John Dehlin sits for a cross-examination of his own life and beliefs on Graham Martin’s show The Cross Examiner, where Graham applies a lawyer’s habit of testing claims and evidence to the case of “rationality vs. religion.” After walking through Dehlin’s path from a BYU political science degree toward a master’s in instructional technology and eventually a Ph.D. in clinical and counseling psychology, Graham asks him to lay out, “like a good lawyer defining terms,” the founding history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Joseph Smith’s start in folk magic and treasure-seeking in 1820s New York, the production and contents of the Book of Mormon, his rise to unchecked political and religious power in Nauvoo as mayor, chief justice, and prophet, and the introduction of polygamy and the priesthood and temple restrictions on Black members. Dehlin describes his own faith unraveling using the “shelf” metaphor common among Mormons and ex-Mormons — troubling facts set aside until the shelf cracks — starting with his parents’ temple marriage ending in divorce, and continuing through his mission, where he says an ambitious mission president pushed missionaries toward quick, uninformed baptisms, turning it into one of the highest-baptizing missions in the world with hundreds of baptisms a month, something Dehlin found ethically appalling. The two discuss the fallout Dehlin faced for leaving and for helping others navigate their own transitions, why he has never adopted the label “atheist” or “agnostic” despite no longer believing, and where he points people who are struggling, including the organization Recovering from Religion. Graham, who says he bought several books because of Dehlin’s show, positions the conversation as a chance for his own listeners to hear Dehlin’s journey directly rather than secondhand. They close with Dehlin explaining where to find Mormon Stories on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
What’s covered
- 00:00 Introducing John Dehlin and his background
- 08:28 Career path before leaving the church
- 15:58 John’s personal story as a Mormon
- 16:43 The revisionist history of the Mormon church
- 24:13 The Book of Mormon examined
- 37:04 Joseph Smith’s character and rise to power
- 46:36 Suppression, polygamy, and church corruption
- 1:02:32 Polygamy, race doctrine, and hidden teachings
- 1:14:14 How John’s faith began to crumble
- 1:17:54 Consequences of leaving and family fallout
- 1:36:06 Supporting people through religious transitions
- 1:50:05 Mormonism as an insular culture
- 2:05:11 Current beliefs and philosophy of life
- 2:21:25 Where to find Mormon Stories and final thoughts
Thumbnail: Main image of Joseph Smith by Unknown painter, from Community of Christ Archives (public domain); Main image of John Dehlin provided by himself; Background image of the Kirtland Temple by JonRidinger.
Episode Transcript
Host: John Dehlin · Guest: Graham Martin
This transcript is machine-generated and lightly edited for readability. The audio is authoritative. Please excuse occasional errors in names and spelling.
Introducing John Dehlin and His Background
Graham Martin [00:00:01] So welcome, John Dehlin. Nice to have you here.
John Dehlin [00:00:04] Thanks. Thanks. Cross examiner. Do I refer to you as the cross examiner?
Graham Martin [00:00:09] You can call me the cross examiner. You can call me Graham. You can call me hey, you, however you like to do it. Hey, Graham, thanks.
John Dehlin [00:00:16] Thanks for having me on your show and thanks for being on my show 100%.
Graham Martin [00:00:19] I'm really glad that I reached out to you. I'm really glad that you offered to have us release this on both of our shows. I think both of our listeners would really benefit from this conversation of me getting to know you and your work and your journey through your belief system. So I really do appreciate it. You, you are by all means a very, very busy individual. So I appreciate you taking the time.
John Dehlin [00:00:43] My. My pleasure. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Yeah.
Graham Martin [00:00:46] All right. Well, I'm going to give my listeners a little bit of a background and correct me if I'm wrong. So you are a former member of the Church of Latter Day Saints. People will call them Mormons or Church of Latter Day Saints. My. My Mormon friends call themselves LDSers all the time. How do you prefer to your former belief?
John Dehlin [00:01:05] Official name is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It's really a handful. A believing Mormon would say that Jesus Christ is the most important part, so you don't want to leave that out. The Latter Day Saints is just Joseph Smith's spin on the name, and it's meant to sort of remind us all that Jesus is coming soon. And the church was founded in 1830 and it took a few years. They changed the name a few times along the way, but that's the name we settled with.
Graham Martin [00:01:34] Gotcha. Okay, that's great to know. And you are now, first of all, you hold a PhD in psychology and you do this podcast that we're doing a dual episode on called Mormon Stories. We're going to get to how you got there and all of that sort of stuff. But you also do other blogs and websites that I saw in my reading. I identified you as somebody who was very influential in the early sort of Mormon blogosphere movement. And as far as I can tell, your current practice focuses on dealing with issues of either being in a high demand religion or being LGBTQ within a. Any sort of religion, and maybe even coming out or leaving the religion, those sorts of things. Am I describing sort of your focus correctly now?
John Dehlin [00:02:27] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I started out, you know, I was raised. I was raised Mormon. We'll talk about this in a little bit. But I started the podcast back in 2005 just to help people be able to talk about things that they couldn't talk about at church. And over time it's grown. So yeah, Mormon Stories podcast and we're all about long form and just letting Mormons tell their stories.
Graham Martin [00:02:54] Absolutely. I have watched many episodes. I started, the episode that brought me in was Eve's Story, a couple of episodes about a young lady named Eve. You and your co host sat her down and she volunteered to discuss some little known facts about mormism which we'll get to later. And then she volunteered to be filmed why you told her this. And you could sit there and watch her process this information that she obviously hadn't heard or maybe heard in the Whispers and the winds, but was now hearing it from a fairly trusted source. And those two videos, I don't think I've ever seen anything like that.
Graham Martin [00:03:31] To watch somebody deal with this information from a trusted source in real time was really moving and I really felt for her. I really loved how you approached it very gently but you know, fact based. So that, that got me down a rabbit hole of following what you were doing and watched a lot of those videos and your viewership is speaking volumes. You've got hundreds of thousands of people that subscribe now.
Graham Martin [00:03:57] What does it feel like to be at this point where people are listening to you talk to people as they deal with these Mormon related issues?
John Dehlin [00:04:06] It's super fun. And I just have to give a shout out to my friend Kara Burrell. She runs a YouTube channel called Nuanceo and that particular interview was on Kara's Nuanceho channel. And she's gotten hundreds of thousands, if not a million views from that one single episode. I tried to get Kara to let me put it on Mormon stories. She's like, no, but that's hers. It's really rewarding. We started out audio only back in 2005 and we probably were audio only for a good five to 10 years. And then we just started recording the video on Zoom. Just kind of like to have it. But it's only been kind of since right before COVID that we started just consciously trying to grow our YouTube audience.
John Dehlin [00:04:48] So we just, this week we passed 250,000. And you know, for, for, for many, for many YouTube channels, that's small beans. But for, for the Mormon specific circles, 250,000 is a huge number. So we're, it's humbling and I'm really grateful. And weirdly, something like 60% of my YouTube audience has never been Mormon. So weirdly, there's a huge appetite for Mormon Stories that extends well beyond active believing, faithful Mormons or even ex Mormons. So that's fun.
Graham Martin [00:05:20] Absolutely. I. I am one of those people. My background is I was never really religious. Religious. Early in my life, I would have answered the question, do you believe in God? With a yes. But fairly early in my teens, I think I would have started answering with a no. And my parents were not very religious. And I am. I am a huge fan of. Of Mormon stories and nuance. Ho. And see who wrote the book. I forget her name.
Graham Martin [00:05:49] Alyssa Grenfell, I think you've talked to that wrote this book. She's wonderful as well. And I'm watching all of this content, and we can sort of probably discuss later why, why the non the Never Mormons is such a huge audience. I think I have some ideas there.
Excommunication and Life After the Church
Graham Martin [00:06:08] But getting back to you, the big event then in your life was in 2015, you were excommunicated from the church. So I think what my listeners are going to be interested in hearing is your journey from being in the church to having some sort of crisis of faith to the point where you leave the church, not necessarily by your own choice. So do you mind if I sort of walk through that history?
John Dehlin [00:06:38] No, that'd be great. Go for it. Okay.
Graham Martin [00:06:40] Yeah. All right. So from an educational standpoint, let's start there. Just so people understand what you were doing with your profession. You have a bachelor's in poli sci, and you got that in the early 90s at BYU, is that correct?
John Dehlin [00:06:52] Yeah. And let me just also just say that something that I think we both decided would be fun is to release this episode on both our platforms.
Graham Martin [00:06:59] Yes.
John Dehlin [00:07:00] Because my audience is used to me being the question asker, not the question answer. But I've got so many new listeners as of the past few years that I think they would enjoy just kind of like, who is this John guy? Let me know more about him. So every couple years, I try and release an episode of someone interviewing me. And so that's kind of what's fun about today is, you know, it'll be fun to kind of get to know your audience. And then it's also fun for my audience to get to know you and also to hear my story as well. So I just love throw that in there.
Graham Martin [00:07:36] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I'm. I'm excited about that. I'm fairly new to the podcast. I've been doing it for a year or so. I am for your audience. I am also a regular host now on several shows devoted to atheism and separation of Church and state are my main focuses. I am an attorney, and that's my focus is. Is pushing back against Christian nationalism, taking over sort of the United States. So my main hosting job is this podc, but also I'm a regular host now on the Atheist Experience, which has, you know, 500,000 viewers as well. So we're in the same sort of order of magnitude of viewers.
Graham Martin [00:08:13] It's humbling to have that many people. I know that my audience over on that show will be very interested from hearing from you. So if we can ever arrange it, maybe we could have you come on as a guest and take some calls and talk to people.
John Dehlin [00:08:25] That'd be super fun. Yeah. Okay, so let's go back. Where should we jump in?
Mormon Stories Podcast and Professional Work
Graham Martin [00:08:29] Okay. So I just wanted to sort of get people in your mindset of what you do for a career before we jump into your beliefs.
John Dehlin [00:08:35] So. Okay.
Graham Martin [00:08:36] Poli sci in 93 at BYU and then got a master's in instructional technology in 2007. Ish.
John Dehlin [00:08:46] Yeah. Yeah. So, weirdly, when I was at Brigham Young University, which is where I got my bachelor's degree, which is like Mormonism's Notre Dame, you know, equivalent for the Catholics, I wasn't sure what to major in, and I kind of had an interest in politics, so I actually pursued political science, thinking that I would go to law school. But I actually also learned at BYU somehow that you should love what you do and be passionate about it and don't be upset here. I talked to several of my lawyer friends, and none of them said they love what they do. And that was like a red flag for me.
John Dehlin [00:09:30] And I know that there are lawyers who love what they do, but just how. It's just so happened the people that I talked to didn't love what they did. And so I'm like, well, I better wait. So I. I left byu. I went to work for Bain and Company, which was Mitt Romney's management consulting firm. I was. It's based in Boston, but I went to the Dallas office and. And that's when the Internet, like 1993, 94. That's when Netscape Navigator first starts coming out. And I learned about the Internet. And I'm like, okay, management consulting is cool, but this Internet thing is going to be big.
John Dehlin [00:10:04] So I moved. I left Bain after a year, went to Chicago to Arthur Andersen and started doing Internet consulting with. The whole time. Not Internet consulting, sorry, computer programming consulting. And the whole time I was thinking, I'll go teach school. I'll go be a principal at a school. But I just need to figure out what graduate degree to pursue. So tech kind of happened as an accident as me just wanting to earn money for my family. So, long story short, I spent a year at the Mormon Church as a tech consultant doing Y2K conversions. So during the year 2000 time frame, around 98, everyone was freaking out that when, when the, when year 2000 came along, all the computers were stopped working.
John Dehlin [00:10:50] So I actually spent a year at the Mormon Church consulting them, converting their databases from kind of legacy DoS based databases into Windows based, like access based databases.
Graham Martin [00:11:03] Yep.
John Dehlin [00:11:03] The coolest project I worked on at the LDS Church, it was a general general authority tracking system. So they had a system that tracked who their future leaders might be, candidates for their future leadership. And they allowed me to be on that project, which was kind of fun to see what things they think about to choose their, their highest level leaders.
Graham Martin [00:11:25] Sure.
John Dehlin [00:11:26] And I'll just say I ended up at Microsoft in around 98, 99, and I was there around seven years. And then that's where I lost my faith at Microsoft. And then when I left Microsoft, took about a year to figure out in grad school that podcasts were going to be a big thing. So by 2005, while I was in grad school studying instructional technology, I learned about podcasts and I started Mormon Stories. Then we're one of the first. We're one of the longest running podcasts in the world. I'm told we're not the longest running, but since we started in 2005, I think we're at least close.
Graham Martin [00:12:04] That is quite a story. And I have, I think you and I have not talked about our histories until this moment. I am stunned at how parallel we are in our background. So let me just give you a quick, a quick version. I majored in political science in the early 90s because I was thinking about going to law school.
John Dehlin [00:12:26] Nice.
Graham Martin [00:12:26] But I talked to people. I hope you're detecting a pattern. You talk to people who were lawyers and they didn't seem too happy. And my father said, hey, you're going to get into a career where you have a high chance that every single day you're going to have to be making some moral decisions, some tough decisions. Are you sure you want that? So I drove myself back down to Charleston, South Carolina, where I was born and raised, sat on the beach and thought about what I wanted to do and decided I didn't want to go to law school yet. And I wanted to get into teaching and helping people.
Graham Martin [00:12:56] Whatever I need to do to pay I got a job at a medical records software company as a consultant working on consulting for medical records software, and eventually worked myself up to be the co manager of their Y2K conversion team.
Graham Martin [00:13:13] And we, I'm telling you, it gets better. So I managed people who were converting hospitals software, their medical record software from DOS old DOS stuff into Windows stuff, old, old, you know, mainframe databases into access databases or SQL databases, same exact thing.
Graham Martin [00:13:38] And then eventually after that Internet came, I quit. And if some friends of mine built a company, a small little company that was looking at the Internet, boom, saying, well, this is a gold rush. I don't want to pan for gold. I want to sell the picks and shovels and the denim jeans. So we, we created a web company that would make you your website or do whatever you need because we had all had this developed this tech expertise. So I think we might be brothers from another mother or gone through some sort of portal. But.
John Dehlin [00:14:09] Yeah, you weren't really raised religiously at all, or were you?
Graham Martin [00:14:12] No.
John Dehlin [00:14:13] Okay.
Graham Martin [00:14:13] None. I mean, my mother took us to church occasionally because I think she felt that was the right thing to do. But, you know, the closest I came to religious upbringing was I was in school. After I was born in Charleston, South Carolina, moved around because my dad was in the Navy. That's why we were there. I have no particular family ties to it, but there's a big Navy base there. We ended up back in Charleston when I started sort of my middle school to approaching high school years. And back then, this is the. The late 70s, early 80s, South Carolina schools were, you know, 49th in the nation, right above Mississippi.
Graham Martin [00:14:52] So they worked very hard to get us into a private school. You had to sort of test into it, but you also had to have, you know, you could get some scholarships if your parents were in the military. So we scrimped and saved and got us in there. And that was a religious school. It was an Episcopalian religious school. So I did do you know, I went to chapel. This was for many years, went to chapel. I was occasionally the person, you know, putting out the candles and saying the lesson for the day. But it, for me, in that environment, it was. It was just at that age, a thing you did it.
Graham Martin [00:15:25] What. There wasn't any truth claims being asserted to me, like nobody was telling me this is literally true. And I sort of took it as. These are interesting stories. I wonder why we're doing this. And for the rest of the day, outside of. For the rest of the week outside of chapel, there was. It was. There was no overt what you would imagine from maybe a traditional Catholic school where you have a nun teaching you and. And there's a crucifix on the wall. There was none of that. No trappings. It was just a nice school that also had chapel once a week.
John Dehlin [00:15:54] Got it. Fun. Well, those are fun, fun parallels. Yeah.
Graham Martin [00:15:58] Yeah, absolutely.
John Dehlin [00:15:59] Yeah.
Graham Martin [00:15:59] So you. Then I want to jump back and start early on with your. With your.
John Dehlin [00:16:07] Yeah.
Graham Martin [00:16:07] Your religious beliefs, if you don't mind, and then we can jump back up to. To what you're doing now, because I think that that's a good arc. So you were, as we said, a. A Mormon. So as you say on. On your show, I would love to hear your Mormon story. And I'm not sure where to start out. I think with my audience, we might want to start out like a good lawyer at the beginning of a contract or a law by defining some terms. That's all right with you? All right, so what is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints? What is that?
The Official and Actual History of Mormonism
John Dehlin [00:16:44] All right. Yeah. So in. And this. This history is going to be new to many Mormons, actually ones that have only heard the official version. So I'll just warn people everything I say I believe is factually true and substantiated. But. But it will seem controversial or even scandalous to the average Mormon because you haven't been told your true history. So in the 1820s, there was a boy named Joseph Smith. He was born in Vermont, but he was raised kind of in a place called Palmyra, New York. He was a younger son of a pretty large family. They were pretty poor. They were pretty unsuccessful farmers, and they didn't love farming.
John Dehlin [00:17:33] So they got. You should also know that they were superstitious. They believed in folk magic, in magic artifacts, in dreams and in visions. But they're also Christian. And during the time. During those 1820s time period, there were rumors of, like, buried treasure, that pirates or Native Americans had buried treasure all around, kind of, let's just say colonial United States, and that you could find it. And there was kind of a ruse that.
John Dehlin [00:18:12] Or a scam that sort of, you know, country folk would do if they were ambitious, and that would be to claim that they had the ability to see buried treasure in the ground and. Or to talk to spirits, because they believe that, like, dead pirates as spirits would guard the treasure. So the con was, if I can convince people I have the power to see underground and that I can communicate with spirits, then I can get money from them or get power and influence from them and so that's how Joseph Smith sort of starts his Mormon story. He spends several years with his dad going around New York, Pennsylvania, and, you know, as a treasure digger or as a crier.
Graham Martin [00:19:06] Right.
John Dehlin [00:19:06] Or there are different words. Scryer, peeper, glass looker. And it turns out this was all illegal, so.
Graham Martin [00:19:14] Sure, sure. Fraud. At a minimum, if you're. If you're. If you know you're lying, if you. If you say something you know is false in order to induce somebody to pay you. That's the definition of fraud.
John Dehlin [00:19:26] Yeah. And there were laws on the books. And if you go back even to Benjamin Franklin in the mid to late 1700s, he has this quote where he's like, man, this is a problem. I can't believe these people are doing things. Well, that's how. That's how Joseph Smith got his start.
John Dehlin [00:19:41] And weirdly, he never found any treasure, but he did make money. But he had this power to convince people that he had special powers to any. And he would take a stone and he would stick it in a hat, and he would look in the hat, and then he would tell people where the buried treasure would be. And every time they started digging and, you know, they'd get close to it, and then he'd say, oh, you know, you didn't kill the chicken rider. You didn't draw the pentagram. Right. And I'm making up those details, but there was always some reason why the people who were digging messed it up.
John Dehlin [00:20:16] And then the spirit would withdraw the treasure farther down. And then Joseph would say, oh, sorry, we're not going to be able to get it today, but it's there. And if you come back next time, pay me a little more money. I'm sure we'll be able to find it. And that was the thing. You're laughing. Why are you laughing?
Graham Martin [00:20:32] I'm laughing because I think there's going to be a theme that we're going to see evolve here, because that's. That's a. A classic shifting the blame, right. That's what psychics do. That's what con artists do. It sounds like a. He was doing a mixture of dowsing. You know, I can find the water underground and I can talk to spirits, so seances. And if. If I'm doing a cold reading, right, I'm trying to pretend like I'm. I'm John Edward, who can speak to the dead. And I say, I'm getting a name. It starts with an A. Is there any A in your life? And you say, no.
Graham Martin [00:21:05] And then I say B. And you say no and I say C and you say no. Eventually I'm going to go, you're resisting the things I can't get through. You've got negative energy. It's all your fault. I can't guess a name out of your life. So this is going to be a thread, I think, as we go forward.
John Dehlin [00:21:20] Yeah. The house always wins, right?
Graham Martin [00:21:22] Right.
John Dehlin [00:21:22] Yeah. Yeah. And so by 18, 26, 27,
Graham Martin [00:21:29] you
John Dehlin [00:21:29] know, the law is onto him. He's being, you know, he's being charged with breaking the law. There's at least one or two trials that go on in Pennsylvania or New York and kind of the jig is up. But, you know, so he needs a new, he needs a new thing. And. But while he was in Pennsylvania, he boarded with this man named Isaac Hale, who had a cute daughter. And so he, he falls in love with, with Isaac's daughter Emma. They elope because Isaac thinks he's a fraud. Which, you know, I think he thinks that with good reason. So he's not going to give Joseph permission to marry Emma.
John Dehlin [00:22:12] So they, they elope, they run away and get married. And eventually they end up, you know, I think Isaac misses his daughter. So they end up coming back to Pennsylvania area. And he says that he comes up with this new story that an angel has visited him and you know, the name changes from Nephi to Moroni, you know, but, but he basically comes up with this new story that an angel has come to him and said, I'm an ancient Native American who died. I'm now in spirit. And I, and I have this record of these people who were Native Americans who actually were Jews who came over on a boat From Israel around 600 BC started civilizations populated America.
John Dehlin [00:23:03] And then half of the group turned bad. And God cursed them all with dark skin as a curse for being bad. They were called Lamanites. The white good ones were called Nephites. And at the end Jesus comes, he preaches the gospel. After Jesus dies over in the old world, he comes to America, visits the Native Americans and then eventually the dark Christian Native Americans actually they probably weren't Christian by that point. They kill off all the white skinned Christian Native Americans. And because they were quote, savages then they lost their Christianity. And so when the explorers came over, led by God to America, the Conquistadors and the pilgrims and whatever God led them over here, they found the remnants of the Lamanites, which were the Native Americans, the Indian tribes.
John Dehlin [00:23:57] And so Joseph basically says, and angels told me that he's going to give me Gold plates, that's a religious record of these Native Americans. And then it's my job to translate those records. And the only problem is no one can see the gold plates. So I get to see him.
Graham Martin [00:24:14] So I want to jump in here. That's first. I just want to be sort of sit in the, in the seat of my audience right now. I'm actually quite familiar with this part of the story. The fact that it opened with his fraudulent psychic treasure hunting was fairly new to me, but this part I'm fairly familiar with. Okay, but that's a lot to take in, right?
John Dehlin [00:24:37] Yeah.
Graham Martin [00:24:37] There's so many claims there that, to quote the Book of Mormon musical, you know, ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America.
John Dehlin [00:24:46] That's right.
Graham Martin [00:24:46] That's quite a claim. But that is literally, I mean, that's well documented as far as I can tell when I'm, I'm starting to read up. I've got a lot of books I bought because of your show and other shows, but that seems to be like, there's not a dispute about that. That's an actual tenet of the church. Is that correct?
John Dehlin [00:25:02] Oh, it's absolutely core. It's core Mormon doctrine.
Graham Martin [00:25:05] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:25:05] And you know, if you, if you're born into it as a sixth generation Mormon like me, it's just fact. Your parents teach it, you're taught it every, you know, three hours in church every Sunday. It's just like that's the world. And then you've got all these non Mormons who don't know how the world really works. You've got all these Latin Americans and Native Americans that don't know their own history like we do. Right. And that's the way. But, but then, so, so it's understandable why someone born in the church would believe that. Why would a convert ever believe it? Most of the time the Mormon Church targets relatively uneducated people or really desperate people that are really on hard times, or they use either the flirt to convert method or just like the happy, positive Mormon family sort of situation where they, where they present themselves.
John Dehlin [00:26:03] And many, many Mormon families really are just happy, positive, honest, good folks. And if you're desperate enough or if you're desirous enough for that super happy, positive American family, you'll join. Even if there's some beliefs that seem kind of weird at first.
John Dehlin [00:26:22] And of course the Mormon missionaries will use biblical scriptures to sort of like loop a Christian in and say, actually Jesus said other sheep I have, which are not of this fold. He did say that in the Bible well, he was talking about the Lamanites and the Nephites. And so there's a way, you know, Joseph Smith, you could almost call the Book of Mormon a Bible fan fiction because Joseph Smith knew the Bible really well. And it's almost like he wrote an American version to kind of parallel the Bible. And so he's able to weave in enough. He uses sort of Old English, just like the Bible, which makes no sense, by the way.
John Dehlin [00:27:00] Why were Native Americans writing in Old English? Or why was Joseph Smith translating into Old English when he didn't speak Old English? But Mormons just don't think about that. But anyway, it mentions Jesus enough and it mentions the Bible enough to where a Christian that really is motivated to have that happy, healthy family or, or that really cute young man or woman that's flirting with them, that's enough to say, well, some of those beliefs I don't quite get, but I'm going with it because it feels good. Right? And that's ultimately the epistemology is the missionaries will say, we'll pray about it. And if you feel that warm, soft, affirming, positive, warm, fuzzy inside, well, that's the Holy Ghost.
John Dehlin [00:27:44] And then you'll know that the church is true. Well, guess what? If this girl is cute enough or this boy is cute enough or, or you're desperate enough or that Mormon family looks amazing enough and you spend enough time with this group that's love bombing you and treating you really special, guess what feelings you're going to get when you pray about the Book of Mormon. You're going to get confirming, confirming feelings that sort of lead you in or you just suspend it and say, whatever, maybe I'll get those feelings later and the missionaries will teach you. Don't. You know, you know, say you believe it, act as though you believe it and the confirmation will come later.
John Dehlin [00:28:22] And in all those different ways, those fantastic stories that shouldn't be believed by anyone based on science and evidence become second nature to so many people.
Graham Martin [00:28:31] Yeah, yeah. It's. As an outsider hearing these stories for the first time, the first time I heard this, I was like, that's ridiculous. Nobody would believe that. And then the more I read and the more I knew a lot of Mormon people. So that medical records company, software company that I work for, a lot of Mormons there still my friends. Hi, Margi, if you're out there. Hi, Lancer, if you're out there. My manager, at some point during my history there was Lancer. He had a. He was the big happy Mormon family person right Everybody is very, very, very nice. So I would talk to them and gently sort of, you know, especially friends I was close with at work would sort of read me in on this and I politely was ingesting this without expressing surprise.
Graham Martin [00:29:13] But internally I was like, wow, you know, people really genuinely believe this. And it wasn't for years until I put two and two together and figured out what you just talked about, which is the flirt to convert, the desperation and the big happy Mormon family and those, those can, those can present all of their own problems, right? In order to be the big happy Mormon family, you have to subject yourself to sort of that emotional brainwashing that a high demand religion demands. Like you, you being upset is not pure or not holy or not righteous or not whatever. So you have to pretend to be happy the whole time or if you're going after to try to convert desperate people.
Graham Martin [00:29:56] Well, they low educated people, desperate people, they tend to live in locations that are not safe. So the Mormon church is sending young missionaries out to not safe neighborhoods. And there have been people who have run into a lot of problems there. So you can run into all of these different problems. But the core, the core methodology of convincing a non believer to, to believe these things is I think absolutely fascinating. Do you run into, have you done any studies or have you read studies about, into that phenomenon like the, I won't call it self deception, but trying to become convinced, right? Trying to become convinced. What's, what's the brain doing there?
Psychology of Religious Belief and Confirmation Bias
John Dehlin [00:30:40] I mean, I mean I was a clinical and counseling, my training is in clinical and counseling psychology. But you know, sort of psychology 101 talks about confirmation bias. It talks about motivated reasoning and it talks about if you're, if you, if you don't know there's a pink elephant, you know, on your drive to work, you'll probably never notice it. But if you're looking for a pink elephant, if you're looking for the, the McDonald's sign or if you're looking for a Volkswagen bug, you'll see them everywhere. So the way the brain works is you kind of see what you're looking for. So yeah, there's all sorts of, there's, there's all sorts of really good psychological studies.
John Dehlin [00:31:21] You know, one is just conformity, the, the ash line conformity study where they get a bunch of confederates in a study to like say a certain line is the wrong matches, the wrong line. And if you get enough people ahead of you saying that the wrong line matches with the wrong line, at least 33% of the time, you will say whatever the people ahead of you said, even if you know it's wrong because of peer pressure and conformity.
Graham Martin [00:31:50] The Stanley Milgram, the Emperor's New Clothes phenomenon, right? I, I, everybody's saying that the emperor has clothes. I don't see them, but I better say that they do, either because I'm wrong or I want to fit in. I don't want to be excluded by the group.
John Dehlin [00:32:03] Yeah. And an even better one is the Stanley Milgram study out of Yale, where they, where, you know, they literally shock test one dude in a white frock with a clipboard asking you to shock, asking you to what you believe to be shock another person and to administer greater and greater charges of electricity. And if you just got some dude over you with a clipboard and a white frock saying, increase the charge, you must complete the experiment.
John Dehlin [00:32:31] 33% of the participants will administer what they believe to be a lethal charge just because someone's telling them to do it. And so authority is, you know, there's peer pressure, there's authority, there's motivated reasoning, there's confirmation bias where you'll feel good about the things that resonate with what you want, and you'll tend to dismiss or feel bad about anything that you don't want. All of those and many, many other psychological studies help explain, plus just the phenomenon of flow or of elevated emotion.
John Dehlin [00:33:07] Again, I mentioned this before, but really, really good music or a really, really good rock concert or a really, really good movie is going to make you feel this overwhelming sense of joy and happiness under the right circumstances, especially if you've experienced really hard times or trauma, and you might be even more primed to have what's called some sort of theophany or epiphany just out of pure psychological need or desperation. And so if a church can get you to label or associate the Mormon church being true with some massive, overwhelming sense of feelings and emotion that really are social, socially informed, then you've made that connection.
John Dehlin [00:33:54] And all of a sudden I had those amazing feelings. The church must be true. Now I'm going to give my life to it, regardless of the doctrines and the theology. So I'm not a social scientist or a social psychologist, but those are some of the things I've studied over the years.
Graham Martin [00:34:07] Absolutely. I did a series on faith healing. In fact, I'm still doing, I've got an ongoing series on faith healing. How did it come about that there are states in this country that have exemptions to charges of manslaughter and even murder? If your child dies because you neglected them medically, but the, the care you were giving them was prayer, right? That's, that's the faith healing problem in America. There are the, especially in Idaho, that's the biggest place where it's a huge problem. So I did a huge series on that and part of that I said, okay, the claim is that if I pray, I'm going and I'm an I believer, I'm a true believer or whatever, the requirement is that I will convince God to heal my child.
Graham Martin [00:34:57] Right. And so one whole episode was is prayer effective? And I read up a bunch of studies, a ton of studies. And the long and short of it is prayer that is self reflective, where you're talking to God is actually effective at the same rate as meditation, trying to get yourself into a trance, all of those sort of, I'm going to calm myself, I'm going to have a lower blood pressure. There's a bunch of benefits to self reflective prayer which is very, it's a low version of what you're talking about that if I'm trying to get into the church and I feel like I want to believe, if I'm sitting here praying to God and asking for questions, it's going to have some positive effect on me because it's meditation.
Graham Martin [00:35:44] So yeah, I, I, I can see how that definitely starts that feeling. And then there's a very, you know, I'm, I'm familiar with those, those studies of what you talk about, of flow. I've heard story after story of atheist, atheists who deconverted from especially evangelical Christian beliefs or Southern Baptist beliefs where they have these experiences in church. And when they look back on them now, they're like, oh, I have that same experience now when I go to a really good rock concert or I go to the symphony. I was mistaking those feelings in that sensation for the Holy Ghost, when all along I think it was the normal human reaction to having fun, basically.
John Dehlin [00:36:26] And it may be they didn't mistake it, but they were primed or conditioned to associate the, you're being told. Yeah, yeah, yeah, theology with, with those feelings. Yeah.
Graham Martin [00:36:36] Yes. Okay. So jumping back, we have Joseph Smith. Smith comes up with this tall tale, but obviously from his history as the treasure hunting con man, let's say one can assume that he's quick thinking and probably fairly charismatic. And he's come up with this tall tale about, hey, angels at least are speaking to me and they have a message and I'm here to deliver it. Are we at the right, is that where we are in history now.
Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, and Truth Claims
John Dehlin [00:37:06] Yeah, he produces the Book of Mormon. It's really, honestly, objectively, it's a very poorly written book if you look at the original transcripts of what he dictated. And again, weirdly, what most Mormons don't know unless they've watched South Park.
Graham Martin [00:37:26] I love that episode.
John Dehlin [00:37:28] We're all taught that Joseph Smith was behind a curtain and he had the gold plates there and, and then he had these ancient sort of a breastplate and these spectacles that were God, God inspired Old Testament prophet spectacles. And that he was sitting there translating the reformed Egyptian on the gold plates into English. And then a scribe on the other side of the, you know, curtain would be, would be writing down what he said. That's what we were all taught growing up. What we learned from south park or from, you know, the, the Internet, once the Internet came online. Is that actually the same stone in the hat that he used to treasure dig is what he used to produce the Book of Mormon.
John Dehlin [00:38:11] So literally, the plates weren't anywhere in the room. Somehow he, God, needed to deliver the plates to him through an angel. But then when it came time to actually translate the gold plates, they weren't needed. They were somewhere in a bean barrel hidden from the scribe and from anyone else. And then Joseph would literally take the same hat and the same stone, because, remember, people felt not only that Joseph had special power, but that his stone had special power. So he'd take this magic stone that he used in treasure digging, stick it in his hat, stick his face in the hat, and he would come up with the text for the Book of Mormon.
John Dehlin [00:38:51] It was very jargon, colloquial, very folksy, horrible grammar, horrible spelling. And if you just read the original transcript, you're like, this dude is just making a bunch of stuff up, Bible fan fiction. But then the editors cleaned it up, put in, you know, capitalization, put in spelling, put in sections, chapters, and verses, and made it seem a little bit more Bible like. And so, yeah, Joseph Smith produces that book. He publishes it in 1830. That's the same year he starts the church. And then weirdly, two years later, he tells everyone this story that 12 years prior, God and Jesus. Well, actually, he starts out by saying, the Lord visited me and told me that someday I was going to start a church.
John Dehlin [00:39:42] Now, again, two years after the church is formed, 12 years after the event literally happened, he starts telling people that basically God, Jesus, as one being, told him to start the church. And then eventually, as his theology changes, where he starts to believe that God and Jesus are separate beings. He actually changes the founding narrative to tell people it wasn't, it wasn't the Lord who visited me, it was God the Father and his son Jesus Christ who both visited me. And you know, so that narrative that God and Jesus told him to start the church comes late and evolves after he's needing to, you know, give people good reasons to continue believing in him.
John Dehlin [00:40:31] After a bunch of things go wrong because banks fail, people lose their life savings. Like all cults, he starts making passes at people's daughters, at women in his home, other people's wives. Eventually he starts practicing polygamy. Unbeknownst to his wife, he takes on, you know, over 30 wives.
John Dehlin [00:40:54] Mother, daughter pairs, sister pairs. I mean this is like David Koresh, Warren Jeffs. You pick Keith Ranieri, pick your cult leader. You're not going to find someone that, I mean you might find someone that outdoes Joseph Smith, but not, not if you factor in how successful the church has become. You won't find L. Ron Hubbard. Doesn't matter who. None of those sort of typical cult leaders out does Joe out colts Joseph Smith, at least in terms of sexual predation.
Graham Martin [00:41:25] Right.
John Dehlin [00:41:26] But yeah, he, you know, he, he starts even taking, you know, 14 year olds, 15 year olds as wives. And you know, in the end he's killed for his, not just his polygamy and polyandry which is marrying other men's, marrying women married to other men.
John Dehlin [00:41:45] He's killed for lying about it, for hiding it from everyone and for a whole bunch of other things and hiding it from his own wife and the church members. So the church ends in 1844 and then Brigham Young takes over, moves all the Mormons to Utah and then sort of establishes a theocracy in the desert that you know, has become Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, southern Canada and northern Mexico. There's kind of this Mormon belt that goes all the way from southern Alberta all the way down into northern Mexico and Chihuahua. You'll just have massive Mormons. I think Mormons are the top religion in Las Vegas, believe it or not, you know, in, in many parts of Arizona, that they're all Mormon. They were Mormon settlements before then, you know, gentiles came in and, and co developed those territories.
Graham Martin [00:42:42] Wow, wow, wow. So obviously if, if everybody knew this story, especially the sort of more cult leader esque things of I need to sleep with everybody's wives or get married to all of, all of the women. There was a meme I saw online the other day that was a three panel comic.
Graham Martin [00:43:04] Guy comes out and says, I have spoken to God. He's told me to start a cult, and he has told me. And it cuts to somebody in the audience going, whispering to a friend that I need to sleep with all the women. And then it cuts back to the leader that I need to sleep with all the women. It's like, it's almost humorous at this point that when you hear cult or when you hear a high demand religion or however it is somewhere in the background, some, you have a high probability of finding this sort of, as you said, sexual predation, that in the end, you're a human male, you now have power.
Graham Martin [00:43:43] So you're going to use that to satisfy some of your basic urges because you don't have a competing sort of pressure either a moral pressure, a social pressure, or a legal pressure to stop you. So ld the church at that point, how many people knew? Like, how did he maintain believers? How was he hiding it up? Those are sort of the questions that are fascinating. Once 50, a few generations pass, then it sort of passes into legend and it's easier to sort of say, well, we're not sure, but in the day, you know, did Brigham Young know and did he take advantage of the fact that, oh, well, now that Smith is dead, I can sort of change the narrative and run this thing? Or were they all in the dark?
John Dehlin [00:44:25] No. So by Joseph's death, my understanding is about 300 of his inner, inner, innermost circle knew about polygamy and or were practicing it. Now, those numbers may be off, but that's just my understanding. He kept it really secret. He kind of used it as a way to gain power and influence with his closest followers to engender loyalty. And again, he had married 22 women before he ever told his first wife, Emma this, Emma that I told you about.
Graham Martin [00:44:59] Right?
John Dehlin [00:44:59] She married 22 women before she even knew. And she, of course, lost her mind. And there's rumors that she even was tempted to poison him, but he would lie to the general membership saying he wasn't practicing polygamy. But once Joseph was killed, one of the reasons that the church came undone in 1844 is because one of the highest leaders in the church, his name is William Law, he finds out about polygamy late, after he's already ascended to the highest levels of the church. He's like, that's not right. That's bad. And then Joseph's like, well, then I'm excommunicating you. And so he leaves and he starts a newspaper called the Nauvoo Expositor.
John Dehlin [00:45:44] And in that, in 1844, he publishes one edition of the Nauvoo Expositor saying, I believe in the Book of Mormon. I believe Joseph Smith has special power. But as a top leader in the church, I just learned that he was practicing polygamy, that they were, like, recruiting poor European girls who couldn't speak English to come to America, and then matching them with Joseph's friends to be immigrant, plural wives. Kind of almost. Sex trafficking.
Graham Martin [00:46:14] Yeah. Human trafficking.
John Dehlin [00:46:15] Yeah, yeah. You know, it was William Law that kind of blew the lid off of Joseph's attempt to hide it. And so. But, you know, there was no hiding it. And by the way, what led to Joseph Smith's incarceration was him commanding that that printing press be destroyed for printing that one edition of the Nauvoo Expositor.
Polygamy, the Destroyed Press, and Church Concealment
Graham Martin [00:46:38] And I. I'd like to jump in at this point.
John Dehlin [00:46:41] Oh, yeah, please, please.
Graham Martin [00:46:42] Because my. I think my audience will be fasc by this particular issue, since we focus on church, state separation at the time. And correct me if I'm wrong, this is the. The. The town or city of Nauvoo is what the Expositor is named after. Smith is mayor at that time. Correct?
John Dehlin [00:47:01] He's. He's not just mayor, he's like, mayor,
Graham Martin [00:47:04] chief justice of the council. All those people. Okay.
John Dehlin [00:47:09] Prophet, seer, revelator. So he's got all the power. He's got all the power, legislative and judicial. He's over it all. He's over it all. He's a monarch. He's a theocratic monarch.
Graham Martin [00:47:22] Right, for sure. So the newspaper edition comes out. He convenes a meeting of the sham meeting, by all accounts of the town council that lasts about a day and a half where they do this fake trial. He finds that they have.
Graham Martin [00:47:39] I forget what the charge was, but basically we don't like it. And we're going to charge them with. With libel and slander, and this newspaper is lying. He then orders the sheriff to go and destroy the printing press. Like, break in and destroy the printing press, which the sheriff does now, at that point, from a. From a Christian nationalism, separation of church and state.
Graham Martin [00:48:04] This is what the founding Fathers are talking about, right? This is exactly it. You're the chief executive of a town governed by the Constitution in the United States. You ordered your thugs to go destroy a newspaper office because you didn't like what they were saying about you personally. Now, it could have been you didn't like what they were saying about your religion, but they didn't attack you or you couldn't like what they were saying about, you know, broccoli. It doesn't matter. You violated the most important amendment we have to our constitution, the first amendment, you know, the freedom of press. You, you deny people their civil rights under the constitution.
Graham Martin [00:48:39] You committed a whole bunch of crimes doing this, all to try to keep this story secret. And this is why we today have to be on alert. Because when you get leaders in power that have these instincts, you.
Graham Martin [00:48:56] I am the man. How dare you question me. I don't like all this fake news that the press is printing. I want my followers to start beating up report, want my executives to start going in and destroying actual press offices. It's just one step at a time until you end up with, as you said, a theocracy.
John Dehlin [00:49:16] Exactly.
Graham Martin [00:49:16] And here it is. It's happening in. In 1844.
John Dehlin [00:49:19] Yep. And Governor Ford, the governor of Illinois, did get involved. And he's the one that convinced Joseph to kind of surrender to a jail. And so he did. Carthage jail. He and a few of his, you know, his brother and a few of his top followers, they surrender. The governor says he'll protect him. And then a mob comes in and assassinates several of them. And at least two of them.
Graham Martin [00:49:45] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:49:46] Now, now, let me blow your mind for a second. Okay?
Graham Martin [00:49:48] So before you do.
John Dehlin [00:49:49] Oh, yeah, please can I read a
Graham Martin [00:49:51] quote from the governor because I think this will speak volumes. So this is what the governor said once he came to the area and was speaking to or addressing Smith through either the press. I'm not sure if he was physically in room, but the quote that was recorded by the press is quote, I now express to you my opinion that your conduct in the destruction of the press was a very gross outrage upon the laws and the liberties of the people. It may have been full of libels, but this did not authorize you to destroy it. There are many newspapers in this state which have been wrongfully abusing me for more than a year.
Graham Martin [00:50:25] And yet such is my regard for liberty of the press and the rights of a free people in a republican government that I would shed the last drop of my blood to protect these presses from any legal violence. And this is. This again is, you know, fairly early on in our country. 1840s is not that long after 1786. Nine, when the Constitution came around. So we're not that far off. This is two generations since.
John Dehlin [00:50:55] Oh, maybe we have 1787. I'm Rusty.
Graham Martin [00:50:58] Yeah. So we have these. We have these, this wonderful speech from this mayor saying, how dare you. Like I'm letting them tear me to shreds with lies. But I would die to protect their right to do so. You get this little taste of power, you take over a town and you, you become a gangster. That's quite the quote. So sorry to interrupt, but I thought everybody would like to hear that quote.
John Dehlin [00:51:24] That's a great quote. And I'll just say, just to kind of blow your mind, you know, I mentioned that after he's killed Joseph Smith's killed, Brigham Young takes over. You know, it takes him a good five to 10 years to admit publicly that he's practicing polygamy. And he waits till he's safe in Utah as like the governor of the territory to kind of say that publicly. But he starts, you know, letting the members know pretty quickly that polygamy is the, is the way things go. But here's what will blow your mind. I, you know, sixth generation Mormon, my own grandmother, my mother's mother, was the polygamous daughter of a third wife. I served two year mission for my church, went to Brigham Young University, three years of church every Sunday. Super faithful Mormon did not learn that Joseph Smith practice polygamy, did not even learn the word polyandry until I was in my 30s.
Graham Martin [00:52:23] Wow.
John Dehlin [00:52:24] So the church had the average Mormon that you meet. I would bet a million dollars if I had it, I would bet $10,000. Now, if you surveyed the average active, faithful Mormon who's above 30, more than half will say they were never taught that Joseph had multiple wives.
John Dehlin [00:52:45] They never heard of any mention of any other wife other than Emma in their entire experience with the church. And none of them were taught that the printing press was destroyed and that Joseph was ultimately martyred because he had been practicing polygamy and had been lying about it and destroyed the printing press. They would have just been taught some vague story about how like the wicked people, people hated Mormons, hate the truth, that the Lord's chosen or persecuted and Joseph was killed by a mob because he was standing up for God and his beliefs in the one true church, and that prophets get martyred.
John Dehlin [00:53:26] But until Mormon stories, podcast and other podcasts and websites and a bunch of really good scholarly books that the church told members for decades to never read. If it weren't for the rise of these scholars and podcasts that the church ultimately excommunicated many of the people, most Mormons today would still never know that Joseph Smith married 14 year olds, mother, daughter, pair, sister pairs, other men's wives, and that he was killed for, you know, that polygamy and for the destruction that he wrought. So imagine running a million, you know, a million, multiple million member organization in the modern era where you're able to keep that from your membership. And by the way, the, the Mormons aren't like uneducated groups.
Graham Martin [00:54:17] Right? Right.
John Dehlin [00:54:17] Harry Reid was the Senate Majority Leader, Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee for President. These guys go to Harvard, they go to Yale. No, yeah, they, they too somehow were warned not to read these books or look at these materials. And so they just like became dentists, became doctors, became lawyers, became moms, and never looked under the covers of their own faith.
Graham Martin [00:54:43] Right. And we should clarify for people unfamiliar that Mormons get wrongfully grouped into a broader group than they actually constitute. So you have the Church of Latter Day Saints. Right. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which is what, what most people will mean by Mormon. But you also have the fundamentalist church, the Warren Jeffs Church, which is the one that in modern times openly argues for and did practice polygamy in a very, very cult like situation that you can go read up on Warren Jeffs and there's documentaries and all that stuff. And sometimes people will conflate the two. Sometimes polygamy is synonymous with Mormon rather than understanding that.
Graham Martin [00:55:28] No, the vast majority of Mormons today not only don't practice polygamy, but as you said, had no idea that it was the, the, the main focus of what Joseph Smith was doing and the reason that it got him killed, because he tried to cover it up by abusing his governmental power. They have no. And, and that blows my mind because we live now in this, in this world where I can get on the Internet and find anything, but we have to go back just 20 years. And the Internet's just starting to really come into its own as far as disseminating information that over time gets affirmed by, you know, confirming, confirming sources, other documents that agree, references to books that you should go read and people that you trust sort of educating themselves and slowly, slowly, slowly start chipping away at the lock that the church has put on this information.
John Dehlin [00:56:25] Yeah. And if I, if I can just tweak what you said a tiny bit.
Graham Martin [00:56:30] Sure.
John Dehlin [00:56:30] So, yeah, think of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints with Warren Jeffs is like, let's just say 20 to 40 to 50,000 people worldwide.
Graham Martin [00:56:39] Right.
John Dehlin [00:56:40] And they're often in southern Utah, northern Arizona, sometimes they're in Montana or Wyoming, sometimes they're in Texas. But they keep to themselves. They look almost Amish.
Graham Martin [00:56:49] Yep.
John Dehlin [00:56:51] They eschew public interactions, they homeschool, they don't mix with the general population and they could easily be confused with Mennonites or Amish. So that's the flds. There are several other polygamous branches too, all smaller than the FLDS religion.
John Dehlin [00:57:09] What's, what's weird is that the average Mormon for the past 150 years believes that polygamy is the law of God. So I'm talking about the average member of the LDS Church, my faith. Let's just say there's 4 million act the church claims around 17 million members. The mainstream LDS Church claims around 17 million members. About 2 thirds of those are people that left the church or got baptized but never really connected. So think of, think of active self identifying Latter Day Saints as being around 4 million worldwide, 2 million in the U.S. 2 million outside of the U.S. but weirdly it's in modern Mormon scripture that celestial marriage or polygamy is God's eternal marriage.
John Dehlin [00:58:02] That's in our Doctrine and covenants D and C132. And most of us know that our ancestors were polygamists, those of us who were born and raised in the church. So Mormons, even mainstream Mormons believe in polygamy. They just believe that God stopped it for a temporary stop around 1890, but that it will be brought back. And to make it even more complicated, if you Moors get married the temple and they believe that if a husband and wife are sealed in the temple that that marriage lasts forever and that they'll become God's husband and wife as gods to rule over their own planet.
Graham Martin [00:58:44] Today I want you to repeat that because nobody outside, nobody outside the LDS, LDSers so to speak, whenever I mention that to rule your own planet, they, that's where they stop believing me when I'm telling me my understanding of the Mormon.
John Dehlin [00:59:04] So they're not being, my opinion is they're not being honest or they've been. They.
Graham Martin [00:59:09] No, no, I'm saying my friends, my people who don't know it. Like when I'm telling them here's what Mormons believe and I say no, that you are, you are going to get married and you're going to rule over your own planet. They're like, okay, you're, you're pulling my leg. Nobody believes. No, no, no. I want you to, to you confirm that this is, it really is a thing.
John Dehlin [00:59:27] No. Joseph Smith taught as man is God once was, and as God is man may become. And all the prophets since Joseph Smith pretty much have taught that. And that's what we were all taught, that heaven is divided into three Main levels, the celestial kingdom where God and all the faithful, active Mormons who are righteous are going to live. And then there's the terrestrial kingdom for like good people that never joined the Mormon Church but are good people. And then the telestial kingdom is for the rapists and the murders and the thieves and you know, really, really bad people like Hitler. He'll go to the, he'll go to the celestial kingdom.
John Dehlin [01:00:10] In the celestial kingdom, you, you live with God, you live with your, your spouse who you got buried within the temple, and your children and you get exalted. And exalted, exaltation means you are promoted to the rank of godhood. And then literally with your wife or wives or with your husband and sister wives, you literally get your own planet and get to do in new worlds what God did in your world. And that's absolute core Mormon doctrine. However, Mormons are embarrassed by that because evangelical Christians and Baptists and an ex Mormon came out with a movie in the late 70s, early 80s called the God Makers and they, they ran that movie in evangelical Christian churches all throughout the United States and abroad.
John Dehlin [01:01:02] It was super embarrassing. So the church started downplaying and like not emphasizing that doctrine or teaching and would secretly still believe it, but would, would stop talking about it and then slowly hope that the members, they left this in the Mormon Church leaders like to leave intentional ambiguity with doctrines that are doctrinal but that are inconvenient. And so like this teaching of polygamy. Our current prophet, Russell M. Nelson, his wife died, who he was sealed to in a Mormon temple, he'll be with her for eternity.
Graham Martin [01:01:42] He knows her secret name, he knows her second name.
John Dehlin [01:01:45] When she died, he married a new woman, got sealed to her in the temple, and he believes. Our prophet Russell Nelson believes in 2024 that when he dies and his wives die, he and his two wives plus any other wives that join, will all be together forever in a polygamous union. Same with our number two, Dallin H. Oaks. His wife died, he married a new woman. He believes he's been sealed to her in the temple. He believes that he'll be with them. So the average active Latter Day Saint absolutely believes in polygamy and in the new and everlasting covenant or eternal marriage or celestial marriage. They just don't like to talk about it. They feel weird about it. They say we don't understand all things,
Graham Martin [01:02:32] but it's God works in mysterious ways version of who knows?
John Dehlin [01:02:36] It's in Doctrine and Covenants, Section 132. Go read it. Go look it up. Doctrine and Covenants 132. It's all there. And so while we're not practicing it in the flesh today as members, we're still getting sealed in polygamous marriages as Mormons, and we believe we'll be practicing it in the afterlife. That's a really long detour.
Graham Martin [01:02:59] But I think, no, no, no.
John Dehlin [01:03:00] This is because it's core Mormon theology
Graham Martin [01:03:04] and it's important, it's important because religion, people have this sort of dualistic relationship with religion, right? There is the community, there's the family, there's the, the emotional reward I get from it. There's that part of religion and then there's the claims, the truth claims that this is true, that's true, this true. And there's almost a cost, as you were talking about when you, when you were trying to convert somebody, they almost have to pay a cost to say that they believe these, these somewhat outrageous to crazy, outrageous claims in order to get the community and get the family support and to get the affirmation from the church or your, your broader, your whole state, depending on where you live.
Why Truth Claims Matter to Members and Believers
Graham Martin [01:03:53] So it's important that people understand the truth claims because even if you down in, in your core, if somebody asked you and you had to answer honestly and they say, oh, are you convinced that you're going to die and practice polygamy with your one of many wives on your own planet where you will be a God and raise up a new civilization to worship you, they might honestly say, no, I'm not convinced of that. Which means they don't believe it. They just, they suspect it, they hope it, they wish it, but they don't believe it. But they don't ever want to say that because somebody might hear them feels to them.
Graham Martin [01:04:28] They've been taught that that is, I mean, and this is not unique to Mormonism. You've been taught the Christian Bible itself. The, the, the, the New Testament talks about a, a almost an unforgivable sin. The one unforgivable sin is questioning the Holy Spirit, right? That if you even question the Holy Spirit, that you may not even be able to be saved. So that's what you're taught from an early childhood. So even having these doubts can cause you, I'm assure. And you can tell me an amazing amount of stress.
John Dehlin [01:05:02] Yeah, no, for sure. And the average Mormon who's active, I would say a third of active, faithful believing Mormons would just flat out say, absolutely, we believe that we become God someday and that polygamy is true. I'd say about a third and then there's another a third to two thirds. That would be like. Well, some believe that it's not clear, but that's how the modern church has nurtured this ambiguity, literally for PR reasons.
Graham Martin [01:05:33] So the church would not, would not bash them if they gave that answer. The church would not say no, no, no, no, no. They wouldn't step in to clarify. They're actively encouraging you to, to give the wishy washy. We're not sure.
John Dehlin [01:05:43] Yeah, yeah, they would say we don't. You know, the prophet Gordon B. Hinckley, one of our past prophets, was asked about this and he's like, well, I don't know that we teach it. I don't know that we emphasize it. You know, it's not doctrinal, that stuff that he will. There's kind of outsider insider language. That's a typical. Another trait of high demand religions or cults.
Graham Martin [01:06:04] Sure.
John Dehlin [01:06:04] They've got secret doctrines that they only talk about as faithful insiders. And then the way they talk. Just like with Scientology. Yeah. Like Beatons and all that stuff. You don't talk publicly public facing about those weird secret doctrines or you get trouble.
Graham Martin [01:06:25] You know, and I think that that right there, this whole fact that you growing up as a faithful Mormon by, by my understanding for a long time, for many years, you says it was. You weren't till your 30s till you found out some of this.
John Dehlin [01:06:41] Yeah.
Graham Martin [01:06:42] That the reason that you had those beliefs was because in some part that the church made a decision to hide other beliefs from you, that they actively sought to keep you ignorant of all the facts so that they could maintain control, so they could maintain income, so they could maintain, you know, volume and size so they could have workers to go on missions and grow the church. There's a lot of motivation that this church has to, if not lie, then to commit lies of omission. Am I reading that right?
John Dehlin [01:07:21] Absolutely. Yeah. The, the Mormon Church currently is worth 250. Estimated to be worth $250 billion. That's with the b. Super wealthy church. And the way that it became super wealthy is by limiting truthful information. So when you get baptized, when Mormon missionaries show up at your door, even, let's just say you're in Africa, you're in Africa or you're in Latin America, let's just say Africa. And the two white Mormon missionaries from Utah and Idaho show up at your door or show up at your hut, knock on the door of your hut and say we're Mormon missionaries. Do you think for a Second, that those white Mormon missionaries from Utah and Idaho say, hey, hi, we're missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints kept black people like you from full membership and full status, kept you out of the temples and kept men from having the priesthood for about 150 years until 1978, when God, as the Book of Moral Musical says John, chased his mind.
John Dehlin [01:08:21] And by the way, we taught that black skin was a curse from God because you, you black person and your ancestors, when you lived as spirits in a, in a premortal existence, y' all weren't as faithful to God. Y' all were kind of fence sitters. And so you, you became black and your ancestors became black, became slaves, because it's what you deserved for being faithful as spiritual children in a previous life. Do you think that in 2024 when they're in Kenya and Nairobi, that that's how the Mormon missionaries lead? Obviously, they leave all that out. They leave out the stone in the hat, they leave out the treasure digging, they leave out the polygamy, they leave out, you know, 50 other super problematic, racist, sexist, homophobic things.
John Dehlin [01:09:15] And they teach like, Jesus loves you and God loves you and you can pray and the Holy Ghost will bless you. And this is, this is, you know, this church is led by Jesus and you want to be like Jesus. Well, you need to be baptized to be like Jesus. And I mean, I mean, there's a little bit more. Oh yeah. Pay 10% of your income to the church for life, right? There's three degrees of heaven. We have the priesthood. You need to get baptized and eventually you can get married. The temple, I just basically told you what the six missionary discussions are for someone getting baptized and all the good, gritty, you know, Joseph Smith getting killed for destroying your printing press.
John Dehlin [01:09:51] You don't even learn growing up as a faithful member who's like 6th or 7th generation most of the time, right? And so, yeah, it's through conscious willingness, knowing, deception, because the church has known about these problems the whole time, but they literally intentionally chose to hide it both from the world and from the membership when it suited them. And so that's why, you know, my biggest. I think we share a common mission. I call it informed consent. I don't, I'm not trying to take people out of the Mormon Church. I'm not, I'm not trying to tell people not to join. I just believe that anyone in it or anyone investigating it deserves to know the truth about it.
John Dehlin [01:10:34] And then if they decide it's still true for them, I'm like, thumbs up. There's a lot of great things about this church. There's a lot of good things about the religion, but everyone deserves to know, right?
Graham Martin [01:10:45] Absolutely. And this phenomenon is not unique to Mormonism. This phenomenon of hiding the uncomfortable history, the uncomfortable parts of scripture. It's not even unique to high demand religions. The, the, the dark, the trope of the dark skinned person is being punished because they sinned previously or they have a curse on them. That's straight out of, of the book of Genesis. You know the, it speaks of Noah putting a curse on Ham because he saw Noah being drunk and the curse was that Ham and his descendants shall be dark skinned. Right. And maybe that's where Joseph Smith got it. I don't know, I'm just sort of making that up.
Graham Martin [01:11:28] But it, that's an uncomfortable passage in the Bible. The original Old Testament and New Testament are filled with uncomfortable truths, right? That when you go to a Baptist or, or Episcopalian or Catholic or just a non denominational service and, and people encourage you to go to Bible study, they don't open it up and say, okay, today we are going to study all the rules of how you can enslave people from around you and keep them as your property and use them as six slaves and pass them on to your kids and how you can't kill them. But if you beat them and they live for a couple of days, that's okay.
Graham Martin [01:12:07] And then if they die later, that's okay. They don't start with those things. They start with what you said. There was this little baby Jesus and he came to save the world and people didn't like him, but he did all these wonderful things and then he died for you. Don't you feel guilty? And that's the story.
Graham Martin [01:12:25] But it's every religion that seems to have, and even if you take it out of the context of religion, political parties and corporations will have these things that they use their power, use their influence to hide from people, either legally hide or nefariously hide because it benefits them. And I think the fascinating part is that the humans have been conditioned to say, when it's a man of God, so to speak, a man of the cloth telling me these things, I am going to be less skeptical, I am going to accept these claims more readily than if it's some CEO or some politician or some snake oil salesman.
Graham Martin [01:13:10] We're skeptical about all of those to a higher degree than when our pastor comes down and says, well, yeah, there was some polygamy going on, but who knows? Who can tell? Yeah, you probably don't want to read those books over here. Like, you're more. You. Somehow culture has trained you to be more susceptible to those claims than claims from people who aren't priests or representatives of a church. And that, I think, makes it even more.
Graham Martin [01:13:37] You're more susceptible, and it makes it almost more insidious that people rely on that to hurt you ultimately, I. E. Take 10 of your income without full consent, as you say, based on them keeping you in the dark.
John Dehlin [01:13:52] Yeah, absolutely.
Graham Martin [01:13:53] Very disturbing. So. So for you, for your Mormon story, it sounds like you're. You're sixth generation, as you pointed out, you were raised to believe all of this stuff. What started the. I don't know if you call it a deconversion or a crisis of faith. What started your questioning of your previously held beliefs?
John's Personal Faith Crisis and Shelf Metaphor
John Dehlin [01:14:15] Great question. Thanks for asking. So a common metaphor in the Mormon and post Mormon world is the idea of a shelf. That you learn things along the way that don't quite sound right. And the church encourages you to kind of put them on a shelf, to put them on the back burner, to have faith, and later you'll figure things out. So there's this idea of putting items on the shelf and then the idea of cracks developing in your shelf. And so, you know, some items that were on my shelf from a very early age, you know, my parents were married in the temple, and, you know, we were taught about eternal families and that we would all be with our siblings and our parents in heaven forever.
John Dehlin [01:14:58] Well, my parents got divorced when I was in middle school, and then all of a sudden both of them remarried, and eventually both of them remarried Mormons. So they needed to get a temple divorce, and then they needed to get temple marriage to their, you know, third spouses, respectively. And all of a sudden I was left like a spiritual orphan. I'm like, well, will I be with mom and my stepdad or will I be with my dad and my stepmom? I don't think they want to hang out together in heaven.
John Dehlin [01:15:27] Who am I with? So that was a question I had from a very young age. Also in high school, I divided the number of Mormons in the world by the number of people in the world. And I got like, less than 1/2 of 1%. And all my friends were like Baptist and evangelicals. And I'm like, wow, God really plays favorites. If this is God's one true church, he's really providing that if the whole purpose of the life is to join the one true church. And less than 1/2 of 1% of his children get to do that. That just doesn't seem fair. So. Yeah. And then of course, I remember in 1978 when the church gave black members the priesthood and the ability to enter the temple and, you know, and I played basketball in Katy, Texas, with black friends and the racism stuff never made sense to me. So those were all cracks along the way or shelf items that I would put on my shelf.
Graham Martin [01:16:21] Or as they say in the musical, you know, the light switch that you just have to turn it off and.
John Dehlin [01:16:26] Exactly. Very good. Well, we'll. We should do shots every time there's a Book of Mormon music.
Graham Martin [01:16:32] My viewers know. Yours probably don't. I am, I am a huge Broadway musical fan, so I don't want to. It's not my only source, but I will probably be playing some music at the end of this interview related to that, because as the, the. For people who don't know, Book of Mormon, huge musical hit, very funny. Written by the makers of south park, who are both atheists, but they describe it as an atheist's love letter to religion. And I fully agree with that. Being a fan of focuses on the weirdness and then saying despite the weirdness, it can inspire people to do good things. So I, I hate to harp on it. I know that some people in the church don't appreciate it. All my Morphin friends love it.
John Dehlin [01:17:14] So it's brilliant. And, and I'm a huge Broadway musical fan too, so I'll. So yeah, I turned those things off. I put those items on the shelf. I had a corrupt mission experience, so I, I was called to serve my two year Mormon mission in Guatemala. And long story short, missionaries would go out. You know, there were missionaries in our mission. They'd go out to a soccer field on a Saturday, play soccer with like 10 kids who were missing teeth and had no shoes, get them really hot, and then they'd bring them back to the chapel where there was a baptismal font, and they would say, hey, you want to follow Jesus and cool off and get baptized? And they would baptize like 10 kids at a time.
Graham Martin [01:17:55] Wow.
John Dehlin [01:17:56] Never teach their parents, never even get parental consent, never even take them to church. And then they would do that four times in a month and get 40 baptisms in a month and then teach all their fellow missionaries to do it. And all of a sudden my mission became like the second highest baptizing mission and in the world over, I think 700 baptisms a month with like 150 or 200 missionaries. And I thought that was horrific. I thought that was like a huge egregious violation of the holy, you know, ordinance of baptism.
Graham Martin [01:18:30] Right.
John Dehlin [01:18:30] My mission president, his name was Gordon Romney, he was super ambitious and he wanted to become a general authority. And I think, I presume he wanted to climb the ranks of church leadership. He's actually a cousin to Mitt Romney. And so he yelled at me. He ended up sending me home four months early because I was expressing concern about these just grotesque baptismal practices.
Graham Martin [01:18:54] Yeah, it's like, it's like the enron of religions. Right. It's all fraudulent paperwork, basically. These people never gave consent. And if you are actually, if you are, I'm assume if you are a good hearted, genuine believer and you see this, you have to think, does our doctrine even say that they're, they're actually saved? Isn't our religion more than just a shaman shaking a stick over a baby or an unaccepting or unknowing person? Because that's all we're doing here. Like they're not consent, knowingly consenting to believing anything or agreeing or affirming that they, that they want to even investigate or believe in this church. They're just literally. Oh, you told me this is where the water is splash and then you draw a tick mark on the chalkboard.
John Dehlin [01:19:44] Yep. Yeah. And it is fraud. However, religions thrive in paradox beliefs that contradict each other. And while we're all taught that baptism is sacred, we're also taught that every soul, every soul is sacred. And we're taught obedience to authority. I would say the most sacred teaching in Mormonism by far is obedience to authority.
Graham Martin [01:20:14] I was wondering about that. That's amazing.
John Dehlin [01:20:18] Yeah. In fact, we're taught obedience is the first law of heaven. Obey with exactness, exact obedience. As a missionary, you're literally taught exact obedience. And so, yes, baptism sacred, but every soul is sacred. You can't make it into the celestial kingdom without a baptism. And then your mission president is pressuring you. So you baptize the little kid and you think, well, Jesus must like it because baptism is good and Jesus got baptized and my leader is pressuring me to do it. So it happens. There's cheeseburger baptisms and Mormonism, there's swimming pool or beach party baptisms, there's baseball baptisms. But most Mormons either block out that part of their mission or they just never learned it.
John Dehlin [01:21:01] But, but our history, definitely all the way back to the 1960s, a huge chunk a third of the 17 million people that were baptized in the Mormon Church that the Mormon Church claims are these type of super low quality baptisms that came out of Mexico, Central America, Latin America, the Philippines and now Africa. And interestingly, the Mormon Church is actually dying in England and in Scotland and in France and in Japan and in Korea and even in the United States and Canada, kind of the developed western world. The Mormon Church is declining in growth and, or declining in absolute membership. And what it's doing to offset its decline is by baptizing like crazy in Africa because the Philippines and Latin America are kind of burned over.
John Dehlin [01:21:55] Like, you know, we've been baptizing there like crazy forever and they're kind of onto us. And so the church is literally expanding, going bananas in Sub Saharan Africa as a way to offset statistically its own hemorrhaging. Even in Utah, like in Utah, in Salt Lake City, Utah, every month a new Mormon chapel is shut down, closes, they close wards, they close stakes.
Graham Martin [01:22:23] Wow.
John Dehlin [01:22:23] They're closing down missions throughout the world, except in Africa. And you know, the church would say we love everyone and isn't a blessing. We're bringing these beautiful African children, We're not racist, we're baptizing all these Africans into the church. Isn't the church progressive and loves black people? When in reality a huge motivation for that is there. The last super large population of less educated, more socioeconomically compromised people. And it's kind of just fresh meat. And that's literally a core internal motivation for our expansion in Africa, which to me is kind of gross. Especially if you realize that they're not being taught that the church was systemically, doctrinally racist for over 150 years. It's a real. And nobody talks about this type of stuff, but it's absolutely a fact.
Graham Martin [01:23:20] Yeah. And in my sort of cultural zeitgeist, I've absorbed the fact that as of, I don't know, 10 years ago, the Mormon Church, and you can correct me on this, would claim in their marketing, we are the quote unquote, fastest growing religion in the world? At some point in my life, that was a marketing pitch I saw. Is that something that they still claimed, am I remembering right, that they used
John Dehlin [01:23:44] to claim that in the, in the 80s and 90s the church believed that, that, you know, by now there would be hundreds of millions of Mormons throughout the world.
Graham Martin [01:23:54] Right.
John Dehlin [01:23:54] And it was growing bananas statistically in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. And then once these baptism techniques started to backfire, once they started to become a pr Disaster for the church once the church was not able to care for all those people who were baptized without real conversions or testimonies. And then once America started fading in popularity worldwide, the growth started to slow. And then definitely once the Internet, around 2004, 2005, with blogs and then podcasts and then Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and YouTube channels, the church has just gotten its, its rear end handed to it as the members started to learn all the things that the church had been hiding from them for generations.
John Dehlin [01:24:57] And that's why, you know, and it's not just a Mormon thing. Religion overall in the developed world is on the ropes. We've got this whole phenomenon called the rise of the nuns. N o N E S Every Christian religion, almost every Christian denomination is in decline. And you could argue that the Mormon Church is declining. Slight, it's slightly less of a pace. But, you know, the past 10, 20, 20 years have been terrible, not just for the Mormon Church, but for Christians, Christianity across the United States and elsewhere. Yeah.
Confronting Progressive Ideas and Family Struggles
Graham Martin [01:25:35] So when you are faced with this, right, you have your experience on a mission, you, you learn this information, you see what's going on with your own family, and you're, you're struggling to deal with all of these, the books on your shelf getting heavier and heavier.
John Dehlin [01:25:53] Yeah.
Graham Martin [01:25:54] How do you deal with that? What's your reaction? Do you, do you sort of turtle up and try to defend your brain from being inquisitive, or do you dig in and say at some point, you obviously say, well, I want to know the truth. When did that happen? I guess is my question.
John Dehlin [01:26:12] Yeah. So I started digging in. While after my mission, I came home traumatized by the spiritual and psychological violence that my mission president sort of wrought on me. But I, but I needed to get really good grades to be able to have a good career. So I started asking questions, and I found some progressive or liberal professors at BYU that I could kind of, you know, ask my more difficult questions to, and they would give me some progressive, liberal answers that kind of pacified me by the time I graduated from college. Go ahead.
Graham Martin [01:26:50] We should clarify for our listeners. When you say liberal, I think you're meaning in a liberal arts sort of progressive type of thing. Not necessarily. I'm voting for Biden type of thing.
John Dehlin [01:27:04] Yeah, yeah. So we're talking early 90s here, and some of those professors were Democrats. But that's not what I mean. What I mean is you don't have to believe everything that the church teaches. The church leaders make mistakes. These are things you would Never learn. Growing up in the church, you would obey. Follow the prophet. The prophet speaks with God. The Book of Mormon is the word of God. It's the truest scripture. Joseph Smith was God's prophet.
John Dehlin [01:27:32] Obey what you're told. Don't drink coffee, don't drink alcohol. Don't have premarital sex. Give 10% of your income to the church and get married in the temple. Have lots of kids, and rinse and repeat. So that's what you grow up with. But then I met these professors at BYU that are like, well, yeah, Joseph Smith made some mistakes. And, well, you know, some people pay tithing on their net and some pay on their gross. And, well, you know, the Bible. You don't have to take the flood literally. Maybe it was a regional flood and God didn't kill everyone and all the animals and children in the world.
John Dehlin [01:28:10] Maybe he just. Maybe that's just how the people at the time interpreted a regional flood. And it wasn't God, you know, and, you know, in the Book of Mormon, maybe it's history or maybe it's like Paul Bunyan and, you know, Babe in the Blue Ox. And maybe it's myth. And maybe scriptures don't have to be literal. Maybe they can just have good. They can still be spiritual and even from God. But maybe they're not historical and maybe the earth isn't 6,000 years old. And maybe God created humans through the evolutionary process and then at the right point in time, sent his divine spirits into the monkeys, and that's when humans started.
John Dehlin [01:28:57] But it was through evolution, you know, and the earth is actually billions of years old. These are the types of teachings that are progressive or a liberal, A spiritually doctrinally liberal professor or Mormon leader would teach someone who is doubting and questioning. And maybe it's not God's one true church. Maybe all churches have truth and maybe all churches are good and bad and this is our tribe, but other, you know, there's many ways out up Mount Fuji. These were the types of things I learned at BYU that made me feel like, okay, I don't have to leave the church. I could be like a progressive Jewish.
John Dehlin [01:29:36] I could be like a, you know, a Reconstructionist or a reformed Jew and. Or a progressive liberal Catholic. And I could. This could be my tribe. It could be my identity. It could be how I raise my kids and give them a moral foundation. Maybe it's true with a lowercase t, but not true with a capital T. Right, right. And that got me. That literally got me out of BYU and sort of 10 years into my married life where I'm, you know, working at Bain, working at Arthur Andersen, working at Microsoft, having lots of kids, doing all the stuff, but always that shelf just keeps getting more and more weighed down with problems.
John Dehlin [01:30:18] It wasn't until I was at Microsoft, I was in my early 30s and I was called, ironically, to teach what's called early morning seminary to Mormon high school students. So every 6am Mormon High School students outside of Utah and Idaho and Arizona show up at the church and receive religious instruction for an hour each day, five days a week before they go to class. And that's where the church really indoctrinates its high schoolers so that they want to serve missions once they graduate from high school. So I was called to be a seminary teacher or the person that indoctrinates the high school students in my Issaquah, Washington Mormon ward or congregation while I was working at Microsoft.
John Dehlin [01:31:08] And it was there that I just said, you know what? Okay, all those things I put on the shelf. Now I've got some time, my career's doing well, most of my kids are born. I'm going to start reading these books that I was warned not to read because I'm strong and I'm committed to. And that's when I learned about Joseph Smith's extra wives, the Book of Abraham and the scriptural fraud that Joseph Smith was involved with. The fact that the Book of Mormon does not stand up to genetic scrutiny, linguistic scrutiny, geographic scrutiny, anthropological scrutiny. There's no scientific evidence that supports the core Book of Mormon narrative from any angle.
John Dehlin [01:31:50] And you know, we're taught that the, that the Book of Mormon is the keystone of our religion, right? Joseph Smith is next to Jesus and righteousness. And when all of a sudden you find out that the Book of Mormon was probably fan fiction and that Joseph Smith was betting 14, 15 year olds and mother daughter pairs and other women married to other men. That's when it all came crashing down as I was trying to be the best seminary teacher I could be for the church. So it was a weird, very, very weird dark time for, for me and
Graham Martin [01:32:20] my family that, that is not an uncommon story. I have heard many people, both famous podcasters like Matt Dillahunty, a famous atheist debater, down to people who call in or friends who have talked to me. And there, there's a common thread here, which is what we've discovered here, which is identical.
Graham Martin [01:32:42] I believed for some reason, maybe because I didn't have, even though I didn't have sufficient evidence, and then there Came a point in my life where something called me to shore up my belief by going and getting that evidence. So I go and I study the Bible, I study the Book of Mormon, I go and read the history, because surely, surely in those books will be the answers to these questions that have been piling up of my brain and that will make me a better mission. What do you call a mission? A missionary. A better missionary. A better example of what it is to be a good Mormon, a better debater or whatever it may be.
Graham Martin [01:33:24] And then they start reading and there's no there there, right? There's, it's, it's just empty or contradictory or immoral or all three. And that is a very common story that people get to that point and they realize, wow, to put it in Christian terms first. Peter 3:15 tells me to always be ready to give a reasoned defense to anybody who asks me about my hope, my faith. So I want to do that, but you got to give me something. And then when you go to turn to the Bible or the history or the scrolls or the morality, there's nothing there. And that's got to be just a. You have a worldview and it's got to at some point shatter that worldview and do massive psychological damage to a person.
John Dehlin [01:34:15] Yeah. And, and while it's a very common narrative in 2024, it was not a common narrative in, in 2001.
Graham Martin [01:34:23] Right.
John Dehlin [01:34:24] When I went through it, there was no one to talk to. My own brother worked at Microsoft and we're very close, we always. But. And he's super smart, smarter than me, and he just was, you know, because of his personal relationship, his family relationships, etc. I'm like, Bro, guess what I just learned? And he's like, la, la la. I want to talk about it. I can't, I can't talk about that. It's going to ruin my life. And I'm like, okay, try and talk to my parents. They're like, we don't know anything about this. Try and talk to my bishop. He's like, I don't know what you're talking about. And by the way, if you start talking about this and spreading these doubts to other members, we're going to have a conversation.
Graham Martin [01:35:03] Right?
John Dehlin [01:35:03] And like there was nowhere to go. And, and that's when I sort of reached a several year period of despair and depression. Just not only my worldview had fallen apart, but I couldn't talk to anyone. And then, But I also, the silver lining is that's where I found my purpose in life. Remember how I said I just did tech because I law didn't work out and I was trying to find my purpose. This became my purpose. By 2004, I'm like, the Internet is going to blow the doors off of this problem once people are able to access the information on websites. So what I'll do is I'll get ahead of that curve, start a podcast, and then I'll be, you know, through tell, helping people, tell stories, interviewing people.
John Dehlin [01:35:52] I'll be able to provide support for people like me. And, and that's, that's how I left Microsoft and started Mormon stories podcast in 2005 as a way to be a solution to the problem that I knew was coming.
Graham Martin [01:36:06] And I, and I'm seeing an arc here in your career and your, and your belief journey that you start off like me, poli sci, looking for a job, just trying to stay focused on life. But then you move into instructional technology. That's what you get your masters in.
Graham Martin [01:36:26] And then now you have a PhD in clinical and counseling psychology and you coach people on how to deal with this. So I see a constant progression from heads down worker, like we all start out to wanting to generally be in education and help people to oh, now I've got the background. I've done my publications, I've done my research, I've done my training. I can actually help people dealing with what presumably you were dealing with when you went through this. Is that what you do now with, with your, I don't know if you want to call it a practice or, or what, but is that what you strive to do with your podcast and your, and your coaching?
John Dehlin [01:37:04] Yeah. So originally, yeah, the idea was get a PhD in Instructional Technology because I knew tech and education would be the way that I helped people. And that's where I learned about podcasts. I stopped with my master's because I realized that a PhD in instructional technology wasn't really going to help me. I did Mormon Stories as my master's thesis for my instructional technology masters. And then as soon as the podcast was launched, it was like I had popped a huge balloon in the sky of pain and suffering. And it started growing exponentially right from the start because there were tens of thousands of Mormons around the world who were having, they were a closeted gay man or woman in a mixed, in a mixed orientation marriage, somebody who was quote, in a sex addiction, meaning that occasionally they would masturbate and look at porn, but they thought they were a broken, oh my goodness, pretty perverted evil person because their wife caught the masturbating or whatever.
John Dehlin [01:38:08] Or maybe they harbored doubts about polygamy or Joseph Smith, but they couldn't talk to anyone. Whatever it was, they found out about my podcast. And then they would, they would ask to meet me, they would call me, they would come to Logan, Utah to meet me. I would meet them whenever I would travel for my jobs with mit, you know, or whatever, the Carnegie Foundation. And I just realized that there was an endless need. And people would come to me telling me, I'm addicted to alcohol, I'm addicted to drugs, I'm self harming, I'm suicidal, I've gone 5, 10 years with anxiety or OCD or religious scrupulosity or depression.
John Dehlin [01:38:50] And I'm like, I don't know how to help you guys. And that's when I realized I needed to get a PhD in clinical and counseling psychology so that I could at least point people in the right direction. Because it turns out there's this term comorbidity with a, with a psychological diagnosis. Sometimes people have more than one diagnosis. Well, several mental, mental illnesses, diagnosable mental illnesses like anxiety, depression, suicidality, you know, scrupulosity, trauma, ptsd, they're comorbid with a religious faith crisis coming out of a cult or a high demand religion. And so I needed to become educated about mental health so that at a minimum, I could counsel people or refer them to someone else who could help them, because they were not just coming to me with a faith crisis.
John Dehlin [01:39:47] It's like, I'm gay, how do I ungame myself? Or I'm gay, how do I come out to my wife? Because we have four kids and I'm a bishop in the Mormon church, you know, whatever. And so the psychology became a natural way for me to get a degree, credentials, education, a research base just to be able to help the people that came to me from my podcast. And I also thought maybe I can make a living, because back in 2005, nobody was monetizing podcasts. Even in 2015, almost no one was monetizing podcasts because most people had never heard of podcasts. Even by 2014, 2015. It's just been in the past eight to 10 years that podcasts have really taken off.
John Dehlin [01:40:32] So I started a nonprofit in 2010, finished my PhD in clinical and counseling psychology in 2015. And that's when I just said, I'll just try and do this full time, see how it goes. And the truth is the nonprofit is just. It's grown every single year since we started it. And now I have A big staff and we're, you know, we're, we're, we grew. We had over a million new subscribers to YouTube just in the previous year and the previous year before that we had a million new subscribers. So we've basically gone from 50 to 250,000 YouTube subscribers in two years. Wow, that's so and so.
John Dehlin [01:41:12] I don't practice psychology, but occasionally I will coach people if they just want some tips on how to navigate the complexities of a faith crisis.
Graham Martin [01:41:22] Right.
John Dehlin [01:41:23] You can go to johndelin.com and/coaching. But I, I, at most I'll have one or two clients a week. I'm, I don't do it for the money. They, I do ask people to pay, but I, I just do it to help people. I, I have more work than I could ever accomplish with, with my podcast with the nonprofit.
Resources and Support for People Leaving Religion
Graham Martin [01:41:42] Yeah, I did go to your website when I was getting to know what you were doing and I, and I did read your publication section and all of that and you seem to be focused in at least correct me if I'm wrong, when you were, you were publishing things on that gay, lesbian, bisexual experiences as it relates to Mormonism or high demand religions. Is my reading of your publication history correct? Is that what you were focused on?
John Dehlin [01:42:09] Sort of. So the first, for my, I actually, I actually met the criteria for a master's in, in psychology on my way to my PhD. So for my master's thesis I developed with my, with my advisor a treatment for religious obsessive compulsive disorder. So my first real focus clinically was on, was on scrupulosity or religious ocd. And so we ran a clinical trial and published our results on how to treat scrupulosity or religious ocd. So that was the first clinical focus. And then I needed another focus for my PhD. And so for my PhD, you have to remember back in 2010, the Mormon Church and most evangelical churches, Orthodox Jews, they were encouraging conversion therapy for their gay, lesbian or bisexual or transgender members.
Graham Martin [01:43:12] Right, right, right.
John Dehlin [01:43:14] It wasn't, it wasn't anything more than like people I found out, you know, once the church, the Mormon Church got into pro, you know, promoting Proposition 8 in California to taking same sex marriage away from gay, same sex married Californians. And then I started noticing this rising suicide epidemic amongst gay and lesbian Mormon youth and young adults. I kept looking in the obituary and seeing another drama student from Sandy, Utah has taken his life after he served a Mormon mission, but without ever getting married. I wonder, and I'm stereotyping, but like no, absolutely. After I saw enough and had enough podcast listeners come to me
John Dehlin [01:43:59] and tell me they were suicidal or they got into a mixed faith marriage, or they were trying to live a life of celibacy, or they had engaged in conversion therapy or electric shock therapy, which was a thing at Brigham Young university in the 70s, they literally ran tests to shock, you know, to. To deliver an electric shock to gay BYU students. There's even reports that they administered shock to their genitals.
Graham Martin [01:44:30] Oh, wow.
John Dehlin [01:44:31] Or to use chemical castration or other types of aversive stimuli to un. Gay, you know, BYU students who were Mormon. Like, that's a whole thing anyway.
Graham Martin [01:44:43] Right, right, right. The stereotypical phrase is the light version of it is pray the gay away. But it's much more insidious than that. It sounds like, you know, I know from a legal perspective, there were a lot of cases of issues with kidnapping, consent. If. If my son's 18, I can't force him to go, but I hire somebody to take him to this camp anyway to try to do this conversion. The stuff. So it's not unique to Mormonism, but it sounds like you were seeing a huge rise during this period.
John Dehlin [01:45:15] Yeah, it was. It. I mean, just honestly, it was. Still, that was what the church. The church would say, if you're gay, if you're gay and a male, marry a woman and it'll go away. If you're gay, if you're a lesbian and Mormon, marry a man and have kids and it'll go away. And if you need any help, help do conversion therapy. That's how things were in 2010.
Graham Martin [01:45:37] Wow.
John Dehlin [01:45:37] So that'll be. Now that I've done scrupulosity. That'll be my PhD dissertation. And so I did a. I think I. I don't say this to brag, but I think it was a groundbreaking study. At the time, we surveyed 1612 either current or former Mormons who identified as somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum.
John Dehlin [01:46:02] It was the large. It's probably one of the largest studies of its kind in the history of the mental health field. And what we showed was that conversion therapy, and specifically religious attempts to change your sexual orientation, like prayer or fasting or hyper religiosity or confessing to your bishop, were the most common and the most damaging ways that a gay Mormon would try and change their sexual orientation. We were able to show incredible harm. And, you know, that led to a ted talk in 2013 where I released a TEDx talk where I released the results of my study to the public. We published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology, which is the premier flagship research publication for counseling psychology.
John Dehlin [01:46:52] We published 12 or 13 other peer reviewed academic journal articles from that one study of 1612 students. And eventually two things happened. The Mormon Church slowly started to discourage conversion therapy and discourage mixed orientation marriage and move away from its barbaric, deadly teachings. And they excommunicated me because I was openly promoting same sex marriage. And that was against the Church's doctrine and theology. Plus, by that time, by 2015, my podcast had become very, very popular. I had been asked to be on Good Morning America VH1 Nightline. Like I, with Mitt Romney running for president.
Graham Martin [01:47:36] Sure.
John Dehlin [01:47:37] Starting to reach out to me and have me be kind of the talking head Mormon guy.
Graham Martin [01:47:41] Right.
John Dehlin [01:47:42] And for all those reasons and the podcast popularity, the Church said, stop advocating for same sex marriage and shut down that podcast or we're going to excommunicate you. And I said, excommunicate me because I cannot, you know, in good conscience shut down the podcast and stop advocating for people that are killing themselves. And so the church excommunicated me in 2015.
Graham Martin [01:48:03] Wow. Wow. So you are. I'm going to sort of abstract this out a little bit because I think this is a pattern you see everywhere. You are coming at the situation with observations, experiments and evidence and pointing out a real problem. And the church is saying, we don't care about that part. You know, we want you to shut up and stop saying it's okay to be gay. And you refuse. And for that they kick you out of the church. Is that a fair summary?
John Dehlin [01:48:38] Yeah, yeah, I think that's fair. Yep. And they didn't just, they didn't just, you know, kick me out.
Graham Martin [01:48:44] Right, right.
John Dehlin [01:48:45] And then in 1992, 93, 94, there was a wave of excommunications, of scholars while I was at byu. They're generally known as the September six. After me. There was a wave of excommunications of other Internet activists who were either encouraging, you know, women's rights in the church. There were women excommunicated for that. There were others advocating for truthful history. They were excommunicated. And there were some, one, one courageous man, Sam Young. He was simply advocating for the, for children, you know, against child abuse within the church and against one on one meetings with church leaders and children, where it often happens, and Boy Scouts. And the church excommunicated him, a former bishop, literally just for trying to prevent child abuse in the church because they decided it was embarrassing.
John Dehlin [01:49:38] So for a good five to 10 years and a mental health professional named Natasha Helfer. She was simply teaching the masturbation's healthy that Mormon therapists should follow ethical guidelines and not preach religion and things like conversion therapy to their clients. They excommunicated her. So it's come back to bite the church. But. But I wasn't the only one that eventually I was one of the first, but I certainly wasn't the only person I screamed at. Yeah.
Graham Martin [01:50:06] So all of this reminds me to mention at this point for people who may be having these issues, of course you can read up and, and on. On Dr. Delin's work. You can visit his website, you can look at, at the Mormon Story podcast. But more generally, there are other organizations that I would recommend. You may have heard of these or worked with them, but there's. Recovering from Religion is an organization that helps people who have been raised in religious environments that they are trying to leave and are having problems with either very hard problems. Like if I come out to my evangelical parents, they're literally going to kick me out of the house and I will, I may die all the way to.
Graham Martin [01:50:46] I've been out of my religion for 20 years and I'm still having dreams about hell. Like that's. They do a lot there. And then there's the Secular Therapy Project. These are a group of therapists who promise not to bring religion into their counseling as a proposed solution. That's a, that's a high level summary. But basically there's a real problem in America where you go to see a therapist and after a few weeks of getting to know you, they might surprise you and say, I think you need to pray more or something like that. You're like, what? That's, that's, that's not the what I'm looking for.
Graham Martin [01:51:25] So Secular Therapy Project is out there. And then another one that's sort of related that I wanted to ask you about is have you heard of the Clergy Project?
John Dehlin [01:51:35] Yeah, I've, I've actually heard of all those programs.
Graham Martin [01:51:38] Okay, for sure.
John Dehlin [01:51:39] Yeah.
Graham Martin [01:51:40] So the Clergy Project for our listeners is a, an anonymous organization of people who are preachers or otherwise church leaders who have lost their faith but haven't yet left their role in the church. So I'm a preacher in a small town.
Graham Martin [01:51:57] I no longer believe in whatever religion I believe in. And I know that if I announce this to my flock, I will lose my job. I will be shunned. No one will. I can't hire a babysitter. I can't hire anybody to cut my yard. Nobody's going to sit with me at the high school football game like, like my life is over. And from a very young age, maybe all I've done is be a preacher. I don't have marketable skills, so if I leave my job, it's going to be maybe go work as a janitor, if there's any jobs in town. So a a group formed to sort of talk about these issues without being out so they could get support and strategies on how to modify and make their make their sermons, I'd say more moderated, not as extreme, not as literal in the Bible.
Graham Martin [01:52:49] Did you see that in when you were starting Mormon stories and people were coming to you? I'm assuming initially they're off the record before you could get anybody to be on the show and talk. But did you see a similar sort of culture of an underground sort of confederacy of people who had their doubts and wanted to work within the church to try to change it? Or did you feel totally alone for a long time, even after you started your podcast?
John Dehlin [01:53:18] Yeah. So something that's different about Mormons and Scientologists and Jehovah's Witnesses and Orthodox Jews is that you're taught it's such an insular culture and you're taught so much suspicion of outsiders that like a Mormon bishop in a million years, if he were struggling with his faith or even a doubting Mormon, would never go to a never Mormon or even an ex Mormon to get help.
John Dehlin [01:53:49] Because you risk your spouse divorcing you, your children disowning you, your parents cutting you out of their will. You risk if you're a dentist, if you live in Idaho or Arizona or Utah, there's a good chance that your clients, whether you're a doctor or a dentist or a lawyer or a executive, there's a good chance your business partners or your co workers or your customers are Mormon. And you risk marital ruin, familial ruin, social. You risk losing all your friends. You risk losing your community because your friends are your church co workers for the most part, and you risk losing your job and your income.
John Dehlin [01:54:30] And so that's why for me, it was really important when I started Mormon Stories to have it feel safe, to have it feel inviting, to have it feel very Mormon, not angry, not even super directly confrontational or critical of the church. And many tell me Mormon stories remains relatively positive and affirming and safe feeling for a questioning Mormon.
Graham Martin [01:54:54] Sure.
John Dehlin [01:54:55] Because. Because no, in a million years, those organizations you mentioned are not going to be attractive to someone coming out or questioning Mormonism. But they are great organizations.
Graham Martin [01:55:08] Sure, sure.
John Dehlin [01:55:09] The other thing I'll say is that because we blog, you know, we started blogging in 2004 as Mormons and ex Mormons and then we started podcasting with Mormon stories in 2005 and then other podcasts started emerging. Ex Mormons kind of dominate of all the ex religious groups you just go to, go to Reddit and look up ex Scientologists, witnesses, you know, ex orthodox Jews, ex evangelicals.
John Dehlin [01:55:39] Nobody compares to the number of ex Mormons. The ex Mormon subreddit has like 300,000 members. Again, Mormon Stories podcast has like 250,000 just YouTube subscribers. We've got over 100,000 Facebook subscribers, like 270,000 TikTok followers. Like in some ways, because we had to serve ourselves and because we got at it early and developed a culture of doing and of serving. In some ways, I think that's why Mormon stories is 60% never Mormon, because we're actually leading.
John Dehlin [01:56:16] I'm not saying other organizations are doing great things, but in many ways, whether it's, you know, ex Mormon, Reddit blogs, YouTube channels, TikTok, if you want to have a wild time, just go to TikTok and type in ex Mormon. There are billions and billions and billions of views of hundreds, if not thousands of ex Mormon TikTok content creators that are creating amazing creative content TikTok videos every single day. So I'm really proud of the ex Mormon, the progressive and the post Mormon and the ex Mormon communities for the way that we've not only helped each other as kind of pioneers in the tech world, but as we've kind of in some ways shown leadership to the rest of the world and certainly to ex members of other cults or high demand religions.
John Dehlin [01:57:10] And you know, I've had Jehovah's Witnesses on Mormon Stories. You know, Leah Remini and Mike Rinder came on, you know, Sarah Edmond Edmondson of Nexium, Like, I'm very proud of my collaborations. You know Stephen Hassan. We've brought Stephen Hassan, the the world cult expert to Utah, had him do, you know, a retreat here, brought him on the podcast. I'm super happy that we've collaborated with so many amazing. With so many members of other cults or high demand religions. Yeah.
Graham Martin [01:57:44] And I said at the beginning that I would get back to that we would eventually work ourselves back to this concept that there's 60% never Mormons listen to your podcast. And I was one of them. And I think in talking you today, I have explored, I've been thinking all along where is it? Where's the hook? What is it that fascinates me? And I think it's, I mean, I don't want to, I want to make it sound mundane, but I think it is the same reason that I like reading novels or watching movies is every story is different. And every story addresses a very core human condition that is then possibly exploited by a religious organization.
Cult Psychology and the Need for Meaning
Graham Martin [01:58:31] And that condition is a desire to feel like you're mean something. This, this, this psychological state of I am, you know, the center of things and so I want to mean something and I want to be part of something bigger. And religions have developed to take advantage of that instinct. And it's so powerful, that instinct is so powerful that it can cause people to go through changes in belief that seem very fascinating to somebody who's never been through that. And it makes one worry about yourself. Like if I had been born in, in the middle of a different nation, you know, if I was born, let's say, in Rome, I might be Roman Catholic instead of an atheist right now.
Graham Martin [01:59:20] Or if I was born in Utah, I might be a Mormon right now. And the realization of that, that what religion you are really depends almost entirely on where you were born and who your parents were can be very scary to people. Like, are we really that malleable in our beliefs? And hearing your stories of person after person coming on and telling a similar story to yours with important differences paints a very broad brush. To say everybody goes through this, everybody. It's not just a Mormon thing, it's not just a cult thing. There are Catholics struggling with mass amount of guilt. There are, as you said, Orthodox Jews who are trying to figure out what to do with their children because they know that they're not supposed to get them vaccinated.
Graham Martin [02:00:09] There's Christian Scientists who don't want to let their kids die, but they wish that the church would just change their policy. But they feel stuck, like they have to not treat their kids because of this community, because of all of these instincts. So hearing you talk about this, I think for non Mormons, it's both educational but also fascinatingly scary and interesting study of the human condition. Like a very core piece of the human condition.
Graham Martin [02:00:39] Listening to your show makes me feel like we're all in the same boat. It may about to be about different things or different religions or whatever, but everybody is just trying to figure out life, be a good person, enjoy themselves while they have time on this earth and try to help other people. And that's what I hear time and time again on Your show is that where that, that tends to be where people end up, and that seems to be where you have ended up, that you have gone through this transition from being a sixth generation LDS that was kept in the dark, to getting involved in education, getting involved in information dissemination, to being now running this, this podcast that is changing lives left and right. How does that feel looking back on that?
John Dehlin [02:01:22] Yeah, well, thank you so much for that acknowledgment. And I'll just say, like, I remember when I saw the Village for the first time or. Or Pleasantville. Or. Yes, the Truman Show.
Graham Martin [02:01:33] Right.
John Dehlin [02:01:34] Like, wait. Or Tangled. I'm like, wait, that's. They're describing. Wait, were those guys Mormon that made those movies? Because, like, the idea of like a fake reality that was created for you, no spoilers intended, right, where you're, you're part of this contrived reality. And then at some point you discover there's something not right, and then you start questioning it and maybe you break out of it. And then you realize that people don't like it when you break the mold. And then your world kind of falls apart. But you also experience freedom. That's the Matrix, Tangled, Truman Show, Pleasantville history, the invention of lying Small foot. Like, there's so many movies that tell that same story. And after I realized that none of those filmmakers were Mormon, I'm like, wait a minute, maybe. Maybe other people are experiencing this too. And then I watch Going Clear about Scientology.
Graham Martin [02:02:31] Right, Right.
John Dehlin [02:02:32] And then I watched the Keith Ranieri stuff about Nexium and I watched the Warren Jeff stuff about the FLDS church and Jim Jones and you start learning about cults and other high demanding religions. And then you, you watch just the stuff about evangelicals and like, God forbid, about, about Jerry Falwell Jr. And Liberty University. And you're just like, oh, there's cults everywhere. And it's not just religions.
John Dehlin [02:02:57] MLMs and businesses can be cults. The military can be. Can have cult characteristics. Corporations and family systems can have cult dynamics. And then they just realize. What I realized was, and this has been my personal mantra for Mormon stories for many years now, it's the Mormon story is the human story, and vice versa. And people some just like I learned more about Mormonism from Going Clear the documentary on Scientology than I ever did, you know, listening to a Mormon podcast or watching a Mormon YouTube channel or reading a book about Mormonism because I felt that on a spiritual or I should say emotional level, because I saw it, I felt safe enough to see it in another tradition and Then to tie it back to myself emotionally.
John Dehlin [02:03:51] And then I realized, whoa, that's what Mormon stories can do to other people. It feels, oh, it's those weird, peculiar Mormons. They've got the Osmonds and Steve Young, and they're kind of fun and they're clean, you know, smiley, happy families. But then there's this weird dark side. What's going on here, and we're just interesting and entertaining enough for people to pay attention. And then they realize that they're not just seeing a quirky Mormon story. So many people are seeing their own stories right within Mormon stories. And it's been very gratifying to grow our influence and to help contribute just to the broader world, because at the end of the day, we're all humans.
John Dehlin [02:04:34] Right? It's right. It's not. Not the Mormon family, it's the human family. And I'm proud to. When I was kicked out of the Mormon Church, I felt sad that I was kicked out of the Mormon Church, but I realized that I kind of joined the human race when I was kicked out of the Mormon Church. And that was a trade up as far as I was concerned.
Graham Martin [02:04:53] Wonderful. So if the Mormon story is the human story, where are you? What chapter are you in now for your Mormon story? For your human story? If you're not a Mormon now, what would you call yourself? What. What are your beliefs at this point in a religious sense, if you don't mind me asking.
Personal Beliefs, Atheism, and Spiritual Identity
John Dehlin [02:05:13] Yeah. So, yeah, I don't. This is probably an answer you'll hear a lot. I've never been comfortable assuming the identity of. Of atheist or agnostic.
Graham Martin [02:05:27] Sure.
John Dehlin [02:05:28] For several reasons. And I, believe me, I get that there's a courageous element to facing the negative stereotypes and owning that title to make it more acceptable to bear those arrows so that others can come along later and feel comfortable if they want to identifying as. Well, because obviously, I'm sure it's still true that atheists have lower approval ratings than, like, child molesters.
Graham Martin [02:05:58] Like, it's still bad.
John Dehlin [02:06:01] Never been elected to office, almost never in the United States. So I. I respect people who take that on what I decided very early on when I lost my Mormon faith. Number one, no other church in the world, every single church reminded me of the Mormon Church once I scratched underneath the surface. So, okay, I thought about Episcopalians. They're progressive. Yeah. But they still have problems. And evangelicals and Presbyterians and Lutherans and Jews and Muslims, they've all got problems. And they all have the same formula of, like, God talked to that other guy.
John Dehlin [02:06:41] And then we're supposed to believe the experience that some other guy had. And by the way, almost all of those other guys wanted their money or wanted their wives or wanted sex or, you know, or like, taught genocide or bigotry or racism or sexism or homophobia or the scriptures that they believed in were racist, sexist, homophobic, and often genocidal. So, like, there was not a church. We had, we investigated. We spent a couple years attending every church we could.
Graham Martin [02:07:09] Sure.
John Dehlin [02:07:10] And finally we realized that the Bible has as many problems, if not more problems, than the Book of Mormon. And I don't want to offend my Christian listeners, but, but just learn about historical criticism and biblical criticism and science and you'll realize that the Bible's got major problems. But at the same time, I was committed to effectiveness, to reaching the most amount of people that I could. And you may as well tell a Mormon you're a child molester. If you're going to tell them you're an atheist or an agnostic, they will immediately shut you off. So I just decided for that reason I was never going to identify as an atheist or agnostic. Also, also I. I realized for me, and I know this won't sound clever to you, I'm sure you've heard it a million times. I don't identify as someone who's an A Easter Bunnyist or an A Santa ist.
Graham Martin [02:08:10] Sure.
John Dehlin [02:08:10] Like, I. There's no part of my identity, what I call myself that has anything to do with all the things I don't believe. And while I get the terms I thought, is religion credible enough and worthy enough of taking up space in my identity? And to be honest, part of why I don't identify as an atheist or an agnostic is because I, like, feel I find the propositions so preposterous and so absurd and so unworthy in a scientific, modern sort of era of sensibility that it's not worth any part of my identity.
Graham Martin [02:08:58] Right, Right. So.
John Dehlin [02:09:00] So for those reasons, and mostly just because I want to be super effective, I've literally never called myself an atheist or diagnostic. I do believe that nobody knows. So I think that literally meets the criteria of agnostic if you don't believe that anyone knows anything about metaphysical, supernatural stuff. So I think everybody's an agnostic. If you look at. Now, there are people that don't know they're agnostic.
Graham Martin [02:09:25] Right.
John Dehlin [02:09:26] But most smart, thoughtful people will acknowledge that, like, well, they think their beliefs are true, but they could be wrong. You know what I mean?
Graham Martin [02:09:35] Right.
John Dehlin [02:09:36] And that they don't know for sure. Those zealots who say they know, they're the scary, in my mind, they're the most dangerous people of all.
Graham Martin [02:09:43] Right.
John Dehlin [02:09:44] So anyway, you can see where I stand with agnosticism.
Graham Martin [02:09:47] Sure.
John Dehlin [02:09:48] And I guess I've already told you my approach to not labeling myself as an atheist.
Graham Martin [02:09:53] No, that is a very practical approach. And I find the labels are used lots of different ways just to know where I'm coming from. I do call myself an atheist, but it's because the way that I find as we're moving through a maturing society that understands that the, that there's subtlety to these sorts of questions, the way that I find it's most commonly defined is, are you convinced that there's a God? Do you believe that there's a God? And if you don't say yes to that, then you lack a belief in God. And that's, that's, that's the, a part of the theist. So that's, it's not anything other than that.
Graham Martin [02:10:35] Am I convinced there's not a God? No. It's sort of like from the legal perspective, we find people not guilty, we don't find them innocent. I, I don't find, I find God not guilty of existing. I don't find him innocent of existing. I, I, I can't prove or say that there is no God. I can just say that of the, of the versions of God that people have presented to me so far, I have not been presented with sufficient evidence. Therefore I don't believe. And I totally agree with you regarding the a Easter Bunnyist and the a Loch Ness monsterist. Right, that's, that's another issue.
Graham Martin [02:11:10] I think the reason some people choose to go ahead and take on the label though is we don't have Easter Bunnyists in Congress saying we don't have to invent investigate climate change because God promised he would never flood the earth again. It's sort of a common trope that you get in the athe is, oh, why do you care so much? If you don't believe, why do you care? Well, we care and we take on the name because there are people not just often in their corner and saying, I believe this personally. Right. I have many, many religious friends, they have their own faiths. We have lots of interesting discussions.
Graham Martin [02:11:48] But the minute that somebody says not only do I have these beliefs, but that in belief includes the fact that there is a God and that I understand what that God wants and he wants me to, to do something, that's when we start running into danger and then those people get elected and we, we see what we're seeing in the world today. So I totally am on board with your way of thinking that yes, 100. If you in, especially in this country, if you come out and say I'm an a, anything is regarding religion, people are going to shut down needlessly because they've been taught that they are that atheism or agnosticism or any sort of disbelief or skepticism even is a bad word.
Graham Martin [02:12:34] I even heard people call in and tell me that. Heard I had people call in and tell me that I was a atheist Muslim. They don't even understand what the word means. It's like communist now that in the political circles, like, if I disagree with you, I'm going to call you a communist. If I think you're bad person, I'm going to call you an atheist. Atheist. The word is almost lost meaning other than to mean I'm on the wrong team. So I agree. I don't bring it up except for, for example, when I do a podcast and if you're in the in, you're in the mission of helping people who are struggling with religion, bringing any sort of label to a belief system, if the question even comes up when they're talking to you, can really shut people down.
Graham Martin [02:13:18] I've seen it happen. As soon as you say, like when I was early, early sort of realizing I was an atheist, most atheists will go through a. The angry atheist phase. I'm. There's probably an angry Mormon, ex Mormon phase too, where my anger came from.
Graham Martin [02:13:34] I really didn't care until I saw people doing things in the world, like telling me that I couldn't play Dungeons and Dragons because it was demonic or passing laws or, you know, saying that we don't need to research AIDS because gay people are bringing this on, on God's wrath. And that's when I'm like, okay, I must be missing something. Like in all my little schoolings and Sunday school tales, I didn't hear that part of the Bible. So let me go research it. And then once you go research it and you realize it's all BS as far as, like, what the politicians are saying is not scriptural or not historical.
Graham Martin [02:14:13] You get very angry. You're like, you're being fooled. We're all being fooled. I would have sworn that there's got to be something more that has convinced all these people, right? Nope. It turns out that a lot of people haven't even read their Bibles. They listen to their preachers they listen to their politicians and they just do what they say. So that's where I come from. That's sort of what really inspired me to start being sort of a vocal activist, because I went through that angry phase for a couple of years and then I came into where I am now, which is I just want to talk to people.
Graham Martin [02:14:41] I find the stories fascinating and I want to understand how religion is being used to create political violence, try to take over governments, things like that. When, when, when all the evidence is that if people actually go and read their scriptures, if people really dive into the claims of their religion, they, they moderate their views, they at least moderate their views, if not abandon them.
John Dehlin [02:15:06] Yeah.
Graham Martin [02:15:07] And that's, that's sort of the goal.
John Dehlin [02:15:08] And I really respect, I really respect that approach. Secular humanism, all those types of movements, I really respect. I will add one last final thing, just as a little bone for my Christians and out there, I love the idea of mystery. I love the idea of wonder, and I love the idea of epistemic humility, which is like, I don't know for sure, anything for sure. And I know that there are plenty of atheists and agnostics that are humble. In fact, atheism and agnosticism is a move for many towards humility. But we all know the insufferable atheists out there. They're more zealous as missionaries than they were as believers.
Graham Martin [02:15:53] Right.
John Dehlin [02:15:54] And they want to convert in there. They're absolutely certain that there's no God, even though I know that's a bit of a canard. And I just like the idea of saying maybe there's some power out there, maybe there's some force, maybe there's some organizing thing, or maybe, maybe, who knows, small chance, there's life after. But like, right. Would I like to keep living on? Sure. So if, if I die and find out there's an afterlife, am I gonna, like, be bummed? I'm gonna be like, no. So, I mean, I do like the idea. One of the reasons I also don't identify as atheist or agnostic is because, like, I like staying open.
John Dehlin [02:16:30] And who knows, maybe some of this stuff, small chance, but maybe some of this stuff is true or it's true in a way that we don't fully understand. And so I'm just going to remain open. And honestly, I think a lot of Jesus's teachings, golden rule stuff, are super legit and super valid. And I think religions often do a good job of creating meaning, identity, purpose, community, friends.
John Dehlin [02:16:57] And so, like, I'm at Least a secular Christian in many ways. Not all the ways, but in many ways. I think if more of us did a better job of listening to Jesus and following some of his core teachings, the world would be better off. That's what I think.
Graham Martin [02:17:19] I agree. I agree. The New Testament is written almost as a band aid over the character of God in the Old Testament. Right? Wrath and vengeance and genocide in the Old Testament. And then I, I told you before, I, I'm doing a long series on faith healing. If, if Jesus is portrayed as anything in the New Testament, he is a healer, he is a doctor, he is about medicine. He is the one. The first time in the Bible that he says, don't treat children as property. You know, suffer the young children, right? Put up with them. Because before then kids were property. You could kill them, girls were a hassle, let's bury them in the pit.
Graham Martin [02:18:07] Jesus is the one who comes along, in the character of Jesus at least, and says, suffer the young children, put up with them. He heals left and right. He makes people have better lives. And that. I think there's many, many, many Christians that hear that message and say, I can get behind that and I'm going to support it.
Graham Martin [02:18:29] And that leads to a very rewarding community, a very rewarding sort of spiritual journey for them. Although I don't, you know, spiritual is a very wishy washy word, but it does something for them in, in maybe a, a finding their place in the universe or finding a purpose. Right. Again, to reference the, the Book of Mormon. You know, it's a love letter to religion from somebody who doesn't believe. Like, there are a lot of good things out there. So I, I totally agree with you. You need to find out what you're comfortable. And to me, I don't care about the labels as much as having conversations where we sort of define terms on our own.
Graham Martin [02:19:07] Because no two atheists are alike. I'm sure no two Mormons are alike. No two agnostics are alike. You have to find out where people stand and meet them on their own ground in order to have a conversation and then decide if you guys can identify politely where you agree and where you disagree, and then where you disagree, decide, well, how do we figure this out? What method do we have as humans to figure out, am I right, are you right, or neither of us right? And we can do that in a loving way, a polite way, an investigatory way, and we don't need labels to do that.
John Dehlin [02:19:41] Yeah, yeah, I love it.
Graham Martin [02:19:43] All right, so this is really good stuff.
John Dehlin [02:19:45] That I'm really glad to, to learn that you're out there. I've just started to watch Matt Dillahunty and I think he's smart. I, I need to check out the atheist experience as well. And there's just, we, we as ex Mormons need to get out of our little, you know, bubbles and bubbles inside bubbles and learn more about the big, the big beautiful secular world out there, honestly.
Graham Martin [02:20:09] Right. Yeah. And I will say, I'm sure the atheist experience would love Guest if you'd like. The athexperience show is a call in show. People will call in and we ask them, what do you believe and why? And then we talk about the whys. And typically it will be a discussion of, well, what reasoning are you using to get there? And we, we typically, our main goal, of course, is to spread the positive image of atheism that, hey, we aren't, we aren't the bad guys you've been told about. We're just people that haven't been convinced yet. You know, I'll put the yet on there. I haven't been convinced yet.
Graham Martin [02:20:43] Right. I may be presented with evidence, but, but we don't want people to become extremists. Right. You know, if we can have conversations where we point out flaws in their logic and ask them to go back and do more reading or whatever, they will moderate their views again. And that's sort of my theme. If we all moderate our views a little bit, we're less likely to have, you know, the Handmaid's Tale become a reality. That's, that's what we're worried about. So I know we're way over time. I really appreciate all the time that you've given me. Is there anything else that you'd like to bring up?
Where to Find Mormon Stories and Closing Thoughts
Graham Martin [02:21:17] For example, where can people find you online? What's the best place to go and see your work and start participating in your Mormon Stories podcast?
John Dehlin [02:21:26] Yeah, I think, I think, you know, the best place to probably have the Mormon stories experience is on YouTube that, you know, we do make some money off of the ads. Of course, if you have YouTube Premium, you get to skip the ads. So that's what I recommend is 10 bucks a month, get YouTube Premium and then watch us there. And if you have YouTube Premium and you just want to listen, let's say you watch for an hour and then you want to just take it on your jog. YouTube Premium allows you to listen even while your ipod is in, you know, lock screen mode or whatever.
John Dehlin [02:22:01] So I would say, number one way for us is through YouTube. We're also available on Spotify. We're also available on Apple Podcasts. That's where we started is on itunes. That became Apple Podcasts and then we have a Facebook page that has over 100,000 followers. We do release our interviews on Facebook. We have to break them up into chunks.
John Dehlin [02:22:27] We also have a TikTok channel where we release shorts for Mormon stories. You can watch little one to two minute clips. We've got like 270 or 260,000 subscribers on TikTok at this point. It's probably our largest platform in terms of subscribers. It might be going away.
John Dehlin [02:22:46] 150,000 followers on Instagram. We also release our shorts as reels on Instagram. We don't do much on TikTok so those are the different ways you can check us out. And then we are donor supported. So if any of you like what we do and want to see it continue. We're a 501c3 nonprofit. We're transparent in our finances. We feel like we run the organization transparently and ethically. And if you go to MormonStories.org and click on the donate button you can become a monthly donor and that's the way to financially support what we do.
Graham Martin [02:23:19] That's wonderful. That's wonderful. I will give a shout out. It's not my organization. I merely am one of their hosts. But the atheist community of Austin does is a similar situation. They Too are a 501C3 organization with a board of directors that is managing them. And they are.
Graham Martin [02:23:35] They produce lots of different shows. The Atheist Experience Talk, Heathen Truth Wanted, the Non Profits. There's a bunch of call in shows and some just hot topic discussion shows that have this mission of trying to get people talking about what they believe and why and then try to enforce a separation of church and state. And then of course there's my podcast. You can find me on as the Cross examiner podcast on any podcasting platform or you can just go to my website@thecrossexaminer.net is my my podcast because apparently Cross Examiner.com was taken for. I don't know, they wanted $50,000 for it. I'm not going to do that.
Graham Martin [02:24:15] So. Exactly. John, it's been an absolute thrill talking to you. You've really educated me and you've given me a lot of of things to think about and more than anything I think you've given me hope. I gotta admit that looking at the rise of things like QAnon and radical political organizations that are Trying to take over the government and do really bad things in the name of religion or by exploiting people's religious beliefs really is stressing and depressing. But hearing your story and hearing how you help other people and showing that the Internet in fact can be a tool for good, it's not all just misleading memes.
Graham Martin [02:25:02] It's actually deep dive conversations that get into the nitty gritty and that has helped people sort of moderate their views, come out of a religion that they weren't happy in. That's really encouraging. So thank you for what you're doing and thank you for taking the time to talk with me.
John Dehlin [02:25:19] Me. Thank you, Graham. It's so nice to meet you. It's so nice to learn about your podcast and all of your efforts as well. You're a professional interviewer, you ask great questions and I'm honored that you would spend the time to learn about my story, to share it with your audience. And I really do encourage my audience to check out both your podcast and the atheist atheist experience if you're looking to for that type of stuff. But let's keep collaborating. We need more cross culture collaborations. And so let's, let's do a little bit more.
Graham Martin [02:25:54] I agree 100%. I look forward to chatting with you anytime you want. And in the future, I will make sure to send people over. I will, I will say for my audience, I know that a lot of you like my sort of lengthy deep dive stories. John stories on Mormon stories is 10 times what I do. He really gets into the nitty gritty. He really takes the time to let you get to know the person he's interviewing or the topic topic he's doing. So I know my audience would love to go over and listen to your content as well because it, it's drawn me in. It's all I listened to for the last several weeks since I, since I discovered what you do.
John Dehlin [02:26:38] Well, thank you. All right, thanks so much and you all take care.
Graham Martin [02:26:42] Bye bye.
John Dehlin [02:26:43] And we'll hope to see you again soon. Thanks, Graham.
Graham Martin [02:26:45] Thanks.
Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.
One Response
You mentioned perhaps having a cohost sit in on another of these episodes. I think Chsnnel Achenbach would be great, she always brings an interesting and sometimes profound perspective. This was a wonderful and informative podcast. Can’t wait to see the book!