Introduction and Dan McClellan's Background

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 7, 2023 and today we have with us Bible scholar and TikTok superstar and podcaster Dan McClellan. We are so excited. Hey, Dan, we're so excited to have you here.

Dan McClellan [00:00:19] Well, thank you for the invitation. I appreciate it. It's good to be here.

John Dehlin [00:00:23] I'll just say from my point of view, it. It has been a long time since a Mormon related content creator has kind of burst on the scene and acquired so much fandom and so much, I don't know, viewer and subscriber success as Dan has. Dan, you've been doing TikTok for how long?

Dan McClellan [00:00:47] Started end of March 2021, so for about two and a half years.

John Dehlin [00:00:52] Like around Covid time, right?

Dan McClellan [00:00:53] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:00:54] And I think you've got like, is it 700,000 TikTok followers or more?

Dan McClellan [00:00:58] Just over 600,000 on TikTok and then I've got almost 125,000 on Instagram and a smattering across other social media platforms.

John Dehlin [00:01:09] And I think I met you first at a party at Adam Ford's house the day Bachelboy was there, right?

Dan McClellan [00:01:14] Yeah, I think that was his 50th birthday, wasn't it?

John Dehlin [00:01:17] And you were just right, starting out. I'm like, hey, you ought to consider thumbnails for TikTok or something like that. But anyway, Dan's taken the world by storm and he's got a catchphrase data over dogma. He worked as an employee of the LDS church for a long time. He has a solid academic background. But I'll let him talk about his own goals. But he's all about, I'll say he just told me, democratizing access to information about biblical studies and sort of fighting disadvantages, information about religion and scriptures. But mostly he's just loved because he provides this dispassionate, non rhetorical data based commentary on the Bible and on religion in general. And people just love it. So, Dan McClelland, welcome to Mormon Stories podcast.

Dan McClellan [00:02:18] Thank you for having me.

John Dehlin [00:02:19] Yeah, really quickly, we want everyone in the world to watch and follow Dan's stuff. So Dan, tell us all the ways people can and we're gonna have them do this at the beginning and the end. Tell everybody how they can access and find the good work that you do.

Dan McClellan [00:02:35] Well, I go by the username McClellan across all my social media platforms and not as my last name is actually spelled, but a phonetic spelling, M A K L E L A N, which is how I spelled my name on my mission because four consonants in a row are difficult for some folks to pronounce. So it usually came out as Makkah kalation Down in Uruguay, I would spell it that way. And it came out McClellan, which was a lot easier. And I got home from my mission and discovered that that was a handy username that was pretty unique. And I knew I was going to have access to that if I was signing up for something. So that became my handle. So on TikTok, on Instagram, on Twitter, on YouTube, you can find me a K, L, E L A N. And then I also have a website where I am teaching online classes. So that's McClellan.com and then I've teamed up with a couple other scholars, Robin Faith Walsh and Candida Moss, who are wonderful professors of New Testament and Bible. And we have a group called dadaskaloi.com, which Dadaskaloy is a pedantic word. It's a Greek word that means teachers. And then I also have teamed up with another TikTok creator named Dan Beecher on our podcast, the Data Over Dogma podcast. And you can find that wherever you get your podcast. But we also have a website, dataoverdogmapod.com which is where you can get the episodes as they come out. And I think, yeah, one just came out this morning. So talking about the story of Balaam and the angel of the Lord and then talking about the history, the concept of Satan. So a fun one that I get questions about all the time.

John Dehlin [00:04:23] And the types of topics you do

Dan McClellan [00:04:26] web courses on are related to the Bible. So I think the first one I did was almost a year ago was on the Israelite goddess Asherah. I've done classes on Adonai and El on homosexuality in the Bible, on the Book of Revelation, on the development of the concept of Satan, on the Divine Council. I think the one I have coming up that I'll probably be teaching sometime in the middle of September will be on the creation accounts in the Bible. There are three different creation accounts that we find in the Bible.

John Dehlin [00:05:01] Love it. And really quickly, you worked for the LDS Church for how long?

Dan McClellan [00:05:06] Just over a decade. I was a scripture translation supervisor, started in January of 2013 and then I left that position this last January. So January of 2023.

John Dehlin [00:05:18] And do you talk about your current relationship with the church or do you

Dan McClellan [00:05:21] not talk about that to some degree? I'll talk about it, but there are things that I consider out of bounds for my social media content. Just because there are issues that can come up with my relationship with my former employer. There's things that I try to avoid.

John Dehlin [00:05:44] But, I mean, in terms of whether or not you're a member and whether or not you attend.

Dan McClellan [00:05:48] Yeah. Oh, no, I'm an active member of the church.

John Dehlin [00:05:51] Okay.

Dan McClellan [00:05:52] Yeah. And I'm happy to talk about some of that.

John Dehlin [00:05:56] Okay. And really quickly, your degrees, just so that people get a sense for your academic background.

Dan McClellan [00:06:04] Yeah. I have a bachelor's degree in Ancient Near Eastern Studies from Brigham Young University, where I focused on Biblical Hebrew and did a minor in Classical Greek. Then I went to the University of Oxford. I did a master's degree in Jewish Studies there, where I wrote my master's thesis on anti anthropomorphism in the source text of the Septuagint translation of Exodus under a wonderful scholar named Timothy Michael Law. Then I went to lovely Langley, British Columbia, to do another master's degree in Biblical Studies at Trinity Western University, which is an evangelical university. And I was primarily there to work with Peter Flint and Marty Abegg, leading Dead Sea Scrolls scholars, and wrote my thesis there on cognitive linguistics and the conceptualization of deity in the Hebrew Bible. And after that, I'd been accepted to go back to Oxford for the PhD. They call it a DPHIL at Oxford, and they didn't offer me any funding, so I was unable to take up that position and was worried for a while that my academic career was over. But I had a good friend named Francesca Stavra Kapoulou, who was the head of theology and religion at the University of Exeter. And we were chatting one time and she said, hey, we have a distance PhD program, so you come do a PhD with me and found a way to make it work. And so wrote my doctoral dissertation through the University of Exeter, where I did cognitive linguistics again, but then the cognitive science of religion, and wrote my dissertation on the conceptualization of deity and divine images in the Hebrew Bible, and then revised and published that as an open access volume within the Society of Biblical Literature Press's Ancient near east monograph series. And that's called Adonai's Divine Images, a cognitive approach where I talk about how they conceptualize divine images in the Hebrew Bible and how that conceptualization changes as their history kind of compels them to renegotiate what they understand divine images to be. And then at the very end, there's a little appendix where I say, and this has relevance to how early Christians conceptualized Jesus relationship to God. And that's leading into a book that I'm working on now, which will be on early Christology and how they understood Jesus relationship to God.

John Dehlin [00:08:22] Beautiful. Well, you are like, you've probably been described as like a walking human encyclopedia of biblical studies. But today we're going to be doing a two part interview. That's how it's planned. At least part one is going to be Dan's Mormon story. So, you know, we won't be getting super deep heavy into biblical studies, even if I could, which I probably couldn't. But part two we're going to be doing. I just asked you to kind of give a general. Provide us with kind of a general 10 things everyone should know about the Bible kind of thing. If you had to pick 10, cherry pick 10 things that you kind of feel like people should know, maybe that people are getting wrong, that's going to be part two. But on Mormon stories, we try and get the Mormon story. And yours is the story of a convert.

Dan McClellan [00:09:12] Yes.

Dan's Early Life and Family Upbringing

John Dehlin [00:09:13] So without any further ado, let's start part one, which is your Mormon story. Okay. Let's talk about your life before your conversion and then we'll talk about your Mormon story.

Dan McClellan [00:09:23] Yeah, I was, I was born in a little town called Charlestown, West Virginia, in a. What I think you could describe as a. As a religious commune. And I don't recall much of that time period. We left when I was six.

John Dehlin [00:09:42] Were your parents hippies? I don't mean that disrespectfully

Dan McClellan [00:09:48] to some degree, but also very much not. So. It's. They contain multitudes, let's put it that way. But they what? Contain multitudes.

John Dehlin [00:09:57] Okay.

Dan McClellan [00:09:58] But we left when I was 6.

John Dehlin [00:10:02] Do you talk about what the commune was like? What the nature of the beliefs there or the tradition?

Dan McClellan [00:10:07] I don't really know a ton about it.

John Dehlin [00:10:09] Was it Christian or.

Dan McClellan [00:10:10] Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a fundamentalist Christian to some degree. I don't know what kind of title they had for or how they identified. But after we left, we moved into Gaithersburg, Maryland, and my memories really start there. And from that point on my parents didn't really talk much about religion. So I would say my upbringing was. Was more or less agnostic, kind of. At least my experience of it was kind of agnostic. It was. Religion was just something I was aware of but didn't have much concern or need for.

John Dehlin [00:10:52] Is it safe to say they had a bad experience that kind of soured their taste for religion?

Dan McClellan [00:10:57] Yeah, I think so. Okay. I don't know. Not religion in general, but at least for what was going on there. And so, yeah, I was raised pretty low on the socioeconomic ladder. I lived in apartments for a long time and was, yeah, pretty, pretty white bred upbringing on the east coast. I think the biggest, I think the coolest thing that happened was we were the first family in the neighborhood to get a Nintendo when the original Nintendo came out. And so that was, was exciting for a while. We, I was popular in the neighborhood, but really it was because my dad wanted to play Arkanoid. So we, my brothers and I were in the basement. I was the oldest of five kids that my mom had in five or six years. And so my brothers and I slept in the basement and when we were asleep, my dad would sneak downstairs and play Arkanoid with the volume turned down real low. So what year were you born? 1980.

John Dehlin [00:12:03] Okay. Okay.

Dan McClellan [00:12:05] I just turned 43 a few weeks ago.

John Dehlin [00:12:07] Okay. Yeah, so I'm 10 years older than you. I'm just trying to. I have my own timeline going whenever my guests are talking. So the original Nintendo. Okay. The 3016 bit, what was it?

Dan McClellan [00:12:20] Oh, gosh, I don't remember.

John Dehlin [00:12:21] Okay, all right, so is it. No, I was thinking Atari for a second, but it's Nintendo. That makes more sense.

Dan McClellan [00:12:26] Okay, yeah, so, okay.

John Dehlin [00:12:28] Arkanoid.

Dan McClellan [00:12:28] Yeah, my dad loved Arkanoid. I love Mario Brothers, I love Duck Hunt and then, you know, Metroid and all those other games. But, but that was, that was like the, the biggest luxury that we had growing up other than that it was, you know, it was grits for breakfast and it was fried chicken for dinner and yeah, it was pretty.

John Dehlin [00:12:49] Did your mom make good? I assume your mom made the fried chicken.

Dan McClellan [00:12:51] I got sick of it.

John Dehlin [00:12:52] Okay.

Dan McClellan [00:12:53] Yeah, I, I was a picky eater. And yeah, the other luxury was cereal. Like my brothers and sisters and I, it was a mad dash for the cereal whenever we knew there was cereal in the pantry, like Captain Crunch, whatever. Yeah, it was not very common, but if there was cereal, as soon as anybody heard cereal hitting a bowl, it was a mad dash in a fight over the whatever box or boxes of cereal were there because, you know, five kids very close in age, it goes pretty quick. So. But yeah, I went to a little high school in Colorado called Niwat High School. I was living in Longmont, Colorado and in the southern end of it. So my district was this, the school in between Longmont and Boulder.

John Dehlin [00:13:45] Do you talk about what your parents, work or profession were or was or is?

Dan McClellan [00:13:52] I don't think I have. I don't think anyone's ever brought it up. My mom was a seamstress for a long time. Did alterations, did wedding dresses, did stuff like that. And then my dad was in different kinds of real estate and construction, so did commercial real estate, did timeshares, did. He was a general contractor for a while, did appraisals, did all kinds of different stuff.

John Dehlin [00:14:16] So you. Did you move from Maryland to Colorado?

Dan McClellan [00:14:20] Yes, when I was 13. So I remember it was the year that the Colorado Rockies became a team. That was the year we moved to Colorado, to Longmont. And so I don't think I was there opening day, but I was there for a few of the Rockies early games at their field.

John Dehlin [00:14:40] Are you a baseball fan?

Dan McClellan [00:14:41] Yeah. I grew up playing baseball, football, and then golf when I was 10. So, still in Maryland, my dad liked to play golf at a place called Falls Road Golf Course. And when I was 10, they were renovating the greens, so they created these temporary greens in front, and they dropped the minimum age down from 12 to 10. So my dad was like, sweet, we're going to play golf. And so I quickly fell in love with golf because it meant that my dad would pull me out of school and we would go play golf. And those were some of the best days of my childhood. So as my capacities with baseball and football kind remain static, while people around me got a lot better, I still had golf that I could lean on. So I've played that ever since.

John Dehlin [00:15:29] Margi and I just watched the Tiger woods documentary. Did you ever see that?

Dan McClellan [00:15:33] I saw pieces of it. I never had to sit down and watch the whole thing, but I. I remember when Tiger woods was. Was starting to. To become prominent, and that was. That was a special era in golf.

John Dehlin [00:15:45] I'm glad you had a good experience with your dad.

Dan McClellan [00:15:47] Yeah, yeah, it was. It was a really good experience. And we don't get to play much once a year. And he. He stopped getting excited about going out to play with me when I started beating him, which was. Which was, I think, before I even started high school.

John Dehlin [00:16:03] What's your handicap?

Dan McClellan [00:16:05] I don't. I haven't had one in about a decade, but I played in a qualifier for the US Amateur about 10 years ago, and at the time, my handicap was around 2.

John Dehlin [00:16:14] Nice.

Dan McClellan [00:16:15] But I. I think around the time I graduated from high school, it was pretty close to scratch.

John Dehlin [00:16:20] Nice.

Dan McClellan [00:16:20] Yeah. And I. I've been able to play a little more golf this year just because I have a little bit more time and a little bit more money. And so I'm actually getting back into practice for the first time in a decade. And I. I broke par.

John Dehlin [00:16:35] What?

Dan McClellan [00:16:35] Yeah, for the first time in a long time.

John Dehlin [00:16:37] On 18 holes.

Dan McClellan [00:16:38] Yeah. Yeah, it was. It was a lot of fun. I took a picture of the scorecard posted online. My wife rolled her eyes at me.

John Dehlin [00:16:46] Where do you play?

Dan McClellan [00:16:47] South Mountain is probably the course I enjoy the most. It's the closest, but also the, I think, the most challenging. But there's one in South Jordan called Glenmore, which I just found, which has really nice conditions. But I played the round. I broke par was a course called the Ridges, which is right by Usana Amphitheater, that I hadn't played a bunch, but I was on short notice. It was the only place where I could get a tee time.

John Dehlin [00:17:12] So you're about to get a lot of invitations to play golf.

Dan McClellan [00:17:17] That would be great. I love to play golf.

John Dehlin [00:17:20] Fun. Okay, so by the time your family hits Colorado, are you still kind of lower SES or are things getting better economically for your family?

Dan McClellan [00:17:30] We remained lower SES until and for long after I moved away from home. Things have improved for my family and my siblings since then. But, yeah, we were not in a position of too much socioeconomic privilege, but we, you know, we did what we had to do. I had a car all throughout high school, only managed to crash it a couple of times, and didn't really enjoy high school too much. Growing up, I wanted to be either a professional golfer or a comic book artist. Those were my goals. Usually depending on the time of year,

John Dehlin [00:18:13] Marvel or D.C. d.C.

Dan McClellan [00:18:15] I got into. So there are two things that got me into comics. One was I went to the All Star fan Fest in 1992 or three, when the All Star Game was in Baltimore, because I used to go to games at Camden Yards from time to time. And we went up for the Fan Fest the week before the All Star Game.

John Dehlin [00:18:34] Are you a Cal Ripken Jr fan?

Dan McClellan [00:18:36] Yeah. I had a Cal Ripken Jr glove when I played Little League. And I had a friend named Saurabh, who was a good friend of mine growing up. And we went to the All Star Game or the Fan Fest, and we were poking around in some of the vendors, and there were a bunch of comic books, and I bought a comic book. It was Jim Lee's run of the new series of X Men. So there's an iconic cover done by Jim Lee, and I bought the first handful of issues of that, and I just fell in love with the artwork. And I didn't know it until later, but I have artists in my background. Some of my family have been somewhat accomplished painters. And my mom shows me a bunch of drawings from when I was very little. I recall getting interested in art after seeing the movie who Framed Roger Rabbit? And the next day at school, some kid showed me how to draw the weasels. And I was like, I can take what's on the screen and put it right there. And it was just fascinating to me. So I fell in love with artwork and then with comic books. And then there was the whole Death of Superman thing that made me want to pay more attention to comics. And so I would say that's when I got into serious collecting. Mid 90s, having to get all the back issues for that whole Death and Life of Superman arc. And then got interested in Image Comics was starting up around that time. So some of the titles from Image Comics, I got into Spawn and Savage Dragon and one called Gen 13 that nobody seems to remember, and Witchblade and stuff like that. So, yeah, that was. So if I wasn't busy playing golf, I wanted to be a comic book artist. And then if it was summer, I was usually busy playing golf. I had a job at a country club nearby, so I got to play quite a bit, which was really nice. That was a great outlet for me.

John Dehlin [00:20:40] Okay, so comic book writer or professional comic book artist or professional golfer? Yeah. You know that there's a Marvel comic illustrator that kind of follows what we all do, right? Have you met that guy?

Dan McClellan [00:20:57] If you're talking about the invincible creator, Ryan Otley.

John Dehlin [00:21:01] Okay.

Dan McClellan [00:21:02] Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're mutuals on social media, but yeah, I'm aware of him. I've also had some other. I've become friends with a couple of different comic book artists. One before the social media stuff, but since the social media stuff, I've become friends with a couple others. So I've got a standing invitation to be a guest at San Diego Comic Con from one of them. So I'm looking. I've already got that penciled in for next year.

John Dehlin [00:21:28] Okay. Fun. Okay. So are you kind of saying you weren't much of a scholar in high school?

Dan McClellan [00:21:34] No, not a scholar at all. Wasn't. Wasn't interested in that. Did not do great in school. I think I graduated high school with a. With a 2.6 GPA.

John Dehlin [00:21:43] Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan [00:21:44] And with, you know, not much else to do. Went to the University of Northern Colorado to study graphic arts. And that was my first time being away from home. And so I became very interested in all of the features of living in a college dormitory. I was in the performing and visual arts dorm at UNC in Greeley. Colorado. It was called Web King Hall. Made some great friends and smoked too much pot, drank too much SoCo, got in too many fights.

John Dehlin [00:22:26] What is SoCo?

Dan McClellan [00:22:27] Southern Comfort. Oh, it's like a peach based bourbon, if I recall correctly. And. And I bounced one too many checks at Pizza Hut. So I had a. I was enjoying myself in Greeley to the degree one can enjoy themselves in Greeley.

John Dehlin [00:22:42] But you weren't golfing. You were. Did you? No.

Dan McClellan [00:22:45] I discovered once I moved away from home and lost that job at the country club that golf is phenomenally expensive. Prohibitively so for.

John Dehlin [00:22:52] But not like a scholarship.

Dan McClellan [00:22:54] No, not even remotely. And I played while I was there, but not for the school.

John Dehlin [00:23:05] Okay.

Dan McClellan [00:23:06] And, yeah, went home for winter break and was kindly invited not to return the next semester. So got kicked out of the University of Colorado with a. With a muscular 0.29 GPA. So. But I. I figured that my future did not lie in academia at the time and went back to what I did best, which was waiting tables. So that was.

John Dehlin [00:23:31] Dang.

Dan McClellan [00:23:34] So that was, that was what was going on with me. And. And then. Let's see.

John Dehlin [00:23:42] I mean, let me back up for just a second. In high school, did you have any interactions with any religious traditions in high school?

Dan McClellan [00:23:53] So my, My mom actually joined the LDS Church, I think, when we were living in Colorado, and. But it was a sore spot in the household and so I don't recall knowing too much about it. I attended my mom's baptism, I'm positive of. I didn't really talk too much about it, but my younger sisters, two of my younger sisters would go to church occasionally with my mom, but I was busy doing other things.

John Dehlin [00:24:19] Around what age do you guess your mom got baptized?

Dan McClellan [00:24:22] Oh, it would have been your age when I was a teenager at some point, somewhere between 13 and 15, something like that.

John Dehlin [00:24:28] And I guess you're saying it was sore because maybe your dad wasn't as happy about that.

Dan McClellan [00:24:33] Probably. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:24:34] Okay.

Dan McClellan [00:24:34] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:24:35] Have you talked to your mom about what made her interested in the church or what her testimony was based on or any of that kind of thing?

Dan McClellan [00:24:42] We've talked about it a bit. But that's her story. Yeah, I would say that's more her story to tell, but we had good friends or she had good friends with a family that lived in Maryland. I had a crush on the daughter who had absolutely no interest in me, but my mom was friends with her mom and she. And that family was lds. And I know that relationship had a lot to do with it, but yeah, that's not my story to tell.

John Dehlin [00:25:09] And I mean, I'm not even asking you to confirm this, but if I had to connect those dots, it would be that your parents had a bad experience with the religion or religious tradition in their early years. And so maybe, I'm guessing your dad probably would not have been excited about the reintroduction of a new religious tradition.

Dan McClellan [00:25:28] Yeah, I don't know the degree to which it was just any old religious tradition versus that particular religious tradition. So, yeah, I've not really. I'm not really brought that up. So. So yeah, I don't know the details of that.

John Dehlin [00:25:41] Well, you haven't talked to your parents about.

Dan McClellan [00:25:43] Not in depth. Yeah, in. In passing, we bring it up. But. But it's not something that occupies an awful lot of my. My cognitive effort. So.

John Dehlin [00:25:53] Okay, fun. Okay. So in terms of were were you ever interested in religion, even from a observer standpoint in high school?

Dan McClellan [00:26:04] No. No, I mean, is this off your radar? Yeah, just off my radar. I think the one interaction I had with religion in high school was when there was a kid in school and I'm almost positive he was lds. I know there were a handful of LDS kids in the school that I interacted with, but I remember one of them mentioning that he said, we don't like that song. And now I don't even remember the title of the song. What if God was one of us? Is that it? No, no, no, no, no, no. Tell me all your thoughts on God. I forget the name of that song, but he was like, we don't like that song because it says God's a she. And I was like, oh, okay, it's just a song. But I'm pretty sure that kid was a latter day saint, but long time ago. And yeah, it was just something that was never on my radar.

Self-Concept, School Struggles, and Rock Bottom

John Dehlin [00:26:57] Okay, what was your self concept through your high school graduation in terms of just who you were, your value, your worth? Kind of that.

Dan McClellan [00:27:11] I don't know that I thought about it much. I was, for me, I had always been focusing on trying to live in the moment.

John Dehlin [00:27:25] And

Dan McClellan [00:27:28] it wasn't an awful childhood, but it wasn't easy by any stretch of the imagination. So, you know, there were times when there was some food insecurity and so things like surviving were at the top of my list and then just trying to find opportunities to do the things that I enjoyed doing, whether it was playing golf or drawing or whatever occupied the majority of my attention. So there were just not things I worried about. I as as much of a struggle as my childhood was, I don't think I ever really felt a need to seek out validation. My family, being in my family, I got enough of that from them. So I think it was just not something that concerned me.

John Dehlin [00:28:23] So it sounds like. Did you overall reflect on your family relationships and unity through high school fondly?

Dan McClellan [00:28:35] You know, there were fights and stuff like that, but not physical fights. I think my next younger brother and I, I think we may have gotten in one or two physical fights. But yeah, I reflect on my childhood fairly fondly. You know, every family has issues, but. But I never felt like I didn't belong. I never felt like I was unloved or underappreciated or anything like that. So, yeah, I reflect fairly fondly on that.

John Dehlin [00:29:05] And knowing how you ended up sort of pursuing scholarship, how do you account for. I mean, I don't even know if you would describe kind of flunking out of college as hitting rock bottom, but how would you account for just your non thriving in high school and college or early on?

Dan McClellan [00:29:31] I think the. I still remember in. When I first got into high school, I got into this art class and it was like first day and the teacher just wanted to see what people were interested in. And I took a piece of paper and drew a big old picture of Batman. And she came over and said, damn, that's really good. And she put me on. I forget what she called it, but she was basically like, okay, you don't have to listen to anything we do in this class. You just do what you want to do. And by the end of the semester, she was like, that was a mistake. She was like, somebody needs to light a fire under your ass. Because I just was not motivated. And I just. I don't think I developed a passion for anything other than activities that made me happy. So drawing, playing golf, things like that were the things that brought me joy. And so I was not motivated to care about school at all, which is a shame. It's something that I've always regretted. And as a parent, I worry about how to develop motivation without trying to impose it too strictly, because I don't want my kids to go through the same thing I went through, having to, you know, flunk out of school and claw my way back. But once I. And it was really my mission that taught me to study and to appreciate the opportunity to study. And when I came back, I realized this is very easy. Once I just became convinced that it was something that was important as an

John Dehlin [00:31:17] observation, just because it's fun to kind of think about things a little bit. For me, like, what I observe you did learn to do is how to pursue a passion and a love. Number one, you had passions. Like, for me, the scariest thing as a parent is if a kid has no passions.

Dan McClellan [00:31:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:31:37] So number. I'm not trying to, like, reframe your. You know, but you had passions, and you learned how to pursue them and how to find joy in them. And I see that. I want that for my kids. I don't care how they do technically, academically, or in anything, if they develop passions and if they learn how to follow them, because I'm going to predict that. But because of that, once your passions changed, you were able to be successful in those, right?

Dan McClellan [00:32:09] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:32:10] Yeah.

Dan McClellan [00:32:11] It was because I knew there was a living out there to be made, either doing comic book art or playing golf. And so I was kind of just biding my time until an opportunity presented itself for me to pivot into actually making a living doing one of those two things. And I was given an interview at the Colorado Institute of Art to go see about a scholarship to go there. And I showed up with a portfolio full of comic book art. This was 1998. And they said, this is all comic book stuff. This isn't marketable. You have to draw advertising. You have to do stuff like that. So, sorry, we don't have anything for you. And then within, you know, 10 years, comic books exploded onto. Into the. The entertainment industry. And I. But it was too late for me because I had gotten frustrated and was like. And so that was not the career path that I was going to be on.

John Dehlin [00:33:15] Did you have a favorite X Men character?

Dan McClellan [00:33:16] Wolverine. Wolverine, yeah, by far. Okay. That was my favorite.

John Dehlin [00:33:20] Did you like the original X Men trilogy or not?

Dan McClellan [00:33:26] Not really, no. No. There was the. The first comic book movie that I ever saw where I actually thought this is how I've. I've always wanted my comic book movies to be. Was into the Spider Verse. I. I think.

John Dehlin [00:33:42] What? Yeah, I mean, that was great.

Dan McClellan [00:33:44] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:33:45] But up until then, all the Spider Mans.

Dan McClellan [00:33:47] No, the reboots.

John Dehlin [00:33:50] What about Dark Knight?

Dan McClellan [00:33:51] It was good until into the Spider Verse. I thought Dark Knight was probably the best, but when I saw into the Spider Verse, I said, that's what I've been missing. That's what I've been waiting for. And so, yeah, I love that one. I love across the Spider Verse. And my daughter and I are very much looking forward to going and seeing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. That looks really good because I grew up when that was on tv.

John Dehlin [00:34:20] You prefer animation to live action, it sounds like.

Dan McClellan [00:34:24] I think animation gets you closer to the comic book, because with live action, they've got a. They play with the costumes and everything to make them look a little more realistic, and some of it's pretty goofy, I think. I think comic book characters that live in an animated world, I think do a lot more for me than trying to make them occupy a real world. It just doesn't work the same.

John Dehlin [00:34:56] That's fun.

Dan McClellan [00:34:57] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:34:59] Okay, let's jump to your Mormon story. So you hit rock bottom. You flunk out of college. How do you get from there to a mission?

Dan McClellan [00:35:06] Well, my brother and I spent a summer in Germany and Austria after he graduated from college, and my parents, the rest of my family, moved down to Dallas, Texas, while we were away. We knew that was happening. It wasn't like they just left, but so we came back and moved back to or moved down to Dallas, and I began doing what I did best at the time, which was wait tables in Dallas. So I've waited tables in a number of different places and in Dallas and lived just north of Frankfort in the tollway in a crappy little apartment, and was just trying to figure out a way to get out of this vicious cycle of having to work seven days a week to afford to pay for my apartment and food and not having any time or money for anything else. And so I would say that was. I hit rock bottom getting kicked out of school and then just maintained for a long time. But it was in Dallas that my mom began to visit teach, as it was known at the time, a young woman who had just moved to Dallas and was waiting tables and was, you know, didn't have a lot of friends in the area. And she was like, oh, my son's about your age. You should go hang out with my son. So she was like, I've set you up on a blind date with. Or I. I'm going to. Here's her number. Call her up. And I was like, really, Mom? This is not gonna go the way

John Dehlin [00:36:52] much in high school or after.

Dan McClellan [00:36:54] No, no, I was. I mean, I think the only person I dated, one girl in high school as a senior, first kiss was when I was 17. And that was somebody I met at the bowling alley I worked at. I worked in the snack bar at the bowling alley. But, yeah, and then I dated briefly at the University of Northern Colorado. Wonderful person. I ruined that relationship, unfortunately. And, yeah, so I didn't really date much, but my mom gave me this phone number, called this girl up. She Said she waited tables at the Bennigans in the Galleria Mall. Anybody who knows Dallas from back then, they know what I'm talking about. And it was kind of funny. My roommate came down with me, and we were going to be asked to be seated in her section, which was out on the patio that was still indoors, but. And her name was Tabitha. And the server who was out there, gorgeous young girl, was being hit on by a number of the tables, but didn't give anybody the time of day. And then she came over to our table, and I was like, hey, I'm Dan. And I had talked to her. So we set this up that I was gonna pick her up after her shift, and she was like, oh, hi, I get off at this time. Hang out. Wait for me, and we'll go out and do something. And she left. And then all the other guys at all the other tables started glaring at me because, you know, I'm not the kind of person that women pay attention to. So they knew something was up. But it felt good for a bit to be. To be hated by other dudes because the girl that they all were hitting on was interested in me. But Tabitha became a wonderful friend of mine. We dated on and off for a little bit, and she talked about her membership in the church, her love of the church and the Book of Mormon. And it was a good friendship for me. And I was kind of adrift at the time and didn't really have any direction or anything like that, but she made me feel like I was doing something right. Like. Like there was direction. A kind of an idea of a path into the future was beginning to take shape. But she wasn't interested in dating me anymore because I wasn't. Her goal was to get married in the temple, and she also did not think I was the best influence in the world. I was doing some stupid stuff at the time. And, yeah, she moved away a little bit later, and in a stupid and juvenile attempt to remind myself of her, which is precisely my won't, I found a copy of the Book of Mormon and started reading it without her knowledge because I wanted to know what was going on with this book that she liked so much.

John Dehlin [00:40:04] And around what year was this?

Dan McClellan [00:40:05] This was 1999.

John Dehlin [00:40:08] Okay.

Dan McClellan [00:40:10] Or into 2000, one of the two. And I thought the narrative was convoluted, and I thought the names were stupid in the Book of Mormon, but I also felt that sense of direction, like I was doing something right again. So for whatever reason, I couldn't put it down. And, yeah, it's still a weird, bizarre point in my life. But I got to a part about baptism, and I thought, I want to keep this feeling with me. I probably need to be progressing in whatever this is to keep that sense of direction there. And so nobody else knew I was doing this, but I talked to Tabitha on the phone one time, and I said, hey, what does somebody have to do to get baptized?

John Dehlin [00:41:09] You didn't go to your mom, who was a member?

Dan McClellan [00:41:10] No, I didn't really know any much. Yeah. And I just didn't want to talk to my mom about that kind of stuff.

John Dehlin [00:41:16] Sure.

Dan McClellan [00:41:17] And she was like, why you want to get baptized? I was like, no, I'm just wondering. Geez. And she had dragged me to church one time. And so I knew where they met, I knew what time it was. The Plano 9th Ward, which was in the shadow of what we called the baptome, which was the Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas. And so I show up one day, jeans and a T shirt. I know I'm supposed to look for the kids with the name tags. And so after a sacrament meeting, I go up to him, I say, hey, I'm Dan. What do I have to do to get baptized? And their eyes kind of glazed over, and they stalled for a minute, and they were like, oh, you got to read the Book of Mormon. And I said, I already did that. What else? They were like, well, you have to take the discussions. And I was like, so I work seven days a week. Is there any way we can do that today? We're like, well, let's do the first discussion today. So we went in and they asked if they could take over the young single adult second hour. And obviously everybody in the class was like, yes, please take over our class. So they taught a first discussion. And this was Elder Brady and Elder Wynn, and they asked me to continue reading the Book of Mormon and to pray for spiritual confirmation that it was the word of God. And then they scheduled a second discussion the next evening at. They were going to come to my place, but I was like, ah, probably not a good idea for you to enter my apartment in the condition that it was in. And I think at the time I probably had a bunch of marijuana plants growing in the closet.

John Dehlin [00:43:12] You were a grower?

Dan McClellan [00:43:13] Yeah, for a little bit. My roommate got spooked when some maintenance person came into the apartment. We had made the stupid mistake of putting these things in the. In the room with the breaker panel, and some maintenance person had to access that, and so he got freaked out and Tore them all down and went and chucked him in a field. So that was gonna be my ticket out of there. But now that. So I was like, don't come to my apartment. Let's go to my, my parents apartment. They're, they're nearby. So the missionary showed up the next day and it was Elder Brady was there, but Elder Wynn was not. There was another kid named Elder Bohan. And I didn't know it at the time, but the previous day was Elder Wynn's last day as a missionary. He went home the next day and it was Elder Bohan's first day as a missionary. So Elder Brady told him, you're gonna, we're gonna teach a second discussion. You're going to extend the baptismal invitation. He did not tell him that I asked them to be baptized. So he was, he was a wreck, was sweaty, was shaking with those little plastic discussion booklets on his lap with the pages clacking together. And he invited me to be baptized on September 9th of 2000. And I said, well, yeah, I asked you guys. And Elder Brady's on the floor laughing by this point because Elder Bohan was butchering it. But they got through it. I accepted the invitation to be baptized. I was baptized on September 9th, oddly enough, baptized by my little brother who had been baptized about six months before. Not entirely unknown to me, but as with the situation with my mom, it was just not something I paid a ton of attention to until suddenly I began investigating the church and chose to be baptized.

John Dehlin [00:45:21] Not the one you went to Germany with?

Dan McClellan [00:45:22] No, another brother. And so baptized on September 9th into a wonderful ward with wonderful people. I still keep in touch with many of them. I was on the outskirts of a very wealthy ward boundary and so I was in a ward with Sean Bradley. I met Sean Bradley my first day there. I was talking with, with a gentleman named Steve who used to play professional ball and then was became anchorman for one of the news stations there in Dallas. And he's like, oh, have you met Sean? And I turn around, there's like a belt buckle right there.

John Dehlin [00:46:06] For those who don't know, Sean Bradley was the 7 foot 6 BYU phenom who ended up playing for the 76ers, among other teams. Dallas Mavericks.

Dan McClellan [00:46:16] Yep. Was playing for the Mavericks at the time. It was, it was funny. He would be after church, he'd be like, well, I gotta get to work. I'd be like, you mean play professional basketball?

John Dehlin [00:46:27] Oh, so he was playing for the Mavericks when you knew him?

Dan McClellan [00:46:30] Yeah, I went to some games, got to know his then wife, who. Who was tiny but a wonderful, wonderful person. And yeah, I used to if he was sitting in the pew behind you, he would sit on the end because he had to straddle the pew in front so there'd be a knee right there if you were sitting in the pew in front of him. But yeah, he was wonderful. I had a great experience in that ward, met some absolutely wonderful people, but I felt like I was behind everybody else. And the bishop at the time, shortly after I got baptized, said, hey, we want to prepare you to go on a mission. And I had heard of what a mission was, and I was like, wow, that sounds like a wonderful opportunity, but I'm already in debt. This has got to be very expensive. There's no way on earth I could ever afford a mission. And he said, we've already had multiple people in the ward offer to pay for the whole thing for you, so you don't have to worry about that. So you just worry about getting ready to go on a mission. So I thought, well, wonderful. So I started preparing for that. And I had heard a stake president say around that time that he had to read the scriptures an hour every day to have the spirit with him enough to magnify his calling as a stake president. And I thought, well, shoot, I can beat that. I'm going to read for an hour and a half every day. And I got through the entire standard works probably one and a half times over the next year in preparation for going to serve a mission. I figured I was going to be way behind everybody out on the mission field. And so I submitted my papers to go serve a mission on September 10, 2001, and then watched the World Trade center towers come down the next day. And there was worry that they were actually going to stop calling missionaries for a while. And so I was unsure what was going to happen. But sure enough, within a few weeks, I got a call to go serve as a missionary in Uruguay, Montevideo. And so I went into the MTC. I want to say it was either December 17 or December 19. It was the day that the first Lord of the Rings movie hit the theaters. And I had.

John Dehlin [00:48:54] Because you missed it.

Dan McClellan [00:48:55] I had been so excited for, like, I remember being in a theater watching this preview, and it's like horses running and swords clanging, and then they show this cavern and then you hear my precious. And I was like. And. And I was so excited. That was the day the movie came out. And at the time I was dating somebody who worked at the Cinemark corporate Offices which were in Plano, Texas. And she was like, oh, I'll get you tickets to an advanced screening. You can go see it before you go. And then like a week later she was like, this must be a really big deal because they're not giving us any tickets for any advanced screening. I was like, ah. So I didn't get to see it. I was going into the MTC that day. I. The first I saw it was when we bought a bootleg CD in Uruguay

John Dehlin [00:49:46] and we went, wait, you didn't watch on your mission?

Dan McClellan [00:49:49] I did watch it on my. Yeah. So my. I became great friends with my mission president and his wife, who the. The folks I served with, we still refer to her as Lyermanna, but they were wonderful. And I was in the offices for. For a large chunk of my mission. And the mission president was. Let missionaries, he trusted borrow his favorite movie, which was the Hunt for Red October. So he would give us that DVD every now and then. But we went to her and we were like, hey, we have this DVD of Lord of the Rings, which based on this very famous classical series. And she was like, I think that would be okay. And so we watched that. And then a week later she was like, so we watched that movie. Maybe don't watch that. Too many heads getting cut off. And we were like, oh, yeah, sure, we'll won't watch it at all. And so, yeah, I went into the mtc, got out into the mission field.

The Psychology of Conversion

John Dehlin [00:50:51] Can I ask you quickly? Yeah. So you study religion quite a bit and, you know, I've spent quite some time thinking about conversion and. And I have a theory that most conversions are far more social and emotional than they are intellectual.

Dan McClellan [00:51:14] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:51:15] I also. There's also an observation that some have, that maybe some would find a meaning if they were on the receiving end of this, but that it's common for missionaries to target people who are kind of down and out or not. Not be targeted. But like, sometimes people that are most interested in. And not just Mormonism, but any religious tradition, people that are kind of down and out tend to be interested in some sort of system or framework that's going to help them have some structure, have some community, have some meaning and purpose. And. And regardless of your tradition, if you can find someone who's in a vulnerable spot, they're going to be amenable. How do you. So that's one kind of, let's just say a secular view of conversion. And then there's another that's like the Holy Ghost spoke to me and I Joined because God told me it was true. How do you conceptualize your conversion? It if you do?

Dan McClellan [00:52:29] For me, it was. I still understand it as a little of both because, like I said, I definitely recognized a feeling of actually having purpose, having direction with my friend Tabitha with reading the Book of Mormon and so.

John Dehlin [00:52:47] And there's also the flirt to convert thing, right?

Dan McClellan [00:52:49] Yeah. Which was. I think she was trying to fight off the sense that she was doing that. So I don't know if that contributed to her being like, ew. I don't wanna. But, yeah, we were just friends by the time any of this was going on. And that did not ever change. But I'll get to that later. So when I was making this decision about I need to pursue this more, this was entirely on my own. I knew absolutely nothing about that community. But at the same time, upon being baptized and being welcomed into this community, I immediately had a sense of fitting into this community, and that made it feel right. So there's absolutely a sense in which community is one of the fundamental features of religious identity and participation, particularly for groups that are proselytizing. People think of religion as they think of Christianity, they think of Judaism, they think of Islam, maybe Buddhism and Hinduism, and they kind of mash those together. And what comes out the other end, as religion writ large, is usually something that's closely related to Protestant Christianity. In fact, there's scholarship that says, if you look at scholarship about religious studies, religion is basically whatever is sufficiently similar to Protestant Christianity. But religion encompasses all different kinds of traditions, many of which don't proselytize at all. Many of which would be unrecognizable to many people. And so it's a lot more complex than that. But within traditions that proselytize and that have hierarchy and that have institutions. Yeah, absolutely. The community is one of the. One of the most effective tools. I never saw as a missionary, I never saw it presented to me that way. I was never told, your job is to go among the poor and try to give them hope. Circumstances arose. We had a couple that we were teaching, and the husband was killed in an accident, was electrocuted in his own garden in the rain. And that was an instance where we were never given any instruction like, this is where you pounce kind of stuff.

John Dehlin [00:55:27] And I would not allege that or accuse it.

Dan McClellan [00:55:30] Yeah. But it seemed like it felt like we had some hope that we could offer, and so I wanted to do that. It was obviously going nowhere, and so I was not going to. That was the point at Which I felt like if I push this any further, I have become a used car salesman and am trying to use this as a foot in the door. And so that made me feel uncomfortable. And there were features of what I was doing that made me feel uncomfortable as well. As a missionary.

John Dehlin [00:56:08] But before. Sorry. I'm kind of wanting to just see if there's anything to excavate just in terms of you conceptualizing your own conversion.

Dan McClellan [00:56:18] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:56:18] So, you know, one narrative is. And I want to also say that you may think about it now, looking back, different than you thought about it at the time. Absolutely. And this is not me trying to deconstruct and secularize your experience, but I am curious about how you view it or how you viewed it. So, like, when you went through it, there might have been the conception of like, I read the Book of Mormon and the Holy Ghost spoke to me through Moroni's Promise and witnessed to me that it was true. That might be one way looking someone else might say. Dan had hit rock bottom. Life was rough. He met a cute girl. He found this cool ward, met the missionaries and read the Book of Mormon, and there were some good Christian messages in it. And all of a sudden he was feeling really good and got a sense of identity and meaning and purpose. And if your mom had joined Scientology or Jehovah's Witnesses or Brother, whatever, it could have been any other tradition. It just happened to be Mormonism. That was the one that you got exposed to. And there's probably a gazillion different, different iterations. I'm wondering how you saw it then and if that's changed in terms of how you see it now, your own conversion.

Dan McClellan [00:57:36] I don't know that it's changed significantly. There were times when I crossed paths with Latter Day Saints, and so part of this was kind of feeling led, as I look back, like the Boy Scout. I was in a Boy Scout troop before I became a Boy Scout. I was a Cub Scout attending a Boy Scout troop because I had a friend who was a member of this troop which was part of an LDS ward. And so I went and started attending Boy Scouts at this chapel. And it was kind of. All this was going on above my head. I didn't really know anything about it. But at the time, I would look back and see significant, sometimes significant points in my life where there were Latter Day Saints who were influencing my life to one degree or another. And then my mom and my brother. And so I think I felt like this was a consistent thread for some reason. I felt like, this gives me a sense of direction, a sense of purpose. It gives me something to aim for. I felt like this gives me a greater sense of community. And so it was a combination of a lot of different things. And then I also can recall it feeling very intuitive to me. Some of the principles that were being taught resonated with me intuitively. And so to the degree I ever described feeling the spirit, I would say it was those resonances, those intuitive resonances. So, yeah, I've. I got used to telling a conversion story immediately after joining the church.

John Dehlin [00:59:27] Because you were a golden convert.

Dan McClellan [00:59:29] Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I. I was serving as a missionary while one of the missionaries who taught me was still on his mission.

John Dehlin [00:59:40] So you went fast.

Dan McClellan [00:59:42] Yeah, it was. So I got used to telling that story, and I have tried not to alter that story ever since. So it's something that I've always tried to be consistent with. And so I don't think my conceptualization has changed considerably. I think that becoming a specialist in the cognitive science of religion has allowed me to look underneath the hood of that story and understand it differently. But I still tell the story the same way, and it still feels. It's still how I experienced it. So it's still a genuine story.

Joining the Church and Early Beliefs

John Dehlin [01:00:24] When you joined, were you, in your mind joining the one true church on the earth? Was the Book of Mormon a historical record? Was Joseph Smith God's prophet? How orthodox or literalistic, do you guess? Or do you remember your conceptualization being.

Dan McClellan [01:00:49] I think it was more of. I had these experiences, and so I'm going along for this ride. And so I have always been. I've always been a to some degree curious person, but I've also been someone who is happy to suspend judgment on things. And so I think it was about appreciating this stuff over here and deciding, let's see where this goes.

John Dehlin [01:01:25] It was feeling good and it was working. It was bringing you joy, bringing you happiness. So you went with it. That's good. That's great. Okay, perfect. And it sounds like your life just started to blossom as soon as you made that decision.

Dan McClellan [01:01:42] In many ways, yeah, it was. Yeah. It gave me something to aim for, gave me a lot more structure. And I was now in a community that talked about these things that had never really been a concern of mine before. Planning for the future, making marriage and family a goal, all of those kinds of things.

John Dehlin [01:02:09] I have to ask two things. Sorry.

Dan McClellan [01:02:11] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:02:11] Was it hard to quit marijuana? And if so, how did you do it?

Dan McClellan [01:02:14] It was not hard to quit because I Never liked the taste of it, I never liked the smell of it. And I very rarely enjoyed how I felt.

John Dehlin [01:02:22] Were you self medicating?

Dan McClellan [01:02:27] There were other things that I was doing to self medicate and I fell in with a bad crowd. And so I've experimented with lots of different things as means of probably trying to self medicate. Marijuana was more of a social thing. It was something that people around me were doing and that I did to be a part of that. But I still remember getting, I drove a, a Jeep Wrangler at the time. I still remember leaving a party at UNC and getting into my Jeep. And back then you had the removable face to your CD player and I stuck the face back on my CD player and it like lit up and all these flashing lights and I sat there and just stared at these lights for like 20 minutes and suddenly snapped too and was like, what on earth am I doing? And so I never, I never enjoyed that very much. There were other things that I. There were other means of self medicating that I enjoyed more, but that I realized were far more corrosive.

John Dehlin [01:03:34] So were those hard to quit when you joined the church?

Dan McClellan [01:03:37] The, the hardest thing to quit was smoking cigarettes. I had quit drinking before I ever joined the church. I, I didn't have any issue with marijuana. All those other things I dabbled in, had awful experiences, and then had no problem leaving behind. But nicotine, yeah, that was the hardest thing. And I still remember my friend telling me, you'd have to quit smoking. And I remember thinking, why on earth would anyone care if I was smoking? I had no idea what this community was. But yeah, that was, that was the hardest thing. And I was still living in an apartment where my, my roommate was smoked regularly. So. And, and to this day, that, that initial smell of, of a freshly lit cigarette, I'm just like, okay, so yeah, that was, that was the hardest part of that.

John Dehlin [01:04:35] Okay. Have you happened to ever see Saturday's Warrior? Because you remind me of the Todd Richards character who drew and then he was a golden convert to the missionaries.

Dan McClellan [01:04:45] No, never saw it. I have just heard people make fun of a song where somebody goes, will I wait for you? So I make fun of that and that makes people think. I know that feature of our subculture and I really know nothing about it.

John Dehlin [01:05:00] If you ever end up watching it, you might relate. There's a character that draws in a park and he meets the missionaries and he's a gold golden convert. In adulthood, you might relate to that character. Okay, so back to your mission yeah. So you were in the office. Does that mean you were AP or just.

Mission Experiences and Challenges

Dan McClellan [01:05:15] No, I was a financial secretary. Okay. So I. I still remember the very first day I woke up in the mission field. The most depressed I've ever been in my entire life at that time and ever since.

John Dehlin [01:05:27] Uruguay. Monte Montevideo, Uruguay.

Dan McClellan [01:05:30] Yeah. They sent me out to a little tin. A little tiny town called San Carlos. And one of my teachers in the MTC was from there, and I had dinner, lunch with her mom every week for the time I was in San Carlos. But I got out there. I remember I arrived in the town. I was like, this is where I'm gonna be living. This is awesome. We went and we taught a discussion, I think that evening, came back, went to bed, and I remember dawning consciousness the next day, staring down the barrel of two years of this. And I had never been so depressed in my entire life. So I didn't hit the ground running as a missionary.

John Dehlin [01:06:10] How old were you when you started your mission?

Dan McClellan [01:06:12] I was. I would have been. Was I 2001? So, yeah, I would have been 21.

John Dehlin [01:06:21] So you were two years older than most of the missionaries.

Dan McClellan [01:06:24] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:06:24] And I'm just curious. And you did the Provo mtc, is that right? Yes, yes. I'm wondering if you found. And after having lived life, I wonder if you ever found the Mormon missionaries to be kind of childish or silly or annoying.

Dan McClellan [01:06:41] All of the above.

John Dehlin [01:06:43] So you weren't loving the MTC experience or like the greenies that you interacted with?

Dan McClellan [01:06:49] I had some good guys and two good sisters in the district I was in, and some of them I still keep in touch with. And so, yeah, it was. Some of the traditions in the MTC just drove me nuts.

John Dehlin [01:07:09] Like what? Or do you know.

Dan McClellan [01:07:11] Oh, when all the orange juice crap, when somebody drops something in the cafeteria, everybody hushes everybody else. I don't know if you ever experienced that, but every day somebody would drop a glass or a plate or a tray and the whole cafeteria would go, sh. And I just thought that was so ridiculous. I referred to BYU as BYHS for a long time as high school as well. Yeah. Because it just struck me that these were kids who did not really have much experience at all.

John Dehlin [01:07:47] Also, you would probably made a lot of sacrifices and. Or changes to get there. And you probably saw a lot of kids that were there just because their parents made them, or maybe they weren't

Dan McClellan [01:07:56] as serious or there were kids that were only there because their parents made them. And I mentioned that I wanted to catch up with everybody on my Scripture study. And I got out to the field and was like, I'm way ahead. Overwhelming majority of y'.

John Dehlin [01:08:11] All. Yeah. Because a lot of missionaries do not read the standard works when or two times in entirety.

Dan McClellan [01:08:17] I felt like I was there because this was a wonderful experience that I had been blessed with and that I wanted to take advantage of. And for most of these kids, it was just kind of what you did. And so they were treating it the way I was treating my semester at the University of Northern Colorado. It was just what you did. And most of them didn't. Not most of them. Many of them didn't want to be there. And I was like. I. Like I would have. I was ecstatic to have the opportunity to be sent to another country, learn another language, and, you know, who knows what blessings and privileges and things are going to come from this experience. And it forever changed my life from day one. But, yeah, it was odd being in the mtc. There were also some wonderful experiences, some horrific ones. President Eyring came to speak at the Christmas devotional. I was there over Christmas, and one of the other missionaries in our district had been sick the week before, had thrown up a bunch of times, and that had gone away, but he wasn't feeling well. And we go down to sit down at the bottom of the. It wasn't the auditorium. It was the gym for President Eyring to give his Christmas devotional. And at one point, my companion leans over to me and taps me and says, hey, do you have that handkerchief on you? I said, yeah. Why? And I look over, and he's got blood dripping down his ear and the side of his face, and the back of his head is covered in blood. And I turn around, and our district leader is hunched over, unconscious, with a pool of blood at his feet and blood all running all down his shirt.

John Dehlin [01:10:15] What the.

Dan McClellan [01:10:17] He had torn his esophagus on the inside, vomiting as many times as he did, and he was dripping blood into his stomach for days. And it all came up onto the back of my MTC companion. And so I immediately jumped up. President Eyring's giving a talk. We're scrambling to try to get this guy out of his seat, pull him out of the seat and trying to clean up whatever we can as our whole district carries him out of the auditorium and up to the. To the front to come up to the receptionist at the front and say, hi, we need an ambulance. And she said, what happened? And exhibit A. This very, very pale, not totally conscious missionary with blood all down the front of his shirt. And she said, well, if. And at the time he was coming to, he wasn't actively vomiting blood. And they said, well, if it happens again, let us know. We can't call an ambulance for you. And we were. We were just, what, Baffled. So we took him back to his room, gave him a blessing, and what. And let him sleep.

John Dehlin [01:11:38] He didn't go to the.

Dan McClellan [01:11:39] Didn't go to the hospital. And we worried that he was gonna die overnight, but. But he woke up the next day and was just fine. And then we got to schedule him to go into the clinic, and that's where he was like, yeah, evidently, I had a cut in my esophagus and was bleeding into my stomach. And so, yeah, we had a couple of odd death scares like that as a missionary. But overall, I was. Yeah, I was surprised by this culture that I had come into. And then when I got into the mission field now, it was that culture combined with the international church culture, which was something I was even less prepared for. But it was.

John Dehlin [01:12:29] It's a long way away from Plano.

Dan McClellan [01:12:31] Yeah, a long way away from Plano. I was. I was trying to speak Spanish. I ended up getting quite good at Spanish, but initially it was just entirely lost on me. But I did two changes in that first area, and then they put me in the offices. So I normally. They have older, more experienced missionaries in the offices. I had been in the mission field for three months, and they threw me in the offices. And I still remember going into this little tiny apartment. It was in a little city called Bus. Yeah, called Buseo, which means scuba diving. And I walk into my apartment with my new companion and walk into the bedroom, and it's dingy and grimy and disgusting, and there's a Britney Spears poster on the wall. I was like, what?

John Dehlin [01:13:33] Elder?

Dan McClellan [01:13:36] And my companion was someone who did not want to be there at all and could not wait to go home. And so that did not help my depression. But the day after, I was with that companion for one change, and then he left. And the day after that, the economy in Uruguay shut down and all the banks in the country closed, half of them to never open again. And I was now in charge of finances for the mission, and I could barely speak Spanish. So it was. I went out of the frying pan and into the fire. But that helped me become close with my mission president. It forced me to learn Spanish. I had to learn how to write checks in Spanish in Uruguay. So I was given a baptism by fire and have appreciated that opportunity ever since because it really kind of forced me to take this a lot more seriously. I was kind of like, I'm surrounded by kids, I'm doing. I'm supposed to be proselytizing. And that made me kind of treat it as more like a full time job than just as a vacation. And then that was where I first got to listen to an EFY CD as well in the mission offices and got introduced to the melodious voice of. I think his name's Peter Breinhold. Yeah, yeah. I'd never heard that, that sound come out of somebody before, but I think,

John Dehlin [01:15:25] do you know Peter? I'm friends with Peter.

Dan McClellan [01:15:27] Not personally, no. But as a. As a missionary, somebody was like, this is an awesome EFY cd.

John Dehlin [01:15:32] Did you like it?

Dan McClellan [01:15:33] What is efy? Initially it was. It was off putting, but. But no, I grew to love it. And now I hear the songs from that EFY CD and takes me back. So there's a lot of nostalgia for me associated with.

John Dehlin [01:15:49] I'm texting Peter to let him know he got a shout out.

Dan McClellan [01:15:55] I think he did a cover of Adam ondiamond at one point that I really enjoyed as well. And then there was. Yeah, my relationship with music on the mission was odd because I could listen to like EFY all I wanted in the offices, but I had. My parents were in a bluegrass band when I was born and I could only listen to like bluegrass and folk up until I got into high school, at which point I pivoted to no Doubt Sublime and Metallica. Those were the first three Ds I ever bought, which did not make my parents very happy. But by the time I got into the mission field, it was now, oh, I guess I'm listening to EFY from here on out. But yeah, Peter Bryant, what else do we have? I think I had an Andrea Bocelli CD that I got to listen to. But yeah, there was one companion I had that one night as I was trying to go to sleep, I could hear this kind of faint beat. I was like, what is going on? And the next day when my companion was in the bathroom, I looked over and saw some wires sticking out from behind his bed and pulled his mattress back and he had a CD player and like Rage against the Machine and Primus and Metallica and all these CDs back there that he was falling asleep to. So I was a little jealous, but also a little annoyed.

Baptism Practices and Mission Reflections

John Dehlin [01:17:30] But I just have to ask because of my knowledge of Mormon missions in Latin America and my own personal experience, there's kind of the baseball baptism phenomenon. That started in the early 60s where missions went for numbers and at times up to hundreds, sometimes even over a thousand converts would happen per month in places like England or Japan or Latin America. But the quality of the conversions were very, very low. 7, 8, 9 year old kids were targeted, parents weren't notified. Just kind of a, in my view, a kind of a bastardization of, or a desecration of the holiness of the sacredness of the baptism with kind of a corporate marketing, numbers based mentality. Did you experience any of that in your Uruguay? Did you witness any of that or was that just not the vibe on your mission?

Dan McClellan [01:18:33] It definitely wasn't the vibe on my mission. I had experienced a little of that in the mtc. We had some presentations where people were getting up and being like, it's all about the numbers, but it's not. And kind of giving me a business take on conversion. And I was so close to my own conversion that this was not as abstract for me as it seemed to be for a lot of the other missionaries. So I tried to take it seriously, but at the same time, you know, we were out there trying to teach discussions and find some success. So I think I was probably a little more selective than a lot of the other missionaries that were out there, but at the same time wanted to feel like I was doing a good job and wanted to feel like that we had value, that we were adding to people's lives. So I think I baptized maybe 20 some odd people as a missionary, probably about average for that mission in the whole year.

John Dehlin [01:19:37] I mean, a whole two years.

Dan McClellan [01:19:38] A whole mission? Yeah,

John Dehlin [01:19:41] there were elders on my mission that had 40 in a month. Have you ever heard of that?

Dan McClellan [01:19:45] No, I've heard of that kind of thing. That wasn't what was going on when I was there. And I was in some areas where the church had been very strong in the 80s and into the 90s, and then controversy had forced the church to withdraw. And like I was one of the first missionaries back in some of these areas and particularly my last area was called Fraile Muerto, which means dead monk in Spanish. And that was a branch. I was the branch president. We had six members and that had been a Ward 10, 15 years earlier. And I think there had been adultery and other stuff in the bishopric that had compelled the church to just withdraw entirely. And so somebody six months before me went in to open it back up and there were these two families that had joined. And so. So I don't think I was. And you know, this was a town of like 1200 people. And I think during the. I forget how long I was there. Probably about six months that I was there, I knocked every single door in the town and had probably spoken to almost everyone in the town. So there was not a ton for me to do there except try to improve the relationship between the church and the community. So, like I did, I organized volunteer projects. Like we were going to go and clean the gutters in the main streets. I taught Tae Bo in the city gym once a week, which got like 50 to 75 people who were there for that, which was an awful lot of fun. And I don't know if Billy Blanks is going to come after me for using his bread, his brand. Yeah, I called it Taebo and was on the radio at one point in this tiny little town to try to improve the relationship of the church to the community. And it was. In a lot of ways, it was a losing battle because. Not because there was anything wrong with the families that were involved, but just because the history there was so well known. And there had other churches had come in and kind of taken. Set up shop in the ashes of that ward. And so they were not about to relinquish their influence. So it had become kind of. I think the Seventh Day Adventists and some Pentecostal groups were kind of the main churches in that town. So I did what I could. To my knowledge that Branch is not still active. It's been many years since I've heard anything about it. But I think the few members that were there are traveling to a nearby city called Melo to go to church. So, yeah, it was a. I have fond memories of that place, but. But, yeah, mine was not a stereotypical experience as a missionary. We did play in a baseball tournament one time. No softball tournament. I do remember that was one of the things that was explicitly forbidden. But we had investigators who were on a team that were playing in this tournament, and they thought having a bunch of Americans as their ringers would be helpful. And I talked to the mission president and we got permission to go participate. Participate in this softball tournament. And then one of my friends was hit in the head with a softball that burst his carotid artery inside his skull. And he.

John Dehlin [01:23:39] Oh, no.

Dan McClellan [01:23:39] Went into the hospital and had to have brain surgery and barely survived. But another close scare with death as a result of us trying to bend the rules a little bit. It Just because we really wanted to play softball. But, yeah, I don't know if any. Don't know that any baptisms came of that. Certainly not entire teams.

John Dehlin [01:24:08] Fun. Okay, so any other formative experiences on your mission, or do you just kind of want to summarize what your mission meant to you? What if you, you know, your kids, let's say your kids, watch this in 10 or 20 years, and anything else you want to share about your mission?

Falling in Love with Scripture Study

Dan McClellan [01:24:24] My mission is where I learned how to study, where I learned to appreciate education and the opportunity to study. And it is also where I fell in love with studying the Scriptures. That was a required part of every day. And I just love that time that I got to spend in the Scriptures and particularly in the Gospels. I have a pretty active and vivid imagination. So it was my escape into this world where these incredible things happened. I was given, when I was in a little town called Salinas, just outside of Montevideo, I was given a Spanish translation of the Bible that had the Apocrypha, and I was given a Bible dictionary that was in Spanish. And I spent a lot of time reading through those things. And I had never read the Apocrypha before, but. But the history in first and Second Maccabees fascinated me, and the stories in the rest of the Apocrypha were fascinating to me. And I just wanted to learn more about the languages, the history, the literature. And I found a little chart in the Bible dictionary that was early proto Hebrew, the Hebrew Alphabet, the Greek Alphabet, the Latin Alphabet, and then modern Latin equivalents. And I realized that. That if I had a Hebrew text, I could at least approximate the sound that it was supposed to make. And I didn't know it at the time, but that's transliteration. So I got a hold of a Hebrew text and I started trying to decipher the Hebrew language, at least initially how it sounded. And so that was where I fell in love with trying to study the languages of the Bible and specifically Hebrew.

John Dehlin [01:26:05] What drove your interest in wanting to go that deep? Because I imagine most Mormon missionaries don't come anywhere near wanting to study that deeply. It's like if they do their daily study, they're lucky to kind of just read the Book of Mormon or kind of like look at whatever the manual is. Do you remember any issues or topics that made you want to go to the Hebrew or Greek?

Dan McClellan [01:26:32] I don't remember specifically topics. I remember seeing this as a puzzle. And as I spent that year preparing for my mission by reading so widely and deeply in the standard works, and I wanted to know more about it, and once I got to understand a little bit more the relationship of what we were reading in English to what was going on in the source languages. That was a puzzle that was now before me. And I wanted to solve that puzzle. And so learning those languages was the way I could begin to put those pieces together. And then I heard about a program at BYU that was starting up called Ancient Near Eastern Studies that was going to be a major. And I thought, wow, if I could study the scriptures for a living, that would be about the coolest thing in the world. And so I decided that I was going to do whatever was in my power to make that my career. So I applied from the mission field right before I was coming home with a 0.29 GPA. And I don't know if they out loud laughed at me, but I have no doubt that the people who saw that application did laugh at me, at me. So I didn't get accepted. But when I came home, I did a visiting student summer semester in Provo, and I took a Spanish class and then tested out of a bunch of Spanish classes. And then I did a semester at a community college, Collin County Community College, which is now Collin College in Plano, Texas. And I got a 4.0 because I had cracked the code and now school was easy for me. And So I had 31, 32 hours. Hours with a 4.0. And an admissions counselor at BYU told me, you need 30 hours to transfer, and if you want, you can ask them to just look at your last 30 hours. So I waltzed in the back door at BYU, transferring with a 4.0, and they have since shut, locked, and padlocked and melted down the hinges on that back door that I don't think they let you get away with that anymore. And so that was what I wanted to do with my life, was crack that, put that puzzle together.

John Dehlin [01:28:56] Do you remember any of the subjects or topics that you really dug into early? So one that comes to my mind is like, there's the scripture. Be therefore perfect. And then you're like, well, perfect. Who can be perfect? And so then you want to go back, back to the original language to understand what the actual word was that then you could maybe try and understand better, because clearly it's not healthy to tell people to be perfect. Do you remember any of the early issues or topics that really were important or interesting to you to help focus you on wanting to understand the original languages?

Dan McClellan [01:29:38] I think that scripture was one of the issues where being able to understand the source language would help you understand a little bit more the context and the nuance. I don't remember specific passages where I wanted to know what the Hebrew or the Greek meant. But I do remember certain topics. I brought the institute manuals with me to my mission. I had taken an institute class in Dallas with a wonderful teacher who's now teaching at byu. And I remember the building where this was taught. You walk in a room and there was a big blue sign just above the chalkboard on the back wall that said find out for yourself. And so that was kind of my mantra as I was preparing to go serve a mission. It's my responsibility to discover all that there is in this, in this worldview to discover and everything. Everything I got from church leaders was pray to find out if this is true stuff. And so I thought if that if they're taking this seriously, then this is my prerogative and this is my responsibility to investigate and to find out for myself. So I have always approached things with that motto in mind with the institute manuals. I remember opening one up and it starts to talk about the older institute manuals and one of them talking about problems with evolution. And I was like, well, this is dumb. I was never really convinced by that kind of thing, but I wanted to know more. I wanted to be able to understand better some of these controversial issues.

John Dehlin [01:31:18] In theory, you weren't convinced that evolution was true or that it was false.

Dan McClellan [01:31:22] I grew up with a competent education and so I knew that evolution was true. And so I was annoyed by folks who were arguing against it. And you know, I had friends who were on the evolutionist false side of things and I was just kind of thought, eh, I don't know how you can take that kind of thing seriously. But I had friends who agreed with me as well. So whatever issue it was, I always had like minded individuals around me in my community. And I know not every Latter Day Saint has that blessing, has that ability to find like minded folks within the community. But I was fortunate enough that I could always find people who agreed with me about certain social and other types of issues around me.

John Dehlin [01:32:19] So just taking that as one example, the historic orthodox Mormon church point of view would be kind of The Bruce R. McConkie, Joseph Fielding Smith view that evolutions of the devil, one of the great deadly heresies. So then you would also. And the D and C, the Doctrine and Covenants along with the Old Testament would suggest a new earth, a young earth and a literal Adam and Eve, et cetera. So you wanting to study the original languages that underlie the Old Testament would then help you try and make sense of the creation story. For example. Am I getting to kind of what some of your early interests might have been.

Dan McClellan [01:33:07] Yeah. The creation story was one of them. Conceptualization of God was one of the main ones. I wanted to know why the Scriptures presented God the way they did. And that has since God. Yeah. And that has since become one of the main foci of my professional academic work.

John Dehlin [01:33:26] Who's God? What is God? What do the Scriptures tell us about God?

Dan McClellan [01:33:29] Yeah. And how do people conceptualize God and why? So it's not that I wanted to prove anything true or false or wanted to validate any dogmas. It was that I just wanted to have the data. I wanted to know. I wanted. And including if I felt like this went one way, I wanted to know why other people took it the other way. I wanted to know why the institution presented certain ideas, certain ways and why other members didn't. I just wanted to understand what was going on with all sides of these things, because I figured there was. There was something going on that was compelling people to occupy all these different sides to these issues. And I just wanted to understand. I have always been a naturally curious person. And so even though I think for the most part I'm willing to suspend judgment on certain things, I want to have the data and at least have a good idea what's going on with different positions and why people are adopting them or not adopting them really quickly.

Early Questions About the Book of Mormon

John Dehlin [01:34:37] Being in Latin America as a missionary and reading the Book of Mormon as intensely as you did, did you ever have questions about like, wow, is this book actually history? And are these people I'm teaching literally descendants of Israelites from 600 BC? Did those questions occur to you as a missionary or not in. And if they did, how did you work through that at the time?

Dan McClellan [01:35:02] Yeah, they occurred to me. And I had seen different apologetic accounts for how this can be historical. And it was a question that I was interested in, but also one of those things where I was kind of like, I'm going to suspend judgment. I'm going to gather data. I can understand this position over here. I can understand this position over here. I'm going to observe and just gather data while my judgment is suspended. So I don't know that I came down one way or the other on that issue during my mission at all. It was just something that I acknowledge that this is how this is presented within the institution. That a lot of people have this belief. I'm just going to kind of stand back and watch things play out was, I think, the position that I took. I was not raised with a lot of the kind of hardline positions on different things that a lot of Latter Day Saints who grow up in the faith are raised with. And no one ever tried to disabuse me of that as a member of the church. I was told, again, find out for yourself. And I was given enough latitude as an adult member of the church that nobody was kind of. Of being very paternalistic to me. Nobody was trying to lecture me about how I had to engage this stuff as a member of the church. And so I approached it how I approached all things. I saw this. This seems to be the consensus view. This is another view. Here's another view. I'm just going to let the data dictate what I think about this, while also to some degree suspending judgment. And I think a lot of people have faith in a historical Book of Mormon. And to the degree that faith is evidence for things hoped for and not seen, you should not expect the data to support what you have faith in. And they don't. The data pretty firmly points in the opposite direction of a historical Book of Mormon. And that's not to say that anybody who has faith in a historical Book of Mormon is somehow entirely irrational. It's just to say the data that exist right now point pretty firmly in a given direction. That's not to say it's impossible that any other position is true. It's just to say that's where the data point. And I've always tried to follow the data where it leads, rather than try to get around the data, to try to assert on an academic level something that conflicts with the data. And I've always been critical of apologetics because I.

John Dehlin [01:37:58] Of traditional Mormon apologetics.

Dan McClellan [01:38:00] Well, all apologetics on my channel. I'm highly critical of just apologetics in general, traditional Christian apologetics, for the most part. Yeah. And I'm highly critical of that as something that is always trying to not follow the data where they lead, but get around the data, sidestep the data to get to a predetermined conclusion. It treats the data not as a guide, but as an obstacle to overcome. And frequently, what I see, and this is not just within Mormonism, it's within broader Christian apologetics, is the goal is not necessarily to show that something is probable or even plausible. The goal is to show that it's not impossible. And I state frequently that as long as you can gin up the tiniest little sliver of not impossible, since your audience, since your intended audience is people who already agree, they just want to feel validated in their agreements, as long as you can gin up the tiniest little sliver of not impossible, that is enough for that audience to hold on to. Apologetics is not aimed at critics. Apologetics is aimed at those who already agree. And I've been highly critical of that for a long time and have tried to promote a perspective that tries to follow the data where they lead, rather than get around the data to a predetermined conclusion.

John Dehlin [01:39:24] And I'm not asking you to call anyone out, but I'm thinking of Kerry Mohlstein's comment that he begins with the conclusion that the church is true and that the Book of Abraham or Book of Mormon are historical documents, and then he gathers the evidence to support that. What's wrong? And again, not asking you to comment specifically on Muhlstein. What's wrong with that approach?

Dan McClellan [01:39:49] I think from your perspective. Yeah, from my perspective, all of these. Let me see if. Hang on a sec. Let me contemplate this for a second. Apologetics starts from a dogmatic position, and a dogmatic position is a position I would describe as something that is asserted or accepted for because of reasons beyond evidence or data. So, because it's what you grew up, it's because what you. You have to do this because of your employment, because you have to do this because you're a part of this group that says you have to do this. There are all kinds of different reasons that people assert dogmas, but the problem with a dogma is you can always gin up that little sliver of not impossible. And so there are ways to find to stack up arguments that this is not impossible and say, see, we have reason to believe. And really what that's doing is just trying to protect a dogma from scrutiny. It's not seeking the truth, it's not seeking information, it's not following the data. And I think that's at least when it comes to public discourse, when it comes to personal faith, that's another arena that's not really. People can do what they want, but when it comes to public discourse, if you're engaging in public discourse, I think you have a responsibility to follow the data. And I think apologetics is not doing that. It begins from a position of dogma. And so I think it is many of the things that contribute to a lot of the social ills that we have in the world today. I think dogmas and people who are structuring power and values because of dogmas sit at the root of so many social ills and so much suffering and so much oppression and systemic power. Asymmetries but if we could prioritize the data, and that's why my motto is data over dogma. I want to try to, to the degree that is possible, prioritize the data over the dogma. I think that will, can lead to resolutions to a lot of these issues. But dogmatism is embedded deep within us, intuitively, subconsciously. We are fundamentally dogmatic entities. And so that is a challenge. It's fighting against human nature in a lot of ways. But if we want to create a better world for everyone in it and not just structure power so that things come out better for us, even if they come out worse for everybody else, I think we have to, I think we have to set aside dogmas and

John Dehlin [01:42:57] I don't, I want to jump back in your story. So I, and we'll probably talk about this more later in part one, but I'm dying to know how you distinguish between healthy, constructive religious belief and unhealthy dogmatic beliefs. Because some could say, what's the difference?

Dan McClellan [01:43:18] Yeah, yeah. And I think that's, that's a difficult line to draw. And I don't come down really, really hard on, on one side or the other. But the position that I've taken in my public discourse is all other things being equal, I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt to the less powerful or the less privileged group. And so if dogma contributes to a less powerful or a less privileged group suffering, having power taken away from them, I think that is harmful. And so when it comes to personal faith, it's inevitable that people have to negotiate with the scriptures, for instance, I talk about this all the time. If you are a human being, you cannot do anything but negotiate with the scriptures. And so people ask me all the time, so then, since we're not actually figuring out what it originally means, does that mean we can't use them? And I suggest it doesn't mean that. It just means as long as you're doing it consciously, if you are aware and open about the fact that you're negotiating with the text and you are not structuring power and values over against the interests of less privileged, less powerful groups, I think go off, do what makes it more meaningful and more useful to you. But my fundamental concern is for those power asymmetries and for trying to protect and structure power in favor of groups that already have too much of it.

John Dehlin [01:44:56] And the first time I met you, I think we had this conversation at the marriage on a tightrope presentation you gave. And I think you showed your wristband of your watch, and do you want to show that now? And does that symbolize in some way the sensitivity that you're outlining? Tell the listeners who can't see what your wristband is and what it symbolizes.

Dan McClellan [01:45:22] So a couple years ago, I got diagnosed with a touch of the fatty liver disease, non alcoholic fatty liver disease. And I was told I needed to lose some weight, go on a Mediterranean diet. And I thought, is that halloumi and souvlaki and things like that? Because I've eaten that a lot in the Mediterranean. And they were like, no, that's not the Mediterranean. But I went out and I got an apple watch because this was going to give me a lot of data for my help, my heart and my health and all that kind of stuff. And my wife had a credit, and she got me a rainbow wristband for the apple watch. And I. I like colors, so I enjoy things that stand out a little bit more. And I thought, this is. This is a great gift because it is colorful. And also I support the humanity, the rights of LGBTQ communities. I still remember one of the most disheartening things that happened to me before I. Within the Latter Day Saint Church, before I served a mission, was sitting in a combined class 1 5th Sunday and having someone talk about organizing to join, organizing against some local ordinance or something. I forget exactly what it was, but they were protesting. The legalization of gay marriage was the foundation of this. And my heart just sunk because this was the first I'd come across this kind, this perspective. And I knew people who were members of the church who did not feel that way, who were pro lgbtq. And so to get a sense of an institutional opposition to that was disheartening for me. And so ever since, I've tried to. Tried to make clear that I think everybody should have equal rights. And that extends to LGBTQ communities. And so if that signals to anybody that I'm not an enemy, that I'm not going to take a harmful position to them, then it's done its job. And this is such an annoying issue. And there are so many people whose lives have been harmed by this unnecessarily, because you can't really maintain that position without harming people and also without instilling a bigotry within those who see that as an identity marker that they have to go brandish in public. And that's what it has become. It's an identity marker that helps people structure power, and it helps people engage in boundary maintenance. And I think they are causing a lot of harm to a lot of very real people. Lives have been taken, lives have ended because of that harm. And so it's something that I think needs to be rooted out of our communities.

John Dehlin [01:48:45] Nice. Thanks for sharing that. So back to getting admitted to byu. You wanted to study again.

Discovering Ancient Near Eastern Studies at BYU

Dan McClellan [01:48:55] Tell us the discipline, Ancient Near Eastern Studies.

John Dehlin [01:48:58] Okay. And immediately when I hear that, I think Dan Peterson and Bill. What's his name? Who are the.

Dan McClellan [01:49:07] Hamlin.

John Dehlin [01:49:07] Yeah, Bill Hamlin. And that whole kind of fair like farms, Maxwell Institute crowd, Jack Welch. Just the whole group that was trying to prove Mormonism in the Book of Mormon to be historical through. Honestly, through the types of dogma that you just announced. Now, that's my characterization, not yours. So, like, what's it like to end your mission, to work really hard to get into a D1 university and then to join this type of discipline, assuming that that's what you. That is the environment you entered? Am I wrong?

Dan McClellan [01:49:52] No, no. Although they were not the entirety of that environment. They were one aspect of it. There were a lot of really good people in that program. And I felt like I did get a top tier education in Ancient Near Eastern studies. And so I got there and my goal was to.

John Dehlin [01:50:10] This is what year you're entering BYU? Oh, gosh.

Dan McClellan [01:50:12] I think it was beginning of 2007.

John Dehlin [01:50:16] Okay. That's when you entered BYU?

Dan McClellan [01:50:20] Yes. So I got home from my mission on Christmas Eve 2003.

John Dehlin [01:50:24] Okay.

Dan McClellan [01:50:25] I had already been turned down. I did these other semesters. I think it was 2005 when I applied and I got accepted. And then because I'm such a genius, I deferred beginning from 2006 to 2007 so I could go do a degree in massage therapy at the Utah College of Massage Therapy. Because I. I thought that would help me pay for school. The reality is that it almost doubled my student loan debt and didn't really help me pay for school at all. However, I now have a skill that I've always wanted to have. So I think I started in winter of 2007, and it was wonderful because I was taking Hebrew, I was taking Greek, I was reading these texts in translation initially.

John Dehlin [01:51:23] Was Griggs there teaching Greek or. No?

Dan McClellan [01:51:26] No, that wasn't who taught me. Mike Pope actually taught my first semester of Greek, who's a wonderful scholar who is in. Does classics at BYU now. And I took Hebrew from Stephen Ricks initially and I just had a wonderful time. And I saw the apologetic side of things as kind of. Of part and parcel with the education, but it's not what I was there to do, and it's not what I was focused on.

Encountering Historical Criticism and the Documentary Hypothesis

John Dehlin [01:51:58] When did you first become aware of the concept or the discipline of historical criticism or the documentary hypothesis? Was it pre baptism? Was it on your mission? Was it while you were at byu? Had you heard of people like David Wright? Had you heard of David Bacavoy? When did you first become aware of historical Criticism and BYU? Were you aware of the minefield that you were entering?

Dan McClellan [01:52:28] I became aware of it at byu, and I don't think I was aware of just how much of a minefield it was. But ever since returning from my mission, I had been online and so was aware that these kinds of. Of discussions were taking place. And I didn't feel informed enough to be able to come down on one side or another. I felt intuitively compelled to defend my faith community. And so I probably started off more naively being apologetic about it, But I was also going to accept the data, whatever its nature. And so at byu, I was happy to. I was happy to follow the data where it was leading. And so I didn't think of it as a threat. I saw that it was a threat to positions that were very popular and even institutionalized within my community. But I didn't think of it as a threat to me personally.

John Dehlin [01:53:30] Would you mind just summarizing the discipline or the approach or whatever it is that I just. Just clumsily tried to explain the issues of the dilemma around the minefield that I tried to describe? Just for those who haven't watched the David Bacavoy or Brett Metcalf episodes and don't know even what I'm talking about.

Dan McClellan [01:53:52] Yeah. So critical biblical scholarship is a field that's been developing for a long time. It grew out of really apologetic Christian scholarship. Attempts in the 19th century to. To try to show that the Bible is historically accurate. And particularly in Europe, and particularly in Germany, a skepticism kind of developed regarding the historicity, the historical accuracy of the biblical texts. And they were frequently concerned with the composition of the text, how the texts came together and when and who was responsible for them. And that critical eye that was turned on those questions produced answers that conflicted with the traditional story. And so Pentateuchal criticism is criticism of the first five books of Moses. And since the early 19th century, scholars have been developing theories about how this text came together to be the way that it is. And this has involved dividing up the text into different sources, because there are places where you have different stories put side by side as if they're the same story, and you can't really make sense of it until you disentangle them. And see, this is two different takes on the same story that often are conflicting, correct? Yes, yes, often conflicting. And when you divide these up, you see there are a handful of collections of these stories that existed independently of each other and at some point were kind of woven together with different degrees of care and different degrees of success. And a great one is the story of Joseph being sold into Egypt. If you read that story just straight through, you have no idea what happened, because it talks about putting Joseph in a pit, pulling Joseph out of a pit. They're Ishmaelites. There are Midianites. There are people trying to stop it. And you don't know the chain of custody of Joseph. It just doesn't make sense. And you have to make up details in order to try to get the dots to connect until you just disentangle the story. And see, there's one story with Ishmaelites, there's one story with Midianites. Each has a beginning, each has a middle, and each has an end. And that is the foundation of. Of source criticism of the Pentateuch, which argues that there are different. Different groups are responsible for producing different stories. And at some point they got brought together, and a redactor or sets of redactors over long periods of time kind of fiddled with them to get them to fit together. And that challenges a lot of traditional ideas about who is responsible for writing these texts, how historical they are when they were written, and that causes a lot of heartache. But as Dave Bockavoy wrote a wonderful book, Authoring the Old Testament, that talks about Pentateuchal criticism and how Latter Day Saints are actually uniquely situated among Christians to understand and accept this principle that authors can take existing stories and put them together. And I think within Latter Day Saint history, we are also united, uniquely situated, to be more accepting of some of that critical scholarship. But I think that we have committed ourselves to some of these identity markers so much that it has become a threat, some of this critical scholarship, like it is, to more conservative Christian communities. But I think there's a way forward for Latter Day Saints.

John Dehlin [01:57:45] Do you remember when you first learn the story of David Wright? Can you summarize that? Or do you even know who David Wright is?

Dan McClellan [01:57:52] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:57:53] And I'm thinking about how my brain would have reacted, learning about historical criticism and then hearing the story of David Wright. BYU professor, especially knowing your commitment to truth. Do you want to retell that story? And then retell your first learning about that story and how that made you feel both for David Wright, but also for your own future as a scholar within Mormonism.

Dan McClellan [01:58:21] I think I first heard the story of David Wright as an undergraduate at byu. And I think the way I heard it was that he was studying Isaiah, the problem of deutero Isaiah, this idea that Isaiah is a combination of at least two different matrix main sources. And he came to the conclusion that a lot of the prophecy in the Hebrew Bible is being misunderstood. If it is being understood as somebody writing about fulfillment that's going to take place centuries or millennia in the future. That prophecy is written for its immediate audience, and it's intended to inform their experiences and inform their understanding of this narrative. And so, if I recall, the idea was that David Wright endorsed in print this idea of deutero Isaiah, which caused trouble for him, which caused ultimately his departure from the church. And I recall being aware that that was that there were risks associated with critical scholarship. But I also recall being fascinated by these theories because they were putting the puzzle pieces together. And because my priority was putting the puzzle pieces together, I didn't worry too much about if I was going to get in trouble. I had never been in trouble before. Like I said, I joined the church as an adult. I brought a lot of perspectives into the church with me, and no one ever tried to disabuse me of those perspectives. And so I didn't feel like I was risking anything. And I think I also probably thought, oh, that was a long time ago. Things are different now because many of the people that I was in my cohort at BYU spoke about these issues in ways that made sense to me as theories and ideas that needed to be taken seriously, not things that needed to be dismissed offhand because they conflicted with our ideologies.

John Dehlin [02:00:43] I mean, David Wright didn't leave Mormonism. He was excommunicated, right?

Dan McClellan [02:00:48] I don't know that. I know the story incredibly well. I think I assumed he was excommunicated, But I also have. Am I, to your knowledge, I've never met David Wright, but to my knowledge, he's always been. Still felt an affinity for the community, which is something that I think I have noticed with a number of folks who have been kicked out of the institution that they don't harbor ill will towards the community in general, which is something that I've always appreciated because I've always found folks of all stripes within the community.

John Dehlin [02:01:28] I mean, I guess, and this is maybe me projecting a little bit, two things I, you know, I was at BYU when the September 6 happened. And, you know, when you learn about scholars that end up getting excommunicated for pursuing truth, two things happen. You feel sad for them and. Or anger at the church for doing that to people, and you feel fear about your own pursuits. Did you feel either of those, or.

Dan McClellan [02:01:57] I absolutely felt sad. This was. I think I'm a very empathetic person, and I think that, yeah, I was. I definitely felt sad that somebody, because they were very clearly doing what they thought was the right thing, was experiencing those kinds of consequences. I don't know that I felt fear. I've never really felt fear about pursuing

John Dehlin [02:02:30] scholarship, because it sounds like the climate change between David Wright and when you were at BYU, where maybe embracing historical criticism 10 or 20 years later was less dangerous, more accepted.

Dan McClellan [02:02:47] I think it was probably. It wasn't sitting close to the surface. And when I was engaging it, yeah, I had teachers who would teach critical scholarship. And it wasn't saying, you have to accept this. It was saying, these are the standards, and if you want to go on in this field, you need to be aware of them. You need to be able to engage with them. You. You need to understand them, and not you need to be able to undermine them. It was, you need to understand them for their own sake. And so obviously, I encountered other professors who were more apologetic in their orientation, but I never felt like anyone was discouraging me from trying to understand these things on their own terms and from taking them seriously. Although I do know that I heard that there were folks who had been. The church had funded PhD programs or something like that for a number of scholars who had ultimately fallen away or been excommunicated or something like that. So I was aware that there was kind of a sense of unease with critical scholarship. But I figured that this was a new day and age, and for whatever reason, I didn't feel threatened by pursuing critical scholarship.

Hugh Nibley, LDS Apologetics, and Faithful Scholarship

John Dehlin [02:04:12] Had you become aware of Hugh Nibley and his lore, and had you gained either a respect or a disrespect for his apologetic scholarship when you were byu?

Dan McClellan [02:04:24] I knew about Hugh Nibley a little bit. I had read so some of his books, Lehigh in the Desert, for instance. And I thought it was. I thought the discussions were fascinating, and I thought a lot of the parallels were fascinating as well. But as I progressed in my scholarship and particularly into graduate school, and as I read things like Kent Jackson's response to Hugh Nibley, I realized that a lot of the connections that are being drawn there are illusory and that there was a bit of what Samuel Sandmel back in 1961 called Parallelomania, where we see things that remind us of each other and immediately assume that there's a connection, there's a genetic link between the two. And that leads to. Once you take that as a foundation, you can build all kinds of theories on top of that, even though that foundation is quite illusory. So I criticize that parallelomania, not just in apologetics, but sometimes even in critical scholarship as well. There are people who take connections too far. And in my social media engagement, I have to talk about ludicrous conspiracy theories and all kinds of claims that come from critics of the Bible and critics of religion that are similarly that kind of parallelomania. So Hugh Nibley was somebody who was kind of formative to my learning about these issues and the discussions, but someone whose scholarship I outgrew fairly quickly in pursuing critical scholarship.

John Dehlin [02:06:04] So I guess what I'm getting at is I'm just trying to put myself in 2007, 2008, Dan McClellan, mind as you're in the shadow of what was farms and Dan Peterson and the emerging Maxwell Institute and Hugh Nibley's legacy at byu, where you're, where you're probably developing a different approach, but I'm going to project into it maybe some disrespect for that tradition of classical Mormon apologetics. And how you're. Are you thinking, well, I can value or see where they're coming from, Dan Peterson and Lou Midgley or Bill. What's his name?

Dan McClellan [02:06:59] Hamblin.

John Dehlin [02:06:59] Bill Hamblin. Or I can see where they're coming from, but I probably am not vibing with their approach. And Maybe I, Dan McClellan, will be able to bring to Mormonism a more honest or faithful or respectable approach. I don't know if you would say to apologetics or to approaching scripture, but I guess I'm trying to get in the mindset of you as you're trying to think about your future, but also the tradition that, that you're kind of swimming in at the time you're at BYU in 2007, 2008. Is there anything there or is there not anything there?

Dan McClellan [02:07:38] Yeah. The first thing I would say, though, is that I never met. I don't know if I never met, but Lou Midgley was not someone I interacted with as an undergraduate, but those other folks I did, and I considered them good friends at the time, and I still consider them friends. I don't know the degree to which they would reciprocate that feeling, but now or the. No, but these were people I got to know personally and enjoyed being around, people who. But I made friends with all ends of these debates. And on a human level, I still respect and appreciate their friendships, if they still exist. And so I was able to decouple the arguments that were going on from these people as friends of mine. And maybe that's more complicated for them now. But when I see. I consider Kerry Muhlstein a friend. I consider John. Gee, if you can imagine, I consider John a friend. And so I still appreciate their humanity. And I can understand the conflicts and the interpersonal issues that have given rise to some of the sometimes vituperative and pejorative kind of debates that go back and forth. I feel bad that that has to be where a lot of this discourse goes. I would like. I think if people got to know each other on a more personal level on all sides of this, there would hopefully be a lot more understanding. But once it comes to print and time to argue for these things, a lot of that gets thrown out the window. I was participating in this discourse, and I was one of a handful of participants. I wanted to be a part of moving this forward, moving our research forward, moving our understanding forward in a constructive way. And I didn't see that as meaning picking this side over and against the other. I think the apologetic side of things is in a weaker position when it comes to the data, when it comes to the evidence. But that does not mean that there is no value in that scholarship, because I think everybody needs, you know, your Mozart needs your Salieri to. To be Mozart, as we understand Mozart. And I think that having something to push against.

John Dehlin [02:10:19] Right?

Dan McClellan [02:10:20] Yeah. Because as we push against, we are improving and progressing. And I think there are things that critical scholars can learn from apologists, although I would have to say that there's a lot more that apologists could learn from critical scholars. And so I don't know that I was envisioning myself being a champion of one side or another as much as I was envisioning myself championing concern for the data wherever they may lead and an openness to follow the data wherever it may lead. And I think I've tried to model that in the scholarship that I've published. The first thing I ever published in my entire life was an essay I submitted to a religious education student symposium while I was an undergraduate at byu. And it was called Latter Day Saints and Patristics. And the argument was basically, apologists look to patristics to find A kind of proto Mormonism. And I think I probably discussed three case studies. I think one was about pre existence, one was about corporeality of God. I forget what the other one was, but I looked at all three and said we're missing the mark if we're looking at these, to try to identify these folks as proto Mormons. This is not proto Mormonism. This is something very different.

John Dehlin [02:11:42] And for those who don't even know

Dan McClellan [02:11:43] what the term proto Mormon means, this is the idea that the early Christians believed the same things as we believe now. They weren't Latter Day Saints, but that the beliefs about God, about creation, about these other things were the same going back.

John Dehlin [02:12:01] It's the idea that we are restoring the restoration. Means. Means Mormonism is going to become what the original Christians thought and believed.

Dan McClellan [02:12:12] Right, right, right. And that a lot of Latter Day Saints have this idea that the first Christians had some concept of temple worship, the way we understand it today, and these kinds of things. And so the first thing I ever published was basically saying stop trying to argue for this, because once you look at the details, that argument becomes entirely unsustainable. And so from the very beginning my goal has been to kind of be a bit more of a mediator and say we can do this in a productive way and we can do this in a way that advances the scholarship and maybe even preserves, if not advances, faith. But when we engage this just for the purpose of proving we're right, I think it becomes harmful, that becomes the priority and everything else becomes subordinate to it, even the data. And so as an undergraduate, I think I was already endorsing kind of a data over dogma approach. And many of the things I've published in Latter Day Saint venues are doing the same, are saying this is what the data indicate and this does not fit well with the way we've always traditionally approached this. But it can still be useful to us if we understand it adequately.

John Dehlin [02:13:41] Did at that time at BYU or since did or do you have any role models, faithful Mormon scholar role models for this approach? You know, either then or now, or at any time in between. Who did you look to as inspiration?

Dan McClellan [02:14:04] I don't know that I look to anybody as. As inspiration. I think I looked to everybody was who was around me and saw value that I could take from their different approaches. But I wanted to forge what I thought was a somewhat new trail. And I think since then I've made friends with a handful of folks who I think are following a similar path and have gotten, you know, have had some Bad experiences because of it. I consider Tom Waymont to be a kindred spirit in that regard. I consider Mike Pope to be another kindred spirit. There are a handful of people, I think, whose approaches and whose experiences resonate with my own, but at byu, no, I don't think I had anyone I looked up to as the example.

John Dehlin [02:14:59] So Thomas Wayman, in my mind, is most known to the Mormon Stories audience as the scholar that worked with Halley to identify the influence of Adam Clark's

Dan McClellan [02:15:14] commentary on the Joseph Smith translation. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:15:16] Was he at BYU as a scholar when you were there and did you work with him?

Dan McClellan [02:15:21] I didn't work with him. I'm almost positive he was there. But I became friends with him after leaving byu.

John Dehlin [02:15:28] Okay. And I guess what I'm saying is, up, up through 2007, 2008, were there any faith faithful Mormon scholars that were privileging data over dogma, or were you like the first that you were aware of? I'm not trying to insult Mormon apologetics or Mormon scholarship, but like, David Wright had been excommunicated. Was there anyone else you could kind of look to?

Dan McClellan [02:15:57] You know, I think the people who, who most closely resonated with my approach were other students that were in my cohort. Although I did have. I did have professors. Honestly, I'm struggling to remember who all my professors were. But I did have a number of professors, I think, who modeled a very healthy approach, at least in the classroom with them. I wasn't aware of the scholarship that they were publishing outside. For instance, Jared Ludlow, I consider a good friend who talked about critical scholarship in what struck me as healthy, productive ways. I don't know that I've read enough of his scholarship to know if that's consistent with how he publishes. But. But yeah, there were definitely professors that gave me the sense that there was nothing wrong or dangerous with how I was hoping to approach things.

John Dehlin [02:17:06] And I guess what I'm getting at is in my mind, you may have been trotting new ground, plowing new ground within faithful Mormon scholarship.

Dan McClellan [02:17:19] Yeah. Well, I will say that that paper that I published on Latter Day Saints and Patristics, and this was in a period when I was deciding where I was going to focus on Hebrew Bible or New Testament or early Christianity. So my first take was on early Christianity. I do know that that annoyed some people. And there were.

John Dehlin [02:17:38] Do you want to say who or do you not want to say who?

Dan McClellan [02:17:41] No, I probably don't want to say who, but there were awards given for papers and I would have won the award for the best student paper. If I had not annoyed one of the judges who did not appreciate that I was basically being critical of apologetics. And so I am not aware of another paper, apart from Kent Jackson's review of some of Hugh Nibley's work, that was saying, hey, apologist, pull it back a little bit. You're barking up the wrong tree. And I saw Jackson's critique of Hugh Nibley as authorization to do that. And so, now that I think about Kent Jackson was one of my first professors, taught an Intro to Ancient Near Eastern Studies. And so, at least in that regard with that publication, I saw him doing a very similar thing. And so I did not see it as trotting new ground, even if the effect was maybe to do something that was unusual and new.

John Dehlin [02:18:52] I just want my viewers and listeners who are, like, really loving Dan and really interested in the kind of questions I'm asking right now. I do want to refer them to David Bacavoy's Mormon Stories interview, not only about his own story, but also his views on the Old Old and New Testament Mormon scripture. I don't know exactly what you.

Dan McClellan [02:19:10] Dave, a good friend of mine as well. Dave's a great friend of mine, as you know, and a wonderful person. And you could not find a more loving person to engage in this. And I think he got a phenomenally raw deal. And the church lost a wonderful scholar who would have done amazing things had his path not been obstructed.

John Dehlin [02:19:33] Yeah. And I just. I think it would be worth anyone who cares about these issues to go back and watch that episode, because David Bacavoy talks about studying at Brandeis, getting a PhD teaching institute at, like, MIT Harvard, and then coming to BYU eventually hoping to pursue the same types of questions and issues you're talking about and getting rejected because of these apologists that we're talking about who hated biblical criticism or historical criticism, and so didn't want David anywhere near infecting the BYU faculty or the minds of students. Do you have a sense for what year David would have interviewed for that job at byu? And were you even there or aware of David at the time? He would have been interviewing at BYU.

Dan McClellan [02:20:20] So I became friends with David, I think around 2010. I was at Oxford working on my master's degree when we started noticing each other online. And this would have been in the forums. Yeah, yeah. Discussion forums and stuff like that, where he was working on his dissertation on divine sexuality. And I had engaged some arguments about, I think, Genesis 4. One, about the nature of this statement, I have gotten a man from the Lord. And we kind of collided in engaging that argument, and we both felt very similarly. And so we were kindred spirits when it came to divine sexuality. So that was what led us to get to know each other. And I think it was shortly after that that he was. Yeah. Interviewing and I think was subjected to some kind of some deal breaker questions about Joseph Smith and things like that. That's ended up getting him. Yeah. Blacklisted there, which is unfortunate. I have heard rumors about who is responsible for that kind of stuff. And if those are true, these are people I still consider friends and I still consider good people. And. And so that is dismaying. That is troubling. But, yeah, I don't know all of the details of those stories.

John Dehlin [02:22:00] Yeah. Okay. Well, I guess back to you. What I'm trying to channel is as you're pursuing these issues, your awareness of, again, how high and sensitive and potentially dangerous and controversial these issues are. So let's just go back. You're an undergraduate, you're starting to study these issues. Tell us about your interests and mindset and how that goes from undergraduate to graduate school and how you start thinking about both your interests and your career.

Graduate Studies and Navigating Faith at BYU

Dan McClellan [02:22:39] Well, as I start to consider graduate work, I'm aware that there's not really anything within the faith community that there are no Master's degrees or PhDs in biblical studies at BYU or in any church school. So I know I've got to go outside. And to be honest, my goal was always to not limit myself to Latter Day Saint audiences, but to become a biblical scholar proper, someone who is writing scholarship for the broader world of biblical scholarship, not just for Latter Day Saint audiences. And so I looked at programs all around, and I wanted to get the best education I possibly could. And so I applied to all different kinds of places. And I had been. I had been at conferences, I'd been presenting before I got to know some scholars out there in the field. And so I also, as this was happening, I was getting a taste of biblical scholarship beyond byu. And I liked it. And I liked that there was a lot of freedom out there and that the discussions were, I thought, a lot more interesting and a lot more exciting than the kind of the low ceiling of apologetics that we've always got to be battling over. This beginning question of is it true? And I find that question to be phenomenally boring because there is so much more out there that is so much more fascinating and can enrich, I think, someone's engagement with the Bible and with restoration scripture, if they can get to the point where they start to try to seek ways to use the Scriptures, rather than seeking ways just to defend the Scriptures.

John Dehlin [02:24:27] So I have to ask, through your graduation at byu, it's a very easy sort of series of dots where it's like, wait a minute, if Adam and Eve aren't literal historical figures, if the earth isn't 6,000 years old, if Noah's flood wasn't literal, if the Tower of Babel probably never happened, if Moses may or may not have even been a historical figure, if Abraham certainly probably wasn't a historical figure, then the whole restoration is built on that. Therefore it all collapses. Did you have any of those thoughts or even a crisis of faith during your undergraduate years or not? And if not, how did you escape it?

Dan McClellan [02:25:14] I don't think that I would say I had a crisis of faith because I don't think I saw my faith as being built on these claims to historicity. And so I would say that those things were not on my list of non negotiables. And I was perfectly happy to consider the data and where the critical scholarship was going in that regard. And I also saw a lot of those things more as credences, more as things that our institution would like you to endorse this as a means of boundary maintenance, as a means of costly signaling, and so of what? Costly signaling?

John Dehlin [02:26:05] Costly, costly signaling. Yeah, I don't even know what that term is.

Dan McClellan [02:26:09] So this is the idea that a lot of the things that we do within society, whether it is actual linguistic communication or rituals that we do, a lot of it is intended to signal to others in the community that we can be trusted. And this goes all the way back to early human evolution, where being a part of a group increased your chance of survival significantly. And so we have deeply embedded in our minds a subconscious predisposition to do things that are going to keep us in good standing within whatever social identities are important to us. And so this means that even shaking hands is something that we do because everybody does it. And in that sense, it is something that we do to show that we are. We know the rules, we can participate. We are an upstanding member of this group. And there are all kinds of different rituals that serve to help people detect who can be trusted and who can't. And there's a wonderful book that was just published by Harvey Whitehouse called the Ritual Animal. That's one of the first attempts to popularize these theories from the cognitive science of religion about the nature of and the function of ritual. So costly signaling is a way to say, I am willing to incur a cost to send a signal to those around me that I am faithful to the group and to its standards. And so we do this kind of thing all the time. And particularly within Mormonism, there is so much that is costly signaling. Bearing testimony is costly signals signaling. It's a way to incur costs to signal to others that we are a faithful member of the group. And it's a way for everyone else to detect that you are a faithful member of the group. You know, going to the temple, people get up and talk about how much, you know, how frequently they go to the temple. And that's a way to signal, hey, I am faithful to these standards. And. And so one of the things about ritual is that it's what's called another term, causally opaque, which means there is not a clear reason why something is done. When we have causally opaque rituals, they are almost certainly they have persevered because they help the group maintain its boundaries and its cohesiveness. And then explanations for why we do it pop up all over the place. But those are usually explanations that serve whatever rhetorical goals someone has at the time. So you think about taking the sacrament. There are explanations for why we take the sacrament, from official ones to non official ones, to what the symbolism all means. But ultimately this is a way to come together as a group and to show, I can be trusted, I'm one of you. And so it serves to maintain and preserve the boundaries of the group. So I forgot why that came up.

John Dehlin [02:29:32] So, I mean, yeah, so I was asking you whether you had a faith crisis at byu.

Dan McClellan [02:29:38] Yeah, so as I was learning about these ideas, I was observing that a lot of what goes on within the interpersonal associations and within the performances that we do within the church are functioning as costly signaling or as credences. As I mentioned that we have these institute manuals that talk about evolution and try to advocate for more of a young earth creationism. But at byu, there were biology classes. There was a week where we celebrated Darwin at byu. And so this created some cognitive dissonance for a time. And I was actually a cartoonist for the Daily Universe, or I drew a cartoon making fun of biology professor for teaching evolution. And I wasn't an anti evolutionist. I've always accepted that. But it was an opportunity to kind of poke fun at the cognitive dissonance of endorsing evolution out of one side of our mouth and then rejecting it out of the other. But that was an example of something where I was like, okay, we've shifted. And belief in young Earth creationism is not a non negotiable to be a member of the church. So it just seems like something that people have, that people use as a means of trying to determine who's on my side when it comes to these ideologies. And so I saw a lot of this as credences and as costly signaling and as stuff that did not interest me.

John Dehlin [02:31:30] And the cartoon. Can you just, first of all, do you have, can you share with us eventually a copy of the cartoon? Oh, gosh. And can you describe what it. Can you describe what it basically depicted?

Dan McClellan [02:31:41] There were actually two cartoons that I did and I'll have to. I don't know if I have a copy of it, but one was like an Intro to Biology. And I showed a professor with a projection thing, a projector, saying, okay, here's what did I say? Here's why all the leaders of the church are wrong. Something like that. It was kind of low hanging fruit. But then I got a lot of attention for that cartoon, even from a good friend of mine who knocked on my door one day and I opened the door and he said, hey, your cartoon was awful. And I was like, I'm not actually endorsing that position.

John Dehlin [02:32:25] Okay, so you weren't saying, you weren't criticizing evolution believing professors for undermining faith in Mormon prophets? That's not what you were doing?

Dan McClellan [02:32:35] I was kind of poking the hornet's nest because then shortly after that I had a. I think the next cartoon I did was a student sitting in the back of a lecture hall and the professor saying, and then President David O. McKay said that evolution was a beautiful theory of the origins of life on Earth or something like that. And then I had a little thought bubble above the student, like about how they didn't come to school to have their preconceived notions challenged by scholars or professors or something like that. I forget exactly what it said, but I was basically showing both sides of it just to kind of poke at that cognitive dissonance that so many people experience. So, yeah, that was an example of something that some people would consider to be a necessary feature of being Mormon and other people would say, nobody cares about that. That's not critical to belief in Mormonism. And so I saw a lot of these things as things that were really there to kind of curate relationships more than they were there, as straight up truth claims that you had to accept to be in good standing in the Church.

John Dehlin [02:33:56] I mean, if I'm trying to make sense because, like, there's so many people, and I think it's because they're, I would say if you care about Mormon belief, they're poisoned with kind of a fundamentalist, Orthodox, Bruce R. McConkie, Joseph Ealing Smith mindset or orthodoxy, which I was. Which then sets them up. And by the way, it's not just framed as like what these men are teaching. Like Bruce Armaconki taught evolution as one of the seven deadly heresies. And Joseph Fielding Smith was just as severe, if not more in his writings with man his origin and destiny, or doctrines of salvation. I was indoctrinated to believe it's either faithfulness to the Mormon Church or a belief in evolution, but you got to pick. And so then when you go to byu, as I did, and meet Bill Bradshaw or others, or Sam Rushforth, and you are taught that evolution is actually maybe the only credible way to look at the world that we know of that's evidence based, then you're like, okay, well, I got to choose. And you weren't poisoned, I'll say, with that framing. And your testimony was never based on that type of framing.

Dan McClellan [02:35:21] Right.

John Dehlin [02:35:22] So for you, it was like your testimony, if I'm understanding it right, your testimony was, this feels good. It works for me. I like the community spiritually. It feels good. And I never got poisoned with the orthodoxy. So, like, this is all not nonsense. I'm going to pursue truth because the Mormonism I was brought into encourages that. So you were never faced with that dilemma. It sounds like.

Dan McClellan [02:35:47] Yeah, I've said many times, I wasn't raised with these hard and clear lines. And so it was never a dichotomy for me. It was never so black and white. It was always something that, where I was accepting a package that, you know, I didn't necessarily have to endorse every last thing. And I think that those drawing those hard and fast lines primarily serves the interests of institutions that want to know where the boundaries are and that want to know who's in and who's out. And I think my research in the cognitive science of religion only further establishes that, that this is primarily about structuring power, structuring values and structuring boundaries so that the institution can maintain its cohesiveness and can achieve its goals.

John Dehlin [02:36:48] So I'm wondering if at some point in your studies you were made aware that it was prophets. There's a revelators who were advocating for this orthodox, rigid, unproductive, anti science worldview, which then Even though it might, you know, you might not have been set up for that faith crisis personally, you would be able to see that many other people were set up for that crisis and it was by people who were sustained as prophet seers and revelators, leaders, which naturally might then cause you to say, well, why are top church leaders sustained as prophet seers and revelators setting up this untenable framing that's causing so many people to leave and that's anti science and anti data, which is kind of where. Anti truth at the end of the day, which was kind of where your passions were found it. Right. Did you at some point note that that was happening?

Dan McClellan [02:37:57] Well, yeah, I'd always been aware that that was the framing that was coming down from on high. But at the same time, one of the things that I was taught by missionaries as I was coming into the church is that they are not infallible, they are not inerrant, that they are human and they are susceptible to error just like any. Anyone else.

John Dehlin [02:38:15] Missionaries were teaching you that.

Dan McClellan [02:38:17] That was. Yeah, in the discussions that we were having, I was kind of pushing them in the direction of having to respond to things like that. So yeah, I came into the church with that understanding that a prophet is only a prophet to the degree that they are acting as such. And that was one of the things that, of which I was never disabused. No one ever told me that I had to think otherwise about that. And so it didn't bother me that Joseph Smith said there were six foot men who dressed like Quakers living on the moon because that was a product of an early 19th century imagination and it was incredibly harmful and unfortunate. But I saw the priesthood restriction as a product of the pretty run of the mill racism of a 19th century leader of the church. And so I was never, yeah, it never struck me that this was something that I had to find a way to be okay with. I could say, no, I'm not okay with that. And, and no one ever told me I wasn't allowed to do that. And whether, and even those folks who will make the case that you have to accept everything, negotiate with that kind of stuff, Everybody has to. Nobody is immune from the need to negotiate. And so the things that serve your interests are going to be centered and prioritized and the aspects of the church history or its leadership or conceptualizations about the fallibility of the leadership that don't serve their interests are going to be pushed to the margins. And so, you know, you can bring up things about someone who insists that the prophet, you know, by mine own voice or the voice of my servants, it is the same someone who quotes that in an effort to say if the prophet says it, it's true, are not going to have a way to harmonize that with Joseph Smith teaching that there are six foot men living on the moon that dress like Quakers. There's going to be some finagling that goes on there, which puts the lie to the notion that anyone consistently and unilaterally applies that same principle across the board. People apply that principle, principle where it serves their interest. And frequently those interests have to do with structuring power and with boundary maintenance. And I'm going to say that phrase way too many times today. But so much of our public discourse and interpersonal communication has to do with us trying to get what we want out of relationships and us trying to make sure that we are in charge or in control or have the power that we want or can get the power that we need. And so, yeah, it's been depressing sometimes how much that goes on in the church, but it's never been a surprise because there's not really any other way. It could be that there are going to be people negotiating these ideologies and these beliefs in order to structure power. That's just an inevitability of a human institution and no one can ever hope to transcend that.

John Dehlin [02:41:57] And I think for some who stumble or lose their orthodox Mormon faith, they would say that's fine if institutions do it. But if an institution claims to be God's one true representative institution, led by prophets that speak with God in Jesus, that institution should be held to a higher standard than demeaning science or data for the service of boundary maintenance and assembling power.

Dan McClellan [02:42:30] And I think that there are, I think, calling it out and I think challenging a lot of those attempts to structure powers is necessary. And I think we have a lot of good members of the church who do that. I mean, the removal of the priesthood ban was something that was a response to many, many, many members of the Church around the world challenging that structure of power. And as much as people will argue that this just fell ex nihilo out of the sky by revelation, it is the product of long term engagement with concerns from members of the church. And so people will say it's inappropriate to agitate and to advocate, and that's laughable. That is what has pushed the change and the growth in the church to where it is today. And so what the Church fully embraces today is frequently the product of what somebody thought inappropriate agitation generations ago. And so that's just nonsensical. That's just saying, I don't like you poking my sacred cow. But that's. The church is built on the corpses of sacred cows that have come before. And so people just need to get over that.

John Dehlin [02:43:55] So, like, immediately, I'm envisioning a Dan McClellan video where Elder Don Corbett gets up and says there should be no activism in the church. And you're like, let's see it. And then he does his thing, and then you give that exact response in response to Elder Don Corbett. Or I can envision Kerry Mohlstein, the passage that I talked about earlier where he says, you know, I start with. With. I start with my belief. And then. And then you provide A classic Dan McClellan response to Mormon spokespeople who represent the church, but then you provide your criticism. It seems like you don't do that. And I know we're jumping ahead to kind of your techniques. I want to get back to your story. But while you just said something that was so clearly connected to Elder Corbett, like, you don't do those types of videos as of yet that I'm aware

Dan McClellan [02:45:01] of, not very commonly.

John Dehlin [02:45:04] And I'm wondering if that's because you don't want to be put outside the boundaries, if that makes sense. You don't want to end up like David Wright or David Bacavoid.

Dan McClellan [02:45:13] That's the assumption that a lot of people make. But I have never been disciplined or criticized. Even while I was an employee of the church. Never once was I disciplined in any way, shape or form whatsoever for what I was putting on social media. Never once did anyone tell me, we're uncomfortable with this. We don't like this.

John Dehlin [02:45:35] But I also don't see you responding to or criticizing people in authority within the church.

Dan McClellan [02:45:40] And there are reasons for that as well. And the main one is because I'm trying to. To produce content that's more broadly attractive to a much wider audience than just Latter Day Saints. Like I said, I wanted my biblical scholarship to be more general. And similarly, I want my social media content to be. And so I've responded a handful of times to some videos making claims about, including some of your own, making claims about aspects of Mormon history, history. And one of the. I don't do very much anymore about Mormon history because it's not a specialization of mine. I am not a specialist in early American religion or in Mormon history. And so I learned my lesson quickly to stay in my lane in that regard. When it comes to the scriptures, I am more of a specialist when it comes to LDS scriptures. And I've posted videos addressing that and I have loads of comments about issues with harmful rhetoric and things like that. I don't know. Yeah, that's something that I've. When I get up in the morning, I look at what I'm being tagged in and the numbers of videos from Latter Day Saint leaders or from apologists just is infinitesimally small compared to the number of videos I'm getting tagged in on other stuff. And so that's just taking the lion's share of my attention. I don't think I'm avoiding it. I think right now it's just a supply and demand thing. But as far back as. I don't remember when I posted it, but the blog that I ran starting in like 2007 or 2008 or something like that, that I've posted commentary on there about how harmful some of the rhetoric from the leadership is, particularly when it comes to things like chastity and things like. Like that. So I have not shied away from it because I'm scared. It's just, I don't know, on any given day, it's, it's not something that I find or it's not something that I think will be of significant interest to my audience. But yeah, I can see myself making videos on that in the future. Obviously there's. I made a video the other day talking about my Mormonism, which got a lot of attention and a lot of negative comments. And so I will, will probably have to revisit the, the rubric that I use for deciding what to. What to publish because it seems like there is a lot of desire out there for, for some kind of commentary there, but it's still not gonna, it's never going to be the meat and potatoes of my social media content.

John Dehlin [02:48:44] I mean, there's another, there's another lens which isn't a lens of Dan's afraid. There's a lens of Dan has goals and Dan wants to achieve those goals. And those goals primarily around the Bible and affecting the world, not just this tiny niche of Mormonism. And it's probably not helpful for you to face up punished by the church or that might limit your desire to influence people's understanding of the Bible. So it's a matter of being strategic and prioritizing and being effective, maximizing your effectiveness versus the framing of fear. Right?

Dan McClellan [02:49:27] Yeah. And because I don't think that there is an element of fear, for years people have Commented that they have a hard time understanding how I have not been disciplined by the church, either as an employee or as a member. But it's not something that crosses my mind. So, yeah, I think most of it is. Yeah, I have goals I want to achieve, and that means trying to produce videos for the most. Videos and content that for the most part is going to interest my audience. And frequently Mormonism is not of interest to my audience, but I'm seeing as my audience grows, that there is a not insignificant contingency that is interested in that. And I don't know the degree to which that's a sincere interest or that's a group of people who want to see me get in trouble or see me stumble or what. I don't know what, what, what degree that is relevant, but, but yeah, I, I, I make the content that interests me. And right now those are not questions that, that I find particularly interesting.

John Dehlin [02:50:45] Yeah. Okay, well, maybe we'll come back to that a little bit. So anything else you want to say about your BYU experience and, and then grad school? I guess I want to know. You're graduating BYU in your mind, are you like, I want to become a BYU professor of ancient study someday, or I want to be the guy that creates the bridge between historical criticism and faithful Mormonism. Do you have in your mind some ambition for, like, how you want your career to end up in its ideal state as you're graduating from byu? A lot of people want to become a BYU professor and then they pursue classics or historical criticism, and they sacrifice a lot, and then they don't make it and they're like, really upset about that. Tell us what you were thinking your peak ambition might be as it relates to your scholarship and faith.

Dan McClellan [02:51:39] Well, it was actually something that concerned me because it wasn't coming back to BYU was not a priority for me. It was always something that was a distinct possibility. So it was always something that was there. And I would not have going through, through undergraduate and graduate school. It was not something that would have bothered me, but I had heard rumors that having a degree from BYU was not, excuse me, was not incredibly marketable. And so going through BYU meant the only place I could really get a job would be byu. And I didn't think that was true. And my experience throughout graduate school is that that is not true. And so I got more excited about going about finding a job somewhere where I could have an impact, have some kind of influence. But at the same time, I graduated from BYU in 2009, so right as the Recession is starting and it was never an incredibly muscular field to begin with, but the jobs just fell off a cliff. And so there were not a lot of jobs out there. And so BYU became more of a target through a process of elimination really. It became where am I going to be qualified to and get a job and where is there going to be a job opening? And BYU was the place where there were going to be positions and where I was going to be more qualified. And so, so it kind of was a de facto short list candidate on the places I wanted to go. But there was never another school where I was like, that's the school I want to go there. It was just, I would love to be at a school where I can have an impact, at a school where I can have a book budget and that will send me to conferences that I want to go to and where I will be able to provide for my family. And I will would have been happy to have gone anywhere. And so yeah, it wasn't all about byu. It was about being a biblical scholar. And you know, you can do that anywhere. And as I've discovered, I can do that without being employed by a university at all. And then I save myself the trouble of committee assignments and, and all of the issues that make people, get people frustrated and burnt out with that industry.

Oxford, Trinity Western, and Academic Career Path

John Dehlin [02:54:11] So tell us how your academic studies, graduate degrees and career pursued from there.

Dan McClellan [02:54:18] So I applied to a bunch of graduate schools, master's programs and a few PhD programs directly from BYU. And I actually got accepted to go do a PhD in, I forget exactly what the title of the degree was, but Biblical Studies basically at Claremont Graduate University in California. And at the same time I got accepted to a master's degree at Trinity Western University in Biblical Studies and a master's degree in Jewish Studies at Oxford. And the way the funding shook out as the recession is getting into full swing was basically, it was a wash. Whichever place I went, I was going to have to borrow significant amount of money and I was going to have to pay more or less the same amount of money. And I figured if I go to Oxford for this master's degree, it's a one year master's degree. I can defer my position at Claremont for a year and I can go to Oxford and hopefully apply again. And maybe with Oxford on the application, I will have a better shot at either getting more funding or getting into a better program. And then I didn't get into any other, any PhD programs out of Oxford and Claremont wrote me an email saying we're Restructuring our whole program. So you've got to find something else to do.

John Dehlin [02:55:45] How can you not get into into PhD programs with the masters from Oxford?

Dan McClellan [02:55:50] I don't know. This was a time period in which PhD enrollments, at least acceptances went way down because they still needed to provide some kind of funding for PhD students. And so rather than accept eight or 10 people, they were accepting two or three. And so I got turned down to a bunch of PhD programs. And I basically had to call up Trinity Western and say, is that, can I come back and do this master's degree that you accepted me for last year? And they had me submit an application. And I got accepted and managed to get a fellowship that helped me fund Trinity Western. And so I have two master's degrees, not because I'm some kind of super student, but because I failed to get into a PhD program and had to go back and do another master's degree just to stay in the system.

John Dehlin [02:56:46] And Oxford did want to keep you as a PhD student.

Dan McClellan [02:56:50] I don't remember if I applied right out of Oxford, because that would have

John Dehlin [02:56:55] been a natural thing is just to stay at Oxford and get your PhD.

Dan McClellan [02:56:59] It would have been nice. But I either did not apply or if I did, did not get accepted. I went into Trinity Western University and did my master's degree there. And that is in bc. I lived in Bellingham and I crossed the border.

John Dehlin [02:57:15] Washington.

Dan McClellan [02:57:16] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:57:16] Wait, but did you have. Do you feel like you had a successful experience at Oxford?

Dan McClellan [02:57:21] Oh, I had a wonderful experience at Oxford. I met a lot of great people. I feel like I produced some great scholarship. I won an award there for having the best master's thesis that year among the cohort at the Oxford center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. I had a great time. I just didn't progress onto a PhD program. I went and did another master's program instead. And so it was frustrating in a lot of ways, but was still an incredible experience. I can still remember and particularly every time I walked across a certain part of town, there was a Sheldonian Theater and I would go into. I would have to walk across the past the Sheldonian theater to get to the Radcliffe Camera, which is where I frequently part of the Bodleian Library, where I frequently did research. And every time I walked across that gravel by the Sheldonian Theater, I would think, what an amazing privilege to be in this city, studying in this university. I can't believe I get to do this. So I had a wonderful time. My wife and daughter did not because they were stuck in a Little flat in the Oxford center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, which was located at a place called Yarnton Manor, which was about five miles outside the city. And we were flat broke and I got complimentary rides into town on the little shuttle that went back and forth. But we had to pay if my wife. Wife and daughter wanted to go. And we did not often had the. The means. We did not often have the means to do that. And so she found herself all by herself in this little flat with a. A one year old who was colicky and had acid reflux. And so it was not a great experience for her. But then we moved to.

John Dehlin [02:59:14] So your wife wasn't sad to leave Oxford?

Dan McClellan [02:59:17] No, no, it was not sad to. To leave Oxford. She feels bad that she didn't get to experience the good part of being at Oxford and me being a student at Oxford.

John Dehlin [02:59:29] And I guess we didn't even cover that. You met her at BYU and met

Dan McClellan [02:59:33] her at University Villas, an apartment complex there just west of byu. And she had served as a missionary in Germany, Munich, Austria. And I had spent a summer in Germany and Austria. And so many of the places that I had visited that no one had ever heard of, she had served as a missionary. So I was fascinated and wanted to get to know her and talk about German and talk about Austria and all that kind of stuff. So that was how we met. Yeah. And we got married before I started my first semester as an undergraduate. And then we had our first.

John Dehlin [03:00:10] Before byu.

Dan McClellan [03:00:11] Yeah, I had deferred for that year to go do that other degree. So we got married in 2006, and then I started the next year and then we had our first daughter in 2008.

John Dehlin [03:00:23] Nice.

Dan McClellan [03:00:24] Just before I finished, I think it was the week I was finishing my very last finals. And so it was a stressful week.

John Dehlin [03:00:33] Yeah. So you got your second masters at Trinity Western, which is in British Columbia. Okay.

Dan McClellan [03:00:41] In Langley, bc. So just outside of. Of Vancouver. It's actually where the Vancouver Temple is located. Okay. Evangelical University. I made some great friends there. That university has issues of its own associated with its engagement with social issues. And yeah, I had a great time there. It was wonderful. Lived in a great apartment. My wife and I were happy, very happy in Bellingham, even though we were flat broke, but we were comfortable and I was enjoying being in that program. And then it was when I finished that program and applied to PhD programs again that I got accepted to go back to Oxford for the DPhil. But they weren't going to offer me any funding, which was a Deal breaker for me. And it was around that time period that I also had this job fall into my lap of supervising Scripture translation. And that is an interesting story. I was presenting at a conference, the Society of Biblical Literature's annual meeting, which happens the weekend before Thanksgiving every year. And it was in Atlanta in 2010. And I was there. And someone, after a presentation that I gave, someone came up to me and introduced themselves to me as a manager of Scripture translation. And they were looking for someone who.

John Dehlin [03:02:04] For the LDS Church.

Dan McClellan [03:02:05] For the LDS Church, yeah. And they were looking for someone to help them revise the way that they were evaluating non English Bible translations for consideration for endorsement or recognition as a preferred translation for non English speaking members of the church. And so I was that individual, offered to have me work with him on a contract basis, but we could never get everything to work out right. But in 2013, I was at that conference and I was. This was the time I was in Chicago and I was sitting at my gate to go fly home back to Utah, but there was no plane there. There was a plane in the gate next to mine and a bunch of people in that gate and they got on their plane and left. And then I went up to a gate agent and said, why is this flight not here? And they said, oh, it got moved to the gate right next to you. So I watched my flight board and take off, and they put me on another flight that was on the other side of the airport. And so I had to truck across the airport to the other gate and sat down right next to that manager of Scripture translation who had introduced himself to me back in 2010. And he asked me what I was doing at the time, and I was finishing up my master's degree. And I told him I was waiting tables at a country club so I could play free golf and still manage to feed myself and my family. And he said, oh, I think we can find something for you to do. And oh no, that wasn't 2013. That was the end of 2012, because it was January 2013 where he got me work. As I came on as an intern initially within Scripture translation, and by the end of the year had come on as a full time Scripture translation supervisor. So that was the first full time salaried position I had ever held. I had been waiting tables and doing all kinds of other things to try to make ends meet, but now suddenly I had health insurance for the first time time in my life and I only had to be 32 years old to get it.

John Dehlin [03:04:16] So you moved to Salt Lake from Bellingham.

Dan McClellan [03:04:19] We came back from Bellingham to. Yeah, to South Jordan. Stayed with my wife's family for a little bit after I got this job. A little bit after I got the job. We had the means to be able to put down a down payment and build a house. So I was staying with my wife's family while that was going on until we moved into our current home, home that we've been in since 2014.

Working as a Church Scripture Translation Supervisor

John Dehlin [03:04:42] And how well did doing translation for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints fit with all the graduate work and ambitions that you had invested up to that point?

Dan McClellan [03:04:56] It was not a perfect fit, but it meant that there was occasional overlap between my academic interests and my professional work. And I was classified as a linguist, and I had done a master's degree in cognitive linguistics. So it was something I was very interested in. And I also got to work on some Bible projects in a few different capacities. And so I was able to utilize what I had been learning, but it was certainly not an end goal for me. It was a phenomenally fortunate position that I was in, and I felt like I was doing a lot of good and it was a very fulfilling work and it sent me to many different parts of the world that I had never even heard of before. So it was. It was an incredible job to have, but it was always supposed to lead to getting back into the academy, getting back into teaching and researching and writing, because I didn't really have the opportunity to research or publish there. If I was doing that, it was on my own time, which I did not have an awful lot of. But they still would send me to that big conference I like to go to before Thanksgiving every year, the Society of Biblical Literature meeting. So I did not feel like I was in a bad place. I had other friends who had gotten their PhD and were doing copy editing because they couldn't find a teaching position, or they were stringing together a half dozen different adjunct positions because there wasn't a full time position anywhere. So I felt incredibly privileged to have a full time salary position while our field was being so heavily restricted. So it was a wonderful job to have at that time. And it didn't really restrict, apart from the time issue, it didn't really restrict my ability to work on kind of parallel academic interests.

John Dehlin [03:07:12] Yeah. So, yeah, it just sounds like academically things were so tough. You. You felt grateful to have a job with benefits that was at least in some ways related to your discipline for a church you loved and believed in, and you would pursue what you could. When you could.

Dan McClellan [03:07:32] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:07:32] Is that right?

Dan McClellan [03:07:33] Yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [03:07:34] Okay. If you were to describe, well, whatever you're wanting or able to say, if you were to describe to someone who doesn't understand all this stuff, just about like the main types of projects you were involved during your 10 years of LDS Church employment, what were the main things you did?

Dan McClellan [03:07:50] So as a scripture translation supervisor, I basically went out to areas to find people who could function as translators and reviewers. I vetted teams, I chose them, I trained them, and then I supervised these projects which were usually translating the Book of Mormon or the full triple combination from English into any one of a number of different languages. And then I was also working on some Bible projects. When I first came on, they were in the process of producing a church edition of the Bible in Portuguese. One had been published in Spanish in 2009. And I came on to take responsibility for the second half of the production of this edition of the Bible in Portuguese. So I got to supervise that project and use more of my expertise. But it was mainly projects associated with the translation of the Scriptures. And then there were times when we were also responsible for what they called core music, hymns and children's songbooks. And also we occasionally had responsibility for temple translation projects.

John Dehlin [03:09:02] So for those who don't understand, like in my mind, the Book of Mormon or the Bible would have been translated into a gazillion languages long before you ever got there. So why would there be a need for additional work? Pick your language. That translation was done between 20 and 50 or 100 years ago. Am I wrong?

Dan McClellan [03:09:24] No, no, not at all. And for the most part, and still in the overwhelming majority of languages, what the Church will do do with a new language is go in and find out what editions of the Bible are available and then conduct evaluations to determine which Bible best fits the Church's criteria. And then that would become what's known as a preferred edition of the Bible, which means that's the one that we prefer the membership uses, that's the one that's going to be sourced in distribution centers, is going to be given to missionaries. That's the one that will be used in translating General Conference quotations of the Bible and things like that. However, this produces a two tiered membership where non English speaking members of the Church are engaging the Scriptures in a very, very different way from English speaking members of the church. And so there has always been a concern for trying to achieve more parity with that experience with the Scriptures. And so English and Portuguese were the first two languages where the church made a great effort to produce a church edition of the Bible so that there would be the chapter headings, that there would be footnotes, and so that there would be an experience with the standard works that more closely approximated what an English speaking member experiences. And part of what I did while I was there was help produce a process for evaluating non English Bibles and also a process for producing church editions of the Bible. So I got to work on some of the other projects in that campaign. So I supervised the beginning of church editions of the Bible in Italian and French. And they should be. Yeah, I don't know where they stand today, but they should be out soon.

John Dehlin [03:11:19] And just to make sure I understand, I'm a bit rusty on this stuff. Those of us who grew up in the church and speak English would know what our Bible experience was. Are you saying that that English, Mormon King James Bible experience that wasn't translated in other languages and made available for a long time?

Dan McClellan [03:11:45] So it's very, very rare that another language will just take the English of the King James Version and translate it? It does happen, but that's usually with a creole or a pidgin. For the most part, translations of the Bible are going to go back to the Hebrew, the Aramaic, the Greek manuscripts and translate it directly from there. And for the most part, most Christians today in non English speaking languages engage a Bible that has been translated in a register that is more contemporary, more up to date. The King James Bible is very, very unique because it has become cemented into the foundation of American Christianity. It is still used by a lot of Christians who speak English today, even though the language is wildly out of date and leads to all kinds of misunderstandings and leads to confusion. And so most Christians engage the Bible in a much more modern language. And so when in addition to the fact that modern translations of the Bible use different source texts and understand the meanings of many texts in different ways. So non English speaking members of the church who have a preferred edition are going to see passages that read very differently than the way they read in the King James Version. They're also going to have a translation that feels a lot more natural to them. So it's a much different experience in a few different ways. And so the goal is just to try to decrease the distance between those experiences without bringing English speaking members closer by having a more up to date Bible. Unfortunately, that is still a bridge too far for a lot of members of the church.

John Dehlin [03:13:36] Do you just have a general opinion about the King James Bible as the preferred Bible versus Other English versions of the Bible that you feel might get readers closer to the original or more accurate versions?

Dan McClellan [03:13:57] Yeah, I think the King James Version is an incredibly significant artifact. I think it causes all kinds of interpretive issues in the church. And there's an idea that it is the pinnacle of English literature or of English prose or. Or something like that, which is not accurate. It was never considered in for its first audiences. It was not considered anything special. It is historical accident that has led it to become embedded within our literary linguistic foundation. Because when there were some Great Awakenings and there was renewed interest in antiquarian stuff and classics and things like that, because the King James Version was manufactured to be front and center. It was there when those interests looked back at previous centuries and wanted to focus on literature from earlier centuries. And then in the 19th century, the king James Version was the preferred Bible that was being shared all around the country by the American Bible Society, which had a goal of putting a Bible in every living room in America. And the King James Version was the one that it sourced, that it used to try to do that. And so it became the preferred translation of public schools in the 19th century when they were using that to teach English. And so because of historical accident, it is embedded in our foundations. And so it gets looked at as the pinnacle of linguistic literary achievement when it's just an accident. And it's actually not that great a translation. I get that question all the time. What translation should people be using? And it really depends on what they want to get out of it, if they want. Bibles can be used for all kinds of different purposes, and translations are executed so as to serve those purposes. But in terms of accuracy and accessibility, I would generally recommend the New Revised Standard Version and particularly the newest edition of the New Oxford Annotated Bible. I think there's. It's in the fifth edition. It's a wonderful edition of the Bible. It has a great translation, has great explanatory notes, great book introductions, even has a bunch of thematic essays in the back. So I highly recommend that one. When it comes to just the Hebrew Bible, a scholar named Robert Alter recently published a translation of the Hebrew Bible that is also phenomenal and has wonderful explanatory notes. And that's coming at it from more of a literary perspective. And then the Jewish Publication Society has a wonderful translation of the Hebrew Bible. They've got a study Bible as well. And then there are wonderful commentaries that they do on the. The text of the Pentateuch. The JPS Torah Commentary series is also Wonderful.

Leaving the Church Office Building

John Dehlin [03:17:01] You may or may not be able to answer this, but I'm going to ask, just because I'm curious, would there ever be a conversation within church headquarters historically that would say, how much are we wed to the King James Version? Would there be? Val, Would there. Can we even have a conversation about. Would there be a value in changing which Bible we use as Latter Day Saints?

Dan McClellan [03:17:25] Yeah, absolutely. Unfortunately.

John Dehlin [03:17:28] Absolutely. What?

Dan McClellan [03:17:29] Absolutely such conversations could exist.

John Dehlin [03:17:35] Is this an area where you have to tread lightly about what you say? Yeah, okay. Okay.

Dan McClellan [03:17:39] Yeah, there's some confidentiality there. The issue, however, with that, the sticking point in my mind for the overwhelming majority of members of the church, is that the Restoration Scripture is clearly couched in kind of a para KJV English. And if we move to a different translation, that severs a lot of what some people call intertextuality between the two corpora. And so if we change translations all of a sudden, there's not as much resonance in the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price.

John Dehlin [03:18:17] You mean like spiritual or emotional resonance? Is that what you mean?

Dan McClellan [03:18:20] Well, linguistic and literary as well. There's a lot of stuff that's quoting from the King James Version of the Bible. And so if we move to a different translation, those quotations are no longer going to be recognizable as, or as easily recognizable. A few generations down the road, those links are going to be gone.

John Dehlin [03:18:38] Like James 1:5, for example.

Dan McClellan [03:18:39] Yeah, it's going to read differently. And. And so those are issues that have to be considered as well. And so in my mind, the King James Version could be lightly updated and we could get a lot of value out of that without severing any or maybe many of those ties.

John Dehlin [03:19:00] So Basically the de McCullen translation of the Bible. No, I'm joking.

Dan McClellan [03:19:04] No, no, not even close.

John Dehlin [03:19:06] I was making a joke. Compared to Joseph Smith translation just for non Mormons who have no idea what joke I just made.

Dan McClellan [03:19:12] But there is. If we went to a completely different translation, produced our own, or said we are going to get the rights to this translation or whatever, we would have to do something to restoration Scripture to the English edition of the Book of Mormon and the D and C and the Pearl of Great Price, and that is a bridge too far for the overwhelming majority of.

John Dehlin [03:19:36] Because if you change the King James Bible, you would have to. And because King James Bible appears in the Book of Mormon and in the Doctrine and Covenants and probably in Moses and Abraham, you'd have to change all of them to ripple those changes.

Dan McClellan [03:19:50] Yeah, that's the concern that I've seen expressed the most by members of the church. And I think that is the main sticking point. So I get asked all the time, when are we getting rid of the kjv? And my answer is usually not soon enough, but probably never, not in my lifetime. They could surprise me. But yeah, that's what I say. Don't hold your breath.

John Dehlin [03:20:13] That's awesome. That's awesome. Is there anything you want to say about what you loved or enjoyed working about working for the LDS Church? And are you even able to say about anything? Because some say the Mormon Church, Mormon Church employment is where you go to have your testimony done. So positive and, or negative, whatever you feel like you're able to share or want to share.

Dan McClellan [03:20:42] I met some of the most wonderful people in the world while working for the church, both in the church office building and in the different communities around the world that I've seen visited, whether it's in Malaysia or on the island of Yap or in Greece.

John Dehlin [03:20:56] Where's Yap?

Dan McClellan [03:20:57] Yap is one of the states of the Federated States of Micronesia. So there are four Yap, Chuk, Pohnpei and Kosrae. And I've supervised projects in all four of those languages and have been to those islands and wonderful, wonderful people out there, wonderful members of the church. And yeah, I've been around the world working for the church and have met some incredible people as well as in church headquarters. And I still maintain close relationships with many of those folks. And so I think for me, the biggest benefit I got out of working there was these personal relationships and getting to know these people with much different experiences from my own and with a lot of things for me to learn from them about working in the church, about how they understand the church to be. I've had wonderful experiences working with some of the church leadership whom I respect and appreciate greatly. Yeah, you see a lot of the warts and all part of the church being inside the church office building, but I. That has never been a surprise to me. So it was really to be expected. It is a large, phenomenally large institution. And getting inside and to see how the sausage is made only made me even more amazed by how much is going on and how much manpower is going into just ensuring that the church can function all around the world. So I don't have anything negative to say about any individual I worked with in any capacity in the church office building. But I do think that because it is a large institution, the institutional interests take over quite frequently and the over

John Dehlin [03:22:56] the interests of what or who?

Dan McClellan [03:23:00] Over the interests of the individuals. So people whose jobs are to ensure that so many magazines go out to so many different places or that these deadlines are all met for some project or another, you are talking about thousands of employees who are all trying to get their job done. And I think that it's very easy to slide slip into putting the job and the institutional interests that those jobs are intended to advance ahead of the one. And so, for instance, we could produce translations. There are around 7,000 languages in the world. We have something like 113. When I left, I think there were 113 translations of the Book of Mormon in circulation. We could do hundreds of more languages tomorrow. But it would be incredibly expensive and it would take a lot of manpower and there would be a lot of issues that would come up. And so that goes into the decision not to create hundreds of new translations of the Book of Mormon tomorrow. Which means that because of those institutional interests, there are people who are speaking those languages who will not have access to the Book of Mormon. So I think, and that's a pretty rational one, you can't just dump your entire budget into doing that and neglect everything else that the institution has to do. But there's a whole spectrum of ways that the concerns of the institution, I think outweigh sometimes the concern of the one. So that was, that was a concern that I had and expressed, but also at the same time can understand even if I do lament it.

John Dehlin [03:24:57] Do you have a sense, could you even put a number at how much it would cost to translate the standard works into X new language? Is it a million? Is it 5 million, is it 10 million, 100 million? Or would you even know?

Dan McClellan [03:25:10] I would know exactly how much, but that would be entirely confidential.

John Dehlin [03:25:15] Okay, well, and then another question that you may or may not want to answer when you see that the Mormon Church is currently estimated to be worth 250 billion, that it's on track to be a trillion dollar church within the next 20 to 30 years, whatever that number is, you could easily start thinking, well, the church could afford a lot more than it's currently doing. Why would it be penny pinching? It's not pennies, it's millions or more. But that could easily stoke your concerns once you know how much money the church truly has.

Dan McClellan [03:25:49] Yeah, yeah, there is a lot that the church has. They exercise influence over incredible resources. And yeah, I, and sometimes, well, frequently while I was working there, I wish that there would be a lot more that could be done to help Members around the world who are struggling, whether it is with resources or scriptures or access to temples or whatever it is that they're struggling with. But yeah, that's, that's. That conversation could very easily slip into things that I probably shouldn't be saying.

John Dehlin [03:26:37] Okay, are you able to summarize if you did have significant concerns about things you observed or conflict or just conscience crises and at various points, are you able to summarize what those would have been about? Or are you not able to, or would you rather not? Or did they exist? Maybe they didn't exist.

Dan McClellan [03:27:09] I would say what I expressed earlier is that there are numerous wonderful, wonderful people. But the structure of the church and the systemic concerns I think sometimes or I think frequently compel people to prioritize institutional interests. And I think that sacrifices the interests of the one. And I can give one example of this. The idea that the church wants to be home centered, once a home centered and church supported gospel study. But the edition of the scriptures that we use is firmly church centered. We have editions of the Bible now that are not broken up into one verse per paragraph, but are rendered in much easier ways to read and translations that are much more up to date and much easier to read. And they're down to the typography that we use. Everything about our scriptures like italics and footnotes. Yeah. And in the way that it's arranged on the page, everything about it indicates that this is a book meant for the church, meant to be read in a chapel. This is not a book meant to be read in a home by an individual or a family. And so that's an example of where tradition and institutional concerns and budgets and manpower and all those things, things just lead us to like it the way it is even though it is. I would argue, and I've argued in print that this is contrary to the goal of having a home centered and a church supported gospel study.

John Dehlin [03:29:04] So what I'm hearing you say is that you envisioned ways that the Scriptures could be produced for the members that would lead to a much richer and more meaningful engagement in terms of learning and inspiration that you felt would possibly have a significant impact on the members experience with reading the Scriptures, but you didn't perceive institutional support for any changes that would lead to that sort of experience.

Dan McClellan [03:29:35] Yeah, and that's something that I've. Like I mentioned, I publish an article in the Religious Educator on the church and the Bible where I talk about that. And there are translations of the Bible out there that are directly aimed at trying to facilitate a better personal engagement with the text rather than a communal ecclesiastical engagement with the text. And I think that would go a long way to improving people's gospel study. But it's. Yeah, that is not a. I did not perceive that that would be a priority for the institution.

John Dehlin [03:30:14] I mean, there's probably a view out there that rich, deep study of either the Bible or the Book of Mormon or the Book of Abraham or of church history, more often than not, doesn't necessarily lead to the type of devotion and obedience and commitment that church leaders would want. And so you could see the powers that be saying, yeah, yeah, just like, keep more of a high level, superficial understanding of the scriptures, mostly pay attention to what the current brethren are saying as your priority. Because, like, if you start studying the Bible, for example, and start understanding historical criticism and start questioning the maybe CES correlated mindset that most people absorb as their typical Mormon experience in seminary institute, it could lead you away from devotion and faithfulness.

Dan McClellan [03:31:21] I actually, I don't think that is correct. I would suggest that there's actually a concern for more deep scripture study. And I'll provide one example of one reason. I think that is a conversation that I had with a number of different members of the church and even some folks at work was about the need for a study Bible, something with better explanatory notes, notes and things like that. And the response that always came back about why that was not something that church administration was going to take seriously was that there were a few concerns. One was if you start saying this is what this verse means, this is what this verse means, then that becomes the doctrine, and that shackles members to whatever that passage is said to mean. And so in that sense, it turns the Bible into something more restrictive and, well, all the scriptures into something more restrictive. And the feedback that I got was that the goal was for the Scriptures to be a source of inspiration rather than an annotated constitution. And so my understanding was that there was a concern that doing something like that might help some people, the people who are more critical thinkers, but could also limit the ability of many members to get what they needed or what they wanted out of scripture study. So I don't think it's as. I don't think it's as simple as trying to limit the depth. I think there are a lot of different institutional concerns out there. Some of them I happen to agree with, others I probably wouldn't agree with.

John Dehlin [03:33:25] Yeah, okay, that makes sense. Let's move to how you became a church employee, LDS church employee that started tiktoking about the Bible in ways that not only were really impactful, but some would argue, challenged traditional Mormon apologetics around scripture, but also, some would say was refreshing and enlightening. But others would say, wow, like, this is the type of stuff that if the wrong people caught wind of, it, could cause that person trouble. Specifically, as a church employee.

Dan McClellan [03:34:18] Yeah, even as a church employee, I've always been pretty outspoken about my concern for more competence, more engaged and critical study of the Scriptures. And so it was. It didn't surprise anyone at who worked around me that I would be doing something like this. And. And most of it was not something that they had never heard from me before. But it was during the pandemic. I was spending a lot of time online, as folks are trapped inside are going to do. And I started seeing a lot of videos being shared from TikTok on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter that overlapped with my academic interests that were videos about the Bible and about religion. But it was. A lot of it was not very academically informed. And so I became curious about what kind of content was over there, because my understanding was that this was primarily, you know, kids videotaping themselves dancing or reserving tickets to Republican presidential primary activities that they had no intention of using. And I started lurking for a while on there, and I saw a lot of content that was directly engaging claims about the Bible and about Christianity and Judaism and religion in general, but very little of it was informed by contemporary scholarship. It was mostly pretty outdated stuff or just conspiracy theories or apologetics from the broader world of evangelical Christianity. And I thought this might be an opportunity to position myself as a bit of a dispassionate observer who can call balls and strikes and present the reality of contemporary scholarship on the Bible and religion. And so I made an account and started posting videos where I was responding to misinformation and also providing information about where it seemed to me the biblical studies was situated and the kinds of discussions that were going on, the kinds of theories that were in vogue. And to my surprise, it started getting quite a bit of attention initially among Latter Day Saint audiences, but quickly among non Latter Day Saint audiences, evangelical atheists, even people who are incredibly critical of religion in general and Christianity in particular. And it was a little frightening because as my audience grew, if I had a particularly popular video that got got a couple million views, and my audience grew by 10 or 20,000 followers within the next day, this was now 10 or 20,000 more people, among whom could be someone who knew some of these issues better than me. I'm not a generalist. I have a particular focus on my scholarship and I have approximate knowledge, so to speak, of many different features of, of the broader world of biblical scholarship. But there are a lot of things that I comment on where there are going to be people out there who know the. The data better than me. And so I was mostly scared that somebody was going to. I've always had a bit of imposter syndrome, and being on social media is no exception to that. So I was always concerned that there was going to be somebody who was there, who was a more of an expert than I was, who was going to. To reveal that I was an imposter the whole time. But because I was trying to stick as close as I could to the academic consensus, so far that hasn't happened. I've tripped up here and there on some smaller issues and have been happy to take the L and to apologize for getting things wrong, which I think has only further endeared me to my audience, that I hope that I'm modeling good kind of behavior for this public discourse where, where I'm willing to own up to doing something wrong or to getting something wrong, or in some examples, where I've said something that has been hurtful to minoritized or oppressed groups, where I've tried to take accountability for that and learn from it and become better. And so it's been an interesting way to engage public discourse in a different way, in a new way, where what has in the past kind of been limited to message boards and Twitter threads and things like that that get very little visibility. This is something that is getting much more visibility. And the fact that there is an audience for that and a desire for more of that kind of engagement with these issues was a surprise to me. Very refreshing. And something that's suggested to me that this was only the beginning of something that could be a lot more significant than me just kind of goofing off in my office in the front of my house.

TikTok Scholarship and Challenging Mormon Doctrinal Claims

John Dehlin [03:39:33] And give our viewers and listeners who aren't familiar yet with your work, what are some of the topics or videos that you have released over your time that have struck the biggest nerves or made the biggest impact, Just so they get a sense.

Dan McClellan [03:39:50] Yeah, I've talked quite a bit about the idea of the inerrancy of the Scriptures, which is something that I flatly reject. There are no data that support that. And so I also talk about this concept of univocality. The idea that the Bible speaks with one unified and consistent voice or from a unified and consistent perspective. When it doesn't, it disagrees with itself all over the place. And that. That was one of the things that initially struck a chord because that was. That was music to a lot of people's ears, and that was incredibly frustrating to a lot of other people and incredibly aggravating, which is a recipe for more comments, more views, more engagement. I think the first video that I published that got over a million views was a video addressing the idea that God had a wife and that God's wife may have been censored in the Bible, edited out of the Bible, which is a position that was taken by my doctoral supervisor in an article from many years ago that somebody responded to critically. And then I responded to their video saying, no, no, this is the academic consensus that they're like Jehovah or Elohim

John Dehlin [03:41:08] had a wife and that there's data to support that.

Dan McClellan [03:41:12] What and this was something I pointed out was the academic consensus that we have inscriptions that talk about Adonai and his Asherah. And there have been debates about the degree to which this refers to a goddess versus some kind of cultic object that was named after the goddess. I think the best arguments are on the side of interpreting that as a reference to a goddess. And one of them even is overlapping with a drawing of male and female deity from a big vase that was written and drawn all over at a place called Quintillit Ajrud. This was discovered in the. These inscriptions were discovered in the 60s and 70s. And so scholars have known about this for quite some time. And there have. There are references in the Bible that have. That have long teased this idea that there was a period in Israel's existence when they understood God to have had a consort or a wife, including a reference in famous Reference in Genesis 6 to the Children of God. The sons of God coming down and having children with the daughters of humanity. And B', Nai Elohim, children of God, sons of God kind of indicates that somebody is having children. And in the broader ancient Southwest Asian tradition, El was the patriarchal high deity who had a consort who gave birth to the seventy sons of El, or children of El. And this is conceptually and directly parallel to what we find in the Hebrew Bible with this reference, reference to the sons of God. And so there was a great book that was published back in 2005. Scholarship has matured a lot since then, so there's a lot that would be different today. But a scholar named William Deaver published a book called Did God have a Wife? That I recommend to anyone for an accessible kind of publicly oriented academic discussion of the evidence for. For God having a wife in ancient Israel. But yeah, that was a video that got an awful lot of attention and upset an awful lot of people.

John Dehlin [03:43:25] I mean, to Mormon ears, the belief in a Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother. That's great to hear, right?

Dan McClellan [03:43:31] Yeah. Which is one of the reasons that I get a lot of comments saying, oh, you're Mormon is showing. And I have to point out, okay, this is the academic consensus. And if you look at the scholarship I've published on this, the way I present it has nothing to do with the Latter Day Saint idea of Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother. So there are a handful of examples of consensuses within biblical scholarship that resonate an awful lot with Latter Day Saint ideologies. But again, like that, what are a couple others? God had a body. The idea that God was anthropomorphic and corporeal and did not lose that body, did not become this immaterial entity that could not be seen until the Common Era. And really, it was within Christianity, third and fourth centuries, where this becomes widespread. And then within Judaism, it's not until the medieval period that the corporate reality and the anthropomorphism of God was fully rejected. So that's one. The fact that the Bible is not inerrant has been edited is another. The fact that creation is.

John Dehlin [03:44:39] That connects with the Mormon article of faith that we believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly. Which makes your angle and Mormonism very compatible in that way.

Dan McClellan [03:44:52] Yeah, yeah, in that way. But every time people suggest that this is a dogma of mine that I'm sharing, I have to point out the way I discuss it is very, very different from the way Latter Day says Saints discuss it. And it is the overwhelming academic consensus and then the idea of creation ex nihilo as a much later doctrinal development, that's another thing that.

John Dehlin [03:45:15] That's creation out of nothing versus the organization of existing matter.

Dan McClellan [03:45:19] Right. So throughout the entire period of the composition of the Bible, Creation X and Hilo didn't exist. The idea was that the universe was created out of unformed matter of some kind or another. And this fits into an Aristotelian and even a Platonic conceptualization of creation. But I think that's one of the things I addressed in that first paper that I published, Latter Day Saints and Patristics, where I said, don't go thinking that this is proto Mormonism. This is something very different. So there are a handful of those areas where on the surface there's overlap between the scholarly consensus and Latter Day Saint ideologies. And this was something that I can't remember the name of the Mosser was one of the authors. There was another evangelical scholar where they wrote a paper, and I forget what the paper was titled, but it was basically about taking Latter Day Saint apologetics seriously. And it was attempting to say, hey, let's take a step back and reconsider where we stand on a lot of this. Because. And. And I think one of the arguments that they made was some of these ideas actually overlap with what the scholarly consensuses are on these things. But again, lest anyone accuse my Mormon of showing this is very different takes once you get into the details about these issues. So I forget where we were going.

John Dehlin [03:46:44] So those are some of your early topics or some of the main topics that have done well on your TikTok.

Dan McClellan [03:46:50] Yeah, any. Anything that generates controversy where some people are going to be heavily invested in either agreeing or combating it. That tends to do well. I've covered homosexuality in the Bible a number of times. That's also something that gets a lot of attention where I've pointed out that we can't really talk about homosexuality as a sexual orientation because that concept just did not exist anciently. They didn't think of someone as having an orientation that was either in the direction of members of the same sex or in the direction of members of the opposite sex. That was something that developed since the 19th century, but that is also very controversial. And then ideas about the development of culture.

John Dehlin [03:47:32] So the idea that the Bible condemns homosexuality, you would.

Dan McClellan [03:47:35] Right, That's a category error. There are places where the Bible condemns certain acts of same sex intercourse. But when I talk about that, I also also point out that there are places where the Bible endorses and promotes slavery and endorses women as chattel. And so.

John Dehlin [03:47:54] And prohibits shellfish from being.

Dan McClellan [03:47:57] Yeah, and so there are. We're all negotiating with the text. And the point I try to make when I talk about that is that everybody's negotiating with the text. Everybody's picking and choosing. That is an inevitability as members of the human race. There is no way around that. That since we're already doing that, I find an important question why are we picking and choosing the way we are? What motivates us to pick this and that over the other thing? And overwhelmingly, when it comes to homosexuality or same sex intercourse in the Bible, we are picking an opposition to same sex intercourse because it is a Convenient identity marker. And it allows us to structure power and values in the favor of our identity politics and that if it were not for its function as an identity marker, it would have been abandoned long ago. Just like slavery, just like other aspects of the Bible that we have negotiated away. And so I argue that the only reason that that is a feature of the Bible that has not been negotiated away is because it helps people structure power and values. And I think that's. Yeah, a lot of people really get upset with me when I talk about that, but that's okay.

John Dehlin [03:49:18] So when I think about a church employee doing a TikTok about scripture and religious beliefs that is non apologetic and that's also truth and data based. What I not even watching your videos. What I imagine the train wreck happening is on the one hand, the Mormon Church is totally fine with the idea that the Bible is imperfect. On the other hand, so much of correlated orthodox Mormon doctrine and teachings rely on misreadings of the Bible inaccuracies, fundamentalist views, anti science, new age creationist views that as soon as you start deconstructing those, you inevitably have to start deconstructing past and even present teachings of both Mormon church prophets and correlated church curriculum. And there's just a general demystifying or de, I want to say sacredness. Like as soon as you start deconstructing and really analyzing the text of scripture, it can take away some of the sacredness of it for some and lead to a deconstruction. Kind of like a thread pulling where you start looking at the Bible as like David Wright or David Bacavoi. You start pulling on that thread of historical criticism and not only does the sacredness of the Bible potentially unravel, but all of Mormonism could quickly follow. Then when you add to that sort of like casting questions about the biblical condemnation of same sex sexuality, that's like a hill. The Mormon Church in the past 10 or 20 years has clearly shown its willingness to die for like all of that adds up in my mind as to something that is not sustainable for a church employee to be advocating for. And so I would have predicted a train wreck. Like there's a lot of people and I hate this when everybody's like, like dad doesn't believe but he's, you know, he's saying all these things and the church is going to come after him soon and excommunicate him. That's never been in my realm of like what's going on with you and TikTok and the church and even your Employment, but certainly in my mind, your employment with the church didn't seem sustainable with the type of content you were creating. So what is it? That was just my mind, just because of the history of what I've seen. David Wright, David Bachavoy, et cetera, Daniel Peterson. And I can imagine the complaints once he found out what you were doing and other people like him, John Ged Muhlstein. I would imagine the types of complaints they would start sending to your bosses and other people in power where they would just say, we don't want this guy who's working for the church saying the things he's saying because it will not lead to good things for faith. So I would have imagined a train wreck at some point, not in terms of your membership, but about the sustainability of your employment. So what can or do you want to say about to what extent your TikTok and your employment came to a head and what eventually led to you no longer being employed by the church?

Dan McClellan [03:53:06] Yeah, there's not a ton I can say there. I can say that there were obviously complaints that got sent in. And I heard about some of these complaints and I think most of it was coming from Twitter and the Desnat factions, not big fans of mine, although I did, I did run into somebody in a Harmon's who recognized me and said they were a big fan and then also said they were part of what some people call Desnat. And I was kind of taken aback by that. So I'm aware that complaints have come in, but I never had a single negative word said to me about the content that I was producing, because I was talking about the data and for the most part I was talking about long accepted facts, or I was talking about what the evidence supports. And I don't think there's anything problematic about saying, for instance, the data don't support the historicity of a figure like Moses from the Exodus. I'm not saying it's impossible that Moses existed. I'm just saying the data don't support it. And that's simply the reality. If you look at all the available data, it is an implausibility. It's not an impossibility, but it is an implausibility. And so I'm siding with what the data support. And I think many members of the church have become to some degree comfortable with the fact that faith frequently means accepting something that is not supported by the data. And so I have always framed things in that way to try to be as clear as I can about what I'm saying. And I think that has made it so that I'm, I think that has defanged a lot of what I'm saying. I'm not saying members of the church are all wrong and you have to reject this, otherwise you are some deluded fool. I'm saying, hey, the data don't support this.

John Dehlin [03:55:14] What would be if you had to list maybe the top, top five core fundamental Mormon teachings or doctrinal tenets that the data demonstrate to be implausible or improbable, what would those top five be in terms of the most sacred cows?

Dan McClellan [03:55:33] Yeah, I think in terms of at least related to the Bible, Pentateuchal composition, the fact that this was not written by Moses. The data certainly don't support that. The data point to a number of different authors writing sometime between the 8th and the 5th centuries BCE, which is centuries before Moses would have existed. There are theories that, and I've pointed out before, there are a couple of considerations that could point in the direction of some kind of historical Moses. But what we have in the Bible right now is certainly not that deutero Isaiah, the idea that from Isaiah 40 to 55 we're dealing with something that was composed after the exile rather than something that was composed in the 8th century BCE and the fact that that

John Dehlin [03:56:23] appears in the Book of Mormon, some

Dan McClellan [03:56:24] of that appears in the book. Yeah, that complicates things for the Book of Mormon. Although there are a number of places where we have KJV translations of Paul appearing in the Book of Mormon as well. So this is not new. This is something that has long term been an issue with how we account for the composition of the Book of Mormon. I think the, those are the two that I usually get called out for.

John Dehlin [03:56:56] Moses have not been the composition of

Dan McClellan [03:56:58] the Pentateuch, composition of Isaiah. I think those are the two that I get called out for more than any other. Although I make a lot more firm stances like just the possibility of prophecy is something that I argue from a methodological point of view cannot play a role in my interrogation of the Bible. Because once you open up the possibility of predictive prophecy and interpreting any text, you can't close that door. There is no non dogmatic, non arbitrary way to distinguish prophecy that we can allow from prophecy that we cannot allow. Because saying, well, let's allow for predictive prophecy is saying we're going to suspend judgment, we're going to withhold the application of critical scrutiny to this saying, well this prophecy over here, no, we can, we can critique that, saying we're not going to withhold that scrutiny. And so once you allow it anywhere, you have to allow it everywhere. But the people who get upset with me for saying my scholarship does not allow for the possibility of predictive prophecy are people who want to allow it for the Bible but deny it for the Quran or for the Book of Mormon, or for the Bhagavad Gita, or for any other tradition that internally may assert predictive prophecy. So when I'm interpreting texts like the Book of Mormon, I'm applying the same methodological criterion. I'm not going to allow for the possibility of predictive prophecy, not because I personally reject that as a possibility, but because my scholarship has a set of methodologies that it uses so that it can be consistent and so that it, it can be as objective as possible. And so when I talk about the Book of Mormon, that can't play a role in how I'm looking at it. And so that is why I talk about the Book of Mormon as something that is, the data indicate it is a product of the 19th century, the book of Mormon. Yes, that's what I would argue the data indicate. From a scholarly methodological approach to the Book of Mormon, there aren't really serious arguments that it is anything other than a product of the 19th century from a position of faith. Absolutely. People can believe it is of ancient origin, but that is a position of faith. That is a position that is existing despite what the data indicate, despite the evidence, not the data that are built upon the evidence. But even for folks who do accept it as something of ancient origin, I have long argued that if you want to understand it better, you need to approach it as something at least addressing a 19th century audience. It was not written for a mid first millennium BC audience. Even if you think it came from there, it's not addressing that audience. It is because it's written for an audience that exists in 1830America. And so if you want to interpret it as best it can be interpreted, you have to interpret it in the light of those historical circumstances, those rhetorical circumstances, those literary and linguistic contexts. That's how you're going to best understand what the Book of Mormon is trying to say, irrespective of where you think it came from. From.

John Dehlin [04:00:34] So if I, if it's all right, do this little exercise with me and then we'll get back to your ending your church employment. If I were to do a roll call, an abbreviated roll call of your interpretation of what the data lead to on the following, let's just say 15 teachings in the scriptures, okay? I want to hear your ruling on each one.

Dan McClellan [04:01:01] Is that.

John Dehlin [04:01:02] Okay, so like a literal Adam and Eve existing 6,000 years ago as the first humans.

Dan McClellan [04:01:09] Genesis 2 and 3 are probably a temple text of some kind from the 8th century BC, 8th 7th century BCE brought together from a handful of different traditions that were in circulation. And so I don't think it was intended to be understood literally. It's an etiology for how things got to be the way they are. And so the Bible does not present that as a historical claim, and the data don't support it.

John Dehlin [04:01:38] Okay. Global flood, Adam and Eve, all the animals on the ark.

Dan McClellan [04:01:42] That's something that's probably a West Semitic adaptation of an East Semitic idea of a catastrophic flood that originally was not global, but only became global global in later iterations. And again, the data don't support that either.

John Dehlin [04:01:58] Tower of Babel language is being confused by, you know, when people built the tower.

Dan McClellan [04:02:03] Yeah. This is probably a 7th century story that is riffing on. It's kind of making fun of the Babylonians. There was a tower called the Tower of Etemenanki that was a little outside of Babylon that had been constructed and had been destroyed. And then it was like 70 years it took them to reconstruct it. And this was supposed to be this grand thing that just they could never seem to get off the ground. And so most critical scholarship identifies this tradition as having developed in that time period and in some sense kind of being a rhetorical mocking of the inability of the Babylonians to complete that tower. And that also provides, hey, you can go see the Tower of Etemenanki. That's what remains from this story that talks about the scattering of the people and the confusing of the languages.

John Dehlin [04:02:59] And that has deep implications for the Book of Mormon, because there are Book of Mormon characters that allegedly come from the Tower of Babel that you're saying there's no data to support ever, really.

Dan McClellan [04:03:09] Right. A critical scholarly approach to this would say this is a tradition that was developed in the South 7th century BCE.

John Dehlin [04:03:17] Okay. And so like a Charlton Heston 10 Commandments depiction of Pharaoh and Moses and the Exodus data for that.

Dan McClellan [04:03:32] Yeah. Much later innovations. If there was a historical Moses, and there is an argument to make that there is some historical kernel to this, it was probably a small scale departure of some slaves that made their way into the northern Hill country and found a way to embed their story within the charter myth of the nation of Israel as it became a nation. And so there are scholars who have tried to recreate what that may have been like. There are some scholars who say, well, that could have been the Levites. Could have been the ones who were slaves in Egypt and managed to escape and make their way to the northern hill country. Others say that this was the kind of spark that started the accretion of all these different tribes into the northern kingdom of Israel. Others say it's something else, but, yeah, nothing like what we see in a Charlton Heston movie.

John Dehlin [04:04:29] What about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jacob becoming Israel, 12 tribes coming. Coming from Jacob, Israel, and then the whole division of tribes and all that.

Dan McClellan [04:04:39] So from a critical scholarly point of view, that is most likely a later retrojection, so a later retelling of early history to try to consolidate all these different tribes in an effort to try to create more cohesion by saying, hey, we all come from the same father. And so it is basically a retconning of these stories to produce a single lineage so that in much later time periods, we could feel like we're all part of the same family and get along a little better. And a friend named Andrew Tobolowski, who just published a bit ago, wonderful book called the Myth of the twelve Tribes of Israel that discusses that in some detail. There are. There are a bunch of different scholarly theories about how and why it came together the way it did, but pretty much all agree that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were originally independent traditions regarding independent families that were worked together in some way or another to create a single lineage.

John Dehlin [04:05:43] Because orthodox Mormonism, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are very literal, that blood lineage matters. We all get patriarchal blessings that tie Taya's two tribes of Israel and the Book of Mormon's all about blood lineage. The Israelites, Laman and Lemuel coming from Lehi's tribe, like blood lineage and Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the 12 tribes in Mormonism. That's very literal and very essential to core Mormon doctrine.

Dan McClellan [04:06:11] Yeah. And that's something that has to be accepted on faith because the data certainly don't point in that direction. Direction.

John Dehlin [04:06:17] Wow. Okay. What about. Are you going to take David and Goliath away from us as well here? Yes.

Dan McClellan [04:06:28] So there's probably a historical David who was. The data would suggest that this was somebody who was trying to take the throne, who had to go south and start a kingdom independently in the south, and was probably a mercenary. And the story of his killing of Goliath, however, is probably an appropriation from an earlier existing story that attributed that killing to somebody else. And that story is also preserved in the Bible. There's a passage in 2nd Samuel that talks about a series of giants being killed. And one of them is Goliath, whose spear was like a weaver's beam, which is exactly how Goliath is described in 1st Samuel 17 said he was killed by a man named Elhanan. And so this is probably an earlier tradition. And whoever was responsible for bringing together the Davidic story, whether that was happening contemporaneous with David's own reign or whether this is something happening century centuries later, seems to have taken that story and expanded on it and put David in the driver's seat. That's what the data would suggest about that.

John Dehlin [04:07:45] And then you've already told us that Isaiah, a single Isaiah, probably didn't write Isaiah. And we don't even know if Isaiah wrote any of Isaiah, but instead, multiple authors not named Isaiah writing Isaiah, which is important to the Book of Mormon because the Book of Mormon quotes Isaiah extensively.

Dan McClellan [04:08:02] The overwhelming academic consensus is that there was a historical Isaiah who is responsible for, if not significant portions, Most of Isaiah 1:39. But that has been added to somebody else who never claimed to be isaiah, writing chapters 40 through 55, speaking not prophetically but historically about things that happened in the past and condemning and critiquing the society in their day, which seems by all the data to be the 6th century BCE. And then there's also data for a third Isaiah that was probably written in the Persian or maybe even going into the Hellenistic period, which is a problem

John Dehlin [04:08:52] for literal or historical interpretations of the Book of Mormon. Why?

Dan McClellan [04:09:00] So we have portions of the Book of Mormon that are supposed to be taken from the plates that had Isaiah on them that were acquired by the Lehigh party, the breastplates of Laban before departing from Jerusalem for the New World around the year 600 BCE. But Deutero Isaiah probably did not exist in that time period. And if it did, it would not have looked anything like how it looks now. So this creates an issue for the notion that the Book of Mormon is a literal translation of a record that existed prior to 600 BCE. So that's another. Another thing that must be accepted on faith, because the data that are available to us now don't point in that direction.

John Dehlin [04:09:51] What about Malachi telling us all to pay tithing?

Dan McClellan [04:09:55] That's a very different, very different concept of tithing back then, because that would have been. Well, actually, it was a little more closely related to how tithing was paid in the early church, where this was about grains and animals and things like that, not about actual money, which existed back then. But the point is more about the opening the windows of heaven is about making it rain. It's about providing for crops. And this is what the promise is as you bring the first fruits of your offerings and God will make it rain so that your crops will grow, which we then kind of render abstract or a little more generic to apply it to late stage capitalist concerns.

John Dehlin [04:10:48] So in your mind, Malachi wasn't saying give 10% of your gross or net income to the church you attend.

Dan McClellan [04:10:55] That's a renegotiation for sure. And the message from Malachi was quite different. But also when you situate the whole book of Malachi in its historical setting, it's responding to very, very different concerns. And so it is something that to make it relevant to us today really has to be proof, text, proof texted, because it's really about different, much different concerns.

John Dehlin [04:11:24] What about Mormon apologists that have wanted to tie the modern Mormon temple ceremony to the ancient temple ceremony of Jews during the Old Testament time periods?

Dan McClellan [04:11:36] I think there are some ways that the temple ceremony taps into some principles of ancient concepts of worship and of sacred space. But I would say the data seemed. Now we're getting into something that is a little outside my area of expertise. But the data seem to me, based on the scholarship that I have seen, to indicate that this is more an innovation on a Masonic approach to these rituals that has been kind of expanded and innovated on by Latter Day Saints who are trying to recreate what they understand to be ancient temple worship. But in ancient temples there were many, many differences. That's not to say there are not resonances, but they are, I would say they are few and far between.

John Dehlin [04:12:39] And then if we switch, and I don't know if there's other big Old Testament ones or if we've kind of covered them, if we want to switch. And you can tell me, are there, or do you think we got the main ones?

Dan McClellan [04:12:48] I think those are the ones that the Latter Day Saints would be most concerned with.

John Dehlin [04:12:51] And then if we switch to the New Testament, like a literal Jesus who died and was resurrected and was the Son of God.

Dan McClellan [04:13:02] So resurrection is another thing that from an academic point of view, that's a physical impossibility. And so without extraordinary evidence for that, there's no way you, a scholar, can say, yeah, this makes sense, because it doesn't. It violates everything we know about the operation of the universe. And so the bar for that kind of evidence is even higher. And we don't have data that come anywhere near getting us over that bar. And so from a Scholarly point of view, the resurrection is something that is not supported by the data. The overwhelming majority of scholars agree that there was a historical Jesus of Nazareth who was probably an apocalyptic, itinerant preacher who probably preached against the Roman Empire and preached the coming of the Kingdom of God imminently and was executed because of it. And then we have Jesus followers afterwards spreading stories about his coming back to life and ministry before leaving again. And so the historical Jesus is a very interesting field of study that is also not my area of expertise, but it's something that I'm looking into more and more. I have studied more extensively the conceptualization of Jesus as divine, as having some kind of special relationship with God the Father. And so I'm more interested in that question. But Son of God was a title that was applied to humans in the Roman Empire. In fact, there are scholars who've pointed out that Son of Man is more divine a title than Son of God. Son of God is more a human title in that period. But Son of Man would have been an assertion of special possession of the divine name. And so that vehicle for divine agency and divine power and authority, which was probably something that Jesus claimed. But another claim that isn't really supported by any data. The miracles and things that were done are pretty stereotypical of stories from that day and age. So it makes sense that these would be ways that people generations down the road would remember what happened. And there's a great book by Bart Ehrman called Jesus before the Gospels that goes into a lot of detail about the study of social memory and how communities remember and how their memories change through time that takes that research and applies it to the historical Jesus, and I think does a wonderful job of talking about what is likely historical in the Gospels and what is likely not. So anybody interested in. In learning more about the historical Jesus? I'd recommend that they check that book out.

John Dehlin [04:16:02] You're okay with Bart Ehrman?

Dan McClellan [04:16:03] Oh, yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:16:05] You're a fan.

Dan McClellan [04:16:06] What's that?

John Dehlin [04:16:06] You're a fan. Is that fair to say? Or you respect his scholarship?

Dan McClellan [04:16:10] I respect his scholarship. And. And I've. And I've had him on my podcast before to talk about his most recent book, which was on the Book of Revelation, which is another thing that Latter Day Saints don't like the way I talk about.

John Dehlin [04:16:26] Why is that?

Dan McClellan [04:16:29] I've repeatedly argued that the Book of Revelation was a text written to exhort Christians in the late first century CE to remain faithful in the face of persecution, whether real or imagined. It's not a prophecy about anything beyond the first century ce. And so it's not a prophecy about today. And so the. When we look at the Book of Revelation and we say, ah, it says once the Euphrates river dries up, the kings from the east will cross over. And, ah, there are angels that are supposed to be bound at the Euphrates River. And so if the Euphrates river dries up, the angels are going to be. And that's a.

John Dehlin [04:17:07] And there's the two prophets killed in the streets of Jerusalem.

Dan McClellan [04:17:09] Right, right.

John Dehlin [04:17:11] OG and Magog and all that stuff. Right?

Dan McClellan [04:17:13] Yeah. The overwhelming scholarly consensus is that this is a story about the end of the first century CE and that the beast, the number of the beast, 666 is a coded reference using Gematria, to Nero Caesar, who had died decades before, but was rumored to have either been in hiding or was rumored to be coming back from the dead to come take over his rule of the Roman Empire. And so the story is kind of incorporating that into this apocalyptic vision of what was supposed to happen within the lifetime of its original audience. So it's not a prophecy about today according to the data that we have available to us.

John Dehlin [04:17:55] So the prepper sort of does not. Prepper crowd is not going to like that.

Dan McClellan [04:18:00] They don't like much of anything. But yeah, no, they won't appreciate that, that's for sure.

John Dehlin [04:18:06] And how about just the four Gospels number one, being written by the people whose names are on the four Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But do they agree on Jesus, his divinity and his resurrection, or do they disagree on that?

Dan McClellan [04:18:19] So I would say they agree on resurrection across the board. All four Gospels mention a resurrection. The earliest Gospel is Mark, and the earliest version of Mark that we think was in circulation only hints at the resurrection. It has the people going to the tomb and the tomb being empty and them becoming terrified. And in our earliest manuscripts, that's more or less where the story ends. And so the rest of the Gospel of Mark, chapter 16, is most likely a later addition to the text. The four Gospels disagree on an awful lot. We have indications that some of them looked at other Gospels. So there are four Gospels. Mark was the earliest. The other three, to one degree or another, used Mark as a source. There are things that are shared across some of the Gospels and not the others that indicate that there were other sources that we don't have anymore that were critical to the way, like Matthew and Luke, for instance, told their stories. And so what is historical and what is not is still a subject of intense debate. But these are Four authors who are writing for different purposes to different audiences and telling the story in very different ways that in some cases are just irreconcilable. You cannot harmonize the story where the veil of the temple rends into after Jesus is dead with another gospel that says the veil of the temple rends in two before Jesus dies. So, like, the details like that are not reconcilable. And regarding their authorship, the traditional authorship that is assigned developed decades after they had all been written. And there's no indication that they are. That those traditional assignments of authorship are accurate. They fit too many kind of conveniences about how people like to think about the development of the Jesus tradition.

John Dehlin [04:20:22] So Matthew didn't write Matthew, Mark didn't write Mark, etc.

Dan McClellan [04:20:25] Correct. That's what the overwhelming majority of scholars would say.

John Dehlin [04:20:29] Okay, okay. So now that we have a sense for the sacred cows, the Mormonism, orthodox, traditional, correlated Mormonism would kind of hold a sacred. I can see how Dan McClelland could still be faithful and pro faith and still hold this view of the Bible and of the Book of Mormon and of Mormon scripture. But I think there's a lot of people that don't understand what you're saying, don't understand the subtleties of what you're saying. And then there's a lot of people that just would say, well, Dad, I know you're a good guy and I believe you're felt faithful, but the implications of what you're teaching is that for far too many people, they start pulling on this cord of the literality of the Bible and the sweater becomes frayed and they lose their faith again. Going back to the end of your employment with the church, I could just see how all sorts of, maybe even good or well intended church leaders would say, we got to get Dan out of here, because the implications of what his teaching is not in the long term, good for orthodox Mormon faith.

Dan McClellan [04:21:35] Yeah, I've never heard any indication that such discussions took place. And I was supported by my leadership in the church office building. And yeah, so there's. I'm sure that there were people who were uncomfortable with it. I know that there were folks who, again, particularly on Twitter, who were uncomfortable with it and that there were folks from the general public and even from BYU and elsewhere that were complaining, but that never resulted in any disciplinary action of any kind against me. And so, yeah, I was quite fortunate to have quite a bit of support and even some fans there in the office office who occasionally recognized me in the halls and told me they appreciated What I was doing, and that's something that I've also found fascinating is I have detractors across the entire spectrum, from faithful Latter Day Saints to former Latter Day Saints to atheists and everything in between. And I also have supporters across that entire spectrum, from faithful Latter Day Saints to former Latter Day Saints, saints to everything else. And I've considered that as long as I have supporters and detractors across the entire spectrum, that I'm probably sitting in a sweet spot, that I'm probably doing something right. If I'm offering reasons for people to remain faithful and reasons for people to feel justified in not remaining faithful, I'm just trying to put the data out there and people are going to interpretate. Interpretate. People are going to interpret that data in a variety of different ways. But yeah, my departure from the church is not something that I am at liberty to discuss publicly. So I would rather not go into any more detail about that just because of, of confidentialities. And yeah, I wasn't rumor going around that I was fired, which is not true in any way, shape or form whatsoever. But yeah, that's about as far as I think I should go about that.

John Dehlin [04:23:59] Okay. So I want to respect that. So. And I will respect that. I mean, I guess. Are you even able to say whether TikTok was related to the ending of your employment?

Current Work, Online Teaching, and Continued Church Membership

Dan McClellan [04:24:16] Oh, yeah. So I mentioned earlier that this was always a. The goal was always to return to academia. About a year ago, I started teaching online classes.

John Dehlin [04:24:31] While still employed.

Dan McClellan [04:24:32] While still employed, yeah. So it was, I think it was the day before my birthday when I first said, hey, I'm going to teach a class on the Israelite goddess Asherah. It's going to be middle of this day in September. The registration is on a pay what you want basis. Donate at least a dollar and you'll get on and then it'll be over. Zoom. I'll record it. Everybody who signs up gets access to the recording afterwards. And I had over a thousand people sign up for the first class. And I had, I started to do that regularly and that became a source of income that by November was outpacing my paycheck. And so immediately I realized this might be an opportunity for me to pivot into doing scholarship full time, even if it is public scholarship, rather than having a full time teaching position at a university. And so that was the decision that was made in January. And I'm sure that there were people who were glad to see me go. And I know for a fact that there were a lot of people who wanted me to stay. And that was a decision that I made and that I talked with my supervisors at church about and that they were so supportive of. So, yeah, it was an opportunity for me to spread my wings a bit. I saw a higher ceiling regarding, regarding my income with impact and impact. So I moved from a very fulfilling, very to me valuable, privileged position into an even more fulfilling, more significant for me position. So I, I feel incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to do that. And yeah, some. Somebody on Twitter yesterday said they find it funny that people are saying I'm on food stamps, which I have not seen. But for anybody who's wondering, no, I'm, I'm not on food stamps. I am making more money now than, than I was before. So I feel, I feel kind of silly saying something like that, boasting about making more money because that's never been what this is. It's never been the, the priority. For me, the priority has been engaging in, in scholarship. But that's definitely something that one of the main motivators for doing what I did was the opportunity to be a better provider for my family.

John Dehlin [04:27:23] I can speak for me. I'm super happy to hear that because I think people who create value and should be compensated for it if for another reason, then it allows them to create more value and more content and it becomes sustainable. Are you able to answer this question? And if so, what can you say about whether or not you've ever found yourself in front of an ecclesiastical leader about your faith or about concerns, ecclesiastical concerns, church concerns, about your work?

Dan McClellan [04:27:56] Not once. Nobody's ever said a word to me. Bishop, Stake President, Only positive feedback is anything I've ever gotten. I am sure that there are folks in my local leadership who are probably nervous about some of the stuff that I say. But no, I've never been disciplined professionally or ecclesiastically or even threatened with discipline professionally or ecclesiastically.

John Dehlin [04:28:26] Nice. And I'll just end this segment. I still want to figure out how to do one or two more. And I know I've been keeping you without a bathroom break or food or drink, and that's inhumane, but I'm just loving this so much. It's just how I roll. But I'll just, maybe I'll end this part on this question. How's it been? I had Bart Ehrman on Mormon Stories years ago. He's clearly the biggest name, I think, on many of the types of questions in the world. On many of the types of questions or topics that you explore. Although he's more new Testament than old. Of course, David Bacavoy is a huge influence on so many of us, especially within progressive and post Mormonism because of his book, but also because of his Mormon stories interview and the work he does. But like, in terms of actual face or name recognition and or reach or impact, with 600,000 plus TikTok followers, plus whatever your YouTube channel and podcasts and the rest have all aggregated to, someone could argue you've made more of an impact than all of them in your work in terms of your goal, which is accessibility to information about biblical studies and advancing truth and challenging untruths about the Bible.

Dan McClellan [04:30:03] I would flatter myself to say I've had more of an impact than all of them.

John Dehlin [04:30:07] But you would or you wouldn't.

Dan McClellan [04:30:09] It would be flattering myself to say that, so I would.

John Dehlin [04:30:12] Can I say that?

Dan McClellan [04:30:14] You're welcome to. I enjoy hearing it, even though I. I don't think it's true. But I'm still only a couple years.

John Dehlin [04:30:22] Wait, you don't think there's more people in the world that have learned from you about the Bible than have learned from Bart Ehrman?

Dan McClellan [04:30:30] I think he's sold more copies of his books than I have followers across all my social media platforms. So I think that more people have heard of him and from him and learned about the Bible from him. Him for the time being.

John Dehlin [04:30:47] Wait, I just want to be clear. If you've got 600,000, just over 600,000 Tik Tok followers and then there's all the people that have seen your stuff but don't subscribe or follow you, that's well over a million people that have engaged with your content. Are you saying that over a million people have engaged with Bart Ehrman and this isn't about Bart Ehrman? I guess I'm trying to say how amazing TikTok is and amazing. How amazing social media is and how amazing your content matches social media and what a huge impact that's all had.

Dan McClellan [04:31:24] Yeah, I would say that my content. The impact of my content on TikTok is probably more efficient and more widespread than Bartarman scholarship. But in terms of the actual printed word, he has far outpaced what I've done.

John Dehlin [04:31:47] But you haven't read a popular book yet.

Dan McClellan [04:31:49] I am about to start one. Yes. So we will see. That will be coming up soon.

John Dehlin [04:31:59] What's your first book gonna be about?

Dan McClellan [04:32:00] If you can say it will probably be a kind of greatest hits of my content regarding what the Bible does and doesn't say. So don't Have a title yet? The contract has not been signed yet.

John Dehlin [04:32:16] But you're shopping it to agents.

Dan McClellan [04:32:20] Already have an interested publisher who has made an offer.

John Dehlin [04:32:24] Nice.

Dan McClellan [04:32:24] But, yeah, my agent has said don't announce it until you have the contract, which should be any day now.

John Dehlin [04:32:31] Now. Oh, nice.

Dan McClellan [04:32:32] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:32:33] Ooh, that's exciting.

Dan McClellan [04:32:34] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:32:35] Your friends and fans will be excited to hear that.

Dan McClellan [04:32:38] Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:32:38] Okay.

Dan McClellan [04:32:39] The ones who have joined my live streams and things already have some vague notion that I'm working on something like this. Okay.

John Dehlin [04:32:46] So this will be a popular book about helping people understand the Bible more accurately.

Dan McClellan [04:32:51] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:32:52] Right. Old Testament and New Testament.

Dan McClellan [04:32:54] Yeah. I'll be sharing about 12 to 15 chapters. Each one will address a claim about what the Bible does or doesn't say. So it'll talk about homosexuality in the Bible. It will talk about creation ex nihilo. It will talk about inerrancy. It will talk about hell. It will talk about the different things that people say the Bible says about these issues, whether it does or does not actually address those issues and how it does address them if it does. So it'll be fun. It'll hopefully go quickly because it should mainly be stuff I've already done. I just need to write it down in a way that's semi coherent.

John Dehlin [04:33:33] Beautiful. Well, that's exciting.

Dan McClellan [04:33:35] Yeah. I'm very excited. In fact, I'm probably going to email my agent today and say, you know where we stand on this contract.

John Dehlin [04:33:42] Beautiful. And just maybe to end how, like, it's a big decision to leave a salary secure job with great benefits and health insurance, as I'm assuming the primary income, if not the sole income provider for your family. You have kids, I assume. Like, that's a scary thing to do. I've done it. And then it can be an exciting thing if it picks up. How's it going?

Dan McClellan [04:34:10] It has been exciting. Yeah. At first I was aware that everything could crash and burn, but I was confident that that appetite for what I was producing was going to be there and that I had not even scratched the surface of the audience that would be out there for it. And it continues to grow. And so I'm excited for the future and I'm confident that it's only going to improve from here. And, yeah, the health insurance is the main thing that was. That was the sticking point. That was what made my wife the most nervous because it was very nice to live for a decade without ever having to even think about it. I just. I got a check every two weeks and everything else was taken care of behind the scenes. So now we have to take care of a lot of that stuff and additional stuff that comes with running a small business. But I think it's been more than worth it so far.

John Dehlin [04:35:17] Nice. Well, on behalf of so, so many of my listeners and viewers and friends, we're all just loving what you do and in awe of it and cheering you on.

Dan McClellan [04:35:29] Oh, thank you so much in all the good ways. Thank you. Yeah, I'm glad to hear that.

John Dehlin [04:35:33] So you were willing, you were maybe the first person ever to come to Mormon Story studios at like 7am because you had a hard stop in an hour. And so we plan to do maybe two episodes during that time. And I'm gonna have to talk to you off camera about what we do. But I'll just say this to end this episode. There's at least two more episodes I would love to do with the you1 would be your views on how people, aware of the issues you're aware of, maintain LDS belief. So not getting into your beliefs or disbeliefs, but like, if somebody wanted to know all that you know about both the Bible and Mormon scripture but still believe, how they might do that. That's one episode that I think would be really, really useful to a lot of people who want to believe. And believe it or not, I John de Lynn and Mormon stories are not about taking away belief. If belief helps people, as long as it's based in data and informed consent, I want people to have that option. So I would love to do that episode with you. And then a second one would be like what we talked about, which is like 10 things everyone should know about the Bible.

Dan McClellan [04:36:46] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:36:47] So I'm just going to leave the end of this episode saying those are aspirations of mine of still wanting to maybe do a couple more things with you. I don't know whether some or any of that could be done today or at another time, but I want to leave my viewers and listeners with the hope that those two things might be possible. There's a chance that those two things might be possible?

Dan McClellan [04:37:10] Yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [04:37:11] Okay, good. All right. Anything you want to say to close out your story? And then I want to give you a chance to plug everything at the end that you plugged at the beginning. But. But anything else about your story that you want to share that you haven't been able to share so far as a way to close, you still remain a believing, active Mormon?

Dan McClellan [04:37:33] I'm an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In fact, I'm on my ward council. And wait, what's word.

John Dehlin [04:37:43] What does that mean?

Dan McClellan [04:37:44] The Ward council is a group of leadership that meets.

John Dehlin [04:37:49] You have a calling that includes you in that council. Okay.

Dan McClellan [04:37:53] I don't know that there's anything else I would add to what we've talked about.

John Dehlin [04:37:59] You said a member, but believing member on some level, or do you not like. Like to use that term?

Dan McClellan [04:38:07] I don't like to. Well, one thing I've done on social media is say my beliefs are off limits. I don't talk about those. And so people say, well, how do you believe this? How do you believe that? How do you believe the other? And my defense is to say, with all due respect, you don't know what I believe. And nobody's going to know what I believe outside of the places where that is relevant, such as in my ward building and things like that. So I don't say that not to hint that I'm not a believing member. I say that to maintain that strict boundary that I have set up, that I will say I'm active in the church, but just for the interest of that boundary that I've set up and my methodological consistency, I. I don't address what I believe. And so I consider calling myself a believing member to fall into addressing what I believe. And so.

John Dehlin [04:39:08] Got it. Okay. Okay. And so anything else you want to end your story with before we plug all your things?

Dan McClellan [04:39:17] I don't think so. Yeah, I didn't really talk about my PhD, which was something that led to,

John Dehlin [04:39:24] like, the substance of your PhD?

Dan McClellan [04:39:25] Well, no. How I got into a PhD program, I don't think I talked about that at all, because I think I pivoted right into.

John Dehlin [04:39:31] Do you want to throw that into the end of your story really quick? Sure.

Dan McClellan [04:39:34] Okay. So my PhD program, after I did not get any funding to return to Oxford, I thought my academic career was over. And then I got this wonderful job and I was able to continue to participate in the academy by attending conferences every now and then and still publishing. And I had a friend, the wonderful professor, Francesca Stavrocapoulou, who was at the time the head of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter, who

John Dehlin [04:40:07] I

Dan McClellan [04:40:07] was commiserating with at one point, who said, hey, we have a distance PhD program here at Exeter that wouldn't require you to move. You could. It's just the dissertation. In the UK, a PhD is a research. PhD is just the dissertation. There's no coursework. I already had two master's degrees, so they figured that was plenty, and so I was able to make that work with her. Help. And then with a generous grant from byu, they have religious education dissertation grant that they offer to folks who are writing, working on their dissertations on topics related to religious education who had graduated from byu. And so I was eligible to receive that award which made it possible to do that program. And I wrote my dissertation there on the conceptualization of deity and divine images through the methodological lenses of cognitive linguistics and the cognitive science of religion. And that was a wonderful experience that took four and a half years of my life and was at times very stressful. But I then revised that dissertation and published it last year in an open access volume called Adonai's Divine A Cognitive Approach, which people can freely access online through a PDF that's posted on my link tree and you can also Google it and find it.

John Dehlin [04:41:38] And you obtained that PhD while you were under the church deployment?

Dan McClellan [04:41:43] While I was. Yeah. So I think I started in. I started in September of 2015 and I defended my dissertation in April of 2020. So just over four and a half years, I was scheduled to fly out to Exeter to go defend in person. And that had to be canceled three weeks before because Covid was suddenly a thing. And I was not able to get out there to make up that trip to Exeter until just last year I was able to fold it into a work trip, which was wonderful.

John Dehlin [04:42:22] Okay, so I will make sure to include that segment somewhere in your story of Churchill employment before we talk about the end of your church employment.

Dan McClellan [04:42:33] That'd be great. I think that would fit a little easier. Okay.

John Dehlin [04:42:35] Okay. Okay. So this has been amazing. Thank you for giving us four, almost five hours of your time just to tell your story. I hope it's an important record of, you know, Dan McClellan up, up through August 7, 2023, for those who would care. And again, we wish you all the best of luck. We want to see you succeed. I think everyone. You know, you're unique in that even though there's people that want to speculate as to your belief or to what your church status is or will be someday, you're universally respected by many orthodox Mormons, but certainly almost all progressives and post Mormons as being someone that is widely respected because of your commitment to truth and your commitment to data and evidence over dogma and over, let's just say, unproductive or unhealthy apologetics. So from that sense, I'm just. You're. You're unique and universally respective minus Mormon apologists and some Mormon apologists and the. Does not crowd, you know.

Dan McClellan [04:43:55] Well, thank You. I appreciate that that is an interesting space to occupy right now, and there does seem to be some truth to that, which is a surprise to me and also an incredible blessing and something I'm very lucky to be a part of. So I appreciate the very kind words.

John Dehlin [04:44:13] But more importantly, your work has meant a lot to people who care about the Bible across the spectrum. And I love that's amazing because it's such a global impact, way beyond this small, little, small pond of Mormonism. Right. And that was your goal, right?

Dan McClellan [04:44:29] Yeah. Yeah. I've always wanted to reach a wider audience, and this has been a way to do that. And it's been, again, it's been surprising, but an incredible blessing. And I get messages all the time that my content has helped people who grew up in very restrictive religious faiths, that it has helped them heal from it, that understanding these contexts better and hearing more about the backgrounds and the significance of these texts has helped them heal from trauma and even from abuse in the past. That has been something that I could not have anticipated and something that is very humbling and I am very grateful to play a role, however small, in people healing and people moving forward and people moving past trauma and abuse and things like that. So I have. Yeah. All I can say is that it is very humbling. It's not what I would have expected, and I still have imposter syndrome in that regard. But it's something that I continue to hear. And so I will continue to produce this content as long as I can so that anyone out there who is in need of that healing can hopefully access it if I am lucky enough to be a provider of that to somebody.

John Dehlin [04:45:55] All right, well, we wish you success.

Dan McClellan [04:45:56] Well, thank you. I appreciate it, John.

John Dehlin [04:45:58] Okay, plug all the things.

Dan McClellan [04:45:59] Okay. Okay, so let's see what's today? Monday on this? Probably won't go out for a few weeks. Okay. So I have teamed up with Professor Candida Moss and Professor Robin Faith Walsh to offer online classes through didaskaloy.com, which is D I D A S K O I spelled that wrong. D I D A S K A L O I dot com, which just means teachers in Greek. But we offer online courses that address the Bible and religion more generally. And that's something that I'm very excited about. And I'm going to be teaching in September on the three creation accounts that we find in the Bible. And you can find my previous catalog of courses, the recordings of which are available for purchase at McClellan.org, which is, again, My username, M A K L e l a n.org and then my co host would find a way to smother me in my sleep if I did not plug the podcast, which is the Data Over Dogma podcast, which I always forget to plug. But we have episodes that come out every Monday where we do. It's an expansion. It's a longer form of what I do on social media, trying to increase the public's access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. So that's something that's. That's going to be quite exciting moving forward. I'm even going to a podcasting convention in Denver later this month. So this is. What's it called? The convention?

John Dehlin [04:47:45] Yeah. Oh, gosh, I forget what I should go to that. I've never been.

Dan McClellan [04:47:49] It's, it's. It's a big convention, though.

John Dehlin [04:47:52] But are you speaking at it?

Dan McClellan [04:47:53] No, no.

John Dehlin [04:47:53] Okay.

Dan McClellan [04:47:54] No, we're just going to attend. Yeah. Because this is an industry that I am. And still consider myself an outsider.

John Dehlin [04:48:01] Me too. So.

Dan McClellan [04:48:03] So I, I have a lot to learn about it. And then, yeah, you can find me at McClellan on TikTok and Instagram and Twitter and YouTube. YouTube and also threads and bluesky. The social media platforms are just proliferating right now. And then, yeah, hopefully soon I'll be announcing a forthcoming trade book on what the Bible may or may not say about different topics that have been controversial. Yeah, I think that's most everything.

John Dehlin [04:48:36] This is probably not the place to ask this question, but I just. It's on my brain to ask it. If somebody says your work more often than not leads people to stop believing the Bible to be divine, we're going to end on this. What would you say to that accusation?

Dan McClellan [04:48:53] I would say if that's where the data lead, then that's where the data lead. And I'm not the choice. To believe that the Bible is divine is something that ultimately I don't think comes down to data. And if someone believes the Bible's description of faith, then they ought to be happy with believing something that is not supported by the data. That is precisely how the Bible describes it. And so I have. I have people accuse me of attacking and destroying faith. It's not my goal. I know plenty of people who can maintain faith in the face of contrary data. And I get messages from people who feel like I help them be more successful at that. And so, yeah, that's not my intent, but if that's where the data lead, then that's where the data lead. And that's not not my fault.

John Dehlin [04:49:58] It's not your department.

Dan McClellan [04:50:00] Yeah, it's above my pay grade.

John Dehlin [04:50:03] All right. Well, Dan McClelland, good luck and thank you so much for coming on Mormon Stories.

Dan McClellan [04:50:07] Thank you so much.

John Dehlin [04:50:08] I appreciate your time and support, Dan. And also if you appreciate this type of content on Mormon Stories podcast, you can go to MormonStories.org, click on the donate button, become a monthly donor and your donations will support our ability to provide you with more content like this. But mostly today, support Dan McClellan and the Good work he does. Thanks, Dan.

Dan McClellan [04:50:33] Thank you.

John Dehlin [04:50:33] Thanks everybody. Hopefully we'll come back whenever we are able to record it to do those follow up episodes with Dan about how to maintain Mormon belief in the face of new views on scripture. And then also maybe some top things you should know about the Bible or that everyone should know about the Bible. So hopefully we'll have Dan back super soon. Thanks everybody. Take care.

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