>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: When you go camping with a Mormon, how do you prevent them from drinking all of your beer? Bring a second Mormon. Welcome to the Cross examiner podcast, the Internet’s courtroom in the case of rationality versus religion. Here, our host uses his experience as both an attorney and an atheist to put religion on trial. We solemnly swear that it is the most informative, educational, and entertaining jury duty you will ever do. And now it’s time for the cross examiner. Welcome, welcome. Welcome to the Cross examiner podcast. I am the cross examiner. I am an atheist. I am an attorney, and I am alarmed. I’m alarmed by the rise of christian nationalism in the United States. And more importantly, I’m alarmed by the massive amount of misinformation that’s powering that rise. I created this podcast to both educate and entertain, hopefully, um, and focus on misinformation in general, and especially misinformation that is, uh, being used to try to merge government and religion both here and around the world. Today I’ve got a very special treat. Doctor John Delinquency, who runs the Mormon Stories podcast, very generously donated his time to do an interview. He helped record it. He’s got a very fancy podcast. I suggest you check out Mormon Stories podcast. The link is going to be in this episode details as well as on my website@thecrossexaminer.net, dot. Uh, so he, uh, generously recorded this as well. So it is not only an audio episode, it’s a video episode. So if you would like to see the full video episode, you can go to my website, uh, and I will have a link to the YouTube version of this, not just the podcast version. Doctor John Delin, as you will hear, is an ex Mormon. And we discuss a lot of things, but especially the misinformation that the church has historically used to fool people into remaining Mormon. And this fits right in with the theme of my podcast. Big, powerful institutions or individuals will use misinformation to trick you to your detriment. It’s. It’s the theme of this podcast. If we can all be a little more skeptical of claims made by people in power or people we trust, we as a country would be better off. I’m gonna cut straight to it. He gave me so much time. I’m gonna make this a two part series. So we’re gonna do about half of it now. Then I’m just gonna cut in and tell you we’re done. And then we’ll. I’ll publish a second episode. That’s the second half. I found the conversation to be very enlightening. I learned a lot and, uh, very entertaining, and I found him to be a wonderfully nice person who’s genuinely helping people out of tough situations. Enough of me talking. Let’s get straight to the interview. So welcome. John Delin. Nice to have you here.

>> John Dehlin: Thanks. Um, thanks. Cross examiner. Do I refer to you as the cross examiner?

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: You can. You can call me the cross examiner. You can call me Graham. You can call me hey. You, however, like to do it.

>> John Dehlin: Hey, Graham.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: With me. Thanks.

>> John Dehlin: Thanks for having me on your show, and thanks for being on my show 100%.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: I’m really glad that I reached out to you. Um, I’m really glad that you offered to have us release this on both of our shows. I think both of our listeners would really benefit from this conversation of me getting to know you and your work and your journey through your belief system. Uh, so I really do appreciate it. You are, by all means, a very, very busy individual, so I appreciate you taking the time.

>> John Dehlin: My pleasure. Yeah, thanks for having me.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: All right, well, uh, I’m going to give my listeners a little bit of a background, and correct me if I’m wrong. So you are a, uh, former member of the Church of Latter day Saints. People will call them Mormons or church of latter day saints. My mormon friends call themselves ldsers all the time. How do you prefer to refer to your, uh, former belief?

>> John Dehlin: Official name is the church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. It’s really a handful. And a, um, believing Mormon would say that Jesus Christ is the most important part, so you don’t want to leave that out. The Latter day Saints is just Joseph Smith’s spin on the name, and it’s meant to sort of remind, uh, us all that Jesus is coming soon. And the church was founded in 1830, and. And it took a few years. They changed the name a few times along the way, but that’s the name we settled with.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Gotcha. Okay, that’s great to know. And you are now, first of all, you hold a PhD in psychology, and you do this podcast that we’re doing a dual episode on called Mormon stories. Um, we’re going to get to how you got there and all of that sort of stuff. But you also do other blogs and websites that I saw. Um, in my reading, I identified you as somebody who was very influential in the early, sort of, Mormon blogosphere movement. And as far as I can tell, your current, uh, practice focuses on, uh, dealing with issues of either being in a high demand religion or being LGBTQ within any sort of religion. And maybe even coming out or leaving the religion, uh, those sorts of things. Am I describing sort of your focus correctly now?

>> John Dehlin: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I started out, um, you know, I was raised. I was raised more. We’ll talk about this in a little bit. But I started the podcast back in 2005 just to help people be able to talk about things that they couldn’t talk about at church. And, um, uh, over time, it’s grown so. So, yeah, Mormon stories podcast. And, uh, we’re all about long form and just letting Mormons tell their stories.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Absolutely. I have watched many episodes. I started. The episode that brought me in was Eve’s story, a couple of episodes about young lady named Eve. Um, you and your co host sat her down, and she volunteered to discuss some little known facts about mormism, which we’ll get to later. And then she volunteered to be filmed. Why you told her this, and you could sit there and watch her process this information that she obviously hadn’t heard, or maybe heard in the whispers in the winds, but was now hearing it from a fairly trusted source. And those two videos, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that. To watch somebody deal with this information from a trusted source in real time was really moving, and I really felt for her. Uh, I really loved how you approached it very gently, but, you know, fact based. So, uh, that. That got me down a rabbit hole of following what you were doing and watched, uh, a lot of those videos. And, um, your viewership is, uh, speaking volumes. You’ve got hundreds of thousands of people that subscribe. Now. Um, what does it feel like to be at this point where people are listening to you talk to people as they deal with these mormon related issues?

>> John Dehlin: It’s super fun. And I just have to give a shout out to my friend Cara Burrell. She runs a YouTube channel called Nuance Ho. And that particular interview was on Kara’s nuance ho channel. And she’s gotten hundreds of thousands, if not a million views from one single episode. I tried to get Kara to let me put it on warm stories. She’s like, no, uh, that’s hers. It’s really rewarding. We started out audio only back in 2005, and we probably were audio only for a good five to ten years. And then we just started recording the video on Zoom. Just kind of like to have it, but it’s only been kind of since right before COVID that we started just consciously trying to grow our YouTube audience. So we just. This week, we passed 250,000. And, you know, for. For. For many. For many YouTube channels, that’s small beans. But for. For the mormon specific circles, 250,000 is a huge number. So it’s humbling, and I’m really grateful. And weirdly, something like 60% of my YouTube audience has never been mormon. So, weirdly, there’s a huge appetite for mormon stories that extends well beyond active, believing, faithful Mormons, or even ex Mormons. So that’s fun.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Absolutely. I am one of those people. Um, my background is, I was never really religious. Religious. Early in my life, I would have answered the question, do you believe in God? With a yes. Um, but fairly early in my teens, I think I would have started answering with a no. And my parents were not very religious. And I, uh, am a huge fan of Mormon stories and nuance. Ho. And, uh, see, who wrote the book? I forget her name. Uh, Alyssa Grenfell, I think you’ve talked to that wrote this book. Um, she’s wonderful as well. And I’m watching all of this content. Um, and we can sort of probably discuss later why the never Mormons, uh, is such a huge audience. I think I have some ideas there. Um, but getting back to you, um, the big event, uh, then in your life was in 2015, you were excommunicated from the church. So I think what my listeners are going to be interested in hearing is your journey from being in the church to having some sort of crisis of faith, to the point where you leave the church, not necessarily by your own choice. Uh, so do you mind if I sort of walk through, uh, that history?

>> John Dehlin: No, that’d be great. Go for it. Yeah.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: All right, so from an educational standpoint, let’s start there just so people understand what you were doing with your profession. You have a bachelor’s in poli sci, and you got that in the early nineties at BYU. Is that correct?

>> John Dehlin: Yeah. And let me just also just say that something that I think we both decided would be fun is to release this episode on both our platforms.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yes.

>> John Dehlin: Because my audience is used to me being the question asker, not the question answer. But I’ve got so many new listeners as of the past few years that I think they would enjoy just kind of like, who is this John guy? Let me know more about him. So every couple years, I try and release an episode of someone interviewing me. And so that’s kind of what’s fun about today is, you know, uh, it’ll be fun to kind of get to know your audience, and then it’s also fun for my audience to get to know you and also to hear my story. As well. So I just throw that in there?

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I’m, I’m excited about that. I’m fairly new to the podcast. I’ve been doing it for a year or so. I am for your audience. I am also, uh, a regular host now on several shows devoted to atheism and separation of church and state are my main focuses. I am an attorney, um, and that’s my focus is pushing back against christian, uh, nationalism, taking over sort of the United States. So my main hosting job is this podcast, but also I’m a regular host now on the atheist experience, which has, you know, 500,000 viewers as well. So we’re in the same sort of order of magnitude of viewers. It’s humbling to have that many people. I know that my audience over on that show will be very interested from hearing from you. So if we can ever arrange it, maybe we could have you come on as a guest and take some calls and talk to people.

>> John Dehlin: That’d be super fun. Yeah. So let’s go back. Where should we jump in?

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Okay, so I just wanted to sort of get people in your mindset of what you do for a career before we jump into your beliefs. So you had poli sci in 93 at BYU and then got a masters in instructional technology in 2007 ish.

>> John Dehlin: Is that correct? Yeah. So, weirdly, uh, when I was at Brigham Young University, which is where I got my bachelor’s degree, which is like Mormonism’s Notre Dame, you know, equivalent for the Catholics, um, I wasn’t sure, uh, what to major in. And I kind of had an interest in politics. So I actually pursued political science, thinking that I would, um, thinking that I would go to law school. But, uh, I actually also learned at BYU somehow that you should love what you do and be passionate about it and don’t be upset here. I talked to several of my lawyer friends, and none of them said they love what they do. And that that was like a red flag for me. And I know that there are lawyers who love what they do, but just how, it’s just so happened. The people that I talked to didn’t love what they, um, did. And so I’m like, well, I better wait. So I left BYU. I went to work for Bain and company, which was Mitt Romney’s management consulting firm. I was, it’s based in Boston, but I went to the Dallas office, and, um, that’s when the Internet, like 19 93 94, that’s when Netscape navigator first starts coming out and I learn about the Internet, and I’m like, okay, management consulting is cool, but this Internet thing is going to be big. So I moved. I left Bain after a year, went to Chicago to Arthur Andersen and started doing Internet consulting with the whole time. Not Internet consulting, sorry, computer programming consulting. Um, um, and the whole time I was thinking, I’ll go teach school, I’ll go be a principal at a school, but I just need to figure out what graduate degree to pursue. So tech kind of happened as an accident as me just wanting to earn money for my family. So long story short, I spent a year, uh, at the Mormon church as a tech consultant, doing, uh, y two k conversions. So during the year 2000 timeframe, around 98, everyone was freaking out that, um, when year 2000 came along, all the computers were stopped working. So actually spent a year at the Mormon church consulting them, converting their databases from kind of legacy dos based databases into windows, uh, based like access based databases. The coolest project I worked on at the LDS church, it was a general, general authority tracking system. So they had a system that tracked who their future leaders might be, candidates for their future leadership. And they allowed me to be on that project, which was kind of fun to see what things they think about to choose their, their highest level leaders.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Sure.

>> John Dehlin: And I’ll just say I ended up at Microsoft, uh, in around 98, 99. And I was there around seven years. And then that’s where I lost my faith at, uh, Microsoft. And then when I left Microsoft took about a year to figure out in grad school that podcasts were going to be a big thing. So by 2005, while I was in grad school studying instructional technology, I learned about podcasts and I started Mormon stories. Then we’re one of the first, we’re one of the longest running podcasts in the world. I’m told we’re not, uh, the longest running, but since we started in 2005, I think we’re at least close.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: That is quite a story. And I have, I think you and I have not talked about our histories until this moment. I am stunned at how parallel we are in our background. So let me just give you a quick, a quick version. I majored in political science in the early nineties because I was thinking about going to law school.

>> John Dehlin: Nice.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: But I talked to people, I hope you’re detecting pattern. You talk to people who were lawyers and they didn’t seem too happy. And my father said, hey, you’re going to get into a career where you have a high chance that every single day you’re going to have to be making some moral decisions, some tough decisions are you sure you want that? So I drove myself back down to Charleston, South Carolina, where I was born and raised. Sat on the beach and thought about what I wanted to do and decided I didn’t want to go to law school yet. And I wanted to get into teaching and helping people, whatever I need to do to pay. I got a job at a medical records software company as a consultant, working on consulting, uh, for medical records software and eventually worked myself up to be the co manager of their y two K conversion team. And we, I’m telling you, it gets better. I managed people who were converting hospitals, uh, software, their medical records software from DOS, old DOS stuff into Windows stuff, old mainframe databases into access databases or SQL databases, same exact thing. Um, and then eventually after that Internet came, I quit. And some friends of mine built, uh, a company, a small little company that was looking at the Internet boom, saying, well, this is a gold rush. I don’t want to pan for gold. I want to sell the picks and shovels and the denim jeans. So we created a web company that would make you your website or do whatever you need because we had all had this, developed, this tech expertise. So I think we might be brothers from another mother or gone through some sort of portal. But, yeah.

>> John Dehlin: You weren’t relays raised religiously at all or were you? Okay, none.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: I mean, my mother took us to church occasionally because I think she felt that was the right thing to do. But, you know, uh, uh, the, the closest I came to religious upbringing was, um, um, I was in school after I was born in Charleston, South Carolina. Moved around because my dad was in the navy. That’s why we were there. I have no particular family ties to it, but there’s a big navy base there. We ended up back in Charleston when I started sort of my middle school to, uh, approaching high school years. And back then, this is the, the late seventies, early eighties, South Carolina schools were, you know, 49th in the nation, right above Mississippi. So they worked very hard to get us into a private, uh, school. You had to sort of test into it, but you also had to have, you know, you could get some scholarships if your parents were in the military. So we scrimped and saved and got us in there. And that was a religious school. It was an episcopalian religious school. So I did do, you know, I went to chapel. This was for many years went to chapel. I was occasionally the person, you know, putting out the candles and saying the lesson for the day. But it, for me, in that environment, it was just at that age, a thing you did. There wasn’t any truth claims being asserted to me. Like, nobody was telling me this is literally true. And I sort of took it as, these are interesting stories. I wonder why we’re doing this. And for the rest of the day, outside of, for the rest of the week, outside of chapel, there was no overt, what you would imagine from maybe a traditional catholic school where you have a nun teaching you and there’s a crucifix on the wall. There was none of that, no trappings. It was just a nice school that also had chapel once a week.

>> John Dehlin: Got it. Fun. Well, those are fun, uh, fun parallels.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, um, you then, I, uh, want to jump back and start early on with your, with your, um, religious beliefs, if you don’t mind, and then we can jump back up to what you’re doing now, because I think that that’s a good arc. So, um, you were, as we said, a Mormon. So, as you say on your show, I would love to hear your Mormon story. And I’m not sure where to start out. I think with my audience, we might want to start out like a good lawyer at the beginning of a contract or a law by defining some terms.

>> John Dehlin: Okay.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: All right with you. All right, so what is the church of Jesus Christ of latter day Saints? What is that?

>> John Dehlin: All right. Yeah. So, uh, uh, in, uh, uh, and this. This history is going to be new to many Mormons, actually ones that have only heard the official version. So I’ll just warn people. Everything I say, I believe is. Is factually true and substantiated, but it will seem controversial or even scandalous to the average Mormon because you haven’t been told your true history. So, uh, in the 1820s, there was a boy named Joseph Smith. He was born in Vermont, but he was raised kind of in, um, a place called Palmyra, New York. He was a younger son of a pretty large family. They were pretty for poor. They were pretty unsuccessful farmers. And, um, um, they didn’t love farming, so they got, um. Um, you. You should also know that they were superstitious. Uh, they believed in folk magic, um, in magic artifacts, in dreams and in visions, but they’re also christian. And during the time. During those 1820s time period, there were rumors of, like, buried treasure, that pirates or Native Americans had buried treasure all around, kind of, uh, uh, let’s just say colonial united States. And that, um, you could find it. And, um, there was kind of a ruse that, um, or a scam that sort of, uh, country folk would do if they were ambitious, and that would be to claim that they had the ability to see buried treasure in the ground and, or to talk to spirits because they believe that, like dead pirates, as spirits, would guard the treasure. So the con was, if I can, um, convince people I have the power to see underground and that I can communicate with spirits, then I can get money from them or get power and influence from them. And, uh, so that’s how Joseph Smith sort of starts his Mormon story. He, um, spends several years with his dad going around new York, Pennsylvania, and, um, you know, as a treasure digger or as dryer.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Right.

>> John Dehlin: Or they’re different words. Scryer, peeper, glass, looker. And it turns out this was all illegal. So, um.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Sure, sure.

>> John Dehlin: Fraud.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Uh, at a minimum, if you’re, if you know, you’re lying, if you, if you say something you know is false in order to induce somebody to pay you, that’s the definition of fraud.

>> John Dehlin: Yeah. And there were laws on the books, and if you go back even to Benjamin Franklin in the mid to late 17 hundreds, he has this quote where he’s like, man, this is a problem. I can’t believe these people are doing things. Well, that’s how, that’s how Joseph Smith got a start. And, um, weirdly, he never found any treasure, but he did make money. But he had this power to convince people that he had special powers to any. He would take a stone and he would stick it in a hat and he would look in the hat and then he would tell people where the buried treasure would be. And every time they started digging and, uh, you know, they’d get close to it and then he’d say, oh, you know, you didn’t kill the chicken, right. Or you didn’t draw the pentagram, right. And I’m making up those details. But there was always some reason why the people who were digging messed it up. And then the spirit would withdraw the treasure farther down and then Joseph would say, oh, sorry, we’re not going to be able to get it today, but it’s there. And if you come back next time, pay me a little more money, I’m sure we’ll be able to find it. And that was the thing. You’re laughing. Why are you laughing?

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: I’m laughing because I think there’s going to be a theme that we’re going to see evolve here, because that’s, that’s a, a classic, um, um, shifting the blame, right? That’s what psychics do, that’s what con artists do. It sounds like a, he was doing a mixture of dowsing, you know, I can find the water underground and I can talk to spirits. So seances. And if, if I’m doing a cold reading, right, I’m trying to pretend like I’m, I’m John Edward who can speak to the dead. And I say, I’m getting a name. It starts with an a. Is there any a in your life? And you say no. And then I say b and you say no. And I say c and you say no. Eventually I’m going to go. You’re resisting the, the things I can’t get through. You’re, you’ve got negative energy. It’s all your fault. I can’t guess a name out of your life. So this is going to be a thread, I think, as we go forward.

>> John Dehlin: Yeah. The house, the house always wins, right?

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Right.

>> John Dehlin: Yeah. Yeah. And so by 18 26 27, um, you know, the law is onto him. He’s being, you know, um, he’s being charged with breaking the law. There’s at least one or two trials that go on in Pennsylvania or New York and kind of the jig is up. Um, but, you know, so he needs a new, he needs a new thing. And, but while he was in, um, Pennsylvania, he boarded with this man named Isaac Hale, who had a cute daughter. And so he, he falls in love with, with um, Isaac’s daughter Emma. Um, they elope because Isaac thinks he’s a fraud, which, you know, I think he thinks that with good reason. So he’s not going to give Joseph permission to marry Emma. Ah. So they, they um, elope, they run away and get married. And eventually they end up, I think Isaac misses his daughter, so they end up coming back to, um, Pennsylvania area and he says that um, he comes up with this new story that an angel has visited him and the name changes from Nephi to Moroni. Um, but he basically comes up with this new story that an angel has come to him and said, I’m an ancient native American who died. I’m now in spirit and I, and I have this record of these people, um, who were Native Americans, who actually were Jews, who came over on a boat from Israel around 600 bc, started civilizations, um, populated America. And then one half of the group turned bad. And God cursed them all with dark skin as a curse for being bad. They were called Lamanites. The white good ones were called Nephites. And at the end, Jesus comes, he preaches the gospel. After Jesus dies over in the old world, he comes to America, visits the Native Americans, and then eventually the, the dark, um, um, christian Native Americans, uh, uh, actually they probably weren’t christian by that point. They kill off all the white skinned christian Native Americans. And because they were, quote, savages, then they, you know, they lost their Christianity. And so when the explorers came over, led by God to America, the conquistadors and the pilgrims and whatever, um, God led them over here, they found the remnants of the Lamanites, which were the Native Americans, the, you know, the indian tribes. And so Joseph basically says, and angels told me that he’s going to give me gold plates. That’s a, uh, religious record of these Native Americans. And then it’s my job to translate those records. And the only problem is no one can see the gold plates, so I get to see them.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: So I want to jump in here. That’s first. I just want to be sort of sit in the, in the seat of my audience right now. I’m actually quite familiar with this part of the story. Uh, the fact that it opened with his fraudulent psychic, uh, treasure hunting was fairly new to me, but this part I’m fairly familiar with. Okay, but that’s a lot to take in, right?

>> John Dehlin: Yeah.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: There’s so many claims there that, to quote the book of Mormon musical, you know, ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America.

>> John Dehlin: That’s right.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: That’s quite a claim. But that is literally, I mean, that’s well documented as far as I can tell. When I’m starting to read up, I’ve got a lot of books I bought because of your show and other shows, but that seems to be, like, there’s not a dispute about that. That’s an actual tenet of the church. Is that correct?

>> John Dehlin: Oh, uh, it’s absolutely core. It’s core Mormon doctrine.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yeah.

>> John Dehlin: And, you know, if you, if you’re born into it as a 6th generation Mormon like me, it’s just facts. Your parents, you’re taught at every, you know, 3 hours in church every Sunday, it’s just like, that’s the world. And then you’ve got all these non Mormons who don’t know how the world really works. You’ve got all these Latin Americans and Native Americans that don’t know their own history like we do. Right. And that’s the way. But, but then. So, so it’s, it’s understandable why someone born in the church would believe that. Why would a convert ever believe it? Most of the time, the Mormon church targets, uh, relatively uneducated people or really desperate people that are, like, really on hard times. And, um, or they use either the flirt to convert method or just like, the happy positive Mormon family sort of situation where they, where they present themselves. And many, many Mormon families really are just happy, positive, honest, good folks. And if you’re desperate enough or if you’re desirous enough for that super happy, positive american, uh, family, you’ll join, even if there’s some beliefs that seem kind of weird at first. Um, um, and of course, the more Mormon missionaries will use biblical scriptures to sort of like loop a Christian in and say, actually, jesus said other sheep I have, which are not of this fold. He did say that in the Bible. Well, he was talking about the, the Lamanites and the Nephites. And so there’s a way, you know, Joseph Smith, you could almost call the book of Mormon a Bible fan fiction because Joseph Smith knew the Bible really well and it’s almost like he wrote an american version to kind of parallel the Bible. And so he’s able to weave in enough, he uses sort of, uh, old English just like the Bible, which makes no sense, by the way. Why were Native Americans writing in Old English? Or why was Joseph Smith translating into Old English when he didn’t speak old English? But Mormons just don’t think about that. But anyway, um, it mentions Jesus enough and it mentions the Bible enough to where a Christian that really is motivated to have that happy, healthy family or that really cute, you know, young man or woman that’s flirting with them, that’s enough to say, well, some of those beliefs I don’t quite get, but I’m going with it because it feels good, right? And that’s ultimately the epistemology is the missionaries will say, we’ll pray about it. And if you feel that warm, soft, affirming, positive, warm, fuzzy inside, well, that’s the Holy Ghost. And then you, then you’ll know that the church is true. Well, guess what? If this girl is cute enough or this boy is cute enough or you’re desperate enough, or that Mormon family looks amazing enough and you spend enough time with this group that’s love bombing you and treating you really special, guess what feelings you’re going to get when you pray about the Book of Mormon? You’re going to get confirming, confirming feelings that sort of lead you in. Um, or you just suspend it and say, whatever, maybe I’ll get those feelings later and the missionaries will teach you. Don’t you know, you know, say you believe it, act as though you believe it, and the confirmation will come later. And in all those different ways, those fantastic stories that shouldn’t be believed by anyone based on science and evidence, become second nature to so many people.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yeah, yeah. It’s as an outsider hearing these stories for the first time, the first time I heard this, I was like, that’s ridiculous. Nobody would believe that. And then the more I read and the more I knew a lot of Mormon people. So that medical records company, software, uh, company that I work for, a lot of Mormons there still my friends. Hi, Margie, if you’re out there. Hi, Lancer, if you’re out there. My manager, at some point during my history, there was Lancer. He was the big happy Mormon family person, right? Everybody’s very, very, very nice. So, um, I would talk to them and gently sort of, especially friends I was close with at work would sort of read me in on this. And I politely was ingesting this without expressing surprise. But internally I was like, wow, you know, people really genuinely believe this. And it wasn’t for years until I put two and two together and figured out what you just talked about, which is the flirt to convert the desperation and the big happy Mormon family. And, uh, those can present all of their own problems, right. In order to be the big happy Mormon family, you have to subject yourself to sort of that emotional brainwashing that a high demand religion demands. Like you, you being upset is not pure or not holy, or not righteous or not whatever. So you have to pretend to be happy the whole time. Um, or if you’re going after to try to convert desperate people, well, they, low educated people, desperate people, they tend to live in locations that are not safe. So the Mormon church is sending young missionaries out to not safe neighborhoods. And there have been people who have run into a lot of problems there. So you can run into all these different problems, but the core, the core methodology of convincing a non believer to believe these things is, I think, absolutely fascinating. Uh, do you run into, have you done any studies or have you read studies about, uh, into that phenomenon? The, I won’t call it self deception, but trying to become convinced. Right? Trying to become convinced. What’s, what’s uh, the brain doing there?

>> John Dehlin: I mean, I mean, I was a clinical and counseling, my training is in clinical and counseling psychology.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Mhm.

>> John Dehlin: But you know, sort of psychology 101. Talks about confirmation bias, it talks about motivated reasoning, and it talks about if you’re, if you, if you don’t know there’s a pink elephant, you know, on your drive to work, you’ll probably never notice it. But if you’re looking for a pink elephant, if you’re looking for the, the McDonald’s sign, or if you’re looking for a volkswagen bug. You’ll see them everywhere. So the way the brain works is you kind of see what you’re looking for. So, yeah, there’s all sorts of, um. There’s. There’s all sorts of really good psychological studies. You know what? One is just conformity. The ash line conformity study, where they get a bunch of Confederates in a study to, like, say a certain line is the wrong matches the wrong line. And if you get enough people ahead of you saying that the wrong line matches with the wrong line, at least 33% of the time, you will say whatever the people ahead of you said, even if you know what’s wrong because of, um, peer pressure and conformity.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: The Stanley Milgram, the emperor’s new clothes phenomenon. Right? Everybody saying that the emperor has clothes. I don’t see them, but I better say that they do, either because I’m wrong or I want to fit in. I don’t want to be excluded by the group.

>> John Dehlin: Yeah. And an even better one is the Stanley Milgram study out of Yale, where they were, you know, they literally.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: The chalk test.

>> John Dehlin: One dude in a white frock with a clipboard asking you to shock, asking you to what you believe to be shock another person and to administer greater and greater charges of electricity. And if you just got some dude over you with a clipboard and a white frock saying, increase the charge, you must complete the experiment. 33% of the participants will administer what they believe to be a lethal charge just because someone’s telling them to do it. And so authority is, you know, there’s peer pressure, there’s authority, there’s motivated reasoning. There’s confirmation bias where you’ll. You’ll feel, um, good about the things that resonate with what you want, and you’ll tend to dismiss or feel bad about anything that you don’t want. All of those and many, many other psychological studies help explain. Plus, just the phenomenon, uh, of flow, um, or of elevated emotion. Again, I mentioned this before, but really, really good music or a really, really good rock concert or a really, really good movie is going to make you feel this overwhelming sense of joy and happiness. Under the right circumstances, especially if you’ve experienced really hard times or trauma, you might be even more primed to have what’s called some sort of theophany or epiphany just out of pure psychological need or desperation. And so if a church can get you to label, uh, or associate the Mormon church being true with some massive, overwhelming sense of feelings and emotion that really are social, socially, um, informed, then you’ve made that connection. And all of a sudden I had those amazing feelings. The church must be true now. I’m going to give my life to it, regardless of the doctrines and the theology. So I’m not a social scientist or social psychologist, but those are some of the things I’ve studied over the years.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Absolutely. I did, um, I did a series on faith, um, healing. In fact, I’m still doing. I’ve got an ongoing series on faith healing. Um, how did it come about that there are states in this country that have exemptions to charges of manslaughter and even murder if your child dies because you neglected them medically, but the care you were giving them was prayer? Right? That’s, that’s the faith healing problem in America. There are the, especially in Idaho, uh, that’s the biggest place where it’s a huge problem. So I did a huge series on that. And part of that I said, okay, the claim is that if I pray, I’m going, and I might, I’m an I believer, I’m a true believer or whatever the requirement is that I will convince, uh, God to heal my child, right? And so one whole episode was, is prayer effective? And I read up a bunch of studies, a ton of studies, and the long and short of it is prayer that is self reflective. Where you’re talking to God is actually effective at the same rate as meditation. Uh, trying to get yourself into a trance, all of those sort of. I’m going to calm myself, I’m going to have a lower, uh, blood pressure. There’s a bunch of benefits to self reflective prayer, which is very, just a low version of what you’re talking about. If I’m trying to get into the church and I feel like I want to believe, if I’m sitting here praying to God and asking for questions, it’s going to have some positive effect on me because it’s meditation. Um, so, yeah, I can see how that definitely starts that feeling. And then there’s a very. I’m familiar with those studies of what you talk about afloat. I’ve heard story after story of, uh, atheists who deconverted from, especially evangelical Christian, uh, uh, beliefs or southern baptist beliefs, where they have these experiences in church. And when they look back on them now, they’re like, oh, I have that same experience now. When I go to a really good rock concert or I go to the symphony, I was mistaking those feelings and that sensation for the holy ghost when all along I think it was the normal human reaction to having fun, basically.

>> John Dehlin: And maybe they didn’t mistake it, but they were primed or conditioned to associate the.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: You’re being told. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> John Dehlin: With those feelings. Yeah.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yes. Okay, so, jumping back, we have, uh, Joseph Smith comes up with this tall tale, and, uh, people believes it, obviously, from his history of. Let’s. I’m gonna. Hold on a second. We’re gonna have to edit this out. Alexa, stop. I apologize for that.

>> John Dehlin: No worries.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: M modern automation is everywhere. Um, but obviously, from his history as the treasure hunting con man, let’s say, um, one can assume that he’s, uh, quick thinking and probably fairly charismatic, and he’s come up with this tall tale about, hey, angels, at least, are speaking to me, and they have a message, and I’m here to deliver it. Are we at the right. Is that where we are in history now?

>> John Dehlin: Yeah. He produces the book of Mormon. Um, it’s really, uh, honestly, objectively, it’s a very poorly written book. Uh, if you look at the original transcripts of what he dictated, and again, weirdly, what most Mormons don’t know unless they’ve watched south park.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: I love that episode.

>> John Dehlin: We’re all taught that Joseph Smith was behind a curtain, and he had the gold plates there, and then he had these ancient sort of a breastplate and these spectacles that were God inspired Old Testament prophet spectacles, and that he was sitting there translating the reformed Egyptian on the gold plates into English. And then a scribe on the other side of the, uh, curtain would be writing down what he said. That’s what we were all taught growing up, what we learned from south park or from, you know, the. The Internet. Once the Internet came online, is that actually the same stone in the hat that he used to treasure dig is what he used to produce the Book of Mormon. So, literally, the plates weren’t anywhere in the room. Somehow, he, God, needed to deliver the plate to him through an angel. But then when it came time to actually translate the gold plates, they weren’t needed. They were somewhere in a bean barrel, hidden from the scribe and from anyone else. And then Joseph would literally take the same hat and the same stone, because, remember, people felt not only that Joseph had special power, but that his stone had special power. So we take this magic stone that he used in treasure digging, stick it in his hat, stick his face in the hat, and he would come up with the text for the Book of Mormon. It was very jargon, you know, colloquial, very, um, folksy, horrible grammar, horrible spelling. And if you just read the original transcript, you’re like, this dude is just making a bunch of stuff up. Bible fan fiction. But then the editors cleaned it up, put in, you know, capitalization, put in spelling, put in sections, chapters and verses, and made it seem a little bit more Bible like. And so, yeah, Joseph Smith, um, produces that book. He publishes it in 1830. That’s the same year he starts the church. And then, weirdly, two years later, he, he tells everyone this story that twelve years prior, he, God and Jesus. Well, actually, he starts out by saying the Lord visited me and told me that someday I was going to start a church. Now, again, two years after the church is formed, twelve years after the event literally happened, he starts, you know, he starts telling people, uh, that basically God, Jesus as one being, told him to start the church. And then eventually, um, as his theology changes, where he starts to believe that God and Jesus are separate beings, he actually changes the founding narrative to tell people it wasn’t the Lord who visited me, it was God the father and his son Jesus Christ, who both visited me. And, um, you know, so that narrative that God and Jesus told him to start the church comes late and evolves after he’s needing to give people good reasons to continue believing in him. After a bunch of things go wrong, because banks fail, people lose their life savings. Like all cults, he starts, um, making passes at people’s daughters, at women in his home. Other people’s wives eventually starts, um, practicing polygamy. Unbeknownst to his wife, he takes on, you know, over 30 wives, um, mother daughter pairs, sister pairs. I mean, this is like David Koresh, Warren Jeff’s pick, Keith Raniere pick your cult leader. You’re not going to find someone that. I mean, you might find someone that outdoes Joseph Smith, but not. Not if you factor in how successful the church has become. You won’t find l. Ron Hubbard, doesn’t matter who. None of those sort of typical cult leaders out does Joe out cult Joseph Smith, at least in terms of sexual predation.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Right.

>> John Dehlin: But, um, yeah, you know, he starts even taking, you know, 14 year olds, 15 year olds, his wives. And, um, you know, in the end, he’s killed for his. Not just his polygamy and polyandry, which is marrying other men’s, marrying women married to other men. M he’s killed for lying about it, for hiding it from everyone and for a whole bunch of other things, and hiding it from his own wife and the church members. So the church ends in 1844, and, uh, then Brigham young takes over, moves all the mormons to Utah, and then sort of establishes, uh, a theocracy in the desert that, um, has become Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, southern Canada and northern Mexico. There’s kind of this mormon belt that goes all the way from southern Alberta all the way down into northern Mexico and chihuahua. You’ll just have massive mormons. I think mormons are the top religion in las Vegas, believe it or not. You know, in many parts of Arizona that they’re all mormon. They were mormon settlements before then. You know, gentiles came in and co developed those territories.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Wow, wow, wow. So, um, obviously, if everybody knew this story, especially the sort of more cult leader esque things of, I need to sleep with everybody’s wives or get married to all of. Of the women. There was a meme I saw online the other day that was, uh, a three panel comic guy, uh, comes out and says, I have spoken to God. He’s told me to start a cult, and he has told me, dot, dot, dot, and it cuts to somebody in the audience going, whispering to a friend that I need to sleep with all the women. And then it cuts back to the leader that I need to sleep with all the women. It’s like that. It’s almost humorous at this point that when you hear colt or when you hear a high demand religion, or however it is somewhere in the background, some, you have a high probability of finding this sort of, uh, as you said, sexual predation, that in the end, you’re a human male, you now have power. So you are going to use that to satisfy some of your basic urges, because you don’t have a competing sort of pressure, either a moral pressure, a social pressure, or legal pressure to stop you. Um, so the church, at that point, how many people knew? Like, how did he maintain believers? How was he hiding it up? Those are sort of the questions that are fascinating. Once, uh, a few generations pass, then it sort of passes into legend and it’s easier to sort of say, well, we’re not sure, but in the day, you know, did Brigham young know? And did he take advantage of the fact that, oh, well, now that Smith is dead, I can sort of change the narrative and run this thing? Or were they all in the dark?

>> John Dehlin: No. So by Joseph’s death, my understanding is about 300 of his inner, inner moral circle knew about polygamy and or were practicing it now that those numbers may be off, but that’s just my understanding. He kept it really secret. He kind of used it as a way to, um, gain power and influence with his closest followers to engender loyalty. And again, he had married 22 women before he ever told his first wife, Emma, this Emma that I told you about, right? Married 22 women before she even knew, and she, of course, lost her mind. And, uh, you know, there’s rumors that she even was tempted to poison him, but. But he would lie to the general membership, saying he wasn’t practicing polygamy. Um, uh, but once Joseph was killed, one of the reasons that the church came undone in 1844 is because one of the highest leaders in the church, his name is William Law, he finds out about polygamy late, after he’s already ascended to the highest levels of the church. He’s like, that’s not right. That’s bad. And then Joseph’s like, well, then I’m excommunicating you. And so he leaves, and he starts a newspaper called the Nauvoo Expositor. And in that, in 1844, he publishes one edition of the Nauvoo Expositor, saying, I believe in the book of Mormon. I believe Joseph Smith has special power. But as a top leader in the church, I just learned that he was practicing polygamy, that they were, like, recruiting poor european girls who couldn’t speak English to come to America and then matching them with. With Joseph’s friends to be, you know, immigrant, plural wives. Kind of almost. Sex trafficking.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yeah, human trafficking, yeah.

>> John Dehlin: Um. Ah, you know, it was William law that kind of blew the lid off of Joseph’s attempt to hide it, and so. But, you know, there was no hiding it. And by the way, what led to Joseph Smith’s incarceration was him commanding that. That printing press be destroyed for printing that one edition of the Naboo expositor.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: And I’d like to jump in at this point.

>> John Dehlin: Oh, yeah, please, please.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Because my. I think my audience will be fascinated by this particular issue since we focus on church state separation at the time. And correct me if I’m wrong, this is the. The town or city of Nauvoo is what the expositors named after.

>> John Dehlin: Navy. Yep.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Smith, um, is mayor at that time. Correct.

>> John Dehlin: He’s. He’s not just mayor. He’s like, mayor.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Chief justice of the council, all those people.

>> John Dehlin: Right?

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Okay.

>> John Dehlin: Prophet, seer, revelator. So he’s got all the power.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Got all the power.

>> John Dehlin: Legislative and judicial. He’s over it all. He’s over at all. He’s a monarch. He’s a theocratic monarch.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Right? So the newspaper edition comes out. He. He convenes a meeting of the, uh, sham. Uh, a meeting, by all accounts, of the town council that lasts about a day and a half. Half where they do this fake trial, he finds that they have, um. I forget what the charge was, but basically, we don’t like it, and we’re going to charge them with. With, uh, libel and slander. And this newspaper is lying. He then orders the sheriff to go and destroy the printing press. Break in and destroy the printing press, which the sheriff does. Now, at that point, from a. From a christian nationalism, separation, uh, of church and state. This is what the founding fathers are talking about, right? This is exactly it. You’re the chief executive of a town governed by the constitution in the United States. You ordered your thugs to go destroy a newspaper office because you didn’t like what they were saying about you personally. Now, it could have been you didn’t like what they were saying about your religion, but they didn’t attack you. Or you couldn’t like what they were saying about, you know, broccoli. It doesn’t matter. You violated the most important amendment we have to our constitution, the first amendment. You know, the freedom of press. You, uh, you deny people their civil rights under, uh, the constitution. You committed a whole bunch of crimes doing this, all to try to keep this story secret. And this is why we today have to be on alert, because when you get leaders in power that have these instincts, I am the man. How dare you question me? I don’t like all this fake news that the press is printing. I want my followers to start beating up reporters. I want my executives to start going in and destroying actual press offices. It’s just one step at a time until you end up with, as you said, a theocracy. Here it is. It’s happening in 1844.

>> John Dehlin: Yep. And Governor Ford, the governor of Illinois, did get involved, and he’s the one that convinced Joseph to kind of surrender to a jail. And so he did. Carthage jail. He and a few of his, um, um, you know, his brother and a few of his top followers. They surrender. The governor says he’ll protect him. And then a mob comes, uh, in and assassinates several of them and, uh, at least two of them.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Yeah.

>> John Dehlin: Now, now, let me blow your mind for a second. Okay?

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: So, uh, before you do.

>> John Dehlin: Oh, yeah, please, can I read a.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Quote from the governor? Because I think this will speak volumes. So this is what the governor said once he came to the area and was speaking, uh, to or addressing Smith through either the press. I’m not sure if he was physically in a room, but the quote that was recorded by the press is, quote, I now express to you my opinion that your conduct in the destruction of the press was a very gross outrage upon the laws and the liberties of the people. It may have been full of libels, but this did not authorize you to destroy it. There are many newspapers in this state which have been wrongfully abusing me for more than a year, and yet such is my regard for liberty of the press and the rights of a free people in a republican government, that I would shed the last drop of my blood to protect these presses from any legal violence. And this is, this, again, is, uh, you know, fairly early on in our country. 1840s is not that long after 1780, you know, uh, six nine, when the constitution came around. So we’re not that far off. This is, ah, two, uh, generations since. Maybe we have, um. So, um, we have this wonderful speech from this, uh, Mayor saying, how dare you? Like, I’m letting them tear me to shreds with lies, but I would die to protect their right to do so. You get this little taste of power, you take over a town and you become a gangster. Um, that’s quite the quote. So sorry to interrupt, but I thought everybody would like to hear that quote.

>> John Dehlin: That’s a great quote. And I’ll just say, just to kind of blow your mind, I mentioned that after he’s killed, Joseph Smith’s killed, Brigham young takes over. It takes him a good five to ten years to admit publicly that he’s practicing polygamy, and he waits till he’s safe in Utah as like the governor of the territory to kind of say that publicly. But he starts letting the members know pretty quickly that polygamy is the. Is the way things go. And, um. But here’s what will blow your mind. I, you know, 6th generation Mormon, my own grandmother, my mother’s mother, was the polygamist daughter of a third wife. I served two year mission for my church, went to Brigham Young University, three years of church every Sunday. Super faithful Mormon. Did not learn that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy, did not even learn the word polyandry until I was in my thirties.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Wow.

>> John Dehlin: So the church had. And you, the average Mormon that you meet, I would bet a million dollars if I had it. Uh uh. I would bet $10,000. Now, the average active faithful Mormon, who’s above 30, more than half will say they were never taught that Joseph had multiple wives. They were old. They never heard of any mention of any other wife other than Emma in their entire experience with the church. And. And none of them were taught that the printing press was destroyed and that Joseph was ultimately martyred because he had been practicing polygamy. And had been lying about it and destroyed the printing press, they would have just been taught some vague story about how, like, the wicked people, people hated, Mormons hate the truth that the Lord’s chosen or persecuted. And Joseph was killed by a mob because he was standing up for God and his beliefs in the one true church, and that prophets get martyred. But, but, uh, until Mormon stories, podcast and. And other podcasts and websites and a bunch of really good scholarly books that the church told members for decades to never read, if it weren’t for the rise of these scholars and podcasts that the church ultimately excommunicated many of the people, most Mormons today would still never know that Joseph Smith married 14 year olds, mother daughter pairs, sister pairs, other men’s wives, and that he was killed for, um, that polygamy and for the destruction that he wrought. So imagine running a million, multiple million member organization in the modern era where you’re able to keep that from, uh, your membership. And by the way, m the Mormons aren’t, like, uneducated rubes. Harry Reid was the Senate majority leader. Mitt Romney was the republican nominee for president. These guys go to Harvard, they go to Yale.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: No. Yeah.

>> John Dehlin: They too, somehow were. Were warned not to read these books or look at these materials. And so they just, like, became dentists, became doctors, became lawyers, became moms, and never looked under the covers of their own faith.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Right. And we should clarify for people unfamiliar that Mormons get wrongfully grouped into a broader group than they actually constitute. Uh, so you have the church of Latter day Saints, right? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, which is what most people will mean by Mormon. But you also have the fundamentalist church, the Warren Jeff’s church, which is the one that in modern times openly argues for and did practice polygamy in a very, very cult like situation that you can go read up on Warren Jeff’s and there’s documentaries and all that stuff, and sometimes people will conflate the two. Sometimes, uh, polygamy is synonymous with Mormon rather than understanding that. No, the vast majority of Mormons today not only don’t practice polygamy, but, as you said, had no idea that it was the, uh, main focus of what Joseph Smith was doing and the reason that it got him killed because he tried to cover it up by abusing his governmental power. They have no. And that blows my mind because we live now in this world where I can get on the Internet and find anything, but we have to go back just 20 years, and the Internet’s just starting to really come into its own as far as disseminating information that, over time, gets affirmed by confirming sources, uh, other documents that agree, references, uh, to books that you should go read and people that you trust sort of educating themselves and slowly, slowly, slowly start chipping away at the lock that the church has put on this information.

>> John Dehlin: Yeah. And if I, if I can just tweak what you said a tiny bit.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Sure. Um.

>> John Dehlin: Um. So, yeah, think of the fundamentalist church of Jesus Christ of the Latter day Saints with Warren Jeffs is like, let’s just say 20 to 40 to 50,000 people worldwide.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Right?

>> John Dehlin: And they’re often in southern Utah, northern Arizona. Sometimes they’re in Montana or Wyoming, sometimes they’re in Texas. But they keep to themselves. They look almost amish. Uh, they eschew public interactions, they homeschool, they don’t mix with the general population, and they could easily be confused with Mennonites or Amish. So that’s the FLDS. There are several other polygamous branches, too, all smaller than the FLDS religion. Um, what’s weird is that the average Mormon for the past 150 years believes that polygamy is the law of God. So I’m talking about the average member of the LDS church, my faith, let’s just say there’s 4 million act. The church claims around 17 million members. The mainstream LDS church claims around 17 million members. About two thirds of those are people that, um, left the church or got baptized, but never really connected. So think of, think of active, self identifying latter day saints as being around 4 million worldwide, 2 million in the US, 2 million outside of the US. But weirdly, it’s in more modern Mormon scripture that celestial, um, marriage, or polygamy, is God’s eternal marriage. That’s in our doctrine of covenants, DNC 132. And most of us know that our ancestors were polygamists, those of us who were born and raised in the church. So Mormons, even mainstream Mormons, believe in polygamy. They just believe that God stopped it for a temporary stop around 1890, but that it will be brought back. And to make it even more complicated, if you mourns, get married in the temple. And they believe that if a husband and wife are sealed in the temple, that that marriage lasts forever and that they’ll become God’s husband and wife as gods to rule over their own planet.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Today, I want you to repeat that, because nobody outside. Nobody outside the lds, uh, ldsers, so to speak, whenever I mention that to rule your own planet, they, they. That’s where they stop believing me when I’m telling me my understanding of the Mormon church.

>> John Dehlin: So they’re not being, my opinion is they’re not being honest or they’ve been, they, no, no.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: I’m saying my friends, my people who don’t know it, like when I’m telling them, here’s what Mormons believe. And I say no, that you are, you are going to get married and you’re going to rule over your own planet. They’re like, okay, you’re, you’re pulling my leg. Nobody believes. I want you to. You confirm that this is, it really is a thing.

>> John Dehlin: No. Joseph Smith taught as man is, God once was, and as God is, man may become. And all the prophets since Joseph Smith pretty much have taught that. And that’s what we were all taught, that, that heaven is divided into three main, um, levels. The celestial kingdom where God and all the faithful, active Mormons who are righteous are going to live. And then there’s the terrestrial kingdom for like good people that never joined the Mormon church but are good people. And then the celestial kingdom is for the rapists and the murders and the thieves and, you know, really, really bad people. Like Hitler, he’ll go to the celestial kingdom. In the celestial kingdom you live with God. You live with your, your spouse who you got buried within the temple, and your children, and you get exalted. And exalted exaltation means you are promoted to the rank of godhood. And then literally with your wife or wives or with your husband and sister wives, you literally get your own planet and get to do in new worlds what God did in your world. And that’s absolute core Mormon doctrine. However, Mormons are embarrassed by that because evangelical Christians and Baptists and an ex Mormon came out with a movie in the late seventies, early eighties called the God makers. And they ran that movie in evangelical Christian, uh, churches all throughout the United States and abroad. It was super embarrassing. So the church started downplaying and like not emphasizing that doctrine or teaching and would secretly still believe it, but would stop talking about it. And then slowly hope that the members, they left this in the mormon church. Leaders like to leave intentional ambiguity with doctrines that are doctrinal but that are inconvenient. And so like this teaching, a polygamy. Our current prophet, Russell M. Nelson, his wife died, who he was sealed to in a mormon temple. He’ll be with her for eternity.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: He knows her secret name.

>> John Dehlin: He knows her secret name. Hm. When she died, he married a new woman, got sealed to her in the temple. And he believes our prophet Russell Nelson believes in 2024 that when he dies and his wives die, he and his two wives, plus any other wives that join, will all be together forever in a polygamous union. Same with our number two, Dalina jokes. His wife died, he married a new woman. He believes he’s been sealed to her in the temple. He believes that he’ll be with them. So the active, the average active latter day Saint absolutely believes in polygamy and in, uh, the new and everlasting covenant or eternal marriage or celestial marriage. They just, like, don’t like to talk about it. They feel weird about it. They say, we don’t. We don’t understand all things, but it’s.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: It’s works in mysterious ways. Version of who knows?

>> John Dehlin: In doctrine and covenants, section 132. Go read it. Go look it up. Doctrine and covenants, 132. It’s all there. And so, while we’re not practicing it in the flesh today as members, we’re. We’re still getting sealed, uh, in polygamous marriages as Mormons, and we. We believe we’ll be practicing it in the afterlife. That’s a really long detour.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: But no, no, no.

>> John Dehlin: This is because it’s. It’s core Mormon theology that.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: And it’s important. It’s.

>> John Dehlin: People were talking.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: It’s important because, uh, religion. People have this sort of dualistic relationship with religion, right? There is the community, there’s the family, there’s the. The emotional reward I get from it. There’s that part of religion, and then there’s the claims, the truth claims that this is true, that’s true, this true. And there’s almost a cost, as you were talking about, when you. When you’re trying to convert somebody, they almost have to pay a cost to say that they believe these somewhat outrageous to crazy, outrageous claims in order to get the community and get the family support and to get the affirmation from the church, or you’re broader, your whole state, depending on where you live. So it’s important that people understand the truth claims, because even if you down in, in your core, if somebody asked you and you had to answer honestly and they say, are you convinced that you’re going to die and practice polygamy with your one of many wives on your own planet, where you will be a God and raise up a new civilization to worship you, they might honestly say, no, I’m not convinced of that. Which means they don’t believe it. They just. They suspect it, they hope it, they wish it, but they don’t believe it. But they don’t ever want to say that because somebody might hear them. It feels to them they’ve been taught that. That is, I mean, and this is not unique to Mormonism. You’ve been taught the Christian Bible itself. The New Testament talks about, uh, almost an unforgivable sin. The one unforgivable sin is questioning the Holy Spirit. Right. That if you even question the Holy Spirit, that you may not even be able to be saved. So that’s what you’re taught from an early childhood. So even having these doubts can cause you, um, I’m assure. And you can tell me an amazing amount of stress.

>> John Dehlin: Yeah, no, for sure. And the average Mormon who’s active, I would say a third of active, faithful, believing Mormons would just flat out say, absolutely, we believe that we become God someday and that polygamy is true. I’d say about a third. And then there’s another, a, uh, third to two thirds that would be like, well, some believe that. It’s not clear, but that’s how the, that’s how the modern church has nurtured this ambiguity, literally for pr, uh, reasons.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: So the church would not, would not bash them if they gave that answer. The church would not say, no, no, no. They wouldn’t step in to clarify. They’re actively encouraging you to give the wishy washy. We’re not sure.

>> John Dehlin: Yeah, yeah, they would say, we don’t. You know, the prophet Gordon, me, M. Hinkley, one of our past prophets, was asked about this, and he’s like, well, I don’t know that we teach it, I don’t know that we emphasize it. You know, it’s not doctrinal, that stuff that he will say. There’s kind of outsider insider language that, uh, that’s a typical, another trait of high demand religions or cults. Sure, they’ve got secret doctrines that they only talk about as faithful insiders, and then the way they talk, just like with Scientology and like Seton’s, mhm, the.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Volume ot eight and all that stuff. Yep.

>> John Dehlin: You don’t talk publicly public facing about those weird secret doctrines or you get.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Trouble, you know, and I think that, that right there, this whole fact that you growing up as a faithful Mormon, by, by my m understanding for a long time, for many years, you says it wasn’t. You weren’t till your thirties till you found out some of this.

>> John Dehlin: Yeah.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Uh, that the reason that you had those beliefs was because in some part that the church made a decision to hide other beliefs from you. They actively sought to keep you ignorant of all the facts. So that they could maintain control, so they could maintain income, so they could maintain, you know, volume and size, so they could have workers, uh, to go on missions and grow the church. There’s a lot of motivation that this church has to, um, if not lie, than to commit lies of omission. Am I reading that right?

>> John Dehlin: Absolutely. Yeah. The. The Mormon church currently is worth 250, estimated to be worth $250 billion. That’s what the b super, uh, wealthy church and the way that it became super wealthy is by limiting truthful information. So when you get baptized, when Mormon missionaries show up at your door, even, let’s just say you’re in Africa, you’re in Africa, or you’re in Latin America, let’s just say Africa. And the. And the two white Mormon missionaries from Utah and Idaho show up at your door or show up at your hut, knock on the door of your hut and say, we’re Mormon missionaries. Do you think for a second that those white m Mormon missionaries from Utah and Idaho say, hey, hi, we’re missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ letter of saints, and the Church of Jesus Christ, letter of saints kept black people like you from full membership and full status, kept you out of the temples, and kept men from having the priesthood for about 150 years, until 1978, when God, as the book of Moral musical says, John changed his mind. And by the way, um, we taught the black skin was a curse from God because you, you black person and your ancestors, when you lived as spirits in a premortal existence, y’all weren’t as faithful to God. Y’all were kind of fence sitters. And so you. You became black and your ancestors became black, became slaves, because it’s what you deserved for being faithful as spiritual children in a previous life. Do you think that in 2024, when they’re in Kenya and Nairobi, that that’s how the Mormon missionaries lead? Obviously, they leave all that out. They leave out the stone in the hat. They leave out the treasure digging, they leave out the polygamy. They leave out, you know, 50 other super problematic, racist, sexist, homophobic things. And they teach, like, Jesus loves you and God loves you, and you can pray, and the Holy Ghost will bless you. And this is. This is, you know, this church is led by Jesus. And you want to be like Jesus? Well, you need to be baptized to be like Jesus. And, I mean. I mean, there’s a little bit more. Oh, yeah. Pay 10% of your income to the church for life, right? There’s three degrees of heaven. We have the priesthood. You need to get baptized and eventually you can get married. The temple. I just basically told you what the six missionary discussions are for. Some getting baptized and all the good gritty, you know, Joseph Smith getting killed for destroying your printing press. You don’t even learn growing up as a faithful member who’s like six or seven generation most of the time. And so, yeah, it’s through conscious, willing, knowing deception, because the church has known about these problems the whole time, but they literally intentionally chose to hide it both from the world and from the membership when it suited them. And so that’s why, you know, my biggest, I think we share a common mission. I call it informed consent. I know I’m not trying to take people out of the Mormon church. I’m not. I’m not trying to tell people not to join. I just believe that anyone in it or anyone investigating it deserves to know the truth about it. And then if they decide it’s still true for them, I’m like, thumbs up. If there’s a lot of great things about this church, there’s a lot of good things about the religion, but everyone deserves to know, right?

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: Absolutely. And it, and this, this phenomenon is not unique to mormonism. This phenomenon of hiding the uncomfortable history, the uncomfortable parts of scripture. It’s not even unique to high demand religions. Uh, the, the, um, the dark, the trope of the dark skinned person is being punished because they sinned previously or they have a curse on them. That’s straight out of the book of Genesis. Uh, it speaks of Noah putting a curse on ham because he saw Noah being drunk. And the curse was that ham and his descendants shall be dark skinned. Right. And maybe that’s where Joseph Smith got it. I don’t know. I’m just sort of, uh, making that up. But that’s an uncomfortable passage in the Bible. The original, uh, Old Testament and New Testament are filled with uncomfortable truths. Right. When you go to a baptist, um, or episcopalian or catholic, or just non, uh, denominational service, and people encourage you to go to Bible study, they don’t open it up, uh, and say, okay, today we are going to study all the rules of how you can enslave people from around you and keep them as your property and use them as six slaves and pass them on to your kids and how you can’t kill them. But if you beat them and they live for a couple of days, that’s okay. And then if they die later, that’s okay. They don’t start with those things. They start with what you said. There was this little baby Jesus and, uh, he came to save the world and people didn’t like him, but he did all these wonderful things and then he died for you. Don’t you feel guilty? Um, and that’s the story. Um, but it’s every religion it seems to have. And even if you take it out the context of religion and political parties and uh, corporations will have these things that they use their power, use their influence to hide from people, either legally hide or nefariously hide, because it benefits them. And I think the fascinating part is that the humans have been conditioned to say, when it’s a man of God, so to speak, a man of the cloth, telling me these things, I am going to be less skeptical. I am m going to accept these claims more readily than if its some CEO or some politician or some snake oil salesman were skeptical about all of those to a higher degree than when our pastor comes down and says, well yeah, there was some uh, polygamy going on, but who knows? Who can tell? You probably dont want to read those books over here. Somehow culture has trained you to be more susceptible to those claims than claims from people who aren’t priests, uh, or representatives of a church. And that, I think, makes it even more, um, you’re more susceptible and it makes it almost more insidious that people rely on that to hurt you. Ultimately, that is, take 10% of your income without full consent, as you say, uh, based on them keeping you in the dark.

>> John Dehlin: Yeah, absolutely.

>> The Cross Examiner/Graham: This is editing cross examiner. I’m going to cut in here and say, this is where we’ll stop for today. As I said in my interview and in my intro, Doctor Dillon was very generous with his time and I really do appreciate that. So we had enough to make this a two part, uh, interview. I’m going to stop here. We’ll finish up in the next episode with the second half of our interview. I hope you agree that. But what we’re hearing about the history of the Mormon church, about Joseph smith is, uh, both fascinating and troublesome. And I hope you can see how it relates to the theme of my podcast here. I highly recommend going and checking out his channel. I have been addicted to it ever since I discovered it through the algorithm. Uh, YouTube figured out I would like it and sure enough I did. There are some very compelling and both inspiring and heart wrenching videos on his channel. So go check that out at mormon stories. Uh, podcast. I, uh, ask you to check out my website@www.thecrossexaminer.net, where you can find all of my content links to my, uh, social media platforms, links to my YouTube channel, and links to all of the different podcasting platforms that carry my my podcast. So with that, we’ll end it here. I look forward to hearing from you next time, and I’ll see you soon. Bye bye. This has been the cross examiner podcast, the Internet’s courtroom in the case of rationality versus religion. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider subscribing. See you soon.