Introduction and Overview of the Interview

Part 1 of 3 · Ep. 1656

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I am your host, John Dehlin. It is September 6, 2022, and I have to say I was talking about this just a few minutes ago. I think you are in store for the person that I think I would list as the number one person I would, up to this date, ever want to interview who's alive on Mormon Stories Podcast. And I mean that sincerely, and I hope you guys agree. We are here today to interview Patrick Mason. Patrick Q. Mason. Hey, Patrick.

Patrick Mason [00:00:34] Hey, John. It's great to be here. Hey, Margi.

John Dehlin [00:00:38] Yeah, and Margi's with us. Hey, Margi.

Margi Dehlin [00:00:40] Hey there, babe. Dreams are coming true today.

John Dehlin [00:00:43] Yeah, totally.

Patrick Mason [00:00:44] I was gonna say you need a longer list. If I'm at the top, you really need a better list.

John Dehlin [00:00:49] No, I'm sticking by it. Let me go ahead and just kind of read Patrick's bio for. First of all, Patrick Q. Mason holds the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University, Goagies, my alma mater, three times over. Patrick has written or edited several books, including Proclaim Peace, the Restoration's Answer to an Age of Conflict, Mormonism and Violence, the Battles of Zion, what Is Mormonism? A Student's Introduction out of Obscurity, Directions of Mormon Studies like the Mormon Menace. And those aren't even the books that we thought about talking about today. Just a year or two ago, this book came out, Restoration God's call to the 21st century world. That's the book that I've read that I'm prepared to kind of integrate into our discussion today. And I've already mentioned Proclaimed Peace, which is brand new, right?

Patrick Mason [00:01:42] Yeah, just a few months ago.

John Dehlin [00:01:43] And it's a joint publication between the Maxwell Institute and Desert Book.

Patrick Mason [00:01:48] Yep. Called co authored with David Pulsver.

John Dehlin [00:01:50] David Pulsifer. Yeah. So. So many books, Patrick. But Patrick is. He's an author, he's a scholar. He has a bachelor's degree in history from Brigham Young University, two master's degrees from Notre Dame, one in International Peace Studies and one in history, and then a PhD in history from University of Notre Dame.

Patrick Mason [00:02:10] Go Irish.

John Dehlin [00:02:10] Go Irish. Right. Yeah. And, you know, he was a Fulbright Scholar in Romania in 2015, past president of the Mormon History Association. He's a professor at Utah State, and he's frequently consulted by the national and international media on stories related to Mormon history and culture. And he teaches courses at USU on Mormonism, American religious history, and religious religion, violence and peacebuilding. What I love about Patrick is that even including the top leaders within the Mormon Church, Apostles, First Presidency members, even people in the church history department, Maxwell Institute, wherever. I would not be able to name a person who has more of a command of the history and more of a finger on the pulse of Mormon scholarship, who is also self describes as faithful and who can speak from a lens of kind of boots on the ground, hearts and emotions engaged, and as Margi would say, integrated as Patrick Mason. And I'm sure there are people, you know, Patrick, who you would put on

Patrick Mason [00:03:16] that list, way above me on that list.

John Dehlin [00:03:18] But that's. That's my list, so I need to look, I need to meet more people, apparently.

Patrick Mason [00:03:22] No, that's kind. Thanks.

John Dehlin [00:03:24] Anyway, that was a super long introduction, but we're super glad you're here, Patrick.

Patrick Mason [00:03:28] Thanks, John.

John Dehlin [00:03:29] Anything you want to say? Just as an opening or disclaimer? You want to correct AD no, no,

Patrick Mason [00:03:34] that was embarrassingly long. But welcome to Mormon Stories.

John Dehlin [00:03:39] Embarrassingly Long

Patrick Mason [00:03:42] the subtitle. Right.

John Dehlin [00:03:44] Yeah. I should add that my dear friend Chris Thomas told me to mention that you might be the only person, aside from Richard Bushman to have been named to two separate Mormon studies chairs.

Patrick Mason [00:03:57] I think that's true. It's a pretty small club.

John Dehlin [00:04:01] And shout out to Chris Thomas, who's a dear friend to us both.

Patrick Mason [00:04:05] Absolutely. I love Chris, who just had a grandbaby. I don't know if you heard that. No, really exciting.

John Dehlin [00:04:11] Congrats, Chris.

Patrick Mason [00:04:12] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:04:12] Okay, so I think we're gonna do this interview in three parts. Patrick's generously given us all day and we're gonna do an abbreviated version of Patrick's Mormon story. Not because he doesn't deserve an eight hour interview, but because, you know, we may never get you for a full day again. And there's. I have a million questions and I wanted to give you the opportunity to ask us some questions because admittedly there have been times where I've been critical or harsh, not just of you, but of the church or of many of your colleagues. And so I just thought it would be fun to be able to turn the tables and let you ask us.

Patrick Mason [00:04:52] That's a great idea.

John Dehlin [00:04:53] Yeah. So those are the three parts. It's kind of an abbreviated Patrick Mason story is part one. Hopefully under two hours. Part two will be a gazillion questions that I and a bunch of my listeners of viewers have for Patrick, Margi two, and then part three will be Patrick, turn the tables.

Patrick Mason [00:05:11] All right, sounds good. Okay.

Patrick Mason's Background and Mormon Heritage

John Dehlin [00:05:14] So, Patrick Mason, what would you like to share? Where should we begin about your Mormon story?

Patrick Mason [00:05:20] Well, it starts at the very beginning. I mean, I was, I was born and raised in the church. I was born, mostly grew up in Sandy. We moved around a lot when I was in elementary school, but mostly grew up in Sandy, Utah. And I had a very, in some ways, I think a kind of idyllic Mormon childhood. Very comfortable, very. My parents are just great people, both faithful members of the church. But also when my dad passed away 12 years ago, one of the things my older brother wrote, the obituary and one of the things that he wrote about my dad is that my dad had, I forget the exact language that he had a ton of gospel knowledge, you know, loved the church, served in the church. But the phrase that my brother used was that he wore it lightly, that it was never heavy handed, it was never over the top. He and my mom both beloved in the ward and in the stake still till today. Like I say, he passed away 12 years ago. But so, I mean, it was just a very comfortable upbringing and, but also very Mormon in the sense that almost everybody I knew was Mormon. Suburb of Salt Lake. And most of my friends growing up were Mormon. And being in the church, going to church, doing church activities, that was just the whole world that I was raised in. And it was very comfortable.

John Dehlin [00:06:53] Were your parents both born in the Covenant? Are they both pioneer heritage, kind of Mormons?

Patrick Mason [00:06:59] Yeah, my dad. So my dad's ancestry does go back to Nauvoo, but like we never told pioneer stories, so we weren't like a pioneer family in any sense. So that, and I don't know why exactly, but that, that just was an important part of what we talked about or sort of our identity. My mom's side, they joined the church in Mississippi right around the turn of the 20th century and then moved to, followed the missionaries who baptized them, moved to Idaho. And so my mom grew up in southeastern Idaho and St. Anthony and then came down to the University of Utah and met my dad there. But her parents were not active in the church growing up and she has two siblings who also were not. So my mom was the only one who participated in the church as a teenager. Kind of just did it by herself. I think she found value in it. She enjoyed it. Her parents never did. Her parents were never hostile to the church. I think we'd call them Jack Mormon. I don't know if we even use that term anymore. But you know, growing up, that would have been the term. And actually one of my actually really tender memories was when I was called on my mission. By that point, my grandparents had come down from Idaho and were living with us. They were a lot older and they weren't in great health, so they were living in our home. And so I was called on a mission and we went to the stake president's office for me to be set apart. And, you know, they came with us to the office and the stake president didn't. He knew my parents very well, of course, but he didn't know my grandparents. He just assumed that they were lifelong members of the church. I mean, they hadn't darkened the door of the church for years and years and years. But again, super supportive and never hostile. Just wasn't a part of their life. And when I was set apart as a missionary, you know, as the custom is, you know, they invite all the men in the room to come. And my grandfather hesitated, of course. He did not hold the Melchizedek priesthood, as far as I know. Certainly wasn't active in the church. But the stake president kind of urged him to come up, and nobody wanted to make a scene. And so he was there, and he laid his hands on my head and helped set me apart as a missionary, despite.

John Dehlin [00:09:10] Without the priesthood.

Patrick Mason [00:09:13] I don't know for sure. He may have been ordained an elder at some point. Certainly had not been active in the church for decades. Right. But it was very sweet, it was very tender, and I think very fitting and very appropriate that he was there in that circle of love, kind of sending me off and my mission. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:09:34] Did you say both your parents were Utes?

Patrick Mason [00:09:37] They were, yep. Both graduated from the U.

John Dehlin [00:09:39] Okay, so. But you ended up at byu, I guess.

Patrick Mason [00:09:42] Byu. And my dad kind of apostatized at some point. He turned his sports loyalties to the. To the Y.

John Dehlin [00:09:49] He apostatized from.

Patrick Mason [00:09:50] From the U to the Y. Athletics. Right. They were always proud to have graduated from the U. And my mom is still a proud U. But at some point, maybe it was when BYU got really good at football, you know, but we were at the national championship game, the Holiday bowl, when BYU won the national championship in 1984. So we were a big BYU athletics family growing up. And so my two older brothers both went to byu. My oldest brother eventually transferred to the U and graduated from the U. Actually, my two older brothers teach at BYU right now. One in history, one in English. Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:10:28] You have two brothers teaching at BYU right now?

Patrick Mason [00:10:30] Yeah, yeah. So my oldest brother Matt teaches in the history department. He teaches early American history, focuses on the history of slavery.

John Dehlin [00:10:36] What?

Patrick Mason [00:10:37] And then my brother Nick teaches British literature, 18th, 19th century British literature in the English department. And then we have a younger brother who's probably the smartest one of all. He went into banking and mortgages and stuff like.

John Dehlin [00:10:51] Wow. Argie's nodding her head. That's. Cause that area of literature is.

Margi Dehlin [00:10:56] That's what you love, Sardi and.

Patrick Mason [00:10:58] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what he teaches. You know, he teaches all the Jane Austen classes and all that. And so. No, he's a brilliant scholar of British literature. He led their European studies program for years. They've done study abroad, so over in England and stuff like that.

John Dehlin [00:11:12] Where did your two older brothers go to grad school? I'm just curious.

Patrick Mason [00:11:14] So the oldest one did his PhD at University of Maryland, studied with one of the top historians of slavery the There. And then Nick went to SUNY Stony Brook on Long Island.

John Dehlin [00:11:24] Nice.

Patrick Mason [00:11:24] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:11:25] What was your dad's profession? And I'm gonna. I shouldn't assume your mom was a stay at home mom, but that's usually the way it is.

Patrick Mason [00:11:31] Yeah, but it wasn't actually. So they, they both graduated from the U. My dad was in business. He spent most of his life in the insurance industry. And then my mom was a social worker. She worked for the state of Utah doing. Doing Medicaid. I was getting Medicaid and Medicare mixed up, but doing Medicaid stuff. So she worked. Actually she was never home full time. She had the double, triple burden of she worked full time. I think maybe for a while. She was working like 30 hours a week. But she worked the whole time that I grew up and then was taking care of all of us and was cleaning the house and I mean, doing all the stuff that women do, second shift, as they call it, and third shift. Third shift, yeah. So she was. Whereas my dad, you know, worked full time and then he was always really involved in the church. I think he was. My brothers are six and eight years older than me. So he was a beloved kind of young men's leader, I think, when they were teenagers. And then by the time I was a teenager, he was my bishop and he was really good at it. He was a great church leader. Really sensitive, generous, knowledgeable. My perspective even as a kid was that he was really well respected.

John Dehlin [00:12:50] Okay.

Patrick Mason [00:12:51] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:12:52] So four sons.

Patrick Mason [00:12:53] Four sons, four boys, no daughters. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:12:57] So your upbringing, your Mormon upbringing, you know, you already. I think you already said this, but like primary and young men's, young women's and scouting, you know, that whole thing.

Patrick Mason [00:13:08] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:13:08] Family home evenings and family scripture study

Patrick Mason [00:13:11] very intermittent even at the time. I always knew like when they'd had a Lesson on family home evening or family scripture study. Because then we would do it for a couple weeks before we slipped out of the habit again. So it was definitely family meal. Like that was sacred family dinner. We were going to be there and. Yeah, but family home evening and family scripture study was very uneven.

John Dehlin [00:13:41] Yeah, that's pretty normal.

Patrick Mason [00:13:42] Yeah.

Family Culture and Growing Up in the Church

Margi Dehlin [00:13:42] I have a question for you. So if you had to describe a little bit what your family culture kind of felt like in those, let's just say, you know, childhood kind of years, how would you describe it? I'm curious if there were things that emerged maybe in differentiation from the church, like, oh, education was really important, or reading. We had like a family culture around reading. Anything that's like an extra or something or was it really church based?

Patrick Mason [00:14:14] Well, I mean, the church was just. I mean, it was like the undertone that sort of went underneath everything. Right. And it was just. I mean, you were just going to go to church on Sunday. Right. And then you were going to go to young men's on Tuesday or Wednesday night. I mean, it was just what we did as a family. But then on top of that, so both my parents, but I think especially my mom, felt really strongly about education. So we were all readers. She also, my mom's a phenomenal piano player and organist and so she insisted that we all take music lessons as well. It took for some of us a little bit more than others, but I played piano all the way through high school and I'm decent. But there was a kind of culture of achievement, especially around academic achievement. None of us were great athletes or other things like that. But there was a sense of excellence of really. She wanted us to get good grades. She wanted us to be Eagle Scouts. So she got four Eagle Scouts. We went through the system and did that. But there was a real sense of being excellent and trying to achieve things. And the church was a framework for doing a lot of that, but not all of it. You know, the music and the education and all of that was, was all on the side.

Margi Dehlin [00:15:34] Got it.

Patrick Mason [00:15:36] So it's not. I mean, we always joke that. She always said that she wanted us to be doctors. And then she. But she just wasn't specific enough because three of us did become doctors. Just not like the kind that become rich. Right. So we have three PhDs in the family. But that, But I really trace that back to. And again, my, my, my younger brother is, is incredibly intelligent. He just went kind of more of the business route rather than the academic route. And, but I really sort of. That all comes Back to our parents and. But also what. One of the. So, so my mom really drove us towards achievement and excellence. But my dad, one of the things that we, I think we all appreciate about him, you know, his whole life was in business and insurance and so forth, but he never liked, forced us into that direction. He was very happy for us to do what we were interested in doing and he was just extremely proud of us for doing and following the path that we followed. And I remember him giving a talk once, it was either my missionary farewell or homecoming, one or the other. But he talked about how he very much felt. He had a deep testimony that we were all children of God, that we were all brothers and sisters. And so he said, these four sons of mine, they're not my children, they're my brothers. And I'm just here for a few years to kind of help guide them and get them to wherever they need to go and wherever God needs to take them. But they're not mine, you know, they're my brothers. And I think he. So he was just happy to see us do. To do well in whatever we chose to do well.

Margi Dehlin [00:17:20] Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:17:22] Wow. I'm. I'm loving how you're describing your family so far as I think about a lot of people that end up in that chair. They're raised in homes that they sort of would describe as being more orthodox, maybe more hardcore, maybe more harsh, maybe more fear based, maybe more shame based on, and maybe more rigid. And it sounds like you use this analogy in maybe a slightly different way in restoration, but there's this idea of religion being the meal or there's the idea of the religion being like the leaven in the bread or the salt on the meal. And it sounds like while. While there was a frame or structure of Mormonism that it wasn't the meal. You weren't, you know, living to be Mormon. Being Mormon was just the way that maybe your lives were framed.

Patrick Mason [00:18:16] Yeah, I think there's something to that. And maybe somewhere in between. I mean, there were definitely rules. Like we were. My parents felt really strongly about the Sabbath, so we were Sabbath keepers. So we didn't play with friends on the Sabbath. But we weren't. On the other hand, we weren't the like, stay in church clothes all day people. Right. So it was kind of like it was a moderately rigorous, I mean a term that I like just overall is kind of generous orthodoxy. And I feel like that's sort of what I was raised with.

John Dehlin [00:18:51] And orthopraxy.

Patrick Mason [00:18:52] And orthopraxy Very much. And so it was clear, like, it wasn't like, if you go on a mission. I mean, all the talk was like, when you go on a mission. Right. So it was clear that, like, this is who we are as a family. This is. But, like, I don't remember, like, much religious art on the walls. Maybe there were some, a little bit, but. And again, we weren't doing, you know, all the family scripture study and family home evening all the time. But for me, it was like seeing the way that my parents lived their life was enough. That was kind of like all the testimony I needed, like, that. My dad, you know, dedicated a lot of his free time to church service. And again, even as a kid, I could tell that made a difference in people's lives. And my mom, you know, she was oftentimes in the Relief Society presidency or something like that. I mean, she was always taking somebody a meal. She was always, you know, and even as a kid, it's kind of on the periphery. But you're also, like, you're vaguely aware of what your parents are doing. And I was aware enough to know, like, these are two people who are. They're out doing good and helping people. And, like, church is the framework through which they do that. And so, like, this. This is the life that we have together.

John Dehlin [00:20:10] Beautiful.

Margi Dehlin [00:20:11] I have a quick question around kind of what it felt like for you being in. So you've described some. Some of the culture of your family kind of around achievement, education, some structure, structured, and I think, you know, that can exist in a place of warmth, in a place of safety and a place of connection, and that can be a real hustle for certain kids that, you know, may be wired differently. How did it feel for you growing up in that family system? And what do you remember about your experience of having those expectations and feeling that.

Patrick Mason [00:20:52] Yeah, for. For me, it didn't feel oppressive. And. And I. I. It's interesting. So my family that I grew up in, we were not. My parents weren't emotionally effusive. So even still today, my mom and I don't always say I love you or whatever with every conversation in my family now. So my wife, she did grow up with that. You never leave the door without saying I love you and stuff like that. So she brought that into our family now. So I'm much more that way now than I was in my family growing up. But it was never questioned. I mean, it was a very safe environment, very, very stable. I think there were some things, as always, some things going on kind of behind the scenes, my dad lost his job a couple of times and maybe now I know that my parents marriage wasn't as easy as they made it look, but they hid that from the kids and things like that. From my perspective as a kid, it was entirely st. And again, not overly, not much physical affection, but just like stability and like this is a safe place. And so yeah, really high expectations. I think that, I mean it's more his story than mine, but I think that was harder for my younger brother than for me. We had kind of too many groupings because my older brothers were six and eight years older. So it was kind of them and then me and my little brother. And I was always high achieving in the areas that my mom cared about. So in music and in education, those were not areas that my little brother naturally gravitated to. And so that was a tenser relationship. But actually they worked it out in the sense that in a lot of ways they were and remain closer in some ways emotionally because they had to work through some stuff because he wasn't sort of made in her image in the way that I more naturally was. But I think even for. I'm sure again it's his story, but. But I think he would say even he. Even with that conflict that he had with my mom as a teenager, he knew it was a stable and safe and loving place. Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [00:23:08] Thank you.

John Dehlin [00:23:09] So in terms of the kind of teachings or beliefs in the home, you know, let's just say we've already talked about the spectrum of like, let's just say fundamentalist or really orthodox versus more liberal or progressive. There's, there's the sort of correlated stuff you learn and then there's like dialogue and sunstone talk about kind of spirituality slash Mormon culture. Orthodoxy. Not, you know, in your home.

Patrick Mason [00:23:39] Definitely. I mean I didn't know that there was a, an intellectual world of Mormonism outside of like church produced material. So my parents were not dialogues on stone type type people.

John Dehlin [00:23:55] Were they aware of those things and critical of them or did they not even know about them?

Patrick Mason [00:23:59] If they were aware of it, they never mentioned it. So my dad was. So we had, we always had a bookshelf with tons of church books, you know, so he, he was born in 1941, so he came of age, you know, in the 50s and the 60s. You know, Bruce Armaconk, you know, I mean you kind of like a Deseret book's heyday when they were just pumping out all the stuff by general authorities and all this kind of stuff. And he read it all his gospel literacy and he also had a deep love of the scriptures. It was clear, again, we didn't do family scripture study all that well, but you looked at this guy's scriptures and he had a deep love affair with the scriptures. And so that was like, those were the books that were kind of around me. It was all the orthodox kind of church deseret book type and book craft and all that kind of stuff. But it was never foisted on us. It wasn't like, hey, let's sit down and read Bruce Armaconki together. None of that. It was just kind of the books that were on the shelf and so. But yeah, if they were aware of some of these other currents, they certainly never let on. I honestly don't think they were, or it certainly wasn't a part of their life.

John Dehlin [00:25:16] Okay.

Patrick Mason [00:25:16] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:25:17] So as you're growing up into your teen years, so your high school year, did you graduate from high school?

Patrick Mason [00:25:23] 94.

John Dehlin [00:25:24] 94, yeah. Okay, so the September six would have happened your junior year.

Patrick Mason [00:25:29] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:25:29] Like, can you remember any of, you know, and the Hoffman stuff would have happened probably while you were in middle school and you were living here.

Patrick Mason [00:25:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:25:39] So can you remember, you know, as an orthodox sort of Mormon in the bubble, can you remember any of the significant sort of troubling or other sorts of Mormon history events?

Patrick Mason [00:25:52] None of it, none of it registered on my radar at all. The Hoffman bombings, you know, I think I was a little too young, A little too young for that to really register. My dad worked downtown and so he talked later about how he was aware of all of that and so forth. But it, I think just age wise, I was just. And even for the September 6th, so I went to BYU. I think if I'd been two or three years older, I would have been at BYU and it would have happened. I would have been aware of it. But like I said, I was a junior in high school. I was interested in being dumb. I was actually a really good student. So I was just doing dumb stuff with my friends and I wasn't paying attention to any of that world. It just was not part of my galaxy at all.

John Dehlin [00:26:38] Okay, wow. Okay. So you're. How would you describe your, your Mormon youth, your Mormon teen years? You could just say like everyone else is, or you can.

High School Years, Faith, and Personal Interests

Patrick Mason [00:26:49] Yeah, I was, I was a really good boy. I was a really good Mormon boy. So I kept all the rules, was very serious about it, Loved the church, loved the gospel. It was really good to me. Had great experiences in young men's really Liked seminary, liked all my teachers. Read the scriptures, Fell in love with the scriptures as a teenager, Prayed every day, morning and night. So it was. Yeah, I was like, all in. And it was very, very comfortable for me. And it was great. I mean, I have. It's almost weird to say in this day and age, because everybody's got stuff, everybody's got baggage. Like, I have no baggage from my Mormon upbringing. Like, just a great ward with great youth leaders. Now, again, as adult, you grow up and, you know, one of those leaders in particular who was really important for me, he had some trouble later on. And so you realize the world's a little more complex than you thought it was when you were 14. But I just had a great experience. And so I was on seminary council. And one of the ways that I describe myself, I'm just naturally religious. It's just like if there's a religious gene. And I know scientists have debated this, I've got it, you know, implanted. I compare myself to Nephi, not in the sense, like, actually, Nephi annoys me in some ways, and I'm not like Nephi in lots of ways, but I'm like him in the sense that it just kind of like, comes natural. It's not a struggle for me. It never was a struggle for me. Like, being religious was just like, there were the clothes that fit really well and. And I had a structure in community and family that. That made that possible.

John Dehlin [00:28:56] So oftentimes those teen years are kind of associated with some sort of identity struggle or conflict or turmoil. Inner turmoil.

Margi Dehlin [00:29:04] Individuation.

John Dehlin [00:29:05] Individuation, yeah. Rebellion. Wanting to, you know. So were there any. Did you have any internal conflicts that come to mind that you're comfortable sharing?

Patrick Mason [00:29:16] Yeah, as a Mormon teen, very petty rebellions. Very petty. You know, like staying out too late

Margi Dehlin [00:29:23] and,

Patrick Mason [00:29:26] you know, driving really fast, you know, and I probably shouldn't.

Margi Dehlin [00:29:34] Five over.

Patrick Mason [00:29:35] No, like. Like really, really fast. That's out of my system, unfortunately. I probably shouldn't say this, but there's an overpass over I215, and me and my buddies, we used to go and urinate off of it. And I'm slightly embarrassed by that now, but we were 16 years old, so it's like petty rebellion, harmless. Never a sip of alcohol, no drugs. I mean, not even interested. And none of my friends did any of that stuff. And we weren't like goody two shoes in the sense. Like, we sat around talking about the church. We didn't. We were just like teenagers, but who were all church members. Again, for whom it was basically comfort. It was like, part of our life. It was our culture. It was everything. So we weren't rebelling against it. We were just, like, doing our thing. A lot of music, listening to a ton of. So if you would have asked my mom at the time, she would have been really worried about the music I was listening to because it was like, you know, grunge. Right. And stuff, like. So it wasn't even, like, hardcore stuff. It was just, you know, but tons of music. I was huge into the music scene in high school.

Margi Dehlin [00:30:45] So.

John Dehlin [00:30:45] Name your 10 favorite bands in high school.

Patrick Mason [00:30:49] So Pearl Jam, U2REM, Big Country, Indigo Girls, Bruce Hornsby, now, you know, Radiohead, Uncle Tupelo Now, War on Drugs, Wilco, you know, other bands. The Smiths, bands like that.

John Dehlin [00:31:08] Okay.

Patrick Mason [00:31:08] Yeah. Kind of alt rock, grunge stuff. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:31:13] What other personal interests, hobbies were you really into in high school?

Patrick Mason [00:31:19] So, I mean, hanging out with my friends and listening to music was like, the main. The main thing. And then you. I've always been a big reader, and so a lot of reading.

John Dehlin [00:31:30] What types of books in high school?

Patrick Mason [00:31:34] A lot of some. Some serious stuff. You know, I. I've always been interested in history from way back, and so I would read history books, but I've, you know, Lord of the Rings and, you know, that. That kind of stuff.

John Dehlin [00:31:49] Which history books were you reading in high school, if you remember.

Patrick Mason [00:31:53] Boy, that's a really good question.

John Dehlin [00:31:55] Like Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Patrick Mason [00:31:57] No, nothing that serious. It would have been stuff like some historical fiction. And I couldn't even name any titles, but. Yeah, but I was always reading. And I've always, especially growing up, played a ton of sports with my friends. I was always the worst one, like, always, you know, so if I got the religious gene, I did not get the athletic gene, but. But I've loved sports. That was the main thing that I did with my dad growing up was we watched sports together. So you. Mostly BYU and Jazz, Stockton and Malone era. And so, like, that's what we would do. He would come home, we'd have dinner as a family and more nights. If there was a game on, we were watching it and while my mom cleaned the house and stuff like that. So again, I learned later that there was some tension there that I didn't see at the time. But. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:32:55] So as far as kind of shame that sometimes develops around law of Chastity stuff, was that just completely not even a factor in your. Well, I. That you're comfortable sharing?

Patrick Mason [00:33:07] No, no pressure to share. I didn't kiss a girl till I was in college. Not because I didn't want to. They. They weren't interested in me. I wasn't, I wasn't the top on their list of desirability. So I went on. I went on dates and stuff like that. But I'd never had a girlfriend in high school again, not for lack of wanting one. So it's just hanging out with the guys all the time.

Margi Dehlin [00:33:33] So.

Patrick Mason [00:33:33] So obviously I had all, you know, I had very strong ideas about the law of chastity, about the dangers of breaking it. Right. And. But it wasn't even an option.

John Dehlin [00:33:48] And sometimes there's, you know, sometimes there's tension between a young man or woman and the bishop around things like pornography and masturbation.

Patrick Mason [00:33:59] Yeah. I remember a very vivid memory of my childhood. My dad was my bishop basically all through my teenage years. So I remember he did one of the annual interviews in our living room and he asked me if I masturbated. I think I was 15 or 16. And like, that was like, like to hear that word coming out of my dad's mouth was odd. And I didn't, but it was. But that still is, you know, he gave us the Boyd K. Packer, the factory pamphlet and stuff like that. But I don't think my parents ever gave us the sex talk. I'm pretty sure that they never gave. I think they outsourced that to the church. And I just took in whatever I learned at church.

John Dehlin [00:34:47] Okay. When you talk about having that religious gene, I'm dying to know. Like, when I was in high school, I loved seminary and I believed it was true, but I wanted my own testimony. And so for me, reading the Book of Mormon, Moroni's Promise, all that was a really serious thing. Did you ever sort of have that sort of thing where you're like, well, maybe my testimony is just inherited from my parents. I got to find out for myself for sure. And did you have any doubts or, you know, any of that?

Patrick Mason [00:35:17] I don't remember having any active doubts, certainly because that was taught to me. I mean, you got to get your own testimony, right? The Moroni's promise and all that. So I did. I read the scriptures quite seriously, I think. You know, with the four years of seminary, I completed the scripture reading for each four years. I don't, I'm sure that I prayed about the Book of Mormon. I'm sure that I did that as a high school student. I don't recall having a kind of life changing spiritual experience confirming the truth of the Book of Mormon while I was in high school. My first experience like that came in the mtc, which maybe fast forward in just a little bit, but this, I'm not a particularly mystical person. Spirit doesn't actively talk to me a whole lot. I don't hear voices, I don't, you know, things like that. So it's, it's actually pretty rare that I get very distinct mystical or religious kind of experiences. And I can sort of count them on my hand, the ones that I've had. But one of them, probably the most important and foundational experience of my life, kind of along the lines of what you were talking about as I was in the mtc, we'd had a fireside that night, I think about Jesus Christ and we were invited to get our own testimony of him. And so I went back to our dorm room and I knelt by the side of my bed and very sincerely just poured out my heart in prayer. I don't know how long I was there on my knees and had. It was the most incredible kind of spiritual experience of my life, of this absolute outpouring of love and faith and knowledge and this just absolute conviction that Jesus was my savior. So I had that experience on my knees by my bedside in the mtc. That was the first. Again, lots of probably little experiences I would have described as spiritual experiences along the way, feeling good and, and feeling confirmed in what I was doing. But that, that was the first time as a 19 year old missionary where I felt that kind of direct communication from heaven.

John Dehlin [00:37:47] What do you, how do you describe that? Like, what was that in your mind?

Patrick Mason [00:37:52] I mean, still, I mean, I can remember it still today. I mean it still gives me, you know, I could still kind of send shivers down my spine. I mean, for me, I think it was, I believe that was pure communication from God. It was certainly there was a kind of physical affect to it. I felt things in my body, felt a sense of warmth and I don't know the tingles or whatever, but more than that, it was deeper than that. It was not just physiological, it was not just mental or intellectual. It was, it was deeper and more profound than that. And it's, it's sort of been at my core ever since.

John Dehlin [00:38:40] So God and Holy Ghost combination?

Patrick Mason [00:38:42] Yeah, yeah, yeah. For me, a witness of the Holy Ghost for sure.

John Dehlin [00:38:47] And what did you take away as an interpretation of that in terms of what it meant in your life or what was being testified of?

Patrick Mason [00:38:56] Yeah, for me, that particular instance and I'd had, I think I said that was the first that's not actually right. Of the really powerful thing. So I'd had a very distinct impression, I can still remember exactly where it was on the street. I didn't want to go to byu. I wanted to go somewhere else. I was sort of interested in going back east to college or something like that. BYU was on my list because I felt like it should be. But I was on a campus visit down to BYU as a high school senior. I remember exactly where I was walking. I could point you to the place on the sidewalk where out of nowhere I got this distinct, very clear impression like, go to byu. So that was. And I did. And I was a good enough Mormon boy to say, okay. And so I did. I set aside all those other schools that I was interested in. I said, I'm going to go to byu. And then in freshman religion class, I think it was a Book of Mormon class at byu, the professor, the instructor, put in probably a videotape of Howard W. Hunter speaking when he was, you know, he was president of the church for only a few months, but he put in a tape of him speaking. And I had in that classroom, just again, like, pure intelligence for me, witness of the Holy Ghost, that this man was a prophet of God. And so those were important experiences, but the one in the mtc, so it did post date those, but it was by far the most powerful of any of those, probably the most powerful spiritual experience I've had in my life. And when you say, what's the meaning of that? For me, it is the absolute core, the bedrock of my relationship with Jesus Christ. So at the core of everything else, I'm a follower of Jesus, and I really believe that he is who he said he was. And there's a lot of study that's gone into that, a lot of thinking that's gone into that since then. But at the heart of that conviction is this experience.

John Dehlin [00:41:09] So you would have walked away believing

Patrick Mason [00:41:12] about God, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he's my Savior and he's the Savior of the world.

John Dehlin [00:41:19] Would you have left those experiences having conclusions about the church's truthfulness and the Book of Mormon and all that?

Patrick Mason [00:41:27] Nope. Separate. I mean, certainly it was within that framework. Right. It was while I was at the MTC or while I was at a byu in a BYU religion class that this happened. So the church was a kind of framework, a structure through which those experiences and those witnesses could come. But. But even at the time, they were distinguishable. For me, it was never like the package deal, like, I know that Jesus is the Christ, therefore Joseph Smith is a prophet, therefore the church is true. Therefore, you know, and sort of go down the line. And maybe it's just the way my brain works, you know, in terms of. I've always been pretty analytical, and so I've tried to be pretty careful in my thinking. So for me, it was like, this is a witness that this man is a prophet of God, right? That President Hunter is a prophet of God. And I think even in that moment, it's like that there are prophets on the earth, right? So kind of the next Russian nesting doll out from that. But the testimony of Jesus, it was like, Jesus is the Christ. It wasn't about anything else. It was like, this is a testimony of Jesus.

Margi Dehlin [00:42:36] I was just curious. So for you, in your brain, you didn't connect at all the idea of your membership or certain behaviors like praying and studying the Scriptures and doing. You didn't connect that that actually allowed for you to have access to that experience.

Patrick Mason [00:42:56] I'll bet at the time I did. And certainly the experience with Jesus Christ, with my testimony of him, was I was in prayer when I did that. So certainly that was the means by which that happened. The testimony of President Hunter, that happened. I was just sitting passively in a classroom in a byu. So I think so now especially, it's really hard for me to reconstruct my state of mind a quarter century ago. Now, I believe those simply as an act of grace, of. An act of will, in the sense of putting myself in a place where I could be open to spiritual manifestations, but not that I earned it or called it down from heaven or like I put the coin in the right slot, you know, or did the right

Margi Dehlin [00:43:53] sequence of the list of things that you need to do to serve.

Patrick Mason [00:43:56] So at the time, I might have felt. But even at the time, you know, I. I knew, like, that testimony of President Hunter, like, that came out of nowhere. I wasn't praying. Or if I remember right, it was like an 8am class. Like, I missed it a fair amount because I was a freshman in college. I was just there sitting passively, and it just happened. So again, now I just understand that as like an act of pure grace. Certainly I was seeking the testimony of Jesus because I was coming out of that fireside. I was amazed. I was about to go out, right? Like, I've got to testify of these things. I've got to know these things. So there was a sense like, I'm going to pray and seek. But I'd said hundreds, thousands of prayers before that and never had an experience. So I had like, no concept that I was going to have an experience like that. There was no sense of like, I'm going to stay here until like an angel shows up or something like that. It was a very sincere prayer, but I'd given lots of sincere prayers before that. So now, yeah, for me, it's just pure grace.

Margi Dehlin [00:45:07] I had a quick question with regard to high school. It could even be college too. This idea, like you've talked about religion in your bones and kind of it feeling really natural for you, having a group of friends and having this sort of structured support for your. For your kind of belief and experience. And it just fitting, right? You're saying it fit really well. Was there anything in your experience in high school? I'm thinking about my children in Logan, which I think is, you know, a pretty insular community, largely Mormon, where we were. Compared to my high school experience. Was there anything outside your experience? So, like, people in high school, maybe a gay classmate, maybe that penetrated for you in any way around? This works for me, but I can see it be hard or even noticing for your mom this idea that like, wow, mom's life looks hard, like for her to have all this happen, or did you have this sense of like, wow, it works really well for me. But did anything penetrate into your feeling box for others? Of like. But it may be different for other people.

Patrick Mason [00:46:22] Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, I don't think I did have that kind of sympathy for my mom at the time. I think it was just like, that's what moms do, right? So now I look back and I mean, just heroic. And she was also fitting into lots of scripts that were given to her. And so, yeah, but at the time, unfortunately, that just didn't register for me. But I did in high school, junior high and high school had a number of friends. They weren't like in my closest inner circle of friends, but a number of friends and classmates who were not lds. There were several who were Jewish. One of my best friends was Catholic. I think his parents were like. And at the time, I didn't even know what that meant really, other than the fact that they weren't Mormon and we never talked about religion. So I honestly don't even know. Did he go to mass? I don't know. Maybe there were a small handful of kids who were Jewish, like just culturally or did they go to synagogue? It wasn't really even on my radar task, but it was definitely like they were in all the honors and AP classes with me and stuff. So I Respected them, I liked them. I knew that they weren't Mormon. And like, I would have had enough of a kind of evangelistic sensibility about me to. To want them to be Mormon. Right. To wish that they were Mormon, but not enough that, like, I think I can say with certainty, like, I never gave a Book of Mormon to anybody in my life before I went on my mission. Right. I don't think I. Even this really close friend of mine, Sean, this Catholic friend, I'm pretty sure I sent him a Book of Mormon when I was a missionary, but I can't imagine that I did when I was in high school, maybe invited them to seminary or to church. But it would have been like very. So it was like there were these friends of mine who I respected and loved and were great people who were not Mormon. So that was enough, like, to see, like, oh, there, there are other paths. There are other ways of being human. And that was good for me. I wish I would add more of that, actually, but. But I mean, it was just a very deeply Mormon world that I lived in. Yeah.

Mission Experience and Engaging with Criticism

John Dehlin [00:48:54] Okay, so anything. Where'd you, Where'd you go on your mission? Where'd you.

Patrick Mason [00:48:58] Seattle.

John Dehlin [00:48:58] Seattle.

Patrick Mason [00:48:59] Yeah. Okay, so I think I was there right before you. So I was in Seattle 95 to 97. When did you guys move up there?

John Dehlin [00:49:05] Yeah, yeah. Ran.

Patrick Mason [00:49:06] Yeah. So it would. Just because I. I ended my mission in Redmond in 97.

John Dehlin [00:49:13] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [00:49:14] So who knows, we might have even barely overlapped there or something like that.

John Dehlin [00:49:19] Yeah, anything. Normally we talk about missions, but since we're pressed for time a little bit. Anything about your mission you want to share or just you want to frame it or characterize what it meant to you?

Patrick Mason [00:49:28] I had a great mission and I learned a lot on my mission. I learned a lot about myself and I was a very serious missionary, very obedient. If I have regrets about my mission, it's for being too self righteous, especially towards my companions. And I write about this a little bit in some of my books. I really regret it, actually. I wish I would have been different, but. But I, But I took it really seriously and I worked really hard and the. And we didn't baptize a ton of people. I baptized some, but I had really good experiences and was. I think I was deeply shaped in the. In the long run most by a couple of things. One is that I really poured myself into scripture study on my mission. I took that time really seriously and just immersed myself in the scriptures, especially in the Book of Mormon and New Testament. So really Came to know God through those books. And then I came especially, I think, in the second half of my mission, I got to the point where, like. And this annoyed some of my companions, who were even more hardcore than I was. I was just really interested in talking with people. Actually, even by the end of my mission, I still liked tracting. And we never had. I never baptized a single person off of knocking on doors. But I had great conversations. I met a lot of really interesting people. And especially in the second half of my mission, I was just as interested in hearing their stories about God and their spiritual lives as I was in sharing anything that I had to share. And again, that frustrated one companion in particular. He was the challenge him to baptism on the doorstep type guy. And I was like, hey, let's have a conversation about God type guy. And so we clashed a little bit. And when I told my mission president about this great guy, Merrill Oaks, my second mission president, President Oaks, brother, brother. And I told him that we were just clashing totally different styles. And he just started laughing. He said, I knew that was gonna happen when I put the two of you together. I knew you'd be good for each other. And we were. And so I really loved talking to people, learning from them. Again, it's just this religious gene in me. Like, I'm interested in other people's experiences with God and if I have something to share that can help you in your journey, great. But. But I wasn't. I wasn't shoving much down anybody's throat, especially by the second year, except again, maybe some of my companions.

John Dehlin [00:52:27] Was Ed Decker doing his stuff in Seattle? He was.

Patrick Mason [00:52:29] He was up in Issaquah doing his thing. So I never served in that area. But he was sort of legendary at the time. So, yeah, the God Makers was making the rounds at all the evangelical churches. I. So that's actually where I encountered evangelicalism, was on my mission. And that was really important. And I was the. I was the weird missionary who loved getting the anti Mormon pamphlets. I collected them and read and studied them. And actually it was evangelicals on my mission who taught me about grace. They were the ones who taught me to discover grace in the gospel. And so I'm grateful to them for those conversations. So I never served in the area where Ed lived. He was sort of legendary for always inviting the missionaries into his home and, like, giving them drinks and feeding them and stuff. Because apparently as it got back to me, I mean, this is second or third hand. Like, his philosophy was like, they're better. It's Better off that they're in my home than out knocking doors. Right. Converting other people to Mormonism. So that was. So Seattle was a really weird place. There was this very strong evangelical influence with a very strong anti Mormon tinge to it. But it's also King County, Washington was then and remains one of the most secular places in the country in terms of low rates of religious affiliation, stuff like that. So. So that was. And that was my first exposure to real diversity, to real poverty, to all those kinds of experiences. And that stuck with me. And I learned to work hard and I learned to talk to people and be with people who were really different than me and learned to love people who were different than me. So, yeah, I look back at my dad, always said that he thought about his mission every day of his life. That's not true for me. I actually don't think about it like consciously. I don't think about it all that much. But it taught me a lot of really important lessons.

John Dehlin [00:54:22] Total shot in the dark. Was Mark Driscoll or Mars Hill doing their thing while you were on your mission? Does that even ring a bell?

Patrick Mason [00:54:28] Yeah, it rings a bell now. I don't know. They didn't, they weren't on my radar then, so. So I don't know if it was a little early or if it just, it wasn't in the right areas or whatever. Yeah. But I know who they are now. Yeah, for sure.

John Dehlin [00:54:40] So. So talk about. I, I mean, I didn't hear much about in high school years you being confronted with, quote, anti Mormon literature. So what was that like for you to encounter critiques of, of the LDS Church on your mission? Were there things that stuck out for you? Were the things that troubled you? Did you just kind of dismiss it? Did you read apologetic stuff and just buy it by that? All hook, line and sinker? Like, how did you deal with the anti Mormon literature that you were exposed to?

Patrick Mason [00:55:14] Yeah, so I didn't reject it. I didn't keep it at arm's length. Like I said, I actually collected these pamphlets and read them and I did read them and I took them seriously and I would have long conversations and I was. Especially in the first half of my mission, I spent a lot of time arguing with evangelicals. The second half of my mission, I didn't just. I was more interested in just having good conversations. So the tone shifted. But. And I had something of a reputation of like being good. You know, we called it Bible bashing. Right. And I was, I was good at it. As good as a 19 year old, right. It's gonna be like. I mean, these people I was talking to, especially like the ministers, they knew way more than me, but I thought I was hot stuff, so. But I did, I read it. Some of it I was put off by what I sensed as a kind of mean spiritedness of some of it. So it just wasn't, it wasn't inviting to me or welcoming to me because it was just mean, but some of it. And I remember, I talk about this in my book Planted. I remember distinctly having a conversation with a guy about Joseph Smith as a money digger. And I remember bearing testimony to him. I know that Joseph Smith was not a money digger. I didn't know. I didn't know what I was talking about, but I just had this kind of fervency bore my testimony of that. And then of course I go home and read a thing or two. I was like, oh, well, actually after all. So I think I mostly responded. At no point did they cause a kind of crack in my testimony. They raised questions for me that persisted and stayed with me and that I took home to byu. And then when I did start to read and study, so they introduced new frameworks and questions for me. But they didn't shake me as a missionary. If anything, probably led me to retrench.

John Dehlin [00:57:22] Okay. Anything else you want to share about your mission?

Patrick Mason [00:57:28] No, just other than I'm sorry for all the people that I was obnoxious to.

Margi Dehlin [00:57:32] Can I have a couple follow ups on the mission? I was really curious. So when you kind of place yourself back into the fervent mode with being hard on companions, I think that you were kind of saying that. Do you remember? Because I think the driver or behind that can be really different for different people. Do you remember what you were thinking in those moments where, you know, I don't know what that was showing up like behaviorally toward them, but if it was like judgment or if it was like a lot of judgment, do you remember what your. What was going on inside you as far as like the drive to act that way?

Patrick Mason [00:58:12] Yeah, I mean, I just for me it was about being as obedient as I could. And I think at the time I would have believed that the more obedient I am, that the more God will bless me and the more. Which would look like bringing more people into the church. Right. So if I don't do everything that I can do and if my companion can't do everything that he can do and if our district doesn't do everything that they can do, like there Are going to be souls out there that we don't get to. Right. Like, we will not do what God called us to do. So I've never had a relationship with God where I felt like he was going to be like a really angry, disappointed, harsh judge of me. It was more that there's work to be done here, there's blessings to be had, and I won't get them unless I'm given 100% and the people around me are given 100% too.

Margi Dehlin [00:59:16] Got it. So strong sense. It sounds like responsibility.

Patrick Mason [00:59:20] Yeah. And obedience bring blessings. Obedience is the first law of heaven.

Margi Dehlin [00:59:23] That's right. And then dependent. Now you're dependent with. You're working with other people.

Patrick Mason [00:59:27] That's right. So it's not just me.

Margi Dehlin [00:59:28] You're like, hey, come on.

Patrick Mason [00:59:30] Yeah, yeah. So companion sleeping in was a big. You know, that was a travesty. Right? Because. And I had some companion. I mean, one companion was smoking the whole time. He was my companion and stuff, you know, so, like, weird stuff happens on mission. But it was this sense that, like, again, not that I. I really don't think I've ever had the relationship where God was the angry God hanging me over the pit of hell. Right. It was just like, this is, like, serious, right? There are souls on the line here. There's people. And if we are not doing everything that we can do, you know, somebody, somewhere, someone is going to be lost, and that's a heavy burden.

Margi Dehlin [01:00:21] Maximize, maximize, maximize.

Patrick Mason [01:00:23] Absolutely.

Margi Dehlin [01:00:23] And then just really quick, also, you described a shift in your mission where I think you said the first kind of part where you were. Oh, much more. Talking a lot and trying to. And then the latter half, I think you mentioned just really being more interested in people's stories. Right. And listening. And do you remember how that shift came about? Was it just super, super, super organic? Did you. Was it more exposure and you just genuinely enjoyed it, like that curiosity. And then how did you receive those stories? Was it like. Well, they're not Mormon, so I mean, that's their experience, but it's a little. You know what I mean? Less. Less, you know, like, how did you perceive that part of it?

Patrick Mason [01:01:10] Yeah, yeah. The transition itself was pretty organic and gradual. There wasn't like a clean break or a shift or a moment. I think I would chalk it up to just greater maturity. And I think also I think the gospel kind of soaking into my heart, my learning to be a little more humble and loving, less judgmental. But yeah, in terms of listening to other people's stories, no doubt. I Mean, at no point did I relinquish the idea that these people should be Mormon. Like, they'd be better off Mormon. And my job here, ultimately, the best possible outcome here is for them to accept the gospel and get baptized. But I was also genuinely okay with walking away if they didn't. Because I think part of this maturity and learning, maybe it was learning about grace from evangelicals, but also really believing in the plan of salvation. Like, at no point, like, I never bought the whole idea. Like, people have one chance. If they say no to missionaries, that's their chance. And they said no. Right. I never bought into that. So I always had the sense, like, life is long, eternity is long.

Margi Dehlin [01:02:28] Right.

Patrick Mason [01:02:29] I'm here. It just wasn't the right time. And so we'll have a conversation. If it goes somewhere, great. If not, we'll go and talk to the next person. So definitely I was not a thorough going, maybe getting close to pluralism, certainly not a relativist, not even close, but willing to let God do his work in his own time.

Margi Dehlin [01:02:55] Okay.

Courtship, Marriage, and Life After the Mission

John Dehlin [01:02:58] All right. Well, there's three post mission strains I want to follow, maybe in sequence. One is your courtship with your now wife. I want to hear about that.

Patrick Mason [01:03:09] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:03:09] I want to hear about the progression of your academic career and also the progression of your faith.

Margi Dehlin [01:03:18] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:03:18] And I imagine those things are all happening in parallel, developing in parallel. So let's start. Is it okay to start with your wife or would you rather start? Of course.

Patrick Mason [01:03:25] We can talk about her all day.

John Dehlin [01:03:26] Okay.

Patrick Mason [01:03:27] Yeah. So my wife, Melissa. So. So I graduated. I graduated from BYU without getting married at the time. That was a really heavy burden for me. Deeply wanted to be married and really tried. I dated a lot and did have girlfriends at byu. It just didn't work out. So I graduated and went to Notre Dame for graduate school. They have a great program in American religious history. I knew that's what I wanted to do. But it was funny when I called my mom and told her that I had gotten into Notre Dame, literally the first words out of her mouth were not, congratulations, I'm proud of you. It's like, how are you ever going to meet a Mormon girl at Notre Dame? Which I did eventually. So God works in mysterious ways. So I went out to Notre Dame and it was my. Let's see, I was in my fourth year there, third or fourth year that I still remember it. I was sitting on the stand. I was giving a talk in church that day. Let's just say there were not a lot of single LDS women at Notre Dame. That may be a surprise, but I was sitting on the stand and all of a sudden this really cute red headed girl walked in at the back door. And I hadn't seen her before. I was like, hmm, you know, I was like, you know, the radar went off pretty immediately. And so she was. So I was in grad school there. She was an undergraduate there. She went there as a good Catholic girl. She grew up in South Texas, Hispanic Catholic family. Her mom was a teacher at a Catholic school. Later on became principal of the Catholic school. And so Melissa had grown up a Catholic and went to Notre Dame. It was a big deal for this Southern Texas Hispanic family to send their daughter to Notre Dame. And she. Her freshman year. Notre Dame's just an incredible spiritual place. I mean, every dorm has a chapel in it with an assigned priest. There's mass and I mean, you know, obviously kids are all over the map in terms of how serious they take it, but it's a spiritual place. It's suffused with spirituality. And so she was on a kind of spiritual journey her freshman year, but just was not connecting with her own Catholicism, despite really trying going to lots of mass with friends and so forth. So she went home after that freshman year and spent the summer searching, reading about all kinds of religions, really searching, like taking it really, that basically, I mean, that's what basically did like a comparative religion course over that summer on her own. And she was increasingly frustrated. And she tells this story about how one night she knelt by her bedside. I mean, it's funny when she tells it, she said, you know, God, give me a sign. She says, I was Catholic, I believe in signs, right? You know, and she said, God, like, if you're real, if you're there, like, you gotta let me know. Like, I'm getting tired of looking and not finding anything. And so if you're there, you gotta let me know. If not, fine, I'll just move on with my life. She goes to bed, she wakes up in the morning with the door knocking and it's two Mormon missionaries. And she sends them away. But actually she had good friends in high school. Some of her closest friends were Mormon. And so later on that day actually sort of occurred to her. She was with these girlfriends of hers. It kind of occurred to her. She's like, oh, wait a minute, I need to talk to your missionaries. And they're like, what? They had been hoping and praying for this for years. And so she had the discussions that summer. Her mom was not happy about it, would not allow the missionaries into the home. So she took the discussions at her friend's home, decided she wanted to be baptized, but her parents asked her to wait to show that she was serious about it. And so she. So that's when I met her. So it was the beginning of her sophomore year. She walks into church because she wants to be a member of the church, but not yet baptized. And so we just get to be friends at first. And then she goes home over Christmas, gets baptized. As soon as she comes back, we start dating. And we dated for a couple years before getting married.

John Dehlin [01:07:29] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [01:07:29] So we met at church, but I had nothing to do with her conversion process. And I actually think that was helpful in terms of her family. They still weren't thrilled about the whole Mormon thing, especially her mom. But the fact that I was not the one, I was not the agent of that. I was just like the pick me up along the way, you know, that helped. And then the big conflict for us at the time was whether to get married in the temple. She was a new convert, obviously, that was my expectation growing up. And we really, we prayed about it, we thought about it, we talked about it. We counseled with our bishop, who was one of our close friends, just an amazing guy. And we came to the conclusion that, no, we shouldn't. That we don't want to start our family by alienating hers. And that broke my mom's heart. I still remember her crying when we broke the news to her that we wouldn't be married in the temple right away. And so we did. We actually had a great wedding on the beach in South Texas. Our bishop. South Padre Island. Yeah. So our bishop, who had counseled us through this whole thing, he. He flew down. So he's the one who married us on this beach. And we had this great party, you know, big Mexican wedding. They pulled out the alcohol after we left. I mean, it was all this, like, negotiation with her family. Like what parts of it. Like, it's going to be a Mormon wedding, but not a totally Mormon wedding. There will be alcohol, but after we like. But not all night, you know. And so, like, we just negotiated this like Mormon Catholic wedding. Right.

John Dehlin [01:09:00] Cool story.

Patrick Mason [01:09:01] And then we got sealed. Exactly. On our one year anniversary. One year. Now you can do it sooner. But we got sealed on our one year anniversary. So that all worked out. But we're really grateful that we did that. And I think that everybody's situation is different, but for us, that was the right thing to do.

John Dehlin [01:09:21] Wow, that's super cool.

Patrick Mason [01:09:23] Yeah. So she's amazing. Yeah, we've been married for 17 years now.

John Dehlin [01:09:30] And. Congratulations.

Patrick Mason [01:09:31] Thanks.

John Dehlin [01:09:32] And how many kids?

Patrick Mason [01:09:33] Four kids.

John Dehlin [01:09:33] Four kids. Okay.

Margi Dehlin [01:09:35] And what do you remember about Melissa? What do you remember, you know, being notable about her?

Patrick Mason [01:09:41] Yeah, she's brilliant. Like, just very deeply smart, curious. She is fun. She has, like, the best laugh in the world. She just has a personality that is just, you know, just contagious. I should not necessarily like life at the party. I think she would describe herself as an introvert. I think that would surprise a lot of people because she is so, so friendly. But she. She's just also a really thoughtful person. Cares a lot about the world, cares about people. I was attracted. Really? I mean, she's beautiful too, so I was physically attracted to her right off the bat. But she's just a deeply good person who cares a lot about people. So immediately after graduating, her first job was working as the family and children's coordinator in the homeless center there in South Bend. She's just started, just this past week, started a master's program in social work up at Utah State. Like that. That's who she is at her core. She's just like a deeply good person who's just, like, off the charts, brilliant, creative. She's an award winning, literally nationally renowned quilt artist. She has pieces in museums and traveling shows and stuff like that. So she's always been creative. So, I mean, she's just. She's a phenomenal human being. And I mean. And some of that stuff was down the road. Right. But, like, that was all in her when I met her.

Margi Dehlin [01:11:19] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:11:22] All right. I love it. I hope to meet Melissa someday.

Patrick Mason [01:11:25] Yeah. Yeah. She's great. She's very passionate. She's passionate about.

John Dehlin [01:11:28] And I came at you a little bit. She came at me. That was. And I respected that. She's like, what are you doing ripping on my husband?

Patrick Mason [01:11:35] You know what I mean? No, she's very. And she'll say, that's the Latina in her.

John Dehlin [01:11:39] John, cut Patrick some slack. I'm like, go, Melissa. Yeah.

Patrick Mason [01:11:43] Well, I still remember that night. And, yeah, sometimes we have different personalities. We handle conflict differently. She's fiercely loyal. She will fight. You were on one side of that, but she'll fight for the people that she cares about and the things that she loves.

John Dehlin [01:12:05] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:12:05] All right. I'm gonna just delve in because I think how couples handle conflict is actually a really interesting. And you had kind of. So part of your story, I remember, was. Oh, I recognize now in retrospect, maybe my parents were having some under rumblings where it Was hard, and I didn't really know. I didn't perceive it at the time. So that's kind of a conflict. A little slice of. Right. How you.

Patrick Mason [01:12:30] And then conflict avoidance. Right, right.

Margi Dehlin [01:12:33] Of a way of experiencing a conflict style in your own home. So how would you describe kind of your conflict differences coming into marriage and what have you created now?

Patrick Mason [01:12:44] Yeah, that's such an important question. And I've thought about this a lot, especially on the academic side. I mean, all this stuff with peace studies and conflict resolution, so forth. So definitely I came from a conflict avoidance background. And so that's. That's my sort of natural approach. I do not. I don't like conflict. It doesn't give me any energy, actually. You know, it takes a lot out of. Melissa's a little bit more of a fighter, you know, And, I mean, she grew up in a great family. Just amazing parents. Great family. But I think they were just more open emotionally and a little bit more open conflict and just more comfortable doing that. And it didn't mean you didn't love each other.

Margi Dehlin [01:13:31] Right, right.

Patrick Mason [01:13:33] And so she brought so two different conflict styles coming into our marriage. And I think we're still working on it. We've become. We're great friends, but we're still working on our communication. We. I think, still the tendencies that we brought into our marriage are still both of our default positions. Again, I've learned a lot of tools academically that I try to implement. So what I'd like to be is more of a kind of conflict transformation person, a person who kind of leans into conflict and is able to transform it into something constructive. I'm still learning how to actually do that. I know how it works intellectually, it's harder to do Personally. She also, again, her default is to fight a little bit, but she's. I think I've smoothed some of those edges off. And so. So, you know, it's not perfect by any stretch, but I think we've both. We've learned from each other and. We're still growing together.

Margi Dehlin [01:14:42] Yeah. Yeah. I think awareness is such a key piece. You know, without awareness, there's nowhere to go. So I love this idea of, like, well, I know how I naturally show up in conflict and what it feels like to me. And then I hear kind of, you're trying some new things in there. And then also it sounds like influence, like you kind of influence each other totally as well.

Patrick Mason [01:15:05] And so I have to. It's a willful act. So when I see her respond in a way that so More forcefully that would naturally I'd want to avoid. Or like, you know, like run. Yeah. Like, so it then becomes an act of will for me to recognize where she's coming from. It's not an act of aggression, you know, on her part. It's just part of her communication and conflict style. So it takes me a minute to recognize that and say, okay, then how do I respond? And she's talked about the same thing. Right. I mean, she'll recognize some of the ways that I approach things and that she. I. She's more emotional. I'm a little more analytical. Right. And so then she has to recognize, like, the space that I'm coming from and what I'm trying to. And so, as you said, the awareness part of it, both the self awareness, but then the other awareness. Right. And to do it within a relationship of love and trust. And so, yeah, again, 17 years, we're not perfect, but we're better than we were 17 years ago.

Margi Dehlin [01:16:15] I love that. That is. Is that is real life?

Patrick Mason [01:16:17] Yeah, Absolutely. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:16:21] Excellent. Okay, let's talk about you. Come now, let's rewind back to your mission.

Patrick Mason [01:16:25] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:16:26] How do you get into Mormon studies to history? Just talk about kind of the. Your career path from mission to.

Patrick Mason [01:16:33] Yeah. So I've always loved history. Like, I. I knew. I declared myself a history major from day one when I entered byu.

John Dehlin [01:16:41] Mostly American, was your.

Patrick Mason [01:16:43] Yeah, I was always mostly interested in American history. One of my great character defaults is I don't speak any other languages. I love traveling internationally and so forth. I just, I barely speak English. And so American history was gonna be it for me. But I've always loved American history, going way back to elementary school. And so history was natural. The religious history was not necessarily inevitable, but I was pretty sure, like I said by the time I graduated from BYU that I wanted to do religious history, and that's why I chose Notre Dame and went there. Religious history specifically. So the history of religion in the United States. So not theology, not, you know, but like the history of religion. And so actually, if you would have asked me during my first two or three years of grad school, like, what my specialty was going to be, it would have been African American religion. I spent. So it was not Mormonism. I was not. I was studying Mormonism totally on the side, like a little bit here or there, but not a deep dive into it at all. My deep dive was into African American religions. And so I wrote papers on that, gave conference papers, publications in that area. So that was sort of my first

Studying Mormon History at BYU

John Dehlin [01:18:01] so going back to your time at BYU, you arrived a couple years after the September 6 crackdown had happened. Student review. I don't even know if that was still around when you were at BYU. I left BYU. Margi and I both left BYU in 93.

Patrick Mason [01:18:14] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:18:15] So we don't know what it was like after we left. We just know. We don't. Joanna Brooks there while we were there. Student review, September 6. There was the whole. Cecilia Far.

Margi Dehlin [01:18:23] Gail Houston.

John Dehlin [01:18:25] Gail Houston, David Knowlton. All that happened while I was there. I'm wondering, in terms of Mormon studies, controversies, truth claim stuff, what did you experience? What do you remember experiencing while you were at byu?

Patrick Mason [01:18:40] Yeah, if anything, that's actually a great question. It's a really important question. And it's. It's. There's a kind of serendipity for me being just young enough to miss all that stuff. And. And the serendipity is that, like, I didn't know how controversial all this stuff was. Like, and, And. And it didn't affect me. I didn't witness it. I wasn't in those circles. It didn't affect me. So, like, when I did become interested, when my academic interest in Mormonism started, like, I didn't know it was dangerous. Like, I. Like, I was so naive. Like, I was just like, well, who wouldn't be interested in this stuff? So I actually. So my first academic exposure to Mormonism did happen at byu, happened under the tutelage of David Whitaker, who was the longtime special collections curator in the library for the Mormon materials there. And so he taught a course in the history department about Mormonism. So not in religious ed. It was Mormon history from an academic perspective. And David taught this. And that was my first exposure to Mormon history, Mormon studies, any of this in an academic sense. And he was phenomenal. And David taught it straight up. He taught. But that's where I learned about Joseph Smith and folk magic. So again, where. Two years earlier, I'm like, he never did it. I'm like, oh, wait a minute, he did. Right. This is where I learned about the priesthood, Temple ban, where I learned about polygamy, where I learned about Mountain Meadows Massacre, where I learned about Mormon Native American relations, correlation. I mean, it was like. It was straight up Mormon history.

John Dehlin [01:20:19] This is a course.

Patrick Mason [01:20:19] It was a course. Yeah. In the history department. I think it's still offered today. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:20:24] Just like Mormon controversies.

Patrick Mason [01:20:26] No, it was Mormon history.

John Dehlin [01:20:27] Oh, okay.

Patrick Mason [01:20:27] It was Mormon history, but not from a religious ed point of view. Not. It wasn't faith. It was like, we are here as historians to study the Mormon past.

John Dehlin [01:20:37] So you would have learned about Leonard Arrington and all that.

Patrick Mason [01:20:40] I think on day one. I think day one, the first lecture was like the doing of Mormon history. So I'd never heard of Leonard Arrington in my life. So David Whitaker is the one who taught me all of this stuff. He was my first exposure. That was when I read the Mormon Experience. You know, Arrington Bitten's book. It's the first time I'd read any of this stuff. The first time I dove into the primary sources in a serious way. Right.

John Dehlin [01:21:05] Would he have talked about Fon Brody? Would he have Talked about the September 6th?

Patrick Mason [01:21:08] 100%, yep.

John Dehlin [01:21:09] Because Michael Quinn had. Would have left the history department just

Patrick Mason [01:21:12] barely, just a few years prior. So this. I would have taken that class after my mission. So this would have been in like 97 or 90, 98 that I was taking his class. So. But again, as a kid, you're like, oh, five years ago. That's ancient history. Right? You know, I mean, it wasn't ancient. It was fresh and it was raw, but not for me. And. But no, we talked. I still have my notes from that class. We talked about everything and it was straight up. And. And I ended up working for David in special Collections help process, like the Thomas collection down there. And we would talk about stuff. I went on a study abroad with him. He was the director of the London Study Abroad. So I went. And so David was my first mentor in Mormon history. And I got it at byu. And that was. It was important for me because, like, we talked about all this stuff in a BYU classroom and like, unflinchingly and like, I knew that David went to church and I was like, okay, like, it's not scary to talk about this stuff again. I didn't know that it was supposed to be scary. Like, nobody ever told me that it was supposed to be scary to do all this. Like, I mean, really, it sounds strange today, but. And I remember and I know that like, my other roommates weren't all that interested in it. And I knew what I was studying there wasn't what we were doing at church. I mean, it was very clear, like, this is the academic study of this stuff. And then there's what you do at church. So there was a division there, but I didn't know that it got people in trouble. I mean, David told me that it did. We Learned about the September 6th and so forth, but it just seemed like it was like, no problem. And it's total serendipity if I was two years older, right. I would have been at BYU during the September 6th, and I think I'd have a very different experience. But for me, there was this kind of distance. And so when I finally. When I started to get into. When I started to pursue it more seriously, you know, in grad school, I wrote a paper here because actually, my professors were really interested that I was Mormon. It was mostly Catholic and evangelical students in my cohort, so came to learn a lot and love a lot about those traditions. But my professor, I had one professor in particular, he was a former Catholic priest. He'd always say he was this kind of, like, gruff old guy, and he'd say, like, what's the Mormon take on that? I was like, there is no Mormon take on, like, the Puritans or something like that. But he always wanted to know, like, what's the Mormon take on that? So me and one other guy, we were admitted into the program. We were really like, the token Mormons. I think it was kind of an experiment because one of my professors there, his name was George Marsden, a huge figure in evangelical scholarship. And he had just written a book called the Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. And his argument in there was like, hey, we're doing this postmodern thing. Like, everybody's bringing their perspectives to the table, like black perspectives and feminist perspectives. And it was a little early for queer perspectives. But he said, if everybody's bringing their perspectives to the table, why can't religious people do the same? And so he had this kind of project of, like, religious people being part of the academy. And certainly you got to learn the rules of the game. You got to do academic scholarship, but why can't religious people be here, too? And so, you know, he was bringing in evangelical students. Obviously, Notre Dame was attracting Catholic students. And so my friend Mike Degrassio, and I'm sure we were. The Mormon experiments is like, how far can we push this? And so we were these two Mormon kids who were admitted into the history program. And so I wrote on Mormonism every once in a while. Really wasn't until my dissertation that I did it in any kind of serious way.

John Dehlin [01:25:08] Let me go back and ask you just a clarifying question so you would have. So, first of all, this course, I wish it were available right now to the public because I had to learn all this stuff in my 30s.

Patrick Mason [01:25:19] I teach this course at USU right now.

John Dehlin [01:25:20] Now, what's it?

Patrick Mason [01:25:21] It's called Mormonism in the American Religious Experience. I teach it every year, and I have a College. So I have a colleague who teaches every fall. I teach it every spring.

John Dehlin [01:25:27] Needs to be like, you know how. Like, I did. Open course. There needs to be an open courseware course where you share your lectures and the reading materials for the world. Because, like, I would love every Mormon. I. You know, I talk about informed consent a lot. We'll get to that later. But, like, everyone should know the intellectual history of Mormonism as. As just a matter of basic informed consent.

Patrick Mason [01:25:49] Yeah, I don't disagree.

John Dehlin [01:25:50] Yeah, I mean, I would pay you to do a podcast on that, but we'll talk about that later. Anyway, so I want to understand. So you take this course and you would have learned about BH Roberts. I'm sure you've learned about Juanita Brooks, Sinfon Brody, Lil Bennion, Leonard Arrington, Eugene.

Margi Dehlin [01:26:08] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [01:26:08] That whole intellectual tradition.

John Dehlin [01:26:10] Yep. And are you saying you emerged. You finished that course not knowing how super polarizing and dangerous and controversial Mormon studies was?

Patrick Mason [01:26:22] I knew it intellectually, not emotionally, not emotionally, not experientially. Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:26:27] Okay. Just wanted to make sure.

Patrick Mason [01:26:28] Yeah, that's a good clarification.

Margi Dehlin [01:26:29] Okay.

Patrick Mason [01:26:30] No, and David made abundantly clear, like, this was not easy for these people. Right. And there were consequences. They paid the price for their intellectual scholarship and for, you know, they made great sacrifices. So that was abundantly clear. I just hadn't felt it or experienced it. I think I was, you know, President Hinckley was president of the church. I think my feeling, my sense, and I don't think I was alone. It was like, that's in the past. Right. It's like, it's a new day, President Hinckley. It's like a new spirit, you know, and so, you know, we've learned from that. And so I think I had this kind of optimism, maybe naive optimism, that. Yeah. That they had paid the price and that now it was a new day.

John Dehlin [01:27:23] Okay, so just me geeking out a tiny bit. Were there any characters in humans figures in that course that really started. That struck a chord with you emotionally, where you're like. You really felt like you felt for their experience or emotionally connected with them, maybe even in a tragic or a sympathetic way. What. What characters stood out for you?

Patrick Mason [01:27:53] Yeah, for me, it was the. The whole experience of race, Mormonism's travail with race. So we spent a lot of time. David was also a Western historian, so we spent a lot of time on Mormons and Native Americans. So really wrestled with that experience all the way up to George P. Lee and some of those difficult stories. But what really, I'm an American historian. I've always been interested in Mormonism, in America's wrestle with race. And so the African American story really resonated with me. So I wrote my. We spent a lot of time on it in that class. It was the first time that we really dove into the details about the priesthood. Temple band talked about, you know, we read a lot of those difficult racist statements from church leaders, talked about the history. I ended up writing my senior thesis at BYU about the history of anti miscegenation laws in Utah, laws against interracial marriage. And that got published in the Utah Historical Quarterly. And the religious influence in that. So I've always been. Those stories really resonated with me. And I had another really profound experience at about the same time is while I was a study abroad student in London, Eugene, England. So as I said, David Whitaker was leading our study abroad, but Eugene England was there leading the theater study abroad. So a parallel program at the same time. And I'd never met Eugene England before. I only knew him from what I'd heard about in. In class. And he put on a fireside one night, four black members of the church there to talk about their experiences. And I just went because I was just curious. And it was one of the most transformative meetings I've ever been in. Eugene, England was. He was just so open and loving and honest and made clear that this was a place where people could share their stories. And then he just, he just. My memory is he just turned it over to these black. So it wasn't him talking at them. It was like creating a space, like, okay, let's hear your experiences. And these, you know, this was in England. So these were mostly black British, you know, Africans, you know, who were living in England. And they talked about. Some of them had heard about it before they got baptized. Some didn't know about the ban until after they were baptized. All of them talked about having. Having wrestled with this, some of the experiences they had as members of the church, experiencing racism in the church. I just remember I still have a journal entry where I talk about this. I mean, just being so deeply moved in every which way. I was inspired by their faith. I was inspired by their courage and their bravery and their fortitude. I was deeply saddened. I mean, I remember were shedding tears, hearing their stories, hearing them talk about their pain. So all of that was happening. And again, when I went to grad school, I studied African American religious history. So that experience, the kind of American experience with race, the way that that infected Mormonism. If there's one aspect of it that really resonated with me, it was the journey with race.

John Dehlin [01:31:26] Okay. Have you met Lester Bush? I'm just curious.

Patrick Mason [01:31:29] I've never met. In passing. In passing, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:31:33] Would you have learned about Darius Gray and the Genesis group at that? Yeah.

Patrick Mason [01:31:36] So I read Lester Bush's essay in that class.

John Dehlin [01:31:39] Right.

Patrick Mason [01:31:40] And then I don't remember when I first met Darius. You know, we've met several times. We've been, you know, done lots of things since. He's one of my heroes.

John Dehlin [01:31:50] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [01:31:51] And all those folks. And I've. I've just recently been reading some of Matt Harris's scholarship and really tough stuff, but those are some of my spiritual heroes.

John Dehlin [01:32:03] Beautiful. What about deep thinking around the church's truth claims and the veracity of the church's truth claims? While you were a BYU student and sister companion to that, did you have any inklings of faith struggles or cracks in your testimony once, you know, if, if you did start at that point, considering issues of the Church's veracity?

Patrick Mason [01:32:35] Yeah, so. So yeah, that is, as I said, it goes back to my mission. All these anti Mormon pamphlets that I got, right. Raising all these questions about Joseph Smith, about the Book of Mormon, Book of Abraham, polygamy, of course, those kinds of things. So that was all now in my mental furniture that I took with me back to byu and the fact that we. I really credit taking that class and doing it under the tutelage of David Whitaker and having conversations with him, like the fact that I could come through, come back. And then we talked about all of that stuff that I read about in these pamphlets that were criticizing the church. Then I came back and in a BYU classroom, we talked about all that stuff in a way that was honest. Where we read the primary sources, we were reading the scholarship. I was like, that gave me a kind of confidence that these weren't things that you just had to shove aside like bury under the rug. It was like, okay, I can read. It was a one semester class. We couldn't talk about everything. But the fact that we talked about every single one of those things that I'd read about, every single one of those criticisms came up in that class in a forthright way. I was like, okay. So that gave me then the confidence that propelled me into then in my own studies than, you know, just in my own private time, like most people do. This is all before you come along, before, you know, most of this stuff is on the Internet. So I'm still reading most of this stuff in books and in dialogue and stuff like this. But it was that class and that experience at BYU that gave me the confidence to do it. And so I didn't. I just genuinely have not had, like the big faith crisis. I have tons of questions, tons of things still, of course, I have lots of things that are. No, no, no.

John Dehlin [01:34:35] But you still have never had a faith crisis.

Patrick Mason [01:34:37] Never. Never. Earth shaking, rattling 1.

John Dehlin [01:34:40] Yeah, I've met people like that.

Patrick Mason [01:34:41] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:34:42] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [01:34:43] I just haven't. And I've had every opportunity to. And I just haven't.

John Dehlin [01:34:54] Right.

Patrick Mason [01:34:54] And again, that's a. That's a grace. It's. I didn't earn that. I'm not better or worse than anybody else. It's just. It's just me, maybe a little bit of privilege, no doubt.

Margi Dehlin [01:35:05] Right.

Patrick Mason [01:35:07] But there are a lot of people whose life stories are roughly parallel to mine who have. Right, yeah. And so again, like.

Margi Dehlin [01:35:21] And not fitting you so well, like the fact, too. Right. Of that original fitting.

Patrick Mason [01:35:27] Oh, absolutely. I mean, here's what I'll say. Like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints as it exists today, it was made for and by and

John Dehlin [01:35:37] of people like me, meaning white, straight,

Patrick Mason [01:35:40] heterosexual, cisgender, naturally religious. Right. So the church was made for and by and for people like me. It's not an irony. It's not lost on me. Now, there are lots of other people who also check all my boxes for whom it doesn't become comfortable. Right. And I have reasons where sometimes it rubs up and there's friction, partly because my politics and my intellectual life and other kinds of things. So the clothes don't always perfectly fit. Right. But the church was built for, by and for American, straight, white, naturally religious

John Dehlin [01:36:18] guys of Mormon background.

Patrick Mason [01:36:21] Yeah. I mean, they weren't originally. I mean, converts have done pretty well. Right. But it helps to be acculturated into it. Absolutely. So, yeah, I don't, you know, even just thinking kind of historically and sociologically, psychologically, there's no doubt that that's all part of the story.

Margi Dehlin [01:36:39] Yeah. I think a really interesting piece for me is the fact that. Of where your story, I think, contrasts so much to other people's stories in that you had this class where you're exploring and being exposed to and then having this whole. Where you can talk about it, you can discuss it. And it's so curious, like to think about if that hadn't existed but you had the information because your church experience.

Patrick Mason [01:37:09] Oh, yeah. There was none of this happening at times.

Margi Dehlin [01:37:11] Right. Like probably a foil maybe to that

John Dehlin [01:37:14] or new religion classes.

Patrick Mason [01:37:16] Yeah, exactly. I mean, I never had any, like, really bad experiences in my BYU religion classes. They ranged from mediocre to good, but. Oh, absolutely. We weren't talking about any of this stuff. Right. It was the fact that I was a history major who took this class at a certain time from a certain. It was like the stars lined up right now. Is that scalable? Is that replicable? Yeah, I think so. I think, as you said, I think if everybody had a class like this as a college student, I think it would strengthen people rather than weaken them on the whole. Right. Some people would take that. I'll bet there were people who took that. I know that there were people who took that class because, as I said, I worked for David. So I worked at a desk just outside his office. I saw fellow students from the class who went in and had long conversations with him. So the inoculation model is not perfect. People who get booster shots still get sick. But I think there's something to it.

Margi Dehlin [01:38:27] Yeah. Just the idea of silence and feeling alone and isolated as opposed to.

John Dehlin [01:38:35] And feeling betrayed and misled.

Margi Dehlin [01:38:37] Yeah. Yes.

John Dehlin [01:38:38] Right.

Patrick Mason [01:38:39] And then. So then there was that. And then.

John Dehlin [01:38:41] I didn't mean to interrupt you, Margi.

Margi Dehlin [01:38:43] No, I like those additions. Those are important.

Patrick Mason [01:38:45] And then in grad school, again, not a lot of Mormons at Notre Dame, but we had, again, just serendipitously or providentially, there was a group of Latter Day Saint students that are studying all kinds of stuff. As I said, I had one guy in my history cohort, but psychology and law and business and philosophy and political science. There was this handful of Latter Day Saint grad students at Notre Dame, and we got together on Friday and Saturday nights and we talked about all this stuff. I mean, we talked about music and Notre Dame football. I mean, all kinds of stuff. But we, like, late into the night, 1, 2, 3 in the morning, we talked about it. We formed our own institute class because there was no institute at Notre Dame. So we created our own. And so we. Again, it's privilege and luck and serendipity and things just lining up. That I had structures and communities and relationships where I could talk about all of this stuff from age 21 to today. But really, in those formative years in my twenties, around other people who are working it out, who wrestled, not all those people have stayed in the church. Some have left, some have. Everybody has different relationships to it, so. But we're all still really close. But it was, again, this sense that, like, you can talk about all this stuff. We don't talk about it at church. And I have ideas about that, about whether that's the good and bad parts of that. But. But I always had a flesh and blood community where I could talk about hard things.

Margi Dehlin [01:40:25] Okay, wait, I have a quick question around this. So you had this experience studying at byu, so when you met Melissa, and Melissa had, I'm just gonna guess, like basic level discussions. And then how did you bridge that gap? Is that. Does Melissa know all the things? Is that something that was important to you? How did you work that out in relationship to another human?

Patrick Mason [01:40:52] Yeah, I mean, I'm not her professor. I was her boyfriend and then her husband, but she from right out of the gate again, this community at Notre Dame of other grad students. She just started hanging out with us on Friday and Saturday nights. Once we got, you know, we had fun dates too. Right. And it was a little weird for her. Cause she was a lot younger. She was six years younger than me and a lot younger than some of the others. But she became integrated in this community so very early in her church life. She was in the mix. And again, she's a highly intelligent person who loves the contest of ideas. Talking about hard things doesn't scare her. It invigorates her. Different people are wired differently. But she had had a powerful spiritual. She genuinely felt and feels that God had called her into this church. And so for her, I remember this is really her story more than mine. But in one of our early conversations while we were dating, maybe we were engaged at this point, we were talking about polygamy. It was just the two of us. And she said at one point, you know, like, I don't care all that much about Joseph Smith. And I was like, what? You know, even still, I was like, like. Because I knew of her commitment and I knew of her spiritual, you know, experiences that are brought her into the church. And she said, like, that's. That's not why I joined this church. That's not like. So she had this really, I think, healthy relationship to saying, like, I don't have to own all that stuff. It's part of this church, it's part of its history and so forth. But I think it also helped that she was Catholic. Right. She's like, there's a lot of, you know, she knew what it was. She knew what it was like to have authentic spirituality in a community and in a traditional with a really messy history. And she was able to divorce that in a way that I think is foreign to a lot of Latter Day Saints. It was even to some degree, still foreign to me at that time. And some people would say, some people might even disagree with decoupling it. But for her, at least in her own experience, she said, I didn't join this church for Joseph Smith. And so there was a sense for her, like, I don't have to own all. Like that stuff isn't my stuff. Like, I came to this community for other reasons and I'm doing. I have a different relationship to it. So. Yeah, so she was part of these conversations, like really early in her church life and processing it. And she still processes it slightly different than I do. We're different people with different experiences and different. But. Yeah, but it was, it was there from the beginning.

Margi Dehlin [01:43:57] Yeah. Thank you.

John Dehlin [01:43:59] Love it. Okay, so. So you didn't. I really, I really relate to your experience because I was exposed through honors colloquium at BYU to Eugene England, Lowell Bennion, Leonard Arrington, Phil Barlow. Yeah. The book of Thoughtful Faith. And so even though I had my faith crisis in the early 2000s at Microsoft, when I leave Microsoft in 2004 and then start Mormon Stories in 2005, I had this naive optimism. It's like, hey, all these super brilliant Harvard educated academics, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Richard Bushman. Richard Bushman. It's like, hey, they all knew. They all knew and know more than I'll ever know. And they still believe. So, like, we just got to talk about it.

Patrick Mason [01:44:47] So what's the problem?

John Dehlin [01:44:49] We'll solve the problem.

Patrick Mason [01:44:50] Right, Right.

John Dehlin [01:44:50] So that's how we started Mormon stories in 2005. It's just like if we just talk about this, get it out in the open, people won't feel alone. We'll talk through it all, we'll make the church a big tent and everything will be great.

Patrick Mason [01:45:04] Everybody lives happily ever after. Right?

John Dehlin [01:45:05] Happily ever after. Right. So I relate, I relate to how you leave BYU feeling. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So really quickly, let's just. Then you've kind of talked about Melissa and you've talked about the fact that you've never really had a dark night of the soul faith crisis. So let's just follow your academic career quickly and just tell us how it led you to ultimately sitting in the Leonard Arrington Chair of Mormon Studies. Yeah, sure.

Patrick Mason [01:45:34] Yeah. And definitely we can talk about it some. I mean, my faith life has changed for sure. It's evolved. It's not what it was when I was a 19 year old missionary. Yeah. I just haven't had some of the same experiences that other people have that many Other people have had. Yeah. So academically. And I won't bore people with this. I mean, it's very serendipitous that. So as, again, I did not intend on studying Mormonism, Mormon history, when it came time for me to write a dissertation. I wrote my dissertation on violence against religious minorities in the south south in the late 19th century. I was really interested. So the first Ku Klux Klan is just racist. That's 1860s. The second Ku Klux Klan in the 19 teens and 20s adds Catholics and Jews to the list. I was like, how did that happen? So I was interested in this period in between, like, how did religious minorities get thrown in the mix? So I thought the dissertation, I thought the story was just going to be violence against Catholics and Jews. And I actually uncovered a lot about that. I've published on some of those things. But I threw in Mormons really as an afterthought because I didn't think there was much of a story there. Obviously everybody knows about Missouri in the 1830s, right. You know, Nauvoo in the 1840s. And so I didn't think there was much of a story in the south in the late 19th century. Well, it turns out that there were more instances of anti Mormon violence in the south during this period, 1870s and 80s, than there were against Catholics and Jews combined. Obviously, anti black violence is on a whole different scale. Right. I mean, that's just, you know, that's part of the nightmare of American history. But all of a sudden I had this treasure trove of data and this was like hard won. This was going through newspapers, like on microfilm. I mean, it was like old school history stuff, like really needle in a haystack type research in archives throughout the South. I literally spent one summer, I got a grant from the American Historical Association. I went from archive to archive in every Southern state throughout the Deep south looking for this stuff and using the church archives, which were just kind of opening up kind of early of kind of the new era of opening up. But. And so I had this dissertation, I had all this great stuff on anti Mormon violence. And I had a decision to make when it came to turning the dissertation into the book. Do I talk about the whole story, including the Catholics and Jews, or do I really lean into the Mormon stuff, which is frankly my best data. It's the newest story and so forth. So I decided to pivot towards the Mormon material that became my first book, published in 2011. And it was again, complete serendipity or providence or something. But that was the year that Richard Bushman. So they had just started the chair at Claremont Graduate University, the Howard W. Hunter Chair in Mormon in 2008.

John Dehlin [01:48:29] Oh, we're already in 2008.

Patrick Mason [01:48:30] We're already in 2008.

John Dehlin [01:48:32] How long were you in freaking Notre Dame?

Patrick Mason [01:48:34] Six years.

John Dehlin [01:48:35] Did you and I. Were we at Notre Dame when I was working for mit?

Patrick Mason [01:48:38] Did we meet? We met once. We met at least, like in the lobby of the hotel at the Morrison. I remember meeting you there. I think that was the first time we ever met.

John Dehlin [01:48:46] Were you single at that point still?

Patrick Mason [01:48:48] Or I may have been. Would have depended on the year 2000. I almost definitely would have because I got married at about the time that I got graduated. I got married in 2004. I got my PhD in 2005.

John Dehlin [01:49:00] Okay, okay.

Patrick Mason [01:49:00] So.

John Dehlin [01:49:01] Okay.

Patrick Mason [01:49:01] So, yeah, so I. Yeah. So all that research is early 2000s. My first job. I stick around at Notre Dame in a couple of teaching positions. My first tenure track job is in Egypt.

Career Path in Mormon Studies and Scholarship

John Dehlin [01:49:14] You were saying something about Bushman, though. I'm sorry, I got you off track.

Patrick Mason [01:49:17] Yeah. So Bushman had. So the Howard W. Hunter Chair in Mormon Studies had started at Claremont graduate University in 2008. Richard Bushman came out of retirement at Columbia University to take that position to basically shore it up. I mean, nobody has more prestige or gravitas as a Mormon historian other than Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, but she wasn't leaving Harvard for that. So Richard came out of retirement to do this with the understanding he'd just be there for three years. So he and Claudia came out to Claremont for three years. So in 2011, when that job came up and when they really opened it up again, I was only a couple years. I got my PhD in 2005. So this is only like five years later when they're posting the job. I had just published my first book. I was a young junior professor when this job came up. But again, part of the serendipity of this is that in Mormon studies, you had this well established older generation, Bushman's generation. Right. By then, all those people were too old to take that position. They were all near retirement age. It should have gone to somebody who was in their own, like, 50s or something like that, somebody who published a couple of books. There was almost nobody like that because of September 6th. Right. A whole generation of Mormon intellectuals either got excommunicated or other people decided, that's not for me. Right. It's too dangerous. I'm not going to touch that. And so there's no middle generation. There's Nobody in between Richard Bushman and me. I mean, there are a few other people like Terrell Givens. He could have gotten that job. But they wanted a historian. They didn't want a literary scholar and theologian. So Terrell actually just didn't fit the job description. But there's almost nobody in that middle generation. So all of a sudden, 2011, I get this Mormon studies chair. I'm 35 years old. There's no reason it should go to me. It should have gone to a much more senior scholar, but there was nobody there. That. There were a couple other options, and things didn't work out because of individual circumstances. So all of a sudden, it just falls to me.

John Dehlin [01:51:32] I mean, when I think about the fact that you say, you know, you were a little too young at BYU to have been impacted by what happened earlier, and what you just said about there being a totally missing generation, it makes me think that from the church's perspective, the purge worked.

Patrick Mason [01:51:49] It did. There was a whole generation. There was a whole generation of intellectuals that's missing.

John Dehlin [01:51:55] So the church did the best thing for itself, and it was effective.

Patrick Mason [01:51:59] It was effective. I'm not sure it did the best thing in the long run.

John Dehlin [01:52:03] So you're saying effective short term, maybe kicking the can down the road.

Patrick Mason [01:52:07] It worked. Yeah, it worked for what they. For their goals in the. In the immediate moment. Right.

John Dehlin [01:52:15] There's a. There's a book in there that's a dark. What we just talked about for the past two minutes, to me.

Margi Dehlin [01:52:20] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:52:20] Is a very dark and sad thing that I don't know is coming across.

Patrick Mason [01:52:24] I'm gonna be writing an essay about this for Dialogue coming up. Really? Some of this. Yeah. From my perspective. Right. I can't speak for other people.

John Dehlin [01:52:32] Like, the consequences of.

Patrick Mason [01:52:33] Yeah, exactly. Basically a whole generation. My career, I mean, and this is a perverse way of thinking about it, but my career, in many ways is made possible because there was no generation ahead of me. I should have at that in 2011. I should have still been laboring in obscurity. You don't get endowed chairs after writing one book. You get them after writing two, three, four, five books. Right. But there weren't. Again, there were some. And because of individual circumstances, didn't work out. But there weren't very many people that had a million lives.

John Dehlin [01:53:15] Really quickly, I just want to ask you about this one thing. So. So there's this idea that. So Lowell Leonard Arrington hires all these scholars in the Camelot years of church history, from like 72 to 82, eventually that gets shuttled in 82. A bunch of those professors get sent to BYU, including Michael Quinn. Yeah, right.

Patrick Mason [01:53:36] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:53:36] And then when the September 6th happens, like we just discussed, it sends this big chill. A bunch of people get cut off and kicked out. And then a bunch of other people just shy away.

Patrick Mason [01:53:45] They opt out.

John Dehlin [01:53:46] Yeah, they opt out. Yeah. I remember when I entered this domain, learning about like there was this kind of. And I think it was Tom Kimball that or Dan Witherspoon or a combination that told me about this. That like at some point some super wealthy Mormon down at Arizona, Arizona State University was looking to set up some type of chair or position for Mormon studies. And that I think Michael Quinn would have gone up for it, but because he had been excommunicated, he was Yale trained, super distinguished, careful, well published, even faithful.

Patrick Mason [01:54:25] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:54:25] And he was somehow blackballed or denied the ability to even get the position. And I'm sure I'm slaughtering the history on this, but it was, it was sort of. Well, I guess what I'm saying is when you were considering this fork in the road of whether or not to do Mormon studies versus African American studies or whatever, I am sure that there were all sorts of people saying, stay away. This is a tar baby. This is radioactive. Mormon studies is the last thing you want to pursue, number one. And there probably aren't a lot of jobs in it. And it's probably going to be a super lonely road. Do you want to talk about any of that? Including the idea that there was a bias with these endowed chairs, that they were usually funded by rich, faithful Mormons and that made it so non faithful ex Mormon scholars weren't even really candidates. So that's a lot to ask you about.

Patrick Mason [01:55:24] But. So if I don't get to some of that, just. Just prompt me again and maybe I

John Dehlin [01:55:30] got it all wrong. So correct.

Patrick Mason [01:55:32] So in terms of my own, this choice to am I going to do Mormon history? I didn't have to make that choice. I was still straddling that line. I mean, my position at the American University in Cairo, I was just like an American historian. And then I published that first book. So it was when the job offer came, like, oh, do I really want to do Mormon stuff? Studies? Is that what I'm gonna do? But certainly there was always the fear, like, will Mormon history actually get you jobs in the academy? And there was a big question about that. There's still a big question about that. And that has to do with lots of different things. But I was very self conscious about that. So one of the things that my generation. So again, I'm kind of on the leading edge of this new generation of scholars who came up, people like Paul Reeve and Spencer Fluman or contemporaries, you know, and what we all learned in grad school is, yeah, you can write about Mormons, but you can't just write about Mormons. You have to put it within a broader context. Right. It can't be like what Arrington and all those guys were doing in the 70s and 80s, the new Mormon history. It can't be that they were so. So good with primary sources and uncovering sources, but it was always like Mormon history for Mormon history's sake. And we learned in grad school, you can talk about Mormonism, but it's got to tell a bigger story. It's got to be situated within a bigger story. So my book is really about violence and religious intolerance and vigilantism and kind of big themes in Southern history and American history. Spencer's book and Paul's books, they're addressing bigger questions, not just Mormon questions. So partly is we learned as a kind of new generation that we had to ask questions in different ways. But then, yeah, when this job came along, and so there were these series of chairs that were started in the 2000s. The two main ones in the 2000s were the Leonard Arrington chair at Utah State and then the Hunter Chair at Claremont. And you're absolutely right. They were both funded, I think, entirely by Latter Day Saints. I don't know how much non LDS money. Yeah, faithful Latter Day Saints Saint money. And at Claremont, the donors were. It was always an interesting dance between the donors and the university, which is oftentimes the case with private money coming into universities for all kinds of things. Right. Whether it be the Koch brothers or whoever. I mean, it's a big question for higher education. But in this case, you see, you had these faithful Mormon donors who obviously, they wanted certain things out of this. You have a secular university, graduate university with a sterling reputation in the study of religion, you know, that wants certain things as well. So how do you, you know, so it was. It was on a personal level, it was a really good relationship between those people. But intellectually and ideologically, I mean, they wanted slightly different things. And the way that the LDS donors put it is they said, we do want somebody who's committed, a committed Latter Day Saint in this position and the way that they framed it. And I think this was a winning argument for the university. They said, you wouldn't put a Holocaust denier in a chair of Jewish Studies. So they were always worried about the anti Mormon scholar, whoever that would be, whoever they had in mind, whether a real person or somebody down the road. Right. They were actually very much thinking about the future. What does this look like 20 years from now, 50 years? An endowed chair is permanent. And so for them, they wanted to say, hey, we fully understand this is academic. There's going to be full academic freedom in this position. But we want to take care that this, again, the Holocaust denier parallelism. I heard that over and over in multiple meetings. And the university said, fine, we get that. We can agree to those terms. So you're exactly right. So far, these chairs have been. And then the third chair was the Richard Bushman Chair at the University of Virginia. And then there's a professorship. It's a little different, kind of. That's Kathleen Flake. And then Paul Reeve holds a professorship in Mormon Studies at the University of Utah. It's a little bit different, structured a little bit differently. But so far, all of the holders of these chairs have been committed Latter Day Saints.

John Dehlin [02:00:16] Who's at Claremont now?

Patrick Mason [02:00:17] Matt Bowman.

John Dehlin [02:00:17] Matt Bowman, yeah.

Patrick Mason [02:00:18] So when I left Claremont three years ago, he took my place.

John Dehlin [02:00:21] That's right, yep. Okay.

Patrick Mason [02:00:23] So, you know, so I think it's a really interesting conversation. At some point, one of these positions is going to go to a non Latter Day Saint scholar who has shown a record of excellence in Mormon studies, but who's just not a Latter Day Saint. And I can list off a number of people who I think would be outstanding candidates for these. So sooner or later, I hope sooner, I think it'll be healthy for the field. Once one of these positions goes to a non Latter Day Saint.

John Dehlin [02:00:54] I wonder if a Matt Harris would ever be a candidate for a position, possibly because I love Matt.

Patrick Mason [02:00:58] His work is excellent. I mean, so John Turner, Laurie Maffley, Kip Sarah Patterson, Quincy Newell. I mean, I can go down the list of outstanding non Latter Day Saint scholars of Mormonism, I guess.

John Dehlin [02:01:10] I guess there's a part of me that thinks. Thinks that a never Mormon scholar is going to have a better chance than an ex Mormon scholar.

Patrick Mason [02:01:16] I. I think in the short term, I think that's probably true.

John Dehlin [02:01:19] Yeah. And that there's a part of me that's sad about that. But I also know we live in a.

Patrick Mason [02:01:23] We live in the real world. Right, right, right.

Prop 8, Gospel Topics Essays, and Church Transparency

John Dehlin [02:01:27] Okay, really quickly, before we jump, you know, before we end this segment and then jump to kind of the deep dive Q and A, I want to chronologically talk about Some of the events that you would have have been a witness to as an awakened follower of Mormonism and Mormon studies and just get brief reactions to those events.

Patrick Mason [02:01:51] Yep.

John Dehlin [02:01:53] So, okay, so you, you begin working at, at American University, what year?

Patrick Mason [02:01:58] Cairo. So I was in Cairo from 2007 to 2009. So I missed Prop 8. I was out of the country for Prop 8.

John Dehlin [02:02:05] Let's start with Prop 8.

Patrick Mason [02:02:06] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:02:06] So when Prop 8 happens, summarize your emotions and feelings about Prop 8.

Patrick Mason [02:02:10] It's actually really interesting because I was out of the country. Like I was a young professor, just like I was just living in a foreign country. New father in 2008. So I was aware of Prop 8 happening. I from Egypt. I didn't understand what a big deal it was like on the ground, four people in California and Utah. You know, I had friends back here and so forth and we would talk, but again, I was like so overwhelmed with life and it was so remote from my experience there that it was like I knew it was happening. It was. I, you know, I read the news reports about it, but I had, I really was distant from the visceral, emotional, kind of personal conflicts around. So when I really got it, when I fully understood Prop 8, was when I moved not just back to the United States, but when I moved to California until 2011. So this is three years after it happened and people in my ward are still talking about it. Right. And I had an elders quorum president, excuse me, you know, great guy who I really liked, but. And this was out of character for him, but he, I remember him like kind of a fist thumping, emotional testimony in Elder Scrum where he said, like, if you don't get a testimony of Prop 8, you need to go get on your knees and go get a testimony of Prop 8. This is in 2011. Three years later, right. It's done. Right. And so that's when I was like, oh, wow, like this thing was real, this was not. So I had the luxury because I was in Cairo. It was, it was a bit of an abstraction at the time. Definitely not an abstraction once I got to Southern California in 2011.

John Dehlin [02:04:03] Right.

Margi Dehlin [02:04:04] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:04:04] Let me back up a tiny bit. So the blogger nackle emerges in 2003, 2004 with by common Consent, Times and Seasons, Feminist Mormon Housewives. Were you plugged into that at all?

Patrick Mason [02:04:16] I was reading all that stuff and I was an occasional guest contributor to BC dc.

John Dehlin [02:04:21] Okay.

Patrick Mason [02:04:22] And then I was also. What I really got plugged into was the dialogue community. So I was a member of the board for dialogue before I went to Egypt and then I had to step down. I just couldn't be an active board member. Well, I was living in Egypt and then when I came back, then I rejoined the board and eventually became chair of the board for a time. So.

John Dehlin [02:04:44] Okay, so when. And people probably hammer me for asking a self serving question, but when Mormon is when Mormon Stories comes out in 2005, was that something that you would have even started listening to or paying attention to?

Patrick Mason [02:05:02] Vaguely aware of, but not a podcast listener. So I wasn't avoiding it. Like, I just wasn't. It wasn't on my radar.

John Dehlin [02:05:10] Okay.

Patrick Mason [02:05:11] But I mean, it was on my. Like I knew it existed. I wasn't actively consuming it. I apologize.

John Dehlin [02:05:15] No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm just curious.

Patrick Mason [02:05:17] No, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [02:05:19] Okay.

Patrick Mason [02:05:20] So I was Mo. At that point, especially in the 2000s, I was. It was all through the blogs that I was engaging in these, other than the academic scholarship. So that's what I was going to Mormon History Association. So I was very much involved in the academic Mormon studies stuff and Mormon history stuff. And then the blogs were my kind of extracurricular engagement.

John Dehlin [02:05:41] Okay. So it was like the Swedish Rescue happens and the Hans Madsen stuff and Marlon Jensen and Rick Turley going down to Sweden to try and. Yeah, try and keep Sweden, the Swedish Swedish Mormon Church from hemorrhaging. Would that have been something at the time you were aware of?

Patrick Mason [02:05:58] Yeah, because that was. What year was that? Do you remember?

John Dehlin [02:06:01] Oh, I'm going to say 10 12.

Patrick Mason [02:06:04] 10, 11 12. So that's. Yeah. So I got into. When I first went to Claremont again, all this stuff was still percolating. You know, there were no gospel topics essays yet in 2011 and so forth. So when I went to Claremont, I went with very much kind of single minded, like I am here to be a scholar of Mormonism. Like that is my job, just to be a historian and always been an active member of the ward. So like, you know, I'll go to church and so forth, but it's like I'm just here to be a scholar. But it was shortly after that, probably 2012 or 2013. So I'm very aware of the Swedish Rescue Mormon moment. Happens in 2012 with Mitt Romney and all that kind of stuff. I'm barraged with media just because my job title has Mormon in it. Right. And because I don't teach at byu so I can actually talk to the media. There's tons of people who are informed who can talk to the media, but it's hard for BYU professors and church employees to do so. So they all end up calling me at Claremont. So I do tons of media stuff with all that. And then about that time is when Tom Griffith, the former federal judge, amazing guy, he reaches out to me and says, hey, Terrell and Fiona Givens and Richard and Claudia Bushman are going to go out and they're going to start giving firesides, addressing faith crisis stuff.

John Dehlin [02:07:32] Is this called the Temple Observatory?

Patrick Mason [02:07:34] Temple and Observatory Group was like the, the. Like the umbrella.

John Dehlin [02:07:37] What year was that?

Patrick Mason [02:07:38] 2012, 2013. Somewhere in there. And that's when you start becoming really

John Dehlin [02:07:43] aware of the faith crisis problem.

Patrick Mason [02:07:46] That's when I get in the faith crisis conversation. So Tom reaches out to me. We have lunch in Provo, and he says, Terrell and Richard are going to go out. You know, at first they were traveling together, and then there was just so much demand, they split up and they each got a junior partner, like the junior companion.

John Dehlin [02:08:02] Terrell and Fiona going on separate.

Patrick Mason [02:08:05] Yeah. So they ended up doing separate things at first. Yeah, the Bushmans and Givens were doing things together. Then they separated. So Tom asked me to come along basically as the junior companion to the Bushmans, which I did a few times. So that was my first entry into this kind of faith crisis conversation. Long story short, eventually that leads to me writing Planted and Publishing in 2015.

John Dehlin [02:08:28] Okay. So as. So after the Swedish rescue happens, that's when Marlon Jensen gets involved. Yeah, that's when I'm commissioned, along with like, Travis Stratford and Greg Prince, to. To do the study on the faith crisis stuff. Let's just say that's 2010, 2011. Did you start getting looped into. Did you get to know Marlon Jensen? And when. When the Gospel topics essays sort of project might have been first envisioned, and then it was starting to be potentially shopped around or promoted. Were you. Were you kind of on the inside by that point?

Patrick Mason [02:09:08] Yeah, so I. I was a participant. I was a contributor in the early phases of the Gospel television.

John Dehlin [02:09:13] From the beginning.

Patrick Mason [02:09:14] Yeah. So. So I was part of the process on the. Specifically on the essay on violence, what became the kind of Mountain Meadows essay when they first envisioned it. So I actually spent an entire summer doing research and writing for this. They originally envisioned that essay as not being about Mountain meadows because they'd already published their Mountain Meadows Massacre book, you know, the Turley Walker Leonard book. And so originally they said, like, the book basically speaks for itself. Right. Let's talk about all the other stuff. Right. All the other instances of of Latter Day Saint violence against others in the 19th century. So I spent a lot of time working on that. They ended up moving directions with the essay. They pivoted the essay back towards Mountain Meadows. But I had done all that work for them. Eventually the research I did there became the core of my book that I published, the book called Mormonism and Violence that I published with Cambridge University Press. But, yeah, I was there kind of at ground level as they were doing those gospel topics essays.

John Dehlin [02:10:22] What are you able to share about, like, the fear or the reasoning or the complexities of getting that project kind of off the ground?

Patrick Mason [02:10:34] Yeah, I can only talk about the conversations I had with them. Right. I wasn't in the room for most of the conversations, but as it was communicated to me, it was basically like, hey, we've identified these 10 or 12 issues. I think a lot of it came out of the research that you and Travis and others had done. These are the issues that come up most often.

John Dehlin [02:10:55] Do you start with there's a problem?

Patrick Mason [02:10:56] Yeah, there's a problem. Right.

John Dehlin [02:10:59] How would that benefit described that people

Patrick Mason [02:11:02] are leaving the church over these questions. And so how are we going to respond? And the way that it was presented me from the very beginning is like, how are we going to respond in a way that is. Is historically accurate, that is transparent and forthright? There was very much a spirit, and I think this very much came down from Marlon Jensen of like, let's just tell the story. And the first envisioning of that project is that we would write long essays, like academic article length, and then there'd be like a medium version and then a short version that all changed. And we ended up basically with just the short versions of each each of these essays. So I know all of those essays, or at least most of them. At least there were long versions of them originally that then eventually became the short versions that became online. But the conversation all along was like. And they told me. And my sort of brief was, lay it out all on the table, and you've got access to our resources. So I was working in the church history department that summer. They said, if you need sources, let us know. We'll go get it for you. So. And you write the story that's there. There were no bumpers on the lane.

John Dehlin [02:12:28] Did you ever get a sense of sort of, like, contrition or ownership around this sort of narrative? And this would be my narrative, but it's like. Like Fon Brody comes out with their book in 45, the Excommunicator. You know, L. Bennion starts Doing his stuff at, you know, in the CES and whatever. And he's kind of like, marginalized. Like, Leonard. Leonard Arrington does his stuff from 72 to 82 and that's shuttled. And he's not even like, released in general conference. And the September 6th happened and they excommunicate them all along with the purges at byu. Sort of like, was the essays project enacted with. Did you get a sense of, like, ownership and contrition that we as a church have been not being honest about our history? Knowingly. Knowingly hiding or whitewashing or keeping information from the members and punishing those who talk about it such that, oh, now it's 2011 or 12. Now it's time to, like, atone for what we've done and now be open and honest. That. And I know I'm making some polar questions here versus like, oh, the Internet's kicking our butt, you know, X, Y and Z. People are really making us look bad. So now we've got to come up with the response. There's kind of a soul searching. Ownership. What's that?

Margi Dehlin [02:14:10] Like, contemplative processing. Taking ownership.

John Dehlin [02:14:14] Yeah. Responsibility.

Patrick Mason [02:14:16] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:14:17] I hope you understand the question. There's a question in there somewhere versus

Margi Dehlin [02:14:21] like, self protective a little bit or how do we stop this?

John Dehlin [02:14:25] Yeah, right.

Patrick Mason [02:14:26] Yeah. And of course, my conversations, I wasn't in the senior level conversations at all. Right. I was working mostly with church history department employees and with some interactions with Elder Jensen and Rick Turley, who was the assistant church historian at the time. And so the sense that I got was very much like, we want to address the current questions that the people have. Right. Very much. This is a, here's a problem, let's address it. But it was also, it was part of a longer story because, remember, they'd already done the Mountain Meadows book by this point, so they'd already spent years and a lot of resources on the worst day in Mormon history and saying, let's get that story right. The Joseph Smith Papers had already started by this point, so major investment in terms of saying, let's put the documents out there. So the gospel topics weren't the. They were part of a longer story of the church history department, I think, internally. And I do give both Elder Jensen and Rick Turley a lot of credit for, like, leading this and shepherding this through with all the politics involved in that, of saying, like, let's turn a new leaf. And I know that Elder Jensen and Rick are well aware of that history and feel like it was time to turn A new leaf. Right. And, and so it wasn't going to be with sackcloth and ashes, but rather it was very much the spirit of we believe the church is true. We believe that God is working in and through the church and so

Margi Dehlin [02:16:29] we

Patrick Mason [02:16:29] don't have to hide our history.

John Dehlin [02:16:33] Do you have a sense for whether this was a hard sell for Marlon Judson and Richard Turley to make, whether there was a lot of opposition, whether it was warmly embraced and accepted or something in the middle?

Patrick Mason [02:16:47] I don't have. I mean, I've talked with Marlon about this since it was a sell. But what he's represented to me is that the senior leadership of the church, they understood that something should be done, done. And then I think there were differences of opinion and we see the way that this played out. There were differences of opinion on should this be on the front page of the website? Should it be the full 35 page essays or just the short one? So there were lots of differences of opinion, I think, in terms of the strategic rollout of this. But my sense from what Elder Jensen is, has represented to me is that they got buy in to the concept, right? And then of course, you know, the devil's in the details, right? The wording of a particular essay. How much do we say, you know, so. But all of this, as you well know, you know, it was all reviewed by the full corner of the 12 and first presidency, but the concept itself of doing it, I think was very much in line with. They'd already sold the senior brethren on the notion of a great era of transparency. The Joseph Smith Papers and the Mountain Meadows Project had already, they'd already proved their worth.

John Dehlin [02:18:04] Okay, how did you feel when you learned that the gospel topics essays were going to be written and were going to come out? As a historian and as someone who had studied those 40, 50, 60, 100 years of.

Patrick Mason [02:18:18] I was excited. I was really excited and, and I absolutely welcomed them then and still think they're a great contribution. It's really hard for institutions to do that. And I saw the level of commitment, the investment of personnel and resources to make this happen. And so I, I really admired the project from the beginning. I mean, I was part of it, you know, and very much I was, I was happy to be part of it. Like, I felt like what we were doing really mattered.

John Dehlin [02:19:03] Did you get a sense that there was a feeling or a motivation in this project of like, we're being mis, misrepresented by our critics and we want to, we, we want to tell the truthful history or something different, which is like, wow, this history is problematic. A lot of people haven't been told it. We gotta get ahead of it and spin it or, or finesse it or frame it in a faithful way.

Patrick Mason [02:19:34] Yeah. So I never heard even inklings of like spin, finesse. Right. It was, it was frame. It was all about like, how do we tell the story, but as part of the faith promoting story of the restoration. Right. Of God's work in the world through the restoration. So it was. So in some ways, I think it was a mix of those two things that you were talking about in the sense of we recognize that like the Internet has changed the game.

John Dehlin [02:20:09] Game.

Patrick Mason [02:20:09] Right. We don't control the narrative. And so if we don't tell a narrative, Right. If we don't take a position on this, it means other people control that narrative for us. So I think there was definitely a realization of that and it needed to be in an online space that books weren't good enough on their own. So I think there was a recognition of all of that. But of course, it's. It's the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It is the church history department of the church. So how are we going to tell the history in a way that affirms the truth claims and the testimony of the church?

John Dehlin [02:20:50] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [02:20:53] Really quickly.

John Dehlin [02:20:54] Do you remember watching the ordained women thing happen and culminating in Kate Kelly's excommunication and what your thoughts and feelings were about that outcome? Outcome?

Patrick Mason [02:21:04] Yeah. No, I watched that really carefully because I was getting calls from the media all the time to comment on it. I was never on the ground. I was in California, so I wasn't on the ground here in Utah attending any of the events. And I look, I mean, I think this is just one of the issues that the modern church just continues to wrestle with, with women's roles in the church and women's equality and what do all these things mean? And I, you know, I. So part of my education, as in peace studies, you mentioned, I have a master's degree in peace studies. So part of that was a lot of was taking classes like in nonviolent theory, nonviolent praxis and so forth. And I was, I'll just be honest, I always had a kind of. Just personally, but also as a kind of. As a scholar who had studied nonviolent movements, I always had a kind of mixed reaction in terms of the efficacy and the sort of strategy behind some of their movements. I understood what they were doing. There's always this poll between the kind of the radical activist versus people working in more moderate ways and maybe inside and so forth. So I recognized that pull and I recognized some of the strategies that they were taking. I wasn't always entirely convinced that they were going to be effective in the short term in terms of actually making the kinds of changes within the church that they wanted and that they were calling for. But I absolutely understood and still understand everything that's behind it. And all of the frustration and all of the anger and the years of feeling like their voices absolutely were not heard, shut out from positions of power, all these kinds of things. So I think people can debate and disagree about methods, but the impulse behind it I absolutely recognize. And I'm friends with a lot of the women who were in that and part of that move movement. So.

John Dehlin [02:23:19] Yeah. And. And when. When like Kate was excommunicated, how did you feel about that?

Patrick Mason [02:23:28] I'm. All those things make me sad. Her excommunication made me sad. I. I like just on a personal level. Right. Your excommunication made me sad. Natasha's excommunication made me sad.

John Dehlin [02:23:44] Sam Young.

Patrick Mason [02:23:45] Sam Young, Right. I mean, so, yeah, go down the list. So I'm just personally sad. I want a church that's big enough that anybody who wants to worship with us has a place to worship with us. And, you know, at a certain point, some people don't want to worship with us anymore. Okay, that's fine too, Too. Right. And I have some friends and colleagues who say excommunication is just like, wrong. I would never excommunicate anybody. I don't go that far. Like the murdering child rapist. Right. I mean, you want to keep them on the rolls of the church. Right. I actually think excommunication, I think there's a place for it in certain very extreme examples. But it makes me sad if, as a community again, if people want to continue to be with us and stay in communion with the church, there's a little bit more Catholic language than Mormon language, But that we could find place now, I don't know. I've never met Kate, so I have no idea at that point, did she want out? Right. What did excommunication. You know, I've heard her talk about it, of course. So, you know, there's a politics to excommunication. Her movement was always meant to be very public excommunication and sort of moving towards that. And if you want to say forcing the church's hand or something like that is there's some strategic calculation behind that, that. But it's, to me, the, it's, it's sad that it comes to that, as

The September Six and High-Profile Excommunications

John Dehlin [02:25:36] you've watched, because we Talked about the September six in 93, you would have known about that. It was hard not to conceptualize.

Patrick Mason [02:25:46] Right.

John Dehlin [02:25:47] 2014, 2015, 2016, you know, Bill Real, Sam Young, all that Denver snuffer Kate Others is like another purge. As you were sad about seeing critics or activists being purged, I'm sure you had thoughts about whether that was going to be effective for the church or whether that would be counterproductive or even have negative long term consequences. Did, did you or do you now have thoughts about that?

Patrick Mason [02:26:18] Yeah. And, and I think, you know, each of those cases is slightly different. Right. They each have their own personality. They have the individuals involved and the issues and the way that they all came about. So you can add Gina Colvin there too. Yeah. Right. And so they're all slightly different. You know, I'm a peace builder at heart and I would like for there to be ways, if possible, for some of these things to get resolved without something so harsh and definitive as an excommunication. I think for some of these individuals that we've talked about, they may have just left on their own. Right? They may have at a certain point. And this actually is going to be a question I may ask you later on. At what point do you just say I can't in good conscience leave my name on the records of this institution that I just fundamentally disagree with. Right. And then that becomes a voluntary act, which is very different. Again, I'm not a person who thinks that there's never a time for excommunication. But, but I would like to think of it as last resort. And in some of these cases, I'm not always sure, was it a last resort? Was it necessary? Were there other ways that as the body of Christ and as the church of Jesus Christ, are there other ways that we could have ministered differently to some of these individuals? And I recognize it's just so complex and there are hurt feelings and there's frustration and the church feels attacked and the church feels like it needs to preserve its good name. I mean, all the. So I understand it's just enormously complex with deep feelings. I wish we were better at transforming conflicts constructively. And sometimes ecclesiastical discipline is an easier way to take an easier path than sometimes the hard work of transforming these conflicts.

John Dehlin [02:28:45] Do you. And this might be repeating the question, it might not be. And you may have already answered it, but were there or now reflecting back, do you feel like these purges,

Patrick Mason [02:29:02] you

John Dehlin [02:29:02] know, could have hurt the church or even made the problem worse for the church. Forgetting might have been better ways to resolve it. What about the outcome?

Patrick Mason [02:29:09] Yeah, I. My own personal view is that in most cases, these recent, you know, these excommunications over the past 10 years, I think in general, they've been counterproductive.

John Dehlin [02:29:20] How so?

Patrick Mason [02:29:22] I think they have.

John Dehlin [02:29:26] There's the Streisand effect, first of all.

Patrick Mason [02:29:28] The the what?

John Dehlin [02:29:29] Streisand effect. Where.

Patrick Mason [02:29:30] What is that?

John Dehlin [02:29:31] So I guess, Barbara, you know, I. Something like Barbra Streisand. There were some photos that were taken of her that she didn't like, but by, like, trying to get them squelched, made more people look at the frames.

Patrick Mason [02:29:41] Okay, right. That's part of it. That's exactly right. And so. So the. The national media, you know, comes and writes stories about this. Right. And those stories, given the environment that we're in, in the 2000 and tens and the 2000 and twenties, those stories are not going to have the church's interests at heart. I mean, the church is not. There is no way the church comes across well in those statements, especially because of the churches, because they won't respond to the specifics. And I actually think there's something admirable. I think there's some good principles behind that, but they won't comment. So it means that the Washington Post, the New York Times, whoever, it means the microphone is put in front of you or Natasha or Kate or anybody else, and you get to frame the whole story. You get to frame the narrative for the national media that's not in the Church's best interest from a public relations standpoint. And so then, especially in a broader culture that is secularizing, where there's just a widespread distrust of institutions, of anything that looks authoritarian, of anything that looks autocratic, I mean, you and Kate and Sam and Jeanne, again, all these people strike very sympathetic portraits in the national media. And I think each of you have effectively found ways to communicate in ways that strike that are part of the national culture, especially in the United States and Europe, to find language that resonates way beyond Mormonism so that these issues aren't just Mormon issues anymore. It's about bigger. Why does the New York Times care about the church excommunicating one person? It's about a bigger story. And so the Church, given the media environment, given the cultural environment, the Church is not going to win these public relations contests. So that's why I think it's counterproductive. It actually Makes some of these individuals martyrs and it draws sympathy to their causes. Whereas dealing with it on a quieter level out of the media eye might actually work better for the church. I'm just thinking purely tactically.

John Dehlin [02:32:11] Yeah. Here I can't speak for others, but I did not want to get excommunicated. That was not an outcome I wanted.

Patrick Mason [02:32:18] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:32:19] I mean, it was hard staying in the church, but what about how it's affected? Maybe members and more progressive or liberal. Do you want to talk about that?

Patrick Mason [02:32:29] Well, that's part of it. Right. So there's the broader media story and then the broader cultural story. And so. But then internally within the church,

Margi Dehlin [02:32:43] I

Patrick Mason [02:32:43] think people who are, look, there are a lot of people within the church who are sympathetic to any of these causes. Right. Whether it be women's equality, whether it be, you know, the kinds of things that Mormon stories does. Right. Transparency around, you know, the history and doctrine and things like that, whether it, whether it be Sam Young and, you know, clergy interviews and things like this. So there are lots lgbt, LGBTQ issues, of course. Right. So there's a wide swath of people within the church who are deeply committed to the church. Right. 100% committed to the church, but have deep sympathies on these issues, either on an intellectual level or a personal level. Right. And so to, for that. So then you or Gina or Sam or Kate become a kind of personification of an issue. Right. And a set of relationships and a set of experiences that they've had in church. And so when an individual gets excommunicated, then naturally that person who has at least some sympathy. Right. They may not be like, you know, they may not be dialed up to 11. Right. But maybe they're at three or four or five or six on a particular issue. They say if there's no room for, for sure for, for John, Kate, Sam, et cetera in the church, where does that leave me?

John Dehlin [02:34:09] Yeah, yeah. And one of the biggest criticisms I get is forever kind of making it about me. But, but I think the past 10 years have been, I mean, we're going to get to, in our next segment, how the church seems to be in kind of a world of hurt right now, as are many, many religions.

Patrick Mason [02:34:27] Right.

John Dehlin [02:34:28] But, but we're having a tough time.

Patrick Mason [02:34:30] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:34:31] And, and so it's in that context. And, and this is, you know, this, we're about to wrap up this segment, but maybe I'll just ask maybe a final question, hoping people forgive that there's some self referential stuff here in this interview. But it's part of why I wanted to interview you, just to talk about these sorts of things. But when did you first get a sense that, you know, because you were like, you talked about it. Byu. When you take this Mormon. Mormon Studies class, you're like, oh, we behind us, Hinckley. And yay. And everything's. No, everything's good now, you know, and then you're studying this stuff and you don't see where the problem is. And then I wonder if there's a point where you were like, like, whoa, things are really serious. Wow, the church might even be starting to hemorrhage. This might even start to rise to the level of an existential threat. Maybe not. I mean, if the, if the Quakers or Shakers or whoever are still around, like, the church isn't going anywhere but like. But at the same token, I wonder if there was a point where you're like, whoa, this is way more serious and even starker dire than I. Than I ever thought. And if. So can you talk about if you ever reached there and if so, kind of when and how?

Writing Planted and the Faith Crisis Phenomenon

Patrick Mason [02:35:54] Oh, yeah. I mean, for me, it was the mid 2010s. It was when I started with Richard and Claudia doing these firesides around Faith Crisis. When I wrote Planted. I've done dozens, hundreds. I don't know how many firesides I've done. And talking to individual people and stuff.

John Dehlin [02:36:14] Maybe hundreds.

Patrick Mason [02:36:16] Maybe. I mean, not hundreds, but maybe over 100.

John Dehlin [02:36:21] And were these funded by Griffithson?

Patrick Mason [02:36:23] As you know, so the Templin Observatory Group ones, those. The early. The Givens and the Bushmans, them traveling around doing things. There was a funding structure for that, not from the church. It was private donors. I actually, I don't know who the donors were who funded that. And then. And I did only a handful of those. And then it turned into just the regular church fireside circuit where I just get invited by a ward or a stake or done a lot of trainings for stake presidencies or bishoprics or, you know, ward councils. You know, how do we deal with these kinds of questions? So if you include all of that kind of stuff, it's definitely over 100. I've never sat down to count. So a lot. And a lot of that stuff, in addition to countless individual conversations and phone calls and meetings and zoom calls and stuff like that, that. So it was that 2013. And it was interesting. When I first started doing these firesides, the gospel topics essays were just coming out, but there was still like nothing. That was it from the church's perspective. Some Mormon stories was there some other blogs and other podcasts and other things were there on the sort of raising these kinds of questions side, There was very little in terms of media, I guess Fair Mormon was active. And I remember at every single one of these firesides, we always did Q and A at the end. It was always the best part. People could ask anything and talk about anything. And I remember in every single one, everybody would always say, like, where can we get more? Like, people were starving for content.

John Dehlin [02:38:01] Why wasn't Fair Mormon? They had their website up with a gazillion questions and answers, right?

Patrick Mason [02:38:05] Well, they had their conference. They have their annual conference conference.

John Dehlin [02:38:08] For probably two decades, they've had a website with, like, all the big problems and all the answers did.

Patrick Mason [02:38:13] I've never been part of that community. I've spoken at the conference once, but I've never been part of that community.

John Dehlin [02:38:19] But somehow that wasn't solving.

Patrick Mason [02:38:20] It wasn't enough. It certainly wasn't getting out enough. And these people, I tell you, were starving for conversations, for answers, for perspectives. And they always said, like, you know, when's the book going to come out? And I always say, there is no book. There's just Fireside. Like, I have a day job, right? I'm just an academic. I'm just a professor. And I'll never forget, I was doing a fireside in Sandy, actually, in my mom's home state. Oh, wow. And this woman asked the same question that I'd heard dozens of times, like, when are you gonna. Like, when are you gonna write a book? Or, when are you gonna do something? But, like, there was so much, like, pain and hurt and longing in her eyes, like, for more. She's like, when are you gonna write the book? And just, like, the spirit hit me, I was like, I guess I'm writing the book. And so then that was the genesis of Planted. So that's it. So I wrote that in 2014, 2015, like, early in the morning before I went to work. I got up early before the rest of the family worked on that and finished it. While I was in Romania on this Fulbright, I was actually riding with the church has a rented villa there that we. That we held sacrament meetings in. So I got the keys to that, and I wrote a lot of Planted in that building in Romania. And so that was just like, my labor of love. It's like, there's so much pain. There's so many questions. People are just starving for anything. And so who am I? I'm just like this professor. I'm like, this in my 30s, right. I'm like, who am I? But. But I just felt called and so I'll write this book. And so that's. You know. And Deseret book had just published Crucible of Doubt by Terrell and Fiona Givens. So that was the first time that a church press had really addressed these issues, you know. And so then I pitched plan to them right about that time they picked up the Deseret book was fantastic to work with. They were starving for this content. They told me they were waiting for a book manuscript that would do something with the gospel topics essays that they existed out there, but not very many people knew about them. Nobody had really done much with them. So Planted makes use of those essays. And so they were really excited when that I didn't know anybody there. I was a total unknown. So then that manuscript came across their desk. But for me, it just like it was that, that. That woman's question, like seeing her eyes and. And just saying, like, okay, I've got to be in this space.

John Dehlin [02:41:00] What was the response to Planted and what role has it played from. From what you can tell if you. If you mind sharing.

Patrick Mason [02:41:08] Yeah, it's been phenomenally positive, people.

John Dehlin [02:41:11] Do you know how many units have been sold by chance?

Patrick Mason [02:41:14] I'm terr. I'm like the worst businessman in the world. I know it's north of 20,000, but I don't know. I don't know how. How far north of that. And so, you know, books. There will be more people to listen to this. This one episode than ever listen. I mean, it's. And I can't. And how many hours did I spend writing Planted? I mean, it's. It's a weird world we live in. Right? But no, it's had. And I didn't know because again, this was like a new thing and this is so recent. Right? 2015. That's only seven years ago. Right. We're talking about like, it's ancient history. That's seven years ago. Right. It's amazing how fast time goes. But I didn't know what to expect. I just put it out into the world because I felt like I needed to, felt called to. And the reaction has been phenomenal. The best thing about it, I've had so many people reach out to me because of that. I've given lots of firesides and things like that, that. But the best thing. And this has happened like countless times where somebody comes up to me afterwards after a fireside, or they email me or they call me or say something like that. And they say we red planted. And it's one of two things. It's either a child who's left the church or the parents of the child. One of the two reaches out to me, and they said we couldn't talk to each other. Right. I'm like, our relationship. Because this child had left the church. Sometimes spouse, but usually child. Like we. Like our relationship was so frayed, was so, you know, like sometimes, like, we'd cut off contact with each other and there was so much pain. And then one or the other read. Either the parents read the book and gave it to the kid, or the kid read the book and then gave it to the parents. And they said, we can talk to each other now. And so many people who have gone. In the first chapter of Planted, I sort of describe what I call the anatomy of a faith crisis. I mean, everybody's experience is different, but I try to generalize some of the things that go into it. And I've had so many people say, like, that was the first time that I felt seen by. You know, it's published by Deseret Book and the Maxwell Institute. So from an official church source or voice, and by somebody in the church. Right. It was the first time that somebody described my experience in a way that I recognized and that felt. That didn't feel judgmental. That just described what it was like to go through this. And again, it's so weird for me to hear it. Cause I haven't gone through that. But it was just from hearing countless people's stories. I mean, that's partly what I do as a historian. Right. I haven't lived through everything in history, but I read enough data, and then I try to be able to describe it and make sense of it. That's. That's what I do as a historian. So. So he Gathering all these stories and listening them, trying to make sense of them, trying to listen with love and empathy, and then trying to put that on the page of what it actually not only looks like, but feels like. And so to have all these people say, like, yeah, you. You got it right. And this. Now I can talk to my parents again.

John Dehlin [02:44:31] Yeah. I'm thinking about some of. Some of the early attempts I made to try and solve this problem. Whether it's the Stale DS website or the essay that I wrote on how to stay in the church after a crisis of faith that I put out on stale DS or those. I don't know if you remember those YouTube videos I did about why people leave the church and how we can Help.

Patrick Mason [02:44:55] Yep.

John Dehlin [02:44:57] I. I've. I've just. You know, I'm almost 20 years into this. This stuff I've been doing, and I've just been reflecting a tiny bit about it, and I. I was kind of wondering, before 2004, 2005, all the Sunstone stuff, all the dialogue stuff, had there been a lot of discussion about faith crises and, you know, what. What it is and how to deal with it, or is that really something that emerged mostly in the 2000s and before then it was just arguing over truth claims, and then people disappear if they don't believe anymore.

Patrick Mason [02:45:33] I think that I might be missing something, but my sense is that, no, it's a 21st century. I think it's an Internet thing. I think the Internet changed everything. And so obviously, people left the church before that. Right. Obviously people left the church over truth claims or social. I mean, we know that lots of people left the church over the church's racial policies and so forth. So the general contours I don't think have changed, but it always seemed. Again, I'm a little bit spitballing here, but I think I'm right. I think before the advent of the Internet, it was so isolated that everybody thought it was just isolated when it happened. It was also much harder to access information, so much easier to access it on Google than it is to go to a university library or something like that. So I think the knowledge of some of the controversial issues was much less, especially the historical and doctrinal issues. And then. And then just. Yeah, because everybody. It's hard to remember. And I mean, you guys have kids, like, trying to tell my kids what he was like before the Internet. Right. It's like. It's so hard for people to remember what that was like, let alone to communicate to kids who never experienced that. But you didn't know what was going on five miles away.

John Dehlin [02:46:53] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [02:46:53] Let alone 50 miles away or something like that. So I. I think maybe the contours of faith crisis, they always existed. We always know people have. Coming in and out of the church for lots of different reasons, but the Internet just, I think, just ramped up the scale, the scope, the. The visibility.

John Dehlin [02:47:08] I. I think. And I'm just. Now we're just kind of chatting and. And we're. We're. We're gonna end in just, like, two minutes. But the other thing that I would add to that, that the Internet did when the church was able to do clampdowns and purges in the 40s or in the 60s or in the 90s or 80s, whatever. You know, like you said, it would just be like entire generations would disappear. There'd be silence for 10 or 20 years. Everyone would be terrified of. Of what happens if they speak out. It seems like the Internet, that made it impossible, made it much harder for the church to do a clampdown that would be effective because with the Internet, people could organize, people could share information, and people could fight back to, let's just say, in just. Or disproportionate or unkind actions by the church to try and squelch it. Is that.

Patrick Mason [02:48:07] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:48:07] No.

Patrick Mason [02:48:07] The Internet not only democratized information, but democratized. Advertise a sense of power and community. Right. And knowledge. Just not just propositional knowledge, but like knowledge of what's going on.

John Dehlin [02:48:17] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [02:48:17] So, like, how many people really knew what was going on with. Lol Bennion. Right. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:48:23] Right. Or even Eugene England.

Patrick Mason [02:48:24] Eugene England. Like some, you know, it was written up in the paper. September 6th definitely made national news. Right. But you.

Margi Dehlin [02:48:31] You could.

Patrick Mason [02:48:33] You could ignore it if you wanted to. Right. You could say, like, that's somebody else's problem. Right. Or that's. That's. It's. That's six intellectuals. Yeah, that'd be. I mean, that's like, you know, or

John Dehlin [02:48:45] if you read the Deseret News, maybe it's not even that covered that much. Right.

Patrick Mason [02:48:48] Yeah, that's. Actually, I. Actually I'd be really interested. What was the desert news coverage of the September 6th? I don't know that. I've never looked at it. It'd be really interesting to know. So. Exactly. So if you exist in that. So if you're in Utah and you're only reading the Deseret News and the

John Dehlin [02:49:03] Church, we call it the Bullet.

Patrick Mason [02:49:04] Right. Or if you're outside of Utah, where you're not getting hardly any news about the church, because you're a tiny little minority. Right. You don't know that any of this stuff is going on.

John Dehlin [02:49:15] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [02:49:15] So the Internet sort of immediateizes everything. Like, it feels like everything is, like right there in front of you. Of course, it's information overload sometimes, but the Internet shrinks the world.

John Dehlin [02:49:28] World. Yeah. Yeah. And then you add to that the ability to organize, to share information and organize.

Patrick Mason [02:49:34] That's right.

John Dehlin [02:49:34] I think. I think that's what's turned the tables a little bit and caused this relatively modern phenomenon of the faith crisis.

Patrick Mason [02:49:42] Yeah. Because, you know, sun and Dialogue existed before that, but those have always been very small communities, like in the hundreds or thousands.

John Dehlin [02:49:48] Yeah. No more than 10,000, probably at any one point.

Patrick Mason [02:49:51] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:49:53] Mark, you've been really patient. We've got lunch here. Anything you want to say really quick?

Margi Dehlin [02:49:56] Yeah, I. Here's a reflection. I'm going to try and see if I can formulate this thought concisely. So I was thinking about you sharing how you had this moment at that gathering in your mom's stake.

Patrick Mason [02:50:14] I think it was a stake fireside. Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [02:50:16] And you had that woman stand up and pose this question and you feel her pain. And I was thinking about, you know, as you've talked about your story with us and that BYU class you had where you were taken through history with the church and kind of all these. And I was thinking about as a historian, you know, and someone who has some sense of privilege while you're hearing these stories, how different it is to have firsthand accounts where you're feeling the pain of someone in front of you. So what would have happened in that class if you had had. This is just an. Exploring an idea. I'm not saying they should have done, but like someone, an indigenous person, talking about how it impacted them to have this place in history, you know, with the Mormon Church doing or where you're face to face. There's something about that, right. Where you're face to face to someone suffering and you're seeing it kind of come through. And I know when I'm thinking about that, when with John and our story and with the faith crisis and he starts the podcast and clearly he's having some suffering with the person he's interviewing. Oftentimes there's meeting there, but it really was. It popped a balloon of suffering that we were not aware in any way that was there, where he just got letters and letters and letters of people, LGBTQIA people. And. And what happens is you become. Now it's like it pops your own bubble. And I heard that kind of in what you were saying, because kind of through it, you were like, that didn't shake me so much, or it didn't really affect me that much. But that moment where you're standing and you're witnessing firsthand someone suffering, you're looking in their eyes or you're hearing their story and it's in their voice and it becomes different, doesn't it?

Patrick Mason [02:52:12] Yep, absolutely. I mean, I think that's exactly right, Margi. That for me, one of the reasons I became a historian, as opposed to maybe a social scientist or something, no offense to social scientists, but, like, I'm interested in human beings and I'm interested in people's stories. I'M interested in who they are and what makes them tick, in their struggles, in their triumphs. And so, like we talked about it, this goes all the way back to my mission where I was just like, I was interested in hearing people's stories. And it's been a kind of recurring. That's why I love. You know, as a historian, I always joke with my students. We read dead people's mail and diaries. Right. But it's in an effort to get to know this person. Person, to humanize the dead, to recognize what the human condition is all about. And it's been so transformative for me, you know, and being in that fireside with Gene England and all these black saints in London, but especially over the past 10 years, as people have opened up and shared their lives with me and their pain and their hurt and their struggles intellectually and emotionally and relationally and with the church and with families like that. Talk about privilege. It is a privileged place to hear people's stories and for them to share their pain with you. And I want to be a good steward of what's shared with me. And I want to respond with empathy. I want to respond with love. I want to respond with validating that their experience is real, they didn't make this up, and that their pain is worth attending to. And so I'm really lucky I get to do that for my day job. Job as a historian. I hope I convey this to my students, like to humanize the past, but I also feel. I feel deeply privileged and lucky. It's a burden, too, as you know. Right. For other people to share these things with you and for you to carry this with them. There's an emotional burden that comes with that, too, but that's worth it. And I think that's what it means to be human.

Margi Dehlin [02:54:56] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [02:54:57] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:55:00] All right. Well, this. This has been so fun for me. This is like what I live for.

Patrick Mason [02:55:07] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [02:55:08] There's a lot of things I've done a million times, but talking to you is not something I've done a million times. So part one has been brilliant. Margi, it's just so great to have you here. Thanks for joining.

Patrick Mason [02:55:19] Yeah, thank you.

John Dehlin [02:55:19] I love you. Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [02:55:20] To be here.

John Dehlin [02:55:21] And. And don't go away. Viewers and listeners, we're going to do part two as soon as we eat our Jimmy John's. And not. We're not officially endorsed by Jimmy John's, but we're going to come back.

Patrick Mason [02:55:30] But would like to be.

John Dehlin [02:55:31] Yeah, we'd love to be. We're gonna. I'M gonna ask Patrick a million questions while still leaving time for part three, which will be Patrick turning the tables on me and Margi and asking us some questions. So, Patrick, this has been wonderful. I hope you've enjoyed it, too.

Patrick Mason [02:55:48] Yeah, this has been great. Thank you.

John Dehlin [02:55:51] All right, thanks, everyone. Come right back for part two, and we'll see you all soon on Mormon Stories podcast. Thank you.

Part Two Begins: Deep Dive Q&A

Part 2 of 3 · Ep. 1657

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. I am one of your hosts for today, John Dehlin. It's September 6th, 2022. I'm here with my partner in righteousness, Margi. Hey, Margi. Glad to have you here.

Margi Dehlin [00:00:14] Glad to be here.

John Dehlin [00:00:14] Having fun today. Yes, we have the Patrick Q. Mason in the house. Hey, Patrick.

Margi Dehlin [00:00:20] Hey.

Patrick Mason [00:00:21] There aren't that many other Patrick Q. Mason especially.

John Dehlin [00:00:26] Well, we just spent a good three hours with Patrick. I won't reintroduce him. Please pause this episode. If you haven't watched part one, go back and listen. We spent three hours talking about Patrick's Mormon upbringing, his Mormon story, his mission, his marriage, his pursuit of Mormon studies as a historian and how he kind of got into the Mormon studies field, and then eventually his reaction to a lot of the evolution of Mormon thought and Mormon discourse. We covered all of that and more in part one, and I really loved it. How are you feeling, Patrick?

Patrick Mason [00:00:59] I'm feeling great. Just had a good sandwich.

John Dehlin [00:01:00] I mean, you know, what's there to complain about?

Patrick Mason [00:01:03] Exactly. Life is good.

John Dehlin [00:01:05] All right, so we planned on a part two and a part three. Now we're going to do a deep dive. I have, I don't know, 15 pages worth of questions, not only that I came up with, but that a lot of my viewers and listeners and some of my very close friends have made. I do want to make sure and mention that the original impetus for this interview, for me at least, was this amazing book, Restoration God's call to the 21st century world by Patrick Mason. I started it a year or however, two ago. I finished it this morning. But I did read the whole thing. And probably five or six pages of my notes are detailed notes on this book.

Patrick Mason [00:01:44] It's a short book. It shouldn't take you a year to read.

John Dehlin [00:01:47] No, we had a disruption. We had a slight disruption.

Patrick Mason [00:01:51] We had a little interruption.

John Dehlin [00:01:52] I read enough of luck. I'm ready to interview Patrick. You know, I'll finish it once we book it. And then we got sidetracked. Anyway, it's a great book, if I can endorse this. I don't know if that's good or bad, Savage endorsement on a book, but, like, I think this book would do very good things for the church and for the members, and it's. It's my kind of Mormonism. Frankly, a lot of what I was hoping would come out of my early engagements with the church is reflected more thoughtfully, more beautifully in this book than I could have ever come up with myself. So I Heartily hardly recommend this book for everyone. Restoration. Also, Patrick is promoting a brand new book he co authors with J. David Pulsifer. The book is called Proclaim Peace, the Restoration's Answer to an Age in Conflict. Patrick is also the author of a book many of you will have heard of called Planted. And then he's also the author of like seven other books. So he's. And we won't list them all.

Patrick Mason [00:02:49] No, we will not.

John Dehlin [00:02:50] Anything you want to say about the books before we jump in?

Patrick Mason [00:02:53] Most of them are academic books that, like three people have read. They're all great, though. They're all brimming with insight.

Margi Dehlin [00:03:00] And all those three people were deeply impacted.

Patrick Mason [00:03:03] They're deeply impacted, changed. Most of them are academic books really, for the field of Mormon studies, Mormon history, so they're not really written to be bestsellers.

Margi Dehlin [00:03:16] Assumption. Got it.

John Dehlin [00:03:18] All right. Well, I'm just so ready to dive in because I've been wanting to interview you for a long, long, long, long, long time.

Margi Dehlin [00:03:23] So.

John Dehlin [00:03:25] So I'm going to just go back a tiny bit. You know, back in the day when I first started Mormon Stories, I was very, very committed to interviewing people along the spectrum. Believers, non believers, critics, people in the church, people out of the church. Once my excommunication happened and, you know, that started to change because before I had Daniel Peterson and and, you know, Terrell and Fiona Givens and Dan Witherspoon and Adam Miller and so many faithful Mormon scholars to kind of convey that side of the camp, those interviews became harder, if not impossible to come by after my excommunication. Now, some will say that's a change in my tone. Some will say that's because when the church marks somebody as an apostate, many others don't feel safe engaging with them, especially in the public arena because of temple covenants or because of job implications or whatever. But I never thought this day would come where you would actually come on Mormon stories and never did. I think you'd give me a full day. Like, if the day ever come, I'd get an hour at the most. So the first question I had is, why are you doing this interview? How are you doing this interview? Like, no.

Patrick Mason [00:04:42] Yeah, it's a good question. Well, I'll tell you why. Excuse me? I'll tell you why I'm doing it. One, I told you that I would and try to be a man of my word. Two, I believe in talking with people. I believe that the conversation is good for us. I don't believe in sort of separating people into Camps and sort of saying, like, you can't talk to these people. We see enough of that in our broader culture. And I want to find ways, I want to try to model ways, however imperfectly, for people who disagree. I mean, you and I don't agree about everything. We've come to different places and different conclusions on some things that mean a lot to us. But that doesn't mean we can't talk to each other. Right. And we just see too much polarization. And so if maybe it's naive. I think some people will be critical of me for even doing this and having this conversation. They think it'll transgress something or endorse, you know, something about you and your project or something. But we're human beings. We're stuck on this planet together. I think we're brothers and sisters, and so can we just talk to each other? And then the third thing, and this may be the most Mormon thing I say all day, is I got a prompting to do it, and I had told you that I would at some point, and then I got a prompting, and so I sent you an email and said, does the offer still stand?

John Dehlin [00:06:31] I love it. Love it. Is there anything you risk by doing this interview or by certain things you might or might not say in this interview? You know, could there be consequences for you, not just for doing it, but for, you know, for things you might say or misstatements or anything like that?

Patrick Mason [00:06:56] Yeah, always. Possibly. I mean, you know, as I just mentioned, I mean, I think I actually already saw it on Twitter. Some people are mad at me for. For doing this and think that even associating with you in any way, like sitting in the same room and having a civil conversation with one another, then in some ways it endorses you, it gives space to you, it gives air, you know, to you. Legitimates, you know, Mormon stories and John Dehlin. And I get that. I get those. Those concerns. I just don't share them. I also think, you know, sometimes there's a time and a place. A year ago, I felt like it wasn't the right time to do it. And I think conversations. I do think there. There is sometimes a time and space where. Where it's going to be most productive. And a year ago, I didn't feel like it was. It was that time and space. Now I did. And so, you know, do I risk anything? I mean, I always. I'm very cognizant of this. I'm sure you are, too. I mean, what we put out into the world, this is for anybody to listen to or to see. And there's a certain responsibility or obligation. You know, you don't get, you don't get a do over. You know, once something is recorded and goes out there, you don't get to say, well, what I actually meant, right. Or I didn't get to finish my sentence or what I had going on in my mind or what I wish I would have said. No. I mean, all that people have is just what's on the record and I misspeak sometimes. Sometimes I don't perfectly communicate what I want to communicate. Sometimes I say things that are wrong. Right. Either because I had the wrong information or just forgot something. I mean, you know, so I think about this every time a journalist calls me. Right. Or anything. I mean, there's always a risk. I also know that there are people, you know, within the LDS community who are so concerned about giving any air to or any space to any kind of criticism of the church that they feel like it's some kind of disloyalty, that they think that it, excuse me, that it somehow undermines the church or the community. And again, I understand where that comes from. I understand that feeling. I'm deeply loyal to the church and my community, to the people that I love and the tradition that I believe in. But I also believe, actually part of that fidelity to it is speaking truth. And it's because I love the community so much, because I believe in the religion so deeply that I'm not afraid. So when a journalist calls, I'm not afraid of calling it like I see it when, when I'm talking with people individually. I'm not afraid of sharing, you know, again, within appropriate boundaries. But I'm not afraid of sharing what I actually think. And so I'm not afraid of talking to John Dehlind when I feel like the time is right.

John Dehlin [00:10:11] And while I. Well, I want both this part two and your part three. Well, definitely part two, I want it to be mostly you having the chance to talk. I do want at least a dialog.

Patrick Mason [00:10:23] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:10:24] And I'm just going to address the people because this is very personal to me. I'm going to address the people who think you shouldn't be on here. Just very quickly in, from my perspective, think about Warren Jeffs and the FLDS community and what it, what it did to that community to have them isolated. The ex Mormon community, the post Mormon community. I don't want to say that I speak for them, but I've spoken to tens of thousands of them at this point. I do think that. And we talked about this last episode prior to 2004, 2005. If you left it, lost your faith in the church, you just kind of disappeared. Oftentimes you were just alienated or cut out from your family and you just moved somewhere other than Utah and just rebuilt a life. Right? Yeah, but, but, and then there were these little. There's always been these little pockets of ex Mormons around. And all I can say is when communities are marginalized, when they're ignored, when they're demeaned and cast off, just like with the FL community, it's a, it's an imperfect and a flawed analogy, but it reminds me of what happens when you're too strict of a parent and you alienate your kid. All you do is you cut off any influence you have. So if you don't like what a group is doing, you've got two choices. You can further isolate and alienate them. And in that case, you have no influence at all over anything that's going to go on there. If you choose to engage them to support, to show love, which I think Christ would have maybe given a precedence for that sort of engagement. You talk a lot about peace. There's like an openness and a willingness to listen in a dialogue and most importantly, a willingness to consider all sides and a willingness to receive influence. And you lose that when you cut off and marginalize. Plus you fuel people, you make them feel othered, you make them feel unimportant or bad or dirty. When, when everyone feels like they're the hero in their story. Everyone feels like they're fighting for what, what they believe in. Just, I think almost nothing good comes from isolation and an unwillingness to have dialogue. Yeah, that's my opinion.

Patrick Mason [00:12:53] Yeah. And I think, look, I can understand why general authorities don't want to come on this show. Right. I mean, but, but just a guy, right? I'm just one guy who teaches and thinks and writes about this stuff and who's a deeply believing member of the church. And so I just, I really believe a scripture that's become really, really important to me in recent years comes from Ephesians, chapter two, and I won't be able to quote it perfectly, but basically says that Christ comes and he breaks down the dividing wall between us and he preaches peace to those who are near and those who are far. And so Christ is not interested the work of Jesus, the way of Jesus is not interested in building these divisions between us. You know, I think about 4th Nephi, no manner of ites, Right. I mean, you know, and so I understand there are reasons why we draw boundaries. I understand sometimes for safety, sometimes for. I mean, there are lots of reasons. It's a human thing to do. But Jesus doesn't seem all that interested in that kind of boundary making.

John Dehlin [00:13:59] What.

Patrick Mason [00:14:00] What he seems to be interested in doing. In fact, what it says. His work of atonement, of reconciliation is to break down the hostility, break down the dividing walls between us, and to preach peace. That doesn't mean we're going to agree about everything. You and I are still going to walk out of the room disagreeing about different things, but we can talk about them.

John Dehlin [00:14:18] Yeah. Yeah. So for that reason, I'm deeply grateful, Margi. I'm sure you feel similarly. Yeah. Um, okay. Thank you for that. Thank you for being here. This question is going to seem totally out of left field, and it's not me building a case, but I do think it's an important question. Whenever you engage in anything public, sometimes people want to know what your bias is or your point of view. So this is going to seem like a really bold question, but I'm going to ask it. What would the personal, professional and social consequences be if you, Patrick Mason, in your position, lost your faith?

Personal Stakes and Honest Assessment of the Church

Patrick Mason [00:14:58] Yeah. Professionally, none. I'm an employee of the state of Utah. I have tenure at Utah State University. It would make no, zero, literally zero change to my employment.

John Dehlin [00:15:12] To your employment status with usu.

Patrick Mason [00:15:14] Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, we saw that happen with Richard Sherlock. Right. I mean, he wasn't a Mormon studies professor. Right.

Margi Dehlin [00:15:21] But.

Patrick Mason [00:15:21] But I mean, but he taught philosophy of religion and so forth. And, and so. So, yeah, I could say on this show right now, I don't believe any of this. And it would not affect me in terms of my employment status one bit. Certainly it would. It would. It would change my position relationally within the. Within the community, but it wouldn't even change, assuming that I continued to do the same kind of Mormon history and Mormon studies work, using the kinds of disciplines of history, working with the methods that we have as scholars. It wouldn't change my publishing opportunities. You know, Oxford University Press doesn't care whether I'm a believing Mormon or not. So it would change none. It would make no appreciable difference for my strictly professional work. Obviously it would change the nature of my family life and, you know, at home and the kinds of things we do as parents and as children. Obviously it would have an impact on those relationships that I have. I think most of my good friendships would withstand that transition. You never know. Till you go through it. But in terms of. Obviously then, but the biggest thing that it would do is that over the past several years since I've been doing these firesides and rote planted, I give lots of firesides. I've become in ways that I'm not fully comfortable with, a kind of model of a believing scholar. Here's somebody who's made it work, knows all the stuff, knows all this history, still deeply believes and participates. Were I to come out and say that's not true, well, obviously then I'm not going to be publishing with Deseret Book anymore. I'm not going to be publishing with Faith Matters anymore. I'm not going to be doing those kinds of things. So it would have a lot of impact in a lot of areas that I care about a lot. I really think it wouldn't change anything professionally for me. That's of course different than somebody who works at BYU or the Church history department or something like that. I've, I've never worked for the church.

John Dehlin [00:17:39] When, when you think about like a Sandra Tanner, Sandra Gerald Tanner or Dan Vogel or Brent Metcalf, and then you think about the broader Mormon studies community, are our non believers treated differently in the broader Mormon studies community, Mormon History association, that sort of thing, then, then faithful members are. Is there a, a bias there or a preference or privilege that comes like a bushman, etc.

Patrick Mason [00:18:11] Yeah. So I'm going to share a perspective and other people may disagree with me. So I think within the professional world of Mormon scholarship, I'm not saying within the sort of public reputation. Right. But within the Mormon History Association, I would say that no, there is no distinction or privilege. I mean the MHA for a long time. I mean, one of the things that makes MHA special is that those sectarian or confessional differences don't matter. What matters is the quality of your scholarship. So there's been non LDS presidents, there's been LDS presidents. Right. Mike Quinn was a beloved figure within mha, has been honored, you know, was honored at the conference shortly before he died. You know, and so what, what, what, what matters in MHA within that community and then more broadly within the professional Mormon studies world is, is the quality of your scholarship. And, and are you doing. It's not just the quality of your research. So, so, so I mean, you know, Gerald and Sandra, I mean, who's, who's done more research than them? Right. But it's, and this is one of the distinctions, and I mentioned this a little bit in the previous session, that where the field is right now is it's not just accumulating facts about Mormonism, but it's about putting that data and that evidence within a broader conversation. What we call the historiography, the broader literature, the questions that other scholars are asking. Not just the sort of intramural debates that happen within a faith, within believers and critics, but actually it's the, what are the questions that scholars care about in the secular academy? And then are you putting your research sort of within those frameworks and so forth? So that's why I think sometimes some of the terrific and really important and pathbreaking research that say, the Tanners did for them, it was always oriented. My sense is it was oriented primarily to, towards members of the church. Right? He was arguing with truth claims. He was coming up with the, it wasn't oriented to the academy. And so whereas the Mormon History association, the American Academy of Religion, other sort of forums for Mormon scholarship, it's not oriented towards the church and towards the church's questions or the questions that are internal to the community of faith, but they're the questions that are generated by the academy. Those are kind of fine distinctions. But I really think, I mean, I just look at my peers within mha, you've got fully believing members, you've got people who have been never Mormons, you've got people who are ex Mormons and they're all given papers in the same conference.

John Dehlin [00:21:04] I can imagine someone misinterpreting what they just heard because one way to reflect back what I just heard was to say the Tanners care about truth claims and academia cares about something else. And someone who would be inclined to misinterpret would say, wait, does that mean academia doesn't care about truth?

Patrick Mason [00:21:25] It doesn't care about. And this has been, this is broader than Mormon. It's a great follow up question. It's a broader thing that goes well beyond Mormon history. In a lot of ways. This speaks to the development of the historical discipline, but also especially religious studies and what separated religious studies and, and I'll try to be really brief here, but religious studies as an academic discipline as opposed to theology. So theology always happens within a confessional context. You can't just do theology in general. You do Catholic theology or Muslim theology or Lutheran theology or Latter Day Saint theology. It happens within a confessional context. The religious studies as it developed in the late 19th and then especially in the 20th century, was an attempt to sort of distance the academic study of religion from any kind of confessional claims or debates or interests. So it's, how do we understand religion as just a human phenomenon? How do we study it? The same way that we would study any other aspect of human life and human existence. And one of the ways we do that, one of the ways that the religious studies discipline has developed, is to hold truth claims at arm's length, to say, we're not here to prove or disprove whether or not Muhammad made his night journey to Jerusalem. Right. We're not here to prove or disprove whether Jesus actually rose from the grave on the third day. Now, what we can do is look at the text. What are the claims? What are the. Let's look at the authorship of text. Let's look at whose interests it serves to make certain narratives, look at the communities, you know. So we ask all those kinds of historical and sociological and anthropological questions about it. But essentially there's a kind of epistemic humility to say, given the tools that we have as a historian or as a religious study scholar, it's impossible for me to say one way or the other whether Jesus rose from the grave. All I can say is what the evidence says, but I cannot make a claim. It's beyond what I can do as a scholar to make a final claim about that.

John Dehlin [00:23:24] Like a conclusion.

Patrick Mason [00:23:25] A conclusion. Right. Jesus did or did not rise from the grave. That's completely outside the realm of what historians can conclude.

John Dehlin [00:23:33] And that's not just Mormon studies, that's religious studies.

Patrick Mason [00:23:35] That's religious studies.

John Dehlin [00:23:36] That's good for me to know.

Patrick Mason [00:23:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:23:38] I hadn't really explained.

Patrick Mason [00:23:39] Exactly. And that's what the whole discipline of religious studies, I mean, whenever a student. So we teach religious studies at Utah State University. It is a state university funded by the taxpayers of Utah. Thank you very much. Okay. And the very generous state legislature. And when a student enters a religious studies classroom, we are not there to build their faith or to denigrate their faith. We're not there to promote. Now they need to come out of Intro to World Religions and to know what are the truth claims that Muslims make. Right. Here are the five pillars of Islam. What are the truth claims that Christians make that Jesus rose from the grave? Right. But we're not here to tell you whether that's right or wrong. We're here to give you the tools to think about it critically, to examine the sources and so forth, but we're not here to do this. And so Mormon history as it evolved since the 1960s, and actually, Fawn Brody, I think, is the first step in this direction. And then it's really matured since the 1960s. The brilliance of Leonard Arrington of like Great Basin Kingdom, he says explicitly in there, he says, I'm not here to prove whether or not Joseph Smith saw gold plates. I'm just here to say what are the consequences of people believing that Joseph Smith did get gold plates and created a religious community and then go settle the desert. Right. And so that's what we've done. So the academic Mormon history, Mormon studies community, we keep those truth claims that arms doesn't mean that. That the people don't have individual opinions about it.

John Dehlin [00:25:08] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [00:25:09] That's not what we're talking about at mha.

John Dehlin [00:25:11] I mean this already is so illuminating for me because from my vantage point, that's all I ever cared about.

Patrick Mason [00:25:19] Right.

John Dehlin [00:25:19] Is. Is it actually true?

Patrick Mason [00:25:21] And that's what most people care about.

John Dehlin [00:25:22] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [00:25:23] Which is why nobody reads my academic books.

John Dehlin [00:25:26] Yeah. Yeah. But like, I don't think it'll be a secret that, that there are those in the Mormon studies community that aren't a big fan of me or what I do. And there's probably a lot of reasons for that. But understanding now the kernel is that their whole world is oriented around avoiding that. That sort of, those sorts of conclusions or even those sorts of questions makes. Makes it almost oil and water just. Just to begin with.

Patrick Mason [00:25:54] That's exactly right. They're just completely different conversations. And it's not the one conversation is good or bad or better or it's that methodologically, I mean. So we talk about history as a discipline that when historians are being disciplined in terms of what we can do as historians, there are certain things that we do not have access to. I do not have access to Joseph Smith's actual experience in that grove of trees. What I have access to is his records, his accounts, the surrounding accounts, what was going on in the culture. The same. How did other people talk about visions at the same time? I have access to all of that. I have no access to that actual moment. Therefore, as a historian, this is not. As a person, as a historian, I cannot make a claim as to the veracity of. Of what he said. So all. So that's why you always get. Historians do the. He reported that or as Joseph Smith claimed, etc. That's not us being lily livered about it, you know, or you know, it's. It's actually us being disciplined in terms of what. What we can.

John Dehlin [00:27:02] Got it.

Patrick Mason [00:27:02] What we can know based on these methods.

John Dehlin [00:27:04] Yeah. Why are you grinning, Margi? You're grinning for a second.

Margi Dehlin [00:27:07] Oh, because I Love seeing your brain make connections.

John Dehlin [00:27:12] Well, you've also lived with me as I've suffered with why do they hate me so much? You know, and you've been. You've been a part of my angst around this sort of topic.

Margi Dehlin [00:27:20] That is true. But I would not grin at that.

Patrick Mason [00:27:23] But. So I can't speak for anybody else but to say that. So I think many scholars would say, hey, Mormon stories is great. The conversations they have are great. That's not what I do as a scholar.

John Dehlin [00:27:35] Yeah, totally.

Margi Dehlin [00:27:36] Right.

John Dehlin [00:27:36] Yeah. Okay. Shifting gears a tiny bit before we get into kind of the topics that I know we both really want to get to last episode, we. We touched on kind of these moments, let's just say around 2015 and later when you realized the church was in a world of hurt, you. You published, planted, and you. You got a sense of. Of the pain bubble that Margi and I got a sense of starting around 2000, but really accelerating around 2005. Just of all the people suffering relating to faith crisis stuff, but also social justice issues, women, LGBT people, racial minorities, etc. Fast forward to 2022. September 2022. What you may have access to data or anecdotal evidence or whatever regarding the health and the vitality of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. How. How bad is it in terms of whatever data you can provide? I have some insider sources. I've reported on some things I've heard. What. What can you share with us about how much of a world of hurt the LDS Church is, you know, this month?

Margi Dehlin [00:28:52] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [00:28:53] Right. Yeah. So I. I'll start by saying I don't have special access to any kind of insider information. You actually may have more than. I rely a lot in terms of contemporary demographic trends. I rely a lot on the research of Jana Rees and Benjamin Knoll and other sociologists of religion who are tracing this kind of stuff. I know that the church keeps its own internal data on this. I have no access to any of that. And so, yeah, I mean, so what I see is the same thing that everybody is saying is a serious and marked decline in retention. Usually in Mormonism, we've talked about retention in terms of convert retention, but here we're talking about retention even of people who are born in the faith. Right. And do you stick with it into adulthood? So we're seeing really significant upward trends in disaffiliation, both formal and informal. I. So far, it's looked like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has done a little better than most other religions in the United States. But the trend lines are the same in terms of a serious drop off generationally in terms of retention within the church, a serious rise in disaffiliation. And our data is mostly on the United States and somewhat in Western Europe. I frankly don't know very much of what's going on in other places around the world. I think that the best person keeping track of this is Matt Martinich who does all this work on demographics. And we can trace it somewhat with the creation of stakes and so forth. So we can do a little guesswork at some things. And it seems it looks like that there is modest and steady growth in sub Saharan Africa, the Philippines and a few other places that in Western Europe, church membership or affiliation rates, activity rates have taken a nosedive with the United States and Canada, you know, North America not that far behind. So right now the data suggests that the church is retaining less than half, maybe significantly less than half of the members who are born into, into the church into adulthood.

John Dehlin [00:31:17] And that's not, not taking into consideration low convert retention rates. Is that right?

Patrick Mason [00:31:22] Yeah, so yeah, you know. Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's looking. We know that convert retention rates have been pretty low for a long time. Vastly different in different regions of the world. Some places like abysmally low, other places actually pretty healthy. But when you combine all of that and then with long term, you know, people who were born into the church with, with those retention rates, it looks, all the evidence suggests that it's well under 50%. Yeah, maybe, maybe even in the 30s.

John Dehlin [00:32:00] So you're saying 30% of the people who were born and raised Mormon are staying in the church in the United

Patrick Mason [00:32:06] States of the current generation, of the current generation of I guess what we're now Gen Z. Yeah.

Church Membership Trends and Retention Concerns

John Dehlin [00:32:12] So if you were to have to come up with a number of the 16 million plus almost 17 million members that the church kind of says that they have, if you had to guess how many members worldwide were actually active of the 16 or 17 million, what would be the best number you could estimate?

Patrick Mason [00:32:30] My best guess, based on again, the data that I see from other scholars and the information we have available to us, I would say that we're probably between a third to 40% activity rate globally. So of the 16, close to 17 million members of record, the. What's my math? So, you know, so 4 million. So. Well, I think because 4 million would be like 25%. I think that's way too low. I think we're probably in the 6 to 7 million range of active. You know, kind of connected, still connected to the church in significant ways of people who would self identify as more. Because that's another thing. Sociologists have shown that the numbers of people who self identify as members of the church versus what the church reports, it's much lower, especially in some countries. So self identifying Latter Day Saints, I would guess that that's probably in the 12 to 13 million range. Okay, so again we don't have perfect data on that.

John Dehlin [00:33:33] Yeah, yeah. My estimates around 4 to 5 million of the active.

Patrick Mason [00:33:37] But yeah, yeah, but that's, it's sort of anybody's guess because we just don't have enough data.

John Dehlin [00:33:42] Yeah. And, and tell me if you, if you're, if, if you also have the same sense that in the United States growth is relatively flat even though the birth rate is higher than average.

Patrick Mason [00:33:57] Yeah, I think growth in the United States is probably flat. Probably pretty close to flat. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:34:03] Meaning that if the Trends continue within 5, 10, 15 years, the, the church will actually be in decline in the United States.

Patrick Mason [00:34:12] Possibly. Yeah. I think there's definitely, almost definitely again imperfect data. Looks like there's negative growth. And in Europe, which, which means decline. And in North America probably flat. Either minimal growth or minimal attrition. Statistically pretty close to flat.

John Dehlin [00:34:34] I'm getting. Gerardo's watching this on, on the live stream and he's saying that 35% of 17 million is 6 million.

Patrick Mason [00:34:42] So there you go. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:34:43] Yeah. Thanks Gerardo.

Patrick Mason [00:34:45] I'm not a math guy. Thanks.

John Dehlin [00:34:48] Okay, so. So things are pretty bad. And you hear. I've heard reports of like along the Wasatch front, something like only a third of the young men who reach pre stage are choosing to serve missions. I'm hearing about something like up to a third of missionaries who go out, come, come home early in some way or another. I've even heard a recent statistic that upwards of 75% of those who are raised in the church, the youth, let's just say the 20 somethings, something as high as 75% of those are leaving the church by age 30. Have you heard?

Patrick Mason [00:35:27] I've heard similar kinds of things and I.

John Dehlin [00:35:30] None of that jumps out as you is outrageously wrong.

Patrick Mason [00:35:33] Not again. We could be arguing within plus or minus. Right. But, but the general trends, I think all of that sounds about right.

John Dehlin [00:35:41] Okay. And it wouldn't be fair to not mention the rise of the nuns and that this sweeping secularization, none of this,

Patrick Mason [00:35:50] I mean what this shows is that Mormonism is not immune to these broader trends and pressures Again, so far, at least as of a few years ago, Mormonism was performing slightly better than evangelicals and mainline Protestants and others. Still not great, but slightly better. Is that still true? Or has in the 2000 and twenties, has Mormonism caught up with the others in terms of how bad things are? But it's a broader cultural set of forces and trends.

John Dehlin [00:36:22] So what's your best sense of the main reasons for our decline, in particular

Patrick Mason [00:36:28] within the LDS Church? Yeah, I think it's all the obvious reasons that everybody said. I think it is a general distrust of institutions. I think there is a certain percentage of people who leave around truth claim issues where, you know, the narratives and what they're. What they're taught growing up in the church don't match then fully with what they find online, and they're not able to reconcile the two either themselves or find anybody to help them reconcile it. I think increasingly, and this is. This is one of the big differences I've seen. So if you read Planted, published at the end of 2015, I barely mention LGBTQ issues. I mean, they were there. It was certainly present, but at the time, it seemed.

John Dehlin [00:37:15] It looked.

Patrick Mason [00:37:15] It seemed like it was mostly truth claim issues. And then women's issues, like the big social issues, seemed like women's issues. That was ordained women and all that kind of stuff. You know, that's the same time that then Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. And then Planted is published in December 2015, November 2000. I mean, it was already at press, right? I mean, when the November 2000, 2015 policy came. So the. The big change over the past seven years has been LGBTQ issues in terms of driving people out of the church, either because they themselves are LGBTQ or allies and friends and family members of lgbtq. So it's a combination of the truth claim issues and then the social cultural issues.

John Dehlin [00:37:57] I. This is a side note, but I heard that the November 2015 policy had a really deleterious effect on the Mormon studies community. Did you. Did you see any of that where scholars, faithful scholars that were maybe holding on, thinking that they could kind of bridge that divide and stay in as a faithful scholar, many of them checked out at that point. I'm probably asking to answer something anecdotal,

Patrick Mason [00:38:23] but, yeah, it would be anecdotal. And, yeah, I think I probably can think of a few cases like that. Look, it was hard for everybody. I mean, I. I had, again, in all this kind of informal ministry that I'm doing like, that I had. And this is a common story, though. I'M not saying anything new that after November 2015, I had so many people come who were like, rock ribbed 100%, dyed in the wool 100%, you know, latter Day Saint never questioned the brethren come and talk to me and say like this. This is literally the first time I've disagreed with the First Presidency. This is the first. This is really hard for me. And, you know, they have a. I remember one guy came into my office and talked to me. He said, I was supposed to be going this weekend to my grandchild's baptism, and now it's not going to happen because his parents are gay. Right. And so it was that. And I think just broadly within the culture, there was a big shift right around that time of general cultural acceptance of LGBTQ awareness of issues. And so one of the things I was talking about and try to help my students understand as a historian, is I don't think there. I literally, in my professional opinion as a historian, I don't think there's ever been a major social issue of consequence where there has been such decided movement so quickly on a single issue as with LGBTQ issues. I mean, think about feminism. I mean, that fight's been going on for decades. We have century and a half. Think about civil rights, you know, same kind of thing. Whereas LGBTQ issues. You think that even if you just want to start with stonewall to the present, I mean, but. But really it's in this century that those things turned on a dime. So. So it was. So I think it's a major issue now. Coming back to your question, I think the LGBTQ questions. Major issue in 2022 that were a. At least from my perspective, I know, not in a lot of individual lives, but looking at a kind of macro perspective, a decade ago were not. Was not at the top of the list.

John Dehlin [00:40:30] Totally. Okay, so would you say, is it over dramatic then, to say that the church is kind of facing an existential threat or crisis or. Or is that overstating it?

Patrick Mason [00:40:44] That. I think it's overstating it in the sense of if. When you buy existential, do you mean, like, is its very existence in question? No.

John Dehlin [00:40:54] Maybe I'll asterisk it and say its existence as it's known and as it's been operating.

Patrick Mason [00:41:03] Yeah. I mean, the question is, is the church going to go into a period of significant membership decline right over the next few decades? That's a possibility. As we've seen mainline Protestantism go into Roman Catholicism, other churches has happened for a few decades now. That's a Very distinct possibility. Now you do have the counterweight of global membership growth. And so still, so you still have global growth. And so I think partly we have to disaggregate the North American and European church, maybe Australia, New Zealand, you know, kind of the quote unquote Western world from the, from the rest of the, from the rest of the church.

John Dehlin [00:41:41] Maybe like Japan and kind of.

Patrick Mason [00:41:43] Yeah, yeah. And none of these categories like developed where, I mean, none of those categories are good. But I think we all kind of know what we're talking about and so. But is it possible that the LDS Church goes into a period of membership, either stagnation or decline? Yes, that's possible. As a historian, as I look at this and I look within the broader trends of American religious history, there have been periods like this before of a kind of general decline and patterns of disaffiliation within broader American religion. And then there's always a revival. This has happened actually several times within American history. So just as a historian, if past is at all predictor, we may be either entering into or already at the bottom of a trough and there may be some period of revival on the horizon. I'm not a prophet.

John Dehlin [00:42:34] Yeah, yeah. So shifting gears a tiny bit now, we've already talked about the difference between kind of how you were entering this field of awareness around faith crisis issues. As someone who you told us last episode has, has to this day never really had sort of that dark night of the soul faith crisis. Right. And approaching it as a scholar and as an academic, which to some degree questions of truth claims, as you already said, are off limits. The way that you, and let's just say Richard Bushman and Terrell and Fiona Givens and others, the way that you all have been approaching this is very different than the way I and many of the people I associate with have been approaching this. Because we, many of us, not to speak for my community either. What happened was we experienced the dark night of the soul. We experienced this heart crushing, soul crushing, life crushing faith crisis or experience. And so we were coming, and have been coming at this question from that angle, not even really aware of academics or, or the, the disciplines of historians, etc. So those are two very different points of view that collide historically.

Patrick Mason [00:43:51] Yeah, no, I totally see that. And actually when, when I look at, when I read some of the stuff or hearing here, some of the things from the post Mormon or ex Mormon communities, one of the things that always strikes me is how little it engages with the world of peer reviewed academic scholarship and I don't think that that's. And I don't mean that as a critique in the sense of like, oh, people aren't like really engaging ideas. It's sort of what we were just talking about. It's two communities who are asking different kinds of questions now. I actually do think there's a lot of utility to reading the peer reviewed scholarship.

John Dehlin [00:44:31] Yeah, me too.

Patrick Mason [00:44:33] And I think it might change and inform because again, a lot of that is being produced by non LDS people. I mean there is, there is fascinating stuff going on right now in the Mormon studies academic world that most people aren't aware of and a lot of it is being done by non LDS scholars. It's just amazing stuff that informs truth claims questions, stuff about gold plates and the Book of Mormon content authorship. I mean, just like fascinating stuff. But these two worlds for the most part haven't talked to each other. Definitely. I can say the world of scholarship is it pays attention to these, to Mormon stories, the podcasts, the blogs, all this as a kind of data point or as something interesting to consider as a cultural phenomenon. Right. But these two realms of knowledge production and dissemination are, they really have existed pretty independently of one another and I

John Dehlin [00:45:30] think to the detriment of both sides, I think.

Patrick Mason [00:45:31] So I think there's a lot more conversation that could happen. And this goes back to Gerald and Sandra Tanner.

Margi Dehlin [00:45:37] Right.

Patrick Mason [00:45:37] I mean they produced so much stuff, but they weren't doing it again. They weren't. When they put it out into the world, it wasn't into the forms that academics, you know, as peer reviewed scholarship. And so therefore it didn't fight, it didn't have as much influence in the academic world as it had in, in these other worlds.

John Dehlin [00:45:59] Yeah, right, yeah. My view is that, you know, obviously progressive and post Mormons would do better to immerse themselves in dialogue and Sunstone and MHA and all these sorts of academic resources, we could all do better in that regard. And the academic community could, would do well to spend more time thinking about the psychological, the mental health, the familial and the social implications. Because the extent to which we're just staying isolated without the cross pollination of each other's worlds, like I'm repeating myself now, I think both worlds are suffering as a result.

Patrick Mason [00:46:39] Yeah. And you get a few people bridging. And so I think like Jana Reese's research, Right. She's writing a book right now on people who have left the church post the next Mormons. And so she's done a brilliant job and I can't wait for that book to come out. But even her previous book on the Next Mormons, I think, is really sensitive to these kinds of things, in addition to, of course, just a regular religion News service column. So she's a really good person who I think is taking from both worlds, but she's, she's, she's the exception rather than the rule.

John Dehlin [00:47:06] Yeah, I've. She's never spoken to me about this stuff. Not. Not that I. Not that she should, but. Yeah, I. It'd be cool to actually have a conversation with her at some point.

Patrick Mason [00:47:15] Yeah, she's phenomenal.

John Dehlin [00:47:17] Yeah. Okay, so now we get into the discussion of apologetics. So what does the term apologist and. Or the term apologetics mean to you?

Patrick Mason [00:47:29] Yeah, I think.

John Dehlin [00:47:30] Is it a pejorative or is it. Is it not a pejorative?

Patrick Mason [00:47:33] Well, it's all, it's all in the eye of the beholder. Right. I think, you know, strictly speaking, of course, just definitionally, as somebody who mounts a kind of rational defense of the faith. And so it's always from a position, you know, you're not an apologist for nothing. You're an apologist for something. Right. So you're in relation to something in particular and to a confessional community and a set of truth claims. So, you know, and apologetics is. Actually has a long and hallowed tradition. I mean, some of the most important work, especially in Christianity, Islam and Judaism, is apologetics. People who have, you know, Thomas Aquinas and others like, who have apartments, applied the life of the mind to defend the claims that their religion puts forward. But apologetics comes in lots of different shapes and sizes, comes in lots of different tones. But I think the basic impulse behind it is that is a readiness to defend against critique. Right. To. To defend that. Every religion deals with this. Every religion deals with people who are critical of it. Debunkers, dissidents. And so apologists are the ones who feel like their job is to stand there and to. To play defense and so which sometimes turns into offense.

John Dehlin [00:48:52] Right. So just from a taxonomy perspective or just a definitional perspective, it's not, to you, especially outside of the Mormon context, it's not inherently a negative term or pejorative.

Patrick Mason [00:49:05] No. I think we just have to recognize it's a particular genre.

John Dehlin [00:49:08] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [00:49:08] Right. And so it. Apologetics is not disinterested. Right. So that's what makes it different than academic history or academic religious studies. It has a perspective, it has something it is trying to defend, whereas academic history tries to be dispassionate. Neutral, objective, and so forth. So one isn't better than the other. They're just different. I think the problem sometimes when we get category confusion, when apologists think that what they're doing is neutral and objective and it's not, or when they blame academic historians for not being sufficiently something passionate or something like that in the fray, it's like, no, just two different things. And I think the OP apologetics, at least in my definitional schema, the opposite of apologetics is polemics. So again, passionate, interested, with a point of view, trying to make a point, but generally critical of. In relationship to a tradition, but critical of that tradition.

John Dehlin [00:50:15] I've never thought of those words being counters to each other. Apologist and polemicist.

Patrick Mason [00:50:18] Yeah. And this may just be my own little.

John Dehlin [00:50:22] No, I've just never made that connection. That's helpful.

Patrick Mason [00:50:24] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:50:25] Okay. So when I think about what happened with me. So I would say prior to 2004, my faith crisis, I'd probably never heard of. You know, I knew about Hugh Nibley.

Patrick Mason [00:50:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:50:39] I probably never heard of fair. Like 2004, I moved to Utah and I go to Sunstone for the first time, and it's there that I start hearing about. And I'd known Daniel Peterson probably at byu. I'd heard about. I. Hugh Nibly was probably still teaching during my early years at byu. So I knew about Hugh Nibali. I knew about doing everybody.

Patrick Mason [00:51:01] Right.

John Dehlin [00:51:02] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But. But I, you know, and I'd probably, at some point, once I learned about Fon Brody, heard about Hugh Nibley's pamphlet, no ma' am knows that. That's not. No ma', am, that's not history. In response to no man knows my history about Fon Brody. But it wasn't until I kind of moved here in 2000, 2004, 2005, started, like, learning about the culture of progressive and liberal and even post Mormonism, that I even learned that apologists really existed after my faith crisis. Right.

Patrick Mason [00:51:32] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:51:32] And so I immediately get to know Midgley and Peterson and Hamlin and learn about Hugh Nibley's role in things like the Book of Abraham and others, and then become familiar with Fair Mormon, where I'm like, whoa, this is a category. And if. And obviously later this term neo apologist comes up, what I want to do is ask you if you may not be comfortable doing this, but that was a thing. And I think it's safe to put that in a general bucket and call it classic. I'm comfortable calling that kind of classic Mormon apology.

Patrick Mason [00:52:11] So am I.

Apologetics Old and New: Styles and Critiques

John Dehlin [00:52:12] Are you comfortable without asking you to be insulting to people who you probably know and care about, are you comfortable giving your own description of what, what that was mostly about or what their techniques or their angle or approach? Yeah, classic Mormon apologetics. How would you describe it?

Patrick Mason [00:52:28] Yeah, yeah. I mean I, and I also, I'm describing it from afar because I was never part of, of that community too young. I mean those guys are a lot older than me. And, and, and, and frankly, it was never, never anything I was all that interested in to be perfect. I mean I read my fair share of Nibley and was stimulated and excited by a lot of what he said, but he's so idiosyncratic, he's almost a category unto himself. But yeah, but of course over the years I've become aware of and paid attention to some of those things. And I would put. And this was the kind of old Maxwell Institute, right when it farms, which then became the Maxwell Institute 1.0. And I think what they were doing is very similar to what you'd see Christian and Muslim and Jewish and other kind of apologists doing against classic defense of the faith, anticipating like what are the objections to the faith? And a lot of what they were doing. My sense I could be wrong. My sense is they were that generation was less interested and responsive less to what was going on at the ground level. And it was a little bit more high level kind of intellectual issues, much of which was coming from evangelicals. Right. So it was like, how do we defend against the criticisms of the Book of Mormon, Book of Abraham that are mostly being leveled by evangelicals? How do we respond to those claims? It was very much driven by, with a set of assumptions about like gather as many facts as you can and show how this is all true. Right. I mean it's like if we pile on enough facts that's just gonna, that's gonna build a high enough wall to show to defend against the barbarians of the gate. Right. And to make a plausible defense of the faith. Sometimes he was purely defensive. As I said, sometimes defense turns into offense. This has been true, I think of apologists throughout history that in defending against critics, one tactic is to then attack the critics to either undermine their credibility, so not just go after their arguments, but to go after them to erode their authority, to erode their standing and their reputation and say, hey, these people aren't worth listening to for reasons X, Y and Z. So at least mine and I've not read the whole FARMS review, you know, and all that. So. But at least from, from what I can see, I think a lot of that generation fits within a pretty classical mode of apologetics.

John Dehlin [00:55:07] And that's where that term ad hominem often comes in, where you attack the person.

Patrick Mason [00:55:11] The person, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:55:12] And then how would you sit? You know, I guess you could think of a. Of a religious organization or a church housing their apologetics in different potential places. Let's say the clergy, or let's say they're mental health professionals. Within Mormonism and probably elsewhere, it's housed within an academic institution. So how would you describe what was going on in terms of, like, science and scholarship and peer review? And number one, the choice to house academic apologetics within an academic institution, for one. What was that about? And then in terms of classic Mormon apologetics adhering to true standards of, of the academy and to scholarship versus doing something else. Can you talk about that or is that too sensitive?

Patrick Mason [00:56:00] No, no. So, I mean, as you say, it makes a lot of sense to house it within a university or, you know, other places would have seminaries or madrasas or other things like that. So for us, it was byu, and so it makes sense to do that because apologetics is. It's an intellectual endeavor, right? It's deeply engaged. It is a rational defense of the faith. Deeply engaged in research. I mean, you know, like some of the reason, just like Gerald and Sandra Tanner put out, like, amazing research, like the digging, the archival stuff, the, you know, you get the same stuff on the apologist side. I mean, these people who are. Will spend weeks, months, years, going after, like a tiny little fact. Careers, Right, Careers. Right. To prove some little tiny. Or to demonstrate, you know, because again, it's holding this wall up, right? And the kind of dogged defense of truth. So it is a deeply intellectual endeavor, which is why, okay, it makes sense to do it at a university or seminary or something like that. The difference between what's going. Again, from my perspective, what's going on in apologetic circles versus, say, the rest of the university is oftentimes there. And I don't know all the processes with the farm's review of books and other things. Oftentimes there is a peer review process, but it's internal. They're not sending it out to outside scholars, you know, Muslim scholars and Jewish scholars. I mean, because by definition, apologetics is an insight, it's a confessional thing. And so it. If there's a system of peer review, it's an internal system within a fairly closed system of scholars. And so whereas the idea of sort of academic peer Review, it's for the broad academy. The idea of the secular academy is that this knowledge has to be accessible to anybody. You don't have to come to it from any privileged position or identity that it's accessible. You might have to have certain training, Right. To understand what's going on. Right. Certain methodological training, but it's accessible to anybody, regardless of gender, race, creed, et cetera. Whereas with apologetics, a lot of it is again, it's going to be self referential. So even the arguments and the evidence they would make would be unintelligible to people who are outside the community of faith. So there may be peer review, but it's a different kind of peer review than happens within the broader academy.

John Dehlin [00:58:25] Yeah, and, and I think my distaste for classic Mormon apologetics developed with two main concerns in mind. One was the ad hominem attacks, whether it's on Brett Metcalf or Simon Southerton or Fawn Brody, just really mean spirited, insulting smears of people's character and their, their intentions, etc. That's always bothered me long before I ever was viewed as a critic, I think. But then the other thing was, you know, if you look at like John Gee, and I'm not asking you to like weigh in on individual people who again may be friends of yours, but you look at like what John Gee does versus what Robert Rittner did, or you look at like, or you know, Kerry Muhlstein and Robert Rittner, or you look at John Sorensen for BYU versus like Michael Ko for Yale. There's something very different going on in the broader archaeological community, in the broader Egyptology community, in the, you know, pick your community. Sociology, anthropology, linguistics, genetics. Right. There's something very different going on in the world of academia that respects scholarship and science, where it appears like when the Church puts its apologetics in the academy, in byu, they kind of want the, the perception amongst the members that this is credible academic scholarship that respects the rules of, of academia and science. But in reality it's not really, it's not really displaying true adherence or loyalty. So they, they kind of, it almost feels like a false impression of respectability and credibility that actually has no substance to it. Do you have sympathy for that concern?

Patrick Mason [01:00:18] Yeah, well, I think, you know, this is a problem that religious communities have had ever since the Enlightenment took over the way we think about the world. So in the medieval period, theology was considered the queen of the sciences. Right. The highest form of knowledge. And the Enlightenment comes along and says no, right. Science is the queen of the Sciences, right? Kind of rational, empirical, the scientific method. And so intellectual religious work, or I should say religious intellectual work maybe, has always not fit comfortably within the Enlightenment academy. And so religious communities, this is not just a Mormon story. Religious communities have adopted the means and the methods and the discourses of the secular enlightenment because you have to, right? That's the lingua franca, that's the coin of the realm in the modern world. But it's never been a fully comfortable fit because part of what religions do is they make claims beyond what can be empirically proven. And so we see this now, sometimes it works. So there have been really influential, say, Christian philosophers of religion, right, who have found ways to make Christian arguments that are actually deeply persuasive to other philosophers. Think about Kierkegaard or something like that. So sometimes it can happen, right, Where a particular confessional point of view can actually make inroads within the broader secular Enlightenment community. It's really hard to do on things that get closer to faith claims. And so religious folk have adopted all the forms and language and they go get PhDs along with everybody else, right? They get PhDs at the right places, they get trained with all the right places. But when they come and try to do that in defense of religious arguments, they can do really smart things. Really smart things, but that are not persuasive to anybody who doesn't already accept some of the faith claims. And so this has been a common problem for Muslim apologists, Christian apologists, Jewish apologists, Mormon apologists, is they say, hey, we've got all the methods, right? Look how we do archaeology, look how we do, you know, etcetera, you know, make historical arguments and so forth, and the fact that nobody else outside is, is persuaded by those arguments, it means one of two things. Either that entire outside community is simply biased and prejudiced against the kinds of truth claims, which is possible, right? They're just saying, no, it's not. We are not even going to consider the possibility that angels are real. Right? We're just. And that is, in some ways that's a prejudicial position, right? To say that's not even on the table to consider, right? So that could be one possibility. And so I think sometimes apologists say, nobody's listening to us. They say that's why, right? They're just prejudiced.

John Dehlin [01:03:29] They're secular, they hate, they're anti religious, they're godless secular academics.

Patrick Mason [01:03:34] Exactly. So they're not actually living up to their own norms, which should be, we're open to all forms of evidence. In fact, they're foreclosing an entire kind of evidence. So that's one possibility. Or the other possibility is you're making claims that even though the methods and everything that you're applying are the same things that you learned in the secular academy, that they're just not like the evidence is not good enough to persuade people who don't come at it with the assumptions that you do.

John Dehlin [01:04:02] And that's the second maybe big concern that I've had is that it creates the appearance to the Mormon who's having sincere questions that hears troubling things and wants to get to the bottom of truth.

Patrick Mason [01:04:18] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:04:18] And they actually care about truth. They haven't firewalled truth off as a question they can't ask. But that's actually their whole reason for engaging the. The apologist can come in with their credentials, with their degrees, with their fancy words, create the appearance of solid scholarship to be addressing the problems where in reality, sometimes not only is it not credible, but it's, it's laughable to those within the broader discipline. And so in that sense, it. Traditional Mormon apologetics can actually be deceptive or misleading to members and funded, you know, funded by the church to do that. You know what I mean? It's kind of the we don't need good answers, we just need answers kind of statement by Elder Oaks.

Patrick Mason [01:05:07] Although I think sometimes it's, I think fueled by various sincere hope that like, if we do the research, we'll get there. Right. So I think a lot of the Mormon archaeological, you know, expeditions to Central America and so forth, and from what I understand, this is not my field, but from what I understand, I mean, Latin American archaeology is still very much a living and growing field. We're discovering new things all the time. But like, all that was like, hey, we don't have the evidence yet, but we have so much confidence that it's going to be there. So we'll like, we'll admit that we don't have the evidence yet, but that's why we're gonna fund all this research, to go find the evidence. Right. And so I think in some ways there's some mirror image on that can be on both sides. On the one hand, Mormon apologist that comes in and says we already know that the Book of Mormon is true. Right. And so therefore we're gonna go find the evidence for it versus somebody else who says we already know the Book of Mormon is a fraud, so we're gonna find the evidence for that. And those are just mirror image conversations.

John Dehlin [01:06:07] Sure. Sure, but there are those people in the middle that are just willing to consider all sides and just want as neutrally and objectively as possible.

Patrick Mason [01:06:14] Yeah, that's right. So there's, there's some people in the middle who say, like, I have no idea, like, let's just look at all the evidence and see, I'm going to go wherever it takes me. And then there's academics who, academic scholarship that occupies a different middle that says we're going to look at all the evidence. But again with the kind of epistemic humility that there are certain things that I can't prove or disprove using these methods that I.

John Dehlin [01:06:37] So when, when I saw there being a shift happening, let's just say 2014, 2015, where people like Daniel Peterson and Louis Midgley maybe seem to be falling a bit out of favor. And then I kind of saw the rise of people like you, the Givens, the Bushman's, you know, Adam Miller, Rosalind Welch and others. Like, I saw that as an incredibly positive thing because it was a different cat. The term that was being bantered around early on was pastoral, but it was this idea of like, number one, we're not going to make a bunch of stupid, bad non scientific arguments in the realm of academia. We're going to just stop that, we're going to stop attacking people and, and we're going to try and be kind and compassionate and pastoral, but then we're still going to try and promote faith. And you know, I don't know if

Patrick Mason [01:07:35] I was going to do so with intellectual rigor as well.

John Dehlin [01:07:38] Yeah, yeah, smart people, good people using intellectual rigor. I don't, I think I came up with that term neo apologetics. I don't know that it means much. I don't know that people even care. But I do know that it's made some people frustrated. And I think you brought it up as something that you thought we might talk about. So I mean, at least I just want to say that when I, when I think I came up with that term, it was to describe something that I saw as a very, as a very positive favorable development within Mormonism.

Patrick Mason [01:08:06] Yeah, and, and yeah, and just, I mean it just means new. Right. And because, and I think descriptively that's absolutely true that I think all those people that you just described, that I would be part of this generation. It doesn't take you five minutes to look at the stuff that we're putting out versus the stuff from the old Farms review and just say these are different projects. Again, some People still sort of pine for the days and actually wish that we were still doing. And there are still some people actually still doing that older model, too, that's not dead. It's still very much alive and well. But all of us, you know, those of us who are doing a different kind of thing, it is different. It's different in spirit. It's different in tone. It's different. I can't say it's totally different in spirit because I don't want to judge people's intentions. It's certainly different in tone. It's different in approach, and it's bringing a different set of questions to the table. But it's also deeply. I mean, the quality of work that's going on right now among the community that you just talked about. You know, you look at, like, the brief theological introductions to the Book of Mormon that the Maxwell Institute put out. Those are incredible. I mean, like, we've never done anything like that in terms of a sort of serious theological engagement with that book. The kind of work that Adam Miller is doing theologically, the kind of scriptural studies that Joe Spencer is doing on the Book of Mormon. I mean, so much stuff going on by believing scholars, like, with deep intellectual rigor. And then there's the more pastoral stuff. So, like for me, Planted Restoration, those are pastoral books. They're written for the church crucible. Doubt those that they're not. They're not on my cv, Right. That's not what I do for my day job.

John Dehlin [01:09:57] That's right.

Patrick Mason [01:09:58] They are not. I'm not applying the meth in those books. I'm not applying the methods that I do as a. As a historian. Those are me. Yeah. I'm bringing some intellectual tools. I'm bringing some historical knowledge, but I'm writing to and for. Those are confessional books. So I called Planted a work of pastoral apologetics. I don't care what anybody calls it, but it is. It's a different tone and with a different approach than what we saw earlier.

John Dehlin [01:10:24] When you say the term confessional, what do you mean by that?

Patrick Mason [01:10:26] I mean, like, within. That's actually kind of an old Protestant term. It means within the confession of faith, within the. Basically within the faith, within the faith, within the religion, with operating within the kind of set of truth claims that the faith accepts.

John Dehlin [01:10:45] Got it. So one of the things that happened recently was I was interviewed on Gospel Tangents with Rick Bennett. Right. And, you know, I've been. Even though I saw the transition to neo apologetics as positive, I still have had concerns and critiques of the, you know, Bushman's and Givens's and even you and Patrick, you know, Spencer Fluman and others. And what I wanted to do is give you a chance to sort of say, hey, this is where I think you misunderstood, or this is where you hurt us or me, or this is where you said things that either weren't accurate or there were unkind or I just want to give you a chance to kind of just say whatever you wanted to say about not. Not that you even know or even have paid attention to me per se, but maybe stuff has gotten back to you here or there.

Patrick Mason [01:11:44] Yeah, no, thanks. Thanks for that. And I did. I've done an episode with Rick also where he showed me the little clip that you did about neo apologists and had me talk about it. I would say a couple things. One, again, I think descriptively, I think you're exactly right in terms of representing just a shift that's happened kind of pre and post and just different generations of people doing different work. I think descriptively that's exactly right. Where I maybe take umbrage or disagree a little bit is at least in some of what I've heard you say would be either a suggestion or maybe outright statement where there's a sense that these people don't actually believe this stuff. Right. Because of their livelihood, because of where they work, because of the financial, cultural, familial incentives. They know how to say all the right things, they know how to stay on the right side of the line. But you know, really in their heart of hearts, come on, you know, they don't really believe this stuff. What right. Thinking person could. So I hear a little bit, again, I don't know if those have been explicit statements or implicit or just perception. Right. And to the degree that that view is out there in the world, I would just fundamentally disagree. Does that apply maybe to some people? Sure. I think that there's probably always been people in the employ of the church who've had their doubts and questions, maybe substantially. Right. But stay within. For a lot of reasons. But I can say that of the names that you listed off and you never fully know a person's heart, right. Even close friends and so forth. But of the people you listed off, the people that I spend a lot of time with, the people that I'm in, that I go to retreats with and write things with and spend sort of intimate private conversations with, these people, we really believe.

John Dehlin [01:13:50] Yeah,

Patrick Mason [01:13:52] it's not insincere. It's not. This is my public face and these. Now, any public figure, you may say something in public a little different than you might say one to one, I don't see that as two faced or a lack of integrity. I mean, I'll talk to my wife in a way that's different than I'll talk to people. Other. Other people. Right. And so I think it's relational and contextual in terms of some of the kinds of things. I mean, I will say things slightly differently to. In a fireside where I'm speaking to a bunch of strangers that I have no personal relationship with. Right. And I'm never going to meet again, I'm going to say one thing, but then if they come to me and talk to me one on one, it's going to be a little different kinds of conversation. So I absolutely grant that. I think that's just communication. But in terms of like this, these quote unquote neo apologists, as far as I can tell, I'll speak for myself. But then as far as I can tell, like, that belief is real, it's sincere, and it's not, it's not financially motivated.

John Dehlin [01:14:52] Yeah. I'm really glad you were able to tell me that. And I do think there's been a misunderstanding and that may be my fault, so I'd love a chance. Well, I've already apologized to you on gospel tangents, but.

Patrick Mason [01:15:06] Which I appreciate it. Thank you.

John Dehlin [01:15:08] Yeah. And I, and I do feel bad when I'm, you know, because I don't feel like I'm generally a contentious person. This, my, my point of view comes from seeing the divorces, seeing the collateral damage, seeing the families, seeing the LGBT deaths by suicide, seeing people just saying, I'm 50 and 16, I'm learning about this for the first time. And what all that money and all that time, like just all that pain and collateral damage, that's kind of always the wind at my sail.

Patrick Mason [01:15:36] Oh, yeah. Well, that's the lens that you're gonna see these things. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:15:40] So I, I have been angry and I have been grouchy and I'll apologize again for that. I do want a chance to restate a little bit because please do. When I've said something like that, I know, I know you're a sincere believer. Although the last episode that we just did with you was very helpful to me because I, I didn't know coming into this interview today that you had never had a faith crisis. That's pretty powerful and that's very rare. I also know that Richard Bushman is on record as saying he believes in golden plates delivered by an angel. So never have I actually believed in my heart that you weren't a sincere believer or that Bushman wasn't a sincere believer, or that Terrell and Fiona weren't sincere believers or Spencer or Adam or any of them. So I've never meant to give that impression and I've never believed that personally. So I'm sad that that's been the impression you've gotten. But here's. And we can talk about a lot of stuff, but here's the, the subtlety of what sometimes I was trying to say there. There's this quote that came from the movie the Jungle. Upton Sinclair, we're just talking about the meatpacking executives who were in some sense, and you can think about tobacco executives that were in some sense in denial that tobacco was causing cancer. So when they, when they actually testify in front of Congress, they're like, no, we have. We don't believe that tobacco causes cancer. No way. Like, if you probably asked them, they would say they were sincere, that they really didn't believe. Because confirmation bias is strong. Right. And there are, we do have social. You know, I did ask you about, like, what happened with your wife or your friends or your job or whatever. We're influenced socially. Right. And so what I think I was trying to get at is there are, you know, the quote from Upton Sinclair is, it's impossible. You'll probably correct me. It's. It's impossible to get a man to see a point of view when his livelihood depends on not seeing it. So I wasn't saying that you and Richard and Spencer and others aren't sincere believers. What I've wondered is, you know, whether it's Bushman's influence. You know, what he can. Yeah, he's a well known historian. But, like, where is he? And I'm not saying he lives to be a rock star, but where is he really valued in the world? Right.

Patrick Mason [01:17:56] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:17:56] It's in a faithful Mormon in the church community.

Patrick Mason [01:17:59] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:18:00] You know, we already talked about how the fact that there are benefactors that fund the chairs, the chair that you sit in, and the chair that every Mormon Studies chair currently possesses is funded by faithful Mormons that only want a faithful Mormon there. And I didn't ask you what would happen if you lost your faith, whether. I don't know what would happen if the people that endowed your chair got grouchy about that. Right. I don't know.

Patrick Mason [01:18:23] At this point, nothing.

John Dehlin [01:18:23] Okay. Because you have tenure.

Patrick Mason [01:18:25] Well, and, and the money's in the bank.

John Dehlin [01:18:27] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [01:18:28] Right. They can't take it back.

John Dehlin [01:18:29] But I don't even know if they could pressure USU to get rid of you and put someone else in.

Patrick Mason [01:18:32] But maybe not legally. Absolutely. No.

John Dehlin [01:18:35] But what I have said is, you know, and I've wondered, and it's probably been insulting, but when you think about book deals, book contrast, social influence, social capital, friendships, relationships, the Mormon studies community that sometimes, in my perception, has favored faithful people and compensation in some level, it. See, it has seemed to me that there are a lot of binding forces that would tend to motivate someone to maintain a faithfulness or, or even preclude them from maybe a level of objectivity that they might otherwise have. And that's not to. That's because we're all subject to confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. And people will say the same thing about me, that I do Mormon stories because I get a paycheck from it. So I know, believe me, I get that. But that's what, that's what I've been asking. When Daniel Peterson does apologetics, he's paid one of his. That's a major source of his income. So how can that not influence, you know, what he writes? And so I guess that's been the question that I've been wondering, and I probably turned it from a question into an accusation, which I regret. But can you, can you at least

Patrick Mason [01:19:55] know that's a really helpful and subtle distinction, and I think it's fair question. And as you just mentioned, I mean, anytime that has been raised, then those of us on the other side will roll our eyes and say, well, what about Mormon stories, right? And so, like, if the shoe fits, you know, and so, yeah, I think it's a totally legitimate question to ask. But I think, I think what I would say is that for those of us, and I have to say most of us who have achieved any kind of sort of public reputation status, whatever, doing this kind of work, are fairly uncomfortable with it. I went and got my PhD so I could be an obscure academic that nobody ever heard of. I mean, that was my dream. And so any of this public stuff is a surprise. We're not ready for it. We're not prepared for it. Oftentimes it's uninvited, even though then sometimes it gets cultivated, right? And so, but the sincere, like, we got to the place where we are to be able to articulate these views in ways that are powerful and compelling enough to people that a critical mass of people say, oh, that's an interesting person, worth looking, worth listening to. We got There out of a kind of sincerity. Right. And then those views find articulation in ways that find an audience. And so it's not calculated to get there. And then once we're, you know, and then we're still the same person. Right. Even after you write a book or say some things and people start paying attention to you, you're still the same person. So, yes, at that point, the incentive structure does come in to reinforce it. Right. Okay. Keep giving us more of that. More of that. I mean, that's the. It's the classic what have you done for me lately?

Margi Dehlin [01:21:57] Thing.

Patrick Mason [01:21:57] It's like, you know, when I go around and talk about proclaimed peace. Okay, what are you working on next? It's like, I just finished this book, like, can I, like, sleep? Right. But there's always this. And, you know, this better, like Mormon stories. It's just insatiable, right? I mean, it's just, you know, to feed this beast. And so people want it. They want the content. And so they've come to trust you and say, okay, here's a person who represents a worldview. And I think most people can tell sincerity and can tell, like, authenticity. Look, there are some con men out there, right? I mean, people get away with it, but for the most part, I think audiences arise and they respond to people. They say, okay, this articulates something that I've been wanting to hear. Give me more of that. So you're exactly right. Then it creates a self reinforcement. Now, what happens when. Because people change, right? You changed. What happened if I changed five years from now, ten years from now? I mean, so then that becomes a really interesting question. Right. For me, the consequences would be less dire again because I'm not employed by the church. And we can point to certain individuals who held on to their questions and doubts until they retired from certain institutions. Right? Yeah. Brian Algalid or something like that. And so there's always what happens when somebody changes? And are all those incentives and structures and so forth, does that prevent somebody from authentically giving voice to the fact that they've changed their mind?

John Dehlin [01:23:34] And there is a lot of that. There's a lot of BYU professors, for example, that don't believe on some or all levels. And they just can.

Patrick Mason [01:23:41] I. I mean, I'm going to be asking questions later on, but can I ask you what. What would that. Let me just. I'll just ask the reverse question. So what if tomorrow, right, or tonight, right. You had a spiritual epiphany and you said, you know what? Even with all that, I Know, you know what? God is calling me. Like, God enters your life, Right. The angel Moroni shows up in your room, and. And now it's like. And you have your album, the younger experience. You have your Paul, you know, experience. And now it's like, okay, stop doing all this stuff and now go forth and preach my word. Right. How hard would that be for you?

John Dehlin [01:24:17] Super hard.

Patrick Mason [01:24:17] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:24:18] It'd be su. I think I would probably get death threats by ex Mormons that felt betrayed.

Patrick Mason [01:24:23] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:24:24] And not to mention, I. It's hard enough to go out in public right now for whatever reasons. I think in some ways I'd be hated by all sides, and that would almost be more than I could bear on some level. So it's. It's an important point.

Patrick Mason [01:24:39] Yeah. And thanks for sharing that. And I. I feel. Because look, there are the strokes, right? The people that come up to you and say, oh, thank you for what you've written, said, or whatever. You changed my life. You helped me so much. That feels good, right? That feels really good. And so. So if you changed, right, If I changed, if you changed, if you did a 180 or even a 90 or even a 10 maybe, sometimes. Right. Then those people are. Some of those people are going to be mad at you.

John Dehlin [01:25:10] Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks. If I can, I have offered a few concerns about neo apologists in addition to wondering about those binding forces. Can I just run them by you and give you a chance to respond to them?

Patrick Mason [01:25:26] Yep.

John Dehlin [01:25:26] Okay. So some of the concerns I've had about neo apologists, the first one is when you, or Bushman or Givens or whoever give answers to, let's just say, questions around truth claims or problematic historical issues like, oh, well, maybe polygamy was a mistake, you know, or maybe the Book of Abraham, maybe the papyrus was used as, you know, the catalyst theory. It was inspired, but it wasn't really a translation. You know, whatever. Whatever types of progressive or nuanced answers that. That you would offer. One of the main critics criticisms often hear is that's not Mormonism. Like. Like, you know, when you hear what Joseph Smith taught. When you hear what the prophet sees and revelators between Joseph and now have taught. When you hear what's taught at general conference, when you see what's in the curriculum, that's Mormonism. And when Terrell Givens gives a private fireside and Fiona says, maybe there's a mother in heaven, maybe you can pray

Patrick Mason [01:26:36] to mother in heaven.

John Dehlin [01:26:37] You know what I mean? It's almost. It's almost like it's almost like you guys are being allowed to go out there and make progressives and liberals feel good, present a counter narrative, a counter way to look at truth claims to appease people that the church might otherwise lose. But in no way you're not a formal, you're not official, you don't have any office, you don't have any authority. And in some sense you're just pacifying a group when the true orthodox fundamentalist correlated Mormonism. That's Mormonism. And so you're, you're almost being complicit in providing what some people pejoratively call double speak where you can, where the organization can speak in two ways to do different groups of people for its own self interest. But when those two points of view aren't really mutually. They're kind of mutually exclusive. So it's, it's a, it's a form of deception or risk management that some would say you're kind of involved in a little bit. Now, I don't mean to be rude or discourteous, but I mean, that's one criticism some have had. Like, your Mormonism isn't Mormonism.

Patrick Mason [01:27:54] Right. I've heard that before. Or sometimes the version is. I wish your version of Mormonism was.

John Dehlin [01:28:04] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like your form of Mormonism.

Patrick Mason [01:28:07] Right, right, right. Which I'm always like, I'm not sure how to feel about that, but totally fair question. Totally fair question. So I think on the one. So it would be, I think the critique would have more bite if any of this were centrally organized, right. If, like, the church was sending me out to do this, right. If this was sort of some kind of like, calculated game that. Okay, well, we'll throw a few bones, right? Okay, so let's find our few handpicked people and send them out to mollify the progressives. Right. None of this is centrally organized. General authorities are clearly aware of, of those of us who are going out and doing this. But, like, I'm, I'm not getting any approval or disapproval. Like, I get no feedback really, on the stuff that I do. Really? No, I mean, it's like, it's like I've occasionally had a general authority, like, in the audience because it's like that's their stake that they live in or something like that. And they say, hey, thanks for coming. That was great, thanks. You know, I was like, that's it.

John Dehlin [01:29:19] And so like sitting with President Holland and like, patrick, I need your, I need your help here. Go out and save. Save our church kind of Thing.

Patrick Mason [01:29:26] No, I'll say that I had one. After I wrote planted, I had one senior general authority call me into his office, send me a letter and say, why don't you come by and talk? You know, felt a little bit like getting called to the principal's office. You don't know what that's going to be like. And we had a great conversation. He actually disagreed with one passage in that book and spent actually a really honest, spoke at length for why he disagreed with it. And then he said, tell me why you wrote what you wrote. And I did. I went probably 15 or 20 minutes telling him why I wrote what I wrote. And I said, hey, look, you know that I go out and get firesides and, and this issue comes up sometimes. Do you want me to stop saying what I said here in the book? You know, because clearly you disagree with it. He said, oh, no, no, no. He said, you keep doing what you're doing. So it was very clear that we disagreed on that point, but he was not interested in telling me what to say, what to tell people, even on something he actually felt very strongly about. And we very clearly disagreed. That's like, that's the level of feedback that I've, I've gotten.

John Dehlin [01:30:36] Would it be too much to say what the passage was about? Would that be too much?

Patrick Mason [01:30:40] It was a passage in there where I, where I talk about race and the priesthood.

John Dehlin [01:30:44] Okay, okay.

Patrick Mason [01:30:46] And he had a different understanding of the history, different understanding of maybe what God was doing and familiar arguments to people. And if you read how I treat it there, I treat it as sin. I treat it as Brigham Young making a mistake beyond a mistake, a sin, a really consequential sin. He had a different point of view, which was not reflexive, not shallow, Deeply informed by a lot of life experience too. That was actually quite moving to hear it. He was quite vulnerable and open with me and he just said, I read this history differently, even though I rejoiced in 1978. He wasn't defending the ban. We just had different interpretations of the history and what was going on. And, and he said, no, you, I said, you know that I go out and talk about it as, as a sin. He said, I'm not going to stop you from saying that.

John Dehlin [01:31:40] So nice. So what I hear you saying is it's not some top down correlation.

Patrick Mason [01:31:46] No, exactly. So I can, I can understand like that functionally I, I could see how somebody's saying that's the, that's the person purpose that all this does. Right. That's the Purpose that me going out and speaking and the givens and that. It's like a pressure valve, right? It lets off steam or something like that. I can see. I don't resent somebody reading it that way, but it's definitely not centralized. It's definitely not calculated. Some of the things we go out and say give some heartburn to people. I do know that through second hand reports. I think on the other hand, I've also heard secondhand that they appreciate that at least we're going out and trying to build faith and so forth. So functionally, does it let off some steam and does it serve the church's purposes in that way? Yeah, yeah, maybe. But it's. This is not a coordinated effort.

John Dehlin [01:32:52] Some would say just allowing you to publish the Deseret book is the way that they make it kind of, it's there imprimatur is once they've allowed your books to be published there, that sends out the signal to stakes and wards and wherever that it's safe to bring you to those firesides.

Patrick Mason [01:33:10] So it's a way to do it

John Dehlin [01:33:11] without formally doing it.

Patrick Mason [01:33:13] Yeah, no, certainly. And that's one of the reasons. That's why I was glad that Deseret book published, planted. You know, it is that kind of informal imprimatur that makes these ideas safe. And the other things, I mean, I think I'd say two other things. One is that religions change, they evolve, they grow, they're human institutions. And so the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints in 2022 is different than it was in 1992 or in 1872. So institutions change, organizational priorities, leadership personalities, those all change. But then the second thing is that when people say, like, this isn't Mormonism, like, what about restoration, my book restoration, what isn't Mormon in there? Right? I mean, like, I am Mormon to like my bones, bone marrow, DNA, whatever, however far down you want to go, every argument I make in that book in proclaimed peace and planted, those are all Mormon arguments. And so do I recognize that it sounds different than the correlated McConkie Mormonism that I grew up with? Yeah, that's the point. Religions change. I mean, I'm not much of a consumer. There's a certain line of books that are out there that basically just regurgitate general authority quotes. Right? Fine. I mean, if that's what you like reading, great, go for it. That's not what I'm interested in writing. And so for me, the point of a book is you have something new to say. And I think the spirit continues to breathe new things into the world and into church. If I'm a vehicle of doing that, I feel grateful for the opportunity. And so. But like, point. Point to an argument in one of those three books that isn't Mormon, you know, and I'll retract it. Those are all very Mormon books. But I complete. But I think religious traditions are big. They're capacious, they're internally diverse. The great philosopher of religion, he's an evangelical. Alvin Planica. No, this was actually Alastair McIntyre. He said religious traditions are internal arguments. They're ongoing arguments with themselves. And so I never see a religious tradition as monolithic. If you tell me, like, this is what Islam is, I'll say, well, that's one thing that Islam is, but there's a billion Muslims out there, right?

John Dehlin [01:35:54] Yeah. And I would agree, like, if Woodstow and Talmage and Eyring had outlived Joseph Fielding Smith, we might have a very different Mormonism today.

Patrick Mason [01:36:01] Yeah. This is where I'm a historian. Right. Everything's about contingency. It's about human action, human agency. It's also where I'm deeply Mormon. It's where my Mormonism and my historical being a historian meet up is like this belief in agency. Obviously there's forces and structures and all kinds of things, but, like, I believe that humans do things. Humans make decisions, good decisions, bad decisions. They affect the course of history. And so religion is a. Every institution, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, is constructed by human beings who made decisions along the way. Some good, some bad, some inspired, some less so, some not at all. Right. I mean, we build these things, which also means that we can change them. And as a Mormon, I believe that the spirit can act in and through individuals and in and through the church in order for us to perfect the body of the Saints.

John Dehlin [01:36:54] Yeah. I once asked James Carville what he thought of Karl Rove, and he said, inside the Beltway, we look at. We separate people into two categories. You're either. You're either making rain or you're being rained upon. You're either in. You're either in the dialectic or you're impacted by the dialectic. But you kind of have to choose, right? Yeah. And you're. You're choosing to be in the dialectic, right?

Patrick Mason [01:37:20] Yeah. I mean, I mean, it's just. It is a. It is a privilege. Margi brought this up earlier. I mean, I love being in the knowledge production industry. I mean, I am so grateful that I live in 21st century America, where I have the luxury of being a professor. Right. Of history. And to be in a place with the kind of security, stability, comfort, luxury, to be able to think for a living and then for me to be able to apply that to my religious life as well, as opposed to, you know, a subsistence farmer somewhere in the year 1100. Right. I mean, is just starving all the time. Right. I mean, so I. I am lucky every day that I get to do what I do professionally. And the way that then I get to bring that to my religious life, too.

John Dehlin [01:38:03] Yeah. Another critique I've had. Thank you for your answer so far. Another critique that I've felt or had is the following. You. One of the most. One of my favorite passages in Restoration. I'll plug the book again and read it or listen to it. I listen to it. You talk about how authority, even the church's authority, is kind of dependent on your. Your Christlikeness. I'm not using your words.

Margi Dehlin [01:38:30] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:38:31] Do you want to say it more elegantly?

Patrick Mason [01:38:32] Well, I think it's section 121 of the doctrine and Covenant Right. No power, influence can or ought to be maintained except by kindness, gentleness, love, you know, love unfeigned, all of those kinds of things.

John Dehlin [01:38:43] And. And I heard that even as far as the current LDS Church leadership goes, their authority is only as good as the extent to which they're acting in a Christlike way. Is that unfair characterization of what you wrote in the book?

Patrick Mason [01:38:59] That's what the Lord said in section 121.

John Dehlin [01:39:02] Yeah. So. So here. Here's my question, slash occasional critique like Dallin H. Oaks is on record as saying it's. It's wrong to criticize the brethren, even if the criticism is accurate. The church makes its members take an oath that they won't speak ill of the Lord's anointed. And Elder Oaks is also on. On record saying, we neither seek nor offer apologies to. To many of us, we read the past 40 or 50 years where the Church has not only, you know, encouraged, let's just say, certain racist ideologies, but in some senses, has even fought the civil rights movement. They fought the Equal Rights Amendment and women's rights. They knowingly shut down truthful historical projects and initiatives like the Arrington administration because they saw that factual history was. Was challenging faith. They excommunicated and silenced critics who were just, in many cases, faithful, scholarly truth tellers. So there's a lot of harm. And not to mention the lgbt. Yeah. You know, stuff. And I could mention a ton of other things the, the systemic child abuse and the COVID ups, and we could go on and on. There's a. There's a. There's a degree to which the Church needs to follow its own steps of repentance that it taught us to confess the sin, to forsake the sin, to make restitution for the sin, to. To stop it and to promise to do better and then to change your behavior. And I'm sure I'm not alone. We're not alone. I would even guess you would join us in wishing that the Church would actually follow its own prescribed steps of repentance. Right? But as long as there are thoughtful progressives like you and the Givens and the Bushmans and the Flumens who are out there on the front lines, it's not the Church that's answering questions about polyandry and peepstones and polygamy and excommunications, etc. It's not them that are answering the questions. It's y'. All. And as long as you are allowed, all are out there talking to the. To the journalists, speaking at the firesides, writing the books. The brethren not only get off easy, but they don't. They don't have to ever follow their own steps of repentance, apologize, forsake and fix things. And so sometimes I've had this feeling that as much as I love what you're all doing, who you are, what you stand for and how much good you're doing, there's a part of me that sometimes felt like you're enabling their lack of accountability. Does that even seem. Do you. Does it seem. Did I make. Did I. Does my question make any sense? And is it deeply offensive? Can you see where I'm coming from? Is there any even credibility to it?

Patrick Mason [01:42:04] Yeah, not deeply. It would be really hard to offend me.

Margi Dehlin [01:42:06] Okay.

Patrick Mason [01:42:08] But no, I think. I think it's a good question. I think it's a fair question. So. And I think there's two parts to it. One, on the apology side. I mean, I'm on record. I was part of. It's quoted by Peggy Fletcher Stack in an article. I mean, I think institutional, especially in this day and age. I think always, but especially in this day and age, institutional apologies can only enhance the moral authority of the institution. We've seen the way the Pope Francis just did this in Canada about the Catholic indigenous boarding schools and so forth. I think these. It's, It's. I understand that institutions aren't people, despite what the Supreme Court may say. Sorry, little swipe at this. But corporations aren't people. But I do think those principles are true, the principles of accountability and repentance. And I think it does not. I understand. I mean we all feel this personally, right? What happens if I admit I'm wrong about something that is hard to do? Are people not gonna like me? Are people gonna think less of me? Right. I mean it's all those feelings that come with that. And you can take a reputational hit right when you do it, but it's the right thing to do. And I think that Mormonism, I think the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is and should be in the truth business. And that includes the accountability business. And so I think it, I don't think it harms us to follow a gospel of repentance. I think it applies to the collective body of Christ as much as it, as it applies to the individual within the body of Christ. So I'd like to see more of that. And I don't think it would hurt the church. I think it would. And I actually don't even care about the outcomes. I don't care if it grows. The church shrinks the church. It's the right thing to do. And so I wish we saw more of that now do I and my ilk, do we provide cover for the brethren on this? I can see that. But I think also, and I mean this with all respect to the general authorities, but I think I have a skill set that most of them don't have. I'm a trained historian. Most of them aren't. They're not theologians. They're not called to be theologians. They're called to be general authorities of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They're called to run and administer this enormous global enterprise. Part of that of course, is a very deep ministry. But they're not theologians. Theology is a different kind of work. Most of them are not trained. We don't train theologians professionally. Within our tradition we've had a little bit of an anti theological bias that's starting to change fortunately in this century. So we actually have real deal theologians. I just play like one sometimes. But, but they're not trained theologians. They're exceptionally busy individuals whose because of life experience and so forth, they're really good at business and they're really good at law and they're really good at managing institutions and they're really good at human relations and all these kinds of things. They're not trained theologians. So I think that this is true of every church in the history of Churches, every religious, they need their theologians. They need an independent class of people who are not in charge of running. I do not want to run the institution. Right. Like that is an enormously complex endeavor that I don't have the skill set for. Thank goodness I am not the church. May be true, because I'm not a general authority. Right. I mean, it's. So I don't have that skill set or proclivity, but other people are really good at it. What I can do is do some of this kind of historical and theological work that I am more inclined toward. I do have training for. So I think it's less about providing cover. What I'd like to see is the Church actually be more intentional about this. If anything, to actually lean into this division of labor and to say, hey, we are not theologians. There was a great statement by Elder Ballard recently. He said, just because I'm a general authority doesn't make me an authority in general. Right. Like, I don't know everything. When I need to know stuff, I need to go reach out to experts. He's actually been great on this in recent years. Some general authorities, I think, do think they're authorities in general, but we need a professional class of historians. They do stuff that general authorities can't. We need a professional class of theologians. They do stuff that general authorities can't. It's not about providing cover. It's about complementary skill sets. One is meant to administer and run the Church. The other is meant to think for the church.

John Dehlin [01:47:03] Are you able to say, if it bothers you, that they keep calling lawyers as church historians versus historians?

Patrick Mason [01:47:11] No. I mean, again, they are. And they would be the first to say every single one of them has said, I'm not a historian. Right. They say, I am here to run the Department of Church History. Right. But the real experts, I mean, actually, Elder McKay, who's the new church historian, just had to put out a video where he said this very thing. He said, I'm not the expert. The experts work here. These are the dozens or however many employees they've got. He said, they're the real experts. I'm just here to run the thing. So that doesn't bother me at all. No, no. Especially because they've been so good recently. It hasn't always been this way in the past. Right. Leonard Arrington ran into this. Right. But are you kidding me? Marlon Jensen, Steve Snow, Elder Curtis. I haven't met Elder McKay. These are men who are curious. They are smart. They know what they know, they know what they don't. Know, they defer to the historians. They said you do the historical work. Right. A lot of what they do, from what they've told me, is they're the ones who have to translate the work of the historians to the rest of the church bureaucracy and advocate for the historians and advocate for why this project matters, why it matters for us to publish all this stuff that's going to make people mad. So they. And I don't think I'm speaking out of turn here. I love and respect Leonard Arrington. I hold the Leonard Arrington chair. He was not a diplomat. He was not as good at navigating

John Dehlin [01:48:39] the church bureaucracy administratively.

Patrick Mason [01:48:41] He was a historian through and through.

John Dehlin [01:48:43] Interesting.

Patrick Mason [01:48:44] Right. And this is why higher ed is a mess, because it's all academics running. Right? I mean, and so let's let the managers be the managers and let's let the historians be the historians. And Elder Jensen, Elder Snow, Elder Curtis, now Elder McKay, they are effective. And it's different than Arrington's era because they're the ones who are able to advocate for the work of the historians to the rest of the bureaucracy.

John Dehlin [01:49:08] That's, you know, that what you just said is really valuable because all these, you know, let's just say Mormons on ex. Mormons on ex Mormon Reddit, they'd sneer at attorneys continually. I have at attorneys continually being called as the head of church history, thinking that there's some legal conspiracy or some admission of guilt or whatever. It's really valuable to have a faithful historian actually endorse it. And I sense sincerity. But like, you should be the one saying, you, as a faithful Mormon historian, should be the one saying whether that's a problem.

Patrick Mason [01:49:42] Well, and that's. So they're at least within the structure now. And this has been basically since Elder Jensen. You know, everything's changed in the past 20 years. It was different in the Arrington era, but now you've got the church historian recorder. That's a general authority position. It's a 70 again. They're in charge of the Church History department. But then you've got the executive director, excuse me, of the Church History department. Right now it's Matt Grow. And Matt Groh got his PhD in history with me at Notre Dame. Matt is an amazing historian. So he is. He is the historian and supervises all the work. I mean, if you look at the roster of people working in the Church history department right now, it would be one of the strongest history departments in the entire country if it were an academic department, just based on the Degrees, the training, the, you know, the credentialing, all that kind of stuff. They've hired. Amazing. The really crappy job market has been great for the church history because all these people intended to get academic jobs. They ended up working for the church history department. And so, so, so you've always had the general authority head of it, and then you've got the executive director who's a real live practicing historian.

John Dehlin [01:50:49] Going back really quickly, you talked about you feel like it'd be beneficial for the church to maybe consider apologies every once in a while or.

Patrick Mason [01:50:56] Yeah, what about more than every once in a while? We have, we have a lot of catching up to do.

John Dehlin [01:51:00] Okay. What about the culture of not being able to criticize leadership? I mean, if I had a rule where no one could, no one in the ex Mormon community could criticize me, or if we had a president, you know, of the United States where you weren't allowed to criticize, I would guess you would think that is deeply problematic. Do you see that as. Are you even able to say if you think that's deeply problematic, that we can't criticize general authorities without getting in big trouble?

Patrick Mason [01:51:26] Yeah, I think for any institution it's a problem. I've actually talked to senior executives, you know, from the corporate, corporate world who have said that they have observed this in their worlds. They said, I've known CEOs who didn't allow for any dissent, didn't allow for any criticism. And Those are bad CEOs and you see the effect in the institutions and I know other CEOs that they say if I haven't received criticism within the first hour of getting to work, I'm not doing my job. Internal criticisms. And so I think I know where, you know, as a historian, I know where it comes from within the church, not just within the temple rituals, but just within an intense. I think it really comes out of the 19th century, this feeling of persecution and the need for loyalty to stick together. Right. Literally, you know, circle the wagons to protect from the outsiders. So I understand where it comes from. And like anything, virtues taken to an excess can become a vice. And I think it's entirely possible. I am a covenant keeping member of the Church. I fully believe in sustaining the leaders of the Church. I don't believe sustaining means I can't criticize any of their decisions, past or present. So I actually take very seriously. I am, I love them as individuals, even though I don't know them like I love them in the abstract. Right. Just like I love humanity in the Abstract, but I don't know most of those guys, but I love them. I sustain them. I believe that God is called and is working through them in some way, shape or form, in messy and complex ways. I sustain them to lead the church, which I choose to be in communion with, and so I will not. There's a difference between disagreeing with and even criticizing some of their decisions versus criticizing, like going after them individually. It goes back to the ad hominem thing, right? I think that the policies and things that, the way that they say things out in the world, I think all of that is we're given the spirit of discernment. And all of that I can talk about. But am I giving them the benefit of the doubt? Am I doing it out of a spirit of love? Am I going after them as a person? I think that's very different. Am I going after their office? Am I thinking that they're not suited for that office, or in some ways that they're abusing the office or that God hasn't called them, or that the whole thing is a sham? I think that's very different than saying, I disagree with this policy or what they've said. I mean, I did a podcast on faith matters, Tom Christofferson and I did a year ago after Elder Holland gave his musket talk down at byu and we spoke pretty openly and frankly about that. And I love Elder Holland deeply, deeply. But I had real problems with what he said in that talk and I said it publicly and I hoped what Tom and I both tried to do is to couch that within sustaining him, wanting the best for him, loving him, giving him the benefit of the doubt, trying to understand his heart and also the difficult position that he's in. So all doing all that hard work while also saying what he said really hurt. And I frankly disagree.

John Dehlin [01:55:03] This is a very quick micro question in The a Kyle McKay kind of announcement in the Church News. There's a phrase that our FM really wanted me to ask you about. It basically says, quote, since learning of this assignment, I have felt drawn to the rising generations and to protect them and to build their faith. I think there's some that feel like what he's saying there is. He doesn't necessarily want them to hear or learn the true factual history. Instead, he's going to try and whitewash or shelter them from the more disturbing things to. To make sure we preserve their faith. Do you read that same way or differently?

Patrick Mason [01:55:39] No, I mean, I think that that's bringing an assumption and a kind of skepticism to It, I mean, I, I personally, my faith is built when I see the whole history, the whole complex history. So they published the whole Joseph Smith papers, right? Everything. Every document that builds my faith. And so then that's the work that the church history department. Now, I, I can understand why people see it that way. Right. People, we all see things through our lenses and through our experiences. But I don't hear Elder McKay necessarily saying, okay, it's time to, to stop telling the truth so that we can protect people's testimonies.

John Dehlin [01:56:12] Okay. Okay. This is great. Well, Margaret's reminding me that we need to leave time for you to ask us some questions. And I've still got some really important questions to ask. I'm hoping to throw the needle a little bit.

Patrick Mason [01:56:23] Yeah, let's get there.

John Dehlin [01:56:24] Okay, so. Okay, so you, you made a really important point when you spoke about the CES letter in your fair address, where you basically said, if Jeremy hadn't written it, someone else would have written it.

Patrick Mason [01:56:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:56:39] I've also heard that there's, there's sometimes a bit of a tendency for faithful Mormon scholars to kind of look down their nose at the CES letter or Mormon think or Mormon stories or even your polygamy. Lindsay says for, for year of polygamy. And to say that's lower grade, not rigorous, sloppy kind of work. I don't know, whatever you say. Here's what I'm going to ask you because I have a, you know, you said maybe it would be boring or not productive for us to go through the list of a bunch of truth

Patrick Mason [01:57:09] claims, like the whole, the whole thing.

John Dehlin [01:57:12] And yet I'm still going to ask you some, but I'm going to ask you kind of a meta question like what, why, why hasn't there been, like, I can ask this in lots of ways, like that course that you took at byu. Why isn't there a public course published by you or somebody else that just takes questioning Mormons through the history of kind of Mormon intellectual history, like, and I'm gonna ask a multi compound part question, so why doesn't that exist? Why isn't there a book that does that? Why, why isn't there. Why aren't faithful Mormon scholars writing rebuttals to the CES letter, writing rebuttals to Mormon think? Why isn't there robust podcast that takes on all the truth claims, lays out the factual history, but then gives, you know, kind of more plausible, faithful narratives like, believe it or not, you know, there's, there's, there was a, there was a Batman, Lego Movie where Batman loses his, his foe and he gets depressed because he doesn't have anyone to kind of fight. Right? Like I'm not sitting here thinking I'm just pummeling everybody. Like I'm just trying to fight for what I think is informed consent, trying to help minimize pain, increased awareness. But I wish, like, you've got an amazing set of, you know, I could go through the list of a hundred questions about book of Abraham Peepstones Polyandry, and I'm going to ask you about some. But why haven't you written that book? Why didn't Bushman write that book? Why didn't Givens write that book? Why isn't Miller written that book? Why aren't there podcasts and PDFs and websites and, and tick tock channels? What's more important than the loss of faith and the weakening of the church in this generation? What, what more important work could be done? I know, I know you have your day jobs with scholarship, but I could fund a six figure position for someone like you to just full time try and provide better answers to questioning Mormons. Why hasn't that been done yet? It's 2022.

Margi Dehlin [01:59:23] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:59:24] Or maybe it has. No, it has.

Patrick Mason [01:59:26] What Obviously hasn't been done satisfactorily or well enough. I mean, to some degree. I actually think the gospel topics essays do some of this. I think the New Saints series does some of this. You know, that comes out of the church. And there's always going to be advantages and disadvantages to things that come out of the church. So I think your question is good. Well, what about all y' all independent scholars? Right? And I'd be lying if I said that we haven't had this conversation.

John Dehlin [01:59:53] You have.

Patrick Mason [01:59:53] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:59:55] I'm dying to know what happened because I would love to see it. I personally would love to see it.

Patrick Mason [02:00:00] Yeah. Nothing so far. In some ways, planted was my part of what I tried to do in planted is address it, but by shifting the conversation. So rather than saying, I mean, you know, the analogy, the kind of whack, a mole analogy of like as soon as you knock down one thing, something else pops up. Right. And so, and that's why I, I, I find when I say tedious, I don't mean that in a kind of condescending way. I, it just doesn't, it doesn't give me any energy, like really, no, to like sit down and like go through like the hundred points like that. I, I don't find, I mean there is fair Mormon. I mean so. So let's not say nothing's been done. They. They've addressed, I think, every critique or question on. In the CES letter in their own

John Dehlin [02:00:58] way, but not with a level of credibility, of honesty and of integrity that someone like you would.

Patrick Mason [02:01:05] Sure. So. So what I tried to do, implanted, was to. To provide. It wasn't about playing whack a mole and like, answering every question. It was about, here's a perspective, here's a framework, here's how I make it work. Right. A framework. Right.

Margi Dehlin [02:01:20] So.

Patrick Mason [02:01:20] So that. That whole thing was kind of epistemological. It was a framework thing. And then it's like to empower you, dear reader. Right. To. Then when you get whatever question comes to you, that then you've got a framework to make sense of it. It's a framework about the role of prophets and who prophets are, about the nature of the church, about the work of Jesus in the world, what the church is and what the church isn't. Right. So here's a framework that then you can. You can fit your specifics in. And that, to me, is more just the way. I'm just talking about Patrick Mason here. Right. But I have been in lots of conversations with my peers and with my friends that acknowledge that, look, you have dominated this space. And then peer podcasts, Bill Real and the others, Mormon discussions. Right. I mean, or LDS discussions have dominated this space. And the sort of thoughtful, faithful response to these things has been inadequate. It's been missing. I think I'm involved in the Faith Matters foundation and their podcasts and everything, and I think they've wanted to do the same thing, but again, their approach has been much more of. Kind of the planted approach of, let's just shift the framework, shift the conversation, provide people a set of tools for religious resiliency, spiritual resiliency, that then can kind of absorb whatever particular questions come along. So that's. That's where the energy has been.

John Dehlin [02:02:58] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [02:02:58] Whether that's misguided, whether it's income, I. I think everybody on my side says it's. It's not enough. Right. We. We haven't done enough. The question is, like, who's going to do it? Right. And we have. Nobody has stepped up.

John Dehlin [02:03:13] I thought Tara would do it. I thought Richard would do it. I thought you would do it. Flumen could do it. You got the whole Maxwell Institute. We've made the point. But I'm just saying people think I hate the church sometimes. They think I want to bring the church down. No, I just want there to Be informed consent. And the essays, as proud as we all should be, as much of a step forward as they were.

Patrick Mason [02:03:37] They're not complete.

John Dehlin [02:03:38] They don't do all the work, sense that they're not just not incomplete, that they're. Many people feel like they're either still in some ways whitewashing or disingenuous or inadequate, insufficient.

Patrick Mason [02:03:49] They're short.

John Dehlin [02:03:50] They're short. Yeah.

Patrick Mason [02:03:51] They're on every single one of those topics. There's more to say.

John Dehlin [02:03:53] Yeah, yeah.

Patrick Mason [02:03:54] So, no, there's. There's work to be done. I. I think part of it, too, goes back to our. And I know we want to talk about other things. It goes back to our earlier conversation about the shift in apologetics, right? So it's like, well, you can't have your cake and eat it too. So it's like we can't love the neo apologists for shifting the tone, but also want the old apologetics, right. That goes point by point on everything. Some of that exists, you know, Book of Mormon central. And some people are still doing this kind of stuff. Actually, in a lot of ways, I think they're more popular than anything I'm doing. But it's. It's two different styles doing two different things. And so I'm. I'm not interested in just, again, that's fairly.

John Dehlin [02:04:32] That's fair.

Patrick Mason [02:04:33] I'm just not interested in a world where life is short and I've only got so many hours in the day. That's not where I've chosen so far to spend my energy.

John Dehlin [02:04:41] And that's totally your call. I'll say two quick things in response, and then we'll jump to some other questions. I know you don't mean this, but to compare it to whack a mole is probably. Probably hurtful or. Or minimizing to those of us who see these issues as really significant and credible and meaningful and real. I know you don't mean it that way, but that, you know, whack a mole is a game that's sort of pointless, right? But like, whether the Book of Abraham is an accurate translation as it was claimed, whether the first vision, whether those changes and alterations over time reflect dishonesty or a genuine experience. Those are central to what many people give their entire lives to, 10% of their income. So I don't mean to, like, be

Patrick Mason [02:05:35] preaching, you know, and I don't mean it as a. Yeah, thanks for calling that out. And I don't mean it that way. I think there's a sense sometimes and all that. I mean, by the analogy is like, it's never enough. Right.

John Dehlin [02:05:52] I'm like, sure it'll never be enough.

Patrick Mason [02:05:53] It'll never be.

John Dehlin [02:05:54] Of course. Because you can't prove faith at the end of the.

Patrick Mason [02:05:56] Exactly.

John Dehlin [02:05:57] Yeah, I get that.

Patrick Mason [02:05:57] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:05:58] Okay. The second thing I was just going to say is that I can't think of a more important work. Like, at the end of the day, whoever it is out there, like. Like helping people not abandon the thing that you believe is the most important thing in the world.

Patrick Mason [02:06:15] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:06:16] These are. These are some of the things taken tens or hundreds of thousands of people about. Of God's one true church. Like, I can't. I understand if you're just not into it or interested.

Patrick Mason [02:06:26] No, well, I mean, it's just.

John Dehlin [02:06:27] It's just hard if you've got answers. Patrick Mason, I care about you. I trust you. I think you're smart and honest and credible. So if you've been able to resolve my top 40 issues, I want to know how you did it. And I'm about to go into that.

Patrick Mason [02:06:43] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:06:43] But we don't have time. But, like, I'm just telling you, I really want to know that. So I'm not accusing you of being selfish or whatever.

Patrick Mason [02:06:50] Right.

John Dehlin [02:06:50] But I'm just telling you if I really care and I've been excommunicated.

Patrick Mason [02:06:54] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [02:06:55] If I really care. There's a lot of people that would really. And I'm not trying to persuade you, you're just a sitting in a chair. I'm talking to a lot of people. Right. There's a lot of people that would really benefit from this information. And I'm not trying to take you beyond the woodshed.

Margi Dehlin [02:07:09] I hope we support boundaries here. We support healthy mental health practices.

John Dehlin [02:07:17] Yeah, yeah.

Patrick Mason [02:07:19] I'm glad we've got the referee here. Margi is sitting in between the two of us. But no, but, no. I take all of that and it actually is, again, for me, my response to all this was planted. Right. It's like framework approach. Right? And then. And then whenever I do a fireside and oftentimes warden stakeholders are a little uncomfortable because they don't know me.

Margi Dehlin [02:07:40] Right.

Patrick Mason [02:07:40] I mean, I'm a guest in there and I say, can we do Q and A at the end where everything is welcome? Like, no question is, is. Is out of bounds. And so it's like, here's my planted framework, right? Here's. Here's kind of the big picture, the macro, the view from 30,000ft. Because I've only got an hour with you and I can't address all 40 questions in an hour. Right. So I'm going to give you a framework approach. And then. Okay. It's Q and A time. So that's when Book of Abraham comes out. That's when polygamy comes out. That's when all these. And so then I'll give specific, specific, specific answers to specific questions.

John Dehlin [02:08:09] So.

Patrick Mason [02:08:09] So I've not trying to defend myself too much, but like, I've given. I don't know how many hours I've given to that.

John Dehlin [02:08:15] Oh, yeah.

Patrick Mason [02:08:16] Work. Right. And so I'm not afraid of answering those specific questions. But we were talking at lunch about how hard it is to write a book. Yeah. And. And that's been. And I'm not going to start Mormon stories. The opposite. Right. I mean, you've given your life to this for 20 years. Right. That's not what I'm going to do for the next 20 years. Years. So what I do is not enough. It's what I can give right now.

Margi Dehlin [02:08:40] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:08:41] Yeah. And you've given more than pretty much anyone, so I don't want to sound ungrateful for what you have given.

Patrick Mason [02:08:48] Well, what. Well, actually, what I'm hearing from you is actually the reason why I wrote planted and did all this. It's why I still do this stuff. Like, I mean, every time I go give a fireside, that's a night I'm not at home with my family or getting paid. Right. I'm definitely not getting paid. Right. I'm usually paying my own gas. Right. I mean, maybe they give me some cookies at the end or something like that. Right. And so for me, this is, as a Latter Day Saint, for me, this is consecration. This is me living my temple covenants. And so. And I take that really seriously. Other people consecrate in other ways. I don't have any money to give. I have. I have a little bit of brain power to give. So that's me doing it. So. But what I hear from you is not adversarial. I hear from you that is the same thing. It's that look in the woman's eye that got me to rope planted. It's like, where are the answers? Right. Who's. Who's going to do this?

John Dehlin [02:09:39] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [02:09:40] Right. And I, I want people on my side to. When they feel called and with the tools, I want them to do what you've asked for. Because for some people, the framework approach is going to be just what they need. Right. Other people need specific answers to specific questions.

John Dehlin [02:09:59] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [02:09:59] I haven't done very much to do that.

John Dehlin [02:10:01] Yeah. Well, you know, believe it or not, it comes from a place of love for the church and for the Mormon people that I am even asking these questions. And people get mad at me when I say I still have love for the church and for Mormon people. But that's. That's why I'm asking. Okay, we're gonna have to do a firing round.

Patrick Mason [02:10:21] Okay. Lightning round.

John Dehlin [02:10:22] Okay.

Patrick Mason [02:10:22] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:10:23] So really quickly. Old.

Patrick Mason [02:10:25] I'm against firing rounds, but we'll do lightning rounds.

John Dehlin [02:10:30] So I'm doing a series with this guy named Mike who runs a website called LDS Discussions, and we're taking on like 40 or 50 of the top problems with the church's truth claims and digging into each one. And we've covered as far as the Old Testament goes, evolution, literal Adam and Eve, Tower of Babel, like Noah and the Flood. Like, you take the first four or five stories from the Old Testament, and if you talk to even Jews. Yeah. You know, secular Jews or even believing Jews who are faithful but who care about science and evidence, they're going to say, no literal Adam and Eve, no literal Tower of Babel, no literal global flood, which. Which kind of like all of a sudden puts the Old Testament as the foundation into question. That then the New Testament builds on that. Then the Book of Mormon builds on

Patrick Mason [02:11:24] and disagree with that.

John Dehlin [02:11:25] But.

Patrick Mason [02:11:25] But I'm with you.

John Dehlin [02:11:25] No, no, no, no, no. I'll lay out the thesis.

Margi Dehlin [02:11:28] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [02:11:28] The premise.

Margi Dehlin [02:11:29] Yep.

John Dehlin [02:11:29] But then when you look at the Book of Mormon, the book and Joseph Smith, he's got, you know, he's got Adam and, you know, Old Testament prophets appearing to him. He's got the Jaredites come from the Tower of Babel that maybe wasn't even an event at all. He's got, you know, dispensations going back to a literal Adam and Eve and. And it all relies on the Flood and the whole Curse of Cain doctrine that was. Doctrine comes out of teachings. So, like, you could argue that all of Mormonism falls with Christianity on the fact that the Old Testament itself can't be really taken seriously. What's your quick answer to that?

Patrick Mason [02:12:13] What's my answer to that?

John Dehlin [02:12:13] I'm trying to group the. All of biblical criticism.

Patrick Mason [02:12:19] So great question. So I don't think that all of religion falls because the first nine chapters of Genesis are not written as history the way that we write it, the way that we regard history. It's not. These are sources that are compiled hundreds, thousands of years later. Stories that are told as part of the national origin myth of the Israelite people. And then those become the sacred texts of the Israelites which then Christians see themselves participating in and Jesus as the fulfillment of. And then Mormonism comes along and sees itself as the restoration of the work that Jesus initiated and it goes all the way back. So no doubt all along the way throughout all of that, most of those folks until the last hundred, 150 years thought that that was all literal historical truth. In the same way that we think that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are literal historical truth. Right. We know better now or we know differently. In some ways we know differently, but we also, I think we should, and this is where biblical criticism and biblical biblical scholarship, we should be paying so much more attention to this as Latter Day Saints to be able to know what these texts are, the problems with these texts, the challenges with authorship, but also what these texts were meant to do and be, the functions that they serve. So I have no problem with any of that. I don't read the Old Testament as a history textbook, especially not pre David. And what it is is it's a story about the covenant relationship between God and Israel that then does become fulfilled in Jesus and the New Testament carries it along. So now did Joseph Smith think that all that was literal history by every indication? Yes, absolutely. Just like every other 19, almost not Tom Paine and a few other people, but most 19th century Americans that they all just assumed it was all literally historically true. Then you get somebody like Brigham Young coming along and actually Brigham Young is not convinced of that at all. Phil Barlow's book Mormons in the Bible is great on showing this, that Brigham Young was not at all committed to the literal historical truth of the Bible. He called a lot of them, he called them like baby stories or something like that. He said, I'm not committed to, to those things. He had a. And I'd be interested in knowing more about like where this is coming from for Brigham Young. But even among 19th century Americans that there was this. It was an option to say, I believe the Bible is the word of God. I don't believe it's all historical literal truth, but I think Joseph Smith did think it was literal historical truth. I think the Book of Mormon clearly operates with the assumption that these things happened. And I think that's consonant. Whether you believe that in some ways it's a product of Joseph Smith or whether it's a product of ancient Nephite writers who would have assumed that it was all historically true, or some mesh of the two that I think you can make sense of the fact that early restoration documents, revelations, etc. There's a kind of that the early Bible, that the Pentateuch has a kind of functional historicity about it. And for them it was beyond functional. It was just like actually literally historical. But I think all. Lots more to say, but you can follow up in terms of where you want to go from there.

Book of Mormon Historicity and Truth Claims

John Dehlin [02:16:03] So why isn't it as simple as no Tower of Babel, which means no Jaredites, which means the Book of Mormon proven wrong just, just by that fact alone?

Patrick Mason [02:16:14] Yeah, so I think, so I think the, the Book of Ether can be, you know, lots of people understand the, the Book of Mormon as a kind of midrash commentary on, on the Bible. And so I think the Book of Mormon, or excuse me, the Book of Ether with the Jaredite story, it's engaging with that, with the Tower of Babel story the way that lots of Talmudic scholarship would do and other things. So it's like, okay, here's a story. We're going to build a story upon a story in order to draw out, to draw out this story of meaning about God's relationship with his people. So now, at what point. So if you want to do like really close textual scholarship, what's going on there? I mean, so this is Mormon redacting a record. You know, you can do some really interesting textual things of like, what's going on there. Which when you think about the way that texts are constructed, the way that stories are told over time, the way that authorship works, especially in, in the ancient world, then there's a way to talk about people building stories upon stories. So you can read it all literally historically true, like Tower of Babel, Jaredites, et cetera. Or you can say this is a founding myth of the Israelite nation that Mormon, in his redaction of some kind of account, is interacting with in some kind of creative, prophetic way. And then it goes there, from there transmitted to Joseph Smith.

John Dehlin [02:17:58] So would that then be possible that there were no Jaredites, but that Mormon or Moroni or Nephi were real? Is that what you're saying?

Patrick Mason [02:18:08] Yeah, so that's one possibility. So I think with all of these, there's multiple. But that's one possibility.

John Dehlin [02:18:13] Is that a reasonable possibility or is that. I mean, we're always trying to like, figure out what's like a. Okay. That that's plausible versus, like stretching things beyond what's reasonable.

Patrick Mason [02:18:25] Well, there's also. I'm perfectly comfortable with Joseph Smith being an active participant in the creation, the composition of the Book of Mormon and so what I can't do, and I've never been persuaded yet by anybody who can point exactly to which words are Joseph Smith and which words aren't. You know, we can look at certain things, certain themes, whatever. You want to look at masonry or whatever. Right. But in terms of the book as a whole, I think the book is far more complex than that. And so I'm also, so there's lots of possibilities for me that are plausible that include Joseph Smith actively, that he's the Midrash writer. Right. That he's engaging the Tower of Babel story and is creatively producing and translating and revealing a text that we get as the Book of Ether. Another possibility, again, is him refracting a kind of Moroni refraction of these texts and so forth. But I don't think we have to be committed to the historicity of the Tower of Babel, nor do I think that the whole edifice falls apart once if we say Tower of Babel is, is an ancient myth.

John Dehlin [02:19:50] When we, when we, when we look at descriptions, contemporary descriptions of Joseph Smith's translation process, where he would look at the stone in the hat and the words would appear on the stone. He would, he would read it.

Patrick Mason [02:20:03] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:20:03] The scribe would write it, the scribe would repeat it back to him, and then the stone wouldn't allow new words to appear until the old words were kind of cleared. That type of tight translation theory doesn't really allow for pseudepigrapha or Midrash or the types of explanations that you just offered. Am I wrong there?

Patrick Mason [02:20:21] No, I, I, but I, that's one account of what was happening. Right. And, and so clearly it's, it's an oral process. Right. And the translation process, the revelation process for the Book of Mormon. And so, yeah. Is he, I have to say, like, I personally, and as I have a lot of agnosticism about that, because I think the sources are sometimes contradictory with one another about the process. They also leave a ton of gaps in terms of, like, what was actually happening in that hat or in that room. And so, so I'm personally, some people have settled on a particular theory, right. And they're pretty sure they know how it all happened. I'm not one of those people.

John Dehlin [02:21:15] Okay.

Patrick Mason [02:21:16] So I, so, so I think you're right. If we go all the way down the road with one particular source or something like that, then that's going to foreclose other possibilities. But I see a lot of give and take within the primary sources that we have, the documents that we have. I Never want to argue with the facts. Right. So here's the source that we have. Let's establish a baseline of those things. I see in that translation process, I still see a ton of gaps that remain unaccounted for. And so do you account for it in terms of fraudulent behavior, knowing a kind of literary composition, a religious genius or inspiration? Right. How do you fill those gaps? People have lots of different theories for how to do that.

John Dehlin [02:22:03] When you look at all the signs that the Book of Mormon is such heavily influenced as a 19th century document, the mound builder myth built into it, Joseph Smith's own biography apparently built into it, the Masonic stuff, the second Nephi, all the King James Bible that appears in there, I could go on and on. For all the 19th century influence, all the Protestant sermons and the Protestant issues of the day that Joseph would have been exposed to. We've got ancient Americans talking about baptism by immersion. Like it just, if you take that, it screams fan fiction, Christian fan fiction is insulting. But like it screams some sort of fiction, fictional work. Right. You can still say inspired, but certainly a 19th century fictional production. Then you add to that the fact that the Book of Abraham, Egyptian papyrus has been translated and no correlation. Then you add to that now what we know about the, the Book of the, the, the revised inspired version of, of the Bible King James Version translation, that's the Adam Clark commentary, influenced the Kinderhook plates. If you add in sort of every attempt Joseph had at, at translating, it looks as though he was never translating. Starts to beg the question as to whether there's something going on there that isn't what we were all told. It wasn't what he was telling people and wasn't what we are told. And so you can go to Midrash or Pseudepigrapha or inspired Catalyst theory, revelation kind of things, but that, that feels like a bait and switch because we were all told he was a prophecy or revelator and translator. That was the original Doctrine and Covenants thing, right? We were told he was translating ancient records, that he had a command. He told us he could read Egyptian through whatever process he could. And now we find out in every instance, not only was he never apparently able to successfully translate, but then the Book of Mormon itself seems so heavily 19th century informed. Like if I did those same, if I produce those same types of scriptures or if I claim to translate Egyptian papyrus and then later it was disproven, you and your friends would say, well, John's a fraud. But then when Joseph does it, I would Say because of your, your parents and your heritage and your, your family and your community and all the other influences, you and other faithful scholars are going to come up with a million reasons why it's still possibly inspired by God. When I think a lot of other people just go, there's something wrong here. There's something fishy. Can you help? I know that's not even really a question. Yeah, but you can understand what I'm trying to get to, right?

Patrick Mason [02:24:52] Totally.

John Dehlin [02:24:53] And then what's your response? Why not just say, you know what? Too many explanations. That Occam's razor. The simplest explanation is he was making it all up.

Patrick Mason [02:25:03] Because for me, I don't believe that. I don't believe that the simplest explanation for the Book of Mormon is he made it up. And I am personally unconvinced. I don't see a grand theory that makes sense of the entire composition of the Book of Mormon. I see theories that make sense of this passage or this move or this particular thing. I don't see a theory that makes sense of the entire Book of Mormon start to finish with its intricacies and so forth. I'm not persuaded by any of them. And so are there Lots of 19th century isms in the Book of Mormon, Patrick Mason? I'd say absolutely yes. And there's two prevailing theories for that. One is that it was a book for, you know, the ancient prophets. It was a book for modern times. It was never a book for the ancient Americas. It was a book for the modern world. So with prophetic insight, they were able to, you know, to see those things and project those things into their writings. That's one theory. I'm on the side of things that I think Joseph Smith is an active, if to what degree, conscious, subconscious, not entirely clear to me, but I think Joseph Smith is an active participant in the translation and revelation process. And so I see a lot of the 19th century America in the Book of Mormon. I also see a lot of other stuff in there that makes very little sense in 19th century America. And so I see it as a kind of, as an enormously complex work. I do believe that all of these, I think translation, especially if we're going to use it in the sense that we normally would today, I think it's not a word that what, what he was doing doesn't correspond to our notions of translation, right? To a kind of plain common sense notion of translation. Even with the gold, even if you believe, you know, with, with the gold plates, even if you believe in a kind of tight control Theory or something like that. That's still not translation. It's revelation. The plates weren't in front of him. He wasn't translating a text. You know, even a tight control is like he was reading a text that was given to him, you know, by vision or on a stone or something like that. That's still not transl. Translation in the sense that we think about it today in any kind of normal sense. The closest thing would be the Book of Abraham. But I'm a catalyst theory guy, so I see all of these as revelatory productions.

John Dehlin [02:27:54] But when the Doctrine and Covenants calls him a translator and he tells people he's translating.

Patrick Mason [02:27:58] That's right.

John Dehlin [02:27:59] What do we do with that?

Patrick Mason [02:28:00] Well, and that's where I think, yeah, that's where I think faithful scholars are doing lots of things to say, like what does that word mean? Like what's going on? I'm Also, I'm not 100% bound to Joseph Smith's own self conception. That. So I. And this is a big meta framework type thing that then I would apply in lots of cases. Like I think God is real. I think Jesus is real. I think the Holy Spirit is real. And I think this is the church of Jesus Christ, not the church of Joseph Smith. So I actually think, I personally believe as a believer that God is doing a strange work in and through the church in which even the people who are doing that work don't fully understand their role in it. And so I think Joseph Smith, by every account, I think he really thought he was actually translating ancient texts. I think he sincerely believed that. And I don't think it was a charlatan enterprise. I don't think it was a con man. I think he sincerely believed that he was translating into English ancient texts. I think as I look back on it, my understanding of what he was doing is different than even his own self conception. And so I think the Holy Spirit does strange works in this world. And I think even Joseph Smith may not have fully his own self conception may have been different than the work of what was coming out of him. So I believe the Book of Abraham is an inspired, revealed text. I believe there are divine inspired, revealed principles in the Book of Abraham. It is scripture for me. That doesn't mean I believe. I'm not a Protestant. I don't believe in the inerrancy of Scripture. I think Scripture is shot through with contradictions and errors and all kinds of things. And that can happen at every stage of the work. But I'm not committed to the Book Of Abraham being a one to one correspondence with text written in ancient hieroglyphics by the patriarch Abraham.

John Dehlin [02:30:19] How committed are you to an actual golden plates in Joseph's possession delivered by an angel? An actual Nephi and Moroni and Mormon historical figures.

Patrick Mason [02:30:30] Yeah. So 100%. I believe there were golden plates. I have no doubt about that. Delivered by an angel. I believe that. And again, outside the realm of what I can prove or disprove as a historian. So that's. Now we're in the realm of faith. I believe he saw visions of the angel Moroni that directed him to the gold plates. The actual reality of the gold plates, I think is there's no dispute that they're actually world gold. Where did the gold plates come from? Right. Did he make them or were they an ancient Nephite record? I think now that's where we can start arguing about things. But I think there were absolutely gold plates. I believe that he had visions of an angel that directed him to the hill. Actual Nephi and Alma and all of that. For me, again, historically, I think the jury is out. So far, there's not a lot of evidence that's piled up. I think there's some interesting stuff, the Nahom altar in Arabia and I think there's some interesting things, all the parallels that people have, but parallels aren't evidence. And so that, you know, there's not yet a historically compelling case that's been made. So for me, the Book of Mormon functions as history. What I mean by that is when I talk about it, you know, in a Sunday school class or whatever, I mean, let's say, you know, Nephi did this, Alma did this. Right? The same way that I could talk about any literary character or historical character or something like that. I mean, I could say this, let's say literary character, right? That Lady Macbeth did this. Right. Now, that doesn't put me in the camp of I do not believe the Book of Mormon is history because I think again, jury's out. But for me, it functions as history the same way, the same way that most of the Bible functions as history. In the paucity of evidence. What I don't, what I never want to do is say that something actually happened if we know that it didn't happen. And I'm also very comfortable, I'm comfortable with myth, I'm comfortable with stories being true that aren't literally historically. I'm comfortable with all of that. I think that's the stuff that humanity is made of. I think that's the stuff that religion is made of. I think that's the stuff that literature and deep meaning. And so while I live in the world that the Enlightenment created and I'm deeply grateful for it, I don't think that's the only. Epistemologically, I think the human experience is richer than simply what the Enlightenment has given us. And there's a lot of. You and I both know there's a lot packed into everything I just said. But. But we're in kind of lightning round mode.

John Dehlin [02:33:34] Lightning round, yeah. What do you do with polyandry, which is Joseph Smith marrying other men's wives? What do you do with Joseph marrying 14, 15 year olds, 16 year olds, sister pairs, mother, daughter pairs. What do you do with Joseph Smith denying that he was doing all this and doing it in Fanny Alger's case, before the ceiling power was Even granted, before DNC 132 is even revealed and lighting, lying to Emma about it, sealing himself to 22 women before he even kind of sealed himself to Emma. How do you make sense of all that and still have Joseph Smith be someone who's credible?

Patrick Mason [02:34:15] Yeah, I don't like any of it. So I'm, I'm not committed to, to, to, to polygamy as a revealed principle. I'm intrigued by a way, a sort of grasping at a critique of like 19th century family models. So I kind of like, you know, the way that other religious people were doing like recognizing that there was something just about like the, this nuclear family that didn't quite capture the richness of divine and celestial relationships. So I think there's something to that. But I'm not committed to polygamy as a divinely revealed principle and don't believe that I have to, even though it's in D&C.132. Yeah, I just said I'm not an inerrantist when it comes to scripture. And Even with Section 132, there's lots of passages of scripture and all four of them standard works where I could point to chapters and say, yeah, I think that's true. And then another passage where I'm like, eh, I'm not committed to that. And people would say, well that's cafeteria or that's selective. I mean that's all religion. We're all selective. Fundamentalism is an interpretive move. We all do interpretive moves when we come to scripture. So this is sometimes one of my frustrations with critiques of religion or of Mormonism in general. It's like, hey, you don't hold to the fundamentalist view, right? Well, the fundamentalist view is constructed. People weren't fundamentalists until the late 19th century. That's an entirely modern way of reading scripture. Like that every word has to be true. I don't have to be a fundamentalist to be a believer in scripture as God's revealed word. That's a totally modern construct. So I'm just not a fundamentalist when I come to Scripture. And I don't think that makes me a liberal or progressive or whatever it actually puts. That puts me in a longer and deeper tradition of Jews and Christians reading the Bible than fundamentalists.

John Dehlin [02:36:22] Right. Margi says you have a question. Is it about polygamy specifically?

Margi Dehlin [02:36:27] No, it's for when you're kind of done with the lightning beliefs.

John Dehlin [02:36:30] Okay. Okay. I really want to hear your question, but I just have more follow ups.

Margi Dehlin [02:36:34] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [02:36:35] I'm sorry. This is. We're trying to do too much.

Patrick Mason [02:36:37] I know, I know.

John Dehlin [02:36:39] So. So the. The maven asked a question. She. She read a Q and A you gave at one point where it says we are too quick to engage in slippery slope thinking if a prophet was wrong about X, then how could I trust him about Y or Z? You wrote she's attributing to you this saying that that kind of reasoning won't get you through the first week of philosophy 101. Our individual ins. Our individual and institutional theologies need to be more mature, sophisticated and resilient. Maven's question. If Joseph Smith lied about God commanding him to marry a bunch of vulnerable. And this is Maven's. Feeling a little bit spicy here.

Patrick Mason [02:37:14] I got it.

John Dehlin [02:37:14] Okay. If Joseph Smith lied about God commanding him to marry a bunch of vulnerable women, I should say rightly, she feels spicy. And girls, I think I have every right to question any other quote, revelation. Close quote from him. And I don't think that position deserves to be called unsophisticated, sophisticated. What would your response to me?

Patrick Mason [02:37:34] I completely agree with her.

John Dehlin [02:37:35] Okay.

Patrick Mason [02:37:35] What. What I'm saying. My art. So what I'm saying 100% I agree with her. She has every right to question than every other thing he said. What I. What I would say isn't going to get you out of Philosophy 101. And I don't teach Philosophy 101. So philosophers tell me if I'm wrong. But what I'm saying won't. You won't get you out of that class. Is saying he was wrong about this. Ergo, he is wrong about everything that is logical. Yeah, but I think it's entirely Fair to say, oh, he's wrong about this. Which by the way, every human being in the history of the world, I believe, save Jesus, has been wrong about something. And so I think we're right to then question. So, yeah, question what he taught about the plan of salvation. Yeah, question what he taught about the nature of revelation, the nature of the church, the nature of the Godhead. Yes, go ahead and question all that. Okay, that's fine.

Joseph Smith's Character and Legacy

John Dehlin [02:38:27] I see I'm going to really quickly hit on probably two of the most potentially offensive or controversial things. I'm going to try to do it in a thoughtful, respectful, delicate way. But I may feel so. So when you shot at being aware, I'm sure you know this is coming to some level. So when you look at Joseph Smith's behavior with sex, right? And then you look at like Keith Renery from, you know, Nexium or Warren Jeffs or, you know, David Koresh. Pick your, and I'm going to use the C word. Pick your cult leader and we're going to talk that second question is going to be about the word cult. But when you think about some of the people most attested in our American history, it's some of these people, right? The bad guys are Keith Ranieri, Warren Jeffs, etc. If you abstract all our context of singing songs about Joseph Smith being taught that he's God's chosen prophet from the time we're a baby, mommy and daddy loving us in the context of us bearing our testimonies about Joseph Smith being true, all the social reinforcement of our leaders and our youth groups and scouting and everything and going on the mission. Like if you take all that context out and you just look at behavior, I think it's fair to say that there are differences in behavior between those different characters. L. Ron Hubbard, you know, but like it's, it's, it is a super reasonable conclusion in my opinion. If you are starting to go down that slope of saying Book of Abraham's a problem, Moses is a problem, like first vision's a problem, Peepstones and a treasure digging, all those things are problems. Then you get to the. His sexual behavior. It's very easy reasonable to then say there's sexual predation going on. If you're going to call it out on Bhagwan Srirajneesh or, or Jim Jones or David Koresh, you're, you're holding, you know, you're not holding Joseph Smith any different standard than you're holding the rest of them. So like in Mormonism, there's probably no more offensive thing than to sort of associate Joseph Smith with the idea of a predator in that way. But I think it's a really fair. You yourself said you're not really behind polygamy. So if you're not behind it, that means he's doing some really awful stuff with 14 year old girls, you know, my daughter's age. Like, would you have let, if you could go back in time with your 14 year old daughter, would you have allowed Joseph Smith to be alone with your father. 14 year old daughter for a month or six months? Those. That's a lot in there. But I, you know, so it almost feels like the most offensive thing you could say about Joseph Smith has a lot of credibility to it.

Patrick Mason [02:41:18] Yeah, yeah, no, I absolutely hear that. And had he, I have a 12 year old daughter right now. Had, had he approached me about that in two years. Right. I hope I would have said no and held the ground on that. And so I'm not, I don't want to baptize any of that stuff and call it sacred later. Polygamy as it's practiced in Utah, I'm a little more generous toward in the sense of, you know, I read all these accounts of men and women who felt like deeply like, who felt like, who felt compelled to. Not compelled in a coercive way, like felt like internally, like they felt like it was revealed to them to be the right thing. And I think, I think it's complex and it's like its relationship to proto feminism and all that kind of stuff. I think there's a lot of really interesting conversations about Utah polygamy even while recognizing, recognizing all the abuse and hardship that happened there. Joseph Smith's polygamy. I don't want to put lipstick on a pig and I don't like it. Again, I'm open to the idea of saying there's some kind of. We want to get at something about relationships that transcend just the kinds of nuclear families that we create here. I mean, Richard Bushman's famous line, Joseph Smith didn't lust after women, he lusted after kin. There's something to that. But he also slept with a lot of these women. Right. It wasn't just like spiritual kinship networks or something like that, which I think would be kind of interesting the way lots of other cultures do. Big kinship networks. Okay. What would that have looked like on a spiritual level? But that wasn't what he was. He didn't stop there.

Margi Dehlin [02:43:15] Right.

Patrick Mason [02:43:16] And so I've got all those same kinds of questions for what I'm able to Do. And I recognize not everybody wants to do this. Can do it is. You know, and this isn't about me being better. Right. It's just like, I can do this. Right. Whether I'm right or wrong, I can do this. Of saying I don't agree with any of that stuff, I can even say without putting myself in judgment of another human being, I can even say that a lot of that looks a whole lot like sin from my perspective. And yet I also truly believe the Book of Mormon is the word of God and that Joseph Smith was the vehicle through which God, for whatever reason, made that happen. And I believe that. Okay. And you could say, well, that predates polygamy. I mean, you could do, like, the fallen prophet. You could do the fallen prophet move, right? Like Book of Mormon, okay. Once polygamy comes in, you know, it's all wrong. I don't go that direction either, because I actually find something deeply true and meaningful about the King Follett sermon. Right. And some of his other teachings in Nauvoo. So even at this very same time that he's practicing that he's engaged in these sexual behaviors that I find deeply disturbing and would even call out a sin, he's also revealing what I believe to be true principles about the nature of God. Right. How does that work for me? My framework on this is biblical in the sense of I'm an Old Testament guy. Not in, like, the let's, you know, like, stone people type thing, but in the sense of. For me, the whole Old Testament is a story about God working through deeply flawed, deeply imperfect people, people we would find morally revolting, and yet somehow God is working through them. And this is a story about God's faithfulness to sinful humanity. I put Joseph Smith in that framework. I don't put Joseph Smith in a. In a second savior framework. I don't believe that. I don't believe he's the second most righteous person in human history next to Jesus Christ. I don't believe that. The evidence. I'd put Mother Teresa closer to that. Right. And I don't know, maybe lots of people, whatever the number is. Right. I don't believe Joseph Smith was a prophet because he's a moral exemplar. I believe Joseph Smith was a prophet because God mysteriously and inexplicably revealed things about the nature of God, the nature of humanity, the nature of the universe, through a very imperfect vessel named Joseph Smith. And I think that power can go to people's heads.

John Dehlin [02:45:52] Yeah. I mean, those same people that didn't want you to come on my podcast because I cause doubts or questions. They believe and follow and give their lives to a guy that has done behavior that's many would say is truly reprehensible. And there's a. There's an irony there.

Patrick Mason [02:46:12] And this.

John Dehlin [02:46:12] This past that they're willing to give Joseph Smith to.

Patrick Mason [02:46:15] To the degree to which they're giving their lives and whatever to Joseph Smith. That's not what I'm. That's. That's not the church that I'm. I think I'm in. I'm in the Church of Jesus Christ. So I'm giving my life in whatever imperfect way I can, my covenants of consecration that I've made and try to take seriously. To me, that's about Jesus Christ. And for me, Joseph Smith is a prophet, not a savior.

John Dehlin [02:46:45] Yeah. Okay. And really quickly that we had an interesting exchange on Twitter, private message, I think, where you took umbrage at the. At the use of the word cult. And obviously, cult is one of the most offensive things that you could call. Nobody thinks they're in a cult. It's never, probably never productive to tell someone they're in a cult. I believe that. And yet, you know, what do you call Scientology? What do you call the FLDS church? What do you call Joe's Witnesses? You could call the high demand religion. I know that in academia that's the tradition, but there's something about Nexium and Bhagwan Shriraj Nish that's like its own category of horribleness. And so I think there's a place for the use of the word cult. And then if you take again away our social conditioning and programming, and just look at the criteria that's been established by people like Stephen Hasson about what a cult is, the Bite Model, or Lindsay Luna, Lindsay Corbin's Recovering Agency book. Of the 31 flavors of undue Influence. There are patterns of undue influence that qualify organizations or leaders as cult like. And so, like, I know you know, you. You. I think you said once you have a Scientology friend and you've talked to him about the relationship of the word, but number one, isn't it fair to use the word cult in some context? And if so, why does, you know, taking away, you know, being as objective as you can be, why doesn't Mormonism on some level, either past or present, still qualify?

Patrick Mason [02:48:16] Yeah. So. So. So I do believe that cult is just not a helpful word. I. I think there are some words that. That. That pick up so much baggage culturally and so forth. That cult originally, it's actually, it's still used by some scholars in a very technical sense, like the temple cults of ancient Rome or something like that. Right. So we mean it in a very techn. Technical sense. But then it got picked up and it now has all this cultural baggage. And so it's only pejorative, you know, when we use, when we talk about the temple cults of ancient Rome or ancient Mesopotamia, that's just a neutral category, right? There's a cultist around it and so forth. But now it's always a pejorative. It's loaded with all this. I just find it to be entirely unuseful in that sense. Now if you, if anybody would come to this by itself is not gonna be a satisfactory answer, but it's gonna be part of something longer. If you come to my ward, the Lundstrom park ward, on any given Sunday or a whole month of Sundays, I like challenge anybody to show me what cult like behavior is going on there. It's just from no objective measure is anything in the Lundstrom park ward other than maybe you could say male authority, right. Or something like that. But lots of places have male authority. But I just defy anybody to come to my ward and say that's a cult. No independent observer who came in and did ethnographic studies of my ward for a year would say, oh yeah, I just attended a cult for a year. Nobody, even the most suspicious, skeptical person, nobody would say that. And so now are there behaviors, structures, modes of behavior, of organization, of leadership, of gender dynamics that are present within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that also line up with and fit in a Venn diagram with a list of characteristics that some scholars have said this is what a cult is. Right? Yes. There are other organizations that also would fit in that Venn diagram that we wouldn't call cults. Right. So part of it, I don't like the term. I just think it's not useful culturally. I think it's imprecise academically. Even those who have tried to bring some, you know, as scholars actually in religious studies, we call these movements new religious movements. Movements. Right. I mean, so again, neutral, objective term. And then, and then you can make your value judgments on, on, based on the behaviors and policies that are going on there. And so, so, so yeah, if, if you make a list of these are cult like behaviors, organizational norms, leadership styles and so forth, can you find parallels and correspondences there within Mormon history and even contemporary practice? Sure, yes, you can. You can also find, you could Also listen to like here are the characteristics of the best organizations in the world. Right. And the best ways to organize your society. And you could line those up with things that happen in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints too. So I personally, I don't belong to a cult. Again, as you said, nobody says they belong to a cult. I don't belong to a cult. I don't believe any reasonable observer of virtually any like, of what's going on grassroots in terms of the day to day living out of Mormonism by most people, again, it's their behavior, by individuals, by the macro institution that lines up with a list of categories that the people are going to say that's a cult. Yeah, sure. But I think the, the converse is true too. So I just find it, I find it not analytically useful.

John Dehlin [02:52:11] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [02:52:12] And then emotionally pejorative.

John Dehlin [02:52:15] Yeah. So Mark, you've been waiting patiently, what questions you have.

Margi Dehlin [02:52:19] Is it a good time?

John Dehlin [02:52:19] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [02:52:20] Okay. Okay. So my question is around, I feel like through the interview I'm getting like a good sense of like building a little bit of your belief, your experience. So my question is around, you know, as you've been talking about your beliefs really centered around Jesus Christ, what it means to you, what you, you know, you've talked about like baptizing things and I don't baptize that or I don't recognizing also, how do I want to say this? Your experience being quite, I know we've talked about privileged but also like at a distance from some harm, like some of the things that were happening, you were out of the country or it didn't really touch you, you didn't know people or you didn't happen to have a family member or. I actually don't know that that's true. You just haven't mentioned it. So hopefully that's true.

Patrick Mason [02:53:16] Family members, do you. Yeah. Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [02:53:18] Okay. So thanks for naming like that assumption. But this idea of. And this idea of belief and then your personal experience. Right. So let's let me reframe that around being white cis, like having that amount of privilege as you're walking the path.

John Dehlin [02:53:37] Right.

Margi Dehlin [02:53:37] Of Mormonism. I'm just curious if it's like being in a family, this idea of being in a church a little bit and your experience is positive. You're like, I'm good, this has worked for me. This is positive. And. But the practice of being part of that family system or that system, you're looking around at your other family members and you're good. But it's like you're seeing people, you're hearing about first hand accounts or seeing people be sexually abused while at church or, you know, LGBTQIA kids or human beings being really ostracized or women really feeling a lot of shame or a pressure of. I'm curious, like, what you do, how you reconcile how you navigate this sense of like, I sense the purity in you, I sense this idea of like, this is what it means to me and my experience in these moments of clarity where I feel close to God, or I feel like I've. How do you reconcile the beauty of that, the love that you feel from that with your participation then of so much harm, like you're not your participation yourself, but like that you're looking around in this place that on some level is intertwined with the beliefs and saying, why is there so much suffering here in the birth of these ideas or beliefs? Like how. What does your brain do? And is that something you carry? And if so, like, what is, what is that process like for you to kind of hold those, both those things, because they seem really like very, very opposing feelings?

Patrick Mason [02:55:27] Yeah. Yeah. You're really good at asking questions. You are too, John. That's a really good question. For me, it's. I do feel that burden. I've felt it. I've come to feel it even more keenly over the last few years as. As I've heard and tried to enter into other people's experiences and empathize as much as I can. I think we live in a broken world. And for me, my church is not immune from any of that brokenness. I think it heals some of that brokenness and it creates other forms of brokenness. I think there's nothing about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that makes it so special that it's somehow immune from the human condition. I want it to be better. I believe that God is working in and through this church, not only in and through this church, not by a long shot. I have a whole chapter on that and restoration. But I do believe I feel the Holy Spirit working in and through this church. And I want. I wish we as broken people were more open and receptive to the Spirit's strivings with us so that we could make the play, make the church more of a place of healing rather than a brokenness. I don't want it. Sorry. I'm. I'm so sad that this church that I love so much, that I've given so much to and that has given more back to me, has hurt a lot of people that I know and love and even more people that I don't know. And. I can't. I actually can't stop carrying that with me. And I want it to be better, and it's not yet. And when we take steps backward, like we sometimes do, I'm really frustrated. Because I've been. Precisely because I've been so lucky. Privileged. Whatever word you want to use to have experienced, like, the love that this community can bring and that. The love of God that I felt through it. And so when we have fallen short of that, which we regularly do, in some cases, systemically do. It. I'm really sad about that and. Sorry, I'm not a very emotional person, but I want the church to reflect the world that Jesus tried to create. And we're. We can't even see Zion yet. It's not even on the horizon yet. We have a. We have a long way to go.

Margi Dehlin [02:59:46] Thank you.

John Dehlin [02:59:51] That's beautiful. Thank you for being so vulnerable.

Patrick Mason [02:59:55] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:59:56] Powerful. Yeah. Couple quick micro.

Patrick Mason [03:00:02] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:00:02] I don't want to. These are going to be super fast, and you can answer them super fast. That was so beautiful. I want to end on that, but I. I know there's a few things that you probably feel strongly about, and I'm not trying to put you on the spot, but I do want to give you a chance to voice. So. $120 billion. Ensign Peak, you talk in your book about Christ not being a capitalist, basically, like, what do you have thoughts about what Christ would do with $120 billion?

Church Finances, Abuse Safeguards, and Prophetic Authority

Patrick Mason [03:00:30] I think you'd have no idea. Like, $120 billion in the ancient world? Are you kidding? I don't think that it existed.

John Dehlin [03:00:37] Shekels.

Patrick Mason [03:00:38] Shekel, Right. No, I mean, it's funny about the crisis. Not a capitalist. It's like one of the very earliest Amazon reviews of my book. I gave it one star or something like that and, like, went after me for saying, crisis, not a capitalist. I was like, I thought that was the least controversial thing I said in the entire book. Like, I mean, that's just, like, descriptively true. Okay, look, I understand. Look, the church is a big, huge global institution that understand investment strategies, and you create more wealth so that you have more to spend down the road. And projections of will there be declining membership and declining tithing revenues and all that. I get all of that. At one point, Bill Gates said, $100 billion is infinite money. Now, that was a while ago. There's been inflation and so forth, but there's. At a certain point, how much is Enough. And of course, the investment funds that we know about, that's only part of it. I mean, there's all of the investments in land and properties. So the church's portfolio is a lot bigger than that $100 billion or whatever it is right now with the stock market. I think it's time to start putting that money to use. The church was the first century. The church was pretty rough, right? Financially, pretty rough. As late as the 1960s, it was rough. The church almost went bankrupt in the early 1960s because of excessive spending and so forth. And that led to baseball, baptisms, et cetera, et cetera. But the church, it's been phenomenally well managed financially over the past half century, which has put its. You know, there's still church leaders alive right now who remember those times of near bankruptcy. So, you know, that's one of the things you get with a very old church leadership. They remember. They have long memories. But we're not at that time anymore. We're not in the early 1960s. And so I think it's time to put that money to use. The church could become the next Gates Foundation. I don't think the church should only turn into an ngo. It's still a church, Right. I believe in building chapels. I believe in building temples. I believe in doing all that kind of stuff. Okay, let's keep doing all that, right? Do we, you know, at whatever scale is appropriate. But even after you do all that, there's a lot of money left over. And so I hope now, like, I hope we wake up, actually, I'm glad for that reporting. I'm glad that we know a little bit more now about the church's finances than we used to. And so I hope that there's a little bit of pressure, internal and external. And so I hope there's conversations happening in church headquarters right now to say, how can we put that money to you? I believe the people in church headquarters are deeply good, sincere people. Right. I think they want to do good in the world. I also think that we're all trapped within the kind of lenses and assumptions and jobs that we have. Okay, let's say all that's fine. Maybe this shook things up a little bit. I would love to see the LDS Church become the next Gates Foundation. Think how much power, like, how much good could be done, Right? How much good? Take half of that.

John Dehlin [03:04:04] Right?

Patrick Mason [03:04:04] I'll take 60 billion. Right. You know, whatever. Yeah. Oh, man.

John Dehlin [03:04:09] Just in Salt Lake City, the homeless just.

Patrick Mason [03:04:11] Yeah. And. And the church does so much good around. It does real Good. I mean, I like some of the humanitarian programs. Other things. The church's welfare system is great in many ways, not perfect. I mean the church does so much good. Think how, if we could scale that and think if we had the right vision. And I knew, I've talked with some people in the humanitarian services department of the church who do have the right vision. They fit within a bureaucracy. They're not the final decision makers. Think how much good could be done for the world. It would be amazing.

John Dehlin [03:04:47] Do you think whenever a bishop has the discretion to be a mandatory reporter on sexual abuse of a child, that the bishop should default to reporting versus what Kurt McConkey seems to have been advising, which is the default to not reporting when they have a choice?

Patrick Mason [03:05:08] Unquestionably, yes.

John Dehlin [03:05:10] When you look at the Boy scouts of America, 80,000 victims have claimed abuse and that's just who have claimed abuse. And 40% of the troops were LDs. Add to that what we know about all the reports of child abuse throughout the church. Do you see a systemic, do you see a problem with systemic child sexual abuse in the history of the Mormon Church? It's a really, probably a brutal question.

Patrick Mason [03:05:36] It is a brutal question, but it's, it's a brutal reality, right, of any sex abuse of anyone, but especially a minor. I mean, I think of all the nice things Jesus said, he didn't have nice things to say about people who abuse children. And so I have no idea what those numbers look like. I would hope that on average LDS troops were better than other troops. But even so, I mean there's going to be cases out there. There's cases that have not yet been reported. I have no doubt of that. The size, the scale, the scope, I don't know, I think it, I think it will come out at some point starting too slowly and it's, I, this is, you know, thinking about like where my heart hurts. This is just something like let's just fix it like right now, right? We will never eradicate sex abuse out of the church any more than we will out of the human condition. Right? I mean there are just human beings in the LDS Church. So Mormons will do bad things. Let's create the structures so that when that happens and when we know about it, when criminal acts are done, especially against minors, it's a criminal offense. We report it, right? Do what is right. Let the consequence follow. I also think, I mean again, it's not a PR issue, but even I think it would reflect better on the church even if we over reported. Right. Or if we went beyond the mandate of the law or something like that. And even if there was some legal liability, I wouldn't be too upset if the church showed up in court saying, sorry, your honor, we did too much to protect victims. Right. I wouldn't feel bad about that. And so. And that seems like something we could fix, at least policy wise. Again, can't fix the human heart, can't fix the human condition, but we could fix institutional policies pretty quickly, I think.

John Dehlin [03:07:49] Yeah. Sam Young has a bunch of questions he asked me to ask you, but I'll just summarize and say, well, I'll ask you, like, do you feel like, was it your impression that Sam Young was trying to fight for children and fight for victims? And did you, as I did, see it as a tragedy that he kind of got punished for that? I mean, you've already answered that.

Patrick Mason [03:08:09] Yeah. I mean, I didn't follow every twist and turn of the Sam Young story. Sorry, Sam, but broad brush strokes. Yeah. Let's stand up for children. Let's stand up for victims of abuse and so forth. Again, this is where we can talk about strategies and tactics and how do you do it? You know, how do you, how do you affect change? All that. All that is fine. Okay. Reasonable people can disagree about tactics and strategies. I hope reasonable people don't disagree about the principles behind it. And so I. From what I saw from afar, I've never met Sam. From what I saw from afar, I saw a guy whose, Whose heart was in the right place trying to predict, protect the vulnerable. I don't know all the ins and outs of what eventually led to excommunication, but the principle. I hope nobody's arguing with that.

John Dehlin [03:09:05] Yeah. Yeah. You've already talked about the church being imperfect, so it's beating a dead horse to really get into it. I was disturbed by seeing the Curt McConkey protocol for the help line.

Patrick Mason [03:09:18] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:09:18] And how every question was about managing legal liability, yet the church turns around and tells people the helpline has always been about helping the victim first. That just seemed like a bald face, just untruth, you know?

Patrick Mason [03:09:31] Yeah, I, I don't know what all is going there, going on there. I, I understand the importance of risk management for large institutions, and I know the church is not exempt from any of that. But I would like to put principle ahead of risk management. And that's a super easy thing to say. Right. Very different when you're a policymaker and have lots of things to take care of. And again, and I personally ascribe, I do not believe that. I just do not believe that anybody in Curtin, McConkie or anybody they answer to woke up in the morning and said, how could we protect abusers rather than victims today? Right. I don't believe that. I think sometimes it's their first priority is how do we protect the church. And that takes priority sometimes over victims and survivors. Insofar as that happens, that's. That's got to change.

John Dehlin [03:10:43] Okay, here's here as I think my, one of my final questions, if not my final question, and then we'll see if you even have time to ask us some of yours. But when it comes, you've already said how. DNC132, you don't feel compelled to. To believe all scripture.

Patrick Mason [03:11:00] Right.

John Dehlin [03:11:01] You believe the scripture can be erroneous. When you talk about racism in your book Restoration, what I didn't see mentioned is the fact that a lot of the racist doctrines and teachings, they're in the Book of Mormon. They're in the, they're in the Book of Moses. They're. They're in the Book of Abraham, the whole cane Cain curse theory. Joseph Smith injected that if it wasn't God into the Book of Moses, Book of Abraham, and then the dark skin is a curse in the Book of Mormon. That's all in the scripture.

Patrick Mason [03:11:31] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:11:32] So I would, I'm going to assume that maybe you don't believe those scriptural teachings specifically are from God. Is that fair to say?

Patrick Mason [03:11:40] Yeah. Right. And I think in each case, I think that we can apply particular readings to each of those texts. That I don't think they'll all function the same way, but in, in a big bucket. Yeah. God's not inspiring racism.

John Dehlin [03:11:52] Okay. And, and some of Mormon scriptural passages are racist. Fair. It's fair to say.

Patrick Mason [03:11:58] Yeah, I think. Yeah. In, in a sentence, yes.

John Dehlin [03:12:02] Okay. And then, and so that's scripture, Mormon scripture. And then you turn to prophetic leadership and you look at all the defining, pretty much all the many, if not most of the defining civil rights movements of our era, women's rights, you know, the era, LGBT rights, trans rights, you know, the civil rights movement. You pick any of those and many more. Not only was, were the Mormon church leaders not prophetic, in other words, seeing ahead, seeing the future, getting ahead of the curve and teaching what's right before the average, you know, you know, modal distribution, the world. Right. Not only were they behind the, the, the rest of the developed world, in most of those instances, in many instances, they were actively behind the antique, the antagonism to the social progress, whether it's Prop 8, whether it's the era fighting the era calling Martin Luther King a communist and, and literally denouncing the civil rights movement. So as kind of a closing question for you, where do Prof. Mormon prophets and Mormon scripture retain value if they have a history of being so problematic?

Patrick Mason [03:13:28] Yeah. So they for you? Yeah, yeah.

Margi Dehlin [03:13:35] So

Patrick Mason [03:13:38] I read all scripture and all prophetic teaching through the lens of the life teaching and atonement of Jesus Christ. Because part of the question is, well, why can you cherry pick and say this scripture and not that? For me, it's not cherry picking, it's a hermeneutic, it's an interpretive lens. My interpretive lens is Jesus of Nazareth, his life, teachings, example and atonement. That's why I call myself a Christian. That's why I hope we're the church of Jesus Christ. And so that's my principle, that's my lens that I use to evaluate all scripture and all prophetic teaching. And insofar as it does not conform with the life, teachings, example and, and atonement of Jesus Christ and the reconciliation between God and humanity that he brings into the world, then I'm not bound to any of those particular passages or prophetic statements. Now, as you said, what do I do with this record of particularly, we're mostly talking about kind of 20th, 21st century prophets and apostles on all of these social issues. I think this is where we see. I'm trying to do this short because it's actually a long answer for me, the Old Testament is the guide of what prophets are and what the prophets are not, because I think it's the most robust set of examples at times. In the Old Testament, prophets are foretellers in the sense of they anticipate coming events, coming world, political, economic, cultural, social events, and they prepare God's people for that. Oftentimes that is not their role and oftentimes their record on some of those issues is pretty poor in the Old Testament too. And so seems to me that there's a different work going on there and that the track record of prophets, ancient and modern on these issues is anything but perfect. So I don't think that's their preeminent role. I would like them, I'd like the record to be better. I would, I'd like there to be more correspondence. But my view of what a prophet is and what a prophet does allows for that. Because I think the primary calling of a prophet or apostle is to witness of God's covenantal relationship with humanity, to Call people to repentance and to witness in the name of Jesus in the world. Now, in my mind, all of that, God's covenantal relationship with the world, the working of God in the world, Jesus is coming into the world. All of that points me to eradicating racism. So I think that some of the mid 20th century prophets and apostles who didn't do that, I would disagree with them. If I were sitting in a room with them, I would say we failed in our prophetic witness in terms of applying what does it mean that Jesus came into the world and what does it mean for today in 1960 or 1970 or 1977? We figured it out in 1978, more or less, with a lot of issues still to work out. But I would say what that looks like is a lot more like what Martin Luther King is doing and the civil rights activists. What does it mean? You know, some of these things are complex and I think take time to get there. But I think the question has to be, what does it mean that Jesus is reconciling God to humanity? We should have been better on civil rights, no doubt. I think we. I don't see. Look, looking back again, as a historian, I understand the reasons that were given for opposing the era. I don't think those were necessary reasons. I think the church leadership could have stood behind the era and it wouldn't have hurt the church. So they were culturally conditioned. But for me, none of that strips them of their primary calling in the world.

John Dehlin [03:18:25] So to testify of Jesus, to call people to repentance, it's not so much being on the right side of social issues, even exemplifying Christlike behavior per se.

Patrick Mason [03:18:36] Yeah, I would love all that to be true. And often it is. Sometimes it is. Right? That's not as I look at the Hebrew prophets. Right. So this tradition that restoration prophets and apostles are a part of, as I look at biblical prophets and apostles, those things don't seem to be part of the job description. So maybe I can get mad at God and say, God, why don't you call moral exemplars to be prophets and apostles? Or I can, you know, so I just look at. For me, this is part of the paradox to wrestle with. Right. I actually think one of our

John Dehlin [03:19:19] two

Patrick Mason [03:19:19] of our major theological projects that Latter Day Saints have to do in the 21st century. I think we have to figure out our theology on gender and sexuality. I think a lot of people think we know what our theology of gender and sexuality is. We don't. So we need Some revelation on that. We need some good thinking on that to figure out what our theology of gender and I don't know where that's going to go. I don't know where it's going to land. I'm not, that's not, I'm not going to be the last voice on that. I may be one voice as part of that, but that's one of our projects. Our other project is we've got to figure out what does it mean to have a prophet? What is the role of prophet? What does it mean to sustain a prophet? What is the relationship between prophet, God and humanity? I think the old, as I've said many times, I think the Old Testament gives us some things. I think Jewish thinkers have a lot to say about this. Abraham, Joshua, Heschelbroke, great book called the Prophets. So I think there's a lot of stuff that we could work with there. We need to figure out what our theology of prophets is. Again. We, I think we think we know, but there's still a lot of thinking to be done there.

John Dehlin [03:20:21] It's so weird that like mission, you know, the first missionary discussion, God speaks to prophets and prophets tell us what God wants. It's built into our core value proposition. And as a church, we just seem so hesitant to want to actually use it these days.

Patrick Mason [03:20:37] Well, what we. It's a young church, it's only 200 years old, and we have relied for 200 years on doctrine, which means authoritative statements about certain things. So I have no problem with the authoritative doctrinal statement, God calls prophets in the world. I believe that. Right. That is a doctrinal statement. I can get behind the theology though, and I can do that as the 19 year old. I can do that. You know, I can teach that to three year olds. Right. God calls prophets in the world. That's a simple doctrinal truth. To understand the theology behind that is really complex.

Margi Dehlin [03:21:10] Right.

Patrick Mason [03:21:10] Well, what does a call mean? Who is a prophet? How does a prophet retain agency? Right. Do prophets predict the future? What is the relationship of the prophetic word and morality? All of those questions are actually really rich and complex. And we think we know prophet should mean this. I think for the most part we've not done good enough thinking on what a profit is and what a profit does.

John Dehlin [03:21:40] Beautiful. All right. Okay. So I have like 10 pages still. They're gonna have to go another time. I have so many amazing questions from hundreds of viewers and listeners that I'm not gonna be able to get to. I feel really bad.

Patrick Mason [03:21:59] Sorry, everyone. I'm long winded in my answer.

John Dehlin [03:22:01] I apologize. I did. I did sincerely tell you that I wanted to have you turn to the table and ask us some questions. It's. I. I don't know how you're feeling in time. I don't know about what your family's expecting you. We have a couple options. We can not do that ever. We can have you ask us a couple questions now. We can take another 30 minutes and. And actually you can tell you the time.

Patrick Mason [03:22:23] Okay. Mostly right now I need to go to the bathroom.

John Dehlin [03:22:26] Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fine. So what we'll do is we'll will thank you for part two and we think we're going to bring Patrick back for a quick part three. Thank you for joining us. Don't go away. We'll see you all again hopefully for a quick part three on Mormon stories. Thanks, everybody. Patrick, this has been amazing.

Patrick Mason [03:22:43] Thank you.

John Dehlin [03:22:44] All right, thanks, Margi.

Part Three: Bridging Believing and Post-Mormon Communities

Part 3 of 3 · Ep. 1658

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. I am your host, John Dehlin. It is September 6, 2022. We are in part three of what I think is a very epic and important is very epic, repetitive and epic. And I think important interview with Dr. Patrick Q. Mason, author of like 10 books, but the ones that we're mentioning today, Restoration, God's call to the 21st century world, which I want to do three hours just on this book. It's that good. He also has a new book coming out called Proclaim Peace the Restoration's Answer to an Age of Conflict, co authored with J. David Pulsifer. He's also the author of Planted, which is one of the first books that came out on helping people navigate a faith crisis. And we just spent six hours plus with Patrick and we just scratched the surface. I've still got 10 pages of questions I didn't get to ask you, but I did promise you that we would allow you to turn the tables and ask me and Margi questions. Margi's taking a quick bathroom break. She'll right back. But I've been a little bit tough on you sometimes. I've been a little bit critical. You probably have thoughts and feelings and questions you want to ask. No questions, off limits, brass knuckles. Put them on if you want. I know you're all about, you know, mix mixing it up and all that.

Patrick Mason [00:01:21] Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:01:22] But yeah, let's. Let's give you a chance to ask some questions.

Patrick Mason [00:01:25] No, thanks, John. And this is great. I really enjoyed the conversation. The six hours flew by. I apologize to the listeners. It probably doesn't fly by for them, but it was fun for us. And thanks for this. I mean, it was really fun. You know, I just thought I was coming on the show for you to interview me. And then when you said, hey, what if we turn the tables? I mean, that's a cool idea and it shows a lot of openness on your side, too, to turn things around. Right. Hey, Margi, welcome back. So, you know, as I thought about what to talk about, and I have a list, I have multiple pages here, too, that we're not going to get to all of it. And I thought about what I wanted to say. The first thing that I want to say, and I want to say this quite sincerely, is just how sorry I am for. Because I know the two of you have been through a lot. I know that you've been called a lot of names. People have said. People in the church have said a lot of really nasty things. About you. And I know that as a spouse, Margi, undoubtedly you've felt that as well, seen that and heard that. And I hope. I don't know if anybody's been directed at you directly, but I know you're in this as a team, and I know that people on my side have felt hurt and felt sometimes not seen or misjudged. So I understand some of the feelings behind that, but it's just not right and it's not okay. We are brothers and sisters. We are not enemies. So I don't have any authority to apologize for anybody. Right. The apology business is weird, but I'm just really sorry for the name calling and the meanness that sometimes you've been on the. On the receiving end of. I'm sorry.

John Dehlin [00:03:33] Thank you, Patrick.

Patrick Mason [00:03:35] And I'm sorry, Margi, you've had to go through that, too. And I'm sorry, too. I was thinking, too, about all of your listeners who, a lot of whom have gone through these kinds of experiences and have felt on the wrong end of people's judgment in the church or from family members and misunderstanding and no doubt hard words have been said. Maybe they've said hard words, but hard words have been said back. I hope we can do better all to one another. I don't care what your relationship to the church is. We can all do better at loving each other. And so. So anyway, I just wanted to say that.

John Dehlin [00:04:16] Thank you.

Patrick Mason [00:04:18] With. With that said, can you. And I know you've probably talked about this in some other forums, but maybe some people are going to be listening because they want to hear what I have to say or something like that. Can. Can the two of you talk about, just on a personal level, what that's felt like sometimes to. To be called the names, to be demonized, to be. And again, people have their reasons. People have their hurt feelings. People speak out of anger and misperception and so forth, but just on a human level. John and Margi, how has it felt to know all these things that people have said about. You

Feeling Misunderstood Across the Mormon Spectrum

John Dehlin [00:05:08] go first. No, you take it. Okay. Oh, wow. So I think the hardest part of it is just feeling fundamentally misunderstood because when somebody says you're evil or a predator or like a spiritual Jack Kevorkian, I've been called or, you know, number one, enemy to the church or when it's said that we hate the church or trying to tear down the church or, you know, what, what. What processes in my mind is. Because I used to have that opinion about Ed Decker, used to have that opinion about the Tanners, like, what? The benefit that I have is that I've been in many of their shoes as a devout Orthodox believer. And so I can go. I was there once. So I do. I do feel like, and I'm not trying to be condescending, I do feel like I start with kind of just a base. Like, I get it. I'm. To you, it seems like I'm attacking what's most sacred and precious to you. And of course, so in some sense, it's like my friend Tom Grover once said to me, they don't boo nobody's. Like, I'm. I'm in the arena. I'm speaking out against an organization that people care about that means a lot to people. And I wouldn't have bought that first microphone if I didn't, you know, know on some level that this was going to happen and that I needed to just. Just pull up, pull up my bootstraps and, and just move forward, just knowing that I'm going to be misunderstood by good people. So in some sense, I bring a lot of acceptance to it. And even I feel like I try and bring compassion because you don't. I don't think you see me belittling people that belittle me. I don't think you see me even arguing with people that the disparage me. I think generally I tend to ignore that stuff. And when in my. In my best self, I try and answer it constructively, and of course, I've failed. But. But. But there is a core sense of feeling deeply disappointed that I'm so misunderstood because to this day, I don't hate the Mormon Church. I love. I love the Mormon Church. I would not do this if I didn't. Like, when I hear about your experience as a Mormon, that's how I feel like I got to marriage, feeling like I was the luckiest person in the world to be Mormon. And when you think about the fact that I lost my faith in 2001 and I stayed actively engaged for the better part of 14 years after completely losing my orthodox, literalistic faith, I hope that's a testimony of how much I love this institution and feel like it was doing a lot of good in the world. So not only have I always loved the church, I still do, and I really love the Mormon people, and I really respect belief. And I'm. I often feel like if I had a magic wand, people think that if I had a magic wand, if I was like Voldemort, which people call me, and if I had that magic wand and I could wave it, that I would make the church disappear. That's actually not true. If I had a magic wand and I could wave it, what would happen would be everyone who was in the church, committed to the church, giving their life to the church, who would want to know all the facts about the church's history, and who would want to know the full implications of that, and who would want to understand how the church can sometimes harm marginalized people. If I could wave a magic wand, only the people that would somehow want to know that stuff, right? They could know it just as a matter of informed consent. And then I would literally not care one stitch if all those people said, well, I still want to believe, like Patrick, I still want to be in it. I would say, yay. Like, for me, it was literally just this idea of how did I get to my 30s before I learned about all these problems? I may have made different decisions. And it's not even that. The weird thing is, is I still feel like the luckiest guy in the world to have been raised Mormons like you. But there's. The church taught me too well about the importance of truth and the importance of honesty and the importance of courage taught me too well. So I just feel like everybody deserves to know. And the harm needs to. The harm that you so emotionally spoke to, that harm's unacceptable. It's got to go down. And so that magic wand, that's all it would do. It would make the. The harm go away. And it would, it would. It would somehow infuse informed consent throughout the church. That's all I want. I don't want to see the church destroyed. I see the church is doing a lot of good and meaning a lot of good to a lot of people. That's what I want. So to be seen as someone who hates the church, to be seen as someone who wants to tear the church down or destroy belief, it's hurtful because it's not. It's not who I am. And it just hurts to be so fundamentally misunderstood, especially when you're trying to alleviate suffering, keep families from being split up, prevent divorces, prevent fractured families and that sort of thing. So that's the hardest part. It's not the name calling. It's not the fact that some people hate me. I don't see a lot of that. I don't. When I go around Salt Lake City, it's, thank you, John. It's John, I love your stuff, John. Keep going. That's 99.9% of what I get. The emails that I Get a thousand to one are positive. I almost never get negative email at all. There are a few haters. I think the harm that it's done to my kids, that's, that's the serious stuff. And I'm going to turn the time over to Margi to answer what she wants to say about any of this.

Margi Dehlin [00:11:26] You know, I think I feel similarly in that I think I have a, I have understanding and I had an expectation that for people, especially in the church, how they would view us. So that wasn't really surprising. I think I prepared a little bit for that and I anticipated that I think for, for me. And I love John's on some level positive spin because I do think he, he has trauma from like diagnosed ptsd, from attacks like, meaning attacks from. It can be external like newspaper articles or external people kind of coming after him and saying he's a predator. But the ones that I really didn't anticipate and have been the hardest were internal, meaning people we knew personally who actually knew us or came into our home and had dinner with our kids who then said awful things or turned around and made accusations that were really. I think that is a piece of the puzzle that I wasn't really prepared for. No member that I know of has reached out to my children, but there are ex Mormons that have reached out to my kids in really ways that like with boundary issues and said some things that are really, have been really, really hurtful. So I think it's that close criticism or the close attacks, those internal from the ex Mormon community and that kind of infighting. It's almost like the, the we always compare it to kind of. But at the same time I'm going to say like this is a choice. We choose to be here. We. And I'm here in a different, on a different level than John is. And that is also by choice. But I really do mindfully step onto this ground when I'm in it and then I also try to step off of it when I'm done, when I'm with my family, when I'm in nature. And I think that's been really key for me keeping my own mental health and balance. But yeah, that, that's how I would kind of talk about that.

Patrick Mason [00:13:53] Yeah, thanks.

John Dehlin [00:13:56] Thanks for asking.

Patrick Mason [00:13:57] Yeah. Yeah. Well, what kind of. As a follow up to that, John, so let's say you've talked a lot about how one of the purposes or aims, I don't know if it's in the mission statement of Mormon stories is to alleviate suffering. Right. Let's say. And maybe this has actually happened. But just hypothetically, let's say a couple sits down with you and says, you know, a mother or a father or both of them, and say, hey, we. We have a child who. Who left the church because of listening to Mormon stories. And. And I know you say and. And that means our grandchildren have never been into the. They're not exposed to the. And let's say these people say, yeah, we acknowledge their problems, right? But our grandchildren are never even going to be exposed to the good things about Mormonism, right? And this has really strained our family relationships. So talk about alleviating suffering. What about our suffering? So I understand that you're speaking to and ministering to our child, right, who has found their way out of this church, and we can even respect and support that, but we're in a lot of pain because of that. What about our suffering?

John Dehlin [00:15:16] Yeah, that's a great question. It's really powerful. And believe it or not, like, would you believe it if I told you that there's a part of me that's sad that I'm not in the church still? Would you believe there's a part of me that suffers? What would you imagine would happen every time my kids bump their knee? Every time. You know, as all humans do, whenever my kids have any sort of struggle, I bet you can imagine what. What. What goes on in my mind. Can you guess?

Patrick Mason [00:15:52] You're praying for them to do, to. To be okay, to be protected, Right?

John Dehlin [00:15:56] Possibly. But also, like, what if I had. What if I had raised him in the church? What if they had a church? What if I. What if we had been able to find a way to stay? What if I hadn't been kicked out? What if they had been able to have that community? What if they hadn't have experienced all that marginalization? I guess all I'm saying is, is, like, I. It's not like, never once, number one, never once have I told anyone to leave the church. Like, I understand when LGBT people, for example, feel like they have to, it's a matter of life or death. But I've counseled with tens of thousands of people, and I don't think you can find one person that will ever say, yeah, John said, get the. Get the heck out of there. Like, not only do I think it's counterproductive to tell people what to do with decisions like that, I think. I think it's unethical. And not only that is I. I want the maximum joy for the maximum number of people. And all the time people come to me and say, I'm struggling with the church, but I'm not sure if I should stay or go. And what people won't maybe believe is that more often than not my advice is, I can't give you advice. But like, why would you leave if you could stay? There's so much if it's working for you. Community, spirituality, meaning, purpose, morals, structure, resolutions about the afterlife, identity. Like, that stuff's not easy to come by in this world. And, and another part of the complicating factor there is that I've tried to build secular community. I've tried to kind of navigate filling all the holes and even creating programs or systems or communities to fill all the holes that get developed when someone leaves a religion. And I don't think we've even scratched the surface of providing people a package of what they need that really competes with what a really good religion is able to offer. And so this probably may not land with you, but I actually feel that same pain even for people who are struggling in it. And I, I get no joy out of taking people out. That's not my goal. And so I think I would say I'm sorry for that pain. I don't think, like, I don't think I caused it. I think you'd have to put that on Joseph's behavior or the problems in the Book of Mormon or the church's LGBT policies or race policies or gender or women policies. Like, I don't feel responsible if people learn about the problems with the church through me because I'm not the author of the problems. And more often than not, orthodox Mormons don't turn on an eight hour podcast episode hosted by an apostate. Most people have serious doubts or lose their faith before overcoming a Mormon Stories. And the role Mormon Stories provides is just to help them not feel so alone, to help them feel like they're not crazy, to help them find community and ideas and role models and support so they can just figure out what's next. But I know your pain is real. I know your pain is real. I don't delight in it. It's not, you know how like on, on, on It's a Wonderful Life, a bell, every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings. It's not like in John's world. Every time somebody leaves the Mormon Church, a bell rings and I'm happy. I'm sad about this whole situation. This is a church I loved and these are people that I love and I just want the most joy in the least suffering and the most truth for the most people. And that's why I'm so. That's why I just told you that this is one of the highlights of my 18 years, is you coming here to talk to me, because I believe I started Mormon stories of the idea that somehow constructive, open, sincere dialogue was the answer. And I did it for about 10 years, and then I got excommunicated. And honestly, a lot of the stuff I read implanted, a lot of THE STUFF Thomas McConkey says, A lot of the stuff that Tom Christofferson says, a lot of the stuff that Dan Witherspoon or things that are now shared in the progressive Mormon communities are things that I was trying to say and trying to encourage back before they excommunicated me. And so I had this naive optimism in dialogue and openness. And in some sense, I still do. And for me, you coming on Mormon stories and engaging me restores my hope that maybe we can find a way through all this that's more constructive than the past 10 or 15, 15 years. And if we can find a way to continue this and model it, I think we'll have less heat and more light. And I believe in the peace principles that you're trying to advocate for. I want to get into your book, and I believe. I love that. You know, you said in Restoration, one of the things that really resonated with me, that made me angry at you for a little bit, is you're like, we need. We don't. We don't need moats. We don't need drawbridges. We. We don't need walls. And. And so, like, then when I said, come on, and you couldn't at the time, I'm like, now, wait, do you mean that or are you just saying that? But you're here, so you mean it. And I, you know, and I'm inspired by that. And ex Mormons have just as much to repent for as believing Mormons do in terms of being angry and lashing out and being hurtful. So I want more peace. I want more love. I want more unity. I'm sorry for the pain. To you and everyone who feels like I've been a part of increasing the pain, all I can say is I'm sorry. I feel it, too. I don't want it. And let's work together to reduce the pain and suffering in our community. And I will show up. I hope you feel respected in how we've dialog today. And I can promise to still be. I had someone who was tuning in was like, this is the old John de Lynn. Like, I've always been this John de Lin. I just haven't you. I've been spicy and angry at times, but I've never changed. This is still me. This isn't like me being a chameleon. I want this type of constructive dialogue. We all lost our way a little bit, but let's. Let's bring it back and let's find a way forward that has less suffering than where we've come from. That's my quick answer.

Patrick Mason [00:22:29] No, that's. Thank you for that. That's. That's amazing. Let me ask a couple of follow ups.

Margi Dehlin [00:22:35] I'm good.

John Dehlin [00:22:36] Okay.

Patrick Mason [00:22:36] Okay. Okay.

John Dehlin [00:22:40] I'm more long winded than you, by the way.

Patrick Mason [00:22:42] That would be very hard to do. I don't think so. Okay, let me ask a couple follow ups on that because I feel that. I hear that, I believe that. But let me press you just like you pressed me earlier. Okay. So I was listening just in the last few days, I just listened to your episode with Steve Pynaker, which is a great episode, actually. That was really interesting to hear you open up about some of those things. But here are three statements you made during that episode. You said that you are trying, quote, trying to take people out of a harmful cult that hurts people. That's a direct quote. You said that Mormon theology is, quote, a big jumbled mess, unquote, and that your purpose is to help Latter Day Saints, quote, wake up from intellectual and spiritual bondage, unquote. So, and that wasn't like three years ago or five years ago. I think that was two episodes ago. Right. So I want to believe you when you say, I've never told anybody, leave the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. But if I'm sitting down with somebody who says, I would like to take you out of a harmful cult that is hurting you, that whose beliefs are a big jumbled mess, and I want to wake you up from intellectual bondage. You don't have to say, leave the LDS Church. Right?

John Dehlin [00:24:12] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [00:24:13] So even if that phrase never comes out of your mouth, either individually or privately or publicly, haven't you been saying that for the last X number of years?

John Dehlin [00:24:24] Yeah. Yeah, man. Fair. And I love it. And guilty, guilty of. I am so guilty of using careless and sometimes irresponsible speech and rhetoric. And I was just thinking about, like, I apologize to you on that Steven Pineaker episode. And then my brother was listening to an LDS discussions episode where he said, I mentioned you in like a somewhat critical way. And I'm like, man, what do I do with that? Like, on the one hand, I, like, finally built a good bridge with Patrick and them, and I'm like, I don't remember that. But he's like, yeah, you listed a bunch of apologists. And, you know, so, like. Yeah, I don't. I don't. All I can.

Patrick Mason [00:25:16] And friends can criticize each other. I'm okay with that.

John Dehlin [00:25:18] Yeah, right.

Patrick Mason [00:25:19] I'm okay with that. So sorry to interrupt.

John Dehlin [00:25:21] No, but I don't know. I. There's no excuse and there's no defense. I. I have been and continue to be careless with my speech, and I'm not proud of it. Believe it or not, I'm tormented by it. And every day I think I was. I was careless in that episode or I got too heated. You've heard me. Even with you. I once did an episode where I called it Caffeinated John, and I literally had to take it down and rerecord it.

Patrick Mason [00:25:49] Like, I appreciate it, actually. I mean, you didn' to do that, right? But you did the decaffeinated version. I still didn't agree with everything you said on that, but. But I appreciated you did it.

John Dehlin [00:25:57] I have a problem controlling my passion and my speech and. And I guess it makes me look insincere when I apologize. And I get that. I. But I. All I can say is I don't like it, I want to change it, and this is not an excuse. But I do think I can say, in addition to whatever changes I need to make, I'm going to go back to a point I made last. Last episode, which is the flds Warren Jeff's thing. When I'm isolated, when I'm called evil, when I'm avoided, when people won't come on the show, when. When people say bad things about me, gossip about me, and then I just feel alone and isolated and judged and kind of neglected or betrayed by friends. I'm just going to tell you without claiming this as an excuse, it's. It's harder. It's harder to maintain the poise and the respect and the dignity that I want to. That's not an excuse. I'm just explaining my experience. But I can tell you this, engaging with you, having more dialogue, as long as we're respectful, it's going to make it harder for me and it's going to make. It's going to soften my heart. And honestly, I think it's an illustration of what Jesus himself probably taught. A soft answer turneth away wrath, but grievous words stir up anger. Walk a mile in, you know, love your enemies, walk a mile. Why did Jesus say all that you're loving me? You could easily see me as an enemy or as treating you like an enemy and you're loving me. And I'm just telling you that's, that has the potential to be transformative for me. And I'm not saying that to manipulate you into doing something that's a true principle is a trap. Like, I still consider myself Christian in many ways, and I, I, I not only want to be a better Christian in that sense, but I think, I think that when I witness true Christianity, whether it's Chris Thomas or Steven Pineaker or you or so many other Christians that have inspired me, I like being around good Christians. It's good for me. I learn a lot. Phil Barlow like so all I can say is I'm going to benefit. If you're out there and you want to see John and Mormon stories, be a little less acerbic, a little less critical. Engage with me. I'll treat you with respect. Treat me with respect and don't silence me and stick me in a corner and ignore me if you can. I'll help you sell some books. I'll help, I'll, I'll give you a chance to fairly articulate your positions. But just don't totally ignore and isolate and just, and disregard me. Let's find a way, a more constructive way. And I think you'll have a better, you, the community will have a better result if we constructively engage. Is that a cop out? And I'm not trying to deflect the blame.

Patrick Mason [00:29:07] It's not a cop out.

Margi Dehlin [00:29:08] Marty, I was gonna. Can I add a couple things that I've observed just about you as well

Patrick Mason [00:29:14] from the front row seat with regard

Margi Dehlin [00:29:16] to this, just a little bit. You could tell me if I'm off, but I do think the hard part about, you know, living being human is this idea of paradox, that two seemingly opposing things can be true. I think you love the church. I think you're really angry at the church too. And both those things are true because. And honestly, the anger probably wouldn't be there if you didn't love it at some point. So both those things are true. So you're experiencing both things from him. Right. And I think that's part of, you know, being alive, honestly. And I'm noticing more and more paradox, you know, the more I live. So. And honestly too, with that is this idea of if you looked at his inbox, if you looked at the amount of texts he gets because love him, he puts his information everywhere he gets. So he has so much like incoming stories. Can you help with this? Like just really, really difficult situations. He is an absolute holder of people's stories, not just on Mormon stories, but like everywhere. If they, if people need help, he is the person that oftentimes people will go to. And so what happens? How long have you been doing it?

John Dehlin [00:30:48] 20, 20 years.

Margi Dehlin [00:30:50] Over that time when you're exposed to people's suffering in such an acute way, like one human, that's one human over 20 years, hearing thousands of stories, holding it all with not a lot of easy closure around those stories is, I think you process it in the best way you can. And what you witness in John sometimes is you'll witness balanced John where the coping is covering it and his wise mind is at the forefront. And then there are times when you experience John on overload, which will happen if he gets emails or you know what, for two weeks he's reading people's, you know, sex abuse stories that come in and then you're going to get probably a little more of angry John. And I think just having that perspective and you know, we're working on that and John's working on more space and more processing time and fun and getting coaching help in that process. But it's a lot, it's a lot in this space. It's a lot to hold. And so yes, there's that paradox of love. The church also probably really angry at the church. And that suffering goes somewhere for him as the holder, sometimes it's wise and sometimes he's emoting because there's nothing else he feels like he can do, you know.

Patrick Mason [00:32:22] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think, you know, the two of you have been in it so long and I like that phrase, you know, the holder of these stories. You know, one of the things that people always talk about, like with pastors and stuff, like who's pastoring to the pastors. Right. Who's ministering to the ministers. And it, it can be really hard to hold that, hold that in yourself in a, at a much smaller scale because I haven't been at that same scale that you have been nor for as long. But, but I've talked about this with, with some of my other friends who are in this space. It's like we're just making this up. Like nobody taught me how to go and do these firesides. Nobody, nobody taught, nobody taught me how to think about these things with nuance. And complexity. And I. I grew up a standard, correlated Bruce Armaconkey Church. Right. And so, like, I'm making this up as I go on. And, and, and. And mine is again, in terms of scale, scope, longevity, it's. It is not where you've been. And so, so.

John Dehlin [00:33:33] Yeah, but I don't want to make excuses because every day I beat myself up. My brother will call me and say, you were too angry. You were too. And I. And he's, you know. Anyway. Can I add one small thing? Sorry. I'll be quick. Like, for the longest time on Mormon stories, I don't think you will have ever heard me call the church occult. And even to this day, I try not to. I think it'll be rare that you ever. What? It's true that I just probably said that I believe you, that I said that a couple episodes ago. I think I remember saying it and thinking, wow, I think I just overstepped a little bit. But I. But I did say it, and it was very recent. I do want to say that my. My turn a little bit. For probably 18 years, I was not willing to go there. And I think I. Actually, Margi will tell you I had a big fight with her and another associate of ours who had been just deeply hurt by the church. And this happened to be a person who. Who, you know. You know, you can pick certain marginalized groups the church has hurt. This was a member of one of those marginalized groups. And I was arguing that the church wasn't a cult and that it wasn't helpful to call the church a cult. This is just like six months ago or a year ago. And then this person was saying, look at it from my point of view. And all the people that have died by suicide because of these policies, because of the devotion, all the families that have been torn apart and all the. All the shunning that's happened and all the behavioral controls that are out of bounds. And that. That's when I. I flipped it and said, this person said to me, if. If my experience had been within a Scientology or Jehovah's Witness context, would you have. Would you have called it a cult like experience? And I was like, yeah, I would. And they're like, the only reason you're resisting calling this a cult like experience is because of the context that you grew up in and your love for the church. That's the only thing holding you back, because if this were Scientology, it wouldn't be a question. And so while I agree with you, Patrick, that the C word is more often not constructive than constructive. I don't know what to call nxivm. I don't know what to call Bhagwan Shrirajneesh. I don't know what to call Jonestown if not a cult. And if I'm just trying to be open and honest, I do see cult like behaviors in Mormonism. And so while I used non constructive language in that particular conversation, and I'm sure I've done it at least a handful of other times, number one, I wish I hadn't. Number two, I think there's an important conversation to be had about what are the traits of high demand religions or coercive organizations or harmful organizations. And there's an extent there's a reasonable conversation to be had about in what areas the church meets criteria at an equal part, two or sometimes even worse than other religions that we feel more comfortable calling cults. But that none of that is to excuse language that polarizes and demeans. I'm not trying to do that, but that I do think there's a conversation that needs to be had.

Patrick Mason [00:36:43] Yeah, absolutely. And it doesn't. And it's that it's that more precise conversation that I think is useful. Right. To isolate the particular things and say this. And rather than landing on a term and say, okay, now I know everything I need to know about the LDS Church because I call it a cult.

John Dehlin [00:37:02] Yeah. Yeah. And that's your description of your ward is beautiful. Now there's a flip description which is what goes on in the temple or what goes on in missions, Mormon missions, where it's a different conversation. And I didn't, didn't want to stop you when you were giving that beautiful response. But I'll also answer this, Patrick, where in the history of Mormonism has a faithful scholar and a critic actually had that conversation? Like, you agree that conversation needs to be happened. And it's in 2022. It's literally probably never happened.

Patrick Mason [00:37:33] Yeah. So. Yeah, yeah. So we're, we've got a lot of work to do. So let me talk about. And this is related. And let's talk about. I mean, you talked about the kind of communities that I'm in relationship with and to some degree accountable to. Let's talk about the community that you're in relationship to and accountable to. So. And I want to narrate it through this way. So you mentioned that episode you decaffeinated and then decaffeinated version of the commentary you did on a fireside that I gave a year or two ago. And as I watched it, I could see on the screen, I don't know if it was on YouTube or something like that. I could see on the screen the comments that people were making in real time and then also the donations that were coming and I can't remember if it's a dollar number or just so and so donated. Right. And in the decaffeinated version, you know, you'd say some nice things or. Oh, that was a good point, Patrick. Or something like that. And when you did that, like, silence. And then on the comments side and then when you start going after me or the church, then like, way to go, John. Like, you know, thanks for being a truth teller and like, money, money, money, money. Right. So, so talk about that. And, and I know you, you, you can notice this too. Right? So Mormon stories over the past X number of years isn't, hasn't built its subscribership by saying nice things about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Right. And so, so talk about that, about your relationship to, to the community that supports you and that and that you're serving. It's a reciprocal relationship. Right. And what that does in terms of the stories that you tell, the tone that you take. And you know what I'm, what I'm getting at.

Relationships, Grievance Culture, and Moving Forward

John Dehlin [00:39:35] Love this question. This is so great. Thank you for asking.

Patrick Mason [00:39:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:39:38] So I'll start, I'll start with where I began, which was at Microsoft having a faith crisis. And this is just truth, like evidence. This is just fact.

Patrick Mason [00:39:48] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:39:49] Like, I was making $200,000 a year with crap ton of stock options, working with the highest level vice presidents in the company, I would for sure be worth five to $20 million right now if I had just stayed at Microsoft. So it, there's zero grounds for the argument that I got into this business for the money. Right. Then when you look at the fact that I left all that voluntarily and then like was making $15 an hour for, and that the first five years of Mormon stories, I made nothing and just did it as a labor of love and as a passion project where during that time I'm interviewing Grant Palmer, I'm interviewing Michael Quinn, I'm interviewing people that have a lot of critical things to say. Like, that was the, that was the deal. It was like, let's have believers and let's have non believers, let's have critics and let's have apologists. Let's have it all. And so, you know, that's what happened when. So not no profit motive there. And even when I started the nonprofit in 2010, there was no reason to believe that I would ever be able to make a full time living off of this. Which is partly why I got my PhD in psychology. Because I'm like, all I know is I did the podcast and a gazillion people reached out and said, my life is in free fall, Help me. And they had no one to turn to but some, some rando in North Logan who had a microphone. And so like the church certainly wasn't helping these people and a lot of there weren't other resources. So. So I stepped in literally to help prevent divorces, prevent the destruction of families, and just to help with the depression and anxiety and suicidality. I know I can say 100%, no money motive, altruistic motives. And I did all that while I was not just maintaining a full time job, but also pursuing graduate work and publishing and doing clinical work. Like outrageous levels of. And I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but outrageous levels of sacrifice, right? With no reason to believe I could make money. So, so then what happened was number one, when my tone started getting more sour in 2013, 14, 15, it wasn't because I was getting more money. Donations were slightly increasing year to year. But I can just tell you that was LGBT suicides Prop 8. That was the excommunication of people like Grant Palmer and, you know, bad apologetics that was harming people and just all the pain and suffering. So I know that, you know, it wasn't about money up until that point. And then in response to helping the church with the, the study on people who leave, helping Marlon Jensen, like giving a TED Talk to try and give a constructive model for how to support LGBT brothers and sisters as a faithful member. Creating stale DS and trying to help people figure out how to stay much like planted. And other books and websites have ended up trying to do like, what was the net effect of me just trying to do what now progressives are doing all the time. But back then was kind of new. I crossed lines that progressive never had never crossed before while trying to stay in. What did I get for that? I got excommunicated, which was hard. But then you add to that the fact that then I became a pariah to the givenses, to the Bushman's, to others, and. And people that I had helped and supported would no longer even come on the show. That makes you upset, that makes you sad. And so some of my change in tone wasn't a response to making more money. It was natural outgrowth of being punished by A church that I loved and was trying to help and by being marginalized and sort of cast aside by people that I considered to be friends. So that takes me to 2015 when I graduated with my, my PhD. By that point, I'm still making 35 bucks an hour. Like I'm not even anywhere close to the what I was making at Microsoft. So still it's not a financial proposition. So between 2015 and 2019, let's just say, was just like I'm just gonna do this non profit thing full time and see if I can even make a sustainable living and even get back to the wage that I made in 2004, 16 or 18 years earlier. So again, that wasn't about the money, that was just about I wonder if we can do, even make a living out of this because I know the pains there, I know the church still isn't fixing these problems. And it's only been in the past few years where I actually started paying myself what I, what I made when I left Microsoft 20 years ago. Not to mention all the sacrifices I and my family financially had to make. No health care, no, no therapy, no health insurance, no retirement. So I mean, you could only take the past few years as really sort of candidates for like John being in this for the money sort of thing. But even, even then I'll just say this. I could be like to this date I have people tell me, john, thank you for what you offer. I don't know anywhere else in Mormonism where I get issues dealt with in such a fair and balanced way. Because even in the past three to five years, I'm still bringing on believers, I'm still bringing on apologists that will come on the show. I'm still doing my best to be as neutral as I can be. And if I were just like, I've seen their YouTube channels right now that have like within six months surpassed my, my viewership and subscriber base. And what are they doing? They're just like, let's dance around in temple clothes, let's talk about soaking, let's make fun of profits and worst faith interpretations of. And I'm not trying to single anyone out. But all I'm saying is, is as flawed as I've been, I could have been infinitely worse. And I want to do, I want to do better. But it would be inaccurate to say that I'm just chasing the views, chasing the subscribers, chasing the money. And you kind of prove my point. Because if, if caffeinated, John, you know, if, if all, if all I was about was money. I would have just stuck with caffeinated John. What was my. You know how many people told me, john, why'd you put up decaffeinated John? I like the first John. Why would I have scrapped that if I was just about the money or just about sticking it to the church? So I'm flawed. I'm, I'm fraught. I'm, I am. I mourn every day. My weaknesses and my. Where I fall down. But I hope those are enough signs. The fact that you're here and I'm trying. I'm doing my best to treat you respectfully. I hope it shows that there are at least embers of the old John, at least embers of constructive John that are still burning. And honestly, I think there's been that John in some sense all along.

Patrick Mason [00:47:26] Yeah. But you know, so do you think that that's great? Do you think your listeners, if, if you went to full time decaffeinated John. Let's just keep using, using that metaphor. Right. If you never went into caffeinated mode, would your followers go with you there? Or do they. So I'll just say some of what I've heard in terms of people critical of Mormon stories and the entire constellation of similar things is they say this is just one more part of a culture of grievance. Right. We're in a point in our culture right now, especially in America. Right. Everybody wants to be mad all the time. And so these, regardless of how they started or whatever, at least right now there's motive and incentive for getting people mad and keeping them mad.

John Dehlin [00:48:24] Yeah, right.

Patrick Mason [00:48:25] Yeah. So, Margi.

Margi Dehlin [00:48:27] Oh, wait, I was just gonna say. Could we maybe say instead of followers. Listeners.

Patrick Mason [00:48:33] Listeners. Absolutely. Thank you. No, that's, that's. I've met up followers only in like the Facebook.

Margi Dehlin [00:48:39] No, I hear you. I hear you.

Patrick Mason [00:48:40] Right, Right. Yeah. Okay. So, but so do you get my question? Culture of grievance. Yeah. And is that what people want? And how do you resist the temptation? Because I believe you that you don't want to go there. You don't want to be an agent of division polarization. We have too much of that right now. On the other hand, you feel a calling to truth telling. Right. Which, which doesn't make people comfortable. Right. So how. Boy, how do you do both at once?

John Dehlin [00:49:09] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'll even, you know, the. One of the most hurtful accusations that has been made and it's been made recently is that I intentionally trigger a faith crisis in somebody so that then I, you know, so you can be

Patrick Mason [00:49:24] the one to have them provide myself as the.

John Dehlin [00:49:27] As the solution to their faith crisis that I'm intentionally. And again, I. You know, I told you my magic wand thing, like, if I could. I swear, if I could make it so that nobody whose life would be worse off by overall, by coming into exposure to Mormon stories would ever hear about Mormon stories, I would push that button. I don't want anyone's life to ever be worse, ever. If. If people's lives are better in the church overall, I want them to stay in the church, just full stop. I want the most joy and the least pain for literally everyone in the world. Right. The trick is, how do we navigate that? And all I can say is, is the church taught, what did Christ do? Christ healed the suffering, alleviated the suffering, and then promoted goodness. And he stood for truth on some level. So I still see myself as very Mormon. I see my values as rooted in Mormonism. Like the hymn O say what is truth? Is the fairest gem that the riches of world can produce and prices the value of truth will be when the proud, the monarch's costliest diadem is counted but dross and refused.

Patrick Mason [00:50:39] Like, I wanted to sing that, that it would have been so true.

John Dehlin [00:50:44] Is the fairest gem. Okay.

Patrick Mason [00:50:46] That rich.

John Dehlin [00:50:47] Okay. So, like, I'm. I absorb that. Like, do what is right. Do what is right. Let the consequence follow. You know what I mean? I've. I've really internalized my Mormonism. So the way I see it is that I'm trying to find excuses to not only complain, but to encourage other people to complain. And manufactured suffering. Like, that's where you and I are different. I had a genuine faith crisis when I didn't want one. I wasn't looking for it. I loved the church. Like, when I learned about the Book of Abraham for the first time, my response was, there's no way that's true. Like, my. My. My cousin told me the story of the papyrus. I'm 31. I'm like, that's. There's no way that's true.

Patrick Mason [00:51:37] Anti Mormon garbage.

John Dehlin [00:51:38] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [00:51:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:51:39] And then I go, wow. And, like, when Paul Mayfield tells me about polyandry, I'm like, you mean polygamy? He's like, no, polyandry. I'm like, that. That's not a word. And he's like, let me tell you what that means. And then I'm like, there's no way that's true. You know what I mean? And, like. And it's been, like, for my life. It's been a series of like 500. There's no way that's true. So I didn't want this. Like, like you. The church was made for me. I was loving it. It worked for me. It worked for me so well. I stayed 13 years after I stopped believing. That's how much the church worked for me. So for me, the historical problems are real and they're legitimate. And for me, the plight of the LGBT people and the deaths by suicide and the depression and the celibacy and the mixed orientation marriages and all the carnage associated with that, that's real. That's not manufactured grievance. That's. There's a body count that's in the thousands, if not tens of thousands in my opinion associated with that. There's the divorces, there's the, there's the split families, there's the, there's the alienated parents from children and grandchildren, and then there's just the people saying I gave my life to what I gave 10 of my income and all my life to something under false pretenses. That's, in my opinion, that's all real now. So is the good the church does. And that's why to me, this is complicated. And that's why I've tried to be responsible. But, but if someone's going to say I'm just creating manufactured grievances, they literally haven't spent time with these people. And I've spent time with literally tens of thousands. That's not an exaggeration. Tens of thousands of people. I've sat and I've heard their stories, I've read their emails, I've interacted with them. The podcast has hundreds of thousands of listeners. And by the way, I don't know if you know this, half of my viewer and listenership now has never been Mormon. So it's, it's ex Jews, ex Catholics, ex evangelicals, ex Jehovah's Witnesses, ex Scientologists, Mormon stories. Audience has doubled in the past year. Like how many things double in their 18th year of existence? That's hard to do. Yeah, and I'm not bragging. I'm just saying we're, we are exploring something that's real. It's real and there's real suffering. And it's not just that. I can't tell you how many people have said I had scrupulosity until I lost my orthodox belief, I was suicidal. Until I lost my orthodox belief, I, you know, like our marriage was on the rocks until I stopped believing those harmful things and, and let go and loosened up and. And all the sexual shame. I was. I was, you know, like, I was like, thought I was the worst person in the world because my wife caught me looking at porn. And now that, like, I no longer think that's evil and my wife has been reeducated. Actually, I'm not that interested in porn because now I have a healthier view of sexuality and porn is no longer interesting to me because I have a healthy sex life. So, like, the number of people who have been benefited, I'm not going to say from leaving Mormonism, but from leaving orthodox, fundamentalist, healthy harm. Sorry, not healthy. Harmful, toxic versions of Mormonism is literally in the hundreds of thousands at this point. That's not to say I want people to leave. So I misspoke in. In my Steven Pinekker interview. It's not that I want to take people out of Mormonism. I want to take people out of toxic, harmful ideologies. And I don't care if they stay in the church or not. I just want people to have as much joy and as less suffering as possible. So I don't know if that answers your question, but that's. That's what gets me excited. It's not feeding off of grievances. I've made way too many personal sacrifices, and my wife and my kids have made way too many sacrifices. It's not worth it. It's not worth it to be hated by tens or hundreds of thousands of people, to be viewed as a bat, to be smeared, to be called a predator online, to be, you know, viewed to have it. So family members have completely cut me off. Like, there's way too much pain in my role. Like somebody said, john, you make too much money. I'm like, I wouldn't do it for less at this point. It's too painful. It's too hard. You do it. You give up your career, be viewed as a. As an enemy to a church that people love. Deal with the smears and the backstabbing and the derision and the constant stress. And that's just that, you know, even the good stuff of, like, everybody saying thank you and wanting to spend, you know, and reaching out to you, and that's all hard, too. And, like, just going to the grocery store and having people want to thank you, I love it. But my family doesn't love it if we're at a movie theater or a ball game or a concert and you want to say thank you. Let me just tell you my story. I love that. But my wife and kids want to.

Patrick Mason [00:56:45] Literally, they just want to watch the ball game.

John Dehlin [00:56:47] They just want to. They want to, like, never go anywhere with me ever. Because can't we just have a nice day at the. At the Jazz game? And that's not to disparage the people that are so generous with their compliments. But all of this is miserable in. In many fundamental core ways. And so, like, I wouldn't wish this job on anybody. And so no amount of money is worth what I do. And I don't mean to sound like a martyr. I believe that I do this for some very core altruistic values that, ironically, I learned from the Mormon Church and. And from how I read the life of Jesus Christ, frankly. Does that seem.

Margi Dehlin [00:57:30] Yeah, I loved your question. Can I just. Yeah, like, all the love for that question, because I think it's real. It's something I see. It's something we've talked about. This idea of being reinforced, measuring by views, what platform you're on, TikTok versus Instagram videos. It's. It's real, this tension between, you know, purpose and intention as opposed to, like, what success means or. And it is there. It is on a level about impact. Right. So how do we measure that? Do we measure through views or, you know, if not through views? And so it is something we talk about a lot. And so. And it's something that I feel like I think about a lot. Even this idea. Let's go back to paradox again, okay? This idea that what we do is we are kind of a vehicle for stories for. And John, more than I like, I'm a newbie right here. But what I'll say is, like, that can be. It can be powerful to tea and healing to tell your story. That's true. Like, we've seen it. To speak it out loud. It can also, you know, it can also be something that re traumatizes you. It can also be something that is a cage for you that they're both true. And so if we're. If our platform is telling stories and you want to give voice to something that's real, let's just take the sex abuse thing. Voice is important. This is reality. But then there's this tension. Are we re traumatizing a community? And that is. That is a hard call. These calls are hard to make. And sometimes when you start in that decision, you feel sure about the balance, and you get to the end and you feel like, wow, that may have been the wrong call. And that's what's hard here. But it is something that I think, you know, we try to be Intentional about and that we're aware about. We're aware of this tension between how stories can be healing and also how they can be re. Traumatizing. And it's. It's a tough. It's a tough call.

John Dehlin [00:59:56] It's valid.

Patrick Mason [00:59:57] All right, so I. I know you. Speaking of family, I think I know you've. Guys, you guys have to go do something tonight. Do you have time for two quick lightning round questions?

John Dehlin [01:00:04] How can I say no?

Patrick Mason [01:00:07] You can say no.

Margi Dehlin [01:00:08] Healthy boundaries.

Patrick Mason [01:00:09] Yeah, healthy boundaries. That's how you say no.

Margi Dehlin [01:00:11] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:00:11] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [01:00:11] Really? I have many, many more. But. But I'm just gonna ask two. Okay, so one. So. So one of my good friends down in Southern California became a guy named Phil Zuckerman. I don't know if you've run across.

Building Post-Mormon Community and Finding Meaning

John Dehlin [01:00:24] Oh, yeah, love Phil. Okay. Yeah.

Patrick Mason [01:00:25] So Phil, secular life for those who don't know. Yeah, exactly. So Phil is a professor at Pomona Pitzer College. Excuse me, Sociologist of religion. Amazing guy. He's as secular as I am Mormon, and has written a number of books about secularism, the secular life, faith, no more people leaving religion, and so forth. So Phil, one thing he told me reminded me of something you said earlier about the importance of these kinds of relationships. Like, nobody would have ever predicted that Patrick Mason and Phil Zuckerman would have become. He actually became one of my best friends in Southern California. We went to lunch all the time, talked about stuff. I gave him a copy of Planted. He emailed me back like a few days later. He's like, I don't know what's going on, but I'm reading this book and loving it. Like, what's wrong? Right. You know, and he said he always alternates because he writes public columns and does a lot of stuff. He says, I always alternate between angry atheist and happy humanist. And he says, oftentimes I'll be sitting down writing a column and just mad at religion. You know, the latest thing that's happened in the news, right? Something every day that you could be pissed off at religion, right? And he says, I'll be sitting down. And I'm just. I'm angry at religion. And I'm angry and I'm writing this thing and then this pops in my head. I said, does this describe Patrick? And he says, oh, crap. And he's like, I have to delete the paragraph, right? I mean, that's what these. And I'm no saint. I'm a latter day saint, right? But I'm nobody special. But because of this relationship. And I'm the same Way in terms of talking about atheists, humanists, secularists and so forth. I think about my friends like Phil, right? And I don't let people, you know, I hear all the time, oh, how could you ever live a life without God? Well, I know a lot of people who do it really well, actually, you know, and so these relationships really matter. So back to Phil. So he said at a conference once where we were talking about secularization, we had all the charts and graphs about how everybody was leaving religion, and most people in the room were Mormon or religious. So he was kind of like somber. And then Phil got up and gave a presentation. He's like, I know y' all think this is bad news. He says, this is all great news. Those charts are great for me, right? He says, this is great. But he says, let me tell you this. And he says, I don't believe any of this God stuff or whatever. But he said, I'll tell you what. So when you're all going to church on Sunday morning, I play soccer every week. Same guys, same commuter. We've been playing soccer together for years. He says, if I get sick, if I get cancer, those guys aren't going to take care of me. He said, they're my friend. They're good friends, right? We've been playing together for years, but nobody's going to take care of me, right? And he says the thing, and I've heard you say similar things. I just want to hear you comment about this a little bit more. He said the thing that secularism, for all of its goods, for all of its benefits. He says the thing that secularism has not figured out how to do is to create positive, constructive communities of care at the local level. He said, we can create government systems, we can create all kinds of things, but communities of care at the local level. That meant that he didn't say minister, but like to take care of people in their need. He said, nobody does that. Like religious institutions, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, whatever. He says secularists have not reproduced that.

Margi Dehlin [01:03:40] So.

Patrick Mason [01:03:41] So how do you. I know you've tried, you know, with. Thrive, with. With other kinds of things, right? How do you create positive communities? Religion isn't going to work for everybody.

John Dehlin [01:03:51] Yeah, right.

Patrick Mason [01:03:52] For people who leave, for people who can't stay, or people who never believe in the first place. How do you create positive secular communities of care?

John Dehlin [01:04:00] Yeah, that is the question. That is the question that I've been asking for myself for the past 20 years. Like, I. I read Kaim Potox, the Chosen and the Promise. I also read My name is Asher Lev, but I read David's harp. I don't know if you've read David's heart, but there's this really touching moment. I think it's Davida who like is down and out and you know, kind. Potok was kind of secular Jew. But who is it that comes to Davida's rescue when she's down and out? It was an orthodox believing family member and, and that's always stuck with me. And because I had, you know, my parents got divorced when I was in middle school and my family was just jacked up for many years. The church was there for me. Leaders were there for me to tell me I was great and to give me opportunities and to help me stay in a healthy, constructive way. And that's never left me. And so whether it's the oasis communities I formed helped form five oasis communities, which were secular churches along the Wasatch front over a period of several years. And then Thrive was the latest iteration of that. I, I came to the conclusion that without. And this, don't be offended by this, but like without guilt, without shame, without exorbitant truth claims about the afterlife, it's hard to get people to show up to stack chairs. Yeah, it's hard to get people to, you know, deliver casseroles. And I'm not saying that's all religion offers. Religion offers other things, things too. But like, I think there's some, you know, guilt, shame, you know, threats about the afterlife and promises about the afterlife. I think those are some important parts of the formula that secularism just doesn't have. And maybe that maybe also spirituality or theology or whatever.

Patrick Mason [01:05:48] But yeah, I think there's other positive strands. Right.

John Dehlin [01:05:51] But all I'm going to say is like, fair. And I look at this challenge because I've tried it and found failed over and over and over again. Not failed. Because I think there is a robust secular post religious community that's emerging. It's one of the things I'm most proud of within the ex Mormon, post Mormon community is we've helped a lot, a lot, a lot of people find lifelong friends and these little, I've called them pods. And what I think of it now. You know what, Margi? Do you want to talk about our book club, Margi, or do you want.

Margi Dehlin [01:06:25] Sure, but you can jump in too. But in answer to your question, like, we have a group of people I feel like would take care of me if I got sick, but they're people that we kind of brought together as a book club. We Read books now we travel some together. We go on dates and break off and, you know, do things that way. So I don't know about like a grandson scheme, solution, but what I can say is this kind of pod, this little group of us that get together on the regular and stay connected has been the most rewarding experience of. And book club with extras. We've got some extra.

John Dehlin [01:07:12] We have a couple pods. Yeah. We actually have a couple friends and

Margi Dehlin [01:07:15] I've got a few. Yeah. But it has been the most rewarding experience of community for me in my life because.

John Dehlin [01:07:25] Yeah. And just to add to that, like, you would know how thin the Mormon community felt to me the moment I was excommunicated because our little community, all

Patrick Mason [01:07:36] that became communities disappeared.

John Dehlin [01:07:38] It became a ghost town, a spiritual communal ghost town in North Logan. In our little community, we had been there 12 years, watch people's kids, serve them, delivered them casseroles, help them sod their lawns. And then most of them just, it was, it was, it was gone in, in the snap of my fingers. And I've never heard from those people since. Like, so, like, there's a degree to which that Mormon community is completely dependent on mutual ascent to a certain set of belief propositions. And in that sense, you could argue there's some superficiality and some thinness to the robustness of that community. Whereas on the flip side, these pods that we've built feel very robust, deep, meaningful, unconditionally loving in many ways. And I'll say that it's religion in a way that brought us together, you know, So, I mean, even, even our pods came through Mormonism in some way. So that's not lost on me either. So I don't know the answers, but I concluded that it's going to be as hard to create systemic, secular, meaningful community of service as it was to kind of reach the moon. Like, we're going to need that level of brain power and experimentation and innovation and creativity and sophistication because it's super hard to build community. We without guilt, shame, absolute as truth claims and promises of, of good things in the afterlife and punishment if you

Patrick Mason [01:09:11] don't behave, especially in an era of bowling alone. Right. I mean, people just aren't finding community, period.

John Dehlin [01:09:16] Yeah, right.

Patrick Mason [01:09:17] And so churches were one of the last and continue to be one of the last bastions of that. Okay.

John Dehlin [01:09:22] Yeah. That's why I don't see it as trivial to disrupt religious networks. I think, I think they provide people. My listeners of yours sometimes hate it when I say this. I Think it's disruptive to the social fabric to just, like, annihilate religious faith communities. It's never been what I want to do. I don't even. I can't even say. I do not believe the world would be better off if we snapped our fingers. All religions died. I cannot say that. That humanity would be better off. Because you know what's worse? What's. What's. What's worse than a lot of the bad things you can list? What's. What's worse to someone's health is loneliness.

Patrick Mason [01:10:05] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:10:06] Loneliness is one of the most deadly things, and sometimes loneliness is worse.

Patrick Mason [01:10:12] Nihilism.

John Dehlin [01:10:13] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:10:13] Right.

Patrick Mason [01:10:14] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:10:14] So those are all fair. And I don't have good answers, and that's why I try and maintain secular humility.

Patrick Mason [01:10:21] Good. Okay, Bunch of other questions we're not going to get to. Last question. I want to focus kind of end. On a kind of positive note. This is. This is for both of you. You can decide who goes first. So we've talked about the burden that you've carried and so forth, but what feeds your soul these days? I mean, you talked about your pods and your friends and so forth, but I want to.

Margi Dehlin [01:10:40] What.

Patrick Mason [01:10:40] What feeds your soul these days? What gives you positive energy that sustains you for the journey? Books, texts, you know, wisdom texts, practices, experiences, relationships. So what. What feeds your soul? Just right now in September 2022. What are you doing? What are you reading? What are you doing to feed your soul?

Margi Dehlin [01:11:04] Ooh. I really wanted to ask this from you, but we didn't have enough time. But now I'm so, so curious. I mean, for me, I feel like it's always the same things. It's, you know, morning meditation, it's sunlight, it's getting out in trees and hiking, it's reading, it's learning, listening to podcasts or. Yeah. Exposing myself to kind of new ideas. It's honestly, in some ways not being productive. Allowing myself to get out of productivity and to just be and enjoy and allow myself to enjoy this life and to feel the depth and beauty and mystery of being here. I want. I want that as much as I can kind of possibly get it.

Patrick Mason [01:11:56] I love that.

Margi Dehlin [01:11:56] And being with. Being with my people, which would include our family, our children and their significant others and kind of our pods, for sure.

Patrick Mason [01:12:08] I love that.

John Dehlin [01:12:13] I would say, for whatever reason, I believe that you can have an amazing marriage and be an amazing parent in the church. For whatever reason, I'm a thousand times better partner to Margi out of the church than when I was in it. I can't explain why. I'm not blaming the church for that. And Margi may disagree, but that's. I see her nodding. I We have a better marriage now than we've ever had the past five to seven years. I think my kids would say I have a better relationship with them than I ever had when I was. Because even though I lost my faith, I was still a very much a Mormon dad in all the bad ways. I'll say a orthodox Mormon dad in all the bad ways. I wasn't your dad. I was not a healthy dad because I was. Was all about performance and all about risk management and righteous living in a way that was alienating my kids and teaching them to lie to me and resent me. So I. One thing that brings me joy is having way better marriage and being a way better parent than I've ever been. Still have a lot of flaws and a long way to go. I would also add, I've had more deep, meaningful friendships than I would have ever imagined possible that I could never find in the church. I found that afterwards. That's kind of one area. The other area is, you know, I love good books, I love exercise, I love good food, I love all that stuff. I love karaoke. But I will say that almost very few things compare to the joy of somebody saying I was suicidal. And because of Mormon stories, I'm happy now. I was, I was depressed and now life has meaning and purpose. I, I. My wife and I are having a miserable time now. We're on the same page and we're happier than ever. Our family was fractured and divided, and now we're unified or just. And don't take this in a disparaging way, Patrick, or believers when they say thank you for giving me my life back. My life wasn't mine. I was. I was. I had given my life to something that I didn't understand. And I had made all sorts of commitments, extreme commitments under false pretenses that weren't bringing me joy. And that doesn't mean leaving the church, by the way. That can just mean changing a mindset to a progressive to a more less orthodox, less rigid, less harmful mindset, but staying in the church. But when people say to me, thank you for giving me my life back or giving my life to me for the first time, liberating me from things that were harmful or untrue. There's. It's hard to find a feeling that's better than that. And that doesn't mean that everybody who leaves, some people who leave really mess up their lives. And that makes me sad. Whenever somebody would have been better off staying, then I wish they would have stayed. Because you can mess up your life and be an ex Mormon, you can totally ruin your life and end up worse off. Please don't do that. Like, stay in the church if you're gonna go wreck your life. Like, but.

Margi Dehlin [01:15:33] But, yeah, that's a hard thing to know. I find most people don't set off.

John Dehlin [01:15:39] Yeah, but I'm a lot like you. And I'm a lot like, I bet the apostles and General Thor authorities wake up every morning saying, how can I promote joy, unite families, and alleviate suffering? So that's what's weird is that you, Patrick, me, Margi, and I think all the leaders in the church and every member and all the secular people, we all want the same thing. We just got to figure out a more peaceful and constructive way to all arrive there. I. Ironically, that's probably what Zion. That's probably what Joseph's vision for Zion was. Maybe. Yeah, maybe that's your vision.

Patrick Mason [01:16:12] It's certainly mine. Yeah, certainly mine. I mean, I think for me, Mormonism, in terms of what it adds to Christianity or the sort of complement. I think it's about exaltation, which means, for me, each human being being a person of infinite and limitless potential, and how do we achieve that on an individual and family basis? And then Zion being. How do we create transformative communities of care that transform the world? For me, it's like Jesus plus exaltation plus Zion. That's my religion. And for me, it's a powerful vision that I want to live up to and help bring about in the world. And like you said, there's a lot of other ways to say that. I hear Muslim friends and Hindu friends and secular friends say very similar things with just. With different terms.

John Dehlin [01:17:11] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [01:17:13] And. And so. So how do we. How do we do all that? Do that together? So. So thank you for coming. On Mormon stories. You do the outro.

John Dehlin [01:17:24] No, that's perfect. You say something, Margaret?

Margi Dehlin [01:17:27] I was going to just say, you know, a few final. Joy for me has been on some level, you know, leaving a structure. This idea of kind of meeting these fears that you have and then getting to be on the other side of those. So leaving Mormonism, which I think for us, on some level, leaving that structure, those expectations and whatever version we created for a family system.

Patrick Mason [01:17:58] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:17:59] And being able to see our children on the other side of that, you know, journey and struggle and become. And to realize on some level that our love the way we experience it now, it feels really, really good to be us. And, and that really means something. When you're coming before from this place where you're fearing that and you're fearing who you'll be and what will become of you, you know, that's not a small thing. So looking around and that's something I feel like our children have really taught us is just sort of like, well, look at you, you know, you just, you had it in you all along and all that. And that's not to say that there's no suffering because that's being human, you know, or that we don't worry or that we don't. But I do think our love and connection is just, it's, it's different now outside of that, that structure we were in. And that's just a little voice of hope for people that find themselves. And we've talked a lot about the heavy, but there's a lot of beauty on this side too.

Patrick Mason [01:19:24] Thanks.

Closing Reflections and Book Recommendations

John Dehlin [01:19:27] All right, well, first of all, the books are Restoration, God's call to the 21st century world. I would love if, if it ever works for you, to have you back.

Patrick Mason [01:19:39] Let's make it happen.

John Dehlin [01:19:41] Two or three hours just on this book. This book.

Patrick Mason [01:19:43] You could read the whole book in three hours. It's a very short book.

John Dehlin [01:19:46] Yeah, but it's, but like, this is a Mormonism that I, again, I hope this isn't a harmful and non endorsement. But like, this is the Mormonism that I was wanting to help build. This is a Mormonism I can get fully behind. That's respectful to secular people, it's respectful to other faiths. It's, it's carving out a distinctive role for the church in the world and for Mormons and an identity. And it's still standing for truth and truth claims while still being broad minded, inclusive, loving and supporting. And it's just a beautiful vision for Mormonism, full stop. So I recommend it and I want to do a full episode multi hours on that. The other book that I would also want to do spend time with is Proclaim Peace, the Restoration's answer to an age of conflict. I don't know a lot about the book yet, but if Patrick wrote it along with David Pulsifer, I'm compelled. There's another book planted and, and I just, you know, you did us a huge honor today by coming on Mormon Stories. Thank you. If I got emotional, I would be getting emotional right now, but I'm late for a thing with my daughter, so I'm just being business like an officious. But really, Patrick, you're a great quality human being. One thing I'll disagree with you is you said you're nobody special. I think you are somebody special. And I mean that. And so thank you for coming on the podcast.

Patrick Mason [01:21:12] Thanks, John. That means a lot.

John Dehlin [01:21:13] Thank you.

Patrick Mason [01:21:14] Thanks, Marty.

Margi Dehlin [01:21:14] Thank you. Thank you for trusting us today.

John Dehlin [01:21:17] Yeah. And I. I would love to have you back. So, you know, but. But let this be. Let's have less contention and division within the believing, progressive and post Mormon communities. And my secular prayer is, let's have today be a step in the direction of less heat and more light. Amen in our community.

Patrick Mason [01:21:42] I'll say amen to that prayer all day.

John Dehlin [01:21:44] Yeah.

Patrick Mason [01:21:44] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:21:45] All right. Love you, Patrick. Thanks, viewers and listeners. And Margi, you contribute so much. My only regret is that I don't leave more time for you to contribute.

Margi Dehlin [01:21:55] I'm happy. I'm content. Thank you. So grateful.

John Dehlin [01:21:58] All right, thanks again. Thanks, Patrick. Thanks, listeners and viewers. Support everything Patrick does. Buy all these books, make all his books sell out, including Planted. And then we'll have lots of faithful, warmer scholars wanting to come on Mormon Stories. But take care, everyone. Love you. And we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Bye, everybody.

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.