Latest / The Lila Rose Show / E286: From Latter-Day Saints to Communion of Saints w/ Isaac Hess | Lila Rose Show

Transcript

E286: From Latter-Day Saints to Communion of Saints w/ Isaac Hess | Lila Rose Show · The Lila Rose Show

• 0:00
  I was a very active, faithful Mormon for most of my life.
• 0:03
  My ancestry goes back Mormon pretty much as far as you can
• 0:06
  count people who knew Joseph Smith.
• 0:07
  The Book of Mormon's credibility is really tied directly to
• 0:10
  Joseph Smith. Was there any clues in his
• 0:13
  upbringing that he would become this at best a prophet and at
• 0:17
  worst a cult leader? I mean, you could say, right?
• 0:18
  I would say yes and no, and here's kind of what I mean.
• 0:21
  Did you know all of this when you were a young Mormon?
• 0:23
  Oh no, I knew none of it and normally did I know none of it.
• 0:26
  Anytime I heard a rumor about something like this, I was
• 0:28
  explicitly told that it was a. Why?
• 0:30
  At this time, exploring Orthodoxy, yes, you end up
• 0:33
  becoming Roman Catholic. Yes, why not Orthodox?
• 0:35
  That's a great question. Hey, I hope you're having a
• 0:43
  great day. A lot of people think that
• 0:44
  they're subscribed, but they're not actually subscribed.
• 0:47
  So make sure that you hit that subscribe button and also leave
• 0:50
  this video a like, thank you so much.
• 0:53
  Also, we've got some fun stuff happening over at
• 0:55
  patreonthatspatreon.com/lila Rose show.
• 0:59
  If you sign up as a paid annual member, you get your choice of
• 1:02
  free merch. You're going to love our free
• 1:04
  merch. It's awesome.
• 1:05
  And if you become a monthly paid member, you get 30% off all of
• 1:08
  the merch. Go check it out over at
• 1:10
  patreon.com slash Lila Roche show.
• 1:12
  Isaac Kess, welcome to the podcast.
• 1:14
  Thank you so much. It's really great to be here.
• 1:16
  I'm. So glad welcome in from Arizona.
• 1:18
  It's great to be by the beach. Arizona is This is the time of
• 1:22
  year for Arizonans, right? This is the only good time of
• 1:25
  year weather wise for Arizona. Yeah, I, I rag on Arizona a bit
• 1:29
  for those who know me. The heat is a little, little
• 1:31
  much in my opinion, but the weather this time of year is
• 1:34
  just perfect. If you're if you've got the
• 1:36
  winter Blues anywhere else in the country, come to Arizona in
• 1:38
  January. I love Arizona, my last
• 1:42
  experience there though was I think in the middle of the
• 1:45
  summer during the pandemic because my Canadian that one of
• 1:49
  my best friends who's Canadian was marrying the love of her
• 1:52
  life at American and it could only work for some weird reason
• 1:55
  in Phoenix, AZ. So it was 100°.
• 1:58
  That was my last memory. But besides that I've always had
• 2:01
  a good time when I go to Arizona and it was still a great time.
• 2:03
  I was just we were indoors the whole time.
• 2:04
  Yeah, if it was only 100, it actually wasn't that bad.
• 2:07
  Yeah, Yeah, that's right. 120 is what you guys get up to, right?
• 2:10
  That's rare, but yes, sometimes. You've been doing some podcast.
• 2:14
  That's not your day job. Your story is fascinating, which
• 2:17
  is why I'm so excited and grateful you came into the show,
• 2:20
  came into the studio today. What is?
• 2:22
  Tell me a little bit about your background.
• 2:24
  So yeah, I go. I've gone around sharing my
• 2:29
  story a few different places, but the basic gist is I was
• 2:33
  raised Mormon, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter
• 2:36
  Day Saints. To give the church the full
• 2:38
  name. They like it when you use the
• 2:39
  full name. And I was a very active,
• 2:44
  practicing, faithful Mormon for most of my life until about the
• 2:49
  age of 35 or so. When I was about 35, went on a
• 2:54
  long, arduous, beautiful, painful, transforming spiritual
• 2:59
  journey where I ended up becoming Catholic.
• 3:02
  A About five years ago now, I was baptized into the Catholic
• 3:05
  Church. So you were baptized for the
• 3:07
  first time. Yes, I was baptized.
• 3:10
  Yeah, LDS baptisms are not considered valid by the Catholic
• 3:14
  Church. Why is that?
• 3:17
  It has to do with the LDS belief in or lack of belief in the
• 3:22
  Trinity. So in order for a baptism to be
• 3:25
  valid according to Catholic teaching, you have to have form.
• 3:30
  The form needs to be correct and the intention needs to be
• 3:33
  correct. So the form needs to be that you
• 3:35
  need to receive a Trinitarian baptism in the name of the
• 3:38
  Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, like it says in the
• 3:40
  Gospel of Matthew. And you also need to be baptized
• 3:45
  with water, and Mormonism actually does fulfill that
• 3:49
  requirement. They do baptize in that formula
• 3:52
  and with immersion. They do single immersion, but
• 3:55
  single immersion does not invalidate A baptism.
• 3:59
  But this came up if if anyone's really nerdy and wants to go
• 4:02
  read it. There was a document from the
• 4:04
  Vatican I think in the 90s that spelled this out that the intent
• 4:08
  is quite a bit different because the understanding of the nature
• 4:11
  of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is quite a bit different in
• 4:15
  Mormonism. So that the intent can't be the
• 4:18
  same as what other Christians are intending to do with
• 4:22
  baptism. Interesting, So the LDS will
• 4:24
  baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy
• 4:26
  Spirit? Yes, but what they mean by that
• 4:28
  is very different than what other Christians believe.
• 4:30
  Yeah, the LDS conception of God is quite a bit different from
• 4:34
  most Christians. All right, so we have a lot of
• 4:38
  Mormons who listen to this show. I know a lot of amazing Mormons.
• 4:41
  We have Jeff Harmon on the show not too long ago, Angel Studios,
• 4:45
  We were both talking before the start about how great Angel
• 4:47
  Studios is. So the goal of this is 1 of
• 4:51
  curiosity and discernment of what is true, because you are of
• 4:55
  such a fascinating background of really knowing LDS theology,
• 5:00
  being immersed in it and then having this change, obviously in
• 5:03
  your 30s. So my goal here and I, what I'm
• 5:06
  excited to do with you is learn more about your background and
• 5:08
  really try to understand the LDSLDS faith and how it's
• 5:12
  different from Christianity, non LDS Christianity, I'm going to
• 5:15
  call it, because I know a lot of LDS people say, well, we're
• 5:16
  Christians too. So we're going to explore that
• 5:18
  question and then get into obviously the differences with
• 5:20
  Catholicism as well. Sure.
• 5:22
  But your story, let's start with that.
• 5:24
  I know I said, what's your background?
• 5:25
  You said before you're, you've done some podcasts recently.
• 5:28
  That's not your day job though, no.
• 5:30
  No, I'm a software engineer by trade.
• 5:32
  Yep, I work for a large retail store that you know you'll have
• 5:38
  heard of, but just leave it anonymous.
• 5:40
  I work from, I work remotely from home.
• 5:43
  You know, it's a great job, it pays the bills.
• 5:44
  It's interesting. But I do this because I love the
• 5:48
  Lord and I just want to share my experience with anyone that it
• 5:52
  might be helpful to do. One thing that I also am excited
• 5:55
  to talk to you about is spirituality and the experience
• 5:58
  of the Holy Spirit and spirituality because I think
• 6:00
  this is whether your faith background is Mormon,
• 6:03
  Protestant, Catholic, whatever it is, Orthodox, this is what
• 6:07
  can be. So I think powerful for people
• 6:10
  for both the good and the bad is the experience of what they
• 6:13
  think they're hearing from God or the Holy Spirit.
• 6:16
  So that's another theme that I'm excited to explore with you
• 6:18
  that. Sounds great.
• 6:19
  All right, so let's start from the beginning here.
• 6:22
  Ray's Mormon. Tell me about that.
• 6:24
  Yeah, I was raised Mormon. I grew up in a very devout
• 6:28
  Mormon household. My ancestry goes back Mormon
• 6:32
  pretty much as far as you can count.
• 6:33
  On both sides of my family. I have ancestors that are fairly
• 6:38
  prominent. Early Mormon leaders, people who
• 6:40
  knew Joseph Smith joined, you know, I, I'm descended from any
• 6:44
  Mormons watching. We'll know who I'm talking about
• 6:46
  when I say the Joseph Knight family through Joseph Knight
• 6:49
  Junior and senior. These are people who are some of
• 6:52
  Joseph Smith's earliest supporters when he was still
• 6:56
  like right when before he even published the Book of Mormon.
• 6:59
  And so I. What year roughly is this?
• 7:01
  18301829 The Book of Mormon was published in 1830.
• 7:07
  So I grew up just, the church was just everything in my family
• 7:12
  life, my extended family life. We went to church every week.
• 7:16
  We studied scriptures as a family constantly.
• 7:19
  We were singing songs, doing all these really lovely things.
• 7:23
  It was a really wonderful childhood.
• 7:25
  I've got great, wonderful parents.
• 7:27
  I'm happy to shout them out. They're wonderful people.
• 7:29
  And growing up LDS gave me, I think it's not a secret at all
• 7:35
  that Mormons create really great and tight communities.
• 7:39
  And I felt that growing up, I just felt like I was a part of
• 7:41
  something bigger. I had friends in church and we,
• 7:47
  we kind of felt like we had a shared destiny, a kind of a
• 7:50
  shared goal that we could work towards.
• 7:52
  So it was, you know, I, I, I can, I imagine it's probably
• 7:55
  like if you grow up, I've not, I've never grown up Catholic,
• 7:59
  but I hear some people, if you go to a really good Catholic
• 8:02
  school, you know, really faithful, surrounded by other
• 8:04
  families that are living in their faith.
• 8:06
  That's what my childhood was like, but for Mormonism.
• 8:10
  So when and where where were you raised Utah?
• 8:14
  I think earlier you said you moved around a bit.
• 8:16
  We. Moved around a bit when I was
• 8:17
  young because my dad was getting his, finishing his education.
• 8:20
  He's a PhD in physics and and then he got his first job at
• 8:25
  Fresno State University. So I actually lived in Fresno a
• 8:29
  few hours north. Of Fresno.
• 8:31
  For four years, so. And there was a Mormon temple
• 8:33
  there. No, not a temple.
• 8:36
  So Mormon temples are not their regular Sunday meeting houses.
• 8:40
  They, those are, the temples are only for special occasions,
• 8:44
  basically. But yeah, there were lots of
• 8:47
  Mormon church buildings, you know, for us to go to.
• 8:50
  How many temples are there? There's, there, you said.
• 8:51
  There's only a few of them. Well, there's, there's a lot
• 8:54
  more now, like when I was growing up.
• 8:56
  I'm going to OK, someone's probably going to kill me for
• 8:58
  getting this being like way off on my numbers.
• 9:01
  When I was growing up, though, there were probably there were
• 9:03
  fewer than 50, I would guess right in the in the world of
• 9:06
  Mormon temples. Now they are more than double.
• 9:11
  There's probably like 200 something like that.
• 9:13
  And they're planning on building a lot more.
• 9:14
  They're kind of expanding the building of them.
• 9:17
  But like I said, they're most active, faithful Mormons.
• 9:21
  If they live close to a temple, will probably go there about
• 9:24
  once a month, whereas every every week or even multiple
• 9:28
  times a week they'll be going to their local church building.
• 9:31
  And the does the local church building say like LDS on it?
• 9:34
  How is it something that the community knows?
• 9:36
  This is a Mormon church building.
• 9:38
  I'm trying to think of one that I would have driven by or seen.
• 9:40
  Yeah, I mean, the temples are more.
• 9:42
  Obvious the temples are very dramatic, right?
• 9:46
  They it's maybe equivalent to like a very beautiful Catholic
• 9:50
  cathedral, right? They're lit up, they're big,
• 9:52
  they're expensive. They're that's where they kind
• 9:56
  of funnel their beauty is into their temple.
• 9:59
  Their regular church buildings are much more plain looking.
• 10:02
  They're not ugly. They look like fairly standard.
• 10:07
  You know, if you drove by 1, you might just think, oh church, you
• 10:09
  know. And what's the point of the
• 10:10
  difference between having the regular church building versus
• 10:13
  the temple? The regular church building is
• 10:15
  for their weekly church services and other activities like just
• 10:20
  Sunday school, community events that they hold, that sort of
• 10:24
  thing. The temple is only certain
• 10:29
  sacred ceremonies occur in the temple for Latter Day Saints.
• 10:34
  And they're actually very private about those.
• 10:36
  Like they don't they are. They don't talk about them with
• 10:40
  outsiders, if that makes sense. But so things like marriages
• 10:44
  happen there. They have some ceremonies where
• 10:49
  they're kind of like inducted into trying to figure out how to
• 10:55
  phrase it in a respectful way. They're they're sort of inducted
• 10:59
  into with some new knowledge that's given to Latter Day
• 11:04
  Saints to guide them in their spiritual life.
• 11:06
  And they make covenants with God in the temples this sort of like
• 11:09
  a once, like when you go through for the first time, you're
• 11:12
  making the covenants for yourself right when you go
• 11:15
  through the temple. Subsequent to that, I'm not sure
• 11:19
  if you're familiar with like how they do baptisms for the dead
• 11:22
  and other things like that. So Latter Day Saints, when they
• 11:25
  go through the temple later, after their initial time, they
• 11:28
  do it on behalf of someone else who has passed on.
• 11:31
  Even though that person was already Mormon when they.
• 11:33
  Were Oh no, they do it for people who weren't Mormon.
• 11:35
  For people who aren't Mormon. Yeah, they're kind of by proxy
• 11:38
  performing baptisms and other. There are other sacred
• 11:41
  ceremonies that happened in the temple on behalf of someone who
• 11:45
  has died with the hope that that person, because they have a
• 11:48
  belief that people can basically hear about Mormonism and accept
• 11:54
  it even after they've passed away.
• 11:55
  But these ceremonies need to be performed for them in the
• 11:58
  temples. So that's the purpose of the
• 12:00
  temples. It's not their regular worship.
• 12:02
  It's these other sacred ceremonies that they have that
• 12:06
  they go and perform for themselves and then for others
• 12:09
  as well. So when you were growing up, it
• 12:12
  sounds like you've got this lovely, beautiful family,
• 12:14
  beautiful community. There was no issue in terms of a
• 12:19
  lack that you experienced growing up with your family and
• 12:23
  community. Did you have any questions about
• 12:27
  your Mormon faith? How did you see other aspects
• 12:31
  of, you know, Christianity? Or how did you see Protestants?
• 12:35
  How did you see Catholics? Did you even think about them?
• 12:39
  I, I didn't have any major questions other than the things
• 12:43
  that kids usually think about. It's normal, I think for any kid
• 12:47
  growing up in a religious home, at some point you hit points
• 12:49
  where you think, do I really believe this?
• 12:51
  Like is this something I'm doing just for my parents or is it
• 12:54
  something I'm doing for me? You kind of mature and I went
• 12:57
  through those types of things in my high school years as well.
• 13:02
  And I don't, I don't think I had any major issues.
• 13:06
  I mean, I, I read my scriptures, I studied them.
• 13:08
  I read the Book of Mormon a bunch of times, as well as the
• 13:10
  Bible and other LDS scriptures, and I attended what they call
• 13:16
  what Latter Day Saints actually call it seminary.
• 13:19
  It's not studies. That's not for priests or
• 13:21
  perspective priests to attend. They have their classes for
• 13:24
  teenagers that you go to during high school, and it's basically
• 13:27
  like a class every single day that you take for four years to
• 13:31
  learn the basics of the faith and that sort of thing.
• 13:34
  So I did all those things and by the time I finished high school,
• 13:37
  I felt pretty secure in my faith in terms of how I thought of
• 13:42
  other religions. I went to high school in Utah
• 13:45
  and I went to high school in a part of Utah and at a time that
• 13:48
  was like it was very Mormon. I hardly knew anyone that wasn't
• 13:53
  Mormon. I had one friend growing up that
• 13:56
  wasn't Mormon and she became Mormon while our junior year of
• 13:59
  high school. Other than that, I didn't have
• 14:01
  any non Mormon friends. So I think that I, the church
• 14:05
  gave me this narrative that early Christianity had gone
• 14:10
  apostate and that Mormonism was the restored true church.
• 14:16
  And so it was our job to bring the truth to other people,
• 14:20
  including Christians. So in as much as I thought about
• 14:24
  Protestants or Catholics, you know, I had, I had respect for
• 14:28
  some, a lot of the things that they believed, but I definitely
• 14:31
  thought in my mind like, oh, they're lacking something that
• 14:34
  and I want to go out and share it with them.
• 14:36
  And so, you know, as part of that, I went on a mission, a
• 14:39
  Mormon mission for two years to, I went to North Carolina.
• 14:43
  So I talked to a lot of Baptists about.
• 14:46
  You went to North Carolina to spread the Mormon.
• 14:48
  To spread the Mormon it. Was in like some other country.
• 14:50
  It was US. Yeah, they send people to
• 14:53
  different places all over the world.
• 14:54
  Like one of my brothers went to Mexico.
• 14:55
  I had a brother that went to Tahiti, but I got North
• 14:58
  Carolina, which was fine with me.
• 15:00
  I you know, I was not disappointed by going there.
• 15:03
  What did you do? I spent two years and a fairly
• 15:08
  grueling experience trying to convert people to Mormonism.
• 15:12
  We were expected to spend almost all day every day being out
• 15:18
  preaching to people. And so, so a typical day would
• 15:24
  look like you'd start the day with study.
• 15:27
  So we'd wake up, we'd eat breakfast and then we'd have a
• 15:29
  few hours where we were, would study the scriptures and study.
• 15:33
  We had lessons that we were supposed to be prepared to teach
• 15:37
  people, you know, if they're, if someone's progressing on their
• 15:40
  journey toward Mormonism, we had a series of lessons we would
• 15:42
  teach them. So we studied those as well.
• 15:44
  So we'd be able to teach them well.
• 15:47
  So after a few hours of study, we were supposed to be out.
• 15:49
  I remember it was a very strict schedule.
• 15:52
  They, it was all, it was very, it was almost like what you'd
• 15:55
  expect, like like like a military schedule, you know,
• 15:58
  it's like you need to be out by, out the door.
• 15:59
  By this time it's 9:00 or 9:30 in the morning, I can't
• 16:02
  remember, and then other than an hour break for lunch and an hour
• 16:06
  break for dinner, we were supposed to be out until like
• 16:09
  9:30 PM. What do you mean out where?
• 16:11
  Where were you in North Carolina as a Mormon missionary?
• 16:13
  Oh, I was in something like 5 or 6 different cities.
• 16:17
  They would move us around a bit. Would you just walk around
• 16:19
  though? And yeah, we just, like, walk
• 16:20
  around. Yeah.
• 16:21
  If we didn't have anything else to do, we just go, you know how
• 16:23
  they like, knock on your door, you know?
• 16:24
  Yeah, we just go pick a neighborhood and go knock on
• 16:26
  doors. So was it mostly door knocking?
• 16:28
  It was mostly door. Knocking It wasn't like sitting
• 16:30
  in a cafe and hoping to strike up a conversation.
• 16:32
  I mean, you could do that. They gave you some leeway in
• 16:35
  terms of how you would try to go find people.
• 16:40
  So when I've met these very, very kind, always very polite,
• 16:43
  courteous Mormon missionaries, they're on mission, and they
• 16:46
  might be trying to mission evangelize me.
• 16:49
  Oh, definitely. They're definitely trying to.
• 16:51
  Evangelize. I usually think, oh, they're
• 16:52
  here and they're just on their time off right now, but they're
• 16:55
  that I'm I'm where? Where are you meeting?
• 16:57
  Them, I mean, I'm trying to think the last time I met one.
• 16:59
  I mean, sometimes I've met them in American cities and I would
• 17:02
  just meet and, and they'd say, well, I'm a Mormon missionary or
• 17:04
  I'm on a, I'm on a mission or. Yeah, I mean, they're almost
• 17:07
  certainly in. In.
• 17:09
  Rationalizing mode. You know what I mean at that
• 17:11
  moment. So what what, what does it look
• 17:13
  like to and and, and and that's I guess another question.
• 17:16
  Do would you say I'm a Mormon missionary?
• 17:18
  How would you introduce yourself?
• 17:20
  We would say I'm a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ
• 17:22
  of Latter Day Saints. Yep.
• 17:24
  And would there be a sort of a, an approach that you would
• 17:27
  learn? We had on, by the way, Austin
• 17:29
  Habash on the show, who is a Catholic missionary who does
• 17:32
  door knocking for the Catholic Church, which he says in part is
• 17:36
  inspired by the, you know, really intensity of LDS as well
• 17:41
  as Jehovah Witnesses. Like they're out there like
• 17:42
  actually pounding pavement trying to reach people.
• 17:45
  Why aren't Catholics? So that's part of what he's
• 17:47
  doing. He's doing a beautiful job of
• 17:48
  it. When you would go door to door
• 17:51
  as a Mormon missionary in North Carolina, were you given some
• 17:55
  sort of a script or training for how to talk to people?
• 17:59
  So we had we had what you call a door approach.
• 18:02
  That's like what comes out of your mouth when you knock on the
• 18:05
  door and someone opens it and they often see you and you can
• 18:09
  tell they're not super excited to see you, right.
• 18:11
  And what do you want type thing, right.
• 18:13
  And so my typical door approach, mine was pretty direct people,
• 18:17
  you know, missionaries. I don't, I honestly don't
• 18:19
  remember being given any real examples.
• 18:22
  It was mostly something you'd learn from other missionaries,
• 18:24
  right? What seemed effect effective and
• 18:26
  what worked and what didn't. And I think different
• 18:29
  missionaries would have different approach based on
• 18:31
  their personality. Mine was usually pretty direct.
• 18:34
  I would say something like, hi, we're missionaries for the
• 18:37
  Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and we're coming
• 18:40
  around your neighborhood today to share the message that God
• 18:43
  has chosen a new prophet to restore the true Church of Jesus
• 18:47
  Christ to the earth. And we were wondering if you'd
• 18:49
  be interested in hearing more. Something like that would be
• 18:52
  what I would say. How often would you get a yes?
• 18:54
  Almost never. Very rarely.
• 18:58
  Maybe. You know, I don't know.
• 19:00
  You'd be lucky if you got a few a week on my mission.
• 19:02
  It depends on where you are in the world.
• 19:04
  So in North Carolina, my people were usually not very
• 19:07
  interested. I've known friends of mine and
• 19:11
  others who've gone to other parts of the world, and they're
• 19:15
  just swamped with people who are interested in hearing about the
• 19:20
  message. So it kind of just depends.
• 19:24
  It's really hard to find good content to watch with my kids
• 19:26
  for when they are allowed to have screen time.
• 19:29
  I'm always on the lookout for low stimulating, story driven
• 19:32
  and values based kids content. That's why I'm very excited
• 19:36
  about Brave Plus. Brave Plus is a new streaming
• 19:39
  platform with content that reinforces our values instead of
• 19:42
  undermining them. Every show is vetted by real
• 19:45
  Christian parents not only to screen out messages that are
• 19:48
  harmful, but to also avoid over stimulating video content that's
• 19:53
  linked to mental and behavioral issues.
• 19:55
  When you check it out, you'll find classics like Strawberry
• 19:57
  Shortcake, Babar, Paddington, as well as new shows like Season 2
• 20:01
  of Iggy and Mr. Kirk starring Kirk Cameron.
• 20:04
  And right now, just for my listeners, you can try Brave
• 20:06
  Plus free for seven days. Go to braveplus.com/lila.
• 20:10
  That's braveplus.com/lila for a free seven day trial.
• 20:14
  On this show, we support moms and babies in everything that we
• 20:17
  do, including how we shop. everylife.com has premium
• 20:21
  diapers, baby products, and women's products.
• 20:24
  We use their diapers in our household and they're made from
• 20:27
  the highest quality materials, are supremely soft and
• 20:30
  breathable, and are leak proof for up to 12 hours.
• 20:32
  When you sign up for everylife.com's Changing Lives
• 20:35
  Club, you get 15% off every order, a free tote and exclusive
• 20:40
  online community. And after your third order, you
• 20:43
  can select a church or or pregnancy Resource Center, and
• 20:46
  Every Life will donate a month's supply of diapers on your
• 20:49
  behalf. You get the best baby and
• 20:51
  women's products delivered right to your door, and you get to
• 20:53
  help moms and babies in need. If you use the code Lila at
• 20:56
  checkout, you'll get an additional 10% off your first
• 20:58
  order. Save lives with pro-life
• 21:01
  diapers, wipes, hygiene and women's products over at
• 21:03
  everylife.com. Use code Lila at checkout.
• 21:07
  You were describing earlier the way the Mormon church talks
• 21:10
  about itself to its members, about how we exist in terms of
• 21:13
  the larger scope of Christianity.
• 21:14
  And these other people who say they're Christians because they
• 21:16
  they say we are Christians. And they say that the early
• 21:19
  church apostatized. And then later on, Joseph Smith
• 21:23
  would come and restore the church to what Christ's plan
• 21:26
  was. Yes.
• 21:27
  Tell me more about what that looks like.
• 21:29
  How did the early Church apostatize?
• 21:32
  That's a great question. You know, really very recently,
• 21:35
  just a couple of weeks ago, you know, Joe Heschmeyer, right, he
• 21:39
  debated a Mormon on the question.
• 21:41
  So if people want to just look a little more, there's a you can
• 21:45
  watch the debate. It was on capturing Christianity
• 21:48
  YouTube channel. I actually did a review of the
• 21:51
  debate just like last week where I get in detail on this
• 21:54
  question, like reviewing official LDS publications and
• 21:57
  how they define the what they call the Great Apostasy, which
• 22:01
  is the falling away of the early Christian Church from the truth
• 22:04
  to the point that essentially the true church was no longer on
• 22:08
  the earth. That's exactly how they phrase
• 22:10
  it in their publications. They say something like the
• 22:14
  period of time when there was no true church on the earth is
• 22:17
  called the Great Apostasy. They don't have a specific
• 22:21
  teaching on when exactly it happened, but the general idea
• 22:26
  is that it happened sometime very soon after the last apostle
• 22:30
  died. So after the apostles died,
• 22:34
  Mormons believe that the apostleship was meant to carry
• 22:39
  on forever. So in the LDS Church today, they
• 22:43
  have 12 apostles. And so once the last apostle
• 22:48
  died, they believe that a certain essential things for the
• 22:52
  Church disappeared from the earth, especially the ability to
• 22:56
  continue to receive what we, what Catholics would call public
• 23:00
  revelation, basically to the ability to write new scripture
• 23:03
  or to reveal something binding on the faithful that had not
• 23:07
  been known before. To them, that's a very essential
• 23:10
  thing that God wants his people to have.
• 23:12
  So if you don't have that, then sometime pretty soon after the
• 23:16
  last one dies, the church starts to get corrupted and the true
• 23:20
  priesthood is no longer on the earth.
• 23:22
  And the church essentially while they're, while they're, I think
• 23:27
  Latter Day Saints would say they were still sincere Christians,
• 23:29
  still people striving to follow God, good people, people that
• 23:33
  they would probably consider brothers in Christ, that sort of
• 23:36
  thing. In spite of that, though, the
• 23:38
  Church itself was no longer on the earth.
• 23:41
  And then? Because there's no 12 apostles.
• 23:45
  Because so the technical thing they would say is based, you
• 23:48
  know, the keys of the Kingdom that are handed to Peter that
• 23:50
  are mentioned in Matthew chapter 16, that those keys were lost
• 23:54
  right when the, when the, the, the apostles held the keys,
• 23:58
  Peter in particular held the keys.
• 23:59
  But there's a sense that they believe all the apostles hold
• 24:02
  the keys and they didn't pass them on to other people.
• 24:05
  When they died, the keys were gone.
• 24:08
  The keys are like the authority to administer the church to
• 24:12
  perform like baptisms, and they don't call it the Eucharist, but
• 24:17
  what we would call the Eucharist, what they just simply
• 24:19
  called the sacrament, that all of those things require the
• 24:23
  priesthood keys. And those things were gone after
• 24:25
  the apostles died. So those had to be restored
• 24:29
  later through the Prophet Joseph Smith in the early 1800s.
• 24:35
  So tell me about Joseph Smith. What did you what were you
• 24:37
  taught about Joseph Smith growing up?
• 24:40
  What was I taught about Joseph Smith?
• 24:41
  Well, yes, we were taught a taught about his life, you know,
• 24:46
  so he was born in 18 O 5 in Vermont, if I my memory doesn't
• 24:51
  fail. And his family moved around a
• 24:55
  bit when he was young. Eventually they landed in
• 24:57
  upstate New York and he lived during a time that's known as
• 25:02
  the second great awakening. I don't know if you're familiar
• 25:04
  with that period of U.S. history, but during the early
• 25:09
  1800s there was a religious revival in a lot of the parts of
• 25:12
  the United States, but in particular in that kind of New
• 25:15
  England. Upstate New York is kind of New
• 25:18
  England. That kind of the kind of New
• 25:21
  England area saw this huge revival in religiosity.
• 25:26
  Sometimes we have this picture of the history of the United
• 25:28
  States that everyone in America was super religious right up
• 25:32
  until like the 1960s. And that's absolutely not true.
• 25:35
  If you talk to people who study American religion, we have gone
• 25:37
  through many cycles of high levels of religiosity and high
• 25:41
  and very, very low levels of religiosity.
• 25:45
  In fact, around the founding of the country was a time when
• 25:48
  religiosity was actually quite low in the United States.
• 25:51
  The founding fathers were mostly Deists.
• 25:53
  They weren't that interested in religion for the most part.
• 25:56
  They believed in God in a vague sense.
• 25:58
  They acknowledged him, but they weren't particularly pious
• 26:01
  people. And that was true for a lot of
• 26:03
  the country. And so Fast forward about 50
• 26:06
  years after the country's founded, you hit the early
• 26:09
  1800s, you know, between 30 and 50 years later, and you get this
• 26:13
  big upswing of people saying, hey, we're losing our faith.
• 26:15
  We need to rekindle the faith of the people.
• 26:18
  So this revivalism really took off in the region of New York
• 26:24
  where Joseph Smith lived, and he and his family were very much
• 26:29
  caught up in it. And so in the in the version
• 26:33
  that I was taught, he began to really question, you know, ask
• 26:37
  these questions. Well, all these different
• 26:38
  preachers from these different churches are coming around.
• 26:40
  I've really got the Methodists, we've got the Presbyterians.
• 26:44
  How do I know which one's right? Who should I join?
• 26:46
  Right? It's a great question.
• 26:48
  These are really, I actually have a lot of sympathy for
• 26:51
  Joseph Smith's spiritual quest. And so the story that later
• 26:57
  became canonized as LDS scripture is that he was one day
• 27:00
  reading the Bible and he got to the Epistle of James chapter
• 27:04
  one, verse 5 that says, you know, I have this memorized from
• 27:08
  the King James Version that I learned as a kid, which was if
• 27:12
  any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all men
• 27:16
  liberally and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him.
• 27:19
  Basically, if you need wisdom from God, if you need to know,
• 27:22
  and especially as it that's interpreted by Latter Day Saints
• 27:26
  to say if you need to know something from God, ask him and
• 27:31
  he'll tell you. So Joseph Smith said that he
• 27:34
  took this to heart, went into the woods to pray and received a
• 27:39
  vision of God and God the Father and the Son Jesus Christ
• 27:45
  appeared to him together. And they told him that all the
• 27:49
  churches that were corrupt and wrong and that he shouldn't join
• 27:54
  any of them, but that he would be an instrument to bring forth
• 27:57
  the truth. And so sometime after that, this
• 28:01
  is, I don't know how long you want me to go on on this like
• 28:03
  basic story of LDS history. It's great, but it's
• 28:06
  fascinating. Sometime after that experience.
• 28:09
  How old was he, by the way? He.
• 28:10
  Was 14 when that happened. And and another another just
• 28:13
  quick clarifying question, had he been raised with any faith up
• 28:16
  until this point? So yes and no.
• 28:18
  His family was very religious. He knew the Bible very well, but
• 28:24
  they were not participants in a particular congregation.
• 28:28
  Got it. They were kind of adrift, it
• 28:29
  sounds like, because they moved around a bit too.
• 28:31
  They were very much adrift. As they moved around.
• 28:33
  There he came. Joseph Smith's ancestors, one
• 28:36
  side of his family were basically skeptics in the kind
• 28:39
  of in the vein of like some of the founding fathers, like
• 28:41
  Thomas Paine. The other side of his family was
• 28:43
  very religious. And so he also, in his family
• 28:47
  life, was kind of experiencing some of these religious
• 28:49
  tensions, too. So, yeah, he was 14.
• 28:55
  And then so sometime after this, he claimed another vision that
• 28:58
  an Angel appeared to him to tell him that there were golden, what
• 29:04
  he called golden plates, which is by plates he means like
• 29:07
  tablets, like a book, you know, like a golden book that was
• 29:11
  buried in a hill near his house, which contained an ancient
• 29:14
  record of the ancient Native Americans.
• 29:19
  And it was a record of their dealings with God and things
• 29:22
  like that, like covenants that God had made with them and
• 29:24
  teachings that he'd given them and that they had their own
• 29:26
  prophets and that sort of thing. And that he would be the one who
• 29:32
  would bring this book forward as new scripture.
• 29:35
  So this is what becomes the Book of Mormon.
• 29:37
  Did they actually find gold plates in his backyard?
• 29:40
  He says he found gold plates in his backyard.
• 29:42
  Not in his backyard, but in a hill near his house.
• 29:45
  And but there's not a historic record of them physically
• 29:48
  existing or they don't exist today.
• 29:50
  They don't exist today. He said that later on, you know,
• 29:55
  this is a story. I'm not sure how official it is
• 29:56
  or if it's like a story that gets passed around.
• 29:58
  But essentially he said that the Angel, later on, when he had
• 30:01
  finished with them, appeared and took them back.
• 30:05
  He did show he did have several people, quite a few people, well
• 30:09
  like 11 people or so in separate groups that say they saw the
• 30:14
  plates themselves and wrote an affidavit saying that they'd
• 30:18
  seen them, but they were never sort of publicly available for
• 30:22
  display. You know, no one, you didn't.
• 30:24
  It was just some some very trusted family members and
• 30:27
  friends that saw them and attested that they had seen
• 30:31
  them. And do those affidavits exist
• 30:34
  today? Yeah, if you have a copy of the
• 30:36
  Book of Mormon, they print them in the front of the Book of
• 30:38
  Mormon. There's.
• 30:39
  And how many are there all these people who say they saw the
• 30:41
  physical globe plates? So in terms of what they call
• 30:44
  the official witnesses, there's 11.
• 30:46
  So there's a group of three and a group of eight, and so you'll
• 30:50
  see those in the front of the Book of Mormon to this day.
• 30:52
  And and how old was Joseph Smith at the point when those people
• 30:56
  saw the plates, do you know? Yeah, he was in his early 20s.
• 31:00
  So had he, had they been in his possession for some time by the
• 31:03
  time he got the witnesses? Yes.
• 31:05
  So again, to play devil's advocate, theoretically he could
• 31:09
  have engineered the plates, but he was supposedly given them in
• 31:12
  his teen years. It took four.
• 31:15
  Yeah. OK, so let's remember the.
• 31:17
  Let me help me. Help me.
• 31:18
  I'll try to remember the timeline of exactly when the
• 31:22
  Angel Moroni was supposed to have appeared to him.
• 31:25
  I think he would have been in his late teens or or so when he
• 31:32
  first had the Angel appear to him.
• 31:34
  It wasn't until four years after that that he actually picked up
• 31:37
  the plates. So 17 years old was when the
• 31:40
  Angel Moroni first appeared to him, revealing the location of
• 31:43
  the plates. But then he didn't receive the
• 31:46
  plates for four more years. So he.
• 31:48
  Knew about the plates for four years and where they were.
• 31:50
  And every year he was supposed to go to the location and meet
• 31:54
  with the Angel for four years and so.
• 31:56
  Finally, he didn't. Receive the plates until the 4th
• 32:00
  year is the story right? And then from then he like kept
• 32:03
  them constantly hidden and covered.
• 32:06
  So there are a couple of people who attested later, like his
• 32:09
  wife Emma, and I think maybe one of his siblings, one of his
• 32:14
  sisters or someone like that who who said that they would.
• 32:19
  It seems like there was some kind of object or they would say
• 32:21
  something like, Oh yeah, I saw them covered.
• 32:23
  One of them said that they kind of put their fingers against it
• 32:26
  and kind of wrestled the pages or something like that, right?
• 32:29
  It seemed like there was something under there.
• 32:30
  And then there were others who said that they saw them as well.
• 32:34
  And the people that those 11 eyewitnesses that said they saw
• 32:37
  the plates, did they see just a Gold Cup like plated booklet?
• 32:41
  Did they actually read the booklet?
• 32:43
  Like what was their encounter, interaction with this physical
• 32:46
  those? Are great questions.
• 32:48
  So they had they were done. It was done in two different
• 32:50
  groups and they had different experiences.
• 32:53
  So the first group, which is the group of what they call the
• 32:55
  three witnesses, they say that actually the Angel appeared to
• 32:58
  them and the Angel. So it was very much like a
• 33:00
  supernatural kind of experience for them where they say an Angel
• 33:05
  appeared. If you read their testimony, it
• 33:06
  says an Angel appeared and showed them the plates, and a
• 33:11
  voice from heaven declared unto them that this was the work of
• 33:13
  God and they're bearing witness. That this is true.
• 33:18
  It gets a little bit more complicated if you look at some
• 33:21
  of the things that they say later in their lives around none
• 33:24
  of them, to be clear, there's no smoking gun where one of the
• 33:28
  witnesses says something like, oh, I was in on it or I made
• 33:30
  this. Side or I was on drugs.
• 33:32
  Or I was on drugs or anything like that.
• 33:33
  For the most part, like the LDS church says, hey, none of these
• 33:37
  witnesses denied their testimony and that's essentially true when
• 33:41
  none of them were like, hey, that was all just craziness, I'm
• 33:45
  out, I'm done with this now. Even though almost all of them
• 33:48
  ended up leaving the LDS church before they died, they all ended
• 33:52
  up having some kind of fallout with Joseph Smith later in their
• 33:55
  lives and left the faith. Even though they had witnessed
• 33:59
  to an Angel of physically appearing to them and telling
• 34:02
  them this is true, Joseph Smith is a prophet, etcetera.
• 34:05
  Yeah, yeah. They still left the face, but
• 34:07
  they didn't deny that experience.
• 34:09
  Wow. Yeah.
• 34:11
  In terms of the eight, it was a bit more pedestrian.
• 34:13
  They, they say pretty, their testimony in the front of the
• 34:17
  Book of Mormon is pretty matter of fact.
• 34:18
  It just says like be it known that Joseph Smith has shown to
• 34:20
  us the plates and we have handled them and they have the
• 34:23
  appearance of gold. You know what I mean?
• 34:25
  That sort of thing. That's it's fairly
• 34:27
  straightforward. What happened to those people?
• 34:29
  Do we know? Most of them also left the
• 34:31
  faith. Interesting.
• 34:33
  Yeah, it kind of varies by person.
• 34:34
  Some of them die. Some of them, like one of them
• 34:37
  was Joseph Smith's father. He stayed in the faith until his
• 34:40
  death. You know, there were a number of
• 34:41
  family members, but. The best thing that we can do
• 34:45
  this new year is to pray more and enter more deeply into our
• 34:48
  relationship with God. And that's why I love Hallow.
• 34:51
  It's the number one prayer app in the world and it features
• 34:54
  guided meditations, prayers, Bible in a year podcast, daily
• 34:58
  mass readings, and so much more. My kids love their kids content,
• 35:02
  including their Bible stories and sleep stories designed just
• 35:05
  for kids. And right now, you can join
• 35:07
  Chris Pratt, Jeff Cavans and others for a 21 day fast and
• 35:11
  meditation based on the book of Daniel.
• 35:13
  It's an invitation to fast from the things of this world and
• 35:16
  make room for God and to be nourished by prayer, meditation,
• 35:19
  and the Word of God. You can do this challenge and so
• 35:21
  much more for free over at halo.com/lila for three months,
• 35:26
  completely free. That's halo.com/lila.
• 35:29
  Nothing beats a great cup of coffee except a great cup of
• 35:32
  coffee that goes towards saving lives.
• 35:35
  Seven weeks coffee.com is what we drink at my house and it's
• 35:37
  organic, pesticide free, mold free, and absolutely delicious.
• 35:41
  So go to sevenweekscoffee.com and save 15% forever when you
• 35:45
  subscribe plus get a free gift with your order.
• 35:47
  And exclusively for my listeners, use the code Lila for
• 35:50
  an extra 10% off your first order.
• 35:52
  That's a full 25% savings on your first order plus a free
• 35:55
  gift. Use the code Lila at checkout at
• 35:58
  sevenweekscoffee.com and in enjoy a delicious cup of coffee
• 36:01
  right to your door. Joseph Smith, you know, I'll
• 36:06
  just say this now because I definitely want to say it later.
• 36:09
  There's a brand new, in the last, I think 6 months biography
• 36:13
  of Joseph Smith that was released by a really great
• 36:16
  historian who's not LDS and has never been LDS.
• 36:19
  It's actually the first biography of Joseph Smith by
• 36:22
  someone who's not LDS or wasn't previously.
• 36:26
  It's by John Turner. It's just called Joseph Smith,
• 36:29
  The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet.
• 36:32
  It's excellent. It's very fair.
• 36:36
  He's done his research very well.
• 36:37
  He's an expert on LDS history. He also has a biography of
• 36:40
  Brigham Young that's considered the the biography to go to.
• 36:44
  So if people are just interested in early Mormonism and Joseph
• 36:46
  Smith's life, go read the book. It's really, really well done.
• 36:51
  But Joseph Smith was not always easy to get along with.
• 36:54
  And so in some ways, you know, when you say, well, despite an
• 36:58
  Angel, it's like, well, you know, if you know the rest of
• 37:01
  the story, yeah, it's sometimes strong personality, puts it
• 37:06
  mildly, if that makes sense. So was there any like, clues in
• 37:11
  his upbringing that he would become this, you know, at best a
• 37:16
  prophet restoring Christianity to its truth and at worst a cult
• 37:20
  leader? I mean, you could say, right?
• 37:23
  What would like, was he a normal kid?
• 37:26
  I mean from what you know of him and what you were taught of him.
• 37:30
  So I would say, you know, is there any clues?
• 37:33
  I would say yes and no. And here's kind of what I mean.
• 37:36
  So when Joseph Smith, here's the yes side.
• 37:38
  I suppose when Joseph Smith was young, he was involved in
• 37:46
  treasure digging, like kind of like supernatural treasure
• 37:49
  digging activities. He claimed to have a stone.
• 37:54
  It's all sounds very strange to us these days, but it was
• 37:57
  actually a fairly common belief among country folk at that time
• 38:02
  in the United States. That kind of like a belief in a
• 38:05
  kind of folk magic, right? He believed he had this stone
• 38:08
  that was a seer stone, something that he could look at.
• 38:11
  And somehow by staring into this stone, he could receive visions.
• 38:16
  He could see, see things. He could see.
• 38:18
  They called it scrying or looking into a peep stone,
• 38:22
  things like that. And a popular a fairly common
• 38:25
  thing that there was a lot of obsession around treasure at
• 38:28
  this time. It's the gold, it's pre gold
• 38:30
  rush, it's. Pre gold rush, yeah.
• 38:32
  But the Gold rush was a big A. Lot of times this was like span
• 38:35
  there would be rumors of like Spanish treasure like oh the
• 38:38
  Spanish when they were doing they buried treasure over in
• 38:41
  those hills, right type thing and.
• 38:43
  I guess if you don't have the Internet, yeah, there's no
• 38:45
  social media. Like what, What's going to be
• 38:47
  the kind of cultural thing that's.
• 38:49
  Yeah, I mean, that sounds sad that with social media today is
• 38:52
  so much of like a cultural phenomenon of, of what people
• 38:55
  are spending their time on. But yeah, if you're there's no
• 38:58
  entertainment, there's no TV, there's no electronic, there's,
• 39:01
  you know, you're you're living in a very beautiful way, very in
• 39:03
  touch with nature. Like what is going to be that
• 39:05
  kind of? Yeah, well, and fun adventure,
• 39:07
  kind of spooky, right? They would do it.
• 39:08
  They would always go at night and they believed they were like
• 39:11
  guardian spirits that had to be appeased in the proper way and
• 39:15
  they would hire. So Joseph Smith in particular
• 39:17
  would get hired to look into his stone and he would go on these
• 39:22
  treasure digs and tell people, like, where to dig.
• 39:24
  And he would actually be hired as a kid.
• 39:26
  Yeah, it's like a teenager. Yes.
• 39:27
  Yeah. He was considered to have a
• 39:29
  gift. People would pay him money.
• 39:30
  People would pay him money. I'm.
• 39:31
  I don't know, they think they are got rich.
• 39:33
  He came from a pretty poor family and how fascinating, you
• 39:36
  know, But yeah, when we know this is the case because we
• 39:38
  actually have he got arrested for this because it was actually
• 39:40
  against the law, because it was considered like a con basically,
• 39:43
  right. It was common enough that you
• 39:47
  you were not allowed, it was against the law to look into a
• 39:50
  stone and charge money for it and try to help people find
• 39:53
  treasure. So we have a court record of him
• 39:55
  being arrested in his very like around the age 20 or so for
• 40:00
  being what they call the disorderly person, which is
• 40:02
  essentially a reference to this. And we have some of the
• 40:04
  transcripts. So even after the Angel Moroni
• 40:07
  came to him, I think at 17, there's a court record of him
• 40:10
  for disorderly conduct having to do with the seer stone.
• 40:13
  Yes. So he was not just doing the
• 40:15
  Angel thing like receiving this Angel visitation as he
• 40:18
  understood it. He was also looking into the
• 40:20
  seer stone that he had since he was a little kid and telling
• 40:22
  people where to find Barry Treasure.
• 40:23
  Yes, yeah, that's right. He actually even in his very he
• 40:28
  has an official account of his own history that's part of LDS
• 40:31
  scripture. Now he has a line in there that
• 40:33
  could be a reference to this where he says something like
• 40:36
  during these teenage years, I kind of was involved in some of
• 40:39
  the normal foibles of youth or something like that, right?
• 40:44
  It could be a reference to the fact that he still had this, had
• 40:48
  some involvement in these, these kind of activities that they
• 40:53
  were pretty common for. It was a common folk
• 40:56
  superstition, but it was also common that a lot of people
• 40:58
  thought this was ridiculous and was, you know, like I said, it
• 41:01
  was against the law. It was common enough and also
• 41:03
  looked down on enough that there was a law against it in the
• 41:07
  court case that he was there is kind of inconclusive.
• 41:10
  What happened at the end of the court case.
• 41:11
  It seems like most likely the judge basically was like, look,
• 41:15
  if you because I think when he was arrested, it wasn't even in
• 41:18
  his home county and he basically said if you'll leave the county,
• 41:21
  we're just going to just move on, right?
• 41:23
  It's kind of seems like a bit of a ne'er do well kind of guy, but
• 41:28
  we're not going to throw you in jail for this or slap a huge
• 41:30
  fine. I think there was some court
• 41:32
  fees assessed or something like that.
• 41:34
  Did you know all of this when you were a young Mormon?
• 41:37
  Missionary. I knew none of it.
• 41:38
  I normally did. I know none of it.
• 41:40
  Anytime I heard a rumor about something like this, I was
• 41:43
  explicitly told that it was a lie, that none of this was true,
• 41:46
  and that these were kind of like lies made-up by anti Mormons to
• 41:49
  besmirch the character of Joseph Smith.
• 41:51
  Do you think there's some truth to that?
• 41:53
  No, I it can be sensationalized in a way that's not true, but at
• 41:57
  least this thing that we're talking about now, this is just
• 41:59
  a matter of, of public record. So growing up and when you were
• 42:03
  a Mormon missionary, how did you see Joseph Smith?
• 42:07
  Like, what did you, what did you think about Joseph Smith when
• 42:10
  you were a Mormon missionary? So there's a a quote after
• 42:16
  Joseph Smith died, one of the church leaders wrote about him.
• 42:21
  And this is also now in their scriptures, in their Doctrine
• 42:25
  and Covenants, there's a line that says Joseph Smith did more
• 42:30
  than any other man save Jesus only for the salvation of
• 42:35
  humanity. That's a paraphrase.
• 42:37
  I got it wrong a little bit, but basically it's like Jesus did
• 42:40
  the most and just behind him is Joseph Smith.
• 42:43
  And that's definitely how I viewed him, right?
• 42:45
  He was. We have hymns praising him in
• 42:48
  the hymn book. And I thought of him as, I don't
• 42:55
  know, just like, you know, maybe in some ways it's not so unlike
• 42:58
  the way that Catholic, we Catholics see the Virgin Mary,
• 43:01
  right? Like he was on a pretty high
• 43:03
  pedestal to me. He was just this great man who
• 43:07
  did this great thing. And I heard stories that are
• 43:10
  almost kind of like Saints stories, you know, stories of
• 43:14
  like the great magnanimous things he did when he was on the
• 43:18
  earth. And there weren't very many
• 43:21
  miracle stories there. That wasn't very much of A
• 43:22
  focus. Every now and then you'd kind of
• 43:24
  hear like a vague, like he healed someone from disease or
• 43:27
  something. But I thought of him as a really
• 43:30
  great man. He was also, I understand, a
• 43:35
  polygamist. He was a polygamist, yeah.
• 43:38
  Which is not unusual for Old Testament, you know, pre Christ
• 43:43
  faithful Jews, right? So they're they're polygamy has
• 43:46
  a tradition, you could say in the roots of Christianity,
• 43:50
  obviously with Jesus Christ, we believe.
• 43:52
  No, that's not that's been abolished.
• 43:55
  The Catholic Church and most all Christians today don't view
• 43:59
  polygamy as part of God's plan for man and woman.
• 44:02
  He created Adam and Eve, not Adam and then three Eves.
• 44:05
  That wasn't the original design. But how did Joseph Smith see
• 44:09
  that? And was that something unusual
• 44:12
  for his time? It was unusual for his time.
• 44:17
  The sensibilities around marriage then were, if anything,
• 44:21
  more strict than today. And it's not unusual for new
• 44:28
  religious movements to experiment with, to put it
• 44:32
  lightly, like a typical marriage arrangements.
• 44:37
  That's actually a fairly common feature of new religious
• 44:41
  movements, both then and today. Certainly Muhammad, yeah.
• 44:45
  It happens a lot. Had many wives and young, some
• 44:48
  child. Because because of that second
• 44:50
  great Awakening I talked about, there was actually somewhat of a
• 44:52
  flurry of new religious movements popping up at this
• 44:55
  time. And so Joseph Smith was not the
• 44:57
  only one at that time to experiment with unusual marriage
• 45:03
  arrangements, we could say. But in terms of broader society,
• 45:07
  in all of these cases, people found it very abhorrent.
• 45:10
  And I think that Joseph Smith, I mean, his polygamy is by far the
• 45:17
  most controversial thing that he did in his lifetime.
• 45:22
  And I can't pretend I can't get necessarily inside of his head,
• 45:27
  right? You'll have some people who will
• 45:29
  look at it and just say, well, he just wanted to sleep with a
• 45:32
  bunch of women, right? So this is a convenient way to
• 45:35
  do it. I think that that's a little too
• 45:38
  simplistic. I think if you spend enough time
• 45:40
  studying Joseph Smith's life, almost every aspect of his life
• 45:44
  resists very simplistic statements in terms of
• 45:48
  motivation. I think that he really felt like
• 45:53
  Joseph Smith was like a community builder.
• 45:55
  He was really, really good and gifted at making this religious
• 46:00
  movement that made people feel like they belonged and were tied
• 46:03
  to each other. And I think in his mind,
• 46:06
  polygamy served as another way to tie his community to each
• 46:11
  other, right? So like, he's married to one
• 46:13
  woman, but if he could also be married to someone in your
• 46:16
  family that binds you together in a way that was very
• 46:22
  attractive to him in particular. And I think also he was a very
• 46:28
  creative religious thinker. There's many times in his life
• 46:30
  where he reads something in the Old Testament or the New
• 46:33
  Testament and it sparks just some kind of thought in his mind
• 46:38
  and he spins that. This is from my perspective,
• 46:42
  right as a former latter day St. He's spins this into some
• 46:45
  totally new theology, some new principle or some new ceremony
• 46:49
  that he introduces as part of his of his church.
• 46:52
  So I think what happened with polygamy and well, and to be
• 46:55
  clear, there also was a sexual component too.
• 46:57
  So I always just kind of say, I think it's kind of all of these
• 47:01
  things swirled together, right? I don't think that you can
• 47:07
  remove the sexual aspect he there or or and I don't think
• 47:13
  you can remove the uncomfortable aspect either.
• 47:14
  He had a pattern of pressuring vulnerable younger women into
• 47:20
  marrying him. How many?
• 47:23
  He was married to 30 something women by the time he died.
• 47:26
  Joseph Smith was married to 30 plus women.
• 47:28
  Yeah, yeah. And at least in a large number
• 47:31
  of those cases, we have testimony from the women
• 47:33
  themselves about how it happened, the kind of
• 47:37
  conversations they had with him, and the fact that for many of
• 47:41
  them, they just straight up say that there was a sexual
• 47:44
  component as well. What does that mean?
• 47:46
  There was this I mean. I just mean that they had sex.
• 47:49
  Right. Well, I mean if he was married
• 47:50
  to them. Right.
• 47:51
  Yeah, Well, there, OK. So that's a great question.
• 47:53
  The reason I bring that up is when.
• 47:58
  So when I was growing up, it kind of went through a series of
• 48:00
  things. When I was growing up, at first
• 48:02
  I was told that Joseph Smith was not a polygamist.
• 48:05
  That because actually the records on this were somewhat
• 48:09
  hard to find it first because he did it very secretly.
• 48:13
  He didn't publicly have. He never was publicly A
• 48:15
  polygamist. The Mormons were not publicly
• 48:18
  polygamist until they've been in Utah for a number of years
• 48:21
  before they announced it. It was all done like very hush
• 48:25
  hush. It became somewhat of an open
• 48:28
  secret after a time, but they denied it for years.
• 48:31
  And during Joseph Smith's lifetime, it was very secret.
• 48:37
  And so there's also this kind of line that the church has the the
• 48:41
  LDS Church for a long time, not always, but for a long time,
• 48:43
  they kind of maintained well. And if he did, you know, his,
• 48:46
  his motivations were very pure. So there was no like sexual
• 48:50
  component to the marriages or whatever and what?
• 48:52
  Why would so he would have married them to just, I don't
• 48:55
  know, take care of them what and but then not sleep with them?
• 48:58
  What was the narrative there? Yeah, perfect.
• 49:02
  I was assuming something I'm not sure if you're familiar with,
• 49:05
  like the LDS doctrine of eternal marriage.
• 49:08
  I have heard about it, yes. So like Latter Day Saints
• 49:10
  believe that marriages that are performed in their temples last
• 49:14
  forever and that in the eternities they'll be married to
• 49:18
  their spouses. So the idea for Joseph Smith
• 49:21
  would be, I will be, I can be, they call it being sealed.
• 49:24
  I can be sealed to all these women and they will be my spouse
• 49:28
  in heaven, but that doesn't require like a sexual component
• 49:33
  on earth necessarily so. But then they're stuck.
• 49:36
  But so a man can have 30 wives, but could a woman have 30
• 49:41
  husbands? No, no, it's it's a pretty
• 49:44
  straightforward polygamist system in terms of man can have
• 49:47
  multiple wives, women can't have.
• 49:48
  Multiple wives And what was the theology behind that as you
• 49:50
  understood it growing up? But.
• 49:52
  The Theology, there's some shifting, I bit, I think if you
• 50:00
  look at this theology historically, in Joseph Smith's
• 50:03
  time, this and in Brigham Young's day, the theology was
• 50:05
  pretty straightforward, which was that man's destiny was to
• 50:08
  become exalted like God in the same way, basically that God the
• 50:12
  Father. So they believe that God the
• 50:14
  Father has a physical body like a human and that he also went
• 50:20
  through a period of like an earth life like ours and then
• 50:26
  became exalted like him, like as a God and that we are on the
• 50:31
  same path. Like that's our destiny too.
• 50:34
  Part of that destiny is to someday have your own spirit
• 50:39
  children who populate worlds, etcetera, etcetera.
• 50:43
  This was, this was pretty explicit in early LDS teaching
• 50:47
  and for Joseph Smith and for Brigham Young, the more wives
• 50:52
  you had, the greater your glory would be.
• 50:54
  You'd have a larger eternal family with which to do these
• 50:59
  God like things of sending your own children to their own earths
• 51:03
  to kind of go through this process of what they call
• 51:06
  exaltation. So that would have been the
• 51:09
  motive, the sort of religious spiritual motivation.
• 51:11
  Does that make sense? I think so, yeah.
• 51:14
  I mean, the principle, which is ultimately a, a truth, a
• 51:18
  principle at work there, which I, I'm going to credit as a
• 51:20
  truth, is that existence is good and it's good that human beings
• 51:25
  exist. Human beings are good, more
• 51:27
  human beings is good. And you know what?
• 51:30
  What is the basis of part of our Christian faith is that God
• 51:33
  created the world and God created man, men and women in
• 51:37
  his image and likeness to be loved.
• 51:39
  And for the it's, it's just really gratuitous almost.
• 51:41
  God didn't need the world. God created the world out of an
• 51:43
  overflow of love. And so in that sense, there's
• 51:46
  something I can see attractive about this Mormon tenet of there
• 51:52
  is a sort of eternity with your family and you're populating new
• 51:55
  worlds potentially, and you're just ever expanding the Kingdom
• 51:58
  of God and. Well and tariff on that family
• 52:02
  is good. It's among the highest of what
• 52:06
  we call like the natural goods, the love that you have within a
• 52:09
  family is absolutely beautiful. And so, and and maybe to tie
• 52:16
  this in very directly, when the LDS church stopped practicing
• 52:20
  polygamy in their very late 1800s, early 1900s, it was not
• 52:25
  really a moment. There was kind of a period where
• 52:27
  they said what they're going to stop and they eventually did.
• 52:31
  The theology around eternal marriage shifted a little bit.
• 52:35
  So it wasn't he who has more wives will have greater glory,
• 52:41
  but everyone needs to be sealed to their spouse.
• 52:45
  And so today the doctrine is very, it's very sort of like
• 52:48
  family centric. If you talk to a latter St.
• 52:50
  today, the reason one of the reasons they're so focused on
• 52:53
  family is because they see the family as something that will
• 52:56
  exist in heaven too. And it's there's no longer any
• 53:00
  real any focus on polygamy. There's some vestiges of it in a
• 53:04
  few places, but it's really focused on your family, your the
• 53:08
  husband and wife that you're sealed together for eternity.
• 53:10
  You'll be together forever. Your children will also be with
• 53:13
  you in the heavens. And it creates a really
• 53:17
  beautiful sense of teamwork, of shared obligation within the
• 53:23
  family. And when you really love your
• 53:25
  family and you imagine heaven, it's really easy to imagine it
• 53:30
  as sort of an extension of this wonderful, beautiful thing that
• 53:33
  you have on earth. Yes, I mean, it makes sense.
• 53:38
  I think it gives me confidence as a Catholic Christian when I
• 53:44
  realized that that was family bonds that I love so much and my
• 53:48
  husband that I love so much on this earth.
• 53:50
  Our love will be even more perfected in heaven.
• 53:53
  But the exclusivity of love, this special exclusivity where
• 53:56
  we're, you know, having children together in this life and
• 53:58
  raising them. We're not having new children in
• 54:01
  heaven the way that we see it on here on earth.
• 54:03
  And so the nature of marriage, the love is there in heaven and
• 54:09
  it's perfected and bonds of love are perfected with all this
• 54:12
  communion of the Saints with obviously our Father in heaven,
• 54:14
  with our Lord Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit.
• 54:17
  But it's, you know, how we can understand it on like time
• 54:20
  bound, you know, space and time bound on this earth.
• 54:23
  Those parameters don't exist in the eternal.
• 54:26
  And so what's designed for those parameters to exist in the
• 54:29
  temporal no longer apply in the eternal.
• 54:32
  So I'm sure philosophers, Christian philosophers, have
• 54:34
  said that much more eloquently than I just said it.
• 54:36
  But that gives me confidence where it's not like my love with
• 54:39
  my husband goes away in heaven. It's perfected.
• 54:41
  Actually, it's deepened. You're more intimate with him
• 54:43
  even than you are. Yes, here, but but also with
• 54:47
  others because you said the exclusivity.
• 54:49
  We are limited, we experience limitations on the earth that we
• 54:54
  won't have in the eternities. And so all everyone in heaven
• 54:59
  will be closer to one another and to God than we can even
• 55:04
  imagine here on earth. And the family is a sign of the
• 55:11
  love which we will experience in heaven and in some sense also a
• 55:14
  sign of the love which God shares within himself, within
• 55:17
  the Blessed Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit are a communion
• 55:21
  of love. And so we we can understand that
• 55:25
  to some degree through the family life that we experience.
• 55:28
  Like if you have a great family life, you have a sense of what
• 55:30
  it's like. You know, there's a reason he
• 55:32
  calls the father, calls the son the son, right?
• 55:36
  It's a family image that is being used.
• 55:39
  And our families are are meant to point us to this higher and
• 55:45
  more most beautiful truth. The difference is in LDS
• 55:50
  theology, there's this kind of tendency to take the natural
• 55:54
  good and just kind of import it into heaven.
• 55:56
  Family life's really good here. So it's the greatest thing there
• 56:00
  too. And anyway, I don't know, I
• 56:03
  hopefully that clarifies a little.
• 56:05
  Bit I think it's I think it's beautiful, it's exciting, but
• 56:07
  it's it's also beyond what we can comprehend on this earth.
• 56:12
  But for Joseph Smith and his polygamy, and you mentioned
• 56:16
  there are these thirty women. There was a sexual component.
• 56:18
  It was kind of hush hush, though at the time, it wasn't like he
• 56:21
  was publicly living with 30 wives.
• 56:23
  What was the dynamic there? Why was it hush hush?
• 56:28
  And how would he be a husband to these thirty women?
• 56:34
  Well, he wasn't much of A husband for them in in a
• 56:37
  traditional sense. Why it was hush hush.
• 56:40
  I think basically because there would was so much prejudice both
• 56:44
  inside and outside of the church against this new doctrine.
• 56:48
  We, even some of the church leaders who later embraced the
• 56:52
  doctrine, almost everyone he taught it to wrote down how
• 56:55
  repugnant they found it at first.
• 56:58
  When he said God wants us to, when he said to the men, God
• 57:01
  wants us to take more women as wives.
• 57:03
  This is a new covenant that he has for you.
• 57:05
  You need to go and take more wives.
• 57:07
  Several of them, one of them in particular, I think it was
• 57:09
  Brigham Young, said that he wanted to die when he first
• 57:11
  heard that. Similarly, we have the accounts
• 57:14
  of many of Joseph's wives when he first taught them about it.
• 57:16
  They were just incensed sometimes.
• 57:19
  They didn't want to share. Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, I
• 57:22
  mean, I mean the ones that he was wanting to marry.
• 57:25
  Yeah. And so he would go, so there
• 57:27
  would be a, a Mormon convert and then he would go to this younger
• 57:30
  woman and then would they be significantly younger than him
• 57:33
  or? There was a variety.
• 57:35
  There were quite a number who were significantly younger than
• 57:37
  him, yeah. Like like 18 year olds or.
• 57:40
  The youngest one was 14. OK.
• 57:42
  Oh, fourteen. Yeah.
• 57:44
  He. Married a Joseph Smith married a
• 57:46
  14 year old. He married a 14 year old.
• 57:48
  How old was he when he married her?
• 57:49
  In his late 30s, yeah, like 38, probably something like that.
• 57:57
  That was the except there weren't.
• 57:59
  He married a 14 year old and then he married several other
• 58:02
  older teenagers who were probably between the ages of
• 58:05
  like, you know, 16 and 19. And then he had several that
• 58:08
  were in their 20s, thirties. And there was even a couple that
• 58:10
  were even older than him I think.
• 58:14
  And so when he was when he would be marrying these women, he
• 58:18
  would be sleeping with them and having a ceremony and then they
• 58:21
  would be off living in a separate household.
• 58:22
  Correct. Yeah.
• 58:24
  And then would he just visit them occasionally and just.
• 58:26
  That's exactly right. And then would they have kids?
• 58:28
  So there's no record of him ever fathering a child by any of his
• 58:31
  other wives. That seems odd, no?
• 58:34
  It is odd, Yeah, I would agree. And there are some LDS
• 58:37
  apologists who will sort of take that fact and try to either use
• 58:42
  it to claim or imply that, well, maybe he really wasn't actually
• 58:46
  sleeping with his wives. Like I said, we have the
• 58:49
  testimony of the women themselves.
• 58:51
  There's just no reason to think that they were, are they?
• 58:53
  Contracepting do you think? I really don't know.
• 58:55
  It's possible, I don't know. It seems very highly unusual
• 58:58
  that he would have 29 plus other wives that he'd have at some
• 59:03
  level of regular sexual contact with, even just one sexual
• 59:06
  contact with and that group not a single pregnant and they're
• 59:09
  not on birth control, right And not.
• 59:11
  And he's not using contraception and not a single pregnancy
• 59:13
  results. I don't know if we know that he
• 59:14
  wasn't using contraception or not, but I just, I just don't
• 59:19
  know. We do.
• 59:20
  There was one, there is one wife who had a child that she thought
• 59:23
  was Joseph Smith's, which is actually again, further evidence
• 59:26
  that they were being sexually active.
• 59:29
  Like you wouldn't think, you know, she told her daughter,
• 59:31
  you're Joseph Smith's daughter, right, Because she was one of
• 59:34
  the mom was one of Joseph Smith's plural wives.
• 59:37
  And so this became like passed down in the family.
• 59:41
  Like, ah, we're actually descended from Joseph Smith, you
• 59:43
  know, was she no now. So then they actually did DNA
• 59:46
  testing in the last, you know, 20 years because obviously DNA
• 59:49
  technology is relatively recent. So that one got ruled out.
• 59:54
  But it is in terms of history, it's significant that they
• 59:57
  thought that they were descended from Joseph.
• 1:00:00
  Smith well, it's also significant too, because if it
• 1:00:02
  wasn't his baby, it was someone else's.
• 1:00:03
  Well, she was. Sorry this will be a bit
• 1:00:05
  controversial, but she was actually married to somebody
• 1:00:07
  else, so some of Joseph Smith's wives were already married to
• 1:00:12
  other men. That were not Mormon.
• 1:00:16
  Some of them were Mormon and some weren't.
• 1:00:17
  So so Joseph Smith went and made those women divorced because you
• 1:00:22
  as a woman, as a. Woman they didn't divorce.
• 1:00:24
  But I thought a Mormon woman can only have one husband.
• 1:00:26
  They can only be sealed to one husband today.
• 1:00:30
  Let me make this clear, In the LDS church today, none of this
• 1:00:34
  stuff goes on, right? They don't do any type of
• 1:00:36
  polygamy at all. But when Joseph Smith was
• 1:00:40
  introducing the principal of plural marriage, he would
• 1:00:43
  approach women secretly and say, God has revealed to me that you
• 1:00:47
  should be one of my wives. And he would teach them this
• 1:00:49
  principle of plural marriage. And then they would, if they
• 1:00:54
  agreed they would, he would be secretly sealed to them for
• 1:00:59
  eternity. But MO and most of his wives
• 1:01:02
  were not married to other men, but there are a few that were.
• 1:01:08
  And and the husband wouldn't know about this.
• 1:01:10
  Sometimes they wouldn't and sometimes they would, yeah.
• 1:01:13
  Are they upset? Sometimes they were.
• 1:01:15
  Sometimes they were willing. You know you because Joseph
• 1:01:18
  Smith was their prophet and their religious leader.
• 1:01:20
  And they're like, sure, you can take my wife and seal her to
• 1:01:24
  yourself. That means she's not sealed to
• 1:01:25
  me. Wouldn't they kind of feel like
• 1:01:27
  I want to go find someone I can be sealed to?
• 1:01:29
  Yeah, at times, yes, right. And you do.
• 1:01:33
  And some of the men were very upset.
• 1:01:37
  The thing that ended up leading to Joseph Smith's death was some
• 1:01:41
  of the very high-ranking church leaders who simply could not
• 1:01:46
  accept this new teaching, left the church, published an expose,
• 1:01:54
  and Joseph Smith had, he was the mayor.
• 1:01:58
  He was basically, he basically ran the city that they were
• 1:02:00
  living in at the time in Illinois.
• 1:02:01
  He had the press destroyed, which is against the law, you
• 1:02:04
  know, freedom of the press. The city can't he, the
• 1:02:07
  government can't come and destroy your press.
• 1:02:09
  So that caused him to be arrested.
• 1:02:11
  And when he was in jail, a mob stormed the jail and shot him
• 1:02:15
  dead. That's how he died.
• 1:02:17
  That's how he died, yeah. And it was because a husband of
• 1:02:22
  one of his sealed wives brides that he had taken got angry,
• 1:02:27
  left the church with some other. So I want to be very careful.
• 1:02:33
  So the person I'm thinking specifically was, is a man named
• 1:02:35
  William Law. And he was one of the ones.
• 1:02:39
  He was a very high-ranking church official who left the
• 1:02:41
  church and was part of the group that published this expose.
• 1:02:45
  I believe that Joseph Smith had something like proposed to his
• 1:02:49
  wife or something like that. But either way, I know that he
• 1:02:52
  left over the idea of polygamy and that he did not want to
• 1:02:57
  accept it. And he was, I think in the
• 1:02:59
  church is what's called the First Presidency.
• 1:03:00
  He was a very high-ranking church leader.
• 1:03:04
  So what was the narrative in the Mormon church about all of this
• 1:03:06
  though? You mean when I was growing up?
• 1:03:08
  I mean, maybe you didn't know those details it sounds like.
• 1:03:10
  So when I was growing up, I was told again that Joseph Smith was
• 1:03:14
  not a polygamist at all. But of course, well, we all knew
• 1:03:19
  that Brigham Young was a was a polygamist, right?
• 1:03:22
  So the narrative I had received growing up was something like
• 1:03:25
  Joseph Smith toward the end of his life, received a revelation
• 1:03:28
  from God about polygamy. And he taught people about it,
• 1:03:33
  didn't really practice it himself.
• 1:03:36
  He died and then Brigham Young becomes the next leader of the
• 1:03:39
  church and he really establishes polygamy.
• 1:03:42
  And, you know, he was married to something like, I don't know, 60
• 1:03:45
  something wives like, or maybe 50 something.
• 1:03:47
  Yeah, Brigham Young had a very high wife count.
• 1:03:49
  But they were not all in his household.
• 1:03:51
  So for Brigham Young, I mean, he yes, they sometimes were.
• 1:03:55
  Maybe not all. He had so many wives, he
• 1:03:56
  couldn't fit them all in a house, right.
• 1:03:58
  Like he would. He had many different homes that
• 1:04:00
  his wives and children would live in and things like that.
• 1:04:03
  But Brigham Young would have houses with many wives in them
• 1:04:06
  at once. Yeah.
• 1:04:07
  Because once they started practicing it openly, it was
• 1:04:10
  just practiced openly. So what I was taught was
• 1:04:13
  essentially that this was like for reasons that weren't really
• 1:04:17
  said, God wanted the Mormon church to practice polygamy for
• 1:04:21
  a time. And then eventually he said, all
• 1:04:24
  right, we're going to stop now. It's that's kind of the
• 1:04:26
  narrative that I was brought up. And I was sometimes given
• 1:04:29
  reasons like, like you actually mentioned one of them, like, oh,
• 1:04:31
  there were so many extra women. They needed to be taken care of
• 1:04:35
  or. I've just heard that there's,
• 1:04:36
  there's a tiny movement right now that I've seen in the US to
• 1:04:40
  justify polygamy on religious grounds.
• 1:04:42
  Interesting. You know, I think after the
• 1:04:44
  sexual revolution, anything goes.
• 1:04:46
  Whatever we want to do. It's not a surprise that this
• 1:04:49
  is, you know, raising its little head up again, like, oh, I'm
• 1:04:51
  going to do it on the religious grounds now.
• 1:04:52
  You know, I'm going to have to have multiple wives on religious
• 1:04:55
  grounds, but that is the big excuse that I've heard used to
• 1:05:00
  justify on religious grounds. Well, I'm going to take care of
• 1:05:02
  more women this way. I'm being gracious and generous
• 1:05:06
  and. Yeah, that.
• 1:05:08
  So that was an an explanation that was given to me when I was
• 1:05:11
  growing up. I don't think that any early LDS
• 1:05:14
  leader used that as an explanation.
• 1:05:17
  That was not how they were conceiving of it, right.
• 1:05:19
  They were thinking of it as when men and women are sealed
• 1:05:23
  together now they'll be in the eternities, right?
• 1:05:25
  This like leads to their greater glory and exaltation and that
• 1:05:29
  sort of thing. And again, if people are
• 1:05:33
  interested in both of this topic, you know, if you just
• 1:05:35
  find this super fascinating, the biography of Joseph Smith is
• 1:05:38
  very good. The biography of Brigham Young
• 1:05:41
  covers this in a lot of detail. There's also a really great
• 1:05:44
  book. I mean, if you're, you'd have to
• 1:05:45
  be a bit of a history nerd to find this interesting, but a man
• 1:05:49
  named Todd Compton wrote a book called In Sacred Loneliness, and
• 1:05:53
  it's a biography of all of Joseph Smith's wives.
• 1:05:58
  So every chapter is a different. All 30.
• 1:06:00
  All 30 something. Yeah.
• 1:06:02
  It's a really beautiful book because it tells the story of
• 1:06:05
  the woman. You know, so often in this story
• 1:06:08
  the focus is all on Joseph Smith, right?
• 1:06:12
  If the wives get mentioned, they're in mentioned in the
• 1:06:14
  context of their relationship with Joseph Smith in this book.
• 1:06:18
  The reason that each woman is in this book, yes, is because they
• 1:06:21
  were a wife of Joseph Smith. But he tells their whole life
• 1:06:23
  story from the beginning until they die.
• 1:06:26
  And of course, including the time their interaction with
• 1:06:28
  Joseph Smith and and it's just, it's a wonderful book.
• 1:06:33
  It's really awesome to hear about all these different women.
• 1:06:36
  They all lived a very diverse set of lives.
• 1:06:38
  Some of them stayed faithful Mormons afterwards.
• 1:06:41
  Some didn't and did all sorts of interesting thing.
• 1:06:43
  At least one of them died a Catholic nun in Tennessee.
• 1:06:47
  It's just fascinating, you know, And if you want, you know, you
• 1:06:51
  get a lot of details in that book because he also tells all
• 1:06:53
  their first hand accounts of how they learned the principle of
• 1:06:57
  plural marriage from Joseph Smith and how he proposed to
• 1:06:59
  them and how what their marriage was like and that sort of thing.
• 1:07:02
  I'm looking as we were talking about William Law, I think you
• 1:07:06
  said this is it sounds like there was a lot of drama.
• 1:07:10
  You kind of indicated there might be with his relationship
• 1:07:14
  with Smith, but it sounds like Jane Law.
• 1:07:17
  This is according to one historian, Jane Law actually
• 1:07:20
  asked to be sealed to Smith after he had refused to seal her
• 1:07:23
  to William so Smith wouldn't seal her to her husband.
• 1:07:27
  And so then Smith denied the couple saying that William
• 1:07:30
  accusing William of adultery, that's why he wouldn't seal her
• 1:07:34
  to Jane. And then he then later on
• 1:07:38
  Analyzer Young, who was the 19th wife of Brigham Young, said that
• 1:07:43
  Jane stated that to her, that Smith visited her at night and
• 1:07:48
  then he proposed to her when Law wasn't home, saying that it was
• 1:07:52
  God's plan for her to enter a polyandrous marriage with him.
• 1:07:56
  This ultimately made Law upset, so it just sounds like there was
• 1:08:02
  this a lot of. There was a lot of stuff like
• 1:08:06
  that going on toward the end of Joseph Smith's life.
• 1:08:08
  Because he was this, he was this, he was the cult leader.
• 1:08:12
  I mean, to call it a cult again is a harsh term.
• 1:08:14
  I know if you're a Mormon listening, you're saying it's
• 1:08:15
  not a cult. But he was the the guru.
• 1:08:18
  He was the guy. He was, he had that spiritual
• 1:08:20
  authority. And so if you were a Mormon or
• 1:08:22
  interested in Mormonism, you were going to listen to what he
• 1:08:24
  said. And even if he said, yeah, maybe
• 1:08:25
  your wife is my wife or you shouldn't be with your wife or
• 1:08:27
  whatever it is, or your marriage is invaluable, then they took
• 1:08:30
  that to mean, OK, this must be the the case.
• 1:08:33
  I think that's basically right. That's not to say he never got
• 1:08:35
  pushed back. Obviously in the case of like
• 1:08:37
  William Locke, he got pushed back in several cases, women
• 1:08:41
  resisted him pretty strongly and then eventually agreed.
• 1:08:44
  And so, but yes, if you're, if you have someone in your
• 1:08:48
  community that you believe speaks for God, can give direct
• 1:08:51
  revelation from the Lord and they come to you and say, God
• 1:08:55
  wants me to have you or he wants me to have your wife or he wants
• 1:08:59
  me to marry your daughter, right?
• 1:09:02
  It's hard to say no to, especially when you've already
• 1:09:04
  invested a lot in this movement. You've already had maybe a
• 1:09:07
  supernatural experience. Well, and they've often moved
• 1:09:11
  right? Like they were all gathering in
• 1:09:12
  one location. So if you became a Latter Day
• 1:09:15
  St. back then, you would leave your family, leave your hometown
• 1:09:20
  and move to wherever the the Saints were gathering.
• 1:09:24
  And so you're living in this new place, you're part of this new
• 1:09:26
  movement. You've got this great community.
• 1:09:29
  It gives this leader a lot of power.
• 1:09:34
  Did you have spiritual experiences when you were a
• 1:09:37
  practicing LDS? Oh, definitely, I did, yeah.
• 1:09:41
  What were those like? You know, it's hard to
• 1:09:44
  categorize all of them. So Latter Day Saints place a
• 1:09:47
  high premium on having spiritual experiences.
• 1:09:51
  In particular, they want you to have an experience of gaining
• 1:09:57
  like a personal witness from the Holy Spirit that Mormonism is
• 1:10:00
  true. They were usually referred to
• 1:10:02
  this as like gaining your own testimony, like gaining a
• 1:10:05
  witness from God that it's true. So all growing up I prayed for
• 1:10:11
  an experience like that. And I can't really say that I
• 1:10:14
  had, you know, 1 distinct experience, whereas like, this
• 1:10:17
  was my moment, right? But often it was, there were
• 1:10:21
  just lots of moments where in the context of church meetings,
• 1:10:26
  church activities or just reading the scriptures and that
• 1:10:29
  sort of thing, where I just felt profound sense of peace,
• 1:10:34
  meaning, joy, connection, that type of thing.
• 1:10:38
  And in the church, this was always kind of interpreted for
• 1:10:44
  me, right? I was kind of told like, oh,
• 1:10:46
  when you have those kinds of experiences, those kind of
• 1:10:48
  feelings, that's God telling you that this is true, that
• 1:10:52
  Mormonism is true, right? So it gave me a lot of
• 1:10:56
  confidence, right? I kind of thought, yeah, like
• 1:10:59
  God is God's here. It gives you this real sense of
• 1:11:02
  like, and it kind of helps, you know, you.
• 1:11:04
  We've talked about a lot of messy stuff with Mormon history
• 1:11:07
  and Joseph Smith and things. And again, when I was growing up
• 1:11:12
  in the mostly in the 90s, pre pre Internet, basically, you
• 1:11:16
  know, we had like a dial up connection during my last few
• 1:11:19
  years of high school. Most of this stuff the average
• 1:11:23
  person just didn't know. And even now though, I think
• 1:11:26
  it's much more common for LDS people to know these things or
• 1:11:29
  at least to know like the basics of them.
• 1:11:31
  But for them there's this basic sense, this basic feeling of
• 1:11:37
  like, yeah, OK, I can't really explain that.
• 1:11:39
  I don't really understand that, but what I do understand is
• 1:11:44
  this, these experiences that I've had, this meaning that I
• 1:11:47
  receive from living this way, this community and that sort of
• 1:11:50
  thing. Yeah, in a sense the the fruit
• 1:11:54
  seems there. The fruit seems there.
• 1:11:56
  Right. You know, you read Matthew
• 1:11:57
  Chapter 7 and you're like, by their fruits you shall know them
• 1:12:00
  well. Like here are my fruits.
• 1:12:03
  So I believe that this is God's work, because to me God seems
• 1:12:07
  present here. So I'm really eager to hear how
• 1:12:11
  you see all of that not being LDS anymore.
• 1:12:15
  And it's not that you have apostatized and said I'm no
• 1:12:18
  longer anything. You're not like an atheist now
• 1:12:20
  or an agnostic, you're a Roman Catholic.
• 1:12:23
  So that's a pretty significant because because I could see I,
• 1:12:26
  I, my understanding is there's a lot of Mormons who leave
• 1:12:29
  Mormonism and then they become sort of just like, I'm just
• 1:12:32
  going to live, be a good person, live a good life, but I'm not
• 1:12:34
  going to do religious stuff because this is abusive.
• 1:12:36
  Like, they have their gripes, right?
• 1:12:39
  There's people who have those gripes about Catholicism.
• 1:12:42
  I mean, they say, well, Catholicism is controlling.
• 1:12:45
  I was raised with this religious stuff, and I don't want to be
• 1:12:47
  Catholic anymore. But you went from Mormon to
• 1:12:52
  Catholic. So I guess the first question
• 1:12:54
  would be, what was that journey of becoming Catholic?
• 1:12:57
  And then I want to hear how you interpret the lens.
• 1:13:00
  What lens you see your life as an L as LDS now that you're a
• 1:13:03
  Catholic? Sure.
• 1:13:05
  So when I got back from my mission guy, it was around 2005.
• 1:13:10
  I got married in 2006. So this is my I'm about to I'm
• 1:13:14
  going to have my 20th anniversary this year.
• 1:13:17
  Beautiful. Very happy.
• 1:13:18
  Congratulations. This was right around that time.
• 1:13:22
  So right around this time the church IA new biography of
• 1:13:27
  Joseph Smith was actually published in by a church member,
• 1:13:30
  like a faithful church member in the book was called Rough Stone
• 1:13:32
  Rolling and it had like pseudo approval from the church because
• 1:13:39
  it was sold in the church's bookstores.
• 1:13:42
  And the person, the man who wrote it named Richard Bushman
• 1:13:47
  is a professional historian, legit historian.
• 1:13:50
  I can't remember, I think like NYU or Columbia or something
• 1:13:53
  like that prestigious university.
• 1:13:57
  But he's also a faithful church member and his biography of
• 1:14:00
  Joseph Smith hold the full story in a way that I think unless you
• 1:14:06
  were some kind of weird history nerd, you just would not have
• 1:14:09
  ever encountered this version of Joseph Smith growing up.
• 1:14:13
  So I just remember when I was at, I went to BYU, Brigham Young
• 1:14:17
  University, the church's kind of flagship university.
• 1:14:21
  I remember people starting to talk about it.
• 1:14:22
  Like, have you read this book? Like, oh, man, it's, it's kind
• 1:14:25
  of crazy, right? And I avoided it for a while
• 1:14:30
  because, but I was, I didn't want to damage my faith, right?
• 1:14:34
  I heard stories of people having their faith damaged or even
• 1:14:36
  leaving Mormonism because of what they read in the book,
• 1:14:39
  which seemed kind of crazy to me, right?
• 1:14:42
  So I just thought, no, I'm not interested.
• 1:14:43
  I don't want to, I don't want to engage with that.
• 1:14:48
  But after some time, I just decided I thought I have to, I,
• 1:14:52
  I don't want to be kind of living intentionally in
• 1:14:55
  ignorance. So I got the book and I, I tried
• 1:14:58
  reading it and I couldn't, I couldn't read it.
• 1:15:00
  It was too difficult to read. The first chapter of that book
• 1:15:04
  talks about like the things, some of the things we were
• 1:15:05
  talking about at the beginning, his treasure digging and that
• 1:15:08
  sort of thing. And it just was so foreign to my
• 1:15:12
  concept of Joseph Smith that I couldn't, I couldn't even finish
• 1:15:17
  it. I read the first couple chapters
• 1:15:19
  and put it down. And it wasn't probably not even
• 1:15:22
  several years later that I finally decided to to engage
• 1:15:27
  with it again. And so my process was kind of a
• 1:15:32
  slow burn of an experience of trying to incorporate a lot of
• 1:15:37
  this information into my own faith and just feeling like I
• 1:15:43
  couldn't figure out how to make it work.
• 1:15:46
  I wanted to. I'm a pretty studious person.
• 1:15:51
  I like to think about things, I like to learn things.
• 1:15:53
  So I didn't want to just ignore it and I wanted my faith.
• 1:15:59
  It's not I when I say what I wanted to say just now was I
• 1:16:02
  wanted my faith to make sense, but I what I don't.
• 1:16:05
  I don't mean by that that needed to be perfectly rational to me,
• 1:16:09
  but that it needed to accord with reason.
• 1:16:13
  Maybe it's like a good way of putting it.
• 1:16:15
  I didn't want to believe in something wrong, right?
• 1:16:17
  There's lots of people who get caught up in different religious
• 1:16:20
  movements and things. How do you know if if it if it's
• 1:16:23
  right? How do you know if it's not the
• 1:16:25
  The church gave me an answer for that.
• 1:16:27
  They say, well, you know, based on your spiritual experience.
• 1:16:30
  And for a while that was fine, but it's not hard to start
• 1:16:33
  asking yourself something like, well, people have these kind of
• 1:16:37
  spiritual experiences and other faiths too.
• 1:16:40
  There are even branches like offshoots of Mormonism.
• 1:16:44
  Like there's some offshoots of Mormonism that still practice
• 1:16:46
  polygamy and they say the same thing to their church members.
• 1:16:51
  You can know that our offshoot of Mormonism is true if you pray
• 1:16:54
  about it. And if you have these spiritual
• 1:16:56
  experiences, that's God telling you that it's true.
• 1:16:58
  And so how do you, how do you break the tie in those
• 1:17:02
  situations, right? If you have like an LDS person
• 1:17:05
  and a Catholic person and a Methodist and maybe even a
• 1:17:08
  Muslim or something who have all had these beautiful spiritual
• 1:17:10
  experiences in their faith, can they all believe that this is
• 1:17:14
  God just telling us that it's true?
• 1:17:17
  So, so I finally sat down and just said I'm going to read this
• 1:17:24
  book. Like I don't want there to be
• 1:17:25
  information and just not know about it.
• 1:17:26
  I want to know about it. I read the book and it it kind
• 1:17:30
  of shook my faith in a way that in Mormonism that never fully
• 1:17:34
  recovered, I didn't immediately leave the church.
• 1:17:37
  I stayed Mormon for probably another, I think more than a
• 1:17:43
  decade after that, but it was a decade of trying to figure out
• 1:17:49
  how to believe what I believed and how to stay faithful in the
• 1:17:54
  church. And there's some really high
• 1:17:55
  spiritual moments in that time too.
• 1:17:56
  It's not like every moment during this decade I was my
• 1:17:59
  faith was razor thin. I had lots of moments even
• 1:18:03
  during that time where I felt the love in the presence of God
• 1:18:06
  and or even felt really satisfied with my faith.
• 1:18:10
  But but it was kind of always lurking in the back of my mind
• 1:18:16
  wondering like, is this really true though?
• 1:18:18
  You know, is this just like kind of a nice story that I believe
• 1:18:21
  in? So the thing that it's hard to
• 1:18:29
  know exactly how, you know, which part does story to jump
• 1:18:32
  to. But I had a moment where I
• 1:18:35
  started to discover more traditional, more ancient
• 1:18:38
  Christianity online. And at first, it was through
• 1:18:41
  Eastern Orthodoxy. You know, no one, no one puts up
• 1:18:44
  a YouTube video like Eastern Orthodox people.
• 1:18:47
  You know, you watch, like, a video of their liturgy or their
• 1:18:49
  worship and things like that. And I just found it really
• 1:18:52
  fascinating. And at the time, I was following
• 1:18:57
  the writing of Rod Dreher a lot. Do you know who he is?
• 1:19:00
  Yeah. An Orthodox.
• 1:19:02
  He's a convert to Orthodoxy from Catholicism.
• 1:19:04
  And, and it kind of opened my mind to a broader Christian
• 1:19:10
  landscape than I had been open to in the past.
• 1:19:15
  I, you asked me earlier how I thought of Catholics and
• 1:19:18
  Protestants before. And in my mind, I kind of
• 1:19:21
  thought, oh, well, I've got something I need to share with
• 1:19:22
  them. And this was the first time in
• 1:19:24
  my life where I thought, well, maybe I could learn something
• 1:19:26
  from them, right? Maybe if this isn't true, maybe
• 1:19:31
  it's possible that something else could be right, in terms of
• 1:19:34
  keeping my faith in Christ. And so I, I, I reached this
• 1:19:40
  point in my faith journey sometime when would this have
• 1:19:44
  been probably around like 2016 or something like that, where I,
• 1:19:50
  I started digging into traditional Christianity.
• 1:19:53
  I bought an Orthodox study Bible, which is still, if anyone
• 1:19:56
  wants to, it's a great Bible. The New Testament especially is
• 1:19:59
  wonderful. It has commentary from the
• 1:20:00
  church fathers in all the footnotes and things.
• 1:20:04
  And it really changed the way I saw Christianity.
• 1:20:08
  Because I encountered this really beautiful ancient
• 1:20:11
  tradition and a way of seeing Christ that it what I wouldn't
• 1:20:16
  say it was totally incompatible with my Mormonism.
• 1:20:20
  I, it didn't immediately make me think, oh, Mormonism is not
• 1:20:25
  true. But what it what it gave me was
• 1:20:27
  a, a kind of a weird confidence. I kind of thought to myself,
• 1:20:31
  even if Mormonism turned out not to be true, I could still be a
• 1:20:35
  Christian. I could follow Christ, I could
• 1:20:38
  have him, I wouldn't lose Jesus if I lost Mormonism and I, I
• 1:20:43
  went through this mental and spiritual transition where maybe
• 1:20:47
  before and maybe this is just unique to me.
• 1:20:49
  I don't want to put this on any other latter day St.
• 1:20:51
  But for me, I think my primary object of faith really was the
• 1:20:56
  church. When I was growing up, they
• 1:20:57
  would tell me things like you need to pray to know if the
• 1:20:59
  church is true. Get your testimony about whether
• 1:21:01
  the church is true, right, the Mormon church.
• 1:21:04
  And in some ways, I think I could say that that was like the
• 1:21:09
  primary thing I believed in. And then everything flowed from
• 1:21:11
  that. So I believed in Jesus because I
• 1:21:13
  believed in the church, right? And I went through this
• 1:21:16
  transition where that flipped, where I realized that my faith
• 1:21:21
  and my desire was for Christ. And I'd be happy to stay Mormon
• 1:21:27
  if that's where Christ, where his truth was, right?
• 1:21:30
  I was like, I'll stay here if this is where Christ is, but if
• 1:21:35
  I, I need to follow him out, I'm willing to do that too.
• 1:21:40
  And it actually gave me a real sense of peace because I just
• 1:21:46
  kind of thought, well, I won't lose Jesus, You know, I like,
• 1:21:49
  I've got him, He's got me. And for a while I was still LDS
• 1:21:52
  because I thought, well, this makes sense to me.
• 1:21:54
  And I've had all these spiritual experiences and stuff.
• 1:21:59
  I don't know. I mean, I don't know if you have
• 1:22:01
  any questions. Or no, I mean, I, it's all so
• 1:22:04
  interesting and it sounds like the lens that you were or what
• 1:22:07
  gave you confidence as you were exploring what ancient
• 1:22:11
  Christianity really was and other people who were Christian
• 1:22:14
  and what they really believed that the goodness that you
• 1:22:18
  undeniably experienced when you were LDS, those spiritual, I
• 1:22:22
  would say consolations of God's love and that peace that you
• 1:22:26
  could place that to say that could really be from God and,
• 1:22:29
  and Jesus Christ is real. But this mechanism that I've
• 1:22:33
  been trying to love him and live, live in faith for him.
• 1:22:39
  The Mormon church is not the fullness of faith.
• 1:22:41
  And there's some error in here, but that doesn't remove the
• 1:22:44
  reality of this consolation I've received.
• 1:22:47
  The goodness of God, the goodness existing in your own
• 1:22:49
  life, your marriage, your kids, everything else that is
• 1:22:51
  beautiful in your life. So you could just it, it sounds
• 1:22:54
  like there was a freedom there that it wasn't all or nothing.
• 1:22:57
  You couldn't, you didn't have to throw out the, you know, maybe
• 1:23:01
  in a sense you're throwing out the baby because you're no
• 1:23:03
  longer going to be Mormon. But your, your faith wasn't just
• 1:23:07
  Mormonism. Your faith was in God and in
• 1:23:09
  Jesus. And you came to see actually
• 1:23:11
  the, the, the, the true, the fullness of that truth is not in
• 1:23:14
  Mormonism. And there's some error here, but
• 1:23:16
  I'm going to go find it elsewhere.
• 1:23:19
  That last statement came a little bit later.
• 1:23:22
  At first, I made this transition while I was still pretty
• 1:23:24
  committed as a Mormon. You know, I was like, I had my
• 1:23:27
  questions, right? I still had these moments where
• 1:23:30
  I was unsure about a lot of things, but but it did.
• 1:23:34
  It kind of prepped me to be, I think more ready to take that
• 1:23:39
  step. When the time finally did come,
• 1:23:42
  like a year or two later. Yeah, I had, so I had a one of
• 1:23:46
  my siblings, several of my siblings left the Mormon faith
• 1:23:50
  and it was really through a conversation of one of with one
• 1:23:53
  of my brothers where he really, I don't, he just was directly
• 1:23:58
  challenged me and basically said, look, if you want to
• 1:24:00
  believe in this thing, that's fine.
• 1:24:02
  But you should think through, you know, first this question of
• 1:24:07
  like, do you really want to know?
• 1:24:08
  I remember him asking me like, do you really want to know if
• 1:24:11
  it's if it's true or not? Like if it weren't true, would
• 1:24:14
  you want to know? I actually think it's a really
• 1:24:16
  interesting question for any religious person to think about.
• 1:24:19
  Just fundamentally, if it weren't true, would you want to
• 1:24:21
  know it? Because I think it's easy.
• 1:24:25
  It's easy to not it's easy to say, even say yes to that
• 1:24:28
  question and not mean it too, right, because our it does
• 1:24:31
  involve so much of our lives, so much of our identity.
• 1:24:35
  And so it's very painful to even consider that what you believe
• 1:24:39
  and what you've always believed and has given you the sense of
• 1:24:41
  meaning and identity throughout your life maybe wouldn't be
• 1:24:44
  true. How do you even start thinking
• 1:24:46
  about something like that? It's scary, especially if you've
• 1:24:48
  experienced goodness. Yes.
• 1:24:50
  And you're like, well, does that mean that goodness isn't good?
• 1:24:52
  Yeah. Is there any goodness?
• 1:24:53
  It's it's terrifying. I can see how it can be
• 1:24:55
  terrifying. Yeah, and he also just
• 1:24:56
  challenged me. He said, look, if something's
• 1:24:58
  true, it should be able to bear investigation.
• 1:25:01
  It should be able to stand up to scrutiny.
• 1:25:04
  You know, like at least to just look at a basic level doesn't
• 1:25:07
  mean it. You know, it's not that you can
• 1:25:09
  only believe things that could be proved beyond a reasonable
• 1:25:11
  doubt in the court of law. But if you're avoiding, if
• 1:25:15
  you're believing in something and also simultaneously avoiding
• 1:25:18
  looking into it. You know, the example that I've
• 1:25:21
  given many times kind of analogy, which I think works
• 1:25:24
  well for faith in general, is a romantic relationship.
• 1:25:29
  Some people, we don't fall in love with our spouse for
• 1:25:35
  rational reasons. I didn't fall in love with my
• 1:25:37
  wife because because she, you know, checked all these boxes to
• 1:25:43
  be the perfect spouse for me or she scored really high on some
• 1:25:46
  spreadsheet that I made or something like that.
• 1:25:49
  Falling in love was a a sort of natural movement of my heart and
• 1:25:53
  will, right? But your love for someone should
• 1:25:56
  also bear scrutiny. If someone comes to you and
• 1:25:59
  they're saying, telling you they've met this great person
• 1:26:01
  and they love them so much and they're so close.
• 1:26:04
  And then you start seeing all these things that raise red
• 1:26:06
  flags, like they're not really who they say they are.
• 1:26:08
  And do you know what I mean? Like their love for them could
• 1:26:11
  be a genuine in a sense, but and it's not that their love spring
• 1:26:16
  forward from rational investigation, but like it
• 1:26:19
  should. They're the weight of rational
• 1:26:21
  investigation. I have no doubt, I've never done
• 1:26:24
  it, but I have no doubt that if I went searching for my wife's
• 1:26:27
  original birth certificate in the courthouse, she, you know,
• 1:26:30
  in the county she claimed to be born and I'd find it, right?
• 1:26:33
  I don't think she's, you know, a secret Russian agent or
• 1:26:36
  something like that. But if she were, I do want I
• 1:26:40
  would want to know it. I don't want to live.
• 1:26:42
  I don't want to live in ignorance if that really were
• 1:26:44
  the case, right? As painful as that would be, I,
• 1:26:49
  I don't, I hope that analogy makes sense.
• 1:26:51
  And that's kind of where I was, right?
• 1:26:52
  I had had enough. Because let's stay on the
• 1:26:56
  analogy of spousal love for a moment.
• 1:26:58
  There would be a kind of unfaithfulness to casting
• 1:27:02
  suspicion on your spouse for no good reason, right?
• 1:27:05
  If someone just said, if some random person came up to me and
• 1:27:08
  said, you know, I, I'm stealing this a little bit from Matt Frad
• 1:27:12
  because he said this before your wife's a Russian agent.
• 1:27:14
  Be like, I don't even know you and there's no reason.
• 1:27:18
  I've been married to this woman almost 20 years.
• 1:27:20
  Leave me alone, right? But there also could potentially
• 1:27:25
  be enough signs that one could encounter that it would actually
• 1:27:30
  be irrational to ignore them. You'd reach a point where to
• 1:27:33
  ignore them would be would be the immoral thing to.
• 1:27:37
  Do and that would look more like you've seen suspicious things
• 1:27:41
  your whole marriage, but you've always said, eh, I just got you
• 1:27:43
  always need. Excuses or?
• 1:27:45
  Whatever. And then you see other clues
• 1:27:47
  that might indicate that this is true.
• 1:27:49
  The person tells you they're the Russian agent.
• 1:27:51
  There's legitimacy behind that person.
• 1:27:53
  There's someone that. Well, maybe there's someone that
• 1:27:55
  I know trust and respect too, right?
• 1:27:57
  The person that is telling me this, it's not some crazy random
• 1:28:01
  person, but someone who's like, I have to tell you what I saw or
• 1:28:04
  something like that, right? So.
• 1:28:07
  So living as a Mormon though I'm curious if the posture is yeah,
• 1:28:12
  seek truth at all costs. No question is to, you know,
• 1:28:17
  difficult or, you know, no, there's no question.
• 1:28:19
  There's no bad question. For example, you know, becoming
• 1:28:22
  Catholic in Catholicism, it's like, yeah, throw everything out
• 1:28:25
  there. You ask whatever question you
• 1:28:26
  want to ask. You don't be disrespectful in
• 1:28:28
  terms of like, you know, curse at God, but like, ask any
• 1:28:31
  question. Wrestle with your faith.
• 1:28:33
  You know, let's let's explore the faith.
• 1:28:35
  Let's, like have debates about it.
• 1:28:36
  There's this robust tradition of debates and inquiry and
• 1:28:40
  exploration and investigation in Mormonism.
• 1:28:43
  Was that, I mean, they had the book in the store at Brigham
• 1:28:46
  Young, right? Or in the church.
• 1:28:47
  I mean, that's a big deal. They had this, it is more
• 1:28:49
  controversial biography of Joseph Smith.
• 1:28:51
  So it sounds like they were open who was written by somebody that
• 1:28:54
  talked about the Seer stone and other maybe less perfect
• 1:28:58
  elements of Joseph's life. Yeah.
• 1:29:00
  So that I think that they're moving more toward that.
• 1:29:05
  They've gone that way a lot more since like the advent of the
• 1:29:09
  Internet. Basically when I was growing up,
• 1:29:13
  I was very cautioned against and they, and you still hear this a
• 1:29:16
  lot from LDS leaders cautioned about against reading what they
• 1:29:21
  term like anti Mormon literature or things like that, right?
• 1:29:25
  And there's some, it's not that there's no wisdom to that
• 1:29:27
  either. If you're trying to, you don't
• 1:29:30
  want to exclusively get your information from someone who's
• 1:29:32
  trying to tear something down. Right.
• 1:29:34
  And if you're as a Catholic, it would be a problem if I'm just
• 1:29:37
  like constantly imbibing all of this anti Jesus, anti church,
• 1:29:43
  anti faith stuff. I mean, that's, that's also not
• 1:29:45
  healthy because we are influenced by what we consume.
• 1:29:49
  And if that's all the input, then it's going to be, it might
• 1:29:51
  be unless we're on a, some specific exploration study with
• 1:29:53
  parameters like This is why I'm doing this.
• 1:29:55
  Those are the questions I'm trying to answer.
• 1:29:56
  But it's just like an endlessly like give it to me, you know,
• 1:29:59
  then it can be a problem. So when I was growing up, I
• 1:30:02
  think it was much less that way. I think it was church members
• 1:30:08
  are often even to this day, a lot of times if you read
• 1:30:11
  something that doesn't fit with your worldview, it can be very
• 1:30:14
  disorienting experience, right. This is true for anybody for
• 1:30:18
  anything. If you read something and it
• 1:30:20
  sounds kind of plausible, but it attacks or it or it goes against
• 1:30:24
  what you believe to be true. It can feel it can make you feel
• 1:30:29
  bad, you know, and as a latter day St.
• 1:30:32
  I was told like that's the Holy Spirit telling you to stop
• 1:30:34
  reading that that what you're reading is bad for you.
• 1:30:38
  Step away from it. Stick with approved church
• 1:30:41
  resources. And today I think you get you
• 1:30:46
  kind of hear both rhetoric at the same time.
• 1:30:49
  You do have you will have some people who say, yeah, let's you
• 1:30:52
  know, study whatever you want. We'll answer your questions,
• 1:30:54
  whatever. But you also will have even to
• 1:30:56
  this day, church leaders who will kind of caution against
• 1:30:58
  that approach, right? The, you know, the current LDS
• 1:31:03
  president has a, a quote from a number of years ago that
• 1:31:07
  sometimes gets bandied about in like former Mormon communities
• 1:31:11
  and stuff where he was asked a question by someone.
• 1:31:13
  I think it was someone saying like my, it was a woman who had
• 1:31:17
  asked him something like my husband's going through this
• 1:31:20
  thing and he's asking me all these questions.
• 1:31:24
  What, what, where should? I Yeah.
• 1:31:26
  Questioning Mormonism, I don't know how to answer him.
• 1:31:28
  What is the answer? Whatever and this church leader,
• 1:31:31
  his name is President Oakes responded and said something
• 1:31:33
  like, well, I'll just suggest that research is not the answer.
• 1:31:37
  And he re emphasized, you know, a very classic LDS thing like
• 1:31:41
  you should pray, study the scriptures, pray, have God
• 1:31:44
  witness to you that it's true. Does that make sense?
• 1:31:47
  Yes, and so. But what about that husband?
• 1:31:51
  And there's just hope that the husband doesn't.
• 1:31:53
  Yeah, I don't know, apostasize. Yeah, I, so I, I don't want to,
• 1:31:58
  I want to kind of thread the needle right here because it's
• 1:32:01
  not right to say that like they're much the LDS people and
• 1:32:04
  the church is much more open to being very upfront about their
• 1:32:08
  history than they were in the past.
• 1:32:10
  They've even done this great project that's called the Joseph
• 1:32:12
  Smith Papers project, where professional historians have
• 1:32:15
  organized all the historical documents related to Joseph
• 1:32:18
  Smith, published them in volumes, put them online.
• 1:32:20
  It's a historian's treasure trove and it's all this primary
• 1:32:24
  source material. It's fantastic, and they're much
• 1:32:29
  better at telling the story of Joseph Smith's life in a more
• 1:32:32
  honest way than they used to. So how how does the current
• 1:32:36
  Mormon church and how did they maybe talk to you and you were
• 1:32:40
  teetering on the edge of maybe leaving Mormonism?
• 1:32:42
  How do they interpret the founding of Mormonism and the
• 1:32:48
  tenets And we I realize that we haven't gotten into some of the
• 1:32:52
  potential historical inconsistencies that people say
• 1:32:55
  exist. So maybe walk us through what
• 1:32:58
  some of those are, some of the other big reasons that people
• 1:33:02
  leave Mormonism and then how the church, Mormon Church, excuse
• 1:33:07
  me, talks about those things. OK.
• 1:33:10
  So for me, just kind of autobiographically, when I left,
• 1:33:15
  I really didn't have anyone from the church who came to talk to
• 1:33:19
  me about it. If anything, I was a little
• 1:33:21
  disappointed in that. I wanted, it's not not that I
• 1:33:23
  wanted to argue, but I remember thinking, hey, these local
• 1:33:28
  church leaders have care for my soul, but no one seems very
• 1:33:33
  interested in talking to me about it.
• 1:33:36
  I met with my local, the person we call a Bishop who's more like
• 1:33:40
  a parish pastor, roughly equivalent, because I wanted to
• 1:33:47
  tell him that I was going to be taking a step away from the
• 1:33:50
  church. At that time.
• 1:33:51
  I started attending an Eastern Orthodox parish and that I
• 1:33:55
  wouldn't be able to fulfill my duties at church anymore.
• 1:33:59
  And he was very gracious about it, but he didn't, he didn't try
• 1:34:04
  to talk me out of it or anything, or he didn't really
• 1:34:06
  ask my concerns like in not like what they were specifically.
• 1:34:10
  Right. So on the one hand, I'm glad he
• 1:34:13
  didn't berate me or anything. He was a very, he's a very good
• 1:34:16
  kind man. On the other hand, there were
• 1:34:18
  several people in the community who just feels like I wish they
• 1:34:22
  would have reached out and talked to me.
• 1:34:24
  But in terms of how do they interpret some of these things?
• 1:34:29
  First of all, one of the big ways is they'll just say, well,
• 1:34:31
  we don't claim that Joseph Smith was perfect, right?
• 1:34:34
  Like church leaders, they give a pretty big in a similar way
• 1:34:38
  that, you know, you can look at the history of the popes.
• 1:34:40
  There's a lot of really bad popes.
• 1:34:42
  There's some popes who probably could put some of the early LDS
• 1:34:47
  leaders to shame with some of their shameless behavior.
• 1:34:50
  And that doesn't destroy our confidence or our faith in this
• 1:34:54
  office, right? That has been established by
• 1:34:56
  God. You can be bad at doing your
• 1:34:59
  job, but the job that you've received is still a legitimate
• 1:35:03
  job. Look at King David.
• 1:35:04
  Look at King David, right? Look at Moses.
• 1:35:07
  He murdered somebody before. Now that was before his call,
• 1:35:09
  but still God has a history of working with complicated people
• 1:35:14
  whose moral lives are sometimes a complex story, right?
• 1:35:18
  So that's, that's often how they'll kind of gesture with
• 1:35:21
  Joseph Smith. You know, in terms of the
• 1:35:24
  polygamy thing specifically, it's a little bit hard because
• 1:35:27
  the church does need to defend that the revelation of polygamy
• 1:35:30
  was true because there's just no getting around it.
• 1:35:34
  The church taught it for so long that this was something from
• 1:35:36
  God. And so a lot of LDS people today
• 1:35:39
  will basically say, well, God did tell Joseph Smith to
• 1:35:42
  practice polygamy. They didn't tell him, God didn't
• 1:35:45
  tell him how to do it. And he went about it in bad ways
• 1:35:48
  sometimes in terms of whether you know, his like, say his
• 1:35:55
  treasure digging past, same thing.
• 1:35:57
  Some people will even go so far to say the fact that Joseph was
• 1:36:00
  involved in that maybe even opened his heart to other
• 1:36:05
  supernatural things that would occur to him later.
• 1:36:07
  And so, you know, they have different ways like that that
• 1:36:10
  they interpret those specific elements.
• 1:36:14
  So what I mean, all those, I mean, again, you could,
• 1:36:16
  especially if you're really invested in and had such a good
• 1:36:19
  experience as a Mormon, you'd be like, yeah, King David, he also
• 1:36:22
  killed somebody, slept with Bathsheba.
• 1:36:25
  St. Paul betrayed or Saint, excuse
• 1:36:28
  me, Peter betrayed Jesus. You know, he was like his, his
• 1:36:32
  first Pope basically in in the Roman Catholic tradition and an
• 1:36:36
  orthodoxy and he betrayed Jesus and, you know, multiple times.
• 1:36:40
  And so you might just say, well, none of those are good reasons
• 1:36:43
  why I should not be Mormon. So why were you doubting your
• 1:36:49
  Mormon faith at this juncture? You were learning about Joseph
• 1:36:52
  Smith, but you could make those arguments about Saint Peter.
• 1:36:54
  Again, I'm playing devil's advocate.
• 1:36:55
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not to say it's the devil
• 1:36:57
  necessarily, but I'm playing the advocate of that side.
• 1:37:00
  How would you respond to that? Yeah.
• 1:37:02
  So a brief aside on this question of how to evaluate
• 1:37:08
  profits, because I have spent a weird, long, a weirdly a large
• 1:37:13
  amount of time thinking about this question because of this,
• 1:37:16
  right? Because I was LDS.
• 1:37:17
  And this is like a very particular question that comes
• 1:37:20
  up if you're thinking about this question from a Christian
• 1:37:22
  standpoint, right? Jesus warns us, in fact, and
• 1:37:27
  it's all over both the Old and the New Testament to beware of
• 1:37:30
  false prophets, right? And the question is why?
• 1:37:35
  Why is it? What is it about prophets in
• 1:37:37
  particular that you have to be so worried about a false 1 He
• 1:37:42
  never we're never told to worry about a false high priest,
• 1:37:45
  right? The high priest or or even a
• 1:37:47
  false king. Those were incredibly important
• 1:37:50
  offices in ancient Israel and during Jesus's day.
• 1:37:55
  But there's no sort of like beware of false high priest.
• 1:37:58
  They'll deceive many people or whatever.
• 1:38:00
  So what is it about prophets in particular that makes them that
• 1:38:04
  they require scrutiny in this way?
• 1:38:07
  And it's because prophets almost always come with no publicly
• 1:38:13
  known authority before they show up, right?
• 1:38:16
  When a prophet shows up, they're basically saying, God called me,
• 1:38:19
  he gave me a message and I'm bringing it to you.
• 1:38:22
  A king and a high priest are very different.
• 1:38:24
  There's like process around how they are established.
• 1:38:27
  So we, other than a few very, very short, relatively short
• 1:38:32
  exceptions in history, we know who the Pope is, right?
• 1:38:36
  There's just not a question about who the Pope is.
• 1:38:39
  And if someone were to declare themselves Pope right now, it
• 1:38:43
  would be really obvious, like any reasonable person would know
• 1:38:47
  who the real Pope is and who's an anti Pope is.
• 1:38:50
  But it's not so with prophets, with someone who comes along.
• 1:38:53
  Even today in the Catholic tradition, we believe in
• 1:38:56
  prophets in not in the sense of giving us new public revelation,
• 1:39:00
  but we have Saints who have visions, We have Saints who
• 1:39:02
  bring us messages from Jesus. And you think about Saint
• 1:39:05
  Faustina, right? She received messages and
• 1:39:08
  visions of the Lord and, and published after her death.
• 1:39:14
  At least they were published. And the church receives these
• 1:39:17
  things cautiously, weighing the fruits.
• 1:39:20
  And it's for that reason that prophets don't have some sort of
• 1:39:26
  external office to which they point to say, you should listen
• 1:39:30
  to me because I hold this office, but simply because God
• 1:39:34
  called them. Can I just ask the question
• 1:39:37
  here? And the other thing it seems
• 1:39:39
  like with the examples that you just used, you know, King David
• 1:39:42
  was a king, St. Peter was a Pope.
• 1:39:45
  He didn't, they didn't have the offices of prophet, if I'm
• 1:39:48
  understanding what you're saying correctly.
• 1:39:50
  And a prophet, when they come, they're not coming themselves to
• 1:39:54
  establish a new institution. That's not the tradition of
• 1:39:58
  Christianity, unless it's Jesus Christ who's more than prophet.
• 1:40:01
  He's also king and and priest, right?
• 1:40:03
  He is God. They're coming to point people
• 1:40:06
  back to repentance and give them maybe hope for the vision and
• 1:40:10
  get them back into obedience to the true church and to the moral
• 1:40:15
  path and to the true faith. So there are a few prophets in
• 1:40:19
  the scripture who came to establish a new covenant.
• 1:40:22
  So Moses is one example. When he leads the people of
• 1:40:25
  Israel out of Egypt, there's a new covenant that gets
• 1:40:28
  established through Moses. Jesus establishes a new
• 1:40:33
  covenant. Yeah.
• 1:40:35
  These are like the exceptions, right?
• 1:40:37
  The overall role of a prophet typically is they show up and
• 1:40:43
  they're correcting the institutional leaders.
• 1:40:45
  They're calling the king to repentance.
• 1:40:47
  They're calling the high priests and the priests in the temple to
• 1:40:49
  repentance. They're calling people back to
• 1:40:51
  God they're and in as much as they gather followers, it's in
• 1:40:55
  promotion of their message. Like you think of John the
• 1:40:57
  Baptist. He's just this guy who just pops
• 1:40:59
  up one day in the river Jordan baptizing telling everyone to
• 1:41:03
  repent. People are going out to him and
• 1:41:04
  he had disciples, but he wasn't trying to establish like a new a
• 1:41:08
  new covenant. He was trying to call people
• 1:41:10
  back to the faithfulness of the covenant that John was a special
• 1:41:14
  case because faithfulness to the Mosaic covenant and in
• 1:41:17
  preparation for a new covenant that was about to be received.
• 1:41:20
  And so when I sit down to evaluate the claims of someone
• 1:41:26
  like Joseph Smith, he's clearly coming in the vein of a prophet,
• 1:41:29
  right? He's like he's saying God called
• 1:41:32
  me directly. And I think that there you
• 1:41:37
  there's a scrutiny we can certainly scrutinize, say, like
• 1:41:41
  the fruits of an individual Pope.
• 1:41:43
  There's nothing wrong with that. But it doesn't tell us whether
• 1:41:45
  or not they're the legitimate Pope.
• 1:41:47
  Their claim to being Pope is not the the proper term is like
• 1:41:50
  charismatic, right? Someone claiming A charisma,
• 1:41:53
  like a gift of the Spirit, like an anointing directly from God
• 1:41:57
  requires a kind of scrutiny that someone who holds a known
• 1:42:00
  institutional office doesn't require.
• 1:42:04
  Now, Jesus did come in this mold, as did Moses.
• 1:42:08
  Moses says to God. I just read this this morning on
• 1:42:12
  the flight here. He says that when I go the
• 1:42:15
  people will not believe me, that you have spoken to me and God
• 1:42:19
  says here are signs you can do to show that I did speak to you.
• 1:42:25
  Similarly, Jesus comes in this vein.
• 1:42:27
  He says I am the son of God, I'm the Messiah.
• 1:42:30
  I mean, he says it in his own sort of caged way, right?
• 1:42:34
  It's just sort of a there's sort of a divine mystery kind of
• 1:42:36
  secret to Jesus's life. Who is this person?
• 1:42:38
  But it's clear, especially the end of in when he's brought
• 1:42:41
  before Caiaphas, he boldly says that he's the Son of Man, says
• 1:42:45
  he is the Messiah, and so we should scrutinize the fruits of
• 1:42:51
  Christ. If if Jesus had been secretly
• 1:42:56
  committing adultery with a bunch of women, I think that would be
• 1:42:59
  enough reason to reject him as the Messiah.
• 1:43:02
  Just full stop. I do.
• 1:43:04
  Because how could he be God and doing right, committing sin?
• 1:43:07
  Yeah, I think that was a special aspect of his, of his claim is
• 1:43:11
  that he wasn't just prophesying about God.
• 1:43:13
  He said he was God. He was the truth.
• 1:43:15
  Yeah, yeah. But I would actually probably
• 1:43:18
  put that with any prophet, right?
• 1:43:19
  I would say just like it's a basic moral test, if someone
• 1:43:22
  claims to be a prophet and that's the source of their
• 1:43:26
  authority is the sort of direct call from God and they are
• 1:43:30
  secretly committing immoral acts throughout their life
• 1:43:33
  unrepentantly and even especially teaching that those
• 1:43:35
  immoral acts that God told them to do those things.
• 1:43:38
  I think that's disqualifying. And I, and I get, and the reason
• 1:43:41
  I say that is because Jesus says in Matthew Chapter 7 to analyze
• 1:43:47
  the fruits. And he specifically says he has
• 1:43:51
  this wonderful phrase that might seem a little curious where he
• 1:43:54
  says, do men gather grapes from thistles?
• 1:43:58
  I'm going to butcher it or, or figs from thorn bushes.
• 1:44:02
  But he, he talks about thistles and thorns, which is actually a
• 1:44:05
  call back to Genesis chapter 3 in the fall when he's
• 1:44:10
  pronouncing the the curse of the fall that they will, that
• 1:44:13
  humanity will inherit. He specifically says that there
• 1:44:16
  will be thorns and thistles will rise up against you.
• 1:44:19
  And so it's basically saying are if someone claims to be a
• 1:44:23
  prophet, are they trying to pull good fruits?
• 1:44:27
  But are actually doing it from amidst wickedness.
• 1:44:33
  So I'm trying to remember your exact question you're asking
• 1:44:37
  like, oh, you're saying, well, why isn't this a good objection?
• 1:44:40
  Like, oh, God called this person who was bad that person who was
• 1:44:42
  bad or whatever God does call flawed people.
• 1:44:47
  And we shouldn't expect any person that's called by God to
• 1:44:51
  be perfect. But I think that there we can
• 1:44:54
  have a basic expectation that they'd be good and that they be
• 1:44:57
  repentant. So let's take someone like King
• 1:45:00
  David. King David was a great Sinner,
• 1:45:02
  but also a man of great and deep repentance.
• 1:45:06
  He wrote the Psalms expressing his great sorrow to the Lord for
• 1:45:10
  the things that he'd done. And God forgave him because of
• 1:45:14
  the things because of his, his deep repentance.
• 1:45:18
  That's that's a model of a prophet you can learn from,
• 1:45:21
  right? He didn't claim after he slept
• 1:45:23
  with Bathsheba. It's like, well, actually, God
• 1:45:25
  told me to do that. God wants me to take lots of
• 1:45:27
  wives. And it would have been easier in
• 1:45:29
  a way for King David to say that than Joseph Smith because there
• 1:45:32
  was polygamy. I mean, I think there was.
• 1:45:34
  My understanding of that time anyways, is that there was more
• 1:45:37
  of that practice. I could be wrong.
• 1:45:39
  No, there was. Yeah, it was.
• 1:45:40
  Yeah. It happened a lot in that time
• 1:45:42
  period. So when I look at the life of
• 1:45:46
  Joseph Smith, I think that it's very legitimate to analyze the
• 1:45:51
  fruits of his life. And I think that we can put them
• 1:45:54
  into like a few different categories.
• 1:45:55
  So first of all, there's like the teachings that he produced
• 1:45:58
  as well as the scripture that he wrote.
• 1:46:00
  So he produced a number, a couple of different books that
• 1:46:03
  not only did he claim were scripture, but he actually
• 1:46:05
  claimed they were ancient records.
• 1:46:07
  So you have the Book of Mormon, which was, According to him, a
• 1:46:11
  record, an ancient record from the from the Americas.
• 1:46:16
  It tells the story of a family from Jerusalem, actually, who
• 1:46:21
  lives around 600 BC And God tells them to leave Jerusalem.
• 1:46:27
  And he guides them eventually to the seashore.
• 1:46:30
  They build a boat, they sail across the ocean, and they
• 1:46:33
  people, the Americas, and they have a whole civilizational
• 1:46:36
  history. It's a big book.
• 1:46:39
  Before the Native these are the Native Americans, or before the
• 1:46:42
  Native Americans. So traditionally Mormons believe
• 1:46:45
  that these were the Native Americans.
• 1:46:47
  More recently especially because with modern science we have a
• 1:46:52
  better understanding of where the Native Americans came from.
• 1:46:55
  They typically will say today that they're like among, they're
• 1:46:58
  just a group that there were probably already people here and
• 1:47:01
  that's why we can't. Really.
• 1:47:03
  But there's no historical record of them.
• 1:47:05
  There is no historical record of this group in the Americas.
• 1:47:09
  The LDS Church doesn't have a specific location.
• 1:47:12
  They don't. There's not a specific place
• 1:47:13
  where they say that's where it happened, right?
• 1:47:15
  It's a bit vague, which in some sense is helpful for their case
• 1:47:19
  because the Americas are really big, right?
• 1:47:22
  We haven't explored every inch of the of the Americas
• 1:47:25
  archaeologically, but as far as I know, I don't think there's
• 1:47:29
  any like non LDS historian anywhere that I know of that
• 1:47:36
  would take the Book of Mormon seriously as a historical
• 1:47:38
  record. And we could get into why if you
• 1:47:41
  want. He also produced a book called
• 1:47:43
  the Book of Abraham, which he claimed was a translation of
• 1:47:46
  some Egyptian papyri that he had.
• 1:47:51
  Then we also can look at again some of the teachings that the
• 1:47:54
  church has had over the years. And I think, I think that among
• 1:47:59
  these categories of things we can look at, I think Joseph's
• 1:48:01
  moral conduct, conduct is a relevant, A relevant thing to
• 1:48:05
  look into. If that makes it may not be
• 1:48:07
  immediately. And I list it last on purpose,
• 1:48:09
  right? Because that one is a little bit
• 1:48:11
  more admittedly subjective. How how bad is too bad?
• 1:48:15
  And what were these things he did?
• 1:48:18
  Were they things God told him to do or not?
• 1:48:21
  Right. Then in some ways you're kind of
• 1:48:22
  making an assumption when you start looking at it, whether you
• 1:48:25
  think they were or not. So if we say, OK, yes, Joseph
• 1:48:28
  Smith, like not the best guy in terms of his personal life.
• 1:48:32
  Lots of ladies make, you know, blew up some marriages, which,
• 1:48:37
  you know, is not OK. When King David did that, he
• 1:48:39
  repented and, you know, he knew it was the wrong thing to do.
• 1:48:42
  He was so sorry. OK, that that's the case.
• 1:48:46
  Was there anything else besides you discovering, oh, the man
• 1:48:49
  that was sort of, you know, given this glowing review as the
• 1:48:53
  second and 2nd to Jesus Christ alone?
• 1:48:55
  Yeah, for me, actually, it was probably the that was probably
• 1:48:58
  the least important thing. The least important was that
• 1:49:00
  Joseph Smith wasn't necessarily the most upstanding character
• 1:49:03
  all the time. Yes, much more important that
• 1:49:06
  were questions around probably the most significant thing was
• 1:49:10
  looking deeply into the Book of Mormon because he makes some
• 1:49:13
  very specific claims about what this scripture is.
• 1:49:17
  And as we kind of talked about before about like the act of
• 1:49:20
  faith is not the product of of reason, but it does need to be
• 1:49:25
  consistent with reason it and we talked about that analogy with
• 1:49:31
  with like a spouse. And so in a very similar way,
• 1:49:33
  when I'm looking at this book that had been taught to me as
• 1:49:36
  this is an ancient record. It was written on these gold
• 1:49:39
  gold pages. It was translated by the gift
• 1:49:41
  and power of God into English. It's a true record of true
• 1:49:44
  people who really existed. It's tells the story of a
• 1:49:48
  civilization over more than 1000 years.
• 1:49:51
  And so I've started looking really deeply into that the
• 1:49:55
  question of like, is this book true or is there is there reason
• 1:50:00
  to believe that it's true beyond just the fact that I've had good
• 1:50:06
  like spiritual experiences while reading it?
• 1:50:09
  You know, is that enough to tell me whether or not it's true?
• 1:50:13
  And sorry, just to be clear, you had spiritual experiences while
• 1:50:15
  reading it? Oh definitely like.
• 1:50:17
  The sense of God's love. Oh yeah.
• 1:50:19
  Or presence. OK.
• 1:50:20
  Yeah. I mean, I'll say today I think
• 1:50:21
  the Book of Mormon, certain parts of it have beautiful
• 1:50:25
  discourses on God. Some parts of it are a little
• 1:50:28
  strange, right? I mean, I've had experience of
• 1:50:30
  God's love reading Pablo Neruda. Yeah.
• 1:50:33
  And I don't know if that's like the correct comparison there.
• 1:50:35
  Well, yeah, I I'm just saying like I definitely did.
• 1:50:38
  I would be lying if I said that the Book of Mormon was, you
• 1:50:42
  know, just some. It's all trash, yeah.
• 1:50:44
  Just all trash or whatever. Like, I think that, you know, I,
• 1:50:48
  I would remember on my mission, sometimes I remember people
• 1:50:50
  saying, I won't touch that Book of Mormon.
• 1:50:52
  Every word in that book is a lie or something.
• 1:50:54
  And I just thought, well, that's just a, that's just a dumb thing
• 1:50:56
  to say. Like that just tells me you've
• 1:50:58
  never looked at it. Meaning there's some things in
• 1:51:00
  the Book of Mormon that are consistent with Christianity and
• 1:51:03
  Catholicism. Oh.
• 1:51:04
  Totally. I mean, there's beautiful verses
• 1:51:05
  that say things like is only through Jesus that we are saved.
• 1:51:08
  There's no other person besides Jesus Christ that can save us.
• 1:51:11
  You know what I mean? Like there's a lot of just basic
• 1:51:13
  Christian message in the Book of Mormon, but it's a different
• 1:51:18
  claim to sort of the Book of Mormon's credibility is, is
• 1:51:21
  really tied directly to Joseph Smith's right.
• 1:51:24
  Because someone might ask something like, well, Isaac, do
• 1:51:26
  you believe in the Old Testament?
• 1:51:28
  Like, why do you believe in the Old Testament?
• 1:51:30
  The reason I believe in the Old Testament is because I believe
• 1:51:33
  in Jesus. Like it flows directly.
• 1:51:36
  My, my faith is tied to Christ. And so I believe in the Old
• 1:51:40
  Testament inasmuch as Christ attested to it and the church he
• 1:51:43
  established believes it. I don't believe in the Book of
• 1:51:47
  Mormon because or sorry, the book of like the Book of Exodus,
• 1:51:51
  because I've done archaeological research, right?
• 1:51:54
  The Book of Mormon, though, is tied directly to Joseph Smith in
• 1:51:58
  the church that he founded. And it's sort of like the
• 1:52:01
  foundational miracle of the movement.
• 1:52:04
  So in the same way that the resurrection is basically the
• 1:52:07
  foundational miracle of Christianity, the coming forth
• 1:52:11
  of the Book of Mormon, that was the first thing Joseph Smith
• 1:52:13
  did. He published it before he
• 1:52:15
  established even the church, and he claimed it was miraculous
• 1:52:20
  from the very beginning. God gave me a miraculous ability
• 1:52:23
  to find this book and to translate it into English.
• 1:52:27
  And when I. If you start looking at the Book
• 1:52:30
  of Mormon with scrutiny, you pretty quickly see that there's
• 1:52:35
  at least a large number of elements that don't fit well
• 1:52:39
  with Joseph Smith's claim at all.
• 1:52:42
  So the Book of Mormon describes people who supposedly lived a
• 1:52:48
  very long time ago, starting 600 BC, moving forward.
• 1:52:53
  And the book is filled with what's referred to as
• 1:52:56
  anachronisms. Are you familiar with that term?
• 1:52:59
  So an anachronism is just something that is not consistent
• 1:53:02
  with the time that it's supposed to be taking place.
• 1:53:05
  So the classic example is something like, if you're, maybe
• 1:53:08
  this isn't a classic example, but it's a common Internet meme,
• 1:53:11
  like if you were to read something where it talks about
• 1:53:13
  Abraham Lincoln checking his iPhone or something like
• 1:53:16
  obviously this is not historical because iPhones didn't exist.
• 1:53:21
  They existed in the time the person wrote some that thing.
• 1:53:24
  But this couldn't be historical. Obviously we all just know that
• 1:53:27
  there were no iPhones then. So similarly, the Book of Mormon
• 1:53:30
  references quite a number of things that existed in Joseph
• 1:53:33
  Smith's time, but we know did not exist in the Americas
• 1:53:37
  historically. So there's certain animals that
• 1:53:39
  are mentioned like horses and elephants and but.
• 1:53:43
  Joseph Smith wouldn't have known.
• 1:53:44
  This. He would not have known this,
• 1:53:45
  no. There's technology that's
• 1:53:47
  mentioned, like the workings of steel and metal coinage and that
• 1:53:51
  sort of thing. Those are big tells.
• 1:53:55
  Yeah, and it's, well, I already St. apologists, they have
• 1:54:00
  answers to these things. So if people are curious, like I
• 1:54:02
  very much encourage you to go down the rabbit hole, go read
• 1:54:06
  their responses about how they explain some of these things
• 1:54:09
  that are anachronisms. You know, you can find, I think
• 1:54:11
  there's probably a Wikipedia article.
• 1:54:13
  It's like anachronisms in the Book of Mormon, and you can go
• 1:54:15
  through those. Don't take Wikipedia.
• 1:54:17
  I'm just saying that's a decent list.
• 1:54:19
  I'm sure you can find a decent list.
• 1:54:20
  Go search out their responses, see if they seem plausible or
• 1:54:22
  convincing to you. They didn't to me.
• 1:54:24
  Right. But deeper than that, though,
• 1:54:29
  was anachronisms around the theology of the Book of Mormon
• 1:54:34
  and the overall plot that the book tells.
• 1:54:38
  So briefly, the Book of Mormon is filled with 19th century
• 1:54:44
  Protestant theology. It just absolutely is.
• 1:54:46
  If you read the the theological works and the types of things
• 1:54:51
  people were talking about in the area that Joseph Smith lived,
• 1:54:53
  The Book of Mormon is directly engaging with all of those
• 1:54:58
  arguments and discussions. It uses the same terminology, it
• 1:55:01
  uses the same reasoning, it uses the same phrases.
• 1:55:05
  It's interested in the same questions, you know, So just as
• 1:55:09
  like a basic example, there's whole discourse, this is on the
• 1:55:11
  Book of Mormon about whether the atonement is limited or
• 1:55:14
  infinite. That's a pretty developed
• 1:55:17
  Christian. And this is supposed to be
• 1:55:18
  taking place in the year like 200 BC, before even Jesus comes
• 1:55:23
  to earth. You have people having rather
• 1:55:25
  detailed discussions around atonement theology that don't
• 1:55:29
  actually come up in Christian history for like more than 1000
• 1:55:33
  years after Christ has been resurrected.
• 1:55:36
  That's a, to me, a pretty big anachronism.
• 1:55:40
  It's, you know, and I, I'm sure Latter Day, I know that Latter
• 1:55:43
  Day Saints will say things like, well, you know, they were just
• 1:55:46
  this group of people had a different revelation, like a
• 1:55:49
  more detailed revelation about Christ.
• 1:55:50
  Like you can come up with a story as to why it's possible
• 1:55:54
  that these people would be talking like this.
• 1:55:56
  But there's also no historical record for these people.
• 1:55:58
  There's. No historical.
• 1:55:58
  Record. And there's historical
• 1:55:59
  contradictions about these people and then there's
• 1:56:02
  theological anachronisms, as you're saying.
• 1:56:04
  And so that to all of you, when you looked at that.
• 1:56:07
  And then you were also learning more about the history of
• 1:56:09
  Christianity and the early church instead of it just sort
• 1:56:12
  of being this like black hole of like, oh, there was a good early
• 1:56:15
  church. And all of a sudden it just,
• 1:56:16
  like, it just like apostatized and it's all disastrous.
• 1:56:19
  And then all of a sudden, you know, Joseph Smith came in and
• 1:56:22
  now it's all good again. You started to learn more about
• 1:56:24
  like, oh, Orthodox, like the Orthodox tradition and the Roman
• 1:56:26
  Catholic Church, and it didn't start connecting.
• 1:56:29
  It wasn't connecting anymore. Yeah.
• 1:56:31
  The, and the final thing I'll say about the Book of Mormon is
• 1:56:34
  the story the Book of Mormon tells is of a group of Hebrews
• 1:56:38
  from Jerusalem who come to the Americas.
• 1:56:40
  They eventually split into two groups and they're sort of like
• 1:56:43
  dueling civilizations over the course of 1000 years.
• 1:56:47
  The plot can be quite interesting.
• 1:56:48
  At times they fight wars against each other, but eventually the
• 1:56:52
  there's kind of like a more civilized group that are
• 1:56:54
  maintaining the traditions of God in a more savage group.
• 1:56:57
  And eventually the more savage group destroys the civilized
• 1:57:01
  group. And that's originally was among
• 1:57:04
  Latter Day Saints was thought. Now the Native Americans are
• 1:57:06
  descended from this more savage group of these two warring
• 1:57:10
  civilizations. And it turns out that this was
• 1:57:13
  just a common, that was actually a fairly common belief in Joseph
• 1:57:16
  Smith's day about the origins of the Native Americans.
• 1:57:19
  So even prior to Joseph Smith being born and before the Book
• 1:57:22
  of Mormon was published, there are other people who are
• 1:57:24
  publishing their own theories about where the Native Americans
• 1:57:27
  came from. And they sound pretty similar in
• 1:57:30
  the way they describe it. They'll even say things like,
• 1:57:32
  oh, yeah, they must have come over from Israel.
• 1:57:35
  That was a fairly common belief. Usually it was like a lost 10
• 1:57:39
  tribes thing, which is slightly different from the Book of
• 1:57:41
  Mormon, but they tie it into biblical history in some way.
• 1:57:44
  And then they'll even say, and they probably split into two
• 1:57:47
  groups and they fought wars against each other and
• 1:57:48
  eventually the savage group destroyed the civilized group.
• 1:57:51
  And if you're familiar with the Book of Mormon that just you're,
• 1:57:53
  you immediately recognize that's the basic plot of the book.
• 1:57:57
  And so those to me were very telling about it seemed to me
• 1:58:03
  that the book that there was nothing about the book that
• 1:58:05
  couldn't be explained by placing it into the like it's 19th
• 1:58:11
  century context. And if you tried to make it
• 1:58:15
  ancient, suddenly there were a lot of problems that were that
• 1:58:20
  were coming up. So you were at this time
• 1:58:24
  exploring Orthodoxy? Yes, you end up becoming Roman
• 1:58:27
  Catholic. Yes.
• 1:58:29
  What? Why?
• 1:58:29
  Why not Orthodox? That's a great question, So.
• 1:58:33
  And I'm going to keep asking questions back about the Mormon
• 1:58:36
  rejection of the Mormon faith. That's great.
• 1:58:39
  But I realized we haven't even gotten that there yet.
• 1:58:41
  We're we're. So I hit a point where prior to
• 1:58:45
  me discovering all the stuff about the Book of Mormon, even,
• 1:58:48
  I hit a point where I was, I was ready to really explore in a
• 1:58:55
  committed way whether or not what I believed was true.
• 1:58:59
  And I wanted to in particular investigate A orthodoxy because
• 1:59:02
  I had been learning about it for a very long time, for even
• 1:59:04
  several years at that point. It's almost like a hobby.
• 1:59:06
  I had some icons, I had some Orthodox prayer books, but I had
• 1:59:11
  never been to an Orthodox service.
• 1:59:13
  And, and I, I kind of was in a stale, a kind of stuck moment in
• 1:59:18
  my spiritual life. So this was the moment where I
• 1:59:21
  sat down with my wife and we I kind of talked to her about
• 1:59:23
  everything. She knew I had been struggling
• 1:59:25
  in my faith a bit. But this was the moment where I
• 1:59:28
  said I'm not going to go to LDS church anymore because I need to
• 1:59:32
  be able to visit this other. I need to see Sunday services
• 1:59:34
  somewhere else. Like I can't be in two places at
• 1:59:36
  once. So I started attending an
• 1:59:39
  Orthodox Church. I started reading the church
• 1:59:41
  fathers and reading scripture, praying more than I've probably
• 1:59:46
  ever prayed in my life and studying LDS history.
• 1:59:49
  So this was just a crazy time, very busy in my life and I
• 1:59:56
  became convinced really quickly is not the right word, but
• 2:00:01
  firmly it's just very deep conviction in the reality of the
• 2:00:05
  Eucharist early on in my journey.
• 2:00:08
  That's hard not to. It's hard not to.
• 2:00:11
  You read the church fathers and you just think either they were
• 2:00:14
  off totally off base, really fast, or the Eucharist is so
• 2:00:18
  central to Christian belief that I have to have it.
• 2:00:22
  And not only is it central, but it's not memorialist.
• 2:00:25
  You know, it's real, like the Eucharist is Jesus.
• 2:00:28
  And I started to hunger for it. And so I was attending Orthodox
• 2:00:33
  services at a beautiful church in downtown Salt Lake City.
• 2:00:36
  And I loved it. I loved a lot about it.
• 2:00:41
  But, and I, and I ended up going there for more than a year.
• 2:00:46
  I, I think sometimes when I tell my story, I say a year and a
• 2:00:47
  half. It was like between a year and a
• 2:00:48
  year and a half that I was meeting with Orthodox priests,
• 2:00:52
  learning about the faith, attending Orthodox services,
• 2:00:56
  trying to be as involved as I could.
• 2:00:58
  Because for me, the progression went something like this.
• 2:01:01
  I already mentioned that I had, I developed a deep faith in
• 2:01:05
  Christ, almost like independent of any particular church.
• 2:01:08
  I just thought, all I want in my life is to be a Christian.
• 2:01:11
  I want to follow and love the Lord Jesus Christ.
• 2:01:15
  And then I realize I need the Eucharist.
• 2:01:18
  That's the next step for me, OK? And not just any Eucharist, not
• 2:01:24
  just anyone who claims to have the Eucharist.
• 2:01:26
  I need a true Eucharist because the early Christians were
• 2:01:29
  worried about that too, right? Who can offer the Eucharist?
• 2:01:32
  Who offers a valid Eucharist? And, and where do I find that?
• 2:01:38
  Oh, it seems like this Bishop is kind of an important thing,
• 2:01:41
  right? You read the early Church
• 2:01:42
  Fathers and even the New Testament, the idea that the
• 2:01:45
  apostles are choosing their successors, people to follow
• 2:01:47
  after them who can offer this true sacrifice to the Father,
• 2:01:51
  which is the Son and given to the people of God through the
• 2:01:55
  Holy Spirit and just kind of trinitarian worship.
• 2:01:58
  I wanted it. And I knew that the Bishop was
• 2:02:01
  an important role because a true Bishop was someone who had that
• 2:02:04
  real Apostolic authority to offer the Eucharist.
• 2:02:09
  OK, which Bishop? That's where the rubber meets
• 2:02:12
  the road, right? I was attending this Orthodox
• 2:02:15
  Church. There were like 4 Orthodox
• 2:02:18
  jurisdictions that I could go to.
• 2:02:20
  I could go to the Antiochians, I could go to the Greeks, I could
• 2:02:23
  go to the Serbians. And there was a ROCOR Russian
• 2:02:25
  Orthodox Church outside of Russia church in Salt Lake.
• 2:02:30
  And you know, at the time they were all in communion with each
• 2:02:32
  other. So, and, and there was also a
• 2:02:35
  Catholic Bishop of Salt Lake City.
• 2:02:38
  Those the, the Orthodox churches didn't have a Bishop of Salt
• 2:02:41
  Lake, but they all had different bishops that their priests were
• 2:02:43
  under. So how do which one?
• 2:02:47
  Right. And then it was right around the
• 2:02:49
  time that within Orthodoxy, the, the controversy between Ukraine
• 2:02:55
  and Russia and the Ecumenical Patriarch came about.
• 2:02:58
  This is a bit in the weeds, but it's fascinating.
• 2:03:01
  The basic idea is that the Patriarch, the Orthodox
• 2:03:05
  Patriarch of Moscow and the Orthodox Patriarch of
• 2:03:09
  Constantinople, who are two of the biggest leaders in Eastern
• 2:03:13
  Orthodoxy, had a disagreement about Ukraine, about who is in
• 2:03:17
  charge of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
• 2:03:20
  And because of that disagreement, they broke
• 2:03:23
  communion with each other. So now I'm in a situation where
• 2:03:26
  there are parishes in Salt Lake City who, at least their bishops
• 2:03:31
  and their patriarchs are not in communion with each other.
• 2:03:35
  So it really felt like I had this question of like, well,
• 2:03:37
  which? Which Bishop?
• 2:03:39
  How do you know which? Orthodox Church.
• 2:03:41
  Which Orthodox Bishop should I be under?
• 2:03:44
  But then it became a more broad question.
• 2:03:46
  It'd be sort of, well, how in general do you know which Bishop
• 2:03:49
  if there's multiple people who claim to be bishops, you know,
• 2:03:52
  And you can even trace this in the history of the Church.
• 2:03:55
  The first controversies in early Christianity were almost all
• 2:03:58
  local, right? So you have Ignatius of Antioch,
• 2:04:02
  who's riding around the year 100 and he is, he has a pretty
• 2:04:06
  simple solution to identifying the true church.
• 2:04:10
  Stick with the Bishop. That's what he says.
• 2:04:12
  Don't gather with those Christians who don't gather with
• 2:04:15
  the Bishop because you even that early, you had some Christians
• 2:04:17
  who were holding their own eucharistic service without the
• 2:04:20
  Bishop. And he's basically saying, it's
• 2:04:23
  pretty obvious, stick with the Bishop that was chosen by the
• 2:04:26
  apostles, and that works for a local dispute.
• 2:04:30
  But then once that bubbles up at the next level, and now you have
• 2:04:33
  two bishops that everyone acknowledges are the valid
• 2:04:37
  bishops of their area, but now they disagree with each other or
• 2:04:42
  maybe they're breaking communion with each other.
• 2:04:44
  So which side of that dispute do you take?
• 2:04:48
  And what mechanisms, like did God provide a mechanism for us
• 2:04:53
  to know which communion of bishops should be ours, right?
• 2:04:58
  Because today there's so many you could choose from.
• 2:05:01
  You could be part of several different Orthodox, Eastern
• 2:05:04
  Orthodox churches. There's Oriental Orthodox
• 2:05:07
  churches like the Coptics, the Armenians, the Assyrian Church
• 2:05:09
  of the East. There's even break off groups
• 2:05:12
  within the Catholic Church, right?
• 2:05:13
  So there's like the old Catholics that have their own
• 2:05:17
  bishops. There's there's lots of
• 2:05:19
  different groups that have split off that even today the Catholic
• 2:05:22
  Church would say, yeah, those are led by true bishops, bishops
• 2:05:26
  who have Apostolic succession and valid holy orders.
• 2:05:30
  So why then are they not a true church?
• 2:05:32
  We even as the Catholics teach that the Orthodox have a valid
• 2:05:34
  Eucharist when they celebrate the liturgy.
• 2:05:37
  The Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Christ in their
• 2:05:40
  services. So it's valid, but it's not
• 2:05:43
  considered permitted or licit. Yeah, it's complicated with the
• 2:05:46
  Orthodox because since it's mostly geographical, I, we, I
• 2:05:50
  don't think we would say that their Eucharistic service is
• 2:05:52
  illicit, right? The Bishop of Thessaloniki, who
• 2:05:57
  is the successor of Saint Paul in that area, right?
• 2:06:02
  He's there's, there's not. We have never said, oh, actually
• 2:06:06
  the true Bishop is this Catholic Bishop there.
• 2:06:08
  When the Eastern, East and the West split, it was a true, sad,
• 2:06:12
  terrible division between valid bishops on both sides.
• 2:06:17
  But that doesn't mean that you should be in communion with
• 2:06:20
  someone who's not in communion with the Pope, right?
• 2:06:23
  So that's when I started asking myself that question.
• 2:06:25
  Like you asked, how did I become Catholic after spending more
• 2:06:27
  than a year attending an Orthodox Church?
• 2:06:30
  There were just a few things that I couldn't that didn't sit
• 2:06:35
  with with me well. And one of them was this
• 2:06:37
  question of what kind of obedience is owed to bishops?
• 2:06:42
  How do I know if the bishops are teaching what's true?
• 2:06:44
  How do I if the bishops have an argument and a disagreement with
• 2:06:47
  each other, how do I decide which ones right?
• 2:06:50
  And as far as I could tell, the really the only orthodox answer
• 2:06:55
  to that question is, well, you just have to study the issues.
• 2:06:58
  If they have a disagreement, you have to study which the issues
• 2:07:00
  and decide which one you think is right.
• 2:07:02
  Pick your pick your favorite, or pick the one you think yeah.
• 2:07:05
  Pick the one that you think is right.
• 2:07:06
  And to me it seemed like, well, that's not how we do theology in
• 2:07:10
  general. If the Orthodox don't tell you
• 2:07:11
  to do that with Scripture, they don't say just read the
• 2:07:13
  Scripture and do the interpretation you think is
• 2:07:15
  right, right? They talk about the importance
• 2:07:17
  of tradition and the ecumenical councils interpreting within the
• 2:07:22
  tradition and the dogmatic decrees of the Church.
• 2:07:26
  How do you know which decrees are dogmatic, right?
• 2:07:28
  Like all these questions start coming up.
• 2:07:29
  So I started to think to myself, well, even if the papacy is not
• 2:07:34
  true, it would be pretty nice if God had given a mechanism of
• 2:07:39
  unity at the universal level of the Church.
• 2:07:42
  So the Orthodox agree that the Bishop is God's mechanism for
• 2:07:47
  unity in the local church. In any particular place, you
• 2:07:52
  must be in communion with the Bishop.
• 2:07:54
  He's the unity principle. So like the Bishop of Phoenix,
• 2:07:58
  John Dolan, he's our Catholic Bishop, and if you break with
• 2:08:01
  him, you're breaking the unity of the Church.
• 2:08:03
  Is there also a principle at the universal level of unity?
• 2:08:07
  So it was through asking that question and studying more that
• 2:08:11
  I became convinced that the papacy was an institution from
• 2:08:15
  God for the universal unity of the Church.
• 2:08:18
  And that's why I became Catholic.
• 2:08:20
  And by the papacy you mean the Bishop of?
• 2:08:22
  Rome, I mean, the Bishop of Rome, yeah, in particular that
• 2:08:24
  among the bishops 1 was chosen by God through Saint Peter like
• 2:08:30
  so Saint Peter ended. Saint Peter was the principal,
• 2:08:32
  the universal principle of unity in the early Church, and that
• 2:08:37
  role was passed on to the Church of Rome as being the Church
• 2:08:43
  which is the principle of unity, and the Bishop of Rome, as the
• 2:08:46
  leader of that Church, receives that responsibility from Peter
• 2:08:49
  to be that particular point of unity for all Christians.
• 2:08:55
  And so there's effectively a tiebreaker.
• 2:08:57
  Yeah, Catholic ecclesiology is pretty easy.
• 2:09:00
  You know, if the bishops disagree with each other, stick
• 2:09:02
  with the Pope. You know, like if there's two
• 2:09:05
  communions of bishops that are arguing against each other and
• 2:09:09
  disagree theologically, or especially if they break
• 2:09:11
  communion with one another, you stick with.
• 2:09:15
  It's not our responsibility. We don't have to become theology
• 2:09:19
  PhDs to answer, you know, a question like how am I going to
• 2:09:22
  judge whether Christ has one nature or two natures?
• 2:09:27
  It's like, come on, I have a job, I have a family.
• 2:09:29
  I can't dedicate my entire life to this question just so I can
• 2:09:32
  figure out whether I should be a Coptic Christian or a Caledonian
• 2:09:36
  Christian, which would be the Orthodox and the Catholics.
• 2:09:40
  So I have to trust that God wants us to know about him.
• 2:09:44
  That's, I mean, in general, that's the beauty of
• 2:09:46
  Christianity, you know, is that God wants to tell us his truth.
• 2:09:53
  He wants us to know the truth so we can live in the truth.
• 2:09:57
  Yes, sometimes there's beauty and not knowing something.
• 2:10:00
  Sometimes there can be beauty and doubt.
• 2:10:02
  But fundamentally, in the most important truths, God doesn't
• 2:10:04
  want us to be in doubt. He wants us to be certain of Him
• 2:10:07
  so that we can live in the truth.
• 2:10:10
  And that was part of the the split from the Orthodox and the
• 2:10:14
  Roman Catholic tradition was ultimately not letting Rome be
• 2:10:17
  the tiebreaker. Yeah, I mean, it's very
• 2:10:20
  complicated. The East West split the.
• 2:10:27
  There were a. Number, there were a number of
• 2:10:29
  things that caused east and West to kind of grow apart for a
• 2:10:32
  period of time for actually for a few 100 years, they were kind
• 2:10:35
  of drifting in different directions.
• 2:10:39
  And when the Pope sort of asserted his authority and in
• 2:10:43
  particular in areas, and I should say he did it somewhat in
• 2:10:47
  artfully, you know, I'm not saying that the Pope was acting
• 2:10:49
  great at that time and he was enforcing certain some of their
• 2:10:55
  disputes were over things that today might seem trivial to us,
• 2:10:58
  like the Orthodox use leavened bread for the Eucharist and
• 2:11:03
  Western Christians had had been were using unleavened bread.
• 2:11:08
  And the Orthodox didn't like that.
• 2:11:11
  They thought that was heretical. You know, so there are things
• 2:11:13
  like that. But yes, in the end, when the
• 2:11:15
  Bishop of Rome said this is the way it is, the Orthodox like,
• 2:11:19
  see you later, you know, we're, we don't need to be in community
• 2:11:22
  with you anymore. What's so interesting, those of
• 2:11:24
  what you already were in saying earlier about some of these very
• 2:11:29
  ethnically or culturally based Orthodox churches that their
• 2:11:34
  Eucharist is valid. This is in the line of Apostolic
• 2:11:37
  succession and it could even be licit except for almost this
• 2:11:41
  like paperwork era. They're just not fully in line
• 2:11:44
  with Rome. But everything else they, they
• 2:11:46
  might as well be, is what I'm trying to say for many of them,
• 2:11:49
  right? I mean, they might as well be
• 2:11:51
  fully in line with Rome because Rome will still respect their
• 2:11:55
  ethnic, you know, approach to the liturgy.
• 2:11:57
  And, and Rome allows different kinds of liturgies.
• 2:11:59
  It's not like Rome says you can't have your, you know, what
• 2:12:02
  would be an example here? But.
• 2:12:05
  Like the Malkites? Yeah, you can't have your
• 2:12:07
  Malkite liturgy, this beautiful ancient liturgy.
• 2:12:10
  So I, and I know this gets into politics of like, well, what
• 2:12:13
  about the Latin Rite and some of the, you know, politics there.
• 2:12:15
  But ultimately, I think Rome does make concessions for the
• 2:12:19
  ancient nature of our faith, of course, and the way that it
• 2:12:22
  lives, it manifests or lives out on these different cultures
• 2:12:25
  across time and space. Yeah.
• 2:12:26
  And I don't want to downplay the differences.
• 2:12:28
  There's a tendency for Catholics to look at the Orthodox and say
• 2:12:31
  we're basically the same, and Catholic and Orthodox look at
• 2:12:34
  Catholics and say, no, we're not.
• 2:12:35
  There's substantial differences in certain points of theology
• 2:12:39
  that are the chief reason that we're still not united and one
• 2:12:45
  of those is the papacy. There's other things about the
• 2:12:47
  Filioque and other, those are probably the two biggest ones at
• 2:12:51
  this point, but there's a few others that.
• 2:12:53
  The fact that there's a tiebreaker in its Rome and then
• 2:12:56
  the Filioque. Yeah, the filioque is the
• 2:12:58
  doctrine that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the
• 2:13:01
  Son. It gets a little, it gets deep
• 2:13:03
  really quickly. And so it's a complicated, but
• 2:13:05
  this is another. Father Josiah Trenum on the
• 2:13:07
  show. Oh, OK.
• 2:13:08
  Yeah, he was making the hard case.
• 2:13:10
  This is just another. That was the reason Rome was
• 2:13:13
  wrong, and we should have, you know, we should all come under
• 2:13:16
  the Orthodox Church. This is another example though
• 2:13:18
  of something where I mean, I can tell you the arguments for and
• 2:13:22
  against the filioque, but how do I this is a matter of revelation
• 2:13:25
  from God, we're how do I judge whether the filioque is true or
• 2:13:31
  not? You know, and both sides could
• 2:13:32
  give me their reasons like, oh, here's how you judge the
• 2:13:36
  theology historically or based on scripture or based on the
• 2:13:39
  writings of the church fathers. They can both mount their case.
• 2:13:41
  But in the end, this is what the Church is for, is to help us in,
• 2:13:45
  is to help us know the truth, the Holy.
• 2:13:47
  Spirit, Well, basically what I think I said with Father
• 2:13:49
  Jezebel, like we're going to break communion over that.
• 2:13:52
  Not that it's not important, but it's like you can, you can make
• 2:13:55
  like you're saying, you can make the case either way, and we're
• 2:13:58
  going to break communion over that.
• 2:13:59
  And what does it mean to break communion?
• 2:14:01
  I mean, look at the state of Christianity Today.
• 2:14:03
  Look at your, I mean, Mormonism is a result, I would say, of the
• 2:14:08
  broken communion of the East and the West of, of Orthodoxy
• 2:14:11
  splitting off from the Catholic Church.
• 2:14:14
  I'm not saying that we wouldn't have had Joseph Smith without
• 2:14:17
  that, but I think you have this whole environment of that.
• 2:14:21
  Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. I.
• 2:14:22
  Mean. What do you think about that?
• 2:14:23
  Do you think we would have had Joseph Smith at the I think.
• 2:14:25
  He's more of a product of the Protestant Reformation.
• 2:14:28
  But we wouldn't have had the would we have?
• 2:14:30
  Would we have had the Protestant Reformation if we hadn't had?
• 2:14:33
  They were. It's hard.
• 2:14:34
  I don't. I'm not I, I don't.
• 2:14:35
  I honestly don't know the answer to that question.
• 2:14:37
  I don't think I have a strong opinion on whether or not
• 2:14:40
  Protestantism came from the East West split.
• 2:14:45
  Yeah, I think my my opinion, I guess we haven't really talked
• 2:14:48
  about this on the show on this is any split weakens the
• 2:14:53
  strength and makes of unity and makes the space for more splits.
• 2:14:58
  I think that's definitely true, yes.
• 2:15:00
  So you have a history of splitting and the more you
• 2:15:03
  split, the more you're going to split.
• 2:15:04
  And not now Protestantism as it, as it you know, exists today is,
• 2:15:09
  you know, whatever, what is it 40,000 denominations.
• 2:15:11
  Yeah, certainly there were some Protestants who pointed to the
• 2:15:16
  to the Greeks, like the Orthodox as a precedent.
• 2:15:19
  Look, they split with Rome. We can too.
• 2:15:22
  That type of thing. Yeah.
• 2:15:24
  So is there looking back on your Mormon?
• 2:15:27
  So then you became Catholic. Well, tell us.
• 2:15:30
  Tell us what happened next you're doing.
• 2:15:31
  All this experience, not to draw it out too long, but once I had
• 2:15:37
  been after about a year, a little more than a year, and
• 2:15:39
  then Orthodoxy and I never became Orthodox.
• 2:15:42
  I'm trying to be clear. I, I would, I don't claim, oh, I
• 2:15:44
  was Orthodox and then became Catholic.
• 2:15:45
  I was just an Enquirer the whole time.
• 2:15:48
  I looked into it for a year so I don't tell.
• 2:15:51
  I don't put myself forward as like an expert on Orthodoxy or
• 2:15:53
  whatever. But I finally decided, well
• 2:15:56
  this. I don't think this is the right
• 2:15:58
  thing. Maybe I should look into
• 2:16:00
  Catholicism because I had never really given Catholicism a try.
• 2:16:04
  I had a latent anti Catholic bias from my time as a Mormon
• 2:16:09
  and being in my time in Orthodoxy had only strengthened
• 2:16:14
  that right. The Orthodox are usually pretty
• 2:16:15
  clear on why they're not Catholic.
• 2:16:17
  You can find plenty of content like that from Orthodox.
• 2:16:21
  So I decided to encounter Catholicism on its own terms.
• 2:16:24
  I started going to Mass. I bought catechism and I just, I
• 2:16:30
  was so blown away by the catechism by its clarity and
• 2:16:35
  just just the way that it presented the teaching of
• 2:16:39
  Christianity. I just thought, oh, this is so
• 2:16:41
  beautiful. I kind of got to the point where
• 2:16:43
  I thought, I hope this is hope this is true, because this is
• 2:16:46
  this kind of clarity was something I felt like I'd been
• 2:16:47
  lacking looking into Orthodoxy. So I loved having that.
• 2:16:52
  Going to Mass was a little bit more bumpy.
• 2:16:53
  I had some good experiences at Mass.
• 2:16:55
  I had some bad experiences at different parishes, feeling like
• 2:17:00
  the reference was not what I wanted it to be, what I expected
• 2:17:04
  it to be, because I knew that the doctrine of the Eucharist
• 2:17:06
  was basically the same between the Orthodox and the Catholics
• 2:17:11
  and I. The Orthodox services I've been
• 2:17:13
  to had all been very beautiful and reverent and some of my
• 2:17:18
  early experiences at Mass I just, I was a little
• 2:17:21
  discouraged, but I kept trying and had some really beautiful
• 2:17:25
  and incredible experiences at Mass, at some beautiful churches
• 2:17:29
  with Mass celebrated so reverently.
• 2:17:32
  Times when I thought, OK, I've got to I the fact that some
• 2:17:36
  people are doing it not reverently shouldn't to swayed
• 2:17:40
  me from continuing to look into this because the beauty is
• 2:17:43
  there. And then COVID hit right around
• 2:17:47
  this time, just after I had had actually a pretty
• 2:17:50
  transformational experience at Ash Wednesday Mass in 2020.
• 2:17:56
  So it's like a month before COVID.
• 2:17:59
  I had this beautiful experience at the cathedral in Salt Lake.
• 2:18:02
  And then COVID hit. Everything gets shut down.
• 2:18:05
  I watched, watched Easter on live stream.
• 2:18:08
  You know, I'm just kind of sitting at home for a year
• 2:18:10
  trying to keep my studies going. I can't go to Mass.
• 2:18:12
  I can't meet up with anybody. But yeah, the next summer.
• 2:18:19
  No, that that summer. See, now I have my timelines all
• 2:18:22
  mixed up. No, it was that fall.
• 2:18:24
  So that fall I joined in our CIA class over Zoom because we were
• 2:18:27
  still in lockdown from COVID. And I just continued to just
• 2:18:33
  prepare until I was baptized in Easter 2021.
• 2:18:37
  You talked about at the beginning the difference between
• 2:18:39
  the intention of a Mormon baptism versus a true baptism, a
• 2:18:44
  Catholic baptism. What's the intention behind the
• 2:18:47
  Mormon baptism that's different from the Catholic?
• 2:18:51
  So this gets the. The precise intention has to do
• 2:18:56
  with their understanding of the nature of God.
• 2:18:59
  So what does it mean to be baptized in the name of this Try
• 2:19:04
  personal God that we are calling Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?
• 2:19:09
  Because that's what for a, for a, for a baptism to be valid the
• 2:19:14
  Catholic Church, it's actually pretty easy to do a valid
• 2:19:17
  baptism. You have to do the Trinitarian
• 2:19:19
  formula. Water has to either be poured on
• 2:19:21
  the head or the person has to be immersed.
• 2:19:23
  And for the intention, all you the intention has to be is that
• 2:19:27
  you intend to do what the church does when she baptizes.
• 2:19:31
  You don't even have to know what the church does.
• 2:19:34
  So in theory, an atheist could perform a valid baptism without
• 2:19:39
  even knowing theology. You don't have to be a theology
• 2:19:42
  expert to perform a valid baptism, but if you are clearly
• 2:19:46
  not intending what the church intends, then the baptism's not
• 2:19:50
  valid. And the judgement from the
• 2:19:51
  Vatican is that when Latter Day Saints perform a baptism, their
• 2:19:55
  understanding of God is different enough because they
• 2:19:58
  believe that God the Father is essentially as a human nature
• 2:20:03
  that he's embodied like us. The Son is a separate human
• 2:20:08
  nature from the Father, so they're not consubstantial in
• 2:20:11
  any way. The Holy Spirit in Mormonism
• 2:20:16
  actually is somewhat of a vague teaching.
• 2:20:18
  But I think most LDS people would agree that he also is a
• 2:20:23
  human nature but not embodied. He's sort of like a pre
• 2:20:25
  Incarnate spirit of some kind. But you really have three
• 2:20:29
  separate beings in the Mormon view of the Godhead, rather than
• 2:20:33
  one being and three persons, and instead of God being the
• 2:20:38
  ultimate transcendent God of all things who's the cause of
• 2:20:43
  everything outside of himself. The in latter day St. theology,
• 2:20:47
  at least traditionally, God is seen as being limited by a human
• 2:20:52
  nature and subject to laws that don't come from him, right?
• 2:20:58
  He he is limited in some of his power and there's things like
• 2:21:02
  that. His creative act is not to
• 2:21:03
  create from nothing, but to organize what already existed
• 2:21:07
  before him. So this is a pretty different
• 2:21:10
  understanding of who God is. Enough that the the Vatican
• 2:21:15
  determined that the baptisms are not valid.
• 2:21:17
  So when Latter Day Saints become Catholic, they get baptized.
• 2:21:20
  And this is also I think an important point when you think
• 2:21:23
  about Protestants because most Protestants have valid baptisms.
• 2:21:27
  Like I was baptized as a Protestant and my baptism was
• 2:21:30
  valid and when I became Catholic the church recognized by
• 2:21:33
  baptism. There is no re baptism 1 Baptism
• 2:21:35
  is sufficient and it was done in the name of the Father Son.
• 2:21:38
  The Holy Spirit in my church was a Bible believing church didn't
• 2:21:42
  have extra books like the Book of Mormon that they pulled in to
• 2:21:45
  sort of understand the nature of God.
• 2:21:46
  They believed in the Nicene Creed, the apostles creed.
• 2:21:48
  So we had the same foundational tenets of understanding about
• 2:21:51
  who God is and the nature of God and.
• 2:21:54
  Salvation, and this gets directly to the question of so
• 2:21:57
  it's often this hot topic of debate online, are Mormons
• 2:22:01
  Christians? Right.
• 2:22:02
  Yes, very hot topic. The answer basically is it
• 2:22:08
  depends on what you mean by the term Christian.
• 2:22:12
  And maybe that's unsatisfying, but I'll I'll explain it like
• 2:22:14
  this. It is true that there is a
• 2:22:18
  commonality among most within the within the Christian branch
• 2:22:23
  of religions. OK.
• 2:22:24
  If you take it like as a sociological term, you have like
• 2:22:28
  the Jewish branch of religions, the Muslim branch of religions,
• 2:22:33
  the Christian branch of religions, maybe like Hinduism
• 2:22:36
  and Buddhism, right? If you're kind of tracing out
• 2:22:39
  these different branches, you'd clearly put Mormonism over on
• 2:22:42
  the Christian side. Like it didn't pop up from
• 2:22:44
  Judaism, it didn't pop up from Buddhism, right?
• 2:22:47
  It came into a specific Christian time and place.
• 2:22:50
  And they believe in the Bible and they believe Jesus is the
• 2:22:53
  son of God and that he's the savior, right?
• 2:22:54
  So it's sociologically. And the resurrection.
• 2:22:57
  All that sociologically, clearly Mormonism is on the Christian
• 2:23:02
  side of, of of the branch type of thing.
• 2:23:05
  But it's also true that you can take nearly all of the Christian
• 2:23:11
  religions, and if you were to kind of cluster them together
• 2:23:14
  around, like their belief in the doctrine of God and who he is,
• 2:23:19
  that they would cluster really close together on that most
• 2:23:22
  fundamental question like who is God?
• 2:23:24
  Who is Jesus? And that's like the Creed,
• 2:23:26
  right? The.
• 2:23:27
  That's like the creed, the apostles.
• 2:23:28
  That's like the most fundamental thing in your theology would be
• 2:23:31
  what is the nature of God? What is the nature of Jesus?
• 2:23:33
  For a Christian, the Jesus question is obviously really
• 2:23:36
  important. You can cluster all those groups
• 2:23:38
  together, whether they're like Baptists and Orthodox and
• 2:23:41
  Catholics and Methodists, right? Anglicans, they'd all kind of be
• 2:23:45
  either, right? Either the same, either they'd
• 2:23:47
  have the same doctrine of God or so close that they're very near.
• 2:23:51
  And then you'd have a few groups that would clearly be further
• 2:23:54
  out like Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, things like that,
• 2:23:58
  right? So it's I think very logical to
• 2:24:02
  sort of draw a circle around one group and be like, well, these
• 2:24:05
  people have something in common with each other that isn't
• 2:24:09
  shared with a few of these other groups.
• 2:24:12
  What should we call that group? Historically, the term has been
• 2:24:16
  Christian. Historically, the church has
• 2:24:18
  said what we mean by Christian is that you at a minimum you
• 2:24:22
  share. We have a common doctrine of God
• 2:24:24
  and a common doctrine of the nature of Christ.
• 2:24:28
  And so if you're using Christian in that sense, then Latter Day
• 2:24:33
  Saints would not be Christian and they would even admit that
• 2:24:36
  they wouldn't, like they wouldn't say we're not
• 2:24:37
  Christian, but they would agree they have a different doctrine
• 2:24:39
  of God. Latter Day Saints are often
• 2:24:41
  quite proud of this fact that they reject the Nicene Creed.
• 2:24:44
  They're not Nicene Christians. They'll even refer, they like to
• 2:24:47
  prefer, they prefer to call the other groups creedal Christians,
• 2:24:51
  like the Christians who would who uphold the creed, like the
• 2:24:55
  ancient creeds of the church, like the Apostles Creed, the
• 2:24:59
  Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed.
• 2:25:04
  But even by saying, oh, they're creedal Christians, we're non
• 2:25:07
  creedal Christians, they're sort of an admission.
• 2:25:09
  And again, I don't think this should be controversial for any
• 2:25:11
  Latter Day Saints that there is a difference There's and it's a
• 2:25:14
  significant one. There's some way you can group
• 2:25:15
  all these together and we're outside of that group.
• 2:25:18
  The reason they don't like it when Christians say you're not
• 2:25:22
  Christian is because to them, they don't use the term
• 2:25:26
  theologically. They're not thinking to be a
• 2:25:29
  Christian is to believe certain things.
• 2:25:32
  They just think to be a Christian is to say that you
• 2:25:34
  love Jesus. And to them, they're like, I
• 2:25:36
  love Jesus. And He's my Lord and Savior.
• 2:25:38
  He's my Lord and Savior and so when when you say to a latter
• 2:25:40
  day St. you're not Christian, what they hear is you saying.
• 2:25:43
  You don't love? Jesus, you don't love Jesus, you
• 2:25:46
  don't try to follow him. And they think I do love Jesus.
• 2:25:48
  I do try to follow him. That feels offensive for you to
• 2:25:51
  say that to me. So that's why I give the answer.
• 2:25:55
  Well, it just depends on how you're defining Christian.
• 2:25:57
  And I find the debate a bit. You know, Paul talks about
• 2:26:04
  avoiding disputations over a word because they aren't
• 2:26:08
  fruitful. And I think that instead of
• 2:26:12
  arguing with Latter Day Saints over this question of whether
• 2:26:14
  they get to count as being in the Christian club, then it's
• 2:26:19
  much more fruitful to just say, well, what we mean by that is
• 2:26:22
  that you there, you have a different doctrine of God than
• 2:26:24
  we have. And if you're talking to a
• 2:26:26
  Latter Day St. who knows their teaching, they'll agree like,
• 2:26:30
  yeah, we do. And you could say, great, let's
• 2:26:32
  just talk about that then. Let's talk about why.
• 2:26:35
  To us, that's the most important, the most basic
• 2:26:38
  teaching of Christianity is the Trinity is who God is and who
• 2:26:43
  Jesus who, who is the Father, who is the Son, who is the Holy
• 2:26:46
  Spirit. What could be more basic than
• 2:26:48
  that? And if we disagree on that
• 2:26:50
  question, let's talk about that first before we resolve, before
• 2:26:55
  we argue about whether or not like the word, what the word
• 2:26:57
  Christian means. Well, let's it reminds you of
• 2:26:59
  the debate with Islam, because it are Muslims worshipping the
• 2:27:03
  true God. Well, what when they worship,
• 2:27:06
  who do they believe they're worshipping?
• 2:27:08
  Who is the God? Who is God to them?
• 2:27:09
  Because it is very possible to be.
• 2:27:11
  And we've had people on the show, you know, former
• 2:27:14
  Buddhists, former Muslims, former everybody, and you're the
• 2:27:17
  first former Mormon. We've had Mormons on the show.
• 2:27:21
  But I say that because it's who they believe that this person
• 2:27:25
  they're praying to is what what is the sincerity in the
• 2:27:29
  direction of their heart. When you were reading the Book
• 2:27:31
  of Mormon and you were encountering passages about
• 2:27:34
  Jesus Christ that we're saying some true things.
• 2:27:37
  You had a sincere and I believe from God experience of his
• 2:27:41
  presence. So I think that's where it's
• 2:27:43
  very dangerous to like you're saying, quibble too much on a
• 2:27:47
  term without defining the term 1st and saying, OK, this is
• 2:27:50
  where the actual disagreement lies as opposed to you don't get
• 2:27:52
  to you don't get to hold this term.
• 2:27:54
  Yeah, and I'm not, I'm not saying this to downplay the the
• 2:27:57
  disagreements. I'm not trying to say the
• 2:28:00
  differences don't matter. Let's all just get along.
• 2:28:03
  You know, the differences do matter theologically.
• 2:28:06
  They matter enough that we don't accept latter day St. baptisms
• 2:28:09
  as being like the as they're as valid.
• 2:28:12
  Obviously the the difference is real.
• 2:28:14
  I'm just saying the argument about what is Christian and what
• 2:28:17
  isn't, you know, the phrase, it generates more heat than light.
• 2:28:21
  That tends to be what happens. You end up just in this huge
• 2:28:24
  flame flame war over who gets to be Christian and why and whether
• 2:28:29
  it's offensive or not and what it means.
• 2:28:31
  When it would be much more fruitful to focus on the
• 2:28:35
  different doctrine of God and why they believe what they
• 2:28:37
  believe, whether it accords with Scripture and the tradition of
• 2:28:40
  Christianity, and how to move forward from there to try to
• 2:28:44
  arrive at the truth. How have Mormon friends and
• 2:28:48
  family responded to your conversion to Catholicism?
• 2:28:53
  For the most part, people have been very supportive.
• 2:28:55
  So I, I've been open, I've told other people, you know, I've
• 2:28:58
  said this before on interviews. My wife is still LDS.
• 2:29:01
  And so we're, we navigate living a mixed faith marriage and
• 2:29:05
  trying to figure out how to support each other and love each
• 2:29:10
  other. You know, I haven't.
• 2:29:11
  My wife is incredible. We're married almost 20 years.
• 2:29:14
  I love her to death. I'm so grateful for her and for
• 2:29:18
  her goodness. She's a wonderful person and
• 2:29:23
  her, you know, she's supportive of me.
• 2:29:25
  She's not very interested in herself.
• 2:29:27
  I don't want to, you know, I'll let her speak for herself.
• 2:29:30
  But she's supportive. Other friends and family
• 2:29:32
  generally have been supportive. What a blessing.
• 2:29:35
  It's been a great blessing. I think I'm noticing this with a
• 2:29:38
  lot of Mormons today. I don't know if this was the
• 2:29:42
  case historically, but this openness among Mormons to engage
• 2:29:46
  these questions, to talk about Joseph Smith's history, like
• 2:29:49
  you're saying, to even be supportive, like you're saying
• 2:29:51
  of people pursuing their Christian faith via Catholicism
• 2:29:55
  or whatever it is. And I, I don't know what what is
• 2:29:58
  going on there in the kind of bigger picture of the economy of
• 2:30:00
  grace. But my hope, of course, would be
• 2:30:02
  that we all become one. Yeah, yeah, I think that's
• 2:30:05
  right. I mean, Mormons don't practice
• 2:30:09
  active shunning or anything like that.
• 2:30:12
  There are some, I some groups that I know do.
• 2:30:15
  If someone leaves the group there, others tell them don't
• 2:30:18
  talk to that person. You're you're not allowed to
• 2:30:20
  associate with them anymore. Latter Day Saints don't do that.
• 2:30:24
  And if there are sometimes, of course, there is difficulty
• 2:30:29
  leaving a faith. If your family is so involved in
• 2:30:31
  a faith and then you leave, you can create distance, you know,
• 2:30:35
  emotional distance between people.
• 2:30:37
  That does happen. But in general, I don't think
• 2:30:39
  that Mormons, I think they are open.
• 2:30:42
  I think they're open in a way, and I think they're more open
• 2:30:44
  than they used to be in terms of with engaging with other faiths
• 2:30:47
  and learning from them and that sort of thing.
• 2:30:51
  What has it felt like becoming Catholic?
• 2:30:53
  It's been amazing. I mean, what has it felt like?
• 2:30:57
  That's a broad question. It feels like jumping into an
• 2:31:03
  ocean that has no bottom in a good way.
• 2:31:06
  Like maybe, maybe maybe that felt sounds too much like
• 2:31:09
  drowning. It feels like entering a forest,
• 2:31:13
  a beautiful forest with the with no boundaries that you can
• 2:31:17
  explore forever and continue to find goodness, truth, and beauty
• 2:31:23
  that exceeds everything that I had expected before.
• 2:31:31
  I I have just found that everything from maybe I'll just
• 2:31:35
  give a few highlights. Here are the things I love most
• 2:31:37
  about being Catholic. OK, one is mass.
• 2:31:40
  That's probably number one. I just absolutely love
• 2:31:43
  participating in the worship of the church, knowing that the
• 2:31:51
  Eucharistic worship is temple worship.
• 2:31:54
  The things that were offered in the temple are fulfilled in the
• 2:31:57
  offering of the Eucharist and in all the same ways that we, that
• 2:32:01
  the Jews loved to go up to the Temple.
• 2:32:04
  You read these Psalms, the psalms of ascent that they would
• 2:32:07
  sing as they were traveling to Jerusalem and climbing the
• 2:32:10
  mountain Mount Zion. I feel, you know, as Catholics,
• 2:32:13
  that's our heritage. When you're approaching Mass,
• 2:32:16
  it's those same songs to think that we get to go to the temple
• 2:32:19
  of God and to worship him and to in be in his presence and then
• 2:32:24
  to receive him. That was something the Jews did
• 2:32:27
  not have was to actually receive God himself.
• 2:32:31
  So Mass is number 1. I just absolutely love
• 2:32:34
  everything about the beauty. I go to a wonderful, wonderful
• 2:32:38
  parish in Arizona where we have extremely beautiful liturgy,
• 2:32:43
  wonderful music. The building is beautiful.
• 2:32:46
  It's just it's taken very seriously.
• 2:32:47
  I love that the communion of Saints would probably be #2
• 2:32:54
  feeling connected. A lot of my journey started with
• 2:32:58
  connecting with history, the history of Christianity, and
• 2:33:01
  when I started reading about these people, these early
• 2:33:04
  Christians that I had been taught that they had gone
• 2:33:09
  apostate, when I really encountered them in their
• 2:33:12
  writings, I fell in love with them.
• 2:33:16
  I could see the sincerity of their faith in Christ and I
• 2:33:20
  wanted to be part of the same church that they were a part of.
• 2:33:24
  I remember reading about the Nicene controversy and reading
• 2:33:29
  the works of Athanasius and I just, I just remember feeling
• 2:33:32
  that hunger. I thought, well, I want to be
• 2:33:35
  whatever church Athanasius would be a part of.
• 2:33:37
  That's the church I want to be a part of this man who defended
• 2:33:41
  the doctrine, the true doctrine of the nature of Christ so
• 2:33:44
  beautifully. And I just love that sense.
• 2:33:47
  I've heard, I heard another convent convert once say to be
• 2:33:51
  Catholic is to never be alone because you always have the
• 2:33:54
  Communion of Saints with you. Even if you're worshiping, even
• 2:33:58
  if you're the only Catholic in your family, even if you're
• 2:34:01
  worshiping far away from other people, you're not alone because
• 2:34:06
  all of the communion of Saints is with you.
• 2:34:08
  So I love that. And then the devotions, the
• 2:34:12
  Rosary. I pray the Liturgy of the Hours
• 2:34:14
  every day. Have you checked out Sing the
• 2:34:17
  Hours? I have, in fact, I I listened to
• 2:34:19
  it, my brother. I listened to it.
• 2:34:20
  Is that really your brother? Yeah.
• 2:34:22
  Wow. I listened to it this morning on
• 2:34:25
  the way to the airport. Because I left so early I didn't
• 2:34:27
  have. To tell him, I'm sure he'll love
• 2:34:28
  to hear it. I.
• 2:34:28
  Didn't have time to pray lads, so I beautiful when I'm too.
• 2:34:32
  If that happens. On the way to the airport, I
• 2:34:35
  heard him sing. Yeah, I I love the devotions of
• 2:34:38
  the church because they bring us to Christ.
• 2:34:41
  You know, maybe it sounds kind of trite to say this way, but
• 2:34:44
  you know, what I love most about Catholicism is the fullness of
• 2:34:46
  Christ. Like it describes the church in
• 2:34:49
  the New Testament is described as the fullness of Christ.
• 2:34:52
  And to encounter the church in its fullness is such a joy
• 2:34:58
  because Christ is the one we seek.
• 2:35:01
  So I don't want half of Christ, or 1/4 of Christ, or even 98% of
• 2:35:06
  him. I want the fullness.
• 2:35:09
  Amen. How beautiful, Isaac, this has
• 2:35:12
  been awesome. I mean, I've learned about
• 2:35:16
  Mormonism. I've learned, just been inspired
• 2:35:19
  by your, by your faith, by your Catholic faith.
• 2:35:21
  Thank you. Thank you so much.
• 2:35:23
  How can people find your find you?
• 2:35:25
  Are you writing or blogging anywhere?
• 2:35:28
  Do you have an X account? I have.
• 2:35:30
  I used to but then I deactivated it for the good of my own soul.
• 2:35:35
  If people want to contact me, I have an e-mail that they can
• 2:35:38
  send to. So I it's it's LDS to Catholic
• 2:35:43
  at gmailcom. It's not my real e-mail, so that
• 2:35:46
  way I can. Have you had a lot of people
• 2:35:48
  reach out? I I've had a fair number, you
• 2:35:50
  know? Yeah, I I can't promise you're.
• 2:35:52
  Happy to dialogue. Or I will.
• 2:35:54
  I will try to respond, yeah. If you write to me and say I
• 2:35:57
  have 10 questions and every single one of them requires A5
• 2:36:00
  page response, it might take me a while, you know?
• 2:36:03
  You've listed some great resources though in this
• 2:36:05
  episode. Yeah, there's so many good
• 2:36:06
  resources you can find. What's your top what What top 1
• 2:36:10
  you would recommend to somebody who's more curious about LDS to
• 2:36:13
  Catholic? Oh, LDS 2 Catholics
• 2:36:16
  specifically, That's a tough one because there is a gap in terms
• 2:36:21
  of bridging the two directly. And I I do want, at least
• 2:36:26
  someday, in theory, to produce something that helps you take
• 2:36:29
  some of these theological concepts and bridge that gap
• 2:36:32
  explicitly. That's a book writing reading to
• 2:36:34
  be written. It is a book waiting to be
• 2:36:35
  written and I would, I would love to write it if I could ever
• 2:36:38
  find the time. But I've really enjoyed Joe
• 2:36:41
  Heschmeyer's work. I have recommended to people
• 2:36:44
  before his book called the early Church was the Catholic Church.
• 2:36:48
  And the reason I recommend that is because he takes you through
• 2:36:51
  both the way that Catholics think and do theology in terms
• 2:36:56
  of how do we know what, what we should believe, right.
• 2:37:01
  And then he goes through specific 4 specific topics.
• 2:37:04
  I think it's the the Bishop's, the Eucharist, I can't remember
• 2:37:08
  all four of them, and kind of shows how those things are
• 2:37:11
  rooted both in Scripture and in the early Christians.
• 2:37:13
  And so as a primer on early Christianity, I think that one's
• 2:37:16
  useful. Joe Hirschmeyer until the Isaac
• 2:37:19
  Hess book comes out. That's right.
• 2:37:22
  Yeah, We'll see. Thank you so much, Isaac.
• 2:37:25
  Thank you so much for having me. Thanks so much for listening to
• 2:37:27
  this episode of the Lila Rose Show.
• 2:37:29
  I hope you enjoyed it. Make sure that you hit that
• 2:37:31
  subscribe button. Over 60% of you are still not
• 2:37:34
  subscribed. And also leave us a like and a
• 2:37:36
  comment. I read all the comments.
• 2:37:38
  Also, you can check us out over at patreon.com/lila Rose Show.
• 2:37:42
  We've got some bonus content over there ad free episodes.
• 2:37:45
  And if you're a paid annual member, you get your choice of
• 2:37:48
  one item of free merch from the merch store.
• 2:37:51
  We've got some great merch pieces out and if you are a paid
• 2:37:54
  monthly member you get 30, 20% off all the merch.
• 2:37:57
  Enjoy over at patreon.com/lila Row Show a big thank you to our
• 2:38:01
  channel partner. EWTNEWTN is the world's largest
• 2:38:05
  religious broadcast network, reaching millions of people
• 2:38:08
  every single day with the beautiful truth of the gospel.
• 2:38:12
  You can be the first to watch new Lila Row Show episodes 24
• 2:38:16
  hours before YouTube over at ewtn.com, slash on Demand and on
• 2:38:21
  the EWTN app.