Kari & Kyle Hanks share their journey of leaving the secretive 2×2 church, a religious group with no official name, written doctrine, or corporate structure. They discuss their upbringings, struggles with faith, the exclusivity of the religion, and the trauma they endured. From discovering the church’s hidden history to creating a support group for ex-members, they expose abuse scandals, strict doctrines on women, and emotional suppression within the group. Their deconstruction was influenced by the Mormon Stories Podcast, COVID-19, and personal revelations about belief, identity, and autonomy. Now, they advocate for informed consent and support those leaving high-control religions.
In Part 2 of their story, Kyle opens up about his life growing up in the Two by Two faith — from a childhood shaped by pressure to “uphold the family name,” to navigating chronic illness and suppressing his passions for music and basketball in order to prioritize church. We talk about the expectations around professing young, the control over dating, marriage, and even parenting — including the harmful encouragement of corporal punishment.
As cracks began to form during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kyle and Kari found themselves questioning everything they believed. From hidden doubts, religious trauma, and Kari’s journey of discovering her bisexuality, to the couple’s darkest moments and eventual transformation, this episode dives deep into how they began rebuilding their lives outside the Two by Two world.
We also discuss the emerging abuse allegations within the Two by Two Church, the beginnings of their Ex-Two by Two support group, and the broader fight for transparency and accountability in a faith that claims to have no organization at all. This is a raw, emotional, and revealing chapter of their deconstruction journey.
Episode Transcript
Host: John Dehlin · Co-host: Margi Dehlin · Guests: Kari Hanks, Kyle Hanks
This transcript is machine-generated and lightly edited for readability. The audio is authoritative. Please excuse occasional errors in names and spelling.
Part 1 of 2 · Ep. 2008
Introduction to the Two by Twos
John Dehlin [00:00:00] Up until a couple years ago, I had never heard of the two by twos. I mean, what I would have heard is like secretive Christian cult, child abuse scandal. Missionaries go around in twos.
Kyle Hanks [00:00:10] They don't have a written doctrine, no written creeds or anything. They successfully never had a name. We have no church building, we have no church organization at all, which is why you've never heard of us.
John Dehlin [00:00:20] That sounds so appealing because what's wrong with churches these days? It's the corporations, it's the greed, it's the power, it's the bureaucracy. But if you want to fly under the radar, if you want to have no accountability, if you want to avoid scrutiny, there's a brilliance in not having a corporate head, right?
Kyle Hanks [00:00:41] You'll never blame the system if you can not have a system.
Kari Hanks [00:00:44] We were surrounded by violence in general as two by twos. We had a lot of corporal punishment. So it was very normalized. And I never really saw that as being abnormal or unusual. Growing up as a two by two girl, you're taught to be mature from a very young age. Like your goal in life is to get married and have a family. I often got the comment, you should smile more or also you're smiling too much. You just have to have the exact right which ends up just being kind of a flat line, no emotion. You do not cut your hair, no makeup, no jewelry, no piercings of any kind, no dyeing your hair, no tv.
Kyle Hanks [00:01:27] There's a lot of disjointed rules that didn't make any sense that you held to religiously because you just want it to be as safe as possible, right?
Margi Dehlin [00:01:34] Obedience is the point.
Kari Hanks [00:01:35] When you leave the two by twos, you're completely afloat. There was no support group, there was no community.
Kyle Hanks [00:01:42] It's so underground that people, when they leave, will spend years not talking to anybody about it because they don't know how to find people. And to foreshadow a little bit, the Mormon Stories podcast was motivational for us in setting up a support group and developing an excommunity.
John Dehlin [00:01:59] What happens when one day you wake up, you're married with children, and you realize you might be in a cult or a high demand religion? I'm John Dehlin, host of Mormon Stories Podcast, and today we are going to be talking about an organization called the Two by Twos. Some call them a cult, some call them a high demand religion, some call them just a Christian church. But we're gonna be talking about that organization and it's also super fun. This is a continuing episode in our series on never, Mormons who listen to and find value in Mormon stories because it helps them understand their own worldview better. And it's March 12, 2025. And joining us today in studio are Kari. Hey, Kari.
Kari Hanks [00:02:47] Hi, Kari.
John Dehlin [00:02:48] And Kyle.
Kari Hanks [00:02:49] Hello.
John Dehlin [00:02:49] Thanks. Hey, welcome to Salt Lake City.
Kyle Hanks [00:02:52] Thanks for having us.
Kari Hanks [00:02:53] Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it.
Meet Kari and Kyle: Raised in the Two by Twos
John Dehlin [00:02:54] Yeah. So y' all were raised as members of the Two by Twos, is that right?
Kyle Hanks [00:03:02] Yep. Yeah, it's. It's the Two by Twos now. We use that term now, but nobody in the group calls it that. In fact, it doesn't have a name at all. So we've been pushing the term two by two because it's the most unique term you could associate with this group. They like to call themselves a lot of other things, like the Truth or the Way or God's Children, Saints and servants, Friends and workers. Friends and workers.
John Dehlin [00:03:27] And for those of you who want to kind of google them or check them out, there are several ABC News reports because like many high demand religions and or cults, they have been enveloped over the past few years in a child sexual abuse cover up scandal like so many of these organizations are. And as I understand it, when y' all started waking up from your experiences and starting to look at the church more critically, you even started a support group on Reddit for X2X2's Facebook. Oh, it's a Facebook group.
Kari Hanks [00:04:07] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:04:07] Oh, okay. I went to Reddit. I should have gone to Facebook. So y' all are kind of the leaders of. Is that fair to say? You're kind of leaders in an X2X2 movement? Is that fair to say?
Kari Hanks [00:04:19] I would avoid the term leader, but we started a support group. Yes.
John Dehlin [00:04:24] Founders, not leaders.
Margi Dehlin [00:04:25] Facilitators.
Kari Hanks [00:04:26] Facilitators, yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:04:28] Facilitators. Administrators of a group.
Kari Hanks [00:04:30] Yes.
John Dehlin [00:04:31] All right, well, I'm deeply curious. I'm of course joined by my wife, Margi. Hey, Margi.
Margi Dehlin [00:04:37] Hello.
John Dehlin [00:04:38] And yeah, so this is going to be an interview in two parts. We're going to learn about the history of the organization commonly referred to as the Two by Twos kind of history. This is going to be very much in the spirit of the Scientology series we did years ago, the Jehovah's Witnesses series we did years ago, where we sort of learn about a cult or high demand religion that we really don't know a lot about. Then we hear about your upbringing in that church up until the point where you start to realize that it may not be what you thought that's going to be.
John Dehlin [00:05:15] As we're Planning it. Part one of this series, we'll leave on that cliffhanger. And then we're going to have a part two where we talk about how you started unraveling and deconstructing your two by two faith, we'll call it. And then what reconstruction has been like for y' all as EX2 by 2ers, for lack of a better term, and being community organizers and builders for others affected as well. How's that sound?
Kyle Hanks [00:05:46] Sounds good.
Kari Hanks [00:05:47] Yeah, Sounds great.
Margi Dehlin [00:05:48] Yep.
John Dehlin [00:05:48] Yeah.
Margi Dehlin [00:05:49] Okay.
John Dehlin [00:05:49] Do you want to start just by introducing yourselves?
Margi Dehlin [00:05:52] Sure.
Kyle Hanks [00:05:53] Well, I'm Kyle. I'm Kyle Hanks. Kyle Hanks. Yeah. What do you want to know about me?
John Dehlin [00:05:59] What do you want to share?
Kyle Hanks [00:06:02] Yeah. Well, I'll just broadly say that I was a member of this group until my mid-30s.
John Dehlin [00:06:06] So born and raised.
Kyle Hanks [00:06:09] Born and raised. Okay. And I think that's all for now. I'll cover it all as we go.
Margi Dehlin [00:06:12] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:06:13] In the Seattle area.
Kyle Hanks [00:06:14] Seattle area, mostly. And then the last few years, we've lived in. Well, how long have we lived in Phoenix now? 15 years. No, 2012.
Kari Hanks [00:06:21] Almost 14.
Kyle Hanks [00:06:22] Almost 14 years.
John Dehlin [00:06:23] All right. And Kari.
Kari Hanks [00:06:25] I'm Kari Hanks. I also am a born and raised two by two. Goes back in my family 115 years.
Margi Dehlin [00:06:33] Whoa.
Kari Hanks [00:06:34] Yeah. So fourth generation on one side and third generation on the other. And. Yeah. Left when I was 33. With our kids. Three kids.
Margi Dehlin [00:06:44] So.
John Dehlin [00:06:45] And y' all have been listening to Mormon stories Five years. For five years.
Kyle Hanks [00:06:49] At least five.
Kari Hanks [00:06:50] We're trying to figure that out, but at least five years. Yep.
Kyle Hanks [00:06:53] Yeah. I don't remember when we started, but
Kari Hanks [00:06:54] we were still two by twos when we started listening.
John Dehlin [00:06:56] What?
Kyle Hanks [00:06:57] It was a key part of our deconstruction.
Kari Hanks [00:06:58] It was.
Kyle Hanks [00:06:59] We'll get into it. But we were both listening separately and didn't realize the other was listening.
John Dehlin [00:07:03] No.
Kyle Hanks [00:07:05] And neither of us can remember how we came across your podcast.
Margi Dehlin [00:07:07] What?
John Dehlin [00:07:08] And yet you were both simultaneously watching without knowing the other was watching.
Kyle Hanks [00:07:12] Yeah. And if I remember right, I think I mentioned it to Kari and she said, yeah, I think I've donated to them.
Kari Hanks [00:07:20] Yeah. It's a big part of our story during a time that was really difficult.
Kyle Hanks [00:07:25] Yeah. And to foreshadow a little bit, the Mormon Stories podcast was motivational for us in setting up a support group and developing an X community, so. Cause there really wasn't a lot of fun.
Kari Hanks [00:07:35] Yes. Thank you both for doing what you do.
John Dehlin [00:07:37] Oh, well, we're honored. We're honored to have you as a part of this series. Okay. So that's fun. I'm just. I'm dying to hear. So I will say that up until a couple years ago, I had never heard of the Two by Twos. I think I had heard about them before y' all reached out. But just like typical. I mean, what I would have heard is like, secretive Christian cult that has child abuse scandal. You know, missionaries go around in twos, don't know much about them. That's kind of what I would have known prior to y' all reaching out. So now we can dive into the history of the church.
Origins and Structure of the Group
Kyle Hanks [00:08:15] Yeah, unfortunately, because of how they're organized, they don't keep records or anything. So people's first. A lot of people's first impression of them is hearing about a scandal in the news. So. But we'll talk about them. So there's two versions of their history of who this group is. The version inside is that it's always been there. It goes all the way back to Jesus. They have little trite, little sayings. They like to say, like, we go back to the shores of Galilee, meaning Jesus came down to earth, called his 12 disciples, sent them forth, and. And they continued on unchanged or continuous. What do they call it? Continuous apostolic succession. Apostolic succession.
Kari Hanks [00:08:57] Basically they believe that Paul in the Bible was the first, what we would call overseer.
Margi Dehlin [00:09:03] I see.
Kyle Hanks [00:09:04] They do what a lot of churches like to do, which is go back, grab characters from the Bible and post date their titles. So we've done that and called them workers is a term we use for people who.
Kari Hanks [00:09:15] Yeah. So Jesus disciples would have been the first workers.
John Dehlin [00:09:18] Can I just say that something that I did with the Scientology and the Jehovah's Witness episode that I think people appreciated was just whenever I hear something that sounds Mormon, I like to kind of note kind of a parallel or.
Kari Hanks [00:09:31] That would be awesome.
Margi Dehlin [00:09:31] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:09:32] And for sure the Mormon Church believes it's the one true church. And for sure the Mormon Church would claim its authority stems all the way back to Jesus, which is not dissimilar to, let's say the Catholic Church, but this idea of authority and is necessary and it goes all the way back to Jesus. Like I remember being given what's called my line of Authority As a 12 year old boy, when I got the priesthood, it would say John got the priesthood from Dave Delin, Dave Delin got it from Preston Delin. Preston Delin got it from. And then it would go back to Joseph Smith, and then it would go to Peter, James and John or John the Baptist, and then it would go back to Jesus and so that line of succession, one true church thing is absolutely core to Mormonism. So it's already very familiar anyway.
Kari Hanks [00:10:18] Yeah, it's an exclusive Israel. So they believe that you have to hear God's word preached through the workers to have salvation.
Kyle Hanks [00:10:26] Yeah, so we'll use the term workers a lot. It's their preachers, they're preachers that go in pairs. If you read, there's a verse in Matthew 10 where he called the disciples, and if you read the verse in the kjv, which is the only Bible we use, there's semicolons between every pair of names. So you'll see. You know, I can't remember the names in order, but that's how they read that is like, oh, well, Jesus sent the, the, we call them workers now in pairs to go out and preach the gospel completely in faith. We have no church building, we have no church organization at all, which is why you've never heard of us.
Kari Hanks [00:10:59] They're not registered.
Kyle Hanks [00:11:00] Not registered. Unless there's certain cases, fringe cases, where governments have required it. But, but we don't have an organization that we recognize. So.
Kari Hanks [00:11:08] And that's why they're called the two by twos, because their ministers go out to and to in pairs. Sometimes if they have like an odd number of ministers in a certain area, you'll see a field with like three versus two. But for the most part they go out in same gendered pairs, both brother workers and sister workers.
John Dehlin [00:11:26] So I wanna, immediately, I wanna ask about that. Cause there's a brilliance, there's sort of probably huge disadvantages, but also brilliance in not having a corporate head. If on the one hand I think churches are started so they can have a tax shelter, so they can funnel money, so they can have religious protections under the law. So I can see a lot of. And so that they can have name recognition or brand recognition. So in that sense, I can see why churches would want to have corporate heads. But if you want to fly under the radar, if you want to have no accountability, if you want to avoid scrutiny, negative scrutiny, and you're able to grow without the that and make tracking you very difficult.
Kyle Hanks [00:12:12] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's toward the end of our story. That'll be a big thing. Doctrinally, it's kind of brilliant.
John Dehlin [00:12:19] Yeah, yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:12:20] But doctrinally it's clever too, because when you're raised in it, as most people who are in it now were raised in it at this point, you've never known anything different. Not having an organization looks like God, it looks like, it's led by the
John Dehlin [00:12:36] spirit, in a sense.
Kari Hanks [00:12:37] Yeah. They would say they're not a religion, they're not a church. Most of the time when I was growing up, we did not identify as Christian.
Kyle Hanks [00:12:45] Yeah, we didn't use that word.
Kari Hanks [00:12:46] We took the name of Jesus, but we are not Christians. That's because Christians call us religion. And we're not a religion. We're a way of life.
John Dehlin [00:12:53] And you know what? I should have started there, because that sounds so appealing, because what's wrong with churches these days? It's the corporations, it's the greed, it's the power, it's the bureaucracy. And so to say, hey, we're just reading the words of Jesus and going out two by two and having our families and following the word of Jesus, that actually sounds super compelling.
Kari Hanks [00:13:15] They make it sound very simple and very appealing. But when you start to delve into the hierarchy and the actual teachings and the rules that they say aren't rules, it gets complicated pretty quickly.
Kyle Hanks [00:13:27] Yeah, it's really handy. Anytime anything bad happens, they'll reframe it in real time. Like, oh, we're just getting together to study the Bible. We just love our little meeting of friends.
John Dehlin [00:13:37] And.
Kyle Hanks [00:13:37] And they'll kind of reframe it as much simpler than it is to say that. That's the good part. That's why we're actually here. All this other stuff. Don't worry about that.
John Dehlin [00:13:44] Also, if there's any abuse, which we'll get to. It's just the local people. It's people being abusive, not a church.
Kyle Hanks [00:13:50] Right. You'll never blame the system if you can not have a system.
Kari Hanks [00:13:54] Well, even on legal levels, it's hard to hold a church accountable when they're not an organized, registered religion.
John Dehlin [00:14:01] Okay, all right, I'm in. So what's next?
Kyle Hanks [00:14:04] So. So that's. And that's the whole story. They don't have a written doctrine, no written creeds or anything. They use the KJV Bible. It wasn't until we left that I realized the only doctrine they had is a hymnal that they've actually tweaked a few times over the years. But.
Kari Hanks [00:14:22] And they do actually quote and preach from the hymn book quite a lot.
Kyle Hanks [00:14:25] Yeah, they do.
Margi Dehlin [00:14:26] From the hymn book. Yeah. How about the Bible?
Kari Hanks [00:14:30] Yeah, the. The KJV Bible and the hymn book. Those are, like, the two things that they use.
Kyle Hanks [00:14:34] And no other Bible. They. They don't. They'll actually kind of preach against other Bibles. And I'm not sure exactly why, because, again, a common theme Throughout. What we're talking about today is that nothing's written down anywhere.
Margi Dehlin [00:14:44] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:14:45] So it's all word of mouth and it's all oral authority based kind of a little bit. You know, they try not to have an authority structure. They would tell you, but they actually do. And that authority gives you what you're supposed to do. And that leads to some little factioning, you know, as we go. But.
John Dehlin [00:14:59] And I should say the King James version of the Bible is sacred in Mormonism too. It's the one true Bible.
Kyle Hanks [00:15:04] Well, it sounds cool. Yeah, it sounds cool to say all those words in English in Old English. It doesn't matter if you're saying them correctly or not, but it sounds awesome. It does sound very holy. And even in the meetings when we pray publicly, a lot of times people use Old English when they're praying, which is interesting.
Kari Hanks [00:15:21] That's funny, because when we met, that was one thing that bothered me is I would use Old English in my prayers and testimony because I was like very rule oriented and a good girl. And Kyle was much more modern with his language and, like relaxed about it. And that was actually something that bothered me.
John Dehlin [00:15:40] Would it be exploitative to ask you to give us an example what it
Margi Dehlin [00:15:44] sounds like we would use thee and
Kari Hanks [00:15:46] thou in our prayers. Like our Father in heaven. We're thankful for everything.
Margi Dehlin [00:15:51] Oh, I see.
Kari Hanks [00:15:51] The more formal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. More formal. The thou language. Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:15:56] And you said you.
Kyle Hanks [00:15:57] And I didn't. I don't. Yeah, I don't know. I didn't really. It wasn't as important to me.
Kari Hanks [00:16:01] I remember. Because it bothered me.
Kyle Hanks [00:16:03] Well, I felt. It felt a little dishonest to me to do that, honestly. And I sort of was okay with people had their traditions or whatever and that that made them feel close to God. Didn't really work for me. And that was okay.
Kari Hanks [00:16:14] Yeah. Even in private prayer where I'm not talking out loud, I'm praying in my own head or my own heart. I was using more formal because we think it's. You're addressing the King of Heaven.
John Dehlin [00:16:23] Yeah. No. We're taught Mormons say thee and thou.
Kyle Hanks [00:16:26] That's interesting.
John Dehlin [00:16:26] Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Okay, Well, I should ask this. Is there any evidence that there's this line of success? Do they claim any evidence of a line of succession from Paul down to the Irish? Was it the. It was founded in Ireland in the 1800s, basically, yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:16:43] We'll talk about him.
John Dehlin [00:16:44] Okay.
Kyle Hanks [00:16:45] I don't think they don't. No, they don't. Not really. It's sort of like, well, we don't really know. We just have faith and we, a lot of times people will say, oh it went underground for years because of persecution, real persecution complex in this group. Any, a lot of different, a lot of different problems that come up. They chalk up to persecution and move on right up to and including the abuse scandal. So any sort of like we don't know our history. Well, it had to go underground. There was persecution or something like that. That's the only thing I've ever heard.
Kari Hanks [00:17:14] But all throughout history you will find with no evidence that there were people meeting in homes just the way that did in the Bible. They issue anything to do with church buildings or even though Jesus preached in temples in the Bible. Yeah, they, they just claim that that happened all throughout history and that that was them continuing.
Kyle Hanks [00:17:36] Yeah, that's. They did it. And then.
Kari Hanks [00:17:38] And there are other religions and other groups that do gather in homes and have Bible studies. But you'll recognize them by their spirit, whether they're the true way or not.
Kyle Hanks [00:17:48] Well, in an honest heart will find us. You know they'll just say stuff like that. And they're not entirely wrong. I mean in the old, in the New Testament there were meetings in homes. If you read into what was going on in some of those letters and stuff. So they find all the verses that match what we do and they really hammer those ones.
John Dehlin [00:18:03] But there's no evidence.
Kyle Hanks [00:18:04] No evidence? No. No actual evidence or even a claim of evidence. No. And because they don't keep any records either. There's no membership records, there's no history records. There's nothing. We were walking around Temple Square. Do you want to talk about that? We were walking around Temple Square yesterday.
Kari Hanks [00:18:17] Yeah, this hit me yesterday. I kind of got emot looking at all the Mormon cultural history because we don't have anything like that. Like when you leave the two by twos you're completely afloat. There's no, I mean when we left there was no support group, there was no community. There were some online that weren't very well administered, administrated.
Kyle Hanks [00:18:39] They weren't just weren't very big yet.
Kari Hanks [00:18:41] They weren't very busy. Like there weren't. There wasn't a lot of activity in those groups and a lot of them were kind of preachy or they allowed current two by twos in there. So it's just a weird mix of scattered groups online. So when we left there was not any support groups or with no written history or you just feel like there's nothing to ground you. There's not even. There wasn't even a way to connect with the X community. Most of us didn't even really use or weren't familiar with the term. Two by two.
John Dehlin [00:19:13] Yeah, you wouldn't know how to find each other because you wouldn't have a name.
Kyle Hanks [00:19:17] There's nothing to Google if there's no
John Dehlin [00:19:19] church, there's no ex church members.
Kyle Hanks [00:19:21] The church has always called things like inside they say we're the truth, we're the way, we're God's children or whatever. Well, none of that Googles, right? That's not a. None of those terms mean anything. So they very sneakily just kept no presence and people know about them. There have been books written about them in the past. I'll talk about those as we go. But there was one book specifically. But, but yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's so underground that people when they leave will spend years not talking to anybody about it because they don't know how to find people.
John Dehlin [00:19:50] So.
Margi Dehlin [00:19:51] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [00:19:51] So we were walking around, you know, looking at some of the, the Mormon cultural history around here and I was saying to Kyle, like if we were ex Mormon, I would bring my kids to see this. They wouldn't care. They would have been bored on this trip because they're not ex Mormon. But it would be part of their heritage, it would be part of their, their family history. We don't have anything like that because our annual gatherings which we called conventions were done on private property, usually a big farm. So we can't really take them there to show them what that was like. We have no. I mean we have some old photographs and you know, this old hymn book that was handed down in my family. But we don't have anything concrete that we can give them of their history or show them or it's all oral.
John Dehlin [00:20:36] No. And that's the opposite of our church because we could think of ourselves as a record keeping people and we were taking minutes and notes from the very beginning. We set up a corporation from the very beginning, a church structure. And journals. We encouraged everyone to keep journals. So I mean that would be very. And even now Margi is a convert. But I take great pride and identity in my pioneer ancestry, even my polygamous heritage. There's a weird pride that, you know, we were the pioneers who did the hard thing. So like I can totally see how you would feel and we'll get to it. Just unmoored, unanchored, unrooted with, without any documents or structures to kind of have as a frame of reference.
Kari Hanks [00:21:26] Yeah. When you leave Mormonism, you maintain a culture. Is that right? Like, you still can feel culturally Mormon when you leave the x2 by twos, they don't even let you have a name. They pretend that they don't have a founder. I mean, you. You leave with nothing. Like, almost no sense of identity. Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:21:41] It's fascinating.
Kari Hanks [00:21:42] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:21:42] If you went and if you told a current member that you'd seen them in the news and they saw a news article that said two by two on it, they would just say, that's not them, because they don't have a name. They only take the name of Jesus.
Kari Hanks [00:21:51] Or they would say, that's Bitter Ex members talking about their group.
John Dehlin [00:21:55] Now, that sounds familiar. Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:21:56] Bitter X members is. We wear that with pride.
Founding of the Movement and William Irvine
John Dehlin [00:21:59] So let's jump to the actual founding of the organization.
Kyle Hanks [00:22:02] Yeah. So the actual founding is there's a man named William Irvine back in the late 80s.
John Dehlin [00:22:07] William Irvine.
Kyle Hanks [00:22:08] William Irvine, yeah.
John Dehlin [00:22:09] Okay.
Kyle Hanks [00:22:09] I'm actually. I'm going to a book here. This is a really good book. It's called Preserving the Truth by Cherie
Kari Hanks [00:22:14] Crop Ehrig, published two years ago. So since we left, she put about.
Kyle Hanks [00:22:19] The author put about 30 years of work into this cataloging, just going everywhere she could, looking at news, you know, microfiche or whatever, going through, looking whatever history she could find, which was usually notes that people had passed, letters that had passed, notes in the news.
John Dehlin [00:22:36] What a legend.
Kari Hanks [00:22:37] She went to England, Ireland, Scotland, and kind of retraced the steps of the original workers. She also has a website, tellingthetruth.info which is where she originally started cataloging the history.
John Dehlin [00:22:48] Is she alive?
Kari Hanks [00:22:49] Oh, yeah.
John Dehlin [00:22:50] Have y' all met her?
Kyle Hanks [00:22:51] Haven't met her in person. We've messaged some.
Kari Hanks [00:22:53] No, we've done, like, coinciding, Zoom interviews with her.
John Dehlin [00:22:56] So you've met her in Zoom? You've seen that?
Kari Hanks [00:22:58] Yeah. Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:22:58] So she's gone back and found every place that this William Irvine character was mentioned. He was actually part of another evangelical group called the Faith Mission. And the Faith Mission. Excuse me. The Faith Mission still exists today as just sort of an evangelical outreach group, non denominational. They survive on donations, and we've never run across them, but we've noticed, we've looked through some of their stuff online and realized that a lot of the terms they use he William Irvine, who used to be a member, lifted from them and used in our group, and we still use them to this day.
Kari Hanks [00:23:29] And they're not an exclusivist group. Like, they encourage people in whatever local church that they go to.
John Dehlin [00:23:36] Can we do a tiny bit of biographical info on this Irvine guy?
Kari Hanks [00:23:39] Yes. Yeah, yeah, we'll get into it.
Kyle Hanks [00:23:40] We do. So I'm going to be reading a lot because this is all stuff we've learned mostly from this book and in the last few years. Again, we grew up thinking shores of Galilee, so.
John Dehlin [00:23:49] Oh, so you didn't grow up sort of worshiping a founder sort of thing.
Kari Hanks [00:23:53] Nobody intentionally cut the founder out of there.
John Dehlin [00:23:55] No Joseph Smith. Equivalent to the point that they don't
Kari Hanks [00:23:58] even think that they were not founded by a man. That's a point.
Kyle Hanks [00:24:02] It's founded in heaven of pride for them.
John Dehlin [00:24:04] Yeah, that's fascinating.
Kyle Hanks [00:24:05] Yeah, we've seen some of the early workers. We've actually seen letters recently that said this was founded in the Garden of Eden and stuff.
Kari Hanks [00:24:12] I heard the name William Irvine when I was a teenager and I asked my parents about it. And most two by twos just believe that he was a worker who was just another worker and maybe was a particularly influential worker who ended up going rogue, which we'll get into. But he was actually the founder.
John Dehlin [00:24:31] That's mind blowing to de emphasize your founder so that he's not a target for scrutiny. That's brilliant.
Kari Hanks [00:24:38] Well, we'll get into why they wanted to erase him from their history because it was sort of an embarrassing story for them.
John Dehlin [00:24:45] Okay, man, I'm on the edge of my seat. Okay.
Kyle Hanks [00:24:48] So, yeah, he was born in 1863 in Scotland and he joined the faith mission in 1895. And as part of the faith mission, they just have people to go out and preach the gospel, I guess. I don't know what they were doing back then exactly, but they sent him on a mission to Ireland. And so he went to Ireland with a few other merry men and started just preaching the gospel.
John Dehlin [00:25:09] Wait, why are you laughing?
Kari Hanks [00:25:11] Merry men?
John Dehlin [00:25:12] Sorry.
Kari Hanks [00:25:13] Just the terms he uses.
Kyle Hanks [00:25:16] And I'm just picturing them all smiling right around. I think they were on bicycles for this point.
Kari Hanks [00:25:19] It was a bicycle mission at first. Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:25:21] And they were just going on faith, preaching the gospel. That was a big thing for him early on was, let's just go in faith. Let's just leave whatever we have, start riding our bikes through the woods.
John Dehlin [00:25:31] And that's very biblical, Jesus says, you know, very. Doesn't Jesus say go in two by twos without person script or something like that?
Kari Hanks [00:25:38] But they ignore the second commission. So the first commission that Jesus sent his apostles out on in Matthew 10 was intended to be temporary. And he said, don't take money with you, leave your script, leave your purse. But then when they came back, he said, now take your script, take your purse and go out and preach to everyone, including the Gentiles. And they ignore the second commission where he said, go ahead and take your belongings and take your money with you. So our workers are homeless. They don't take, they take. Well, they have money, but they claim to not have money. And they only have a suitcase or two that they take with them. They stay in the homes of members.
Margi Dehlin [00:26:16] So they're nomadic.
Kari Hanks [00:26:17] They're nomadic, yeah. They're itinerant.
Kyle Hanks [00:26:18] Somewhat.
John Dehlin [00:26:19] Yeah, itinerant. So I mean, pretty much any biblical church focuses on some things and ignores other things. So definitely on the one hand it is Bible based and New Testament based. On the other hand, like you said, they're hyper focusing in the cherry pick. Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:26:37] Skip over inconvenient parts. So yeah. So 1895 is when he started. He went to Ireland and by 1897 he'd kind of split off from them too. He hadn't formally split off from them, he hadn't been kicked out of the faith mission, but he'd been doing his own thing and trying to come up with his own theology, his own doctrine.
Kari Hanks [00:26:55] So that's sort of the date we used to say when the two by twos first started. It was like 1896. 1897.
Kyle Hanks [00:27:01] Yeah. And that's what they were doing. They were going around living in faith and he got a bunch of other guys to come around with him. My Merryman snarky comment was that he had a bunch of other people who liked what he was doing. Really going in faith, really just going to towns that nobody had been to and preaching the gospel on the side of the road somewhere. They, they called them tent missions early on.
Kyle Hanks [00:27:23] And within about eight years he. I don't. Did we have. When he actually got kicked out of the faith mission, it was several years down there. It was years later when they decided to cut ties with him. But he was kind of doing his own thing and he started bringing a lot of people on board, just following him around. And he, he started at first it was all men, but he pretty soon brought on females, women to preach with him.
Kari Hanks [00:27:49] So basically everyone they were converting at that time, in the very beginning, to my understanding, were joining in this bicycle mission. So every convert in the beginning was a worker, including the women.
Kyle Hanks [00:28:01] Yeah. Because he felt that that was the way to have faith is to go out and preach. That's what you just did. And so early on that's all they were doing. They were all just preaching and driving around, you know, going town to town. But of course, that only lasts for so long before you need someplace to stay. And maybe you're running out of food or something.
Kari Hanks [00:28:18] They were sleeping in barns and starving. And they decided it would be good to convert some people who had homes so that we had places to stay as we traveled around.
Kyle Hanks [00:28:27] So that was actually a little bit of a theological tweak, an innovation, we'll say, just to do that. Even in 1905 is the first time that they started preaching exclusivity, meaning. So the faith mission had been come one, come all. If we're Christians, we can all worship together. He had been that way as well. He'd had his tent meetings on the side, but encouraged people to go to other.
Kyle Hanks [00:28:52] Their own houses of worship, too. But if you really, really want to preach God exactly right, come here and we're really preaching, we're really doing it. And by 1905, they had started talking about, well, maybe we're the only ones doing it right. Maybe people should come to us.
Kyle Hanks [00:29:09] And so they were about 10 years into their ministry total when one of the early workers got ahold of a theological book called Natural Laws in the Spiritual World by Henry Drummond. And I don't know anything about that book. I haven't read it. It's an old theology book. But the point of it was that natural order has things that lead to other things and continuous lines. You can always find continuous lines in nature. What about continuous lines in the.
Kyle Hanks [00:29:40] Hey, what we're doing is in the Bible. That means we go back to the beginning. And so they started preaching at that point. About two years after finding that book, they started preaching exclusively. You have to come to us to be saved, Period.
Kari Hanks [00:29:50] And they got the idea of the living witness doctrine from that book. Yeah, the living witness doctrine, meaning one of God's preachers has to preach his word to bring it alive. For you to have salvation, you have to hear it through one of God's ministers. And they decided, we are those ministers. We are the ones you have to hear the gospel preached through to bring you a living salvation.
John Dehlin [00:30:16] Yeah, it's always kind of this franchise model where you gotta go through. Go through them, right?
Kyle Hanks [00:30:20] Yes, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And they. And they, like I say, up until that point, they. They'd been welcoming to anybody. And now they say, you have to come to us. And about that time, they start switching over and saying people who come to us have to be rebaptized. Through us also. So. And that continues to this day as well.
Kari Hanks [00:30:37] They will not accept other churches baptisms. So you have to be, if you convert to 2 by 2 ISM, you have to be re baptized which I believe is the same in Mormonism.
John Dehlin [00:30:45] Mormons believe no other baptism is legitimate other than a Mormon baptism. 100%.
Kyle Hanks [00:30:50] Yeah. Because you thought you had it before but now you have it for real. So let's recommit.
John Dehlin [00:30:54] Yeah, we take it further. And only Mormon marriages count in heaven too.
Kyle Hanks [00:31:00] So by 1914-19, so 17 years into his ministry, he Irvine, what we kind of learned was that he started to go crazy. He started. It kind of started going to his head a little bit. I think that's my interpretation, just power. And yeah, he decided that not only is he one of the true workers, he's the true worker. In fact he's mentioned in the Bible as one of the two witnesses in Revelation.
Kari Hanks [00:31:26] He and the apostle John. Right, yeah, John and Revelation were. Yeah. So he believed he was a biblical character.
John Dehlin [00:31:34] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:31:34] So the worker said that he lost his anointing. And anointing doesn't really mean anything tangible. It's just a. You're anointed because you God is speaking through you. And they sidelined him a little bit. He wanted to be the leader of everybody. A lot of the ministers thought we should be a little more, we should all have the same power. We shouldn't have one person at the head of us. And there was even a fraction a faction back then. And I'm going to mention the other person because it does come up when you Google there's a man named Edward Cooney, C O O N E N E Y and he believed that Irvine was going the wrong way.
Kari Hanks [00:32:10] He wanted. Yeah, he wanted the ministry to be more equitable where there wasn't a higher egalitarian.
Kyle Hanks [00:32:17] Yeah, yeah. So and that, that ended up, long story short, that ended up in a spin off, I think he ended up in Australia. So when you look us up online a lot of times you'll see the word cuneite because he started with William Irvine and then spun off.
Kari Hanks [00:32:30] And Kuneyites exist but they're not the same thing as two by twos. People often use those terms interchangeably. But Kunaites are their own split off faction and there's only like a couple of hundred members left from our understanding.
John Dehlin [00:32:43] Reminds me of the Monty Python Life of Brian skit. The Judean People's Front versus the People's Front of Judea. We're not the People's Front of Judea. We're the Judean People's Front, Right?
Kyle Hanks [00:32:53] Yeah. There's a South park sketch in there somewhere, too. So by 1919, Irvine had separated from the church and had gone to Jerusalem. So from 1897, from 1897 to 1919, he started this gigantic movement. And at this point there were hundreds.
Kari Hanks [00:33:09] I think they were worldwide too. They spread out very quickly in the early 1900s to Australia, New Zealand, Europe, South Africa. The ministers were spreading out pretty quickly.
John Dehlin [00:33:21] And that's very similar to Mormonism, because almost immediately Joseph Smith is sending missionaries all over the world.
Kyle Hanks [00:33:26] Yeah, same thing.
John Dehlin [00:33:26] So that weird late 1800s, early 1900s, I guess everyone's just sitting around needing churches. And so, like missionaries were just converting everybody like crazy to these weird homespun religions all over the world.
Margi Dehlin [00:33:39] Yep.
Kyle Hanks [00:33:40] Yeah. And whatever the latest preacher was in town tended to grab some people and then, you know, whoever had them in their church last got all upset about it and they'd fight and stuff. But yeah, that was the earliest, the oldest convention grounds. We'll talk about what a convention is in a minute. But it's sort of a gathering place for our people and annually goes back to 1911 in Washington state.
Kari Hanks [00:34:02] And it's still running. It's the oldest one that is still
Kyle Hanks [00:34:06] continuing in the U.S. wait, they've sold it.
John Dehlin [00:34:08] It comes to Washington in 1911.
Kyle Hanks [00:34:11] Earlier than that, probably.
Kari Hanks [00:34:12] They came to the U.S. and Canada in the early 1900s, but they established the first convention, which is like our. It's like our General Conference, but only in person.
John Dehlin [00:34:21] And y' all both grew up in Washington? Yes.
Kari Hanks [00:34:23] So that was my home convention, mill town. It's the oldest running, still continuing convention in the United States.
John Dehlin [00:34:32] So Washington is kind of your Utah.
Kari Hanks [00:34:36] I would say that the Pacific Northwest in general has the most dense population of two by twos. Definitely out of the US Worldwide, there's. They seem to be more scattered and rural.
John Dehlin [00:34:49] Is Scotland, Ireland.
Kari Hanks [00:34:51] The thing is have members, but I would say mostly kind of rural.
Kyle Hanks [00:34:56] Yeah, we don't. Again, we don't have. We don't carry history. We don't put milestones in for ourselves.
Kari Hanks [00:35:01] They don't tracking thing.
Kyle Hanks [00:35:03] Yeah, we don't have. We don't have a Nauvoo. We don't have a. You know, we don't have any of those things because we also were raised thinking this is equal. Throughout the world, anywhere you go, you'll find our people.
Kyle Hanks [00:35:16] That's sort of true. What actually happened, and this is my own interpretation through reading this history book, is that William Irvine had a lot of. He had a lot of his early guys and he scattered them around the world and then they stayed there. Cooney in Australia, we grew up hearing about a guy named Jack Carroll in western United States. In George Walker. Eastern United States would be George Walker. There's these. I'm just saying those names because when two by twos, watch this, they'll know what I'm talking about. So I know I'm talking about you.
Kyle Hanks [00:35:47] He sort of. I can't think of the word, but he had these lieutenants that just went around and started. And so they all have these sort of downlines of more ministers. And the ministers who offered, went to them and said, I'd like to join you in your ministry. And so around the world, it's a little bit localized in that sense. Not local, local, but say western us, Eastern US or so there's territories, kind of. Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:36:09] And area authorities or general authorities over regions.
Kyle Hanks [00:36:13] Right?
Margi Dehlin [00:36:14] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [00:36:14] But I would say where we grew up was probably one of the most populated areas in the world for two by twos. And I thought it was that way everywhere. So when I heard people in the eastern US were driving one to two hours for a Sunday morning meeting, I was mind blown. I didn't know that that was the thing because our convention when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, had upwards of 1000 to 1200 people at the annual convention. So those were the numbers I was used to.
John Dehlin [00:36:44] Has anyone tried to figure out where there's the most dense populations of 2 by twos in the world?
Kari Hanks [00:36:51] Nobody has figured it out. But there are worker lists that are published in the church, not published, passed around internally in the church. And you can kind of guess based on how many workers are in one area, how many, what we would call friends are also there. And I would definitely say the Pacific Northwest is one of the most densely populated up into northern western Canada as well.
John Dehlin [00:37:13] But any other regions in the world that come to mind just because there
Kari Hanks [00:37:16] are a lot in Australia.
John Dehlin [00:37:18] Okay.
Kari Hanks [00:37:19] And they're worldwide, they're everywhere, but not as. As populated.
John Dehlin [00:37:24] Okay, I agree.
Kari Hanks [00:37:25] All right. Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:37:26] And I don't know why exactly. East coast is less than less.
Kari Hanks [00:37:28] And Washington had four conventions. So when I say ours had 1200 on a Sunday, there were also how many conventions in the state? Four. Five.
Kyle Hanks [00:37:37] Four. Yeah, five or six with 10 drivers.
Kari Hanks [00:37:39] He grew up going to a different convention just south of us, closer to Olympia.
John Dehlin [00:37:42] Got it. Okay.
Kyle Hanks [00:37:44] Yeah. So Irvine himself eventually got excommunicated. We've never had a formal Excommunication process, because we don't have formal process of any kind of. But he eventually was kicked out of the church and he retired to Jerusalem because he still thought he was going to get called up in the Rapture or whatever.
Kari Hanks [00:38:02] And there were some people still who stayed loyal to him, who he basically instructed or commanded through letters. So there also is another spinoff faction called Ervinites that are very small in number, but they exist out there.
John Dehlin [00:38:19] And you all know there's like a thousand different branches of Mormon breakoffs, right?
Kyle Hanks [00:38:24] Yeah. These groups can't help themselves.
Kari Hanks [00:38:25] So at this point, the two by two started very purposefully cutting him out of their history to the point that they would take photographs with multiple workers in them and cut him out of the photograph. And they would be preaching about some of the early workers and they would name them. And then when they got to William Irvine, they wouldn't name him. They would say that Scottish worker. So we grew up really not knowing the name. We would hear names of early workers in the US Like Kyle was saying, Jack Carroll or George Walker. People would look up to these people as early kind of overseers, but they would not acknowledge a founder.
John Dehlin [00:39:08] So that's the whitewashing of history, which we share in common.
Kyle Hanks [00:39:12] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's. And they, again, with the whole apostolic succession and living witness doctrine, it has to be spoken this way. That only makes sense if it goes all the way back to the beginning, if you don't acknowledge a founder. So we. Yeah, we didn't know. I knew the name Jack Carroll because he was the oldest. He went as far back as you could go in our region. No one ever really talked about what happened before that. Oh, well, he came from Europe. Question.
Kari Hanks [00:39:37] He's an Irish worker. Buried. There's a cemetery right next to the Milltown Convention grounds in Washington that has a lot of older workers, kind of like the legendary ones. And Jack Carroll's buried up there.
John Dehlin [00:39:51] Interesting. Okay. Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:39:53] So that. That just continued on. They successfully never had a name. They tried to. They just, in their little announcements that they would give a town as they went town to town, they would say, we're just here to preach Jesus. We only take the name of Jesus. We're not one of those churches that takes money. They will accept donations, but they don't require it. You don't have to tithe. So we've never had formal tithing.
Kyle Hanks [00:40:15] And so the news. The news oftentimes would see these guys come in and want to take a. Write a little newspaper article about Them, which is all the history we have. And that book that I showed earlier does a really good job of going back and finding all that information.
Kyle Hanks [00:40:28] And they have all kinds of names. Well, tramp preachers they call them, because they were just tramping around, I guess, go preachers black stockings for a while. Because for a while one of them decided women should have black stockings, so they just wore black stockings. The traditions come and go a little bit because again, it's oral tradition only. And as people spread out, it's very hard to connect. You know, Pre Internet Day 100 years ago, there's no way to connect all the dots on those things. So you see little. Little doctrinal shifts, little traditional shifts. And so as you travel around the world, you'll find those.
Kyle Hanks [00:40:57] And they're kind of surprising because you're raised to think this is a worldwide thing that goes all the way back to. To Jesus himself. And then you travel to another part of the country and they do things a little bit differently. And you're a little surprised by that. So, yeah, all of that. Everything we just said from Orley Mervine on down, we've learned within the last five years.
The Name, Beliefs, and Practices
Kari Hanks [00:41:15] But the name Two by Two was first published over 100 years ago by outside publications like journals or newspapers in Ireland that were kind of following this group and educating. Now they're in this group town and now they're preaching in this town and they're moving around and kind of keeping people up to date on what was going on with them. They started using the term two by twos.
John Dehlin [00:41:37] Were they. Were you able to find instances in the history where they were looked upon with disfavor, scandal, you know, that sort of thing.
Kari Hanks [00:41:48] Those early publications that were calling them Two by Twos were criticizing how they did baptisms and.
John Dehlin [00:41:55] But was more theological.
Kari Hanks [00:41:58] Some of it was theological, but some of it was these people are coming in here and disrupting the town and riling people up and preaching in their tent missions.
Kyle Hanks [00:42:07] Yeah, because they were preaching that at this point, as they spread through the US especially early 1900s, part of their message was, all of your previous religious views are wrong.
Kari Hanks [00:42:16] You all are going to hell. We are right. You're going to hell.
Kyle Hanks [00:42:19] Especially clergy.
Kari Hanks [00:42:20] People don't like to hear that.
Kyle Hanks [00:42:22] William especially. But then his lieutenants as well, started preaching very directly that all of the clergy you've listened to before, those guys are going straight to hell. We're doing it the only correct way. We're going by faith. And so, yeah, it riled people up a little Bit. Especially clergy members.
John Dehlin [00:42:37] Yeah. And a lot of LDS opposition in New York, Kirtland, Ohio, and Nauvoo, Illinois. Was people being offended at our truth claims. Yeah, you know, among other things. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So it was mostly theological or just competitive opposition.
Margi Dehlin [00:42:58] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:42:58] Because I don't find. They weren't really doing much. They were just preaching by the side of the road, often in tents or barns or something. They weren't really. They weren't building church buildings. They weren't taking over politics. They've always been very separate from politics. So in that sense, they weren't riling people up. It was just pulling people away from other churches.
Kari Hanks [00:43:13] They were very fire and brimming. So, yeah, the town's clergy wouldn't like that.
John Dehlin [00:43:17] I'm going to just say, and this will be slightly repetitive. It sounds. You know, the common criticism against religions, and specifically high demand religions or cults, is they're about sex, power and money. And it really sounds like this church was intentionally set up to not be about money, to not be about sex. Cause I think your itinerant preachers are supposed to be celibate. Not about sex, not about money, and not about power. Cause there's no formal power structure. I mean, clearly there are gonna be power dynamics. But it sounds like it was set up to avoid those three main trappings, which is actually, at least in its intention, kind of cool.
Kari Hanks [00:44:02] I think the harm in the beginning came from the exclusivity. And that brings in the power dynamics of, you have to. To hear from us to have salvation. There's going to be some power that comes into play there.
John Dehlin [00:44:15] I mean, that's the ultimate power, ironically.
Kari Hanks [00:44:17] William Irvine. I think one of the reasons why. And I might be reading into this, but in my opinion, one of the reasons why celibacy in the ministry was so important to him was because he had an illegitimate son, we believe. I don't know if this has ever been proven, but legend has it that he had an illegitimate son and that was one of his greater sins that he regretted. So he really wanted a celibate ministry. And then as far as money, I don't really know how it was back in the early days.
Kyle Hanks [00:44:49] Do you know, they had donation boxes at their meeting sites, at their tents or whatever. They'd have a donation box in the back and people could give if they wanted to.
Kari Hanks [00:44:58] And when we were growing up, it was always cash under the table. Like you shake a weight worker's hand and you might have a $50 bill, you know, not me as A kid, but like an. A man who's an elder might have a $50 bill in his hand and hands it to the worker when he's shaking his hand after a gospel meeting. Or like. One thing Kyle and I did was when we had the workers staying in our homes, we would put some money in an envelope and leave it on their bed.
John Dehlin [00:45:21] So money comes in, money comes into it.
Kyle Hanks [00:45:23] Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't. You gotta eat. So.
John Dehlin [00:45:26] But my point is it's engineered to try and keep those influences to minimize. Other than the exclusive truth claims, which is maximum power and control.
Margi Dehlin [00:45:37] The control pieces there very early.
Kyle Hanks [00:45:40] Yeah, but the messaging is really good, though. It addresses, like you're saying, it addresses the main concerns of established religions. So when people hear it. This will be part of my story later. But one of my grandparents found it because he was looking for something that wasn't corrupted. He went looking for something that just looked like pure people. Yeah, Purely just going in faith, preaching the gospel. Of course, the early ministers had a lot of problems with that, such as starving, not finding food, not finding places to stay, getting sick, things like that. But they continued on in faith, and that sells to people who are looking for that kind of thing.
Kyle Hanks [00:46:13] So the history of Irvine sort of rounds out with the last little bit I would say is that he originally everybody was ministers, and after he had started inviting women preachers, they also had married couples, too. And that's something I didn't know until the last couple years past. Workers, yeah, married couples in some cases left their children behind with family members to go preach.
Kari Hanks [00:46:35] They were not allowed to bring their children. So if they were married with kids, they would have to. Basically, their kids would have to be raised by relatives. So when you go into the work, it's like. It's very similar to a Mormon mission, but it's for life. You don't usually leave the work. People can and do, but it's looked down upon.
John Dehlin [00:46:54] So what you learned recently is that some of the couples that would go out in twos would be male and female and were married. Do you know if they were celibate as married?
Kari Hanks [00:47:05] No, they were. Probably wouldn't have been.
John Dehlin [00:47:07] Okay. But that would have been information withheld from you that there used to be married couples growing up.
Kari Hanks [00:47:14] That's something we kind of were. I was always sort of generally aware of that, but I never really wondered why it wasn't allowed anymore. Yeah, because that definitely changed when we were young. I think the last married couple to go into the work was in the 1960s. And then after that, there was very direct communication from the workers that they would no longer be allowing married workers. If you wanted to marry, you had to leave the work.
John Dehlin [00:47:41] And just the existence of some change that. A systemic change. You're both smiling. Is an indication that there's a power structure and some ultimate authority making decisions. Right.
Kari Hanks [00:47:52] Well, it's funny because they preach against change. They don't like the idea of change. They don't like the idea of growth. That's a worldly thing. Like churches that change their minds. In fact, they would point to Mormonism and say, they used to allow this, but now. Or they didn't used to allow this, but now they do as an example of like, look, worldly churches change. They change their mind and they can just like decree a new doctrine. And it is so. And we don't do that, but they actually did.
Kyle Hanks [00:48:17] Okay, so. Yeah, so that's. I think that kind of closes out the Irvine story. And so it's continued on. Still goes around today, workers traveling in pairs, the different regions. Now we'll start talking maybe a little bit about what it looks like now the ministry still goes around just like it did, mostly just staying in homes of members now because that's more functional. They don't stay in an open barn anymore. They'll. They'll go to members houses and stay. And the regions have gotten a little smaller. So there will be an overseer worker. There'll just be one older brother worker.
Kyle Hanks [00:48:53] There'll just be one older brother worker ahead of over a group and over an area, a geographical area. So, like where we were raised was Washington. And so just for. As an example, Washington, northern Idaho and Alaska was under one overseer. He was probably one of the older brothers. He wasn't too old, but old and seasoned. And under him would be all of the pairs of workers in that area and they would be divided up into fields, they called them. So they're the harvest. They always talk about going out in the harvest field and finding, you know, needy souls. And so those. That'll be those. Each of those fields will be an area of maybe several towns or something, a couple counties, something like that.
Kari Hanks [00:49:34] When we were growing up, a field was usually one to 200 people, something like that. So about 100 people per pair of workers.
Kyle Hanks [00:49:41] Yeah, and they'll just assign workers to an area and they'll stay there for about a year and then they'll. The overseer will rewrite the list and shuffle people around and the pairs will get switched up. They don't usually Stay. The pairs don't usually stay together. And yeah, that's how, that's, that's the transition into now. And they've been doing that for, you know, close to 100 years.
John Dehlin [00:50:00] And then the local meetings, sort of Sunday school teachings, sacrament, all that kind of stuff.
Kari Hanks [00:50:09] So meetings Sunday. So we'd have three meetings a week. Sunday morning, which is where you have the sacrament. We would call the emblems. So we would use grape juice and bread. And that was considered the most important part of the meeting, which is at the end of the meeting, where anyone who has been baptized can partake in the emblems. So Sunday morning meetings and Mormons started
John Dehlin [00:50:28] with wine in bread and then they moved to grape juice in bread and then they moved to water.
Kari Hanks [00:50:33] Some areas of the world, like most of Europe and I think Australia, use wine, but because oftentimes the two by twos baptize younger teenagers in the US they use grape juice so that everyone can, can partake in it who has been baptized.
Kari Hanks [00:50:48] So Sunday mornings would be in someone's home. Meetings are always in a home of where we grew up. And I understand not everyone grew up with this many two by twos around them, but when we were growing up, there were like between 20 to 40 people in the home. And they would set up chairs in the person's living room, folding chairs usually. And you come in and you sit kind of around the living room in a circle.
Kari Hanks [00:51:12] And you have each person who has professed their desire to serve God, which we call professing or joining the two by twos. Usually you profess when you're. We've heard as young as 6. Normally it's between 8 to 12. Is when kids. Professional.
John Dehlin [00:51:31] That's like the equivalent of being saved.
Kari Hanks [00:51:33] Yes, that's joining. Yeah. You're professing your desire to serve God for the rest of your life or joining the two by twos.
John Dehlin [00:51:41] And is that when baptism happens?
Kari Hanks [00:51:43] No, baptism would be when you're a teenager. And that's. It's. They can they kind of compare it to like getting engaged versus getting married. When you profess, you're committing to God, but baptism is like really sealing the deal.
John Dehlin [00:51:57] Okay.
Kari Hanks [00:51:58] So if you're baptized and you leave meetings, it's really. You're not looking at a, at a pretty eternity. So Sunday mornings you would, you would pray and give a testimony if you have professed. So you. And they never separate children and adults. Younger kids sit with the general congregation always. And then Wednesday nights they have.
John Dehlin [00:52:20] Okay, wait, can I ask a question?
Kari Hanks [00:52:21] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:52:22] So is it like three or four families? Basically 20 people?
Kyle Hanks [00:52:25] Yeah, it can be. They try to just split them up evenly through a few different homes. So it depends. We were raised in an area that had a lot of us, so we would probably have. Yeah, three or four families plus some older people. Yeah, they don't divide them up by age at all. It's just kind of. It's somewhat geographical and in a town. The town I grew up in had quite a few. I think there were two or three Sunday morning meetings and the workers would tell us which one to go to. They would assign an elder of a home and then they would tell who to go.
John Dehlin [00:52:50] Oh, wait, so you don't get to pick which families.
Kyle Hanks [00:52:53] You don't. And that was actually.
Kari Hanks [00:52:57] That was actually one of our small cracks. We like to use the Mormon analogy of the shelf. That was something we put on our shelf because when we. When we had kids, they assigned us to a meeting that was much farther away. And we passed one or two meetings on the way to get there. And we had little kids and, you know, the kids would get tired and it was just. It felt like much more of a hassle to drive past two meetings that were closer to us to go to this one farther away. But yeah, you don't get to choose. They assign the meetings. They choose who is worthy of having a meeting in their. In their home, which we call elders, normally a married couple.
John Dehlin [00:53:36] So elders are people that have been deemed worthy to hold meetings in their home.
Kyle Hanks [00:53:39] Yeah. By the workers assigned to them.
John Dehlin [00:53:41] Yeah, by the missionaries. By the workers.
Kyle Hanks [00:53:43] By the local missionaries. And like we say, those change year to year, though. You'll have two in your area, then the next year you'll have two more. But each pair has the same authority. They can come in and change things around.
John Dehlin [00:53:52] And it's basically your assignments per area.
Kyle Hanks [00:53:54] For the workers it is. Yeah.
Kari Hanks [00:53:56] But not for elders. You can have a meeting in your home indefinitely unless you do something that they don't like. They don't like, and then they can remove it.
John Dehlin [00:54:03] So that's a dishonor if you removed
Kyle Hanks [00:54:06] it, if you lose your meeting. Yeah. They don't write anything down, though. So it's. It can be anything from. From. They found out you were living a double life and doing terrible things to your wife. Cut her hair.
Kari Hanks [00:54:16] We have heard of a meeting very recently, within the last couple of years being removed from a home in Canada because the wife cut her hair too short.
John Dehlin [00:54:25] So women having long hair is an important thing.
Kari Hanks [00:54:27] Yeah. You don't cut your Hair. We'll get into that.
Kyle Hanks [00:54:29] Yeah, we'll talk the meetings, then we'll talk about it.
Kari Hanks [00:54:32] So then there's Wednesday night Bible studies, which are less formal, but same setup. You still sit in a circle in the living room and you give a prayer and a testimony, but you don't have the emblems, the sacrament in Wednesday night Bible study. And those studies are. You're given a list which the workers assign. Normally they'll have you read through either a book in the Bible, so you're reading one chapter each week, and then you read it before the meeting, and then you go and discuss it in the meeting in your testimony, or they'll have a topic like the sower and the seed or something, and then you read through that for a month or so.
Kari Hanks [00:55:06] And then gospel meetings are Sunday afternoons and those are structured differently. So you would go to a rented hall like a library or a school or funeral home, some public place, and you sit and listen to the workers preach to you for an hour. Those are the Gospels.
John Dehlin [00:55:24] So there's two Sunday meetings, two Sunday
Kari Hanks [00:55:26] meetings and one Wednesday meeting.
Kyle Hanks [00:55:28] And those second meetings are kind of the mission. It's the continuation of what they've been doing since William Irvine, which is the pair will go find some public place and preach to for an hour. And those are open to the public. They're always done in public places. They're not advertised real well, but because especially where we've been in Seattle and the Phoenix area, there's so many people, you can fill up a room pretty easily. So they don't advertise very well.
Kari Hanks [00:55:49] They don't actually proselytize very much because they're so worried about being discovered. They value their secrecy so much that they don't proselytize very often. You don't often get converts.
Kyle Hanks [00:56:01] So what started as a very successful set of missionaries growing this church in the last few years, at least in our lifetime, has changed to just preaching to the flock, mostly staying in their homes. Yeah, they've got plenty of people with open homes for them.
Kari Hanks [00:56:18] And actually in our grandparents generation, they would hold more than three meetings a week. They would often have gospel meetings every evening when they were going into a new area and trying to more purposefully recruit members.
John Dehlin [00:56:31] Can I blow your mind for a second? Mormons used to have two Sunday meetings, one in the morning and one in the afternoon or evening, and then one on Wednesdays.
Kari Hanks [00:56:40] Well, they were on the right track, but somewhere they were close.
Kyle Hanks [00:56:42] They didn't quite have it, but in
John Dehlin [00:56:44] my lifetime they got Rid of the second Sunday meeting and consolidated it into a three hour meeting.
Kyle Hanks [00:56:50] Yeah, well, if they.
John Dehlin [00:56:51] It's a two hour meeting.
Kyle Hanks [00:56:51] If they were honest, they would find our preachers then, as we were often told.
John Dehlin [00:56:55] We're getting indoctrinated already. Okay. Anyway, that's interesting. Okay.
Kyle Hanks [00:57:01] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [00:57:01] So each, so each meeting is an hour during the week. And then our annual convention is four days. So you would go and take work off, take school off, whatever you need to do to be there for the whole four days. Ours, where we grew up, started Wednesday night and then went all the way through Sunday afternoon. And they have three meetings a day. The morning meeting is two hours, the afternoon meeting is two hours and the evening meeting is an hour. And you're sitting on really hard wooden benches, usually in like a tent or an old barn that they've cleaned out for it or something like that and listening to the workers preach.
Conventions, Dress Codes, and Community Rules
John Dehlin [00:57:42] So again, our general conferences are twice a year, but it used to be. And it's Saturdays and Sundays only. But it used to be three two hour meetings on Saturday and then two two hour meetings on Sunday.
Kari Hanks [00:57:54] So the difference I think with our convention is once you're on the convention grounds, you don't have to leave. They provide all of your food and they provide sleeping quarters, usually in an old barn. And they'll separate men and women in the sleeping quarters. They'll have a nursery for mothers to go with their babies to sleep, or their young kids. Or you can bring a tent or a camper and bring it onto the grounds and sleep.
John Dehlin [00:58:16] Fascinating. Yeah, that's once a year.
Kyle Hanks [00:58:19] Once a year. And there's a bunch of them and they don't all go at the same time. They, they rotate through because the ministers travel from. To each one. Or we'll go on a tour of several of them. So yeah, they'll bring workers in from
Kari Hanks [00:58:32] overseas for convention rounds. So usually in a geographical area, conventions are scheduled in a way that they stagger but are close together. So the workers from overseas can hit 7, 8 conventions before they go back to their country.
Kyle Hanks [00:58:48] It's become very American centric, we like to say overseas for places we can't. It is US centric, we can't drive to.
Kari Hanks [00:58:55] There is like a mini convention that we call special meetings six months up away from convention. So it's not the same as convention though. It's like one day with the three meetings and you bring a packed lunch and then you leave at the end of the day. Just like a mini convention.
John Dehlin [00:59:11] Yeah, okay, I'm getting it. Yeah. So you've got your equivalent to general authorities that are going around in the main annual convention, in the mini convention, as like the keynote speakers to kind of really lay down the good stuff.
Kyle Hanks [00:59:25] Yeah, yeah. I think almost all of them have a little part. The women have a very short part. The men can go on for quite a while.
Kari Hanks [00:59:32] Women never lead the meeting. So there is a hierarchy. I don't know if we've. Yeah, a patriarchy. Yeah, definitely. So sister workers would speak first and the shortest, and then. And then a male brother worker would lead the meeting, which means he has a longer time to speak at the end, and he closes the meeting out. And then you have overseers, which are always men and usually older men. And the overseers are still workers, but they oversee a larger geographical area, which I think you mentioned.
John Dehlin [01:00:03] Yeah, yeah.
Kyle Hanks [01:00:04] And they make all the final decisions, too. If anything, if a question comes up, it pretty much goes to them and they tell you yes or no. And that could mean, as we'll talk about a little bit later, that could mean they say something that's the opposite of what everybody else is doing, but you got to do it. They're the ones most led by God, according to them.
Kari Hanks [01:00:22] And they assign fields where workers go. Like workers can't usually choose where they want to labor. We call it. The overseers would assign that.
John Dehlin [01:00:31] Such a creepy term, overseer, by the way.
Kari Hanks [01:00:33] It is creepy.
John Dehlin [01:00:34] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [01:00:34] It's one of those things. We had so many terms that we grew up with. Terms and concepts that we grew up with is just second nature. We don't think about it. And we get a lot of that feedback when we talk about it. People kind of recoil and go, that's. That's a weird thing to say. And it's like, oh, yeah, it is kind of weird. I never thought about it.
John Dehlin [01:00:47] Maybe doctrine, theology, Real quick, behavioral practice.
Kyle Hanks [01:00:52] So theology is non Trinity. We don't believe in the Trinity. And that has changed. Originally they did, which is interesting. We just, within the last, what, month or two, figured that out, that some of the early ministers were teaching that God is the Godhead of three, whatever. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Nowadays they don't teach that. They teach that there's three separate entities.
Kyle Hanks [01:01:14] And they like to really accentuate things that other people don't talk about. So it kind of makes us separate. They love to say that we're in the world, but we're not of the world, meaning we don't live on a compound. Although that might have been preferable in some cases. But we don't We. We go to school with everybody else. We work with everybody else. For the men, it's actually kind of hard to tell who's who. We just look sort of Mormon. For the women, it's. The women are much more noticeable. Maybe you should talk about that.
Kari Hanks [01:01:47] Yeah. Men basically just have to have short hair, be clean cut most of the time. I mean, they can have beards, but no tattoos, no jewelry, except, like a watch and wedding band. Women, when I was growing up, did not. You do not cut your hair. And some women would have very long hair, especially sister workers.
Margi Dehlin [01:02:07] Like, no trims. It's not just have long hair. It's. You can't cut your hair.
Kari Hanks [01:02:11] I was allowed to trim to keep my hair healthy because that would make it grow longer. Like, you can cut the dead ends off of your hair, but you can't cut length off of your hair.
Kyle Hanks [01:02:24] It depends how different families. Again, nothing's ever written down at all. So everyone has a little bit of interpretation as far as how far they want to take different things. So this will come up a lot in our stories of how we kind of grew up with different traditions or whatever. Some families absolutely never even get scissors near a woman's hair. And women have to wear dresses and skirts all the time.
Kari Hanks [01:02:45] I never cut my hair until we started deconstructing. No makeup, no jewelry, no piercings of any kind.
John Dehlin [01:02:53] For women, no earrings.
Kari Hanks [01:02:54] No earrings at all. No piercings, no necklaces, no makeup, no dyeing your hair.
Margi Dehlin [01:03:01] It's like unadorned.
Kari Hanks [01:03:02] Unadorned. That's.
Margi Dehlin [01:03:03] That's.
Kari Hanks [01:03:04] Yeah, that's what they would say.
Kyle Hanks [01:03:05] And the women also wear their hair on top of their heads. Especially the adult women. Married women. Yeah. One of the sort of derogatory terms or nickname terms that people came up with for us early on was the buns and skirts or bun heads, because the women always had dresses and skirts on and had their hair up on top of their heads. And that's a. There's a verse, something about women preaching with their heads covered. And that's just where we fell on that one. Some churches will say that you should wear a head covering. We decided the hair should literally be up on top of your head.
Kari Hanks [01:03:36] And then modest. Modest dress. Jean skirts were a big thing for us. Like for floor length jean skirts, usually some families allowed pants outside of meetings, like to school or to work. Well, usually not work. If you're an adult. Two by two woman, you're wearing a skirt or a dress. Like, I rarely saw my mom in pants. Even if I see her in pants today. It surprises me, but I was allowed to wear pants around the home and to school. A lot of families didn't allow that. But in the meeting setting or when workers or other two by twos are around, you're always in a dress or a skirt.
John Dehlin [01:04:09] What about swimsuits?
Kari Hanks [01:04:11] We were allowed to wear swimsuits, but they had to be modest.
John Dehlin [01:04:16] No bikinis.
Kari Hanks [01:04:19] I mean, I've seen two by two girls in bikinis, but I would not have felt comfortable in a bikini myself. I was a rule follower, so that would have made me uncomfortable.
John Dehlin [01:04:29] What about dietary restrictions or sexual.
Kari Hanks [01:04:33] No alcohol, no. No smoking, no drugs. There weren't a lot of other dietary things other than those. What was the other question you asked?
John Dehlin [01:04:43] Sexual rules.
Kari Hanks [01:04:44] Yeah. No sex before marriage. And if you're a worker, you're celibate. And that was something that you could. There's different. They don't excommunicate. There's no official process. But you could be asked to stop taking part in the meetings or stop taking part of the emblems or not come to the meetings. If you. If they found out that you were living with someone or you had sex before marriage or you were gay or anything like that. And it really depends on the workers. It's whatever vibes the worker wants to go with. As far as we've heard for the LGBTQ community, anywhere from you can sit and listen and not take part or just don't act on it to. You are no longer allowed to attend meetings at all, which means you're going to hell.
John Dehlin [01:05:32] And can you be demoted as a worker if you misstep? Can you be removed kind of from the.
Kari Hanks [01:05:38] You can be kicked out of the work. Oh, yeah. Yep.
Margi Dehlin [01:05:40] Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:05:40] Okay.
Kyle Hanks [01:05:41] Or put on a pause. Sometimes we've heard of a worker or two being asked to just take a break for a year because resting the Resting. Yeah. Lots of little euphemisms for can't preach right now.
John Dehlin [01:05:51] And regular members. Adults just have regular jobs and just do their job.
Kyle Hanks [01:05:56] Church stuff among you.
Kari Hanks [01:05:57] They would preach a lot that you're in the world, but not of the world. So you are supposed to be separate kind of mentally and emotionally from your peers, especially at school. Like, making friendships at school is something that we'll individually talk about in our stories.
Margi Dehlin [01:06:12] But that's a Mormon thing, too.
Kari Hanks [01:06:15] That quote, in the world, not as the world.
John Dehlin [01:06:17] Oh, a thousand percent. Not of the world. In the world. Not of the world. Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [01:06:22] Yeah. They teach us that we're the potentially the only light anyone ever sees. They're very exclusive. So they'll teach kids, very small kids. I remember hearing from early on that, you know, don't put your candle under a bushel. You might be the only light that the world sees. You might be the light, the only Bible they read. Yeah, yeah, sorry.
Kari Hanks [01:06:38] That anyone ever reads.
Kyle Hanks [01:06:39] Yeah. So we carry. From a very early age, we carry that responsibility of being like, we're right. Everybody else probably needs to see us.
John Dehlin [01:06:47] But a weird twist is not being very missionary minded.
Margi Dehlin [01:06:50] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [01:06:50] Yeah. And the thing is, is they say they are. That's a kind of a thing that. That's one of those really obvious things that I didn't think about until well into adulthood. And I will talk about it later maybe, but I have talked to a few workers who have stepped aside on their own, and that's one of the things that kind of bugged them a little bit, is they realized they got into the work and they just kind of bounced around from friend's house to friend's house. And maybe they would have a project to go to somebody's private property where there's a convention, and then they would go work on that a little bit and do something, upgrade a restroom or something.
Kyle Hanks [01:07:19] And they weren't actually doing any evangelizing, but they do tell us that we're supposed to evangelize, and they really encourage us to invite people to meetings. So now and then there were times where you would have a worker who really wanted to evangelize and they would put. They would put little announcements on cards or something that said, hey, come to our.
Kari Hanks [01:07:37] I brought some.
Kyle Hanks [01:07:37] Yeah, come to our Bible mission. We're just preaching Jesus. We don't take a collection. Come on down.
Kari Hanks [01:07:43] They used to do that.
Kyle Hanks [01:07:45] They don't do that much anymore.
Kari Hanks [01:07:46] They used to do that a lot when we were younger. They would even sometimes take kids with them and go door to door and knock on people's doors.
Kyle Hanks [01:07:52] Yeah, I did that one time.
Kari Hanks [01:07:52] Or they'd put adverts in a newspaper.
John Dehlin [01:07:54] The obvious extreme example is Jehovah's Witnesses.
Kyle Hanks [01:07:57] Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:07:58] Just part of being a Jehovah's Witness is to constantly go out on Saturdays or whatever.
Kari Hanks [01:08:03] Yeah. And they don't really do that anymore. So my great aunt was in the work and I have some of her old photo albums.
Kyle Hanks [01:08:11] We didn't have the formal go out and preach like a Jehovah's Witness, but we did have the. Make sure you're on your best behavior all the time. Make sure. Sure. Make sure that people think highly of God because of you. We Heard when I was younger that don't worry about what people think about you because of God, but worry about what people think of God because of you. So we were constantly carrying this example of truth to the world.
Kari Hanks [01:08:32] So I have this, see if I can. It's going to be hard to see, but I'll read it. This is from the 1940s. It says special gospel services beginning Sunday, May 13th in the. And then there's an address each Sunday, 7:30pm Tuesday and Friday, 8:00pm we urge everyone to come and make these services a blessing. And then it has the names of the. The sister workers on it.
John Dehlin [01:08:55] Got it. All right, well, anything else is kind of crucial to the framing to then jump into your stories.
Heaven, Hell, and Shunning Outsiders
Kari Hanks [01:09:02] Yeah, I want to talk about heaven and hell because my understanding is Mormonism has like different levels of. Yet for the two by twos, it's very binary. You have hell or heaven. And hell is a literally literal fiery burning, eternal torture forever. There's no redemption possible. And heaven is basically, we were taught convention is what heaven will be like. So you're sitting around worshiping at the feet of the throne of God with
John Dehlin [01:09:34] the words of the forever.
Kari Hanks [01:09:35] Lots of singing, singing praises, singing hymns with his chosen, saved people forever, for eternity.
John Dehlin [01:09:42] Okay, that's important.
Margi Dehlin [01:09:43] Was that a lure? Like, did you love convention where you were like, I would. That is what I want.
John Dehlin [01:09:49] Or is it more like I want to do convention?
Margi Dehlin [01:09:51] Or is it more like hell is just so terrible.
Kari Hanks [01:09:55] I loved convention as a kid. Cause I had good experiences there, which is not the case for everybody. As an older adult who was listening more to the messages being preached, I thought eternity might be boring if this is what it's like forever and ever. But we're taught that there's such a feeling of peace and joy that in heaven that it would. And when the alternative is hell, torture and suffering and burning.
John Dehlin [01:10:25] Convention.
Kari Hanks [01:10:26] It sounds great.
John Dehlin [01:10:27] Yeah. Interesting.
Kyle Hanks [01:10:29] Yeah. The convention is just a little taste of heaven. It's a little. This is our natural version. This is what we're doing on earth. But heaven's gonna be so much better.
Kari Hanks [01:10:35] And they don't recognize the family forever thing. At least that's not how I was taught. I was taught that in heaven you wouldn't recognize your earthly family, but everyone would be one big family of God, so it wouldn't matter to you. But as a child, that was something that scared me. I thought, if I die young and I go to heaven, I'm not going to recognize my parents there. Like that sounds scary.
Kyle Hanks [01:10:56] I just grew up Thinking it wouldn't matter because we're just all souls and we wouldn't recognize each other anyway. And we're all just there in peace. There is a verse that says something about that in heaven there's no marriage or giving in marriage, something like that. They took that to mean there's just no, we're all just there together. That's it.
Kari Hanks [01:11:12] There's two more kind of rules that we missed, which is no TV. Two by twos do not technically not supposed to have TVs. A lot of people have a TV hidden in a cupboard in their home somewhere or in a closet. But we didn't grow up with tv. So a lot of cultural references we don't understand, some of those we've tried to catch up in the last, last little while. But. And that was actually something we did before we left, we ended up getting a tv. And that's a big no, no. And then most families in the US specifically don't celebrate Christmas. So we didn't grow up having Christmas trees or decorating. My family did presents because my parents loved doing presents. And it was like something that was fun for us, but we didn't make it a religious thing.
John Dehlin [01:11:56] Huh.
Kyle Hanks [01:11:57] And nothing being written down. That's where you go around to different parts of the world. In Australia, they don't understand why we didn't celebrate Christmas.
Kari Hanks [01:12:02] You know, the workers there didn't preach that Christmas was wrong. And we had a worker here in the 70s, like my parents grew up with a Christmas tree, or my mom did at least. And then some worker came along in the 60s and 70s and started preaching that that had pagan roots. And all of a sudden Christmas trees weren't allowed anymore.
Kyle Hanks [01:12:18] Yeah, the traditions are really strange. You'll see. The TV tradition is such a funny one. The X community jokes about it a lot because it doesn't really make any sense. But what happened is television came out on the market for people to buy and were readily available to the average consumer. And a worker decided, well, if they're going to stay home and watch tv, they're not going to come to the church meetings. At least that's the lore I've heard and said, well, we shouldn't do it. God's people shouldn't do something like that. And that held. It held everywhere, pretty much everywhere in the world. People who grew up in this have iPhones, they got iPads, they got all kinds of things, but they don't have TVs or they've hidden them. They're in a closet somewhere and they pull them out in a big chair.
Kari Hanks [01:12:58] And that means also no movie theaters. If Jesus returns while you're in a movie theater, he's not gonna collect you from a movie theater or a school dance. No dancing. No dancing.
Margi Dehlin [01:13:08] So as computers have come on the scene, how do they. I mean, have they had to update kind of that where. Well, if you have a computer, you can't watch. Computers can be a lot like this on a computer.
Kari Hanks [01:13:19] Most of the workers know now that two by twos are watching shows and movies and just don't do it when the workers are around. But workers themselves would not watch shows and movies. I have seen a worker watch YouTube clips of like cute cats or something, but they're not watching shows and movies or listening to music. Whereas the general two by twos are allowed.
John Dehlin [01:13:39] Wait, you can't listen to pop music?
Kari Hanks [01:13:40] General two by twos. Most families allowed music, but workers would not listen to music. But were you allowed?
Kyle Hanks [01:13:47] Well, and there's certain parts of the globe where that's not allowed. So in Australia, they have Christmas, but they don't. They weren't allowed to listen to music to the point that they would. The workers. There was a time where car antennas were the big wire antennas, you know, and the workers would go around a convention and snap the antennas off of the cars because they're like, you shouldn't be listening to music.
Kari Hanks [01:14:07] They were damaging people's properties.
John Dehlin [01:14:08] Dang.
Kyle Hanks [01:14:09] But where we live, that wasn't a as big of a deal. My family didn't listen to a lot of music, but it wasn't a deal breaker. So there's just a lot of disjointed things. There's a lot of disjointed rules that didn't make any sense that you held to religiously because you just wanted to be as safe as possible.
John Dehlin [01:14:24] Right.
Margi Dehlin [01:14:25] And obedience is the point, right?
Kyle Hanks [01:14:27] Yeah, the obedience. Exactly. The obedience is the point that it wasn't that there. It wasn't that the rules were clearly defined, because they weren't. It's that if you were a good Christian, if you were a good. We didn't even say Christian. If you're professing to love and serve God. God and follow Jesus, if you're going to go in the Jesus way, you're going to do the simplest thing to stay as close to the center of the fold. They like to say, like a sheepfold, stay in the center. Don't go to the edge. So a very conscientious, scrupulous two by two would just stay like Well, I don't really know how we feel about that, so I feel I'm going to stay away from it.
John Dehlin [01:15:01] And baptism is a requirement to go to heaven or not, I think so.
Kyle Hanks [01:15:07] It. Yeah, it's one of those weird things. I'm not sure.
Kari Hanks [01:15:09] Confessing and you're. And you die before you get a chance to be baptized. I. You would be saved?
Kyle Hanks [01:15:15] I think so, yeah. I don't know.
Kari Hanks [01:15:16] But if you're an adult and you refuse baptism, then you're not taking steps with Jesus, so then you're not willing.
Kyle Hanks [01:15:23] Okay.
Kari Hanks [01:15:23] And then we kind of didn't. We didn't talk about membership numbers. Well, they don't keep track of membership. When we were growing up, our. From what we've learned from this book that Cherie published was like the peak two by two, when they were most populous. And they estimate that there were about 150,000 to 200,000 worldwide in the 1980s. Pre Covid, that number was down to about 75,000. Rough estimate. And it's definitely gone down since then
John Dehlin [01:15:55] because I think I chatgpt it, and I think chatgpt may have said like 800,000 to a million.
Kari Hanks [01:16:01] That's not right.
John Dehlin [01:16:03] Okay.
Kyle Hanks [01:16:03] Yeah, no, no, we're close to that.
John Dehlin [01:16:05] I don't think that you know of.
Kyle Hanks [01:16:07] That we know of. Yeah.
Margi Dehlin [01:16:08] I mean, it's the secrecy part. The secrecy part is so very like.
Kari Hanks [01:16:11] But again, if you. They do have worker lists that they release every year. So if. If you know kind of how many friends there are compared to workers, you can come up with a rough estimate. And if there were a million two by twos worldwide, there would be a lot more workers.
Margi Dehlin [01:16:26] Oh, I see.
Kyle Hanks [01:16:26] Yeah. They're very purposeful about where they send workers to an area that has a certain number of friends, is what we call them. I know we started using that term, friends, which is adherence to the two by two faith. And sometimes people have offered to go into the work. They've offered to their overseer, like, I feel called to go in. And they've said, well, wait, we don't really have a place yet. We'll put you in a place eventually. That type of thing. The ministry, I should say, is not compelled in any way. It's just volunteer. Somebody feels moved by the spirit, quote, unquote. They'll go to the head worker, the overseer, and say, I'd like to be on your staff. And then they decide. Yeah, nay.
Growing Up Inside the Church
John Dehlin [01:16:58] All right, so now that we've heard about kind of the framework of the church, I'm dying To hear. We're dying to hear about your upbringings in the church.
Kari Hanks [01:17:09] Okay, yeah, I'll start with mine. Yeah, two by twos.
John Dehlin [01:17:14] Go.
Kari Hanks [01:17:14] Back in my family, I'm fourth generation on one side and third generation on the other. Both of my grandfathers were elders, so they had meetings in their home. And then all of my growing up years, we had a Sunday morning meeting in our home as well. So being an elders kid, I mean, it was normalized for me. We weren't allowed to drink the grape juice in the fridge. I always wanted grape juice. But that was for meeting the weekend pretty much was cleaning, getting ready for Sunday morning meeting, making sure the house was ready and set up and setting up chairs and kind of getting prepared for that.
Kari Hanks [01:17:54] And I guess there was an added pressure, looking back, of making sure that you behaved as an elder's child because you don't want to do something that would put your parents meeting in jeopardy that might risk them having the meeting removed.
Kari Hanks [01:18:10] But I was the youngest of four kids of three older brothers. And we were very spread out in age. So my oldest brother is 11 years older than me and then nine years older and then four and a half years older. Then my mom had a miscarriage and then me.
Kari Hanks [01:18:25] So we were pretty spread out in that way. My grandpa's sister was a worker, so she went in the work in 1950 and was in the work until she died in. I want to say I was three. So around 1990.
Kari Hanks [01:18:42] So that was sort of this. We had this family reputation of. We kind of joke now as x2 x twos that it was like royalty. There are certain families that have this reputation of royalty.
John Dehlin [01:18:55] So just in Washington or throughout the
Kari Hanks [01:18:58] world, in Washington, it would be localized. Yeah. We didn't know that many two by twos unless we went to convention with them or traveled to other conventions. And there are some. There's enough doctrinal issues between the west and the eastern U.S. in Canada that I was taught growing up that you want to be careful not to move Colorado or East or marry someone Colorado or east of there because they believed that divorce and remarriage was okay. And on the west it was strictly forbidden. In all cases, you do not get divorce and remarriage. Remarry.
John Dehlin [01:19:35] That's wild. That regionally there's sort of judgment or differences.
Kari Hanks [01:19:42] And they wouldn't swap workers back and forth that often either between the east and the west coasts.
Kyle Hanks [01:19:48] We just didn't think about that too. That's so obvious now, that that's a theological split. But at the time we thought, well, you know, those ones over there, they're a little different than us. We'll just. We'll just keep to ourselves. And that should have bothered us more, I would think.
Margi Dehlin [01:20:01] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [01:20:01] It was just kind of one of those general warnings of like, okay, just make sure you don't date. Date. Anyone from Colorado was always like a big. Everyone was suspicious of Colorado, where we
Margi Dehlin [01:20:10] grew up, where everything goes wrong.
Kari Hanks [01:20:14] I don't know. And they're, you know, even within. So we've learned since leaving, even within the ministry, there were arguments going on with specific workers centered around Colorado and east versus the west coast. So there was a definite kind of split in. It was almost like a different faction. If you were visiting the east coast, it was okay to go to meetings there and to like go to convention there and you would be con and they would be considered two by twos in that way. But they're confused with some doctrinal issues. So that's how we looked at it.
John Dehlin [01:20:48] Okay.
Kari Hanks [01:20:50] So I actually grew up my early years next door to some other two by twos, which was unusual. They don't usually live next door to each other and they happened to be Kyle's aunt and uncle. So I was best friends with his cousins when I was young and Kyle would be over there for birthday parties and, you know, I'd see him occasionally. So the first picture we have together, I'm two and he's five and we're sitting with a bunch of kids on a couch. So that's kind of a fun. I've always known him my entire life. Wow.
Kyle Hanks [01:21:21] She was always my sister's friend.
Kari Hanks [01:21:23] Yeah, I was friends with his sister and his cousins. So he was sort of just always, always around.
John Dehlin [01:21:30] This probably goes without saying, but you probably are encouraged to only socialize with other two by twos. Is that right?
Kari Hanks [01:21:36] Yeah. Yep. I'll get into that when I get to my school year. So we lived next door to that family until I was eight. It's actually funny, for a while, for some reason, we ended up in two different fields, even though we were right next door to each other. So there was one memory I have where we have the workers at our house and they had their field workers at their house at the same time. And we had sister workers and they had brother workers and they ended up having a water balloon fight in the front yard, which was really fun. We didn't see workers play that often and have fun.
Kari Hanks [01:22:06] And then the overseer was like, how did this happen that you two live right next door to each other and you're in different fields. Who did that? And they were like you did, you assigned the fields. So after that they were put in our field and then they would just walk over to our house for Sunday morning meeting. So that was fun. And then when I was eight, we moved away from there to another part of Washington.
Kari Hanks [01:22:28] And my oldest brother also got married and moved out that year. He was 19 and he moved out of state and my home. And this is very common in the two by twos. We had a lot of corporal punishment and my brother is very tall and was kind of my protector. So him moving out made life more difficult in many ways in that way for me. I was also sexually abused by an older teen two by two when I was eight.
John Dehlin [01:22:58] Non worker, non worker, correct?
Kari Hanks [01:23:00] Yeah, yep. And I started having more mental health issues at that age. Anxiety and OCD coming up. But we did not have terminology for mental health. We just, just didn't understand what it was, what was going on. So I was just seen as a nervous little kid. I didn't even have a term for anxiety.
Kari Hanks [01:23:21] Growing up. As a two by two girl, you're taught to be mature from a very young age. Like your goal in life is to get married and have a family. So I always took that very seriously. I was one of those kids that, like Kyle was saying, preferred to stay in the middle of the fold because as the workers would preach, if you're on the outer edges of the fold, sometimes the wolves can come and grab those sheep. So I took that really seriously. And I had a lot of scrupulosity OCD from a young age.
Kari Hanks [01:23:53] And it presented in some other ways. Like when I was, I think 14, we had a fairly large earthquake, it was a 6.8. And so that brought up some new OCD fears and things like that. But yeah, mental health just was really medicine in general. Two by twos, at least in my family and a lot of other families I'm familiar with, this wasn't the case for everybody. But a lot of two by twos don't trust science.
John Dehlin [01:24:22] Yeah, like mental health is probably discouraged.
Kari Hanks [01:24:24] Like psychologists, we just weren't educated about it. We didn't have terms for it. We didn't really know what was going on. So a lot of treatments, quote unquote, looked like essential oils or foot toxin baths or ear candling or things like that. And my mom really did try to help me in the ways that she knew how, but there just wasn't a lot of knowledge or education or trust in your typical doctors. And she. I also started having chronic illness symptoms around that age and I have a genetic condition, but that's when it really started raising its head. And again, like, we went to a few doctors, nobody could really find out what was going on. So we just sort of tried to take care of it at home.
Margi Dehlin [01:25:09] I see it feels like a major theme for you growing up in many facets. Like you've mentioned earthquake, you know, discipline, the way that you were, you know, the corporal punishment aspect, suffering from abuse, it's safety, like, and trying to stay in the middle of the sheep flock idea is just danger is everywhere. How do I stay safe in this, in this life, in this world?
Kari Hanks [01:25:43] I did really feel that way. And we were taught that two by twos are where you are safe and two by two people are who you are safe around. Even though my abusers were two by two. So at the same time, I'm going to school, where I was always safe at school. And yet you're taught, like, don't get too close to these people.
Kari Hanks [01:26:04] You can. I was allowed to have friends at school, but they were not supposed to be on the same level as two by two friends. Like, there's a very clear, distinct difference. Two by two friends are your real friends. They are your. The real community that you can trust and rely on.
Kari Hanks [01:26:22] So my family and two by twos in general, I remember like when workers sent out emails or passed out meeting, they would print meeting lists of where people were to go to meeting or worker lists of where, what fields workers would be in. We would shred those. So we would get a collection of lists because my dad was an elder. So he would hand them out at meeting and then. And the rest of them he would shred. Or if we had old lists that we came across in paperwork or something, we would shred those. So there was definitely this underlying secrecy and paranoia of government that just ran through the entire two by two culture.
Kari Hanks [01:27:00] And yeah, as far as corporal punishment, there was just. We were surrounded by violence in general as two by twos. Like all of my, you know, when I would look around at certain friends that I was growing up with, there was a lot of corporal punishment. So it was very normalized. And I never really saw that as being abnormal or unusual.
Kari Hanks [01:27:24] And then there was also a lot of talk in my home about spirits, like angels and demons, being literal entities that could appear to you. A lot of two by twos had stories about hearing audible voices or having a spirit appear to them in person. And that was something that terrified me as a kid. I didn't care if it was a demon or an angel. I do not want to see some being in my room talking to me. You know, that was always a scary idea.
John Dehlin [01:27:54] And that comes from Jesus and the New Testament, right?
Kari Hanks [01:27:57] Yeah, yeah. And again, like, when I'm talking about my experience, it's what I'm familiar with. And other families may have had different experiences in that, but that was. That was definitely something like Ouija boards were seen to be something that evil spirits could communicate through that kind of thing.
John Dehlin [01:28:15] Us too.
Childhood Activities and Social Restrictions
Margi Dehlin [01:28:16] Did you have interests or hobbies?
Kari Hanks [01:28:20] One advantage of not growing up with a TV was I loved to read. I read all the time. There were certain books we wouldn't go near which would be books about religion or theology.
John Dehlin [01:28:35] So information control.
Kari Hanks [01:28:36] Information, yeah, there was information control, yes. But I loved both fiction and nonfiction. I played piano most two by two kids have some sort of instrument that they take lessons with. Piano is a big one because there's no like choir or music group that ever plays at meetings. But when I was growing up, the gospel meetings we went to, if they rented a hall with a piano in it, like a. I don't even know what hall would come with a piano.
Kyle Hanks [01:29:07] A lot of granges and stuff. A lot of the old types of halls.
Kari Hanks [01:29:11] There's like an Elks Lodge, I think we would have.
Kyle Hanks [01:29:13] Yeah, the lodges, Granges, stuff like that would have pianos in them. Sometimes schools or schools.
Kari Hanks [01:29:17] And then they would have. Yeah, and then they would have a two by two who could play piano, play along with the hymns, which my dad would often do. He was often the piano player at gospel meeting. So I took piano lessons. I took horseback riding lessons for a while.
Kari Hanks [01:29:32] I wanted to play soccer because my brothers played soccer. But soccer practice for girl teams was often Sundays, so I wasn't allowed to do that. So anything that interfered with meeting times, anything that could develop from a hobby into a passion or a love that could interfere with your relationship with God and could be an unhealthy thing in the eyes of the two by twos. So I really loved writing. I wanted to be an author when I was young.
Kari Hanks [01:30:04] But that. But being famous as a two by two is not something you would do like it. That was heavily discouraged. So I would be told, like, well, maybe you could use like a pseudonym or something. But that's not really. Like, do you see other two by twos with published books? That's not really a two by two career. So that.
John Dehlin [01:30:24] And they wouldn't say two by two so what would they say?
Kari Hanks [01:30:26] How would they say that's not some like, do you know any other professing. Published authors.
John Dehlin [01:30:30] Professing.
Kari Hanks [01:30:31] Professing.
John Dehlin [01:30:31] So inside you would refer to each other as professors?
Kyle Hanks [01:30:35] Yeah, that's. That's how.
Kari Hanks [01:30:36] Not professors just professing.
Kyle Hanks [01:30:37] Professing. Are they are professing or the friends.
Kari Hanks [01:30:40] Do you know any other of the friends who are published authors or do
Kyle Hanks [01:30:43] they go to meetings that. We use that phrase a lot.
John Dehlin [01:30:46] It's so weird.
Kyle Hanks [01:30:47] It is weird because there wasn't a strict set of words. It was just words that were notional. So are. Are they. Some of the friends, are they professing also? Another thing we would do is we would filter things through the workers judgment too. So things like, you know, would the workers approve if you did something like this?
Margi Dehlin [01:31:03] That type of thing.
Kyle Hanks [01:31:04] They sort of spoke for God too. I don't know if you ever.
Margi Dehlin [01:31:06] I can so see why. Just that that switch in terminology for you to call things actually what they are or to be healing.
John Dehlin [01:31:16] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [01:31:17] It's empowering and it gives you a sense of autonomy separate from the group.
Margi Dehlin [01:31:20] That's right.
John Dehlin [01:31:21] But it's weird because. Yeah, you're saying, you're saying two by twos now, but when you were experiencing it, you would have said.
Kari Hanks [01:31:28] Right. That wouldn't have been the exact quote,
John Dehlin [01:31:29] professing or the friends.
Kari Hanks [01:31:31] Or the friends or anyone else who goes to meetings.
Margi Dehlin [01:31:34] Right. Which is like a code term for safe. Safe information, safe people. Tribal. Acceptable.
Kari Hanks [01:31:42] Yeah, you're part of the same. You're part of the tribe. You're accepted here. Like. Yeah, that's how they know each other. The two by twos have. There's a lot of pride in being able to recognize each other, like in public or, you know, if you're picking up a worker at the airport that you've never met, they'll say, we recognize each other by the spirit. But in reality, if you're picking up a sister worker at the airport and she has her hair in a bun and she has a dress on and she looks like a pioneer and she had, you know, no makeup, no jewelry, you're recognizing them by their outward looks. Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:32:15] Okay.
Kari Hanks [01:32:16] So I don't know what year the movie ants came out, but I was at a sleepover birthday party with some school friends and they decided the next day that they all wanted to go see the movie ants in theater. And I was feeling really bothered about just kind of going along with it. I knew I wasn't supposed to go to movie theaters, but I got in the car. And we all drove there. And I saw. I think it was a pay phone outside of the movie theater. And I said to my friend's mom, I'm not really supposed to go to into movie theaters. Like, I think I should call and ask my mom's permission.
Kari Hanks [01:32:51] I'm pretty sure it'll be okay, but. Cause we're, like, with the group with a birthday party. So I called and asked permission, like, hey, all the kids are going to see ants. Which is totally innocuous. Can I go with them? Like, we're all here at the movie theater. And my mom's like, absolutely not. I'm gonna come and pick you up. So she came and picked me up from outside of the movie theater while all my friends went in to see the movie.
John Dehlin [01:33:14] Did that kind of scar you a little bit?
Kari Hanks [01:33:16] It was. It was really embarrassing. And it was one of the first times I remember really noticing, like, there are rules, even though they say there aren't rules. This was a hard line that was drawn that you are not allowed to go in a movie theater.
Kari Hanks [01:33:33] And then When I was 13, my older brothers snuck me into a movie. Like, snuck me out. They were babysitting me, and they gave me this big story to tell about. Like, tell mom. We went to an IMAX theater because IMAX theaters were okay. They were educational movies. So we had this big backstory about which IMAX movie we went to see.
Kari Hanks [01:33:53] And they took me to a movie theater, and we saw this rated R movie. And I was 13 and had not been exposed to a lot of stuff like that. And so I remember my brothers, like, covering my eyes for half the scenes.
Kari Hanks [01:34:05] Anyway, so we get home and my brothers. I don't. I think my two oldest brothers had already moved out. They dropped me off at the house, and I went in, and my mom's like, what'd you guys do today? And I was like, oh, we went to an IMAX theater. And she's like, which one did you see? And I think it was like, was it Michael Jordan?
Kyle Hanks [01:34:21] It was the Michael Jordan biography.
Kari Hanks [01:34:23] Michael Jordan biography or something.
Kyle Hanks [01:34:24] That was your cover story?
Kari Hanks [01:34:25] That was my cover story. So anyway, I told her we went to this Michael Jordan imax. And she goes, I looked it up in the paper. And they stopped showing that last week. So she caught me out on our line. We all got in big trouble for lying to her and going to a movie theater.
John Dehlin [01:34:39] Can I just note, especially for those who are brand new, that we like to evaluate. I mean, we'll leave it up to you. To decide whether two by twos qualify as a high demand religion or just a normal Christian group or as a cult. But we want to always call out the framework, the easy, easy to remember framework. The bite model. High demand religions or cults control your behavior. That's the B. So high, high control over behavior in a way that induces shame and guilt. So that's the B. The I is information control, which we've already started to highlight. They weren't allowed or encouraged to read books that weren't approved, especially about other faiths or religions. And then t, the thought control, controlling what thoughts you have through manipulation and then manipulation through emotion. So we'll get there. But I imagine, for what it's worth,
Kari Hanks [01:35:32] we've had Dr. Steve Hassan and Dr. Janja Lelich come and over Zoom in our support group.
John Dehlin [01:35:38] Oh, fun.
Kari Hanks [01:35:39] And they both consider the two by twos to be a cult. So Dr. Steve Hassan says it takes all of the bite model.
Margi Dehlin [01:35:46] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [01:35:46] Things. Yep.
Margi Dehlin [01:35:47] Yep.
John Dehlin [01:35:48] But we'll let you decide.
Kari Hanks [01:35:50] So once I started dating when I was 16, I would. The rules suddenly got much lax, more lax around movie theaters. And when I was with my date, we I was allowed to go to movie theaters. My parents just were like, didn't say anything about it. So that was a weird switch that happened.
Kari Hanks [01:36:06] I'm not exactly sure why, other than my older brothers were troublemakers in a lot of ways. So maybe by the time I was a teenager, they were like, as long as we know where you are and you're home by curfew and you're not having sex, you know, we trust you.
Kari Hanks [01:36:23] So that was. That was when I started going to movie theaters for the first time. We still have a TV or anything. So after moving in the middle of second grade, I changed schools in the middle of the school year.
Kari Hanks [01:36:35] And I started experiencing a lot of bullying, mostly, I think because of how I looked as a two by two. By the time I got to junior high, my first year of junior high, I had been begging my parents to homeschool me for a while, which was not a commonly done thing. In the two by twos. We knew a few families who homeschooled, but it wasn't like a thing the two by twos did.
Kari Hanks [01:36:58] But I was having such a bad time at school that I was begging my parents to homeschool me. I came home one day with my arm completely bloodied from being shoved into a locker door because kids were trying to get me to swear and I wouldn't swear. So after that, my mom agreed and pulled me out of public school and I homeschooled through the rest of junior high and high school.
Kari Hanks [01:37:21] Now, looking back, there are definitely experiences I feel like I missed out on, like school dances and prom and kind of the typical teenager. Like two by two teenagers aren't. They're discouraged from exploring. Exploring your sexuality. There's really no.
Kari Hanks [01:37:40] The normal teen and early adolescent years of like figuring out who you are and your identity and discovering autonomy and independence and. And all of that is very discouraged. So I do feel like I had a very restricted teen and adolescent years. I'm bisexual and I didn't realize that until I was in my 30s because that wasn't something that you're allowed to explore as a two by two.
Margi Dehlin [01:38:07] Right.
John Dehlin [01:38:08] Is masturbation denounced within the phase?
Kari Hanks [01:38:12] You know, they don't directly talk about that or sex at all really, other than just don't do it before marriage. So it wasn't ever really something that was talked about. But I felt a lot of shame and guilt around it.
Kyle Hanks [01:38:26] It's a very sex negative culture to the point that it's so taboo. You don't talk about it. There's taboos that you do talk about, like don't listen to the wrong music or read the wrong books. But sex is so far over the line that they really just don't talk about it that much.
John Dehlin [01:38:39] I'm guessing same with porn then.
Kyle Hanks [01:38:41] Yeah, okay. Definitely.
Kari Hanks [01:38:42] Yeah. And that was one thing that it took me really until adulthood when I had a daughter who turned eight, I started thinking more about my own sexual abuse at that age and realizing I didn't have language for my body parts. I didn't have language to understand. I had nightmares for decades after that happened, but I didn't understand why. And I think not having access to what was healthy and what was unhealthy at all, it just wasn't talked about at all. Really. That impacted me in that way. Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:39:18] Okay.
Kari Hanks [01:39:20] My OCD also started getting worse during my teen years. Like, I had scrupulosity to the point that if the thought of prayer popped into my head, I thought God was telling me I needed to go bow down beside my bed and pray. So I was doing that dozens of times a day. Sometimes I started feeling bothered about the work. So the way that they preach about, like when you feel moved to go in the work, first of all, being a worker is considered giving your very best. It's like the ultimate sacrifice. And when you have ocd, giving your very best is like what you expect of yourself.
Kari Hanks [01:39:56] So I Thought if going in the work is your best, then that's what God would want from me. Like, why would I give any less? So I started feeling like that must mean God wants me to be a woman worker, which was a very scary thought. I wanted to have kids and get married and have a home and a family, and workers give all of that up. It's the ultimate sacrifice. So all through my teen years, I felt very disturbed and bothered by the idea that I might, God might call me into the work. And I thought that was God calling me into the work in my late teens.
Kari Hanks [01:40:29] And I was dating all throughout my teen years too. But in my late teens, I remember a worker preaching at a convention that, that we also need homes, like we need good homes for the workers to stay in and for meetings and to raise kids who are professing.
Kari Hanks [01:40:43] And after that I was like, okay, that's what God wants me to do. So I felt more peace after that. But that was like a theme through all of my teen years that I felt very conflicted about. When I was 14, we moved from the Seattle area to the Las Vegas area.
Kari Hanks [01:41:01] So I spent all of my teen years in the Vegas area. And there were definitely less two by twos there. So it was pretty lonely compared to what I had come from, where there was this big culture and lots of peers my age.
Kari Hanks [01:41:14] I didn't have a lack of friends because there were so many two by two kids that I grew up around in the Seattle area. But when we moved to the Vegas area, there were like a few kids my age, but not, not very many.
Teen Years, Isolation, and Chronic Illness
Kari Hanks [01:41:27] So that was kind of a lonely going through my teen years there. But I got used to being by myself. My chronic illness was definitely a theme through my teen years too. I didn't feel good a lot, and again, like, we just kind of. It was just something you lived with.
Kari Hanks [01:41:45] And then Kyle and I became good friends when I was probably 19. It was about for a full year before we started dating that we really went from kind of like, oh, this is my friend's older brother, to we were becoming good friends, even though I had a boyfriend at that point.
John Dehlin [01:42:09] I read that education, like higher education, college is discouraged. Is it discouraged generally or just for women?
Kari Hanks [01:42:17] Or neither in my family. It definitely wasn't seen as a liberal thing that could pull you away from God. So higher education was discouraged across the board in my family, for all of us, but especially for women, because men did need a job that could support a family, whereas women just needed to get married and have kids. And be supported. So that was what I was taught about my role as a woman.
John Dehlin [01:42:44] And that's information control and that's thought control and that's behavioral control. Those are big ones, I think, just to call it out.
Kari Hanks [01:42:53] Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I was a good two by two. So that's what I did. Yeah, I met Kyle and we were friends and then we dated long distance for. Because he was in Seattle still. I was in the Las Vegas area.
Kari Hanks [01:43:08] So we dated long distance the entire time. We were dating for six months before we got engaged. And then we were engaged for another nine months Just so no one would think it was a shotgun wedding or something. Planning the wedding, you know.
Kari Hanks [01:43:23] And then we got married and moved back to. I moved straight out of my parents house in with Kyle, which for me, like, adjusting to marriage was a pretty easy transition. But adjusting back to being in Seattle was really difficult for me. I'm not sure if there were certain triggers there. I know the weather was really difficult on my mental health. I remember having nightmares where I would wake myself up screaming, which I had never done in my life before. So that was. It was difficult adjusting back to being there. And we were there for three years and then we moved to Arizona. We wanted to move back to the sun for weather reasons and also because my parents were still in the Las Vegas area.
Kari Hanks [01:44:05] So we wanted to be closer to them. And Kyle had job opportunities in Arizona. And Arizona has a lot of two by twos. And there were a lot of families our age with kids, you know, starting their families. Like we had a. When we moved to Arizona, we had held wish. Our daughter, eight months old.
Kyle Hanks [01:44:25] Yeah. Something like under a year.
Kari Hanks [01:44:28] Yeah. I should mention too, in the two by twos in. In the Seattle area, when our oldest daughter was born, there were a lot of two by two families utilizing midwives and home births. So that's what we did as well. She was born actually in a freestanding birth center.
Kari Hanks [01:44:44] And that was a bit of a traumatic process. She was born, her cord got pinched on the way out of the birth canal. So she was born not breathing, completely floppy, white, unresponsive. And when you've just given birth, your body releases this flood of love hormones, oxytocin, that signals your uterus to contract to stop bleeding. And that process was blocked for me because I was worried about my daughter not breathing. She had to be manually bagged.
Kari Hanks [01:45:16] And so then I started hemorrhaging, which is also a complication of one of my chronic illnesses that I didn't know I had at that time. So it was a bit of a scary process, but all ended up being well. And we were sent home, like, six hours after she was born from that birthing center.
Kari Hanks [01:45:39] Anyway, so we moved to Arizona when she was 8 months old and decided to have kid number two almost right away. I think she was 9 or 10 months old when we got pregnant again.
John Dehlin [01:45:53] Can I ask a couple of quick questions? Okay. So I want to. So Brooklyn made an interesting observation that the workers are a little bit like the Sea Org in Scientology, where if you're kind of really dedicated to the church, family is discouraged. And that is a really extreme thing now that I stopped to think about it, that if you want to really work for the church and give your life to the church, you have to forsake ever getting married or having kids.
Kari Hanks [01:46:26] Yeah, self sacrifice.
John Dehlin [01:46:27] Everybody's pretty extreme. And are the overseers also celibate and no family? So they're former workers.
Kari Hanks [01:46:34] They follow all the rules of the workers, plus they're in a leadership position.
Kyle Hanks [01:46:38] They are workers. They're not former workers. They are workers. They have fields they go to and everything else. They travel around in pairs as well. They just have a little extra responsibility.
John Dehlin [01:46:44] Oh, they're also in pairs.
Kari Hanks [01:46:45] Yes.
Kyle Hanks [01:46:45] But there is a. There's no pressure for anybody to go in the work, but it is. It is seen as the ultimate sacrifice, which. It is a big sacrifice. So you do feel like. I think all of. Very common among the X community is saying that they went through a period where they felt called to the ministry because that would be the best sacrifice. That would be me giving my best. And we have him singing about giving our best to God.
Kari Hanks [01:47:06] So to be clear, they're not pairing overseers together either. So you'll have a pair of workers where one of them is the overseer.
John Dehlin [01:47:13] I was gonna ask that, and then I'm, you know. And so that's reminding me of the Catholic Church and priests and nuns, basically. And then I'm just dying to know whether, you know, gay and lesbians who are born and raised two by twos end up seeking out. You're nodding your head.
Kyle Hanks [01:47:32] I think that's probably true. I think a lot of.
John Dehlin [01:47:36] How do you know? It's very common.
Kari Hanks [01:47:37] It's very common because we see it in the ex worker community that there are a lot of ex workers in the LGBTQ community who are gay or lesbian. Yes.
Kyle Hanks [01:47:45] Yeah. We've always, you know, you have suspicions or whatever when you're young and you're watching the workers or whatever. But. But no One would ever say, this is why I did it, you know. But yeah, when workers leave and talk more openly about it, that is definitely a thing. It's definitely a thing of like, well, I don't feel called to have a family because that's not what I'm attracted to. So I'm going to go try this instead. So it's not a. I wouldn't say it's a common story, but it happens for sure.
John Dehlin [01:48:08] And then there would have to be pairs of workers who end up having liaisons or trists or whatever.
Kyle Hanks [01:48:14] So we hear.
John Dehlin [01:48:15] Yeah. From ex workers.
Kyle Hanks [01:48:19] Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:48:19] Okay. So that's interesting. The other thing I just wanted to ask about was kind of the epistemology. Like, you know, we haven't talked a lot about the E and the bite model, emotional manipulation. And I'm wondering how you're taught a testimony. I don't know if you'd call it a testimony. How you're taught to know your church is true, how you're taught to gain a witness and how testimonies or witnesses or whatever you call them are sort of nurtured and encouraged for children and youth and adults. Just how are emotions used to strengthen commitment to the church? And I know that obviously fear of a burning hell forever. You've already mentioned that. That definitely sounds like a big part of the E. Is that the big one?
Emotional Suppression and Existential Impact on Children
Kari Hanks [01:49:11] So there's, there's a lot of emotional emotion control. Emotions in the two by twos in general are really encouraged to be repressed. So you don't show a lot of fear or anger or sorrow. But you, you also don't show a lot of joy or excitement when you're in meeting. You're supposed to be sober but peaceful. So like as a girl I often got the comment you should smile more or also would get the comment you're smiling too much at meeting. You just have to have the exact right. Which ends up just being kind of a flatline, no emotion.
Margi Dehlin [01:49:52] Wow.
Kari Hanks [01:49:52] I professed when I was 10. And that's a very emotional event for the two by twos. One of the only few emotional events for the two by twos and that I didn't even realize I was wanting to profess. But my brother's girlfriend, who later she's now my sister in law, they got married. She was a convert to the church. And so they actually what we call, tested the meeting. Which means they don't do this at the end of every gospel meeting or convention meeting, but they'll have meetings where they test the meeting to see if anyone wants to profess their commitment to God. And they, and they knew that she wanted to profess, so they tested the meaning for her.
Kari Hanks [01:50:30] And she. And the way you do that is you're seated during the hymn, but if you want to profess, you stand up. So she stood up. And I found myself hopping up also. And immediately there's this flood of emotions. A lot of it is like I have 200 people looking at me and I'm 10 and this is really scary. So I in a lot of it also is like that, that love bombing, that being fully embraced into this tribe or into this fold. And so I was sobbing through the rest of the hymn while I'm standing up there and my family's crying. And a lot of two by twos who know you well are crying. So that's a very emotional event in the two by twos. But emotion in general is just not seen as serious or sober.
Kyle Hanks [01:51:14] Well, it's. You should have faith, you shouldn't be fearful, you should have faith, you shouldn't be too angry or too anything. You should just have faith that God will take care of it.
Kari Hanks [01:51:23] But even expressing joy is seen as embarrassing or shameful in a way. Like human emotions. We're not human in the sense that we're just passing through this life. We're just passing through this world. The purpose is the next life. So we're strangers in this world. We don't act like other humans do. So and that includes the full range of human emotion. Even funerals, two by two funerals are big thing. Like you have potlucks and you have big get togethers for funerals and there are a lot of elderly members who are always dying. So like funerals run all throughout my childhood. It seemed like we were always at someone's funeral.
Kari Hanks [01:52:01] And they don't talk about the person who died very much. They talk about how Jesus used this person's life to be a light or to be an example. And so there's, there's even. I have some funeral notes from when my great aunt who was a worker died of cancer.
Kari Hanks [01:52:17] And the worker who was preaching at her funeral was talking about how, you know, I'm looking out at the audience here and I don't see a lot of sorrow. There's a lot of dry eyes. But that's because she used her life to point to Jesus. So we have joy about that. So it was almost like shutting down any sorrow that the family might have been feeling in that moment. Because how could you be sitting in the audience as A family of her after the worker said that if he's saying it's a good thing, that there's a lot of dry eyes, then you don't want to be the one who starts crying.
Kyle Hanks [01:52:51] Yeah, you don't grieve because you're happy. You don't grieve that someone's gone. You're happy that they've moved on from grief.
Kari Hanks [01:52:57] Grief is shut down very quickly.
Margi Dehlin [01:52:58] That's right. And in Mormonism too, at our, you know, our church funerals, I think it can be viewed as a lack of
John Dehlin [01:53:07] faith, like to grieve, to be sad.
Kari Hanks [01:53:09] Because it would be like if you
Margi Dehlin [01:53:10] knew the plan and if you know how it all works, you or your
Kari Hanks [01:53:14] loved one who died is in heaven now. Like when we did move to Vegas, I made friends with a boy who. We were both. We were two days apart in age, actually, 15, 16. And we were friends all through our teen years after Kyle and I got married and he passed away in a motorcycle accident when we were 23.
Kari Hanks [01:53:33] And even that kind of story was like, oh, he was on his way home from gospel meeting. It was Super Bowl Sunday. So he had chosen to go to gospel meeting instead of watching the football game, even though he really liked football. It was this event that became glorified and he was almost like martyred for the two by two cause. And so showing grief in that way, it was just. Yeah, it was shut down pretty quickly because he's in heaven now. Like God, God in his mercy took him young and took him early because maybe he knew some struggles that he had ahead of him or whatever reason might be given.
John Dehlin [01:54:09] So that sort of theological speculation that always accrues to the benefit of the organization sounds very familiar. And I'll just say you're reminding me that emotional manipulation isn't just using high emotion to bond people to the church. It's getting people to suppress and mute their emotions so they're less in touch with their intrinsic self and who they are, and instead assume the organization, or as Stephen Hasson would say, the cult Persona or the cult personality. And that's where this idea from Severance of the Indian Audi comes in. Because there's whatever your intrinsic feelings and identity and instincts might be, in your case, bisexual or other things, but then there's suppress all that. And what does the organization want me to be feeling exactly? I'm only gonna feel. I'm gonna kill all feelings that the organization doesn't approve of. And that qualifies as emotional manipulation.
Kari Hanks [01:55:11] That's the E. Yeah, absolutely.
Kyle Hanks [01:55:13] Yeah, because if you have those wrong emotions, you're actually wrong with God. The creator of the universe is upset with how you feel about it. That's how we internalize it. So it's spoken by the workers, but they kind of speak for God. Cause they, they sacrifice a lot and God's supposed to speak through them. So if we're having the wrong emotion, there's something deeply wrong with us, with our spirit, with something we can barely control. That's a lot of manipulating a human being too, to tell them that feeling you're feeling, that's natural the way you're created. God doesn't really like it. You're going to have to fix that or God can't accept you. And it's just that all the time.
Margi Dehlin [01:55:46] And I think what that does, particularly as a child growing up, is it creates almost an existential crisis in a child because it teaches you that what you're feeling can't be trusted. Like if you're feeling sad and the adult in front of you is saying, no, no, no, no, no, you shouldn't be feeling sad. It's not sad. This isn't sad. I don't know why you're feeling that. You should be feeling this thing that over time it teaches you that your experience is not to be trusted, that your world and experience of it is not real.
Kari Hanks [01:56:20] Yeah. And what that leads to is a lot of like depending on external validation. When you don't trust yourself, everything has to be verified by people outside of you. It's interesting because even though the workers didn't have careers, never worked to earn money once they were in the work, never got married, never had children, people looked to them for external validation in all of those areas of their life. If you needed marital advice or you had a kid who was misbehaving, you could have the workers come over and sit down, have. And have a conversation with them about it.
John Dehlin [01:56:55] Unmarried child giving you advice about marriage.
Kari Hanks [01:56:58] They would give you advice. There were a lot of stories we've heard in our ex community of women who were being abused by their husbands, who would go to the workers for advice. And the workers would say, just stick it out, pray he'll get better, God will intervene. You know, encouraging people to stay in abusive marriages. They didn't know what they were talking about.
John Dehlin [01:57:17] They probably didn't have any training in mental health counseling.
Kari Hanks [01:57:20] Right. And I will say, to be fair to the workers, if you're going to call the two by twos a cult, which a lot of people do, fair. The worker the ministry is a cult within a cult because they literally give up their very identity and become a worker. That becomes their new identity. So when we talk about self sacrifice, that's a real thing. Like workers do self sacrifice everything for what they believe in. And a lot of them are misled to believe that it will be this experience where they are uber blessed and they have, you know, less conf. You know, temptations or. And in reality, they're still human, but they're expected to maintain this, this extra special level of behavior. And if. And if two by twos are repressing emotions, it's hardcore in, in the work.
John Dehlin [01:58:10] Yeah, they're victims too. Is that kind of what you're saying?
Kari Hanks [01:58:14] They are victims also, for sure.
John Dehlin [01:58:16] Have ex workers come out and told their stories.
Kyle Hanks [01:58:19] Yeah, okay. Yeah, we get a lot of those too, because just as they. Just as we go to them or went to them for advice on things that they didn't have any respect, any reasonable reason to give us advice, they also believed they were supposed to give it. They also believed that they had this calling, that that was their job. Their job was to shepherd the flock. And so they didn't know whether they were giving good advice or not, but it was coming from them. They sacrificed their whole life to go into the ministry, God speaking through them. They're going to believe whatever they say, too.
John Dehlin [01:58:52] I mean, for me, what that reminds me of is when I was asked to give blessings of healing or even father's blessings. I'm 16 or 18 or 21 and somebody's sick and they're like, elder Dylan, will you give me a blessing? And I'm supposed to figure out what. Whether God's going to heal them or not, you know, and if he's going to heal him, you know, whatever. And any words of counsel or if a kid or a spouse wants a father's blessing, I'm supposed to be channeling God's will for my wife, for my kids. And so you're just like, okay, well, it's what we're supposed to do, so we'll just do it.
Ministers in the Home and Family Dynamics
Kyle Hanks [01:59:29] You know, I will say that one sort of conflating factor to all that too, for our group is that the minister stayed in our homes, which means they needed homes to stay in. So if you have a husband and wife that aren't getting along and maybe one's even abusing another one, oh, man, what's the worker gonna say Now? I think they really do believe they're giving good advice, of course, but there's gonna be A little bit of a bias of how do we keep this open home? How do we keep. If we split this couple up, if we tell the couple this isn't good for you or whatever. I mean, they shouldn't be giving any advice, but if they did, if they said you should stay apart for your safety or something like that, they might lose a home that they could visit and stay in for a few nights when they're in the area.
John Dehlin [02:00:05] Did you call it open home?
Kyle Hanks [02:00:07] I'm sorry. Yeah, open home, which just means a home that the people in it are professing and they're open to the ministry.
John Dehlin [02:00:12] Got it.
Kyle Hanks [02:00:12] So we've actually noticed this little thing too.
Kari Hanks [02:00:14] Open home often also usually means a home with a meeting in it.
Kyle Hanks [02:00:19] Okay. It could be that's how we used it. Yeah, I didn't. I don't think I used it that way, but I. Yeah, it could be.
John Dehlin [02:00:23] Wait, there's differences between.
Kyle Hanks [02:00:24] Well, not everybody has a meeting. Yeah, No, I, I think that. Yeah, it's. It's just a home. Yeah. The homes that the, the ministry often talks and I, no joke, I just figured this out within the last month. Ministers often talk about the congregation as homes. They say we, you know, they look for open homes, they look for faithful homes. They don't often talk about faithful families, stuff like that, because in their minds, the homes are there to receive them, to receive their ministry. They don't talk of it in terms of families. So when someone comes with a family problem, they see this as a home problem. I think that's my own interpretation.
Margi Dehlin [02:00:59] Interesting.
Kyle Hanks [02:00:59] That just occurred to me within the last month, I was kind of thinking, reading over some old sermons and stuff and thinking, oh, that the language is interesting here. They're actually perpetuating.
Kari Hanks [02:01:06] The terminology is very insidious. Like if you have a professing spouse and an unprofessing spouse, as they would call it, you have a broken home or a divided home. Like the terminology in and of itself implies that it's problematic or it can't exist the way it is long term.
Kyle Hanks [02:01:25] Yeah. There's no healthy reason for a couple to split up. In their minds. It's. If you're following God, if you're doing what they. What God says through Jesus and actually now through the workers, if you do all that stuff, you're going to be. It's all going to work out for you. So when it doesn't work out for you, it is your fault. And I think that plays into both of our deconstructions a little later.
Kari Hanks [02:01:44] Anyway, as far as emotion control, also being raised in a family that consisted mostly of men and the two by twos being very patriarchal, there was. Emotions were repressed in that sense for me as well and I think for my mom also, not to speak for her, but. But in my family, emotions were seen as a very feminine equals weakness kind of thing. Like the girls are showing emotion. It was either something that was kind of. They would chuckle at it or it was seen as kind of silly girl emotions. So I think that was probably something that was common in a lot of two by two families. But it definitely was there in my home and especially having like three older brothers.
Margi Dehlin [02:02:27] But.
Kari Hanks [02:02:28] So where was I in my story? I was on kid number two.
John Dehlin [02:02:32] Yeah, thanks for that. That really helps expand our understanding.
Kari Hanks [02:02:37] Yeah, it's really interesting to hear the questions that you ask and just it's always good feedback for us on like what's. How other people view us has always been an interesting part of our deconstruction.
John Dehlin [02:02:48] But women getting married young with no education and having lots of kids or not lots of kids, family size was
Kari Hanks [02:02:55] very personal, I would say. Yeah, okay.
John Dehlin [02:02:58] Yeah, okay. So is birth control discouraged?
Kari Hanks [02:03:02] No, it wasn't for my family.
Kyle Hanks [02:03:05] That's a good question. I'm not sure.
Kari Hanks [02:03:07] I think I knew of one or two families who didn't believe in birth control and it was really obvious because they had a lot of kids.
Kyle Hanks [02:03:13] Yeah, it was.
Kari Hanks [02:03:13] I didn't know anyone in our generation, I don't think who.
Kyle Hanks [02:03:17] We just didn't talk about it as usual. We just didn't talk about important things.
Kari Hanks [02:03:21] But again, back to the science. There was a lot of rumors around medical birth control, like the pill or something causing health issues or like, oh yeah, I heard of this person who went on the pill and then they were paralyzed and they couldn't walk after that. There's a lot of a culture of fear around anything medical, at least in my family and the surrounding families that I was familiar with.
Kyle Hanks [02:03:45] So yeah, a lot of guidance comes from. Here's a story I heard somewhere, you know, without really running that story to ground to see if it's a real story or even happened.
Kari Hanks [02:03:52] It's just a lot of lore.
Kyle Hanks [02:03:53] Yeah, a lot of lore.
Kari Hanks [02:03:55] So at my second, right before I was due with our son, my mom was diagnosed with stage two ovarian cancer. She'd been having health issues for a while, like back pain, just kind of non specific symptoms and. And yeah, she had like a five pound tumor I think that they took out.
Kari Hanks [02:04:18] So she. I got this information the day of my 36 week appointment, which that day is kind of a blur to me. I think I was dissociating a lot. And she ended up after her surgery being in the ICU with complications for a while. So she was supposed to be at my son's birth. It was a home birth, but she wasn't able to be there for quite a while after. I think we took my son to visit her when he was two weeks old or something like that. And by then she had started chemo and had lost her hair. And it was really shocking. I ended up with Bell's palsy towards the end of my pregnancy, probably from underlying health issues and also just the stress of what was going on.
Margi Dehlin [02:05:03] I can imagine.
Kari Hanks [02:05:04] I remember my son's birth very clearly and then honestly, his first year of life. I have very little memory. Kyle's often reminding me, like, remember how he used to do this? Or he would start walking this way. And sometimes I remember and sometimes I don't when he mentions it. But I had so much postpartum anxiety, which again, I didn't have language for.
Margi Dehlin [02:05:28] Right.
Kari Hanks [02:05:29] I think I even was dipping into postpartum paranoia a couple of times. I remember this one day I had had not been getting very much sleep. He did. He might as a newborn. He was a rough sleeper. And I remember hearing like helicopters passing over our house and thinking, they're after me and my baby. And I knew that that was a weird thought to the point that I didn't tell anyone because I knew it sounded crazy, but I really believed it.
Kari Hanks [02:05:59] And so again, I had these mental health issues coming up that just were not being taken care of. We had no Support from the 2 by 2 community during this time. I always thought they would step up and like support you through things like that. But through my mom's cancer, my postpartum anxiety, my own health issues that were really starting to rear their head. I had two babies who were a year and a half apart and I just felt totally adrift, like we had no support.
Margi Dehlin [02:06:29] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [02:06:30] Mike and Abby, who are really good friends who run our support group with us. There's four of us who run this, who started and run the support group.
John Dehlin [02:06:39] Facebook group.
Kari Hanks [02:06:40] The Facebook group.
John Dehlin [02:06:41] Do you say what it's called?
Kari Hanks [02:06:42] The group X2. X2 support group.
John Dehlin [02:06:44] Okay.
Kyle Hanks [02:06:45] EX2 X2 support group.
Kari Hanks [02:06:47] Mike and Abby. They had lived near us when our daughter was young and they had a kid a month apart from our oldest. And then when we moved to Arizona, they moved shortly after and they were there for A year and they lived near us. And our second two kids were two months apart. So she and her babies were over at my house a lot while the guys were working. And that kept me sane.
Kari Hanks [02:07:09] And after that they moved away. But we're still really good friends and they visit us every Thanksgiving, every year. So that was a really difficult time. And definitely some big cracks in my. The things I was putting on my shelf. And one of them was just not feeling very supportive. Supported by the community, by the two by two community. In fact, we had neighbors during that time who were organizing like meal trains and coming together to support us, I think. Didn't we move right after Finn was born?
Kyle Hanks [02:07:41] Yeah, we did. I don't remember how long.
Kari Hanks [02:07:43] Very shortly after he was born. My next really clear memory is being at his first birthday. I felt like I woke up out of a dream, like, and I was like, oh, I'm at his birthday party. So that was a really difficult year where. Yeah, again, the two by two system that should have embraced and supported us just felt non existent. So that was a big crack. In retrospect, I don't think I looked at it as like a crack in my faith at the time, but looking back, that was a big thing.
Kyle Hanks [02:08:14] Yeah, it's a thing on the shelf. We love the shelf breaking analogy. We've co opted it from the Exmo community because it's so handy because it makes a lot of sense. It's looking back, there's a lot of stuff you'd put up there but didn't think about it at the time.
Kari Hanks [02:08:27] You know, where did you first. Was it. Did you hear that?
Kyle Hanks [02:08:29] I heard it on Mormons podcast. Yeah.
Kari Hanks [02:08:31] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:08:32] Fun.
Kyle Hanks [02:08:33] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:08:34] We love to help in any way we can.
Kari Hanks [02:08:37] Thanks for any languages.
Lacking Language for Feelings and Experiences
Margi Dehlin [02:08:38] I was gonna say when you're talking about language and emotions and how not being given words to attach to whatever it is you're experiencing, it really does, you know, I don't know, make you reflect on the power of language that you can literally breathe experiences into existence. And also by not having language, you can. You can take them out of existence for people too, at least at the time that they're experiencing.
Kari Hanks [02:09:10] And there was so much I didn't have language for. My. My earliest memories of crushes were on girls, but I didn't have language for bisexual. I knew I liked men too. Like I was into my husband, but I didn't have language for that. You could like more than one gender. I didn't have language for my mental health conditions that were going on at the time. I didn't have language for questioning two by two beliefs. I didn't have language for my health problems that were going on or even the intrusive thoughts that I was having after the birth of my son in particular, that got really bad.
Kari Hanks [02:09:45] All of that was scarier because I didn't have language. And so when you can't define something, it's scarier. And also you're cut off from any support. Once I learned what intrusive thoughts were and what OCD was, I was able to find support. I was able to find other people out there who had experienced it. I was able to look up support groups on social media. I could talk about my experience and find other people who related. When you don't have language for that, which is something that is withheld from the X2 X2 community before our support group. It's so much more complicated.
Margi Dehlin [02:10:18] Yeah, you're an island.
John Dehlin [02:10:20] Yeah. And just not having access to TV growing up. Limits or Internet. I'm assuming you weren't on the Internet a lot or certain books.
Kari Hanks [02:10:31] Yeah, we did get Internet on our computer when it became a thing and we had social media, we would talk to people on.
Kyle Hanks [02:10:38] But there is a general suspicion of worldly knowledge, information.
Margi Dehlin [02:10:42] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [02:10:42] Like even science.
Margi Dehlin [02:10:43] If science is suspect, that leaves you in a very, like, vulnerable place.
Kari Hanks [02:10:48] Even now there are workers who preach stay off the Internet. Maybe especially now because of us.
Kyle Hanks [02:10:52] But yeah, we. I think we all have different experiences because my family wasn't quite as much that way. But. But there is a little bit of like, the best answers start here. If you have to move out, you can. But the best answers are in meetings. So you just do that.
Margi Dehlin [02:11:06] Okay.
Kari Hanks [02:11:07] So we had our third kid right before our oldest turned four. So we had three kids, three and under.
John Dehlin [02:11:15] Oh, wow.
Kari Hanks [02:11:17] Yeah. Very close in age. Which we wanted because we are so spread out from our own siblings. We were hoping by having kids closer in age that they would feel closer to their siblings and be friends. And I homeschooled them up until very recently.
Kari Hanks [02:11:34] So that was something that we planned. We wanted our kids close in age, but also easier said than done when you're having kids close in age and your body is struggling with unidentified health issues and you're very entrenched in the natural community. And so breastfeeding is an expectation.
Kari Hanks [02:11:54] I breastfed or was pregnant or giving birth solid for six years. I breastfed my oldest daughter until I was five months pregnant with my second. And then. Yeah, it just continued on from there. So I was taking a lot out of my body. And that also made it a little bit more difficult to realize that some of what I was struggling with was chronic illness. Because when I'd go to the doctors, they would say, well, you had your baby so close in age and you've been taking a lot of resources from your body, which is true. But I would see other mothers doing that, and they were bouncing back quicker and they were having energy to go on hikes, which I wasn't able to do.
Kari Hanks [02:12:28] So I was just noticing, especially the older. As my kids got older and older, that I was not recovering, My body wasn't recovering from. From having these kids. And. And also we were starting to struggle more. So we were starting to struggle more with getting to meetings physically because of my health and my anxiety. We would put in this so much effort to get ready for meeting with three little kids who didn't want to go because they have to sit there quietly for an hour.
Kari Hanks [02:12:57] We let our kids draw quietly or color quietly. Some families did that, some didn't, but they have to sit there on their own chair quietly for the whole hour of meeting. Our kids hated that. And as our daughter got older, she's a very skeptical kid, and she was asking questions like, mom, why do women have to look this way and why do we have to act this way? And if there's a loving God, why this? You know? And I didn't have answers for a lot of her questions. I was like, I don't know. That's just how we've always done it. That's how we've always looked.
Kari Hanks [02:13:29] Which she wasn't satisfied with that. So more cracks on the shelf. And my chronic illness with us not physically getting to meetings, which physically being in meeting where you can hear and feel the spirit of God is like a big thing for the two by two. So in us not being physically at meeting as often, we started just not being invited to, you know, family events as often or get togethers or potlucks as often. And I definitely noticed some ableism coming up in the two by twos, where they have this idea that if you, even if you have physical struggles, it's just a greater sacrifice and God will reward that in turn.
Kari Hanks [02:14:15] But when I did make it to the meetings, I didn't feel I wasn't feeling the blessing that I was told I would feel. It just felt like a big exhausting effort. We would often get all the kids ready for meeting, get in the car, get halfway to meeting. I would have some sort of panic attack, which in retrospect, threw me into some sort of medical episode. I remember like losing my vision, losing my hearing, basically blacking out. And we'd have to turn around and go home.
Kari Hanks [02:14:44] And those were never rewarded because we weren't in meeting. Even though we put in all of the effort to get there, nobody was recognizing it or seeing it again with the external validation. So it just felt like more and more difficulties and less and less of, of this blessing that we were told we would have with our sacrifice. And on top of that, as a mother who was putting everything into her children, which you're supposed to do, and I don't regret having kids, but it was my entire identity as a two by two mother. That is where your value is. And I remember having conversations with my mom, like, I just feel useless to God.
Kari Hanks [02:15:25] Like I don't feel valuable. I. I don't. I don't feel like I have my own identity. And the response was just keep going and eventually you'll feel the blessing. And yeah, it's hard to have little kids and, you know, so there's a lot of that going on. And yeah, I guess that brings us to the end of 2019.
Health Struggles and a Path to Questioning
Kari Hanks [02:15:43] I got a diagnosis finally of POTS. I was sent to a cardiologist who did what's called a tilt table test in hospital. And I got my diagnosis, which was incredibly validating. It was actually a really significant day for me almost. I would say it was a good day for me because I had answers.
Kari Hanks [02:16:06] The year before, our whole family had had like a stomach bug of some sort that was over within 24 hours. But instead of me getting over it with the rest of the family, I ended up bed bound for two months.
Kari Hanks [02:16:19] And I couldn't take care of my kids. I couldn't take care of my body. I was crawling to the bathroom. My blood pressure was super low. My mom had to come from the Vegas area because Kyle ran out of sick leave at work.
Kari Hanks [02:16:32] So she was sitting by my bed, like, taking care of me and Kyle and my mom would take me to the hospital and they would give me IV fluids and they'd be like, there's nothing wrong. You're just dehydrated. Your labs look great. I remember one doctor was like, your labs are so perfect. We could put them on our website as an example of what the ideal lab work looks like. And I'm like, but I'm dying. Like, I'm sick. I was losing weight. I was an unhealthy weight. I couldn't stand up to shower or take myself to the bathroom. Like, how can this be ideal health.
Kari Hanks [02:17:04] That's, that's not. So being diagnosed and having an answer and POTS doesn't usually show up in lab work. So it makes sense that they, you know, we're just screening for are you dying? And I wasn't. I thought I was dying. I was writing goodbye letters to my kids. It was a really scary, difficult time to be that sick and to have everyone just like. I don't know. You seem fine.
Margi Dehlin [02:17:26] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:17:28] You've probably heard the term the body keeps the score that sometimes we develop autoimmune or other types of. Because we're just constantly enduring stress or dissonance. And this is a theory of mine. It's probably, there's probably some science behind it, but I'm not speaking from a science informed perspective, just life experience. That too much untreated stress, too much cognitive dissonance for too long can do bad things to your mental health and your physical health. Do you speculate that there was some of that going on for you or not?
Kari Hanks [02:17:58] I definitely have speculated that as a child being in a state of constant fight or flight, especially with the corporal punishment that was in our household and how it could come out of nowhere very quickly I learned to be very hyper vigilant. And it hasn't. It's not lost on me that my chronic illness has to do with the autonomic nervous system, which is your fight or flight system. I do have an underlying genetic condition, so we also have a child with these conditions too. So there is a familial aspect to it.
Kari Hanks [02:18:29] But it was triggered during a time in my life where I was undergoing the abuse and a lot of other significant stressors. When I was 8, that was like when my symptoms became very prominent. And definitely stress even now can set me back sometimes permanently. And by stress I mean a virus or a literal like emotional stressor or I mean, name it.
Kari Hanks [02:18:58] If it can cause a flare in my health symptoms, it might be a permanent setback. So yeah, I think there is something to that theory.
Margi Dehlin [02:19:06] But and to add onto that with genetics now in science, what's the name?
John Dehlin [02:19:11] Epigenetics.
Margi Dehlin [02:19:11] Epigenetics. So we know with genes even genes can express are more apt to express during times of tumult or when there's a high stress kind of part. So.
Kari Hanks [02:19:22] Exactly.
Margi Dehlin [02:19:23] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [02:19:25] And during this time in my life where I felt very unsupported by community and my mom, who had been a big emotional support for me throughout my life, was not available because she was dealing with her own health issues. I don't Think coincidental that my health got a lot worse during that time.
Margi Dehlin [02:19:41] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:19:42] I'll just add one thing we learned from our excommunication, or mine, I should say, is just this idea of thin community. You think that Mormonism shines by its intense, high connected, high committed community, but then you realize that's only when everybody is serving the community and giving to the community and strengthening the community. But the community is a centimeter thick. If in any way you're falling short of what you know, what reinforces and builds up the community, well.
Kari Hanks [02:20:16] And just like how I, as a two by two was scared to have friends as a teenager who wore makeup up because they're toying on that they're on the edge of what is safe. Right. That being in the middle of the fold is where your safety is or where my safety was. Yeah, it's that same idea of, like, when you start. When you. At any age, if you start questioning or you start doing things a little bit differently or you're a little more verbal about your politics and your politics aren't as conservative anymore as they used to be, the rest of the tribe is going to back off a little because all of a sudden you're not that safe person.
Margi Dehlin [02:20:52] You're a danger.
Kari Hanks [02:20:53] You might even put ideas in their head or lead them astray or. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, end of 2019, I got diagnosed and then we headed into Covid era. And that was complicated for my health because I was working with multiple specialists and all of a sudden we're trying to figure out how to continue doing my testing that I needed done, but also switching everything to telehealth. And meetings were canceled, as was church in most of the country. And with that, we had physical space and distance from meetings. And that's when my shelf broke.
John Dehlin [02:21:35] Meaning you're sitting there not going to meetings, and then what thoughts come into your mind?
Kari Hanks [02:21:42] There was a lot of political unrest in the country. So I started really examining not just like what beliefs were handed me in a box with a pretty pink bow tied on it, but what do I believe? What are my values at the core? And I realized I was changing my. My mind, that what I valued, what aligned with my values, not two by two values. I was having a political deconstruction of examining ableism because of my chronic health, but also along with that, racism, LGBTQ ideas. I had always been kind of of the mind of like, I don't see harm with love as love.
Kari Hanks [02:22:19] But we looked at the LGBTQ community as basically having a struggle akin to alcoholism. Love the sinner, hate the sin. Right. It's. We feel bad for them because of their inclinations or whatever two by twos would call it.
Kari Hanks [02:22:34] But as long as they don't act on it, then we can love the person that had always not really sat right with me and everything went under the microscope. I had time and distance away from. You could call it the brainwashing of being in meetings and starting to think for myself. And I read 70 books that year. I started reading things I had never let myself read before about all of those topics, as well as science. Like, my kids were getting to the age with homeschooling, where we had trended more and more secular with them in their education. So here they were learning about evolution in their science, and I'm learning right alongside with them things that I had never learned about evolution before.
Kari Hanks [02:23:16] Because two by twos believe in a young earth. Earth is like 6,000 years old. And evolution. Like, it's ridiculous that scientists think we come from monkeys. Obviously God made us Adam and Eve, all of that.
John Dehlin [02:23:29] So y' all are literal Adam and Eve as the first humans. 6,000 year old Earth?
Kari Hanks [02:23:34] Yeah. In fact, many two by twos don't believe in dinosaurs.
John Dehlin [02:23:37] Yeah, no dinosaurs.
Kari Hanks [02:23:38] Satan planted dinosaur bones to confuse.
John Dehlin [02:23:40] Wait, that's us. That's what I was taught. Wait a minute.
Kari Hanks [02:23:43] Not everyone's taught that I believed in dinosaurs. I just believed that they lived at the same time as humans because that's how you had to fit the timeline.
Kyle Hanks [02:23:50] What? I didn't believe that we'll get into my story, but I didn't.
Kari Hanks [02:23:55] It's funny because during this time, Kyle and I, as two by twos, you sort of learn, like, find a good two by two person to marry and then God will take care of the rest. And so there wasn't a lot of communication in our marriage at this time about nuances in our beliefs. We just sort of assumed we're both professing, so we must believe the same thing. And it turned out there were a lot of nuances. I was a very literal believer in everything in the Bible. And Kyle can talk about his beliefs later.
John Dehlin [02:24:25] Yeah. So we are taught as Mormons that any two faithful Mormons can make a marriage work as long as they're faithful Mormons. So it sounds like y' all had that really quickly. I think this is maybe a natural point to wrap up episode one and then we'll have maybe episode two, Start with Kyle's story and then weave back in the shelf breaking. But I heard you say early that politics kind of wasn't a part of that. They kind of two by twos kind of eschewed the world and eschewed political identity.
Kari Hanks [02:25:02] Yes.
John Dehlin [02:25:03] But I was wondering all along this is sounding if we're starting to do homeschooling and skepticism of medicine and you know, it's starting to sound like it could be politically tend to be politically conservative, which made me wonder how much there was a tie. There was a correlation between Republican support for the Republican party and being a two by two.
Kari Hanks [02:25:26] Yeah, the two by twos are very conservative. And I was racing political politically conservative. So my dad's Canadian, so he doesn't actually vote. And my mom just never did vote because a lot of two by twos believe that they shouldn't get involved in politics. But the two by twos that I do know who do vote would almost always vote Republican. And if you're liberal, you keep it to yourself because that's one of those like danger flags that could alarm the rest of the group if you start getting ideas that are not conservative.
John Dehlin [02:25:54] Okay.
Kyle Hanks [02:25:54] You're typically not involved politically though. You wouldn't. You don't see too many two by twos in politics or, you know, wearing the politics on their sleeve necessarily. I have met one that was a mayor one time, but that. That's it. That's the only political involvement I've seen from a two by two.
John Dehlin [02:26:09] Okay. And then just because I'm curious, like some of the book titles that you would have read that maybe you shouldn't have been reading around that Covid time. That would give us a flavor for the types of books that started opening your eyes. What would those.
Kari Hanks [02:26:25] A lot of Bart Ehrman.
John Dehlin [02:26:26] Oh, wait a minute.
Kari Hanks [02:26:27] That's not good for me.
John Dehlin [02:26:29] That's not good.
Kari Hanks [02:26:30] I was deep reconstructing the idea of hell through a lot of what he was talking about.
John Dehlin [02:26:35] First, where did you learn about Bart Ehrman?
Kari Hanks [02:26:38] Where did I learn about him? Probably Mormon stories. Oops, sorry, I don't remember for sure, but I think Mormon stories. I heard his name and then I started reading his books.
John Dehlin [02:26:49] Okay, wait. Maybe we can talk about how you really quickly how you got into Mormon stories and then we'll carry it over to the next episode.
Kari Hanks [02:26:56] You know, I don't exactly remember when I started listening, but as I was reading these books, I was also. I started reading a lot of books about people who had left other religions. Like, I was fascinated with cults. Clue number one. I was like, I'm not in a cult. But how. What would it be like to be in a cult. That's such a weird existence. So I was reading and looking for podcasts about other beliefs and other ideas and other viewpoints. And Mormon stories obviously came up as one of those. Other books I was reading were like White Fragility, Anti Racist, or I can't remember the exact title of the book,
Margi Dehlin [02:27:35] how to be an Anti Racist.
Kari Hanks [02:27:37] Yeah, I was reading. I started reading a lot of atheist books, Hitchens, Dawkins and I at the. Was around the end of November. So I should say, like, meetings in Arizona resumed in June of 2020, which there was a huge COVID wave. I think Arizona was leading the world for cases at that point. And then they decided to open meetings back up, which we just didn't feel safe going back at all.
Kari Hanks [02:28:10] And so we didn't. And so we had this physical space still through to the end of November 2020. It occurred to me, it was like a realization I had that I didn't believe in a higher power anymore. It didn't feel like a choice. It just felt like it hit me like a realization like I used to believe in a higher power. And through reading all these books and listening to different podcasts, not just yours, but other ones as well, I was realizing I didn't. I was unraveling all of it. I didn't believe in a higher power at all. And that kicked off a really difficult six months in our marriage.
John Dehlin [02:28:47] Yeah. And we'll get. We'll cover that next episode. And so how was there a lot of time between you not being sure you believed in God and starting to say, wait a minute, was I in a cult? Was there much time between those two?
Deconstruction and Leaving the Two by Twos
Kari Hanks [02:29:04] I don't remember when I started thinking the word culture, but it was, it happened all very quickly for me. My deconstruction, it was everything under the microscope, including, was I in a cult? It felt like all at the same time. So it was around that same, that same summer into fall that I started thinking there are really cult like aspects to this, especially the control over women was something that was really starting to bother me.
John Dehlin [02:29:35] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [02:29:35] And just honestly, reading books about cults and people who had left cults and listening to Mormon stories and hearing so many different stories there and seeing similarities. Like there are difference. There are a lot of differences in different religions. But there's an underlying theme that for me, exclusivity was a big one. Like everyone who had left an exclusive religion, who was told, if you leave this religion, you're going to hell or, and. Or something awful will happen to you, like the two by twos, would often preach, if you leave. If you leave meetings, you'll die in a car accident. Or here's someone who left meetings and they got cancer and died. Like, those stories were common themes. I was hearing from other cults as well, and I was like, well, if that's a cult and the same thing's happening here, maybe this is a cult.
John Dehlin [02:30:25] Well, that's a really good cliffhanger for part two, so. And still, Kyle, I really, really want to hear anything you want to share about your intro story up to this point that helps us get a sense for the cracks that developed for you.
Kari Hanks [02:30:40] Sure.
John Dehlin [02:30:40] Sounds good, but what a great introduction to the two by twos. What a great sense for the lived experience now of people who are two by twos. And so many parallels between two by twos and Mormonism. And, you know, some of the content is, you know, different, but you know, that we're tracking with how familiar your. Your story. I mean, it's different, but in so. In so many ways, it's.
Kari Hanks [02:31:10] It's a lot of similarities.
John Dehlin [02:31:12] Yeah. So I guess I just want to say, Kari, thank you so much.
Margi Dehlin [02:31:17] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:31:18] For being willing to share your story up to this point. And also, Kylann, Kari, thanks to you both for helping us learn about another tradition which is always effective in helping us see our tradition more clearly through someone else's tradition.
Kari Hanks [02:31:34] Kyle and I have always said, like, we feel like Mormons are our cousins.
John Dehlin [02:31:38] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [02:31:39] Like third cousins. Like, not a cousin, you know very well, just a cousin that's around. Like, they show up at a reunion, you're not sure where they came from.
Kari Hanks [02:31:44] You're like, hey, we kind of look alike.
Kyle Hanks [02:31:46] We know some of the same people.
Margi Dehlin [02:31:48] And there's something. It feels meaningful, especially with the secretive aspect, I think, of what you all have been through, to actually say it out loud. Like, we were talking about words, the power of words, speaking something into existence. Where there is that kind of secretive aspect, there is, like, the lack of records kind of out there. It just feels meaningful. Like, this is. This is a record of sorts of what is in a way that a lot of people would not be able to fully understand without hearing it from you. Yeah.
Kari Hanks [02:32:26] Thank you for recognizing that, because that's very true.
Margi Dehlin [02:32:29] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:32:30] And as we're closing, we just want to remind people that it's really helpful if you'll like this episode on YouTube or Facebook, if you'll comment on it, if you'll subscribe to our podcast, that all really. And if you'll share it with others. All of that really helps these get shared far and wide by the algorithms. We also just want to always mention that we all exist primarily through the generous donations of our donors.
John Dehlin [02:33:00] Two thirds of our revenue comes just from donors who subscribe to the podcast and then every month they donate to keep us afloat. So if you are a donor, thank you. You're the reason why we're here. If you're not a donor and you want to see this type of content continue, you can just go to MormonStories.org, click on the donate button, and become a monthly donor. And we'll keep helping. Not just Mormons and progressive Mormons and ex Mormons, but over half of our audience has never been Mormon, like these wonderful people. So you can know that your donations don't just support our people, but they support a lot of people all over the world, which is really fun to know.
John Dehlin [02:33:43] So, yeah. So next episode is all going to be we're going to shift from the hook of we discovered we were in a cult to, oh, oh my gosh, how do we leave a cult? And then in your case, how do we help?
Building Community and Finding Support
John Dehlin [02:34:00] How do we help create a community to support other people? And how does Mormonism and Mormon stories kind of interweave with that and play a role? Anything you want to say, Margi?
Margi Dehlin [02:34:11] I don't think so.
John Dehlin [02:34:12] Okay.
Margi Dehlin [02:34:12] I'm excited to dig in and hear a little more from Kyle this next time around, too.
John Dehlin [02:34:17] Well, thanks, Kyle and Kari Hanks. Thanks everyone for joining us and come right back for part two. Be good to each other, be kind to each other, and we'll see you all again for part two of this episode of Help Help Us get out of the Two by Twos. Or we figured out we had to get out of the two by twos with Kyle and Kari Hanks. Take care, everybody.
Part 2 of 2 · Ep. 2009
Introducing the Two by Twos Cult
Kari Hanks [00:00:00] How do you hold accountable a group of people so good at not existing?
John Dehlin [00:00:04] If ever there was a church set up to explicitly avoid the pitfall of so many religions, which is their downfall due to sex, money and power, it was your church. It didn't even have a name. It didn't even have a legal organizational structure. It totally downplayed and then erased its founder. So like, how could anything go wrong?
Kari Hanks [00:00:27] It was hard to imagine existing outside of 2 by 2 ism. Like we couldn't picture what life outside would even look like. It was too hard to imagine. It was easier to imagine us just disappearing from life altogether. If it's so hard to leave this religion that death seems like a reasonable way out, it's a cult.
Kyle Hanks [00:00:50] I thought the fact that I'm even here feeling this right now is because I'm giving too much weight to something that's not giving me anything back. When I really, really need something to lean on, there's nothing. And that's not my fault. I can't say I was a doubting person that was always sinning all the time. All the things that you would say about somebody who left, like, oh, they never really had it. I did really have it. I based my life around it. It's not what you do, it's who you are on a molecular level.
John Dehlin [00:01:12] It's your identity, it's your marriage, it's your family relationships, it's your community, it's your worldview.
Kari Hanks [00:01:17] Then very well known, highly respected overseer was found dead in a hotel room. He was an abuser who abused women and children. It felt like the last good guy that we knew was going down. Like it felt like if. If he has allegations, who doesn't? Like the whole thing is corrupt. Right. That's how it felt to us at the time.
Kyle Hanks [00:01:40] We started having people flooding to us for information.
Kari Hanks [00:01:42] Our group was just absolutely exploding because people were hearing about it, because we were sharing public information and then word of mouth and everyone was like, where's the information coming from? It's coming from the support group. So we had a lot of ex members who had been out for a long time just hearing about the group. We had a mass exodus from the two by twos who were flocking to our group.
John Dehlin [00:02:03] You didn't just heal and ride off into the sunset. You decided to try and provide community for other people. Right. And support.
Kari Hanks [00:02:13] We gave the X community an identity. That was our goal in pushing the term two by two was this is our identity. This is the culture we came from. It has a name you're kind of
John Dehlin [00:02:23] like Leah Remini and Mike Rinder taking down a cult. What do you do when you wake up one day and realize that you may be in a cult or a high demand religion and you're married with three kids? Hi, I'm John Dehlin. This is Mormon stories podcast. It's March 12, 2025 and we're here in part two of our in depth interview with Kari and Kyle Hanks. Hey guys.
Kari Hanks [00:02:50] Hi, John.
John Dehlin [00:02:50] Welcome back.
Kyle Hanks [00:02:51] Hi again.
John Dehlin [00:02:52] We just spent two and a half hours in part one hearing all about the Christian tradition known as the two by Twos. They actually don't have a name or an organizational structure that is in any way legal or corporate. You'll have to go Back to Part 1 to learn all about that. But we learned about their history, their, their, you know, beliefs. And then we heard primarily from Kari and kind of her experience growing up as a two by two, kind of her lived experience all the way through marrying Kyle and having three children. And then we sort of ended with that cliffhanger of Kari
John Dehlin [00:03:35] as soon as Covid happens, having a little bit more time, stopping attending her two by two meetings, reading a bunch of books that no two by two, no self respecting faithful two by two should ever be reading, like Bart Ehrman or Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, which led to her wondering whether she was in a cult or a high demand religion. And that's where we left off. I'm here today again with Margi. Hey, Margi.
Margi Dehlin [00:04:01] Hello.
John Dehlin [00:04:02] Thanks for joining us. So what we're going to be covering this time is basically we want to hear Kyle kind of your. Anything you want to share about your upbringing in the two by twos or however you would describe it. And then what it was like once Covid hits and the wheels start coming off the wagon.
John Dehlin [00:04:24] And then we'll talk about how you both handled that as a married couple with kids. And then of course, a really important part of your story is finding Mormon stories. Why ex 2 by 2 members or questioning 2 by 2 members would be interested in Mormon stories at all? We love our never Mormon audiences and we can't get enough interviewing people who never been Mormon but find value in Mormon stories. And then we'll talk about not only your deconversion and leaving of the two by two faith, but also starting or helping start with others, a Facebook support group for people who have left or are leaving or questioning the two by two movement or organization or non organization organization, whatever you want to call it.
John Dehlin [00:05:19] That's my intro for this part two, I would ask everyone who to please, please, please take a second to like this episode, to comment on it, to subscribe to our YouTube channel or Facebook or wherever Spotify, and to share this episode with anyone who you think you might, who might value it because all of that really helps our growth. And we're also super thankful to our donors because we couldn't do this without our monthly donors. And if you want to become a donor, it's really simple. You just go to moremorestories.org, click on the donate button and. And become a monthly donor. That's all we have for any anything other than just to jump right back in your story.
Kari's Faith Crisis and Deconversion
John Dehlin [00:06:01] So Kari, when we left off you, it was 2020ish. You had read all these books and you were thinking about whether your church is true. You'd lost your faith in God and you were questioning whether you wanted to remain a two by two. Is that right?
Kari Hanks [00:06:15] That's right. Yep.
John Dehlin [00:06:16] Anything else either of you want to correct about the intro? Did I get anything fundamentally wrong?
Kyle Hanks [00:06:22] Sounds good.
John Dehlin [00:06:22] No, not at all. Okay.
Margi Dehlin [00:06:25] All right.
John Dehlin [00:06:25] Margi, anything you want to add?
Margi Dehlin [00:06:27] I don't think so.
Kyle's Background and Upbringing in the Church
John Dehlin [00:06:28] Okay, well, let's jump back just a bit in the timeline because Kyle, we didn't kind of hear your founding story and mostly we're interested in anything you want to add about your lived experience as a two by two that you think would be interesting for our audience. The kind of highlights important aspects of the tradition, but also unhealthy aspects of your tradition. And even more specifically, as. As we mentioned, the items that started building up on your two by two shelf that ended up leading to the eventual collapse.
Kyle Hanks [00:07:01] Sure. Yeah. Well, so my history goes back three or four generations and for reasons I'll probably talk about in a bit, I actually, I don't know all of my family history in the two by twos, but I know a couple of the stories that are kind of interesting. One of them, we talked about those preachers that come to the or the workers, the early workers that came to the US and traveled around. One of my family members, one of my great grandparents, sat in one of those missions and knew immediately that it was amazing and wanted some more of that. And the workers at that time were doing mission style gospel meetings, we call them, once every night of the week at that time.
Kyle Hanks [00:07:44] They were really recruiting and my grandfather went and heard them. My great grandfather. I'm sorry, went and heard them. And after three nights, he knew he was. He was listening every night. He listened every night. For six weeks. And after the third night, he knew this was it. These guys are doing it just like the Bible says. And his whole family joined the two by twos. And so that was one of my grandparents. And that grandparent married a professing person as well. The other side of my family, actually, one was professing, was a two by two, and the other was not. Originally, my great grandfather on one side of my family was a minister.
Kyle Hanks [00:08:19] I believe it was Methodism, and even built a church at one point, which I visited, which is kind of neat. It's a coffee shop now. But he told his son, my grandfather, well, they had these discussions about, does anybody really go around like the Bible, and do it just like the Bible says, in pairs of ministers? And so he said, I think. Think it's possible. I think it can be done. I think you can go in faith. So be on the lookout for that. I don't know how to do it, but be on the lookout for that. So he was. And then he met my grandmother, and she brought him to a gospel meeting.
Kyle Hanks [00:08:52] And the rest is history. He understood it, saw it when he saw it, when he was ready to see it. And so both sides of my family professed. And I was born into that world. So, yeah, I was born in 1983 to goodly parents.
Kyle Hanks [00:09:09] We don't use that term. I've just started on here. Yeah. So my family, very similar to Kari's in a lot of ways. Very conservative, kind of a Rush Limbaugh conservative family. I was born, actually went home to Federal Way, but then we moved out to Enumclaw, Washington, a country, kind of a farming community in western Washington. And they wanted to raise us out there and in kind of a safe farming town. That's what they wanted for us. So we grew up out there. And there were a lot of two by two people in that area. Oddly enough, I think there were two or three different Sunday morning meetings, which each one would have had three or four, maybe five families in each one.
Kyle Hanks [00:09:47] So I grew up around a lot of. We call them professing kids, professing friends and family. And throughout my life, there was a sharp delineation between professing friends, professing family and everybody else. And it was the first time I remember that separation being notable was when I brought a friend home from school one time. We were allowed to have friends at school, but they were worldly, though. We didn't want to get too involved with any of them. So a friend came over from school after school, and we Played around. And then my mom said, okay, it's time for him to go home. And I said, what?
Kyle Hanks [00:10:21] Why can't he stay for dinner? My friends always stay for dinner. No, he needs to go home. And that's when I first realized, oh, we're completely separate. This is a different type of person. We're different people. And that I absorbed that as a responsibility from that point forward of upholding a standard, of being the good, professing, God fearing person in a family that had a lineage that went back several generations. I actually felt very compelled by that feeling for most of my childhood.
Kyle Hanks [00:10:56] And we'd get reminded about it a lot to remember to uphold the family's name. My parents would send me out the door every morning to school. Remember whose kid you are. This is important to not just carry the family name, but the family name was downstream of God.
Kyle Hanks [00:11:09] We're professing. We profess our love for Jesus every day. We are the light of the world. So I took that very seriously. I was a very serious professing. I was very. I took it as a responsibility to be an example to everybody. And I knew I was different from a very early age. And that was good. It was scary. Sometimes it was lonely at school knowing that I was a little different than everybody else. Maybe didn't celebrate the same holidays and didn't know about the TV shows, but that felt like the right thing. So I grew up as a very serious kid. I think of myself that way anyway.
Kyle Hanks [00:11:45] And when I was. Something I'm going to mention, because it'll come up a little later, is When I was eight years old, I became diabetic type 1 diabetes. I got fifth disease, which I don't think it's called fist disease anymore. I think there's a name for it, but it's one of those measles, mumps or Bellas type diseases, viruses. I guess I got that and I think it damaged my immune system or something. It ended up damaging my pancreas. And I got diabetes at 8 years old. So at 8 years old, I went from nothing one day to getting real thirsty one day. Next day I was in the hospital and I came out giving myself injections.
Kyle Hanks [00:12:25] And my parents gave me a lot of injections, gave me all of the injections at first. And then I learned how to do it. And being that kind of. I think that sort of plays into me being a real responsible, scrupulous kid. Serious kid. Like, this is a serious thing I have. I need to be careful with this. I need to be careful we always hear from the workers, be careful, be careful, be careful, be careful. Spiritually now I can be careful. Naturally. I was just a careful, cautious kid. Didn't like to take any risks. Becoming diabetic was a very serious thing, obviously. And I remember the emotional toll it was on my parents to have to take care of a very sick kid.
Kyle Hanks [00:13:01] And that meant a lot to me. Even at the time, I was very aware. At eight years old, I was very aware that they were working real hard to keep me alive sometimes as a young kid was very.
Kyle Hanks [00:13:14] At first I had a pretty good honeymoon phase for about six months after getting it. But I became. What's the word I'm looking for? Very volatile blood sugars, I guess you could say.
Kari Hanks [00:13:25] What do you mean by honeymoon phase?
Kyle Hanks [00:13:26] It was a phase where my pancreas kind of kicked back in for a few months after I got diabetes and sort of worked for a while and then went full on. And that's fairly typical from what I've heard. But I was very adamant.
Kari Hanks [00:13:38] I knew that, but I figured the audience might not.
Kyle Hanks [00:13:40] Yeah, thanks. Yeah, so that was just part of my upbringing too. So I had a lot of. And I bring that up because it was like a very serious time and a very serious thing and I had to be very careful. I remember my mom is in the medical field.
Kyle Hanks [00:13:54] My family didn't have the anti education vibe that some professing people do. My, my grandparents on one side were actually educators and my mom and my dad both have degrees. My dad has worked in manufacturing. My mom is in medical field and so she knew exactly what to do with a diabetic kid. And I remember my dad being a little bit nervous about having to put injections into a little kid and it affected him a lot. And I remember him practicing on potatoes. He would take a potato and practice first on that and then he would come do it on me because he was just so worried about hurting me.
Kyle Hanks [00:14:26] And that means a lot to me. And I'll talk about that more as I go. But I took that on as even more responsibility. It's like they're taking very good care of me. I need to even be more responsible. I need to never let them down on this. I need to be really strong and strong in whatever place I have professing kid, diabetic kid, whatever kid, light of the world kid. I need to be really.
Kyle Hanks [00:14:46] I need to take that very seriously. So I actually had a meeting at my home as well. We didn't have a Sunday morning meeting, we had a Wednesday night Bible study in our home. And that was a privilege.
John Dehlin [00:14:55] It's called an open home, right?
Kyle Hanks [00:14:56] Yeah, we had an open home.
John Dehlin [00:14:58] I'm learning.
Margi Dehlin [00:14:58] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:15:00] Yep, we were open. And so for us, weekends wasn't as big a deal for us as far as Friday, Saturday. But on Wednesdays, I come home and I'd have about an hour to do my schoolwork, and then time to start cleaning up around the house. And I would vacuum, and I would set up the chairs and do some of the dusting and stuff and get the house all clean for.
Margi Dehlin [00:15:16] For.
Kyle Hanks [00:15:17] For people to come over and have a Bible study that evening. It was a very. My family was very serious as well. It was a very sacred duty to have this Bible study in the one true way.
John Dehlin [00:15:26] This probably goes without saying, but if you haven't watched part one of this interview, you'll get a lot more out of it if you pause, Go watch part one, where we explain the history of the two by twos and its structure. Because that joke I just made about, you know, being an open home, there's significance to that and other things of just being able to hold meetings in the house, that sort of thing. So we're not gonna retread all that history, go back and watch the part, and then come here for the second. Sorry, just had to make that explicit.
Kyle Hanks [00:15:56] Yeah, no, that's great. I won't repeat too much. Kari covered a lot of great stuff in that episode, so I won't cover too much of it again. But we had very similar upbringings in that way, just with maybe a little bit different emphasis in certain places, like education. Education was very important in my family. And, yeah, I guess I'll talk about education a little bit later, too. But I stood to my feet and professed in a gospel meeting when I was either 10 or 11. I can't actually remember which year. And we talked about emotions on the last episode. And, yeah, I cried, too, because I was making such a serious decision and everyone else around me felt emotional. And to this day, I'm not exactly sure why everyone feels so emotional when a kid who's too young to make any decisions joins a church, but they feel it.
John Dehlin [00:16:42] Can you give us an example of what's said when a kid professes?
Kyle Hanks [00:16:45] Just said to the kid or.
John Dehlin [00:16:47] No, what a kid says when he stands up and professes.
Kyle Hanks [00:16:50] So the kid doesn't actually say anything. So the way that typically is done is they'll have one of these gospel meetings, these mission meetings, and they'll announce a hymn and they'll sing the hymn. And they say if anybody wants to join, you can feel free to stand at the last verse or two or whatever. Whatever they decide.
Kari Hanks [00:17:06] Everyone during it.
Kyle Hanks [00:17:07] It's kind of.
Kari Hanks [00:17:08] Everyone's singing the hymn while you're standing there.
Kyle Hanks [00:17:11] So you just stand up and everybody looks at you.
Kari Hanks [00:17:13] And then when the hymn is over, the worker will come to the mic and say, please be seated. And so everyone who professed sits down. And then often after the meeting, they'll have whoever professed come up to talk to the workers, and they'll just be like, I don't even remember what they said to me. I think they gave me, like, a list of, like a study list to read or something or.
John Dehlin [00:17:31] So it's literally just an active statement.
Kari Hanks [00:17:33] You don't have to make a public proclamation verbally.
John Dehlin [00:17:36] Okay.
Church Practices, Hymns, and Testimony
Kyle Hanks [00:17:36] Now, you don't have to say much. I think of it kind of like an altar call. I've heard from other Christian churches, Protestant churches.
Kari Hanks [00:17:42] But from then on, you do speak in every single meeting. You give a prayer and a testimony in every meeting from then on.
Kyle Hanks [00:17:49] And so I, of course, felt even more responsibility, like, oh, now I'm. Now I'm part of this. Now I'm carrying this with me. I need to really be a good example to the kids at my school now and stuff like that.
John Dehlin [00:17:59] Are your hymns similar to normal Christian hymns?
Kyle Hanks [00:18:04] That's a really good question.
Kari Hanks [00:18:04] Borrow a lot of from other people.
Kyle Hanks [00:18:08] Every once in a while, we'll be watching a show or something that's religious, and we'll hear a hymn in the background. We'll recognize the tune. When my grandfather, who was a Methodist son of a Methodist preacher, he was actually a Methodist minister himself, but he never preached. He had gotten his ordination in the mail, and then he just threw it away because since then he'd found the one true way, the two by twos. And so he never actually preached as a Methodist minister. And in his hymnal, he actually had hymns, titles of Methodist hymns next to the titles of ours because it helped him remember the tune sung to the
John Dehlin [00:18:39] tune of that kind of thing. Our hymn law is the same thing,
Kari Hanks [00:18:42] but a lot of hymns are written by two by twos. I wrote a hymn when I was 15. It's not in the hymn book that they use in meetings, but it's in a supplemental hymn book that they published for people to have displayed in their home on the piano or whatever.
John Dehlin [00:18:56] Do y' all know if there are any hymns you sang that would have the same music as a traditional Christian hymn?
Kyle Hanks [00:19:01] Not off the Top of my head.
Kari Hanks [00:19:02] Like, what's that one that they play in the Titanic when the ship is sinking?
John Dehlin [00:19:06] Nearer my God to thee.
Kari Hanks [00:19:07] Yeah, that's one. Is it the same words, though? It's the same.
Kyle Hanks [00:19:10] I think it's the same words. I'm not sure. There is one to the tune of Aloha Oy by Elvis. There's a hymn that matches that tune. I think there's a lot, but we're not sure where the crossover is, to be completely honest.
Kari Hanks [00:19:22] Our hymn book has 412 hymns, so there's.
Kyle Hanks [00:19:24] Yeah, a lot of them, and they have retooled a lot of them over time. That's an interesting thing we've learned since leaving as well, is that they've actually redone some of the words to sort of match a slightly tweaked theology over time. Again, nothing's really written down, but we feel this way right now. So they retool the words just a little bit. It's only happened a couple times in.
Kari Hanks [00:19:41] The most recent hymn book was published in the 80s. We're still using that one, I think.
Kyle Hanks [00:19:45] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's see.
Kari Hanks [00:19:47] So.
Kyle Hanks [00:19:47] So we had the meetings in our homes. That was really important. We. We were a very serious family about professing. It was the most important thing in our family, period. We had hobbies. I played sports. I played basketball. I was very tall when I was young. I was actually about 6ft tall by the time I was in junior high, and I was coordinated. So I played basketball a lot, and I really liked it. But there was always that undertone, kind of like we heard in Kari's story of, well, make sure that you keep the most important thing first. Keep first things first. We'd hear that phrase a lot. Don't. If these hobbies start taking up too much time and they start taking up meeting time, and you miss a meeting here or there, that's not good. We don't want to do that.
Kari Hanks [00:20:23] So.
Kyle Hanks [00:20:24] So I always had that running in the back of my mind as well. And let's see, we didn't have a tv. I think we talked about that. That's important. But my hobbies. I really liked basketball when I was younger and being diabetic, I needed to have activity, and they were like, perfect. Join some basketball teams. And I played pretty well, and I was okay when I got to high school. When I got to junior high, the high school coaches were watching me and saying, hey, maybe come play for our team. And sometimes they'd invite me into practice with the varsity players. The seniors, because they're like, this guy's pretty coordinated and he might get taller.
Kyle Hanks [00:20:56] And when I became a. When I got to. I played freshman year of high school and then I quit because I started looking at the schedules and I realized there's going to be practices on Wednesday nights, when my family has a Bible study. There's going to be games maybe on Wednesday nights, or traveling on a Sunday morning.
Kyle Hanks [00:21:11] Especially when I wasn't old enough to drive myself. I can't make other people sacrifice their time in these professing meetings. I can't make them sacrifice that for me. So I quit. I just didn't do it. And I have a little bit of regret around that. I mean, I probably wouldn't have played pro, but that's just. I give that example as that is our view on it. It's meetings first, everything else second.
Kari Hanks [00:21:34] It's almost like when you start liking something to the point that it becomes a passion. The two by twos tell you at that point it's not healthy anymore. So you never really develop passions for things because it's dangerous. It's not healthy.
Kyle Hanks [00:21:49] Yeah, everything needs to. Everything in your life needs to be designed to pull you to the center of the fold. So that can be friendships. I had friends when I was younger that stepped aside from meetings. So I just didn't talk to them anymore. I didn't hate them, I didn't dislike them. If I'd have seen them, I would have been nice to them. But they weren't the best friends. The best friends are the ones in the meetings. And that just became my internal voice. That's just who I was until adulthood, Honestly, just whenever there's a fork in the road, take the one that takes you closer to the meetings.
Kyle Hanks [00:22:16] And don't be a stumbling block. Whatever you do, don't cause another person to stumble. I had things that I liked, I didn't. I wasn't bothered by music. My family didn't really like music. They didn't like it played in the house.
Kyle Hanks [00:22:26] I listened to rap music and headphones. I didn't see it as a problem. It was art to me. I liked it, but I knew not to play it out loud because I didn't want it to bother anybody else in the house and I didn't want them to. They'd go to pray at night and then they'd have this music going in their head that's kind of the devil working. And for some reason that worked. I was like, well, that's fine. I won't do it then I won't offend anybody else with my stuff. But I think a lot of my beliefs when I was younger, a lot of what I did was just based on let's try not to offend anybody, let's try not to pull anybody else away. Let's be really, really faithful. Be responsible. So that was most of my upbringing.
Kari Hanks [00:22:57] I think it's to the point that like even now you and I struggle with how do we have fun. Like life is always about responsibilities and being serious and like taking care of what needs to be taken care of. But when we have some free time, how do we enjoy ourselves? Like how do we have fun? That's actually been difficult to figure out.
Kyle Hanks [00:23:17] Yeah, yeah. That's why I say it becomes your internal voice on some level too. It's, it's, it's. I still battle it too. It's like, well, I could go do this hobby but I gotta do something important. I gotta go do, do the dishes or mow the yard or something. I still have a little bit of that in me.
John Dehlin [00:23:31] I actually have the answer for you. Do you want to know what it is?
Kyle Hanks [00:23:34] Yes.
John Dehlin [00:23:35] It's karaoke. That is the one true answer for how to have fun.
Kari Hanks [00:23:41] The one and only one for joy the correct way.
Kyle Hanks [00:23:43] That is the extrovert, right?
John Dehlin [00:23:46] No, I'm kidding. That's where I found joy. Along with lots of TV and puzzles,
Kyle Hanks [00:23:52] karaoke and sad buds.
Kari Hanks [00:23:55] We do like catching up on shows that we missed out on when we
John Dehlin [00:23:57] were Everyone see severance. Okay, back to you.
Kyle Hanks [00:24:01] Throwback to the previous episode.
John Dehlin [00:24:03] Yes.
Kyle Hanks [00:24:04] So the only other thing that I think is interesting about my upbringing is that being very serious, professing God fearing family, we that that was all the time we, if we went on a vacation, we found meetings. We would call around, you know, pre Internet days or even, you know, like pre social media and all that. We would get a phone number from someone who would give us a phone number to a worker, to a friend somewhere and we would find a Sunday morning meeting somewhere. And sometimes that meant shooting a whole Sunday of your vacation, driving an hour and a half to somebody's house.
Kyle Hanks [00:24:34] Because this is important. We need to go meet with these people. We may never see them again. We may never have seen them before, but it was an important part of our life. And in some ways that's kind of cool. It's a unique experience that I can't give my kids. I've been to Sunday morning meetings on islands in the Caribbean when we went on a cruise one time instead of Going to the beach, like the normal cast, the normal people on the boat. We went to a. A meeting with three people up on a hill, on an island somewhere.
Margi Dehlin [00:25:02] Can I ask you a question about that? So how do you find those meetings if it's secret, like, if it's not really.
John Dehlin [00:25:08] That's a great question.
Kyle Hanks [00:25:09] Yeah, well, it's. The two by twos aren't a great community, but they're a great network. People know people who know people. And similar to how we love to trace, everyone loves to sit around and trace back. When did the truth find us? Who is the first person to profess. They love to do that. They also love to find all the connections because invariably you're related to somebody. I mean, it's not that big of a group and everyone's born in. So there's a lot of people connected to a lot of people. And I think when we were in that example I just gave, I think somebody else had gone, had talked to a worker who had gotten him a hold of some.
Kyle Hanks [00:25:42] The overseer of the area that covered the Caribbean at that time, and he knew of somebody on this island and somebody else had had the same scenario. So they gave us the contact info.
Kari Hanks [00:25:51] You would often start by calling your Sunday morning elder, and then they would be like, hmm, well, I know someone who was there last year. Let me call and ask them. And then it's. Yeah, it's these connections. And just to clarify, everyone is born in. There are people who are.
Kyle Hanks [00:26:04] No, no, for sure, but I would say the vast majority. There's not a lot of converts. They're not. Like when.
Kari Hanks [00:26:10] I just don't want to dismiss people.
John Dehlin [00:26:11] We talked about that last time, for sure.
Kyle Hanks [00:26:13] Yeah. And. And when I hear Mormon stories, stories of people going on missions and baptizing 30 people, I just crack up because I'm sure there's workers right now who haven't converted that many.
John Dehlin [00:26:22] 30 in a month sometimes.
Kyle Hanks [00:26:23] Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Kari Hanks [00:26:24] That's.
Kyle Hanks [00:26:25] That seems crazy to us because we don't have. I mean, it's ones and 1, 2. Ones and twos, basically.
John Dehlin [00:26:30] Yeah.
Family Culture and Home Life in the Two by Twos
Margi Dehlin [00:26:31] So can I ask a question about that? Do you feel like part of that is it. It lends to the belief of exclusivity? Like if, if you're, if you're not proselyting, does it add to kind of your. Your specialness and value? Do you think that's part of why, like, why that was. I know you're just.
Kyle Hanks [00:26:53] Yeah, no, that's. Good question. I think that there is. We've talked a lot about language and how language is manipulated. And the obvious problem with not many converts into the true way is, like, how true is it if nobody's getting saved? But there's things you can do with language that makes it okay. Like, well, we love our little meeting. We love our little group. We're just a simple people. We don't. We're not. You don't know any of us. We're not famous. We're not in politics. We're not celebrities. We're just a little. We're just a little group of people that meets in a. In a home and studies the Bible. And that becomes the value. Hidden in that is the fact that most of the people in that town don't know you exist. But you don't talk in those terms.
Kari Hanks [00:27:30] Well, I actually preach about it was frequently preached when we were young, especially, like, how fortunate and lucky we are out of all the people in the world to be born into this one true religion. And look at all the people out there who are unwilling or have hard hearts or don't want to hear God's true preachers. So it was used to compare and contrast, like how fortunate and, yes, special and lucky we were to be born into this. Just what are the chances? And then look at all those unwilling people out there.
Kyle Hanks [00:28:00] Yeah. And that worked on me, too, because they made me take it very seriously, too. I'm really, really lucky to have this. Now, if you would have asked me, even when I was younger, do you think everyone's going to a fiery hell except for you and a handful of people? I probably would have said, no, God's the judge. I'll leave the judge.
Kari Hanks [00:28:16] I would have said yes.
Kyle Hanks [00:28:18] Yeah, I don't know if I could have done that. I would have said, that doesn't make sense. You're right. But God will lead them, however. But I know for me, I have to stay as close to the center as I can. I was blessed and lucky to be here. I need to hang on to this. I need to hang on to the revelation. We talk about that. Don't lose your revelation of truth. So, yeah.
Kari Hanks [00:28:37] Yeah. I think most people believe everyone else is going to hell, though. I didn't like that idea. But that's how it was taught.
John Dehlin [00:28:43] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:28:44] We've come to find out in adulthood that we had slightly different feelings about a lot of things. And mine was a little more.
Kari Hanks [00:28:49] Less literal.
Kyle Hanks [00:28:50] Yeah. Because it had to be for me. It's like. Because I pushed on it a couple times and realized it didn't quite hold. So let's then maybe I can loosen up on that idea a little bit. However, I need to do this. This is really important for me to do this. And of course, once we got married, now I have a family in this, so now I really need to stick with it.
Margi Dehlin [00:29:09] Got it. Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:29:11] So that's a. It's funny because that's not really an answer to your question, but it is kind of how we process, I think, a little bit. Again, nothing's ever written down, so everyone has to kind of work out their own salvation with fear and trembling.
Margi Dehlin [00:29:21] So you've mentioned a couple descriptors, I think, already of, like, your family culture, the culture, like, of your home life. What I heard was serious. Right. What are other descriptors that you would use to describe what your home felt like for you?
Kyle Hanks [00:29:45] That's a good question. I. I would say it was a loving home, loving upbringing. It's really. It's funny because I think, and you can clarify the question if you want to, but for me, I think that that question sounds like asking, like, how did we feel about it? If that makes sense.
Margi Dehlin [00:30:06] It's more like the values that you absorbed. Like, it sounds like also hard work.
Kari Hanks [00:30:11] Like, you.
Margi Dehlin [00:30:13] The setting up of the chairs and you were, like, very mindful around some of these regular kind of meetings and things that your family kind of helped out with. It's more like the values, the things that you. Oh, you mentioned education. So it's more like from that. Like what you absorbed from kind of your home life. And I'm kind of curious as a. Compare contrast a little bit to Kari's experience, just because you've mentioned that there were some differences.
Kyle Hanks [00:30:45] Yeah, education was important.
Kari Hanks [00:30:47] I think a lot of the differences that we had you sort of processed internally more in your later years, like college era, wouldn't you say, like where you started being less literal? Because I wouldn't say that your family wasn't very literal. I feel like they took it very literally and seriously and, like, word for word, it was true.
Kyle Hanks [00:31:09] Yeah. In a lot of ways, until you got to the point where that didn't make sense. Like, well, dinosaurs existed. Like, we don't know. We think it was young Earth. But then, I don't know. Question mark. God.
Margi Dehlin [00:31:20] So science and medicine.
Kyle Hanks [00:31:22] Science and medicine were important in my family.
John Dehlin [00:31:23] And education.
Kyle Hanks [00:31:25] Education was really important. Yeah.
Kari Hanks [00:31:26] But a lot of those things probably also just weren't talked about in your family.
Kyle Hanks [00:31:30] Yeah, we just didn't talk about that stuff. We didn't talk about. We didn't talk about any sort of Thing that would lead to any sort of.
Kari Hanks [00:31:35] Not a lot of, like, in. In depth.
Kyle Hanks [00:31:38] Yeah.
Margi Dehlin [00:31:39] How about the emotion part?
Kari Hanks [00:31:40] Yeah.
Margi Dehlin [00:31:41] So Kari was saying, and I know you've talked about this also within the. The system of belief. Right. Was that true in your family, too? Kind of. Emotion overall, very shut down. Okay.
Kyle Hanks [00:31:55] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Emotion was secondary to getting it right. Being right. The word right was spoken a lot in my family. We got to do the right thing. Be right, do right, do good. How you felt about it was far secondary to that. It was very. It was very rigid in that sense. So if I was uncomfortable with something, I shouldn't be uncomfortable with it. I should do the right thing.
Margi Dehlin [00:32:19] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:32:19] So that's. That's. Does that answer that question? I don't.
John Dehlin [00:32:22] Okay. And remind me. No TV or tv.
Kyle Hanks [00:32:25] No tv. Absolutely not. To this day, they don't have one. Yeah. And no movie theaters. I went to my first movie theater when I was about 18 and saw about. Then I'd have to. I'd have to go back and look because the first movie I saw was Vertical Limit, which is too bad, because that movie's not good. I wish I would have.
Margi Dehlin [00:32:45] I haven't heard of it. Good.
Kyle Hanks [00:32:47] It's not. It's just a silly.
Kari Hanks [00:32:49] What a waste of my first movie theater.
Kyle Hanks [00:32:51] First movie I went and watched, and I was like, this is not even a good movie.
John Dehlin [00:32:53] It's like your movie virginity. It's like your movie virginity. You didn't even have a good experience.
Kyle Hanks [00:32:59] And I went with a bunch of kids who were professing. I don't know, we all talked ourselves into doing it or something, or maybe they didn't care.
John Dehlin [00:33:03] So it's like an active, grave rebellion a little bit.
Kyle Hanks [00:33:06] It was hesitant rebellion for me. My parents were not happy about it. But then they also were like, well, you're old enough to make your own decisions.
Rumspringa, Romance, and Marriage Within the Faith
John Dehlin [00:33:12] It's your Rum Springer.
Kyle Hanks [00:33:13] Yeah. Just one night of watching a terrible movie, then back to it.
Margi Dehlin [00:33:17] Oh, the loss.
John Dehlin [00:33:19] Lost your movie virtue.
Kyle Hanks [00:33:21] Yeah. I'll try to regain it. I'll watch Severance. So I mentioned traveling around. We traveled. One of the things I liked that we did when I was younger was travel to different conventions around the country. So I mentioned that there's a lot of different annual conventions, and they don't all run at the same time. They run. You might have one or two running, and then the workers will move to the next one and move to the next one. And I grew up going to a lot of them, especially before I had any responsibility in life. I was a, you know, 16 to, say, 20 range, where you can. Got a car or a friend with a car or something. And. And of course, that's where you meet professing girls who are good enough.
John Dehlin [00:34:02] Right.
Kyle Hanks [00:34:02] You know, I never. I was very scrupulous about that, too. I never. I've never dated well. I've never dated anybody but Kari. I don't know if I've ever said that publicly, but Kari's the first person I dated. I was too awkward anyway when I was younger. I just wasn't very good at that. But also.
Kari Hanks [00:34:17] But you should say why that is, like, why you had that standard of not dating.
Kyle Hanks [00:34:22] Yeah. Well, because I also. Yeah, it's hard for me to wrap my mind around. Exactly. Other than just being kind of awkward. But also I just really wanted a person who shared my values, which was professing and going to all the meetings and doing all the things. And also that I was attractive to. Well, it's not that big of a church. That's a real need needle to thread. So I'm glad I found Kari for sure. But finding somebody who matches all of the values that you have when it's a very small group is not easy to do.
Kari Hanks [00:34:53] And I think there's a lot of pressure on, like, finding someone good enough and, like, not letting down.
Kyle Hanks [00:34:58] Yeah. With a high standard. And of course, Kari, like, she mentioned, wrote a hymn. You can't get more professing than that. She wrote a hymn that's actually in a published book. It's not used in the meetings right now, and maybe it won't be if they hear about this.
Kari Hanks [00:35:10] Oh, the irony now.
Kyle Hanks [00:35:11] Yeah, it says Kari Hanks because they published it after we were married. But. But yeah. So when I was younger, teenage years, we would travel around, and I remember one year a friend and I went to. I think we came up with seven or eight different conventions, meaning we'd go to a different one every week for several months in a row. So, yeah, that's kind of my. My life up until, I guess, high school. And then I went to college at Western Washington up in Bellingham.
John Dehlin [00:35:43] Nice.
Kyle Hanks [00:35:44] It was where my dad went to school. It's basically the same degree he got. It was the safest thing. It was. I didn't even apply anywhere else, which was. What was the degree he was in? Manufacturing engineering.
John Dehlin [00:35:54] So nothing that would cause you to question or learn.
Kyle Hanks [00:35:57] Nothing at all. There's some science in there, but I could always. I had already done a pretty good job of. Of tabling that. It's Like, I can do science and maybe 6,000 years, maybe 6 million. I don't know. God's time's different than ours.
Kari Hanks [00:36:07] Safe in the sense of. Of how aware you were that you needed to take care of your health and, like, have good health insurance and, like, diabetes was always on your mind.
Kyle Hanks [00:36:19] Yeah, that. That was the main thing. I knew that by the time I left home, I'd have to have a good career because I needed good health insurance. So again, thinking ahead, being responsible. My goal in going to college at all was to get a job that could be a career. It could pay for health insurance and could raise a family and give the option for my wife to stay home if that's what she chose to do. Even though my own mom actually worked part time for all of my growing up years, I knew that I wanted a wife that had the option. That seemed like the best thing to do.
Kyle Hanks [00:36:47] So I went to a school that didn't have very many professing kids. It had a few. And I chose my roommate by someone. Someone someone knew. Someone who knew my family who knew that another professing kid was going to be going to that school that year. And they contacted us and said, hey, you're both going to meetings.
Kyle Hanks [00:37:07] Do you guys want a room together? And I said, of course, we're both professing. That's the best way to do. And so we. So we agreed to room with each other. We went to the college dorms and lived in the same unit for a couple of years. We lived together for a couple years. I didn't meet him until after we'd agreed to live together. And we actually met at a church convention ahead of time. We just agreed to meet up at a church convention so that we could meet each other.
Margi Dehlin [00:37:30] That's wild.
Kyle Hanks [00:37:31] Yeah, it's kind of interesting to look back on now and then. I spent my four years in college not partying or not doing anything interesting, just going to meetings. They called me the church bus because I had a car. And I would go around and pick up whatever kids were going to the school at the time that were two by twos, which there were never more than maybe two or three, I think. But I would. I would go get them all and I would take them to the meetings, and if they weren't around, I'd go by myself. And there was a short time where there weren't actually any workers in our field. So on my Sunday afternoons, I drove about an hour down to the next field and went to their gospel meetings because it just felt like the right thing to do.
Margi Dehlin [00:38:13] So.
Kyle Hanks [00:38:13] And then it was toward the end of college that Kari and I started dating. And I guess my version of that is you and I just started talking. You were always my sister's friend, so I didn't think of you that way. And your cousins and cousin's friend.
John Dehlin [00:38:26] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:38:27] And you. You broke up with somebody and I was the first person you talked to. And I was the first person he talked to as well, which is awkward.
Kari Hanks [00:38:38] That is really awkward.
Kyle Hanks [00:38:40] And I said. I said, I don't know, man. Go figure that out on your own. And then you.
Kari Hanks [00:38:46] And I said, but you didn't say that to me.
Kyle Hanks [00:38:47] Nope.
Kari Hanks [00:38:50] Let me help you with that.
Kyle Hanks [00:38:53] So, yeah, I don't think I wasn't being sneaky about it. It just kind of worked out that way. Then we met up and started dating.
Kari Hanks [00:38:58] Yeah, I went up to visit his cousin, who's still one of my best friends. She was living at home still. Was she living at home or was she.
Kyle Hanks [00:39:06] I don't remember.
Kari Hanks [00:39:07] But anyway, we met up at her parents house and Kyle drove down to their house, also his aunt and uncle, and we were all gonna go to a pizza place to watch the Seahawks game. And then his cousin caught on to, like, the vibes that were going on. She's like, I'm actually gonna go shopping. I don't care about the game. So he and I went and watched it at this pizza place by ourself and that was our first date.
Kyle Hanks [00:39:30] Yeah, we can watch TVs at restaurants, just. We can't have one.
Kari Hanks [00:39:33] Yeah, yeah, got it.
Kyle Hanks [00:39:35] So, yeah, we dated for six months. Long. Long distance. Never lived together, of course, and then got engaged for nine months, which in hindsight sounds crazy. That sounds like a quick. Especially being long distance that entire time.
Kari Hanks [00:39:47] Yeah. But we'd known each other our entire lives and our families all knew each other.
Kyle Hanks [00:39:52] And I think our families were both really happy that two professing kids had found each other.
Kari Hanks [00:39:55] Until we got engaged.
Kyle Hanks [00:39:57] Yeah, we got engaged. And I don't know, I think that. I don't know, I think my parents heard that you dated a lot and that couldn't possibly be good. So they didn't love that. But that's okay. We got married anyway.
John Dehlin [00:40:09] In the Mormon world, it's really hard to behave or stay worthy in that engagement time before you get married. And sometimes engagements and marriages are rushed, so you don't have sex. Similar for you guys.
Kyle Hanks [00:40:23] I don't think we rushed it, but we did, theoretically.
Kari Hanks [00:40:25] That's the idea. Yeah, you gotta check under the hood before you buy the car.
Kyle Hanks [00:40:29] Right? Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:40:30] Is that what most two by twos do?
Kari Hanks [00:40:33] I don't.
Kyle Hanks [00:40:34] I don't know what most people do, to be completely honest. I think that probably not.
Kari Hanks [00:40:38] Probably say it's probably pretty common but not talked about to have sex before marriage.
Kyle Hanks [00:40:44] Yeah, we were.
Kari Hanks [00:40:46] I mean, I've never had another partner, so like, we were good two by
Kyle Hanks [00:40:50] twos for most of the engagement.
Kari Hanks [00:40:53] For most things. You put it that way.
Margi Dehlin [00:40:55] Yeah. But it was a teaching that you. That you shouldn't have sex before marriage. But you think it's actually quite common.
John Dehlin [00:41:03] They're speculating, Speculating, speculating, speculating.
Margi Dehlin [00:41:05] Because a lot of people still did. Do you think?
Kari Hanks [00:41:08] I think so.
Margi Dehlin [00:41:09] Is it the type of thing that people would have felt really bad about?
Kari Hanks [00:41:14] Oh, I mean, unless they're kind of headed out, like if they're leaving, if they're on their way out of the church, then I don't know. But the problem with that also is because sex isn't talked about in general. There's not education on how to protect yourself and birth control and things like that. So there are occasionally teen pregnancies in the two by twos.
Kyle Hanks [00:41:37] Yeah, that type of stuff happens. Consent isn't talked about at all in the two by twos because. And my theory is because they don't view it as a choice. It's. You don't do it before you're married, and then after you get married, it's a duty. So it's not viewed through the lens of consent at all. It's viewed through the lens of doing the right thing and duty, essentially. But again, a lot of that stuff. It's like we mentioned in the last episode, sex is one of those things that's too far over the line. We don't even hardly talk about it at all, good or bad, which is unfortunate.
Kari Hanks [00:42:08] Similar to Mormonism, sex is very strictly defined. So there's a lot of loopholes that people can use to mess around but technically not have sex.
John Dehlin [00:42:18] So y' all do that too?
Kari Hanks [00:42:19] Yes.
Kyle Hanks [00:42:20] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [00:42:20] It's not like what we've heard about soaking. That's pretty extreme, what we've heard in Mormonism, but there's similar.
John Dehlin [00:42:28] Is that something teens or young adults
Kari Hanks [00:42:30] would talk about, like messing around but not having sex? No, it was just kind of common knowledge in the teen dating world. I think that there were loopholes that you could get away with doing other things.
Kyle Hanks [00:42:44] I had such a curated friend group, though, and I'm not saying that as a point of pride at all. I'm saying that as I was a little too. A little too tight fisted with my friend group, I tended to associate with people who were very, very much rule followers. So our conversations at worst were like, boy, it'll be great after we're married. So I would say that my experience might not have been average. My experience might have been on the extreme side of the. The do all the. Do all the right things, follow all the rules spectrum. So that's my own personal.
Kari Hanks [00:43:18] Yeah, I think there. I think there's a wide range of people who fall on all ends of the spectrum and in the middle, as far as who's having sex and who's not and how far they're going, and it's just not talked about. So.
Kyle Hanks [00:43:31] Yeah. Okay.
John Dehlin [00:43:32] And then marrying outside the faith is probably a big.
Kyle Hanks [00:43:35] No, no, huge. Yeah, it's a huge problem. You're very much looked down upon if you were to do that. It never.
Kari Hanks [00:43:41] Unless you convert them.
Kyle Hanks [00:43:42] Yeah, you can convert them, but that's a lot of work. I never want to do that. I never even dated because I just thought, no, marriage is such a. It's such a serious thing and you're making a lifetime commitment. I never, never entertained the idea even once of even dating somebody who wasn't professing. So neither did I. Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:44:00] So that's very familiar to us. Minus. Y' all don't have the eternal marriage and we do.
Margi Dehlin [00:44:07] Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:44:08] Because you're always paranoid about somebody pulling you away, just like I was paranoid about pulling other people away if I. If I was a discouragement in any way or didn't uphold the standard in any way. I was also afraid of that myself. Like, I don't want to marry somebody who's questioning or who could pull me away or whatever.
Kari Hanks [00:44:23] For how much faith they have, they worry a lot about losing it.
Kyle Hanks [00:44:27] Yeah. They don't have a lot of emotion, they don't have a lot of emotions, but they have a lot of fear, so.
Expectations Around Faith, Marriage, and Family
John Dehlin [00:44:33] So would y' all have been married with the understanding that you would stay true to the faith till the end?
Kyle Hanks [00:44:38] Oh, yeah, 100%. Yeah. At the time we were married, we were both severely, in very much two by twos for life. No chance of ever doing anything else. We both married very safely, but not safely in a bad way, just safely. Like, we were very happy to have found somebody that we were attracted to, but also had very high standards and wanted to raise a family in this. In this faith. If you would have told us that both of us would talk on An X podcast later, we would have been genuinely horrified. It would have terrified us.
Kari Hanks [00:45:09] It's to the point. The assumption of being in it forever in a marriage to me and for us was to the point that when we did have individual doubts or questions or like Kyle, even before COVID started having some questions, he was listening to certain things in podcasts. He didn't tell me at first because it's like scary to express that to your spouse that you were having doubts.
Kyle Hanks [00:45:32] Yeah, that's one of the weird things about being that much in is you're afraid to fall out. And so we didn't even talk about. We've talked more about our beliefs before since we've left because to do so before would be to open the door
Kari Hanks [00:45:45] for our communication got so much better after we left meetings.
John Dehlin [00:45:49] So.
Kyle Hanks [00:45:50] Yeah. So early married life. I think Kari's pretty much talked about most of it, but I think, yeah, I think you did talk about most of it. I think we just kind of. As Kari's health got worse and things like that, I was just, you know, just keep kicking till you hit shore kind of thing. I was just had my head down. I'm gonna keep working, keep helping and it'll work out somehow. And I think if I had to say there was anything on my shelf, it would be when we first started having kids and just realizing, oh, these kids are pre wired. They have their own thing going on.
Kyle Hanks [00:46:21] I remember distinctly having a thought when our oldest was about three or four months old. I saw her do something and I just had this fleeting thought in my head, oh, she did that on her own. I didn't teach her that. I had this idea, we were taught growing up that the good parents with the good professing, two by two kids, they raise them right. And if they raise them right, then the kids will never depart from the way and they'll just do it. You just do the right thing and your kids will do the right thing. And I had that first thought of, what if they don't though.
Kyle Hanks [00:46:53] What if I'd seen it, I'd seen lots of families good professing go to all the meetings families. But some of their kids didn't go anymore. Some of them did, some of them didn't. Maybe some of them had gone to different religions or become atheists or whatever. And I remember having this feeling with my first kid. My first shelf item that I remember specifically is, but what if they don't? Are you still going to love them?
Kyle Hanks [00:47:17] Well, of course. Why wouldn't I? Why would I Not talk to my kids. And the thought crossed my mind, why would I treat my kids like I see a lot of people treating their own non professing kids who've left. And I just shelved it, put that thought away.
Kari Hanks [00:47:28] I remember even having a conversation around that time like, what if one of our kids is gay? Or and I remember you saying something like, kids aren't just these empty buckets that you get to put your own ideas and beliefs and values into. They come with their own. They're their own people. You know, especially when we had multiple kids and they were so different from each other.
Kyle Hanks [00:47:49] Yeah. And that didn't seem like a profound idea, but it was to me at the time. It was. My whole life had been geared toward being responsible and doing the right thing. And then I saw my kids doing whatever they wanted when they were a few months old. They had their own little ideas. And so, yeah, I'd say that was like the first shelf item.
Kari Hanks [00:48:05] Well, not only did they have their own ideas, but you wanted to allow that.
Kyle Hanks [00:48:10] Yeah, I mean, I felt like the loving thing to do would be to let them be themselves. And the idea that we were supposed to spank that out of our kids, to be completely honest, didn't sit with me at all. We were told by several people when we had young kids, you need to make sure you break their will.
Kyle Hanks [00:48:27] That type of language was very popular. Corporal punishment was a big deal in the two by twos. I had a Wednesday night meeting in my home and we always kept open rooms in the home, quote unquote rooms that back rooms down the hall away from the meeting room, which was usually the living room. We would keep a few rooms down the hall in case there was a kid that was getting fussy and disrupting the meeting, the parent would take them out. And I was in a meeting one time where a kid got fussy and taken out of the room and then another kid got fussy and taken out of the room and then another kid got fussy, got taken out of the room because you need the kids to be quiet in meeting so you can take them out.
Kyle Hanks [00:49:02] Well, there were several kids. You could hear spankings going on down the hall and then another kid got fussy and everybody was doing the mental math in their heads. And that fourth kid got hauled out in the front yard and so spanked right in front of our house. And at the time we laughed about that for years. And looking back at that, I'm horrified. When I started having my own kids, I wasn't laughing at that time anymore. That wasn't a funny anecdote to me anymore. It was like, oh, you punished a whole bunch of kids. You altered their internal voice before they had one, because you're telling them whatever they were doing, regardless of what it was.
Kyle Hanks [00:49:34] They're being told to be quiet. And they're very little kids. You're rewiring that at a very early age. You're not letting them be themselves on some level and believing, true, believing, God fearing, Jesus, whatevering person. Me didn't like that, and I didn't know what to do with that feeling, so I shelved it.
Kari Hanks [00:49:51] I would say that was the first, like, really rebellious, I guess, if you want to call it, thing that we did while we were still two by twos was break that cycle of physical discipline for our children. Because even in our generation, it was very common. And we. I started reading and learning about gentle parenting, which is where I learned about unconditional love. And all of that made sense to me.
Kyle Hanks [00:50:17] Yeah. Having kids that could express their own
Kari Hanks [00:50:19] identity, that was like a big U turn. We took away from the two by two culture.
John Dehlin [00:50:25] Rebelling against corporal punishment of children, basically.
Kari Hanks [00:50:28] Yes.
Kyle Hanks [00:50:28] Yeah. And I think, to be fair, I think a lot of, say, millennials, older millennials like us having kids now probably maybe felt the same way. Even some that are still in. I think there was less corporal punishment in the meetings publicly as we got a little older. But when we were younger, when we were little kids, we all did this. Every little kid that grows up in the meetings plays meeting. Sometimes when they're getting together, they play. They mimic what they've seen, and they mimic by sitting around in a circle, maybe singing or something, and then hauling out a baby doll or a stuffed animal and spanking them.
Kari Hanks [00:51:00] Yeah. My girlfriends and I as little kids, my friends who were girls, would take our baby dolls, and all together, we had like 30 of them between the three of us or whatever, and we'd put them on a row on the couch and play meeting and playing. Meeting meant each baby had its turn going out of meeting, getting spanked or, you know, whatever else, however else we would be cracking our dolls. And we thought it was hilarious. It was almost like a virtuous thing if you were a parent and you could spank your kid loud enough that the whole meeting could hear it from the bedroom, you know, so that was
Kyle Hanks [00:51:32] a shelf item for us, I think. And then Kari talked last time about how we were kind of in a fog for several years. Having three kids close together, having a lot of Health issues come up trying, but not always making it out to meeting very well, not feeling particularly well supported. But then I kind of wasn't expecting it either. I was kind of like, well, they'll support us if we show up. We need to show up. And I was getting a little frustrated that we couldn't make it to the meetings and things.
John Dehlin [00:51:57] Meaning you were maybe frustrated at Kari?
Kyle Hanks [00:52:01] Indirectly, maybe indirectly, although I never blamed her for it. I mean, it's health, you know, what can you do? It's just that I think I had a little bit of building frustration with I lived the right way and it's not quite working out perfectly here. I thought we did all the right things. I thought we checked all the boxes.
Kyle Hanks [00:52:16] So that's just building a little bit in my head. Again, I didn't think of it as a shelf item, but I, looking back, I think it was. And so that kind of went on for a while. And then coming out of that, when our youngest was, I don't know, maybe four or so, the kids were a little older. Kari was working on her health. She hadn't got her diagnosis yet, but I think there was a period where you had done a little better. And I started realizing that my faith isn't something I can articulate very well, but my kids are going to start asking questions already.
Kyle Hanks [00:52:48] We had this young daughter who was critiquing what she'd heard the workers say and wanted some explanations for some of this stuff. And we didn't always have good explanations. And I actually started listening to bible believing people versus atheist debates on YouTube.
Kari Hanks [00:53:04] I would have freaked out if I'd
John Dehlin [00:53:05] known he was listening to Matt Dillahunty,
Kyle Hanks [00:53:07] that type of stuff, or even old, early, like Hitchcock, Hitchens versus whoever type debates and stuff. And it never affected my faith. I didn't think maybe it did, but at the time I was like, I was just looking for. I need to deepen my faith somehow. And we're just going to these meetings and we're saying the same thing over and over and all this stuff. But it's really important to me. I want to raise this family right. And I started listening to even Bible scholars. I don't think I got to Bart Ehrman. There was others, but. And yeah, I didn't. I wouldn't have told you. I don't think. I think I mentioned it one time and you got very upset.
Margi Dehlin [00:53:39] So
Kyle Hanks [00:53:42] I was building maybe even a little earlier than Kari. I was starting to build that kind of like trying to think critically about it to some degree.
Kari Hanks [00:53:49] And letting in some outside influences.
Kyle Hanks [00:53:51] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:53:52] And this is something very familiar. When two faithful Mormons get married, we talk about the triangle that they're really. There's a third. It's actually a throuple, and Jesus and the church are the third partner, but they kind of are most important. In other words, you're married to Jesus first and your partner second, or the church first and your partner second, such that you learn to hide things from your spouse.
John Dehlin [00:54:20] If there are things that you don't believe your spouse would, you know, if you were ever close friends to begin with, which oftentimes you weren't, it's just like, whoa, I found someone who's a member who. Who I'm attracted to, and they're willing, let's get married. You don't ever become best friends to begin with. But even if you were close, as soon as you're doing something that might not be approved of, that the church or Jesus wouldn't approve of, then you're not talking about it, you're hiding it. And it can build this wedge between the couple where you're hiding things, and that can be experienced as unfaithful, and it can be really toxic to the. To the relationship.
Kari Hanks [00:55:00] We were taught that same thing about the triangle, that God's at the top. And the closer you get to God, the closer you get to each other, and the farther away from God you get, the farther away you get from each other, because that's the shape of the triangle.
John Dehlin [00:55:10] Wow. You were literally taught that.
Kyle Hanks [00:55:13] Yeah, yeah, it was. That was the model for us. And, yeah, I didn't. Again, I was just doing it from my own deepening of faith. I wasn't trying to. And I wasn't trying to hide it from her either. I brought it out a couple times, and she was like, what are you doing? And I was like, oh, sorry, sorry. I didn't mean to. You know, I'm. I'm just working on myself here, I guess. And I didn't. And so we didn't talk about it that much. And.
Kari Hanks [00:55:31] Yeah, I don't think you intentionally were hiding things. I think it was more like he was concerned that he would hurt my faith if he talked about it too much or that I might interpret it the wrong way.
John Dehlin [00:55:40] Just like. Like with that rap music you were listening to.
Kyle Hanks [00:55:42] Yeah. Back to my own faith of just. I really. The worst thing I could think of was to be. To offend somebody else. I mean, that's biblical, right? The worst. The worst thing you can do is offend somebody. Yeah. And I think the verse says offend a child, but we. We're all children of God, so we'll just use the verse that way. And so. So, yeah, I think we pulled back on spiritual talk. And also your health at that point was starting to get worse. Like, we kind of went through a period where it was okay and then it was overwhelming. Yeah, it was an overwhelming thing.
Kyle Hanks [00:56:09] So. And I think that's kind of where we were as we got to Covid era. Covid for me, started out as healthcare concern. For me especially being. Or for both of us being diabetic, getting diabetes. After I'd caught a virus, I saw another virus coming, and I was like, I don't. I don't like this.
Kari Hanks [00:56:26] Well, they were saying early on how diabetics were particularly high risk. Yeah, yeah.
John Dehlin [00:56:31] And in. In Utah and Arizona and Idaho, as I understand it, there are pockets of very conservative Mormons that were anti mask and anti Covid vax and were actually. Their faith in the church was challenged because the prophet came out saying, wear masks and get the vaccine. And it caused a lot of people to question the truthfulness of the church or maybe wonder if the church was following an apostasy. Were there similar dynamics with COVID and vaccines and masks?
Covid Cracks the Foundation of Belief
Kari Hanks [00:57:05] Yeah, 100%. With two by twos being taught that one thing that was special about our church was that there was unity all over the world. And then seeing Covid come along. And every geographical area was handling things very differently because in the Pacific Northwest, they had a professing doctor who was advising the workers, and they were taking very careful precautions. And then where we were, it was just like a free for all. And when they started meetings back up again, they were like, if anyone's concerned, there is this one meeting that has masks. And if you want to wear a mask, you can go to that one meeting.
Kari Hanks [00:57:39] Everybody else can do, you know, whatever they want. Like, some people are extra concerned and might want to wear a mask. There was a worker who, like, wrote an email about the vaccine being the mark of the beast. And to be fair, he was removed from the work for a time because of that email. I think.
Kyle Hanks [00:57:56] For a year.
Kari Hanks [00:57:57] Yeah, for about a year. But a lot of people believed that you have some of this in your. And you're like, why? This led the catalyst to your own kind of faith shakeup.
Kyle Hanks [00:58:08] Yes. I think that's where we are now, is kind of where we both started. We both stepped away and started essentially deconstructing my own deconstruction. Besides just trying to deepen my faith from other things. I'd also watched a few deconstruction stories and just like Kari said, watching cult documentaries or something, I was absolutely fascinated by deconstruction stories.
John Dehlin [00:58:29] Can you take us through some of the ones that grabbed you early and then. Yeah. And then how that led to Mormon stories? Not so much because I care about Mormon stories per se, but I want to understand other people's deconstruction.
Kyle Hanks [00:58:42] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:58:42] And how we can help with that.
Margi Dehlin [00:58:44] Sure.
Kyle Hanks [00:58:44] Well, my own. My first. The first story I ever watched was a lady named Megan Phelps Roper from Westboro Baptist. Yeah, you probably heard of her. Her story fascinated me because I'd already. I'd also seen the Louis Thoreau documentaries about Westboro Baptist he did for the BBC, I think it was. And I was fascinated with them because they were. They were like our group but on speed. They were just. They were.
Kyle Hanks [00:59:11] I saw, I identified with a lot of it, but they had a lot of extra anger. They were even smaller. They were even more isolated. And so when Megan Phelps Roper left and then started talking about her experience, I watched it expecting to hear about this crazy colt. And we did. But also I heard some interesting things. The fact that she told her story long form, it was two or three hours. I listened to it, I listened to it several times because I thought, that's crazy. There's some identifiable things there. And I don't, honestly, to be completely honest, I don't remember exactly what those were, but I just remember thinking, they're crazy, but they're.
Kyle Hanks [00:59:49] Women can wear pants. Are we more restrictive than a crazy cult that got a documentary? That's weird. And so that was probably around the time that I was doing the whole listening to Bible scholars and all this stuff. And then I think I credit the algorithm because I think probably from there I ended up on Mormon stories. Somehow. I don't remember specific examples of Mormon stories that resonated with me in particular, but I remember themes. I remember themes of people leaving and the narratives around them. Things like, well, they never had it. They never truly had it and stuff like that.
John Dehlin [01:00:26] Things that were disparaging about them.
Kyle Hanks [01:00:28] The way they interacted with the community as they left was really interesting to me because it sounded exactly, exactly like us. It sounded like the exact same things we say to those bitter ex members who leave and say bad things about us.
John Dehlin [01:00:38] Y' all say bitter too. Oh, bitter.
Kari Hanks [01:00:40] X and I have shirts that say bitter on them that we wear to our in person ex. Two by two get together.
Kyle Hanks [01:00:47] Yeah. So those types of themes. And also the concern about, you know, the. The model, I think, from somebody inside watching somebody leave is, oh, they just got angry. They just left. They stopped believing. They hate God and all this stuff. The narrative about the people who leave is so different from the narrative of the people who leave themselves because so many people leave reluctantly. And the stories, the things that were resonating to me, being completely inside, by the way, at this point, but my faith was. We'll talk about COVID in a second. But I remember hearing themes of like, wait, I've talked like that about people.
Kyle Hanks [01:01:21] I've called people. They're just bitter they left, but they can't leave it alone. I've said that about people. I've probably said those exact words about friends of mine. And hearing the commonalities in all these stories. I like that you're doing this series of never Mormons as well, because it just shows all the commonality between the groups. There's so much fear. Fear about telling your spouse that you're having any doubts, fear that you're telling your family. You're letting your family down. You're letting down this lineage. Pioneer lineage for an LDS faith or for us. It's just we've professed for generations. We don't know how far back, not very far back.
Kyle Hanks [01:01:53] But you're letting you to even question, to even look outside, to even look outside anything but the KJV Bible, you're showing some doubt. You're falling short a little bit. And true believing, planning on always going to meeting my entire life, me resonated with that. I remember watching and thinking, wow, that's interesting. And there was a tiny bit of empathy I had because I was like, man, they're good people, though they're not very few people.
Kyle Hanks [01:02:23] I think a lot of people, maybe people think this about us coming on Mormon stories. They're just coming on to tear us down. No, they're not. They're trying to tell their own story. And that was interesting to me.
Kari Hanks [01:02:34] I remember particularly LGBTQ themes being helpful for me because as I was deconstructing my political beliefs, I was learning to have compassion and empathy for groups of people that two by twos do not ever consider the perspective of so people of color and the LGBTQ community. And I was identifying with some of their stories of feeling repressed, maybe before I even could put language to that, of recognizing parts of myself in their stories. So I remember those being really impactful. And I was reading a lot of books about people leaving every type of religion, Scientology, and flds and. Yeah, just. Just eating up. I was like a sponge, just soaking up as much information as I could get.
John Dehlin [01:03:30] Kari, do you remember now reflecting back on the first moments you may have experienced attraction to women? Did you experience that before? Did you even allow yourself to.
Kari Hanks [01:03:42] Yeah, my first crushes now in retrospect, were on girls that I remember.
John Dehlin [01:03:48] Okay.
Kari Hanks [01:03:48] Yeah. But it's a running theme through all of my childhood. I just didn't have the language for it, like in the Two by Two. So it would have been as ridiculous as saying you were attracted to a tree. Like, you just don't. It's not a thing. It doesn't exist. You don't talk about it. Other than there are gay people and we kind of feel sorry for them and they have a very personal struggle. But especially bisexuality wasn't even on my radar as a thing that could exist, really.
John Dehlin [01:04:14] So the Mormon stories and other high demand religions discussing LGBTQ acceptance not only connected with you because it was a marginalized group within your community, but it made you start wondering about yourself, particularly
Kari Hanks [01:04:30] Mormon stories was where I was getting that content from. Yep.
John Dehlin [01:04:34] Okay.
Kari Hanks [01:04:35] That was really impactful.
John Dehlin [01:04:36] Okay. Did y' all stumble on ex Mormon Reddit at some point?
Kyle Hanks [01:04:40] No, I don't. I haven't done much of that, no.
John Dehlin [01:04:43] Y' all have. Y' all spent any time on Reddit?
Kyle Hanks [01:04:44] Not really.
John Dehlin [01:04:45] There is an X2. X2.
Kari Hanks [01:04:46] Yeah, there is.
Kyle Hanks [01:04:48] I've been on there and looked around a little bit. I've talked on there a little bit. But yeah, it's.
John Dehlin [01:04:52] We have the largest ex religious subreddit in the world that I'm aware of. Like, bigger than Catholics, bigger than Baptists, evangelicals, ex, you know, witnesses. For some reason, Mormons just dominate, you know, ex religious YouTube, ex religious podcast, ex religious Reddit. Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [01:05:12] Yeah, I have some thoughts about that, actually. We'll get to it when we talk about the end of our deconstruction starting a group, but I think there's some reasons for that. But I think we just talk about COVID now because. So I'll just tell my own story. I think Kari talked about it when Covid started and everything started locking down. We locked down ourselves first.
Kyle Hanks [01:05:31] I remember every. I think everyone probably remembers the great toilet paper rush of March of 2020. About two weeks before, we'd gone out and bought extra toilet paper because we were just seeing this coming and thinking, man, if a virus gets going crazy in the country, this is not good for us.
Kyle Hanks [01:05:48] But I thought, you know, there's very few things that Bring a lot of people together. And one of those is sports and another one is tragedy. And this virus looks like it could be a tragic thing. Hopefully we all bring ourselves together. Hopefully we all just put differences aside and try to do the right thing, try to help each other out. And what felt like the right thing for me to do at the time was for us to not go to meetings for a little bit and not go into a small room where we're all sharing emblems out of the same cup and singing and all this stuff.
Kyle Hanks [01:06:15] So we stopped going. And I realized that, I think when my face started really cracking, was realizing that we were very much alone in thinking that a lot of the group we were from, the Two by Twos, they felt like, well, this is just another worldly thing. Don't get caught up in the hype. Just keep going to meetings.
Kari Hanks [01:06:34] Faith over fear.
Kyle Hanks [01:06:35] Yeah, don't have fear. I mean, they're fearful of everything all the time, but don't fear this. You know, they tend to be fearful of things they can't see, but they're not fearful of this. And that hit me really hard because I was taking it very seriously. I'm thinking, we don't know what this virus does. At the time, we didn't know anything about it. This could be really bad for someone, for a family with health problems. I'm the sole breadwinner. I need to keep it together here. And then hearing from, even from the ministers at the time when things shut down, they were doing a lot more call in meetings.
Kyle Hanks [01:07:04] We could call in the ministers, speaking to the phone. And we were hearing real, in my opinion, craziness about, well, this is just some worldly problem. This is just the world trying to shut us down. And they were processing it all as persecution in a way. And I thought, that doesn't make sense at all. I hadn't foreseen that. I hadn't foreseen that way of processing the information. And early on, I think before COVID even came to the US I called someone in the Two by twos and I told them my concerns. I said, this is kind of a scary thing. What do you guys think you're going to do?
Kyle Hanks [01:07:34] We're probably going to do whatever. And they said, they responded by telling me a bunch of conspiracy theories that were detached from any reality in my mind.
Kari Hanks [01:07:45] That's when we learned about QAnon.
Kyle Hanks [01:07:47] We learned about QANON accidentally because I think this person I was talking to had kind of gone down that rabbit hole.
Kari Hanks [01:07:52] A lot of the two by twos were into QAnon. Not all of them, but a lot of them were.
Kyle Hanks [01:07:57] And I hung up the phone and I went to Kari and I was like, you won't believe this conversation I just had. This is the wildest thing. And so I don't want to paint with too broad a brush and say everybody in the two by twos is completely crazy. That's not true. There's all. There's the widest spectrum. But what really cracked my faith and ultimately I think was the last. Was the last thing on the shelf was just seeing a lack of care around people who. The elderly and the people who have health issues and things like that. And I will never fault anybody for getting something wrong about COVID or not taking a vaccine or whatever.
Kyle Hanks [01:08:27] Those are all personal choices. But the narrative about the narrative that we shouldn't fear a thing that's very real and tangible to us, that was confusing to me right up to the point of we actually know someone who died. Someone who passed away very early on who had a kid our age. This person was about my age. They passed away. Their spouse was in the ICU and their kid had to go live with grandparents from COVID And people within the two by twos kind of was like, well, we're just going to keep having meetings. Yeah, they got sick. We don't really know what happened. And I thought, man, there's a gigantic disconnect between our faith and reality right now.
Kari Hanks [01:09:06] They weren't even using the word Covid in general. Like, we were hearing of elderly people passing away and this lady we knew passed away. And they weren't calling it Covid. It was like they were pretending it didn't exist.
Kyle Hanks [01:09:20] Yeah. And again, I don't want to paint with too broad a brush and say everybody lost their minds. But enough people were saying things that there was a real. There was a real. The faith butted up against something and needed to reckon with it. And in my mind, it wasn't doing it. It was making people worse judges of what to do than better.
Kyle Hanks [01:09:41] And to get to meeting, I had to get around my faith to get there. I had to. Faith wasn't helping me deal with this crisis. Faith was giving me a lot of stuff. I had to work around to keep my family safe. And I know that many people, I've heard on Mormon stories, many people have left their faith when they realized, hey, they're shutting down, that. Why would you do that? We're a faith based community.
Kyle Hanks [01:10:01] Those people are in the two by twos as. As well it was the opposite for us. It was like, why shouldn't we have some faith, pull back, let God's faith. Let. Let God put faith in us to continue our faith forward even if we can't meet together and we'll meet up on the other side. And instead there was a narrative of if we don't meet together, the faith's going to go away. Essentially, you're going to lose out. Someone even told me on the phone, I had a family member tell me, this is. This is Covid is bad because it's going to keep you away from meetings.
Kyle Hanks [01:10:25] It's going to cause spouses to divorce. It's going to processed it as essentially, Covid was somehow persecuting all of us in our faith. And that's a condensed version of me losing my faith, essentially is realizing that it just didn't pour it into the real world.
Kari Hanks [01:10:38] We got an email after meetings opened up again, and we voluntarily had stayed away for several more months past what everybody else was doing. We got an email from a worker in our field at the time who was talking about how God is the one in Deuteronomy who put the plague on people's houses. So it's really up to God who. Who gets sick and who doesn't. And it's not up to us to worry about if we're passing something on to other people, because it's up to God to choose who gets sick and who doesn't get sick. And so just no accountability, no responsibility.
Kari Hanks [01:11:10] And that it's very important to physically be in that place of meeting, to have your kids in meeting. And it was very clear to us that our presence in meeting was valued more than our lives in a very literal way. And we also have children with chronic illness.
Kari Hanks [01:11:25] So that was insane to us. Like there was no way we were going to sacrifice one of their parents or their own health to have them physically in meeting. Just didn't make sense to us.
Kyle Hanks [01:11:36] Yeah, it was very evident to me that this thing I'd grown up with taking such good care of in my life called the truth. The first time it gets tested, I feel like it didn't survive that test. It was lacking in something, and I was looking for help outside of it because I wasn't getting help from my faith at that time. And long story short, that letter that Kari's talking about, she read it to me on the phone, and that was the first time I said, we're not going back.
Kyle Hanks [01:12:02] This is not a responsible group. My faith, I had faith to believe in things. That I couldn't see. I believed in God. I can't see God, but I have faith in him. My faith doesn't disregard things I can see. And I felt like the two by two faith was struggling so much to deal with just a normal real world problem. Viruses happen. And they were struggling so much to just keep people, trying to keep people from walking away. They were afraid that if people walked away, they wouldn't come back.
Kyle Hanks [01:12:28] Well, that's interesting, right? It means you have to stay there. You have to stay in to have any connection with God. And that was not. I realized that my faith, as it was to me, was so personalized that it actually didn't match the two by twos anymore. So.
Kari Hanks [01:12:42] And then I told you I was an atheist.
John Dehlin [01:12:45] Yeah. How was that conversation? Tell us about that.
Kari Hanks [01:12:49] That was a really, really difficult six months.
John Dehlin [01:12:53] Were you afraid he'd leave you when you told him?
Kari Hanks [01:12:55] Oh, yeah. Yeah. Tell us that story again. Like I. I mentioned briefly in the last episode before we stopped, I. It. It was. It didn't feel like a choice. It didn't feel like I woke up one day and was like, I want to be an atheist. That's not what it felt like. It felt like this realization that I just didn't believe anymore. And I could try forcing myself, but I, but I, I just didn't. I. I went through the whole gamut. I was like, do I still believe in hell? Am I dragging my kids to hell if I'm an atheist?
Kari Hanks [01:13:26] I was under the impression that a marriage in the two by twos that was built on two by two faith would not survive two different beliefs. So I thought I was ruining my marriage. Like this wasn't something that I wanted or that I had sought out.
Kari Hanks [01:13:43] And the more I accepted it in myself, I thought I might lose my peace. I will never experience joy again. These were feelings that you feel as a two by two because you have God. But with some time, I realized I was still capable of this full range of human experience, of having joy and peace.
Kari Hanks [01:14:05] And there were things about it that were comforting to me, like the randomness of suffering. So these were things I was starting to accept about myself.
Losing Faith and Sharing It With a Spouse
John Dehlin [01:14:14] Can I ask a question? So you may have mentioned it in the previous episode, but just for the sake of containment in this episode, the main reasons you lost your faith in God, that you can think back and say these were the main reasons God died for me, were what?
Kari Hanks [01:14:32] Allowing myself access to information that had been withheld from me in the church and just educating myself, reading information, reading Books. And that's how it hit me.
John Dehlin [01:14:41] And the big ones were what Bart
Kari Hanks [01:14:43] Ehrman was a big one, who I'd heard about on Mormon Stories podcast.
John Dehlin [01:14:46] So like a flawed Bible, flawed New Testament, is that right?
Kari Hanks [01:14:50] Yes, because for me, the Bible as a two by two had always been very true. Everything in it was true. It was not metaphorical, unless Jesus said it was a parable. So it was literal and true. And once the contradictions in the Bible were pointed out to me and the, I don't know, you would call them anachronisms or just things that didn't add up, didn't make sense, it all fell apart for me.
Kari Hanks [01:15:13] And also just being a parent had started, this idea had started to accumulate of if God is a loving parent and I understand how that feels now, as a parent, I would never punish my children or make them suffer, especially not for all eternity. But like I coming from this, I had, you know, recently been educating myself about gentle parenting. And we weren't using corporal punishment, so punishment itself didn't make sense to me. This like reward and punishment binary system of, of a higher power that we had been taught, it just wasn't adding up for me anymore. So that was the God that I had been taught as a two by two.
Kari Hanks [01:16:01] And I did do some research into other theologies and how other people learned about God. And two by twos are very works based. Like we weren't ever really taught about grace other than it's sort of synonymous with forgiveness. So I learned about grace and I learned about the Trinity and I learned and I, I had an open mind to these other ideas, but it just didn't fit for me.
John Dehlin [01:16:22] So I mentioned a lot that my Christian listeners are super mad at the Mormon Church for killing not just belief in Mormonism, but also in God and Jesus. Why didn't you just go to like, well, there's a couple answer questions. Why didn't you just go to like liberal Christian which is like, ah, it's myth, it's metaphor, it's good moral principles or some other Christian tradition, you know, or not Christian, but still believing in God, but just not Christianity, the Christian God. You could make a God that felt right to you. You know what I mean?
Kari Hanks [01:17:00] Yeah, yeah, I thought about that. So with my deconstruction, first of all, I had to take everything down to the bare bones of what I had been taught. I had to deconstruct everything that I had been taught about the two by twos and belief and God and Jesus and everything and then rebuild from There. And when it came to the rebuilding process, as I was learning about all these different theologies and different ideas and different religions and different viewpoints and different beliefs, and all of these opportunities opened up of what I could adopt as my own belief, I just realized I didn't need it. I realized that I had been seeking external validation my entire life for proving that I'm a good person, that I'm a moral person, that I'm okay, that I'm an acceptable human.
Kari Hanks [01:17:51] The idea that that had to come from outside of myself, from. From whether that's a higher power or the two by twos or the workers or even parents, it felt unhealthy for me. For my own healing and my own reconstruction, I needed to accept myself as a moral, good enough human the way that I was, and build on that, on my own internal validation. So for me, externalizing that wasn't healthy anymore. Does that make sense?
John Dehlin [01:18:23] So you just kind of lost interest in external sources of authority.
Kari Hanks [01:18:29] Right. And once I realized I can still feel the full range of peace and joy by looking at a sunset that I believe came about naturally, not through a higher power, then I just didn't need to look outside of myself for those feelings. And on top of that, you know, a lot of these books I was reading were talking about the problem of suffering. And if there's a loving creator, why in nature does a baby antelope have to be played with by the lion for so long before it's killed? And why our babies getting cancer and suffering horrifically before they can even talk? All of that stuff just.
Kari Hanks [01:19:08] It felt more kind and comfortable to believe that those things were random. And on top of that, if you don't believe in unicorns, it's really hard to force yourself to believe in unicorns. And that's how I felt about a higher power at that point. I thought I could fake it till I make it maybe, and, like, eventually might change my mind, but it just felt like too much work when I realized that what I was building internally was okay for me.
John Dehlin [01:19:37] I'm seeing Margi's head nod quite a bit. Are you channeling? Are you vibing with this?
Margi Dehlin [01:19:45] Yeah, I'm just vibing it. For sure. Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:19:48] Okay, so you had to. Do you remember, like, a day you had to, like, have the conversation with him?
Kari Hanks [01:19:55] I do remember. I remember the date.
John Dehlin [01:19:57] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [01:19:57] Yeah, it was the end of November, and I.
John Dehlin [01:19:59] What year? 2020.
Kari Hanks [01:20:01] 2020.
John Dehlin [01:20:01] Okay.
Kari Hanks [01:20:02] I just kind of blurted it out to Kyle. Like, it almost felt like this exciting new discovery about myself. With a lot of potentials. And it was scary, but it was like there's. There's this whole new world opening up to me. I think I'm an atheist. And the reaction I got was intense betrayal. It was as if I had told him that I had had an affair. The hurt was so deep, and I wasn't expecting that. Like, it made. It made sense to me once I realized it. And I definitely could have broached the topic in a more gentle, maybe toned down my excitement kind of way.
Kyle Hanks [01:20:37] Oh, wait.
Margi Dehlin [01:20:38] Not a celebration.
John Dehlin [01:20:41] But you were excited about your own discoveries, it sounds like.
Margi Dehlin [01:20:44] And it felt like a celebration. It sounds like.
Kari Hanks [01:20:46] It felt like it did. I had internalized a lot of what I. What I was presenting to Kyle. And this is my fault too. I tend to do this. I tend to internalize new ideas that I have and really work them from every angle before I come out and present them to Kyle. So I had already worked through a lot of, like, the potential scary parts and the problematic parts in my head and come to the place where I was excited. And this was like a new discovery of mine. And it completely shocked him. I think.
Margi Dehlin [01:21:17] I think just really quickly, like noticing that this is a moment where actually you are connecting with yourself and you are doing this new process of, you know, how do I feel about this? How do I. Which I don't know. I think it does feel like empowering. It does feel like a coming to
Kari Hanks [01:21:43] or growing up as a two by two girl and not being allowed to accept, Explore your identity and your autonomy and your independence. It felt like the first time I was doing that, like I was choosing a value for myself rather than inheriting it or having it handed to me.
Margi Dehlin [01:22:01] And I think that's one of the hardest situations to be in. Sometimes when you're in relationship with someone, when the thing that frees you or the thing that actually, you know, liberates you hurts your spouse.
Kari Hanks [01:22:18] Yeah, it was incredibly difficult and very confusing. And his hurt hurt me. And yeah, it was a really, really tough time. That six months was just for both of us, incredibly dark. I was suicidal a couple of times. I thought, I'm hurting. My existence is hurting people that I love. You know, I also have my two by two family that's hurting because I told them that I wasn't going back to the church around that time. So it was a really, really dark, difficult time. Yeah. And you can speak to what you were going through during that time too, because I think.
John Dehlin [01:22:55] Yeah. How was that for you, Kyle?
Kyle Hanks [01:22:56] Yeah, it was terrible. Yeah, it was. She described it very well because that was my viewpoint on it. She Steel manned my viewpoint very well. It was. It was a chaotic time anyway. But to. We've mentioned before that just based.
Kyle Hanks [01:23:13] The system we grew up in, we tended to not talk about things that really mattered. And we thought we were. I mean, we were close. We've always been close. We've been very good friends. We're very lucky in that way. We didn't just pick each other out of, you know, because we fit the criteria. We are actually really good friends too. And so when she said that, it came out of nowhere. And I immediately thought, we haven't even talked about this. And that's what felt like a betrayal to me, is that she'd been doing work on her own on the side. I had too, to be completely fair.
Kyle Hanks [01:23:42] But, you know, in the past that I'd talked about some things that maybe were outside the norm. I had talked to her about it and we'd had these discussions and she told me to not do that anymore. And now this. And that felt. It did feel like a betrayal.
Kyle Hanks [01:23:54] It felt like, how in the world did we get here? We had this all planned out exactly right. We had the good family. We had 2.3 or so kids. We had dogs in a minivan, and we were professing and had a good job. We checked all the boxes. And now in the middle of this, we're disconnected. And yeah, I had the same dark period of my life, to be completely honest.
Kyle Hanks [01:24:17] It was. I don't want to misuse psychological terms or anything, but I was depressed for a couple months. And it was not just. I don't want to simplify it down to. I was depressed that Kari was now not believing. It wasn't that. It was. I was depressed that my entire worldview didn't work. The worldview that I had spent 30 some years putting together and curating carefully and making sure not to offend anybody and raising a family with these values and sacrificing any time I needed to to make sure that this belief system continued on through me and around me. And now it's not. And I was despondent for a while, and I was.
Kyle Hanks [01:24:55] It was dark because it's. It's weird to describe now because when I. When you say it out loud, it's like, really? You got that depressed about it. But I had a hard time. I would wake up in the morning for a while. Like, I wish I hadn't woken up. I don't want to be up today. Sleep was better. And, and I was constantly. It was like the only thing running on my brain. I'd go to work and I could concentrate on work. That was a break for me to go to work. And then I'd come home and I'm like, okay, back to the black cloud. Like, it's not just that I felt like I had failed somehow.
Kari Hanks [01:25:23] He would call me on his lunch break from work because he has done that our entire marriage. And he would just be crying and like his whole lunch break would just be him not able to talk, just sobbing on the phone.
Kyle Hanks [01:25:34] Yeah, we had a lot of. And we had a lot of arguments and a lot of. We would try to have good conversations and we couldn't do it. We were just too disconnected. And neither of us wanted that to be clear. Like, we didn't, we didn't want to be disconnected from each other, but we were. And I was realizing that that was the only connection I had. I wasn't that connected to the church anymore. My beliefs aside. My beliefs were part of it for sure.
Kyle Hanks [01:25:58] But there's a version of me with my kind of loosey goosey beliefs that. Where I could allow for a little bit of gray area when I needed to. Worked really well to keep a family together and to be a good example of my own family name and all this stuff. And now what it felt like was outside of my control is that that was gone. And.
Kyle Hanks [01:26:16] And so I wasn't having the freeing feeling of like, I can start over. I was having the feeling of like, oh, I just ran off a cliff accidentally. The, the analogy I've used is back in those old, like Warner Brothers cartoons or something. You see the character running around, he'll run off a cliff and he'll just keep running for a while.
John Dehlin [01:26:31] It's Wile E. Coyote.
Kyle Hanks [01:26:32] Yeah, the Wile E. Coyote thing. And there's a moment in all of those cartoons where they'll stop and look at the camera and blink a few times in midair and think. And you can tell they're. They're looking at the audience thinking, this could go a lot of different ways. I could turn around and run back to the coast or to the cliff, but I was running from that, so I shouldn't do that. I can fall and put a big character sized hole in the ground or I could build some sort of aircraft on the way down or something that, that pause, stare at the camera, blink, fear.
Kyle Hanks [01:26:59] I was there for months of just like frozen in place. Like, I don't know what to do. Nothing prepared me for, for any disjointed belief at all. And I knew that. I use that analogy because running off the cliff also implies that you could run back. And I knew I couldn't do that. Meetings. I was checked out of meetings at this point, kind of. I hadn't told anybody, but I knew mentally I'm not a two by two anymore. Clearly my values don't align with them. And my deconstruction had progressed to that point, I think. But we also weren't seeing eye to eye on anything. And I felt completely just. Just in the dark.
Navigating Marriage Through Deconstruction
Kari Hanks [01:27:39] I think we were both kind of reacting from a place of fear and concern. Like, I knew I was constantly worried that, like, now he knows I'm an atheist, he's not going to want to stay married to me because he's still a believer. So this, this place of fear, of like not being accepted, not being wanted, it's not going to work out. It wasn't that we didn't want it to work. It was just like we were so quickly flooded and so quickly in this reactionary state with each other that was so difficult to communicate. And it was during that time, at some point, Kyle came to me and he was like, I found this podcast and Mormon stories and I want you to listen to this episode because it explains what I'm going through.
Kari Hanks [01:28:22] And I said, I found Mormon stories and I already listened to that episode. And we started communicating through these guests that you, you had on your show. Like, hey, this one episode where this guest said this, that's how I'm feeling. And it was like we were able to use Mormon stories to start reconnecting and communicating. It was like the only thing we had in common for a while.
Kyle Hanks [01:28:44] Yeah, there was a short time where we kind of communicated through the. By holding up the doll that is the Mormon stories guest. Because it was. There was relatable stuff on all sides. There was, you know, families that had differing faith and stuff like that. And that was a common point for us, I think.
John Dehlin [01:28:59] And you don't remember what that first episode was?
Kyle Hanks [01:29:01] I wish I did. Yeah. I wish I did.
John Dehlin [01:29:03] It's fine.
Kari Hanks [01:29:03] There were just so many. I mean, we were binging it back.
John Dehlin [01:29:06] Did y' all have any idea who Mormons were, what they believed a little bit before you started? Like, were we Amish to you? Were we Mennonites to you?
Kyle Hanks [01:29:16] No, I only had good feelings about Mormons. So there was actually a ward in my local town. I grew up in a small town, but that town had a ward with a lot of kids. I had a lot of kids that I went to school with who were LDs and they were fine. I didn't know anything about the beliefs other than other than they had some polygamy in their past and something about Moroni and not much else. We actually had a minister our workers love to talk down about other religions and one of our ministers, it's come up a couple times, like those Mormons with their copyrighted materials.
Kyle Hanks [01:29:49] We don't copyright anything. We just have the Bible and we actually had one, one minister who brought up Maroni one time and referred to him as Maroney Baloney. Just as a way just to be disparaging, just off handed disparagement. So I knew about them, but I never. They were just kind of like everything. Some people are Mormons, some people are Catholic, whatever.
Kari Hanks [01:30:09] I actually wrote down that quote from an overseer and he said this in 1968. So this was before we were born, but we grew up with this, this idea about Mormons. He says, I was looking at a Book of Mormon and on the first page it says it is copyrighted. Do you say that is an inspired book? They will never let anyone see the book unless they pay for it. Which isn't true.
Kyle Hanks [01:30:32] Which isn't true. I've had people offer me books of Mormon before, but.
Kari Hanks [01:30:35] And then, yeah, recently I was asking,
John Dehlin [01:30:39] by the way, did y' all know Joseph Smith tried to sell the copyright and wasn't able to. Yeah, he was like broke and needed money and he received a prophecy that if he sent some of his followers to Canada or whatever, they'd be able to sell the copyright. So he sent them to Canada and they weren't able to sell it.
Kari Hanks [01:30:56] That's really funny.
John Dehlin [01:30:57] Anyway.
Kyle Hanks [01:30:58] But no, my impressions of LDS members, even to this day, they're just really good people. They're nice people.
John Dehlin [01:31:04] We are co workers.
Kari Hanks [01:31:06] I did not grow up around Mormons and I thought they were a cult because we basically were taught every other religion as a culture before coming on here. I sourced our, our support group for any ex 2 by twos who had stories about Utah specifically. And someone mentioned. And I found a workers list and this story was on the bottom of it. But basically there's a legend that workers told that in the 1930s they came to Utah to preach the gospel and they had set up a tent and the Mormons came and burned their tent down. So Utah is not very friendly to the two by twos and that's why they never put like a, a lot of energy into it. I think there's like 1 to 202 by twos in Utah. There's one field, very small. It's a small population.
John Dehlin [01:31:51] How many two by twos?
Kari Hanks [01:31:52] About one to 200.
Kyle Hanks [01:31:53] A couple hundred at most. Yeah, there's one field.
John Dehlin [01:31:56] And if you're watching, if you're a Utah two by two, reach out to me and you can come on the podcast and tell us why these people are really bad people and totally wrong and misrepresenting your faith.
Kari Hanks [01:32:08] Yeah, there you go.
John Dehlin [01:32:09] I'm sure they'll do it. Right. I'm sure they're watching, right?
Margi Dehlin [01:32:11] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [01:32:12] Who knows? Maybe you never know.
John Dehlin [01:32:13] We were, but they don't think of themselves as two by twos. No.
Kyle Hanks [01:32:16] They're probably watching, thinking, who are these people? They're not the two by twos. We're the truth.
John Dehlin [01:32:20] That'll be wild when somebody says, yeah, I was a two by two, but I didn't call myself that. And I was curious about this weird church called the Two by Twos. So then I started learning about them and I realized that was us.
Kyle Hanks [01:32:32] I have no doubt that's happened at some point.
John Dehlin [01:32:34] Anyway, so you. You thought Mormons. Do you think that story's true, that Mormons burned down their tent, or do you think that? I don't know.
Kari Hanks [01:32:41] Again, workers love persecution stories, so it's just hard to know. I don't really know.
Kyle Hanks [01:32:45] Who knows?
Losing Community and Imagining Life Outside the Church
Kari Hanks [01:32:46] Another thing that we started realizing that I want to, like, bring out as we were deconstructing was we started realizing the community of support that had been consistent through everything we had been through was our already ex. Two by two friends, like Mike and Abby and another friend who lived with us for a while were our friends when they left the church and we were still two by twos. And then when we were leaving the church, they were there for us and supporting us. More so than any two by two friends we had had. These ex members who were supposedly bitter and angry were consistently there for us
Kyle Hanks [01:33:24] and never told us to leave either. No one ever tried to talk us out of going. They just were there for us to talk to. But I didn't. Even during my faith crisis, I didn't even talk to them because I knew they were gonna. I thought they were probably gonna tell me to leave, and I didn't want that, but I knew the people inside were gonna tell me to stay, and I didn't really want that. And I wasn't getting along with Kari. I mean, we were getting along, but, like, the important parts of our conversations weren't Happening. And I got into a really dark place, too.
Kyle Hanks [01:33:51] And I remember driving to work one day in the. What was the December, I think we decided. I can't remember the dates on this stuff, but I was driving to work, and in the darkest place, I remember thinking, maybe this is hell. Maybe losing all purpose and all meaning and realizing you don't have a single person to look out, to, ask, to talk to, because every single person is going to have an agenda in your life. That's not true, but that's how I felt at the time.
Kyle Hanks [01:34:17] And I was driving to work, and I just thought I failed completely. Thirty some years, I completely failed. And I have three kids now. Those are souls we talk all the time about. It's better for you. They warn the people inside. The workers warn the people inside.
Kyle Hanks [01:34:34] If you leave, that's even worse for you. People who know and leave are way worse off in eternity than people who never knew it in the first place. I brought my kids into this. I have this whole family.
Kyle Hanks [01:34:44] Something I did failed. I didn't even blame Kari for her beliefs. I was like, well, she can't help that, clearly, but could I have helped it? I'm supposed to take care of things. I'm the one holding things together. I'm the responsible person here. I can't cause someone else to stumble. Never occurred to me that somebody else might cause anything for me. I just kept myself away from people that could.
Kyle Hanks [01:35:03] And I was driving to work one day, and I thought, maybe I shouldn't be here. And the time period I'm talking about was about a second and a half, probably, but it felt like a thousand years. There's like a before and after to it because I was driving and I thought, I don't have to get to work today.
Kyle Hanks [01:35:22] Like, maybe I'm just better off not here. Maybe the kids will be better off. Kari will find somebody else. The kids, they're growing up in a household of somebody who lost it. I had it, and I lost it. Kari had it, and she lost it.
Kyle Hanks [01:35:35] Maybe they'd be better off without me around. And it was the darkest feeling I could possibly imagine. And I thought, this might be how hell feels, and that might be where I'm going, but I'm going to keep driving. And so I kept driving and got to work that day. And I made a decision that day that I'm going to figure it out, too. I think that's where. When Kari talked about, like, I can think of my own values and come into your new self. I made a decision to do that. Because the other decision, I. I don't. At the moment, at that time, I was like, I might be sending a whole family to hell with just not taking care of the beliefs I was given.
Kyle Hanks [01:36:18] And I don't believe them. That's the problem. It's not that I believe really hard and am disappointed that we're all not going there. I also don't really have it. I've kind of lost the revelation. This is a mess, but I should stay.
Kyle Hanks [01:36:33] And I've never felt like that since. I never felt like that before. I've never felt like that since. But I did hit a rock bottom just driving my car down the freeway at 4:30 in the morning. And the before and afters of that, I didn't come out of that thinking, okay, now I'm past it. I'm good.
Kyle Hanks [01:36:51] I don't believe anymore. I'm not gonna go to the meetings. I still wasn't sure. I threatened Kari a couple times with maybe taking the kids to those meetings anyway, just out of spite, but I didn't really believe it. And from then on it was a matter of, okay, well then what do we do now? What? What is that all? Everything I put my effort into in the first 30 some odd years of my life, that wasn't it.
Kari Hanks [01:37:12] That was a big realization moment for me when I realized if it's so hard to leave this religion, that death or suicide seems like a reasonable way out.
John Dehlin [01:37:27] Preferable, it's a cult.
Kari Hanks [01:37:30] Like, that was a big profound moment for me where I accepted that term. You asked about that earlier and as we're talking about this, that memory comes back to me because that is not how leaving a healthy religion should feel. Like that's not a healthy. Whether you feel comfortable using the word cult or not, that is not a healthy religion. If leaving makes you consider suicide, yeah,
Kyle Hanks [01:37:58] I felt the same thing. Even in that moment, I thought the fact that I'm even here feeling this right now is because I'm giving too much weight to something that's not giving me anything back. When I really, really need something to lean on, there's nothing there. And that's not my fault. I can't say I was a doubting person that was always sinning all the time. All the things that you would say about somebody who left, like, oh, they never really had it. I did really have it. I based my life around it. And when I felt that it wasn't for me anymore, the fact that I would feel that like, wow, my life is on some level has ended and there's going to be a new life after this. That's. That's a bit ridiculous. And I knew it at the time. And so it was like.
Kari Hanks [01:38:30] It was hard to imagine existing outside of that of 2 by 2 ism. Like, we couldn't picture what life outside would even look like. It was too hard to imagine. It was easier to imagine us just disappearing from life altogether.
Kyle Hanks [01:38:45] Yeah, I think it's probably similar to the LDS faith. It's not what you do, it's who you. You are on a molecular level. You don't have language prior to what you learned.
John Dehlin [01:38:54] It's your identity, it's your marriage, it's your family relationships, it's your community, it's your worldview.
Kyle Hanks [01:38:59] And the more you've curated that over time, like both of us had, the more that was true. And so we were kind of stepping off. We were realizing, I'm off that cliff looking at the camera, going, wait, where do I go? I'm going to have to build something on the way down. And so that's kind of what we did next.
Kari Hanks [01:39:14] Yeah, we tried some couples therapy for a while. It really stirred the pot and didn't help much at that time. So I went into individual therapy, which was more helpful. And we just spent the next year really, like, Covid was going on still. And we were just processing a lot, learning a lot. We started working more on our communication. I told Kyle that I was bisexual in 2022. And that was a really healing experience for us because I was a little scared that it would be a repeat of the atheist conversation. And it was not. Kyle was surprised, but immediately accepting and warm and loving and, like, fully on board with this part of my identity. And that was really healing for both of us to, like, be able to repeat that conversation in a way that. Yeah, I don't know how to explain that. I was just very.
Margi Dehlin [01:40:11] Well, it's kind of like you had done some becoming. You had done some work, and so it allows. It sounds like it allows you enough of a similar situation to see the growth together you had made.
Kari Hanks [01:40:26] Yeah, and I was more aware, a little more aware of, like, how to present it and to be aware of, like, the impact it could have on him. But he was just immediately so supportive and loving and accepting. And I came out to my kids who were like, cool, whatever. No big deal. Like, which also speaks to sort of how the culture was already changing in our house around topics like LGBTQ issues, and that they were just immediately like, that's cool, mom. Shrug, like, whatever.
John Dehlin [01:40:54] Kyle, I'm wondering what kept you from feeling insecure or afraid, threatened by her coming out as bisexual, that maybe she might want to love other people.
Kyle Hanks [01:41:04] Yeah, well, bisexual means she likes more than one, and I'm one of the genders, so it works out.
Kari Hanks [01:41:10] There was a little bit of. I had to reassure him a little bit as far as, like, but you're still into me, right? Like, yeah, of course I'm still into you.
Margi Dehlin [01:41:16] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [01:41:17] I guess I just wasn't that threatened by. I think, honestly.
Kari Hanks [01:41:19] And our communication had improved to the point that we could have those conversations of, like, I love that you're telling me this, but, like, I'm a little nervous about this, or I'm a little worried about this. And then we were able to talk through it.
Kyle Hanks [01:41:31] Yeah. I think that we've compressed a lot here. We've compressed, like, a year. But in that time, we both committed individually to, let's work on ourselves, figure out what's valuable to us. We know we're valuable to each other, so let's do what we didn't do before. Let's talk about all of our values. Let's talk about everything that's important to us. Let's just put it on the table and talk about it. And if it's uncomfortable, that's okay, but it's not a threat.
Kyle Hanks [01:41:56] I think we'd processed while we were in. We processed any sort of deep conversation as a threat to the stability of us at this point. We'd both been through feeling suicidal at that point, and it's like, well, we're both still here. Let's do this. We want to be friends. We want to do this for each other, for ourselves and for each other. We love our family. We don't want something outside of us to break that up. And so everything on the table. We've had a lot of really honest conversations that we wouldn't have had before, which is crazy to think that being in a church made us less honest, in a way.
Kyle Hanks [01:42:26] And maybe honesty isn't the right word. Maybe it's just authentic. We weren't authentic. Yeah. And so we've been. So that was just something we decided to do. And it's. And it's been good.
Kari Hanks [01:42:36] Yeah. And on some other podcasts, I've come out about my bisexuality, and in the comments, people have said things like, poor Kyle. Did you see his face? And, like, as if I was coming out to Kyle on a podcast, like, I didn't know. So do you want to speak to that in case we get Any.
Kyle Hanks [01:42:51] Well, I mean, I already kind of said that. Like, it. It doesn't. I mean, I'm one of the genders. You still like me.
Kari Hanks [01:42:57] So I didn't come out to Kyle on a podcast. It was a private conversation. He's fully supportive of my sexuality.
Margi Dehlin [01:43:02] You used all your new communication tools. Yes.
John Dehlin [01:43:05] Well, I think the fear isn't that she necessarily won't be attracted to you. It's that she'll feel a desire, need to explore with other partners, too.
Kyle Hanks [01:43:15] Yeah, I mean, it's. That kind of gets into the whole. Every conversation is on the table, and that's just like. I think that we just decided that's more healthy. We've had to reevaluate all of our values, and now it's more of a negotiated space than it was before. We didn't grow up with negotiated values. We grew up with values that were given to us and told they were holy. And now it's like. Well, holy's an operative phrase. I guess. Mostly we just need to talk what is valuable for our family.
Kari Hanks [01:43:45] And learning that marriage isn't a union where you lose your autonomy to join and become one person.
Kyle Hanks [01:43:52] Right.
Kari Hanks [01:43:52] That it's two people with sometimes different ideas and different needs in a relationship, communicating and working those things out in a way that is mutually beneficial to each individual and to the relationship as a whole. Whereas two by twos teach that when you get married, you're basically setting aside your identity and becoming one with this person, especially the wife. Right. Submitting to your husband. And Kyle. Seeing Kyle and both of us growing individually in a way that we could come to the table with all of our fears, all of our concerns, all of our needs, all of our desires to be fully autonomous people and to explore whatever sides of our identity we need and want to explore.
Kari Hanks [01:44:39] And being willing to. To have those open conversations, that's a lot of work and a lot of growth and has also been really awesome. Like, just. I don't know, it's. I think it has really strengthened our marriage.
Kyle Hanks [01:44:55] Yeah, definitely. I agree with that. And I also. I don't think you mentioned it, but I also went. And it was a long time after Kari started, but I went and started getting my own counseling, too. Just. And I went to therapy. I'm not actually going to one right now, but for about two, two and a half years, I went to a
Kari Hanks [01:45:08] therapist just because she moved. So, sadly, you lost your therapist.
Kyle Hanks [01:45:11] Yeah, I did lose my therapist, but that's okay. But I just felt like I needed a third party to talk to some of how I was feeling and stuff like that. So, yeah, I think that we just have decided to grow. Like, that's the best way to put it. And I think that it's weird to think. I think we were talking, maybe we were talking before the show, but about autonomy and the idea that I can go to choose to do this thing, I can go choose to grow. That's kind of a foreign concept. When you're raised in a high control group, you do what reinforces the group.
Kyle Hanks [01:45:40] Well, we don't have a group so necessarily. So we have to take that responsibility on ourselves. And I guess that maybe feeds back to my feeling responsible, but now I'm responsible for myself and that I think we can meet together on that. And I think it works really well.
Kari Hanks [01:45:54] Yeah. And speaking of autonomy, one of the things I did during this time, it was, I think early 2022, maybe January, was I went and got my ears pierced. That was easily one of the top 10 best days of my life. Like, I can't describe the feeling of. Of what it was. Like how freeing it was to be able to choose to put holes in my own ears. Like it sounds like such a simple thing, but that had never been allowed and it would just represented so much to me of how far we had come.
John Dehlin [01:46:27] Well, Mormon female equivalent of that. Can you guess what it is?
Kari Hanks [01:46:30] The second piercing or shoulders.
John Dehlin [01:46:33] What? What?
Kyle Hanks [01:46:33] Or shoulders. Like showing shoulders.
John Dehlin [01:46:35] Horn shoulders is one when a woman. Tell me, Margi, if I'm wrong, when a woman wears a tank top, but also when you take off your garments and wear just normal.
Kyle Hanks [01:46:42] Yeah, it's like a rite of passage.
John Dehlin [01:46:44] Almost like an ex Mormon probably.
Kari Hanks [01:46:46] Very similar feeling for you.
John Dehlin [01:46:48] It was piercing yours. That's awesome.
Kyle Hanks [01:46:49] Hadn't thought of that connection, but you really did.
Margi Dehlin [01:46:51] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [01:46:51] It was a great day. I had a couple friends go with me and we all went out to dinner to celebrate after. And it was really, really awesome.
John Dehlin [01:46:58] Yeah, that's fun.
Kyle Hanks [01:47:00] So after that.
Kari Hanks [01:47:02] Yeah. So moving on to like our support group and kind of the. All of the craziness that came after,
Building Community for Ex-Two by Two Members
John Dehlin [01:47:10] you didn't just heal and ride off into the sunset. You decided to try and provide community for other people. Right. And support.
Kari Hanks [01:47:20] Yeah. So the beginning of 2022, I went to Kyle and I was like, you know, I've been thinking of how difficult it was for us to leave without community and without support. And like the two by twos preach that leaving is the easy way out. But it was so hard and so difficult. I thought there was something wrong with Me and Maybe there's like 50 other people out there feeling the same way.
Kari Hanks [01:47:43] I was thinking about starting a Facebook support group and Kyle was a little hesitant for reasons that maybe he can explain. But I also brought the idea the same day to our friends Mike and Abby, and they were like, immediately on board. They were like, oh, this is. Yes. I think Mike had even said he had thought about doing it before, but I was like, do you guys want to start this group with us? Like, let's all be. The four of us work together really well. We've been friends for a long time. Mike and Kyle actually roomed together briefly in your first years of college or something. Anyway, so, yeah, they were like super on board. And Kyle's like kind of hesitantly, but on board. So we started the support group.
John Dehlin [01:48:25] And that was a Facebook group.
Kari Hanks [01:48:26] Facebook group, yeah. And he called it the X2X2 support group.
John Dehlin [01:48:30] Okay.
Kyle Hanks [01:48:31] EX2X2.
Kari Hanks [01:48:32] And we purposefully chose the term 2X2 to be in the name because there weren't any other support groups that were using that name. And we were like, it can be a really healing and powerful thing to like we were talking about earlier, Margi, to have language to call something what it is. And these are two by twos, so let's use the term and put it out there. And we knew the growth would mostly be word of mouth in the beginning anyway, so we started the group. And the first year it grew to about 700 members, right?
Margi Dehlin [01:49:03] What?
Kyle Hanks [01:49:04] Yeah, yeah, we thought. I was pretty optimistic that it would grow, which is why I wasn't sure I wanted to do it. I was like, man, this sounds like a full time job. And also, I don't want to be defined as an ex. I don't want to be a bitter ex my whole life. I'd rather think of what I'm going toward and build a group around that.
Margi Dehlin [01:49:18] I see that.
Kyle Hanks [01:49:19] But the.
Kari Hanks [01:49:19] And what will family think? Who's still in.
Kyle Hanks [01:49:22] Yeah. So I should back up just a second. And right before that, I did tell my family. I hadn't told my family. It was a year and a half between the last meeting I went to and telling my immediate family because I knew that I was breaking a chain that was very. Would be very hard for them to deal with. And disappointing them, you know, the family name is ruining the family name on some level. And I thought, man, it's a whole. It's one thing to leave and the heartache that comes with that, disappointing so many people, but also now to start a group and be an Administrator of an X community seems like a lot.
Kyle Hanks [01:49:55] It seems like I'm really being a stereotype of an ex member here. And so I. At first, I was a little hesitant to do it, but then I thought, no, we need it, though. There were groups online. There were some web pages out there that talked about history. There were even a few Facebook groups, But a lot of them had used terms like. The groups were called things like truth. The way they string a bunch of things together. Anytime you talk to an X2X2, a lot of times they'll just string a bunch of, oh, we were part of the truth. Or the way. Saints and servants and all this stuff.
Kyle Hanks [01:50:25] And we were like, we need to simplify it down. Just SEO. Good SEO. But. But also I thought, man, if we did it, I think it could be successful, because I think, given our experience that we were just coming out of such a dark time, maybe we could help some people. So well.
Kari Hanks [01:50:40] And we really wanted to establish a community, and all four of us had this commonality and the goals, the vision that we had for the group was an inclusive, accepting place that it didn't matter what your beliefs were. Now, we wanted to be a safe place for the LGBTQ community, and that really hadn't been done before, and a
John Dehlin [01:51:00] safe place for believers. I just joined your Facebook group, and it tells you, hey, there are believers and non believers in this group.
Kyle Hanks [01:51:08] Yeah, we don't allow proselytizing in there because we've all experienced enough of that, but no proselytizing. And we're pro lgbtq. And those are kind of our two.
Kari Hanks [01:51:17] Those are in the rules.
Kyle Hanks [01:51:18] Yeah, those are the two of the rules. But also, this is where I want to hat tip to Mormon stories. I'd watched Mormon stories for long enough now to realize that, in my view, and I don't know how you view Mormon stories, but to me, Mormon stories was a hub where I found a lot of other things. Everything from Sandra Tanner, you know, historical stuff, people who'd been X for a long time and had a lot of history. That stuff is amazing to me. I don't even understand the history, but I love listening to those episodes.
John Dehlin [01:51:43] You like Sandra Tanner?
Kyle Hanks [01:51:44] Yeah, I love Sandra Tanner episodes. And Mike, I think his name, who wrote the book, and you did all those episodes.
John Dehlin [01:51:49] LDS discussions.
Kyle Hanks [01:51:50] That's really cool. And then there's all these. All these younger. You know, I almost said kids. They're adults. All these YouTube channels of people.
John Dehlin [01:51:59] Nemo and Alyssa.
Kyle Hanks [01:52:00] Nemo, yeah. Alyssa Grenfell. Exmolex, Zelf. I know I'm going to forget some, but I think it's really cool because when I was thinking about our support group, I was thinking, well, Mormon Stories has all these people on. They have a place that they can go and if, if, maybe if Mormon Stories is clicking for somebody, but they can go follow Sandra Tanner to learn history or they can go follow, you know, fun commentary by Zelf on the shelf or something, RFM or something like all of these different channels. There's so many different places. Mormon Stories is the hub with all of these spokes and it ties everything together so well.
Kyle Hanks [01:52:32] Why don't we do that? Why don't that. For me personally, I think all four of us who run the group each maybe have a little bit different idea of what we want out of the group. But that for me, that is the idea. That's why I was, I decided I'm going to do it. And I want to do it really well because I want people, no matter who they are, to be able to come in. And even if they don't find it in our group, they can head off on one of the spokes of the wheel out to something.
Kari Hanks [01:52:52] And there have been spokes that have come from it. There is now an LGBTQ specific x2 x2 support group and a Christian specific one and an atheist specific one. So there has been all these little spokes that have come off for more support, more explicitly, you know, for whatever your need is.
Kyle Hanks [01:53:10] I think that some of those may, I think the Christian one and maybe there might have been one or two others that predated ours as well, but it's helped them too. What's that?
Kari Hanks [01:53:17] The Christian one was before.
Kyle Hanks [01:53:18] I think it predated ours. But, but it, but tying it all together into a kind of a hub for all that, a hub for the network, I think, really helped and helped where we're going to go with the story in a second.
Sexual Abuse Allegations and an Overseer's Death
Kari Hanks [01:53:30] So then in summer 2022, an overseer, a very well known, highly respected overseer from the area where we grew up, was found dead in a hotel room. This was in and of itself really unusual because workers don't stay in hotel rooms. They stay in the homes of professing people.
John Dehlin [01:53:52] Oh.
Kari Hanks [01:53:54] So it was very strange. Kind of the thought at the time was that maybe he had been sick and stopped for the night so that he wouldn't get anyone else sick. Nobody really knew. And there was a huge funeral for him and time passed.
Kyle Hanks [01:54:15] And then what's a huge funeral? I don't know if Mormons have Big funerals. But the funeral, for this funeral, I
Kari Hanks [01:54:21] don't know how many would have been there.
Kyle Hanks [01:54:22] People. 500 people.
Kari Hanks [01:54:23] They had it at a convention grounds. Oh, easily 500. I was thinking more a thousand, maybe a thousand.
Kyle Hanks [01:54:28] Highly high.
Kari Hanks [01:54:30] 5,500.
Kyle Hanks [01:54:31] Yeah. Yeah. Some of these funerals can get really, really big. Especially for a minister who spent his whole life in and especially as an overseer. Highly respected people traveled from miles around, from states away to go visit.
Kari Hanks [01:54:44] This was a man that we had stay in our homes when we were children. So he was a worker that we grew up knowing really well. And so then, end of 2022, our support group has around 700 members.
Kari Hanks [01:54:58] Fast forward to March 2023. We received a message from a group member in our support group that she had heard or someone had posted. Was it Sheree, maybe even posted that there was rumors going around that workers were calling emergency gatherings with workers and elders across the western US and Canada, which was.
Kari Hanks [01:55:25] There was no reason why that would be necessary in our minds. We'd never heard of such a thing happening before. It, it was unheard of, like unprecedented. We're like, okay, something big is going on. That's very strange. So we were kind of keeping our earload to the ground in our group. And then I get a message from someone in the group that her, her sister, who was a two by two at that time and the wife of an elder, was at one of these gatherings and that the workers had shown them, handed them a letter about Dean Brewer, who was the worker who had died in the hotel room that said he was an abuser who abused women and children.
Kari Hanks [01:56:14] And then they were told to hand the letter back to the workers. But she, this elder's wife, hero, managed to get pictures of the letter on her phone and sent them to her sister, who with her permission, sent them to us.
Kari Hanks [01:56:31] So we had this letter in our possession written by Dean brewers, successor, the current overseer of that area in the Pacific Northwest. About Dean Brewer, I have, if you don't mind, can I read part of it, please? Our dear friends, I'm skipping part of it, but pointing out the main part. We have come to the tragic conclusion that Dean Brewer had another side to his life that none of us except victims ever witnessed or suspected. It has come to the surface in recent months and more so in recent weeks that Dean was a sexual predator. We never respect or defend such totally inappropriate behavior among us.
Kari Hanks [01:57:11] There's a very united consensus among us that the only thing to do is to be transparent with all of You. For obvious reasons though, this is very difficult. We are very sorry for the hurt this will bring to the hearts of many. Thankfully, he is no longer in a position to hurt anyone. Some things have come to light from Dean's own records. Dean had his own Best Western Hotel preferred customer account and spent a considerable amount of time and money in motels. As we all know. When he died last June, it was in a motel in Government Camp, Oregon, a place that he frequented. The receipts often included two guests.
Kari Hanks [01:57:44] Victims have come forward. His actions include rape and abuse of underage victims. He totally abused his authority as an overseer in order to control, manipulate and threaten his victims. So we transcribed this letter and it has a typo at the bottom. Sincerely, you brother. And then signed by the current overseer. We transcribed this and decided, Abby and I specifically decided to release it publicly on social media.
John Dehlin [01:58:13] What do you mean by transcript?
Kyle Hanks [01:58:16] Wrote it down in this copy that somebody had sent.
John Dehlin [01:58:18] Did we transcribe it so it wouldn't be the original document?
Kari Hanks [01:58:21] It is not the original.
John Dehlin [01:58:22] We have to avoid legal stuff.
Kari Hanks [01:58:23] So remember I had mentioned how the workers showed her the letter. She took pictures on her phone. So I got those images and from those images I put it in a format that was shareable online.
Kyle Hanks [01:58:35] Really important point that they weren't handing the letter out to everybody. They were showing it to people they viewed as worthy to see it in the church, which is some elders and some workers, not all. And then taking the hard copies back for themselves. They didn't want to distribute a copy, but someone took a photo and tried transcribed it.
Kari Hanks [01:58:50] So they were telling elders to tell their meetings about Dean, but to, and I quote, be vague. And this was also only a certain geographical area where Dean had spent the most time. Now, being a prominent overseer, he had traveled extensively, including to other countries. But because he mostly labored or was on worker lists in the the northern, western part of the US and into Canada, they believed those were the only areas that needed to know. And that was historically how they handed handled things, was keeping it very geographical and quiet.
Kari Hanks [01:59:30] And we decided there's so many people that knows who Dean, who know who Dean is, that I think this would. Everyone should know this, like everyone in the current and X community should know. So Abby and I shared it both in our group and from there. People shared it and on our public Facebook pages. And I think for both of us, I know for me, I think for Abby, this was the first time either of us had shared anything about the church since leaving. And they left like A decade before we did. So that was kind of a scary thing to do, but we felt like it was important that people know.
Kari Hanks [02:00:09] And, yeah, the next couple months were absolute chaos for us. Specifically, we have an admin chat with where the four of us communicate about group things. And I wanted to read a little bit of what we were talking about at the time because, like, shows the impact of this. So when we first got the letter, March 22, 2023, and heads up to anyone who doesn't like this, there's a lot of cursing in here because we were very shaken up.
Kari Hanks [02:00:38] So I said, holy Mike. And this was after I showed them all the letter, before we shared it publicly. Mike says, yeah, this is huge. This is some serious shit. Kyle said, I feel sick to my stomach. Abby said, I'm raging. I said, I'm shaking. So this was our initial response to this news about this overseer, who we all knew really well had had in our homes as kids.
Kari Hanks [02:01:01] And for the record, Mike and Abby gave us permission to read this. And at that point, membership in our group was at 900 people. And Mike says, maybe this news will push us to a thousand before the end of the month, which it happened, like, the day later.
Kari Hanks [02:01:18] The next day, we released the letter. Kyle. We're still processing. Kyle says, holy crap. I had no idea DB Was this kind of worker. This is hard to process. I feel like the floodgates are about to open. People are going to start telling their stories and it's going to get ugly, which it did.
Kyle Hanks [02:01:34] Yeah. And I knew part of it was just that he was so well respected. We looked at workers not as deities, but we looked up to them a lot. We realized they. They sacrificed their lives for us to bring the gospel. We look up to them so much. And Dean, in particular, my family looked up to him. They thought he was this great guy. And so having I understood, because we'd both been so recently through a faith crisis, this was going to cause faith crises. To find out if it could happen once, could it happen more.
Kyle Hanks [02:02:03] That's an open door to a faith crisis. And I was terrified for people inside. And I actually gave a heads up to some people I knew, my immediate family being one of them, saying, I have a letter. I know it's authentic. We actually authenticated it before we shared it to anybody to make sure it was real. It wasn't somebody just spreading rumors. And I said, there's going to be. People are going to spread rumors. This is going to be crazy. This is, you know, one. One guy with Some indiscretions hit everyone really hard and then.
Kari Hanks [02:02:31] And there was some discussion about, like in sharing this publicly, are we going to be responsible for throwing other people into full on faith crisis? I'm terrified of that because we had just come out of this very dark period of time and we weren't interested in dragging other people through that exactly. But it felt like the right thing to do. Abby says this bombshell is going to go down much differently than they have in the past. Meaning other scandals that had just been handled very locally. And usually what they would do is they'd move a worker to a different area.
John Dehlin [02:03:02] Like the Catholic Church.
Kyle Hanks [02:03:03] Yep, very similar.
Kari Hanks [02:03:04] She said our group is a massive force at this point, meaning we have a group of people who are now organized and sharing information.
Kyle Hanks [02:03:16] One thing that happened right away is people started realizing that they got the letter from the X community and not from the workers. And that bothered a lot of people. And that letter, I don't know if you're going to get to this, but the letter started to be shared within the community. The workers started sharing the letter around and so people started posting it online. And we realized right away Kari mentioned a typo in the letter. We realized that that was our copy of the letter, the workers, our copy. And we thought about correcting the typo. And then we thought, well, it's out there, now people have it. But we realized, and I'll just fast forward a little bit to this day, we've never seen a copy of the letter that wasn't the one we released. Even though we know word for word it is their letter. We've heard, we've, we've authenticated it.
Kari Hanks [02:03:58] Yeah. An overseer wrote this letter, but they never intended it to be widely shared.
Kyle Hanks [02:04:02] They wanted to just share it with a few people and then kind of make this go away.
John Dehlin [02:04:04] You have the photo of it, right?
Kyle Hanks [02:04:05] We have a photo of it as well.
Margi Dehlin [02:04:06] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:04:07] Have you shared the photo of it?
Kari Hanks [02:04:08] No. Shared the photo of it.
John Dehlin [02:04:10] Is there a reason?
Kyle Hanks [02:04:12] We didn't need to, actually, I think
Kari Hanks [02:04:15] considering an elder's wife was brave enough to send it to the X community, that my thought was to protect her.
Kyle Hanks [02:04:24] Yeah, I think that was the main thing because they were still in. But yeah, we started having people flooding to us for information, instant messaging us, like, what is the scandal? How bad is it? We're not getting information from our own workers, our own elders.
Kari Hanks [02:04:37] So we were just being just absolutely flooded with messages from people both in and out of the church who were like, what's happening? I Want more information. You guys seem to have the information. Why am I not hearing information from my workers? And also, I was raped or I was abused, and not just by Dean. Like lots of stories were starting to come out. So at the end of that day, I said, good job today, everyone. You guys are seriously amazing. And today was tough. A lot of emotions and chaos being flung around. We are a great team. We all deserve a round of applause.
Kari Hanks [02:05:08] Keeping it together today and also processing our own feelings and being brave because again, this was somebody that we knew who had these allegations. The next day, Kyle says, try describing our last 48 hours to ourselves. Ten years ago, I said, this will all hit the media one day in some way for sure. Guys, you do realize we broke that letter. That is why people inside is what I meant. Don't know. They were not going to know. The workers never had any intention of people reading that letter. Abby says, seriously, it wouldn't have gotten out otherwise. Maybe with a few connected people, maybe a couple families would be disrupted, but most wouldn't even know.
Kari Hanks [02:05:46] And then we started talking about how people would leave over this. Kyle and I speculated over whether or not his parents would cancel their trip to see us that next month. And they did, which they did. They haven't seen our kids since.
Kyle Hanks [02:06:00] Yeah, they're very upset. That information. They didn't. They didn't.
John Dehlin [02:06:04] That's.
Kyle Hanks [02:06:04] I think it probably felt like betrayal to them and they haven't wanted to speak to us since much. They. There's a little bit of communication, but it's not the same as it was
Kari Hanks [02:06:13] and none with our kids.
Kyle Hanks [02:06:14] Yeah,
Kari Hanks [02:06:17] we had multiple elders and their wives reaching out to us, upset that they had found out from our post online and not from the workers. On March 25, we posted information in our support group on how survivors could report to local law enforcement as well as resources, because we had survivors experiencing mental health crises and who were suicidal. And we posted that information at the request of the sheriff's office, who we reached out to to confirm some things that we had heard about Dean. And we were able to get his death report from them because there were a lot of crazy rumors going around that we wanted to make sure we were. Were putting out accurate information.
John Dehlin [02:06:55] How'd he die?
Kari Hanks [02:06:57] They didn't say how he died, but they did say it was natural causes. One of the rumors going around at the time in the two by twos was that he had died bent over a hymnbook listening to a meeting. That's not true. He had accessed pornography that day. And he Was found dead on his couch. On the couch in the hotel room. He had several white envelopes with $100 bills in them. Other than that, there was really nothing interesting on the report. Natural causes. It said he had a letter in his car giving him permission to drive it. Because, of course, workers don't drive their own cars.
Kari Hanks [02:07:30] They drive church member cars. I said, I'm just swamped with messages right now. Today is going to be wild. Then I said, I was in the bathroom being sick because my name was circulating in the two by twos as the one who had spoken with the police. So it was actually Mike who had called and gotten that information from the police. But my name was going around the two by twos as the person who had done that. And it's funny looking back on this, because the idea that my name circulating amongst the two by twos would make me feel sick to my stomach to the point that I was in the bathroom is laughable now because we're very notorious in the two by two community now just because of what we do with our support group and because of this crisis. But back then, it's interesting to see how uncomfortable I was with that idea that people would know who I was in that community.
John Dehlin [02:08:17] Let me ask, how do members again? What do you call them? Members of the movement?
Kyle Hanks [02:08:25] I don't know. Professing people.
John Dehlin [02:08:26] How do the professing people call them Two by Twos? They're like, oh, there's this letter. Oh, one of our own may have been abusive. Let me find a support group. If they don't think of themselves as two by two. If the church doesn't call itself two by two, how do they find a Facebook group called two by two when they don't even think of the church as being named that or identify as 2 by 2?
Kari Hanks [02:08:47] In the beginning, it was word of mouth, People telling other people about it.
John Dehlin [02:08:51] That would have had to have been believing members telling other believing members.
Kyle Hanks [02:08:56] I think a lot of communication opened up around the scandal, but.
Kari Hanks [02:09:00] And we have really pushed the term two by two to the point that, like, international media has published articles not using the term two by two. And we've reached out to the journalists and been like, you have to include the term two by two or your article's not going to show up in searches. And they have gone back and edited it and put it back in.
John Dehlin [02:09:19] Wow.
Kyle Hanks [02:09:19] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:09:20] So you named the church.
Kari Hanks [02:09:22] We didn't, but we promoted the name that already has existed for over 100 years. We popularized it.
John Dehlin [02:09:28] We popularized the name for the church.
Kari Hanks [02:09:29] Yeah, we gave the X community an identity. That was our goal in pushing the term two by two was this is our identity, this is the culture we came from. It has a name.
Kyle Hanks [02:09:41] And to your point though, it's a great point because people who, when we started the group many people joined early on and said oh this is my old community. I left 30 years ago and haven't talked to anybody since. I don't even know how to find ex members. That's how little community there was. Like I say there were a few websites and, and groups here and there but as far as a broader community, there wasn't a broader community that many, many people had left. Of course now we're finding out from because of abuse and things but also just all kinds of reasons they left the community and never have never talked to anybody, never.
Kyle Hanks [02:10:12] Another feel kind of weird. Like I have this weird history that doesn't match anything anywhere. So that's part of why we've been pushing the whole two by two concept. It's like if we can just get this concept out there then people can find each other.
Kari Hanks [02:10:25] So the workers were sent our infograph about how to report abuse and what like resources for if you're in a mental health crisis. And they started sending it around and then they found out it came from the X community. And all of a sudden they were like we don't know if we can trust this then. So they ended up calling the sheriff's office and validating what we had said that they had recommended we share those resources. It was just like there were so many mind games going on in the two by two community at the same time where the workers were like this looks like helpful information, I'm going to share it. And then they find out it comes from the X community because the only information was coming from the X community at that time, you know, on how
John Dehlin [02:11:05] to help survivors and yeah, and just to throw in what I know, ABC News ends up covering this. The FBI is investigating, it's an ongoing investigation. And the last number I heard was like 800 to 900 reports of covered up child abuse.
Kyle Hanks [02:11:25] Yeah, I mean that was our next several months was just people reaching out to us. A lot of people not even wanting to report to anything, just wanting someone to hear their story. Like yeah, 20 years ago something happened to me. I need someone to talk to. And there's been different hotlines and different organizations that have stepped up and set up different things. But yeah, ultimately we'll talk about the FBI in a second. But yeah, the next several months of our lives was just fielding calls from people who'd been abused and had never told anybody about it.
Kari Hanks [02:11:55] Yeah.
Documenting Abuse, the FBI, and Survivor Advocacy
Margi Dehlin [02:11:55] So.
Kari Hanks [02:11:56] So a couple days later, we got another message from a survivor along with two other survivors that this person knew about, asking about the current of one of the current overseers of the Pacific Northwest, if we had heard of any allegations against him.
Kari Hanks [02:12:13] That one was really shook us up again because again, this was someone we had had stay in our homes when we were young. And there were three survivors coming forward at the same time. We sat on that for a couple of days. Not like wanting to kind of. We were really just processing it. Like it was. It just felt.
Kari Hanks [02:12:32] It felt like the last good guy that we knew was going down. Like, it felt like if. If he has allegations, who. Who doesn't like, the whole thing is corrupt. Right. That's how it felt to us at the time. It was just a really big thing to process.
Kari Hanks [02:12:48] And then the church or some workers, I should say, sent out an email that some current two by twos had also come forward with allegations about this same man. So we shared that and said we also have had people in the X community. Altogether, I think there were seven or eight survivors who ended up coming out against this other overseer. So he stepped down from his position as overseer, but they were keeping him on as a worker and he was still allowed to attend meetings. So we pushed publicly.
John Dehlin [02:13:19] Meetings, stay in people's homes?
Kari Hanks [02:13:21] Yeah. I'm not sure if he was staying in people's homes still or if he was with a relative, but he was still preaching. Our understanding was that he was still allowed to preach and he was still having fellowship with people, including women and children. So we, we post about this online a lot until current 2 by twos picked it up and put pressure on the workers to remove him entirely from the ministry and from meetings. So he was removed. Wow.
John Dehlin [02:13:50] In the report that I heard from ABC News, the guy that was named as an abuser, the news report said that he was suspended or put on probation for a time, but by six years later, he's been promoted. So this idea that just seems so strange to me in Mormonism that literally child abuse can get you a promotion. I'm seeing the same thing happen in the two by twos.
Kari Hanks [02:14:15] Yeah. And there were also a lot of people up high who knew about these things. Like, we were hearing from survivors. Abby and I were getting individually 12 to 15 messages a day from people reporting abuse of. From two like that they had been abused by two by twos. And a lot of these survivors had told workers at the time that it happened or told other people, elders, somebody they trusted in the church, and nothing had been done about it or some
Kyle Hanks [02:14:42] minor little change, like, you know, shuffling some worker off to a different state, sometimes to a different country, different places, trying to shake things up a little bit, tell these people, well, don't go the to this meeting anymore. We'll assign you to a different meeting to keep you two apart and all that stuff. So they'd been trying to take, again, they have the highest authority, they have the authority of God. So they're just doing stuff. And it's not particularly educated or trauma informed, of course, and legally dubious, I would say. But they thought of themselves as the main authority to do this and they kept it out, away from law enforcement most of the time.
Kari Hanks [02:15:14] So go ahead, John, you had a question?
John Dehlin [02:15:15] Well, I mean, if there's no organization, then there's no organization to sue.
Kari Hanks [02:15:19] Exactly.
John Dehlin [02:15:20] And there's no organization to name, to hold accountable. Yeah. And I can even tell you right now that in one generation this will probably largely be forgotten because all the current members don't lose.
Kari Hanks [02:15:31] That was our goal with media.
John Dehlin [02:15:32] Well, I know, but I'm just saying, like, it's even worse with the LDS church and the Catholic Church, but with you guys. If nobody thinks of themselves as two by twos, if no one, if everyone's discouraged from even mentioning this or talking about it, if there's no lawsuit, if there's no one to sue, then fast forward a generation, no one talks about it, it all gets forgotten. And there's no even way to trace it, because none of these people think of themselves as two by twos. And so they won't have any way to say that happened to our community because they won't think of themselves as two by twos, nor have any reason to look up the term two by two.
Kari Hanks [02:16:10] I think the term two by two has been promoted enough at this point that people would at least know to Google it. Like, I have nieces and nephews still in the church, and that's my worst fear, is that all of this will repeat itself generation after generation. And our motivating factor for talking to media and pushing media and pushing the term two by two out there, of course, was to prevent this from happening again in the future. Prior to this abuse scandal, if you googled, there wasn't media about the two by twos. There was, there were people screaming into the wind, Particularly Australia, I think, had a 60 Minutes thing that they had done about.
Kari Hanks [02:16:50] And there were some survivors who were talking about their abuse, especially in Australia, I would say. But. But it hadn't become a well known thing. Media hadn't really picked up on it, especially not us media. So there was a reporter who had some connections with the two by two. She hadn't been a member, but she. She had grown up sort of with some relatives who were members. And she published an article in the Daily Dot about. And I think that was the first one that talked about the crisis. And from after that, it just exploded in the media. And we had.
Kyle Hanks [02:17:25] Well, you know, what happened next is someone reached out to us and said, hey, we have a contact at Vice News named Anna Merlin. And we said, oh, oh, it's Anna
John Dehlin [02:17:35] Merlin who covered the Tim Ballard stuff.
Kyle Hanks [02:17:36] They won. And we just listening to Tim Ballard and we're like, yes, let's get her. So we worked with her. You and Abby worked with her quite a bit. And she put out a couple articles before Vice Digital went down with Rolling Stone or with Vice before Vice went away.
Kari Hanks [02:17:48] It was right before Vice.
John Dehlin [02:17:49] Okay, okay.
Kyle Hanks [02:17:50] So that was kind of a cool connection too. We'd actually heard of her own Mormon stories.
John Dehlin [02:17:53] That's awesome.
Kari Hanks [02:17:54] And then the Hulu doc producers, we worked with them behind the scenes. We're not on the documentary. It would have been nice to get some credit, but we didn't put a
Kyle Hanks [02:18:03] lot of time into that.
Kari Hanks [02:18:04] We put a lot of time into that. We spent a year working behind the scenes, connecting them with some. Some survivors.
John Dehlin [02:18:08] I do that all the time. I'm always consulting documentaries. And you don't get any credit or money. You know, we do it for the
Kyle Hanks [02:18:15] cause story got out there.
John Dehlin [02:18:16] But it's just weird that.
Kyle Hanks [02:18:17] Yeah, but that was the first media outside of a few print articles, that was the first documentary, quote unquote. It was kind of a long news.
Kari Hanks [02:18:25] Nothing had ever.
Margi Dehlin [02:18:25] What's the name of the documentary?
Kari Hanks [02:18:27] Secrets of the two by two Church. I think it's Impact X Nightline or Night.
Kyle Hanks [02:18:35] Yeah, it's on Hulu.
Kari Hanks [02:18:36] It's on Hulu. I should have that written down, but I don't.
John Dehlin [02:18:40] Okay.
Kari Hanks [02:18:41] And then. So November. So we're working with media throughout that summer and November 2023, Mike and Abby were.
Margi Dehlin [02:18:49] Was.
Kari Hanks [02:18:49] It was 2023, Mike and Abby were at our house for Thanksgiving. It was the day before Thanksgiving. I was upstairs taking a nap. I missed a phone call. They left a message. I checked my messages. They had my full name correctly. Hi, Kari Hanks, this is so and so from the FBI.
Kari Hanks [02:19:08] We'd like to talk all things two by two. And here's how you can verify that this is a real call, not a scam. So I did that. I verified through their instructions that it was indeed FBI. That was quite a shock. Went downstairs, told Mike and Abby and Kyle, like, you guys, I just missed the call from the FBI.
Kari Hanks [02:19:28] They want to talk to Abby. And I. I was like. So we called them back, and I was like, well, actually, Mike and Abby are here for Thanksgiving right now. And he. He's like, yeah, yeah, I'd like to talk to you both. Not sure if that means he knew they were there.
Kyle Hanks [02:19:41] They knew a lot of things.
Kari Hanks [02:19:42] They knew a lot of things. They knew. They knew overseer names. They knew the regions those overseers were over. They. They had done. They had done their background work.
Kyle Hanks [02:19:51] They liked all your posts.
Kari Hanks [02:19:52] They had listened to our podcast on Trust Me and so said that they had really appreciated that. One of the first things he asked was, are you safe? Have you received any threats from the church? Fortunately, we had not, so we were able to say that we were safe.
Kari Hanks [02:20:08] He thanked us for what we've been doing for survivors. He knew that we had cataloged quite a long list of information. Abby has put in the majority of that tracking movements of overseers and what years they were in what areas, and workers in general, they. She's put in so much work to all that. So we've kept kind of an ongoing, mostly email communication with. With the FBI. There was a recent article published in BBC about another sort of side scandal involving something we call the Baldwin babies, which is allegedly coerced adoptions in the two by twos that the workers were facilitating.
Kari Hanks [02:20:51] So, for example, I've had mothers come to me who wanted to send information about that to the FBI, but were too nervous or just didn't have the emotional capacity. So I'll pass information on at the requests of survivors or Baldwin baby mothers or whatever.
Kyle Hanks [02:21:07] So their investigation's been going on since then, and they've interviewed. I would say we recently interviewed almost everyone I know connected to this has been interviewed in person by the FBI. Now, we've had many stories of people saying, they recently showed up at my
Kari Hanks [02:21:21] house today, they've interviewed a thousand people and still have another thousand to interview and are still receiving reports. So the FBI publicly announced an investigation into the church with the A landing page specifically for the two by two church. So it's like FBI.gov I don't remember the exact website, but it has the term two by two in the landing page, which is really wild to see.
Kari Hanks [02:21:46] And meanwhile, our group was just absolutely exploding because people were hearing about it because we were sharing public information and then word of mouth and everyone was like, where's the information coming from? It's coming from the support group. So we had a lot of ex members who had been out for a long time just hearing about the group. We had a. A mass exodus from the two by tws who were flocking to our group. And we went from 900 members to over 3,000 by the end of that year. And now we're hovering around 5,500, which
John Dehlin [02:22:19] is freaking amazing, which is crazy because
Kyle Hanks [02:22:21] that's just a lot of homes. That's one person that has Facebook. It's not the five people who left. So, you know, we talked about church size. I think in the 80s, we think it was probably at its peak, 150 to 200, maybe more. And anecdotally, we've heard many people say that their fields or their meetings are half the size they were. Now, several people have said to me, my entire meeting left when we realized that half the women had been abused or assaulted in the meeting, but none of us had ever talked about it. Finally, somebody said, let's do a straw poll. I was talking to somebody who said that they were in a meeting where the elder of the meeting, the man of the home, said, well, there's a few victims. That's just. That's not a problem for us. We don't need to worry about it. We don't know any victims.
Kari Hanks [02:23:02] And.
Kyle Hanks [02:23:02] And somebody said, raise your hand if you were a victim. And half the women in the meeting raised their hands. And ultimately that entire meeting, as far as I know, has left the belief system. So. And that's a story we just keep hearing versions of that repeated.
Kari Hanks [02:23:15] Yeah, and that's something that's different that we've been hearing about that, to my knowledge, hadn't happened before, where you have entire family groups and entire meetings leaving together, which is just fascinating to me.
John Dehlin [02:23:28] So when I was listening to the ABC News report, it characterized this system of celibate missionaries or elders staying in people's homes with children around that are highly trusted as like the perfect recipe for abuse.
Kyle Hanks [02:23:49] Yeah. And we, of course, grew up believing that they had extra power from God to do, to live a better life. And of course, as you get older, you just don't analyze that. Of course this is going to happen. Of course, having that scenario you just laid out, of course that's not going to end well. But if you've been raised in it believing that God gave this group extra power to do the right thing or whatever, and you think everybody's being super conscientious all the time, that it'll come as a surprise. And that's why a lot of people. And I genuinely feel bad for people in the church right now, hitting a wall at 100 miles an hour going, oh, that didn't work out like I thought it would. It's led to significant abuse. Abuse at a scale that's. That's pretty crazy. I mean, it's not wrong to bring up.
Kari Hanks [02:24:32] Well, here I have some numbers on how big this abuse scandal is, at least. So Mike and Abby have been collecting worker lists, including historical worker lists. So he ran some. Mike ran some numbers recently, and this is what he wrote. So I'm quoting Mike. About 20% of male workers within the U.S. since 1950, brother workers in the U.S. since 1950 have allegations of sexual abuse. 20% that you know of.
Kyle Hanks [02:25:01] That we know of.
Kari Hanks [02:25:02] About 4% of the Catholic clergy has been alleged to have committed sexual abuse. Just to compare.
John Dehlin [02:25:08] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [02:25:09] And there are.
Kari Hanks [02:25:10] And they have an awesome TikTok. I highly Recommend. It's our 2 by 2 story who
Kyle Hanks [02:25:15] you are 2 x 2 story. Yeah, that's Mike and Abby. And we highly recommend they do a really, really good job of speaking to these issues.
John Dehlin [02:25:23] Wow. And I'm just, I'm struck by the idea that if ever there was a church, and we talked about this in part one, so you missed it if you didn't watch part one. But if ever there was a church set up to explicitly avoid the pitfall of so many religions, which is their downfall due to sex, money and power. It was your church. It was almost like it didn't even have a name. It didn't even have a legal organizational structure. It totally downplayed and then erased its founder.
John Dehlin [02:25:58] And then it did all that it could to have it be local. No churches, no real estate run in people's homes. And then no personality cults, or at least minimizing the risk of personality cults. So, like, how is this church going to become taken down by allegations of sex, money and power? You're even making your missionaries celibate so they can't go around having sex with people. So, like, how could anything go wrong? And yet it turns out that suppression of sexuality probably led to extreme, let's just say perversions or abuse by those missionaries. Because it's just like we learned with Catholic celibate priests. It's Just unhealthy and unnatural to just completely suppress a human need, a basic core human need, which is sexuality. It leads to abuse and perversions and probably mental. Serious mental health problems.
Kyle Hanks [02:27:00] Severe.
John Dehlin [02:27:00] Yeah. So they're. So in spite of the organization being carefully curated to avoid those things, it actually creates a likely higher than average prevalence of sexual abuse.
Kyle Hanks [02:27:12] That's. That's it.
John Dehlin [02:27:13] Right. Clearly y' all were. In terms of power, you were controlled at a. I would say your cult was more extreme than the cult, you know, the Mormon Church that I was raised in. I don't know if y' all see it that way, but I see what y' all were raised in as probably more severe and extreme than what I was raised in. So that just speaks to the undue influence and power that the leaders had over the members, even though it was designed for them not to have power. Right.
Kyle Hanks [02:27:43] I mean, even the Mormon Church has curtain of McConkey. Right?
John Dehlin [02:27:46] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [02:27:47] They know there's systems in place to address the pitfalls if they happen. Whether or not that's done correctly, that's for them to decide. But in our group, there wasn't. There was no higher authority than the worker. That was. Just happened to be in your field this year, and you've said before, something you have said before that I really. When you said it, I was like, that's it. People shouldn't speak for God. When you start speaking for God, that takes away all accountability. And there's no room for someone to say, hold on a second, can we talk about this one thing? And when you don't hold on a second and talk about this One thing for 100 years, what do you think's gonna happen? You're gonna end up with a lot of unaccountable people with unchecked power.
Margi Dehlin [02:28:26] Yeah, yeah.
Mental Health, Power, and the Church's Lack of Accountability
Kari Hanks [02:28:27] And speaking to the problems with mental health that you were saying, there were some EX members and ex workers who recently did a survey of about 70 to 80 ex workers and they found that 72% of them experienced depression while in the work, 76% had anxiety, 17% had OCD, 37% had suicidal ideation, and over 5% had a suicide attempt.
Kyle Hanks [02:28:56] So an attempt mental health, crazy to
Kari Hanks [02:28:58] think about, at least for the workers, is what this was on, is the
John Dehlin [02:29:02] prevalence of OCD is 1 to 2% of the population.
Kyle Hanks [02:29:05] So an OCD is hidden in groups like this. That's part of the problem of groups that are very top down. Exactly. Mental illness can hide it. Groups that don't allow for that sort of trying to learn about yourself, trying to learn about mental health. Just that simple idea. Everything you do is seen as a virtue or something wrong with you. And so when you have a system that's not accountable at all, and you've also pathologized normal humanity as being sinful. So if something happens to you, it's actually your fault that it happened. It's not the group that did it to you. And it's not human nature that God created you with. It's just a stew where. Yeah, at the end of the day, it's like, it's surprising. It happened and it was chaotic. It's happening, by the way, it's not over. The FBI investigation's currently ongoing. The story's not over.
John Dehlin [02:29:49] But how do you shut down an organization that doesn't exist?
Kari Hanks [02:29:51] That's the question.
Margi Dehlin [02:29:52] Can I just say, like, it actually reminds me of. Do you remember the picture that you look at and it's like a woman and you look at it and it's one thing and then there's an old
John Dehlin [02:30:02] lady and then an older lady.
Kari Hanks [02:30:03] Yeah.
Margi Dehlin [02:30:04] And then it tells you. That's what that reminds me of. You're saying, oh, you know, the setup. It's too. It was this perfect thing to eliminate all of the. But then look again and it's the perfect scenario to hide, predators to hide to create this perfect thing. It's that flip of like. Actually, it's also perfect. Hard to track. It really is hard to like, no
John Dehlin [02:30:30] accountability if there's no name nor corporate structure.
Kari Hanks [02:30:32] Well, and the two by twos never saw leadership in the workers. They would never call workers leadership. And many of them, for the very first time, because of this abuse crisis happening, realized they had no power over the overseers. For an example, there was an overseer, I'll just say, in the Midwest who was treating survivors really horribly. Like sending out emails saying, I will not hear more reports of. Of abuse. Gossiping is evil. We shouldn't be calling out people's crimes. By which he meant abusers.
Kari Hanks [02:31:03] There were some really awful rumors about how he had treated women. Not necessarily allegations, but just red flags and just not being nice to survivors in general. Not hearing them, not supporting them. A lot of current two by twos in his area wanted him out and he would not step down. So they're realizing for the first time when we actually take the reins of power and call for accountability, they don't. There's no check and balance here. They don't have to step down if they don't want to.
Kari Hanks [02:31:32] So we realized during this time. This was about a year ago now, and it did end up in the media that he had a Facebook account, which was unusual if you're a worker, Especially.
Kyle Hanks [02:31:43] Especially an overseer.
Kari Hanks [02:31:44] Especially an overseer. And it wasn't very active. But his. And I wasn't friends with him on Facebook, but his likes were public. So Abby and I realized he has this Facebook page. His likes are public. I went on there and I took a screenshot video of pages that he liked and followed. They included questionably underage close ups of volleyball players, butts, and our favorite, because this is like a very two by two thing. An Archie website that took Archie comics and created fanfic porn out of them. Now, Archie comics growing up was like one of the forms of entertainment that we were allowed like most two by twos grew up with hundreds of Archie comics.
Kyle Hanks [02:32:22] The most scandalous thing, Archie porn.
Kari Hanks [02:32:23] Archie porn. So I posted.
John Dehlin [02:32:25] That's your soaking. Basically.
Kari Hanks [02:32:27] Yes, Archie. So I posted this video. No comment, no context. Online, publicly. It went viral within the church. Within that week, a few days, overseers from the Pacific Northwest flew out on a plane to where this overseer was, and he stepped down from the work. It took porn. It took pornography to hold him accountable, not how he was treating survivors.
Margi Dehlin [02:32:52] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [02:32:52] Legal porn.
Margi Dehlin [02:32:54] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [02:32:55] That's what it took to hold him accountable. And it took other overseers getting on a plane and flying over there to deal with him, to get him taken down. So that is a leadership structure, in my opinion.
Margi Dehlin [02:33:07] Yeah, absolutely.
John Dehlin [02:33:08] How does it feel to have so much power, to be too.
Kari Hanks [02:33:11] That one was fun. That was like the one fun thing we did that year.
John Dehlin [02:33:14] You're kind of taking down a cult. You're kind of like Leah Remini and Mike Rinder taking down a cult.
Kyle Hanks [02:33:18] Right. And. And it's crazy because that's true. And we feel a heavy responsibility about how we message things, how we. That we're not passing along false things, that we're not. We want to be trauma informed. That's something we've all learned. Trauma informed as a concept.
Kari Hanks [02:33:34] We're not professionals.
Margi Dehlin [02:33:35] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [02:33:35] Trauma informed as a concept is something we have all learned. The four of us who run this group and others around. There's a wide community of people who are helping out and doing different things, have different initiatives to help. But all of that's being done by the ex community. The inside community feels no responsibility at all. They view any accountability as persecution. So there's no reason for them to go out and learn how to actually take care of these things and how to speak to survivors, how to address victims. So to your point, we do have a lot of power, but. But it's not power that we wanted. This all fell in our lap. But it fell in our lap because we were the ones being responsible. Back to that theme.
Kari Hanks [02:34:08] And a lot of the X community has so many survivors in it. So you have groups of survivors, including myself, helping other survivors because the church won't do it, which is re. Traumatizing some of the stories we heard. I cannot even tell you how horrendous they were. And we're not trained to handle things like that. But the church isn't being accountable to its own situation that, frankly, it created.
Kyle Hanks [02:34:34] Right?
Margi Dehlin [02:34:34] Yep. Such a good point.
John Dehlin [02:34:36] So I have so many questions. So we talked about sex and power. You say this guy died with envelopes full of $100 bills. Where's the church getting money? How much money does the church have? Like, there was a time where no one knew that the Mormon church was a $300 billion corporation.
Kari Hanks [02:34:58] The FBI is very interested in asking the same questions. There's a lot of money.
Margi Dehlin [02:35:06] There's a lot.
Kari Hanks [02:35:06] We don't know how much. It's not trash. We do know that there are wealthy two by twos who are holding accounts of money for workers. So it's not necessarily in the workers names.
Kyle Hanks [02:35:17] Yeah, we. We always get asked two things. Anywhere we've talked about, there's two questions. One, is this a cult? Two, how does the money go? And the fact that we're. The fact that I'm now in my early 40s and have no idea how money is handled in that group is very strange. Everything's done privately because there's no organization, there's no public accountability. There's no. You know how churches oftentimes as nonprofits will publish their statements of what they've been doing with their money? No one's doing that. I've heard rumors that are shocking enough that I wouldn't repeat them because it's like, if that's true, the money going through this church is hard for me to wrap my head around.
Kari Hanks [02:35:52] That there have been wealthy two by twos who have died and left all of their inheritance to harvest. We do know that the workers fly other workers around the world every year for conventions to the tune of thousands and thousands of dollars that they move workers around a lot. Yeah, there's a lot of money. There's one area of the country that is funding therapy for survivors. It's the only part of the country that's doing it. One small Geographical area. And that has been quite expensive for them because I know that they've had a lot of survivors utilizing that.
John Dehlin [02:36:28] They can't be banned from countries because they don't exist.
Kari Hanks [02:36:31] Right.
Kyle Hanks [02:36:32] It's got to be done at an individual level, I think. I don't know. I got to be honest.
John Dehlin [02:36:35] How would you even find the leaders?
Kyle Hanks [02:36:36] I don't know how the FBI is going to handle it, because there's nothing to grab onto. It's just a bunch of. Of individual people.
Kari Hanks [02:36:41] They express frustration to us at the same thing. Like, how. How do you hold accountable a group of people so good at not existing?
Margi Dehlin [02:36:48] That's right. Being invisible.
Kari Hanks [02:36:50] Yep.
Kyle Hanks [02:36:51] Yep.
John Dehlin [02:36:52] I guess I'm just curious, like, where. Where are y' all going from here? Are y' all. Like, I. I saw that you have a podcast.
Kyle Hanks [02:37:00] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:37:00] It seems like it's audio only. It doesn't even seem to have the name two by two in it. Like, have y' all can considered. Does it. Okay, well, have y' all considered a YouTube channel?
Kyle Hanks [02:37:10] So here's. Here's the thing about all this. We went from fully in to Covid. Deconstructing really quickly. Darkly deconstructing. Starting a group. And at what, a year and a little over a year into the group, a major global scandal breaks. We haven't really put ourselves back together yet.
Kari Hanks [02:37:26] And our deconstruction completely hit pause during that scandal, too, because we didn't have time to think about our own emotional needs during this time. There were many. So, so many survivors coming forward. And a lot of these had allegations against people we knew. And a lot of the survivors were people we knew.
Kyle Hanks [02:37:43] So that's what we've known all our life.
Kari Hanks [02:37:45] A lot of processing. I'm in trauma therapy twice a week right now. And we just very recently have been kind of talking about, like, our deconstruction again. And like, where are we on this? And picking back up on that and like, what do we still need to process and what would be healing for us and things like that.
Kyle Hanks [02:38:05] Just speaking into it a little bit. I think all of us have. When we left, we had a little bit of deference to the group. It's a group that. Oh, it's just a bunch of people who like to get together for Bible studies. It's not for me, but they can do their thing and we help. Maybe, maybe didn't want to speak into them too much. We didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings. We didn't want to cause any offenses or anything like that. Even though we're not believing we've left. We have our own beliefs now. I think just now.
Kyle Hanks [02:38:31] 2 years post Dean letter. Right about now. It's in a couple weeks. Two weeks, two years. We're just starting to get our head above water a little bit and think, well, how do we want to speak into this? And I mean, coming here, for one thing, is being much more public, talking publicly about it. And we talk about Mike and Abby's TikTok, which is really good and hits really hard. They're talking about things.
Nonprofit Work and Moving Forward After Leaving
Kari Hanks [02:38:48] Abby helps found a nonprofit called Voices for the Truth, which has partnered with rainn, the international. I forget the acronym for rainn, but they help sexual abuse survivors. So she has voices, which is awesome.
Kyle Hanks [02:39:05] And there will always be people who are hardliners, who are inside, who will think that it's persecution, in fact, increasingly so I would say that the people who remain are the hardliners more than ever. The people who had any nuance to it or had maybe a conscience towards some of this stuff anyway, have all left now. So the people who are inside still are much more harder to reach, maybe, but for our own selves. Yeah, it's just. It's like, okay, yeah, where do we go now? We're starting to kind of feel that out a little bit and speak into it. My own little YouTube project is just talking about stuff publicly.
Kyle Hanks [02:39:38] People know it's me. I use a pseudonym, but it's not because I'm hiding. It's because I wanted to separate it out from the being an admin of a support group a little bit. So it's called cow tipper Verne's X2X2 podcast. It's a cow tipper. Vern is an old moniker I used on a website back in the geocities Angelfire days, when so long ago. Yeah, I know. A friend and I had a silly website we used. It was like redneck themed and stuff, and so we used Cow Tipper names.
John Dehlin [02:40:02] Have you ever tipped a cow?
Kyle Hanks [02:40:03] I never have. I don't think you can. I think that's folklore. I think so. I think that cow tipping is one of those things that everybody knows. It's kind of like a lot of the stories you hear in churches about, oh, this thing that happened somewhere. Everyone knows someone who, who tipped a cow, but no one's actually done it. And I think that's true for a lot of these apocryphal stories you hear in church meetings about, like, oh, this thing happened and this person, you know, had this revelation or this person Crashed their car because they didn't.
Kari Hanks [02:40:27] Spent the last of their money that they had to get to convention over feeding their family.
Kyle Hanks [02:40:31] They didn't commit to God. And then some terrible thing happened. None of that happened, probably. It's probably everybody knows somebody who it's happened to, but it hasn't happened to them. So. Yeah.
Margi Dehlin [02:40:39] All right.
John Dehlin [02:40:40] I'm curious about x2x tour. So have you ever gotten together in groups as x2x tours, and if so, in what format, how?
Kyle Hanks [02:40:47] We've tried.
Kari Hanks [02:40:48] Yeah, Kyle and I have, and then when Mike and Abby are in town, we try to host at least one a year locally. In Arizona, where we are, we've had some people fly in from out of town for it, which was cool.
John Dehlin [02:40:57] What's the biggest group you've seen?
Kyle Hanks [02:40:59] We've had like, what, 40 or 50, I think.
Kari Hanks [02:41:00] 40 or 50 the first year.
John Dehlin [02:41:01] That's cool.
Kyle Hanks [02:41:02] Yeah, the first year was like.
Kari Hanks [02:41:03] First year were like five of us. Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [02:41:06] But. But again, it's. It's global, too. So, like, in our group, a significant percentage of our group is actually from Australia, and a significant percentage are from Canada, and there's certain parts of the. We have people in our Facebook support group now from every continent. So we're all still pretty spread out, but.
Kari Hanks [02:41:20] Well, not every continent. Not Antarctica.
Kyle Hanks [02:41:22] Not yet, eventually.
John Dehlin [02:41:24] Thank you for that.
Kyle Hanks [02:41:26] I'm glad somebody the literalism giving some clarity on this.
John Dehlin [02:41:29] Words matter.
Kari Hanks [02:41:30] Words.
Kyle Hanks [02:41:31] You're right, they do. I got to be careful, as you've already seen. But. Yeah, but. And then other people have been setting up meetups for exes and stuff, so, you know, maybe not quite thrive level yet, but a lot of people, ooh,
John Dehlin [02:41:42] you know about thrive.
Kyle Hanks [02:41:42] I know about thrive.
John Dehlin [02:41:43] I can come to Thrive. Y' all are welcome to Thrive.
Kyle Hanks [02:41:45] Yeah, you should come sometime. So. Yeah, but I think there's a lot of different. And like Kari mentioned, there's lots of spinoff groups as well, of people gathering around certain interests, but x2 x2, so, you know, whatever those be, there's even a group recently that started for people who have left themselves but still have professing spouses what to do about that. So they created their own Facebook spin off of our group, and they're collecting people over there.
John Dehlin [02:42:08] What's that called?
Kyle Hanks [02:42:09] I don't know. It's a private group, and you have to come into our group. You got to know the secret handshake to get into some of these groups, but.
John Dehlin [02:42:14] Ooh, you have secret handshakes.
Kyle Hanks [02:42:16] No, we don't.
Kari Hanks [02:42:17] We are not cult leaders, but yeah.
Kyle Hanks [02:42:19] And then also, we're watching a lot of other people start their own podcast. Tons of substacks. Now.
Kari Hanks [02:42:24] People are finding their voice. Especially, I think, after this scandal, people aren't feeling like they have to defer to the two by two so much anymore. They're really reclaiming their voice and power.
Kyle Hanks [02:42:36] I think there's part of you that when you leave, you still think you're broken somehow. That even if you don't believe it anymore, maybe you still carry some guilt. And that guilt's going away for a lot of people right now, and they're finally speaking into, yes, this is what I believe now. This is why I left. I'm not going to hide this anymore. So I think that's awesome.
Margi Dehlin [02:42:51] Yeah, that is awesome.
John Dehlin [02:42:53] Well, man, hats off to y'.
Kari Hanks [02:42:55] All.
John Dehlin [02:42:55] I mean, I remember when I went. When Margi and I went through it at Microsoft in 2001, we had the same reaction. It's like, wait, this is way too hard. We got to figure out a way to make it less hard. And that was before podcasts existed. That was before social media existed. But we just couldn't not do it. And so you guys have had a
Kari Hanks [02:43:19] huge impact on people.
John Dehlin [02:43:21] Oh, well, that's not what I was saying, but you have.
Kyle Hanks [02:43:23] That's what we're saying.
John Dehlin [02:43:24] Oh, thank you. But, I mean, it's cool to know there's someone else who kind of likes, you know, another couple that kind of like, yeah, this is way too hard. There's no support, there's no resources. How do we even find people? Let's do something about it. Like, we just need. We need everyone in their own coming out of their own religious tradition if it's been harmful to follow your example. That's so inspiring. I'm inspired. Are you inspired, Margi?
Margi Dehlin [02:43:52] I am. And I really feel for. And I don't know, I'm inspired also by the attention you're giving your own healing. Because I think coming out of a conditioned place recently, kind of detransitioning. I think you can keep this belief that your purpose is to show up for other people and harm yourself doing so. Like, I think it's not so much about showing up for other people. It's like, at any cost, it's that your own healing is not really important. And so just the fact that you address that and you are. You're aware of, hey, we want to help people. We want to be there. And this was something we could not turn away from. And also. And also we want it to actually be good. For us too. Like we no longer want to participate in these missions or beliefs or ideas where we're the sacrificed people.
Kari Hanks [02:45:02] Yeah. And in fact a few months into the abuse scandal Kyle and I released a statement publicly on our social media that we needed to pull back from the public aspect of it because we had, we were the clearinghouse for information for the two by two church. And at this point we were like you guys have enough information now it's time to start taking accountability. We've put our lives on hold, our relationships on hold, our health on hold to be this clearinghouse for you for several months now. We're not going to abandon survivors and we're not going to abandon the X community. But our focus is the X community. You two by twos are on your own now. Like figure it out with, with what. We've, we've given you informed consent.
Margi Dehlin [02:45:43] We're passing the baton. Yeah. You can take it.
Kari Hanks [02:45:46] And we had to do that for our own mental health because it was just too much.
Margi Dehlin [02:45:48] I can imagine, I can imagine.
John Dehlin [02:45:51] So thrilled. I just. On this YouTube channel just two months ago ABC News announced former elder of secretive two by two Christian sect sentenced to 120 years in prison.
Kari Hanks [02:46:04] That's in our area. I know that guy.
John Dehlin [02:46:05] His name's Zwillhofer Zwiflehofer.
Kari Hanks [02:46:07] Zweifelhofer.
John Dehlin [02:46:08] Zweifelhofer.
Kyle Hanks [02:46:08] We know him personally.
John Dehlin [02:46:09] So you knew this guy?
Kari Hanks [02:46:10] I know him. I'm good friends with one of his
John Dehlin [02:46:12] daughter in law and it's listing just all these felony counts against him.
Kari Hanks [02:46:17] He had 10 counts of exploitation of a child which is under Arizona law. What? Child pornography. That's the crime and it's a very harsh sentencing in Arizona. So he got 10 years or 11 years was it per photograph?
Kyle Hanks [02:46:32] Yeah. I want to make one point that I'm not sure if we've made clear yet is that this isn't just the ministers who are abusing people. It's the church is rife with abuse. So it's a percentage of it is ministers. It's also just abuse of relationship abuse, elders abusing people. And a lot of the assaults and abuses that have happened weren't from workers. It's just from the community at large.
Kari Hanks [02:46:52] Yeah, I think, I think it was around 20% of. Of the, the allegations we've heard involved allegations against workers. But there's also elders and there's family members and there's. It's a culture of systemic abuse.
Margi Dehlin [02:47:06] Yes. So insidious and so interesting that you
John Dehlin [02:47:08] left not knowing any of this. You discovered that after leaving for separate.
Kyle Hanks [02:47:13] Yeah, it's crazy. I was. When I was going to a therapist, I started going. And a couple, A couple, maybe two, three months in, I was like, okay, scratch what we were going to talk about. This thing just happened. And that's what we talked about for the rest of the time. And at the end of when she was moving on to another job, she's like, yeah, you didn't plan any of that, did you? That just kind of fell in your lap, this whole thing. We left for very personal reasons. And, yeah. Now looking back, I wonder, I have to be honest, I wonder how I would feel if I were on the inside. Maybe true. Believing me would be on the wrong side of this. I have empathy for people.
Kari Hanks [02:47:43] We've had a lot of those conversations of like, would this have pushed us over the edge? Would this have pushed us over the edge?
Kyle Hanks [02:47:48] And so when people are talking, you hear people talk about, like, oh, the exes are bitter and trying to just burn everything down. I actually don't. I don't care what anybody believes about God or anything. I just want people to be safe. But I understand if this is hard for you. It took me a year and a half to tell my own family that I'd left. Knowing how they think about it, with very little on the line now, with a big scandal like this going on, hitting people very immediately, I actually have a lot of empathy for people and the struggles they're going through right now. And I hope everybody, everybody can get through it.
Kari Hanks [02:48:14] But just as informed consent as a motivation for you guys and what you do, I do feel like it's so important that two by twos have the information so that they can make an informed decision on whether or not they want to be aligned with the church.
John Dehlin [02:48:28] Amen.
Kyle Hanks [02:48:28] They don't like informed consent. When I was young, there was. That book we showed earlier is a really good book. It's a recent book. There's actually another book called the Secret Sect that was released in the 80s and that was trying to give conformed consent, consent to people. And when I was a young. When I was young, probably 8, 10 years old, that book made its rounds in my community. And the people in the community burned
Kari Hanks [02:48:46] it, literally buying copies to burn.
Kyle Hanks [02:48:49] They were buying copies of this book called the Secret Sect and burning copies of it. That's just so on the nose. But that's what they were doing back then. So informed consent hasn't always gone very well. But now with the Internet, it's hard to burn copies of the Internet.
Margi Dehlin [02:49:01] So indeed.
Closing Reflections and Words of Gratitude
John Dehlin [02:49:05] Well, before we end, I'm just going to really quickly ask everybody if you've enjoyed this episode. Please take the time to like it. Please take the time to subscribe to this channel. Wherever you are listening or viewing, wherever it's being shown, please comment that helps. Please share it. Those are all ways that help encourage Spotify and YouTube and all the algorithms to kind of get the word out. We are always thankful to our donors that make all this possible. So thank you donors. We couldn't do it without you. If you value this content and you want to see it continue, please go to MormonStories.org, click on the donate button and become a monthly donor.
John Dehlin [02:49:47] I want to stay in touch. I have a thousand questions. We probably need a wrap up for today. I'm really curious to hear how EX members are doing, how they're finding meaning and purpose and identity, how they're doing with alcohol and drugs and exploration into all different types of lifestyles. If there's a lot of similarities between EX Mormons and EX2 by twos, we don't have time to get into that today. But mostly I just want to say y' all are cousins, siblings, in a sense, we are immediately in love. I can speak on behalf of all our viewers and listeners. We're in love with you guys and your communities.
John Dehlin [02:50:26] We hope we can find some way to support each other, to help each other, maybe even to get together at some point because we have so much we can probably teach each other and learn from each other and support each other in. So you know, Kari and Kyle Hanks, thank you so much for your courage, both in leaving and figuring things out, but also in helping protect victims and give a voice to victims, for helping provide community to others who need it. And then to raise your voice and to come on this podcast, which is going to reach probably hundreds of thousands of people to.
John Dehlin [02:51:08] And that comes Margi and I know probably as well as anyone, you know, in this space that comes at a price and it comes at a cost for our individual mental health, for our relationship with each other, for our relationship with extended family and for our family and for our kids and everything. So as two people that kind of know a little bit about what y' all have been doing, our gratitude and admiration and love and support are extended to you. So thank you.
Margi Dehlin [02:51:40] Yeah, we see you, we see the work and we're really, we're grateful for the work that you've done and wish you all the rest and space and healing too, for you.
Kari Hanks [02:51:53] Thank You. That really means a lot. And thanks so much for having us on. It's been an honor, really.
Kyle Hanks [02:51:58] Thank you very much.
John Dehlin [02:52:00] All right, so if people want to get a hold of you, how do they get ahold of you? Go to that Facebook group.
Kyle Hanks [02:52:04] Go to the Facebook group. I also have an email.
Kari Hanks [02:52:06] The Facebook group is specifically 4x2x twos or people who are trying to leave the church.
Kyle Hanks [02:52:13] You can also message us on there. You'll see us as admins.
Kari Hanks [02:52:16] And Kyle, you have an email, though?
Kyle Hanks [02:52:17] Yeah, Kari and I. Well, it's yours too. We have a. We have a Gmail address. X ex2x2podcast gmail.com x2x2podcast. And we don't have. We kind of had an idea of having an us podcast. I kind of have my own little thing on there right now.
Kari Hanks [02:52:31] I needed to not be part of that right now. It was just.
Kyle Hanks [02:52:35] But you can contact me there.
Kari Hanks [02:52:36] So, yeah, we'll definitely respond to people who reach out there.
Margi Dehlin [02:52:40] And many times people comment on the YouTube this release as well, which is great.
John Dehlin [02:52:45] Yeah. Do you have a way for people to financially support what you're doing or do you not take donations or.
Kyle Hanks [02:52:52] We've done it all for free so far. We haven't.
John Dehlin [02:52:54] We did for five years, too.
Kyle Hanks [02:52:56] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:52:57] Maybe it's about time.
Kyle Hanks [02:52:58] I don't know. We'll see. I think we're finding a good balance right now, so. Yeah, I appreciate that.
John Dehlin [02:53:03] Okay. All right, well, stay in touch and we hope to see you all again soon. Maybe come back on Mormon Stories. And we'd love that.
Kari Hanks [02:53:12] Again, thank you both Sean and Margi. Appreciate it.
Kyle Hanks [02:53:14] Yeah, thank you.
John Dehlin [02:53:14] Our pleasure. All right, well, again, thanks to Kari and Kyle Hanks for coming on Mormon Stories Podcast. Hats off to all the former and current 2 by 2ers out there and all. All of our never Mormons who are viewers and listeners as well as our Mormons and ex Mormons. We just want this to be one in a series. We recently, just a month or two ago. Oh, I should give an update. We recently, a month or two ago, had an ex Pentecostal on a shrier. On a Shrier. Just this past weekend, our friend Nathan Hinckley with some family members and I think another couple. Couple that we had on as well.
Margi Dehlin [02:53:55] Oh, the Johnsons.
John Dehlin [02:53:57] Yeah. Went out to Anna Schreier's house and did. Helped renovate and refurbish the house.
Kyle Hanks [02:54:07] That's awesome.
John Dehlin [02:54:08] And we'll be announcing it, but we shared photos on our last episode that we did on Sunday. But like really Fun story of one of our Never Mormons receiving love from the community. So anyone who sent money to Anna Schreier, anyone who's helped out, including the Hinckley, Nathan Hinckley and his family, and anyone else, the Johnsons or whoever's been loving them and helping them. It just makes our hearts sing when community rises up to support each other. Isn't that amazing?
Kari Hanks [02:54:38] Yeah, that's awesome. I listened to that episode and I'm really happy to hear that update.
John Dehlin [02:54:42] Yeah. But also we. We really want to hear from any of you who have never been Mormon, who watch or listen to Mormon stories and feel particularly benefited by it. We want to hear your stories. So the way you do that is you go to MormonStories.org, you apply to be on the show, you create a little video, you fill out an application, we vet it, and if it feels like a good fit, then we'll invite you to come on. So we hope to have this beautiful, just one in a long series of Never Mormons. For me, it's fun because obviously I love Mormons and I love Mormon stories, but we're like over 2,000 episodes into Mormon stories now. I've heard a lot of Mormon stories. Can you imagine? It's fun to hear stories from other traditions, too.
Margi Dehlin [02:55:26] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [02:55:26] We love learning about other churches.
John Dehlin [02:55:29] Yeah. So we want Mormon stories to spotlight lots of high demand religions or groups. So please check. You know, do that. Please email us@mormonstoriesmail.com if you have feedback. And again, we appreciate any financial support y' all can offer. Yeah. Anything else, Margi, that I'm forgetting?
Margi Dehlin [02:55:50] I think you've covered it.
John Dehlin [02:55:52] All right, well, thanks for joining us today. Thanks to Brooklyn and Gerardo and Julia and Maven and the OSF board and everyone who makes this possible. Thanks to Margaret and Nemo and anyone who is a part of our team. You guys be good to each other, be kind to each other, and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care.
Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.
One Response
Just watched part one if the interview with The Hanks leaving Two by Two. I cannot express how interesting it is to find others who grew up in this kind of group. I grew up in The Salvation Army. They do good things but life on the inside is very similar to what I heard today! Our pastors ( called Officers) are in pairs. We call it ” The Work” and ” Leaving the Work”. Thank you for being brave enough to share.