we were teaching had smoked and drank the day before his baptism, which you're supposed to have four weeks of abstinence from that in the Philippines. And I reported that to my district leader. I was like, hey, he's not going to be able to be baptized because this happened. And it got back to the APs, and then the APs called and were like, baptize him anyway. And so we did. And then of course this member never showed up because he felt shame because we're taught that drinking and smoking is sinful. And he was suddenly supposed to be clean. And then right off the bat was dealing with all the sin and shame. And so then we never saw him. We saw him for like two weeks after that. And then he wouldn't, I think he moved. He like didn't want to see us ever again. And so things like that happened. I remember there was this 8 year old girl and she couldn't answer the baptismal questions correctly. There's a list of questions that you're asked to see if you're worthy or ready to be baptized. And she didn't know the answers. And so my district leader didn't pass her. He was like, hey, I don't think she's ready. Just keep teaching her and we'll try again a different time. And then the AP's found out again and they called us and they were like, why isn't this baptism happening? And we're like, well, she's not ready. We're going to try again later. And they were like, if he doesn't pass her, we will come down there and do the interview ourselves. And so then the AP's drove 4 hours to my area to interview this girl who everyone there knew wasn't ready, and then she got baptized the next day.
Guest [00:44:17] And in your like, missionary brain cell. Because I know we could speak about, like today how we view those. But as at that time, how did you view like their extreme intent on having so many baptism? Did you view it as like, oh, they know better that this person really should be baptized? Or did you really see it as just like, wow, they're really into the numbers. Like, how did you view it at the time? Like, their, their intensity on that.
Emma [00:44:41] It was kind of. It changed over time, I think. At first I was, I thought that they were caught up in like they were into the baptisms, and then I knew they were worried about the numbers. It just kind of evolved of like trying to reconcile why is this happening. And it started to like, become tension in the mission where you would have missionaries that were trying to do things right in quotes and then missionaries that cared about numbers. And I remember just fighting with some elders that were like, hey, sisters, you're not baptizing weekly. You must be doing something wrong. And I remember getting into fights with my district leaders and being like, we are actually doing it right, whereas other people aren't. But when we spoke about those things, we would get in trouble. And then it would just go back to like, this is what the mission president is asking us to do. If you don't follow the mission president, you are actually disobedient. And so it was just this huge struggle that was hard to reconcile of like, how do we deal with this? Yeah, I just didn't really know how to deal with it.
Guest [00:45:48] Cluster of a lot of competing interests sounds like, as well, like, where do you actually know and go? Go for what you're supposed to do. That's gotta be really tough. Missions everyone already knows is already you're physically exhausted, you're mentally exhausted, spiritually exhausted, you're hungry. And then it's. It's gotta be really, really tough to battle all of that day to day.
John Dehlin [00:46:09] Oftentimes you're sick and you have diarrhea or you've had diarrhea for weeks or months, stomach problems, amoebas, dysentery. Like, it's. There's a lot, let alone safety and fear about being assaulted or abused. Like, it's intense.
Emma [00:46:24] And it's important to note that even if you feel almost deathly sick, there's like this shame involved in. If you take time to rest, like, you're expected to go. There are no rest days. And so even if you're sick, you're just out there going anyway.
Baptism Quotas, Competition, and Misconduct
John Dehlin [00:46:43] So I'm curious, if you think about your conscience, there's, there's a way to kind of view this. Well, first of all, what. Do you remember the highest baptizing months your mission had in terms of like how many missionaries and how many baptisms at most your mission had in a month?
Emma [00:47:08] Yes. Christmas in July, we would have this initiative called White Christmas, where it was our gift to Christ to baptize as many people in one day as possible. And so missionaries would like, hoard baptisms, like, while baptizing weekly as much as possible. They would save some for this certain day. So I remember companionships, like baptizing 13 people on this day. And it was like a push, a
John Dehlin [00:47:36] single companionship, having 13 baptisms in a single day, day.
Emma [00:47:41] And mission wide, everyone was supposed to be baptizing as many people as they could on that single day. So it was like December 23rd and mission wide. I think we baptized like 300 plus people in one day in our entire mission.
John Dehlin [00:47:57] But, but do you remember the. The highest number per month in your mission of total baptisms in a month? So like we had over 700amonth. Chile had over a thousand a month with only 200, 250 missionaries. Right. So do you remember?
Emma [00:48:13] I don't remember per month, but I do remember that specific day. Like in one day it was over 300.
John Dehlin [00:48:18] Yeah. So maybe 5, 6, 700amonth in your mission.
Emma [00:48:22] I think I remember hearing, I could be wrong. Like 1000 was the highest we reached in one month.
John Dehlin [00:48:29] Yeah, yeah. Because if every, let's just say there's 120. Let's say there's a hundred companionships if they're baptizing at least once a week on average, that's four weeks times a hundred companionships. That's four. That's at least 400 baptisms if everyone's able to baptize at least once a week. But if they're able to get more than that, it can be five, six, seven, eight, nine hundred, a thousand. Right?
Emma [00:48:55] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:48:55] Okay. The other thing, you know, I remember being taught on my mission, meet your goal. This my mission. President Gordon Romney, meet your golden family in the morning and baptize them by the afternoon. And so they, you know, we were frequently taught early on, yeah, you can baptize people the same day you meet them. And I was like, wait a minute, they haven't had all the six discussions yet. Like, they haven't even learned about eternal families. Or the plan of salvation. Like on the first day they just, they kind of learn about God and Jesus and Joseph Smith and the church, like in the first discussion or two. And there would be anything from teach them all six discussions, which are one hour each. They're supposed to be one hour each. Teach them all six discussions in the same day. Or in my mission it was, oh, you can baptize them after one discussion. And the justification that would be used would be once they get the gift of the Holy Ghost, they'll be able to learn better lessons two through six, once they've got the gift of the Holy Ghost. So it's actually better to baptize them in on the first day you meet them, if you can, you know. And so there would be this pressure to literally find them and baptize them on the same day. Is that, did that happen in your mission?
Emma [00:50:12] So one of the only rules that stuck from Elder Oaks was to ensure retention, they had to go to church four times within a six week period in order to be baptized. So we didn't have any like same day baptisms. Although I can assume that in some other areas it probably happened because we had several people that we reported like, oh, they were supposed to come into church this week, but they didn't. So they can't be baptized. But because that was supposed to be our baptism that week, it was like, nope, baptize them anyway. Even though, you know, they were supposed to go. Just do it anyway.
John Dehlin [00:50:47] Yeah. So even. Yeah. And in our mission we were baptizing like gangbusters. But then the church realized this was getting out of control. So they sent Elder Ballard to our mission and he implemented a rule that that was they had to have all six discussions and go to church at least two Sundays before they could get baptized. That came, let's just say, a year into our mission. So after things were going crazy and so we all thought, well, are we in trouble? Like, did the mission president, has he been leading us wrong? And. And we would, we would change our practices at first based on Elder Ballard's recommendations. But then over time there would be exceptions and they were, oh, well, they're sick or they had to travel from really far distance. And if we don't do it now, president. And so it went from like obeying the, the, you know, the prophet or the, the apostle to, well, obey the apostle unless you get special permission from the mission president. And then it eventually moved to, well, zone leaders. If the mission president is not available, then zone leaders could approve it. And within without within a little amount of time, even though an apostle had given the new rules within a few months, the mission is just back to do baptizing whoever they wanted, whenever they wanted.
Emma [00:52:06] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:52:07] And that. Does that sound familiar in your.
Emma [00:52:09] Yeah. We actually rarely were allowed to contact my first mission president. He was very much like, hey, there's a line of authority. There's people you need to contact first. So you couldn't contact your zone leader unless you talk to your district leader first and so on. And so it was like district leader, zone leader, AP's mission president. And you could not talk to the one above it unless you talked to the one below. And so we never even were able to talk to the mission president. President. My first mission president. That was his rule. And so it would always stop at the aps. The APS, to me seemed like the big bad guys, where it's like, I don't even want to talk to them because they're just gonna say, baptize them anyway. And one of my APS was actually brought up to what I believe to be like, the golden child of the mission. He only had two areas his entire mission and was like, born is the word they use for when you first enter your first area. He was born in the office. And so right off the bat, he already had weekly baptisms. And then one of my friends from the MTC was in an area next to his, and the APs took over their area because the APs were running out of baptisms. So overnight in a transfer, she was really upset because they had worked really hard is what she said. And they had eight baptisms lined up. And then the next day, they found out that the APS were going to take over their area, and then they baptized them. Because this AP was like the mission president's child of example, where it's like, Elder. I'm not going to say his last name because I did not get permission, but like, Elder, so. And so has baptized. Baptized 96 weeks, his entire mission. And so, like, it can be done. But I just remember he went to a whole different area to baptized someone and counted it as his own. It was just this whole plot of, like, this certain elder is going to be the example for the entire mission of you can actually baptize every week, even though you think you can't.
John Dehlin [00:54:08] So an AP used his power to poach con. To poach investigators from the sister missionaries to pad his string and record of weekly baptisms.
Emma [00:54:21] But I believe that it was plotted by the mission president because the Mission president was the one who chose this elder to be in the office and keep him there baptizing weekly. And once they found out, then he was like, all right, we're gonna have your area be this one.
John Dehlin [00:54:35] Now go ahead.
Guest [00:54:37] You know me and I love making like joke analogy examples. Just reminds me of somebody like going hunting at like a reindeer farm or something. Like, yeah, cool. Like you found one, like shooting fish in a barrel. Like shooting fish in a barrel or something. Like you poached it. Congratulations. It was a fenced in area. You couldn't have failed. Like set up for success.
John Dehlin [00:54:56] Yeah, there was. I saw this, I think. Oh, it was, it was the, the TV series succession where all these rich people, billionaires go to like this place in the UK where they're all dressed up in their hunting garb and they have their weapons and literally they have these animals in cages right in front of where they are and they let all the animals out at once and all the animals, like a gazillion animals run all in front of the rich people and then they just start shooting and they're able to say they kill.
Guest [00:55:25] Look, Daddy, look what I found.
John Dehlin [00:55:28] I killed the buck, you know, 12 points. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a, it's a Potemkin town. It's a, it's a fraud. It's a ruse. But, but, you know, it happens. I was going to, I was going to ask. So were there, were their sales incentives? Were there rewards? Like in our mission, if you got seven baptisms in a month, you would get a certificate with your name on it and you'd get your name in the newsletter that then got sent all the missionaries. So everyone would know who are the missionaries that got 10 or more a month for the newsletter? The seven got you the, the certificate with your name on it. And then if you got 10 or more in a month, you got a Janice Cap Parry serving with joy cassette tape. And you'd get to come up in zone conference and stand in front of the zone. But the mission president would give you your certificate, give you your cassette and like applaud you in front of all the other missionaries. And then if you, if you and your companionship got 10 in a month, you got to go to a special steak dinner at a party and the mission president would throw a party, and only the companionships that got 10 or more would be able to go to the party. Like, that's the way our mission rolled. Were there either incentives, rewards or leadership opportunities that were tied to statistical success?
Emma [00:56:49] Absolutely. I would say a little bit less obvious than what happened in your mission. But we had a weekly. We called it the Belief the Eye, which is a newsletter that would get emailed to every missionary every week. And it would have the Belief the Eye. It's the Hilligan word for newsletter, I think newsletter.
John Dehlin [00:57:08] Okay.
Emma [00:57:09] But it would have, like, week, 96 week this. So it have every single week. And then your name would appear by how many weeks consecutively you had baptized. And if you missed one week, your name would be removed, or I think they would make it, like, small. It would be really small under that week. But if it was, like, actual consecutively, it would be in big, bold letters like, sister so and so baptized 14 weeks in a row. And that one AP was always at the top. I think there's 96 weeks in a mission. And he made it all the way to the end of his mission without missing a week. And that was mailed out every single week. And then they would do to welcome new missionaries. You were only invited to the mission home to eat really good food and stay, like, kind of have a day off unless, like, you had to have baptized weekly. And the reason he did that was so that you could stand up and he'd say, who baptized the past six weeks? And then you'd sit down if you hadn't. So he would only invite weekly people in to showcase them to the new missionaries coming into.
John Dehlin [00:58:14] They're called weekly people.
Emma [00:58:16] Yeah, we would just call it weekly baptizing. Just like, are you. Weekly was kind of our vocab, and that's how I'm weekly.
John Dehlin [00:58:24] Are you weekly? Oh, you're not weak. She's not weekly. He's not. I mean, was it that kind of culture?
Emma [00:58:29] A little bit, yeah. Like, we would just see people's names. Like, I remember companions that we had never met before, and they were like, oh, I just remember seeing your name on the thing. And I knew that you would be a good companion because you were weekly. Like, it was just a thing we talked about. And you. Like I said, you couldn't train unless you were weekly and had been the last six weeks. So you weren't allowed to be a trainer.
John Dehlin [00:58:53] That's a. That's a position of status in the mission, right?
Emma [00:58:56] It is. It's seen as a position of status, a position of, like, you're righteous. And so you were given this opportunity. This was unsaid but obvious. All of the APs were our highest baptizers and APs.
John Dehlin [00:59:09] To non Mormons, AP means assistant to the president.
Emma [00:59:12] So right underneath the mission president.
John Dehlin [00:59:14] And what was their role? How is that different from being a regular missionary?
Emma [00:59:18] Yeah. So the assistance to the president got to be in the office, which. So for most of the time, instead of being out, like walking through the
John Dehlin [00:59:25] dirt and knocking doors in villages. Right.
Emma [00:59:28] They got to sit in an air conditioned office and type away at a computer. But yet somehow they still had time to go baptize people every week.
John Dehlin [00:59:36] But they also got cars, usually when a lot of the missionaries wouldn't have cars. And they could drive all around the mission with their cars and help get. Help encourage other companionships to get the baptisms correct.
Emma [00:59:51] Yeah. Only companionship with a car were the elders in the office.
John Dehlin [00:59:55] Yeah.
Emma [00:59:55] You could not be an assistant to the president unless you were male. That's just a side note there. You had to be an elder. Yep.
Guest [01:00:04] Brad Wilcox told me that women get all the same benefits as men. Apparently not. Oh, this is rocking my world.
Emma [01:00:10] Brad Wilcox says a lot of things.
Guest [01:00:12] Brad Wilcox does say a lot of things.
Emma [01:00:15] But yeah, that I'm trying to think of what else were incentives. But basically you were just paraded around the mission. You know, we weren't given like gift cards or anything. But I do remember whether this is accurate or not, it was the culture in the mission that there was rumors that it didn't matter how many rules you broke, as long as you baptized weekly, the mission president would not send you home. And I never talked to these missionaries, so I don't know if it's true, but there was rumor of one elder who went to a completely different island, had a party weekend, did whatever he wanted, and came back and baptized that weekend. And so he was fine. And then there were rumors of missionaries who were trying so hard to do their best, but because they didn't baptize weekly, they were like, sent home.
John Dehlin [01:00:57] Yeah.
Emma [01:00:58] So whether that is true or not, that was the culture that was being passed around in our mission.
John Dehlin [01:01:03] So in my mission, the. The APS would literally drive their cars to other countries and do tourist excursions. And you're not supposed to leave your mission, let alone the country. Yeah, they would leave the country, drive to, like, Honduras, go on tourist excursions, because they would get their 10 baptisms on Saturday. And they were leaders, so they could do whatever they wanted. And so. And they would take the zone leaders that they were buddy buddies with who also were getting 10 or 20 or 40 baptisms a month. It was like this insider corruption, kind of like different rules for the baptizing elite where in fact, the mission, the, the zone leaders in the APS were often the most disobedient missionaries who had the most privilege, who had the cars and who also had the most baptisms. And they had the most privilege from the mission president, this weird system.
Toxic Mission Culture and Lack of Accountability
Emma [01:02:02] And it was also rumored that, you know, the APs and the elders in the office would read your weekly email to the mission president because every week you were expected to email him. And so no one actually said anything to the mission president because we, at least I was afraid that other people would read it. So I had zero relationship with my mission president other than seeing him talk to us at zone conferences.
Guest [01:02:30] Are we ever going to take a break here just to say like how strange it is that we're talking about people's like quote unquote salvation, at least in their minds or in the church's minds. These are real people. Each one of these people that we're talking about, these are not just like numbers. These are real people who you're messing with their lives.
John Dehlin [01:02:45] Missionaries or the converts.
Guest [01:02:46] The converts, quote, unquote Gomberts. But like the actual people, the people who the baptismes, like, you're not only, you're messing with their lives and how they view themselves. And like you mentioned this person who felt all the shame because they drank and smoke and like you're kind of like undoing and messing with a lot of their ideas in their head and their culture and possibly their marriage and their family, whether they stick with the church or not. And then also it's all just kind of at the end of the day to stroke somebody's ego. Like some punk 18 year old kid from Idaho who's like, got a, got a great story for when he comes home and there's just all of these lies.
John Dehlin [01:03:22] Some ambitious mid level bureaucrat Mormon mission president that's trying to become a general authority and is trying to get the numbers so that they can get promoted up the, the corporate ladder, basically.
Guest [01:03:34] Yeah. There's so many, you know, you get me talking about missionary work in like developing countries and you're undoing certain cultural norms, whether it's drinking tea or just the way that their family dynamics work. You're doing uprooting all of this for what? For like, cool, you got a bunch of numbers now and like you're the man when you go back home and you got like a really cool first date story to tell for the rest of your life.
John Dehlin [01:03:56] Yeah, yeah. I mean there's the whole colonialism, like, you know, cultural colonialism stuff, but More Mormons should really get it. Because what happens to a Mormon if they lose their faith and, or convert to another religion? What happens to their marriage, to their parents, to their children, to their extended family? It's like the worst possible thing for a Mormon to leave Mormonism. And yet Mormons never think about the fact that when we send out 40 to 80,000 missionaries worldwide in a given year, we're literally doing that to other people. We're telling them that their religion is inferior, we're telling them that their religion isn't true. We're telling them that we know what's best for them and potentially if their families at all faithful, we're uprooting and disrupting their entire cultural, familial, social context. And it's. Yeah. And it's highly disruptive. It's kind of culturally arrogant and colonialistic. And oftentimes, if not done with the right spirit, it's literally for just flexing bragging rights, statistical success that oftentimes actually has no tangible meaning either to the church locally or to the lives of the converts.
Guest [01:05:13] Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of ick. Pretty ick.
John Dehlin [01:05:18] Yeah. I was also just gonna say really quickly, just to add Cara to what you're saying, this culture of like, don't ever speak above the person you're reporting to is an essential component of a culture of, of, of rule breaking and plausible deniability. Because you don't want the mission president knowing that all these corrupt, fraudulent baptisms are happening. They need to not know that the quality of baptisms that are the drunks are being baptized. Just mentally handicapped people are being baptized. Unmarried people are being baptized. People who haven't had the discussions or don't know what they're doing are getting baptized. The mission president can't know that. So the mission president wants a culture of, of not going over the heads of the people above them so there's not a culture of tattletailing so that the good things that are happening statistically don't get ruined. And that's why when I, when I complained to my mission president about the baptismal fraud I experienced by the assistance of the president, he punished me and sent me 6 hours from the nearest telephone and 12 hours bus ride from the mission home.
Emma [01:06:33] Because.
John Dehlin [01:06:34] Because tattletailing or whistleblowing ruins it. And so you have to have this culture of never going above your immediate leader. Does that make sense?
Emma [01:06:45] Yeah, I total makes sense. I think he would always talk about the line of authority, the line of authority over and over again. And I Didn't feel like there was anyone I could talk to about the bad things that I saw happening. And even if you did try to talk to someone, they didn't have the answers. Like, I never felt like I could talk to my mission president. And I was afraid that if I did, it would have bad consequences for myself. And so some of, like the rumors that I've talked about, who knows what is actually factual in that? But that's what was being talked about between the missionaries. But no one was able to go to a higher source and say, is this happening because I'm concerned or is this true? I don't know. And so it was just, things were happening, it was passed around, no one knew. And to go back to what Kara was saying about like, we're messing with people's lives. The people in the Philippines are extremely poor. And just to get to church, it would cost. It was like a 7 peso ride per person to get to the building and 7 pesos back. That's 14 pesos times however many people in your family. 50 pesos for rice. These people were starving, yet we were telling them to pay to go to church. And I remember one family telling me, they were like, we don't have money to eat this week. And I shared a scripture, I read it in my journal, and I was just horrified at what I had said. But I said, man cannot live by bread alone, but by the word of God, have that thing memorized. And I convinced these people to starve that week so they could sit in a chapel for three hours for basically nothing. And it. I'm just like horrified that that was something. Like, I would tell people that all the time.
John Dehlin [01:08:35] There's a. There's a video that I made for the Understanding Mormonism channel about tithing that has general authorities literally telling people in developing countries, if you have to choose between food and paying your tithing, you pay your tithing. And this is a church with like hundreds of billions of dollars of stock, portfolio, real estate, cash, investments. We've got a trillion, effectively a trillion dollar American church telling Filipinos without shoes and food to give money to the church before they buy food.
Emma [01:09:09] And we would guilt trip them. Like, at the time, I didn't realize what I was doing. But we would say things like, I came all the way here from America. I don't get to see my family. I don't get to talk to them. Like, I'm missing out on so many things. So I can bring this message to you. Like, you need to do this. And we would use those tactics. Like me, a privileged white American who gets to go home to their nice house that has flooring and heating and water, telling these people that they need to sacrifice everything and devote it to the church and literally starve. And there was a quote that was taught to us. I don't remember who it was by, but I wrote it in my study journal and I read it last week and I was like, I cannot believe. I used to believe this, but it said, God keeps the Filipino people poor so that he can save them all. And we don't. You know, we're spending so much money to send people to the Philippines, yet we're not helping them in literal ways that they actually need help. We're just going to keep them poor so that we can save them. It's seriously wrong.
Poverty, Exploitation, and the Church's Impact
John Dehlin [01:10:18] Carry. Your mouth is still open. Your mouth has been open for, like, two minutes.
Guest [01:10:23] If I keep it like this, then I won't just, like, rant. I'll just keep it like that because then I would have so many things to say. Man, anyone listening to this? God is not keeping you poor to save you. Let me just set that record straight. That is not a true thing. No, no, no, that's.
John Dehlin [01:10:40] And now when you look back, how. What do you think or feel about believing that?
Emma [01:10:45] I feel terrible. Like, just remembering all of the things that I would say to people. And I. I actually cared about these people. But the things that I taught them, like, there's just. Even now, there's guilt. Of, like. Of course, I didn't really realize at the time, but I did that, and I can't take it back. Like, there's so many people, you know, we were expected to baptize weekly. There's like 60 plus people that are required to pay 10 of their money to the church. They spend so much money to get there. They spend all their time when we could be helping them. Instead, we're asking them to help us.
Guest [01:11:30] Did the church have resources for people? Because at least, like, how I understand it, people can pay into the system and that they can get, you know, bishop storehouse food or anything. Like, did that money, did they ever come back and see it in any substantial way? Like, they get food from the church or housing assistance or anything like that.
Emma [01:11:47] From what I understand, it's based off of fast offerings, which are only by your ward or branch. So there was very little, like, assistance coming from the church to its members that I saw. Obviously, missionaries are not super involved in that, you know, because they're focused on other things. But There weren't very many people that talked to us about support that they received from the church.
John Dehlin [01:12:15] Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it can be part of the dark side. And you know, we talked about this in a recent episode. Kara, I. We can get outraged about this, but if we're trying to be fair, number one, I believe that the church leaders believe that the, the gospel, meaning Mormon, Mormonism, following the principles of the Church of Jesus Christ. I really do believe that the leaders believe that it helps these people, everyone, including people in developing countries. And I saw it sometimes, sometimes in Latino culture. I think it's very similar to Filipino culture. If these men didn't have religious structure, they might have multiple wives in multiple villages. They might get, you know, go, go to bars and get drunk a lot, not be great spouses, maybe be abusive when they were drunk, maybe father lots of children with different, you know, households. Not a great family setting. And if they follow the gospel, followed the law of chastity, paid their tithing, served in the church, got the community of the church as a support, it could lift them out of poverty and who knows, maybe they'd even get an education, move to the States and like, improve their, the lot, their lives for themselves and for their children. Let's, let's to try and be fair and balanced. Did you see that happen at times?
Emma [01:13:50] I did hear some rumors of that for my time. We actually mostly baptized a lot of children, so it's hard without their parents. We did have to get parental consent.
John Dehlin [01:14:02] But you baptize a lot of children with the parents not being baptized, am I right?
Emma [01:14:06] Correct.
John Dehlin [01:14:06] Yeah, yeah, that was. Most of the Guatemalan baptisms were like 8 to 10 year olds. Parents even never got baptized.
Emma [01:14:12] But yeah, so it's hard to say, like, oh, yeah, they completely changed because for the most part they were just children and they were already who they were. They didn't change much. The few people that I was a part of their baptism that were like older and could potentially have some great change to their life were most of the people that like left and I never saw again that were, had been smoking the night before or were already a drunk. I think it just capitalized on their shame. But I do. Like there were stories of that happening. I just didn't see it in my experience.
John Dehlin [01:14:57] So in your two year and a half as a, as a Mormon missionary in the Philippines, you did not see the, the Mormon Church improve a lot of the lives of the people that you baptized?
Emma [01:15:10] I saw it through people that had been part of the church for a long time, like members that their families had been baptized when missionaries first arrived in the Philippines. But for some historical context, when missionaries first arrived in the Philippines, they were taught. They only taught people who spoke English and were wealthy members so that they could support the church there. So most of these people, you know, have a good family support system. You know, all of those values that would cultivate a good home setting were already in their families. And I saw that continue through members that were in the church. It did provide a good sense of community. In the Philippines, the church is where most of the people spent their free time. Like they would just hang out there. And it was a good place for them to go because their homes often were not great or they didn't have plumbing there or other things. So the benefits that I saw were mostly to long members of the church and not new members. And I think a big problem of that was that we were so focused on baptizing new people that no one took the time to care for the new members that you often see in the states of like the love bombing and offering the community was not really something that happened in the Philippines. They were just lost.
John Dehlin [01:16:38] Wow. So what about. So in Guatemala, after these baptismal practices kind of became ubiquitous, you would have wards, wards with like over a thousand members of record, but maybe only 20 people attending. So like, you know, inactivity rates as high as 90 to 95% of the ward. Imagine trying to home teach. Yeah. 100 people because they're, you know, there's only 20, 30, 40 active members. But then you've got a thousand people that need to be visited or visit taught. You can't even find the people, let alone visit them all. And then stakes similarly where, where the, the wards and the branches and the stakes and even the buildings expanded to meet the numbers and the roles were filled, but the actual, you know, the roles of the wards and the branches were filled, but the actual attendance was super small. Like not even enough male priesthood leadership to even staff the basic leadership positions within the branch award. What. Did you have any insight into the membership records and the activity rates and how that affected the vitality of the branches and wards?
Emma [01:18:02] Yeah, there were definitely tons of names on the record that no one had any idea who they were. And actually created tension between missionaries and
John Dehlin [01:18:12] the leaders and district leaders. Right?
Emma [01:18:15] Yep. Stake, district.
John Dehlin [01:18:16] Describe that tension.
Emma [01:18:18] Yeah, so we would meet with them and they would. It would either be like a passive aggression of them being upset that the primary was just full of children, that the leaders were expected to take care of that. No parents were there to support them or they were upset that we were just baptizing people, that they then had to expend more resources to try and outreach. We often didn't work very closely with the ward or branch leaders because of that tension. But I remember one time we attempted, I got a new mission president and this mission president was more for, hey, let's work on reactivating. We still had the expectation to baptize once every week at one time he even said twice a week, like two per week. But he was like, hey, it's okay to spend time reactivating people. And I remember the, the bishop in that ward being upset, but also like, it's finally time that someone is actually going to do this. Because I think it was like 80 to 90% inactive and they hardly had enough people to give callings to for like the basic functions of their words.
John Dehlin [01:19:30] Yeah. So this is a really important thing. Most Mormons don't know and certainly non Mormons don't know that the Mormon church boasts 16 plus million members. But half of the people who have been baptized Mormon in the world are outside of the United States. And of that half of the 8 million who were baptized outside of the United States, the activity rates are something like 10, 10%. And a huge percentage of like baptized Mormons in Brazil or baptized Mormons in Chile or baptized Mormons in the Philippines. The church counts them on their total membership statistics, but they don't even consider themselves Mormon. And when they report to the census, the Brazilian census, the Chile census, the Filipino census, there's only a fraction of actual self identifying Mormons relative to the number of Mormons that the church claims. And what this leads to is the church boasting 16, 17 million members, but actually only having 3 to 4 million active members actually attending church. Having temple recommends paying tithing and holding colleagues. So it's kind of a deceptive thing for the church to ever say 16 million Mormons. It's more like 3 to 4 million.
Guest [01:20:58] I'm looking at the church newsroom right now on their total church membership of Filipinos. Do you want to guess what they say? How many Filipinos are members of the church? Guess.
John Dehlin [01:21:07] Let's have, let's have our guest guess.
Emma [01:21:11] Oh, this could either be way off or way under. I want to say maybe like 5. 5 million probably. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
John Dehlin [01:21:22] Okay, I'll say 100,000 just to go low so that you can shock us, Kara.
Guest [01:21:28] 805,000 total church membership in the Philippines. Philippines. 805,000.
John Dehlin [01:21:34] So almost a million.
Guest [01:21:35] Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:21:35] And we know you're, you're telling us that the activity rates are probably 10% or less. So there. Right. There is almost a million 800,000 that the church is boasting when really there's probably only 80, 80 to 100,000 actually attending. Right?
Emma [01:21:50] Yeah. They have something like 805 stakes at this point just in the little Philippines
Guest [01:21:56] and they have two temples and guess how many are under construction or announced that and guess who announced them. Most of them. There's like six temples that have been announced by Nelson. Yeah, some of them have had some groundbreaking, others haven't. But a couple by Monson, the rest by Nelson though.
John Dehlin [01:22:13] And I've been told by an inside source, by the way, this is kind of breaking news. We need to include this in maybe a scoops episode. I found out the re one of another reason why Nelson is announcing so many temples in addition to a flex of like it's his, it's his legacy to be the highest temple building Mormon profit. It turns out that for the church to maintain its tax exempt status, for the Mormon church to maintain its tax exempt status as a charity or as a church, it has to do something with its money. And so building temples is one of the major ways the church can spend a boatload of money with all this cash that it keeps collecting and stay in business and be perceived as a, as a, a charitable institution. So that's one of the main finance based accountant, you know, IRS based reasons for Nelson building so many gosh darn
Guest [01:23:14] temples makes total sense. What part of the Bible or Book of Mormon is that in again? That Jesus told everyone to file under things under tax exemption status and let all of the buildings just go empty. That I missed that part. Oh, okay.
John Dehlin [01:23:27] Yeah. I mean it's hard not to be snarky because that's. Think about how many mouths that could feed, how clean water, literacy, disaster relief. Like there's so many Christ like things that money could be done with and it's, it's, it's being used to get contracts to build ornate buildings with fancy chandeliers and expensive paintings on the wall and construction contracts for families of general authority or you know, cronies of general authorities. Not necessarily. Like you said, I even care. There's some truth to what you're saying. The Book of Mormon condemns wealth and displays of wealth and conspicuous materialism and consumption. Right?
Guest [01:24:07] Yeah. That's not the Jesus that I was down with and I think the church knows that. It's roots that it's that I think members know that that is not the Christ that they're worshiping, would be for all of these gaudy temples. But alas, we go on. The tax exemption status must go on.
Emma [01:24:23] But I mean, going back to like people actually believing that it's doing good, I believed that if these people were sealed to their family, that it would make them happier than any real house that they could be in. And so, you know, that's why it continues. Because in the moment you actually think that this is helping them. But if you get some space and you think about like, you know, basic needs aren't actually being met here, so much more good could be done than what is currently happening.
John Dehlin [01:24:56] So problematic. So did you have, do you remember the lowest number of sort of like attending wards? So wards you attended, what's the lower number? Lowest number of kind of Sunday church attendance? Because in the United states it'd be 250 people active attending a Mormon ward on a Sunday. What was the lowest number of attending members you saw on a Sunday in the Philippines for a Filipino ward?
Emma [01:25:30] Yeah, I want to be fair because I know that it's not accurate for the whole mission. I was usually in like the mountain outskirt areas. So in the cities it's going to be much larger. But from what I saw, the lowest that we had, that wasn't a branch because the branch was maybe like 20 people. But for a ward it was around 30 to 50. For a whole ward?
John Dehlin [01:25:55] Yeah. In the United States, 30 to 50 is a branch, not a ward. But in developing countries they do things differently, right?
Emma [01:26:03] Yeah. And there's actually talk because it's based off of active priesthood holders per area. And so there was one ward that we were in that was soon going to be demoted to a branch. And there was like this huge push of like, we gotta reactivate some people because they didn't want to be demoted to a branch. But you could have only like 12 priesthood holders going. But because they're all priesthood holders, it could still be considered a ward. That's how they base the status.
John Dehlin [01:26:33] Yeah. And what's happening in, over the past couple years, in 2022, is that they're just collapsing. They're, they're shutting down wards and branches and stakes and missions worldwide. As the Mormon Church starts to really collapse domestically and foreign, it's just having to collapse these wards and branches and stakes and missions because it's, it, the church is imploding and it's realizing that a ward, it's better to have one ward with 200 active attending people with a youth program and a relief society and an elders quorum that's vibrant. It's better to have that type of ward than eight wards where there's only 30 or 40 members attending. But it means they have to shrink and contract and then they have to sell off all these buildings. And so you see in 2022, every week a new Mormon chapel is up for sale somewhere in the United States or somewhere across the world because they've over expanded and now they're having to contract or they're going to kill the church. These baptismal practices are contributing to the death of the modern Mormon Church, full stop. True.
Emma [01:27:40] Absolutely. And for me personally, my struggle with my first mission president specifically and what happened on my mission was the real beginning of like my faith transition.
John Dehlin [01:27:54] How so?
Emma [01:27:56] I came home and I was really struggling, especially with my first mission president because it was like he wasn't doing things right. And my question was, how could God call someone like this to be a mission president if he is all knowing like why, why would he do that? And it's not like just some bishop in a ward where there's not many options, you know, and you just call the best you can. Like this is a mission president. You have the entire church population to pick from and this is the man that you picked. And this, these are the things that he did. And even on the mission, I recognized the first nine months of my mission were absolute hell. So it's like, why? Why would he do that? And I couldn't understand. And I remember coming home and talking to my parents about it and they shared with. And what I would say is I would never share this with anyone who didn't serve a mission because they wouldn't understand. Because I didn't want to wreck anyone else's testimony. It's like, oh, you can only understand this if you've like served a mission. But when I shared this with my parents, what they said to me was, this is actually more common than you think. And they shared with me about brothers experiences where one of my brothers had said there was like a drug ring happening in his mission, there was like lots of sexual activity happening in other missions. And I was just shocked that this was one, a normal occurrence. But two, like, if we really believe that the prophet calls the mission presidents through revelation from God, it's all part of his plan. Why would that be part of his plan? I didn't understand.
John Dehlin [01:29:33] Yeah. And I relate because, you know, I'm Viewed these days, I. I jokingly refer to myself as Mormon Voldemort. If I, if I were to pinpoint the first major crack in my testimony, it was my mission and seeing these abusive practices, reporting it to my mission president. And later, ironically, when I got home, I reported these baptismal practices to who? Elder Down, H. Oaks, and actually talked to him on the phone. And I said, these baptism practices are corrupt and they're wrong. And he apologized. And that was in 1990, 1991. Which people are like, what? Elder Oaks apologized? Yeah, once upon a time. He did apologize, but at least privately, but not publicly. But the church has known about these baptismal practices not just since the late 80s, early 90s. They've known about these baptismal practices since the early 1960s. And somehow this happens time and time again, and they can't or they won't fix it. And it does cause many missionaries to ultimately lose their faith.
Emma [01:30:39] And they had, you know, with my first, my second mission president coming in, they had Elder Tay come in, who was like, over the Philippines general authority or whatever.
John Dehlin [01:30:49] Area authority.
Emma [01:30:50] Yeah, area authority. He came and kind of cleaned it up where he was like, hey, Elder Oaks came up with these rules back in 2002 or whenever it was. And he's like, you weren't following them because one of them was, you cannot baptize a child without the parent, like, also being baptized. So that was like their a rule that we hadn't been following.
John Dehlin [01:31:12] Yeah, yeah, it's a mess. Let me ask you really quickly. So ordained women happens. You're on your mission in what years?
Emma [01:31:21] September 2017 to March 2019.
John Dehlin [01:31:24] Okay, so ordained women happens, 2014, 2013 to 2014, where the church gets put on notice that the way they treat women is just unacceptable. And then what we saw emerging the years after ordained women is the church flexing or bragging about giving women, young women in missions, more leadership opportunities. Prior to ordained women, it was just young men become, you know, trainers, or young men become district leaders, young men become zone leaders, young men become assistant of the president. Women don't have leadership opportunities on the mission other than training. Then you start hearing rumblings that they start providing leadership opportunities, increased leading opportunity, increased leadership opportunities to women on Mormon missions. Did you see any of that?
Emma [01:32:18] We have what was called sister training leaders, which I not sure when that started, but it was supposed to be the equivalent to a zone leader.
John Dehlin [01:32:28] They couldn't just calm zone leaders, though.
Emma [01:32:29] Yeah, they couldn't call them zone leaders. They were sister training leaders. But the difference was There was less sisters in our mission than elders, and so there was one companionship assisted training leaders per two zones. But we didn't really. I was a sister trained leader at one point, and you didn't actually have any power. You could say you basically just visited with the sisters and were like, are you okay? What's wrong? And if anything was wrong, you talked to the zone leaders, but they would never do anything about it, basically. Well, in my experience. I know that other zone leaders have other experiences, but.
Gender Inequality and Patriarchy on the Mission
John Dehlin [01:33:08] So did you feel like you had opportunities for advancement on your mission as a sister missionary? Did you feel like you were less important or part of a patriarchy? What did you feel in terms of gender identity and authority and. And leadership in the mission, or did you even think about it?
Emma [01:33:26] I definitely felt inferior to the elders, especially when we were trying. There was one point when I was a sister training leader, and I was really frustrated about the baptismal practices, and I was trying to help other companionships in our zones feel okay about, like, kind of moving aside from that. And I remember just getting shut down by the male leadership, where they were just like, hey, that's not what you're supposed to be doing. Like, basically, you don't have a say. And I couldn't go to the mission president as a sister training leader. I reported to the zone leader. So even as a female leader in the mission, I was reporting to the male leaders and didn't. I felt like I didn't really have a say in anything.
John Dehlin [01:34:16] Did that bother you? Did the patriarchy basically bother you?
Emma [01:34:20] At the time, I just thought that was how it was, especially from how I was raised. But later it did bother me. But at the time, I was just like, yep, that's how it is. That's how it goes.
John Dehlin [01:34:36] Yeah. Okay. So how just to kind of draw your mission to a close, you know, you had a sense that these baptismal practices were wrong to begin with, then everyone tells you that they're okay. I imagine that at some point you just start doing them like everybody else. How did this culminate and. Or end with you just swimming in all this baptismal malfeasance? And you said at some point you expressed concerns like, talk about how. How the second half of your mission was and your instincts that this was wrong. But just swimming in a culture of kind of fraud, of spiritual fraud. How did your mission end?
Emma [01:35:27] Yeah, I really struggled with it a lot until I got a second mission president and met an elder. That kind of confirmed the feelings I had where I wasn't Sure. I was like, I don't even know what I'm supposed to be feeling. And I met an elder who had arrived in the mission during my first mission president and left and then came back when the second mission president arrived. And the story was that he disagreed with the mission president, and so he went home, and someone. Someone higher in authority, listened to him and allowed him to choose to come back to the mission when that mission president was no longer there. And, you know, there's no way to fact check this. It's not like I can track down the people and be like, hey, was this true? But what I do know was, is this missionary who was in my district left home early and came home the exact transfer that I got, a new mission president. And so I concluded that someone higher in authority knew what was going on and didn't do anything about it. And it made me mad. I was really upset because I was like, okay, he got to tell someone and got out of this. Someone somewhere knows, and this person had the power to send him back at this time. And I was upset. But then we got the new mission president, and he was like, don't worry about baptisms. We're worried about quality. So I was like, okay. It was just that one mission president, like, it's fine. Bad egg. And then this new mission president comes out with a new standard of excellence and was like, you were expected to baptize twice a week. And my empty companion was an improvement, or it was like, it felt like an improvement for a while. And then when that happened, I remember talking to my MTC companion, and she, like, had a panic attack, and she was like, we're back again to what we were at before. Like, it wasn't just me. Like, she had a legitimate panic attack. A lot of people were upset about this, but, you know, we were told, trust your mission president. And at this time, I was just in survival mode, where I was like, you know, I'm just gonna do the things. Because it was inconceivable to me to leave home early because.
John Dehlin [01:37:35] Leave the mission early, leave the mission
Emma [01:37:37] early, because that's what unrighteous people do, unfaithful people do. So I was like, I will stick it out. And. But that question just stuck with me the entire time where I couldn't figure out why this was happening because it didn't align with things that I had been taught about how prophets work and how revelation works and how leadership works. And so I carried that question through with me till my eventual faith transition.
John Dehlin [01:38:03] Yeah. And as a Orthodox Mormon growing up, you are taught to believe baptism sacred. So when, for me, when I was a missionary and seeing the way I processed, it was a sacred ordinance, was being perverted and corrupted. That's how I saw it on my mission. Did that ever translate that way for you?
Emma [01:38:26] In my head, God was watching and would work it all out in the end, where it was like, you know, we are doing the best we can. He will bless these people, even though it might be ruining their salvation. He'll fix it, was what I thought. But mostly my thought was at one point I blamed the mission president, where I was like, all the sins and all the bad things that are happening, it's his fault and he's gonna have to pay. I remember thinking that I was like, he'll have fun in hell, is what I thought in my head was about that first mission president.
John Dehlin [01:38:59] Yeah. And just this is just an uncanny parallel. So I was that missionary. I, while in Guatemala, complained to Gordon Romney. He. I was his own leader at the time. He punished me, sent me far away. I got sick. And then as soon as I got sick, he put me on a plane home to get me out of the mission. So I go home and they give me a chance to end my mission honorably four months early. But I'm like, I'm not ending my mission four months early. That's what slackers do. So I got reassigned to Arizona. I go to Arizona. They didn't send me back to Guatemala. I go to Arizona and I tell my mission president there, ironically, Daryl Woolsey, who ends up as a mission president in Philippines. That's another story. Or. Or a general, 40.
Emma [01:39:42] His name? Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:39:42] Have you heard his name?
Emma [01:39:43] I think, yeah.
John Dehlin [01:39:44] Okay. So I tell him about the baptismal problems in Guatemala. He never gets back to me, leaves the mission. My next mission president comes in and I'm like, whatever happened? Did you ever tell church headquarters about these baptism atrocities? Because my mission president still there. You can end it. You can pull them out of the mission. In my mind, they're like, they're going to kick him out. They're going to take him, send him home, punish him. And you know what they. They told me when I. When I complained to church headquarters about the mission president. Do you want to guess?
Emma [01:40:19] I have no idea.
John Dehlin [01:40:20] They said, elder Dylan, he's only got a few months left on his mission. We don't want to make a big scandal, so we're just going to let him finish out his mission honorably and then we'll fix it with the next Mission president.
Emma [01:40:35] I believe it because my first mission president, it was rumored that he didn't allow mission tours, which is when general authorities came to the mission. The entire time I was there, no General authorities came. And I was like, that's weird. How does he have the power to not allow that? And I'm now thinking maybe they knew, and so they just stayed away because if you know, you have to do something. So they were all just like, we'll stay oblivious. And then as soon as I got a new mission president, General authorities started to come to our mission, whereas before they had not.
Finishing the Mission and Mixed Emotions
John Dehlin [01:41:08] Yeah, it's a culture of intentional ignorance or plausible deniability, you know? Yeah. Okay, well, anything you want to like, but you finish your mission. What was it like to finish your mission? Were you triumphant, excited, you were valiant, and you come home super energized, or was it something else?
Emma [01:41:31] I was definitely excited to get home. I missed the States. I missed my family and friends food. The food. I did love the Filipino food, though.
John Dehlin [01:41:40] Okay.
Emma [01:41:41] But it was a feeling of, like, I didn't know what my purpose was supposed to be anymore. I felt like I needed to have come home extremely changed. I felt like my testimony had needed to go through this huge transformation. Like, because I had gone on a mission, I therefore needed to be some pure, righteous Mormon and do everything right. But then I just realized that I was still me, and the only thing that came out of it was questions. And so I was really discouraged when I got home because I didn't know, you know, because of how I was raised through gender roles and prepping, I had zero plan for college. I didn't know where I was going to move. And so I was just like, I don't even know what I'm going to do with my life. Like, the plan was go on a mission and get married, but I had zero marriage prospects, and I was not really interested in dating. So I was like, I don't know what to do.
Reflecting on the Mission's Lasting Impact
John Dehlin [01:42:43] Over the years of people as people have tried to explain Mormon stories and why I do what I do, I've had people basically just pinpoint my mission and say, john, you were scarred by your mission. Your mission changed you. And in some ways, it was almost like to give me a pass for doing Mormon stories because I had such a traumatic mission. I'm curious whether you feel. What you feel the impact of your mission was on you. Have you. You know, would you. How would you characterize the impact of your mission and specifically these fraudulent baptisms? What was the impact of that mission? On you?
Emma [01:43:21] Yeah. Well, to give a positive side first, I. It was a really great opportunity to learn about new cultures. That was, like, the first time I'd actually been exposed to cultural differences and race differences and learning a language and a new culture, which was an amazing experience that I couldn't have gotten anywhere else. But on the other side, like, the stress that you undergo as a missionary, like, just the feeling of despair, and also the questions that came out of my mission, it really affected my testimony, but also gave me a lot of shame and guilt because, you know, I was taught to believe that if anything goes wrong with you or your testimony, it's not the church's fault or it's not anyone else's fault, it's your fault. Like, you did something wrong. And so I wondered if I had actually done a faithful mission or if maybe it was my fault that I was having these questions, because righteous people just don't do that, is what I believed.
John Dehlin [01:44:23] So you. You were left after your mission wondering why you didn't feel better, why you didn't feel more successful.
Emma [01:44:28] Yeah. Why I wasn't, like, having this huge, strong testimony. Why. Why didn't it work for me when it seems to work for everybody else? I must have done something wrong.
John Dehlin [01:44:40] And then I'll end with this question, maybe. Have you processed the reality that you probably, on some level knew that this mission was wrong, knew that the baptismal practices on the mission were wrong, that you knew that your conscience told you that, and then either you chose or were conditioned to ignore and suppress your own. Your own conference conscience, when you probably knew better? Have you even thought about that or processed how you feel about the fact that you knew better but participated in it anyway?
Emma [01:45:19] Yeah, I have thought about that. And it's difficult to know, like, because I recognize a lot of conditioning that went into the beliefs in the place where I was at. And I think with the information that I had, I mean, of course I would like to think that I did the best that I could, but I wish that I could go back. Like, if I had to relive my mission experience, I would do it completely different all over again.
John Dehlin [01:45:56] Because you feel what I feel.
Emma [01:45:57] I feel guilt for all of the people that I baptized, for the things that I said to them, for the teachings that I taught and continue to share with people. And a lot of these people almost view me as, like, a celebrity, you know, like people from the Philippines. It's been three years almost that I've been home three years. At the end of this next month, and they still message me, and they still reach out all the time, and they still tell me how much they loved having me there. And it's just, you know, for a while, I really wanted to go back to visit these people. And now I just feel like at this point, I feel ashamed and like I can't face them because of everything that happened. And even if I tried, I don't know that they would even understand what I was trying to explain to them, because now some of these people are in the middle of the church while some of these people have, like, distanced themselves far from it. So I feel a lot of guilt.
John Dehlin [01:47:03] What about the cultural colonialism piece that you were basically telling them that their life, their lifestyle, their culture, their beliefs weren't legitimate and that our church, our practices, our way of life was superior.
Emma [01:47:22] I've started to, like, digest that as I have considered my views on racism in general and just realized how selfish I was at the time. And, like, I just didn't get it, you know, Like, I was just so privileged and didn't understand what I was actually saying to them, and it was just so false. But that's what I was taught to believe, and I believed it.
John Dehlin [01:47:54] So if you could look into the camera and. And speak to your converts, your investigators and your converts and the Filipino people, you would say what?
Emma [01:48:06] I doubt any of them are going to hear this, but I would just one, say I'm sorry for all of the legitimate help that I could have given because I was in a position to give it and did not. And also for the potential damage that one I have felt from the church that they could be feeling and hopefully just ask for forgiveness for that, but also understanding, because I didn't really know what was happening at the time. And hopefully that they can get to a happy place and value their culture and return to the things that they were at before, but also maybe keep the good things that they gained of, like community and other things
John Dehlin [01:49:00] beautiful and powerful. And the Mormon Stories podcast community on Facebook, which has like 16,000 members. There are a ton of Filipinos on there. And at first I thought we were just being spammed. You know how sometimes you get other countries, but there are a lot of Filipinos in the Mormon Stories podcast Facebook community. And I've had several Filipinos reach out to me from Instagram. So I hope that this is only the first of several interviews that we do. I would love to get some native Filipinos to talk about the Mormon experience from a Filipino expected. There have been a few times where we almost had that happen. But this is just an open invitation. We want some. Some Filipinos to also share their experiences. So we look forward to that. Please reach out to us, and we'll try and make that happen. Yeah. Kara's like, john, stop inviting people on Mormon stories. We can't. We can't. We can't interview all the people that John keeps inviting people to interview.
Guest [01:49:57] No, the opposite. You are subject to a conversion from cultural colonialism. You have a front row seat. Please bust down our door.
Closing Thoughts and Farewell
John Dehlin [01:50:08] All right. All right. Well, Emma, this has been so fascinating, so important. Honestly. I told you. I've done, like, 16, 1700 hours, and this is, like, for me, one of my favorite and or most important interviews. Just because we're covering so many topics that are really relevant, really timely, and you're a great storyteller.
Emma [01:50:32] So thank you.
John Dehlin [01:50:33] Thank you so much for being willing to share your story so far. I know it's going to help a lot of people. Sorry. I know it's going to help a lot of people.
Emma [01:50:41] I hope so. I really. I know that we're talking about a lot of hard topics and shedding the light on the negative side of the church and the things that happen, but I just think that the church shed so much light on. They just kind of, like, gloss over it, that someone needs to talk about the negative sides. And, like, I recognize that there are good sides, but no one's really talking about them. And so we need to talk about them.
John Dehlin [01:51:08] That's why I created Mormon stories for this exact reason, because worlds can we talk about the hard stuff? Certainly not at church. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Emma, for part two. And, Kara, it is always so wonderful to have you doing all you do in my honor.
Guest [01:51:27] It's been really good couple hours with you, Emma.
John Dehlin [01:51:30] We're gonna lose you for part three. Is that right?
Guest [01:51:32] I'm sorry. Yeah. Okay, again, back to what we were talking about, like, five hours ago. Sometimes Mormonism makes you have commitments that now you have to go take care of. Like, my kids that I decided on, you know, back in the olden days. Just kidding. Love you kids. Love you guys so much. I just have to go take my kids to music class now, so Jen's gonna take over for part three.
John Dehlin [01:51:51] O. Okay. All right. Well, Cara, it's great to have you. Thanks so much. You add so much to this organization, so thank you.
Emma [01:51:57] Stop.
John Dehlin [01:51:59] And, Emma, we'll come right back for part three where we'll talk about how a. A Mormon. How a young woman raised as a Mormon prepper ends up having a faith crisis and discovering a new sexual identity and what that's like to come out to your prepper parents as queer and while you're at BYU and how you navigate that so there's still more to come.
Guest [01:52:25] And landing a really cool jacket.
Emma [01:52:27] Thank you. My girlfriend actually thrifted this for me, so spoiler alert. I have a girlfriend.
Guest [01:52:34] Sorry, ladies, she's taken and her jacket is also taken and not for sale. Damn it.
John Dehlin [01:52:40] All right, so join us. Join us. Don't go away. If we are premiering this, just wait till tomorrow we'll release this. Or if you're like most people listening on the podcast or viewing on YouTube or elsewhere, just come right back for part three because the story even gets better. So we'll see you guys all on the flip side for part three of this interview with Emma. Thanks so much, everybody. See you soon.
Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.
In Part 2, John and Carah discuss with Emma what it was like to serve an LDS mission in the Philippines, where missionaries were encouraged to baptize impoverished Filipinos by any means necessary, largely out of a desire to inflate mission statistics.
See Part 1 and Part 3 of this series with Emma, who was raised in the Mormon “Prepper” movement.
Show Notes:
- “I-Thou vs I-It Conversions: The Mormon ‘Baseball Baptism’ Era,” by D. Michael Quinn, Sunstone Magazine, December 1993
- “Dr. Ted Lyon on LDS Church Change, Latin American Missions, LDS Membership Statistics, and Thoughtful Faith” on Mormon Stories
- “Kiddie Baptisms? My Mission Experience in Guatemala,” John Dehlin on Mormon Stories
- “Stories from a CES Director, Mission President, and Trustee for Deseret Trust Company,” Roger Hendrix on Mormon Stories
- “How a Mormon Mission President Lost His Testimony,” Roger Hendrix on Mormon Stories
- “Tithing and the LDS/Mormon Church,” Understanding Mormonism
- Church Membership Information for the Philippines
- “New Temples Veil Mormonism’s Decline,” Simon Southerton on Mormon Stories
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One Response
In the latest podcast you humorously compared missionary actions to shooting recently caged animals. But that is precisely what happens at the hunting preserves owned by the church.