Introduction to Simon Southerton and His Book

Part 1 of 2 · Ep. 348

John Dehlin [00:00:00] This is Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm John Dehlin. On this episode of the Mormon Stories podcast, I interview Simon Southerton, author of the book Losing a lost Native Americans DNA and the Mormon Church, published by Signature Books. In 1998, Simon stepped down from his calling as bishop when he discovered DNA research that in his mind overwhelmingly disproved the Book of Mormon claims regarding the true lineage of the Lamanites or Native Americans. Finding no scientific basis for the widely accepted Mormon teaching that the inhabitants of North, Central and South America were descendants of Lehi and thus a scattered branch of Israel, Simon found his faith deeply shaken and asked to be released from his calling as a bishop. He talks about the feelings he experienced as he made this life changing decision.

Simon Southerton [00:00:45] I would go from absolute peaks of exhilaration, feeling like I'd resolved all of these problems, you know, flood evolution, Book of Mormon problems, all of those were resolved, but then to utter despair.

John Dehlin [00:00:58] A few years later, Simon published a book about DNA in the Book of Mormon, only to find himself labeled as a critic of the church. And though seven years inactive at that point, church leaders in his native Australia actively sought his excommunication. In the interview, Simon discusses the apologetic response to the evidence.

Simon Southerton [00:01:16] Everything that the apologists write and say is unofficial. The church doesn't stand behind it. So you've got to ask yourself, why do we have to accept this if the leaders of the church aren't prepared to stand behind it, even when they're paying their salaries and where the church should go from here, whichever way they go, I think there's going to be pain. But at the end of the day, I think eventually the church should go the way of truth.

John Dehlin [00:01:39] Losing a lost tribe, DNA and the Book of Mormon with Simon Southerton, next on Mormon Stories.

Simon Southerton [00:01:54] 1, 2, 3.

John Dehlin [00:02:01] Mormon Stories podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you. To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today@mormonstories.org for the full unedited version of this interview. Look for it in the itunes feed or find it@mormonstories.org hello and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin, and I'm very excited to have a guest that I've wanted to have on my show for quite some time and some of you will be familiar with him. His name is Simon Southerton. Hey, Simon. Hi.

Simon Southerton [00:02:44] John, it's really nice to talk to you.

John Dehlin [00:02:47] Sure. Now, there's all sorts of stuff I could read here from your bio. I'll just say that you hold a PhD from the University of Sydney in plant science and you're currently specializing in the molecular biology of forest trees. You're a forest geneticist and a principal research scientist with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, is that right?

Simon Southerton [00:03:08] That's correct, yep.

John Dehlin [00:03:09] CSRO and Simon, if you don't know, is the author of a book that was an important book for me when I was trying to work through some of my thoughts and feelings about the church. And the book is called Losing a Lost Tribe. It's published by Signature Books and it talks about the DNA with the Native Americans, those that in the church we've often referred to as Lamanites. And just to give you a quick preview, Simon was involved in doing genetics as a bishop in Australia when he started really studying the DNA issues and the Native Americans, and that led to an interesting journey for him. So I just think it's an important story to get down. And so that's what we're going to be talking about today, right, Simon?

Simon Southerton [00:03:53] That's right, yep.

Growing Up in the Church in Australia

John Dehlin [00:03:54] So let's talk about, as we always do, your early years in the church. Let's just start from the beginning and just talk about what role the church played in your life in those early years.

Simon Southerton [00:04:02] Sure. I may actually start just a couple of years before we joined the church because our entire family were Anglicans, so I have a large family. I have seven sisters and a brother. And I must confess that I didn't really enjoy being an Anglican. I used to hide under the house to avoid going to church. But my father was very dedicated and really enjoyed church and was very determined that we as children would attend as well. And so we all attended together as a family. And then I think he was starting to feel a little bit uncomfortable with the Anglicans because we all used to go, all eight children at that time, would sit in a pew in the service and we were a little bit noisy and so we distracted the congregation quite a bit. So when the missionaries came along in 1970, I think he was sort of just a little bit frustrated with church and was prepared to listen. I was 10 back then. And so, interestingly, back then there wasn't a real rush to baptise people into the church. We were taught over a period of nine months, and I think we had probably three different missionary sets that taught us. And first of all, Mum and Dad were taught by Themselves. So all the children would gather in the kitchen while the missionaries taught the discussions. And then we would just learn from Mum and Dad what they were teaching them. So we'd be out there grumbling about, oh, and how we couldn't give up our tea or some of the other things that the Mormons didn't allow us to do. But then we were taught and that for me was a really big change. I really loved the missionaries and had a lot of fun with them.

John Dehlin [00:05:24] Were they from the States or were they from Australia?

Simon Southerton [00:05:25] I think not all of them. I think we had one that was an Australian. I think he's still in Sydney, actually in the social services department of the church. So we were all baptized in 1970, in September, apart from two of my older sisters who joined the church over the next couple of years. So we were baptised in September. I think a couple of years later we went to the New Zealand temple to be sealed. Oh, wow. So that was really, really exciting time.

John Dehlin [00:05:50] How did New Zealand get a temple

Simon Southerton [00:05:51] before Australia as a proportion of their population? I think there are a lot more Mormons in New Zealand.

John Dehlin [00:05:57] Is that because of the Maori influence or.

Simon Southerton [00:05:59] Almost certainly. The Mormon Church has always sat very comfortably in Maori communities, very family centered and they flocked into the church in large numbers. And it would have been a flip of a coin between Australia and New Zealand. I don't know that there's full statistics, but I would imagine there would be much higher concentration of Mormons in New Zealand, Zealand than in Australia.

John Dehlin [00:06:19] Okay, so your family was sealed. Now real quick, do you remember any early conversion for you experiences that you sort of once looked upon as spiritual experiences? Was there any emotional or spiritual element to your conversion or was it just sort of. Mom and dad said to do it, so I'm doing it.

Simon Southerton [00:06:38] I don't remember any one specific time. I certainly felt I'm a very emotional sort of a person. I can sit and watch telly and I will cry very easily. You know, I don't know what it is. It's in the genes there somewhere. And so, yeah, when I went to General Conference or listened to General Conference or my church leaders, I would often feel very strong emotional reactions to the things they were saying. And there was a very heavy emphasis, I think, in Sydney and the youth program to give the youth opportunities to feel the spirit, to feel those very strong emotions. And I've certainly felt them as I read the Book of Mormon. I prayed on several occasions, following Moroni's advice to receive a witness, but never on my knees did I receive a very clear witness? But certainly as a. I read the book, there were times when, yeah, I would be in tears and feeling very strong feelings about it, and I would have started to feel Those probably around 13, 14, I would say. I certainly wasn't one of those guys that went on their missions, having never read the book or never seriously considered the Book of Mormon or anything like that. I was pretty serious.

John Dehlin [00:07:38] So for you, you felt like at the time you had received a witness by reading the book?

Simon Southerton [00:07:42] Yeah, I felt that I was completely converted before my mission. I certainly went through a bit of a period on my mission when I was very intense about. I really strongly wanted to get that on my knees witness that many spoke about. And I guess up until that point, I hadn't really felt a huge need for that because I was pretty convinced.

John Dehlin [00:08:05] Did joining the church have a positive effect on your family that you can remember, or negative or.

Simon Southerton [00:08:10] Oh, no, I think it had a positive. I know that my parents have said on a few occasions, Mum and Dad both used to say that their marriage was pretty rocky at the time and it made a big difference there. I think we were always a pretty close family. My father was very determined every year and very frequently for the family to get together for family outings or family camping trips. We always used to go down to a place called Bateman's Bay and we'd camp for three weeks every year.

John Dehlin [00:08:34] Nice.

Simon Southerton [00:08:35] Yeah, I think we got on really well as a family. So overall, I think it was very positive. I had lots of good friends in the church. I enjoyed church, unlike the Anglicans. I don't remember sort of any good friends that I had at the Anglican Church, but straight away, when I was really strongly socialised into the church, had lots of friends and lots of good activities.

John Dehlin [00:08:54] Did you have a pretty strong ward back then?

Simon Southerton [00:08:56] Yeah, I think so. It was out at a place called Emu Plains, at the foothills of the Blue Mountains, just west of Sydney. Yeah. Very active in the youth program. Graduated from Ceremonary. President Kimball was the prophet during most of my teenage years, and I loved listening to him talk because he had a very distinctive voice. I think partly because of the surgery he'd had, but it was. Yeah, I loved his voice and loved listening to him.

Native Americans and Pacific Islanders in LDS Teaching

John Dehlin [00:09:18] What do you remember about the way Native Americans and Pacific Islanders were talked about in your years growing up in the church? How did you think about them? What were you taught about them and what role did that teaching play in just how you viewed the world?

Simon Southerton [00:09:33] I think it was Quite significant in the teaching process. My father was well educated, and there were a lot of people joining the church then that were well educated. So the missionaries couldn't just teach about the Book of Mormon without saying, by the way, there is research that looks very interesting. And, you know, there were film strips about digs in the Americas that showed baptismal fonts and temples and, you know, with the voiceover often, you know, describing how this fits so well with the Book of Mormon. And so that was fairly reassuring. But I think from an Australian perspective, the very significant thing for us is that the proportion of the church population in Australia and in particularly in New Zealand that are Polynesian is extremely high. So in New Zealand, I don't know what the figures would be, but it would have to be in the sort of 40 to 50% of the church would be Polynesian. Moris and Samoans and Tongans have migrated to New Zealand and also flowed through into Australia. So in Australia, we would probably have 20 to 25% of the church in Sydney would be Polynesian and fairly high numbers in Brisbane and Melbourne. And they all referred to themselves as the descendants of Lehi. They all felt that Lehi was not Leman. That was quite an interesting thing. They often refer to themselves as Lamanites, which is sort of curious because the mythology, if you like, for lack of a better word, that had arisen was that Hagoth in the Book of Mormon who sailed, took a lot of people and sailed off and was never heard of again. Many of them believe that he was one of their ancestors, but I believe he was a Nephite. So. But it's not like it was spoken about all of the time. But I think there was a very clear perception amongst the Polynesians that they were descendants of Israelites. Lehi was one of their ancestors, and many of them had patriarchal blessings that would tell them that they were from the tribe of Manasseh, which is the same tribe, I think, that Lehi belonged to.

John Dehlin [00:11:17] So does it say that somewhere?

Simon Southerton [00:11:20] I think it's somewhere. It says that. I'm not. Don't quote me on that one. But they certainly felt strong connection to Lehi. But also many of the prophets had, whenever they spoken to them at state conferences in New Zealand, had spoken about their connection to Lehi. So they felt that they were in the House of Israel just as much as Native Americans were. So I think it's the. Just the sheer number of them that were in the church that I think was quite important for me in sort of raising the profile of that belief in their connection to Lehi.

John Dehlin [00:11:47] Okay, so growing up around a lot of Polynesians who called themselves Lamanites or descendants of Lehi and that bringing some magic, I guess, and some intrigue and something special to your overall Mormon experience, then feeling you had so many of them living all around you.

Simon Southerton [00:12:03] I certainly had very good friends amongst Polynesians. I wouldn't say that they walked around referring to themselves all the time as Lamanites, but that was just a well known fact, I guess, that members in Australia, both Polynesians and non Polynesians, sort of knew that their ancestors were descended from Lehi. I guess the other thing that's significant is I don't know how widely known the work of Thor Heyerdahl was in America. Would you be familiar with Thor Heyerdahl?

John Dehlin [00:12:28] Tell us about that.

Simon Southerton [00:12:29] Okay. I think he was a Norwegian sort of adventurer and he was convinced that Polynesians were descended from a race of people that lived in South America because he'd visited with a few scholars, but he'd formed his own very strong views that that's where the Polynesians came from. And so in order to provide evidence in support of that view, he built a raft out of reeds and sailed into the Pacific.

John Dehlin [00:12:54] Oh, cool.

Simon Southerton [00:12:54] But he sort of had to cheat a little bit because it's very difficult to sail into the Pacific from South America. It's because of the nature of the currents. He had to be towed about 100 kilometres off the coast in order to get around that problem. Because it is extraordinarily difficult that the currents are against you and they just, you know, if you've got four or five kilometer an hour currents against you, then you don't have much say in where your boat's going to go. So everyone in the church in Australia and New Zealand would have known about Thor Heyerdahl and his voyage because it was just very widely discussed and very popular because it was in the news. And the church really latched onto that because it just gave additional support for the belief that the Polynesians had migrated into the Pacific from the Americas.

John Dehlin [00:13:35] Oh, right, right.

Simon Southerton [00:13:35] When in fact, there really is no support for that. So I think one of the.

John Dehlin [00:13:39] So since then, Thor Heydahl's theories have been disproven?

Simon Southerton [00:13:42] Oh, yeah. The wider academic community has completely dismissed his theories. There really is no very little evidence of any significant connection between the Pacific and South America. I mean, there's one or two things, like the sweet potato that is now widely used throughout the Pacific almost certainly came from South America. And there seems to be, there's some pretty good evidence that Polynesians landed in California. They've some very unique boat building technology and fishhook designs that are very characteristic of Polynesians, which have been found in Californian digs. But in both cases, it's almost certainly because the Polynesians had an amazing sailing skills. They'd invented the outrigger canoe. So the outrigger gave amazing stability to ocean going vessels. So they had very, very large outrigger canoes that could take, you know, 40 to 50 people, entire communities basically, and they could sail off and they could navigate very well by the stars. And they colonized the Pacific very, very rapidly because they could travel such long distances with these canoes. It's almost certainly given that they have this very strong track record in sailing, that they got to California and to the Americas somewhere and they picked up food to go back and they took with them the sweet potato.

John Dehlin [00:14:56] So they sailed back and forth even.

Simon Southerton [00:14:57] Yeah, almost certainly because they could just go for such long periods of time on these boats. They had an exhibition in Canberra not long ago with some of these outriggers. And they're substantial boats, very substantial. So it wasn't just a little canoe with one or two people fishing. These were deliberate colonizing voyages. Because the Pacific islands that they colonized, many of them were quite small. So the populations would grow pretty rapidly and then, and there was no room, so they started fighting. And then some of them decided, well, I'm going to get the heck out of here. And so they shuff off. So I think there was an island, I can't remember the name of the island, but it's in the sort of middle of the Pacific that was believed to have been colonized first. And from then within the next few hundred years, they colonized widely throughout the Pacific most places. So it took about 300 years from the very first voyages out of Southeast Asia for them to colonize the Pacific. But most of the colonization took place from around about a thousand years ago. So not all that long ago. So they got to, you know, Hawaii, New Zealand, Easter Island, a lot of those sort of very far flung places in the last 1200 years. So just amazing skill. So I don't think there's, there really isn't such a strong tradition of sailing amongst Native Americans. And I think it's partly because they just. There weren't a heck of a lot of islands off the coast of the mainland that looked attractive and they wanted to colonize Whereas in the Pacific, as you move east from Southeast Asia, in many cases you can actually see the island on the horizon. And so there are a lot of these sort of baby steps that they could do in their voyaging and to increase their skills significantly. So just some amazing people.

John Dehlin [00:16:29] Okay. And so where we were going was that there was some excitement in your teen years about the work of this researcher that the church felt might even give credence to the idea that the Pacific islands were somehow populated from Native Americans.

Simon Southerton [00:16:44] Yeah, that was very widely believed, I think, by members of the church. Interestingly, John Sorensen, who is one of the leading apologists for the church, was in the Pacific at the time that Thor Heyerdahl arrived on his raft. I think he was serving in maybe might have been French Polynesia somewhere not too far away. So I remember reading that he was very excited by that voyage. I think it had a very significant influence on his life.

John Dehlin [00:17:09] So any other experiences in your youth that are worth mentioning that sort of play into your experiences and later, you know, the things we're going to talk about. Anything else you want to mention about your youth?

Simon Southerton [00:17:18] I had a very strong interest in agriculture. I loved growing things and so that's where my interest in science came from. I actually did an agricultural science degree at Sydney University. I worked a lot with my father in the garden growing vegetables. And he instilled in me, I think, a very strong connection with growing stuff. He was a very keen gardener and so I guess that's where my interest in agricultural science came from.

Mission, Marriage, and Career in Genetics

John Dehlin [00:17:41] Okay, so how was your mission? Good experience?

Simon Southerton [00:17:43] Yeah, I think on the whole it was pretty positive. I was, I guess, a little bit disappointed that I was called to Melbourne initially because I lived in Sydney and Sydney and Melbourne are sort of rival cities in some respects. But no, I grew to really love Melbourne. I think it's a wonderful place to live, wonderful people.

John Dehlin [00:18:00] Where were you hoping to go?

Simon Southerton [00:18:01] Probably overseas. I think Perth would have been fine. My brother went to Perth. Actually my sister and brother served in Perth. But no, that was a minor issue. I got into the mission field and I loved it. So yeah, I went to Melbourne. I remember meeting with my mission president on the very first day that we were down there. And he just told us straight up that Melbourne is attracting door knocking, house to house mission. And that's what we did. We just knocked doors from 9 o' clock in the morning until sometimes as late as 9:30 at night.

John Dehlin [00:18:28] Wow.

Simon Southerton [00:18:28] And so those were hard days. But that's when I would memorize scriptures. I'd memorize my discussions going from house to house.

John Dehlin [00:18:35] So you were pretty committed, pretty devoted?

Guest [00:18:37] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [00:18:38] I think there were things that I mentioned earlier that on my mission, I wanted to receive that Witness because it was very common to hear stories of missionaries who'd got up in the morning and they'd prayed and the Spirit had told them, you gotta go and knock this street. Go and knock. And they find that golden investigator. There was a little period there where I was thinking, you know, I've been pretty devout. I've worked pretty hard in my life. I've read the Book of Mormon a lot of times. I'm pretty committed missionary. And I really wanted to receive that Witness for myself. And so I actually spent, I think it was three months, you know, every evening just on my knees asking for a witness. And I was that frustrated that I eventually did meet with my mission president and he managed to convince me that you may have already received your witness. And, you know, I sort of agreed with him because, you know, I did feel quite emotional as I read the Book of Mormon and emotional about a lot of things. And so I managed to sort of put that to rest. But I must admit, it did sort of surface from time to time. I used to think, well, why is that promise there? And it just seems odd that I knew that I wanted to receive that positive answer. I wanted to receive that very clear, warm feeling in my heart.

John Dehlin [00:19:42] Right.

Simon Southerton [00:19:42] You know, when I asked why, you know, that scripture's pretty explicit. Just ask, you'll receive that Witness. And I sort of couldn't understand why I wouldn't get it when I wanted it. I wanted the answer that would increase my faith even further. I guess so. I wasn't looking for an out. I wasn't looking to get that stupor

John Dehlin [00:20:01] of thought you wanted the Witness.

Simon Southerton [00:20:04] I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

John Dehlin [00:20:06] No.

Simon Southerton [00:20:07] It's not like I was asking for an angel to come down and stand in front of me and just spell it out. I wasn't asking for anything like that. It was just what was promised in Moroni. You know, I think this is not an uncommon experience. There are many people who felt this same thing. There are some who, yeah, they can get down and they can pray and bang, and they just get it like that. So I guess I just sort of thought, well, maybe I just didn't have the faith that was required or something.

John Dehlin [00:20:30] So that's how you interpreted your. What you felt to me was a lack of a witness.

Simon Southerton [00:20:34] Of a witness, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:20:35] And you Tried. You tried through your mission?

Simon Southerton [00:20:37] Yeah, once I'd met with my mission president, pretty much that was the end of it. I didn't. It was just from time to time you'd sort of think about. But by and large, my mission experience was very positive. Really enjoyed it. There were areas where it was tough. You got spat on every day, and somebody rolled their window down and abused you almost every day. But there were other areas. There's a particular area in Melbourne where I served, where it was a lot of Jewish people. And I never got any persecution the entire three months that I was there. It was just really nice. But there are some other areas a little bit rougher. And, yeah, you copped it all the time, but that didn't really bother me. But. So, yeah, I served full two years and then returned home. That was about 1983, I think. I was pretty determined just to carry on, just to do the things that the prophets had counseled us to do, and that was to get married, raise a family, and get on with serving in the church, which I did.

John Dehlin [00:21:28] So you came home and went back to school, got married.

Simon Southerton [00:21:32] Yep. Not long after I got back from my mission, I met Jane, my wife, and I think we dated for about three or four weeks, were engaged, married by the end of the year, so probably within about nine months. And that's.

John Dehlin [00:21:43] That's pretty fast.

Simon Southerton [00:21:45] It is pretty fast. And a year later, our first child, Jessica, arrived. And we've got five children now, so we've just gone girl, boy, girl, boy, girl for our children.

John Dehlin [00:21:54] So you got married within a year of your. Of coming home and five kids within how many years?

Simon Southerton [00:21:59] I think they're spaced about every two years to two and a half years. So over about 11 or 12 years.

John Dehlin [00:22:05] Was that more than, you know, the average Australian would have in terms of children?

Simon Southerton [00:22:10] Certainly more than the average Australian. Not probably fairly close to the average Mormon Australian. Very uncommon to see families of five children in Australia and extraordinarily uncommon for families of nine children, which is what I came from. But Jane has, I think, six or seven in her family, so quite a large family as well. So, yeah, we were keen to have family, so five to us seemed pretty normal.

John Dehlin [00:22:34] Okay, so did you actually ever become a geneticist? To what extent was genetics part of your profession, you know, leading up to your time as a bishop?

Simon Southerton [00:22:42] Yeah, genetics is a pretty major stream within most agricultural science degrees. So, yeah, when I came back from my mission, that's when I was completing my degree in agricultural science and I had pretty good introduction to Genetics. There I certainly learned about DNA, but the tools for studying DNA, they weren't available to me, I guess in the School of Agriculture at Sydney University, but I was certainly aware of DNA research. But it was towards the end of my degree I did pretty well, so I got an honours degree and then I moved straight into a PhD and I studied leaf rust in wheat.

John Dehlin [00:23:18] Oh, right.

Simon Southerton [00:23:19] Wheat is a major crop in Australia. It's one of our biggest export earners. So it's a very important plant and leaf rust is one of the biggest threats to it. Leaf rust is a very interesting disease in that there is a major gene, there's a single major gene in wheat for resistance to this rust. So there's one gene somewhere in the genome and we didn't know what it was back then that conferred resistance. And my research was studying how the plant was resistant to the rust. That was really quite a fun period. I really enjoyed that research. Since then I've moved away from wheat and pretty much most of my time has been devoted on tree genetics. But, yeah, it was a very fascinating time. So back then the molecular tools weren't available, but now the molecular tools are just amazing and researchers in csiro, where I'm working right now in plant industry, have cloned or identified the actual gene. So they know what the gene is and they know the spelling changes in that gene that cause a wheat plant to be resistant. So things have changed dramatically since then. Back then it was sort of a black box. They knew that there was a gene and I think I sort of came close to getting involved in that research, but no, that. But I started some work on eucalypts not long after because I went overseas to England and worked for a couple of years in Norwich at a place called the John Innes Plant Science Centre, which was an amazing place to work. A lot of people there using molecular techniques. It was then that I really wanted to work in the molecular field because I had a pretty good grounding in genetics and I wanted to get down to that DNA level to understand what was going on in plants. And I started then studying flowering. In eucalypts, there are certain genes that switch on flowering. And so during that time, I mean, I had a wonderful time in England, really enjoyed the work there, but I was also very involved in the church. I've always enjoyed working with the young men and so I was. I think I was young men's president over there in the Norwich ward for most of the time that I was over there and just really enjoyed being with the Youth. And I think I sort of enjoyed their questioning. You know, they're just much more interesting to be around than the high priests and the elders. I was a young men's president there, and then when I was a young men's president in several wards when I was back here in Australia, and then I was called into bishoprics and then finally as a Bishop in 1996 in Brisbane, which was a really very rewarding calling, but very tough, very hard. Anyone that served as a bishop will know that it's a pretty tough calling. We had one of the very few deaf units in Australia that was in the ward that I was in. This was an OGA ward in Brisbane. So we had, I think at one stage something like 15 or 20 deaf people that would meet in our ward. So we had somebody up there next to the speaker signing to the deaf all the time. I think the deaf back then, maybe it's the same now, but the deaf, they miss out on a lot of the sort of subtleties of communication that we have, all those subtle inflections of our voices and that can give away sarcasm and when we're being funny, that sort of thing, they miss a lot of that. They can be bursts of anger very rapidly and there can be confusion and so they can get a bit testy at times. So we had a very challenging experience. But at the same time it was very exciting because it was probably one of the first deaf units in Australia. And for a while there it was, it was doing very well. But yeah, so that was a. That was an interesting experience.

Connecting DNA Research to the Book of Mormon

John Dehlin [00:26:25] So when did you first start making a connection between modern DNA research and development and the Book of Mormon? Do you remember kind of how this first started of you making those connections and starting to look into it?

Simon Southerton [00:26:39] Yeah, no, I remember that with almost perfect clarity. It was back in 1998. I really had not had much of an interest in the origins of Native Americans. I'd never really taken any serious interest in their origins until I had a bit of a cris and started to look into it. But in early 1998, I was feeling a bit frustrated in my career. I'd actually resigned from the forestry company that I was working with, this biotechnology company. I resigned from it because I was unhappy with the way the research was being directed. And I started working in a sort of a short term contract at the University of Queensland. And I decided to enter a graduate medical degree at the University of Queensland. And so for several months in preparation for this exam, I studied university level chemistry, physics, some maths. But also biology. And I studied university level biology textbook for about probably two months. And I don't think I've ever had such a comprehensive appreciation of the importance of evolution. It really lies at the centre of modern biology. It holds it all together. It makes sense of all of the data that we have. It's an absolutely brilliant theory. It's not a theory in the respect that there's uncertainty about it. The scientists use the word theory differently. It means that it's the best explanation for all of the data that's available. So I felt that I had a very strong appreciation of this. And it just so happened that at that time, a Hebrew professor at Brigham Young University, Donald Parry, published an article in the Ensign called the Flood and the Tower of Babel. And it basically claimed that modern geologists incorrectly assumed that the Earth was old and that the flood was a very recent global phenomenon. So four and a half, 5,000 years ago. And he claimed in this article that this is what faithful Latter Day Saints believed. And if you didn't believe that, you sort of implied that you misinterpreted the geological evidence. Now, you know, I'm not a geologist, but what I was concerned about was the biological problem that belief in a universal flood just four and a half thousand years ago created. There were enough beetle species on the Earth four and a half thousand years ago to sink the ark.

John Dehlin [00:28:51] So, wow, I had no idea.

Simon Southerton [00:28:54] Oh, I think there's about a million, you know, let alone all of the other species. How do you make sense of it? Because if there had been a global deluge which had wiped out vast numbers of species of animals and plants, the evidence for this would just be so obvious in the archaeological record. There are enormous problems with a belief like that. You know, we have trees that are over 5,000 years old now, they know from carbon dating there are whole hillsides of one clone of a tree. So these are trees that the branch falls, touches the ground, forms roots and then another tree sprouts. There are whole hillsides that are exactly the same clone and they can estimate from the rate of the growth of this clone that they're about 10,000 years old. Now, I study eucalypts and there are 600 species of eucalypts and they don't like being flooded for 30 or 40 days. Most of them die. The problems just go on and on. From our uniquely Australian perspective, koalas have to have fresh eucalypt leaves to live. There's nothing else they eat. So there had to be fresh gum trees on the on the boat to keep the koalas alive. Why is it that all of the marsupials, apart from a few in South America, why is it the marsupials got back to Australia but other animals didn't, like lions that would have eaten them quite happily. So, you know, it just goes on and on. You can go on forever about the problems. How did Noah manage to collect the Australian animals anyway in the first place? So I was enormously frustrated by this article. It didn't affect my faith at all. I'd read a few things in the Ensign that sort of bothered me in the past, and when I was younger, I'd sat through talks from general authorities and heard them ridiculing evolution, and it didn't really bother me. But, you know, as an adult, I'd sat through a few of those and I was a little bit troubled, but it really hadn't registered very strongly with me. The main problem was that I had just finished reviewing a modern biology textbook, and so I think I had a pretty general and deep appreciation of the importance of evolution. And in order for there to be a flood four and a half thousand years ago to generate this, the enormous diversity of species that we have on the Earth now, evolution would have had to have gone into hyperdrive. You would have had to have had an enormously rapid rate of evolution. And there just isn't evidence for any of that. It just doesn't make sense.

John Dehlin [00:31:05] So you were going to tell us sort of the day where you started becoming really troubled. Was this article the Flood and the Tower of Babel like the first crack in your testimony, or when did the first crack start developing for you as it relates to these issues?

Simon Southerton [00:31:19] It certainly wasn't a crack in my testimony. I just wanted to be able to talk to other Mormons about this because I think I'd sort of accumulated a little bit of frustration that biological scientists didn't seem to be all that highly regarded by church leaders and they'd stick the boot in every now and then at general conference. So I just wanted to know. I wanted to talk to other Latter Day Saints about the flood and evolution and how they resolved these sort of things. I spoke to a scientist of my own Ward about this, and he agreed with me. He didn't believe there was a recent global flood. But I did want to find out what other scientists, particularly at Brigham Young University, thought about this sort of thing. And so I went on the Internet, which back then was, this is 1998. It was sort of starting to kick off, but not an awful lot of people had the Internet in their own home, but scientists used it all the time. And so I went on the Internet to see if I could find what other Mormon scholars had written. And I searched for weeks.

John Dehlin [00:32:12] Oh, is this why you were a bishop or before you were a bishop?

Simon Southerton [00:32:15] That was while I was a bishop.

John Dehlin [00:32:16] Okay.

Simon Southerton [00:32:16] Because at that time, I had stopped working in order to prepare for that exam. So I did have a fair bit of time and I did have access to computers. Took up a position at the University of Queensland. And so I had access to computers there. And, you know, there wasn't an awful lot of stuff on the Internet back then anyway. But certainly there was nothing that I could find that had been written by BYU scholars about the flood. Interestingly, since then, some. Some BYU scholars have got together and written some pretty compelling articles that say that there really is no evidence of a universal in the last four or five thousand years. But what I stumbled on on the Internet, that really started to raise some serious questions was a statement by the Smithsonian Institute. And this statement was referring to the Book of Mormon. And it pretty much dismissed a lot of the scientific claims that the Book of Mormon puts forward. For example, in relation to Old World plants and animals that were present in the Americas, which weren't there, and, for example, horses and cattle. It said that steel hadn't been found in the New World. There was no evidence of any language connection. What really surprised me was not necessarily all the things it was saying, but was just the certainty. And that was sort of a little bit unusual for a scientific institution to make those sort of claims. But that sort of surprised me to make those very bold claims about the things that the Book of Mormon was presenting just had no connection with reality. Sort of jolted me. And so I then started to look for anything online that supported the Book of Mormon. And. And I guess it was during those searches that I used the search engines that I normally use in my research and up popped a couple of research papers on the DNA research on Native Americans. And that really caught my interest because, you know, I worked in genetics, I worked with DNA all the time. So it didn't take terribly long to become familiar with the approaches they were using. They were slightly different to what I was doing on a daily basis. But so after two weeks, I think I'd accumulated roughly 30 or 40 research papers, and the sum total of it was that the DNA analysis had been completed on about 2,000 Native Americans and also roughly 500 Polynesians. And there was simply no sign of any Israelite DNA. Both groups clearly had DNA that came from Asia. So I ended up in this really straight line.

John Dehlin [00:34:27] No one was looking in the scientific papers. No one was looking for, quote, Israelite DNA, you know, amongst the Native American populations.

Simon Southerton [00:34:34] Right. No, but if it had been there, they would have found, and they would have had no qualms about publishing it. But I think, you know, your comment there raises a good point. The academic community outside of the LDS Church has really never seen any evidence of Old World connections in the Americas. For the last hundred years, the scientific consensus in non Mormon scholars in the US has been that Native Americans came from Asia through the Bering Strait 14 to 20,000 years ago. Yeah. So at the same time that I was reading about the DNA, I was also learning, you know, what the wider academic community about the origins of Native Americans. So the DNA research fit very comfortably with that. So here I studied for a couple of weeks. I was always sharing these things with my wife. I'd come home and I'd say, look, I'll just drop a couple more research papers in front of her. She could tell by reading the abstract sort of what the research discoveries were. She's a schoolteacher, very intelligent, and was able to get the gist of the research papers. I guess I wouldn't say that she was as preoccupied with it as I was, but she could see that there was an issue there. But I generally allowed her to consider these things and weigh them up for herself. I didn't sort of slam them down in front of her and say, oh, this isn't. This is a death knell for the Book of Mormon or anything like that. In fact, for the two weeks that I was reading these research papers, it didn't affect my testimony. I still believe the Book of Mormon was true, but at the end of two weeks, I was completely convinced that Native American DNA came from Asia.

John Dehlin [00:35:58] Huh. But you didn't make. You didn't make any connection.

Simon Southerton [00:36:01] No, I didn't. I never really made a conscious connection. Sort of sit down and weigh it up and say, yeah, I'm gonna go with that. That looks like that's where most of the evidence lies. I think it was a Sunday night at the end of this period of fairly intense research that we sat down with our children and we quite often we would sing songs with them. And that particular Sunday night we sang Book of Mormon stories. And I remember feeling very, very upset and quite confused about that experience. And by the end of the song, I determined we were never gonna sing that as a family again. I Just couldn't because it's so obvious in this. You know, you sing this song and it's sung to the beat of a Native American Tom. Tom. Distinctively Native American. The children in primary, they stick their fingers up behind their head to mimic the feathers and the headband. And very, very distinctively Native American. And so, yeah, I just realized, I think that for me that was a really almost what they call sort of a line in the sand. That was a pretty emotional time for me. I went to bed that night very confused and I woke up in the morning and I just wasn't a Mormon anymore. So it was while I was sleeping. Things got sorted out in my subconscious.

John Dehlin [00:37:07] Okay, but your book came out when? 2004.

Simon Southerton [00:37:09] Yeah, 2004.

John Dehlin [00:37:11] Okay. So how long did you serve as bishop?

Simon Southerton [00:37:13] I was called in 96, so it was just under two years that I served as a bishop.

John Dehlin [00:37:17] Okay.

Simon Southerton [00:37:18] And at that time I was serving as a bishop.

John Dehlin [00:37:20] Did you ask to be released as bishop then in 98?

Simon Southerton [00:37:22] Yeah, that was pretty much one of the first things that crossed my mind. You know, that morning, that week was a pretty bizarre sort of week. I would go from absolute peaks of exhilaration, feeling like I'd resolved all of these problems. You know, flood evolution, Book of Mormon problems, all of those were resolved. But then to utter despair. I remember feeling on four or five occasions complete and utter desperation. But you know, humans are pretty resourceful things and you recover from these things. But yeah, certainly one of the things that came to mind straight away was that I just could not serve as a bishop if I didn't believe the Book of Mormon was true or if I had serious doubts about the Book of Mormon, I had to be released. And so I rang my stake president, Karl Mora, a wonderful man, rang him on that Monday, set up an interview with him, I think on the might have been the Tuesday night or the Wednesday night, and asked to be released. I explained the difficulties that I was going through. He's a very non academic, but, you know, very kind and sensible man. And he could see the problems for me, didn't infect him at all. And he asked me, oh, look, can you hang on for a few weeks? Because it is difficult to just suddenly release a bishop. Most releases of bishops have four to five or six weeks of work that goes into the identification of selection of the other bishop and the calling of the new bishop. So he knew that they would have to have somebody sort of stand in as the bishop. Turns out it was one of the stake presidents he stood in as Bishop for a period until they had selected the new bishop. So I met with the stake President on the, I think it was the Wednesday and then on the Sunday I met with all of the Stake presidency. They were pretty much the same. They didn't question my integrity or question my understanding the science. And I felt like I was treated very kindly. And the following Sunday I was released. I even, I think I even conducted the meeting and I spoke at my release.

Guest [00:39:12] Wow.

John Dehlin [00:39:13] Sure. On release. So did you never try and like contact the church or contact biologists at byu? It doesn't sound like you went through a period of bargaining where you tried to come up with answers or find other Mormon biologists that could help answer the questions for you. Is that right or wrong?

Serving as Bishop While Doubting

Simon Southerton [00:39:29] I think that's right. I didn't have any doubts about the problem. I knew that the vast majority, over 99.5% of Native Americans had DNA that was definitely from Asia. So I didn't need to have that confirmed to me. I knew that there was nothing that a Mormon scientist was able to say to convince me that that was incorrect. And that's been proven to have been true. Ten years later, now they accept that their DNA does come from Asia. But I certainly wanted to talk to BYU scientists. I didn't sort of throw up my hands, I'm leaving the church or anything like that. In fact, I serv as a primary teacher for another two or three months. But I was put in touch with Scott Woodward, a BYU scientist who had worked with DNA. And we corresponded on and off. It was a bit challenging because he was in the middle of a trip to Peru. I alerted him to all the research papers. He was aware of the papers. And we had a bit of a sort of a backwards and forwards for about two or three days. It was pretty robust, but it was quite polite.

John Dehlin [00:40:26] What was he saying?

Simon Southerton [00:40:27] Well, he was sort of looking at the plausibility. What I didn't realize initially was that he had changed his view of the Book of Mormon quite significantly from the way that I interpreted the Book of Mormon. And most Mormons would have interpreted the Book of Mormon at that stage. Most Mormons believed that most Native Americans were descended from Israelites. That was a very widespread belief and I think many Mormons still believe that. But he'd sort of reached the point where he didn't think that it was doctrine that all of Native Americans were Lamanites. And he sort of essentially believed that the Lehigh contribution to the Native American gene pool was fairly modest or very small and that they had mixed with large numbers of Native Americans when they first arrived.

John Dehlin [00:41:07] So this is back in 98, he

Simon Southerton [00:41:09] was already thinking this stuff, thinking along those lines. And you got to remember he's, you know, he's a byu. I hadn't been talking to Mormon apologists for years. But Mormon apologists have been aware that Native Americans have very strong connections to Asia from just the archaeological evidence. There's very strong evidence that they've been in the Americas for 13,000 years. The most compelling evidence is these stone spear points of a culture called the Clovis culture, which are just scattered all over North America. Thousands and thousands of these have been found in all sorts of places. And thousands of radiocarbon datings have been done on the oldest of these stone spear points. And they all come up at about 13,000 years ago. So the apologists were starting to sort of wind back and limit their understanding of the Book of Mormon very significantly. You know, there were things so Scottish had listened to that apologetics, but he did, in the midst of his defenses of the Book of Mormon, he did admit that he had struggled with some of these issues and he'd resolved most of them. But for me, it was very confronting. As you know, as I mentioned earlier, I was surrounded by Lamanites, people who believed they were descended from Lehi. Some were in my ward in Sydney. There were hundreds of them. They all believed they were descended from Lehi. I'd never heard any of that sort of stuff at church, so I guess it was a pretty short exchange. But in a sense, the sum of that communication was that the problem just got worse. It didn't get any better.

John Dehlin [00:42:31] Did you get the sense that he was motivated by a desire to prove the Book of Mormon as true, or that the church had sent him to Peru to try and find that evidence? In other words, kind of to affirm the Church's teachings?

Simon Southerton [00:42:45] I don't think that there was any decision on the behalf of BYU to send him to Peru or anything like that. I think he had some other scientific questions that he was. Was interested in, but he'd certainly had to struggle with the results he was finding.

John Dehlin [00:42:58] Right. Well, that's a pretty fast decline for you. It sounds like you went from believing. Bishop, was there anything else that was affecting your testimony or was this just like a train wreck that just happened within the course of a couple weeks?

Simon Southerton [00:43:12] I would say that I lost my testimony while I was sleeping.

John Dehlin [00:43:15] Yeah. So it was like you went from literal believers to complete non believer within a 24 hour period?

Simon Southerton [00:43:23] 12 hours, yeah. Overnight. I Literally went to sleep believing, and I woke up just not believing at all.

John Dehlin [00:43:29] So for those who like to attribute disbelief or disaffection to a desire to sin or being offended or some type of social thing, did any of those things play in as well for you?

Simon Southerton [00:43:44] No, they had nothing to with do with it.

John Dehlin [00:43:46] Do you feel like you were happy in the church and as bishop and in your family? Do you feel like your family was having a positive, happy church experience up until that point?

Simon Southerton [00:43:55] I think overall, yes. You know, serving as a bishop is hard, but I found it deeply rewarding. I really enjoyed the relationship I had with the Stake Presidency. I felt I was a good bishop and felt pretty comfortable. There were just little things here and there. They were all minor there. They weren't things that preoccupied my thoughts. I was absolutely convinced that the church was true and I had no intention of leaving the church. I certainly wasn't looking for a way to get out.

John Dehlin [00:44:21] And how much of a shock was it, you know, a few weeks later to just not believe, not believe it at all?

Simon Southerton [00:44:27] Oh, it was deeply shocking. As I mentioned earlier, you know, I went on this sort of roller coaster ride, I think it was one or two probably a couple of times, and I sort of woke up in a sweat thinking I must have completely misinterpreted the research. So I'd go back and I'd look at a couple of papers and reassured myself, but that soon stopped. But I must admit that over probably a couple of months, there would have been four or five times when I just felt utter despair. The church teachings are in many respects very comforting. They take away this fear of death and what's going to happen in the afterlife, because I'd been raised to believe that Christ was going to return before I died, so I'd be amongst those who'd not taste of death. Many of the people in the church were taught the same thing and believed that back then. And I wouldn't be surprised if some of the youth are being taught the same things these days. But I must say that, yeah, while there were days of utter despair, there were days of just real genuine highs. Absolutely thrilled that many of the things that I struggled with over the years and they weren't major concerns, but all of the problems are solved by reaching that one conclusion.

John Dehlin [00:45:38] The ones about evolution and age of the earth and all those scientific things,

Simon Southerton [00:45:43] you know, by then, I must say that I was aware of other issues like the Book of Abraham. As far as I'm concerned, the Book of Abraham is the most blatant Fraud in the Church. I've seen the apologetics, and it's the worst apologetics I've ever read. Joseph Smith was taken in by a con man. He made the Book of Abraham up. So if I'd had these problems with the Book of Mormon, and then I looked over at the Book of Abraham and it was compelling and that it was true, and things may have been a bit different, but how is Joseph

John Dehlin [00:46:10] conned in relation to the Book of Abraham?

Simon Southerton [00:46:12] Well, in my view, this traveling salesman came through town. All the members of the church knew that Joseph Smith could translate ancient languages, and he declared on the spur of the moment that they were the words of Abraham and he could translate them. And so straight away, he was compelled. He was locked into producing a translation for this book.

John Dehlin [00:46:30] But did someone con Joseph? I just want to make sure I understood what you said.

Simon Southerton [00:46:33] I don't know whether they conned him, but I think he got in a tight spot when he declared that they were the writings of Abraham. Okay, so then he was compelled to produce a translation.

John Dehlin [00:46:42] Okay, I just want to make sure I didn't misunderstand what you were saying.

Simon Southerton [00:46:46] Don't quote me on the Book of Abraham. I'm no expert on it, but, you know, the apologists are now saying that it's not a translation and that he was inspired by the manuscript to produce the text of the Book of Abraham, even though the translation of the papyrus now bears no resemblance at all to the the Book of Abraham story. But for me, the most compelling is the facsimiles in the Book of Abraham, which very similar facsimiles have been produced in many, many other papyri. There was an exhibition, I think, while the Louvre in Paris was being renovated. They had quite a lot of the Egyptian relics, went on a tour, and they came to Canberra a couple of years ago. And I could see the components of the facsimiles in the Book of Abraham being rendered in many times throughout other papyri. So all of the elements of those papyri are very well understood by Egyptolog, and they have no connection. They're mistranslated. The various characters that are identified in those facsimile by Joseph Smith and they appear there in the Book of Abraham are just incorrect.

John Dehlin [00:47:44] And you knew about this stuff back in 98.

Simon Southerton [00:47:46] I didn't know anything at all about it before 98. I came across that stuff on the Internet as well. So I guess I mentioned the Book of Abraham because here we're talking about the two main scriptures that originated with Joseph Smith and I already knew that the Book of Mormon was severely compromised. And so to see the controversy surrounding the Book of Abraham, and in my view, the fairly weak explanations by apologists just convinced me that there's just problems everywhere here. I already knew the Book of Mormon was in trouble, but this sort of broadened the problem, I guess.

John Dehlin [00:48:17] Right. Okay.

Simon Southerton [00:48:17] So beyond those two, I'm not really all that interested in getting to the bottom of all of the other problems. Not really all that interested. Mainly because if the founding scriptures are compromised, then, yeah, that explains everything else.

John Dehlin [00:48:30] Else. Okay, so some dark lows, but also some high highs. So you said you served in primary for a couple months. Then what happened? Did you try and, like, talk to ward members or did your stake president try and help you? Was there ever any efforts to get you back or to get you to believe again or any of that kind of stuff?

Simon Southerton [00:48:50] I must have had a few conversations with my stake president, but I didn't know. I don't think they were really keen to spend a lot of time with me, me talking through this, I guess because they probably thought, you know, it's science, they don't really understand it, and, you know, that's a problem that Simon's going to have to deal with. But I know that one of the first things my stake president asked of me was that I wouldn't talk about this. So I didn't talk about this with anyone in the church or even said, family. I sort of said, well, you know, give me a break. I've got to be able to explain to my family why I've just been released as a bishop. And he could see the sense in that. So, you know, I had to write a letter to my family explaining why I was being released as. But, you know, I met with the stake presidency member and said, look, I'm willing to serve in positions where I don't have to talk about the Book of Mormon. And so I think I was called to teach in primary and I taught a few lessons, but I think at the time I had to go away for a conference somewhere else. I think it was in Adelaide and a couple of other things. So there were a couple of weeks when I was away, and so I didn't hold out a great deal of hope I would be able to stay active in the church, but I didn't sort of run for the door. We didn't really want to do that. My wife was still serving in primary, and, you know, our children were still active in primary in the youth program. So we hung On, I think I had a couple of sort of unpleasant. Got a fairly terse and critical email from another scientist in the wards. Very uncommon for there to be two scientists, two plant scientists in the one ward, but there was another one in the ward and I got a very nasty email from him claiming that I'd completely misunderstood the research. And it was a tough time. I just had to bite my tongue, didn't say much, and I was starting to feel a little alienated. And that got a heck of a lot worse when I received a letter from the area president. Vaughan Featherstone was the area president at the time. And, uh.

John Dehlin [00:50:34] Oh.

Simon Southerton [00:50:35] Uh. Oh. I was in. I think it was about two months after I had actually approached the stake president and he just launched into. Yeah, I can sort of understand what his motivations were, but they were. It was a pretty nasty letter, but he launched into a script. There's one in Nephi that talks about the cunning plans of the evil One. And when they are learned, they think they are wise, but their knowledge is foolishness and all that sort of stuff. You know, as a PhD student, you do tend. As a scientist, you do tend to know an awful lot about very little. So you do get. People do think you're very wise, but you're not. You know, you just know a heck of a lot about very little. But it was a letter that hurt me quite deeply, I think, because it warned me that I would be hurting my family and my father who died, and that I would be hurting future generations in the church, and even predicted that I'd become a hollow shell of the man that I was once in the church. You know, this was at a time when I had not really decided I can't stay in the church. I was really struggling and I was at a lot of things going through my head. I was still active, but I was very confused. And so it was a very disappointing letter. And what was even more disappointing was that it was a letter based on rumour. He hadn't even spoken to my stake president about me personally. And even my stake president, Carl Mora, admitted that he was quite disappointed with the last. It just wasn't something that was going to help me in my situation. And so I wrote back to Elder Featherstone and explained why I was quite disappointed to receive such a letter. And he apologised. He wrote back about a week later. This is when people used to write letters. And I got. He apologised. But in that letter, he couldn't. He couldn't help but urge me to reconsider and to come back. So another thing that occurred then was, I think it was before even Elder Featherstone's letter arrived and was, it was after I'd been communicating with Scott Woodward, I received what looked to be an article, a research article published by the FARMS scholars at byu and it was supposedly authored by Scott Woodward and another scholar named John Tevednis. He's not a scientist, he's, I think, a linguistics scholar at byu. And this article just launched into this discussion of the DNA issue relating to the Book of Mormon. And it was dated August 1998. It was August 1990. And it labeled anyone that had a problem with the DNA issue a critic of the church. And you know, that really bothered me tremendously because I wasn't a critic of the church. I had honestly spoken to my stake president and asked to be released. I don't know how you can function as a bishop if you're deeply troubled by the central text of the LDS Church, if you're deeply troubled by the claims of the Book of Mormon. And so in my view, there was no alternative. I had to ask to be be released. And so I was beginning to feel like the battle lines were very clearly being drawn. I was being branded a critic of the church and it didn't seem like there was much hope that I was going to find a comfortable place to live within the Mormon Church. And so towards the end of 98, I applied for a position at CSIRO in Canberra and was offered a position in early 1999. And in, I think it was February in 1909, we moved to Canberra. And I think that was pretty much for us, a convenient time to just withdraw from the church. We haven't been back since.

Leaving the Church and Writing the Book

John Dehlin [00:53:57] So starting around 1999 you just stopped going to church?

Simon Southerton [00:54:00] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:54:00] Okay. And I want to talk about what life's been since leaving the church. But let's jump to when you decided to go ahead and write a book about it. When did you start thinking about writing this book?

Simon Southerton [00:54:11] Probably around about 2,000, probably about a year and a half or 18 months later. The book took a long time to write because I had a full time science job that demanded my time. And so I think it was about three or four years. Very, very painful. A lot of writing into the very wee small hours of the morning. But it was the response of the church, it was the branding me a critic of the church so quickly. And it was the nature of the apologetics, the way they were responding to the science was quite troubling to me. And so I just. There had to be another side. Yeah, so that was the motivation. I think I was disturbed by the way the Church was responding, which was not really doing anything, not really openly acknowledging anything, and allowing the apologist to speak on their behalf unofficially. So everything that the apologists write and say is unofficial. The Church doesn't stand behind it. So you've got to ask yourself, why do we have to accept this if the leaders of the Church aren't prepared to stand behind it, even when they're paying their salaries? Salaries of the farm scholars are being paid by the Church, but the Church isn't prepared to stand behind what they write.

John Dehlin [00:55:17] And that bothered you and made you want to write a book?

Simon Southerton [00:55:19] Yeah, I guess for a little while there, I was a little bit surprised. Why is it that this issue hasn't been addressed by a scholar in the United States? So I couldn't understand that for a while. So, yeah, I just. I felt like it was very unlikely that anyone else was going to write it. And so I launched into it. Took a long time. It was very, very difficult. But yeah, I was published in Signature Books were really excited, I think, when they saw the first manuscript and been very thankful for their support during that whole period.

John Dehlin [00:55:47] And again, was your motivation, it was that you weren't happy with the Church's response, but would it be fair to say that your motivation was to take the church down, to lead people out?

Simon Southerton [00:55:59] Well, it's the same sort of thing that drives most scientists. You do science to find the truth behind things. I was studying the rust fungus in my PhD to understand exactly how plants are resistant to that fungus. And when you're in scientific community, if people come along with ideas that you disagree with, you're entitled to question those. So you, you know, there are ideas that you don't like. You present counter arguments and yeah, my whole. That's the reason I sort of like science. You want to discover new things and you want to reveal things that are true. And I just felt the scientific side wasn't getting a fair hearing. I must admit that I had been hurt by the way that the church had treated me. And I have heard since that there are other members in the church in Brisbane who have also been quite troubled with the way. Way the whole thing was handled. So there is an element of, you know, probably getting back at the church could be interpreted in there. But I think the fundamental motivation has to be, for me, that I just wanted to get the truth out, the true story of what the DNA research is showing and to be fair to myself. I stand behind what I've presented in the book. I think the apologetic community now pretty much admits that Israelite DNA hasn't been found in the Americas, and that's pretty much what I was saying six years ago. Took them about four more years to actually admit that. But yeah, there's been a a lot of stuff's happened over, I guess over the last 12 years or over the last six or seven years since I published my book. But the central claims of the book, I think, still stand.

John Dehlin [00:57:31] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Music today was provided by the Saber Rattlers. Check them out@sabre-rattlers.com the Mormon Stories logo was just generously donated by StudioCase.com thanks for listening.

Guest [00:57:46] Come come ye saints. No toil nor labor fear but with joy wend your way though hard to you this journey may appear gracious shall be as your day Tis better far for us to strive Our useless cares from us to drive to the San Jo your hearts will swell oh I All is well, all is well. Why should we mourn? I think our lot is high Tis not so all is right and what, why should we think to earn a great reward if we now shun the fight Gird up your lo fresh courage take Our God will never ask for sin sake soon we'll have tale to tell oh, all is well, all is well oh, all is well, all is well. Should we die before our journey's through happy day all is well we then are free from toil and sorrow too with the just we shall dwell. But if our lives are spared again to see the sa the rest obtain I will make this chorus swell oh, all is well, all is well,

John Dehlin [01:01:36] all

Guest [01:01:36] is well, all is well all is well oh, all is well, All is well.

Genetics Basics and Native American DNA Origins

Part 2 of 2 · Ep. 349

Simon Southerton [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3.

John Dehlin [00:00:07] Mormon Stories Podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you. To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today@mormonstories.org for the full unedited version of this interview. Look for it in the itunes feed or find it@mormonstories.org There are probably lots of technical papers we can refer people to if they really want to dive into this stuff. And so I just want to say for you and for everyone that what we're about to do is not do a deep dive into the full rough complexities of genetics as it relates to this issue. But I do think it's important just to lay out kind of the basics, right? And if people can just understand the basics, then they can decide if they want to kind of dig a little deeper. But, you know, I guess we could start with just what's the narrative that the church taught for 150 plus years? You know, let's start there.

Simon Southerton [00:01:10] Okay. Well, if we start with DNA, I think you would readily acknowledge that you look like your parents, you look like your ancestors. And the reason you do is that you've inherited their DNA. The There must be unique things in their DNA that you carry, and you carry a mixture. Half of your DNA comes from your mother and half from your father. And DNA is what pretty much drives everything in the body. Every single cell in our body has a copy of our DNA. And humans have about 3 billion bases or letters of DNA in their genome. So those letters are the ones most people are familiar with. There's a. They're referred to as A, C, G and T. And while the DNA sequence may look entire random, it's not entirely random. It contains in amongst that information all of the genes which code for proteins, which do the business of creating our bodies, creating muscle cells, skin cells, heart cells, liver, you name it. All the information to guide the creation of our bodies and the operation of our bodies is contained in our DNA. So that DNA is packaged in 23 pairs of what we call chromosomes. And most people have probably seen a picture of a chromosome at some stage in their life. So we have 23 pairs of those. So one pair, say for example, of chromosome 1, one pair of the two chromosome ones that you have comes from your mother and one comes from your father. But there are also other bits of DNA that are slightly different in their inheritance. There's the X chromosome. We all have an X chromosome. Women have two X chromosomes, so they receive one from their mother and one from their father. But males have an X and a Y chromosome. So we always know that X chromosome comes from our mother and, and the Y chromosome always comes from our father. And most of that DNA, as I mentioned before, every cell in our body has a copy of that DNA. It's unbelievable really, isn't it? It's 3 billion bases of DNA, but it all resides within a structure in the cell called the nucleus, which is sort of like the command centre of the cell. It drives how that cell behaves. So humans have around about, I think it's between 20 and 30,000 genes. It's being revised, that number's being revised all the time. And not all the genes in a particular cell are active. So many of them have been switched off, but a certain proportion will be switched on and that will depend on what part of the body it is. So if it's a muscle cell, certain genes are on, many are off. If the genes involved in producing the eye, there are many genes in muscle cells, for example, that are completely inactive while an eye is being developed, that sort of thing. So there is another piece of DNA that we have, a very, very tiny amount of DNA that comes all the time from our mother. It's called mitochondrial DNA. And mitochondria are little energy that are not in the nucleus. They're in the outside of the nuc place called the cytoplasm. And it's their position in the cytoplasm that explains why they come from our mother. So when the sperm fertilizes the egg, the mitochondria that are in the egg cell from the mother are the ones that go into the new developing zygote and eventually the fetus. So the sperm just delivers the male derived chromosomes. So studying, I mean, we have 3 billion bases or letters of DNA in our genome. And that's a very difficult amount of DNA to sort of dig into and find really use to study human inheritance. And so scientists at the earliest points when they were studying human genetics, identified DNA that they could track much more simply. So mitochondrial DNA is much simpler to study. There's a couple of reasons for that, but one of them is that if you were to compare the entire 3 billion bases of DNA in our genome to the mitochondrial DNA, it would be equivalent to comparing a 500 page book to a single word. So a 500 page book contains many thousands of words. Mitochondrial DNA only has about 16,500 DNA letters in it, that's an awful lot less than 3 billion. So it's just much easier for scientists to study it. But it's also its inheritance pattern, so it's inherited down maternal lines, which makes it much easier to track its inheritance. And on the male side of our pedigrees, the Y chromosome DNA has also proven to be very useful for studying human ancestry. But there are several things about the mitochondrial DNA that make it very nice to study, one of them being that there are many. If you consider a single cell, there are only two copies of our entire genome. So one copy from your mother, one copy from your father. But outside of the cell, there are many mitochondria, and each mitochondrion has many copies of the mitochondrial DNA. So there's a lot more copies of the DNA in the mitochondrial DNA. Even though it's a fairly short amount of DNA, there's a lot more there. And that makes it particularly easy to study, because in comparison to other genes in the genome, there' just so much more of it. So that's a sort of a very quick sketch of DNA and human genetics. But in terms of studying people's ancestry, it's the little differences in our DNA that are the most revealing things that are the same don't tell us much, but it's the little differences in the DNA. So you might be interested to know that every generation, when we pass on our genes to future generations, we actually pass on about one or 200 small mutations or small changes that have occurred in our bodies to future generations. So all the time, there are these new mutations that are cropping up in people's DNA. And every time there is a new mutation that begins a new lineage or a new branch in a DNA family tree, and it's these particular mutations in the mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome DNA that have been very revealing for scientists and have enabled them to build up these very comprehensive trees of relatedness between people. So each mutation, if you consider a group of individual women that are all passing on a particular DNA lineage to their offspring, if a new mutation occurs in one of those women's mitochondrial DNA, that is then passed on amongst all of her offspring, and it may well be a very useful mutation to distinguish her offspring from the other individuals. So as humans have moved around the world over many thousands of years, mutations have cropped up in our mitochondrial DNA and our Y chromosome DNA. They've been passed on to future generations, and family trees of these mitochondrial DNA lineages have been created. And scientists in the last 20 or 25 years, have built up very comprehensive databases of these lineages and they enable us to determine relatedness between different human populations. So they're very, very powerful tools that have been developed over the last 10 or 20 years.

John Dehlin [00:07:45] Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a really good overview. So what are the main conceptualizations of, you know, our understandings of these foundations of genetics that play into these questions where the modern day Native Americans come from?

Simon Southerton [00:07:59] Well, pretty early on, scientists realised or discovered that most of the mitochondrial DNA that Native Americans had carried particular mutations that were also common to DNA lineages of Native Americans, and they weren't found anywhere else. So that pretty much confirmed that that's where their mitochondrial DNA came from. There are very rare cases where a particular mutation will occur spontaneously in different places around the world where people are connected. But so much data has been accumulated that the scientists pretty much know where these are, but the scientists have avoided those regions. So they're focusing on areas where there is very little likelihood that these mutations will just crop up by chance. So they identified mutations that are very distinctly Asian and they gave them names. They call them by the letters A, B, C and D, and they're about roughly 25. Pretty much every letter of the Alphabet has now been used and they give them subcodes. So you might have an A, A, A2, A3 type lineage. One lineage might only be 5,000 years old. The X lineage is an example of a lineage cluster which is very, very old, 30 to 35,000 years old. So it's pretty arbitrary, but they're quite well characterised. So the Native American A, B, C and D lineages have clear relatives in Asia, but they're not close relatives. So you can clearly tell that the connection is quite ancient. And the way that scientists can tell how long ago two particular lineages have a common ancestor is simply by counting up the frequency of different mutations that both of those lineages carry. So if you consider a very large population of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of individuals, they tend to accumulate mutations at a fairly steady rate. So the number of mutations is correlated with time. So if two DNA lineages only have one spelling change between them, that suggests they're very closely related. If they have 25, that suggests a much, much longer time until you share a common ancestor. So the DNA is pretty powerful in that it shows relatedness between groups, but it also can tell us how long ago two groups shared a common ancestor, which has been very useful information when it comes to learning about the ancestry of Native Americans. In particular, but also many other human populations around the world already.

John Dehlin [00:10:28] I can just see a problem for traditional Mormon doctrine or theology. The Bible asserts a literal Adam and Eve. And as I understand it, the Bible provides sort of a genealogy from Adam and Eve down to David or Abraham or whoever, and it even provides years or ages for many of those people. And I think that's where people kind of get the 6000 years ago kind of number, because, you know, we have recorded history at some point bc, and if you count backwards from that to where the Bible would start time, you really can't go back more than 6,000 years from now. And yet we have DNA that clearly is telling us that people have lived for tens of thousands of years on the earth before, you know, we had their predecessors which were different species, right?

Simon Southerton [00:11:22] Yeah. Well, it's not only the DNA, I guess, that has convinced scientists that there are these sort of time spans in humans. So the scientists weren't particularly surprised to see with the DNA, that the connection with Asia was 16 to 20,000 years ago. It's been quite well understood from the archaeological record that there are fossils that look just like us that are hundreds of thousands of years old. There has been a fairly robust debate. There's one group of scientists that believe that all of our ancestors were in Asia, that humans migrated out of Asia and colonised the world. And there are others that have believed that that they've migrated at various stages and that there have been a lot of sort of intermixing between different populations. And I think the DNA science has pretty much confirmed that Africa certainly is the homeland of humans. The DNA is fitting very nicely and sort of giving us a much better idea of really how things took place. And it looks like there have been sort of several waves of species that are very closely related to us that have moved out of Africa and colonised Asia. And then when the Homo sapiens came through, beginning of roughly 50,000 years ago, there's been a little bit of interbreeding with these species, but then they were generally wiped out. Some of our ancestors were a bit rough, so the Neanderthals were wiped out either by being killed or just being out competed by modern humans. They may well turn out to be other relatives out there in our family tree that crop up over the next few years, because there have been lots of finds. Even just a few weeks ago, there was another, what appears to be another species discovered in. In China. And it'll be fascinating to see where this all leads. But what it really has confirmed there doesn't seem to be any disconnect between these ancestors of ours that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago and us today. The colonization of the Earth has occurred over tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years. There doesn't seem to be any evidence of this all starting at a single point in a single individual, six or seven thousand years ago. That's just what the science is showing. Very abundant evidence that we've occupied vast areas of the world for many, many thousands of years, and that includes the Americas. There's clear evidence from the archaeological record and the DNA evidence is really sort of shoring up some of this work. When I say shoring up, I mean it's research from different scientific disciplines which is validating the other disciplines findings. But there's now clear evidence that Native Americans had reached most of the way down to the bottom of South America, about 14,000.

John Dehlin [00:13:53] So where does the DNA evidence regarding Native Americans challenge the Book of Mormon specifically?

Simon Southerton [00:13:59] Well, I think for me, and I think for most Mormons, the migration of Lehi to the America, it's described essentially as a migration into an area where man hadn't lived. There are pretty clear statements in the Book of Mormon that suggest that Lehi was told that the land was kept from the knowledge of other nations. The Jaredites, they were sailing to a land where man had never been. These tend to suggest that the civilizations which are described in the Book of Mormon arose from those original colonizations. The simplest way to understand the Book of Mormon is in a sort of a hemispheric context. There are no unambiguous descriptions in the Book of Mormon of people that didn't come from the Middle East. So when the Nephites or the Lamanites bump into another civilization, the Mulekites, first of all, they don't know where they come from. And then they learn from them that they came from the Middle East. And when they bump into the ruins of the Jaredites and the Book of Ether comes forward, they come from the Middle East. There's nothing clear in the Book of Mormon that suggests that when Lehi got there, there were just Native Americans everywhere. So it's perfectly understandable why most members of the church believe that the descendants of the Book of Mormon people, the Lamanites, are just everywhere. And so the DNA just creates an enormous problem for people that hold those beliefs, which back in 1998 was virtually every Mormon that I ever encountered. I had never heard of the limited geography. I'm referring to theories that apologists have come up with to explain the Book of Mormon in light of the research.

John Dehlin [00:15:32] And the Book of Mormon for many years said that it's the record of what that the current Native Americans were,

Simon Southerton [00:15:38] what the introduction used to say, that they were the principal ancestors of the American Indians. And that was changed fairly recently, I think it was about 2007. It was changed to say that they were among the ancestors of the American Indians rather than the principal ancestors. But it essentially summarises what members of the Church have been taught and have believed ever since Joseph Smith, many of the prophets and apostles have referred to Native Americans from all over north and South America, and to Polynesians for that matter, in the Pacific, as Lamanites, as the descendants of Lehi. So the Book of Mormon seems to me to be pretty straightforward on this front. There's no mentions of any people in the Book of Mormon whose origin isn't explained in the text. They just all come from the Middle East. So.

John Dehlin [00:16:21] Right. And so prior to the emergence of the archaeological and genetic evidence, the traditional Mormon view, as espoused by Joseph Smith and most prophets and apostles, if not all from Joseph Smith until 10 years ago, would be that Native Americans from the southern tip of South America all the way up to, you know, Canada, that they were the descendants of Lehigh, in effect. Right.

Simon Southerton [00:16:49] Well, I don't see much evidence that that's even changed since the archaeological evidence has come along, even the DNA evidence. It was widely known when Spencer W Kimball was a prophet, certainly amongst scientists, that Native Americans ancestors were from Asia. Even as recently as December last year, there's an apostle visiting people in Guatemala at a temple dedication and reassuring them that they're the descendants of Lehi. So I don't see any sign that anything's changing beyond the scholars. And I don't know why I should really take anything seriously that the scholars are saying, because Church leaders don't take them seriously. So that's the problem that I have with all of the apologetic none of it is authorised by the Church. There may be links on the LDS website to what particular scholars at FARMS are writing, like the limited geography apologists, but it's always on the basis that what they're saying isn't Church policy, that's not authorized by the Church.

John Dehlin [00:17:43] And just to get back to the limited geography theory for a second, and I will refer my listeners to the Michael Coe interview that I did several months ago about the archaeological issues regarding the Book of Mormon. But basically the large geography theory would be, you know, Native Americans as descendants of the Jaredites and Lehi would have filled up all South Central North America and the population numbers that the Book of Mormon seems to indicate would sort of match well with a large geography theory, as would the idea that Joseph didn't have any. I don't know of any idea that Joseph considered the notion of there being two hill Cumorahs, a hill Cumorah in Central America and a hill Cumorah in New York. When he talked about the hill Cumorah where the plates were buried, there seems to be every indication that he meant the same hill where he allegedly dug up the plates in New York. Right. And so that would be the large geography theory, is that right?

Simon Southerton [00:18:33] Yeah, that there is only one hill cumorah and that everything was played out across the. It was hemispheric. So both north and South American continents. There is absolutely nothing that Joseph Smith has written that seriously challenges that view. And that seems to be what most members still hold onto. You know, the limited geography theory now centers on Mesoamerica.

Geography Theories and Israelite DNA Arguments

John Dehlin [00:18:54] Basically, the entire Book of Mormon, or most of the Book of Mormon happened in Middle America, Central America, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico, whatever. And that either the plates were buried there and magically transported to the hill Cumorah that Joseph extracted the place from, or somehow Moroni walked from Guatemala to New York and then buried them up there. Is that right?

Simon Southerton [00:19:19] Yeah. Again, why should I take them seriously with these limited geography theories if the church leaders don't take them seriously? To me, that just seems to be a nonsense. You know, even amongst mesoamerican Indians, they've DNA tested almost 1200 now, and 99.6% of their DNA looks like it came from Asia. There are the odd lineages that don't look Asian. And when the scientists have investigated further, they've found that they come from Africa or they come from Portugal, or they come from Spain, but nothing from Israel. So it's a very, very small geography that we're talking about then, because as you would have learned in the Michael Coe interview, the archaeological evidence in Mesoamerica supports the DNA evidence. There is no clear evidence of any Old World influence in Mesoamerican Civil. Those civilizations arose quite independently of what's happened in the Old World. I mean, a very good example of this gradual emergence of modern civilizations. You can see it in the botanical record. They know from DNA analysis that the ancient ancestral plant that maize was domesticated from, Teosinte, which occurs in southern Mexico, it was first domesticated around about 7 or 8,000 years ago. And many other crops unique to the New World have been domesticated by Native Americans cultures. We don't need to rely on the Old World to explain the emergence of any of these domesticates. Potatoes, beans, pumpkins domesticated by Native Americans. There are no Old World crops, domesticated crops or domesticated animals that were in Native American civilizations prior to the arrival of Columbus. The truth is, Native American civilizations arose completely independently of the Old World. And the interaction with the Old World civilizations post Columbus were absolutely catastrophic for them, largely because of that, that they were completely independent. And resistance to many of the diseases that Europeans brought in after Columbus is what caused enormous decline, absolute catastrophe for many Native American cultures. But, you know, I must hark back to the point that I find it very difficult to take any of this apologetic very seriously, because church leaders don't take it seriously. They're doing it sort of behind the scenes. They keep these little group of apologists going, keep paying their salaries and they keep defending the church because it's handy for them to be able to say to somebody who's got a problem, oh, go and talk to our scholars, they don't have any problem with this. I think the Church needs to be upfront about this. I guess the other issue is, sure, the church hasn't authorised any of these, but there's not only. It's not only the limited geography theory that exists now amongst the apologetic community. There's Rodney Meldrum and his heartland geography theory has emerged in the last few years, and they are bitterly opposed to each other. So you have apologists that are completely at odds with other apologists.

John Dehlin [00:22:04] And just real quickly, what is the heartland theory?

Simon Southerton [00:22:06] Well, the heartland theory is championed by Rodney Meldrum, who's quite charismatic in the way that he's presenting the evidence, but he's. I should have mentioned, I mentioned earlier on the X lineage. It's got an interesting history because it's one of the five lineages found amongst Native Americans, quite a rare lineage. It occurs in about 3% of Native Americans and it doesn't have a direct ancestor. They haven't found a direct ancestor in Asian populations. They've found X lineages there, but they're not directly descended from X lineages amongst Native American. And it's been found in some Middle Eastern populations, but also throughout Europe at a very low frequency. And Rodney Meldrum believes that the X lineage in Native Americans is descended from the X lineage in the Middle east. And he's claiming that it's direct evidence that Middle Eastern people colonized North America because the distribution of the X lineage is mostly in eastern North America. That's where it occurs at its highest frequency. Now, you know, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that, but it's not a recent introduction. As I was mentioned earlier on, the number of unique mutations that have occurred in the A, B, C, and D lineages tells us that they're very distantly related to Asian A, B, C, and D lineages. And it's the same with the X lineage. It clearly came into the Americas over 16,000 years ago. Even though we can't find its direct ancestor in Asia, we know just by the age of the X lineage in American Indians that it came in early, and it seems to be about the same age as the other ones. So it's almost certain that it came in at the same time through Asia and that its Asian ancestor has died out. But Rodney doesn't accept the dating evidence, so he's used the X lineage evidence, the fact that it's distributed in areas that surround what he refers to as the heartland or, you know, North America, and even in the vicinity of New York, to support the claim that the Book of Mormon civilizations occurred, you know, in North America. So he's been very successful. He's very charismatic, and he's speaking to large audiences all over North America and convincing many that. That the limit of geography is incorrect, that the Book of Mormon events occurred pretty much exactly where most Mormons are comfortable with them occurring. So those civilizations occurring in North America, not too far from New York. The final battles took place in New York, around the Hill, Cumorah. And he's been very successful because his ideas line up very closely with many of the statements that earlier leaders of the church have made and with what most Mormons believe are true.

John Dehlin [00:24:30] So his theories would be consistent with what Joseph Smith and all the subsequent apostles and prophets pretty much have taught, Right?

Simon Southerton [00:24:37] I think. Yeah. On the face of it, they sit much more comfortably with it.

John Dehlin [00:24:40] Yeah. Is there anything else we need to know about the DNA record that would sort of inform the basic pieces of evidence regarding DNA in the Book of Mormon?

Simon Southerton [00:24:49] No, I think we've covered most of the important points. I guess the point that we haven't covered is that many of the apologists say, okay, we don't know what Israelite DNA looks like, so we can't conclusively say that they haven't found us. The real problem for the church and for the apologists is that we have a hard time finding DNA that isn't Asian. So the scientists are continually finding Asian DNA, and when they do find the odd mitochondrial lineage that looks like it came from somewhere else. It invariably has been found on further investigation to have come from Africa or from Western Europe.

John Dehlin [00:25:21] Western European DNA and African DNA would be different than Middle Eastern DNA.

Simon Southerton [00:25:26] Yes, Middle Eastern DNA has a lot of similarities to European DNA. We talked a little bit about the DNA lineages they have for mitochondrial DNA, the A, B, C and D. Well, in Europe they have other lineages like H or V or T, and there are a few others. Well, Europeans and Middle Eastern populations are fairly closely related, but how they differ is in the frequency of these. So the H lineage might occur at a frequency of, say, 10% or 15% in Middle Eastern populations, but it occurs at a frequency of 60 or 70% in Europeans. And it's the same with the K lineage is a lineage that's been found at high frequency in Middle Eastern populations, but it's quite rare in European populations. There is relatedness, but when scientists have found a particular H lineage and looked for its closest relative, they have always found so far that the closest relative is from Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, the sort of countries that had a lot to do with the early colonisation of the New World. So the L lineage is very rare in Middle Eastern populations, very low frequency, a few percent or even less. And it's quite different to all of the other lineages that are found in European populations. We can clearly see from the family tree of DNA lineages where we all connect in at the base. But lineages from African people are pretty much all L lineages, and they're not old lineages, they just have a deeper branch. The branch comes off lower down in the family tree, but they've accumulated many new mutations all the way up to the present day. So it's not like they've stopped evolving and we've just evolved from them. We have a common ancestor, so it's

John Dehlin [00:27:02] not accurate to say that we don't have any idea what Israelite DNA would have looked like. We actually can get a decent sense for that. And more importantly, it's really clear that the Native American DNA is from Asia anyway.

Simon Southerton [00:27:14] Yeah, so, yeah, that's right. It's not correct for them to say that we don't have a clue what Israelite DNA is like. But, yeah, you know, the other problem is that the vast majority of the lineages they've found amongst Native Americans are from Asia. If people want to know what the apologetic responses are, go to Mormonthink. I do discuss some of them in my book, but really, to be honest, I don't really have the energy or the motivation to track and respond to all of the claims and counterclaims of the apologists. Firstly, the apologists don't agree with themselves. We're not talking about a single band of apologists that are singing in unison. We're talking about, you know, huge numbers that completely disagree with each other. For example, the heartland and the limited geography. They're at each other's throats and they completely contradict each other. The Church doesn't stand behind any of their apologetics, so it's hard for me to see why I should take them seriously. But among the scholars at byu, which I would have to say have the most credibility, they have already admitted that Israelite DNA hasn't been found in the Americas and Asian DNA dominates the DNA of Native Americans. So they've acknowledged that much. So then we have a problem. If there was an incursion of people from the Middle east in the Americas, it was vanishingly small, that small, that we cannot detect it at this stage. Yeah, they might like to argue that the mitochondrial DNA is only one lineage and the Y chromosome is another lineage. But the technology is moving on. There is technology now that's being used that can investigate not only the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA, but the entire genome. It's now possible to sequence an entire genome in a couple of weeks and to look at all of the mutations in that genome. And so they can determine amongst all the rest of our genes where a person's DNA comes from. And there are studies that are now emerging amongst Native American populations where they're starting to look at the entire genome, not just the mitochondrial DNA. So it's not going to be too long before we have very large amounts of information on the nuclear genome. And I have every confidence that that's going to demonstrate that whatever African DNA is found there or whatever European DNA that is found there, it came in after the arrival of Columbus. So, sure, they can make these arguments, but the essential problem is still there. We have no evidence of any significant number of Middle Eastern people entering into Native American populations. So then that begs the question, how on earth did civilis described in the Book of Mormon that were led by Middle Eastern people? How could they lead these populations and never mention the fact that these populations ever existed? These are very, very clear problems that need to be addressed. They're not being addressed by the leaders of the church. They're being addressed by the apologists in small online communities, and hardly any in the Church are aware of them.

John Dehlin [00:30:07] Yeah. Something just occurred to me. Tell me if this thinking Makes sense. But it's pretty clear that those of Asian ancestry would have had dark skin, right?

Simon Southerton [00:30:17] Yeah. They would have inherited the skin color of their Asian relatives.

John Dehlin [00:30:21] If those who claim that Lehi and the Jaredites just encountered this large populace of existing natives came from Asia, why would the Book of Mormon make the attempt to explain the dark skin as being a curse from God if it was already clear that the people that the Lehigh and the Jaredites encountered already had that dark skin?

Simon Southerton [00:30:43] Yeah, it doesn't really make a lot of sense, does it? They would then sort of blend in to the large masses of people that had dark skins. I think the linking of skin color in the Book of Mormon with how good a person is or how bad a person is is just really problematic and offensive. Even the explanations that, oh, no, it's not the skin color that's the curse, it's just the mark to show you that God's cursed them. Even that is disgusting. It's offensive. I mean, what does God care about skin colour? I don't think he does. It just doesn't solve the problem. And these ideas that just, you know, it offends Asians as well because they have a darker skin. It offends Polynesians who have a darker skin. A lot of Israelites probably have a slightly darker skin than most Europeans. I just. Yeah, I think it's something where the Church just needs to be right up front about this and just completely distance itself from any of this. Call it a curse, call it a mark, it doesn't make any difference if that's what God's using. It's still offensive and it's just repulsive. It doesn't get you out of the mess.

Life After Leaving and Personal Reflection

John Dehlin [00:31:52] Let's now shift to what was the

Simon Southerton [00:31:55] response to your book about one apologetic article. I think Ryan Parr wrote a response that was published in the Farm's review of books and. And as predictable. It trashed my book. But it was largely a review that wasn't a review. Very, very little of the book was addressed. The review was mostly focused on, I guess, my original post on the web from about 2000, where I gave a personal account of encountering the DNA evidence and many of the things that we've talked about that was published on the Recovery From Mormonism website. So he basically focused on that. So there really hasn't been, I think, much of a direct response to my book. It's basically been a response to, I guess, the perceived criticisms that are quite common amongst the ex Mormon community. But interestingly, the review came out about four or five years ago, and he would have been aware that Native Americans had been in the Americas for close to 14,000 years. But he didn't acknowledge that in his review. He carefully worded the review not to reveal that that's where the science was headed and that's what it was showing. So, yeah, it's been a bit disappointing in that there really hasn't been a detailed response to the book because I go into, for example, the mound builder myth that was very common in the 1900s in the Americas. This view that at that time, the fairly despised red men or the Native Americans of North America, they were believed to have wiped out a more sophisticated white race. This myth emerged that they had actually wiped out the people that had built those mounds and that the Mound Builders were an advanced white race. And, you know, that just fits hand in glove with the story of the Book of Mormon. But it was. That's what everyone believed for most of the 19th century. And it was quite convenient because Europeans were taking the land of Native Americans for many years. It made it quite a convenient little myth, if you believe that they had already wiped out an advanced civilization themselves. And it was only when the Smithsonian Institute and the Peabody Museum arose in the middle and latter half of the 1900s. They then began to scientifically investigate the mounds, and they found that there was very clear evidence that they were connected with the people that lived in those areas. So I review all of that in my book that doesn't get a mention. I review all of the archaeological evidence that supports the Asian origin of Native Americans that never got a mention in any of the reviews and very, very passing references to the discussion of the DNA evidence. So that was quite disappointing that they really hadn't engaged with many of the things that I'd written in the book.

John Dehlin [00:34:30] Now, this is definitely a sensitive question. Answer it as much or as little as you want. Yeah, I just wanted to give a chance to talk about it, if you want to. But I seem to recall several years back, them even sort of coming after you personally and making accusations about your own morality and choices you'd made in your life, et cetera. If you want to talk about that, or if you'd rather not, I. But if you do, where was that accusation made and, you know, how did that make you feel and what was that about?

Simon Southerton [00:34:59] Yeah, it's difficult for me to know where the accusations arose. It's hard not to believe that, you know, the church had made some inquiries about me because, you know, by then here we're talking A number of years after my book was published, I hadn't been to church in I think seven years. And yeah, suddenly the stake president in the area wanted to talk to me and. And he proceeded to make inquiries into my personal life at that time, you know, it had been very stressful leaving the church, moving down to Canberra, away from friends there, losing a lot of friends and feeling somewhat alienated. And we went through a period, my wife and I, we were separated that coincided with that period. In fact, it was after the separation we had actually reconciled and we were back together, and we're still back together when the stake president came knocking and he was prying into my personal life while I was separated, which I thought was pretty inappropriate since I hadn't been to church in seven years. But he insisted that that's why he was interested in me and why he wanted to talk. And so, I mean, I could have made life simple for him and for the church by resigning my membership, but I didn't. I didn't want to make life easier for them. And so he persisted and he held a church court and they made inquiries into my personal life which I refused to discuss with them. And they also made it very that the disciplinary council would be closed down if I discussed any other problems that I had with the church. So I was not permitted to talk about my book or my very public apostasy. Apostasies are much more serious charge than some of the charges they were raising against me. Why did they come after me for something that was much less serious? But the stake president was very persistent and he proceeded with a disciplinary council. And my wife attended, Jane attended, and it was really quite interesting. It's pretty hard to defend your character when you're not allowed to talk about pretty significant other issues. So, yeah, I mean, it was actually got reported in the press. It was a bit of a kangaroo court and the outcome was fixed right from the beginning.

John Dehlin [00:37:01] So what was the decision?

Simon Southerton [00:37:02] I was excommunicated. Excommunicated for having an inappropriate relations with a woman. It's not adultery, as many people may have heard, but yeah, that's what they chose to do.

John Dehlin [00:37:13] So you were not excommunicated for adultery?

Simon Southerton [00:37:16] No.

John Dehlin [00:37:16] You were excommunicated for inappropriate relations with the woman?

Simon Southerton [00:37:19] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:37:19] After you had reconciled with your wife? Yes.

Simon Southerton [00:37:23] It is a bit funny, isn't it? I've been a member of the church a long, long time, and one of the most important things about the repentance process is that you stop doing what was wrong. And here I am. I'M reconciled. It's seven years since I've been to church and yeah, it was just. It didn't paint the Church in a very good light.

John Dehlin [00:37:41] How did that make you and your wife feel to be drugged through the mud like that?

Simon Southerton [00:37:45] It didn't hurt at all really. I don't have anything to hide. I'm very comfortable and we're both very comfortable with ourselves and with our lives and it was just a pretty bizarre experience, really. It was really unusual. I met with all of the Stake Presidency. Like normally if you go and meet with your Stake President, he's quite comfortable just meeting you by himself. He actually admitted he was a little bit afraid of what I'd be like. So he met with me with both of his counsellors present. Perfectly nice man. It's quite possible that the Church didn't really press him to hold the Council. He was certainly aware of my book and he was certainly aware of my story. But it is pretty hard to believe that he wasn't motivated by the fact that I was a pretty outspoken apostate.

John Dehlin [00:38:27] Adultery doesn't always lead to excommunication, even full on adultery.

Simon Southerton [00:38:30] Yeah, that's right. It is quite remarkable. And for those of you who, the listeners who would know about a Church court, you know, there are people in that are half the High Council is assigned the responsibility of making sure that everything runs smoothly and it's all fair and it's all above board and according to the handbook. But you go and look in the handbook and you look at how serious apostasy is compared to inappropriate relations with a woman. I even asked the Council while I was there, do you think this is as important as open public apostasy for the last seven years? Just outrageous.

John Dehlin [00:39:03] What's your theory on why they didn't excommunicate you for apostasy?

Simon Southerton [00:39:06] Oh, it's clear he didn't want me talking about the issues that my book

John Dehlin [00:39:10] raised with the other members of the High Council.

Simon Southerton [00:39:13] Oh yeah, yeah. This would have been 15 pairs of ears that didn't need to hear about the DNA evidence and they didn't need to hear about any other problems related to the history of the Church.

John Dehlin [00:39:23] You don't think word got around?

Simon Southerton [00:39:24] I don't think they knew any of the details. I would say I think they knew that I was the bad bishop who got upset about DNA and that's probably about all they knew. But if I was defending myself in that Council, I would have been entitled to describe the evidence, the way I'd been treated by Area Leaders, the response of the Church, all that sort of thing, and they might have been troubled by that. He didn't want any of that. So he persisted with this really quite outrageous claim that he was purely motivated by other things. It's almost laughable. Anybody that's been a bishop would know that if you took action against every active member and every inactive member on rumours about their sexual propriety, you could be holding disciplinary councils every second month for all of the time you're a bishop. You'd just be so bogged down in disciplinary action. This wasn't a simple, oh, I've heard a rumour they instructed bishops to interview people, to extract evidence. So the whole upshot of it was really potentially very damaging. Because I'm left thinking, could it be my family? Could it be my sister in Canberra? Could it be other members of my family that were pushing the stake President to take this course of events? What good could come of the whole thing? It was just ridiculous. But because they chose to pursue it, I was quite happy to take them along. I don't have anything to hide. So I don't think it didn't reflect very well on the church in Canberra or around the world. It got a bit of coverage in the press around the world.

Why the DNA Issue Has Not Devastated Church Membership

John Dehlin [00:40:50] How do you explain this not being catastrophic for the church? The whole DNA in the Book of Mormon issue?

Simon Southerton [00:40:57] I don't necessarily think that it isn't a serious problem for the church. This perception amongst the members of the church that the Church is going along fine and it's growing, one of the fastest growing churches in the world, is pretty much a myth. It's perpetuated by the public relations department of the church. But the Church is in serious difficulty at the moment. Outside of the us, I don't think the church is growing in most parts of the world. In fact, I think in many parts of the world, it's declining.

John Dehlin [00:41:24] Well, no, I mean Latin America, Philippines, Africa, lots of growth, right?

Simon Southerton [00:41:29] Certainly, I think in Africa there's been some fairly recent rapid growth. But I would argue that in South America, many of those countries, there's been a pretty significant decline. A lot of wards and branches being closed, a lot of stakes being closed. So if you look at the real activity rate of the church, in other words, people that are attending, which we can really only gauge by the number of congregations. There are many places in the world where the number of congregations, the growth in those has pretty much declined or stopped. In New Zealand, it's going backwards. In some parts of South America, it's gone Backwards, dramatically. Chile and Brazil and many other countries in South America has been very significant decline. And I would even argue that Even in the U.S. now, we're starting to see a very significant slowdown in the growth of the church. In spite of, you know, these stories that come along all the time, oh, the church is the fastest growing in the United States. You know, I don't think for a moment that the DNA issue is the significant cause there. I think it's a contributor. I think there are many other problems that many members of the church are becoming aware of, really quite dramatically, and some of them are very confronting. All of the issues surrounding polygamy and polyandry and Joseph Smith marrying the wives of men that he's just sent on missions and marrying young women as old as 14. And then, you know, these are very confronting issues that many members of the church are coming to terms with. Sure, I think for some people, DNA is a major problem. But, you know, I would have to admit that the Book of Abraham is probably even more compelling. It's just so obvious the problems that are there and that there aren't any good answers. So, yeah, I don't. I think it would be foolish of the church leaders to think there isn't a problem here. They must know that there are significant problems with the membership at the moment. You know, you've had a general authority admit that they're suffering an apostasy at the moment. I think DNA, I think you'd probably even admit that, John, that it's probably likely to be one of many contributing factors really hasn't changed the challenge against the Book of Mormon from the archaeological evidence all that much. But it just gives you a quantitative measure, a very clear measure. So the problem was always there, but it's just really shone a very bright light on it.

John Dehlin [00:43:37] Okay, so you're saying that maybe it is either a big deal or going to become a big deal, but in reality, you know, I don't think any of this news has really hit Latin America. I don't think that the members in Central and South America are thinking a lot about DNA and about the Book of Mormon narrative. I just, My guess is it really, really hasn't reached there yet. And even if you argue that the church is not significantly growing, it's still at least growing to a small degree. So we haven't seen the type of devastation, you know, let's say, the community of Christ experienced when they, you know, gave women the priesthood and distanced themselves from a historical Book of Mormon and stuff. So how do you account for the lack of devastation?

Simon Southerton [00:44:17] Well, if you were to look at New Zealand, where we do have a very sizable Polynesian population, you could argue that that's pretty devast what's happened there. They've had a decline in the activity rate, a very significant decline over the last 10 or 12 years.

John Dehlin [00:44:32] But not related to DNA, right?

Simon Southerton [00:44:34] No, you can't prove that. But these are members who believe their ancestors came from South America. Many Polynesians believed they were related to Native Americans, but they've seen on TV recently programs that have shown that their ancestors came from Asia. Just general run of the mill documentaries that have clearly shown that there are ancestors came from Asia. So that might have been particularly hard for quite a lot of members of the church in New Zealand, you know, who speak English and can see many of the documentaries that have been produced. But I'm not arguing for a moment that it's all down to DNA. But there certainly has been a significant decline in the number of congregations of the church in New Zealand over the last 10 years. But I don't know what effect it's going to have on Native American people from South America and Central America when it becomes more widely known as among them. That their ancestors came from Asia. May well be that to a large extent it doesn't really have much impact, but it's one of a number of issues that are likely to be influencing what appears to be a slowdown in the growth of the church over the last five to 10 years.

John Dehlin [00:45:33] Right, but do you have any speculation as to, you know, even just in the US alone, why this hasn't wiped out 30% of the membership, just kind of a death nail in the coffin of the Book of Mormon?

Simon Southerton [00:45:44] Well, I think the vast majority of members of the church don't really have much interest in science really related to the Book of Mormon. The vast majority don't even look at the LDS apologetics. And many that do encounter the DNA evidence would be pretty keen to see how it's resolved by the apologists. And many probably just accept their line of argument. They work at byu, they're faithful Latter Day Saints, so they're smart.

John Dehlin [00:46:07] They have.

Simon Southerton [00:46:07] That's what they think, they're smart. Yep.

John Dehlin [00:46:09] Big degrees. So you're saying the apologists have been kind of effective?

Simon Southerton [00:46:13] I mean, they like to say that it's not been an issue, but it's pretty hard to argue that when there's probably been 30 publications. They are basically setting themselves up as the sources of, you know, if you need to understand the Book of Mormon go to the apologists. Well, you know, most members of the church have been taught that the prophets have the right to interpret scripture, not the apologists. Many Mormons in the United States live in very close knit Mormon communities. So there are very strong bonds between people that have grown up in the church together and entire communities are very close. And so they probably feel inclined to go, want to stay in those communities as they currently are and not rock the boat. There are certainly many members. If I believe what I read online, there are many members who still attend, but they don't believe in order to maintain their position in their communities. As you would know, I suspect there's probably pretty strong pressure on somebody in Utah, in their work environment, in their family environment, to not rock the boat.

John Dehlin [00:47:09] That wouldn't be just in Utah. That's wherever anyone comes from, a devout LDS family, you just. The consequences would be so high.

Simon Southerton [00:47:17] And in places like Australia and New Zealand, where the church I think, has got to acknowledge that they are really hurting, where congregations are not growing, there's no moral growth that many members because they're either recent converts themselves or they're the children of converts. They don't have this three or four or five generations in the church and most of their friends are outside the church. It's a softer landing, it's a bit easier if you got friends and often many family members outside the church who will support you and still be there for you to talk to when you leave. So that's much, I think, much less of a challenge for an Australian or a New Zealand member of the church and probably in the UK as well, which is also starting to show decline.

John Dehlin [00:47:57] Right. What about the argument that says I've had a spiritual witness that this book is true. There's no way that Joseph could have written it. So no amount of science is going to shake me from that spiritual witness. Plus the fact that no one can explain its origins.

Simon Southerton [00:48:11] Yeah, I think that's one of the things that I've thought about quite a bit since leaving the church. You know, there are many people around the world, in many other churches who feel very strong emotional bonds with their churches and they feel very strongly about their beliefs. So I just don't accept now that Mormons are any different. You know, they feel very strong feelings about their beliefs. I don't believe now that a strong emotional feeling is the Holy Ghost witnessing to me that something is true, because there are many people that feel that same feeling, that Holy Ghost telling them that their beliefs are also true. And they completely contradict with LDS beliefs. I just think humans are very emotional creatures and we feel things very strongly. That's how I understand that. I don't really think that the Book of Mormon is all that remarkable in terms of the breadth and depth of the story that's told within its pages. I think there are many very, very intelligent people, and I think Joseph Smith was a very intelligent person and he was capable of imagining it up. If it wasn't him and it was somebody else, Solomon Spalding, I don't really care. That doesn't really affect the outcome for me. So I'm not really all that interested in delving into how it came about. It certainly smacks of a 19th century origin in Eastern North America.

John Dehlin [00:49:26] What about the argument that it doesn't matter if it's a historical book? It doesn't even matter, you know, if any of these things happen and it makes people live good lives, it gives people meaning, it brings people joy. And some say it brings people to Christ, others just say it helps, like I said, provide people with meaning and fulfillment. So why, why mess with that? Why not just let people just be happy and content in their beliefs? Why go about releasing facts that would upset that apple cart when it's bringing a lot of joy and happiness to a lot of people?

Simon Southerton [00:50:00] I don't really have any problem with people viewing the Book of Mormon that way if they want to. But the challenge is there are some genuine problems with the historicity of the Book of Mormon. Why not allow members of the church to openly question that as they do in the community of Christ, just because they might have suffered a membership decline? It's the right way to go. They've taken that option because it doesn't stack up the historicity. There's no evidence for the historic.

John Dehlin [00:50:26] But what about the utilitarian view that says if the Church lets everyone talk about this and promotes it, then more people find out, more people get discouraged and lose their belief and they fall away? But the Church is providing a lot of joy and happiness and meaning to people, so it's best to just not talk about it or deny it in any way you can, because that allows the maximum amount of people to obtain the maximum benefit from Mormonism.

Simon Southerton [00:50:51] Well, that's clearly the approach they're taking right now. They frown on any public discussion of the historicity. But you know, there are genuine questions there. And yeah, the Church is definitely on the horns of a dilemma, because in my view, it's asking members of the Church to believe things that are not true. And why aren't members of the church entitled not to believe it and to be public about it instead of hiding all the time? Because they're certainly bleeding members who are troubled by the historicity. It may well be that many will stay in the church if the church does show shift and allow public questioning. But it's a very challenging problem. But currently, anybody that questions the historicity is treated as somebody that doesn't have enough faith or they're treated as immoral. They've got some sort of moral problem, or, you know, it can't be that. It's not really history. You've got some other reason for questioning, and that's, you know, that's very harmful for those people as well. So whichever way they go, I think there's going to be pain. But at the end of the day, I. I think eventually the church should go the way of truth. We can't all go along just shutting our minds to true things that we learn that are painful. Many members of the church can't live like that. They just want to know what's true. If you shut people off, if you exclude those people, it's extraordinarily painful. And sure, there might be members of the church who will feel the pain of being exposed to these issues, but there are many, many people who are hurting very, very deeply because, because they are treated as immoral or as weak or demonized, if you like, by the church because they dare to question. So I guess that's why I persist in presenting the evidence in a way that allows people to make up their own minds and make their own decisions about where they go. I must confess I admire the work that you're doing because you are trying to create a safe place for these people to go who are troubled by the evidence and trying to create a safer place for them after they confront family members. You're trying to help members of the church deal with people in a compassionate way when they lose their faith. I'm not saying these are not complex problems. You know how difficult it is.

The Right to Know and Informed Belief

John Dehlin [00:52:53] Are you kind of saying that people have the right to at least know about these problems so that they can make their own informed decision about whether they want to, you know, step up to the levels of commitment that the church might expect from people?

Simon Southerton [00:53:05] Absolutely. The church demands an awful lot from its members. To give up two years of your life, in some cases going to dangerous countries, paying tithing a lot of your income for many years in the church, the time commitment of the church, these place enormous pressures on families. Many People feel very hurt when they discover many of the problems of the church. So, yeah, I think if you have very high expectations of what a person is to do in the church, then you should allow them the right to question and to know the true history of the church and to know the truth about the issues surrounding the Book of Morality.

John Dehlin [00:53:38] Mormon.

Simon Southerton [00:53:39] It's not enough to just say, I'll go and talk to the apologists. I think they need to show the courage to actually stand up and say, yes, this is what we believe, if they're going to expect members to accept what the apologists are saying. But they've shown no signs of doing that. Everything is unofficial. There's no official positions.

John Dehlin [00:53:56] Yeah. So where are you now? I think it is important that no matter where you are in life, everybody's got truths and values that are important to them and that they believe in. Everybody's got a testimony of sorts, even if it's completely secular. And so I would love to hear you just talk about what you believe in and how your life is and what are the truths that you sort of hold dear.

Life After the Church and Closing Thoughts

Simon Southerton [00:54:17] Well, I think it was certainly very tumultuous for a number of years after leaving the church. But, you know, everyone has ups and downs in their lives and that doesn't stop or start when you change your activity in the church. So I'm pretty much a humanist now, I guess, if you want to put me in a box, I'm pretty happy for people to maintain a Christian belief. I have many friends at work, even scientists who are Christians. But, you know, as a family, we're very happily settled in Canberra and we don't attend any church. There are times when I think I probably wanted to find a church after we came back to Canberra because we'd instantly lost virtually every friend that we had. But, you know, I now have many very good friends through my work and Jane has many friends through her work. So happy and productive lives. My scientific research, research is very stimulating. I still work on forest trees. The work is probably going to lead us to very fruitful outcomes over the next few years as we start to use DNA tools to help breed better trees. It'll make more paper which is better for the environment because we can cut down fewer trees and natural forests and we have more plantations. So I feel very good about that. That's a really strong motivator in my life. But all of our children now are pretty much adults. We've got a couple that are studying at university at the moment, another one going to university next year. Year. They're very happy, balanced, nice people. It has been, I think, a little bit difficult to feel a little bit, I wouldn't say cut off, just not feeling as comfortable as some of my family, you know, which is perfectly understandable. But I don't think it's helped by the stigma that's associated with leaving the church. You know, rumours started not long after, within weeks of me resigning from the office of bishop, that I'd committed adultery, which is, of course, completely false. And that's so common. People are labelled as weak or if there's some other sin, they wanted to drink or they wanted to go out and commit adultery or that sort of nonsense. But that's just not the case with most people who have struggled with the issues. Many of them say they're just much happier, much happier after they've left the church. And I feel the same way. Sure. It's been very difficult to adjust because, you know, you do have many very comforting beliefs in the church, that families are forever and we'll live one day as a happy family unit. Yeah. So you lose that, but in many ways you sort of grow up because Australia is a pretty secular society. There's a very high proportion of the population are agnostic or atheist or don't attend church, you know, much less religious than the United States. And I have just absolutely wonderful friends at work who are complete atheists and they're living perfectly moral, happy lives. They marry, they have children, and they're just wonderful people to be around. And they know the realities of life and death, and death's a tragedy and it's a horrible thing, but, you know, they're accustomed. They've learned to deal with those sorts of things, which is part of the human experience. When I was going through the initial, first few weeks after I left, I sort of, you know, lost my faith. I sort of wandered down the street and I looked at my neighbors through a different pair of eyes than I looked at them when I was a member. If they smoked, that's all I saw of them. If they drink, oh, they're an alcoholic or they're this and that. I saw them as just, you know, fellow human beings going through life just like we all are, you know, trying to find a path through. And life is tough. But my respect for fellow human beings just increased dramatically after I left the church because, you know, here are these people haven't darkened the door of a church their entire life. And they've got a moral compass, happy family relationships, they're fun to be around and for me, what was so nice was they didn't look at me and think, oh, you're the weakling that left the Mormon Church. They have respect for me. And that's been a real positive. And I still have some just wonderful friendships with people that I work with. And Jane has some wonderful friends. We have common friends that are just really nice to be around. So we're pretty comfortable in our lives at the moment, very happy. And no doubt there will be some tough times ahead as all lives are filled with tough times. But on balance, we've moved into some pretty positive places.

John Dehlin [00:58:20] Well, Simon Southerton, it's been a pleasure to get to talk to you, to hear your story. I've wanted to interview you, like I said, for a long time. I think whether any of our listeners agree or disagree with what you've done in terms of the reasons for why you've done it, I think almost everybody has to agree that it's an act of conviction and courage to follow your convictions and truths, even at the expense of losing potentially friends and family and relationships and all sorts of things. And so I just want to, on behalf of my listeners, thank you for the courage you've had to speak your truth and to come on and tell us your story so that we could all hear that perspective and help that inform the decisions we make. So thank you. The book is Losing a Lost Native Americans DNA in the Mormon Church by Simon Southerton. You can get it at Signature Books and probably on Amazon and all sorts of other places. Simon has a blog, simonsotherton.blogspot.com and we'll try and put up links to Elder Featherstone's letter and other links that we think will be helpful in people kind of, you know, reading about your story and understanding your position. Maybe we'll even put a link to the farm's review. Yeah. Missing the boat.

Simon Southerton [00:59:26] Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:59:27] All right. Well, Simon, thanks again.

Simon Southerton [00:59:29] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:59:36] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Music today was provided by the Saber Rattlers. Check them out@sabre rattlers.com the Mormon Stories logo was generously donated by StudioCase.com thanks for listening.

Guest [00:59:51] Come, come, ye saints no toil nor labor fear but with joy wend your way though hard to you this journey may appear Grace shall be as your day Tis better far for us to strive Our useless care from us to drive to the San Jo Hearts will swell oh, all is well all is well. Why should we mourn? I think I is hard Tis not so all is right why should we think to earn a great reward if we now shun the fight. Good of your Lord. Fresh courage take Our God will never us for sake? Soon we'll have tale to tell? Oh, all is well? All is well? Oh, all is well, well? All is well? Sam? And should we die before our journey is through happy death? All is well? We then are free from? From toil and sorrow too? With the just we shall dwell? But if our lives are spared Again to see the saints the rest obtained? I will make this chorus well? Oh, all is well? All is well? All is well?

John Dehlin [01:03:44] All is well?

Guest [01:03:47] All is well? Oh, all is away? All

Simon Southerton [01:04:03] is away?

Guest [01:04:06] All is away?

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