Episode Introduction and Content Warning

Part 1 of 2 · Ep. 1481

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is August 30, 2021, and we have had a great month on Mormon Stories Podcast. We are just rocking and rolling, and today is going to be no exception. Let me first begin by reintroducing Kara Burrell. Hey, Kara, thanks for joining us. Hey, John, it's great to have you.

Guest [00:00:21] It's great to be here. I mean, I do have the best job in the world, so not a problem to show up for work today. I'm excited for this one.

John Dehlin [00:00:28] Glad you like it. So, Kara, I introduced Care first because Kara took over or basically launched Mormon Stories podcast TikTok channel a couple months ago. Now we just passed a million likes on the channel. We're what, 60,000 followers? How many?

Guest [00:00:45] It's. It's neck and neck with my Nuance channel, which is like, kind of like, I don't know, depressing or cool. But, yeah, it's around the. Around 66,000.

John Dehlin [00:00:54] 66,000. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And one of the cool initiatives that we launched early on to try and spur more progressive and post Mormon involvement in TikTok is we created a hashtag called My MormonStory. We have so many people who come to us, I think at least 10 a day come and say, can I be on Mormon Stories podcast? And we, number one, don't have a way to really screen and filter everybody. Don't have the time to do that. And number two, we don't like being the filter for people's story. And so we had this idea of creating a hashtag on TikTok called My MormonStory and ask you all to try to see if you could do your Mormon story in less than a minute or less than three minutes, depending on what your TikTok limit is.

John Dehlin [00:01:38] And so that hashtag now has over, like, 1.2 million views on TikTok. A bunch of you have done it. And what we promised is that we would pick, you know, a few of the people who created a My Mormon Story TikTok video to come on Mormon Stories. And we were going to do several. We're going to kind of have that be an ongoing thing. And the first person that we've selected to come on Mormon Stories podcast from that project is. Is Lauren Rogers. Hey, Lauren.

Lauren Rogers [00:02:05] Hi. Good to be here.

John Dehlin [00:02:06] Thanks for joining us.

Lauren Rogers [00:02:07] Yeah, thank you for having me.

John Dehlin [00:02:08] Okay, what's your TikTok channel? What's your name?

Lauren Rogers [00:02:10] Xmo. Underscore.

John Dehlin [00:02:12] Mom.

Lauren Rogers [00:02:12] Underscore.

John Dehlin [00:02:13] Yeah. Okay. And you've Been tiktoking?

Lauren Rogers [00:02:16] Yes, I have.

John Dehlin [00:02:18] Yeah. And I really enjoyed your, my Mormon story and I've enjoyed following your TikToks. But Lauren Rogers has a really cool story for a lot of reasons. Let me just give you kind of that overview of, of what you're gonna be hearing today. Just so you know. First of all, we'll do what we wanna call a content rating. In the past, I always tried to make every single Mormon Stories episode sort of like believer friendly, no swearing, all kind of calm and John Dehlin like again, orthodox Mormon friendly. And what we found is that while we want Mormon stories to always have that sort of content, we also want to be able to have people like John Larsen that sometimes may swear a little bit or be irreverent or just express anger and, and depending on the interview subject or the topic, sometimes things may be a little bit more or less explicit, more, more or less profanity, et cetera.

John Dehlin [00:03:06] And so we want to try and do both to create episodes that aren't in an echo chamber that are friendly to those who are either questioning the church or in the church or newly out of the church. And we also want to be able to create content for, you know, ex Mormons that can sometimes validate or express what ex Mormons are feeling. So our solution to thread the needle is to try and provide content warnings and that's what we're going to do today. So my sense for today's episode, and Lauren, you can tell me if I'm wrong, is that generally this is going to be a believer friendly interview.

John Dehlin [00:03:38] We're going to try and be kind and compassionate sort of systems, not people about the church. We're going to have Lauren tell her story and in a way where, where it's not trashing or attacking the church and there may be a mild swear word thrown in here or there because we want this to be authentic. Now Lauren, do you. How would you.

Lauren Rogers [00:03:59] Yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:04:00] Does that sound right?

Lauren Rogers [00:04:01] Yeah, that sounds perfect.

John Dehlin [00:04:02] Yeah. Kara, can you comply with that today? How does that sound for you?

Guest [00:04:05] BLEEP now?

John Dehlin [00:04:06] Yes, perfect. Now in terms of what we're going to be covering, Lauren's got a super cool story. I'm not going to try and tell you the whole story here, but a couple of the things you're going to be hearing about, you know, kind of raised in the church, we'll be talking about that. We're going to be talking heavily about her mission experience. She experienced a significant amount of abuse and neglect on her mission from the mission president to various elements of her mission, to the extent that she today suffers, probably qualifies as disabled because of the medical neglect and abuse that she experienced on her mission.

John Dehlin [00:04:42] Psychological, emotional, et cetera. So we're going to be heavily talking about her mission abuse. We are also going to be talking about her exploration in terms of her own sexuality. She is married, she does have a kid, and she has, through her faith crisis and journey has been able to kind of explore her sexuality. And that's going to be a topic and then also just kind of her and her husband's kind of faith journey. Are there any, any other major themes that you think we're going to be hitting today, Lauren or Kara?

Lauren Rogers [00:05:10] No, that about. That covers, that covers the main ones.

John Dehlin [00:05:12] Okay. All right. Carrie, anything you want to say before we jump in?

Guest [00:05:16] No, I just love when we get somebody from the tick tock world in here into the real world and talking to Lauren before it started. You're a sweetheart. I think we're gonna. And her baby's here, her husband's here, so. Oh, yeah, there's a. Yeah, there might be a little bit of baby babbling, but it's gonna be worth it because it's making all of us smile in the room, so.

Lauren Rogers [00:05:36] She's so cute.

Guest [00:05:37] There's a benefit to the baby babbling if you're here, if it's coming across through the audio.

John Dehlin [00:05:42] So yeah, we're, we want to be a baby friendly studio here at Mormon Stories podcast.

Guest [00:05:46] And her baby is whatever, nine minus. Let's see, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. It's six days apart from my son.

Lauren Rogers [00:05:53] Yeah. So that's awesome.

John Dehlin [00:05:55] All right, so buckle in for a multi hour, emotional, thoughtful, heart wrenching and heart touching and inspiring Mormon stories. And I should add, Lauren has been become a bit of an activist in kind of the TikTok world, but also in across Utah for various causes. So we'll have a, a bit of an activism theme as well. So Lauren, where does your Mormon story begin? And any disclaimers you want to start with or corrections or additions?

Descending from Brigham Young and Mormon Roots

Lauren Rogers [00:06:23] Yeah, no, I, I, my Mormon story I think just starts with, you know, Brigham Young. I'm a direct descendant of Brigham Young. And so as I've really deconstructed, I've recognized how much my story has to do with the generational trauma that can be passed down when big events happen. Right. And I imagine being, I descend from a son named Alonzo. I imagine Alonzo's life was not as happy as it could be if he would have had a Father that didn't have 56 other children to attend to and 55 other wives to attend to. And so I imagine he wasn't very present in his life. And that probably caused trauma. And that trauma has been passed down through the generations all the way to me. And so being. Being a descendant of Brigham Young was like a huge part of my childhood. It was something that, you know, I was very proud of.

John Dehlin [00:07:19] And did your family talk about it?

Lauren Rogers [00:07:20] Oh, yeah. I mean, we have Brigham Young's chair that sat in his house. It's at my parents house. We have Alonzo Young's family Bible. We. It was just a huge part of our, like my maiden name is Young. Like we it all the way down with songs.

John Dehlin [00:07:35] Wow, that's amazing. Okay, so multi generational trauma and prophetic pride.

Lauren Rogers [00:07:41] Oh, yeah, for sure.

John Dehlin [00:07:43] I mean, I have other family reunions. You'd go to of like all the descendants of Brigham Young?

Lauren Rogers [00:07:46] No, because he had so many. But yeah, I mean, I have a copy of Brigham Young's Patriarchal Blessing and it talks about like his descendants. And I'm like, growing up, that was like, that's me. Like, I always had that like huge pride, but also like pressure to live up to, you know, descendant of a prophet.

John Dehlin [00:08:07] Yeah. So what was your upbringing like?

Growing Up in a Strict Mormon Household

Lauren Rogers [00:08:12] So I grew up in a very orthodox Mormon household. Like, no movies on Sunday, no caffeine. Like, very, very strict in our observance of Mormonism. And I was very enthusiastic about it. I loved going to church. What city I was in? Houston, Texas.

John Dehlin [00:08:31] Okay.

Lauren Rogers [00:08:32] Yeah. And so, yeah, I grew up very, very much involved in the gospel. You know, I was beehive my maid and Laurel class president. I just was always had all the big callings and I was always, you know, very, very involved and very enthusiastically involved.

John Dehlin [00:08:50] Yeah. Okay. I grew. I grew up in. I grew up in Houston, actually. So I have really fond memories of the Stake activities and the youth leaders and just Houston in general. But maybe before we get to that, you know, did you guys do all the things in your family? The fam home evening, the scripture study?

Lauren Rogers [00:09:12] We did family scripture study every day and family home evening every week. And I mean, I studied the scriptures personally from before I even got baptized. Like, I. That was something I took a lot of pride in, is that I never missed a day. Even if it was just a verse. I would read the Book of Mormon every single day.

John Dehlin [00:09:31] And again, you probably said this. How many siblings?

Lauren Rogers [00:09:33] So I have three older brothers and then I am an identical twin. So my sister and I end up really? Yep.

Guest [00:09:40] That's actually funny because there's kind of a joke on TikTok right now that she looks like X1 Panda Girl a little bit. Yeah. I think. What's her name? Jessie. Is that her name?

Lauren Rogers [00:09:50] I don't remember her.

Guest [00:09:51] I did a dual live with her the other day. I should probably. I think her name's Jesse. Anyway, excellent Panda Girl. I just go by, but people are like swiping through TikTok and they're like, lauren, excellent Panda Girl. No, no. You guys kind of look the same. Yeah.

Lauren Rogers [00:10:01] And then my sister just recently got into Exmo Tik Tok and people are like, you look just like X Mom. I'm like, yeah, we know.

John Dehlin [00:10:10] Okay, so you have an identical twin. There's five of you siblings total?

Lauren Rogers [00:10:13] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:10:14] Super orthodox house.

Guest [00:10:15] Yeah.

Realizing She Was Gay as a Teenager

John Dehlin [00:10:16] Anything else you want to say about how Mormon you guys were? No.

Lauren Rogers [00:10:21] I mean, yeah, we were very. Just very strict and I think typical. I feel like that's typical in Mormonism. There's lots of strict families. But maybe I'm wrong.

John Dehlin [00:10:30] What did your parents do for work?

Lauren Rogers [00:10:33] So my dad works for FedEx. He's in HR. And then my mom does everything. She was a stay at home mom while I was younger, but then she started substitute teaching and then just working for different entrepreneurial. I don't know how if I said that right, but she's very into everything. She's a woman of many traits.

John Dehlin [00:10:55] So when, at what point does your Mormon story start to get rough or challenging or beautiful and powerful? How does it proceed from childhood to adolescence?

Lauren Rogers [00:11:06] Yeah, well, when I was 12, that's when I had my first gay panic when I was like, oh my gosh, I think I might be gay. But at 12? At 12.

John Dehlin [00:11:17] And did you even know what that meant at the time?

Lauren Rogers [00:11:21] Yeah, I did know what it meant because I had multiple gay friends. And so I was very. I didn't know a lot about it as far as like the church went and what their stance was. It was on it, but I knew that it was not something I should be like. I loved my friends who were gay and I didn't find anything wrong with that, but I knew it was something that didn't go with being a Mormon. And so I very quickly repressed that and convinced myself that it wasn't true. And honestly, I'm very thankful for that that I was able to successfully trick myself into thinking I was straight, because I can only imagine that my trauma in the church would have just multiplied because, you know, my brother is gay and he knew he was gay while he was Mormon.

Lauren Rogers [00:12:10] And, and yeah, it was so difficult for him, so traumatic for him. And so I'm grateful that I didn't have to go through all of the trauma that most gay people have to go through in the church because I tricked myself very thoroughly that I was straight.

John Dehlin [00:12:22] What made you think you might be when you're 12?

Lauren Rogers [00:12:26] I didn't have the normal feelings for guys that I was supposed to be having. You know, I, I didn't have very good language either. I would feel uncomfort nervous around guys when I could tell they were flirting with me. And because I didn't have the language to know what that meant, I just interpreted that as, oh, that's must much. Must be what a crush feels like. Like, I'm nervous. Those are butterflies. And then I also, I found myself just really being attached to my female friends and so. And really wanting to dress more masculine and do more masculine things. And my friend told me like, like my friend asked me if I was gay and that's when I was like, oh no, am I? And then very quickly went through all the mental gymnastics I needed to convince myself that no, I was straight and I didn't need to worry about that.

John Dehlin [00:13:21] You dodged a Mormon bullet. Yes, I very much wasted your youth.

Lauren Rogers [00:13:25] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:13:26] Okay, so. So you went back push yourself quickly in the closet at 12, and then what happened?

Lauren Rogers [00:13:31] Yeah, and then I think my brother coming out to me as gay was also a huge thing in my life. You know, I just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed because I.

John Dehlin [00:13:44] He came out to you when he was. You were how old?

Lauren Rogers [00:13:47] I was? I believe I was 15 or 16 and he was 18.

John Dehlin [00:13:52] How was that going? Did he come out to you before he came out to his own parents or to his children?

Lauren Rogers [00:13:56] Yeah, he came out to my sister first. Your twin or my twin? Yeah, I think he might have come out to a friend before my sister. But in our family it was, I believe, my sister. And then me and I. He did it with a letter. So I was in my room when I read it.

John Dehlin [00:14:12] Had you have had any idea, would you have had any idea?

Lauren Rogers [00:14:15] Well, I mean, he played with Barbies with me. He had pink purses. He would walk around in our high heels like when we were little kids. And so a lot of my friends thought he was gay, but I was like, no, like he's not gay. He would have told me, you know, because we were very close. And so I, I was very convinced that if he were gay, he would have told me by now. So he can't be gay. And so I. But I. Yeah, I just. I read the letter and I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed because I just knew that he was going to have a life of sadness, you know, a life of hardships.

John Dehlin [00:14:48] Did you love him?

Lauren Rogers [00:14:49] Yeah. Yeah, I loved him so much. I was very close to him at the time. He was probably the only brother I was close to at that time, so I felt attached to him, and I just felt so sad that I. I knew that I felt like he was doomed to. To live a life of sadness because there was no place for him in the church. You know, by 16, I knew that because even though I was convinced myself I wasn't gay, I was still very emotional about the gay topic. You know, I very much saw myself as, like, a fierce ally.

John Dehlin [00:15:21] And how can you be a LGBTQ ally as a devout Mormon girl? How does that work?

Lauren Rogers [00:15:29] Just, you know, I had a lot of friends who were gay, and, you know, growing up in the South, a lot of people grew up in Christian households. And so I had two different friends who came to me talking about how they were gay and their parents weren't going to accept them, and they were scared. And, you know, I, at 13, was bearing my testimony that God loved them even though they were gay and that there was nothing wrong with them. And that was just something I intrinsically knew.

Lauren Rogers [00:15:59] And there was a huge cause of discomfort when I went to learn what the church's stance was on being gay. It was a problem I had with the church from a very young age, and so I very much was passionate about it because now I know, because I was gay, and I knew that somewhere deep down, and. And my brother coming out to me gave me the excuse to become a very active, you know, ally to the LGBTQ community.

John Dehlin [00:16:29] As a. As a Mormon teen, were you worried about his soul? Were you worried about Heavenly Father? I was him going to the celestial kingdom or Celestial kingdom or some bad place?

Lauren Rogers [00:16:38] Yeah. I mean, I. At that point, I knew there was a family in my ward that my parents were close with, who they were in a mixed orientation marriage. So I knew there was, like, hope for him that he could still get married in the temple and have exaltation. And I was just so scared that it would be too hard for him because it seemed too hard for me. I thought that that would just be an impossible challenge. And I was terrified that he would try and try, but ultimately fail and lose his exaltation. I was very, very afraid for his soul and afraid for his happiness more than anything.

John Dehlin [00:17:17] But what'd you tell him in terms of like.

Lauren Rogers [00:17:20] Oh, when he. Yeah, after I read the letter and I finished crying, I went to him and I hugged him and cried again. You know, sorry, I'm not normally emotional. I just told him I loved him and that, you know, I am proud of him.

John Dehlin [00:17:36] That's a nice response.

Lauren Rogers [00:17:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:17:38] Especially from a Mormon girl.

Lauren Rogers [00:17:41] Yeah. And I, Yeah, I was just. He was very relieved because I was probably the most enthusiastic Mormon of the siblings. Like, we were all pretty active. Well, all of us but one were very active at that time. And so I think he was afraid that I wouldn't react well. And, and I found myself wishing he would have told me sooner because he grew up hating himself for being gay. He grew up thinking he was an abomination. And I was just like, I wish you would have told me because I would have told you that that's not true. Like, I would have made sure you knew that you weren't an abomination because of your sexuality.

John Dehlin [00:18:19] That's great. So how did your story progress

Lauren Rogers [00:18:25] then? I guess I, I went on a mission. The, the mission age changed and, you know, more difficult things happened in my teenage years that really made me just cling even more to the gospel. I became what I now can clearly see was a fanatic. Like, I was, you know, in a really difficult emotional place and I was using the gospel to self medicate my depression, you know, and so I just became super, super devout, even more than I had been. And so when the mission age changed, that was it. That was the only thing I cared about, was going on a mission, preparing for a mission.

Lauren Rogers [00:19:09] And at that point I was becoming a bit more of a feminist, you know, at least for a Mormon standard. Not like a true feminist at that time, not yet. But I was, you know, put out by the fact that women didn't get any authority in the church. And I, I was so excited to be a missionary because I knew I would have the authority of God. You know, like I, I could finally use all the zeal that I had to actually do work in God's kingdom. And I was just ecstatic to serve a mission and turned in my paperwork the first day that I could, you know, you could do it, I think, 90 days before your 19th birthday.

Lauren Rogers [00:19:47] And I turned it in that, that very day and served my mission directly after high school because I have an early birthday, so I didn't do any college. I just went on my mission.

Shame, Bishops, and Church Standards in Adolescence

John Dehlin [00:19:57] Let me ask you really quickly, did you have any kind of shame kind of in your Adolescent years related to your bishop or, you know, the church's standards, or were you sort of like the perfect Mormon girl or somewhere in between?

Lauren Rogers [00:20:12] Yeah, no, I had a lot of shame, but not because I ever, like, did anything bad. I was very, very obsessive with being exactly obedient and. Which was probably just a manifestation of my anxiety and being a bit too obsessive about those things. So it wasn't shame about anything I had done. It was just more shame about, like, my body and being a woman. And I was, like, obsessed with modesty because it made me extremely uncomfortable if, like, men would look at me.

Lauren Rogers [00:20:47] And now I. Another clue, you know, that I, you know, wasn't comfortable with male attention because I wasn't sexually interested in men. I was. I was gay, you know, and I just didn't know that that was why. And also, of course, the shame culture of the church, you know, I was very much afraid of my body. I didn't even, like, look at it. When I would shower. I would. I would go in between the shower curtains to change so that I wouldn't accidentally see myself. Like, I just was so ashamed of, you know, the female body because I was told that it was something to be covered and not to mention, you know, feelings of arousal for female bodies rather than male bodies, which was confusing at the time.

Lauren Rogers [00:21:31] And so I didn't even want to look. I didn't even want to look at a female body, even though it was my own. So, yeah, I experienced a ton of shame. Never really talked to my bishop about any of those things. But I did also have shame with a bishop, I guess. When I was 13, I had a sip of alcohol and that was. That was the worst thing I had ever done, you know, And I only did it because I was, like, peer pressured and all of that. I didn't even want to, but I.

Lauren Rogers [00:22:00] When my parents found out, they took me to the bishop's office and made me confess. I didn't want to confess. I told you, I'm like, that was six months ago. I never did it again. I didn't even want to do it. Like, I should be fine. Like, I don't need his help to repent for something I'm not doing anymore. That's what repentance means. It's changing.

Lauren Rogers [00:22:18] And. And so they took me anyway. And they told me before I went in, we already told him everything you did. So you can't lie. You have to tell him everything. And so, you know, I told him everything, and he told me I couldn't take the sacrament for I don't remember how long, but that was the worst shame. That was probably when I clicked and became a fanatic because that was so much shame. I had never experienced something like that. I was convinced everyone in the building saw that I didn't take the sacrament. You know, my friend is the one who passed the sacrament to me.

Lauren Rogers [00:22:53] And I was convinced he saw and would think less of me. And so I promised myself in that moment that I would never do anything again that would warrant having to go to the bishop because that was such a horrible experience. And so I became very obsessive about following everything at that point in my life. Like at 13.

John Dehlin [00:23:13] I mean, it's. It's complicated because on the one hand, shame is no fun. It leaves scars, and it whips you from the church's standpoint. It whips you into shape, and it makes you sort of like, try and live the best life you can, because you certainly don't want to experience that again.

Lauren Rogers [00:23:28] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And that's what's so hard for me about the church is, you know, the shaming that happens is. It's just so unhealthy. It's so damaging. But it's one of their biggest tools. You know, that's how they. They get obedience is. And it's frustrating because they mask shame as kindness or love or correction. You know, like, it's. It's not seen as something negative when, you know, those shameful things happen to you. It's seen as, you know, God is teaching you, you're learning. And that's just not.

Lauren Rogers [00:24:10] Not a God I would ever want to follow. You know, that's not. Especially as a parent, when I know the correct way to teach my daughter to do good things is, you know, positive reinforcement and teaching her intrinsic motivation. And that's what's good, that's what's healthy. And if God wants. Was a loving parent, that's what he would do. He wouldn't shame his children into obedience. And so that's. Yes, that's another thing that I really hurt that the church is like that. I. I have so many friends and family that are still in the church, and I. I am pained that they have to feel that shame when it just shouldn't be necessary.

John Dehlin [00:24:53] Yeah. Before we jump to your mission, I'm curious to know what your testimony looked like. So were you going to seminary? Early morning seminary? Did you read the Book of Mormon? Did you pray about it? Did you try and get to know if the church was true? Did you already Just know it was true. Did you have secret doubts? Like, where was your testimony in those teen years?

Building a Testimony Before the Mission

Lauren Rogers [00:25:15] Yeah, I. So I, Yeah, I went to early morning seminary and I studied my scriptures and prayed and did the callings and the temple. And I had read the Book of Mormon dozens of times. And each time I had prayed about it and gained a testimony that it was true and was very, just very, very spiritual. But I did have a lot of. I didn't call them doubts. I called them questions.

Lauren Rogers [00:25:42] You know, I had a lot of questions about, you know, homosexuality and. And I had a lot of questions about, you know, why black people were denied temple blessings and the priesthood and why polygamy was a thing. Polygamy made me really uncomfortable. I remember when I was 14, I found out for the first time that Joseph Smith also had plural wives. That was something I didn't know before, and I, at that point didn't even know the extent of it.

Lauren Rogers [00:26:17] But it caused me to doubt for the first time at 14. And that doubt only lasted a day. And then I convinced myself that it was true again. But that was the first and only time I doubted was when I found out about Joseph's polygamy. And so, yeah, I had these.

John Dehlin [00:26:31] How did you learn about that at 14?

Lauren Rogers [00:26:32] In seminary. My seminary teacher mentioned that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy, and I was like, what

Guest [00:26:39] do you think it was part of, like, the inoculation that a lot of people are doing where they, you know,

John Dehlin [00:26:44] if they mentioned it just briefly, then, yeah, oh, sorry.

Guest [00:26:47] Yeah, yeah, go ahead and finish. Yeah, if you just mention it briefly and you're like, oh, then it's not something to worry about. People who are smarter and have better testimonies than I ever could or would.

Lauren Rogers [00:26:55] Exactly.

Guest [00:26:56] They, they're. They know about it, they're fine with it. I'm not going to look into it anymore. Plus, it gives me all these uncomfortable feelings, thought stopping or whatever.

Lauren Rogers [00:27:03] Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. I mean, I saw that at BYU as well, like in my religion class. My Rest, like Foundations of the Restoration, they absolutely basically went over, like, most of the things in the CES letter. But I didn't even know what the CES letter was. But they presented everything like, as like faith building ways. But now you won't be alarmed when you hear about it on the Internet. And so, yeah, I think the church definitely tries to like, inoculate its members on these hard topics more and more. That's something I'm seeing them do.

Guest [00:27:37] And when you mentioned that you read the Book of Mormon multiple times As a teen and you prayed about it. Would you mind going into that experience of. I'm assuming you read like Moroni's Promise and prayed about it and you felt like you had a confirmation that it was true.

Lauren Rogers [00:27:51] Yeah, my answers were never, like, big spiritual experience. I never felt like the burning in my bosom, but I would read it and always ponder on, you know, the good things that I had learned from it. Because, like I mentioned, I used like the scriptures and church to self medicate for my depression and my anxiety. And so I could think of so many instances where something the Book of Mormon said had made me feel comfort when I was hurting. And so to me, that was my answer that, you know, it had to be from God because it helped me when I needed help. And so, yeah, that I never had, like any big experience. It was just those little experiences of like, this seems to be a good book. So it's true, you know, that's. That was how I thought.

Guest [00:28:44] Yeah. When you're a teen, you're like, grasping for something in turbulent years that gives you comfort and you kind of just like need a motivated reasoning almost that like the system I was born in. Of course it's true. Because the anxiety and panic attack that would come if I questioned it. That's not gonna happen. So.

Lauren Rogers [00:29:00] Yeah, exactly. Yeah, totally.

Receiving a Mission Call

John Dehlin [00:29:03] Okay, so mission.

Lauren Rogers [00:29:05] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:29:06] Okay, really quick. What year did you graduate from high school? So we can understand kind of the cohort.

Guest [00:29:10] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:29:11] Of what time frame we're talking about, because all this inoculation stuff, not part of my upbringing. And I'm even guessing it wasn't part of your. Your seminary experience either. So what year are you graduating from high school?

Lauren Rogers [00:29:21] 2014.

John Dehlin [00:29:22] Okay, so this is seven years ago. This is right as the church is releasing its gospel topics essays. This is right when the CES letter first comes out.

Lauren Rogers [00:29:31] Yeah, it came out like a year before I graduated, I believe.

John Dehlin [00:29:34] And this is the year Kate Kelly and I got our letters to be excommunicated, both on 2014. Okay, so 2014, you graduated from high school.

Lauren Rogers [00:29:42] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:29:43] This is after they lowered the age for women to go on missions.

Lauren Rogers [00:29:46] Yes. And so, yeah, I was preparing to go on my mission. I was getting on my vaccines and all of that. And the day after, like, literally the day after my mission paperwork, like, got sent in, I started getting, like, weird health symptoms, like a really painful rash, like, on my face and on my back and like brain fog and fatigue. And I was like, what is going on?

Lauren Rogers [00:30:18] And then it actually took a really long time for me to get my mission call, because it was like, I turned it in right before the brethren go on vacation for a month. And so it took, like, two months for me to get my mission call. And my health just, like, did a super sharp, like, out of nowhere decline. And so I talked to my stake president, and I was like, hey, when I turned in my mission paperwork, I was super healthy and nothing was wrong. But now, like, I had to change my diet completely. I, like, stopped being able to eat, like, gluten, dairy, and sugar.

Lauren Rogers [00:30:47] So that's like a huge change. And it started improving my health. But it's like, it still felt like something like that should have been included in my. In my paperwork, you know, because that might determine where I go on my mission. And I told my stake president that, and he said, no, this spirit has told me that Satan is trying to prevent you from going on a mission because your mission will be so important for God's work. And so we're not going to tell the brethren about your health, and you're going to go where you were called to serve without them knowing that you were sick.

Lauren Rogers [00:31:19] And so at the time, I was ecstatic. I was like, great. Like, I was so nervous I wasn't gonna be able to serve anymore. And that's been, like, the greatest desire of my heart for so long. And so I was ecstatic that God was saying, no, Satan's trying to push you down. You're gonna be all right in the health department. Go on your mission anyway.

Lauren Rogers [00:31:39] And so now looking back, I'm like, that was super, super neglectful. Like, that was super irresponsible. That my health has. Is important too, basically. You know, like, serving a mission is not more important than sacrificing my health. I had no business going to a third world country if. Where there might not be good medical care if my health was a question.

Lauren Rogers [00:32:05] And that's exactly where I was called. I was called to South America. And so I. I don't know if you want to comment or pause before I go on or.

Guest [00:32:16] All I'll say to that is that I'm assuming that you probably had a lot of those scriptures in your brain about, like, how great your joy will be in heaven if you bring. Save it, be one soul unto me. And that you are willing to put your own health and needs and concerns on the back burner. Were those. Was that kind of like, in the forefront of your mind that, like, whatever happens, happens? Because if I can baptize one person, it'll be worth it? Like, what was your Motivation. Yeah. Besides just having that drive, it sounds like that you always had. Was there a second motivation to, like, convert people that that's a higher priority than your own well being?

Lauren Rogers [00:32:49] Absolutely. There was kind of a combination of, like, first that, you know, it's more important to. To serve God and to serve my mission and to do what he wants me to do than to be worried about my own well being. You know, that that's my number one priority is God, and my needs come second. So that was absolutely the first reason. And the second reason was, you know, there are so many promised blessings to people who serve missions. You know, they promise you health, they promise you protection, and they promise that your family will be protected. Those are the. The three big things that I was just really leaning on those promises because.

Lauren Rogers [00:33:31] And those three things, you know, health, protection, and that your family would be protected, all did not happen for me on my mission. And so that was really. That was really devastating. But I'm getting ahead of myself in. When I was set apart, my stake president even blessed me that all of my health problems would fade away as I served my mission faithfully. And so that was something that I clung to as I served my mission and something I 100% believed in. I believed that the Lord would bless me for my service with health because he had promised to. In a blessing that I believed was from God.

John Dehlin [00:34:09] There's that. There's that phrase, whom the Lord calls, the Lord qualifies. And there's also that, you know, the Lord will never give you any challenge that you can't face, sort of idea. And so, yeah, you just think, I'm on top of the world. The Lord's going to make me a superhero, and I'm going to be able to rock Brazil, convert the whole country. Right?

Lauren Rogers [00:34:29] Yeah, exactly. I just was. I really was. I was on top of the world because I had the authority of God and I had the promises of health and that I could not fail, you know, because I had no doubt in my own ability to be faithful and to be obedient, because I had been doing it a long time. I was very good at it. And so I knew that meant 100%. It meant I was gonna find success and I was gonna be protected because I believed so much in. In those promises and in those scriptures. And that really set me up for, you know, just not. Not being wise when it comes to my. My health, not advocating for myself and my health as much as I should have, you know, And. And so that's why that rhetoric is so dangerous.

John Dehlin [00:35:21] Yeah. Just yesterday we had Matt Easton on the guy, the BYU valedictorian that Mormon apostle Jeffrey R. Holland denounced in that recent talk.

Lauren Rogers [00:35:31] I was at commencement that year. That's the year I graduated there.

John Dehlin [00:35:34] Yeah. Well, he told his heart wrenching story yesterday about he's at the end of his mission. And this is a TikTok video Kara made of this just last night. He's, he's finishing his. He'd been, you know, knew he was gay since he was like 12 or whatever but you know, never experimented with that, had only dated girls, was a faithful kid and missionary, gets to the end of his mission and he's still gay. So he tells his mission president I'm gay. And the mission president gives him a priesthood blessing and promises him from this point forward you will no longer experience same sex attraction. You'll date women, you'll marry a woman, you'll have kids. I think he even told him he was going to be a bishop someday or something like that.

Guest [00:36:18] Like a leader in Zion.

John Dehlin [00:36:20] Yeah. And he gets to BYU and just in a couple weeks he's like, wait, I'm still attracted to men. But what I think non Mormons won't get, and we have a lot of non Mormon listeners, is when a church leader gives you a priesthood blessing, tell us what we're taught that means what a priesthood blessing from a church leader means what?

Lauren Rogers [00:36:40] Yeah, I mean we are taught that it's very literally God speaking through the person that, you know, if they have the proper authority, so the church gives them the proper authority and they're using it correctly. And if the person receiving the blessing has enough faith, then anything they are promised is the word of God and it will come true. And the upon your faith, that's the damaging part because then when it doesn't come true, you blame yourself, you know, because God can't be wrong. And, and yeah, when I was watching last night that part and I just cried and cried and cried because that's exactly what happened to me. I was so many times blessed health and blamed myself when it didn't, when it didn't happen for me.

John Dehlin [00:37:24] I'm so sorry. All right, so how did that mission go?

Health Struggles Begin on the Mission

Lauren Rogers [00:37:29] Oh man. So I started my mission with my ridiculously hard diet and my rash and being in pain and all of those things. But you know, keeping my diet actually helped me slowly get better. And so by the time I actually got into the mission field because I was in the MTC for like six weeks because it was a born. No in Chile actually Yeah, I served in Chile and the MTC was actually in my mission, so I didn't even have to go far when I was done in the mtc.

Guest [00:38:03] And what was the mission that you were called to?

Lauren Rogers [00:38:04] Santiago East. I almost said este.

John Dehlin [00:38:07] Sorry, why did I say Brazil?

Lauren Rogers [00:38:09] I said South America. So I didn't. I wasn't specific. Yeah, okay.

John Dehlin [00:38:12] Chile. You're in Chile.

Lauren Rogers [00:38:13] Chile, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:38:14] Okay.

Lauren Rogers [00:38:15] And so when I first got to the mission field, I was the happiest I had ever been in my life. I loved being a missionary. I, like I mentioned before, I had the authority of God and I knew how to use it. I just loved that I could devote every waking moment to. To Jesus and to God because I just was so. Yeah, I was so devout and I. My health was getting better and. And shoot, I forgot what I was going to add. Sorry, one sec.

John Dehlin [00:38:50] Let me just say while you're looking, Chile is a really important country in the history of Mormon missions. It is, because when I was serving my mission in Guatemala in, you know, from 88 to 90, Chile was the top baptizing country in the world. There were. There was at least one mission, the Vina del Mar Mission, southern Chile, that had over a thousand baptisms in a month. And. But it. It was. It was all. It was like 95 corrupt, fraudulent baptisms where they'd like, take people to beaches and baptize them just at a party and they had no lessons and no discussions and had no. Had never been to church and had no idea what they were doing. They baptized kids. They baptized. They take names off of tombstones and put them on baptismal certificates. Like a total sham.

Lauren Rogers [00:39:36] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:39:37] So bad that when. That the church had been decimated by over baptisms throughout the 80s and 90s that Elder Holland had to take a special trip to Chile and spent three years there and closed 30 stakes in Chile while he was there. And I have a Mormon Stories episode about this from Dr. Ted Lyon, who was a mission president in Chile. He was the president of the MTC in Chile, and he was Elder Holland's interpreter while he was in Chile. And so you would have gone to Chile a couple decades after that. That disaster had. Had happened.

Lauren Rogers [00:40:13] Yeah. But we were still seeing the effects of that. We had so many less actives to teach. And that was the explanation I was given on my mission, is that, you know, people were baptizing people incorrectly. So most of these less actives we were assigned to go teach didn't even know anything about Mormonism. They were Mormons only technically, you Know, because they had been baptized when they didn't know anything, and they were scared because of the turmoil in the government at the time. And so they clung to any. Any message of hope, and they accepted. And so, yeah, that was. I saw the effects of that on my mission. For sure.

John Dehlin [00:40:49] There'd be words with a thousand members on record, but only, like, 20 people attending. Yeah, that kind of ridiculousness.

Lauren Rogers [00:40:56] Yeah. Yeah, totally.

John Dehlin [00:40:58] Yeah. Okay. So what were you going to say about going to Chile?

Unsafe Conditions and Assault on the Mission

Lauren Rogers [00:41:02] Yeah, so I was just. I was super happy. I had. It was. Everything I ever wanted was to be a missionary. And I, before my mission, was extremely, extremely shy. And all of that vanished on my mission. Like, my anxiety vanished, my shyness. Everything was just peachy.

Lauren Rogers [00:41:20] And that slowly. That happiness slowly got chipped away. Through the mission. I was exactly obedient and exactly diligent and did everything I was supposed to do. But I kept having problems like my. I had lots of companions who were not very nice to me, you know, and that was really hard.

Lauren Rogers [00:41:47] I had good companions as well, of course, but I. I had multiple sexual assaults that were not. It was just not even. You don't get a day off, you know, you don't get a day off to decompress. You are shamed into not even telling anyone about it. And so that was something that you're comfortable going into. Yeah, I was just in the street, people. I stood out like a sore thumb.

John Dehlin [00:42:22] Blonde hair.

Lauren Rogers [00:42:23] Blonde hair, a head taller than everyone else. And so I had multiple people, you know, asking me to marry them and things like that. And so I, on two different occasions, had people, you know, groping me in the street. There was one man who followed me all the way home, continuously groping me until I was finally able to get in the gate of my house.

Guest [00:42:42] And it's terrifying.

Lauren Rogers [00:42:44] And we stayed living there, you know, it wasn't. It wasn't a big deal to anyone. And this man knew where I lived, and it was. It was really hard to see that my safety wasn't important to my leaders.

John Dehlin [00:43:02] Was that something you would have felt comfortable telling your mission president?

Lauren Rogers [00:43:05] Oh, no, absolutely not. But I did. I did tell.

John Dehlin [00:43:09] Why absolutely not?

Lauren Rogers [00:43:11] Because there was so much shame in the culture. It was very much. The idea was, you will be protected by the Lord because you're a missionary if you're being obedient. So if something happens to you, you must not have been obedient.

Lauren Rogers [00:43:30] And now that, of course, wasn't taught by the mission president, but that was the culture of the mission. And so it Very much suppressed. Suppressed. People voicing legitimate concerns. It was just not a very safe environment to have dialogue about those hard things because, you know, it was seen as doubt and it was seen as not being a good missionary. And all I wanted was to please God. All I wanted was to be a good missionary. And so I complied to the culture of silence.

Lauren Rogers [00:44:04] You know, we weren't even allowed to eat dinner and that. And we walked all day, you know, so it's like our health was just not a priority for the leaders. And that was hard.

John Dehlin [00:44:17] There's an episode On Mormon Stories, episodes 976 to 979, entitled Experiencing Sexual Assault as a Missionary, Camille and Maddie. It's a. For those who want to kind of delve into the archives. It's a really important episode that just shows how two sisters were raped on their missions and how the church completely bungled and mistreated those women. So I'm going to refer people to that as one example.

Lauren Rogers [00:44:43] I've seen that episode. Yes, it's a really good one.

John Dehlin [00:44:46] I'll put that in the show notes.

Lauren Rogers [00:44:48] And yeah, that's another huge passion of mine is just missions are so unsafe. They're physically unsafe. You know, they're not safe for your health or your mental health. And I would really, really love to see some reform in the church. And I have tiktoks about what I would like to see changed. There's a lot. But the biggest thing is reporting incidents needs to be something that's available to every missionary. Every instance of robbery, I mean, pickpocketing and robbery was very common in my mission as well. Like every instance of assault, those things need to be reported. The church needs actual statistics of, you know, how safe and not safe missions are in mission areas are because people are being traumatized and the church is letting it happen.

John Dehlin [00:45:35] I know, I know several people who had guns pointed at, you know, several missionaries who had guns pointed at their face, at their chest while they were missionaries. Again, being robbed, being beat, being assaulted. And it's actually a mission rule to not write home about the negative things. You're literally instructed in the white handbook. Don't tell your family about bad things that happen to you. Keep your letters home positive. Am I right about that or.

Lauren Rogers [00:46:03] Yes, you're correct about that. That's.

John Dehlin [00:46:05] So your parents wouldn't even know.

Lauren Rogers [00:46:06] Yeah, my parents never knew anything that was difficult about my mission. And when I got home and was utterly broken and shared some experiences with them, they were appalled and they just wish that I would have told them And I was like, I couldn't. I couldn't be disobedient. That wasn't. It wasn't an option for me to be disobedient, even if it was just common sense that I should tell my parents if things like this happen and no one. And no one's helping me.

Guest [00:46:34] We're kind of passionate here at Mormon Stories about informed consent on a variety of different topics. But even if I was a devout Mormon, I would want to know those statistics, those things that you were mentioning. I would want to know how my child's doing. And no matter how much I believed in the church, I would be passionate about their safety and them being able to feel like they're in a space that they can confront their mission president if they're feeling, you know, abused in any way. So I would just hope that any. Anybody who's passionate about the health and safety of their children and other missionaries around the world would want to see that too.

Guest [00:47:07] And just from an informed consent perspective, that if you're going to be paying, what is it, $500 a month and that you're sending your child to a different part of the world, that you have an informed consent policy with the church, that you know that they're going to be taken care of and that these things are not going to be hidden, that they're not going to be abused or neglected.

John Dehlin [00:47:27] And the challenge is that the church provided statistics like that, like would go, your son or daughter is going to Brazil where you have a 20% chance of being assaulted with a gun and a 15% chance of being sexually assaulted. You know, what parents are going to let there. So the church has an incentive that. Not to disclose the risks, I think.

Lauren Rogers [00:47:48] Exactly. And that's, for me, one of the. Has been one of the hardest part of my deconstruction of my faith is, you know, I loved the church so much and I gave everything I had to the church. And they're supposed to be the good guys. They're supposed to be the ones protecting people and helping people. And I saw over and over them choose protecting themselves over protecting their members. And that's extremely disappointing for an organization that's supposed to be following Jesus, who, you know, is the example of perfect love. It's just. It's just horrifying that they continuously choose protecting themselves over protecting their members.

John Dehlin [00:48:33] So tell us the stories on your mission that illustrate that. So people know what happened to you specifically.

Lauren Rogers [00:48:37] Yeah, so I think probably the first story I'll tell is, you know, I already shared a Bit about how the culture was very much like, you know, you can't really complain about not feeling safe because that means you don't have enough faith in the promises of safety. And so it really discourages things like, you know, voicing real actual concerns, which is, like I said, super harmful. But I had one experience that I didn't even realize was awful until I got home from my mission and told my parents.

Lauren Rogers [00:49:15] But I was in my apartment late one night and we were in my area, we were very close to a very bad part and our apartment. We heard someone trying to get into our apartment and I lived with one other companionship. So there's four of us sisters there and we were told when we got to Chile that don't really call the police if there's something wrong. They're not gonna, they probably won't help you because you're American. They'll probably just try to extort you, you know, kind of thing. And so calling the police wasn't an option. We called our district leader and our zone leader and of course they were asleep because it was like 11 or no, it must have been past 11:30 because we didn't go to sleep till 11:30.

Lauren Rogers [00:50:00] And my mission at the schedule was shifted to be an hour later. But anyway, so I ended up calling my mission president who lived in my ward at the time. I was in the ward of my mission president. So he would have been a five, ten minute drive.

Lauren Rogers [00:50:14] And he didn't, he didn't come and check on us. He said a prayer for us over the phone and told us to go to sleep. We were on the first floor and our windows didn't lock and a man was trying. Well, we didn't know a man, but we heard someone trying to get into an apartment. That was. His response, was a prayer of safety. And I was just like, at the time, I was like, sweet. I guess if he feels good, then he has a spear that means I'm safe. But now I'm just appalled that like we could have all been murdered. Like he could have just come and check on us.

Lauren Rogers [00:50:44] Like any responsible adult would have just come to check on us. And he didn't do that. And that to me is just like, really illustrates just the dogmatic beliefs of, and the culture of the, the Mormon mission is that you're safe, don't worry, and doesn't matter how unsafe of a situation you're in.

Guest [00:51:09] Just challenging his prayer, that the fact that that would not be enough is a, is a challenge to his authority. I'm sure.

Lauren Rogers [00:51:17] Oh, exactly.

Guest [00:51:18] So, yeah, that's so hard to hear. I'm sure that happens a lot, especially when we're talking about, you know, blessings of anything that they think that it will has some kind of magic sauce in it, and people are kind of set up for some real devastating situations.

Lauren Rogers [00:51:32] That's really hard to hear. Yeah, that's what's hard is just looking back and realizing, like, you know, especially as a feminist, I'm like, I should have advocated for myself. I should have demanded that he come and check on me.

Lauren Rogers [00:51:48] But of course, I can't do that to myself because I was in a very different place. I 100% believed in his authority from God. And so I had no choice but to trust that he knew what he was doing.

Lauren Rogers [00:51:59] And, you know, that goes on to. To the next story, which, as, you know, as I said, I. I had a very difficult diet to follow. And so when I changed areas to more of an expensive area, it all of a sudden I couldn't afford my food.

Lauren Rogers [00:52:18] And I already wasn't allowed, you know, to eat dinner. Not that we weren't allowed to, but it was kind of discouraged, like, seen as a waste of time. Like, you should work through dinner if you were really a good missionary. And so, you know, not having enough money for food was a huge problem for someone who was starting to, at that point, experience some fatigue from how rigorous the mission schedule is.

Lauren Rogers [00:52:43] So I spoke with my mission president, and I asked him for more money so that I could eat. And I explained why about my diet and all of that. And instead of giving me more money, he told me that I had no business eating with members and so that I needed to eat at home from now on. So that was adding 30 meals a month that I needed to pay for for myself. And he didn't give me more money. And so I ran out of money even faster and didn't have any money for food. And members started to just. I told them, like, I'm so sorry, I can't go to your house.

Lauren Rogers [00:53:18] I have to be obedient. And so they would bring me food or they would bring me groceries. And these people were poor and they were giving me of their food. And the reasoning for my mission president is it was gonna be too much of a burden for them to cook for me. And so eventually I.

Lauren Rogers [00:53:37] You know, after a week or so of starving, I was like, no, I'm not going to starve. And so I just pulled my own. I asked my parents to transfer money into my account from my college savings account. Into my, my account that I could withdraw from. And I just bought my own money or, sorry, bought my own food.

Lauren Rogers [00:53:57] And I also wish I would have told my parents then because they said they would have sent me money, you know, I didn't have to pull my personal money from what I needed to go to college to eat when I was. I paid for most of my mission. Like, I was already paying the church for my food. Like, they should have just given me enough money to eat. So that's another example of how they just. They're more concerned with money than helping their missionaries be healthy and have enough food.

John Dehlin [00:54:27] It's such a sign of power that you're literally there as a volunteer to increase their membership and the money that they receive and, and you're paying for the privilege of growing their membership and the money that they end up bringing in, you're paying.

Guest [00:54:43] It's not like the stake president's personal bank account is affected. They have, like, such a pride about, like, I don't know, squeezing the most obedience, the strictest rules out of their missionaries when you probably would have been a much more effective missionary, quote, unquote, if he could have, you know, funneled a little bit more money from Salt Lake City corporate offices or whatever. My sister had a similar experience. My sister was vegan throughout her mission for health reasons. And same type of situation as. Well. Just. Yeah, like, especially the. I'm sure the calories that you're burning, you're probably walking, you didn't have a car. I'm assuming you didn't have a bike or anything.

Lauren Rogers [00:55:19] Heat all day, every day.

Guest [00:55:20] Yeah. So the amount of calories that you're burning off that you need to replenish and when you're not taking care of yourself day after day, week after week. Yeah. So then what did that manifest into?

Lauren Rogers [00:55:31] Well, I mean, for me and for a few other sisters that I personally know of, it manifested in an eating disorder. You know, I began to binge any moment I had to eat because I was like, this might be the last time I get to eat today. And so I would eat until I had horrible stomach pains. I was so full because I was so scared that I was just not going to have enough energy to finish my day, because that's what started to happen. By the evenings, I would be dragging my feet because the energy to lift my foot to take a step was too much.

Lauren Rogers [00:56:03] And so I. Yeah, it was, it was really. That was just really hard for me. Um, and at the end of my mission, I finally started eating dinner I was like, this is ridiculous. Like, I am a human being. I am not a machine. I'm going to eat dinner. And, you know, that was with my last companion and I, we started eating dinner and like, pushing back at the mission culture, which is ridiculous to think that eating dinner is pushing back. But, yeah, that's.

Guest [00:56:33] I don't want to go. Like, I. I want this to be a very nice episode for believing people. But all I'm thinking about is the. The documentary going clear. Have you seen that on Scientology? And I remember them talking about, like, just the way that the volunteers on the Sea Org would be like, begging to, you know, scrub the floor with a toothbrush kind of things where, like, there are people in organizations who have altruistic gold. I think we all do as human beings for our tribe, for the love of humanity, to do hard things. And that's a beautiful part, but at the cost of sacrificing, when that is just the.

Guest [00:57:10] The tools of undue influence that John always likes to bring up that are employed when you're in such a vulnerable space away from your family. And yeah, these tools of undue influence that can be really utilized in kind of frightening ways. And I'm sure you're going to keep getting into more and more and more, but all I have is just this image of like, the way that people will scrub the floor with their toothbrush if they believe in a cause enough. And like, you'll stop eating dinner. You'll. You'll do all of these things. You'll like, almost kill yourself for this, this, quite honestly, this beautiful goal that you believe in, the salvation for the Chilean people.

Guest [00:57:43] But if it comes at the cost of, you know, a lifelong detrimental effects of your health, there needs to be checks and balances to make sure that people are not set up for these types of, like, massive failures of this, this system, this missionary program. So that's just. That's the image that's running through my head right now. People on floor, toothbrushes.

Lauren Rogers [00:58:04] But that kind of describes how I was, I was, you know, sacrificing so much, but I was doing it enthusiastically. I was. I was happy to give God everything that I had. For sure. That's how I felt. Yeah, I guess I'll share Mormonism.

John Dehlin [00:58:22] Sacrifice is a virtue. And on a mission, it's even amplified. And so like the. It's almost glorified. The more you're in pain, the more you're suffering, in some sense, the more unhealthy and unsanitary the conditions, the more of a faithful, valiant missionary you are. I remember on my mission there was an area called Polo Cheek, which was like no electricity, no indoor plumbing, tarantulas and scorpions. And people would get sick with stomach illnesses that sometimes would last years after their mission. And that was the most honorable place to serve. And the missionaries there were viewed sort of like the, the Navy seals or the green berets of the mission. And those elders were the ones that were made assistance to the president. But. And some, you know, learned character, others were harmed in ways that, that had medium to long term consequences. And that's just part of this ethic of righteousness and sacrifice.

Glorifying Sacrifice and Suffering in Mission Culture

Lauren Rogers [00:59:28] Yeah, absolutely. That 100% describes my mission culture. Sacrifice and pain and suffering and danger and health crises were glorified. And that's awful, but that's absolutely what the culture was.

Guest [00:59:42] And it makes you feel like the church is more true when you hear those stories, like you sacrificed what you did. What? There's this YouTube channel, I think it's called Lifey now, but it used to just have mission stories from people who had different missions all around the world. And they come on and somebody would interview them for their YouTube channel. And when I was Mormon, I would watch all of them. I thought missionary stories were fascinating. When you hear somebody went through something really, really difficult like getting malaria on their mission, or I remember hearing a story about somebody who was in Africa and they slept half of the day, half of the night on their, their mattress, but then when it got too hot because they didn't have air conditioning, they would roll and they'd sleep on the cold floor.

Guest [01:00:15] And that's how they spent their mission, was sleeping half on the tile floor, half on their, on their mattress on the floor, over and over. And you hear those stories and you're like, they did it for this beautiful altruistic goal of like, bringing souls to Christ. And when you put it in that context, if it is true that that's a beautiful sacrifice that that person made and you kind of anything to do with like, their mental sanity and like their health is kind of on the back burner because you start out with the presupposition that it's true, and then the sacrifice is worth it. So I know to Mormons, like, it's a, it's an incredibly, like, uplifting story of the sacrifices that, that people go through.

Guest [01:00:51] But if we back up and question not even if the church is true, but just if the system in place is just healthy for human flourishing whatsoever, if we can. We don't even need to go on the truth claims of the church. Is this healthy to set up our young people for. To be putting themselves in the situation? That's the question I think that we're going to be talking about the most. Is, like, the system at play here. The. The. The rights, quite honestly, the rights of young people who sign up, who volunteer their time. What are they entitled to? What. What do they have a right to when they.

Guest [01:01:21] When they sacrifice so much for, again, this altruistic goal? That's. That can be beautiful in a lot of ways. So. So where does your story go from there?

Lauren Rogers [01:01:29] Yeah, I think there's two more short, impactful things that happened to me before I'll get into. Once I began to get really sick on my mission. And the first thing was I started to teach a. A lesbian couple. And I just fell in love with them. I. I thought they were amazing. I thought that their family was beautiful and the love they had for each other was beautiful. And. And, you know, I. I just so deeply cared about these two sisters that I was teaching. And, you know, on maybe our fourth lesson with them, I. We left the lesson, my companion and I. And I just cried because I was like, I. I can't. I can't keep teaching them because if they accept the gospel, their family will be torn apart. Like, they love each other. They are a family, and I can't do that to them.

Guest [01:02:31] They had kids as well?

Lauren Rogers [01:02:32] No, they didn't have kids, but. But, yeah, it was just heartbreaking. I told my companion that I couldn't do it anymore, and she, of course, was like, yes, you can, because it'll be better for them in the next life. And, you know, no concern about what this life. It's all concern about the next life. Any degree of suffering in this life is worth it to Mormons because of the glories of the next life. But.

Guest [01:02:58] And you had, like, continual lessons with them. They invited you back.

Lauren Rogers [01:03:00] Yeah.

Guest [01:03:01] Okay. So they were, like, interested.

Lauren Rogers [01:03:02] Yeah, they were interested. And I told my companion, I'm like, I'm not doing it anymore. I'm not teaching them. And she convinced me and said that we should, and I agreed. But then I was a senior companion, and I just didn't book any more appointments, and I.

Lauren Rogers [01:03:16] Yeah, it was just. It was too painful for me that the issues I had with the church's stances on LGBTQ people was just too. Too much for me to bear the suffering of having to teach them. And. And, you know, my. Like I mentioned, my brother was gay, and he had come out to me before my mission. And he had gotten home from his mission, right. Right before I left on mine. And so I was on my mission when he was actually excommunicated for being gay.

Lauren Rogers [01:03:52] And that was another huge event in my mission. It just absolutely broke my heart. And I felt, I felt like I lost my eternal family. I felt like I was there in Chile trying to help other people get an eternal family. And I had lost that myself because, you know, it's, it wouldn't be complete without my brother. And my brother couldn't be in the, in the celestial kingdom with me anymore. And so that was just so, so hard for me to, to deal with. But, you know, it made me, you know, dig into the gospel even more and say, like, if I can't have it, at least other people can, you know, and really try to, to get more converts. Even though now I look back and say, thankfully I didn't have any converts. So.

Guest [01:04:42] Can I ask you a question? I hope you're not embarrassed to answer this because I have a very embarrassing answer as well. So you said that you stopped booking appointments and maybe your companion had the idea that if people try hard enough, they can change their sexual orientation with the gospel. Did you have that opinion?

Lauren Rogers [01:05:00] No, I didn't, I didn't have that opinion. And I was very vocal to my companion, making sure she understood. When she told me that, that I'm like, that's not true.

Guest [01:05:09] Okay.

Lauren Rogers [01:05:10] It's not a choice. Like, if it was a choice, you know, why in the world would, would people choose that when they're Mormon? Like, that's just asking for pain, you know?

John Dehlin [01:05:20] Yeah, yeah, makes sense.

Guest [01:05:22] Got it.

John Dehlin [01:05:23] Okay. So you stop teaching the lesbian couple.

Lauren Rogers [01:05:27] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:05:28] And that's kind of compassionate.

Lauren Rogers [01:05:31] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:05:31] Because you'd only set them up for trouble.

Lauren Rogers [01:05:33] Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:05:34] I mean, for those who don't know they're going to be asked for baptism, you have to be interviewed by a missionary. But there are certain sins that if they've been committed, like abortion, and I'm saying sins in quotes for those who can't see, like abortion or being in a same sex relationship or murder. Those are the three things. So again, being LGBT is comparable to murder. Then you would have to like do an interview with the mission president or whatever and they would just nothing about

Guest [01:06:05] if you've ever like, molested someone or sex.

John Dehlin [01:06:07] No, no, no, that's not, that's, that's not a question. I don't think so. Oh. I mean, unless I'm, Unless they've changed somebody.

Guest [01:06:13] Tell us in the comments, but go on.

John Dehlin [01:06:15] No, no, no. It's just. It's just. It's just the gays we're worried about most. So anyways, they would have been put through the ringer and embarrassed. And. And so it's.

Lauren Rogers [01:06:23] It's actually separate.

John Dehlin [01:06:25] What's that? And forced to separate if they wanted to get baptized. So it was actually a very compassionate move on your part to drop them.

Lauren Rogers [01:06:31] Yeah.

Guest [01:06:32] I think you know how, like, every member of missionary, and you're always asked when you're Mormon, like, do you have anybody that might want to hear the missionary's message and stuff? And you have to, like, go through your Rolodex of, like, who do I want to, like, annoy them? Who's gonna, like. You know, thankfully, in la, most of my friends were lesbians. And I was like, you're not gonna do it. This is not gonna fit. So it's actually. It's a pretty good. It's a pretty good, like, fail safe. Like, what are you gonna do? Oh, nobody's interested. Everybody are disqualified. Darn it. They don't have to sit through the missionary lessons.

Lauren Rogers [01:07:00] Exactly.

Guest [01:07:01] Yeah.

Lauren Rogers [01:07:02] Yeah. And then after that, that's when my health really started to decline. I started getting sick a lot.

John Dehlin [01:07:08] How much of that do you think was kind of stress? Oh, and depression and anxiety about being in a mission, kind of like advocating for something you didn't necessarily feel great about.

Lauren Rogers [01:07:21] Absolutely. I think that that had a huge, you know, portion of. Of why that happened. And not to mention, you know, lack of good nutrition and overworking, you know, being exposed to the elements all day, every day, that definitely contributed. And this. It was just like my sicknesses just started to get really intense. Like, I would be unable to get out of bed. Like, I needed help from my companion to walk to the bathroom.

John Dehlin [01:07:48] I.

Lauren Rogers [01:07:50] And I had conversations with my mission president about how sick I was. At one point, you know, I. I had been sick for, I think, a week and literally unable to get out of bed even to feed myself. And my companion at the time was.

Lauren Rogers [01:08:10] She won't watch this. She was crazy. And I. She didn't even. She abandoned me basically. All day I would just shiver and be cold because she would take the heater. We didn't have central heating. We had a little space heater. She would take the heater away from me and go do arts and crafts in our study room while I. Oops, sorry. While I, you know, froze to death and was sick and couldn't get out of bed in the bedroom. And she wouldn't feed me because I couldn't get out of bed to eat. And so I just, I wouldn't eat until the sisters who lived with us would get home at 10 o' clock and then they would feed us or feed me.

Lauren Rogers [01:08:43] And so it's just, it was just a week of me not being able to sleep because I was in so much pain. And, and finally when I was able to speak to the mission president, I told him how sick I was and I was expecting him to call an ambulance for me because I thought I was dying. And once again he said a prayer for me over the phone when he could have once again at least come and seen me. He was 10 minutes away. He could have given me a blessing, but he didn't, he gave me a prayer and, and the, he didn't say this, but I, the sense I got from him was, you've been sick long enough, like, let's get better, have faith and keep working. And so that's what I did. My pushed through.

Guest [01:09:29] And also for context, a mission president's job is pretty much just to take care of the mission. It's not like he has another job he has to go to.

Lauren Rogers [01:09:35] Yeah, no, he didn't have, he's pretty

Guest [01:09:37] much just there to do that.

John Dehlin [01:09:38] So, and, and if we going to try and like be tough on systems and not people, you know, he's in charge of like 100, 150 companionships, 2 to 300 missionaries, all spread out throughout the super large area. I'm not making excuses for him. There are mission presidents and their wives that are more or less compassionate, more or less abusive. But I, I, you know, but there's this weird combination of not really valuing science, not really valuing medicine, and being in developed countries where you're trying to do everything on the cheap. And then, you know, who, who wants to be responsible for 200 to 300 people?

John Dehlin [01:10:16] And I'm just going to say something that may or may not be distressing to you, but I'm just going to be fully honest. Amongst the patriarchy of a mission, there was always kind of this, you know, gossip about the sister missionaries that were problems. It's like, oh, Sister Jones, she gets sick all the time or stays in bed all the time, or she's really emotional and without meaning to be like judgmental or offensive.

John Dehlin [01:10:46] And it's all without a really, not just a lack of understanding about mental health but like, but without a care or concern because virtue and a mission. Like, I'm thinking about my mission. I think there was a three month period where I had diarrhea. Excuse me, Every single day. I was super sick. My stomach had sharp, severe pains.

John Dehlin [01:11:09] Heavy gas and gas. Just imagine what walking around all day with heavy gas and diarrhea is like. As a missionary, it's often once or twice, you know, on an outing, you'd have to go back to your office to change your garments, like, but it was a virtue. You never stayed home. You just pushed through and you did the Lord's work and you worked extra hard. So there's this again, this ethic of pushing through on your mission and a disrespect for the weak or the fragile that are sick a lot or that stay home a lot because you're supposed to push through if you're sick. And so I can just assure you that between the mission president, maybe his wife, and the missionary leadership on the mission, it was just like, oh my gosh, Sister Rogers, she's sick again. You know, I don't know. Did you ever feel that? Did you even know that was happening?

Lauren Rogers [01:11:57] Yeah, no.

John Dehlin [01:11:58] How does that help your mental and physical health?

Lauren Rogers [01:12:00] Yeah, no, it definitely didn't. And, and I'll agree that, that it, it is the system, not the person. Like, I don't, Well, I don't 100% blame my mission president. I think that he was irresponsible, but I understand why. I understand that he truly believed in the dogma that was unhealthy of the mission culture. And, and he truly believed that a prayer would be enough.

Lauren Rogers [01:12:26] And so I don't put all the blame on him. And, and yes, I, I agree that there, there was this sense that you did need to push through and that, yeah, sisters were problems if they were anything but successful and silent. You know, like, I, I had several issues with mission leaders because I spoke up, you know, when, when they did something that was incorrect. You know, I, I knew the gospel backwards and forwards. I, I knew all of the priesthood protocols and I, I knew all of that. And I, I had no shame in saying, hey, that's not the way things are supposed to be done.

Lauren Rogers [01:13:04] And you know, that was, that caused a lot of judgment from my leaders, a lot of, Yeah, I think by the end of my mission, I probably was seen as a problem sister because one, I was getting sicker and sicker and two, because I, you know, I didn't, I took some things laying down, but I didn't take everything laying down. I did, you know, stand up for, especially the other sisters. I was over at one point when I was A sister training leader. I, you know, was defending some of the sisters who were being berated by the zone leaders. And I was very, very vocal of saying, like, no, like, I'm the one who's doing exchanges with these sisters and I'm the one telling you that they're good missionaries and they're being obedient.

Lauren Rogers [01:13:52] Like, I don't care that they don't have baptisms. Like, you're not going to rebuke them or. He was asking me to rebuke them. I said, I'm not going to rebuke them. Yeah. For not being obedient, to not trying hard enough. And I'm like, no, I'm not going to do that. And he got the assistance involved, that zone leader, to, to correct me. And that was just devastating because, you know, it's expected that a, that you submit to your leaders even when they're wrong. And it's expected that you just say sorry and that you're humble and, you know, if you disagree with your leaders, then you're prideful.

Lauren Rogers [01:14:30] And that's so dangerous because one of the sisters that he was asking me to rebuke later went home early, was severely depressed. I can only imagine the damage that would have happened if I would have rebuked her for her lack of success. Like, that would have been seriously damaging. And, and so, yeah, it's dangerous that people that, you know, 18 year olds had authority over me and could tell me what to do. And if I didn't do it, then, you know, I was shamed. Like, that's just not a good setup to have. It's just a recipe for disaster.

John Dehlin [01:15:07] Yeah. I'm so sorry. It's not fun.

Lauren Rogers [01:15:09] That's okay. Yeah, I got over it.

Mission President's Response and Coming Home

John Dehlin [01:15:13] Another thing that people don't know is when you. Okay, there's this weird combination of. And this is just bringing back all sorts of memories because I had a traumatic mission for sure. When you arrive in a foreign country as a Mormon missionary, they take your passport.

Lauren Rogers [01:15:27] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:15:27] You literally. They put it in. And I think their justification is that

Lauren Rogers [01:15:31] they don't want you to lose it.

John Dehlin [01:15:32] They don't want you to lose it because then you can't go home. So they put it in a safe. But the net effect of that is you can't come home even if you want to. Yeah, you would have to go to the mission president. But then the mission presidents, they're. They get demerits from their leadership if too many missionaries go home. So the, the area authorities and the general authorities are always pressuring mission presidents to never let anyone come home early. And you're looked at as a worse mission president if people go home early. So there's this weird sense of you don't have your own control of your own money. Month to month, you get an allotment that's way too small. You can't. You don't have control of your own passport. And then if you get sick, you don't have proper medical care. They're trying to do everything.

Lauren Rogers [01:16:16] You don't have your insurance card, so you can't get.

John Dehlin [01:16:18] You don't have insurance card, and they don't want you to go home. So there's this denial about whether you're sick and whether you're really sick and whether it's just a bad attitude or laziness. And then again, this culture of work really hard and work through, push through the pain. It's a death, I don't want to say death trap. It's a very negative trap for legitimate physical or mental health illnesses.

Lauren Rogers [01:16:46] Yeah, absolutely. I should, 100% should have gone home early from my mission. The last three months of my mission, I was so extremely ill. And, and, and yeah, you know, it's. If I would have been able to get proper medical care and go home early and rest, then I am sure that I would not be disabled. I am sure that I never would have, you know, developed me.

Lauren Rogers [01:17:16] And, you know, my doctors agree with me that I, that the reason I became so ill was because there was that shame of it wasn't an option to go home early. Just like going to the doctor wasn't really an option. Like, the mission president never preached against it, never told us we couldn't go to the doctor. It just culturally wasn't an option. You just didn't ask to go to the doctor. You informed them when you were sick, but they got to tell you what the proper treatment was. And in my case, the proper treatment was a prayer over the phone. And so, so, yeah, I just kept pushing.

Lauren Rogers [01:17:52] And at the very end of my mission, that's when it got really, really bad. I was severely fatigued all the time. I found out after my mission that I had actually contracted mono from one of the other sisters I lived with who had mono. I don't know how she got it, but I must have shared a drink with her or something. I don't know. But I got it from her. And, you know, if those of you who don't know when you have mono, like, the treatment is lay in bed and don't get up for four weeks. Like you have to, have to rest. And if you don't, it can worsen your symptoms and even prolong your symptoms up to a year.

Lauren Rogers [01:18:29] And so obviously I didn't get to rest. When I got mono, I worked the same amount of days. I worked every single day, 16 plus hour days, walking all day. And that just really destroyed my body. Towards the end of the mission, just walking was difficult. And my poor companion, I walked so extremely slow and it was the fastest I could walk. And I felt like such a lazy missionary, but all I could do was just to keep shuffling my feet forward.

Lauren Rogers [01:19:04] I, you know, in the last three months of my mission, I. Shoes that had lasted me like way long just were gone because I couldn't pick my feet up. I was just dragging my feet everywhere. And you know, it was just so much neglect. And I was treated as if I was trunky.

John Dehlin [01:19:25] Tell us what that means.

Lauren Rogers [01:19:26] So trunky is like at the end of your mission, it's like when you get more lazy or don't, don't follow the rules as well because you're just ready to go home. And I was ready to go home, but I didn't let that affect my, my obedience or my diligence or my righteousness. Like, I was devoted to, to being the best missionary I could be, even when I was so sick I could barely walk. And you know, and you know, I, I started having lots of feelings by that time, you know, that. Sorry, I keep saying, you know, by that time I started to feel like my mission president was disappointed in me.

Lauren Rogers [01:20:10] He hadn't offered me the medical care I needed, had denied me enough money, and, you know, I had been demoted from being a sister training leader after I had that incident with the, the assistants and the zone leader. And so I felt like something's off. He has abandoned me.

Lauren Rogers [01:20:33] And so I emailed him when I only had a few weeks left in my mission. And I asked him, I said, like, seems like you're disappointed and I trust in your discernment as my leader. Like, I know I don't have that much left in my mission, but I want to be the best missionary I can be. So please tell me, like, what I can do, what I've done wrong so that I can be a better missionary. And he didn't respond. And I thought, that's okay. He probably just wants to speak to me in person. Like, I'm going to have my exit interview soon. It's okay.

Lauren Rogers [01:21:05] He'll address it there. And then when I got to the interview, he started to speak about, I believe, his brother in law, who didn't serve a very faithful mission and felt guilty about it for 25 years after he served his mission and felt all this shame and all this regret. And he's telling this big long story instead of asking me questions in an interview. And I felt extremely uncomfortable because it felt like it was going in a very hurtful place. And then he shared that finally his brother in law was able to repent of his unfaithful mission service and he could feel peace. And he told me that he didn't want me to experience that type of shame or regret for not serving faithfully.

Lauren Rogers [01:21:51] And so he invited me to repent and extended that invitation. And I, you know, being an obedient missionary, accepted. I accept sobbingly. I accepted that. I said, yes, I will repent, having no idea what on earth he was talking about, because I was perfectly obedient.

Lauren Rogers [01:22:07] And then he said, great, do you have any questions for, for me before I end the interview? And I was like, what did I do? I asked him, I referenced my email. I'm like, what is it that you think I need to be doing better? And he didn't answer my question, but instead went on a monologue about who my future husband was going to be. Kind of prophesied to me about my future husband, and then ended the interview. And I, you know, walked out to my companion and I said, I need to go to the bathroom. And I went to the bathroom and just sobbed for probably 30 minutes.

Lauren Rogers [01:22:43] And she thought I was crying because I didn't want to go home. And finally I told her, like, he told me I needed to repent. And she was like, for what? Like, she was my companion. She knew how obedient and how diligent I was. And I just said, I don't know. He didn't tell me.

Lauren Rogers [01:22:58] And I. And that was the moment that I. That really broke me on my mission. I was just like, I gave every, like, my health is crap and I can barely walk. And I did that because I love God and the things I get is my mission. You're paying, I'm paying.

John Dehlin [01:23:16] And it's a year and a half of your life.

Lauren Rogers [01:23:18] Yeah. And the things I got was repent. And so. And this, this will show you how, you know, dogmatically obedient I was that night. You know, I got on my knees and I was like, well, I committed to my mission president that I was going to repent. And I have to obey. Like, I have to follow through with my Commitment. And so I knelt on the ground for hours because I couldn't. Just trying to think of something I could repent for. And then ultimately I realized, yes, I have something. And I repented for having bad feelings for my mission president. And then I went to bed with a clear conscience.

Lauren Rogers [01:23:52] And, you know, I knew I had lived my mission. I knew how obedient I was, and I knew that any God I loved, the God that I knew was. Was proud of me. And so at that point, I was like, I have to just not care what this mission president who's wrong thinks of me and accept that God is pleased with my effort, that I gave him everything that I had.

Lauren Rogers [01:24:22] And so I went home and was very ready to take off that badge. I, you know, got released as soon as I could, and I was actually released with my sister. We served our missions at the same time, since we're the same age. And I remember my stake president, he was, you know, there to release me or whatever. And he said he was going to say a closing prayer, and then as we could keep wearing our badges until the end of the night, but after, like, once we went to bed, we needed to take off our badge because we weren't, like, authorized to wear it anymore.

Lauren Rogers [01:25:01] And then he offered a prayer. And I immediately took. Took it off and put it on the table. Like, during the prayer. I was so ready to get it off. And my mom, when she opened her eyes after the prayer, saw it on the table and, like, gasped. She was like, lauren, like, why'd you take it off so fast? Because she, at that point, didn't know how traumatic my mission had been. And. And, yeah, it was just that started a phase of, like, deep depression and lots of doubt.

John Dehlin [01:25:28] When I started my mission, I think my brother, if I'm remembering right, he took me to the airport to say goodbye, because you could back then. And he said to me. He literally said this to me. He said, you have two years to serve and the rest of your life to think about it.

John Dehlin [01:25:44] And, you know, and you're also sort of told that, like, your service is going to make the difference as to whether or not some people obtain salvation and make it to the celestial kingdom and others don't. And so the level of guilt and shame that can be heaped upon you is just so severe sometimes, depending on how scrupulous and conscientious you are. If you're one of those missionaries that just doesn't really believe it and you just take everything with a grain of salt and blow it off and have fun, and you don't take it seriously. You don't care. But if you're, like, one of the really scrupulous ones, it really weighs on you.

John Dehlin [01:26:19] And then when you add to the fact that. That you believe that your mission president literally, again, speaks to and for God. One of the most radical things I think I've ever said on Mormon Stories podcast is that it should be illegal to claim to speak for God. And that's heretical because that's every religion ever. Right. Except for the fact that I just think it's too much power.

Lauren Rogers [01:26:40] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:26:40] It's too much power to give any human to. To believe that they tell you what God's will is. I think that crosses into the level of overt abuse.

Lauren Rogers [01:26:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:26:54] Because when your mission president is telling you, Lauren Rogers, that you need to repent and he's disappointed in you, who's really telling you that?

Guest [01:27:04] God.

John Dehlin [01:27:05] Right? Am I right? Am I exaggerating?

Lauren Rogers [01:27:07] Exactly. He was supposed to be speaking for God. And that. Yeah, it was heartbreaking for someone that's

John Dehlin [01:27:13] conscientious and trying their hardest. What's. What does that feel like?

Lauren Rogers [01:27:17] It feels terrible. I felt like, you know, I just. The only thing that gave me comfort was a scripture in the Book of Mormon that talks about, like, you know, the Son of Man descends below them all and. And that he was considered a devil, you know, and so realizing that, like, this is. At the time I thought, like, this makes me more like Christ. Like, that people think incorrect things about me. Like, he was a Son of God and they thought he was a devil. They called him a devil. And I served a faithful mission, and my mission president thinks that I didn't. And I had to be like, that's just okay. Like, that's a humiliating, horrifying experience, but it brings me closer to Jesus, so it's okay. And that's how I rationalized that abuse away when I was still believing.

John Dehlin [01:28:05] Yeah. The other thing I'll just say is that it can become really serious. My. One of. One of the most traumatic moments of my life was finding out that my roommate from my freshman year at BYU, his name was Monty McCotter, and we knew each other in high school.

John Dehlin [01:28:23] We became BYU roommates. Really loved the guy. Funny, great guy. Goes to, I believe, Puerto Rico. On his mission, he was hit by a car and killed. And missionaries die pretty much every month. A Mormon missionary somewhere dies at least.

John Dehlin [01:28:39] And so the stakes are really high. So if the church is true. If the church is really true, then, yeah, like, you know, If Islam's true, then those men who flew those planes into the Twin Towers are heroes and they'll have 50 virgins when they die. And they're doing what Allah wants. But if that church isn't true, then those deaths are in vain.

John Dehlin [01:29:03] And if the church isn't true, then what you suffered on your mission that is still affecting you today was just an abuse. An organization that claims to be one thing, but really isn't, and people making these severe sacrifices monetarily time wise, and then mental and physical health, making these huge sacrifices for something that again, with informed consent isn't what it claims to be. And then that all of a sudden makes what's a noble sacrifice kind of like abusive or deadly, you know, and now that the church is ramping up, you know, the church is like, you know, we just did a recent episode with former Mormon Bishop Simon Southerton from Australia talks about DNA in the Book of Mormon and how the church is shrinking all over the world now that the church is like dying in Mexico and Latin America and the Philippines and Asia and the United States, except for the birth rate.

John Dehlin [01:29:58] The church is playing a numbers game where they're sending all the missionaries to Africa and they're sending all these missionaries to sub Saharan Africa. You know, the branches and the wards and the stakes and the temples are all going bananas in Africa.

John Dehlin [01:30:11] But what's the unforeseen cost of the physical and mental health of those missionaries serving in Ghana and Kenya and South Africa and Zimbabwe and all these countries where the conditions possibly are even way worse than what you and I experience in Latin America? I would love to do right now. I'm calling on any sub Saharan Africans who have joined the church who want to come on warmer stories and talk about joining the church from sub Saharan Africa. I want to interview you and anyone who served a mission in Sub Saharan Africa and had a rough time of it. I want to hear your stories as well.

John Dehlin [01:30:51] So that's a call out right now. Anyway. That's a little bit more of my, my rant, my little monologue about unsafe missions. They can and often are deadly. Whether it's physical or mental issues, disease, or even unsafe living conditions like, you know, leaky gas pipes that end up exploding, car accidents, people getting run over or again, murder or assault or rape. It happens every day. Every day in the world. A Mormon missionary is either killed, raped, assaulted, or neglected in some serious way. And I don't mean to laugh about it, but sometimes I laugh about things that are traumatic.

Lauren Rogers [01:31:31] Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that that's such a big issue in the church. And, and I think believing members are starting to see that as well. I mean, I know my parents, who are very believing, completely understand and are on my side about my mission experience. And I just hope that the church can wise up a bit about how they treat their missionaries and, and the system. Because that's the thing is, yes, there was lots of different people who treated me poorly or neglected me on my mission, but it's because of the system. It's because that's how it's set up. It's set up to suppress doubt or suppress, you know, concerns and to glorify, like we said, unsafe situations and things that have detrimental consequences. So, yeah, I completely agree. It's awful and it needs to be fixed.

John Dehlin [01:32:33] Yeah. Okay, so you get home and what do you want to say about the aftermath?

Returning Home Disabled and Seeking Healing

Lauren Rogers [01:32:40] Yeah, I think for me, I was blessed again with health. When I got home from my mission, I received a priesthood blessing and I was blessed that I would heal from this illness. I hadn't been diagnosed yet, but I was blessed that I would heal upon my faithfulness. And like I said, upon my faithfulness, that's such a abusive term because then when you don't get healed, then it's your fault. And that's just not true. There's just nothing that I did wrong to be disabled. Like, I'm sure several people in the comments might argue I should have advocated my for myself more. I should have demanded to go to the doctor or I should have went.

Lauren Rogers [01:33:22] Walked myself to the doctor. But that just wasn't a possibility. You know, I didn't know where the doctors were. I didn't know how to get there. I didn't have enough money to pay. I didn't have my insurance cards, and I didn't want to be disobedient. My mission president told me what to do, and so I did it.

Lauren Rogers [01:33:38] And so there was so much shame. I didn't want anyone to know how sick I was because there was that assumption that they were going to think that I was disobedient and that I wasn't protected because I wasn't a good missionary. And it was so heartbreaking when I felt my mission president thought that about me. I couldn't bear my friends and family thinking that about me. And so I, you know, hid. I hid my illness from everyone but my immediate family. I was on bed rest when I got home for three months. And so my immediate family knew. My sister was the one who had to bring me food and help Me walk to the bathroom.

Lauren Rogers [01:34:17] And so she knew how sick I was, and my parents knew how sick I was, and. But I didn't want anyone else to know because of how embarrassed I was that, you know, I just felt like I didn't have enough faith, and that's why I wasn't healed and people were going to think I was disobedient. And so even once I got my diagnosis, which is a mouthful, it's myalgic encephalomyelitis, which is a chronic illness with no cure.

Lauren Rogers [01:34:40] Basically means I have about 10% of the normal energy that a person would have. And so my entire life, I is focused on expending the least amount of energy possible. So I have to use a wheelchair if I'm going to be walking more than five or 10 minutes. You know, if I am fatigued, I lose my balance, so I have to use a cane.

Lauren Rogers [01:34:59] I have an even more strict diet because everything makes my fatigue or my headaches or my chronic pain worse. And, you know, I could go on that. There's lots of other symptoms, but it just.

John Dehlin [01:35:09] So you came home and got a diagnosis?

Lauren Rogers [01:35:11] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:35:11] How long did it take?

Lauren Rogers [01:35:12] It took. So I got a diagnosis of mono pretty quickly.

John Dehlin [01:35:18] Yeah, that's.

Lauren Rogers [01:35:20] But it took a few years for me actually to be diagnosed with, you know, because there's so another. It's also known as chronic fatigue syndrome. People are kind of moving away from that name just because it's kind of a misnomer. That's only one of the, like, nine symptoms.

Lauren Rogers [01:35:39] And so. And it's. There's also a lot of stigma around it. A lot of people think it's like a fake disease when it's very well documented to be an actual physiological issue with your cells. Like, they. They have even, like, have tests for it now. Like, it's. It's not fake, but there's kind of a stigma that it's like, all in your head. And so that was another reason I was kind of ashamed to tell people, because I. I was too afraid at that time of what people would think of me. And. And so, yeah, it took a few years, but I did get the diagnosis eventually that my mono, because mono is one of the.

Lauren Rogers [01:36:15] The triggers, I guess you could say that there's several different ways you can get chronic fatigue syndrome, or me and a virus or overexerting yourself. And I had both can cause it. And so, you know, every time you get a virus, you're not going to get chronic fatigue syndrome. And so that's why my doctor Was very confident in saying that because you didn't rest because you worked through such a hard virus. You developed me.

Lauren Rogers [01:36:43] And so the diagnosis brought peace because I knew I wasn't crazy and it wasn't in my head because, you know, it took a while to get diagnosed. But it's also devastating because like I said, there is no cure and there is no treatment. They can give me painkillers, but painkillers come with their own side effects. And that's really it.

John Dehlin [01:37:02] That's really go away over time.

Lauren Rogers [01:37:04] It can go in remission. It never goes away, but it can go in remission. I know several people who have had remissions of like 10 years before it came back, or sometimes some people are lucky enough to have it go into remission completely and never come back.

Lauren Rogers [01:37:20] So that's always the goal. That's what I will hope will happen to me as I am always trying new treatments. There's lots of different treatments available that are supposed to supposedly help, but none of them like, are like FDA approved. This is the cure type thing. It's just like, you can try this, this might help you, you know. So that's kind of where I am at this point in my life, is trying to heal and take care of myself, you know, because I didn't for years after my mission as I was trying to hide it. So I didn't use a wheelchair because then people would know that I, you know, was, was sick.

Lauren Rogers [01:37:58] And so I would just. I went to BYU right after my mission and I would, you know, walk to the Life Science building because I was south of campus, and then take the elevator up because I couldn't climb the stairs. It was way too difficult for me to climb those huge long stairs up to campus. And I would just walk. I would be late to all my classes because of how slowly I had to walk. I would have to call in sick a lot to my job. But I did end up telling my boss that about my condition, so she was understanding.

Lauren Rogers [01:38:28] And I would just come home every day, like smiling, pretending like everything was happening as I walk, walk down the street. And then the second I was inside my house, I would literally collapse onto my couch. And that's just like how I lived for years.

Lauren Rogers [01:38:44] And yeah, I was. It was really hard to know that my, the reward for my faithful service was, you know, feeling like death all the time.

John Dehlin [01:38:57] Yeah, I'm so sorry. I was going to say this reliance on priesthood blessings is so problematic. Like if, you know, if somebody had a crystal ball and claimed to be able to like, see some other part of the world through a crystal ball. Or if, you know, if they were a witch doctor that claimed that they could rub, burn something or rub some herbs together and cure illnesses, and they were like, claiming to be legitimate medical practitioners, they would be arrested or put in jail or whatever.

Overreliance on Priesthood Blessings in the Church

John Dehlin [01:39:34] But Mormons to this day are still led to believe that there's this priesthood power that actually can be trusted and relied upon. And there's no evidence at all that that priesthood blessings work. If they did, then every Mormon priesthood holder right now needs to go to every hospital near them and cure everybody with every disease.

John Dehlin [01:40:01] You know, make a business out of it. Like, like, you know, priesthood power does not heal people. People, Mormons die of cancer and they die of illnesses and you know, you know, they don't cure colds, it doesn't cure flus, it doesn't cure cancer. It's just a prayer that people say to kind of make themselves feel good. That's all it is. But, but when you're on the faithful end of it, you make meaningful, significant life decisions, sometimes at the expense of your own safety or, well, being, trusting that something's actually happening when it's not.

John Dehlin [01:40:39] And I don't think we talk about that enough because we're afraid to be disrespectful of people's religious beliefs and we don't want to be super negative or critical of people's sacred religious beliefs. But it's a problem because it's not real. And people's health is real. Their physical, mental health is real.

John Dehlin [01:41:04] And it's a problem that we need to address because it's irresponsible to, for the church to keep teaching its membership that these blessings actually heal and work. You know, there are going to be Mormons that say, no way. I got a blessing and I felt better. Well, guess what? You don't know whether you would have felt better if you hadn't had the blessing. You just don't. That's why we have science to be able to demonstrate that. And the best proof that Mormon priesthood blessings don't work is that no amputee has ever been healed. There's not one instance ever of an amputee being healed or somebody who is decapitated or, you know, the only types of healings that happen are where there's a plausible misdiagnosis occurring or where spontaneous healing or actual physical healing is possible.

John Dehlin [01:41:54] So, yes, a cold, a flu, maybe even some sort of cancer diagnosis or misdiagnosis, some sort of condition that maybe the Doctor didn't fully understand or that would have gone away on its own. Yes, a blessing would have happened in the middle of that experience. And so you can attribute that to your own healing, but there is no evidence that Mormon priesthood blessings actually heal people. None. Ever. And so again, that's a rant. But I think it's, I think it affects people's lives.

Lauren Rogers [01:42:28] Yeah, no, absolutely. I, this morning I was counting up and I was blessed five different times given a priesthood blessing where I was promised that my illness would, would go away. And one of the times was even like, I rebuke the healness and command you to be healed. And it was like this crazy powerful experience. Like spiritually I, I felt all the fiery feelings and nothing happened, nothing changed. And, and yeah, I think that it's, it's irresponsible, but it's also like, no offense but like, really dumb. Like it's just such a circular, circular reasoning. Like if I'm healed, then it's God and if I'm not healed, then it's also God.

Lauren Rogers [01:43:09] Like, it doesn't make sense. It's just confirmation bias when it works. And when it doesn't work, you weren't supposed to be healed. And it's just like so clearly not logical now that I'm on the other side of it. But back then it was, yeah, it was very real of like, you just have to trust. And if you are sick, it's because God wants you to be sick. And what does that do to someone's psyche? To think that God wants me to be sick because I was promised, I was promised the healing and I know I was faithful enough so he wants

John Dehlin [01:43:39] me to be sick or you didn't have enough faith, which again is that blame reversal thing where you just feel worse about something that is totally out of your control. And then lately I think the brethren have caught on that people realize these priesthood blessings don't work and it becomes a, a cause of lack of loss of faith. For some people to get this priesthood blessing and then have it not come true that they've started this rhetoric of have the faith to not be healed. That's a general authority talk that's happened in the past five or 10 years where they're basically saying God's power is everywhere, he'll heal you whenever you get better, and that's that.

John Dehlin [01:44:18] God gets that credit. But whenever, like you said, whenever you, a priesthood blessing doesn't work, it's either you, you didn't have enough faith or like you said, God wants you to be sick or you need to have the faith to not be healed. It's this circular, makes no sense, harms everybody, helps no one other than the church. It helps the church because that circular logic always is reinforcing your faith or your shame.

Lauren Rogers [01:44:45] Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:44:46] So if you're grateful that you got healed, you attribute that to the church, so you like the church more. And then if you don't get healed, you're broken, you're wrong, try harder, do it better, and the church benefits because you give it even more devotion than you had before. So it's a sick circular cluster, something.

Lauren Rogers [01:45:07] Exactly.

Guest [01:45:08] Yeah.

Lauren Rogers [01:45:09] No, I feel like, you know, I have to recognize the positive side of it, too. It can also give people peace, like.

John Dehlin [01:45:16] Or hope.

Lauren Rogers [01:45:17] Yeah, it gave me hope because it's like I had been promised healing and I knew I was being faithful. Like, I was obeying all the commandments and doing everything I was supposed to do. And so I did have that hope that, like, one day I will be healed. And. And that did bring me peace. And. And that was a huge thing in my deconstruction phase. That caused me a lot of fear of, like, how will I ever have hope? Like, if it's not true, then I'm going to be miserable all the time. And if it's not true, then I became disabled for nothing. And if it's not true, I don't get to be resurrected.

Lauren Rogers [01:45:53] That was my only hope, that I would get a resurrected body and not have this broken body anymore. And so it did bring me a lot of hope and peace. But on the other side, I have found significantly more hope and joy and happiness in not believing those things and believing that this is the life I have and I need to enjoy it and. And find ways to experience life in my new disabled state. Because before, it was just all about lamenting the experiences I was losing. You know, lamenting that I can't run anymore. I was a runner before. I loved to exercise. And that's.

Lauren Rogers [01:46:33] I can't do that. I can't be active. I can't chase my daughter around and play with her. I can't push her on the swing or all of those things. It was something that I just lamented that loss, and I was so sad about that loss. And now I can. Instead of doing that, I can focus on what can I do. I can give her rides in my wheelchair. Like, she can sit on my lap and my husband can push, and she loves it, and it's so fun. And. And those are experiences I was missing before because I was so focused on the next life. I was so focused on being faithful so that I could receive that, you know, that reward, that resurrection.

Becoming Disabled and Confronting Sexuality

Lauren Rogers [01:47:19] Sorry, I forgot the word. And so, you know, I. This is pretty dark, but I found myself as a believing member after I became disabled, wishing to die and thinking I was happy. I longed for death because it meant I wouldn't be sick anymore. And don't know how I thought that I was happy because I was happy in looking forward to. To what I would receive, but I wasn't happy in the now, in what I was experiencing. And. And since leaving the church, I have been able to experience so much joy in the now and, you know, not care that I'll never be healed because I have an awesome life.

Lauren Rogers [01:48:05] You know, I have an amazing family. I love my daughter with all my heart. I love my husband. I love the life we built together.

John Dehlin [01:48:11] And we just skipped a whole bunch of stuff.

Lauren Rogers [01:48:13] Yeah, we did, but that's my future. But, yeah, it's just. I'm able to.

John Dehlin [01:48:18] Let's go back and take us to. Let's go back. And so. No. So you go back to BYU and you get your diagnosis.

Guest [01:48:26] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:48:26] And you're disabled.

Lauren Rogers [01:48:28] Yes, but I'm hiding it and full of shame. And dating was very difficult for me because of my sexuality and because.

John Dehlin [01:48:36] Talk about that. Did you start dating?

Lauren Rogers [01:48:39] I started dating and I found that it was just awful. I hated it. It was so scary. I was just nervous. I never had fun on any of my dates. I was just like an awkward, nervous shell of a human. And I. I thought I was just shy, but I just wasn't into guys, you know, Like, I just. That's not what I wanted to do. And I. I didn't. I didn't. I couldn't realize that, you know, it just wasn't an option for me to be gay. Because that didn't serve me. That didn't help me in any way. Yeah, exactly. And so it was. It was just impossible for me to realize that I was gay while I was in the church. And I. Yeah, I just. I also.

John Dehlin [01:49:28] I just have to note this, that if you're not allowed to have sex before you're married, how in the world could you discover your sexuality?

Lauren Rogers [01:49:34] Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:49:35] Right. You just think, well, maybe we'll talk more about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a thing, right?

Guest [01:49:41] Pornography. You can't know what turns you on. Whatever. So whatever shames you the most is probably where your sexuality is.

Lauren Rogers [01:49:49] Exactly. But, yeah, no, I. Yeah, you just

John Dehlin [01:49:53] think, oh, I guess I'm. This is how I. This is what.

Lauren Rogers [01:49:57] This is what I must be.

John Dehlin [01:49:58] This is what it. Well, it's like, this is what being a heterosexual must feel like, is whatever I'm actually feeling.

Lauren Rogers [01:50:04] Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:50:05] And in your case, you were feeling

Lauren Rogers [01:50:06] what I was feeling anxiety and terror around men. And I was like, that must be butterflies, you know, And I was feeling comfort and warmth and, you know, good things around women. And of course, I didn't label that as a crush because I was straight, so that couldn't be a crush. And so my language was just, that's a close friend, you know, like, I. I love that person platonically. And that was just the language. That was the paradigm that I had. And so there was no room for me to discover that I was anything but straight, especially because, you know, there's a difference between. And this is something I learned recently between, like, romantic attraction and sexual attraction. And I did, to some degree, have romantic attraction to men.

Understanding Romantic Versus Sexual Attraction

John Dehlin [01:50:53] Tell us the difference, because my daughter Clara has come out as asexual, and she wrote a book about it called A Little Book of Ace. And that's something that ex Mormon dad never plans on having your kid come out to you as. But one of the really wonderful parts about this book called the Little Book of Ace is it breaks down like five or six different types of attraction. So there's sexual attraction, there's emotional attraction, there's intellectual attraction, there's aesthetic attraction, and there are others, and they're all different. And you can have some, but not others.

Lauren Rogers [01:51:27] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:51:27] So what would you say?

Lauren Rogers [01:51:29] And so learning this has been so helpful for me because I just didn't have the language to understand what my feelings were.

John Dehlin [01:51:35] And so platonic is one. That's friendship, right?

Lauren Rogers [01:51:38] Yeah. So romantic attraction is simply like, I desire, you know, romance with a person. I desire to be connected to that person. I desire to be, you know, close to that person. It just doesn't come with what you would consider sexual attraction, which is like, I want to make out with that person. I want to sleep with that person. You know, I want to, you know, see them naked. That's the sexual attraction. And so I didn't feel that way about men, but I did desire to have closeness with some. Some men. So very select men.

Lauren Rogers [01:52:12] And so ultimately, that's how things worked out with. When I met my husband, like I mentioned before, dating was very stressful for me. I felt very anxious. I did not have a good time on most of my dates. But with my husband, it was just very different.

Lauren Rogers [01:52:29] He was Nervous. And that kind of made me less nervous, if that makes sense. Like, I could tell, you know, he was just. Yeah, he was just different. And so I was able to not feel those anxiety feelings and just feel comfortable. And I'm convinced that's why our relationship developed that, you know, that he.

Lauren Rogers [01:52:49] Yeah, he was able to help me through. And. And it wasn't until we got married that we realized, oh, there's some sexual dysfunction here. You know, like the. Something's not quite right with our sexuality. And we didn't realize then that it was my sexuality that was a problem, that I was, you know, homosexual. I'm just. Just not sexually attracted to men. I'm very much attracted. Sexually attracted to women.

John Dehlin [01:53:16] Yeah. And I. Some of. Some of my listeners have gotten mad at me for saying this as well. But on the one hand, I do believe in sexual fidelity and sexual responsibility. I think that there are lots of problems, physical and mental health and social problems that can come from kind of irresponsible sexual behavior. So I'm not a libertine or whatever the right word would be in that sense. I believe in healthy, responsible sexuality. And I think it is abusive and irresponsible for. For a system to be set up that encourages people to get married before they've had sex.

John Dehlin [01:53:55] Because we all know that, you know, the three. Let's just say three of the main causes of divorce are financial problems, you know, let's just say in laws, and sexual problems. Right? And if you're not able to, you know, know that you have sexual compatibility with somebody and you're not able to find that out until after.

John Dehlin [01:54:19] It's. It's like giving your life savings to a box that you're going to open and you don't know what's in it. Again, there's an element of informed consent. You're. You're giving your life and your eternity to someone. You don't even know if you're fundamentally sexually attracted to them until after you've already signed the deal. And that is. That feels completely irresponsible and unhealthy. And if you ask Natasha Helfer or me or others that work in the mental health field, we're the ones that have to pick up the collateral damage of all these relationships that become super fraught and problematic, and especially because the church adds to that.

John Dehlin [01:54:58] Get married quick without ever having had sex, and then have as many babies as you can. Kids get thrown into the mix, and they can become the closest collateral damage in these relationships as well. So I. I Have a hard time imagining that I wouldn't encourage my kids to absolutely be sexual act sexually active with their girlfriend or boyfriend or partner before they ever decide to commit their lives to them. Am I crazy?

Lauren Rogers [01:55:21] No, you're not. I 100 agree that, you know, obviously teaching my daughter to practice safe sex is really important, but there's nothing immoral in my opinion. About.

John Dehlin [01:55:33] Disagree.

Lauren Rogers [01:55:34] Kara, about sex.

John Dehlin [01:55:35] Do you have different thoughts?

Guest [01:55:36] Not that I disagree. The we're. The only small, slight disagreement is I think we need to add into the element that sexual compatibility changes throughout the marriage whether you're on birth control or again with kids. And so to say that you will align yourself before marriage and that that's the key, that you will stay the same if you, you know, agree on, like, the frequency or sexual attraction or whatever before marriage, that. That will car 60 years of your life. The top priority, no matter what in a marriage is just communication. So whether that's between sexuality or finances or whatever else. So making communication the highest priority is more the way that I would phrase it.

John Dehlin [01:56:15] Sure, absolutely. Yes, I agree with. There's. I have no disagreement on that.

Guest [01:56:18] Right.

John Dehlin [01:56:19] Yeah. But what about the having sex before my understanding. Yeah, basic. Establishing basic sexual compatibility prior to an eternal commitment.

Guest [01:56:28] Yeah, yeah. It's hard for me because I was one of those people before our marriage where it's like, how many things can we get away with before I feel any shame? So we were good. But it's like, good in quotes. Like, yeah, good in quotes. Like, you know, I. If I. If I, in my going back to my Mormon brain, the things I was like, oh, we probably shouldn't have, like, laid on top of each other because that can lead to something else. Which leads to something else. But, like, knowing that, like, okay, if. If we were not married, there would definitely be things that'd be going down. There's not a. There is not a single miscommunication of sexual attraction between us two. And so we knew that going in. So I think maybe we. I don't. I. It's hard to say if. If that is the. I mean, exception to the rule.

John Dehlin [01:57:11] The idea is. So the idea is that if you engage in Levi Lovin or whatever they call it, and you're both attracted to each other, that there's a good chance you would be sexually compatible. And I haven't totally thought about that. And I've never experienced, like, sexual dysfunction in a marriage. So I'm wondering what Natasha might say about whether that's a good test. Levi Lovin is that A good test for sexual compatibility. Maybe it is.

Guest [01:57:35] Were you just, you know, in your head, you're like, if we pretty much, if you, anyone out there who has like a high sex drive in marriage. Mormon, Mormondom. All of that situation where you say to yourself, if I was not Mormon, I know exactly what I'd be doing every single second of your engagement. You know, you're like, how soon can we move up our wedding? All of those things. So that I think plays in, in a good way to forming a good bond like with the person that you're engaged with in, you know, in planning to get married to. So I always have, I've had to learn, I've had to learn a lot of those things that you're talking about because that was not my experience being, being LDS in the church.

Guest [01:58:14] I was like, no, we had very frank discussions about what our sex life would be like. Pretty much that's the only thing you can do is talk about that kind of stuff. You're like, and then we're going to do this and then we're going to do that, but we're not allowed do to. To talk about it. We're not allowed to like do anything, but you can talk all you want when you're engaged. So we had a very clear communication about what a relationship would be like. So it does break my heart that there are people who are conditioned within the church to not even have those conversations, that even those conversations would be seen as sinful and shameful and turns on turn ons.

Guest [01:58:44] But no, like, I think Mormons, we have a really high view of marriage and, and you know, getting divorced and anything like that is seen as a failure. And so I come, I came from a culture in Mormonism where we wanted to set ourselves up for the best marriage. And I felt like even though I got married young, at 19, I knew that having a very frank discussion with the man I was engaged with would be the best way to set us up for success. So it breaks my heart that people don't have that type of discussions and things so.

Lauren Rogers [01:59:15] Well, yeah, I had those types of discussions with. There were plenty of clues that I was gay in that time frame, but I just wasn't in a place where I could acknowledge them. You know, it was the expectation that I got married in the temple and so I had a man willing to marry me in the temple. And, you know, it didn't matter that I was absolutely terrified, you know, to have sex.

John Dehlin [01:59:39] And, and even that can be conceived as just fear around sex, purity, culture. Not necessarily a lack of fundamental attraction.

Lauren Rogers [01:59:48] Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah. And so that's what I thought it was. You know, I almost called off the engagement twice after I got engaged to my husband once because of the. The fear was so intense that I. I was. I started going to therapy about it even, like. And I was just so convinced I was doing everything my therapist told me to do. I wasn't feeling any better. I still did not want to have sex.

Lauren Rogers [02:00:12] And I. Yeah, I almost called off the wedding because of it and ultimately decided not to because I love my husband, but also because of the shame that would have been associated with calling off an engagement. Like, I had already sent out invitations, like, that would have marriage. Exactly. And then the second time I almost called off the engagement was because of the ceremony itself. Like, I was very much a feminist at this point. And the idea of covenanting to my husband to obey him, I was not happy about that.

John Dehlin [02:00:49] Was it hearken or obey? Which was it?

Lauren Rogers [02:00:51] Harken? Hearken unto the counsel of your husband as he hearkens unto counsel of. So, yeah, I was not ready to do it. No, I like that.

Guest [02:00:59] I was not into that heavy sarcasm from John. Just making sure that comes across on the microphone.

Lauren Rogers [02:01:05] Yeah. I was just devastated that I would have to do such a humiliating covenant. And, you know, I. Ultimately, this will show you how amazing my husband is. What convinced me not to call off the wedding. You know, I. Well, I mean, I prayed about it and had spiritual experiences that said I should marry him. And I'm sure that was just hormones or pressure to get married. And I told him what my concern was. I told him that I.

Lauren Rogers [02:01:32] That. That was awful. But I didn't want to covenant to obey him. And he doesn't. He covenants with God to obey God. And I didn't want to give myself to him. And he doesn't give himself to me. He just receives me. And it just was so unfair. And.

Lauren Rogers [02:01:50] And I. I shared that with him and he was so sweet and told me, I don't care that it's not in the temple. I covenant to obey you. And I. And I give myself to you. I covenant with you.

Navigating Intimacy in a Mixed-Orientation Marriage

John Dehlin [02:02:07] How cool is that?

Lauren Rogers [02:02:08] Yeah. And that. And that quelled my fears. And I was like, okay, he's a good. He's a good one. I kind of got to keep him.

Guest [02:02:16] I'm having, like, post Mormon regret that my husband didn't do that.

John Dehlin [02:02:22] Damn it, Aaron, you blew it.

Guest [02:02:24] That's a really good, sweet husband. Yeah, it's really smart of him.

Lauren Rogers [02:02:27] He's Amazing. I'm convinced that he's the only man on earth that I could have a success, a successful marriage with as a lesbian. But, yeah, so that quelled that fear. And I also wanted to just quickly mention that I said dating was hard because of my sexuality. It was also very difficult because of my disability. I had to turn down many dates of, like, do you want to go on a bike ride with me? No, I can't do that. You know, do you want to go on a hike with me? Nope, I can't do that. You know, like, it. And I felt very much like, who would want to marry a disabled person?

Lauren Rogers [02:03:02] Like, nobody, you know, and so that. That also made it very difficult was I was struggling with my health, and I, you know, was struggling with those feelings of anxiety. And then once I actually got engaged, struggling with feelings of lack of that sexual attraction. I. I definitely felt, like, emotionally attracted to him and, like, romantically attracted to him. Like, I wanted to be with him. I loved being around him. We spent every day together. And so there was definitely so much compatibility.

Lauren Rogers [02:03:32] There just was no sexual interest from me, which I didn't. I didn't understand. That's what the problem was. And even. Even after I got married, I didn't understand that was what the problem was. On my wedding night was actually the first time in my life that I had a panic attack. I had two on my wedding night. Was not able to have sex.

Lauren Rogers [02:03:55] That's not surprising, you know, and, you know, my husband, of course, was compassionate and caring and cared about consent, so he didn't push it, you know, like, so that was also a huge sign that I missed, you know, that, yes, purity culture is. Is can make people very afraid to have sex. But my reaction was much more visceral than I think, just purity culture.

John Dehlin [02:04:21] Was it aversion? Aversion?

Lauren Rogers [02:04:25] Oh, yeah. It was absolute. Like, I don't want to see that. I don't want to look at it. I don't want to touch it.

John Dehlin [02:04:30] Like, all of, like, his penis.

Lauren Rogers [02:04:32] Yeah, yeah, I was. It was just absolutely.

John Dehlin [02:04:35] That's real. Like, just think about it for listeners that don't get this. If you happen to be attracted to any body parts of the same or opposite sex, you can get what attraction is. Well, aversion is whether aversion is that certain body parts actually repulse you. And imagine if you're married to a partner where certain body parts actually make you feel sick or bad or gross or super uncomfortable. Imagine what that would be like. A lot of us can't even imagine that unless I'm trying to imagine being with a man. And then I can start to understand from my perspective what you might have been.

Guest [02:05:14] Yeah, anybody just try to say a prayer. Try to think. I am a straight woman. If I had a prayer, if I believed in the Mormon God, and I prayed as hard as I could to be attracted to female genitalia, I could pray on my knees all day and night and cry myself to sleep trying to make it happen. And it wouldn't happen. It would just not happen. And I wish people would really put themselves in people with different sexual orientations and trying to see themselves in their shoes. That that's not something that can be fixed with increased faith, let's say. So I really hope that people understand the aversion is serious. Super serious.

Lauren Rogers [02:05:52] Yeah. And like I said, I had those two panic attacks. And I didn't quite have panic attacks, but I continued to have panic for, you know, months into, into the marriage. When we finally did have intercourse, it was very painful and it continued to be painful for years, you know. And also I now know that you know why. But you know, we just, just the.

John Dehlin [02:06:21] I mean, I'm, I'm not. This is.

Guest [02:06:23] I'll ask the questions, John. Just kind of like I have a friend who had. Has vagina vaginismus. Did you ever have any like, actual diagnosis diagnoses with like the pain for reasons or was it just the aversion that was not able to relax or.

Lauren Rogers [02:06:40] Yeah, so I ended up going a few years into my marriage into a pelvic floor physical therapist who, she was amazing and helped me and work through and, you know, what people don't understand is like your pelvic floor, you know, like, you're. The muscles down there are very sensitive and you, you know, arousal is absolutely necessary for women to, to not have pain.

John Dehlin [02:07:07] And for those who don't understand, explain why. I mean, I know it's graphic, but this is an educational.

Lauren Rogers [02:07:12] Yeah, well, a lot. Just like with men, you know, when men become aroused, there's a physiological thing that happens. Blood rushes to the genitals. The same thing happens to women. You know, your, your vaginal canal actually expands, it, you know, relaxes, it prepares for penetration, basically. And you know, your clitoris will also swell so that there can be pleasure. And none of those things happen for me.

John Dehlin [02:07:36] There's lubrication.

Lauren Rogers [02:07:37] Yeah, lubrication.

John Dehlin [02:07:38] Right.

Lauren Rogers [02:07:39] Self lubrication. So all of those physiological things that are supposed to happen with women, none of them happened for me. And that caused a Lot of pain. And, and when I went to my physical therapist two or three years into my marriage, you know, I actually had adhesions on my muscles because I was having sex with, with, with those muscles

John Dehlin [02:07:59] tight instead of relaxed and without the self lubrication.

Guest [02:08:02] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:08:03] So. So when there's attraction in a female, all the right things happen to where it can be a really pleasurable experience. When there's not attraction, it can actually be a violent and damaging experience. And it's no one's fault, it's no one's choice. It's just what the body is doing based on how it's wired. Is that right?

Lauren Rogers [02:08:20] Correct. Exactly.

Guest [02:08:21] And all I wanted to add was I think somebody like me who came from a very conservative Mormon household is that I was more accepting of when somebody, when a man would say that he's gay, I was more accepting of taking them at their word for that because of the physical arousals is a lot more present.

John Dehlin [02:08:37] Visible.

Guest [02:08:38] It's visible.

John Dehlin [02:08:39] It's obvious.

Guest [02:08:39] Yeah. And so for a woman you have to, you have to be like, what's on. You're on the spectrum of like. And I want people to hear that that like it was, it's quite honestly a like vine like this. I don't want to use the word violent, abusive, but like something that was physically damaging because your body is not in a state that is aroused. The exact same things that we, we can acknowledge that happens to a man when he's aroused should have been happening but they weren't. And that's a very clear cut sign that your sexuality is exactly what you say it is. You know, it's, it's really frustrating to hear people that are like, oh well if you work through it this way or da da da da.

Guest [02:09:23] Purity culture would allow you to, you know, fill in the blank that like when people express that they have an aversion to believe them. And I think that that's, that's a real, a real disconnect I think, between religious conservative cultures and LGBTQ community. Community.

John Dehlin [02:09:41] I, I announced recently on Mormon stories that I, I haven't yet. This is the first time I. Well, I don't know how you self identify sexually, but to this point it's bizarre. I had not interviewed a lesbian. I did for a, a short little YouTube channel I had called LDS Homosexuality, like right during Prop 8. So I, I interviewed a few lesbian women way back in 2008, but somehow none of those episodes made it onto Mormon stories. And so I will, we'll get to how you sexually Identify now. But Carrie, you make such a good point that, like, for the man, arousal is visual and it's obvious, but for a woman, it's totally invisible. It's only what's going on inside. And so the lesbian, but just.

Lauren Rogers [02:10:22] You have to. It's harder to see.

John Dehlin [02:10:25] Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. I mean, it's technically visible under the right angles and angles and light, but I mean, not nearly as it could

Guest [02:10:34] get so dirty right now.

John Dehlin [02:10:35] Let's just say from.

Lauren Rogers [02:10:36] What's that?

Guest [02:10:37] Nothing.

John Dehlin [02:10:38] Yeah, from like 10 steps back, you know, you don't know.

Lauren Rogers [02:10:41] Right, Exactly. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:10:43] And that's. That's an important phenomenon to understand.

Guest [02:10:45] Right.

John Dehlin [02:10:46] That makes female sexuality very different than male sexuality.

Lauren Rogers [02:10:50] Yes. And I'll add that my. My husband was absolutely amazing through this whole experience. You know, as you can imagine, it could have been very difficult for him. He could have taken it personally that I was having pain or that I couldn't orgasm, you know, that I didn't feel any pleasure. He could have taken that personally. But instead he was just very concerned. And in trying to help me have a good experience, we did so much. We had a month long honeymoon and we did so much research. We went to sex drops. We, you know, got me medication because we realized, okay, well, you're not lubricating, you're not, you know, you're not swelling.

Lauren Rogers [02:11:26] You know, he did that check for me and we tried to get prescriptions. We got different medications that are supposed to help with that because I was under the assumption that there's just something wrong with me physiologically, like something's not connected. I know I must be aroused because I'm happy to be with my husband. And so the fact that these things aren't happening means there's something wrong with my body. I need to treat it medically. And so I went to doctors and tried to try to get that problem fixed.

John Dehlin [02:11:56] There's a pill for that.

Lauren Rogers [02:11:57] Exactly. I took female Viagra. I took. Had topical creams, you know, I had numbing cream for the pain and different cream for the pleasure. And it just was a huge mess.

John Dehlin [02:12:06] You know, almost sounds like conversion therapy. Like female. Female version. Right?

Lauren Rogers [02:12:10] Yeah. And. And I also, I went to several OBGYNs in Utah when I got back to school because I had a year left of school after I got married. And I went to her and I explained all the issues I was having. And she said that her solution to my painful sex was to have a baby. She said, stretching. Stretching out your, you know, your hymen and your vagina. Will help you have pain free sex. So that's my diagnosis. That's my recipe for you prescription. Thank you.

Guest [02:12:48] Just bring a human into the world.

Lauren Rogers [02:12:50] Exactly this issue. I guess there's nothing else I can do. And not surprisingly enough, after I had my baby, it did not get better. And that's when I was outside of Utah and had an OB GYN who was not Mormon and told me, yeah, that's not normal. Let me send you to a specialist. And that's when I finally was able to go to a pelvic floor physical therapist. And she was like, wow. Like, I. So I tore when I gave birth and my adhesions and my muscles were bigger than the, like the scar tissue from my tear. Like, she was like, wow, these are intense.

Guest [02:13:25] Like, oh my goodness.

Lauren Rogers [02:13:27] And it took six months of going every week and having her. Literally, it's just like a massage, like an internal massage with a glove. And she was working out those adhesions and those knots basically. And it was horribly painful. But eventually did help. Um, so that's another, another shout out I'll do of like, if you're a woman and you're having painful sex, like, pelvic floor physical therapist is your saving grace. Like, so many people just don't talk about that. Like, I had so much frustration in the beginning of my marriage because I had no one to talk to. Like, I talk, I would talk to my mom.

Lauren Rogers [02:13:59] Was it ever painful? Did you ever have a problem orgasming? Nope. And nope. Like, nobody I talked to could help me. And I didn't know where to go because I was clearly having so many sexual issues and I just thought I was the problem.

Lauren Rogers [02:14:13] I didn't recognize that I'm just gay and that just doesn't work well. But eventually sex became very different for me. Instead of a sexual experience, as you might think, it became a very emotional experience because I have such a supportive husband who worked with me and, you know, would stop in the middle of, you know, our activities if he saw that I was in pain, you know, like, he was very, very much focused on me.

Lauren Rogers [02:14:44] It didn't become a source of contention in our, in our marriage. And it became something that felt like, this might sound like super not feminist, but it felt like a gift that I could give to my husband. Like, I wanted him to feel pleasure and, and I enjoyed the emotional connection. And so sex became not sexual for me. It became an emotional bonding experience that I could have with my husband where I felt loved and I felt desired and that felt good too, you know, and so it, it became something that, you know, made our marriage stronger because I married a good guy, you know, not. I don't think every guy would. Would be that understanding and amazing.

Guest [02:15:25] And I just want to pause to thank you for being vulnerable enough to share that because I think a lot of listeners are really going to connect with that, whether they've had the same issues or just even like, modeling really healthy consent in a marriage. That's really interesting. Yeah. And communication.

Lauren Rogers [02:15:41] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:15:41] The thought that I had was a, it was a bifurcated thought. How beautiful that story is in terms of your connection, your love for each other, his sensitivity, and how, I don't want to say dangerous, but like, I could see an apologist, a Mormon apologist saying, hey, lesbian Mormon women, just marry a sensitive guy and you'll learn to be able to have emotional sex with him and you can do it. Now you, You, Lauren, have now provided the key to mixed orientation Mormon marriage. Just have emotional sensitive sex and you'll be fine.

Lauren Rogers [02:16:23] Yeah, no, I, I totally agree because the science says that mixed orientation marriages are, have terrible outcomes, you know, especially when failure rate. Yeah, especially when they're done for religious reasons. And ultimately, you know, by the time I realized I was gay, I was out of the church. And so my decision to stay with my husband was absolutely not religious. And so I would say, you know, my advice is don't, don't marry someone you're not attracted to for a religious reason. You know, like, yes, my marriage is an anomaly. It works. It's beautiful. I love my marriage, but I don't advocate for mixed orientation marriages because that's not the norm. And I'm not, you know, I also have a very specific sexual orientation where that works. Like I'm. My, what I call myself is I'm biromantic homosexual. So I, I do have romantic interests in men as well as women.

John Dehlin [02:17:22] By romantic meaning attracted to.

Lauren Rogers [02:17:25] Romantically attracted to both gender, men and women. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:17:29] Biromantic homosexual.

Lauren Rogers [02:17:31] Yeah. Lesbian meaning lesbian. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:17:34] Okay. So meaning sexually.

Lauren Rogers [02:17:36] Sexually, I'm only attracted to women. And so that's why I'm a homosexual, you know, and so that makes me gay. But I, I do have that caveat that makes my marriage work, is that I am romantically attracted to my husband. And that makes it much easier to, to stay in a marriage where, you know, we have that mixed orientation.

Guest [02:17:58] And just generally, I think human beings, they tend to think of themselves as always the exception to the rule. And I think you are literally the exception to the rule. But for anyone listening to this who's like, and I will also be the exception to the rule or my children will, or I'll force something upon them in a mixed orientation marriage, like we were saying, the statistics are pretty clear on what mixed orientation marriage is, how they go, and recognizing that most people by definition are not exceptions to that rule.

John Dehlin [02:18:26] Yeah, it's like I played Russian roulette, I spun the chamber, it didn't kill me. So I'm going to recommend Russian roulette to somebody else. You would never do that.

Lauren Rogers [02:18:34] Absolutely not.

John Dehlin [02:18:35] That's a, that's a dark metaphor.

Lauren Rogers [02:18:36] Yeah, no, it's apropos. I think it's appropriate. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:18:40] Jump the shark there.

Lauren Rogers [02:18:41] No, I mean, I personally know multiple people in my life that either are or were in mixed orientation marriages. And, you know, one ended in divorce, another ended in divorce. You know, and even the ones that don't end divorce, there's lots of pain and anguish and hardship. And so. Yeah, it's just. Why do that to yourself? You know? Like, it's, it's, it works for some people, but the, some are so small in the minority and it takes so much extra work that it's not something I would ever recommend choose. Yeah, yeah.

Guest [02:19:17] And you were saying around in a religious context as well.

Lauren Rogers [02:19:19] Yeah. The studies do show that religious reasons are, are the, the damning aspect. Like there are, there are people who are in mixed orientation marriages because they simply fell in love for the right person. But it's not a religious reason. If it's not a religious reason, the science shows it's, it's a little bit better.

John Dehlin [02:19:37] Yeah. I did my PhD dissertation on the LGBTQ Mormon experience, and what we found is that not only do mixed orientation marriages have a minimum of a 70% failure rate, so two to three times a higher failure rate than a, than a first, you know, heterosexual marriage. So you're two to three times more likely to get divorced. But the quality of life ratings for the, the queer Mormons in mixed orientation marriages were lower than for those who have lupus. So lupus is the super debilitating disease, probably not unlike chronic fatigue syndrome or the other diagnosis that you gave it. So super high levels of chronic illness.

John Dehlin [02:20:24] People who are in mixed orientation marriages have worse quality of life ratings than those people, not to mention the straight spouse that doesn't feel like their partner's attracted to them, doesn't feel loved by their partner, they're lonely, they're sad, and then all the issues of like, infidelity or dishonesty or, you Know, lack of attraction, just. And that. That is literally one of the two recommendations the church has to an LGBTQ member right now. It's either be a celibate, which is actually the only thing that's worse than being in a mixed orientation marriage in terms of quality of life. The church has two terrible options for their LGBTQ members, actually three or four. Because it's literally either be celibate. Awful. Be in a mixed orientation marriage, usually awful. Or get excommunicated.

Lauren Rogers [02:21:16] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:21:17] Or die.

Lauren Rogers [02:21:19] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:21:20] Those are the four choices the church offers to its LGBTQ members.

Guest [02:21:23] And sometimes on the down low, as Kyle Ashworth will tell us, there's some gay cuddling parties going on sometimes too, on the DL.

John Dehlin [02:21:30] Yeah, yeah. A mixed orientation marriage with infidelity.

Lauren Rogers [02:21:34] Yeah, yeah, exactly.

John Dehlin [02:21:35] Yeah, yeah. So. So I don't know if you're. You mean. I mean, I first have to echo what Kara said. I'm Lauren. I'm so grateful that you're willing to be so vulnerable, so candid. We never talk about these sorts of things to, to be lurid or licentious, to get, you know, it's, it's purely to educate. Because I know for a fact that Natasha Helfer has just. And it's not necessarily queer women, it's just sexual dysfunction in a marriage for whatever reason. But I know that she is like, has a six month waiting list because of all the sexual dysfunction in Mormon marriages. And we have never on Mormon stories talked about kind of female sexual lack of arousal or an orgasmia or, you know, what were the other diagnoses that you talked about? Like, anyway, just sexual dysfunction.

Guest [02:22:28] Pelvic floor scarring. Yeah. Things like that.

John Dehlin [02:22:31] All that stuff.

Guest [02:22:32] Yeah. Like, it's very intensive. Like the, the therapy my friend went through as well, and I couldn't even. I didn't even know it existed.

John Dehlin [02:22:39] And, or the pain.

Guest [02:22:41] Or the pain.

John Dehlin [02:22:41] So called.

Lauren Rogers [02:22:43] So vaginismus.

John Dehlin [02:22:44] Vaginism.

Lauren Rogers [02:22:44] Right.

John Dehlin [02:22:44] That's the other one.

Lauren Rogers [02:22:45] I wasn't diagnosed with that. But that's like what typically people are diagnosed with.

Guest [02:22:49] Yeah. So just as a public service announcement for people that these things exist and that if you're having struggles within your marriage and this sounds familiar, like, take care of yourself, get a sex therapist. Get the help that you need.

John Dehlin [02:23:05] Get a licensed sex therapist. So Natasha Helfer is a licensed sex therapist. There's several in Utah. My daughter Clara works for a couple. Find a licensed sex therapist. They can help you.

Part 2 of 2 · Ep. 1482

John Dehlin [00:00:00] There's two things I really want to explore, at least in your story. So, like, I'm wondering, how do you know that you're lesbian? Like, how. How would you even be able to figure that out or explore it? Once you're locked, quote, locked into a mixed orientation marriage, assuming that you're just straight, I also am going to imagine that your faith journey has been interwoven into your journey of sexual discovery. So where should we take your story to kind of follow those two threads along with any other threads you want to cover?

Lauren Rogers [00:00:32] Yeah, I think that the first place to go would be the faith journey because like I, I think I said before is like, it was just impossible for me to recognize my sexuality in the church because it, it wasn't helpful. It was not helpful to be gay as a faithful Mormon and especially as a faithful married Mormon. And so, yeah, it was just. I never, I never would have understood my sexual, my sexual dysfunction or my sexuality if I would have stayed in the church. And so that, yeah, that came after. And so the first thing to talk about would definitely be my faith journey.

Faith Crisis and Shelf-Breaking Moments

John Dehlin [00:01:11] All right, so let's, let's do it. Let's jump in.

Lauren Rogers [00:01:13] Perfect. So after I got married and graduated from byu, I felt a lot of pressure from the church to get pregnant. And so I, as soon as I was graduated, I went off my birth control and very quickly got pregnant and experienced a lot of fear because I, you know, I was very disabled and I didn't. I could barely take care of myself. I felt like. And so the thought of having to take care of another human caused me a lot of anxiety and fear leading up to my birth experience.

Lauren Rogers [00:01:53] And at this point, I'm still very strong in the gospel. You know, I had overcome any of the doubts that, you know, were caused by my horrible mission experience. I, I didn't resolve my questions. I still had a multitude of very deep questions and would often talk to my husband about them and talked to my husband about my issues with, you know, the sexist covenants in the temple and all sorts of different things.

Lauren Rogers [00:02:23] And so he was becoming more aware of issues of the church. You know, he never had been aware of those issues. And I was staying faithful even though I had lots of questions. And then my baby was born and changed my entire life. It was just, look at that smile. Yeah, it was a complete paradigm shift for me.

Lauren Rogers [00:02:48] You know, up until the moment of birth, I was scared to be a mom, but when I held her for the first time, it was, of course, you know, of course not Everyone is, you know, blessed, for lack of a better term, to have these types of experiences. Some people need to, you know, grow to have that attachment with their baby. But I had just this amazing experience when I saw my baby for the first time and I held her and she was put on my chest.

Lauren Rogers [00:03:16] I had the most explosive, ecstatic, euphoric experience of my life. And I had just a complete paradigm shift. All at once, she became the object of my worship. You know, I had loved and worshiped God my entire life and made him my priority. And suddenly I knew that that could no longer be, that my baby was going to be my number one priority for the rest of my life, that there was just no question that she was the most important thing in the world to me and that. That she was the object of my devotion from now on. And so I, in this experience that my parents had told me, like, you're going to understand God's love in a more intimate way, and you're going to, you know, have more appreciation for God when you actually have kids.

Lauren Rogers [00:04:11] And that was not the experience I had. I had quite the opposite of kind of realizing how pure and how strong a parent's love was and realizing that's not the love I felt from God. That's not the love that is taught from the Mormon Church, you know? The Mormon Church.

Lauren Rogers [00:04:33] I knew, according to the Mormon Church, the way I felt about my daughter was wrong, that I was supposed to put God first, then my husband and then my children. And there was nothing in the world that could. Could convince me not to put my daughter first, not to put her above God, above my husband, above myself. And it was just. Yeah, it was an epiphany. It was just. I knew. I knew that she was the most important thing in my life. And there. There was no going back after that. And that was really the.

Lauren Rogers [00:05:04] The beginning of the end of my testimony in the church. I. I suppressed those feelings of, you know, I had never doubted God's existence. But in those moments, I was like, you know, I remember thinking as I was pushing my baby out of me that there is no God. There is no God.

John Dehlin [00:05:21] It's.

Lauren Rogers [00:05:22] He doesn't exist. And that was so strange that in that moment that was supposed to be the most spiritual experience of my life, according to my mother, that it was the moment that I had this epiphany that he didn't exist. And of course, I pushed that down because I didn't want to deal with that, you know, and I just focused on how happy I was to Be a mom and didn't tell my husband about my huge paradigm shift and my. The doubt that was starting to creep in.

Lauren Rogers [00:05:51] But as I already mentioned, my husband's amazing. And because I had been working on him, helping him become more of a feminist throughout our marriage, he actually brought it up to me one night after we put the baby down for bed. She was a few weeks old. And he said, like, Lauren, we have to find out if the church is true. We have to investigate it like we never have before, because it harms women, like it oppresses them, and we can't let that happen to our daughter unless it's true.

John Dehlin [00:06:27] Then we could abuse and harm the women and subjugate them all we want. Exactly.

Lauren Rogers [00:06:31] No, but we had this idea that if the church was true, we could try our best to mitigate the negative effects of the church. We know how damaging shame culture and purity culture and the sexism was to us growing up and to me growing up. And we could try our best, if it was true, to mitigate those effects and to teach her healthy sexuality and to teach her to have intrinsic motivation instead of rely on, you know, what the church really pushes, the external validation and all of those things we know are not healthy. Like, we can. We can try to mitigate if it's true, but we're not willing to put our child through all of that harm unless we are sure, more sure than we have ever been, that it's true.

Lauren Rogers [00:07:16] And so that started us on a journey of investigation. And for the first time in my life, I learned all of the questions I always had about the church from an objective view instead of, I know the church is true, so what's the right answer? You know, I wasn't trying to make the facts fit my reality. I was trying to look at the facts and just discern what reality was. And that's something I had never done.

Lauren Rogers [00:07:43] And so my husband and I spent six months deeply deep dive study into church history, into church doctrine, church publications, you know, fact checking. We read the CES letter, we read lots of other documents. Documents, you know, and we. I'm very analytical. So we had a Excel document with like every issue. And then what's the Mormon response? And then what's the, like, I guess, objective, what do the facts say? And then Occam's Razor or something. Exactly. And. And that's what it came down to when we had all of these issues.

Guest 2 [00:08:19] Is it?

John Dehlin [00:08:19] Okay, so this is always, I think, one of the most important parts of all my Mormon stories, interviews, because so many Mormons go 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years, never being given the information. Never. And then if they are given the information, which almost no one is, it's contextualized in a way to where they were to know that there were problems, whether it's through inoculation or some other means. And so can you slow walk us through for sure, each of the main issues that you confronted describe what the problem was for someone who doesn't know any of this stuff and. And how you processed it and where you came out on it? Yeah. Is that okay?

Lauren Rogers [00:09:00] Yeah, maybe.

Guest 2 [00:09:01] I also would be interested to know what was the biggest, you know, shelf breakers or whatever you want to call it, that. That were things that you were weighed heavily on your Excel spreadsheet.

Lauren Rogers [00:09:12] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I. Going with the shelf analogy, something that I kind of like to say about my faith journey was that I had a full shelf probably from the time I was 14 on, but I had like a titanium shelf. Like, I believed there was nothing that could break my shelf, but obviously giving birth to my daughter did. And so I had lots of moral issues. You know, the immoral actions of Joseph Smith was a huge thing for me, such as his marrying other men's wives. And really for me, what got it was the lying to his wife. He. His first wife, Emma. He did not tell her the truth. And that he coerced young, vulnerable women. He was in a position of power, and he coerced young, vulnerable women to marry him. And that was. So.

John Dehlin [00:10:12] Lied about it to Emma.

Lauren Rogers [00:10:13] Yeah. And then lied about it to Emma.

John Dehlin [00:10:14] Yeah.

Lauren Rogers [00:10:15] And that was. That was something I found out when I was still a believing member. And that was a hard pill to swallow. And so looking, being able to put an objective lens over all of the things I already knew about the church that were terrible was like. It just became so obvious. It was like, embarrassing almost. Like it's just not true. Like, Joseph Smith was just a bad man. Like, he.

Lauren Rogers [00:10:43] And that's hard to say because I know Mormons say they don't worship Joseph Smith, but they essentially do. You know, they sing praises to him, literally sing praises to him and revere him as, you know, the prophet of the restoration and all of those things, and he was not who he said he was. And I mean, as someone who experienced, you know, sexual assaults on my mission and since and before and, you know, other forms of emotional abuse and coercion, it was very disheartening to me to discover that the man I loved and revered as a prophet of God did those things to women and not just one and not just two.

Lauren Rogers [00:11:31] Like, he did it over and over and, and that was just so disturbing to find out. And, and to go into just a little bit of more detail of why, how he coerced women for, you know, people who don't know.

Lauren Rogers [00:11:48] He, as a prophet of God, was able to tell people with authority, according to their beliefs, that he could give people's blessings of exaltation or salvation. And he would promise women that they and their entire family would be exalted if he. If they agreed to marry him. And if they didn't agree to marry him, an angel with a drawn sword would come and kill him.

Lauren Rogers [00:12:13] What are you supposed to say as a faithful child? Because some of these women were as young as 14. What are you supposed to say when a prophet of God says, you have to marry me or I. Or I will be killed, and if you do marry me, you and your entire family are going to be saved? Like, there is no answer. But, yes, I will marry you.

John Dehlin [00:12:31] And oftentimes it was like, you've got 24 hours to decide. So there's that element, added element of pressure. And of course, the implication is if you don't marry me, then your family probably won't be saved. So it's a threat. It looks like an opportunity, but it's a threat veiled as an opportunity.

Guest 2 [00:12:48] And it's not that far away from the church's modern views of polygamy in the afterlife that we are still technically a polygamous church, whether we, like, 132.

John Dehlin [00:12:58] Go read it.

Guest 2 [00:12:58] Yeah, but you are going to not have the highest degree of salvation in the afterlife still, if you are not okay with God's views on polygamy in the afterlife. So it's still very much ingrained into our culture just because Joseph Smith the prophet, isn't asking women to do it. We still, like you were talking with your problems with the temple, we're still coerced in strong, strict ways within the church and hard to erase that.

Lauren Rogers [00:13:20] Yeah, absolutely. I, and, and that was, for me, another, Another issue I had with, oh,

John Dehlin [00:13:28] are you still doing polygamy? Because there's one more thing.

Lauren Rogers [00:13:30] Oh, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:13:31] Well, if a woman. If a woman declined Joseph's advances and spoke openly about it, he would literally call her a slut or a harlot in the newspaper. So there was the added, you know, insult and shaming if she declined and spoke up. Nancy Reagan is an example.

Lauren Rogers [00:13:50] Yeah, exactly. And, and I just can't imagine how, how horrible and It. And that's the thing. If you read their journal entries, they talk that it's like the great shame of their life and how. How difficult these marriages to Joseph were. And. And it's just. It's so heartbreaking, but also infuriating. Like, I can't stand. I've gone to a church, the church a few times since my faith journey out of it. But when I hear the song Praise to the Man, I. I get visibly, like, I feel sick, like it's awful. He was just not a good person. And that's a hard pill to swallow as a Mormon. And I get that might turn off a lot of people who might be Mormon who are viewing this, but it's what I found to be true.

Guest 2 [00:14:44] Question. If your shelf was titanium, I think some people would argue the way the typical apologetic is. You're expecting him to be perfect. So what if he's not perfect? He can still be a prophet. What's your response to that? Why were you not able to rationalize it in that way?

Joseph Smith, Polygamy, and the Gospel Topics Essays

Lauren Rogers [00:14:57] Yeah, so I think the biggest reason I wasn't able to rationalize it away anymore was because the rationale I used as a believing Mormon to why his actions, which seemed like he was coercing women to sleep with him were not that way, was, you know, he just didn't know any better. He was trying to follow God's commandment, and he had. He didn't want to. Right. Because he loved Emma so much he didn't want to. And then he had the threat of an angel that he was going to kill him. So he was scared. And that's why things look so bad, is because he didn't know it better.

Lauren Rogers [00:15:32] And he was scared and trying to follow God even though he didn't understand. And so that was the. The rationale that I had and how I justified his actions. But then realizing that the Lord in, as you said, DNC132 gave very specific instructions on how plural marriage was supposed to be practiced. And he didn't follow them.

John Dehlin [00:15:54] So he didn't follow them.

Lauren Rogers [00:15:55] Joseph didn't follow them.

John Dehlin [00:15:56] So he knew part of that's because that revelation came after he had already started practicing it.

Lauren Rogers [00:15:59] That's true. So he practiced it secretly, which is its own problem. Exactly. But you know, the whole thing of,

John Dehlin [00:16:06] in fact, in fact, people don't. The revelation, DNC 132, not only came after he had already gotten well into a dozen or more wives, he only produced it as a way to persuade and even coerce Emma into going along with it. So he didn't really feel like he needed a revelation until Emma just made a big stink about it after she found out. After he had hid it from her for years.

Lauren Rogers [00:16:29] Yeah, exactly. You know, there are just. There are very simple requirements from. In that revelation of what plural marriage is supposed to look like. It specifically says you need the consent of your first wife, that the woman, the plural wife, you marry needs to be a virgin. And I don't remember the rest of it. I'd have to pull it up. But he. He married other men's wives. They were obviously not virgins.

John Dehlin [00:16:53] Yeah, they had to be virgins.

Lauren Rogers [00:16:54] Yeah. And, you know, he didn't get the consent of his wife, and, you know, threatening her with damnation if she didn't consent, you know, is so manipulative and so abusive, and I couldn't see that as a believing member. But now it's so clear how wrong that is to use your power to. To do that to a woman you're supposed to love and protect. You know, especially now that I understand marriage a lot more. Being married, it's just unthinkable that. That you. You could do that to your spouse because. Yeah, I. I would never do that to my spouse, and I would never accept such behavior from my spouse. And so it. It's just heartbreaking to think that. That he got away with that and that Emma had to. To live that life. It's just so sad.

John Dehlin [00:17:52] Yeah. One of the things people just don't realize is that Emma was like the. Something like the 18th or 20th wife sealed to him. So she's his first wife in civil marriage, but then secretly gets sealed to 20 other women without her knowledge and consent. Finally she finds out, freaks out, and then he's like, okay, I'll seal you to me. 20 wives in.

Lauren Rogers [00:18:18] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:18:18] Like, how in the world is that of God?

Lauren Rogers [00:18:20] Yeah, it's. And that's the thing in the church's essay that. That they put out about the subject. They talk so much about how much Emma and Joseph love and respected each other, and it just is so upsetting because if you love your wife first, you don't lie to her, you don't cheat on her. And if you have the power of God to seal yourself to her, you seal yourself to her as soon as you can. Not 20 wives in. So, yeah, it's just. And that was. Slides perfectly into the other thing I was going to say about how the church's essays really helped me in my deconstruction because their language is so deceptive.

John Dehlin [00:19:01] So the gospel topics essays, they helped

Lauren Rogers [00:19:04] me stay faithful when I was a Mormon, you know, when I had all these questions, they were great resources for me. But the second I became objective, I would read, I would look at the sources that they cited and realize, holy crap, they are twisting and bending the truth to make the church sound good. And it became so clearly deceptive. And I couldn't rationalize that if it's the Church of God, then they shouldn't be deceptive. And that's what the topic essays are. They are deceptive. Their language is just seeped in, in half truths or misleading words. And, you know, it's. It was very helpful for me to see that and to recognize that the church is doing that.

John Dehlin [00:19:56] Yeah, I'm sorry.

Lauren Rogers [00:19:57] No, no, you're good.

John Dehlin [00:19:58] So, for example, like, they'll. Instead of saying 14 years old, they'll say several. Several months shy of her 15th birthday just to try. And that's just a small example of the deceptive language used to try and not admit reality. But. But another is they go to great lengths to say there's no evidence of sexual interact. Joseph and his, you know, polyandrus wives or whatever. And it's like, what do you want? Like, VHS tapes? Like, what. What evidence are you looking for? Like, he swore them to secrecy. They knew the stakes were high. Like, what evidence do we have of any sexual activity in the 1800s?

John Dehlin [00:20:35] And if we know that all. All prophets were having sex with all their plural wives from Brigham Young on, why wouldn't Joseph have been having sex. Sex with his plural wives? That was the whole point. The Book of Mormon says that it's to raise up a righteous seed, which means to have sex.

John Dehlin [00:20:50] So. So the fact that the essays would retreat to there's no evidence of sexual activity. Again, what do they want? Like a cyber cam? Like. Yeah, what are they wanting?

Guest 2 [00:21:00] Yeah. Have they tested the descendants of Joseph Smith? I think that's their evidence that they're resting on that, that we can't find any children evidence.

John Dehlin [00:21:08] But, I mean, we. I think we all know that there are lots of ways you cannot have children.

Guest 2 [00:21:13] Children. Abortions were going on in Nauvoo.

John Dehlin [00:21:16] There might be abortions at Nauvoo. The pullout method. You know, women, Women can, you know, we.

Lauren Rogers [00:21:22] We know that women had their periods later. Back then, he was marrying teenagers. And the average age that women got their period at the time was 17. So they might not have been fertile when he was sleeping with them. You know, like, there's so many reasons why there might not be children. And there's plenty of evidence that consummation happened in plenty of the marriages. Especially, you know, three of them went on the record saying, yes, we, we slept with him. You know, in the, A bunch of them. Yeah, in the temple lot case or whatever. They, they admitted. Yeah, we had, we had sex.

John Dehlin [00:21:55] Sworn affidavit. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay, so that's one row in your spreadsheet. Joseph Smith's polygamy and coercion. And I guess the second is the church's deception in the gospel topics essays.

Guest 2 [00:22:09] Is there anything else in the gospel topic essays that like jumped out to you as blatant half truths?

Lauren Rogers [00:22:14] Oh, yeah. So the race in the priesthood essay was a huge nail in the coffin for me. It was just rife with not only like manipulative, manipulative language that like technically is true but is super deceptive, but like straight up lies. Like they, they say things that are simply not true.

Lauren Rogers [00:22:37] Some examples of the deceptive language might be, you know, they talked about how they just didn't know the reasons that black people weren't given the priesthood. And they have disavowed theories. The use of the word theory saying. Because let me explain. There were the disavowed theories of why black people couldn't enter the temple and receive temple blessings or receive the priesthood were because they had the curse of Cain or that they were less valiant in the pre existence and you know, lots of things that are just racist, you know, like those were the disavowed theories. And calling it a theory makes it seem like it wasn't taught as doctrine when it absolutely was. Multiple prophets of God taught it as doctrine, as eternal truth.

John Dehlin [00:23:25] And, and not only was it in Mormon doctrine, the book literally named Mormon doctrine, but at least I think two first, you know, first presidencies, signed statements calling the black priesthood ban doctrine. This is prior to 1960. We talk about this in Matt Harris's interview. He's a great historian that's talked a lot about that.

Guest 2 [00:23:44] Yeah, I'll put that in the show notes.

John Dehlin [00:23:46] As John Larsen reminded us, it's in Moses, the book of Moses, which is part of the pearl of great price in Mormon scripture. The curse of Cain is actually embedded into the book of Moses. So it's not hearsay, it's not policy. It was doctrine for 150 years before the church had to roll it back or walk it back.

Guest 2 [00:24:07] Exactly.

Lauren Rogers [00:24:08] Yeah. And so it's extremely deceptive to call it a theory when the church knows that it was taught as doctrine. And another big one that really upset me was when they changed the ban. In the essay, they were talking about receiving that revelation and how the leaders of the church looked forward to the promise that prophets like Brigham Young had said that one day black people would be allowed to hold the priesthood.

Lauren Rogers [00:24:42] And so they paint Brigham Young's words about black people, the priesthood, to be. He promised they would one day get it. And that's not at all what he did. When you actually look at the. They actually. It's also very telling when they don't cite things. They make a claim and have no source on it. But I found the source of what they were talking about, and his quote was something along the lines of like, black people will. Will get the priesthood when everyone on earth has gotten the priesthood and this and that and the other, basically saying in the millennium, in the next life. Basically, he was saying, when pigs Fl.

Lauren Rogers [00:25:19] People will get the priesthood. And so to paint it as a hopeful promise that one day they will receive these blessings is just dishonest. Those were not the. Like. That's not what Brigham Young was saying. And if you read his actual quote, it's very clear. And that's why they didn't include the source by that claim. And that was something that was also really disheartening to see all of the places where they added sources and all the places where they neglected to add sources was very telling of their intentions to deceive and to paint a picture that was not true of the church's history.

Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham as Shelf Items

John Dehlin [00:25:52] So polygamy, blacks in the priesthood, gospel topics, essays. Any other big ones? Book of Mormon.

Lauren Rogers [00:26:00] Yeah, the Book of Mormon, the founding story.

John Dehlin [00:26:03] What's wrong with the Book of Mormon?

Lauren Rogers [00:26:05] Well, other than its racism and its lack of female representation, you know, people don't.

John Dehlin [00:26:11] People have never thought about that. Do you want to talk about that? Because that. That was a major shelf breaker for me.

Lauren Rogers [00:26:16] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:26:17] Do you want to talk about.

Lauren Rogers [00:26:17] There are two other than, you know, like, Mother Eve and Mary and.

John Dehlin [00:26:22] Which aren't actual figures in the book.

Lauren Rogers [00:26:24] Yeah. So he names people who actually. Who weren't actual characters in the book. Like, they weren't there. They were mentioned, but they weren't actual characters. I believe there are three. There are three women who are named Saria, Abish the Lamanite, and Harlot. The Harlot Isabel. So those are the three.

John Dehlin [00:26:44] It's Isabelle, but a Bish or some weird name. But three named women.

Lauren Rogers [00:26:48] Three named women in the whole book

John Dehlin [00:26:50] and, like, 100 and whatever. 80 named men or.

Lauren Rogers [00:26:52] Exactly. And so is God.

John Dehlin [00:26:55] Literally, that Sexist.

Lauren Rogers [00:26:57] Exactly. And that was something that bothered me, you know, back when I was believing. Yeah, it was so frustrating to me, the complete lack of representation and role models for. For women in the church. And so that was really hard. But other than that, and of course, the racist teachings about, you know, the black skin being a curse.

John Dehlin [00:27:23] Yeah. Dark skin.

Lauren Rogers [00:27:25] And there's just so many other problems with the Book of Mormon. You know, historically. As I dove into the actual source documents of the founding of the church, it became very clear that the founding story that the church paints is just not accurate. The first vision, for example, in all of the restoration videos and everything that's depicted, he has this amazing first vision and then faces all of this persecution. But the truth of the matter is he didn't tell anyone about the first vision until years after it supposedly happened. So, no, he didn't face any persecution from, you know, from people saying he couldn't actually have seen a vision. So that's just not true. And so many little things like that that just add up to just be overwhelmingly convincing that he just made it up.

John Dehlin [00:28:18] Yeah. We just had an episode with John Larsen about this, the 1832 version of the first vision that it says he was like 15 or 16, not, you know, not 14. He visited. In the first account, it said he just the Lord visited him, not God and Jesus, that he had already decided that the churches weren't true. And there's just so much that doesn't line up. And then there's so much evidence that between 1832 and 1838, his beliefs change. And so then the advancing accounts of the Book of the first Vision sound more and more fabulous, more and more spectacular, more and more specific as time goes on, but also change according to his changing beliefs. And that challenges the credibility of the story.

Lauren Rogers [00:29:07] Yeah. And another thing that challenges the credibility of his story is that his experience, you know, going into the woods and praying and having a darkness come and then being freed by a light and receiving the message that none of the churches were true.

Lauren Rogers [00:29:25] That's exactly what happened to his father years before. Like, his father is documented to have that visionary experience. And so Joseph Smith was just stealing from other people to create his religion and just adding onto it, making his own spin. And another big thing is people, the church loves to say, Joseph Smith had a third grade education. He couldn't have written a book so complex, like, he didn't even know how to write. And that's just so misleading as well. He, yes, technically had a third grade formal education, meaning he Went to school until third grade. But it was very common at the time to be homeschooled.

Lauren Rogers [00:30:03] And both of his parents were educators, so he got a good education. And I believe he probably had a very high iq, you know, was very, very intelligent. And there's also record from his mother's journal of him telling stories about the inhabitants of the Americas before the settlers were there and all of those things. He would tell these elaborate stories about them before he ever got the plates.

Lauren Rogers [00:30:34] So how did he know about the Lamanites? How did he know about all of those things if he had yet to receive the plates? It's because he was just a very gifted storyteller and was fascinated with Indian lore. He was. And another thing, if you look at just his family life growing up, his mom was a Presbyterian, his dad was a universalist, and there was apparently a lot of conflict in their home about the subject of religion. And Joseph Smith, you know, perhaps in an attempt to do good, wanted to end the conflict in his home. And so he would share these stories of visions and share these stories of, you know, this ancient record and the golden plates, before he ever had the golden plates, before he ever knew what they were.

Lauren Rogers [00:31:22] And he would share these stories and establish doctrine, and his family would believe him, and it would end the conflict. And I think he. This is going a lot into speculation land, but I. That's what I think is his reasons that he. He made the church was that it was so helpful, and he was so successful in preaching to his family and solving those conflicts. And he believed he. He could. He could end the conflict of religion by, you know, whether whether he believed he was inspired of God or not, I don't know. But I think that he was so gifted as a storyteller that he decided, I'm gonna do this.

Lauren Rogers [00:32:00] I'm gonna end all of these conflicts about religion, because I know a better way. Yeah, that's a lot of speculation. So we can stick back to facts from now on.

John Dehlin [00:32:12] Any other big shelf items or big. In the Book of Abraham is one for some.

Lauren Rogers [00:32:17] Oh, yeah, for sure. For me, it was like, you know, he had a surefire test to see if he was actually a translator, as he claimed to be. And he failed the test. Like we know how.

John Dehlin [00:32:30] So.

Lauren Rogers [00:32:31] So he. The Book of Abraham was claimed by the church to be a translation that Joseph Smith did on some papay rye that he had bought from Egypt. From Egypt. And so he supposedly translated this. This document, and it was the Book of Abraham, and it was canonized. And now we Know, because we have people who know Egyptian, that the. What is on the document that we have, you know, the remnants of the document that we have that he supposedly translated is nothing to do with Abraham or anything in the book of Abraham. So we know that it's not true. We know that his translation was false. So, yeah, he had. He had a test. He claimed to be a translator. There was a test. Can you translate this thing correctly? And he failed. And so that really ends a lot of his credibility, in my opinion.

John Dehlin [00:33:26] Yeah.

Family Experiences with LGBTQ Issues in the Church

Guest 2 [00:33:28] What else?

Lauren Rogers [00:33:28] There was obviously homosexuality, and all of that was something that really, really weighed on me.

John Dehlin [00:33:37] What were your thoughts on that? Why was that challenging your faith?

Lauren Rogers [00:33:42] Because it was just something intrinsic that I knew, especially with a brother who was openly gay, that I. I wasn't open myself about being gay. But he was, and I loved him, and I saw how good and kind he was, and I just knew there was nothing wrong with him. I knew that he.

Lauren Rogers [00:34:03] That he was not an abomination. I knew that, and nothing could change that. And so to hear the rhetoric of the church about gay people was very upsetting because it went against my personal morals. And so it was just a struggle my whole time in the church to try and reconcile that, to try and say, okay, I know the church is true. I know what the church says about gay people.

Lauren Rogers [00:34:28] How do I make this work? Because it seems so wrong, you know, and so that was always really hard. And, of course, even harder when my brother was excommunicated. It was just like. Yeah, a devastating blow. I. Yeah, I.

John Dehlin [00:34:45] Did you talk? Did you tell a story?

Lauren Rogers [00:34:48] No.

John Dehlin [00:34:48] When did that happen?

Lauren Rogers [00:34:49] It happened while I was on my mission. And he just. You know, I got an email saying, okay, I've been excommunicated, you know, And I just cried and cried because I thought that I had lost my brother for eternity. And I didn't realize at the time how abusive that is to punish. To punish the family members of people the church is trying to punish. Like, the church didn't like my brother's actions. And so they punished me and my siblings and my parents.

John Dehlin [00:35:27] Wait, explain how you guys got punished.

Lauren Rogers [00:35:31] So when he was excommunicated, he lost all of his church blessings, meaning he lost his endowment, and he lost his opportunity to be the highest degree of heaven, which is where I was planning on being and my family was planning on being. So it meant he couldn't be in heaven with us. He might go to heaven, but it wouldn't be the same heaven, and we wouldn't be able to be A forever family anymore. And so it very much felt like I was being punished for, you know, someone else's sin. I don't. I don't think he was sinning, but, you know, the church did. And the church, it's just such an abusive practice. It's just power. It's controlling people's lives with the fear of. Of losing everything, because the church is everything to its members.

John Dehlin [00:36:19] You know, we've all been sold as Mormons, this idea that the most beautiful doctrine in all of Mormonism is the eternal family. Turns out that's the most terrorizing doctrine in Mormonism because what it really means is everyone's going to be without their family in the afterlife. You talk to just a regular old Christian, they're like, no, everybody's together in heaven. That's just the way it is. It's only a Mormonism where if one of your children or siblings or parents steps out of line, your family's blown up in heaven and a bunch of empty chairs in the social kingdom without your family. And it really does terrorize and cause so much pain. And yet we're still all under this illusion that that's the most beautiful doctrine in Mormonism.

Lauren Rogers [00:37:01] Yeah, absolutely. That was something I realized that the Church preaches so much to be family centered and to be all about the family, and. But it's not family promoting if it only promotes one type of family. It only promotes heteronormative, cisgendered family with lots of kids.

Lauren Rogers [00:37:22] That's it. That's the only family it promotes. And so, no, it doesn't affirm families because the definition of family is so much wider than that. And that's something that I really realized that I thought that the family was so important, and I still believe that. And to see the church for what it really was, that it didn't actually value the family. It used the family as a fear tactic to get people to stay in line. And that was really heartbreaking to realize because, yeah, like I've said before, I just loved the church. I loved it so much. It was my whole life. And realizing it wasn't true was the hardest thing I ever did.

John Dehlin [00:38:08] Yeah. So hard.

Lauren Rogers [00:38:10] Yeah. Trying to think of other shelf items I had. I. Gosh, I should have brought my notes of my Excel sheet because. Yeah, there were so many different things.

Guest 2 [00:38:27] Can we have a copy? That'd be so nice.

Lauren Rogers [00:38:29] Yeah, I'll see if I can, actually,

Guest 2 [00:38:30] because I really love what. I would love to see what the. You said you have the apologetics kind of. Oh, yeah.

Lauren Rogers [00:38:35] Column I had a. An excuse, you could say, for every single issue I had, I could find some sort of justification. And do you remember that Oaks quote

Guest 2 [00:38:45] where he's like, we don't need good answers, we just need answers?

John Dehlin [00:38:48] Yeah, for sure.

Lauren Rogers [00:38:48] Oh, my gosh.

Guest 2 [00:38:50] Have you heard that he's telling that to, like, a group of CES directors or something? Right, John?

John Dehlin [00:38:53] Yep, totally.

Guest 2 [00:38:54] And I think that's very true. It's like if somebody else has worked it out, some other rational, smart person has thought of it, there is an answer. Don't tell me if it's logical or not. It just needs to be something on a website somewhere that somebody's written down who's probably smarter than me, with a PhD in religion that can, you know, manipulate words better than I can. And you put your faith that somebody else has figured it out. So apply no to critical thinking sometimes. And yes, like, you can move forward with faith.

Lauren Rogers [00:39:23] Yeah.

Guest 2 [00:39:23] If faith is a higher priority than logic and sound reasoning, sure. Move forward with it. So I get that completely.

Lauren Rogers [00:39:31] So, yeah, absolutely. I really could find a justification for everything if I tried. And like I think I said before, Occam's Razor, it was just the simplest answer was it just wasn't true. In order for it to be true, there were so many hoops that had to be jumped through, so many twisting of meanings of words and manipulating scriptures and changing historical events to match to make it work. And, yes, you can go through the mental gymnastics to do that, but Occam's Razor would suggest the simplest answer is the correct one, and the simplest answer was it was just a fabrication. I'm trying to remember something else you said triggered something I wanted to share about. Shoot.

Fears and Emotions Around Leaving the Church

Guest 2 [00:40:20] Well, I was gonna ask. Is it okay if I ask a question while we're thinking of it? So what was your. Your state of mental affairs at the time? Were you panicking? Were you feeling like the rug was ripped out? Were you feeling more joy that you were able to explore your sexuality? Or did that maybe come later? Yeah, the.

Lauren Rogers [00:40:41] The sexuality exploration came later in this transitional phase of, you know, investigating. It was just anxiety and fear. You know, I. The Church makes it very difficult to leave. You know, it very.

John Dehlin [00:40:56] What made you afraid to leave? Tell us.

Lauren Rogers [00:40:58] Well, the Church uses rhetoric that paints a picture that leaving is the worst thing you could ever do. They talk about people who have left like they're this big, tragic story of they lost their faith, they lost their way, they were deceived, all. All of these things. And so I. First, I knew how Everyone I loved would talk about me once I left, if I left. You know, I knew the words that would be used because I had heard them my entire life and I had used them to talk about other people.

Lauren Rogers [00:41:29] And that was just normal because the church was, was everything. And so that, that was really scary to think that people wouldn't think highly of me anymore. And also, you know, I had given quite literally everything I possibly could to the church. Like I gave my health up to serve the church and to serve God. And to think that, well, one, to think that that was all in vain was awful. To think I did it for nothing. That I became disabled and, you know, ruined my life, changed all my life. Dreams had to change, all my goals, everything had to change. All my career goals, all, everything I wanted to do with my life had to change because I could no longer do most of the things I wanted to do. And that sucked to realize like, that might have been in vain.

Guest 2 [00:42:17] You know, there's a sunken cost.

John Dehlin [00:42:20] I always call this, yeah, sunk cost fallacy. I was about to say that.

Guest 2 [00:42:22] Yeah, on the same level, aren't we, John? Yeah, or I feel like we often like to say that, yeah, the people who are leaving the church are some of the people who are the most motivated to stay in it because they gave up the most. Um, and yeah, I can imagine to be devastating that you've put in so much and coming to terms with the thing that you sacrificed, your health and well being and so many things could possibly not be true, that that is cause for outrageous amounts of anxiety, I'm sure. Depression, existential crisis all over the place.

Lauren Rogers [00:42:54] Right, for sure. And, and also I was losing all my hope, you know, that the only thing that had gotten me through, you know, becoming disabled at such a young age was, you know, the hope in a resurrection. And if the church wasn't true, I didn't know if I believed in that anymore. And so, you know, I was just so sad that it might not be true and hoping, hoping so much that I would find that it was. I really, I was going in objectively, but I was really hoping that it would be true.

Lauren Rogers [00:43:30] But yeah, the concept of maybe it not being true was sad because I wanted to be a goddess. Like, what an amazing thing that Mormons believe they get to become gods. Like that's what I wanted. I had faced a lot of abuse and oppression and I was ready to, to be powerful and to be a goddess and to rule with my husband over worlds and populate planets and all of those things. I was so, so enthusiastic and so excited to fulfill my purpose as a Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:44:05] And.

Lauren Rogers [00:44:06] And to think that that purpose doesn't exist, it's just a fairy tale. Was heartbreaking. And. And yeah, I. As I transitioned out of believing it, it was. It went from heartbreak to anger to heartbreak, back and forth. You know, like, I would have heartbreaking prayers where I sobbed and said, please let it be true, God. Like, that's all I've ever wanted my whole life. I want. I want that blessing that I was promised and then be angry of, like, I'm so mad that you're not real and I did all of this for you. Like, I know that doesn't make sense to pray to a God that I didn't believe was real, but I was. I. I would pray and just be mad that I was realizing he. He didn't exist. And.

Guest 2 [00:44:47] Did you have any. Like, a lot of people obviously deconstruct the truth claims of Mormonism, but they still believe in Jesus Christ and they'll still pray to him. Were you still having any devotion to, like, a Christian deity?

Lauren Rogers [00:44:59] Yeah, that was a really hard part for me because I just kind of became a lot of my deconstruction, which I haven't mentioned yet, was in God himself and how unfair and unkind the God we were supposed to worship was. And so realizing, like, if this God is true, I don't want to worship him because he's a genocidal maniac. Like, I.

Lauren Rogers [00:45:29] Yeah, it became hard for me to believe in the Christian God after that, but I. I couldn't let go of the love that I felt for Jesus. You know, I had been so devoted to him and. And had done so much for him in my life that letting go of that was something that I just couldn't do. And so I still hold a very special spot in my heart for Jesus, but as a man, not as my savior. I believe that, you know, there's enough historical evidence to. To see that he was most likely a real person who did real things and was actually killed.

Lauren Rogers [00:46:02] And I think that a lot of his teachings were beautiful. And, you know, he was radical for his time. He taught radical acceptance, which is something that I personally believe so strongly in. That, yeah, I would say Jesus is now one of my heroes, but not one of my gods anymore. And so that was a really hard loss, though. I felt. I literally felt the same, you know, the same emotions and feeling of feelings of grief that I did when one of my friends died. Like, I literally felt that I was grieving the loss of A dear friend.

Lauren Rogers [00:46:40] When I. When I didn't. When I stopped believing in the church and in Jesus divinity. And it happened right before Christmas, and that was terrible Christmas for me. Just like every Christmas song would just make me sob. And it was just a very, very difficult process to transition out of belief because I felt like I was losing so much.

Guest 2 [00:47:03] So if I'm hearing you, you're saying that because obviously the trinitarian view and the way that a lot of Christians view things and they get kind of upset with Mormons because we never believed in the correct Jesus in the first place, because our view of our devotion to our Heavenly Father is who we truly worship, and then we also worship Jesus Christ. I still. I'm an ex Mormon, but I still. I'm never really exactly clear about how much we're supposed to worship Jesus Christ as our older brother versus giving all of our devotion to Heavenly Father. But it sounds like what you're saying is you recognized Heavenly Father as kind of like a genocidal maniac who was very unfair, who set up this system, who sacrificed his son, and that you give your love and devotion to Jesus Christ and that you're putting more of the blame and discomfort and unfairness on your Heavenly Father and not Jesus. Is that what I'm hearing?

Lauren Rogers [00:47:51] Yeah.

Guest 2 [00:47:51] You had no problem worshiping Jesus, but not Heavenly Father?

Lauren Rogers [00:47:54] Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It was the hardest thing for me to let go of when I transitioned out of the church was, you know, my. My love and belief for Jesus and. And, you know, as I mentioned before, becoming a mother is what helped me start my deconstruction. And. And, yeah, Heavenly Father became kind of a villain in my eyes, like, through my deconstruction process, because I felt what a mother's love, what a parent's love should be. And the thought that Lori Beth, my daughter, Laurie Beth, could do anything that would cause me to disown her or punish her in extreme ways, like, was unthinkable.

John Dehlin [00:48:39] Like, cast her out of your presence

Lauren Rogers [00:48:41] for never see her again.

John Dehlin [00:48:42] Like, when you talked about this early in the episode, I thought that is one of the most powerful. Like, I've heard 40,000 exit narratives by now. And that's not an exaggeration. And it's always like, Book of Abraham, Peepstone in a hat, polygamy. I am just now wondering, why is giving childbirth not top 5 or top becoming a parent, not top 5 or top 10 cause for Mormon faith crises? Because that's so profound.

Lauren Rogers [00:49:18] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:49:19] You just have to have a kid and think about what it means to be a good parent, to realize that Mormon God, you know, Mormon God doesn't qualify on the even base level of being a healthy, loving parent.

Lauren Rogers [00:49:32] Exactly. That was, that was really the biggest thing for me was just recognizing that, Recognizing that, you know, not only is it unthinkable, like I literally would rather die a horrible death than ever choose to be separated from my daughter. Like there is nothing in the world. Like she could murder someone and go to jail and I would visit her every week.

Lauren Rogers [00:49:57] And that's not an exaggeration. Like she's, I created her, you know, my body created her. And there's this narrative in the church that we owe God everything because he gave us life. And when I became a parent, I realized how messed up that is.

Lauren Rogers [00:50:15] My daughter doesn't owe me anything. She didn't ask to be created. I chose to create her. I chose to give birth to her. I chose to get pregnant. I owe her everything. I owe it to her to be the best parent I can, to make sure she has every chance to be successful and happy in this life. And that's something the Mormon God doesn't give. He doesn't give that chance to his, his children. He doesn't parent in kind, loving ways. He is an authoritarian parent, which we know is unhealthy. We know the social sciences tell us that authoritarian style parenting is damaging and harmful and that's the way he chooses to parent.

Lauren Rogers [00:50:55] An all knowing God chooses to parent that way. And I, you know, just the more I learned about parenting, you know, I, I am very, I love to study, I love to read. I, my husband actually got his degree in family studies at byu, so he knew all the right studies, all the right books to read when it came to parenting. So we were very, very well informed parents when we had kids or when we had one kid, our child.

Lauren Rogers [00:51:23] So we knew, we knew what it meant to be a good parent and we knew what it meant to be a bad parent and it just was. So it became very obvious once I felt that parental love, that God was not a good parent.

John Dehlin [00:51:34] I love that so much.

Guest 2 [00:51:35] That's so interesting because I'm sure byu, who's obviously been in the news this week for a lot of reasons. There's so many things at BYU where, who's, who's that has that saying, The Frankenstein is that John Larsen has that saying that if you put together every professor at byu you get like an atheist or something because each one in their own department like supersedes in other, other disciplines.

John Dehlin [00:51:56] They're atheist so, like, in their own discipline, they're a believer.

Guest 2 [00:51:59] Yeah, like, so, like the marriage and family and people who know the social sciences on what makes a good parent, that they can literally, like, deconvert people on their faith in heavenly Father by teaching what a good parent would be while people are then audibly like, oh,

John Dehlin [00:52:16] wait, no, I'm sorry, they're an atheist in their discipline.

Guest 2 [00:52:19] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:52:19] I think. Believer in all the other disciplines.

Guest 2 [00:52:21] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:52:21] Is that right?

Guest 2 [00:52:22] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:52:23] The sociologist knows that the age of the earth is billions of years old. The evolutionary scientist knows that evolution.

Guest 2 [00:52:29] True.

John Dehlin [00:52:29] But then in all the other disciplines.

Guest 2 [00:52:31] Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:52:32] So, like, I didn't want to misquote John Larsen.

Guest 2 [00:52:35] Yeah, yeah. And I just. Yeah, I think that's so interesting that, like, you can be a faithful, devout Mormon and studying what you hope for your children can literally deconvert you. I think that's such an interesting point.

Lauren Rogers [00:52:49] Yeah, absolutely. Just the longer I was a parent and the more experience I got, you know, like I mentioned, I was studying for like six months, so my baby was still very young. But I. It just became more and more clear. More things I would read. It was like I would. I could never do that as a parent. I would never say that to my child. You know, when I would read the scriptures or revelations by prophets, and that was another huge thing. Part of my deconstruction was, what is the point of a prophet if not to talk to God and get the answers to these big questions?

Lauren Rogers [00:53:23] Like, you know, we. We have these hard things, like the, the blacks in the priesthood essay when they say, we just don't know why black people were denied those blessings? Well, you're a prophet of God. Ask God, like, what's the point of existing as a prophet if you're not going to ask these hard questions, if you're not going to request revelation from God on these hard topics that are hurt, not only causing faith crisis, but are hurting people. Like people in the church are hurting. People of color are hurting. Gay people are hurting. Trans people are hurting. Women are hurting.

Lauren Rogers [00:53:58] Men are hurting, too, because, you know, the. The church oppresses their. Their sexuality and their expression as well. And so it's like so many people in the church are hurting. And God could end that hurt by answering some of our questions. And he either chooses not to, or the prophets can't really ask him because they're not really prophets.

John Dehlin [00:54:16] It's even worse. He not only could end it, he could have prevented it.

Lauren Rogers [00:54:20] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:54:21] By having revelations in the Book of Mormon that talk about gender Identity and expression and sexuality, sexual identity and expression and race and critical race theory or whatever. You don't pick your social ill, civil rights movement, slavery, women's suffrage, like he could have just said in the Book of Mormon, Joseph's founding scripture, okay, women need to vote, we need to stop having slaves. You know, you don't choose to be gay. You know, trans people exist. Here's what you do about it. Now, that would have been scripture, right? That would have been revelation.

Lauren Rogers [00:54:56] Right, exactly.

John Dehlin [00:54:57] And a huge age of the earth. Evolution's true, you know what I mean?

Lauren Rogers [00:55:02] Yeah. And something that I'll go on the apologist route that a lot of people and I even believed, you know, that we don't have all the answers because we need to have faith and we need to have hard experiences and grow and learn from those hard experiences because our purpose is to become like God. And so that requires a lot of refining and a lot of suffering and a lot of those things. And, and that's the position of the church on why those things happen. And you know, if you phrase it like that, maybe it sounds good, but I just began to realize how ridiculous and nonsensical that is that, you know, I, I don't need to suffer to be a good person.

Lauren Rogers [00:55:49] You know, I, I'm not going to make sure my child suffers so that she can become a good person. I'm going to try and teach her to be a good person through kind, loving, gentle ways like she doesn't need to suffer to be good. And it's just so ridiculous that people accept that answer that we need to suffer. And on top of that, like we need to have faith.

John Dehlin [00:56:09] Why?

Lauren Rogers [00:56:09] Why what? What does that give us? If our purpose is to become God and God is all knowing and faith is believing in things we don't know like we can't see, then why do we need to have that skill to become a God? It doesn't make any sense. Because when I'm a God, I'm going to know everything, so I don't need to have faith. And so why can't God just tell us? Why can't God just answer our prayers a little more clearly?

Lauren Rogers [00:56:34] If he was really concerned with our growth and our well being, he would give us these answers, just like I'm going to give my daughter answers when she has hard questions. Because to me it seems like God is more concerned with devotion than our well being. If the Mormon God is true, he's more concerned that we blindly obey him no matter what than actually helping us become good people by answering our hard questions and showing us how to be empathetic. And. And all of these things just became so clear to me the more I learned about parenthood.

John Dehlin [00:57:10] I'm thinking of a Mr. Deity episode or a TikTok episode potentially. But. But what you're saying is so profound. You can imagine sort of God with his architects in heaven before the founding of the world. It's like, okay, we're going to create this mortal probation as a test. We're going to have these spirit children now. We're going to create this mortal probation as a test, and we're going to send them all down and test them. And it's like, okay, well, what are we going to test them on, Heavenly Father? Should we test them on how charitable they are?

John Dehlin [00:57:43] That's not the big one. Okay, should we test them on, like, overcoming really big obstacles like natural disasters or calamities or, like, preventing war or, like, fighting disease or promoting literacy? How are we going to grade them? And it's like, here's how we're gonna do it. I'm gonna make it so no one remembers me.

John Dehlin [00:58:01] I'm gonna make it so there's no evidence that I exist. And the big test will be, can they still believe in me when there's no reason to believe in me? And that's gonna be the defining characteristic of their mortal probation, to decide whether they get to live with me forever. Like, any parent who did that, you know, you send your kids to miracles. What's that?

Guest 2 [00:58:22] I'm do lots of miracles. Then as soon as they invent video cameras, I'm out. I'm just not gonna do them anymore. It's not fair.

John Dehlin [00:58:27] No. A parent that, like, sends their kid to a foster care and, like, erases any evidence that they ever existed. And, like, their test is, are you. Can you find me as a parent now that I've destroyed all the evidence?

Lauren Rogers [00:58:39] Exactly.

John Dehlin [00:58:40] Spend the rest of your life trying to find me what that parent would be?

Guest 2 [00:58:43] Monster.

John Dehlin [00:58:44] A monster.

Lauren Rogers [00:58:45] Exactly. And that's what I realized. I applied what God does to what if a parent on earth did that and realized that's terrible, messed up, it's abusive, it's controlling, it's manipulative, it's. It's not a God I want to follow, you know, and it's. Yeah, it was.

Guest 2 [00:59:04] And going back to you talking about your mission and how much you basically abused yourself for the church, for your devotion to God and how that is glorified. Yeah. All of this believing things on bad evidence is glorified. Doing a lot of things. And if you would act the same way to somebody who's in an abusive relationship with you, if you were like, well, I'm in the refiner's fire, that's a glorified thing in the church that like Christ refines you, God refines you for his purposes, for his higher law that he's preparing you for and you sacrifice yourself and that, that's kind of cool. Sometimes I think that's a beautiful part of the religious experience is doing hard things until you are debilitated in some way or until X, Y and Z, or until you, you know, subjugate yourself and subjugate others or marginalize others.

Guest 2 [00:59:49] Like, yeah, there's small pieces of truth within religion that I think are beautiful like that, you know, but then when it's exaggerated and you're not able to differentiate when it's healthy for you and for society anymore, it's very, very destructive, as I think like that, that difference.

John Dehlin [01:00:07] Well, just that idea. I hate you for your own good, I'm gonna punish you, you know, inflict pain upon you to help build, build your character. That's definitionally abusive, right?

Lauren Rogers [01:00:18] Yeah, exactly.

John Dehlin [01:00:18] Yeah.

Lauren Rogers [01:00:19] And yeah, it was just so astounding to me that it wasn't obvious before, you know, and, but at the same time, I know it couldn't have been. That's how I was raised, you know, that was the world I grew up in. That was the paradigm I had. And, and like I mentioned before, I had a lot of really difficult things happen to me in my adolescence and that was how I self medicated. That was how I stayed afloat was like throwing myself into the gospel. And so I have to remind myself to have grace for myself for not realizing sooner, you know, that yeah, it's just, it's really hard, it's hard to realize when it's your whole life. It's hard to realize when it's your support system, it's, you know, your social system, it's your, it's your everything. You know, the, the church isn't just a religion, it's absolutely a culture to be Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:01:16] And we're, I'm going to circle back to something we've already kind of said, but when Kara mentioned the sunk cost fallacy, you know, we all know that if you're 60 or 70, it's a lot harder to leave the church than if you're 20 because you have to admit that 40 or 50 years, 60, 70 years of your life were spent built on a lie. Basically. I have to imagine this is kind of a sensitive thing, you now facing a disability, potentially a lifelong disability. It has to have crossed your mind a lot, if not every day. If I hadn't have believed in this church, if I hadn't gone on that mission, maybe I wouldn't be disabled.

Lauren Rogers [01:01:53] Yeah, honestly, that. That's something that was one of the hardest parts about leaving was. Was just wishing so badly that I could have either found out sooner that it wasn't true or, you know, not even that, because to me, it's just like, I just don't think that was possible. I don't think I could have recognized it was true because I was so, so convinced it was and so devout that I think something like childbirth was the only thing that could have gotten me to see. To see the truth. But I certainly wish that I would have advocated for myself. I would have either not gone on a mission or demanded to go home when I was struggling to walk like I should have.

Lauren Rogers [01:02:32] When I called my mission president and told him how sick I was and he didn't call an ambulance for me, I should have told him, don't be stupid. I'm dying over here.

John Dehlin [01:02:43] Call.

Lauren Rogers [01:02:43] Get me to the doctor. You know, like, yeah, that's definitely something that most days I try not to think about, but some days I'm just like, gosh, I wish I could go back. I wish I could go back and change that because, you know, my life would be a lot better if I didn't have this illness. And I just can't. I can't think that way too often. Sometimes I let myself think that way and let myself feel sad. But then I have to pick myself up and remind myself I. I still have a lot to be. To be grateful for.

Guest 2 [01:03:17] So considering that you. Sounds like do not believe in the church whatsoever, is there any. For people who are committed to themselves to going on a mission because they still believe in the church or they're sending their kids on missions because they still believe in their church? Do you have some advice for people who. Who are still potentially wanting to go on a mission?

Lauren Rogers [01:03:37] Yeah, I actually tell this to all my friends who serve a mission, is that you have to advocate for yourself because your leaders will not do that for you. That as much as you believe in the church and want to serve God, great, go. Go and do what, what you want to do for your life. You are the master of your life. But do not put yourself in unsafe situations.

Lauren Rogers [01:03:58] Do not, you know, let people neglect you. Like, if you're sick, stay home. If you need to go to the doctor, demand to go to the doctor until they let you. Like, it's just, I know that's hard to say, but honestly, I wish someone would have said that to me because I, I thought it would be disobedient to do that and to.

Lauren Rogers [01:04:23] And that was a huge thing I said to God when I still believed in him. You know, when I would beg him to heal me and beg him to make good on his promises of healing was, I could be such a better servant if I wasn't disabled. All I want to do is serve you. I want to serve you for the rest of my life.

Lauren Rogers [01:04:39] Heal me so I can do it better, so I can do it more thoroughly. And, you know, so if you believe in God, God, then the God you believe in wants you to serve him your whole life. So don't do something that's gonna prevent you from being able to serve. You know, advocate for your health, advocate for your safety, because, you know, God doesn't, Shouldn't want you to put yourself in those dangerous situations. So that's what I typically tell people is just be an advocate for yourself.

Guest 2 [01:05:10] I like that because it sounds like your framing of the God that you worshiped when you were on a mission was a God that you needed to sacrifice, you know, down to your very life to serve. If that's what he asks of you, down to what you said, like, about how you're like, okay, I guess I'm going to repent and get on my knees and the only thing I need to repent for is having, like, ill will against my mission president. Right. Sounds like, like you had that certain view of God. And it doesn't mean that a Mormon who's serving a mission, it sounds like you're saying, needs to deconstruct their entire belief in God, but at least reframing it, that God would not ask you to hurt yourself. Like God would want you to advocate for yourself.

Lauren Rogers [01:05:49] Yeah.

Guest 2 [01:05:49] So if you're going to serve a church, a mission for the church, believe in the best faith interpretation of a loving God at least.

Lauren Rogers [01:05:55] Exactly. Yeah. I, you know, I thought that I believed in a loving God, but I absolutely believed that God, you know, God wanted me to sacrifice. God wanted me to show my devotion, prove my devotion, which when you think about it, doesn't make sense. If he can see my heart. He doesn't need me to become disabled to show him that I love him. He hopefully wants me to have a good experience in life and wants me to be healthy and thrive. So, yeah, Just to focus on the loving aspect of God, because I think most Mormons believe God is loving.

Lauren Rogers [01:06:30] I didn't recognize how unloving the Mormon God was until I started to deconstruct. I think a lot of the harmful things that the Mormon God has done is framed in a way for believers that it was. It was ultimately loving in the end. You know, he denies gay people rights because he loves them and he doesn't want them to be committed to a marriage for their entire lives that won't continue in the next life. And so it's framed instead of, you know, bigotry, it's framed to be love. He loves them so much that he will. He will correct them. And so I think that most, most Mormons do believe that God is loving and can't see that a loving God wouldn't do most of the stuff that the Mormon Church says that God did.

Guest 2 [01:07:15] Yeah, well said. Right on.

Coming Out as Having Lost Her Faith

John Dehlin [01:07:18] So anything else you want to say about your faith journey? I mean, I guess it's worth saying that you haven't technically come out yet as having lost your faith publicly. So this interview is the first time many or most people or anyone is really going to hear this other than your husband and whoever else you've got to.

Lauren Rogers [01:07:38] I've privately told my family and a few select friends, but, yeah, I, for a long time was afraid to come out as ex Mormon because, like I said, I didn't want people to say those nasty things about me losing my faith or being deceived because I just don't believe that they're true. I don't see it as me losing anything. You know, I left because I gained something. I gained more knowledge about the church. I gained more insight.

John Dehlin [01:08:06] The opposite of being deceived.

Lauren Rogers [01:08:08] Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:08:08] You were informed.

Lauren Rogers [01:08:09] I was informed.

John Dehlin [01:08:10] You got informed, not deceived.

Lauren Rogers [01:08:11] And that's one thing that's unfortunate about this interview, that I can't go into every last detail of all the sources I read and everything I learned because like I said, once I saw all of the evidence, it was embarrassingly obvious that the church wasn't true. And heartbreakingly so. You know, I was heartbroken that it wasn't. But I think that's why so many people say things like that, that you were deceived, because they don't see it all at once. They might see one problem at a time. And that's how I was when I was in the church. I would tackle one problem at a time. I would tackle blacks in the priesthood, and I would study and study and study and come to some sort of justification and feel a little bit more at peace.

Lauren Rogers [01:08:52] And then I would tackle the next problem. But when you look at them all at once, all in one spot, there's no denying that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is a fabrication by Joseph Smith that it is not run by God. And if it is, that God is not one that should be followed because he's awful.

Guest 2 [01:09:15] If you get, which probably will come a criticism that you were looking for bad faith interpretations of Joseph's actions and trying to fit the CES letter and all of the things, the anti Mormon literature quote, unquote, try to fit that into a paradigm that made sense for you because you realized you're were technically not attracted to men and wanted to find a way out of the church. What would your response be to that?

Lauren Rogers [01:09:43] Yeah, I mean, my response would be that I didn't realize I was gay until I had been out of the church for like six to nine months. I don't remember how long it was a significant amount of time after. So I had no, no ulterior motive. You know, I, I truly, truly, truly wanted to do that research and find that the church was true because of all the reasons. I already said, you know, it was my everything. I had given so much to it. But I, that's just not what I found when I did the research. And yeah, I think that people are going to think that people are going to say I wanted it to not be true and they would be wrong.

Lauren Rogers [01:10:24] And I can't change their mind on that because that's what they have to believe. They need to believe that in order to feel good about their discipleship because, you know, so many people do things that they otherwise wouldn't do. Unkind, uncaring things that they otherwise wouldn't because of the church. They reject their gay children or their gay friends. They probably wouldn't do that if it weren't for the church. But they do. And so they, they have to, they have to justify somehow their belief in this church that has, you know, historically and currently oppressed many groups of people.

Lauren Rogers [01:11:03] They have to believe that it's true so that they can be happy and feel good about themselves. But, you know, they don't realize that their happiness is, I don't want to say false because I don't know, but I know my happiness was not true happiness. I truly believed I was happy, but it was because of you almost died. Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:11:27] Came really close to death.

Lauren Rogers [01:11:29] The, the church told me what happiness was. Happiness was obedience. I was obedient. Therefore, I, whatever I was feeling, had to be happy. And so, you know, I. I wished after I was disabled and got home from my mission and my life was very difficult, I honestly just wished to die because then I would not be sick anymore, I would not suffer. I just felt so terrible all the time, and I just wanted it to end. I just wanted to go into that peace of the afterlife. I wanted to be resurrected. I wanted to have that perfect body. And so I was having all of this, not necessarily like suicidal thoughts, but I mean, I wanted to die and I thought I was happy, and it's just so insane to me, but I thought I was happy in that time where I literally wished for death almost every day.

Lauren Rogers [01:12:27] And it was because I was looking forward to death with hope. You know, I was saying, I can't wait to experience all these wonderful things I have for me in the afterlife. And it just really stifled my happiness. And in a way where I didn't realize that it was stifling my happiness. And so a lot of people think there is no happiness outside the church, because that's what they're told. They're told there is only joy within the church. You can have momentary pleasure outside of the church, but there's only joy to be found in the restored church. And that is simply not the case.

Guest 2 [01:12:56] If you're wishing for death, yeah.

Lauren Rogers [01:12:59] Then you're probably not happy. And I have found, especially since discovering my sexuality and really settling into my post Mormon life, I have found more joy than I. Than I ever thought was possible. And the thought that so many people are suffering and think that their suffering is necessary and will live entire lives of hardship and heartache and suffering because they think that's what God wants is just heartbreaking. And I just, you know, I'm very outspoken on certain platforms about the church because.

Lauren Rogers [01:13:45] Because of that. Because I just desperately want my friends and family to be happy. And I have experienced joy on levels that I could never have imagined since leaving the church. And it's not a momentary thing. Before it was, I would suffer. I would suffer, I would suffer. And then I would have a beautiful spiritual experience and I would be reminded that God loved me and that Jesus was real. And I would feel that euphoric feeling, and then I would go back to suffering, you know, and so I thought I was happy because I had all those moments of joy, but my joy rarely isn't there.

Lauren Rogers [01:14:16] Now I am just so happy all of the time. And it sucked getting there. Like the deconstruction Process was so hard, but now that it's over, I. Well, mostly over. I'm probably still deconstructing things, but, yeah, I just wish people would know that there is so much joy, so much happiness to be found outside of the church, that the church doesn't have a monopoly on joy.

John Dehlin [01:14:44] So beautiful. That was so powerful. So much important stuff to learn and to contemplate from that. And I've heard tens of thousands of these stories, so thank you. My last big question is, what do you do when you realize you identify as a lesbian, that you are attracted to women, but you're in a marriage with a husband that you love and adore and with a kid that you want to raise with the husband and want to support?

Discovering Her Lesbian Identity Within Her Marriage

John Dehlin [01:15:14] How in the world do you go about navigating that, knowing that maybe some of your core. Well, how do you discover what your core needs are, your core desires are? And then what do you do? How do you even contemplate continuing in a marriage when, you know, that's a big part of you that's either a big question mark or that's leaving you on a weekly or daily basis, unsatisfied or unfulfilled? Tell us that. Take us through that part of the story. I guess.

Lauren Rogers [01:15:42] Yeah, absolutely. So I guess to set that up, I think what's important to talk about is kind of the journey our marriage took as we left the church. You know, as I said, it was very, very difficult to leave the church. And we discovered that we. Outside of the. You know, we were told by the church what our worldview was supposed to be. And so we had our worldview in common. And when we left the church, we discovered our worldviews were very different, and that caused a lot of conflict. And we really struggled for a few months, and we even considered divorce. And ultimately, thankfully, we worked through those problems. We went to therapy.

Guest 2 [01:16:36] We,

Lauren Rogers [01:16:39] you know, recommitted ourselves to each other. And that was the context of me discovering my sexuality was, you know, the strongest point of my marriage, where we were so committed to each other, so in love. Had really worked really hard on our marriage. You know, it was really, really hard. But we worked through those. Those problems. And so.

Lauren Rogers [01:17:05] So when I did discover. I'm getting ahead, let me explain how I discovered, you know, I. I was with my husband, and I had, you know, obviously recognized before we married that there was some issues where I wasn't feeling as attracted to him as I thought I should be. But I buried that because I was like, but I love him. And it doesn't matter. And attraction can grow. And I like who he is and how vain of me to like, you know, I thought I was just being vain, that he needs to be a perfect 10 or like, you know, I was like sad at myself for thinking that way and not realizing that it was something deeper.

Lauren Rogers [01:17:45] And so a few months ago, I started to kind of realize, no, no, I'm just not attracted to my husband. You know, and at that point I hadn't realized that I was attracted to women. I mean, I had, but I had chalked it up to the over sexualization of women in the media that, you know, women are attractive or women turn me on because of media being awful and over sexualizing women.

Lauren Rogers [01:18:15] So I started having these feelings of, oh my gosh, I'm realizing I'm not attracted to my husband. This is, could be a really, really big problem. And I was really scared. And I didn't want to tell my husband that because how would that feel to have your wife tell you, sorry, dear, I'm not attracted to you. Like, and so I didn't feel like I could tell anyone. And so it was a few days of, you know, turmoil before one night I was up really late thinking and decided that I was gonna look up some, you know, not pornography, but like erotica, more, more, more explicit media choices and just listen to my feelings.

Lauren Rogers [01:19:01] And because I was starting to get this inkling of maybe I'm attracted to women. And when I didn't push those feelings down and it was like literally just on tick tock, so obviously not, nothing too bad, but like, I just said, okay, is this something that I am attracted to? And it was just very obvious when I actually could ask myself that question honestly and not be afraid of, you know, eternal ramifications that I, I could realize, yeah, yeah, I'm attracted to women.

Lauren Rogers [01:19:36] And I very immediately, you know, told my husband I was in bed already. And he came in bed and I said, I need to tell you something. And I told him. And I had no apprehension because we had had such, you know, we, we were at such a good point in our marriage that I knew I could trust him and I didn't. I hadn't even fully realized my sexuality yet. So I just turned to him and I said, I think I'm bisexual. And he's like, okay, like, let's talk about that. And so he asked me lots of questions and kind of dived into how I, how I felt about male bodies and female bodies and my sexual experiences.

Lauren Rogers [01:20:20] And he asked all the right questions. You know, because. Probably because of his major, he. He kind of knew what questions to ask. And after he asked all those questions, he's like, lauren, you're not bisexual. You're gay. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I think you're right. And then I wept, but it was tears of joy. I was so relieved that there was.

Lauren Rogers [01:20:42] That there was an answer, that it's not that there was something wrong with my sexuality or wrong with my body, that I was just gay. And that was such a relief. I couldn't sleep all night. I kept waking up my husband and talking about how excited I was that I finally had an answer to all of these questions, that I no longer felt broken. I just felt like myself. Like, I felt like, yes, I'm gay. That's who I am.

Guest 2 [01:21:08] I.

Lauren Rogers [01:21:08] And honestly, the thought of divorce or separation wasn't even. Wasn't even a question for us. We. We had already had that discussion. You know, we. A few months before, we had had the discussion, should we stay together or should we get divorced? And we had come to the conclusion we should stay together. So we didn't feel the need to have that discussion again.

Lauren Rogers [01:21:30] But it was such a relief that we got to decide what that meant for our marriage, that we weren't going to be told by a church or by a God what our marriage needed to look like. And that was huge, because if I would have made that realization as a Mormon, then it would have been terribly difficult because I would have had to live a life of suppression. You know, I had already lived a life of suppression, of suppressing that part of me. And the thought that I would have to do that for the rest of my life, that. That was terrible. Like, that. That would have been terrible.

Lauren Rogers [01:22:07] And so to be free to say we get to decide what our marriage looks like, and a religion isn't going to tell us anymore, you know, and there's just so much restriction on what a marriage is supposed to be. In Mormonism, you know, you. You can't even think about someone other than your spouse, or it's a sin. And that, frankly, just was not possible for me. You know, I could not enjoy my sexual experiences with my husband if I wasn't fantasizing about women, which should have been a clue to me that I was gay a lot sooner, but it wasn't.

John Dehlin [01:22:40] That's what you're doing earlier on.

Lauren Rogers [01:22:41] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:22:42] Oh, wow.

Lauren Rogers [01:22:42] Which I don't think I mentioned before that, like, I had trouble, you know, feeling pleasure or even orgasming until six months into my Marriage when I finally gave in to the urge to, to fantasize about women instead, and I was still in denial. And so, and that wasn't even with like, sex like that, that was still a painful experience. That it was just like in other activities that I would do with my husband that I would be able to, to have pleasure, but it would only be when I would think about women. And I somehow did not realize back then you would have thought that that would have been a pretty big clue, but it wasn't serious.

Guest 2 [01:23:22] Compartmentalizing.

Lauren Rogers [01:23:23] Yeah, I know.

Guest 2 [01:23:26] Yeah. That's so interesting.

Lauren Rogers [01:23:28] So, yeah, so, because the, the Mormon definition of marriage is like, no fantasizing about someone else, no masturbating, no watching porn, no watching any inappropriate media, you know, no flirting with other people, no sex with other people. Like, all of those things are very, very strictly defined. And sexual sin is considered next to murder. And so it was very serious business. You, you can't break those rules when you're a Mormon. And so to, to have the freedom to say our marriage is going to look like whatever we want it to look like. You know, if we want to open our, our marriage to, to other people, we're.

Husband's Reaction and Navigating an Open Relationship

Lauren Rogers [01:24:05] We're going to do that because we get to decide. I'm not saying that we necessarily. That that's inevitable, that we will do that, but the fact that I have that option, you know, that, that, that there are avenues that I can take to be in the marriage I want to be in and be sexually fulfilled. Like, what a relief. You know, I, I don't have to be afraid that I'm going to be in this marriage that's going to repress. Repress me for the rest of my life. I can know that I have options, that no matter what we decide, we're going to decide something that will work for both of us, whether that is media choices or opening the relationship or, or a million other things.

Lauren Rogers [01:24:47] You know, like we, we can, we can make it work for us if, if that's what we want. And it is what we want. We want to make it work.

Guest 2 [01:24:55] And you said working for both of you. And while I am highly impressed with how you have been able to work through these issues continually, sounds like from the very beginning of your marriage. And I've just been thinking about your sweet husband who we went out to lunch with, who's been here taking care of your daughter, and what has it been like for him and to a. Recognize that it wasn't that he couldn't turn you on. First of all, that this is something that is just a sexual orientation that's innate within you. So what is his deconstruction of the. The marriage, like, you mentioned? How has that helped his psyche?

Lauren Rogers [01:25:34] Oh, yeah, he. I mean, yes, there were some hard aspects of it, but. But for the most part, it's been also a great relief for him because obviously it's hard that, you know, his wife isn't sexually attracted to him. Like, of course that's gonna be difficult, but he doesn't take it personally. And he now has, you know, like you said, that relief of knowing it's not him. Like, he's not the problem. I'm just gay. And that's such a relief. And not only that, that I'm a lesbian and I'm choosing to be with him. Like, I fell in love with him. That is awesome. Like, I feel like that's every guy's dream to have a lesbian fall in love with him.

Guest 2 [01:26:18] You know?

Lauren Rogers [01:26:19] Like, I.

Guest 2 [01:26:20] That speaks worlds to his character, doesn't it?

Lauren Rogers [01:26:22] Yeah. Yeah, he's. He's just amazing. And, yeah, it's been. It's been really good for him, and it's been really fun for our marriage. I feel like we. We have more in common than most heterosexual marriages. We both love women. And, you know, I. I know I shared this before, but, you know, we. We went to the beach, and we could both be like, check out the girl in the red swimsuit and be like, nice. She's cute. You know, like, that's just fun for us. Now, instead of me feeling guilty that I noticed or pushing that down and him feeling guilty that he noticed, it's just.

Lauren Rogers [01:27:00] It's so ridiculous that in Mormonism you're expected to turn off your basic hormones in your body and not notice other people. You know, that that's a sin, that if you even look at another woman, if you're, you know, a man and you're married, then. Then that's a sin in Mormonism. But to be like, you have eyes. Like, I. I know my husband has eyes and that he has hormones and that he has a sex drive. And so it doesn't offend me if he notices a beautiful woman, just like it doesn't offend him that I notice a beautiful woman. And it's just taken out all of the jealousy of our marriage.

Lauren Rogers [01:27:37] Because before I really struggled with jealousy, I would. If I thought or if I saw him looking at a woman, you know, that he. In that way, you know, I would get very upset and come to realize it was because I wanted to look at women that way. And I didn't feel like I could. And so Jealous wives.

Guest 2 [01:28:00] Maybe you're gay.

Lauren Rogers [01:28:03] Yeah. But it was just such a relief to be like, yeah, I get to check out women, my husband gets to check out women, we get to discuss it together, we get to have fun together, you know, And I, yeah, it's just only benefited our marriage. Our marriage has only gotten better since my discovery of my sexuality. And, and that's something that is something else I want to put out because I know that mixed orientation marriages normally are not the best option. But I want it to be clear that, that I am with my husband because that is what we both want, you know, that we are both very happy in our marriage.

Lauren Rogers [01:28:41] And even though, yes, there is stigma, rightly so stigma around mixed orientation marriages, that ultimately I just want people to respect my decision to be with my husband because I know a lot of people might think I'm not being true to myself being with a man as a lesbian, but I am, I, I am being true to myself because I want to be with him, because I love him. And so I am following what I want. And ultimately it's just really made me realize that marriage is, is not such like a strict thing. It's not, it shouldn't be in a box. And that ultimately you get to decide, you could decide what your life's going to look like.

Lauren Rogers [01:29:23] And I never got to do that as a Mormon because my life was laid out for me exactly what I needed to do, exactly who I needed to be. And being able to discover who I am and what I want my life to be has been such an amazing and fun experience.

Guest 2 [01:29:37] Beautifully said. Yeah, John, you're gonna say something.

John Dehlin [01:29:43] So, you know, obviously, because I did my research on this topic, it's, I'm having a flood of memories and of feelings. I always used to say that of course people can choose to, to enter into a mixed orientation marriage, but I always like to say that it should have just like a cigarette box, it should have a big red warning label saying, warning. Mixed orientation marriages have been found on average to be very hazardous for your health and for the health of your loved ones and have a very super high failure rate. And so like there's that coming into my brain. I'm also mindful of, you know, I interviewed Josh and Lolly Weed, so you guys are probably still in diapers when Josh and Lally Weed came out in, let's just say 2006, 2007, as a very public Mormon, mixed orientation marriage and for many, many years they were paraded around as like the example of you can do it, you know.

John Dehlin [01:30:37] And then of course, just a few years later, Josh comes out as gay and leaves Lolly and now he's dating men and that marriage failed. And I think we're all, we're somewhat happy for them that that happened, not

Guest 2 [01:30:52] happy for the kids that they created under, under the guise that they were. They, they can make it work. That's the problem, I really think is the crux of it is the lie that the church sells that it will work. And then there are, you know, these children that are left as the collateral damage of that.

John Dehlin [01:31:07] When in Josh and Lollies case, I think they're still best friends. I think they still co parent, you know, I don't know, they, they don't talk to me. But probably in part because I was critical of the harm, I felt like their very public example was potentially causing to encourage other people to enter into mixed orientation marriages. Even though I think they were careful to not say, don't use this as an example when you go public and when you allow yourself to become a

Guest 2 [01:31:37] public figure, get articles written about you from the church.

John Dehlin [01:31:43] But anyway, I get a sense that they're still besties and that their kids are probably fine. Who knows?

Guest 2 [01:31:48] Again, systems always. Yeah, they did the best within the system that they felt like they had to. But yeah.

John Dehlin [01:31:53] And then the final thing that comes to mind, you just reminded me of one of my favorite Mormon stories interviews of all time that I haven't thought of in so many years. I interviewed this man named Eldon Kirchner. He. I actually went down to Colorado and I went down to Colorado and I filmed him and his family. Basically Eldon was gay, grew up in Arizona in a super conservative Mormon family and knew he was gay, went to byu, became what was a young ambassador, but did the conversion therapy thing and married a woman because he was promised that he should and her name was Heather.

John Dehlin [01:32:30] And even though he was gay and she was straight, they were best friends and just loved each other and she accepted him and they made it work and they had beautiful kids and they loved their kids. And then she died of cancer and it's a classic Mormon Stories episode, but I just remember watching it and feeling really fraught because I'm like, on the one hand I want everyone to run away screaming from a mixed orientation marriage. And here there's a couple, or at least the gay man in a couple, just like now you saying, hey, it works for us. And yeah, but that's that is the human predicament or that is the human condition is that everyone's got to find their way and none of us needs to even feel the responsibility of standing in judgment over someone else's decision.

John Dehlin [01:33:21] We just need to have all the information, know the data, know the risks, and then make an informed decision. And what I love is that you weren't doing it under religious duress. You know, and that's the thing. No one would enter into a, almost no one would enter into a mixed orientation marriage without religious duress. And who knows, maybe you would not have married your husband if you had been able to explore your sexuality previously and fell in love with a woman. And maybe you would have made other choices, but it doesn't matter. That's where you are now. Mormon stories isn't so much advocating for anything in or out of the church, in or out of whatever type of marriage.

John Dehlin [01:33:57] What we are advocating for is full information, kind of an evidence based life, best information you can have and then in fully informed consent when, when you're making your decisions and cares. Nodding. So I think I said something right?

Guest 2 [01:34:11] Yes. What else did you want to say to that, Lauren? I was gonna ask a follow up

Lauren Rogers [01:34:14] question, but yeah, no, I honestly, because of, because I know the research around mixed orientation marriages, because of my husband and his degree, I was honestly very hesitant in coming forward with my story about my sexuality. I, I really had to weigh like, is it important enough to me that I share my truth when people could take, you know, take my story in the wrong way and make bad decisions for their life and. Or just judge you? Oh yeah, or judge me. And I had to weigh that. To me, discovering my sexuality came with learning so many things about sexuality. That is for me wasn't common knowledge.

Lauren Rogers [01:35:01] And if I would have known the differences between, you know, sexual and romantic attraction and all sorts of different things, if I would have known those things, I would have gone through a lot less pain in my life. And so even though I was nervous that people might take it the wrong way, if I seem like I'm promoting mixed orientation marriage, I rationalize that the other information, the other side is also really important to get out that people need to know, you know, first, it's not normal to have pain during sex. If you do go to a doctor, like a qualified doctor and get that figured out and you know, really listen to your feelings and don't, don't just follow the paradigm you're given, like really try and discover what is right for you.

Lauren Rogers [01:35:48] And so I Agree that it's something that I. I still feel a little nervous about that. I don't want people to think that that is right because it worked for me. Because I don't think it works for most people.

Guest 2 [01:36:00] Now, speaking of most people generally, I'm going to be so professional and ask this question, like, just generally speaking, you said that when you were Mormon you were having sexual relationship with your husband and had snuffed out a lot of those, you know, gay feelings from the time you were 12 years old. Do people in mixed orientation marriages who are not even Mormon, who are in positions such as yours, still have sex with men? If you know what I'm asking, like

Lauren Rogers [01:36:33] if I still have sex with my husband.

Guest 2 [01:36:35] I guess that's. Yeah.

Lauren Rogers [01:36:35] What I'm asking everything. No, you're good. I'm an open book. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:36:40] No, so direct. I could never ask that question.

Lauren Rogers [01:36:44] No. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like I don't really know what the future will hold. We have talked about so many dis. Or sorry, so many possibilities, my husband and I, and we see it as a possibility that we might not continue. Like we might eventually land in a place where we don't have sex, or at least not sex very often. We might be in an open relationship and still love each other and still be married to each other. But it's very possible that that won't, that won't always be a part of our marriage. But it still is at this point. You know, I. I said to my therapist that I, or my therapist kind of helped me understand that sex.

Lauren Rogers [01:37:24] I've kind of Pavlov. Pavlov myself into being able to have a good time, you know, in heterosexual sex, being a homosexual because of the church, honestly, you know, like, you weren't allowed to masturbate. Right. So I only ever experienced those pleasurable moments when I had intimacy with my husband. It was like, you know, intimacy with my husband and then let's focus on Lauren's pleasure now, you know, and so it was never something we were able to achieve, like, at the same time, but it is something that I only ever did when I had intimacy. And because I had such a strong emotional and romantic relationship with my husband, I was, I was able.

Lauren Rogers [01:38:08] I'm in a place where I'm able to say, like, yeah, I absolutely, like, will continue to have intimate relations with my husband. They continue to typically not be, like I said before, not be sexual experiences. They're much more emotional experiences for me. It's much more about the connection and the, the feeling loved and the Feeling wanted for me. But, but yeah, it's, it's something that for our marriage, that's how it works and you know, is working pretty well at this point. And. But we're open to what the future might hold. We're open to things changing because we don't, we don't pretend to know what the future will hold and we don't pretend to know what will work for us in five years.

Lauren Rogers [01:38:50] We just know that we're great at communicating and we will continue to communicate our needs and kind of figure things out as we go.

Guest 2 [01:38:57] That's so interesting. And again, thank you for being like open and vulnerable enough to share that. And I'm just kind of thinking of a lot of the sexual repression that a lot of Mormon women go and post Mormon women go that through deconstruction. And I'm just thinking that somebody probably just heard that thinking like, yeah, sure, I have a sex life with my husband, like, and we orgasm or whatever. But they don't have that degree of emotional intimacy that you describe. So it's like you can have one but you don't always have the other. And like there is a striving that I think most married Mormon women, ex women, whoever, like everyone's striving to have a strong connection with their, with their partner, their spouse, in whatever orientation, quite honestly.

Guest 2 [01:39:41] So I think that's, that's a really key, interesting part of your story that I'm actually surprised by of like that's a really interesting dynamic that I hadn't quite been able to dig into before so that you're able to articulate that. And yeah, that's really, really interesting.

Lauren Rogers [01:39:57] Yeah, that's definitely something that I love about our marriage that, you know, we strive really hard to just meet each other's needs and we're willing to sacrifice to do that and never at the expense of either one of our like, emotional well being. But we, yeah, we just. I feel so lucky to have such an amazing husband. And, and it's not luck. I mean we, we put the work in. We, we really, really did put the work into to have such a strong marriage. But yeah, we, we're lucky that it works for us because I know that's just not the case for a lot of people.

Lauren Rogers [01:40:37] And I, I feel, yeah, I just feel really lucky that I can enjoy having sex with my husband even if it's not the way I imagined sex would be. It's not like the super sexual experience for me, but it's still some, it's still a positive Experience. And, and like you said, yeah, a lot of, a lot of straight people don't have that connection. A lot of people, for them it's only the physical and, and it's so amazing to have that emotional connection and that.

Lauren Rogers [01:41:06] Yeah, it's, it's very, it's very special. Our relationship is so, so awesome and perfect and amazing and I could just talk about praises to my husband for hours.

Guest 2 [01:41:18] So I love that you said that you corrected yourself and you're like, it's not luck, it's that we put the work in. And I hope that's what people are hearing that like you've been through some outrageously hard things through your disability and your sexual orientation and that it's taken a lot of work and that you've had a partner who's been patient as you're patient with him. And that's an incredible example and as well for your daughter. And I guess as a wrapping up, the final question that I have, John, I don't know what other final questions that you have is. You mentioned that giving birth to your daughter was so major in motivating you to really figure out your belief in the church and in God.

Identity, Authenticity, and Message to Others

Guest 2 [01:41:55] And then I'm sure that has other implications with figuring out your identity and being true to yourself. So what is your message for. I don't know if you're planning on having more children, but for your daughter who might listen to this one day, what do you hope that she takes away from your journey?

Lauren Rogers [01:42:10] That's a good question. Yeah, I mean, at this point I'm not planning on having more children, but you never know. But that's a really good question. I, I mean, I guess the obvious things of like, do your research and don't believe something just because someone tells you it's true and you know, informed consent and loving people the way they are and yeah, ultimately I just hope that, that she.

Lauren Rogers [01:42:46] My biggest desire in life is that she can be happy. And so I hope that she learns how important advocating for herself is and how, how important it is to do things for yourself and to, to do the things necessary to, to deal with any trauma you might face. Right. You know, I've gone through a lot of trauma in my life and a lot of people let that trauma rule them and control them. And I probably did for a little bit. You know, I definitely wallowed in self pity plenty of times in my life, but, but I also got, went to therapy and dealt with it and you know, got on medication when I needed to and I, you know, I advocated for myself, and that's something I hope my daughter can do, is to stand up for herself.

Lauren Rogers [01:43:41] But also a huge thing that we haven't really touched on that much is advocating for other people that, you know, I feel like it would be immoral of me to have the knowledge I have about the harm and the abuse of the church and not say anything like that would be immoral, because not only are people suffering, but people are dying.

Lauren Rogers [01:44:10] The suicide rate in Utah is well above the national average. No, it's. The number one cause of death for teenagers is death by suicide. And if people think that that has nothing to do with the church, then they need to talk to more gay people, because that's absolutely, you know, the reason why.

Lauren Rogers [01:44:34] Why there are so many people who feel that their only option is to end their life. And so I hope that she can. That she can be strong enough to defend other people and to stand up for other people, because that has been a huge part of my deconstruction, is the empathy that I was able to develop for others and realizing that it's not okay to abuse anyone ever. You know, like, there's no accepting abuse because of the end goal. It's.

John Dehlin [01:45:15] Yeah.

Lauren Rogers [01:45:16] I just hope that she can advocate for herself and advocate for other people, because those are the two things that I think will facilitate the most happiness in her life.

Activism, Protests, and BYU Chalk Drawings

John Dehlin [01:45:27] And you've been working hard to be a bit of an activist here in Utah. Do you want to talk about that or not so much?

Lauren Rogers [01:45:32] Yeah, no, absolutely. I guess I don't know where to start. I. Well, so I heard about, a few months ago, Natasha Helfer's situation when she was called to a disciplinary council, and I really resonated with her message. You know, her, she was very vocal about ending shame culture, especially, like, sexual shame and supporting LGBTQ members. And those things had affected me so deeply in my life. I had, you know, at that point, I had attributed my negative sexual experiences to shame culture and the shame and sexuality. I didn't. At that point, I hadn't quite realized I was gay, but I was very moved by her message that she advocated for things I wanted to advocate for, that she advocated for, you know, the LGBTQ community.

Lauren Rogers [01:46:31] And I, you know, saw myself as a fierce ally. And my brother had been excommunicated himself for being gay. And so I watched the live stream of her excommunication. I mean, it wasn't inside, but, you know, and was just devastated at their treatment of her and devastated that they went through with the excommunication and so I organized a protest. I didn't even live in Utah, but I flew to Utah, and I.

Lauren Rogers [01:47:02] I organized that protest outside of church headquarters. And it, to me, almost felt like reconciliation or repentance, that I had not been there for my brother, that he was excommunicated. And although it was heartbreaking, I thought the church had made the right decision.

Lauren Rogers [01:47:23] You know, ultimately, he had broken his covenants, and I thought that. That the church was correct to relieve him of them so that he wouldn't be accountable. And. And looking back on that, I'm horrified that I thought that.

Guest 2 [01:47:38] But.

Lauren Rogers [01:47:41] But, yeah, I. I very much felt the need to make up for that and to. I, at that point, had realized how abusive excommunication is, that they can hold your salvation over your head and punish you and punish your loved ones. And.

Lauren Rogers [01:47:59] And I just was like, no, I'm not gonna take this sitting down like I did with my brother. I'm gonna. 1. I'm gonna go and support this amazing woman who had become, like, a hero of mine in just a few days, as I read her story and saw some of the work she had done. And I so desperately wanted to show her love and support, but I also wanted to let the church know that what they were doing was wrong. And even if they didn't even read my petition, you know, I.

Lauren Rogers [01:48:29] I still felt like I had the moral obligation to do something. And so having that experience, which was overall a very positive experience, a lot of people showed up. So many people were so loving and so kind. Natasha showed up herself, and I was just so grateful that she was able to. To be there and see how many people were. Were there to support her. And I realized that then how big of an impact activism can have. Not necessarily on making big changes in the church, but hopefully, eventually, yes, but.

Lauren Rogers [01:49:05] But in healing people who were harmed. And so that's why I got to Utah, and right after Elder Holland's talk on Monday, that was very inflammatory and very hurtful to the gay community or all of the LGBTQ community. And I organized the chalk event at BYU because I.

Lauren Rogers [01:49:28] I didn't want. I didn't want more people to die. I didn't want more people in my community to die. And I knew that his words could have that effect. And I knew that I know how lonely it is, and I didn't want them to feel like they were alone. And so that one wasn't a protest. I wasn't protesting Elder Holland's words. I wasn't saying anything about Elder Holland. We went and we only wrote messages of love and support. We, you know, drew rainbows and quoted nice scriptures and, you know, were able to just spread the entire sidewalk south of campus with messages of just love and support to the LGBTQ community.

John Dehlin [01:50:18] And you helped organize that.

Lauren Rogers [01:50:20] Yeah. And the people. So many people reached out or I saw messages of other people who said they saw those messages and. And felt like they. They weren't alone and felt like they could keep going and felt like somebody cared about them and just reminded me, like, yeah, that's.

Lauren Rogers [01:50:44] That's what I have to do now. You know, Like, I. I know so much about the church. I understand its harm, and it does no good for me to try and to fight the church because they're always going to win. They have better lawyers and more money than you could ever imagine. But I can try and spread love and.

Lauren Rogers [01:51:04] And to stand up for what I believe is. Is right. And so that's something that's become very important to me. And, you know, they erased byu, erased the chalk, and we went again the next day, and then they erased it again, and we went again on Sunday. And so we. I've just been very proud of the post Mormon community that, you know, we. We are so determined to. To spread love and to spread understanding, even though the church would like to paint us in a very negative light. The church loves to paint ex Mormons as hateful, angry, offended people. But the reality is, maybe some people are.

Lauren Rogers [01:51:43] But most of us just want the people we love to be safe, and we want the people in the church to be safe. And so often those things are the same thing. The people I love are in the church, and I want them to just. To not be hurt and to not suffer unnecessarily.

John Dehlin [01:52:07] There's a video that came out a day or two ago with the BYU student sort of dumping water on one of the chalk drawings and maybe saying some homophobic things. Is there anything you want to say about how you felt or what you thought about that video?

Lauren Rogers [01:52:26] Yeah, I. You know, when I had organized the event, I was very nervous. I assumed we were going to get lots of pushback. I had assumed we were going to get. The police called on us and all of those things, but, you know, we had cleared it with the police. We were not doing it. We were following all the rules, basically, and so I knew it was going to be okay, but I was very nervous. But that wasn't the experience I had at the event itself. So many students came up to us, asked us what we were Doing and said to. That's amazing. Can we join?

Lauren Rogers [01:52:55] And I bought a bunch of extra chalk. So I would just give them chalk, and they would start writing love messages to people as well. And. And so, because I had received such a positive experience at the event, I was.

Lauren Rogers [01:53:08] Yeah, I was really shocked to. To see that video and to see that, you know, that hope in humanity that had been restored was kind of, like, dashed again. And. And that's why I was like, yeah, let's go again. Let's do it again. Because love is more powerful than hate, and it's easier for them to destroy. It takes a lot less time for them to clean up the sidewalk than it did for us to do it. But ultimately, love wins. And I was willing to keep going back and keep going back. And.

Lauren Rogers [01:53:41] And honestly, as disheartening as it was to hear that homophobic slur and that hate come from. From that man. What was more hurtful, surprisingly, was that BYU cleaned it up. It wasn't on their property. We had approved it from the Provo police, and they sent BYU ground. So BYU employees to clean up what wasn't on their property.

Lauren Rogers [01:54:07] And they didn't just do it once. They did it. They did it twice. You know, they did it Friday morning, and then they called in their grounds at 3am in the morning on Sunday. So not only were they working on a Sabbath, so they were being hypocritical, but they did it in a time where they wouldn't be seen because they were seen on Friday. And that caused backlash. So they called. They called their students. The people who work grounds are students. They called them in at three in the morning the Sunday before school starts to clean up. Messages of love like that weren't even on their property.

Lauren Rogers [01:54:41] Like, it was so disappointing to feel like. I thought we were doing something so amazing, and we were. We did do something so amazing. So many people felt love when they needed to. And then that's how BYU responded in cowardice is what I would call it. That they did it in the dark of night when no one would see them do it. And they. They wanted to erase the love that we had put down. And I just can't see why that would be necessary. I can't see why they would feel the need to erase messages of love that weren't even on their property. Just despicable, in my opinion.

John Dehlin [01:55:16] But you're not giving up.

Lauren Rogers [01:55:17] Nope, we're not giving up. I'm heading to BYU right after this, actually.

John Dehlin [01:55:21] That's awesome. All right, well, Lauren Rogers, this Has been just such a delightful. Isn't she lovely?

Lauren Rogers [01:55:29] Isn't she lovely?

Guest 2 [01:55:32] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:55:32] Oh, you are delightful and wise and

Lauren Rogers [01:55:35] poised and kinda trauma made me wise.

John Dehlin [01:55:39] Oh, well, it doesn't make me happy, but I'm happy. You. I'm happy. Thanks for doing your, you know, my Mormon story TikTok so that I could learn about you. Thanks for your TikTok channel. Thanks for sharing your wisdom with us today and thanks for your activism to try and pay it forward and spread the love like. And it was fun to meet your husband and your child. It's just been a delightful day.

Lauren Rogers [01:56:07] Yes.

Guest 2 [01:56:08] For me too.

John Dehlin [01:56:09] I hope we can hang out and see each other again and have a cheeseburger again.

Lauren Rogers [01:56:14] Yeah, absolutely. I am so thankful that I was able to come here. I was really nervous because I hadn't come out publicly as having left the church, but that's gonna change. Yeah. There's something very therapeutic about being able to share my story. And so thank you so much for having me and giving me a platform where I could have a voice because that's something that the church loves to suppress female voices. So it's awesome to have the ability to have my voice be heard. So thank you so much.

John Dehlin [01:56:49] Yeah. And what a beautiful. It's not like a typical lesbian story per se, although that doesn't exist. And we've had several. Fortunately, we've had several women who identify as lesbian reach out to us and express interest in coming on Mormon stories. This won't be the last, right, Kara?

Guest 2 [01:57:07] Oh, I have a DM full. It's not fun. Darn it. If I was gay, that'd be much more fun. But I have DMs full of women who want to talk to me, but only for producing Mormon stories. But yeah, we'll definitely have a lot more now that I'm here. Now that the female voice is here on Mormon stories. You can't get rid of me, John. Gonna fill this chair with lesbians every

John Dehlin [01:57:27] day of the week.

Guest 2 [01:57:27] Just kidding.

John Dehlin [01:57:29] Yeah, more to come. But what a beautiful. You know, again, I. I express public. I don't know if shame's the right word, but I lamented that sixteen, whatever hundred episodes in a Mormon stories and this. You know, I had not yet interviewed someone who identifies as lesbian for some weird reason, but what a great first woman. We're gonna do more. What's that?

Guest 2 [01:57:52] I told you, it's because I wasn't here.

John Dehlin [01:57:53] Yeah, it's all. It's all about Kara. At the end of the day, it's all about Kara. It's always, I did.

Guest 2 [01:57:58] I made a TikTok that was what's really funny. Let's tell the audience. I made a TikTok that I was trying to find. We left a meeting and I was like, I gotta. I gotta reach out. I gotta find, like, a really good, like. Like another good lesbian story. And I didn't realize yet that we had already booked you to come on on this Monday and that you identify as a lesbian. Had no idea. And then she messages me and she's like, well, you're interviewing me on Monday, and I am one. And I was like, I am so good at my job. I just, like, manifest it. I put it out there, and it's just like, right here in front of me. But we'll see if anyone can beat this interview. I don't think they can.

John Dehlin [01:58:30] Well, yeah. Well, it's been lovely. Lauren, thank you so much. And, Kara, thanks so much for being co host and producer and for all the ways you make you improve the quality of what we put out through Mormon Stories in the Open Stories foundation and occasionally make things more enjoyable.

Guest 2 [01:58:51] Occasionally. Occasionally you add something. Yeah. I think it's just a fun job, and I'm happy to meet so many amazing people and hear so many amazing stories. And, Lauren, you articulated so many important things today. Just, like, even if we only talked about mission stuff, that would have been enough. This was, like, two entire important interviews. In one, I felt like so. And three, talking about, like, the Holland and the chalk thing at the end there, too. So you articulated so many good things today. So, yeah. Thank you for your vulnerability and driving out here and doing all the advocacy work that you've been doing and really just bringing Lori Beth. Is that her name? Lori Beth? So come walk around. Be like a cute little presence in the room. Yeah. So it's been a really fun day. So thanks for telling your story.

Lauren Rogers [01:59:35] Thank you. I'm so glad that I had the opportunity.

John Dehlin [01:59:40] And in our interview yesterday with Matt Easton, we listed a bunch of resources for LGBT Mormons, youth, adults, including byuq, Color of the Campus, Encircle, Affirmation. We'll try and list a bunch of links and resources. The Trevor Project National Suicide Hotline. There are all sorts of great resources that you should check out that we'll maybe try and include on our show. Notes for those who are in need of support.

Where to Follow Lauren and Closing Thoughts

Guest 2 [02:00:06] Right on. And tell everyone your TikTok handle again. And anything else you want to share about. If people want to follow you or reach out to you, what do they need to know?

John Dehlin [02:00:15] Yeah.

Lauren Rogers [02:00:15] My. My TikTok name is Xmom, so it's Eczemom underscore. And yeah, I try to answer all my comments and DMs, so any questions or anything, any other activism ideas that I can do, I'm always looking for an opportunity to. To show love to the community.

Guest 2 [02:00:36] So, yeah, do you have an Instagram or is it just a private one? I mean, we shouldn't be giving it out.

Lauren Rogers [02:00:40] I technically have one, but I don't use it.

Guest 2 [02:00:42] So TikTok would be the best place for people to find you.

John Dehlin [02:00:45] Yep.

Guest 2 [02:00:46] Okay.

John Dehlin [02:00:47] And if you want to increase your chances of being selected to be interviewed on Mormon Stories Podcast, but more importantly, if you want to share your story, please download TikTok or use your TikTok account. Create a video telling your Mormon story in between 1 and 3 minutes. Could be negative, positive, or both. And tag it MyMormonStory. And Kara and I, it's got 1.2 million views that hashtag now. And Karen and I will monitor that. And we're going to be selecting others of you to come on Mormon Stories and tell your story. But. But more importantly, whether or not we bring you on, you will have shared your story.

John Dehlin [02:01:30] And once you get in the millions of views on any hashtag or any video, you're reaching a lot, a lot of people. So we hope that hashtag lives long and prospers. We'd love to see it get to 2 million and 3 million and 4 million. Because Mormon stories, as great as it's doing, you know, we don't have a single hashtag on Mormon stories on YouTube that's reaching that many people. So.

John Dehlin [02:01:55] So TikTok is a powerful thing. Please use it, please check it out, learn it. If you really want to make a difference, that's one great way to do it. We'll go ahead and wrap up and just say thanks for all your support.

John Dehlin [02:02:07] Thanks to all the donors that make Mormon Stories Podcast possible. You know, your donations, pay for me, pay for Cara, pay for Gerardo, pay for Brooklyn, pay for Jennifer, and all the different support that we have to make all this content possible. The lighting, the cameras, the sound, the hosting, the rent of this facility, marketing, just all that stuff your donations pay for. So thank you.

John Dehlin [02:02:33] If. If you're one of the, you know, 999 out of a thousand that listen to or watch more Storage podcast and you don't donate, we're losing donors every month because people lose money, lose their jobs, lose, lose interest and. Or they get mad because we covered one Topic or another didn't cover one topic or another. We would love to invite some of you to become a monthly donor now, today, because we always need new support to replace support that ends. So Please go to moremorestories.org, click on the Donate button. Become a monthly donor. 10 bucks a month, 20 bucks a month. Whatever you can afford.

John Dehlin [02:03:10] Your donations are tax deductible in the US they go 100% towards the mission of the Open Stories foundation of Mormon Stories. And we'll just help as many people as we can for as long as you will support us.

John Dehlin [02:03:23] And that's how it works. A ton of you stepped up to support the John Larsen campaign. So we raised over $10,000 already in just a few days to support John Larsen becoming a regular contributor to Mormon Stories Podcast and us hosting the Mormon Expression podcast so that people can consume that and enjoy it. So if you don't know what I'm talking about, go to mormonexpression.com or mormonstories.org mormonexpression and you can become a donor and supporter to John Larsen, the Mormon Expression Project. Or you can just donate to Mormon Stories. Generally, there are other ways you can support us. Subscribing to us on YouTube, on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok, on Twitter, any of the socials.

John Dehlin [02:04:07] We're pretty much on it. Subscribe to us there. You can like our content, you can comment there, and you can just share these wonderful episodes. If you know anyone that could benefit from today's interview with Lauren Rogers or yesterday's interview with Matt Easton or any of the interviews in our library, just share it. Share it on your social media, share it on Instagram, on Facebook, make shorts of these videos, share it on TikTok. We love that. And just share the links with friends and family. That's a great way to get the word out through word of mouth.

John Dehlin [02:04:37] So that's enough for today. We've got many more exciting Mormon Stories episodes in the days, weeks, months and years ahead. But we always treasure you, our listeners, and our viewers. We consider this a sacred honor. Kara, over and out. Rogers.

Guest 2 [02:04:51] Rogers that.

John Dehlin [02:04:52] Rogers.

Guest 2 [02:04:53] Rogers, Lauren.

John Dehlin [02:04:54] That and Lauren, drive safely. Stay in touch. We'll see you again soon.

Lauren Rogers [02:05:00] Yeah, perfect. Thank you.

John Dehlin [02:05:01] Thank you.

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.