Welcome and Guest Introduction

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. I am super excited to have you with us today. And of course, we are joined today by my partner and co host on Mormon Stories, Carah Burrell. Hey, Carah.

Carah Burrell [00:00:15] Hello. Hello, John Deloitte.

John Dehlin [00:00:17] How's it going?

Carah Burrell [00:00:18] Great. I'm excited for this one. Feeling good to have you.

John Dehlin [00:00:21] Yeah, good to see you. All right, well, today we are super excited to have with us in studio Dr. Jonathan Westover. Hey, Dr. Westover, or John, as you like to be called. How's it going?

Carah Burrell [00:00:35] Good.

Jon Westover [00:00:35] I'm doing well, thank you.

John Dehlin [00:00:38] For those of you who aren't familiar with with John Westover, let me just go ahead and read a quick bio. He is a professor and chair of Organizational Leadership in the Woodbury School of Business at Utah Valley University. He is also academic director of the UVU center for Social Impact and and the UVU SIM Lab and faculty Fellow for Ethics in public life. His PhD is from the University of Utah. And it's kind of organizational behavior and human resources is the way I think about it now with that kind of more formal, stuffy introduction. How do you characterize kind of who you are and what you do?

Jon Westover [00:01:22] Yeah, what I'm doing now professionally. You said it. I consider myself a scholar practitioner, so I'm in the university space and I do a lot of work at uvu. But I also try to have practical application in what I do. So I do consulting on the side. I do business oriented HR and organizational leadership publications for practitioner audiences. And I also run my own podcast, the Human Capital Innovations Podcast, that focuses on those sorts of practical topics for organizational leaders to know how to better run their teams and have effective organizations. My Ph.D. from the University of Utah was in sociology.

Jon Westover [00:02:05] So, you know, sociology is a very broad field. So my areas of emphases were comparative international sociology and the sociology of work and organizations. So that's the connection back to business. I knew all along when I was going through my PhD that my hope, my goal was that I wanted to end up in a business school teaching those sorts of courses and doing that kind of research. And my dissertation and all of the research that has followed has looked at comparative international similarities and differences in terms of employee motivation, employee engagement, work characteristics, other things like that that impact organizations so that aligns itself well with OB and with HR topics. And so that's what I do and teach today. Hr, organizational development, organizational behavior, leadership ethics, those sorts of topics.

John Dehlin [00:03:01] Excellent. Well, there's so many as I started really getting into your outline. There's so many things I'm really excited to discuss with you. One is just your story. And part of what's most intriguing about your story to me is, is to see that you have spent a lot of years trying to live what, you know, I used to refer to as the Middle Way.

John Dehlin [00:03:24] And what, unless you're kind of a longtime Mormon Stories listener, you will not have heard me mention that term in quite a long time. But it's this idea that there's this middle ground between kind of fundamentalist Mormonism or super orthodox and orthoprax Mormonism and kind of ex Mormonism. There's this middle way of not believing everything, literally taking a more buffet approach to your or your, your praxis, to your behavior within Mormonism and being kind of a progressive and liberal Mormon. And you've spent a lot of time, you've published in the Ensign and in the New Era and the Friend.

John Dehlin [00:04:05] You have consulted with the church even in its Sunday School curriculum. You've had several interactions with Elder Holland, Jeffrey R. Holland and President Nelson. And you know, you've been trying, you know, you were even involved with Stale DS and Fair Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:04:23] So that's, I really am interested in that journey of your pursual of the Middle Way path. So I think that's going to kind of be the first block of our interview together. Is your story as framed by your attempt to be a Middle Way Mormon. That's going to be part one of your story.

Jon Westover [00:04:44] Okay, great.

John Dehlin [00:04:45] Is that all right?

Jon Westover [00:04:46] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:04:47] But also I'm really interested in, just like we did with Roger Hendricks, where we had kind of a management consultant analyze the current Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints from the standpoint of management consultant. I'm really interested in having, doing, doing a several hour deep dive with you on kind of analyzing the Mormon Church through the lens of an organizational behaviorist. Is that, is that, how would you describe your discipline?

Jon Westover [00:05:21] Yeah, yeah. You know, organizational behavior, organizational development, change management. Those are the types of framings that often people will use. When you say consultant, that can mean almost anything. People consult in all sorts of. But that's, that's, you know, the type of consulting work that I tend to do.

John Dehlin [00:05:39] Yeah, yeah. So I think that we gotta have that be the major part too. So. Okay, great. Those are the two things that you're in store for listeners and viewers. And it's probably going to be two multi hour sections. But for, for this part one, I just, you know, we're going to talk about your, your story and what, what it's been like for you to pursue that middle way and where you are today and a cool, interesting story along the way.

Growing Up in a Conservative Mormon Home

Jon Westover [00:06:07] That sounds great.

John Dehlin [00:06:07] So where does your Mormon story begin?

Jon Westover [00:06:13] So I thought first actually I would just mention the old Mormon expression episodes have gone back up and I appreciate that. I've gone back and started re listening to some of the early episodes shout out to John Larsen. Yeah, I recently re listened to an episode you did with John Larsen back in the really early days of Mormon expression, when Mormon stories was off the air and you were the whole episode was about Middle Way Mormonism and stale DS and some of those types of topics. And you made a very impassioned case for the middle way. And you know, I was thinking about that in relation to like where I'm at and how I navigate things.

Jon Westover [00:07:00] And I think there are actually some similarities to, I mean, this was probably what, back in 2010ish, 2008-2010ish for you. Time has passed and maybe there aren't as many people trying to navigate the middle way these days, but that's something that I've tried to do, whether it's out of my own spiritual sense, whether it's out of just practicality and necessity, given my family dynamics and background and all of that, you know, I suppose it's all mixed together.

Jon Westover [00:07:34] Okay, so if I'm going to start with my Mormon story to get you to the point where, you know, I decided to try to go this middle path, you know, I was raised in a very conservative orthodox Mormon home. I was born in Ohio. My dad had his career with LDS Family Services for 25, 30 years, something like that. And when I was 4 or 5, he was transferred out to Oregon. So we moved to Salem, Oregon at the time. And that's where I spent the majority of my childhood years and went through most of my schooling.

Jon Westover [00:08:09] And my dad and my mom were always in leadership positions. My dad was bishop for a time when we were there. And we have a large family, eight children, five boys, three girls. One of my sisters, my second older sister was born several months premature, back in a time when that was much more dangerous. And so she survived, but she had severe mental and physical handicaps and a lot of mental health challenges along the way as well. And so we kind of had that added component to our family dynamic of caring for a high need sibling and my parents doing that. And that shaped a lot of the way I grew up viewing the world and wanting to try to help and protect the Marginalized and those sorts of things.

Jon Westover [00:09:05] And as conservative as my parents are in many ways, they're also very service oriented, very loving, and also individuals who are inclined in most aspects to try to look out for people who may need extra help may be disadvantaged in certain ways.

Jon Westover [00:09:28] So as I was growing up, the church was everything to us. We went to everything. If there was an event with the church, we went to it. My parents always talked about supporting your leaders. So it didn't matter if we had no interest in whatever was happening, we had no personal connection to it. If they were doing it, we would go because you had to go support your leaders.

Jon Westover [00:09:53] And that was just the environment I grew up in. But honestly, I loved it for the most part. I grew up in the West Salem Ward in Salem, Oregon. Really great people there, just great leaders. I never had a bad experience with a leader while I lived in Oregon.

Jon Westover [00:10:11] They were just good loving people, trying the best they knew how. And I really appreciated that. We, you know, I was heavily involved in scouting while I was there. I didn't like scouting per se, I liked camping, but just had great leaders that helped that be something that was fun and interesting. I can't remember if I put it in the outline, but I actually grew up with John Heater, who played Napoleon Dynamite.

John Dehlin [00:10:38] Same word?

Jon Westover [00:10:39] Yeah, same ward. He was a year ahead of me in school. And so he and his twin brother as well as his younger brother, you know, we were all friends and close and his father was our family doctor as well. So anyways, we had those types of connections. Just kind of fun and just lots of good times, lots of goofy adventures and those sorts of things. And I remember one, it was either Easter or Thanksgiving, but our. Our oven broke at our house. So I remember going to the church to cook the turkey and spending the day at the church and just playing all day and you know, those types of things.

Jon Westover [00:11:16] Those are great memories. In the old kind of modular church building that the members had built that was there in West Salem. I think it's still there. Last time I visited Salem, it was still there. So lots of good memories about all of those sorts of things.

Jon Westover [00:11:33] I'm trying to remember when it was probably around 93, 94, my father quit LDS Family Services and decided to go back and work on his doctoral degree. He'd done all but a dissertation in his doctoral degree at Oregon State when we were living in Oregon. Sorry, at Ohio State when we were living in Ohio. But then the time lapsed from when he could finish the dissertation. So when he decided he wanted to get the PhD. He had to basically restart a program. So he went to Oregon State in Corvallis, and that was his focus. And I remember sitting down, you know, having family meetings where they would.

Jon Westover [00:12:16] Where my parents would sit us down and talk about how, you know, they were planning on moving us to Rexburg because my dad was going to finish his degree and then he was going to go teach at than Rick's college. That never happened. But on a couple of occasions over the years, we had those types of conversations.

Jon Westover [00:12:34] And that just speaks to how very Mormon we were. Very, very. In. In every way you can think of very much. McConkey Mormons. I just. I remember my teenage years having a copy of Mormon doctrine. You know, you have like the bathroom reading. We just had a copy of Mormon doctrine sitting in the bathroom. And I remember eating it up, picking it up and reading it and just always being fascinated by the answers that you could find by reading that stuff. And so going through those years, I would say I was very orthodox and I loved the church. I thought it was wonderful.

Jon Westover [00:13:21] I certainly had, you know, some of the. I always wanted to please people. I always wanted to be good. I was always kind of that good Mormon kid. And, you know, I never got into trouble and, and I did what was asked and all those sorts of things.

Jon Westover [00:13:40] But I always, you know, was very focused on trying to be as perfect as I possibly could be, to please God, to make everyone happy, to make my parents happy, those sorts of things. I remember one time when I was young, I did question because I was just a curious person. So I remember one time being in a Sunday school class and the director of the seminary institutes out in. In Oregon was in our ward and he was substituting for the Sunday school class. And I remember asking him a question when I was probably 12 or 13, and it was kind of one of those, like, wait a minute, we were talking about the Book of Mormon.

Jon Westover [00:14:26] I can't remember the story, but it was just one of those moments where it didn't make any sense. Like, logically it didn't seem consistent. And so I asked the question, you know, how do we reconcile this? And I stumped him like he didn't know. And he said, well, that's a good question. Let me go do some research and I'll get back to you. And I remember him coming back, like, later that Sunday evening, he. He drove to the house and he met with me and my parents. He's like, your son asked a really great question. And, you know, he didn't have a great answer, but he had done some research and he'd come up with some kind of apologetic answers and shared that with me.

Jon Westover [00:15:00] And I just remember feeling super special because I, you know, had, you know, had a good question, he'd validated the question. I didn't feel super satisfied with the answer, but, you know, it was. He heaped praise on me for being thoughtful and those sorts of things. So I felt special about it.

Jon Westover [00:15:20] The only time in my childhood where like, I wasn't sure about like, is the church my thing. It's probably something every kid goes through at various points. But I remember there's one time when I was like 10 or 11 where I just thought it was way more fun to stay home and watch TV and eat snacks and play with my Legos. And so I pretended to be sick three weeks in a row. And my parents freaked out because they thought I was going down a dark path as a 10 year old or whatever. And so they put in place, if I remember correctly, they put in place a restriction on eating the big family Sunday dinner.

Jon Westover [00:15:57] My mom always did a really nice family dinner on Sunday and if I didn't go to church then I wouldn't be allowed to have that big fancy Sunday dinner. So that was enough to cure me of my, my weekly illness. And, and I honestly, from that point on, I don't think I ever missed church ever.

Jon Westover [00:16:15] Up until I was like a young father, you know, maybe needing to miss to take care of a child or something like that. So I don't know that I was very, I was all in, very committed and really ate it up for the most part. Then feel free to interrupt me at any time.

Teenage Spiritual Experiences and Early Testimony

Carah Burrell [00:16:37] Do you have any spiritual experiences throughout your teen years that you feel like tied you to the church where you had a testimony of your own? For sure, not something from your parents.

Jon Westover [00:16:47] I mean, I certainly felt like I had spiritual experiences along the way. But I will say I, I really was not a fan of what I felt was like faux spirituality. I really, really hated it when I felt like a leader was trying to be emotionally or spiritually manipulating, especially in seminary. Most of my seminary teachers drove me crazy that way because it just seemed so manufactured and fake, so independent of that. I mean, if I had an experience where I felt good when I was in seminary or something like that, I almost automatically discounted it because I'm like, yeah, they're just totally manipulating me with

Carah Burrell [00:17:32] the church movies and the music comes in, you're like, I know what you're doing here, right?

Jon Westover [00:17:36] But I had some of my own experiences where, you know, I felt the love of God. And like one I've written about this, this was, I can't remember, it was one of those things that was maybe published in Meridian or something years ago. But I wrote about an experience as part of the scouting program. We did a lot of road biking back then. So in my mid teenage years we just did tons of biking and went on these big long trips. And there was this one trip, it was about a 217 mile bike ride over two days. So big long trip. We, we prepared for it for a really long time and you know, just like you would prepare for a marathon, you, you work your way up.

Jon Westover [00:18:21] And so, you know, I, my, my family was not well off. You know, a single income home with dad working for the church. You know, we didn't have a lot of money, eight kids. I didn't have a good bike. And I remember just having to, to focus on, on preparing myself for this huge bike ride because I knew I was, I had a crappy bike and if I was going to finish, I just had to like figure out how to do it on my own. And lo and behold, we do the, this is probably when I'm like 14, maybe 15 and we do this big long bike ride.

Jon Westover [00:19:02] And I think I'm dead last. I think I'm like every, there's, this is a big like multi stake, multi area region scouting bike ride. And so there's hundreds of kids riding their bikes and certainly along the way a bunch of people dropped out. But by midway through the second day, you know, I was, I was in the back of the pack of the people who hadn't dropped out. I was the very last person.

Jon Westover [00:19:29] And that was one of those kind of defining moments for me because, because I had to decide am I gonna drop out or am I going to press forward? And I committed to myself I was gonna press forward. But you just get exhausted, you get physically exhausted, you get emotionally exhausted.

Jon Westover [00:19:45] And I felt at the time like I'm having this, like God is riding along with me, kind of helping me get to the next hill or get to the next landmark. And in terms of life lessons, I think it was a tremendous life lesson of resilience and, and persistence and those sorts of things, independent of any sort of other spiritual experience I may or may not have had. But I definitely felt like a closeness, you know, as the term goes, in my extremity, you know, I felt a closeness to God and I felt love and support. And I finished, I was dead last, but I finished, and I was super proud of that. And that was probably the most impactful experience I had as a teenager.

Carah Burrell [00:20:35] That's beautiful. And you mentioned you wrote about that in Meridian magazine, where you're, like, tying it to enduring to the end in other ways and making some gospel parallels.

Jon Westover [00:20:44] I'm sure I made gospel parallels. I doubt I would have said it. I would have framed it in terms of enduring to the end, but I'm sure I talked about just persistence and resilience and those sorts of things.

Carah Burrell [00:20:57] And growing up, did you read the Book of Mormon and take on Roni's promise and feel like you had a witness that it was true?

Jon Westover [00:21:05] I did read the Book of Mormon. No, I never felt like I had that. That kind of an answer.

John Dehlin [00:21:13] Did you want it?

Jon Westover [00:21:14] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:21:15] You tried for it?

Jon Westover [00:21:15] I definitely wanted it in both in Oregon and then when we moved to Missouri. You know, there were. Were opportunities where they tried to. Where leaders would try to reenact kind of like the Joseph Smith experience, where you could have your opportunity to get your big answer. And. Yeah, I just never had that.

Jon Westover [00:21:36] But I also didn't feel like I needed it. Like, I really, really wanted it, but I didn't feel like I needed it because my parents would tell the story of how they came to know the church was true, how they came to have a testimony of the Book of Mormon, and, you know, their profound answer that, you know, they didn't need an answer because they always knew that was their answer to us as kids, you know?

Jon Westover [00:21:58] And so I'm like, well, I guess I've always known. So I guess that's why I'm not getting an answer. And that's kind of how I framed it in my mind.

John Dehlin [00:22:05] Were you disappointed?

Jon Westover [00:22:08] Yeah, I mean, definitely. You consistently have the messaging that if you ask earnestly and you're. You're trying to be righteous, that you'll get an answer. And.

John Dehlin [00:22:20] Yeah.

Jon Westover [00:22:20] And, man, I don't know how I could have been more diligent or focused or earnest, you know, and so it was frustrating that I didn't feel like I got it. And I was never one to, like, bear my testimony in public, ever. I just. I felt like that was too much of a private thing, that if I. If I felt something deeply that was between me and God and it wasn't for. And I was just skeptical, I guess other people would get up. And I don't mean to say that everyone who gets up and bears their testimony is fake, but that's kind of how it felt to me, especially as a teenager, I felt people would get up and share their testimony and talk about how they knew things.

Jon Westover [00:23:02] I'm like, I don't know. I mean, I've tried to do everything I could possibly do and I don't seem to have the assurance that you have. Why do you get the assurance and I don't kind of thing.

John Dehlin [00:23:13] I totally relate to that. And I. It's an intriguing position, as I contemplate then your adolescence, because on the one hand, very orthodox and believing family, also a real strong desire to believe, but also like a BS meter going off, as you say in your. And not getting that. Not getting that confirmation yourself puts you on a bit of untradition, non traditional path.

Jon Westover [00:23:39] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:23:39] And kind of explains this kind of middle way thing. Yeah. So let's get to that. So like, so as you're progressing into, you know, finishing high school, tell us what took you to the beginnings of this middle way approach.

Family Moves and Prepper Culture in Missouri

Jon Westover [00:23:56] Yeah, well, so we, my family moved to Missouri. Before I get into that, more specifically, perhaps one other quick story from Oregon. Oregon's one of those. Salem was one of those unique places outside of the Mormon corridor where we actually had release time seminary.

Jon Westover [00:24:17] There were enough Mormons at the high school, and if I were to wager a guess, I would say maybe 10% of the high school or something like that was LDS. So they had early morning seminary, they had release time, and they had after school seminary. And I did all three at various points in time.

Jon Westover [00:24:34] But I remember at one point, one of the main seminary teacher who'd been there for a long time, he got called as a mission president. He was very young. He got called to Thailand. If I remember correctly, he's a faculty member at BYU now. His last name is Goodman and he was maybe 40 or something like that. He gets called as a mission president. So everyone's excited for him and we're like all feeling special because our seminary teacher got called as mission president.

Jon Westover [00:24:59] His replacement was a woman. And she lasted one semester. And because at the time, I think this has changed, but at the time, if you were married, if you were a female and married, you weren't allowed to be a seminary teacher. So she was single when she started as our seminary teacher. She then met somebody and got married.

Jon Westover [00:25:20] And so she got fired from teaching seminary. And that was odd to me. That was really bizarre, frankly. But the other aspect of it was she didn't get married in the temple. And I remember just thinking, well, wait a minute, like all we ever hear about is how Important it is to get married in the temple. And here's my seminary teacher who, you know, the church has to let go because she's a woman and she just got married and she didn't get married in the temple. What's going on? You know, so that kind of stuff. And then my next seminary teacher, just for that second half of the year before we moved, he.

Jon Westover [00:25:58] Man, I just really. He rubbed me the wrong way. He was very much just always smiling, patting you on the back, but it was all fake kind of a guy. And I don't mean. I'm sure he felt like he was doing what he needed to do to connect with the kids. And I'm sure he did connect with many of the kids, but it just didn't work for me. I really did not like him. And I felt like he was super fake. And at the time, Alanis Morissette was really big. So she was coming to Oregon, she was coming to Jagged Little Pill. Yeah, yeah. And maybe it was Portland, maybe it was Salem, I can't remember.

Jon Westover [00:26:36] But she was coming to do a concert. And he was very. So that seminary teacher, he was very outspoken about how she was influenced by Satan and that we should not go to the Alanis Morissette concert. And if you did, like, you're really on a dangerous path. And he had a little. He had a, like an idea box, a suggestion box that he put in the seminary room. And he's like, if you ever have feedback for me or anything like that, you can put it in there. I wrote him like a five page letter about how ridiculous he was and, like, trying to, like, teach him the doctrine of, like, personal revelation and stuff like that.

Jon Westover [00:27:11] So I wrote this big long letter and I put it in the box. And then I show up to seminary one day and as teenagers do, like, one of the teenagers went into the box and was like looking through it and then found the letter. And I didn't sign it, but they were reading it aloud to everybody. And I'm like, oh my gosh, now everyone's, you know, they. I don't know if they knew it was me, but I was very embarrassed he knew it was me and so he called me over, you know, at lunch to, like, come and meet with him. So we had this big long conversation.

Jon Westover [00:27:41] And, you know, I just, at the time, I'm just thinking he, he's full of it. He doesn't get it. And, you know, so that, that was like one of those shelf things. I'm like, here's the seminary teacher. Who I just don't feel good about at all. And I'm supposed to look up to him. And so. So all that kind of happens, right? And then in the meantime, my dad is. Is getting close to finishing his. His doctoral degree at Oregon State University.

Jon Westover [00:28:14] But he also, my older brother had served a mission in the Kansas City Mission in Missouri. So they went out to pick him up from his mission, and when they were out there picking him up, they toured church history sites. And both he and my mom felt a strong impression that they needed to move the family to Missouri.

Jon Westover [00:28:36] And my dad would talk about preparing for the second coming often. And so they get home and they kind of ruminate on it for a while. And then at some point, maybe, I don't know, it was maybe January, February, something like that. That year, they sat us down as a family and they just said, you know, we've had this.

Jon Westover [00:28:58] My parents, the way they told the story at the time is they both, independently of each other, had like, this visionary experience in their dreams at night, indicating that they needed to move to Missouri with the family to prepare for the second Coming.

Jon Westover [00:29:12] And so we're kind of shocked by that. And they're like, this is very, very special, very spiritual, unique to our family. It's not for everybody. So we don't want to be sharing this with people. This is what we're going to do. And at the end of the school year, we're going to. We're going to move to Missouri. No, no job, nothing like that. We're just going to move to Missouri and. And figure it out.

Jon Westover [00:29:32] And so we did the end of that school year. After my junior year of high school, we moved out to rural northwest Missouri in Hamilton. For anyone listening who happens to be quilters, Hamilton has since become like the quilting mecca of the U.S.

Jon Westover [00:29:49] so if you. If you're into quilting, a Mormon family out in the ward there, they started the Missouri Star Quilting Company, and it took off and they basically bought up the whole town. And now it's just like one big quilting town. And they bus people in for retreats and stuff.

John Dehlin [00:30:04] Is this close to Independence?

Jon Westover [00:30:05] Yeah. So it's about an hour from independence. It's like 20 minutes from Adam ondiamond, 20 minutes from far west. So they're just right in the middle of it, like, really close to where Hans Mill was and the massacre happened. So all of that stuff is just right there. And so we were just right in the middle of it. So we move there. No, my dad doesn't have A job. And they bought a house with what they made from the house in Oregon. They also bought 80 acres of land out by Far West Temple site. And the idea was that they wanted to develop the land as a place to prepare for the gathering. So my dad would always talk about the infrastructure that would be needed when the time comes. When the prophet says it's time to go to Missouri.

John Dehlin [00:30:55] Kind of prepper stuff.

Jon Westover [00:30:57] Yeah. And I wouldn't say prepper in the sense that, like, Tara Westover, for example, she's like some sort of distant cousin to me. My ancestors helped settle Rexburg area.

Carah Burrell [00:31:08] Oh, you have the same last name. I just made that connection.

Jon Westover [00:31:11] Yeah. So like, our family connects there. Right. And at some point, my family went off to Northern California. Her family stayed in the Rexburg area. But anyway, so prepper not in the sense that people often think of prepper in terms of, like, storing guns and having, like, all that kind of stuff, but prepper in terms of, like, very conservative, orthodox. Prepare for the second coming.

Jon Westover [00:31:36] Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And, yeah, they wanted to develop the land so that they could start to build the infrastructure for all the members to come out when the time came. And that was the whole idea. And so, yeah, just very interesting. So that was the context. We get there. And I ended up going to one semester of high school in Missouri and then just graduating early. And then I did one year of college at Missouri Western State University in St. Joseph, which is about 45 minutes from where my parents live. So I would just commute back and forth. And I had a job and would do school and all of that for that year.

Jon Westover [00:32:16] Being in the middle of all of the church history stuff, you know, I felt like I probably had a better understanding and knowledge of a lot of church history and doctrinal stuff just in the family I grew up in, anyways, leading up to that point in time, because, you know, we had family home, evening and all those sorts of things. We always talked about that kind of stuff. But when we got there and we're now living in the middle of all this stuff, that became, like, a huge focus. And so I just remember all sorts of conversations and lessons and both at home and at church, in the ward around all these.

Jon Westover [00:32:55] Everything that happens, you know, in the Doctrine Covenants that happens in those areas. And we weren't that far from, you know, three hours from Carthage and Nauvoo. And like you said, independence. I remember going up and touring the.

Jon Westover [00:33:12] At the time, it was the RLDS temple. They're in Independence now. The community of Christ. And I just remember being. That was probably the first time I'd ever had a meaningful interaction with someone who wasn't, like, our version of Mormon and just being, like, shocked about, you know, like, it was the first time I had the notion that.

Jon Westover [00:33:37] That there might. Someone might feel equally strongly about something different, looking at it differently than the way I did. Now, I did have a lot of friends in Oregon who were religious, and it wasn't a predominantly Mormon area. So even though there were a good number of Mormons in the school, most of my friends were whatever, some other religion, but none of them were super die hard. And so it wasn't the kind of thing that even came up that often. So this really was one of the first times I had that kind of an experience and just thinking, oh, wait a minute. There are actually people who feel equally strongly, you know, about their perspective, and it's different than mine, and it doesn't feel right because it's different.

Jon Westover [00:34:20] But on the other hand, I can see where they're coming from, you know, kind of going through that thought process. And then just like that, half a year, I went to high school there. It's just because it's steeped in Mormon history.

Jon Westover [00:34:37] The locals talk about it. There's lots of conversation about Mormon stuff, and I just heard a lot of things during that time. I was one of two, if I'm remembering correctly, one of two Mormons at the high school there. And so I was very much a kind of a strange, peculiar person, you know, with that being the case. And I would just hear.

Jon Westover [00:35:06] I remember I had one. One teacher at the high school who was very, like, stridently anti Mormon and would say things all the time, very inappropriate, frankly, in a school setting. But he. He would say all sorts of things and, you know, for in large part is the first time I'd ever even heard or thought about anything like that. And so that kind of started me down the path of questioning my upbringing a little bit.

Jon Westover [00:35:32] And then I went to college, and as it does for many people, you go to college, you have a little bit of independence. Even though I was still living at home, I drive up and I would spend the day at the university and take classes from people who thought nothing or believed nothing like I did. And that started to, you know, I started to think about things in a new way and challenge the way I understood the world.

Jon Westover [00:35:57] Something else that happened during that time is the local chapel was really small and there were a lot of transplants. So, like, my family moving from Oregon back to Missouri to prepare for the second coming. That wasn't a completely unique story. There were like half of the ward people had similar types of stories about why they were moving to Missouri. So you had like half the ward that were.

Jon Westover [00:36:20] They'd been there for generations. And then you had like half the ward that had moved to Missouri to prepare for the second coming. And so it was growing and the chapel was small and they had to renovate it. So for about a year while they were renovating, we went to church in the local community center there in Cameron, Missouri. And it just wasn't suited to having, like, good church services. And the sacrament meeting was fine. You're just all in one big room, but then you divide up in all these little groups and, and it's all just in one big room. So you'd have like little section of chairs over here and over here and over here, and everyone's talking over each other.

Jon Westover [00:36:55] It's just loud. And so, like all of the positive social elements that I experienced in Oregon with the church, I just didn't have that there. Part of it is I'm just this angsty teenager. Probably I moved away from my friends. I'm sure that had something to do with it. But now I'm going to church and not feeling at all like, socially fulfilled or spiritually fulfilled.

Jon Westover [00:37:23] And I'm going to college and like, learning new things and thinking about things in new ways. And so that. That was the first time, like, I really started to. To. I guess it allowed me to. To be open to the possibility that maybe things weren't the way I thought they were, right since. So that was like the door cracking open.

Carah Burrell [00:37:44] Carah, I just had a question. So what in the minds of the people who are moving to Missouri, in your family's minds, what was the idea of what would happen during the second coming that you were preparing for? So I don't even really know because I think a lot of people have different ideas. So for non Mormon listeners, can you explain a little bit of what you guys thought was going to happen?

Jon Westover [00:38:03] Yeah, well, I mean, there's, there's in Mormon scripture, in the Doctrine Covenants and in teachings of Joseph Smith, he declared that area to be Zion. And we don't talk about it that way now. We talk about, you know, Zion is wherever you are, and you build up Zion in your local location. But my dad was very literalist when it came to that notion of no, Zion is a physical place. It's in northwest Missouri. And there will be a time where the saints will be required. The faithful Saints will be required to return to Missouri in preparation for the second coming.

Carah Burrell [00:38:40] Even though the church is a global church, by this point, that people from Africa, New Zealand, everybody is going to have to get on a boat, on an airplane. Is that the idea that they literally think, you know, I guess, whatever, Yeah.

Jon Westover [00:38:53] I mean, it doesn't even make sense, but yeah, I mean, that's, that's the idea that in previous generations, that was a commonly held belief and understanding, and it persisted with my father and certainly a lot of people who moved out there.

John Dehlin [00:39:08] I mean, for, for those who aren't really familiar with Mormons and Latter Day Saint tradition, like, we literally, when the church was formed in 1830, eventually it was named the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, because like the Jehovah's Witnesses and others, early Mormons were like, expecting Jesus to come any moment. And so Joseph Smith absolutely was preparing the members for the literal second coming of Jesus, likely in his lifetime. And, and like you said, named Independence, Missouri, of all places, not only as the, as the land of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, but as. As the, the place where Jesus would come.

John Dehlin [00:39:50] And up until about 1890, even after Joseph died, Mormons were still thinking that Jesus would come by then. And it wasn't until, you know, Jesus didn't come by 1890, and the federal government was bearing down on the church, and the church realized it had to give up polygamy and kind of reinvent itself, that the church started shifting away from a more millennialistic mindset and more towards Zion. As Zion dwells within us, instead of Zion, is Independence, Missouri, where we all need to go because Jesus is coming any minute. The church, you know, in the early 20th century, started pivoting away from that and really has wanted to avoid that ever since, because, you know, the Jehovah's Witnesses have gotten stuck in this sort of mindset of like, okay, okay, it's 1878.

John Dehlin [00:40:40] Okay, no, it's 1912. Oh, oh, no, it's night. And you just get in trouble because you get these false prophecies that then don't happen, and then you look dumb and your prophets look dumb. And so it's. It's just like polygamy. The Mormon Church wants to get away from this millennial sign of the times kind of mindset. But as I was growing up, Even in the 70s and 80s, Joseph Feeling Smith and Bruce R. McConkey were still very much fueling this fire of like, what are the signs of the times? What does it say, in Revelations, you know, when is it coming? And as a youth growing up, I.

John Dehlin [00:41:13] I wanted to know when the second coming was, and I wanted to live for that. And so there's always going to be this strain in Mormonism. Unless you just divorce yourself from all the New Testament revelations and all the millennialistic utterances of early Mormon prophets, you're always going to have this strain. And the church is probably annoyed by it, but they can't completely divorce itself from it. And so now in 2021, you've got the preppers, but your parents were kind of the precursors to the preppers. And it's kind of fringe conservative Mormonism, but it's always been there and it always will be there in one form or another. You know what I mean?

Jon Westover [00:41:53] Yeah, yeah. And so, like, Adam on Diamond is not something you ever hear about now. Right. But it's a place. It's about 20 minutes from where my parents live. And we would go out there and we'd have youth activities there. We do priesthood commemoration activities as a ward there.

Jon Westover [00:42:12] There was one time where the young men's leaders, we like, did a camp out there, and then they, like, set us loose for two hours on a Saturday morning to try to have our own spiritual awakening in isolation, kind of our own Joseph Smith type of an experience like those types of things. It all happens there. The idea in Adam on Diamond is that's where Christ would return and bestow all of the key. All the keys would be returned from Adam through all the.

Jon Westover [00:42:41] The different dispensations of prophets which return the keys to Christ at that time after he'd come back for the second Coming. So the Valley of Adam on diamond was, you know, is still considered a sacred place, though I don't think it's commonly talked about or understood for most younger people.

Carah Burrell [00:43:00] So the people there that really believe in this, what is their rationale of why the current church leadership doesn't pay more attention to it, doesn't emphasize it the way that they emphasize it?

Jon Westover [00:43:10] I'm sure they would all have kind of their own answer to that question. I know something I've heard from my dad. Whether it's this specifically in relation to this question or something like how to make sense of the gospel topic, essays, or anything else where they feel like the church is getting away from the rigid orthodoxy that they think is appropriate, it tends to be because they're like, well, it's just PR spin. It's for. It's for the outsiders because, you know, don't cast your pearls before swine kind of an idea. That's my suspicion, is what a lot of them would think.

Jon Westover [00:43:46] But, you know, I'm sure some have angst about it. I've heard my dad for as faithful and orthodox as he is, you know, he also hasn't been shy about speaking up about things that he's been frustrated with in the institutional church, even though he's always supported the Brethren and the Prophet. And he says Russell M. Nelson is his favorite prophet ever.

Jon Westover [00:44:12] So that's all great. But yeah, that's something I think they have to wrestle with. And I don't remember the source, but it was probably five or so years ago. And I remember learning about Dieter F Uchtdorf traveling out to Missouri to some of the historical sites and going to Adam on Diamond and he didn't even know about it. Like, he had no idea. Right. And so he's an apostle and he claimed to have not known anything about all of that segment.

Carah Burrell [00:44:44] Is that like in a video somewhere, like in an interview or.

Jon Westover [00:44:47] I don't remember. I just remember it being super striking at the time when I heard it.

Carah Burrell [00:44:52] That is fascinating.

Jon Westover [00:44:53] And it doesn't surprise me. I mean, he. I mean, most Mormons today probably don't give Missouri or Adam on diamond or Far West a second thought ever, almost. And he didn't. He wasn't in the U.S. you know, he grew up in Germany. So it doesn't necessarily surprise me. And certainly the church has tried to distance itself and doesn't talk about it. It's not really showing up in manuals much.

John Dehlin [00:45:20] Yeah, it's interesting because, like, if there's an article of faith which is viewed as like our fundamental.

Jon Westover [00:45:26] The literal gathering of isra.

John Dehlin [00:45:28] Yeah, we believe in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of the ten tribes, that Zion, the new Jerusalem will be built upon this, the American continent, that Christ will reign personally upon the earth. And, you know, and. Yeah, and it's just. It's all religions, but it's super interesting how religions can just jettison core doctrines and. And leave them behind. Polygamy is one, millennialism is another. Yeah.

Jon Westover [00:45:56] And I remember where we were at. We were kind of, kind of on the edge of the stake in Missouri, and the stake presidents were always people called from kind of the city area, and maybe rightfully so, but at the time it was the Cameron Ward, now it's the Far west ward.

Jon Westover [00:46:21] You know, they were seen as kind of fringy kind of out there. And. And I remember my dad getting out there and the stake president getting Wind of him talking about Zion and talking about these sort of literalistic things and calling him in to interview him about it because he's worried about my dad being too fundamentalist or something.

Jon Westover [00:46:40] And you know, my dad, kind of the way I remember my dad telling the story is, you know, that he tried to inform the stake president about the literal teachings around Zion and the area that they were in. And then he wrote like a 20 page paper.

Jon Westover [00:46:55] I remember him sharing it with me, like a 20 page paper about the doctrine of Zion as a literal physical place. And he shared that with the stake president. The stake president kind of backed off and eventually actually my dad was called as bishop there.

Father's Church Leadership and Mission Preparation

Jon Westover [00:47:12] So my dad has been bishop twice and stake bishop twice and branch president twice and second time being branch president and bishop out in Missouri. And so that's just kind of the context. And after my first semester of college in Missouri, I decided I was going to move back to Oregon for the summer. I was going to work.

Jon Westover [00:47:39] My dad and my two younger, my two not younger brothers, my two older brothers had served missions at that point. And so definitely I felt the expectation for a mission. And I'd always considered I was going to go on a mission. Like it never even crossed my mind at that point that I wouldn't go to college, I wouldn't go on a mission. Like these were just automatic things that I was going to do.

Jon Westover [00:47:59] And for the first time I'm like feeling uneasy about that. I moved back to Oregon and I'm living with a friend, working over the summer, working construction and having the separation from my parents for the first time. Being back, you know, where I mostly grew up and being with my friends and having space and autonomy, you know, that was the first time I really gave myself the opportunity to fully unpack like where I was thinking with regards to the church. And I'd heard enough about various anti Mormon arguments and things like that over while we were in Missouri in particular.

Jon Westover [00:48:40] I did have one friend when I lived in Oregon who, you know, I think he was Mennonite. And I remember him telling me one day in P.E. like in 8th grade or something about how I didn't believe in the correct Christ. So I remember like there were a few times of little things like that happening when I was growing up in Oregon and I was just like, no, that's dumb, of course I believe in Christ. So I just set it aside. But now that I'm back and I had time and I was separated from my parents and had the opportunity, I always wanted to dig into what some people were saying.

Jon Westover [00:49:13] So I went, I remember going to the library there in Salem and I remember going to the forbidden section of the library where they had all the Mormon stuff. I remember checking out a bunch of books. One of the first ones I read was the God Makers. And that was, that was eye opening.

John Dehlin [00:49:29] Yeah.

Jon Westover [00:49:29] You know, and, and it started, you know, I started to recognize, oh, wait a minute, like, so this is where people are getting some of the types of arguments that I'd heard. And I started to look at other things and I had, I still have a friend, actually, he's a Methodist minister. At the time he was. He went to the Methodist church there in Salem. And I went to church with him on a couple of occasions that summer. And I remember just, that was my first time going to a service of a different faith and actually enjoying it. I was like, huh? And it was very Christ centered.

Jon Westover [00:50:08] I'm like, oh, I really like that. And yeah, reading more about some of the other things and reflecting on the approach that I'd seen in terms of the leadership in Missouri, all of that contributed to taking a step back and trying to better understand where I stood. I should also say there was our bishop when we moved to Missouri, I'm sure an otherwise good man, but man, he was not a great bishop. And he was a convert from the RLDS church and maybe three years. He'd been three years a member of the church and was called as bishop with an RLDS background.

John Dehlin [00:50:53] It's gotta be Slim Pickens sometimes back there.

Jon Westover [00:50:55] Yeah, he was a dentist.

John Dehlin [00:50:56] Right, okay.

Jon Westover [00:50:57] Mormon dentist. Right.

John Dehlin [00:50:58] That helps.

Jon Westover [00:50:59] He's still a dentist in that town. But he's not, he, he, he's not associated with the church anymore. But you know, I remember going, that was the first time I ever had leaders that were just off putting. And yeah, other than my, that one seminary teacher, like I'd never had that with leaders in my ward. And so the bishop was off and, and the. Some of the other young men's leaders were off. And it just, you know, that was the first time I was like, really, man, God messed up when he called these people to these callings.

John Dehlin [00:51:32] I think Carah and I both had really fantastic Mormon ward upbringings in our youth. And I think that, at least for me, that really shaped my commitment to the church for decades to come. But if you don't have that during those really formative years, I can see why you jumped on the Middle Way path so early. That, that would, that would be pretty jarring potentially.

Jon Westover [00:51:55] And I did for most of my upbringing. Yeah, you know, I really. I really felt like I had that same really positive experience and. But yeah, it was enough of a, you know, to disrupt kind of my worldview that I was willing to look at it. So by the time I came back, I did moved back to Missouri. After that summer of working and saving up money, I went back to the university. I was living at home for that semester. And then I had to decide, like, am I going to go on a mission?

Jon Westover [00:52:27] At this point, I still. I still, as I recollect back, I think I still had strong faith in Christ. I still was very much a believer in God and Christ, but I did not believe in terms of the other literal beliefs, the faith claims of the church. I did not have a testimony of the Book of Mormon at that point.

Jon Westover [00:52:53] I felt like the church was a good place with good people, but no different than any other good church trying to do good things. So that's kind of where I was at. And then I had to decide, am I going to go on a mission? My dad served in Brazil back when there were like two missions in Brazil.

Jon Westover [00:53:08] My brother, my oldest brother served in Spain. My other brother served in Missouri. And clearly the expectation was I was going to go on a mission. And so I really wrestled with that. And as I think back on it, I like to think that I was on the verge of not going because I would like to think of myself as being independent enough that I could have made that decision. But in reality, I'm not sure. I don't know if that was ever actually on the table because it was just every expectation. You could not be living a good life and not choose to go on a mission.

Jon Westover [00:53:39] And I remember I had one friend who didn't, who chose not to go on a mission, and he was just going to college. I remember having the conversation with my dad. He was asking about him. He went to the same university I was going to, but he was living in the dorms up on campus and stuff. And I remember talking to my dad about him. My dad was bishop at the time. And he's asking, how's this guy doing? I'm like, well, I think he's doing well. He's. He's in school, he's doing a good job. He has this job, he's studying hard. And it seems like he's happy.

Jon Westover [00:54:08] He's living a good life. And my dad just turned to me, he's like, no, he's not. He's not doing what he's supposed to be. Doing, he should be on a mission. So he, by default, that means he couldn't be happy, couldn't be doing what's right.

Jon Westover [00:54:22] And it was crystal clear to me that that was the expectation and there was no other option to, you know, to not go on a mission without having just this explosion within the family. It would have been like the biggest controversy ever if I chose not to go on a mission.

Jon Westover [00:54:41] And so, long story short, I decided to go on a mission. I actually wrote an article, I think it was in the new era I wrote about this, the decision to go on a mission. And I, I've always loved music.

Jon Westover [00:54:56] I always sang in choirs growing up, did musical theater, those sorts of things. And I remember sitting in the sacrament meeting one day and we were singing I'll go where you want me to go. And I, if anyone knows that hymn, I love it. Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a beautiful hymn. And I just got choked up and I just felt, you know, very strongly that, you know, I need to go on a mission. I'm going to go on a mission. I don't have traditional faith or belief in the way that everyone else says that they have it, so something must be wrong with me.

Jon Westover [00:55:31] But every other important person in my life says that they know without a doubt that all this is true. And I'm going to go and I'm going to, I'm going to focus on Christ, I'm going to focus on service and, and even if it's like a miserable two years, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna put up with it. Not all that different actually, to like, you know, how I kind of perceived that long bike ride. I had done like, I did a hard thing. It was, it sucked. It was really hard. But I persevered, I got through it and life went on.

Jon Westover [00:56:05] And in large part, that's how I viewed the mission. I'm like, it may be miserable for two years I'm going to focus on serving people as much as I can and try to get through it. And so I put in my papers, I got called to South Korea in the Seoul West Mission. And In February of 98, I went through the temple and then I went to the MTC and ended up in Korea.

Jon Westover [00:56:33] I don't know if it's still this way, but at the time, if you were going to a Korean speaking mission, you went to the MTC for three months, which was.

John Dehlin [00:56:41] Oh, wow.

Jon Westover [00:56:41] Which was brutal.

John Dehlin [00:56:42] I didn't realize that.

Jon Westover [00:56:43] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:56:44] Because Korean is a super hard language to learn.

Jon Westover [00:56:46] It's a hard language to learn. And three months in the mtc, you know, and I. I'm a pretty straight lace guy. I was, I never was, like, super rebellious other than, you know, people might say I was a little bit rebellious in thought or in, you know, asking questions and those sorts of things, but I never did things I wasn't supposed to do. So I was super straight laced. Someone like me probably should thrive pretty well in the mtc, but, man, it's hard. You sit in those rooms for 12 hours a day studying your brains out and eating too much. And like, it was just. It was just. It was a hard three months.

Carah Burrell [00:57:29] And

Jon Westover [00:57:32] that was actually one of the. Probably the second most powerful personal spiritual experience that I had happened in the mtc. And looking back, I'm like, okay, I'm exhausted. I'm separated from friends and family. I'm trying desperately to make this work.

Jon Westover [00:57:54] I'm trying desperately to believe in all of this. That's the context I'm in. But I have this epiphany one night after. I didn't usually like the speakers that they. They. We do go. Go to classes and everything. And then every now and then once a week or so, they'd have like a devotional. I usually didn't like those speakers because I thought they were just fake. It just seemed like faux spirituality. But there was this woman speaker who came and she spoke to. To a group of, you know, a district, several districts of missionaries. And so it was. It wasn't in like the auditorium. It was like a smaller group of maybe several dozen missionaries.

Jon Westover [00:58:30] And we're having this interaction with her and. And I just remember her being awesome. And she didn't seem fake at all. She just seemed completely genuine. And she just focused on, God loves you, God knows you, it's all going to be okay. And I just remember at that point, I'm like this euphoric experience of just feeling. Yeah, that's absolutely right. I have all these. I have this big laundry list of questions, concerns, none of which have ever been answered.

Jon Westover [00:58:58] And I'm just trying to figure out, am I doing the right thing? Should I be here going on a mission? And as I recall back thinking about that experience, the answer I felt like I had was, you're in the right place doing the right thing. You have lots of really great questions and just keep going. And so that's what I felt like I needed to do. And that one saw me through the whole mission. Really, that experience.

Pre-Mission Temple Experience

Jon Westover [00:59:32] I should also Just briefly, I don't want to get into details about the temple, but going into the temple pre mission and I'm trying to think. I think it was the St. Louis temple. I remember going, like, serving, being part of the St. Louis temple open house previously because it had just opened not long before I went through the temple.

Jon Westover [00:59:52] And then I went, you know, and went to the temple. But I had read the God Makers. Temple prep sucks in the church. Like they don't do enough to explain what you're going to experience. And I had that same experience with like the formal temple prep that happened in the ward. It was just all fluff. You know, the temple's amazing and you're going to love it and it's going to be this great experience and that I. I have memories of my parents packing up their bags and going to the temple in Portland. I went to the, the Portland Temple dedication when I was a kid and I remember my parents always going to the temple. So I have all these expectations. Going to the temple. And then I read the God Makers and I'm like, oh my gosh.

John Dehlin [01:00:34] Yeah, what the crap going to say? If I had read or watched the God Makers prior to going through the temple, I would have had a very different experience in the temple. So, yeah, that's already where you. Your story diverges.

Jon Westover [01:00:48] Yeah.

Carah Burrell [01:00:49] Interview with the Maker of. Do you have an interview with him?

John Dehlin [01:00:51] Yeah, yeah, I did an interview with Ed Decker, the author of the God Makers book and movie.

Carah Burrell [01:00:56] Okay, I'll put that in the show notes.

Jon Westover [01:00:58] I remember.

John Dehlin [01:00:59] Thanks, Carah.

Jon Westover [01:00:59] And I remember.

John Dehlin [01:01:01] I remember when I was at byu, this is just a fun recollection of, you know, some of the freshmen are like, oh, what goes on in the temple? And somebody else goes, I heard that somebody wears a green apron in the temple. And I'm like, no, that's not true. That's God Makers lies, you know, because I had no idea. But you knew, you know, you knew. Yeah.

Jon Westover [01:01:21] And I remember, like with the apron. I remember thinking, is that really true? Is that the case? And like, if I get to the temple and there's green aprons, I remember thinking that. I remember one of the things. Now the God Makers, I never saw the movie at that point. I had only read the book, but it was based on the old temple ceremony. Right. And obviously the church has made a lot of shifts over time to the temple ceremony and they got rid of all the penalties. It's interesting, actually. My father on a number of occasions has lamented the fact that the church has done away with the penalties in the temple.

John Dehlin [01:01:58] He's bummed about that.

Carah Burrell [01:01:59] Yeah.

Jon Westover [01:01:59] Because he feels like they're really important. They taught something very important, and he didn't like that those were taken away. But anyways, so that was the version of the temple that I knew from reading the God Makers. And so I was expecting those sorts of things. And one of the things, it was unclear to me, but I was expecting, and I just had to decide, I'm just going to be okay with this.

Jon Westover [01:02:23] I thought I was going to have to go in naked, and it wasn't far from that. When you go through the washings and anointings, you wear the shield. Back then, it was just an open shield. And so you were buck naked with this poncho thing that was kind of covering you, but you're mostly just pretty naked. Pretty naked. And so it wasn't far from what my expectation was, but it was not quite as bad. And the reality was, in the early days of the church, they were completely naked. So anyways, when you're wearing a silky,

John Dehlin [01:02:58] super light poncho that's completely open on the sides. A thousand percent open on the sides.

Jon Westover [01:03:02] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:03:04] It's pretty naked.

Jon Westover [01:03:05] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:03:05] And then they're touching you with oil in weird places, including your groin. Yep, that's that. It feels weird.

Jon Westover [01:03:12] Yep, it does. So, yeah. So. So I go to the temple and again, everyone, you know, families there, and this is an amazing experience. Everyone who is important to me says this is an amazing thing, and I just never was comfortable with it. And of course, in large part, that was probably due to the fact that I read the God Makers before I went to the temple, but I was never comfortable with it.

Jon Westover [01:03:37] And even going to the mtc, and then you'd go up to the Provo temple once a week. I didn't like doing that once I got to Korea. The Korea, the Seoul Korean temple was not in my mission, even though I was in Seoul West. It was just on the other side of the river. So for the first, like, year and a half, I was on my mission. We never went to the temple because it was in the other mission, my temple.

John Dehlin [01:04:02] In my mission, you weren't allowed to go to the temple while you were a missionary unless you had special permission. So I don't know if they've changed that. But historically, missionaries were told, you're here to do work for the living, not work for the dead. So anyway, that's how it was always for me.

Jon Westover [01:04:16] Yeah. Eventually, my mission president got permission for us to go to the Soul Temple. So I did go to the Soul Temple. I don't know, two or three times while I was there.

John Dehlin [01:04:27] And my mission president used temple attendance as an incentive to get numbers to get numerical baptism. If you got enough baptisms, he'd let you go to the temple.

Jon Westover [01:04:36] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:04:37] It's like sales incentives.

Jon Westover [01:04:39] Yep. And, yeah, there's plenty of that we can talk about here in a moment once I get to Korea. But the mtc overall, you know, I have a good group in my district. I actually had two companions in the mtc, and they were great guys, and we became friends. And so it was a really hard three months, but there were also positives to it. And ultimately, I felt like I had had a spiritual answer. Not to all the long list of questions I had, but am I doing the right thing? Am I in the right place at this time? And I felt like the answer was yes.

Jon Westover [01:05:16] So. So I get to. To Korea, and I remember it was like, the first. The very first, like, meeting with the new mission president. He was a seminary teacher from Salt Lake area, and he had a testimony meeting, so with all. With all the office elders and then all of the new missionaries who just came in.

Serving a Mission in Korea

Jon Westover [01:05:36] And I was not down for, like, public testimonies. It was one thing if you're, like, privately with, like, you to one person saying something, and then I could frame it however I wanted to, and I didn't have to go through the typical points that everyone always says in the testimony. I could do it the way I wanted with an individual. But in this setting, we're doing this. This group testimony meeting, and I distinctly remember, like, not going up, and everyone else is taking their turn, and everyone's looking at me like, westover, it's your turn. You need to get up there. And I did not feel comfortable testifying about the Book of Mormon to know it's true.

Jon Westover [01:06:17] I just completely gave a testimony about Christ and that God loves us and that we need to serve each other and be kind to each other. And my mission president chastised me afterwards because I didn't testify about the Prophet and the Book of Mormon.

Jon Westover [01:06:33] I'm like, okay, well, this is how it's going to be. And being, you know, I was nervous before then, but I thought I could probably kind of do my own thing. And then he kind of, you know, set the record straight in that setting, like, you need to be teaching these things.

Jon Westover [01:06:50] And so I only. Fortunately, I would say fortunately, I only had that mission president for a couple months, and then he finished his term, and then I had a new mission president who was actually a Korean man who also was a seminary and institute teacher in Korea, but very different personalities. And I would say even though I had issues with my second mission president, it was an upgrade from the first mission president.

Jon Westover [01:07:13] But I was just. Not only was I nervous about the Korean language because you. Even after three months in the mtc, you don't come out prepared to go be immersed in Korea and be able to teach. It's just too hard of a language. And so it takes a really long time to get more fluid and comfortable.

Jon Westover [01:07:32] So there's a language barrier for sure, and that was part of it. But I also just really felt uncomfortable after that encounter with the mission president in terms of teaching people, you know, investigators. But when I got to my first area with my first trainer, like, it wasn't a problem because we never taught anybody.

John Dehlin [01:07:54] We.

Jon Westover [01:07:55] We just. We walked around all day, every day, and we never talked to anybody hardly.

John Dehlin [01:07:59] Like, can I ask you about Korea?

Jon Westover [01:08:00] Yes, please.

John Dehlin [01:08:01] So one thing I. I've been a soul, and one thing I noticed were all these crucifixes or crosses all throughout. And I always thought about, you know, when you go to Japan, you don't. I don't. I've been to Japan, too. I don't remember seeing that as much. It's more Shintoism and shrines and Buddhism and ancient kind of stuff. Soul seems super Christian to me, and even evangelical Christian. Is that how you experienced it? And do you know anything about the history of that or why that is?

Jon Westover [01:08:33] Yeah, so it's. It's that way in Korea, too. I mean, there's definitely a lot of Buddhists and a lot of Confucius kind of underpinnings of the culture and the religious, spiritual thought influence and influence. Absolutely. And I don't know. I don't know, like, percentage wise in Japan, what it would be. But in Korea, you know, I was always told that it was around 50% of Koreans were Christian and around, you know, of those who were religious, you know, half were Christian, half were, you know, Buddhist, essentially.

Jon Westover [01:09:10] And so that definitely meant that there were plenty of Christian churches with crosses. And so we saw them all over the place, for sure, and a lot of them were evangelical. And you had other. You had, like, the Moonies that were there during that time as well.

Jon Westover [01:09:29] And so I had this expectation of very few people having any sort of a Christian background. And in fact, in the mtc, the way my teachers had framed it is that most people, you would have to teach them the basics, kind of like, Ammon going to Lamoni and talking about the Great Spirit, you have to find common ground where they're at, because they won't know where you're coming from at all. And there was definitely some of that because there were a lot of Buddhists there. But the vast majority of the people that we were teaching were actually Christians. They had some sort of a Christian background.

Jon Westover [01:10:11] There was also a lot of Jehovah's Witness there. The Jehovah's Witness church was probably as large as the LDS Church. And so you'd see Jehovah's Witness missionaries out all the time, and you'd run into them when you're tracting and that sort of stuff. But with my. With my first area with my trainer, we really just didn't talk to that many people.

Jon Westover [01:10:35] We walked around all day. We did some door knocking. We tried to do some street contacting. And when we did talk to people, my trainer always talked to them. So I went the first three months of my mission really almost talking to nobody, which was not great in terms of trying to develop language ability, but it was great in the sense that I was uncomfortable with how I was going to be teaching people. I remember one time in particular, my trainer turned to me because we were teaching this young man, and he'd never done this before. So he totally caught me off guard.

Jon Westover [01:11:11] But he asked me, okay, Elder Westover, you take it now. You teach the Joseph Smith story. And completely caught off guard. I didn't know he was going to do that. I was not prepared. I felt completely uncomfortable doing it, and I just froze up.

Jon Westover [01:11:26] And he's like, come on, you can do it. You can do it. He's trying to encourage me, and I didn't feel like I could do it. And finally, he's like, the guy we were teaching had some decent English, and he's like, well, let's just teach him in English. Do it in English. It's okay. He'll understand. And I couldn't do it. I couldn't bring myself to do it.

Jon Westover [01:11:44] And he was upset with me after the fact and having that conversation with me about what happened, like, why couldn't you teach the Joseph Smith story? And it was just a combination of all these things. The language barrier, the culture, being new, being exhausted, being uncomfortable with where I stood with my testimony, and not feeling like I had a literal belief in some of these core things.

Jon Westover [01:12:09] And so I just had to try to navigate that. Eventually, my trainer goes home, I get a new companion and my second companion. It was his first time being a senior companion. And his language, as bad as my language was, his language is not much better, even though he'd been out a year or so. And so we were totally in the same boat. And that was the first time that I was like actually involved in decision making about what we were going to do during the day and actually talking to people and all that kind of stuff. So that, that was the first point in my mission where I actually started to feel like I was getting my legs under me and, and kind of figuring things out a bit.

John Dehlin [01:12:51] So what if you had to, if you had to sort of summarize your mission experience and especially highlight whatever important things happened to you that contributed to your kind of journey as kind of an emerging middle way Mormon? Were there any kind of highlights for you in that regard or.

Jon Westover [01:13:10] Yeah, I, I think stories or. Yeah, I, I would say. And I, I want to be careful how I couch this because I don't think there was bad intention from mission presidents or from other mission leaders. I think they were doing what they thought was right the best they knew how.

Jon Westover [01:13:30] I want to try to be generous that way, but I don't know how else to frame it but spiritual and emotional abuse a lot of the time throughout the mission. With my first mission president from the Salt Lake area, I remember him being such an angry person.

Jon Westover [01:13:53] I remember him chastising me for not having a strong enough testimony of the Book of Mormon. I remember him yelling at me because I was, you know, as you do every now and then you have mission president interviews once a month or once a transfer or something like that. And so he'd come to the, to the Stake center and he was interviewing all the missionaries in the district and I was studying my brains out. Like every moment I got, I was trying to study Korean and trying to learn the vocabulary and all of that stuff so I could be a good missionary. And I'm studying my brains out and he walks in and I guess I was like bent over with my hands over my ears.

Jon Westover [01:14:33] I was trying to block everything out so I could just focus. And he saw me and he thought I was sleeping or something and he just ripped into me. He just screamed at me. And his wife was actually in the room and she had actually been helping me like do flashcards or something like that at one point and she, she got on him for it and came to my defense. But that's, that's the framing for that mission president, that he was perhaps a well intentioned jerk and he was just so focused on whatever he, he thought was important. And he did not treat the people around him very well.

Jon Westover [01:15:11] He, I remember on several occasions him talking about how he only needed four hours of sleep. And so he didn't, you know, missionaries are being lazy. His expectation for us, I mean in the white handbook it was always get up at 6:30 in the morning, go to bed at 10:30. His expectation for us was you have to get up at 5:30, but if you're a new missionary, you have to get up an hour earlier to study the language. Oh, and you need to exercise because that's in the handbook. So you need to get up an extra half hour early because that's not included in your normal day.

Jon Westover [01:15:39] So now we're getting up like crazy early, we're all exhausted, and he's always chastising us for not being enough. That's my recollection of that first mission president. So very not positive at all. The good thing I'll say about him is that he was not a numbers person.

Jon Westover [01:15:57] And so we felt no pressure to hype numbers or anything like that. Once he left. The new mission president came in, the Korean mission president. He was a much kinder, more gentle, gentle man, soft spoken. And I appreciated that and that approach on the one hand. On the other hand, he was a complete numbers person. So it was just a trade off and it was numbers at all costs.

Jon Westover [01:16:27] Do whatever you need to do. He wanted us to be strictly obedient and you'd always focus on that. Be strictly obedient, follow all the rules. But if you're not getting your numbers, then clearly you're sinning and you're not being obedient.

Jon Westover [01:16:42] And if you break the rules but you have a baptism, then clearly it's okay because God was paving the path for you to have that or something like that. Right. And so that was this new context. And in some ways it was good. It helped the mission, the mission and the missionaries learn how to be a little bit more proactive and productive and effective and how we went about doing our work every day.

Jon Westover [01:17:10] But it was also arbitrary and capricious in the way he, the way he dealt with the missionaries. And there were missionaries who absolutely would just go to the, like the, the school, the local school and grab kids as they were coming out of school and play soccer with them. And then all of a sudden, lo and behold, they had eight baptisms that month or something like that.

John Dehlin [01:17:31] That's like my mission.

Jon Westover [01:17:32] So there, there was plenty of that. Probably not to the extent that you saw. Yeah, but we went from being a mission that baptized maybe five to 10 people a month to baptizing 100amonth.

John Dehlin [01:17:45] A lot in Asia.

Jon Westover [01:17:47] It's a lot in Asia. And. And some of that was because we were legitimately just being more effective with our time and how we approach things. And the Korean mission president had a good perspective to share about how to connect with people and some of those sorts of things.

Jon Westover [01:18:04] But also, I would say at least half of those baptisms every month were not completely legitimate. They're people that just became friends with missionaries and then got dunked. And so there was one, you know, at some point, I become a trainer, and then I become a district leader, and then I become a zone leader.

Jon Westover [01:18:26] And I had, I mean, moderate success from the number of baptism standpoint. I think I ended up with a dozen or so baptisms on my mission in Korea. But I was always determined, like, I'm never going to do those sorts of things to get someone to join the church.

Jon Westover [01:18:48] I want them to make the choice on their own. I want them to be well informed of what they're doing, and if they decide to join, great. If not, that's fine. And I know some missionaries would get so bent out of shape because someone would choose not to get baptized, and they would feel heartbroken for them. I don't remember ever feeling that way for anybody. I'm like, if they want to join the church, great. If they don't, fine.

Jon Westover [01:19:14] And that was kind of the way I went about doing things. And for whatever reason, I just ended up with a couple different families that ended up joining together and that kind of a situation. So I felt good about that. I'm like, if the family is deciding to join together, you know, that's going to be solid. And. And they're doing it for, you know, what seemed to be the right reasons and whatever.

Jon Westover [01:19:42] But the numbers were always a big push. And that made me uncomfortable, made a lot of the missionaries uncomfortable. And that then trickles down, though, to some of the mission leaders. And I feel like I spent most of the time as a zone leader trying to play interference between the APs, who, for the most part, with a couple exceptions, but for the most part were just arrogant jerks. In my experience, thought that they were like junior general authorities or something, but playing interference between the missionaries in the zone or in the district, and then the missionary, the APs, and the mission president.

Jon Westover [01:20:23] And I felt like I was. I use the metaphor, I felt like I was swimming in the deep end of the pool with Them like, trying to shove me under the whole time. That's just the sense I had as I was moving on through the missionary time.

Jon Westover [01:20:42] It influenced things like health. I remember listening to an episode a couple months ago that you did. I can't remember who it was, but it was missionary experiences. And I was like, yeah, it just hit home and resonated because there were missionaries that were unhealthy and had various illnesses. The mission president, the Korean mission president was adamant that we not go to see a Western doctor.

Jon Westover [01:21:06] And so they have like these little neighborhood clinics all over the place. He said, if you're sick, go to one of these clinics. But usually you didn't get the kind of care that you needed. And some people had persistent health issues. I had persistent issues for about six months, and at one point I was down about £50.

Jon Westover [01:21:30] And the attitude of the mission president was, you're clearly not following the rules, you're not being diligent, stop being lazy, and then God will bless you and you won't be sick anymore. Only after months and months of this and losing like 50 pounds. He then put me in touch with, there's like a roaming medical missionary that was over all of Asia. And he finally put me in, in touch with that guy just over the phone. And he asked, you know, what my issues were and what the symptoms were. He asked what I was doing about it.

Jon Westover [01:22:10] Everything I was doing was because the mission president and, or the local clinic told me, you should be doing these things. He's like, okay, you need to stop doing all of that right now. And he gave me a prescription to a couple other different medications, and within a few weeks I was better.

Jon Westover [01:22:27] And so that kind of a situation, actually, earlier on I hurt my ankle in just playing basketball, pick up basketball with other missionaries. I hurt my ankle. And I don't know because I never went to the doctor. I was convinced that I would get sent home, which would be the worst thing possible in terms of shaming for the family if I told anyone about my ankle. And so I just walked on it for six months. And it was the nastiest thing. And it was either like the worst sprain ever, or I broke my ankle and never got it properly treated.

Jon Westover [01:23:03] And again, I remember showing my, my, my trainer and he's like, ah, you're, you're fine. Just ice it, take ibuprofen, okay? But after six months of icing it and taking ibuprofen and, and having to like, change the way I walk to deal with the pain and those sorts of things. I mean, clearly something's not right. Clearly I should have gone to the doctor. I should have gotten it checked out and had something done to heal, and I just didn't. Because the culture was, if you're sick, if you're hurt, it's your fault.

Jon Westover [01:23:38] And there's always this danger, this fear of getting sent home for something like that. And nowadays it's not an uncommon thing. So many missionaries come home early for a variety of reasons. But back then, I was like the kiss of death if you came home early from a mission. So I was determined I wasn't going to let that happen.

John Dehlin [01:23:54] Sure. So as you reflect back on your mission experience, overall, it sounds like it was yet another somewhat of a disappointment. I mean, I don't want to characterize it all as a negative thing. I think anyone who goes on a mission has really positive reflections about learning a language or a different culture or learning how to do hard things. But I think about it as almost like a third strike. Like. Like you have some weird seminary experiences and some just insincere people where you're questioning their sincerity, Then you've got this bad Missouri ward slash branch experience, and then you've got a mission with some problematic mission presidents. Is that a fair way to kind of summarize your mission experience?

Mixed Feelings and Returning Home

Jon Westover [01:24:42] Yeah. And I mean, the way I made sense of it more and more, it was the old dichotomy. You know, you say, is it the doctrine or is it the culture?

John Dehlin [01:24:51] Right.

Jon Westover [01:24:51] And I said, well, the culture is completely jacked up. The institutional church, like, even at this point, I'm thinking the institutional church has major, major problems. And the culture of the mission was horrible. And I had some really bad mission leaders. But when it comes back to Christ and, like, serving people and those sorts of things, you know, I was. I was still all on board with that.

John Dehlin [01:25:17] Sure.

Jon Westover [01:25:18] And I tried to focus my time as a missionary towards, you know, finding any way possible to serve the people in the communities that I lived in. And that's, you know, so I grew. I grew to love the people, to love the language, to love the culture, and for all the negative experiences. By the time my mission was coming to a close, I asked to extend.

Jon Westover [01:25:42] So I stayed in extra transfer. And I didn't want to go home. Like, not because I wanted to keep being a missionary, but there was a lot of meaning and purpose as a missionary. I didn't want to go back to Missouri. So that was part of it. I loved the culture, I love the people. And I made lots of great friends while I was there. And I had seen people who, who I taught, who had joined the church.

Jon Westover [01:26:12] I had seen it change their lives and make a huge impact. And I thought, you know what? This works for them. And, you know, I would love to stay here and, like, do this the right way to help them have a good experience. I remember thinking that and just being sad when I had to leave.

Jon Westover [01:26:31] But as. As it happens for everyone, that the time comes to an end and I fly home and I end up working in Missouri for about six months to save up money to go back to college and end up transferring to byu. So all of that then leads me up to Provo and landing at byu.

Jon Westover [01:26:52] And I was not thrilled to go to byu. I had a full scholarship in Missouri Western State University. And, you know, I had good time there, but I, you know, I wasn't sure what the future looked like staying in Missouri. So in that sense, I was glad to get out of Missouri. On the other hand, I always had this.

Jon Westover [01:27:17] I was always very nervous about the idea of Utah Mormons. You know, I grew up with the sense that, you know, Utah Mormons were kind of this. This crazy subset of the church. And, you know, being in Oregon, being in Missouri, we had all of our own levels of crazy, I'm sure. But I just. The idea of being in Utah at BYU was something I was very nervous about, but I decided I was going to do it. I ended up at byu and now I'm, you know, taking classes and looking for a job.

Jon Westover [01:27:51] I ended up working for just a couple weeks, maybe a month at like a call center, and I'm just doing that work. In the meantime, I applied at the mtc and then I get a call, and I was thrilled. Not only was it the best paying campus job you could get, so I was happy about that. But I was going to get to teach Korean and I loved the language.

Jon Westover [01:28:14] I was a little more nervous about the gospel side of being an MTC teacher, but frankly, the teachers do like 90% of what they do is language. At least we're in the Korean area. So anyways, I then end up as a Korean teacher at the mtc, and I loved it. I didn't love wearing a white shirt and tie every day because I was hoping I was past that after the mission. But I loved being with the missionaries and grew close to them and seeing them grow and develop during their three months that they were there. And I taught there for three years.

John Dehlin [01:28:52] Okay, and what did you study at byu?

Jon Westover [01:28:55] I switched majors. A handful of Times I was a math major in Missouri. I then switched to business in Provo, and then I actually switched to accounting. So I kind of honed in on accounting. And they have a really great accounting program at byu. Yeah, I was good at it. And, you know, it's this prestigious program, and so I decided I'm going to do this. But luckily I realized that I hated it.

Jon Westover [01:29:24] And so I decided I was going to switch one more time. Actually, what had happened was after that first year at byu, I was also minoring in Korean. And one day, my Korean professor, who was actually, he'd been the first.

Jon Westover [01:29:44] The first bishop in Korea, he was at byu. He was a professor, and he came into class and he's like, would anyone like to return to Korea for an internship this summer? And I had no other plans. I'm like, I would love that. So I didn't know what I'd be doing, who I'd be doing it with, but I raised my hand, I signed up, and I ended up working in the corporate organizational development office for LG Electronics in Gumi, South Korea, which is down near kind of Pusan area, and went back for the summer to do that. That job.

Jon Westover [01:30:17] And that's after doing accounting that year. And after doing a summer internship doing the organizational development, the hr, the. The org behavior type of stuff, I came back and I was like, accounting just isn't doing it for me. I loved what I did over the summer. That's what I want to do.

Jon Westover [01:30:35] And I went to professors and just asked, like, what do I do if I want to do this? Because BYU didn't have a specific program for that at the time. And they suggested I switched to go do, like, psychology or sociology. So I switched one more time, and I ended up graduating in sociology for my undergrad. And then I went straight into my master's program in public administration in the

John Dehlin [01:30:57] business school at byu.

Jon Westover [01:30:59] At byu.

John Dehlin [01:30:59] Okay. Mpa.

Jon Westover [01:31:01] Mpa, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:31:02] Thinking you would do what

Jon Westover [01:31:06] I wanted to do, what I did in Korea. You know, they did corporate trainings, they did executive retreats, consulting type of work. So that's what I decided I wanted to do at that point. And I wanted to do an mba, and I wanted to do it at byu, but the business school wouldn't accept people into the MBA program without work experience.

Jon Westover [01:31:31] You had to have at least, I don't know, three or five years of work experience to get in. But the MPA program, which was. I. I did hr. That was my focus. And half of my classes were MBA classes. Half my classes were MPA classes. And so that was like my workaround because I was able to get accepted into that immediately after my undergrad still with the idea that that's what I wanted to do is that kind of consulting work coming out of that program. And so I, I, once I moved into my master's program, I had the opportunity to start teaching part time at BYU as well.

Jon Westover [01:32:08] I also worked in their internal consulting arm, it's called the Human Resource Development Office. And they're basically the internal consultants doing stuff throughout campus with all those sorts of things. I did that for a couple years and loved it. And so that was my thinking is I'll either end up as an internal person at a big corporation doing consulting work like at BYU or at lg, or I'll end up doing external consulting and going around and doing stuff. I'd also, I spent a year with a consulting firm based out of Orem area during that second year of my master's program as well. So I got some experience with external consulting.

Jon Westover [01:32:49] I knew that that's what I really wanted to do. But the more I had experience with external consulting, the more I realized that that wasn't the lifestyle I wanted to live. They travel a whole lot, you know, often 75, 80 plus percent of their time is travel. And I didn't want to do that by this point. I'm married, I have a child,

John Dehlin [01:33:13] you

Jon Westover [01:33:13] know, so I'm trying to think about family and what I want for the family moving forward. And so that's when I actually decided to go on to get a PhD because I knew I loved doing the research, the organizational analysis, those sorts of things. I love teaching and I figured being a professor would be a great way to do all of that. And I could do consulting stuff on the side. So I applied to the U and did the program there and along the way, you know, did part time teaching different places, started my own consulting business, started doing that on the side and, and you know, eventually finished that program.

John Dehlin [01:33:54] Did you consider like Harvard or Yale or Dartmouth or Northwestern or mit, Sloan, any of those kind of B schools or.

Jon Westover [01:34:03] No, I didn't. I applied to exactly one master's program and that was the MPA program at BYU and I applied to exactly one PhD program and that was the program at the U. And honestly, who knows if I would have gotten accepted to any of those other programs. I had good test scores and good grades, so I suppose I could have had a shot. But family situation was such, you know, that those really weren't possibilities. And even when we went up to do the PhD, you know, kind of the agreement was because I think my wife was ready, you know, for me to be done with school, and she wanted me to go off and have a job and earn money, and we'd been living in student housing and being poor and all that, and I'm like, if we can figure this out, where we can buy a house and do the PhD.

John Dehlin [01:34:53] Yeah.

Jon Westover [01:34:53] And so we moved to Tooele. Tooele, you know, 45 minutes or so west of Salt Lake City. And we were able to get into a house and live there for a couple years, for the first couple years, the PhD program. And that was kind of that. That compromise to be able to continue with school.

John Dehlin [01:35:12] Yeah. All right. So I'm really curious how your faith journey starts to develop and how you start getting more explicitly into the middle way. So where. Where does that start emerging in your story?

BYU, Graduate School, and Seeking a Middle Way

Jon Westover [01:35:29] Yeah. So, I mean, during my time at byu, certainly that's emerging more because I'm trying to. I really did not like either this. The single student wards or the married student wards that we went to. Really did not like those for a variety of reasons. I liked my studies. I liked my work. But more and more, I just felt like, you know, I'm. I'm. I don't seem to be fitting the mold for what I'm seeing predominantly around me in terms of the expectations around belief. I was always very orthoprax.

John Dehlin [01:36:12] Always.

Jon Westover [01:36:13] I did all the things that I was supposed to do, and I looked very much like. To any outside viewer, I'm sure I look to be very orthodox, and I wasn't one to speak up in class very much. I wasn't one to share my testimony.

Jon Westover [01:36:28] So I just kind of do my thing and be quiet. And then I live a faithful life in all the outward things. And that's how I'm going about my time at byu. But as an MTC teacher, clearly there were.

Jon Westover [01:36:48] I was clearly the more liberal, nuanced teacher than was typical. And so that was something, you know, I'd have to navigate a little bit. I remember having conversations with. I can't claim to be, like, overly progressive around LGBT issues at the time, but I remember having conversations with district submissionaries where I hear them, like, making a joke or saying something, and. And I would sit him down and explain, you know, this is not appropriate, and have a conversation about, you know, if. If this is a sin, okay, but that means it's a sin like any other sin. And do we talk about people who.

Jon Westover [01:37:37] Who have a Relationship before marriage who are straight. No, we, we don't, we don't talk about them that way. So we're not going to talk about someone who's gay that way. And I remember having those types of conversations and, and talking about how it's never appropriate to judge and those sorts of things. Even at the time, though I probably had a. More of a more similar kind of attitude towards those types of issues at the time, you know, as I was raised.

Jon Westover [01:38:07] But then I, I go up to, to the U. And I, we moved to Tooele and the ward I'm in, in Tooele, we, we have a bishop who. All I can say is I, I'm sure he was, well meaning, he was probably trying to do the best he knew how, but man, he was a jerk. And again, just screaming like times where he would just yell and scream. And I was a ward clerk at the time and I just remember having instances where he would just come in the room and scream at you for whatever reason. And I remember going to like bishopric meetings and he was just such a command and control kind of a leader.

Jon Westover [01:38:50] And so the room would be filled like in a ward council meeting. The ward would be filled with people from all these different auxiliaries. And no one would say a word because he would snap at them if they did. And so he would just sit behind his desk and people would just wait for him to decide on what they were going to do. And that was the way he led. And he was just a hard person that way.

Jon Westover [01:39:16] And it was hard to feel a good connection in that ward. It was hard to feel a sense of spiritual upliftment in that ward. And then the ward split, the ward split. So he, that bishop went in the other direction with the other half of the ward. And then we got a new bishop. And the new bishop was a kind man and I felt much better about him. And my wife and I were serving in various callings. I was a scout master at the time. My wife was primary president.

Jon Westover [01:39:50] And you know, it was overall a good positive experience at that point. But I'm also doing a PhD in sociology. And you can't go too deep into an academic program like that before you start to challenge all of your assumptions about the world and what makes things work the way they work. And so I already had this big, huge shelf. I already had all these questions that never had been resolved, all these concerns.

Jon Westover [01:40:21] And by this point I, you know, it. I started the PhD in 2005. I really kind of had my first iteration of faith crisis the summer of 97 when I had moved back to Oregon. So, you know, by this point I'm eight years in to this unorthodox kind of a path and now I'm in a PhD program and it's, it becomes very apparent very quickly that there's a lot of other ways to make sense of all the experiences that I've. I had had up to that point, the good and the bad. Right.

John Dehlin [01:40:56] Let me ask, had you. So by the time you had started your PhD program or even a year in, had you been made aware of like Eugene England and Lowell Bennion and Leonard Arrington and kind of the sunstone dialogue strains of Mormonism? Because I haven't heard you talk about that. And then I'm also wondering if you ran into Armand Moss at any point because he's kind of a well known Mormon sociologist. So. Yeah. Anything you want to talk about the intellectual roots of your middle way? Mormonism is interesting to me.

Carah Burrell [01:41:31] Yeah.

Jon Westover [01:41:32] So let me back up a little bit. You know, in addition to some of that stuff I read over that summer back in Oregon, the one mission rule that I really broke was that I would read stuff that wasn't like pre approved mission literature.

Jon Westover [01:41:48] And so I did consume a lot of apologetic materials during that time. I consumed a lot of some of that intellectual Mormonism material during that time. I remember one of the first times that I really started to encounter apologetic materials, actually my branch president in the mtc.

Jon Westover [01:42:17] It was just one of those, it was like a Monday or Tuesday night where you'd have a lesson with the branch president. And so he comes and he teaches us about multiple earthly probations and movement between the kingdoms.

Jon Westover [01:42:32] And I'm like, what? I never heard any of that before. Not that I had any firm literal belief in any of that, but I'd never heard those sorts of teachings before. And I remember writing a letter back to my dad about it. And so then he sent me like a whole pile of stuff at the time. He sent me, you know, stuff from McConkie and Smith and like the Seven Deadly Heresies talk, which I'm sure you're familiar with and like those sorts of things. So I'm reading all those sorts of things and apologetic responses to some of those sorts of things during that time and kind of building out my library of farms materials and that kind of stuff.

Jon Westover [01:43:13] I didn't get exposed to sunstone until I was at byu. So as a sociology student, an undergrad sociology student at BYU, so probably in the 2002, 2003 range, that was the first time that I had read Sunstone. And I remember just thinking it was such a breath of fresh air, being so appreciative to come across it, like, where has this been? Because this is exactly, you know, the way I want to try to approach things.

Jon Westover [01:43:44] I remember reading it was an article by. I didn't know him well at the time. He was in the business school at byu. But Bonnar Ritchie had written a really nice article in. In Sunstone that resonated really well with me. And. And so those types of things that I started to connect with and started to.

Jon Westover [01:44:09] To focus on and realize, you know, at least at the time, I felt this is very. This is doable. Like, people are strident, orthodox believers and they can believe what they want to believe, that's fine. But I can believe the way I want to believe. And as long as I'm living faithfully, as long as I'm doing the orthopraxy, that, like, I don't need to be a thought police for anyone and no one needs to be a thought police for me. So that's the way I was approaching things at that time.

Jon Westover [01:44:41] Yeah. And. But the more I'm getting into, both my Masters of Public administration, I mean, the socio. The sociology undergrad at byu, they're fairly liberal in that area. In the MPA program, they're also fairly liberal, but none of that compares to when you get up to the U. And now in the sociology program up there, I mean, there's like strident, like anti Mormon type faculty in the faculty in that program. And so people would say things specifically related to Mormonism, but also it's just a very liberal discipline. And so you start to get exposed to all that kind of stuff. So by that point, I think I had my. I had an article published in Sunstone, like around 2006, maybe. That was my first time there.

Carah Burrell [01:45:30] And

Jon Westover [01:45:33] so that. Yeah, I guess that that was the point where I was. I was starting to interface with some of those different types of narratives. I was not aware of your podcast at the time. I did. I can't remember exactly when it was around 2006 or 2007, probably that. I remember watching your YouTube video on. On the Reason People Leave.

Carah Burrell [01:45:59] Yeah.

Jon Westover [01:46:00] And I remember as soon as I watched that, I'm like, yeah, that. That's exactly right. And I was so sick of hearing all those reasons shared over and over and over again. And you articulated so well.

John Dehlin [01:46:13] I mean, the stereotypes, the stereotypes, false

Jon Westover [01:46:16] stereotypes, the false stereotypes. Yeah. So, yeah, you explained it so well. And I remember sharing that with people. I'm like, yeah, this is, you know, this is what we're doing wrong and this is how, this is what we needed to change and do better and

Carah Burrell [01:46:29] want to see that video. I'll put that in the show notes as well. Yeah, that's a good one.

Jon Westover [01:46:33] Yeah. And I mean, at the time I was very much. Again, I'm married in the temple. I was married in the San Diego temple with a very conservative Orthodox family. My wife is from a very orthodox family. And we have, you know, by the time we're, I'm starting my PhD program, I have two kids. You know, we're doing that thing, we're active and all of that. Right. So I'm very invested in trying to figure out a way to make all of this work in a way that I'm comfortable with, where I feel like I can be genuine. And again, authenticity is important to me. It always has been.

Jon Westover [01:47:09] I don't like people being fake and putting on a facade. So how do I do that in a way that I can be true to myself and still maintain, appreciate the values of my upbringing? There are many really good things about my upbringing, really great people from my upbringing, all of that. You know, I don't want to discount any of that.

Jon Westover [01:47:34] And so now I'm familiar with some things like Sunstone. I'm familiar with some things like that video of yours early on. And then I get an offer to teach part time at BYU in the business school. So I'm at this point, I think it's about 2007. I've done a couple years of my PhD program at the U.

Jon Westover [01:47:58] And we're still living in Tooele. I'm teaching at the U. I'm teaching at byu. So we decided to move and we moved to Lehigh because it's right in the middle and we're splitting time between the two universities. And Lehigh was another eye opening experience because it was just so, so conservative. I don't know, you know, I don't want to get into like politics, but Eagle Forum level conservative politics.

John Dehlin [01:48:31] Yeah. Rosika.

Jon Westover [01:48:32] Yeah. And so just like tons of people in the ward and in the neighborhood, like next door neighbors, people across the street who are like prominent Eagle Forum people, for example. And it's just very, very orthodox, conservative Mormon, where we were at in Lehigh. So we move in the first year or so. Like we're kind of flying under the radar a little bit. I'm just kind of doing our thing. I'm continuing with my PhD program and I Remember actually having a temple recommend interview with my bishop at the time, and he was concerned because I was in a PhD in sociology program.

John Dehlin [01:49:12] Yeah, that's sketchy.

Jon Westover [01:49:14] Yeah, it was. Right. So he. He's like probing and asking more questions because of that. And. And so we kind of have a longer conversation, a longer interview, and ultimately he's like, okay. He's like, I think you're. You can have a temple recommend. Okay.

Carah Burrell [01:49:29] Okay. For dumb people like me. What is the. What was he suspicious of? That you're doing a PhD in social. That you were too liberal, just not orthodox, you were going to toe the line.

Jon Westover [01:49:39] Yeah.

Carah Burrell [01:49:39] If he gave you a calling, like, what's the connection there?

Jon Westover [01:49:43] Yeah, I. I think definitely it's not exclusively the case where the church teaches you need to be politically conservative. That's not true. But culturally, it's the dominant perspective. Right. And so in a place like where we were living, where pretty much everyone was super, super conservative politically and religiously, they saw. He saw that as with skepticism. Like, can you be a good Mormon and be liberal? I don't think he thought you could be.

Jon Westover [01:50:14] And so that was part of it. Part of it was where the. Where the. The inner. The temple recommend interview kind of opened up was when you get to the question about, do you associate with any group that's contrary to the teachings of the church?

Jon Westover [01:50:32] And that's been kind of reworded, I think, recently. I don't remember what the new wording is, but essentially that was the wording at the time. And, you know, so we then we end up exploring, you know, a PhD program at the University of Utah in sociology, because that is super sketchy. That's like affiliating. That's like you're in the belly of the beast and you can't. Like, how can you do that and be in good standing? So that. That was. Those were the concerns.

Jon Westover [01:51:01] And so we explore that. And he ultimately felt satisfied that I'm okay, so he gives me the temple recommend. Now, remember, you know, we were talking earlier about, I was never super comfortable with the temple, and that's still the case now.

Jon Westover [01:51:15] I didn't like the temple. I would go with my wife, and we would go periodically. Once we were having kids, that wasn't even that often because we had little kids, and it's hard to get away when you have babies and such. Um, but we would on occasion go. And I. I just never liked it. I. And I all. I just didn't have.

Jon Westover [01:51:37] Not only did I not have the literal beliefs in A lot of those things, but I didn't. Like, I couldn't care less about the literal beliefs. Like, they just didn't matter to me at all. Like, I couldn't even bring myself to think they were important. By this point, I'm like, I don't even want to try to believe these

John Dehlin [01:51:54] things,

Jon Westover [01:51:56] but I still valued the upbringing. I still valued the heritage. I still valued the culture, the social components, those sorts of things. And so we'd still be involved in those ways.

John Dehlin [01:52:09] So for me, when I was going through all this there, I mean, I had exposure to Sunstone and Eugene England and Lowell Bennion at byu, but then it was kind of like slow burn until I kind of went into heavy faith crisis mode. Then I was willing to ask the question, is the church true or not? I concluded that the church wasn't what it claimed to be around 2001. And from there, when I got into, again, Eugene, when I rediscovered Bill Barlow and Eugene England and little Bennion and all that, it was in an attempt to carve out a middle way for myself after losing all my belief.

John Dehlin [01:52:53] Is that. How did you have that. That moment of like, yeah, I'm willing to ask if it's really true. And then sort of that arrival at the conclusion that it's at least. It's at least not what it claims to be, if not not true, you know?

Jon Westover [01:53:12] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:53:12] Did you have that in any of this up until this point in the story or. Or.

Jon Westover [01:53:17] I mean, for me, really, it was when I was 18.

John Dehlin [01:53:20] Okay.

Jon Westover [01:53:20] And so that was the point. I'm not sure I fully allowed myself to ask the question, is the church not true? But I certainly. I had such a pile of. Of questions and concerns, and I definitely at that point thought that the church wasn't everything it claimed to be.

Jon Westover [01:53:45] And I definitely, at that point thought that the only way I could make it work at that point was you have this bucket for doctrine. You had this bucket for culture. And I put almost everything in the culture bucket. Almost the only things that were in the doctrine bucket were Christ and Christ teachings, and pretty much everything else was in the culture bucket that I. I went on that way for a really long time, you know, for that next eight years or so, and through the mission and through my time at byu, my time teaching at the mtc, and then by the time I'm, you know, I have this crummy bishop in Tooele, we moved to Lehigh, you know, I'm really, again, I definitely don't have a traditional belief.

Jon Westover [01:54:36] I definitely. I think there's major, major problems with the institutional church at this point, for sure. But I'm also committed to being a faithful Mormon at that point too, if that makes sense.

Maintaining Belief Without Literal Faith

John Dehlin [01:54:52] And consciously in your own mind, having concluded that the church wasn't true or wasn't what it claimed to be.

Jon Westover [01:55:00] Yeah. Certainly not true in the sense that it said it was true.

John Dehlin [01:55:04] Mm, yeah.

Jon Westover [01:55:05] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:55:06] And not uniquely true, like, only true. You had you abandoned that at some point?

Jon Westover [01:55:10] Yeah, yeah, I think I abandoned that by my mission.

John Dehlin [01:55:14] Okay.

Jon Westover [01:55:15] But I still felt it was good, good organization, a good institution, despite the problems. One of the, one of the realizations I had while a missionary, again, was deeply flawed. Institutional characteristics and leadership.

John Dehlin [01:55:31] Yeah.

Jon Westover [01:55:32] And culture, like those things were deeply flawed. I, I really recognized a lot of that at that point. I continued to see it when I was at byu, when I was teaching the mtc. Same thing, man. Like you'd have all of these, these general authorities in embryo. Just self important people, both admit staff and administrators at the MTC that were like, trying to jockey and position themselves for those future opportunities, but also the teachers, like so many of the teachers, thought of themselves that way too. And that, that just completely bugged me to death.

John Dehlin [01:56:05] Okay. So I, I'm. This is super interesting to me, so I'm just going to keep asking some questions. So. So when, when I was going through this, I was conscious of Phil Barlow's book of Thoughtful Faith. I was conscious of Armand Moss and his work the angel and the Beehive.

Jon Westover [01:56:23] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:56:24] I was conscious of kind of Eugene England's essays.

Jon Westover [01:56:27] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:56:27] And then I had read Kaim Potok, who, who talks a lot about kind of Middle Way Judaism.

Jon Westover [01:56:32] Right.

John Dehlin [01:56:33] And so by the time I start Move to Logan and start Mormon Stories podcast, I'm like conscientiously saying, yeah, I don't want orthodox and fundamentalist Mormonism, but I don't want to leave the church. But I'm also aware that there really isn't a middle way. And so in my mind I'm like, hey, let me, Let me team with Dan Witherspoon and Sunstone in dialogue and let's see if we can carve something out. Not thinking that we were like true pioneers, because obviously I was aware of the, the people that had come before, but it wasn't as explicit. I didn't feel like it was as explicit. Like, hey, everyone, let's get on the Internet and let's see if collectively we can carve out a middle way. I don't know that. I don't know how much that had existed.

Jon Westover [01:57:15] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:57:17] Because even Bushman and Barlow and the others probably still believed in golden plates, you know. Right.

Jon Westover [01:57:22] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:57:22] And certainly there, there weren't people willing to say, yeah, the church isn't true, but it's a good way to live. And I'm going to say that publicly and try and see if we can build a community around that. So that's, that's kind of what was going through my mind. It was a very conscious thing by, by 2004, 2005 for me, in fact, I even had it in my mind, maybe a reform Mormonism.

Jon Westover [01:57:47] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:57:48] Could emerge, hopefully not as a schism that was explicitly out of the church, but maybe within Mormonism we could forge a reform Mormonism, you know, so, so that the umbrella could be as big as possible.

Jon Westover [01:58:00] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:58:00] And I think I remember reading in your outline.

Jon Westover [01:58:03] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:58:04] The idea of you wanting a big ten or a big umbrella kind of Mormonism. So I guess I'm, I guess I'm kind of curious. 2005, 2006, is that explicitly in your mind yet? And, and also the risks involved of trying to do that.

Jon Westover [01:58:20] Oh, the risks involved. I'm not sure. I was probably.

John Dehlin [01:58:22] Because you weren't trying to be a public figure.

Jon Westover [01:58:24] No, no.

John Dehlin [01:58:24] Or write about this.

Jon Westover [01:58:25] No, I wasn't. So I was probably pretty naive to the risks. But yeah, I, I definitely was a proponent of big tent Mormonism and was all about having inclusive wards where everyone was genuinely, genuinely and authentically needed, wanted, valued with opportunities to contribute in meaningful ways regardless. Like no thought policing. People show up. They do, you know, they can contribute in a way that's comfortable for them. And like, I know that generally speaking, it's the more kind of traditionally, literally orthodox members are probably the ones that, generally speaking, are the ones that put in the majority of the service in the church and hold the big callings and do all those sorts of things.

Jon Westover [01:59:13] But I lived a very Mormon orthoprax life up to that point. I'd served a mission, committed myself, and devoted myself to over two years without traditional belief. And I just didn't buy into the idea that you couldn't be a meaningful, committed, loyal contributor to the church without having literal belief. Like, I just, that didn't make sense to me because that wasn't my experience.

Jon Westover [01:59:40] And I thought if I can do it, other people can live that way too. And the reality is, I'm sure in any ward that the vast majority of the people who show up, they may stand up a testimony meeting and say they know these things with an Assurance. But vast majority of people, when they say they know, it just means that this is good to them, it's useful to them, it's helpful and meaningful to them. And so the vast majority of people who attend weekly in any ward probably aren't like super literal or completely orthodox in every single way. And so we don't need to thought police.

Jon Westover [02:00:20] Let people think what they want to think, and if they want to come and contribute, let them contribute. So the big tent Mormonism idea was definitely something I bought into. I mean, really during the mission, but certainly my time at byu and, and now I'm in Tooele and I'm. I'm thinking that I remember having a discussion with, with my older brother who was, you know, very, very conservative.

Jon Westover [02:00:48] And I remember having a conversation about, like, walking to Missouri if the prophet asked you to, like, coming back to, like, my family moved to Missouri, so he, he, he was living out there with his family near my parents, and they were visiting us in Tooele. And I don't even remember how it came up, but he, but we're having that conversation. I'm like, I'm not going to. Like, if the prophet told me to do that, I wouldn't do that. It's like, sure you would. No, I really wouldn't. Like. And he was shocked. Like, well, no, that's stupid. Like, there's no way I would do that.

Jon Westover [02:01:17] And if the prophet told me to do that, he's wrong. And I remember having an intervention with another brother who lived in kind of the highland area at the time, because this was maybe around 2007 ish. I think it was pre 2008 election. And we were just having a political conversation.

Jon Westover [02:01:36] And he was shocked that I wasn't like, planning on voting Republican. And they staged like a mini intervention for me during the halftime of the BYU football game.

Carah Burrell [02:01:47] Most Mormon thing I've ever heard in my life.

Jon Westover [02:01:49] Like, they were just shocked that I.

John Dehlin [02:01:50] Oh, the most Mormon thing is when he said that his dad was disappointed that the penalties were removed from the temple. That was. So this is second for me. It's the second most Mormon thing I've ever heard.

Carah Burrell [02:02:00] On top of already moving to Missouri.

John Dehlin [02:02:02] Yeah, this is kind of super Mormon. This is not average Mormon. This is like.

Jon Westover [02:02:07] But they really. My family really. I mean, I wouldn't say everyone, but. But the general consensus was certainly at the time that, like, you couldn't be a good Mormon and not vote Republican. And the fact, like, I remember my brother asking me, you know, what do you think? Who do you Think the prophet's gonna vote for? Like, I don't care.

Jon Westover [02:02:28] That was my response. And they were just dumbfounded by that. They couldn't believe that. And so anyways, again, none of that has a place in the church. I don't think it shouldn't. Like, we don't. That's a cultural component that I just think is so dumb. And I would love for that if the church can be a truly healthy and psychologically safe place that anyone can show up and contribute in a way that's meaningful to them and not have to worry about how literal or non literal their belief is or how conservative or liberal they are or whatever. So that's what I'm thinking around this time and wishing that that could be the.

Jon Westover [02:03:06] The case. I also just want to throw in a quick note. My stake president when we were in Lehigh or when we were in Tooele was Laura Lee Hall.

John Dehlin [02:03:19] And we've interviewed on Mormon Stories podcast. Let's go ahead and add that to the show notes. And worthy hall was. Was a. Not only a stake president.

Jon Westover [02:03:30] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:03:32] But also was chief architect for the LDS Church and for temples for, I don't know, probably designed 30 temples. Amazing human being. Love, Lori Lee.

Jon Westover [02:03:44] Yeah. And at the time, she was presenting as a male. She was a stake president. And I just remember her being tremendously kind and compassionate, like the best leader I'd ever had. I just remember very distinctly feeling that way. And in part, perhaps I was in contrast to my jerk bishop, who happened to be the bishop, by the way, when Laura Lee was excommunicated, it was that bishop who had become the new stake president who excommunicated her.

Jon Westover [02:04:13] And he was a real piece of work. But Laura Lee was just wonderful. And I remember one specific instance that I'm sure she's forgotten about long ago. But we, we'd always been poor, living in student housing, and now we're in a house. And the very first Christmas we're like, we're going to get a real Christmas tree. Because we've never been able to have a real Christmas tree. And so I don't even know how to do that. We go to Home Depot or whatever to get a Christmas tree. And I'm not, not sure of the protocol. It's at night, no one's around, so I just grab a tree and I just start dragging it through Home Depot to the register.

Jon Westover [02:04:46] And that's not what you're supposed to do, but that's what I did. So I'm dragging the tree through and Laura Lee's There. And I recognize her, and that's my stake president. And she just gives. She could have said something like, that's not what you're supposed to do, stupid.

Jon Westover [02:05:03] She could have said anything like that. But she just gave me a big smile and said, merry Christmas. And that was Laura Lee. Right. And in contrast to other leaders that I've had that have been kind of jerks.

Conservative Ward Life and a Local Abuse Scandal

Jon Westover [02:05:18] So anyways, now. Now we're in Lehigh and very conservative ward. It's so interesting because this was the first time I'd ever heard a stake president refer to himself as the prophet of the stake. And I don't know how common that is in other places, but that's how he framed himself, and that's absolutely how he led the stake.

Jon Westover [02:05:42] You do not question. Just like you don't question the prophet, you do not question the stake president. He pronounces edicts and you do them with exactness.

Carah Burrell [02:05:51] Is he saying that explicitly, like in state conferences or.

Jon Westover [02:05:54] Yeah.

Carah Burrell [02:05:55] Wow.

Jon Westover [02:05:55] Yeah. And when he came to the ward or whatever. So he was very adamant that what he says goes, what he says goes. No questions.

Carah Burrell [02:06:02] He's got the powers of discernment. He's got the keys over this entire stake.

Jon Westover [02:06:06] Yep.

Carah Burrell [02:06:07] That's intense.

Jon Westover [02:06:08] Yeah. And so that was definitely, you know, as much as there were some kind of interesting things that happened in the ward in Missouri, and there were very, very kind of millennial prep type members. They're very orthodox. I had never experienced that. That. That was very bizarre to me.

Jon Westover [02:06:32] And that. So that's this, the culture and the dynamic in this new stake in this new ward. I have that interview, the temple recommend interview with the bishop. Ultimately, I get the recommend and he says, you're fine. And we're just kind of flying under the radar. We've lived there for about a year and then I get a call to meet with the bishop.

Jon Westover [02:06:52] And I learned over time that he's a very nice man. But at the time, all I knew was that he seemed scary and he seemed grumpy. And so when I got called to go meet with the bishop, I assumed that I was getting called in to be chastised and raked across the coals for something. I think I was like the 11 year old Scout leader or something at the time. And he was a big time scouter, so I'm sure I was doing something wrong. He was going to berate me for it. So that's what I'm assuming is going to happen.

Jon Westover [02:07:26] He pulls me in and actually it's not that at all. He has A son who is getting close to missionary age and he felt like his son needed some, like some mentorship. And so he wanted to talk to me about that. So that's what it ended up being. I'm like, huh, okay, well, that was more positive than I thought I was going to be.

Jon Westover [02:07:43] Really though, I think he was feeling me out a little bit more. And then like three weeks later, I get a call from the stake and they extend a call for me to serve in the bishopric because the second counselor was moving out. They needed to replace him.

Jon Westover [02:07:58] And so I accept and I end up in the bishopric with him for the next three and a half years or so while he finishes off his term as bishop in that Lehigh ward. And I kind of consider that again, like my mission in a lot of ways.

Jon Westover [02:08:19] I knew there were a lot of things I would be uncomfortable with being in a bishopric, but I knew I would enjoy working with the youth and I knew that I would enjoy serving the members and getting to know the members in the ward, all those sorts of things. And so that's what I decided my focus would be. And I decided I needed to try to ease the burden of the bishop because bishops have a lot of burden. A lot is expected of them. So my job would be to try to ease his burden so that he could focus on the needs of the members more.

Jon Westover [02:08:51] And so we accept. Now at this time, I'm still in my PhD program. I'm working like four or five part time jobs, different places to pay the mortgage. My wife's doing a master's program at the time. We have, I think, four kids with the fifth on the way.

Jon Westover [02:09:08] And so it wasn't a minor thing to accept the calling, not to mention the fact that I was a little uncomfortable about it just from the faith perspective. But my wife and I turned to each other and decided, yeah, we're going to do this.

Jon Westover [02:09:27] And for the most part, I would say it was a really rewarding experience of just focused and devoted service. And frankly, it helped to distract me from the stress of PhD program. I'm sure you have experience with that, John, but PhD programs, it's a gauntlet. And you're going through comp exams and you're going through defenses and there's just lots of stress. And I don't know about you, but I had to deal with a lot of politics in my PhD program.

Jon Westover [02:09:59] So just all of that, right, you're dealing with all of that. And frankly, as much as time as it took, it was a reprieve to not have to worry about that stuff and just, like, focus on serving the people in the neighborhood.

John Dehlin [02:10:13] Yeah. Any distraction you can have in a PhD program is welcomed.

Jon Westover [02:10:17] Yeah. Yeah. And the way. The way they approached it hasn't been this way. In other words, I've been in. But they were very adamant. Their interpretation of the handbook was very particular, and they preached it as gospel. Like, their interpretation of the handbook was exactly the way it needed to be.

Jon Westover [02:10:38] And they insisted that if you were going to extend a calling or ask someone to give a talk or to even pray in church or in addition to doing youth interviews or anything like that, that that should always happen in the home.

Jon Westover [02:10:51] So never should that happen at the church building. You're never calling people into a room at the church to do those things. You're making appointments after church on Sunday and you're going to visit people in their homes, which in a lot of ways was good, I thought. I mean, it took a ton of time. I've talked to other people who've served in bishoprics, and they talk about the time spent extending callings and releasings and asking people to give talks and all those sorts of things. And I'm like, oh, my gosh. The amount of time that we had to spend was a ton of time.

Jon Westover [02:11:25] But it meant that I was in, like, over the course of that three and a half years, you know, I probably was in every single home in that neighborhood at least a couple times, just in that interpersonal dynamic with families. And I liked that. I liked chatting with them and talking about their needs and their concerns and their struggles and all that kind of stuff. And I. I really enjoyed that. So that was all meaningful and fulfilling to me.

Jon Westover [02:11:53] I also appreciate it from the standpoint that I never was put in a position where he had to interview a youth, like, by themselves. At the time, I didn't think anything of it. They just said, that's the way you're supposed to do it. Make sure that the parents are there. And so that's what we always did.

Jon Westover [02:12:11] And I appreciated that. I learned later. I don't know if this is because of what happened earlier, but I learned later that there was a major sex abuse scandal in the ward just prior to when we moved in Lehigh. In Lehigh, yeah. And so I'm not sure, was it a seminary instructor? No, it was an older teenage youth in the ward who perpetrated abuse on a bunch of kids and a bunch of families over an extended period of time.

Jon Westover [02:12:46] And it was just dealt with, you know, at the local level with the Priesthood and they didn't want anyone talking about it. They threatened members with their temple recommends if you speak up about it or if you share anything about this with anyone, if we catch wind of you talking about this, you're going to be disciplined. You're going to have your temple recommend taken away and perhaps you'll be disfellowshipped.

Jon Westover [02:13:11] And if they talked about it, yeah, like they. Again, the stake president was my way or the highway, you know, very strict that way. And he, he had said, this is what we need. We are not going to talk about this. We're handling it. The priesthood is handling it.

Jon Westover [02:13:27] We're not going to talk about it. And so the first man, the first two years or so that I was in the ward, I had no clue because nobody talked about it ever, even though it had hit like five families, tons of kids, and nothing had really happened to the abuser.

Jon Westover [02:13:43] Now the abuser was an older teenager, not an adult. So I recognize that's a little bit of a different situation, I suppose, in how someone might try to handle that kind of a situation. I don't claim to know the right way to handle that situation, but threatening people to be silent was not the right way to handle it.

Jon Westover [02:14:05] And when I found that out, I just couldn't believe it. And I remember that that stake president, as his time was up and he was, he was going to leave the role and a new stake president was going to be called. He kind of did his final, his final round of ward conferences, going and visiting and talking to everyone. And that's when I, when I learned about it, because he got up and he spoke and in ward conference, in veiled terms about this incident and about how everyone needs to make sure that they're following the priesthood leaders and so forth. And it was so strange and like, what is he talking about?

Jon Westover [02:14:49] Where is he coming from? And so I had to ask around afterwards and that's when I, you know, people very hush hushed, like nobody wanted to say anything. And finally I got people to start to tell me. And then I went to the bishop and asked him, like, what was happening here.

Jon Westover [02:15:01] And, and so anyways, it had, it was the previous bishop who then moved out as soon as he was released. And then that stake president, the way they handled things was just horrible.

John Dehlin [02:15:16] We just did an episode yesterday about the church covering up sexual abuse scandals. And one of the dark things I've realized is how it must be. One of, One of the reasons the church continually is hiring lawyers to be general authorities is because they Know the law and they know how to fix things. They're good at fixing things and you need that. And I think the people that rise in the ranks as general authorities aren't necessarily the most pastoral Christ like people. They're the ones who know how to handle crises, how to keep it quiet, keep scandal from emerging, how to shut it down, how to silence people and how to, how to make sure that as few, there's a minimal collateral damage when a scandal breaks out.

Jon Westover [02:16:06] Yeah, because protecting the good name of the church is first and foremost.

John Dehlin [02:16:10] Right. And the war chest, like you don't, you don't want lawsuits bleeding the war chest like the Catholic Church. Right.

Jon Westover [02:16:16] Yeah. And so, you know, there's that hotline that people can call. And I remember having, not with my current bishop, but with the previous bishop in my current ward. I remember having this debate with him a little bit. There was some other sex abuse scandal cover up in Idaho at the time it was in the news. And so this, I don't know when this was, maybe five years ago or something. And I just, as I do sometimes now, I just from time to time will email my leaders and say, hey, I just want to let you know this is unacceptable. This is where I stand.

Jon Westover [02:16:47] These are the boundaries. If this ever happens, this is what I would expect to happen. And that bishop, who's a good man, very kind man, he pushed back and he's like, no, no, the church is very proactive about this. They have a hotline I can call if there's ever an issue. And I don't think he'd ever had a reason to call it. So I don't think he actually knew what the hotline was. And I tried to educate him a little bit on what it was and just pleaded with him, like if you ever become aware of anything, you do not call the church first, you call the local authorities first and foremost.

Jon Westover [02:17:25] I mean, it's not only for the victim, for the sake of the victim, but for the bishop too. The church will throw the bishop under the bus in a heartbeat to protect the good name of the church. And we've seen other examples of that. There's an example of a bishop down in St. George a number of years ago where that happened, who's just trying to do what he thought the church wanted him to do. Totally gets thrown under the bus. And you know, so I've had those conversations on occasion with various leaders. And certainly the case, the situation in Lehi was just so horrific and the impact was so wide, sweeping with some of Those members, it just, it should never happen. And in this case, it wasn't a leader who abused these children, but it was leaders who covered it up.

John Dehlin [02:18:17] Yeah, yeah. So going back to kind of your time in a bishopric, there's this idea of like seeing the sausage get, get made and how that can affect your faith. So you already were a progressive, liberal, non literal, middle way Mormon. I'm guessing that being in a bishopric might have exacerbated that or strengthened that.

Serving in the Bishopric as a Progressive Believer

Jon Westover [02:18:41] Yeah, sure. And by that, by that point, you know, I, I, I've heard stories about people who serve in bishoprics and they're a little bit concerned about like the process of, of the inspiration behind callings, for example. Right. I had no romantic notions about that when I went into the bishopric.

Jon Westover [02:19:02] You know, I felt like it, you know, it was the bishop and the bishopric thinking about the needs of the ward and the members and who's available and just making a pragmatic decision. And that's how I assumed it happened. And that's the experience I had as we made callings and extended callings to people.

Jon Westover [02:19:24] So that lived up to my expectation, but I had no romantic notion about that. And I know a lot of people do and a lot of people who haven't served in a calling like that think that's, you know, there's some magical inspiration that happens. And it's, I mean, so much of inspiration is just confirmation bias manifesting itself. So you, you're inclined to think a certain way and then someone pops into your head and then you seek confirmation for that person being God's choice. And lo and behold, that person is God's choice.

Jon Westover [02:19:59] And that happens so often. And I don't want to take away from people who feel like they've had spiritual experiences in extending callings or receiving callings or whatever, but I didn't have those notions either. When I received the calling to be like, I didn't have any like notion that I was somehow super special because I got called to be in the bishopric. I was available and the bishop felt good about me, so he called me to be in the bishopric, you know.

John Dehlin [02:20:29] So where did things go from your time in the bishopric? Like, I know at some point, like in 2006, 2007, I had taken a sabbatical from the church, but then was afraid to leave it. So I started stale DS around 2007. I know that Prop 8 is probably going to factor in to your journey by 2008. So where did your middle way Mormonism journey lead?

Jon Westover [02:20:55] Yeah, I, and for the Again, for the most part, I enjoyed my time in that ward. I enjoyed my time in the bishopric. I enjoyed the members and the community components. I like. I really like that. And we had a bunch of young children. They had lots of friends to play with. Like, all of that, I thought, was really a positive thing.

Jon Westover [02:21:17] And I can't remember the year, but Boyd K. Packer had given his talk and conference, kind of his infamous talk that they ended up changing after the fact. Maybe around 2007 or so that happened. And I remember being so upset, and I remember I was not one to openly challenge my wife, often for the sake of harmony, but that was a time I'm just like, he can't say that. That is horrible.

Jon Westover [02:21:46] And that's not even consistent with the church's current teachings. He can't say that. And I was so upset. And then I remember going to the next bishopric meeting, and, like, the whole meeting ended up being people defending Boyd K. Packer, and I was beside myself. Like, I just couldn't even believe people were defending the indefensible.

Jon Westover [02:22:06] It was just. It was a horrible thing that he said, and it was a horrible stance to take. And I felt that at the time. I feel even more strongly that way now. Prop 8 is revving up around this time.

Jon Westover [02:22:21] I'm pretty liberal and more progressive, much more progressive than I had been earlier in my life around LGBT issues. I really had no exposure to it, you know, earlier in my life and didn't really start even thinking about it until, you know, I was. I was studying sociology, frankly, and. But by this point, you know, Boyd K. Packer had given his talk, and then I remember I was traveling to Portland, Oregon, for a conference the spring of. Oh, it was before the. It was probably spring of 2008, so the spring before the Prop 8 vote.

Jon Westover [02:23:00] And the guy sitting next to me on the plane was just a super nice guy. I'm not super outgoing, so I don't typically talk to people on the plane when I'm traveling. But he was just nice. And we just said hi and started chatting a little bit, and he just started opening up to me. And pretty soon it became apparent that he was lds.

Jon Westover [02:23:22] And in fact, he lived in the ward that I grew up in in West Salem, and so we had connections there. So we started talking about all that. And the more and more we got into it, though, it started to seem more and more like it seemed like he was gay, but was not yet comfortable telling me that he was gay.

Jon Westover [02:23:39] After an hour, hour and a half of chatting he told me, you know, that he's gay. And then he started to open up to me about the challenges with his family. He had been married to a woman and had children, had gone through all of that, ended up getting divorced, had a partner at this point, disowned by his family, not allowed to bring his partner home for family visits, all of that. Right.

Jon Westover [02:24:08] And I had heard stories like this before this point, but this was the first time I had any direct interaction with someone who had lived it, and just the heartbreak of it. And I remember just hoping. I was like, you know, the people in West Salem and the West Salem ward, they're really kind, good people. I think they might be okay with you coming with your partner to church. I remember saying that to him, and he's like, oh, I don't think so. And I don't know if he'd had previous experiences where he tried or if he just felt like the church was inhospitable to it.

Jon Westover [02:24:44] Certainly Prop 8 wouldn't have helped with any of that. But if I hadn't already come to the conclusion that the church was dead wrong on LGBT issues by that point, that. By that point. At that point after that conversation, I was 100% convinced that what the church was doing was completely damaging and destroying families unnecessarily.

Jon Westover [02:25:08] And. And then I came back and served, like, another three years in the bishopric after that. And that was hard for that reason in particular. And so every chance that I got, I tried to just teach love and compassion and inclusivity and all those sorts of things. And I thought, for the most part, is well received by the members. And I felt like I had developed good relationships with members in the ward. I'd been in, you know, their homes many times, and our kids played together, and. And I'd served them for hours and hours and hours on end. And then the time finally came that the.

Jon Westover [02:25:53] It was time to change out the bishopric. So the bishop gets released, and all of us get released. The new bishop is called the bishop. The new bishop had actually been our home teacher. And I felt like I knew him decently well and thought he was a nice guy. And so, you know, we're just going to transition to this new stage. That's fine.

Jon Westover [02:26:16] And then to me, at the time, it seemed inexplicable. Though now I look back and I'm like, well, I mean, I shouldn't have been so surprised. The new bishop was very conservative, both politically and religiously, socially, and he deemed me unfit. He deemed me dangerous.

Carah Burrell [02:26:37] And

Jon Westover [02:26:39] so I Went from being in the bishopric and trying to influence things where I could in a positive way to like the bishopric gets released, everyone else gets new callings. Some of them are high priests or some of them get called into high council, council or various whatever callings. And I, I don't get a calling for a year, no calling at all. And people ask for me, different auxiliaries ask for me to serve in their areas. And the longer that goes on, you know, the more people start talking. And there's got to be a reason, right? Like maybe I had an affair or maybe something, something must have happened if I'm not getting a calling. And, and it really was just that this new bishop just felt like, he actually told me at one point, you know, that I'm, I'm dangerous. Dangerous to the youth, wolf in sheep's clothing.

John Dehlin [02:27:33] All that just because you weren't speaking out?

Jon Westover [02:27:35] No, I was just, I was just more progressive and liberal. I really wasn't speaking out.

John Dehlin [02:27:40] Your private beliefs?

Jon Westover [02:27:41] In my private beliefs, I mean I there in lessons at church and sometimes and things I would say I would definitely teach things in a more nuanced way. So I wouldn't like do the McConkie approach and have definitive kind of answers to things.

Jon Westover [02:27:58] So that was enough for him to feel that I was not safe. And it threw me for a loop because at this point I thought I had figured out a middle way because I, I'd been living it, I'd been committed. I just served in a really high demand bishopric calling, I mean, easily 20 plus hours a week serving in that calling. That it was one of those things where they just constantly had more and more demands for our time. And you know, there's a never ending list of things from the handbook that you're supposed to be doing. And so no matter what we did, we always weren't doing enough and we were always expected to do more.

Jon Westover [02:28:37] And I was always very conscientious and I always wanted to try to do, do my best. And so it was just a tremendous amount of time. But I felt like they trusted me and I felt like I had delivered and I felt like I figured it out. I can do this. It was a meaningful experience. I enjoy the community, I enjoy the members. I feel like I've been able to make a contribution all while not having any of the traditional literal beliefs until I get released and then the new bishop treats me that way and it's just bishop roulette, of course.

Jon Westover [02:29:16] And in that case, I happened to have a bishop who saw me as dangerous. And that's when I realized that's when I kind of had the second stage of my faith crisis, that the church doesn't seem to want me or can be hospitable to me. And I wasn't even speaking out at this point at all. Not on social media, not anywhere. I was just being more nuancey in how I taught things and being a little bit more flexible. And that was enough, you know, to deem me unsafe.

Carah Burrell [02:29:50] Is there an example that you can think back to? Because I never was a progressive Mormon, I never understood this nuanced space. So I'm trying to think through in my head and probably just be faster if you can give me what would be an example of a lesson that you're supposed to teach or any subject that comes to mind where there'd be the one regular Utah county, maybe conservative way that it would be taught and then your more nuanced approach to teaching it. Do you have an example that comes to mind?

Jon Westover [02:30:17] One specifically that comes to mind? I remember I was asked to teach a gospel doctrine class, and it must have been like the church history year. And the lesson was like the milk strippings, apostasy lesson. Thomas Marshall, Thomas B. Marsh. And I was asked to teach it, and I agreed before I knew what the lesson was. And I remember, like, having that sick feeling when I actually looked it up, because a lot of the lessons are about, you know, you can focus on the love and the kindness and acceptance and follow the example of Christ. And you can do that with most lessons without too much trouble. And that's what I would do regardless of the topic. That's almost always what I did. But this particular lesson, like, it is just so much all the tropes about apostasy. Right. All the things that you talked about in that video that we talked about

Carah Burrell [02:31:11] earlier, People just don't leave for good reasons. I kind of stuff.

Jon Westover [02:31:13] Yeah. All the negative stereotypes about and reinforcing all the negative stereotypes about why people leave the church and go apostate. That's what the lesson is. And so I get home and I'm looking at it. I'm like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe I just agreed to give this lesson. And I almost called back and said, I'm sorry, I actually am not available. I thought I was. I'm not. But I thought about it a little bit more. I'm like, no, I'm gonna teach it my way. So I end up pulling up, like, every progressive quote I can find from Hubie Brown and Other people about thought and dissent and just people being really like.

Jon Westover [02:31:53] There's the one quote from Hubie Brown where he talks about he doesn't really care what people think, but that they think. Right. That's one example of a quote. But I pulled up as many of those types of quotes as I could find, and that's how I taught the lesson. I actually started the lesson out by.

Jon Westover [02:32:09] I started the lesson out with an open discussion about why do you think people leave the church? Right. It's fairly in line with actually what the manual said, but my intention was to kind of give the members the rope to hang themselves with. So they started saying all these things. I start writing them up on the board, and then I started.

Carah Burrell [02:32:32] What were the things, by the way? I'm just curious.

Jon Westover [02:32:34] Lazy, wanted to sin. I don't know. All those types of typical stereotypes, just

Carah Burrell [02:32:40] like the negative bad faith interpretations of

Jon Westover [02:32:42] a lot of that. Like nobody would leave and be able to find happiness and fulfillment outside of the church. And if they leave, it's because they're doing something bad or they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing. Whatever. Right.

Carah Burrell [02:32:54] There's no good reason to leave the church. So, yeah, okay.

Jon Westover [02:32:57] And so those are all the things people are saying and people are sharing a few stories about people they know who have left the church. And so I'm. I'm kind of jotting these things down, and then I start to share some. These quotes and I start to ask, well, so how does that fit with some of what we're talking about and some of the things you've shared? And I put on the board and slowly it starts to unravel a little bit, and some people get very uncomfortable and a couple people walk out of the room.

Carah Burrell [02:33:22] Walk out of the room?

Jon Westover [02:33:23] Yeah, because, you know, I was, in a subtle way, challenging their narrative and their belief right around apostasy and was suggesting it's never our place to judge, it's never our place to try to. There's, I mean, multifaceted reasons why someone may choose to go to church or choose not to go to church. And for us to assume that we understand what someone's going through when they make either decision is really silly. So we shouldn't. I mean, basically we shouldn't be judging, period. And so I was kind of throwing the whole premise of the lesson under the bus, but I was doing it in a subtle way and I was using quotes from general authorities to do it.

Why People Leave and How Jon Stayed

Carah Burrell [02:34:01] And you'll definitely find doublespeak. I've listened to general conference once, where you'll have one speaker say one thing about why people leave. And then, you know, Uchtdorf will be like, it's not our place to judge. You know, that, that quote from Uchtdorf where he's like, there are many church leaders who've made mistakes in the past. You know, you'll have this. You can definitely cherry pick whatever you want. So that's. That's interesting that people are like, I came to church to reinforce my narrative, not to hear various opinions on this.

Jon Westover [02:34:30] And I completely cherry picked, like, the. More.

Carah Burrell [02:34:33] The challenge. Yeah.

Jon Westover [02:34:34] The progressive, nuanced types of quotes. I completely cherry picked. And I ignored any of the more hardline types of things because I was trying to make that point. Right. And I completely. I almost completely ignored the lesson. And I, I also, I. I shared like, a more accurate history of the Thomas B. Marsh story, because that's a story that get. I don't know who Thomas B. Marsh was. Obviously he lived ages ago, but I just feel like we're doing him wrong by portraying him this way. Like, there's all these church leaders. I remember once telling my parents that William Law was a hero of mine, you know, and they were, like, dumbfounded by that, how he was.

Jon Westover [02:35:16] He was an apostate, he was an enemy and a. To the church and betrayed Joseph. He stood up, he spoke out when everything could go poorly for him if he did. So that takes courage. And I was just so impressed. And that everything he said in the Nauvoo Expositor is true.

Jon Westover [02:35:38] That is something that I think is worthy of holding up as an example. Not Hiram supporting his brother just because he's gonna be loyal no matter what. And so anyways, I'm digressing, but that was, you know, I remember having that kind of a conversation. But in this particular gospel talk doctrine lesson, you know, there were some people who got up and walked out because they were uncomfortable. I think for the most part, it was decently received.

Jon Westover [02:36:05] But those types of experiences were enough, I think, for that new bishop to say, this guy, we're not putting him in front of anyone as a. Not even as a primary teacher. Right. Like, I wasn't in any calling.

John Dehlin [02:36:19] Yeah. In my experience, you teach those types of uncorrelated lessons. A third really appreciate it, a third are asleep, and a third are super offended, and they go complain to the bishop. And so my experience is that trying to be a progressive, an active, progressive Mormon, you get flagged at some point. You're always trying to manage your capital.

Jon Westover [02:36:41] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:36:41] You're always trying to not be viewed as a threat. But inevitably, if you, if you try and have an open, candid discussion, even if it's still faithful, you eventually get flagged as a threat. And, and then the bishop wants to minimize your exposure influence to the youth and other members of the ward. And it's the type of thing that led Dan Witherspoon while he was in Tooele. Yeah. To be denied the opportunity to bless his own son, give his own son the priesthood. And it's just a hard Pre. Even pre 2015, it's, it's a really hard road for many. And it sounds like that your experience was very similar to Tom Kimball and Dan Witherspoon and Janice Bengler and Natasha.

Jon Westover [02:37:24] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:37:24] And me and so many other people that tried that middle road.

Jon Westover [02:37:27] And, and I really thought that it was going to work until that point. Right. At that point, that. That's what I call my second faith crisis.

John Dehlin [02:37:36] You said 2008, is that right?

Jon Westover [02:37:37] Yeah, yeah. Around. No, no, no, no. When I was released from the bishopric. So this would have been 2011.

John Dehlin [02:37:42] 11. Okay.

Carah Burrell [02:37:43] Yeah. Okay.

Jon Westover [02:37:44] So, you know, literal belief, that was long gone.

John Dehlin [02:37:48] Yeah.

Jon Westover [02:37:48] But you know, feeling like I can contribute in my own way and I'll be valued in the church, I was holding on to that. And I just had a calling in the bishopric and felt like I'd been given a lot of opportunity to serve and, and it was meaningful to me.

Jon Westover [02:38:04] And in the meantime, I finished my PhD, I got hired at UVU as a full time faculty and things were going well and we're living the good life and I thought everything was good. And then all of a sudden I'm deemed untouchable and unsafe by this new bishop.

Jon Westover [02:38:22] And that rocked me. In some ways that was harder than the initial faith crisis because I had always been committed this notion that only the literally faithful, those with literal dogmatic belief, are the ones that will serve in the church. Again, that's just not my experience. After a mission, after serving in multiple callings, serving in the bishopric, I was every bit as committed as anyone else. And I extended lots of callings to lots of people. People. And some of the most orthodox faithful people were just as likely to turn down callings or to accept and not do anything as anyone else. So my experience has been that that's a bit of an artifact, a cultural artifact, that it's a self fulfilling prophecy that manifests itself in words.

Jon Westover [02:39:19] And lo and behold, if you treat someone like they matter and you give them an opportunity to contribute in a meaningful way, they will tend to do it regardless of what their literal level of belief is. If there's value to them, right? If it is actually something that serves them and is helping them in their life, if that plays out, I don't think it matters. And so I just don't think thought policing is healthy in the church.

Jon Westover [02:39:50] And I don't buy into the narrative that only the most dogmatic people are the ones that are going to ultimately serve. And you get outside of the Mormon corridor and you go to other areas of the country. Not only did I grow up in other areas of the country, but I've also traveled a lot for work and been in other parts of the country or in other countries and seen the church operate. And in most places outside of the Mormon corridor, maybe with my area, you know, of the church in Missouri where I live, where people are preparing for the second coming, most places, they're just happy if you show up.

Jon Westover [02:40:31] Like, if you just come and contribute, they don't care. They're not going to question you. They don't care what you think. They just are happy that you show up, that you can contribute, and they're going to make you feel welcome because they need you. They need, they need people to help.

Jon Westover [02:40:48] And that's what I wish it was like in Utah County. And maybe it's just a numbers game. Maybe we just have wards that are big enough where people can step back and fly under the radar or just get comfortable doing nothing or whatever. But again, I, you know, it's been my experience that if I'm, if I'm willing to contribute, it doesn't necessarily mean anything about my literal level, level of belief.

A Second Faith Crisis and Its Aftermath

John Dehlin [02:41:13] So when you say second faith crisis, you had kind of already lost your literalistic faith. So what, what were you losing? Were you losing faith in kind of your optimism that there might be a, A role of influence for you within Mormonism? I don't want to put words in your.

Jon Westover [02:41:31] Yeah, that. No, that's exactly it.

Carah Burrell [02:41:33] Okay.

Jon Westover [02:41:34] I was losing faith in the notion of the community and that I could be valued in the community. And heartbreaking. Up to that point, I thought I was able to figure out that niche for myself. And I had served in good faith for a long time.

Jon Westover [02:41:52] And I always consider I may not have traditional faith in terms of the literal beliefs. I consider, consider myself, you know, a more of a metaphorical, symbolic, figurative type of a believer. I'll take stories and I'll take teachings that are, that are, that taste good, you know, that are fulfilling to me. And to my soul. And I'll take those things and I'll disregard the rest. And that, for me, should be plenty. It's certainly plenty to encourage me to live a good life. And I live a faithful life. I do all of the Mormon things. I live a very orthoprax life, and I choose to. I don't feel any coercion to live that way, and I do that, you know, so I'm a faithful person, even though I'm.

Jon Westover [02:42:41] I suppose I'm faithless in the eyes of many. And so I just balk at this idea that somehow, just because I can't convince myself to believe literally in things that I think are demonstrably false or not, I'm just not capable of believing in that doesn't mean it doesn't have value. And the analogy gets shared. I've heard it before, I think, on your podcast, but I'll share it again. You know, like believing in Santa Claus. I love Christmas. I think few people love Christmas more than I love Christmas.

Jon Westover [02:43:15] And I. I've never believed in Santa Claus. I grew up in a home where we just didn't do Santa Claus. So even when I was a little kid, I didn't believe in Santa Claus. That never hindered my ability to love Christmas or to think it was an awesome time or to get into the spirit of Christmas or whatever. And even when I started to move away from.

Jon Westover [02:43:38] When I started to move away from literal belief in a lot of the core tenets of the truth claims of the church, I still held onto more literal belief in Christ and God. And over time, even that started to dissipate. So even now, you know, I look to Christ as an example, the teachings of Christ as an example, and I'm happy to emulate this figure of Christ in how I live and try to live. And I'm happy to do that. And I think that's been very meaningful for me.

Jon Westover [02:44:09] I'm completely uninterested in whether or not there's a literal resurrection or any of that other literal stuff. If he literally, you know, if the historical Jesus is exactly what is portrayed in the Scriptures, or if there's actual miracles and all those sorts of things, I just don't care. Like, it doesn't matter to me one bit. It's irrelevant to me because what matters is that I have these principles and these teachings, and these are the things that I think feel good to me and how I want to try to live my life.

Jon Westover [02:44:39] And so if I'm living in good ways to impact people for the good be a positive impact in my community. What's the problem with that? Right. And that's what I keep coming back to. And at that, I thought that was acceptable at this point in the church. And then I realized maybe it's not acceptable.

John Dehlin [02:45:00] Yeah. When I wrote that essay, how to stay in the church after a crisis of faith. So I. I left for a year, got scared, came back, and I'm like, I'm gonna do it and I'm gonna help everybody else do it. So I started the stale yes. Website and then I wrote like an 80 page essay. How to stay in the church after a crisis of faith.

Jon Westover [02:45:18] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:45:18] And it was like, I'm gonna solve the model. And so I put that out there and a lot of people love it. It's like how to. How to do a temple recommend interview when you don't literally believe. How to participate in Sunday school, what types of callings you might do. You know, how to talk to your bishop, like all those things. How to keep your marriage together. Like, I thought I was doing something really important. And at first so many people resonated with it. And then like, add a year or year and a half to that, and I just saw so many people wash out of that.

John Dehlin [02:45:46] Of that approach. Because after time, it's just you. You. It's like the church is a blood system. The church culture is like a blood system. And a liberal gets identified as a virus. And as soon as they're flagged as a virus, all the white blood cells just start attacking it. And who wants to live in that environment over time of being perceived as a threat and constantly being minimalized, marginalized, ostracized, even in soft, shunning ways. Right. And it made me go to Brian Johnson, who just passed away this year, by the way, the kind of one of the. The guy who took over stale DS and ran for a long time.

Jon Westover [02:46:29] I didn't know he passed away.

John Dehlin [02:46:29] He just passed away this year. Vallejo, I think was his username. Something like that. But anyway, I had to go back and at the beginning of the essay, put a big asterisk and say, john de Lynn no longer endorses this. This way of life.

Jon Westover [02:46:46] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:46:47] Partly. A, because I saw so many people wash out of it. B, because I was struggling with it myself. And see. Because so many believers were like, see, John does it and all these other people do it, so you can do it too. And I realized that was just an unfair.

Jon Westover [02:47:03] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:47:03] Burden to put on people. So it's, it's interesting to see you in sort of an independent sphere, just really following the same kind of path that so many other people that I've talked to have. But that's still 10 years ago. Yeah. So by 2011, I know it's about to come. In terms of the broader Mormon sphere, Kate Kelly's about to emerge with ordained women.

Jon Westover [02:47:24] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:47:25] The church is about to come out with its gospel topics essays. You know, Kate and I are about to get our summons for excommunication. So I'm curious where your story goes after your second crisis of faith. You clearly didn't leave it because you're still in it, so.

Jon Westover [02:47:39] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:47:39] Where did it go from there?

Jon Westover [02:47:40] Well, I mean, much of. Well, really all of the family dynamics that existed before this point existed after this point. So I still had all the reasons to try to figure out how to make it work, but it was a crisis. I felt very disillusioned.

Jon Westover [02:48:00] We ended up leaving. I went on my first Fulbright the end of that year, and we moved to Minsk, Belarus. So we had five children at the time. My wife and I move our kids to Minsk. We're living in the capital of this post Soviet country, and it's one of those places where, I mean, they have like a branch.

Jon Westover [02:48:25] There's maybe four branches in Belarus, the whole country, and there's one branch in Minsk, and people travel from all the surrounding communities to come in. So people will travel an hour, hour and a half to come into church on Sunday. Where we didn't have a car when we lived there, but the public transportation was pretty good. So we would walk to the train station, catch the train, switch train stations, go, you know, take another train, and then walk to the church. It would take us about an hour to go to church on Sunday.

Jon Westover [02:48:52] But a lovely branch, about a hundred strong, just good down to earth people just trying to, you know, in this post Soviet country, with all the challenges associated with that, trying to live their life and trying to find solace in the church. And as much as had been disillusioned from the way things happened in Lehigh, now we're in this new environment. And by the way, the political environment in Belarus is such that foreigners are not allowed to participate. So we can go to church. So my family would go to church, but we're not allowed to talk, pray, we're not allowed to give lessons or anything like that.

Jon Westover [02:49:31] Very strictly prohibited. You get. You get shipped out if you do that, if you get caught. And so, you know, I'm continuing with that. And so we just show up just to go. And there was actually an older missionary couple. They were service missionaries. They lived within a few minute walk of where we were living. We became friends with them.

Jon Westover [02:49:51] They would go walk with us, you know, and travel to church, to there and back every Sunday. And they became good friends. And it was just. It was a really. Actually a nice environment to encounter. After that year, that hard year that I had in Lehigh.

Jon Westover [02:50:10] There was no expectation for me and there was no one wondering what was wrong with me because I wasn't serving, because I wasn't in a calling. It was just us, you know, trying to find meaning in the community of the church.

Jon Westover [02:50:24] Even going and not. We didn't speak Russian. So going and not understanding what's happening other than just knowing the hymns and those sorts of things. And we would just go and kind of do our own thing and sit in the back and people were very nice to us and all of that was. Was lovely and it was a really good experience.

Jon Westover [02:50:43] So we come back from. Oh, I should also say so the other thing that happened while we're in Belarus, actually this, this was the first time I'd been exposed to. To apologetic literature. I'd read stuff like evangelical literature, God Maker, some of that kind of stuff. I'd read some. I'd been aware of Sunstone and read a lot of that. I eaten that up. I love that.

Jon Westover [02:51:10] But I was completely oblivious to the podcasting world until Belarus. We go to Belarus. And that time while we were there, I consumed like a thousand hours of podcasts between Mormon expressions, Mormon stories.

John Dehlin [02:51:24] All of them started in 2012.

Jon Westover [02:51:27] Yeah, all of it. Like I'm listening to all of it. And there wasn't much talked about that I wasn't familiar with at that point. But it just felt so validating to have like there's this whole huge community of all these other people. I had never been on NOM or Stale DS at that point. So that was the first time I had gone onto those boards.

John Dehlin [02:51:51] That's for those who don't know. NOM is New Order Mormon, which no longer exists, but it was a big deal at the time.

Jon Westover [02:51:57] Yeah. And I was involved with both of those for several years, posting and yeah, yeah, I was always more of a lurker. I would post from time to time, but I would read it religiously and it was kind of my decompression. I'd go to church and then come back and watch, read, stay LDS or NOM or whatever, or listen to a podcast anyway. So that was the first time I really got exposed to a lot of that. And actually, now that I'm thinking about happened because I was watching. It was the Mormon Studies conference at uvu and you had spoken.

John Dehlin [02:52:41] Ian Scott. Yeah, Gordon. Were debating.

Jon Westover [02:52:44] Yep.

John Dehlin [02:52:44] Yeah, that.

Jon Westover [02:52:45] So I. I watched that session and I'm like, wait a minute, who's this John de Linde guy? And so then I. I looked at Mormon stories and then. And then I got exposed to Mormon expression, and there's a huge back battle catalog, right. Of all the stuff at that point. So I'm listening and catching up to all that. So all that happened while we were in Belarus.

Jon Westover [02:53:08] And it felt great, though, to know that, like, hey, there's. It's not just me up to this point. Like, I really just felt like the outcast, misfit. Right. I was not aware of other people that were doing it the way I was doing it, because it's not something people talk about openly ever. Right. And the only times I'd ever been even slightly open, you know, just in being a little bit more nuanced in how I would approach things and what I taught, you know, I'd get smacked down for it. And so I just. I had no idea that the extent of it beyond, like, the Sunstone crowd.

Jon Westover [02:53:45] Right. And so that, that was eye opening, and that was great to discover. We get back from. Actually, while we're in Belarus, we decide we're selling our house in Lehigh. We're not going back to Lehigh, so we sold from Belarus, we sell our house, we buy our house in Orem, and we immediately move. When we get back from Belarus, we move to Orem, the Orem ward where we've lived ever since.

Jon Westover [02:54:12] It is a little bit more, I hate to say progressive, because it's still. It's Orem, it's Utah county, but there's more socioeconomic diversity in our neighborhood. There's a little bit more diversity in terms of life stage, kind of the whole spectrum. Whereas in Lehigh, it's like everyone was like 30 to 55 and they were in that range kind of a thing.

Jon Westover [02:54:36] And so it's just. It seemed like it was a little bit more of a welcoming ward. So we come back from Belarus, we're now in this new ward. I don't know for sure, but, you know, again, having served in a bishopric, I know how it often happens is when a family moved from one ward to another, oftentimes the bishop calls the old bishop and asks about the family.

Jon Westover [02:55:01] The way the new bishop in Orem treated me, without ever having met or talked, ever suggested to me that the bishop from the old ward, you know, and he had talked because I was treated the same way, like out of the gate, as soon as we moved to Orem, which again, kind of befuddled me. I'm like, why this soft shunning is happening. And I'm going and I'm supporting my wife and my kids every week.

Jon Westover [02:55:32] I'm willing to have a calling, I'm willing to contribute. Eventually that bishop becomes a little bit more comfortable with me, gives me callings, but always like monitoring me. And whenever I would give a lesson on anything, it didn't matter if I was, you know, just teaching a group of like five people, he would show up and sit in the lesson. So that kind of thing went on for a long time. Eventually he's replaced a new bishop comes in.

Jon Westover [02:56:04] Anyway, so life in Orem, though, is pretty good. We loved, we love being close to uvu. We're like just a mile up the road from uvu. My wife also teaches at uvu, by the way. She's, she just finished her doctorate and she teaches math at uvu.

Jon Westover [02:56:20] She just defended her dissertation about a month ago, so we're super proud of her. It's been a great place to live in that regard. Kind people and good people, you know, good friends for the kids. All of that's been pretty good.

Jon Westover [02:56:39] And then, but then, like you said, then I'm certainly aware of high profile cases such as yours and Kate Kelly's and have discomfort around that. After getting back and moving to Orem, I, I, that's when I joined fairmormon.

Jon Westover [02:57:03] I decide, I decided at that point that I needed like, in order. My experience in Lehigh before we went to Belarus was such that I was not seen as safe. Right. So I determined to be seen as safe. I will join FairMormon and support Fair Mormon in a way that I'm comfortable with. And so that if anyone ever questions me in terms of being nuancey or whatever, I can say, well, hey, look, this is what I'm doing. I'm like going above and beyond even what is expected in a normal ward situation or a calling.

Jon Westover [02:57:42] I'm aware of all the hard issues. I'm aware of all the complexities. I'm still trying to make it all work and I'm trying to help people navigate it. Right. And so that's what I'm doing with Fairmormon.

Carah Burrell [02:57:54] And but just to clarify, but without a literal belief in the church as well, though, but that's kind of on the DL or were you more open about that? Part.

Jon Westover [02:58:04] So by this point, I had been pretty open with bishop and stake president in Orem, had long conversations with them and been very open about it. Like, long, long conversations about where I sat with things. In part because when we moved, I was of the mind when we moved that I would just.

Jon Westover [02:58:27] It was nobody's business. I would just go about like anyone moving to a new war and you start with a fresh slate. But when the new bishop was treating me like the old bishop with no interaction with me whatsoever, meaning the old bishop must have talked to him and like, shared his concerns about me.

Jon Westover [02:58:43] At that point, I'm like, okay, if I'm going to, like, continue being engaged with the church and with my family, I just have to talk to the bishop. Like, I just have to like, lay it all out and let him understand where I stand. So that's what I did. I'm not sure that was the best choice, but that's what I did. And with the stake presence, we have these big, long conversations. So he knows where I stand, but he knows that I'm living a faithful life. Like, I'm doing all the things.

Carah Burrell [02:59:09] I'm following the Mormon rules, I'm following all the rules, all the boxes.

Jon Westover [02:59:12] Yep, doing all those things and I'm willing to serve. And. And so ultimately he's still nervous about me. I, I still don't fit the mold. And so, you know, he and, and many others, they're not quite sure what to do with me right. In that situation. But ultimately he decided, okay, you, you can have a temple recommend, you can have a calling. He just monitored me closely.

Carah Burrell [02:59:34] When you say that you had long conversations with them, I can imagine a lot of the truth claims of the church would have come up and you might have said, what? Like, this is the way the church teaches it. I don't adhere to this type of narrative anymore. Like, what were the actual, like, problems that you guys didn't see eye to eye on?

Jon Westover [02:59:53] Yeah, I mean, frankly, a lot of the church history stuff they're just completely unaware of. Right. And that was the case. I remember sharing something. This was pre CES letter, but I remember sharing something, man. It was probably 2012 ish, 2013. That was, it was kind of a compilation of a lot of the issues. I remember sharing that with the bishop.

Carah Burrell [03:00:17] Like a document that you gathered.

Jon Westover [03:00:19] I didn't, I didn't put it together. Someone did. It was pre CS letter. Someone had put together this document with a lot of the issues. And I shared it with the bishop and I just said, I gave Him My, my straightforward assessment. I'm like, I, I think like 80 of these are like spot on, 100. Just true. This is, it is, it's like historical fact. This is what it is. Another 20% is.

Jon Westover [03:00:46] It's true, but with a little bit of a spin. Right. It's, it's portrayed in a certain way that's certainly negative, that you could take a different, you could, you could take a different perspective on it. So that's kind of how I, I couched it to him and just said, I think you really need to be aware of these things because members are going to have concerns about these things. And honestly, I don't think he was aware of almost any of it prior to that point. And anyway, so he monitored me closely.

Jon Westover [03:01:14] But, you know, our kids were friends and his wife and my wife were in the primary presidency together. And, you know, so, I mean, over time I think he, he became comfortable with me just like kind of doing my own thing and I wasn't outspoken and so he was okay with that.

Jon Westover [03:01:32] He had to. I'm trying to remember. I remember there being a bit of an issue, you know, when I taught part time at byu. You have to get an ecclesiastical endorsement. I remember being there being a bit of an issue back then when I had to do that when I was living in Tooele at the time when the bishop had to call. I remember when I had an article accepted to the Ensign that was getting published and they called the bishop and the stake president to make sure that they don't have some crazy person that they're publishing an article for. And so I remember him.

Jon Westover [03:02:05] I got the impression that he wasn't sure if he was going to green light me or not. But ultimately, the way he framed it, to me, he's like, you're a good soul. So I said, yes. And so they published it.

John Dehlin [03:02:18] It's kind of nerve wracking.

Jon Westover [03:02:20] Yeah. So that kind of stuff just kind of continued to happen. I get involved in Fair Mormon Bill Real and I joined like a week apart. We didn't know each other at all before that, but instantly because we were both like in the same space in

John Dehlin [03:02:35] terms you've been listening to his podcast by that point.

Jon Westover [03:02:38] I don't think I was. I don't think I was aware.

John Dehlin [03:02:40] Okay.

Jon Westover [03:02:41] Of his podcast. Maybe I was.

Carah Burrell [03:02:44] That's quite. Taking quite the turn in history. So if people don't know, that would have been a more faithful Bill Real podcast than quite. If you were to log on today. Just wanted to say that.

John Dehlin [03:02:54] Yeah, yeah.

Jon Westover [03:02:55] No it was. And I certainly became aware of it shortly thereafter. If I wasn't before. That was really early days for him too. I'm not even sure how much he had done by that point. You know, if, if he had been doing, probably wasn't any more than like six months or something that he'd been doing it.

John Dehlin [03:03:11] Sure.

Jon Westover [03:03:12] Um, so we joined the same time and immediately, I mean the way fairmormon works is you have this big list and like you have all these emails go out. You, you, you were part of the list for a while, right? Yeah. So you get these emails and goes out to everyone and then some people respond and, and then there's all these back channel conversations that happen. So all that's going on and very quickly Bill and I connect because we're, we're like in the same headspace and it's very different than like everybody else. Everyone else is, is.

Jon Westover [03:03:40] I would say most of the Fair Mormon people are cafeteria in their own way. Right. Because they know all the issues and they have to figure out how they're going to reconcile it. They tend to have their own area of expertise and then they focus on that and they kind of just let everything else go and let the, the other experts deal with those other things.

Jon Westover [03:03:58] That was my experience with them and kind of how I made sense of it. So anyways, Bill and I immediately though we start to realize a lot of the ways that other members of the FAIR board would respond to questions in the emails or the Ask Fair Mormon service.

Jon Westover [03:04:18] Maybe they were kind of true, but they were always putting a really positive spin. Sometimes they're just these really weak apologetic responses that just didn't really make sense. They don't pass the sniff test. Nothing that I would never make those types of arguments.

Jon Westover [03:04:34] I always felt like there's just so much of the fair stuff had so many logical fallacies embedded throughout all of it. And I'm an equal opportunity logical fallacy person. So I would read a lot of the evangelical anti Mormon literature stuff and I feel the same way. Okay, they're making some good points, but there's other stuff that's clearly a stretch, you know, and I would do that with Fair Mormon too. And I would call them out on it on the fare board, which obviously they don't particularly appreciate. Bill and I both would do that quite a bit.

Involvement With FairMormon and Its Limitations

Carah Burrell [03:05:04] Do you have some examples that come to mind that they would make?

Jon Westover [03:05:09] I remember one time there was, and this is such a silly one, but someone asked about the word of wisdom and green tea. Now in my mission with a Korean mission president, we were explicitly taught that green tea was okay under the word of wisdom, and that if people ask that, we could say green tea was okay, black tea not okay, Green tea, okay, okay. But other leaders have said green tea and black tea are not okay. And ultimately, like, I remember someone emailing in to the. The Ask Fair Mormon, you know, service, and they asked this question, and I was the first to respond.

Jon Westover [03:05:48] I'm like, well, there's debate about this. You know, this. This hasn't been consistently taught over time. And this is how it's been taught by some leaders. This is how it's been taught by other leaders. Here's my personal experience. This is what my mission president taught and my mission. Personally, I don't think it matters, and I don't think it's anyone's business. So do whatever you're comfortable with, especially if it's for health benefits, you're totally fine. So that's what I say. Oh, my gosh. Like something as simple as that.

Jon Westover [03:06:16] The people coming out of the woodwork to correct me, not just behind. In this case, not just behind the scenes, but also with this person who had emailed in to call me on the carpet for it. Those sorts of things happened on a somewhat regular basis. And then behind the scenes, if I would challenge what someone was saying, typically what would happen is it would be me and Bill. Either he'd come to my rescue or I'd come to his rescue, and then everyone else would like, like, dogpile on top of us, the two of us, and they just pile on, pile on, pile on. And it was just so frustrating.

Jon Westover [03:06:55] Yet Bill was starting this new podcast that was doing okay. Fair wanted to restart a podcast, so. So they asked him to head that up for Fair Mormon. They also. They previously had their own board, you know, a NOM or Stale DS board, but they had their own Fair Mormon board previously, and that had gone away, and they. They were thinking about trying to start something else up. So Bill really took on the podcast.

Jon Westover [03:07:23] I took a lead role on this new board that they were going to start that was going to be a safe place for faithful Mormons to come and ask their authentic questions and to be validated and to be able to be walked through the process called Mormon

John Dehlin [03:07:38] Discussions or something like that.

Jon Westover [03:07:40] I don't even. Fair Mormon Support Board, I think, is what it was called. And it lasted for maybe a year and a half, two years. But ultimately, too many of the fair people just got super uncomfortable with it because they're like, here's this person who's posting these things that are not doctrinal, and we can't allow that, and we need to smack that down. And we're like, that's the opposite of the whole point of this board. The whole point is to help people feel that they're not crazy, that they can be validated in their concerns. It's a reasonable concern. And let's help walk them through the process of trying to better understand how to deal with what they're dealing with.

Jon Westover [03:08:18] Right. That was the whole point of it. And. But so that's not the mentality. That's. That's more of a pastoral, apologetic approach, which is not traditionally the mentality of most at Fort Fairmormon. And, you know, if you got the old oak, like Daniel Peterson, you know, they want to smack people down and they want to assert, you know, their. Their answer.

Jon Westover [03:08:45] And there just. There wasn't a lot of. Of comfort with allowing a more pastoral approach, a more nuanced approach in Fair Mormon. So I was doing that with Bill for a while. Over time, Bill started to get more outspoken.

Carah Burrell [03:09:05] Can I ask a quick question? You just mentioned the mentality of Fair Mormon versus Peterson. Can you speak to what the mentality was of Fair Mormon then and maybe how it's changed maybe since your time there? I have no idea what their goal.

Jon Westover [03:09:19] I have no idea what it is now because I have nothing to do with it.

Carah Burrell [03:09:21] I mean, they're hiring KWAKU to do these other, like, outspoken videos of, like, let's get to the kids, you know, like, let's try this other approach. It seems like they're just, like, grasping at straws now because they know their arguments are not really.

Jon Westover [03:09:33] I did email with John lynch after the KWAKU stuff.

John Dehlin [03:09:37] I have an interview with him on Mormon stories, and for those who want to check it out.

Carah Burrell [03:09:41] And who is that exactly?

John Dehlin [03:09:42] He's the president and founder of Fair Mormon, John.

Carah Burrell [03:09:44] Okay.

John Dehlin [03:09:45] Yeah.

Jon Westover [03:09:46] Oh, what's the other guy who lives in Northern California?

John Dehlin [03:09:48] Scott Gordon.

Jon Westover [03:09:49] Scott Gordon, yeah. And I forget what their official roles are.

John Dehlin [03:09:53] And they're kind of president, CEO.

Jon Westover [03:09:55] Yeah, I don't remember which is which. But they're the two big main people. And anyway, so I, you know, I always. I felt like John lynch more than the other people at Fair Mormon. I felt like he was a reasonable person when I was working with them. Anyways, I emailed him a while back, you know, with the KWAKU stuff, and, you know, just expressing my dissatisfaction with the approach. And he was very defensive and, you know, said, but it's all the stuff you've talked about before, you know, but it's resonating with the kids.

Carah Burrell [03:10:36] Is it?

Jon Westover [03:10:38] He claims, I don't know. So I don't really know what their approach is right now. But at the time there was like this, this certain contingent that seemed to be wanting to move it more in a pastoral approach, acknowledging the challenges. This was still pretty. The essays started to come out during this time, but when I had joined, it was still pre essays and so acknowledging the problems that exist, validating, trying to have a more pastoral approach. There was a contingent like that, but then there was the old school contingent that definitely had more hardline approach to how they wanted to deal with stuff. And when people emailed in questions, a lot of times they were harsh in how they would respond to people.

John Dehlin [03:11:22] The, the. I. The idea of talking to you as an insider during this time is super interesting to me just because, you know, it was 10, 2010, 2011, I learned about Hans Mattson and Marlon Jensen, and we started doing the faith crisis study that, you know, was involved with Swedish Rescue and other things. And so by the time you saw my debate at UVU with Scott Gordon. Yeah, that's the first time I release the preliminary data from that study.

John Dehlin [03:11:52] And we found in that study that that Fair Mormon was actually accelerating people's disaffection for Mormonism, not, Not, not resolving it. And so I started hitting Fair Mormon really, really hard at that point, and Scott and I had had a pretty contentious and lively debate. And so by the time you and Bill Real were entering Fair Mormon, I think I was personally kind of at war with these guys, Scott and John, and there wasn't a lot of positive esteem because I, I really thought not only were they not meeting their own goals, they weren't keeping people in the church, but then they were insulting and demeaning and, and that was around the time other people. And so I just thought, they're hurting everybody.

Jon Westover [03:12:39] Yeah, yeah, put it. And that was around the time that the quote, unquote hit piece came out about you.

John Dehlin [03:12:44] Yeah.

Jon Westover [03:12:45] And I, I remember that was one of the first things that Bill and I got in big trouble for, because we actually came to your defense behind the scenes at fairmormon. Oh, my gosh. You want to see people dogpile on you?

Carah Burrell [03:12:57] And that was defend John de Lin at Fairmorton.

Jon Westover [03:13:00] That was. That was the worst possible thing we could have done. But, you know, we were. They saw what we could contribute, so they kind of gave us our things to work on and we worked on our things and we would kind of be behind the scenes and chime in on. On the behind the scenes communications and had my meetings with. I worked mostly with John lynch, not much with Scott. I remember sitting at a table with Daniel Peterson at a FAIR Mormon conference for a dinner once and stuff like that, you know, so I had those kind of encounters.

Jon Westover [03:13:31] But frankly, I mean most of the people that, that I exchanged messages with, it was pretty negative. So that was also disillusioning. I was so frustrated with that. Here I am trying in good faith, trying to continue to make it work, trying to make a contribution. I'm aware of these issues more than most people. And so can we do this in a way that's going to be healthy and helpful for people? That was my intention and that was not a particularly well received intention.

Jon Westover [03:14:09] This was also the time it was probably in large part due to this study that you released the results on. This is when they started to rebrand so they changed from FAIR the acronym to FAIR Mormon. So I worked with them a little bit on kind of the business side of that and trying to help them think through some of those sorts of things. They didn't. Most of what they decided to do is not what I would have suggested, but I was involved in a lot of those conversations and I was involved in the rollout of that. And you know, it was an attempt for them to take a softer approach.

Jon Westover [03:14:44] But it just. That approach didn't win. The old contingent won out. And I remember there was this one time with Stephen Smoot. This was before he went off and did his PhD. So I'm not sure if you.

John Dehlin [03:14:59] I don't think he's finished his PhD.

Jon Westover [03:15:00] Oh, has he not?

John Dehlin [03:15:01] I don't think so.

Jon Westover [03:15:02] Yes, any. He's working on a PhD. So at the time though he. Maybe he was a grad student or maybe he was just had his bachelor's. But anyways he was very, very involved. So he was one of those that would. Would speak up often. And I remember one time he, he wrote this, this kind of, this allegorical paper, this essay about essentially it was the wolf in sheep's clothing members versus the warrior members who were protecting and defending the faith. And he draw all these conclusions from it.

John Dehlin [03:15:36] Musket members.

Jon Westover [03:15:37] Yeah, I mean it was totally desnet, but so he didn't use that term of course, and he didn't use musket, but it was that kind of a framing. Right. That was his approach and how we need to really defend the Faith. And he drew these conclusions.

Jon Westover [03:15:51] And I remember he sent it to everyone for feedback on the behind the scenes board. And I think I was maybe the first one to respond to it. Maybe a couple people said, hey, this is really great, good job. I responded to it by, I knew it's not what he was getting at. By flipped, I flipped the narrative between what he was trying to say was really the great approach of Fairmormon. And, and I, I flipped it so that FairMormon was the negative side of the story in his essay. And, but I, I, I acted as though, the way I wrote it, I acted as though I honestly thought that's what he was trying to get at.

Jon Westover [03:16:31] And it was a good, Good faith critique of Fair Mormon and what we can do to improve and be more effective in what we're trying to do. That's how I portrayed my communication. And that was not well received. Obviously. They, you know, people piled up on me for that one as well.

John Dehlin [03:16:47] And because you were saying what, what were you trying to say?

Jon Westover [03:16:51] I was trying to say in a way that I was hoping maybe they could hear. They, they didn't hear it. They couldn't accept it. But I was trying to say, you're doing a lot of harm. You have good intentions, you're trying to help people, but your approach is not effective.

John Dehlin [03:17:05] Why?

Jon Westover [03:17:05] You're doing a lot of harm.

John Dehlin [03:17:06] What's the harm? Why wasn't it effective?

Jon Westover [03:17:10] They, they were trying to defend the indefensible in ways that just don't make sense.

John Dehlin [03:17:19] So bad scholarship, bad science.

Jon Westover [03:17:21] Bad scholarship, bad science. Being harsh. So they were, they were often very harsh. And the people that in good faith would ask questions and that even to this day, I don't understand why in the world, if someone is coming to you, would you treat them like a troll? Even if they are a troll, like, treat them in a Christlike way. Treat them as though they're sincere, as though it's a real authentic question that they have. Because we know people have these real authentic questions, but they often didn't. They often were just incredibly negative, mean,

Carah Burrell [03:17:53] just like dismissive, like, don't worry about it. No validation that this should be a concern.

Jon Westover [03:17:57] Certainly sometimes very dismissive demeaning of people who would have those questions. Like, you wouldn't even have that question if you were faithful enough, if you were doing the right things. You must be lazy, you must be wanting to sin, you must be wanting an excuse.

Carah Burrell [03:18:11] But they actually say those kinds of

Jon Westover [03:18:12] things, like, oh, I mean, implicitly, it would certainly, it would be very easy to see. I don't want to say they always wrote those things very explicitly, but it was definitely implied that somebody could walk

Carah Burrell [03:18:25] away from that email exchange or whatever.

Jon Westover [03:18:28] Yeah, absolutely.

Carah Burrell [03:18:28] Feeling like, okay, if I pray more, then this issue will go away for sure. Why is it still bugging me? Yeah, I should feel better about Joseph Smith marrying 14 year olds, but I'm not because.

Jon Westover [03:18:39] Or all the spin, the hail spin around like he never had sexual relations or, you know, a few months shy of 15 nonsense and those sorts of things. That, that was the typical MO of a lot of the ways that, that they would respond to a lot of the real serious questions that people would have. And that is just. I was never on board for that. And again, my, my approach, I always thought it would be more of a pastoral approach, like let's, let's meet people where they're at, address their questions, validate them, assume good intentions and assume that they're trying to figure out how to work this out and then provide support to help them do it.

Jon Westover [03:19:18] And that's what I felt like fair Mormon needed to do. And for the, and there were some that wanted to do it that way, but for the most part, most just didn't. They wanted to keep the old way. And, and, and so during that time, there's a bit of a divide that started to emerge. And that's eventually, that's when Bill real. I don't know if he got kicked out or he just was threatened to be kicked out and he left.

Jon Westover [03:19:44] And I don't remember the exact time frame. I can't remember when that happened in relation to when I left, but it was fairly close proximity and he left. And I'm like, oh my gosh. Okay. He made major contributions. They're now kicking him to the curb. I'm getting pretty fed up with a lot of the stuff I'm dealing with. I'm not sure I'm willing to deal with this anymore. That's how I was feeling. And then there was a conference talk.

Jon Westover [03:20:11] I remember this. What year was this? Maybe 2014, fall of 2014. There was a conference talk that was just. So it was another one of those really negative LGBT conference talks.

John Dehlin [03:20:26] Was it the Packer? Why would a loving heavenly father do that?

Jon Westover [03:20:29] No, that. That was the other one I referred to earlier.

John Dehlin [03:20:31] Okay.

Jon Westover [03:20:32] Back when I was in the bishopric, this was a different one.

John Dehlin [03:20:35] Maybe Oaks?

Jon Westover [03:20:36] Maybe. Yeah. I can't remember who it was, but I remember the immediate response on the fair board and the emails was this immediately piling on Spiking the football like, yes, they told him how it is, this is how it needs to be. And all I did is I responded and I said, hey, let's be. First of all, there were people who had come out to me on the Fair Mormon board who had more nuanced faith but didn't feel safe to say it, or who were even LGBT that were part of Fair Mormon. And so this is all behind the scenes, but they are piling on whether it was Oaks or whoever, this horrible talk and just saying, this is amazing.

Jon Westover [03:21:15] This finally they're just laying down the law, this is the way it has to be. And all I did is send a two sentence response saying, hey, let's be a little bit more sensitive to people who might be struggling with this or something like that. That's all I say. Oh my gosh, the pylon starts to happen again. They're just attacking me. John lynch actually came to my defense at the time, which I appreciated, but that was when I decided, okay, I'm done. So I, I emailed John, I said, I'm done. I don't want to deal with this anymore. He, he actually called me personally and tried to talk me out of leaving, but I just didn't, I just didn't want to have anything to do with anymore. So at that point I was gone and just went about my merry way.

John Dehlin [03:21:59] I have to note that like you tried to kind of stay in the church as an active participant. That didn't work out so well. Then you go to Fair Mormon, try to be an active participant there, and that didn't work out so well. So that's a couple botched or failed. Not, not for any fault of your own. But if I'm thinking about your story, that's kind of at least two major instances where you really tried to do good in the church. And in both instances came up. Yeah, wanting or short. And it must have been sad. That must have been hard for you.

Jon Westover [03:22:32] Maybe it wasn't pleasant.

John Dehlin [03:22:33] Yeah, yeah.

Carah Burrell [03:22:34] And sometimes I think of things in almost terms of like a Venn diagram for a long time feeling similar to that what John just described of like, you know, I overlap in so many areas of what I value with Mormons and it's just push comes to shove and enough places feels like that Venn diagram. I'm sharing fewer and fewer similarities with these people.

Carah Burrell [03:22:55] And I want to ask you kind of a question, audience. Don't get mad at me because I started to realize the farther and farther I got out of Mormonism, I was surrounded by very non critical thinkers, let's say. And so you seem like you're very familiar with like logical fallacies and you're trying to work in an area where you know these very well and you are surrounded by people trying to do the same work, but you're like, no, we can't do it this way. This isn't Christlike enough, or this is, this is plagued with logical fallacies. And you, you want your team to be better, but you feel like either you're just dragging non critical thinkers behind you or you've got to get out of that, that circle now.

Carah Burrell [03:23:33] And so that's where I guess I'm leading into our, like our next question is, and feels like enough of those things happen throughout your membership in the church where you felt like a more and more of a drift.

Carah Burrell [03:23:45] Does that sound familiar to like the way that the, the way that you felt like you were smaller and smaller things that you might have shared with the people who still wanted to stay active Mormons. And I also, before I get to the question, I also just, I don't mean to be insensitive calling anyone that's a Mormon a non critical thinker, but it does make you feel like you're the one taking crazy pills when you know, okay, this is immoral, or this is not the way science works, or this is just plague with lots of logical fallacies. And so it makes it really difficult when you want to stay Mormon.

Carah Burrell [03:24:17] And so for people who are like, oh, I can stay Mormon, I can stay progressive, I can do all these things, you're gonna feel like you're, I guess you can articulate what does that feel like to be fitting inside a smaller and smaller space within Mormonism.

Jon Westover [03:24:31] Yeah, you just, you know, I felt just more and more marginalized over time.

Carah Burrell [03:24:36] Right, because you wanted to stay and make it work. Right.

Jon Westover [03:24:41] And I should say I am a straight cisgender white dude. Right. So when I say I'm marginalized, I recognize that that's still with all the other privilege that I have and I still feel that way. So if I was a gay female person of color, would I be willing to put up with this?

Jon Westover [03:25:06] Probably not. I mean, because then that would just add to all of the layers of marginalization. But I do have different privileges and I have been given opportunities to serve and all those sorts of things. So in ways I've been connected or embedded with the church in ways that maybe other people haven't had the chance because of their gender or because of whatever. So I want to acknowledge that. But yeah, being marginalized sucks regardless of the reason.

Jon Westover [03:25:32] And the more and more you get marginalized or even softly shunned, it's not pleasant. And you mentioned taking crazy pills. I mean, one of the sicknesses that I feel like exists in the dominant culture in the church that I wish could get fixed. It's not unique to the church, but it's certainly pervasive in my experience is just the amount of gaslighting that goes on constantly.

Jon Westover [03:25:57] And that's the exact aim of the gaslighting is you want the person with the question, the concern, whatever, to feel like they're taking crazy pills. And I just hate that. So we need to get away from that kind of stuff. We need to get away from blaming the victim. There are things that people do and say that leaders do and say that members do and say that are offensive, that are hurtful, that harm people. And just because I was hurt or offended or harmed and I call them on it, doesn't mean I'm just like the stereotypical angry member who wants an excuse to leave. Right.

Jon Westover [03:26:38] Even though that's the dominant narrative. So we need to get away from that nonsense and just be more. Be more holistic in how we approach the challenging issues. And I don't care if it's a strictly orthodox Mormon who's doing it, or an ex Mormon or a never Mormon who's doing it, I'm gonna call it out the same.

Jon Westover [03:27:01] If people are making fallacious arguments that just don't hold up or don't make sense or are harmful, regardless of what the intention is, you can have the best intention in the world, but if you're harming people, then you shouldn't be doing it.

Carah Burrell [03:27:15] Yeah, that's where I think your analytical brain comes in, where it's like, we can have the same goals within Mormonism or within, example, Mormon spaces or nuanced Mormon spaces, But if the approach is not advantageous for the growth of either community, yeah, I think that's a healthy thing to do. It's to call it out that the approach is not going to. If it's harming people, if it's fallacious, yeah, absolutely. Call that out.

Jon Westover [03:27:39] And it's. And I've tried to be careful. I'm sure I've said some things that are probably not super gracious or giving people the benefit of the doubt and everything I've said today. But I'm trying to. To be generous and how I'm framing the experiences that I've had in relation to other people because I do feel like the vast majority of people I've encountered in the church have been really good, well meaning, well intentioned people with a few exam, a few exceptions who have just been ironically, I mean some of the, who I would deem to be like the most evil people I've ever encountered in my life also happen to be some of my priesthood leaders that I've had in the past that have just been horrible.

Jon Westover [03:28:26] And that's a whole nother conversation about how did they get into those roles when they're like that. But the vast majority of people are just good, well intentioned people. The question isn't about whether they're good, well intentioned people. The question is, is it harmful or not or is it benefiting people or not? And I can honor someone for their intention and the attempts that they're making while also calling out the bad outcomes. Right. And so that's what I try to do. I hope that's what I'm doing today because I don't want to throw anyone under the bus.

Carah Burrell [03:29:01] Yeah, right on.

John Dehlin [03:29:03] So you part ways with Fair Mormon, what, what comes next?

Jon Westover [03:29:10] So shortly thereafter I go on sabbatical. We, we go to Northern California from UVU. From UVU, like your 7 year mark or something? Yeah, Yep. So I've been there, now I'm tenured. I, I go on sabbatical and we go to Northern California. So we're living in this, this small town called Lakeport in Lake county, not far from where Scott Gordon lives actually.

Jon Westover [03:29:37] And I was, I was just doing sabbatical research and teaching a few classes just on the side at a local university there. And again we go outside the Mormon corridor. You get up to Northern California, which actually for California is actually pretty conservative.

Jon Westover [03:29:58] You get into those more rural parts and, and California still has plenty of conservative people. So Lake county was plenty conservative. But you get up there and they're just happy to have you. The ward, like we literally were like 10% of the ward when we moved in.

Jon Westover [03:30:15] Eight people in my family. That gives you a picture of the size, Mike. I had all six kids at the time. My kids made up a quarter of the primary. So you immediately move in and they're just happy to have you. And they treated us well and they were kind and we had a good experience there. Good people, good community.

Jon Westover [03:30:41] And yeah, and we enjoyed it. But during that time is when the November exclusion policy was released. So that's a gut punch. You know, you're trying to figure out, Go ahead.

John Dehlin [03:30:59] When Kate Kelly and I were excommunicated did you have any reactions to that? Because that happened before.

Jon Westover [03:31:04] Yeah. When was yours? I remember explicitly.

John Dehlin [03:31:07] It was 2014.

Jon Westover [03:31:08] Yeah, I remember explicitly. Yeah, I remember explicitly when Kate was excommunicated. No offense, but that one hit me harder than yours.

John Dehlin [03:31:18] No, I don't.

Jon Westover [03:31:19] Just, you know, because of women, the plight of women in the church, you know, really, I was very sympathetic to ordained women and everything they were arguing for. And so, you know, again, I think, okay, you know, outside pressure, you know, small baby step improvements that the church seems to be making. Okay. You know, maybe. Maybe the church can. Can improve in some of these areas. And then she gets Xed.

Jon Westover [03:31:48] Oh, around this time, it was. It was, I think, before both of your excommunications, Whitney Clayton spoke at a stake conference. And I'm pretty good. Like, I. I can give people a lot of room to say crap in church, so if someone says something cringy in sacrament meeting, I'm pretty good at letting it roll off and chalking it up to good intentions. And I'm gonna focus on what matters to me and let the rest go.

Jon Westover [03:32:20] He spoke, and his rhetoric was so divisive, and he spoke out against apostates. He didn't specifically name you and Kate, but it was clear that he was referring to you and others. And I got up and walked out, and I was so tempted to yell out, f you as I walked out. I was so pissed off.

John Dehlin [03:32:44] Really?

Jon Westover [03:32:44] Yeah, I was so pissed off with what he was saying and how he was saying it, and I didn't. I had a little baby at the time, so I took the baby out, I walk out, I take the baby out, and I spend the rest of the time just wandering the halls, fuming.

Jon Westover [03:32:59] So I remember that. And then I remember Kate getting excommunicated and being hit hard by that. Not necessarily even just because of Kate, but because of what it symbolized. Right. And I really hated that the, The. The Swedish rescue happened sometime in there.

Jon Westover [03:33:21] I remember being upset about that as I. As I'm listening to the audio of that and how that's portrayed. I remember going to some sort of a meeting with Turley where we just happened to both be in a session where we're in close proximity to each other and had a little bit of an opportunity to interact. And I just remember, you know, seemed like a nice guy, but I. I just was not impressed by the approach taken. And I understand, given his position at the time, I mean, what else are you going to do? I guess you either have to be willing to complete Speak out and probably have that ruin your career or you have to toe the line.

Jon Westover [03:34:03] And he toed the line. So I guess it's not completely surprising, but it's frustrating otherwise, you know, a good guy. And so those types of experiences are building up. We're now in California for sabbatical, and the November policy happens. And, you know, I just can't believe it.

The 2015 Exclusion Policy and Speaking Out

Jon Westover [03:34:23] I can't believe how they redefine apostasy. I can't believe how they're excluding kids. Um, I can't believe all of the faithful members coming to the defense of the church to justify it. Um, I, I was pleased. There was a decent amount of backlash to it. So that was somewhat encouraging. But that died down within a week or so and people just kind of got in line and so that was super discouraging. Um, and I, I went on the record then and I stay on the record now. I, I think the church is completely wrong.

Jon Westover [03:34:57] I think it's completely damaging. I'm glad they reversed the policy. It should have never happened in the first place. They should have never doubled down the way they did in the first place. And that was probably the first time. I had posted some things that were somewhat challenging before this time, like on Facebook sharing more nuanced things or challenging church cultures, that kind of stuff. But I never flat out challenged church leaders like the Prophet and the brethren at that time, up to that point.

Jon Westover [03:35:34] But then I did. I was very, very outspoken on Facebook at the time. I just thought it was so appalling. I couldn't believe it. And the amount of backlash that I got from people that I lived with and served with and, and served, and the amount of hate that I received in my inbox from those people that I thought were friends because I spoke out was sad, you know, and frustrating. And some of the vitriol that I received from some people and had to unfriend and block a whole bunch of people at that time. So that was hard.

Jon Westover [03:36:20] That was also. I don't want to, like, get too much into this. I don't want to completely throw my parents under the bus because my parents are good, loving people. They are service oriented people. But this was at this time, my parents wrote a letter to the family. They decided that they needed to wash their hands of their apostate son.

Jon Westover [03:36:43] So they wrote like an eight page letter laying out the doctrine and laying out why it was ne. Why it's necessary for the church's stance on LGBT issues. While I might have good intentions, I'm clearly wrong. Clearly at fault that I need to repent and that they've taught me well and that they're washing their hands of me. That's essentially the, the, the gist of, of their lengthy letter. They send it out to the whole family as painful as a warning.

Jon Westover [03:37:13] And it was, it was very painful. I remember getting that letter and you know, I've always tried to be a good son, a good, good kid, do all the right things, tried to follow my parents example. My, my dad actually is, is one that is known to speak up and speak out about things that he thinks are wrong, especially with the institutional church or the culture.

Jon Westover [03:37:40] He certainly had done that over the years, both when he was with LDS Family Services and in his various leadership roles. But the bottom line was they had a lot of family members contacting them, saying, hey, what's up with John? He's off the deep end and asking them about me and asking what's going on? And so ultimately they felt like they had to respond and they had to, to be able to share with people that they had done their due diligence as parents.

Jon Westover [03:38:12] And so that letter was very, very hurtful. It was hard to get past. Time does heal. And so over time kind of mend the relationship with the parents and get more comfortable, but it did. It's the kind of situation where I just wasn't comfortable having my kids be alone, unsupervised with my parents, which is a sad thing. But I don't want them sharing. Who knows what they might say. And so I just wanted to be extra careful about that.

Carah Burrell [03:38:47] And I think if I can just add one thing, I think that that's really important to add that type of context that you're speaking out against the 2015 exclusion policy as there's a lot of people trying to defend the brethren and their decision to make this policy and not understanding the ramifications. And one of them is that just by speaking out in opposition against it, a family member says something publicly on Facebook, how they don't support it, and the other more conservative LDS family members can wash their hands of this guy over here. And what type of atmosphere does that create in a large Mormon

Carah Burrell [03:39:23] family of all of the siblings, all the grandkids, knowing that their grandparents or whoever, that if they're closeted, if they're, you know, secretly struggling with some type of, you know, maybe a same sex attraction or whatever, they know that they cannot possibly come out if somebody who just support, just is acting in support of LGBT issues is ostracized like that So I just kind of wanted to make sure that that point is really finely made because that, that's what I think is the, the ramifications that are really damaging in, in Mormon culture and in Mormon homes.

Jon Westover [03:39:56] So, yeah, it makes for a psychologically unsafe family dynamic. Right. You just don't feel safe to come out to, to share, be your authentic self and share where you're coming from with the types of issues that we should be able to talk about. Like, you can't talk about them at church. If you can't talk about about them at church, you should be able to talk about them with your family. If you can't talk about them with your family, then what. Right, and that's where. That's what leads to depression and.

Carah Burrell [03:40:24] Yeah, exactly.

Jon Westover [03:40:25] All that.

John Dehlin [03:40:26] And what's kind of weird for me as a trained psychologist, is to know that your dad was a licensed mental health professional and at some point, president of American amcap. AM cap.

Jon Westover [03:40:38] Yeah. What does that stand for? American association for Psychotherapists. Something or other.

John Dehlin [03:40:44] But the fact that Something would write that letter about his own son to the entire family as a registered licensed mental health professional, makes me wonder what type of counsel on therapy he was giving Mormons. A little bit. It's a little bit. I, again, I think you're not trying to throw it out under the bus, but I'm a little disturbed by.

Jon Westover [03:41:05] Well, and I think he, he absolutely approached his counseling and practice from a Mormon lens. Absolutely. So there's zero question about that and the potential harms that could have come about because of that for people, regardless of his good intentions. And I, My dad is a good person.

Jon Westover [03:41:26] He has good intentions. But that's, that's the, that's his context and that's, you know, how he felt. He felt like he had to respond that way. My grandparents followed up with a similar letter that they sent out to the whole family because, you know, I'm dangerous. And they had just.

Jon Westover [03:41:48] It was super uncomfortable. But like we had this big family reunion. All of the aunts and uncles, all their families, like 150 people or something there of my grandparents, posterity, right down in St. George, just the year before, just maybe the summer before, something like that, or a couple years before maybe. And they, they, they had had it like a family, big family meeting. And they had like kind of this, this, this program and different people spoke on different stuff. And then out of the blue they call me up, they're like, john, we want you to come up and want, you know, you're, you're faithful, you're successful, you're, you know, you're a good example.

Jon Westover [03:42:27] We want you to come up and say a few words. I'm like, what? So I'm like the cousin that comes up and super awkward, super uncomfortable. I did not appreciate being called out by that in that way. I think in part because of that, they felt like, you know, a year or two later that now I'm being vocal and they felt like, you know, they just like, endorsed me as like, the model grandson, the model cousin, you know, that everyone else should try to be like.

Jon Westover [03:42:54] And now I'm doing this. So now they have to wash their hands at me. Now they have to separate themselves from me. So that was the context for them. Now, again, you know, my grandparents are really good people, service oriented people. My grandfather was a state patriarch for years. He gave me my patriarchal blessing.

Jon Westover [03:43:12] Good guy. Good, good man. And I love him. But it was a harsh thing, you know, for them to do that and to send it out to the whole family. To my family's credit, you know, some of them, you know, rolled their eyes at these letters and just ignored them, but others, others took them to heart, and so that's. That's hard and it takes time to heal that.

John Dehlin [03:43:34] So painful as I'm thinking about, you know, I've lost a lot of family members and relationships because of what I do. And a lot of times I've. I've felt, well, it's got to be because you're doing a podcast, because it's Mormon stories, because you're being so vocal.

John Dehlin [03:43:49] And it's not that I'm in any way driving satisfaction from your story, but you're helping remind me that people get cut off for much, much less than, than what I do. And it makes me feel a little bit less bad about doing what I do, knowing that in some sense, if I'm just not silent, if I'm just trying to carefully act with integrity, it's probably still going to end very similarly because that's just how people in high demand religions are kind of very carefully trained to treat anything that is perceived as a threat. And it's super sad. And it's why Mormon stories exist. It's why the Open Stories foundation exists.

John Dehlin [03:44:29] I think it's why Carah believes in this work, and it's why all of us do what we do. And I'm so, so sorry that that happened to you.

Jon Westover [03:44:37] Yeah, I appreciate that. And, you know, I. I feel like, you know, our family's largely gotten past it, so I don't mean to dredge up any old hurt feelings. I, I've, I've dealt with it. I'm past it. Like, I don't feel, you know, anything negative towards my parents now. But it is an important part of the story and it's an important part of, of just how everything unfolded for, for me and for my family.

John Dehlin [03:45:05] Can I, can I ask. So just to check in with your timeline. So, you know, I didn't have my big faith crisis till I was 31, my really big one, but. And even then I stayed another, I don't know, 13, 14 years in the church. But I'm thinking about how long of a slow burn this is for you and your timeline. You're starting at age 18, kind of realizing something's rotten in Denmark. And that was true for me. But also how long you're trying to navigate this middle way. So many people that I know who tried to go this middle way, you know, they'd last a few years.

Jon Westover [03:45:46] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:45:47] But eventually they, it just would be too much. Either it would. That they would tap out or they would keep studying the history and, and decide that, no, Joseph Smith was like, beyond the pale. I can't stay in this institution any longer. Or they would just wear down or they would have bad family experiences, and at some point they just, it was. Just wasn't sustainable for them.

Jon Westover [03:46:13] Right.

John Dehlin [03:46:13] You're at this point in the story, and again, we're still only six years ago, so we still have six more years to go. In your story, you're not tapping out. You're, you're, I don't want to say glutton for punishment.

Jon Westover [03:46:25] I was going to say more.

John Dehlin [03:46:26] Oh, you were going to say that.

Jon Westover [03:46:27] I was going to say maybe I'm a glutton for punishment.

John Dehlin [03:46:29] Like, do you, do you have any sense for why you kept going past 2015, 2016, when literally your entire family is denouncing you? You know, and you'd been doing it for so long.

Jon Westover [03:46:41] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:46:41] I mean, why you kept going, Was it your spouse?

Jon Westover [03:46:44] Because. Because of my. Because of my immediate family.

John Dehlin [03:46:47] So your believing spouse.

Jon Westover [03:46:49] And because of. I mean, it's still my spiritual home. I mean, it's still my upbringing. It's still my heritage. It's still all those other things I continue to derive value from.

John Dehlin [03:47:01] But I'm talking about the pain.

Jon Westover [03:47:02] I still live in Utah county. And so you're right. I do think in some ways I'm a glutton for punishment. Like, I'm willing to put up with the pain for these other reasons. I mean, yeah, I mean, I could have made a different choice certainly. And yeah, I mean, just continued to go the path that I'm on. And it's a strange thing to a lot of people. I've had a lot of other people close to me that during this time have gone from the point of like being, calling me out on the carpet and being super negative towards me to now they've transitioned completely out and are completely, you know, ex Mormon and hate the church, you know.

Jon Westover [03:47:47] And so, yeah, the timeframe for me versus a lot of other people has been very different. And all I can say is despite the challenging things and despite the pain, you know, there's still those other elements I just can't get rid of or ignore. And so I have to do the calculus of what makes sense for me and my family. And ultimately I've decided to try to make it work.

John Dehlin [03:48:14] I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but I had a friend die by suicide just this year who was in a mixed faith marriage where he felt like he couldn't get out of it, but his wife didn't understand him, but he couldn't leave it. But, but staying was too hard.

Jon Westover [03:48:32] And, and I have to say I, while I don't want to get, I don't want to speak for my wife or get into her journey, but I will say that my wife has been very supportive despite, you know, like, we've very rarely been on the same page in terms of religious belief over the last. We've been married 19 and a half years. But she, she's, she's been supportive and.

John Dehlin [03:48:58] Good. Yeah, so that's good. Well, so, so how does your story kind of, I mean, we got another five or six years, but is there anything like really crucial to your status, navigating the middle way that you want to share about your story?

Finding a Theological Home in Mormon Universalism

Jon Westover [03:49:17] Yeah, I mean we move out of the, the, the exclusion policy. We come back to Orem. This is actually when I had mentioned earlier, my bishop calls me to be a Sunday school gospel doctrine teacher and rescinds the calling. And so this is actually when I start attending Community of Christ and for.

John Dehlin [03:49:38] In Salt Lake or in both.

Jon Westover [03:49:41] So for a year, you know, it was go to the three hour block and then either go up to Salt Lake or they would meet. At first it was at the Masonic Temple in Orem actually, and then they moved to the Episcopalian church maybe in Provo, I'm trying to remember.

Jon Westover [03:50:01] So I did that for a while, you know, just trying and I really, I have to Say, I really like the community of Christ. I like their just way more inclusive, way more my speed. Like no thought policing. You can, you can come as you are and be whatever you want to be. And they're completely affirming of that. And so I really like that.

Jon Westover [03:50:23] But it, it didn't have the ability to, to fill like the social and community needs that I had. And there's still the family dynamics at play, some of those sorts of things. And so for about a year, you know, doing, doing both and not really sharing that with anyone, by the way, but, but doing both and, and, and kind of testing out the waters and, and ultimately after a year of that, you know, deciding, I don't think that's, that's a right, that's a, a replacement or something that I would want to, to do instead of the LDS Church.

Jon Westover [03:51:07] I wasn't sure I wanted to completely give up any sort of a spiritual home. I've traveled quite a bit for work over the years, you know, teaching and, and working in various countries and, or, or even just for a conference. And whenever I travel, I genuinely enjoy going to visit the churches in the community where I travel to, and that includes the LDS Church. If I can go to an LDS service, you know, in a foreign country, I think that's fun and sometimes it's enjoyable and sometimes it's less so. But when it's, especially when it has a real local flavor and doesn't seem so, you know, Mormon corridorish, I think it's a lot of fun and, but I've gone to plenty of other churches over the years and have always enjoyed that.

Jon Westover [03:51:51] I feel like I've done a fair amount of trying to explore other possible options for a spiritual home. And ultimately I feel like if not the LDS Church, for me, this isn't for anyone else, but for me, if not the LDS Church, where else would my spiritual home be? And I don't feel like I found a place that that would be. So it would be either the LDS Church or nothing and couple that with the family dynamics and all the other things and that doesn't seem terribly appealing to me either.

Jon Westover [03:52:26] So that's kind of where I'm at. Since then I've had additional callings. At one point I had an opportunity to interact with the general Sunday school presidency and board for the church as they were trying to redefine their approach to curriculum and those sorts of things.

Jon Westover [03:52:47] So I felt like maybe I could have a little bit of positive influence there and how they approach, approach teaching in the church. I Had a series of callings where I basically got to train teachers in the ward and then in the stake on how to be. You know, I. I did it in such a way that I was trying to teach, you know, train on how to be more inclusive in your teaching approach. That wasn't, like, explicitly the charge when I was given the calling, but that's the approach I took. And so, you know, feeling like I'm having some level of. At the local level, having some level of positive influence, even though I chalk up the, you know, the institutional church and in Salt Lake, I'm like, I'm just going to try to ignore the.

Jon Westover [03:53:27] What often I see is just the nonsense coming out of Salt Lake. And up until like, a month ago, I was second counselor in the stake Sunday school presidency. And, you know, so some level at least, of leaders saying, okay, we'll allow you to be involved in some way. But of course, then we get to 2020 and Covid hits, and everything goes at home and. Or remote.

Jon Westover [03:54:03] I remember when it first went, before it went remote, we just went home, right? And you just kind of did your own thing at home. We did the sacrament at home. We would do our own little kind of family service, maybe watch music and the spoken word. You know, something like that. I've always loved the music of the church, and so, you know, I like watching that.

Jon Westover [03:54:25] And I remember a couple times in those early days of COVID we even reached out to other families in the ward and said, hey, do you want to do, like, a combined zoom sacrament meeting? You know, these two or three families? So we did that a couple times.

Jon Westover [03:54:40] But then inexplicably, the stake, maybe the area presidency, came out and said, don't do that. That's inappropriate. So we're like, okay. So we stopped doing that. So we started watching my friend who's a Methodist minister in Oregon. Their services were all virtual. And so we started watching virtual Methodist services in addition to doing sacrament in our home and those sorts of things.

Jon Westover [03:55:06] Eventually, the word started broadcasting, and so we started watching that in addition to doing sacrament at home. And that's been kind of the story throughout Covid. We've tried to be very cautious and safe in relation to Covid. Ironically, we went into complete. We were so careful, like, lockdown as a family. We didn't go out for almost anything in those early days.

Jon Westover [03:55:31] And I still to this day have no idea how, but I was like the first person in the warden stake the whole neighborhood to get Covid in, like, May of 2020. And so you know, we just were determined to stay safe, keep the kids safe, keep my wife safe, not spread it to teachers, not spread it at church or anything like that. Right. So even as things started to open up and people started going back, I just let the bishop like, we're not, we're going to just keep watching from home. We're not going to go in person until, you know, certainly not until everyone is vaccinated in the family.

Jon Westover [03:56:06] And that's still not even possible for the younger kids. And so that's, that's kind of where we're at right now. I still have positive feelings for the members of the church. I still would love to find a way to meaningfully contribute to the church if I can be accepted for that offering and not marginalized or ostracized or you know, in some way shunned, you know, for, for having unorthodox thoughts. I self proclaim. For a long time I've been a self proclaimed Zen Mormon universalist. So I mean I, I like kind of to couple a lot of the things, teachings of Buddhism with still more of a Christ centered approach and more of a universe, universe, I can't say the word universalistic approach to the church and some of those elements of, of the doctrine and in some ways the church has tried to get away from some of those things over time.

Jon Westover [03:57:06] But if the church is going to make sense to me, I have to be able to think not in exclusive terms but in a more inclusive way. And so that's how I would approach, continue to approach it and interacting with, you know, family, with neighbors, whatever you

Carah Burrell [03:57:21] called it, a Zen Universalist Mormon. Is that something that you've coined or is that an actual thing?

Jon Westover [03:57:28] I'm not aware of anyone else.

Carah Burrell [03:57:29] I like it. Define that a little bit more. I like that.

Jon Westover [03:57:32] Yeah. I mean a lot of the origins of, of what Joseph taught, for all the pros and cons, of all the stuff that happened during his days, you know, he did teach many things from a very universalistic perspective.

Jon Westover [03:57:51] You know, if I, you know, I don't have any kind of literal notion in a, a God in a white robe, but you know, any sense of like a higher power or, you know, I do still consider myself a spiritual person and I, I want to seek out meaning and purpose and fulfillment and those sorts of things. And if there's any sort of an afterlife, the only way it could possibly make sense to me is if a loving God provides a way for everyone to, to have the highest eternity, you know, and, and so this Whole idea of tiered levels in the eternities has never made any sense to me.

Jon Westover [03:58:36] And I know, I know the doctrine and the teaching around the atonement and what members would say about everyone having that opportunity through the atonement of Christ. I don't believe Christ would be someone to cast someone into eternity of, you know, the terrestrial or telestral kingdom or even the bottom degree of the celestial kingdom.

Jon Westover [03:58:59] You know, I just don't see that as making any sense for a loving God. And, and so that's not something I would ever choose to, to have informed the way I interact with people. So universalist in that sense. I'm Mormon, you know, I know the church has walked away from that term. That's my upbringing, that's my heritage. I'm going to own that. And regardless of whether I, like, left and never associated with the church ever again, I'm still Mormon. And I don't think that can ever really change.

Jon Westover [03:59:32] And I mean Zen in terms of, you know, I spent a lot of time in Asia, not just in Korea for a mission when I worked with lg, but in other Asian countries as well for work. And, you know, I think there's a lot of sense to be had in Buddhist approaches to interacting with the world and trying to be mindful and those sorts of things. So, yeah, I don't know for a long time, if anyone asks if I feel forced to be put into a box, which I don't like, but if I feel compelled, I'm going to say I'm a Zen Mormon universalist.

Jon Westover [04:00:09] I'm a hopeful agnostic. I don't claim to know that there is a God or isn't a God. I don't think we can really know that there is or isn't a God. I live my life as though God is real and as though God is there. I choose to live that way. And I still, you know, do things like pray with the family and those sorts of things. And I find meaning in that. So I'll continue to do those things.

Jon Westover [04:00:39] But, but I, I don't, I don't feel a need or I don't feel compelled to, to adopt kind of a more traditional literalist view of a lot of the doctrines or truth claims.

Carah Burrell [04:00:55] So we get a lot of Christian listeners who, you know, they hear somebody doesn't have a literal faith in Mormonism or lost their faith, and they'll comment right away to be like, well, you never know the true Jesus, so why don't you just try out the real Jesus? Whatever their version of the real Jesus is. So what would your response be? To what? Why you can't just, you know, still find a faith community to find something that works better for you outside of Mormonism and that you can believe in the truer, better, bestest version of Christianity that you could.

Jon Westover [04:01:27] I mean, this is a real question. I know it is a lot. I know it is. And I've had friends of other Christian faiths that have posed it to me over the years as well. In good faith, by the way, like I, I, it's a real question. I, Sorry you never knew the real Jesus. Sorry for chuckling, but it is funny to me because the premise of it,

John Dehlin [04:01:46] if I can give a derivative, it's, it's, it's like you're missing out. There's this amazing Jesus. I know, I know that you could upgrade your Jesus. So go to, you know, South Mountain Church or K2 or one of these, you know, New age or evangelical non denominational Christian churches. More Bible based. Paul Cardall kind of.

Jon Westover [04:02:06] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:02:07] Is an example of this.

Jon Westover [04:02:08] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:02:08] Upgrade your Jesus and just go for full on Jesus mode.

Jon Westover [04:02:13] I guess my response to that is that's kind of what I did. I mean, within still the Mormon box, but I, I went full on Jesus mode. That's how I made it work for a really long time. And that was my focus. That was always my focus on anything I was ever teaching. If I ever felt compelled to share a testimony, it was always centered on that and it was always centered on my version of Jesus, which was not the, the dominant narrative around like what most chapel Mormons would say is their Jesus. You know, I don't like the whole idea of like my Jesus, your Jesus, whatever.

Jon Westover [04:02:48] But my conception of Christ in the role of Christ in my life was definitely not what probably most attending Mormons would say there's was. Right. And so, you know, I feel largely that is what I was trying to do. I've also gone to a lot of different churches and over the years, I don't know, I don't find it compelling to say I can replace one version with another or one dogma with another.

John Dehlin [04:03:23] I mean, there's kind of focusing on Jesus, meaning just focusing on being kind to other people. Yeah. And I think that's where a lot of progressive Mormons end up going. It's just like, be kind, don't be a jerk, love people. And that's what many progressive Mormons mean by being more Christ focused.

Jon Westover [04:03:41] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:03:42] Which I sense is kind of how you've been proceeding the past 10 or 20 years, I think, I think maybe what the people that Carrie and I are alluding to, it's more like Bible based. Study the Bible more, study the New Testament more.

Carah Burrell [04:03:55] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:03:55] Really get into you know, scriptures in the Bible and, and usually it's some sort of like Sandra Tanner, a Grant Palmer like conversion to a better form of Christianity and you're nothing's. Have you tried that? Did you try any of those non denominational Christian churches?

Jon Westover [04:04:15] Yeah, yeah, I've tried that. I would say for a long time. I had a very similar kind of a framing as Grant Palmer actually. And you know, over time I just, I couldn't maintain that level. Like, like I said earlier, it just is no longer compelling to me to even try to maintain some sort of a literal belief in any of it.

John Dehlin [04:04:41] So literal resurrection.

Jon Westover [04:04:43] Yeah, like it just doesn't like if it, like that's a nice hopeful idea and I'm fine with people holding that. I just don't see how it is relevant to me whatsoever with how I live my life. And so you know what, what how I live my life is, is based on some of those other things you just said in terms of the teachings of Christ, the example of Jesus, not the, and again, again I hate to say like the Mormon Jesus or like whatever other version of Jesus, but you know, I forgot a long time like since my mission I have not believed in like the corporate Jesus model of the church.

Jon Westover [04:05:25] I just can't believe that. I haven't believed that in decades. And you know, even before I got to the point where I just chalked up any, anything literal is just not mattering. So I don't know, I would say I, I understand the question. I, I, I understand where it's coming from. I guess the premise of it I just don't find interesting. Yeah, it just doesn't, it just doesn't matter to me at all and yeah, it doesn't. I don't feel like it changes the way I live or the way I act in any way.

Jon Westover [04:06:04] I've chosen how I, I want to live a faithful Christ like life and that ultimately doesn't matter what actual literal belief may or may not be behind it.

John Dehlin [04:06:16] Sure. Next question there. It seemed like prior to the November 15 policy and I'll say the cumulation of kind of Gospel topics essays, CES letter. Yeah the excommunications and then the November 15th policy there, there really was an active, vibrant kind of middle way, New Order Mormon Dan Witherspoon sort of real strain, kind of like a thoughtful Faith Gina Colvin Waters of Mormon.

Jon Westover [04:06:57] Yeah. And when did she step away? That like three or four years ago maybe.

John Dehlin [04:07:01] Yeah, well, she got a disciplinary council.

Carah Burrell [04:07:03] Right.

John Dehlin [04:07:03] And then was.

Jon Westover [04:07:06] She didn't get, she didn't get X.

John Dehlin [04:07:08] She was spared of excommunication.

Jon Westover [04:07:10] Right.

John Dehlin [04:07:10] Because a bunch of people interceded and then she resigned. It kind of.

Jon Westover [04:07:13] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:07:13] Thumb her nose at the church a little bit, but yeah. Anyway, my point is like there was a big strain for a lot of years of kind of cultivating middle way Mormonism. A lot of Mormons, you know, blogging, like by common consent and right times and seasons and, and I get a sense that the November 2015 policy dealt a real death w blow to a lot of faithful Mormon scholarship. A lot of middle way Mormons. It was just like that, that just knocked so, so many people out. And yeah, there's, there's still kind of Spencer Fluman, Adam Miller kind of like Maxwell Institute stuff going on.

John Dehlin [04:07:52] They brought in, they import, you know, they got rid of Daniel Peterson and Louis Midgley and those people and then they imported Terrell and Fiona Givens and, and Phil Barlow and others. But even now, Terrell, you know, Fiona Givens has been booted from the Maxwell Institute. I, I hear word that Terrell regrets even going to the Maxwell Institute, now wishes that he had stayed back in Virginia.

John Dehlin [04:08:18] I, I've heard the Spencer Flumen multiple times has tried to leave the Maxwell Institute, but you know, they keep really pressuring him to stay. It just seems brutal. The Middle way Mormon path seems kind of brutal and untenable like never before. Almost like the church. And then Holland's. The continual re. Injuring of the LGBTQ Mormon community.

John Dehlin [04:08:45] Holland's recent musket talk. Like, it seems like so many people who tried to go down your path have just been, have, have washed out.

Jon Westover [04:08:55] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:08:56] And that there are few people doing it now. That's not true. Like, there's still the Faith Matters podcast. There's still. I don't, I haven't heard from Thomas McConkey much, but Patrick Mason, you still, he'll hear rumblings from him. But like it. Have you got a sense that a lot of the people that have tried to, to really make this work and stay in it are. It's just, it's becoming a smaller and a smaller group and there's more and more polarization.

Jon Westover [04:09:24] Yeah, I think that in less and

John Dehlin [04:09:25] less of a middle way.

Jon Westover [04:09:27] Yeah, I, I think it has become more and more polarized for sure. A lot of the main middle way voices previously have either gone Quiet or gone away. I think that's absolutely true. I think there's still plenty of people who are just keeping it to themselves and for whatever reason, trying to make it work, you know, for their family, for their whatever, right within their local congregation. I'm sure there's plenty of that still.

Jon Westover [04:09:58] But, you know, for people who want to be vocal, it's harder and harder it seems, to do that and to make it tenable. And certainly the September policy was, you know, a bit of a death blow for me. I mean, was. That was like the first time I ever had, like, the. There were times my wife and I had talked about, you know, what if I left? What would that look like? What would that mean for the family?

Jon Westover [04:10:27] And, you know, we'd had some of those types of conversations, but it wasn't until the September policy or the November 2015 policy that, you know, I really, you know, was thinking this. This just doesn't seem to make sense to. To try to. To do it now. What happened between having some of those conversations and aftermath of the policy?

Jon Westover [04:10:53] We returned to. To Orem. We are back in our ward. And I mean, ultimately what I decided was as long as my kids are wanting to go to church, I'm not going to put myself in a position where I'm not going to be able to sit on it in if they get interviewed for something where I'm further marginalized and not able to be their dad in relation to their relationship with the church.

Jon Westover [04:11:21] So I decided then, you know, that, you know, even if I have to, you know, further step away or do things on my own terms, that I would do everything I could to maintain a temple recommend that I, you know, so that I could stay in, quote, unquote, good standing so that I could, you know, not send my kids off to something that I'm uncomfortable with them doing without me mediating it in some way.

Jon Westover [04:11:53] And so, you know, that. That's been the ongoing reality of it. You know, again with temple recommend, you know, I've had thorough conversations with leaders to a point. And then I got to the point where I, like, said everything I needed to say, they said everything they needed to say. And now I just, you know, if I go through a temple recommend interview again, I do all the things, you know, in terms of orthopraxy, and for the other questions, I just say, you know, in my own way, you know, I believe in my own way, or I hope in my own way. And I've had enough thorough discussions with them in the past that I Don't feel like I need to rehash it all again.

Jon Westover [04:12:37] And they, they have been okay with it. So as long as, as they honor my boundaries and they allow me to participate fully in that way, you know, I want to stay engaged enough that I can intercede for my kids if necessary. You know, I, on occasion will email the ward leaders about you know, concerns that I have. I'm, I'm not shy about that.

Jon Westover [04:13:06] My, my two older daughters are in seminary, which, you know, causes heartburn. But I'm, you know, before they started, I met with the seminary principal and their teachers in person, explained the situation and my expectations, and I reiterated it multiple times since, you know, especially like the most recent one, One time I, I felt compelled to reiterate was after the, the BYU honor code nonsense that happened in 2020 and just make it explicitly clear that in no uncertain terms, like, it is not acceptable for them to allow any of that kind of nonsense to make it into the classroom again. Recently with Holland's talk, I again reached out to ward and ward leaders and seminary leaders.

Jon Westover [04:13:55] I, I, I just, it needs to be crystal clear. And if they can't comply with the boundaries, then, you know, I'm clear that, that my kids will not participate. And so, and so far that's been, you know, at first, I'm not sure they, they believe me. You know, I think they, they try, they, they have the power, they have the control. They're going to tell me how it's going to be. I'm not going to tell them how it's going to be until I say, well, okay, then, then they're not going to participate. And as soon as I say that, then they end up honoring the boundaries that I set.

Jon Westover [04:14:29] So that continues that, I mean, that's how, how our, the relationship has continued again during COVID you know, doing it from home. So, so we have more control.

Defending the Middle Way and Looking Forward

John Dehlin [04:14:44] If, if, if I were to sort of glibly recharacterize what I just heard in maybe a less charitable way, you know, it's, I could say, did I just hear you say that you are somewhat fearful that you might lose influence or control over your kids since they're engaged in Mormonism, and you know that if you step too far out of the lines, the church is going to marginalize you and push you out and ostracize you even further. So in, in response to the church's sort of long history of coercive techniques, you're choosing to remain in the middle way as a matter of kind of self preservation? And as a matter of remaining a positive influence in your kids lives when otherwise the church might end up coming between you and your kids. If I were to restate it that way.

Jon Westover [04:15:42] That's exactly right.

John Dehlin [04:15:43] Holy moly. I wasn't expecting you to endorse that. I was expecting to go. That's not a good interpretation of what I just said.

Jon Westover [04:15:52] No, I, I mean, that's, that's it.

John Dehlin [04:15:54] Did you really care?

Jon Westover [04:15:57] That's it. And that, that's a hard place to be.

Carah Burrell [04:16:00] Right?

John Dehlin [04:16:00] Yeah.

Jon Westover [04:16:04] But you know, I, I refuse to allow the church to come between me and the kids.

John Dehlin [04:16:14] So if I were to say, why would you dare come on Mormon stories then? Because some people have been excommunicated for that or for a combination of that and other things.

Jon Westover [04:16:24] So what, you know, if, if the, if leaders were going to come after me, they would have done it. I mean, I'm still, this isn't, I'm not saying anything here that I haven't said openly in Facebook posts for years.

Jon Westover [04:16:42] And you know, other than, you know, some people messaging me, calling me out or whatever, you know, I've never had leaders who have threatened disciplinary action against me, you know, because of, of posts the heart. I mean, the harshest thing has been my parents and grandparents reaction. Right. And then some private messages that people have sent me.

Jon Westover [04:17:08] So it's, it is, it is a. I, I recognize it's a strange thing, it's a hard thing and it's, it's uncomfortable and in an ideal world this wouldn't be the situation. But I'm not, I'm not concerned, I'm not specifically concerned about coming on the podcast. And all of a sudden, you know, that's like grounds to excommunicate me. I don't, I don't think I've said anything remotely, you know, deserving of any sort of discipline as we've been talking today. So if my leaders disagree, they can call me in and we can have a conversation. But I mean, it's the same thing. If they, I've been clear about this in the past with, with certain leaders, like boundaries around my family, those are firmly in place.

Jon Westover [04:18:00] And if, if the church were ever to come after me in any sort of way for discipline, for no other reason than like speaking my conscience about LGBT issues or trying to say, you know, having a non literal belief and serving in the church is okay, and if that is enough for, for them to come after me, then they're, they're, they're, they're signing the deal for the family Right. Like, there's just that. That would be a really hard thing. But I. I don't. I don't believe for a second that my family would.

Jon Westover [04:18:42] Meaning my immediate family. I don't believe for a second that they would stand for that. And so for that. For that reason alone, I just don't think they would come after me.

John Dehlin [04:18:54] Okay.

Jon Westover [04:18:55] As you know, I haven't. I haven't been so outspoken and strident, you know, consistently over time that it's hard for me to imagine them even wanting to anyway.

John Dehlin [04:19:04] But I hope I. I really hope that remains the case. That's what I would want for you, if that's what you want.

Jon Westover [04:19:11] It is, I should say. I mean, it's. It is. You know, I've thought over the years, like you said, this has been a long time. This has been a long burn. And I've had. I've had many people who have once been faithful who have since left the church, you know, that are in my life that have asked me about that and questioned me about it, and they're like, how in the world, you know, why don't you just leave the church? But again, everyone's situation is different. And if my family situation was different, if I didn't live in Utah county, perhaps I would make different choices.

John Dehlin [04:19:44] Yeah.

Jon Westover [04:19:44] But. But it is what it is. And. And so, you know, with. With the slow burn the way it is, I'm. I'm dealing with it, you know, the best way I know how to deal with it. And, I mean, I just have to live with that, you know?

John Dehlin [04:19:58] Yeah. I was going to ask you a different angle to the same question, which is like, for some people, it becomes a matter of conscience. They can't stay. It's like, right. Joseph Smith, his credibility is not Right. High enough, or the church is harming LGBT people, or it's misogynistic or it's racist or whatever. And is. They get to the point where it's a matter of conscience, where they just can't stay. And I'm guessing your answer is, again, I stay for my family. Yeah.

Jon Westover [04:20:24] I mean, it's a matter of conscience that I speak up for. Sure.

John Dehlin [04:20:29] So, like, doing this is part like.

Jon Westover [04:20:30] Like doing this, like. Like posting things on Facebook, like speaking at Sunstone or, you know, there, after the. After the. The honor code nonsense at BYU, back in 2020, I had the unfortunate opportunity to have to go speak at BYU at a conference. Just like the day after, like, the CES administrator submitted their letter reasserting, you know, what the honor code's position had to be right.

Jon Westover [04:21:06] And the whole thing was just disgusting in the first place. And then I find myself in the situation where, you know, I'm supposed to go speak at this conference at byu. It was an inclusive pedagogy conference, by the way. It was about having an inclusive classroom.

Jon Westover [04:21:24] And so I'm going to speak at this conference. But it's not just me. Like, if it was just me, I was of the mind to just say, screw it. And I didn't want to set foot on campus. But I had two co authors, we were presenting together, and I didn't feel it was fair to just throw them under the bus and whatever. So I just reached out to them the day before the conference, and I said, if I'm going to go, then I need to take the first five minutes of our time to speak about what's been going on in the honor code office and the dynamics at byu.

Jon Westover [04:22:02] I need to call it out. We're at an inclusive pedagogy, inclusive classroom conference. How can you not talk about that? And they said, that's fine. So that's what I did. And it, you know, it was predominant. It was probably like 40% BYU professors, 40% UVU professors, and 20% people from other universities that were attending this conference.

Jon Westover [04:22:25] And, you know, every single BYU person in that room was hanging their head in shame. You know, as I was up there speaking, they. They understand. They know the ramifications of it. And, like, those are the types of opportunities. If I have that opportunity, I'm gonna share my piece. You know, I'm gonna say why this is wrong.

Jon Westover [04:22:49] And I have no qualms about calling the brethren bigots if they're bigots. I just don't. And, you know, I got a lot of crap back then. I got a lot of crap just recently after Holland's talk. And I posted things, you know, with people saying that it was reverse bigotry. I was bigoted towards the church for calling out the church's bigotry.

Jon Westover [04:23:15] I had one friend, you know, I just posted the definition of bigotry. Like, I literally looked it up in the Webster dictionary. This is the definition of bigotry. This is what just happened. You draw your own conclusion. And, you know, the amount of people, you know, pushing back on that and getting really upset. I didn't even go into it more than that. That's all I did. And then I had one friend, you know, who responded, good person. Good, good, kind hearted person. But she said, if this is how we're defining Bigotry, then I'm a bigot. But I'm not a bigot. I love people like, well, no, you're a bigot.

Jon Westover [04:23:52] It doesn't mean you don't have good intentions, and it doesn't mean that you're not a lovely person. In other areas, we. But if this is what you believe and this is how you act, and this is how you behave to other people, then you are. Yes, by definition, you are a bigot. And so I have zero problem. I know. I know it rubs people the wrong way if I call the Brethren bigots, but I had zero problem calling Holland or Oaks or Nelson a bigot.

John Dehlin [04:24:14] Oops.

Jon Westover [04:24:15] I mean, they're. They're homophobic bigots, and it's just the reality.

John Dehlin [04:24:19] And that can get you in trouble, though.

Jon Westover [04:24:22] Yeah. And maybe. Maybe that's the one thing I have said in the. But I've said it in the past, you know, so I'm saying it again here. But it's. That's.

John Dehlin [04:24:35] They.

Jon Westover [04:24:37] They seem completely blind to the LGBT issue, like, unable to comprehend the damage that they're causing. And I've corresponded with Holland, Elder Holland, over the years a little bit, And most recently after his. His speech at BYU back whenever that was, late August, early September, whenever that was. And his only response was defensive.

John Dehlin [04:25:10] Whoops.

Jon Westover [04:25:10] His only response was defensiveness. He's corresponded with me in good faith in the past, as I've tried to do with him, and he. I mean, maybe I'm making a bigger thing out of it than I should, but when he responds to an email by calling me Mr. Westover instead of Brother Westover, that seems intentional.

Jon Westover [04:25:34] And it seems like he's marking a line and saying, you're no longer in this. Whatever he thinks the big tent should be. I've heard him say that before, but apparently criticizing him for bigoted comments, which are demonstrably bigoted by definition, then, you know, then. Then he can't respond in a cordial way. And what blew me away by his response was not necessarily that he was defensive.

Jon Westover [04:26:02] I was pleased that at least he responded so that. That was nice. But. But what surprised me by his response was that he. He's an apostle. He's supposed to be living a Christlike life. And I can't fathom for a second ever responding purposely in a way to. To.

Jon Westover [04:26:26] To hurt a student of mine. I don't care how. How horrible the student may be, how much of a brat they may be, how frustrated or annoying they may be. If a student came to me and expressed concerns. And if, even if I thought they were complete being completely unfair with me, I would never respond to a student that way. I'm nobody. I'm just, you know, I'm just this guy who's trying to live the tenets of a Christ like life.

Jon Westover [04:26:54] You know, he's an apostle. So I, you know, I, I've learned over the years you really can't have higher expectations sometimes not even a general sense of decency. Even that level of expectation for some of the church leaders is not tenable. But I, with Holland, I was surprised because in the past he's been at least under, you know, somewhat understanding and willing to listen a little bit. And I'm sure he got hammered. I'm sure he got all sorts of messages after his speech. And so maybe he was just having a bad day, but.

John Dehlin [04:27:34] And what was bigoted about his speech for you to summarize?

Jon Westover [04:27:40] Yeah, he, I mean, he specifically calls out a valedictorian for doing nothing more than giving the pre approved graduation speech. He reaffirms the church's stance on LGBT issues and saying we need to stand firm to it, that there's no, really no questioning it. In fact, we need to defend it with musket fire, which is horrible in and of itself.

Jon Westover [04:28:11] He equate, like what. One of the things that really got me is when he said, when he talked about, you know, getting messages from a donor who was upset about the, the, the demonstrations on campus and how that was dividing campus and how he and the brethren have wept many hours and wrestled with this issue for a long time.

Jon Westover [04:28:40] Like, that just falls so flat for me. I, I believe that he has wrestled with the issue. I believe that they've talked about it extensively. I don't believe they're very open to theological possibilities around LGBT issues. There's that great new book, Queer Mormon Theology, for example.

John Dehlin [04:29:00] Blair Osler.

Jon Westover [04:29:01] Yeah, Blair Osler. Yeah. That's a great example of just a new way to frame issues. Bill Real and RFM had a really great podcast, I don't know, a month or so ago, two months ago, where they talked about different alternatives that the church could take right now with minimal, you know, doctrinal impact.

Jon Westover [04:29:25] And it's true. Like, you know, and I've been saying those things in smaller circles for a long time, and I. The church leaders are smart men. Holland is a smart man, and they either haven't had very thorough conversations, or they're just completely blind and oblivious to counter arguments and other possibilities with no creativity about how they could address the issues.

Jon Westover [04:29:55] Either way, it's a problem and it's worth calling out. And I don't care if in his privilege, he and his brethren in Salt Lake, you know, have had to wrestle with a heart issue, and they. They feel sad about it. Like, I just don't care like that in comparison to the Karm and the damage and the hurt caused to everyone else because of their words and because of their stances. That's what I care about.

Jon Westover [04:30:25] And so I. I just. I couldn't believe that he, like, actually called. That he actually called out, you know, a donor conversation, you know, as if that is in any way congruent with the damage, the harm, the suicides that have occurred and the additional harm that his words would have. The other thing he said in his response to me, which was just demeaning and belittling, is, you know, he calls me Mr. Westover and he says, I didn't see you on the roster. You weren't. You weren't part of the people attending the meeting. As if somehow that meant my concerns are invalid.

Jon Westover [04:31:03] Which makes no sense either. I mean, clearly he knows that it gets posted on the website. Like, anyone can watch his remarks. He knows that there's going to be a firestorm after he says those things. He's not stupid. And so, you know, that is not a dodo. He's not a dodo.

John Dehlin [04:31:23] You know, and I go. I've met with him, and I go between knowing that he knows he's smart, went to Yale, he's been around a long time. It's over 80. Like, I. I waffle between thinking that he totally knows what he's doing and he's doing it in a calculated, intentional way to just saying he's either old or in poor health or just still out of touch and clueless. And it's. Sometimes I waffle back and forth, but you're probably right. He probably knows what he's doing.

Jon Westover [04:31:54] Well, and I. Super smart. I do waffle back and forth, too. And age certainly takes a toll. So, I mean, you never know where his mind was at in a given day or whatever. So you have to acknowledge that. But that speaks to other issues and systemic problems in, in, you know, how. How leadership is set up in the church and those sorts of things as well.

John Dehlin [04:32:17] Well, certainly when he goes to England with Tom Phillips, his sons sitting on the stand.

Jon Westover [04:32:22] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:32:22] And talks about his callings having made it to heaven, knowing that the second anointing conversation really was born out of England and Tom Phillips and who he was friends with.

Jon Westover [04:32:36] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:32:36] While Tom Phillips's son is sitting on the stand. I'm just like, that hubris is mind blowing.

Jon Westover [04:32:43] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:32:44] I couldn't believe he went anywhere near talking about people's, you know. Yeah.

Jon Westover [04:32:49] Did he realize where he was going before he got there? I don't know.

John Dehlin [04:32:53] But, yeah, there's too much.

Jon Westover [04:32:55] Yeah, it's. It is mind blowing too much. So those, those sorts of things, I, you know, it's. It's hard to. To make sense of that. Again, I have no qualms in calling out bad behavior out and, and for myself as well. I mean, that's the thing is I'm not perfect. I try to, like, live a Christlike life. I try to do well by others. I try not to cause harm. I try to benefit people around me. And I'm sure I hurt people, and I'm sure I do think I fall and make mistakes. I have no doubt in my mind. So I'm not trying to claim to be something I'm not.

Jon Westover [04:33:29] But I will be the first to acknowledge when I make a mistake or if I've hurt someone, even if it wasn't my intention, even if there was a misunderstanding, even if they're totally off base on kind of how they perceive the situation versus how I perceived it, all of that, it doesn't matter. Like, if. If there's harm done by me, regardless of the reasons or the intentions, I'm going to apologize for it and I'm going to try to make it right. I'm going to try to make it better. And the fact that the church as an institution is incapable of doing that, that our leaders are.

Jon Westover [04:34:05] Are unwilling and unable to do that, is a huge, huge problem and a huge double standard. And I mean, when you talk about sick culture, that's. That's like one of the top things on my list of things that need. Need to be addressed if we want to make the church a more healthy place.

John Dehlin [04:34:25] So I just have one. I have one final question, and this is, you may be uncomfortable with the question, and if so, just dismiss it. I knew Matt Holland when I was at BYU because we were both American Heritage tas. And I know that he eventually, you know, he worked at Monitor, which was a great company. He got his PhD, I think, at UNC Chapel Hill or Duke or one

Jon Westover [04:34:48] of those places maybe.

John Dehlin [04:34:49] And then he ends up at BYU just as a political science faculty.

Jon Westover [04:34:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:34:54] And then voila, one day he's president of Utah Valley University. And I don't. I don't think that made sense to anybody. No. Because Normally, I mean, you may, some people may not love UVU or think it's a top notch scholarly place, but you don't. It's still a university.

Jon Westover [04:35:15] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:35:15] And you don't, you don't just become the president of a university when you haven't even been a dean, you know, or a provost or a department chair or anything. And then you would be at a community college working your way up or, you know, some. Not a major R1 or division one kind of university. So.

Jon Westover [04:35:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:35:39] So I mean, there's two questions, like, how much was that nepotism? And we would be speculating, but how much was that nepotism? How would that happen in a state school? And then the second, I guess then the second question is, is like, how did he do, did he, did he. Did he honor that university in that role? And I know you knew him and worked with him and that you still work there now, and there could probably be unpleasant ramifications for you if you're too candid, if, in fact, you have criticism. So if there's anything you want to say that I'm curious.

Jon Westover [04:36:12] No. Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:36:13] We could talk after.

Jon Westover [04:36:14] I'm fine addressing that. Yeah. I, I will say I think Matt is a very, A very nice man. I think overall he was a good president, and I think he served the institution well for the eight years or so that he was president.

Jon Westover [04:36:32] And he certainly, you know, I have no doubt that he did his best. And did, you know, what he thought was right for the institution? No question there in my mind. Were there things I disagreed with him on? Sure.

Jon Westover [04:36:47] You know, were there times I was frustrated with how we approach things? Sure. But overall, you know, I think he was a good president. Now the, the separate question, though is, you know, was he qualified when the, when he was appointed?

Jon Westover [04:37:00] And I don't think anyone would argue that he was qualified other than maybe him and his dad and maybe Pat. Yeah. And. And it's. It's two different things to say he was capable. Capable versus qualified. Was he capable? Yeah, he. He showed that he was capable.

John Dehlin [04:37:19] Smart guy.

Jon Westover [04:37:20] Yeah. And in any other context or circumstance, would that ever happen? No way. And so if his name wasn't Holland, there's no way that he would have had that job.

John Dehlin [04:37:29] But it wouldn't just be his name, it would be somehow the power levers. Well, the state legislature, behind the scenes, the churches, kind of the theocracy stuff, basically.

Jon Westover [04:37:38] Yeah. The, the, the, the board of regents and the trustees are heavily influenced by the church, for sure.

John Dehlin [04:37:44] Yeah.

Jon Westover [04:37:46] So, I mean, I don't know any behind the scenes, anything like, I can't speak to any of that specifically other than it is clear it makes no sense that someone who had never even been a department chair and just barely had received tenure would become a university president. And I remember I kind of chuckled at the time. Again, nothing against Matt, but you know, they were trying to fill out his resume when he got announced to try to, you know, demonstrate that he was deserving. And so they tried to throw everything in there that they could that might contribute to the sense that maybe he was qualified.

Jon Westover [04:38:20] And you know, one of the things that they, they put is that he had led a study abroad like one study abroad. I'm like, okay, that's great. A study abroad. That's a, that's a cool experience. In no way would that qualify anyone ever to be a university president.

Jon Westover [04:38:35] So the disconnect there, you know, it was, was dramatic. I don't think it was lost on anybody. I think, you know, people at UVU recognized it and. But he, you know, he, he did a good job and he was generally well liked and well received at the university. So no real qualms there.

Jon Westover [04:38:57] The one, you know, again, I don't have any first hand knowledge of this. Just hearing after the fact, behind the scenes kind of the rumors and gossip about it, I guess. It's not rumor or gossip that Ned Hill, who is the dean of the Marriott School at BYU was a candidate for that position. I don't know if this rings a bell for you at all. It was actually.

John Dehlin [04:39:20] I met Ned.

Jon Westover [04:39:20] Yeah. And it was actually in the paper. It was a big deal. When he dropped out of the search, everyone considered him to be the front runner for the, the president at UVU position. And, and then his wife started getting attacked, personal attacks to his wife because she was a Democrat. And when that started happening, he withdrew his name from consideration. And then Matt swooped in. You know, I don't know who knows exactly what was happening behind the scenes. I have suspicions but. And that, that's, that's, that stinks for Ned. I mean, Ned was a long devoted church member, dean of the business faculty and dean of the business school. Certainly he was heads and shoulders above, you know, qualified and deserving for that kind of a position. And then he got sidelined for whatever reason.

John Dehlin [04:40:08] So the implications are that friends of the church would attack his wife in a way to intimidate him and make him back out.

Jon Westover [04:40:16] I mean that's, that's the kind of the assumption. But were there for sure.

John Dehlin [04:40:22] Were, was Were there rumors or gossip around Matt Holland's departure from Utah Valley University?

Jon Westover [04:40:28] No. When he came, he said from the very beginning that, you know, he saw himself being there for maybe five years or so and he stayed for eight. So, you know, all sorts of rumors started to arise after five years. Like, what's the next thing for President Holland? You know, rumors from, like, he's going to try to get Hatch's seat in the Senate, run for governor, get Herbert's seat. Those types of rumors were flying all over the place. You know, he got called as a mission president. I don't think that was a huge surprise to anybody. And wasn't a huge surprise when he got named a general authority.

John Dehlin [04:41:08] But no rumors of scandal or anything?

Jon Westover [04:41:10] Oh, no, no, no.

John Dehlin [04:41:11] Okay.

Jon Westover [04:41:12] No, nothing like that.

John Dehlin [04:41:13] Okay. Yeah. All right. Well, man, this has been a really interesting sort of like, story about kind of a long game, middle way approach to mormonism in the 21st century. And I really appreciate your willingness to kind of go there and tell us the story from start to finish. I think for me, my mind is, I kind of like, at some point, my idea that this approach was tenable, it kind of died. And then Dan Witherspoon left the Open Stories foundation, and I kind of have stopped paying attention to it, the Middle Way, but it's apparently still alive and well. And it's really, it's really, it's kind of interesting to see that you've been able to do it for so long.

John Dehlin [04:42:04] It sounds like you're not planning on stopping anytime soon. I'm sure there's a lot of other people who are doing it, if not because they want to, but because they have to. And so I'm glad that you would come on and allow us to kind of feature this on the podcast.

Jon Westover [04:42:18] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:42:19] Thank you.

Jon Westover [04:42:19] Yeah. And maybe as we close this segment, you know, I wish, I truly do wish, like, the church could be a safe, healthy place for everybody, like a truly inclusive place, a big tent, you know, psychologically safe, emotionally safe place for everybody. That. That would be my preference. We're a long way from that.

Jon Westover [04:42:42] And in some ways there have been positive baby steps in that direction, but in other ways, there's been backpedaling. And so, you know, what things will look like, you know, in the coming decade or two. Who knows? I will say, you know, not to out anybody, but one of the things was in my outline, I didn't actually get to it, but in my Orem ward, there was about a year where I convened a group of couples in the ward to meet and we'd rotate houses and we would meet as a study group and review the gospel topic essays.

Jon Westover [04:43:17] So I mean there was a contingent of just in one ward of a sizable group of people, of just people I was personally, you know, had relationships with. I wasn't trying to like reach out to every person I thought might be interested. There was certainly a decent sized group that was very interested in having those conversations in just one ward, you know, so, so there's got to be people in every ward that are, you know, trying to figure out what makes sense for them given their context.

Jon Westover [04:43:51] And I wish people didn't need to be closeted about that. Like, I wish, I wish the church was a place like you said earlier with Reform Judaism. Like why can't the church be a place where you can have a range of beliefs and a range of orthodoxy?

Jon Westover [04:44:11] It seems feasible to me. I know it doesn't make sense to a lot of people, but it seems feasible to me if the culture could shift. And unfortunately, in a lot of ways there's only been doubling down into more rigid culture in recent years, which makes, you know, me a little bit more skeptical about like the long term prognosis. But I don't know. I mean, the church has so much money that it can write off into the future into perpetuity with no members and still survive and be thrive and thrive. But if, if it wants to thrive in the normal sense of like having vibrant communities and lots of members, it has to adapt or it will become irrelevant in the lives of so many people.

Jon Westover [04:45:01] And yeah, I, I, you know, the last decade has been tumultuous in a lot of ways. Lots of people choosing to leave the church who are previously very faithful orthodox members. And you know, the, the coming decade will be more of the same unless there's some pretty significant changes.

John Dehlin [04:45:22] Well, the good news is there's a lot of these kind of neo apologetic Mormons, liberal progressive Mormons like Tom Christofferson, Patrick Mason, Rosalind Welch, Spencer Flumen, you know, the whole Faith Matters group, Terrell and Fiona Givens. If, if we don't lose them, you know, there's still a lot of, of progressive Mormons fighting that good fight. I don't know whether the ranks are growing or shrinking. I, I don't think that this middle way Mormonism is, is very appealing to Gen Z, even Gen Xers. Yeah, I think they're, it seems like they're just exiting and, and skipping go. And they're not passing go, they're not collecting $200 they're just.

John Dehlin [04:46:10] They're moving on. But we'll see. I. I think the church is eventually going to have to become more progressive and accommodating. It's just a matter of whether it'll retrench more before it eventually goes that way. But, yeah, I don't think it's. I think in the long run, the church has to become more progressive and liberal. It's just a matter of how long it'll take. So we'll see. And we'll see. We'll have you come back in five or 10 years and see if you're still able to do the long view, maintain the. We'll see. Middle Way Mormonism for the long haul. Maybe that should be the name of this episode. Middle Way Mormonism for the Long Haul.

Jon Westover [04:46:49] Well, thank you. Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.

John Dehlin [04:46:51] And we're going to have you back. So what I really want to do is have you kind of put your top 10 points of analysis or criticisms or observations about the modern Mormon Church from the standpoint of an organizational behaviorist or psychologist, and just have you do a Roger Hendricks. But. But from your own specific discipline. And I think that would be really fun. What do you think?

Jon Westover [04:47:16] Yeah, that'd be great.

John Dehlin [04:47:17] Okay, Carah, any final words before we go get Indian food?

Carah Burrell [04:47:22] Oh, are we great now? I'm. I really appreciate. You were articulating so many things that are so foreign to people like me. Like I said, I went from conservative Mormon. Probably would have been real good pals with a lot of the people you were talking about in those words, straight to kind of like, you know, shelf breaking and leaving. So this is an area that I've never really tread in and understood before. So it was really interesting hearing you articulate your points of view, and I respect them.

Jon Westover [04:47:48] So, yeah.

Carah Burrell [04:47:48] Thanks for coming on, John.

Jon Westover [04:47:50] My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

John Dehlin [04:47:52] All right, well, thanks, John. Come back again soon. And thanks to all our listeners who have joined us today. We hope you know we've always tried to portray various positions on the spectrum at Mormon Stories podcast, and so we hope you've enjoyed this attempt at kind of portraying the Middle Way, which we don't always do, but hope you've enjoyed it. Thanks to all the donors and supporters that make this possible. Your donations keep us alive. We do have a lot of people canceling. We probably had 20 people cancel their donations this month. It's been a lot. And I've. I email every single one and say, is there something we did?

John Dehlin [04:48:31] At least a few that responded have said it's just financial hard times. I don't know about the ones that don't answer, but we also have a lot of people who've been joining and. And in some ways things are better than ever. So it's hard to know what to make of anything these days. But I will just say this, that we know that less than one out of a thousand of our viewers or listeners donate and we're losing donations all the time. So if you do value this type of programming, if you want to see it continue, if you value having care on board. Gerardo John Larsen.

John Dehlin [04:49:00] If you value us upping our game with with audio and video quality, we really do need your support. So. So please consider becoming a monthly donor@mormonstories.org 10 bucks a month, 20 bucks a month, whatever you can afford. It's tax deductible in the US, 100% transparent in our finances, and all of it goes to supporting these efforts. We also want to remind those of you who are still hanging on that we're having an Amazing Thrive Conference November 14th in the Salt Palace. You can go to Thrive beyond mormonism, thrive beyond religion.com and register. We're going to have a great lineup and mostly our goal is to help you find friends and community so that you're not alone in your journey and so that you can find friends and community to.

John Dehlin [04:49:47] To do life together in whatever way you need to do life as a progressive or post Mormon. So please join us if you can. Any other announcements or final points?

Carah Burrell [04:49:58] Carah Just come to Thrive. It's going to be fun. Got a bunch of tiktokers coming. We got so many fun people. And then there's also a party the night before Thrive that we're going to do karaoke and there'll be like a cash bar for drinks and so it'll be like almost a two day event that we've kind of expanded it to. So if you can make it to Salt Lake into the Salt palace, please come to thrive November 14th, everyone.

John Dehlin [04:50:18] All right, and thanks, Carah. It's always great to have you along. It makes it a lot more fun and interesting.

Carah Burrell [04:50:24] Yeah, I hope so.

John Dehlin [04:50:25] Yeah. Thanks a lot. All right, take care, John.

Jon Westover [04:50:27] Thank you. Take care.

John Dehlin [04:50:28] All right, listeners. Take care, everybody. See you guys soon.

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