Introduction and Guest Welcome

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is my birthday. It is August 20, 2021. I am 52 stinking years old. No, 52amazing years old. I'm just getting over a cold. And I am super excited for my birthday present today. My birthday present today of all days is to have Radio Free Mormon in the house. Radio Free Mormon, how are you doing, brother?

Radio Free Mormon [00:00:33] I am doing great, thank you, Dr. Dehlin. Happy birthday.

John Dehlin [00:00:36] Thank you. Yeah, you're a little younger than 52, right?

Radio Free Mormon [00:00:40] I'm a little bit older. But now you're at that age where you have as many years under your belt as cards in a. As cards in a deck.

John Dehlin [00:00:47] Is that a good thing?

Radio Free Mormon [00:00:49] I guess so. It's 52 cards.

John Dehlin [00:00:51] Last time we were together, you did a card trick, and I had no idea how you did it. It was amazing.

Radio Free Mormon [00:00:56] I don't even remember that, but I'm glad. It was amazing.

John Dehlin [00:00:59] We also have. Joining us today, back from our interview with Simon Sotherton yesterday, we have the Gerardo Sumano back joining us as co host. Thanks for joining us.

Gerardo Sumano [00:01:10] Yeah, thanks for having me.

John Dehlin [00:01:13] Gerardo is my Radio Free Mormon sort of superfan attache. And I don't even know what the word attache means, but basically, every time Bill Real and Radio Free Mormon do an amazing episode, Gerardo's like, John, you got to hear this. Or, John, you got to get this other person on. Or, John, you got to cover this story. So basically, Radio Free Mormon Gerardo likes your podcast more than mine.

Radio Free Mormon [00:01:39] He's showing great taste, I must say. No, seriously, seriously. You are doing some great stuff. I mean, you think by this point in your career, you'd be tapering off, but you're just doing better and better and more interesting interviews with more interesting people.

John Dehlin [00:01:54] That's got to be somewhere in your notes. So thank you. Thank you for sharing that. No, actually, rfab, you regularly call me and tell me that you. You're like, I listened to this episode or that episode, and I can't think of a bigger honor that occasionally you still listen to Mormon stories after all these years. That's actually a really big honor.

Radio Free Mormon [00:02:14] Well, thank you. But I'll tell you, it's because you put out stuff worth listening to.

John Dehlin [00:02:19] Oh, well, you're really kind. All right, listeners, for the three of you who don't know who Radio Free Mormon is. I did. Less than two years ago. Rfm. It seems like three at least, doesn't it?

Radio Free Mormon [00:02:31] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:02:32] Two years ago. Less than two years Ago, I met RFM in person when I made a trip to Seattle to visit Mike Brown. And I did an interview in Mike Brown's house with Radio Free Mormon. And it's a really good interview. People loved it. Radio Free Mormon has been a force for many, many years. He joined the church. You can hear the full interview. It's episodes 1211-1217. We did at least seven hours with RFM, which is not enough. But if you go back and listen to that episode, you'll hear his story about his conversion. Right, rfm, you were a convert to the church?

Radio Free Mormon [00:03:14] That is correct, sir. I was baptized in June 2000, 1978. I was 18 years old, fresh out of high school.

John Dehlin [00:03:23] Yeah, 1978. And he went on to get a law degree from tu, as they say in College Station. Is that right?

Radio Free Mormon [00:03:33] I have no idea what they say in College Station, but I could tell you a few good Aggie jokes which you'd appreciate. University of Texas at Austin, baby.

John Dehlin [00:03:42] Yeah. Where he studied ballet as an undergrad. Is that right?

Radio Free Mormon [00:03:47] Well, yeah, that and other dance. I have a bachelor of arts degree with a major in dance.

John Dehlin [00:03:53] And one of my favorite things about RFM is that we both have a fondness for show tunes. Now he likes. He's more into some of the more classics and I'm a little bit more into some of the more modern, but we definitely overlap. He was instrumental in mine, actually. My actually watching Camelot. And my next homework assignment is to see the Exorcist, which is not a show tune.

Radio Free Mormon [00:04:17] It's one of my favorite musicals. I'm waiting for the musical version of the Exorcist.

John Dehlin [00:04:21] The musical. That'd be fantastic. Anyway, rfm, you'll. If you know his story, you'll know that he was a faithful Mormon, became a defender of the faith for many, many years, and something happened. And in my interview with RFM originally, I believe I asked him what caused him to kind of lose his faith and turn from kind of a big time apologist to, you know, the host of Radio Free Mormon that some would say is fair minded, analytical towards the Mormon Church, others would say is critical. But either way, I don't think you had quite an answer at that point. Is that right?

Radio Free Mormon [00:05:01] That is correct. And if you go to whatever number that is in that seven hour series podcast number, you'll find that you ask me that question and I am stumb all over myself because I have no idea. Your question was what was it that caused you to stop believing in Mormonism? And I had no idea you Remember, I'm sitting there going, I don't know. There was no point. There's nothing I can point to any particular point in time, like so many people can. CES letter might be involved in their story or the essays, the church essays. But no, not for me. So what I did was I did something that's very unusual for me, which is called introspection. I am probably the most self unaware person that you could possibly meet. And I thought, you know, I really need to take some time, slow down and think and contemplate on my history of over 40 years in the LDS Church and find out what on earth happened. Because obviously at one point early on, I was a tbm, and obviously now at this point of the journey, I'm rfm. And those things are very different. So how did I get from being TBM to rfm? And I'm really excited because I have some answers to that now and I made some notes. I had to do a lot of thinking, and I'm ready to present it today.

John Dehlin [00:06:24] All right, we're glad to have you. We're welcoming our live listening audiences on both Facebook and YouTube and we're streaming to Twitch, but I don't think anybody even knows that we're there or follows podcasts on Twitch. We are super grateful. We've been having Cara Burrell here as a co host on many episodes. Gerardo said, I really want to be co host with rfm. So, Gerardo, I'm really grateful for all you do for the Open Stories foundation to make me look better than I should with the lights and the camera and the thumbnails and everything. But. But we love you most for your mind and your heart and your intellect, and we're just super glad to have you. And for those of you don't know who Gerardo is, check out my recent interview with him. It's definitely one of the best interviews of the year, if not of the decade. But, Gerardo, welcome. Thanks for co hosting today.

Gerardo Sumano [00:07:18] Yeah, thank you, John. Thanks.

John Dehlin [00:07:20] Anything you want to say about RFM before we begin?

Gerardo Sumano [00:07:22] No, just like, yeah, you were right.

John Dehlin [00:07:25] I'm.

Gerardo Sumano [00:07:26] I'm a pretty big fan of rfm, Build Real, and their work, and it's awesome. They've been putting out some really good content. So I would recommend anybody who hasn't listen to Radio Free Mormon or their new show that they put out every Wednesday, Mormonism Life. It's. It's great. You should go check it out.

John Dehlin [00:07:47] All right, well, with those. Those are two pretty beefy endorsements. RFM and of Course, many of your fans are joining us. We do want to invite listeners and viewers who are joining us live to share any comments or questions on the live stream. And we'll do our best to integrate them into Radio Free Mormon's kind of story. But without any further ado, as I like to say, and that's not to be confused with the French adieu in the Book of Mormon. Radio Free Mormon, take it away.

Radio Free Mormon [00:08:18] Okay, thank you so much. Now, I don't want to replicate what we talked about a couple of years ago, but I want to try and keep this less than seven hours. In fact, I want to keep this under three hours. So mainly, obviously, a lot of stuff has happened in 40 years. I think pretty much anybody could say that about their life. And so I want to try and put this in context, hit the high points, allow for people to ask questions, hopefully make it fun. It was fun for me to figure this out. First off, my analogy of Mormonism at this point in my life is that Mormonism is kind of like a school system, and particularly elementary school, and even more specifically sixth grade is how I look at it. Because let's say you go to school, you get to the sixth grade, and you obviously go from first grade, second grade, third grade up to sixth grade. But there is no junior high, there is no high school, right? You're just supposed to say in sixth grade for the rest of your life. This is what Mormonism was like in my experience. We know that there's junior high, there's a high school, they really do exist. There's even a college, right? But you are not told about these in your 6th grade LDS class. In fact, you are told that all you should know, you will learn in the sixth grade. And you really shouldn't be looking at anything else from any kind of higher grade. So is it any wonder that you get bored relearning all the stuff in sixth grade over and over and over and over again for the rest of your life? That's kind of like what Mormonism was like for me. I really believed that it was only 6th grade material, and I sure learned the heck out of that sixth grade material. But then finally I started realizing that there was a junior high that the church wasn't really telling me about and was even warning me against finding out about. And then there was high school, for crying out loud, and then even college. So that's my analogy of Mormonism. What do you think of that, John?

Losing Faith: Many Roads Out of Mormonism

John Dehlin [00:10:33] I really like it. I love it a lot. I think about just this idea you know, losing your faith in the church. Can, can. Can be characterized in lots of different ways. Sometimes it's a loss of faith. Other people don't like that characterization. Some people don't like. Some people like crisis of faith. Some people don't. One of my favorite terms I've heard, which is going to be offensive to some is, Is graduation. It's just kind of moving on to something that for you is bigger and better. But the downside of that is people sometimes feel like that's insulting or condescending. But I think it's a. Can often be appropriate. So I like the framing. How about you, Gerardo?

Gerardo Sumano [00:11:12] Yeah, I, I really like it. I. And I like what RFM is saying where like, we go every, every day, every Sunday to Sunday school, and we're learning just the same things that we learned four, three years ago. It's always the same curriculum and the same. Just quotes and, and General Conference seems to be the same every time. Nothing new. Not no new Revelations, no new interpretations of scripture or new scripture. So it just gets a little monotone and boring. And like RFM is saying, there is this other stuff, like, I, I don't know if this is what he's referring to, but scholarship going on at BYU

Radio Free Mormon [00:12:03] or,

Gerardo Sumano [00:12:06] or, or, or that, that like, you're not supposed to really look into, but it's still there. And I don't know, I just see it just as. And it's hard for, for me to, to know why the church does this. Why. Why would the church want to keep members just this way? And I don't know if RFM has an answer to that, because I see it differently. And I compare it to what, Jehovah Witnesses a little bit. Jehovah Witnesses have a little bit of Mormonism as to like, they're always repeating some of the same stuff, but at the same time they get new stuff that JWs really get excited about. And that's maybe a little different in Mormonism.

John Dehlin [00:12:55] Do you know.

Gerardo Sumano [00:12:56] Do you have any idea why the Mormon Church has decided to go or do this rfm?

Radio Free Mormon [00:13:03] No. Well, I have a few ideas, I suppose. One of which is that it's a worldwide church and they've got to have some kind of correlated curriculum throughout the church. But I think it's more than that. I think that we probably have the same situation. Even if this were just a church that existed in the United States of America and no place else in the world. The idea is that we've got to take everything that's been said by Joseph Smith. Everything that's in the standard works, and in spite of the fact that in many, many cases they are contradictory to each other, we've got to simplify, simplify, simplify. We've got to harmonize, harmonize, harmonize. And we come up with a very basic kind of story that was agreed upon by church leaders probably about 100 years around the beginning of the 20th century, I think. And I think James Talmas was largely responsible for coming up with a correlated curriculum that we now have as Mormonism and what is taught to us. And so there's also the development of the correlation committee in the early 1960s. And the decision was made that there were a certain number of subjects that every member of the church needed to hear a number of times over and over again at church. And it was a limited number of subjects and presented in a very singular kind of way. And so that's where we get to this point where you go to church and if somebody says, I'm going to talk on this subject, well, you can go to sleep now because you already know everything that they're going to say, because you've heard it a million times before.

Gerardo Sumano [00:14:31] Yeah, yeah. And it happens in the temple. Like in the temple ceremony, members go every time. And it's just the same movie, just the same ceremony, but they are. And we're taught as Mormon that that's the way by hearing the same stuff over and over again or reading the Book of Mormon for the thousandth time, like we're gonna in some way find new meaning. And you still were supposed to still try to find new meaning, and you learn new stuff from just hearing the same thing over and over again. And the excuse I would. I was given growing up as to why we were just doing this stuff, like learning this stuff again and again, again was, well, members are not doing this thing. Members are not 100 obedient, or members are not reading the scriptures every day. So we gotta keep talking about it.

John Dehlin [00:15:27] So there's always the milk before meat thing too, but somehow the meat never seems to come.

Radio Free Mormon [00:15:32] Yeah, yeah. Where's the beef? No, what you're saying, Gerardo's. Okay, sorry, don't mean to offend one of my biggest fans right off the bat, but no, this is the exact thing that I think is the common experience. I've certainly experienced the same thing in the LDS Church. And it's always, always the same thing. Once you're able to identify it, is that anything that you might be tempted to see as a problem or an issue or Maybe things aren't great with the way things are done in the LDS Church is. It's your fault. Okay? And I remember a classic example of this was when I was in high priest group a number of years back. So high priests, the older guys, right? So the ones who know all the basic stuff, they've been in the church for quite a while, and usually they've had some positions of leadership of some sort to be a high priest. And so it was. I think it was right after the church ran out of presidents of the church to do their little manuals each year that were studied in high priest group and the other groups as well, Elders, Quorum, Relief Society, and now they don't have anything. So what they did was they assigned the manual, which was the investigator's manual, the Gospel Essentials or Gospel Principles Manual. They just sort of revised it, tweaked it a little bit. Nothing really remarkable, I think, but that became the course of study for the entire year for the high priests. And I remember when it was being handed out, and I'm going, you've got to be kidding me. I mean, this is kind of insulting. You know what I mean? That high priest. Now you're going to be studying what people who don't know anything about the church, who are investigators, are going to be studying in the very most basic sort of format. And there was this other guy over here who says, well, I guess the people in Salt Lake City, you know, the prophet thinks that we don't understand these things enough, so we need to study these more. And I'm just going, oh, my gosh, you have got to be kidding me. Really? You really think there's anything in this Gospel Essentials manual that you haven't heard a thousand times before that you don't know backward and forward? But that's the initial first impulse that we are taught, which is that the problem is with us.

Gerardo Sumano [00:17:53] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:17:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:17:55] Yep. And that's. That's called blame reversal. We learned about that from Luna Corbin. Yeah, blame reversal. It's always the fault of the member.

Radio Free Mormon [00:18:05] Right. And so when you say graduating from Mormonism, that's actually in my show notes, because that's how I have come to frame it. A lot of times the question is asked, how did you lose your testimony in the LDS Church?

John Dehlin [00:18:17] And.

Radio Free Mormon [00:18:17] And I like to rephrase that question and say, how did I graduate from Mormonism? Right. Because there you go back to sixth grade. How do you graduate from sixth grade? Well, that's something we can talk about. If you say, how did I lose my testimony of sixth grade? Or why is it that sixth grade was worthless and I wasted my life repeating sixth grade for 40 years? That's a different question. Right?

John Dehlin [00:18:45] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:18:45] So I like how I graduated from Mormonism because I think that fits my experience. So you're ready for me to talk about my self analysis on this issue?

John Dehlin [00:18:57] Yeah, let's dive in. Man. I'm excited.

A Decade of Mormon Apologetics in the 1980s

Radio Free Mormon [00:18:59] Okay, so here's my problem. My first problem was this, is that I did apologetics for a full decade and beyond, but mainly the 1980s. I was into apologetics like nobody's business. At least I came upon it honestly because when I joined the church back in 1978, I had a brother who was already a member of another religious organization that Gerardo may have heard of. It's called the Jehovah's Witnesses. Did you know that? Gerardo? My brother's a J Dub?

Gerardo Sumano [00:19:27] Yeah, you told me about it.

Radio Free Mormon [00:19:28] Okay, great.

Gerardo Sumano [00:19:29] Weeks ago. Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:19:30] Great. So let me see here. Back to my notes. Yeah. So as soon as I joined the church, as soon as I started studying the church, he's bringing material home from the Kingdom hall to help me understand why it is that Mormonism is not true. Because, you know, it can't be right. Job's Witnesses is the true religion. So Mormonism, definitely not true. So he brought it home. It was a little collection of papers and a binder. It wasn't something that was slick and published at a bookstore or anything. It was sort of like a homemade affair. And on the front, I think it was a yellow, yellow binder. And on the front somebody had stenciled in the Mormon file on front. So that was the name of it. And I went through that. It caused me a lot of grief and a lot of trouble. And I talked about that more with John de Lynn. So I'm not going to repeat that here. Back a couple years ago, I talked about it, but that started me on the road of apologetics. And one of the first books I read was Hugh Nibley's Since Cumorah because a neighbor had it. I didn't know what it was, but I'm trying to read everything I can. I'm fascinated by the subject of Mormonism. Really lit a fire in me. I don't think I'd ever had any kind of academic interest really in anything before that. But this kicked off something in me and I wanted to know more and I wanted to be able to defend the church that I had just joined, which I know is true, against the world and specifically against my Brother and the Jehovah's Witnesses for those who like

John Dehlin [00:21:07] Hugh Nibley is so out of style and out of fashion now. Oh, would you even be able to remember a way to summarize in a sentence or two what what Hugh Nibley was trying to do with since Cumorah? I remember just the lore around that book. When I was at byu, I tried to read it. It just seemed kind of gobbledygook to me. But everybody thought it was the wisest, most profound thing ever. What was she nibbly trying to do with since Cumorah? What, what if you remember? I don't expect you to remember, but if you happen to.

Radio Free Mormon [00:21:36] Well, I've read it a couple times a second time in the 1980s. But my recollection, basically what he does is he tries to look at the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance. I think they figure prominently in the book as well as other ancient texts and then situate Mormonism and Mormon doctrine as being comfortably located within those texts with the idea that Mormonism is actually a restoration of what was had a long time ago. And how could Joseph Smith have known? That question always lurks behind most unibly books I think.

John Dehlin [00:22:11] Got it. So trying to establish, try trying to give credibility of Mormonism as a world religion and as Mormon scripture as, as sort of on par with the Bible and the Koran and other world class scripture. Is that what you're saying?

Radio Free Mormon [00:22:26] Well, I think really just showing that Mormonism is indeed what it claims to be, which is a restoration of what was lost. So here's all this other stuff, this old stuff and apparently it was lost and now Joseph Smith restored it. But now we're finding out these documents. Of course the Dead Sea Scrolls were not discovered until 1945. So Joseph Smith had no idea what was in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Naga Maddie gets discovered a couple years later in 1947 if memory serves. So you've also got the Naga Maddie library. And how did Joseph Smith restore a church that has elements of these texts and doctrines that were believed by these ancient peoples when he didn't even have access to them? That is the question, guys.

Gerardo Sumano [00:23:09] Is that where he talks about a little bit maybe about baptisms for the death and how that was actually happening and now we have more evidence about it and just like how did Joseph Smith knew kind of kind of thing. Is that where he kind of talk about those kind of things? Yeah, I know the temple ceremony kind of like happening to some kind of stuff like that, right?

Radio Free Mormon [00:23:36] Well that's the kind of general thing of Most of his books. I know that he did a paper about baptism for the dead, also went on prayer circles. See, that's the idea. We got a prayer circle in the temple. Well, he does a study on prayer circles and talks about prayer circles existing anciently. So here's a restoration of something that was had anciently. Therefore, Mormonism is true, Church is true. Right. And I have a book. I don't have sense. Kimora. I got a whole bunch of books here. Here's one. This will. This will be our representative book for Hugh Nibley. I don't know if you can see that. Can you see that? Okay.

John Dehlin [00:24:08] The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri.

Radio Free Mormon [00:24:13] Yeah. Yeah. This was his big book. One of his big books on Abraham. And when I say big, I mean it's really a big book. So we'll let this one go as part of the representation for Hugh Nibley here. I'm just giving that as an example. Also, another book that I found before my mission was the Book of Mormon on Trial. Do you remember that one? Yeah. This is a newer, updated version of the one I read then. Can you see that? Okay.

John Dehlin [00:24:43] Yeah, yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:24:44] You can tell it's updated because it says the Book of Mormon. Another witness of Jesus Christ on trial.

John Dehlin [00:24:50] On trial.

Radio Free Mormon [00:24:51] Yeah. So it's just updated. But most of it's the same thing that I. That I read way back then. And the Book of Mormon gets put on trial, and there's these three shyster lawyers who are trying to prove that it's not true. And dang, if the Book of Mormon doesn't beat them every time and show that they're wrong and the Book of Mormon is right.

John Dehlin [00:25:07] That's awesome.

Radio Free Mormon [00:25:08] Yeah. And it's a cartoon, so it's easily accessible to me. I get to the mtc, right? And I find in the MTC bookstore there was a book there, big fat paperback book called Mormonism Challenge and Defense. And I think it was by a guy named Roger Gunn, G U N N, which just talks about ap apologetics from front to back. And it's in the context of these letters he was writing back and forth. I think it was a Baptist minister, and he's having this argument, Bible bash, sort of about Mormonism, why Mormonism is true, and that it ends with a debate that they had. And the transcript of the debate back in the 60s. This was. So that really fired me up, and I thought that was wonderful. I really doubt that they have that book available at the MTC bookstore anymore. I don't even know if you've heard of that?

John Dehlin [00:26:01] No.

Gerardo Sumano [00:26:01] Were you allowed to read other books other than the missionary library at that time when you went on your mission?

Radio Free Mormon [00:26:09] Well, not really, but this was a book that was available at the mtc, so I got it and I read it, and I guess if they sell it at the mtc. Not the BYU bookstore. The MTC bookstore. Right.

Gerardo Sumano [00:26:20] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:26:21] Then I guess it's okay.

John Dehlin [00:26:22] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:26:23] So. But like I said, I doubt that they have that anymore.

John Dehlin [00:26:26] What year were you in the MTC? RFM.

Radio Free Mormon [00:26:29] I was there November of 1979 through January of 1980.

John Dehlin [00:26:34] Okay, awesome.

Radio Free Mormon [00:26:35] It's been a while. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:26:37] That's great. So the Tanners were. The Tanners were running full steam by then.

Radio Free Mormon [00:26:42] Yes. Yeah, very much so, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:26:44] Okay.

Radio Free Mormon [00:26:44] But I didn't read their stuff. Are you kidding me? Because I was a TBM. TBMs do not read the Tanner's material. No, no. So anyway, so I'm on my mission. I'm reading stuff there. I'm in Japan, so it's kind of limited as to what I can find. I remember getting a copy of Joseph Fielding Smith's Answers to Gospel Questions, which in many places are very apologetic. Got back from my mission, continued with this pursuit of mine in apologetics. And this is what sets it up for the 80s, right, where I'm going to undergraduate school and then later on to law school during the course of the 80s. But I'm also studying the heck out of the church and especially with regard to apologetics, because I want to be the go to guy when people have questions about the church or when missionaries are having trouble with an investigator to be the one that they can call on to answer the questions. Yeah, that was what I wanted to be. Did you ever have a feeling like that, either of you?

Missionary Experience and Apologetic Aspirations

John Dehlin [00:27:46] I wanted to be that. And it was very common for me to know people who wanted to be that or who were that. I don't know that I ever achieved it because my mission kind of broke me a little bit.

Radio Free Mormon [00:27:56] Oh, right, right. That's like your first podcast.

John Dehlin [00:27:58] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:28:00] Where you talk about that.

John Dehlin [00:28:01] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:28:01] And the kitty baptisms.

John Dehlin [00:28:03] Yeah. I never, never achieved Gospel Scholar because of my mission.

Radio Free Mormon [00:28:08] Ah, well, I'm sorry.

John Dehlin [00:28:10] Yeah, we did that mission. What's that?

Radio Free Mormon [00:28:14] I was saying we didn't have that going on in my mission, to my knowledge. Okay.

Gerardo Sumano [00:28:19] I did have it. I was on my mission. I was reading Joseph, feeling, Smith, McConkey and some nibly. And yeah, missionaries would call as a zone leader. Missionaries from other zones would call us all the time. Just ask us, ask me and my companion questions about how to answer to antagonistic questions from investigators or people who just call them out on the streets and stuff. So, yeah, I, I def, I, I was really into apologetics while on my mission, so I, I understand.

Radio Free Mormon [00:28:53] Yeah. We want to be able to give an answer for why it is we believe what we believe and why we're not absolutely drooling idiots for believing it.

Gerardo Sumano [00:29:01] Yeah, yeah. And it's really exciting. And faith promoting.

Radio Free Mormon [00:29:05] Yes.

Gerardo Sumano [00:29:07] Until you be before you find. Well, at least on my mission, everything was way too superficial. We were answering to the normal Christian criticisms that are not, that don't deal with any of this new stuff that I like. Joseph Smith polyandry and that kind of stuff I, I didn't know about. So it was just very kind of like the question about why does the Book of Mormon talk about Jesus being born in Jerusalem? Or why does the Book of Mormon talk Just, just stuff like that.

Radio Free Mormon [00:29:44] Yeah, I think it's Alma 710. Yeah, no, I didn't study this at all. Hopefully I'm right.

John Dehlin [00:29:53] I was gonna say, in addition to being able to answer questions, it's nice to be viewed as the smart one and as the one with the strongest testimony and who's most confident and secure in his testimony. I mean, I think they're strong social reinforcers to trying to send to that level of status in award or stake or mission. Right, right. Rfm.

Radio Free Mormon [00:30:12] Yeah. There's a little Hermione Granger in me.

Gerardo Sumano [00:30:15] I love it.

Radio Free Mormon [00:30:18] But. So I'm not going to go through all these experiences in the 1980s. So I'll touch on a couple as they come up. But the main thing is, is that with few exceptions, I know all the arguments against the LDS Church and I know the answers to those arguments. And I came upon them gradually over the course of a decade. And I end up the decade right in the spring of 1989, teaching that institute class on defending the faith, which I did the curriculum for and I did the presentation of and I recorded it. And I've got 10 of those 12 lessons up now. I still have to get the last two. They don't seem to be very popular now, believe it or not. But they do represent where I was at that time in my membership in the church after 10 years. And so a lot of times I hear people talk about, well, they read the CES letter overnight, boom, they decide to leave the church, it's an overnight thing. Or maybe they read the essays on the church website, boom, they're out. But with me I'm not able to point at something like that and say, oh, well, that's the straw that broke the camel's back. Because I already knew all this stuff. I had learned it. I had learned the answers to the questions, and therefore there wasn't anything like that that happened to me to cause me to graduate from Mormonism. And yet I was looking at this time period and thinking, well, the answer has to be apologetics. That has to be where it is. And I kept looking and looking at apologetics, and I thought, no, that's not my story. It's definitely other people's story. But it wasn't my story. And so that's why I couldn't figure out what it was that caused me to graduate from Mormonism, because I'm looking in the wrong place. It's like the story of the guy. It's at night, he's on the street. He's on a street corner. There's a big street lamp above him, and he's searching for something there on the ground and in the curb. And this other guy walks by. He says, what are you looking for? He says, I'm looking for a quarter. I dropped it. He says, where'd you drop it? He says, I dropped it at the end of the block. At the end of the block. Well, why are you looking over here? He says, because the light's much better here. Okay, these are the jokes. But. But that's where I was looking. I was looking in the wrong place is the problem. And then I started thinking about it and realizing that it wasn't. That it wasn't apologetics with me, it was something very different. It had to do with this graduation process that took a long time. And ultimately, here's the fundamental bottom line, is that for me, ultimately, and gradually, Mormonism, although it was a huge and positive influence in my life and helped me grow dramatically. I mean, it was the first intellectual, spiritual endeavor of my life, and I loved it, and I was passionate about it, and I wanted to learn everything I possibly could about it and experience everything I could within it. But ultimately, it became insufficient, and that's the word, insufficient. Mormonism became insufficient to me in pretty much every respect. And we'll talk about some of those tonight. And that's how I'm going to categorize tonight's talk. So if we go back to sixth grade, just because I go on from sixth grade to junior high, it doesn't mean I forget everything I learned up to that point in sixth grade, only that I built on it. So There may be some things that have to go by the wayside afterward, but it's not saying sixth grade was a total waste or first grade was a waste because they were important building blocks for me. But I was able to finally graduate from sixth grade after repeating it many, many, many years. And that's when I was able to discover that I had been sort of held back. I don't know if I've been held back for bad grades or held back because the principal of the school decided that he didn't want anybody to graduate from elementary school, so they had to stay in sixth grade in perpetuity.

John Dehlin [00:34:27] It really is a powerful metaphor.

Radio Free Mormon [00:34:29] Well, thanks. And then there was this quote I recently discovered talking about how a man who believes the Same thing at 40 as he did at 20 has just wasted 20 years of his life.

John Dehlin [00:34:40] Absolutely.

Radio Free Mormon [00:34:40] And I thought. I thought, wow, that's powerful, isn't it?

John Dehlin [00:34:44] Yeah. That's a really, you know, if you apply it to Mormonism, the. The pinnacle of Mormonism is to believe at 80 or 90 or 100 the same things you believed when you were 5.

Radio Free Mormon [00:34:56] That's exactly what it is.

John Dehlin [00:34:58] That's profound. I'd never really thought about that before.

Radio Free Mormon [00:35:01] Right. That's why I've said at other times that in Mormonism, we never really graduate from primary. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:35:08] Ouch.

Radio Free Mormon [00:35:09] Because that's the whole point. Well, it's the point of it, right?

John Dehlin [00:35:12] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:35:12] I mean, more in the. In the LDS Church, in any ward, you've got all these different callings. Right. Because it's a lay ministry, everybody has to do their callings. The type of calling that is that there's more of than any other calling in any ward is teachers. Right. You've got a. You got an elders quorum, you got a bishopric, you got all these other people, but you got teachers all over the place. And it struck me not too long ago that it's really ironic that Mormonism has more teachers than any other calling, and yet the last thing they want to have happen in any of their wards is anybody actually learning something

John Dehlin [00:35:54] that's. Yeah. So many teachers and so little learning. I'll never forget rfm. I think I've told you the story. I'll never forget when Rich. When Richard. When I was really coming out with Faith Crisis stuff on Mormon stories, and I had interviewed Richard Bushman, he brought me down to BYU once to present to that little summer study group that he hosted for many years. And I presented my Faith Crisis kind of pitch to, like, Spencer Fluman, I believe. Brian Hauglid was there, maybe Terrell Givens, I'm not sure. But, you know, that whole crowd. We're in this little office and I have lunch with Richard Bushman at a local pizza joint, and he says to me, Mormon Sunday school is not about. It's not a school, it's not about education. It's a ritual. He said Mormon Sunday school is a ritual where the same things are repeated and the practice is everybody re upping and reaffirming the correlated belief. And that was Richard Bushman who told me that.

Radio Free Mormon [00:36:59] Right. The entire. True, the entire purpose is just to indoctrinate and to repeat what it is you've heard before. And the last thing that they really want to have happen in any Sunday school class or any class in the church is for something new to be brought up.

John Dehlin [00:37:15] Yeah, stick with the, stick with the curriculum.

Radio Free Mormon [00:37:18] In fact, this was, this was an important experience. I have all these little experiences and turning points in my life, and I hadn't thought about this one. But this is before my mission. This is before my mission. And I remember that there's all these commandments in Mormonism, all these things you're supposed to do. The Sabbath day, the tithing, blah, blah, blah. Right. And the question is, why do we do that? And the answer that I always got from everybody was, because you'll receive blessings. And it was no more than that. It wasn't like this blessing or that blessing. Right. But you'll receive blessings. And I. Is that funny?

John Dehlin [00:37:54] Did you have experience?

Radio Free Mormon [00:37:56] Well, you heard that.

Gerardo Sumano [00:37:57] It's just funny because he, it can always be interpreted as like, oh, I found my keys and, and I'm receiving blessings because I'm doing that, or I got this new job or, and up to. All the way to like, my grandma was cured of her cancer, so I'm receiving the blessings, you know, so it's just, they, they're, they're, they're trying to make it so broad. So like anything good that happens on your life, you will always attribute it to the fact that you're being obedient.

Radio Free Mormon [00:38:32] Right? Right. And I actually had a friend in the church who kind of dropped me like a hot potato when I became more RFM than tbm. He was, he was in the Stake Presidency. I'm not going to mention his name, but he lived in a very, very black and white world, which is if anything good happened to him or his family, it's because they were being blessed for being so obedient. And if anything bad happened to him or his family, it's because they were being tempted and challenged by Satan because they were being so obedient. So it covers everything.

John Dehlin [00:39:09] Yeah, Anything good, church gets credit. Anything bad, you did it wrong.

Radio Free Mormon [00:39:14] Yes, exactly. So these different categories that I'm talking about. Oh, I didn't finish my story about blessings. Right. There was actually more to that because I was in a Sunday school class. There was a guy who was teaching the class and he was talking about the word of wisdom. And he says, why do we keep the word of wisdom? And I'm going, I know what the answer is because I've heard it from everybody else. Right. The answer is. It's like the password is blessings. So I say, I raised my hand. He goes, yeah. He says blessings. And he wasn't happy with that answer. He says, oh, yeah, yeah, blessings. But what specifically? And I went, wait a second. I've been hearing blessings for my entire time in the church, although it's admittedly short from everybody. And now you're wanting something specific. So this is my experience where I'm saying the thing that I'm supposed to say in order to show my devotion, my. My loyalty, my correctness by giving the right answer in Sunday school. And the teacher now is challenging me on it. And he's actually challenging me in such a way that my feelings about blessings, which is that's kind of a non answer answer. And he's telling me it's a non answer answer. And I'm realizing, wait a second, maybe we need to be a little more specific with our language.

John Dehlin [00:40:36] That reminds me of some liberal BYU professors that wrote up on the chalkboard, the university is the place to have your is more a place to have your answers questioned than have your questions answered. And the fact that these were three allegedly faithful Mormon challenging me to question the answers I had been taught my whole life was kind of mind blowing. Wait, we're not supposed to wait? What? What? Question the answers. No, you know, and that. That was the beginning of the end for me too, anyway. Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:41:09] And even Hugh Nibley talks about one of his stories that he talks about when he would teach the, oh, the Pearl of Great Price class. What is it called? The, the. The advanced class. The, the grad graduate course on Pearl of Great Price, whatever it was. And it could have just been his Book of Mormon class. Anyway, it's the first day of class, it's in college, and the student comes up at the beginning of class, first day and says, now, Professor Nibley, you're not going to teach us anything new, are you? Because that's really the Mormon attitude defined. We don't want to hear anything new. We just want to hear what it is that we've already heard and know is correct. Right. So anyway, anyway, these main categories that I'm talking about where over 40 years I came to realize that Mormonism was insufficient and that I had graduated kind of without knowing it. But looking back then, I'm going, yeah, I graduated from this a long time ago. There's basically six categories. I don't know if we'll get to all of them, but number one, intellectual. From this point of view, I can look at Mormonism and see it as primarily an anti intellectual institution. We can even see statements to that effect by Boyd K. Packer when he talks about the three greatest challenges to the church. And the first two get a lot of play and the third one doesn't get as much play. Right. Do you remember those?

The Church's Three Greatest Threats

John Dehlin [00:42:39] Oh yeah. The three greatest threats to the church are the so called gays, the feminists, and the intellectuals.

Radio Free Mormon [00:42:46] Right, right. It's actually the gays. It's the so called intellectuals.

John Dehlin [00:42:50] Oh, got it, got it.

Radio Free Mormon [00:42:52] Okay. Because the so called intellectual from Boyd K. Packer's point of view is one who doesn't come to the right conclusions.

John Dehlin [00:43:00] So so called is the great condescending insult of a general authority. They anything they don't like, they put so called in front of it.

Radio Free Mormon [00:43:06] Yes. So intellectual was one where Mormonism ended up being insufficient. Two was philosophical, three was actually music. Four had to do with my experience with message boards. All right. And the changes that brought about with me. Five is scriptures, believe it or not, and six is literature. And I lump poetry into literature.

John Dehlin [00:43:30] And we got to cover all these rfm. So Gerardo, let's make sure he doesn't get out of here without covering all six, because I want to hear all six.

Growing Bored with Apologetics

Radio Free Mormon [00:43:39] Okay. So by the end of the 80s, I grew bored with apologetics. This is the first one. Intellectual. Okay, intellectual. And so I think that apologetics was very interesting to me for a number of reasons, one of which is because apologetics, not only are you the go to guy, the defender of the faith, right? The one with the halo over your head and the shield, but it's also an avenue that Mormon can use in order to continue to learn about the LDS Church in a way that is generally socially within the church, acceptable, there are other ways to go learning about the church that are not considered acceptable in the LDS Church. But this one is acceptable. And I wasn't thinking about this at the time. This is all in retrospect, you understand, But I got done with apologetics. I pretty much done that to death in the course of 10 years.

John Dehlin [00:44:32] And you were just give people a one or two sentence on what you were doing when you like, they're even non Mormon, never Mormon that probably don't even know what apologetic means. Tell us in just a couple sentences what you were doing for those 10 years. Just describe it a little bit.

Radio Free Mormon [00:44:46] Okay. Well, I am reading every book that has to do with apologetics. Any book that has to do with defending the faith, any book that has to do with evidence that the church is true. And FARMS is going great guns. It was founded at the end of the 1970s, in the 1980s, it was in its heyday. And it's producing all these different publications and making them available to people for the costs of printing and shipping. So these are papers that have been published in all these different areas by all these different scholars about all these different aspects of Mormonism generally. Defense of the faith. And that's what apologetics is, is defending the faith. And I'm buying these and I'm reading them and I'm marking them up and I'm three hole punching them and I'm putting them into notebooks. I'm doing all sorts of stuff. I'm reading B.H. roberts book, which was the Mormon Doctrine of Deity. And he talks about how, you know, the scriptures show that the Mormon view of God is correct. And I'm reading that and I'm marking it and I'm taking all these notes and putting it over into my scriptures. Here's my scriptures that I got in 1984. It's a Christmas present for my mom and my dad. So there's that.

John Dehlin [00:46:06] It's the quad.

Radio Free Mormon [00:46:07] It is a quad. And I can't show you all the markings. I have it here, but trust me, there's a lot of stuff in here. Because I wanted this to be my, well basically my weapon of choice when it came time to Bible bash. So if you look here at the front, you know, there's a few blank pages at the front and at the end, well, mine aren't blank. I don't know if you can see

John Dehlin [00:46:30] that a little forward more. Look at that. Yeah, my Bible looked the same way.

Radio Free Mormon [00:46:34] See, I've got all this stuff in here I was able to get from other things and I wanted to have them with me, so I copied them in here. Could a prophet. And then there's like 31 different instances of things that prophets did. This is when People challenge Joseph Smith or others, they can't be a prophet because they did this, right? Well, look at the Bible and look at all the things the prophets there did. And there's references. There's one magic in the Bible. There's one how to recognize the witness of the Spirit, and then there's all these things. Well, tons and tons of stuff. Okay, so that's basically what I did.

John Dehlin [00:47:13] Like, why it's not. Why it's not a problem that Joseph Smith had 40 wives. Why it's not a problem that there's steel in the Book of Mormon. Why it's not a problem, you know, that there's two Hill Cumorahs. If it all happened in Mesoamerica, like, why it's not a problem that Joseph Smith's first vision story changed over time. You would have just been studying all the articles and books, BYU studies articles, maybe even reading some of the critics, like the Tanners and others, and learning all you needed to learn about why all the problems weren't really problems and being able to repeat those arguments to people who had doubts and questions. Is that right?

Radio Free Mormon [00:47:53] Yes. And of course, in the 80s, God Makers was the big thing. And so the book came out. I actually did get that book and I read it in conjunction with reading the response to that book.

John Dehlin [00:48:06] The Truth. The Truth about the God Makers.

Radio Free Mormon [00:48:09] Yes. By Gilbert Chartres, right? Yeah, yeah, by Gilbert Sharfs. And I'm sorry, I have a question.

Gerardo Sumano [00:48:16] Arifm so as you were reading and getting into apologetics and just answering people's questions and trying to figure out how to answer to critics, did you ever find yourself knowing that some of the answers you were given giving to people or giving to yourself were not actually good answers? Or that you, in order to come up with an answer, you had to ignore some evidence and rely on just one, one side of the story? Or did you ever. Did you ever come up, like, did you ever have that experience in apologetics?

Radio Free Mormon [00:49:05] Yes, yes. Although it's something that I tried to ignore for a while. But toward the end of the 1980s, I conceived of a magnum opus on the subject of apologetics. And I was going to call it Diamond Truth because it's a reference to something Joseph Smith said. The truth. Diamond Truth, and God is my right hand man. Anyway, that was too long. So it was going to be Diamond Truth, and I was going to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mormonism was true. And then I didn't really get that far into it. I didn't put a lot of words to paper on that particular project before I started realizing, yeah, I think that might be asking a little much from the evidence. I believe they could maybe show by a preponderance of the evidence that it was true, but it wasn't an ironclad case. And so I never ended up writing that, thank goodness. I wrote a bunch of other stuff, but. But not that particular book. And I talk about this in a podcast I did called Selling your soul for Apologetics, where I talk about my experience. And I start realizing that the more I learn, the more I start realizing that some of these arguments that I've been making are not as strong as I had originally thought. And there's also this idea that when I'm presenting an argument, many times I know of other information and other evidence over here that weakens my argument, but I don't present that evidence when I'm talking.

Gerardo Sumano [00:50:41] And you're relying on your. On the critic not knowing about it.

Radio Free Mormon [00:50:45] Yes. And nine times out of ten they're not going to know about it. But if they do bring it up, then I also have in my holster a response to that. But my hope is not to have to use it. And so I started realizing, once again, not very self aware, but I started realizing that the strength of my argument and my ability to win the argument hands down with someone from another faith was largely dependent upon concealing information from them.

Gerardo Sumano [00:51:16] Yeah, yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:51:17] And this is another one of the reasons why I kind of gave up apologetics for Lint, because it really wasn't doing what I had hoped it would do. I still thought there was a strong case to be made, but I went from trying to defend the church and doing whatever was necessary in order to be a good apologist. A good apologist, toward the end of the 1980s, starting to move away from that and trying to discover or see if I could discover new things about the church or about its scriptures. And I seem to have an ability to do that, and I don't know where that came from necessarily. I think it basically has to do with the fact that I learned a whole lot of data points within the church and in the Scriptures. I mean, I'm reading the Scriptures like nobody's business. In 1988, I remember, I set the goal and actually accomplished it of reading the entire standard works that year. And all you have to do is read like eight pages a day every day for the entire year. And you could. You too can read the standard works in one year. So. But trying to learn this and a bunch of data points and starting to See connections between different data points and things sort of presenting themselves to me as I'm reading and trying to interactively read the text of the scriptures and other things. And so that actually takes us to the next point. But however. However, I've got to tell you a couple other things I haven't mentioned before. Okay. I mean, when we talk about studying the Scriptures, I look back on this and I go, man, you were so into this. And remember, I'm. I'm going to undergraduate college for an undergraduate degree. I am dancing on the side. I'm going to law school. And at the same time, I'm doing all of this other stuff on top of that. And I look back and I just think, wow, you were really, really into this between undergraduate and law school. There was a couple of years where I worked, worked at a bank, and I remember going to the bank and during lunch I would bring my scriptures or whatever it is I was reading. It was church related. And I would take a brown bag to lunch and I would sit away from everybody else. I'd find a quiet place and I would read during lunch. And I remember patting myself on the back because I got the idea from Joseph Fielding Smith. Right. Because he told the story about how people would wonder how he became such a scriptorian, and his answer was by brown bagging it. Because he would take his lunch to work every day. And of course, he's the church historian. Yeah, but. But he would eat his lunch privately while he's reading.

John Dehlin [00:54:02] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:54:03] And so I felt I'm following in the footsteps of Joseph Fielding Smith. So that's pretty good. Yeah. And I would do that. I mean, there was another time earlier on, before the bank, when I'm working for the irs. Apologies to everybody here, but basically just data entry. Taking the raw forms and sticking the numbers into the computer all day long. And this is back when I had discovered the Walkman, the Sony Walkman. And in the library at the institute building for the University of Texas at Austin, they would have General Conference on cassette tape.

John Dehlin [00:54:43] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [00:54:44] Do you remember those things?

John Dehlin [00:54:45] I do. I sure do.

Radio Free Mormon [00:54:47] And they were in plastic, and you

John Dehlin [00:54:48] open it up like a book, there'd be like a big expanding holder of all the cassettes, and you'd flip them over and listen each side. And you just couldn't wait for the General conference audio cassette tapes to be released to listen to them all. Absolutely.

Gerardo Sumano [00:55:02] You guys are too old.

Radio Free Mormon [00:55:05] I know. So this is a trip down memory lane. I hope you'll enjoy it with us. You don't have to stay there. But yeah, and I would take those and I put them in my Walkman and had the, you know, the AA batteries and listen to them while I'm doing all this stuff. Right.

John Dehlin [00:55:21] Gerardo's making fun of us, but we were cutting edge when we had Walkmans and we're listening to General Conference on our cassette tapes. Our older friends thought we were cool.

Radio Free Mormon [00:55:30] Yeah. So anyway, I'm spending all my time doing this and I won't tell you everything else else I did, including, you know, going to see the God Makers and then getting into it with Dick Baer the presenter afterward. And just all these things that I'm doing. Just trying to do my best to be a true, faithful defender of the faith and learn everything I needed to know in order to properly defend the Lord's restored church. But, but, and this is a big thing, David Knowlton, who I think you know.

Scholarly Papers and FARMS Rejection Letters

John Dehlin [00:56:04] Yeah, I do.

Radio Free Mormon [00:56:05] Right. He became professor at BYU for a period of time, then he was no longer a professor at byu. That's his own story.

John Dehlin [00:56:13] An article about phallic, phallic symbols and church architecture and even show all these kind of penis looking structures on church architecture, including the church headquarters, which if you look at it, it's one long tall tower in the middle with two globes at the bottom on either side. And he just pointed out how Mormon architecture was one big phallic symbol. He also talked about the Mormon missionary program in Latin America when there was a lot of terrorism going on down there in South America with the Shining Path in Peru and communist insurgencies and stuff. And the church felt like he endangered missionaries by talking about Latin American missionary work and terrorism and the CIA and stuff. And so he got booted. Plus he was gay. Plus he was gay. That didn't help his cause at byu.

Radio Free Mormon [00:57:03] Yeah. And so I am getting back from my mission in 1981, going to university of Texas Institute. I'm just getting introduced to it and I'm taking a class now on the Book of Abraham and specifically on Hugh Nibley's then just released book called Abraham in Egypt. And so I got to be in there because the requirements for being in the class was either you had to be a graduate student or a return missionary because, you know, those are really equivalent. Right. I didn't think about anything about it at the time except hey, I'm, I'm an rm. I can take this class. And I didn't really learn that much from it, I think. But the one thing I did learn, I learned from David Knowlton and this was critical because prior to this, I had the idea that, well, frankly, knowing everything that there was to know about the LDS Church was the same thing as knowing what it was that was in the missionary discussions. That was my idea. And it took me a while to figure out what the missionary discussions were and to know what was in them. And then I thought, I have it made. And when you give a presentation in church, this is something I learned on my mission. You should have a handful of five minute talks ready to go, maybe some notes in your scriptures somewhere, so at the drop of a hat you can give a talk. The message that was given to me, though I could not tell you exactly who gave it to me, but maybe you know the same message, which is that when you talk in church, you're not supposed to say anything new. All you're supposed to do is say what has been said before. And so I subscribe to that. And we get to this, because it was all I was taught, right? We get to this class, it's right after my mission, so I'm probably 21, 22 years old, and we're supposed to all give a presentation at the end of the class about the Book of Abraham. So I cannot remember what it is that I talked about, but it was imminently forgettable. And all it was was talking about what other people had said about the Book of Abraham. I mean, we get into this method in the church very naturally because really all it is is quoting what other people have said, or scriptures, which is what other people have said, or general conferences, which is what other people have said in order to establish a point that everybody already agrees with. Right. Hello.

John Dehlin [00:59:47] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we're following along.

Radio Free Mormon [00:59:50] Okay, I need a little audience response here.

John Dehlin [00:59:52] No, no, we, yeah, you got it. We're. I'm, I'm. I can't wait to hear this David Knowlton story. I'm, I'm in. Man.

Radio Free Mormon [00:59:58] Oh, this is one of those things that's so small but so big and so life changing.

John Dehlin [01:00:03] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:00:04] So I give my presentation and we basically spend one class with each presentation. And David Knowlton's up. I don't know David Knowlton, except he's much older than I was. At least he seemed much older and much wiser and much more educated than I was. And he gives a presentation about the Book of Abraham that has nothing to do with what anybody has said about it before. It has nothing to do with necessarily the book that we'd read by Hugh Nibley, but it is his own intellectual response to the Book of Abraham about something. In other words, it was new. It was his. He's not quoting somebody else. He's saying, this is what I see in the Book of Abraham. He had some kind of chart up there, blah, blah, blah. And I was thunderstruck by the fact that a person could talk about something in Mormonism like the Book of Abraham and be able to have creative thought about it.

John Dehlin [01:01:05] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:01:07] And I was so enamored with this. I can't remember what he said even. Sorry about that, David. I can't remember what he said, but that wasn't as important to me as the fact that he said it. And I went up to him afterward, and I was just raving to him about how fantastic his presentation was, and I had never thought of that. And were you quoting somebody? I know? I asked him that question, you know, were you getting this information from somewhere else? He says, no, this is just what, you know, came to me as I was reading it. Just what this amazing. And I remember him. His eyes kind of got a little bit wide behind his glasses and. Because he was surprised that I was so enamored with just the idea that a person could think about the Scriptures. But that was a huge turning point in my life because all of a sudden I realized that it was okay to personally creatively interact with the Scriptures and not be anchored to what other people had said about

John Dehlin [01:02:03] almost. It almost gave you permission to start using your brain and your. Your creative imagination. You needed somebody else to kind of set that example. And frankly, you don't get that in church. That's beat out of you. That's beat out of you. That's correlated out of you. That's disciplined out of you at church. And the people that do that are oftentimes punished, either indirectly or directly. And. And so, David, that's so fun that David Knowlton was a part of your awakening. I love that.

Radio Free Mormon [01:02:36] Yeah. And I've talked about him before. There's another story about him. It doesn't fit in here. I'll tell it another time. But it's another small thing that had this big impact on me. Right. Anyway, with regards to this. So thank you very much, David. You are instrumental in creating the monster that is Radio Free Mormon. So we go. There was all these doctrinal books that I read. I was big into doctrine in the 1980s, the Sydney Sper Symposium. They'd have that every year. They would have basically BYU professors come and present papers on a theme, and then they collect them all, put them in a book, publish it, and I'd be able to get it at the local bookstore. I would anticipate those, and I would get those, and I'd read through them, and I'd be so fascinated by all the insights. But by the end of the 1980s, I'm looking at these and I'm looking at all the BYU professors writing, and I'm starting to have the same realization that they're kind of just repeating the same stuff over and over as well. That was the common experience. It was the rare BYU professor who's presenting at the Sidney Sperry Symposium who's actually going to be creative or say something new that they discovered as opposed to just repeating what other people had said before them. So I came to understand in the process of all the study that I was doing in the 1980s, which is that there is a finite and discrete number of things that we can learn about the Gospel, and that's it. And in fact, beyond that, we really aren't supposed to go. And by studying it enough and by reading so many books about doctrine and reading the same thing over and over and over and over again, I, number one, learned it pretty well. But number two, I also started figuring out where these boundaries are and that we cannot go beyond them. So that's one thing there. Another thing is that by doing the apologetics, I learned the tricks that anti Mormon would use in order to try and fool people into believing that they were right when they were wrong, which ended up helping me out later when I started to see apologists doing the same kind of thing. Yeah, but like I say, these are things you really, or I really didn't want to see at first. I could see it much more clearly with the anti Mormon doing it than with the Mormon doing it.

John Dehlin [01:05:02] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:05:04] All right. Oh, my gosh. Are we really going to do this? Okay, let me try and. Let me try and do this here. Okay. So I start seeing things in the Scriptures because I'm immersing myself in them. You immerse yourself enough and stuff, you're going to start seeing things. So the first thing that I started seeing was what I called the endowment of the Pentateuch. And I wrote a little paper on the endowment of the Pentateuch. And the idea of this, this paper, the Pentateuch, of course, being the first five books of Moses in the Bible. And my idea was, is that I've been to the temple a number of times. I know what the endowment is, but there's always this penchant for Mormon to try and take what we have now and stick it in the past to show that we are now true. Sort of like Hugh Nibley. Right. And it occurred to me that the exact structure of the endowment as we have it today probably was not had anciently because, you know, we like to think that, well, they had temples, and ancient Israel in the Old Testament, they have temples. And so what we want to think is that they actually had the endowment going on in their temples.

John Dehlin [01:06:18] Because for Joseph, this idea of restoration of all things was a really big deal. And so it meant that whatever we saw happening a long time ago, we had to bring back. Right.

Radio Free Mormon [01:06:29] Yes, exactly. And I think at some point it started to occur to me that whatever they had in the Old Testament would not be exactly the same as what we have now. Because, for one thing, we've got a Protestant minister.

John Dehlin [01:06:43] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:06:44] In the endowment. Remember, this is the last part of the 1980s. He's not X until 1990, when they take him out of the endowment. And also you got Peter, James and John in there, too. So they're New Testament characters. Why would they be in an Old Testament endowment? I'm not going to go into detail here, honestly, but the idea was that if you looked at the story of the children of Israel from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, three beings, by the way, who are the progenitors of this group, and then them being in slavery in Egypt and then leaving and going out to promised land, all this kind of stuff. I wrote a paper that said what it posited was that this was their form of the endowment. It was built into their. Their history. And it hit. I compared it kind of with the endowment itself, and I tried to be sensitive about that, because you're not supposed to talk about the temple endowment, Right?

John Dehlin [01:07:49] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:07:50] But I wasn't too, too crazy in drawing parallels. Maybe I was, but they're basically just big, large parallels. Anyway, I submitted this paper to different venues because I was really excited about it. This is the first thing that I have done along these lines that has to do with any kind of creativity on my part, like David Knowlton. And let me see here. Ah, here it is. Sunstone Foundation. I submitted this to Sunstone. Can you imagine? I've got a letter here from November 1, 1988, signed by Albert Eugene Peck.

John Dehlin [01:08:26] Albert Peck. I've interviewed him on Mormon stories.

Radio Free Mormon [01:08:29] Yes, you have. I submit it to him. I get this letter back. It says, Dear Mr. Radio Free Mormon, thank you for submitting the endowment of the Pentateuch to Sunstone. Unfortunately, it does not meet our current publishing Needs.

John Dehlin [01:08:47] So you were offended?

Radio Free Mormon [01:08:49] Was I offended? No, I was disappointed.

John Dehlin [01:08:52] Joking. I'm joking.

Radio Free Mormon [01:08:53] Oh, no, no, I was disappointed. And then from the. Is it the following month? Oh my gosh, it's the following month. I have a similar rejection letter from the Ensign magazine. Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. This wasn't the rejection letter. This was the letter before the rejection letter where it says, dear Radio Free Mormon, this is just a note to inform you that your intriguing article is still under study. We are asking some outside of the staff appraisal and it has taken more time than we planned. We will contact you when that work is concluded. Thank you for your patience. Sincerely, J.M. todd, managing editor. And it wasn't long after that that he got the. The rejection notice. So whatever the. Out of staff people who had, they had review it, apparently they gave it a thumbs down. Oh, and then, then I wanted to show you all of my, my rejections. Oh my gosh. I have a lot of rejections, and not just with papers I've submitted, but here's one, because I also submitted to farms, the foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies. And I have an undated letter, which is unfortunate, from John L. Sorenson.

John Dehlin [01:10:06] Nice.

Radio Free Mormon [01:10:08] Who was at the time the evaluation editor. At least that's what he has under

John Dehlin [01:10:12] his signature line here, Michael co's best friend.

Radio Free Mormon [01:10:18] Well, anyway, so it's two pages. I'm not going to read the whole thing. It's a. It's a little bit more of a lengthy rejection letter from farms. And I think the main paragraph is. There are several reasons immediately evident why we would not undertake to publish your article. So it's not just one, there's a lot of them. And he goes into detailing exactly what those are. He does say, nevertheless, it represents very thoughtful preparation on your part and includes a number of good insights, none of which we want to publish. So there's that. I'm not going to bore you with that. I had mentioned this letter from Joseph Fielding McConkey because I had read, like all of his books, I was kind of a fanboy for Joseph Fielding McConkey because even though he would repeat lots of the same stuff that everybody else had already said, it seemed that in every book, and he was publishing quite a number of books in the 1980s, it always seemed like there was one or two, maybe even three or four things in every book that he had where he had something interesting, something new, something fresh to add to the discussion. And I read his books for those nuggets, so I was impressed with him. I sent a copy of it to him. I have his letter from August 20, 1988.

John Dehlin [01:11:35] Hey, that's today.

Radio Free Mormon [01:11:37] Holy Toledo, you're right.

John Dehlin [01:11:41] The anniversary of your letter from Joseph Fielding McConkey.

Radio Free Mormon [01:11:44] Well, this is only 43 years. Is it 33 years ago. 33 years ago. 33 years ago. Let me just say that. Let me just read this. It's very nice. It's in his handwriting. And what he says at the end is, I think you think well and write well. I mean, why am I sending to Joseph Field in McConkey? He's not a publisher, you know, he says, I'll shop it around. You know, it's August and there's not a lot of people here right now. But he says, I think you think well and write well and would encourage you to continue to do both. Doing so with the realization that there isn't much of a market for either among most in the church at the present time. I had to read that a few times before I understood what he was saying. I suppose we are too busy going to meetings, as ever, Joseph F. McConkey.

John Dehlin [01:12:48] Wow.

Radio Free Mormon [01:12:49] Interesting idea, huh?

John Dehlin [01:12:51] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:12:52] So even he was saying, I don't think there's a lot. Big market for people to read books or papers in the church that are, even if they're well thought out and well written, a little cynical. Yes, yes. And probably justifiably so. So, anyway, those are a few things. I've got a bunch of things here in this.

John Dehlin [01:13:13] I just want to say. Rfm I don't know if I'm queuing into this, but if you would have had this awakening, that maybe you can feel liberated enough to be creative and to step outside the common answers. And so you do this research and you write this paper and you share it with a bunch of different venues, hoping to get some positive reinforcement, and then you just get rejected everywhere. I. I just imagine emotionally that would feel disappointing and kind of sad, like you kind of stuck your neck out and you got swatted back for it or at least ignored or rejected. I don't know if you felt that way, but that's how I would have felt.

Radio Free Mormon [01:13:53] Well, I think I just felt disappointed. I thought it was pretty good. But then again, you know, if John Sorensen is telling me this part of me saying, yeah, he probably knows what he's talking about, although I didn't necessarily agree with him. Right. But Endowment of the Pentateuch never made it to publication. Oh, gosh, I've got so many things in here. I'm not going to say Anything else? Except for, oh, another letter from Albert Eugene Peck from 1989. What on earth. I don't know if this was the same thing that I submitted. It probably was. They had an essay contest at Sunstone. Thank you for submitting your essay to the Sunstone student essay Contest. I apologize it has taken me so long to announce the decision. We received 17 essays which were read and evaluated by four readers in the consensus of their judgments, awarded prizes to three individuals, and yours isn't one of them. I added the other part, but, you know, that's what it says. I'm sorry, your essay was not selected. Okay, so he seems like a very nice guy, but, you know, you got to write rejection letters when you're an editor and a publisher. So having said all of that, that's the endowment of the Pentateuch. And I may come back to this. I don't know. Time may be slipping away from us. But I also started seeing some other things in the Book of Mormon in particular, particularly with Lehi's dream of the Tree of Life. And what I saw here, the structure of the Book of Mormon, is you got the Tree of Life dream by Lehi, First Nephi, chapter eight. And there's some intervening material that Nephi wants to see. The same dream that his father saw, right? So he's up on a mountain, blah, blah, blah. He has this huge panoramic vision of the future on both hemispheres. And that's from chapter 11 through 14 of First Nephi. And so what occurred to me, and there were reasons for it and very specific textual reasons for it, is that up to this point, by the way, first Nephi 8, the dream, the dream of the Tree of Life is so overdone in the LDS Church. You have all these lessons on it. Everybody knows what it is. It's just like. And everybody knows what everything represents and symbolizes. So it's a huge snore fest whenever anybody's going to talk about it. But I'm reading through the Book of Mormon, I got to go through it. And so then I get to the vision. And generally it had been perceived that Nephi's vision that he received is something separate and apart from the dream of the Tree of Life, okay? It's like he wants to see the vision that his father saw, but then as a bonus, he gets the dream, but he sees this huge vision which he then writes down. And the thesis of the paper was that this vision that Nephi receives is not a huge bonus, but it's actually an extended interpretation of the symbols presented in the Dream of the Tree of Life. So he gets the interpretation, which is. Becomes this panoramic vision. And so I'm doing all this textual analysis, blah, blah, blah. I send it off to. To farms, and I get a bite. I get a bite from farms, and I end up. Actually, I closed this too soon. I end up getting a letter back from Stephen Ricks.

Lehi's Dream and Book of Mormon Studies

John Dehlin [01:17:24] Yeah,

Radio Free Mormon [01:17:26] here it is. This is March 4, 1992. We've had a couple of reviewers make comments on your paper, Lehigh's Dream of the Tree of Life A Closer look, which I guess was the working title. Generally speaking, they found your paper well written, but would not recommend publication in its present form. A summary of their comments follows. And then they had a lot of comments to make about things that they thought would improve the paper. I'm sure they were right. And then he writes me this letter, and then the last paragraph on page two is. The most logical form for the publication of your paper would be in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies. We would be glad to consider a shortened version of your paper that incorporates the above points. Thank you for your patience, et cetera. So I'm so new to this that I actually thought, well, this is just a rejection letter. And I was at the prosecutor's office one day, and I think I got a call. I'm sure I got a call. What I'm trying to remember is whether I called or whether I was called. And it was Stephen Ricks on the phone. And he talks to me about the paper. And at the end of it, I'm sitting there saying, so, are you gonna. Do you wanna publish it? And he kind of laughed and he said, well, of course I do. That's why I'm having this conversation with you. But I couldn't imagine it. And I hung up the phone. I was just on cloud nine. They wanna publish my paper. I'm gonna be like the guys that I have been idolizing and trying to emulate and reading for over a decade. So I was really thrilled about that.

John Dehlin [01:19:04] So that arrived. You arrived? Rfm.

Radio Free Mormon [01:19:07] I've arrived. I'm going to be published in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies. I'm going to go to the High School of Performing Arts.

John Dehlin [01:19:13] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:19:13] I mean, I was dying to be a serious actress.

John Dehlin [01:19:15] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:19:17] Anyway, if you get that reference, fine. If not, just we'll move on.

John Dehlin [01:19:20] Is that fame?

Radio Free Mormon [01:19:21] That is A Chorus Line.

John Dehlin [01:19:23] A Chorus Line. Got it.

Radio Free Mormon [01:19:24] Basically, same time period. So very good. I'll give you partial credit for that.

John Dehlin [01:19:28] Okay.

Radio Free Mormon [01:19:31] Okay. So I'm going to get out of this. But that's where I started seeing things. And it started occurring to me. You know, apparently this has not been seen before. These connections had not been made before. And I'm starting to see that I have this ability to see things in the scriptures that maybe haven't been seen before, or at least not published on. I always have to say that, right? Because I can't say I'm seeing something that's never been seen before. What I can say is I'm seeing something that to my knowledge, hasn't been published on, at least not that I've seen. Right. So that was published in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies in 1993. The following year, I had another paper published in the same journal. By the way, I always tell people that this is right when this journal was getting off the ground. It had started in the early 1990s, and I figured they just needed stuff to publish, and that's why they went to mine. There was one in 1994 which was called Cry Redemption. The plan of salvation is taught in the Book of Mormon, where it makes the argument that. And this is something I've been studying in the late 80s and into the early 90s, which is that if you look at the Book of Mormon on its own terms, it really seems to be very heavily influenced by the idea of grace, and that the grace of God is accessed by crying unto the Lord for mercy. And that over and over again, there are stories told in the Book of Mormon about persons and groups of persons who are born again like that through the act of calling upon the Lord. So I go through that, and they published it. I thought that was wonderful. They published that as well. So I'm writing high. I also have to tell you that I wrote a sequel to that paper, which had to do with some other thoughts that came to me, which may have been more controversial even than those. And they ended up turning that one down. So it's not all roses there, but I had two papers published, one more turned down. Oh, let me tell you this story. So it's the 1990s. I'm in the prosecutor's office. I remember I'm trying a case. It was a vehicular assault case, I think. And the reason I remember that is because when you're trying a vehicular assault case, the blood has been sent of the suspect down to the lab. It comes back over the legal limit. You've got to get that evidence in in front of the jury, which requires you to call a witness. From the state toxicology lab, and that's down in Marysville. And I don't know the people who work there, but they send up an expert, whoever it is, who's available to testify. And so it's after lunch, I'm coming up for this part of the trial where I'm going to have to be talking to the expert. And I see a guy who's on the second floor of the courthouse sitting on a bench, and he's reading something. He's very immersed in reading this paperback he has. And I figure he's the expert from the lab. And I go walking up to him and I introduce myself and he says, hey. He says, I was just reading about you. And I looked down and he's got a copy of the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, and he's reading one of those two papers that got published, and I realized that my expert is a Mormon. So that's just sort of a little story.

John Dehlin [01:22:50] Anyway, I love it.

Radio Free Mormon [01:22:52] Yeah. Is this an audience or an oil painting?

John Dehlin [01:22:55] So, so, rfm, really quickly, I, I. Since you're mentioning the, you know, intellectual as kind of the first of six pillars, as you're, as you're publishing these articles and, or having some get turned down or rejected, I'm. I'm curious how this ends up shaping kind of you looking at the church in new ways. So I'm. Maybe that's. Is that, is that what's coming up with the Adam God Theory manuscript? Is that what is that? Is what, Is that coming.

Categorizing the Faith Transition

Radio Free Mormon [01:23:28] Yes, it is. And I figured that the best way to present this is categorically, as opposed to chronologically.

John Dehlin [01:23:35] Yeah. Yeah, of course.

Radio Free Mormon [01:23:36] No, no. And I'm just saying that that's just one of the decisions I had to make, because a lot of these things, I mean, we're talking about time, Right. Over four decades.

John Dehlin [01:23:45] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:23:45] And it's not like this happens, then it stops, and then this starts, and then it stops.

John Dehlin [01:23:50] Right.

Radio Free Mormon [01:23:50] They're all happening at the same time,

John Dehlin [01:23:52] kind of parallel processes, right?

Radio Free Mormon [01:23:54] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:23:55] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:23:55] And that's why I figured I can't go chronologically, because then it's going to be hopelessly confusing, even more so than it already is. And I've got to go categorically, which may go back in time a little bit and overlap, but that's the way it really happened.

John Dehlin [01:24:09] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:24:09] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:24:09] No, that's great. No, I just want to let you know I'm. We're tracking your story, and we're just curious to see how this intellectual strain culminates and what I'm hearing so far is you. You. David Knowlton inspires you to be creative and to start thinking outside the box.

Radio Free Mormon [01:24:25] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:24:26] You start publishing, you start submitting some articles, some get rejected, some get accepted. That's got to feel validating and exciting. And I'm just on the edge of my seat to see how the intellectual strain plays out. How about you, Gerardo?

Gerardo Sumano [01:24:40] Yeah, same. Yeah. This is great.

John Dehlin [01:24:43] So if we're quiet, it's because we're on the edge of our seats. In suspense.

Radio Free Mormon [01:24:47] RFM okay, well, I don't have two screens, so I'm just looking at. Mike. My notes here, and I'm not looking at you. And then I. I pause for a factor, and then there's nothing. And I go, oh, my gosh, are they still here? And I have to pull up the screen to see if you're there. Yeah. So let me just talk briefly about this. This is its own story, so maybe I won't talk about this. This has to do with other papers written. This fascination I have and then writing things out. And I did a manuscript about Adam God, trying to resolve the Adam God conundrum, which I really felt like I did. I spent so much time on this. I'm thinking about it all the time. This was at a time when I. This is back in the early 1990s. I lived in a situation where I could walk to work. That's cool.

John Dehlin [01:25:34] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:25:34] So. And I'd walk home from work, and it's like all the time I'm walking, I'm thinking about this. It's just consuming me, and I'm trying to develop it in my mind and thinking about this and that, ideas coming to me, putting them on paper and. So anyway, that was the. The Adam God theory manuscript, which ended up leading.

John Dehlin [01:25:56] Did that get submitted somewhere?

Radio Free Mormon [01:25:58] Oh, yeah. To different places. Thumbs down from everywhere.

John Dehlin [01:26:02] And was that. Did you. Did you get into the Eugene, England? Bruce, I'm a Conkey. Conflict about that.

Radio Free Mormon [01:26:08] No.

John Dehlin [01:26:09] Okay.

Radio Free Mormon [01:26:09] No. And I don't know when I found out about that either.

John Dehlin [01:26:12] Okay.

Radio Free Mormon [01:26:12] I may not have known about that at the time. It's amazing how many things we don't know. I think sometimes the process.

Gerardo Sumano [01:26:18] Maybe you should mention it for. For listeners who don't know what that was.

John Dehlin [01:26:23] Well, rfm, you'd probably do a better job at that in me. You know, for those who don't know. What's the atom God theory? Just explain it in a couple sentences. Well.

The Adam-God Theory and Church Embarrassment

Gerardo Sumano [01:26:32] And Eugene, England.

Radio Free Mormon [01:26:39] The Adam God theory was taught by Brigham Young. It was a doctrine at the Time which he claimed to receive by revelation, which is that the being who is the father of our spirits, the person that most Mormon today would identify as Elohim, was actually Adam.

John Dehlin [01:26:56] And Adam the first human.

Radio Free Mormon [01:26:58] Yes. Before he was the first human, but the same individual. Right. Back when he was Michael. And that Elohim was actually a God above him. So it's something that was taught in the church during Brigham Young's administration. It was taught by the prophet.

Gerardo Sumano [01:27:17] Didn't he claim that Joseph Smith taught him that?

Radio Free Mormon [01:27:20] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:27:22] Basically the God that we pray to existed in human form as Adam, the first God, the first human in, in the existence of this world or this civilization. Correct, right.

Radio Free Mormon [01:27:36] And that becoming Adam and then providing, beginning the process for providing the physical bodies of all of his spirit children was part of his job description as the God of this world.

John Dehlin [01:27:45] So God, God is a exalted resurrected human with all the body parts and passions that come along with it. And to spread his divine seed, he had to come to earth and begin his. His progenitors initiate the creation of his progenitors. Correct.

Radio Free Mormon [01:28:06] I think maybe descendants. Descendants, Sorry, progenitors.

John Dehlin [01:28:09] Goes the progenitor.

Radio Free Mormon [01:28:11] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:28:11] And create his descendants. Thank you.

Radio Free Mormon [01:28:14] That's okay. That's okay. Anyway, so back in the 19 was around 1980, Eugene England was mentioning this in some of his classes at byu and he got called on the carpet by Bruce or McConi who found out about it. And he and Bruce McConkey did it in a multi page letter to Eugene England which was stamped in big red letters on each page. Confidential DO not disseminate. And then it ended up getting disseminated,

John Dehlin [01:28:42] basically taking Eugene England to the woodshed for even talking about this stuff. Right. Because it's embarrassing to the church.

Gerardo Sumano [01:28:50] And he admits, Berma Conkey admits on the letter that bring him. Because the church has been denying that Brigham Young or the, the strongest apologetic argument that the church officially had and the apologists had was that Brigham Young never taught it, or if he taught it was just one or two times and it was just this obscure thing that maybe was written or transcribed incorrectly. So we really don't understand it. And it's probably just like trying to deny, deny, deny. So this was the first time where an, an apostle, a prophet here in Revelator is admitting on a letter that Brigham Young actually taught it and that and that he was. And, and not only that he taught it, but that he was wrong and that and the, the doctrine that Brigham Young had taught was wrong, which was pretty explosive. And that's why Maybe Jill says. Sorry, her fam is. Is saying that is mentioning the fact that it had in big letters that it was confidential. It was not supposed to be decimated. But thanks to. I think it was the Tanners who got a hold of one copy of the letter and then published it. And I think Sandra Tanner has mentioned that Bruce sent the response to Eugene England, not only to him, but to other people as well. So I know. I think Sandra has mentioned that the moment Bruce Haram Conkey made it available to other people other than Eugene England, then they felt like they were. They were. They had the right to publish it as well.

Radio Free Mormon [01:30:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:30:38] Thanks, Rhoda.

Radio Free Mormon [01:30:40] So the brilliance of my theory was that it resolved the problem. The problem with the Adam God theory is that it doesn't match what's taught today. That's simply it. And Brigham Young's a prophet, so if he's teaching something about God that is wrong or different from what current prophets teach in Houston, we have a problem. But what I did was not in detail. What I thought was this. Here you got the Adam God theory, which really is taught by Brigham Young and really is different from what is taught today. And now you've got what I call the orthodox theory, because I had to have some kind of handle to call it just to be able to write about it. The orthodox theory, the Adam God theory. And if you took the Adam God theory and you stripped away the non doctrinal or non doctrinal elements of it, because my belief was there was truth to it, but there are also some things in it that are not doctrinal that even contradict some things in the scriptures or maybe things that Joseph Smith taught. But you have the orthodox theory as well. And the orthodox theory has things in it that are not doctrinal. And if you strip away the non doctrinal things from the Adam God theory and strip away the non doctrinal things from the orthodox theory, the current theory, all of a sudden what's left of both can be harmonized together. And that was the point of the whole paper.

John Dehlin [01:32:14] That was very hand wavy.

Radio Free Mormon [01:32:17] Well, sorry, I'm trying to help communicate what it is I'm talking about.

John Dehlin [01:32:22] No, I meant metaphorically hand wavy.

Radio Free Mormon [01:32:25] Oh. Oh, I thought you meant because I was using my hands.

John Dehlin [01:32:27] Well, that's true, but it was also metaphorically hand wavy, which is how I see a lot of apologetics. It's kind of like these are not the droids you're looking for. Everything is okay. Let us use a lot of words to help Explain something so that at some point you just go, okay, it's not a problem anymore because enough words were used.

Radio Free Mormon [01:32:47] Well, I tried not to do that. I really tried to use my words to convey meaning because I did end up with a message that I wanted to convey and I think it does it. Sometime I'll send it to you. It's like 200.

John Dehlin [01:33:00] But RFM. If we're just kind of being self reflective a tiny bit. Don't you think every apologist thinks that what they write is actually not hand wavy, but is instead really genuinely resolving the problem? Don't you think every apologist kind of feels that way to some level?

Radio Free Mormon [01:33:16] Oh, I'm sure. Yeah, I'm sure that that's true. My main experience with this particular paper is that I'm solving this. I'm figuring out the way things really are. Yeah, okay.

John Dehlin [01:33:27] Yep.

Radio Free Mormon [01:33:28] And not necessarily hand wavy, at least not the way I define that term. But I'm onto it. I'm understanding. Yeah, I'm understanding the way things really are because now I've got it figured out and it matches. I mean, it's really, really impressive to me. Okay. And usually the things that I do are not impressive to me. So. And I'm being serious about that. So I'm thinking, wow, this is amazing. I'm getting, you know, hints and clues from beyond and inspiration and seeing scriptures and they're coming together. It's a thing of beauty. And this took a number of years. And I remember toward the end of the process thinking, am I really onto and discovering the relationships of the gods to each other and to us?

John Dehlin [01:34:17] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:34:18] Or is this really just a bunch of mental masturbation?

John Dehlin [01:34:22] Yeah, yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:34:24] In other words, am I going through all this? I mean, what is the connection? Does this really represent reality in the cosmos or is it just me, you know, coming up with stuff?

Gerardo Sumano [01:34:36] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:34:37] And I started to get sort of the feeling that this is probably less about the reality of the cosmos and more about me just sort of coming up with stuff.

John Dehlin [01:34:47] Rfm. I was going to wonder about two different possible conclusions because I was wondering in my mind where you were taking us with this first intellectual strain. There were two thoughts that I was predicting as possible conclusions for you. One was you sort of asking yourself, why am I, rfm, receiving the defining revelation around the nature of divinity and their relationships to each other. If I were in your shoes back then thinking, now wait a minute, don't we have prophet seers and revelators that are supposed to be figuring this out? I would have been Asking myself that question first, which is like, why is this coming to me and not the dudes who are sustained as prophet seers and revelators? And then a second maybe cousin to that is just something that you like to do, which is to invoke kind of folksy, you know, quotes. And there's that. There's that quote from. I'm sure you'll know who the author is. Who's. I think it was. I don't know if it was Groucho Marx or whoever who said, I would never want to be a club of someone who. Maybe it was Mark Twain. I would never want to be a club of someone who allowed me, who would. Who would want me as a member.

Radio Free Mormon [01:36:02] Yeah. Groucho Marx is famous for quipping, any club that would accept me as a member, I don't want to join.

John Dehlin [01:36:07] Yeah, yeah. And I was wondering if those were two of the insights that you had as you became an embraced, entrenched, established member of the apologetic published community. And maybe neither of those is where you were going, but those were two that occurred to me.

Radio Free Mormon [01:36:25] I'm really glad you brought this up, because this is an important element, and I don't think I'm the only one who thinks this or has thought this. Right. But as I'm beginning to study and discover more things. And by the way, it also encompasses starting to studying things beyond the approved curriculum, like things that earlier church leaders said, obviously, if I'm into the Adam God theory, I'm talking about Brigham Young and all these things he said about things that are discounted today. There comes a point, and I hate to say this, but there does come a point where I started to believe that I was on the right track. And because I'm on the right track, and because we have prophets of God on the earth today, they must already believe this.

John Dehlin [01:37:17] Oh, yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:37:19] Does that sound familiar?

Gerardo Sumano [01:37:20] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:37:20] And they can't say, is it.

Gerardo Sumano [01:37:23] You don't talk about it because it's so sacred. And it's only reserved for the most obedient or. Or the most diligent. So, yeah, that. I. I totally had the same thoughts when. When I discovered new things or thought like new things about scriptures and stuff. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:37:46] There's something endearing about that. Gerardo and rfm. But there's also something a little bit scary about that because you start. It almost starts to branch into the realm of psychosis, where I remember this documentary of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. It was kind of a Beatles thing. And there's this homeless guy, like, camping out on John Lennon's doorstep. And finally, John Lennon has compassion for him and lets him in. And he and Yoko feed this homeless guy. And the guy is like. The homeless guy is like, man, when you wrote, like, he named one of John Lennon's songs, like, when you wrote, like, Lucy, this Guy with Diamonds. You were talking about my daughter Lucy, you know, as if this random fan was channeling the mind and will of John Lennon. And John Lennon was like, no, dude, I, like, had some breakfast and I burped. And then I thought of the lyric, like, it had nothing to do with you. But the fact that this fan thought that he was channeling the mind and will of a beetle, it can start to sort of step into the realm of psychosis a little bit. When you think that you're sharing the mind and will of God's prophet seers and revelators. Am I wrong about that at all? Rfm.

Radio Free Mormon [01:39:13] I think there may be part of that there. I would be the worst person to opine on my own mental stability. But this is where these two things come together. Right. I'm learning things that they're not teaching. I'm convinced that what I'm learning is correct. They're prophet seers and revelators. They're above me. They're more advanced than I am. Therefore, if I put these things together, they have to already know this, right? Yeah, yeah, they have to know it, but they're not talking about it. Why aren't they talking about it? Because there would be mass producers, panic in the streets. The members are not prepared for this. Which now elevates me, puts you to their level. Yeah, yeah. Basically.

John Dehlin [01:39:57] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:39:58] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:39:59] So now you're like the. You're like the prophet series of revelators. You're on their level.

Radio Free Mormon [01:40:03] Yes, I have been introduced into the mysteries.

John Dehlin [01:40:07] Yeah. Which I think is a form of psychosis. That's just my opinion.

Radio Free Mormon [01:40:15] Well, Mormonism makes psychotics of us all.

John Dehlin [01:40:18] Okay, so are you mentioning that as a beginning of the crack in your faith? Because at this point you're probably feeling.

Radio Free Mormon [01:40:29] No, there is no beginning, there is no middle. There is no end. There's just the story.

John Dehlin [01:40:33] Okay. All right.

Gerardo Sumano [01:40:37] I guess what John is trying to ask is how would this later reflect into. Or how this start. How. How did this experience Started opening cracks, Right.

John Dehlin [01:40:48] How it plays into the story. But you don't have to answer yet. But I'm.

Radio Free Mormon [01:40:53] I don't know. Do you have cracks about your sixth grade experience?

John Dehlin [01:40:59] I mean, I would just say that part of me would feel like, wow, I'm channeling what the prophets are thinking and feeling. And then part of me would go, well, that's kind of crazy talk. That's just me. And that would make me wonder again, like I said before, why. I mean, every time there's someone like Denver Snuffer or some schism, you know, I think about what's in their brain, which is, okay, so God made this huge, you know, apostasy, then he had this huge restoration, then Joseph Smith restores it all, then it grows into this huge big thing that in reality only very few, small percentage of the world's population even knows about. Even the super small gospel plan is still known by so few, then that falls into apostasy, and then it's some schmuck lawyer in Sandy, Utah that's supposed to be fixing it all. And I would wonder, does it ever occur to Denver Snuffer that that doesn't make a lot of sense? Why would God need to restore the restoration again for the third or 12th or seventh time? Like, I just wonder whether Denver ever wonders how silly it is that some schmuck lawyer from Sandy is the, is the one mighty and strong to repair the restoration that had already been restored. But anyway, that's kind of where, where I'm getting at with my question.

Radio Free Mormon [01:42:25] Yes, his is not the restoration, it's the reparation. Yeah, but seriously, I mean, who was Jesus of Nazareth? Who was Joseph of Smith? Right? They're all small, tiny, insignificant figures that God uses the weak things of the world to accomplish his miraculous words through. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:42:44] And if you bend, if you, if you submit to the psychoses, then you're like, yeah, I'm all that. You're RFM in the 90s or 2000s, thinking I'm channeling revelation from the gods. And I stand shoulder to shoulder with the prophet seers and revelators. And all I'm saying is what would also occur to me in those heady times of self confidence and inspiration would be like, okay, this does sound a little bit weird. You know, that's all I'm saying.

Radio Free Mormon [01:43:11] Right. And it's not necessarily shoulder to shoulder, but I'm in on it. I understand. They know it too, in part is

Gerardo Sumano [01:43:18] what we're promised in Mormonism, right? Like that eventually we're gonna get the, the beef like John is talking about.

Radio Free Mormon [01:43:27] Right?

Gerardo Sumano [01:43:28] So. So we're waiting for that. And I don't know, we're programmed in some way to, to await for that moment.

John Dehlin [01:43:37] Yeah, well, all I, I think I'm probably projecting RFM and all I'm saying is, is that in my faith evolution, there was always this kind of rational voice in the back of my brain saying maybe, maybe I'm talking to God or maybe I'm just making all this shit up in my brain, you know what I mean?

Radio Free Mormon [01:43:57] I've been blessed to be untethered from rational voices.

Faith-Affirming Beginnings of the Journey

John Dehlin [01:44:01] Okay, all right. So so far your, your story is all faith affirming and so pillar one of your. Of your faith journey is, is leaving me thinking that you're communing with the gods. But let's, let's just see where the story goes.

Radio Free Mormon [01:44:15] Right. Well, there's also of course this tension that goes on, which is you got to go to church for three hours every week where.

Gerardo Sumano [01:44:21] Right.

Radio Free Mormon [01:44:22] It's a desert.

John Dehlin [01:44:23] There's bored into tearful submission of tediousness.

Radio Free Mormon [01:44:28] Yes, yes, absolutely. And it's required. Yeah, it's required. Like Hugh Nibley said, Mormon have an almost infinite capacity for boredom because they have to.

Gerardo Sumano [01:44:42] And John might remind us that or that boredom is one of the techniques that high demand religions or slash cults use. Just, just an interesting fact because it

John Dehlin [01:45:00] can put you into a trance that can elicit sometimes some spiritual feelings.

Radio Free Mormon [01:45:05] Yeah, I never had any spiritual feelings from boredom, but maybe some people do.

Gerardo Sumano [01:45:09] Well, it's just, it puts you into the state of mind where you. That it allows your mind to take in information without a lot of critical thinking. So just like in general conference, like you're so bored out of your mind, it, it doesn't matter what they're talking about. You're in your. I don't know, maybe John can explain this better, but.

John Dehlin [01:45:35] No, it's okay. I'm curious to see where RFM's taking us.

Gerardo Sumano [01:45:38] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:45:39] Okay. So these are mainly stories and hopefully they will end up creating a picture, a mosaic of sorts that may help you understand where I came from and how I love it here. Okay, so I'm going to skip the rest of this part. By the way, there was another story that I did think of with your comment a while ago, John made me think of, which had to do with who am I? Right. So I'm over, I'm doing a fireside. Okay. Over at a friend's house about the second paper that I had written about Cry Redemption. The plan of salvation is taught in the Book of Mormon, dealing with the grace and the stories in the Book of Mormon. And I remember there's a number of people there and I'm presenting on this and I think it's really interesting and I'm Just going from the Scriptures. Right. And I remember at some point in the middle of this presentation, this sister who was seated over here interrupting, maybe, she probably raised her hand but say, who are you to be teaching us these things? And if this is what the, the prophets want us to know, why aren't they teaching us this. These things? And it was a little bit hostile.

John Dehlin [01:46:51] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:46:52] And I remember being caught off guard and just sort of standing there with the deer in the headlights look because nothing was coming. And fortunately my friend whose house I was presenting at jumped in and he says he, he diffused the situation by asking her, why are you so defensive? Anyway, I was really glad that he did that. And so then it goes into this thing about I'm not defensive and why is it. And so he took over. But I always remember that because I'm just excited about this new information, this new way of viewing things. Right. But here I'm, I'm butting up against the TBM attitude of who are you to be teaching us this?

John Dehlin [01:47:33] Yeah. Yep.

Radio Free Mormon [01:47:35] Because in Mormonism, once again, one of the main rules is that truth is determined not by what is said, but by who says it.

John Dehlin [01:47:44] Yeah. It, it reminds me of when was it Oliver Cowdery who's got his own peep stone and Joseph's all talking about personal revelation in the peep stone. And then Oliver like tries it himself and Joseph's like, no, no, that's my job. That's not your job.

Radio Free Mormon [01:48:03] It may be a combination with Hyrum Page.

John Dehlin [01:48:05] Hiram Page. That's it. That's right.

Radio Free Mormon [01:48:06] Who's Oliver Cowdery's brother in law, I think.

John Dehlin [01:48:09] Okay. Sorry, I got that story wrong, but the point is it's all fine. Personal revelation is fine as long as it's reflecting what the Brethren say.

Radio Free Mormon [01:48:18] Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:48:18] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:48:19] That's how you know it's true revelation. Yeah, it's really.

John Dehlin [01:48:23] Which really means you could never have any original thoughts without getting smacked down either by the, by the leaders or by the followers. That, that through milieu control, control the other members to stay in line with the Brethren. Right.

Radio Free Mormon [01:48:37] Yes. And that's actually going to come up here a little bit later on. I won't jump to it now because I'll stick with my outline. I'm gonna try and stick to a little bit closer than I usually do, mainly because otherwise I'll get lost. So we talked about this intellectual part. Right?

John Dehlin [01:48:52] Okay.

Radio Free Mormon [01:48:52] And the fact I'm finding all this intellectual stimulation within gospel studies, but not at church, not at general conference.

John Dehlin [01:49:04] Right.

Radio Free Mormon [01:49:04] Instead I have to create this idea, this fiction in my head that actually the leaders of the church know this stuff, but they're not talking about it. So instead they. They think it's more important, once again, because the membership, generally, they can't handle the truth. But I can. So I'm special. I'm special in God's own eyes.

John Dehlin [01:49:26] Sure.

Philosophy, Scripture, and Intellectual Life

Radio Free Mormon [01:49:28] So let's go to philosophical. That's the second category. Okay.

John Dehlin [01:49:31] Okay. Philosophical. The philosophies of men.

Radio Free Mormon [01:49:35] Yes. All these are going to be a lot shorter, and I'll start popping through them. Okay. When I say philosophical, I don't mean classic philosophy. But I will tell you this is that when I was at ut, there was a mall. It's actually the mall from the late 1960s where the guy went up in the bell tower and, you know, clock tower, started shooting people. But this is the 1980s, and there's this beautiful mall, and there are buildings flanking each side. And these are different colleges. They're probably some of the original buildings on the campus. And it's on the south part of the campus. Anyway. They're beautiful. I never had any classes in any of them. But one evening I'm sort of walking around and I'm looking at these buildings, and one of them was the philosophy department. And I knew that because it said philosophy on the front. And along the sides are these statues in niches or niches, niches, whatever, in the building. And they're statues of the great philosophers. Maybe it was just busts, but they had their names above them. And, you know, there's. There's Plato and there's all these different philosophers. And I have to tell you, to my shame that walking around there, I thought, what a waste learning philosophy is because these guys were not prophets. And you can't find out the truth by trying to reason it out in your mind. Either God has to reveal the truth from heaven or it will be forever unknown. So I was extremely dismissive of these philosophers. I had no interest in learning anything they had to say because they have nothing to teach me. Okay, go ahead and respond to that,

John Dehlin [01:51:30] Gerardo. Go.

Gerardo Sumano [01:51:35] It just reminds me to feeling in the same way as well. I remember on my mission, I was really dismissive of other religions. And I remember on a p Day looking on the LDS website and finding this article about. About Muslims and the Islam religion. And pretty much the article on the LDS website claimed that is it Muhammad, I think, the prophet of Islam, that he was inspired just as Joseph Smith, and that he had received revelation. Maybe not all truth, but he Definitely got some truth and that he had had to come from God. And that was really, really hard for me to reconcile. Just the fact that someone without the authority I could. Or the church is admitting that someone without the authority was receiving revelation, that's just feeling the same way. Yeah, I can relate to.

Radio Free Mormon [01:52:46] Yeah. There's probably quoting from this landmark address that Spencer Kimball gave in 76 or 78, where he talks about these different world religious. World religion founders, including Muhammad. There's Martin Luther as well. And then allows for them to have been inspired of God in their work, which was a big deal even at the time. But of course, generally, the way Mormon interpret that and understand that is to the extent that what they taught is consonant with Mormonism. That's the part that was given by God.

Gerardo Sumano [01:53:19] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:53:20] Right. All the other stuff that doesn't match Mormonism. Well, that's where they got it wrong.

John Dehlin [01:53:24] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:53:25] So, yeah, I have no. And it's in the temple. Right. The philosophies of men mingled with Scripture. Is that still in there?

John Dehlin [01:53:34] Yeah, I'm not.

Radio Free Mormon [01:53:37] I think it is. It was associated with the Protestant minister originally, but I think that.

Gerardo Sumano [01:53:43] I think Peter, James, and John mentioned that.

Radio Free Mormon [01:53:46] Okay, good. Because they had interactions with the. The Protestant minister as well. Anyway, the philosophies of men mingled with scripture. So. Philosophy? No, thanks. I'll go with the revelation every time. Thank you very much. So now we're going to the end of the 1990s, and I get a Christmas present or something from somebody, might have been a birthday present. You know how you get sometimes presents that you would never get for yourself and there's a reason?

John Dehlin [01:54:14] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:54:15] Well, somebody got me a collection of videotapes of a PBS program which I had never watched and never even heard of, and it was called Genesis with Bill Moyer. You ever see that?

John Dehlin [01:54:30] Bill Moyers, He's a legend.

Radio Free Mormon [01:54:32] Yeah, he was a big deal. He's an Austin boy, by the way.

John Dehlin [01:54:35] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:54:36] This is up in Washington now. And I get this, and I just go, oh, my gosh, are you kidding me? I don't care what it is that Bill Moyer has to say about the book of Genesis.

John Dehlin [01:54:45] Hey, I get to do something that I almost never get to do, which is to correct rfm. I think it's Moyer's plural.

Radio Free Mormon [01:54:51] Okay, well, have you already looked it up?

John Dehlin [01:54:53] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:54:54] So you're cheating, basically.

John Dehlin [01:54:56] You're trying to get me to bet you I confirmed it. What? I knew. Why would I look it up if I didn't know it?

Radio Free Mormon [01:55:02] Why would you look it up if you didn't know it.

John Dehlin [01:55:04] I mean, I confirmed it. I thought, wait, he's saying Moyer. I think it's Moyers. So I looked it up and it was Moyers. Not a big deal. It's because I. It's. I. It's because whenever I talk to you you know so much, you're always like I just did with freaking Oliver Cowdery and Hiram Page. You're always correcting me. So I just have to just do it one time in my life, and I can say I actually knew something that RFM didn't once. Give me one.

Radio Free Mormon [01:55:30] You got me.

John Dehlin [01:55:31] You got me on my goddamn birthday. Give me one time where I can actually correct you. RFM.

Radio Free Mormon [01:55:36] I think you just got us a PG13 rating. You got me. You're smarter than I. No, you got me. Totally. So it's Bill Moyers.

John Dehlin [01:55:45] All right, thank you. Good.

Radio Free Mormon [01:55:47] So. Oh, back to the story on Genesis. The whole idea of this project, the Genesis Project, is that it's a show. And he has a different panel on of guests every week for every episode. And they divide the book of Genesis up into its component stories, the main stories in the book of Genesis. And each episode they talk about one of those stories as they work their way from Creation down through Joseph in Egypt at the end. So the panel, there's like four people on each panel, and I can't remember it too well. I remember Mandy Patinkin was one of the recurring guests, and I thought, this guy's an actor. I mean, what is he going to tell me about Genesis that is of any value? The only thing that anybody can tell me about Genesis that's of any value is Genesis itself and the prophets of God in the LDS Church. Right. So the thing that surprised me is that I put it on. And that was amazing because I really wasn't interested. But I did put it on probably one Sunday, right. When you don't have a lot to do. And here's these people who are not members of the LDS Church and not even necessarily religious people, but who have considered the story. And now they're sitting around in a group and they're talking about the story for that week. And I'm listening to it and I'm going to. Oh, my gosh. These people are seeing things in these stories that I've never seen before that have never occurred to me that I've never heard about. And it may not be doctrinal. Right. Or teaching wise, but they are pulling things out of these stories that are significant and that are important and that I could feel the weight of. And what that ended up doing for me was reversing my position about philosophy. Now, once again, this isn't technically philosophy, okay? Not classical philosophy, but what I suddenly understood was people who are not Mormon, even much less not prophets of God, can see things in scriptures, that when they discuss it, I am edified by it. And in fact, I'm edified it. I'm edified by it more than listening to the prophets of God say the same thing about the same story that they have said for 200 years now.

John Dehlin [01:58:22] Yeah, yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:58:23] So this. This was hugely, hugely important to me. And this is one of the things that I remembered, which I'd forgotten when I was trying to figure out what happened to me. So all of a sudden, now there's sort of a schism that occurs where I realize through this broadcast, through these. This genesis with Bill Moyers, that other people can bring out of the scriptures important things to me that I didn't get from Mormonism.

John Dehlin [01:58:57] Yeah, yeah. That's scary. It's. You know, we're taught this whole philosophy of men. We're all taught to just look to the brethren for truth. And it's scary when you either learn something from a unofficial source, external source, or when you feel inspired. I remember feeling just like chills up my spine when I was watching a Jim Henson movie, a Muppet movie, and I thought, why is the Holy Ghost inspiring me from the Muppet movie? And that's why Mark Twain says, you know, travel is fatal to prejudice. You know, if you're in the bubble, you can feel like all truth and all wisdom and all inspiration is only in the bubble. But as soon as you step out, you learn that there's wisdom and inspiration from lots of sources, and that's a slippery slope.

Radio Free Mormon [01:59:47] Yeah. Was that the Muppets Take Manhattan that you felt the spirit in?

John Dehlin [01:59:50] Might have been. Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [01:59:52] I think I'm kidding. I hope I'm kidding. But who knows? Who knows? So, yeah, so. And none of those things that they were talking about have anything that they're saying. This is doctrine. This is the way things are in the journey, eternity. They're just saying this is how it impacts me with my life experiences. And that was very, very impactful to me. So that's really the philosophy there. Okay, Ready to go on the music?

Boredom at Church and in Mormon Culture

John Dehlin [02:00:18] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:00:19] Okay. So Mormon ism and music is. Well, Mormonism does with music what they do with everything else. They make it boring as hell. And like I say about Mormonism, you Know, going to church is. Or watching general conference, it's. It's not just as boring as watching paint dry. It's as boring as watching dry paint dry. That's how bad it is. And so they do the same thing with their music. Everything has to be made horribly, horribly boring. Now I know there's some people who really love the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which is what it used to be called. Now it's what the, the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square. Temple Square, yeah, yeah, the tea cats, yeah. So. But regardless what you call them, it's still boring. It's not my cup of tea. And that's all they do is they sing their songs, you know, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, law. It's just so boring. And they don't do anything else. And I will tell you that back in 1979 or so, this is before I went on my mission, shortly after I joined the church. Now I'm in dance at, by this point, and I have been for a few years. It's one of my. The great loves of my life is, is dance. And they are advertising for auditions, I think for a presentation they're going to be putting on at the stake. And it was called Behold the Man. I still remember the title of it. It's about, you know, like Jesus and probably an Easter time kind of presentation. Now anybody who's been a member of the church for any period of time knows basically what kind of format this is going to follow, right? And you're gonna have people singing songs and choir up there and maybe some people reading different scriptures in between. Right. Maybe a narrative told in a boring way between the boring songs. But I am sitting there thinking, oh my gosh, well, maybe they'll have a role for some dancers in this. And it's just so silly to think about that looking back on it, right? Because of course they're not going to have any dancers in their Behold the Man production in the Mormon Church. I mean, that might be interesting. Forget that. So, but I remember asking somebody who was in charge of it said, well, you got any place for dancers? No, there's not going to be any dancing in this. Okay, well, anyway, I thought maybe I could contribute something. So. But music. So music is very, very boring in Mormonism. And then in the 1990s, once again, the last part of the 1990s, like I said, there's overlapping going on, right. I do this absolutely insane thing which is I get the CD for the soundtrack of Jesus Christ Superstar. Why did I do that? Can't remember. All I know is I did changed my world. As far as religious music goes.

John Dehlin [02:03:20] You've.

Radio Free Mormon [02:03:20] I know. You know that. The soundtrack, right, John?

John Dehlin [02:03:23] Yeah, yeah. I saw. I saw the musical in Chicago just a few years ago for the first time.

Radio Free Mormon [02:03:29] Gerardo.

Gerardo Sumano [02:03:30] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:03:31] You know it?

Gerardo Sumano [02:03:32] Yeah. I've never seen it, though.

Radio Free Mormon [02:03:35] Okay. And I got the. I got the vhs.

John Dehlin [02:03:38] Christ Superstar.

Radio Free Mormon [02:03:42] Who in the hell do you think you are? That was a sixth grade version that we sang. Recess. But do you think you are what they say you are? I think is how it goes. But, oh my gosh, talk about night and day, talk about black and white, Talk about boring versus interesting. All of a sudden you've got these people who are singing songs about Jesus and even Jesus is singing. Right. But it's amazing. It is energetic, it's passionate. I remember coming up with the expression saying that Jesus Christ Superstar. Putting passion back into the passion.

John Dehlin [02:04:23] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:04:25] Because Mormonism just sucks the life out of everything. It really. It sucks all the interest out of everything. You could take it, have the most interesting thing in the world, which I think the gospel is, and certainly did at the time, and make it absolutely boring simply through the method of presentation. And so Jesus Christ Superstar. Oh my gosh, this is amazing. And I got a couple of other CDs at the time. One was of a men's choir, the Maranatha Men's Choir, singing some gospel songs. They were great. I got one with Elvis Presley singing gospel songs. So there were some of his earlier recordings. And I could play these on Sunday. I'd play him going to church. I pay him, coming back to back from church, you know, having a great, great time. But once again, what it's doing is, is it's showing me this contrast between what Mormonism does with the gospel and what can be done with the gospel, which is much better.

Gerardo Sumano [02:05:28] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:05:29] So it's one thing. It is one thing to be bored at church and just think, well, that's sort of the way it is. And I guess I just got to live with it. And, you know, it's what we do and have this sort of uneasy sense that things are not necessarily what they should be. But then it's another thing entirely to be exposed to something that takes the same kind of subject matter and does it amazingly well. And now you look and say, oh, I see why this is boring. And it's not that it doesn't have to be boring. It could be fantastic. But for some reason they want it to be boring. So this is like an experience I had I'll just tell this experience back in college when I was a dance major, I was in the. The advanced ballet class. Finally worked my way up to the advanced ballet class, or as Mr. Danielan would say, the A, D, V, A, N, C, E, D class. That was when he was telling us that we needed to shape up and do better. Yeah. This is the advanced class, boys and girls. By the way, if you know Mr. Danielan, who since passed away, you would want to realize what a wonderful impression that is of him. But one day. One day there was a traveling company, a Fiddler on the Roof, coming through town and performing at the Performing Arts Center. And the chorus for the show came and took class with us. Ballet class. So we're in there. We're in the advanced class. We all kind of know what we're doing to a certain extent. Other people. People have different abilities, and I'm kind of toward the bottom of that, believe me. But it's. It's a known quantity. It's a known level of ability that we have. And we're the advanced class. Right. There's nobody who's better than us. It's the college, and we have this class with the. The touring company. And I will never forget the experience of watching these boys, these girls, these men and women who are touring with Fiddler on the Roof in the chorus, in our class. And everything they do is so much better than everything that we did in the advanced class.

Gerardo Sumano [02:07:57] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:07:58] Whether it's at the bar and especially, you know, in the. On the floor and doing everything bigger, better, more, wonderful. And I know that it was a shock to me. I expect it was a shock to other people in the class, too. It's like we thought we were at the pinnacle. Right. And then finding out there's this level way above us.

John Dehlin [02:08:22] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:08:23] That really exists. So this is another way of my trying to illustrate that even when you think that you are at the top of your game, and it couldn't be any better because you can't conceive it, that there can be, and often is a level even farther above that that you don't know exists until the touring company comes through and you've got real dancers or much better trained dancers or much more talented dancers taking your class with you. And all of a sudden, all my visions of being in the advanced class kind of crumbled. And I realized it didn't mean squat compared to what these people were doing. So they were in the class, and everybody, including myself, is trying so hard to dance up to their level. And failing. But it sure showed us that there was a level above which, that we were dancing at and which we were not at. So I liken that to the church as well. Does that make any sense?

John Dehlin [02:09:25] Yeah, it's kind of like. It's kind of like what, what else am I a lower level at than I thought? You know, in what other areas of my life did I think I was kind of maxed out at the pinnacle and maybe I'm. I'm just a super lower level. Right.

Gerardo Sumano [02:09:40] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:09:41] Right.

John Dehlin [02:09:41] Makes you start wondering, yeah, what else am I lower level than I thought? Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:09:46] And the bot. The bottom line is probably everything.

John Dehlin [02:09:48] Yeah, right.

Radio Free Mormon [02:09:50] There's probably everything. And as much as we try to be right about things, I mean, I think most people try and be right. The fact of the matter is, is that we're wrong about so many things right now as I sit here, I am wrong about so many things that I don't even know I'm wrong about. And I won't until later on.

John Dehlin [02:10:12] But one of the most absurd things about Mormonism is they produce 18 and 19 year olds that think they literally know everything. I mean, of course it's famous to be a teenager and think you know everything, but a wise parent just kind of smiles at that teenager, says, just wait till you get older. But in Mormonism, you know, a 19 year old Mormon missionary, an 18 year old Mormon missionary is taught that they know everything that really matters. There's, there's literally nothing else they really need to know that matters. They just need to remember and follow and they can go to anywhere in the world, meet the smartest and wisest women and men and feel like they're intellectually and spiritually superior to them because we have the truth. The truth. And everybody else, you know, in every other tradition, culture, way of life needs to bend towards our, our perspective. And so in Mormonism, that's a, that's a feature, not a bug. Everywhere else outside of sort of a high demand religion, you just smile and say, the wisest people realize they don't know anything.

Radio Free Mormon [02:11:18] Right.

John Dehlin [02:11:19] But that's not Mormonism.

Radio Free Mormon [02:11:21] Right. The more you learn, really, the less you know.

John Dehlin [02:11:24] Yeah. I mean that's. Who is that? Plato or Socrates or Aristotle, One of those guys? That was, that was what they realized. Right.

Radio Free Mormon [02:11:31] It might be because I, I try and stay away from philosophers because they have nothing to teach me because it's

John Dehlin [02:11:36] the, it's the philosophies of men.

Radio Free Mormon [02:11:38] Right?

John Dehlin [02:11:39] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:11:40] Oh my gosh. So that was music. So we've gone through the intellectual stuff. We've gone over philosophy, we've gone over music. Ah, let's go to the scripture, shall we?

Scripture Study and Proof Texting Problems

John Dehlin [02:11:54] All right. Scriptures.

Radio Free Mormon [02:11:55] Okay, so this is once again early in the 1990s that I realized, well, here's this thing. I've spent all this time studying the scriptures. I've marked them up, I've memorized all these passages. I mean, I memorized all the, the seminary scriptures in the 1980s. I wasn't in seminary because I grabbed. I joined the church after graduating from high school. Right. But I got a hold of the, the scripture mastery.

John Dehlin [02:12:20] Scripture mastery, yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:12:22] And I memorized them all and there were 40 for each of the standard works. That's 160 total. And additionally I memorized other scriptures and I'm spending all this time reading the scriptures. But in the early 1990s, there's sort of this little crisis that I have, which is simply this, that the church clearly teaches that, oh, you should study the scriptures. But by the way, you don't need really to study the scriptures at all because all you have to do is pay attention to what the current leadership is saying.

John Dehlin [02:12:52] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:12:54] Living prophets trump dead prophets, right?

John Dehlin [02:12:56] Yep.

Radio Free Mormon [02:12:57] So I'm sitting here thinking, am I honestly just doing this for no good reason? Is the whole point of studying and reading the scriptures just to learn facts like the names of people, places, events, without actually learning anything doctrinal that might be helpful or good? Okay. In other words, is it totally fruitless to be spending all this time studying the scriptures when all you have to do is, you know, read the conference edition every six months and you're good to go? And I think a lot of Mormon are like that.

John Dehlin [02:13:38] Yeah. I got to that point where I felt like it's modern day revelation that matters? And that's after I had the teachings of the living prophets class where they shared Ezra Tap Benson. I believe it was his teachings that, that, that living prophets trump dead ones. And of course it's very convenient to teach that because there's a lot of really inconvenient and embarrassing things taught by past prophets. So, you know, so I remember carrying the, I remember always carrying the conference, the latest conference edition of the Ensign in my big bloated standard works and thinking I'd much rather read a conference talk than the actual scriptures because at some point I was convinced at BYU that conference talks are scripture. Do you remember that?

Radio Free Mormon [02:14:22] Sure.

Gerardo Sumano [02:14:23] And sometimes I don't know what happened to me sometimes was like reading the scriptures, specifically the New Testament. Well, also the, the Old Testament Finding things that did not really match with my view of Mormonism, a lot of things that were in some ways contradicting. So, yeah, it's a lot safer and a lot easier to just go and read what, what the prophet is saying.

Radio Free Mormon [02:14:56] Absolutely, yeah, absolutely it is. And I agree with you because they're going to have a talk about a certain subject. You don't have to read through the Scriptures and cross reference and all this other stuff and then try and understand it with the King James Version, English from Elizabethan English. Right, right. And all this stuff. So I had this mini crisis and a number of things happened during this time. First off, I was reading through, what was it, the New Testament, reading Paul, and he talks about the veil that the Jews have on their hearts when they read the Old Testament. And the point that he's making is, look, the Old Testament is replete with prophecies about Jesus Christ. Okay? That I've later learned is a very debatable proposition. But going back to the early 1990s, he's talking about that. And he says that when the Jews. Of course he's a Jew. When the Jews read the Old Testament to this day, there's a veil over their hearts or their minds that they can't understand. They can't even see. What's so obvious is that all these prophecies about Jesus Christ, how can you read the Old Testament and not understand that they predict Jesus and that he's the Messiah? And he answers that by saying there's a veil over their minds or veil over their hearts, that they are kept from understanding what the Scriptures really mean. Okay. And so I developed this idea. I actually gave it as a talk in sacrament meeting. I think I called it the Veil of the Scriptures, where I suggested that the same thing applies to us too, that it's not just Jews, you know, in Paul's point of view, having a veil over their mind, that they can't understand the meaning of the Scriptures pointing to Jesus, but that the Scriptures may actually have other things in them that we could learn, except for the fact that we also have a veil over our minds. And that the veil over our minds is the same as the veil that Paul was talking about, which is a veil that keeps you from reinforcing. Yeah, yeah. You're not learning anything new when you read the Scriptures. All you are is reinforcing what it is that you already believe. And that's what that veil symbolism meant to me. And I presented it in a talk in sacrament meeting. The veil of the Scriptures and That was very profound for me because by seeing what Paul saw in the Jews and then saying, you know, is it just them or is it I, Lord, are there things in the Scriptures that I can't see because I'm not allowing myself to see them? And then things started breaking open. This is also in the time period when I'm writing these papers. Right. These original papers for the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies. And. And there was an article that I read. It was actually a book review that was hugely important in my life that I'd forgotten about until I was doing this introspection I told you about. And it was in 1989. Actually read it in probably 1990 or 91, but it came out in 1989. It was the first issue of the Review of Books on the Book of Mormon by farms. Remember Daniel C. Peterson being the editor?

John Dehlin [02:18:09] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:18:10] He called it affectionately, the Robot Bomb.

Gerardo Sumano [02:18:13] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:18:13] The Review of Books on the Book of Mormon, the Robot Bomb.

John Dehlin [02:18:18] I did. I didn't. I didn't know about that.

Radio Free Mormon [02:18:20] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:18:21] And I did have Lewis Midgley as a professor. I was a political science major at byu, so Lewis Midgley was a professor of mine during that time period. In 89, actually. I was on my mission in 89, but right after. But Louis Midgley's still around. He's still alive and kicking.

Radio Free Mormon [02:18:38] I understand he's somewhat of a curmudgeon.

John Dehlin [02:18:40] He's a bit of a curmudgeon, which

Radio Free Mormon [02:18:43] may be understating it. But this. This book review that he wrote and that I read was so important to me because I'm starting to realize this idea that when people write about the Scriptures for a Mormon audience, then really they're not trying to learn anything from the scriptures. You're not trying to see what the author of the Scriptures had to say or meant by what he. Or she. I could say. Or she. But it's basically he. What he wrote. Right. Instead, all you're doing is using the scriptures as a pretext for confirming Mormon doctrine. Makes sense.

John Dehlin [02:19:25] Is that proof texting?

Radio Free Mormon [02:19:29] It is, in a way, proof texting, as I understand it, is generally looking at one particular scripture and using that to prove a doctrine.

John Dehlin [02:19:35] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:19:36] But this. It's a similar idea, except maybe broader.

John Dehlin [02:19:39] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:19:40] And there was this book that had come out, and remember I told you I really like Joseph Fielding McConkey, also Robert Millet.

John Dehlin [02:19:47] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:19:48] Another professor at BYU, and they had written a couple books together, and one of the books they'd written together I really liked, which was called Sustaining and Defending the Faith. Came out in the 1980s. Apologetics. Right. And I read that book several times. It was so good. It's a small book and marked it up, blah, blah, blah. But they came out with a multi volume series in the latter part of the 1980s, which was a doctrinal commentary on the Book of Mormon. And I remember I never bought it. I mean, it was hard back, it was kind of pricey. But I did see it at the bookstore and it cracked it open. And I looked in there and I looked at a couple of things. Okay. There's certain specific things I looked at to see if they were seeing anything that maybe I saw and they didn't. And so I'm wondering about it and I'm thinking, gosh, are they really just sort of using the Book of Mormon to teach Mormonism? Which sounds like very obvious the thing to do on its face. Right. Obviously the Book of Mormon teaches Mormonism.

Gerardo Sumano [02:20:45] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:20:45] Right. It's the foundation of the Mormon Church.

John Dehlin [02:20:47] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:20:49] But I had read it enough to realize that there are some things in it that actually aren't necessarily the same as what Mormonism teaches. So do we read the Book of Mormon to try and find out what it says or just use it to try and shore up what current Mormonism teaches and the stock trinal New Testament commentary? My impression of it was that that's what it was doing, was the latter thing.

John Dehlin [02:21:10] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:21:12] So having said that, I read this article, this book review by Lewis Midgley, which is reviewing Book of Mormon doctrinal commentary by Joseph Fieldy McConkie and Robert Millett. Okay. I have to look this up because I don't have that with me anymore, but it's online, so let me just take this one paragraph and imagine how this really struck me in the early 1990s, as Lewis Midgley is putting in words what I am starting to understand myself but don't have words for yet. The flaws. This is Louis Mitchley. The flaws. First off, he's talking about flaws in this. Right. I mean, you don't criticize Joseph Fielding McConkey. Right.

John Dehlin [02:22:00] So, and the grandson of Joseph Fielding Smith. Right. This is. This is Mormon royalty, basically. Joseph F. Smith to Joseph Fielding Smith to Bruce Al McConkie to Joseph Fieldy McConkey. You don't mess with that.

Radio Free Mormon [02:22:13] No, but he did, and I appreciated it. He says the flaws in doctrinal commentary are ones common to much of Mormon scholarship. So it's beyond just this book. He's saying it's prevalent. The tendency is to divert attention away from the message and meaning in the text under consideration and back towards what we already know. Such efforts do not enhance our understanding. They tend to make the very teachings they celebrate seem merely sentimental and insubstantial. Such endeavors also tend to close the door on the untapped possibilities of within the Scriptures. So he goes on, I'm going to read this rest of this paragraph, but you can see where he's coming from and maybe you can see why it's resonating so much with me in my early 30s. He goes on, our tendency is to rely upon presumably authoritative statements on matters that may seem urgent to us, but which may not have been of concern to those responsible for providing us with the Book of Mormon. Now, when he talks about these presumably authoritative statements, he's talking about what always happens in these seminary or institute manuals and also in his commentary, which is, if you got a passage from the Book of Mormon that you're explicating. Right. We'll find out what some church leader said about it. Okay. That's the authoritative statement.

John Dehlin [02:23:59] Right.

Radio Free Mormon [02:23:59] And the fact he even said presumably, you know, caught my interest.

John Dehlin [02:24:03] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:24:05] These secondary materials may be edifying or at least harmless, but are quite often of limited value, being themselves flawed by the kind of neglect of the enigmatic and yet fruitful particulars found in the Book of Mormon that has brought the church under divine condemnation. Part of the neglect of the Book of Mormon and the resulting censure may be traced to our urge to advance seemingly authoritative answers to questions that are not addressed in that text. So he goes on like that for a number of pages.

John Dehlin [02:24:52] Kind of. So is he kind of calling them out for being speculative?

Radio Free Mormon [02:24:56] No, no, he's calling them out for being banal and boring. Yeah. And vapid.

John Dehlin [02:25:05] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:25:06] They're not saying anything of importance. All they're doing is using the text in order to reflect Mormonism back to the reader.

John Dehlin [02:25:14] Not doing anything creative, basically. Not doing anything creative.

Radio Free Mormon [02:25:18] Yeah. They're not making any effort. Yes. They're not making any effort to understand what the text itself is saying.

John Dehlin [02:25:23] Got it.

Radio Free Mormon [02:25:24] All they're doing is using as a pretext to teach modern Mormonism, which is, of course, what happens in every single one of our Sunday school classes.

John Dehlin [02:25:31] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:25:32] And I was a Sunday school teacher for a while, and it rapidly became obvious to me with the teacher's manual, which is that we go through the Book of Mormon one year, Church history, Doctrine and Covenants, next year, Old Testament, New Testament. Right. Four year program. We have a manual for each of those, but the manuals are the Same, because the goal of the manual isn't to talk about or learn from the Scriptures. The goal of the manual is always to use the Scriptures as a pretext to talking about current Mormon doctrine. So, yeah, anyway, so, yeah, and he's responding to that. And I was starting to awaken to this idea for my own studies, and hearing him say this really, really made its mark on me, because I'm not the only one seeing this. Here's Lewis Midgley seeing it too, and calling out Joseph Fielding McConkey and Robert Millet for doing it.

John Dehlin [02:26:33] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:26:34] Okay, so let me go ahead and just say, as an example of this, something I had noticed a while before, back in the earlier 90, whenever it was, I'm reading through the Book of Mormon and It's Alma, chapter 34, verse 34. It's a very easy reference to remember. It's amulet talking. And this passage gets used quite frequently in the church. And it says, you cannot say, when you're brought to that awful crisis, this is seminary scripture. Right. And that crisis being death, that I will repent, that I'll return to my God. Now, you cannot say this, for that same spirit which doth possess your bodies at the time that you go out of this world, that same spirit will have power to possess your body in that eternal world. Right. Remember that. Everybody knows this for sure.

John Dehlin [02:27:16] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:27:16] And it is always, always, always used to teach the same idea, which is that we need to get our act together in this world and get our appetites under control and our temptations mastered, because the same spirit that we have is going to be the same spirit we'll have when we're resurrected.

John Dehlin [02:27:35] Right.

Radio Free Mormon [02:27:36] So we need to take care of things now and not take those temptations into the next life. Right?

John Dehlin [02:27:42] Absolutely.

Radio Free Mormon [02:27:43] Okay. At some point when I was reading this, I realized that that's not what it's saying at all. It's what it's always quoted as saying, but that's not what it's saying at all. In fact, the Book of Mormon never talks about the spirit of a person having a separating sit. Well, does it? No, I think it does, but it doesn't talk about this idea of our spirits. When it's talking about that same spirit which possesses your bodies. It's not talking about our spirit. It's not talking about our personal spirit. And if you read it in context, and I encourage everybody to do, to. To do so, it will become immediately obvious to you that it's talking about one of two spirits. One is the spirit of God and one is the spirit of the devil.

John Dehlin [02:28:28] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:28:29] And what is saying possession? It's saying not our personal spirit, but at any given point in our life, we're going to be possessed by one of those two spirits or the other. We're either going to be possessed by the spirit of God or the spirit of the devil. And the critical thing is which one of those two spirits is possessing your body at the time you die? Because whichever one of those two spirits is possessing your body at the time you die is the spirit that's going to have power to possess your body in that eternal world.

John Dehlin [02:28:57] Yeah, it's this war of spiritual influence and temptation.

Radio Free Mormon [02:29:02] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:29:03] Spiritual work. Angels.

Gerardo Sumano [02:29:05] This reminds me a little bit of the Lori and Chat Day Bell's worldview on, on people having evil spirits possessing them. And that's why. Or that's how they justified doing what they did.

John Dehlin [02:29:22] Because there were zombies, because they're. They had lost their own spirits and the bodies had become possessed by. By evil spirits. Right?

Gerardo Sumano [02:29:30] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:29:30] Yeah. Yes. So once I realized that that was part of my, my process as I'm trying to read the Book of Mormon, trying to understand what the authors are actually saying and trying to set aside my preconceptions, which I know what Mormon doctrine is. Right. And trying to put that upon the, the text itself, get rid of it, try and understand what they're saying. And this bubbles up. Right. In fact, this bubbles up to the point where if you did not have Mormon doctrine as part of your worldview and if you were just going and reading the Book of Mormon as a non member to try and understand what it says, it would be so obvious to you, or at least to me, that what it was saying was not what the Mormon say it says, it's what the Book of Mormon says it says. Which is the interpretation I just gave. Right. And honestly, if you go back and read that, you'll see it's clear beyond dispute that it's talking about the one thing and not about the other. It's not even close. The only reason we think it's talking about the one thing and not the other is because that's what we've been told over and over again it's talking about. So that was one of my proof texts. Okay. And so when I opened up the doctrinal, the Book of Mormon doctrinal commentary, I didn't get it. I didn't read through it, but I did open the Alma 34. 34. And I said, I wonder what they're going to say about this. It's like, yeah, a proof text. And of course, what they do is they quote authoritative statements saying that it means your personal spirit. The same old, same old. Right. They missed it. And that was one of the things I looked at to see are they going to be really interacting with the text or just trying to import Mormonism into their commentary. And they failed that test from my point of view. Now I've got to also tell you the story on myself. It has to do with John Twentis.

John Dehlin [02:31:23] Yeah. Who? Who's that? Tell us who that is.

Radio Free Mormon [02:31:25] John Twentis, a very, very smart guy, scholar, very influential in Mormon apologetics with FARMS for a long time, wrote a number of books, etc, papers, presentations. Very nice guy. I didn't know him from Adam. All I know is that at this time I've made this discovery and I'm a 34. 34. I've got no place to publish this. This is before the Internet. I can't just put it up. Right. I can't talk about it in a podcast, but I understand it and it's important to me and I'm reading some kind of publication. It might have been Insights, which was a newsletter from farms. I can't remember what it was, but I'm reading it and John Twentnes was the author. And for the very first time, I see somebody in writing explicating Alma. 34. 34. The way it actually means, the way it's actually written. And he came to the same conclusion that I did. Now, this is where it gets embarrassing because you might think, oh my gosh, this is so validating. Right? Somebody else sees this in it the way I see it. But no, I am in my early 30s. It's half a lifetime ago. Okay? So there's some distance here. I get jealous, I get upset.

John Dehlin [02:32:46] Huh.

Radio Free Mormon [02:32:48] Because this should have been me writing this, right?

John Dehlin [02:32:50] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:32:51] This should have been me getting the attention, the publicity. I could have been a contender,

John Dehlin [02:33:01] you know, Brando.

Radio Free Mormon [02:33:02] Yeah, it was you, Charlie. It was you all along on the water. Good. Very good. Yeah, very good. And yeah, I was embarrassed. I know I am embarrassed by the fact that I was jealous of it. But the deal is, I mean, John Twettiness is super smart. He's got all these ideas. I've only got a couple of ideas, so I'm very territorial about them. Right. I've grown up a little bit since then. And now, you know, people say, oh, do you mind if I use them? That idea? I said, fine, you know, go ahead, because I've got more of them. Now, and I realize that there's a lot more to be gained by sharing than by, like, you know, hoarding and saying, oh, this is my idea, and you don't get to use it. I mean, that doesn't even make any sense. Right? It's an idea. And I. Obviously, I couldn't say that he had plagiarized it from me because I never published it anywhere. Okay. This is where it gets really bad. I write John Twentis. I love it, and I write him a letter and say, hey, just so you know, I came up with this idea myself already. Okay. Oh, gosh. I just want you to know that this is, like, my idea, and you're kind of stealing it. Or at least you're late to the party.

John Dehlin [02:34:15] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:34:17] Oh, gosh. Believe it or not, I don't tell this story a lot. So you're embarrassed? Oh, gosh, am I turning red? So I. I send it off to him. Yeah. I mailed it, and I get this letter back from him, probably about in the same spirit as the one I wrote, just letting me know that he's been teaching this idea for, you know, since I was in diapers. And. But I realized that was a dumb thing. But it did lead into an actual sort of relationship that I had with John Twentis, which lasted for a number of years. And, you know, I'd share ideas with him, and he would, you know, critique them. He was very, very kind, very giving of his time, very helpful. So I want to give him the recognition for that and especially for his graciousness in allowing the relationship to develop to that point when it got off to such a bumpy start because of me. Okay, so that's me and John Twetnes. So we talked about the Lewis Midgley interview. Okay, let me go here, because we've only got a little bit over an hour. We're gonna go four hours. I'm sorry. You okay, John? You okay?

John Dehlin [02:35:28] I'm good. This is important to get on the record, because as you become more and more legendary, we need your story of record written down and shared. So.

Into the 2000s: A New Decade of Questions

Radio Free Mormon [02:35:39] All right, well, I'm gonna start going. So now we're into the 2000s, right? And that's what I mean. From 2000 to 2010, we're into that decade.

John Dehlin [02:35:48] This is where I'm starting to pay attention.

Radio Free Mormon [02:35:51] Why?

John Dehlin [02:35:52] Well, no, no, no. What I mean is it 2000. 2001 was my intellectual awakening in Mormonism. So. Okay, so you're now talking in the chronology at a point where I'm starting to Read Simon Southerton, Michael quinn, Graham Palmer. 2000, 2001-2004 is when I start having my awakening. That's all I'm saying. I read Von Brody around that time myself.

Radio Free Mormon [02:36:19] So I agree.

John Dehlin [02:36:20] I'm just putting. I'm just kind of trying to. I always like to track my story within whatever narrative I'm hearing because it helps me understand the context a little bit better.

Bart Ehrman and New Testament Scholarship

Radio Free Mormon [02:36:33] All right, well, it's the 2000s now, and I am starting to try and work out a little bit more on a treadmill. Right. And the problem is, is that walking on treadmill is not a lot of fun. I want something to have on the tv. By the way, there is no TV in the house, okay? There's no cable, there's no dish. But we do have a VCR player. So I discovered this thing called the Learning Company. And the Learning Company made VHS tapes. It's still the early 2000s, and I'm behind the technology curve. So VHS tapes of professors in United States universities who are very popular professors teaching the classes that they are famous for teaching, and they record them, put them on tape, and then they sell them. Right. So what I do is I figure, well, this would be a good time for me to start learning a little bit more about things and about the scriptures. And I get a series by Professor Bart Ehrman.

John Dehlin [02:37:32] Oops.

Radio Free Mormon [02:37:34] About the New Testament, who we've interviewed

John Dehlin [02:37:37] on Mormon Stories podcast, actually.

Radio Free Mormon [02:37:39] Yeah, I've never actually talked to him, but he was very instrumental in my life as well. And the main thing is this is that I'm sitting there walking, and he's got like 30 minute classes, maybe 50 for some. But anyway, I'm breaking him up. I don't walk for 50 minutes. That'd be too much for me. So I'm. I'm sitting there and watching him stand there and teach to me. And he's teaching his introductory course on the New Testament or about other books, Right? And I am absolutely floored because I'm sitting here listening or walking here listening to Bart Ehrman talk about the scriptures, the New Testament that I have read and that I know backward and forward by this point and have tons of it memorized. Okay. And yet he is teaching me things about the New Testament I have never, ever heard before. And it was like waves of knowledge washing over me with every single lecture. And I'm thinking, how could I have studied this for so long and so hard? I've never heard of any of this. Yeah, it was exhilarating. It was incredible. It was wonderful. But at the same time, I'm starting to realize that my reading exclusively LDS material about the scriptures, I thought it was giving me all the answers, but it was actually an extremely narrow perspective.

John Dehlin [02:39:13] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:39:14] And completely avoiding all this other stuff and all this other stuff that Bart Ehrman's talking about. It's all news to me. But this is all very basic 101 stuff in college for a New Testament course. This is stuff that the. The freshman would be learning.

John Dehlin [02:39:33] Right.

Radio Free Mormon [02:39:34] So this was just an absolutely amazing experience. And it started me studying. I. I started getting other courses by Bart Ehrman, by other teachers through the Learning Company, reading these books. It was right around this time that the Gospel of Judas was finally published. And that was absolutely fascinating. So I'm learning about, you know, Gnosticism. I'm learning about all these different early forms of Christianity. Oh, by the way, I'm getting behind on my books. I apologize. So here's a couple of the books, ah. That I got from there was. Oh, Lost Scriptures by Bart Ehrman.

John Dehlin [02:40:14] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:40:15] There's Lost Christianities.

John Dehlin [02:40:19] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:40:19] By Bart Ehrman and a whole bunch of other books by him, which I don't have access to right now.

John Dehlin [02:40:24] I'll just. I'll just quickly. I just shared the link to my Bart Ehrman interview, though. When I did, I did. He gave me like one hour with him. So we covered the books. Misquoting Jesus, God's problem, Jesus Interrupted, Forged, and how Jesus became God. And for those who just don't know anything about Bart Ehrman, think of him as the guy who helped us understand that Matthew probably didn't write Matthew, Mark probably didn't write Mark, Luke probably didn't write Luke, and John didn't probably write John. More importantly, the manuscripts that we have for all those quote Gospels were produced probably, you know, two to three generations after those, you know, apostles of Jesus would have even lived. And they contradict each other in really meaningful ways. And as Mormon, we were raised to sort of say, well, if Matthew and Mark don't say something different, it must all be complementary. It must mean that somehow there's lots of knowledge and we just have to synthesize it. But what Barth helps us understand is that the story, if you put the manuscripts chronologically, the story actually grows and changes over time in ways that are mutually, you know, contradictory and mutually exclusive in our understanding of them, such that we have to kind of conclude that just like Joseph Smith's first vision, the story of Jesus probably grew over time from him being just kind of a wise guy. To ultimately becoming the Son of God. And it basically just leaves you realizing that the Bible has as many significant problems, if not more, than the Book of Mormon does. Am I right? Rfm?

Radio Free Mormon [02:42:13] Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [02:42:14] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:42:15] Just one example of that that I learned early on, which I had no idea, even though it was right there on the face, the. Of. Of things that. That in the synoptic gospels, Right. Matthew, Mark and Luke, which is one set. And then you got John, which is very different. In the synoptic Gospels, Jesus teaches by parables. And in fact, one of them says that he never taught by any other means than parables. Okay. Then you go to John. What is the one thing that Jesus never uses in John?

John Dehlin [02:42:41] I'm going to say parables.

Radio Free Mormon [02:42:43] You'd be right. I set it up effectively. Yeah. There's no parables in John. There's just declarative. I am statement havens. Right. So all these things are just fascinating to me. And I'm learning so much. And my God, this is. This is my. My love. Right. The scriptures, the gospel. And now I'm just learning all this stuff. And a lot of it is consonant with Mormonism. Right. Like all the changes that crept into the scriptures over time. But then there's other things he's talking about that are not so consonant with Mormonism and that can be applied in less than helpful ways or faith promoting ways. Less than faith promoting ways of Mormonism.

John Dehlin [02:43:18] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:43:18] And I'm sort of hearing that, but I'm trying to focus over here. Once again, this is a work in progress occurring on different levels. So this leads me into reading so much stuff, whether it's Bart Ehrman or reading Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, which I got into at the time. Here's a representative book of that. Okay. There's others around.

John Dehlin [02:43:39] The Lost books of the Bible. Is that what it says?

Radio Free Mormon [02:43:42] Yeah, the lost books of the Bible.

John Dehlin [02:43:44] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:43:44] So this is just a bunch of old texts that didn't make it into the Bible, you know, and so I'm reading these. I'm reading all sorts of other things. I'm reading the. The Apostolic Fathers, which I discover and fall in love with, and reading books about the Apostolic Fathers. I'm reading New Testament Apocrypha. I'm reading all of these ancient manuscripts. Okay. Though obviously in modern form, in translated form. But the whole goal as I'm doing it, unfortunately, is I'm trying to prove Mormonism true.

John Dehlin [02:44:23] Right.

Radio Free Mormon [02:44:23] I'm still doing the Hugh Nibley thing.

John Dehlin [02:44:25] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:44:26] It's in the middle of the 2000s. So I'm around 45 years old in that area. I'm still doing it. So like I say, it doesn't go here, then stop and then start again. That's not my life. It's this stuff sort of overlapping and going on at the same time. But I'm spending all this time marking up these books trying to prove Mormonism true. And then I have this earth shaking incident happen. And what it is is this. Got the office here, there's a river just out back. And there was a revetment up next. Excuse me, There was a revetment on the river. And every Friday afternoon I and two other lawyer friends would meet there and they would bring cigars and I'd bring a Diet Coke. And we just sit there and talk about the happenings of the week and chit and chat. It was really, really nice. Glenn. Glenn Hoff was one of these two lawyers and he had had some contact with Mormonism. I think he took the missionary discussions at some point in his life, though I don't think it took. And he actually just passed away a couple of months ago and I spoke at his funeral. So if I get for Klempt, you'll understand why. But because of his understanding and interest in Mormonism, I'm telling him about all these things that I'm finding when we're on the revetment, right? And I remember him chuckling and I said, what is it? And he says, well, I don't mean to be rude. I said, what? He says, well, I just have this mental image of you sitting in a room surrounded by stacks of ancient documents that you are pouring over in order to try and find Mormon words.

John Dehlin [02:46:19] Yeah, yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:46:20] And I laughed, of course, because it was very funny. But I went, I think he's right. For whatever reason, the way he said it or the place I was at, I was able to take that in and realize that that was a valid criticism. And then I started realizing, well, what I'm doing here is I'm taking all these texts that were written and preserved, and I am, you know, the best possible ratio is 5% supports Mormonism when it's probably more like 3 or 2% I can use to support Mormonism. That's all I'm interested in finding. Yeah, that's what I'm doing. And that's what I'm finding that supports Mormonism. And I think I'm doing a really, really good job of it. Yeah, but really, what am I doing except trying to find Mormon words? I love the way he put that, that's great.

John Dehlin [02:47:14] You're kind of becoming aware of your confirmation bias, right?

Radio Free Mormon [02:47:18] Yes. And I'm realizing that I am discounting everything else except for what it is that I want to, to use that will support Mormonism.

John Dehlin [02:47:26] It's also called motivated reasoning. And it's scary when you realize you're. You're engaged in it. Right. It's weird, it's disorienting.

Radio Free Mormon [02:47:34] Yeah. I wasn't valuing anything in those texts. Anything except what I could use.

John Dehlin [02:47:40] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:47:40] I was even ignoring things that not only had nothing to do with Mormonism, but that might even contradict Mormonism.

John Dehlin [02:47:48] And I wonder if there are any apologists listening now. And I would just ask them whether they've ever wondered whether they're doing this as well. And if there are any apologists that are listening, I would ask you to write in. I'd be curious to hear your own self reflections in this regard.

Radio Free Mormon [02:48:04] Another thing I realized was that there are all these different views that are presented. I mean, it's kind of like the Bible. If you actually look at the Bible, pretty much every different view about every different thing related to theology is represented in the Bible to the point where people have different views and they even contradict each other.

John Dehlin [02:48:23] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:48:23] The same thing goes with these extra biblical manuscripts, maybe even more so, but I'm not looking at that. But I'm starting to realize that for every gospel principle or theological principle, you could find something in any of these manuscripts that would support it no matter what your position is.

John Dehlin [02:48:46] Right.

Radio Free Mormon [02:48:46] Because they have different positions themselves. And a lot of this isn't just me reading it now. It's these people arguing amongst themselves back then with different camps, different religious beliefs. Right. Just like today.

John Dehlin [02:49:01] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:49:01] And putting it in scripture.

John Dehlin [02:49:03] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:49:04] And then it occurred to me, you know something? It's not that remarkable that I can take 3, 2% of what's written in these ancient texts and support Mormonism with it when I realize that it wouldn't make any difference what position I was trying to prove true today.

John Dehlin [02:49:23] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:49:24] I could do the same thing and find different places in the same texts that would support my beliefs.

John Dehlin [02:49:31] Totally. Yeah. Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:49:35] So that was really kind of mind blowing for me.

John Dehlin [02:49:38] Yeah. I remember having that awakening. You could justify murder in the scriptures, you could justify slavery, you could justify polygamy, you could almost justify any behavior with the scriptures. You can find some stories, some obscure text in Isaiah that justifies pretty much any behavior you want. Any theology, any doctrine, anything you can pretty much use. And that's the beauty of Scripture, they're so vague, they're so nebulous, they're so esoteric and they're so self contradictory that they pretty much can justify anything. I'm probably speaking extreme, but that's a thought that I had at one point or another.

Radio Free Mormon [02:50:27] Oh yeah. Oh, go ahead.

Gerardo Sumano [02:50:28] Something interesting is that RFM is mentioning how the same scriptures of this, the same arguments could be used sometimes in, in both to support one religion or one denomination and, and, and then the

Radio Free Mormon [02:50:41] same time

Gerardo Sumano [02:50:44] you use it to support another one. It was interesting. I was listening to RFM's interview of Carrie Shirts where Carrie was talking about, I think it was a paper about how someone was writing a paper about how the Eve, the scripture on the Bible about the stick of Judah and the stick of Joseph was not really talking about the Book of Mormon like Mormonism tries to claim. And, and this was a faithful Mormon who was writing a paper about this and that. That was interesting to me. And then I did some research about it and yeah, I found out that yeah, it's true. Like it's definitely not talking about the Book of Mormon, of course. And then I, I, there's this guy on Tick Tock who works for the church in church headquarters and he has a Tick Tock channel where he talks about biblical biblical scholarship. I think he is, he's in the department of a scripture translation for, for

Radio Free Mormon [02:51:56] the church, for the Mormon Church.

Gerardo Sumano [02:51:58] And he was doing a live video on Tick Tock and I asked him the question about that scripture on the Bible and if he was really talking about the Book of Mormon when he talks about the stick of Judah. And his response was, well, it depends on who you ask. Because if you ask Mormon, they're gonna say that, yeah, it's talking about this, about the, is predicting the Book of Mormon and but then there's the other inter, the Christian interpretation which doesn't see it that way. And it, and it's talking about something. And the scholar and the biblical scholars would say that this is talking about something completely different. So there's just two ways of seeing it. And I just thought it was interesting his response of saying, well, neither is correct or wrong or correct. Like you can see it both ways. It's just interesting.

John Dehlin [02:52:57] Right?

Radio Free Mormon [02:53:00] And that actually was John Twitness that Carrie Schurz was talking about.

Gerardo Sumano [02:53:03] No.

Radio Free Mormon [02:53:04] Yeah, yeah. So great, great comments. I'm gonna step it up here a bit. I was going to talk a little bit about my experience teaching Sunday School from 2006 to 2010 where I started incorporating my researches into the gospel doctrine, the adult Sunday school lessons.

Teaching Sunday School and Crossing Boundaries

John Dehlin [02:53:25] That's always the beginning of the end. When you start bringing your worldly learning into the, the Sunday school room, you're gonna get in trouble. It's. It's the beginning of the end. It happened with me.

Radio Free Mormon [02:53:36] I got this Oxford Bible commentary.

John Dehlin [02:53:39] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:53:40] And reading along, find me a Mormon

John Dehlin [02:53:44] Apostles name anywhere in that book, you're not going to find it. So it's a problem.

Radio Free Mormon [02:53:48] Okay. And else in my Bible I got this one.

John Dehlin [02:53:51] Yeah. Now you're really straying into the philosophies of men.

Radio Free Mormon [02:53:55] And this is actually based upon research that I'm doing as I'm reading stuff. And this is very well regarded. The nrsv, the New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha by the way, and all sorts of wonderful notes. And I went through this and there's a few people who didn't like my class. One in particular who didn't like it because I'm not teaching from the manual. Right. So it was a. Basically either people hated my class or they absolutely adored it. It was the best Sunday school class they'd ever been to. And they like coming out of a desert and finding water after years in the desert. Of course they were also the people who were just bored to be there, but they're there because they're supposed to be there. But this one person who really, really complained a lot, she beat a path to the bishop's office after every class, I think to complain about me. And fortunately there were other people in leadership who really liked my class, who kept me from being released sooner than I was. Because I was four years, I was able to go through the whole standard work. So that was good. So we've got this. Trying to find one other thing here. Oh yeah, yeah. And that's this, that I would take my notes and instead of putting them on a piece of paper and reading from them, I started taking my notes and just writing them in the pages in the margins of the teacher's manual so that when I went to class I would stand. This is in the, the chapel stand up in front of everybody. Well, here's my teacher's manual. And I hold my teacher's manual up so that they would think I'm teaching from the manual. Right, right. But actually I'm looking at my notes in the margin.

John Dehlin [02:55:40] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:55:41] So that extended my glide for a while being the teacher there. Anyway, had lots of fun, lots of wonderful experiences. But this Bible really bothered. Oh, who was it? It was the high priest, group leader. And why Is it rarely do people come up to you and talk to you. They want to, you know, go to your leader behind your back and complain.

John Dehlin [02:56:02] That's the way it works. It's the passive aggressive sort of culture of Mormonism. Right?

Radio Free Mormon [02:56:07] Yeah. And I would hear about it from my moles. Inside leadership. Right? Yeah. And one thing that really, really bothered him was that I would teach from this red Bible.

John Dehlin [02:56:15] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [02:56:17] Because it's not the King James version. Right.

John Dehlin [02:56:21] Yeah. I realized rfm that I was. You know, people did not come to church to learn. They came to church. Mormon came to church to have their beliefs reaffirmed and to reaffirm their beliefs. And as soon as you're introducing new learning and new knowledge, it's disruptive, it's disorienting, and it's unsettling because people don't go to church to learn. They don't go to church to be questioned. They go to church to be comforted and reassured that they're on the right path. And it is a slippery slope. It is a sure sign of apostasy when you start introducing the philosophies of men and women, mingling them with scripture and sharing unapproved sources in elders, quorum or high priest group or Sunday school. It really is the beginning of the end. And then people. It happened to me. And that's when people start telling on you. And that's when you start feeling like maybe this church isn't for me, maybe it's not going to be edifying. Or you start realizing the only way to make it interesting is to bring in outside learning. But then when you do that, you disturb everybody and you realize, do I want to just keep disturbing people's Sunday experiences? And how long can you stay in that role of being the gadfly? Right.

Radio Free Mormon [02:57:42] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:57:42] Feeling bad?

Radio Free Mormon [02:57:43] No, it's a trade off. It's definitely a trade off. There are people, like I said, who complained about it, who didn't like it. But then there's these other people who would actually come up to me and tell me, that is the best Sunday school class I've ever been in my entire life. And these are people in their 40s and 50s, right?

John Dehlin [02:57:57] Yep.

Radio Free Mormon [02:57:57] Maybe visiting somebody in the ward. And so I. I realized it was a polarizing experience.

John Dehlin [02:58:04] Yeah. I will say a third. A third were annoyed, a third were intrigued, and a third were asleep. And that was always. That was always my experience.

Radio Free Mormon [02:58:14] Exactly. And I thought that was probably better than 100% of the people being asleep, which is the normal experience.

Gerardo Sumano [02:58:21] But.

Radio Free Mormon [02:58:22] Yeah. So we're doing all this, having a great time, at least I felt like I was. Oh, my gosh. I'm gonna just continue to hurry up a little bit. So let me go. Let me just skip two Literature.

John Dehlin [02:58:36] I don't want you to skip the Amazing Randy, but you can if you want to.

Radio Free Mormon [02:58:41] Oh, I will. I'm gonna skip that. That's a different story. Doesn't really have anything to do with it. It's just gonna. All right, Okay. I love Randy. So literature. So now we get to literature. Right. So I have now spent the. The 2000s reading so much of biblical studies, Old Testament studies, New Testament studies. I've actually gotten kind of burned out on that. Not that I learned everything there was to know, but I think I had a basic freshman's college freshman's understanding of the classes that would be taught on an introductory level. Oh, that was another. Another book that I got, which was the New Testament A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings by Bart Ehrman, which he wrote and used to teach. And so I got that. Oh, my gosh, fantastic stuff. So anyway, going on. So now it's 2009 and I'm kind of done with the. The scriptures, at least for now. And I go, what on earth? And I just think, you know, I Finally. I'm 49 years old, my time is limited.

Reading Widely: Shakespeare, Stoicism, and Literature

John Dehlin [02:59:44] Midlife crisis.

Radio Free Mormon [02:59:47] Yes. So I got. Went out and got a bright red copy of the complete works of William Shakespeare. No, seriously, I decided I need to read Shakespeare. Why? Because he's like it, right? He's it. And I started shifting out of the Bible to literature, to other literature, to world literature. And I thought, well, Shakespeare, I gotta go there. And I'm intimidated as heck by it. I had a few experiences with Shakespeare in my life. I was in high school and I was in Hamlet. I played Claudius, you know, the most two dimensional cardboard version of Claudius that has ever trod the stage. I'm sure. But it sort of gave me an appreciation a little bit for Shakespeare. Certainly hard to memorize and very hard to understand in many regards. But there are some places that were not hard to understand. In fact, the way it was worded and the way it was phrased was so overwhelmingly powerful as to be amazing. So I went back to Shakespeare, said, I got to read this. And I proceed to take. I started in May of 2009 with the Tempest, which I got in the paperback version. And I read through that. I did my best. And then I started getting other books about Shakespeare. The most important thing was a guide, a Handbook about plays of Shakespeare. There's about 35, 36 of them, so I can't remember the exact number. I'm not sure scholars are exactly sure about that. There's basically a corpus or a canon of Shakespeare plays, and it took me over two years to work my way through them where I'm like, focusing on it. I'm sure I'm doing other things as well, but this was not an easy process for me. So I use a lot of handbooks, a lot of helps a lot to help me understand what was going on. And I have to admit that the most important part of the handbook that I read before I read any play had the synopsis of the play in it. Because for me to understand what Shakespeare was saying, I had to understand first what the play was going to be about. In other words, I had to understand what the play was about before I could read the play and understand what it was about.

John Dehlin [03:02:02] Right. Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:02:04] So there's a few things in there that I learned. A lot of things I learned. But the main thing that I learned was that there is literature in the world that is so much more impactful to me, so much more inspired, if I may use that word. To me, even more so than the Book of Mormon. Now, that may sound obvious to many people comparing Shakespeare with the Book of Mormon, but I held the belief of Mormonism that this is the most correct book. And I still have a lot of respect, appreciation for the Book of Mormon. But like, when I'm in the advanced ballet class, right, and the, the, the traveling company comes through and all of a sudden, oh, my gosh, I had no idea, right. That people could dance like this. I thought I was at the top echelon, and I find out, no, I'm pretty far down the run ladder compared to these people. Well, that's like my feelings with the Book of Mormon and Shakespeare. Does that make sense?

John Dehlin [03:03:08] Yeah, totally.

Radio Free Mormon [03:03:10] Okay. It doesn't mean the Book of Mormon is crap, but it means that sixth grade versus college. That's all. And so I'm reading Shakespeare. I could tell you a whole bunch of stories about it, but I won't. I will tell you that there's a number of things in Shakespeare that are so important to me because they deal with the human experience.

John Dehlin [03:03:36] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:03:37] And they talk about them in ways, it's always incredible with literature, poetry, whatever it is, to hear somebody articulate something that maybe you sensed or thought or felt. But now here it is, and all of a sudden it's like you're rediscovering it or discovering it for the first time.

John Dehlin [03:03:54] Sure.

Radio Free Mormon [03:03:54] And of course, he would also say things that I had never even considered at all. And I'm just blown away by the magnificence that is Shakespeare. There's a reason that he is generally considered to be at the pinnacle of Western English literature, and that's because that's where he is and there's nobody even close to him.

John Dehlin [03:04:13] Yeah. He deals with the human experience and core key themes. Absolutely.

Radio Free Mormon [03:04:18] Yes. I could say many, many things about it. Won't. Okay, I'll do another thing all about Shakespeare at some point, and that'll be hours long.

Gerardo Sumano [03:04:26] Wrong.

Radio Free Mormon [03:04:26] Okay, but even Hugh Nibley would quote from Shakespeare. Right. He. There's a couple lines from Hamlet that he would quote all the time. And one of them that was really good, which is. It's the chamber scene in Gertrude's chambers where Hamlet comes to confront her about whether she's in on killing his dad and marrying his uncle. And regardless if you know the plot, the ghost shows up and talks to Hamlet. And Hamlet's the only one can who can see it. The queen can't. His mom can't see the ghost. We know the ghost is actually there. We know it's not a figment of Hamlet's imagination because in the first act of the play, other people see it. In fact, they see it first and they bring it to Hamlet's attention. So we know that the ghost is real, but the queen can't see it. And she's looking right at him. Right. And what she says is beautiful. What she says is. And I believe this is correct. She says to Hamlet, he says, can't you see him? She says, I see nothing, yet. All there is I see. What a great quote.

John Dehlin [03:05:31] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:05:33] I see nothing, yet. All there is I see. I see everything there is to see, but I don't see it, even though it's right in front of her face. Okay. So anyway, there's a number of examples won't go on to that I've got to actually skip over a few of these things. Okay. So anyway, I get through with them. I'm scrolling down a lot in the outline, just so you know, John. So I get done now with Shakespeare, and it honestly takes me from May of 2009 to August of 2012

John Dehlin [03:06:02] over

Radio Free Mormon [03:06:03] two years to work my way through the plays of Shakespeare. And then I feel like I sort of have a pretty good grasp on it. And I sit down, I read through them again, just to try and read them again while I still have all this study that I've done in my mind. And as you go on, you. You're able to understand it better without all the helps, right? So you sort of become conversant in what is almost a foreign language, even though it's really just English in many respects. To me, it was kind of a foreign language. So now I'm done with that. And now I go, now what do I do? Well, I guess I should start reading the books of great world literature that I've avoided reading my entire life. And I feel a little bit maybe enabled or emboldened to do this, having gone through Shakespeare. So I start reading these books, and I go to Barnes and Noble, get all their paperback versions of different classics. They have their own section, right? Moby Dick. I start reading Greek philosophers, believe it or not. Philosophers like Epictetus.

John Dehlin [03:07:10] Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Radio Free Mormon [03:07:12] Who is a wonderful Stoic philosopher. And Marcus Aurelius.

John Dehlin [03:07:16] I think it was a Roman Stoicism. Another slippery slope.

Radio Free Mormon [03:07:20] Why is that a slippery slope?

John Dehlin [03:07:22] Well, it's actually. Just. Actually, what I found is that a lot of people, when they lose, when they find Mormonism no longer spiritually gratifying, think Stoicism is a. Is a life philosophy along with secular Buddhism, that. That becomes a very viable replacement for vapid, shallow, you know, expired Mormon theology and spirituality. That's what I found.

Radio Free Mormon [03:07:51] Yeah. Well, I want to tell you a little bit because it was very

John Dehlin [03:07:57] significant

Radio Free Mormon [03:07:57] to me because I'm reading some of these quotes from Epictetus, and honestly, this isn't a book full of Epictetus. I have to tell you, I'm really not that smart. And I mean that seriously, because I'm reading sort of a collection. It's a collection of quotes from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and, I think, Plato, all within the pages of one book, right? So it's like the Reader's Digest version of all three. And. But I'm reading some of the things that. That he wrote. I'm going, oh, my gosh, this is so profound to me. And I can't help but comparing it with what I hear in General Conference. Right? Which is not just boring, it's also not stimulating. It's not impactful, it's not profound. It's insufficient. I haven't used that word enough. I use it at the beginning. I should have been using it with every one of these sections. Right. Because all along the way, what I'm discovering is that Mormonism is insufficient on all of these different grounds. Just like sixth grade is insufficient after you're no longer 12 years old and you've gone on and you want to learn more. So I don't have that book with me right now. But what I did start doing was taking. I got a book that's blank. It's like a letter book, inside joke. And I started writing down different quotes from different books that I would read. Lots of Shakespeare at the beginning. And I've sort of fallen away from doing it as much as I should. But I wanted to be able to have a place where I could have things that were impactful to me from different books at a place where they were in one location. I could look them up without having to try and find the book again. So let me see here. That one's way too long. That was for Moby Dick. We're not going to talk about that. What we are going to talk about is this one from Epictetus. I'm a bridging an eight hour presentation down to four hours, just so you know. Where's Epictetus? Excuse me. I've actually got to put these on. I apologize. I hate having to put these on every time I have to put these on so I can read. Okay.

John Dehlin [03:10:16] Welcome to middle age rfm.

Radio Free Mormon [03:10:18] Well, thank you.

John Dehlin [03:10:21] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:10:22] You know something? I guess we'll have to forget about Epictetus because I don't know that I had it marked. There's so many things in here. Obviously, I read Thoreau, Walden and lots of things from him in here. Walton is such a boring book, but it's peppered with so many gems. And by that I mean he's talking about, you know, spinning the winter out of pond. Right. And a lot of things have to do with growing things and all this other stuff. But the insights he has are amazing. This is one thing that struck me. No doubt another. No doubt another may also think for me. So he's talking about letting other people do your thinking for you. He says, no doubt another may also think for me. But it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself. You can see why that was impactful to me.

John Dehlin [03:11:21] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:11:22] And, oh, there's so many things in here. I wish I could find that Epictetus quote. But sometimes when you take a book and you're going to assemble all the quotes in it, then that book itself becomes a place where quotes can be difficult to find. It kind of ends up defeating the purpose it was meant to correct. And I saw that in here the other day. It was just really, really nice. But we'll just. We'll just figure that we'll leave it with stoicism being impactful to me on a number of fronts. But. And also, as I'm doing this and as I'm reading, not only am I being overwhelmed by the power of the literature that I'm. I'm reading and experiencing, but it's also bringing up thoughts to me. And I write some of my thoughts down here in this book. And let me tell you, here's a. Here's a few of the quotes that I wrote down here in this book, once again. And I put my dates next to it. This is from February 16, 2014. When we put God in a box, he turns around and puts us in a box. Now, I'm not exactly sure what that meant, actually. I think I do know it might be too long to discuss, but when we try and define God. Okay. To the point where we know exactly what he is, like Section130, I think of the Doctrine and Covenants. Right.

Gerardo Sumano [03:12:48] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:12:49] What we do by that process is we end up putting ourselves in the box that we're creating for God.

Gerardo Sumano [03:12:55] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:12:55] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:12:56] Okay. So that's what I meant. When we put God in a box, he turns around and puts us in a box the same day. Oh, I wrote this. I think I wrote a lot of these when I was sitting in church.

John Dehlin [03:13:06] When you were what?

Radio Free Mormon [03:13:07] Sitting in church?

John Dehlin [03:13:08] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:13:10] Mormonism has defined hell as a lack of progression, then turned around and created a church that matches the definition.

Gerardo Sumano [03:13:19] Oh, wow.

Radio Free Mormon [03:13:21] That must have been a very boring day in church. Oh, gosh. Let me read this. This is from March 2, 2014. So this is from a couple weeks later. There's just two others. These are me where I was thinking about Jesus, and the forgiveness of sins is just a thought that came to me. Jesus forgave sins before his death. His death was not necessary to forgive sins during his lifetime. If Jesus forgave sins before his death, can he forgive us our sins apart from his death? Anyway, that was just a thought that occurred into my mind. But this next one, this is really, really something that'll show you where I was on March 2, 2014, as I'm finding words to express how it is I'm feeling. The church is a boy's suit too tight for me now that I am growing up.

John Dehlin [03:14:21] Yeah,

Radio Free Mormon [03:14:23] the church is a boy's suit too tight for me now that I am growing up. And so those express how it was I was feeling. Got all these other quotes in here. Anyway. Anyway, that's just an idea of that.

Gerardo Sumano [03:14:36] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:14:37] Okay. So in Reading. Oh my Gosh, was it 15 to 20 books a year? It's amazing how much you can read when really there's not a lot of home life going on. But we don't have to get into that. I was sort of a monastic during those 20 odd years, so I had lots of time to read. Reading Faust, Paradise Lost, O Pioneers by Willa Cather, Leaves of Grass by my favorite prophet, Walt Whitman, who came to be my favorite prophet. Walden throws another great prophet, Charles Dickens. I just want to say one thing about Charles Dickens is that I'm sitting here, I'm reading. I. I've got really no direction as to what it is I'm supposed to read, except sort of this understanding that there are certain classics that you're supposed to read, and obviously Charles Dickens, right? Well, I've never really read Charles Dickens in my life. I tried to read the first part of something in eighth grade and got horribly bored with it. Never read it. But I thought, okay, I've got to read something by Charles Dickens. Well, he's written all these books. Okay, so what should I read? Well, I kind of know the. The plot of A Tale of Two Cities, and that sounds kind of interesting. So I went and I read A Tale of Two Cities a few years back. And I remember, as I'm reading this, I'm going to get almost tearful here, that I was so overwhelmed by Charles Dickens and his writing and this story that I remember thinking, oh, my God, I can't believe I almost lived my entire life without ever reading Dickens. That's how fantastic it is.

John Dehlin [03:16:25] Wow. Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:16:27] And then I find out, you know, because these things, they're Barnes and Nobles productions, they have intros by people who really know what they're talking about. And there was a story about Mark Twain who apparently said that he made it a practice to read A Tale of Two Cities every couple of years because he thought it was so incredible.

John Dehlin [03:16:48] That's a good endorsement.

Radio Free Mormon [03:16:49] Yeah, it's better than chloroform in print. Right. So anyway, so this is. And I'm still doing this. I'm still doing this, though perhaps not as much because I'm not quite in the monastic cell that I used to be. I got this podcast going on as well, so I'm not able to devote as much time to it. But, man, I have a lot of these under my belt and I love reading these types of books. One that I recently read this year was this by John Steinbeck. Travels with Charlie in Search of America. Yeah, Fantastic book. Not one of his better known books, but absolutely fantastic. And I remember just sitting down reading this and just feeling so good reading it. I wouldn't say it was the spirit, but definitely wonderful, wonderful stuff in here. And at some point I'll talk about a few things in there, but who am I kidding? I'm never going to get around saying all the things that I have to say.

John Dehlin [03:17:46] But rfm, what I hear you basically summarizing is you're having this classical Western civilization education. All the great books you were supposed to have been introduced to kind of in high school and, or college and, or in graduate school. But life and, or Mormonism creates such a bubble and we're created, we're inoculated with such cynicism towards the philosophies of men that we ignore the great works of Western and Eastern literature and of thinkers. Because why would you study anything other than Spencer W. Kimball and Ezra Taft Benson? They, you know, yokels from Idaho and Arizona are the pinnacle of modern human thinking and spirituality and greatness. So why would you stoop to reading Charles Dickens or Mark Twain when it's the philosophies of men? So our minds are kind of poisoned towards great art and literature as Mormon. I don't mean to sound so dark and cynical, but, but yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:18:53] Well, when you have all the answers and you have the source of knowledge, real true knowledge, and Mormonism is about true knowledge and knowing what that true knowledge is, and then living your life in conformity with that true knowledge, then if you've got these gentlemen on the earth who are right there, they have God's ear or God has their ear and they speak directly with God and then they tell us what God wants us to know.

John Dehlin [03:19:14] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:19:16] Why else, why would you read anything that would be different from that?

John Dehlin [03:19:20] Everything else is a waste of time.

Radio Free Mormon [03:19:22] Yes.

Gerardo Sumano [03:19:23] Yeah. And as you're going through this RFM and discovering all this new literature, what, what were your thoughts regarding? Because obviously you had to be thinking and, or comparing it to the Book of Mormon or the Doctrine Covenants. Like all this great literature comparing to what you were trained to believe. It was amazing literature and super inspiring stuff. Right. Like we're, we're trained to think that the Book of Mormon is just, just this amazing, amazing book, that nothing can be better than that. What, what were your thoughts?

Radio Free Mormon [03:20:13] Right. Well, I'm not necessarily making those connections actively at the time, but I am reading all this stuff, enjoying it tremendously and feeling myself growing as an individual. Because that's one of the things about literature I Know, some people say, well, why do you spend all your time reading this or memorizing, you know, Shakespeare stuff, for goodness sake? Why on earth would you do that? And it's hard to express it for me, but I have the sense that when I do that, I am becoming a bigger person. I'm growing in a positive way. I'm packing on muscle, so to speak. Right. If it's a workout, I'm packing on muscle and I'm growing and I'm becoming more of a human being, more realized, more informed. All these experiences that other people are writing about in such wonderful ways are becoming part of me. So as a result, I become bigger than I was before and I can see better and further perhaps.

John Dehlin [03:21:16] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:21:17] Only because I stand on the shoulders of giants.

Gerardo Sumano [03:21:20] Right.

Radio Free Mormon [03:21:21] But you know, the Book of Mormon, it's. It's its own book. It has its own positive things. I still think that one of the great lines in scripture is in the Book of Mormon, which I think is first, second. Nephi. 33, 9. Or is it 6? Anyway, it's where Nephi says, I glory in plainness, I glory in truth, I glory in my Jesus, for he hath redeemed my soul from hell. That's beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Other parts of it, not so good. Right?

Gerardo Sumano [03:21:55] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:21:55] But there are a lot of things that are. It's a varying quality.

Gerardo Sumano [03:21:59] Right.

Radio Free Mormon [03:22:00] And I think that being able to experience great literature helps me look at the Book of Mormon more in context with the other things that it. I don't want to say competing with, but you understand what I mean.

Gerardo Sumano [03:22:16] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:22:17] Other things that it's can be set up against and compared to.

John Dehlin [03:22:22] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:22:22] And it is not what I had originally thought it was, which was this fantastic piece of literature.

Gerardo Sumano [03:22:30] Right.

Radio Free Mormon [03:22:30] It's something that I gained a witness of when I was 18 and prayed my way through it. It's very important to me. And I've certainly read it 20, 30 times, probably at least 30 times by now through and studied it, you know, out the yin yang. So it's very significant in my personal journey. But there are other things that I think actually are better.

Gerardo Sumano [03:22:50] Right.

John Dehlin [03:22:50] I'm just going to say. Rfm, I need to interject this here. Two things just occurred to me. One is, as long as you never read great works of literature, you can swallow the trope that the Book of Mormon is the most important and most powerful and most edifying and magical book in the history of civilization. Yeah. You can swallow that as long as you've never read any other great literature. And I think A Mormon upbringing is going to do everything it can to keep you from reading and appreciating the great works of literature. But as soon as your mind becomes expanded, it becomes a lot tougher of a pill to swallow that the Book of Mormon is a great book. I'll never forget John Hamer. When I said to John Hamer, how do you explain the Book of Mormon? He's like, it's just a boring, not that interesting book. And I'm like, you can't say that. And then I realized how smart John Hamer was, and I was like, oh, maybe I should read a couple more books. And I had, I just hadn't really allowed myself to believe that they were great books. But the other thing I was going to say, RFM is you are, well loved. You are loved by so many people. And for a long time, you know, you always have this ego as a podcaster where you want to be the best and the smartest. And then I just realized RFM is special. RFM is really, really smart and witty, but lovable and he has a big heart. And I would say that, you know, Mormonism obviously influenced you, but I don't think Mormonism is what made you great. And as I hear you discuss, you know, I know, because I spend a lot of time with you on the phone and I know you love Shakespeare and I know you love great cinema, and I know you love music and works of art and Broadway shows, and that there are a lot of really great things that inform the beautiful, wise, funny, entertaining person that you are. But it really makes sense to me that at some point, a lot of your greatness, RFM really was forged by leaving the intellectual and spiritual and philosophical confines of Mormonism and venturing out into the great wilderness of fine literature and art and music. And that's what really has forged RFM into the great wise soul that we all love and value. And you worked hard for that. And you, you did it not because of Mormonism, you did it in spite of, and react, reacting to the banality of Mormonism. And, and I think this is really, for me, this is really illuminating to just understand what shaped you. Rfm.

Concluding the Story and Support for RFM

Radio Free Mormon [03:25:39] Well, I'm glad that you say that and I appreciate it very much and all the kind words. And this is why I'm basically concluding now I'm just going to skip the other stuff because it's, you know, we're rapidly coming up on four hours of what I thought was going to be a three hour presentation, but really this pretty much covers it. And I can't cover every single detail. Who'd want to see every detail? But the in the general ideas being that yes, this is what has made me me, whether you like me or don't like me. And believe me, there are plenty of people who don't like me too. Ask my two ex wives. But this is what has created me. It's the Mormonism as well, plus all the other stuff that I've tried to learn. And believe me, there's so much that I haven't read and that I'll never have time to read or experience. Once again, the more you read and get into the stuff, the more you realize I'm never going to be able to read everything that I would like to read because the more you know, the less you know. Right, right. And so believe me, I, I, I recognize that I do not know very much. I know a little bit here and a little bit there, but yeah, so this is me, this is how I've come to be me. I would, I probably quibble just a little bit. And trying to be fair to Mormonism, I don't think Mormonism tries to keep you from reading great works of literature. Okay. And I, I don't think you actually meant to say that necessarily, but it does try and keep you so busy reading the Book of Mormon, which we're supposed to read every day, right? Yeah, from the Book of Mormon, every day. And that's just the Book of Mormon. There's conference talks, there's all this other stuff, there's this religious literature that we're supposed to read. There's, and frankly that ends up taking up so much time with most people with a full time job, family responsibilities, activities in the church that you've got to do callings, callings that it can be very, very difficult to work in other things. And so I just happen to have been able to do this based upon very unfortunate circumstances in my life that I would not have chosen for myself, but which ended up, I mean I, I say quasi humorously that basically for 20 years I lived in the basement and was fed on buckets of fish heads. So I had a lot of spare time to be able to do this and I'm really, really glad that I did. And I found out that I have interests above and beyond just Mormonism and in scriptures, into literature, into music, into so many things and all these things make life so much richer and it becomes, well, it goes from the black and white of Mormonism and Mormon literature to Technicolor. So it's sort of, like, the wizard of Oz. The first scenes in the sepia tones. Right.

John Dehlin [03:28:32] Yeah, right.

Radio Free Mormon [03:28:33] And then she gets to Oz and bam. Technicolor.

John Dehlin [03:28:38] Yeah. Well, I. I appreciate your graciousness with Mormonism. And I'm just going to say maybe the church doesn't forbid you from reading great works of art and literature and appreciating them, but it doesn't want you seeing them as fountains of wisdom and truth. It wants you seeing the white, you know, prophets and apostles from Idaho and Utah as the fountains of true wisdom and truth. And we're carefully curated as Mormon to devalue, quote, the wisdom of men and the philosophies of men and to actually really value as the true meat. The. What is actually the milk of. Of correlated Mormonism, which is the wisdom of white dudes from Idaho and Utah. And. And if you're going to branch out and really, truly embrace the wisdom of. Of humanity, you really are departing from the. The walled garden that. That is, you know, correlated orthodox Mormon bubble. And you don't have to agree with me, but that's how I feel.

Radio Free Mormon [03:29:44] Well, it's sort of like, what was that, that. That movie? I can never remember the guy's name. I think he's East Indian. He was hailed as a new Hitchcock. He's got a new movie out about the beach, which I never knew.

John Dehlin [03:29:55] M. Night Shyamalan.

Radio Free Mormon [03:29:57] Yeah. Talk about an overrated director.

John Dehlin [03:30:00] No, he's one of the greats. I disagree.

Radio Free Mormon [03:30:03] He did a couple things that were okay, but. And not in a long time, but anyway, anyway. What? The Village, right?

John Dehlin [03:30:14] The Village, Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:30:15] Right. And that's kind of like Mormonism.

John Dehlin [03:30:17] Yeah, absolutely.

Radio Free Mormon [03:30:18] In the Village, this is the way things are. This is the way life is. And you don't go beyond this barrier because if you do, there's bad things there, Right?

John Dehlin [03:30:25] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:30:26] These are the sharks in the water. They'll get you if you do the half gain or off the side of the boat.

John Dehlin [03:30:31] Absolutely.

Radio Free Mormon [03:30:32] And so then you find out, of course, that this is a system where this has been sort of put in amber, this whole cultural system, and it's sort of. Oh, back in the. Maybe the 19th century or it's. It's a while ago. And they don't have electricity, do they? It's very, very kind of pioneer experience. And then this gal, and I think that's Dallas Howard, Ron Howard's daughter. She's in it, right?

John Dehlin [03:30:59] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:31:00] And she ends up going through the barrier and finding out that it's really the elders in the village who are putting on robes to be the monsters, to scare people and keep them from leaving alert. It's only 20 years old, but maybe 15. And she goes through it and then she finds out it's the real world out here. It's like it's modern times and there's cars and there's, you know, everything, but it's just this totally artificial bubble that they're living their lives in and they live their entire lives in them. And then she. She makes her way through the. The forest and the scary stuff in the forest that they put there in order to keep people from finding out that they're living in an artificial world. Because the belief is the artificial world is better. It's not like it's a malicious thing. Right.

John Dehlin [03:31:53] It's safer. They're keeping you safe.

Radio Free Mormon [03:31:56] Yes. From the modern world and all the horrible things in the modern world. So it's all very benevolent. It's all very met with the best of intentions. Right. Because you're going to be good to these people. You're going to give them the best life that you possibly can give them, which is apart from the modern world.

John Dehlin [03:32:11] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:32:12] But then she finds out, oh, here's the modern world. Oh, my gosh. This has just been this whole fiction that was created. That was my whole life.

John Dehlin [03:32:20] Yeah. And I've been living someone else's lie, you know, under the illusion that they were trying to keep me safe. Rfm, and that's Pleasantville that's tangled. That's the Truman Show. That's the Matrix. And oddly, that's the story of the Mormon Temple ceremony of Adam and Eve being kept ignorant in the Garden of Eden. And then they partake of the tree of the fruit of Knowledge, of good and evil, and they're what cast out of the Garden of Eden. That's many of the great cinematic works. It's basically have the same theme. And look, it was baked into the temple ceremony all along. And that's what you went through. You know what? You were reborn. You were born again. And that's what Christ, I think, talked about. Christ talked about being born again, not being born of the mother, but. But having a rebirth. And that's what happened. You had a rebirth. An intellectual and a spiritual and a psychological and an emotional awakening. And I would argue that's one of the purposes of life, is to go through that. And I'm so glad you went through it, rfm, because we've all benefited from that. Now, really quickly, rfm, in your notes, you talk about, you know, the message boards and John Larsen and you talk about eventually rational faiths and Mormon stories and my excommunication. Can you just quickly go through that history? Because I don't want your story to be out there without you being able to kind of make those final dots. I've been reconnecting with John Larsen. I've been bringing a more on Mormon stories. Those message boards were really important and they still are in some ways still important intellectual influences for many people. So can you not. Can you give us a brief sort of sense of the touch points there that led to now?

Radio Free Mormon [03:34:22] Probably not.

John Dehlin [03:34:23] You don't want to. You're going to skip that.

Radio Free Mormon [03:34:26] Well, if you. If I tell you what, let's look at audience reaction. Okay. Because we are nine minutes from. Well, we did start at 15 after, but basically we got nine minutes until the cut off point at the top of the hour. Let's see. Because it would take at least an hour for me to do justice to that. So let's see what people think. If they want to hear more, I'm happy to tell them. And can we do that? Is that okay? So we'll have a part two take care of. If people want. If people want.

John Dehlin [03:34:53] There's 421 people right now joining us live.

Radio Free Mormon [03:34:58] Raise your hands if you right now

John Dehlin [03:35:00] go to YouTube or Facebook and we're going to have a vote and we're going to allow RFM to see the votes and we will make it. Gerardo, I'm going to have you be El Hues, El Grand Juiz and we're going to see. Gerardo is going to tally the votes now and we'll.

Gerardo Sumano [03:35:19] What are the two options? Like make the two options kind of clear.

John Dehlin [03:35:22] Option one is this is it. But this is how we end. We've heard enough RFM story. We've heard enough. And the other is we have RFM come back on Mormon Stories and take us through his involvement in the discussion boards with, you know, Fair Mormon and the Maxwell Institute and those boards, his involvement there, his exposure to John Larsen, his early appearance on Mormon Expression podcast, his listening to Mormon stories, his eventual becoming a blogger for the Rational Faiths blog.

Radio Free Mormon [03:36:00] Your excommunication too, by the way, because that was very important to me.

John Dehlin [03:36:04] What's that?

Radio Free Mormon [03:36:05] Your excommunication.

John Dehlin [03:36:07] My excommunication. I remember interacting with you as the host of Mormon Stories podcast even before my excommunication, I believe.

Radio Free Mormon [03:36:16] Really? Wow, you have a good memory.

John Dehlin [03:36:19] Or maybe I'm mistaken.

Gerardo Sumano [03:36:21] Everyone. Everyone is saying they want RFM back for a part two. And yeah, no One. They've had enough.

John Dehlin [03:36:32] I have bad news. Rfm. The. The. The consensus is overwhelming. They're saying, moss, por favor.

Radio Free Mormon [03:36:39] Okay, well, we'll schedule it. We will schedule it. Thank you very much, everybody. You've been wonderful and very patient. My gosh. I mean, I'm going through this, and I'm going, this has got to be so boring. But mainly because it's like the end of Pee Wee's Big Adventure, right? When Dottie says, are you guys. Aren't you gonna stay and watch the movie? And he says, I don't have to watch it, Dottie. I lived it.

John Dehlin [03:37:02] All right, well, the consensus is overwhelming. You've brought us to the precipice of your own intellectual, psychological, and emotional awakening, and you can't end there. You've got to bring us all the way through of how you go from tbm. You've took us from TBM to progressive liberal Mormon. What you didn't take us to is from kind of starting to become disaffected, questioning liberal progressive Mormon to rfm. You didn't take us all the way there. Rfm. And that's just the truth.

Radio Free Mormon [03:37:36] Well, this is part of the deal, is that I'm not able to do that in very diagrammatical ways. Okay. And that's part. Been part of my struggle in understanding this, and I hope you'll understand that, is that I have given you a lot of the picture, which is me outgrowing Mormonism. Me. What was that thing about Mormonism is becoming like a child suit, a boy suit that I am rapidly outgrowing, graduating from Mormonism. And so that's why it is that I've been pursuing these things, finding out these things, loving the journey, and then turning around at some point. And once again, your. Your excommunication was pivotal in that. And I will talk about that next time. Turning around and looking and saying, oh, my gosh, this is like, I'm not really part of this anymore the way I used to be. I've gone so far beyond it that I don't consider myself exclusively the property of the LDS Church anymore. In other words, I'm not TBM so much as I am rfm. From TBM to rfm.

John Dehlin [03:38:47] All right, so we're gonna have you back for part two. We don't want to skip the good stuff. And so we're gonna have you back. And it's.

Radio Free Mormon [03:38:55] I thought this was the good stuff. What are you saying?

John Dehlin [03:39:00] I'm saying that part one was amazing, and part two is going to be even More amazing because we'll talk about your excommunication and just all the stuff that a lot of us live through. And, you know, basically, it's one thing to reach. Listen, rfm. It's one thing to reach the point of realizing the church isn't what it claims to be. And that really is just the beginning. That's when your eyes are opened. Well, you know, once Adam's eyes are opened and Eve's eyes are opened, there's deciding to leave the garden and then braving the lone and dreary world. And you haven't taken us there yet, God damn it. And so you're going to. You're going to.

Radio Free Mormon [03:39:38] Okay, if you say so. But here's the thing. Okay, what did you say about realizing that the church. Something about isn't true. You said that, right?

John Dehlin [03:39:46] Isn't what it claims to be.

Radio Free Mormon [03:39:47] Is it what it claims to be? Good job. Because that's how I try and frame things. On the other hand, from this context that I'm looking at, right, that would be the same thing as looking back at sixth grade and saying sixth grade isn't what it claims to be. Because I hear what you're saying, and I know that the. And I. I agree with you that in many respects the church is not what it claims to be. And yet it sort of is what it is. And I think it's great for sixth grade, but it's not all there is. And there's so much more. And in my case, it ended up preparing me for so much more because this is what started my scholasticism, was Mormonism. So it prepared me and laid the groundwork for all this other stuff that I've done since then. And for that, I'm forever grateful. But on the other hand, the problem with Mormonism is at its heart that it wants to keep you where you are and it doesn't want to let go. And as I mentioned to you two years ago, there's no point at which Master Po comes to you and says, snatch the pebble from my hand. Then it will be time for you to go. What Master Po says here is, you can never snatch the pebble from my hand because I am more advanced than you, and you need to listen to what I tell you to do for your entire life. And you need to stay here in the Shaolin Temple and never leave and never learn anything more than what I can teach you.

John Dehlin [03:41:18] Rapunzel, stay in the tower. Adam and Eve, stay in the garden. Yes, Truman, stay in the Truman Show. Neo, never unplugged from the Matrix.

Radio Free Mormon [03:41:28] Frodo stay in the Shire. Yep.

John Dehlin [03:41:30] Frodo stay in the Shire.

Radio Free Mormon [03:41:31] Luke, stay on Tatooine.

John Dehlin [03:41:33] Yeah. All right, so you've taken us to the point of your eyes being opened. And part two is going to be what you did once your eyes were opened.

Radio Free Mormon [03:41:42] Okay.

John Dehlin [03:41:43] And how you became rfm. Because all we know is how you became non tbm. We still don't know how you became rfm.

Radio Free Mormon [03:41:52] Okay, fair enough. I'll try and structure part two around that idea then.

John Dehlin [03:41:57] All right. Rfm, you're the best. Now listen, how can people support your amazing life? Changing cultural, changing life, lives changing work? How do people support you and Bill Real and the whole enterprise?

Radio Free Mormon [03:42:15] Yes, go ahead. One of the things you can do is you can go to radiofreemormon.org, click on the Donate button and make a donation. Today you can make a recurring donation which are favored $5 a month, $10 a month, $50 a month, whatever you can afford. No job is too big, no fee is too big. So that's the financial aspect.

John Dehlin [03:42:36] Can I ask you this rfm, what if people were to donate enough? Is it true that you could get to the point where you did this full time and we could see endless content, maybe even books or other sorts of. Maybe even tiktoks from RFM if people donated enough? Is that in the realm of possibility?

Radio Free Mormon [03:42:59] Yes. And I started saying yes early on just to show that I am a prophet. I knew what the question was going to be before you even asked it. Mainly because I think we've talked about this before. But yes, I mean, I'm 61 years old. I'm getting to the age where I would like to back off of my career as an attorney to some extent because right now I'm kind of doing two full time jobs. And that is exhilarating, fun, exciting. It's also a bit exhausting in some respects. So yeah, absolutely. I talk about the. The fact that there's so many things I'm never going to get around to being able to say everything that I want to say. And that's without necessarily repeating myself all over the place. There's just so many things that I would like to talk about as it relates to Mormonism, as it intersects with literature, other things. It's just this inexhaustible, well, bubbling forth from within me. And if I were able to do it full time, then I would just have more ability to produce more of those things that I would like to.

John Dehlin [03:44:03] And I'll just say there's a lot of things that would cause the Brethren in downtown Salt Lake City to shudder in their boots. Can you imagine what a full time, fully dedicated RFM to unpacking Mormonism. Can you imagine what that does to the Brethren shuddering in their boots in downtown Salt Lake City? I can only imagine how afraid they are if donors were to step up and allow you to become a full time contributor in this space. I might retire rfm. If you became full time. You know, those of you who hate me, if you hate me, and if you want to see me retire, then I challenge you to donate to RFM to allow him to become full time. And maybe I'll hang up my boots.

Radio Free Mormon [03:44:49] Who knows? It could happen. It's got to happen at some point, I suppose.

John Dehlin [03:44:53] Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:44:53] But yeah, two things that that brings to mind are what? Ben Grimm from the Fantastic Four. I'm shaking in my blue little shorties. And Scott Marvel reference, yo. Totally scar from Lion King. Ooh, I quiver with fear.

John Dehlin [03:45:13] All right.

Radio Free Mormon [03:45:14] I don't really think. I don't really think they're that scared of me. I mean, there's 15 of them. There's one of me.

John Dehlin [03:45:19] Yeah, you're a. You're a force. RFM. Okay, were you gonna say a second thing? I interrupted you. Was there a second thing you were gonna say besides.

Radio Free Mormon [03:45:26] Yeah, if you could, like, share however you want to with friends, family, whoever you feel comfortable doing that. I know there might be, you know, some difficulty in that regard, but Radio Free Mormon links with your friends on Facebook or whatever. And Mormonism Live as well, which is the new duo podcast that I'm doing with Bill Real. We started last December. We just got done with episode 37, I believe it was, last Wednesday night. It's every Wednesday. It broadcasts live and we have live call ins at the end. So it's live TV on YouTube and people can call in and say whatever they want and ask whatever ever they want. We have a minimum of editing or suppressing different views. Everybody gets to have their say.

John Dehlin [03:46:16] All right, so share, tune in, subscribe, share and donate to Radio Free Mormon and Mormonism Live and Bill Real and Marriage on a Tightrope and all the great things coming out of St. George and Bill Real's affiliates.

Radio Free Mormon [03:46:33] But mostly Radio Free Mormon, but mostly

John Dehlin [03:46:35] me, as RFM likes to save, but mostly me, meaning rfm. All right. Rfm. We love you. You are loved. Gerardo, you want to say anything to RFM before we go?

Gerardo Sumano [03:46:48] No, this. It was great. Thank you. Thank you for doing this episode. And I'm super Excited for part two? Yeah.

Radio Free Mormon [03:46:56] Well, thank you, Gerardo. I really appreciate it. And Gerardo, before we go, I think we need to sing Happy birthday to Dr. Dehlin, don't you? Can everybody join us please? Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear Dr. John Delinquen Happy birthday to you

John Dehlin [03:47:21] and anymore. Thanks guys.

Radio Free Mormon [03:47:25] Okay.

John Dehlin [03:47:27] Love you, rfm. You're a great friend. Thank you. Gerardo. Thanks for all you do for us and for joining us today. Shout out to Carol Burrell as well, who has also been a great co host the past couple months. And please do thanks to Bill Real that helped bring us rfm and shout out to him. And just thanks to all of you that joined us today. Thanks for the comments and questions, please tune in. Again, thanks to everyone who makes Mormon Stories podcast possible. Thanks all the donors. We have lost a lot of donors recently because of our attempts to, you know, help, not have the COVID vaccine sort of terrorize our population. And so if you value this programming, if you want to see continue support rfm, support Bill Real, also consider becoming a monthly donor to the Open Stories foundation or Mormon Stories Podcast. We need to replace all the donors that cancel for one reason or another. And if you want to see us continue, please become a monthly donor@mormonstories.org and we promise to bring you more good content from around Mormonism, progressive Mormonism and post Mormonism. You can also subscribe to us on all the platforms. Check out our TikTok channel at Mormon Stories Podcast, our Instagram channel as well, and just share it and spread the word. We appreciate it and for as long as you guys will support us, we'll keep doing great things and and then once RFM becomes a full time force, I'll start working towards retirement. So anyway, love you guys, take care and we'll see you all guys again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories Podcast.

Radio Free Mormon [03:49:06] Bye bye everybody.

John Dehlin [03:49:07] Take care everybody.

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