Welcome and Introductions

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is May 22, 2023, and we are back for another episode with John Larson as a part of our Mormon Expression series. For those who don't know, Mormon Expression was an amazing podcast that had a really, really solid run. John Larson was the host, and we were able to work with John Larson to bring him back onto Mormon Stories to do a monthly episode. You can check out the entire Mormon catalog on Spotify or on itunes or wherever you consume your podcasts. But this is a once a month episode and we'll give you just the warning up front that while we try and do a believer safe episodes, sort of like standard for Mormon Stories, this is at least one episode a month where there may be swearing, there may be anger and open expression of adult like things. And that's just the disclaimer we like to give. So if you don't want to hear an occasional swear word or sort of candid adult speaking from an ex Mormon perspective, you may want to skip this episode, but we don't think you should because John Larson is brilliant. So welcome John Larson back to another episode.

John Larsen [00:01:16] John, I think you disappoint the audience a little bit with that disclaimer because it makes it sound like there's going to be some really randy, raunchy stuff coming that's really going to be titillating. But if truth be told, our swearing is kind of standard, average for American culture. So probably lower.

John Dehlin [00:01:32] Probably lower than average.

John Larsen [00:01:36] You know, I've given all sorts of reasons why I swear, and the answer is really? Well, that's just how I talk. And frankly, everybody around me talks. So, yeah, sorry, guys.

John Dehlin [00:01:46] You're saying. Wait, are you saying it's the Mormons that are weird? Is that what you're saying?

John Larsen [00:01:51] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't have any problem saying that. I haven't said that for a lot of years. If you're. If you're an adult and you spend a lot of time with Disney movies. Yeah, that's not a good. It's not a good look.

John Dehlin [00:02:04] All right, well, it's good to have you back, John Larson. And we are also very excited to have in the house co host for our Mormon Expression episodes, the one, the only, Kara Burrell, also known as Nuance Host, Nuance Ho. Nuance Host, nuance ho on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram. Welcome, Kara. It's good to see you.

Carah Burrell [00:02:25] Thanks for having me. These are the best episodes of my life. I missed Last month, I was in the car looking at the rainbows, driving back from the airport exactly one month ago. So I missed last one and missed you guys. Thanks so much for having me.

John Dehlin [00:02:39] And you're sporting a spring tulip.

Carah Burrell [00:02:41] Yeah. So there's no, like, flowers in this room, so I thought it'd be one.

John Dehlin [00:02:46] All right, well, thanks for flowering our lives, Kara.

Carah Burrell [00:02:53] Is that a euphemism? I don't know what that means.

John Dehlin [00:02:55] No, I know. I don't do euphemisms. All right, well, John Larson, do you have any announcements before we begin today,

John Larsen [00:03:03] or do you want to jump right in a couple? And I went a few months without giving out my contact information, and I did again last time. You can contact me. My email is johnohnlarson.org and you can contact me directly. I read all the emails. I usually save them up for a month or two before I send responses. And if you want a response from me, I really love emails that directly attack something that I said. But if you just send me an email that says, I'm a dumb, dumb head, I'll just say, yeah, you're right, and I'll go on with my life. So I prefer you be a little bit more specific. But I get all kinds of messages from people telling me about their story, asking me questions, and I enjoy all those. Let them riff. Don't worry about sending me an email. And wait, maybe I shouldn't. I should be fair. Do you guys want to give out your contacts?

Carah Burrell [00:03:55] Yeah, I was about to say be very worried about sending me an email.

John Dehlin [00:03:58] Yeah, Carol will turn it back on the Internet. Carol will blow you up. Carol will blow you up.

Carah Burrell [00:04:07] It's not what I meant. Mostly you guys can stop sending me emails because most of them are people sliding into my DMs. Relax, everybody. It's just a couple shoulders. Relax.

John Larsen [00:04:25] I. I get. I get those rare enough that they make me feel really nice. So. So, yeah, go ahead and send me inappropriate or a solicitous.

John Dehlin [00:04:32] I don't know what you guys are talking about. I don't get any of that.

John Larsen [00:04:35] Yeah. Okay, so I've got. And. And one of the reasons I give it out is, you know, I am not on anybody's team. I don't have a group that has a view of the truth of the universe that I have joined to. So I am just simply looking for what is true and what is historic and finding what's going on the best I can. So we're always looking for feedback. If there's anything I say that's incorrect or that I need to clarify, please send a message. I'd be glad to. So the first thing I want to address is I actually get quite a few emails. Emails. And we get a lot of amazing support through Mormon Stories. If you like me, I'm giving you your line. If you like me coming on, you know, please go to Mormon Stories, give to Mormon Stories in general. And we have a special Mormon expression fund which ensures that the Mormon Expression podcasts are up. And that's how we pay Kara, and that's how we pay me for coming on, because people get paid in the world we live in. So. But also people have sent me a lot of messages saying, I want to support you directly, John, meaning me, not the other John. And I generally kind of demure because, you know, once you start taking cash donations, you have to have an accountant, you have to have a lawyer, you have to like wrap it all up. It can sometimes be a lot more pain than it's worth. But I sacrifice my time to be on the podcast. And by the way, there are a lot of questions about my well being and stuff like that that I get from time to time. I'm doing great. You know, I come on here, I get angry for 20 minutes and then I go on with my life. And part of my life is I have a regular full time job and I also have a little farm that I'm running and we're doing all sorts of new and interesting things to combat climate change and deal with, deal with the way things are going. Looking at small space gardening and trying to find ways that people can grow more of their own food like we did In World War II, the Victory Gardens and things like that. So I am putting up a link to Amazon.com It's a wish list that I have for the farm. And if you like me doing this podcast and you want to help me, you can help me by helping me buy stuff like hoses and faucets and all sorts of stuff like that. So if you want to support John Larson and what he does, first give to the Mormon stories, you know, conglomerate. But if you want to go even further and, and you can go onto my Amazon, you can pick the item, you can buy it, you can ship it here, it's tax friendly and everybody smiles.

John Dehlin [00:07:16] I love it.

John Larsen [00:07:17] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:07:18] And you need to, you need to pay back your donors by showing us some photos of your amazing farm and crops.

John Larsen [00:07:26] And I will. The stuff I put in there is stuff I actually need. I will send you all a picture of Your hose in the grass. And if I can write your name on the item, I will gladly do so so that it can ever be memorialized that Joe Schmo gave us this faucet.

John Dehlin [00:07:44] And, Kara, if you buy him a faucet or a hose, you can call it a nuance hose.

Carah Burrell [00:07:49] Oh, I have three jokes I was waiting for, and that wasn't even one of them. You can also, I'll send you pictures of your hoe in the grass, too. The price is great. That's my first joke. And the second one is if you send it to an address in Salt Lake or whatever, and you need to, like, have a carrier to, like, oh, no, it's sent to the wrong address. I'll just like, I'll take it to you. Like, I'll just bring it to you, John.

John Larsen [00:08:10] Yeah, well, you know, you make that joke. But the reason I did this is I was looking around at different ways to do, you know, various fundraisers. And a lot of the companies that host these things, you know, like Patreon and stuff, they take a huge cut, and I just don't like supporting those companies. So I was looking at the best models for supporting, like, artists directly. And the ones who do it the best are actually, like, the only fans people. And they do a lot of this. You know, you can buy your favorite OnlyFans first and, you know, a new ball gag or something. And, you know, they'll have a shopping list. So I'm told. So I'm told. But I almost opened an OnlyFans page for me to see if I could get fans supporting my only page fan. And I don't know if I get enough interest. I'll give you some nice bear photos or something. Yeah, you can see how far you can get me to go.

John Dehlin [00:09:08] All right. Yes.

John Larsen [00:09:10] Sorry, John. I guess that's why it's rated R.

Carah Burrell [00:09:13] My only fans would be like diapers for my kids. Thanks.

John Dehlin [00:09:17] That's my disclaimer, John Larson.

Responding to Listener Feedback and Criticism

John Larsen [00:09:22] All right, so that was number one. Number two, I got an email from an individual who had some. Not materially, but they had some issues with how I characterized the ranch the church uses or leases from time to time for hunting. And my response to them was, I will read your email in its entirety with everything. You just have to go on the record, put your name on it, and they didn't respond. So going back, I welcome all and every counter view, and I will read it and I will consider it. But if you're not, if you're a stranger randomly on the Internet, Sending me an email and you're not willing to actually back it up, there's nothing I can do with that. So I'm glad that they sent me those. I would have very happily read their objections or there were things that they think I mischaracterized just in interest of disclosure. My information on the ranch came firsthand from an individual who was a guide there. That's where I got my story. But if you want to correct me, please do. I will gladly read it, but I need you to not be anonymous because I don't know who you are or what you're saying or if you're just making shit up. So there we go.

John Dehlin [00:10:42] All right.

John Larsen [00:10:43] Okay, the third one, I got a great email, a long email from somebody that was explaining to me that the tax scheme that I spoke of in last podcast in which you can donate stocks that you've received as like stock options at their full market value, even though they never cost you that in order to kind of game the tithing system and take the full value of it as a tax write off. And the individual said, well, any nonprofit can do this. And that is absolutely true. In fact, you can give stocks to Mormon Stories if Mormon Stories is so equipped to take them. John, do you take stock donations?

John Dehlin [00:11:25] We have a few times received stock donations. Yeah.

John Larsen [00:11:29] Yeah. Okay. So every nonprofit can do this. I fully acknowledge that. My point was not that the church is using the tax law legally in this case, because we know they use the tax law illegally in some cases, it's been shown. But it's that they are telling their membership that this is God's money, and they are saying that they are handling God's money and they will tell members that if you do not pay a full and honest tithe that you're stealing from God. So the problem I have is not that they're using American tax law the way it's written. The problem I have is they're using American tax law and American tax law loopholes that are designed for the rich in the name of God and they're allowing people to discount their gift to God. That these individuals say they're stewards of using a loophole in American tax code. That's my problem.

John Dehlin [00:12:25] Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much anytime you claim sort of a direct connection to God and Jesus, I think you're going to be held to a higher standard of accountability. Right. And scrutiny. So I think that's fair.

John Larsen [00:12:42] Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So any. Any other comments before we. We jump into the main topic on that?

John Dehlin [00:12:48] No, let's do It. Go ahead, Kara.

Carah Burrell [00:12:50] No, just gonna say Jesus. Jesus in the Atonement is a loophole. The entire gospel is just loopholed around. It's. It's. Everything about it is a loophole. That's the whole point of it. So I just. I can see how they'd be like, it is what it is, you know?

John Larsen [00:13:05] And we're going to talk about a enormous loophole in Mormonism here tonight. Okay, so the title of this podcast is Superiority in the Church. And I definitely did not want to use the word supremacy, and we'll talk about that a little bit. So I want to talk about culture a minute to make sure that we're on the right page and people don't misconstrue what we're talking about this evening. We need to kind of lay a foundation of what we're doing. When I was in college for a long time, I majored in anthropology, and I switched off that major because there's no money in it. But I was taken aback by the amount of cultural variety there is in the world, but more importantly, the cohesion of that cultural variety that when you go to a culture, especially when it's very different from yours, the individuals that behave in very, very similar ways, and we do, too, you and I, dear listener. And because it's hardwired into how we transmit knowledge, how we transmit what you need to know to survive in the world, how we keep social cohesion, how we quell violence, how we quell sexual violence, how we make sure children are taken care of, all that gets encoded into our culture. Switching cultures is very difficult, and it's usually not very attractive to people. People have a preference, or we could say a bias for the culture they grew up in. And, you know, sometimes they might discard this, that, or the other, but generally speaking, they stay in the bounds of that cohesion, their life. They dress like other people in their culture. They wear their hair like other people in their culture. They wear jewelry like other people in their culture. And that's like a human universal. This is not a criticism of any of us. It's really hard to break out of that. So we have. And I'm going to say that all of us, every single person, has sort of an inherent cultural bias towards their own culture and their own preferences and their own peoples. And by their own peoples, I mean people who behave and think and act in a way that's similar to the way you behave and think and act, because then. Then you're not always constantly in fights. You know, there's certain assumptions about what's good and what's bad and what's allowed and what's not allowed and all that stuff. So I'm gonna lay and say that everybody has a cultural bias, but that doesn't necessarily mean that everybody thinks that their culture is superior. Like, I can have a cultural bias towards not eating spicy foods, you know, and then when I go to different cuisines, like, I might fight Indian food or Mexican food, I might have them spice it down to my, you know, my, my American palate, as it were. But that doesn't necessarily mean that I think that the, the American spiced food is superior to, to the other. So I, I can still be biased towards my thing without thinking that the other is less than. That is absolutely a possibility. So not everybody who has a strong cultural bias to their own culture is in fact looking at it from a point of superiority or a point of preference or a point of better than. Does that make sense? I want to make sure I'm not calling everybody like a racist right here at the beginning.

Cultural Supremacy and In-Group Favoritism

John Dehlin [00:16:42] Yeah, that makes sense to me. It makes sense that we kind of evolve as tribal creatures and probably are genetically selected towards people that love their group and that feel fondness to their group and feel unity with their group. Because historically, and I'm speaking in a millennial or even a what's 100,000 year sort of time frame perspective, we survive and thrive in groups. So that part makes good sense. But then I think what I hear you saying, John, is that when it comes to civilization, when it comes to kind of our species going out of the world war every 10 or 20 years and annihilating each other and the entire species to go with it. You can transcend pure, raw tribalism to the point where you can say, I love a good cheeseburger, but I love lasagna and lo mein, and I can value and appreciate other cultures as much as my own and transcend the idea that we've got God on our side and that we're the best. But instead say, what if there are many ways up the cultural Mount Fuji and everybody's got something cool to contribute? More like an orchestra sort of thing, where the tuba and the drombone and the timpani all play a role. That's how I'm hearing you.

John Larsen [00:18:17] Yeah, yeah, well stated. But unfortunately, when we observe the world, it seems that most people, and I'd say both historically and here, most all of us, will take that cultural bias, that preference for our own culture actually can turn into something that's quite negative. And they can turn into microaggressions. By that, I mean where you might treat people who are not of your culture or who. For example, there are many, many, many, many varieties of the English language, and there are many, many varieties of the English language inside the United States. So somebody might be speaking their local vernacular in a way that is ungrammatical in your vernacular or in other words, you're projecting onto them because of the way they're speaking culturally, that they're not as intelligent. And then you start treating them as such. You speak down to them, or you laugh at them, or you call them out, or you grade their paper lower because they're using the grammar that they grew up with and not the grammar that you grew up with. And microaggressions can come in dismissal of others. You just. You see a bunch of people who are from a different culture at a party talking in a way that's slightly different. You're going to gravitate towards people who are like you, and that can go for doing job hiring. You're going to feel more comfortable with somebody who, you know, speaks like you or acts like you. And of course, it shows up in hatred of others. We see it all the time on the Internet that people actually start pushing negative feelings onto others. And of course, there's also blaming of others for social problems. And these are very common, even though, you know, like the statistics. I'll use that one example. The statistics have shown over and over and over again, the immigrants to the United States commit crime at a lower rate than citizens of the United States. That's been demonstrated again and again and again and again and again. But there is a whole segment of the population that won't believe it, because the sources of news they might get might just focus on whenever an immigrant commits a crime. So they naturally have a bias towards that. And of course, I'm arguing that this kind of goes into this intrinsic sort of thing that we have where they're not like us, they're other. So we're gonna pay attention the ways they're not like us, and we're gonna be more attuned into their negative behaviors. Another great example of this is statistics have shown that white men and black men in the United States smoke pot at the same rates. But there is an overabundance of black men in prison for minor possession and smoking and things like that. So there you get a bias where people say, oh, well, you know, black men smoke potential, even though white men smoke pot too. And because of that cultural bias, the one group is basically punished or sectioned out more, which feeds back into the narrative. Oh, I don't. I'm scared of black men, because black men are all in the prisons. So you start. You start getting this feedback loop that reinforces the cultural bias in the first place.

John Dehlin [00:21:38] Okay.

Superiority vs. Supremacy and Meritocracy

John Larsen [00:21:39] All right, so let's talk a little bit about superior supremacy versus superiority. There's sort of this garden variety superiority that we're kind of talking about that is omnipresent and all over the place. And that kind of bias that I just mentioned, we have to anticipate that we all have it. That's why when you hear somebody say, well, I'm not racist or I'm not biased, well, we all are. Unless you work really hard at it. And even if you work really hard at it, you're still gonna keep uncovering biases. Cause like John pointed out, it's kind of in our DNA as a way that we socially bond and form social cohesive units for survival, but it turns into a heavier version all the time. So, for example, I just went and I just did this in five minutes. I wanted to create a list of conflicts that I could come up with very quickly that were racially or culturally motivated, meaning that at least one of the aggressors, if not both, they were coming from a place of assumption that their culture was superior and the other culture needed to be attacked, targeted, eliminated, or otherwise distressed. So these are just ones. Recently, the Armenian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, the Croatian genocide, European imperialism and colonization was all based on the idea of superiority of one group. The Holocaust of the American Indian was based on manifest destiny and the idea that white people deserve the land. White Christian people deserve the land more than the indigenous Indians. The Incan genocide, the Aztecan genocide, perpetuated mostly by the Spanish, whole civilizations wiped out based on cultural belief of superiority. The imperial Japanese rise before World War II, and the enslavement of the Korean people and Chinese people was done on an idea of cultural superiority. Fascism in Italy in the 20th century, on the idea that the white Italian people were superior. German fascism that rose into Nazism. I mean, that one's well known. The genocide of the aboriginal Australians. Hell, the Crusades, the Moors coming into the European. The expansion of the Roman Empire, the expansion of the Greek Empire, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire. They just go on and on and on. And all of these major conflicts and all these major things have not just a racial component, but an idea that we, the perpetrators are superior to other people. And therefore we need to impose our will or destroy the others.

John Dehlin [00:24:21] There's probably a religious element too. It's our food's better, our language is better, our genes are better, and our God is better, right?

John Larsen [00:24:28] Yep. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

John Dehlin [00:24:29] Do you want to add something, Kara?

Carah Burrell [00:24:32] No, I think you got most of them. Did you get the Israeli Palestine conflict?

John Larsen [00:24:36] Oh yeah. The Palestinian apartheid that continues to this day is definitely racially and religiously motivated.

John Dehlin [00:24:44] I mean, in some sense, I heard it once said that the history of humankind is the history of war. Right? Like it's just the way that we've evolved is tribally and then tribes have to fight and you steal resources from your neighbor if you can. And that's kind of how we build and grow, right? Mm, yeah.

John Larsen [00:25:05] Okay. So on top of that, we kind of established that racism and hatred towards others is so ubiquitous it can virtually be called universal. But then inside a group we start getting other divisions, we start getting classes and castes and those sort of things. So I think that most people would without flinching, describe like the United States and European culture as a meritocracy. And by that we mean that those who are most deserving get the resources. So if you study something in school that's harder, like say become a surgeon, then say to become a plumber

Carah Burrell [00:25:52] in

John Larsen [00:25:52] terms of school time, then our society value is that the surgeon is worth more and therefore the person who is a surgeon demands more resources, demands more pay, demands more of everything. Okay, so that's a meritocracy. So in meritocracies, the idea that some people are more deserving of the basics, food, shelter, being able to be cool in the summer, warm in the winter, safety, security, that those things should be distributed unevenly to the people who deserve them the most. Okay, and on top of that we have an age old tradition, at least in the Judeo Christian segment. It probably exists in others I'm just not versed enough to talk about, which is the doctrine of the divine right of kings. So if I'm reminding everyone of this, the reasoning went something like that. God got something like this. God is in charge of everything and God is watching us and engaged in our affairs. And that's why we pray to God for his intervention all the time. This is a thousands of year old practice. So God is aware of who the king is. And God could kill the king at any time because God is above the king. But God doesn't kill the king. And we can take that as God's quasi endorsement of the king. So if the king ever behaves in a way that God doesn't like, then God will kill the king. Therefore, every decision the king makes is sanctioned by God, and the king has the divine right to make choices. This is why Henry VIII could still be the head of the Episcopalian Church, the head of the Anglican Church, and have actually beheaded four of his wives, because there is no. He's the king. So as a Christian, he can't do that, but as a king, he can. And who are we to say that he can't do it because God so endorsed him.

John Dehlin [00:27:57] Yeah, absolutely. The king has God's seal, right?

John Larsen [00:28:03] Yeah. So we have a natural bias towards those who are more clever. We think, okay, they deserve more stuff. And then we have a natural bias towards people who are our rulers, because we tend to believe that they have been put in place through blessing, through divine providence, through God's hand. The next thing we have going on here is birthright, which is the idea that you deserve something from the actions of your forefathers. That if you set Kara and I next to each other, most people truly believe, even though they probably won't acknowledge it, that if Kara had a superior ancestor, that she deserves more resources than I deserve. So that I was related to a railroad Baron who died 120 years ago, but I still have a 10, 20, $50 million trust fund. The basic assumption of our culture is that I deserve that because just by being a descendant of the person who got that. So we have really baked into our culture the idea that you deserve things because of the action of your forefathers. And the converse of that is you might deserve something that's not as good because of the conduct of your forefathers. If your forefathers were bad, then that punishment can roll generation to generation. And that's really common in our culture. And it's bad baked into Mormonism wholesale. And we'll get into that a little bit more.

John Dehlin [00:29:32] I've kind of heard it said that the victors in history get to get to write the history. And it's almost like the king and the servants of the king and all the wealthy people, they get to write back into history that God. That God approved their victories when really they just won. And then they had the power and the money and they got to write the history. Right. And they attributed it to God's providence.

John Larsen [00:29:57] Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And all these things still live with us, and they're biases that we haul around with us. You can still find old members of the peerage, people who still hold title and they will tell you they believe, most of them do, that they are of superior bloodlines. I was watching a show on Netflix a couple years ago with Kimmy. It was a view inside the great houses of, of Europe, of. This was all in Great Britain. And sure enough, they had one of the lords or Duke or whatever the hell he was. They're talking to him and he full on, without flinching, said this thing, you know, that, well, they've been selectively bred and educated, that they're just of superior stock and the people believe it. I found there's a universal attribute that all humans have, which is everybody believes they fully deserve everything they have. If you have $5 million in the bank, you believe you deserve $5 million in the bank. If you have $1,000 in the bank, you believe you deserve $1,000 in the bank. And so on and so on and so on. Because we have taken on that idea that wealth is a sign of merit so deeply that it permeates everything. Even though Jesus Christ and the Buddha and Muhammad had different messages, we still at our hearts honor those who are successful in acquiring resources. And we all suffer from this. We all want to acquire wealth in order to pass on to our children. But why? Because we want to give them an advantage in the next generation. But we also can all look at history and understand that this disproportionate distribution of wealth and power has been a constant scourge on humanity. Yet we can't stop the process ourselves. We structure our entire lives and our Tyler wealth gathering schemes around passing on wealth and making our children's lives easier. When we know full and well that that one thing has caused humans unending suffering. Okay, all right, now, now you got the individuals. Call me a socialist and whatnot. I just wanted to lay the foundation before we start attacking the Mormon faith and particular that these things are deep, deep, deep in our culture and deep in our psyche.

Carah Burrell [00:32:25] I love this kind of paradigm that you set up. This is fascinating. And I also would want to add to that that the meritocracy that you're. The ideas that again, a dirty rotten socialist would probably perpetuate was that the meritocracy is only looking at a small view of what is, like, valuable to see society, that it has to have like a monetary value when there's so many diverse talents and so many things that people can bring in. And me as a mostly stay at home mom, like meritocracy doesn't really value the type of work that I do. So, yeah, if I, in my highest ideals. As a Mormon mom, I would want my kids to be able to be mothers or whatever, you know, and fit into their gender roles. But even within the construct of Mormonism, as I would have tried to perpetuate, I wasn't setting my kids up to be successful because the environment that we're in doesn't have a meritocracy for women's work a lot.

John Larsen [00:33:16] And I agree. And the work that we all need to do is ask ourselves what the word merit means, if you believe in a meritocracy. Because I've talked to many people over the years where they'll go on about that thing about education and people who work hard and people who sacrifice and the merit should go to them. The reward should go to them. Then you say, well, what about school teachers? Do you believe that they don't have merit, do you think? And then they start hedging and humming and hawing because it destroys the paradigm to say, oh, the merit goes to the people who are the best boon to society. We want to pay them the most. But I think most of us would acknowledge that school teachers are indispensable and are intelligent people who deserve much more. But we're okay with a society where they're not rewarded, and I was going to say rewarded monetarily, but that's not the right thing. Schoolteachers suffer to pay the bills and feed their children. They're given poverty wages. Okay, so now we're gonna go into Mormon doctrine, and I wanna lay down the thesis here that Mormonism has baked into its theology the idea that not only that Mormons and white people are superior to everyone else, but there's grades of superiority in the church that allow for some members of the church to have more of the blessings of the church, more access to saving Ord, and more of everything than others. So over the next hour or so, we're going to walk you through the doctrine and show you what Mormons truly believe on this.

John Dehlin [00:34:49] All right?

Race, Blackness, and the Curse of Cain in Mormonism

John Larsen [00:34:50] All right. So first, let's start with the curse of Cain and blackness. I will refer everyone to the Mormon Stories podcast we did about a year and a half ago, where we took all the scriptures on the mark of Cain and on what that means for the Mormon belief on blackness. And we go through it quite in depth. I don't wanna recover all that material, but if you're interested in this topic, you didn't get a chance to listen to it. I would highly encourage you to pause now or pause at the end and go listen to that podcast. So you can see just how icky and deep the racism against brown skinned, black skinned people is inside the church and how it's codified in scripture. We're hit a couple of those scriptures again. But it's really important that you understand from the get. The Mormons believe that white skin is a mark of being a superior human being. And unfortunately that's sort of the definition of white supremacy. But I hesitate to say that because most Mormons aren't violently so. And when we talk about white supremacists, we're using thinking about people who want to have some kind of race war and want violence to be acted against black people or brown people. And I want to state unequivocally that Mormons in Mass do not believe that, although there are Mormons inside the church and sheltered by the church that do. Okay, all right, so that's the curse of Cain. So let's start with the pearl of Great Price. Now the pearl of Great Price is probably should be considered one of the most pure scriptures by Mormons because, you know, Bible, it's accurate insofar as translated correctly, the Book of Mormon was schlepped around the country and buried in a hole and had to be translated from reformed Egyptian, you know, with a rock in the hat and all that kind of stuff. But the pearl of Great Price was God's voice, basically directly to Joseph. In the case of the book of Moses and in the case of the Book of Abraham, this was a scroll that was found inside a mummy in Ohio that was translated by Smith directly.

John Dehlin [00:37:11] Okay, yeah.

John Larsen [00:37:13] All right. Book of Abraham, chapter one, verses two through five. And this is in the voice of Abraham. And finding there was greater happiness and peace and rest for me, I sought for the blessings of the fathers and the right whereunto I should be ordained to administer the same, having been myself a follow of righteousness. Desiring also to be one who possessed great knowledge and to be a greater follower of righteousness and possess greater knowledge, and to be a father of many nations, a prince of peace, and desiring to receive instructions and keep the commandments of God, I became a rightful heir, a high priest, holding the right belonging to the fathers. It was conferred upon me from the fathers. It came down from the fathers. From the beginning of time, yea, even from the beginning or before the foundation of the earth down to the present time. Even the right of the firstborn, or the first man who is Adam, or first Father, through the fathers unto me, I sought for mine appointment unto the priesthood according to the appointments of God unto the fathers concerning the seed. This scripture is really important because it establishes that the priesthood is at its fundamental, a patrilineal transmission, meaning you get the priesthood from your father and your father's worthiness or you're tracing back to the patriarchs is key to having a legitimate priesthood. That the priesthood is not something that God created. You know, we tell two stories about the pre existence and one of them is that we were all God's children, we were all sort of equal and then God chose us and came down and then he gave us the Gospel. But according to Joseph Smith's scripture, that's not how it works at all. The priesthood is a right that is intertwined with bloodlines and the ability to be connected racially in to those who have the right of the priesthood.

Chosen People Theology Across Judaism and Mormonism

John Dehlin [00:39:08] Yeah, and John, I don't know if you want feedback here or want to discuss. I think it's maybe worth noting that you know, if you start back with, with Judaism in the Old Testament and maybe you're going to get there. So I don't know if I'm kind of stealing your thunder.

John Larsen [00:39:26] No, no, go, go.

John Dehlin [00:39:27] But we very much start with, you know, you know, Adam and Eve and then Noah. But then, you know, pretty quickly you get to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And you know, Abraham starts out as being kind of God's, you know, chosen prophet and it ends up with Jacob being renamed to Israel. And then you get 12 tribes and you know, coming out of that are the Israelites that go to David and Solomon. And the whole time in that Old Testament you got this little, this little group of Middle Easterners that are globally relatively inconsequential. You know, the Chinese, you know, dynasties are thriving at this point. You've got other major civilizations around them. I don't know if it's the Babylonians or whoever, Philistines, but I mean you've got stuff going on here in, in Latin America, you know, Mesoamerica. But somehow this little tribe of, of what ends up being Jews basically are God's one chosen people on the earth. It kind of starts there and then Jesus comes along after you know, 10001500 years, however long it is. And Jesus in one sense sort of says, oh no, it's much bigger than just Jews. It kind of moved from being Jews to being Christians, which basically is something anyone can believe. But I think very much the exclusivity and the superiority still creeps in because you've got Jesus talking about lambs and goats, wheat versus Tares and you know, you Know, kind of his chosen people, and then the people that won't be receiving the word kind of Gentiles. Right. That notion of chosen still carries on into Christianity, but it's more about what you believe instead of your blood lineage. I think is. Is kind of was kind of Christ's, maybe Christ's contribution. Maybe real scholars are gonna disagree with me here. And what's interesting for me then when you talk about Mormonism is when Joseph Smith kind of, you know, creates his church and he calls it a restoration. This blood lineage stuff still ends up being super important to Joseph. And so you got the Book of Mormon talking all about Israel, and the native Americans are actually Israelites and they're the pure blood of Israel. And then all these patriarchal blessings start coming out where Mormons, miraculous, are somehow declared to be blood descendants of actual Israelites. And it's kind of. For me, it's always seemed disappointing, one of many disappointing things about Joseph Smith, that he had to insert this sort of God's chosen people based on blood lineage into Mormonism because it was almost like Jesus got us away from that. But what's worse is how is that not kind of racist to basically say one group of people, the blood. The blood of Israel are the. Are God's favorites, Like, so anyway, that's just my reflection that this blood lineage exclusivity and superiority starts with the Jews. And I'm sure they weren't the first to do it, but it kind of carries all the way through. And Joseph almost kind of doubles down on it. I just wanted to kind of note that.

John Larsen [00:42:50] And you may agree or not, it's a good summation. And definitely all the peoples of the Book, you know, the Jewish people and Islamic people and Christian people all have this to a degree. And in fact, you can look at other cultures. You know, in Hinduism, there's definitely a baked in view of the different castes, you know, we're trying to move away from those things in the modern world. But, you know, the Brahmans are definitely of a superior quality of human being than the Untouchables, for example. And yeah, there's that tying back to the Abrahamic blood, the Jesus thing. I think your characterization is generous, but I'd be remiss if I didn't kind of push back a little bit. Jesus himself actually resisted giving the quote, unquote, the Gospel to the Gentiles. And in fact, he called the woman who was. Who was Roman, who asked him, he called her a dog. So I would say Jesus was actually kind of Racist too. Which goes to show you, if you're racist, well, you're in good company because most of us are at some point in our life, you know, but what happened with Christianity is as, as Christianity spread primarily among the lower classes, the slave classes, the Romans, until Constantine, the narrative became a Roman narrative, which is why the Bible is written as it is. It's, it's, it's a Roman reinterpretation of like a Jewish event. So it gives a lot of deference to Rome, right, In, in, in the, in the New Testament. But then they just turned it on its head and then, you know, what's the Latin phrase under this sign? I conquer was, was, you know, Constantine. So you took this message of peace and acceptance and it, and it only took 400 years before Europe was completely blood soaked in the name of Jesus Christ for the next 1500 years. So, you know, that's why call me skeptical Christians when you keep talking about peace, because I look at your history from the beginning and it is bloody and dirty.

John Dehlin [00:45:04] Not to mention colonialism.

John Larsen [00:45:05] Right, Colonialism. I mean, all this stuff, all this stuff, the Crusades, the wars with the Moorish people, the wars on the Eastern front, the conquering of the barbarians, the pagans, the Angles, the Saxons, the Franks, all that stuff was all done in the name of Christianity, right? And because, hey, you either convert or you die by the sword. It's not really a very peaceful message. So it's there. But just like in the Cain podcast I showed where Joseph Smith took scriptures that have been interpreted in a racist fashion, but aren't necessarily racist, and then with using modern revelation, he made them explicitly racist. So, and that's what we're doing with the Book of Abraham. Let's go back to Book of Abram, chapter 1, verse 25, 26 and 27. This gets more explicit now. The first government of Egypt was established by Pharaoh. That's not true. That's a lie. The eldest son of Aegyptus. There was no Egyptus. That's a lie. The Pharaoh was not the son of Egypt. That's a lie. The daughter of Ham. There was no Ham. That's a lie. The Pharaoh was not the eldest son of Egypt and the daughter of Ham. That's all make believe. None of that's real. I just want to, I would want to be clear when I'm talking to Mormons, be very explicit. And it was after the manner of the government of Ham, which was patriarchal. That's all make believe. There's nothing historical to say that the Government of Ham was patriarchal. And what does it even mean if we're only talking about Ham's grandchild? What do you mean the government of Ham? You don't talk about even a giant family of having a government. So I just want to show that Joseph Smith is really tangled in the head. All right, verse 26. Pharaoh, being a righteous man, established his kingdom and judged his people wisely and justly all of his days, seeking earnestly to imitate that order established by the fathers in the first generations, in the days of the first patriarchal reign, even in the reign of Adam and also of Noah and his father, who blessed him with blessings on earth and with blessings of wisdom, but cursed him pertaining to the priesthood. Cursed him pertaining to the priesthood. Now, Pharaoh being of a lineage which he could not have, the right of priesthood notwithstanding, the Pharaohs would fain claim it from Noah through Ham. Therefore, my father was led away by their idolatry. What Joseph Smith is making the case here is he's claiming that the Egyptians wanted the gospel, they wanted the true church. And you gotta read a lot of Nibley to really unpack this stuff. But they weren't given it because they didn't have rights to it because of their fathers and because of the curse of Cain through Ham. So they had black blood, therefore they were not able to have the priesthood. And Nibley believes that all of Egyptian rights death rites are actually a perversion of the true gospel, which is absolutely, utterly ridiculous. Okay, okay. All right. So Book of Abraham, we're going to go to chapter two, verse 11. And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse them that curse thee, and in thee that is in my priesthood, and in thy seed that is thy priesthood. For I give unto thee a promise that this rite shall continue in thee and in thy seed after thee, that is to say, the literal seed or the seed of the body. And shall all the families of the earth be blessed even with the blessings of the gospel, which are the blessings of salvation, even of eternal life. What I want you to hear this is God speaking. And God is basically saying, hey, Abraham, I really like you and you have right to this priesthood that others, even though they might have been trying, don't have rights to, but it's gonna go to your kids. Now, this doctrine is the antithesis of the doctrine that the Mormons give to the general public all the time, which is we are all equal in God. The baptism is the equalize it will give the priesthood. The scriptures say otherwise, that there is an order of things that is divinely righted by birth. And that people deserve it not for their own transgressions, but for the sins or lack of sins of their fathers. That God is very clear in Mormon scripture that you might be entitled to the priesthood not because of anything you did, but because of the actions of somebody who died 140 generations ago.

John Dehlin [00:49:34] Yeah, I think that's fair. Literally in the scriptures, God clearly has his blood favorites. And then there's the Gentiles, you know, that's all the way through.

Carah Burrell [00:49:46] And especially things that, when I was Mormon that I held onto those ideas, those scriptures, all the contradictions about, like when you, when you repent, God forgets your, your sins as far as the east is from the west and, and all of that washing away. And the, the articles of faith that say that, you know, we're not like other Christians, we don't hold on to Adam's transgressions. And those are nice ideas. Those are testimony, faith building ideas. I would love for it to be that way. But from the doctrine of the church, the scriptures that are canonized, and then the way that the church has practiced and continues to practice. Yeah, I think it's opposite to like those lovely faith building stories. It's just not the way Mormonism works.

John Larsen [00:50:25] Yeah, yeah. And those scriptures that I've read, I mean, I know they're kind of wonky and kind of boring, but they have been used for over 100 years. They were used in the church to justify not putting especially people of any kind of color other than European white into positions of authority. And in some cases they've been used to actually strip the priesthood away from people after they were given it. Okay, Book of Abraham, chapter three, verse 19. This is a little bit more explicit and more important to what we're talking about. And the Lord said unto me, these two facts do exist that there are two spirits. One being more intelligent than the other. There shall be another more intelligent than they. I am the Lord thy God. I am more intelligent than they all. Now the Lord has shown unto me, Abraham, the intelligences that were organized before the world was. And among all of these there were many of the honoble and great ones. And God saw these souls, that they were good. And he stood in the midst of them and said, these I will make my rulers. For he stood among those that were spirits, and he saw that they were good. And he said unto me, Abraham, thou art one of them. Thou was chosen before thou wast born. And there stood one among them that was like unto God and he said unto those that are with him, we will go down for their space there, and we will take of the materials, and we will make an earth upon which these may dwell. And we will approve them herewith to see if they will do all things whatsoever. The Lord their God shall command them. And they who keep their first estate shall be added upon. And they who would not keep the first estate shall not have glory in the same kingdom with those who keep their first estate. And they who keep the second estate shall have glory added upon their heads forever and ever. And the Lord said, who shall I send? And one answered, like unto him, the Son of man, here I am. Send me. And another answered and said, here I am. Send me. And the Lord said, I will send the first. And the second was angry and kept not his first estate. And at that day many followed after him. Now I was criticized when I said that Jesus shot first and that Jesus was the first one to pitch his plan. Not saying, but there it is right there in scriptures. Jesus proposed his thing first. So what is being argued here is that we're not equal. That there are those who are of higher order of human beings and they were of higher order in this pre existence, this premortal life that none of us remember and none of us have any access to. And that God himself chose from the very best of those spirits and made them his rulers. So I brought up the kind of the folk belief, meaning it's not scriptural, even though the church endorsed it, the divine right of kings. I mean the Catholic Church. But here it is that Joseph Smith has reinserted into the scriptures that God himself is saying that he takes the best spirits and makes them leaders. That leaders and rulers and those who are priesthood authority over with you are inherently better or more meritous people than you are. And it's right here in the scripture coming from one of those people who is a higher merit than you. And we who don't have that merit should believe these guys. Because that's God's plan is he talks to people in the same way that schizophrenia talks to people and we're just supposed to accept their word for it, that the voices they're hearing are God because they are the noble ones and they tell us that and we believe them because they are the noble ones.

Pre-existence and Spiritual Valiance Doctrine

John Dehlin [00:54:18] The only quick question I have, John, and maybe I'm not fully understanding, so I just want to check with you. It seems like you might be making with that preexistence argument, maybe two conflicting arguments. Because on the one hand what I Hear you saying is history is replete with people that are judged to be, you know, superior, whether it's royally or religiously based on their blood lineage, that they don't necessarily deserve, that it's something that their forefathers somehow some status or privilege that their forefathers won and yet they just inherit it because they won the genetic lottery and were born into the family or the societies of power. On the other hand, this scripture that you just read us talking about the pre existence to me is Mormonism's almost twist of brilliance by basically saying that whoever ends up in power and in status in earth life, it's because they made individually the right choices in the preexistence. And so in that sense that for me those scriptures you just read is the way that the church justifies people's superiority individually. Because if a black person doesn't get the priesthood, it's because when they were in the preexistence they made the wrong choices individually. And that's why they don't end up in a better status here. Same with Mormons. If, if someone gets born into a Utah Wasatch front, you know, 12, 12 children, Mormon family with the stake president dad, it's not because of some blood privilege, it's because they chose valiantly in the pre existence. Tell me if I'm misunderstanding your point.

John Larsen [00:56:11] No, no, you're stating it well. And this is sort of the genius of Joseph Smith and it was a time box genius. So there are these common beliefs that I kind of laid out that people have, especially people who've acquired a lot of power and resources, people who are in positions of power, they're lords, they're accounts, they're kings, they're priests, they're high priests, they're founders of churches. They're people who have much in terms of treasure and power and land and opportunity. And they rely on the general population kind of giving them deference because there's always more of us than there are them. And if they get enough of us with our pitchforks, then we can take them down. So they're always kind of at this battle of trying to justify what Joseph Smith did is he established multiple times that he had these signs that pointed to the fact that he was actually a meritorious person. And like you pointed out the church doctrine, rather than try to justify why the plagiannet should rule, not the Tudors or whatever, Joseph Smith time shifted. He's like, well I have the golden plates. And then it's like, oh, okay, let's see the golden plates. Sorry, you can't see the golden plates. I can read reformed Egyptian. Well let's see. I'm sorry, we don't have really good examples of reformed Egyptian. I was meritorious in the pre existence. Well, none of us can remember it right. So he creates these long tendrils of these doctrinal stories that justify their power and authority and position that they use to lord over everyone else today in a way that can't be challenged. It's circular because if you accept Joseph as a prophet, then you accept all this bullshit that he put in the scriptures that justifies him as the prophet. And how do we know he's the prophet? Because it's in the scriptures. Well, how do we know the scriptures are to be taken seriously? Because he's the prophet. And that seems so ridiculous, but there are literally however many million Mormons you think there are who buy into that today and shape their entire lives around that circular paradox that falls apart once you assume that it's not real.

John Dehlin [00:58:36] Yeah. And for me the best examples of this are some of those hymns like Israel, Israel, God is Calling or Ye Elders of Israel. What are those songs? You know, Ye Elders of Israel, Come join now with me. You know, it's Come to Zion, Come to Zion and it really is kind of a racial superiority vibe. And whenever we sing those hymns about Israel, that's basically who we're celebrating ourselves. Kara, let's get you in here.

Carah Burrell [00:59:05] Yeah, I was just going to add on to what John Larson was saying that and yeah, both of you, that there is so many things that are this circular argument over and over again, especially when you call into question Moroni's promise that if you pray about the Book of Mormon, the Book of Mormon is true because you're feeling these warm feelings asking God if it's true. And within the Book of Mormon there's scriptures like Alma 13:3 through 4 that says the exact same things. Kind of like that Abraham scripture, that this is the manner after which we were ordained, being called and prepared from the foundations of the world according to the foreknowledge of God. And the ideas within Mormonism are supposed to be that you have your free agency to choose good or evil. And that shouldn't like override these facts. But then at the same time they kind of want to have it both ways. That yeah, then, then there are going to be people who in the pre earth life they were for no. Out of what merit? Out of what, what could they have done in the pre earth life when they knew everything, when they, when they did, like, are we crazy here? Like, we came down to earth to have this free agency, to have this moral mortal experience, to choose good and evil, but then just the very spirits that were preordained to go down and lay the foundations of this earth. Joseph Smith said in Doctrine and Covenants 138, 53 through 56, that Prophet Joseph Smith, he's like, I saw me. It was my dad, my brother, John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, like all my homies that happen to be like, hanging out here in this time, in this part of America. We just happen to be the ones that were foreordained to do this great and marvelous work. Like, what a great coincidence, you know? But it's like, well, what were. What was the merit on which. That you even had that. That. That pre Earth foreord to begin with? So, yeah, it's this incredible circular argument that I do think just kind of all relies on people believing in the Book of Mormon in the first place. And then you'll just take all these ideas along with it. And don't forget that the book of Abraham is the same book that says that God lives on a star called Kolob. So take all of it with a grain of salt for the love. That's my piece on that.

John Larsen [01:01:14] Yeah, exactly. All right, I'm going to get more specific as we proceed here. Moses, chapter three, verse five. And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew. This is for I, the Lord God created all things of which I have spoken. Let's pause for a second on that one. And I want to continue making the case that exaltation in Mormonism is complete exhausting. A hellscape of all possible hellscapes. I have over my shoulder right here, there's this beautiful horse chestnut tree, and it is covered in flowers right now, and it is just buzzing with bees and hummingbirds. There must be, I would guess, 4,500 flowers on there. And those little hummingbirds are going all over the tree and they're pollinating those flowers and they're pollinating those flowers with pollen from other flowers. And those flowers will turn possibly a lot of them not into a little acorn. That acorn will fall to the ground and season after season, a lot of them will. Most of them will just either be eaten by animals or they'll rot or they'll decompose, but some of them will have exactly the right circumstances and they will grow into a tree, and then that process will happen over and over again. And in Moses 5, every plant of the field before it's on earth, and every herb of the field for it grew, God created. So God had to use his enormous God brain to start, let's say 6000 BC and he had to take every plant that produces seeds, and a lot of plants produce billions of seeds. And he had to map out in his mind this one would cross pollinate with this one. And then he had to map out his mind that this wasp would, would, would be there the right time to make that pollination happen. Exactly. And this quality of dirt would be there that would have water over it. And he had to do this for every single blade of grass on the planet in their entirety, for every generation going back to the creation. Mormons believe this for real. What I, what the, the, the. The somebody's mind planned out every single tiny bit of minutia. Jesus Christ. All right, anyway, that's intense. For either the Lord God created all things of which I have spoken spiritually before, they were natural upon the face of the earth. For I, Lord God, not caused it to rain upon the face of the earth. And I, the Lord God had created the children of men, and not yet a man till ground for heaven's created and their flesh upon the earth. So everything that's happened in Mormonism was absolutely 100% to the minute detail foreordained by God. Right. And building on that, Moses 6, 51, he called upon our father Adam by his own voice, saying, I am God, I made the world and men before they were in the flesh. So not only do we have this meritocracy, the people who land in positions of ruling, that was absolutely designed by God. There are absolutely zero accidents in Mormonism. So the current quorum of the twelve apostles was foreordained tens of thousands of years ago. And every little thing that had to happen to get them in office, every person who died, who was in the office before them, was absolutely orchestrated by God from the foundation of the of the earth. Okay, all right, so let's jump over to the book of Mormon, 2nd Nephi 5. 21. And he caused a cursing to come on of the end upon them. Yea, even a sore cursing. Because their iniquity, behold, they had hardened their hearts against him. And they become like unto a flint. Wherefore, as they were white and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they may not be enticed unto my people, the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come on them. So here we have one of the first, overtly racist teachings by Joseph Smith that black people and brown people, because we're not talking about, like, African black. What we're talking about are South American Indian black. And so that Joseph Smith, via the Book of Mormon, makes clear that they are black so that white people will find them unattractive. That alone should be reason enough for everyone to leave the church. That one verse right there. As a matter of fact, when I first led the church, I hesitate to admit this. I was up in Logan. I had that printed on a T shirt that I wore around for a couple of years, and people would just stare at me.

Exaltation, Worthiness, and Eternal Hierarchy

John Dehlin [01:06:01] Yeah, I had this thought. I actually attended church this last Sunday.

John Larsen [01:06:06] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:06:06] And I had this thought because the guy that invited me to listen to his talk, he gave this lovely talk and he talked about his own faith journey. And in it, he mentioned the CES letter from the pulpit in sacrament meeting. He mentioned the exclusion policy and how disappointed he was. He mentioned the Gospel topics essays. It's gotta be one of the only sacrament meeting talks in the history of Mormonism that mentioned those three things all in one talk. And I happened to be there and the stake president was up on the stand. But when I thought about what a radical act it would be to simply get up and give a sacrament meeting talk where all you do is quote the most outrageous things that Mormon prophets, seers and revelators have said and that come from Mormon scripture, you could actually give a scandalous, scandalous sacrament meeting talk that would be viewed as excommunicable purely by reading scripture and quoting Mormon prophets. Isn't that true? Like the scripture you just mentioned, John Larson? It's scandalous, right? It's scandalous.

John Larsen [01:07:16] I was reading, in preparation for this, I was reading some Ezra TAF Benson, and believe it or not, I thought it was too over the top and too caustic for this podcast. I thought that has to be addressed directly. We're going to do one in here a little while. The teachings of Ezra Taft Benson and is going to make everyone's blood boil. He did not pull any punches at all.

John Dehlin [01:07:38] Yeah, absolutely.

John Larsen [01:07:41] Raging, raging fucking racist. Okay, Garrett, did you have anything else?

Carah Burrell [01:07:48] No, just. I was going to sing we thank the O God for a Prophet, but it's not time for that hymnal break yet.

John Larsen [01:07:53] Okay. The skin of blackness. But here's what it says right after the next verse. And thus saith the Lord God, I will cause that they shall be loathsome unto thy people, save they shall repent of their iniquities. Now at the beginning, I kind of gave a big pass and I said, look, we're all culturally biased. We all kind of look down our nose potentially at people of other cultures. According to the Book of Mormon, that was God's doing. I will cause that they shall be loathsome. The fact that white people find dark people loathsome is the work and handicraft of God the Father. He did that. He did it on purpose, according to this scripture. And 23. And cursed shall be the seeds of him that mixeth with their seed, for they shall be cursed even with the same cursing. And the Lord spake it. And it was done very clear here that you can't intermix the races. God does not want that to happen. And verse 24. And because of their cursing which was upon them, they did become idle people, full of mischief and subtlety, and they did seek in the wilderness for beasts of prey. Because the white people didn't do that. Oh, no, sir. No, sir. They didn't go in the. In the woods looking for beast of prey. That was the filthy, loathsome Indians who did that. And then. And let's be clear, this is. What this is, is a narrative by white settlers who were invading Indian lands and needed a story to tell themselves that what, the genocide that they were inadvertently or advertently participating in was ordained by God. That's what this is.

John Dehlin [01:09:25] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Columbus, the Book of Mormon, and Manifest Destiny

John Larsen [01:09:27] All right, let's talk a little about Columbus from the Book of Mormon. And I looked and beheld a man among the Gentiles who was separated from the seed of my brethren by many waters. And I beheld the Spirit of God that it came down and wrought upon the man. And he went forth upon the many waters, even unto the seed of my brethren who were in the promised land. And it came to pass, I build the Spirit of God. And it was wrought upon other Gentiles. They went forth out of capacity upon the many waters. The slavers and the conquistadors, the rapers and the pillagers. They were. They were moved upon by God to do that. And it came to pass that I beheld many multitudes of the Gentiles upon the land of promise. And I beheld the wrath of God. And it was upon the seed of my brethren. And they were scattered before the Gentiles and were smitten. And I beheld the Spirit of the Lord. It was upon the Gentiles all. Let me repeat that again. I beheld the Spirit of the Lord. And it was upon the Gentiles. And they did prosper and obtained the land for their inheritance and beheld. They were white and exceedingly fair and beautiful, like unto my people before they were slain. Joseph does not make any. Look, the things that happened in the new world were bloody and people suffered. Millions of people suffered horrific deaths, enslavement, disease. And the Book of Mormon tells us that was God's doing because Laman and Lemuel were jealous of their asshole little brother. Right. Isn't that the story? Like, all of this is because of one family's fight on a ship ride? You know, it's. It just. It just bakes one's fucking noodle.

John Dehlin [01:11:13] Yeah. And, you know, I talked earlier in this episode about how it started with the Old Testament and Jews and then spread to Christianity. If you talk to your average, educated, you know, semi orthodox Jew in the United States and you ask them about the genocide in the Old Testament or the favoritism in the Old Testament, even Orthodox Jews are likely gonna say, yeah, we don't so much believe that God ordered genocide. We don't so much believe that we're, like, literal. I asked Stephen Hasson this, who's an observant Jew. He's like, we don't think that we're chosen of God. We don't think that God really gave us permission to kill men, women, children, and animals in the Old Testament. That's sort of us writing into God's mouth our own. Our own cultural stuff and our own interpretation of history. You know what I'm saying? What's different is Mormons don't. In 2023, Mormons don't have that correction of the Old Testament or the New Testament and certainly not the Book of Mormon or any of the other scripture that Joseph produced. So they're stuck with that literalistic narrative that's just heinously racist. Right, Right.

John Larsen [01:12:32] Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, you said it well. And that's where. Because Mormons are stuck in a prison of their own making, because Joseph Smith and the early founders of Mormonism made clear that they were doing a restoration following the apostasy so that there was a true order of the church and the gospel and history that was lost, and they were sent by God to bring it back to us. That that was their mission, was to restore the lost teaching, the restoration. That's the whole driving principle. That's why we're not Presbyterians. That's why we're not Methodists, because of this. Well, Joseph Smith, being a man of his times, put in all of this racist, imperialistic American exceptionalism into the scriptures. And Mormons cannot back away from it because the Bible, you can read the Bible and there's genocide in there. But it's not foundational to like you're saying, to the identity of the religious believers in Mormonism. It is because if you reject the reality or the literalness of what Joseph Smith said, then you reject the foundation of the entire Mormon paradigm and Mormonism becomes nothing. Yeah, I've had great conversations with members of the 12 from the community of Christ. I've sat down with them. They're brilliant, sensitive people. They're trying to do the right thing, but they're saddled with this baggage of Joseph Smith, you know, and it's like, if you want to be a Unitarian, just be a Unitarian man. Quit hauling these racist white guys around with you. And Mormons have that problem. Okay, so I think we've established the pearl of great prize, the Book of Mormon. And Kara, I had that scripture written down that Kara shared earlier from Doctrine and Covenants 138, which was a revelation by Joseph F. Smith in 1918 where he said, yeah, not only are the rulers like we see in the pro great price, but we're them. We and my buddies as Kara, as you said. So all the book of scripture, all the book of modern revelation established this idea that there are some people who have what they have in this world because of their privilege, imbued by God from the pre existence.

John Dehlin [01:14:58] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:14:59] All right, well, let's consult that we have modern revelation. Right? So let's see what the modern prophets, let's see if they can add some clarity to this, shall we?

John Dehlin [01:15:10] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:15:10] So I'm going to quote Joseph F. Smith, the same guy who had that Revelation 138 from Doctrines of Salvation, a book he wrote I would highly recommend everybody read.

John Dehlin [01:15:20] Wait, don't tell, don't tell. Let me guess, he's going to take it metaphorical. He's going to say that this was all metaphor. Right? This was myth. Is that where he's going to go?

John Larsen [01:15:30] Well, let's see, shall we? Place your bets.

Carah Burrell [01:15:33] The mouthpieces of God. What do they have to say about the majority of people who are not white on planet earth that are also God's children?

John Larsen [01:15:42] All right, and he's going to sum up everything I've been saying better than I ever could. Okay, quote Joseph F. Smith, modern prophet. There is a reason why one man is born black with other disadvantages while another is born white with great advantages. The reason is that we once had an estate before we came here. And were obedient more or less to the laws that were given us there. Those who were faithful in all things there received great blessings here, and those who were not so faithful received less. Every man had his agency there and men received rewards here based on their actions there. Just as they will receive rewards hereafter due to deeds done in the body. The Negro evidently is receiving the rewards he merits. Joseph F. Smith.

John Dehlin [01:16:34] And that's son of Hyrum Smith, Joseph's brother and prophet, President of the church.

John Larsen [01:16:40] Indeed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, there's actually even worse things said than this. But this one summed it up really well, that when you look and you say, why are there some families in the church that generation after generation after generation they're called into these posh callings. Why is it that somebody can serve their whole life in the church as a gentle servant of God and have estates worth multiple millions of dollars if their heirs fight after? Why do some people have. Have money? And why. Why are some stake centers built really, really nice and some are built really shitty? Why do some people have. And the answer is, well, it's because of what you did before you were born. Which is really, I want to point out, contradictory to what Joseph Smith put in the articles of faith. You know, he said man will be punished for their own sins, not for Adam's transgressions, not for the sins of the fathers. But that is not the actual belief. The belief is if two people in the church have, one has more than the other, it is because of what they did in the pre existence. Do you all, dear viewers, dear listeners, see where I'm getting at, how dangerous of a belief this can be? Now go ahead.

John Dehlin [01:18:01] Yeah, and you kind of talked about, you know, there's no way to prove that. There's no way to demonstrate what your righteousness was, what your valiance was in the preexistence. It's almost tautological. If you're succeeding as a Mormon, then just by facto you were amazing in the pre existence and that's all you gotta do. And so it ends up being very futile, very monarchical, very patriarchal, very much entitled family based. You just have the loophole of Joseph's doctrinal exception or explanation that you could just pull out at any time as the justification for the power and the bigotry and the money that you've sort of been able to accumulate, right? Through whatever, through whatever means necessary. Right?

John Larsen [01:18:58] Yeah, yeah, it's yours by entitlement. God wants you to have that money and it has some Ramifications that we're going to talk about in a minute. I did want to. Before we get there, just take to pause for a second. Talk about popular culture and Mormonism. We've talked about scriptures, we've talked about modern prophets. I'm going to name off some works. Let's start with Nephi Anderson's 19th century novel. Great. Everyone should read it. It called Added Upon. Added upon tells a love story that begins in the pre existence and transitions to the earth and then goes into the afterlife. We did an entire episode of Mormon Expression on it. I would refer you to that. The belief that our relationships, our children, our spouses are all foreordained and that these things are happening because of a special privilege that was earned. Of course. That should bring to mind Saturday's Warrior by Alexi Alvedo and the other guy. I'm sorry that. That you know where, where, where Emily. They are arguing and Emily is supposed to be born. They were four days they were a family before you know where, where, where they were in the pre existence and it was all set up. There's many Mormon families who have an inordinate amount of children. 14 children, 12 children, 11 children who believe that they were all foreordained in this preexistence we have no access to. The lovely and talented Carolyn Pearson is a participant in this. My turn on Earth is completely about this status on earth that comes from this pre estate of what happened before us. Of course there's a prequel to Saturday's Warrior Star Child, one of my favorites which is all about. All about this. The for the strength of the youth and. And youth conferences and. And all that have been pounding into kids heads. That they are the chosen ones saved for the last generation. That they. They are special by the very act of being born in the church. They manifest that they are support superior spirits. They are human beings that have more intrinsic value and are deserving of more things of power, of rights, of privileges, of treasure, of money, of property because of their birthright. This is a common, common teaching in the church.

John Dehlin [01:21:27] Not to mention patriarchal blessings, right?

John Larsen [01:21:30] Oh yeah. Patriarchal blessings are replete with this stuff. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:21:34] Carrie, did you want to add anything?

Carah Burrell [01:21:37] Just that if you watched that last episode that John Dehlin did about the 60 Minutes piece that the youth of the church, if you're born male, that they're allotted. What was it like $2,000 per. Per like their scouting program per year and the young women's are allotted like I don't know, $20 or something. So and there's definitely these themes. I would say as somebody the youngest of the crew here, I don't want to name our ages or anything, but that was definitely a huge theme for us growing up. And my entire indoctrination, especially as a woman in the church, was that, oh my gosh, I have to have as many kids as possible. It's like, yeah, free agency, free will. I get to pray about how many kids I'm supposed to have. But quite honestly, when I'm sitting in a culture of other females in the church, one of the last, last after I lost my faith, I was pregnant, but I was still in this group of other Latter Day Saint women. And they're all excited for me that I was having my third baby and another person was pregnant with their fifth. And they're like, yeah, I just prayed and I just, I didn't want to have another one, but God told me I should. And I very emphatically was like, I am putting on a tinfoil hat and saying, no more children. Do not give me any more. In a low key way of saying, I don't care what God has to say. And they were all kind of aghast at me that I would just say so blatantly in front of a group of LDS women that I don't care what God tells me, how many more kids to have, I'm gonna take back some, some bodily autonomy here. So even just bringing that up in a group of Latter Day Saint women from every different angle, from the time I was a youth as a woman in the church, to being an adult who is just expected to have as many kids as possible and carry on what my role is as a woman in the church. So this is all, all ties together for me.

John Larsen [01:23:26] Yeah. And that's a great transition. I want to now spend the last bit of this podcast talking about the effects of this stuff.

John Dehlin [01:23:33] John, man, John, I'm sorry, I just have to add one thing. Kara, that was brilliant. One more thing. You can always tell the brightest kids in Mormon seminary class when they're to trying told that they're Saturday's warrior, that they were preserved by God. To the evening of Saturday, which is kind of this week based metaphor for saying that Jesus is about to come on Sunday morning. And so like you seminary class at Murray high school in 2023, you were saved by God and Jesus until the very last day to usher in the coming of the Savior. You can always tell the smartest seminary kids because they think for a second and they say, well, wait a Minute weren't, you know, wasn't older brother Tommy wasn't, wasn't his class told the same thing. And now that I'm thinking about it, like weren't my parents back in the 90s, weren't they told that same thing? And then now that I think about it, wasn't grandpa told the same thing? And you can always tell the smart ones because you realize that every generation literally since the beginning of Mormonism, but even going back two millennium, like Jesus apostles thought Jesus was coming right after. But isn't it interesting that even within Mormonism the most recent generation is always the most elect relative to the previous generations. It's almost like this self effacing thing that the old Mormon white men in power get to say is they kind of get the pat, pat the heads of the youngest generation and say you're God's favorite, we have all the money and the power, but you were God's favorite chosen, you know, for December of 2023.

John Larsen [01:25:25] Right?

John Dehlin [01:25:26] I mean, yeah.

Carah Burrell [01:25:28] Now do a fundraiser and earn your own money for girls camp.

John Dehlin [01:25:33] Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. Okay, John, sorry, I just had to add that.

John Larsen [01:25:37] No, no, so true. And it speaks to the mechanism by which this is imbued. This idea of being superior to those around you just starts so early. Now let's talk about some of the net effects and Kara brought up, one of the first ones is the belief that gender is imbued in the pre existence, therefore the traditional WASPy sort of gender roles that we really kind of became entrenched post World War II. The idea that women should be homemakers and having children and cooking dinner and taking care of that stuff while the man goes out and has positions of authority and gets raises and money and, and decides all those that was justified. If you look at the church's stand against the era and stuff internal to the church by relying on the idea that this is intrinsic. By that I mean that you're a woman, I'm a man, I can't do anything about it. I get to have the priesthood. I'm white, you're black, I get to have the priesthood, I can't do anything about it. God put that up from the get go. Gender is an eternal immutable aspect. We can't change it. I'm sorry, you're basically inferior by birth because you're a woman. You're not allowed to do these things. I might look at you as an equal, but we know doctrinally that you're not. So what can I do?

Gender, Patriarchy, and the Mormon Elect

John Dehlin [01:27:06] But they put a knife in it, because they say actually you're the most special gender. You just don't get any power or money or influence or status. Go make the babies. But you're actually the best. There's sort of this, you know, what is the term, Kara? Sort of this benevolent patriarchy, you know, benevolent sexism. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Larsen [01:27:25] The gilded cage sexism, it's sometimes called.

John Dehlin [01:27:29] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:27:30] You know, women are so, are so wonderful and special. They need to be protected by us men and we don't want them to be. They need to have a male escort whenever they go out so they don't hear cat calls. So they don't, you know, that sort of thing. Yeah. And then what it does is it makes it so you never have to reform anything. You know, I'm sorry, I think that women really should have more rights than they do. But what can I do? This was put in place by God.

John Dehlin [01:27:55] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:27:56] Okay. This teaching has bled over among the Mormon people over and over again into nationalism, anti immigration, American exceptionalism and religious status for supply side economics and other things like that. I can show you where Ezra F. Benson talks about, you know, elements of capitalism that aren't even universally accepted inside our capitalistic system as being the word of God, as being intrinsic, as being something that is just going to happen because that's the way God set it up. And when you have God's chosen people making decisions, those decisions are obviously the right decisions, even when they're wrong. And that leads to the other problem, which is this has become a seedbed for white supremacy. And now I'm going to pull the word out. Mormonism is not a white supremacist religion, but its scriptures are. And there is a not insignificant, not majority, but not insignificant percentage of the population that is white supremacist and is involved in these things in Coeur d' Alene and in southern Utah and in the Mexican colonies and in other places where there are hotbeds of white supremacist thinking among church believers. And you have to connect the dots and say we've given a platform for these kind of beliefs to fester because they're not routinely dismissed because like you say, they can oftentimes be justified with scripture.

John Dehlin [01:29:37] Yeah, yeah. And that's just one. Go ahead, Kara. Yeah.

Carah Burrell [01:29:42] You know, when you're, you're getting into a debate with somebody and the Mormon will always kind of want to come back and say like, okay, well that's not actually what we practice. Like, that's not, you know, I know a couple black, black man and A white woman who got married and nobody judges them and everyone. But wouldn't you guys argue that just the doctrines of Mormonism are supposed to be so foundational. This is a restoration. These things are never supposed to change. And the argument actually lies more with calling it a white supremacist religion by looking at the doctrine itself, not just looking at that. Your ward is like an anomaly that actually accepts these two people that you know that got married and are having mixed race children or whatever. The argument actually lies with what the mouthpieces of God have said, what the doctrine is as it's taught. And that is what is what fortifies the culture itself. It doesn't. Mormon culture will reform because of pressure from the outside in of people to not be racist. It's not going to reform itself from the doctrine itself. That supposedly doesn't change, but then it does when it's reformed by the outside culture. And so this, it's just this silly old, silly old adorable Mormons who think that the doctrine never changes, but it's really that outside in pressure from the bottom up outside in event how any dogma really, really changes. And so the argument that like, well, we're not like that. I know, I know a couple who, who's. We don't have a white supremacist religion. What are you talking about? Yeah, that, that's culturally informed by people not putting up with bullshit as much. It's not actually because your prophets suddenly got this wonderful revelation. Obviously if you go back to the 1978 priesthood ban being lifted, it wasn't because the prophets were so painstakingly excited about it. It was a cultural reform to reform

John Larsen [01:31:31] the doctrine for sure. Okay, let's take a term like the mission field baked in. That term is a sense of superiority that there is a place that is separate from the place that we have sanctified by our very presence there. That our influence on the government makes every other place sort of a big othering. And it's funny, when you listen to people come back from their missions, they will often talk about how they love the people. And if you listen to them, especially elderly mission couples. It's very patronizing the way that Mormons talk about everyone else. And they talk about them as if they're deceived, as if they're stupid, as if they're inferior. It's a belief that is all over the place and it comes in the fact of missionaries. I am so embarrassed. I'm mortified when I think back to myself as a 19 and 20 year old kid trucking around the streets of San Diego with that sense of entitled superiority. I had like, you know, feeling like you could take on pastors, priests and rabbis, feeling like you could flip open your scriptures and destroy other faith paradigms, believing that we could teach Buddhists and Hindus anything. It's this arrogance. And I've talked to missionaries since and I'm always floored by the twin ignorance and arrogance of their own intelligence that they walk around with. And again, I am owning that sin. I had that because I inherited a belief of my betterness. But I am glad that my mission actually taught me that I wasn't. So I'm forever grateful for that. But that is not because in those aspects I was obeying the rules of the mission. Quite the contrary. It's because I started listening and watching and not paying as much attention to the church leaders. But that arrogance, and I've seen it in the business world because I have a BYU degree. I have had people assume that I am a Mormon and talk to me like we're insiders, like we're on the know, like we're both on the inside track. It is disgusting and it is real. Yeah, okay. Exploitation of immigrants and migrants. Utah, Arizona, Idaho, Colorado. These places are agrarian places that are full of Mormons that are rife with exploitation of immigrant labor for field work. For Logan has one of the biggest slaughterhouses in the west. And there's been several raids where the whole place is shut down when they go after illegal immigrants. I personally believe, based on my conversation with Mormons, my years in Mormonism, that sometimes that racism is justified because of these beliefs. And treating immigrants as less than or as not as deserving as the people who are native or who are us I think is a net result in part of these teachings. Yeah, fraud. Mormonism is rife with fraud. Ponzi screams multi level marketing. The Utah prisons are full of stake presidents and bishops. And the problem is you have these teachings that your Stake President is a holy man that was selected by God, ordained from the pre existence because of the merit he had there and you believe he is smarter and more in tune with the Spirit and he starts trying to sell you some property or this scheme that's gonna get you rich and you know that he has money and you already believe in prosperity gospel, you are going to be subject to fraud. Don't take my word for it. The Mormons talk about this. The state of Utah talks about this. This is a well known, well documented thing that Mormons are highly susceptible to fraud from other Mormons. And I would argue that it stems from these belief systems of superiority.

John Dehlin [01:36:01] Yeah, yeah. So there's. And by the way, whenever. Whenever. Whether it's cultural imperialism or sort of these sort of fraud schemes, they have to be rooted ultimately in this idea of superiority, because if you're going to rip someone off, you have to find a way to justify it. So whether you're going to take their land and commit genocide upon them or just rape their savings account, so to speak, it's usually rooted in some sort of sense of entitlement or superiority, I think.

John Larsen [01:36:33] Yeah, agreed. Well said. The next one. Just microaggressions against others. Anybody who's lived in Utah will tell you they get these sort of microaggressions of where their kids aren't. They're not asked out on dates, they're not invited to parties, they're not. They're excluded from events. There's a trunk or why are there no kids going through my neighborhood? Well, we did a Trunk or treat. Why do we do a trunk or treat? Because. Because of the evil of the other. The Gentiles. Right. You know, it's. It all roots back to this. We're special, we're different. And. Sorry, it gets on you guys some, but that's. That's just. Okay.

John Dehlin [01:37:11] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:37:13] The dismissing of financial and other impropriety because the church is special and it's other and it's blessed and we know what we're doing. What did Hinckley say after he appeared on 60 Minutes? And then I think it was Mike Wallace was trying to pin him down on some things. And then he came back and he kind of did some misleading things on polygamy in particular. And he came back and he said, trust me, I know what the doctrines are. And everybody laughed because everybody knew he was. He was playing that because we're just better. And when you see evidence that we're not like that we did lie, that we did commit fraud, that we did break laws, that we did take advantage of people, that normalcy bias, that cognitive dissonance kicks in and we say, well, we are better so we can do the same things that other people do and not be judged for them, because we're a special people. And what I think is fascinating is about every 10 years, there is a financial expose in the church. Church going all the way back. We could do a podcast and cover them, and they always blow up in the media. And everybody always says, how do Mormons continue on after this? And then it just goes back to normal. This latest One with the SEC is just the latest in a long line of financial exposes of the church. And Mormons just go about their lives. They will after this one too. Yeah, and then the last one I want to bring up because it kind of hits home for me in the audience the inferiority and othering of the ex Mormons. So ex Mormons are not just people who rejected the gospel. Their own intrinsic status shifts. So given the narrative of the pre existence, you have that one third host of heaven who chose Satan's path and you have all the righteous people. Well, by becoming an ex Mormon you have shown your stripes, that you are actually not one of the chosen. You might be one of the elect, but you're not one of the chosen. For many are called, but few are chosen and you are no longer part of that group. You have othered yourself not just as somebody who's not a Mormon, you have shown yourself to be in a very real way for Mormonism, a sub human. You are unworthy, you have no worth, you are in rebellion against God from the foundation. You are denying the very nature of your pre existent reality where you, you made promises and covenants and God chose you. But you're not one of the chosen. It in my mind fuels the intra family fights, the custody battles, the writing out of the wills, the dismissal, the uninviting people to weddings, the all of the othering and the hatred that gets spewed towards ex Mormons comes from this teaching. Because it's not just you rejected the teachings, you're rejecting your core identity. You are haram, you're unclean, you're unworthy,

Othering of Outsiders and Ex-Members

John Dehlin [01:40:42] powerful. I love it.

John Larsen [01:40:47] Well, that's what I got. I think that it's important for us to acknowledge this thing, that it's there and to go to the top where I spent all that time for us all to put a little humility on and realize that we have the tendency to do these microaggressions to be people who distribute favor and merit to people who are like us and not pay attention to others, to push other cultures to the margin. And I think it's especially true for those of us who grew up in the Mormon paradigm, whether we left the church or not, because we got this teaching that is a sickness through all of western culture, but it's on steroids with Mormonism. So each of us, including myself, needs to always recognize, kind of like an alcoholic at a bar, that we got a problem. And our problem is the belief in our own superiority.

John Dehlin [01:41:50] Beautiful. Well, I'll give kind of my closing thoughts. And then Kara will invite you to give yours. But I'll just say I started feeling like these Mormon teachings of superiority didn't make sense very, very early on. I'm old enough to remember pre priesthood ban and post priesthood ban because I was born in 69 and the church didn't give full status to Black people until 78. So I lived nine years prior to the priesthood ban and it never made sense to me even as a child. So that was one of the first things that ever made sense as a Mormon in high school. Mormons made up. There were like two or three Mormons in my graduating class. And then all these other religions were also claiming to be the true religions. And I just remember like doing the math as I like to call it, and I remember asking how many Mormons there were at the time. And let's just say there were 5 million or whatever at the time in the, in the 80s. And then I remember dividing the number of Mormons in the world, God's chosen people, by the total number of people in the world. And it was less than 1/2 of 1%. And even as a high schooler Mormon, very orthodox and devout, I was just like, man, if God is all power, if God is all powerful, and if we're his chosen people, he kind of sucks. He's kind of inefficient, like his plan kind of blows. Like he's not a very good architect. And this idea that, well, that just makes us more elite, that didn't quite make sense to me as a kid. Then I go to Guatemala and there are all these tall, light skinned, light eyes, brown, blonde, Utah 19 year olds going over Guatemala and because of their money, because their money and power and status, they're able to persuade these super poor kids without teeth and without shoes to get baptized because we've got the money to build the chapels and we've got the money, you know, to, to create the infrastructure for the churches there. And I realized just how culturally manipulative it was that we were targeting the developed world and that cultural colonialism started to grade against my, my sensitivities. And then, you know, once I come back from my mission graduate and go work for a company like Microsoft or Bain, and you start working with some of the elite people in the world, whether they're Sikhs or Jews or secular Jews or Catholics or whatever, atheists, agnostics. You realize, man, if we're the chosen people, there's a lot of people that are way smarter and in many cases way more moral than we are. Once you meet an atheist that does good for no desire for reward in heaven or no fear of punishment. They only believe in the now. And they're choosing to be moral because for morality's sake alone, then all of a sudden you start going, whoa. This sense of spiritual superiority that Mormons are claiming or social superiority kind of stops making sense. And then once you realize that within the church men are getting all the power and the status and women are kind of relegated, that stops making sense. And then you start learning about like history and colonialism and you read a book like you read a book like Guns, Germs and Steel and you realize that America didn't succeed because we had God on our side. We had the right width of territory that was farmable or arable, the right height, the right longitudes and latitudes and the right weather patterns to make, and the right animals that were just existing all around us. That's what contributed to our cultural and social and political hegemony. Not, you know, the right spiritual beliefs or practices. And at that point, sort of American exceptionalism that's by the way, hardwired into the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants and Mormonism in general, it all starts collapsing like a house of cards. And then, and then finally when you read a book like Recovering Agency by Luna Lindsay Corbin and you study sort of the playbook for high demand religions or cults, you know, you just, you open up the book and you read it and guess what? There's a chapter on elitism and there's a chapter on us versus them thinking. And you realize cultural and social and spiritual and racial superiority is baked into what cults are. It's baked into what cults do. It's baked into their formula for success. Because it feels good to be told you're better than everybody else. And that's motivating. And you need an enemy, by the way, to be able to rally the troops and to whip yourselves up and to fight against. You need an enemy. And whether it's dark skinned people, black people, women, LGBT people, other countries, Baptists, Catholics, the great and abominable church, Jews, whatever it is, you need to feel better than everybody else. And you need a way to justify your cultural and your spiritual and your social colonialism. And so it's all there. It's all in the playbook. The elitism and the superiority, it's all there. It's part of the formula that frankly has made Mormonism a quarter of a trillion dollar church. And it made the Catholic church, a multi billion dollar church, centuries before Mormonism. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. And then you got to figure out what to do with that knowledge. So that's, I think what you're saying, John, is so important. I think it's as Mormon as fruit in your jello. And the question that I have is, how are we going to unwind ourselves from it? You know, those are the questions I have.

John Larsen [01:48:39] Preach the word, Brother John. Wow, that was a mic drop. That was fantastic. I can't, I can't applaud more. No. And then my contention, and I've done it in many asshole ways, is that it can't be unwound. It has to be discarded wholesale. But that being said, I know I call people out. I understand the real life intricacies of extracting yourself from the church sometimes is very, very difficult. But I will challenge and say, and I've made this case, one of the last Mormon expressions was why the church can't reform on the gay issue. I would invite people to listen to that. I still stand by the arguments I made there that the church just has to be discarded. People have to walk away from it and start over. And the joy of starting over is there's many beautiful things, like you point out in this world, that when you lift those blinders off, you can see the good and joy and wonderful and loving place that the corners of this world are that you just didn't see. Sorry, Kara, I don't want to steal your thunder.

Carah Burrell [01:49:44] I thought John deland, John Larson, you guys really wrapped it up well there. The only thing that we haven't gone into, though I don't make this podcast any longer, is just the idea that we're talking about bloodlines and for ordination before the world was, and thinking that we are people who came down to this earth with a special knowledge and a, a birthright, a first estate that we're going to be able to carry on into the next life. And then within that system there is this hindrance that, that that's limiting your actual true potential, your true spiritual growth. Because within that you're not allowed to question a part of, of. I was just reading while you guys were talking, how you are supposed to know if you have a birthright and how you fulfill your patriarchal blessing is through worthiness. And how do you do that in, in the, the, the confines of Mormonism, not a whole lot of questioning will also allow you to be worthy at the same time. And so it's this interesting paradox I think that the thing that Mormons that I would have said that I was after was, was the highest amount of spirituality, of connecting with God the Father, my maker and things, learning more about where I came from and where I'm going. But then you start asking more questions and asking more questions always. This is going to lead to a decrease of your worthiness in, in the Mormon paradigm and not an increase in it. And so to stay worthy, to stay living up to this foreign ordination you have, obedience is the, the first principle of the gospel, right? So obedience and just continuing and going along these things, if you just stay obedient, if you just stay quiet, if you just stop questioning, if you are asking for apologies for all of these, these genocides and all of these things we've been talking about, that is actually a hindrance to your worthiness, a hindrance to your, your estate being continued into the next life. And what a sucky paradigm that is. If we're after true spiritual growth and we're not allowed to question. I don't know what you're. That's just gonna be, it's gonna be a, a stopgap. It's gonna be a dam that doesn't let any kind of true spiritual water flow through it. And why do so many people leave the church? It's cuz I think we were on a pursuit for knowledge, we were on a pursuit for spiritual growth and we were blocked. When we asked questions, we were told that we were wrong and we were evil by, by, by our leaders and things. So that's, that's my piece on that part that it just, it all has to tie together to not question the entire paradigm we're in.

Marriage, Priesthood, and Reinforcing Superiority

John Larsen [01:52:08] So true. And you remind me that I left out one really important example of all this that illustrates what you're talking about, which is Mormon marriage and how people get married so young. And you know, I've lamented why don't the older people stop it from happening? You know, people getting married after three or four months. Well, I think it all is fed by this and what you're saying. Well, we are, and John's mathematics, we are the elite of the elite of the elite. So if any but two people can make a righteous marriage happen, it's two worthy Mormons. And matter of fact, Kimball basically said that full out. And then when your marriage isn't working well, like you're pointing out, Kara, it was foreordained from the beginning. It's God's complete will. So must be something wrong with you. You're not doing it right. You're not reading the scriptures enough. You're not. And it's these layers and layers of control where unwinding the clock or figuring things out, like Kara just brilliantly pointed out, is proof that you're doing it wrong. And it just pulls people back in and doesn't give them room to question. So again, the insidiousness of these teachings that it's really not any advantage to believe that you're better than everyone else.

John Dehlin [01:53:22] Love it. I do have one final thought that I just want to share. And John Larson and Kara, you know, this has been such a important episode. Well, first of all, like, yeah, we didn't even mention Mormon superiority as it comes to ordinances because, you know, Mormons don't like this to be said explicitly. But no other baptism in the world counts other than a Mormon baptism. No other marriage in the world counts in heaven other than a Mormon marriage. No one has the Holy Ghost as much as a Mormon does, you know, and of course, heaven is supremely stratified. There's not just three levels of heaven plus an outer darkness in Joseph Smith's heaven, but even the levels have levels. And the celestial kingdom has three levels within it. Like, the stratification just goes on literally for eternity in Mormonism. And the ordinances are one of the worst parts in my mind about that. But the one thing I wanted to end with is, you know, there are a lot of things that people enjoy about Mormon doctrine, and one is certainty. And when you lose your faith in Mormonism, there are a lot of people that just are sad that they lose their certainty. And you need to ascribe to some sort of philosophy like Buddhism, to realize that certainty was, was an illusion all along. And once you realize you never really had certainty, then there becomes this beauty of just living in the moment and being okay without having what actually turned out to be fake or false certainty. But what is the advantage to losing the idea that you're better than everybody else? That seems like a real positive benefit to being Mormon is believing that you're superior to everyone around you. You could be, you know, you could be a 19 year old kid from Magna, Utah, and you think you're better than a, you know, than a PhD level Columbia professor. If you're serving in New York because you're Mormon, right. What's the upside to losing that sense of superiority? And I'll just say this for me, the superiority, the sense and the teaching and the doctrine of superiority became a burden after a while because you look at your Mormon people and why you love your Mormon people and you're proud in some ways of your Mormon people. When you look at amazing Jewish people and amazing atheists and amazing Catholics and amazing Sikhs and amazing Muslims, you start to carry this cognitive dissonance where you're just saying, I'm being taught that I'm better, but that's not how I'm experiencing the world and feeling this burden of having to tell everybody they're wrong to bring a Book of Mormon to work and to pass out a Book of Mormon to your Jewish colleague who you really love because your Elders Quorum president told you you need to fill the quota of Book of Mormons handed out to Gentiles. That becomes such a burden after a and you start looking around and you start saying, does my Jewish friend really need Mormonism? Does my Catholic friend who loves his wife and loves his kids, is he really going to be better off if he leaves his church and comes to Mormonism? And my atheism friend who's brilliant and rich and ethical and moral, is his life really going to be improved by sitting in church for two hours every Sunday hearing the drivel that's so often shared from the pulpit and in Elders Quorum? No, his life is probably not going to be improved. And what you realize is you lose the sense of superiority. But what you do is you get to enter, you get to enter the human race as a fellow citizen. And while you no longer get to deal with the dissonance of being taught that you're better than everybody but not experiencing superiority in the world, you get to join the human race. And as a fellow member of the human race, you get the excitement of realizing that every single person you meet is your brother, is your sister, is your teacher, is your guide. And you can learn from a Jew, you can learn from a Muslim, you can learn from a woman, you can learn from a gay person or a trans person. They've all got stuff to teach you. And so instead of feeling like that Wilford Woodruff manual from Elders Quorum is going to be the source of your truth from that year. It can be Oprah, it can be Maya Angelou, it can be Malcolm X, it can be Gandhi. Everyone's your prophet, everyone's your teacher, everyone's your brother, everyone's your sister. And humanity becomes a source of education and enlightenment that your whole worldview was shut off from when you had a Mormon centric worldview of superiority. And that's the upside. The world becomes your brother and your sister. The world becomes Your teacher and your prophet and your seer and your revelator, and you lose the infantilization of Mormonism that keeps you tiny in a box of ignorance and a provincial, colonialistic, white, racist, sexist, homophobic pablum of doctrine. And all of a sudden, the world becomes this beautiful university of truth and enlightenment and of wisdom. And everyone around you, including a child, can be your teacher and not in some patronizing, oh, you've got some things to teach us, little boy. No, that boy or that woman or that gay person or that trans person or that African. They have legitimate things to teach you if you'll step down from your pedestal and actually look around and be humble and open and willing to learn.

John Larsen [01:59:32] Oh, my God. John is on a roll, man. I've got a chubby. That's great, John. You know, everything you're saying is exactly right. You know people, you leave the church, and I'll tell you the greatest thing is I can experience things without contextualization. When there's a beautiful sunrise, when there's a beautiful sunset, when I'm sitting with friends like I was this weekend late into the night, arguing about things like free will over a bong or whatever, you know, it's just there in the moment, and you don't have to give it walls. You don't have to ascribe meaning to it. You can just confront the universe as it is and just revel in the beauty of it. And like you're saying, the beauty of everybody around us and the experience they bring and the wisdom they bring from all of the ages. Rather than looking for the right thing, let's look for the things that are beautiful and helpful and kind.

John Dehlin [02:00:30] Yeah. And they're all around us.

John Larsen [02:00:32] Yeah. All right, well, hey, I'm going to sign up for you guys at church.

Carah Burrell [02:00:39] John, I want you to do that rant at a testimony meeting, the Mormon Chapel next month.

John Dehlin [02:00:43] Next month.

Carah Burrell [02:00:44] Just imagine.

John Larsen [02:00:46] I think John outranted me this episode. I think he gets the he did. I'm the Ranter of the Month award that I have dominated on the Wall of Mormon Stories, and my picture is going to be replaced this month with John Dehlin.

Carah Burrell [02:01:00] We all have our own superiority biases we're trying to undo, and here we are putting up plaques.

John Dehlin [02:01:08] Let's put Kara first. Let's have Kara be. Be the Supreme.

Closing Reflections and Takeaways

Carah Burrell [02:01:12] I love everything you guys said, and all I'll add to that is I did an episode today with one of my other favorite podcasters, Bill Real Today, about taking the spiritual experiences that we had Within Mormonism, understanding them, contextualizing them, and then taking the threads of what we, what we liked about that and then what we still resonate with now. And one of the main themes was that we are all interconnected. And I think that's exactly kind of the same theme that we're talking about right now, is that we're all human beings and we're all have these ubiquitous types of human experiences. And for the Mormon Church, with all of its. Its problems and its dogmas and its tools of undue influence to come along and just wrap those spiritual experiences up and label them a sunrise that came from God. God did that, God did this, God did this. And it all is labeled and stamped to fortify a Mormon testimony that leads people to all of these, these misalignments, you could call them, with actual truth and with the spirit superiority complex perhaps within Mormonism, I think is a real disadvantage. It does a disservice to us and not acknowledging the beauty, the humanity in everyone by thinking that our spiritual experiences are the most profound, the. The ones that are actually intact when we know that people could have the exact same Book of Mormon, they could have the exact same Moroni's promise, but then they also think the Warren Jeffs is the prophet. You know, the ways that we come about truth are. They're so haphazard. And the God that gave us this brain and these ways to be able to connect with him, the, the epistemology on how we actually know what is true. There's just so many ways that people are having these experiences that go across all different cultures. And it is the. The most rational argument to come to that, hey, we're just a bunch of Homo sapiens born into different cultures. It's an absurd thing that we're even here right now, now and just give love, give connection, give the. The highest truth that you can would be. Would be love, I would hope, and compassion for yourself, compassion for others as we just kind of untangle ourselves from this Mormon mess, from the support superiority and just, yeah, give ourselves a lot of love and compassion along the way. That's all I have to say on that.

John Dehlin [02:03:25] I love it. Thanks, Karen.

Carah Burrell [02:03:26] Number one. I'm number one, though.

John Dehlin [02:03:32] Thanks, Kara. It's great to have you and thanks, John Larson. This is an important episode. We appreciate it.

Carah Burrell [02:03:37] Super important. This is really good.

John Larsen [02:03:38] Thank you for the opportunity and all of you out there again with your kind words to all of us. We do this because it helps people and I appreciate everyone who reaches out and thanks for fighting the Fight.

John Dehlin [02:03:56] And I'll just say to close John Larson, that I just attended a going away party for a friend of mine who you've stolen away to the Pacific Northwest. I'm tired of you stealing people, really quality people to Oregon. Cut that shit out, John Larson. Cut. Stop. It's like you're a new prophet. It's like you're a new prophet and you're holding. You're calling your own gathering, but it's in Bend and Beaverton instead of. Instead of Salt Lake. What's up?

John Larsen [02:04:26] Yeah, I'm actually in Corvallis is where I'm at.

John Dehlin [02:04:28] Corvallis?

John Larsen [02:04:29] No, we're building a community out here. Not in any kind of weird, perverted, strange way of just people who care about each other. And yeah, my message to you all is it doesn't have to be the way it is. As a matter of fact, by the time this gets released, I will recorded another podcast on the John Larson Channel and I'm explaining exactly what I'm doing out here. So if you're, if you're curious at all as to what's going on, I would invite you to tune over there. I'll send Maven a link and you can click to it and. No, we should all try to make the world better. It's worth it. I'm fighting for.

John Dehlin [02:05:12] I love it. All right, well, please, please subscribe to the Nuance Ho YouTube channel.

Carah Burrell [02:05:17] Thank you.

John Dehlin [02:05:17] Please subscribe to Nuance Ho Patreon and support Kara and her wonderful work. Please check her out on Instagram and YouTube and TikTok and all the good things. Keep up the Good work.

Carah Burrell [02:05:28] My TikTok hit a million views, by the way. I just wanted to add that my 60 minutes 1000.

John Dehlin [02:05:33] Good job, Kara. Keep up, keep up the good work. And also, you know, thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Please do follow us on, subscribe to us on YouTube, subscribe to us on Facebook, follow us on TikTok and Instagram and wherever you can. If you want to donate to the Mormon Expression, you know, project, you can go to mormonstories.org mormonexpression Become a monthly donor. And as long as your donations, you know, pay for it, we'll keep having John and Kara on to do this wonderful series. In addition, we invite you to check out the Mormon Expression Library, 300, I believe, plus episodes. You can get it on Spotify or on itunes. But John's just done some amazing, groundbreaking work in Mormon podcasting and you can check out that entire library or catalog wherever you consume your podcast. It's definitely worth your time. Thanks for supporting the Open Stories Foundation. Thanks for supporting Mormon Stories. Most importantly, be good to each other. Be kind to each other. Tune in again next week for another episode of Mormon Stories podcast and we'll see you all again really soon. Thanks, everybody. Take care.

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