Welcome and Introducing Simon Southerton

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, shondalin. It is August 19, 2021, and I am very excited for today's episode. Today I have to thank for this episode, first and foremost, my compadre, Gerardo. Hey, Gerardo. How's it going?

Gerardo Sumano [00:00:20] Hey, John. Doing good.

John Dehlin [00:00:22] We got you a nice high def camera and a good microphone. And now you're going to be an occasional co host, just like Kara Burrell.

Gerardo Sumano [00:00:30] Yeah, yeah, we'll see how it goes.

John Dehlin [00:00:33] It's so great to have you. And not only are you co hosting, but you kind of line this one up. You pay attention to what's going on on the Internet, and you noticed a really cool post that Dr. Simon Southerton had made and you. You lined this up, didn't you?

Simon Southerton [00:00:47] Yeah, yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [00:00:48] It was super interesting. Simon definitely had some really good insights. So I was like, we got to cover this.

John Dehlin [00:00:55] All right, well, Dr. Dr. Simon Southerton, welcome back to Mormon Stories. This is not your first rodeo, as they say in Texas.

Simon Southerton [00:01:02] No, it's probably my third, I guess.

John Dehlin [00:01:07] Yeah, yeah. So. So, listeners, for those of you who don't know the name Simon Southerton, I will just give a quick recap. When I was first going through my faith crisis, when way, way back in 2000, 2001, I was working at Microsoft and I read this article that a man named Thomas Murphy, who was a professor in Washington, actually had started speaking publicly and writing about DNA tests with the Book of Mormon. This is before the LDS Church changed the title page to the Book of Mormon from, you know, the principal answer, you know, basically saying that the Book of Mormon was about the. The principal ancestors or something to the effect of the Native Americans. Where they basically went from basically saying the Book of Mormon was written by the ancestors of the current Native Americans, and then they changed the title page to be the Book of Mormon was written about some population that was somewhere among the ancestors of the Native Americans. That shift in rhetoric that the title page of the Book of Mormon underwent some point in the 2000s was directly due to first, some of the work that I learned about from a professor named Thomas Murphy, who I've had on Mormon Stories podcast. But within a very short amount of time, a Mormon bishop in Australia named Dr. Simon Southerton, who himself was a geneticist, started having a faith crisis, I believe, while he was bishop, because he, as a geneticist, was very curious about what the DNA tests would find to either verify or not verify the genetic origins of what we understand to be Native Americans. Or what we used to understand as Mormons to be as Lamanites. And sure enough, Bishop Simon Southerton, Dr. Simon Southerton, geneticist Simon Southerton, lost his faith, stopped being a bishop, and wrote a very important book called Losing a Lost Tribe, which I myself bought and read during my own faith crisis years before I started Mormon Stories podcast. It was instrumental to me in helping me sort of start seeing the church, the Mormon Church for what it was. And Simon. That makes Simon Southerton for me, a legend. Right up there with Grant Palmer, Michael Quinn, you know, and all the legendary Mormon historians and authors. We have had Simon Southerton on Mormon Stories podcast a few times, talking primarily about either his story and, or DNA and, or genetics. We had him on to talk about when the LDS Church came out with their Gospel topics essay about DNA and the Book of Mormon. We had Simon on about that. And so that is my introduction of the Dr. Simon Southerton. Simon, what did I leave out of the introduction that you would want to either amend or add to or remove from what I said?

Simon Southerton [00:04:00] I think it was pretty much right. I don't. There weren't any glaring errors that I can see. There's a lot of, a lot of other stuff. But yeah, most of it's pretty boring.

John Dehlin [00:04:10] I mean, the church went after you just for telling the truth about genetics and they. Did they like, try to disfellowship you or disfellowship do or did you resign? Like, I forget. Exactly.

Simon Southerton [00:04:21] Yeah.

Simon Southerton's Faith Crisis and Excommunication

John Dehlin [00:04:22] What, what, what was the final status of your gen. Membership?

Simon Southerton [00:04:27] Just a quick timeline. So it was 1998 when I, I wasn't actually looking for DNA evidence to prove the Book of Mormon wrong. This is a familiar story. We never look for, we're never trying to find historical things that prove the church wrong. We're trying to find things that back it up. So I, it was early days of the Internet and I stumbled on the Smithsonian statement regarding the Book of Mormon and was completely shocked to see that the entire scientific community in the US didn't see any evidence of Israelites in the Americas prior to Columbus. And so I went online thinking, well, that's, you know, that's interesting, but because I work in the field of DNA, the first, when you start searching in the search engines, you know, DNA papers started cropping up. So that, that's when I went down the rabbit hole, if you like, and found just dozens of research papers on Native Americans. So, so that was back in 1998. It took me a couple of years to build up the courage to publish my story on the Ex Mormon website that was published in 2000. And you may have read that story. I'm not sure.

John Dehlin [00:05:47] Oh, I'm sure I did, yeah. Exmorman.org Right.

Simon Southerton [00:05:50] That used to be a very long one. Very rambling and sort of. It was a very difficult time initially because I went to bed, a believing bishop with lots of questions with a very, very heavy shelf, and woke up in the morning knowing instantly, but the whole thing was false. And it's. It's a really weird experience. The most profound experience I've ever had in my life. Can you imagine that? Going. Going. I was a tvm. I believed the whole thing and I was a bishop, devout. But never at any time did I sort of think to myself, yeah, no, it's all wrong. I've changed my mind. I just woke up. And I knew it was all because I was a very emotional member. So I. I felt very strong emotions as the prophet spoke, as I read the Book of Mormon. And I think it was emotions that triggered me more than anything else because we sang Book of Mormon stories the night before. I went to bed and had my epiphany while I was asleep. So, I mean, if you know the words to the Book of Mormon story, that song, it's a. It's quite an emotive one, certainly a very emotive one for me. I was very uncomfortable with it as we sang it as a family. Because you're talking about the Book of

John Dehlin [00:07:21] Mormon stories my teacher tells. Okay, yeah.

Simon Southerton [00:07:25] So I think that emotional experience was very important for me. But another one that I think we'll probably touch on later on when we talk a little bit about the pandemic is that at the time I was between jobs and I had an unusual amount of time. I was studying for an exam and I had a bit more time on my hands. So there was a change in my life. And whenever you have a change or a break from your normal routine, it gives you time for your mind to sort of step outside of your. Your very busy schedule and your maybe take a little bit of time to think about those things that are on the shelf. I didn't have a heavy shelf because I wasn't academic. I wasn't really all that academic about the Book of Mormon. I'd never sort of read apologetics or anything like. Anything like that. So, yeah, so that was a big shock after I had my faith crisis to encounter apologetics and the absolute rubbish that they write. We all know what the Book of Mormon says. It was pretty Obvious. And all of the prophets had said the same thing. So. So I then encountered apologetics. I was directed to apologetics by church leaders in Australia. And that's when I knew. I very quickly discovered that the church had absolutely no interest in getting to the. Looking objectively at what I'd come across. And for me as a DNA scientist, it's just so freaking obvious. There's just nothing. There's no. There's no Israelite DNA in the Americas, so American Indians or Polynesians. So when I realized that the leaders weren't going to be interested in and only wanted to talk to me through apologists and whatever, I just thought, okay, well, that's when I. That's what really drove me writing the book. So the book was published. Losing Lost Tribe was published in about 2004, I think, and it was about three years later that they hadn't attended church for seven years. They tracked me down and interfered with my personal life and it tried to excommunicate me for adultery and all sorts of nonsense. So. But yeah, it was a very bad look for the church was. It was in the newspapers all over the world. So the whole world knew why they were excommunicating me. It's just the leaders in Australia thought they were. Who wasn't connected with my open apostasy for seven years.

John Dehlin [00:10:07] So anyway, they never, they never wanted to be about, you know, they never want it to be about the actual issues with the church. They always want.

Simon Southerton [00:10:16] Absolutely. I was instructed by the state president that if I raised the DNA issue, they would close down the council. The decision was made, I was gone. And yeah, so it was just a. A kangaroo court, as they say, most appropriately for Australia.

John Dehlin [00:10:41] Extra appropriate for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, you know, Simon, you've been a really important person for me and for so many progressive and post Mormons and ex Mormons and honestly for the church, because for the church to actually change the title page of the Book of Mormon. You know, few of us like Sam Young can say that he directly influenced, you know, the church policy in at least allowing it to be an option for parents to attend with children. A few of us maybe have helped the church, including you, help the church come out with the essays, but you and Thomas Murphy literally helped the church change the title page to the Book of Mormon. That's a pretty phenomenal accomplishment and super

Gerardo Sumano [00:11:31] recent too, because I would. When I was on my mission just in 2013-15, at least in Spanish, the title page of the Book of Mormon was still the Original one. So, yeah, the change was pretty recent.

Simon Southerton [00:11:45] It was, it's, it's obviously, it's not what I was going for. What I'm going for is for these guys to admit that this thing isn't history. And there's an awful lot of very smart Mormon academics around the world now that no, darn. Well, it's not history. Apart from the ones at BYU who are paid BYU salaries. They're paid by the Church to defend what the church leaders think is the truth. And it's high time that they admit. I mean, you've got guys like Greg Prince, who's a very highly regarded scholar, amazing man, still a member of the church. He knows it's not history. And you've got scholars like, you know, Brian Howglit and David Bockavoy, highly respected LDS scholars. But once they're free of the absolute thought control of the, of the sort of, of the Church, then they can, yeah, it's, they're, they're much more able to tell us what they really think. And there's, you know, I've had friends in BYU over the years who know the Book of Mormonism history, but they can't say it publicly anywhere at byu.

John Dehlin [00:13:00] Yeah. Or you lose your job. Well, Simon, we're so glad you're, you're joining us again on Mormon Stories. Gerardo, I'm really grateful that you, you made this happen. I do want to start by, start and end by having you plug a new book because it turns out the DNA science has changed a lot, advanced a lot. But like science usually advances. The advancing DNA science has not increased the Church's sort of terrain of truthfulness. It has even shrunk it more. And so what you've done, Simon, is you've written an update on your DNA research as it relates to the Book of Mormon and Native Americans and or what we used to refer to as Lamanites. Do you want to just talk about your book really quickly? We'll promise to have you back to talk about the DNA science another time, but go ahead and just. We'll. It will start and end by plugging this new book so that you can share it with as many people as possible.

The Sacred Curse: Updated Research Overview

Simon Southerton [00:14:01] Yeah, it's just an ebook that I show. It's about 100 pages, an ebook that I've got on my website. The key things that it's got, I guess is my original book was based virtually all of it on the mitochondrial DNA research. And at that time, I think around about 7,000 indigenous Americans had been tested and that's now up to about 16 or 17,000. But we now also have the, I think, well over a thousand indigenous Americans from indigenous Mayans, the Maya being the basically the tribal group that Mesoamerican apologists at BYU have focused almost all of their energy on for the last 40 years. And that shows absolutely no evidence of Israelite DNA among those thousand mitochondrial DNA lenses. So I review that and that includes ancient remains as well. But I think the biggest thing is that there's been a shift away from mitochondrial DNA, which is a. That's a small molecule, very easy to work with, with the older DNA technology that scientists had 40 years ago. Unbelievable. 40 years ago that they were doing this, but now they're doing whole genomes. So the mitochondrial genome is basically one locus in the genome, but the whole genome scientists are looking at thousands, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of loci or markers, DNA markers across the genome. These whole genome studies, there's just nowhere to hide. They can detect. They can distinguish genomic DNA from different tribes of American Indians. They can easily distinguish DNA from somebody from Cornwall, from. As opposed to somebody from Scotland or even from Cornwall to Devon. So if you're in ancestral DNA, they can. Those two counties are right next to each other in the uk, so. And they can distinguish. So they. The power of whole genome studies is just amazing. And what. One of the things that they've found is that all Native Americans carry, just like we do, a very small amount of neanderthal DNA at 1.4% on average and about 0.04% of Denisovan DNA. We've got other sneaky humans in our ancestry, and that DNA is just carried on forever. It's always going to be around about 0.04%. So scientists are desperately keen to look for any ancestors buried away there in the genomic DNA, because the databases of the data from one whole genome, which can be sequenced for basically 20 bucks, is just enormous. So if there was ancient Israelite DNA in American Indian populations, it would be impossible to miss, virtually impossible to miss. So this idea that it's sort of being wiped out or whatever is just nonsense. I mean, Neanderthals lived 40 to 50,000 years ago. Denisovans probably even a bit older than that. So

John Dehlin [00:17:43] is all this covered in your book the Sacred Curse?

Simon Southerton [00:17:45] Yeah, so that's covered in a lot more detail in, in the Sacred Curse, which it's, it's an ebook at this stage. I'm, I'm tempted to the next few years to possibly put it into a book.

John Dehlin [00:18:01] Okay. And so, listeners, you can get that@simonsotherton.com we'll make sure and put a link to it in the show notes. Simon's priced it at a very affordable $4.50 for the ebook. That's a super good bargain. Listen, everyone, Simon did not do this for the money. But you know, if we support the work of our historians and our scientists in the progressive and post Mormon community, that positively incentivizes them to do more good work or to update their work. So everyone, please make a note to yourself to buy Simon's book and to read it and to share it. And Alan asked a question. Have you listened to Dr. Hugo Perego discuss DNA in the Book of Mormon? And I'm just going to say, Simon, we want that to be a teaser for when we talk about that when we bring you back. Is that okay?

Simon Southerton [00:18:58] Yeah, I've certainly listened and read a lot of stuff that he's written, but he won't correspond with me. Of course, I've tried. He won't correspond with me. But Dr. Perego's work is primarily on mitochondrial DNA. He might have published something on genomic DNA, but I haven't heard him talk about the whole genome research. Yeah, but we can talk about that down the track.

John Dehlin [00:19:26] Okay, so we'll have you back to talk about your book in DNA. What we're going to talk about today, as I understand it, is how the LDS Church's sort of how Russell M. Nelson's massive temple building initiative is not actually, in fact, an indicator of Mormon Church growth, but instead, what I think your argument is that you're going to lay out for us today is how the temple building initiative is actually masking a decline in growth of the LDS Church. And if you want to, Simon, why don't you take us back to what made you want to start doing this sort of informal, I don't want to say amateurish research, but I know you're not a social scientist. Like, you're not a demographer, you're not a sociologist. So we'll just give those disclaimers up front. You'll be the first to admit that. But go ahead and tell us if you want to start by what made you want to start studying this yourself?

Church Growth in Historical Context

Simon Southerton [00:20:31] I think I've. Well, I joined the church in 1970, and that was a time in Australia where the church was booming. Like, they really had 5% growth. And we had lots of new members joining and not just single members. Lots of families were joining the church in the 70s. So it was a very exciting time. And we all. It's quite invigorating if you've been on a ward that's been split or you're anticipating being split. And so it was important to me as a member to feel that the church was growing. The leaders always gave the impression that it was growing. But I guess towards the end of my experience in the church, so this is even before I left the church in 98, I was starting to get. See things that didn't look all that good or didn't seem right. We lived in Canberra a few years before we left. And Canberra, I know the state president, he was a good friend. He was desperate for there to be a stake in Canberra. We only had small, I think, three struggling wards at the time. They created another struggling Ward 4. And then they. I think they fudged the numbers a little to make us look a little bigger than we were. And they eventually created a stake with, I think, five wards. So we're now down to four wards. So it's struggling. It's struggled ever since. But the thing that troubled me the most was I had a good friend in Canberra at the time who had looked at the statistics for years in Canberra, and he had determined that the church always performed better and the church grew better when the units were large and thriving. And I was always involved in the young men's program. And it really frustrated me that we had these wards split into smaller groups with small groups of young men. It always made sense to me to have big, vibrant young men's and young women's programs to maintain the active membership. And the church was. Sorry, go ahead.

Gerardo Sumano [00:22:57] Yeah, Simon's just. Just what your experience was. It just. I had the same experience in Mexico where my dad was in the state presidency for a long time. And, And I experienced as a youth, like similar stuff where there was obviously not enough members to justify the splitting of a word or a stake. And they were still doing it. What my dad, because I recently started, started talking to my dad about this, who actually has told me that now the church is backing away from that strategy. But according to him, originally the reason for this was to. Because bishops and stake presidents and bishoprics, all those are volunteer positions or callings. They wanted to make the load of. Of work lower or. Or just easier for bishops and state presidents. So they figured that if they had smaller words and smaller stakes, then the stake presidents and the bishops would be able to take care of the members a lot better than if they had bigger congregations. And that's my guess. Is that. That's one explanation. But I mean, there's always two sides to the story, you know, and. Because from one side. Yeah, I can see that. But on the other side, we also have a baseball baptisms happening in Mexico and in other countries and, and the brethren knowing about this and not doing enough to stopping it. So they kind of knew that these numbers. Well, in my mind, I feel like they, they knew that these numbers were inflated and, and they were using it in some way to kind of like. Yeah, like you're saying, make it look like the church was growing and, and getting bigger, faster.

Simon Southerton [00:24:59] Yeah, well, they, the consequence of that was that they closed a whole pile of units down in Mexico in the last few years. I don't know what year it was, but I think it was about three or four years ago. Yep. So. So that was the thing that really bugged me because I did care a lot about the young man. In fact, I didn't really care about elders, quorum or high priests. I was never in those quorums my entire life in the church, I was either in a bishopric or the young men's president. So I saw the impact of that. And just before I left the church as a bishop, they split. So when I was, when I was made a bishop, they had split the previous ward. So. And the, the war that I became the bishop of, we got half the membership, but we got about a quarter of the youth. And all of the youth of both wards went to the same high school. And yet I was pressured to divide. So we, so we had to divide a young men's program. And I was even put under enormous pressure as a bishop to, to create a separate seminary for kids that are going to the same darn high school. Enormous pressure in stake leadership meetings. And I looked around in my ward and I said, no, I haven't got a suitable seminary teacher. I'm not going to do it. And that was a clear instance. They don't give. They just don't care about the impact of their decisions on the most. The future generation of the church. So, so that was a thing that. So it was that really. So another thing, it was sort of connected to this obsession with the growth of the church. So those things were occupying my mind when I left the church. And so I think what's sort of occupied my mind mostly since is that is really I actually do rejoice in the decline or. Because the decline of the church, because I believe that the LDS Church does an awful lot of damage to families, even though the church is family centered about. I think it's about 80 to 85% of families in the church have active members in the family and inactive or people who don't share those beliefs anymore. So it's very, very common in families to have mixed faith families and there's just an awful lot of tension and division that comes into families and stress on relationships that occurs because of that. And I think that's what I'd like to see decline in the future. So, so yeah, so I think I've always had that interest in the growth of the church. And I guess the thing, another thing that did bother me obviously is that the church just doesn't, it, it always portrays this sort of growth image. And you ask most members today. Yeah, we're producing so many temples and you know, awards are being produced here and all over the place and all the members think that the church is growing but, but it's, it's just not, it just doesn't stand up. And so within a few years of leaving, I was starting to see that the data just wasn't reflecting reality.

How Active Is the LDS Membership Really?

John Dehlin [00:28:30] Simon, if it's, if it's okay for, for those who are kind of new to the learning about Mormonism or questioning the LDS church truth claims or don't really know much about the church statistics, it's been pretty well established now for at least the past 16 years that only about a third of the worldwide membership is even active and or self identifies as lds. You could probably say up to a full third of the 16 million-plus that the church claims cannot be found and don't even self identify as Mormons. If you go to places like Brazil or Chile or Mexico where they do a census and they compare the number of Mormons that the church claims to the, to the number of people who self identify through the census, you'll literally find millions of a gap of millions that makes up probably a full 4 million, you know, members of the church, you know, 4 or 5 million right off the bat. Then there's another half of, of the remaining, let's just say, you know, 10 million, another 5, 5 to 6 million just are inactive. So that leaves really only about in 2021, about 4ish million of the, of the alleged 16 million who are actually active believing or semi believing Mormons.

Simon Southerton [00:30:05] I'm at the point now where I think that's probably even at the high end.

John Dehlin [00:30:08] Yeah. And just to tell you a couple more quick what I hear and then Simon, I want you to correct me. My understanding is that the activity rates outside of like the United States and maybe Canada. In all the other countries around the world, it's probably around 10% or less activity rates. And then if you look at Western Europe, Eastern Europe, developed Asia and a lot of other countries, the church is actually shrinking or in decline. So if you go anywhere in Western Europe, like you said in Australia, in Japan, it's not that the, that the growth is in decline. It's that the actual church membership in many of these countries is shrinking. And the only thing in the United States that keeps the church from actually shrinking worldwide is a birth rate of 3 children on average per Mormon family in the United States. And it's that birth rate that just keeps the church at growing at a little bit less than 1%. But, but Simon, that's okay, let's just say this. That's what that was me filling in the listeners to my understanding and just kind of laying the playing field for what I understood prior to your research. Now why don't you sort of fill in what you would correct from what I said and then we'll jump into your presentation once, once you're.

Simon Southerton [00:31:33] Well, I think it'll probably come out during the presentation, so I think we might jump right in there. But before we just go on, I must say, I must confess to always being a little bit cynical when it came to church, the way the church presents things. I have a very vivid memory of sitting in the foyer waiting for a temple recommended view when I was a bishop. So here I'm in the foyer and there's church news articles sitting next to me and I pick them up and I have a flick through and I had to put it down. I just can't read a newspaper that every single article is just positive spin. Call me a cynic, but it's just after a while you just don't trust it. It's like North Korea, it's like Russian propaganda. It just tells one side of the story. So I guess I've always had a little bit of a critical bent, I guess, if you like. But so yes, so when I started looking into now, this has taken sort of about 15 years to get to the point where I am now, where I treat the way the church handles its growth with the same view as I treat as I view the way they handle truth data, the same way I view the way they talk about history. They hide the uncomfortable things. They're very consistent. They always hide things that are uncomfortable. So if we flick onto the first slide, I mean this slide really sort of portrays sort of the image I think that the members have. There's just a continual exponential increase in temple dedications. And this is completely in line with what the leaders of the church are telling the members. The church is growing constantly. And if you look at the total membership in the church, yes, it does. It grows every year. It's a very solid, steady increase. It's not no longer exponential, but it's.

John Dehlin [00:33:39] Simon, really quickly, most people listen to Mormon stories and don't even watch. So if you'll do our listeners a favor, for each slide that we show, will you describe what is on the slide so our listeners can kind of know what, what's on the slide?

Temple Building Boom and What It Signals

Simon Southerton [00:33:54] Yeah. So each bar there represents the number of dedicated and functioning temples at that particular decade. So the, so the there. So for example, in the 1980s, that second bar there includes the numbers from the year before. So it's cumulative. And the final bar, this is only after one, what, two years of this particular decade. That's the number of temples that are either functioning, dedicated or under construction, about to be dedicated or even or announced. So that's the number that's likely to be built in the 2000s. So the massive amount.

John Dehlin [00:34:42] So for our listeners, so the X axis is decades from the 70s to the 2000s. The y axis is number of temples, number of temples open in aggregate. So it starts at 16 in the 70s, it goes to 43 in the 80. It's kind of, it looks like exponential growth because it's 43 in the 80s, 68 in the 90s, 130 in the 2000s, 167 in the 2010s. And now you're up to 252 in the 2020s if you count both temples under in operation plus all the ones that have been announced.

Simon Southerton [00:35:19] That's right. All the ones on the books and ones that are announced.

John Dehlin [00:35:22] And it looks like exponential growth.

Simon Southerton [00:35:25] It's fair to assume that most of those announcements are going to be built within a decade. So that's probably an under representation of what's going to be completed. There's probably going to be, because I think a lot of these new temples almost pop up temples. Many will, many more will be announced, I would imagine, and they will. So that number might even be in 3 or 400 by the end of the maybe 300 by the end of the decade that are actually built and operating. So I mean, it's probably true that there's a, there's certainly a clear change in the what's required for a temple in terms of active Membership in the region. I think Belgium just had a temple announced and they've only got one stake in the, I think one or two stakes in Belgium. And there are other, quite a few other temples where even Mormon members that follow the church growth data are quite surprised by the.

John Dehlin [00:36:27] Like Rome, Italy. Most people are saying Italy has no business having a temple based on the number of members in Italy.

Simon Southerton [00:36:33] Well, no, the, the number of temple endowed members in Rome, I think would, I'd be very surprised if it's more than about 1500. Yeah. The Rome temple will be sustained by the American tourists sailing around the Mediterranean for both financially and people entering the temple. Because before you get on the boat or you get on the plane, you've got to have a temple recommend to go through the Rome temple. So you pay your tithing in America. Right. It's, I mean, look, this is being very cynical. Obviously the leaders and the members love temples and they believe they're very important. But you got to scratch your head, though, when you look at Rome. That's a pretty expensive and grand looking temple for a country like Italy, which has very, very few members. What are they? True. What's the point of it if not to tell the Catholics we're here, we're rich.

John Dehlin [00:37:35] Right.

Simon Southerton [00:37:36] It was just a. Yeah, interesting.

John Dehlin [00:37:42] Okay, so we've got this exponential growth in temples.

Simon Southerton [00:37:45] Yeah. But it doesn't. I started to see some, some of the earliest. If we move on to the next slide, I think this is a, this is really quite an interesting slide. It just. The dust doesn't match up with the census data. So these are countries that are either in the Pacific, floating in the Pacific, or on the edge of the Pacific. And I'm quite interested in all of them. And the first column shows the number of the percentage of that country's population that the church claims in its total in the membership for that country. When you. In the second column is the percentage of that country's population that on their census says that they are lds. So there's an exaggeration factor here. Okay. And it runs from, you know, 1.9% up to 8.6%. So 8, not percent, actually fold. So 8. If you look at the Marshall Islands, they're exaggerating the, the actual membership by Eightfold.

Membership Numbers by Region and Country

John Dehlin [00:39:04] And, and Simon, if I can, if I can just explain this slide really quickly to our listeners. Is that okay? So it lists.

Simon Southerton [00:39:13] You'll do a better job than me, John, I'm sure.

John Dehlin [00:39:14] No, no, no, no. I, it's just because honestly, it helps me make sense of what I'm seeing too. So the slide says phantom Pacific membership. And then it's got a bunch of countries like Tonga, Samoa, American Samoa, Cook Islands, Marshall Islands, Chile, New Zealand and Australia. It's got the, the percentage that the Mormon church claims is LDS within the country. Right. So Tonga, you know, the Mormon church claims that Tonga is 64 Mormon. The Mormon Church claims that Samoa is 40 Mormon, that the Cook Islands is 20% Mormon, that that Chile is 3.3% Mormon, that New Zealand is 2.4% Mormon. This is the, the thing that I said before, that Australia is 0.6% Mormon. That's based on the church's statistics. Yeah, yeah, but we all know that those statistics are a fraction of the truth and what the censuses show. And this. Simon, you're giving data to what I said that there's an exaggeration factor of anywhere between sort of two, a multiple of two in Nue. I've never heard of Nue, but it's basically the church is half the, the, the actual Mormon population in Niue is about half what the church claims. And that's the most generous, you know, the least deceptive of all the numbers. What you're saying is in a place like the Marshall Islands, the church is exaggerating at a factor of almost 900% over claiming the, the Mormon representation. And you know, in places like Australia, the church is claiming like Australia, New Zealand, Chile, you know, the church is claiming twice the actual membership that that actually self identifies. Am I reading that chart right? Yeah, Simon. And then places like American Samoa, it's. The church is claiming three times the actual number, Tonga almost four times, Cook Islands four and a half times and then Marshall Islands eight times. So in other words, the church is over claiming its membership in the Pacific islands somewhere between 200% and 800%. What's actually true?

Simon Southerton [00:41:34] Well, let me talk about Tonga. A Tonga is a fascinating case because in Tonga almost everyone goes to church. Okay. It's a very, very united. They just, they're very, they're all Christians pretty much. And the vast majority of them attend church. So the church is claiming that 64% and it grows by about 1 or 2% a year. Claiming 64% of Tongans are LDS. But on the census only is it. I can't see the slide, but I think it's 16% or 18. Okay. It's a little small for me to see, but anyway the, so it's a, so it's not a matter of these people the 64,000, you know, so sorry, the 64%, there's just a whole lot of them are inactive. There's an awful lot of them that are going to another church. So there's about 44,000, because Tonga's population is around about 100,000. So there's about 44,000 people that the church is counting who on the census say they go to another church. So you've just got their name on a record sheet and means absolutely nothing because they're sitting in another church, they attend, and so they actively attend another church. Thirty years ago that was grounds for excommunication, but now they count them. Now Tonga is in the absurd situation where the church keeps counting this way because they're also including anyone that's. And they'll count these people until they're 110. That's when they take them off the records that they could well end up with 110% of the Tongan population being LDS within, you know, 15 or 20 years time because of the way they count. This is completely absurd. There are no other, as far as I know, there aren't any other churches that count their act, their membership the same way. Why not tell the world how many people are attending? Because attendance is a measure of the strength of a church, not phantom figures like this, which is just complete nonsense. So. But the other thing to remember, in most countries outside of Tonga, like In Tonga, those 18,000 that say they are attending on the census probably are attending because everyone goes to church in Tonga. So you divide the number of congregations in Tonga, which is about 170, by. Sorry, if you divide that by the number of congregations, it works out as about 110 per congregation. And that seems pretty much about right. So that's 18,000 that are attending, but not in Australia and many other countries, many of those people who say they are LDs on the census are saying they're LDs in the same way that many, many Catholics say they are Catholics on the census and they never step foot in a Catholic church in their entire life. So it's a. The actual, the numbers of people in most countries, Tonga is, I think, an outlier here and probably Samoa. But in many of those countries, if somebody is saying they are LDs on the census, that does not mean they're attending the LDS church. And I suspect in Australia that probably half and probably even less than half of those that say they are LDs on the census are actually attending.

John Dehlin [00:45:17] So, Simon, let me really quickly, Simon, for our listeners who aren't, who have never been lds, there's just A couple things that I want to reiterate or make really clear again. One is that the Mormon church today claims 16 million members. But something the church has never been willing to do is actually produce, as Simon mentioned, active numbers or statistics on active attending membership. And this is obvious for those who have been kind of thinking about this for a while. But just for those who Simon, we have a lot of people who have never been LDS who watch the podcast. So yeah, the Mormon Church secretly, deeply, ferociously guards. It tracks its activity rates every week, but it ferociously guards the aggregated summaries of those statistics and even in the past few years has worked hard to obscure the numbers even more. And I'm not going to steal your thunder on that, Simon. So I'm not going to say how yet.

Simon Southerton [00:46:21] Presentation. It's been a nice leak, but just so people know.

John Dehlin [00:46:27] Yeah. That the Mormon Church. And I just say the reason for this part of the reason is when I was growing up in the Mormon Church, there was this thing called scripture mastery where you had to memorize these scriptures every year. And one of the scriptures that you memorized in the Old Testament year was Daniel 2, 44 and 45. And what it basically said is that the kingdom of God was cut forth from the mountain like a stone cut out of the mountain without hands. And in Daniel's dream the stone rolls forth and consumes all nations. And so there was this real push between the 60s and the 90s that the Mormon Church was going to become the biggest church in the world at some point. But it was certainly said in the 80s and 90s that the Mormon Church was among the fastest growing churches in the world. And so that set the Mormon membership with this expectation that was even rooted in prophetic utterances was that the church. Part of the, part of the evidence that the Mormon Church was true was that it was going to keep growing and growing. And wasn't it Rodney Stark that predicted tens or hundreds of millions of Mormons by now? And all those predictions have eroded because it turns out that either Mormonism is sustainable and in. Throughout the world and. Or that the missionary program is just bankrupt in terms of being able to produce long term sustainable, committed, devout membership. So Simon, that's just me giving kind of our non LDS listenership a tiny bit of context and background. Is there anything else you want to add to that or, or.

Gerardo Sumano [00:48:09] Gerardo, I just wanted to mention, and correct me if I'm wrong, I just wanted to put it on, on perspective with that table that Simon was showing us. So would it be correct to say that for. For example, in Mar. In the Marshall Islands, for every eight members that the church is claiming, only one of them actually identifies as LDS or like in Tonga. For every. For every. For. For. For every. So, so is that correct for like, it just correct me if I'm wrong.

Simon Southerton [00:48:50] No, it. So essentially it means that for every eight Marshall Islanders, I think Marshall Lines is a fairly small place. But for every eight Marshall Islanders the church is claiming.

Gerardo Sumano [00:49:02] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [00:49:03] There's only one that's really a lds. Yeah, yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [00:49:08] Is the same almost like between three and four that the church is claiming only one is actually. Actually lds.

Simon Southerton [00:49:14] Yeah. Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [00:49:15] That's a good. I think I just wanted to add that because it's a way. A good way to put it into perspective. And this is people that on the census said they were LDs. That doesn't mean that they were active.

Simon Southerton [00:49:27] That's right. Well, in Tonga. Tonga is the unusual one there because I think they are. Okay. Because it's. Everyone goes to religion in Tonga is a. It's the culture. It's part of the culture. So they've adopted a little bit like the. What do they call them? The cargo cults. You know, the cargo cults in the Pacific. But yeah, they, they adopt Mormonism is. Fits very nicely with their culture. And it's. It's sort of. It's. I mean, it's obviously done very well. I mean, 18% of the population's nothing to sneeze at. Yeah, but. But yeah, they, they. They're very, very, very devout, very religious. I think in terms of Australia, I think because we have a large Samoan and Tongan population in Australia, I don't think the activity rate would be. Would be over 90% or close to 100% as it is in Tonga. I suspect it's probably slight declining slightly. Right. Because of the evil influence of our secular culture.

John Dehlin [00:50:42] Yes.

Simon Southerton [00:50:44] Yeah. Big tongue in cheek there. So let's move. This is a graph that I've been sort of updating every three or four years. So I've been working on this for a while. So it's really quite clear that not long after the turn of the century that things started to go south for the church. But before I talk about that, because the church doesn't publish its attendance like most other churches on the planet and hides that data. It hides that data because it's not very good. People who track the growth of the church have to use some other surrogates. And the best surrogate that we have at the moment is the number of congregations. So the growth in congregations, which is essentially the number of people are sitting in pews on Sundays, it's linked to that. That's our best measure. It's not perfect. There'll be some errors with it, but it's all we've got. And if you track the growth in congregations, there are some really problematic trends. So if you look at that graph,

John Dehlin [00:51:49] do you want to describe the graph or do you want me to.

Simon Southerton [00:51:51] Yes, on the left axis. So the Y axis is the number of. That's the total number of church units in a particular country. The colored lines are all the countries on the right there. And on the x axis is the year. And I've just indicated the year 2000 as a fairly. As an interesting point. It is quite fascinating, actually. The year 2000 does seem to be a bit of a tipping point for the church. So you can see that before 2000, there was fairly steady increases in the populations of most in the lds. Sorry, in the number of units congregations in those countries. But for some of those countries, there's clearly been a significant decline. South Korea, about. There's been a 40% decline in the number of congregations from 1999 to the current day. But the UK is a fairly steady decline, probably about 10 or 15%. But New Zealand, Australia are fairly flat. Japan, I think about 20% decline in congregations. But you'll notice there's one country with a very, very different trend, and that's Nigeria. So Nigeria has gone from under 200 congregations basically around about 20 years ago or 30 years ago, to over 600, approaching 700 congregations. So that's exponential growth for you there. So this clearly showed that the church was struggling in many developed countries around the world. If you move on to the.

John Dehlin [00:53:39] And Simon, if I can just add just a tiny bit of commentary there.

Simon Southerton [00:53:42] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:53:43] Oh, yeah. Just to reiterate what you just told everybody, this shows that the UK since 2000 has been declining in wards and branches and stakes. You know, Japan has been declining in wards, branches and stakes. South Korea, you know,

Simon Southerton [00:54:03] the unit data. So any branches and wards. Most of those have had stakes to close as well.

John Dehlin [00:54:11] Honestly, I'm surprised to see that Australia and New Zealand are slightly ticking up. But the other thing that this doesn't really.

Simon Southerton [00:54:20] I can actually, I can explain why that's the case.

John Dehlin [00:54:23] Okay, that's coming.

Simon Southerton [00:54:25] Okay, well, I'll explain now. I think be the best time.

John Dehlin [00:54:29] Okay.

Simon Southerton [00:54:29] Australia has about 10% of our congregations are language units. So Samoan and Tongan units. We have a very high Polynesian population in the church in Australia. So probably 13 to 14% of our units are independent language units. But also many of the English speaking wards are filled with Polynesians as well. So I know somebody that moved to a ward a couple a year or so ago and they moved into a ward that was an English speaking ward. But 80% of the people were Polynesians. So and most wards in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne would have Samoan and Tongan members. So New Zealand is even higher. It's a much higher proportion. So that I think is masking what's going on in the non sort of the European populations in Australia and New Zealand. I've got no doubt that Australia, the broader Australian membership of the church is declining significantly. In Australia we've got a post Mormon group and many, many people from Adelaide are in the group, particularly heathen city Adelaide and same in Perth. So the church is really struggling in parts of the country where there isn't a strong Polynesian presence. So that explains what's going on in Australia and New Zealand.

John Dehlin [00:56:07] And when there are baptisms in Western or Eastern Europe, it's almost always immigrants into those countries who are super poor or lower SES because they're immigrants. And that's who so often when the missionaries, Mormon missionaries, have baptisms in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, developed Asia, even in the United States, oftentimes it's not with the native, higher ses, more educated populations, it's with the poor. And of course the church missionaries process that as the poor are humble and that's why. But it really is a matter of once you have a good education, once you are doing well with the community and with a family and with a job and with a good socioeconomic status, then you don't, then the church's value proposition is a lot less high. It's not that people who reject Mormonism are more prideful. It's that usually the super lowest SES are just so needy in terms of their needs that joining a, a church community of any type is going to help increase their, their socioeconomic status by just having the bishop storehouse or some additional friends or some people to look after you. And then of course we know the retention rates there.

Gerardo Sumano [00:57:33] Well, here in West Valley they're offering like immigration services at church buildings and stuff for, for immigrants.

John Dehlin [00:57:40] Language. Right, language. You know, English is a second language. Teaching. Yeah, right. A lot of missionaries these days are teaching, offering immigration services or teaching English as a way to sort of like a baseball, a modern baseball baptism program to try and just provide something to convince People to get baptized.

Simon Southerton [00:57:59] Well, I don't think that's the case in Australia and New Zealand. I think because you know somebody who's a Mormon in Tonga and they moved to Australia, I think that's where, I think it's immigration where we get it rather than conversion in Australia. I mean you might get the, you know, a few that, that they would join in because they've got a good community in Australia. I'd be surprised if they have many converting because I would imagine people that

Gerardo Sumano [00:58:33] were already Mormons from other countries, most

Simon Southerton [00:58:35] of them would be already Mormon and when they come to Australia and New Zealand.

John Dehlin [00:58:39] Got it.

Simon Southerton [00:58:40] So New Zealand, I think it's around about. Might be as high as 20% of their congregations are language units.

John Dehlin [00:58:47] A couple quick comments. We have Matt McFarland saying hello from Adelaide, the city of heathens.

Simon Southerton [00:58:53] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:58:54] And then we have Brendan saying the Samoan speaking ward in Sydney used to have 400 plus. Each Sunday at sacrament meeting they closed that unit and redistributed the members across English speaking wards. Those English wards were probably about to collapse if they didn't. So this is fun to have people from across the United States sharing or across the world sharing their experiences. Ipolani says we also have an ex Mormon Polynesian group here in the United States. Some of them are global. So yes, if anybody wants to, you know, share their experiences from their local wards, congregation stakes or districts. We also have James saying hello from sunny Brisbane. Okay, Simon, you wanted to go to the next slide, is that right?

Trends Showing Decline in Church Membership

Simon Southerton [00:59:46] Yeah, let's just go on to the next slide.

John Dehlin [00:59:48] Okay, describe.

Simon Southerton [00:59:49] This is the slide I shared recently in my little hobby horse post on Facebook. And yeah, it shows, really around about the turn of the century, there was just a. It's like the church changed gears. It was creating in the vicinity of 900 units, so wards and branches every year on balance. So that that number is the sum total of the ones that are created and closed. So that's the, the net growth of you on the Y axis and the year on the.

John Dehlin [01:00:31] So between 95 and 98, the church was averaging around 900 wards or branches per year. Yeah, net new, right?

Simon Southerton [01:00:42] Yeah, net new. And you know, the number of units is roughly 30,000. So that reflects a growth of about 3%. And then it just fell off a cliff. Now obviously there's not any one thing that happens in a particular. Well, yeah, it's. People suddenly didn't decide, okay, we're not going to go to church in one year and it all fell off a cliff. There's obviously something that's dramatically changed there, and the next slide will show that, but we'll explain why that happened. But the point I want to make is that since basically the year 2000, so about 1999 onwards, the average growth in units, if you average all of those bars, it's about 0.08% growth in church units, or around 200.

John Dehlin [01:01:35] What, 250 per year.

Simon Southerton [01:01:37] 250 per year. But in 2018 is a very critical year. They came very close to reporting negative growth. The Church has West Africa to thank for that because there's massive growth in West Africa that year, otherwise they would have reported a decline in units. But what's interesting is that that 0.8% average growth in units is actually less than the global population growth rate, which is about 1.1%. So the church is actually declining looks on the basis of this data to be declining as a proportion of the world's population. So, yeah, while there may be more Mormons attending each year, there are even, you know, they're still. They're just declining as a percentage of the global population and.

John Dehlin [01:02:35] Oh, good. Is it okay if I say something really quick, Simon?

Simon Southerton [01:02:38] Sure, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:02:38] For those who have been studying, just reported a total membership, but then subtracting out, you know, deaths and, you know, infant baptisms, you know, and trying to calculate and estimate resignations, etc. All of the estimates that I've seen put the Church's growth rate at less than 1% once. The people that kind of know stats and no demographics and no statistics. So that kind of using branches and wards as a proxy for actual growth or shrinkage really does seem to map well on the other ways of analyzing the Church's declining growth rate. So the Church really is, I think, by pretty much all estimates, growing at less than 1% a year at this point, which, as you say, is less than the global, global growth rate. And everyone I've ever talked to, and we'll get probably get to this in future slides, predict that within a certain amount of decades, the Church will literally be in real decline. And the other thing I want to say is I, and I think you'll probably talk about this as well, you alluded to it. If the Church had not done a massive investment in Africa those, those last four or five years, I think we would have seen, yeah, a real, actual negative, you know, a decline. Not just a slowing of growth, but an actual decline. The Church sort of saw the writing on the wall demographically five or ten years ago and said, we gotta Ramp up Africa or the membership is going to see statistically that the church is actually in decline, not just flatlined. Tell me if you think that's wrong, what I just said, Simon.

Simon Southerton [01:04:34] No, I think that's right. And the next slide actually shows that clearly. But before we go on to the next slide, I just want to be. To be. I guess there's one potential criticism of using that raw data in that way is that hidden in the data is the. That is not counted. There is the creation of wards from branches. Okay. And the creation of branches from wards, okay. So there, there is generally more heading in the direction of branches towards. So that is a reflection of some sort of growth. But it probably wouldn't make much difference to the numbers, the overall numbers. It might move 0.8.9. But that's, that is a criticism of using that data. But what can you do? We wouldn't have to do this if the Church told us the truth. So, yeah, this is, this is. Mormons have to. Devout Mormons have to go through this stupid exercise. Even academics at BYU are speculating about what the true attendance is. They can't even get the data out of the church. So it's just crazy. But if you switch onto the next slide.

John Dehlin [01:05:45] Yeah, that's. That's actually a huge condemning thing that you, You've made made subtle references to. The Mormon Church absolutely has the activity rates and they track it weekly and they collect that information weekly. So the fact that the Church chooses not to share that information and never has, as far as we know, or at least not prior, you know, not since the 1960s, it is sort of a condemnation because if, if the church was growing in leaps and bounds, it would, and it was 100% activity rate, they would certainly sort of trumpet that from the rooftops. Correct.

Simon Southerton [01:06:22] Actually, your comment there. Just maybe think of another point. So we're going to talk about some actual attendance data in the uk and even that attendance data is optimistic because somebody commented it's really interesting to read at the end of the talk. I've got some threads, some links to some Facebook threads, and a Reddit thread on my Hobby Horse post. And there's some brilliant comments in there. And one of the commenters observed that. And this reminded me of how attendance is counted. It's once a month. So one, the bishops pick one, one sacrament reading a month to count the attendance. And the actual. The attendance of the ward determines the budget that is given to each ward. So there's a little bit of an incentive for a bishop not to report the lowest week in the month, but to record the highest week in the month. And they very frequently pick this far Sunday when lots of family and friends, some of them who may not be members of the church, are in attendance in the congregation and they get counted, so they pick the top Sunday. And in fact, somebody who saw the UK data that we'll talk about a bit later on, he observed from his state that yes, he thought the numbers, the actual attendance numbers were inflated by about 10%. So it could even be worse than what it is because they're picking Sundays when there is more people attending than ordinarily would. If we move on to the next slide, the next slide shows very clearly why we had that big drop off the cliff in 1998, I think, to 1999. And you can see that. So what this graph shows is the net congregation growth divided up into the countries, sorry, just the different global regions, okay, Asia, Africa, Europe, so on. And the color. And you can see very clearly after the year 1998, previously there was that light blue bar which was South American congregation growth. There was a massive closure. So any long, any bar that goes underneath that long, the x axis, any bar that goes underneath reflects the closure of many units and branches or woods and branches. So you can see for about four years after 19, an awful lot. I think it was about 850 congregations were closed primarily in Chile. I think about 350 in Chile, another 250 in Peru, 100 or so in, in Brazil. So it was mostly in Peru and Chile, but a very large number. So Jeffrey Holland went down there as a, as an apostle at the time and oversaw the closure of many of those units. So that explains that sudden drop. But if you look at the other.

Why the Church Stopped Reporting Growth Data

John Dehlin [01:09:32] Can I just speak to that really briefly just because we cover that in Mormon stories. And I actually talked to Elder Holland about this myself because I, I had served in a mission in Guatemala where they were baptizing up to 7, 750 people a month. Some companionships were baptizing up to 40 people a month. And Chile Vinha del Mar had had a, had months where they were baptizing over a thousand a month. And other Chilean missions too. These were all by and large fraudulent baptisms. And you know, Latin America and even the Philippines had bonanza decades where missionaries were just padding the, the baptismal records with all these fraudulent or super low quality baptisms. And Elder Holland confirmed to me he was sent to Chile for something like three years. And he told me personally that he closed or over 30 stakes in Chile alone to try and correct for all these stakes that were created based on fraudulent numbers. And I believe, Simon, you can tell me if I'm wrong, that the Philippines sits in the Asia region. I also know that Elder Oaks was assigned to the Philippines around that same time. And I'm guessing that, that those red bars in 2003 and 2004 were Elder Oaks going to the Philippines and closing several stakes in the Philippines. Is that, is that possible, Simon?

Simon Southerton [01:11:01] Yeah, that's almost certainly. That's what's going on. If you, I can't actually see the slide, but if you flick the slide up.

John Dehlin [01:11:09] Okay, there you go.

Simon Southerton [01:11:10] Yeah. I can't have three things open them on my, on my laptop at once. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if that's what's going there on there. But you know, if you look at things like Europe, Europe, you know, fairly steady growth up until about. So something's clearly going on around the turn of the century because Europe is virtually a negative all the way. It's that little orange bar there. It's a negative almost all the way through to the current day. This is a, the other, of course, fascinating thing this graph shows is the huge increase in Africa in the last five or six also probably about 10 years. And you can see in 2018, that's when they had the first decline in units in North America and it was only Africa that saved the church.

Gerardo Sumano [01:12:08] And it's my.

Simon Southerton [01:12:09] How ironic as, as far as I

Gerardo Sumano [01:12:12] understand it, even though they're closing units, they're not removing the membership records. So they're closing units and the membership records are still going to be passed to the new merch word. So they are, they still get to claim 16 million members while they're closing and closing and closing units. So that's just an important thing thing to, to know too.

John Dehlin [01:12:40] And I think I, as I understand it, Simon, what, What happened around 2016, 2017 and 18 is they, they realized that there were all these war. Well, I think there was this initiative that the church realized that all these wards outside of Utah were thinning and thinning and thinning. And if they didn't have a robust big ward with lots of youth, then the youth wouldn't come to church because the youth program would be so terrible. But they didn't want to show long term decline. And so what they did is just in a couple years we'll take the hit in the United States. We'll collapse a bunch of wards and branches and stakes and just take the hit over a couple years and then hopefully we won't show long term decline in the United States as well. And so that's what they did thinking that if they collapsed all these wards and branches and stakes, then the youth programs would have a lot of youth which would then help keep youth be active. But really what that really shows is just this long term attrition. And the only thing that was keeping the church alive in the United States, as we've mentioned, is the birth rate amongst the active and particularly amongst the active in Utah and Idaho and Arizona. That's my understanding, Simon, and you can again correct me if any of that doesn't sound right to you.

Simon Southerton [01:14:05] Certainly having just such a large population, you know, half the church in North America, the natural growth is a much higher proportion of the growth. So.

John Dehlin [01:14:19] And the only other thing I'll say is what's keeping those bars higher from 2010 on is the blue, it's the African. But we all know that, that Africa growth is going to be super low retention growth just like it was in Asia and Latin America prior to the correction. So we can all, yes, that the large growth in Africa is sort of just padding the numbers. There'll be some real growth in Africa, but what we can just all anticipate, 5, 10, 20 years down the road is some massive correction in units in Africa. When we realized that that was just a thousands of branches created with all these missionaries we sent there. But, but how much actual real growth and retention the church is able to win in Africa is going to be the question. And I'm anticipating it's going to follow the trend of Latin America you'd expect.

Simon Southerton [01:15:16] So I know that Christianity as a whole I think is just booming in Nigeria and I think they're very religious, a little bit like Tongans. So it's a very high proportion of the population are religious. So if it's booming, they're trying to, they've got a lot of competitors. It's a very competitive marketplace. So it just remains to be seen what's going to happen there. They do speak English, all well spoken. So they, they will have access. And, and one, one thing that's happening right now is a very dramatic increase in access to the Internet. So they'll be connected up to the world. So there's no, no language barrier in terms of connecting up with an ex Mormon community and finding out what the real history of the church is. But you know, it might make no difference. The Internet may make no difference. It might just be that it's Just super attractive to be in a, an American religion. But I just can't imagine it's going to be sustained for the next 10 or 15 or 20 years.

John Dehlin [01:16:27] Right,

Simon Southerton [01:16:29] so we move on to the next slide. This is 2018 was a really interesting year. As we saw in the previous graphs, the church came extremely close to closing, to recording a negative increase in the net number of congregations. So the Church made a lot of, took a lot of actions in 2018 that in my view were a direct response to that sort of problem. We know that they don't want to record negative things. So the first thing that they did in 2018 was that an April conference, they stopped publishing the statistical report. So now the statistical report that we have we had in 20 before 2018. So in 2017 was a fairly bare bones statistical report. The Church used to republish reams of data in the statistical report. You would remember, I don't know if you'd remember this John, but back, back when I was a kid there was a number of deacons and teachers and high priests and elders.

John Dehlin [01:17:41] Wasn't it called the Mormon Almanac?

Simon Southerton [01:17:43] It was called, yeah, but a lot of this was published in the Ensign. In the, in the, in General Conference.

John Dehlin [01:17:52] Well, just yeah, to put up for, for the non Mormons out there, just to put a fine point on this. So the Mormon Church has two global conferences a year, one in the spring and one in the fall. And every single year that I had been alive for like 45 plus years, in the spring session of General Conference the church would boast its new membership. And every year there would always be this huge buzz of oh my gosh, we've added another 500,000. Oh, we've added another million. Isn't the church amazing? Isn't the church true? And that for my whole childhood, the 70s and 80s and 90s, it was like this massively faith affirming moment every year to hear the annual spring general membership statistics numbers be announced and then as soon, and I'm going to let you finish this sentence Simon, as soon as the church started experiencing real significant traumatic decline in growth. Simon Southerton, tell our never Mormon listeners what the Church decided to do. Hide it, to stop reporting for decades. Right?

Simon Southerton [01:19:08] Yeah. They do what they always do. They go back to, you know, the way they, I mean it's just exactly the same with their history and this got them into. I mean they're not evil people, they're not bad people. They're just obsessed with everything being positive. But not everything's positive in the world. Most other churches, they confront the problems. If you go to a Anglican church or a Catholic church and you talk to people, they, they just confront problems that they're facing. They talk about them and. But no, the church hides its history thing. It's got in the habit of hiding the history. A few very influential general authorities in the past. I don't know, I suspect, I suspect Boyd K. Packer was one of them. Yeah, we don't. That's not very inspiring, that bit of truth. So let's not talk about that. All those academics, they're evil because they talk. Some truths aren't very helpful and attendance data is not very helpful data if you're trying to portray the image of the church is just, you know, growing in leaps and bounds. So the report went onto the, the church's website.

John Dehlin [01:20:24] What were you saying really quick?

Gerardo Sumano [01:20:25] Just that that excitement of the statistical growth like announcing conference now that has been replaced with temple. The amount of people are going to be announced in the next General Conference.

John Dehlin [01:20:37] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [01:20:37] Temple growth is bears. Is completely unrelated to.

John Dehlin [01:20:41] Well, it shows how much money you have. That's all it shows.

Simon Southerton [01:20:45] Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:20:46] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [01:20:47] Yeah. And the, an interesting fact I think is that each year the surplus money the church has from tithing, it's about a billion dollars each year. That that money can cover the cost of all the temples, no problem at all.

John Dehlin [01:21:04] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [01:21:05] So it's just. Just obscene amounts of money. I've made some very scary calculations. I don't know if you want to talk. We won't talk about it today, but.

John Dehlin [01:21:15] No, anything you want to talk about, Simon? This is great.

Simon Southerton [01:21:18] No, we'll talk about another time. I think the amount of income generating that's going on in the Mormon Church is scary. It's.

John Dehlin [01:21:25] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [01:21:25] It's in the vicinity of $30 billion a year.

John Dehlin [01:21:28] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [01:21:30] And if you start dividing that by the number of active members, that's an awful lot of money coming in per active member. They could actually pay people to come to church and this church could still go on for eternity. Anyway, that's, that's a bit of a distraction, but let's get back to. So the first thing was to get rid of the report from General Conference. But the more interesting thing I think was that because I was tracking some of these websites, the data that, you know, true believing Mormons were publishing on these websites excitedly every week. All the branch and all the branches that were created and awards were created and stakes were created and districts and missions and stuff. Some of these websites, I think Kamora.com is one of them. But all of a sudden they stopped reporting it. And I found out that they all received a letter from the church's lawyers requesting that they no longer publish regular updates on the number of wards and branches. No wonder why they do that. I mean, it's just blatant. It's just blatant. We don't like the data, so hide it, don't publish it. But thankfully it spurred a guy who runs the Fuller Consideration website. I won't say his name because I don't think he's comfortable with saying his name. But he then started publishing it every day. So. And I take my hat off to him. He's amazing guy. He publishes it more frequently than the church than the devout Mormons were publishing. So his site is fascinating to. And I use it all the time just to track what's going on. So you get a daily update on. And we can. I think the next slide might show the sort of data the. Oh, no, we'll go on to that. We'll go on to that in a moment. We'll show his slide. But yeah, so the net result of the action was that more information now comes out on this other website. But I think the most critical things that happened were some significant changes to churches to church meetings. So the big one was that they shortened church to two hours and then they restructured how things happen. So one week Sunday school, you know, another week is young women's, that sort of thing. That was critical because that allowed for people to hold callings, say in Sunday school and in young women. So you've got really active people who are doing most of the work in the ward can do. Can work in separate duplicate callings if you like. So that's an important thing. But it also reduced the workload for just by having one hour less of church. So you had less things that needed to be done. So that took a bit of pressure off wards in terms of manning the ward, the number of people that have to do things. And as you would know from your experience in the church, 20% of people do 80% of the work. That's I think, common throughout the church. But the most critical thing that they did was to basically almost halved the priesthood leadership positions in the ward. So the high priest group and the elders quorum were merged into one group and the young men and bishoprics were merged. So in a large award, they can call extra men to serve as advisors in young men's. But in smaller units, no, no young men's leadership anymore. So this saved Six to eight priesthood callings, which is a significant number if you're a small unit. So the net effect of those Sunday meeting changes and the priesthood reduction in priesthood leadership positions. And they've also opened up a couple of callings, I think, to women. Now I can't off the top of my head remember what they were apart from washing the towels and witnessing baptisms. I can't remember what they do. Anyway, the net effect of that was that you could, sorry, the, the one

Gerardo Sumano [01:25:47] for women to be witnesses in the.

Simon Southerton [01:25:51] Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano [01:25:52] Temple baptisms that I, I thought that was pretty important back when I, I was a youth. I remember we, we would schedule every, I think it was every month or every couple months where our word would go and do baptisms for death. And then sometimes we had to cancel because there was not enough priesthood holders from our world that were willing to go that day at that time for the youth to do baptisms. There was always more women than, than priesthood holders. So there were a few times where we had to cancel it and not. And, and even the, the youth would all congregate at the, at the church building to all drive to the temple and, and it would have to get canceled just because there was not enough.

Simon Southerton [01:26:41] Yeah, so that's a, that's an interesting change. But I think even the baptisms for missionaries that the missionaries do in the unit, I think they can be witnessed by one as well. I mean, it's a, it doesn't make a massive difference to the workload of a church unit, but it's, but the overall changes in reducing number of callings essentially mean you can be a smaller unit and still survive. So you could, you know, you could be down. I know Peter Bleakley in the uk, quite a prominent member who just got, got the boot. He attends a unit. I think we're down to about 40 people. They don't even have any youth. But it just means that a tiny branch can function and linger on them. And so the church doesn't have to close as many units. So I think if you show them the next slide.

John Dehlin [01:27:35] Okay, next slide. And yeah, I just, we all thought, oh, how, you know, Elder, you know, President Nelson is shortening from three to two because he, you know, some type of revelation. But it's pretty clear that even at the, even at the collapsing of units across the globe, they just weren't having enough leadership and enough adult activity rates to staff all the calling positions. I just think that's a brilliant point you're making that if people want to know why they went from three to two hours. It's so that the bishops and. And so the members wouldn't be so stretched so thin serving in so many different callings because they just didn't have the membership to staff the callings that the church had been structured around. That's just a brilliant point. And I hadn't really.

Simon Southerton [01:28:29] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:28:30] Fully understood that.

Simon Southerton [01:28:32] I'm not claiming that they. This was the only motivation. Obviously they had other, you know, they wanted to. To help take the burden away from families. You know, that's what they claim with Sunday.

Gerardo Sumano [01:28:45] Easier to be Mormon.

Simon Southerton [01:28:46] Yeah, but they were, you know, they would. There was a lot of song and dance at the time among members. How. You know, it's very inspired that people were doing home church. And then the pandemic came and it was a revelation because of the pandemic, because then people then knew how to have church at home. Oh yeah. But certainly a real benefit was that they could. You could. Church could function with few, much fewer staff. So this is sort of more in line, what we're talking about a moment ago, the Fuller Consideration website, if people want to hop on. That is fascinating. It's sort of that, that graphic there sort of illustrates the problem the church is facing and where. Where the growth is. You can sort of see it's mixed. So any, any red thing is negative. So it's closed branch or unit or stake. Anything green is. Is growth. And you can see North America mixed. South America not a lot happening. Africa booming. Europe mostly red and mixed over in Europe. And sorry, it's already in Australia and New Zealand and quite a lot of negative in Japan, Taiwan, Korea and a positive. Lot of positive in the Philippines. So that's a really. But this, this website, if you go to it, it's got just piles of data. You can spend a couple of hours scrounging around.

Third-Party Estimates of LDS Activity Rates

John Dehlin [01:30:18] So you go to Fuller Consideration.com and the view you're looking at here is showing in.

Simon Southerton [01:30:28] And you can expand that out and look at particular areas, but then you can. They've got all of the data listed in. In table. So it has the open wards, open branches and you can see where that branch or ward was. Is located on. In the world. So they've got all of the country data there. So the data here is. Some may have noticed on the previous slide there was a black box for 2020. Ordinarily by now the church would have published the data for 2020, but the church hasn't published that for some reason. But the Fuller Consideration website has been tracking the weekly data so it's. It's got the 2020 data on it.

John Dehlin [01:31:15] So lots of red in the United States and Mexico and in some parts of South America. Lots of red in Europe in Scandinavia, Western Europe, lots of red in Japan and Southeast Asia. And then lots of green, basically, in. In. I mean, weirdly, along the Atlantic coast in the United States, you're seeing some green. I'm guessing that's shenanigans. You're seeing some green in South America, but overwhelmingly, the green that you see is in Africa, you know, sub Saharan Africa, basically.

Simon Southerton [01:31:52] Yeah. Western. Western Africa is the most.

John Dehlin [01:31:55] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [01:31:56] So do they call it the whole. No, that's the other side, the Horn of Africa, I think. But you see Western Africa along the coast there. Very, very dense. If you open that up there, just heaps, heaps going on there. And so that's Nigeria and Ghana and the Ivory coast on the. Just underneath that.

John Dehlin [01:32:16] Yeah, pretty ordinary. Consideration.com is the web. The web page.

Simon Southerton [01:32:24] Yeah. Okay, so let's get on to the. Really the most. Probably the most interesting part of this week.

Leaked Attendance Data from the UK and Australia

John Dehlin [01:32:29] All right, next slide this for a while.

Simon Southerton [01:32:33] In September 2020, actual attendance data for the 46 stakes in the United Kingdom was leaked out. Now, if anyone's suspicious and thinks, oh, I don't believe it, I've had a. Confirmed to me from a couple of active people. Yeah, that's pretty much reflective of my stake. Peter Bleakley is also member of one of these stakes and he's confirmed it. So. So this is the actual attendance for over 10 years. That's a summary of it for the 10 stakes. So if you go to that website down the bottom, you can see this was published by, I think it was Chris Mace on Reddit. So that's a Reddit site. So if you go there, you can drill down and see the data for each state. So there are some stakes that grow that have grown, only about three or four. One of them that's grown the most is the stake next to the temple at Preston Chorley, which is no surprise. I think it's had a. They put a missionary training center there. And temples tend to attract retirees that move to temples, so they can go to the temple regularly. So that's not surprising. I think the London Hyde park stake also grew, but that's probably because it's London and London's a fantastic place to go to, so who wouldn't want to go? So there'll be a lot of tourists visiting London and visiting. So I was a bit intrigued by the Data because in 2020, it just looked like it was continuing this similar trend. In fact, a slight uptick there. And Turns out the 2020 data was reported in March of 2020. So this is pre pandemic really, the data here. But I mean this is completely shocking data. You've got 27,000 people attending and that's dropped by 13% since 2011. An activity rate of under 15%. So 14.7% each unit. The average attendance is 86, almost half the stakes. I think about 20 stakes had greater than 18% decline in that 10 year period and 5 stakes reported greater than 30%, one of them 40% decline. So this is, I think that was Birmingham. So there's really serious problems that are going on. The 27. The church reports 188,000 in 320 congregations and only 27,000 are attending. It's just staggering.

Gerardo Sumano [01:35:21] The activity rate is pretty shocking. 14%.

Simon Southerton [01:35:26] Yeah. And remember that's an optimistic attendance. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's your fast Sunday attendance for the baby or, you know, they know they've got a, I don't know, a super duper speaker coming in on a particular sacrament ring is going to attract people. I count. I wouldn't be surprised if some bishops count them every week and they pick the highest week. So this is, this is semi inflated as well. I mean you've almost got to take into consideration the number of missionaries that are serving in the United Kingdom. It's probably a fairly significant proportion of that population. Probably 600 or so of those are missionaries, many of them from overseas. So I mean these are shocking because, partly because we've never had anything like this. We've always heard this sort of figure. Roughly 30% are attending. Some people think, yeah, maybe a little bit less than that in the uk. I think the UK is going to be better than most countries in Europe. I can't imagine for a moment that the activity rate in France and Sweden and Norway and many of those countries is going to be any better than this. So I've heard speculation that the average attendance outside of America is probably in the vicinity of 15% or less. So if the active attendance outside of the US is that low, then okay, let's assume America is 30%, then global attendance is probably like 25 or pushing dangerously close to 20%, which means well under 24 million. So I think, you know, folks like Peter Bleakley who I've corresponded with, he thinks it's closer than to 3 million attending. Not the, not the, you know, the 4 or 5 or 6 that many people suspected. I mean, it's just. It is. It's just amazing. It's staggering that we. This has just been so well hidden from us. What's going on? I mean, I think many of us believe that the UK was a pretty much bedrock Mormonism. It's, you know, how many members have come out of the uk, how important has the UK been for the church in past history? But it's clearly got big, big problems. So the average ward is 86. There's got to be piles and piles of church congregations in the. In the UK, where 40 or 50 or 60 people attending. How can you. What sort of a youth program is a ward of 60 or 70 going to have when you've got three kids coming up, coming along? So they're going to be forced. I'm pretty sure they're just going to have to. I just can't see how they can avoid closing an awful lot of units. And that sort of brings us. We start talking about the pandemic, right?

John Dehlin [01:38:36] This is pretty.

Simon Southerton [01:38:37] It's going to be terrible. I know active people have told me that they're expecting 10 to 25% never to come back because they've had time to think. But the other implication of the UK data for us, I think it's got implications for Australia because, you know, we're sort of almost a chip off the old block, the uk. Many of us have answers. All my ancestors are from the uk. Most of the non Polynesian population in Australia would be. Would have European or, sorry, UK ancestry, much more biased towards the UK than Europe than, say, the US is. So it suggests that, you know, the Australian activity rate might be as low as 20%, I think. And the. The sort of people of European background, I suspect the activity rate might be similar to the UK, it's about 15%. So instead of being 155,000 Mormons in Australia, they brag about, it's probably more like 25 to 30,000 that are actually attending. And that's consistent with the census. The census. We track religion on the Australian census. We've just done one, so we're looking forward to another. Does it. The census between 2011 and 2016 for Australia saw a decline in the proportion of the total Australian population that are LDs. So that 61,000, I suspect that less than 50% of those are attending and that's sort of in that 25 to 30,000 ballpark. And that's roughly 100 people per unit. And I think that's higher than the UK estimate, partly because we do have a very sizable Polynesian population. If you see photographs, and I've seen them over the years many times of single adults and young, single adult conventions in Australia, half the population, half the people in the photograph would be Polynesian. So that's protecting or masking the collapse in the broader Australian population. So we're seeing the collapse happening in Adelaide and Perth more clearly than in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. So, yeah, I hope that this sort of sparks a few more leaks. It's just unbelievable to me. Surely there are people in the church that know this data. I see it every week. It's shocking.

John Dehlin [01:41:20] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [01:41:21] Why isn't somebody from the membership department leaked this? 10 years ago, 15% attending in the

Gerardo Sumano [01:41:30] UK I think a lot of us, I don't know, because when I was a missionary, we would see this rates definitely because we as missionaries, we get to the ward and we get, we get the list of all the members and then we would compare the number of members to the people that we're actually attending. And sometimes we, I don't know, like, I think the way we were thinking it is just like, oh, this is just happening here. And you never stop and think like, oh, maybe actually this is happening everywhere else. Which actually was because I served my mission in Mexico City and where I'm from, Merida, is just the same thing, just huge membership lists and then only like 50, 60 people attending each week. So, yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with members thinking maybe it's just us. And because the church doesn't publish these numbers, there's no way for members to really get a broader sense on. On this data.

Simon Southerton [01:42:34] Well, another the vast. I know when I was an active bishop, we knew that there was a lost member file. Okay. So in Australia at once, when I was a bishop, 30% of the records, they didn't have a street address for the person. And we were always getting bundles of, can you please go around, knock on this person's door and their neighbors and find out if somebody and so lives there anymore? And you couldn't get rid of these darn things until you'd done that. But yeah, 30%, and I suspect it's probably high now, 35 or maybe even 40% of the membership records cannot be linked to an address. So they're lost members and they're in a file. So the records that award has generally don't include most of those. So if awards only got an activity of around about 40 or 50% on the basis of the records they've got, when you factor in the 30% sitting down in Sydney or wherever the records are kept in your country, when you start factoring in those, that 40% quickly turns into around about 25% or even less. So I'm pretty sure that Australia would have had the same sort of declines in the broader Australian population that the UK has seen. And that lost member file would just be enormous in some of these countries.

John Dehlin [01:44:06] We've got a comment from Beck. She writes, I grew up in East Anglia. In England we had two wards and a branch in our small city. Now it's one small ward, mostly foreign university students from the local university. If any listeners, reviewers want to share the status of the membership, whether it's rising, flatlined or in decline in your particular city or state or country, we would love to just share that as we're kind of, you know, in the stage of some final analysis and or wrap ups. But Simon, just to summarize, what I heard from you from this UK data is that this is sort of substantiating what we've been thinking for a long time, which is that outside of the United States basically and Africa, outside of Africa and the United States in general, not only is the Mormon Church not growing, but outside of the United States, in Africa basically the Mormon Church is in not just decline, but in many countries it's in free fall, shrinking at a rate of somewhere to 15 to greater percent over I don't know, let's say a 10 to 15 year period. And if we. That's all pre Covid numbers. And so yeah, so you're saying that, that maybe even though the Mormon Church boasts as as high as 16 plus million members, the real number you're saying might be as low as 3 million worldwide. And then when you factor in the fact that the church is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, someday approaching a trillion dollars. That's a lot of money for a shrinking church, right? Yeah.

Simon Southerton [01:45:59] If you start dividing the income generating money the church has by the number that are actively attending, it's scary. You could, I've done some calculations. You could pay every single individual walking into a chapel $7,000 a year. You could pay them to come to church, every single individual man, woman, child, seven grand a year on the money the Church is making from its assets. It's a staggering, I mean we don't know the full story, but yeah, the church has in the vicinity of $400 billion worth of income generating assets. So it's those stocks from Ensign Peak. It's the land, it's buildings, it's Real estate companies that it's got. If you add it all up and somebody has done, I can't remember his name, but he's got a. There are links out there and blogosphere or whatever, it works out around about $7,000 US per year per individual. So a family, you could buy them, average family could pay them 25 grand a year to come to church. No more tithing anymore.

John Dehlin [01:47:08] Yeah, the church could tell members to stop paying tithing and just the interest that it gains off of its investment assets at Ensign Peak, not counting its core assets that it uses to run the business, but just if the church makes an average of a 7% annual return off of now the $140 billion plus that it makes through Ensign Peak. And that's just what we know of. There's likely other places where the church has stashed its money and its investments that we don't know about. The only reason we know about Ensign Peak is because the whistleblower David Nielsen released that information to the general public in a whistleblower lawsuit against the Mormon Church filed with the Internal Revenue Service of the United States. If you just assume a 7% annual return on just the Ensign Peak alone investments. And we've seen that in Covid because the church invested in things like Tesla and GameStop and Amazon. The church made something like what, $20 billion increase in growth of stocks and bonds and assets just during COVID alone. So that $120 billion has ballooned to $140 billion just in the past couple of years. The massive wealth growth is sort of almost obscene. So if the church, if all church members stopped paying tithing today, the church could grow at 7%, modest growth, still cover all its current operating budget. And like you said, Simon, have a billion dollars every year left over to just pay the members to go to church or to invest in something like a pathways, which Roger Hendricks shared in a Mormon Stories episode called, you know, a Management consultant looks at Mormon Church strategy. You can see that what it's doing is it's investing in low cost education literally as a way to sort of persuade people to join the church. It's sort of like a baseball baptism program where they're saying to the Africans, join the Mormon Church and you can get a US based degree for pennies on the dollar. And that's its new business strategy to try and convince people to join. Because the doctrine and the theology with the Internet now is just not selling. Correct?

Simon Southerton [01:49:44] Yeah. Well, I can put a link on your page too. There is a guy who has gone through the public records of the land the church owns, the companies the church owns, the properties that rents out, you know, City Creek, but also many other buildings the church owns and they generate money from it. He's added that up for the world and it's approaching. So it's that $100 billion is actually $400 billion of income generating assets. So if you own a block of land that's increasing in value, so that's an, you know, potentially an income generating asset if you've got real estate and you're renting out property and all that sort of thing. So when you add all those things up and he's just, he's used public records, publicly available records, did a massive amount of work. It's close to 400 billion now. So then that's generating $30 billion a year if you do the 7% calculation.

John Dehlin [01:50:47] We're also seeing reports now on ex Mormon Reddit of Mormon ward chapel buildings and stake centers all over the world being put up for sale. So the church is liquidating many of its building, you know, stake buildings and ward buildings to help offset or to enhance its financial position because as it collapses wards and stakes, it's clearly selling off its chapels because otherwise they'll be, they'll be sitting empty.

Gerardo Sumano [01:51:19] I think maybe the idea is selling those buildings and investing that on temples.

Simon Southerton [01:51:25] That could be what.

Gerardo Sumano [01:51:28] At least that's what I hear. It's happening.

John Dehlin [01:51:34] There's a. I'll just share a few comments from our listeners. Captain K writes, when I was a missionary in London, England, the only successful baptisms were African. Oh, a nice comment for Gerardo. White Salamander writes, I like to watch Gerardo's face as he's processing the dialogue in the charts. He's a bright guy. Gerardo is one of the smartest dudes I know and I know a lot of dudes and women. So you are right, Gerardo is super smart and that's why we have him on. See Mandy writes, in my ward in Washington, since I left in 2019, I have several friends who also independently decided to leave in my ward. Who knows how many others. I can only imagine this pattern globally. I love the feedback coming in. Ramon Abdone writes, I was warden, state clerk and bishop twice. So I'm very familiar with membership records. All those years active membership is only really at 20. If you're lucky, maybe even 10. Ramon. I would love to see where actually Ramon is from because Ramon, the only thing you didn't share is where you were a bishop and a State Clerk Ramon. So maybe you can share that in a second 21st century states, which is a podcast we love. It's a YouTube channel we love. They're out of the UK and Scotland. They write none of my friends attend anymore. Our ward was less than 40 active members in the ward. And again in the Mormon Church, it takes a couple hundred active attending members to make award. Normally it's a branch and what the church has done is resisted downgrading so many wards to branches. And so you're seeing all these wards with people attending where it really should be downgraded to a branch. Anyway, 21st century saint says that in Scotland our ward was less than 40 active. They recently imported a ton of young adults into the ward to boost the numbers. So I'm sure the church is hiring Bain McKinsey consultants to figure out how to shift membership, move the numbers, you know, do much of statistical machinations to hide the massive decline in active membership worldwide. All right, any Simon. So IQD writes IQD 36, 500 on the rolls at their branch, maybe a hundred come, that's a 20 activity rate. So we're basically getting, you know, you know, confirmation from wards and branches all throughout the world.

Lost Members and Phantom Records

Simon Southerton [01:54:20] That, that 20%, again, that doesn't include the lost members that are not assigned to that branch. So they've got plenty of records in a storehouse somewhere that are not assigned to that branch. So the actual number in that is not 500, it's probably 7 or 800 if you include the loss member records which are sitting in exactly that country's headquarters somewhere. Can I that person, the caller earlier on that mentioned East Anglia, I'd be fascinated to correspond with them because we lived in Norwich for a couple of years.

John Dehlin [01:55:01] Oh, if you live where to reach out to Simon?

Simon Southerton [01:55:05] Yeah, the one that there was a call early on that mentioned East Anglia and most of the members were connected to the university. I don't. It may not be Norwich. It might be possibly Cambridge.

John Dehlin [01:55:16] How do people reach you, Simon? If people want to reach you, how do they reach you?

Simon Southerton [01:55:20] Just if you go to my website, there's an email thing.

John Dehlin [01:55:24] SimonSotherson.com you can put my email down

Simon Southerton [01:55:27] the bottom on the final page.

John Dehlin [01:55:29] Okay.

Simon Southerton [01:55:30] My email address is simon.southerton11gmail.com so David

John Dehlin [01:55:36] writes in about 2016, a senior couple of my ward were called as stakeholders finders and their purpose was purely to go through the membership records and track people down that were no longer active. I'll add that there are senior missionaries, mountains of Senior missionaries in Salt Lake City and all they do is just call people and desperately try and track down all the lost members throughout the world.

Simon Southerton [01:56:00] And these are very, very unsatisfying callings. Could you imagine knocking on the door of people who don't want to hear from the Mormon Church?

Gerardo Sumano [01:56:08] Yeah, I did it. I did it on my mission.

Simon Southerton [01:56:10] Yeah, it happened. Yeah, it's a very, very unpleasant thing.

Gerardo Sumano [01:56:13] Yeah.

Simon Southerton [01:56:14] And they make it so darn hard to get off the records. We, we went through this painful process all the time. The church wouldn't allow us to give them a form letter here. If you want to leave the church, if you just sign this piece of paper, we'll get over and done with it. We won't arrest you anymore. Oh, no, you got to write a letter. So these people, you're making them write a letter to the church, it has

John Dehlin [01:56:36] to be signed by notary public. So they actually, I mean, this is just like another example of the deception and the fraud and the dishonesty of the church because they had so many people decline resigning their membership through Quit Mormon, which was this integrated volunteer led site where this amazing lawyer, Mark Nagle had all this volunteer time that he would use himself and harness through others to help massively process and facilitate the mass resignation of people. The church increased the burden and made it so if you went through Mark Noggle's website, Quit Mormon, you had to actually get a, you know, notary public to stamp and seal and sign the resignation letter before the church would process it. And they just made it. So Mark wanted to give up. So now I tell people, use Quit Mormon if you want, but the fastest way to resign is to just let your bishop, your local bishop or branch president know. And they're super motivated to purge the ward roles of apostates because they know that learning evidence and truth and history about the church is like a virus that infects people like coronavirus. They want you off the rolls, they want you off the records. And so if you just tell your bishop or branch president, hey, I read the CES letter, I want you to resign. I want you to take me off the records. And if you don't, I'm going to start going around to ward and branch members and telling them about the CES letter, they'll have you removed in eight hours. They'll have you off the records of the church. Celinda writes, my last two wards have been dissolved here in Florida. Our records had about 700 names in our last ward with about 100 active. And again, if you. If you also factor in the peoples whose names have been shifted to church headquarters, the activity rates are even lower than that. Keely Z says you can download the CES letter. It's online in PDF format. If you go to CS letter.org in 70 pages, you can read all the reasons, all the things the Mormon Church has hid from you for centuries. It turns out you can go to cesletter.org and see all that. Captain K writes, a good question. Why are they building a temple in Dubai? Many people call it another Filipino temple in the Middle East. There aren't many Arab members. The church is now catering to tourist temple visitors. Martine wrote about that as well. The Brussels, Belgium temple, the Rome, Italy temple. Those are literally temples for rich, white American Mormons that like to travel intercontinentally and, and visit temples during their wealthy, you know, sort of cruise, cruise line, wealthy Mormon membership sort of tourist excursions. And that's why many members are. Well, that's why the church is building temples in all these other foreign areas. Beck writes, I'm interested in the Huntsman case not because I think he'll get a penny, but because I think it will make open a lot of their business practices. I spoke to James Huntsman yesterday on the telephone and the news out of the James. So a couple people asked if, if, if members can initiate fraud lawsuits against the Mormon Church. There's the Gabby case that's happening in Utah, which just got a new breath of life. Kay Burningham is the attorney of the Gabby case. And it just turned out that Judge Robert Shelby is allowing one element of that case to continue. So that's, you know, just Google, you know, news and Gabby and Kay Burningham, and you'll see that that case has been extended some oxygen or some life by Judge Shelby. So that's positive news. And then also the James Huntsman case. Just a couple days ago, David Nielsen, for the first time, the whistleblower from the Ensign Peak investment house, David Nielsen, filed a complaint, which is the first time David Nielsen has actually officially spoke publicly. Prior to that, his brother Lars Nielsen had leaked in an unapproved way David Nielsen's filings with the IRS as a complaint. But what David Nielsen published for the first time in the James Huntsman lawsuit, that's a Federal Circuit court lawsuit being filed in the state of California. What was filed by David Nielsen was an acknowledgement that while he was working for Ensign Peak, the leaders of Ensign Peak referred to all of their funds as tithing dollars and that the leader of Ensign Peak, when it was decided to withdraw, you know, funds from the 120 million. Not for charitable purposes, not for water, not for, you know, immunization of sick people, not for feeding the hungry or clothing the naked. The $2 billion, the only money that was ever withdrawn from Ensign Peak in its history of operations that's known to this day was something like 1.2 billion that was withdrawn from Ensign Peak to bolster the commercial city shopping mall that was being built in Salt Lake City. $1.2 billion and something like 8 billion that was used to prop up a failed insurance company called Beneficial Life. What David Nielsen showed and published in the James Huntsman lawsuit was that the leader of Ensign Peak acknowledged that that money was going to be taken out of Ensign Peak, put in a middle holding company and then transferred to both City Creek Mall to bolster the failed or the overruns to that commercial shopping mall and to bolster up Beneficial Life, this failed insurance company. The leader of Ensign Peak admitted to his employees that that was a shell game to hide to the world and to the church membership where the money was going, that they didn't want people to, to know that inside Peak that that money was being used to prop up those failed commercial ventures. And that, according to Mark Pugsley, was a blockbuster story coming out of the James Huntsman lawsuit. Now, Simon and Gerardo, do you guys have anything to add about that?

Whistleblower Evidence and Legal Proceedings

Gerardo Sumano [02:03:39] Very interesting, that. Well, and, and I'm glad that David Nielsen is from. Fine. It's finally speaking and in this way after the church has pretty much called him a liar and just rumors and say, and the church lawyers are just trying to smear those that leak information saying that it can't be trusted, that it was leaked without approval. And it was. Yeah. So, yeah, it's great because I don't know, I don't know him, never talked to him. But I would bet that because of the church being still being dishonest about these funds and, and where these funds were used and, and their response to the leak information is that David is. It's willing to speak now. So that's great.

John Dehlin [02:04:34] And I'm just gonna. Just because it's been brought up and Simon, I hope you're okay. You know, we, we still have over 800 people joining us live. It means that's an extraordinarily large number for a live stream Mormon Stories podcast episode. What that shows is that there's massive interest in this topic, Simon, So thank you for coming on. What I'm showing you now is the filing by David, by David Nielsen. In this Huntsman versus the corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And it is a corporation and it's just, it's a.

Simon Southerton [02:05:12] They just changed the name.

Gerardo Sumano [02:05:13] I think

John Dehlin [02:05:16] that's again, just deception, right?

Simon Southerton [02:05:18] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:05:19] But what it shows, you know, it talks about how this Roger Clark character intentionally misled people, you know, withdrew the money from Ensign Peak in a way to where it would intentionally be non visible to the world and to the membership. And it shows this one exhibit from David Nielsen's internal information from his role as an employee of Ensign Peak. And what it shows in this internal document, this leaked exhibit from the, the James Huntsman lawsuit, it shows their 1.4 billion to City Creek, 0.6 billion to Beneficial Life in 2009. And, and again, it, it, it makes clear in the text of this exhibit that Roger Clark explicitly told the employees of Ensign Peak that they withdrew those funds in a way to where no one would ever be able to know that the money was being pulled from Ensign Peak and where it was being given to. And that's all part of this testimony. And we'll make sure and share this in the show notes of this episode. Again, again, Simon, I hope you're okay with me sharing this information.

Simon Southerton [02:06:43] No. Well, it's, it's consistent with the, you know, what we're talking about today. The deception, the hiding of the truth. I mean, I'm Australian. Australians eyes glaze over a little bit when you start talking about law cases and whatever. Americans are big on law. We're less. We don't track it as closely as Americans do. I don't mean that as a criticism. It's just the way America is. But what I can tell you is that what's moral and what's legal ain't the same thing. And if you start following lawyers and the church does it, you're going to do things that just stink. And Ensign Peak is a thing that stinks because they followed lawyers. And I think they're going to run into all sorts of troubles. They're doing some dodgy things in Australia which we could spend a while talking about. I've currently got a complaint. I know people that have put a complaint into the Charity Commission in Australia. The church in Australia is claiming that they've donated almost a quarter of a billion dollars to humanitarian aid. It's false. There's no way Australian Mormons have donated a quarter of a billion dollars. That's in the last four or five years. But the reason the church is doing that is so that the church looks more charitable and members, because they then are paying tithing to a charity, they can claim 100 of their tithing back. That's why the church is doing it. Yep. It's probably illegal. They've probably got lawyers who said, oh, yeah, we can make it look legal, but it's bloody immoral. It's money that's been. It's been funneled in from the US because that's roughly what the global church is donating to humanitarian aid, but they've chosen to funnel through Australia so Australia can take the benefit of looking more charitable. Australian LDS Church. But if you ask any member in Australia, do they know the church has donated 250 billion? Nope. Not publicised. It's all secret, but it's in. They were forced to make public declarations in the. On the Charity Commission's website. So I mean, it might be legal, but it's immoral. They're robbing Australian taxpayers because Mormons should be paying tax on that money that they're donating to the church. Otherwise Australian taxpayers are supporting the missionary program of the Mormon Church. So the Australian. Effectively Australian taxpayers supporting Mormonism to propagate.

John Dehlin [02:09:36] Yeah. Some of the other comments coming in. We'll just read through some of these comments because it's basically getting evidence from our listenership of what we're kind of talking about, but throughout the globe. Gabriela writes in Bakersfield, California, I've seen them change the word boundaries and dissolve and create new words to try and move the membership around. So Gabriela is testifying, is testifying to kind of a membership shell game in. In California.

Simon Southerton [02:10:03] Yeah, they do that a lot in Australia too.

John Dehlin [02:10:06] Beck says, yes, we had senior missionaries as finders when my husband was ward mission leader. Ramon checked back in with us and made clear that when he talked about super low activity rates, he was talking about Manila in the Philippines. That makes total sense, Ramon, because we know that the baptisms in the Philippines have been super fraudulent, just like they have been in Mexico and in Latin America and they've been padding the church membership records. Wayne, who's we're going to give voice to our. Our very vocal Orthodox Believing member. Wayne is representing Orthodox Believing members. He's fighting a noble battle of. Of 799 progressive or post Mormons to or non Mormons to one or a few Orthodox Believing members. Wayne writes, Christianity is in decline and atheism, secular humanism, etc is on the rise. And the fact that you're not not out there trying to convert people to Christ, that says A lot. Well, Wayne, I appreciate, number one, that you're listening. I want to welcome all our orthodox and believing listeners who listen. We actually want orthodox and believing members to feel comfortable listening to Mormon Stories podcast. We try and maintain as healthy and as constructive of a tone as we can. It's sometimes hard to do that, especially when you're talking about the church being in decline. So we'll ask your forgiveness if this episode has been a little bit more on the unhappy or negative or even cynical side.

Audience Discussion and Reactions

Simon Southerton [02:11:43] Yeah, I think we're just a bit shocked by the true data. But I. Hi, Wayne. I think in our defense, an important step in the process of getting people to other Christian churches is to get them out of Mormonism. So isn't that a positive?

John Dehlin [02:12:01] Well, Wayne says this group is an antichrist movement.

Simon Southerton [02:12:05] Oh.

John Dehlin [02:12:06] Not a pro Christ movement.

Simon Southerton [02:12:08] Oh, okay. But if you want to get Mormons to go to Christ, you've got to get them out of Mormonism, haven't you?

John Dehlin [02:12:14] I mean, that was Grant Palmer's argument and Sarah Taylor's argument that Mormon Jesus is not really the biblical Jesus. And what you're seeing is the Mormon Church back away from many of its teachings that have been offending Christians for so long, like the teaching that Mormons will become gods someday and have their own planets. The church is backing away from that. You know, the church is backing away from a lot of its distinctive theologies and trying to become more friendly to evangelicals and Catholics. But yeah, many Christians would say what you just said, Simon, if you truly want Mormons to become Christian, then they need to leave Mormonism. And that, you know, a lot of orthodox believing Mormons are going to take offense at that. And in fact, most orthodox Mormons will say the Mormons are the real Christians and that all other non Mormons are illegitimate Christians. But that's sort of the, you know, that's sort of the closed book, off the off the public record Mormonism. Because even though Mormons themselves will say they're the only legitimate Christians and that all other non Mormon Christian baptisms don't even count in heaven as baptisms or, you know, non Mormon Christian marriages don't count as legitimate marriages in heaven, that's what Mormons will say to themselves in private. You would never get an orthodox believing Mormon to admit to the Christian world that their baptisms are illegitimate and that their marriages are illegitimate. You know, even so, Wayne is trying to kind of thread that needle of appearing like Mormons are true legitimate Christians, standing shoulder to shoulder with all their global Christian brethren. And sister, when in reality it's Mormons that call the rest of the Christian world illegitimate. Am I wrong Gerardo and Simon or not?

Simon Southerton [02:14:17] No, not necessarily. Movement.

John Dehlin [02:14:24] What's that?

Simon Southerton [02:14:25] Or an Antichrist movement. Anyway, I think we've probably given him enough oxygen.

John Dehlin [02:14:31] Yeah. Yeah. Wayne, we wish you well. And we're. We're not. We know. We wish you well. Okay, some other comments from around our listeners. 10 or 79 writes stories I hear about some wards and stakes in California during the pandemic are sobering loss of 30% or more in one year due to out migration. So 10 or 79 is reporting massive declines upwards of 30% in California awards and stakes since COVID And yeah, I'm sure the church is not looking forward to releasing any statistics during and post Covid.

Simon Southerton [02:15:11] Well, I don't think there would have changed an awful lot of things because they wouldn't have done too much because the, you know, people couldn't attend for a long period of time there. So it's, it's going to be weird. Maybe that's why they're not publishing it because it's pretty, pretty weird sort of a year.

John Dehlin [02:15:31] Brian writes, you know, a temple is a tourist temple when it's open by appointment only. That's a good thing for us to be paying attention to. Randall Smith Writes a Tedious Way to Determine Activity Rate this is a good idea from Randall Smith. A tedious way to determine activity rate on award is to look up each member on the LDS Tools app, count how many hold callings versus those who do not. That's brilliant. Now of course the IT groups at church headquarters are going to find a way to obscure that now that Randall has given members the idea.

Simon Southerton [02:16:06] You probably need to be an active member, don't you, to get that access?

John Dehlin [02:16:10] Yeah, but, but, but many of our listeners are and so listeners, if you want to do your own anecdotal analysis a la Randall Smith right now before the Mormon Church makes this impossible because we know they hide any information that they can go right now to your ward or stake, do this analysis that Randall Smith recommends and then go to the comments section on MormonStories.org for this episode. It'll be released tomorrow. And tell us what you find in terms of the real activity rates in your wards or branches.

Simon Southerton [02:16:44] I think the fascinating my prediction is, well, I've certainly heard anecdotal reports the pandemic is going to have a church is going to take a big hit, sort of between 10 and 15 or 20% just won't attend anymore. And certainly people starting to see that in the UK when they're returning to their wards. But in my experience over 20 years of observing people leaving the church and talking to them about their experience, a common theme is that they need some interruption to their normal day to day schedule. Either a change in job, moving house, moving ward or something a major event in their life that takes them temporarily outside of the day to day routine that keeps them completely preoccupied and doesn't give them any time to think about those shelf items or the things that bother them. That's the biggest problem for the church. For the pandemic. You've had massive numbers. The entire church has all suddenly been given time to think and to ponder, ponderise, as we were taught. And that's when we've seen a 30% growth in the Australian post Mormon community since the pandemic began. And this we're up to, you know, 370 people. It's a very active group, probably, probably 80 to probably 90% of those people would be viewing, commenting or posting in the group over a sort of a couple of weeks or monthly, on a monthly basis. So they're all hopping in there quite regularly and that's grown. So I just think the pandemic is a huge problem because it takes, it gives people that break. Yeah. And it was well known when I was an active bishop that when a senior member was released from a calling, like a state president or a bishop or whatever, get him into another calling straight away because they lose them because they suddenly have time to think. I've got a good friend who was a in Australia who's a barrister and lifelong member of the church, totally devout and he had a break and took him outside of his regular routine. He didn't even read anything anti Mormon. He just stumbled on the essays and read the essays, look at his wife and said these don't look good, they're hiding something. So a lot of that going on.

John Dehlin [02:19:35] If you're an orthodox believing Mormon and you don't know what we're talking about. The church came out with a series of essays about seven or eight years ago called the Gospel Topics essays. They talk about Joseph Smith Marrying 30 Plus Women, the book of Abraham not really being a translation of Egyptian papyrus. We had been taught. They talk about all, you know, the DNA problem that Simon Southerton helped us learn about, that the Native Americans really aren't descendants of Israelis like we had been taught. And the church admits all this in the Gospel Topics essays. Of course they put their spin on it. They Talk about the Mountain Meadows Massacre and how many people Mormons, you know, men, women and children that Mormons killed in a, in a massacre in, in the late 1800s. Lots of really great and important stuff that you can read about that the church is now admitting. And you can go to the Gospel topics essays. Gerardo, you were going to say something when Simon was talking. I want to give you a chance to jump in. Do you remember what you were going to say?

Come Follow Me and the Internet's Role in Decline

Gerardo Sumano [02:20:30] Yeah, I was just going to mention about. The church is counting on the Come Follow Me program to, or we're counting on the Come Follow Me program to be like a rescue program for, for church members who were going inactive or, or just to make a better curriculum for, for members. And but in my opinion that's actually making it worse. And, and with Kobe, it just made it worse where like, because if you look at the curriculum on, on Come Follow Me, it's, it's just kind of like dumbed down Mormonism. You're not getting any of the substance that was there years like decades ago. It's just very, very, very on the surface very boring stuff that they're including there. Very monotonous and just like it's just very boring. And so I think that's just not gonna, that that's not gonna help the church either. Right now when, when the church had to go from home and, and then with Nelson wanting families to do. To do this program at home, it's just. I, I don't know. I mean I know a few active families and I don't know of any that actually do the program as it's set to be supposed to be done. So.

Simon Southerton [02:22:03] Sorry, go ahead.

Gerardo Sumano [02:22:04] And just what, what John was saying about what the church is doing right now of taking of taking out all those unique parts of Mormon doctrine of, of the planets and just like, and concentrate just on the Christian part of it and just focus on Jesus. The problem with that is that Mormonism doesn't have a strong biblical scholarship. And, and they. We know that they don't really want to have to do anything to do with, with biblical scholarship for. And it's been like that for years. In part, it. It's my opinion part of it has to do with the fact that biblical scholarship debunks a lot of. Of their. Of of the interpretations of the Bible, for example, just like the, the prophecies in the, in the Bible about the Book of Mormon anyway. But just because they don't have that strong like we Mormons don't understand Revelations and they Just don't understand the Bible and, and at the same time they're trying to focus on Jesus and, and Chris Christianity. What has just become is just a very dumbed down curriculum that is very bright, boring, and in my opinion it's not helping retain new members and members

Simon Southerton [02:23:26] that were there already, I think. Isn't that curriculum, doesn't that run across seminary, even connect seminary up with.

Gerardo Sumano [02:23:32] Yeah, yeah, seminary. Yeah.

Simon Southerton [02:23:35] And Sunday school, young men. Oh my God.

John Dehlin [02:23:39] So because, because the, the, you know, the Internet has forced the church to become honest and open about its history.

Simon Southerton [02:23:48] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:23:49] And because the church is in such free fall for having kind of weird doctrines that it can't hide anymore. Just like Scientology has been able to until south park came along. Scientology was able to hide its weird and strange doctrines. South park exposed weird doctrines of Scientology and the Book of Mormon musical. And south park, you know, and the Internet and YouTube were able to expose the weird Mormon temple ceremonies, the weird Mormon teachings, the weird Mormon doctrines about the Garden of Eden being in Missouri, about Mormons getting their own planets, about the weird temple rituals and the temple clothes in the Mormon Church. Now the church, like you say, Gerardo, is having to shrink and shrink and shrink and get rid of its weird, uncomfortable secret doctrines, including the doctrine the second anointing, which we helped expose and make public along with Thomas Murphy and you know, Hans Mattson and others. Now the church is having to shrink its distinctive doctrine, come clean about its history, and it's making the, the curriculum a disaster, as you, as you said. Yeah, Gerardo and, and Simon.

Simon Southerton [02:24:58] Well, I think I've thought an awful lot about what's, what's causing all of this. And obviously, you know, you know, I think there can be little argument that the Internet is the underlying problem that the church is facing and trying to deal with. This has had a massive impact on, I think it's had a massive impact on the apologetic effort of the church. Because Mormon apologetics, I mean if you think just about the scriptures, they're very simple problems. The Book of Mormon, was it a translation of an ancient record or was it invented in the 19th century? And the DNA shows there's no evidence at all of any Israelites reaching America. So there's a big, big problem. The apologetic responses, hundreds of papers, reams and reams of stuff that are written to address a very simple problem. Were there is lights in pre Columbian, pre Columbus America. And they weren't. There's just not a shred of evidence of it. The Book of Abraham is the same, you know, we've got the facsimiles from the papyrus with. With which are all extremely well understood by Egyptians. I know every element of those facsimiles. And the translation offered by Joseph Smith is completely wrong on all accounts and it doesn't match the papyrus. You've got whole departments almost in BYU writing apologetics on the book of Abraham to answer these very simple problems. So if you need really long, long answers and very smart academic sort of stuff to address simple problems, that doesn't work in the Internet age. Somebody can produce a TikTok or a podcast or whatever and just quickly introduce these problems. And I mean, this is why the CES letter is so effective, because it just lists so many of them. But I think the, the bigger problem for the church with the Internet is that it just connects everyone, just like it's connecting us right now. I've had the experience of living in Australia pre Internet in the church, and you never heard anything about anybody leaving the church or expressing doubt. Anyone expressed doubt. Come and talk to the bishop, we're going to talk to you. No, you can't talk about that stuff. So anytime anybody had any doubts, they're alone and isolated. Well, the Internet now, if you've got any doubts and you go on the computer and you instantly connected to thousands and thousands of other people who are doing probably exactly what President Nelson doesn't want them to do, talking to other people who've got doubts and reinforcing your doubts. So this connectivity is just incredible. You can go on anonymously, you don't have to reveal your name. But, you know, the other, of course, thing that. I mean, you've done an amazing job in this field, John, is support. Providing a support network for people. Because that's tragic, it's absolutely tragic to go through a faith crisis. Mine was weird because it was. Whilst it was very brutal, I went for days on end when I was after my epiphany where I was deeply, deeply upset for a few, you know, for a couple of hours and then I would, I'd be out. It would be almost like being bipolar for a little while, where I'd be just on the top of the world. This big problem that I struggled with for 30 years has been resolved, but then back into the depression of losing all of those very comforting beliefs. So it's a very difficult. So the Internet has been amazing for providing that wonderful support network, not just communicating information, but emotional support. I mean, if you go onto Reddit, even though, yeah, there's a lot of angry stuff and crap and Whatever. There are just some wonderful, wonderful people on Reddit and on Facebook who were there to, to support people who are going through this crisis. They've been through the road, they've been down the path. When I left, there was nothing. There was no. And it was a bun fight. It was the wild west in the ex Mormon community for quite a few years before it settled down, before we got emoticons and we started to communicate a little bit. And then of course we've now got videos so we can actually talk to each other as human beings. But of course, I mean my, my daughter is an academic and she's looking at the influence of social media on human relationships and she's so she's a bit of an expert on TikTok. And TikTok I think is worth. I mean, I know you, John, have looked at TikTok pretty seriously, but the trouble, the real challenge for the church with TikTok is that it's very addictive amongst the younger generation, but it follows trends and there's no. The algorithms that are supplying the. Whatever they call tox or whatever ticks the algorithm that's feeding that into their. The you what is the for you page on TikTok doesn't distinguish ex Mormon content from Mormon content. It's just, it's far too. That requires another level, level of sophistication. So that means that the younger generation are seeing in their feeds, Mormons are seeing in their feedback a very engaging, snappy little message that tells them that Joseph Smith had 35 wives and some of them were 40 years old. I mean, and sung to a beautiful song and other really amazing things like the, you know, the communicating the message about Native Americans having no Lamanite ancestors. Far better than I can do in a book. I mean, it's very useful to have those things sitting in the background so that when somebody does. A young kid sees this, what is that really true? And the smart kids are going to be thinking, well, I might do a little bit more research. And so then they go on and they'll read the CES letter and then if they want to go a bit further, they can go into the academic books and they might actually eventually one day end up reading a book by me or many other the academics who've published things that are critical.

John Dehlin [02:31:54] Absolutely. Thank you, Simon. That was so well said. There's so many good comments coming in, I'll just share a few more. Bradley writes, they combined two wards in my mission in Argentina combined, they maybe had 70 to 80 in attendance. They Gave us the old ward membership list. It was over 1200 in one ward in Argentina. So that just shows. It's just kind of anecdotally,

Simon Southerton [02:32:26] What's the capital? Ocean.

John Dehlin [02:32:28] What's that?

Simon Southerton [02:32:30] It doesn't, it doesn't count the ones back in Buenos Aires that they couldn't find in the water.

John Dehlin [02:32:34] Right, right. So that's, that's just the ones that. Yeah, yeah. There's so many good comments coming in, it's almost, it's almost hard to know which ones to pick. But we've got so many people listening that I want to. And so many good. You know, there's so many good comments coming in. I want to make sure and give them a chance. So Captain K writes, the missionaries in Greece and Serbia get beat up all the time by citizens and proselytize illegally and end up in prison. So that's kind of disturbing. Yeah. As the church becomes less and less popular, and frankly, as America becomes less and less popular, Mormon missionaries sell, you know, they're less and less effective. Right.

Simon Southerton [02:33:27] It's fair to say that America hasn't looked all the best in the last 18 months. I don't want to be too hard on Americans, but, you know, you guys have been hard on Australians in the church for a long, long time. So here's a bit of payback. But the pandemic, the vaccine and masks ain't political in Australia. Right.

John Dehlin [02:33:49] So people are taking the science.

Simon Southerton [02:33:52] The science is obvious. The masks, boss, are not 100% effective. They work. If you get a large proportion of your population wearing masks, it's very effective at slowing. You need to slow the spread of the virus. It's just, I mean, we've got our nut jobs on the fringe, right? One or two politicians, we've all got them. But we don't have whole political parties that are making it a bloody platform that masks don't work and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, huge numbers of people not taking the vaccine. We. We've got a significant number that are probably not going to take the vaccine, but I suspect Australia will probably get close to 80% will take the vaccine. It's amazing.

John Dehlin [02:34:40] For those who haven't checked it out yet, we on Mormon Stories just did an episode a couple days ago with three medical doctors. One of them is a joint MD, PhD from Harvard, who's an assistant professor at Harvard. And we really hope, you know, Utah is falling behind over half of the country right now in terms of vaccine uptake. And the large percentage of the Utahns who have not signed up for the vaccine are orthodox believing Mormons. And so what we have on are two ER docs, one in Utah, one in Nevada and then a Harvard scientist researcher, MD, PhD, and they just talk about what they're seeing. And also we interviewed a pulmonary ICU doctor in Tennessee and they just, you know, they just talk about what they're seeing in the ICUs, what they're seeing in terms of trachs and admissions and deaths. And it's over 90 plus percent unvaccinated in the ICUs that are, that are full overflowing now and in Utah, Nevada, all throughout the world, definitely throughout the United States. And zero admissions to the ICU for vaccine injuries. So there's a huge perception, false perception in Utah and elsewhere that the vaccine is causing massive death and injury. And you know, I just interviewed three, four people that live in either the emergency room or the er, they do that, the ICU full time and they're seeing almost no vaccine injury and almost no ICU admissions, literally no ICU admissions, intensive care unit admissions for vaccines and 90 plus percent of the COVID related admissions to the ICUs or the unvaccinated. So we're hoping.

Simon Southerton [02:36:44] Can I make some observations here because I follow the long as it's not

John Dehlin [02:36:47] political Simon, because we don't want to create the background.

Simon Southerton [02:36:50] No, no, no, it won't be. We're in a unique problem in Australia. We have extremely low vaccination. Well, we have vaccination rates going through the way it's really taking off. We'll get to 80% within a month, couple of months I would say. But we sort of a little bit slow out of the box blocks because we had so little COVID infection. We, our lockdowns were really effective but we're now struggling. This delta variant has changed things completely. The delta variant is so infectious that scientists right now are saying there is no herd immunity is not achievable. Right. So what that means is the vaccinated population can no longer protect the unvaccinated. We're not going to get high enough people, proportion of the population vaccinated. It's working in the UK because they've had so many of their population has been infected with COVID or vaccinated. They're up over 90% sort of immunity. That's where you slow the virus down. But they're still getting 80 deaths, 90 deaths a day in the United Kingdom. So Australia, our only protection is to get the vaccination level up to 80 or 90% to protect us from the virus. Now that's, that's a big challenge for our country. We hope that we're going to get there. We've followed the science so far. We just need the. We need people to get vaccinated. And if you're unvaccinated, you're no longer. And this is true for America and particularly for Utah. You can no longer rely on your vaccinated friends who've got vaccinated to protect you. They can't protect you anymore. Partially because vaccinated people at a lower level can get infected with COVID and pass it on. They survive the infection, but they're passing that. They get infected and they pass it on at a fairly low rate. But that rate, when you've got 80% of your population vaccinated, that's a lot of people and they're just passing on a little bit. That means your unvaccinated population cannot be protected anymore. And sadly, Utah is, is quite vulnerable. Australia, we're almost in the same boat. We need our population to get vaccinated as, as soon as they can. We had a bit of this because we were using the AstraZeneca. The. There were, there is a blood clot issue, but that's largely resolved because they now know how to identify it early on and there's a treatment for it. And previously people were dying because of the blood clots. But in Australia we've had 14 million vaccinations, seven deaths. Most of those deaths were before the. They'd figured the problem out. So it's only about three and we can probably avoid most of them in the future. So these vaccines are unbelievably safe. Unbelievably safe. Just I don't know, I don't know how you can crack through, but don't get caught up in the misinformation. These don't you know, these, it's. These were not rushed through in a risky manner. They had the science has been so well developed prior to the vaccine, the COVID hitting. All they needed to do when Covid arrived was to sequence this genome and slot pieces of DNA into the constructs their vaccine contracts from the knowledge they learned from the sequence of COVID So the coronavirus, they had that sequence in a week, okay 20 years ago. That would have taken them five months to sequence the genome. That's how things get so quick. Plus all the money was thrown at, into the vaccine development for the testing, which is extremely expensive. There was just no money, was no object. So plus they sped up the process, the regulatory process in Terms of, you know, making the application and normally that would take them six months to analyze it, blah, blah, blah. They just got in front of their eyes, the experts eyes very quickly they analyze it and we moved on. It's a global crisis. We have to speed things up. But in terms of the, these, these things you hear about, all the science was risky and you know, it's a risk, huge risk, blah, blah, blah. It's not, it's, the science has been exactly the same and they've, it's been just unbelievable. Amazing what they've, what they've done that the vaccines are just incredibly safe. All right, well that's my other hobby horse.

Final Reflections, Resources, and Closing

John Dehlin [02:41:38] Yeah, well we, we will probably, it's probably time to start wrapping up but we have a couple really important things to, to close with. So many good comments. I want to thank everyone who's made amazing comments. We didn't have time to get to them all but we did get to a lot of them. There, there, there was one kind of troll who was basically saying that Simon, you don't know what you're talking about with DNA that he actually said, he called me a son of perdition. But he said, you Simon, are lying about the DNA. And so that's a, he's thrown down the gauntlet. Wayne threw down the gauntlet. Wayne wrote I'm a PhD biologist and I can assure you that John Simon are lying about the DNA issue. So that's, that's a call Simon, that you're going to need to come back and give us an update on the DNA.

Simon Southerton [02:42:28] I'm not going to feed trolls, but

John Dehlin [02:42:31] will you feed our audience with a geneticist wisdom about hard earned wisdom about the, the Mormon Church's, well, the, the viability of the Church's claims around Lamanites and DNA. Would you be willing to come back and talk about your book? Okay, so what I want to do really quickly is show, show just some final notes. So Simon, you have here in additional notes a reminder to go to Fuller Consideration to look at all the data. Also to go to Camorra.com to see really good analysis of church statistics. There's a link here for retention rates that we're going to put in the show notes. Simon's got some links to his, his posts on Facebook and Reddit that we want people to be able to see. And then most importantly, please go to SimonSotherton.com and buy Simon's book called the Sacred Curse. Please reward Simon for his amazing scholarship by supporting his book. He's discounted the book heavily. It's only $4.50 for the ebook and if you can't afford it, Simon, we'll give it to you for free.

Simon Southerton [02:43:45] Free.

John Dehlin [02:43:46] That's how much of a good hearted philanthropist Simon is. Simon's blog can be found@simonsotherton.blogspot.com and of course we're going to bring Simon back to talk about his book. The only other thing I want to show before we end is again this amazing website called fullerconsideration.com you can see kind of you can zoom in on where wards and branches are being added or removed, which is super fun, but also what I thought was super cool. They've got this huge grid of membership statistics since the beginning of the church. So you can literally go all the back to 1830, see the membership growth rates and it even has projections out into the future. But you can even see numbers like members per ward and you can see that number growing which shows that they're hiding declining membership by just growing the number of members per ward and branch. That number has just been steadily growing over time. They also show a declining number of full time missionaries from highs of 80,000 down to like 51,000 members in 2020. Now to be fair, Covid happened. We'll see if that number of full time missionaries increases, but a decline in new missionaries, a decline in average mission length. You can just sort of have so much fun with this with this database. So shout out to the good folks at fullerconsideration.com@camorra.org just so much good information. So Gerardo, I want to thank you for being a co host in this episode. We've had Kara Burrell on lately, but we want to bring you on whenever it makes sense. And you actually brought this amazing article in piece by Simon to my attention. You line this up, you helped with the visuals and you of course make me look a lot better than I normally should with the cinematography and the lighting. And it's great to have your HD camera and high quality microphone. And I just want to thank Mormon Stories podcast donors. If you like this new software that we're using, if you like the lighting, the camera, the cinematography, if you like having co hosts like Gerardo and Kara that can bring us higher quality content, please continue your contributions. And I also have to say that if you value programming like this or like our coverage of the vaccination, we've lost so many donors. We have literally lost probably 30 or 40 monthly donors just because we chose to speak out during a global and a national and A statewide health crisis. As the ers and the ICU units are full. Full. And as the Mormon Church itself is risking losing its own orthodox, conservative believing members by actually issuing a statement in the past week urging its members to get vaccinated. Because the ICUs in Utah are overflowing with dying Mormons and dying conservative orthodox Mormons, dying unvaccinated Mormons and dying Utahns. As Mormon stories in the Mormon Church sort of stick its neck out and lose donors and members, we need those lost donors to be replenished, even here on Mormon Stories. So I'm not trying to, like, take advantage of a crisis, but because we've lost literally thousands of monthly donations due to our coverage of the health crisis in the state of Utah and in Arizona and Idaho, we ask you if you value. Simon, if you value this episode, if you value our attempt at stopping the health crisis, please become a monthly donor. Go to mormonstories.org Click on the Donate button. Become a monthly donor and help replace the massive loss of donorship that we, as a matter of conscience and as a matter of fact, caring about our public health, we're willing to take that hit. And we just ask any of you who are within the sound of our voice, less than one of a thousand listeners or viewers actually contribute to this podcast. If just one or two out of a thousand of you become monthly donors, you can help. Help keep Mormon stories alive for decades to come. So please become a monthly donor, if you don't already. Simon, I'm sorry that I've been filibustering, but I just needed to make that call because otherwise we're gonna, you know, we risk going out of business. Simon, do you want to add anything before we kind of close this down? And then, Gerardo, I want to give you the last word as well.

Simon Southerton [02:48:56] Right. I've just discounted my book. I didn't save the change yesterday. Usual problem. Yeah, so, yeah, so people who have been purchasing just moments ago paid a slightly higher price, but, yeah, another discount now I think is saved. We'll see.

John Dehlin [02:49:13] Okay, doesn't matter. Like, it was at $8 and you reduced it to five. Right.

Simon Southerton [02:49:19] Like 450. Yeah, it's.

John Dehlin [02:49:21] It's still.

Simon Southerton [02:49:22] You do make a good point. I mean, we're. It does frustrate me when I look at the, you know, the church community and say, for example, the things that are being written by Rodney Meldrum and his crowd about the excellent age in American Indians and that sort of thing. They're writing books, flogging them for 25 bucks. They probably sell 20 times what we sell. Myself, it's because they've just got this hungry audience of elderly Mormons that need to hear this stuff. So that's what we're up against. We're up against a huge machine that runs very well on money.

John Dehlin [02:50:05] Yeah. All right, well, any, any final words, Simon, other than your promise to come back and talk about a DNA update with the, with the Laymanites in the DNA. Any, any, any closing words for us?

Wrap-Up and Thanks to Co-Hosts

Simon Southerton [02:50:20] No, I think we've, we've rabbit it on long enough. Okay. No, it's been a real pleasure. This is, I've really enjoyed this format, Gerardo. It was great having you there. Just to make it a bit more of a relaxed chat, as I, as you said, John, you know, and I'm aware of this, I'm not a social scientist. I've got a social scientist offspring. My daughter Claire is a social scientist in the University of New South Wales. And yeah, I guess if I was going to finish, I'm happy to say a little bit about my family. She was recently quoted in the Washington Post. Her area of research is, as I mentioned earlier, it's about social media and how it impacts human relationships. And so there's been a lot of interest in her work recently during the pandemic debate about masks and public shaming of people in Australia who are found to have the virus. And, you know, we had a guy named Barbecue man, because he went to three different shops comparing barbecues. Pretty embarrassing for the guy. And if you shame people that have done the right thing and recorded where they've gone and they get Covid, then that's a, that's a bad thing because then people don't tell you where they've been and they don't. You don't track the virus down. So she's often quoted in newspapers in Australia. So I've got a son, Richard, who's studying. He's working with csiro and they're developing an app that can help farmers identify weeds in the field. So they can just hold their app, their smartphone up and find out exactly what the weed is and they can learn how to eradicate the weeds. That's a really useful thing. My other son, Philip, he's studying, just finishing off a primary teaching degree. So he'll be out teaching soon. Another daughter, Olivia, in Ollie in Melbourne. She's finishing off her master's and probably will do a PhD in social science as well. And our oldest daughter has just had our first grandchild, so we're all thriving Post Mormonism. And my wife Jane, she's happily teaching away. She's currently stuck at home because we are, I actually am in quarantine lockdown as Canberra had its first case in a year. So we need to stomp on this delta variant because we just don't want it to get out. We want to, we're trying to hold the virus at bay so we can get vaccinated levels out there. So Jane's teaching from home. All the schools are closed to stomp on the virus. We hope it's under control.

John Dehlin [02:53:14] I love hearing your family update. I love all examples of people thriving. You know, if people can thrive in the church, that's great. And when people leave the church, I love, I love to hear how your wonderful family is thriving. I love this comment from Belinda Law Morley. She writes as an Aussie. Thank you for having Simon on. I didn't know of him before, but we'll buy the book and look forward to finding out more. And then Belinda goes on to say, oftentimes Mormon Stories seems very Utah centric. So it was good to see, you know, Oz exists. And yes, Linda, that's a good reminder. Like we on Mormon Stories love, in the past, we've covered saints in the uk in Sweden, we've covered saints in Scotland, we've covered saints in Latin America. We just interviewed Gerardo, who's from Mexico. We've done saints in Brazil, we've done Native Americans, we've done, you know, we've tried to cover various geographical regions, but we want to do it more. We specifically want Africans. So if you want African, I was just gonna say West African or sub Saharan African. And you want to come on Mormon Stories and tell your story, we would love to interview you. Please email me@mormonstoriesmail.com we would love to interview people from the Philippines if you're, you know, Eastern Europe, Asia. Like, if you've got a cool story from a place that isn't Utah, isn't the United States even other regions of the United States? We want you on Mormon Stories. So please email us@mormonstoriesmail.com if you've got a great story you want to tell. That blood breaks outside of Utah or what we normally do. That's one of the, you know, one of the things that we want to do on Mormon Stories podcast. So thank you, Belinda, for calling us out. And I just want to say you're right and, and all we need are volunteers to tell us good stories. So many people are writing in saying thank you. Sam writes thanks Simon, it's great to see you. I'm visiting Salt Lake City, so it's fun to hear you. I sell real estate, and I'm convinced that the LDS Church buys property because this is safe investment and the members can take care of the buildings, and the church just gets the increase. So that's some fun input from Sam. Anyway.

Simon Southerton [02:55:39] Yeah, yeah, no, we. We spent some time together.

John Dehlin [02:55:44] Washington, Simon. Jeff writes, I met Simon many years ago in Southerton California. Always loved historian work. I and the entire family are now out of the church. So Jeff Harrington says. Hi, Simon.

Simon Southerton [02:55:59] Hi, Jay.

John Dehlin [02:56:00] Yeah, and. And lots of listeners. I can't even share all the people that are thanking you, Simon, for being willing to come on Mormon Stories podcast. And I also just want to thank Gerardo because this wouldn't have happened without Gerardo. So, Gerardo, thank you so much for coming to me and saying we need to do this episode. And thank you for co hosting Gerardo. It's so great to have you.

Simon Southerton [02:56:24] Yeah, thank you, John.

Gerardo Sumano [02:56:26] No problem.

Simon Southerton [02:56:29] I really enjoyed having Gerardo there. Thank you. It just became a chat rather than a talk. I'm much more comfortable. And I think you'll find visitors, Wolf, you know, people from, say, Africa or wherever are going to be much more comfortable in this sort of a setting where you can. Where you can just sort of chat. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Because, you know, this stuff is more outside of my field of DNA, but I felt much more comfortable talking about it. So, yeah, this is a pretty enjoyable experience.

Gerardo Sumano [02:57:06] Thank you.

John Dehlin [02:57:09] So thank you, Simon. Thank you, Gerardo. And again, we're grateful that Kara Burrell has been joining us as well as a co host. And, you know, we hope to have other guest co hosts. John Larsen's been joining us occasionally, and, you know, and we just love co hosts. So, Gerardo, you're the best. We know you're going to be bringing other cool episodes to us in the future. And again, we thank you, Gerardo, for the thumbnails you do for us, for the cinematography you do. And again, thanks to the Mormon stories donors that pay for me, that pay for Gerardo, that pay for Kara, that pay for Brooklyn, that does our editing and just that pay the bills that keep the lights on Gerardo. Any final words you want to say before we close?

Gerardo Sumano [02:57:55] No, I think we covered it pretty good. And yeah, just thanks, John, for. For your work on this and for covering it and just. I don't have much else to add, but.

Simon Southerton [02:58:10] Okay.

Gerardo Sumano [02:58:10] Thanks, everyone, for tuning in.

John Dehlin [02:58:12] And Simon, yeah, We're going to bring you back for The DNA discussion. As soon as you're ready, I'll look to you and Gerardo to let me know. Gerardo, you can co host that one. And Simon, you got an open invitation if you ever want to prepare anything for my audience. You know, I. I know you love Radio Free Mormon. We do too. So we support Radio Free Mormon. We're actually having Radio Free Mormon on Mormon Stories podcast tomorrow morning on my birthday. Tomorrow's my birthday. It's my 52nd birthday. We're going to bring out Radio Free Mormon on to talk about how he went from being an apologist and a true believing Mormon to. To a podcaster criticizing the Mormon Church. It's called cleverly from TBM to RFM. Join us tomorrow at 8am, Utah time for that episode. We love RF Radio Free Mormon. Simon, you keep supporting Radio Free Mormon, but you can come on Mormon Stories anytime and we'd love to have you talk to our audience. Okay.

Simon Southerton [02:59:08] Yeah, thank you. No, it's. It's been fantastic.

John Dehlin [02:59:13] All right, thanks. Thanks, Simon. You do great work. Thanks, Gerardo.

Simon Southerton [02:59:17] I'm quarantined.

John Dehlin [02:59:19] Yeah. And listeners, if you are not yet vaccinated, Please go back two episodes to my interview with three boots on the ground doctors that are working in ER rooms, working in ICUs, and then one pulmonary specialist that literally is traking people and watching the unvaccinated die. None of them have seen any ICU admissions because of, quote, vaccine injury. All of them are seeing 90 to 99% of the COVID admissions to ICUs being unvaccinated. We are not shills for the government. We're not paid by big pharma. We are not paid by hospitals. We are not Kool aid drinkers of some political agenda. We are citizens that care about science, that care about evidence, that are watching the ICUs fill up with the unvaccinated. We're watching our friends that were unvaccinated die. And we're just asking you to listen to doctors that are watching unvaccinated people fill up the ICUs, get trached and die. We're asking you to please consider listening to the evidence and consider getting vaccinated before you and your loved ones die. Die. Consider it. Listen to the Mormon stories episode episodes that, that interview doctors. We're just asking you to please consider it. We're not shaming you. We're not talking down to you. We're just asking you to consider real evidence and not talking heads that aren't based in evidence. Please consider it. Thanks again, Simon and Gerardo. Love you guys. And we'll see you guys all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care, everyone.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.