Introduction and Episode Overview

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John De Lynn. It is October 11, 2020 and we are, we are, I am excited about today's interview. It's not going to be a three or five or a ten hour epic interview, but as far as I'm concerned, it's an important interview with an important topic. For those of you who didn't catch my my last Mormon Stories podcast episode from Sunday or who just have been a little bit out of the loop recently, one of the Mormon apologetic organizations called Fair Mormon released a YouTube video campaign. And in the YouTube video campaign they have several actors, Kwaku L from Saints Unscripted or Three Mormons YouTube channel, Cardan Ellis, a podcaster, and Brad Whitbeck and others creating these hip new young apologetic Mormon YouTube videos. And it's kind of in a Saturday Night Live shtick or theme. They've got usually Kwaku and Brad up there as kind of news news anchors with city skyline behind them. They're holding pieces of paper like Chevy Chase, you know, back in the Saturday Night Live days. And then they've got graphics and animation and sometimes actors come in and they're definitely more, they're, they're, they're, they're attempting to be more humorous and funny. They're attempting to appeal to younger audiences. They make lots of jokes. Sometimes they even swear or make sexual references. Oftentimes those swear words are bleeped out and, and, but they're trying to basically attack Jeremy Reynolds and me, John Dehlin, CES Letter and Mormon stories. And the basic approach seems to be to, to do the tip typical apologetic responses in, in rapid fire ways. Some would say there's some dishonesty

Anthony Miller [00:02:18] or

John Dehlin [00:02:19] even gaslighting in the content or the substance of the videos. They've been reviewed by several people including Douglas Still Go in the UK and Zelf on the Shelf have done some response videos already. But some, some, some would say that they're funny, some say that they're dishonest. Some say, some say that they're hip. Some say that they're mean spirited and, but, but what Fair would say is that they're highly successful, that they've garnered more views than that other Fair Mormon videos in the past and that they're highly effective. But others would say it's, it's, it's also just this classic Fair ad hominem stuff where they're attacking, you know, people like me and Jeremy as being liars. They're attacking Mormon stories and, or Jeremy The CES letter as, as being dishonest. And they're even going as far as to say that we're intentionally breaking up families for profit. And then extensions to that are these other two YouTube channels, Stone 16 and then Midnight Mormons, where they get even more vicious and cruel. And this, all, this all erupted last week with a super violent video that was shared on Twitter that then Cardinalis and Kwaku retweeted that then resulted in Jeremy Runnels and I getting a bunch of death threats on Twitter with people holding knives and threatening to kill me or Jeremy in really violent ways. Jeremy and I both reported this to the police department and to the FBI. We're doing all we can to stay safe, but it's a really shocking time and the reactions have been really mixed. Basically, some again, active Mormons, believing Mormons, orthodox Mormons, apologist Mormons, think it's great. Daniel Peterson says, let a hundred flowers bloom. You know, Scott Gordon and John lynch are over the moon, happy with the results. They're getting more views than ever. Kwaku and Cardin and Bradley are doing victory laps at how successful things have been. And then on the other hand, there, there are many orthodox believing Mormons, progressive Mormons and post Mormons that are saying these videos are dishonest, they're heinous, they're violent, they're mean spirited, they're awful. And to be honest, it's an unsettling time for me and for many other people. I don't love it. I. It's not something that's very fun. And, and so I'm trying to get grounded and make sense of the moment. And I'm trying to calm down, calm my nerves and just figure out where we are and where we're going. And one of my favorite humans in the Mormon, post Mormon realm is Anthony Miller. And one of the great things about Anthony Miller is that he can always be relied on to give kind of a thoughtful, measured, intellectual, but, but also heartfelt response to, to the times. And so what I, what I did is I reached out to Anthony and asked him if he would join us today on Mormon Stories. And we could kind of go through his kind of his analysis and a little bit of the history of Mormon apologetics, what hasn't been working, how apologetics has evolved over time, kind of where we are now. We want Anthony's analysis of the ethics, the effectiveness, the cynicism of the current campaign. And then we're going to talk about what we might see in the future. And we want to include your comments and questions. We're just going to do this for an hour or two. It's not going to be a super long interview. One thing I want to ask for up front is several of you emailed me screenshots or text of your correspondences with either John lynch of Fairmormon or Scott Gordon of Fairmormon. And in some of those responses I've read Scott or John calling me and Jeremy liars and using their perception as us of us as liars to then justify these hard hitting, sharp elbowed, almost vicious campaigns. If any of you have the text from those interactions, if you had screenshot, message me on Facebook or email them to me, or message me, text message me, whatever you have to do. I'd love to share them on this episode. You can comment here on Facebook. We're going to be streaming this later to YouTube but but I would love some of that text. I'm not able to find it and I would love some of that to be able to share today. But without any further ado, I want to welcome Anthony Miller back to Mormon Stories Podcast. Welcome Anthony.

Anthony Miller's Background and Faith Journey

Anthony Miller [00:07:15] Thank you John. I appreciate you welcoming me to this conversation. I look forward to it.

John Dehlin [00:07:22] Thanks for making the time.

Anthony Miller [00:07:24] Absolutely, my pleasure.

John Dehlin [00:07:26] And if you'll begin, I'm going to go share this on a couple Facebook sites while you do your intro. But if you'll go ahead and just introduce us a bit, tell us who you are, tell us where you blog and how people can learn more about you and even what you do professionally and then it can just dive into your intro and I will be I'll be right back.

Anthony Miller [00:07:47] Sounds great. So my brief story would be if you want to know more about my journey and my experience, I shared my Mormon Stories interview a year ago August in 2019. It was pretty long, but I shared my experience and what helped me I My parents joined the church when I was three years old. I grew up in the church in Mesa, Arizona. I grew up with a very literalist, fundamentalist version of Mormonism, Bruce R. McConkie Packer Benson Hinckley type of black and white Mormonism in Mesa, Arizona. About a third of the population when I was growing up was lds and so my experience probably was fairly similar to like a more rigid Utah Ward and seminary experience. I had release time, seminary and so forth. The church worked really well for me. The church blessed our family. My parents divorced when I was young and the church did a fantastic job gathering around us and helping my siblings and my mother. I served a mission in Barcelona, Spain, which was very influential to my life, had very foundational spiritual experiences there. Then I came home from my mission, got a bachelor's in Spanish, then completed an MBA at University of Utah and another Master's in Financial Services at the American College, and I've lived in Billings, Montana since 1996 and have a financial planning practice here. I also spent about seven years teaching finance at Rocky Mountain College, which is kind of like Westminster College in Salt Lake City, but a little bit smaller. And about four and a half years ago, after having been active believing pretty literalist believing most of my Life, our then 22 year old son came out to us as gay and that was something that I couldn't put on the shelf. And so I went online searching for resources to figure out how to support him, having a hard time believing that God would want him to live a life absent the kind of intimacy that a married couple shares. And in that evening of April 29th of 2016, I stumbled across the Gospel Topics essays and I didn't know they existed. I had always been led to believe that those topics and the information in those were anti Mormon lies. And over several days between reading the Gospel Topics essays and then searching for reviews of them and finding Mormonthink and then searching for more information and finding Mormon stories in the CS letter, I ended up in a very acute existential faith crisis. And over time support resources like Mormon Stories Workshop, Sunstone, Online Communities, Mormon Spectrum Groups, a tremendous amount of reading and consuming of podcasts and lectures and so forth. I went through complete deconstruction and reconstruction of meaning. And so I participated in addition to Mormon Stories, my interview, and a couple other episodes where I've been on panels, I participated in podcast interviews with Gina Colvin for the a thoughtful faith that some people found helpful. I participated with Glenn Oslin. We did an episode for Infants on Thrones, and then I participated in quite a few episodes for the Mormon Discussion Podcast with Bill Real, Alan Mount, and other guest participants as we unpacked our personal experiences with the Gospel Topics essays. So in any event, that's a little bit about me. I'm excited to share that next May I'll be doing a TEDx talk here in Billings about finding meaning and building community after a faith crisis. And I'm working on a book that I hope would be helpful for people. Hopefully it'll be done by the time that I give my TED Talk. So in any event, that's a little bit about me. I have two children. Our son and his partner live in Northern Utah Our daughter lives in Orem, Utah. She's going to Utah Valley University. My wife is still an active believing, but very nuanced believing member. She's in the Stake Relief Society Presidency here in Billings and is an ordinance worker. And then I have siblings in the church and out of the church as well. So that's about me, a little bit about me.

John Dehlin [00:12:48] So thank you, Anthony, it's so great to have you. I'm curious, did you ever have an apologist phase after your faith crisis? Were you ever? So many people, even rfm, even myself, spent time as apologists before we actually ended up, you know, fully losing our faith in the church. Did you ever have that type of experience?

Anthony Miller [00:13:11] Yeah, so I had an acute existential faith and identity crisis experience, an experience of a crumbling of constructs of what God was and what spiritual experiences were. And so I anxiously tried to put things back together. And so I consumed tremendous amounts of material from apologists from Mike Ash's book Shaken Faith Syndrome. As soon as Laura Hale's book came out with the different essays in A Reason for Faith, I bought and consumed that. I consumed the Gibbons books. There are several YouTube channels and blogs that have apologetic material. I found Rob Terry's Church Is True blog and spent a ton of time on that. I got John Ogden's book When Mormons Doubt. I joined the Thoughtful Faith Facebook group that's now called Waters of Mormon. I consumed a lot of material from Dan Weatherspoon as well from his Mormon Matters podcast that's part of the. Still is part of the Open Stories foundation, but he's now moved on to a different venture. So I did everything I could to try to make sense of things and come up with and find apologetic reconciliations for the ambiguities that I could hold. And the problem that I experienced is the more time I spent with the fair Mormon traditional apologetic stuff, it just made it worse. Actually, it didn't help me. So I tried to find, you know, some sort of satisfaction or confidence and answers with apologetics, and I just. I wasn't. I wasn't able to. I tried.

John Dehlin [00:15:14] Sure, sure. I'm having some people tell me my mic is a little bit soft compared to Anthony's. So I just tried turning it up. If you guys will let me know if my mic is too loud or too soft, that'd be great. So, Anthony, why don't we start? The first bullet point you had for today was kind of the motivations behind Mormon apologetics. And I wanted to couch it in a question that may be you Know, maybe seen as a little bit of a rough question, but somebody once said to me that the truth doesn't need to be defended. That, you know, if, if, if a religion claims to, you know, have prophets that speak to God and their scripture and all this revelation, there shouldn't even be a need for apologetics. But that's probably a purist, idealistic kind of thing. So, you know, why don't you go ahead and start with the outline that you provided and talk to us about how you would describe the motives of the apologist. We'll try and channel our apologist mindset, get into their skin. Maybe we can have them on at a future date, but let's start there. I think that's a great place to start.

Motivations Behind Mormon Apologetics

Anthony Miller [00:16:21] Yeah. So I would distinguish between apologetics and what leaders of the church, you know, the brethren, the general authorities do. So I mean, you can go all the way back to the time of Joseph Smith where if he was criticized or whatnot, how he would react to those criticisms. And the challenges of what happened in Kirtland when Martin Harris talked about seeing things with spiritual eyes and a number of the Quorum of the twelve left the church and the other apostasy that happened in Kirtland after the anti bank scandal and so forth and the things that the current brethren do in, in terms, to me, I would distinguish personally. The meaning that I'd attribute to apologetics is different than that. To me, apologetics are things that non leaders of the church do in order to try to get more into a defensive mode or trying to find workable solutions to difficult problems a little bit more from an intellectual standpoint as opposed to a preaching standpoint. I don't know if I'm being clear on what I'm trying to communicate there, but what I would say in terms of motivation behind apologetics is my friends who are apologists, whether they're traditional apologists or amateur apologists or nuanced NEO type of apologists, what my sense is, is that they have had spiritual experiences. Whether it's the elevation emotion, I'll explain that briefly. As human beings, when we participate in or perceive or contemplate acts of moral goodness, there's something that happens within us. It's probably part of our evolutionary design and experience. But when we perceive and participate in acts of moral goodness, we experience something called the elevation emotion. And with the elevation emotion, it's measurable. Michael Ferguson did a TED talk about the study that he did. And the name of the TED talk is called you'd Brain on God that your listeners and watchers could search for Michael Ferguson, your brain on God. He took people and he put them in a functional MRI machine and had them pray and sing hymns and listen to conference talks and so forth, so that they could have spiritual experiences. And then he would measure what was happening with regard to brain activity and so forth. And what he and Jonathan Haidt and others would explain is that when we experience the elevation emotion, there's particular activity that happens within our brain and then there's a release of dopamine in our system. And when that hormone of dopamine gets released in our system, we experience a sense of warmth in our core and our charitable disposition increases and our tolerance for others increases. And so if you were to explain elevation of motion, or if you were to look up elevation of motion on Wikipedia, basically what elevation of motion is, if you describe it, it's the fruits of the Spirit. But in the Mormon construct for elevation of motion is that that experience represents a reliable divine witness of truth of the subject matter and so forth. Drawing on the explanation of the fruits of the Spirit in writings of Paul and Galatians as well as this was a common narrative in Joseph Smith's time. And of course it made it into the Doctrine and Covenants and D&C 50, where he talks about how you preach and receive with the Spirit and that's how you know things are true and so forth, or the Scripture and doctrine covenants about the burning in the bosom type of experience. So we experience elevation, emotion. We can call it connection, we can call it the Spirit, whatever meaning that you want to attribute to it, we experience that. And then there's two other things that happen. The first thing that happens is something called the illusory truth effect. And what the illusory truth effect is is when you repeat something over and over again, you begin to believe that that thing is true. And to the extent you can not disbelieve that the thing is true. And in Mormonism, that's what we do. We teach lessons and after every lesson, we bear testimony. We go on missions and we bear testimony. We have fast and testimony meeting. And from the time that we're primary age, we get up and we say, I know the church is true, that Joseph Smith was a prophet, and whoever the current prophet is, is a prophet of God. And. And so the illusory truth effect has an effect on us in terms of our belief system. And then the final thing that I would say, or the third thing that I would say is we experience something called Confirmation bias. So with confirmation bias, what happens is the way our brains work is we have literally have a very difficult time seeing outside of our biases. And scientists know this. That's why when people apply critical thinking, or they do critical scholarship, or scientists do studies, they have peer reviews because they recognize that it's very difficult and that maybe even physically impossible for them to see outside their biases. So if they want to test a hypothesis, they test it. They try to add critical scholarship and thinking into it, but then they also do peer reviews. And for most of your listeners and watchers, what they would recognize in an experience of confirmation bias is the most commonly driven vehicle on the road today is a Honda Accord. That's a statistical, rational fact. But for people who have never driven in, ridden in a Honda Accord, they've never rented one, they've never researched them when they're driving around, they notice cars that are Honda Accords, but they don't recognize those as Honda Accords. But the minute they rent a Honda Accord and start driving it, or they buy one and start driving it with confirmation bias, they all of a sudden start recognizing all those cars on the road that are Honda Accords that they didn't recognize before. And most all of you have probably experienced something like that, that first flip of paradigm shift of confirmation bias, so forth. Well, with regard to religious belief, if you believe your spiritual experiences represent reliable divine witnesses of truth, if you've had all these experiences with the illusory truth effect, that you can't disbelieve what you've said and thought over and over and over again, then the experience of confirmation bias is someone could show you all the trinitarian problems in the Book of Mormon, or they could show you the problems with the Book of Abraham. And with confirmation bias, you might not even be able to see it, even if you're trying to see it, just like if you've never been in a Honda Accord, if you tried to notice all the Honda Accords on the road, you still wouldn't notice as many until you start driving a Honda Accord. So these are the things that are happening. So with that context, what, what I would say is, I think this most significant motivation behind apologetics is these are people who have what they believe is a testimony of the truthfulness of the gospel, whatever meaning they attribute to the gospel, or of the text of the gospel, or of the authority of the priesthood, or of the authority and keys of the brethren. And because they have that strong belief based on that construct, and just like most of the Rest of us, over time that had that experience, when we would encounter things that would cause dissonance, we would put them on a metaphorical shelf in faith that we'd receive further light and knowledge someday. And sometimes we'd take it down and we tried to look at the apologetics to see if there was a satisfying answer for the thing on the shelf. But most of us, over time, we accumulated things on our shelf because we want to hold onto that construct of our. Of our testimony that we know those things are true. And I think that a great percentage of the people who are apologists for the church, they have shelves. In fact, they might even talk about helping people put things back on a shelf if they're in faith crisis and they really believe that it's true. And so their motivation is, because they believe it's true, they're on a mission from God to protect faith, to defend the faith, and to try to find satisfying answers for ambiguities. And some people will venture into apologetics and it makes them uncomfortable, and then they just put it on the shelf. I read some of Michael Ash's stuff over a year before I had my faith crisis, and it made me uncomfortable when he was talking about tapers and horses. And I put it back on my shelf, literally until I had my faith crisis and then pulled that book back on the shelf. And I think that's the primary motivation is they really believe it's true. I. I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. I don't think that they're doing it for power, reputation, or authority or ego, although that does get wrapped up into. Or money or money. I think that gets wrapped up into those things for all of us at different times in our lives. But I think the underlying motivation is they really believe they're defending the faith and they're doing the will of God and they're trying to protect people, and they really believe that it's a bad approach to apply critical scholarship versus apologetics. So that's my take on my number one thing on our. On our outline.

John Dehlin [00:26:29] Really quickly, I have a friend reach out to me privately and make the following comment. He said, Anthony Miller is trying to invalidate people's religious experience. It's ridiculous. It's really just pseudoscience. And I think what he's saying is when you talk about elevation of motion and, you know, confirmation bias, etcetera, you're basically just trying to define people's genuine religious experiences, using pseudoscience as a way to invalidate their genuine real religious experiences. What would your response to my friend be if he made that accusation?

Anthony Miller [00:27:09] Yeah, I would say I am grateful for that question because that is not what I'm trying to express. So what I'm saying is that people have experiences and those experiences are measurable. But the elevation, emotion, it could be a spiritually connecting experience. Like if someone is experiencing the fruits of the spirit or a spiritually connecting experience to the divine, or when they're teaching a lesson or whatnot. I don't think by saying that describing physiologically what is happening to that person as elevation motion, I'm not saying that that can't be a spiritual experience. I mean, I would hold space for someone that would say that they believe that those experiences are spiritual experiences. I thought I believe they were. And I lean in my reconstructive experience with regard to faith and belief, I lean pantheistic. And so my bias is the meaning that I attribute to God and spirituality is that God. The meaning that I attribute to God is that God is an omnipresent energy that exists in and through everything. And because it's omnipresent, we're part of it and we exist in it. And leaning on Eckhart Tolle, I would say it's impossible to be separated from God because God is part of us. And as we shed the ego, we operate with less dysfunction in our life and we discover divinity that is within us. So that's different than a bearded, polygamous man who's resurrected, living on a planet near a star called Kolob that's crystallized. That's a very different meaning attributed to God, and it's a different meaning than evangelical Christians would attribute to God or whatnot. But I would say I love elevation emotion experiences, and I seek them out, and I don't have a problem calling them God or divine at this point. And so hopefully I've explained that by calling them elevation emotion, by identifying that we actually do experience confirmation bias and the illusory truth effect. That need not mean that I'm saying that if someone has a connecting experience, that they shouldn't interpret it as being an experience with God.

John Dehlin [00:29:54] Beautiful. Okay, let's go to point 2 in the outline. I think it bears note that, you know, there is such thing as Mormon studies and Mormon scholarship. And whether we're talking about Dialogue foundation, the journal, the journal Dialogue of Mormon Thought that began in the 60s, whether we're talking about Sunstone, the journal Mormon History, and while we're talking about farms, the foundation for Ancient Research, and Mormon Studies, which was a thing back in the day. Or the Neil A. Maxwell Institute, now formerly led by Daniel Peterson, now led by Spencer Fluman. There, there have, there, there's, there's often there's Mormon apologetics, but there's also sincere attempts at, at, at critical scholarship, things like David Bacavoy and others. So why don't you talk to us about the difference between those two things so that we can kind of really zero in and narrow in on, on the apologetic realm?

Defining Apologetics and Critical Scholarship

Anthony Miller [00:30:53] Sure. So what I did is I actually looked up the official, at least on Google, the definition of apologetics and apologetics are considered to be reasoned arguments or writings in justification of something, typically a theory or a religious doctrine. Doctrine. So apologetics is starting out with I want this, I want to find a satisfying answer that supports my belief that the Melchizedek priesthood is a real thing. You know, even though it might be different than the meaning that was attributed to it in the Bible or something. Our modern. And so apologetics is finding, trying to find reasoned arguments to explain ambiguities and to come up with a defense of that theological faith or belief. Critical thinking is an objective analysis and evaluation of something in order to form a judgment. It's not starting out with a belief that you need to try to defend. Maybe you start out with a hypothesis, but it's not starting out with a belief that you need to defend. And so critical thinking is something that we're taught that we need to apply to all areas of our life. But I didn't apply it to my faith because when I would find things that would cause dissonance, then I would put them on the shelf. Sometimes I would be able to take them off the shelf, but I, over time ended up accumulating more things on my shelf than I would take off. So critical scholarship is similar to critical thinking. It's taking an objective analysis and evaluation of information and then sitting with where that leads you. It's like applying the scientific method to things. When I first heard the term critical scholarship as applied to belief in the Church, I needed it explained to me that critical scholarship with regard to the Church doesn't mean that it's critics or anti Mormon. It means, for example, David Bachavoy would do study with how the Pentateuch, the five books attributed to Moses, came about. And if the study of that led him to the conclusion that the Pentateuch had multiple sources, it was developed and then redacted over a period of time, centuries. And the form that it exists in today didn't exist until after the Babylonian exile. And that when he looks at when written Hebrew was invented and whether the older texts that are older than the Pentateuch, you know, did they mention Moses? Did they mention Abraham? He might come up to the conclusion that the character of Moses represented in the Pentateuch is probably a composite legendary character with a compilation of many different stories. He might come to the conclusion that the law of Moses and a lot of the narratives surrounding Moses really weren't developed until during or after the Babylonian captivity. And he might come to the conclusion, well, he has. I know, because I read a post about Abraham is that there probably was a character named Abraham that existed Maybe in the 8th century century BCE, plus or minus, upon whose life the character of Abraham was developed in Scripture. And Abraham wasn't a character, a literal historical character who lived in 1800 BCE or whatnot. So with critical scholarship, what David would do, and he can correct me if I'm misspeaking, is he would do study to figure out what it is. And then if he's seeking to hold faith or meaning that's attributed to those texts because they have been enduring, because they have had meaning for people, then he would be able to sit with the ambiguity and not have to have a literalist, fundamentalist interpretation that Abraham and Moses were literal historical characters in the ways that they're represented in Scripture, because that's needed in order to hold a belief that Joseph was a prophet. You know, at least the meaning that people attribute to prophet, typically because of the book of Moses and the book of Abraham and because of the narratives of the Abrahamic covenant and the Temple, and because Joseph Smith supposedly had a literal historical Moses appear to him and give him keys in a physically resurrected form. So critical scholarship would say, well, maybe Joseph believed that that happened. Maybe he had a mystical experience, but he couldn't have had a visit from Moses. And the Abrahamic covenant is a symbol, but it's not this fundamentalist literal historical thing. So that would be the difference between apologetics. Apologetics would start out with, say, I need Abraham to be a literal historical character in the way that he's represented in the book of Abraham and in Scriptures and with the Abrahamic Covenant in the Temple. And critical scholarship would just go wherever the data leads you.

John Dehlin [00:36:21] So tell me, this is a fair kind of summary that that critical scholarship would basically say, what's the evidence? And then what conclusions can we draw from our analysis of the evidence, you know, independent of. Of our preferences and desires and biases? Mormon apologetics would say, the church is True. Everything happened as. As Joseph, and the church has outlined it. Now, how do we select or interpret the evidence in a way that bolsters faith? Is that. Is that fair to say? Those are the two.

Anthony Miller [00:36:56] Yeah. Bolsters or defense, or at least helps people put it on a shelf.

John Dehlin [00:37:01] Right.

Anthony Miller [00:37:01] Yeah, Right. So that would be a good question.

John Dehlin [00:37:04] And honestly. And I don't think we're being unfair, because as I understand it, I'm trying to remember if it was John Gee or Kerry Muhlstein that actually shared a quote in one of the fair Mormon conferences where he basically said, we begin with the assumption that the Mormon Church is true and then go from there.

Anthony Miller [00:37:23] Yeah. He was speaking about the Book of Abraham. Yeah. I begin with, was this guy or Mulsteed.

John Dehlin [00:37:28] Was this guy or Mostied.

Anthony Miller [00:37:29] It was Kerry Mulstee.

John Dehlin [00:37:30] Okay. Yeah.

Anthony Miller [00:37:31] Yeah. So he begins with the belief that it's true. And that's his starting place.

John Dehlin [00:37:37] Yeah, And I think that's what. I think that's. That's a great description. Okay, so the next question is, you know, I. I think of Mormon apologetics beginning. Well, probably begins a couple of years ago, but I really think of it beginning. You could maybe say B.H. roberts did some. Some apologetics in the early 20th century. You could probably go to one of the Hyde brothers or I don't know if you remember if it was Orson Hyde or. I'm sure there are some apology Pratt. Orson Pratt. Parley Pratt.

Anthony Miller [00:38:09] I think so.

John Dehlin [00:38:10] Yeah. Talk us through a bit of the history of Mormon apologetics as far as you know it. I know this isn't your expertise.

Anthony Miller [00:38:17] Yeah. So as far as. I mean, we should ask Brian Whitney about this. But what I would say is there were a lot of theologies that weren't settled in Mormonism until the early 1900s, including even the nature of the Godhead. And so that's when the lectures on faith were taken out of the Doctrine and Covenants, and James Talmadge was involved in those kinds of things and so forth. So one was dealing with theology and trying to figure things out, and whether Adam was God or whether Elohim was our grandfather or our Father and those kinds of things. BH Roberts, it seems like he was trying to make sense of things, and so he went to the brethren to try to find answers to the ambiguities. My recollection from watching those episodes that you did with regard to BH Roberts is that's when there were academics and others that were trying to deal with some of those issues, but they maybe weren't entirely satisfying for BH Roberts at the time. When I think of apologetics, at least with what that I'm familiar with, I would think of Hugh Nibley's response to no Man Knows My History as kind of being the beginning of modern day apologetics.

John Dehlin [00:39:57] So Fawn Brody, David O. McKay's niece, writes this biography of Joseph Smith that basically begins with the assumption that he's in some way a fraud or a charlatan and that the church isn't what it claims to be. And then she writes her history, right?

Anthony Miller [00:40:11] Yeah. And then he needs a response. You know, the church wants a response. And so they have Hugh Nibley do a response. And he wrote, I think it's called no Ma', Am, that's Not History or something like that. And he tries to do a takedown of the book, but he does it with quite a bit of the excerpts that I've read, quite a bit of harshness, quite a bit of direct attacks on her. And it seems that that kind of set the tone as to this is how you do apologetics. You. You kind of attack the messenger. You don't necessarily deal with all of the issues that they bring up. You try to selectively pick issues that either are important to you or that you think that you have an answer to. And that's how you deal with apologetics. So, I mean, I think there's carryover because when I was deconstructing everything, you know, I loved Stephen Robinson's book Believing Christ and Following Christ. Like, I just thought Stephen Robinson was a hero. But then I started to read some of the stuff that he wrote about Dan Vogel and signature Books. And like, my perception of Stephen Robertson dramatically changed.

John Dehlin [00:41:36] I never actually, I never knew that Stephen Robertson went after Dan Vogel and others.

Anthony Miller [00:41:42] Yeah. When Dan Peterson was in charge of fair, he would have different people do responses to books that came out as signature books or other places that were considered anti Mormon. And yes, Stephen, my recollection is, from what I've read is that Stephen Robertson did take down stuff on Dan Vogel and Signature books. That's my recollection.

John Dehlin [00:42:10] And how did that make you feel at the time?

Anthony Miller [00:42:14] I mean, it was a totally different tone than the books Believing Christ and Following Christ to go after people and attack them personally. We refer to that as an ad hominem attack. It was just a very different approach. But then as I read more see, my initial exposure to apologetics is I would encounter evangelical Christian, anti Mormon stuff and the majority of the anti Mormon, evangelical Christian stuff when I would run into it, they would use ellipses, they would use misdirection, they would use dishonesty, they would use God Makers kind of stuff. And so that discredited. If it weren't for Ed Decker and the God Makers and some of the evangelical Christian stuff that was trying to do anti Mormon stuff, I probably would have gone through a faith transition years earlier. But I saw a fair amount of dishonesty and personal attacks and stuff like that and embellishment in some of those things. And so when I was exposed to fair's website years ago, when I would encounter anti Mormon stuff, it kind of turned me off because it would use those harsh tones and things like that. It wasn't until my faith crisis four and a half years ago, where what I was studying was actual critical scholarship in history and not kind of the evangelical Christian, anti Mormon bent. Although, you know, Sandra Tanner's done some pretty amazing stuff, and it's turned out that her stuff was not even remotely close to the God Makers kind of stuff.

John Dehlin [00:44:08] I went ahead and googled. The Stephen Robinson article, and I'm pulling it up here. It's called, it's called Dan Vogel the Word of God Essays on Mormon Scripture. It's a review of, I guess, something Dan Vogel did coming out of BYU from the Maxwell Institute. And it starts out, this is Stephen Robinson. It says Coral Horse back.

Anthony Miller [00:44:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:44:38] And this time he's got a printing press. Yep. That's a great way. That's a great way to start, isn't it?

Anthony Miller [00:44:46] Yeah. I mean, that would be great resource material for the, the new fairmormon videos that we're going to talk about, because that's the kind of language that they're using. Even so, it seems like what they're, what they're doing with these new videos is just kind of a continuation of the style of apologetics that traditional apologetics had in the past. Like this, starting out, calling Dan Vogel core whore.

John Dehlin [00:45:16] Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so. So take us just briefly through the history, as far as you're aware, of kind of the rise of farms, Jack Welch and Daniel Peterson, and then we'll call that traditional apologetics. And then the emergence of what I call neo apologetics or progressive nuanced apologetics, really briefly. We don't have time to get deep into that, but just briefly.

FAIR, the Maxwell Institute, and Neo-Orthodoxy

Anthony Miller [00:45:43] So as I understand, the FAIR was at BYU and it increasingly became more and more ad hominem, harsh kind of stuff. And, and then when Dan Peterson was let go from that group and they rebranded as the Maxwell Institute, and then Fair Mormon kind of took over the FAIR website and so forth. There kind of was a split where the Maxwell Institute focused a little bit more on scholarship and less on what you just read from Stephen Robinson and then Fair Mormon. And then later the interpreter ended up with the more traditional type of apologetics, defending everything that they can. More a tendency for more literalist fundamentalists interpretations of things. One friend is, I'll give you a brief example. One friend that I have that was really helpful to me during my faith deconstruction is more of a traditional type of apologist. And I asked him about the patriarchs living for centuries and mortality between 4,000 and 3,000 BCE and he came up with a very. He thought that, well, days were shorter back then and so they lived longer because the world spun faster or something like that. And then maybe there was a big asteroid that hit the Earth and it slowed the earth down. So now years are as long as they were. And I'm like, so, so someone that lives 600 years, you know, instead of 100, does that mean days were only four hours long? Like how does that even work? You know? And, and so he was trying that kind of. I've got to have it be true, where the Maxwell Institute would look at and say, well, some of these things have got to be figurative, you know, more metaphorical. But they want to hold on to that. There still was a literal historical Noah, he probably didn't live for 600 years, that kind of stuff. So. So that's my understanding of fair. And then kind of the split.

John Dehlin [00:48:01] And let me just jump in really quickly. We have a comment from Doug Smith. Doug writes FARMS was what turned into the Maxwell Institute not fair. And, and yeah, I would. The way I remember the history is that people like Jack Welch and Daniel Peterson led FARMS at byu, that FARMS turned into the Maxwell Institute with Daniel Peterson still involved, but it was just rebranded. Either right before Neil A. Maxwell's death or after his death, it was kind of rebranded the Maxwell Institute. Daniel Peterson was taken down out of the Maxwell Institute by me and by others because of his continued Gregory Smith, Lou Midgley, you know, others because of their Bill Hamlin because of their continued sharp elbowed, kind of brass knuckled, ad hominem, mean spirited attacks. At some point the president of byu, Jeffrey Holland, other apostles got tired of that sort of mean spirited pseudo scholarship and they booted Daniel Peterson for the Maxwell Institute around 2012. And Jerry Bradford waited, he did a search and eventually he brought in Spencer Fluman. Spencer Fluman came in and ushered into the Maxwell Institute, a new brand of apologetics that I have referred to it as neo apologetics. It's also been referred to as pastoral apologetics. And this is more associated with people like Terrell and Fiona Givens, Richard and Claudia Bushman, Adam Miller, Patrick Mason and others where they're basically saying we're going to stop the ad hominem. And to this date I've never. Patrick, Patrick Mason's always been kind to me, Adam Miller or you know, you know, Terrell Givens, they've never attacked me or Jeremy Runnels publicly in any mean spirited way. It's, we're going to let go of the ad hominem attacks. We are going to be as honest with the history as we as correlation will allow us, but we're also going to be empathetic. Instead of insulting and demeaning those who have doubts and questions, we're going to be as empathetic as we can and start saying we're so sorry and this is so hard. And instead of gaslighting them and saying this stuff's been in the Ensign for 20 years. What's wrong with you? Why didn't you learn it like the rest of us? That's sort of classic apologetics. The neo apologist would be more pastoral, more loving, evalidating evidence and more kind and throwing away the, the ad hominem. But being as scholarly as they could be or as I like to say as much as BYU or political, the political winds and or correlation would allow them to be. But yes, I just wanted to agree with Doug Smith that FARMS turning the Maxwell Institute brought Daniel Peterson along but then gave him the boot around 2012.

Anthony Miller [00:50:57] Yeah, that's, that's accurate. Actually. It's farms not fair. Fair Mormon was fair.

John Dehlin [00:51:04] Yeah, I think Fair's always been kind of a non profit that's been run by two main people. John lynch, who I had on Mormon Stories podcast in the first 10 or 20 episodes. So we go way back. And then Scott Gordon have been the two kind of heads of Fair Mormon. And then Daniel Peterson's always been until recently on the board of directors. And every time Fair Mormon has held an annual conference, they've always had Daniel Peterson give the closing keynote. And it's only been recently where the church started saying we're going to invest in the More Good foundation and we're going to invest less in Fair and more in things like Book of Mormon central, Pearl of Great Price Central and the Interpreter Foundation. And the Interpreter is the journal that Daniel Peterson started ironically with David Bacavoy when he was booted out of the Maxwell Institute and had to start his own thing. And so the interpreter is sort of Daniel Peterson's way to continue his ad hominem pseudo scholarship attacks. And the Maxwell Institute has distanced itself from that. So that's kind of an overview of traditional apologetics and more progressive, nuanced pastoral or neo apologetics. Anything else you want? Anything else you want to say about that?

Anthony Miller [00:52:26] Yeah, yeah, that was very helpful. I would add one more dynamic that Richard Bushman explained during that fireside where he talks about the dominant narrative not being sustainable. What Richard Bushman explained is in the last several decades, there have been more and more members of the church and non members of the church getting very interested about Mormon history. And so over time, there was not just Leonard Arrington or Richard Bushman or Susan Easton Black, there were quite a few that got really interested in harvesting from the archives history. And we were learning more and more about the history and the difference between the history and the more possible polished narratives that we had about history. And so what Richard Bushman has explained is that critical scholarship and historical scholarship with regard to church history ended up developing really fast over a period of decades. It was very different than many of the dominant Polish narratives. And then with the advent of the Internet, people could discover, you know, you know, over a weekend, information that before they would have had to go, you know, even know that books existed or PhD dissertations or whatnot, or maybe they had to go to, you know, the corner of a library in Boise, Idaho to find, you know, a book about polygamy or, you know, other kinds of things. Many, most Mormons probably have no idea about. No man knows my history. They don't know about Mormon enigma. They, they don't know about the works of the September six. They don't know about Mormonism and the magic worldview. They don't know about all those books. The vast majority of Mormons, but because of the advent of the Internet, in one weekend, in a period of not very many hours, they can get that information distilled. And so Richard Bushman has explained that where before people would consume this information over an extended period of time, if they consumed it at all, if they were aware about it and they consumed it, they would do it over an extended period of time. So they could process the ambiguities over an extended period of time time and maybe come up with some sort of extended nuanced belief over time, dealing with the messiness of things. Whereas today, because the Internet Someone can read the CES letter or, you know, they can read the gospel topics essays in one sitting over a few hours. And they consume a tremendous amount of information with a very abbreviated time and not be able to reconcile that volume, volume of information in a very abbreviated time period. So that's an additional dynamic that has been happening.

John Dehlin [00:55:36] I love it. Okay, that's great. So you, you mentioned as the fourth point in your outline, that there are examples of people who have moved from, you know, traditional apologetics to more critical scholarship over the years, and they've kind of explained why. Tell. Tell us why you wanted to talk about that. And. Yeah, let's dig into that.

Apologists Who Transitioned to Critical Scholarship

Anthony Miller [00:55:59] So there are a number of people that were more traditional apologists and as they studied critical scholarship or even did, you know, develop their own, they just couldn't keep everything on the shelf and sustain everything. And some perfect examples of that would be David Bachavoy or Radio Free Mormon as another example of someone who did

John Dehlin [00:56:24] traditional apologetics, maybe Brian Hoglit.

Anthony Miller [00:56:27] Right, Brian Hoglit is a fantastic example of that. And so there are people who hold, held traditional views, maybe they were even directly involved in traditional apologetics. And then over time, they incrementally, they just couldn't hold what they had before because of the critical scholarship. Like there are some, like, Gee will do everything he can to refute the documentary hypothesis, because if the documentary hypothesis is accurate, then that is a game changer for the book of Abraham and the book of Moses and his current belief constructs. But if he was doing a lot of critical scholarship on, on the documentary hypothesis and how the Pentateuch came about and so forth, he might get to a point where he couldn't hold that anymore. And certainly Brian Hoglid could not hold that anymore. And so they get to a point where, like Brian said, he finds apologetics abhorrent at this point. Or Matt Harris, who you recently interviewed about the gospel to topic essays. They just don't believe that apologetics is. We should just pursue truth and then try to make sense of it rather than start with the end in mind. Whether it's. Whether it's a belief that the church is all bad or the church is all good or whatnot. We should just actively explore and see, seek truth and try to see through our biases. And so in any event, there are some examples of people that have. And I think there'll be more, I think, of these guys that are participating in the new Fair Mormon video series, I think it's quite likely that over time they'll be or in, they call it Stone 16 or Midnight Mormons. I think it's quite likely that there will be a percentage of those at some point that won't be able to hold to traditional apologetics anymore.

John Dehlin [00:58:49] And I think you highlight something that's really important not just for scholars or pseudo scholars, but also for the layman or laywomen, so to speak, is that for many, there's sort of a group of like apologists, let's just say institutional apologists like Daniel Peterson or John Gee, who. It's literally their job. They're bankrolled by the Church. They're not doing any substantive scholarship that I'm aware of. Daniel Peterson is not well respected in his field for his academic scholarship. John Gee is certainly not respected in his field for his Egyptology. But instead they hold these positions at BYU as sort of official apologists bankrolled by the church. And then they're always writing articles for Interpreter or for some BYU studies journal, not really peer reviewed except by other apologists. And they're writing essays, reviewing essays from the church and just doing all they can to bolster faith by doing pseudo scholarship with an apologetic bent. But. And then of course there's Scott, you know, Gordon and John lynch, which I don't really know how to explain. But. But what you'll find is that a lot of this, the, the apologist scholars that over the years have tried to engage in this scholarship, not only have many of them become non believers over time, but I think you also referenced this yourself, that many people go to Fair Mormon in their resources and it's sort of a bridge. I heard David Bachavoy describe this once. Fair Mormon, like, gives you this soft landing where it's like, okay, the Church isn't what I thought, but at least it's, there are good answers, or at least there's answers. And it allows you to take a breath and calm down and say, okay, well, smart people like Hugh Nibley or John Gee or Daniel Peterson, they use a lot of fancy words. They have a lot of letters behind their name. So if they can still believe and hear all these highfalutin explanations about Nahom and ISIS and, you know, whatever, if they can believe, I can believe. And it sort of assuages their concerns for a time. But I've had so many people tell me that FairMormon or the Maxwell Institute ended up accelerating their defection from the Church for a couple reasons.

Anthony Miller [01:01:19] Why?

John Dehlin [01:01:19] One was because they found the ad hominem distasteful. Two is because they found the Logic and the reasoning flawed or suspect or, you know, not really credible. And three was because when they go to some of these, you know, Fair Mormon websites or even the videos on YouTube, they go just wanting to learn about polygamy or wanting to learn about Book of Abraham or wanting to learn about Joseph Smith, but then they see all these other topics and all of a sudden it introduces them to the CES letter or introduces them to the Book of Mormon or to Mormon Stories podcast and it becomes their gateway out of the church. And that's true for non bankrolled apologists like Peterson and Guy, but also for sincere questioners. Tell me if that's what you've heard as well. Anthony Miller.

Anthony Miller [01:02:15] Yeah, so I see that. I mean, you interviewed Lance Miles and his wife and that was his story. He, he was in a Sunday school class and had a question about something and went to Fair Mormon and saw the big list on Fair Mormon of all the problems. And that's what initiated Lance's faith transition for me when I stumbled across the CCS letter and the gospel topics essays and everything. That one weekend I went to Fair Mormon to read all the responses and I watched all the videos. Brian Hales did a number of videos response to the CS letter and the responses to the CS letter did more to damage my faith than the CS letter did.

John Dehlin [01:03:04] Why is that?

Anthony Miller [01:03:06] Because when they would so there would be a CS letter topic about something and then FairMormon would do a response to it and they would either validate something as being true, accurate, that is a big, big problem, or they would answer part of the issue but not deal with the issue that was the biggest problem. Or they just wouldn't even like if you go to Fair Mormon to try to find out how they answer this idea. Like in my Mormon Stories interview I mentioned. Here's the problem. Between 3000 and 2000 BCE, there were like 50 to 60 million people who lived on the earth. And they had diverse languages and spiritual practices and so forth. And so the story of a single Adamic language and a tower and a confounding of languages absolutely has no basis in reality. It's a Jewish origin myth that was written into the Pentateuch. But the problem with that is the brother of Jared comes out of that mythical story. And it's not just the brother of Jared and the texts in the Book of Ether, the Nephite interpreters come from the brother of Jared's stones from that story. And then King Mosiah uses these Nephite interpreters stones that come from the Tower of Babelmeth to translate some of those 24 gold Jaredite plates. And then later on, Moroni uses these mythical Nephite interpreters that are origined in the Tower of Babel in single language myth to translate the 24 Jaredite plates for the Book of Ether, as well as a grand revelation from a literal historical brother of Jared that would represent the sealed portion on the plates. And if the Book of Mormon was 500 pages of text, the 2/3 sealed portion would be a thousand pages equivalent of text that Moroni would have translated using these mythical and Nephite interpreters. And then Joseph Smith then supposedly uses these Nephite interpreters for some of the 116 pages. Maybe they were in the frames or not. Maybe he had these other crystals that he put in his top hat or not. But the problem is, foundationally, if the story of the brother of Jared is based on myth, then that makes everything else. I mean, this is kind of a black and white way to look at it, but it fits foundationally. It's a problem for the King Mosiah, for the brother of Jared, for the Book of ether, for the 2/3 seal portion, and for the translation of at least the 116 pages, if any at all. Because it's all based in the myth. And so it's a problem.

John Dehlin [01:06:22] Yeah, yeah, it's a problem. Okay. So I think, I think it would be. I think it'd be worthwhile to kind of jump to the next part of the conversation, which I think is really super important and interesting because there really is a debate about, you know, current generations and former generations and the younger generations and how different generations consume information differently. And to me, this strikes to the heart of the assumptions behind Scott Gordon and John lynch and their new YouTube campaign with Kwakuel and Cardinalis and Brad Whitbeck. It's sort of based on some assumptions about what Gen Y or millennials or Gen Z, you know, what they care about, what they need, what they think about and how they operate. So maybe you can talk about the different generations and differences you see.

Generational Differences in Faith and Authority

Anthony Miller [01:07:23] Yeah. So just briefly, baby boomers, their generation, they grew up in a situation where there is a respect for authority, there is a respect for hard work and experience. They might choose to work with an attorney or a financial advisor based on, on their credentials, even if they don't really like the person very much. They were the ones that grew up where you trusted the news and so forth. And they would use, they'll use sayings that are fire related. For some reason, like, it's important to work hard and burn the midnight night oil and all those kinds of things. And so as a financial advisor, if I'm working with baby boomers, I'm going to show as many of my diplomas on the wall as I can because that gives some credibility. And they make decisions about things with regard to those kinds of things. So Gen X, which is my generation, I'm an older Gen X person. You're a Gen X person. Gen X people are less concerned about credentials and experience, and they're more concerned about, can you teach me why what you're recommending is going to be useful for me? And it's an interesting dynamic because the majority of all financial decisions in America today are made by the Gen X woman. So the Gen X woman is so busy, this is over generalization, but it kind of explains. Explains the dynamic. She's the one who researches things on the Internet. And so if her parents want to know what mattress to buy, they'll ask the Gen X daughter, and the Gen X daughter will research it on the Internet and find out the answer. If her kids need something, she'll research it out and so forth. Gen X don't want to have their time wasted because they are so busy. So when you call them, they often pick up their phone, they wait for you to leave a message, and then they'll listen to the message, and then they might text or email you back instead of call you back. It's very different than how the baby boomers consume information. Millennials are different because millennials are the first generation. They grew up in a school classroom where they sat in pods. So instead of sitting, everybody facing the teacher and respecting the teacher's authority and so forth, they sat in groups. So they learned in groups. And they tend to make decisions in groups. They're very fearful of making mistakes. And there's variation in these different groups. This is overgeneralization, but it kind of explains the big picture. Millennials, well, if one of them in a friend group gets an iPhone, they're all going to get iPhone, but they're going to have different, different cases for their iPhone. If a millennial makes a decision that's a big decision, they're not going to make that decision without conferring with other people, where a boomer or a Gen X person might make those decisions independently. Younger millennials grew up with more of the Internet generation, and then Gen Z or the younger generation, they're like maybe 24 years old and younger. Gen Z grew up with A very, very different environment. They grew up with social media. They grew up with as well as the younger millennials. They grew up with participation trophies and 9th place ribbons and grade inflation. And Gen Z. And I refer to in my outline Jonathan Haidt's book Coddling of the American Mind, where he talks about Gen Z tends to catastrophize things. They're really, really concerned about what other people say and do. They grew up with social media. So instead of dealing with bullies on a playground like Gen X did, Gen Z and the younger millennials grew up with bullies online. And it's a different dynamic. Gen Z, a lot of Gen Z has this narrative that words can equal violence. So as a Gen Xer, you and I grew up with this idea that if you went to college and, and Bill Moore Meyer was going to come talk and then some right wing person was going to cop like, like a Ben Shapiro was going to come talk on campus and then some left wing, like we would go listen to those people. And college was a circumstance where there was a debate of ideas and you could have significant differences and that'd be okay. Gen Z and the younger millennials have grown up with this idea that words are the equivalent of violence and they justify violence in return. So if Bill Maher as a comedian, or Ben Shapiro or Ann Coulter or maybe some a person that someone doesn't like show up on a college campus, like there'll be protests and they'll burn tables and even physical violence. Because a lot of Gen Z have this idea that words equal violence and they justify violence. And so that's why when you get some of these Gen Z people posting pictures of Bowie knives, you know, you got to take that serious. Because if it was a Gen X person doing it or a millennial doing it, maybe that'd be different. But there are more people in Gen Z that really believe that violence, that words can be reacted to with violence. And so it's a very, very different dynamic. I highly recommend to all of your listeners reading or listening to the Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt to talk about the dynamics of what's happening with Gen Z. Now, Gen Z, because they're younger, they're not necessarily making a lot of decisions, but they have grown up with, they've grown up with a very decreased attention span. They've grown up with social media. For them, Facebook is old school because it takes too long to read a post. And so Gen Z spends more time on Twitter. They love TikTok even more than YouTube. They won't watch, you know, an hour long lecture on YouTube, but they'll watch an eight, you know, or a seven minute video on YouTube. So it's a very different dynamic. Gen Z also, Jonathan Haidt talks about call out culture where they grew up with this not respecting of boundaries where if, if somebody does something online like they'll totally dogpile on someone that's very unique. So these are the kinds of things that are different between the generations. And so what happens in the dynamic is your listeners as members of these different generations, they experience and process information differently. Probably your older millennials and your Gen Xers might be the ones that consume most of your podcast hours, quite possibly, as opposed to Gen Z might not spend as much time listening to those.

John Dehlin [01:14:52] But they'll in fact, let's take just one minute to talk about like, I don't want to say critics, I kind of hate that word. Even though I, I, I am critical of the church often, I'm also complimenting the church often. Let's talk about like, you know, up until recently when people have had concerns with the church or when they've had, you know, historical narratives, they want to share that they felt was more accurate or they wanted to educate the membership. How has it been done in the past so that we can then contrast it to why FairMormon decided to take a new approach. And you know, is it fair to say that the church and fairmormon were losing? And if so, how and why were they losing so that then we could see why they made the changes they made. Does that make sense?

Anthony Miller [01:15:43] Yeah, I mean, they did it with conferences, they did apologetics, with conferences, with papers, with journals like the Interpreter. They did it by writing books, by compiling essays, like Laura Hale's book A Reason for Faith or Shaken Faith Syndrome by Michael Ash. And the critical information, that's how that was delivered too, you know.

John Dehlin [01:16:09] And so if it's okay, I'm gonna just answer my own question just because I've got this on the top of my mind. So the way I think about it, when I started, okay, so in the, before I was paying attention to things, let's just say in the 70s and 80s and 90s, it was sort of like Dialogue Journal would come out with some articles and then, you know, the Analogs at byu, BYU Studies Journal or whatever they would call, you know, they would come up with some articles. And so it was often a lot of time these conversations were happening in these sort of Mormon studies academic journals, either Dialogue or Sunstone or you know, the Book of Mormon, Book of Mormon Studies Journal, or whatever they were called. And there would be sort of these academic discourses going back and forth between these journals that really the rest of Mormonism didn't know anything about. There would be the Sunstone Symposium, which would be a chance for these scholars to all come down and once a year meet and give papers and give responses to papers. And that was actually a vibrant Mormon intellectual ecosystem for decades, until the church condemned Sunstone in Dialogue and forbade any of their employees, any CES employees, any BYU employees, for participating or from writing in Sunstone or Dialogue. And you could literally get fired from BYU or have your continuing status terminated if you continued as a church employee attending Sunstone or publishing in dialogue. And. And so that really stunted, you know, the scholarship or the exchange of free exchange of ideas. And then, of course, the September six by excommunicating people really made a blow. And so it seemed like Sunstone took a dive. Dialogue kind of took a dive in the 90s and 2000s. But one thing that didn't take a dive, Signature books kept chugging out. So George Smith is funding the Smith Pettit foundation and Signature Books. He's also keeping Sunstone alive by donating millions of dollars to Sunstone in addition to Dialogue and Smith Pettit and. And Signature books. And so what you see in the 90s and 2000s are these books. Grant Palmer does An Insider's View, Michael Quinn does the Hierarchy, the Mormon Origins and Extensions of Power and Origins of Power series. Simon Southerton publishes, you know, Losing a Lost Tribe. And this is where. This is where I come into play, because I'm looking for information. There's nothing really on the Internet. I can't go read Sunstone or Dialogue because I don't have access to the actual publications because I'm in Seattle. And the only thing I could find by 2001, 2002, 2003, are these online forums, like Further like Knowledge, View from the Foyer, New Order Mormon, which are like these Internet chat groups or forums where you could talk to people or by buying books from Signature. And so that's why in 2004, 2005, I leave Microsoft, and I discovered that these Mormon blogs are just starting to emerge. And so by common consent and Times and Seasons are these new blogs that emerge, Feminist Mormon Housewives. And very quickly, I'm like, these blogs are okay, but they're still very academic. They aren't really reaching the masses. And that's when we start with the podcast. Mormon Story starts And then what you see is this emergence of Mormon themed podcasts. Mormon, Mormon, Mormon Stories, and then John Larsen's Mormon Expressions, and then Infants on Thrones. And you see this sort of explosion of education to the masses that also leads to, well, number one, the Swedish Rescue, and the church realizing that it needs these essays to emerge to try and counter all this criticism. But then also we have Jeremy Runnels CES Letter that comes out of Mormon Stories and Mormon Expression and Mormonthink, which was a really important resource prior to CES Letter. So we've got these journals and these books that are really, really restricted to small groups of Mormons. But then we've got podcasts, blogs a little bit, but they kind of peter out. Podcasts blow information into the Mormon consciousness, along with Facebook and Instagram. And then CES Letter like, takes it to a whole new level, such that by 2014, 2015, 2016, like, the church is in a world of hurt. Because. Because all you need to do is like, ah, I need some help. And you. And you start Googling and you stumble on Mormon stories or you stumble on Mormon expression, or heaven forbid, you find CES Letter. And literally in an afternoon, you have everything you need to know to lose your testimony in like four hours. And so that's kind of like, that's kind of like where things were. And I got a sense that Daniel Peterson, Bill Hamlin, Lewis Midgley, even the Maxwell Institute were becoming irrelevant. And Fair Mormon was even starting to become irrelevant because FairMormon's website, number one, gave bad answers. It lost its battle to Jeremy Runnels. And its comprehensive topical guide was so comprehensive that it became this gateway to everyone losing their faith. And so by the past few years, even when the church releases its Gospel topics essays, those Gospel topics essays led a crap ton of people to lose their faith. And so it was just like Mormon apologetics has been on the ropes. They've been bludgeoned. Daniel Peterson is, you know, old news. Midgley and Hamblin are old news. And the essays aren't working. And, and by 2019 or so, it just feels like apologists are kind of getting bloodied and beaten down now. Now that's kind of setting the stage for what I think is interesting, which is kind of the different approaches and methods for distribution. So why don't you talk about the emergence of the firesides and, and the different ways that apologetics have tried to respond to this problem and correct and add to anything I said, if you want. Of course.

Anthony Miller [01:22:51] Yeah. So I would certainly say that your perception of, you know, your point of view about how this all is happening is coming from someone who's a Gen Xer number one. And for someone who's had a tremendous amount of exposure over an extended period of time. For most people I think today who are running into these things, they're getting exposed to it on social media or because, you know, between 1 and 3% of their ward each year is going through a faith crisis. And now most people who are active believing members have probably some sort of a family member or a ward member or friend who they have, who has gone through a faith transition. And so it's exponentially growing. But even if we stay at a rate of maybe 3% of otherwise active believing members losing belief over a 10 year period, that's a million and a half potentially or more of the maybe a little bit less than 5 million active members of the church today. So in any event, I would say that boomers probably still believe that the traditional apologetics are relevant because that's how they consume information. And as a Gen Xer, you know, I'm gonna read Bill Davis's new book on the Seer Stone. I'm gonna read those kinds of things. Cause that's how I consume information. I'm gonna read books, I'm gonna listen to them on Audible, I'm gonna consume podcasts and so forth. So what I would say, I guess if I were to do some pushback is I would say what you're explaining is a dynamic that varies based on the generation that is consuming the information and the generation that's producing the information. And so a Gen X person or a baby boomer person who's an apologist is most likely going to try, try to consume and produce information in the way that makes most sense to them. They're not going to download a Tick Tock app and watch Mike Norton videos on TikTok. Mike Norton, just as a side note, posted, I think it was yesterday, that it took him years to have 30,900 subscribers on his YouTube channel. And in a matter of months he already has 30,900 subscribers on his TikTok channel. So things are just moving really, really fast. So, so if we're going to go to the next thing, then you talked on the outline. I wanted to talk about the current spectrum of apologetics. So the first on approaches and methods for distribution, there are firesides. So Bill Real was doing firesides. The Givens are doing firesides. Richard Bushman was, you know, and probably still is doing firesides.

The Current Spectrum of Mormon Apologetics

John Dehlin [01:25:58] Talk about these just, just at a high level, just one minute, you know, what are they?

Anthony Miller [01:26:02] So, at a. So at a high level. At a high level, the Givens and Bushman's have been invited to different places across the country to do firesides, either in a stake or in someone's home or something like that, because a stake president or people that are local who have read Dialogue, you know, who have read Greg Prince who have, you know, they want to bring in someone that can help provide some sense of reconstructive semblance or meaning. But this isn't only happening in Mormonism. This is happening in other faiths. You know, when you look at evangelical Christianity, you can see what's happening with people like Rob Bell and Rachel Held Evans and others where there's a deconstructive experience where people are moving away from literalism and fundamentalist interpretation of Scriptures and they're going either losing everything entirely and trying to existentially reconstruct some sense of meaning that they attribute to things, or they're at the very least going to a metaphorical view of things. And so in any event, and there are, I think, some donors who have funded some of these firesides from the givens and others that have gone around the country and given these talks and so forth. And, you know, and people like Dan Witherspoon is still participating in these kinds of things. Or you've had Janice Bangler on your podcast, she's gone to Richard Rohr's Living school. And there are other Mormons that have gone to Richard Rohr. He's a Franciscan priest who's kind of a reconstructed pan atheist Christian. So these kinds of things are happening across belief systems that are having a hard time staying with literalist fundamentalist interpretations of things. They're just crumbling. There's firesides, there's conferences on the more literalist fundamentalist sides. There's the conferences with Rodney Meldrum and the Heartlanders, and Glenn Beck shows up at those and so forth. This is how in our interview we talked about creative destruction. When institutions are dealing with creative destruction, the more literalist defensive people try to double down on protecting the institution, and they feel a threat from creativity and the innovators. And this is what we're seeing happening. So you'll have the givens go give firesides and Fiona Gibbons will talk about Heavenly Mother and maybe even that the Holy Ghost is Heavenly Mother. And then you'll have these literalist fundamentalist conferences that you have to pay to go to, by the way, with Rod Meldrum and The others that double down and then there's like the super right wing ones that believe that there's apostasy in the church history department and they believe that the Seer Stone wasn't used and that Richard Bushman is an apostate and so forth. You have those kinds of conferences as well. So these are happening. There's a whole spectrum that's happening from the nuanced, metaphorical inside and outside of Mormonism all the way to the doubling down on traditional apologetics and then even far right wing apologetics that are more severe than what we see coming out of Fair Mormon these days. I would add one more thing, and that is one thing that Lindsay Hanson park told me is that the CES letter has had a greater per capita effect on the FLDS than it has on the LDS Church. That makes sense to me that younger people who are in the more fundamentalist, literalist their education and their experiences have been, been the more susceptible they are. Like Patrick Mason would say that he said in his former presentation that the CS letter was the perfect response to the type of Mormonism that is not sustainable and that it's interesting. And she told me that when Jeremy found out that the CS letter was having a greater effect on the ethnic LDS community, he was really surprised by that. But it makes sense to me.

John Dehlin [01:30:43] So yeah, and it's, and it is really weird to see kind of these different camps. I mean, and it's probably just human behavior. Right. Like we tend, there's always going to be a spectrum of orthodoxy, politically, religiously, in all religious traditions. I don't think this is uniquely Mormon. So you would expect that, that while people like Richard Bushman and Terrell Givens would emerge as sort of these more pastoral neo apologists, you would expect people like Daniel Peterson or even more conservative people, maybe the Interpreter foundation, maybe others, to attack their own. You know, Givens and I would guess Givens and Bushman would think of themselves and Mason and others as protecting the church, strengthening the church, wanting to see the church, you know, grow and thrive, and yet you would find the more orthodox Mormons even attacking them. Right. And it makes for an interesting kind of ecosystem.

Anthony Miller [01:31:43] Yeah. If, if anyone gets bored and they, and they want to hear like the super right, right wing stuff, they would go look at the Joseph Smith foundation and the work of the Stoddards. James Stoddard is their leader or whatnot. They have takedown pieces on the Church history department and they think the essays are a huge mistake and they disbelieve that the Seer Stone was used for anything. And they've been brutal on Richard Bushman. So it's interesting to see the super right wing apologists that are out there.

John Dehlin [01:32:27] Yeah. But even the, as I understand it, even the Interpreter foundation has published articles that have been critical of people like Brian Hagler or Richard Bushman or the Givens or Terrell and Fiona Givens. Right?

Anthony Miller [01:32:40] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There was one in particular, I recall, that just tried to do a takedown piece of the given suggesting prophetic fallibility. They just thought that that went too far. I can't remember whether it was Greg Smith or who wrote that one, but yeah, so it's interesting to watch, you know, without a horse in the race, just, you know, to watch from the outside what's happening with the experience of the dynamic of the creative destruction that's happening when fundamentalist, literalist belief becomes unsustainable. And it's primarily due to the dynamics of being able to access information very easily and quickly because of the Internet and social media. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:33:32] Yeah. Okay. So should we talk about the Radical Orthodoxy proclamation in Desnat?

Anthony Miller [01:33:40] Yeah, just briefly.

John Dehlin [01:33:42] So I don't think at Mormon stories we've talked about Desnat at all. And I haven't wanted to. I've literally avoided covering it, but with these recent death threats, I think we kind of have to probably start talking about it.

Anthony Miller [01:33:54] I think you do. Yeah. So the Radical Orthodoxy proclamation was written by. Oh, his name. It's given.

John Dehlin [01:34:04] Nathaniel. Nathaniel.

Anthony Miller [01:34:05] Nathaniel, yeah, and a number of others. And basically what the Radical Orthodoxy, it's not a proclamation, actually, it's a manifesto. I mistyped it in our outline. It basically says we think that we should be able to not take literalist fundamentalist views about things. So they don't specifically say like, believe in evolution or maybe accept that Paul didn't write Hebrews or Ephesians or something like that. But at the same time they hold really strong almost on a fundamentalist basis to Loyalty to the Brethren and the Family Proclamation. And so, and there's a multiple number of signers of this and the Givens signed it, which was very interesting to me because I thought that that would be not something that they would sign. But then there's the other people like Jacob Hess, who has said some of the most horrific things like to mama dragons and so forth, who is very, very anti lgbtq. Q In some of the things that I've read, at least of his signed it as well. And basically it's a manifesto saying we don't have to Be does not. Or the Stoddard's kind of fundamentalist literalists about things. But at the same time, we're going to try to hold to a belief in divine authority and a need for loyalty and obedience to the current Brethren. And we can hope for change on things, but we're going to hold certain truths to be immutable, including the things that come out of the Family Proclamation. And the reaction to that, you know, Patrick Mason, I don't know if he called it a nothing burger or something like. Like that, but it was pretty much it was not anything. And Adam Miller, I think, had a similar response. People who are LGBTQ allies or who believe that women should have a greater voice generally had a very negative reaction to this Radical Orthodoxy manifesto.

John Dehlin [01:36:35] Did you say. Did you say Patrick Mason called it a nothing burger?

Anthony Miller [01:36:39] Yeah, something like that.

John Dehlin [01:36:40] Wait, so the given signed onto it, but Patrick Mason called it a nothing burger?

Anthony Miller [01:36:46] Well, I don't know if he used that word, but that's what he expressed, that it was nothing. And so that's very interesting to see that change of dynamic. So there, there are people who want to hold on to an idea that there can be nuanced and that fundamentalist, literalist interpretations of scriptures and the Family proclamation. Well, in this case, not the Family Proclamation, but of scriptures can be a problem. But at the same time, they're expressing their orthodoxy that they believe that they need to be loyal to the Brethren and they trust that God is head of the church and so forth. So they're trying to kind of straddle the two lines. And some of the reaction to this Radical Orthodoxy manifesto is, is an opinion that maybe it's these individuals trying to separate themselves from the Stoddards and from the does not and the super fundamentalist, literalist type of people. And they're kind of trying to stake ground to stay that say they're different than. Than those. Than those others. Extremists. It's an interesting thing that happened. I. I think it's just a different version of fundamentalism, because it seems fundamentalist to me when I read it. I've read it a few times with regard to the Family Proclamation and the belief that there's keys and divine appointment and power. And while they don't believe the Brethren are infallible, they believe that it's important to be obedient and loyal to the brethren. The Desnat group, as a basic gist, if people Google it, they'll see that. There was a Huffington Post article about that. But basically, these are People who think that maybe BYU is an apostasy, They double down on this idea that the ban couldn't have been racist and Brigham Young didn't make a mistake. So they're very, very literalists. And because they're part of this younger millennial Gen Z cult culture, they have some of these things that I referred to in Jonathan Haidt's book Cuddling of the American Mind, where they have call out culture. So they'll, they'll, they'll take a screenshot of something from a liberal progressive Mormon or an LGBTQ Mormon who's trying to find a middle way, and then they'll share that and they'll all dogpile on, on that person, like serious bullying. And they'll have people that participate in their groups that threaten violence or, and whatnot. For example, if there's a pride parade or when there were people that were protesting the rollback of the change at BYU of same sex dating being allowed in the honor code. Like there are some of these guys that would go drive up with their big diesel trucks and like smoke out, you know, slam on the accelerator to smoke out those people. Like, so it's not like actual violence, but I mean, it's approaching that kind of thing. And they really believe that BYU is in apostasy. They, they slam and they go after people like Jackson Washburn and, and Julie Hanks and others. And, and it's really quite disturbing some of the things that they do. And so there is some idea that maybe this radical orthodoxy manifesto is to try to separate those signers trying to separate from themselves, from the does not group. But there are people who have signed that, that are listed on that, that tend to sometimes share does not messages, which is a little weird. But these are super right wing orthodox people that believe that basically DNC Section 50 approach to teaching and preaching the gospel is the wrong way and they want to attack people and go after people and individually. And it's pretty harsh. And there is a concern that it could turn into violence.

John Dehlin [01:41:07] Yeah. And so we started seeing a little bit of this with. Is it Hannah Syriac? Is that a name that means anything to you?

Anthony Miller [01:41:16] Yeah. So Hannah has a new podcast for Fair Mormon and I think it's meant to. And I think she's would be considered like a Gen Z person. She's a convert to the church, she's a former Catholic, but she, you know, believes Moses and Abraham were real people and that Moses wrote some texts that ended up in the Pentateuch and so forth. And, and so she's more literalist fundamentalists in her beliefs, even knowing some of the messiness of the development of the Bible and other scriptural texts. And so she has signed the Radical Orthodoxy proclamation. But there are people that like some of the stuff that she says too, because she's really hardcore on the family proclamation being immutable doctrine.

John Dehlin [01:42:11] Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but there seems to be. She seems to tend more towards the spectrum, closer to does not than, than maybe then maybe to the kind of pastoral apologetics. And regardless, I wouldn't say she's does

Anthony Miller [01:42:30] nap, but she's definitely not Jackson Washburn.

FAIR Mormon's New Approach Targeting Younger Generations

John Dehlin [01:42:33] Yeah, and so, and this kind of leads us to kind of the main subject. We've given our listeners a lot of history and context now. It kind of leads us to the emergence of Kwaku El and Carden. Is it Ellis, is that right? And Brad Whitbeck, because they seem to be cousins to Hannah Syriac. And it all seems to be kind of trying to address the Gen Z problem. So why don't you go ahead and now talk about fair's new approach, Kwaku Cardan and where you see things are, and then we can talk about whether it's going to be effective and where it's all going.

Anthony Miller [01:43:18] Yeah. So apparently Jimmy Snow and Zelf on the Shelf and Exmo Lex and some of these others and probably Mike Norton on his TikTok channel have been making dents and causing Gen Z and younger millennials to question. And so Fair, Mormon and traditional apologists didn't really have a consistent way to try to combat the losses and the loss of belief and the encounter with complex ambiguities with regard to church history. They have Hannah doing a podcast series and they have Saints inscripted, you know, and so the next thing was Kwaku, you know, has quite a bit of experience. He was with. It was three Mormons and then they changed it to Saints inscripted when Mormon became a curse word or, you know, an epithet or something like that epithet. And so Kwaku and these others decided to do a response to the CS letter, but they wanted to make it fake funny. And so they recorded all these episodes and then they edited them and cutted them, cut them into shorter episodes with some sharpness and comedy and so forth to make it attractive for Gen Z and to try to combat what is happening on TikTok and what's happening with regard to Gen Z that watches Zelf and Jimmy Snow and the other kinds of stuff. And so Kwaku's been working on and the others have Been working on this for some time. I recall him writing at one point somewhere that he was working on these months ago and that he was excited that they were finally going to be released. And so then they released them kind of in a series, hoping to get play and traction to deal with the losses due to Gen Z. And so Kwaku, when these started coming out, he got a lot of pushback. And of course, I think the pushback was primarily from millennials, Gen X and the baby boomers, because those generations that doesn't. Most of that kind of stuff approach doesn't work for them. And. And so he was getting quite a bit of pushback. So he did a post saying, this is what we got to do, because that's how Gen Z does. They're not gonna. They're not gonna read a boring long PDF, they're not gonna watch, you know, a fair Mormon lecture. And so this is how you got to do it. And my response to Kwaku was, well, if Gen Z doesn't have the attention span to read a long boring PDF, then you don't have to worry about them reading the CES letter. Right. And his response to that was that it's less his concern that I'm paraphrasing his. Less his concern that Gen Z is going to go read the CS letter and click on all the links and then read FairMormon's response and everything like other generations would do. What he suggested is we got to combat it because these other Gen Z delivery mediums or persons, what they do is they use the CS letter as resource material for their episodes. And so they're trying primarily, not necessarily to debunk all the CES letter, although they are trying to do some of that, but they're trying to, number one, I think, inoculate Gen Z against reading the CS letter. So if Gen Z hears about some of these topics and then they decide to read the CS letter, they're going to run into some of these topics so they won't be surprised by them. And so maybe Kwaku and the others think that that is a successful approach to it by saying a circle or stone's no big deal, and polygamy is not a big deal as long as they're consent and so forth. But the other thing is, I think that he's trying to. And the others are trying to place mistrust in this. And so there's one thing that I would read. Radio Free Mormon, one of his listeners emailed John lynch at fairmormon talking about Kwaku dropping the F bomb and other kinds of things that would be offensive in these videos. And the basic response of John lynch at fairmormon was, I'll just read one paragraph. He said, there is something remarkable in how these videos have helped us reach the youth with solid information that he considers solid information. He says previous videos of ours are typically dry, scholarly content has had 0 views from anyone under 25 age 25, and only about 10% of the views are from people under age 35. Also, a typical video would get at best 2 to 3,000 views in a couple years. The least popular of the new Kwaku videos have garnered more than 2 to 3,000 views in only a matter of hours. And 37% of those views are from people under age 35, and 10% of those views are from people under age 25. And he says, so clearly the content is reaching the people who need it. John lynch and quite possibly Scott Gordon and the others at fairmormon, whether or not they think the approach is helpful, they appear to be supporting the approach because they're getting a higher volume of use very quickly in their target demographic because they have plenty of material for Gen X and baby boomers and older millennials. But fairmormon hasn't had very much material that would be attractive for Gen Z and millennials to consume. And Saints Unscripted and Book of Mormon Central and Pearl of Great Price Central is trying to get to that group. But what they found with these videos is they've had even more play in the target demographic of Gen Z and younger millennials in a very short period of time.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of the FAIR Videos

John Dehlin [01:50:25] So I, I'm going to just ask you several questions now because there's a lot in that, that little paragraph. So, so first and foremost, yes, they're getting a lot of views. And what the theme I kind of want to cover really quickly is, is this effective? Is it working? Is it achieving the, the uber objective objectives, and will it backfire? So first of all, yes, they're getting a lot of views and yes, they can track the age, the average, you know, the age brackets of what percentage of their viewers brackets. But what they can track is whether the people actually viewing the videos are believing, you know, orthodox Mormons or whether they're just people that follow ex Mormon Reddit, people that follow me, people that follow Jeremy. Because when as soon as we notice these videos coming out and we saw from our opinion how dishonest they seem to be, how gaslighting they seem to be, how attacking they seem to be how to people like me and Jeremy and in some cases how un Mormon they seem to be in terms of using profanity, insults, jokes that just felt very, I'll just say inappropriate for someone who was raised an orthodox Mormon. You know, we, we freaked out and started sharing them everywhere and, and, and pushing people to their sight. So I guess my first question is, can they assume that all these views are believing active orthodox Mormons that are having their questions answered and that are keeping them in the church? What do you think about that?

Anthony Miller [01:52:06] Well, I think one indicator, I don't know that it would answer that question entirely, but one indicator is the likes and dislikes. And on most of these videos the dislikes exceeded the likes, which leads me to believe that it was, you know, ex Mormon Reddit people and people like me and you and others who, who disbelieve who. Probably more than half of the views are people like us. And I'm not seeing Gen Z share it on Facebook, but Gen Z doesn't use Facebook. So you know, they use, they use TikTok, they use Instagram and they use Twitter and maybe there's other stuff that they use. So maybe I'm missing it because I'm an old fogey, not a boomer, but a Gen Xer. But I think it's highly likely that a good percentage, maybe even more than half, are not questioning believing Mormons. And Jeremy has posted as these videos came out, that he's had a huge, huge boom in hits to his website and a huge increase in downloads of the CS letter. So whether those are new CS letter readers or not, I, I don't know if Jeremy has, you know, that kind of information, but my take is they're not producing the kind of results that Scott and John think that they are. I, I think it's quite likely that the majority of the views are non believing people that aren't going to all of a sudden. I mean there, there might be someone who sees it on ex Mormon Reddit and they go watch it and maybe that gives them an answer for polygamy that they're okay with, you know, or they really believe what Steve Smoot says about Olishem, you know, and the in the Book of Abraham episode. But I think the vast majority of them, it's gonna, if they are people on the edge or believing people, it's probably gonna lead them to get curious about going ahead and reading the CES letter. And I think that will backfire. And I think the majority of views are probably, yeah, it's a Streisand effect kind of thing.

John Dehlin [01:54:26] So I was just gonna say that. Another indication that most of those views were ex Mormons, anti Mormons or that's not a good term, non believing Mormons, progressive Mormons is that they had to shut off comments. So the comments were so critical of those videos and so negative that they literally had to turn off comments on those videos. But you know what they say all press is good press. So I think the jury's out as to whether or not they're going to be effective. I, I want to share. Samuel Pinson. We love you Samuel. Samuel writes 90% of those views were Mormon Stories podcast listeners. LOL. I think that, you know that that could be true. And then, and then, yeah, like you said, Scott, Scott writes the Streisand effect is a thing. And I think there's just no question that by talking about me they're going to be googling me. By talking about Mormon stories they're going to be, you know, these people are going to Google Mormon stories and John Dehlin. And I can just say for 2020, my downloads and views have never been higher and donations to my podcasts have never been higher. And Jeremy is saying the downloads to the CES letter have really spiked recently. I just think that's a lose lose for them. And the Streisand effect indeed is real. So let me ask you about some of the tactics. So when, what do you think about number one, this, this approach of being funny, of being critical, of having Satan say that like Jeremy and John Deyn are like even too bad for hell and for Satan, you know, cropping my head on a demon's body. What do you guys think about, what do you think, Andrew Anthony, about their attempts at humor? Do you think that's going to be effective or not? And then I'm going to talk to you about other elements of the videos. But let's just start with their attempts at humor.

Anthony Miller [01:56:28] You know, I, I'm not Gen Z and so I think it would be hard to me as a Gen Xer, I don't think that that's helpful. You know, I grew up with again I referred to before the narrative, you know, in Doctrine and covenants section 50 is that you're supposed to preach the gospel by the spirit of truth and not any other way. Because if it's another way, it's not of God. And the person who's receiving the preaching is supposed to receive it by the spirit of truth. And the way, you know that the person has preached it and received it by the by God's way, is that they're connected together in the spirit. You know, that that's what I grew up with. And so my view of these, like, I don't think I would have felt ever felt, even as a believing member, I wouldn't have felt the spirit. You know, watching these videos, you know, maybe they would have been, you know, sharp and funny and entertaining or something like that, but that's not going to enhance my testimony by me feel having the spirit or elevation, emotion or whatever it is that you want to call it, watching those videos. So it's certainly not going to resonate with someone like me from a Gen X generation now, whether or not Gen Z, like a, you know, a lot of millennials, including younger millennials, they, if they're really conservative, they love Ben Shapiro. They love stuff that, you know, is really sharp and critical. There are people who have really appreciated the Donald Trump approach to, you know, calling people, people out and so forth. And so, I mean, certainly there are going to be people that watch these, that it's going to resonate with them because they like that kind of material. But I think if, if what you're trying to do is you're trying to help really sincere believers who are experiencing a faith crisis or dealing with ambiguity, I think that I would have to think that the majority of those people are going to be turned off by these because they're just not going to see God in it. That's my take.

John Dehlin [01:58:55] Yeah, we have a really interesting comment from Dallin and I'd love to hear from our listeners what you guys are seeing on the ground. If any of you listeners have orthodox or believing, if you are orthodox or believing Mormons, we want to hear from you. If you have family who are orthodox or believing Mormons who have reviewed these videos, we would love your comments right now to share what their experiences have been. I just wanted to share one comment from Dallin. Dallin writes, I've taught my teenagers who are TBM that that sort of humor is not cool and I will not tolerate it. So that's a really interesting perspective from Dallin. Share. Share.

Anthony Miller [01:59:33] Jonathan Streeter's.

John Dehlin [01:59:35] And then, yeah, and then Jonathan Streeter writes, hi, Jonathan, we love you. Thoughts on things and stuff is awesome. He writes, my TBM brother had never heard of John de Lind or the CES Letter until seeing some of those videos. He asked me what they were after watching some of the Fair Mormon video. So now he knows. Mission accomplished. But just going back to the style like, it even goes as far as to have some swear words uttered and then bleeped out. I believe in some of these videos, like, for me, swearing is just so not Mormon. I still. I'm 51. I'm excommunicated. I still am uncomfortable swearing. What do you think about that approach of, like, being edgy to the point of, like, bleeping out swear words and cropping a face of Brigham Young on what I think is a rap star with his arms around six, you know, scantily clothed women? What do you think about kind of that edgy rough? Is that gonna be good for Mormon youth or not? Good for Mormon youth. Resonate or not resonate.

Anthony Miller [02:00:36] So again, here we are, two straight white men who are Gen Xers.

John Dehlin [02:00:41] Yeah, Gen Xers are. Yeah.

Anthony Miller [02:00:43] Old enough that we're almost boomers.

John Dehlin [02:00:45] Yes.

Anthony Miller [02:00:47] So I would say the thought that comes to mind is to consider the material that was in Jana Reese's book, the Next Mormons, and the data that she had of the number of younger millennials who drink coffee, maybe even use weed and do other kinds of things like that, but they'll still still consider themselves believing and go to church. And maybe they don't buy into the whole harshness with regard to LGBTQ rhetoric. Like, Kwaku thinks that. I asked him about that and the thread on his post, and he said, oh, that's old school. That's not even a thing anymore. And I responded, I'm like, I've got people that. That I'm supporting in our Mormon spectrum group who are LGBTQ who would tell you that it's not old school. Like, it's still an issue. It's a problem that people are experiencing, including in younger generations. But in any event, what I'd like to say is Jana Reese did show that the younger generation, they process and experience things differently than the older generations. So I think it's quite possible that Gen Z Mormons, you know, they've watched Game of Thrones, you know, they've watched all sorts of stuff on streaming media that includes lots of F bombs and cursing and so forth. So they might be a lot more loose in terms of using that kind of language than older millennials or Gen X or boomers. And so they might. You know, John Lynch's response to radio. The comment that Radio Free Mormon shared was, what's the difference between bleeping out an F bomb and saying fetch? You know, isn't it the same thing? Like, if you're a Gen Xer, it's different, but maybe Gen Z Doesn't think it's any different.

John Dehlin [02:03:01] Yeah, there's this sort of, like, there's sort of this vibe or feeling of what it's like to be a Mormon teen or a Mormon young adult. And it's, it's always been squeaky clean. It's always been like, like leave it to beaver, white shirts and ties, no swearing, clean cut, clean, clean shaven. I do wonder what, what message this sends to youth and young adults when it's basically kind of overtly and explicitly abandoning that. I don't want to call it, I don't want to call it like a brand, but it is a, it is a, it is a vibe. It is kind of a cultural, a cultural artifact of modern Mormonism. And I, I just wonder what this edginess with, with swearing and with, and with sarcasm.

Anthony Miller [02:04:03] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:04:03] I wonder if that is what the Brethren would really want. It's hard, you know, who knows if the Brethren, if, you know, the quorum of the 12 and the 15 have seen any of these. Who knows if they've approved them either directly or indirectly. But I just can't imagine them wanting our youth to become more like these videos. Right.

Anthony Miller [02:04:24] Yeah, I would agree, definitely. But I think that the quorum of the 12 and the First Presidency, they're more concerned with retention and loss of numbers. And so maybe if Scott and John go to the first presidency or corner of the 12, if they get asked or a general authority and they say, hey, look, we have 5, 10,000 views on these videos, we're getting the message out, maybe they'll be okay. I don't know. I mean, this is the kind of thing, like I'd go back to this idea of how creative destruction works. When institutions get long in the tooth and creativity goes away and innovation and change is considered a threat. You see these kinds of double downing kind of things. And I think that's what they're doing here. And I'm surprised that fair Mormon is okay with this, but if they feel like they're getting results and that instead of, instead of a third of missionaries coming home early, only 15% of missionaries come home early, maybe that makes a difference.

John Dehlin [02:05:48] Yeah. So let's, let's talk about your view of the substance. So they've covered Book of Abraham, they've covered polygamy, they've covered seer stones in a hat like they're, they're trying to hit all the biggies, right? Yep. And it's clear that these are written by classic Mormon apologists, but then spiced up with humor by Guys like Brad or Cardan or Kwaku, because you could tell they're reading from a teleprompter and then trying to make the jokes land. But they're really heavy on the classic apologetic. Avoid the hard stuff, redirect people's attention, provide misinformation, lots of ad hominem. What is your overall grade for the substance of the intellectual or scholarly responses in these videos?

Grading FAIR Mormon's Response to Critics

Anthony Miller [02:06:45] I mean, it's an F. It's really bad.

John Dehlin [02:06:48] Really.

Anthony Miller [02:06:50] Yeah. So I think you mentioned that his name is Doug. He's. He's from the uk. He has a website called Nemo and still go.

John Dehlin [02:06:58] Doug Douglas. Still go. I think.

Anthony Miller [02:07:00] Yeah. He has a website or a YouTube channel called Nemo. There are only 50 subscribers. So all of you are watching. Go go to you to YouTube and look up Nemo N E M O and then type in fact checking Mo wives, Mo problems. And he does. There's only 623 views right now. But he does an ongoing. It's 21 minute and a half or 22 minutes long about. And he goes through and he does a takedown of that video and he does another, you know, take down. You know, I think there might be. He might have uploaded two or three now. So he goes through. So like one, One great example is on Book of Mormon translation. You know, Jeremy, in the CS letter, he talks about the Seer stone and that the translation supposedly happened with the Seer stone, which was a folklore magic device, you know, similar to like a Ouija board. And then he, with frustration expressed. Am I supposed to believe that, you know, this sacred text came through the equivalent of a Ouija board? And in the, in the tits video is what they call it, which is very ironic.

John Dehlin [02:08:19] Thoughts on things. No, it's, it's. This is the show, right?

Anthony Miller [02:08:22] This is the show. Yeah. So in the. So in the tits video on, on. On translation, they totally misrepresent and say that Jeremy was saying that. That Joseph Smith used a Ouija board to, to translate the Book of Mormon, but Ouija boards weren't invented until 1892. You know, like you can't get more dishonest than that. Right. And so there are several others in the videos that are super bad. Like, you know, even Steven Smoot talks about Ol Shem, even though John Geese come out and backed off of the whole Ol Shem argument with regard to the Book of Mormon as being a hit. And so I think that overall it's like it's a failing grade. It's not a zero, but it's less than 60% in my view. It's a failing grade to say that a teenage girl who is told that her salvation and the salvation of her family is based on marrying Joseph Smith and that that represents consent, you know, that that's just not helpful. Or to suggest that there, that there wasn't any sexual relations. That just doesn't make any sense. Because even in the gospel topic essay, you know, in one of the polygamy essays, in the kirtlandaubu essay, they refer to Joseph. Some of the relationships probably were sexual. So even the information that they're sharing in these videos conflicts with even some of the gospel topics essays information. It's really bad. I think, I think that anyone that actually watches the video and decides they're going to read the CES letter and they read it with a critical mind, they're going to see it's going to be like all the other fair Mormon stuff, like I said at the beginning of our discussion, is that FairMormon's response to the CS letter did more to damage my face than the CS letter did.

John Dehlin [02:10:47] Yeah.

Anthony Miller [02:10:47] And that'll be the same with these.

John Dehlin [02:10:49] That's your prediction.

Anthony Miller [02:10:52] So do you want to share?

John Dehlin [02:10:55] Yeah, I've got some comments I'll share. Shane writes, these videos omit the valuable things the church teaches, whether the church is true or not, like love one another, service and doing good. So Shane is basically saying they're not focusing on some of the most important components of Mormonism. And so I just want to.

Anthony Miller [02:11:18] I chatted you a link to one of the Nemo videos so you could share that.

John Dehlin [02:11:22] Okay. Yeah, you can actually switch to comments and share. Share your own links in the comments. But, but I'll share that for sure.

Anthony Miller [02:11:33] Okay.

John Dehlin [02:11:34] Sam Pinson is just sharing some links so those of you on Facebook can. And we want to hear really quickly anyone on Facebook who's joined us who wants to share responses or, or reactions or opinions. I'm just going to be sharing some of these now. Matt Allen says, I find these, these two kids thoughts very interesting where they see right through their arguments. So, so there are Matt's. Matt's sharing some links of some other people and their reactions that are. That are interesting. Sean writes, these fair videos just seem like uninformed people trying to be hip with Mormon history, but they don't actually know it and this is where they'll fail their viewership. So Sean's not predicting a lot of success. And Craig writes, despite being out for 18 years, I've respected my family's choice not to want to know my reasons why I lost belief. Yet only in the last six months have two of my believing son in laws and two daughters have discovered the CES letter independent of me and begun to question their testimonies. Something is definitely going on. Yeah and and I have. I definitely have had people and I saw some posts on Reddit where these videos themselves have caused people to have doubts and leave the church. So we're already starting to see that and I'm curious to see if the church is going to catch on to that, that these videos are introducing people to me by talking about me to the CES letter. And we already are seeing people leave the church because of these Fair Mormon videos and you're already starting to see people on ex Mormon Reddit post. Thank you fair Mormon for helping my wife leave the church and I think we're going to see more and more of those in the weeks and months ahead unless the Church pulls them. Samuel Pinson, we love you. He writes, the purpose of these videos is to allow the younger generation to dismiss the CES letter and the issue it raises without consideration. They will say I've heard that before and it has been debunked. And that's right, it's kind of this inoculation approach. Yeah, yeah, totally agree. So the bet is if we just say if we've got these funny, sarcastic, you know, slightly profane, you know, hip gen zers who say things like Seer Stone and polygamy and polyandry and they say things like John Dehlin and Jeremy Runnels are liars and dishonest, that that's going to just make the gen zers tune out and it's going to inoculate them from further doubt. My question to you is, is that true? Anthony Miller? Do you think that calling me and Jeremy liars and just almost like speed reading these scripts where they mention all these things, do you have that low of an opinion of Gen Zers? Because I think that for me that's the crux of the problem with this approach. It actually I believe that Fair Mormons approach holds a really low opinion of gen zers such that they're easily fooled, they don't care about information, they're easily susceptible to just smears and ad hominem, they don't care about facts and frankly that they're easily manipulated. Do you think Gen Zers are as easily manipulated as John Lynch, Scott Gordon Kwaku, you know, Cardinalis and Fairmormon view Gen Zers?

Anthony Miller [02:15:08] Well, Gen Z does have very short attention spans and they catastrophize and they, you know, do their call out culture and stuff like that. So I mean there, there is a challenge. But my view is that Gen Z Mormons grew up with a deeper study of these kinds of things. And so I don't know. I think it, I think it remains to be seen. I disagree. And, and people who have responded to Kwaku, like BYU professor Trevin Hatch and several others have vehemently disagreed with Kwaku and the others on these kinds of things. Believing people like Derek Knox actually just did a comment vehemently disagree that Gen Z is that shallow that they don't have the attention span to look at these kinds of things in depth at all.

John Dehlin [02:16:10] Yeah, I think his comments worth reading. I'm an educated believer. This is Derek. I'm an educated, I'm an educated believer. And here's my approach. I don't think the new Fairmormon videos succeed. They rely too much on entertainment and style rather than a careful, thoughtful and responsible engagement of the issues. The use of mockery and disrespect betrays a significant amount of fragility, aggression and insecurity. Another weakness is that Kwaku and his cast are charismatic and entertaining personalities and not experts in the material they are discussing. And then he goes on to say I'm concerned about. And that comment ends. Did you see a follow up comment from him? I haven't yet.

Anthony Miller [02:16:52] I haven't yet. But Derek is a very thoughtful theologian, convert to the church, openly gay man. I have a lot of respect for him. If the tone of the church could evolve to Thomas McConkie, Derek Knox type of Mormonism in the future, it'd be a lot healthier than these traditional apologetics in my view.

Risks of Celebrity Endorsements and the Streisand Effect

John Dehlin [02:17:22] Yeah. Let me ask you what I think is one of the other real risks besides the Streisand effect. You know, we, we learn from Paul Dunn that when the church invests in a, a celebrity with charisma and that's true with Tyler Glenn. That's true with Dan Reynolds. That's true with Mindy Gledhill. That's true with, you know, pick a Mormon celebrity who's left the church. Pick a general authority that, you know, like Paul Dunn that got a bunch of, you know, followers and then apostate didn't apostatize but got kicked out of his positioned as a general authority because he was lying to people. Like the church is at risk when it, when it relies on celebrities. And if you think about It. Kwaku seems unstable. Like, I've got video of him, actually, when Covid hit and BYU was telling. Threatening Kwaku with expel. With expulsion. I've got a video of Kwaku basically saying to his followers, don't come to our d. You know, I'm not going to tell you to come to our dance parties during COVID because the church may excommunicate me or kick me out of byu but go to my friend's website, and he's going to tell you where to go to these parties. Like, that's a pretty blatant disrespect for BYU and the church. Not to mention, you know. You know, some of the more violent things that Kwaku has done where he's retweeting these violent videos showing me getting my head bashed in that caused me to call the police and the FBI, you know, and then we know about. And this isn't me trying to smear anyone's reputation. I'm literally not. Because we all have weaknesses. I have weaknesses. I don't believe in ad hominem. I'm asking a question about risk. Risk for the church. This Cardin guy, who's very. I think he's very talented. He's very charismatic, as is Kwaku. This Carden guy has already been arrested and convicted of smuggling a knife onto an airplane. If you go back into the Desert News archives, you can do Cardinalis Deseret News. He literally was. Was, was convicted. Was charged with a felony. And he. I think he pled and it was reduced to a misdemeanor. But this guy snuck weapons onto. Onto airplanes. Can this blow. Can this investment in these personalities backfire for the church because these guys prove to be unstable or risky? I think that's one interesting question.

Anthony Miller [02:20:00] Well, I. I think. I think all three of those guys are pretty talented entertainers. Like, if. If there was a comedy night and they weren't talking about Mormonism, they'd probably be entertaining to go watch their comedy night. I think they're pretty creative and so forth. And so I do think that there's risk. There's risk in celebrity. But at this point, I think if fair Mormon really believes that there'll be a reduction in people experiencing faith crisis due to the inoculation from these videos. I don't think they'll. I don't think they'll really care that much if. If one of these guys ends up with. With a problem. I mean, we're. We all. We all are all at risk of making Mistakes. You know, hopefully the older we get, the less likely we're going to make a mistake that is going to really show bad on, on the institution, institutions with which we affiliate. And it is certainly more likely when people are younger. But I don't know, I don't necessarily think that it's a high or a low probability that one of these three guys end up, you know, with a big problem. But it is, it is risky to have celebrity because, you know, think of Jared, the guy for Subway, you know, the guy who lost all the weight and was the, the main guy in the advertisements for Subway sandwiches. And then it came out that he did some very, very bad things and went to prison. That was not helpful for Subway. So there is risk. But, you know, I think, I think at this point, the traditional apologists maybe don't care quite so much because they're losing Gen Z and the younger millennials at a much faster rate than they were losing Gen X and Baby Boomers. And if they think this makes a difference and they feel like when they watch Zelf on the Shelf, when they watch Eczema Lex, when they watch New name Noah on YouTube and Jimmy Snow, they, they must believe that they need to speak out because they perceive that a lot of it's reaching a lot of people. And so they feel like they just have to do something. I don't know if it was President Oaks or I think it was President Oaks. It might have been him or Elder Packer who said something at one point that as apologists, you don't really have to have a great argument. You just need to have an argument. And just by having an argument, that's better than having nothing. And so maybe with that idea or approach is we have all these Gen Z, younger millennial type of venues that are spewing out things that are causing people to go into faith crisis. So we need to have an answer. Whether or not it's a great answer, we need to have an answer.

John Dehlin [02:23:18] Yeah, well, it's, it's interesting. Really quickly, do you want to comment on. Because I'm, I feel like I'm a little bit close to it. The, you know, there's, there's. Regarding the video that was created of me and of Jeremy Runnels where I get my head bashed in, where I'm depicted as a Nazi and get my head bashed in by a baseball bat. And then all the death threats that came through Desnat, where people are like sharing on Twitter pictures of them holding knives, saying, I'm going to gut John De Lin I'm going to cut out his insides. You know, his wife's going to cry when she sees him bleeding on the floor. You know those types of desnat retweets with violent images. There's two ways to look at that. One is that does not harmless that, that this is just the new culture. That those people don't really intend violence. That, that that's it's kind of over dramatic to you know, report that stuff to the police or the FBI or even get too scared or concerned about that. That it's just the way culture is evolving and that's just the way Twitter is. But it's just meme culture and that's, that's kind of what Kwaku has said. It's just like this is meme culture and in meme culture people create mean vicious memes and it's not a big deal and don't worry about it. That's one point of view. Another point of view is that that sort of visual or textual violence can become really dangerous for real people and could lead to really violent outcomes and a coarsening of our culture overall. And it can lead to really risky things. And that for Kwaku and Cardinalis to be retweeting these violent videos is really egregiously irresponsible and vile and despicable. Where do you come down on that question, Anthony Miller? Because I'm a little bit too close to it.

Anthony Miller [02:25:15] Yeah. So I, I would say it's a both and you know the kid that made the head bashing video, I think he's like some 17 year old kid supposedly.

John Dehlin [02:25:24] Do we know who it was?

Anthony Miller [02:25:27] Yeah, yeah, we know who it was.

John Dehlin [02:25:29] Okay.

Anthony Miller [02:25:30] Some 17 year old kid who did it, you know. And so a lot of it is hyperbole I think. But at the same time, you know, again I'd recommend that book the Coddling of American Mind and to understand Gen Z and how they perceive speech as being violence and being justified to respond to speech they don't like with violence. There are circumstances where I don't know if it was Bill Maher or Ben Shapiro was going to go speak at a campus in California somewhere, I can't remember what university it was. And the protests went violent and they were burning stuff and there were people that were like bludgeoned and hospitalized because they were beat with you know, metal pipes and stuff like that. And so I would say it's a both. And in that there are people in Gen Z that if they have enough incendiary reason and their perception of, you know, words equate to violence. And if they, if there are people in those groups who like really believe that they need to respond against Jeremy, against you, against your families with violence. I mean, that happens in Gen Z now while that happened, you know, among does not followers and so forth. I, I don't know the answer to that. I think that the police and the FBI would have a better feel on what that risk is. And is that risk in Utah the same as it was in some of these college campuses where there was violence as a response to just simply having a guest speaker who they disagree with on campus? So I think it's a both and I think, you know, I agree with Radio Free Mormon suggesting that you report it to the police, into the FBI. Not because I think the 17 year old kid or Kwaku or you know, that a large percentage of the watchers of these videos are going to come after you, you know, with a lead pipe or a bowie knife, but because the FBI and the police have a better feel to evaluate that level of risk and, and whether you would need to be concerned if, you know, we have an. On our next Thrive conference after Covid is over, if there's a bunch of doznat protesters that show up, you know, outside our Thrive conference, the FBI and the police are going to have a better idea as to what's the probability of that and what's the degree of risk. And so you don't need to worry about that so much in that you need to report it to people who have better knowledge of what they can assess, assess the actual degree of risk.

John Dehlin [02:28:38] And in the end, in the end, just to kind of summarize today and to kind of wrap things up, do you have a sense. Because there's, you know, when I, when I did the presentation a week ago about the financials of the church's nonprofits, you know, more good foundation, Interpreter Foundation, Book of Mormon Central or Book of Mormon Archaeological foundation, whatever it's called.

Anthony Miller [02:28:59] Right.

John Dehlin [02:29:00] And Fair Mormon, it looks very clearly like Fair Mormons on the decline, revenue to Fair Mormons decreasing. And then like Daniel Peterson's getting a million dollars a year for Interpreter. You know, moregood foundations got millions over the past several years. Yeah.

Anthony Miller [02:29:15] So that's not, that's not his personal compensation, but he's. He gets a budget. He gets a budget. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [02:29:22] He got a million dollars into his nonprofit, the Interpreter foundation just in one year.

Anthony Miller [02:29:28] Right.

John Dehlin [02:29:28] And all of that money was itemized on an other expenses line in the 990. I'm just saying, like money seems to be flowing into more good foundation, Book of Mormon central, you know, Pearl Gray Price central and, and what else? And the Interpreter Foundation.

Anthony Miller [02:29:50] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [02:29:51] And then, then the Fair Mormon seems to be on the client. It's also weird the Fair Mormon hasn't changed their name because we all know that Satan has a victory whenever someone uses the word Mormon. So Fair Mormons, I wonder if it's a declining dying brand, if it's a declining dying organization and if the church knows that it's going away. And so they figured they'd use the dying brand as a way to test out some of these more aggressive strategies to see whether or not they want to incorporate it going forward. That's just speculation. But my real question to you is in the end summarizing, is this going to work or is this not work? Is this going to backfire or not? Is fair and, or the church and, or the more good foundation and, or the donors, are they going to regret this campaign or are they going to, are we going to see more of it in the years and months ahead? What do you predict?

Anthony Miller [02:30:42] Yeah, so I think there's all sorts of money and people who are more fundamentalist literalists who are going to put their resources into these kinds of things. You know, whether it's the things that you talked about in the episode where you explained the Morgood foundation or whether it's the kind of conferences that have the Rodney Meldrum and the others, you know, or you know, the South America Book of Mormon tours and so forth, I think my view is those things are still financially viable because there are people with a lot of money that are willing to support those things. You know, like you mentioned in the recent release about the, the, the Hour group that some of the Operation Underground

John Dehlin [02:31:35] Railroad with Tim Ballard you're talking about.

Anthony Miller [02:31:37] Yeah. Some of the New Skin founders heavily fund that and, and Glenn Beck, you know, seeded it with like a million dollars. So I, I think that there's enough money out there with more fundamentalist, literalist leaning kind of people that I don't think that these institutions go away. And I do think that the church has so much in resources that if they think that there's going to be a return on investment, investment, they're going to continue to support and fund these kinds of things as well. So I don't think any of these things go away. I think it continues to be messy. I think that we continue to see 1 to 3%, maybe even as high as 5% a year of each ward in developed countries going through faith transition. And I think we just continue to see the church only growing in developing countries, countries and shrinking primarily in the rest of the US due to declining birth rates and due to faith transition and faith crisis. So I, I think there's a show to watch for a long time. This is going to continue and it's not going to stop. It's not going to stop the attrition. You know, just like Jonathan Streeter mentioned his family member who all of a sudden knows who you are and what the CS letter is. And these fair Mormon videos now people in mixed faith marriages. I've been seeing people in mixed faith marriages share the videos with their believing spouse who would never look at the CES letter, who might not even read the gospel topic essays. But they're watching these fair Mormon videos and I think it's going to backfire. I don't think it's going to stop. Stop.

John Dehlin [02:33:28] So you're saying it's not going to slow down the disinfection and you're saying it could even slightly increase the disaffection?

Anthony Miller [02:33:35] Absolutely. I, that's what I believe.

John Dehlin [02:33:37] You think it's going to backfire and make it worse? It's going to make things worse.

Anthony Miller [02:33:41] I think it will make things worse, yes. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:33:44] Yeah, I think that's possible. Well, it's time for, it's time for us all to go home. Sounds great. Anthony Miller, you're a great human. We're so excited about your TED Talk and your book.

Final Reflections and Closing Thoughts

Anthony Miller [02:33:55] Thank you.

John Dehlin [02:33:56] And mostly we just, I just want to thank you personally because you bring a level of wisdom and kindness and love, but intellect to the discourse that I think is universally loved by the people that know you. And so I consider it a personal honor that you would come on Mormon Stories and just be with us and share with us your perspectives.

Anthony Miller [02:34:22] I appreciate that, John. I really appreciate that. Thank you so much.

John Dehlin [02:34:26] All right, well, thanks. Anything else you want to end with? Anthony Miller, any final, final comments or shout outs to your future book or your website or anything you want to share?

Anthony Miller [02:34:38] So I blog on unpacking ambiguity unpackingambiguity.com and you can email me@ unpackingambiguitymail.com and I'll continue to share stuff online, on social media. And when my TED Talk happens, I'll be sure to share it with everybody. And who knows, maybe we can talk about it and have an episode where we talk about my TED Talk after I give it.

John Dehlin [02:35:03] Absolutely. We'll do a reaction video. Absolutely.

Anthony Miller [02:35:07] Thank you.

John Dehlin [02:35:07] All right, Anthony, you're awesome. We love you. Thanks so much for joining us. You stay safe and take care.

Anthony Miller [02:35:12] Have a good weekend. Thanks.

John Dehlin [02:35:13] Thanks, brother.

Anthony Miller [02:35:14] Bye.

John Dehlin [02:35:14] And all the listeners, thank you so much for joining us today on Mormon Stories. I've loved your comments and questions. We're going to stream this to YouTube later, but thanks to everyone for joining us today. Thanks to everyone for your comments and positions. Thanks for your support of Mormon Stories podcast. If you love Mormon Stories Podcast, less than one out of a thousand listeners or viewers actually donate. It would mean a lot to me, especially on this Christmas time. If, if you could just become a monthly donor. 10 bucks a month, whatever you can afford. Go to MormonStories.org click on the Donate button at the top of the page. Please become a monthly subscriber. We're all our. All our finances are transparent. All of your money goes to creating this programming. We don't. We are super responsible and conservative with how we spend your money. And all we're doing is trying to help promote healing and growth for Mormons and post Mormons. We're trying to improve the Mormon church, make it harmless people. We're trying to save families, prevent divorce, keep families together and, and promote informed consent for Mormons everywhere. So. And for investigators so that people can just know what the church is and then make informed decisions as a result. So if you value this, value this programming, please become a donor today @mormonstoriesgmail mormonstories.org Please email us at mormonstories gmail.com with feedback. Please share this wherever you can. Give us positive reviews on Facebook page and on the Apple podcast app. Again, share this with everybody. Stay, stay attuned. Stay in touch, stay safe. And thanks for everyone who encourages me when things get violent, when things get scary, when things get discouraging, I want to thank all our donors and all of you who reach out to me and give me encouragement because that keeps me going. So thanks everybody. Love you guys. Take care and we'll see you guys all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Goodbye, everybody.

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