Introducing Paul Toscano and His Heritage

Part 1 of 7 · Ep. 77

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Tell us your name, please.

Paul Toscano [00:00:02] I'm Paul Toscano. Hi, Paul. Hello.

John Dehlin [00:00:05] Thanks for joining us.

Paul Toscano [00:00:06] Well, thank you for coming and taking this tape. So tell us, tell us about a

John Dehlin [00:00:12] bit about your heritage in your early years.

Paul Toscano [00:00:15] Well, I'm Sicilian. My grandparents came from Sicily. They came through Ellis island around the turn of the the 20th century. My parents were born in this country, so I'm second generation Italian. I was born in Brooklyn, New York. I did not grow up there. My parents moved from Brooklyn twice. The second time they stayed in California. The first time they went to California and went back. I won't get into the reasons for that. But the second time they moved, it was about 1951. I was born in 45, so I was about 6 years old when they left the second time to stay and they moved to California. They settled in West Covina eventually. They lived briefly in Rosemead, California, and then they settled in West Covina, where I grew up. I went to the Covina High School, which was not in West Covina, but it was the school district that I was in. What can I say else about my background? One funny story that my brother Larry tells is that and this was about two years ago, we're taping this on August 2nd of 2007. But about two years ago, he and his family went down to California to go to Disneyland. And they were in the California Adventure, and there's some kind of a genealogy booth or exhibit there. And so he types in the name Toscano. And then they tell him that we're related to a medieval monk by the name of Toscano who was burned at the stake for opposing the Pope. And that just made me laugh so hard because I thought, well, maybe this whole thing that's happened to me in my life is genetic. And apparently he was not a chaste monk because he had descendants. So that is another aspect of this that's funny. I'm not sure it's true, but how much can you trust Walt Disney? But nevertheless, that's the story. I grew up in Southern California, went to grammar school there, and then, as I say, went to Trawick Junior High, where I was terrified of being hazed, but managed to get through that without incident. Went to high school, was not a particularly great student in high school, although in the last couple of years I managed to pull my grade point average up to an A or B so that I could get into the California Scholarship Federation, which was really the California Sex Federation was what it should have been called. We were famous for taking trips to the beach and hanging out at the beach. There were 10 National Merit Scholars that graduated from my high school that year that I graduated. They were a bright bunch of kids. Probably not as bright as I would like to remember, but pretty bright. And I don't know my high school. I had a lot of fun in high school. I enjoyed it. And then it was in high school that I came to be introduced to Mormonism. I was a Catholic. We were not very good Catholics. We would be considered probably lapsed Catholics. My mother did not like the priests, and she did not like the rules and strictures of Catholicism.

John Dehlin [00:03:53] How many siblings besides your brother?

Paul Toscano [00:03:55] I have three younger brothers, so there were four boys. My dad. I should tell you something about my parents before I launch into talking more about myself. My dad was. Nobody knows where he was born. He would never tell anything about his birth. He couldn't get him to give me his birth certificate. More recently, I think he might have been born in Tunisia, in Tunis. Because before my paternal grandparents came to this country, they migrated. They moved from Sicily, southern Sicily, across the Little Channel there to Tunis, which is the location of ancient Carthage. They married there, actually. And I know this because I actually did work to get their marriage records from that city, which took some doing. And also I got the birth records of my father's older brothers and sisters who were born there. His birth record is not there, and it wasn't in this country. I thought for a while he might have been born on the ship. But a strange thing happened. Just before my father died in 1997, he admitted to my brother Joe, my youngest brother, who never told this to me until after my father was dead. So I could never question him about it. But my father admitted that he was a twin. This was all very shocking to us. And there was no record of a twin in this country. But a year almost to the day, a year to the day before he claimed to be born. He claimed to be born on August 15, 1915. But in August of 1914, a twin was born, or not a twin, a baby was born to my grandparents. He might have been the twin of that baby, which would explain some things because it would show him to have been born in Tunis. And then maybe he was sick and they didn't report him because they came over on the last boat out of the Mediterranean before World War I began. It may have been that they were terrified of being turned back. And maybe they didn't report him. And so it's hard to put this together because that generation was very close mouth about everything. You had to pry it out of them. And my dad would never really talk about that. He was a veteran in World War II. He never talked about that, except that I did know that he was a spy. He worked for the. What was it? The OSS, the antecedent to the CIA. And he went over there, like in 41 or 42, and spent maybe 18 months, two years, then came back and then was drafted because they had no record of his service. And it took the highest officer over the oss, who had the record of who had served there, to get him out of being drafted again. And I know he was wounded because he bore the wounds on his body. And he lost a couple of friends, which I think damaged him somewhat. He was somewhat of a distant father. Not so much distant as just kind of involved with his own worries. My mom was.

John Dehlin [00:07:09] What was his profession?

Paul Toscano [00:07:11] His profession? Well, he started off as a kind of an electronic technician. He went to kind of a vocational school after he got back from the war. And then when he moved to California, he opened up a television repair shop in the most unlikely place, San Marino, California, where people could buy new televisions before they'd pay a repairman. They were so rich there. He didn't do well there. That went under. Then he went back to school and took more courses and then wound up working, of all places, at Jet Propulsion Laboratories. He was on the team that sent up the first Voyager. He was a quality control engineer who would travel around and make sure that the various parts that were being produced by contractors with the government were up to snuff. And he was an inspector, and he did that for years and kind of slowly made his way up the chain there. My mom went to the eighth grade and stopped. She was born in Brooklyn. My dad was born in Detroit or Reading, Pennsylvania, but lived in Detroit, Michigan. There's no record of where he was really born, but he claimed to have been born in Reading, Pennsylvania. Or maybe it's pronounced Reading. I can't remember how they pronounce it there. Forgive me. For those who know, my mom was born in Brooklyn, New York, and she went to the eighth grade, and after that she had to go to work. She went with my grandmother to work in the sweatshops there, where they made women's coats and sewed pockets on women's coats. And it was very grueling work, and they didn't get paid very much. They lived in a tenement on Meserel street in Brooklyn, in the Williamsburg area, near the Williamsburg Bridge. And I remember very well, growing up there, my grandfather was my primary caregiver. When I was growing up, they tried to put me in a daycare, but I cried too much, so I didn't like it. I felt like I was being put in prison. They had naps. Who would have thought I didn't want to take naps and have these horrible cookies. So I can remember protesting strenuously about that. And so they let me out. My grandfather took care of me. There's an old story where growing up, my mom would make this bowl of mush for me in the morning so that I would eat it. But by the time she left and I got around to it, it was cold and I wouldn't eat it. So my grandfather would whip up this spaghetti with bread crumbs and butter and garlic and a little glass of wine for lunch. And I was supposed to eat this mush. And he just couldn't force me to do it and I didn't want to eat it, so I'd eat with him. My mom would get home from work about 6 o' clock and she'd see I hadn't eaten it and she'd get very upset. A few days of this, I don't know how long it lasted. She finally was. She reached the limit and she said, if you don't eat this, Polly, you're going to wear it. And I couldn't understand what she was how do you wear cereal? I thought she must have misspoken. I couldn't figure it out, so I didn't eat it again. And she came home and Polly, she says, And I come bounding in, not suspecting anything. She had the bowl cupped in her hand and she put it over my head. And I just looked at it, thought, somebody has taken my mother away and replaced her with this person. So I started to cry. My grandfather bolts into the room and scolds his youngest daughter for this breach of parental duty and affection. And she kind of collapsed. But we tell that story. That was the story that we told. But I had a very wonderful childhood. My grandparents, my parents loved me dearly and I never lacked affection. It was very hard to leave that environment. When they moved to California, I was six. I can remember very well the day that I last saw my grandfather. And that was kind of heartbreaking. It took 10 days to drive across the country in those days, stopping at little motels. And I guess we actually took Route 66 because we took the southern route for part of the way and wound up in California in 1951. And that's how we migrated. I was never close to my father's side. Still don't know much about them. Very close to my mother's side. But they're all gone now. My mother's dead. My father's dead too now, but her siblings are all dead. I have some cousins that still live in New York that I occasionally contact. I know we are affectionate, but not very close. I grew up in the west and they're eastern and I'm kind of a western, west coast guy. In 1963, moved to Utah to go to BYU and have lived in Utah ever since. So that a little bit about my background. And I guess I should say that it was in high school that I encountered the Mormons. The fellow that converted me was named Blaine Lee, and he was in the same year I was. And he was a lot different from me. I was more nerdy and he was on the cross country team. And we kind of met up. And Randy Pico, I still contact Randy from time to time. And I was about 16 years old, it was in 1961. And he just asked me if I was interested in Mormonism, would I like to know more. Those were the golden questions that were asked back then. Every member a missionary. And I said, no, I'm not interested. I have my own religion. But he persisted and I wanted to be courteous and I listened. And after a while I became intrigued with Mormon doctrine. Now, a lot of people, when they join Mormonism, are attracted to the family aspects of it. I had plenty of family aspects. I wasn't attracted to that particularly. I was interested more in the teachings. I secretly took the missionary lessons without my parents knowing it, which was stupid on my part. But I did it because I didn't want to upset them because I didn't think anything was going to come of it. But after a while I came to. I'm not sure what converted me. I don't remember any particular major spiritual event. I just came to the conclusion that this doctrine was true. I remember writing a story in a book called no More Strangers by Hartman and Connie Rector. It was like in one of the volumes of that series, my story appears. It was a story that I had written for them and the incident is true. I remember looking at this book called the Mormons or the Mormon Story. And in there there was a picture of the 12 apostles, the modern 12 apostles. And it had Legrand Richards and Harold B. Lee. And it was a picture taken around, I would imagine, 1960, 1959. And I remember that Legrand Richards was wearing Penny loafers and possibly had white socks. And I looked at their faces and I thought, I can believe these guys are the twelve apostles. And for some reason, I kind of felt like they were. I never thought that years later I would become their nemesis, but I knew that there was some kind of connection there. So I wanted to join the church. And finally, when I told my mom that I wanted to join Mormonism, I was shocked at her violent reaction. I was simply not prepared for her emotional and violent reaction, which, frankly, I chalked up at the time to menopause. I didn't know what to think because it was completely beyond anything. It was as strange a reaction as when she dumped the mush over my head years earlier. I mean, it was not characteristic of her, certainly unexpected from my perspective. I did not think she cared that much about religion, but I think did not understand that for her, religion and culture were intertwined in a way that she foresaw that this would be a breach with the family that would never be healed, that she would see me going off into a realm that she would not want to follow. And I could not understand that. I could not understand her feelings. And so I was adamant. The more she objected, the more I dug my heels in, and I. And this was the very first time in my whole life that I expressed any kind of. How can I put it? Any kind of objection to my parents, any kind of disagreement with my parents. Because until then, I was kind of. You know, I would complain when she asked me to paint the eaves in August, you know, because I didn't want to be out there sweating and painting the eaves of the house, but I would not really oppose it. I'd just go do it. And I was very close to my mom, closer to her than to my dad. I think all my brothers felt closer to my mom than my dad. My dad was a little distant from us, but in fact, to be perfectly honest with you, my dad was a pain in the patoot. As time went on, he became more and more difficult. He had moments of violent. You know, he would hit us. He knocked my brother's tooth out in one violent episode. And the reason why I say this is for something that I'll tell you later, but this is not to disparage him. I had affection for my father. It's just that he could be dangerous because he would have these explosive fits of temper, and he was not. He wouldn't sit down with you and tell you stuff, and we didn't play ball or go fishing. He was just distant from us. But he worked hard and he was always worried about money. But he would gamble. He had a gambling habit that my mother detested. And it would create this constant friction between them, which grew as time went on to the point when I was in high school, I just didn't like to be at home because they would bicker so much. The bickering was just awful, and my father could be extremely insulting and very cruel to my mom. And I just, you know, there was nothing much that I could do. At one point I thought she would leave him. But women at that time didn't have much they could do. If they left their husband, where would the income come from? And what about us kids? So it was not really possible for her. So I think she felt trapped. Eventually, oddly enough, I don't know how to tell this chronologically, but I can jump around, I guess eventually. When they moved to Utah, all my brothers joined Mormonism at one or another point in their lives over a long period of time. I think my second brother Larry joined mormonism in the 70s, and my brothers Tony and Joe joined in the 80s.

John Dehlin [00:19:03] They are all.

Paul Toscano [00:19:05] Joe reverted back to Catholicism. My brother Larry is kind of like me, where he's believing of some things but not of others. And I can't really speak for my brother Tony. I think he's in a conservative Mormon family, but I don't know what his beliefs are at this point. But they all joined and my parents came here. They never joined the church, but. They moved to Orem. When we were living in Orem, they lived nearby, and that was in the late 70s and early 80s. So it was kind of interesting that eventually they followed us to the extent that they were able to out here into the Rocky Mountains. I don't know. There's so many things that I've been writing my autobiography, so I have a lot of stories that I've thought about, and I don't know, I'm having trouble filtering them out.

Joining the Church, BYU, and Early Student Life

John Dehlin [00:20:11] So your baptism, you got baptized at what age?

Paul Toscano [00:20:16] I was just about going to turn 18. I was 17. It was on March 15th of 1963.

John Dehlin [00:20:26] So probably a senior in high school.

Paul Toscano [00:20:28] I was a senior in High School.

John Dehlin [00:20:30] Mr. Okay. And then your first year of college, where was that?

Paul Toscano [00:20:34] Well, that year, 1963. In September of 1963.

John Dehlin [00:20:38] Mr. That's when Kennedy was shot, right?

Paul Toscano [00:20:41] Yeah, it was when Kennedy was shot. I was in Howard Hatch's French class. I was in a French class, a freshman college, when Kennedy was shot. But In September of 1963, I went up to BYU, and it was a rainy day. Nobody was there. We were there about four or five days before school actually began. So the kids didn't start coming to the campus. And those were the days of byu. I mean, it was. It was. I mean, we wore beanies. We wore freshman beanies during orientation week. We all shook Ernest Wilkinson's hand as president of the university and had some grip, and he liked to crush the bones in the hands of the freshman boys.

John Dehlin [00:21:32] So you shook his hand?

Paul Toscano [00:21:33] Oh, yes. I had a number of encounters with Ernest L. Wilkinson. He's an interesting man. Short, kind of grumpy. He chewed his tongue a lot. I've found myself chewing my tongue now, and I realize it happens to older guys as they get nervous and worried about things, they start chewing their tongues. But anyway, yeah, I got to byu.

John Dehlin [00:22:01] That's pretty immersive. To go from a new convert to the BYU experience. Was it overwhelming? Super conservative? Was it?

Paul Toscano [00:22:11] Oh, back then, BYU wasn't conservative. It didn't strike me as being conservative. I mean, there were.

John Dehlin [00:22:16] Because you were conservative?

Paul Toscano [00:22:18] No, because they didn't have dress standards that I can recall. People could have beards if they wanted to. The emphasis wasn't on rigidity, the rigidity of behavior. I never noticed it. I mean, I remember in my freshman year, I think it was my freshman year, it could have been my sophomore year, that there was a big debate between Melvin Cook and the geology department and the religion department over the age of the earth. And students and faculty were there and they were saying the nastiest things to each other, and it was just complete open debate. I saw that happen on a number of occasions where there was just a lot of openness. I never felt the. It wasn't conservative like it is now. It wasn't correlated. The correlation program hadn't come into effect. And so, you know, the MIA had its own budget, the Relief Society had its own budget. You know, Bell Spafford was still president with lifetime tenure over the Relief Society. I think it was just a more loose. You know, the church was a loose confederation of sometimes warring agencies that it gave a sense of freedom and openness that I don't think is there anymore. So, no, I never felt that it was that way.

John Dehlin [00:23:38] So what was it like socially? What were religion classes like, and what was it like academically for you?

Paul Toscano [00:23:44] Well, I don't know how to express this. I think academically I didn't do well in my first three years. I don't know why I got there. I wasn't homesick. I was just a little bit lost. I felt I would go to class, not always. My attendance wasn't very good. Sometimes I had to work. I think that was the main reason. We didn't have any money. My parents sent me some money. I lived on $40 a month. That was all that I had. We spent $20 of it for rent. That's all we had, $20 of rent. And the other $20 went for food, which was $5 a week for food. And we lived. Somehow we had a little extra money. We had to have enough because we had a telephone. So we had to pay the telephone bill and the utilities were included. And I lived on University Avenue. I lived at 1009 North University Avenue, right across from Hawes Field, about two houses or three houses south from Provo High. And every morning I get up and go up that hill behind the field house up to campus. And I worked. I made a little extra money working. I think I didn't work my freshman year because I had a scholarship for that year, but I didn't have a full scholarship only for the freshman year. And so the second year, my sophomore year, I had to work as a janitor. And I would get up at 3:30 in the morning and get to work at 4 and finish at 7. So we did 4 to 7.

John Dehlin [00:25:40] Were you in?

Paul Toscano [00:25:40] We got a dollar an hour. Our motto was, make a million dollars, work a million hours. And that schedule just kind of made me tired all the time. So I had a hard time in the early morning classes and stuff. So I think that was the problem.

John Dehlin [00:25:56] Did you have as peers anyone who would be recognizable today by name?

Paul Toscano [00:26:01] Any people that I knew.

John Dehlin [00:26:03] Yeah.

Paul Toscano [00:26:04] Well, I met Lavina Anderson between my freshman and sophomore year. She was in a summer ward with us and I met her and her sister, Sally Hale, who recently died, who was the head of the Hale Theater, that theater family. She was in that ward. She was dating. Happy Clough was his name. He went back down to California. I don't know whatever happened to him. There were various people that. I guess Hiram Andrus was our bishop. Was my bishop in the years of the. Let's see, it would be my sophomore and junior year. This was like in 64, 5, 65, 6. So I knew Hiram Andrus.

John Dehlin [00:26:55] Who's that?

Paul Toscano [00:26:56] Hiram Andrus was a very popular religion teacher at the time and he wrote some very influential books that I think influenced a lot of us. And nobody ever talks much about Hyrum anymore. He eventually got booted out of the Religion Department by Bruce McConkie. And he became a researcher in the Harold B. Lee Library for a while. And then after that he even left there. They gave, gave him an early retirement. And this was like in the 80s.

John Dehlin [00:27:29] He was influential on you then.

Paul Toscano [00:27:30] He was influential on a lot of us.

John Dehlin [00:27:32] What were some of his teachings or approaches?

Paul Toscano [00:27:34] Oh, he was the one who would teach the Joseph Smith theories, I mean, theology classes. He wrote Joseph Smith and World Government. He wrote Joseph Smith, they knew the Prophet. He wrote a book called Joseph Smith the Man and the Seer. He wrote the three volume work, God, man and the Universe, Principles of Perfection, those things.

John Dehlin [00:27:58] And did he have a slant?

Paul Toscano [00:28:00] Did he have a slant? Was he liberal? Well, he was extremely conservative.

John Dehlin [00:28:05] Was he accurate? Did he embellish? Was it faithful history? Was it accurate? You know.

Paul Toscano [00:28:10] Well, he was accurate to the extent that you could be. He was faithful. He was conservative. I think what he was doing was digging up stuff from the early church history in the Joseph Smith period, which really was kind of. The information was new to us then. I mean, in 1966, I remember him going to the church historian's office and opening crates of documents that had not been opened since the trek from Nauvoo, that he was seeing stuff that hadn't been looked at for 100 years or 120.

John Dehlin [00:28:47] And they would let him.

Paul Toscano [00:28:48] Yeah, they would let him. And he was writing stuff about Joseph Smith and his teachings and his theology that was really quite phenomenal even to this day if people read those books. I mean, he's not a concise writer, he's not the greatest writer, but he was a great researcher and had a very clear picture of the teachings of the prophet Joseph Smith. Now who did he influence? Mike Quinn, Andy Ehat, Lyndon Cook, myself, Margaret. I don't know about Lavina, but I know that he influenced a lot of people. He was a very influential person that I think most people don't mention anymore. Maybe they've forgotten or maybe they just don't want to get because he isn't. I don't think he got the scholarly credit that he deserved.

John Dehlin [00:29:37] Were you aware of Lowell Bennion or TE Edgar Lyon at this point?

Paul Toscano [00:29:41] I knew who. I don't know who. I didn't know T. Edgar Lyon, but I did know Lowell Banion. I mean, I knew of him. I never met him.

John Dehlin [00:29:48] And was he able to have any influence on BYU students at that time?

Paul Toscano [00:29:52] I didn't think Lowell Bennion did on BYU students because he was up more at the U, wasn't he? Yeah, I don't think that. I mean, people knew about Lowell Bennion, but I think it was a U. University of Utah phenomenon.

John Dehlin [00:30:02] And what about Sterling McMurran? Same thing.

Paul Toscano [00:30:05] Sterling McMurran was considered by the Religion Faculty at BYU to be a liberal. And I think he may have had debate. No, he didn't have debates. I think J.D. williams at the University of Utah had a debate once with Hiram back in the 60s. I came to know J.D. williams. He organized a. Around the time of our excommunications, he organized a big tribute to the people who were excommunicated that was held at the University of Utah. And he was actually. He lived in the same condo park that Margaret and I lived in during that period, which. Which was in Park Place, which is in Salt Lake Cottonwood area. So I got to know some of these people later. But at the time when I was at byu, Margaret was deeply influenced by, or she took a lot of classes from, and was influenced by Hugh Nibley. I never was. I never took classes from Nibley. I'd met him and I'd heard him speak at lectures and things, but I never took classes from him. I was there at his retirement thing that they did for him in 1975, but I never took classes from him. So I didn't know what I was going to do.

Mission Experience and Temple Reflections

Part 2 of 7 · Ep. 78

John Dehlin [00:00:01] Start over and say what? Yours?

Paul Toscano [00:00:02] Well, at byu, my BYU career is really divided into two segments. Before my mission and after my mission. Before my mission, I'm really floating. I mean, I don't really have a sense of what I'm going to do for a career, what courses I should take. I'm just filling in general education courses. I go to church. I don't have a sense of any focus there until I get into Hyrum Andrus Ward. And then suddenly, in the middle of my sophomore year, I decide that I'm going to really study Mormonism. And it was Hyrum that inspired this Hyrum Andrus, who had been my bishop. And I started taking every upper division course in religion that I could take that dealt with the early history, really the early doctrine of the church. I was much less interested in church history and much more interested in theology. And that's, I think, rare because I met many people interested in church history and a lot fewer interested in Mormon theology. And so I followed him around, hire him around. And then I took courses in the New Testament from Robert Patch, and I took an Old Testament course. I took courses in these so I could understand the background and how Mormonism is grounded in Judeo Christianity. And I did this all before my mission. And I also got to know Chad Flake, who at the time was the curator of the special collections of the Harold B. Lee Library. And he would let me in and look at journals, and I would read. I read various journals. Some of them were much more interesting than others. I think I read the George Lobb journals, which contained every petty detail of the man's life. But as soon as he comes to something interesting, he doesn't say anything. I think that Brigham Young milked the cow this morning, shoveled manure this morning. Brigham Young came over and spoke about many wonderful doctrines. Next morning, he's up giving us a detail of what he cooked for breakfast. But he does not report what Brigham Young said. It's extremely frustrating. And it was assigned to me to read through this by Hyrum. I think he was doing it just to. I think he knew that there was nothing in this journal. I can't remember if it's George Lobb's journal or whose it is, but it took me months to read it.

John Dehlin [00:02:28] Any interesting journals?

Paul Toscano [00:02:29] Yeah, there were interesting journals. One of the things that happened, but this happened later. I went on my mission. I didn't think I was going to go on a mission because we had the Vietnam War and there was a quota and two Missionaries had already gone to Italy for my ward, which was the ball and Park Second Ward in California.

John Dehlin [00:02:48] So this is by 65, I'm talking

Paul Toscano [00:02:50] 65 now and 66. And. I got endowed in 65 in the summer of 65, I was 20 and I wasn't going to go on a mission. But I asked my bishop if I could get my temple endowments. And the. They approved it. And so I went. And that was a strange thing. I drove down with my roommate, Jerry Hurst, back in the 60s. We just drove up and down from Southern California to Utah all the time. And there was not a nice freeway then. It was little pieces of freeway. But mostly there was just these double lane highway that you'd have to be shooting around into the other lane to get around trucks. And so it was kind of a risk go going down there all the time. But I made like 100 or 200 trips up and back to Southern California in the period between 63 and 66, because maybe not that many. It couldn't have been 100, but it must have been 50 or 60. Anyway, I lost my train of thought. Oh, Jerry Hurst and I were driving down there in 65 for me to go get my endowments. And there was this terrific. As you get out of past St. George and into that canyon that you have to drive through just before you get into the flats that lead to Las Vegas. As we hit that flat, there was a thunderstorm like which I have never seen before or since, where there was lightning striking the ground all around us. It was beyond belief here and there in front of us and behind us and this big ball of lightning. I know there's not supposed to be balls of lightning, but there was one came up out of the sky, headed right at us and kind of smashed against the windshield. It didn't break the windshield, it didn't do any damage. But you know, Jerry was driving and his knuckles were wide and I was. There were no seat belts. We had no seat belts. It was kind of very dramatic. And then I wind up going that night we got to Jerry's house at about 5 in the morning. I had barely time to shower. And his sister was getting married that day. So they were all worried about the wedding and all those preparations. So we all rush over to the Los Angeles temple. And they had the largest session up to that date in the Los Angeles temple. That was July 17, 1965. And here I am in this. I have no idea what to expect. There is no preparation for this. I am sitting in there going through and getting my endowments. It took from 7 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon. They all left because they were just getting married. They weren't going through an endowment session. So they went in, got sealed, got the wedding over with, and they left me in the Los Angeles temple. And when I got out, there was a temple worker who handed me a note that said, car parked in someplace. And they left me a car. And I eventually made my way to the wedding reception. When I got there, everybody was gone. The food was gone.

John Dehlin [00:06:04] So your temple experience?

Paul Toscano [00:06:06] My temple experience was I was this huge temple session going through with a billion people. It took forever to get through it. But my experience of the temple was not negative. It was only negative in the practical sense that I was starving and that I had to get through the thing with all these other people. But I really loved the temple, and I think it was because I was not prepared for the symbology, but I was prepared for the theology, because having studied all these courses and been with Hiram Andrus and others, it was amazing. One of the guys that I knew in this period was a guy named Guy Potter. He knew a lot about, and I learned stuff from him. We were just trying to dig up information, but there wasn't much information to be had. I didn't know where to go. I didn't know where the repositories were. I knew that Hyrum was digging stuff up.

John Dehlin [00:07:15] So it sounds like your convictions were largely intellectual. Is that true?

Paul Toscano [00:07:21] Oh, yeah. My whole experience of Mormonism has been one of illumination. To me, the most important way that the Spirit I felt, the Spirit of God, if that's what I felt, was through illumination.

John Dehlin [00:07:38] What do you mean by that? Illumination in your mind?

Paul Toscano [00:07:42] Yeah, illumination in the sense of seeing connections and also seeing things that other people did not see. Before my mission, I remember going down to California one time and being asked by the Mia people if I wouldn't mind presenting a presentation to the Stake Emin and Gleaners. Well, there were about a hundred people there that showed up. And my speech was on why Christ is the Father. This was my thing. This became a thematic. This is a theological theme that has caused me more trouble in Mormonism than any other thing, because the church advances the idea that there's. From the first vision, that there's the Father and the Son, and then the Holy Ghost somewhere gets in there. But my view, which I got from Hyrum Andros and also from reading the Book of Mormon and from looking closely at the Doctrine and Covenants, my view was that Christ is the supreme being. It's very Swedenborgian. I had a very Swedenborgian concept, which I still have, of the Godhead, and that is that Christ is the Father who comes to earth as the Son, and then from him flows the light of Christ that we feel is the Spirit of God. There may be a personage that's the Holy Ghost. I don't have a problem with that. But it's Jesus Christ who is the supreme being for me and for the Church, it's the Heavenly Father.

John Dehlin [00:09:27] So you didn't believe back then that Jesus had a father?

Paul Toscano [00:09:31] I didn't care. It makes no sense. No, I don't.

John Dehlin [00:09:35] So what about the first vision?

Paul Toscano [00:09:36] Well, it was an angel who. It's Adam. He's the Father, but he's not. And he might be the father of Jesus body, but Jesus is the supreme being.

John Dehlin [00:09:48] And this Hyrum Andrus?

Paul Toscano [00:09:50] Well, it's on the frontispiece of the Book of Mormon. If you read the frontispiece of the Book of Mormon, it says Jesus is the eternal God, the Father of heaven and earth. It says it throughout the whole book. And I bought that. That was the theology that I didn't. Hyrum pointed it out, but I could sense that from the beginning. I always was a person who believed that Jesus was the most important person in our theology.

John Dehlin [00:10:15] So you were tuning into early Joseph Smith theology, sort of like New York Kirtland theology.

Paul Toscano [00:10:22] Well, I don't buy that crowd.

John Dehlin [00:10:23] And you were sort of Nauvoo.

Paul Toscano [00:10:25] I don't buy that. I don't think Nauvoo changed anything. I don't think Joseph Smith changed his view of the Godhead. I think that's just a misreading on the part of people who do not read theology, but they read history. Historians make that mistake. I don't think theologians do. Because he's saying stuff in Nauvoo that. I can't quote it to you now. But there's stuff that he says about Jesus when he's in Nauvoo that fortifies this view. I think it's people maybe, like, I don't know who it is that has done this, but there's a theory among Mormon intellectuals who study this that somehow there's an early and a late view. I don't see that the King followed discourse. Does anything. Well, come on.

John Dehlin [00:11:10] As God is man has God may become. You think that's talking about Jesus? Yeah.

Paul Toscano [00:11:15] I don't see why.

John Dehlin [00:11:16] Well, if that's true, then Jesus lived on earth and he Had a God.

Paul Toscano [00:11:19] Yeah, that's true.

John Dehlin [00:11:20] So there was a father.

Paul Toscano [00:11:21] Well, no, I don't think that. I think that Jesus may have lived on an earth, but I think that Jesus is the supreme being. I think that.

John Dehlin [00:11:31] Well, he couldn't have lived on earth and have always been a supreme being. Yes, he could, with a bunch of other supreme beings. Is he living by himself?

Paul Toscano [00:11:40] I mean, the idea that has developed in Mormonism. Well, let me first say that I don't know, but I will say that my view is that there wasn't a big division in Joseph Smith's teachings. I think there was clarifications of things, but those raised other questions that were never answered. I don't think you can have a Newtonian view of the Godhead. I don't think it's that there's Father and the Son has a father, and that Father had a father and that Father had a father. That gets us nowhere. That is just a silly thing that some people said in the 19th century that made people feel better. I can't believe that that's true.

John Dehlin [00:12:29] More importantly, you don't believe that Joseph Smith believed that?

Paul Toscano [00:12:31] Oh, I don't think he believed that for one minute.

John Dehlin [00:12:33] But you do believe that Brigham Young did believe that was true?

Paul Toscano [00:12:36] I don't think that Brigham Young believed it, but he taught the whole Adam God theory. Well, the Adam God theory, if understood correctly, is that Christ is the supreme being and that Adam is Michael the Archangel, and that what Christ does is he makes a covenant with Michael the Archangel, that Michael the Archangel will be the father of Christ's body, and Christ descends through Michael the Archangel, who is Adam, and that Christ, the Supreme Being, becomes the. The Son of his Son, and the Son who is Michael becomes the Father of his Father.

John Dehlin [00:13:16] Just for a short period of time.

Paul Toscano [00:13:18] I don't think time is something that you can impose on these deities. That's the Newtonian concept that I don't abide. What I'm saying is that what the Adam God doctrine meant to do was to impress upon people that Christ was the supreme being. Because it's Christ that takes. St. Paul says Christ is little lower than the angels. He goes down through the angels. Well, this is how he does it. I mean, Brigham Young taught a doctrine where he says that Adam is God. But what he's talking about, I don't think was meant. I don't know what Brigham Young thought. But I will say this, that I don't believe Joseph Smith thought that Adam God was somehow superior to Jesus Christ. And there's A reason for this, which I would like to now explain. Because if you have the view either that the current church has, which is that there's a Father and a Son, or you have the view that Brigham Young had, that there's a Father and the Son and the Father is really Adam God, then what you have in the crucifixion is that you have the Father sending his son to die. And I just don't buy it, because that's cruel and ruthless.

Developing an Independent Theology

John Dehlin [00:14:42] And you never did.

Paul Toscano [00:14:43] And I never did buy it. And the reason why is because Abinadi says that God himself will come down. God himself will come down and take upon himself the sins of the world.

John Dehlin [00:14:55] Well, the original Book of Mormon also said that God and Jesus were one.

Paul Toscano [00:14:58] Yes, they are. That's my view, is that the Book of Mormon is correct. And I don't think that Joseph Smith's later clarifications on cosmogony, cosmology, and the Godhead should be interpreted in a way that alters that original view. I think you have to interpret the later revelations not as junking the earlier ones, but as footnotes to it. You have to see it in terms of Jesus still being superior. I don't think he changes that view. I think he introduces a considerable amount of theological complexity. But. I don't believe that God the Father sends his son to die because that's just cruel. And it's the thing that authorizes the church to. To do away with people, the church, the corporate, in other words, patriotry, this over emphasis on God the Father, with the idea that God the Father sends his son to die. I just don't buy that. I think that's not what is taught in the Book of Mormon. And I think the Book of Mormon lays out the theology that we're supposed to believe in about Jesus. And then all the other things that come later in Nauvoo particularly, are to be seen as illuminations of that idea and not as rejection of that idea.

John Dehlin [00:16:22] Okay, so to bring this back up just a little bit, what we have here is Paul Toscano in his early years as a young man having radical theological beliefs that diverge from what's being taught by leaders and by the mainstream members of the church. So early on, you're having these divergent theological differences.

Paul Toscano [00:16:47] I'm just saying, what's in the Book of Mormon?

John Dehlin [00:16:49] No, no, no. But okay. I'm trying to paint the picture historically. I'm saying that early in your young men years, you had differences in theology from church leaders and from the church body.

Paul Toscano [00:17:03] I suppose that I did not think so because I did not think that I was saying or believing something apart from what was church doctrine.

John Dehlin [00:17:12] But you probably heard people teach that as God is manless was.

Paul Toscano [00:17:15] Well, I began. This is the story I was telling. I went down to California. I was asked to speak at this immanent gleaner thing. And so I put on this thing about Jesus being the Father, on this theory that I just explained. I didn't go into Adam God. I knew it, but I didn't go into it, and I didn't go into a lot about it. I just merely posited the idea that I quoted some scriptures from the Book of Mormon and I said that Jesus is the eternal Father. He's the Father of the resurrection. It's in him that we have eternal life. And I was immediately, the next day, interrogated by three members of the Stake High Council with the theory that I might be a fundamentalist Mormon or something, but I wasn't. I was just a convert who had basically believed what I thought I was reading in the Book of Mormon and which Hyrum himself, Andrus, had taught at. BYU. So this has really been my bone of contention. Which is the heart of the bone. This is the heart of the contention that I have, or the dissent that I have had from the leaders of the Church because I believe they don't believe what I think about Jesus, and they don't really buy the Nauvoo teachings either. So where are we?

John Dehlin [00:18:35] You have always had a sincere interest in theology. You take it very seriously. And when it gets dismissed or changed in ways that you are not comfortable with, that's important to you. And you want to speak up about it.

Paul Toscano [00:18:48] Oh, I would say that because. Yes, I would say that because I think the myth is what causes us to order our lives. We order our lives, whether we know it or not, according to the myths that we believe. And whether the myths are true or false, it doesn't make any difference because we will conform to those mythological ideas.

John Dehlin [00:19:11] But for you, the truth of the myth is important because it can then shape in major ways the way someone comports themselves and acts and behaves. Yeah, There's a lot at stake at the theological underpinnings. For you.

Paul Toscano [00:19:25] Yes, yes. I see it as the infrastructure, like the infrastructure of a building or the foundational. It's like the blueprint. I mean, you can't really escape beyond that. And for me, and this is something that in the 15, 16, 17 years ago at Sunstone, there was quite a few debates over this very issue as to what was the nature of God. And I still think it's a mystery. I mean, in some places in our scripture, in Mormon scripture, there's the idea that God is one, and then in the lectures on faith, he's there, too. And then there's the Trinity, and then there's the idea of the heavenly father and mother. And then introduced into this is the idea of a council of gods, which is in Abraham, the book of Abraham. So what is it? But the way I have read the Scripture for me is that I don't want to lose sight of what Brigham Young said, and that is, you have to keep your mind riveted on the cross of Christ. You have to not lose sight of him as the central figure, because once you lose sight of him at the central figure, you drift into various, I think, mistakes about the Adam God doctrine, to me is just the idea that Christ calls an angel to be a God so that he can descend into the earth.

John Dehlin [00:20:58] So real quick. And we won't have time to delve into each one. But were there other theological tenets that were very important to your belief? This is putting you on the spot.

Paul Toscano [00:21:10] No, this is probably the principal one

John Dehlin [00:21:14] about the atonement and forgiveness, repentance.

Paul Toscano [00:21:18] Things related immediately to Christ are very important to me. The atonement. I don't agree with Boyd Packer's idea that we have a creditor. We can't pay him. We're going to go to hell because we can't pay the debt. And then Christ comes and he pays the debt, but he becomes our new creditor, and he's worse than the last one, according to Brother Packer.

John Dehlin [00:21:43] Your interpretation is the. Brother Packer?

Paul Toscano [00:21:44] No, I can quote you the speeches in which he's actually said practically what

John Dehlin [00:21:49] I've said, that he was a worse creditor.

Paul Toscano [00:21:51] Well, it says that you have to. Well, he says it. The old creditor didn't want you to commit adultery, but the new creditor doesn't want you to have lustful thoughts. So I ask you, frankly, it's not so easy to commit actual adultery. You've got to get somebody to do it with you. But you can have lustful thoughts without anybody around. It's easier to commit adultery in your head than it is to commit adultery in somebody's bed. The fact is that according to this theory of the atonement, Christ becomes a creditor. But the Scripture doesn't say that. The scriptures say that once we accept through faith, repentance and Baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost. Once you accept the vicarious work that Christ has done for you, you go from being his creation to being his child. Then you're born again from being a child. You can grow up to be a friend and eventually a joint heir, a partner with Christ and the Godhead. That's what Mormonism teaches. The New Testament says that when he comes, we shall be like Him. So I think as a theological matter, we can become like Christ. But he's not our creditor. He puts at our disposal a reservoir of spirituality that is his own infinite reservoir of spirituality because he makes us a joint heir. That's what it says. It doesn't say that we become debtors to him as creditor, but that we become joint heirs with Christ. So where does it ever say anywhere in the Scripture that Christ becomes our creditor? It's just a misunderstanding. And the reason why there's that misunderstanding, it's a works concept. People are very uncomfortable that some people sin in their youth and they take drugs and they have sex illicitly and yet they can repent and get back in on an equal footing with the person who's. Who has all his life been faithful. Well, that's the very story of the prodigal Son or the story that Jesus tells about the laborers in the field. And some worked all day long and got the same amount that some who came in at three o' clock in the afternoon and only worked for three hours and they got the same. And the ones who had worked all day long, he says, well, I paid you what you asked for and can I not do with my own what I wish? I can pay them the same if I want. It's creating a union problem. He's got a. He's got laborers that are unhappy because he's being generous to one. I think that's the issue. Because when we see the mercy of God come down upon someone who we are offended by, it hurts us. Because we've worked all day long, we've labored all the day long in the heat of the day. And then the Lord blesses this other person who comes in as a kind of a late comer, Johnny come lately. And he gives them the same blessing. It seems it irritates us. I think that's at the heart of this feeling that the atonement needs to be explained a little more legalistically. But I do not understand it that way. I think Jesus is not legalistic, that his love is without condition and kind of an image of the crucifixion his arms are stretched out to us all the day long.

John Dehlin [00:25:16] So Christ, God, the nature of God, or Christ as God, the atonement, forgiveness, resurrection, these are the central themes. Any other ones stick out as being ones that were really important to you back in those early years and from then on. Are those the main.

Paul Toscano [00:25:32] Those I think probably are the main ones.

John Dehlin [00:25:35] What about one true church and priesthood authority and keys? Were those resonating with you back then?

Paul Toscano [00:25:46] I felt that the priesthood issues were very important. Although I do not see them as authoritative, I originally accepted them pretty much the way the church teaches about them. But the more I studied priesthood issues, the more I realized that priesthood was really taking upon yourself the image of Christ. To become a priest after the order of the Son of God means that. He's the head of your order and it's to him that you need to dedicate yourself, not somebody else. And not to a corporate enterprise, not to real estate. It's to him.

John Dehlin [00:26:34] What about just divine revelation and prophets and apostles as getting God's guidance and revelation and then giving it to the members? Was that ever important to you or fundamental to.

Paul Toscano [00:26:47] Well, it didn't seem to me like that was really what was intended. I never thought that. The leaders of the church were dispensing the Gospel. I thought the leaders of the church were dispensing the ordinances and that once you had the ordinances, it was up to you to receive your own revelation

John Dehlin [00:27:14] about the Gospel, not to sit at their feet and have them tell you what the gospel was.

Paul Toscano [00:27:22] You work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. What the keys of the priesthood did was allow the ordinances of the Gospel to be administered. Once you have the ordinances through the ordinances, it says somewhere in the Doctrine and Covenants, through the ordinance, the power of God is manifest. And from the power of God you get the mysteries. But the ordinances were a way that binds us as a family. The ordinances are merely reenactments of our incapacity to save ourselves. It takes a priest who represents Christ to. To bury us in the water and pull us out again, which shows that a new person is being born. And when you go to the temple, that ordinance is done in the baptismal fonts in the temple in the lower part. Then you go through the rest of the temple ordinances, which are clothing, which is like we put swaddling clothes on and getting a name, which is like getting a name, and you just grow and you go through this maturation. That's what the ordinances of the temple represents symbolically, you are maturing as a child of Christ to the point where you become one with him and the Godhead. Well, I didn't think that that required dispensing information.

Diverging from Orthodoxy as a Young Man

Part 3 of 7 · Ep. 79

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Okay, so it's clear that theology was very important to you and that as a young man, you were developing a theology that in many ways was divergent from where the church was taking the theology.

Paul Toscano [00:00:11] Oh, yes, yes. Divergent from where the church was going.

John Dehlin [00:00:14] And you had a strong view about the nature of God, which was Christ for you. And you probably put less stock in. The leaders are what it's all about. The church leaders are what it's all about and where to sit at their feet and learn for you. They were partners in a community and had some authority, but certainly it wasn't their authority that was. That was sort of guiding and driving your perspective. You were working out your own theology, your own belief system.

Paul Toscano [00:00:50] And I thought. I wasn't thinking that I was inventing a theology.

John Dehlin [00:00:54] No, you were trying to learn what the theology was.

Paul Toscano [00:00:58] Right. I was connecting with the theology that I thought I was reading in the standard works.

John Dehlin [00:01:06] Right. Okay, so talk us through how you go from that. Well, first of all, was there ever any spiritual sort of underpinning? Did you ever have that big moment where the Book of Mormon lights up or you get the burning in the bosom, or on your mission, you're sitting there reflecting one night, and all of a sudden you. You feel as though God's speaking to your soul, saying, it's true, it's true. Paul, you know, was there ever an overwhelming spiritual element or like you've already discussed, was it more about illumination in your mind as you're working out the theology?

Paul Toscano [00:01:40] It was the second thing.

John Dehlin [00:01:41] Okay, okay.

Paul Toscano [00:01:42] I wasn't given to having great. At least back then. I wasn't given to having great, I mean, emotional experiences. I cry in Shirley Temple movies, but I don't necessarily believe them. I mean, movies can make me cry, but they don't make me believe. But when I read the New Testament, the Gospel of John, the Red Letter edition, Jesus words back then, I felt that I was receiving genuine illumination, and I felt that revelation, even I don't refer to what I get as revelation because that's a freighted word in Mormonism that has more authority than I wish to give it. I feel like I received in my life illumination about what I was reading. I'm not sure this is different from what people feel when they're in science and they get an illumination or some kind of presentment of an idea that works out. I don't know. I'm not suggesting that I have authoritative revelation. I never have said that. But I do feel that my beliefs are tied to what I'VE read in the Scripture and I'm surprised when I hear. I don't go to church now, but when I was going to church, I was always surprised when I would hear members of the church in sacrament meeting or Sunday school go off on this Heavenly Father stuff.

John Dehlin [00:03:13] Well, you have to admit you sort of did a head nod to it. But what you're not acknowledging is that the Scriptures are like the Constitution. Any clause in the Constitution, depending on what era of the US History you're reading about, you can find dramatically different interpretations about what the commerce clause should mean or what liberties we might have. You can find areas in the Book of Mormon where it supports your view that Jesus was God the Father. You can also find interpretations that says Jesus prayed to God and who's he praying to?

Paul Toscano [00:03:47] You find one scripture where he prays to God and 500 scriptures where it says that he is God. And you only focus on the one where he prays to God. Okay, why? The reason why is because people don't want to take up their cross and follow Him.

John Dehlin [00:04:09] No, but you didn't acknowledge that Scriptures can be very self contradictory.

Paul Toscano [00:04:17] Where is the contradiction in the Book of Mormon about who we worship? Where does it say that we worship God the Father? In the Book of Mormon or even in the New Testament?

John Dehlin [00:04:26] We worship both.

Paul Toscano [00:04:28] Where does it say both? Even the first vision says, hear him. God the Father is something we have created out of very little. It's not the Church of God the Father and His holy Apostles. It's the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Neither God the Father nor the Apostles are named in the name of the Church, and yet they're the ones we give most preeminence to. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is a really good name,

John Dehlin [00:05:01] but you seem to feel like you've got the theology figured out. And if only people would read the Scriptures and really understand what they're directly saying, they would arrive at the same conclusion you have.

Paul Toscano [00:05:12] The Scripture says, come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. It doesn't say go to the Father. When Philip asks Jesus, when you're going to show us the Father, he says, have I been so long with you, Philip, and you don't know me? Abinadi says, God himself will come down. He won't send somebody else. He will redeem his people for you.

John Dehlin [00:05:36] This is important because it takes away from our emphasis on Christ.

Paul Toscano [00:05:39] No, it's important because what it does is it means that if you're the top guy. You have to make the biggest sacrifice. You don't sacrifice somebody else. That's what Bin Laden does. Is he a Christian? Is he a Mormon?

John Dehlin [00:05:54] Okay, so how do you go from having this theology to being deeply involved in Mormon studies like Sunstone, etc.

Paul Toscano [00:06:02] Well, I was deeply involved in Mormon studies before I went on my mission. And I had journals full of notes and things that I had taken and I took them with me on my mission. And when I went on my mission and got there, I went to Italy. And then this is where this Pauline thing begins. And my name is Paul and I go there and I wind up going to. My first assignment in Italy is Brindisi, which is the other end of the Via Appia. And that's where I met Kent Wahlgren. Kent Wahlgren later wrote the two volume work on American Masonry Bibliography. It's a huge effort. Unfortunately, on the date of its publication and its delivery to him at his apartment in Paris, he died of a heart attack. So he never saw it finished. But Kent Wahlgren was my first missionary companion in Brindisi. And then I was transferred a few like six weeks later to Reggio Calabri, which is on the toe of the boot of Italy. Well, in the book of the Acts you can read that Paul stops in Regium on his way to Rome. And from Regio I was.

John Dehlin [00:07:09] So you started feeling. Identifying with Paul.

Paul Toscano [00:07:12] I was transferred to be one of the first two missionaries to open the city of Rome. David Rode and I opened Rome.

John Dehlin [00:07:18] Opened Rome, yeah.

Paul Toscano [00:07:19] We were the first for the church. For the church. I dedicated the city of Rome myself. From one of the seven hills, I gave the dedicatory prayer.

John Dehlin [00:07:28] And you were you feeling sort of that this was an important place in history?

Paul Toscano [00:07:32] Well, a person. I'm not saying that I'm St. Paul and I'm not saying that I'm St. Paul to the modern church. I'm just saying that these things happen to me. And I think one of the ways we find meaning in life is to see ourselves not only to see a myth, but to see ourselves as part of a myth. And whether that myth is a family myth or a corporate myth, or a money myth, or some kind of sexual myth, we invest ourselves in some kind of a way that gives us a beginning, a middle and end. An Aristotelian structure in which we can feel like we have meaning. And yes, because of these things that were happening to me in my mission, elders in my mission would write me letters and I would write letters back explaining things that they had questions about. Because I had spent the last two years or two and a half years before I went on my mission in the company of religion professors at byu, particularly Hiromandras, who did have potential answers or at least some answers to these questions. So I would share these with the missionaries. And I got kind of a reputation for writing these letters. Well, that's kind of Pauline letters. Pauline. So, you know, through my mission, I have this experience when I get back from my mission, I have a couple of. Right at the end of my mission, I have a couple of serious speed bumps I hit because my mission president did not really cotton to my way of thinking.

John Dehlin [00:09:05] Your theology?

Paul Toscano [00:09:06] No, not my theology. I think it would be a praxis that grew out of my doxy. There was an issue that came up when they were going to excommunicate this one elder because he had left his city in the north of Italy to go down to visit a girlfriend in the south. And we got dragged into an early morning meeting with the president. We were all on the office staff, and he got us all together and announced that he was going to excommunicate this elder. You know, everybody's kind of stunned by this. And I raised my stupid hand and I say, well, aren't we supposed to have a trial first? I mean, I didn't think that we could excommunicate people without having an elders court. And he says, well, this elder is guilty and he doesn't deserve a trial. And I persisted. I said, well, President, isn't that why we have a trial is to ascertain his guilt and even if he is guilty, to try to get the word of the Lord on whether he should be punished or whether there are extenuating circumstances. What do we know? He took that ill. So I was released shortly after that from the office staff, and I was going to be sent to Lower Slovia or something for that. Some of my friends on the office staff kind of interceded and I got sent as a co junior companion.

John Dehlin [00:10:32] So you clearly had a lot of confidence.

Paul Toscano [00:10:34] I didn't have confidence. I just thought it was reciting the thing I should say. It's not a matter of confidence. I'm just kind of stupid. I just said that what I thought came to my mind about, well, shouldn't we be doing this? I didn't want him to make a mistake as a mission president. He did get released early. He did make some mistakes. The person who released me from my mission was Hartman Rector Jr. He was a substitute mission president. And he interviewed me quite thoroughly. It took a day because he had seen what president, the other president had written about me. And he had Hartman, who I knew quite well and have known since 1969. When I was released, we became very close friends. And he went through the blue sheet that they, the president of the, you know, they stick in your permanent file at the church headquarters, I guess. And he rewrote it because he said this was just completely slanderous. He felt that the president had his own agenda and that was wrong. And I got redeemed at that point a couple of months later. And the reason why I tell you this story is that a couple of months later I'm teaching at the ltm. I didn't go to the LTM because they didn't teach Italian. Then when I left in 66, by 69, they were teaching Italian in the LTM and I was a Italian missionary. So I got a job at BYU teaching missionaries. And again I taught the same doctrine about Christ. And I got into trouble immediately. It turned out that the second counselor in the mission presidency of the ltm, Ernest Wilkins, was the president. He was Harold B. Lee's son in law and his counselor. I forget his counselor's name. His second counselor was at the Sunday school class that I was teaching to these Italian missionaries. And I did the same thing. I said, look, the Book of Mormon says this about Christ. I think we have to be much more Christ centered than we are at that time. I wasn't saying don't pray to God the Father. My view is that Christ is the Father. You can pray to him in the name of the Son or in the name of the Father, it doesn't matter. It's not like that. It's just you pray to God, it's him. But I wasn't emphasizing the difference. I was just emphasizing these points in the Book of Mormon. And of course I immediately got into trouble and was dragged into. And I was accused of heresy by Ernest L. Wilkins, who was the president of the. Not Ernest L. Wilkinson, who was the president of the university. He's Wilkinson. But Ernest L. Wilkins was the president of the ltm. He told me that I was wrong. And I said, well, okay, tell me why I'm wrong. Tell me why these scriptures are wrong. He says, I don't know why they're wrong. He says, I'm just the mission president and I get to decide what's wrong. I said, well, why don't you ordain me a high priest and then I can decide what's Right and wrong, too. So that was the coup de grace for him. He said, you insolent. A little troublemaker is what he said. I'm sending you to see one of the general authorities. They'll clean you out. They'll fix you up. So I was scheduled to see somebody like Bernard P. Brockbank, who was sick that day. And so they shuttled me off to somebody else. And it turned out to BE Hartman Rector Jr. And I walked into his office, and he looked at me and said, what are you doing here? I said, I don't know. This is what I said. This is what happened. I laid it all out. He said, well, I teach that doctrine all the time. What's wrong with that? I said, well, apparently Ernest L. Wilkins doesn't understand it because he's all upset. So he says, don't worry about it. Go down there. I'll make a call. And he did call down. And they restored my job and allowed me to go on. But I could see the handwriting on the wall. And I quit and became the copy editor of the Banyan Yearbook. And that's how I earned some money. The rest of the.

Mission Outcomes and Spiritual Gifts

John Dehlin [00:14:38] Real quick, just back to your mission for a second. How did your mission go in terms of success? Were there baptisms? Were units growing? How did that all shake out? Was it a tough mission with not lots of success or baptisms?

Paul Toscano [00:15:00] Well, I have a story about that, too. When I was on the office staff, we were living on the Ali Mazzini. And we had an office in one building. And right across the street there was a big apartment for the missionaries. And in the apartment for the missionaries, it was all made out of marble. The Italians don't use wood. They don't have a lot of wood. They used marble. And I remember meeting in this marble dining room with a marble table and the assistants to the president. I was the historian and recorder. So I didn't have a lot of say so in the management of the mission. But they heard my voice, and I considered them all my friends. They were trying to come up with a motto for the mission, which I felt was kind of silly. I didn't think we needed a motto. But fine. And they came up with the motto of 65, 40 and baptize. And I thought, what are you guys talking about? And the motto was that if you tracked 65 hours a week and teach 40 hours a week, you will baptize. Well, who are you going to teach 40 hours a week was my question. I mean, what are we going to do? Hogtie people and Tie them to a lamp post and teach them. It's really hard to get people to let you in and listen to you. This is an impossible burden. We were sitting in this marble room around this marble conference table talking about this, and I said, look, I think if we're going to have a mission slogan or motto, it should be scriptural. And they said, well, what do you suggest? I suggest, in the world, ye shall have tribulation, but be of good jeer. I have overcome the world. That was my idea of a motto. Not 65, 40. You're baptized. You can see by that how far apart we were. Because I'm thinking, this is a tough mission. Not many people get baptized. It's very hard to get into people's doors. The missionaries are working themselves. They think that if. If they pray harder and work longer, they will get more success. But I don't think that that is it here. I think it just takes patience, and it's not about ours. It's just about being guided to the people who want to hear this message and not to be overly concerned. If there just aren't a whole lot of baptisms, it is not in our hands. We are only the instruments of the Lord. We are not going to create great success by works. Again, it comes to my grace works issue, which is the other theological. You ask, is there another one more important than Christ? No, but it's tied to him. Things happen by his grace, his sufferance. It doesn't happen because we want it so badly that it's going to happen. That's kind of a New Age idea. My idea was you suffer the things that happen and you try to find a meaning in them. But anyway, so that was an answer to your question. Was it successful? I think the mission was successful, but you would not be able to tell that by looking at the statistics.

John Dehlin [00:18:30] That doesn't count. Okay, so how did you go from this theology into the sunstone sort of pursuits?

Paul Toscano [00:18:39] Well, let me say one thing about my mission that I should point out, and that is we had motorbikes. Let me say no more than that, that we were able to ride motorbikes. So it was a mission that was not like today. I mean, I didn't have to wear a suit all the time. Sometimes I wore a cardigan sweater, a sports coat and slacks. And the mission president didn't seem to care. We didn't have that kind of rules. I didn't start out knowing how to ride a motorbike on my mission, but when I was done, I could. So it was a different mission. It was very open.

John Dehlin [00:19:13] Do you think that that. Do you have an opinion about whether that is a more appropriate model versus the highly regulated missions that we have today?

Paul Toscano [00:19:22] I think it is, because what it does is it relies upon the maturation of the missionaries. They may not arrive mature, but they become that way because they're expected to in a heavily regulated boot camp kind of suits, name tags, bikes and helmets and backpacks. Not only do we make our missionaries look peculiar in a way that they don't really need to, but I think that they don't get an opportunity to exhibit the spiritual gifts because they're under rules. You can't be inspiration. I mean, how many inspirations do we read about in Scripture where the inspiration was to obey the rule? Most of the time the inspiration is to break the rule or to do something that no rule covers or to do something unusual to break out of the envelope. But the missionaries aren't going to do that usually. So I don't see how. It's like we deny the spiritual gifts by not letting them operate for fear that they might cause embarrassment. You have two missionaries sitting on a Buddha. Did they get inspired to do that?

John Dehlin [00:20:37] No.

Paul Toscano [00:20:37] Was that immaturity? Yes, but that's the risk you have to take in sending 19 year olds out. But if you teach them correct principles, they should be able to govern themselves. But we apparently don't believe that. We believe in. Not really. They're a little confused on principles, but they at least know that they're supposed to obey their mission president and the rules, which I think, you know, certainly, probably there's some guys on the mission and gals that need that, But I don't think that we should structure the entire missionary program of the church on that.

John Dehlin [00:21:12] Okay,

Paul Toscano [00:21:14] so where were we?

John Dehlin [00:21:15] The sunstone.

Paul Toscano [00:21:16] Oh, you want to move on to sunstone? Well, okay, this is what happened. I get off my mission in 1969 and I give my first Sunstone speech in 1985. So that's 16 years later. So what happens between 1969 and 1985? Well, what happens is briefly is that in 69 I graduate from with my bachelor's degree in English In, I think 70, and then I get a master's degree in English. I did work in Shakespeare and I got it in 72. I meet my wife Margaret in 72, but just as a friend. Margaret and I know each other in 72, I become a faculty member at BYU in the communications department, and I have the job of supervising the student publications where I had Done some work, and I helped Lauren F. Wheelwright organize the first Mormon Festival of Arts at byu. But the communications department felt like I was railroaded into the position on the faculty that they wanted to give to somebody that they wanted to choose. And so I realized that, and so I quit the next year, and I went to work at the Ensign magazine under J. Todd. This was before Lavina was there and others later. But I worked there as an associate editor for about a year. But I found it to be a very cramped and strange experience working for the church. I didn't like it. J. Todd, bless his heart, I just couldn't tolerate him. They're also controlling, and. And there's ill will in the church office building. They don't like to admit this, but there is. People are poorly paid and there's ill will. So I left and I left, and then that was 1973. And then in 1973, I went to Washington, D.C. to get a job working for the United States Information Agency. But when I got there, Nixon, there was a big change, turnover. And there was a whole bunch of people who worked in that agency who had been let go, and they were on the street looking for jobs, and they had more connections than I did. So I didn't stay there very long, but I stayed there long enough to go to some of the Watergate hearings and to be in the White House during the Watergate period. I had a friend of mine who was an intern at the White House, and I met him there, and he. I was actually in the Oval Office while Nixon was down the hall getting his hair cut. And later he got the real haircut, but that was a year later. 74. But the hearings were being held at that time. On that trip, I went up to the pageant up in Camorra, and Margaret happened to be there with her family, and I met her there again. I was kind of curious, and I toured the parts of the New York area for the church so I could get a sense of what that was. I hadn't been back there to see those. On the way back, I think I went to Nauvoo and Carthage and all of that. We saw all of that. I think it was on the way out there rather than on the way back. But I got back that fall, and then I got a job at BYU working in the Department of Instructional Development, where we wrote textbooks and helped faculty members author their textbooks. And that's where I met Anne Osborne, who's now married to Pullman, who was the former General authority elder. Pullman and I just saw them about two or three months ago at a gathering that Helen Whitney put together for all of those people who had participated in this recent documentary on the Mormons. And Ann Osborne, who was in that documentary? My wife was in that documentary. I went to the party and there's Ann Osborne, who I hadn't seen in 30 years. And she was so happy to see me. And she told everybody that I was the one who taught her how to write. And she had a great career as a writer after that. And I talked to Elder Poolman. He was very nice to us and we had a very nice chat. And that was recently. But Ann Osborne was somebody that I worked with way back in the 70s when, when she was writing her first textbook on reading the X rays of the brain, the blood vessels of the brain. I also wrote with. I forgot his name. First name was Christian. His name is Christiansen. About an 868 page self teach statistics book. Boy, that was a horrible job. And an advertising book and some other books that I wrote there. And that was going to be my job as being a technical writer. And then I realized maybe this would be a dead end job. And I applied to the law school, which had J. Reuben Clark. J. Reuben Clark Law School. And I was not in the first class or the second, but I applied to be in the third class, which was the first one to go to the new facility. And I was admitted And I went three years to law school and graduated in 78. And I married Margaret right after I passed the bar.

John Dehlin [00:26:45] Real quick, were you aware of Dialogue during this time?

Paul Toscano [00:26:48] I was aware of Sunstone and Dialogue, but I considered them to be liberal publications and that I would not publish in them or speak at Sunstone. In fact, I had a rule for myself because I was considered to be a very good speaker. But I kind of made a promise that I wouldn't get on the mini lecture series and speak unless I. I would only speak if I was called upon to do so by my stake president or bishop. And at that time I was serving. I served as an elders quorum president in the mid-70s. And then I was called into a bishopric. No, I was called into the Stake Mission presidency for a while and then I was called into a bishopric. But eventually I was released from that bishopric over the same issues that I had got into trouble before.

John Dehlin [00:27:38] It's a recurring theme.

Paul Toscano [00:27:39] It's a recurring theme. And. I got released and then we moved. Margaret and I moved to Orem, where that was in 79. We moved to Orem and Then we had our first child in 79, Angela, who's now 27, maybe 28, because she was born in 79. So how old is she? Probably 27. It doesn't matter. It's the kind of thing a parent mulls over because we're embarrassed that we don't know all the time the ages of our children. But I know their names. That's important. Anyway, in 79 we had Angela. But what I'm going to tell you is that in 1980, there was an attempt to. Our stake president, that former stake president at BYU had called the new stake president in our Orem ward and felt that we were not orthodox Mormons. And there was an attempt to. We actually went through an informal tribunal around what year? 1980.

John Dehlin [00:28:48] Over the stuff you were teaching. Talking about the God. No.

Paul Toscano [00:28:51] We were accused of practicing polygamy and we were accused of promoting various evils. None of those.

Women, Priesthood, and the Sunstone Symposium

John Dehlin [00:29:00] Who were the other women?

Paul Toscano [00:29:01] Well, it wasn't me. I wasn't the one who was supposed to have been practicing polygamy. I was supposed to have encouraged it in some others.

John Dehlin [00:29:10] Friends you had.

Paul Toscano [00:29:12] Well, not friends. It was somebody. It's a long and painful story that I'd rather not get into. But there was a student at byu.

John Dehlin [00:29:19] You brought it up.

Paul Toscano [00:29:20] Well, I did, but they had a number. I'm saying there were a number of different allegations, none of which were true. And eventually we were cleared of all of them because it was just made up, essentially.

John Dehlin [00:29:33] But was there something you were doing that was not ordinary or different or unorthodox, that was leading people to want to try and speculate or make up?

Paul Toscano [00:29:44] I think the only thing that we did was that students who had been in our old BYU ward would come over to our house and we would talk about stuff that was the main thing. I don't think there was any. There was nothing other than that, except that it turned out that one of the young men that was coming over to our house and talking to us actually did have in his own mind, a relationship with two women. They did have a kind of plural marriage arrangement about which we had no knowledge. And when we did, we told them, well, you know, you can't be married. This is just nothing. I mean, how can. It's kind of adultery or fornication or something like that. But by that time, this came to be known to some of the stake presidents at byu, and they felt that somehow I had encouraged this when it was really. I mean, I've never been

John Dehlin [00:30:44] a fundamentalist,

Paul Toscano [00:30:45] a fan of polygamy. I mean, even though I understand that it's part of our history and it may have purposes, it's not something that I've ever thought was a good thing for us.

John Dehlin [00:30:57] So some bumps up with leadership in the.

Paul Toscano [00:30:59] Yeah, bumps up. In fact, they actually had meetings with Margaret and I, and Margaret was holding Angela when she was a tiny baby. And, you know, they were just grilling us. And I was not doing very well in answering their questions. I was very obstreperous and a little rude and I said things I probably would not say now, or maybe I would, I don't know. But they were irritating me because they were always going after me and I was always trying to support them. I wasn't saying that people should leave the church. See, I never believed, even if I believed that the doctrine was not taught right, I never believed that erring in doctrine was a sin. I don't think it's always very helpful to earn doctrine. But I understood that people have differences in doctrine. I didn't care that the leaders didn't think the way I did. I always thought that they were the leaders of the church. I didn't think that a leader of the church had to be correct all the time. They had to be authorized. Because the main thing I saw them doing was authorizing the performance of all of the ordinances that bound us together. The way I put this in another place is to say, well, it's the Pope that binds the Catholic Church. You have to be allegiant allegiance to the Pope. And in Protestantism, you have to believe that the Bible is inerrant. Or at least if it's not inerrant, it is the authority that you believe in. And of course, in Protestantism, different readings of the Bible will create different denominations schisms. But in Mormonism, I didn't think that either authority was the unifying principle or Scripture was the unifying principle. I thought that the unifying principle was the ordinances. If you accepted the ordinances and believed in the ordinances and accepted them, it made you part of the family. It's like being born into a family. You can't undo that. It's like DNA. I mean, you're in it. You may be a black sheep in the family, they may not always like you. You may disagree with dad and mom about some things, but you're in. That's how I felt Mormonism was that the ordinances made us in the family. So it never occurred to me that I would be excommunicated for my beliefs because I Understood you could be excommunicated for sin, but I didn't think it was a sin to earn doctrine. And I always have left open the idea that I could be wrong. But what I've experienced in Mormonism is that nobody tries to show that you're wrong. They just assume you're wrong or explain to you why you're wrong without ever going through the trouble of proving or demonstrating that you're wrong. And this is what I see happen all the time. So even in all those instances that I've mentioned before where I got myself into trouble, there was never an attempt to show me that I was wrong or explain why. I mean, they would say, you're wrong because you're not obedient. But they wouldn't say, well, I'd say, well, look at the scripture. Why would it say that? And this over here say that. How do you reconcile those things? There was never any discussion like that. And there never. Was it my excommunication. It was always, we're right, you're wrong. Which I suppose it's just Sicilianness. We don't like to be pushed around. Talk to me. Let's eat together. But don't tell me what to do, because I want you to prove it to me. Show me something. So by 70, that happened in the 80s and I got a black mark, or they have some kind of sticker. I think it's an unsmiley face that they put on your church records. Because after that, I was never called anything. We moved to Salt Lake about, oh, three or four years later. And I hadn't been called anything for a long time, which was unusual because we attended church all the time. We were active and paid our tithing. I got it into my head. I called my friend Hartman Rector. I said, you know, Hartman, I think somebody's put some kind of a mark on my record. I don't know why I think this, but I just haven't been called anything. Could you check? And he did. And he called me back and he says, yes, they did. They put a mark or something that says you're not to be called to anything. I said, oh, that's very discouraging, because there was never any. Even though they had tried us and told us that they cleared, there was nothing to it. They still marked the records. And so after that, that was like, in 84.

Part 4 of 7 · Ep. 80

Paul Toscano [00:00:01] Well, the sunstone thing began in 1984 when Margaret gives her first speech. Her first speech is the ribbed or. Yeah, the missing rib. The forgotten place of queens and priestesses in the establishment of Zion. And she was the one who actually first spoke on this subject. Now, in all fairness to me, the information from this speech was something that Margaret and I had talked about for a long time, in fact, since 1971, when I first met her.

John Dehlin [00:00:31] Was this women in the priesthood thing important to you?

Paul Toscano [00:00:34] Yes, it was. It wasn't important at first because it took me a while to figure out that it affected women, because my first interest in this came with the idea of the fullness of the priesthood. And the fullness of the priesthood was an idea that I began to develop with some other guys at BYU whose names I could mention, but I won't. In a class that we put together in a graduate religion class that we put together, of which Brother Cowan, the blind religion professor back then, was the graduate advisor. He never showed up and he didn't see anything because he was blind, but he was a good man. What we did is we took six to eight of us and we divided up the Journal of Discourses, the Histories of the church, the. The Joseph Smith Papers up at the Church Office Building, and the Minutes of the council of the 12, which were available to us and some other sources that were available to us back then. There was this period where documents were open because Leonard Arrington was there. And we went through these things quite closely, making notes. We had to use note cards. We didn't have laptops or anything, so we're writing note cards. And we all came out of this thing with boxes of note cards where every time it was ever mentioned the fullness of the priesthood, the fullness of the apostleship, the second anointing, the second endowment, whatever, even tangential reference to the Holy order, whatever it is, we would write down the notes, and we gathered this all together after a semester and read through them all, and I kept them. And it made no sense. It made no sense to us until we realized you look at something and you're trying to fit it into the framework of your belief structure that you've got. How you see the priesthood, how we saw the priesthood there. I suddenly realized that there is a priesthood apart from the one to which we are ordained that was given in the temple. Suddenly it came to me and to the others. I'm not saying I was the principal one. It came out of discussions. And we're sitting there talking at night, trying to figure out what could this possibly mean. And after many discussions and thinking it through, and this was before I went to Washington. And then when I went to Washington, I'm still communicating by letter on an old royal typewriter. I'm writing to some of my friends, particularly Greg Alvord, who was a very close friend of mine. He's dead now, but a very close friend of mine. Suddenly I got the flu. When I arrived in Washington, I had the flu. I was staying with some friends of mine there and I had the flu and I was sick for two weeks. I didn't even leave their basement because it was afraid I might infect their kids. So I just stayed down there. But I would force myself to get up and write this letter. I would keep working on this letter. It was like 25 pages long, single spaced, an onion skin. And when I was done with this letter, I realized that I had worked through these quotes, I had figured it out. I didn't realize I was figuring it out, but I had. I said, well, this could mean this and this could be. And suddenly I realized that when you go to the temple that the priesthood that we get outside the temple, the one that we're ordained to as priests, teachers, deacons, you know, elders, 70s priests, apostles, that priesthood is provisional. It's like a scaffolding that's necessary to build the temple. Once the temple is built, you can take down the scaffolding. Because it was intended that the priesthood be given in the temple, that the investment in the robes of the priesthood. By being actually dressed in these priesthood robes in the temple, you are actually having the priesthood placed upon you. Which is very similar to the way that when they make a duke or an earl or even the Queen of England, they put robes and finally a crown, scepter, orb, and all of these are symbols that are going on in the temple, which is the creation of queens and priestesses and kings and priests.

John Dehlin [00:04:21] So those other things are offices, those

Paul Toscano [00:04:23] other things are provisional priesthood. It's a provisional priesthood. It's like, you know, you got a temporary license, but the permanent driver's license, the one that sticks, the one that's notarized by God himself, that one comes only through the temple and it doesn't even come through the temple.

John Dehlin [00:04:39] Does the language really say that?

Paul Toscano [00:04:40] Well, you. I'm not going to repeat on this thing the language of the temple, which I can do, but there are several places in the temple where it tells

John Dehlin [00:04:47] you that it's

Paul Toscano [00:04:51] in this position, you can do anything. It tells you that. And it says it to the women as it's saying it to the men. And then if you understand the shape of the robes and what they're trying to depict in their way, and if you understand the garment and its markings and all of that and what that's supposed to mean, and all of these things, and that you are actually one, you are in the priesthood, you are then a child thinking of yourself as Adam and Eve, but thinking of yourself as Jesus, because all of these are vicarious identities that you take. It's kind of like the Kachina ceremonies that the Hopis do, where they become the God in the dance. That's what the person becomes. We become the God. Then the blows of death and all the other things are inflicted upon the God. Because when God himself takes upon these pains and penalties and these punishments, it redounds to the benefit of all of those who wrap themselves in his grace or in his works, or in his vicarious work. That's what the temple is about. Suddenly, I'm writing this to my friend Greg and I'm explaining this to him, and I realized that the difference between the provisional priesthood, which is given in the church as a means to get things done, but then ultimately the priesthood that's going to last, that's eternal, is in the temple. And then I realize how this connects to the second endowment or anointings or whatever you want to call them. So I lay it all out in this letter and I send it to Greg. And he then later that becomes the beginning of our understanding of this. It was later, after I married Margaret, when I was showing her these notes, that she began to say, well, then this is how the women got the priesthood. Then she actually did her own independent study of Joseph smith's speeches in 1842 to the relief Society, and realized that in those speeches, he's preparing to make them priests. He says, I'm going to make of the society a kingdom of priestesses. He begins to prepare. I'm thinking of the Relief Society as a kind of provisional priesthood organization, kind of like the quorums of deacons and elders and wherever of the man. And that the Relief Society was going to be a provisional priesthood organization for women, but that that would prepare them to go to the temple, where they would have the same rights as men to preside as priests and function as priestesses with their husbands. And that was the. That work led to her seminal speech in 1984, which is the first sunstone speech that Annie Toscano gave. And that was the speech. And she was Asked to give it twice because it was so amazing to people how she put it together that they asked her to give it again the next day. And they did. I heard it the second time because I was watching the kids the first time at home. I decided that because they had marked my records and that I couldn't speak in church anymore and they were going to let me that my vow not to speak without authority from my bishop or stake president, all bets were off. And that's when I started in 1985, giving Sunstone presentations in these sunstone presentations. If somebody wants to go back and dig these up and look at them. And I have published some in the Sanctity of Dissent, but not all of them. They're all about the centrality of Christ in Christology and that nothing makes sense in Mormonism, including the Temple, apart from seeing it from a christological point of view and the importance of emphasizing grace rather than works. Even though I got nothing against doing good works, it isn't the thing that changes us. There has to be a transformation that's essentially divine. So that's what. And that's my Sunstone speeches from 1985. And they become more strident and more obstreperous because I'm frustrated. What did you want to happen?

Expectations of Church Leadership Response

John Dehlin [00:08:55] What did you expect that Boyd didn't. President Packer or Elder Packer or Elder Hinckley would go, oh, dang, we've got it wrong.

Paul Toscano [00:09:03] Yes, that's what I expected.

John Dehlin [00:09:04] They'd go, okay, Paul, we gotta listen to Paul. And then we're gonna adopt that and start speaking.

Paul Toscano [00:09:09] Yeah, I thought it would be like the Council. I. Stupid, aren't I? I thought it would be like the Council of Jerusalem where when Paul goes to the Council of Jerusalem and says, well, we can't be circumcising gentiles, if the grace of God comes upon them, there's no need for them to become Jews first. And Peter says, you're right, that's what I thought would happen.

John Dehlin [00:09:29] But what was Paul's office when he did that?

Paul Toscano [00:09:32] Who knows? I mean, to me it hasn't anything to do with the office. It has to do with the pure reality of the truth of the thing.

John Dehlin [00:09:40] So you have a really egalitarian view of what being in the church.

Paul Toscano [00:09:45] Well, I think. I think that the view that the apostles are going to spoon feed us the gospel is the damnedest, stupidest idea that ever came across Christianity, because that's not what they did in the early church. They never did that.

John Dehlin [00:10:00] There wasn't Joseph Standing up by a tree and everyone's sitting down listening to Joseph talk about.

Paul Toscano [00:10:04] I'm talking about the Apostles of Jesus.

John Dehlin [00:10:07] Okay, okay. Oh, the early church.

Paul Toscano [00:10:10] Yeah, the primitive church, as they call it in some places. And Joseph Smith is shoveling out doctrine as fast as he can, but he's not sitting down holding people's hands. That's one of the big problems. He's a revelator. He's writing stuff, publishing stuff, but he doesn't. If anything, he withdrew. I mean, he would. Sometimes he would obfuscate because he was afraid he would get persecuted. Once you've been tarred and feathered and you lost a couple of kids and your wife's upset at you and you've been driven out of one city and another and people stand to kill you and you become more conscientious about what you say in public and private. But he was very bold, even to the end. No, but I don't think that he's spoon feeding people the gospel. He's bringing on more stuff, some of which, as I said before earlier on in this interview, some of which in Nauvoo confused people about what he meant in the 30s. What he says in the 40s seems to contradict what he said in the 30s. That is true, that people pick up, I believe, because he did not spoon feed it to them. He did not show them how the stuff he's telling them in the 40s did not contradict the stuff he said in the 30s. He assumed that they could figure that out. He had a lot more sense of egalitarianism than other people did. He thought people were as smart as he was and could follow him and would understand what he was talking about. Apparently this isn't true.

John Dehlin [00:11:40] So you had this sincere. You had the sincere belief that you had the theology figured out. At least some of the central theology figured out more than maybe most people did. And that if you spoke publicly and eventually loud enough or charismatically enough or intelligently enough that you could maybe even change and shift the direction of church theology in a more Christ centered, correct sort of way.

Paul Toscano [00:12:06] I don't want to say that I thought that because. Because it sounds too arrogant. And I don't think I thought that. What I thought was, first of all, I did not think I had Mormon theology figured out. What I felt that I had figured out was the core gospel. The core gospel was Christ and him crucified, that he was the Supreme Being, that we had to see through the lenses of that belief, that when we looked at the temple we, we weren't seeing pagan. We weren't giving it a Masonic interpretation or a pagan interpretation or a New Age interpretation. We had to see that the holes in the garment were the wounds of Jesus. We had to see that the garment that you wear on your body is the skin of the animal that represents his sacrifice. You're wrapping yourself in his grace. That the priesthood robes that you're putting on are the robes of the order of the priesthood after the order of the Son of God, that you cannot get around him, you cannot go to the Father and somehow sidestep the Son. The Son of God is greater than the Father because although the Father may have been the Creator, the Son saved the creation by a personal sacrifice where he did not insulate himself from pain, but he bore the greatest part in his own person. He doesn't send somebody else to do the dirty work. He bears the Cross himself and calls us to do the same. I thought that that message and that there's no hell, that the worst of us get a degree of glory. I thought those messages of Christocentricity and grace and universal salvation, that these were the heart and soul of Mormonism and that all the other theologies and speculative theologies that may grow out of the statements of Joseph Smith could be understood best in light of. Of these teachings that are the pillars of the Church.

John Dehlin [00:14:02] And is your not experiencing or hearing those in everyday church services build resentment or frustration?

Paul Toscano [00:14:10] I didn't care about that. I couldn't figure out why the apostles weren't doing this. What are the apostles of if not Jesus Christ?

John Dehlin [00:14:17] Well, they are talking about Jesus and repentance.

Paul Toscano [00:14:19] Are they?

John Dehlin [00:14:20] Yeah, sure.

Paul Toscano [00:14:21] Such that when I give a speech about Jesus, I don't get persecuted because it sounds like their speech about Jesus. I don't think they do a very good job because I don't think you can go through their speech. Lately they've been doing a better job because lately they've been persecuted by the fundamentalists, evangelical Christians, and they want Mitt Romney to get elected. And so therefore they're skewing their teachings more toward this because they have a political reason for doing it. But why weren't they doing it in the 60s and 70s and the 50s and the 40s?

John Dehlin [00:14:49] You're saying they're emphasizing grace more now?

Paul Toscano [00:14:51] Yes, of course. And now they've put Jesus Christ's name is bigger in the logo and they put his name on the Book of Mormon as another witness for Christ. All of which is great.

John Dehlin [00:15:02] When Time magazine asks Gordon B. Hinckley about Jesus or God once being a man and man becoming God?

Paul Toscano [00:15:09] Yeah. I would not. If I were the president of the church, they would ask me that and say, sure, we believe that because that's in the New Testament. The New Testament says that when Jesus comes, we shall be like him. Our doctrine merely says that we're going to be gods like him. What does it mean to be like him if it doesn't mean to be like him? If the evangelicals are all upset about this and the Pentecostals are all upset about what the Mormons believe, it's because they haven't got the sensitivity to the scripture. The scripture can be interpreted the way we say. If Christ says that when he comes, we're going to be like him. I believe that. That's what I would have said. This may offend some people, but we should stop being offended because we have different views of very difficult issues. It doesn't mean we're out of the family of Christians simply because we have maybe even the wrong view. But he didn't. He said, well, that was just a couplet. As God once was, man is now as man. How does it say it?

John Dehlin [00:16:10] Man as God once was and as God, as man may be God.

Paul Toscano [00:16:13] Right, that's it. That famous couplet that I get wrong for some reason. That couplet is not just a couplet. It is a very important clarification of Christian theology which really is going to. The question of spiritual maturation from going to a creation of God, to a child of God, to a friend of God, to a joint heir with God in the Godhead. That's all that that means. And it's right there in the New Testament. Just like baptism for the dead is in the New Testament. And terrestrial. Celestial. Terrestrial and celestial is in St. Paul's writing. It's not like Mormon doctrine invented a lot of this. It's that it's there and it's clarified and it's expanded. That's a lot of what Joseph Smith's work is, the idea that God has a body, we should have known that from the resurrection. Now the idea that Jesus has a father, we should have understood that that's what St. Paul means. As in Adam all men die, so in Christ shall all be made alive. Who is going to be the father of Christ's body if not Adam? Because it says in there. And who is going to be his mother? Well, it's going to be Mary, but Eve is involved in that. There is an attempt in Mormonism to play out all of these suggested Prophetic statements of the Old Testament. In Christological terms, he is, like it says in the Battle Hymn of Republic, he is the hero born of woman. Pardon me, he is the hero born of woman who will crush the serpent's head. Well, that relates back to the child of Adam and Eve. The Adam God doctrine was that Christ is actually the literal child of Adam and Mary. And it's a very strange theology. I admit this. People don't like it. They like. I don't know why. They like trinitarianism. It's not really much more logical, but they're more used to it. It's kind of like the weather. It's kind of like the weather you're used to.

John Dehlin [00:18:22] So what does it mean if you take this theology really seriously and that you think you understand it pretty well, let's say back in the 80s, but none of the traditional Christian churches have it right and not even Mormonism, which you still probably hold back then as God's true church. What does that say about God and Jesus that they've got this theology that's so crucial, yet none of the churches have got it right. And it's you, it's you, Paul Toscano, who's figured it out and all the others. What does that mean for the validity of any church or for any credibility that God or Jesus might even have? Because nobody understands it but Paul Toscano and a couple of his friends?

Paul Toscano [00:19:01] Well, I don't think that's true. No.

John Dehlin [00:19:03] But did you think about this? Well, sure.

Paul Toscano [00:19:05] I'm very disturbed by the fact that over the period from Joseph Smith's death to now that the church has abandoned much of what Joseph Smith taught, that his ideas are not explored and ramified. It bothers me a great deal. It bothers me that if it weren't for the historical reality of polygamy, we would have crawled back into Protestantism a long time ago. But because polygamy is in our history, the Protestants won't have us back.

John Dehlin [00:19:46] But what does that say about just belief in God and Jesus at all if nobody can get it right?

Paul Toscano [00:19:53] I don't think it matters whether you get it right.

John Dehlin [00:19:56] What's the purpose of this whole deal then?

Paul Toscano [00:19:58] What I mean by that is I don't think that if a person is good hearted and they're trying to live their life according to the lights that God has given them, that is their judgment, that is what they'll be judged on, that they love one another, then they are his disciples.

John Dehlin [00:20:15] So the theology doesn't matter.

Paul Toscano [00:20:16] After all, the Theology matters. But what I'm trying to say is I think it's the duty of the leaders of the church and of the church to teach and to stick by the revelations of Joseph Smith. Christ revealed himself through Joseph Smith in a way that we are supposed to honor. I think it would be way helpful if we did that. I think we wouldn't be losing as many members as we do. We would not have a program to bring them in and give them milk. We would actually give them meat after milk and they would be able to stay in. They would be more. I think that's the problem. The problem is not that I think that it's essential to an individual salvation that they get doctrine right. I don't think that's true. I think it helps to get it right. I think getting the right foundation. It's not like just because your foundation is cracked doesn't mean you can't live in the house. You can live in the house. It's not very helpful to have a cracked foundation. When floods come, they leak. It makes things worse. But it doesn't mean that there isn't a church there. It doesn't mean that it's not the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It's just that when something new is revealed, it's not a good idea to abandon it. You should stick with it until you understand it.

Loving the Church Too Much to Stay Silent

John Dehlin [00:21:40] This reminds me of the discussion I had with Margaret that both of you, the problem wasn't that you loved the church too little. The problem was that you loved it and its theology intensely. And so it was hard for you to see that be dismissed and marginalized and turned away from. That seems like it was the backbone of your conviction.

Paul Toscano [00:22:01] Well, I didn't leave my family in California to join Mormonism so that I could run across the recreation hall with a spoon in my mouth and an egg and sit on a balloon. I am not interested in the MIA and I'm not interested in Mormon culture. I am interested in. I was interested in the revelations of God through Joseph Smith. That's what I was converted to. If you get converted to one thing and then you find that the leaders of the church are embarrassed about it and they can't dump it out of the handcart of our theology fast enough. I don't know what's wrong with them. What are they embarrassed about? They never talk about from General Conference. You couldn't tell we were Mormons but for the fact that we keep showing the logo and showing soft focus.

John Dehlin [00:22:46] Well, I'm talking about Joseph Smith.

Paul Toscano [00:22:48] Yeah, but not talking about what he said. I mean, yes, they talk about Joseph Smith, they use the name Joseph Smith, but do they ever go down and analyze the King Father discourse or the June 16 discourse, or the discourse on the Father and the Son that he gives earlier on, or the discourse on the priesthood that he gives in October of 1842 or whatever when he said the priesthood hasn't yet been restored? Do they analyze his statements? No, they want the Conestoga wagons and the oxen and the pioneer and the flannel and the bonnets and. But they don't want to know what was going on in the heads of the pioneers. They've externalized 19th century Mormonism and are not interested in the early. No, no.

John Dehlin [00:23:26] They're talking about faith, repentance, baptism.

Paul Toscano [00:23:28] They're talking about faith, but not faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. They're talking about repentance, but which they mean is an exterior repentance, not a transformation. They are talking about baptism as a way to get into the Church, not a way to rise as a new spiritual person, to grow into a person that is as mature as they are spiritually. And they're certainly not going to let you do that or talk to them as equals. They are not talking about the gift of the Holy Ghost as the only means to get the truth. They have used the Church public relations department and the correlation committee as the means to get the truth. So I don't know where we're talking about faith, repentance and baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost because they've got agencies of the Church to block the operation of almost every one of those. So what do we. I don't know. You're laughing. I'm saying this. You hit this witch. And I'm going, I don't want this. I don't want this to be on the television because people will yell at me. I'm tired of being yelled at. I'm the one who wants. I'm not saying that everything Joseph Smith said and did was right. No, he did things that I would not approve of. I feel that maybe we're a problem that creates problems. But he was only a normal guy, but he was a tremendous intellect. His books and texts and interpretations and new versions of Isaiah. It's beyond beliefs. And where have we come at every turn? We just don't want to deal with that. Just show us the Conestoga wagons and that's all we want from the 19th century.

John Dehlin [00:25:02] You're kind of a fundamentalist.

Paul Toscano [00:25:04] No, I'm not. I am not a fundamentalist. A fundamentalist wants to go back and live in the 19th century. I don't want to do that. I want us not to be ashamed of the heritage that we had through Joseph Smith. That's what I want.

Escalating Tensions Leading Toward Excommunication

Part 5 of 7 · Ep. 81

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Okay, so how do we go from these harsher and harsher, stronger and stronger, more and more frustrating speeches you were giving in the mid to late 80s, to excommunication?

Paul Toscano [00:00:14] Well, I started out thinking the apostles know all this stuff. And I'm just talking to people in the church who don't know it, and they get irritated, and I can't help that. Well, but as time goes on, I'm beginning to realize that as I listen to conference, I conclude that, okay, the members of the church are not ready to hear this, so the brethren are giving them milk and not meat.

John Dehlin [00:00:41] So giving them lots of credit, the benefit of the doubt.

Paul Toscano [00:00:44] Absolutely. As time goes on and I listen to them and I have some private communications with them.

John Dehlin [00:00:51] So you did try and talk to them?

Paul Toscano [00:00:52] Yeah, I mean, I didn't make a pest of myself, but I talked to a few of them and Hartman I could talk to all the time.

John Dehlin [00:00:57] Do you want to talk about that or would you rather not? Well, I mean, you tried to have this conversation with the general authorities.

Paul Toscano [00:01:02] Yeah, Yeah, I talked to Neal Maxwell. He told me I needed to be meek, which was true.

John Dehlin [00:01:08] Meaning he didn't agree with you?

Paul Toscano [00:01:09] No, he didn't say that. He just thought I should be meek.

John Dehlin [00:01:12] But you explained to him what you've explained to us?

Paul Toscano [00:01:14] Yes, more or less. Yes.

John Dehlin [00:01:15] And he said yes.

Paul Toscano [00:01:16] I wasn't as articulate earlier on, but I got so. So that I understood more what I believe, so I was able to express it better.

John Dehlin [00:01:22] And so you were talking about Christology, Christ centeredness, God the Father.

Paul Toscano [00:01:25] And he says, well, I talked to Hartman about it. He thought it was fine.

John Dehlin [00:01:31] And Brother Maxwell, did he argue on the substance?

Paul Toscano [00:01:34] No, he didn't. He just felt like I needed to know my place.

John Dehlin [00:01:37] But did he treat you okay?

Paul Toscano [00:01:39] He always treated me with great kindness. I mean, I only met with him on one occasion. I think I met with him on Sunday, several, very briefly, but only one where we actually talked privately. I liked him. I had no problem. I remember meeting with Dallin Oaks right after he became an apostle. And I had been his research assistant for a period of time while I was in law school. So I knew him. And I wrote a book early on in the 80s, which nobody's read, called Gospel Letters to a Mormon Missionary. And it's an epistolary. It's Letters to Larry. I think he had read it. He read it. It was very nice. And he was a little worried about my ideas about priesthood because I had written in that book that I thought that there was an outward and an inward priesthood. There was a priesthood that came by ordination, but there was a priesthood that comes only by the Spirit. And he said, well, that's dangerous. And I said, well, is it any more dangerous than a person being ordained to stay president who doesn't have an ounce of the Spirit in them? You guys seem to have no trouble ordaining people who don't have any spirituality whatsoever. That doesn't bother you as much as somebody who has spirituality but no ordination.

John Dehlin [00:03:00] You sent this to who?

Paul Toscano [00:03:01] Dallin Oaks? And I said other things too. He said, well, I sense that you have problems with the leadership of the church. I said, I do. I don't understand why they don't teach the gospel more. I know they think they're teaching the gospel, but for them everything is the gospel. Writing in your journal, home teaching, being nice to your wife, opening the door of the car so she can get in. I mean, this is not the gospel. The gospel is the incarnation, the crucifixion, the resurrection, the redemption and the universal judgment. I mean, this is what it says in 3 Nephi. I can quote you what the gospel is. And he says, well, we try to do that. And I said, well, I don't know, pardon me for saying this, but I think you've just got a scattergun approach and you need a bullet because I don't think this is going to work. And he says, well, you seem to be upset. I said, well, I'm upset because I think you claim to be apostles and that's a very big claim and you need to deliver and you don't. You're the worst apostles we've ever had in the history of Christianity.

John Dehlin [00:04:14] Holy moly.

Paul Toscano [00:04:16] I said, you said that to him? Yes. He said, well, which one of us are you talking about? I said, listen, Elder Oaks, any one of you is a better person than I am. Any one of you is a better man than I am. It's just as a group that you don't do very well. You line up in order of seniority to go to the bathroom. I think you checkmate your best instincts because of this authority thing. I don't think it's a good thing. If you had 12 deacons, they wouldn't do that, but you do. And I think that's wrong.

John Dehlin [00:04:51] And he just sort of took it well.

Paul Toscano [00:04:53] He took it very well. He was a very open minded. I mean, these are not bad men. They just could do better. And they don't like to be told that by somebody like me. I mean, I'm just A Sicilian convert that comes out of the blue with a kind of a harsh way of saying things that offends people as I do, that people don't understand the depth of my frustration and they assume I'm ambitious and that I want to be one of them. That's not how I feel. I certainly would not want to be a leader of the church. I just don't understand how we are being true to all of those early Mormons who buried children in shallow graves between St. Joseph's Missouri and Salt Lake City, who made huge sacrifices for this church and have continued to do so down through the 20th century. I don't know how we can be true to those people by denying what we are, because we want the praises of a world that is so deeply confused that their praise or their criticism should not matter to us.

John Dehlin [00:06:00] So what about just the argument out of sympathy, that they're just trying to get people to stay married, they're trying to get kids to stay off drugs and alcohol and have sex and not have, you know, illegitimate children. They're trying to help people just have a happy, normal, healthy life. And that, you know, the practical advice maybe is the most relevant and important. And whether Jesus was God or Jesus was the Son, or whether Adam assumed some angelic position so that Jesus could come down the earth or God could become Jesus, maybe what's wrong with the argument that that's so less important than things like doing your home teaching so that people can help each other in the ward, help families grow, raise righteous children, Forget all that theology and doctrine and focus more on sort of the day to day practicalities. What's wrong with feeling empathy for the fact that they're just trying to help people stay married, have productive lives, keep their jobs, keep their families intact, and raise their children relatively healthily? And so they have a lot of practical advice for that.

Paul Toscano [00:07:05] Well, down in Melanesia, when a person is dying, this was years ago, I guess it doesn't happen now so much. They felt that the spirit was going to leave the body. The person got very ill. And so what they do to keep this spirit from leaving the body of this ill person, quite ill person, was that they would make a compound of grass and dung and mud and urine, and they would make a paste and they would put the paste in all of the person's bodily openings to keep the spirit from coming out. The result was always traumatic and death always ensued. But the elders felt that they had done their best. Okay, my point is that I don't believe telling young People that sex is loathsome, evil, dirty, disgusting, immoral, and you should save it for the one you love is essentially a good message to give to them. Now, I have no idea what the proper message is. If I were in charge, I would not be giving that message at all. I would not bring that subject up. Because I don't think it helps to talk about drugs and alcohol and sex and being nice to your wife and doing your home teaching. Because I don't think that makes the world better. Because I don't think the world works that way.

John Dehlin [00:08:35] By merely talking about it, it makes sense.

Paul Toscano [00:08:38] I think that the way you make people better is to tell them the Gospel, talk about the Godhead, talk about the angels, talk about miracles, talk about the New Testament, make the connections they can't make from the Old Testament to the New Testament. And magically, somehow, I don't know how, but when people are concentrating on those things, their lives get better. Because the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, though it has been incorporated, is not a corporation. And the members of the church are not widgets. We're not cranking out widgets. All of the things that you're saying works in a corporation. But this is not a corporation. This is the body of Christ. Now, if it's a body, when you pray or think, things get better. Even if you're not picking at your scabs all the time and be concentrating all on your blemishes and your fat and all of that that you're worried about, your life gets better. If you can pull yourself out of yourself and think about things that are eternal. Home teaching is not eternal. Being nice to your wife is not eternal. Writing in your journal is not eternal. Those things are not eternal. Those are not eternal things. Telling kids about sex when you don't know anything about it yourself is not eternal.

John Dehlin [00:10:11] But certainly they can have practical value.

Paul Toscano [00:10:16] Okay, let me put it to you another way. Morality is the enemy of religion. The more you talk about morality, the more people sink into despair, because that's the way it works. The more you judge, the more they sense you're judging them. The more they're always measuring themselves against what they think as other people's expectations. The more despair they get. Except for the real dumb people in the church who believe they're living up to these moral standards and they become arrogant. So you generate a syndrome of arrogance and despair from which there is absolutely no escape except the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which teaches us not to judge ourselves and others and to have hope. And if you can have it. Faith, which I no longer have, but hope and charity.

John Dehlin [00:11:04] You do have faith. We'll get to that.

Paul Toscano [00:11:05] No, I don't. No, I don't. What I have is hope, but I do not have any longer any faith. Faith is something that you have to feel inside you and trust God. I don't distrust him, but I don't trust him. But I do have hope. I hope Jesus is the Christ. I hope he was raised from the dead. I can't think of anybody better to fill that position. But after my excommunication, it was like being hit by a Mack truck and. And I lost my eyesight. I lost that sense. I haven't lost hope. I hope I haven't lost charity, even though my charity is sometimes manifest as rebuking betimes with sharpness. But my sharp rebuke comes from the fact that I do not believe, nor do I have any evidence that's been presented to me that carping about people's morality and their behavior is going to make them better. It certainly doesn't is my experience. It just makes them feel more despondent.

John Dehlin [00:12:06] But doesn't the, doesn't the. Look at the. I mean, I know you can isolate and pick instances or subcultures, but look at the general membership of the church. It's a bunch of basically good, honest, hard working, family, committed, responsible people.

Paul Toscano [00:12:26] I don't know if that's true or not. I hope that's true.

John Dehlin [00:12:28] Oh, come on.

Paul Toscano [00:12:29] But that can be said about the Presbyterians and the Methodists and the Catholics and the Muslims. By and large, they're all in this thicket trying to make sense out of stuff. But what transforms people is the preaching of the word of God, which is not practical. It is allowing them to have faith in something for which there is very little evidence. That is essentially mythological. But somehow a magical thing happens. It happened in Joseph Smith's time. The reason why Those people left St. Joseph's Missouri and dared to go across the plains and were willing to bury their children in shallow graves was not because they were being taught to do their home teaching. They were being taught things like Adam, God, and God has a body and eternal progression and the law of consecration and stewardship and that Jesus appeared in the Kirtland temple and things that were eternal but very, very unpractical. It's like the humanities. The reason why we have all the problems we have in Washington D.C. with all these yokels that we've now elected to office and that are essentially ruining the nation and They've done it as Democrats and they do it now as Republicans is because they don't read poetry. They're not men of letters. The humanities haven't humanized them. Nothing has schooled their intuitions. Nothing has schooled their imagination. They are men with a failure of imagination. The failure of the war in Iraq and we've had two is not a failure of the nation. It's a failure of imagination. We could not imagine by sending 19 year olds and giving them Kevlar and AK47s that they would kick in the doors of innocent people and shoot dogs and children. I'm just a bankruptcy lawyer and I could have imagined that. What is it that they're taking that would kill the imagination, that they couldn't imagine what I'm saying? That they would send our guys, we're having our guys, torture their guys. But the worst effect is going to be on our guys. Not today, 10, 15 years from now, when they realize what they have done. And there will be in their minds no atonement. It's not by teaching practical things that we humanize the world. It is not practical to say to the world, I am the bread of life. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And he that believeth in me and liveth shall never die. There's nothing practical in that. And yet, even as I say it, can't you hear it resonating down the centuries of 2000 years and bringing people into something better than what they lived in? Whatever mud or plague or other thing that they had to go through. It is the impractical thing that the apostles are given to teach. What is that impractical thing that God Himself entered into the world, laid aside his sovereignty, his glory, His his kingdom, and made Himself into a Jew and lived in Jerusalem as a carpenter's son, and allowed Himself to be scourged and afflicted and hammered with nails and die and rose again from the dead and take everything up with him. That's very impractical. And yet that is the thing that gives people hope. And that is the thing they don't say. Because they're so focused on trying to keep people from having sex illicitly. Well, that is a no win proposition. They are of course going to have sex illicitly and they're going to take drugs. And why do they do it? Because they have no hope.

John Dehlin [00:16:21] They talk about the atonement all the time.

Paul Toscano [00:16:24] They don't talk about the atonement.

John Dehlin [00:16:26] They do.

Paul Toscano [00:16:26] They talk about creditors and debtors and Christ paying the debt and your obligation to be obedient. That is not the atonement.

John Dehlin [00:16:39] No, but they talk about mercy and they talk about salvation. Maybe they weren't as much when you were. I mean, I'm talking about general conferences I go to now.

Paul Toscano [00:16:52] Then how come those things are so boring when they say them? It isn't false doctrine. That is a problem in the church is boredom. And they don't want people. I believe that they have a problem. I don't believe they're. You know, I'm not saying that I am the apostle and they're not. I'm saying they need to do a better job. They're losing too many people. They're worried about leaving the Church in worse condition than they got it. And they are. And that's because they have. This pendulum has swung toward legalism. The more you emphasize morality, the more you emphasize these things, even if you say it nicely. I mean, you've got to be talking, you know, their position on gays, their position on women, their position on a number of different issues is just very punishing. They've got to come to that balance about being loving and open, but strict about the ordinances. I mean, I know that sounds. And you cannot address the problems of people directly. You can let them tell you their problems, but then what you have to say back has to be. You can't be giving them advice like that, because you can't give generalized advice. It doesn't work. I mean, you don't see Jesus giving generalized advice. What he says is sometimes contradictory. He that loseth his life shall find it. He that seeketh his life shall lose it. And you go, blessed are the peacemakers, the cheesemakers. Oh, he must mean everyone in the dairy industry. It's confusing what he says, but it isn't confusing to the heart because it does something there. If you just let. Is an instruction that isn't like an order. It's an illumination. And that's what I feel is missing. I mean, maybe the brethren do a better job than I think. Maybe they don't. They should not have excommunicated me for pointing out that they need to do better.

Conversations with Apostles and Stake President

John Dehlin [00:19:26] Well, let's talk about that. So take us from your speeches at Sunstone and your private conversations with some apostles to your excommunication.

Paul Toscano [00:19:36] Well, Actually, my excommunication happened because I blocked them from excommunicating Margaret. So how'd that happen in 1993, in July, she went down to BYU with her slide projector and she put on a Slide show for a group of women called Voice, which was a feminist group at byu.

John Dehlin [00:20:06] Yep, I was there.

Paul Toscano [00:20:07] You were there at that meeting?

John Dehlin [00:20:09] I was there at 93 when voice was very prevalent and Margaret was visiting.

Paul Toscano [00:20:15] She went down there and she puts on her slideshow. I used to call it Margaret's Traveling Show. And it would be these slides that she got from, I don't know where, of all these images of the female divine, you know, Greek goddesses, Egyptian goddesses, Mesopotamian goddesses, little Venuses that were very fat and pudgy, but very fertility symbols. She went down there, and I went with her, and I helped plug in the projector, and I sat there, and she gave this interesting presentation as a humanities teacher to these students. When it was over, some of the students who are quite perspicacious and up front, said, well, you know, are you saying there's a Mother Goddess? And she says, well, certainly that's part of Mormon theology. And why do we hear about her? Well, you know, we don't hear about her. And she's, you know, it's repression. I mean, the leaders of the church don't have anything to gain to talk about Heavenly Mother. It makes things even more confusing. So, no. And so the next day, and she answered some other questions. And so the faculty advisor to the Universe, who is essentially the job I had years before, was out of town. And so they took the story about Margaret and put it on the front page of the next summer universe. The summer universe isn't as monitored as the regular daily universe. And it said, mother God, repressed voice, told with a picture of Margaret and then the story about her, which wasn't really what she had gone there to do, nor was it the main point, but it got in the paper. It was the most sensational thing.

John Dehlin [00:22:03] And this is. Cecelia Farr's there. Gail Houston's there. This is a pretty sensitive time, right? Isn't Cecelia Farr, like, marching on the Capitol steps for abortion? And they're holding vigils at BYU about pro choice or pro life? And, I mean, I remember it being a very volatile time.

Paul Toscano [00:22:20] Okay, well, I didn't know that, but yeah. Anyway, Boyd Packer sees this on the front page of the Universe, which he reads. I hope it's not his only source of information, but he read it. And rather than call Kerry Hines, our stake president, we live in Salt Lake in the Cottonwood area. Instead of calling him, he calls Melvin Hammond down in Mexico as an area presidency. Because Melvin Hammond knows Kerry and Kerry knows Boyd Packer because they were in the seminary and institute program at one time, maybe in Brigham City or somewhere. So they're all friends. Maybe not friends, but they know each other. I think Carey looked upon Elder Packer as a mentor, maybe. Well, anyway, Elder Packer calls Elder Hammond and says, I don't know why Carey can't control that woman. Something like that. Hammond, soon after, maybe the same day, calls Carrie and says, I just got a call from Elder Packer and he thinks, you can't control that woman. You've got to do something. So I think, then what happens? That triggered a call from Kerry Hines to Elder Packer saying, well, what can I do to make this good? And so he went to visit him. I don't know whether they visited the church office building. Elder Packer lives kind of down in our area. Maybe he went over to his house or something. And that happened on the same day that that happened. That afternoon, Carrie calls Margaret in and tells her she's not allowed to publish or speak or discuss or get in the paper about Mormonism. She's completely silenced.

John Dehlin [00:24:06] How do you know who called who? I'm just curious.

Paul Toscano [00:24:09] Carrie told us. And. I don't know about who called. I don't know whether Cary called Elder Packer. Elder Packer called Kerry, but I suspect it happened the other way. But Kerry told us. And then Elder Packer said so in an article that got published that October, he said the date on which this happened, and it turned out to be the same date that we had written in our journal that Margaret had gone in. And he told us that Hammond called him.

John Dehlin [00:24:46] Okay, so they tell Margaret to stop talking about.

Paul Toscano [00:24:50] Yeah, don't speak about this stuff. About any stuff. Any related things related to Mormonism.

John Dehlin [00:24:56] Yeah, the Mother in Heaven, women in the priesthood. Because it's disruptive.

Paul Toscano [00:25:02] Well, it wasn't disrupting anybody that we knew of because it was only at Sunstone. It's not disturbing anybody in our ward or stake. We're not doing this in church. We're not trying to advance speculative theology in church. This is only at Sunstone. People have already lost their testimony at Sunstone or on their way. I mean, it's not like, oh, there's

John Dehlin [00:25:22] lots of believers at Sunstone now. Don't talk about Sunstone that way.

Paul Toscano [00:25:25] Well, there are a lot of questioners at Sunstone or else they wouldn't be there. And they have to also know that the church has put Sunstone off limits. So they've got to be a little bit rebellious to go. But it's not like people were getting their testimonies heard, even at Sunstone talking about these things. So I saw. No, that's what they said to us. That's what Kerry first said. You're damaging people's testimony. And I said, well, who? Show me one person whose testimony has been damaged by anything I've said. And if it comes to taking a body count, I will put my body count of lost testimonies against Boyd packers any day of the week. Okay.

John Dehlin [00:26:04] Wait, why are they talking to you when it's Margaret who gave the speech?

Paul Toscano [00:26:07] Because the woman is nothing. They always involve the husband.

John Dehlin [00:26:12] So they called you about Margaret's speech? Yeah, they didn't call her at all.

Paul Toscano [00:26:16] They called her in on that day to talk to her. I didn't go.

John Dehlin [00:26:19] And then how'd you get?

Paul Toscano [00:26:20] Well, because he said, I wish I should be meeting with you and your husband.

John Dehlin [00:26:23] Okay.

Paul Toscano [00:26:24] So he set up another meeting for me.

John Dehlin [00:26:26] Okay. All right.

Paul Toscano [00:26:26] And at that point, you know, I. I told him that I supported Margaret and that I wasn't going to tell her to support. I'm not going to stand by his statement. I'm going to stand by her beliefs. And we had several meetings, and I conflate them in my mind, although in my journal, I have them all. I made contemporaneous entries so that I would remember, but I don't right now. Remember. But I do know we met on August 5th. I remember that date. I think we met. And I met another time alone with him. So I met. I think we met twice with Margaret and once alone with him. But I do remember when I was alone with him. When I met him alone, I think he may have called me in to talk to me alone. I went to his house, which is by the Cottonwood Country Club, and it's a very lovely house, and he has a nice study, and he's got beautiful furniture in this nice study, and he's got an elk's head on the wall. And I'm sitting there talking to him, and I'm. I'm not the kind of a person that. I'm a little anti authoritarian, and I don't suffer fools lightly. I said, kerry, this is beyond you. You are not a theologian. You are not a person who studied the Scripture. You're a real estate agent, and you should stay out of this because you don't know what you're talking about.

John Dehlin [00:28:00] He's your stake president.

Paul Toscano [00:28:01] Yeah, he's my stake president. And he says, well, you know, so

John Dehlin [00:28:05] you start trying to talk about the theology.

Paul Toscano [00:28:07] No, I don't talk about the theology. He's talking about the theology. And I'm saying to him he doesn't understand what he's talking about and he should stay out of that because he doesn't know anything about theology. And I said, but I don't think you have the right to silence my wife. I don't think you have that kind of authority. And he says, well, you're damaging people's testimony. And I said, well, you can't. I find one. Bring somebody in here who says their testimony was ruined by Paul Toscano or Margaret. You're never going to find somebody who'd say that.

John Dehlin [00:28:40] You really don't believe that a discussion about how the top church leadership doesn't have the nature of God or the atonement. Right. Women should have the priesthood, but they're suppressing it and they're being abused and, and that there should be a discussion of Mother in Heaven, but we're not doing it because we're scared or because we're trying to keep the people down. You don't think those who are persuaded by those beliefs don't ultimately come to some type of conclusion, that at a minimum, the church isn't what they thought it was, but at maximum that it's corrupt and rotten and they should leave it? You really don't believe that?

Paul Toscano [00:29:20] Well, I would believe it if those things, what you said happened, but that's not what was happening.

John Dehlin [00:29:25] Those are your main arguments.

Paul Toscano [00:29:27] That's what I'm. Well, you're confusing what I believe with what we said.

John Dehlin [00:29:30] Well, that's what you were saying in Sunstone.

Paul Toscano [00:29:32] Yeah, in Sunstone we were saying that, but we. That Sunstone doesn't get picked up by the church.

John Dehlin [00:29:36] Oh, come on. It was like 6 to 10,000 subscriptions plus whatever the.

Paul Toscano [00:29:42] Plus whatever.

John Dehlin [00:29:43] Peggy Fletcher Stack started writing in the Solar Tribune and it started getting amplified in the early 90s, and that's.

Paul Toscano [00:29:50] Well, I don't believe that it hurts people's testimonies. I just don't believe it.

John Dehlin [00:29:54] You believe that what you and Margaret were teaching from the mid-80s to the early 90s was testimony neutral to people's convictions?

Paul Toscano [00:30:02] Well, I think it was actually testimony positive because most of the people we were talking to and most of the people that even Peggy Fletcher's articles are reaching have no effect on people who've never heard this because it wasn't laid out well enough for them to be damaged by it. They just think there's a bunch of nutcases out there talking about something they don't get it. It's the people who already know about it and can't contextualize it, who we were helping.

John Dehlin [00:30:28] But your conclusions are that the Brethren don't have it right and the Church is messed up and that, you know, and it's continually oppressing.

Paul Toscano [00:30:37] Is this a shock to you that the Church is messed up?

John Dehlin [00:30:39] No, I'm saying that you're trying to argue that that wouldn't have a deleterious impact on their levels of activity or convictions about the truthfulness or the church.

Paul Toscano [00:30:50] The people that we're talking to already believe the church is messed up and don't believe the brethren know what they're talking about.

John Dehlin [00:30:55] So all those girls at the Voice thing at byu, the freshmen through seniors in this young, you know, these BYU females, they already have these notions.

Paul Toscano [00:31:06] Well, there were 20 people there. 20 women.

John Dehlin [00:31:09] No, but the worth of the soul is Great.

Paul Toscano [00:31:12] There are 20 women there already concerned about the role of women in the church or they wouldn't have been in a feminist group at byu. Margaret just gave a presentation about how Goddess images appear in artwork. They were the ones who raised the question. She said, well, there is the Mother in Heaven theology in Mormonism. Why don't we hear more of it? Well, you know, it's in Joseph Smith's teachings. It's in Eliza Snow's hymn. It just doesn't get spoken of very much. It's kind of repressed. That was mostly all she said.

John Dehlin [00:31:43] Is it possible that you underestimate the potential impact or even danger of what you and Margaret were teaching?

Paul Toscano [00:31:52] Well, let me ask you this.

John Dehlin [00:31:54] In terms of the strength and vitality

Paul Toscano [00:31:56] of the Church, do you think that the Brethren damage people by taking a position against homosexuality and damaging all of those people in the church who are homosexuals? Do you think that the Brethren's position on being Republicans doesn't damage those people who want to ally themselves with Democrats? Do you think that the leaders of the Church's position on the question of money as a sign of God's favor doesn't hurt the poor?

John Dehlin [00:32:27] Okay, so all those things can be debated.

Paul Toscano [00:32:29] Do you think that the Church's interpretation of tithing, where you pay tithing on the gross, doesn't systematically damage the poor?

John Dehlin [00:32:37] Okay, those are all we could argue those.

Paul Toscano [00:32:40] Well, don't you think that the leaders of the Church have more opportunity and more potential to damage people's testimonies than we did? Why aren't they excommunicated on the same grounds? Why are we excommunicated for damaging people's testimony? But not Boyd Packer.

John Dehlin [00:33:00] My question was not whether or not they can do damage. My question was, are you sure you guys weren't doing damage?

Paul Toscano [00:33:06] Well, I can't be absolutely sure.

John Dehlin [00:33:08] To people's faith in the church and in their levels of commitment and devotion to the church that would ultimately speak to the church's strength.

Paul Toscano [00:33:17] All I can say is show me somebody who will say that we have damaged them. That is a fact. That is not something that you can make up. If somebody had been damaged. Show me. I can show you dozens of people who've been damaged by the leaders of the church. You show me one person that was damaged by Margaret. Show me one person who lost their testimony because of something I said.

John Dehlin [00:33:40] Margaret talked in her interview about a lot of women who ultimately were dissatisfied by the way women were treated in the church and it made them leave.

Paul Toscano [00:33:51] Yeah, but that had nothing to do with what she said. It was how they were treated in the church. Margaret wasn't treating them. It was how they were treated by their bishops, their husbands, their stake presidents, and other males. You have to come up. If you're going to say you're going to convict us for damaging somebody, you better come up with a body. You need to come up with a wounded person. You can't get somebody in jail for running over somebody unless you can produce a person run over. What we were trying to do was go to those people who were already damaged by the juggernaut and take the people that were on the side of the road whom had been passed by by the priests. And we're going over them to tell them, well, Joseph Smith did teach that there was a mother in heaven. Joseph Smith did promise the women the priesthood. The fact that the leaders of the church now have not carried through on it because. Does not mean that God himself wasn't worried about this at one time. Because the church leaders now make mistakes doesn't mean that you can attribute those errors to God or Joseph Smith or the founders of our religion.

John Dehlin [00:34:51] Okay, so what about the argument that. What about. And I may get in trouble for asking this from people who won't like the question, but what about just the argument that the women wouldn't have known they were being treated badly? They wouldn't have thought of it as being so egregious if you guys hadn't been continually making them aware of that fact?

Paul Toscano [00:35:13] Well, you know, I mean, lots of

John Dehlin [00:35:15] women stayed active in the church for a lot of years before any of the progress made in feminism or first, second, third wave feminism. And somehow they weren't defecting in masses, you know, they were staying active and contributing to a relatively healthy church, one that you would say was healthier then than it is now, you know, and so anyway. So you won't concede at all that yours and Margaret's arguments could lead to a weakening of one's commitment to the church or confidence in it.

Paul Toscano [00:35:46] I think that we didn't. We have no evidence. No one's ever told me that because of something I've said, they left the church. I have heard dozens and hundreds of people tell me that because of how the church treats women or gays or intellectuals that they've left the church. I also know that there are hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Arab women who have had clitorectomies and have their vagina sewn up, who never complain about it. They never see it as an abuse because it's part of their culture. It's true that there might be do gooders who want to see this process stopped. And of course, by telling the women that they're being abused, this may cause some problems to the fundamentalist Arabs and Muslims, not Arabs, but Muslims who do this. It could cause them some problems. And I'm sure that a lot of black people in the 19th century were perfectly happy serving as slaves until those awful white abolitionists came down and just stirred the pot and caused them to want to be free. Yes, I suppose all of things might be true. Yep, that could be true, John. Yep. I suppose we'll have to suffer for what we've done.

The Church Disciplinary Court and Trial

Part 6 of 7 · Ep. 82

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Okay, so take us now from these conversations with your stake president to the, to the, to the court in the trial.

Paul Toscano [00:00:10] Well, we had several conversations with him. One I remember, I talked about alone. And in that one, he was complaining about how he didn't obey the prophet. And I said, well, you don't obey the prophet either. And he said, well, what do you mean? I said, well, you've got an elk's head here on the wall. President Kimball said, you shouldn't shoot the little birds. This is much bigger than a bird, and you shot it. He said, well, that's not controversial now. I said, it is for the elk. There's a certain element in hypocrisy of this because he's enforcing rules he agrees with. He doesn't enforce the rules he doesn't agree with. And that's what they claim about me. But that wasn't true. I was only pointing out that Jesus let the women be the first witnesses of his resurrection. Jewish women weren't allowed to be witnesses. The witness of the first resurrection, the women that went to the tomb and saw him there, That was the sign and qualification for the apostolic office, was that you saw the resurrected Christ. The first people to see Christ were women. They were the ones who reported it to the males. Eventually, they saw Christ. So who are the first apostles? When Matthias is chosen, he's chosen on the basis that he was one who had been there and saw Christ. Well, you can kind of skip over those things and pretend like they don't exist, but there they are. Joseph Smith promises the Relief Society. I'm going to make you a kingdom of priestesses. But we don't follow through on the promise. The fact that the current leaders of the church don't follow through on the promise, they may have very good reasons for not doing it, but we were talking to people who knew this already, who were suffering from this lack of fulfillment of promises, and we're trying to help them. And now you're saying what many people have said about us is that we created the problem, but we didn't create the problem any more than we created slavery or any of the other problems. We were just trying to help.

John Dehlin [00:02:16] So how's your stake president taking this discussion?

Paul Toscano [00:02:19] Well, that's when he decides that Margaret is not a fit target for excommunication, that I'm much more worthy because I'm obstreperous, I'm rude, I contradict him all the time, and I call him Kerry instead of President Hines. So he called another meeting with our Bishop Wilson. Martin, who's a very good fellow. And Wilson was trying to mediate and it didn't work out so well. And Kerry, he warned us. He said, if you give this. I told him I was going to speak on all is not well in Zion, False Teachings of the True Church was the name of the speech I was going to give in August of 1993 at Sunstone, just a week or so later. And I told him, and he said, well, if you give that speech, I'm going to excommunicate you. And I said, well, fine. And I spoke. And he never went after Margaret. Margaret was just too nice and sweet and she is. She's just a nicer person than I am.

John Dehlin [00:03:22] But her speech in August of 1993 was very bold. And I would have interpreted it as also pleading for excommunication or begging for it from the standpoint of doing what you know is going to lead to that end.

Paul Toscano [00:03:38] Yeah, yeah. It's kind of like hiding Jews from the Nazis a little bit. Yeah. We're not going to obey. We're not going to do that thing because it's wrong. And of course people disagree. I don't think it was wrong even now. But the leaders of the church have to run the church and they felt like we were a danger to it. That's how they looked at it. They never see themselves as quite the danger. They see others, but. And maybe they're right. But yes, we spoke boldly, but she didn't get excommunicated then I was excommunicated. And what happened was that on the 12th of September, we got the home teachers come and deliver the summons, and on the 19th, a week later, I was excommunicated. And this was at the same time period. All in this September. Let's see, I forget the order exactly, but I think it was Lynn and Whitesides and then maybe Avraham and then me and Maxine and then Lavina and then Mike Quinn, Lavina Anderson, Maxine Hanks, in that order that I first stated they were excommunicated all that September. And. And it was a very impolitic thing for the leadership of the church to do. I don't think it was the leadership really. Boyd Packer was behind it. He went down and I think changed stake presidents for Avraham Gileadi, putting in somebody who would do it, would do the excommunication. And he knew that Kerry would follow his orders and excommunicate me. I don't know about how he managed the others, but it was staged. It was staged and it came out. And Steve Benson has a website that you can look up and read about all of this because he kept good records. And at that time, he was still in good favor with the leaders of the Church. His grandfather, Ezra Taft Benson, was still president of the Church, even though he was mostly incapacitated.

John Dehlin [00:05:45] Were you friends with Steve Benson?

Paul Toscano [00:05:46] Yeah, not real close friends, but, yeah, friends.

John Dehlin [00:05:50] So how did you feel when you received the summons and that you knew that it was really going to happen? Were you disappointed? Were you excited? Were you feeling like, I'm Galileo and I'm going to take the hit, but someday I'll be vindicated? Or were you like Les Miserables, where they say the masses will rise up and there'll be a revolution and we'll overthrow these tyrants that run us? You know what.

Paul Toscano [00:06:16] What were you feeling at the time? I knew I was going to get the summons because he had told me. And I didn't feel like I would be vindicated. I didn't know what was going to happen. I didn't know they were going to excommunicate me. I knew they were going to try me. And I knew that my excommunication would depend on how much influence the stake president exerted on the High Council because they knew me, and I spoke to them frankly about my feelings, and they did excommunicate me. Although later I learned that some of them felt they had no choice. And I don't think a few of them felt I shouldn't be excommunicated, but they had no choice.

John Dehlin [00:07:11] So what was the actual.

Paul Toscano [00:07:14] Well, we were sitting at a table, unlike when Margaret later was excommunicated, where they just had a semicircle of chairs with her sitting there facing them, which was different. I actually sat in the High Council room at one end of the table with the stake presidency at the other and the High Councils on each side. High councilors. And what they did was. It took a while. They first went through an explanation of what should happen, and then they divided the council between those who would see no injury was done to the Church and those who would see no injury was done to me, although not much happened on that regard on that score. Then they handed out my speech. They had dittoed up the most recent one you had given, the one that all is not well in Zion, false teachings of the true Church. And they handed that out, and then they had a tape of it and they played it. So the whole thing? Yeah, the whole thing. That's why it took so long.

John Dehlin [00:08:12] And Were you feeling proud of the words you had spoken or were you feeling embarrassed by them?

Paul Toscano [00:08:15] I wasn't embarrassed. I wasn't proud. You know, it's not the same audience I had intended it for, so there's a shift in rhetorical stance. But I stood by my words. You know, they asked me questions. They were only really worried about one section about where I don't even remember this now very well. Had I thought I should have looked it up in the speech. But there was one sentence that really bothered them, and it was really more of an intimation I had made, that priesthood leaders sometimes are abusive. It wasn't really a very strong statement that they picked on, but they said, do you really believe that? And I said, well, you know, it can happen. But they didn't argue with me about theology. They just wondered, you know, they just heard it. Then there was no. Except for that one phrase. They really didn't question me about why I'd said what I did. They were a little offended that I would suggest that priesthood leaders would do something hurtful. I said, I didn't mean that it was advertent. I don't think priesthood leaders necessarily intend to hurt people, but it happens. But then they went on, and what they went on to do was to have Margaret come in and make a statement about my character. And I think Lavina came in and made a statement about my character before she was excommunicated. Yeah. And then there was another member of the stake who came in. There were three, and then it was noon. I mean, it took all that time to get through all of those.

John Dehlin [00:09:53] Starting at what time?

Paul Toscano [00:09:55] About 6. It took until about 8 just to get the speech handed out, the instructions given and listened to. So it was about 8 o' clock in the morning? Yeah, it started at 6. I asked it to be started early because I prefer to get it over with and not have to be there until three in the morning. And then they. And I don't know, it just took a while. I mean, it takes a long time. Anybody who's been like, I am a lawyer in court hearings, they know how long it can take. And when you read the transcript of it, you think, gee, it took four hours to do this, but it does. It just takes time. They took a break or two. And I should say that my wife was there and all four daughters were with me. They were very small. My youngest daughter was Sarah, and she's. She was like eight or nine.

John Dehlin [00:10:46] See, they're listening or they're outside.

Paul Toscano [00:10:49] They were outside with a Vigil. There was a whole bunch of people at a vigil that was held outside for me.

John Dehlin [00:10:54] What were the people doing in the vigil, do you know?

Paul Toscano [00:10:56] Well, they were having breakfast and they were holding candles and they were singing and then they were sitting on the ground. But my daughter Sarah would not be with them. She insisted on being with me and she wanted to come into the meeting with me. She was only about 9 years old.

John Dehlin [00:11:08] What number is she?

Paul Toscano [00:11:10] She's the youngest. So in 1993. She was born in 84, so she's nine. And I'm looking over here at a picture of them that people the camera can't pick up. I guess that's them. That's them when they were little. They're all 20 years older than that now. But Sarah would not. She wouldn't sit be outside. She wanted to be in the council room with me, but they wouldn't let her, of course. And so she sat outside the door for the whole time.

John Dehlin [00:11:45] Kind of traumatic for young kids.

Paul Toscano [00:11:48] It's very traumatic. I mean, I don't think people understand how. Because they can't intellectualize about what's happening and there's no structure like you suggested. You know, did you feel proud? Did you think you were doing the right thing? Do you feel like Martin Luther? Do you feel like this? Do you feel like that? They don't have any of that. For them, it's just dad and mom are being treated badly and so it's stuck with them. They think of Mormons as more or less punishing, although they know plenty of Mormons who aren't they, you know, the church. They're just not interested.

Receiving Excommunication and Its Immediate Impact

John Dehlin [00:12:20] Why didn't you leave them home? Well, I guess you would not have gotten a babysitter. It's hard.

Paul Toscano [00:12:28] It's hard to get a babysitter at 6 in the morning. But also we knew that their mom wasn't in the meeting, so their mom was able to take care of them. And it's not like we kept it from them. I suppose people say, well, why did you? Because the truth was that we were being tried for a membership. I'm not going to hide that from them. We don't do that in our family. We don't hide information. So I guess it just never occurred to me to do that. And besides, they wanted to come. They got up really early, which they hardly ever do, and they were wanting to come, but they were sad later. I mean, over the years, I mean, they saw their mother get excommunicated, their aunt got excommunicated. Friends of ours got excommunicated. People they know are good people got excommunicated off of their ideas, not because they did some sin, but because they had ideas that were thought to be dangerous. So, yes, they were there.

John Dehlin [00:13:23] So six to noon.

Paul Toscano [00:13:24] So six to noon at noon or right close to there, they broke and said they wanted to deliberate. And it might have been one o', clock, but I think it was like 12, 12:30. And then they broke and I think they went and had something to eat. And then they came back and deliberated for a couple of hours. And then about 3 o' clock, they called me back in with Margaret and they announced that I'd been excommunicated.

John Dehlin [00:13:46] And were you just numb by that point? Were you dejected?

Paul Toscano [00:13:49] Well, I was tired and I knew that they were going to. When I went, I said that I didn't know whether they would excommunicate me. I didn't know absolutely. But I was fairly certain, because the circumstances, that I was going to get Xed. So I kind of knew that that was going to be the. I mean, that was the probable result.

John Dehlin [00:14:08] So were you feeling charity towards them? Were you feeling anger?

Paul Toscano [00:14:11] I didn't feel anger toward the council. I didn't even feel anger toward Boyd Packer or anybody. I just realized this is what they had to do. From their perspective, I was an apostate. I could understand why they thought that.

John Dehlin [00:14:22] And did you feel like you had God or Jesus blessing? Did you feel like with God you were okay?

Paul Toscano [00:14:32] Yeah. As Mike Quinn put it once, he said, I don't think the Holy Spirit of promise sealed that. And I don't think now. I, of course, having lost my faith, I have no idea. I mean, we've been examining the past and not talking about how I am now, but I'm kind of putting myself into that frame of mind of the past. I mean, I thought that, you know, what can I say? I put it this way. When the counselors who excommunicated me with Elder Boyd K. Packer, an apostle who was behind it, faced their judgment, I think they can honestly say that they tried to help the church, to do right by the church, to protect the church, and they felt that I was damaging the church, or at least people in it or whatever they believe, and that they had to do what they had to do, I think they will speak with a clear conscience and that they will be fine. I think if there is a judgment, if there is a life after death, if Jesus, I hope, is the Christ and I'm judged by him. And he asked me whether I thought what I was doing was what I had to do, what was right by my conscience, I'll be able to say yes, just like they can. It's just that we disagree. And I don't think that those kinds of disagreements can ever be really harmonized. I mean, I never said they weren't the apostles. I never said they didn't have the authority that comes directly from Christ through Joseph Smith. I never argued about their authority. I just argued about their competence. And from my perspective, I felt that they were neglecting, not just cosmetic things, they were neglecting the infrastructure upon which the religion rests. And they were taking one of the world's great religions, the last religion to believe in an anthropomorphic God. And they were basically letting it fade away, abandoning its most difficult but yet most precious elements out of embarrassment. Because they think like corporate men. They think about the next quarter. They're not thinking in the long term.

Faith in God After Leaving the Church

John Dehlin [00:16:51] So there's a lot of people that I've run into when they lose their faith in Mormonism, they quickly lose their faith in Jesus and in God. So were you a firm believer in God, Jesus and Joseph Smith and in the restoration, all the way up until your excommunication and after? So there was never this sort of cynical. I'm going to put on a mask of being a true believer, a mask of caring about this doctrine. But really, I have this insidious desire to bring down the columns and cave in the church. And this will just be the way that I do it, by masking myself as a believer and by emphasizing these doctrines that I really don't care about. But I'm going to make it sound like I do, because this is. The ends are really the thing I'm going for.

Paul Toscano [00:17:42] Well, I don't wear masks. My daughters tell me that I have no public and private face. I have one face. And that I pretty much tell you the truth as I see it. It doesn't mean I don't change my mind. I do. And it doesn't mean that I'm arrogant and think I'm absolutely right. But I am convicted of what I've told you. Now, I could be persuaded, I have been persuaded to change my mind about things. My wife has caused me to change my mind many times. My children have, my friends have, leaders of the church have. But I have not been able to change their mind because they will not hear my statements on their merits. They always are concerned about my authority. Where is your authority? This is what the pharisees asked Jesus, I'm not making invidious comparisons. I'm only pointing out a story in the scripture where the Pharisees say, what is your authority? And he says, well, let me ask you this. By what authority did John the Baptist do what he did? And they said, oh dear, if we say that John had no authority, the people will stone us. But if we say he did have authority, then they'll wonder why we didn't follow him. And they said, we cannot tell was the answer the Pharisees gave to Jesus. And his answer to them was, well, neither do I tell you by what authority I do these things. Ultimately though, it's not about authority. I concede their authority. I just think that Mormonism cannot be reduced to the pablum that we get from them. I think that it's one thing to say young people and new converts need to be fed milk before meat, but there has to eventually be meat. There has to be a place for those who question, there has to be a place for those who doubt, and there has to be a place for those who suffer intellectually. And I don't believe that the leaders of the church have any right to make the extraordinary claims they make for themselves and not deliver. They cannot claim, as Boyd Packer did recently. You know, when somebody said, when somebody asked him a question about dating or sex or something, he said, why would anybody ask an 80 year old man about sex? That's a very duplicitous, malevolent. Bad thing for him to do. The reason they're asking him is because he is an apostle, because he's given advice from that Apostolic office on this very subject, because he has told people how to live their lives. And the fact that he's 80 years old is irrelevant. If he doesn't know anything about sex now, he never did and he shouldn't have been saying anything about it. He cannot claim to have the right to advise them and then when they have a question, back off with that. That's duplicitous and malevolent. Did. Did.

John Dehlin [00:21:14] Were you hoping for a different effect from the excommunications?

Paul Toscano [00:21:18] I wasn't hoping for any effect whatsoever. I was doing what I thought was right. I'm not a corporate man, I'm not making widgets.

John Dehlin [00:21:25] What do you think the effect was?

Paul Toscano [00:21:27] Who knows? I have no idea. You don't know either. Nobody knows the effect of this tape. What is it going to be? Am I speaking to people now? Is it remote posterity? Will it get destroyed? Will it have any effect whatsoever. Will anybody care about what I've ever thought in my life? I doubt it. But maybe it isn't that. It has to do with. You know, I love Jesus Christ intensely. I love him now, even though I know he may be a fictional character. He may be entirely a Fig Newton of the people who wrote the New Testament. I can't help myself. I love him anyway. And I can't help that when I read his words, I think nobody ever spoke like this. If this wasn't the Messiah, he should have been. I don't want any other Messiah, but I can't tell you whether it's true or not. I hope it is, but if it isn't, we've been probably deeply enriched if we believed in it anyway. Because what's the opposite? What's the alternative, but despair? It's better. And I'm no longer a part of a religion that diminishes him. And I don't mean diminish. I mean you can give lip service. Lord, they say, Lord, Lord. There are many who say, Lord, Lord, but they never knew me. That's what I fear, is that they can talk about Jesus, but they don't trust him to do his own work. They set up rules and regulations and rewards and punishments and threats. And they make people feel like excommunication lurks in the shadows of the bushes of their home. If they say the wrong thing and it gives people a climate of fear develops that is not from Jesus Christ. That can't be. That's just the church. Like Brigham Young said, why do men create idols? Why do churches create idols? They don't do it to lead the people astray. They set up idols so that people don't slip further into sin. They think that the idols will help them from slipping further into sin. But in the end, they become the reason why people slip into sin.

Part 7 of 7 · Ep. 83

John Dehlin [00:00:01] So where are you now?

Paul Toscano [00:00:04] Well, I'm in Salt Lake City practicing bankruptcy law. I wanted to redeem people's souls, and now I'm redeeming their cars. It's kind of ironic. The ironies of God seem to be endless. People want to know whether I still have faith. I don't think so. There was a time when I think I had a lot of faith. I mean, I believed deeply and profoundly and intensely. Now I'm very uncertain. And so you've asked me throughout this whether I thought then that I was doing right. And I've answered truthfully that then I did. You didn't ask me whether I feel that way now. Would I now do the things I did? Probably not. Would I now give those speeches? Would I now? Probably not.

Ongoing Doubts and Views on Church Authority

John Dehlin [00:01:03] Why not?

Paul Toscano [00:01:08] I think because I'm so uncertain now. I mean, I do have hope. It rises and falls. It comes in waves and troughs. You know, peaks and troughs. Some days I believe, and some days I don't believe. In fact, my favorite scripture is that one in Mark. I think about the man who says to Jesus, his daughter is going to be healed. And Jesus says, anything is possible to the person that believes. And the man says, lord, I believe. Help thou, my unbelief. That's me. Lord, I believe. Help thou, my unbelief. Sometimes I find myself talking to the Lord and then stopping and thinking. I wonder, what am I doing? I don't even know if there is a Lord. I hope there is. I think it's because in Mormonism, certainty became equated with authority. People bear their testimonies. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt. I don't think it's possible to know beyond a shadow of a doubt because we live in the valley of the shadow of doubt and death. And I don't think we can escape that. I think if we're honest with ourselves, we have doubts. I don't think you can have faith without doubt. I don't think faith removes all doubt. I think sometimes doubt is a negative way of expressing faith. We can doubt our doubts. We can doubt hell, we can doubt false doctrine, all of which is a way of expressing faith. We are defined by not only what we believe, but what we refuse to believe. So I don't think faith and doubt are inseparable. I think they're basically like pleasure and pain. I mean, they come together. You can't have really one without the other. And it's how we manage our doubts and manage our faith. If our faith becomes so powerful, so strong, so certain that we're willing to impose our beliefs on others and punish them for not agreeing with us. I think our faith has taken us down a wrong path. If our doubts are such that we are so certain of our doubts, so confident in our doubts that we are mock and are cynical of other people's belief structure, I think that our doubts have taken us down the wrong path. But if our faith gives rise to hope and charity and allows us to deal with existential angst and carry on in the face of trials, then I think faith is good. And if doubt softens our certainty, softens our desire, our arrogance, then I think doubt is a good thing. Now, I know a lot of people listening to this. If they have gotten this far and I have not been offended by earlier, they will say, well, you're arrogant. Well, I don't think I am. I may be, but I don't think so. I think I'm just. I speak boldly. I don't deal in euphemisms usually. And I'm Mediterranean and I'm kind of an in your face kind of guy. But. But I don't think it's arrogance. Certainly my belief that the leaders of the church could improve could be. Certainly. And certainly that is the closest thing that I do to arrogance, because it seems like I'm judging them. But my feeling is we're all in it together again. You recognize that. I see the ordinances as a way of bringing us into one family. Complaining to your dad that he's a bad driver, he wants to always drive on all the vacation things, and you say, dad, you're just a lousy driver. Face it, you go too fast, you go too slow. You keep doing this to the sound of the music. Gassing it until you rock on the car. You don't know you're doing it. We're all nauseated in the backseat. You're just a terrible driver. It doesn't mean you don't love your dad. It doesn't mean he isn't a good dad. It doesn't mean he isn't your dad. You got DNA to prove he is. That's how I feel about the leaders of the church. They're in their positions. Some of them may have wormed their way into these offices. I suppose that can happen. I feel sorry for them because then they don't get much of support from on high if they've done that and they can be left dangling. But, you know, I do not fault the leaders of the church if they don't get better revelations If God does not speak to them, it's not their fault. It's not their fault. If God doesn't speak to them in a way that they can say, thus saith the Lord, or the Lord doesn't tell them. I want you to write this revelation and say, the Lord appeared to me in the Salt Lake Temple on such and such a day and I felt his wounds and I know it was real. And he told me to say this to the saints. If the Lord doesn't command the president of the church to write that kind of a revelation, it's never going to happen. President Hinckley would not arrogate to himself this thing. It's not their fault then. But it is their fault to let people believe they get that kind of revelation when they don't. And it is their fault if they're not clear about it. If they don't make it clear, they can say, when we tell you this, we say, we are not. This is not the result of a discussion we had. And this is our best thinking. This is the word of the Lord himself. But this here, it isn't exactly like that. This is the best that we, as the heads of the church could think of. And this is our solution to a problem. This is inspired by the Holy Spirit. We feel very strongly that it is. But it isn't God speaking to us out of his own mouth in his resurrected body that isn't it. This is just because our experience has taught us after many years that if we do this, this is going to happen. So we're not doing that anymore. We're going to do this. This comes from experience, and it's the best we can do.

John Dehlin [00:07:37] What if that weakens the church? Because it makes the church think that God's not really at the helm, but instead it's a bunch of wise, good men doing the best they can.

Paul Toscano [00:07:47] The reason why it won't weaken the church is because it's the truth. If it's said by men who love the members of the church and are telling them the truth, how can that hurt the members?

John Dehlin [00:07:58] Because as you said about two hours ago, people are inspired by the fantastic and the irrational. This belief that these men are special witnesses of Christ who speak directly with God in Christ and who get their direction and their guidance directly from them is the sustenance that gives these members a desire to stay faithful to their spouses and to serve in the church and to keep the church strong and vital. To demystify that is like the wizard pulling across the curtain and saying, hey, it's just me. But still pay attention to that big mask up there and do what he says.

Paul Toscano [00:08:39] Well, I imagine that some people would respond that way, but I don't think that that's what would really happen. I don't think they would stop believing in the leaders of the church. As leaders of the church, they would come to realize that it's a probationary state, that the purpose of mortality is to come to terms with death. It is to come to terms with doubt. They would have to be taught along with this that it's wrong for the saints to be members of the church because of an error, of a mistake. They have to be members of the church because of the testimony that they have received from the Spirit, that it's true. Not because the brethren do or don't speak to God face to face. Not because of the nature and the quality of the leadership's revelations, but because a power from God has entered in the soul of that member and has transformed that member. The Lord says, I am the vine, ye are the branches. They have to feel the SAP, the spirit of God coming out of the trunk into the branches. That's what makes them part of the. The vine. If they're there because somebody has glued them on with super glue, that's not the same. The super glue of lies isn't what's going to make you a living body. And so I think that the saints have to be taught that the first principle of the gospel is not obedience, but the first principle of gospel is faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Faith is not certainty. What is it? Well, when you're young, faith is what you believe because what your parents have taught you and your leaders have taught you and your elders have taught you. But when you're middle aged, faith is based upon the experiences that you yourself have had. But when you have enough of those experiences, the negative ones pile up. When you're younger, your father lays his hands upon you and he blesses you and you get better. Or like what happened to me when I was an Aaronic priesthood leader. I went to the dorms and one of the guys there, David Bradford, was very sick. And I put my hands on him and blessed him and all of a sudden he threw up the thing that was in his stomach that was making him sick, and he was better immediately and went. That was such a positive experience. People believe that. It was the talk of the whole dorm. You believe it because of those good experiences, but as you get older, you get more and more bad experiences. Divorce happens. Children go awry People take drugs, jobs are lost, houses go into foreclosure. Bad things happen. And the more bad things happen, the more difficult it is to predicate your faith upon positive experiences. So then what happens as you get my age, you've been excommunicated. People think you're arrogant. People think you want to start your own church. People think you're ambitious to be an apostle. People think you're a polygamist. People think you're a homosexual. People think you're an asexual. People think you're a nitwit. I mean, every possible thing. An adulterer, you name it. How does a person in that situation have faith? Well, you get up in the morning and you choose to have it. You choose to believe in Jesus, even though he may be a fictional character, like Hamlet. He may be as fictional as Henry V, as fictional as Dionysus. You choose every day, every day you choose to believe every day, you choose to have hope. Every day you choose to be charitable, to have not just to your friends and your family, but your enemies, those people who have despitefully used you. There's not much you can do in the way of charity for your enemies. But you can pray for them. You can hope for the best. You cannot judge them and condemn them. I mean, it's true that people will say, well, Paul, you just judged the apostles. No, I didn't. I just explained to you why I think they don't do a very good job. But that isn't judgment in the sense that I think they should go to hell or be punished. I would never punish them. If the tables were turned and I was in their place with what I know now, I would never do that. There may have been a time where I might have because I was young and stupid, but now it doesn't do any good to drive people out. I mean, sure, you have child molesters, somebody who's murdering people, somebody selling the Saints swamp land in Texas, or blowing up chapels. Yeah, because they're doing palpable damage. But over a disagreement about something as difficult to sort out as the Godhead, you think that was settled? You think the Godhead issue was settled in Mormonism? No, it's just you've got 10 different versions of the Godhead thing now. How do we sort it out? Well, you sort it out by getting together and having dinner and a barbecue, and you talk apostle to apostate until you both realize, well, you're not as great an apostle as I thought, and I'm not as bad as an apostate as you thought, and you come closer together until you realize that it's only doctrine. What matters is that the doctrine doesn't become a wedge. It becomes something we can discuss, something we can talk about, something that can enliven our lives, give it meaning, but we're not going to use it as a meaning. Means to throw each other out.

Looking Back and Assessing the LDS Church Today

John Dehlin [00:14:43] This is a loaded question. But think back to the time when you were most active in the church and you were most embraced by the Church, and you were living off the thrill of the enlightenment that you were receiving. If you could choose that time versus where you are now, would you go back and maybe undo. This is sort of a happiness question. Are you happier now than you were then? Do you feel more at peace than you felt back then? Or do you feel like it's just gone sour and will stay sour? Or do you feel more hope and more authentic than you've ever felt?

Paul Toscano [00:15:23] Well, I can remember those days, and I know what you mean. I would not go back because of something Joseph Smith said. If your mind. Oh, man. If you wish to contemplate God, you have to be willing to go to the highest, to rise to the highest point and sink to the lowest abyss. And I think back in those days when I was having, you know, you say I was at the zenith of my church experience. I wasn't experiencing the nadir. And after my excommunication, and probably in the late. Even into 2000, 2001, I was experiencing the nadir. It's only been in the last maybe year or two that I have come out of the abyss more. And to feel that that wasn't where I was.

John Dehlin [00:16:25] Why is that nadir important?

Paul Toscano [00:16:28] Because if you want to become the friend of Jesus, you have to know something about descending below all things. I mean, that's the whole point of my theology, is that he didn't insulate himself as sovereign from the creation and from what he inflicted upon others. Not only do we have to endure whatsoever the Lord sees fit to inflict upon us, as the Scripture says, but he had to, too. He inflicted it upon himself in worst measure. And the idea is that the purpose is that we have experience. And what does the experience teach us? Well, it teaches me not to, you know, it teaches me to. That truth is more fluid, it's not rigid. There's something about spirituality that isn't a constant judgment. Now, I know there's a paradox in that because I've been judgmental about the church leaders, but I'm only judgmental of them on One point, and that is that they're judgmental. They need not be judgmental. They need not try to create a patriarchal religion where the patriarch is always right. They need not to enlist the theology of God the Father to fortify a patriarchal structure which allows them to dictate to the saints. I think that's wrong. I think they need to take a Christocentric view of this. They need to base it on Christ. They need to be like him. They need to be the servant of all as he was. They need to be willing to suffer with the saints, not stand apart and judge. They need to be embracing. And I think they try to do that in their own personal lives. I don't have doubts about that. I think it's very hard for them to translate that into the corporate structure, to somehow let that happen through the departments of the church. I mean, there's lots of things that they could correct, but it's very hard to do it. It's very scary. It's very frightening because that's not what they would do in a corporate organization. I mean, they've got real estate to manage. They've got employees all over. They've got people who are ambitious in working their way up. They've got universities to do students. They've got relationships with government and other churches and foreign governments. And they've got billions of dollars invested in an organization. And their role is to try to. The whole purpose of this is to bring people to spiritual maturation. But sometimes the corporation, as much as it facilitates this, it can also interfere with it. And it's very. I give them great credit for the management. I mean, I think that's not my problem. Doesn't go to their management. I mean, sometimes I think they over manage because of their legalism. But it's the legalism that's the problem, not the over management. The over management would go away if they would trust the Lord to do his work. He doesn't always report to them. And not everything that comes into their collective head is his will. And I don't think they know that. I think they worry, like you do, that if they were to be frank about this, that many people might lose their testimony and leave. So I think they are worried they've got a tiger by the tail. I believe sometimes that one of the biggest problems we have in the LDS Church is that the leaders expect the saints to be perfect. And the saints expect the leaders to be perfect and that that mutual expectation creates a lot of problems and they can't accept that God works through somebody as imperfect as, you know, as sometimes they identify me. And sometimes saints don't think that God can work through somebody as imperfect as they are. And that's not true. That's all God has is imperfect people to work through. And he does. However he does, it's a miracle. It's like in Shakespeare in Love. It will all turn out well. How? I don't know. It's a miracle. It will turn out well. Even for me and others. It may not have seemed so. I think in the end. I have hope that in the end, all of the animosities and all the concerns can be swept away, and there would be genuine repentance and forgiveness and understanding, even if that's delayed somewhat. So there it is.