Introduction and Conference Welcome

Guest [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3.

Guest 2 [00:00:07] 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

Guest 3 [00:00:26] today@mormonstories.org hi everyone and welcome out to the Mormon Stories Seattle Conference. It is great to see you all here and hopefully we'll get a few more people wandering in as things move along. First of all, I'd like to thank everyone who helped out with the planning on the planning committee. Blaine Nelson, Garen Thatcher, Cheryl Bruno, Natalie Kelly, Benita Miglior. And thanks to Erin Brown for helping us find this great venue and to everyone who helped just giving suggestions and all of that along the way. So thank you to all those who helped get it together and to Open Stories foundation and Mormon Stories for helping with our speakers and just helping us figure out what we were doing as we were planning along. We are going to start with a musical number by Nate Eiley and Joe Morgan. So I'm gonna let them come up and introduce whatever they're doing if they want or not.

Kristine Haglund [00:01:43] So

Guest 3 [00:01:45] yeah, we'll go from there. Thanks.

Guest 4 [00:01:49] So this is a little more nerve wracking than I thought it would be, but

Guest 5 [00:01:57] say anything about sure.

Guest 4 [00:02:00] This is a song that I wrote about my parents. Both Nate and I grew up in Mormon families and this kind of exemplifies what I really love in them and the good things that I that they showed me and the church had a

Guest 5 [00:02:20] lot to do with that.

Guest 6 [00:02:47] She always knows when things are right. Flashback to 1983 there's something important I

Guest 5 [00:03:03] want you to see.

Guest 6 [00:03:06] A young mother with a Radio Flyer packed full of groceries and kids beside there's so much I can't even begin you shown us love you're enough surprise

Guest [00:03:32] my sin

Guest 6 [00:03:36] we didn't have everything was naive I always wanted what we had. I've seen my father cry I've seen tears flow from his eyes falling to me myself. Maybe he couldn't save that life but. You were so hard to support us no, we gave up so much,

Guest [00:05:25] Sam.

Guest 3 [00:05:52] Thank you Nate and Jo.

Kristine Haglund [00:05:54] That was awesome.

Guest 3 [00:05:56] So we're going to move on to our speakers now. We have some great speakers today. I'm really excited to hear from them. Our first speaker is Christine Hagland and she blogs at BCC or by Common Consent and she told me she has three perfect children. Welcome Christine.

Kristine Haglund [00:06:32] This is exactly as nerve wracking as I thought it would be, which is very. Oh, and please all indulge in a great round of laughter about that picture that was on the announcement. I did not pick it, but I do thank the organizers for not putting underneath it infinite shades of gray. Would have been really embarrassing.

Kristine Haglund on Personal Narrative and Storytelling

Guest 3 [00:06:58] All right.

Kristine Haglund [00:06:59] Once upon a time, brothers and sisters, I bring you the love of the Stake President. And it came to pass. Here's the story of a lovely lady. My heart was pounding. It must have been the spirit nudging me to get up here.

Kristine Haglund [00:07:16] The people of New York are represented by two separate but equally important groups, right? All of these are templates for stories that we tell and that we hear. And I was sitting in the Mormon Stories Conference in Boston a few months ago and kind of wanting to get up and tell my story and also feeling like I couldn't possibly, partly because I'm getting old and my story is getting long, and partly because I just couldn't think of how it would fit into any of the templates that I knew or the ones that people seemed to be using.

Kristine Haglund [00:07:55] And so I've thought about that in the time since then, and I had written a sort of academic, ish talk like the ones I usually give called the Ethics of Personal Narrative. And I was reading it over just this week and decided it was too pedantic and obnoxious and.

Kristine Haglund [00:08:18] And I really wanted to try to tell some of my story. And I don't know if I'll succeed, and this might be just a mess, but I'm going to try. So there are some good things about having templates for our stories, right? First, they give us a place. They give us a place to start. It's really hard to make sense of all the things that happen to us, to come up with a narrative that.

Kristine Haglund [00:08:44] That makes us make sense to ourselves, let alone to other people around us. And so we have lots of templates, you know, starting when we're little and we have fairy tales and we sort of know plot elements. It's fun. My perfect children have all sort of figured this out, and it's fun to listen to them tell their stories in different forms. Nowadays they tend to sound like really bad Disney Channel shows. So they're not as great as when they used to be fairy tale stories, but it's still fun to watch them figuring out how to talk about what is happening to them. Templates of stories can evoke a whole tradition. So, for instance, when you get up in testimony meeting and

Guest 5 [00:09:39] tell

Kristine Haglund [00:09:41] something like your own story in the words that other people have used. You're connected to this long, long line of people that you love and who have given a lot for the truth. That they understood it can connect you to people with similar stories. One of my best friends in college was named Jenny. And we became best friends on a day when we were in a big group conversation. And somebody said something, and Jenny said, that's not an island you're standing on, Sinbad. It's a whale.

Kristine Haglund [00:10:13] And no one else laughed except for me. And we had had the same set of cassette tapes of classic stories growing up. They were called the Super Scope Storyteller Presents. And so I knew this line and knew what she was referring to. And it gave us a whole. You know, we sort of knew that we had this shared history, this shared vocabulary for telling our stories.

Kristine Haglund [00:10:36] More recently, I met a man that I really like. And we were kissing, and it was getting a little breathless, and he stopped for a second. He said, are you thinking what I'm thinking? And I said, probably. And he said, stagecoach driver? I was like, yes. Both of our anxieties about this activity had been informed by the same correlated story about the stagecoach driver who never went near the edge of the cliff. And that was the one you wanted.

Kristine Haglund [00:11:02] And we both were thinking, we have three wheels hanging off. And it was awesome. So they can connect us to people, but they're not always helpful. They can calcify and deaden our stories. Think about testimony meetings. You've sat through that where just nothing happened. Everyone said the same thing, and nothing was alive.

Kristine Haglund [00:11:32] Or the sitcom that goes on for two seasons longer than it really ought to and becomes formulaic and dull. Or Mack Wilberg hymn arrangements that use that darn French sixth chord and the modulation to a half step higher for the last verse. Just a few too many times

Guest 5 [00:11:52] or

Kristine Haglund [00:11:55] sometimes we can miss the real story. We can miss seeing what's going on because we are so beguiled by the form that we know. When I was youngish and married, I was a beehive advisor. And I had these great girls that I loved. And they were, you know, 12 and 13 and just starting to articulate their own spiritual experiences. And they didn't have the.

Kristine Haglund [00:12:23] They didn't have as much of the template absorbed. And so they used really interesting vocabulary to describe what was happening to them. And they came up with novel analogies and metaphors. And I loved listening to them try and tell about their growing sense of their own spirituality. And I happened. I moved away after that and happened to be back visiting when Several of them had come back from their first year at BYU and had been asked to stand up and say something about their testimonies and about their experience at byu. And they each got up and said exactly the same, you know, they used all the same words, the same kinds of expressions that you would expect any BYU freshmen to have picked up in their, you know, gigantic BYU student ward.

Kristine Haglund [00:13:12] And I felt sad partly because I just missed those, you know, 12 and 13 year old girls. There's, there's something really magical about that age. But also I started to wonder, when we use the same words that other people use for their experiences to describe our own, do we start constraining our experience? Do we start actually not having the kinds of experiences that we might because we are hanging them on particular pegs in our minds and sort of missing them. And Orwell's essay Politics in the English Language talks about this in a different context, right? He talks about how when we use cobbled together phrases that are already available, jackbooted thugs.

Kristine Haglund [00:13:59] And I can't think of his examples. And of course we have different ones now. But you know, the phrases that you see in the newspaper or here on Fox News over and over again that are used so often, they don't really mean anything. We don't notice them there. And we do the same thing in prayers, right? We have these, these prayer words that we use that sometimes lead us into temptation. Like the time when I blessed the food and sacrament meeting because I was just saying words I knew because I was nervous.

Kristine Haglund [00:14:30] So we can lose the real sense of things by relying too much on ready made forms. The other thing that I think many of you and I have experienced sometimes is that the kinds of stories we tell can make exclusive communities. If the ending of your story happens to be different than what people are expecting, you can find yourself looking at an audience that's going or, you know, not nodding or saying Amen.

Speaking Truth in Love Within Community

Kristine Haglund [00:15:06] And so I've thought about why that happens and also about how we, how we tell stories that do somehow stay alive. One of the phrases that I love in the Scriptures is in Ephesians chapter 4, where Paul talks about speaking the truth in love. And I've often, I guess when I was younger, I grew up in Tennessee. And so the association I had with speaking the truth in love was Southern women saying bless her heart and then saying some really horrible mean thing, right? That, that was, you know, speaking the truth meant saying something mean and putting some, you know, veneer of civility over it.

Kristine Haglund [00:15:52] And of course that is nothing like speaking the truth in love. And as I've gotten older, I've started to believe that, that Paul says that not, not because it's a commandment, but because it's a description that is that we can only speak the truth in love. That truth establishes itself only as we love and as we tell each other in a way that lets us exchange love what has happened to us.

Kristine Haglund [00:16:24] My sort of most vivid experience with this is after what I would probably describe as my most intense faith crisis, which came in sort of the opposite way of many people's. I grew up in a household that, where you had to read the Book of Mormon before you were baptized in the standard works before you were 12, and then you got your own dialogue subscription for your 12th birthday. And that was sort of how I grew up. And so there were no questions that were off limits. There was no, you know, that's too scary to think about, none of that. I grew up in this expansive intellectual environment that thought, you know, all truth belonged to Mormonism.

Kristine Haglund [00:17:06] And by golly, we are going to find as much of it as we can and we are going to thrash it out at the dinner table. And it was wonderful. And so then I got to the MTC and encountered really for the first time, the kind of narrow anti intellectual strain that exists within Mormonism that I just really hadn't. Hadn't encountered. And it was devastating to me. I was just crushed. I had no idea what this was. I ended up coming home early from my mission and really thinking, I can't do this. I don't understand what this Mormon culture is and it doesn't fit with what I've grown up.

Kristine Haglund [00:17:50] But if I can't do that, then I lose my family too. And I, I just don't know who I am if I'm not Mormon. And I actually made a pretty serious suicide attempt because I just thought, I can't live as not a Mormon and I don't know how, I don't know how to keep living as a Mormon.

Kristine Haglund [00:18:15] And my family responded by pretending that nothing had happened. Basically. We've never spoken of it since I got out of the hospital. And so I sort of didn't know how to tell this story because I didn't have much of a chance. And you know, I had a therapist, but the whole Mormon piece doesn't really make sense to very many people.

Kristine Haglund [00:18:41] And then one day I was at an Exponent retreat and a woman named Alison, whom I will dearly love forever, said, tell me about what happened on your mission. And Seemed to really want to know. And I remember standing in the sunshine and telling her this story and seeing her cry and say, I'm so sorry that happened to you. And something about, you know, not telling the story to myself in the dark, but telling it to someone else and seeing her loving response took all the poison out of the story. And it made it possible for me to sort of start putting back together an identity that made more sense to me.

Kristine Haglund [00:19:27] And I've thought about that a lot because it's a story I've not told very much and that I don't actually trust myself to tell. Well, I don't think I understand all of what happened. I don't think I. I don't think that I love the people that I encountered in the MTC enough to tell their story truthfully. I just.

Kristine Haglund [00:19:50] I don't know it. And so I'm sure that I didn't tell Allison something, that. Where the content was what was true. I think I'm positive that I told her a distorted, partial version of my story. So it wasn't expressing myself perfectly that made the difference. It was the exchange, it was the response between her and me. And this imperfect story became a vessel of love. And I think that's when our stories become true and when they become redemptive, when they become a means of exchanging love.

Stories That Stay Alive and Shape Faith

Kristine Haglund [00:20:30] Think about if you had a primary or Sunday school teacher growing up that you loved. Do you remember anything that was in the lessons that they taught you? I don't much, but I remember a few teachers who I knew loved me. One of them.

Kristine Haglund [00:20:51] I remember being generally bored and really badly behaved in his class. But every week he made these beautifully decorated cakes. He loved to decorate cakes. And every week he would make an exquisite, beautiful cake for a bunch of like 9 and 10 year olds who, you know, really don't generally appreciate such aesthetic feats.

Kristine Haglund [00:21:21] And yet I remember those cakes and I knew that he loved us. That those cakes were his awkward way because he was a really awkward person. That those were his way of telling us that he adored us and cared for us and thought about us during the week and prayed over us as he was squeezing careful millions of little star shaped things of frosting over our cakes.

Kristine Haglund [00:21:52] And those are the stories that. That matter. And so if I were to tell just the story of what he had taught me or what I had learned in his class, it would, you know, it wouldn't convey anything of what was true about that exchange.

Kristine Haglund [00:22:09] What was true was that frosting is sweet and he loved me sometimes the stories aren't so easy. There was a bishop who, who I grew up with and who I loved. He wasn't my bishop growing up, but he was a friend of our families. His wife made my 15th and 16th and 17th birthday cakes because my mom wasn't into that. I went to prom with their son.

Kristine Haglund [00:22:37] He was a dear friend of our families. And then when I had gone away to college, he had become bishop. And when I got home after college and, and met the man that I was going to marry, he was the bishop of our ward. And he gave my then fiance and now ex husband a piece of advice that was desperately mistaken and wrong and had utterly disastrous consequences for my life and for my children's lives.

Kristine Haglund [00:23:11] And for a long time in the story that I told myself of my marriage and divorce, he was the villain. He was the only person who could have, you know, averted tragedy. And he was wrong about something. And his mistake, you know, sort of pushed us all over the cliff.

Kristine Haglund [00:23:38] And then about four years ago, I went home for Christmas and he's now my parents home teacher. And I was dreading this encounter. He was going to come over while we were there and I thought, I'm not angry with him anymore. I think I've mostly forgiven him, but I really don't want to see him. I don't know how I could face him without saying, do you know what you did? Because I don't think he does. I doubt he even remembers. And I think he would be devastated if he realized that what he had done.

Kristine Haglund [00:24:14] So I was just dreading this encounter. And he called the day before he came to talk to me and he spent about half an hour on the phone asking me about each of my children and what they were like and what they would want to hear, what kind of treat they would like. And so he came over and he brought three different kinds of cookies because I actually told him the truth was about my three picky children.

Kristine Haglund [00:24:39] And he brought all three kinds. And he spent about an hour and a half teaching a beautiful, carefully prepared lesson that had something for each one of my children at their different ages. And he just loved us. And I can't tell the story the way that I used to anymore. He's not. He can't possibly be the villain that wasn't a true story. The true story is that he loved me. And he loved me imperfectly, as we all always do. And.

Kristine Haglund [00:25:17] I love being able to tell his story more truly than I could have for all those years. And it redeems so much of what was terrible about that experience to. To just recognize that we were all human and all doing what we thought was best.

Kristine Haglund [00:25:36] Another example of this kind of loyalty to the truth of other people's stories was my little sister. And about five, seven, I don't remember exactly how long ago she converted to Anglo Catholicism, which is a sort of really, really high church version of Episcopalian worship with even more incense than Episcopalians and even better music. It's really great.

Kristine Haglund [00:26:04] And she was going to be confirmed, and she invited the family to come. And so I had planned to go down to Philadelphia where she was being confirmed. My parents were coming. And about two days before the event was supposed to happen, she called me sobbing, and she. She said, I can't do it. I can't be confirmed. And I said, what's the matter? Did you change your mind? And she said, no, not at all.

Kristine Haglund [00:26:27] I'm still sure that this is what God is calling me to do. But I just found out that the Bishop of Philadelphia said that I have to be rebaptized, that Mormon baptism doesn't count as Christian. And so I have not just confirmed, but I have to be rebaptized. And she said, I can't do that. And I said, I really didn't understand what the hang of. I said, if you believe, then, you know, why is this different? And she said, I can't stand up in a church and say that my parents and all the people that I loved growing up were not Christian. I can't do that, and I won't.

Kristine Haglund [00:27:05] And as it turned out, the archbishop came to town and overruled the bishop and said that as long as she felt she had been baptized as a Christian, that they would not judge that situation, which I think is completely contrary to Episcopal canon law, and for which I am very grateful.

Kristine Haglund [00:27:25] And so we went to my sister's confirmation, and it was beautiful. And my parents were, and are heartbroken that my sister is not Mormon anymore. But her action of loyalty and of love in saying, I know my parents are Christian, and I will not deny that truth has made all the difference in the world in them being able to keep their relationship and to learn to love each other.

Kristine Haglund [00:27:55] I think if I were elaborating rules for speaking the truth in love, they would sound something like, tell your story to someone that you love. Tell your story to someone who loves you. Tell your story to someone who loves you enough to challenge you at the places where you might not really understand.

Kristine Haglund [00:28:18] Write it. Write your story. Read it. Read it out loud to yourself and see if it rings true. And then write it again often and tell it again often. Don't be stuck in one way explaining yourself to yourself and to others.

Kristine Haglund [00:28:36] There is a beautiful novel that I love called the Master of Hestvikin. It's actually by Sigrid Unsett, who's a Nobel Prize winning Norwegian novelist from the early 20th century. She writes this saga called the Master of Hestvicken that's about a man named Olaf who murders people, is cruel to his children, is sort of a 14th century Viking in all the good and bad ways. And this is her account of his deathbed.

Kristine Haglund [00:29:11] He's been lying in a room and his family is all around, and he has been seemingly. He's been in and out of consciousness and his children have been talking about him and about the grace of God, which they are starting to understand in their church.

Kristine Haglund [00:29:26] And he's half awake. And here's what it says. Olaf had lain awake and had heard sentence passed on his own life by the mouth of his son. Meanwhile, an image hovered before his vision. It was the frenzy of fever, but not so violent that he did not know it for what it was. He saw a cornfield overgrown with tares and thistles, willow, herb and brambles. The weeds flaunted their red and yellow flowers in the sun, and the corn was so choked by them that none could tell that the ground had been sown.

Kristine Haglund [00:29:59] But out in the field there walked one. Sometimes he thought it was his guardian angel. Sometimes it was Eric, a friend, who did not ask whether the dying man had done him wrong, but thought only of gathering up the poor ears of corn that he could save among the thistles. It should not have been so. His life should have been like a cornfield, swaying, clean and bright and ready for the sickle. But one there was who would find one ear of corn and lay it in the balance.

Kristine Haglund [00:30:27] We all need someone to tell our stories that way. All of our lives are choked with weeds and brambles. And we need both to have someone tell our story that way and to learn to hear each other's stories that way.

Kristine Haglund [00:30:43] I think when we do, we give each other a foretaste of heaven, which is described in my very, very favorite, totally obscure Old Testament verse, which is in Zephaniah, chapter three, that says, the Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty. He will save. He will rejoice over thee with joy. He will rest in his love. He will joy over thee with singing. And I love that image of God singing our stories.

Kristine Haglund [00:31:15] And I am quite sure that as we learn to tell our stories in love and speak our own truth in love, that we will start to tell stories to which our brothers and sisters will not only say Amen but also want to shout Hallelujah and we'll all live happily ever.

Guest 3 [00:31:46] Thank you, Christine. Our next speaker is going to be Brent Metcalfe. He is the editor of New Approaches to the Book of Mormon and the co editor of American Apocrypha, and he's from right here in the Seattle area. After Brent speaks, we're going to have a congregational hymn, Come Thou fount of every blessing. And then we'll have a break until our next session for a while to socialize. And we have some goodies out there to munch on and water. So, Brent,

Brent Metcalfe on Research and Church History

Guest 5 [00:32:26] It's kind of interesting. On the way in today, I was listening to NPR and they had a series of confessions by people who had done things that they had faked and got away with it. And one made me smile.

Guest 5 [00:32:45] The caller said that he was able to fake getting on as a featured speaker at a conference that he had not registered for nor had been invited to attend. And so I may be that guy today is what I'm trying to tell you here.

Guest 5 [00:33:05] You know, my story is kind of interesting and Christine made a very interesting comment about how often the truth of a story or the emotional impact of a story can get lost in the form that we use to present it. And I can pretty well guarantee you that this is going to be pretty formless. So that shouldn't be happening.

Guest 5 [00:33:28] But you know, I was just sitting there reflecting on right after I got back from my mission, I went to work for the church security department. And for a time I worked in basically the dispatch unit for the church security department. And I remember that there was an ERA rally being held in town.

Guest 5 [00:33:53] And one of the things that was going on is security guards would call into the dispatch center and they were giving us lists of license plate numbers. And then what would happen from there is that those license plate numbers would then get reported to the police department so that we could find out who they were registered to.

Guest 5 [00:34:15] And what was going on is that they were actually going around the area where the ERA meeting was being held and taking down the license plate numbers of the cars in the area so that they could have those the registrants names reported to the state presidents of the people who are attending.

Guest 5 [00:34:32] And you know, at the time, you know, I reflect back on that and I was kind of in a similar situation, Christine, in that I could not fathom unbelief. It just wasn't even an option for me. I couldn't even imagine having that conversation with my parents where I'd be sitting down saying, I just don't believe in this anymore. I was an ardent apologist. I was a devout believer in every way. But little did I know that just three short years after that I would be the one having that conversation with my parents and just a decade later that I would be excommunicated for what I actually believed or didn't in this particular case.

Guest 5 [00:35:19] So how does this happen to someone? How does somebody go from being devout believer to unbeliever? Well, let me kind of tell you my tale and I'll tell you where it's left me. I served a full time mission. While I was on my mission, my dad, who was working as the recorder in the Salt Lake Temple, was actually called to be the managing director of temple for the LDS Church, which you basically think about as being the chief operating officer for all the temples throughout the world.

Guest 5 [00:35:55] I got back from my mission following in, you know, the tradition of my family, went to work for the LDS Church security department. My brother, my brother in law, my dad, all church employees. While I was doing that, I became a voracious reader.

Guest 5 [00:36:14] And there's one book in particular that just changed the way that I viewed text and the way I viewed scripture. And that was a book by Raymond E. Brown called the Birth of the Messiah. And I don't know how many of you have ever had the opportunity to read that book. He was an absolutely brilliant Catholic exegete who is now deceased.

Guest 5 [00:36:40] But his analysis of the infancy narratives and Luke and Matthew just opened up a whole new world and way of understanding a text and how they could be read. So while I was there at church security on those marathon shifts for 12 hours at a time, I just became this incredibly voracious reader. And I would read everything I could, could get my hands on about, you know, critical methodology, exegetical methods, anything on literary criticism that I could read, I just devoured it.

Guest 5 [00:37:18] And during that time a friend of mine was a publisher for an off campus newspaper at BYU called the 7th East Press. And I published a couple of articles in that press and in that page paper. And what ended up happening is that a general authority, Bruce Emmerkonki, had the paper banned from campus. Well, as a result, some of the contributors to the paper were contacted by their ecclesiastical leaders. But in my particular case, because I worked for the LDS Church, I was contacted by my Employer.

Guest 5 [00:37:53] And basically I was told to cease and desist, even though my argument were very apologetic. If you ever have the interest of digging through the BYU archives and going through those papers, they were about as apologetic as you can possibly get.

Guest 5 [00:38:08] Well, evidently this didn't satisfy certain leaders at the top. And I continued doing my reading in the church archives every day. And on one particular day I found a book by Elias Smith, who is an early 19th century preacher, been owned by a professor at BYU by the last name of Paulson. And what he had done is he had inserted a parallel into the front cover area that showed the parallels between the life of Elias Smith and the life of Joseph Smith and parallels, for example, that they both believed they had restored primitive Christianity, they both had visions of God and so on.

Guest 5 [00:38:49] And the parallels were quite striking, but nothing really unusual that I hadn't read in other Christian primitivist literature and so on. But the person who was the over correlation for the church, Roy Doxy at the time, came in on the day that I had actually called the book down and checked it out. And he went and took the book and made a photocopy of those pages. And then as he was leaving, the receptionist there said where are you taking those? And he said I'm taking them over to Elder Peterson's office.

Guest 5 [00:39:23] Well, as it turns out, I wasn't supposed to be put on probation as I was from the church security department. I was actually supposed to have been fired. And this was Markey Peterson's confirmation that I hadn't been fired. And so things happened very, very rapidly. I was called into a meeting with the head of hr, the representative for HR over our department, and the managing director of Security, the director of security over our department. And I was forced to resign. And that was against the wishes of my stake president.

Guest 5 [00:40:00] So what happened then? That just set off an interesting chain of events because the November following I get a call, call from Tom Monson's secretary asking if I would come in and meet with Elder Monson. So I said sure, that's fine. And I went and met with him. And it soon became really clear what the purpose of the meeting was. It was twofold. One, he wanted to ensure that I wasn't going to go on an anti Mormon circuit and start telling people about what had happened to me. And secondly, to apologize without giving an apology.

Guest 5 [00:40:35] And that is that he told me that when it became discovered that this had happened and that I was forced to resign from my job, that a shouting match ensued among the members of the 12 and in particular between Neal A. Maxwell and Markey Peterson.

Guest 5 [00:40:56] And he turned to me and he said, you know, we can't apologize for anything that's happened because it involves an apostle, and we can never embarrass an apostle. And so that was basically the solace that I was supposed to take. I had lost my job. Everything had fallen apart in terms of my financial situation at the time.

Guest 5 [00:41:22] But, you know, thanks to nature, I guess, a young bishop by the name of Steve Christianson hired me to go work for him as a researcher. And it was during that time I continued doing research in the church archives that I met somebody else who became also a very good friend of mine. And his name was Mark Hoffman.

Guest 5 [00:41:51] Mark came to me one day when I was researching the archives and said, I've got a letter that I'd found. Do you think that your boss, Steve Christiansen, would be interested in buying it? And I said, well, what letter is it? And he showed it to me, and it was a letter by William W. Phelps to Martin Harris, or, I'm sorry, from Martin Harris to William W. Phelps, now known as the Salamander Letter.

Guest 5 [00:42:24] Well, to make a really long story short, I continued doing my researching. Then the bombings happened. And it was during that time that I felt everything unravel for me in terms of faith, because I had made every mental gymnastic possible to try and retain belief. I had got to the point where I recognized that there were just enormous problems with the Book of Mormon. And I had basically convinced myself that you could still believe, because maybe what the Book of Mormon is, is just a product of Joseph Smith trying to struggle and grapple to understand God, and it's not actually an ancient record at all.

Guest 5 [00:43:05] I was doing everything I could to hold on to belief. But when the bombings happened and Steve was murdered, that was the thing that just kind of broke it for me. And I remember almost having a. What would you want to call it, Born again experience, if you will, one day driving in front of the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City, of all places, and just finally letting the words come into my head.

Guest 5 [00:43:38] There is no God. You're alone, and only you and humanity can make things right. And suddenly I just felt this incredible release, like, I'm okay. I can get through this now that I've just come to that point, and I've actually said the words in my mind that I never wanted to ever say. I just felt this incredible release.

Excommunication and Its Aftermath

Guest 5 [00:44:04] So my research continued, and so did the church's interest in me. And I remember Stake President coming over to my house one night, and the whole stake presidency came over, just showed up unannounced. And they were having a talk with me. And the stake president said, do you believe that Ezra Taft Benson is a prophet of God? And I said, well, for me, the dilemma is I would first have to believe in God in order to believe he's a prophet of God. And so that, you know, that doesn't give me much wiggle room for the answer here.

Guest 5 [00:44:40] And it was really interesting because the stake president called my dad the next day and he said, brother Metcalfe, I want you to know that I don't know if I've ever met such an honest young man as your son. And, you know, it was just this radiant, glowing response.

Guest 5 [00:45:01] Well, then about a week later, Richard G. Scott comes and visits my dad and said, derek, do you know that Brent stake president has requested his excommunication? And my dad was just mortified by this. He couldn't believe it was going on. Well, at that particular point, that one kind of got nipped in the bud, and general authorities went back and said, send it back to them.

Guest 5 [00:45:33] We're to take no action on this. Well, again, research went on, and I decided to edit a collection of essays called New Approaches to the Book of Mormon. And I gathered together a group of scholars who had very specialized skills in different areas of. Of expertise.

Guest 5 [00:45:52] The person, Stan Larson, for example, who analyzed the Sermon on the Mount in Third Nephi, looking at it from a text critical point of view, from the New Testament textual Criticism, had a PhD in Textual Criticism. That was his specialty.

Guest 5 [00:46:07] The person who analyzed the limited geography theory had a PhD in anthropology and had spent years, actually on the actual dig sites. And as it turns out, her husband is also probably the preeminent archaeologist that Mormonism has ever had, and that's Ray Matheny.

Guest 5 [00:46:28] And so we got together, we did this book with the intent of applying critical methods to the Book of Mormon and basically seeing where it would take us in individual areas. My own contribution to the study was looking at the order in which the Book of Mormon was dictated, which is actually different than the current order of the Book of Mormon that we have today.

Guest 5 [00:46:52] When Joseph smith lost the 116 pages, rather than going back and replacing them by starting from the beginning again, he actually continued on to the end of the book, then went back and did the opening portion again. So I analyzed, what type of impact did this have on the text itself and the narrative? Are there any signs that we can find in there?

Guest 5 [00:47:17] One of the more Curious ones that I discovered was that for whatever reason, Joseph Smith switched between two synonyms during the process of the dictation, where he favored the word therefore when he was initially dictating, then switched over to the word wherefore as the dictation proceeded. And so, basically, when you rearrange the text back into the order that I was proposing, you see a very clear development of the usage of those two words. But when you break it out and put the front portion of the Book of Mormon first, Nephi through Words of Mormon to the beginning of the book, that whole evolution flow is disrupted.

Guest 5 [00:48:00] And so it was that type of thing that we were looking at, at that type of level of minutia and detail that we were getting into. And so not long after the book was published, Stake president shows up on my doorstep again, completely unannounced, and comes in, we start having this nice little chat. And I said, you know, I really appreciate you coming over here, but I imagine there's a reason why you've come over here tonight. And he says, yes, we need to hold a cord on you.

Guest 5 [00:48:34] And so that was kind of the beginning of the whole process. At the end, I attended my excommunication cord of love. Who wouldn't? I mean, to me, it's like missing your baptism. And it's a rite of passage. I will. I wanted to see what this was like. It had mysteries shrouded this my entire life, and so I wanted to see what it was like. And it was very interesting. At the end, they were saying, we hope you're like the sons of Alma and Mosiah and that you'll come back someday. And you seem like just such a wonderful person. I said, yeah, but they never excommunicated the same of Alma or Mosiah.

Guest 5 [00:49:17] So, you know, a little bit different situation here. But the impact at the time was actually fairly negligible. And I suppose if there's anything I would want any of you to get out of this today is that there's life after the church.

Guest 5 [00:49:35] When people ask me about it, I'll often refer to my exit from the church as a retirement retirement. I'll tell them, I've retired from the church. You know, I did my time, and now I get a break. And that's kind of the view of life that I've taken since then.

Guest 5 [00:49:52] I think that if there's one thing that the parents within the church or friends and loved ones who have other friends and loved ones who end up questioning and doubting, that that's something that I would hope that. That they would hold on to is to recognize the value of each human being.

Guest 5 [00:50:11] You know, I think it was the Dalai Lama, and hopefully I'm not going to butcher this too much. If I recall, he once made a statement to the effect that people take different roads to fulfillment and happiness. Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost.

Guest 5 [00:50:29] And I think that that, to me, is really the key. Through my. My whole entire experience, the emotional jarring nature of it, that that's the thing that I've taken away is that I look at other LDs now. I don't want to try and dissuade them from belief. If they found happiness and that's what brings them joy, good for you. You know, my road went in a different direction and I found happiness and joy as well. And yes, you can be happy outside the church. I mean, I remember growing up hearing no one is truly happy outside of the church.

Guest 5 [00:51:04] That's just not true. You can be happy in any circumstance. But the thing that I would plead for, I guess, when all is said and done, as I have gotten older and I reflect on this more and more, is that we show each other greater degrees of charity when we're talking about such sensitive issues as a person's belief, and then we give each other the benefit of the doubt. It may drive us nuts to hear, you know, some conservative Mormon going off on what their belief system is, but it probably drives them nuts as well to hear me talking about what my beliefs are. I think compassion and charity are key, and that's the thing that I've taken away from my experience.

Guest 5 [00:51:48] I harbor no ill will. I have no bitterness or resentment in me for anything that's transpired. In fact, I actually think I can say now I can recognize the things that were positive in my Mormon experience and the positive impacts that they had. So, yeah, we needed to show a little bit more love to each other. Thanks,

Guest [00:53:33] Satan. Me how to.

Guest 2 [00:55:05] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Music today was provided by the Saber Rattlers. Check them out at saber-rattlers.com the Mormon Stories logo was generously donated by StudioCase.com thanks for listening.

Closing Hymn and Reflection

Guest [00:55:20] Come, come, ye saints no toil nor labor fear but with joy Wend your way though hard to you this journey may appear Grace shall be as your day Tis better far for us to strive Our useless cares from us to drive to the San Jo your hearts will swell.

Guest [00:56:05] Oh, all is well, all is well. Why should we mourn? I think our all is high? Tis not so, all is right? Why should we think? To earn a great reward? Lord, if we now shun the fight? Gird up your lo.

Guest [00:56:49] Fresh courage take Our God will never us forsake? Soon we'll have? Let's tell a tale? Oh, all is well? All is well? Oh, all is well? All is well? Sam? And should we die before our journey's through Happy day?

Guest [00:58:24] All is well? We then are free from toil and sorrow too? With the just we shall dwell? But if our lives are spared Again to see the saints the rest obtain? I will make this glory swell? Oh, all is well? All is well? All is well? All is well? All is well? Oh, all is well? All is well.

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