Introduction and Episode Overview

John Dehlin [00:00:01] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host for today, John Dehlin. It's April 1, 2025, but we're not fooling. We're not fooling today. We are here to talk about a recent kerfuffle, I'll call it, that erupted on the Mormon and the ex Mormon Internet where a church educator, Jared Halverson, posted a short video hoping to encourage Mormon women to not give up the faith and to stay strong, noting that he had discovered recently a trend towards Mormon women disaffiliating from Mormonism at a higher rate than men. And the Mormon Internet again blew up as a result of the video he posted and the comments. We're going to be covering all of it today. We're going to going to be covering Jared Halverson's original video, the response to it. We're going to be covering the fact that he apologized. And then we're going to even be responding to his apology. And then also we're going to have Jana Reese later on in the show to share some data with us that she has been digging into about why Mormon women are losing faith and or leaving Mormonism. And if we have time at the end, we're even going to talk about recent changes in the Mormon church where the garments for Mormon women have been by many accounts improved. So we've got so much to cover today and two of the three faces that we have in studio are going to be very familiar to to you. So let me just go ahead and introduce the amazing panelists we have today. We have back in Studio, Amy McPhee Olivest from Breaking Down Patriarchy. Hey, Amy.

Meet the Panelists

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:02:01] Hey. Great to be here.

John Dehlin [00:02:02] Welcome back.

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:02:03] Thanks.

John Dehlin [00:02:04] And we also have Katie Ludlow Rich joining us in studio as well.

Katie Ludlow Rich [00:02:09] Great to be here. Thanks for having us.

John Dehlin [00:02:12] And before I introduce Abby, Amy, remind us just a little bit about yourself.

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:02:17] About me?

John Dehlin [00:02:17] Yeah.

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:02:18] Yes. I'm Amy. Amy McPhee, Alabest. If you've seen me before on here, it may be because of Dear Mormon man, which is an essay I wrote in 2016. And then I have a podcast and YouTube channel called Breaking Down Patriarchy and also on social media as well. So I study patriarchy. I'm a feminist historian and writer. Yeah, it's really great to be back here. Super excited to talk today.

John Dehlin [00:02:42] So great to have you and Katie remind us about your good work these days.

Katie Ludlow Rich [00:02:46] Yeah. So I am a writer and independent scholar and we were, my co writer, Heather Sundahl and I were on in December to Talk about our book 50 Years of Exponent 2. And I'm also a blogger at Exponent 2.

John Dehlin [00:02:59] And you also do some Instagram stuff, right?

Katie Ludlow Rich [00:03:03] Yeah, yeah. Talking about Mormon feminism and Exponent and

John Dehlin [00:03:08] fun things and all the good things. And a. A brand new face to the Mormon Stories audience, but not a new face to me is Abby Maxwell Hansen. I know Abby because I first, I think became aware of her around the 2013, 2014 time frame where she was a participant in the ordained women movement, but also at some point became a blogger. I don't know if it was for Exponent at first or if you were doing your own blogging, but either way, absolutely. Abby, please introduce yourself to our audience.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:03:39] Yeah, sure. I'm Abby Maxwell Hansen. Yeah, I was part of Boarding Women. I kind of had an especially excitable bishop and stake president. So I got in. I think I kind of became famous for that. And I ended up in a documentary that was a BAFTA nominated documentary film, probably, gosh, 2016. And then I have been blogging with Exponent 2 since about 2019. I've been really involved there. So I've just kind of been on the Mormon feminist scene for. For well over a decade now. Yeah, about 2013 is kind of when I went from being just a regular Mormon mom, lifelong very devoted member, to being a devoted Mormon feminist and kind of entering this progressive Mormon world. So that's me.

John Dehlin [00:04:23] And you blog. Where can people find your blog?

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:04:25] So it's Exponent 2. I have always blogged for Exponent 2. Katie and I are both here from the Exponent 2 organization. Has the magazine, it has a retreat and it has a blog. I run a lot of our Instagram page. We just started that up this last year really having like an active blog Instagram page. And that's where we have all these discussions about garments and Jared Halvorson and all these kind of things. So yeah, we are a fantastic organization to be part of. So proud to be part of it.

John Dehlin [00:04:51] Excellent. Well, I'm super happy to be promoting Exponent 2 and breaking down Patriarchy because you all do great work, all of you. So thanks to all of you for joining. Also thanks to our live. We're live streaming right now, so tons of thanks to our live audience. We're going to do our best to incorporate comments and questions from our live audience. We always appreciate super chats on YouTube. That's the best way to make sure we see your questions or comments. We'll do our best to share all of those. We're grateful for our Donors who make Mormon Stories podcast possible. Thank you. If you're a donor. If you're not, you can go to MormonStories.org, click on the donate button, and become a monthly donor. That's how we afford this stuff. So. All right, without any further ado, let's jump in. Maybe before we play Jared Halverson's video, I guess. Amy, if I remember right, you actually knew Jared back in the day. Do you want to tell us anything about that to start with?

Jana Reese [00:05:50] Sure.

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:05:51] Yeah. I do know Jared. I. He and I were in the same cohort in Jerusalem for a semester abroad during college and. And I remember him and know him to be such a good person, like, deeply just a good, good person, smart and kind. And his wife is actually the sister of one of my mission companions, and they got married while we were on our missions. So I remember looking at their wedding photos that had gotten sent to my mission companion, and we have. We actually have a lot in common, Jared and I. I don't know if you want me to talk about that a little bit.

John Dehlin [00:06:24] Sure, yeah.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:06:25] Yeah, yeah.

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:06:25] I mean, I was thinking about it. I haven't talked with Jared. I know. I think we taught at the MTC actually at the same time after our missions, but I was thinking about kind of the, like, our tracks at that time of our life. We were both in Jerusalem together, and then we both went on Spanish speaking missions. I think he had gone on his mission before Jerusalem, but. And then, yeah, we were both MTC teachers, we both went to byu, we both got married in the Temple, and then we both actually wanted to be ECS teachers, wanted to be seminary, seminary teachers. And one thing that occurred to me is that while we were, like, doing all these things in the same kind of realms, we were having very different experiences. And it's only in retrospect that I really realized that. And it seems like he hasn't really realized that until recently too. For example, even just being in Jerusalem and all of the course of study that we had in the Scriptures, which is, you know, written by men, for men, interpreted by men, and then going on missions where his experience going through was like, I don't know if he had leadership positions, but. Or teaching in the mtc, I was always, always presided over by many, many layers of boys who are younger than me on my mission, or men all the way up. And then the temple, of course, we've talked about, you know, before on this podcast, but the language in the temple, if you don't have the structure pointed out to you If a man can go through these things because privilege is invisible to those who have it, they go through all of these steps not realizing that the women in the room are making very different promises than the men in the room, and the women in the room are being presided over. And so all of these pain points that I accumulated, you know, if. If the men aren't paying attention or they don't have it pointed out to them, they might not notice. And the last one I'll say is just the ecs. I mean, I. My understanding is that he became an ECS teacher, like, through the church. I showed up, I came home from my mission, and Jerus just on fire with my love for the Gospel. And I wanted to be a seminary teacher. So I showed up for an ECS class at byu, and the very first class, I was engaged at the time. And the male teacher said, hey, could I talk to you after class? And I went up, like. And he said, I noticed that you're wearing a ring. Are you, you know, married? Are you planning to get married? And I said, yes. And he said, well, just so you know, if you're planning to have kids, you should know that you won't be able to teach in the ECS program once you have kids. So I just wanted you to know that and to really think about whether this is a path that you want to pursue. And I know how I felt in my body when that happened, but I had no way of kind of analyzing why that felt so horrible to me. Well, I dropped the class and didn't go into the course of study and the career that I would have wanted to do. And meanwhile, I. Jared did, and I doubt he ever knew that maybe there was a woman in the class who had a very, very different experience than he had. So I just want to point that out at the beginning. Wonderful man, deeply good for as far as I know, and I can tell. But this is an example of just, like, maybe a little bit of blindness, because it hasn't been pointed out, maybe to him individually, of the structural differences that women encounter. Yeah.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:09:51] Can I say something? 1. Amy, I had no idea. I had a very similar experience. I thought I wanted to be a seminary teacher, and then I found out once you're pregnant, they'll kick you out, they will fire you. You can come back and work as the secretary at the building, but you cannot be a teacher because they don't want someone in front being a bad example of a working mom. But they'll still hire you, but for less pay as a Secretary, not as a teacher. So that's crazy. Also, I'll say another thing. Right before we started, Amy might have to leave before end. And so as one of Amy's biggest fans, I said, amy, please talk more than Katie and I at the beginning, because Katie and I don't have a hard end date. So if Amy talks more, it's because we said we are your biggest fans. Please talk. We'll talk after you leave. So just wanted to add that. Talk all you want.

Katie Ludlow Rich [00:10:40] You're really sweet.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:10:41] Thank you.

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:10:42] Thanks.

John Dehlin [00:10:42] And Amy, when you CES Church education system, right, that you were talking about, I say ecs. Yeah, yeah, I did.

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:10:50] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:10:51] You know What?

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:10:52] That's my PhD program. Sorry, it's muscle memory.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:10:56] It's force of habit.

John Dehlin [00:10:57] Oh, that's good. CES.

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:10:58] Sorry, my PhD program that I'm in right now is the ECS department.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:11:01] So I thought maybe people said education, CES.

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:11:05] I'm sorry.

John Dehlin [00:11:05] Oh, no, no, no. I just not trying to correct you. Just want to make sure we're on the same page.

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:11:08] Yes, I'm glad you said that.

John Dehlin [00:11:10] Is it possible that as a result of ordained women and other sort of progressive movements in mormonism, that maybe CES women instructors in 2025 are treated differently than maybe five or 10 years ago?

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:11:26] Yes. In fact, April Young Bennett, were you going to say the same thing as me? One of our Exponent bloggers, April Bennett, wrote a blog post that went super viral, like, had like tens and tens and tens of thousands of views about how women get fired when they're pregnant. And guess what? Within a couple years that changed once everybody knew about it. Exponent 2 does a lot of stuff like that. And you were going to say something, Katie. Sorry.

Katie Ludlow Rich [00:11:48] I mean, very similar. Just I think it was around 2014 or 15 where that particular rule changed. And I also had that similar experience of being a 16 year old at EFY and talking to one of these men and being like, I want to do this, I want to teach like this. And he's like, yeah, well, if you want to be a mom, then you are going to get fired. And while that change with ces, I think there are a lot of temples that still have that rule where if you are a woman with a child under age 18 in the home, you cannot be an ordinance worker while your husband can. And that's still the case. So while some areas are seeing change, other areas are not. But you can work in the mini daycare space in the temple for. For children waiting to go be sealed to their parents while Their parents are sealed to each other. So you can, as a mom, watch children in the temple, but you can't be an ordinance worker, so you can

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:12:36] do invisible labor and support other people. That's crazy. That's a wild idea. I have a feeling that might come up in it.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:12:43] That sounds very familiar today.

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:12:46] Absolutely.

Who Is Jared Halverson and What Did He Say

John Dehlin [00:12:46] All right, well, if it's okay, I'll just introduce Jared Halverson to our audience. Here's a photo of his BYU page. It says he's an associate professor of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University, and then I'll try and read his bio. Jarrett Halverson is an associate professor of Ancient scripture, coming to BYU after 24 years of serving in the church education system. Raised in Texas and Southern California, he came to BYU originally as a Presidential scholar and a wide receiver on the football team. I didn't know that. Leaving to serve a mission in Puerto Rico and returning to teach at the MTC. As you mentioned, Amy, he earned a BA in history and an MA in religious education from BYU and an MA and PhD in American religious History from Vanderbilt University. That's a good school. Focusing on secularization, faith loss, and anti religious rhetoric. He is frequently involved with interfaith dialogue, has been a featured speaker in both devotional and academic settings from coast to coast, and hosts a popular YouTube channel and podcast called Unshaken. He also works one on one with people around the world experiencing faith crises. Okay. And yeah, he is kind of the church's go to guy these days, or one of the go to guys for faith crisis stuff. He's spoken at restore. He's spoken on faith matters. And interestingly, his. I. I was watching some sort of super conservative Mormons reacting to Jared's apology, and they kind of mocked the idea that Unshaken was shaken because the. His podcast is called Unshaken, and yet obviously these events kind of shook him a little bit. But. Okay, so now that we've given a little bit of background on Jared, should we go ahead and play the clip? Just play the full clip. And it's probably worth mentioning this clip. Katie, you could probably speak to this. This clip that was shared on instagram and probably TikTok is not a full clip. It's actually an excerpt from a larger episode. Do you want to give some context to that?

Katie Ludlow Rich [00:15:07] Yeah. There's a podcast episode where he is speaking to this Come follow me lesson. Right. And so it's chapters 24 through 26 of the doctrine Covenants, and he talks about those other chapters as well. And this clip is pulled from the section when he's talking about D and C25. But there's so much more context and there's a lot more from this broader episode that we can dig into than even what he just says in that clip.

John Dehlin [00:15:30] And for those who are never Mormons, Doctrine and Covenants is one of our four key scriptures within the Mormon Church, along with the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the Pearl of Great Price. It's kind of Joseph Smith's revelations that he received when he was alive. And what are the basic themes of that kind of Come, follow me lesson.

Katie Ludlow Rich [00:15:49] Yeah, so this one is shifting from revelations about the church structure and organization to individual revelations. And so D&C24, it's multiple short revelations to different men. And D&C 25 is to Emma Smith, and it relates to both Joseph and Emma in council to them. And that is kind of the context, is that he's. He's talking about these individual revelations through Joseph Smith to people from. From God.

John Dehlin [00:16:17] All right, well, let's go ahead and play the full clip and then we'll have y' all respond to it. Is that all right? Okay, here we go.

Women Leaving Religion at Higher Rates Than Men

Speaker F [00:16:25] I work in the field of secularization. I work in the field. That's not the right way to put it. I'll say it this way. Many of you know that I study faith loss and secularization and anti religious rhetoric. You know that I'm trying to keep my finger on the pulse of people losing their faith around the world and doing whatever I can to try to resuscitate that faith. Well, as I've been studying books about this and reading articles and watching graphs and statistics, some of those statistics are pretty unsettling to watch. The rise of the nones, as they call it. N O N E S. No, this is not people flocking to the Catholic convent. None, as in no religious affiliation. I'm a part of none. And that's been on the rise since about the 1990s. It's peaking in. In ways that, that we haven't quite seen before. Well, one of the statistics that has worried me most of late comes from a study, a survey that was done in 2023. And it's suggesting that for the first time that I can think of, more women are leaving religion than men are. That's shocking to me as a historian of religion in America because there was actually a great article I read in grad school called women's. Excuse me, called religious history. Is women's history that women have always outnumbered men not at the pulpit, but in the pew. And so often it's these sister saints organizing benevolent societies. Ours is called the Relief Society, doing incredible things. So much heavy lifting in the kingdom of God is done by God's daughters, and it's always been that way. Now, this is a revelation, section 25 for one of God's daughters, an elect lady Emma Smith. And so I want to talk more about women here, though the verses we're going to see for a second apply across the board. But I'm concerned by the fact that women are leaving religion at faster rates than men right now, again, according to this 2023 survey. I'll give me. I'll just give it. Throw out a few numbers for you. They were interviewing people who had left religion, and they were checking gender, and they were checking age. Okay. And then comparing some of those statistics. Here's some numbers to wrestle with. Among the baby boomer generation, of those who had left faith, who had disaffiliated from religion, 43% of them were women. Okay. So in the minority. Now bump ahead a generation, and let's talk about Gen X. That's my people. In the gen X generation, 45% of those that left religion were women, which meant 55 were men. Okay, 55%. Go forward an age group. And among millennials, how many men versus how many women leave the church or leave churches, leave religion? Out of 100, 47 of them would be women and 53 would be men. But then we look at Gen Z. Those are the students sitting in front of me in class. Those are perhaps your teenage or young adult children. And In Gen Z, 54% of those that are leaving religion are women. Again, first time I can be that. I'm aware of where more women are leaving churches than men, which, again, is a cause of concern for me. I read a book once on the history of secularization in Great Britain in the 20th century, and one of the author's main points was religion seemed to collapse in Great Britain when women stopped coming to church. Men were a mixed bag, sometimes strong, sometimes weak, sometimes coming, sometimes leaving. But women seem to hold steady, and they held the church up until they stopped doing that and there wasn't much left to keep it afloat. Sister saints, be aware of just how important you are in the kingdom of God. Each of you daughters of God, each of you elect ladies. And then prepare yourself for this caution in section 25, verse 10. Yes, it applies to men just as much, but I want you sisters to hear it with feminine ears. 25:10 to Emma Smith. Verily I say unto thee that thou shalt lay aside the things of this world and seek for the things of a better. A better world. In some ways, I'm asking you to sacrifice. Lay aside the things of this world. But in another way, I'm not asking for a sacrifice at all. It's not a sacrifice when you get more than you give. That's called an investment. And so invest in a better world by saving your stock and not putting it into this world. Those are all declining returns. You want an amazing return on investment, then lay up treasures in heaven where moth and rust doth not corrupt.

John Dehlin [00:21:58] All right, well, there's so much to unpack, but maybe let me give each of you a chance to give whatever reactions you want. Is that okay? Maybe.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:22:09] Yeah.

Katie Ludlow Rich [00:22:10] I'd be curious about each of you, how you kind of experience that in your bodies and kind of what your. Your gut reaction is.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:22:18] Do you want to go first, Amy, or do you want me to?

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:22:20] You can go ahead.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:22:20] Okay, I'll go first. I. I am a lifelong Utah Mormon woman. Like, I. I think I'm the. I'm the only one here, right. Who was born In Utah, was 100. From the womb. I was just. Patriarchy was the only thing I ever knew. And I have lived in Utah for 43 years. Other than just a few months. I have lived here in either Davis county or Utah county, in very highly Mormon populated places. And I have noticed people all across the Internet, like, lose their minds over Jared Halverson. Like, I can't believe he would say something so absurd. And I guess my response is actually like, yeah, that's just kind of sounds like a Mormon guy. Like, why is everyone freaking out about this? Because I've heard men say these kind of things, and I think maybe I have. I'm glad, Amy, that you know Jared and that you can say, I think he's a real. Your experience have been that he's a really good guy. Because my gut says it's a really nice Mormon guy who just like so many Mormon guys that I know and love in my life, like, really important, good men, just don't get it. And I'm like, it's one more Mormon guy who doesn't get it. I've experienced this hundreds of times. Like, it's not any different. So honestly, my gut reaction is not the, like, fury and rage that other women maybe, who are not around as much Mormonism as me their whole life has. I think he seems like a nice guy who doesn't get it.

Jana Reese [00:23:43] That's me.

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:23:45] Yeah. Totally. I had both. I have a lot of. In my body, just, like, so much tightness in my chest and, like, kind of shaky, but also. Yeah, my husband listened to it after me, and he was enraged, and I was like, oh, that just seems so normal. So to your point, like, I kind of had the both of, like, No, I. I hate how that feels. It's. I. Yeah, you feel very talked down to and patronized and. And I have critiques for a lot of the content, which we'll talk about, which we all do. But it also is just totally. Like you said, I'll be like, yeah, that's, like, what I have to deal with all the time. It's not that different. Yeah.

Katie Ludlow Rich [00:24:24] Yeah. And I think that's kind of similar where it does sound so par for the course, but it's the patronizing, the listen with your feminine ears. And that I, because I am a man in the church, can counsel all women in the church and all women who may be leaving religion without needing to reflect what is going on on the institutional level to cause this without having to reflect. What about those stories that people are sharing with me that mean that they are actually making real choices for their lives? I'm just gonna give counsel to all of you.

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:24:59] I will also say, I do have to say, like, when he's like, I'm

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:25:02] shocked to see this. I was shocked that he was shocked.

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:25:05] I really did think, like, in 2025, especially studying what he does, like, this is new to you.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:25:12] How do you. This. That's.

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:25:13] That was actually shocking to me that he was so surprised by it. But we'll talk about. We'll talk about why in a minute.

Women's Erasure From Mormon History and Teaching

John Dehlin [00:25:19] So y' all aren't shocked that younger women are leaving the church at a higher rate than younger men?

Katie Ludlow Rich [00:25:24] No, no, not at all.

John Dehlin [00:25:26] Yeah.

Katie Ludlow Rich [00:25:27] And maybe we'll touch on that article he referenced. So women's History is American Religious History is an article by Anne Brod, who's a senior lecturer at Harvard Divinity School. She makes a tiny appearance in 50 years of exponent, too, because the then president and of the Oregon associate editor were attending Harvard Divinity School. And Ann came and spoke at an Exponent lecture. But her article talks about, yes, women outnumber men in the pews. And that has to the point at the time that she wrote, it had always been the case in America, and not at the pulpit, where that was men. But if you want to look and understand women's history and religious history, she gives a reframe. And what you have to do is look look at the presence of women in the churches, the power of men and women's role in dissent and in shaping these organizations. And in this episode, in this clip, it seems that Jared kind of stopped short, that he understands that, yes, women have always outnumbered men, but that if you want to understand the dynamic and what makes those dynamics happen, you have to look not just at that women are there, you have to look at the relationship to power and their role in dissent and how that shapes or pushes women out.

John Dehlin [00:26:51] Yeah. And I just want to thank you all for coming because I think we always need to remember that it's. This isn't fun to talk about. This is work and it's pain and its energy probably a lot more for y' all than for people like me. So thank you.

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:27:09] That's nice of you to say. And also, that kind of reminds me of another thing I felt was a little bit of frustration too, because I'm like, did you not read, like, my, the article that I wrote in 2016, Dear Mormon man, tell me what you would do. I'm like, you're exactly my target audience. Like, it's literally the title of the essay is addressed to you, Jared Halvorson. Like, you've never read that. This is news to you. And like the time and energy and blood, sweat and tears and gut wrenching work that we pour into trying to build a bridge to exactly him to help him understand, let alone, like, I mean, as I've done, breaking down patriarchy and realize that, like, women have been writing about this for hundreds of years. Hundreds of years. And just that, like, reinventing the wheel with each new generation of women not being able to benefit from what their foremothers said. And that's why we've had a hard time, you know, reaching gender equity for women. But also the frustration of all of this work. Just like, I'm sorry that you, you haven't, you know, learned about this yet, but it's not for our lack of effort. Like, we're really killing ourselves here to put this out there for men to be able to take advantage of. And like, let me make this in a smaller, more palatable, super entertaining, like, format so that you don't have to read a whole book. And it's not people's fault if they just haven't encountered it yet. But there was a little bit of that frustration for me too, of like, you really haven't. Okay, well, and we'll get to this later. But he's showing up now, it seems like, with like, real sincere intent and And I. We don't even need to direct this toward him as a person. But for men in general, there are so many resources out there for you to be able to understand why women are having the experiences they are so.

Katie Ludlow Rich [00:28:55] And part of this problem. And you can talk about, like, the definitions of patriarchy, right? But when you are looking at statistics here of huge generational shifts and are not looking at the structure and the institutional challenges that are leading to these results, not looking at how women's voices and dissent are being received by the institution or ignored, and that are making the problem an individual problem, that you as an individual, are not sacrificing enough, that you are too worldly as an individual. And if you were to be less worldly and sacrifice more, then the church can continue to benefit from your labor without us having to look at how the institution is harming enough people that we're seeing a generational shift.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:29:50] And I'll say we're talking about, like, Jared and all Mormon men like him who are so often such good men, who we love and who I know love us. Like, I don't feel like it's always this combative, like, we're fighting against them. It's the system that is just so ingrained in everything that they don't see it. And women don't always see it either. I have my own experience of, like, waking up. I think a lot of women have that feminist awakening or that faith crisis or something where suddenly they start to notice all of these things.

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:30:23] Women.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:30:24] One thing I did for years and years, I started paying attention, because once you start seeing it, you can't unsee it. You start. I started watching at church, like, how many men speak versus women. You know, general conference is one. A lot of people have started to notice in the last few years, like, why are there 34 speakers and only two of them are women? Like, that's one that's starting to come up, but most of it still goes right over everyone's head. So one thing I did, maybe this would be a good time to do it, is I list Katie and I, at least both of us, we listened to the whole podcast that this little clip from Jared was from, because it was like. Like Katie was saying it was an entire Sunday school lesson. I think if I'm understanding right, he does every single week with the come follow me lesson. And he also does it with, like, I was seeing all kinds of other places where he puts his lessons. And he's a great teacher. And I mean, like, he's good. He doesn't say nearly as much as me. I'm impressed. And so anyways, there's lots of great things about him. And honestly, his lesson was not bad. Like, this is probably a kind of inflammatory part that got pulled out and kind of, you know, lit a lot of people on fire. But, like, his lesson wasn't terrible. But what I did is I listened. It was about an hour and a half. I didn't even pay attention to how long it was I went through, and I wrote down every single time he talked about a man and every single time he talked about a woman. Now, this is the lesson on Emma Smith. This is. The title is An Elect Lady. And it's like the Girl Power, you know, supposedly Sunday school lesson in the year where we cover women. And Jared said things like, isn't it amazing that Emma gets an entire section to herself just for her? Like, what a blessing. And to me, with my feminine ears, I hear that. And I think, well, there's like 138 sections, and we get one for a woman. The other one is commanding her to accept polygamy or she'll be destroyed. Like, this doesn't feel like a brag. Kind of like two women speaking at general Conference, even if they give really good talks. That's not a brag. Hello. It's still. It's not a good thing. So, anyways, I was. So I went through less. So here's what I did. So Jared and I tried to be very generous with this. I'm just curious if he even noticed this, because I don't think he did, because most people don't. So. So I went through. He has four women that he mentions in his entire lesson. One is obviously Emma Smith, that the lesson is about the. And then the other three, I really. I really am being generous, giving these as mentioning women, because the second one is a story about him doing nice things for his wife. And it's a nice story. Again, none of these stories are bad. These are just. The point is, it's a focus on him. He says, here's a story about something I did for my wife. I would leave her little love notes everywhere. I'm a good husband. This is something nice I did for my wife. The third story mentioning a woman is a female student in one of his classes who had severe social anxiety, and she was terrified in getting in front of people. He had a revelation from God to tell her, you need to stand up and bear your testimony in front of people. So. And she was like, oh, don't want to. I'M really terribly shy. So again, it was him giving revelation to a girl, but it was a girl in the story. And then the last one, well, and here's what I did. I did either is it a one gender or a group of that same gender. And so the fourth one is he talks about bishops, wives and the advice, which is good advice that he gives to the wives of newly called bishops. And so three out of the four is really just a story about him that involves women. But we'll do four. We're going to be generous. Okay. Now, on the other hand, I'll try to go quickly through this. These are all the men that he talks about in this lesson. John Whitmer, Oliver Cowdery, Hyrum Smith, Samuel Smith, Joseph Smith, senior Joseph Knight, senior Joseph Smith. He talks about the missionaries who are all male at the time in general. He tells a story about the patriarch and him going to his patriarch first Patriarchal blessing. He talks about great Greg Dibb, a high counselor in a stake he really admired. He tells stories about Heber J. Grant and J. Golden Kimball. A story about Elder F. Button, if I heard that name right, Howard of the 70 coming to Puerto Rico when he was on his mission. And this guy, this general authority, gathered all of the priesthood leaders on the entire island. So all of the district presidencies and branch presidencies, and he as an elder, got invited to this priesthood meeting. And to quote Jared, he says it was amazing. And quick side note, I'm assuming that the sister missionaries were not invited to this priesthood meeting because as my experience with ordinary women goes, men are not very excited to invite women into their priesthood meetings. But I would, I would wager a huge amount of money that if there was a general authority visiting from Utah and all the men on the island came together, I bet you anything the Relief Society was in charge of the luncheon for the men, especially at that time. And so anyways, the sister missionaries were not there. They were there, but Jared was there and he was saying this was an amazing, again, kind of the experience, like you were saying with Amy, with him, that he loved going into the CES program and he just maybe didn't realize, like, oh, what would have been like to be a woman? So anyways, sorry I got sidetracked there. So he's telling this story and at this priesthood only meeting, a district president named Omo stands up and he answers a question to the general authority about how would he do his calling if he had to concentrate it into only three hours in a week and he said first he would have a one hour meeting with all of his priesthood leaders under him. So he'd have his counselors, the high council, come, all of the branch presidencies, because then he could meet with these men and they could run the church for him. And then another hour he would go on splits with the elders because it was important to be involved in the missionary work. Now he's obviously not going on splits with the sisters because he's a man and he can't. And then the third one, he did say he'd spend like an hour with his family maybe studying scriptures and stuff.

Speaker F [00:36:01] Stuff.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:36:02] Okay. So then he talks about Brigham Young, Parley P. Pratt, W.W. phelps. He shares a song that I looked up and it was composed by a man. And he tells a story about a male bishop who would watch the congregation to see who was singing. And he talks about Heavenly Father and Jesus never mentions Heavenly Mother. So I added up either 32 people or groups of people in total. Four of them, again, being very generous, I'm saying four of them were about women. So 88% of your lesson. That was supposed to be the girl power lesson of the year. The one year, the one lesson called An Elect lady was almost 90% men. And there's 220 people in the Doctrine Covenants. Two women are mentioned ever. I don't know if you know that, Emma. And one other woman whose name I always forget, that has like one verse in section 90. And I just feel like these kind of lessons go right over people's heads. They haven't, they don't notice it. Um. What were you going to say, Katie?

Katie Ludlow Rich [00:36:57] Sorry, just right on par with General Conference then with the statistics like that. This is very similar to what you're going to see within the lesson manuals themselves for many decades now. Similar to what you hear at any given conference, especially General Conference.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:37:12] Yeah. And even when there's like a sacrament meeting that feels like surface level, feels like a woman, a female centered sacrament meeting, like the primary presidency is speaking. If you actually sit and listen, you're like, well, they all base their talks on a general authority's talk. And all of the quotes were men and the scripture stories were men. And. And you go through and you're like, so it was a. It was a feminine mouth saying it, but the words that were coming out were very masculine. And I just. Two other like examples of this. This happens so much and if you really start watching it at church, you will see it all the time. I remember there was, when we were Doing teachings of the prophets. And there was the manual on Lorenzo Snow. There was a whole lesson on the Release Society. One chapter. Now recall, Lorenzo Snow has a sister named Eliza R. Snow who was literally president of the Release Society for over two decades. Like you could have even jumped and been like, we're going to talk about in the women's lesson, you know, in Release Society, we'll talk about his sister for one chapter. But no, you couldn't. And it was almost, I remember this was right as I was having my feminist awakening and I started like giggling in class because I just thought it was so ridiculous. Because what they did is they found there'd been a day that his sister had planned a day long Release Society event. And Lorenzo Snow happened to stop by for an hour in the middle and they said, will you stand up and say some words to the Release Society sisters? And he stood up and said, like, well, I don't know what you're all doing here, but I think you're amazing or something. And they took his words and turned the entire lesson into Lorenzo Snow stopping for an hour at an activity. And they couldn't, they couldn't see that. And nobody thought that was weird. And then it was like, within the next year, I had another one where it was Mother's Day and we were in Relief Society and the lesson was called Joseph and Hyrum Smith, comma witnesses for Christ. And I remember saying to, I had a really good bishop at the time and I remember saying to him in the hall, you know, the Relief Society is the women's organization today in the women's class for the women's organization on Mother's Day, the one day of year that we like celebration set aside specifically to honor women. Do you think it's a little weird that we had a lesson about two men and he actually kind of stopped and said, huh, okay, yeah, that is kind of funny. And then it went nowhere. And it was nice to hear him say that. But like, even men who listen and kind of are like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. It doesn't change anything. And so if you start watching, it's just lesson after lesson after lesson. It's just men, men, men. And that wears on you. And it changes the way you think as a little girl growing up in the church and as a woman in the church without even realizing that it's having that impact on you. I think until you start stepping back and seeing the big picture, you don't even realize the harm that it does and that it's doing to you and how much work it is to undo that internal lack of trust of yourself and lack of trust of other women and like, the. The innate, you know, thing to go to a man for the answer for everything, whether it's religious or not. And you have to, like, work your way through that. And we're. And we're propping it up all the time.

Katie Ludlow Rich [00:40:20] So, Amy, how do we start to see the structure? Like, how would you go from those individual experiences to moving to see this as not just an individual problem, but like a system?

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:40:33] Well, that's. Yeah, that's like, exactly what I was interested in when I started my education project. Right. Was like, where is this going to come from? And I was going to say, and this is related to this. Maybe not the structure, but the definitions. Because we were talking about before we started just like, quickly, the definitions of even patriarchy, of Patri, Father Archy, ruling system. And people, I think a lot of times think of patriarchy as always, like, oh, men are bad. That's women calling men bad. And it's. It's definitely not. You have, like, we're talking about benevolent patriarchy versus virulent patriarchy. And the. The definition would be like a virulent patriarchy, like you think of the Taliban or something, is where men say women are evil or gross or untrustworthy. Just women are bad, and so men need to be in charge. Benevolent patriarchy is men saying women are angelic and maybe even more moral. They're morally superior to men, and thus men need to be in charge. Right. And in benevolent. I think the way it feels, actually, I was thinking about this this morning that, like in a virulent patriarchy, or. Or maybe just a virulent patriarchy experience. Like the other day I heard a man say that his whole life he thought of women as whiny bitches. And when he said that phrase, like, I felt it in my body when. So when a man speaks in that way or when a structure functions in that way, it feels like a punch in the face. And it leaves a mark, it leaves a bruise. Everybody can look at it and say, that man is abusive. That guy's a jerk. And you can see how it affected the woman. And you can see that the problem is that man in benevolent patriarchy, it's more like a man giving a woman a cookie, and then she eats the cookie and she feels sick afterwards and she doesn't quite know why. And like, the men just giving women cookies, and you're like, I don't know why I'm feeling, is there something wrong with me? There might be something wrong with me because I feel sick after I'm eating these cookies. But he's so smiling at you. And. And the thing is, the cookies have poison in them. But the problem is. And they're both bad, right? Like virulent patriarchy, Benevolent patriarchy. They're both bad. The one challenging part of benevolent patriarchy is that it's very hard to identify what's going on. Because if the man is smiling at you and he's giving something, Giving you something that looks nice.

Virulent Versus Benevolent Patriarchy in the Church

John Dehlin [00:42:57] Compliment.

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:42:58] A compliment, or. Yes, like pedestalizing.

John Dehlin [00:43:01] Is that the word?

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:43:02] Yes, exactly. Then you think the problem is you. You don't know what's in that cookie. And the other thing is, it's hard to talk to men about it because the men also feel benevolent. They feel like, well, I'm doing this nice thing for you. And I think so. It's very hard to criticize the gift. And here's the thing, too, is they're often just giving women the cookies that they were given by the generation who taught them, here's how to be a nice man. Here's how to be a good man. Give women cookies. That's what you're supposed to do. And so when the woman is like, I think it's the cookies that are making me sick. Then he. Then it's a struggle for him to be like, wait, but I'm nice. And he is. And there's also no mark. And so he can say, like, I didn't hit you. Like, I'm doing all these nice things for you. So it's very, very tricky. So how do we see the structure of it? Like, how do you see, like, what's in this cookie? Like, what's in the cookie? There's poison in there. And that's what Abby was just unpacking. Like, look at the data. Look at the number of men. Let's think about how psychologically, emotionally, socially, this conditions us to doubt ourselves, to think less of ourselves as women, how it stunts men. I mean, there's all. There are all these ingredients. And, yeah, that's what I study is looking around the world and not just within Mormonism, but in other religions and in all kinds of, you know, government systems. The ingredients that go into those cookies that actually do make you people sick.

John Dehlin [00:44:29] Yeah, yeah. And I can just. Because I've made so many of these same errors that Jared's made before. You could just see him thinking, come on, I was trying to say something good to women. I was Trying to say something kind. I was trying to say how important they are. And you could even anticipate in his mind him thinking or feeling, dang, you just can't win. You know, if you're rude to women or you exclude them, you get in trouble with these feminists. But if you try and say nice things and compliment them and encourage them, you can see those thoughts, you know, and that emotional reaction. I just also wanted to add, if we're talking about numbers, we don't want to forget the Book of Mormon. By my count, there are six female names or women's names mentioned in the Book of Mormon out of 337. Like, we often talk about truth claims in the Mormon Church on Mormon Stories podcast, Book of Abraham, you know, polygamy, whatever. That's a problem. If 2% of the names in what the Mormon Church would call the most correct scripture on earth, the most correct book on earth, the most sacred Book of Mormon scripture, 2% of the names are women's names, that. That starts to hit at the truth claims level. So I just had to throw that in.

Katie Ludlow Rich [00:45:49] Yeah. So growing up at the church, women become very able to put themselves into male experiences. Right. To read scriptures written by men and for men and think, okay, how does this apply to me? And it's a muscle that we develop, and it becomes very strong. We're very good at that. But it. It can be hard to then flip. That's for men. And to. To hear how often men will, you know, if a woman comes on general conference, that is snack time. That is the bathroom break time. I have heard that in person when I was a BYU student from Boys. You know, things like that where they don't have to put themselves in that experience. And it becomes hard to see why they need to. And so then when they do hear women's experiences, it so often is still interpreting. How does this play into the prophet? What. What is this woman doing that supports or goes against what the prophet is saying? And it becomes too easy to still center the male experience even when they do hear what women say.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:46:58] You just reminded me of a story. I'm gonna see if I can remember it right. But there was. A few years ago, I was with a couple Mormon men and. And the man who's talking, I just want to clarify, in case he ever hears this, that I think he's one of the good guys, like a really good Mormon man who, for context, he had been divorced before and he was remarried. And anyways, he's really active in the church, loves the church. Good guy, just good guy all around. And I guess the stake president had once said to him something like, hey, brother, you know, so and so, I just want, you know, I think you would make a fantastic bishop. I don't know if that'll ever happen because you've been divorced, you know, kind of thing. But I just want to let you know, I think you'd be a great bishop. And he was expressing in front of me, like, oblivious to, to the what I'm about to bring up. He was talking to another man and he was having this conversation saying how disappointed it was because he felt like he could do a lot of good in the church and he could, he would be a fantastic bishop. I think lots of men make great bishops. I don't want to get rid of all men bishops and replace them all with women. I want to keep the good ones and have good female bishops too. But anyways, this guy, I just remember him kind of throwing his hands up in frustration and just kind of saying, like, but I can't even be a bishop. And I remember being like, hello, like your audience here. Like, you know me, you know my ordained women history. Like, you know these things about me. Like, but like, does not even occur to him. Like, men are so blinded. And I'm like, oh, is it frustrating to be like, I have talents and things to offer and I want to help my community and I want to make things better, but because of some dumb rule, you're not allowed to be in it. And I'm like, at least you did something. You got divorced. Like, I didn't do anything. I was just born as a woman and I didn't bring this up, I didn't say anything. But that's always stuck in my brain. And I'm just like, men don't, don't see it.

Exponent II and Ordained Women Explained

John Dehlin [00:48:58] Katie, would you mind just a 30 second to 1 minute summary of what Exponent 2 is and what it tried to do for Mormons and for the church for 30, 40, 50 years. And then, Abby, I want you to do the same thing with ordained women, because most of our audience is going to have no idea what ordained women was and what it tried to do. This is just to give people the history of women trying to help the church learn and do better. So what is Exponent 2?

Katie Ludlow Rich [00:49:25] Exponent 2 started as a quarterly newspaper from this group of women in Boston in 1974. And they had come across this publication called the Woman's Exponent, which was a Utah based, very suffragist, very women's Rights, but also very faithful paper from 1872 to 1914. Then there was the Relief Society magazine, and that had ended in 1970. And so this group of women find these stories and they're like, oh, like there's a huge long tradition of women in the church writing about these things. It's the women's movement in Boston. And they're like, we are going to talk about women's experiences and their faith together and start this little paper. And so they start a quarterly newspaper. And in 1975, got significant backlash by general authorities. And they were told things like, the Prophet speaks for the church. You do not speak for the Church. Do not get ahead of the Brethren. Do not talk about controversial issues like the Equal Rights Amendment, because it was coming up very soon that the church was going to come out publicly against that and use incredible resources for that. And so the original editor was forced to resign because of this pressure from general authorities. But the paper continued and it has lasted over 50 years, now is now a quarterly magazine, a daily blog, and an annual retreat.

John Dehlin [00:50:39] And to what extent would you say the Mormon Church leadership has embraced and incorporated and adopted, you know, the writings in Exponent 2 or not?

Katie Ludlow Rich [00:50:52] That's a great question. There is such a complicated relationship between the church and feminism and Exponent, we never again experienced such severe interference as in 1975 when general authorities flew out to Boston to tell them to discourage the publication. But there are times, like in the 90s, when there was this huge retrenchment and the September 6th excommunications were feminists and scholars were excommunicated for their writing. The Exponent staff wasn't excommunicated, but there were still consequences where, like Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian who's one of the founding mothers, because of what she wrote in exponent 2 about reading in the friend about so, which is the children's magazine from the church about a history of the church that didn't include women. And she was like, I could make some suggestions here about how to actually incorporate women. And it'd be real history, not a made up history, but how to talk about women's influence in the church. And a guy with the yellow highlighter, you know, cuts that out, hands it to general authorities, and without ever talking to her, she gets banned from speaking at byu. So there's a long, complicated relationship. And has it ever been embraced? Have I ever seen a change in the structure where women speaking about their experiences and about challenges in the church is really embraced by the Brethren? And Honored and that, like, this role of dissent is brought in as a valuable part of the church and the growth of the church. No, I have not seen that.

John Dehlin [00:52:24] Yeah. Has a Mormon church leader ever publicly said, hey, Mormons, Mormon women, Mormon men, y' all need to check out exported too. It's a great resource.

Katie Ludlow Rich [00:52:32] No, certainly haven't heard that. But I also haven't heard in invitations to, like, talk publicly about your experiences and your challenge. Because we actually want to hear that.

John Dehlin [00:52:41] Yeah.

Katie Ludlow Rich [00:52:42] And be part of, like, partnership to make change. Yeah, haven't seen that either.

John Dehlin [00:52:47] Okay. And then, Abby, really quickly, can you just remind people about what ordained women tried to do and. And how. How that was received?

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:52:56] Sure, I'll try to do it quick. In 2013, a movement of Mormon feminists called itself Ordained Women, including, came and said, basically, okay, here. Basically, it was the kindest, sweetest, gentlest, most faithful testimony promoting group of women possible in the sweetest, kindest, most gentlest, politest way possible, asking, please, to our prophet, could you pray about the possibility of women receiving equality in the church? Which would mean women being ordained to the priesthood. Black men didn't used to be ordained to the priesthood. Like, things can change. We belong to a church of continuing revelation that has a prophet that's supposed to be able to receive revelation. And so there was just a website at first where people could go and put up a profile and say, hey, I'm. It was kind of in the style of, like, I'm a Mormon. And it would say, I'm Abby. I'm a mom. I love this, this, and I think women should be ordained. And I joined my voice, asking the prophet to please pray about this. It was. There was no demanding. Like, if the story you have in your mind is that these women were like, rioting on Temple Square. Like, you got the church's version of what happened. It was a bunch of women like me. At the time, I was in my primary presidency. I was a ward missionary, and I was the compassionate service leader, and I had a stellar Vizne teaching record. I'd also like to point out. And that was me. And I was a woman who was reaching kind of a breaking point where I was like, this is not working for me. Things are falling apart. And ordained women came onto the scene because they went to our general conference or twice annually. What's that called? Biannually, twice a year, we have general conference. And they had gone and politely in their church clothes, stood in line outside of the priesthood meeting, because the priesthood meeting said, it's for all Priesthood holding men and any prospective priesthood holders. So like, while the women are standing there, a Japanese tourist in jeans walks by, is like, what's this meeting? And they're like, come on in. And they would, you know. And he just walked right in because any man is a prospective priesthood holder. And the women said, we consider ourselves prospective priesthood holders. And they waited politely in a line and they said, no, you can't come in. And the women said, well, thank you for letting us wait in line. And they walked away. And so I saw that in 2013, I saw that first time the group went to General Conference. And I felt so moved. And I even remember like having the conversation in my kitchen, you know, saying, have you heard of the Sardine Women group? And you know, being told like, yeah, it's dumb, the men aren't lining up to go to Release Society meeting or something. And I said, really? Because I think they're kind of cool. And it just moved something in me. So I put a profile up on the site just with my picture saying. And it was one of the strongest spiritual promptings I'd ever had in my life. Like, it was all I could think about for weeks on end. Like, you should put up a profile. You should put up a profile. This is what you could write in your profile. Anyways, when I put it up, I got a lot of particularly bad backlash. Backlash from my local priesthood leaders, I guess, because I had seemed like. I guess my stellar visiting teaching record had made them feel like I was really happy with everything and, and I really experienced like talking to again, men not hearing, like going in and pouring my heart out. I'm sorry, I'm getting sidetracked. Pouring my heart out to a bishop, like bearing my soul and saying, these are what's hurting me and this is why I'm doing it. And thinking that he would hear me because he knew me, he knew how good I was. I'd been in his ward for over a decade. His wife was my good friend. Like, he knew me, he knew I wasn't a bad person. And so I laid all my pain out. And what happened is he took it and used it as a way to give me church discipline and say, well, I can tell Satan has control of you and you are a bad influence for the women in this ward. And we're going to take away your temple recommend, release you from all your callings, not let you speak in church. We're going to talk about a disparate council up to excommunication and all these things. And I was like, I just wrote a profile on there. So anyways, it's. And then at that point, I was like, well, now I'm radicalized. And so then I did end up joining the group in person. I ended up leading the first group of women into the Marriott center fall of 2014. Like, if you Google me, you'll find pictures of me taking a group of women into the first priesthood session. And. And just that's what moved me.

Speaker F [00:57:13] And.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:57:13] And the documentary that I was featured in and stuff that all these things happened because I was just a very sincere woman in the church, feeling uncomfortable trying to find a place. So I'm sorry, that was much longer than your.

John Dehlin [00:57:28] How many people were excommunicated as a result of.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:57:31] I think it was just Katie Kelly that got excommunicated. She was the original founder and she was an active Mormon woman, and she just wanted to make things better. And yep, I'm pretty sure she was the only one, unless I'm forgetting something.

John Dehlin [00:57:46] And I should say, when I was summoned by my bishop into a disciplinary council ordained. My. My ordained women profile was mentioned as one of the reasons that I would be excommunicated.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [00:57:56] That's funny. I just remembered yours went up, like, at Thanksgiving, because I was at Thanksgiving dinner and I was like, oh, John Dillon put up. And mine went up on December 2nd of 2013, and yours went up. Thanks. And I just connected that I didn't know you at the time, but it's nice to re. It's nice to have a reunion. All of us in our church discipline reunion trauma bonding group.

John Dehlin [00:58:20] I think. I think 2013 to 2015 is going to go down as a watershed couple years in people losing their faith in and leaving the Mormon Church and ordained women has a lot to do with that, along with the exclusion policy for LGBT youth. And I want to get Amy in, but Katie, looks like you want to say something really quick.

Responding to Jared's Apology and What Change Requires

Katie Ludlow Rich [00:58:43] So I just want to kind of pivot to Jared's apology when he got this big backlash and how if his response leads to like, it seems so sincere and it seems so meaningful. And I had a really nice email interaction with him yesterday. And I'm like, this is a guy who. It is so rare to see the level of humility and sincerity and apology in recognizing hurt and a willingness to listen. And then I'm like, this could be a moment of hope that I see where in so many other previous experiences there was not that kind of humility and willingness to listen and learn. And I just hope if I ever face the level of public backlash that he has this week, that I'll have half the grace he has had in responding.

John Dehlin [00:59:31] Absolutely agree. Amy, I was just going to quickly ask you to share, just really briefly, your attempt, because you came out with that essay, dear Mormon man. What would you have me.

Amy McPhee Olivest [00:59:44] What would you do?

John Dehlin [00:59:44] What would you do? And then you also came out with the Breaking Up Patriarchy YouTube channel. Do you want to just briefly talk about your attempts as well? Because the context here for me is how much Jared calls himself a historian. Not to pile on him, because he's just one of many. How much of Exponent 2 as a historian has Jared read? How much did Jared know about ordained women in the history there and then? Amy, I also think mentioning what you've tried to do to help educate the Mormon Church of men also plays in here.

Amy McPhee Olivest [01:00:16] Yeah, thanks. And that was kind of on my mind, too, as I was thinking again about his video where he's like, whoa, women are leaving. Like, why?

Jana Reese [01:00:24] And.

Amy McPhee Olivest [01:00:24] And he answers a lot of his own questions in the video, right? He says, like, it's just crazy. Like, they do all of this invisible labor. They show up, they show up, they show up. Sometimes men do, sometimes men don't. And women do until they don't. And that happened in Great Britain. And I think we're. That's what he's seeing is we're reaching a tipping point in our church and in religion in general. And yeah, he answers some of his own questions and, and then, but then there's just this big. There's obviously like the invisible labor part that he talks about that he's like, women do all this heavy lifting in the church, and so they're so important. But we're not given. We're not given a voice. We have no vote. It's not in any way equitable. And so, but the gap in his understanding is what does it feel like? Why are women leaving? And what you both just shared, like, here's why. So I think, Katie, you said you gave him a copy of 50 Years of Exponent, right? Like, you can start a copy of that.

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:01:19] Yeah. So yesterday I went to BYU campus because BYU Special Collections had an exhibit about 50 years of Exponent 2. Like, that archive is what has held the record starting since 1977. It's what Heather and I used in writing the book. And I think it's really presumptuous to show up at someone's office and give them a copy of your own book in a moment like this. But to be fair, less than half is what Heather and I wrote in the Institutional History, and the rest is an anthology with lots of different women's voices. And I thought that this is one piece of, like, you can hear women's experiences, and you can read what it was like to be in the relief Society in 1960, when you were in charge of budgets and in charge of programming and receive lessons that were created by women and focused on the needs of women and how that has changed over time and how Even from the 1960s to now, women have less autonomy and authority in the church than they did even for living memory of women who are in their late 70s and 80s and many of whom I interviewed for this book. And it's just one tool here to be handed. Here is so much experience and knowledge and wisdom that can maybe help you understand why we are facing this moment.

John Dehlin [01:02:31] It's just such a silo. Because on the one hand, he holds himself out as one of the experts in the church for why people are leaving the church, yet as it relates to women's issues specifically, he seems to have read very, very little about the. The, you know, women's experiences leaving the church. What. What's he studying if he's an expert on people leaving the church? If it's not one of the three great threats to the church, which is feminism. Right.

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:02:59] And to his credit, when I left that book next to his office, he emailed me. He's like, are you still on campus? I'd love to meet with you. He runs down and he looks at that exhibit of 50 years of excellence. Exponent, too. He started reading the book last night. He's like, I'm gonna put it on the top of my pile. And I really appreciate that he's in this moment and is like, okay, I have missed something, but I want to show up here, and I'm very interested to see how that. How that goes.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [01:03:26] So it turns out we're starting a Jared Halverson fan club. We like you, Jared. We want you to keep. Whenever men come onto Exponent to, like, whenever a man comes on and says something like, I've been a bishop three times and on the head council, and I always try to listen to women, and I love women and stuff. Sometimes I. And I totally understand why sometimes women will jump in and, like, kind of bite their head off and be like, whoa, you think you're.

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:03:49] You know, guess what?

Abby Maxwell Hansen [01:03:49] We never had this. They get mad. And I always. I always. If you come to exponent 2, and you come and read and you engage as a man in these discussions in a respectful way. I will always say thank you for coming and joining our space and listening to our voices. Now you might have some blind spots and we would love to help you. And I think you, you were probably a wonderful bishop. Like, thank you for having been a bishop who listened to women. There's still structural problem, all the things that Amy is such an expert on. But thank you for doing the best you could in the system. Now, can you. Will you listen to us and engage? And I think when men are coming respectfully to our spaces and listening, we should not kick them out. We should embrace them. We need our male allies because we are not in positions of power in this system and men can do things that we can't do. We want you to come and read Exponent 2. Come and follow us on Instagram. Go and follow the Amazing Amy's YouTube. Go binge this weekend. All of her videos she's ever made.

John Dehlin [01:04:51] Breaking down patriarchy.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [01:04:53] Breaking down patriarchy. Come and listen because you'll learn so much. And we want you here. We want the Jared Halversons. We don't want the jerks like you guys can just. We don't want the word radio. You guys can stay right where you are, but we want the Jared Halversons. We love you guys. We want you here.

Amy McPhee Olivest [01:05:10] 100% agree.

John Dehlin [01:05:11] Love it. If it's okay, can I read a few of the comments responses just, just so we can get a sampling? So many of our viewers and listeners responded and I thought we would just maybe share a couple and then we're going to go to some of the other responses. So women on the stand, they wrote. Women definitely are needed and we uphold the church. That is so true. I wonder, however, if there is any room in your. What I know is sincere worry about women leaving religion. For wondering why women might be leaving, I fear that women who are yearning for small and impactful changes that promote partnership and show respect and value for women's voices, wisdom and perspective may need more than just a quote. Please keep doing what you've always done because it's all on your shoulders. Close quote. Isn't responding to our needs important? Won't we be stronger if we do? What can we do to make more room for young women to thrive and flourish? Isn't that how we help them stay and how we build Zion together? So that's women on the stand.

Mormon Feminist Voices and Online Communities

Abby Maxwell Hansen [01:06:22] We love women on the stand. That's Amy. She's a fantastic Instagram account to follow as well. For anybody who wants to learn about Mormon Feminism. Women on the stand is great.

John Dehlin [01:06:31] And I'm pretty sure they were the ones who were having women sit on the stand in the Bay Area and then eventually were told by area authorities that women couldn't sit on the stand during church meetings.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [01:06:41] That's what started the thing.

Amy McPhee Olivest [01:06:43] Yeah.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [01:06:44] She's another ink, by the way. Yeah, that's your state. We love all the enemies.

Speaker F [01:06:48] Yeah.

Amy McPhee Olivest [01:06:48] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:06:50] Okay, so shout out to them. Let's just read a couple more. The next one is Edge of Inside. If women are so needed and important to the church, why are we relegated to positions of labor with little to no voice? Teenage boys have more authority than women. We know our worth and value and choose to participate in places where our voices are valued. Keeping the church afloat by only doing as we're told by the men is no longer palatable to many of us. We don't need or appreciate platitudes and placation. We desire respect and equality. I see some heads nodding.

Amy McPhee Olivest [01:07:31] Yep.

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:07:32] Well, yeah, it just makes me think back to the point that Anne Broad made in that article. Jared referenced that when you look at the history of religion in America, you can't just look at the presence of women in the pews.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [01:07:44] You.

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:07:44] You also have to look at the relationship to power and what they do when they dissent. Their voice of dissent. How does that shape. And in the LDS church, the most common response to people speaking up about their experience, not even when they're organizing things like ordained women, but especially when they are organizing things. The response is to encourage it to shut down, to excommunicate, to ostracize, and not to have any level of process where people can talk to each other in ways that can kind of bring these good people and their hearts together.

John Dehlin [01:08:26] All right, let me just read. Let me just read a couple more and then we'll play the video from Julie Hanks and Britt Hartley. Dr. Julie Hanks chimed in, and she shared, and she's also joining us in the live stream. I think right now, Julie Hanks wrote, maybe churches need to reflect on what they are doing or not doing to push women out of the church. Women aren't the problem. Women are tired of associating with organizations that don't listen to their voices, that don't give them authority and don't offer privileges that they offer men. Church is the only place in my life where I am told I can't do certain things because I am a woman. I am prevented from holding certain leadership positions because I'm a woman. I am prevented from Blessing others lives through performing ordinances. Because I am a woman, I don't see my gender reflected in the leadership of the church or in general conference talks. Women are leaving religion because it is so steeped in patriarchy. Women aren't leaving churches for worldly things. Women are leaving because we are no longer tolerating sexism and systems that limit opportunities to serve. Churches are the only place left in my world where women are denied opportunities of gender. That's why women are leaving. It's not a mysterious phenomenon. I'm seeing some, some heads nod. Any quick reactions there?

Amy McPhee Olivest [01:09:58] Yeah, actually one comment that I saw was to this video actually was, this is like the slum Lord being mad that I found a better place to live. Like, and that really made me laugh. But yeah, it isn't, it's not a mysterious phenomenon. I, it also reminds me of a quick analogy. I have a sister who works in a very super, super important and underpaid profession and she recently got in the mail like a little thank you note and a Jamba Juice, like five dollar gift certificate. She's a nurse, so she does like life saving work is not paid enough. And like the president of the hospital sent all the nurses a $5 Jamba juice card that was like, you are so important. We value your work so much. And she's like, you know, there's a way to show value. There's a way to show that you value someone and it's called paying them what they're worth. And that the analogy comes to mind. Like women have said over and over and over again for decades and centuries. Like, here's how you show that you value us. We don't want you to say women, you're so amazing. Women, you're so important. Women, you hold up the church. We're so tired of being told that we've already told you how you can value us and that is by listening to what we're actually saying. And there's, there's plenty of material out there.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [01:11:20] So I've heard so many Mormon men say, oh, I was taught to receive respect. Women growing up, the church taught me to respect women. Boys around me, they would tell dirty jokes and they would try to go too far on dates. But no, I respected women. And I thought, you know what, I don't actually care if you tell a dirty joke around me. Like, like, you know, I don't really want you to, but it's not the end of the world. Do you know how you could respect me would be to treat me as an equal Rather than being like, hey, I need to preside over you, I need to come sit in on your meetings. I need to, to be the keynote speaker in your female meetings. You know, that would actually be respect. And I feel like sometimes Mormon men have got the wrong idea of what kind of respect we want, because I don't. It's nice that you don't try to fill me up on a date, but that's not the only type of respect. Like, I also want the respect that says you're my equal. I think you're just as smart as me. I. I will sit and listen to you. Come. Come and be a speaker in our priesthood meeting. I want to learn from women.

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:12:25] So can we talk about the Emma Smith of it all? And please, like any other comments that

John Dehlin [01:12:30] there are and give context for those who don't mind you.

Emma Smith, Doctrine and Covenants, and Women's Stories

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:12:34] So this particular come follow me lesson was about Doctrine Covenants 25, which is one of two directed towards Emma Smith. Right. And the Other one is DNC132, which is the polygamy chapter. And so Jared talks about polygamy a little bit in this broader episode, but what he is saying is, like, Joseph and Emma were a power couple, that they were the first prophet and first president of the Relief Society, and that they were equally yoked. And he's saying, like, Emma has some heads and tails here, you know, some strengths and weaknesses. And, and some of that is that she sometimes supported polygamy as the strength and that she sometimes opposed it is the weakness. And that in DNC 25, that if this was just Joseph talking to her, not the Lord, Emma would be the first one to call that out. He doesn't talk about how when she was presented with DNC 132, she threw it in the fire and said, this is not from God, Right? So of the two sections directed to her once she said is, this is not from God, and she threw it in the fire. And if he's saying she would be the first one to call it out, she did that Relief Society fell apart two years after it was founded. So it was founded in 1842 in Nauvoo, when Joseph had already secretly married about a dozen women behind her back. It falls apart in 1844, two years later, when by that time Joseph had married both of so of her two counselors, the original secretary and the replacement secretary. He had married all of them or one of their daughters in one case, none of this with her consent. So Relief Society falls apart because in part because he had tasked her With. With rooting out the rumors of polygamy. And so part of Relief Society's purpose is to protect Joseph's reputation while he was actively marrying dozens of women who were participants in Relief Society. And so we are not talking about a power couple equally yoked. If we cannot look at the power imbalance there and the abuses of power that were happening within the marriage and within the institutional church. And if we can't talk about that imbalance of power and the abuses of power, then why are we pretending that this is an equally yoked couple that had a good and healthy marriage and using Emma as the example to women to stay in the church and sacrifice more? Emma left the LDS Church. She did not follow Brigham west, and she called out these abuses. If we're going to follow Emma's example, then that is an example of open dissent against abuses of power. It is against removing yourself from institutions that continue to abuse you. And there's a whole other religious tradition that stays with Emma and her sons and now ordains women. It's now the community of Christ and is a very different tradition when it does not follow polygamy.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [01:15:32] I will say, yeah, Emma is kind of like the leading, like, heroine for. We're talking today about women leaving the church. We're not talking about the women who are comfortable and happy and love the church, who are. So many of my friends and the people around women around me are women who love the church. We're talking about this section, this little group of women who are very on the edge leaving or have left the church for this group of women. Emma is like our charging. Like, she's the one who stood up to Joseph Smith, who, Who let. Yeah, like, saying left the church, who I. Here's my experience, and I feel like this is. I've heard this happen to lots of other women, but I kind of went through a faith crisis. And then there was a night where I had just read all of the. I was starting to read, like, the real complete history of Joseph and Emma. And I have. And it's funny because that apology from Jared Halverson, he's up at 2:22am losing sleep. And I'm like, you know what? I'm glad that a man is up losing sleep over women's issues, because I remember that night, it was probably about 2014, 2015 in there somewhere, where I stayed up all night sobbing over the story of Emma and Joseph. And sometimes when people say to me, like, I know all about polygamy, like, it doesn't bother me I think, do you know all about polygamy? Because unless you've stayed up all night crying, I don't believe you really know all about polygamy. I think you know the church's version of polygamy. Because when I started hearing all these. Because I had that Deseret book version of Joseph and Emma, like, the love letters, the Jared Halverson, like this come, follow me lesson version of Joseph and Emma, which was they were equally yoked. They were a power couple. They were so in love. They both supported each other. And then I started reading. I was like, wait, he had 35 other wives. He didn't even get sealed to her. Delayed. Already sealed himself to, like, 22 other women. He was marrying all these women behind her back. Like, you were just saying, Katie, like, she was standing up in Relief Society saying, we have to defend Joseph. He is not this full. You know, he's not stepping out on me and getting all these extra wives while all these women secretly behind her back were married to him. And I remember just. That's what gutted me, is because I started thinking, what if I was going around my neighborhood and all my friends in my Release Society class who I think were my best friends, all of these other women in my neighborhood and my. And all these people that I think are my close friends that have my back. I find out. I'm humiliated to find out that not only is my husband marrying all of them, but, like, they're all lying to me. They're all in on the thing, and I'm standing up like a big, dumb idiot in front of everyone saying, oh, Joseph is not responsible for this. That's what broke me. And then I started reading stories about, like, a time that Joseph got violently ill. And they think maybe it was stomach ulcers in retrospect. But immediately when he got ill, Brigham and Joseph were like, emma poisoned him. She's trying to murder him. And Emma was like, no, I swear I didn't poison him. Like, I didn't do it. And I just realized, like, wait, that's not the Deseret book version of Joseph Emma that I'm familiar with. Like, they think she was trying to murder him. She hated him so much. And, like, just hearing these stories, it's just crazy to me that a historian, like a very nice historian, like Jared would use Emma when we now live in a day when we can go and learn the real story of Emma and our hearts can break for her as, like, an example of. Of equality. No, she's one out of 35 wives. And when only one out of a married couple is able to say, hey, I'm going to talk to God and get a revelation for you. Oh, you're going to be destroyed if I can't have more wives. When that's. And the, and the one on the other end just has to take it and the most she can do is throw it in the fire. That is not an equal. And that's. And that's indicative of the entire system of the church when the men can give the women blessings and speak on behalf of God to women, and when men are the only ones who can receive revelation or scripture. Or just like Jared Halverson talking about the girl in his class that had a lot of social anxiety in this lesson where he was talking to her and he had a direct revelation from God to tell her that she needs to get over her shyness and stand up in front of people like women. We don't do that. We are not trained to give blessings and to receive revelation for other people. We aren't ever talking to a man and say, whoa, God's talking to me. And God says that you should take my nursery calling. Like, we never, we don't experience that, but men do that all the time to us. It's such an uneven balance. Emma and Joseph are a great example of all of the problems with rest of the church.

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:20:01] And I think even if you do have like a really sincere testimony of Joseph Smith as a prophet of the restoration of the gospel, you can still look at that relationship and take important lessons. It doesn't even have to mean inherently that you totally reject the church or Joseph or, or any of that. You can still look at their relationship and say, what does this teach us about power? What does this teach us about how we can be better responsive to abuses of power? We can still learn from it without throwing everything out, if that is what you want to do.

Amy McPhee Olivest [01:20:30] And I'll just point out too, just thinking about, you know, our knowledge of this. I'm just thinking about how I think all of us experienced our, our feminist awakening or like learning, starting to learn this history much later in life. I'm just thinking about like this more complicated history, like the true history of polygamy of Claudia Bushman and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and our feminist foremothers within the church. My, my mom, for example, she's never heard of those exponent women. She doesn't know the, the, the real story of polygamy. I discovered it in my 30s and 40s along with then all of these other Feminist foremothers outside the church and, and like this critique of patriarchy starting to see the system. It wasn't until my 30s and 40s, my daughters have grown up knowing it. They've learned about, you know, again, in the secular world, Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympic de Gouge in school. I didn't. And they're learning about that stuff in church thanks to Mormon stories and Exponent 2 and even Ordain women and just the Internet.

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:21:36] So I feel like the Internet with breaking down patriarchy.

Amy McPhee Olivest [01:21:39] And thank you. I'm working my guts out, you know, trying to put that information out there. But so, like, again, is it. Is it a mystery that, like, now that, you know, you see the graph and now women are starting. Women are starting to see the system. And this is actually like, really gratifying and really moving to me that, that concept again of Gerda Lerner, the historian, that was like, women are not making progress because they haven't been able to benefit from the knowledge that has already been gained in prior generations. You can see that it's happening now. We know. We know these stories now. We are discovering them in our adulthood. But I'm sorry to say, but that graph is just going to keep moving in that direction, I think, because the information is out there now. We have the critical thinking skills to question what we're being told. When men are like, I received a revelation, or this is just the way it's always been. We know better now. And so, yeah, that's, that's the way the momentum is just going to keep going. So they have to be able to reckon with that and, like, what the real issues are about, why women are leaving. And that's one of them.

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:22:40] And we have to be able to welcome people in when they have those feminist awakenings.

Speaker F [01:22:43] Right?

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:22:44] Right. And I know we've kind of touched on this already. Like, you had said that, like, most of us discover these concepts in our adulthood. Right. And it's okay if somebody has not been attuned to that, has not. Has read maybe Mormon Enigma and thinks they understand something about Emma, but has not looked at the power dynamic yet and now are willing to thank you, like, thank you for being willing to challenge what you previously understood and incorporate new information that when you know better, you. You can do better. And that's all of us. We are all learning so much and we have to be willing to adapt. And I think that the concept of the unshakable is so interesting to me because I remember even being an active member and thinking I don't want an unshakable faith because when something huge happens, I want to be able to move and adjust and be. Be changed by what I learn and, like, let it be. I have a growing faith, a growing spirituality, a growing. An adaptable thing as I learn more.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [01:23:53] I would like to quote Katie quoting someone else, but I forgot who you were quoting, so you can tell me. I think it was a founding mother of exponent too. But you said something to me this summer. You said, or another woman said, our communication in the church used to be vertical. Do you know who I'm talking about? And it used to be the leaders would tell us stuff and then we would do it. But the Internet has changed that because now our communication has become horizontal for the first time ever. So a woman in Nebraska who keeps getting yeast infections can talk to a woman in New Mexico who's also getting yeast infections, and we can put together from wearing garments. Yes, I. I should. Yes, I should have gotten to that point a little sooner. But we can talk and be like, oh, this is not just a me problem. This is a problem that other women are experiencing. Like, oh, I didn't just have a bad bishop. This is a system where bishops do not understand the needs of women. And we can be like, oh, what worked in your stake? Well, I could try that in mine. And we're talking together on this level that never happened before. And unfortunately for the brethren, the Internet is not going away at this point. And so this horizontal communication, it. We're never going back to that vertical. Do you remember who said that?

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:25:07] Yeah. So that was Joanna Brooks, who is one of the editors of the book Mormon Feminism. And that was a huge part of my Mormon feminist awakening because I had seen so many pain points in my life, and that book gave me my own history. Like Amy was talking about, that when we're cut off from our history, we just keep reinventing the will. And I. And I'm there alone, thinking I'm the only one who has gone through the temple and left sobbing because of how painful it was to hear this patriarchal language, like 20 years old. Getting married three days later. That was my moment of being totally shaken up by the church and being like, oh, they think I am covenanting to my husband, that my husband becomes my Lord and God. And I didn't gain the language of salvific coverture. Later, until Brooklyn Fever wrote an article that I read and helped me understand why this system that was being taught in the temple without it ever being named right and so that's the moment I have. And it's that book by Joanna Brooks and Rachel Huntstein book and Hannah Wheelwright that gave me my history within Mormon feminism. We have this horizontal communication. We are teaching each other, and it's not going back to where we can just shut down dissent or even just experience, if not dissent.

John Dehlin [01:26:23] I'm super. I'm loving this conversation. Thank you all so much for everything you're sharing so far. Let me just share a few comments from our viewers and listeners. First of all, let me just say, if you're enjoying this presentation and you Want to see YouTube, share it all throughout the world with the algorithm. Please take a second to like this episode either on Facebook or on YouTube. Feel free to subscribe to the channel, comment in the comments, share the link, all of those things YouTube calls engagement. And engagement motivates YouTube to then push this video out throughout the world. So thanks for everyone who's joining us. Y' all be happy to know we have 1100 people joining us on the live stream, which is a very strong number for. For a live stream. So I love it that people are caring about this issue. Thank you so much. I'll just share a couple things. Thanks to Angie Millett for the donation. No, not yet, Maven. Please go back to the regular screen. Thanks to Angie Millett for her donation. Someone called Sumner Brent writes, I've known Abby since Girl Scouts. She's always had that rare spark to lift others. This channel and convo are so meaningful. Thank you, Abby, for being a light in our community.

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:27:39] Thanks.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [01:27:40] I know who that is.

John Dehlin [01:27:41] Thanks.

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:27:41] Girl Scout leader for over a decade. Incredible work.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [01:27:44] Giant Girl Scout troop goes on without me. I just retired, but, you know, buy some Girl Scout cookies. That's why I'm in my Girl Scout uniform in the picture. My grandma's Girl Scout uniform from the 30s.

John Dehlin [01:27:54] And also just, you know, Christina Cruz, thanks for your super chat as well as Jesse. Rich. We really appreciate it when, when you all are able to support us financially. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, Rich. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker F [01:28:08] There we go.

John Dehlin [01:28:08] Thanks, Jesse.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [01:28:09] Rich.

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:28:09] Jesse.

John Dehlin [01:28:10] And then really quickly now, maybe you could change to the comments. I want to read Katie's tiny, tiny bit spicy comments. It's just too good not to share. Katie wrote in response to Jared's original video. This is so cute. You think preaching to women about not holding up the entire sky so that more men can stand at pulpits above them, preaching at them is a winning strategy. I'd love to hear how much of your research has included reading books and Listening quote with your masculine ears. Close quote to podcasts by, from and for women to hear and understand the actual concerns of women leaving religion. How much of your concern has included the humility of to believe you don't already know the answer? So, Katie, that's a little spicy.

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:29:06] To Jared, I'm going to say I'm sorry I was an asshole because, like, I'm just like, popping off there. When I heard, like the. With your feminine ears. I think, like, just steam was coming out of my feminine ears. And I, I think that's one of the problems with algorithms and with the Internet is that we can have these moments where we forget that we're talking to real people here.

John Dehlin [01:29:26] Yeah.

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:29:26] And that was definitely a moment I had where I. And I have experienced heat on the Internet where I'm like, oh, don't you realize, Like, I'm a real person? And so that was the grace that he has shown. Even with assholes like me popping off like that. Like, thank you, Jared, for being willing to be kind when not all of us were.

John Dehlin [01:29:43] I mean, I think that's gracious of you. I think it's gracious of Jared, but also, I don't know, a marginalized, traumatized group, do they need to also carry the burden of caring for men's feelings at a moment like this? Like, it's gracious, it's probably constructive. And also we should just know that women should be able to just be angry and not have to caretake men's feelings.

Speaker F [01:30:04] Maybe.

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:30:05] Okay, so to an extent, right. But if we're going to have productive conversations and invite people to actually learn and actually move forward, and if he is going to continue to be willing to, to read things that people said to him and to actually change and incorporate his opinions and I think at some point we have to extend the grace that people can learn and grow. Do Mormon women need to, in general just protect and hold the feelings of men? Mormon men who get their feelings hurt if women don't like something they do or say no, but especially when they show a willingness to listen. I'm like, okay, let's give some grace. And yeah, I think all our cool, our jets and not just keep like throwing flame, but be like, okay, now let's have a conversation.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [01:30:51] Yeah, I, I think all of us exponent to and breaking down patriarchy, our platforms, we want men to come and engage and listen and we promise we will not bite your head off if you make a mistake. We will. If you come in as an, as an asshole yourself, we might have Katie, be spicy on you for a moment.

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:31:09] We might block you. But.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [01:31:11] But if you come in genuinely wanting to learn and engage Mormon men and post Mormon men, to come in and deconstruct the patriarchy and see us as real human beings who want to have relationships with the men in our lives, who love the men in our lives, hate patriarchy, love men. It's a totally different things.

John Dehlin [01:31:32] Beautiful. All right, well, we are in. You're all. If you haven't enjoyed already what we've talked about enough, we have even more. We're so excited to now have joining us on the podcast, Dr. Jana Reiss. So I'll bring Jana on. Hey, Jana.

Jana Riess Presents Data on Mormon Retention

Jana Reese [01:31:50] Hey. How are you?

John Dehlin [01:31:51] Good. Thanks so much for joining us.

Jana Reese [01:31:53] Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure to listen to part of the conversation I've caught the last 20 minutes or so.

John Dehlin [01:32:00] Yeah. Well, it's an honor to have you. This is not your first time on Mormon Stories podcast, but every time is. Is a real honor and a thrill for me. Jana, would you tell us really quickly just a little bit about yourself and kind of what you do and especially since today's episode is around why people are leaving, why women are leaving the Mormon Church, how your research kind of ties to that, and then maybe we'll show a little bit of data.

Jana Reese [01:32:25] We love data. So I'm Jana Reese and I'm the author of the book the Next Mormons, which came out of the a few years ago from Oxford University Press. That book was looking at generational change within Latter Day Saint the fold in the United States and basically arguing that millennials were a little bit of a different breed than two generations ago. And with my research partner, Benjamin Knoll, who is a political scientist, I am co authoring another book which is primarily looking at people, people who either leave the church or who have experienced a faith transition but decide to stay in a sort of liminal space. And that book is due in August to Oxford. So lots and lots of work right now.

John Dehlin [01:33:13] Excellent. Okay, well, you've prepared some slides for us to kind of answer this question. Based on the data you understand, the research you've done and absorbed, you can kind of help us start to understand why Mormon women are leaving. So should we jump into the data?

Jana Reese [01:33:33] Yeah, go to the 1 of LDS retention rates over time.

John Dehlin [01:33:37] Okay, so here's, here's a slide. Here's some data. Could you see it?

Jana Reese [01:33:42] Yeah. Okay, wonderful. Okay, so just to give a big picture, it's not just women who are leaving religion and in general and Mormonism in Particular, this is looking at the retention rates that the Pew religious landscape studies have shown over time. So 2007 Mormons had a 70% retention rate. Essentially. That means that if you grew up in the faith, are you still a member? Do you still use that as your self identification on a survey? It doesn't necessarily mean that you're active, but that you claim the identity. And so in 2014, when Pew repeated the study, that was 64%. And then the most recent one that was just released this year is our retention rate is 54%.

John Dehlin [01:34:33] And half of the people raised Mormon now identify as Mormon. Did I get that right? Or baptized?

Jana Reese [01:34:41] No, that's correct. Half of the people, 54% of the people who say that they were brought up as Latter Day Saints still claim the identity as adults.

John Dehlin [01:34:51] That's. That's kind of alarming, right? Maybe

Jana Reese [01:34:58] it depends on your perspective. You know, if you are looking at this and you are sitting in the church office building. Yeah. I'm sure that there is great reason for concern there, particularly because so many of the, the cultural indicators in the United States more broadly are really not indicative of this turning around anytime soon. And when we think about what's going on in the bigger picture, Mormons kind of came late to the disaffiliation party, but at this point, the party is well underway.

John Dehlin [01:35:32] All right, well, let's keep going.

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:35:38] Next slide question to Jana.

John Dehlin [01:35:39] Oh, yeah, Katie has a question.

Jana Reese [01:35:41] Absolutely.

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:35:42] Jana, what have you seen in your research about. So I know you've looked at things over time, like since the 1970s to now, like what. What have the church leaders been concerned about before when they do see people leaving? Like, where has their focus been previously?

Jana Reese [01:35:58] That's a fantastic question. It's the volume that we're seeing. And by the way, volume. I am coming closer to the microphone. I see in the chat that my volume is down, so let me hope that this is better. But the volume of people leaving now is higher than it was in the past, and so that's a concern. Church leaders in the past have made statements about how the, about how it was more nominal or marginal members who were leaving the church. And so it wasn't that much of a concern. I think there's plenty of quantitative evidence that that's no longer just the case, that it's not only people who are marginal members, but also people who were all in, who have left the church that is a big concern. So in terms of how they responded in the. I'm sorry, I'm getting another note about My microphone.

John Dehlin [01:37:01] It's okay. You can pay attention to those when you're not speaking.

Jana Reese [01:37:05] Keep going. Tasking. Multitasking is not. Not a strong suit. So in answer to your question, Katie, what have they done compared to in the past? It's interesting that very recently, just within the last five years, the church has poured a lot of energy and. And money into a couple of things that in the past have been very good for retention, one of which is the church educational system. So people who do attend seminary and do attend institute have had higher retention rates in the past. So I think, drawing upon that research, the church is reinvesting in those programs in a pretty big way. So there's that and also all of the emphasis on temples. You know, all of the emphasis on going to the temple, getting married in the temple, having a current temple recommend. All of those are things that in the past have proven pretty good for retention.

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:38:05] Thank you.

John Dehlin [01:38:05] All right, should we jump back to the data? Here's the next. Here's the next slide. It's entitled Women have indeed erased the gender gap in religious ID identification. Go ahead, Jenna. Oh, one moment. Okay.

Jana Reese [01:38:32] Can you hear me now?

John Dehlin [01:38:33] Yeah, that's better.

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:38:35] Okay, good.

Jana Reese [01:38:35] I unplugged the microphone. Honestly, I wonder if those are just more trouble than they're worth. Okay.

John Dehlin [01:38:41] You sound great to me.

Jana Reese [01:38:43] Good, good. I'm sorry that it was not as clear before.

John Dehlin [01:38:48] No worries.

Women Closing the Gender Gap in Religious Identification

Jana Reese [01:38:49] So let's look at the slide. Women have erased the gender gap in religious identification. Okay, great. Thank you. So this is a very recent study that was put out by Paul Jupp and Brooklyn Walker just a few weeks ago. This is very new, and just to give you a little bit of context, that orange dotted line, that's men across the generations. And the black solid line is women across the generations, where younger women, younger people are on the left side and the elderly are on the right side. What we see here is a really big gap between younger women and older women. We have nearly 30% of younger women now claim that they are nones, as Jared Halvorson said, you know, n o N E s. And we can see that older women are quite religious and that the percentage of nones in. Among older women was in the single digits. For men, it's more of a straight line, which is kind of interesting. So men were the early adopters in terms of leaving religion. For a long time, it was a truth universally acknowledged that women were more religious than men and men were more likely to leave religion, which is why you see that they're even above 20% among the oldest generations. And so they have grown a little bit. But the growth, at least in this study, the growth of the nuns among women is much more dramatic than it is among men generationally.

John Dehlin [01:40:22] Got it. Okay, let's go to the next slide.

Jana Reese [01:40:26] Okay, so this is from the study that Benjamin Noll and I have done and the next Mormon study. So this was the basis of the next Mormon's book, and it will be the basis of the book that we're working on now. But this, this data, I want to be really clear, is still being analyzed, and so don't get wedded to any one percentage that you see here. So Ben is a political scientist, and I think we are the first people to ever take political science survey questions and apply them to American religion. I don't know if anyone in the listening audience has heard of doing this, let me know. But in, in Poli Sci, essentially you want to ask people, do they feel like they can make a difference in their local government? Do they feel like they can make a difference to their national government? Can they make a difference in writing to their congressional representative? And would they want to run for office? Do they feel empowered to run for office? So those are kind of questions that people have been asking in political science surveys for a long time. We wanted to find out how much efficacy, which is the word, do you feel like you can make a difference, have an effect, how much efficacy people felt in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints here in this country. And as you can see, it's actually pretty low. It's a little bit surprising how low it is for both women and men. The people like me have some say questions at the general level. So the Institutional Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, only 19% of women strongly agreed that, that they had some say in how things were done, but only 24% of men strongly agree.

John Dehlin [01:42:15] It's some say.

Jana Reese [01:42:16] I know, right? It's not like I could change the course of LDS history. It's rather, I could have some say. And it's a little bit higher at the local level, but not as high as we were expecting it to be. What is higher, clearly, is that people feel that the leaders care about them. So in terms of strong agreement there, we have strong agreement at both levels, the local level and the general level, that people feel strongly agree that their leaders care about them personally, but there's less of that among women than there is among men. So like I said, don't get wedded to any one particular percentage here. But the General trend line is that women have expressed less power and efficacy in the church than men. And in these questions, you will not be surprised to know that the people who expressed the strongest efficacy were elderly white men.

Amy McPhee Olivest [01:43:13] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:43:15] All right, let's go to the next slide.

Jana Reese [01:43:19] So this is just the same kind of thing, looking at women and men side by side and also showing the other options in the survey question. So not just strongly agree, but where do they fall overall? And so there is the strongly agree. Oh, there's a typo there that should be somewhat agree, and then neither agree nor disagree. Somewhat disagree, strongly disagree. So most people agree that they have, some say, an influence. It's a majority for men, and it is not quite a majority for women. We've got 54. What? No.

Speaker F [01:43:54] What.

Jana Reese [01:43:55] What are we up to there? 48%. So it's not quite hitting those majority levels, which is interesting, you know, the sense of empowerment that people feel or don't feel. And the reason that we want to ask these questions about efficacy is that in poli sci, if you say that you don't think that your voice is going to make a difference, you are more likely not to vote. If you say that your leaders don't care about you, you are more likely to not want to be in spaces where they are leading.

Amy McPhee Olivest [01:44:27] Right.

Jana Reese [01:44:28] And that just makes good sense. And so in religion, is it the case? And I think there's a case to be made for this, that if people just don't feel like they are being heard, which we saw in comment after comment of women's responses to what happened last week, if women feel like they're not being heard, are they just more likely to leave? And I think that the answer is yes. And particularly in LDS culture, where women are socialized essentially to not make waves, it's in some ways easier to just exit than it is to stay and fight that exhausting fight again and again and again of trying to make your voice be heard.

John Dehlin [01:45:08] Okay, this next table was particularly intriguing to me. Do you want to describe it to our audio listeners?

Jana Reese [01:45:16] Yeah, sure. So with the trends that are happening with religion in the United States, as more people not only leave religion, but people who stay in religion becoming less religious. So even though they still identify, the trends are that most people are praying less, most people are a little less certain about God, et cetera. So we were tracking that compared to our 2016 data, and actually the change for all members together is not dramatic at all. Usually it's just a few points. There isn't any case in any of these theological questions of growth, like more people believing that the LDS First Presidency members are prophets and apostles today, or that the sealing ordinances are the only way for families to be eternal. So those were a couple of the questions. Or Jesus Christ was literally resurrected. There's no growth in those categories, but there's very little loss really. We're looking at two points, three points, five points loss, and sometimes zero loss that it was exactly the same. So mostly the story is one of continuity between the 2016 data and the more recent data. But let's look at the next slide. It's not evenly distributed at all between women and men. And this to me was the biggest surprise of the most recent data. So that the average change in theological certainty among women was a drop of 11 points. And among men the just the certainty question was a gain of three points. Which like I said, it's been a truth universally acknowledged that women are more, more religious than men. Ben and I co wrote an entire article about this for the Mormon Handbook of Religion and Gender or something like that. And there's a whole section in the next Mormons that says Mormon women are nine points more religious than men. And that that nine point advantage has been largely erased. Mormon women and Mormon men look pretty similar now in their beliefs and practices.

John Dehlin [01:47:22] And just for those who are listening only and aren't able to see these charts, just to kind of make the explanation real, for Jana's and Ben's most current data, it, if I'm reading it right, 49 of all current members who are, you know, currently identifying as members endorse the statement that the LDS Church is the only. Oh, go ahead.

Jana Reese [01:47:49] No. So this is a, this is a scale, right? This particular table is only showing the strongest agreement on the scale. So that you are absolutely certain, for example, that God exists, that you are absolutely certain that Jesus Christ was resurrected from the dead. This is measuring certainty. If we were to combine the first two options of both belief and certainty, that would be more what you're talking about.

John Dehlin [01:48:15] Okay, okay, so let me see if I can get it right. 49% of your respondents are absolutely certain that the LDS Church is the only true faith leading to exaltation. 51% are absolutely certain that LDS sealing ordinances are ultimately the only way for families to be eternal. 56% are absolutely certain that God is an exalted person of flesh and bone. 57% are absolutely certain that Joseph Smith was a prophet. 54% are absolutely certain that the Book of Mormon is a literal historical account, but it does mean that 46% are not certain that the Book of Mormon was a literal historical account. Correct.

Jana Reese [01:49:01] That's what it means.

John Dehlin [01:49:02] And 43% are not certain that Joseph Smith, you know, was a prophet. And do you think it's safe to say that most or all of these respondents are active, you know, actively attending members? Jenna?

Jana Reese [01:49:17] So that particular data does come from the current LDS sample. So we had more than 1100 people in that sample. And in terms of activity level, most of them say they are active in the church. It was a little bit of a drop from our 2016 data of the percentage who said that they were, were very active in the church, but not much.

John Dehlin [01:49:41] Okay. All right, let's go ahead and go to the last, last table, if that's okay. And then I want to hear a few personal thoughts from you as well, Janet, if you, if you care to share.

Jana Reese [01:49:55] Oh, actually this has the very or somewhat active thing compared by gender, and it would be good to look at that. I think in our 2016 data, 85% of women in the current LDS sample describe themselves as being either very or somewhat active in the church. And that has had a 10 point drop. So 75%. For men, they've gone from 87% to 85% and only a 2 point drop, which I think is instructive here. So when we're thinking about people who may stay indefinitely in that more liminal space or who may already have one foot out the door, these are some of the indicators that you want to look at. Are they considering themselves very or somewhat active in the church? Do they hold a current temple recommend? Have they attended in the last 30 days? And for women, all of those are down.

John Dehlin [01:50:50] Yeah. And if I'm comparing men to women, women are paying a full tithe at less of a rate than men. Women are less active than men, and women, less. Women hold a current temple recommend than men. And all of that's kind of surprising to me.

Jana Reese [01:51:14] It was very surprising to us as well. And I think now that we have from multiple data sources, information about what is happening with women and religion in America more generally. It makes more sense. But in the isolated context of just looking at this data, when it first started coming in, there were some head scratching moments. Like really that was one of the things that we were counting on was that women would again be more religious than men.

John Dehlin [01:51:43] And so just to summarize, Jana, really quickly, we were so grateful you're able to share these data with us. If you had to summarize any perceptions, you're able to glean on why Mormon women have. Have, you know, have really started leaving and or disbelieving in. In the Mormon Church as of the past five to 10 years. What would be some of the summary causes or reasons or explanations you might have?

Why Mormon Women Are Leaving the Church

Jana Reese [01:52:14] There are multiple explanations. I do have some ideas on this question. Score of things primarily that have not only come through the data but also have come through the hundred qualif. Qualif. Qualitative interviews that I have conducted over the last six years, now five years. And you know, it's very important to listen to what women say and men as well. I've interviewed equal numbers roughly of men and women and their reasons for leaving the church are often different. And that's important to attend to as well. For, for women, I would say that gender is very important as a reason the sense of not feeling listened to. I've talked with a number of women for whom this was always an issue and it was an issue that many times they were able to put on the shelf for a long time until something happened. Whether that was going to the temple for the first time and having a really difficult experience as a woman. The temple I think experience has improved in the last few years for women, but too late for those interviewees to not having leadership opportunities, not being given the same budget in young women's that the young men had. I mean there's so many. It's hard to choose like so many things that are unequal right from the beginning. And as one of the comments that you. I think this was from Julie Hanks. This, she said is the only space in which my gender is precluding my activity.

Katie Ludlow Rich [01:53:54] Right.

Jana Reese [01:53:55] In which that becomes something that defines everything that she is or isn't able to do in the space. That's the, you know, the number one criterion for many of these callings in the church. And when women are now living in a situation and certainly for younger women who have always grown up in that situation where this is the only space in which the sexism is so very blatant. Right. It's a lot easier to simply say this is not for me. This is not worth, you know, worth my being here. So gender is very important. Politics is something we haven't discussed. That's very important also. And thinking about younger women, a book I would recommend is Melissa Deckman's book Generation Z Politics. She does talk about the Trump effect and how young women have been affected by that. I think in a patriarchal religion where you are taught as a woman that you will be protected and that protecting women is extremely important as a value. And then having grown up in that environment, you start to see that the people who taught you those values are voting. For someone who boasted of sexually assaulting women, that doesn't compute. You know, it doesn't compute. So if patriarchy, if the bargain that women make in patriarchy is that they will exchange ability to lead or ability to have a voice for being protected, everything falls apart when they're no longer protected.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [01:55:33] Right?

Jana Reese [01:55:34] So that's one of the things that's going on. Certainly the Internet is one of those things that it's impossible to quantify the degree to which that contributes to people leaving religion. But it cannot be stated forcefully enough that the Internet is hugely important, not just in exposing people to information that they didn't necessarily have, but giving them access to community. If they should decide to leave the church, knowing that that community is there to receive them afterwards is also very important. I mean, I could go on and on. We could talk about this all day, but those are some thoughts.

John Dehlin [01:56:11] Well, Jana, I know it's important as an academic to kind of have your academic hat on intentionally versus your personal hat on, but I also know that, that you are a member of the church, and up until at least last I heard, you still were attending. I want to give you at least a chance to share any reactions you might want to share about Jared's either original. Jared Halverson's original video or his apology or just anything you would want to add as someone who also wears the hat of, of a baptized member of the church.

Jana Reese [01:56:49] Oh, yeah, sure. I was not expecting that question, but I'm happy to answer it. I am an active member of the church. Whenever I'm in town, I'm there on a Sunday. And yeah, this was hard to hear. I. I am not. I don't think I've met Jared personally, but I certainly know his work and we have a lot of friends in common. And I think in some ways that makes it hard, harder when you hear someone whose voice you respect and someone that you know is friends with your friends. Right. When you hear coming out of that person's mouth things that are really tough. I mean, Katie mentioned that her feminine ears were steaming. I think my, my feminine ears were also a little bit, a little bit steamy that day as well. And, and I so appreciate that he apologized. I think that that is a model for the ability to have discourse in a really reactive age online. And it takes so much courage. I mean, I've been a columnist for Religion News service for 12, almost 13 years now. And so I have had the experience of being attacked online and that's acutely uncomfortable. And I've also had the experience of having said something really stupid and having to apologize for it. And it's very hard to do that. So I have a lot of respect. I wish that other church leaders would take a leaf from that book of recognizing that an apology and a recognition that a person needs to learn and needs to listen, that would go a long way to come from church leaders. I don't know if you discussed this, but before I came on the call, but we just passed the one year anniversary of Annette Dennis's talk from last spring. Did you guys talk about that at all?

Politics, the 2015 Exclusion Policy, and Church Departures

John Dehlin [01:58:43] No, but we should have, so please.

Jana Reese [01:58:47] Okay. Well, I think two things. First is that.

John Dehlin [01:58:53] And you can remind people what that talk was and what was said if you want.

Jana Reese [01:58:57] Yeah. So this is one of the Relief Society leaders who, who made the statement that was roundly criticized about how women in this church have more power than women in any other religion in the world. And we had thousands of Instagram comments in response with women pushing back and saying, now you're telling me that I have priesthood power. What does that actually mean? What does that look like? I can't actually do anything in this church that I couldn't do before. So what are we talking about here? I would say two things. The first was I as a researcher was very surprised by that reaction and the just the magnitude of it. And I found out about it from being called by or contacted, I guess text by a reporter from the New York Times who wanted to know what I thought. And you know, at first I was a little bit dismissive, like, well, you know, we've seen this before. And then the comments began to mount and then there was this question about the comments disappearing for a time, which I really don't think there was any nefarious thing going on there. I think it was more of a platform issue that nobody expected. This volume of comments and this volume of engagement. I think that was a turning point moment when the church had to look at the fact that thousands of women were weighing in here, wondering what their role was and that it wasn't just the usual suspects. No offense to all of us who are the Mormon feminists on this panel.

Katie Ludlow Rich [02:00:29] Right.

Jana Reese [02:00:30] We've been at this for a while, but it wasn't just us. It was also women who are more traditional women who are more like what the church would want women to be historically. And that was A bit of a wake up call for the church. The other thing, though, that I would say is that in the last year since that has happened, we haven't really seen any substantive change except what I'm chronicling in my research. We've seen more women leave.

John Dehlin [02:01:02] Yeah, really quickly. Jana, I'm so grateful for your perspective. It's so tricky these days, but because on the one hand, we at Mormon Stories want people regardless of their political affiliation, regardless of who they voted for, whether they like Biden, Kamala Harris, Trump, Bernie Sanders, we don't care. We want everyone to feel welcome and a part of this experience. We don't want to feel like there's any particular bias that's trying to be imposed on people. On the other hand, you can't not talk about politics and, or in this case, the Republican Party or Donald Trump when you're talking about why Mormon women might be leaving the Mormon Church. And so it's super hard because if you just, if the word Trump is even mentioned, all of a sudden people are saying, I'm checking out. So in this case, Trevor Brooks wrote enjoying until Jana voiced her political opinion. And I'm like, wait, did Jana even voice a political opinion? Or did she literally just say how, you know, Mormon, you know, voting patterns for the Republican Party or Trump might be affecting women's exit from the church. But let's go ahead and just like address that head on. Jenna, what would you say to that comment from Trevor?

Jana Reese [02:02:24] Well, I think in fairness to Trevor, it's both definitely there. There is now an abundance of research about how the Trump effect has had pretty complicated results for religion, and most of them have not been kind to religion. I would point out, though, that it's really easy to blame this on Trump because much of the turnoff of the politicization of religion started as early as the early 1990s. So when we're looking at the Contract With America, we're looking at Newt Gingrich, for example. That's when we also begin to see the rise of the nones. And that's one of multiple factors that many social scientists look to as what is one of the ways that we are going to try to explain this really sudden and pretty massive shift in what's going on in American history. But the other thing I would say to Trevor is, yeah, absolutely, I think that Trump is not a Republican.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:03:23] Right.

Jana Reese [02:03:24] He is a very different kind of politician. He is not traditionally conservative. He's certainly not the kind of person that you would have expected Mormon leaders to ever get behind and someone that he. He is now a convicted rapist, basically. Right. This is showing, though, that what is happening in American religion and American politics is that people's political identities have superseded their religious identities. And it used to be very much the other way around. Scholarship now is showing that people are making their religious decisions based on their politics, where they will be religious or whether they will be religious at all. The first question is often, where will they fit in most comfortably? And the relationship of Latter Day Saints and Trump has not necessarily been a fully comfortable one from the very beginning.

John Dehlin [02:04:24] Love it. Thank you for addressing that, Jana. And I just want to state explicitly, we don't care who you voted for, what your political affiliation is. We want everyone to feel welcome on Mormon Stories podcast, and we need all of you to have thick enough skin where we can talk about candidates or political parties or political beliefs within the context of how it affects all of us. We need to be able to do both. So please know we want all to feel welcome and please please understand we have to be able to talk about this stuff with everybody storming away saying, how dare you offend me for this or that reason? Okay, Janet, well, we want to invite you to stay and just jump in whenever you want. I'm going to get Katie and Abby back in a little bit, and then we've got a few other things we want to share really quickly. Janet, if people want to support. Support your ongoing research financially or in any other way or follow it, can I just give you a quick chance to kind of shout out any. Any ways people can or. Or can follow or support you, just in case you have to drop off before we end?

Jana Reese [02:05:30] Well, that's. That's very nice. I don't have a book yet for you to go out and buy, but when the book is published, certainly that would be much appreciated to help spread the word about the research. I think it's important not only to try to understand people who have left, because there are, as you know, so many different narratives that the church has told about why people leave. And the church has often made up those narratives without actually speaking to the people who leave themselves about why they left, and then also because I think I'm looking at a middle group that hasn't gotten a lot of attention from either scholars or from the church itself. You know, statistically, more adult Latter Day Saints don't have a temple recommend than do have a temple recommend. Right. So what do we do with this large population of people who are in the church but are not as fully Invested and. Or perhaps orthodox, as the church would like them to be.

John Dehlin [02:06:27] All right, so. And you also have a column that you write semi regularly, is that right?

Jana Reese [02:06:35] Yeah, so I write for Religion News Service. I'm writing less often now because I'm working on the book. So for the next few months, I'm more like a twice a month columnist than usually, which is weekly.

John Dehlin [02:06:47] Okay. And just to be clear, do y' all need any more financial support to be able to finish your research? And if so, how could people offer it?

Jana Reese [02:06:54] Thank you. We were very fortunate and people were incredibly kind when we raised money on Kickstarter in order to fund the survey. We raised more than $40,000 in just a few days, which was great. But that has closed and I'm donating my time to this project. I don't get paid for it. I think we have enough for our expenses for the next few months. But, boy, it's nice to know that if that changes that we could maybe come back to this. Data is very expensive. Good data is very expensive to obtain. And hiring graduate students, you know, all of those things, it has taken quite a lot of money.

John Dehlin [02:07:36] Okay, well, if people want to reach out to you to support you in any way, do you want. Do you want to give them an email or a way to contact me?

Jana Reese [02:07:43] People can find me through Religion News Service if you click on Opinion and then you click on Flunking Sainthood, that's the name of my column. So anybody can contact me that way.

John Dehlin [02:07:52] Perfect. Okay, Jenna, thank you so far for all your contributions. Please stay as long as you want and jump in anytime you'd like for the remainder of the show. Is that okay? Okay. All right. So Katie and Abby, all of y' all have been watching. We want to thank Amy McPhee. All the best. Amy had to bolt. She told us ahead of time. She had a hard stop. So check out Breaking out patriarchy. Thanks, Amy McPhee. All the best. But don't go away. We have so much more to cover today. We haven't even played Jared's Apology and talked about how we felt about it. But let me just pause and give Katie and Abby both a chance to just share anything they want to share for what we've been discussing so far.

Katie Ludlow Rich [02:08:35] Yeah, I have a kind of two part reflection that was kind of sparked by asking Jan about her current affiliation. And so I had stopped attending shortly before I started working on 50 years of Exponent 2 and my co author, Heather Sundahl and is an active member. And for me there, I Think there's a tendency that when you leave the church, it can be so easy to think, why doesn't everyone think like I do? Why isn't everyone upset about the same things I am? I made the good and smart decision. Why doesn't everyone do what I do? And I hear this level of, like, anger and frustration from so many ex Mormons. And in engaging in this research, an exponent 2 is not an ex Mormon community. It's community community for Mormon women and gender minorities across the spectrum of belief. Which meant that in my reading and in my research, I was interviewing a lot of current active members and I had to learn to regain a new level of respect. Like, I have met Jana at a number of occasions and she is someone who I deeply respect and I value her as a person and her research and her thoughts. And I cannot say she is making the wrong choice for staying active in the church and kind of regaining that respect. Which leads me to a concern I have with the clip that Jared Halverson had shared in his podcast in this approach, where with a Come follow me podcast, your most likely audience is active church members. And so when you talk about women leaving the church as following the world and how in order to stay they need to, you know, seek for a better world in the next life and give up the things of this world. And in a suggestion that they're being worldly and aren't having the right perspective, it does not respect that people who leave may make a good choice for themselves and may have thought and considered very seriously and meaningfully in all of the factors and chosen a good spiritual path for themselves. And when you are speaking to mostly current active members and suggesting that those women who do leave are being worldly, it is not a bridge building experience there. And it further separates Mormon women from each other, those who stay and those who have left. And it gives a gulf where if you are staying, even if you're like hanging on by your fingernails in the church, that you are making the godly choice, while those who left are making the worldly choice. And it's really hard to be in community with each other when we are divided with rhetoric like that. And if we want to be able to have conversations with each other and be in community with one another, then we need to come to these conversations with a true level of respect that people who are smart and thoughtful and caring about all of these issues can choose to stay for whatever complex personal reasons. Also smart, thoughtful people can choose to leave and have it be a good choice for Them. And I get concerned about the rhetoric that makes it seem like we. We cannot see each other.

John Dehlin [02:11:38] Love it.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:11:39] We have so much more in common. Like, people who have left the church, people who are right on the edge. People are in the church. We have way more in common as a little group of people than anyone else in the rest of the planet. There's billions of people who are like, who's Nephi? But we all know who Nephi is, right. We all understand getting wedgies with garments. Like, there's things that. It doesn't matter what divides us. We have so much more in common. And. And I feel like. I feel like I walk that tight line, all that tightrope all the time. I have people being part of exponent, too. I have women who are like, burn down the church. And I have women who are like, I love the church so much, and they are both beautiful human beings, and I see both of their perspectives. So, yeah, I love. I wish we could all just come together. Like, we all have so much more in common than we have. Respect.

Speaker F [02:12:28] Yeah.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:12:29] With respect.

Amy McPhee Olivest [02:12:30] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:12:30] I think conversations like this are very helpful. Abby, did you have a thought or two that you were sitting on as you were watching

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:12:40] Jana.

John Dehlin [02:12:41] Jana speak? Yeah.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:12:42] You know what? My only thought I was sitting on that I really want to say is, Jana, I think you're really cool, and I love reading your column. So that's all I'll say to Janice stuff. I think she's phenomenal.

Jana Reese [02:12:52] Well, thank you both. That was lovely to hear from both of you. Thank you. You know, just to say. Just to throw this in there, one of the things that does bother me as a researcher is when I hear orthodox members of the church continue with these narratives about why people leave. And I wish that I could just express to them how much agonizing often goes into that decision. And the longer that someone was in the religion and the more invested someone was, the harder it is to leave, the harder that extrication process is. I mean, there is so much pain, and we are supposed to mourn with those who mourn. One of the things that has been very interesting to me is we have a whole series of questions in the survey about family members and whether they're still in the church, and if not, how that has affected family relationships. And the upshot of it is that only 17% of our current members said they didn't have any family members who'd left the church. So this is a huge phenomenon, and we're going to have to learn to speak about it better than we are without assigning blame. And as far as what Jared Halvorson said in particular, I did think it was very interesting what Kata was pointing out about looking at women as somehow being worldly for making this choice. The argument could be made just as heavily on the other side that women were thinking in fact of their divine worth.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:14:31] Powerful. Can I share what Amy, who had to leave early, texted us a little. Is it okay if I share kind of this? She just talking about, like women leaving for, you know, Jared kind of implying it like for worldly reasons. Like, he kind of frames it as like you need to sacrifice the things of the world. So it makes it sound like women are leaving, get all this money and fame when they leave the church. She said she wants to ask the question, like to Jared, like, does he realize that he's actually asking women to give up their voice, their vote in their community, their opportunity for sex, not sex. So you still get to have sex. You just have to get married. Your opportunity for self actualization, healthy relationship with their body and an opportunity for leadership. Like, those are the worldly things that you know that he's actually saying that we're so wrong to go out and get. So I thought that was interesting. So I was gonna throw that in.

Katie Ludlow Rich [02:15:28] From Amy, you referenced earlier that Brit Hartley and Julie Hanks conversation with I think Bill Real and Radio Free Mormon. Right. That aired on Friday. And I thought Brittany made such a beautiful case for how many women are seeking a rich spiritual life and seeking a spiritual home that that feeds them. And so when they're leaving institutional religion, they are not necessarily leaving spirituality. And what can we look at? Like, why are women not being spiritually fed and is there something that we can do to make this a spiritual home again?

John Dehlin [02:16:05] I love it. Well, let's go ahead really quickly. There are a couple comments I'll just read because we're super grateful for the super chats. Unexcited says Female Panelist Appreciation Fund So that's a little bit of a UK donation to, to our panel. Brandy Hepler writes, I agree that we need the ones in power in order to have them assist in change. So thank you Brandy for your support. Blonde Misery writes, I was raised in the LDS Church. I always felt that children of divorced parents, especially girls, were seriously looked down upon. However, males were looked at as faithful. Regardless, I'm sorry you had that experience and thank you for sharing that. Blonde Misery Victoria Perry writes, The 2016 election was the final straw for my Christianity. I'm a survivor of sexual abuse. And I could no longer sit in the pews with people who did not care about me. And that is what their votes said in that survival course. Victoria Perry's opinion and experience. And we're grateful you shared that, Victoria. And then I'll finally add Ruth Heath in terms of addressing politics on Mormon stories. Ruth writes, not commenting on the current political climate in America and religion would be ignoring the elephant in the room. And I think we agree as well, again, not to be taking any sides about how people should or shouldn't vote. And again, thanks Ruth Heath for the financial support. Okay, really quickly, please like this episode. Please subscribe to this channel on YouTube. Please comment, please share all of that engagement will help it be spread far and wide. Did you have a quick thing?

Katie Ludlow Rich [02:17:56] You want to get that context of that political situation of how 2016 may have impacted people staying in the church? I would add the November 2015 policy of exclusion that came out that was initially leaked online, the policy by the church that prevented the children of couples where one was living within a homosexual relationship or marriage from being baptized. And it also defined gay marriage as apostasy. And so that policy in November 2015, I think was a watershed moment as well for especially millennials and younger. But really, it wasn't just the progressive of Mormons who spoke out against that and were horrified by that because so many active members have either they themselves are queer or they have queer family members. And so many of them want the church to be a place where all of their family can feel welcome. And it was so hurtful to to be divided like that by the church by a new policy that was an unforced error by the church. And I think that's a huge part of the context of what's happened in the last decade.

John Dehlin [02:19:03] Love it. And I'm seeing Jana nod in the background as, as this is being said. Okay, well, since we have it queued, we, you know, we're really grateful for Bill Real and RFM and Julie Hanks and Brit Hartley for jumping on this story on Friday or Saturday or Sunday whenever they did. Because it really did lead not only did lead to an important moment where someone who's viewed as a representative of the church actually apologizes and says, I'm going to try and listen and do better. Because we all know the Mormon Church is on record of saying we neither seek nor offer apologies. That's number two in command, Dallin H. Oaks, who's in the first counselor in the first presidency, most senior apostle after Russell Nelson, the prophet. So that Seemed like it was a healing moment and it came about in part because of this episode. So we thought we would just play a brief clip if that's okay. So let's go and roll that clip

Self-Sacrifice, Gender Roles, and Why Women Stay or Leave

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:20:05] on the self sacrifice.

Speaker F [02:20:06] Brit.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:20:08] I think that message we hear from men a lot and maybe men need to hear it, but women don't need to hear it. Part of what I do in my therapy practice is try to un, undo that self sacrifice message because that's what women default to. And so it's like I'm going, the therapist in me is going like, no, don't, don't go back to that, that mode of, you know, deny yourself and just, you know, give it, give it all to the church or to your family or whoever. Yeah, it does so much. It's there so much damage and in

Amy McPhee Olivest [02:20:45] my own coaching practice too.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:20:46] And what's interesting about the women who are leaving, if he would have listened to them at all, what spiritual places are they going to? They're going to places where they have authority, even if it's just with themselves. We're not even talking about authority over others. The reason that women are flocking to paganism, mythology, astrology, tarot, witchy stuff, all of that kind of thing, and it's, it's very Gen Z female oriented, all of that space is because there's not a man between you and the divine. There's not a man between you and your own voice and your own intuition. And so this is why women are flocking to those places. They're not, they're not usually going to other churches where they're not leaving Mormonism and going to another religion where man stands between them and God. And so we have to kind of get this idea that I'm over you, going to call you back to self sacrifice to the point of self denial and expect you to just hold on and just like white knuckle that till you die so that you can get rewards in the next life so that we men can benefit from your invisible labor. You know, women are going to find spiritual paths where you're not standing in between them and their spirituality and their divine and whatever, you know, concept of

Amy McPhee Olivest [02:21:59] divine they resonate with, that's where women are going.

John Dehlin [02:22:05] Love that clip. I think you were kind of referencing that, weren't you, Katie?

Katie Ludlow Rich [02:22:08] Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think women seeking places where they have authority and have a rich spiritual life is in line with what I have seen with so many women who leave. It's not because they are not spiritual or not seeking to live a good immoral life. They are doing that in ways that do not deny them voice.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:22:30] I know one. Could I. Oh, you can go first.

John Dehlin [02:22:34] Yeah.

Jana Reese [02:22:35] Okay. I just want to. To. To say one thing about the self sacrifice argument. Those are such great points. And actually some women are leaving the church because they are sacrificing themselves for their families. So that's an interesting dynamic of, for example, women who are following their LGBTQ children out of the church or a spouse out of the church. I've interviewed people in the both of those situations, and the church was what taught them to put family first and sort of recede.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:23:06] Right.

Jana Reese [02:23:07] And they're doing that in leaving the church.

John Dehlin [02:23:11] Love it. Thank you, Jana.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:23:12] Awesome. And I will always defer to Jana Reese for everything. But I. What I was going to say was part of Ordained women years ago is I remember people like mocking us, like, ha, ha, what are you going to do? Leave the church and get ordained somewhere else? There's lots of like, it was like a mocking thing. And guess what happened? A bunch of women from ordained women left. They felt a real calling to be a priesthood. And so they. Including one of our board members, exponent to. Her name's Nancy Ross and she's also a blogger. She be. She left the LDS Church and she was ordained into the community of Christ as an elder and she leads a congregation down in St. George. So women are leaving and finding places where our spiritual gifts are actually appreciated.

Speaker F [02:23:59] Love it.

John Dehlin [02:24:00] Okay, well, there's people saying they want to hear the apology, so if it's okay, let's go ahead and jump to the apology and because apparently Jared got an overwhelming number of what, unpleasant negative comments on his Instagram page.

Katie Ludlow Rich [02:24:19] Some nicer than mine.

John Dehlin [02:24:20] Some nicer than yours, maybe some less nice.

Katie Ludlow Rich [02:24:24] A little bit.

Amy McPhee Olivest [02:24:24] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:24:25] Yeah. And. And I think also he somehow stumbled on the. The bill real Radio Free Mormon Mormonism after Dark episode with Brit and Julie. And you know, and apparently it caused him a lot of distress. So let's go ahead and jump to the clip and hear Jared's apology.

Jared Halverson's Video Apology Played and Discussed

Speaker F [02:24:47] Hello, everybody. I am Jared Halvorson. Some of you may have gotten to know me for the first time recently, and I just wanted to let you all know that I am losing sleep over pain that I'm causing. And I just want to apologize for hitting a nerve that I had actually hoped to calm. When I say I'm losing sleep, that's literal. There's my clock. It's a little after 2 in the morning. And the last, well, four hours or so, I've been reading your comments, watching a longer video from some people that are just hoping I can learn some things and I am eager to learn as much as I can. That's always been the case. I am. I just want to help and my. I had hoped to help to support my sister saints to build you up and that did not come across. I. I so wish that. That there weren't a connection between. I don't even know how to say it. I'll. I'll keep thinking. I'll keep wrestling. I'm just grateful. I'm grateful for the love of God, for all of his children. And it's something I feel keenly. I want everyone to be able to feel that wherever their pain might be. I do try to meet with people one on one as often as I can. I've tried to respond to many of you in the comments on Instagram and the sisters who were on the video recently. I reached out to both of them tonight as well, just seeing if there's a way we could meet and so I can learn more from their experience in the church and leaving the church and out of the church. I do try to do that as often as I can. It's one thing that's been a blessing to me through this explosion is there's just so much pain out there and it's given me a chance to put my finger on the pulse of so many sisters in and out of the church that aren't feeling heard. I want to know you. I wish we knew each other. I wish I had the time to go and have lunch with every one of you to hear the experience you've had, good, bad and ugly and. And how we can make things better. I've always loved something that Bill Gates once said, from a business perspective, that your best source of information are your unhappy customers. I mean, unhappy customers of the church all the time. And they are an incredible source of information that I hope I'm using to make my classes a more welcoming place, make my office a place where healing can occur as we just mourn with those that mourn and. And wrestle with difficult things. I am a firm believer in the power of validation and of empathy. I try to prove contraries in every conversation I ever have. And so this morning when I woke up still reeling from the firestorm, I prayed, as I often do, for thick skin and a soft heart, which is a hard combination. It's a contrary of its own, but one that I. I'm praying to develop. I again, I'm sorry for pain that I'm. I've caused. Grateful for the atonement of Jesus Christ that can heal us all, and grateful for your perspectives that you are teaching me, and so please continue to do so. I do believe in a Zion on the horizon where we are one heart and one mind, dwelling together in righteousness with no poor. Whether that's poor in spirit, poor in. In. In the feelings that they are being given about their worth. I just want to express my love to each of you and my love for the Lord who keeps me going through all of these things, and pray that he'll keep you going through things as well. Thank you for just giving me the chance to. To talk to you. And I pray that this doesn't cause additional pain, but gives you a little piece of a heart that is broken in me for unintended pain that I may be causing. I feel strongly about the Hippocratic oath when it comes to what I'm trying to do, which is cause no pain. And I just. I just want to support and understand and love and teach as the Savior would. And I'm a far cry from him, but I'm working on it. Thank you.

John Dehlin [02:29:50] All right, reactions. Katie, why don't you go first?

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:29:53] My first.

Katie Ludlow Rich [02:29:54] When I first heard that, I was amazed that I had never seen an active LDS man with as big of a platform as he does, who's had as many callings and as many. As much influence in the church, have such a sincere apology for something like this. And I believe him that he was really wrestling with this and is going to put in work to understand where the problem was, where the breakdown was, and to try and do better. And so that's where I'll kind of stop with. My first reaction is I was really impressed,

John Dehlin [02:30:33] Abby.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:30:33] And my first reaction was like, good. Like, thank you. And then I opened the comments, and immediately the comments were, you have nothing to apologize for. The people who are saying this are just apostates or jerks, you know? And I was immediately crestfallen. And my. My gut was like, jared, please don't read these comments and let them persuade you that you're fine and that you're doing great because you are on the right track. When you apologized. Don't let every. Don't listen to all the people who are telling you that we're the problem because. Because we are not the problem. Women on the edge, women who are leaving. You're on the right path, Jared. Please, please stick with it. Hang in there with us.

John Dehlin [02:31:13] Jenna, did you want to share any reactions to that?

Jana Reese [02:31:17] Well, as I said before, I'm very grateful for the apology. I thought it was very classy and also courageous because apologizing in Internet spaces is tough. I like what he said about having a thick skin and a soft heart and I think that that kind of attitude can facilitate better conversations going forward. Or at least I hope so. I would say, you know, we talked about the Annette Dennis thing that happened a year ago. This is another of those watershed moments, those inflection points where the church has the opportunity to really pivot if it has the courage to pivot and truly listen to women and truly listen to the dissatisfaction that many women have experienced. I don't know that it did that last time. Maybe this time will be different.

John Dehlin [02:32:07] Let me share. Thank you, Jenna. Let me just share some of the comments that are rolling in from our viewers and listeners about it. And I should just say I really do. Like I had Britt record a little session. She also shared on our TikTok and Instagram just this idea that we should be gracious. We can't. Let's just say as people have left the church or ex Mormons, we should be thoughtful about on the one hand criticizing church leaders for never apologizing and then on the other hand when they do apologize, just raking them over the coals. So you know, one core move is to be gracious when some someone who's a faithful person in a position of leadership or responsibility actually does apologize. The first move needs to be gracious acceptance and acknowledgement of that, I think. So I'll just reflect Brit there and I know Amy felt the same way. But having said that I will just reflect some of the comments that people are making right now and then maybe we should have a quick discussion about from Yalls perspective what a healthy apology is versus a non healthy apology. Just not to attack Jared but just to let us all learn maybe, maybe what we should and shouldn't do. So goofy McGoatface says at least he had a normal face and not a manic smile. Songs of Our Of Our Own says he wants to cause no pain, but as a man in the high levels of the church he benefits from the mistreatment of women. Owen Qua says he seems sincere but we should still be critical of his delivery. Marty Bueller writes, I love that he consistently talks about the church is like a business with customers and stocks and that couldn't be more true. It sure ain't a religion. Songs of Our Own also says, I think it's nice that he apologized but he's not at all addressing the problem. In fact, he's making it worse. That's their opinion. Alexandra Levin writes, I think this is the first time and only apology I've ever seen from an LDS leader. Maven, our own Maven writes, this is not the first time Jared Halverson has been criticized for causing this kind of harm. He does it all the time. He does meet with people for lunch, etc. But in the end he does not change anything. That's Maven's view. But, but you know, that's her experience. Godi Goatface also writes, I'm still less than impressed by the apology itself and I appreciate him doing it. Someone else says his apology comes across as insincere because he starts out making himself the victim. That's new. Richard Jones Tim Rathbone writes, he made himself a victim. Alexandra Levin says, he seems genuine. So I you know, let's just and then Maven writes. Ruth Heath I agree men always focus on their own hurt feelings first when they are criticized. Okay, so that's just a sampling of the comments made again and we're not trying to disincentivize apologies or rake Jared over the coals, but I did want to just reflect some people's reactions. Is it worth having a conversation about more versus less helpful apologies or not? Is this not the time to even do that?

Katie Ludlow Rich [02:35:45] So I guess my first impulse is to think don't. I can't require someone to be perfect in exactly how they phrase an apology. And he says a lot of different things in the apology. And so yes like some of those comments maybe reflect a piece of of truth that he uses business language. He you know he does start by talking about his experience but that that did not bother me when I also heard like I'm sorry for what I did and these are some actions that I am going to do to learn more and listen better. And if that is a pattern for him, which I don't know him well enough to know if it is. If he like was said that this he will meet with people for lunch but then it doesn't actually change. Like if he can't step back and start to look more at the system and still in the future only looks and puts responsibilities on individuals who leave the church then I think well then this apology and this process maybe wasn't successful. But at the start I think he said he said a lot that I thought was quite valuable.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:36:54] I feel like if this could be the introductory chapter to a multi volume book where he is and maybe he has met maybe, like, Maven saying, maybe he hasn't had a great track record. Maybe he has met with people for years and. But maybe sometimes it's something as public and big as this can kind of finally give you a paradigm shift. So, I mean, the apology. I don't have criticisms of trying to do an apology under so much pressure with so much scrutiny. I thought it was perfectly fine. Thank you, Jared, for the apology. I appreciate it. But now, do you just go back to living exactly the way it was, or do you make changes and do you listen? Because, like, I have stories. Like, I brought. I thought of stories this weekend just of, like, experiences that were really painful and kind of changed the course of my life as a woman in the church. And if we have time, I'll tell them. If we don't, it's totally fine. But women just. Just have these moments that men do not experience. And if he does, if he just puts his head in the sand and says, look, I apologized. Everybody stop being mad at me. And he doesn't listen, it won't change anything.

John Dehlin [02:38:05] Janet, did you want to add any commentary on the apology?

Jana Reese [02:38:13] Sorry, my dog just. Your dog is welcome.

John Dehlin [02:38:15] We're a dog positive.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:38:16] Yeah, we are.

Jana Reese [02:38:17] Dog positive. I so glad he's such a good boy. Yes. I thought it was a very good apology. And like, Katie, I. You know, I don't expect perfection. And in fact, one of the things that I find very humanizing about it is that it was unrehearsed. Unlike everything we hear from the institutional church, this is one person up in the middle of the night speaking from his heart. And it's not correlated. It's not produced by the public affairs department. And it's not going to be perfect. I don't want perfect. I want human. And I feel like I got that. So I. I am grateful for that. And like has already been said. I really hope it's just the opening of a larger chapter where stuff gets done.

Speaker F [02:39:01] Beautiful.

Katie Ludlow Rich [02:39:02] If you try so hard to be perfect in a moment like this, you're gonna freeze. Because if you. If you worry about every single criticism that could be made, parsing every word in every language, then you're not going to go make that apology. And so I'm glad that he was willing to just put that out there, knowing that even his apology was going to be criticized. That. That took some courage.

John Dehlin [02:39:21] Absolutely beautiful. If I could just give 2 cents what I. You know, one thing I notice again, and I'm repeating myself a bit, is that he calls himself a historian. But he doesn't seem to have spent much time learning the history of women in the Mormon Church. And I don't think, and I think that's most evidenced by the lack of thoughtful discussion about Mormon feminism in his curriculum, in his Sunday school lessons and Emma Smith.

Panelists Reflect on Feminism and Personal Experiences

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:39:49] The way he tells the Emma Smith story, you're like, bro, that is the Deseret book version. You're a historian. Give us more.

Speaker F [02:39:58] Come on.

John Dehlin [02:39:59] So for me, I'd like to see him read In Sacred Loneliness, read Mormon Enigma about Emma's life, read from Women's Exponent, learn about ordained women, watch the interviews of ordained women, you know, participants that were on Mormon Stories podcast. Go read Amy McPhee all the Best's Dear Mormon man, what would you do? I always forget the exact title that sounds right. And also watch Breaking Down Patriarchy. But don't just stop there. When you're teaching your lessons, when you're giving talks to Mormons, don't just code switch. And when you know ex Mormons are watching, then say the things that ex Mormons will want to hear. Incorporate your learning about Mormon feminism into your public and private, you know, podcasts and talks and lessons and one on one conversations with active, faithful, believing Mormons, because that's. They're going to listen to you. They're going to be less likely to listen to us.

Katie Ludlow Rich [02:41:09] He says he's read books and articles about Emma Smith, and I bet he has. And there aren't that many out there, There aren't that many full books. And he probably has read Mormon Enigma. But if you read it with this lens over your eyes that Joseph is a true prophet who restored the gospel and I am going to look for any way to not criticize him, then that's not studying Emma's life. Right. And so you need to be able to look at Emma's full human experience without worrying about how that impacts how you feel about Joseph. And if you're going to study women in the church, like, you have to study them in their first full complexity and let that do whatever it does with you. It doesn't have to change your testimony and your belief, but if it doesn't change anything about how you feel that you didn't study that woman's life.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:42:00] Yeah, I feel like women are only studied as long as they're connected to a man. Like, before I really started to learn about Emma, I just had no idea what happened to her after Joseph Smith died. I was just kind of like. And then she just ceased living and, like, froze in time and so when I learned things like, oh, she went on and married a never Mormon man, and that she did it on his birthday.

John Dehlin [02:42:23] On Joseph Smith's birthday.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:42:24] On Joseph Smith's birthday, which was not a time to be getting married, it was, that's December 23rd, two days before Christmas, in the dead of winter, in a time when we didn't have like electricity and heat. Like, it was definitely a jab like, hey, I'm moving on because you probably because you got 35 wives. Well, now I'm getting a new one and I'm moving off my life. That was, that just floored me because that was. I didn't realize she was a whole and complete human being outside of her association. Association with Joseph Smith and the founding of the LDS Church, like, Jared, like, can you, as a historian, talk about women on their own, not connected to the important men in the story?

John Dehlin [02:43:06] What's difficult is we all know that if he started reflecting an awareness and a sensitivity towards Mormon feminism in his podcast, in his classes at byu, in his one on one conversations, we all know that what happens to BYU professors and church employees when they start becoming awoken to Mormon feminism? They often get fired or, or demoted or reprimanded.

Katie Ludlow Rich [02:43:36] And so what does that show you about the system?

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:43:39] Yeah, it's not him. It's not him. It's not the Mormon feminism. Like, people like to turn and blame the women, like ordained women and Mormon feminism and things like that. And you're like, that's not the problem. It's people who like, blame Mormon stories for making people lose their faith or something. And it's like, this is just the delivery system of the factual information about history and what happened and what the problems in an institution is. We're trying to fix them. Don't blame the messenger. Like, fix the system. That's what we want.

John Dehlin [02:44:09] Yeah, powerful. Jan, I see you nodding your head. I want to make sure I give you a chance to provide any response you want to provide.

Jana Reese [02:44:20] Well, I'm afraid I have to go and I'm sorry that I have to duck out early, but I'm, I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to be here and to respond. The one thing that I would like to say that I didn't say, there was a comment about business in what you read and the responses to the apology. And one of the things that I did notice about his original statement is that he was encouraging women to be less worldly while using a stock market analogy of roi. Okay.

John Dehlin [02:44:51] From one of the world's top billionaires Right.

Jana Reese [02:44:54] Well, I mean, actually in the original statement. So last week when he was saying that, you know, women are worldly and they need to be thinking about the treasures in heaven, they need to be thinking about the return on investment, you know. And this kind of language that we use, I think is perhaps not the best language to be thinking about the things of eternity, especially when you were chiding other people for their worldliness. Just going to put that out there. Like I said, I'm really glad that he apologized. I thought it was lovely. And hopefully there will be improvements going forward.

John Dehlin [02:45:33] I love it. Well, Generice, thank you so much for joining us. We always love having you. We hope you'll come back and we really want to help promote your book.

Jana Reese [02:45:42] Oh, thank you.

John Dehlin [02:45:42] And you have a patch look too, right?

Jana Reese [02:45:45] I have a what?

John Dehlin [02:45:46] I mean, you have the Next Mormons is a book people came by now, right?

Jana Reese [02:45:49] Yes, that's true. Wonderful. Go do that. The Next Mormons. How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church.

John Dehlin [02:45:56] All right. All right. Generous. Thank you so much. You take care. Come back soon. And since Katie, we know you have a hard stop and we'll be reaching three hours when it's time for you to go. Abby, I know that you wanted to share maybe a couple personal experiences. Let's just spend the next 10 minutes, each of you taking some time to give whatever closing thoughts you want. And if Abby wants to go, I just want to make sure we leave time for Katie for you to give your final thoughts as well.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:46:26] Okay, I'll try. This is a story Katie reminded me of. She sent me a Marco Polo this morning while she was getting ready. I only have two Marco Polo friends. It's Katie and one other exponent blogger, Linda. And they we talk whenever I need to talk feminism stuff. I just sparkle pull of them. So she's at me and reminded me an essay that was that's in this book that I had got published in the magazine. And so maybe I'll share this experience because Jared saying he wants to hear from women and he wants to learn from women. So here are. I have two experiences. One I wrote about my husband is in the military, so I'm an army wife. I've had he's been gone almost four years of when I was a mom with little kids. He missed, missed the first baby that I had. He missed like so much stuff. And I was on a second deployment had just started and I was pregnant again. I was going to have another baby with him deployed. And I remember this was January of 2011 and he left on a Sunday. And then I went in for. It was my 14 or 15 week appointment, just the regular checkup with my doctor. And I had a. It was either Monday or Tuesday morning. It was within 48 hours of him leaving on this deployment. And they couldn't find a heartbeat. I had a missed miscarriage. And so basically the baby had passed away, but my body wasn't passing it on its own. And so I had to immediately go in for a dnc, which is not the DNC like we've been talking about, but the kind where you get put under. They go in, they clean out the uterus, they, you know, take everything out. Right. And then I woke up and I went home and my husband was gone. And I had two little kids and they had gone to bed and I was. Was alone at home. And my two female neighbors came over. It was my house. And then the next two houses over, these two women came over and they just sat with me. They had both had miscarriages before, and I don't remember how long we sat and talked, but we talked for a long time. And it was very comforting for me. And I was, you know, I just come home from the hospital, I was cramping, I was bleeding. I didn't have a bra and I didn't have makeup on. I was like crying. It was just a moment, right? And it was a very female moment in my life, surrounded by women. And after, we'd been there for a long time talking about this experience that we all three have had, and they said, would you like a priesthood blessing because my husband's gone?

Katie Ludlow Rich [02:48:44] Right.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:48:44] And I said. And I kind of hesitated because I was like, again, bleeding. No makeup, no bra. Do it. Do I have to get dressed? I don't want to get dressed right now. And I said, you know what? Yes. Because. Especially because one of their husbands is a very good friend of mine, still a good friend to this day. Love this man. And so I said, you know what? Yeah, go ahead and send your husband. Bring your husbands over for a blessing. Well, what happened was they all had little kids at home, so the wives had to go home and swap with their husbands and send their husbands back over to my house alone because they needed to be there with their little kids. And so two men showed up at my door, and again, one of them, my dear friend and came in. I asked him to give me the blessing. He gave me a beautiful blessing. It wasn't. And I. He gave me a hug and I felt comfortable, I felt loved. And yet it was such a jarring experience to be like, why did I have to send these two female friends away and have them send men in uncomfortably so even my dear friend, because. Because why? And I was learning it, you know, I hadn't even learned at that time yet. The women used to give blessings that, you know, this. This was something that women have lost. And so as that was January of 2011, I still remember the date. This is how, like, you know, like those moments that like, burn into your memory forever, they're like a change for everything changes on that day. Little trauma. It was April 13, 2011. It wasn't very long after I'd had this miscarriage. My husband was deployed, and I had really been struggling with the temple. I mean, like, for years I had been trying to make it work. This is a very common thing. And. And I'd been like, these things are weird. I'm uncomfortable with this. I was just starting to tap into, like, sexist things that made me uncomfortable. But mostly I just had questions and it didn't make sense, make any sense. And it made so little sense that I finally gave up. And I was starting to fall asleep. And I was like, why am I coming? So a whole series of events. Without getting into the details, I felt like Heavenly Father had led me to April 13, 2011, where I went to the temple with some friends. One of their dad was in the temple presidency. It was the Mount Timpanogos temple. And they said, you can go in and talk to the temple presidency. And I went in and they said, actually no one from the temple presidency is here, but the temple recorder is here, and he's just as good as the presidency. And I remember even feeling like Heavenly Father has sent me here with my whole list of questions and I must be supposed to meet with the temple recorder, not a presidency member. Like, I was so convinced that this was the answer to my prayers in every way. And I sat down across the desk and from this man and I started to ask my questions. And he immediately started to dismiss everything. And he would say, oh, that doesn't matter. It's not important. And he kept saying, it's not important to your salvation. Don't worry about it. Let me write down some scriptures for you to read. And what he did not understand was I was scripture mastery queen. I have read all these scriptures. I can quote them for you. And it was just so. It felt so dismissive and this. And I was in there for maybe an hour, hour and a half. I was there for a long time. And it was late at night. And I remember just, it slowly started to like settle into my brain that like, this man doesn't have answers to any of these questions, like. And I was like, oh my gosh, was my answer from God actually that there are no answers, that I was led here to be told, you are not going to get answers going down this route. And I, and I went home and I remember just being looking at these scriptures he'd written down and being like, none of this answered a single question I had. And it's just that experience of having a man completely dismiss me. And when he was saying to me, these are not important for your salvation. Don't worry about this, it doesn't matter. I was like, look, very old man, I am a human being crying across the table. You don't understand. I have put everything into this moment and you're just telling me it's not important. And like that experience of being invalidated by a man who has authority that you will never have, those things change our lives and you reach a point where you realize, I'm not going to get the answers going down this road anymore. Anyways, that was a story Katie had reminded me of, so I thought I would tell it.

John Dehlin [02:52:58] Thank you. Those are great stories. Stories. Thank you.

Katie Ludlow Rich [02:53:00] Yeah. Abby has a beautiful essay that is included in 50 years of Exponent 2. So does Amy McPhee Alabaster. Jana also has an essay that she wrote with Linda King Newell about Mormon enigma. That's in 50 years of exponent two. And so this, this particular book, this collection, hold it up again, if you don't mind. Yeah. It has certain limitations. Right. It is focused on American women, It is focused on English speaking women. It is not the experience of the global church population. Right. But since the 1960s to now, it does cover a lot about women who have been connected to the church. Many very faithful, very believing who are willing to share their experiences of their pain points and of their faith and have that be in conversation with a community. And it's through the history of it, you can see how often those perspectives have been dismissed, ignored, sideline, treated with suspicion, pushed out. And then we're brought to this moment where we're like, why are women leaving the church? Women, even if they stay, have been talking about their complicated experiences with the church for a long time. And it is an opportunity to sit in and listen. Whether you are a active, believing person or if you have left. This is an opportunity to listen to experiences and leave hopefully understanding more about the individual and systemic experience.

John Dehlin [02:54:29] Maybe that book should be required reading for all Mormon church leaders and members, but also especially for social media spokespeople for the church. Why don't you hold it up one last time? It's called 50 Years of Exponent 2 by Katie Ludlow, Richard and Heather Heather Sundahl.

Katie Ludlow Rich [02:54:48] We have an afterword by Laura Thatcher Ulrich, Pulitzer Prize winning historian. It's published by Signature Books. And so you can, you can buy this book, you can subscribe to Exponent 2 magazine, you can read the blog, follow. What's the exact handle?

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:55:01] Okay, there with Exponent2 has two Instagram accounts. We encourage you to follow them both. There is the first one. We have a magazine. The first one is. The magazine is going to be. We're going to make sure that we say this exactly right. Exponent. Exponent I underscore Mag. That's the magazine that is going to be like artwork, well curated stuff that's planned like six months in advance. If you want to follow the blog, we are going to be a little more wild and spicy on there and we are posting very, very regularly on there and we will talk about things in the moment as they happen. And that one is Exponent II blog. So please come follow that if you want to hear the voices of women and talk about things real time with other people. That's a great Instagram account to follow.

John Dehlin [02:55:47] So please buy this book right now, everybody. Let's have a thousand of you or more buy this book and let's have this book shoot up in the Amazon rankings for Mormon themed books. Katie's nodding.

Katie Ludlow Rich [02:55:59] Oh yeah. I mean I would really appreciate. Yeah. And it's not just that. It's work that I love and that I poured myself into. It includes so many voices here. There's 102 selections in the selected one works from 50 years of the quarterly publication and blog. There's lots of different experiences across the spectrum of gender, sexual orientation, range of belief, age range. There's a lot in there.

John Dehlin [02:56:25] Love it. Really quickly before we end, one of the things I'm just noticing is how impactful kind of the ex Mormon Internet it has become. Just a. Just a few weeks ago when the. Or a couple months ago depending on the timeline, when the church released that polygamy lesson for children and then the ex Mormon Internet kind of blew up. We saw within a month or two the church totally editing and changing the lesson. This is another example of a mainstream top level church spokesperson. He's not like an official spokesperson for the church, but that guy ain't talking like that guy's been in his job for a couple years now, and he literally has not said one word publicly.

Katie Ludlow Rich [02:57:10] The official spokesperson.

John Dehlin [02:57:12] Yeah, I'm forgetting his name right now, partly because he never talks.

Amy McPhee Olivest [02:57:15] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:57:15] But I mean, Jared's as much of a spokesman as probably anybody. Yeah, right.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:57:20] He's the public face. He's the one people are looking at.

John Dehlin [02:57:23] Yeah. And, and so I guess on the one hand, I'm struck and happy that, like Mormonism After Dark. Bill Rio, Radio Free Mormon Mormon stories, Exponent 2, you know, Julie Hanks, Britt Hartley, no nonsense spirituality, you know, and there are others, Mormonish, and so many great ex Mormon resources out there that are, that we know the church is paying attention to. And we're seeing almost immediate reactions from the church to these social media assets. On the one hand, I'm very proud to be a part of this community. On the other hand, I'm like, wow, like, where are the faithful Mormon podcasts and spokespeople that are also paying attention and being willing to offer loving critiques or concerns or just heartfelt expressions of sadness? It's just, how do y' all feel about, about that sort of disparity or dichotomy?

Speaker F [02:58:27] I don't know.

John Dehlin [02:58:27] The right.

Katie Ludlow Rich [02:58:27] It's a feature, not a bug, that you have to be outside of the mainstream in order to speak. And it makes me think of Katie Bowler at Duke Divinity School and her book the Preacher's Wife. And she looks at evangelical women and how women gain influence. And their path was not through ordination, but through marriage that their husbands could be ordained and then they could get platforms with lots of strict requirements around it. But in order to have a voice as a woman in evangelical traditions, that was the path. And in Mormonism, women have been so excluded from institutional voices. And if you do speak up and if you do show that sympathy, you're often pushed out fast. That in order to have a voice within Mormonism, it is through influence on platforms outside of the church and with

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:59:14] things like garments, which, if you want to talk about garments before we go, I, I, I'm cool either way. But I do have a couple thoughts on it, if you want me to. But yeah, with garments. I feel like women who wear garments and attend the temple regularly don't dare talk about their problems with garments. But it's women who have left and stopped wearing their garments who are the ones who become vocal and say these are the problems. These are the issues that then drive changes like the shorter sleeves and the skirts and things like that. It's not because the active Mormon women were talking about it. It's because the women who left, we're talking about it.

Katie Ludlow Rich [02:59:45] And then we hear from the act of Mormon influencers how happy they are about these changes, when sometimes they are the same people who criticize people for talking about the problems.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [02:59:54] All the people who are like, ordain women is evil and of Satan, and they're like, yay, we love all these changes for women in the church. And you're like, you're welcome. We did that for you.

Katie Ludlow Rich [03:00:02] But we want to be in better, healthier conversation and community. Like, we don't want it to be so divided.

John Dehlin [03:00:10] Well, I. We do have several slides on the garment changes, but because we're at three hours and because Katie has to go, why don't we save that for a follow up episode?

Abby Maxwell Hansen [03:00:16] Okay.

John Dehlin [03:00:17] Would that be all right, Abby?

Abby Maxwell Hansen [03:00:18] Totally fine.

John Dehlin [03:00:18] Katie. Okay.

Katie Ludlow Rich [03:00:19] Yeah. And with me or without Abby has so much insight on this issue.

John Dehlin [03:00:26] No, I mean, when, when you were on before, Katie, I'm, I thought, why don't we have a regular feature where, where we can have, you know, you three or any combination of other women who are available to just come and, and, and honestly, I don't want. I, I want to see y' all talk about lots of issues, not just issues dealing with women, but especially with issues of dealing with women. We would just love. We're grateful, you two and Amy and Jenna, we're all here. We're grateful for Brit and Julie Hanks and for all the women who commented or posted response videos or participated today or wherever you participated. So huge thanks to all those important contributors. And also, we're so thankful that y' all are here and we hope y' all will come back.

Katie Ludlow Rich [03:01:20] I think we'd both love to come back.

Amy McPhee Olivest [03:01:22] Yep.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [03:01:22] Katie and I like to talk.

Final Thoughts and Closing Reflections

John Dehlin [03:01:25] All right. Okay. Any final words before we, before we wrap up? It's been three hours. Final words?

Katie Ludlow Rich [03:01:32] I just want to really thank you, John, for being willing to host this discussion. And I think how much you let us just talk was, I think, really showing about how willing you are to, to hear and listen to, to all of this and host on your platform about it. Thank you.

John Dehlin [03:01:47] Thank you. It's super fun and meaningful to me.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [03:01:49] So I certainly don't think it's unfeminist to say thank you to male allies and men who apologize and listen. Like, thank you. We want you on our side and we want women to come who are uncomfortable and not sure what. Like Amy said, the poison cookies they're eating where they're like, why am I frustrated? I'm told this is all how things are supposed to be. Come and talk, do the horizontal conversation come, just follow Exponent, read the blog post, get the magazine, subscribe, do these things and come and join this community. Because no matter what, where you end up, that's one Beautiful thing about Exponent 2 is that no matter where you end up, we have women, we have bloggers who are in their Release Society presidency, and we have bloggers, like I said, Nancy Ross, who has left the church and is an ordained elder in another faith practice. And everywhere in there you can feel comfortable. There are not a lot of spaces, actually, I don't know any other space that is as magical as Exponent 2, where we will host the voices of women and gender minorities. No matter where you are and where you will find interesting companionship and thoughtful discussion and dialogue like you will at Exponent too. Because there's lots of places that gear only towards people who are in the angry phase, having just left the church, people who are like, I love the church and I don't want to change anything. Like Exponent 2 is that place that brings us all together. So please come and join our community.

John Dehlin [03:03:15] I love it. Also, a shout out to Latter Daily Digest and the Culture Hall. They're important contributors as well. Also, I know there's a podcast called At Last She Said It. I've never seen it.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [03:03:27] Great one too.

John Dehlin [03:03:28] But that's a faithful women led podcast and I think they did a response.

Katie Ludlow Rich [03:03:33] Well, I'm sure they did a response, but they also just guest edited the last issue of Exponent 2 magazine and they have a book coming out, a signature book for Mother's Day. I think it's just called At Last She Said It. And they're doing great and important work hosting conversations for often even a more faithful leaning community, but are bringing in that nuance and that complication.

John Dehlin [03:03:54] I love it.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [03:03:55] Yeah, go follow them too if you haven't. There are just amazing women. That's one thing. In the last since ordained women, I've seen a huge change in the diet, in the discussion and the amount of discussion online of women and people coming together and all. Every time a new podcast starts, every time a new blogger submits a guest post to Exponent 2 or something, my little feminist heart leaps with joy and I'm like, oh, I'm so grateful to that you're joining and that you're here.

Amy McPhee Olivest [03:04:24] Follow.

Katie Ludlow Rich [03:04:24] Alas, she said it. Follow women on the stand. And there, I mean there's so many Other that.

John Dehlin [03:04:28] That's an Instagram, right?

Katie Ludlow Rich [03:04:29] Instagram, yeah. I mean, you follow them both on Instagram, but yeah.

John Dehlin [03:04:32] Okay. And then also Latter day struggles.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [03:04:34] Oh, yeah, well, the hammockers.

Katie Ludlow Rich [03:04:37] Yes, yes. Yeah. And they've. Jana has covered their recent story as well. And there's.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [03:04:45] Yeah, all right. There's lots of community. If you're feeling a little itchy in the church. There's so much community out there for you.

John Dehlin [03:04:54] Love it. Okay. Well, also thanks to our own Maven and Julia and Brooklyn, who helped make Mormon stories possible, along with our board of directors. I have to always just thank our donors. We couldn't do this without those of you who donate on a monthly basis. If you value this type of content and you want to see it continue, if you want to see us be able to pay our staff and our contributors, which we always try to do, you can become a monthly donor@mormonstories.org click on the Donate button. Become a monthly donor. And we really appreciate those of you who can please always subscribe and like to this episode and to the channel on YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok, wherever that helps with the algorithms and stuff. And yeah, thanks to all the people who commented today your comments and questions. Also apologies for all those who on Instagram or YouTube or TikTok or Facebook who commented and we weren't able to share your comments. There were just hundreds and hundreds of women sharing their experiences about why they left the church. We may need to do an episode just dedicated to that because there's no way we could have read hundreds and

Katie Ludlow Rich [03:06:03] hundreds and send us guest posts at Exponent.

Abby Maxwell Hansen [03:06:06] Yes, that's right. Go to exponent II.org and go under the blog tab. And we love guest posts, people, all women, all the time, will do their very first published piece of work on the blog or in the magazine sometimes, but just on the blog where suddenly thousands of people read it and you get responses and community and connection and it's like a life changing moment for a lot of women to, like, see their experience in words, in print.

John Dehlin [03:06:36] So love it. All right. And finally, just Jared Halverson, thanks to you for being classy and apologizing publicly and then promising to try and do better. That's a classy thing to do. And we welcome you to this journey of becoming better feminists and we look forward to seeing those changes manifest in your public presentations and writings and podcasts and Instagram posts, et cetera. So 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.

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