Introduction and Welcome

John Dehlin [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3. Mormon Stories Podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you. To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today@mormonstories.org hello and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin, and I'm super happily extra excited to announce not only who I'm currently about to interview, but also a bit of a series that I hope to embark upon in Mormon Stories that I think many of you are going to enjoy.

Brad Kramer's Background and Beliefs

John Dehlin [00:00:57] So today, interviewing Brad Kramer. Brad may be known to some of you. He's married, he has five kids. He was raised LDS in Utah. He has a bachelor's degree in Russian from BYU and a bachelor's degree in history from the U of U. And then he has a master's in American history from the U. And then finally he just submitted his dissertation revisions for the completion of his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Michigan. So he's sort of a Mormon, would you say, sociologist or anthropologist? Brad?

Brad Kramer [00:01:40] Yeah, probably something like an anthropologist and, I don't know, aspiring polymath of.

John Dehlin [00:01:50] Aspiring what?

Brad Kramer [00:01:51] Polymath. Just I've got a number of kind of disciplinary backgrounds that I flirt with and, you know, at one point I was on the trajectory to become a fully fledged Mormon historian and then I veered more into the social science. But.

John Dehlin [00:02:09] So you, so you got a lot of interest. Well, excellent. Well, I, I'm particularly excited to have Brad on one because, and this is what we're going to be focusing on in our interview today. Brad, I think, represents kind of a new generation of, I'll just say believing, thoughtful, believing Mormon who doesn't take the traditional apologetic view, but is still very much interested and willing to stand up for belief, but from an exceptionally well informed and thoughtful, I would say, perspective. And so, you know, we've had Terrell Givens and Richard Bushman on, and of course I have respect for those, those men and others, but I think Brad represents something different and, and I think you'll get a sense for that.

John Dehlin [00:03:03] So we're going to be talking today with Brad about his, his sort of experiences with the church and where he's come to as far as his sort of fully informed testimony, LDS testimony. But then we're going to talk about a framework that Brad has been developing for what I'm going to call maybe a more mature relationship with the church. And he's going to make the argument that maybe those who have become disaffected with the church or have left, you know, might be, you know, might. Might benefit from considering sort of a broader, longer view that involves kind of viewing the church in a different light.

John Dehlin [00:03:49] And I'm not going to give too much away on that. But. But this is only going to be the beginning of what I hope to be is a series. So some of you will remember that, that in the first year of Mormon Stories Life, we interviewed a couple by who went by Roasted Tomatoes in Serenity Valley. They were prominent Mormon bloggers at the time who didn't want to use their real names.

John Dehlin [00:04:13] And we talked about how Serenity Valley had left the church, actually had her name removed, married Roasted Tomatoes, and then eventually rejoined the church. And I think the episode was called Finding Our Way Back Home. And it was really fascinating to me and inspiring to many. So we're going to be bringing back this couple now. They're actually willing to use their real names, and their names are Jason or J. Nelson Seawright, who's a professor of political science at Northwestern University, and his wife Taryn.

John Dehlin [00:05:00] And we're going to be bringing them back on to discuss their return, to discuss sort of how they've been since they've left the church. And just to give a little bit of a teaser, I don't believe that either of them are active anymore.

John Dehlin [00:05:18] And I guess I viewed Brad and Jason with a high degree of respect because they're both individuals who are extremely well informed and intelligent, but also they're respectful in their dialogue and their discourse. And so once I bring them both on, I'm going to bring on Jeremy Runnels, who is the author of a book called Letter to a CES Director, which is a book that expresses Jeremy's. The many reasons why Jeremy felt like he couldn't stay, you know, an active, believing member. And then to conclude, I'm going to have a series of exchanges. I'm going to kind of moderate a series of exchanges between Brad and Jason regarding, you know, some of the main topics.

John Dehlin [00:06:02] So I kind of view this as a bit of an epic series. We'll see if we can pull it all together. But that's just to give you a teaser for what all this is about. I hope you're as excited as I am. So I should also mention briefly that Brad is currently sort of the head of marketing and PR at Evangelism for Covert Books, Greg Covert Books, which is doing a lot of Interesting stuff. And so with that, Brad Kramer, welcome to Mormon Stories.

Brad Kramer [00:06:30] Well, thank you for the generous introduction. A couple of things I want to say in response to your description of not just what you and I are going to talk about today, but the series one is that you mentioned that I'm hoping to introduce a framework that would, that would at least invite disaffected or disaffiliated, you know, former Mormons to think in. I don't know, more to think slightly differently about the church. I would say that that's part of it. But I'm as much speaking to intellectual Mormons like myself who stay inside the church and, and hoping that this framework will also will really give both sides a kind of language for reacting more, not just more civilly, but more generously and more sympathetically to each other. So I definitely don't want to give the impression at the outset that I'm trying to talk down to ex Mormons.

John Dehlin [00:07:39] Excellent. Well, that's important.

Brad Kramer [00:07:43] And that leads to the point I wanted to make about Jason, which is, you know, there's a general. When it comes to talking about difficult subjects, sensitive topics, there's a general rule for civil discourse, which is that you are to sort of try to engage, you know, if you're going to engage the opposing side, you should engage them at their best. Right? You shouldn't, you shouldn't engage the sort of the knuckle draggers on the other side, the lowest common denominator on the other side, but you should engage, you should engage the other side at its best.

Brad Kramer [00:08:14] And Jay is a friend of mine. He's been a friend of mine for a long time. We became friends while he was still active in the church. He's no longer active in the church. We're still friends. And honestly, Jay is sort of, in my mind, in my imagination, he is the ideal interlocutor, sort of on the other side of this Mormon intellectual divide between people who stay and people that leave. And Jay is thoughtful. And so in my worst moments, when if I'm starting to think about people that have left the church in less generous or derisive terms, I try to make that correct.

Brad Kramer [00:08:58] The corrective for me is to make J in my head, sort of the prototype of the interlocutor that I can productively and sort of thoughtfully and generously engage and not, not sneer at, not look down on, not disrespect. So he's a, he's a gentleman and a scholar, and it's going to be great having that conversation with him when we have it.

John Dehlin [00:09:21] Yeah. And I feel. I feel the same way about you. And. And that's why I'm so excited about this series. So this is going to be good. All right, Brad? Well, I'm sure it's. It's hard to sum up. How old are you now?

Brad Kramer [00:09:35] I'm. Let me do the math. 35.

John Dehlin [00:09:37] Yeah. So I'm sure it's hard to sum up 35 years in a few minutes, but maybe talk to us a bit about your history to the extent that it touches on your interest in issues related to history and sociology or social sciences and faith. And I'd love to take that to the point where you can talk about whether you actually experienced, you know, some type of dissonance or, you know, let's just say intellectual disturbances with the church that can hopefully bring us to the resolution points that you hope to make.

Brad Kramer [00:10:12] Okay, so I'll give you a little bit of background. And in some ways, my own personal history with Mormonism is best under. You know, I understand it best in retrospect in terms of thinking about how my relationship with the church sort of engages with my intellectual life and what was interesting to me. And I think this is probably something like a point of origin for me when it comes to describing how I came to be the kind of Mormon that I am. So, as you mentioned, I was raised in the church, and I was raised by a. A fairly conservative, traditional father and a fairly heterodox, not traditional, sort of what you would call her. Like, her father was actually friends with Jean England, so she's kind of a Jean England type. I was raised by an iron rotter and Leah Honen parents.

John Dehlin [00:11:19] Wow.

Brad Kramer [00:11:20] And they're still married.

John Dehlin [00:11:24] And mom was a Liahona. Dad was the Aaron Rodger.

Brad Kramer [00:11:26] Yeah, mom was Liahona. And mom had something like a faith crisis in the early 90s around feminism and intellectualism and ended up making peace in the church. And I think, obviously I'm gonna be oversimplifying it, but I think a big part of it for her was that as she was going through it, she was also the primary president in her ward with an incredibly supportive bishop who.

Brad Kramer [00:11:51] And so. And so she was. She wasn't just sort of needed. She didn't. She retained a space in the community, but she also. It was fulfilling work that she did, and she sort of came out on the other side of her faith crisis with her relationship with the church still intact.

Brad Kramer [00:12:10] So that's kind of. I've sort of got Mormonism coming in different strains As a child. So when I start attending seminary and you know, I grew up in Utah, so it's release time, seminary, it's the full CES package, I start to realize that I'm bored, that I just, you know, I just don't.

Brad Kramer [00:12:38] It's not that I have any particular antagonism or any particular basis for disbelief or anything like that. I'm just bored. I'm bored with seminary, I'm bored with Sunday school, I'm bored with church. I still go to church because that's what you do, you know. But I'm not engaged. Mormonism doesn't grip me.

Brad Kramer [00:12:56] And a couple of things happened my second year of seminary. One is that I started, I started to feed myself intellectually, stuff that had nothing to do with Mormonism, but I started like reading popular science books, like reading Carl Sagan and you know, these kinds of just, just voraciously.

Brad Kramer [00:13:24] And I had a really good seminary teacher. I had a seminary teacher who was also a sort of a Gene England type, very intellectually engaging seminary teacher. So it was like my intellectual engagement with Mormonism sort of got activated at the same time as my general intellectual curiosity started to get fed. So it was funny because one would expect that I started to engage in hard science and started to realize, oh, evolution is real and science is an authority.

Brad Kramer [00:14:03] You would think that that would have caused me to disengage from Mormonism, but it didn't. It was like somehow I needed that part of my brain to be active in order to really care about Mormonism. And then Mormonism started to be intellectually interesting to me.

Brad Kramer [00:14:19] A third thing that happened around that time was I did have a kind of a transcendent, powerful spiritual experience praying about the Book of Mormon. And all of this basically led me to the decision that I would go on a mission. And I did. I went on a mission.

Brad Kramer [00:14:38] I went to Russia and I came back from my mission a very smug, self assured, self righteous iron rotter who still, I wasn't anti intellectual or anything like that. So I was still very intellectually engaged with Mormonism, but in terms of orthodoxy I was, I was a really hardcore iron rodder.

Growing Up Latter-day Saint

John Dehlin [00:15:04] And did you sense that your mom was a bit different and ever give her a hard time about it or judge her?

Brad Kramer [00:15:09] Well, so I didn't actually. So I knew even as a teenager that my mom was different. I mean, it was all, it was all very clear to me by the time I was 13 or 14 that there were differences between my parents.

Brad Kramer [00:15:24] But I do remember, honest, honestly, one of the most. One of the memories that I have that I regret most, like in my entire life, was my mom and my dad were fighting about something. I mean, something could have been trivial. I don't even remember what the thing was. But you know, all couples, married couples, fight.

Brad Kramer [00:15:47] And I remember pulling her aside and telling her that you receive blessings for submitting to priesthood authority, even if priesthood authority is wrong. And this would have been like six months after my mission or something. So in other words, I was leaving open the possibility that in this particular situation my dad was wrong and she was right, but she should submit to him anyway. And I'm so glad that she didn't, you know, in hindsight, because it honestly, it's one of the most shameful memories that I have as a Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:16:23] But every kid makes mistakes, especially right off a mission.

Brad Kramer [00:16:27] Right off a mission, it's just terrible. So I went to BYU.

John Dehlin [00:16:32] What year were you at BYU after your mission?

Brad Kramer [00:16:36] 2000. So I had quite a bit of college credit under my belt actually before my mission. This is kind of a funny aside. I'd been a music major at the U of U. I was a piano performance major. But I sort of set aside the music career path and went to byu.

Brad Kramer [00:16:53] Was thinking about pre law or something like that, started going to classes and BYU actually liberalized me quite a bit. It's probably just my inner nonconformist or something like that. But if I'd been at almost any other campus, I probably would have swung me in a more rightward direction because on almost any other campus you do your non conforming thing by being conservative, but at BYU you do it by being liberal.

Brad Kramer [00:17:29] But a couple of really important things happened in terms of my personal trajectory at byu. One is that I got married and we started a family pretty quickly. And having my oldest son born, it's just a really radical paradigm shift. It's not that it's a shift that necessarily pushes you in any particular direction. It just you radically rethink things about your life, about yourself, about what you want, where you're going.

Brad Kramer [00:18:03] And that happened at the same time as I was reading initially, as I was just reading Hugh Nibley voraciously. And it wasn't Hugh Nibley apologist. I never really got into Hugh Nibley apologist, but it was Hugh Nibley, social critic, Old Testament prophet, right?

John Dehlin [00:18:24] Oh yeah.

Brad Kramer [00:18:25] So like. Well, I mean, as an Old Testament prophet, this sort of critic of the church, right?

John Dehlin [00:18:31] Of the social structures.

Brad Kramer [00:18:34] So yeah, critic of the church to the extent that he was a critic of capitalism and a critic of militarism. And to the extent that Mormons or Mormonism embodied or supported those things, he was also a critic of the church. So it was approaching Zion, Brother Brigham Challenges the Saints, these kinds of prophetic writings of his that really struck a chord with me. And then I happened to be lucky enough that I met him one day and we struck up a friendship. And he and I were pretty close for a couple of years before he started to decline really rapidly. And I actually stayed fairly close with Phyllis, his wife, up until. Right until he died. And now I'm still pretty close friends with Zina and Boyd.

John Dehlin [00:19:24] That must have been during the whole Martha thing, huh?

Brad Kramer [00:19:27] Well, Martha thing was exploding right as he died. I remember the plug for her book was going to come out in Oprah Magazine, and I was on the U of U campus. This is after I'd gone back and I was doing my master's. I might have still been doing the bachelor's at that time, but I'd gone back to school. I was doing the history degrees, and I was in the Utah bookstore, and I saw that week's O Magazine. So I opened up and there was a little blurb on it on Martha's book. And so I called Phyllis to read it to her because I knew she wouldn't have seen it and she didn't want to hear it because Hugh had died that morning. So that sort of gives you a sense of the timing, sort of everything exploding, right? As he's completely out of the equation and his final inexorable decline.

John Dehlin [00:20:26] Man. Well, we should have you back just to talk about your experiences with Hugh.

Brad Kramer [00:20:30] But, yeah, it's definitely. There are interesting stories there. And then I did the. When they first. When they restarted the Bushman Givens Seminar, I was a master's student and I applied and I got into that. That first one that they did. And that's what got me into sort of like, at that point, I wasn't really interested in working on Mormonism per se. I was reading Mormon history, and I was starting to engage with the blogosphere and sort of the new Mormon intelligentsia, so to speak.

John Dehlin [00:21:08] But what year would that seminar have been? I'm just curious.

Brad Kramer [00:21:12] 06. Okay, so I remember it was during the World cup, and we would all. We would all find excuses to, like, leave. Leave where we were supposed to be studying to go over to the Wilkinson center and watch World cup matches.

Brad Kramer [00:21:27] But yeah, so summer 2006, and it was good. It was great experience, and I ran across some really terrific Archival materials that I initially sort of presented on in their little. We wrote a paper and we presented at this little symposium that they do at the end.

Brad Kramer [00:21:45] But then I really wanted to spend some good time with these materials and work them into my master's research. And they were materials that I felt like I could use the insight of an anthropologist on. So I contacted David Knowlton to see if he would be a sort of an adjunct on my master's committee.

Brad Kramer [00:22:08] And then David sort of ruined me for history by introducing me to all these anthropological literatures and sort of modes of analysis. And so I ended up just applying to anthrophd programs and so engaging really, really deeply with anthropological theory and with anthropology as a discipline. Sort of my point of initiation into it was engaging in this very sort of fine grained analysis of these historical Mormon texts. And so for me, the things were really tightly embedded.

Brad Kramer [00:22:51] So after I got out to Michigan, I started participating more robustly in the blogosphere, in the blogger NaCl as well. And you know, we, by the, by the time we moved to Michigan, we had three kids, three sons, and.

Brad Kramer [00:23:12] And then when we moved out there, we had two more daughters. While we were out there were so, you know, five. Five and done for the record. But. Right, but, you know, so that's. For me, it was like, I mean, going back to that seminar, it was interesting, right, because all the other seminar participants were more or less my age.

Brad Kramer [00:23:35] And one of the things that Terrell and Richard do is they bring in sort of guests, not quite speakers, but like guest Mormon scholars who just come in and kind of chat with us, maybe talk kind of informally around a table about the research, informally present something, but then just have a chat. And the repeated pattern in the seminar was, you know, scholar would show up,

John Dehlin [00:24:00] and

Brad Kramer [00:24:03] almost always a male scholar, because Mormon studies is almost all male scholars, but which is a separate problem. Mormon scholar would show up, he'd talk a little bit about his research and his background. And then when it, when it started getting to like Q and A or sort of conversation, the seminar participants, the actual fellows, me and my fellow fellows, we would kind of zone out because it would almost inevitably turn into this kind of tortured conversation about balancing faith and intellect, right? Like, how can you be faithful and intellectually engaged? Like, these two things were really in strong tension with each other.

Brad Kramer [00:24:52] And it was like for this older generation of scholars, these things were necessarily in tension with each other, right. These guys had come of age academically during the period following the lockdown after the Arrington spring up and through the.

Intellectual Disillusionment and the Church

Brad Kramer [00:25:10] And the sort of. The shutting down of symposia and the crackdown on intellectuals in the early 90s. And so for them, this was like, these things were existentially in tension with each other, faith and intellect. But none of us had really. We were all still too young when that was going on to have it sort of deeply affect our psyches. So it was almost like the conversation would shift into Richard and Terrell and Visiting Scholar X talking about balancing faith and intellect, and the kids in the room rolling their eyes and just sort of waiting for it to be over. Because for us, this just wasn't. This just wasn't an issue.

John Dehlin [00:25:52] Now, is that. Is that if we want to talk about this in the second half? I'm just curious whether that was a product of. Of you. You being raised differently, or was it a product of you just not of being too young to have experienced what they were talking about?

Brad Kramer [00:26:11] I assume it's. I assume it's both. I mean, we all knew in our heads what they were talking about. We all knew the history, but we hadn' experienced it. So it wasn't a crisis for us. We weren't forced to choose sides ever. Right. So for us, it was just something that we were aware of but didn't sort of affect us deep down into our cores. And we didn't struggle with this. You know, it was like we would have these very candid conversations about difficult subjects or whatever, or, you know, I mean, we were sort of trying to canvas, as a seminar, trying to canvas like, 19th century intellectual Mormon history.

Brad Kramer [00:26:48] You know, it's fraught with all these difficult questions. And it wasn't as if we were like any of us were experiencing any kind of, like, challenge to our relationship with the church or whatever as we were. You know, I mean, they had us, like, read for. The first thing we did in the seminar was we just had to read Journal of Discourses. Like, we had to pick, you know, different participants would read different parts of it. And then we were like, we were creating this sort of crowdsourced chart of different themes and topics and quotes and stuff.

Brad Kramer [00:27:31] So, you know, we're encountering these problematic documents head on. And it just. It just didn't cause a problem. You know, like, it just. We weren't. We weren't. It wasn't being filtered through this underlying angst about, you have to balance these two things that are. That are working against each other.

John Dehlin [00:27:53] Is that because you didn't ever feel like you had been deceived or misled maybe, or was it because you maybe had been inoculated either by choice or by exposure, maybe having a sunstoney type moment where, you know, you just didn't grow up with the. You weren't ever set up for disillusionment. Is that possible?

Brad Kramer [00:28:13] I don't know. In my case, I don't think it was really. I think it was more that I just didn't have. I think if it had, if it had something to do with my upbringing, it had to. In a weird way, it had to do with having a father that was a little bit, a little bit too much on the iron rod side.

Brad Kramer [00:28:35] Because in a weird way what that did is as you're a teenager especially and you're butting heads with your parents. One of the ways that we all learned to engage with my dad when we would argue with him about any particular thing is he would invoke the authority of the church constantly. And that really actually diluted the church's authority in our eyes in its own way. It wasn't that we became completely disillusioned about the church, it was just that like we felt a certain freedom to roll our eyes because, oh well, a general authority once said this ironically, my dad sort of trying to play that as a trump card made us much less impressed with it, gave us the freedom to roll our eyes at certain things that came from the church.

Brad Kramer [00:29:27] And so it kind of watered down my expectations about the church a little bit. I just didn't have this sense that the church was this sort of omniscient organization that knew all the right things and was perfectly set up and organized to convey to us truths. I had a very humanistic idea about the limitations that the church had as an organization, even if I still fundamentally believed that God was behind it.

Brad Kramer [00:29:59] And so I think it was just a general. So in other words, I never really felt like I had been misled per se because I never really had a view in my starting in adolescence. I never really had an idea in my head of the church as an organization that has its act together enough to even be able to systematically mislead. You know what I mean?

Brad Kramer [00:30:29] I just felt like, because I knew I had heard things, I'd heard crazy stuff growing up all the time. I had crazy Sunday school teachers telling me teaching me fence sitters in the pre existence as the reason for the priesthood ban.

Brad Kramer [00:30:45] I mean, I'd heard crazy stuff my entire life. But I guess including in seminary, you know, and I guess even then because of the diversity of experience that I'd had and because my dad had kind of, let's say, overplayed his hand a little bit when it came to sort of trying to hold up the church as a perfectly authoritative organization.

Brad Kramer [00:31:10] I ended up just never really, like, realizing that. That so many of the things I'd been taught were crazy. Never really made me think that, like, the church is crazy or, like, the church is, like, lying. It was more like the church just can't get anybody on a message and nobody.

Brad Kramer [00:31:34] Like, I just never had any real faith in the ability of the church to, like, systematically control anything in our lives. So. And I suspect that growing up just at the time, we did sort of right at the dawn of the information age.

Brad Kramer [00:31:52] And being the first generation, I was born in 1979, right. So the first generation raised completely in the post 1978 Mormon world. There's something about that that I think that means that a lot of younger intellectuals, Mormon intellectuals, it's not to say that all of them are going to stay in the church or anything like that, but that Mormon intellectuals don't engage in these sort of these problematic questions through a filter that is ultimately defined by this kind of existential angst between, or, you know, this existential tension between faith and intellect that was so strongly cultivated in people even just a generation older than us. Right.

John Dehlin [00:32:40] Okay, cool. So were you going to tie that back to the Bushman Givens thing, or was that just a framing for beyond that?

Brad Kramer [00:32:49] Well, that was basically just a framing sort of trying to pinpoint one of, I think, the differences that, for me personally, and it seems like for a lot of people closer to my age, a lot of Mormon intellectuals closer to my age.

Faith Paradigms and Letting Go of Eden

Brad Kramer [00:33:06] So there's another thing, though, that I want to bring into the conversation before I kind of introduce this framework that you mentioned. And this also has to do with my personal history, but I think it's a part of my personal history that we may be able to extrapolate a little more from.

Brad Kramer [00:33:23] So grew up in Utah, grew up in Salt Lake, Wasatch Front. Heavily legacy Mormon, you know, third, fourth, fifth, fifth generation Mormon on both sides of my family. So all my, you know, parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, everybody's raised in the church, Right.

Brad Kramer [00:33:49] Big families, too. My Dad's family has 10 kids. My mom has six. I'm the oldest of six kids. You know, dozens and dozens of cousins. And I'm raised in, you know, like, I'm raised in a part of the church where your ward is like, you know, nine square blocks.

Brad Kramer [00:34:13] And more than half the people who live in that boundary are literally members of the ward or members of the church. So you're surrounded by Mormons. You go to school with Mormons. Right. So I knew lots and lots and lots and lots of Mormons growing up.

John Dehlin [00:34:27] Right?

Brad Kramer [00:34:28] Schoolmates, family members, extended family members, obviously ward members. And because I was Mormon, I was predominantly hanging out with other Mormons. So as I've gone through and I've sort of started to try to think about this, systematically going through and thinking about all the kids I knew growing up at various ages, up and through the mission, honestly, because I'm still surrounded by people my age that are all Mormons on the mission.

Brad Kramer [00:35:04] And of all the people that I know that I knew growing up, roughly half of them are completely inactive. They have no relationship to speak of with the church, which reinforces in my mind that there is a real serious problem. There's a real retention problem. There's a real membership hemorrhaging problem. The church really is hemorrhaging young adults.

Brad Kramer [00:35:39] But the flip side to that is that a very, very small percentage of that group, which, again, would include dozens of people that I could read a list of names, you know, 40, 50, maybe 60 people that I know that I grew up with that are no longer a part of the church in any meaningful sense at all, never ever go to church.

Brad Kramer [00:36:05] Only maybe three or four of them left for sort of principled intellectual reasons, right. That they came, you know, they learned more about the church. They learned more about its past. They learned more about scripture, they learned more about doctrine, whatever. And they came to the conclusion that Mormonism isn't what it claims to be. They came to the conclusion that Mormonism is false, that the church can't be true in the way that they had been taught that it was true, and therefore they left on principle. So

John Dehlin [00:36:45] why did the 96% leave?

Brad Kramer [00:36:48] That's the question that I really think needs to be. I think that's the question that church leaders are really trying to figure out. I think they see the problem of sort of transparency and not being able to contain sensitive information. I think they see that as ancillary to the general problem of retention. I mean, and to be fair, like people, a number of the people that I know, after they sort of bored, you know, left Mormonism, just sort of detached themselves from Mormonism. They also came to.

Brad Kramer [00:37:35] Believe that there were problems with Mormonism after the fact. But a number of them don't fundamentally disbelieve anything about Mormon. They don't think that Joseph Smith was a fraud. They don't think that Thomas Monson is a fraud. They're just not interested.

Brad Kramer [00:37:53] There's just nothing to keep them in the church. And they like life as a not active Mormon better than they liked it as an active Mormon. And that's really what it comes down to. And I would also say that there's a difference, just again, when I'm looking at this sort of cohort of peers of mine, of childhood peers, that social issues.

Brad Kramer [00:38:25] Are much more of a sticking point or much more of a source of alienation from the church than historical issues. In other words, with historical issues, the problem is like, oh, I didn't know this about the church and why was I not told this about the church and am I being lied to by the church? You know, it's this sense of betrayal. But with the social issues, it's things that are right out in the open. It's not as if the church is disguising the fact that it is, you know, anti gay marriage. Right. It's stuff that's right out in the open that they are ashamed by or that they, you know, they view as being sort of genuinely, genuinely bad, genuinely harmful.

Brad Kramer [00:39:08] And then that contributes to really serious alienation. And so I think that as a causal factor, I suspect that the social issue stuff, the anti gay marriage stuff, the gender stuff is. Is much more of a causal factor than these other kinds of more difficult abstract questions or historical questions.

John Dehlin [00:39:36] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Our research at Y Mormon's question, which was admittedly a snowball sample, but we had an n of over 3,000, and it certainly reflects issues with women, issues with gays and lesbians, and, you know, just spiritual promptings to go elsewhere or feeling bored or unedified at church is definitely being significant factors for many. So, yes.

Brad Kramer [00:40:05] See, the church does a great job at making you feel edified at church, if you fit.

John Dehlin [00:40:10] Exactly. Yeah.

Brad Kramer [00:40:11] And if you don't fit, it can be an intensely alienating experience. And I think my mom's experience is also a little bit telling, Right. Because even the way that we talk about it in sort of insider discourse inside the church and sort of faithful discourse, we talk about the importance of conversion and fellowship. We talk about the importance of having a testimony as this kind of inner conviction, and the importance of having a connection like being fellowshipped in the community.

Brad Kramer [00:40:44] And very often when there's a deficit in one, people can sort of anchor themselves to the other, at least temporarily. So if something happens that causes you to feel really alienated from your ward, that inner conviction, that deep testimony that Mormonism is true can help you weather that.

Brad Kramer [00:41:04] Conversely, if you're going through a faith crisis, but you still feel a profound connection to and support from, from your ward community, that can help you weather the crisis of testimony. Yeah, but when things happen simultaneously, it's somebody's not, you're not going to stay.

Brad Kramer [00:41:27] So if you're feeling alienated, and so that's a big part of the problem is that these things sort of on a macro scale are happening simultaneously demographically. Mormons are starting to their demographic changes happening for North American and Western European Mormons that reflect larger trends in society. We marry later, we place a higher premium on higher education, and we're less conservative, less and less sort of prone to Cold War type thinking.

Brad Kramer [00:42:10] And we are products of the information age. And so you have a whole generation of people that don't fit the mold because they're waiting longer to get married. And when you're an adult in Mormonism, but you're not married, you're not really an adult, you get treated by the church and the community, even not vindictively, but just by default, you get treated like a full grown child until you're married.

Brad Kramer [00:42:45] And so you're not experiencing full. So it's alienating to be who you are in the church. Plus you're encountering information that makes it very difficult to sustain the kind of unquestioned, unwavering faith that you had as a child. And so it's just no wonder that there's a crisis now.

John Dehlin [00:43:07] Brad, before we dive in, I always want my guests to connect with my audience and my audience to connect with my guests. And of course, my guess is that part of your motivation is to help people who are either on the fence trying to decide what to do or maybe even people who have left consider maybe a different paradigm that would allow re. Re engagement at some level. But if, if you've never, if you've never faced, you know, this sort of dark night of the soul that we've been talking about for so many years, if you've never really stared down some serious doubts or questions or, or even contemplated leaving or a crisis of faith, it's going to be probably harder for the listeners to connect with you.

John Dehlin [00:44:01] And I don't want to. I honestly am not trying to prejudice them against you or stack the deck, but is there anything in your Michigan years, you know, did you ever have that tough time or have you just never really experienced what so many of my listeners have experienced?

Brad Kramer [00:44:19] No, I think I have. I mean, I don't want to trivialize anybody else's experience. Because for me to. I want to be careful. I don't want this to sound like me saying to somebody who experienced a crisis and left, hey, I experienced exactly what you experienced, and I'm still here. I'm not saying that's what happened. Part of what I was trying to allude to before is, on the one hand, that it never really happened for me around historical issues.

John Dehlin [00:44:46] Okay.

Brad Kramer [00:44:47] For me, it happened as a part of two much more sort of contemporary issues. One of them didn't really quite make me. Didn't make me want to leave so much as it really ratcheted up my general cynicism about the church. And that was sort of being closely involved with Damon in the process of writing and preparing the Book of Mammon.

John Dehlin [00:45:16] Damon Smith?

Brad Kramer [00:45:17] Yeah, He's a good friend of mine. We're still good friends. And so, I mean, to me, there are parts of the story that he tells in the Book of Mammon that are significantly more difficult for me to digest spiritually than anything out of our deep history.

John Dehlin [00:45:40] And these are things about the corporate inside workings of the church, I'm guessing.

Brad Kramer [00:45:44] Exactly, exactly. So, like, Damon has this story in there, right, about how the whole re. Emphasis on flooding the world with the Book of Mormon and everybody writing testimonies in these paperback Book of Mormons and sending them. That was, in part, a resolution to a stocking problem.

John Dehlin [00:46:09] Inventory. It's an inventory.

Brad Kramer [00:46:10] Like an inventory issue. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:46:12] Yeah.

Brad Kramer [00:46:13] To me, that's worse than Mountain Meadows. I mean, that is so hard. That was so much harder for me than learning any of our skeletons from our past. But I don't think that quite got me toward considering leaving. It just made me much more cynical, and I think I'm probably a little less cynical now about the corporate aspect of Mormonism than I was when I was first sort of hit with it. But the thing that pushed me.

John Dehlin [00:46:50] Let me just refer my listeners, for those of you who haven't listened to the Damon Smith interview on Mormon stories. It's really, really good, so please check that out.

Brad Kramer [00:47:00] It is. It's one of the best podcasts you guys have ever recorded. Honestly, it's really, really, really good. And again, Damon's a good friend of mine, so that one didn't. Wasn't quite a membership crisis. It was more just like a crisis of cynicism.

Brad Kramer [00:47:18] But as to the question of whether or not I would stay, I struggled massively with Prop 8 and its aftermath, and I continue to struggle massively over LGBT and women's issues. In the church. And for me, where the rubber meets the road in terms of crisis is that I have daughters, and I regularly question whether or not I want them to go through the young women's program.

Brad Kramer [00:47:54] So it's these very practical family things, and then just having so many people that I'm close to that I care about, that my family cares about who are lgbt and knowing the kind of pain that affiliation with the church causes the vast majority of them and the kind of relief that they experience when they leave. You know, for me, it becomes a question of, like, I'm sort of in constant crisis.

John Dehlin [00:48:32] That's not fun.

Brad Kramer [00:48:33] It's not. But it's managed crisis, too. And it's a crisis that I think in part is more manageable because it has. You know, I'm a white male. Like, it hasn't. It's easy. It comes from a place of privilege. Right? Like, I can sympathize abstractly, but, like, I'm not just a white. I'm a straight white male.

Brad Kramer [00:48:56] And so I can sympathize abstractly with the pain, but it hasn't. Like, I haven't actually personally been abused by the church in the way that I think the church sort of systemically is in a systemically abusive relationship with its LGBT membership and to a lesser degree, with its female membership.

Brad Kramer [00:49:24] So for me, it's a kind of constant crisis. It's a managed crisis. And I can't say with absolute confidence that I won't end up on the outside at some point. I mean, I don't think I will. And that's in part because I also don't think that my spouse will.

Brad Kramer [00:49:45] In other words, I try to be very cognizant of the sort of the social and. And pre rational dimensions of this whole equation. For me, like, why is it easy for me to maintain, to stay inside? But whereas I describe it now as a kind of perpetual crisis, that is also a managed crisis, initially I think it was much more serious because initially it wasn't managed. Right.

Brad Kramer [00:50:21] It was just a crisis that came on, and it was a real long, long period of asking the question, do I want. Of me personally asking the question, do I want to remain and of Trace and I asking ourselves the question, do we want, as a family, to remain? So I'm not outside the church, but I know right where the exit sign is. You know what I mean? Like, I'm sitting inside and I know where the marked exits are.

John Dehlin [00:50:59] And yet you want to. You felt motivated to want to come on and provide a framework to potentially assist others.

Brad Kramer [00:51:09] Well, and in part to potentially assist others. I mean, I suspect that it's going to be impossible for me to not describe this in a way that reflects my own position and therefore isn't on some level going to come across as more of an outreach that's intended to keep people in or bring people back. But I guess really part of what I'm hoping is that, and the larger goal for me is to just make it easier for Mormon intellectuals who weather their crisis and stay in the church and remain believing and are sincerely believing, even if their mode of belief isn't particularly orthodox, to have productive conversations with.

Brad Kramer [00:52:06] In other words, for people like me and people like Jay to be able to have a productive conversations with each other where we don't sneer at each other, where we don't look down at each other, where we don't, you know, assume, where we don't sort of read one another's choices cynically.

Brad Kramer [00:52:30] So, and I guess if I were to introduce anything that was particularly calculated to help people potentially stay or potentially come back, it would be something that, an idea that I got from Jana Reese, actually, which I think is just beautiful, which is that. And this is the way that I think about it. When I think about the question of whether I will leave, I no longer think about it in terms of will I capital L leave. I think about it in terms of do I need a sabbatical?

John Dehlin [00:53:11] Right. And I think Joanna Brooks also has talked about that idea.

Brad Kramer [00:53:15] Yeah, I would imagine she has. So there are people that I know. I mean, I can imagine being in situations where I would advise somebody to leave, but I would advise it almost even, you know, like if one of my kids four or five, six years from now, during their adolescence came out to me. And you know, Trace and I have talked about this. I think that my.

John Dehlin [00:53:45] As gay, as gay.

Brad Kramer [00:53:45] As gay, as gay.

John Dehlin [00:53:46] Yeah.

Brad Kramer [00:53:47] My instinct would be to tell him or her to take a sabbatical from Mormon. In other words, a sabbatical in the sense of not ruling out the possibility of coming back, but a sort of a guilt free dissociation from the church, make a life and make a happy life without the negative consequences that are going to come from you trying to remain directly affiliated with the church and then sincerely pray and sincerely hope that at some point the church becomes worthy of having you back.

Brad Kramer [00:54:25] To me, that's a pretty obvious example. But in general, I talk to people quite regularly who are having. Experiencing some degree of crisis or another. And that is, you know, in situations like that, or even like siblings of mine, like I have siblings who have left that I, and I don't blame them for leaving at all.

Brad Kramer [00:54:55] I don't think that they were wrong to leave. But I do think that if I had, you know, if I had a time machine or whatever and I could go back and influence the way that they, in some way influenced the way that they thought through their, their choice to leave, that I could encourage them to think of it more in terms of even a long term sabbatical than leaving. And this is a problem because the church doesn't, the church itself doesn't encourage that kind of thinking. It encourages very all or nothing thinking. And it talks about people, church discourse talks about people who leave in terms of having made, you know, lasting choices or whatever.

Brad Kramer [00:55:38] And of course it still wants people to come back, but it doesn't want you to think about your relationship with it if you're still in, in terms of taking a sabbatical. It wants you to think of it in terms of, in the kind of terms that, you know, Elder Holland describes when he talks about this stuff. He says, stay, don't you dare leave. Don't you dare, you know, hurt, hurt the, you know, do that to the people around you that love you, trust us, you know, like very, very absolute terms, stay, stay, stay. And that sort of codes the choice of leaving as being extremely severe and radical.

Brad Kramer [00:56:15] And this radical break, if you choose to leave, you're abandoning. And I just don't think that's a very useful way to think about it.

John Dehlin [00:56:22] And for some, it's actually leaving or taking a sabbatical might be critical for their well being.

Brad Kramer [00:56:28] Absolutely. I mean, this is part of what I'm saying that like, Mormonism is great for a lot and it's great for. It can be a great source of happiness for a lot of people in their lives and it can shape their lives in really beautiful ways. And a lot of this is easy for me to say because I've never really been, I've never been directly on the receiving end of the kinds of harm and abuse that the church is capable of inflicting on people. And so, and I think this is probably a good segue into the actual kind of model that I've been thinking about. If you don't mind moving into it now.

John Dehlin [00:57:17] Yeah, let's totally do it.

Brad Kramer [00:57:40] Come, come, ye saints. No toil nor labor fear, but with joy.

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